As someone currently dipping their toes into this stuff, the code for that visualization is pretty neat. That scroll experience is kind of terrible though, IMO.
Well, that thing in Florida is the most ridiculous gerrymander I've seen since the original.
It's actually my parents' district.
Which of course gives us very little idea as to where your parents live.
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NMM2 Holly Woodlawn
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I think that the social science on who will vote for who is getting so good that there needs to be some sort of regulation or law on gerrymandering in order for democracy to survive.
There's also a problem that all the democrats live near each other in cities, so even plausible looking districts will pack them together.
Here's an editorial from The Nation a year ago: http://www.thenation.com/article/republicans-only-got-52-percent-vote-house-races/
5 has it. If you draw districts that represent coherent geographic areas, it would be even worse, unless there were 5 times as many districts. Pennsylvania is pretty coherent in that you have a Pittsburgh district that is 90% Democrats, four Philadelphia districts that are 90% Democrats, and one Allentown/Scranton district that is 70% Democrats, and every other district is 55% Republicans.
The odd thing is that since most Republicans represent a sizable number of Democrats, and most Democrats represent nothing but Democrats, you might expect the Democrats to be more extreme than the Republicans. I blame money.
Having coherent congressional districts could work, but only if there were a lot more congressional districts.
The UK house of Commons has 650 seats, for about 1/5 times the population of the US. So small cities like Oldham can also be left-wing strongholds, whereas the US equivalent of Oldham (Syracuse, NY) gets this guy.
What's the U.K. equivalent of Buffalo?
The size of the US Congress is limited by the floor-space available in the US Capital. Which is stupid. There is no reason every representative needs a desk; make it standing room only.
Is there any reason beyond corruption and self preservation why there have to be a given number of seats in the House of Representatives?
"By enlarging too much the number of electors, you render the representative too little acquainted with all their local circumstances and lesser interests; as by reducing it too much, you render him unduly attached to these and too little fit to comprehend and pursue great and national objects," quoth Madison at a time when the idea that the electorate might ever exceed ten million, let alone a hundred, would have seemed absurd.
11.1: No, they could change it by statute. Although color me extremely skeptical that enlarging the House of Representatives would make Congress more functional.
A couple of redistricting cases at the US Supreme Court this morning, one of them potentially huge.
I still think sortition is better than voting, but the extreme city/suburb sorting we're seeing is a good argument for mixed-member proportional representation, a system where geographic constituencies exist, but are balanced by a party-list system that results in overall proportionality. Hard to do without a higher ratio of reps/population, though--Germany has 610 in their lower house vs only 80m people.
And the UK has 650 for 64m people. But those sort of constituencies would require about 3000 Representatives in the US, which wouldn't as potchkeh says, likely make the House more functional. Multi-member STV might make it more representative though.
Of course we also have states. Those nearly always have fewer people per representatives than the House of Commons.
New Hampshire has the state legislature with the most representatives. The lower house alone has 400 seats, which is probably close to the total number of people who live in New Hampshire.
Although color me extremely skeptical that enlarging the House of Representatives would make Congress more functional.
And the PA Assembly, which is the largest in the land (for a state that's #6 in population) is a wretched mess, which is in your favor. OTOH, it's hard to imagine the House working less effectively.
Would this accomplish anything? Set the population:Representative ratio such that no Rep has more constituents than a Senator (with the Senator defined, for these purposes, as representing half his state).
So right now, Wyoming has 2 Senators and 1 Rep for ~580k people. Set the floor, then, at 290k/Rep nationwide, which gives you, Great Googley Moogley, some 1090 Reps. Which would take California from 55 to 132, or from 12.6% to 12.1%, but Wyoming (and 5 other states) from 0.23% to 0.18%.
But of course the proportional issue is a problem in the Senate, not the House. The real question is whether it would ameliorate the issue in 5.2. Looking at NYC, there are currently 9 districts wholly in the city, plus one more evenly split; all of those but Staten Island is Dem. Under my system, that would jump to 29 districts, a jump of almost 3X. That's certainly suggestive that more Reps = better urban representation. Certainly, in PA, it would be all but impossible to create as lopsided a delegation as there is now, and an honest redistricting would get you much closer to the state's actual partisan balance. It would, for instance, be simple to have 3 districts meeting in Pittsburgh, all of which would be majority Dem (but maybe +5 each, instead of +16 which is the current district).
BTW, Look at the map of PA-7, and look at how they reshaped a +13 Obama '08 district into a +2 Romney '12. Specifically, they took out all the black areas to put them into Chaka Fattah's already-black district.
17.last: I love that you have to explain that the district that's elected someone named Chaka Fattah is not lilywhite.
And partisanship aside, here's a big problem with how urban districts are typically drawn: you get all-urban districts, or at most urban/first ring suburban districts, surrounded by all-suburban distracts, which results in the often-poisonous relationship between city and suburbs replicated in Washington. If you drew three 290k districts radiating out from Pittsburgh's Point*, each would be roughly evenly split between city and suburb, including both inner and outer ring suburbs (although probably not exurbs, as long as you stay compact). And now you have reps whose constituents are both welfare queens and teabaggers, and while only one set would constitute her electorate, she'd still be performing constituent services for both, and would be much less likely to have the Rep to City: Drop Dead attitude that, around here at least (famously in Milwaukee too), you tend to get from suburban Representatives.
*in truth, you'd probably want to center on Oakland, where the universities are, but it's awfully tempting to use the rivers
18: I was just thinking of our foreign commenters.
Top clarify on "largest", PA's Assembly is the largest full time leg in the land. NH consists of part timers, no doubt living free in their spare time.
19: I can't see that being good for urban representation. I'd rather have metro areas become multi-member districts.
I'd rather have metro areas become multi-member districts.
With proportional representation or what? Otherwise you'd get imbalance, depending where you draw the lines. e.g., Pittsburgh MSA is (probably) majority Rep, but Allegheny County is majority Dem.
23: Yeah, some kind of proportional representation. I'm partial to STV but am admittedly not a voting-system wonk.
24: I don't see how you get there without amending the Constitution, which is a nonstarter. Changing the number of seats is, per 12.1, statutory. So it's at least worth thinking about.
We definitely need more Reps. At the very least we could adopt the Wyoming rule, which would bring it up to 550 or so. And it's not far from the cube root prediction, which would give almost 700 for the US, which closely matches the 750 or so in the European Parliament.
Also, make PR a state, add DC to Maryland, and split CA and TX.
Everybody in the suburbs is either bitter or on drugs.
What are the structural barriers to expanding the House? Would it dilute representation for small states, so it would be held up in the Senate?
Also, make PR a state, add DC to Maryland, and split CA and TX.
Also, eliminate Delaware and one of the Dakotas. But mostly Delaware.
There's a ballot initiative here (hobbyist-type and not destined for the ballot, I think) called Neighborhood Legislature - the idea is that you divide each state legislative district into 100 tiny districts of 5,000 voters that each elects a neighborhood legislator, then each group of 100 gets together and elects the regular Legislature. So the idea is to make everything personal and not needing money to operate - a bit like sortition, really. Of course the New Hampshire House of Representatives is known for having a similarly low population:representative ratio, and for being extremely silly.
25. All the Constitution seems to say about elections to the House is :"The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature." That says nothing about the method by which that choice should be expressed, not as far as I can see, does any amendment. I can see that the wording would rule out whole or partial List Vote for the country as a whole, but why couldn't you move to STV by statute?
the New Hampshire House of Representatives is known for having a similarly low population:representative ratio, and for being extremely silly.
But, possibly, representatively silly.
Here's an interesting table of population/representation ratios.
Montana's Rep has just under a million constituents; Rhode Island's each have 528k (numbers from 2010, so a bit low on average).
28: I'm not sure there are any, other than the general sclerosis of our system. If you look at the table linked in 35, you'll see that small states are both over- and underrepresented, since they end up being edge cases (most starkly, RI has just 60k more people than Wyoming, but 2X the seats in Congress). Oregon is 5th most underrepresented, SC and MN 7th and 8th most overrepresented. Which is to say, it's not just tiny states that are the outliers, and they lie out there in both directions.
Although if we can replace him with a her, Congress will be measurably improved.
I always assumed that the reluctance was the House itself. Why would you vote to dilute your own personal power?
31 is actually better than I thought. Also, if it would make things more constitutionally cromulent I'd be okay with states themselves being STV districts, although admittedly that'd only work for smaller states.
29: To further the goals of irredentist Greater Pennsylvania, I strongly support repatriation of the Lower Counties.
Maybe, if you had an early flirtation with a Fascist ideology, you might try to avoid seeking personal power and instead nobly dedicate your life to running a school so you can leave the fate of your society riding on the abilities of children instead of yourself?
To further the goals of irredentist Greater Pennsylvania, I strongly support repatriation of the Lower Counties.
Fuck off. Those belong to Maryland.
And it's more than a million now.
I was going to say something stupid about Cresap's War, but that Wikipedia page is pretty hilarious. It lists the casualties on both sides as "heavy" and lists a number of colonial leaders as KIA, including governors, since they died at some point in the 1730s-1760s. I should improve it, but I like these falsehoods more.
I stand by the map on the wiki page linked in 46. Philadelphia stands on what is rightfully Maryland soil. That Mason-Dixon line is a scam.
This is just brilliant:
Cresap continued his raids, destroying barns and livestock, until Sheriff Samuel Smith raised a posse of 24 armed "non-Quakers" to arrest him on November 25, 1736. Unable to get him to surrender, they set his cabin on fire, and when he made a run for the river, they were upon him before he could launch a boat. He shoved one of his captors overboard, and cried, "Cresap's getting away", and the other deputies pummeled their peer with oars until the ruse was discovered.
And he never had the advantage of having seen a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
Wait. We're not invading Holland?
I prefer to think of it as "unusually determined tourism".
And it would have worked, too, if not for his unmistakeable Marylander accent, the foulest ever to pass human lips.
Marylanders don't have an accent. Everyone else has an accent.
If the goal is equitable representation in the federal government and a transparent government where voter preferences translate cleanly and reliably into their chosen representatives and/or the legislative outcomes they vote for, fiddling around with extra House representatives or electing them at large is silly. Let's have proportional representation and at-large districts. If the goal is success of the Democratic Party, we could gerrymander districts the way Republicans have if we just controlled state governments, and demographic shifts will help us in several states over the next few years.
On the other hand, if we want good policy outcomes, we'll need a benevolent dictatorship.
|| The comments at the Crooked Timber Picketty seminar are very Crooked Timbery. |>
55 -- So far, and since I wrote one this is in keeping with my own general megalomania, but still, I honestly feel that the discussion here, including the front-page summaries, were about 800x better than what they have going on over there.
Both of the comments so far are basically "nice book, now let me tell you how it relates to some unrelated concerns of mine, which by the way I'm not even going to explicitly argue but just hand-wave about. PS I am an academic." Some of the best comments there came, for real, from Bob. What a bunch of morons.
"Comments" in sentence one up there means "front page posts at Crooked Timber," says this moron.
45: If the only plan you have is to invade Holland, you invade Holland.
When the Germans did it, they really missed out by not calling the invasion day, Holland Days-chluss
56: Skimming the first one (I would read it more thoroughly, but I want to try to bring comment quality here down a bit): "That r>g is due in part to g-depressing monetary and fiscal policies." I thought Picketty's point was that r>g is a fundamental part of any capitalist system (ignoring short-term perturbations like the world wars), and to ameliorate it and prevent a return to a rentier society you need to do something strongly anti-capitalist like taxing wealth.
60 -- one might have thought it obvious that one would have reached a similar conclusion* from a book that explicitly states that a lot, and spends inordinate amount of time on the nineteenth century, but hey I'm an academic and, hey, let's change the subject to what I'm thinking about.
*Personally, I don't know that he thinks it's a fundamental part of any capitalist system, but he certainly doesn't think it's the product of short-term fiscal policy or the kind of broader social-welfare policy the first piece is advocating for, and in fact his data shows that trends are similar in heavily social-welfare protective states. But why actually bother to engage the book.
France's regional elections: widespread FN success. It's not just Trump. link.
Terrorists and right-wing parties in the West have a weird, symbiotic relationship.
They overlap an awful lot from what I've seen, and not in the symbolic 'christian taliban' way as much as the very literal 'members of one group are members of the other one' way. Getting people scared is a really great path to power for right wing organizations.
And getting right wing Western politicians to rattle sabres and attack your religion is a great recruiting tool for terrorists.
Could you construct a Mixed Member Proportional system where each state effectively works as a regional list? I guess the majority of states are too small for that to work, even if it would work for NY/CA/TX.
My Piketty chapter summary was a jumbled ramble, but the chapter kind of was too.
64: see the Biryani Project. Up-and-coming conservative politician Afzal Amin had an amazing idea to hire racist white thugs and Muslim thugs to stage demonstrations and threaten each other, but then not actually fight, and then he'd take credit for keeping the peace.
Terrorists and right-wing parties in the West have a weird, symbiotic relationship.
They overlap an awful lot from what I've seen, and not in the symbolic 'christian taliban' way as much as the very literal 'members of one group are members of the other one' way.
Not altogether sure about that, to be honest. Just looking through this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_European_Union
the highest casualty postwar attacks are by, in order:
Islamists, Islamists, far-left, Islamists, unknown, left-nationalists, Islamists, Arab secular, Arab secular, organised crime and far-right, far-right, far-right, Arab secular, left-nationalist, Islamists, unknown, unknown, unknown, nationalist, unknown, Islamists, unknown, Arab secular, no motive... the big players in European terrorism were people like PIRA, the Red Brigades, Abu Nidal, Baader-Meinhof, 17 November and ETA, and none of those were really far-right. You've got a few Italian far-right bombers, and the OAS, and not much else really in the Premier League.
Right-wing terrorism dominated the sport before the formation of the European Union, though, and seems likely to play its way out of relegation in the next few years.
70: In the US, sure. The Klan. But in Europe? Plus, that's going back a fair distance.
Dude you just had an election where 40%+ of the electorate in many regions of France just voted for an openly fascist party, plus semi-fascist governments in Hungary and Poland, plus things like Golden Dawn. I don't think foreseeing an era of right-wing violence and terrorism in Europe, largely directed at Muslims, is much of a stretch.
I'm not actually sure where, say, ETA's non-sovereignty related policies stand on the spectrum.
69: Wow, I forgot how much of terrorism in Europe once-upon-a-time was related to Palestinian nationalism, one way or another. And Tigre's right that the big Islamist attacks are all relatively recent (post-9/11). But there's been a sea-charge there--the biggest post-9/11 attack not related to Islamists is the 2002 Myyrmanni bombing, caused by a Finnish chemical enginering student who liked to make bombs and didn't seem to have an ideology. With the same number of deaths but less destruction was the guy who attacked the Dutch queen in 2009, and it's unclear what his ideology was.
69. For some reason that list doesn't appear to include the Breivik attacks, so I'm not sure how reliable it is.
75 - I think because Norway's not in the EU.
In case anyone's wondering, by the way, Anders Breivik isn't on that list because Norway isn't in the EU.
I don't think foreseeing an era of right-wing violence and terrorism in Europe, largely directed at Muslims, is much of a stretch.
I dunno, everyone's always going on about a rise in Islamophobic attacks, but the actual casualty numbers are remaining stubbornly low - most of the attacks are verbal abuse, vandalism and low-level pushing and shoving. Which is really unpleasant of course but it's not exactly going to push ISIS off the top rank any time soon.
I forgot how much of terrorism in Europe once-upon-a-time was related to Palestinian nationalism, one way or another.
And it worked!
Since this seems to be the shootings thread, here's a handy interactive map where you enter your address and it tells you how many shootings have taken place within one mile of your location in the last year.
I checked my office. 86! Huzza!
most of the attacks are verbal abuse, vandalism and low-level pushing and shoving.
So, dsquared-orism.
86 is a lot. More than the total number of non-combatants whom the UN believes have been killed in drone attacks! I thought my house would be a competitor, but I only have 5 in the past year.
Just to continue the scattered nature of the thread, there's yet another response to Piketty up at CT and it's another "nice book, now let me tell you about me, my area of interest and my research. PS I am an academic." How are more mass shootings not committed by academics?
I have 26. It would be higher but almost half of my one mile circle is taken up by a park. I really shouldn't make this a competition, should I.
Because you can't publish your account of your mass shooting without waiving your Fifth Amendment rights.
I have two, one fatal. If I moved a couple of blocks, I'd have none, but then I'd have to walk up a higher hill from the bus stop.
How are more mass shootings not committed by academics?
IRB approval is tricky.
86: The fatal one in Schenley Park is a mislabeling; it took place in East Pittsburgh, which isn't particularly close to pittsburgh.
That's not the one that was by me.
Right. Those were small animals.
89: Dude, Googleproof your confessions.
If I read the literature correctly, as long as I don't wet the bed, cruelty to small animals and setting fires are fine.
Although, not having to get up in the middle of the night is tempting.
Two, one fatal.
As I've alluded to but not said explicitly, this fall one of the girls had a close relative show up in those listings across the river. I'm still thinking a lot about what I heard at that funeral, the way people in a community much more affected by this than I am were talking about it. "I'm so glad my son is incarcerated or it could have been him," women kept saying, and I have said similar things myself about Rowan. It's a chilling, wearying way to live, and I live only the tiniest slice of the bad bits.
Ugh. It's hard to overestimate the amount of psychic energy taken up by "will my kid get shot/shoot someone" if you haven't been around people dealing with it.
On the other hand, I was told by our local cop that the older, mostly peaceful black gang is now back in charge of the neighborhood, because most of the immediately local members of the more aggressive (but not to white people!) El Salvadorian gang have been deported to El Salvador, where they are now fighting a near-open civil war against their former local gang rivals from LA who were also deported to El Salvador. Good times, sucks to be you El Salvador.
I think the Boland Amendment isn't a thing anymore. We can send Oliver North to El Salvador.
To be clear, I wasn't particularly worried Rowan was going to be shot except during one bad week when he was worried about that, plus I suppose the time when I knew he had a gun before he turned himself into police, at which point I was worried about suicide by cop. But I've said "At least he's fed! At least there's a roof!" and that sort of thing plenty, at least in my head.
I'm out walking in my evidently quite shooty neighborhood for an hour or two most nights at times ranging from late evening to early morning and I've never seen anything. I will very occasionally hear gunshots, and on a couple of occasions I've seen out my window young men sprinting, but nothing first hand. I guess one shooting every two to three weeks isn't that frequent, and a one mile radius covers a lot of city. My takeaway is that being a superhero would be very difficult.
39 near my current location. At first I'm surprised by that just because I'm in on an office campus with high security and it takes at least 10 minutes to walk out of here the usual way. But I guess the campus isn't that big.
36 within a mile of home. Sounds about right. I also found that a tiny bit surprising because that area includes a college, which is probably a low-shooting area. But then, the college's security isn't that impressive and college kids buy drugs so who knows, and I guess a 1-mile radius almost anywhere in a city would include some areas that seem like they should be low on crime, so that would even out.
One within 10 miles of where I grew up. Yay rural population density.
100: You're better than that. Go on the stair master for thirty minutes a day for a month. Then be a super hero.
Will this Stair Master grant me powers?
No, your super powers stem from the eggplant, strategically deployed down the front side of the costume and tucked away safely inside the spandex.
Eight shootings within a mile of home. Not so bad.
105: Don't you live in NYC? A mile covers a lot people there. I would have expected more. Not that that's a bad thing, of course.
A one mile radius shows about 9 fatal and 3 non-fatal shootings for my locale. Which is maybe a bit more than I would have guessed, but not much.
It's a little weird for me -- the one mile radius gets a bunch of water and a couple of big parks. So lower density than you'd think.
Did anyone else see dupes? I checked my parents' address, and there was a triple-homicide marked down twice in a neighboring town.
So the number people are reporting is represented by the green blob saying "Cluster of **** incidents. Click to zoom or unpack"?
No, if you put in an address, there should be a blue marker on that spot, and that gives the 1 mile radius statistic. Doesn't work for my address for some reason.
It didn't work for mine either - maybe Minneapolis is glitchy for it generally?
Eyeballing it it looks like there were ~4 fatal shootings, and maybe one nonfatal one depending on the distance. That's not too bad.
I get "nothing found," not consistent with the map when magnified, and there is no blue marker.
My map had something shown as near my home when it wasn't. There's a red dot on that college campus I mentioned, but when I look at what the specific address is, the address is something like 3 miles away. I didn't check all the other dots around me but the overall number is plausible. I'm not sure if the problem is Slate's or the Web site that actually tracks the shootings.
The map says there was a nonfatal one more or less within sight of our back porch, but I don't remember it. Oh wait, that's a location error: it happened at a gas station a mile or two down the road. Another, just outside the 1 mile radius, happened in Indiana PA, which is 60-odd miles away. Unfortunately, the Report Error procedure sucks.
Overall numbers 8 shootings, half fatal. Three were a single incident, conveniently within a couple hundred yards of an emergency room.
||Your crazy racist uncle Justice Scalia misses the good old days when those people knew they were better off in their separate, not-so-equal schools:
There are -- there are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to -- to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less -- a slower-track school where they do well. One of -- one of the briefs pointed out that -- that most of the -- most of the black scientists in this country don't come from schools like the University of Texas.
They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they're -- that they're being pushed ahead in -- in classes that are too -- too fast for them.
I'm just not impressed by the fact that -- that the University of Texas may have fewer. Maybe it ought to have fewer. And maybe some -- you know, when you take more, the number of blacks, really competent blacks admitted to lesser schools, turns out to be less. And -- and I -- I don't think it -- it -- it stands to reason that it's a good thing for the University of Texas to admit as many blacks as possible.|>
it happened at a gas station a mile or two down the road.
The petroleum-based economy causes a great deal of violence.
This is the guy whose point/research/amicus brief Scalia was trying to summarize, but I think it's clear that Scalia did so in a way that took it from "OK I can see how this might be a legitimate argument, even if incorrect, but it's missing a lot" to "I am definitely a racist." I'm not a big fan of reading too much into rhetoric alone but in this case, from the excerpts of the transcripts I've seen (haven't read the whole thing) Scalia seems pretty clearly to be taking a possibly legitimate argument that might be attractive to racists, and stating it in a way that makes clear that he's pretty damn racist.
The stuff I excerpted was the only real crazy-uncle style racism that I saw on a quick read of the transcript. Though of course Scalia was his usual scornful asshole self (went on derisively about, e.g., the notion of a critical mass of minority students). Alito and Roberts were full of disingenuous shit but are too smart (and don't suffer from Scalia's lack of self-restraint) to say anything flagrantly bigoted.
Am totally not surprised to see that it's Stuart Taylor attempting to provide the plausibly deniable racist perspective here.
Address as of a year ago, in rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn: 28 shootings in a one-mile radius, 8 fatal.
Address now: 12 shootings within a mile, 4 fatal.
The closest shooting stat is the one that more closely tracks what feels like the lived reality. Closest a year ago: .13 miles; closest now: .59 miles.
Still in Florida 2 More Days: 1 fatal, 2.93 miles away.
Home: 1 fatal, 1.98 miles away. A police shooting.
Where I lived 2001-2009: Nothing!