MyTurtleSwimsUpsideDown

Bean day!

Doctor Who theme

Natural resources. One morning someone will find Smokey in the national mall; victim to an apparent electric scooter hit and run.

Are you thinking of the Bill O’Reilly infomercial?

Hey Greg!
Welcome to Lauren’s marriage.

Why use Chris Pratt for Mario 🤷‍♂️.

It looks like the difference between the RCV elections you linked and the Portland one is that the Portland election has 3 seats available per district race instead of 1. There are at least 3 ways that could be managed:

1. Do a standard RCV elimination, but stop once you have 3 candidates left.

2. Do a standard RCV elimination until you have a majority candidate. That candidate gets one of the seats. Then remove that candidate, reassign their votes, and continue elimination until you have a new majority candidate. Repeat.

3. Do a standard RCV elimination until you have a majority candidate. That candidate gets one of the seats. Then restart the RCV count for the second seat with voters’ 1st choices, but the first seat winner removed from the running. Repeat for the third seat.

Edit: It’s none of the above! 😂 It’s a combination of 2 & 3 known as Single Transferrable Vote. The article (archived) doesn’t at all explain how counting works, but this video does.

This looks like something out of Dr Strangelove or an early Bond film. If it weren’t for the modern bezel around the screen, I would not be able to tell the difference.

I would have very clean ears then.

How do you ensure there is not biase from judges based on their knowledge of the competitor, be it country they are representing, or personal connections, or racial / religious opinion?

So yeah, remove the feels sports and limit the Olympics to reals sports.

So guess we would have to remove things like baseball, fencing, football, boxing, rugby, tennis, karate, basketball, wrestling… basically any opposition sport where a judge has to make subjective determinations of edge cases, such as calling balls/strikes, in/out, off/on-sides or determining whether an act is sufficient to warrant a foul, or whether an infraction or series thereof is egregious enough to warrant an elevated penalty. We can’t have events where officials might be affected by perspective, bias or poor judgment.

So that leaves us left with: races, target sports, feats of prowess (jumping, throwing & weightlifting) and… Golf, I guess. Though, maybe golf counts as a target sport…🤔 With all the time and space freed up from getting rid of all the subjective sports we can add more objective ones, like chess, hot dog eating and cubing.

nobody actually pays those bills. They're just some elaborate dance between insurance companies and hospitals.

Sometimes there is an elaborate dance between the two on pricing. Sometimes the insurance company dances on its own to determine why the service is not covered.

If you don't have insurance, the cost is lower

Depends what you mean by cost. insurance is always out to make money, that means paying less, and negotiating lower prices with providers. However, there are some situations where it benefits both the service provider and the insurance provider to inflate the initial price, and negotiate a steep “discount” to a final price (a portion of which the patient pays) that is higher than the non-insurance price. But I don’t remember the exact details, and I may be conflating this with some other healthcare industry scheme.

or removed entirely. Supposedly.

If a hospital is nonprofit, I believe they are required to have a (self determined) charity care policy that they must follow. If you make below a certain amount, you can apply for relief, but that also applies for to after-insurance costs, not just no-insurance costs. For-profit hospitals will rake you over the coals and send collections after you. Part of the problem with charity care, is that you may have to ask for it, and few people know enough about it to do so. And you may have to ask for it in the right way. If you aren’t specific enough, they may offer you “financial assistance” which is just a payment plan. Then they’ll treat you the same as a for-profit hospital would.

If you’re interested in a deeper dive, the Arm and a Leg podcast is a great show about healthcare costs in the US.