Here is an argument against donating to presidential candidates, stated less glibly than I did last night.
First premise: downballot races need the money. Even small donations to House and state candidates make a difference.
Second premise: presidential candidates don’t really need your money. They won’t notice it. They’re swimming in it.
Third, and most important premise: a downballot donation helps the top of the ticket.
That is to say: every dollar you donate to JD Scholten in IA-4 is going to help Sanders, Warren, Klobes, whoever. The voters JD Scholten turns out aren’t going to vote for Trump.
(Is that 100% true? No, but, close.)
In fact, in places like Iowa, the effect is even stronger, because a vote turned out by Scholten is also going to go to whoever ends up running against Joni Ernst in her Senate reelection race.
This seems like an especially strong argument if you’re in a safe D area, like I am in Chicago and you are in CA and NY. Want to donate to Warren? Why not do it through Iowa or Maine and hit 3 races at once?
There are structural reasons this strategy makes sense, too, because downballot candidates are doing DIFFERENT THINGS than Warren and Biden. How much of a Warren donation goes to bid up the cost of media buys? Why allocate your donations to that?
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In 1917, the Supreme Court in Buchanan v. Warley struck down Louisville's zoning laws, which explicitly restricted Black families, on the basis of the 14th Amendment.
1917 is very early in the history of American zoning. Oak Park, where I live, enacted zoning in 1921, and it was a novelty; newspaper articles described it as one of the first comprehensive zoning systems in the nation.
If you spend some time doing archival research, you quickly confirm a suspicion: people in the 1920s were luridly, cartoonishly racist. The Court outlawed explicit racial zoning, but not implicit racial zoning, and thus was born the "single-family zoning district".
Opening of Ronin. De Niro walks behind the cafe, cases the joint, hides his gun behind some milk crates. Why? Nobody’s patting him down. It’s a cafe! Why not just go in strapped?
This first car chase is great, Stellan Skarsgard riding along in the passenger compartment of an iPhone 4 directing the whole thing.
You don’t get all the boops and beeps Frankenheimer envisioned with this ’97 technology. Real missed opportunity, Apple. I’d have paid extra for it.
DNSSEC on the orange site front page, so there’s my morning. I wrote a long thing there, if you want to go track it down.
About 8 years ago I collected all my arguments against DNSSEC (DNSSEC is bad) into a single blog post, “Against DNSSEC”. It’s on HN this morning, but you can just read it here: sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/01/1…
For the past couple years I’ve debated writing a follow up, called “Stick A Fork In It”. I haven’t been dumb enough to call it on DNSSEC quite yet, but I think the case is pretty strong. Here are some reasons to believe DNSSEC is never going to be relevant:
If I asked 100 people to tell me what this app does, “bank” would come in last, after “social network”, “dating site”, “new phone”, and every other kind of app ever made. But, nope: the answer is “bank”.
This is like that episode of The Office where Ryan adds a social network to Dunder Mifflin Infinity. You’re chatting with your friends, you’re talking about the latest music, about the election; all of it is happening in their virtual bank.
This is a bank for people who are unwell, by people who are unwell.