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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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Yeah this and other "mathematically unbiased" district-drawing algorithms often get plenty of upvotes on Hacker News, so I've seen them. My first issue with them is that they often have to choose some arbitrary optimization criteria to close the space of the problem (e.g. for this one why is that the "shortest" splitline should be chosen among all splitlines?).

My second issue, more practically, is that you'll never get state congress critters to give up even a little bit of power, let alone the power of the district-drawing pen. But red-blooded Americans love a good competition so I'd like to almost think that it would become some sort of televised spectacle where each party announces its next line like it's the NFL Draft. Maybe even some will gamble on it (or would have, if the BBB didn't hamstring gamblers). The congress critters would even get additional time in the limelight, which we all know is what they truly crave aside from receiving a greasing of the palms from industry buddies and pals.