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Maine Took the US One Giant Step Toward More Democratic Elections
  • Unless Maine also repeals their use of instant runoff voting for the presidential election, their own votes won't count toward the national popular vote. The compact makes no provision for counting ranked ballots, and there isn't really any fair way to do so anyway.

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    What are you reading/listening to this week? (February 21st, 2023)
  • The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson

    It starts with the nameless narrator experiencing a near-fatal car crash due to his drug and alcohol induced hallucinations. During his lengthy recovery in the burn ward, he meets a psych patient who alleges their story begins 700 years ago in a German monastery. She tells him stories about their past in Germany, including how she obtained and translated a copy of Dante's Inferno predating all known German translations. She tells other stories too, about a Japanese glass craftswoman, an Icelandic Viking, an Italian blacksmith, maybe some others, most of whom die young and tragically. She's also a talented sculptor of stone gargoyles, a skill she allegedly learned from the narrator. The narrator suspects her stories are just the delusions of a schizophrenic, but can't go back to his pre-accident life, so he agrees to go home with her to continue his recovery, and maybe learn a little more about her and why she's taken an interest in him.

    I'm about 3/4 through it and impressed with how it's written. Unfortunately, I never read the Divine Comedy, so I'm pretty sure I missed some things that a better educated reader would have recognized.

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    Proton blog: Are security questions terrible for account security?
  • Once, I made an account for something that let me write my own security question and answer. I thought that was much better than the usual options and wrote something that cryptically referenced a difficult problem I once worked on. The answer could possibly be found online, but only to someone who properly understood the question. Later, when I needed to authenticate myself again, I got my security question. The answer isn't something you typically memorize, but I knew what the prompt meant and how to work it out so I did so.

    But I was too slow. Apparently you had to answer within one minute. It took me about ten so it locked me out. Tech support helpfully reset my password after merely verifying my phone number and SSN which are probably known to thousands.

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    Go outside or go to jail: Top NC Republican targets trans restroom rights
  • Can we just let gender-neutral toilets be the default so we can all stop worrying this? The fact that the stranger shitting next stall over may or may not have a penis is not a problem. Having to scrape turds off my shoe because someone followed this guy's advise and shat on the sidewalk makes it my problem.

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    *Permanently Deleted*
  • Not sure about MIchigan in particular, but other states have, in relatively recent history, given ballot access to presidential candidates who were unambiguously constitutionally ineligible for the office. It doesn't make much sense to me either, but apparently neither the 14th amendment, nor any other federal law restricts who can run for president, merely who can hold the office if elected.

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  • Wordle rules: Yellow letters present in another position; Grey letters are unused.

    Took me longer than usual to find anything that fit.

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    Colorado Supreme Court kicks Donald Trump off the state's 2024 ballot for violating the U.S. Constitution
  • One consequence of this, even though it only applies to the primary and even if it is reversed on appeal, is to effective kill any momentum the NPVIC might have had.

    It really punctuated the fact that there is no such thing as a national vote when voters from different states aren't even presented with the same choices. With the electoral college in place, this mostly doesn't matter, but NPVIC would encourage the most partisan states to run up the score for their guy by any means possible.

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    Ranked choice is 'the hot reform' in democracy. Here's what you should know about it
  • I really wish IRV advocates would stop lying about things like:

    since voters can feel free to support them without fear of inadvertently helping a candidate they definitely don't want to win.

    There is absolutely a spoiler effect in IRV, and it isn't just theoretical -- it happened in one of the elections the article praises as successful.

    Any election system works well with only two choices. IRV improves very slightly on plurality and works well with many choices, provided only two of them matter. But as soon as you get three competitive candidates, exactly the thing many election reformers want to see, really counterintuitive things start to happen.

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    Wisconsin judge rules 1849 law doesn’t outlaw abortion
  • Seems simpler for the good people of Wisconsin to just vote on a new law that says whatever they think is proper. Obstetric science has advanced somewhat since the time when Ignaz Semmelweis first proposed doctors washing their hands before delivering babies (especially if they'd just come form the cadaver lab), so some of the reasoning behind the 1849 law might be out of date.

    Unfortunately, that would require certain politicians to go on record about something that might be used against them if they later ran a national campaign, so better to let the court take the matter out of their hands and (mis-?)interpret an old law in a politically advantageous way.

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    Reddit says a bug is letting slurs get added to its links - The Verge
  • Verge's editorial standards may discourage printing out the f-word in question, but following the links shows it to be the f-word for homosexual, not the f-word for copulation.

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    Panera Bread’s Charged Lemonade blamed for a second death, lawsuit alleges
  • Panera should go ahead and put prominent warning labels on it. Call it The lemonade so charged it killed [name of latest victim]. It might double sales of the product.

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    Say Goodbye to Those Absurd Side-Effects Readouts in Drug Commercials. The FDA finalized a rule that will require a drug’s side effects to be "presented in a clear, conspicuous, and neutral manner.”
  • Are they keeping the loophole where you only have to discuss side effects if you also discuss the intended use?

    I've seen an obnoxious trend in pharma ads where you get 25 seconds or so to guess what ailment the actors are concerned about from their demographics and general demeanor, followed by an instruction to "ask your physician if [brand name] is right for you too."

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  • I got a good deal on a 3.5 pound bag of Swedish Fish, but they're "best by" Nov 14.

    So which will make me sicker? Eating them all within a week, or eating them after they go bad.

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    I thought of a few examples, but want some more. Don't count songs with nonsense lyrics or instrumentals without lyrics. Don't count bilingual songs (unless neither of them is English, or if the English portions are commonly omitted). Don't count songs primarily popular among immigrant populations or others fluent in that language.

    Basically, songs an American monoglot could sing along with, but couldn't translate.

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