olofscience

Actually, First-past-the-post is a subset of ranked voting. It's the special case where you only count the first choice of every voter. Not many people are aware how complex voting really is though. For ranked voting, the way you count the votes actually decides who wins! Imagine an election where candidates complain and say "if we counted it another way, I would win!" However, it's mathematically sound. You can see it explained below:

The implied analogies are not in any specified order extreme herbivores could be extremely right wing for all we know

Actually, that IS a better one. Anyway, since the electoral college is in the US Constitution, until that changes 3rd parties will probably continue to fail. As a side note, the EU Parliament is actually a proportional representation system as explained in that video, making it more fair than our own UK system. Didn't stop Leavers from saying it's undemocratic/unelected though.

Even if you diminish the amount of credit I'm given, I'll just do this for the other readers here: In the video, the 2 types of animals are: herbivores predators However this is NOT a black/white classification as some animals are omnivores These types can be an analogue of left-wing, right-wing, and centrists in terms of political affiliation now the voters for the extremists (tiger and turtle) realise that their candidates have a low chance of winning they also take note that out of the 2 most popular candidates, 1 of them *might* have something in common with themselves (assumption: normal human behaviour in seeking out people similar to yourself) if anyone wins they're prefer the candidate to be the same general type as them (herbivore or carnivore) even if they're not the first choice - i.e. lesser of 2 evils rather than waste their vote, they hold their nose and vote for their second choice due to diminishing number of members and voters, tiger and turtle drop out of the race/run out of funds/etc. repeat several times, and you end up with only 2 parties To avoid confusion please note that "turtle" on the explanation above is about the video I posted, rather than the SC poster claiming to be centrist.

Hmm you're being very inconsistent here. You say it's obvious where the centre line is with a range of complex arguments on this forum, but the video's high-school level explanation of Duverger's law, using animals, is vague and makes a lot of assumptions?

What do you mean? I can help explain it to you if needed, although the video has already brought the explanation down to a very simple level. Basically this phenomenon is called Duverger's Law, as voters would rather choose the "lesser of 2 evils" rather than waste their vote on a candidate or party with no chance of winning. Repeat this over many elections and you'll end up with a 2-party system. You've seen this with many posters here. <facepalm> Okay...what's your proof that you're centrist? Telling yourself over and over again isn't proof. Your mother telling you that you're special also isn't really proof that you're special.

Did you actually watch the video? It's quite short and is very easy to understand.

Well at least you've stopped pretending to be centrist

For that you'll need to ditch FPTP elections so there will be enough representation in Congress. "We need a third party" is exactly one of the topics in this video. Mathematics of elections is actually quite interesting:

I'm all for technological solutions, but until someone investigates the police who are not the police, this would limit the effectiveness. In the UK we have the IPCC - Independent Police Complaints Commission that handles any cases of alleged police misconduct. A body like them would be in charge of handling evidence from bodycams, getting witness statements, etc, because you simply can't trust the police department to do that to their own. They're too close to the cases. As the Romans said, "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

Get rid of militarized equipment from police departments. Divert some funds from police to social support - mental health, community services, etc. Establish independent bodies that have the power to investigate the police so that it's not just the police investigating themselves. And that's just what I could think of in a few minutes, I'm sure better ideas are out there. But have you stopped listening?

1) No, if the problem hasn't been fixed then it needs to be the topic to focus on. Just in case you forgot, it's about law enforcement abuse and murder of minorities. 2) This entire thread is about those stupid white liberals.

Yeah, that was funny. However, while you're focusing your outrage on those white liberals and raging against those who "try to change culture" (like HBO deciding to temporarily pull Gone With The Wind completely voluntarily), is there anything being done for reducing police abuse against black people? You see, raging against these arguably extreme white liberals is changing the topic of conversation. And that's what the racists want. They don't want to talk about the original issues.

Geez, here you are again, winding yourself up. It's been 2 weeks since "CHAZ" was established, yet no other city has replicated it. So breathe, relax, calm down, it's not going to be where you are anytime soon. Unless you're still wanting a civil war? Here in the UK right-wingers converged on monuments and statues last week looking to "protect" them from this imaginary wave of anarchy. But nobody was attacking the said statues and monuments, so looking for a fight, they attacked the police instead.

Oh wow, I did not know that. I was just throwing out a rather crazy idea (I thought) as yes I'd imagine plenty of practical problems for something like that. Biggest of all is that those are only good in absorbing energy in just one direction. And they're practically the same as a high-stiffness spring except for the fact that they'll dissipate the energy as heat instead of springing back. As you may have already guessed, I'm actually quite new and one of them 'millenials . I do think that the slider and variations thereof are the best we have at the moment. I was hoping my calculations earlier in this thread would get to a good ballpark of what was needed for a good shock absorber, but unfortunately they're way too long. Even if they were half of what I calculated it still seems very impractical... What's the VolPlane?

Just need to add - for anything breaking, the energy absorbed is equal to the area under the stress-strain curve, PLUS the surface energy used to create the extra fracture surface. (theoretically, + the heat dissipated by the stretching + plastic deformation + fracturing, but we can probably assume it's negligible). I was actually imagining if you had those hydraulic pistons/shocks (for car doors and stuff) as risers, but they might still not have enough stretch to actually mitigate a hard opening. But again this is all theory, still plenty of unknowns so testing would still teach us something

The energy absorbed by linear elastic stretching is given by E = 0.5 * K * x^2 Where K is the elastic modulus, x is the distance stretched. For anything breaking, the energy absorbed is equal to the area under the stress-strain curve. Meaning that, if something breaks without stretching, it hasn't absorbed much energy. If it hasn't absorbed much energy, it hasn't slowed you down very much. (Kinetic energy is given by a similar equation: E = 0.5 * M * v^2 where M is your mass, v is your velocity) So ideally, the risers should stretch as much as possible before breaking, then the reserve deploys from a slightly-slowed down skydiver. If the risers simply break without stretching, then you're pretty much going as fast as you did before, and all you can hope for is that the reserve opens softer than your main. Which might still be a better gamble, but reserves aren't exactly designed to open slowly.

Someone posted something similar earlier this thread, but I thought it was still viable until I did some calculations. Assuming that freefall speed is 120 mph (54 m/s), and canopy speed is 14 m/s (30 mph - still pretty fast), if the opening takes 1 second (pretty hard opening) you'll get about 4 Gs. That doesn't sound very high until you realise the upright position is quite bad for this kind of acceleration. Let's assume it's even worse, say your canopy opens in 0.5 s, giving an 8G acceleration. If we were to completely absorb 0.5 seconds with an elastic stretching to bring it back to 4 G's, you'll need 10 metres of stretching since you're trying to get rid of 40 m/s (from 54 to 14 m/s). Even if you're just trying to mitigate the very worst case, say 0.25-second opening which causes 16 G's, you'll need 5 metres of stretching to bring it down to 8 G's. If your risers are stiffer and don't stretch 5 metres, they won't relieve the acceleration anyway. It would be like trying to use water to break a terminal freefall - it will feel hard as concrete when you get a hard opening. So as much as I wanted this elastic stretching idea to work, unfortunately it probably won't. However, what might work is if the risers break completely at a certain load - if the RSL or a MARD is connected, then the reserve might give you a second chance of not opening so hard.

Given all that's happened in recent years, this is a relief. For a brief period it seemed that the entire older generation was against us. How many of you have portraits like this though...

I started jumping the same year as you, but only have about 10% of the jumps you accumulated. I never worked in the industry and strictly kept it a weekend hobby. You're exhibiting classic signs of burnout. It happens to any job or any hobby that you work too intensely on without taking breaks. As you already decided, take a step back, relax, and don't burn yourself out on the next hobby you choose. With time, the feeling can come back :)

Interesting, but Ayn Rand did not really have a clue about mathematics or Game Theory. A lot of her theories also don't stand up to scientific scrutiny. Have you ever heard of the Nash Equilibrium and Nash's Existence Theorem?

That wasn't what I asked for. I had to google that and even as a left-leaning person I don't agree with what came up. Covid-19 is contagious - if you're next to a person who has it, you can get it because virus-laden particles get in the air or on surfaces. I've been living next door to a muslim family for years, and have had zero desire to convert to Islam. I think your assertion that socialism is a contagious disease is also rather overreacting.

That's great. And if it gets out of control the Oregon government has options available, and if it escalates further the Federal government (and um...Trump) can step in. But unless socialism and islam has mind-control devices included, they will spread only as quickly as any other ideology spreads.

How? Like how homosexuality is contagious? If you say bullshit like this please back it up with: a causal mechanism on how it's contagious evidence, preferably peer-reviewed

But it hasn't, yet.