Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

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I hear you, I'm just saying we keep grinding forward. This admin has less than 3 years to go. Nothing stops this freight train, even if they try to slow it down. You can't fix stupid, you can just keep turning the gears to grind it down.

> Trump is likely to have delayed off shore wind in the US by at least 4 years, and may be many more. This will cost ratepayers a lot, and set the US behind most other countries in the world.

Democracy has unfortunate failure scenarios, make a note for history books and system design lessons. The electorate should learn to vote better next time. Existing coal plants will get run into the ground (they only supplied 16% of power in the US in 2024, and that number will decline forever), and there are only two gas turbine manufacturers in the world; their backlog is 5-7 years. As the US exports more LNG, that will force domestic prices up, pushing up electricity prices of generation from fossil gas. Renewables and battery storage will be the only option.

As of this comment, the world is very close to 1TW/year of solar PV deployment, and this will not slow down:

https://ember-energy.org/focus-areas/clean-electricity/

https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/global-solar-install...

> Democracy has unfortunate failure scenarios, make a note for history books and system design lessons. Vote better next time.

Major problems with the US system have been known for a long time. It's been regarded as basically obsolete for over a century now, by the kind of people who study this stuff.

How about we try keeping big money out of politics and using ranked preference voting before we declare democracy obsolete? People have been studying that stuff.

I think they're talking about the flaws in presidential democracies. Not democracy itself. Parliamentary democracies are supposed to be a better design.

If you ask most voters they'll say big money in politics is bad but if they know that why aren't they voting the issue?

What is the money doing that the voter can't overcome?

They all think it's big money on the other side. Everything they learn themselves isn't the result of a big money campaign, it's honest truthful information that they were smart enough to find on their own.

This is precisely why I don't care very much about accusations that there's big money in politics. Of course there is - there's huge numbers of people and institutions with money, using that money to advocate for the political change they want to see, and an important strategy for doing this involves promulgating information that they think is favorable to their cause. Everyone is doing this all the time.

Nonetheless, an individual citizen still has to support some political cause (even if you are completely politically disinterested, there are multiple factions claiming that your inaction is tantamount to support for their opponents). Whatever information about the world you think is true, or whatever political cause you think is in your interests, someone else can point to a monied interest who supports similar things. There's no way to use the absence of big money as a heuristic for what political causes are good or bad for you to support.

How about, before we try to keep "big money" out of politics and adopt ranked preference voting, we ban ill educated people and ban voting yourself other people's stuff. Voting is not a survival skill, it's a civic obligation.

What specific educational test would you like to see for someone to be legally eligible to vote in some jurisdiction? SAT score higher than a certain threshold (what specific threshold?). What if huge numbers of people cheat on the test in order to be able to legally vote? What if instead the educational criteria is a degree from some credited educational institution? Who decides what institutions will be authorized to grant people the right to vote or not? What if some authorities within those educational institutions believe in universal suffrage and so make sure to give suffrage-granting degrees to literally everyone who sets foot in their institution, regardless of their academic performance? (During the Vietnam War in the US many college professors gave passing grades to all males in their classes, in order to allow them to keep their student draft deferments, to try to prevent them from being drafted into the US military to fight in Vietnam).

There's a set of similar questions one could ask about exactly how you implement a ban on "voting yourself other people's stuff", in an adversarial political system where everyone has a different idea of what that means and is motivated to use whatever constitutional framework exists to ensure that their idea gets structurally advantaged.

I'm not saying you have to have a certain level of education to vote, I'm saying you have to have a certain level of functional ability to not be incarcerated for the rest of your life. Such as you have to be able to read and write and do math at some certain level.

Voting yourself other people's stuff would be that the safety net is bare minimum to keep people who are going through unexpected issues alive. But no one gets to live in the social safety net. No one who is receiving these kinds of benefits from the government should expect name brand anything, or to even be able to choose what food to eat, or to travel, or even pick who you socialize with. If you want to eat steak, you have to be a net producer. If you want name brand clothing, be a net producer. If you want to go to the beach, be a net producer.

Everyone who should pay some amount of tax, and anytime there is an increase in government spending, that amount that they are taxed should go up. If there is a decrease in government spending, it can go down. But everyone pays something. People need to have skin in the game. The US's current situation where nearly half the country are not net tax payers is not sustainable. Anything that can't go on forever, won't. So the country should ease into better situation, where the country is a nation of producers and not a nation of consumers, instead of hitting a brick wall where suddenly your ration of beans just stop.

Such as you have to be able to read and write and do math at some certain level.

Yes, we should implement this as it’s never been tried before! Oh, wait…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test#Voting

Perhaps instead of reading’, writing, and ‘rithmetic, maybe we should test one’s knowledge of history, eh?

Maybe you should learn to read at a level that you understand what I wrote? Smugness based on an intentional misreading just makes you look dumb.

Plenty of illiterate people manage to stay out of jail, you’re implying that you weren’t suggesting literacy tests for voting, so I’ll just admit to being at a loss as to your point. But if you care to take another whack at how you would suggest “we ban ill educated people”, I’m all ears.

I am not attempting to describe the world. I am trying to define the expectations we should have of the citizens of our polity. It has nothing to do with illiterate people manage not to commit crimes. I am saying that before we decide to get "big money" out of politics or we let people vote for the seven people who promise them the most shit, we should decided to put people who chose not to acquire basic skills that any human within standard deviation of average intelligence can acquire, when given 12 years of free education, into jail. It literally is not a literacy test for voting. It's an "are you a lazy piece of shit who is going to drag all of society down" policy.

> I'm saying you have to have a certain level of functional ability to not be incarcerated for the rest of your life. Such as you have to be able to read and write and do math at some certain level.

Having a failure of parental upbringing and education system causing someone to be incarcerated seems cruel. Should a child who ran away from home & school to avoid family abuse be incarcerated? There are so many current systems of society (education, police, disability, etc) that have failures at the margin that adding incarceration seems over the top.

FWIW most experts now favor approval voting [1] over ranked choice. Approval voting has similar advantages as ranked choice in allowing 3rd-party candidates and favoring moderate candidates. It avoids the chaotic behavior that RCV can exhibit [2] where shifts in the order of voters' down-ballot preferences can very significantly alter the outcome of the election [3]. And it's also much easier to explain to voters ("It's like voting today, except you vote for everybody you'd find acceptable and the best candidate wins. Sorta like when you're picking a restaurant to go out to with friends - you go to the place that is acceptable to the greatest number of people, not the one that a minority really want to go to"), doesn't require that you reprint ballots (you can re-use normal FPTP ballots, but you just count all votes instead of disqualifying ballots with multiple candidates marked), and is easily adapted to proportional representation and multi-member elections (you just take the top-N best candidates instead of the top-1).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting

[2] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1o1byqi/...

Not to be cynical, but what does it look like when most candidates aren't acceptable to a majority of people?

What does what look like? Approval voting? The unacceptable (usually extreme) candidates fail to get votes and so get booted out of office, with their places taken by more moderate, common-sense candidates.

FPTP, particularly with partisan primaries, has the misfeature that you need to rally the base in order to win the crowded primary field. This leaves only extremist candidates heading toward the general election. In a country like the U.S. where voting is not compulsory, this turns off the moderate electorate, who are forced to choose between two extreme candidates that both seem batshit crazy, and encourages them to stay home.

there's no such thing as "acceptable" or not, there are just utilities and _relative_ satisfaction. you want to get the most satisfaction possible from the options you have.

https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6

approval voting is insanely good at this.

https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig

There is no system that is immune to takeover from a demagogue. There's not even any hard evidence that any system is more resilient to it than the US is. It's all just tradeoffs.

Germany had 7 major political parties in the run up to 1933. In fact if you look at the history of dictatorships that took over democracies, having 2 to 3 stable institutionalized parties is actually protective. The other thing that appears to be protective is a history of peaceful transitions of power, which the US has the longest or second longest.

Germany only became a democracy under duress in 1919, and it never really settled into a stable democracy.

Under immense pressure from an impressive list of disasters during the 1920s, it reverted back to authoritarianism in 1933.

I don't think this teaches us much about the US

Germany was a constitutional monarchy with a written constitution, and a representative legislature 50 years before 1919. The Kaiser in many ways was more limited in power than the President of the United States.

Nearly every democracy to dictatorship is preceded by disasters.

The US constitution has a really bad early adopter syndrome where it was so good at the time that it's hard to move away from. Nearly every country with a constitution modelled on ours has failed at some point.

"We basically run a coalition government, without the efficiency of a parliamentary system" - Paul Ryan.

To be more specific, our majority-based government locks us into a two-party system where one party just has to be slightly less bad than the other to win a majority. But our two parties are really just a rough assembly of smaller coalitions that are usually at odds with each other.

The presidential democracies that function usually have some sort of "hybrid" model where the legislature has some sort of oversight on the executive office. But they are still much more prone to deadlock or power struggles.

What is considered the best* system of government? Which country comes closest to the ideal model?

*best is funny to define

I guess the answer has to depend on demographics. But if we are spitballing, it probably wouldn't be all bad for every country to have a Lee Kuan Yew.

Can you provide examples that support your assertion, that the US system was already generally seen as obsolete in 1926?

Smells like BS.

"Obsolete" is pretty strong, clearly it's still limping along and hasn't quite yet succumbed to Benjamin's Franklin's expectation that it would fall to Despots if not vigoriously maintained.

But it was absolutely seen as "a good first effort" that could be improved upon in the 1890s.

Evidence of that is the new Australian Federation used the UK Westminster system and the system straight of Washington as inspiration to create what was considered "better" .. a Washminster system of government.

The current degeneration of a system founded by people opposed to Party Politics into a Hotelling's law quagmire of two parties, neither particularly broadly representative of general population, should be sound evidence that something went wrong along the way.

That's the emergant behaviour of discrete iterations of the US electoral system as was and as is for you.

Still, absolutely thumbs up for effort and intent those bold founders.

Shame it didn't scale well and got captured by corporations.

Seems like an easier problem to attack than, say, slavery, women's suffrage, the draft, etc. Once you look just a bit deeper, the US system hasn't been stagnant monotonically over the long-term. Not that originalists would ever admit it.

Sure, it's morphed from the original in various ways .. but perhaps not substantially enough to protect it from being gamed.

Transparency, limiting campaign funding, taking away corporate lobbyinging, universal suffrage (including everyone), indpendant commissions for electrol boundaries (stop parties directly dicking about with boundaries), ranked voting, more room for independant blocs, no "presidental" elections, cicada like co-prime terms for justices / other heads of non-p[olicy arms, ... many ways to improve the current system to increase broadly democratic representation.

The original point by the green account stands though, "problems with the US system have been known for a long time" .. perceived or otherwise, as evidenced by many others looking at the US system and picking and choosing what they use.

Those ember energy reports are excellent!

The US is mostly hurting itself here, our portion of emissions is mostly historical now, and if we have more expensive and less reliably energy because we are dumping money into decrepit coal generators rather than cheaper renewables, that will only limit the US's economic growth even more, and make the US a smaller chunk of emissions overall.

I have a very rosy view of the future of energy for the world, especially for Africa which can be completely revolutionized with solar and batteries. But for the US, it's dark days. We need to stop hitting ourselves, but as long as hitting ourselves and hurting our economy is owning the libs, part of our body politic is going to keep on doing it.

You make great points, and I can only recommend reducing your exposure to the US and its choices to the best of your ability. I invest to get exposure to companies outside of the US now, not inside. I invest in renewable energy funds in Europe (partly to get citizenship, but also to contribute towards the energy transition there). I intend to leave tech soon to move into clean tech finance. The direction and trajectories are clear, to ignore them would simply be out of emotion.

Is the US hurting it's future economic potential and infrastructure stock out of ideology? Absolutely. Do I care if the US continues to fight against these energy technology torrent rapids out of ideology? I do not. That is the US' choice to impair their future infrastructure and capabilities as a nation state. I can only observe and comment on a suboptimal system I do not control.

Having grown up in the US, and been very proud of it despite some egregious mistakes that happened when I was of voting age that I could not stop (e.g. Iraq War), it's very hard to bet against the US. And in the past it's always been a bad idea. But you make a very compelling argument, and the returns on the US vs. international stock markets over the past year make a very objective argument that I'm investing in the wrong places.

I still feel an obligation to fix the mess here, as much as possible, and will continue to do so, but full minimization of US-exposure has never sounded so good.

We win or we learn. I thought I was a proud American too, that these were my people. Turns out, the US is just an exploitation engine with a God/control complex attempting to bully its way to remain in its position as a superpower while neglecting everything a superpower needs to be one, for profits of those who stand to gain. It is not great because it is great, it is marketing and PR of a paper tiger that has been coasting on trust for decades while rotting from the inside. These are not my people. I no longer am invested in its outcome, but I understand others my have differing opinions. I still care about good people, and have constrained my attention scope to only those people, versus entire nation states. I focus my attention to context where problems want to be solved, not just say they are desired to be solved as a diversion strategy ("purpose of the system is what it does"). Appreciate the conversation as always. Life is short, time is non renewable, spend it wisely.

Your comments make me hopeful. Thank you.

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