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It seems useful to identify the right problem. It's better to know you just need the right compiler than the think the issue is something else as you can then work on building the right compiler.

Obviously democracy should be limited to the relevant franchise. We don't let children vote, we don't let people who don't live (and are not from) an area vote. The entire point is to identify the right set of people who should vote, based on those who suffer from the related externalities.

It seems unfair to say the article just moves the problem elsewhere, it touches on proposed solutions such as street-level development votes.

> It's better to know you just need the right compiler than the think the issue is something else as you can then work on building the right compiler.

You completely misunderstand the sufficiently smart compiler objection. It is about dodging real problems by proposing magic solutions.

You can't make C/C++ a safe language "just" by writing a sufficiently smart compiler. It requires a new approach and perhaps even a new language like Rust.

> It touches on proposed solutions such as street-level development votes.

That is not a generic solution to the vetocracy problem. That is a specific identification of a group of people that the author of the article believes should be endowed with making a particular decision. There is no general framework proposed for selecting such a group of people in the general case.

Let's consider some possible general mechanisms. The "simple" problem that we "just" have to solve to make the authors otherwise perfect solution work.

We could endow that responsibility on a single individual, such as the author himself. He feels he made a good decision in the street-level case, maybe he can do the same for other cases, like mining rights or cross-country oil pipelines. So whenever the question comes up as to who is affected by such a thing we go to the author of the article and ask him to tell us. Kind of like a dictator or even a King.

Or we put together a committee and they decide between them who is impacted. Kind of like an oligarchy. Or maybe we all get a vote on who is impacted. A democracy to decide who is impacted and who gets the right to vote. It's recursive! Or divide and conquer!

It's starting to sound like picking the mechanism to determine who is impacted by a particular change is a very similar kind of activity to existing political mechanisms. That is suspicious. Maybe it isn't an easy problem to solve after all.

I’m reminded of the phrase “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”. You’re framing this as just “shifting the problem” without acknowledging that problems have degrees of severity. There’s nothing inherently wrong with saying, “let’s make the problem less severe right now, but continue looking for a better solution”.

It seems to me the real front line of the debate is whether the problem is in fact made less severe by what’s being suggested. But apparently engaging in that debate isn’t quite as gratifying as attacking the person’s entire framework for finding solutions.

> I’m reminded of the phrase “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”

Well, if our arguments are going to devolve into trite cliche then I might trot out: primum non nocere -- First, do no harm.

It is not clear to me that this approach is free from potential harm. On the contrary, limiting people's access to participation seems like the kind of tool a wealthy elite would gladly wield against the poor and disenfranchised. I strongly doubt that it would primarily be used to protect the weak.

The current NIMBY-ism status quo is actively harming the weak and poorer folks. Continuing it will continue harming those folks. In many areas it seems to be wealthy people from other locales or powerful city representatives with no actual skin in the game who block many beneficial building projects.

I believe the authors intent is to find ways to let people who are influenced the most have the most say. Even then he suggests rolling it out in small experiments which would allow checking the assumptions. If it's harmful, then stop.

> Well, if our arguments are going to devolve into trite cliche then I might trot out: primum non nocere -- First, do no harm.

Oh get over yourself. I used a “trite cliche” as a way to give a general sense of the point I was trying to make before going into it more detail. Had I responded with only that, sure, that would be devolving the argument, but I didn’t.

> It is not clear to me that this approach is free from potential harm. On the contrary, limiting people's access to participation seems like the kind of tool a wealthy elite would gladly wield against the poor and disenfranchised. I strongly doubt that it would primarily be used to protect the weak.

That’s a strong argument and one that I’m inclined to agree with.

> If your solution to vetocracy is to limit democracy then you aren't using democracy. Democracy becomes subordinate to the mechanism you are using to define the limit. At that point, the mechanism that determines that limit becomes your solution.

All large democracies use limiting mechanisms, you don't directly vote for most things - which would be a direct democracy, which tends to break down on all but very small scales. All western democracies are a representative democracy, this is already a limiting mechanism, not everything goes everyone's way, we vote for representatives, and hope that they vote for the majority of our interests the majority of the time.

The core argument here seems to be that the catchment area of development (an already pre-existing limiting mechanism) is simply defined too broadly. I don't think identifying people who are genuinely affected from those that have nothing better to do between scoffing tea cakes than complain is worth while - So long as the area is reasonable well defined to not include too many people who are barely affected, then you don't have to worry about separating the tea cakes from the rest.

This is not moving goalposts. The further normal people are away from a development the less shits they give because they have their own problems to deal with.. unfortunately that just leaves the people with nothing better to do, who will complain about literally anything because they already have a house and a pension, seem to have lost all empathy of any struggle they had getting there.

> So long as the area is reasonable well defined to not include too many people who are barely affected, then you don't have to worry about separating the tea cakes from the rest.

There we go again. I get the feeling you don't feel yourself asking for a magic genie here. Clearly you believe that there is an algorithm to determine a "reasonably well defined area" but are unable to provide one.

My challenge is: please, provide this algorithm that will work in all of the crazy cases that show up, from the small to the large. From a slight densification of a suburban area, to a commercial development like a shopping center or business park, to industrial use areas, to an infrastructure project like a new bridge or airport, to a massive development like a nuclear power plant.

I'm arguing that such an algorithm is beyond the possibility of man. You might as well ask for magic.

But as long as you believe such an algorithm is possible, while also refusing to provide it or to sketch it out, you can fall back on: come on bro, it might be better than what we have now, trust me, stop being such a downer. In fact you can turn it around on me - like asking me to prove it couldn't exist!

Meanwhile, my intuition is that any limits that are enacted to prevent participation will disproportionately advantage the existing elite and wealthy to the detriment of the middle and lower classes.

15 minute cites have become a bit watchword among urbanists. I think drawing a 15-minute walking circle around a development would be a very reasonable place to start. Pretty typical walking speed is ~5 km/h, so roughly an area about 1-1.3 km.

1 km is actually a pretty big circle, so there would probably be room for multiple circle sizes based on the proposed development size. Adding 50 housing units is a 5 minute concern. Adding 1000 is a 15 minute one.

Now we're firmly in the territory of motte and bailey. You can retreat to an argument based on "but all I want is to allow homeowners to vote on bike lanes in their own neighborhoods!" while dodging the harder topics that are really at the heart of land use.

No thoughts on heroin clinics or other social services initiatives. No thoughts on sensitive land issues like protected water-ways. No thoughts on major regional infrastructure initiatives. No thoughts on industry needs (e.g. pipelines).

Also not a general purpose solution to vetocracy. Now you just have an idea to handle squabbles in middle-class suburbs. That kind of thinking won't get high-speed rail built in California, so good luck.

> There we go again. I get the feeling you don't feel yourself asking for a magic genie here. Clearly you believe that there is an algorithm to determine a "reasonably well defined area" but are unable to provide one.

A catchment area is already being defined based on some rules, it's not magic. That's the place to begin. It's not going to be an algorithm, it's going to be a poor bag of heuristics. Suggesting the existing method needs refinements is not the same as suggesting magic.

> A catchment area is already being defined based on some rules

I don't know what the term "catchment area" means to you, but I have no idea how that applies in Canada. As of right now, there is no way that I am aware for me to vote on land use rights. That is, I am aware of zoning bylaws that define what I can use land for. The options that I am aware of are: I can apply for rezoning to an alternate existing zoning designation (including parceling out or assemblies) or I can apply for an amendment to the existing zoning bylaw. These are pretty opaque processes but certainly require involving the local district and they definitely involve public hearings, require public notices and invite public comment.

As far as I know, no one locally gets a vote. So this isn't altering an existing process or narrowing it's scope (what I suppose you mean by refining), it is proposing an entirely new process. I can't speak for every jurisdiction in Canada, North America or Europe, but I feel that this isn't just re-drawing some borders. We aren't suddenly going to have councils at the 15 minute walking range, or councils for my street. And even if we did they are going to be more like HOA/Strata councils - which are a nightmare to behold.

Further - this doesn't answer the larger question which everyone wants to dodge. For example, he talks at length about larger infrastructure projects like wind power and energy power-line corridors. That is a kind of thing that spans multiple jurisdictions. How does one coordinate that?

None of that is thought out or proposed, just hand waved away as a "research project".

If we are claiming a process to solve vetocracy - I want to hear about how you are going to coordinate land use rights to build high speed rail. How are you going to manage defining the list of who is affected by that? Otherwise you are just wasting time on toy problems that can be trivially solved in other ways.

We've been wrestling with democracy for 1000s of years, and you demand perfect solutions. Right now. Otherwise it's all monkey motion.

Good grief.

Authorities which span and overlap other jurisdictions are common enough. In the small, water, conservation, school, fire, etc.

I think of regional and intrastate arrangements as like treaties. But I'm mosdef not a lawyer, so my analogy is prob more weong than right.

Between direct and representative is participatory democracy. AKA citizen assemblies, citizen juries.

A diliberative body (council, legislature) selects a bunch of people (sortition), gives them a charter (scope of work), empower sthem to investigate (interview experts, research, dig into a problem). The assembly/jury writes up their conclusions and recommendations. The empowering body then acts or not.

All work and meetings are public.

Early experiences have been very encouraging.

> Oh. So the solution is: I don't have a solution so I'm going to move the problem from one place to another and state that it is an interesting question for someone else to solve.

This is most of political theory in a nutshell. Whenever you see "The solution is..." just apply this template.

The simplest exercise to follow this to its end: only parents should be allowed to vote on matters that affect children. Education, medical policy, school boards, etc.

It’s an easy case to make that always comes with pretty intense debate. Assume that…but with everything.

EDIT: To be clear, this is an example to show where this path leads. Not something I'm advocating.

Parents are the last person to vote on education so. Most are unqualified, all are emotionally involved.

Since we cannot exclude people from voting, well, that everybody can vote, directly on indirectly on almost everything is actually a good thing.

>Parents are the last person to vote on education so. Most are unqualified, all are emotionally involved.

They shouldn't need to be qualified or emotionally not involved to vote on something that affects them, their families, and their children.

That's democracy.

Anything else is authoritarian dictums, whether they are based on god given or expertise given or gun given power.

Maybe it's only the children who should be allowed to vote on matters that affect them.

Definitely not, they are children after all and as such not yet ready to oversee the consequences of their choices - not because they are stupid but because they lack some essential skills which will come along later in their development. That is what it means to be a child, that is why children are not legally responsible for their actions, that is why they require adult supervision.

The education your children get affects me if I have to encounter your children. If you live in my community, then it is also likely that my tax dollars pay for your kids' educations. The medical decisions that you make for your children (vaccinations) can also affect me.

So no, that's a non-starter.

That which explains everything explains nothing. Literally everything affects you in the sense implied here, so "it affects me" is quite plainly insufficient justification for intervention. Everything affects you in some sense.

I don't expect to get a vote over what happens in Cleveland, because I don't pay taxes in Cleveland, but I sure as fuck expect to have a vote in what happens with my money here. I'm not an "investor." I'm a citizen. There are no extra shares or votes which I can buy. These are different classifications with different expectations.

> All we need are the right people to vote. None of the wrong people. And then we can bribe [20th century respelling of educate] the right people to vote the right way. Then democracy will work. ̶/̶s̶a̶r̶c̶a̶s̶m̶

Rousseau agrees. I'm glad we've finally reached terminal Enlightenment.

> Who do you decide gets to vote?

Proof of work, the human version. Like a giant captcha.

So, if you spend enough work on a certain task you prove that you care about the issue at hand, and you can vote.

So busybody NIMBYs get more influence. Not different from the status quo.

If you don't like the outcome, you can just work for the right to vote against it. Sounds fair to me.

Then the infinite righteous energy of some cause will win out. Do we always want that? Do we ever want that?

Do you think the best way to come up with a fair or ethical decisionmaking process should be based on whether it will an outcome favorable to you?

just like proof of work, this favors those who already have power & resources. the wealthy, corporations, etc.

Why? Nobody said that more work == more voting power. It could be just a small threshold of (say) 1 hour of work to gain access to voting.

As soon as I read "buy them off" I closed the article.

Why shouldn't people affected by a development be able to partake in the benefits? Otherwise they're "paying" for a project by disruptions to their lives and environments without getting anything in exchange.