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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • There are two types of gerrymandering, packing and cracking. A packed district is where you concentrate voters from the opposition party into one district. You give up a seat, but the remaining districts swing more heavily in your favor. A cracked district is what you are describing, where you dilute the margins of the opposition party by breaking up their strongholds into multiple districts and combine them with areas that vote in your favor.

    This was not a “middle of nowhere” district as it included a chunk of the city of Nashville and its suburbs. It was a classic cracked gerrymander as Republicans split Nashville into multiple districts and combined them with large swaths of red countryside (see also the notorious Austin gerrymander in Texas). The margins can sometimes be close enough in a cracked district for the opposition party to win, but in this case it was unlikely as it was Trump +22 in 2024 (in spite of including some of Nashville).





  • It depends on how many of the gerrymandered districts are packed (large Democratic majorities) and how many are cracked (Democratic population centers are split up into multiple districts with small-ish Republican majorities). Cracked districts can be won if Democrats turn out in record numbers. Packed districts just produce more lopsided majorities in favor of the Democratic candidate.

    Of course, this gerrymander is only one of the voter suppression tactics that Texas Republicans will use to lower Democratic turnout.




  • an app launcher. Literally every other desktop on the planet has one, how this isn’t considered basic functionality is beyond me. Give your grandparents a vanilla GNOME computer and tell them to get to Facebook and you will see how necessary this is. Default should be dash-to-dock with intelligent autohide so you only see it when you need it. This would fulfill GNOME’s hangups about it while also improving usability, so I fail to see a downside.

    GNOME does have a launcher, which works just like the launcher on Mac and Android. You can even select whether to see all your apps or only the most-used ones. I do agree that a taskbar/dock with intelligent auto-hide is a must, though (at least for my usability). That’s also not to say that some folks would rather have a Windows style launcher, and there are several DEs that provide that.