Notices by M. Grégoire (mpjgregoire@mastodon.club), page 38

@DialMforMara @cryptovexillologist
Someone who really didn't care about the status signals she's sending to others wouldn't have a laptop covered with political stickers.

Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture | Current Affairs
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contemporary-architecture

I agree with the substance of the article, though I'm not sure why the writers decided to put it into a left vs. right framing. Maybe it's easier to get leftists to say that modern architecture is mostly bad if you blame it on capitalism?

#architecture

@ink_slinger
Typically when a reformed electoral system is brought in briefly and then revoked, it was introduced by the parties of the status quo to block a rising challenger; and when the challenger gains power, they eliminate the intended obstruction. But I don't know the specifics in Alberta.

We should also remember that multiple-member constituencies were quite common in the past of Canada, as well as in the UK.

@ink_slinger Have a look at the comparison table of voting systems at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method#Comparison_table !

#VotingSystems
#ElectoralReform
#politics #Debian

@ink_slinger There are so many fun different voting systems. For instance, in approval voting, you get to put a checkmark against the name of everyone you think would be acceptable as a winner, then the person who gets the most votes is selected.

For me any system to be used to elect governments needs to be something that can be easily explained and conducted without any electronics.

15 years ago, I was in BC, explaining STV to an audience with an average age in the 60s. Not a success.

When it comes to popular elections, it is very important that the system be something well-understood and trusted by the public — so quadratic voting is *not* the right method to elect the representatives. But there are other applications where it would be useful, such as setting priorities among 41 equals.

Colorado Tried a New Way to Vote: Make People Pay—Quadratically | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/colorado-quadratic-voting-experiment/

#politics #voting

FWIW, I'm not completely opposed to #ElectoralReform in Canada. I favour more use of preferential ballots; they're particularly well-suited to voting for mayors.

Once (or if) voters become comfortable with #PreferentialVoting, then we could try it for the election of MLAs...

(Australia, which is a sister-country to Canada, has used preferential voting for a century, so we can have some idea of how it would work in practice.)

#canpol

#PEI election today and referendum today. I hope mixed member proportional representation maintains its losing streak in Canada.

OTOH, if we want to experiment with #ElectoralReform, a small province would be the best place to try it out.

#pepol #canpol

@sconlan How do you get past the Washington Post paywall?

@manu Oui, SVP.

@ckohtala Not currently an academic, but when I was working on my Master's, I organised myself with #Emacs #Orgmode, including todo lists, Gantt charts, notes from articles I've read and papers I was working on.