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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*Proposing to cut interest rates poor countries pay for their massive debts by around 11% so they can fund social needs.*

Much of those debts should be wiped away.

Most US cities are worse than many third-world cities in public transport.

Since the many cars that Americans use emit enormous amounts of greenhouse gases, the whole world should demand that the US start catching up.

Violent antisemitism, threatening murder, has been percolating for years in Australia.

I don't think a threat of murder in 2019 had much to do with criticism of Israel's atrocities. It was simply hatred and scapegoating.

Billionaires have taken effective control of many governments and used it to impoverish most of humanity. A fraction of the billionaires are Jewish; most are not. Focusing condemnation narrowly on the Jewish billionaires lets the (non-Jewish) majority of billionaires, such as Musk, off the hook.

Ironically, today's Nazis give their political support to the right-wing governments that cooperate thoroughly with Israel's atrocities. They cite antisemitism as an excuse to persecute people who reproach those atrocities, and mostly leave the other antisemites (Nazis who support them) alone.

*[The wrecker] and his oil-and-coal oligarchy should face sanctions for its war on the environment.*

Zohran Mamdani condemned an event held in NYC which encouraged Americans to invest in West Bank land being stolen from Palestinians.

Bravo, Mamdani!

The leftist premier of West Bengal has accused Modi's party of stealing the election.

This is plausible, given the laws they adopted to deprive Muslims of Indian citizenship if they don't have written proof of it. One of the two laws (which operate together) is explicitly biased against Muslims.

*[Executive agencies are] increasingly ignoring US courts, new analysis shows.

Critics warn that respect for rule of law could break down as executive branch flouts judicial decisions.*

Starmer Labour called itself the "adults", meaning the ones who would prevent adoption of mad policies such as raising taxes on the rich. Rich people from increases in taxation, thus leaving a choice of various policies that won't solve the big problem of impoverishing the non-rich.

With a right-wing party in power, the "adults" may try to stop it from tearing up the legal system and constitution. However, with an ostensibly left-wing party in power, the "adults" try to prevent any major economic changes that could once again direct a large part of the country's productive capacity to the non-rich.

*Six supreme court justices handed down a ruling built, ostensibly, on the belief that the US has changed so much as to render the protections of the Voting Rights Act unnecessary. No one should be that gullible.*

US citizens: denounce the DOJ's Attack on the Southern Poverty Law Center.

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.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

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She seems to have argued at trial that she had no intent to harm anyone, and had only released the bees so they could "enjoy the lovely, flowering landscape" in the area. The landscape was also infested with deputies, though, and the jury does not seem to have believed that was a coincidence. [...]

I've seen no evidence that the one deputy taken to the hospital suffered from anaphylactic shock. It seems a lot more likely that his "elevated heart rate" was caused by his decision to tackle a 59-year-old beekeeper than by the bees themselves. But I'm speculating about that. [...]

This week, the judge sentenced Woods to six months on those charges. According to her lawyer, with time served she will be out in two weeks anyway. [...]

Finally, kudos to The Guardian for refusing to let society ignore the real victims in this case: the bees. "[A]bout a thousand of Woods's bees died during the encounter," it reported, "many of them crushed when several hives toppled as she wrestled with deputies trying to arrest her, and others because female honeybees die after delivering their sting." I assume that "about a thousand" is based on a careful reckoning by a court-appointed bee expert and not just a number that Woods threw out there. Regardless, while I don't really buy the deputies' story here, I do sympathize with the bees. They have enough trouble these days without humans getting them involved in dispute resolution. Leave the bees out of it.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

District 4 shaping up to be San Francisco's loudest and silliest race:

This level of turmoil befitting a Latin American junta is, again, incongruous for a nice, quiet little beach community. But, again, don't believe it -- this is a place where odd stuff happens. District 4 voters have managed to elect two representatives who later spent time in federal prison -- Leland Yee and Ed Jew. Other than Dan White, who murdered Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the only supes to be incarcerated have been from District 4. And, for what it's worth, both of them went down for on-the-job crimes. [...] In the era of district elections, no D4 supervisor has served two full terms. No district has run through more representatives than District 4. [...]

And yet these are the issues getting the most play in this race: hand-waving about a done-deal zoning plan, calling for the installation of a Great Highway on top of Great Highway and pushing distorted and hyperbolic crime narratives during a time of citywide and nationwide crime reductions. But it gets better: All of this is being undertaken via a tsunami of third-party cash. Vast sums of money are flowing into the sleepy Sunset to further rile everyone up.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

And about 1 time in 100, the customer draws a little picture for us instead. So I thought I should share some of those.

If you're thinking, "they're all dicks, aren't they"...

...you are a smart person.

Of the drawings, I'd say that it's 90% dongs; the rest are a mixture of smilies, pentagrams and cats, in about that order.

(I especially like the ones that just wrote out the word "PENIS", which is like, the Philip K. Dick of dicks.)

To generate this gallery, I had to place eyeballs on hundreds of thousands of signatures, going back to 2021. That's right, I just white-knuckled it, you're welcome. (If you're about to start replying with "Why Didn't You Just", I am begging you to Not.)

Now, if you're thinking, "Wait, why do you even still have that 5-year-old data"... you are, again, a smart person.

Even though the payment processors won't let you issue a refund or a chargeback on a transaction older than 6 months, our point-of-sale saves every bit of information it has about every transaction forever. "Oh geez, you should delete that" you might be thinking. There literally is not a delete button.

After a year, one might want to look at daily graphs, but there's no way you'd care about individual transactions, or anything of higher aggregate resolution than "hourly". Maybe "10 minutes" if you're a complete maniac. But nope, we still have the full PDF of the receipt, including name, last-four, scrawled signature and exactly what products were purchased.

(Though, the customer name isn't included most of the time, only sometimes. I'm not sure what the difference is.)

Anyway that means that when -- not if, when -- this vendor gets popped, all of that data will be stolen, sold, laundered, mixed, and purchased by a data broker who will annotate their profile about you with how much you drink and what, how many nights a week, and whether you attend gay parties. Some of it might even be true! That profile will then be purchased by your car insurance company, your health insurance company, the recruiters used by every future employer, Google, Amazon, Instagram, ICE, TSA, FBI, CIA, all of the "AI" companies, and Deputy Dewey of the East Cowfuck, Texas Police Department.

Oh no, what started off as a juvenile story about poorly-drawn dicks turned into a dystopian nightmare. Welp.