I know… depressing. Ironic ultranationalistic memes aside… Let’s continue and be serious for the rest of this post. Sorry for being a Millennial there. Ukrainian officials are in Paris today discussing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I think the following is the most reasonable path to peace. France and the rest of the European Union …
Yearly Archives: 2025
Regarding the US joining the Commonwealth
King Charles has extended a potential offer of Commonwealth of Nations membership to the United States. I oppose it for many reasons. Limited benefits What exactly is the Commonwealth of Nations? It’s a loose forum of former British colonies and the United Kingdom. There are no travel benefits to being a member of the Commonwealth …
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Hungary and the Schengen Area
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5365421/hungary-lgbtq-rights-ban-orban Hungary passes constitutional amendment to ban LGBTQ+ public events. The ECJ is going to have a thing or two to say about this. It is a real test of how much authority they have. But most importantly, it risks causing a brain drain, which the Schengen Area will enable, and Hungary doesn’t tax its …
Obvious AMTRAK expansion
While I know this is unlikely to happen as long as Donald Trump is in office, here are some fairly obvious AMTRAK expansions which should happen based solely off airport traffic data. I might do a more thorough analysis later, but just pulling data off of Wikipedia which is from the FAA (because I’m lazy) …
Checks and Balances
Some people still think the Department of Justice is independent of the president. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the American system of government works. The Department of Justice works for the President as part of the cabinet. It is not an independent agency. It is no more independent than the Department of State …
Geography as destiny
Geographical determinism is a theory which gets thrown around sometimes in amateur political science circles, but ultimately it doesn’t make a lot of sense, neither does it have significant predictive power. cc ge pv rl rq va GDP per capita Homicide Rate Population Latitude Landlocked CPI score 2021 Overall Score Homicide Rate -0.208828 -0.222991 -0.074121 …
Why Democrats will win in 2026
I just wrote How Democrats and Republicans Win, read that first. So we have 7 keys to win control of the House of Representatives, along with my projection: Strong short-term economy: False Strong long-term economy: False Major policy change: False No foreign or military failure: False, alienating NATO and tariff policy Major foreign or military …
How Democrats and Republicans win
Before reading this, read 2024 Was Lost On Turnout if you haven’t already. The secret to winning elections is turning out your base. Republicans won in 1994, 1998, 2002, 2010, and 2014 because of a collapse in turnout for the Democrats. Republicans consistently see more consistent voting in House elections in Presidential election years vs …
Proof of the power of Visas
Brexit is shrinking crowds at Britain’s biggest art galleries This paper from iNews in the UK has proved that visitor numbers to UK galleries have collapsed 20-50 percent compared to 2019 while art galleries in the European Union have seen no such decline. All of this is from Brexit. Brexit has been devastating to the …
Probability of a perfect match
What’s the probability that a candidate will have exactly your tech stack at their previous job for a web developer position? Assuming an even distribution: (I know, a horrible assumption) Let’s say you are looking at only three options: AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. There are more options than this. Your web server likely …