He represents Vermont, our second least populous state, with only about 650,000 residents, and 371,000 votes cast in the 2020 election.

For reference, Washington DC has a population of 690,000, and cast 346,000 votes.

Additionally, Sanders is a long time incumbent. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1991 where he served until becoming a senator in 2008 (which was prior to citizens United). In Vermont, the house of Representatives is a statewide election due to their small population.

Despite being an independent, Sanders has in many ways been acting as a Democrat, so the Democrats have avoided running against him for fear of splitting the vote. Combined with the overall democratic lean of the state, that gives him a relatively secure position.

Many other Democrats are similarly secure in their own seat. However, as part of being members of the party proper, they are under much more pressure to raise money for the party as a whole to spend on competitive raises

Optimistic of you to think we’ll all make it to next time. I’m on that list several times already.

By private companies. Federal employees have a lot more protections.

By saying “common”, we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming

That policy is surprisingly on point.

Mutual funds are a systemic risk by being dumb money. Normally this is talked about in the context of index investing. The more money blindly tracks an index, the more that index becomes detached from reality. This causes measurable inefficiencies in the market [0]. In practice, this isn’t that big of a deal, since “follow the index” essentially means “do what the smart money does”, so the distortion is not that great.

In the context of voting, the analogous action would be abstaining (or voting with the majority of voting active shareholders). I suspect the reason this is not done is a combination of there not being enough active voting shareholders (as you say, that is why boards are a thing), and the risk of activist investors.

On a much smaller scale, we have something similar happening in my local HOA. The county owns about a dozen units as part of it’s public housing program. Combined with the low turnout at HOA meetings, and the 1 property = 1 vote, this means that they could vote for essentially anything they want.

In practice, their policy is to show up to all meetings but abstain from votes unless they are needed to make a quarum. If they are needed, they vote for whatever the consensus was among every else there.

[0] See the index effect. Being added to an index increases a stock’s value, despite there being no change to the underlying fundamentals.

They are working with the Palestinian Authority, which is generally recognized as the government of Palestine.

The president ordered it. There is no legal mechanism to compel private companies to use the new name.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/restoring-names-that-honor-american-greatness/

Reading the orders, the gender one is much more impactful.

Canceling DEI programs cancels those programs, which just isn’t that impactful. Maybe it slows or reverse progress on equality at the population level. But an individual is not going to notice a difference (unless they were explicitly working in administering it). Further, those DEI programs were only for federal agencies, which are going to have a much bigger culture shift from the coming idealougical and loyalty purge. Minorities are still protected by strong anti discrimination laws and the 14th amendment.

The anti trans order, in contrast, declares that trans people don’t exist. And the entirety of the federal government must act accordingly. This will have a direct effect on every openly trans person in the country. Further, the legal protections trans people have are based entirely on an interpretation of gender discrimination laws that the current Supreme Court seems unlikely to endorse; and which Trump has directed the Attorney General to not follow.

You get this property in algrabraic structures called “wheels”. The simplest to understand wheel is probably the wheel of fractions, which is a slightly different way of defining fractions that allows division by 0.

The effect of this is to create 2 additional numbers: ∞ = z/0 for z != 0, ⊥, and ⊥ = 0/0.

Just add infinity gives you the real projective line (or Riemen Sphere if you are working with comples numbers). In this structure, 0 * ∞ is undefined, so is not quite what you want

⊥ (bottom) in a wheel can be thought as filling in for all remaining undefined results. In particular, any operation involving ⊥ results in ⊥. This includes the identity: 0 * ⊥ = ⊥.

As far as useful applications go, there are not many. The only time I’ve ever seen wheels come up when getting my math degree was just a mistake in defining fractions.

In computer science however, you do see something along these lines. The most common example is floating point numbers. These numbers often include ∞, -∞ and NaN, where NaN is essentially just ⊥. In particular, 0 * NaN = NaN, also 0 * ∞ = ⊥. The main benefit here is that arithmetic operations are always defined.

I’ve also seen an arbitrary precision fraction library that actually implemented something similar to the wheel of fractions described above (albeit with a distinction between positive and negative infinity). This would also give you 0 * ∞ = ⊥ and 0 * ⊥ = ⊥. Again, by adding ⊥ as a proper value, you could simplify the handling of some computations that might fail.

Not sex related, but I learned it in sex ed. Most males do not have a big depression in their chest. Turns out that the males in my family happened to have a condition known as Pectus Excavatum.

Israel and Palestine are both countries. Private ownership does not factor into the equation. If you get into the weeds, part of the dispute is a claim of private property rights that predate Israel. But even that duspute could be viewed through the lense of collective rights.

There is only one country whose national religion is Judaism, but it is practiced in plenty of other places.

More to the point, the fact that there are other Islamic countries is of little comfort to the Palestinians. They do not live in those countries and those countries do not want them.

Some of those countries do provide varying levels of support for Hamas because they (accurately) see it as an indirect way to attack Israel.

By the same token, any blame you want to place on Israel for this conflict reflects on Isreal as whole, and not every individual living within it.

I had the good fortune of meeting a couple of board game nerds before getting into the hobby myself. They had a seperate insurance policy specifically for their games.

I want to see the ensuing trademark lawsuit from the owners of xvideo.com