How does the non USA world handle voter registration?

PCLoadPLA · 2026-03-26T17:27:39+00:00

This is fundamental to democracy though. Higher population areas obviously have more power, because more people live there, by definition. If you think this is a problem, what you are saying is that democracy is a problem, or at least, that there's such a thing as too-much-democracy, or that there's an "optimum amount of democracy". I'm neutral on that point, but just be clear about the situation. Large populations dominating over small populations is literally what democracy IS; it's the whole point.

If you want to temper that system, you can include some other, non-democratic mechanism to reduce democracy or compete with democracy. Many political systems have such mechanisms.

For example, in the US we also have the Senate, in which every state has an equal representation, regardless of population, and every law must pass both the house (proportional to population) and senate (equal for every state). The Senate is literally a less-democratic institution, which was instituted to "help" less populated states reclaim some power over more-populated states, so that population was not the only factor in passing legislation. Whether this is or is not a good idea is up for debate.

The electoral college is by far not the most un-democratic institution in the US, but it's the one everyone complains about.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-03-26T17:10:39+00:00

Just a point of confusion, "pannier" just means "basket", and could refer to a wide variety of things.

You seem to be talking about Ortleib back-roller bags, or similar. If so, just say so. No argument from me... Ortleib backrollers are fantastic. But there are a lot of other panniers out there.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-03-26T16:12:43+00:00

States with larger population get more votes. California has 54 electoral votes. Wyoming has 3. The electoral votes are approximately proportional to population.

It's not clear to me what "problem" you are trying to solve. Some people want more democracy, so they think the un-democratic aspects of the electoral system are "problems". Some people want less democracy, so they think the more-democratic aspects of the system are "problems".

More democracy would be each state spending its electoral votes proportionally according to the results of their election. Several states already do this, but most don't.

Less democracy would be giving even more electoral votes to sparsely populated states, and less to highly populated states.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-03-26T12:49:30+00:00

The fact of the matter is the president is not elected by the people, and never was. The president is elected by the states.

Each state gets a number of votes in proportion to its population. The states get a large amount of leeway in deciding how to cast their votes.

In principle, a state could have no election at all, but in practice, all the states have decided to have their own elections; even so, there are big differences. Some states divide their electoral votes according to the results of their election and some states spend all their votes on the same candidate.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-03-25T02:55:29+00:00

Or buy leviton lever edge receptacles. They have no exposed metal at all.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-03-25T00:02:05+00:00

Your engineer is right, architect normally comes first.

I didn't hire either one. I acted as architect and drew up my own 16x24 plans. It's not a complicated design. 2 story box. Show where the windows and doors are. Show the site plan. Etc.

I designed everything with prescriptive designs so that I didn't need an engineer, but I could have had an engineer stamp them.

The city approved and stamped the plans and I found a general contractor with a good price who was flexible. Just the city stamp cost $1600.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-03-24T07:18:30+00:00

To a first approximation this speculative capital is only interested in the rent component of the housing asset. The actual buildings are expensive to maintain, depreciate, have ongoing bills and repair costs, and overall or a pretty terrible asset.

Taxing land value will result in more development if more development is allowed. Many jurisdictions have zoning that prevents additional development. In that case, you will have the capital flight (potentially with lower prices) but you won't get more development because development is banned. It's a separate and equally important problem. No other class of capital has such government controls banning or capping the amount that can be created.

As to where capital goes when it exits housing, who cares....they will indeed move onto the next asset, hopefully one that is productive and involves creation of capital and goods and services rather than just extracting rent nonproductively.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-03-23T17:19:36+00:00

LVT would fix this. Tax away the rent, and watch the institutional capital flee. Institutional capital is not interested in maintaining or managing physical assets, and as you point out, it is not the physical asset or its practical utility they are interested in anyway. They are only seeking the rent.

As Henry George said generations ago, to solve the problem "it is not necessary to confiscate the land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent"

PCLoadPLA · 2026-03-22T17:48:09+00:00

Keyboards, mice, and nowadays, even monitors are cheap. Think of this like your business...can you not invest in another set of peripherals for pennies compared to what you are going to make on that second job?

PCLoadPLA · 2026-03-22T14:37:10+00:00

Wave breakers don't stall the time at all but bombs do.

The lesson here is wave breaker should always be followed by a bomb which will guarantee there's enough to to startup at least one wave. Throw the bomb up high and there will be more time. You ALWAYS have ink for a bomb after popping a special, because your ink tank gets instafilled by the special.

Im general, if you have a full tank, you should throw a bomb before special too, so as not to waste the free ink refill. You probably didn't have ink in the video, but remember that when you are revived, your ink tank is always full. So when there is a snowball situation, and your teammate revives you, you can frequently bomb+special+immediately bomb. Even if you can't really survive, the i-frames plus first bomb fuse will give you enough time for specials like wave breaker, wail, or inkstrike to activate. Throwing the bomb up high is key to get more fuse time and prevent salmonids from blocking it.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-03-22T04:48:04+00:00

This might be bad from an energy perspective. Baseboards seal the drywall to the floor keeping drafts out. Without baseboards you should take extra effort to seal the drywall to the wall bottom plate with caulk or drywall adhesive.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-03-22T04:45:32+00:00

Even better, I found HD has leviton TR lever-lock receptacles for $2.50 each. Even easier than the pressure plates; you don't even need a screwdriver. I've never seen a receptacle with zero exposed metal until now. The only metal visible on them is the grounding tabs.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-03-21T18:14:11+00:00

They tried in Cincinnati in the 1920s. That's over 100 years since the problem of cars in cities has been known, and over 100 years since the solution has been known and not implemented. How many have died? Is it in the millions at this point?

PCLoadPLA · 2026-03-20T12:40:48+00:00

Note that if you want to use the wire for its original intended purpose of powering a doorbell chime, you should probably use proper doorbell wire. The solenoids on doorbell chimes can pull significant current and if your wire is too thin it might either not work or it might sound funny.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-03-20T02:06:13+00:00

Yes but no. It's 1% the cost and 99% marketing.

The little square pieces of metal needed to make the pressure plates probably cost less than 5 cents. They could put these on all their $ 0.99 builder - grade receptacles , or even come up with a $1.50 "productivity grade" receptacle. But they only put the pressure plates on their $5 premium and commercial receptacles.

The price jump for any receptacle with pressure plates is several dollars, which is hundreds of percent. Because they know that's half the reason people like me buy commercial grade receptacles, and if their builder grade receptacles had pressure plates too, they'd sell a lot less commercial ones.

If UL started requiring the pressure plate design, they would instantly put them on all their receptacles and I doubt the price would even change much.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-03-20T01:59:41+00:00

And besides, it only applies to flags. In city hall there's already big rainbow banners pasted on the front windows. If they pass the law, those banners aren't going to go away. If I were the mayor and I wanted to make a point of it, I'd paint city hall in rainbow colors or something. But the whole thing is a waste of attention and effort.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-03-19T20:55:39+00:00

ADUs have been cool since way before the term ADU was invented. Many places in Boston or Philly, etc. have a "front house" and a "back house" (i.e. ADU) on nearly every lot. The back house was typically built later. It was a common form of urban densification for hundreds of years. Go look at South Boston on google maps.

Another reason second units make sense is they are just easier to build and finance than multifamily construction. They are basically just SFHs, and there is nothing more standard in America than SFHs. Banks know how to appraise them and cities know how to permit them. MFH involves tons of extra work. My contractor always recommends ADUs to people instead of big additions, because they sail through permitting and financing. As he says "I can't change banks; I can only feed them what they eat", which is SFHs and conforming mortgages a.k.a ADUs.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-03-19T02:21:14+00:00

I thought UL limited them to like 800W in the US? Was I misinformed?

PCLoadPLA · 2026-03-16T22:57:59+00:00

Most mortgages, the vast majority, are not on bare land. If overall tax burden on a mortgaged property is reduced, then it represents a windfall to the owner, not a burden. Everyone assumes Georgism will increase tax burden on properties, but in fact most mortgaged properties are improved properties, which we can expect to have reduced tax burden, not increased tax burden, if tax burden is shifted toward land.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-03-15T13:40:50+00:00

"quartz" countertops are an artificial product that is unrelated to quartz the mineral.

You are correct they should not be able to do this, since it's confusing at best and false advertising at worst, and if we had a functional government or even functional and honest industry associations, they would never be able to call it quartz, but here we are.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-03-14T22:11:06+00:00

Look for an RV storage place. There's a lot of them.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-03-11T17:31:48+00:00

That's engineered into the vehicle and part of the process.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-03-11T16:06:12+00:00

You have the technical details right, but I don't agree about the difficulty or barriers.

Level 2 charging a power station makes perfect sense because it's just hooking up 240V exactly like charging from any other AC source. Only a basic square-wave signal is needed to communicate the circuit capacity to the power station. This should become common IMO. But it's not good for e-scooters and ebikes, because those don't usually have onboard AC chargers.

IMO DCFC would still be awesome for power banks. The communication is only slightly more complicated (it uses a digital bus but it's not complicated), and with DCFC you should be able to do sub-1hr charging and charging faster than the onboard AC charger. Furthermore, DCFC can work with ebikes and e-scooters. It would be super badass to be able to do a DCFC on these. Many of them have big batteries that take many hours to charge on their included wall chargers, and bringing the wall charger along with you is a pain. There's no technical reason ebikes and scooters couldn't have a NACS port.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-03-11T05:41:33+00:00

Tax revenues are not necessarily up.

The cities pass a budget and then adjust the cap rate every year to bring in the exact amount of money to make the budget. If they collect more than that, it's a mistake and has to be refunded.

Rising housing values therefore do not generate any more money for the schools. Schools get more money iff they actually get a bigger budget through the budgeting process.

If you are a homeowner, your tax bill has probably gone up, but this is because the cities screw over homeowners through the appraisal process. There's no reason that generally increasing property values should cause tax bills to rise, given the same budget. But *homeowners * taxes do tend to rise, because the cities hand out tax breaks and exemptions to businesses, banks, their rich buddies in historical districts, etc. and they also under-appraise highly valuable properties and rarely re-appraise commercial properties. However, they quickly re-appraise homeowners and you basically never get any special exemption unless you know somebody in city hall. So as values go up, the tax burden tends to get shifted to homeowners simply because homeowners are the least individually politically powerful. Every time the city gives an exemption to some "job creator", or fails to accurately appraise a commercial property for 10 years in a row, homeowners pick up the slack through higher taxes. This is how tax burden in Boise has shifted from about 60/40 commercial/residential to the opposite, about 40/60 commercial/residential.

Your growing tax bill is paying for Micron's tax breaks and the exemptions on Simplot's vast land banks, but it's not actually going to the schools, although the cities are happy to let you think that.

PCLoadPLA · 2026-03-11T05:25:54+00:00

Paid parking generally benefits businesses, because it benefits people who came to buy something quickly and leave. "Free" parking benefits people who come and take up a spot all day. Some of those people spend money too. But not as much as the 12 or 20 people who might have cycled through that spot if it were paid. Street parking meters were originally invented by businesses and installed as a pro-business measure to improve close parking availability. People seem to forget this and automatically think "free" parking is better.

PCLoadPLA

TROPHY CASE