United States. And you’re right that we should get that support. It remains to be seen if we will. Shockingly, even Republicans seem to be considering a temporary Universal Basic Income as a possible solution.

There is no general field of inquiry. — Snakes Alive

Are you saying that it is completely impossible to even attempt to do what philosophy purports to be about, or just that there is no concerted effort to do that which thus has a name?

We live in a digital age. People don't have to get together in person to produce entertainment. Sure, some forms of entertainment are produced that way, but not all forms have to be anymore. Music can be created by independent musicians at separate locations performing over recordings of other musicians, and then compositing all the tracks together. Visual entertainment can be entirely computer-generated, even that requiring huge teams, because each individual can work separately and collaborate over the internet. Even things like sports could conceivably be substituted by e-sports, especially if the e-sport is playing a game that is a simulation of the old meatspace sport. (Maybe instead of watching people play NFL football, we'll watch our favorite players play themselves in Madden NFL 20 competitive livestreams.)

I think the "circuses" part of this equation is really the least vulnerable. It's the "bread" part that's in jeopardy, as restaurants and other public venues shut down, tons of bottom-rung employees that staff those customer service positions get sent home or hours-reduced or laid off, and then they have less money to spent, leaving them not only without "bread" (figuratively and literally) for their own consumption, but without "bread" (figuratively) to spend, leaving other less-vulnerable businesses that could have continued operating just fine despite the pandemic suddenly with far fewer customers, so they have to reduce their staff as well, so even more people have less money to meet their own needs by patronizing other businesses who then have fewer customers so have to lay off more people and so on and so on.

I just hope that the rich people at the top of the pyramid realize that that entire pyramid they're sitting on top of is going to crumble unless they do something about it, like implement a universal basic income (even temporarily!) so that people who have to stay home from work for public safety can keep spending money, not only to continue to meet their own needs, but so that other people who otherwise wouldn't have to stop working for public safety can keep their jobs, and keep meeting their needs by spending more money on other businesses and so on. Because if not, then all those businesses whose stocks you rich fuckers are living off of are going to go broke, all those mortgage and rent checks you're collecting will stop coming, and you'll end up the undisputed kings of a worthless pile of rubble filled with the carcasses us what used to be the working people. You guys have all the power, so it's your call: pay up to postpone collapse long enough for things to go back to normal, or lose everything along with everyone else.

Don't look at what things say they are in their marketing; look at what they are. — Snakes Alive

That was the whole point of my anecdote. In my broad interests across many topics, I wanted to investigate the most core or central topics, the ones that other topics reduced to or depended upon. I didn't know to begin with what those were, and I didn't see any of them being advertised as such. I just looked for connections to different things. I thought that physics on the one hand, and either economics or political science or some combination or super-field of the two on the other hand, were what I was looking for, and (in my youthful naivete) that I was pushing into new ground in asking about the foundational issues that underlaid those things: what, ultimately, is real, and what, ultimately, is moral?

Nothing ever said "philosophy is the field that answers those kinds of questions". I had had wildly inaccurate and inconsistent ideas of what philosophy was across my adolescence: at one time when asked what my philosophical views were I basically recounted string theory (to the best of my understanding at the time, at least), at another time within a few years I basically recounted utilitarianism (without knowing it was called that, thinking I had made it up).

Then as part of my general ed requirements in junior college I took a Philosophy 101 class, and just looking at the syllabus, I realized that this was a field full of people who had already been asking the same things about what I had previously thought were two separate topics. My fringe "physics" speculation had veered into metaphysics, and my pontification about rights and duties and such in the context of political science and economics was really getting into ethics... and hey, here's one already-existing field that covers both of those topics, philosophy.

If you're saying that philosophy is just one culture-specific take on that general field of inquiry, then what is the name of that general field of inquiry itself? If I had "known" back then what you're saying now, and so "should" have avoided getting "trapped and detoured" into philosophy instead of pursuing the true course toward the answering of those big questions, what field should I have gone into instead?

I haven't been reading this thread because until last night I've been completely unaffected by coronavirus and trying not to worry about it because I've just finished up a year of near-constant existential dread and didn't want to spiral back into it again over "what's probably nothing really, just the usual world-is-ending news cycle".

In my county there's still only been one confirmed case, and they're in quarantine. Life around me continues as normal. It's a beautiful spring, even though it's raining unusually much for this time of year. All kinds of birds and bunnies and butterflies and flowers everywhere.

I work from home normally, and all of my coworkers have the option to do that, so even if we did have to do social distancing, I thought, that won't affect my line of work.

Then yesterday (Monday) instead of the usual start-of-the-week slam, we only had 20% of the normal workload. Because since so many other people can't go to work, they don't have any money to spend, which means other businesses have less money to pay their employees, so those people get sent home or laid off, and then they're not spending money which means the same process repeats elsewhere, until eventually even my tiny isolated otherwise-unaffected company loses all our customers as the whole economy shuts down.

So at the end of the work day yesterday, the boss cut all our hours (and thus pay) in half indefinitely, as a desperate measure to buy the company a few months until this all blows over.

I've been setting aside a third of my take-home income for a down payment on a house for years and so I've got a big income cushion and a pile of money to fall back on, so if I end up just having to tread water (or sink slowly) for a few weeks or even months to get back to my old life, that's fine with me, and I know I've got things way, way better than a whole lot of other people in that regard. But I'm really terrified that the business might not be able to hold out for that as long as I can, and I might not have the opportunity to get back to my old life at all.

If philosophy is just a folk tradition, presumably that's only talking about western philosophy stemming from Thales et al. Does that mean there is no such thing as "eastern philosophy", because those are largely different traditions of different folk? "Largely" because there is some cross-over; does that not count? Why not?

And what is the field that is about what philosophy claims to be about (the "big questions" etc), if philosophy isn't "really" about that? To illustrate with a personal anecdote: since I was very young I have had very broad academic interests. Through my adolescence those broad interests were increasingly reduced toward two fundamental poles of sorts: my natural science interests boiled down to physics, and my social science interests boiled down to something in the direction of economics or political science. Always searching for ever more and more fundamental cores of those fields, I eventually realized that my interests were essentially in what I now recognize as roughly metaphysics and ethics, though I didn't know to call them that yet. When I discovered formal academic philosophy early in college and realized that those two things were, broadly speaking, what the field was all about, that's when I "got into philosophy". But if what I was interested in all that time, the fundamentals about what is real and what is moral, wasn't actually philosophy, because philosophy is just one culture's folk tradition and isn't "really" about those topics, then what was I into back when I didn't have the name "philosophy" to describe it with?

I assume you read the OP, so I don't know what more you want.

If I am understanding this correctly, it sounds like philosophy is about analyzing the best way to analyze a particular field...well if education is about analyzing the best ways to teach and learn a particular field, there is at the very least a massive overlap. So while I am not suggesting that, education=philosophy, "philosophy of education" may be redundant when compared to "philosophy" - even the meaning "love of wisdom" sounds related to education. — ZhouBoTong

I think I agree.

Do you see the difference between thinking the Sun is going to rise tomorrow, and behaving as if the Sun is going to rise tomorrow? — leo

Not really. At least, I can’t imagine a scenario where someone who thinks that doesn’t act like it’s true, unless for some contrived reason like he’s pretending to think otherwise.

The Earth might suddenly stop rotating. Yet it keeps going. What makes it keep going? — leo

The full answer is complicated, but it boils down in the end to there not being a possibility (or there being far fewer possibilities than otherwise) for it to stop. Keeping going is just the most likely, “default” thing for it to do.

When you decide to pick a flower and you do it, what made the flower be picked? Is it just a pattern, or are you responsible for the flower being picked? Are you just a pattern? — leo

Yes. The chain of events leading to the flower being picked was part of a pattern of possibilities like any other events, and I am part of that pattern, but there’s no “just” about that because the only alternative to being part of a pattern is being completely random and that’s not better. And part of my pattern involves examining and altering my own patterns, and that pattern is what constitutes freedom of will.

You can break the laws that society imposes on you, does that mean they aren’t laws? — leo

Not in the same sense as physical laws, no.

You say the true laws of nature can’t be broken. How would you prove that such laws exist in the first place, considering that we “routinely transcend” apparent laws? If they exist, why would all things follow these laws and not some other laws? — leo

Starting from a place of now knowing whether the universe behaves in a lawlike fashion or not, we can only assume one way or the other. To assume it does not behave in a lawlike fashion is just to give up all hope of understanding it at all. We may nevertheless still fail to find laws that it consistently follows even if we do assume that there are such laws, but if we act on the assumption that there are such laws by trying to figure out what they are, then we have at least a chance of understanding the universe, if such a thing is possible.

An alien sounds like a being from some other planet being subjected to the same laws of nature as you are, whereas I’m talking about beings (forces, energies, or however you want to call them) who are the source of everything that you see and feel. — leo

If what we think is the universe is actually just some construct inside of a broader universe, then whatever being(s) exist outside of this construct in the broader universe are still basically aliens. You're basically saying "what if the universe is a simulation?" I covered this already in the OP.

An understanding of what sorts of things can be true and what makes them so gives you a way to tell which statements are the true ones and which are the false ones.

There is no need for philosophy here. Five year olds have such an understanding. — creativesoul

An understanding of what sorts of things can be true and what makes them so is a kind of philosophy. I agree that five year olds often have a pretty good intuition for that kind of thing, but lots of adults forget it, and start claiming that weird things that can't be true are obviously true. Disabusing them of such notions and making sure people keep to the common sense that five year olds have takes philosophizing.

I actually make this very point myself:

I consider that general philosophical view to be a naively uncontroversial, common-sense kind of view, from which various other philosophical schools of thought deviate in different ways; and I aim to shore up and refine that common-sense view into a more rigorous form that can better withstand the temptation of such deviation. — The Codex Quaerentis: Introduction

Are you denying that there are true statements? — creativesoul

Not at all. I'm denying that we can know for certain, especially prior to any philosophizing, which statements are the true ones and which are the false ones.

A good philosophy gives you a way to tell which statements are the true ones and which are the false ones.

That philosophy can't then depend on already knowing for sure which statements are the true ones and which are the false ones.

Because to know that would require the philosophy that, you say, first required that we know that.

Take undeniably true statements. Use them as a means to discriminate between different philosophies. — creativesoul

How do you know what statements are undeniably true? Isn’t that a philosophical question? Seems kind of circular to then base your means of discerning truth on something you discern to be true based on... what means exactly?

You do know you are an American. Would North American be better? — ssu

Yes. In English, “America” refers to the United States. North America and South America are not parts of “America”, but parts of “the Americas”.

In Spanish and probably other languages it’s different. IIRC English is bit your mother tongue so maybe it’s different in your language too.

Logic cannot determine what is good philosophy or not, because logic is formal. It has no material concepts and philosophy typically does. It can never say anything about the validity of these concepts, it can at best trace whether the steps made in reasoning with these concepts are valid. However, that says nothing about the nature of the premises. A = A does not make a philosophy, no matter the relevance of the principle of identity. — Tobias

Agreed:

... while philosophy and mathematics share much in common in their application of logic, they differ in that mathematical proofs merely show that if certain axioms or definitions are taken as true, then certain conclusions follow, while philosophy both does that and asserts the truth of some axioms or definitions. So while mathematics says things of the form "if [premise] then [conclusion]", philosophy says things of the form "[premise], therefore [conclusion]". Mathematics explores the abstract relations of ideas to each other without concern for the applicability of any of those ideas to any more practical matters (although applications for them are nevertheless frequently found), but philosophy is directly concerned with the practical application of the abstractions it deals with. It is not enough to merely define axiomatically some concept of "existence", "knowledge", "mind", etc, and validly expound upon the implications of that concept; it also matters if that is the correct, practically applicable concept of "existence", "knowledge", "mind", etc, that is useful for the purposes to which we want to employ that concept.

[...]

Philosophy uses the tools of mathematics and the arts, logic and rhetoric, to do the job of creating the tools of the physical and ethical sciences. It is the bridge between the more abstract disciplines and the more practical ones: as described above, an inquiry stops being science and starts being philosophy when instead of using some methods that appeal to specific contingent experiences, it begins questioning and justifying the use of such methods in a more abstract way; and that activity in turn ceases to be philosophy and becomes art or math instead when that abstraction ceases to be concerned with figuring out how to practically answer questions about what is real or what is moral, but turns instead to the structure or presentation of the ideas themselves. — The Codex Quaerentis: Metaphilosophy

Ok. What justification can you provide for excluding thoughts about existence? — Pinprick

Excluding them from what? I’m not excluding them from beliefs, I’m limiting beliefs to just them. I think you misread me.

Right, but wouldn’t you agree that not all thoughts are beliefs? If so, then the thought “no Gods exist” doesn’t have to be a belief. — Pinprick

I’d say all thoughts to the effect that something exists or not constitute beliefs. There are also thoughts that are not about what does or doesn’t exist, which are not beliefs, but we’re not talking about those here.

That’s not how it works.

How do you distinguish superior answers from inferior ones? — A Seagull

That is the big question that all philosophical questions are in service of. I wrote 80,000 words on that that I’m not gonna retype here.

Do you consider that your answer to the question 'What makes a good philosophy' to be a superior one? — A Seagull

Yes.

What I actually wrote was: — Frank Apisa

Lots of talk about what the word "god" means...but not about what the word "believe" means. — Frank Apisa

I did not misquote you.

You are simply underrating the true advances in human society just to make a point how things still suck. — ssu

No, the original point was that things suck now. Pointing out how they used to suck more is besides that point. I’m not disputing that they used to suck more, just saying that that’s irrelevant to the OP.

In your diagram you make a distinction between "doesn't think god exists" and "thinks god doesn't exist". This is mere wordplay. — TheMadFool

No, this is the crux of the whole issue. To believe to the contrary of something is also to not believe in the thing, but to suspend belief entirely is still to not believe in it, even if you’re not also believing to the contrary.

Saying that things are bad now isn’t saying they weren’t worse (even in the same regards) before. The abusive structures of capitalism are just softened and disguised versions of the same structures you’re talking about. Being softened makes them better than the raw untempered versions there used to be, sure, but that doesn’t make everything sunshine and roses today either.

Belief is much more than that, belief changes how you see the world, how you feel, how you act and react, it is more than a thought. It would rather be behaving and being as if something is true. — leo

What is it to think something is true than to be of a state of mind such that you are inclined to act like it is true?

Regarding the existence of God: is it laws that cause change, or will? Do laws enforce themselves, or does will enforce laws? — leo

This question isn’t clear, but on my account will is a process as lawlike as any other, which is to say not completely but substantially enough. And laws of nature are not “enforced” by anything, then aren’t normative laws like those humans pass to govern each other, they are just patterns in the structure of possible ways the universe could be.

Regarding the problem of Evil: is it right to assume that God is necessarily all-powerful? We might have two competing gods, a Good God and an Evil God, who are extremely powerful but not all-powerful. A loving God who is the ultimate source of love and joy and hope and everything that is good and who can transcend the laws of physics (miracles) still counts as God to me. — leo

Transcending the laws of physics is not possible because if they could be transcended they would not have been actual laws to begin with. We routinely transcend all kinds of things once thought to be laws of nature; that just shows that we were wrong about what the laws were before.

But as for the problem of evil, if you want to count as God something that doesn’t meet all the regular criteria that’s fine, just a matter of semantics, but still you’re basically talking about a really powerful all-good alien who’s just not powerful enough to overcome the influence of an equally powerful evil alien, neither of whose existence we have an evidence of. That’s kinda crazy sounding and though on my account you’re free to believe it yourself if that really seems the most plausible interpretation of your experience of the world to you, you’re going to need some big evidence to back up any assertions to anyone else that that’s more likely than other, less outlandish accounts.

Philosophy is the search for wisdom, which is the ability to discern superior from inferior answers to questions. A good philosophy is thus one that provides such an ability.

about what the word "believe" means. — Frank Apisa

To believe something is just to think it’s true, nothing more. You could believe for no good reason (a “blind guess”), or you could believe for reasons. My entire OP is a list of reasons why I believe various things that I do. You can contest the cogency of those reasons, but to label the conclusions “blind guesses” without addressing those reasons at all is just to object to the very having of this conversation, in which case... there’s the metaphorical door.

Agree 100% with this as long as you aren’t equating “thinks” with “believes.” — Pinprick

I am, because they mean the same thing. To believe something is just to think that it is true, nothing more.

Check your proof again — god must be atheist

It's not a proof, just an explanation.

You say you can beleive in not (both god and Not God.) — god must be atheist

Nope, I say you can not-believe in both God and Not God.

You can't "believe both something and its contradiction" = believe in God and Not God
You can't "believe both the negations of those two things" = believe in Not God and God
You can "not believe both things" = not believe in God and not believe in Not God

There's a difference between not-believing something and believing not-something. That's why I used functional notation, to make that clear.

B(not-G) is different from not-B(G). The former implies the latter, sure, but not vice versa.

The law of the excluded middle demands that G or not-G, but when we have a function B(G), the law of the excluded middle permits B(G), B(not-G), not-B(G), and not-B(not-G).

B(not-G) entails not-B(G), so if B(G) then not-B(not-G), but you can not-B(G) and not-B(not-G) at the same time with no contradiction.

In plain English, you can't believe both something and its contradiction, or believe both the negations of those two things, but you can not believe both things so long as you don't believe not either of them.

I'm getting so tired of writing thousands of words about subsets and multidimensional spectra that I decided to just draw a picture instead and see if that's worth more:



Of particular note: all soft atheists are agnostics of some kind (5 & 8), but not all agnostics are soft atheists, some soft agnostics are theists (4) or hard atheists (6). But all hard agnostics (8) are also soft atheists. Sorry Frank.

If being unconvinced that god exists is atheism then what is being convinced that god doesn't exist? — TheMadFool

A subset of atheism, called "strong atheism".

:up: :victory: :cool:

entomology — SonOfAGun

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.



(Fun fact: I once wrote a paper for a philosophy class about Descartes' conceivability argument, wherein I argued that the argument is sound but Descartes misconstrues what "conceivable" really means, which I titled "Inconceivable: or, You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means". The TA who graded it got a big laugh out of it.)

I haven't seen his name mentioned much over at CNN, even MSNBC, or Fox. Have you? — Shawn

Among the news results showing up in that search I linked last night were CNN and MSNBC, so yes.

And to confirm, this news-specific search that doesn't even mention Bernie by name:

https://www.google.com/search?q=california+democratic+primary&tbm=nws

...shows ABC, NBC, Vox, CNN, Boing Boing (?), and NPR all clearly reporting a win, just on the first page.

Could have early stage dementia. Sort of like Reagan. — Bitter Crank

Reagan had dementia? Now that I don't recall.

Oh dear. — Pfhorrest

Reagan died of Alzheimers. — Bitter Crank

I was referencing his testimony on the Iran-Contra affair, wherein he repeated many, many times "That I don't recall" or "I don't recall" to almost all of the questions. And when asked about his own JCOS Chair by name, famously said "oh dear" as he tried to remember who that was.

And the joke, besides just that reference, is that me not remembering Reagan's well-known dementia/Alzheimers suggests that I myself am having memory issues, to which I remark "oh dear" upon the realization.

Though since you didn't get the reference, maybe you're the one who should be saying "oh dear". ;)

None of that is true. — Snakes Alive

"This isn't an argument. It's just contradiction. I came here for a good argument. An argument isn't just contradiction. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition. That's not just saying 'No it isn't.'"

are we saying that the classic apologetic Trilemma still applies? — 3017amen

If you mean the same thing I think you mean (Lewis's trilemma of "lord, liar, or lunatic"), I'm not making any claims here about Jesus in particular, so I'm not sure how that applies. Are you maybe talking about the three "omni"-attributes usually attributed to God instead? (Omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence). Your mention of Epicurean denial sounds like maybe you do. So you're saying the kind of "God" you mean doesn't have to have those attributes? So what are the things that define your concept of "God"? Ignoring those omni-attributes, does your concept of "God" fit into the structure of different senses of the word that I laid out at the start? (Non-cognitivist, transcendent, immanent, incarnate).

I don't think that inquiring about concrete questions in life has much of anything to do with philosophy. — Snakes Alive

Philosophy uses the tools of mathematics and the arts, logic and rhetoric, to do the job of creating the tools of the physical and ethical sciences. It is the bridge between the more abstract disciplines and the more practical ones: as described above, an inquiry stops being science and starts being philosophy when instead of using some methods that appeal to specific contingent experiences, it begins questioning and justifying the use of such methods in a more abstract way; and that activity in turn ceases to be philosophy and becomes art or math instead when that abstraction ceases to be concerned with figuring out how to practically answer questions about what is real or what is moral, but turns instead to the structure or presentation of the ideas themselves.

[...]

The characteristic activity of philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom, not the possession or exercise thereof. Wisdom, in turn, does not merely mean some set of correct opinions, but rather is the ability to discern the true from the false, the good from the bad; or at least the more true from the less true, the better from the worse; the ability, in short, to discern superior answers from inferior answers to any given question.

[...]


...philosophy is the lynchpin of the entire chain of activities conducted by society, and so is instrumentally useful, in some distant way at least, toward any practical end whatsoever. Every practical activity involves using some tool to do some job. At the lowest level of abstraction away from the actual use of said tools to do said jobs, technological fields exist to maintain and administrate those tools, and business fields exist to maintain and administrate those jobs. A level of abstraction higher, engineers work to create the tools that those technologists administrate, while entrepreneurs work to create the jobs that those businesspeople administrate. Those engineers in turn heavily employ the findings of the physical sciences, which could be said to be finding the "natural tools" available from which engineers can create new tools tailored to specific needs. And though this step in the chain seems overlooked in society today, the ethical sciences that I envision could be said to find the "natural jobs" that need doing, inasmuch as they identify needs that people have, which we might also frame as market demands, toward the fulfillment of which entrepreneurs can tailor the creation of new jobs. And those physical and ethical sciences each rely on philosophical underpinnings to function, thereby making philosophy, at least distantly, instrumental to any and all practical undertakings across society.

I hold that the relationship of philosophy to the sciences is the same as that between administrative fields (technology and business) and the workers whose tools and jobs they administrate. Done poorly, they constantly stick their nose into matters they don't understand, and tell the workers, who know what they are doing and are trying to get work done, that they're doing it wrong and should do it some other, actually inferior, way instead, because the administration supposedly knows better and had better be listened to. But done well, they instead give those workers direction and help them organize the best way to tackle the problems at hand, then they get out of the way and let the workers get to doing work. Meanwhile, a well-conducted administration also shields the workers from those who would detract from or interfere with their work (including other, inferior administrators); and at the same time, they are still watchful and ready to be constructively critical if the workers start failing to do their jobs well. In order for administration to be done well and not poorly, it needs to be sufficiently familiar with the work being done under its supervision, but at the same time humble enough to know its place and acknowledge that the specialists under it may, and properly should, know more than it within their areas of specialty. I hold that this same relationship holds not only between administrators and workers, but between creators (engineers and entrepreneurs) and administrators, between scientists (physical or ethical) and creators, and most to the point here, between philosophers and scientists. Philosophy done well guides and facilitates sciences, protects them from the interference of philosophy done poorly, and then gets out of the way to let the sciences take over from there, to do the same for creators, they to do the same for administrators, they to do the same for all the workers of the world getting all the practical work done. — The Codex Quaerentis: Metaphilosophy

I created this poll because Bernie supporters were disputing my claim that Biden had a better chance of getting elected than Bernie. If Bernie supporters vote Trump over Biden, Biden will lose. But if they'll vote for Biden, even begrudgingly, they don't have much basis for disagreeing. — Relativist

That depends entirely on whether Biden voters would do likewise. If Bernie and Biden voters are equally likely to vote for whoever gets the Democratic nomination over Trump, then neither is more electable than the other on that account.

On the other hand, if Biden voters are less opposed to Trump than they are to Bernie, and so more likely to defect to Trump if Bernie gets the nomination, then that makes Biden more electable, sure.

But some quick thinking along these lines suggests that, in general, if being less like the opposition (in an effectively two-party FPTP system like ours) is better, and being more like the opposition is more electable, and electability is a salient criterion for nomination, then the worse candidate for any given party's nomination will always be more likely to get it.

Upon reflection, that's a pretty obvious consequence of the underlying problem: voters (modulo the effects of the electoral system) are leaning in the worse direction. If voters in general favor Biden > Trump > Bernie, or generally any preference order than ranks Trump (or almost any Republican) over almost any Democrat, then of course elections are going to swing in a Republican-ward direction.

I see why Bernie losing nationwide is bad, I just don't see why California taking care to count as many people's votes as possible is bad for Californians. It's not like Biden is winning more because of it or something.

In any case, all hope is not lost. I was just running the numbers a minute ago and Bernie needs 1266 more delegates on top of the 725 he has right now to reach the 1991 delegate threshold to be guaranteed the nomination. Since only 1773 of the 3979 delegates have been appointed so far, that means he needs 57% of the remaining 2206 delegates to be sure to win. And he only needs 1182 delegates, or 54%, to win a plurality.

Professional statisticians like FiveThirtyEight say that that's very unlikely, but seeing the numbers myself, it doesn't feel so hopeless after all.

Because we try to maximize the number of people whose votes get counted, so we let people vote by mail, and count them all so long as they put them in the mail by election day.

In Texas, if you couldn't make it to the polls in time on election day, tough luck, they want to have a number to report that night.

I don't see why you think this is bad for Californians somehow.