Skua

yes, if I could do maths

strings are in base two, got it

Anglicisation of golpista, I assume

Damn Antarctic elites

How does supporting this limit anyone’s ability to vote in November?

Pluto being too small isn’t actually the grounds on which it got demoted. The size requirement is just being massive enough to reach hydrostatic equilibrium - that is, be heavy enough that it’s round. Pluto does meet this one

The one it fails is clearing its orbit. This basically means being much heavier than everything else in the same orbit. Be gravitationally in charge of your orbit. The other eight are all hundreds if not thousands of times heavier than everything else in their orbit (not including moons, since they’re gravitationally bound to the planet anyway), whereas Pluto is less than a tenth of the total mass in its own orbit. Ceres is actually more gravitationally dominant over its orbit than that, although still nowhere near the eight planets.

This one sounds a bit weird at first, but I kinda like how it has such a massive delineation between the things we instinctively think of as planets and everything else.

Never mind the depths I was already on edge when I met the fucking crashfish

I suspect that this might be a tactic intended for the domestic audience. The current government is extremely unlikely to be in power a week from now, and might be doing this just to force the next government to either follow through or retract it

Power word: erektiohäiriö

Power word: impotence

Depends on what’s on offer in the steam sale! Although I did pick up the Myst remaster, so I might just be having a crack at that

For only 7.99 you can get enough store points to open three Crates of Eden, each of which has a chance to give you four seconds of total invisibility or two silent takedowns!

Deadnaming is okay when you’re doing it to mercenary companies

Apologies, I was using “NATO troops” as a shorthand for the large number of countries involved rather than the specific command structure. You are right to bring that up

Ahh, the counterpart to casual racism: ranked competitive racism

The Korean War had over a million NATO troops and also tens of thousands of Soviet troops and, somehow, remained a proxy war. A particularly bloody one, but there was still no actual open full-scale warfare between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Even China and America remained officially at peace, despite making up the majority of the forces on each side

I’ve not heard of that one before, but I can see the reasoning behind it. Is there a name for the system that I can look up?

There are versions of PR that mitigate this issue. Mixed-member PR sacrifices a little bit of precision in the proportionality, but limits the seats assigned to party lists to only some additional ones used to balance out the un-proportionality of the results. Most of the elected body is not from party lists.

I’m afraid I am completely unqualified to answer this beyond that Irene’s reign was a very messy one, ending with a rebellion against her. Her own son (the legal heir to the throne for who she was originally just regent) also rebelled against her earlier, and she had his eyes put out. It seems to me like Irene specifically was just absolutely ruthless enough to get past whatever societal rules may have been levelled against her

That said, there absolutely were empresses-regnant of the Byzantine empire, and there’s no reason to consider that a separate entity. Irene Sarantapechaena and about four or five others absolutely were ruling Roman empresses