"We did vote". Except that an extraordinary number of people that could vote, didn't. So when somebody says "vote, people", they're obviously talking to those people that chose not to vote.
I think my idea for this is that a candidate doesn’t win the election unless they get more than 50% of all eligible votes, not 50% of the votes cast. If there is no clear winner the seat is vacant, but a new election is scheduled for two weeks later. Districts and states that don’t care to vote simply don’t get a say.
> I think my idea for this is that a candidate doesn’t win the election unless they get more than 50% of all eligible votes, not 50% of the votes cast.
This would think out the representation significantly, and applied to presidential voting would be rather dificult. The highest share of eligible voters in US history to support a US President is 42.6% for Ulysees S. Grant (Harrison and McKinley both close behind with +40%). Not one President has ever broken the 50% of eligble voters mark, and even those presidents that won in relative landslides in the EC (Washington, Monroe, Roosevelt, Reagan, Nixon) all had shares of the eligible votes that were in the 30%’s.
Yes and the idea would be to change both politician and voter behavior. To me these arguments are like saying that because we have always put water into round glasses it would never fit in a square one.
Understood and appreciate the reply. It’s a very high bar to clear, though.
In Australia where there is compulsory voting (and fines for not voting) the turn out in the most recent national election was about 91%. If you have to get 50% of the eligible voters this means attracting about 55% of the ones who do turn up and vote.
In that same country, only 1 (Sydney) of the 172 seats in the House of Represenatives was won by a candidate with more than 55% of the vote but turnout in that district was ‘only’ 87.4%. Even though the candidate won 55% of the 87% of eligible vote, she fell 3700 votes short of winning 50% of all eligible voters.
Australia make it compulsory to vote and easy to vote, too, and they still can’t get everyone to the polls. And even in the safest seat in the country, you still have the clear winner - the second place candidate was 34 points back! - falling short of the 50% of eligible voters mark.
Grandted, Australia is a different system to the US, but I would be interested to understand how you imagine you could get people to vote when the threat of fines and prosecution still sees countries like Australia fall 10% short of perfect attendance, and then why setting a higher bar than 50% + 1 vote results in a better system.
I suspect one way might be to make it very easy to vote, expensive (in fines or in criminal penalties) to not vote, and then to restrict the number of candidates to a two. But the downsides to that (forcing people to make a political choice or be fined, offering only two options in a complex world) seem significant, too.
Scored approval voting takes care of ten candidates. And sure let’s say after 3 elections with no winner fines could be imposed too, Australia style. But I would hope that having no representation while having the opportunity to have representation would be motivation enough.
there is no "scored approval voting". approval voting is literally score voting with a 0-1 binary score scale, and with the scores implicit in the state of an empty or filled oval.
It was more like Obama was so cool and had so much panache he won despite having an extremely incompetent team...and then both he and his team believed he won because of them and proceeded to self-sabotage the DNC from within.
To be clear, I'm not excusing him. I think he was very cool indeed but ultimately a weak president that lacked in leadership before and after his term
It depends on the context, but I think the heart of leftism/rightism is described by the idea of slave/master morality described by nietzsche and others.
In our nation it's a bit different, because the right wing is also seen as christian while the left-wing is more athiest. I would chalk that down to a certain duality that exists within each wing, which I think is desirable.
No, and I'm not sure why you're purposefully being obtuse.
To be clear, they're baiting because their reply starts with "oh yeah?" which is a clear indication they are not truly willing to hear a different argument.
I think that leftists are motivated by some animosity for winners that makes them worship losers. So whatever strategy they develop tends to be ineffective in the long run. Whenever some figure breaks out and becomes effective at accomplishing some purported goal, leftists have to dis-associate with them.
Elon musk is an example. I don't think elon ever had an allegiance to the right wing, but he was basicially forced into some right wing alliance after far-left became critical of him for being a successful industrialist. It was breakup that basicially didn't need to happen if the left was more unified and diplomatic in their relations. Compare that to how right wingers dealt with their disagreements with him over immigration: it's not like the whole right wing shattered due to purity tests. Elon's worldview is essentially that of 2010s neoliberal reddit, same of Joe Rogan and whatever other figures that have supposedly "turned to the dark side".
Like for example, I think you could solve environmental problems more effectively by tricking the right wing into believing they were always environmentalists then by supporting leftist-environmental causes which have a tendency to devolve into grievance politics about natives and biodiversity and such. I think intersectionality is probably one of the worst memes spawned from leftist academia, it just feeds into attention seeking behavior and basicially prevents leftists from holding any reasonable goals within their own group.
But mostly I think the problem is like I said earlier, the emergence of control freaks. Like they try too hard to control the discussion and enact censorship, and most people see through that. It's like people who think they are smart by conciously moving the overton window to the left, but it actually invites a disproportinate response away from them. Thats how I would describe the current socio-political situation.
Get involved with your local dems at a grassroots level, and help break the incumbents that are hell-bent on maintaining the status quo. You need fresh faces in congress that don't believe it's all just a game.
One of the biggest challenges I have as an ambitious engineer and a father of two, is that I do actually have plenty of time to be a high achiever in both facets of my life, but only if I'm working in isolation.
My kids are active in about 12-13 hour period between 6.30am and 7.30pm. The rest of the time they're asleep. On school days, window of time in which I can actually be present with them narrows right down to two blocks: 6.30-8.30, and 3.30-7.30. That's only 6 hours in a business day in which I can be active and present with them, leaving me with 18 hours to get everything else done.
There's obviously more to being a dad than just being actively engaged with your children when they're at home and awake. There's all this supplemental work that needs to happen to support them as well. But it's not _that_ much.
The problem is that this I spend with my children actively overlaps the time in which my peers and co-workers are working. Not being available to my teams for synchronous communication slows down their execution, and not having my team available to me while I'm working slows down my own execution. When my team or I need answers or collaboration to unblock us, communicating asynchronously means we can potentially be blocking for half a day or more on a task.
At that point you can either just wait and be unproductive, or start/continue a different task, maintaining multiple active work streams. The latter is problematic for a number of reasons, such as the increased cognitive load of regular context switching, an inability to work on dependent tasks, etc.
So ultimately for me, I don't think the issue is that there's not enough time to do both, it's just that both work and family generally need you at the same time.
A CEO's job isn't the one that everybody here apparently thinks it is. A CEO's job is networking, marketing and PR. They get paid the way they do because they can get into the rooms they need to get into to build the inter-business relationships they need to build.
Yes, but the way you're phrasing it suggests there's something getting lost in translation. A CEO's job is to perform the role of CEO: when the head of engineering wants to zig, and the head of marketing wants to zag, they need to choose between the two in a way that leaves no question about what the decision is or whether the direction should be followed. I don't think people would obey an AI oracle in that way, I certainly wouldn't.
That's right. Obviously they need to build a network before they become a CEO, but that's what Ivy League's, family connections, and exclusive private schools are for.
In Australia, the government has certified OAuth2 Identity Providers which act as a broker between social media sites and a provider that can verify your age, such as a bank. This allows age to be verified by a provider, with the social media provider having no access to your identity. If the social media companies chose to support this, they would be complying with the legislation. It's not the government forcing you to identify yourself.
This gives the identity brokers full insight into what sites you are visiting. Worse yet, it consolidates the information in one, easily leaned-on place: If I provide an ID to 3 non-Australian companies, sure, those companies know who I am, but the government or other companies would need to extract that information from each one. With an OAuth scheme, all that information is in one convenient place for the surveillance freaks.
They're brokering the negotiation, they're not actually the identity provider. The broker has no knowledge of your actual identity. So in this case, the identity provider (such as your bank) knows that you've been referred by the broker and that you wish to provide your verified age and only that age. The social media company knows that you've chosen to use the specific broker to verify your age, but not who the actual identity provider is. The broker knows that a request with your metadata (IP addr, HTTP headers, etc.) has been initiated between a specific social media site and a specific identity provider, but they don't have access to your actual identity.
Nobody in the negotiation has a complete picture. To correlate it all together, you would need logs from all 3. And at least in the Australian case, due to our data retention laws, if you've got logs from the social media provider, then you can already associate the user with a specific identity by requesting the information from the ISP which they legally must retain for 2 years, so it's really not necessary.
All this concern about social media privacy is a little ridiculous IMO. If you're using social media then you've already compromised your identity. If somebody wants to find out who you are, they already can. They don't need a verified identity, and social media companies seem to me more than willing to cooperate with governments. Law enforcement has been using this type of correlating data for years to establish identity in CSAM investigations.
It should be written into law that they (the intermediary identity brokers) cannot sell or share any information with data brokers. They should be an independent organization funded by the government, but without its funding tied to yearly renewals (otherwise they would need to curry favor on a yearly manner to whomever is in power).
I'd love to see a way for people to revoke/replace their personal info, kinda like rotating passwords or changing their names - but for street address, birthday, government ID numbers, etc.
Penalties (of any scale) are insufficient to ensure absolute security.
> What I don't understand is why parents don't take responsibility for reducing the contact with such harmful products.
It's critical mass. I didn't want my 13-year-old daughter on social media, because even 7 years ago we knew the harms. We were firm, and we kept her off it. The problem was that we were attempting to help her with her mental health, but when you're literally the only kid who didn't read the group chat from your friend group the night before, that does remarkable damage to your mental health. It cuts off an enormous part of their social life.
If the majority of kids weren't using it then it'd be easy, but because it's their primary form of communication, it's incredibly difficult.
Do you think there could be explicitly child-friendly social media? I don't know how you'd get past the network effect, but could it work? Maybe adults would have to set up groups, and connections could only be established with Bluetooth or something to ensure physical proximity (yes you could cheat but you'd need weird hardware or software to do so).
Adults setting up groups would be so that you could have a group for "year 11 maths class" but not for "people who hate susan"
It'd be fine if they were just using chat apps. It's not the communication that's the problem, or the bullying. That's going to happen regardless, and it's nothing new to online spaces. If anything, having online spaces available is helpful, because kids who are excluded at school are able to find places they fit in online. It's the algorithmic feeds and short-form video content. It's flooding their brains in their most formative time.
Strangers are fine. It's strangers in social contexts where strangers can do harm that's the problem. An unsupervised 8-year-old on Hacker News isn't going to get groomed; an 8-year-old on Snapchat might well be.
If you draw a firm boundary with that contributor, and they continue to push, ban them.
"This doesn't meet the standards of our project for reason xyz. Please refrain from submitting further PRs that do not adhere to our contribution guidelines outlined in CONTRIBUTING.md."
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