Yes, I always hate bringing that up because I would sincerely say that the Dems do gerrymander worse then the GOP, which is sort of like comparing Hitler-Stalin-Mao admittedly, and the visual appearance of those districts is what we use to prove it but its not really the best proof. The cautionary there though is that most 'objective' district concepts, which are sincere, basically are far more likely to create a republican flavored map because they typically operate by adding land parcels out from some starting points geometrically rather than, say, following a river or highway which is what populations generally do and city boundaries often do. A township in my area is, barring a big river or lake, a square, 8 km a side. Further west it's typically ~10 km, 6x6 mi. The villages incorporated inside them look like no such thing, take this map, only one of those especially craggy corporate boundary lines is a river. Those villages (<5000 pop) and 3 cities (5k+) annexed mostly by water pipes and dead end residential roads. FYI the colored-in sections all have equal population +/- 3.1%

You're likely right, but I do think it is the inevitable terminus of District Representation and I don't think its too bad an idea. I got a lot of practice gaging comprehension of phys/math word problems over the years so I can usually tell when people are following something and I've run it by people. The most common objection, too my surprise, was to my habit of using blocks of a thousand or decimals around 1, very commonly I just got a repeat of my own preference before I dumbed it down, "Why don't they just have votes equal to their district's population?"

As to who gets counted, that's pretty easy, nobody would ever count partial because the three-fifths baggage so its all in or no, citizen or not, binary. Non-voters always count though. My county has 101,000 people, 60,000 registered voters, about 42,000 that voted in Nov2012, and about 7,000 who showed up for the spring elections. Our norm for non-presidential General Elections is 22-30k. But man, woman, child, felon or non-voter are all counted. We've got a state pen in the district for instance, none of those guys are allowed to vote, they're convicted felons serving their term, but the ones who are citizens which is most are counted to the District population.

Only if you can convince them to do a random seed as part of it. There's a lot of tricks you can do if you know how the computer algorithm functions which would have to be public and if its not computerized its probably going to be partisan.

Reporters are mostly lazy and people tend to think 'read an article' constitutes serious research.

It's harsh, and also deserved. He made a great deal of effort to coming off as the middle of the road neutral arbiter in his early dealings with congress when he was actually pretty polar relative to the senate. The price for that spin is when he did get victories they were portrayed as a left-leaning compromise and his defeats looked even more a GOP victories over him. This probably was beneficial spin at the time but it made him look weak to his own and of course the GOP is happy to insult him as weak, and indies simply accept it as true. Pile on his initial portrayal as the man who would make other countries love us again and how badly that turned out he essentially got himself pinned as looking like a pushover. I suspect history will be much kinder to him then Carter but he's not likely to have a positive legacy to point to. Even if we eventually go the single payer HC route as I now think likely I suspect ACA will be credited less as the first step and more as the monstrosity which convinced people 'better Single-payer then ACA, if neither isn't an option'.

Vast numbers of companies have gotten waivers, some bordering on cronyism, many quite reasonable like high-turnover companies.

View original postP.S.: If you haven't seen the latest xkcd yet, fairly sure you would enjoy that one.

Not a normal reader but yeah that's a good one. I've often pointed out that shadow conspiracies are unlikely because they'd require too much competence to realistically exist based on what we've seen of things.