Mike Murphy-Burton
@mikemurphyburton.bsky.social
92 followers 590 following 360 posts
Your friendly neighborhood tech-creative ADHD magpie.
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* Crime Index improvements
* Guaranteed jobs for students in [unspecified areas]
* Paid NURSING AND TEACHER work terms
* Lower wait times and increased access [whatever that means] for mental healthcare
* 10,000 new homes by 2030
Reposted by Mike Murphy-Burton
It is long, long past time to ditch the first-past-the-post system.

#NLpoli
Newfoundland and Labrador’s election shows the problem again. A party can win a majority of seats without majority support.

Proportional representation would make every vote count equally and ensure real majority rule.
Two pie charts compare votes and seats in Newfoundland and Labrador’s election. The left chart shows the popular vote: PCs 44.5%, Liberals 43.7%, NDP 8.4%, Independents 3.9%. The right chart shows seat share: PCs 52.5%, Liberals 37.5%, NDP 5%, Independents 5%. The graphic highlights how first past the post gave the PCs a majority of seats despite not having majority voter support, with a message calling for proportional representation.
Reposted by Mike Murphy-Burton
#nlpoli

I think, now that we've concluded this round of "There aren't any good choices", it would possibly behoove us to talk much more concretely about what options we want. I'm going to try to create a digital dashboard for a variety of issues. I'd love to hear ideas for what should be on it.
Reposted by Mike Murphy-Burton
"Transsexuality is bourgeois" reflects the common belief that medicine, technology, and any improvements to quality of life are owed to capitalism. The reality is that capitalism holds these improvements hostage for the sake of wealth.
Reposted by Mike Murphy-Burton
No food coma, but the happy afterglow of my son's first birthday yesterday is good enough for me.
I feel like @kierongillen.bsky.social has made his name on this phenomenon
This depends heavily on how integrated or colluding the market actors are, however.
Reposted by Mike Murphy-Burton
This two-parter below is exactly why it's hard to make clothes in the United States.

Let's look at how much it costs to produce a button-up shirt in the US. 🧵
Someone on Twitter replies to me: "meh. buy american or stfu." 

Two hours later, in a separate thread, the write: "$30 for a single button-up is ridiculous unless it is decent quality silk."
Reposted by Mike Murphy-Burton
We need to put a cap on C-suite salaries. Say 10-20x average salary, ratcheting down over a few years, including ALL compensation.

You can pay people whatever you want, but every dollar over that 10% is taxed at 100%. Every dollar over 15% is taxed 150%. And so on.

1/2
I've always favored the term vice signaling for that and its various adjacent nonsense.
When AI safety folks talk, this element of unsafe behaviour gets short shift, but this is absolutely the thing I am most worried about. We can see that imposing a worldview on these systems is possible - necessary, in some ways - and we need to talk about how that happens and under what conditions.
The administration “is currently pressuring OpenAI and other AI companies to make their models more conservative-friendly.”
OpenAI is trying to clamp down on ‘bias’ in ChatGPT
GPT-5 is better at resisting liberal ‘pressure,’ the company says.
www.theverge.com
Not just regular politicians you absolute emptiness of a human being.
I think that you're drawing an equivalence between nazis and politicians, and I find it deeply abhorrent.
What the fuck are you talking about now?
Trans people are in danger for their lives, American troops are on city streets, fishermen in the gulf are being murdered, and progressives are in the crosshairs for imprisonment and worse. But do go on about how mean some people (not me) are to your favourite mayoral candidate.
For those wondering, there are a lot of technical folks who feel basically the same way about these tools.
Democracy is not a system of everything you want, ever. If progressives cannot vote for the lesser evil sometimes, well, things get bad. As they have. You didn't have the choice of everything you wanted or a compromised vision. You had a pale vision of progress or evil and fucking darkness.
Yeah, cause nobody was screaming Biden wasn't electable in 2020.
But I've got some Galaxy Brain Nincompoop screaming at me that the party has No Policies, which is just the dumbest, most childish take I've heard in years, so maybe it's time to take a look in the mirror and ask "Could I maybe be asking for things that don't exist at the cost of human lives?"
At this point, I think that an electoral strategy built around convincing the "good" dems to switch sides is destined to fail. Y'all don't have much appetite for the shit sandwich that is democratic compromise.

Like, I get it. None of the options are awesome. But that's democracy.