Mar 28: No major quote

Was this the day he was in the hospital?

Did Iran agree to a ceasefire? I’d totally believe Trump just said this to manipulate the markets.

I mean, the guy literally threatened to do war crimes.

Not true, he’ll do a lot of options trading.

Yeah, maybe for paper ballots have the default as equal to lottery than let people add numbers with negative being below the lottery position? Having a default solves a lot of practical problems, but I think summing all everything will still take computers. It’s just too much to determine what’s greater than what for every relation for every ballot then sum everything. Maybe doable for small numbers of people, but not for a whole city. Still paper ballot give something to go back and reference then you can use a program hash to validate the count.

When voters are required to rank every candidate vote splitting isn’t an issue. This is actually easier when there is a lottery rank because you can make a default ranking as equal to (or below) lottery, then just pull people above or below. Strategically, I think the lottery option is more a “candidates below this rank suck” option, which forces politicians to be at least better than random citizens from the perspective of most citizens.

I made a top level comment on this too.

I’d actually really like to see a graph showing incarceration as a different category of slavery. Maybe have like like total slavery as one line then the different forms of slavery as other lines. I’d like to think total slavery is at least going down, but it’d be good to see how far we have to go and over what periods we’ve lost ground.

In voting theory, there are these voting graphs where every candidates is a node. If you rank every candidate, you can draw directional lines between each node then sum all the ranking from all the voters to find a cumulative ranking.

Most people oppose this system for the practical reason of no one wanting to rank every candidate at the ballot box; however, I believe I’ve found a clever work around to this complaint. You have a none option (or a lottery option) and you allow people to rank people equally. From there it’s pretty trivial to set up a tablet or something where you can send candidates to the bottom or top and modify the <=> symbols between them. Everyone starts in a random order below the None/Lottery Option. If you want to get fancy you could even give people the option of grouping and moving an entire party on the tablet. In the cumulative ranking, anyone equal or below the None / Lottery option gets tossed. If it’s an election where you need multiple people just start at the top of the ranking and work your way down. Once you hit None/Lottery, your repeat the lottery or go without for any further seats.

The None/Lottery Option also prevents it from being weak to large numbers of candidates as frankly people will just ignore the vast majority of candidates leaving them below the none/lottery option. In a polarized society people will put the opposing party below the none/lottery option. You can vote [lottery > blues > reds] or [blues > lottery > reds] and it’s the same result for red vs blue.

There’s a slightly more advanced version of this where you put numbers on each relation then normalize. It gets complaints of not meeting the condorcet criterion, but it’s actually superior. I think this gets too complicated at the voting booth though, so whatever.

Some people do criticize this because strategic voting can get weird, but since this system has a none/lottery option that argument doesn’t hold water. If the population “strategically” votes [blue > yellow > lottery > red] and [red > yellow > lottery > blue] then [yellow > lottery = red = blue] is the favored result. They could easily swap yellow and lottery and get [red = blue = lottery > yellow]. They made their choice. That’s democracy, we ought to respect it.

Also, also, if it’s truly equal e.g. [red=blue > lottery ] just flip a coin. It’s unlikely to be truly equal but we’re already accepting some luck in this system.

One concern I have with direct proportional representation is that it will create secure seats, which no longer respond to their constituents. Competitive seats have to worry a lot more about how to satisfy their constituents, and can’t easily get away with corruption.

I like the idea of adding a lottery option to some sort of ranked choice. I’m perfectly fine electing good politicians, but if a majority of people think they’re corrupt, we should be able to rank a lottery option above them.

I’m fine with re-running if the chosen person opts out, but I don’t like the opt-in versions. I’m also not fond of some of the statistical biasing some people advocate with the system – a straight lottery where everyone has equal odds. I’d compromise on including felons, but personally I think including them incentivizes rehabilitation.

I also worry that this effectively gives power to public servants who are not necessarily good people – wasn’t Stalin originally a secretary? I can see every think tank offering up people with their own agendas to work in a new office but having an established office with entrenched interests also seems super dangerous.