urbanMSP

1. Hodges
2. Dehn
3. NLP

Look a lot of you may know that I was pretty strong Frey to start, but he has screwed up... a lot. Starting with crime, I got eeked out by some of the language that was written in the plan for downtown. Then he tries to attack Hodges on the budget issues while all other candidates (besides Hoch) are staying quiet. He's just consistently been going after Hodges on issues that really aren't worth it. He's told developers to do certain things, like keeping height down, just because he's scared it may hurt his election chances. The coming out for Jacob profile picture that quickly came down. Skipping the plastic bag ban vote while his wife is actively lobbying against banning them.

Hodges has been decent, and the city council has a good chance of flipping key seats to make the city even better. PLEASE VOTE FLETCHER IF YOU'RE IN THE 3RD WARD. Dehn is popular with the student population and makes me feel special. I feel like he has enough experience understanding that we need to keep moving forward with sustainability issues, and one of those issues is housing. Nekima has an awesome housing plan, but honestly the charter schools, defending the golf course and occasional accusatory actions has her at 3rd.

I think this will be my same list. I really don't want Frey, even if he'd be better than Hoch, and I think Hodges will improve and work well with progressive CMs. NLP and Dehn....not sure they're ready to be mayor but I like their messages.

I was on team Frey at first. He came to my house to ask for my support and helped me move some firewood, and he seemed to be on my same page, but the whole interaction seemed scripted and very sales-y. Then I noticed whenever I emailed him about bike and ped safety issues (I work in his ward) that I didn't like some of the responses. Just seemed like they didn't really care and were trying to convince me that it was fine, and some of the responses from him directly seemed like...well like he was running for mayor rather than responding to a concerned resident. "I led on this and that bike thing, that pedestrian thing," stats, etc. Seemed defensive, like he took it personally, like I was wrong. And then after one email he declared that he wanted to talk to me on the phone and gave me his cell number. Which is fine, he is known for that, I actually like that about him, but then he found my number somewhere (probably DFL database) and called me and texted me before I even had a chance to call him. I really didn't like that, seemed very pushy, crossed a boundary with me.

Then the public attacks on Hodges which seemed really skeezy, then the cop union-related donations, the conflicts of interest and former "business darling" status, his alliance with Barb and Goodman, his statements about Minneapolis needing "ambition" and "swagger"....I couldn't support him anymore. And his staff is being really annoying on Twitter, claiming that the recent criticisms of his record were coordinated by one of the other campaigns and that men were unfairly ganging up on his female staffer.

He seems overall very Clintonian, willing to compromise, wanting to get things done rather than do the right thing, seems more driven by personal ambition, tries to be everything to everyone, cultish followers and staff, kind of condescending, overly image focused....I just don't like him.

I didn't see those interactions in real time, but it sure looked to me looking back at it like the staffer in question waded into Ben's mentions, responding to each criticism he had of Frey.

Which is fine, but don't complain that people are bullying you when you picked a fight.

People I know (and know to be honest) in the restaurant industry are saying things like this about Jacob Frey:

One of my biggest regrets of the tip credit battle was failing to record a conversation with him and several industry professionals, in which he told us that he thinks an increase in minimum wage without a tip credit is regressive and harmful to the BOH, while publicly being against a tip credit.

I’ve also heard from other owners that he told them to their faces that he supports a tip credit. Jacob Frey represents the worst of slimy politicians.

It seems to be par for the course for him - tell people what they want to hear and then do whatever is the politically expedient thing. Whatever you think about the tip credit, this is not a man who should be mayor. He lacks core beliefs.

Meanwhile, union types that I'm social media friends with (but otherwise don't really know) who worked on the other side are saying basically the same things about him.

People I know (and know to be honest) in the restaurant industry are saying things like this about Jacob Frey:

One of my biggest regrets of the tip credit battle was failing to record a conversation with him and several industry professionals, in which he told us that he thinks an increase in minimum wage without a tip credit is regressive and harmful to the BOH, while publicly being against a tip credit.

I’ve also heard from other owners that he told them to their faces that he supports a tip credit. Jacob Frey represents the worst of slimy politicians.

It seems to be par for the course for him - tell people what they want to hear and then do whatever is the politically expedient thing. Whatever you think about the tip credit, this is not a man who should be mayor. He lacks core beliefs.

A slick, young male mayor with no core beliefs could be especially damaging. Make the compromise with the devil and then sell it with a smile.

Although I like Dehn an awful lot as a person, he's much too beholden to the Our Revolution peeps. NLP has not demonstrated any interest in actually governing.

My issue with Dehn comes from his call to disarm the police. It is true that the Minneapolis police have a long history of being a bad department in terms of the excessive use of force. On the other hand, I've lived most of my life on the fringes of society and have met a lot of truly terrible people. I know that if the police are disarmed, there are people (criminals) in this city who will have no qualms about taking advantage of that fact. I've met some of them personally. If we had as few guns in this country as the UK or Australia I could see the argument for disarming the police but as long as there are 300,000,000+ guns circulating in the US it is an utterly nutty idea. The last thing we want is for the police to be unarmed while criminals are not. We would need at least a generation of real nationwide gun control for it to be a good idea. The fact that people are dying at the hands of the police is a major problem, but I also worry about those responsible for the other 40 to 60 homicides per year.

It makes me wonder what other barmy ideas he has in his head. People who can think outside of the box are useful in legislatures because they often come up with creative solutions, but are also in an environment where their bad ideas are left on the cutting room floor. They are less suited for leadership positions.

NLP has some good ideas, and she is definitely a person who should be in the conversation of how we run the city, but some of what I have seen online makes me question whether she has the temperament to govern, and whether she cares about the residents of the city who aren't part of her immediate constituency. I am tempted to make her my third choice but I think she would be better suited on the city council or in the legislature.

I have basically come to Hodges and Hoch by process of elimination. All of the other candidates are so fundamentally flawed that there is no way I can vote for them.

Ray Dehn never proposed disarming the police.

No?

http://www.citypages.com/news/mayoral-c ... /436728243

I just don't see how Hoch can be in play. To the extent he's willing to say anything, it's that he won't do anything that "people" dislike. That's not leadership, especially when it's an older, wealthy white guy saying it. He's a puppet waiting for Barb Johnson to operate him.

My old neighbors used to have a fancy, catered New Years party every year in their double unit condo (we stayed in my place doing tequila shots &, in the case of my MIL, spilling popcorn everywhere). Lisa Goodman was usually there. When I actually went, it was painful. Old, rich, white, ostensibly liberal people who would not so subtly complain about how Hennepin Ave was a "ghetto." I don't recall meeting Hoch there, but I can totally see it in my head. It's him.

Re Ray, yeah, he's a little nutty and while I think what he meant about disarming police was misconstrued, he's right that our police are over armed and we should be de-escalating first.

But you don't need to vote for Ray. Vote for Hodges. Hoch is terrible.


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Tom Hoch donated to Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek several times from 2014-2016. Stanek sent Hennepin County Sheriffs to beat up protesters/water protectors at Standing Rock. Stanek treats Hennepin County Jail (which is also the City of Minneapolis jail) as an open pipeline to ICE. https://twitter.com/NaomiKritzer/status ... 3886230528

Hoch's mailers and tweets are all full of anti-Black dog whistle bullshit. I admire his work at Minneapolis Public Housing and Hennepin Theater Trust, but his abhorrent views have been getting a free pass this cycle.

The mailer Hoch sent to our house says there's a crime problem in our neighborhood, where there's effectively no crime: https://twitter.com/ajm6792/status/919316604554502146

The solution he proposes: a review of our policing.

Seriously, there's no substance at all. Just fear mongering and dog whistling.

This affects all Minneapolis and St. Paul races but I had to pick a thread.

This really, really annoys me:

http://www.startribune.com/with-a-month ... 447982593/

To correctly determine how to redistribute votes from eliminated candidates, one must know the order of rankings on each ballot. With a small field of candidates, this is not very difficult. But the possible combinations of ballot rankings increases exponentially with more candidates.

My (yet-to-be-moderated) comments:

Under Minneapolis' system, the number of rankings does not increase exponentially. Since Minneapolis only allows ranking three candidates, that's 16*15*14 = 3360. The 3120 number is 16*15*13 which seems wrong to me. I may have missed something though.

If Minneapolis did it correctly and allowed all candidates to be ranked, we'd have 16! possible rankings, so it would grow factorially, which is much faster growth than exponential.

But with three rankings, growth is only n!/(n-3)! = n*(n-1)*(n-2) = (n^2 - n)*(n-2) = n^3 - 3n^2 + 2n so the growth is only polynomial.

Knowing how to count is important! Especially given sensational statements meant to make something look complicated when it isn't. Heck, even with factorial growth this isn't complicated to understand. It's simply a number of runoff elections run in sequence until someone gets more than 50% of the remaining votes.

The growth in the theoretical number of rankings has no bearing whatsoever on how complex the counting is. And it isn't very complex.

This is a very good example of why we need to teach these "advanced" math concepts in secondary school.

I love some good pedantry, but I don't think the mathematically accurate word choice makes any difference here.

Somehow, I think saying, "But the possible combinations of ballot rankings increases polynomially with more candidates" makes this seem more complicated than "exponentially."

This is perhaps hyperbole, but I'd call it pretty tame.

Well, the real point is that the number of possible rankings has absolutely zero to do with how much time it takes to count. With a naive algorithm I come up with O(B*NlogN) where N is the number of candidates and B is the number of ballots. Way, way less than exponential growth.

The "helpful" article is sensationalizing, making something appear more complicated than it actually is.

Just to pile on... "Exponentially" is well-understood for most people discussing rapidly increasing numbers as time (or, in this case, x-axis units) increase - it's a colloquial term. Nobody says "it increased polynomially" even if that's technically true.

I don't think the difference between exponential or polynomial makes the number so significantly different, more/less complicated. Better math education for this journalist wouldn't have made it easier to explain to readers. I think most people understand that a computer can handle datasets in this range, whether is in the order of 10-30,000 or 1 million possible ballots. Both require a little more anticipation than a basic Excel tool, but neither are so complicated that the city would have to outsource the computations to Cray. The journalist wasn't sensationalizing anything, just making people aware that this is actually a bit more complicated than a single choice ballot.

And all that is secondary to explaining to the general public how RCV works in a simplified tool, which was in fact good journalism (and what people really needed to know).

Both require a little more anticipation than a basic Excel tool, but neither are so complicated that the city would have to outsource the computations to Cray.

Well damn, and here I thought I was finally gonna get a commission!

The best term to use would probably be 'super-linear' growth, but no one knows what that means. I must admit that I've used 'exponential' in place of "faster than linear growth" for simplicity/understanding at times, and I'm an MSE with a math bachelor's.

EDIT: ...and not to be difficult, but this actually could be done with something as simple as Excel. I don't even think the number of potential combinations has much to do with the complexity (you only need to check a tiny number of them). You simply have to keep track of how many 1's, 2's, and 3's each candidate gets. It's really nothing more than adding subject to some logic constraints which are only applied after the summation is complete. There's only about 400,000 residents of Minneapolis, even if they all voted you'd have nothing bigger than a 400,000x16 matrix of results (piece of cake in Excel). I'm with David Greene here, this shouldn't be construed as complex. It takes a bit of learning to understand what your vote actually does, but that's about it.

All of this talk about math just serves to make ranked choice voting pointlessly complicated. At the end user, it's very simple. Rank your candidates in order of preference. That is all people need to know.

I mean, I knew y'all were nerds. But I didn't know you were math nerds.