tax pollution • tax land • give people money don't tax the rich, pay the poor. jacyanthis.com www.cgdev.org/expert/rachel-glennerster economics.uchicago.edu/directory/Michael-Kremer
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Approval voting!
“President Trump’s 50 percent tariffs landed like a declaration of economic war on India, undercutting enormous investments made by American companies to hedge their dependency on China.” www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/b...
unions 🤮 just provide a social safety net. Ubi now.
awesome
We have the first ever cast vote records from an approval voting election! ✅✅☑️✅ The St. Louis data is conclusive: voters embraced the system's flexibility. 33% approved multiple candidates, debunking bullet voting myths. felixsargent.com/democracy/20...
Great analysis by @fsargent.bsky.social on the benefits of Approval Voting as seen in the most recent St. Louis election: felixsargent.com/democracy/20...
with political pressure.
newrepublic.com/article/1627...
against yimby ideas generally. she's totally got Boomer vibes
ironically, Naomi wolf is also against this.
public comment is a deranged idea.
so, political pressure, but only at specific intervals. reduce the power of any one administration. average it out over multiple administrations. seems reasonable.
it's almost as if we want taxes with negative or neutral dead weight loss.
certainly a hell of a lot more than if we picked randomly. although we should upgrade to score voting or approval voting.
well, political pressure ultimately just means accountability to be aligned with the public interest, so there has to be some kind of political pressure at the end of the day.
The hidden cost of blocking Ubi.
[BILL ALERT] SB 79, which broadly legalizes more homes near high quality transit stops, has passed the Assembly appropriations committee! The bill now goes to the Assembly floor, then back to the Senate for concurrence. Learn more: cayimby.org/legislation/...
there's no evidence of this that I've ever seen. it may be more appealing to voting reform activists because they tend to be idealistic and prioritize the feeling of expressing a ranked preference, whereas the vast majority of voters would prefer the simplicity of approval voting
it's extremely irrational to have more than two choices in the runoff. you can just call the first round the general if you like. there are no primaries.
then just educate them.
of course, it matters what voting method is used in the general because if there are more than two candidates, a bad voting method can get you a sub-optimal outcome. but no idea why you would want more than two in the general anyway. medium.com/election-sci...
you should do the top two and do a head-to-head. there's absolutely no reason to do ranked choice. Approval voting is superior to it in every way.
no, I did not prove your point, I countered it.
ideally they were not partial, they just looked objectively at the facts and the facts supported the conclusion without any need for bias.
www.electionbyjury.org/manifesto
I met Scott when he was running to be d10 supervisor in San Francisco in 2010. I think. he was standing on the street getting signatures to run. I signed but this was way before I knew anything about housing economics. so ironic. I thought I was a progressive at the time and signed to be nice.
what is there to debate. housing is an essential thing that we need for people to live for the love of God
Yes, it satisfies the favorite betrayal criterion which is amazing.
That's not a strategy. asitoughttobemagazine.com/2010/07/18/s...
well, it's not true that there's no strategic voting with approval voting, it's just that it still gets good results even if voters are strategic.
so we need to run our government with election by jury so rational thought goes into setting policy.
The owners of companies are not interested in giving away money. they want to be rich.
there's no evidence that I'm not familiar with any of that. it just doesn't support your position in any way.
you have to switch to score voting or at least approval voting if you want this to go away.
A system is designed for parties if the electability matters because parties are an indicator of electability, not to mention The advantages of team coordination. most voting methods incentivize this. www.rangevoting.org/NESD
that doesn't make any sense. if they weren't efficient, they would be fired and replaced with people who were more efficient.
that doesn't make sense. we want taxes with negative or neutral dead weight loss.
nah. they're quite efficient and operate at very small margins.
that makes no sense. paying in excess of the market rate for something is effectively charity, and why would you give charity to people who happen to work for you rather than the people who are the most in need like those in third world countries?
fuck yes
Motherfucking wind farms…
just do Ubi damn it
Claude Opus 4.1, to me, while building out a comprehensive policy understanding of SNAP simplified reporting: “The confusion in the documents shows how complex this system is - if we're getting tripped up just researching it, imagine how confusing it must be for actual SNAP recipients!“ EXACTLY
The MetaFilter Board election will be held soon using approval voting. This will be the second time I’ve voted in such an election, and the first time I did it (for the Drupal Association Board), it felt good not to split the vote between the two candidates I was equally supportive of […]
Everyone who was wrong about Trump — please say so openly to those who trust you and follow you. You have influence and thus bear responsibility.
mamdani sucks. x.com/cremieuxrecu...
my co-author there took his phd under John Horton Conway, who invented the game of life.
a bunch of disagreements. You're confused.
not quite. I've elaborated on this here with Warren Smith, a Princeton math PhD was arguably the world's top expert on voting theory. www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6
but there's not any evidence to support that skepticism..
there's zero evidence that it's unsuitable for any offices. clayshentrup.medium.com/the-proporti...
no, it wins for being incredibly accurate and resistant to strategy, and also being precinct summable so it helps escape duopoly. The simplicity is just icing on the cake.
I don't know what you mean by it doesn't have to. it objectively doesn't but that's a major flaw of that system. not to mention it being complicated and inaccurate. some analysis we wrote in November 2006. www.rangevoting.org/AusIRV
not remotely realistic.
some people in Oregon are about to file an initiative for election by jury. this would be utterly transformative and blow alternative voting methods out of the water. www.electionbyjury.org/manifesto
Note that the United States has won unrivaled virtue. our ability to do citizen ballot initiatives via signature gathering even at the city level. this is how we got two US cities to adopt approval voting for mere tens of thousands of dollars. this is promising.
if you're trying to break duopoly, score/approval voting are by far the best options, and arguably the only options. asitoughttobemagazine.com/2010/07/18/s... www.rangevoting.org/NESD
Approval voting is almost as good as the best, and dead simple and cheap and transparent. it's overall the best bang for the buck by a light year. by a parsec even.
Approval voting is just score voting on a binary 0 to 1 scale. The scale resolution doesn't make that big of a difference though.
Don't blame me, I helped two cities get approval voting.
ngl my median scenario for the us is that maga just becomes the new normal and the us descends into pure russia where the economy is broken, breaks culture, and there's no political solution anymore
wealth can be separated into investment and consumption. your utility function depends on your consumption, not how much investment you own.
Oregon property taxes are extremely low.
Note, we are making a highly capitalist argument. get rid of taxes on income and capital gains, and anything else that is the product of the labor of the person being taxed. replace rent control and minimum wage and any in-kind benefits of the social stage, internet with Ubi, etc. pure capitalism.
irrelevant. Land value taxes don't have dead weight loss, so you want to maximize them. You're having an emotional reaction because you don't understand the economics behind the issue.
to you, it doesn't because you don't know basic economic concepts.
www.noahpinion.blog/p/europes-cr...
🌮 🌮 🌮 www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddo...
On one hand, at least he's coming around on the other, fuck you
yeah if you can make a guy this deranged look electable, you are a marketing genius.
He's absolutely awful on policy but charismatic like our man Trump. so leave it to the low information voters to get him elected.
it is mathematically proven that if you use different axioms, it results in absurdities. if I had a nickel for every time I had to explain this to a novice like you, I would be a rich man. your hubris is amazing. www.rangevoting.org/UtilFoundns
state what you believe to be the correct social welfare function and I will easily show you how it results in absurdities. www.rangevoting.org/UtilFoundns
you have not shown any holes in my thinking. you have just shown that you don't understand the subject matter and you have plowed forward with immense novice confidence despite not being able to make a single coherent argument.
The subjectivity is in the preferences you have for the candidates or options. assessing how the voting method should aggregate those subjective preferences is 100% objective and mathematically proven. give me any alternative social welfare function and I can show that it leads to absurdity.
if you have different preferences than me, you can vote for different candidates or options than me. why is this so hard for you to grasp?
you keep saying things with this utter certainty despite demonstrably not having a basic grounding in social choice theory. your confidence is far in excess of your expertise. which is basically zero.
we can empirically observe people trying to maximize their expected utility. and we know that the system that maximizes net utility maximizes the expected utility for any given voter, at least to the extent they are behind a veil of ignorance. which is reasonably good approximation.
no, it is a claim about the nature of what preferences are that can be objectively assessed. we understand the biological underpinnings of preferences. genes trying to get themselves copied. we can use revealed preference experiments to see how people decide things under uncertainty. you are wrong.
so far you have not made a single even remotely coherent argument against approval voting. you thought it had some issue with "bias", and I've shown you data that that is absurdly wrong. then you just hand wave about meta preferences but can't specifically critique approval voting.
You're stuck in the classic fallacy of confusion between subjective and objective. your preferences are subjective but how to aggregate them can be objectively evaluated.
it doesn't matter what values you hold. you can like whatever candidates you like or whatever options you're voting on, however much you want to. but we can objectively evaluate a system in terms of how well it aggregates those preferences to select the result that makes the most people the happiest
The literal point of democracy is to maximize your expected utility. That's the point of decisions and that's why you evolved that decision-making machine between your ears. and election is just a decision made by more than one person.
but you said your issue was bias, and that's something we already account for in these measurements. so you were just wrong about that. among all voting methods, approval voting is extremely good in terms of having very low bias
like sure, you could pick a voting method because you like the name of it. it just makes you happy. and you can say that preferences are subjective. sure you can like a voting method for whatever reason you want to. you can also be crazy and unpragmatic.
yeah that's just mental illness. like these people you elect are going to determine whether you go to war and how much taxes you pay. and if you think the way your ballot looks or silly superficial aspect of the voting process is significant. compared to that, you are just insane.
to you prefer to have preferences that are fulfillable is just irrational. that is literally mental illness. The point of making decisions is to maximize the expected number of copies of your genes you make. That's literally why you evolved that gray decision-making machine between your ears.
if your preference is to see the guy win who other people would prefer, that would already be factored into your utility.
like you could have a system that has zero bias but adds randomness and thus gives you statistically much worse outcomes but without biasing toward the center or extremes and that would hurt you much more. if you prefer that system because it's not biased, you are an irrational fool.