Tootfinder

How the US democracy is designed to avoid representation
Right now in the US, a system which proclaims to give each citizen representation, my interests are not represented very well by most of my so-called representatives at any level of government. This is true for a majority of Americans across the political spectrum, and it happens by design. The "founding fathers" were explicit about wanting a system of government that would appear Democratic but which would keep power in the hands of rich white landowners, and they successfully designed exactly that. But how does disenfranchisement work in this system?
First, a two-party system locked in by first-post-the-post winner-takes-all elections immediately destroys representation for everyone who didn't vote for the winner, including those who didn't vote or weren't eligible to vote. Single-day non-holiday elections and prisoner disenfranchisement go a long way towards ensuring working-class people get no say, but much larger is the winner-takes all system. In fact, even people who vote for the winning candidate don't get effective representation if they're really just voting against the opponent as the greater of two evils. In a 51/49 election with 50% turnout, you've immediately ensured that ~75% of eligible voters don't get represented, and with lesser-of-two-evils voting, you create an even wider gap to wedge corporate interests into. Politicians need money to saturate their lesser-of-two-evils message far more than they need to convince any individual voter to support their policies. It's even okay if they get caught lying, cheating, or worse (cough Epstein cough) as long as the other side is also doing those things and you can freeze out new parties.
Second, by design the Senate ensures uneven representation, allowing control of the least-populous half of states to control or at least shut down the legislative process. A rough count suggests 284.6 million live in the 25 most-populous states, while only 54.8 million live in the rest. Currently, counting states with divided representation as two half-states with half as much population, 157.8 million people are represented by 53 Republican sensors, while 180.5 million people get only 45 seats of Democratic representation. This isn't an anti-Democrat bias, it's a bias towards less-populous states, whose residents get more than their share it political power.
I haven't even talked about gerrymandering yet, or family/faith-based "party loyalty," etc. Overall, the effect is that the number of people whose elected representatives meaningfully represent their interests on any given issue is vanishingly small (like, 10% of people tops), unless you happen to be rich enough to purchase lobbying power or direct access.
If we look at polls, we can see how lack of representation lets congress & the president enact many policies that go against what a majority of the population wants. Things like abortion restrictions, the current ICE raids, and Medicare cuts are deeply unpopular, but they benefit the political class and those who can buy access. These are possible because the system ensures at every step of the way that ordinary people do NOT get the one thing the system promises them: representation in the halls of power.
Okay, but is this a feature of all democracies, inherent in the nature of a majority-decides system? Not exactly...
1/2
#uspol #democracy

from my link log —
Idris 2: quantitative type theory in practice.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.00480
saved 2025-06-11 https://dotat…

Idris 2: Quantitative Type Theory in Practice
Dependent types allow us to express precisely what a function is intended to do. Recent work on Quantitative Type Theory (QTT) extends dependent type systems with linearity, also allowing precision in expressing when a function can run. This is promising, because it suggests the ability to design and reason about resource usage protocols, such as we might find in distributed and concurrent programming, where the state of a communication channel changes throughout program execution. As yet, howe…

How an AI assistant developed by Brazilian nonprofit NoHarm is helping pharmacists in remote Amazon clinics process prescriptions more quickly and catch errors (Pedro Nakamura/Rest of World)
https://restofworld.org/2025/brazil-amazon-ai-healthcare-prescript…

AI is making health care safer in the remote Amazon
At overburdened clinics, pharmacists use AI to catch dangerous errors. It’s frontier tech meets frontier medicine — with global implications.

Trump drops IVF promise,
preferring to blame women for infertility
Instead of treatment, Project 2025 proposes shaming patients for premarital sex
https://www.salon.com/2025/08/08/trumps-drops-ivf-promise-preferring-to-blame-wom…

Trump's drops IVF promise, preferring to blame women for infertility
Instead of treatment, Project 2025 proposes shaming patients for premarital sex

Intracortical bipolar stimulation allows selective activation of neuronal populations in the cortex #BCI

Intracortical bipolar stimulation allows selective activation of neuronal populations in the cortex
Background Intracortical electrical stimulation has emerged as a promising approach for sensory restoration, such as a cortical visual prosthesis, yet its effectiveness is limited by current spread and electrode density constraints. Objective To determine whether intracortical bipolar current steering—via modulation of the return electrode position—can enhance neural activation selectivity compared to traditional monopolar stimulation, with the aim of improving spatial precision in sensory…

The minimal periodicity for integral bases of pure number fields
Khai-Hoan Nguyen-Dang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09457 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09457

The minimal periodicity for integral bases of pure number fields
Fix $n\ge3$. For the pure field $K_a=\Bbb Q(θ)$, $θ^n=a$ with $a$ $n$th-power-free, we encode an integral basis in the fixed coordinate $\{1,θ,\dots,θ^{n-1}\}$ by its \emph{shape}. We prove a sharp local-to-global principle: for each $p^e\!\parallel n$, the local shape at $p$ is determined by $a\bmod p^{\,e+1}$, and this precision is optimal. Moreover, the global shape is periodic with minimal modulus \[ M(n)=\prod_{p^e\parallel n}p^{\,e+1}=n\cdot\mathrm{rad}(n), \] providing many applicati…

Too Helpful, Too Harmless, Too Honest or Just Right?
Gautam Siddharth Kashyap, Mark Dras, Usman Naseem
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08486 https://arxiv.org/p…

Too Helpful, Too Harmless, Too Honest or Just Right?
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong performance across a wide range of NLP tasks, yet aligning their outputs with the principles of Helpfulness, Harmlessness, and Honesty (HHH) remains a persistent challenge. Existing methods often optimize for individual alignment dimensions in isolation, leading to trade-offs and inconsistent behavior. While Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures offer modularity, they suffer from poorly calibrated routing, limiting their effectiveness in alignment ta…

RedDino: A foundation model for red blood cell analysis
Luca Zedda, Andrea Loddo, Cecilia Di Ruberto, Carsten Marr
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08180 https://

RedDino: A foundation model for red blood cell analysis
Red blood cells (RBCs) are essential to human health, and their precise morphological analysis is important for diagnosing hematological disorders. Despite the promise of foundation models in medical diagnostics, comprehensive AI solutions for RBC analysis remain scarce. We present RedDino, a self-supervised foundation model designed for RBC image analysis. RedDino uses an RBC-specific adaptation of the DINOv2 self-supervised learning framework and is trained on a curated dataset of 1.25 millio…

Rough numbers between consecutive primes
Ayla Gafni, Terence Tao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06463 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06463

Rough numbers between consecutive primes
Using a sieve-theoretic argument, we show that almost all gaps $(p_n, p_{n+1})$ between consecutive primes $p_n, p_{n+1}$ contain a natural number $m$ whose least prime factor $p(m)$ is at least the length $p_{n+1} - p_n$ of the gap, confirming a prediction of Erdős. In fact the number $N(X)$ of exceptional gaps with $p_n \in [X,2X]$ is shown to be at most $O(X/\log^2 X)$. Assuming a form of the Hardy--Littlewood prime tuples conjecture, we establish a more precise asymptotic $N(X) \sim c X / …

First-order State Space Model for Lightweight Image Super-resolution
Yujie Zhu, Xinyi Zhang, Yekai Lu, Guang Yang, Faming Fang, Guixu Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08458 http…

First-order State Space Model for Lightweight Image Super-resolution
State space models (SSMs), particularly Mamba, have shown promise in NLP tasks and are increasingly applied to vision tasks. However, most Mamba-based vision models focus on network architecture and scan paths, with little attention to the SSM module. In order to explore the potential of SSMs, we modified the calculation process of SSM without increasing the number of parameters to improve the performance on lightweight super-resolution tasks. In this paper, we introduce the First-order State S…