Meeting the federal deadline for state-level certification in almost every state is considered a ministerial duty. That means that it would only involve civil or administrative penalties, i.e., a light slap on the wrist at best. For criminal conduct, it would need to be elevated to obstruction of federal elections. This would be a federal crime and therefore pardonable.

Thanks for the link, but the plan The Nation outlined doesn't require fake electors or fraudulent documents. The only potential misdeed here is simply a failure to meet a federal deadline. It's related to the previous attempt insofar as it's an attempt to undermine American democracy, but this current plan is much more sound, involves much less legal culpability on the part of anyone involved, and generally appears to be constitutionally valid. Which is to say, the Republicans learned. The Democrats did not.

The bottom line is, overthrowing democracy is either a meaningless administrative infraction or a federal crime that will be pardoned. See the problem?

The VP certifies the results received by the deadline. That wouldn't change anything here, and she would be obligated to declare Trump the winner. Like Pence, the VP can't decide not to certify legitimate results submitted to congress by the deadline. The point here is that select blue states won't make the deadline through republican stalling, SCOTUS won't "interfere" in the election by adjudication, so the VP is required to only consider the full electors submitted by the deadline. And it would be perfectly valid at the federal level. The state actors might be committing a crime by stalling, but Trump will pardon them, so they really have little risk.

Realistically, even without "shall," most states carry the legal obligation in state statutes not the state constitution. The problem is that the crime is minor or will almost certainly be pardoned immediately by Trump. So even if it's "illegal," oh well. The governor refuses to certify, thereby breaking the law, Johnson still holds the deadline, the number of EC votes is lowered, Trump is declared the winner, and then the governors are pardoned and are in the good graces of the incoming POTUS.

Just to be clear, that makes everything valid and constitutional at the federal level for this plan. I don't think you're grasping how fully fucked we might be.

But the general public will just get the wrong idea and make baseless generalisations - as evidenced by comments under this post. All in all, this is bad science communication.

Perhaps, but to be clear, that's on The Economist, not the researchers or scholarship. Your criticisms are valid to point out, but they aren't likely to be significant enough to change anything meaningful in the final analysis. As far as the broad conclusions of the paper, I think the visualization works fine.

What you're asking for in terms of methods that will capture some of the granularity you reference would need to be a separate study. And that study would probably not be a corrective to this paper. Rather, it would serve to "color between the lines" that this study establishes.

Alright, but dismissing the study as “pretty much bullshit" based on a quick read-through seems like a huge oversimplification. Using canonical syllables as a measure is actually a widely accepted linguistic standard, designed precisely to make fair comparisons across languages with different structures, including languages like Japanese. It’s not about unfairly favoring any language but creating a consistent baseline, especially when looking at large, cross-linguistic patterns.

And on the syllable omission point, like “probably” vs. “prolly," I mean, sure, informal speech varies, but the study is looking at overall trends in speech rate and information density, not individual shortcuts in casual conversation. Those small variations certainly don’t turn the broader findings into bullshit.

As for the bigram approach, it’s a reasonable proxy to capture information density. They’re not trying to recreate every phonological or grammatical nuance; that would be way beyond the scope and would lose sight of the larger picture. Bigrams offer a practical, statistically valid method for comparing across languages without having to delve into the specifics of every syllable sequence in each language.

This isn’t about counting every syllable perfectly but showing that despite vast linguistic diversity, there’s an overarching efficiency in how languages encode information. The study reflects that and uses perfectly acceptable methods to do so.

In most cases, being vague requires more informational transfer. To be vague but still connected to whatever is the signified, you need to give more information around the idea rather than simply stating the idea. Think about being vague about how you feel versus being blunt about it.

Writing a number on someone with a marker is not branding. This is stupid. The IDF is committing actual atrocities, and this article is about writing a number on people with a marker and referring to them by that number. Relatively humane prison systems refer to people by their inmate number as well.

What is even going on? This is literally a distraction from the actual terrible things regularly occurring. Think about it this way: within the horrifyingly violent context of Palestine right now, here is an entire article that could be headlined: "IDF Uses New Weapon Against Palestinians: A Marker." See how absurd that is when there are much more important events occurring?

Who wrote this? The IDF?

The vehicles with a higher automated driving rating than Tesla use a more diverse range of sensory inputs. While it may not make fully autonomous driving, it very clearly would have made Tesla closer to it based on the fact that cars that use things like lidar in addition to cameras surpassed Tesla's rating many years ago.

Ah, I see. Well, let me say this: seeing a grocery store parking lot filled with giganti-merican vehicles is always obnoxious.

But why couldn't you use the truck bed?? It's like the one time they could have actually put it to use! You'd think they'd be all about it. Like guys (and it's always guys) that carry a pocket knife and someone actually needs a knife for once. They practically cry they're so happy.

Maybe I misunderstood the OP. I thought they were saying they were in a huge truck and the person they were with got so many groceries that it filled the truck bed and full-size cab and they even had to have groceries in their lap. I get they're trying to be critical of large vehicles, which I'm all for, but the way they went about it is so confusing that it pulled all my attention trying to figure out the bizarre context they were trying to manufacture in order to say big truck bad.

It seems like a tremendous amount of groceries would actually be the extremely rare case where having a truck might serve a purpose. You know... once.

"It's not a crime!"

Narrator: it is.

"I'm the victim, the older woman assaulted me! That's assault and battery!"

Narrator: he's not, she didn't, and it wasn't.