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”
Author: robla
Electoral theory wonk, activist, software developer, and engineering management nerd.
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.
Voting Methods in The Perl Journal
Back in 1996, I wrote an article for The Perl Journal, which they published in the Volume 1, Issue 3 in Autumn 1996. There are several alternatives available for the article: A scan I made of my 1996 article "Perl, Politics, and Pairwise Voting: Perl as the Activist's Friend" - I used CamScanner to make a… Continue reading Voting Methods in The Perl Journal
Debating Oprah
I managed to get into some wordy discussions with MikeMC over on Medium. Here's how it played out from my perspective: Oprah Winfrey gives an excellent speech at the Golden Globes (transcript). This causes rampant speculation about Oprah for President 2020. A backlash ensues. The backlash includes a lot of crappy discussion on a giant… Continue reading Debating Oprah
Jimmy Carter, populism and Donald Trump
Jimmy and Rosilyn Carter, surprising the crowd by walking instead of riding in a limo (image from Carter Library via National Archives) In January 2016, before either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump had secured their nominations, I posted an article on Daily Kos titled “What Donald Trump and Jimmy Carter have in common”. Since Republicans… Continue reading Jimmy Carter, populism and Donald Trump
Western accent?
There’s a fantastic discussion of red state politics on the wellRED podcast interview of Sarah Smarsh by the three hosts of the show. At the 46:00 point in the podcast, the group discusses how they all deliberately chose not to lose their respective accents. Smarsh says as part of journalism school, she needed to learn… Continue reading Western accent?
2017 update
I've neglected this blog for a really long time, but it's not like I haven't been writing publicly. A few links to my post 2010 writing: medium: robla - a lot of my recent writing, which has skewed political. Sign of the times, I guess... DailyKos: robla - this has been where I've posted most… Continue reading 2017 update
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