Spiracle

Black Alabamians, who make up 40% of the voting age population according to this article, have a reasonable shot of electing their preferred representative in at least 2 districts

Small correction, Black Alabamians make up ~27% of the voting age pop. The 40% number in the article was about district 2. Based on the rest of your post, I assume you mistyped.

Here is the new map proposed by the AL legislature.

Thank you! Yeah, that is about what I thought it would be. District 7 goes from ~56% Black down to 51,32%. District 2 grows to ~40% Black, and I don’t see how it could grow higher without some very weird shapes. I was surprised that District 6 (Birmingham) didn’t become majority Black, but it seems that the cluster there is still taken by a tendril from CD-7.

Because of how racially polarized voting is in Alabama, the panel said in each of those two districts, Black Alabamians will need to make up the majority of the voting-age population or "something quite close to it."

That’s quite the conundrum. With party-lines being drawn so close to the racial divide, and with the USA’s horrible two-party system, a normal map would just lead to a tyranny of the majority, which is one of the worst outcome of democratic elections.

Changing the districts to more proportionally represent the population’s opinion (which in this case happens to coincide closely with ethnicity) sounds like a band-aid solution. It doesn’t fix the underlying problem, it seems obviously wrong on the surface of it, works really awkwardly, but it’s the best currently available method towards achieving equally in the spirit of democracy.

Thank you for the discussion/explanations. I quite enjoyed it and feel much more informed now.

Thanks for the article linked. That map was great for finally seeing what, exactly, people are talking about. It looks like Alabama is mostly White with two big-ish and a couple small clusters of Black voters. They achieved the one Black majority district by CD-7 basically extending two long tendrils to "eat" much of these two clusters (Birmingham and Montgomery), and despite that it is only barely a majority (56% Black).

If these two tendrils were removed, it looks like there would still be just one Black majority district (CD-6) with CD-7 and CD-2 both having somewhat big minorities of Black voters.

Seems like you would need to cut very carefully to achieve two Black majority districts, which very much sounds like gerrymandering to me. However, this is just based on that one map, so I may very well be mistaken.

"the abridgement of the right to vote based on race or color."
"Black voters have less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect candidates of their choice to Congress." (from the article)

Please correct me if I’m wrong, since I’ve only started informing myself on this topic starting with this article:

It seems to me, that the basis of the argument that you need a Black majority in order to fully assert your right to vote is the assertion that voters who are Black cannot be represented by officials non-Black people vote for. It seems to assume a strict racial divide in who people vote for, with White people having their White representative and Black people needing their Black representative.

This seems like a very foreign concept to me, since politicians are supposed to be able to represent multiple groups in my head, and since political opinions should not map 1-to-1 to race.

On the other hand, I resonate much more with the article’s quote on "voter dilution" by Terri Sewell. If you pack some districts so full that they are majorly Black, you thereby risk reducing them in others until their opinions as a voting block are pretty much irrelevant there. This seems like an argument to work towards having a significant minority of voters in several districts instead of concentrating them in one or two districts.

Currently 1 out of 7 of them are Black majority, while about 2/7 people in Alabama are Black. It’s illegal racial gerrymandering that keeps it this way.

2/7 people being black does not automatically mean that 2/7 districts should be Black majority. It really depends on how clustered together those 2/7 people are.

If they live evenly spread out in the state, zero of the districts should be Black majority. If they are clustered in big groups (racially divided districts), then it makes more sense for them to be a majority in some places.

As an outsider, I assume the racial divide is clear enough that dividing the districts by ethnicity makes some sense(?)

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TIL thanks to your post: Since ~2020 ethnicities are generally capitalised.

Racial and ethnic groups are designated by proper nouns and are capitalized. Therefore, use “Black” and “White” instead of “black” and “white” (do not use colors to refer to other human groups; doing so is considered pejorative)

https://blog.ongig.com/diversity-and-inclusion/capitalize-race/

Hilarious that capitalisation of a colour is suddenly supposed to make that word not be a colour. Yeah, if I’m writing white as White, it is definitely not a colour any more…

Dang it.

At least the new vaccine is supposed to protect against the newest variant. Not looking forward to another shot, though.

https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2023/what-to-know-about-the-eg5-variant

It failed to boot for me, too. Only worked when I stopped asking it to encrypt the hard drive.

To be honest, only laziness is stopping me from switching to another OS, though. Very poor experience so far.

Fun fact, a playground I went to recently had the closest approximation to this I’ve seen yet standing there.

Because money is still a restriction, it included a small (locked) money box and a note to please insert money if you take anything. More of a do-it-yourself shop, but great nonetheless.

Achja, der Staat hat wohl wieder zu wenig zu tun. Ziemlich sicher, die Hauptbeschwerde der Asylsuchenden war auch, dass das ganze viel zu schnell geht.

Besser, wir durchsuchen noch einmal auf Amtswegen die Daten der potenziell Millionen von Menschen. Das wird die ganze Angelegenheit angenehm entschleunigen. Man muss ja auch mal Muße haben. Vielleicht kann dann auch noch ein jahrelanges Rechtsverfahren laufen, um festzustellen, ob die Rundumüberwachung vielleicht doch menschenunwürdig ist. Damit hätten alle wieder was zu tun.

Definitiv ein solider Plan, der nicht unnötig Geld kostet und nicht schiefgehen kann.

Wie viel Fleisch hat sie in den letzten Jahrzehnten gegessen? Siehste!

Ich dachte, das wäre schon wieder vorbei. Machen die da noch mehr dieses Jahr?

Super simple ELI5:

• Electronics (computers/phones/laptops etc) work by running electricity through stuff ("conductors").

• While moving, the electricity "bumps" into stuff on the way. That’s bad, and only the reason electronics get warm. Electric energy is turned into heat instead of doing its job.

• In a _super_conductor, electricity does not bump into stuff. Everything works smoothly, no waste heat. Batteries would last longer. Heat damage would no longer be (as much) a concern. Basically, all-around better.

The warmest current conductor I’ve read about only worked at below -27 °C, I think, and needed huge pressure, like on the ocean floor. Others work at surface pressure but require even lower temps.

Benefits of safe, cheaply mass-produced, room-temperature, [EDIT: and workable] surface-pressure superconductors:

• Massively better battery life of everything.

• Much, much more efficient use of anything that needs electricity, reducing cost of everything that needs electricity.

• Extremely efficient energy transfer (power lines etc can lose a lot of energy on the way), making electricity itself cheaper.

• Some inventions are suddenly much more feasible (Maglev trains and hoverboards are examples I’ve seen mentioned, but don’t ask me about the science behind that.)

• Electronics can become smaller, yet again. It would probably make Smartwatches and "Spatial Computing" devices more feasible.

EDIT: Based on one YT video, I’ll add that the material also needs to be able to worked into various forms and solid/stable enough not to crumble over time. Apparently, there are some technically great superconductors already, but they crumble apart or lose their superconductor status if electricity flows through them the wrong way, or something, making them useless.

Children are easy to carry and often easily accessible. Sadly, it is often as simple as driving close to one in a car, then pulling them inside.

Actually, that can work for adults as well, according to some vids and news stories I’ve seen. Many crimes are incredibly easy. Just like the death toll and environmental/monetary/health cost of cars, it’s just not mainstream knowledge.

And that doesn’t include all the other causes. Runaways are missing, and often intentionally trying to stay missing. Parents taking children and leaving the country without telling anyone can make them all be "missing". Bureaucratic issues can mean that a simple move leaves children "missing" in one official register or another. Some people or families are simply not "in the system", living off-the-grid.

I remember having to figure out why audio was not working on a new installation. That was once, probably ~5 years ago and was fixed quickly once I found a solution online.

I’d vastly prefer my ears to stop working intermittently due to a FOSS driver issue over a corporate overlord installing bloat, spyware, demanding regular payment for the privilege of them not deleting my driver, just to drop support for them some years later anyway.