The only part he can be excused for is making the wish, imo. It is a reaction born out of his frustration with his lack of confidence, and he doesn’t know that it will really work.

Once it became clear that the wish had a real effect, and he chose to ignore the real Nikki’s suffering and indulge himself in the lie, he became a complete villain.

If he had instead wished for the courage to tell Nikki how he felt, completely different movie.

I’m not the person you were arguing with before.

You are talking about prices, I am talking about value. While you have clearly read plenty of libertarian monetary policy primers, you aren’t prepared to discuss this topic beyond that level.

Value does not come from rarity. It comes from utility - what a thing can do - and desire - how much other people want it.

Gold has a small amount of utility and a large amount of desire. Fiat currencies have a small amount of utility (namely paying taxes to avoid jail time) and a large amount of desire.

You rail and rail against inflationary monetary policy as if it is some inherent evil of fiat currency. The money supply can be reduced, just as it can be increased, just the supply of gold can change. It doesn’t change the source of value, only the price.

Currencies are arbitrary. Gold has some industrial value, but essentially no utility to own.

Imagine the global economy collapses, and you have 100 tons of gold - what good will it do you?

Currencies have value based on what you can exchange them for - that is why dollars (and euros and all fiat) are valuable. People will give me things I want if I give them some paper. Gold as a currency is the same, but only as long as people value it. Exactly the same as fiat. It being limited only affects the per-unit PRICE assuming some value, it doesn’t give it value to begin with.

Ranked choice in the US is pretty much only instant-runoff (IRV).

All the votes are tallied for a voter’s first preference, if no majority winner then the ballots for the lowest-voted candidate are re-tallied for their next preference - repeat until some candidate gets a majority.

It is a terrible voting system, mathematically only barely better than first-past-the-post. The reason (in my opinion) that it has gotten some traction in the US is that it is the change that is least-threatening to the party duopoly, with the math telling us that is supports the same big-tent duopoly that FPTP does as an end-state.

A better form of it is the condorcet method, where candidates are compared pairwise based on preferences. E.g. on how many ballots is candidate A ranked above candidate B? The winner of such an election is the one who wins the greatest number of head-to-head elections.

STAR is interesting, but I personally find it too complex and it fails at preventing many different electoral pathologies.

Approval voting is the method I prefer (mark all candidates you approve for holding this office). Immune to spoilers, simple to explain, adaptable to single and multi-winner elections, and ensures that the candidate that has the broadest electoral support wins.

There are a few edge cases that are generally considered ‘bad’ and best avoided in the study of voting methods. Things such as voting for a candidate actually reducing the chance the voter receives an outcome they would be happy with, or of there being a single person whose vote could alter the outcome of the election.

The particular passage they linked is talking about the spoiler effect, where a candidate close in ideology to another candidate causes both of them to lose and a candidate of a different ideology than the one with the most support wins. E.g. in 1912 Roosevelt ran against Taft, allowing Woodrow Wilson to win with 40 ish percent of the vote, despite Taft and Teddy have a majority between them and being much closer on policy.

Arrow’s impossibility theorem is a formal statement (and accompanying proof) that any ordinal system of voting, where voters indicate relative preferences between candidates, is subject to the spoiler effect. First past the post and ranked choice voting are among the worst in this regard, creating spoilers even in cases where voter preferences do not require such a condition to exist.

Other majority-rule systems such as condorcet methods are less sensitive to spoilers and, under certain models of voter preferences (e.g. smooth ideological preference 'i like candidates on the right and I like them less the more left they are), is immune to spoilers.

The data would still be encrypted. Sure, they could try to brute-force the key but it is very unlikely they try that on some rando’s phone.

All the big tech companies are built on open source projects… No idea what the guy you replied to was on about.

Any useful thing you code will be used to feed the beast.