(satire) *DHS Warns Any Action By Americans Will Be Treated As Domestic Terrorism.*

(satire) *Authorities Unearth Mass Grave Of [the bully's] Advisors.*

(satire) *Taylor Swift Adds Additional Wedding Dates In L.A., Miami, Boston.*

Arguing for a ban on ads for commercial gambling.

I can support this cause.

*Chicago Ordinance Would Bar Cops from Active Involvement in Extremist Groups.*

Every state should enact such a law, and so should the federal government, if we ever pry it lose from violent extremists in the federal government.

* Data from missions showing critically low snowpack on mountains across the west raises alarm among experts.*

This problem of global heating was predicted many years ago. We could have prevented some of the dryness if we had made a global effort.

*Pity the poor billionaires – demands for higher taxes must feel hurtful.*

And biased! Don't forget the unfairness of increasing the tax rate only for the super-rich ;-!

Israel agreed to a "cease fire" in Gaza, but violates it in several ways. In fact it is only a reduction in the frequency of atrocities.

The wrecker is pushing forward towards the goal of abolishing FEMA by rendering it useless.

Resisting the construction of datacenters for pretend intelligence is not mere nimbyism. They are the only aspect of pretend intelligence that people have a chance to oppose.

*In the words of the antitrust expert Zephyr Teachout: "If you want democratic governance of AI [sic], block datacenters. Google's not coming to any democratic table, not listening to any rules, without people showing force."*

I see one other point where we can resist — by refusing to call it "intelligence".

The Sierra Nevada tourist hub -- home to ski resorts, lakeside casinos, and roughly 25 to 28 million annual visitors -- is facing an energy crisis with a familiar culprit: the data centers powering the AI boom.

NV Energy, the Nevada utility that has supplied the bulk of Lake Tahoe's electricity for decades, told Liberty Utilities -- the small California company that services the region -- that it will stop providing power after May 2027. The reason? NV Energy needs the capacity for data centers. As in: the energy supplier for the Lake Tahoe region is telling the utility company that it has less than a year to find another power source.

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It's so weird, like: you sought me out at my place of business and the first thing you do is demonstrate that you haven't read my blog, ever.

This is getting so frequent that I feel like I would save time if I actually memorized a prepared speech. "I have been asked to read the following statement."

A couple of weeks ago one of these kids kept throwing out all of these ridiculous sci-fi what-ifs leading me to say, "I really need you to understand this, Lieutenant Commander Data is a work of fiction."

Then later he says:

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People keep describing things as "mask off" but this is just getting ridiculous.

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Three "fully functional" arcade games were installed Monday at the District of Columbia War Memorial. According to the group, the game features "furious tweet battles against Iranian schoolgirls, low-flow shower heads, and other threats to American freedom like DEI and The Pope, and an opportunity to collect several Trump style peace trophies."

"Just to save you time, the only way you can lose is by trying to hold Melania's hand. But it's The Middle East, so you also can't win either," the group said in a statement shared with HuffPost.

A plaque next to the machines states: "The Trump administration knows that the best way to sell combat is by making it a video game, that's why they've been pumping out the 'sickest' Iran War video game hype reels. But why stop at clips when you could go full throttle? Introducing Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell, a high-octane, flag-waving, boots-on-the-ground simulator where freedom isn't debated, it's deployed. No briefings, no hesitation; just pure pixelated patriotism. Strap in and play hard, because this game may never end."

The arcade games are expected to stay at the D.C. War Memorial, located near the reflecting pool in West Potomac Park, for a few days. The group also made the game available online. [currently not working.]

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Approval voting is an election method voters say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to each candidate and whoever gets the most ‘yes’ votes wins. It isn’t a popular or good idea. It’s mostly promoted by one guy, but the internet being what it is he’s managed to make the appearance that it’s a serious thing, based mostly on having gotten a real math paper published and once having convinced a very geriatric Kenneth Arrow to be interviewed who then acted like a gracious guest. I’ve now spent an unjustified amount of time arguing with this person and digging into what that paper says, so I’ll explain what’s wrong with it for your benefit.

When argued with this person does a lot of talking about ‘math’ and ‘theorem’. Those familiar with Arrow’s theorem might find this a little odd. Arrow’s theorem is a theorem. How could two theorems say contradictory things? It comes down to what assumptions you make. Assumptions may or may not correlate with the real world. Which theorem applies is an empirical question about which one’s assumptions are most accurate.

The core insight of Arrow’s theorem is this: Consider an election which there are three parties, the Alice, Bob, and Carol parties, named after their preferred candidates. They’re all close to the same size, and the Alice party’s preferred candidates are Alice, then Bob, then Carol, in that order. For the Bob party it’s Bob, Carol, Alice, and for the Carol party it’s Carol, Alice, Bob. This is a very strange and confused scenario which doesn’t happen very often in practice, but it can happen, and Arrow’s theorem basically says there’s no perfect way to handle it, although there are reasonable things which can be done in practice.1

The paper in question is spun as claiming that approval voting is a loophole around the no spoilers criterion. That criterion specifically says that if one candidate would beat another in a two-way race, then adding in a third candidate who doesn’t win shouldn’t switch it to the other candidate. Consider what happens in the difficult case described above when we’re using ranked choice ballots. Let’s say the numbers of members of the three parties are very slightly different and the tiebreak we choose happens to pick Bob. This is a problem because in a two way race Alice would beat Bob with 2/3 of the vote but now Bob wins because of Carol having been introduced even though Carol didn’t win. The same argument applies when either of the other two candidates win.

Intuitively it seems like moving off of ranked choice ballots should make gameability worse rather than better. It allows voters to express their preferences in every scenario and the vote ranking algorithm to use all of that information. It turns this is exactly what happens for approval voting: The simplicity of picking a winner masks yet even greater opportunities for voters to get what they want by voting dishonestly. Only if you assume the fallacy that by limiting what voters can express to approve/disapprove you’ve successfully forced them to limit their preferences to approve/disapprove does it hold up.

Consider the difficult case with approval voting. Let’s say the voters vote completely honestly. Or maybe they vote strategically based on some complex negotiation which happened ahead of time. Which assumption you make doesn’t matter for getting to the conclusion. One way or another, one of the candidates will win. Let’s say it’s Bob. Why won’t Alice beat Bob in a two-way race? The details are a bit involved (this was, in fact, the subject of a publishable paper) but it rests deeply on a fundamental assumption: Because the ballots are yes/no, the feelings of the voters about candidates are yes/no. In particular, it assumes that in a two way race between Alice and Bob voters who like both candidates or dislike both candidates will state so honestly, putting in a wasted ballot, instead of strategically voting yes to the candidate they like more and no to the candidate they dislike more. They’re supposed to say ‘Both candidates are great, don’t care’ or ‘Two evils, no lesser’. Any voters who do otherwise are Bad, Immoral, and defiling the mathematical beauty of the voting system. This is, to put it politely, an unrealistic assumption, and real world voting systems should not be designed based on it.

There are other arguments which could be made for and against approval voting but no-spoilers was chosen as the supposedly unassailable point in its favor so having debunked it I’m now going to declare victory rather than doing a comprehensive review of voting systems. Ranked choice remains the best option, with some tweaks like allowing voters to list candidates as tied in preference being legitimate practical improvements.2

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For an external USB 5TB+ spinning disk (not SSD), is HFS a better choice than APFS? Assume no weird edge cases like spanning volumes or RAID are involved. It's just a disk.

It is very easy to find either answer, but hard to find one that sounds like it's from someone who knows what they are talking about, and isn't just cargo-culting it or reading from a press release. So show your work.

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