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Democracy 2024: Stakes vs. Horses

The 2024 U.S. Presidential election isn’t just another tick on the political timeline. It’s a crucial juncture for — quite literally — the future of American democracy. We’re not just deciding who gets to sit in the Oval Office for the next four years. We’re determining the trajectory of our nation, the resilience of our democratic institutions, and the preservation of democratic norms.

Our democracy has been put through the wringer in recent years. Remember 2020? (It may still be 2020 from your vantage point.) We had a sitting president trying to overturn the election results, and his supporters stormed the Capitol, causing scores of injuries and deaths. Now, we’re looking at the possibility of a rematch between President Biden and former President Trump in 2024. Even if Trump manages to not be the GOP nominee, those chasing his tail aren’t any better. This isn’t just about domestic policy, or “R” vs. “D”; the domestic and global impacts are significant.

Now, the lazy media loves a good horse race. They’re all about the odds, the polls, the back-and-forth between candidates. But that’s not what this election is about. It’s not just about who’s leading the polls or who’s predicted to win. It’s 100% about the future of our democracy, the resilience of our institutions, and the direction our country takes for the next 20-40 years.

The 2024 election will have far-reaching implications for a range of policy areas…from the future of abortion, and other critical rights, the U.S.’s role in global conflicts, and domestic issues like voting rights. The balance of power in Congress could also shift, with many key races flying under the radar.

So, while the horse race might be exciting, let’s not lose sight of what’s really at stake here. The 2024 election is about the future of American democracy. It’s about whether our democratic norms will survive and how we’ll navigate a range of critical policy issues. Let’s focus on these stakes, not just the day-to-day fluctuations of the campaign.

Welcome To 2024

Hey folks,

This is likely our last shot at preserving liberal democracy in the U.S., or at least avoiding 20–40 years of abject horribleness by wannabe bigoted and sociopathic demigods.

The year 2024 is also set to be a significant year for global politics, with a large number of critical elections taking place around the world. Nearly half of the global population will go to the polls this year, with at least 40 countries electing leaders. This includes countries such as Taiwan, Britain, India, and Iran.

Along with the POTUS showdown, the U.S. general election will also include one-third of the seats in the Senate and all the seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

In India, still the world’s most populous democratic country, elections will be held in April, where ~600 million eligible voters will determine whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be elected for a third term.

Iran will hold elections on March 1, 2024, to elect a new parliament.

In Europe, the European Parliament election, the second-largest vote by population in 2024, will take place.

Other countries with significant elections include Taiwan, Pakistan, and Mexico.

These elections are critical as they will shape global politics and have a profound impact on international geopolitics for years to come. They will also highlight the global health of democracy and either alter or reinforce the current course of economic, political, and geopolitical policies.

State Of The Union

The Movement Advancement Project (MAP) has some great maps that show the peril we’re in, here in the U.S. This one shows “Democracy Ratings By State”:

  • High Overall Policy Tally (4 states)
  • Medium Overall Policy Tally (16 states + D.C.)
  • Fair Overall Policy Tally (19 states)
  • Low Overall Policy Tally (11 states)
  • Negative Overall Policy Tally (0 states)

This is a pretty comprehensive resource that tracks and analyzes over 40 aspects of state election and voting laws across the United States, including the District of Columbia. These maps are designed to provide a clear picture of how different states are performing in terms of fostering a healthy election system and optimizing civic engagement.

Each state is assigned a “Democracy Tally,” which is a count of the number of laws and policies within the state that contribute to a robust election system. This tally is a part of the broader evaluation of state election and voting policies, which are grouped into six major categories:

  • Voter Registration
  • Representation & Participation
  • Voting in Person
  • Voting By Mail
  • Election Security, and
  • Independence & Integrity

Visitors can click on any state to view detailed laws and state profiles. Additionally, folks can explore the maps by subject area to understand specific aspects of election and voting laws.

There are other maps on the site that show just how much of a hold that hate, misogyny, and fear has on the populace.

Getting Involved & Staying Informed

For folks in the U.S. (I’m not comfortable interfering in elections abroad), Indivisible is a good starting point. I’m also a fan and supporter of The Bulwark, though I grok that “liberals” might still be wary of former die-hard GOPers.

Ground News is also a great place to check your biases whilst also getting up to speed on what’s happening at home and abroad.

FIN

There will be regular pro-democracy posts on the blog in 2024, so use the per-topic RSS feeds if you want to avoid them.

Democracy 2024: Pro-Hunger ≠ “Pro-Life”

Ref AP News: https://apnews.com/article/iowa-summer-ebt-food-assistance-0e878c5c0fc9dd0dd55622cb22a82561.

Iowa has decided not to participate in the 2024 Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer for Children (Summer EBT) program, which provides $40 per month to each child in a low-income family to help with food costs while school is out. The state’s Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Education announced this decision, with Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds stating that federal COVID-era cash benefit programs are not sustainable and do not provide long-term solutions for issues impacting children and families. Reynolds also expressed concerns about the EBT card not promoting nutrition and contributing to the childhood obesity epidemic.

States participating in the federal program are required to cover half of the administrative costs, which would amount to an estimated $2.2 million in Iowa. Some state lawmakers, such as Democratic Sen. Izaah Knox of Des Moines, have voiced their opposition to the decision, calling it “cruel and short-sighted” and expressing concerns about the impact on children and families in Iowa.

Nebraska has also decided not to participate in the Summer EBT program, which would cost the state about $300,000 annually in administrative costs. However, Nebraska will continue participating in a different federal program called the Summer Food Service Program, which combines programming like reading, physical activity, and nutrition education with food assistance.

Dear GOP: You cannot be pro-hunger and also claim to be pro-life.

Dear So-Called MAGA “Christians”: Matthew 25:35-40.

And, Reynolds would be against any long-term solution that provided decent, living-wages to folks, along with affordable (or, free) daycare. So, she’s a pretty terrible piece of work.

Nebraska has a history of incompetence when it comes to finances and child welfare.

Something For The Fediverse Readers

If you’re on Fosstodon, please pop a note to the admins there to ban this blog as well (it’s using the WordPress federation features). We would not want their sensitive sensibilities to be offended by equally “offensive” stuff I have and will post here, as I seem to have done via @hrbrmstr (which they’ve banned without recourse).

Ligatures In RStudio Dailies

I had thought most folks likely knew this already, but if you are a user of RStudio dailies (this may apply to regular RStudio, but I only use the dailies) and are missing ligatures in the editor (for some fonts), the “fix” is pretty simple (some misguided folks think ligatures are daft).

RStudio, like VS Code and many other editors/apps, is just a special purpose web browser. That means ligatures are controlled via CSS. RStudio also supports themes. There are many built-in themes. I use this third-party one. We can use these themes to sneak in some CSS that gives you granular control over ligatures.

The CSS class we need to target is .ace_scroller. That’s the contents of the editor pane, console, and any other monospaced “scrolled text” components. If you’re wondering, “Why …ace…?”_, that’s die to RStudio’s use of the Ace editor component. Say all the nice things you want to about the Monaco editor component used by VS Code (et al.), but the wizards at Posit wield Ace better than I’ve seen any other app dev team.

You can start here to learn about all the ways you can, and, may need to customize ligatures, but the following worked for my new fav font family:

.ace_scroller {
  font-variant-ligatures: discretionary-ligatures;
  font-feature-settings: "dlig" 1;
}

There are many possible values for font-variant-ligatures, and you can fully customize the font-feature-settings to target only the ligatures you want (for example, the previous linked font has eight stylistic sets).

UPDATE

sailm-b has forked and is maintaining a more updated version of rscodeio.

FIN

If you were missing out before, hopefully this brings you back into the ligature fold.

Avoid libwebp Electron Woes On macOS With positron

If you’ve got 👀 on this blog (directly, or via syndication) you’d have to have been living under a rock to not know about the libwebp supply chain disaster. An unfortunate casualty of inept programming just happened to be any app in the Electron ecosystem that doesn’t undergo bleeding-edge updates.

Former cow-orker Tom Sellers (one of the best humans in cyber) did a great service to the macOS user community with tips on how to stay safe on macOS. His find + strings + grep combo was superbly helpful and I hope many macOS users did the command line dance to see how negligent their app providers were/are.

But, you still have to know what versions are OK and which ones are not to do that dance. And, having had yet-another immune system invasion (thankfully, not COVID, again) on top of still working through long COVID (#protip: you may be over the pandemic, but I guarantee it’s not done with you/us for a while) which re-sapped mobility energy, I put my sedentary time to less woesome use by hacking together a small, Golang macOS CLI to help ferret out bad Electron-based apps you may have installed.

I named it positron, since that’s kind of the opposite of Electron, and I was pretty creativity-challenged today.

It does virtually the same thing as Tom’s strings and grep does, just in a single, lightweight, universal, signed macOS binary.

When I ran it after the final build, all my Electron-based apps were 🔴. After deleting some, and updating others, this is my current status:

$ find /Applications -type f -name "*Electron Framework*" -exec ./positron "{}" \;
/Applications/Signal.app: Chrome/114.0.5735.289 Electron/25.8.4 🟢
/Applications/Keybase.app: Chrome/87.0.4280.141 Electron/11.5.0 🔴
/Applications/Raindrop.io.app: Chrome/102.0.5005.167 Electron/19.0.17 🔴
/Applications/1Password.app: Chrome/114.0.5735.289 Electron/25.8.1 🟢
/Applications/Replit.app: Chrome/116.0.5845.188 Electron/26.2.1 🟢
/Applications/lghub.app: Chrome/104.0.5112.65 Electron/20.0.0 🔴

It’s still on you to do the find (cooler folks run fd) since I’m not about to write a program that’ll rummage across your SSDs or disc drives, but it does all the MachO inspection internally, and then also does the SemVer comparison to let you know which apps still suck at keeping you safe.

FWIW, the Keybase folks did accept a PR for the libwebp thing, but darned if I will spend any time building it (I don’t run it anymore, anyway, so I should just delete it).

The aforementioned signed, universal, macOS binary is in the GitLab releases.

Stay safe out there!

Tracking Rite-Aid Store Closures

Rite-Aid closed 60+ stores in 2021. They said they’d nuke over 1,000 of them over three years, back in 2022. And, they’re now about to close ~500 due to bankruptcy.

FWIW Heyward Donigan, Former President and CEO — in 2023 — took home $1,043,713 in cash, $7,106,993 in equity, and $617,105 in “other” (total $8,767,811) for this fine, bankrupt leadership. Lots of other got lots too for being incompetent.

Rite-Aid is under no obligation to provide a list to the public, nor to do any overt announcements regarding the closures.

Each closure has the potential to create or exacerbate food and pharmacy deserts in many regions.

You can get individual stores (like this one), but there’s over 2,100 of them, so doing this manually is a non-starter.

Thus, I threw together a couple of R and bash scripts to help real data journalists out, in the event any of them can pry themselves away from the POTUS horse race.

One R script is to get the individual store URLs. The bash script is used to polittely get all 2,100+ store pages (I have a script I just re-use for things like this). The other R script is used to get the JSON that’s tucked away in the HTML files to get the store info, which includes latitude, longitude, store number, and address (there is more data in there, I just pulled those fields).

The map at the top of the post is just there for kicks.

The repo is also mirrored to my GitHub (sub out ‘hub’ for ‘lab’ in the URL) if you really need to bow down to Microsoft.

Foliage 2023

The days are getting shorter and when we were visiting Down East Maine the other week, there was just a hint of some trees starting to change up their leaf palettes. It was a solid reminder to re-up my ~annual “foliage” plotting that I started way back in 2017.

The fine folks over at Smoky Mountains — (“the most authoritative source for restaurants, attractions, & cabin rentals in the Smoky Mountains”) — have been posting an interactive map of ConUS foliage predictions for many years and the dataset they curate and use for that is also very easy to use in R and other contexts.

This year, along with the usual R version, I have also made:

The only real changes to R version were to add some code to make a more usable JSON for the JavaScript versions of the project, and to take advantage of the .progress parameter to {purrr}’s walk function.

The Observable notebook version (one frame of that is above) makes use of Observable Plot’s super handy geo mark, and also shows how to do some shapefile surgery to avoid plotting Alaska & Hawaii (the Smoky Mountains folks only provide predictions for ConUS).

After using the Reveal QMD extension to make the Quarto project, the qmd document rendered fine, but I tweaked the YAML to send the output to the GH Pages-renderable docs/ directory, and combined some of the OJS blocks to tighten up the document. You’ll see some Quarto “error” blocks, briefly, since there the QMD fetches imports from Observable. You can get around that by moving all the imported resources to the Observable notebook before generating the QMD, but that’s an exercise left to the reader.

And, since I’m a fan of both Lit WebComponents and Tachyons CSS, I threw together a version using them (+ Observable Plot) to further encourage folks to get increasingly familiar with core web tech. Tachyons + Plot make it pretty straightforward to create responsive pages, too (resize the browser and toggle system dark/light mode to prove that). The Lit element’s CSS section also shows how to style Plot’s legend a bit.

Hit up the GH page to see the animated gif (I’ve stared at it a bit too much to include it in the post).

Drop any q’s here or in the GH issues, and — if anyone makes a Shiny version — please let me know, and I’ll add all links to any of those here and on the GH page.

FIN

While it is all well and good to plot foliage prediction maps, please also remember to take some time away from your glowing rectangles to go and actually observe the fall palette changes IRL.