A few years ago I fixed a Washington Post candidate quiz using a spreadsheet. The problem with WaPo's version was that you could express your position on various issues but not how much you cared, which skewed the results.

I just launched a site to help with the large field of candidates for California Governor in the June primary.

This is much better than the spreadsheet. Instead of binary positions you answer ten questions with a sentence or two outlining your position on each issue. It doesn't need to be an essay, this works well with pretty directional statements. For each issue you also indicate how much you care on a 1-5 scale.

The site calculates the match between you and each candidate, weighted based on issue importance and then returns a ranked list as well as a summary of the candidates positions on each issue. Positions are included for Xavier Becerra, Chad Bianco, Steve Hilton, Matt Mahan, Katie Porter, Tom Steyer, Tony Thurmond and Antonio Villaraigosa.

Unfortunately it can't help with the tactics of voting in a jungle primary. I really wish ranked choice voting was a feature of this election so I could vote my preference without fear of allowing one of my least favorite candidates to reach the general election.

Technically this site is an experiment in using a lot of AI.

I researched candidate positions using OpenAI deep research to arrive at a brief paragraph for each candidate and issue.

The UX is courtesy of Claude Design which created a design system based on this blog but punched up the look and feel for a new microsite.

The site itself was created with Codex and GPT 5.5 and lives in a Cloudflare worker.

Candidate ranking is based on vectors - candidate and user positions are converted to embeddings using OpenAI text-embedding-3-large and then cosine similarity and simple weighting of issue importance generates the final score for each prospective Governor.

All of that probably took the same amount of time as the spreadsheet version from 2020.

Because of the embeddings I call this Retrieval Augmented Voting, check it out at rav.ithoughthecamewithyou.com.

• Measure A, Earthquake Safety and Emergency Bond Measure
• Measure B, Term Limits for Mayor and Board of Supervisors Charter Amendment
• Measure C, Gross Receipts Tax Exemption and Top Executive Pay Tax Increase Initiative
• Measure D, Changes to Top Executive Pay Tax Initiative

Only four measures to decide on for June! I'm sure we'll be punished for this in November. Here goes:

Measure A, Earthquake Safety and Emergency Bond Measure

Measure A asks San Francisco for $535 million in general obligation bonds to seismically retrofit fire stations, harden police facilities, replace the 110-year-old Potrero Bus Yard, and finally extend the Emergency Firefighting Water System into the Sunset and Richmond, which apparently the previous three earthquake bonds since 2010 forgot about. The USGS puts the odds of a 6.7+ Bay Area earthquake in the next thirty years at 72%. Repayment runs about $933 million over 25 years and doesn't raise property tax rates above the existing cap.

Yes. Working fire infrastructure after an earthquake is a good use of funds. This also upgrades police stations and will be used for the Potrero Yard MUNI project. The MUNI part was previously defeated as a ballot measure in June 2022 (I voted for it then, and happy to do so again this year).

Measure B, Term Limits for Mayor and Board of Supervisors Charter Amendment

Measure B caps service as mayor or supervisor at two four-year terms over an entire human lifetime. Current law already limits supervisors to two consecutive terms with a four-year cooling-off period; this closes the loophole that lets a former officeholder return after sitting out. In the twenty-five years since district elections came back in 2000, exactly one person has used that loophole. Prop B amends the city charter to prevent it from happening again.

Yes. After two terms, find something else to do. More specifically this amendment means you can't take four years off and then run again, and I'm fine with this change.

Measure C, Gross Receipts Tax Exemption and Top Executive Pay Tax Increase Initiative

Measure C, sponsored by the SF Chamber of Commerce, accelerates a planned business tax cut by a year and raises the small-business gross-receipts exemption from $5 million to $7.5 million, helping about 800 businesses. The controller estimates it costs the city $30-40 million a year, in a year already $169 million in the hole. It also exists primarily to neutralize Prop D - if both pass, whichever gets more votes wins.

No. This is designed to kill measure D, which I also oppose, but it also costs $30-$40 million a year in more generous small business exemptions.

Measure D, Changes to Top Executive Pay Tax Initiative

Measure D, sponsored by SEIU and IFPTE Local 21, raises the Top Executive Pay Tax by 800-900% on companies with more than 1,000 employees and $1 billion in revenue whose top executive earns more than 100x the median worker, and redefines "median worker" from the median San Francisco employee to the median global one - which sweeps in basically every large retailer, bank, and tech firm with an SF office. Estimated revenue: $250-300 million a year. Several grocery chains and pharmacies have publicly threatened to leave if it passes.

No. This is a ridiculous tax and I want no part of it. I voted against this in 2020. If we want a tax to signal disapproval of large companies, perhaps it should be based on the percentage of stock that is locked up so you need to ring a bell to get it, but the employee with the key is on a break or otherwise busy. But I don't even think we should do that.

Virginia joins the National Popular Vote movement, bringing the total to 222 electoral college votes. Once we reach 270 presidential politics will pivot from a few hundred thousand swing voters to the needs of the entire nation. We probably wouldn't have elected Trump I and might not be suffering through Trump II today. This is getting close - do something!

I've sometimes wondered how often I agree with San Francisco on the endless ballot measures. I have a vague sense after each election but I've never bothered with the bigger picture. Thanks to AI it's now a pretty easy question to answer - I fed blog posts to ChatGPT and then the resulting data to Claude Opus to whip me up some python visualization. Which looks like this:

That's a decade of trying to understand what the measures actually mean and do the right thing.

Maybe there is a downward trend, but throw away the outliers and I'm pretty solidly around 70%. San Francisco should save the money and just ask me.

Abolish ICE protest at Ocean Beach on Jan 31, 2026. We're in the top right of the B. Photo from Yahoo News.

Starmer might start to do better in the polls if he arms Denmark with Trident. Trump seems to respond better to strength rather than weakness, and a deterrent if Kalaallit Nunaata Radioa [1] ever goes off the air could be established.

This might seem impractical. The UK needs a nuclear option and doesn't have much to give. But we don't need to hand over subs and train the Danish navy. Unlike the US there isn't a complicated nuclear football and authenticated launch sequence. We could just add the Danish prime minister to the chain of command. Some simple enabling legislation, and two envelopes in the safe instead of one. Only Mette Frederiksen would know the contents of the second envelope.

This is crazy, but it hasn't been a normal January and at some point the policy of appeasement has to end.

[1] I once listened to a Radio 4 Today Program interview with a Trident submarine commander. He said that every morning at 6am they came up to periscope depth and listened for the Today Program. If he couldn't find it then it was safe to assume that civilization had ended and he was free to unleash armageddon. The very next day the Today Program was off air due to strike, and I was briefly terrified. It turns out they check three times.

Public approval of Congress hovers in the teens, but instead of kicking them out, we reelected incumbents 97 percent of the time in 2024. Representatives fear primary challenges more than voters, and they spend much of their time fundraising for the next election.

We could get rid of gerrymandering, impose term limits, extend House terms, and introduce federal funding for elections.

Instead, we have Proposition 50. This introduces a completely partisan redistricting of California with the intent of counteracting a similar effort in Texas. It expires with the normal redistricting that will follow the 2030 census, although who knows if that will actually happen. It will likely spark repetition in more states.

With much regret, I'm a yes on 50.

It will be impossible to fix America's creaky democracy once it no longer exists.

I'm not in favor of quietly returning to the status quo in 2030. We have learned how much of our system depends on good intent, and this must change. Demand a citizen-driven constitutional convention. Resist the failed state that we seem intent on becoming.

TLDR: If you live in San Francisco and have windows, please consider signing this letter.

I need to replace my front window. The wood is rotten. While San Francisco never gets that cold, all the cold there is whistles in through the gaps.

In general I want to make my house a little bit more energy efficient whenever I replace something. I'd assumed I could find some nice looking double paned replacements and get on with my life. Sane jurisdictions even require certain levels of insulation for this kind of project. San Francisco went the other way. There is a 14 page guide to the requirements. Which boil down to window originalism, if your house is old enough:

"Another significant difference is that vinyl, fiberglass, and aluminum windows often do not have an important detail that is common on most older wood windows: the Ogee (pronounced Oh-jee) lugs at the bottom of the top sash (also called the meeting rail) of a double-hung window."

Yes, when Meta and Red Hat cancelled their conferences in San Francisco I'm pretty sure it was the lack of Ogees.

What about some double paned units?

"There should be an interior space bar, preferably of a dark color, within the insulated unit that visually divides the interior and exterior grilles."

This relates to divided light windows (i.e. you've got multiple panes of glass in one window). You might want to just have a single double paned window, but no, it needs to be in keeping with the original. You might then think that you could put some wood details over that single window but no, just in case someone looks closely and at an angle there has to be a shim inside to simulate it being multiple individual panes.

Doesn't the city care about the environment at all?

"While the advantages of double-paned windows are well known, a properly weatherstripped, single-glazed sash window can greatly reduce or eliminate air, noise and air infiltration (where most energy is lost)."

Greatly reduced is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Looking at U Values here, the rate of energy transfer in watts per square meter per Kelvin (1°C = 1K) – W/m2K, old single pane windows are over 4.8, modern double paned are 1.3 and triple paned 0.8. Lower is better, almost four times better just for double paned.

I don't know exactly how these requirements came into force. It could be out of touch planners wanting windows for a more civilized era. Maybe there is a concentrated benefit / diffuse cost thing going on in favor of a few eye wateringly expensive custom window builders. But when you're trying to pretend that single paned windows are a boon to the environment something has clearly gone very wrong.

Even at the aesthetic level I'm not sure we need all the Ogees. I love the chaotic architectural chaos of San Francisco. The hot pink victorian next to the grey brutalist remodel. It's part of the charm of the city. Also, the expense of complying with what was popular 100 years ago cannot help with affordability, a key challenge.

Happily my supervisor, Myrna Melgar, has proposed legislation to shred this document and allow most people to choose replacement windows that best fit their needs. It looks like her proposal is currently on a three month vacation with the planning department. If you have windows and live in San Francisco you should probably care about this, and you can sign a letter to show your support for the change here.

Updated 2025-05-03 17:06:

This passed!!!

MUNI is headed for a ~$300 million deficit over the next couple of years. A small part of this is my fault. I live where I do for easy access to public transport. I used to take the 28 to work at least three times a week before the pandemic but like many people in San Francisco I now work from home. That's only part of the story though. MUNI decided to let kids ride free, and this is about 15% of their ridership. Many people over 18 decide not to pay as well, and fare dodging is reportedly around 20%. Over a third of passengers are not paying at this point.

As recently as 2021 fares were almost 20% of MUNI's revenue. In the 2024-2025 budget that's down to 8%, $108 million out of a $1.4 billion dollar budget.

In the short term MUNI has to reverse the trend on fares. My kids can afford to pay (at least I can) and a transit system in crisis should not be subsidizing my family's commute. MUNI has added more fare inspectors, and maybe that would help, but other steps could be taken here. MUNI fare gates don't check that you've paid on exiting the system - why not? Busses could enforce boarding at the front and producing payment or proof of payment. We can't have one fifth of users skipping payment. Also, the diverse range of payment methods removes any social pressure to pay. If I board and sit down without tagging I could be a fare dodger or I could have bought and used a mobile pass.

Longer term we need to be less embarrassing. You can't have an It All Starts Here campaign and then install whatever these ugly things are. We're also going to spend $200 million replacing the floppy disks that run light rail (maybe with laserdiscs?). San Francisco is the heart of the AI revolution. We take driverless cars instead of Ubers. MUNI's ballooning costs are largely people. At the very least the light rail system should be fully automated.

I guess we have to pretend we want to shoot you in the face to win at this point?

Arizona, Michigan, and all the other swing states - I love you, but you should get one person one vote. We need a National Popular Vote. We need more ranked choice voting. But most of all we do not need another four years of Trump, and so I'll be enthusiastically voting Harris/Walz in 2024. I'd rather have whatever remains from this lettuce than suffer through another Trump term. If you have allowed yourself to believe that Harris is as much of a threat to democracy as Trump, remember that the supreme court is lost to the right for a generation, hold your nose, and vote Harris/Walz. If you're concerned that Walz has stretched the truth a couple of times in the service of a good story, check out these 30,573 examples from Trump.

Trump lost in 2020. Vance can't say it for some reason, and that's disqualifying just by itself. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016. 65% of Americans support electing the President on the popular vote (make it happen here). A majority of Americans support safe access to abortion. A majority of Americans favor stricter gun control laws. A majority of Americans support free college. A majority of Americans support Federal health care. A majority of Americans support same sex marriage (data here). This is a very sane country in thrall to a dangerous and dare I say deplorable minority. If you're not registered to vote, get registered. If you're Stein or Kennedy curious get that out of your system by writing your representative and demanding ranked choice voting. And then vote for Harris/Walz so we can put this Trump thing to bed and find some path back to a politics that actually works for America.