271–280 of 343 posts
This can be gamed easily by running N-1 clones of any given candidate, where N is the total number of votes allotted.
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> Only question was, what were different nations willing to do to stop it? Yes, exactly. Some nations were willing to tell their moralizers to shut up, and just pay off the slaveowners. The US wasn't willing to make that compromise; we let the moralizers drive the process, so we had to fight a war and kill a million people.
> The US wasn't willing to make that compromise; we let the moralizers drive the process, so we had to fight a war and kill a million people... Yeah, "moralizers" like Hamilton, Washington, and Ben Franklin, who were so obstinate and short sighted they refused to simply pay the British Crown instead of fighting such a destructive war. Too bad you couldn't be there to show them the error of their ways. /s Yeah, this i…
You think the Colonies could have paid the British Crown to become independent? Where are you getting that from? What makes you think the British would have accepted it?
But if you are just asking as a pure hypothetical--should the Colonies have paid for independence, if the British would have accepted that resolution--then my answer would be yes, of course. Independence was the goal; if we could have gotten there without having to fight a war, so much the better.
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> Excepting, of course, all the violence used to keep the slaves as slaves in the first place I assume? Because, what? That's not real violence? It's real violence, sure, but it's there in all of the cases, so it drops out of the comparison we're making. We're not talking about the costs of slavery itself; we're talking about the costs to end slavery. A million lives seems to me like a much bigger cost to end slavery…
This is the US man. We didn't pay the British Crown a cent, and no one saw any reason to change that policy for southerners. Paying for freedom is not something America as a nation was given to doing in the Late 18th and 19th century. Heck, vast majority of us wouldn't do it today. This country was literally founded on the principle of not paying for freedoms. And this history is the very reason we carried so much ca…
Paying off the slaveowners is not just an "idea". It actually happened. In every other country that ended slavery. That's why I'm drawing the comparison. Every other country managed to end slavery without fighting a war that cost a million lives. So why did the US have to?
> what part of our history to 1860 would lead you to believe that it was our policy to pay money for freedom?
You're missing my point. Of course it wasn't our policy to pay money for freedom. That's why we had to fight a war that cost a million lives to free the slaves.
My point is, why wasn't it our policy to pay money for freedom? Why couldn't we do the obvious thing that all the other countries did to free slaves without it having to cost a million lives?
And if your answer is "we should never pay money for freedom", why not? The slaves were freed either way. Wasn't freeing them the goal? Wouldn't it be better to achieve that goal without it having to cost a further million lives?
> on the question of just ignoring the violence against slaves
You're missing my point again. I'm not ignoring the violence against slaves. I'm pointing out that that violence happened regardless of how the slaves were freed. So when counting the cost of freeing the slaves, you can't factor in the violence that happened while they were slaves, because that violence had already happened; freeing the slaves with a war that cost a million lives didn't make any of the violence against the slaves while they were slaves go away, any more than paying the slaveowners for the slaves' freedom did. The million lives it cost in the US Civil War wasn't instead of the 400 years of violence against the slaves; it was in addition to it.
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The voting method breaks down entirely when you consider strategic voting by groups, and multiple-repetitions game strategies. 100 players would form a voting cartel, and each member would spread their votes out among all the members' favorite issues. Reneging on the cartel's rules means that the entire cartel retaliates on the next vote. So each party has exactly 100 issues in their platform, and no individual voter…
I like the idea of voting quadratically with money. Every vote scales with cost. Instead of hiding the reality, just expose it and limit it with quadratic scaling.
Doesn't sound sustainable, but it's an interesting idea to play with. You could adjust the price-point to make it more or less price-competitive with lobbying and conventional bribery, and to serve as a sort of tax. Might make for a good cyberpunk setting.
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"Democrats are against outright hostility and blatant marginalization of certain classes." There are tons of YouTube videos on college campuses that prove otherwise.
Reminder: having shitty ideas is not a protected class, and “free speech” does not mean you get to say whatever batshit crazy thing comes to mind without other people expressing themselves
I always hate the framing as “polarized”. There’s tons of things Democrats and Republicans agree on. Military spending goes up every year. Save for Dodd-Frank, deregulation has been common across presidencies for 30 years along with corporate tax cuts... The establishment gets things done, they really do, it’s just not things that help everyday people. I’m not sure how this would help that.
Almost all voting systems in use today will allow a plurality of political actors, and hence most democracies have more than two parties represented in parliament. That is, except "first past the post" which is the system in the UK and US. It inevitably and systemically always devolves into a de facto two-party system. I'm sure you can see how this is a problem? Granted, quadratic voting specifically was probably not…
The two longest lasting, largest, most successful democracies of all time - I don't see the problem.
The arguments against winner-take-all are mathematically maximizing a collective total happiness score for single elections. But governments are run by people, not math, and I've yet to see anything addressing the psychology of election systems and especially not over time.
If instead election systems are scored on how well they do after 250 years or how few world wars they start then winner take all is the only winner.
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You are absolutely right about lawmaking being a profession, but in a lottery system, I reckon these professional lawmakers would simply be hired by the representatives, and they could stay on for as long as they are deemed useful. The representatives would act more like full-time overseers on the executive and legislative branches, if that makes sense.
Junior lawmakers are also perfectly capable of hiring senior lawmakers yet the balance of power still shifts towards lobbyists, so I would assume that the same issue would exist for lottery-drawn representatives.
1. By nurturing personal relationships with politicians. I may be mistaken, but I feel like this is probably the most effective method. You want to exploit the natural tendency people have to want to help their friends, even decent people.
2. By helping politicians get what they want (e.g. reelection, but also first election, or election to a new position).
3. By providing compelling arguments and objections to various policies, grounded in special knowledge about their industry. These compelling arguments may be good (in which case the lobbyist's influence is actually a good thing), but they may also be bad (misdirection or lies).
I think lottery is less vulnerable to 1 and 2 (but not immune). It doesn't help against 3, although having seasoned lawmakers does, since they can see through the bullshit.
Either way, it's speculative, and it would need to be properly evaluated somehow.
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> What has the public done to you to deserve this? Well, what they did was force me into temporary slavery. > It's like working at a restaurant and spitting in customers' food If the customers were forcing me to work in a restaurant, I think I might do that. > If you're unhappy about being forced into duty, you can abstain from voting at all Why would I do that, when a much more effective method of screwing over the…
What? The "public" didn't force you to do anything. The public is just people. You're part of the public, for Christ's sake. A representative who would act as you propose wouldn't be screwing some mysterious nefarious entity that likes to enslave people, they'd be screwing you . > You don't get to complain about "fairness" or the "right" way for me to protest, when you are forcing me into slavery. What about the part…
Sure it will. It will help cause more bad policies to happen, at the margin.
There would be lots of controversial laws, and 10% of people voting here to mess things up, would effect something.
That's my revenge on the 90% that forced me into this, because of their "support".
> Surely they can bloody negotiate
Why do that, when we can just sabotage things? You don't get to force me into this, and complain when I fight back.
People do not have to react the way that you want them to, or that you find fair. Burning everything to the ground, in whatever way I can, is a perfectly acceptable retaliation to slavery.
Sure, there would be collateral damage. But there is always collateral damage. No matter what political stance a person is fighting for.
Looks like this would favor highly coordinated groups to have outsized influence over poorly coordinated groups. So people who vote in isolation have less influence than people who organize and vote as a bloc. I think it also means that places where one party predominates would require the minority party to be highly coordinated in order to have any chance with one single silver “bullet” whereas the dominant party ca…
> So people who vote in isolation have less influence than people who organize and vote as a bloc. I think that’s a feature not a bug. It would encourage people to propose plan or candidates that are acceptable to a wider part of the electorate.
I'd much rather see IRV gain traction to remove the spoiler effect and disincentivise negative campaigning.