Archives 2021

Graph listing the US presidential elections from 1904 to 2020
When Your Debate Opponents Argue Your Point

While researching arguments for and against the National Popular Vote, I ran across the site Keep Our 50 States, which tries to argue for keeping the Electoral College, and, um, it doesn’t do a very good job of it.

For instance, the “The Issue” page shows this Mike Lester cartoon:

I’m not sure what this is supposed to convey. That California’s 55 Electoral Votes are neatly balanced by… New York’s 29? Is it because they’re both reliably-Democratic states? So shouldn’t Texas be in there as well? Or are it and Florida lumped in with the “flyover states”? This is very confusing.

Speaking of confusing graphics, the same page has this chart:

Graph listing the US presidential elections from 1904 to 2020

At first blush, this appears to be the worst argument ever devised for the Electoral College. Saying “the Electoral College is fair because it elects equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats” is like saying “this judge is fair because he convicts half of the defendants who come before him, and acquits half”. You can’t know whether the judge is fair until you know how many of his defendants are actually guilty (maybe 90% are, and he lets a lot of guilty people go free; or maybe only 10% are, and he wrongly convicts a lot of people who come before him. Likewise, we can’t judge whether the Electoral College is fair until we know what the outcome of an election is “supposed” to be.

And, of course, that goes to the heart of the matter. In a democracy, we’re used to the winner of the popular vote winning the election. That’s how it works for governors, senators, mayors, and pretty much every post except president. So the argument above is remarkably wrong.

But beyond that, what amazes me is this: the person who designed the graphic had one job: fit thirty data points into three columns. But apparently this Einstein divided 30 by 10, somehow got 9, and then tried to shoehorn the remaining three entries on the sides.

I’m open to debate, and I don’t mind having my mind changed. But please, try to do better than this.

Republicans Voting Against Their Interests Again

Law & Crime is reporting that the North Dakota Senate has passed SB 2271, which would block the release of presidential vote totals in the state until after the Electoral College votes.

It’s ironic that Republicans, who were crying for election transparency in the 2020 election, are pushing this kind of anti-transparency bill. But it makes sense:

Law & Crime says that “The bill is designed to prevent implementation of the national popular vote compact – a multi-state agreement aimed at circumventing the Electoral College.” and other sites, including right-leaning ones, agree.

It’s also ironic because North Dakota is a “safe” state: Democrats know they can’t win it in a presidential election, and Republicans know they can’t lose it, so neither party bothers campaigning there. The Electoral College actually harms Republicans in North Dakota by encouraging campaigns to ignore their state-specific issues. If North Dakotans want the same thing as Floridians or Pennsylvanians, great. If not, they’re out of luck.

But this seems to be another case of Republicans acting against their interests purely to Own the Libs.

What the Hell Is Up With MacOS Periodic Jobs?

Yesterday, Feb. 25 at 13:19, my Mac ran periodic monthly. I thought it odd that this would run on the 25th rather than the 1st of the month, and in the afternoon rather than late at night, so I dug a little deeper.

It looks as though Apple now deprecates cron in favor of launchd agents. Okay, fine. Yeah, I see that there are three periodic jobs:

> launchctl list | grep periodic-
-	-9	com.apple.periodic-monthly
13804	0	com.apple.periodic-weekly
-	-9	com.apple.periodic-daily

launchctl print system/com.apple.periodic-monthly shows details about the monthly job:

event triggers = {
        com.apple.periodic-monthly => {
                keepalive = 0
                service = com.apple.periodic-monthly
                ...
                descriptor = {
                        "Repeating" => true
                        "GracePeriod" => 14400
                        "Interval" => 2629746
                        ...

Nowhere does it say to run this job at a particular time on a particular day. Rather, as far as I can tell, it wants to run every 2629746 seconds. What’s that?

launchctl print system/com.apple.periodic-daily shows

"Interval" => 86400

which makes perfect sense, since 86400 is 60 × 60 × 24, the number of seconds in a day. And com.apple.periodic-weekly runs every 60 × 60 × 24 × 7 = 604800 seconds.

But 2629746, the monthly interval, is 43829.1 minutes = 730.485 hours = 30.4368 days. What the hell is that?

I note that the average month length in a year is 365/12 = 30.4166 days, which is close. And what with leap years, the average year is really 365.25 days long; 365.25/12 = 30.4375, which is close to the periodic-monthly interval. So maybe Apple took the length of the average century, when all leap days, century non-leap days, and millennial non-non-leap days are taken into account, and divided by the number of months in a century? Or something else? Who knows?

Maybe Apple has decided that it doesn’t matter when accounting and log-rotation jobs run, and that it’s okay for them to drift. Fine. Except that the simplest and easiest documented way of adding your own periodic jobs is to add a file to /etc/periodic/daily, /etc/periodic/weekly, or /etc/periodic/monthly. And people might want resource-intensive cleanup jobs to run in the middle of the night, and for reports to run on the first of the month. So what the hell, Apple?

Grand Reopening

A while back, I figured my site needed a bit of a facelift. So here it is. I’ve moved my posts from Epsilon Clue to here, and I plan on posting at ooblick.com rather than there.

Obviously, any time you move from one site to another like this, there’s the risk that people won’t follow you to the new site. To prevent this, I waited until no one was reading me there, so no one was affected by the move.

If you’ve somehow stumbled on this post in the future, be sure to update your RSS feeds, or whatever our robot overlords have replaced them with.