It wouldn’t be the first time a dude showed up to a place with a gun wanting to kill people, killed people, and then got away with it scott free while conservative media fawned over him.

Just cancelled my subscription.

This has national security concerns. He shouldn’t be near anything requiring a security clearance, which likely means he shouldn’t be CEO of SpaceX.

**Issue 1 ** To create an appointed redistricting commission not elected by or subject to removal by the voters of the state
Proposed Constitutional Amendment

The proposed amendment would:

1. Repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering approved by nearly three-quarters of Ohio electors participating in the statewide elections of 2015 and 2018, and eliminate the longstanding ability of Ohio citizens to hold their representatives accountable for establishing fair state legislative and congressional districts.

2. Establish a new taxpayer-funded commission of appointees required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts to favor either of the two largest political parties in the state of Ohio, according to a formula based on partisan outcomes as the dominant factor, so that:

A. Each district shall contain single-member districts that are geographically contiguous, but state legislative and congressional districts will no longer be required to be compact; and

B. Counties, townships and cities throughout Ohio can be split and divided across multiple districts, and preserving communities of interest will be secondary to the formula that is based on partisan political outcomes.

3. Require that a majority of the partisan commission members belong to the state’s two largest political parties.

4. Prevent a commission member from being removed, except by a vote of their fellow commission members, even for incapacity, willful neglect of duty or gross misconduct.

5. Prohibit any citizen from filing a lawsuit challenging a redistricting plan in any court, except if the lawsuit challenges the proportionality standard applied by the commission, requirements pertaining to an incumbent elected official’s residence, or the expiration of certain senators’ terms, and then only before the Ohio Supreme Court.

6. Create the following process for appointing commission members: Four partisan appointees on the Ohio Ballot Board will choose a panel of 4 partisan retired judges (2 affiliated with the first major political party and 2 affiliated with the second major political party). Provide that the 4 legislative appointees of the Ohio Ballot Board would be responsible for appointing the panel members as follows: the Ballot Board legislative appointees affiliated with the same major political party would select 8 applicants and present those to the Ballot Board legislative appointees affiliated with the other major political party, who would then select 2 persons from the 8 for appointment to the panel, resulting in 4 panel appointees. The panel would then hire a private professional search firm to help them choose 6 of the 15 individuals on the commission. The panel will choose those 6 individuals by initially creating a pool of 90 individuals (30 from the first major political party, 30 from the second major political party, and 30 from neither the first nor second major political parties). The panel of 4 partisan retired judges will create a portal for public comment on the applicants and will conduct and publicly broadcast interviews with each applicant in the pool. The panel will then narrow the pool of 90 individuals down to 45 (15 from the first major political party; 15 from the second major political party; and 15 from neither the first nor second major political parties). Randomly, by draw, the 4 partisan retired judges will then blindly select 6 names out of the pool of 45 to be members of the commission (2 from the first major political party; 2 from the second major political party; and 2 from neither the first nor second major political parties). The 6 randomly drawn individuals will then review the applications of the remaining 39 individuals not randomly drawn and select the final 9 individuals to serve with them on the commission, the majority of which shall be from the first and the second major political parties (3 from the first major political party, 3 from the second major political party, and 3 from neither the first nor second major political parties).

7. Require the affirmative votes of 9 of 15 members of the appointed commission to create legislative and congressional districts. If the commission is not able to determine a plan by September 19, 2025, or July 15 of every year ending in one, the following impasse procedure will be used: for any plan at an impasse, each commissioner shall have 3 days to submit no more than one proposed redistricting plan to be subject to a commission vote through a ranked-choice selection process, with the goal of having a majority of the commission members rank one of those plans first. If a majority cannot be obtained, the plan with the highest number of points in the ranked-choice process is eliminated, and the process is repeated until a plan receives a majority of first-place rankings. If the ranked-choice process ends in a tie for the highest point total, the tie shall be broken through a random process.

8. Limit the right of Ohio citizens to freely express their opinions to members of the commission or to commission staff regarding the redistricting process or proposed redistricting plans, other than through designated meetings, hearings and an online public portal, and would forbid communication with the commission members and staff outside those contexts.

9. Require the commission to immediately create new legislative and congressional districts in 2025 to replace the most recent districts adopted by the citizens of Ohio through their elected representatives.

10. Impose new taxpayer-funded costs on the State of Ohio to pay the commission members, the commission staff and appointed special masters, professionals, and private consultants that the commission is required to hire; and an unlimited amount for legal expenses incurred by the commission in any related litigation.

If approved, the amendment will be effective 30 days after the election.

SHALL THE AMENDMENT BE APPROVED?

Have you read the language on Ohio’s Issue #1 this ballot?

The current mapping of congressional districts system is a bipartisan commission. If the commission doesn’t agree, the state legislature decides the maps. Guess how that turns out every time. The new system would replace that with an actual bipartisan commission that doesn’t just default to the state legislature.

Turns out the state legislature doesn’t like this. While they couldn’t prevent the ballot measure, they could decide the language used. I’ll go find it and reply here.

“Tabloids” was the word you were looking for.

Another source, Rolling Stone

Sound like something you did with replacing files. KeePass is dead simple, and that’s why it’s great.

Immich is better if you can host it.

You can buy an ARM laptop right now.

Isn’t that a serious federal crime? How did they not get caught doing that?

Yeah, if not for me the government would have responded appropriately and bankrupted the company.

I bought a bit of BP shortly after the oil spill.

I was hoping to lose it all, but had the feeling I’d end up making money. I did make money.

All those shareholders should have been fucked.

Okay, a couple things here are way off. The electoral college is not a cause of the two party system. FPTP is the primary driver of that.

No, both parties don’t want the electoral college. Pretty sure the Dems would love to win nearly all modern presidential races. This is a pretty lame “they’re both the same”.

Appears to be $5/month.

I agree with your argument, but not what you’ve applied it to.

“Federation” isn’t the main feature of Lemmy, and we don’t need to focus on it. It’s enough that it exists. When selling a house, would the first thing you focus on be the insurance rates if something goes wrong?

Because they want to merge with another company and need regulator approval.

I used to work at a third party store that worked on a different model and was pretty incredible.

The owner took all the commissions and paid everyone a straight (decent) salary. This caused a number of changes in how the place was run.

Better customer service. It didn’t matter to us if you were coming in to buy a phone or for a problem with your bill. I’ll happily spend two hours on the phone with the company trying to fix your bill without selling you a thing.

We had strict standards for process, and our paperwork would be reviewed by someone who did entirely executive stuff. Our stuff always had 'I’s dotted and 'T’s crossed. What I learned from this is that the company was regularly and routinely trying to scam agents. Every month we’d have to reconcile payments with the company and there would always be discrepancies.

Interestingly, we’d have you sign a separate contract with us instead of the company. If you cancelled service within six months (the charge back period), we would fine you up to $400 and require return of the equipment. This would cover any legitimate charge backs. We had a lawyer on retainer and would regularly sue people for breaching this contract and not paying the fine.

We kept a stock of loaner phones. If you broke your phone and couldn’t immediately replace it for whatever reason, we’d loan you a phone for a few days.

Our customers were loyal, and we had a special relationship with the company.

This was back when the companies were paying agents well. Over time, the company got more and more greedy, and squeezed any decent business model out of the market. The execs who knew our situation loved it because we beat the hell out of any other places for customer service, and we had several large contracts with local companies.

Of course these execs who knew us were slowly replaced MBA penny pinchers who didn’t know and didn’t care about our unique circumstance.

One of the earliest squeezes was that the company confiscated accounts that had more than a hundred lines. Those would be now run by the company’s B2B department instead of the agent(s) who landed the contract.

Oh, and another interesting tidbit. We’d often waive paperwork fees for one reason or another. We got a corporate email that said our competitor had higher fees and didn’t waive them. So you can guess what we did. Raise the fees and stop waiving them. This is how competition works in the real world. Why would anyone go the other way?

I don’t think our stores exist anymore, but they were pretty great while they lasted.

Steam recently removed their arbitration clause, largely because paying for a thousand arbitration cases is worse than dealing with a class action.

There’s absolutely no way I’ll donate after they announced shutting down mozilla.social in favor of flushing their money down the AI path.