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Dianne Feinstein has died

nytimes.com

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Re: Dianne Feinstein has died

#211

Post by ativzzz »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #171
anonymouse008 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other comments have gotten at the nuts and bolts of administrations, and here's the PR side of it: Do the 'Mom Test' on any candidate and you will see why 9 out of 10 times a challenger to an incumbent fails [0]. The only challengers who succeed beat the 'good enough test' while simultaneously fending off the current administration's inertia (aptly put by paulgb) [0] https://www.momtestbook.com/

what is "the mom test"? the link seems to be an entire marketing campaign selling a book and a brand, with no "test" clearly specified - can you summarize it, please?

From chatGPT: "What is the mom test?"

The "Mom Test" is a term from a book by Rob Fitzpatrick titled "The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you". It is about customer development and strategies for entrepreneurs to properly validate their business ideas.

The title refers to the notion that even your mom, who generally loves you unconditionally, would lie to you to spare your feelings if your business idea wasn’t good. So, the "Mom Test" suggests a method of asking the right questions to get honest and useful feedback from people, including those who might be predisposed to be nice to you.

The key principles of the Mom Test are:

    Talk about their life instead of your idea: Ask about specific behaviors and thoughts in their past and present, not about hypothetical futures. Avoid asking whether they think your business idea is good. Instead, focus on their problems, pains, and needs related to the area your business is focused on.

    Ask for specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future: People's predictions about their future behaviors are typically inaccurate. By asking about their past actions, you can gather more reliable information.

    Talk less and listen more: This is about them, not about you or your idea. The goal is to gather insights, so avoid leading questions and let them do the talking.
By following these principles, entrepreneurs can gather real insights into customer needs and challenges, which is crucial for validating and improving business ideas.

Re: Dianne Feinstein has died

#212

Post by alistairSH »

eropple wrote: post #143
bandyaboot wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I recall correctly, the Republicans can refuse to allow a replacement to be seated on the Judiciary committee…and they certainly will do that if they can.

Senate business can be conducted with the VP as tiebreaker as well, as I understand it? But I could be wrong.

I believe committee membership votes are currently subject to a supermajority, so filibuster rules apply. There won't be a new member seated to Judiciary without a Senate rules package. Sen. Manchin (D) likely won't allow that to happen.

This means judicial nominations are effectively hamstrung for the time being.

Re: Dianne Feinstein has died

#213

Post by davidw »

grotorea wrote: post #73
Enginerrrd wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather see a proportional system.

(Closed-list) proportional system wouldn't stop an unfit party insider being put at the top of the list.

Proportional has other flaws too, like small parties playing 'kingmaker'. As in: say the two major parties each get 45%, and I run an outfit that got 10%. To have a majority, you're going to have to deal with me, so I'm going to have way more influence than my 10% would warrant.

I've seen this happen in the real world in Italy.

Re: Dianne Feinstein has died

#214

Post by mc32 »

jliptzin wrote: post #23
bhouston wrote: post #6

She was mentally unfit to serve for the last couple years. It was a travesty many countries seem to have no mental bar required to serve or even reasonable age limits (Feinstein was 90!) Any decision "she" was made in the last couple years was made by her aids and not her. This is not how democracy is supposed to work. Details: > Four U.S. senators, including three Democrats, as well as three former Feinstein staffer…

It is how it’s supposed to work. She was 85 when she got elected the last time. If voters don’t want 90 year olds in office, maybe they shouldn’t vote 85 year olds in for a 6 year term. If she can’t be beat in a primary, then we need something like ranked choice voting so people can safely vote for an alternative third party without risking spoiling the election for a candidate they definitely don’t want.

We should have the ability to do a recall when mental faculties come into question. Have a bare minimum mental fitness test: Time awareness, location awareness, action consequence relationship, grade 6 comprehension and control over bodily functions

Weekend at Bernie's should remain a farce and not a commentary on reality.

Re: Dianne Feinstein has died

#215

Post by kemayo »

throwaway4good wrote: post #182

Why is it that people like Feinstein or Ruth Bader Ginsburg do not retire? Do they fear to be prosecuted by their successors, Soviet style? No pension in their employment contract? I don't understand the mechanism.

I think it's mostly ego. You're a powerful and successful person, the kind of type-A personality who can get all the way to the top of a fairly exclusive profession, and you wind up thinking you're irreplaceable. "I could retire... but I don't trust that the person who replaces me will be as good as I am."

They're not even entirely wrong in the short term -- the Democrats in particular seem to have been doing a really awful job of nurturing younger leadership candidates over the last decade or so. Possibly because of the geriatrics who run the party feeling (subconsciously?) threatened by the push they'd then face to retire...?

Re: Dianne Feinstein has died

#216

Post by krapp »

throwaway4good wrote: post #182

Why is it that people like Feinstein or Ruth Bader Ginsburg do not retire? Do they fear to be prosecuted by their successors, Soviet style? No pension in their employment contract? I don't understand the mechanism.

What are they going to do, subject themselves to the cruel joke that is medicare and social security? Return to the workforce? Greet people at wal-mart? Flip burgers? Why would they give up power and money and privilege to be turned out onto the street like a common dog?

Re: Dianne Feinstein has died

#217

Post by philipov »

paulgb wrote: post #104
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

List them here! You aren't actually saying anything.

My wife was part of a congressional primary campaign so I got to see some of this close-up. It’s hard to list all the reasons, but there is definitely a sort of institutional inertia that makes it hard to primary someone on the story of merely being the better candidate, unless there is an a prior consensus among voters that the incumbent needs to go. Some examples: - Congressional elections are expensive; incumbents…

The part about voter apathy towards primaries is important. It means that the sort of people who vote in primaries don't represent an unbiased sample of their party: they skew towards the extremes, because those people can be more easily mobilized. This means that primaries don't produce candidates capable of representing the median voter very well, and we end up with a choice between the canonical Giant Douche and Turd Sandwich. That's why the Freedom Caucus doesn't want McCarthy to use funding to influence primaries in their states; it would allow him to enforce party discipline on them.

This becomes even worse when combined with "safe" districts where whoever wins the primary for the district's ruling party is nearly guaranteed to win the general election as well. It makes one wonder how democratic we should consider such an election to be.

All this is to say that it's important to not just look at whether an institution is democratic in form, but whether it is also democratic in outcomes. The Law of Unintended Consequences will be obeyed.

[https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/UnintendedConsequences.h...]

Re: Dianne Feinstein has died

#218

Post by iambateman »

pxx wrote: post #138
jliptzin wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is how it’s supposed to work. She was 85 when she got elected the last time. If voters don’t want 90 year olds in office, maybe they shouldn’t vote 85 year olds in for a 6 year term. If she can’t be beat in a primary, then we need something like ranked choice voting so people can safely vote for an alternative third party without risking spoiling the election for a candidate they definitely don’t want.

Ranked choice voting (the brand name for Instant Runoff or Hare voting) neither theoretically [0] nor empirically [1] has the outcomes for third parties that you think it does. This combined with its other flaws makes it worse than plurality. Not only that, it doesn't allow for distributed counts [2], it can wreck the secret ballot [3], and it is not monotonic [4]. Arrow gives us an impossibility result for elections…

The real problem with RCV is that it doesn't intuitively make sense to an average person. I wrote a web app for RCV and spent months trying to build a user experience that would help people understand the concept and it just doesn't work.

People come to the question of voting assuming it's easy to understand...We've never had to deal with complexity around the concept so we expect it to be simple.

Introducing an algorithm plays into the fears of people who believe in a deep state which is secretly trying to manipulate people.

We deeply need a better voting system, but one of the core requirements must be that one can explain it to a middle schooler in 30 seconds.

Re: Dianne Feinstein has died

#219

Post by schnebbau »

alphabettsy wrote: post #180
bell-cot wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those in their first ~2 decades of life have long been exempted from proper representation, and I've never heard the elderly complain about that. Having both ends cut off sounds more fair and balanced to me.

Comparing a child to someone in their 70s with a lifetime of experience is silly. Maybe there should be limits once in office at a certain age, but not everyone ages the same.

My father is in his 70s and can barely remember what he had for breakfast. He should not be representing anyone, or even voting for that matter.

There's no way to separate the able minded from the seniles fairly, so an age limit is the best way to do it.

Re: Dianne Feinstein has died

#220

Post by bell-cot »

alphabettsy wrote: post #180
bell-cot wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those in their first ~2 decades of life have long been exempted from proper representation, and I've never heard the elderly complain about that. Having both ends cut off sounds more fair and balanced to me.

Comparing a child to someone in their 70s with a lifetime of experience is silly. Maybe there should be limits once in office at a certain age, but not everyone ages the same.

If you've been around many kids, you know that "18" is completely arbitrary, and adult-ish maturity comes to some far sooner than to others. (And to a few, it never does seem to come.)

And if you've been around many elderly people, you know that quite a few are less competent to vote than the average 14-year-old student council member, and that letting ~all of them do so is no less arbitrary than that "18".

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