Favorites June 14 2021

Brent Bellamy @brent_bellamy

Let’s talk about slip lanes, those right turn lanes that prioritize vehicle speed over safety. As drivers enter slip lanes their eyes are most often looking down the street, searching for an opening in traffic not straight ahead where pedestrians and cyclists may be crossing 1/12

This is a great thread, long story short, these lanes are bad, and should be removed from residential and downtown areas. There are easy ways to do it!

Equal Vote Coalition @TheEqualVote

@mattyglesias @ClayShentrup @GRobLewis Our current system is "simple." What we want is "representative," "fair," "equitable," "safe to vote my conscience," ... things like that.

I had never heard of Score voting or STAR voting before, and they seem pretty great. There’s this "Impossibility theorem" for voting systems, which seems to imply it’s impossible to have a good system. But it turns out that its definition of ‘voting system’ precludes all the best systems! These other systems perform really well compared to simple plurality and even Ranked Choice.

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Finding the right provisions might be challenging, and passage might be an uphill battle, but Pelosi, Schumer and Biden are hugely dropping the ball by not even really trying to take action on this.

Grace Panetta @grace_panetta

New from me: Congress likely won't take action on the growing threats to election integrity, leaving election workers vulnerable to criminal prosecution and results open to partisan tampering (building on work/thoughts from @Nate_Cohn @rickhasen et al) https://t.co/zE8Id6Risl

I have been imagining that democrats are aware and are just slow at writing bills. 😬

mcmillen @mcmillen

"specific scene" is doing a lot of work here

The specific scene is "batman going down on catwoman", no joke. That's what DC says is out of bounds. It’s a rated R show, it’s not the substance. I suspect other characters would be allowed. The reasoning – "Heroes don’t do that" seems to imply Batman specifically can’t.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

Genuinely think this would be a good idea, not just in campaign offices but all kinds of advocacy groups. There’s more to life than just appealing to the median, but people should be acutely aware of when they are and aren’t trying to do that and avoid wishful thinking.

Simon Bazelon @simon_bazelon

If I was running for President I would require all of my staffers to make their lock screen say "the median voter is a 50 year old white person who did not go to college and watches 4 hours of television a day."

I really wish I had something like this median data for Mountain View voters.

Jeff B. tried to do his best, but he could not @EsotericCD

This is obviously karmic revenge for those two back-to-back Blue Jays World Series wins in 1992 and 1993.

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

The entire nation of Canada not having won a Stanley Cup since 1993 is one of the craziest streaks in sports history and I think you have to root for it to keep going with so many other of our most important sports curses (Cubs, Red Sox, 1 v 16 seed) having fallen by the wayside.

Canada won two world series in a row? I'm not going to make fun of their dry spell though, Sharks still have zero stanley cups.

Toronto, March 2019