Status:
Feeling a bit better today but still pretty low. I tried a couple of tricks to shake me out of it, which usually work when I’m just in a funk, but they didn’t do their magic this time so I reckon this is the fatigue. Which is good as the fatigue passes with rest. Eventually.
One of the tricks was to dive into a spreadsheet. I transcribed all the voting results from the Birmingham elections into a big sheet and had a look at what the overall voting share looked like. The popular vote, if you will.
| Party | Votes | % | PR Seats | FPTP Seats | +/- |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Green | 56,230 | 20.29% | 20 | 19 | -1 |
| Reform | 55,666 | 20.08% | 20 | 23 | 3 |
| Labour | 55,486 | 20.02% | 20 | 17 | -3 |
| Con | 44,654 | 16.11% | 16 | 16 | 0 |
| LibDem | 29,941 | 10.80% | 11 | 12 | 1 |
| Ind | 27,547 | 9.94% | 10 | 13 | 3 |
| Worker | 5,054 | 1.82% | 2 | 1 | -1 |
| Your | 1,807 | 0.65% | 1 | 0 | -1 |
The Greens, Reform and Labour all got near as damn it 20% of the vote. The Greens officially won but not by a significant margin.
I then figured out how this might look using a simple proportional representation system, dividing the 101 seats accordingly. This was surprisingly close to how FPTP played out, which was rather annoying as I don’t like FPTP. Of course people would vote differently under a different system so not much should be read into this.
Here’s the Google doc if you want to make a copy of it and have a play yourself. I’m pretty sure I copied the results accurately but caveat emptor, I do have CFS.
Reading:
- Closure of Radio 4 on Long Wave — Feels like one of those “end of the 20th century” moments.
- The Asteroid and the Meaning of Life
- I want to live like Costco people — One of the best side-things about working at Loaf was access to the Booker cash & carry card, even though Booker is owned by Tesco and isn’t that much cheaper than in the supermarket. There’s something about wholesale… See also Selco.
- ‘Everyone was in tears’: the tenants given eviction notices just before ban in England — Whenever you see some sob story about landlords and their great burden, remember shit like this. Fucking terrible way for a society to manage a vital need.
- Why I love Brighton - reason no. 45: New Age bullshit — My old Brummie chum Danny has been living in Brighton for a while now and clearly doesn’t feel like a local yet.
- People who don’t like people are making all of our decisions — “We are living in the ultimate revenge of the nerds, driven by a crew of socially awkward tech bros who won’t stop until the society that they never quite fit into is obliterated." Years and years ago, at the dawn of social media as a concept, I was consulting for Will Perrin at Talk About Local, a startup looking to get neighbourhoods sharing news online using blogs and stuff. After the meeting I said offhandedly how ironic me advising on social media was as I didn’t really like people that much and used the internet to route around them (undiagnosed neurodivergent that I was). He said most of the people he was talking to were like that. It didn’t seem like a problem at the time.