Are unisex bathrooms a thing in the US? There are a few places in Adelaide that have them. I don’t mean like one stall, I mean a washroom with a bunch of stalls off it that is all unisex.
Very rare but they do exist. More common are single person unisex restrooms.
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Super rare.
They make no sense either given the existence of stalls.
They are also an architectural disaster, especially for women.
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They are rare, but becoming more common. I saw one implementation in Boston recently where they had just taken the old separate rooms and changed the signage in front of one to, “unisex with stalls and urinals” and “unisex without urinals”. The audience was made up of probably 80% people with vaginas, so there was still a long line for one and basically no line for the other. I got tired of waiting, so I eventually just went into the one with urinals and just made my best effort to avert my eyes when I had to walk past the urinals.
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F
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Pretty good article that attempts to explain it. It’s gerrymandering
Wait is Bud Light woke now?
ETA million dollar grift idea: woke brands of Walmart
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Eh, not sure I’m fully on board with that conclusion.
The first paragraph mentions Iowa, Idaho and South Carolina.
In 2022 state legislature elections, Republicans were preferred by 10 points in Iowa if you combine all the districts. In South Carolina, it was 2-to-1 margin. Idaho was more than 3-to-1. All of these states have Republican governors, lieutenant governors, AGs and SOSs and send two R senators to DC.
Gerrymandering explains none of this.
Is it really “overreaching” if the majority is voting for this stuff?
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Yes, I oversimplified a bit there. It’s more like gerrymandering + the increasingly high rate of uncompetitive general election districts, which makes party purity more and more important since the “real” races are all in the primaries, and they tend to vote in their primaries in higher percentages. This pushes them further and further right, and makes it more difficult for potential challengers to out-crazy them.
Yeah I think one of the biggest problems is incumbency advantage. It discourages people from running, which leads to less parity
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Yeah the article talks about that, about how it’s such a massive advantage to be the incumbent in ways that you don’t even think of at first like, for example, traveling on the taxpayer’s dime, stuff like that.
Literally the point of gerrymandering is that it undernmines the competitiveness of the races! Thus using election results to gauge overall sentiment is suspect. Hell, tons of state legislative races feature cantidates running unopposed. My Democratic congressman regularly get 98% of the vote here. Statewide and national Democratic candidates typically underperfom him by a ton (despite the fact that they are lost causes as well!). That is toally standard in much of the US.
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There’s a reason why the vote is that lopsided (In SC at least). A Republican runs unopposed far more frequently in state elections there. In the 2022 elections out of 124 districts a Republican stood in 106. A Democrat stood in 68 (disclaimer: I only scanned once so I might be slightly out).
So yeah, looking at the SC headline figures alone- 69% of the vote netted the Republicans 71% of the seats - you’d think it’s democracy working as it should. Dive down a bit though and you realise just how fundamentally broken democracy is at the local level there.
It is literally true that nearly 60% of the legislature ran unopposed!
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Okay fair points about unopposed/uncompetitive races at the state legislature level.
I believe my point about those states having Republican ~everything for statewide elections remains.
Another point is that uncompetitive elections depress turnout. I would suspect that in general it depresses statewide tirnout for the “second” party as well. It’s distressing to think about gerrymandered elections as subject to systematic error (if used as a gage of public sentiment).
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If only they did reapportionment based on votes cast for the House and gave states an incentive to maximize turnout.
