learhpa

Greetings!

Next Tuesday, September 15, starting at 10AM, Janci Patterson - Brandon's coauthor on Blightfall, as well as Skyward Flight and Bastille vs. the Evil Librarians, will be dropping by for an AMA.

Please drop your questions here, and starting at 10AM on Tuesday, Janci will answer them!

Note: This is a spoiler-free post so that everyone can participate. If you have a spoilery question, please spoiler guard it:

[Book]>!your spoilery text here!<

renders as:

[Book]>!your spoilery text here!<

Grumble.

Why do they do this?

I'm a big guy. Not big enough that I need two seats, but big enough that I have to work to squeeze into one, and need extra leg room.

I pick a window seat because there's just a little more space against the fuselage. If there are no window seats, I pick aisle, because I can stretch out a little bit into the aisle when service isn't happening.

I have a flight tomorrow, and I just got moved into the middle seat. An arrangement which will be physically uncomfortable for every person in the row. And the other two people will blame me and be hostile towards me.

grumble

We (/r/cosmere) are getting a bunch of reports that wiki pages randomly generate unknown errors

The users reporting this think it's a problem with our wiki, but (a) the pages load fine from windows and mac desktop in both old and sh.reddit, and (b) on discussion with the users, it turns out they are seeing the problem in other subreddits' wikis, too.

Is this a known issue?

click here

The election for Insurance Commissioner may be the most important election in California (after Governor and Attorney General) this year. The state is in the middle of a serious crisis caused by home insurance companies leaving the state. This is driving up insurance costs and resulting in homes being uninsurable except via a bare-bones state-run insurer of last resort (which is paid for by the insurance companies). The effect on housing affordability and availability is a huge problem.

Meanwhile, those who are insured are struggling to get insurers to pay out after disasters, leaving the insurance commission squeezed between two problems: something has to be done to keep insurers fro

There are ten candidates for superintendant of public instruction. This is an area I struggle to make good judgments on, as I do not have kids, and am not generally in touch with the controversies of the day in education. That said, my main issues are (a) willingness to protect kids from in-school intrusion by ICE; (b) understanding of the deep extent of covid-related learning loss and some creativity around how to resolve it; (c) data-driven decisionmaking.

Normally I would discount Anthony Rendon (former Assembly speaker) as a career politician looking for an office rather than as someone deeply committed to education, but back before he got into politics he ran early childhood programs i

There are three candidates for Controller.

the job of the Controller is to act as the state's chief accountant, and so usually this is a good place for someone with significant accounting experience. I often vote for fiscal conservatives here because the job has basically no social policy impact and fiscal conservatives usually make good accountants.

In this case, though, the alleged fiscal conservative (Herb Morgan) wants to move the state's books over to a publically published (good) blockchain (!!) and use AI to do realtime auditing (!!). This isn't fiscal conservatism; this is silicon valley tech-libertarianism pushing the tech fads of the day.

Meghann Adams, on the other hand, is a s

There are six candidates for Treasurer.

I think it's reasonable to ignore Glenn Turner, a former crystal and Tarot card seller who is now a mental health activist and who believes the job of Treasurer would be best served by a radical political vision. She wants CalPERS and CalSTRS to divest themselves from anything related to the military, fossil fuels, or environmental damage (which would almost certainly result in poorer returns and long-term financial costs). On the other hand, she wants us to develop public banks, celebrate a student debt jubilee, and adopt universal health care, while taxing extreme wealth --- none of which are really in the core competency of the treasurer, whose j

There are three candidates for Attorney General:

• Rob Bonta, the incumbent;

• Michael Gates, the former city attorney of Huntington Beach;

• Marjorie Mikels, a litigator from the Inland Empire.

Bonta is by far the best choice. He hasn't been perfect, and in particular he's not great at going after either corruption in government or abuse of power by corporations, but he's been leading the charge to protect people from the Trump administraiotn's abuses, including lawsuits challenging the deployment of the guard, the birthright citizenship EO, cutting of of federal funding, and other clearly illegal and unconstitutional acts by the administration. This is 100% the highest priority

There are four candidates for Secretary of State.

• Don Wagner, an Orange County supervisor and former assemblyman, pushed for California to release voter data to the Trump DOJ, wants to require voter ID, wishes to require ballots to be returned (not postmarked) by election day, supports the SAVE act, is suing the current Secretary of State to force her to purge voter rolls, and wants the legislature to undo universal absentee ballots.

• Shirley Weber is the incumbent and has, as far as I can tell, done a perfectly reasonable job. She has refused to cooperate with the Trump administration's demand to turn over our voter rolls (successfully winning a lawsuit over the issue), strongly supp

The fundamental job of the Lieutenant Governor is to check every day to see if the Governor is alive and in state, and be prepared to do the Governor’s job if they aren’t both. (California is weird; the Lt. Governor acts as Governor whenever the Governor is out of state). Beyond that, they serve on various boards and committees.

Accordingly, my priority listing for Lt. Governor is basically the same as for Governor:

(a) I want someone who will resist bad behavior by the Trump administration — standing against the civil liberties abuses, protecting abortion rights and the rights of trans people, etc, and who will lead the charge if the administration and its allies interfere with the electi

Thinking through the governor candidates.

There are 61 of them, which is just too many for me to spend time looking at all of them. Younger me would have felt ethically obligated to, but the opportunity cost is too high.

I’m looking at candidates through these lenses:

(a) I want someone who will resist bad behavior by the Trump administration — standing against the civil liberties abuses, protecting abortion rights and the rights of trans people, etc, and who will lead the charge if the administration and its allies interfere with the election and/or try to ignore the results the way they did in 2020.

(b) I want someone with imagination and creativity who is going to be able to come

It's hard to know anything about Reza Safarnejad's background --- he has a campaign instagram and a campaign website (http://reza4california.com), but they don't really talk about his background other than to say he "has been quietly working behind the scene on complex nationwide efforts such as transparency in Police Investigations and national virus research programs" (the 'learn more' link that supposedly takes you to a description of his background instead takes you to a web page filled with lorem ipsum blocks).

That said, he has an incredibly detailed platform. He wants to:

• break up monopolies
• audit government spending and end waste and fraud
• reform the bar to bring an end to fr