I’m in mid Michigan, and you’re fine. The circumstances that lead (ba-dum) to the issues in Flint are unlikely to occur elsewhere, particularly if you’re closer to Detroit.

Yup, same thing. Calling a government official corrupt is unlikely to be able to be called libel in general. It’s a really high bar you have to clear.

The burden for libel or slander on a public official is pretty high. It pretty much has to go well past criticizing the government in an unambiguous way because government officials prosecuting people for criticizing them is Bad™

I doubt you’d see anything unless he claimed the judge did some specific act of moral turpitude on a specific occasion.
Yelling at the government about mismanagement and impropriety is just about as close as you can get to what the first amendment is for, in a nutshell.

The fact that he’s wrong and a loathsome asshole doesn’t change that he’s allowed to say it.

And the whole “you can have it removed and be kicked out of the country thing”.

Like, having your citizenship stripped is so much worse than a ticket, even if you don’t have any money. You can be deported.

Jumping straight there instead of “waiving the fine at clerk or judges discretion” is super extreme.

That’s significantly worse than the $15 fine they have. Like orders of magnitude worse in every way. You’ll do more damage to the person by forcing them to do community service, and stripping someone of their citizenship is extreme, to the point where it might run afoul of international treaties and qualify as a human rights violation.

It’s like they don’t have an exemption process , just the default is "vote or pay $15”.

Well that’s pretty cool, thanks for sharing! :D To repeat to check my understanding, you’re looking at where structures are relative to other structures, their shape and orientation, and how that goes together in a big system to influence general structure survival in a wildfire situation.

Do you foresee the outcome being something where you could “tune” a neighborhood to be more survivable, or would it end up with too many combinations to be viable?

When you refer to that diagram, is it a way of gauging fire spread risk? Like this grill could start a medium sized fire, and it’s close to a shed which could become big fire, and that could spread to house, etc, etc?

They do have mail in voting.

Okay.

From the metrics in the study referenced above trafficking accounts for roughly 25% of prostitutes, regardless of legality. When it’s legal, they have workplace protections and get normal workplace benefits like retirement plans.
When it’s illegal, they have little legal protections, and are subject to abuse because while victims, they’re also criminals and are punished if caught or saved.

Personally, I think better outcomes for the majority of people is preferable to markedly worse outcomes for a smaller set.

If people are too scared to tell the police, they’ll be too scared in either case. Police can also arrest people for suspicion, they just can’t press charges.

In jurisdictions where it’s illegal, the vastly more common occurrence is that trafficked persons are afraid to talk to the police because they’re doing illegal things and fear legal penalties.
Actual evidence suggests that outcomes for trafficked persons are better when it’s decriminalized, even though it happens more often.

What? No, I understand how Senate seats work. It’s not undemocratic because they’re not voted on, it’s undemocratic because they over represent some people over others. Wyoming and California should not be on equal ground because California has 80 times the population.
All issues that impact a state impact the people of the state. States don’t have interests, they’re just collections of people living on a piece of land.

Giving votes to land is an artifact of getting the country started.

What.

In most democratic systems, the whole point is that you vote, and the majority wins. That’s the point of voting.

A loophole where one side can just block voting breaks the whole thing.

That’s just a baffling position.

https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-prostitution-increase-human-trafficking/

I know there’s a handful of studies out there, but this one is fairly comprehensive.

It’s difficult to know for sure the answer to your question. The authors theory is more that due to economic reasons, the demand following legalization grows faster than the domestic supply, because demand grows higher in countries with high wealth because they can afford it, and supply is lower because wealth people are less likely to become prostitutes.
They then look at a bunch of countries to put specific numbers on those trends and see if they balance out to an increase or decrease in trafficking.

The evidence gives weight to their theory, which would sidestep the specifics of how enforcement was conducted.

It’s also important to note that their study was independent of the harm reduction aspect of decriminalization, which is increasingly well accepted.

What I’d be curious to know is if decriminalization results in a global increase in trafficking, or just local.
If someplace decriminalized prostitution, and that just diverted trafficked persons there instead of elsewhere rather than causing more people to be trafficked, then you could potentially be doing a net good making sure that people who ended up trafficked ended up in the lest harmful place that could happen to them.

I think it only makes sense if you think that it matters that Wyoming is fairly represented, and not the people in Wyoming.
I don’t particularly care about the representation of the land, only the people who live on it, where each person should have as much say as any other.

The Senate is explicitly antidemocratic, and since I’m a fan of fair representation, I’m not a fan of the Senate.

Well, I suppose you could also make it so states get equal numbers of senators and representatives. That would also be fine, since there’s a slight use for the Senate having a longer election cycle.

Since this whole thread is basically playing and dreaming, I’ll easily agree that you can’t just drop the Senate without at least giving a look at how that impacts the rest of the government organization.

Australia has mandatory voting, and so does Belgium. There are definitely some places with compulsory voting that aren’t great, but there are others that are fine.
Most require you to show up or face a minimal fine if you don’t have an excuse, but you don’t actually have to cast a vote, just check the box for showing up.

We already have a registry of who did or didn’t vote.
That you voted is a matter of public record, as is voter registration information.
Registration data is used for campaign purposes, and voter participation data is mostly used to encourage people to vote.

It exists because there was a time when we needed buy in from states, not just people. The Senate was how that was accomplished.
It’s a way of ensuring our democracy isn’t too democratic.

You can understand the point of the Senate without thinking that we need to ensure that land is adequately represented in our government.

I mean, objectification is already a thing women have to deal with. It won’t make that problem worse.

Every study on places where it’s been decriminalized have shown that it results in an increase in prostitution, an increase in trafficking, and better safety and recovery routes for those involved.
Greatly reduced harm to a slightly increased group of people.

Being able to kill a bill without having the votes to vote it down by either talking for a while or just threatening to talk for a while seems fine to you?

It’s a procedural loophole that allows the minority party to tacitly veto legislation that doesn’t have a supermajority.

Lobbying and pacs weren’t created by citizens united.

Honestly, reversing citizens united is the only part that’s needed. Pacs and lobbying aren’t intrinsically bad, they just need regulation and oversight that they don’t have because of citizens united.

A group of people showing able to pool their resources to advocate for legislation, and people should be able to ask their representatives to take action on their behalf.
Pacs and lobbying are now far more than those two things, so we need regulation, but we still need them.