Richard Stallman will speak in Erlangen, Germany on June 16 at 16:00, at the School of Engineering of FAU.

The talk is on the moral issues of free vs nonfree software.

We suggest you bring cash.

Australia has allowed some Australians who became PISSI wives, and were imprisoned for years in Syria, to return to Australia.

Some of them face grave criminal charges for supporting PISSI, and they deserve that. But exiling people is an unjust punishment for any crime, and punishing them without a trial is unjust too.

*Report shows banned non-fiction books doubled over last school year in US. New PEN America report analyzed 3,743 unique titles removed from libraries and classrooms and found books about activism and social movements were targeted.*

Citing the household cost of blockaded oil and gas to remind people of the desperate need to start climate defense.

The article uses the fashionable term "toxic", saying that the topic of climate disaster and the need to prevent it has become "toxic". What does that actually mean? Why in general does a topic, cause, or person, become "toxic"?

It is usually the result of a systematic campaign of vilification which aims to associate the target with a vague criticism, for which the reasons rarely rationally reconsidered. In the case of climate defense, we know this campaign has been operating for years, funded by the fossil fuel companies and spread by the many businesses that have relations with them and the politicians that they have funded.

The word "toxic", at the concrete level, refers to the existence of such an association for that target. But its connotation puts the blame on the target. Thus, it is a weasel-word whose effect is to endorse the campaign -- in effect, to condemn climate defense for being the target of vilification by the rich.

I therefore suggest rejecting the word.

Many victims of domestic violence that includes blows to the head suffer from memory loss and cognitive disabilities.

Mexico city is pumping so much water out of the aquifer underneath it that it is sinking up to 40cm per year.

When pipes leak under Mexico City, where does the water go? Into the aquifer? If so, leakage is just a way of extracting less. But I can't be sure of that — that water may take years to reach the aquifer than where it is needed. And engineers would compensate by increasing the extraction rate.

With enough money, solar-powered desalination could provide water for Mexico City, and pipelines could bring it there. But this would require taxing the rich.

Radical listening — a way of drawing passersby into exploring political issues together.

US Food and Drug Administration scientists published papers on the rate of side effects from Covid and Shingles vaccines, and found that serious side effects were very rare — one in a million.

Anti-vax agency officials withdrew the papers, claiming that the conclusions are invalid.

US citizens: call on Tell Congress: Reject the magats' budget that attacks public education.

See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.

US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.

To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.

Please spread the word.

US citizens: call on Reuters to stop enabling helping the deportation thugs.

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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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.

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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.

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