Dispatches from the Eccentric Frontier

Hold Your Nose and Vote by Tuesday, November 4, 2025

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 02:44:54 GMT

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.

This is a special, off-year election, which tends to have low turnout, so your vote will carry more weight than usual.

( If your vote didn’t matter, they wouldn’t spend so much on influencing and suppressing it. )

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Hold Your Nose and Vote by Tuesday, November 5, 2024

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 03:53:31 GMT

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.

( If your vote didn’t matter, they wouldn’t spend so much on influencing and suppressing it. )

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

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Hold Your Nose and Vote by Tuesday, March 5, 2024

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 22:56:07 GMT

( If your vote didn’t matter, they wouldn’t spend so much on influencing and suppressing it. )

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

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Hold Your Nose and Vote by Tuesday, November 8, 2022

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 04:57:46 GMT

( If your vote didn’t matter, they wouldn’t spend so much on influencing and suppressing it. )

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

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Hold Your Nose and Vote by June 7, 2022

Sun, 22 May 2022 22:09:06 GMT

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.

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.

( If your vote didn’t matter, they wouldn’t spend so much on influencing and suppressing it )

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

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If You Like Your Health, Vote No in California’s Recall Election

Wed, 18 Aug 2021 02:06:03 GMT

The GOP have given up on being a competitive party in California and are now simply attempting to disrupt the state as much as possible. Due to our state having the most permissive recall law in the nation, their third attempt to get it on the ballot has finally succeeded and now they’re wasting $276m of our tax dollars in hopes of installing someone who is not competent to handle the state’s challenges and will very likely try to turn us into another Florida with regard to COVID-19. The San Francisco Chronicle isn’t even considering candidates for endorsement. The LA Times says “Hell, no!” Beyond the COVID response, consider what happens if Dianne Feinstein has to step down and gets replaced by an extremist like Kevin McCarthy or Darrell Issa. Even Faulconer, a rare Republican who acknowledges Biden’s victory, used to lobby for climate deniers even though he claims to have changed his spots. Even the California GOP won’t endorse a candidate because they have no solutions, only more problems to heap on our shoulders. The state has plenty of real problems, and we don’t need a bout of chaos engineering between now and January 2023. Please vote no.

Newsom is telling people to not even bother with the second question. Strategically, this makes no sense, but rhetorically, it does: any effort to enthuse people to vote for a particular candidate in the recall will also enthuse them to vote Yes on the recall.

So how to vote strategically to mitigate possible damage? The LA Times suggests Faulconer as the least-bad viable option. The Sacramento Bee produced a voter guide, but it’s paywalled. Fortunately, Ballotpedia is following this. I’ll be voting for Joel Ventresca, who is a progressive Democrat with actual public service experience, just to bring down the percentages for the chaos candidates.

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Escaped gaming meme: Orange Team Utopia

Sun, 13 Dec 2020 20:53:20 GMT

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.

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Hold Your Nose and Vote by Tuesday, November 3, 2020

Wed, 07 Oct 2020 04:27:01 GMT

It didn’t have to be this bad.

At the time of this writing, the current death toll of COVID-19 in the USA is 209,560. By the end of the year, it will likely double.

For comparison of scale, 2,977 people died in the 9/11 attacks.

Our nation is being hit harder than one 9/11 attack per week because the President shut down our proactive measures against pandemics, botched the response, and made mask-wearing a partisan issue, and his party has done nothing to mitigate this. If we had moved faster, made mask-wearing the norm, and rolled out test and trace nationwide, we could all be sending kids to school safely and dining indoors in restaurants by now. Compare deaths per 100,000 population; if we were doing as well as Germany (another large country with large land borders), over 160,000 more people would still be alive.

It is time for the Republican Party to go the way of the Whig Party that they replaced. This willful, colossal failure should be sufficient cause, though I could fill this post with more, starting with their efforts to undermine democracy. I have voted for Republican candidates in past years; I will now consider membership in the party to be disqualifying for any office, and will not link to their campaign pages.

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.

( If your vote didn’t matter, they wouldn’t spend so much on influencing and suppressing it )

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

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Hold Your Nose and Vote by Tuesday, March 3, 2020

Thu, 20 Feb 2020 23:52:41 GMT

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

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

County Committee

( If you’re a registered Democrat )

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.

( And the rest of the ballot )

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Hold Your Nose and Vote on Tuesday, November 6, 2018

Sun, 28 Oct 2018 05:21:31 GMT

What to do about climate change? Vote!

Sun, 28 Oct 2018 04:27:24 GMT

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!”

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In case anyone is migrating away from Google Plus...

Tue, 09 Oct 2018 01:10:12 GMT

...I’m the same Max Kaehn found there.

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Remembering Yeti

Thu, 12 Jul 2018 05:32:27 GMT

( A eulogy for a loving cat )

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Remembering Emma

Mon, 11 Jun 2018 04:37:44 GMT

( A eulogy for a charming cat )

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Hold Your Nose and Vote on Tuesday, June 5, 2018

Tue, 22 May 2018 02:15:10 GMT

( Top Two is a terrible primary system )

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Yeti’s summer haircut

Sat, 22 Apr 2017 05:01:50 GMT

Yeti loves to sit in the puddles in the tub, which causes his coat to get matted. And unlike Cleo, he can’t be bribed to sit still for extensive grooming.

So in mid-Spring, we take him to Canine Showcase for a trim:

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Escaped gaming meme: Dark Lore

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 17:12:26 GMT

( Captive sources of information )

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Escaped gaming meme: Dragons are not color-coded for your convenience

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 05:51:27 GMT

( Dragons are not color-coded for your convenience )

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Escaped gaming meme: Hybrids

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 06:07:05 GMT

The basic idea behind the Seas of Chaos campaign was to have an in-game excuse to rip off any fantasy setting (whether novel or comic book or video game) that we wanted. When I sat down to browse the D&D 3rd edition books for ideas, I noticed that they had really gone overboard on all the hybrid characters; there were rules not just for half-elves and half-orcs, but half-dragons, half-demons, you name it. And that gave me an idea for a plot theme...

( A background thread from a recent storyline )

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Escaped gaming meme: Post-Information-Age society

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 03:29:04 GMT

( Notes on a galactic post-Information Age society )

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Escaped gaming meme: Cheap-Ass Megastructures

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 01:52:34 GMT

( I had the idea this morning and wanted to see how the back-of-the-envelope calculations looked )

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Repair California’s town hall went well

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 20:55:14 GMT

When I initially heard about Repair California’s plans for a constitutional convention for California, I was skeptical: the backers were a business group, and our political process is sufficiently screwed up that a no-holds-barred convention with lots of special interests weighing in could screw things up even more than they already are. I was pleased by the town hall meeting today; the people there were talking sense and pointing out that California’s problems have been building for decades, and are not just the result of the recent downturn. To fix the problems in Sacramento, we need to do more than just repeal the 2/3 rule for passing a budget; we need to fix the system so we aren’t deadlocked between the “loony left” and “radical right” (as one speaker put it).

The plan is to keep the issues addressed by the convention limited (to avoid special interests getting a gravy train hardwired into the constitution), and to select delegates through a random process comparable to jury selection (with some different filters— not mandatory, and with more reasonable compensation) and provide them with access to experts, opportunities for feedback from their home communities, and plenty of time to deliberate with lots of visibility. They had Larry Stone (the Santa Clara County Assessor), Liz Kniss (the Santa Clara County Supervisor), and Richard S. Gordon (the San Mateo County Supervisor) speaking, as well as representatives from Courage Campaign and Common Cause, and the New America Foundation. (The latter group have a Reform California web site.)

I didn’t even have to bring up my favorite electoral reform causes; various speakers brought up clean elections, instant-runoff voting, and proportional representation. (I went to the mike to give people the URLs to the California Clean Money Campaign and Californians for Electoral Reform, since they weren’t in a high-tech setting where I could just tweet them to an overhead screen.

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New online presence

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 02:26:09 GMT

I’ve created a Twitter account, mostly to add one more data point to annoy Internet censors in Iran. I’ve hooked the tweet stream up to my Facebook account.

Thanks to the kindness of firecat, I now have a DreamWidth account. It’s currently just a placeholder in case of a migration from LiveJournal. (I’m crossposting from DreamWidth right now; mithriltabby is slothman.)

As to the new appellation “mithriltabby”, I’ve been using it for increased uniqueness, since it seems I’m not the only Slothman or Catslaugh out there. To stake my claim on the name, this time I nabbed the vanity domain, which I’m using as my new home page.

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