Every branch of the federal government has experienced a decline in democratic accountability.

The House is so gerrymandered that only 10% of seats are remotely competitive each year, and it hasn't kept up with population growth.

The Senate is permanently gerrymandered, with state population differences that are far more disproportionate than what was originally designed for and intended when the Constitution was written.

This combined with hyper-partisanship prevents the US from accepting new states like Washington DC (population 700,000+) and Puerto Rico (population 3.2 million), depriving millions of US citizens from Congressional representation (no, non-voting representatives don't count).

The Supreme Court has become hyperpartisan, and appointments are a high stake circus that rely on arbitrary retirements and deaths. They need to be elected at this point to preserve democratic legitimacy.

As for the Presidency... the Electoral College has resulted in the election of the loser of a popular vote twice in 25 years.

I don't know how reform will happen, or if we'll ever see it in my lifetime but we desperately need it. The US government needs to be accountable to the people again.

Democracy is precious, and it's so tragic to see how much it's declined.

Besides the goofy name, people thought the move was premature. Netflix wanted to go all-in on streaming. The catalogue was a lot more limited back then, though, and the DVDs helped bridge the gap since a lot of movies and TV shows that were unavailable for streaming were available by DVD instead.

You have to scroll down a bit to page 83 to get to the one the article is referencing.

She requests that the Board "commission a report assessing the implications of siting Microsoft cloud datacenters in countries of significant human rights concern, and the Company’s strategies for mitigating these impacts."

She specifically cites the 2024 completion of a Microsoft datacenter in Saudi Arabia, citing a "State Department report [that] details the highly restrictive Saudi control of all internet activities and pervasive government surveillance, arrest, and prosecution of online activity."

The Board opposes the proposal because it believes Microsoft already discloses extensive disclosures on key human rights risks, and has an independent assessment each year of how they manage risks and its commitment to protecting freedom of expression and user privacy. They also re-iterate the need to comply with local laws and legally binding requests for customer data.

The proposal is non-binding, so the Board doesn't have to act on it even in the unlikely event it gets majority support (ESG proposals rarely do, especially in this environment). In practice many Boards do choose to act on majority-supported non-binding shareholder proposals, though, because many shareholders will vote against directors the following year if they don't.

They told me bills needed to be physically postmarked, not printed, so what I brought didn't count. The problem was I had gone digital/paperless, so I hardly ever received physical bills in the mail.

I eventually had to switch two of them to paper billing, wait a month or two, get the bill, and then use that before switching back, then go back to the DMV. It was really annoying.

The noise cancelation features, and now the live translation function? So cool.

Nobody blinks twice nowadays at getting into a car with a total stranger.

There were only 13 states when the Constitution was ratified. It was never envisioned to be as disproportionate as it is today, with California's two Senators representing 40 million people vs. Wyoming's 0.6 million.

I wonder if it slowly progresses over time, or if it develops opportunistically once some other bodily system that keeps it in check breaks down with age.

I have a channel for my neighborhood, another for the parents at my children's school, another for my extended family, another for work colleagues and another for a few friends.

I hope to see a passenger pigeon one day though.

Natural gas is hard to transport and often needs to be liquified to travel overseas, so global prices vary widely.

I imagined the Catholic Church, for example, would be publishing missives reminding everyone that only humans can have souls, and biologists would be fighting an quixotic battle to claim that consciousness can arise from physical structures and forces.

I'm still surprised at how credulous and accepting societies have been of AI developments over the last few years.

1) Increase productivity (produce more from the same inputs) 2) Increase labor (more people working or more hours worked) 3) Increase capital (builds more equipment/infrastructure)

Early AI gains will likely be from greater productivity (1), but as time goes on if AI is able to approximate the output of a worker, that could dramatically increase the labor supply (2).

Imagine what the US economy would look like with 10x or 100x workers.

I don't believe it yet, but that's the sense I'm getting from discussions from senior folks in the field.

I'm in my 40s and I remember my school days vividly. I remember like ~20-30 specific lessons and events from 4th grade alone.

I switched from Twitter to Threads and have been happy with it (Bluesky was invite only at the time so I didn't bother). Threads actually got me to start using Instagram too, ironically.

Here's Matt Levine on one of the incidents: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-09-04/wells-far...

The logic is if you couldn't trust a banker to not defraud their employer by submitting dishonest meal receipts, how could you trust them with client money and confidential information. I don't disagree.

I must have read that book over a dozen times in middle school.