Saturday, I spent a day indoors in the least likely of places, the 2022 Campaign Bootcamp for Vermont Republicans at the Capitol Plaza Hotel in Montpelier. Everything about the Bootcamp was professional and polite, but there wasn't the ooze of money that one might expect in other parts of the country -- and few ties or jackets.  I imagine the Democratic Party had a similar event, and probably with more people. In a hotel conference room, the many PowerPoint-assisted presentations on the mechanics of campaigning provided a refresher on how to ask people to do something: who to ask; how to ask; when to ask; what to ask; where to ask; and when to stop asking. There are clear similarities between the campaign techniques of this workshop and a VPIRG canvass: how to talk with people on the phone and in person. The window for productive canvassing is about 3 hours per day in the late afternoon, and weekdays are best. That's not a lot of time, so it needs to be used wisely. Bottom line...

  If you are the right age, you probably know the tune    My Hero, Zero  from watching Saturday morning cartoons. Zero is important for more than just efficient counting; it's useful for posing well-behaved minimization optimization problems (I welcome any mathematics critique). How could we tell if traffic safety efforts were effective? Try to count "lives saved"? People concerned with traffic safety took a long time to reimagine how to think about measuring safety and setting goals. It started in Sweden, of course. With  Vision Zero , there's an understandable objective, and, whether talking in absolute or relative terms, shrinking is going in the right direction. Just steer toward zero. Trying to control a robot in the real world? Then minimize the error between ideal motion and actual movement -- zero error is best. The same goes with any kind of machine learning, minimize the error. Do this by carefully assessing the problem and transforming it into somethi...

 Today is the day that three Vermont gubernatorial candidates (Stephen C. Bellows, Peter Duval, and Phil Scott), whose names are printed on the Republican primary ballot, were supposed to debate on Vermont Public Radio and Television. But Mr. Scott doesn’t feel like campaigning for his Republican nomination, “Gov. Phil Scott has told VPR-Vermont PBS he’s unavailable for a primary debate in June” (Matthew Smith, personal communication, 03 June 2022). So instead of letting me and Mr. Bellows go at it, VPR has decided to cancel its debate and cover bike touring instead. I expect that vtdigger will do the same.  There’s not much democracy without debate. No question about it, though; avoiding debate and interviews is an excellent political strategy. But it’s not the press’s job to be Governor Scott’s agent.  VPR yielded to Mr. Scott’s desire to have a summer vacation instead of a proper primary campaign. VPR said it would do candidate interviews instead of a true primary deba...

 Laney Smith is on the right track with yesterday's  commentary on VTDigger . We must drive less. The ecological problem requires it. Driving a car is only a part of the problem. There is the plowing, salting, sanding, painting, repairing, and reconstruction of the road, all of which have environmental and economic impacts. The road is a scar and barrier on the surface of the planet.  And then there is the existence of the car itself. I know. I too have lived my whole life as a car user. It's hard to imagine living in Vermont without a car. But I have gone long stretches without regularly using a car and visited car-free places. People live there without the worry and expense of trying to keep up with the high-consuming Joneses. Getting to car freedom is accomplished in discrete decisions: buy a car, or not; join a carsharing club, or not. It is not the smooth trajectory that macroeconomists tend to deal with. We must understand that as we go forward, deliberately and wit...

  Comments for March for Our Lives (Saturday, June 11, 2022) I wish I could be with you, but other obligations prevent me from attending the march. Thank you for reading my comments. I am a candidate for governor of Vermont. I am a fusion candidate, as David Zuckerman, Jim Douglas, and many other Vermonters have been. You will find my name printed on the Republican primary ballot.   I welcome write-in votes on all other primary ballots. Visit PeterForVermont.Earth for more information. Many of you have been moved to attend today’s rally because of recent high-profile mass shootings at Uvalde and Buffalo. These are the most visible of daily events -- well-documented by gunviolencearchive.org . Most mass shootings are also suicides, and suicides account for the majority of gun deaths. No amount of school security and hardening can defeat the many ways that people pursue suicide. With a suicide-by-gun at Mount Mansfield Union High School fresh in their minds, the good voters of...