Neal McBurnett

Can you share a link to the full text? I'm not finding it.

I think we should pursue positive change wherever we get traction. Getting experience with PR is critical to getting people behind an initiative to adopt it at the state level. Local government often has some of the biggest impacts on people and is pretty darn important.

City council elections often have little to do with party politics. Several have adopted PR without an intermediate step. The linked article doesn't seem to address municipal elections.

Domination is often a problem, and it's rare that any particular faction somehow stands for worthy compromise on all issues. So ensuring that significant factions all get proportional representation remains important.

I agree that people would like parties better if they had more choice.
What proposals do you have for breaking the duopoly? PR seems like the best bet to me.

Compared to most city councils using either single-winner districts or at-large block plurality, and which are typically dominated by the largest faction. PR is unsurprisingly producing a much more representative council, as designed, and being viewed favorably by the voters.

I'd always love more evidence and study. But another data point is that over half of voters in Colorado are unaffiliated with any party, and the percentage is growing. Many other states are similar.

STV is very sensitive to elimination order, and it is infeasible in general to even figure out the margin of victory, making Risk-Limiting Audits (RLA) of STV a nightmare. So I agree it is more chaotic than PAV, which is linear and easy to find the margin of victory and deal with discrepancies.

Parties are deeply distrusted by voters in the US, so party list methods will not gain traction.
The movement to primary elections a century ago was intended to take candidate selection out of the "smoke-filled rooms" of party insiders.
That's the chaos that Swedish parties successfully fought.

Interesting, I'd love references. But most municipal elections in the United States are non-partisan. STV has worked well in Cambridge MA for nearly a century, as well as in many other cities a century ago including Boulder. It is now working well in Portland OR and elsewhere. PAV should as well.

...And certainly not the AWFUL form of RCV that Utah has been using, which is anti-proportional and should make any "RCV" fan embarrassed.
And unfortunately, STV is sometimes just plain impossible to audit - you don't even know how close the election really was (the margin of victory). Dangerous....

I'd say It should help.
But for real progress, we need Proportional Representation, in the form of Proportional Approval Voting (which is straightforward to audit) or via STV, the *other* much better form of "RCV". The one that Portland adopted, not the IRV that New York adopted.....

YouTube video by Stand-up Maths Explaining the Trump Tariff Equation

Matt Parker points out that the tariff equation is so bad, it includes unnecessary asterisks for multiplication (when multiplied terms are usually just smooshed together)
youtu.be/j04IAbWCszg

I am so, so heartbroken to hear this. I've corresponded and worked with Jameson for several years. He was an incredibly brilliant, kind, committed champion of so many good causes. His work on election methods was unparalleled. Please let me know of any celebrations of his life.

FAQ on Microsoft’s topological qubit thing Q1. Did you see Microsoft’s announcement?A. Yes, thanks, you can stop emailing to ask! Microsoft’s Chetan Nayak was even kind enough to give me a personal briefing a few weeks ago. Yest…

For more on the point that Clare makes, see what Chetan Nayak Says in
Comment #31 at Shtetl-Optimized, along with other comments criticizing Microsoft for putting press releases out before peer review: scottaaronson.blog?p=8669

The DeepSeek Surprise: Why China's latest AI move matters - and why it may not Think of DeepSeek as a catalyst for expansion rather than a threat to existing players, which is why such a massive hit to NVIDIA's stock may not have been justified.

A cogent overview of the DeepSeek Surprise, by Daniel Ritchie of the Brainwave Collective: www.coloradoai.news/the-deepseek...

Yikes! Can someone clarify the context? Does this mean all advisory committees within DHS currently have zero members? And that there is an implicit call for people anywhere to apply for membership, to be vetted in some unspecified manner going forward? Is there a list somewhere of such committees?

Glad to see you here! That looks like the cat Nicky I had at age 8 ❤️

We Need To Rewild The Internet  | NOEMA The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.

Thank you @crookedfootball.bsky.social. Your précis of the new piece lists all my passions!

"draws on the work of James C. Scott, Elinor Ostrom and ecologists to think about how we might reclaim the internet from the tech oligopoly that has turned it into a small number of gated ad-mills"

@axz.bsky.social Great talk today on tools and workflows for policy governance in online communities! www.youtube.com/live/Q1xYwRw...
I've been listening to the Another Way podcast by twitter.com/lessig recently - so much in common! podcastaddict.com/another-way-...

Search for progressive rock among genre names in everynoise

Everynoise is a blast to wander around, even though it isn't being updated anymore. You can even do a text search for genre names.

techcrunch.com/2024/02/12/e...

everynoise.com

I was surprised when they went to questions withoug showing us the insides. Glad that the first question/answer quickly cleared that up. They're just moving at the speed of science, not media. Good work! And surprising!
Did they clarify that earlier in the press conference? If so, I missed it...

Enjoying seeing external Bennu material at Osiris-Rex (science.nasa.gov/mission/osir...) sample-return "reveal" press conference (www.youtube.com/live/21X5lGl...) but surprised that they haven't actually opened up the TAGSAM container to reveal what is inside. Intense anticipation for coming days?

But we need to get these points out to the world, not just those who have managed to get an invite code to a network that requires an account to see the content.
Or what is the best current writeup on the open web?
My attempt to get it unrolled and posted seems to have failed.

@unroll.bsky.social: unroll

Thank you both for this conversation about the crucial reform we need: proportional represenentation, which the LWV of Boulder Colorado broadly supports!

I doubt many places will really want to have nine winners in a contest, and far more candidates. Four or five winners seems more common, so the upper bound is more like 20%. Which of course is still a vast improvement!

Since I joined bsky all of 45 minutes ago, I guess I might be one of the last accounts to have come into existence under the non-federated approach?