Tootfinder

How the US democracy is designed to avoid representation
Right now in the US, a system which proclaims to give each citizen representation, my interests are not represented very well by most of my so-called representatives at any level of government. This is true for a majority of Americans across the political spectrum, and it happens by design. The "founding fathers" were explicit about wanting a system of government that would appear Democratic but which would keep power in the hands of rich white landowners, and they successfully designed exactly that. But how does disenfranchisement work in this system?
First, a two-party system locked in by first-post-the-post winner-takes-all elections immediately destroys representation for everyone who didn't vote for the winner, including those who didn't vote or weren't eligible to vote. Single-day non-holiday elections and prisoner disenfranchisement go a long way towards ensuring working-class people get no say, but much larger is the winner-takes all system. In fact, even people who vote for the winning candidate don't get effective representation if they're really just voting against the opponent as the greater of two evils. In a 51/49 election with 50% turnout, you've immediately ensured that ~75% of eligible voters don't get represented, and with lesser-of-two-evils voting, you create an even wider gap to wedge corporate interests into. Politicians need money to saturate their lesser-of-two-evils message far more than they need to convince any individual voter to support their policies. It's even okay if they get caught lying, cheating, or worse (cough Epstein cough) as long as the other side is also doing those things and you can freeze out new parties.
Second, by design the Senate ensures uneven representation, allowing control of the least-populous half of states to control or at least shut down the legislative process. A rough count suggests 284.6 million live in the 25 most-populous states, while only 54.8 million live in the rest. Currently, counting states with divided representation as two half-states with half as much population, 157.8 million people are represented by 53 Republican sensors, while 180.5 million people get only 45 seats of Democratic representation. This isn't an anti-Democrat bias, it's a bias towards less-populous states, whose residents get more than their share it political power.
I haven't even talked about gerrymandering yet, or family/faith-based "party loyalty," etc. Overall, the effect is that the number of people whose elected representatives meaningfully represent their interests on any given issue is vanishingly small (like, 10% of people tops), unless you happen to be rich enough to purchase lobbying power or direct access.
If we look at polls, we can see how lack of representation lets congress & the president enact many policies that go against what a majority of the population wants. Things like abortion restrictions, the current ICE raids, and Medicare cuts are deeply unpopular, but they benefit the political class and those who can buy access. These are possible because the system ensures at every step of the way that ordinary people do NOT get the one thing the system promises them: representation in the halls of power.
Okay, but is this a feature of all democracies, inherent in the nature of a majority-decides system? Not exactly...
1/2
#uspol #democracy

And when I'm talking about understanding the drives to violence, I did write about something similar recently.
https://write.as/hexmhell/algorithmic-violence
The drives behind this and the shooting last week are pretty radically different, but there's some overlap. People like Kirk are part a huge political machine slowly crushing people all over the world. There's a hopeless rage that would naturally drive even the most calm person to the edge of violence. You can't look at the world honestly and be OK. We want to do something. We want to react. But everything we do is silenced or must rmain silent. So it's easy to understand why someone might choose violence. Very different situation, but everyone is subject to the same national and international influences.
I don't promote violence, not because I disagree with it but because I think it's expensive. It takes time to plan, especially for those trying to get away. Guns are not cheap, nor are bullets, nor is the range time you need to get somewhat good under pressure. It's not cheap for the person doing it, and it's not cheap for the community that has to clean up. The community will face police repression (which, if we're honest, was gonna come anyway). The community will have to post bail, will lose a person for a while, will need to support the family, will go to hearings, will write reports, will do interviews.
Sun Tzu said that deploying one soldier to the front takes 7 in the field. Logistics are a huge invisible cost. Some of that time and energy could be reused. It's never bad to be armed and able to defend if needed. But a lot of that energy and time would be better spent planning a community pantry, a tool library, organizing a union, etc. We are living in a disaster, and we need to invest in thriving through the next crumble.
Kirk is replacable. They're almost all replacable, because they don't really care about human life. We do, so none of us are. It's not really a worth while trade, IMHO.

According to the following article "The D.C.-based think tank estimates the tariffs will bring in an estimated $1.3 trillion of net new revenue through the end of Trump’s current term "
OK let's run some numbers... And remember, the R party wants to cut households in with a one time $500 check. Remember that number $500.
US population is very roughly 300,000,000, about 3x10**8
$1.3 trillion is 1.3x10**12
So if the R's want to repay us for the tarif…

Trump is bringing in so much revenue from tariffs that it’s seriously reducing the $37 trillion national debt
It's the equivalent of a new payroll tax or a 17% cut in the size of the military, according to a top think tank.

So #Zope released new versions of their packages, with pkg-resources style namespace removal.
Totally normal way to do the bumps:
1. At first, keep the existing testing hack (writing `__init__.py`).
2. Notice that the next package fails because it expects test paths relative to `zope` subdirectory. Skip it for now.
3. While doing the next package, realize you could remove that hack and simply run tests within the `zope` subdirectory! Go back and update all the previous packages, including the one that failed before.
4. Back to bumping. Notice that in the very next package you've had an even better solution: instead of `cd`, you just called `python -m unittest -s …`. Go back and update all the previous packages.
5. Back to bumping. The very next package turns out to actually expects test paths relative to the top-level site-packages directory. Well, you can use a hybrid of the `__init__.py` hack with `python -m unittest -s …`.
#Gentoo #Python

This evening I have been listening to one of @… 's podcasts and thinking about my failure in trying to lead the village's planning working group, and about the cognitive dissonance underlying my Tricycle project. I suspect this essay will be a grim read; it's not well formed in my mind as I sit down to write.

I liked the premise of this The Dig podcast, that it was going to tell me why Chicago's left-wing mayor is seemingly so unpopular, but it's very in the weeds and didn't provide much of an overview of the issues. Feels like it's only for people who are already Chicago politics junkies
https://

Republican Speaker Mike Johnson thinks the “No Kings” rally planned for next week is a “Hate America” rally meant to extend the government shutdown
—something someone who has never been to a “No Kings” event would say. 
The “No Kings” rally is a nationwide action with a very simple goal:
oppose the blatantly authoritarian tilt of the Trump administration.
The protests are supported by groups like the Human Rights Campaign,
the American Civil Liberties Union,

Mike Johnson Blames Shutdown on “No Kings” Protest in Absurd Rant
The House speaker is blaming the Republican-led government shutdown on Americans protesting Donald Trump. Make that make sense.

Appreciate the nod that spatial data viz is hard, @…!
The motivation part about expensive GIS tools is a little off though 💸 :qgis:
https://m…

New on blog: "How we incidentally uncovered a 7-year old bug in gentoo-ci"
"""
“Gentoo CI” is the service providing periodic linting for the Gentoo repository. It is a part of the Repository mirror and CI project that I’ve started in 2015. Of course, it all started as a temporary third-party solution, but it persisted, was integrated into Gentoo Infrastructure and grew organically into quite a monstrosity.
It’s imperfect in many ways. In particular, it has only some degree of error recovery and when things go wrong beyond that, it requires a manual fix. Often the “fix” is to stop mirroring a problematic repository. Over time, I’ve started having serious doubts about the project, and proposed sunsetting most of it.
Lately, things have been getting worse. What started as a minor change in behavior of Git triggered a whole cascade of failures, leading to me finally announcing the deadline for sunsetting the mirroring of third-party repositories, and starting ripping non-critical bits out of it. Interesting enough, this whole process led me to finally discover the root cause of most of these failures — a bug that has existed since the very early version of the code, but happened to be hidden by the hacky error recovery code. Here’s the story of it.
"""
#Gentoo