It’s memes all the way down.

If you want power over another country, attacking them is a very inefficient path. You will take losses, and you won’t be able to take their resources intact. The easier and cheaper method is to just bribe their leaders into selling you whatever you want.

The US starts wars even when it doesn’t need to, because there are a handful of companies that stand to make a lot of money selling weapons. No other country has such a large and influential military lobby, so other countries tend not to start wars for private profit.

The Linux kernel (the code) is open-source. Linux Foundation (the people who write said code) is headquartered in the US. The US can decide what Linux Foundation can and cannot do, who works there, etc. They can’t control who uses the code.

I’m guessing most IoT devices are made in China (or increasingly Southeast Asia), so yes.

With Sri Lanka’s ranked ballots, they didn’t need consolidation. Working-class voters could have had this, at any time, with no risk.

Ah, you’re talking about SLFP voters second-preferencing the JVP. (I thought you meant UNP voters supporting the SJB.) That is more plausible, except the SLPP leaders and hardliners would attack it tooth and nail, fearmonger that it would split the vote and help the UNP win, and so on. No one wants to let go of power.

this new plurality-winning party is going to trounce the split alternatives, until one of them disappears, or both of them disappear.

Hard to predict. Depending on how many seats his coalition gets in Parliament, Dissanayake might have to get support from one of the other blocs to get bills passed. But if he can get a majority, he has a great chance to destroy both the established parties simply by appointing an honest auditor and letting them loose on the previous government’s files.

When voters only get (or only use) one choice, and there’s two parties on the same side of a divide, one of them has to utterly dominate the other, to stand any chance against a popular third party.

What the new party did was to challenge the old poor Sinhala vs Tamil+Muslim+rich divide, and turn it into more of a common people vs political / business class divide. Obviously, there aren’t enough businessmen or politicians to form a party by themselves, so we’ll have to see what they do. Maybe they’ll negotiate with the new powers, or maybe they’ll run smear campaigns, or maybe they’ll wait for it to get corrupt and unpopular.

Either these voters start using their ranked ballots properly - or they’re going to keep getting a two-party system.

The other possibility is a de-facto one-party state, like Mexico or Japan. I really don’t see hardline Sinhala nationalists and hardline Tamil separatists co-operating.

Sir this is a meme.

Jokes aside, I’m Indian. Sri Lanka has a much better education system than we do.

But as you point out, they’re acting like they have America’s elections, where this schmuck who got 17% is now a massive liability to the runner-up who got 33%. If those two presumably-liberal blocs got together, they could handily oppose the leftist bloc.

It would be useful if you tried to understand Sri Lanka’s political system before you made such comments. The SLFP / SLPP was historically supported by working class Sinhala people. The UNP was supported by Tamils, Muslims and richer / more urban Sinhalas. In 2022, the SLPP collapsed due to an economic crisis and widespread corruption. The SJB was an attempt by a section of the UNP to win over former SLPP voters by adopting centre-left economic policies and Sinhala nationalist rhetoric. The UNP base - largely Tamil and Muslim - are not going to vote for them! This is why the JVP was able to win - they consolidated the working class Sinhala vote, while not threatening Tamils and Muslims.

Their voters just aren’t using it, for some goddamn reason.

The reason being that, for many people, there is only one choice that is acceptable.

Every single person who wanted him, last time, could have listed him… also. They sure didn’t. His support was three percent. That’s not a viable path to power, that’s a punchline.

That’s a viable path to getting your face in the public consciousness, so you can win next time. As you said, losing a prior election isn’t a pre-requisite. But the posters you printed, the speeches you made, and the fact that one in thirty people took you seriously enough to vote for you, are a pretty strong boost when you run again.

Anyone who voted for only him, “last election,” was a fool.

Or they were the people who made this year’s result possible.

If you can’t rally a shitload of people behind your guy… you lose.

Yes, but you show that so-and-so’s platform has x amount of support, putting them in a better position next time around.

The winner of this election was not decided by everyone seeing through The Matrix or whatever and deciding to defeat a broken electoral system. It sounds like 95% of them are functionally unaware of which electoral system they have.

It’s incredible how one can see some piece of evidence that contradicts their pet theory with their own eyes and say, no, the reality is wrong and my theory is right. I mean, it makes sense sometimes - the discovery of Neptune is a famous example - but in general, it is better to adjust theory to fit the facts, rather than the other way around.

Given the system you’re voting under - you should vote for someone who has a chance of winning.

The problem is that who ‘has a chance of winning’ is decided by who people vote for.

Voting for a third party with single-digit support is not much better.

Uh, that’s what the Sri Lankan voters just did? The winner this time had 3% of the vote-share in the last election.

Sri Lanka has ranked ballots! What the fuck? They’re not even using Plurality, they’re doing RCV!

In theory, yes, but so few (~2%) people use it that in practice it is first past the post.

Duverger’s law is about how there tend to be two parties.

Emphasis on the ‘tends’. It’s a probabilistic observation, not a law of nature. Treating it as the latter leads to people acting against their best interests.

Sri Lanka has ranked ballots. It’s not a Plurality voting system.

You are right, in theory, but please check how many additional votes the winner (or the runner-up) got as second-prefrence votes. It was around 2% of their totals. This is because in practice, most voyers didn’t bother putting second and third preferences.

The new guy won despite winning <5% of votes in the last election. If people vote for the candidate they like instead of trying to game the system by calculating who they’d rather not win the most, then maybe we can kick out corrupt incumbents and get in fresh faces (they’ll get corrupted over time too, at which point you rinse and repeat).

In this context, I guess the self-employed would be an intermediate ‘middle class’. A doctor or accountant with her own practice, a master tradesman who can pick and choose his clients, a programmer who does contract work for companies - none of them are propertied enough to have their own workers, but neither are they employed by a boss who takes a cut of their pay. But I agree that a lot of people who call themselves middle class are actually either upper class or working class.

I hope some OEM (especially those opposed to google) picks up and develops mainline linux like Pine Phone.

Huawei is being forced to do it. But like Android, their HarmonyOS is not 100% open-source. There’s also KaiOS, which some Nokia and Alcatel, and all Jio, devices use.

even Dalvik and the android runtime itself is an inefficient relic of 10+ years ago when mobile devices had at most 2gb of ram and a tiny low power ARM processor.

Both the ones I mentioned are designed to be more memory efficient. KaiOS in particular is aimed primarily at feature phones and entry-level smartphones.

Mint has three prebuilt options, Cinnamon is just the default. Beyond that you can also install other desktops.

Write down a list of the software you use (e.g. web browser, office suite, notepad, image viewer, video player, … ). Download Linux Mint from here and use Balena Etcher to write it into a pen drive. Switch off your computer, plug in the pen drive and switch on. DON’T INSTALL YET. Run Linux ‘live’ for a couple of hours, see if everything (speaker, printer, webcam, all the software you listed above) is working correctly.

Once you have confirmed that all is well, copy your files into an external hard drive, confirm that everything important has been backed up, and then install Linux from the pen drive. (You can have both Windows and Linux on the same computer, but then Windows should not be given internet access or it will ‘update’ and mess up everything. This can be repaired using, for example, this software, but why bother?)

Any distro that can run Chromium / Chrome. And everything other than Teams will work even on Firefox.

Mint works. Most alternatives don’t. I can install Mint on a total newbie’s system, and not have to worry about something breaking two weeks later. Hell, most newbies can install Mint if you give them the USB.

On a deeper level, I think Mint devs are one of the few teams that understand the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ philosophy.

Look at the party affiliations of the winner and runner-up.

At this point their biggest product is probably Android. That’s a bigger marketshare than Microsoft’s and Apple’s put together. Yes, they’re fucking up now, but the battle is still theirs to lose.