Contravariant

Democracy isn't really meant to prevent something the majority wants.

If the majority wants a criminal to lead the country they'll elect them, or someone with the same policies, or someone who promises to put the criminal in power. The end result isn't all that different, and the latter two could be worse in some ways.

In a democracy the majority rules, and should they decide to put a lunatic in charge, well, that would be the least of your problems.

All reasonable arguments not to vote for Harris. But no arguments whatsoever to vote for Trump.

And unless the archaic and infuriatingly flawed election system is fixed, you've got a civic duty to pick the lesser of two evils.

If you want a system that cannot be abused then don't remove the safeguards designed to fix mistakes.

Allowed innocents to be released from prison, and allow the disenfranchised to regain their voting rights.

This is why there is always a higher power to overrule previous decisions, and when it comes to elections there is no higher power than a majority.

It's one of those safe-guards that democracy implements that's currently having rather unintended consequences.

The reasoning is that taking away voting rights is far too easy to abuse, and if a majority of people agree with whomever you wanted to prevent from voting/getting elected then you're fucked anyway.

Which, incidentally, is looking like a very real possibility right now.

Well, who did you trust to build your hardware?

Well at some point you encounter a phase change, which complicates things, but mostly the heat capacity (how much energy it takes to raise the temperature) is fairly constant. In an ideal gas it is exactly constant, but that is a bit of an approximation, even if it works quite well for most gases.

Depriving Russia of nuclear scientists, or capable people in general, might well be worth whatever wages they brought home.

If you want to bring the inter-european war into it I'm not sure if we can afford to be unpragmatic about this. By all accounts letting Russia bleed manpower in exchange for some small wages is well worth it. If you want to deprive them of money you really need to strike at their ability to export gas and oil at inflated prices. Advancing knowledge about fusion aids that goal, though the effects are likely (hopefully?) too late to matter.

That same description applies to downloading a zipped file.

For a revolution to succeed you need the power to remove any people in power that oppose you, doesn't get more authoritarian than that.

And at this point it's also code for 'machine learning'.

Which really is just fancy statistics. Sometimes it's barely more advanced than plain regression.

Reminds me of the time I did roughly the same thing trying to get people to move away from internet explorer.