https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/hawks-helping-keep-oakland-streets-safe-by-dispersing-crow-roosts/

while Baz insists he has nothing against crows, it’s the mess they leave behind that has people crying foul.

That’s what I’m secretly training the crows for.

I doubt the falconer would have any issue with me—I’m helping to keep them employed.

I’m indifferent to squirrels… but my city has hired a falconer to scare the crows away with hawks, so now the crows symbolize the oppressed masses being persecuted by the state.

A crow-calling whistle and a small tin of peanuts.

Blood Meridian as an illustrated children’s book.

What’s the purpose—research? Tax evasion? Shits and giggles?

Not with a typewriter, though.

Yeah, that’s why we need at least… two of them.

You know that there are two unrelated words, and you’ve seen two different spellings—it’s a natural assumption that the latter stems from the former.

Why so many people would pair them up the same (etymologically unsupported) way, I don’t know… maybe we’re used to correlating words relating to art with French, and assuming that words with “ou” come from French as well (and this case just happens to be an exception).

I use “mold” for both, and regard “mould” as the British spelling for both.

But the etymologies are interesting—the verb comes from French modle, while the fungus comes from late Middle English mould. So if anything, your assumed distinction is etymologically reversed.

One issue specific to the Fediverse is that each instance and each community might have its own standard for what it considers “credible”—and part of another user’s credibility score might come from users on instances with which yours isn’t federated and doesn’t share information.

TIL Habermas is still alive.

Not using their turn signals if the only other traffic is pedestrians.

So many times I’ve been crossing an intersection to the opposite corner where I could cross either street first, so I pick the street that won’t block the car crossing the other way. They’re not signalling so I figure they’re going straight, and cross the other way so they won’t have to wait for me—but seemingly every time it turns out the car was really turning after all. So they’re stuck because they couldn’t conceive of pedestrians as traffic they need to communicate with.

A long family tradition.

It’s not like Condorcet’s scenario where every candidate has a pairwise election against every other candidate—it assumes a subversive agenda-setter who presents each new proposal as a yes-or-no alternative to the existing status quo (the previously-accepted proposal). Once a policy is rejected, it isn’t re-introduced.

That’s true for any pairwise vote, but not for the entire sequence.

As in the Condorcet paradox, voter preferences are intransitive: voters preferring A to B and B to C doesn’t imply that voters will prefer A to C. But where the Condorcet paradox shows how this can lead to a cyclical subset of candidates where no candidate can beat all other members of the subset, the chaos theorem shows how this can lead to a series of votes that ends absolutely anywhere.

Yeah, the Condorcet criterion is a lot more restrictive in the space of policies (where you can make incremental changes in any direction) than in elections for a discrete set of candidates. (Which is why they say that in most cases there won’t be one.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKelvey–Schofield_chaos_theorem

There will in most cases be no Condorcet winner and any policy can be enacted through a sequence of votes, regardless of the original policy. This means that adding more policies and changing the order of votes (“agenda manipulation”) can be used to arbitrarily pick the winner.

The article doesn’t explicitly say that this includes policies not preferred by any single voter, but it’s implied by “any” and “arbitrary” (and can be verified by the original theorems).

The McKelvey–Schofield chaos theorem proves that, if an electorate is presented with a series of proposed policy changes and everyone votes according to their honest preference, the proposals can be fashioned and ordered in such a way that any policy can be made to win—even one that no voter prefers to the starting point.