P.T. Barnum: prominent anti-racist, progressive Republican politician, pictured here in 1851.[Wikimedia] Carnival barkers have a certain "reputation" for truth and honesty. One famous carnival barker: the alleged source of the phrase "There's a sucker born every minute". Because of this, I've grown more curious about P.T. Barnum over the past four years. It seems many… Continue reading Trump and P.T. Barnum
Author: robla
Electoral theory wonk, activist, software developer, and engineering management nerd.
Trump and the f-word
UPDATE: 2020-09-03 - I'm trying to force myself to use the visual editing tools for WordPress to edit this blog post. Please bear with me.
We’re getting down to the final stretch. There are only eleven TEN more weekends before the November 3rd election day. There are many elections that matter, but Biden vs Trump is the one that many of my Facebook friends are posting about. And the “f-word” keeps coming up. (EDIT: 2020-08-30 at 5:30pm – I’ve been cleaning this post up quite a bit based on the Facebook discussion)
To my friends and family who are registered members of the Democratic-party….
Battle of the DMs
This is the "first IRC server", according to Wikipedia[1]. Back in my day, a "server" was a physical machine. The picture is from much later, but the machine is probably from 1987 or 1988. (robla updated this 2020-07-31 1:40am PDT... yes, robla really should go to bed) Who is going to win the battle of… Continue reading Battle of the DMs
Mastodon kinda kicks ass
It really does. If you don't know what it is, see my RobLaWiki description (at <https://robla.miraheze.org/wiki/Mastodon> ), or see the Wikipedia article (at <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software)>), or just see my user profile: <https://mastodon.social/@robla>. This is the logo. I got it from here: File:Mastodon_Logotype_(Simple).svg
Blogging is dead; long live journaling!
I have accounts on Quora, Twitter, Medium, reddit, Mastodon, myndmess, Electorama, Miraheze, GitHub, GitLab, and robla.net, among other. Blogging is so aughts. I'm going to cover just a few of the sites that I journal on here: Website(s): robla.net/RobLaWikiJournal: https://robla.mirahze.org/wiki/RobLa_journalMicroblog: https://mastodon.social/@robla (see also: https://twitter.com/robla)Website(s): Electorama/electowikiJournal: https://electowiki.org/wiki/User:RobLa/JournalMicroblog: https://twitter.com/electowikiWebsite(s): myndmess.orgJournal: https://myndmess.org/wiki/User:RobLa/JournalWebsite(s): Wikipedia (en)/Wikidata/WikimediaJournal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:RobLa/JournalWebsite(s): MediaWikiJournal: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:RobLa/Journal Those… Continue reading Blogging is dead; long live journaling!
Thinking about “flyover country”
Doc Searls from Santa Barbara, USA / File:Glacial_features_near_Beaver_Dam_Lake,_Wisconsin.jpg / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) UPDATE: 2020-04-24 - I posted most of what I was working on a few days ago over at Quora: https://www.quora.com/What-dont-most-liberals-realize/answer/Rob-Lanphier I still have some content for Daily Kos as well, but I'm still working out how to present it for the Daily Kos… Continue reading Thinking about “flyover country”
Why donate to a non-profit with a hard-to-pronounce name?
I'm joining the board of Miraheze! I explain why in my very long story about my relationship with electoral reform, MediaWiki, Wikipedia, Electorama and Electowiki. I also give you instructions for donating.
End of a chapter…
I didn't get a chance to publicly pontificate about Internet Archive while I was employed there. From March 2019 until very recently, I managed the Core Infrastructure team at Internet Archive. I suppose I did take one notable opportunity to blog about it. I wrote a blog post for blog.archive.org titled "Two Thin Strands of… Continue reading End of a chapter…
Replacing the jungle primary, December edition
photo via Wikimedia Commons by Rich Niewiroski Jr. A few weeks ago, I posted "Replacing the jungle primary", where I outlined a couple of proposals that seemed like plausible replacements for California's current "top-two" primary system. I assigned both proposals jargon-y names, but I only want to highlight one of them: "Majority Approval Filter (MAF)". … Continue reading Replacing the jungle primary, December edition
Replacing the jungle primary
California's jungle primary can be replaced with an approval voting-based primary. This is a description of how it would work.
