@travisfw for a variety of reasons, I don’t think ranked-choice / instant-runoff voting is a great system. i prefer it to the horrible status quo of plurality voting, of course, but i think it has a lot of problems. it’ll take a separate post to explain why. 1/
@travisfw but the thing that maintains the two-party system isn’t the “binary” lack of gradations of approval, but the spoiler effect. approval voting eliminates that. there is never a penalty for expressing your support of the party you most support, in addition (if necessary) to your “approval” of a party you support less, but do not wish to spoil. 2/
@travisfw in all deterministic voting systems, there is some benefit to strategic voting. in approval voting, you still have to think about who you don’t want to spoil. in RCV, you have to think strategically when your first and second choices have similar levels of support. (you can always opt out of thinking strategically, but then your vote may have undesirable effects.) 3/
@travisfw approval voting is a simpler and more predictable game, from a voter’s perspective, and strategic voting never requires you to misstate your preferences (since you cannot rank, you are never compelled to rank an option you like less over an option you like more to avoid a bad outcome). /fin
it is more engaging to just fight it out than it is to create the conditions under which we wouldn't have to fight.
the road to a wasteland is paved with high engagement.
[new draft post] How to understand approval voting https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/03/28/how-to-understand-approval-voting/index.html
@otfrom @Jgmeadows it's definitely a price of freedom, taking on various costs (and learning how to run your own things). like any costs, there may be contexts where it's unaffordable. but i can't for the life of me understand how so many well-funded projects tether themselves directly to AWS/Azure/Google APIs. or how standard and ubiquitous GitHub-specific tooling has become for testing and CI among firms capable of independence.
@otfrom @Jgmeadows (my own way of dealing with this stuff, for now, is to depend on cloud providers only for generic Linux servers, so that if one enshittifies there’s no lock-in, i can migrate. but if they collusively enshittify, if the “industry standard” becomes slop, i’ll still end up with nowhere to run.)
@otfrom @Jgmeadows the devils — and perhaps angels! — must live in the institutional details.
@davidtoddmccarty yup. i’m definitely a (fucking) mixed-economy-ist. 🙂
the cloud is just some profit-hungry one else’s computer, and if they can they will eventually prey upon you, no matter how nice and technically awesome they seem today. https://grimgreenfo.rest/notes/9rdle0uyo4d30029 ht @Jgmeadows
@davidtoddmccarty social democracy. finland, norway, sweden, denmark, and iceland. whether you think it is “capitalism” or “socialism” or whatever is irrelevant i think. i would consider deploying existing policy instruments like income taxes, and maybe new ones like wealth taxes, to compress the upside of the income and wealth distribution a bit more.
@ivory yesterday i had 40+ drafts, some of which i did expect someday to come back to. today they are gone, replaced by a single draft i added yesterday.
“Hamas may be horrific, but just because you’ve diagnosed a malignant tumor doesn’t mean you hand a rusty scalpel to a drunk and tell him to cut away while the patient screams in terror.” #PhilKlay https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/03/gaza-war-indefensible-united-states/677896/ ht @davidtoddmccarty
@homelessjun@mas.to
Image of a warplane with red dots of damage in a pattern that might be observed on return home, commonly used as a symbol of survivorship bias, since the damage is not actually representative of how warplanes are damaged, but of where warplanes can take damage and still make it back to base.
On the one hand, one should not brook, or worse succumb to, weak conspiracy theories that amount mostly to Rorschach tests of the conspiracists' priors and prejudices.
On the other hand, we must not let the awfulness of a lot of conspiracism trick us into defending institutions that in fact are broken, corrupt, and often predatory.
@pluralistic squares the circle well. https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/black-boxes/
@WarnerCrocker oh, that was mine. sorry about that. just venmo me.
looking forward to pastor.ai
prompt your own sermon. blitzscale your megachurch. tithe.
"It’s not that these people don’t know that an industrial-scale killing machine whirs just beyond their garden wall. They have simply learned to lead contented lives with ambient genocide." #NaomiKlein https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/14/the-zone-of-interest-auschwitz-gaza-genocide ht @hagbard @alanferrier
[tech notebook] tar or tgz? https://tech.interfluidity.com/2024/03/27/tar-or-tgz/index.html
i didn't even know Boeing made container ships.
moving from the King James to the King Donald edition. ht @GreenSkyOverMe https://mastodon.social/@indivisibleteam/112167844083854571
@phillmv "there's nothing better for a person's character than working a job."