Democracy is not, in itself, a particularly good way of running a State; it’s complicated and messy and really an awful lot of work. It’s only virtue is that it’s the most fair. But even that’s only really true when…
You Should Read This: ‘When You Think of It, We Shouldn’t Even Have an Election’
I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: there will be an election this fall, and in the fall of 2028 too. But neither election is likely to go smoothly. It has been obvious for a long time now…
Moar War: What Even Is It?
So, the U.S. being a country with laws but not really interested in operating by laws, there’s a problem in how the U.S. does “war”. Other than all the killing civilians, and murder and such. Those are called war crimes,…
May Day: I Wish You Well
I’ve mentioned before that I do IT and run servers for a living. And this has been a week for folks in my line of work. Most significantly, there was a vulnerability announced this week that lets an attacker take…
Still Ain’t Representin’: Florida
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…