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E_V
September 4, 2021
I need to link to this
A source of information that's loomed large in my one from many places,
political consciousness for many a year now is so I'm going with the
three character name.
electoral-vote.com
I really wanted to call it
The site electoral-vote.com hit the net at a "E_V_Z_V_IN_ONE_EZ"
time when doing poll aggregation was still a
new idea, they were one of a few
commentators that was trying to clue poeple
in about the US electoral vote system:
presendential elections use a popular vote
at the state level, but the results are then In its early years I thought
(roughly speaking) weighted by the electoral it was really impressive site.
votes for each state. I was saying things like
"This one computer geek hanging
The main feature of the site was an out in Europe is doing a better
electoral vote map showing the way you job of covering US politics than
would expect an upcoming election to break, the entire American news media."
as predicted by the current average of the
publically available polls for each state.
Some of the more interesting material,
I thought, was breakdowns and analysis
of local races, which remain underreported
and under-appreciated. To this day
voting turnout dwindles except when there's
a well-publicized big ticket election, like
the national presidency-- everyone wants to
vote in the superbowl, no one wants to bother But in a local race, the
with trivia like local races. odds are better your vote
might be a critically
deciding factor, and the
The site was originally run by one guy, outcome of the race has a
"V" whose straight world identity is more direct effect on your
Andrew Tannebaum. As time went on-- and life...
it acquired many imitators-- it began
focusing less-and-less on data, and more And the Republicans in recent
on verbal explication of the political decades have been successfully
scene-- at it's worst, it became an playing a long game where they
aggregator of politico opinion pieces. leverage success in local
Eventually, "V" brought in "Z", a races to long term success in
professor of history to round out the the national ones-- sometimes
site, and some of it's best features by rigging the rules in their
have been things like a historical favor...
review of US political scandals...
(Z is Christopher Bates, using
Zenger as a handle.)
That V is Andrew Tannenbaum has never been a
secret, but it's also never been heavily
featured there. Tannenbaum was previously
best known as the author of the "Minix"
operating system, and the author of many
books on subjects like that.
There was an odd heated dispute between
Tannebaum and Linus Torvalds-- Tannenbaum
was critical of the "monolithic" design of
Linux, which put Torvalds on the Later editions of Tannenbaum's
defensive... book on operating systems bore a
pull quote from Torvalds: "This
I've got no strong opinion on book changed my life." Their
the technical issue there, but argument did not seem to lead to
I note that the open source any lasting acrimony.
operating system that was
*not* monolithic (Stallman's TANNENBAUM_MICROK
"Hurd") never got far enough
for serious use-- Stallman's
comment was that the design
was "Very hard to debug", a
failing I've seen in many
other otherwise superficially
attractive software designs.
Minix was essentially an academic
project, a minimal operating system
intended for students to learn from https://itsfoss.com/fact-intel-minix-case/
though in recent year it's been abused as
a component built-in to many (most?)
Intel systems, whatever the nominal This intel "management engine"
operating system is they're using-- many crap is apparently a way to
people find that a rather bad idea, implement DRM in ways hard to
including Tannenbaum, but he remarked in avoid.
an amused tone that Minix was now more
widely used than Linux. INTEL_ME_NOT_FOR_ME
There's quite a lot to like about the electoral-vote
commentary, but for me they're also unfortunately
one of the leading examples of the "moderate jihad", Those silly lefties just
the fanatic moderates dedicated to the true faith of don't understand the
centricism. compromises the democrats
need to make in order to
MODERATE_JIHAD successfully continue to
not do very much.
The EVistas often gleefully play along with
the mainstream press when it involves sniping
at the True Enemy, like Bernie Sanders:
BERNIE_JIVE
BERNIE_HAS_NO_BLACK_PROBLEM A minor Warren-Sanders spat was played up
hard, (with electoral-vote fiddling along):
ELECTION_FOLLIES
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