David > Recent Status Updates

Some of the recent portion detailed issues with the former administration's dealing with people seeking asylum in the US, which was pretty heart-breaking. And it was aggravating because of the "non-answers" provided to questions about the actual situation for people being held, trying to get enough money to call their loved ones, while the "official" policy said such calls were free.

I powered through the rest without more updates. I liked the conclusion - a couple more puzzles for him to solve, a tough personal choice to make with one (more-or-less) obvious answer, and then a little wrap-up so we get to see whether the process was successful.

Overall, a fun and satisfying read!

Lots happened since last update. They got a sample from planet Adrian's atmosphere that includes an astrophage predator, just what they need! But they've had several accidents that almost cost the mission, and the remaining astrophage in the ship got infiltrated by the predator, which wrecked the ship's power. But they're figuring a way to recover using the small ships--the beetles. Also flashbacks happened.

A few chapters later, Grace has Rocky as a roommate (in his own tubes within the ship, since the earth ship has better scientific instruments). They've sampled the astrophage on planet Adrian, with unexpected results, and haven't figured out how to save their worlds yet.

Also had several flashbacks to prep on earth, and it seems clear Grace was not intended to be the science person on the mission. No explanation yet

Rocky is there for the same reason - astrophage is destroying their world by killing their sun.

We get some backstory fill-in on radiation and how the ship could deal with radiation.

We're watching as very different life forms try to understand each other. It's not every story that includes Fourier transforms! He's using them to translate "Rocky's" language to something he can store in a spreadsheet for lookup purposes.

The little aside about his relief at not having to explain what sleep is (p. 205) was a good laugh!

Wow, close contact with this alien being. Now to figure out how to communicate! They've connected with some models of atomic elements, and with a clock. Grace needs a nap before they can move on to other, bigger ideas.

He's remembered the ship has centrifuge capability to mimic gravity. And he's looking at the object thrown over from the alien ship, figuring out what star system they're from, and now they want to meet.

Grace has had another ship (!) approach him as he's hovering motionless - first known human contact with alien intelligent life! He experiments to figure out there's really someone(?) in the ship. Then they throw something at him, slowly, that he spacewalks to catch. Now to figure out what it is...

Ryland (or should I refer to him as Grace?) Experimented with the astrophage and figured out how they reproduce, which got him whisked off to Stratt on a Chinese carrier. There he's finding out what else has been discovered about them, and that a spaceship is going to be made using them to make transport to the star Tau Ceti, roughly 12 light years away from earth.

(Switched to the library hard copy.) Finding more of the humor and the detail that made The Martian a great read for me. Sometimes it's a struggle to rationalize how much reasoning he can do while being unable to remember some basic facts from "before," but it's not much of a distraction.

Listened to this audiobook on our first trip to Fairmont in over a year (definitely makes the travel time easier). Enjoying the story of her youth, moving to Canada while longing for her old friends in Cal, learning French in Canada, returning eventually to Cal, pursuing a law degree, and getting involved as a prosecutor focused on getting results beyond jailing people.

Starting chapter 1, examining whether the founders really thought a pure democracy made sense or if the citizens were not really capable of the demands of such a government.

The intro is very much in line with my feelings about the state of the electoral college. It also promises the book will offer refutations to popular myths about the college, so I want to try to internalize as much of that as is reasonable (or possible!).

Off to a good start. Similar to the reasoning process in The Martian, but very different considering the scrambled memory our hero has to manage!

The last chapter on "citizen assemblies" is interesting, being something outside my experience. The concept seems good, with having a representative group of unelected citizens consider challenging problems, but I don't see how such a group would ever be allowed power by Rs who seem to want everything their way.

This chapter on leveling the slanted Senate, while academically interesting, seems awfully unlikely to be proposing anything with a snowball's chance of getting implemented. Once you say Congress needs to approve and realize that the changes would make it hard for Rs to have power, it seems impossible for any of it to get done. We can't even get the filibuster eliminated, what with Manchin defending it. Sigh.

On this page:
"[The Senate] serves as a drowning pit where the voices of more than half the American people go to die."
Making a good argument that the Senate is a barrier to good representative government. Already a senator from CA represents 70x as many people as one from WY, and it's going to get worse.

Proportional representation, or ProRep, does sound like a big potential improvement over winner-take-all voting that requires only a plurality! Good examples here of how gerrymandering can't really be fixed effectively when voters are self-sorting as they are: with Democrats packed into cities and Rs spread over the exurban and rural areas, Rs will get more reps than votes would indicate.

Discussing gerrymandering: "you can fix bizarrely shaped districts, or you can fix unrepresentative results. But with single-member districts, you can't fix both...."

Really just one presidential voting reform discussed here, namely the state compact to have electoral votes for a state cast based on the result of the national popular vote, but many benefits are described, starting with how candidates would want to pay attention to voters outside the "battleground states."

Strong praise for ranked choice voting (RCV), with examples to clarify how it works and survey results to illustrate how voters think it improves civility in campaigns.

Nice overview of barriers to fair voting in our current system: what can be done about the electoral college, 2 senators per state, winner-take-all electoral assignment, and unbalanced distribution of representatives? The next few chapters will try to explain.

The section on drowning out big money in campaigns is just one chapter, on using donation vouchers to allow voters of any financial level to contribute. The overview section is a helpful summary of the current system, and the voucher chapter explains how the system in Seattle works with examples.

Voting rights are stripped from people to different extents because of criminal convictions, depending on the state. One ideal would be to allow people to vote from jail, as ME, VT, and DC currently allow, but at least why not restore the right to vote when their time has been served? FL is one of the egregious cases, requiring all fines and fees to be paid, effectively barring many ex-cons from voting.

In Make Voting Convenient we mostly read about at-home voting. Having voted from home via mail for several elections, this makes sense to me - it's easy, it's convenient, it allows looking up info about issues or candidates, and it's secure because the ballot and signature are verified against registration before the ballot is counted. What's not to like?

Ch. 2, Protect Voter Registration Records, points out some of the legitimate concerns of election integrity, while also noting how rare those cases are and what alternate ways of keeping voting rolls clean exist already. Great discussion question from the book: under what circumstances can you imagine someone risking 5 years in prison to cast one extra fraudulent vote?

Their system was a better predictor of things happening in 2008, and led to them making good returns for clients in 09 and 10 as well, leading to much more investment.