PersonalIt seems these days what I really want from TV shows is tense, dramatic, and dark. Lately, I've been watching Amazon's adaptation of
The Boys, the premise of which is basically "what if Superman was a sociopath?" (After all, super-powers corrupt super-ly. As does the desire for revenge.)
For video games, it's been the opposite, partly because I want stuff Erica will enjoy watching. After finishing
Luigi's Mansion 3 (fun, except the difficulty curve goes a bit vertical at the end, making that bit more frustrating than relaxing), I played
A Short Hike (the
other, significantly more relaxing, game about coping with anxiety by climbing a mountain). And then I started on
What the Golf? an absurdist golf puzzle game (more lateral thinking than high-precision timing challenges so far). And Julie got
Super Mario 3D All-Stars, so started another run through
Mario 64 (does all right on the big screen so far, though feels slipperier / camera controls seem more frustrating than I remember, they could have done a bit more to smooth that out).
On a somewhat related note, I took Eris on a walk to the newly-redone Prospect Hill Park this weekend. Was really nice.
Politics: NationalOh, boy, 2020 never stops. I've said a few times (though maybe not in writing), going to really sting when they replace RBG with Amy Barrett. Was hoping we could make it through a few more months, though. Of course, any Republican statements about not confirming justices during an election year were transparent lies (I did
call that one), which is a little galling (but
that's the point). I actually have a hard time saying that Trump should hold off on nominating a justice or that the Senate should hold off on considering that nominee. I mean, they should do a lot of things: Certainly it's
possible for a politician to come to believe that they're doing a terrible job and the voters don't support them. But merely refraining from making certain appointments, as opposed to e.g. resigning, seems like an insufficient response. Still, who should expect that? This is a president and a Senate majority that
already didn't have the support of the majority of the country, and they were elected until the start of their next term, not the start of their next election.
Instead, we should take about constitutional hardball: escalation, deescalation, and strategy. A Senate majority
can reject all judicial nominees or even refuse to consider them. (Whether the President could do more in face of a refusal to consider nominees is a question left open by President Obama, though it's probably nothing.) A Senate majority plus the President
can confirm any judicial nominee. Legislation
can be passed with a bare majority in both houses of Congress. A majority in both houses of Congress plus the President
can add additional justices to federal courts, including the Supreme Court. The same (or two-thirds of both houses without the President)
can prevent existing justices from being replaced by decreasing the size of the court. Removing justices immediately
can be done by two-thirds of the Senate in addition to a House majority. A bare majority of both houses of Congress plus the government of a territory can add a new state to the Union, with two new Senators and at least one Representative. (This is at least somewhat of a ratchet, removal of states is a trickier matter.)
In hardball politics, the potential for escalation
can motivate preemptive restraint, if escalation is both feasible and avoidable. The question is whether Democrats can make a credible claim now that they are both capable of escalation and capable of restraint. (In the past they've seemed capable of
nothing but restraint, but Republicans will somehow find a way to doubt both. Especially since if you're switching from approximate tit-for-tat to maximum hardball, it doesn't make sense to claim that you're giving up on restraint in advance.)
The election doesn't really change things for
this nomination, there's still a lame duck session. So it's annoying to have this distract from Trump's track-record, especially on responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. But also in general: The US's allies don't think they can count on our word anymore, the President is someone who doesn't take the job at all seriously, the deficit spending is incredible, the Republicans supposed plan to replace the ACA is a mirage (and even the "repeal" part of their plan was such a disaster that it couldn't pass with a bare majority), their tax cut was so overtly skewed towards the most already-wealthy they couldn't even make
that popular. (And the idea that would pay for itself with increased growth was completely ridiculous, even without unexpected global emergencies. It's not that government spending can't boost growth or that
tax cuts are different from spending in this respect, it's that Republicans target that towards things with the lowest economic multiplier.) The only way this
should be relevant to the election is that a new justice could rule on any election disputes, if that happens first. In practice, the media will be totally distracted by the idea that
Politics: MassachusettsMassachusetts has two interesting ballot measures up for a vote this year. I think MA residents should vote yes on 1 and 2.
Question 1 is a "right to repair" measure that requires manufacturers to provide car owners access and a way to delegate that access for on-board diagnostics systems, excluding data that is not relevant to car diagnostics. Car manufactures have funded a scare campaign to convince people that this is not possible without giving absolutely everyone unrestricted remote access to data like GPS history and call logs. If this political strategy works, you can expect every would-be-monopolist car manufacturer will intentionally rig their diagnostics system with data bombs. "Oh noes, it's really too bad it's impossible for a
third-party mechanic to repair your transmission without emailing all your location history to your evil exes, there was no other way to design this, pay up." People should have strong property rights in their machines and their data, and the substantive right to repair things they own.
Question 2 introduces ranked choice voting for most state and federal elections in MA (excluding President for some reason). The opposing statement is just so laughably weak, it mentions Jerry Brown (former Governor of California) complaining about a mayoral election where "the winner won with voters' seventh and eight place ratings". But under a first-past-the-post system, that implies that the winner would have been selected based on no stated preference of a majority of voters, and it's not necessarily correct to assume that relative preferences further down the list are less significant. The opposition also argues that in ranked choice voting, voters risk voting for eliminated candidates and therefore having those votes ignored, leading to situations where "winners win a false 'majority' of the remaining ballots, not a true majority of all the voters voting in the election". But concern about winners winning a "false majority" seems a bit misplaced when defending a system where winners don't need to win
any sort of majority. Sure, you can have a subsequent choice skipped over in ranked-choice voting, but in first-past-the-post you can have your first choice skipped over, with no opportunity to have any other relative preference affect the election at all. Ranked choice voting isn't perfect, it is a bit more complicated. But it's only more complicated in scenarios where no candidate has majority first-choice support. And it avoids the confusion about whether a wider set of candidates could have a chance, absent concerns about "throwing your vote away". (This isn't just a theoretical concern, either. MA just had
a House primary where the winning candidate had 22.4% of the vote, and all of the candidates in that race favored the adoption of ranked-choice voting.)
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