First-past-the-post does need to go, but what gets me is that Trudeau started an electoral reform process involving public consultations and buy-in from the other parties, and what he regrets is not that he shut it down when it wasn’t going towards his preferred system, but that he didn’t just skip all that and use his majority to implement his preferred aystem.
Trudeau also commented on the form of electoral reform:
He said one of his mistakes was leaving the door open to proportional representation when he did not plan to pursue it. The other, he said, was “not using my majority to bring in the model that I wanted”—the ranked ballot.
Trudeau said he believes a ranked ballot is the most effective at reducing polarization because it causes parties to moderate their message in an effort to pitch to be the second choice of supporters of other parties.
However, the system was dismissed by many of the Liberals’ opponents who noted that as a centrist party the Liberals were likely to receive more second-choice votes and be the primary beneficiaries of such a model.
He regrets not using his first-past-the-post majority to push through a change to the electoral system that would mainly benefit his own party.
Vox half-assed their paywall - the full articles are still in the free RSS feed
He’s rich enough to get several warnings before someone maybe considers bringing charges against him.
It’s “many” like in “Many people on twitter are saying…” i.e. they found 3 or 4 people saying crazy shit and acted like it was a big thing.
I deleted my account when I discovered that bullshit. LinkedIn’s new opt-out AI data gobbling has me this close to deleting that account too.
How do you know when to stop wiping?
the only complaint came from a Russian boxing body with a history of making suspect claims in the past
And that was only after she defeated a previously undefeated Russian. Sounds an awful lot like sore losers making up excuses.
They needed to have something that might be less appealing than an AI assistant
The update is pretty important:
Update, July 5, 1:50 p.m. PT: Apple has told IGN that it has now approved the Epic Sweden AB Marketplace app, and that it’s asked Epic to fix the appearance similarity issue in a future submission. Epic Games confirmed this with an update on its X/Twitter account, which you can see below.
I meant kill it by stalling it in Parliament long enough to make sure implementation couldn’t happen in time for the election. If the Conservatives won the election they wouldn’t follow through with implementing the bill.
The line is in the subtitles as "At least Z’s safe with us until we do.”
But what if Trudeau tried to recapture that significant slice of the electorate whose hearts he broke, by bringing back his pledge to reform our election system? Except this time, don’t just talk about it: do it.
If his confidence-and-supply agreement with the New Democrats endures until Fall 2025 as scheduled, Trudeau would have ample time to dust off all the work his previous ministers and committees undertook and get a bill before Parliament for debate.
The author seems to think that passing a bill is all it would take to implement electoral reform, but I suspect it would just be the beginning of a process that almost certainly could not be completed before next year’s election. The Conservatives might even try to stall the bill long enough to kill the whole thing.
Nick Fury was Black in the (first) Ultimate universe
Don’t forget that the $25k wouldn’t all be gains in the first place. If the investment had increased in value by 25%, it would be 20k base and only 5k gains; if it had increased by 100% it would be an even split. We’re talking about taxing a part of a part of the sale value.
Its just unreasonable to expect spotify to be able to afford that when they already barely pay musicians.
The audiobooks help them pay even less for music:
With the introduction of the stand-alone audiobooks offering, Spotify is now able to pay lower music-licensing rates for the music-and-audiobook bundle, introduced in the U.S. in November 2023. The 2022 settlement agreement between the National Music Publishers Assn. and streaming services includes a carveout for bundles (such as Amazon Prime and Apple Music + Apple News), which the new audiobook offering falls under. Such plans lower the mechanical licensing rates the company pays in the U.S. Spotify’s lower royalty rates are retroactive to March 1, 2024.
However, NMPA president-CEO David Israelite had strong words for the move when contacted for comment by Variety. “It appears Spotify has returned to attacking the very songwriters who make its business possible,” he wrote. “Spotify’s attempt to radically reduce songwriter payments by reclassifying their music service as an audiobook bundle is a cynical, and potentially unlawful, move that ends our period of relative peace. We will not stand for their perversion of the settlement we agreed upon in 2022 and are looking at all options.” The NMPA and streaming services resolved a years-long standoff over royalty rates with a Copyright Royalty Board ruling in 2022, and agreed upon a new rate of 15.35% for the 2023-2027 period.
Somehow governments keep making fixed election date laws that the government is free to ignore.