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Ross Perot Has Died

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101–110 of 222 posts

Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#101
post #25

> ran into the establishment What he ran into was the inevitable math of a first past the post electoral system. You want third parties, you need ranked choice voting or something similar. Even if you're fine with the main parties, RCV is probably better in terms of electing who most people want. You could argue that Bush senior might have won with it if the Perot voters ranked 1) Perot 2) Bush. Bush junior might hav…

The single-winner form of ranked choice voting (a.k.a. instant runoff voting) doesn’t help third parties as much as you think!

It makes it safe for you to give your first choice to a third party candidate who has no chance of winning, because they’ll have no effect on the result after being eliminated in the first round. But as soon as your third party candidate becomes a serious challenger, you’ll risk instead eliminating your second choice, whose redistributed votes are much more likely to favor your last choice.

https://www.electionscience.org/library/the-spoiler-effect/

So IRV is great for stopping weak third parties from upsetting the balance of the two-party duopoly, but not so great for helping strong third parties get a real chance at winning. If you want real change, there are much better systems available: take a look at approval voting, score voting, or Condorcet voting.

Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#102
post #62
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You want third parties, you need ranked choice voting or something similar. Arrow's Impossibility Theorem : "When voters have three or more distinct alternatives (options), no ranked voting electoral system can convert the ranked preferences of individuals into a community-wide (complete and transitive) ranking while also meeting a specified set of criteria: unrestricted domain, non-dictatorship, Pareto efficiency,…

Certainly - that doesn't mean that we can't have a system that's a bit better than we currently have, though. It just means there's not a perfect system.

No, it just means there is no ranked/ordinal voting system that satisfies Arrows criteria. It says nothing about score/cardinal voting.

Arrow: "I’m a little inclined to think that score systems where you categorize in maybe three or four classes probably (in spite of what I said about manipulation) is probably the best."

Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#103
post #25

> ran into the establishment What he ran into was the inevitable math of a first past the post electoral system. You want third parties, you need ranked choice voting or something similar. Even if you're fine with the main parties, RCV is probably better in terms of electing who most people want. You could argue that Bush senior might have won with it if the Perot voters ranked 1) Perot 2) Bush. Bush junior might hav…

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20393390.

Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#104
post #66
post #25

> ran into the establishment What he ran into was the inevitable math of a first past the post electoral system. You want third parties, you need ranked choice voting or something similar. Even if you're fine with the main parties, RCV is probably better in terms of electing who most people want. You could argue that Bush senior might have won with it if the Perot voters ranked 1) Perot 2) Bush. Bush junior might hav…

> You want third parties, you need ranked choice voting or something similar. Ranked choice or similar would only give you an occasional third party win here and there, in some small number of electoral districts. It will not give you serious and viable third parties with long living organizations. What you'd need is, proportional voting for the House. Electoral districts the size of at least 10 House representatives…

> What you'd need is, proportional voting for the House. Electoral districts the size of at least 10 House representatives.

Problem: Most states don't have 10 House representatives. And in general it allows candidates to bifurcate voters in the same way that gerrymandering does. If you have a group of aligned people who should by population have their own representative, splitting them between two or three districts means they get no representation at all.

The better solution is range voting:

https://rangevoting.org/

Then you can use the existing districts without changing anything else, but it immediately makes third parties viable. And it boots out anyone who doesn't represent their entire district when there is anyone running against them who does, which puts a damper on all this line drawing nonsense as well.

Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#105
post #32
post #29

Remember his famous “Giant Sucking Sound” comment? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_sucking_sound

I'd say he was right: "We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, ... have no health care—that's the most expensive single element in making a car— have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but…

> the winner, Bill Clinton, supported NAFTA, which went into effect on January 1, 1994.

Which ultimately ended up damaging Mexican wages, too, because we showered Mexico with heavily subsidized corn (and other agricultural products) forcing rural Mexicans into the cities and the maquiladoras.

Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#106
post #8
post #5

Ross Perot was way ahead of his time. We are finally getting an idea of how terrible some of these deals have been. https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/perot-in-1992-...

This debate footage is so remarkable to watch in 2019, for several reasons. 1: They allowed a third party candidate in a general debate 2: The candidate is able to take breaths & even pause without someone cutting jumping in, allowing him to make an complete point 3: No one is talking over him while he talks. Sure the candidates are tougher to manage in 2019 (especially after Trump changed the game in '16), but the d…

There's no way to think that the terrible questions, the lack of follow up, and the lightweight Today Show-type moderators are not an intentional choice by network owners who don't want the candidates' direct address to the audience to affect the outcome in a serious way.

Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#107
post #74
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ranked voting actually does enable third party candidate wins (assuming they can garner sufficient public support) with ranked choice voting the stigma of voting third party is removed and people can safely vote primarily for who they want instead of primarily voting strategically.

Where does it work? Australia has single-representative voting districts with instant-runoff voting, and they seem to have something that looks to me being close to a two-party system in practice. I admit, I didn't browse though all possible countries, so perhaps you know a better example? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Representatives_(Aust...

If you actually work through the game theory, you find that single-winner instant-runoff voting is nearly as vulnerable to Duverger’s Law of two-party domination as plurality voting.

https://www.electionscience.org/voting-methods/runoff-electi...

There are much better single-winner systems available: see approval voting, score voting, and Condorcet voting. But if you want a legislature with proportional representation, you really need a system with multi-representative districts.

Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really glosses over and ignores the actual history of OSX by going directly from describing NeXT, to iphone stuff. The first releases of OSX were basically NeXT with a weird half baked apple GUI on top of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server_1.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Public_Beta As OSX has evolved as its own product, of course it's been diverging from its roots, but even as recently a…

> it was blindingly obvious where it came from Why so many APIs in the Apple ecosystem start with NS

Oh man, I hadn't made that connection before but it's so obvious now

Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious enough to play out how much that chunk ended up being worth. Perot reportedly acquired 16% of NeXT for his $20M investment[1]. I don't know the details of the cash/stock split but Apple ultimately acquired NeXT for $350M after paying off its debts[2]. That's $56M for Perot if he maintained that 16% stake. If he kept it all in Apple stock (unlikely I know, but fun to play this out) he'd have had about 2.…

That assumes that NeXT did not undergo any dilution post-1987. Not sure this was the case — IIRC, they had to raise several more rounds of investment.

Yes, but even so, the (fictional) RoI on the start money is a few orders of magnitude. Which is not quite ordinary.
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