Scott Boehmer

Author: Scott Boehmer

  • Ranked Choice Voting would be good for North Carolina

    Let’s talk about Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). It’s a voting system that’s making elections fairer for millions of Americans—nearly 20 million, in fact! But what’s so great about it? Here are a few key benefits:

    1. Winners need majority support: With RCV, winners have to get over 50% of the vote. That means they can’t just squeak by with a small slice of support.
    2. Better campaigning: Candidates can’t just play to their base—they have to appeal to more people. This means fewer nasty attack ads and more focus on real issues.
    3. No more “spoiler” candidates: Ever felt like voting for your favorite candidate might “waste” your vote or hurt your second choice? RCV fixes that. You rank your choices, and if your top pick doesn’t win, that candidate is eliminated, and your vote can still count for your next choice.  This enables broader discussion from a wider range of candidates.
    4. Saves money and increases turnout: RCV skips the need for costly runoffs, which often have low voter participation.
    Don Berryann & Lennie Friedman

    Ranked Choice Voting would be good for North Carolina (NC Newsline)

  • The Delusion of Advanced Plastic Recycling

    Given the high stakes of this moment, I set out to understand exactly what the world is getting out of this recycling technology. For months, I tracked press releases, interviewed experts, tried to buy plastic made via pyrolysis and learned more than I ever wanted to know about the science of recycled molecules.

    Under all the math and engineering, I found an inconvenient truth: Not much is being recycled at all, nor is pyrolysis capable of curbing the plastic crisis.

    Not now. Maybe not ever.

    Lisa Song

    Selling a Mirage: The Delusion of Advanced Plastic Recycling Using Pyrolysis (ProPublica)

  • Elon Musk, the Right, and Wikipedia

    Similar attacks on speech are becoming only more common throughout the American right, with president-elect Trump’s longstanding hostility to the media escalating at a rapid clip. In recent months, Trump has suggested he wouldn’t mind if reporters were shot, threatened to jail journalists, editors, and publishers who refuse to reveal confidential sources, threatened to investigate or pull broadcasting licenses for news organizations that reported on him unflatteringly, and filed SLAPP suits of his own against news publications and pollsters.

    This hostility to information sources outside their control extends far beyond the media. Right-wing groups have launched coordinated campaigns to ban books from schools and libraries, particularly those discussing race, gender, or LGBT topics. They’ve pushed legislation like the “Kids Online Safety Act” that, while framed as protecting children, would require platforms to restrict access to information deemed “harmful” or “inappropriate for minors”, which is likely to include resources for LGBT youth and information about reproductive or gender-affirming healthcare, sexual education, or mental health. And they’ve supported state-level laws requiring internet platforms to implement age restrictions that threaten privacy and are vulnerable to weaponization against content deemed “obscene”. The common thread connecting these efforts is not protecting children or promoting “family values,” but controlling what information people can access.

    Molly White

    Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia (Citation Needed)

  • The LLMentalist Effect

    One of the issues in during this research—one that has perplexed me—has been that many people are convinced that language models, or specifically chat-based language models, are intelligent.

    But there isn’t any mechanism inherent in large language models (LLMs) that would seem to enable this and, if real, it would be completely unexplained.

    LLMs are not brains and do not meaningfully share any of the mechanisms that animals or people use to reason or think.

    LLMs are a mathematical model of language tokens. You give a LLM text, and it will give you a mathematically plausible response to that text.

    There is no reason to believe that it thinks or reasons—indeed, every AI researcher and vendor to date has repeatedly emphasised that these models don’t think.

    Baldur Bjarnason

    The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con (Out of the Software Crisis)

  • My Doctor Emailed Me Back

    Here we reach the crux of the matter and the source of the distrust many trans people have for the NHS. We tell them we are trans, we want to transition. But that information about who we are and what we want counts for nothing unless we also have their permission. The system denies that we are reliable bearers of fundamental truths about ourselves. Our lack of trust in that system is just the equal and opposite reaction: they don’t listen to us, so we don’t listen to them.

    Abigail Thorn

    My Doctor Emailed Me Back (Trans Writes)

  • Important Dates for 2025

    Find reasons to celebrate the things that matter to you.

    January

    1: New Year’s Day

    20: Martin Luther King Jr. Day

    29: Lunar New Year

    30: National Croissant Day

    February

    1: Ice Cream for Breakfast Day

    14: Valentine’s Day

    17: Presidents’ Day

    March

    4: Game Master’s Day & Paczki Day

    14: Pi Day

    15: Ides of March

    20: Spring Equinox

    April

    9: Unicorn Day

    15: Tax Day

    20: Easter Day

    May

    4: Star Wars Day

    11: Mother’s Day

    21: Tukayyid Day

    26: Memorial Day

    June

    6: Doughnut Day

    15: Father’s Day

    19: Juneteenth

    21: Summer Solstice & Free RPG Day

    July

    4: Independence Day

    20: National Ice Cream Day

    August

    2: Ice Cream Sandwich Day

    4: National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day

    8: International Cat Day

    10: National S’mores Day

    19: World Photo Day

    26: National Dog Day

    September

    1: Labor Day

    18: Cheeseburger Day

    20: National Pepperoni Pizza Day

    22: Fall Equinox

    October

    4: National Taco Day

    13: Indigenous Peoples Day

    15: Cheese Curd Day

    28: National Chocolate Day

    29: National Cat Day

    31: Halloween

    November

    4: Election Day

    11: Veteran’s Day & Origami Day

    27: Thanksgiving

    28: French Toast Day

    December

    21: Winter Solstice

    24: Christmas Eve

    25: Christmas

    31: New Year’s Eve

  • 2024 Was Hot

    Scientists say this year is almost certain to take over the top spot as the hottest year. The global average temperature could potentially breach a key threshold, reaching 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial average. Countries have agreed to try to limit warming to below that level in order to avoid much more intense storms, rainfall and heat waves.

    The record-setting build up of heat has surprised scientists, setting off a climatic whodunit.

    Lauren Sommer

    2023 was extremely hot. Then came 2024 (NPR)

    After reading that, I stumbled upon this Ask NASA Climate article from a decade ago:

    Last week NASA and NOAA announced that 2014 topped the list of hottest years ever recorded. Yikes!

    What’s worse, the ten warmest years ever recorded have all occurred since 1998. Yikes again!

    I fear this news story might turn into a blip that gets tons of attention and is then forgotten after a few days. But it’s a topic that deserves sustained attention.

    Laura Faye Tenenbaum

    The 10 warmest years: Not exactly forever ago (Ask NASA Climate)

    The only year from that article’s list of the hottest years on record that is still in the top ten is 2014, and 2024 is going to knock it down to number 11. The 10 warmest years on the record are the most recent 10 years.

  • Never Forgive Them

    The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an unpaid intern, with the goal to juice as much value from the interaction as possible. To be clear, tech has always had an avaricious streak, and it would be naive to suggest otherwise, but this moment feels different. I’m stunned by the extremes tech companies are going to extract value from customers, but also by the insidious way they’ve gradually degraded their products.

    Edward Zitron

    Never Forgive Them (Where’s Your Ed At?)

  • A System Built to Eat People Never Stops Eating

    So I live in a nation, and so do you, maybe. Nations are made-up things, but they are wicked popular these days. They’re literally everywhere. Mine is called “The United States of America,” and growing up I was told that it was the greatest best country in the whole world and of all forever times, and I believed it, too. There was even a rumor going around that God loved us most, which even as a kid seemed fishy to me, but damn if a lot of people didn’t believe it.

    …

    This nation was founded in the traditional belief that creating wealth by consuming human beings—owning them and using them and murdering them—was not only good, but goodness; generative, nurturing, sustaining. This nation was founded in the belief that the proof that winners are noble is that they had won, and the proof the losers are savage is that they had lost, and so the winners should have not only wealth but all exoneration, while the losers should have not only poverty but all consequences.

    A. R. Moxon

    A System Built to Eat People Never Stops Eating (The Reframe)

  • The 10 Biggest Myths About Our Economy

    We cannot separate what has happened to working people over the last five decades from the dangerous lure of Trumpism. To build a path forward, we must debunk these 10 destructive myths about our rigged economy.

    Robert Reich

    The 10 Biggest Myths About Our Economy (YouTube – Robert Reich)