Welcome to Sensible Talk

SensibleTalk.com is Robert Niles' blog devoted to whatever he feels it makes sense to talk about.

I am an American.

In my country, there is no official language, so my government can't tell me what to say.

There is no official religion, so my government can't tell me what to believe or to think.

And everyone born here is a citizen, so the government can't pick and choose who gets rights, based on who our parents are.

These are not problems with America. These are the strengths that make our country great, and each of us, as Americans, should accept the responsibility to protect them.

I'm pasting the above to my Facebook profile today, and I invite you to copy-and-paste these sentiments around the Internet as well, as a statement against the religious fundamentalists in our country who disagree with them. Thank you.

And I thought the electoral college was bad.

Here are the results from yesterday's Parliamentary elections in the United Kingdom. Note the number of votes each of the top three party received, then the number of seats in the next House of Commons they'll have as a result:

Conservative: 10,706,647 votes - 306 seats
Labour: 8,604,358 votes - 258 seats
Liberal Democrat: 6,827,938 votes - 57 seats

Let me do the math for you:

The Conservatives won one seat for every 34,989 votes its candidates received.

The Labour party won one seat for every 33,350 votes its candidates received.

The Liberal Democrats won one seat for every 119,788 votes its candidates received.

The U.K.'s political system is a bit different than ours. The government's run by a Prime Minister, not a President, who is not elected by the people. Instead, the party with control of the lower house of Parliament (the House of Commons) designates its leader as the Prime Minister.

After yesterday's election, no party has a majority in the House of Commons, so either the Conservatives or Labour will have to strike a deal with the Liberal Democrats or the other, minor parties to control enough votes to appoint a Prime Minister.

But, wow, did the Liberal Democrats get jobbed.

How did this happen? Seats in Parliament are not appropriated according to the national vote. People in the U.K. vote in districts, as we in the United States do for our Representatives. But in the U.K., whichever candidates gets the most votes wins the seat, even if that candidate did not win a majority of the votes cast. This is called the first-past-the-post system.

First past the post works well when you've got two major parties, as the U.K. has had for most of its recent history. But when votes are split among three, four or even dozens of candidates, it often delivers winners who enjoy only a slight fraction of support within a district.

Indeed, what happened in the U.K. yesterday was that Liberal Democrat candidates drew enough votes away from Labour candidates that 100 new Conservatives won election to the House of Commons. This, despite the fact that U.K. voters collectively preferred the two liberal parties over the conservative one by a margin of 60% - 40%.

Contests between two candidates (or two parties) are easy. Let the citizens vote, and whoever wins the most votes wins. But what happens when you have three or more candidates seeking a seat?

Political scientists and game theory geeks have come up with dozens of different ways to narrow a wide field of candidates to a single winner. Most involve having voters pick second and third choices, or even ranking all the candidates, from most favorite to least. Read Wikipedia for the geeky detail.

One popular system listed in that article is an "instant runoff," where the candidate getting the least first-place votes is eliminated. Then, that candidate's votes are released and re-counted for the candidates those voters had picked as their second choice. If that doesn't give any candidate a majority, then the second-least popular candidate is eliminated, and so on.

That version of an instant runoff system allows the supporters of the least popular candidates first crack at determining who gets the "second chance" votes. I prefer an instant runoff system which counts everyone's second-choice ballot equally.

Here's my ideal voting system: If more than two candidates stand for a seat, voters should select a first and second choice. If no candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes, then the seat goes to the candidate that was selected as the first- or second-choice on the highest percentage of ballots, assuming that he or she was selected as such on at least 50 percent of the ballots cast.

If no candidate was selected as a first- or second-choice on a majority of ballots, then the two candidates who got the most selections as a first- or second-choice face off in an actual run-off election four weeks later. (Holding an election is expensive, so ideally you'd have a system that minimized the need for a separate, second round of voting.)

In the U.K., it's most likely that in districts where no candidate received a majority that the Liberal Democrat voters would have picked the Labour candidate as their second choice, and vice versa. So my system would have led to more seats for the Liberal Democrats and Labour, better reflecting the overall distribution of votes in the United Kingdom.

My system likely also would have delivered the U.K. a hung Parliament. But at least the Parliament would have more accurately reflected the political slant of the U.K. people, providing stronger encouragement for a Labour/Liberal Democrat coalition.

These feathered friends joined us for a spell on our walk around the neighborhood today:

Apologies for the low-res iPhone photo quality. And, yes, I know that they are a peacock and a peahen.

For 10 years, people bought over-priced houses they could not afford without borrowing extreme amounts of money that they would never be able to pay back. When that Ponzi scheme ended and the economy collapsed, the government chose first to bail out the bankers who made those loans.

The losers in that decision? Among others, the nation's kids.

Without bubble-inflated sales, income and property tax revenue, local and state governments are cutting back. With no second round of stimulus on the way from the feds, schools will have to gut their programs to cover these cuts. (FWIW, the bubble didn't inflate property tax revenue in California - Prop 13 decimated that in the mid-1970s, though, and our schools have been suffering that damage ever since.)

Why can't Congress pass another round of stimulus spending to help the nation's schools? Because now that the nation's banks have had their fill, members of Congress suddenly have discovered the deficit they didn't care about when Washington was bailing out Wall Street, paying off the pharmaceutical industry or funding two wars.

Funny how that works, isn't it?

Which city's sports fans have suffered the most?

As a stats geek, I'm not happy with answers that rely on goats and curses. Nor can I accept that fans of one team have suffered too terribly when the other pro teams in that same city have racked up one championship after another. (Jets fans, I'm looking at you.)

So in 2007 on my ThemeParkInsider.com site I developed a quantitative solution to answering this question: The Sports Misery Index.

In short, here's how it works: A city gets one point for each season played its pro sports teams since the last calendar year in which one of those teams won a championship. (For example: Pittsburgh gets one point for the NFL season which just ended in 2010, since it had a team - actually, two - win a title in 2009.)

We're counting Major League Baseball, the NFL, NBA and NHL here. And cities with two teams in one sport get only a single point for each season played in that sport. (This rule helps to keep from overstating the misery of LA and NY sports fans. C'mon, they gets lots of chances to win, as shown by their position on the chart below.)

So the more seasons in which you've had to watch your cities' teams fail to win a championship, the more you've suffered as a sports fan.

I have updated the Misery Index after the 2010 Super Bowl, in which the New Orleans Saints delivered a huge relief to the sports fans of that city, claiming its first-ever championship.

	City	Last title	Misery Score
1.	Cleveland	1964 (NFL)	131
2.	Buffalo	never	98
	San Diego	never	98
4.	Seattle	1979 (NBA)	90
5.	Minneapolis	1991 (MLB)	65
6.	Washington, D.C.	1992 (NFL)	57
7.	SF Bay Area	1995 (NFL)	56
8.	Atlanta	1995 (MLB)	52
9.	Kansas City	1985 (MLB)	49
10.	Houston	1995 (NBA)	41
	Dallas	1999 (NHL)	41
12.	Cincinnati	1990 (MLB)	39
13.	Milwaukee	1997 (NFL- Green Bay)	37
14.	Charlotte	never	35
15.	Denver	2001 (NHL)	33
	Phoenix	2001 (MLB)	33
17.	Portland	1977 (NBA)	32
18.	Salt Lake City	never	30
19.	Nashville	never	24
20.	Orlando	never	20
21.	Baltimore	2001 (NFL)	17
	Chicago	2005 (MLB)	17
23.	Tampa Bay Area	2004 (NHL)	16
24.	Jacksonville	never	15
25.	Miami	2006 (NBA)	13
26.	Columbus	never	10
	Memphis	never	10
	St. Louis	2006 (MLB)	10
29.	Indianapolis	2007 (NFL)	5
	Boston	2008 (NBA)	5
	Detroit	2008 (NHL)	5
	Philadelphia	2008 (MLB)	5
33.	Raleigh	2006 (NHL)	3
34.	San Antonio	2007 (NBA)	2
35.	Pittsburgh	2009 (NHL)	1
	New York/NJ	2009 (MLB)	1
	Oklahoma City	never	1
39.	Los Angeles	2009 (NBA)	0
	New Orleans	2010 (NFL)	0

I hope that fans will use the system in deciding which teams to root for, if their city doesn't have a team in the game. That said, while Cleveland, Buffalo and Seattle fans undoubtedly have suffered and deserve to see a championship parade, I can't see too many folks getting too upset about San Diego's sports drought. Not when San Diego fans get to drown their sorrows on a sunny, 70-degree beach. In January.

Anyway, congratulations New Orleans. (And this is coming from a Colts fan, remember.) And let's go Cavs!

This is for readers in the Los Angeles area (or anyone who's spent some time in LA).

Which of these old-school LA-area joints would you most like to go to for lunch?