When Hillary Clinton ran for office, she made the future of the coal mines in Appalachia part of her campaign. The solutions she was offering for the miners, however, were the same tired retraining schemes. I couldn’t see how retraining 50 year old miners to be web site designers was going to work. Instead, I proposed just paying these guys a decent pension for life, thank you for your service but we have to move on.

I see that I’m not the only one thinking this way. There’s a movement called Just Transitions that sounds much more reasonable. Spain recently agreed on such a process with their miners: http://www.industriall-union.org/spanish-coal-unions-win-landmark-just-transition-deal

Its going to cost more, but it’ll work, and it’s much more fair. Much easier to get support from the miners. All the “controversy” over coal v jobs goes away.

Lessig writes on Pelosi’s first act of the new Congress, a bill to address many of the anti-democratic flaws that have become consequential in the last few years.  Fix the process first, then we can fix the issues.

Source: Democratic House will address most important civil rights issue in half century

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/99ac/092d014aac16728912563975282e20039e19.pdf

Imagining music as a sequence of articulations (we used to say “gestures”), then realizing these as sequences of text representations with rules for morphing based on textual differences.

The Next Big Thing in Music Theory.  How to measure music now: intervals, beats or money?  The introduction of “externalities” into music theory.

Ranked-choice voting: Maine proved the concept in 2018 midterms.

Proportional representation is starting to gain adherents.

Competitive book-sorting event pits New York library workers against Washington State’s / Boing Boing.

Wow.  Go, Seattle.

https://www.npr.org/2018/10/26/661011560/life-death-and-the-lazarus-drug-confronting-americas-opioid-crisis

One of the most clear-sighted and honest discussions I’ve heard about this; not mired in emotion nor suffused with moral outrage. Well done.

AMERICAN PSYCHOSIS on Vimeo on Vimeo

Chris Hedges.

Watched S5E1 of “Rake” with Shelley tonight. As the credits rolled, she says “Rake is back”. Yup.

The American Economy Is Rigged – Scientific American.

Stiglitz’ laundry list of fixes is good, comprehensive and likely not do-able in the context of the political system as it stands.  Any takers?  His diagnosis is good, though, especially when he dissects other arguments for inequality.