Yeah, with the current system, the only real hope for a major third party is for one of the major parties to split. Because any small third party just eats up the votes of the major party closest to its position. But, big parties only tend to split when they face major electoral defeats and there’s a lot of infighting. That means that not only did they lose, but now due to being split, they’re not even an effective opposition, and the other major party wins more easily than ever. (Which tends to lead to complacency and corruption, which tends to lead to eventual electoral defeats, once the other party gets its act together…)

And then there’s the problem that the only people who have the possible power to pass electoral reform belong to one of the two major parties, and it’s completely against the interest of those major parties to get rid of FPTP, because FPTP locks in their duopoly. That’s why, for example, when the Canadian Liberal party promised to get rid of FPTP, they abandoned that promise as soon as they were in power.

Maybe reform is possible because people are human, they don’t always optimize for the perfect win in a game. But, game theory says that it’s going to be a major uphill battle to pass any kind of reform.

The V2 assembly site was located right next to a concentration camp, and they used slave labor from that concentration camp to build the rockets.

Do we know for certain that he believed in the ideals of the Nazi party? No. Did he ever try to fight the system in even the smallest way? Also no.

The best you can say for him is that he was indifferent to the suffering of the slaves being used to assemble the rockets, and willing to allow the rockets to be used to attack London.

In the “Nazi bar” analogy, he’s a Nazi who goes to the Nazi bar wearing a Nazi uniform, and the best you can hope for is that he’s going for the beer and not because he likes hanging out with the other Nazis.

I would assume it’s the worst. The only thing it has going for it is that it’s easy to understand.

The only powerful position in a parliamentary system is to be in the party in power. No third party has ever been in power. At best, they’ve been a part of a minority coalition, and even those are relatively rare. Canada definitely supports Duverger’s law.

Many countries with FPTP still have large 3rd parties

The “law” says that 2 main parties tend to emerge. In Canada only once has the prime minister ever come from a party other than the Liberals or the Conservatives. That was in 1917 when the main issue was conscription, and the pro-conscription “Union” party won over the anti-conscription Liberals. It’s pretty clear that in Canadian politics there are 2 main parties, and a few other parties that cling to survival.

Occasionally one of the parties ends up imploding, but Duverger’s Law is so strong that normally it’s only a short time before the duopoly is re-established. In Canada, Brian Mulroney and his party were so unpopular that it caused the Reform Party to form from disaffected conservatives. That meant that in the 1993 election the “Progressive Conservative” party managed only 2 seats in the federal election. But, 10 years later, the rift was healed and once again the Conservative party was the main opposition. Then the Liberals self-destructed and very briefly the NDP was the official opposition, but a few years later Justin Trudeau took the Liberals to a huge victory.

Sure, it’s better to have a third party with a few seats than it is to have no third party at all. But, I’d hardly say that events in Canada disprove Duverger’s law. In fact, they tend to support it. In more than 150 years, despite everything, the two main parties are essentially the two main parties from 150 years ago.

It’s unfortunate that the US founding fathers were well educated, but from a time 200 years before Game Theory was understood.

Duverger’s Law says that in a first-past-the-post system, you’ll eventually end up with 2 political parties. And, 2 political parties is a terrible state for a country.

Also, you’re eventually going to get political parties even if you try to ban them. They’ll just become “clubs” or something. A group of people agreeing to act together (say a union) is always going to have more power than a bunch of people acting individually.

I would hope that any country thinking of creating a new political system, or making major updates to theirs would hire a lot of game theorists to figure out how the rules could be abused and what the system might look like in 250 years.

It could, and eventually would, but the premise of this comic is “the earth has stopped rotating”, not “the earth is now rotating at 1 revolution per year”.

Don’t get me wrong, nearly every fighter plane looks cool. But, it’s just different varieties of cool. Like, a lot of the US planes look Lamborghini-cool, with hard surfaces and so on. The Russian / Soviet planes just look more sculpted.

And, if the rule of cool doesn’t apply, then why did P-40 fighter planes have shark’s mouths?

I dunno. The nose of the MiG-21 looks weird, but I really like the look of the delta wings, the rudder and the ailerons. The F-104 with nothing mounted on the wingtips looks like a dart, which is cool I suppose. With the typical big fuel tanks on the wingtips it looks like some kind of catamaran.

IMO basically every Soviet / Russian jet has looked better than American jets.

I like the look of the MiG-15, the 21, etc. But, IMO the jets really got beautiful right as the Soviet Union was collapsing.

The SU-27 is a beautiful plane, the MiG-29 too. It just seems like with some of these jets, the American equivalents were designed by computer and manufactured precisely to spec. While, it feels like some of the Soviet planes involved guys with hammers trying to make a beautiful curved surface.

It also helps that the Russians often use colourful paint jobs, while the US uses flat boring grey that shows every flaw.

Not sure why the North Atlantic matters to China.

Spreading the weight around using toes doesn’t seem to be a useful strategy. It’s also not something that humans do. Human toes are not at the weight-bearing part of the foot. And, while I’m sure toes are somewhat involved in agility, having individual toes doesn’t seem to be. In fact, if you look at apes like gorillas and chimps, it’s pretty clear that our toes have been getting shorter and less important as we’ve been evolving as upright-walking creatures who don’t live in trees. Instead, the sole of the foot, which used to be much more like the palm of a hand, has been getting longer and sturdier.

If you have separate toes, you have multiple fragile things that can break or be torn off. If you have one mega-toe it’s going to be sturdy. That’s probably why the heaviest animals have the fewest / smallest toes.

Depends on the state of your esophagus, doesn’t it? If it’s closed (which it mostly is) then your mouth and nose holes go to your lung cavity. Your anus is also part of a cavity that goes through your intestines all the way up your throat and stops at your esophagus.

Humans have multiple toes because our ape ancestors used their toes like fingers. Having multiple, separate toes is probably bad for survival unless you’re using toes to manipulate tools.

Animals that have distinct toes include apes, geckos, mice, raccoons and similar animals which need them to grip onto surfaces or to manipulate things. There are predators which have separate toes because they’re a place to mount claws: eagles, cats, etc. There are animals that have separate toes with webbing between for swimming. But, for a lot of animals, separate toes aren’t really useful, so they’ve evolved away: elephants, rhinos, giraffes, horses, cows, etc.

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I mean, humans run around on something that birds would consider knees, and stupidly try to support their entire body weight using only half their legs.

Or, just imagine what it says if they actually didn’t know about this last week. That would be even worse, it would mean that the team doing publicity and taking orders didn’t realize that they were half a year away from being done…

But, yeah, I can’t see how this doesn’t result in a disaster. They really do need to release something before then, something with this year’s DBs before they’re irrelevant. They could take the old game, update the DB and just sell it at half price. Or, they could sell it at full price but with a coupon for say 50% off the new game.

The November release date of Football Manager has always been awkward. The FIFA games all come out in late September / early October, right after the teams have been finalized. By the time Football Manager comes out, 1/3 of the season has already been played. IMO their best bet would be to release in the summer before the season starts and then do a post transfer deadline day patch. The initial release could use the squads as they existed at the end of the previous season – probably something a lot of people would want anyway because they could be in charge of all the summer transfers. In fact, I wonder if a release date of early June or something might be ideal.

My guess is that one major motivation for people to buy Football Manager is that they’re saying “I could do a better job of running my team than this bunch of idiots”. And, that feeling is probably strongest right at the end of a season. A Football Manager release at the end of the season might be ideal for people who want to spend the summer doing all the wheeling and dealing they wish their clubs would do well, as they wait for the season to start again.

If they think they can have the new Unity-based game ready and polished in March, just call it FM 26, release it before the season starts, and do a full update once the various transfer windows have all closed and the DBs are all updated. If they don’t do that, who’s going to buy FM 25 when FM 26 will have all the bugs fixed, the new season’s DBs, and is only a few months away?

Should it also be illegal for a company to issue press releases when good things happen? Or, maybe, required that they issue press releases any time there’s bad news?

I don’t see a problem with it as long as it’s clear that the group pushing the bad news is honest about their short position. Especially in a world where an advertising duopoly has appropriated nearly all the advertising money that used to support news, and as a result news organizations are crumbling, we need short sellers. Shorting a company is extremely risky, and generally an organization will only take a short position if they’re sure the stock is overvalued. That means they’re going to do deep research on the company – the kind of research that used to be done by financial reporters.

Naturally, if they do take a short position they really need the stock to drop, so they’re going to frame everything they find in the most negative light possible. They’re also going to be extremely aggressive about getting the news out, because they need shareholders who don’t pay much attention to the news to hear about what’s happening and want to sell. While they might not be fully honest about the companies they’re shorting, the kinds of companies they’re shorting are also often not being at all honest about their performance.

I’m sure that sometimes a company gets targeted by short sellers without doing anything wrong. But, I’m even more sure that there are companies out there lying to their investors to keep their stock price high.

This would conceivably be true for car repair as well. A mechanic is incentivized to order as many repairs as possible for a car.

So why don’t they?

They do. Car mechanics have a notorious reputation for doing repairs that aren’t necessary, or for breaking something so that the owner has to come in again soon.

is also incentivized to serve their customers well by selling them only things that truly benefit them.

Yeah, there’s a natural counterbalance that means they don’t want to be seen as dishonest. Similarly, an insurance company is counterbalanced against trying to prevent every test or procedure by also wanting to be seen as honest.

We don’t need insurance companies in all those other industries

You’re aware that car insurance is a thing right? Any industry where the charges are going to be extremely high is going to involve insurance. Cars are fairly expensive devices, and so there’s car insurance, and if you’re in a big accident your car insurance will pay for the repairs. But, the car insurance will keep an eye on you to make sure you’re not committing insurance fraud, and also limit how much the car repair shops are allowed to spend to repair your car.

Yes, it’s clear why it’s legal and necessary to some extent. In a for-profit system, a doctor’s office or hospital, every procedure or test the doctor can order (and have the patient pay for) will generate profit. Doctors have an incentive to order as many tests as possible. I assume that most doctors are somewhat honorable and won’t abuse this too much, but they’ll probably still err on the side of ordering as many tests as possible not necessarily because of profits, but because more tests gives them more information.

Meanwhile, in a for-profit system, an insurance company will generate the most profit by agreeing to as few tests and procedures as possible. So, they will have an adversarial relationship with doctors and will try to arrange as few tests and procedures as possible. My guess is that the average insurance company is less ethical than the average doctor, so they’re probably more likely to refuse to allow tests that are actually medically necessary.

In a sane system, there would be a neutral referee, the government, who would resolve disputes and severely punish any actor in the system that was behaving badly. But, AFAIK that only rarely happens in the US, where the idea is that the “invisible hand of the free market” will magically make it all work.