Truly there are few things and few industries more efficient than the modern data center and we don’t really accomplish anything by having fewer of them aside from less redundancy (ie more unreliable service) and greater centralization. That this likely uses *more* power and water is unavoidable.

Not having any documentation of the procedure by which the city audits its election results seems like maybe a bad thing. "Our process exists only as spoken lore, passed down from generation to generation" is kinda a bad approach to repeatable, reliable processes.

I'm still not sure what should have been done on releasing election results, but I think the fact that city staff seem to have *known* something was off, but did not inform the Election Commissioners of that prior to releasing results was inappropriate. They're the people intended to make that call.

BTW: The new five-person Bike Champion majority on Cambridge City Council have all ridden multiple times with the Peabody/RAUC #BikeBus. Kids on bikes have caregivers who vote.

If anyone is interested in the actual process behind how @johnhawkinson.bsky.social and other volunteers produce the "early results" for Cambridge City Council election #1s, I did a writeup of the process by which dozens of folks helped people get results last night. www.reddit.com/r/CambridgeM...

How I’m spending my day

"No, 12 million Americans don't believe the country is run by shape-shifting lizards." foreignpolicy.com/2013/04/02/n...

If you want to help on Election Day, and don’t have anything to do, I could use a few more people to hold signs for @abciepac.org on Election Day in the morning or evening; let me know if you’re interested!

please vote in your local municipal elections on Tuesday (if you have one).

I specifically changed my work travel plans to accommodate being part of this event. I'm glad I did, because it's just a genuinely joyful thing every time.

While my hotel window could use some cleaning, the view is cool.

This is a weird ballot.

A nice moment of feeling like ‘bikes are normie here,’ getting two separate mailers from the local bike advocacy machine

i have no tattoos, does this make me eligible or ineligible for public office?

Sobrinho-Wheeler feels like a strange addition to this anti-bike lane ballot. Then again, anything that includes Moree is clearly a weirdo outlier anyway.

Interesting to see only Wilson get left off an ABC ballot in the 2023 election. There's probably a story there.

Amused that these ballots basically split 50/50 on who goes first.

Tossing in McGovern at the end of this list is pretty funny.

cry havoc and let slip the frogs of war

I think that it's important for everyone who moderates an online space to know that the broad opinion of people on the platform will always be "fuck the mods". Whether people perceive you as doing too much or doing too little, you will always be the object of scorn. You just have to deal with that.

It's interesting that although many people ranked these 6 (which was the ABC + Bike Safety combination list) *first*, fewer ranked the intersection than either the full ABC or CBS list. I talked to many folks who expressed dismay about some of ABC or CBS endorsements, but they mostly still add more.

the alphabetical "Fuck bikes" ballot.

"x is a human right" ah, you mean access to it varies widely by privilege level of the recipient? or just that access to it is routinely denied?

So, for the E-Bike Library, I think I need some software. (This is a specific request for advice.) Basically, the e-bike library is big enough now that we have things slipping through the cracks, and we're adding more volunteers, so we need to have a shared consistent view of work to do. 🧵

One of the most common reasons people come to visit the e-bike lending library is "because we want to avoid buying a second car to get around" (usually parents of two small children).

“Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.” Diary of Anne Frank January 13, 1943

Almost at the halfway mark of our fundraiser! Will you help us put more butts on bikes? With your support we will -Expand our fleet of cargo bikes & ebikes -Upgrade our booking software to be more efficient -Provide new pickup locations -Fund a dedicated storage space donorbox.org/grow-the-lib...

Voting for these candidates and contributing to Wilson has to sting a bit. “I voted for 6 NIMBYYs first, what the hell.”

@communitypedalpower.org , our local #cambma ebike lending library, has helped our family biking community grow by leaps and bounds. They’re doing a funding drive to increase their capacity, consider throwing them a few bucks. donorbox.org/grow-the-lib...

Celebrating two years of the E-Bike Lending Library! In the past two years, the E-Bike Lending Library has grown from 4 bikes in a backyard to 40 bikes serving hundreds of riders across Greater Boston. We've completed more than 1000 loans... and we have an ambitious plan to complete even more. 🧵

"no other ranked exactly these candidates" yeah, because this is an insane ballot leftist with a reputation for being a dick, centrist harvard biz school incumbent, bartender aligned with anti-bike-lane small-business owners there are more ridiculous ballots, but this one is pretty wild

Took my kid with me to see John Mulaney in Boston tonight. (Kid is 24.)

# of paragraphs for news orgs to mention there's no discernable need to deploy troops to Portland, Oregon The Guardian: 1st paragraph BBC: 4th paragraph AP: 5th paragraph Time: 6th paragraph Politico: 8th paragraph NPR: 9th paragraph CNN: 10th paragraph NBC: 12th paragraph Fox News: never mentions

There is no measured way to say what I am about to say. If the Supreme Court agrees with the Trump administration to end birthright citizenship, we must end this current Supreme Court. I do not say this lightly.

Alphabetical ballots do make me chuckle.

Whenever people talk about "luxury housing," I remember there are literal mansions in Hartford, CT that are now selling for less than it costs to buy a starter home in Silicon Valley. If we judge luxury by market value, there is no housing that is intrinsically, permanently "luxury housing."

This is a kinda weird set of 3 to pick.

Genuinely interesting to me how many ABC-friendly ballots Totten was included in, given that he believes that those who support building market rate housing suffer from a “disease”. Like, if it built a candidate grouping algorithm based on ballots, pretty sure Totten is a shoe-in ABC candidate.

I know it’s not the point, but trump’s choice to revel in a $16M bribe when he has substantial influence over literally trillions of dollars is so short sighted. Like, my dude, you don’t live in a trailer anymore. You have so much more opportunity for grift than this penny ante shit!!

58 of the 186 bullet votes for Siddiqui are in 11-2. (It contains Rindge Towers, which is a significant Siddiqui base.)

Today is 2 months since I got my new cargo bike (Haul ST), and I just crossed 300 miles ridden on it. I continue to like it a lot for my needs.

296 ballots ranked exactly the CCC slate candidates and nothing else. 6 of them did so alphabetically, like this ballot did.

375 ballots ranked exactly the ABC candidates and nothing else.

CCC slate minus Wang and Wilson, which is better known as aka "CCC slate, but just the Whites."

I added a counter for how many combinations of the same set of three are in the ballots, which provides an interesting additional datapoint to me.

Missed opportunity for better Totten/ Al-Zubi partnership here; Al-Zubi was effectively “first runner up”, and most ideologically aligned with Totten. This year, Totten has been campaigning on behalf of Al-Zubi, which should help with ballots like this one.

Genuinely curious what the order was on the ballots for 6-1, given the lack of any ideological coherence to this ballot and the fact that they voted for the maximum number of candidates. There's a lot of ballots that make no sense to me, but this one has no discernible order at all.

Cambridge Bike Safety list, with incumbents other than Nolan at the top. (imo, Nolan didn't and doesn't deserve CBS's endorsement, so this seems like a reasonable choice to me.)

In the 2023 election, Pasquarello was included on fewer ballots (3844) than any candidate other than perennial oddball Gregg Moree (1079).

So, this ballot was: Anti-bike, anti-bike, anti-bike, anti-bike... McGovern (who is aggressively pro-bike!) When you look at Cambridge municipal ballots, it's so interesting to see a little insight into how people's minds work.