Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts • Hacker News Board

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#171

Post by Thorrez » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 5:06 AM UTC

blackflame7000 wrote: post #158

memetomancer wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yours would best be described as the 'naive' take on the situation, and rests on a false premise. These minorities need 'help' in that a majority is going to be self-interested and lacking compassion or any sort of integrity at larger scope. In the U.S. this might take the form of tax loopholes for speedboats and golf memberships eating into funding for basic social services (infrastructure, law enforcement, educatio…

There will always be a majority and there will always be a minority. But the thought process behind, "they are a minority, therefore they need assistance" is elitism at best and racism at worst. Furthermore, the laws that we pass that give special treatment to one group over another make that divide all the more permanent.

>There will always be a majority

Not if there are more than 2 groups. There could easily be 3 minorities with 0 majorities.

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#172

Post by zimpenfish » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 5:23 AM UTC

agjm wrote: post #149

swebs wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's currently a push to take it to the supreme court so it can be stopped once and for all. Archive link because the Baltimore Sun doesn't like Europe: http://archive.is/a3mMR

I think the Baltimore Sun probably likes Europe just fine - what they don't like are self-contradictory rule sets that can cost them $20,000,000+ on top of the cost of achieving "compliance." 'Sarah Toporoff, a Massachusetts native who works in Paris for the Global Editors Network, which promotes newsroom innovation, raised similar questions. She said U.S. newsrooms “are a benchmark for digital innovation” — and it’s…

> on top of the cost of achieving "compliance."

Compliance with GDPR is easy though - don't aggressively track and monitor European visitors. If you've stuffed your website that full with invasive trackers et al that you can't show it to Europeans for fear of broaching personal privacy legislation, you should probably have a good long think about where you've gone wrong.

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#173

Post by erik_seaberg » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 5:38 AM UTC

zimpenfish wrote: post #172

agjm wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Baltimore Sun probably likes Europe just fine - what they don't like are self-contradictory rule sets that can cost them $20,000,000+ on top of the cost of achieving "compliance." 'Sarah Toporoff, a Massachusetts native who works in Paris for the Global Editors Network, which promotes newsroom innovation, raised similar questions. She said U.S. newsrooms “are a benchmark for digital innovation” — and it’s…

> on top of the cost of achieving "compliance." Compliance with GDPR is easy though - don't aggressively track and monitor European visitors. If you've stuffed your website that full with invasive trackers et al that you can't show it to Europeans for fear of broaching personal privacy legislation, you should probably have a good long think about where you've gone wrong.

GDPR is not merely a list of bad things to avoid, it adds a lot of ongoing burdens to every company active in the region. Hire more people. Actively investigate your own compliance. Wait months for government permission to deliver features.

There are people who aren't doing anything wrong, who did the math and decided they can't clear a profit on proving they aren't doing anything wrong.

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#174

Post by dmitriid » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 6:01 AM UTC

erik_seaberg wrote: post #173

zimpenfish wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> on top of the cost of achieving "compliance." Compliance with GDPR is easy though - don't aggressively track and monitor European visitors. If you've stuffed your website that full with invasive trackers et al that you can't show it to Europeans for fear of broaching personal privacy legislation, you should probably have a good long think about where you've gone wrong.

GDPR is not merely a list of bad things to avoid, it adds a lot of ongoing burdens to every company active in the region. Hire more people. Actively investigate your own compliance. Wait months for government permission to deliver features. There are people who aren't doing anything wrong, who did the math and decided they can't clear a profit on proving they aren't doing anything wrong.

The ongoing burden is minuscule.

What’s wrong with actively investigating your own compliance?

What government permissions are you even talking about?

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#175

Post by slim » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 6:40 AM UTC

padobson wrote: post #90

bcatanzaro wrote: post #42

Could we reduce the power of gerrymandering by increasing the number of districts? At the first census, there were 3.9M people and 65 districts. Now we have 327M people and 435 districts, so the number of people per district has increased by 12.5X. I would think this makes gerrymandering more lucrative, since gerrymandering works because of quantization error.

Let's do a 100x - 43,500 districts. This would probably fix Citizens United too, it'd be really expensive to buy 43,500 congress members.

why not 327M district? (direct democracy)

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#176

Post by thechao » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 7:35 AM UTC

crdrost wrote: post #99

tialaramex wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you worry about this, the reform you want is multi-member districts. Instead of voting for one representative people are picking several and the districts are bigger. This is how EU parliamentary elections work for example, a region gets say 5 slots and it needs to send 5 representatives to fill those slots, elected democratically but the EU doesn't tightly constrain the method used. There are a few ways you can d…

With that said, before you start writing your state legislature about “Multi-member districts TODAY!” you should also know that they have a very difficult history of being shot down by the Supreme Court. This was pointed out to me by a number of good folks on Politics.StackExchange[1]. But yes, the route to avoiding a second US Civil War is only incidentally through the “eliminating gerrymandering” nodes of the graph…

That response fails to distinguish between multi-member at large districts which are Real Bad^TM, and some form of ranked mechanism which are Real Good^TM. Multi-member ranked districts are both more representative and more competitive than our current system.

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#177

Post by RhysU » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 10:56 AM UTC

jellicle wrote: post #112

Spivak wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the arguments in favor of the electoral college is that it boosts the voice of people who are in areas with lower population density. This is to ensure that minority interests are respected and taken into account by presidential hopefuls. Without this protection the voices of people who live outside the 5 major metropolitan areas simply wouldn't matter and candidates would have no reason to listen to their iss…

Can't we make the exact opposite argument? In the unbalanced system which currently exists in the USA, rural voters are given huge, disproportionate advantage in electoral power, leading to national decisions being made that favor them (have some more farm subsidies!) and ignoring the voices of the millions of citizens who happen to live in large cities and populous states. Why are rural people better than city peopl…

It is interesting to read one significant thread here discussing gerrymandering starting as an effort to increase minority representation. Otherwise, minority blocs can be overridden by a majority and diluted into have no representation.

Then another thread discussing rural voters being given excessive representation. Why shouldn't the cities dominate, they ask?

Rural voters comprise a minority.

How consistent should these threads be in terms of the arguments and what is seen as good? How consistent are they in practice?

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#178

Post by padobson » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 12:46 PM UTC

slim wrote: post #175

padobson wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's do a 100x - 43,500 districts. This would probably fix Citizens United too, it'd be really expensive to buy 43,500 congress members.

why not 327M district? (direct democracy)

Mob rule is not what you want. It's terrifying.

What you want is a slow projection of the will of the people onto the seats of power. That's why separation of powers is so brilliant.

Judges are completely insulated from the people, unelected with lifetime appointments.

The President - when chosen by a real electoral college rather than the funky thing the EC has actually evolved into - is more answerable to the will of the people, but still insulated enough to do the job without the daily whims of the mob plunging the ship of state into chaos. It takes time and slow calculated movements to steer the ship of state. We want an executive who can make those calculations without constant fear of political turmoil.

The Senate, as it was originally designed, is closer to the people but also insulated. Senators get six years to advocate for the interests of their state. Before the 17th amendment, they were chosen by the state legislatures to directly represent the interests of the state as a whole.

And the House is directly answerable to the people, with each member representing a portion of them - 700k or 70k or 7k. It's the most powerful part of the government and also the most distributed. It's the beating heart of democracy and the starting point for all discussion on what constitutes the rights of the citizens, as directed by the citizens. But it is just a starting point. How the will of the people filters its way into the senate and the executive and the judicial branch is the refining process of a representative republic, the best form of government yet implemented by humans.

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#179

Post by tombert » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 2:29 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #146

tombert wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you're suggesting. Individual districts are going to have problems the the rest of the state or country don't know/care about. Having a representative for these districts makes sense. For example, in my district (Brownsville in Brooklyn), we have an almost tragically poorly-ranked school system, due largely to bad funding and high crime rates in the area. I don't expect someone from Midtown Manhatta…

That's not a great example because really the school budget should be set at the state level and distributed evenly to every district based on student headcount. You do make a valid point that many issues are local and that could be lost in a system where the party is focused at the state level instead of the local level. Proportional representation systems are prone to having this issue for example.

Some areas are going to require more funding than others. For example, certain areas are wealthier and as a result are less reliant on the after-school programs, while poorer areas have a higher likelihood to be single-parent, or both parents having to work, meaning that the after-school programs are vital.

That's just one example, but it's not as simple as "give a certain amount of money per kid to the schools", and saying this is reductionist.

Re: Ugly Gerry – Font created from congressional districts

#180

Post by zw123456 » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 3:52 PM UTC

H8crilA wrote: post #165

zw123456 wrote: post #84

I think that a solution this problem as well as many others like undo influence, too much money needed and so on, could be solved by increasing the number of representatives. I believe that the only stipulations in the constitution is that each state must have at least one and that a representative cannot represent less than 30K citizens. The number was frozen 35 in 1911 by the house, but they could change that if th…

It seems that across countries the size of the parlament is proportional to the square root of the population size: https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/364/is-there-an...

Interesting. I am not sure what the underlying basis of the cube root is, but the population of the U.S. has gone from 80 million to 340 million since 1911 and the size of the assembly has not changed in that period. I think it is an overlooked aspect that could be at the root of a many problems.

Also , no states have been added in over 60years , it is time D.C. And Puerto Rico get state hood.