So we can posit the existence of an antimetheus who gave fire to the gods and was rewarded by a bird bringing him a new liver each day.

Blue canary in the coalmine by the lightswitch

The only winning move is not to play.

Recently implemented useful thing: Putting a hair tie on my glass so I don't lose track of which one is mine and just get a new glass five times a day.

Advanced version: measure 8oz of anything, pour it in the glass, and put my hair tie at the water line. Now I can reliably measure 1 serving of most drinks.

Residential. Retail. Commercial. Parks.

Long ago, the four land zones mixed together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the NIMBYs attacked. Only the Urbanist, Master of all four land uses, could stop them. But when the world needed them most, they vanished.

Almost a hundred years passed and the internet and I discovered the new Urbanist, an upzoner named Sonja Trauss. And although her land use insights are great, she has a long way to go before she can house everyone.

But I believe - Sonja can save the world.

I'm think there's a way for any coalition with bare majorities in the US Senate, House, Presidency, and at least one state government on a given day to establish de facto permanent rule by creating unlimited microstates.

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer or a constitutional expert of any kind, but this looks like a relatively straightforward exploit.

Here's how it would work: First, let's say some party dominates an election or two and ends up in full control of Congress and the White House, and is determined to keep the other parties out no matter what. Let's say it's the Bull-Moose party. An easy way to ensure this would be to create a lot of reliably-Bull-Moose voting states - each one gets you two Senators, a Congressperson, and three votes in the Electoral College. Enough of those and you'll have supermajorities forever.

To create a new state, all you need is a majority in both houses of Congress (and possibly presidential approval, but I'm not 100% clear on this part). If the new state you're creating is made of existing states, you also need the state(s) you're carving up to agree. And - that's it.

There's no reason a state can't be a quarter acre lot where one person lives.

So if the Bull-Moose party also controls, say, Idaho, the state can agree to create one thousay new microstates that each consist of the house of one Bull Moose activist, and Congress can approve it.

And here's the kicker: even if this outages the rest of the country and support for the Bull Moose party plummets, it doesn't matter - because even if everyone else votes against them, a few hundred die hard Bull Moosers in what was formerly a corner of Idaho will command supermajorities in the House, Senate, and Electoral College indefinitely.

It's probably worth noting that we're already living in a milder version of this world, with low-population states dominating the Senate, germanderred districts filling the House, and popular vote losers routinely winning the Electoral College. This just takes all the anti-democratic aspects of the existing system and turns them up so far that they can't ever be put back.

The moral of the story is that privileging certain votes above others based on arbitrary-as-fuck geographical boundaries is terrible and we should stop doing it. The Electoral College is awful and the Senate is awful and congressional-districts-especially-gerrymandered-ones are awful and moving towards a more democratic system that's less susceptible to this kind of fuckery might be a good idea.

First-Past-the-Post electoral systems tend to enforce a two party system that’s almost impossible to break. Which is what makes current UK party preference polling so weird:

The Brexit/Bremain split within both parties has been so deep and so strong (and the leadership of both so abhorrent to so many) that it drove almost half the voters to the Brexit and Lib Dem parties. 

That’s not supposed to happen. What’s supposed to happen is that parties pick up on gradual changes in public opinion and adjust their positions to maintain their electoral viability, and voters stick to one of the two dominant parties because anything else is (correctly) perceived as an ineffectual vote. It takes a massive exodus from the main parties or unprecedented engagement and coordination to get out of a given two-party system (as opposed to just gradually shifting the two parties over time). But, by cutting across party lines and inflaming an ideological conflict that the existing parties were not equipped to represent, Brexit managed it - at least, it might.

Right now we have this rare, extremely unstable four-way-almost-tie dynamic. But it’s extremely unstable - as soon as one or two of these parties start pulling away, it should create pressure on everyone else to join the top-two-coalition that’s closest to their views, and then we’ll be at a new equilibrium. And right now I have no idea what that’s going to be, or if we’ll somehow get something other than a two-party equilibrium that will spur ten thousand poly sci papers over the next decade. I guess what I’m getting at is that Conservative and Labour leadership have pulled off some of the most comically inept political performances of all time. In a system that’s built to keep their two parties on top forever, they somehow managed to squander their advantage and end up in a position where we have no idea what the dominant political coalitions are going to look like a few years from now.

Technically, it’s only a Spider Man if it’s from the Avengers region of New York. Otherwise it’s a Sparkling Night Monkey.

The Order of the Stick's current arc started with #947 on March 31, 2014. In the more-than-five-years since then until the most recent update (#1170), four days have passed in-universe. So, for everyone keeping track at home, that's less than one day of in-universe time per year of updates. Sources: https://oots.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0946.html