Bob @ Bob @midwest.social

Posts

20

Comments

127

Joined

2 yr. ago

What's the proposal like this year? The last time they tried to legalize it they wanted to install a state sanctioned monopoly and a lot of people I know who loved weed voted against legalization for that reason.

Everything I'm reading about Framework laptops sounds great! When I need a new one they'll definitely be on my list.

It's way more complicated than that.

The legislature is historically responsible for 70% of the attempts to amend the constitution and they're trying to make it even harder for citizen lead initiatives to happen. Only about 25% of citizen amendments pass when they get put to a vote, a total of 19 successes in all of Ohio history. We're not drowning in direct democracy here.

The real problem is that the proposed signature requirement is so onerous basically no one will ever be able to get anything on the ballot ever again.

Add to this that the August ballot measure is 100% a retaliation for the upcoming November ballot measure, and yeah, it's total bullshit. We're not even supposed to have August elections anymore and the secretary of state basically changed the rules just for this.

I bought a Thinkpad specifically because they're built to be easy to upgrade and repair. They're aimed at corporations, so the IT managers value that ability. I've upgraded the RAM and installed an extra hard drive. I'm probably going to fix or replace the CD drive in the future, since someone damaged it and it only opens with the paperclip method now.

They are addressing the issue, if you read the article. They've recovered 3/4 of the leaked tritium and the concentration detected was 1 nanocurie per liter, 1 twentieth of the EPA limit for safety. Detectable does not always mean problematic.

If you want this kind of thing to happen less, you gotta pressure congress and the NRC to make it less onerous to build a nuclear power plant. Our current fleet is just plain getting old. Yes, safety is important, but the NRC once asked a company to build a full-scale pilot plant before they would approve an energy plant. There needs to be a reasonable balance.

The rule in spirit is no motorized transport. I'm perfectly aware of the actual rule.

I don't think anyone should be above the rules based on status, no. Only accessibility should allow for exceptions and honestly even as a disabled person I'm fine with being cut out from things like this, even though I'm sure there's plenty of other people who feel differently.

Good. They have one rule, and honestly any kind of e-bike is breaking that rule. An e-bike is for people who are so addicted to cars they can't imagine not having motorized transport.

Yeah I think it's hilarious too, but they do have a justification. It gives you the "freedom" to vote for everyone you like.

If I were going to name the system I'd call it Binary Voting, since every vote is really yes/no on every candidate. But hey, one rebrand at a time, I suppose.

Missouri Agrees is working on a referendum campaign to switch every election in the state to Approval Voting (AKA Freedom Voting). They're actually doing a fundraising campaign right now in order to pay for the effort.

If you don't know what Freedom Voting is, it's very simple.

1. Vote for everyone you like.
2. Most votes wins.

The short answer for why it's so great is that it means you're no longer limited to choosing just one candidate. You can pick everyone you like without having to worry about strategy. The long answer gets into polling data, voting theory, and even representing systems, but the big takeaway is that it's always safe to vote for your favorite no matter what.

If we can flip every election in Missouri with the proposed state constitution amendment, it'll be huge for voting reform for the nation as a whole, because we'll have a g whole state demonstrating how great Freedom Voting is compared to the status quo.

I'm always happy to chat, let me know if you have any questions.

Howdy. If you're interested in election reform give me a holler. If you're interested in anything else, you can give me a holler about that too!

Everyone knows our social problems started exactly when we began helping Ukraine.

♪♪Almost heaven, home of Iowa♪♪ ♪♪Fields of soy beans, Mississippi River♪♪

As soon as I saw that headline I knew something was up. Phosphogypsum is totally fine to use as a part of road material. Like most minerals it contains traces of uranium, which decay into radon, the radioactive gas in question. The thing is, radon is constantly leaking out of the ground. It's only a problem in basements where the air doesn't circulate. Using phosphogypsum in the road isn't going to make any interesting changes in the road's radioactivity. I'd be more worried about the radiation dose from flying on and air plane.

Yeah..... FairVote is not a great organization. I really hate to badmouth anyone, but I've caught employees lying about things that really shouldn't be lied about.

As for that article in particular, it has a few obvious flaws and biases, including, at best, half-truths.

They make the standard claim that RCV produces a majority winner, but the problem is that this isn't true. RCV discards ballots in order to get the math to claim the winner has >50% of the remaining ballots. They don't necessarily have support from >50% of the voters. You can get any system to claim a "majority winner" by eliminating last place candidates and discarding exhausted ballots. The Alaska special election is an example of both a spoiler RCV election and one the where the winner didn't have majority support.

They play word-games with the concept of what a vote actually is, and try to claim that approval voting gives some people more than one vote while RCV doesn't. Horseshit. Your vote is your entire ballot for any voting system. Under RCV you rank candidates, under approval you say Yes/No on every candidate. Voting "Yes" for more candidates doesn't change your influence on an approval election, because you have to give an opinion for every candidate. See here for a brief talk about one person one vote.

They talk about how adding compromise candidates can hurt your favorite under approval as if that's a bad thing. We want people to vote honestly, there shouldn't be an incentive to cast disingenuous votes. RCV encourages you to vote for candidates you don't actually like.

They make claims about sensitivity to strategic voting that simply aren't true, approval voting is actually quite robust against strategic voting.

Throughout the whole article they make a lot of comparisons that don't actually support their reasoning when you follow the logic. There's honestly too many to bitch about but at one point they heavily imply that 71% of voters ranking more than one candidate is evidence that people don't vote strategically under RCV.

They repeat the wrong claim that voting for more people means more power. It's weird how they don't consider ranking more people as "more power" than ranking only a few. Again, everyone voting in both kinds of elections have equal power, no matter how they vote. For approval, it's easy to see just by imaging your vote as placing all the candidates into two piles. For RCV it's easier to just think of your entire ballot as your vote, which is a logical view of equal power that works for any voting system.

They try to make the claim that people interpreting their task as voters differently would give different people different power???

Look, I'm sorry for this wall of text, I really am, but you have to understand that FairVote is a political organization in the bad way. At least this article didn't lie about spoilers or vote splitting like they often do. Under RCV, voting for you true favorite can backfire, but under approval it's always safe to give your favorite a vote.

The thing is, RCV isn't bad, it's just approval is better. Approval is much easier to use for any kind of election, be it single-winner, multi-winner, or proportional. The other versions of RCV get confusing in a hurry.

To prove it, I'll explain all three versions right here:

Single winner:

1. vote for everyone you like
2. most votes wins

Multi-winner:

1. vote for everyone you like
2. most votes wins first seat
3. all ballots with 1 winner on them count for ½
4. most votes wins second seat
5. same as step 3 and ballots with 2 winners count for ⅓
6. most votes wins third seat
7. same as steps 3 and 5 and ballots with 3 winners count for ¼
8. etc. Etc.

Proportional:

1. Vote for as many parties as you like
2. Each ballot is divided by the number of votes cast on that ballot
3. assign seats to reflect the vote totals

That's it. It really is that simple.

Again, sorry for the wall of text, it's just I'm here for honest discussion and FairVote pisses me off with how much they try to spin things.

I guess the problem here is that a torso would be biological waste instead of medical waste?

Pretty much every alternative voting system gets very similar results in practice. Most of the arguments between voting nerds are about what kind of things are more important. Approval people favor simplicity and scalability, RCV people favor individual voter expression. I could give you all the arguments about why approval is better, but we're in the middle of a funding drive so I'm kinda burnt out on it.

Well the group doesn't organize through Reddit, but we interact with all the internet sites, because people are on the internet.

I'm an unofficial volunteer for The Center for Election Science and right now their big thing is helping people switch their elections to Approval Voting. So basically I just keep an eye out for conversations and posts where election or representation reform is relevant and join the discussion.

If you wanna win hearts and minds, you gotta show up where the people are.

That being said, I'm on Lemmy because FUCK REDDIT and monetizing social interactions is gross and icky.

Does it have a way to bypass the API problem that's about to hit us? I don't browse or anything anymore, I just show up in places where I'm told people have questions I'd be good at answering.

Yeah, I'm very grateful that I'll have plenty of spares. I think the biggest challenge is that I'm going to be engraving the sides. If it was the top it would be a lot easier, but God damn do side labeled keys look good.

I'll have to create a rig of some kind that holds the piece in a secure and consistent location. Then I'll probably index off of one of the lower corners so I get consistent placement of the etching. I'll have to think more about how exactly I want to do it.

Yeah I installed the official app because I have to use Reddit for political activism. The app sucks donkey balls. It's genuinely confusing to try and navigate. It's never clear where you are. The app SUCKS.

I socialize here now, I only go to Reddit if I have to.