https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/california-electrici...
Calling SONGS-2 or 3 functional is a stretch given their steam generator problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
A more laymans' terms comic that explains it with some FAQ built in: https://www.chickennation.com/voting/
It won't instantly change the world, but it will allow people to vote their true conscience vs. strategic voting, and allows smaller parties a chance at real power.
Seattle voted the two progressives on city council out (and Sawant retired) some time ago, homelessness has gone nowhere but worse since then. Like clockwork, we're adding another ~1000 street homeless/year.
As it turns out, the opposite-of-progressives don't have a solution for it either. Which isn't surprising, since they've held most of the council seats and the mayor's office for decades, it's just that now they don't have a progressive boogieman to blame for their failures. Meanwhile, Broadway and Pike and Denny and Pine look worse than they ever have, and so do the streets surrounding them.
It's almost like homelessness is an emergent property of a housing shortage.
The slate's politics seems to be pro-out-of-state-business/landlord/police, anti-density, anti-pedestrian, anti-homeless NIMBYism. Politically positioned as the common-sense solution to the insane progressive politics that have been ruining the city.
The metrics aren't exactly on their side. SPD continues to be an incredible combination of overpaid, unaccountable, incapable of hiring, useless, and actively dangerous to the public, the homeless numbers keep growing, rents and cost of living are rising, and the council is doing everything it can to stonewall the state's efforts to solving the housing crisis in the city.
> Why do you think things are so bad in the PNW compared to other places, if not the governance?
It might have something to do with the hundreds of thousands of highly paid people moving into an area which didn't build enough housing units to support them, thus displacing tens of thousands of people out of the margins and onto the street.
It probably didn't have as much to do with (a loud) minority of progressives that were on the council as we've been told.
I've only got a child's grasp of free market economics (and of musical chairs), but this seems to be the most predictable outcome of that sort of thing. When the number of people in an area exceeds the number of beds, some of those people will eventually be sleeping in tents.
Seattle has five-year waiting lists[1] for low-income housing, and practically no housing options for someone who is actually broke and homeless, even if they don't have an addiction.
It has some shelters, but shelters aren't housing. A shelter is a place you can (sometimes) sleep, it's not a place you can live in. And it doesn't have 9,000 empty shelter beds, to house all the street homeless, either.
You know where has abundant housing? NYC. A city with 10 times the population, but half the street homeless. Because the rest are housed. (A foreign concept to this city.)
But sure, I guess you like seeing thousands of street homeless all day, every day.[1] Because that's what you'd get, even if they were all sheltered (which Seattle won't do, either).
P.S. It damn well is the public's responsibility when public policies create the housing crisis.
[1] Which certainly put you in opposition to the expressed preferences of this entire city.
California is not a good model for almost anything these days, just look at the high speed rail project. Cost of living is worsening for the middle and lower classes who are emigrating to other states. The government is corrupt and inefficient, spending vast sums on homelessness while achieving effectively nothing. Progressives can't blame anyone but themselves since California is a one party state with no real opposition.