Senators skip classified briefing on NSA snooping to catch flights home

If I say "pay me 50 dollars, and I will give you X", and then you pay me and I just grin at you, and the WORST you can do to me is to say "fine, then we won't do that again", that's not accountability.

The only thing preventing that would be their own consciences, which may work once or twice but is guaranteed not to work forever.

Their own consciences AND each other. "Each other" meaning a heterogenous group of people from all walks of life, instead of mostly their buddies and "the people doing the same stuff for a different team", which is so much weaker a check. Ever been where thousands or ten thousands of people are? No cameras, no cops? At least where I am those tend to be peaceful and rather moral on average. Small groups of friends however, they can be real dicks. Split them up and mix them with people they don't know that well, or at all, and they will behave much better. Such is the nature of criminal conspiracy, it doesn't like randomness and shooting from the hip.

Don't ask me about the specific implementation details, but I think there should be more "actual accountability", and I don't see why that wouldn't be applicable to "random politicians" as well. For starters, if everybody could theoretically get "drafted" for this tomorrow, many people would make it much more of their business to pay attention to what is going on, to what others are doing in that capacity. That in itself could have a positive effect.

And maybe it could start small, with a few hundred random people who have somewhat of an influence. And if that goes well, do more of that. A/B testing, you know? Because if we're just doing Gedankenexperimente, I don't see why how I experienced the world so far, namely that people in general are good even when they might be a bit lame, and people who want power are usually compensating and sport at best some kind of genius of mediocrity, shouldn't win over your concerns.

From the Wikipedia article: > FairVote [argues Approval Voting] can result in the defeat of a candidate who would win an absolute majority in a plurality system, can allow a candidate to win who might not win any support in a plurality elections

This sounds like a good thing. You end up with an elected official that satisfies most of the population.

51% of voters think Alice would be the best person to lead, they'd be OK with Bob but think Carol and Dan are morons. 49% think Carol would be the best person to lead, they'd be OK with Bob but think both Alice and Dan are morons.

So now if we use normal majority voting, Alice wins and 49% of voters have an elected official they think is a moron.

With Approval Voting, Bob will win. Sure, he might have been everyone's second choice, but he's EVERYONE's second choice. So now we're all reasonably happy.

Sure it is. You're presumably selling X to me at a profit, so if you screw me now, you're losing all of your future profits, which keeps you honest when that's worth more to you than the benefit of screwing me out of $50 once. Obviously that only works in cases where we're talking about repeat players, but it's still miles away from nothing.

>Their own consciences AND each other.

What do you think that buys you?

Here is how this would play out. A hundred honest people go to Washington. Someone suggests that they get $250,000 for their local community center. That's nothing out of the federal budget, and it seems like a worthy cause, so OK. Somebody else is a teacher and wants a million dollars for her school, same deal.

Soon people are exchanging support for each others' "worthy" pet causes. Somebody's pet cause is a sister who needs a heart transplant. It sure would be nice to get a heart transplant for everybody who needs one, though it turns out there just aren't enough donor hearts for that. But we can make an exception for this guy's sister, can't we? We need his vote to get the community center and the school money.

Eventually somebody asks for something that costs a billion dollars instead of a million and some people have reservations about spending that much on something that smells like favoritism, but the first one will be something sympathetic like a billion dollars for cancer research (which so happens to target the rare type of cancer that the bill's sponsor has). So that one gets the green light because who is going to tell a cancer patient you won't fund cancer research? And once you set the precedent for a billion dollar personal project the next thing you know federal laws are being passed which give a regulatory advantage to the company of the chosen one who works in that industry and major government contracts are being awarded on the basis of "I don't trust these low bidders I've never met but I know this guy."