docdeek

I don’t work for VLC but do live and work in France. I think you’re right on the reasons (and there are likely others) but of all the ones you mention, I think it is the family that is the biggest reason I stay. I could speak English and French elsewhere in Europe, have the right to live anywhere in the EU thanks for the Union’s freedom of movement, and I can ‘sort of’ vote, if only for local and European elections.

But with kids in school, relatives close by, and family links in the city and region whre we live, moving somewhere else is not yet on the cards no matter how large the tax bill and unsettled the politics - at least for the moment.

Understood and appreciate the reply. It’s a very high bar to clear, though.

In Australia where there is compulsory voting (and fines for not voting) the turn out in the most recent national election was about 91%. If you have to get 50% of the eligible voters this means attracting about 55% of the ones who do turn up and vote.

In that same country, only 1 (Sydney) of the 172 seats in the House of Represenatives was won by a candidate with more than 55% of the vote but turnout in that district was ‘only’ 87.4%. Even though the candidate won 55% of the 87% of eligible vote, she fell 3700 votes short of winning 50% of all eligible voters.

Australia make it compulsory to vote and easy to vote, too, and they still can’t get everyone to the polls. And even in the safest seat in the country, you still have the clear winner - the second place candidate was 34 points back! - falling short of the 50% of eligible voters mark.

Grandted, Australia is a different system to the US, but I would be interested to understand how you imagine you could get people to vote when the threat of fines and prosecution still sees countries like Australia fall 10% short of perfect attendance, and then why setting a higher bar than 50% + 1 vote results in a better system.

I suspect one way might be to make it very easy to vote, expensive (in fines or in criminal penalties) to not vote, and then to restrict the number of candidates to a two. But the downsides to that (forcing people to make a political choice or be fined, offering only two options in a complex world) seem significant, too.

> I think my idea for this is that a candidate doesn’t win the election unless they get more than 50% of all eligible votes, not 50% of the votes cast.

This would think out the representation significantly, and applied to presidential voting would be rather dificult. The highest share of eligible voters in US history to support a US President is 42.6% for Ulysees S. Grant (Harrison and McKinley both close behind with +40%). Not one President has ever broken the 50% of eligble voters mark, and even those presidents that won in relative landslides in the EC (Washington, Monroe, Roosevelt, Reagan, Nixon) all had shares of the eligible votes that were in the 30%’s.

More than 40 dead bodies in Lebanon would suggest the capacity described is far from hypothetical.

>> I'm confused what you think you're arguing with.

That the congresswoman has been investigated by the DOJ under different administrations, Democrat and Republican, is a fact. Your claims about the competence of the DOJ - whether true or not - don’t change that fact.

No, my implication is that this is not the first time that this congressperson has been investigated by the DOJ, and the last time it happened the DOJ was under the control of her own party’s president.

The same Congresswoman was previously investigated by the Biden DOJ in relation to "her finances, campaign spending and interactions with a foreign citizen, according to people with knowledge of the matter."

NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/us/politics/ilhan-omar-in...

My first-year philsophy professor gave a similar warning. He offered words to the effect that if we (the students) started thinking that the philosophy we were reading made no sense, was idiocy, or just nonsense, pause for a moment and imagine whether we thought it was likely that Plato was an idiot and everyone hasd missed it for millenia, or that we might be misinterpeting something. There’s always the chance that we’ll have an insight that others might not have had, but there’s a reasonable chance the the philosophers we were to study might not be exclusively stupid.

>> I’ve heard people say, out loud, “he unalived himself”, in reference to someone dying by suicide.

I also grew up in the previous century and it is equally strange to hear ‘dying by suicide’ when it used to be more common to say ‘committed suicide’ or just ‘killed himself/herself’. The author does a reasonable job of explaining why people might use ‘unalive’ and why he thinks that is a bad idea, but what was the reason a person started ‘dying by suicide’ instead of ‘killing himself/hersself/themselves’?

We’ve interacted on r/peloton before - your father is a giant and I am glad the biography is out. :)

Love that this is on Hacker News! INRNG has some of the best commentary about professional cycling online, as well as book reviews and travel pieces around famous climbs and races. If you are a fan of professional cycling, it’s a must-read.

The Just Stop Oil website’s FAQ suggests their goals are far more ambitious than now new projects:

WHAT DOES JUST STOP OIL WANT?

We demand that the UK government commits to working with other nations to establish a legally binding treaty to stop extracting and burning oil, gas and coal by 2030 as well as supporting and financing poorer countries to make a fast, fair, and just transition.

https://juststopoil.org/faqs-updated/

Also a non-American but, when it comes to pardon power, both Democrats and Repiblicans have pardoned close friends and family members (Clinton his brother, Biden his son, for example) and the pardon of Mark Rich by Clinton and Edwin Cox by GWB both appear to have a smell of quid-pro-quo about them. Perhaps Obama stands out in recent history as a president that, while pardoning or commuting the sentences of some controversial people, didn’t seem to stoop as low as blanket/unconditiaonl pardons for family and associates, but this is more than just a Republican or a Trump problem.

Thanks, I missed it on the event presentation.

How do you put a case on a foldable phone? Or do you not put one on, rely on the ceramic to protect the screen, and pay for Apple Care for cheap replacement screens?

There’s likely some information on there that some people must want to share if services like Xcancel and Nitter exist and allow you to share it without being on X itself.

> How many deaths would go from minor to major? How much impact to quality of life that isn't death would there be?

That’s a good question. It seems in this case that 3 to 6 deaths a year qualifies as ‘minor’ for the government. I don’t know where the line should be but, based on the number of people that suffer and die from air pollution related causes in the US each year, I thought that 6 additional deaths probably meant it qualified as minor. I’d be just as interested as you to know what the answer is.

Edit to add: ‘minor’ in this case doesn’t mean people deserve to die or that we should be happy they are suffering, just that compared to some other even worse projects, this one is less important.

I’m not suggesting it is OK or not OK, just that ‘minor source’ of air pollution is probably the right term to use in context for this single site.

AFP is where France24 got their information, and both AFP and France24 are reliable sources of news. Maybe you had an issue with the source AFP relied on?

FTA: 'The largest estimate for any single facility ever.'

From the researcher: 'We estimated between $53 million and $99 million in annual health damages from associated air pollution — among the largest health-damage estimates produced for a single facility to date.' [0]

Still enormous, but there is a significant difference between being 'THE X of all time, and being 'among the X of all time'.

Regarding 'minor source', in this case the expected additional premature deaths in the research range from 3.4 to 6.5 annually. [1] At the same time, air pollution leads to about 100,000 deaths a year in the US. While tragic at an individual level, adding 0.006% to the annual premature death count is fairly minor, just as reducing the deaths to 999,994 would be considered a pretty minor fix to the issue.

[0]: https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/analyzing-air-pollution-health...

[1]: https://www.pecva.org/wp-content/uploads/Health-Impacts-Vant...

[2]: https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/identifying-sources...

It’s an AFP story - that’s a reputable news service.

FTA for context: The Times had not lost a defamation lawsuit brought in the United States over one of its articles in more than 50 years.

[2003]

Not an American but, if I had to guess, it would be 'Black' with a capital letter (as in the list of words) and not 'black' all in lowercase. It is likely to align the use of capital letters with other races in the US (white and black, for example, instead of white and Black).