Whew! Over 1200 words. Thanks for the detailed response.
With 100% sincerity I wish you good luck with your campaign to improve or fix the system.
To quote Richard Branson: Complexity is your enemy. Any fool can make something complicated. It is hard to keep things simple.
The problem with your code is that you've chosen the wrong solution. Ranked voting will forever go through the cycle "plurality is broke" ==> "wow, IRV is cool, let's do that" ==> "crap, that outcome was fucked, this ranked voting stuff reeks, back to plurality." ==> "plurality is broke" ==> ad infinitum.
The pragmatic solution is approval voting. Simple, combinable (combining results from districts is trivial summation), explainable and adequate. Yep, adequate. Not perfect, not fantastic but adequate and not intrinsically broken. I'm sure you've seen the analyses that expose the instability and dangers of IRV. Maybe you want to do something more Condorcetish and that is where you are going with your math. The problem is that less than 1% of the population will ever fully grok how it works and it will ultimately fail because joe public won't understand it and will reject it when it stumbles, even if it only appears to stumble.
Similarly to the original topic, technical folk are so often perfectionists but with flawed direction. The fanciness of the GUI gets focused on at the expense of performance, features get added without first understanding the challenges the users actually face. All resulting in the genesis of the complaint for this topic - slow, unpleasant to use and annoying software.
This behavior of falling in love with the wrong thing runs so deep in the tech world it is often invisible to all but a few grounded pragmatists. Kinda sad I think. How do you get folks to take a genuine, critical look at the things they've gotten attached to?
Switch to approval (aka "multi-choice" voting) and the need for tweaks that mitigate burial and vote splitting issues go away. I think most if not all the crazy stuff that you see in primaries evolved from various moronic attempts to fix plurality.
Plurality always slowly degenerates into dysfunction. Try it with a bunch of friends. Use single choice to decide where to go for dinner. It might work once or twice but most of the time it will not yield the "winner" that makes the most people happy. Then switch to approval (which actually most people would intuitively use anyway). The result might not be perfect but it won't be pathologically wrong most of the time.
By the by, IRV is *worse* than single choice. This is one of those cases where intuition leads you astray. Also don't waste our time with range voting. Burial is a major source of voting dysfunction and a 0-1 range (approval) is far less vulnerable to burial than a 0-10 range (for example).
If we mine the asteroids and bring the metals back home the planet will get heavier and heavier, that means we will get heavier (weight, not mass) and the year will get longer. I'm sure that will lead to some kind of disaster. Better for us to all pick flowers from our organic gardens and just look up at the stars at night. Mining asteroids! Hmmph, stay home I say.
Senior Luddite #153.
by careful inspection. At least this can be done to a degree. For an example of where this was done well with Economics (at least done well in my opinion) see Henry George's book Progress and Poverty. For the time starved listen to the free audio book on you daily commute. http://hgchicago.org/links/pro... or the unabridged version: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Flibrivox.org%2Fprogress-...
Yep, I was born and raised in the Cook Islands. How many other Cook islanders are reading Slashdot?
I tried this on my work laptop and it's almost working! Thank goodness I kept a USB floppy drive around in my PC parts junk box. I don't know how you got the patch on one floppy though. It took 122 floppies for the patch I downloaded. Was I supposed to compress the patch somehow? I'm currently loading floppy # 83, wish me luck.
You know who I voted for? I'm no fan of the Democrats. Nadar said it best, the only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is the speed at which their knees hit the ground when the corporations come calling.
The Democrats tend to be dumb/compassionate, the Republicans, dumb/cruel but both tend to have some connection with reality. The Libertarians are the worst, they are intelligent/out-of-touch. Clueless about the reality around them and pawns of corporate power whilst totally unaware of it. There is no greater destructive force at play in the US today, well, except maybe for the religions
Why, prey tell, should the President negotiate with the Republicans right now? There is no win scenario in that for him. Given that you responded to my obnoxious and trollish post I can only assume you are of a Libertarian bent. Since Libertarians are unable to see past their moronic goddess Ann Fucking Rand I am painfully aware of how pointless dialog with you all is and know that I just wasted five minutes of my life responding. However I take some pleasure in being a total jerk about it. Hmmmm... time for another snifter of Hennessy
Motorcycles, sports cars and large pickup trucks are jerk magnets (apologies to genuinely respectful decent people who drive such vehicles, you seem to be the exception). Given that fact don't expect kindness towards speeders, tailgaters, or aggressive drivers built into the programing of robotic vehicles.
(still bitter and bitchy, explanation elsewhere in this story).
Robotically controlled cars are just an expensive, inefficient and dumb way to do public transportation. Everyone will use either public transportation or an automated car so you pay one way or the other, only thing is the robo-cars will be 10x the cost of public transportation so only egotistical dumbasses will buy 'em.
Think elevators but horizontal and branched.
(I'm still bitter after spending $$ to visit Washington DC and being locked out of the Smithsonian, did that leak into this post? Moron libertarian tea party nutters fsking up the country. Rand was a moron fraud, wake up damnit. Mutter, grumble, snarl
Instead of a forced single entity how about something a little more wacky? For example I'd like to see all the cellular radio providers put hidden bids in for the *sell price* of their bandwidth. The market price is set at the average of the two lowest bids and *all* carriers must honor that price. Can't make money at that price? Off to the auction block with you. The price setting process would be carried out every six months. At best it would lead to convergence on two or three "best" carriers providing cell bandwidth around the country. At worst it would provide some entertainment value watching the carriers do battle.
The "two-party system" is a symptom of single choice voting. Multi-choice (approval) voting is a supremely simple fix but few enough people are willing to study it to the point of getting it so I guess we'll be stuck with "one man, 1/n vote" for the foreseeable future. Given all that the only response likely to make a difference is to choose the party least loathsome to your values and try and make a difference *inside* that party.
WHS sounds interesting but a bit complicated. Also, obviously not available on Linux. After many years of trying (in no particular order) rsync, unison, bup, ugarit, btrfs raid, afs (that was the worst install ever) and probably a few others I found Moosefs and for my situation it seems to work pretty well. My requirement is that I can slap a few components together for a new system, boot from USB stick and be up and running in under 15 minutes of my time (the install process may well run much longer but I can get other things done). I have a script to install Moosefs and install all the packages I normally require. Moosefs replicates my data across multiple machines keeping N copies of each file where N is:
I dunno, I've eaten dog before (tends to taste a bit like what it was eating, coconut and scraps, yech). I also had a dog that got hit by a car and the neighbors got to it before we did. Apparently they ate well that night. Shit happens. Things are born, die, sometimes get eaten by other things. That said I could never eat my own dog (extreme starvation situation excepted). Your emotional attachment is just that, an emotional attachment and personally I'm fine with offending your sensibilities if it yields a cure for some nasty disease.
All that said however, I'm a firm believer that *all* animals should be treated with compassion and respect. I consider brutal treatment of cows destined for a grease burger just as despicable as torturing lab monkeys with toxic cosmetics. Why single out dogs for special treatment?
Seems like a great solution for feral dogs and helping breeders get rich. To all your pure-bred (assuming genetically modified is still "pure-bred") dogs, cats whatever add a gene that causes them to die if not fed a special additive to their food.
No more strays
I'm just kidding of course but whats the bet that the Monsanto equivalent in the pet world does just exactly this?
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers. - Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in "Oath of Fealty"
