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Category Archives: Wonk
Media companies really shouldn’t let this strike drag out
The writers strike has temporarily saved me from staring zombie-like from my slouched position on the couch, and instead has me typing zombie-like from a differently-slouched position on my couch. After seeing a couple of mildly amusing clips from on-strike writers (from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report), I was curious enough to poke [...]
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Inflated house prices
I like reading Paul Kedrosky’s Infectuous Greed blog, even if I think he occasionally says some things that are completely moronic. One reason I do, though, is the occasonal food for thought, like this post on inflated house prices. Yale economist Bob Shiller says in the weekend issue of Barron’s that he’s still looking for [...]
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Seattle Parking Tax: Money Has To Come From Somewhere
Apparently, Mayor Nickels plans to propose a parking tax for downtown Seattle to fund transportation. Fantastic! That means that the people who commute to downtown from Issaquah or wherever pay some for Seattle transportation (as they should) whereas those of us who live and work in Seattle aren’t getting disproportionately taxed.
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28 years of “You Light Up My Life”
I’m a big supporter of moving back to a 28 year maximum term on copyrights. I’ve been thinking about how to describe that, and I think I’ve come up with one way of doing it. Rupert Holmes would still be able to earn a living off of his 1979 hit “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)”, [...]
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IRS file format for tax stats: .exe files
If you want to get IRS tax statistics, looks like you better have a computer that supports .exe files (Microsoft Windows executable). SOI Tax Stats – Filing Season Statistics / Taxpayer Usage Study There are so many things wrong with this, I’m not sure where to start…
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The New York Times: CBS News Makeover, by Four Kibitzers
Metafilter pointed out a really good article: CBS News Makeover, by Four Kibitzers. Lizz Winstead, co-creator of “The Daily Show”, pointed out a bunch of really cool things that CBS could do, but that they won’t do, such as media commentary and podcasting. However, I’m not sure that we need to wait for CBS to [...]
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Hearing set for splitting Washington into two states
Puget Sound Business Journal is reporting that there’s a hearing set for splitting Washington into two states. Even though it has a snowball’s chance in hell, I’ve always thought this would be a great way of highlighting just how much Western WA subsidizes Eastern WA.
Instant Runoff on KUOW (NPR Seattle)
(update: 9/20/2006 – This is an old post I made to the blog on electorama.com, which I’m shutting down) There was a great show about Instant Runoff on KUOW, the NPR affiliate in Seattle today. The guests were Steven Hill from the Center for Voting and Democracy as well as the Republican Party official who [...]
If Debian used Instant Runoff…
The last Debian Project Leader election was a very close one. Martin Michlmayr won a Condorcet-tallied election in a very close race between him, Bdale Garbee (the incumbent), and Branden Robinson. Doing analysis on these result yields some interesting observations. Among the most surprising is that Branden Robinson would have won had San Francisco’s rules [...]
Selectricity…yay, someone beat me to the punch