Last summer, I calculated what the U.S. House of Representatives would look like if the U.S. used statewide proportional representation by party registration to elect congresscritters: TLDR: it was very different from how it currently looks. That started with looking…
Nanny Statists: Speaking Of Vice Taxes
I mentioned vice taxes in the title of last Friday’s post, but over the weekend I realized that I actually hadn’t said anything about them in the post itself. I only really talked about outright bans. And vice taxes are…
Nanny Statists: Moral Panics, Vice Taxes and Authoritarianism
This time, I’m not talking about the latest “Oh, will someone think of the children!?” nonsense that’s fronting the movement to install age-gates on your personal computers. Or whatever’s behind the recent movement to force your 3d printer to ask…
Gerrymandering: Good Politics, Bad Policy
Viewed just from the perspective of electoral politics, you can’t really blame a political party in power for using its position to make the next election more favorable for itself. Winning sort of is the point in politics. And anything…
Enough Of This Foolishness: You Are Responsible For Your Own Online Experience
Seriously: you are choosing to use the systems you use. And you can make different choices. This applies to almost everything about how you use the Internet; everything other than your choice of provider, in fact. And maybe that as…
Generative AI: A Drunken Walk Through The Library Of Babel
Colin Fraser described the experience of using a Large Language Model (LLM) as like co-writing a screenplay with the computer, where it provides the lines of whatever character its prompts describe. Which is an interesting and useful way of thinking…
You Should Read This: Trump Is Anything but Unpredictable
Kevin Williamson, of The Dispatch and the Competitive Enterprise Institute (previously of the National Review), is not someone with whom I expect to agree very often. If ever. But it happens occasionally. Just as I can agree with Barry Goldwater‘s…
Institutionalism: Supporting Fascism From The Inside
We don’t need more Democrats; we need better Democrats. Or, ideally, a lot more representatives who aren’t Democrats at all. (And who are also not Republicans, though in these fascist times that should go without saying.) Jonathan Larson at The…
You Should Read This: Let’s Talk About LLMs
James Bennett‘s blog describes him as “a software developer living in California”. Which is all I know about him. But on that blog today he has a pretty good piece up called “Let’s talk about LLMs“. His basic interest in the…
Make It Again: The 25th Amendment Is Just Bad
The 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is, bad; just, really, really bad. OK, one section of it is just, really, really bad. But that’s the one section anyone pays attention to, so it kinda sticks out. The first three…