191–200 of 570 posts
We need to vote out the people pushing for backdoors. They seem to want backdoors at any cost, without any technical understanding of why its a terrible idea. Vote them out!
Just like we needed to vote out the people that voted for the bailouts and the Iraq war. Politics keeps moving on. I'm still on the Iraq war. I'm not interested on any other issue until we solve that one. Edit: s/bailouts of/bailouts and/
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California is not as progressive as you might hope. The cities are full of progressives, but outside the cities is very conservative. You have to be fairly moderate to win statewide office. Newsom was a reaction to Trump, but sort of an aberration. More than half of our governors have been Republicans, including Regan, who went on be President and a paragon of the GOP. Since the 80s 14 out of 30 years has been Republ…
Nancy Pelosi represents San Francisco. I don't think you can call even the cities progressive.
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Obligatory plug for electoral reform. Lesser evils aren't inevitable; they're a product of a bad voting system. https://www.fairvote.org/rcv https://www.fairvote.org/alternatives Maine has converted to RCV already and it's stood up in court; 49 to go.
Let's say the US had 5 parties and all 5 supported 5 variations of the EARN IT act, what then?
> to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness
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>as horrible as this is do you think that banning encryption will put an end to the abuse itself? No, but there's a huge excluded middle between the level of abuse with easy E2E encryption and no abuse. >prevent the greater evil which is that of normalization of mass-surveillance within society (any more than it is already) which will ultimately destroy more lives. Facebook has been around for 15 years now without E2…
Agreed. Making encryption the boogeyman is the wrong way, too broad. Ensuring the easily accessible comm channels are accessible to law enforcement, seems like an OK compromise. What those channels are should be the focus of the discussion imo.
I am probably in the minority here on HN but I think bundling together encryption with platforms like Facebook/IG is a bad idea given how easy those platforms make it for bad actors to meet/identify potential victims. Signal/whatsapp etc I am ok with since they dont provide that same ability.
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I'm surprised that this attitude survives along side the attitude of "the government sucks at everything and it should be made as small as possible" that seems to be so pervasive in the US. And I'm surprised that I get the same blank stares from Americans that have lived for a decade in Europe. It's like they've never contemplated any other way of electing. Of course it's not true about everyone. I'm generalizing a l…
Most people who believe the “the government sucks at everything and should be as small as possible” probably still worship the Constitution and “the forefathers” and believe it’s completely compatible.
I also believe that "whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist." -- Lysander Spooner
I cannot believe that the one thing we have bipartisan consensus on is destroying strong encryption. I guess I’m biased since this is essentially my whole livelihood, but this is crazy, right?
Have you noticed routine protest and informed debate occurring throughout the US for oh say 30 years to be generous?
Political reality isn’t logical, it’s on the nose. There’s no engagement to prevent this, and decades of flag waving as enforcement funding is cut.
That has an impact.
The generation that still holds the most seats in government has no idea how any of this works.
Giving them the benefit of the doubt it’s ignorance not informed malice their intuition is nevertheless “expand police state.”
I’m sure we’ll all take a break from HN and debating flat or skeuomorphic to tell them piss off
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Major this. Also plug for CGP Grey's "politics in the animal kingdom" video series that explains exactly why we have that 'lesser of two evils' problem, and how exactly RCV and Alternative vote systems resolve that problem, in a very simple, understandable way. https://www.cgpgrey.com/politics-in-the-animal-kingdom
The problem with Fair Vote and the CGP Grey videos, while I like them for an introduction to the subject, both have two very misleading points. 1) When they say RCV they specifically mean Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). There are many other, and better, RCV methods. 2) They overclaim IRV's ability to solve the spoiler effect (see my other comment for links). While other RCV methods have strong resistance to spoiler effe…
"Ranked voting" is the more general term.
> Ranked voting is any election voting system in which voters use a ranked (or preferential) ballot to rank choices in a sequence on the ordinal scale: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. There are multiple ways in which the rankings can be counted to determine which candidate (or candidates) is (or are) elected (and different methods may choose different winners from the same set of ballots). The other major branch of voting systems is cardinal voting, where candidates are independently rated, rather than ranked.[1]
> The similar term "Ranked Choice Voting" (RCV) is used by the US organization FairVote to refer to the use of ranked ballots with specific counting methods: either instant-runoff voting for single-winner elections or single transferable vote for multi-winner elections. In some locations, the term "preferential voting" is used to refer to this combination of ballot type and counting method, while in other locations this term has various more-specialized meanings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting
I share your frustration with FairVote and CGP Grey (and recently an episode of Patriot Act) painting an unrealistically rosy picture of RCV/IRV as the solution to our voting problems.
There are some other systems that aren't ranked voting at all that I think would be significantly better than IRV, such as approval voting, range voting, and STAR voting (which is basically range voting with an immediate runoff between the top two).
For some reason, FairVote persists in claiming that in approval voting (which is like traditional first-past-the-post voting except that you can vote for more than one candidate), you somehow maximize your voting influence by voting for only one candidate. They call this bullet voting. I don't know what possible reason one could have for believing this.
This manifests in their comparison chart:
https://www.fairvote.org/alternatives
They show "resistance to strategic voting" as "high" under RCV and "low" under approval voting. This is somewhat subjective, but I think they've got it backwards. Under approval voting, strategic voting and honest voting are basically the same: you vote for as many of the candidates as you can tolerate, and maybe if there's a candidate you really don't want to win you vote for everyone but them. Under RCV, it's only safe to put you first choice first if they are either clearly in the lead or so far behind they have no hope of winning. If the outcome is in doubt, it's possible to cause your first place candidate to lose by putting them first. (That's a weird problem for any voting system to have.)
For this reason, I don't trust FairVote; I don't think they're presenting their preferred voting system or the alternatives honestly. They're more of an advocacy/PR organization that's pushing their chosen solution out of a sense of inertia or something.
The Center for Election Science is a smaller, less-well funded group that advocates for approval voting (and similar methods) that I donate to from time to time. They had a successful campaign to convert Fargo ND to approval voting back in 2018.
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To be fair, the UK did have the "Alternative Vote Referendum" where we got the second-worst voting system proposed as an alternative to the worst voting system (FPTP). That might explain why nobody thinks "alternative voting systems" are any good; they just think of instant run-off.
Interesting! Was this done on purpose to discredit the voices for change, or was it just incompetence or a compromise or something like that?
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Most people who believe the “the government sucks at everything and should be as small as possible” probably still worship the Constitution and “the forefathers” and believe it’s completely compatible.
Well I guess I am not part of most people, as I believe Government is inherently inefficient, and should be microscopic.. I also believe that "whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist." -- Lysander Spooner
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I want to push back against this, and specifically fair vote. - What they are referring to as RCV is called Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). IRV is a RCV, but RCV isn't IRV. Think "Rock and Roll is The Beatles" vs "The Beatles are a Rock and Roll group." - IRV isn't that great when it comes to Voter Satisfaction Efficiency (VSE)[0]. There's even other RCV methods like Ranked Pair[1] that are exactly the same for the vote…
Thanks for your post, I'll dig into your links. I hadn't heard of STAR in particular. Two counterpoints: - I'm aware of Arrow, but I file it under "perfect being the enemy of the good". :) Whatever the flaws of IRV, it still represents an order of magnitude improvement over FPTP at capturing political preferences. (We suffer so much status quo bias, it takes a lot of activation energy just to communicate to the avera…
This is 100% how you should think about it. But what I'm trying to say is that we already have substantially better methods, so why not use them? Perfect is the enemy of good, but if I have the choice of eating acid, a bowl of oatmeal, and chocolate pudding, I'm going with the pudding. Perfect is the enemy of good when we don't already have the choices sitting right in front of us.
> [IRV] still represents an order of magnitude improvement over FPTP at capturing political preferences
And here's where I'm disagreeing, but only slightly. It is definitely better, but not an order of magnitude.
> Approval voting
I love approval voting. It is great because of its simplicity. That's why they use it in systems like Netflix. Easy to collect and gather results from. Honestly I use it all the time. It is how I solve the "where do you want to eat" problem with friends. You just list things until you get a unanimous vote or if you exhaust your list you just take the most approvals. Simple and easy.
The reason I don't like it for elections is that it makes tying easy and I do not believe it has enough precision. The interview I linked Arrow talks about this so I'll deffer to him (he's clearly smarter than me). In elections you need a clear winner.
Why I like score voting (and Condorcet methods, like RP, which is again RCV) is because I actually hate party systems, but I recognize that they can't be destroyed. But these methods drastically reduce their power (I don't think IRV does).
And I highly encourage you to dig more into the subject and am happy to provide links. I also highly suggest looking deep into everything that the Fair Vote chart discusses, mainly because I believe you will be as frustrated as me (and others, like Condorcet proponents) when you learn what each of those topics are. Everyone I know that is well read in the subject is frustrated by Fair Vote's mischaracterizations.