Every mining conference I have gone too in the past 5 years has been hilarious. Everything always starts with, we acknowledge today that we are on the traditional lands of the Tsleil Waututh First Nation and are thankful for xyz.

Okay now that that's out of the way lets talk about building this mine.

Corporate pandering is the worst, and what's even worse is large companies have people dedicated to that sort of garbage.

43-9?

Damn, I didnt realize it was that bad

it's pretty comical:

2024 POTUS results:

Harris: 58.47% vote
Trump: 38.33% vote
(59.97% eligible voters, solid turnout)

Congressional Seats: (52 total)

Democrats: 82.7% of seats
Republicans: 13.3% of seats

Dems afterthought: "we need even more!"

Texas by Contrast, for fairness:

38 seats total:

25 republicans: 65.8% of seats
12 democrats: 31.6% of seats
(1 vacancy, in a D+21 district no less)

2024 results:

Trump: 56.14%
Harris: 42.46%

Texas is objectively less unfair, and more in line with the democratic representation our country was supposedly built on. Gerrymandering is gross, but over-doing it in response to someone doing it less severely is really gross.

California is gerrymandered but your data is flawed. 60% of people voting for one presidential candidate in a popular vote is a landslide in a state as large as CA. You only need a majority to win a seat, it's not inconceivable that this simply played out as expected in most districts

The equivalent data for Texas is also flawed. Although to be fair, the ratio in texas was around 1.3 : 1 (Trump : Harris) while in CA it was more like 1.5 : 1 (Harris:Trump) which is a much sharper ratio

This points out a major issue with gerrymandering, which is that it's difficult to measure how fair or unfair it is

This post was edited by dannywanghere on Aug 22 2025 10:14am

Meanwhile in Canada.

Polly loses his own riding, some poor bastard conservative that actually did win his own riding has to step down to create a by-election so Polly can go there and get re-elected.

Politics are a joke.

you're correct its not a perfect comparison, however i'd wager a good amount that if we went county by county in California and Texas we'd still find California is more unfair overall.

the real core of this issue in gerrymandering is a lack of representation, obviously. and if you're in a Red county that is in a Blue district one avenue of democratic representation for you is just gone. poof. your rep will never represent the beliefs of you or those around you. and the same works in the opposite direction for Texas blue voters.

however if we take it a step further we often see why it tends to favor democrats a lot of the time, big cities. those cities vote blue, so you just extend the border of the district to chew up red territory that extends outwards from them. whereas its hard to draw a rural district into city territory and justify it. large cities should in theory be a single district, that makes sense at least. but they often aren't, they look like a crazy octopus of districts extending outwards as much as they can to water down rural and suburban votes.

obviously GOP run states also often exploit this and chop up cities to water down their votes with rural or suburban votes, texas would be an example of that as well as georgia historically. but America's great cities aren't by-and-large in GOP run states. Chicago, New York, Boston, LA, etc have always been blue and will remain that way seemingly forever.

i should also state as a centrist i dont blame either side specifically. its all legal, and its all a game to them. i dont see a grand conspiracy from liberals, i see a system thats been abused and in reality its given the dems an edge almost by accident, albeit a slight age.

I wouldn’t assume that voting blocks will stay stagnant forever. We’ve seen significant movement in our lifetime. Midwest states like Ohio and Iowa used to be swing states and now are squarely red. Meanwhile even this last election Hispanics shifted significantly to republicans. Voting coalitions change. Sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but they do change.

I do agree with your sentiment that we seem to be in a situation where many folks live in areas where their reps simply don’t and won’t represent them.

I don’t think it’s likely, but jungle primaries and ranked choice voting would go a long ways towards addressing this. I think we’ll always have a 2-party strangle hold but ranked choice voting would at least open the door for 3rd parties. Right now our 2-party system encourages extremism candidates through our primary system. And often the general election many folks are tasked with two extremes they dislike. At least with ranked choice voting and jungle primaries even folks in the minority could feel they potential steer the election towards at least more centrist candidates.

But I also realize we’ve gone far down the route of making voting machines boogeymen, so the idea of ranked choice voting beyond the few areas that already have it is likely a pipe dream atm.

This post was edited by TeenyUncle8 on Aug 22 2025 11:40am

It's infected all sorts of institutions; I'm quite sure the DNC also took time to do a land acknowledgement. Musa al-Gharbi has some interesting ideas on the subject. My wife (real) took a course simply titled 'DEI' for her degree and they did mention its highly lucrative
https://www.city-journal.org/article/review-of-we-have-never-been-woke-by-musa-al-gharbi