Well, page girls too, actually. I know almost all of my posts this month have been about brainstorming my story of the Great Christmas Blizzard, the next installment of a saga that begins with “Orphans of Opry Tower”, but hey, it’s my blog, I can … Continue readingPage Boys of the Perfect Storm
Earlier today Jeffrey Tucker asked on Twitter “In theory, the higher end your status and the more protected your position, the more you are willing to tell the truth. In practice, it seems to be the opposite”. As I pointed out in my replies, there’s … Continue readingAccident of Birth: A Feature, Not a Bug?
At LessWrong Virgil Kurkjian has a fascinating post, “Leto among the Machines”, analyzing Frank Herbert’s “Dune” chronicles, specifically its worldbuilding point of the Butlerian Jihad (the elimination of computers from human civilization), from a “rationalist” perspective, especially how the Butlerian Jihad makes perfect sense once … Continue readingNemesis Among the Machines
We should abolish elections and replace them with sortition, random selection from the citizenry, thus guaranteeing a representative body. I’ve posted about that before. But if we must have elections, what voting system should we use? Pure proportional representation, that’s what; specifically multi-winner ranked choice … Continue readingFor Proportional Representation
What if we abolished elections and replaced them with a system that was much more democratic? Sounds fantastic? It shouldn’t, because “democracy” as everyone understood it until a couple centuries ago had nothing to do with elections. Rule by the people meant just that: political … Continue readingAbolish Elections: For Sortition and Direct Democracy