While researching arguments for and against the National Popular Vote, I ran across the site Keep Our 50 States, which tries to argue for keeping the Electoral College, and, um, it doesn’t do a very good job of it. For instance, the “The Issue” page shows this Mike Lester cartoon: I’m not sure what this… Continue reading When Your Debate Opponents Argue Your Point
Law & Crime is reporting that the North Dakota Senate has passed SB 2271, which would block the release of presidential vote totals in the state until after the Electoral College votes. It’s ironic that Republicans, who were crying for election transparency in the 2020 election, are pushing this kind of anti-transparency bill. But it… Continue reading Republicans Voting Against Their Interests Again
Yesterday, Feb. 25 at 13:19, my Mac ran periodic monthly. I thought it odd that this would run on the 25th rather than the 1st of the month, and in the afternoon rather than late at night, so I dug a little deeper. It looks as though Apple now deprecates cron in favor of launchd… Continue reading What the Hell Is Up With MacOS Periodic Jobs?
A while back, I figured my site needed a bit of a facelift. So here it is. I’ve moved my posts from Epsilon Clue to here, and I plan on posting at ooblick.com rather than there. Obviously, any time you move from one site to another like this, there’s the risk that people won’t follow… Continue reading Grand Reopening
One of the nightmare scenarios sometimes brought up when arguing for the Electoral College and against the popular vote is, what happens in case of a really close election? There would have to be a nationwide recount. Think Florida 2000, times 50. For instance, take the 1960 election, where Kennedy beat Nixon by 0.17% of… Continue reading National Public Vote: Close Elections
I just spent some time banging my head against Ansible, and thought I’d share in case anyone else runs across it: I have a Firefox role that allows you to define a Firefox profile with various plugins, config settings, and the like. And I have a work-from-home (WFH) role that, among other things, sets up… Continue reading Ansible: Roles, Role Dependencies, and Variables
Sometimes you just need to grep recursively in a directory. If you’re using find $somedir -type f -exec grep $somestring {} \;, don’t: Use xargs to avoid creating a bazillion grep processes:find $somedir -type f -print | xargs grep $somestring But spaces in the output of find (i.e., spaces in filenames) will confuse xargs, so… Continue reading Recursive grepping
There’s an idea for a game that’s been rattling around my brain for a while, so I finally decided to learn enough Unity to birth it. To get an idea of what I have in mind, think Sid Meier’s Civilization, but for elections: you play a campaign manager, and your job is to get your… Continue reading Campaign Manager: Serializing Recursive Objects
Like the rest of the world, I’m working from home these days. One of the changes I’ve made has been to set up Emacs to work from home. I use Emacs extensively both at home and at work. So far, my method for keeping personal stuff and work stuff separate has been to, well, keep… Continue reading WFHing with Emacs: Work Mode and Command-Line Options
Here’s a rather breathless letter to the editor of the Brattleboro (VT) Reformer, promising dire consequences if we start electing presidents the same way we elect governors, senators, mayors, and school board members: The Los Angeles Times editorial (Feb. 17 in the Reformer) would like to disenfranchise more than half our nation by ending the… Continue reading Popular Vote: Majority Rule Is Disenfranchisement
