Here are links to the resources I used to figure out how to fill out my ballot. I give my conclusions, and I invite you to come to your own, and I hope this effort saves you a headache. $ means an order of magnitude of money backing a candidate, starting at the thousands, so $$$$ means a candidate has single-digit millions of dollars in their campaign.

I’m not thrilled with some of the candidates, but I keep in mind that a vote is not a valentine. You aren’t confessing your love for the candidate. It’s a chess move to get closer to the world you want to live in. If you would like to have a better choice of candidates, I commend your attention to FairVote and Californians for Electoral Reform.

Comments are screened. I’m not in a mood to argue.

This is a primary election running under California’s jungle primary system, where the top two vote-getters go on to a runoff in November. If you want a more sensible system— such as one where you can rank all the candidates in one election— I commend your attention to FairVote and Californians for Electoral Reform.

Here are links to the resources I used to figure out how to fill out my ballot. I give my conclusions, and I invite you to come to your own, and I hope this effort saves you a headache. $ means an order of magnitude of money backing a candidate, starting at the thousands, so $$$$ means a candidate has single-digit millions of dollars in their campaign.

I’m not thrilled with some of the candidates, but I keep in mind that a vote is not a valentine. You aren’t confessing your love for the candidate. It’s a chess move to get closer to the world you want to live in.

I will not be linking to Republican candidates’ web sites. Being a member of the party that has turned against democracy— from voter suppression to sedition— should be disqualifying for any elected office, and the party needs to go the way of the Whigs. Any remaining Republicans with integrity should start putting together the infrastructure for a new party, because the current one does not look salvageable.

Comments are screened. I’m not in a mood to argue.

At long last, humanity has finally created a post-scarcity world where poverty, disease, and hardship are largely things you learn about in history class. This could be in the heart of Star Trek’s Federation, or another setting.

Your characters, however, don’t fully appreciate the peace and tranquility. They make trouble. And got caught at it. After some psychological profiling, you wind up in a very private presentation:

Utopia needs challenges to keep up its immune system. Orange Teams are secretly allowed to get away with pranks, heists, scams, and theft as long as they avoid actually endangering or harming people. Dangerous criminals go directly to behavioral rehabilitation, or are confined to the Chaos Enclaves where people go to opt out of Utopia. But merry pranksters and gentlefolk thieves have a niche in society making sure that the rest of the people don’t get too complacent.

And sometimes, Orange Teams discover real problems, and root them out before they become widespread.

Facing the choice between rehab, being surrounded by jerks in the Chaos Enclaves, and becoming a professional prank-and-heist crew, your team chose the latter option.

As usual, I’ve done my research for the upcoming election and written up my notes to share with the rest of the class. I’ve given my conclusions, and invite you to come to your own. Even if we disagree on every issue, I’m happy if this saves you a headache.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s 2020 Voter Guide. The Mercury News has a Q&A on this year’s voting.

Party-Nominated Offices

President of the United States

County Committee

Voter-Nominated Offices

Thanks to California’s “jungle primary” rules, the top two vote-getters in the primary will face off in the general election. If you would like a better system than that, I commend your attention to Californians for Electoral Reform.

The UN recently published a report that we have 12 years to avert drastic climate change. While individual action helps a bit, we’re going to need to address the problem as a civilization. And that means voting.

As a first step, that means voting for people who are willing to acknowledge the problem in the first place. If the media weren’t bending over backwards in pursuit of a false “balance” in response to accusations of left-wing bias from right-wing ideologues, the headlines would read “Republicans deny & ignore the greatest threat to humanity’s future”. The realistic view is that we’re going to need a mass international mobilization at a level last seen in World War II, and that begins with admitting that we have a problem.

Beyond that, we need to pick the candidates who have the best long-term thinking.

We know what unchecked growth looks like: the most profitable developments happen, jobs boom, housing prices and rents go up. Gridlock ensues because people have to commute long distances to their jobs, and lower-income people are gradually forced out of their homes.

We know what slow growth looks like: your neighborhood turns into a bedroom community for the places where the jobs are booming. Housing prices go up, and either rent goes up or rent control is enacted and eventually people get turfed out of their apartments when the building gets sold, and they either have to move a long way away or become homeless, because they can’t afford housing locally.

The solution is smart growth: growing the economy, housing, and infrastructure in a way that keeps our quality of life. I’ve lived in Sunnyvale for 20 years, and am hoping to do so for another 50, and this is what will be needed to keep it thriving through the coming changes.

At the state level, we should be building water infrastructure and modernizing our electrical grid to be resilient and better at working with distributed power generation. (It also needs to be hardened against the next time the Sun sneezes in Earth’s face, like it did in 1859.) In the long run, it may mean some big projects. If we don’t want to lose places like Alviso (elevation –13’), Foster City (elevation 7’), and Stockton (elevation 13’) to rising seas, it may mean anything from sea walls to a tidal gate or locks across the Golden Gate. If we want to be able to afford big projects, we’ll need a big economy.

At the local level, we should be building new housing on major thoroughfares— both market-rate, for the people with lucrative tech jobs, and affordable, for the people holding the 4.3 new jobs created for every tech job. It means creating better infrastructure for bicycling and public transit, such as physically separated bike lanes and dedicated mass transit lanes on those major thoroughfares, so the people who move into that new housing don’t contribute to automobile gridlock. Here in Silicon Valley, it means turning a lot of the one-story places along El Camino Real into multistory developments with shops on the ground floor, a floor or two of offices above that, and a few floors of residences above that. It means building a lot more pocket parks in residential neighborhoods to cool off during hot summers, increasing street tree cover, and using white asphalt every time we resurface our roads.

(Rezoning all the residential neighborhoods for high density doesn’t make sense. New housing needs to be near mass transit and local shops, so people can get by without cars.)

Smart growth is about a can-do attitude that is ready to engage with new challenges rather than push them away. It grows the economy, and that makes it possible to deal with the bigger challenges that are coming our way soon. Right now the challenge is growing jobs and housing; in the future, it will be to build water infrastructure (like desalination plants) when the Sierra Nevada can no longer hold onto its snowpack, and to build vertical farms when the Central Valley can no longer support agriculture, whether it’s caused by drought, by a superstorm like the one in 1861 that turned it into a lake, or by saltwater intrusion into the aquifers. (The Midwest is also imperiled.) When there are climate refugees from Arizona, Florida, and Louisiana, we’ll want to be among the places that can welcome them and help them land on their feet, not the ones building walls and saying “No room! No room!”

As usual, I’ve done my research for the upcoming election and written up my notes to share with the rest of the class. I’ve given my conclusions, and invite you to come to your own. Even if we disagree on every issue, I’m happy if this saves you a headache.

• President and Vice President of the United States

  Thanks to our electoral system, there are only two viable choices for President, protest votes are ineffectual, and often regretted. How many Nader voters are happy with their choice in 2000, after George W. Bush got us into a $3tn war in a country that posed no threat to us? If you want more than two choices, I commend your attention to FairVote, who support electoral reform that would give us more possibilities. If you want to make a stand, demand of your representatives that they commit to reform that will make more parties viable, so we can have more than two choices. And if you’re tired of the concept of “swing states” altogether, check out the National Popular Vote compact.

  No matter what you see in the polls, the election belongs to the people who show up to vote; in the UK, people got complacent and wound up with a vote for Brexit that is inflicting ongoing damage to their economy. Please be sure to vote.

  ( Just in case you haven’t already made up your mind... )

obsessivewoman suggested we try a beef tenderloin this year, so I reserved a couple of 7 pound roasts at Safeway and picked them up on the 23rd. We spent a while on the America’s Test Kitchen web site reviewing different recipes (which vary wildly) and eventually distilled it down to this:

The night before the party:

1. Remove the silverskin, but not the chain; recipes also suggest that one can simply segment the silverskin to avoid it shortening during cooking and curling the meat, much like cooking calamari.
2. Tie the roast with twine every 1½–2 inches, folding the tails over to achieve uniform thickness and trying for as cylindrical a profile as possible.
3. Set it on foil and cover it in kosher salt (about 1½ tbsp).
4. Close the foil and put it in the refrigerator overnight.

On the day of the party:

1. Two hours before cooking, remove a stick of unsalted butter from the refrigerator to soften.
2. 20 minutes before cooking, heat oven to 300°F.
3. Remove roast from refrigerator and blot dry with paper towels, removing any remaining salt.
4. Rub butter all over the roast (¼ stick should be enough) and then cover in low-salt Montreal steak seasoning. (Every recipe we saw for tenderloin managed to cover it in either butter or olive oil.)
5. Place the roast diagonally on a baking rack on a cookie sheet; it’s too long to fit in a prime rib roasting rack.
6. Insert meat thermometer and begin roasting.
7. At 105°F, remove the roast, flip it over, and replace it in the oven.
8. At 120°F, pour olive oil in a saucepan and begin heating on medium high.
9. At 125°F, remove the roast from the oven and immediately bisect it. Sear each half in the olive oil, 1 minute on each side.
10. Let the halves stand, tented in foil, for ¼ hour.
11. When carving, remove the chain first and slice that onto a separate platter in 1–1½” segments. It requires more attention when eating to get around the gristle, but it’s very flavorful.
12. Now that the chain is removed, slice the rest of the roast in ¼–½” medallions.

Tenderloin cooks fast compared to a prime rib; it’s ready to serve in a couple of hours. The result is very flavorful, and tender enough to cut easily with a butter knife.

Future avenues of investigation:

• A guest mentioned that there are waste-not-want-not recipes for silverskin. See if I can track one down.
• One recipe I saw used a rub of 4½ tsp of kosher salt, 1½ tsp of sugar, and ¼ tsp of baking soda to make the surface tacky (in that case to make an olive oil-peppercorn mixture stick to it); that might also get more butter to stick to the roast.