By that line of reasoning, this proposal is great because not only the first but also the second and third candidate are elected, making an even later portion of the voters happy
That's a fair point and it has merit. I however don't think the big two will care for it as it does two things, weakens their positions and two give fringe/radicals on both sides voices, of course regular run of the mill third parties (who would syphon votes from the big two).
Of course they wouldn't like it, they loose the boogeyman of "if you vote third party you're just helping the party you really don't like!"
Ranked choice gives smaller parties a chance while preventing them from being a spoiler, I think it's great because it would actually force the two incumbent parties to actually work for their vote instead of assuming you have no real choice (hey, you're pro-choice/pro-life so you HAVE to vote for us or the other guys will have their way, ha ha).
If this made the entire state one giant district, then it would give real power to third parties. But a district with just 5 representatives is not enough to pose a huge threat. They would get some more power, but surely not much. Or perhaps I'm missing something. (When it comes to politics, I'm usually missing something, often something big.)
>A potential patent applies to any implementation. Even if you write a clean-room clone of React, if it uses the same patent, Facebook has a patent claim.
Sure, but that only rules out a reimplementation of React. The question most people face is "React or existing alternative X?". If your chosen alternative is still actively developed, it's probably notably different from React in concept and implementation (why else would it still exist).
Now if Facebook owns any react-related patents, you use all of them by using react, your alternative has a good chance to be sufficiently different to not be infringing.
In terms of your chances of using Facebook patents, any alternative is strictly better than React itself.
A self-sufficient Mars colony isn't easy, but it doesn't seem impossible. And the lack of FTL doesn't really limit us to this solar system either: generational starships with nuclear pulse propulsion [1] could get us to the next star with around 100 years travel time. Not exactly something we want to start tomorrow, but fairly feasable.
The biggest issue I can think of is oil running out, but we're on a good trajectory to solving that. Other resources seem either abundant or replaceable. The threat of global nuclear war is problematic but not really solvable by throwing more people at the problem. Overpopulation isn't projected to be a problem. Climate change will be a major inconvenience and costly, but unlikely to be an existential issue.
Of course there's lots of injustice, hunger, disease, murder and torture that would be nice to resolve, but it's not an existential issue for humanity.
In any scenario where society or technology breaks down enough for these skills to be useful, the majority of the population still won't miss them. Without industrialised fishing and farming (which relies on oil and huge production chains) we don't have nearly enough fish for people to filet or grain for people to make bread (let alone beer). And statically speaking you will be starved before your vegetables are grown.
I agree that throwing away the physical books would be stupid, but the index is ready enough to rebuild if we ever need it again. And in a post-computer world search times in the order of days or even weeks would be acceptable: when looking up crop rotations a few days more or less won't make or break your harvest
Rebuilding the index might require actually reading all the books over again. The whole point of an index is that it is 1000x smaller, so it makes absolutely no sense to throw away a paper copy of it.
https://github.com/mozilla/voice-web/issues/242