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Comment by no1youknowz | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, good luck to you and bai!

I am happy for all those that voted Tory. The country would have been a complete shambles had Labour got in. Do you people have short memories of the last Labour Goverment?

There was no money left.

Immigration was out of control.

There were musings of ditching the pound and having the euro as the currency.

Giving more powers to the EU.

Complete madness. Labour would not have been more happier if the UK was sold off like Greece.

Now under a Tory parliament, the UK has a chance of being great again. Being fiscally responsible and fostering a climate for more jobs for people and better wages. Last I heard the UK was outpacing Germany!

It's funny, where will you go. Yeah, no-where IS perfect.

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You are being downvoted (and probably me to follow) because you said something 'unpopular' in a context of a quite lefty post. To be honest I think the British public voted for the better candidate out of the existing options. They were not presented with stellar choices, so they had to make do. Online privacy, I believe was not why most people voted or did not vote Tory.

Yes, apps like Aral's (which good on him, I support it), have a chance of being affected. Maybe. Its just as likely that it won't be. Who knows? The whole world is snooping and listening so it might as well be happening wherever he goes.

However, had Labour won you'd see the exact same post created by someone else, leaving the country because Labour had won, stating his/hers reasons and telling the public to be ashamed of themselves. This is how democracy works. half the people will be unhappy.

Labour is increasingly right wing, but you're wrong about Tory's being a good option.

Tories now have majority rule in the house of commons for 5 years, which means they can push whatever they want as long as they're aligned without being reigned in. Last time this happened the gap between rich and poor deepened massively, benefits were slashed, our rail system was privatised and Libraries closed- oh, and Miners went on strike due to terrible conditions.

38% is not a Majority vote, in my mind, and leveraging young voters because they "don't know better" and have very little consideration to other issues that do not affect young fit workers is a very American thing to do.

honestly, growing up poor has taught me to respect socialist ideals such as public free healthcare and benefits for the unable. - But there was a time in my teen years where even I would have voted conservative because "these issues" wouldn't have affected me as a young worker- but they will one day and people should be quick to recognise that.

Tories scare the life out of me, they have a history of being self-serving. :\ and you're right about the choices not being stellar.

I'd suggest creating another party- but we have so many!

There is never a "majority" vote. It would take the majority actually going out to vote.

There is a silver lining there as well for the Tory-disappointed. Keep in mind that most likely a lot of the votes that gave Cameroon his win, came from people who might have voted UKIP and changed their mind in the last minute.

I'd like to believe the Conservative of today are not those from the 80s and that today, all parties except the extremists, start from the centre and lean from there.

Edit: let me drop this here: The majority vote that gave the win was actually a lot smaller than people think. The deciding factor was in the hands of about 1000 people:

http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2015/05/majority-2015.html

The miners didn't go on strike due to terrible conditions… the miners went on strike to try to prevent the closure of their pits which were unprofitable at the time.

The miners strike is always blamed on Thatcher but Scargill has a lot to answer for - previous strike ballots had rejected strike action so the union decided to call a strike without a ballot.

I think Thatcher took the wrong approach but given with the way the unions in the 70's had tried to bring down governments I don't think she had much choice but to face them down.

Thatcher's government failure was to repair the communities after pit closures but encourage new business etc to set up there.

Scargill's hubris and ego led the miners on a journey of suffering, remember this is the man who was still claiming the union had an obligation to house him long after he had retired.

Also don't forget the striking miners killed a man by throwing a concrete block through the windscreen of the truck(?) he was driving.

The miners strike has become a popular myth of how Thatcher destroyed the workers but the NUM has a lot to answer for.

By the way, I don't' see myself as left or right wing. I look at an issue, and sometimes the left has a good solution, sometimes the right does. What we need is not a new party - we need a new way of governance which is issue based, not 'time' based. Maybe one day technology will be advanced and easy enough to allow safe referendums from your mobile device. Continuous referendums...

What we need is a way to link policy with its desired effects. Call it evidence-based lawmaking if you like. If you make a new policy, that policy should have a falsifiable goal embedded into itself. If that policy doesn't achieve its own goal, it is overturned - no courts, no appeals, etc., it simply winks out of existence.

Doing this would require creating new institutions with size and scope equal to current justice systems, albeit with different, if related, goals. It may be worth the work, though.

Continuous referendums... mind blown. Anyone working on this?

This is what libertarians would like.

We would also like that the "consent of the governed" be unanimous. Or at least very high.

Just because %60 of the population, for instance, wants to ban gay marriage, they should't be able to. IT should take %95 or something like that.

We no longer have the multi-week latency between our hometown and washington. Votes can be instantaneous-- and in the 1990s MIT made software that would allow anyone to audit an election and prove it was legitimate, and prove that their vote was counted, electronically. Everyone could do a recount in a few minutes. Things like the blockchain might even be a better way to do the same thing.

So we no longer need "representatives" that don't even represent us-- because they are picked by the two party heads in a system that keeps any other party out, structurally with "election rules"-- not even getting into the shenanigans that keep them out of debates, and off the ballots in many cases.

Frankly, I think our election system is deeply compromised (whoever controls the software controls the outcome) and representational government is no longer necessary.

So, rewind 10 years or so, when there was a de facto ban on gay marriage. Would you have required the same 90% margin to repeal the ban?

How about to pass a budget?

In a direct democracy, who writes the bills?

Should people be taking 10 hours out of their week to read and vote on all of the items that would be put before them?

> This is what libertarians would like.

I don't think you can say that. Libertarians are not a single group with a single dogma or something.

I've seen some libertarians making a good case for a Monarch-like figure as well. Instead of having elected representatives who basically have no responsibility since they change every 5-10 years, having someone for life embodying the State may be something more reliable for the Country in the longer term, and who would have to listen to the people since they would not be going anywhere a few years later.

I can't say I really agree with the idea, but I can't really condone democracy as it is right now, where people who have no education, who can't reason with logic, and don't care about anything except their own situation have as much voting power as people who are trying to make reasonable, structured decisions based on principles or a good understanding of the country's situation. "Democracy" as we call it is not perfect indeed, and it actually sounds like the worst compromise of all options we have out there. That's the lowest denominator, and we can see how it keeps failing us over and over again no matter how we hope it can work.

Your democracy can only be as good as your people, and that says a lot about the quality of what we have right now.

> Just because %60 of the population, for instance, wants to ban gay marriage, they should't be able to. IT should take %95 or something like that.

If you want no decisions to be made, then setting thresholds like that is the best way for statu-quo. Or you know, you can actually have a constitution for things to be prevented to change in the first place.

Look into quadratic voting (http://ericposner.com/quadratic-voting/) as a solution to e.g. the gay marriage problem.

The German Pirate Party had a system called "liquid democracy" which allowed you to vote yourself, or revocably delegate your vote to others. Interesting idea. IIRC it didn't work.

IMHO, continuous referendums are a mindblowing idea... mindblowingly bad. Politics, like any other skilled job, requires commitment and expertise. The "wisdom of crowds" is not a substitute: while it may aggregate information successfully, it cannot create information. For example, figuring out Putin's intentions, or doing a cost-benefit analysis of TTIP, is difficult and time-consuming. If nobody has the incentives and responsibility to do that, it will not get done: political expertise will be a public good, and will be undersupplied for the standard reasons. Representative democracy leads to candidates and parties who have reasonably strong incentives to demonstrate their competence. Direct democracy does not.

Noone knows if it would have worked, because they never implemented it (except for some local levels).

There was much party-internal warfare about it.

One faction saw Liquid Democracy as the solution to all problems.

The other faction insisted on "Datenschutz" (privacy extreme), which to them evidently meant that having your real identity tied to any election is unacceptable. They would rather have people vote twice or three hundred times on the same ballot than introduce any kind of identifier.

It's a great demonstration of why the German Pirate Party doesn't even get enough votes anymore to have the listed by name in TV when election results come in.

It's actually got it's own problems though. Everyone will vote yes to lower taxes, but also vote yes to spending more on schools, welfare, etc. Referendums are best if fiscally neutral, but that makes them hard to use for lots of issues.

I doubt the equilibrium would be perfect. Even if the balance tips only 2 or 3 percent towards less tax / more spending, it would still represent the citizens opinion better than the decision making models of modern day democracies do.

I think that can happen only if we had an absolute single identity identifier. One issues to every citizen and is not mutable or shareable. One you cannot falsify or duplicate, lend to your friend or use after you die. There were many attempts to create such identities but I'm not sure any had that goal and neither worked anyway. There is a privacy concern with 'true identity' token like that, but that is something we'll have to live with. Until that happens, continuous referendums are not attainable, I don't think. Maybe a future generation of the blockchain?

Having said that, should I copyright the term? just in case ;)

In Australia there is a political party that is along those lines - http://www.senatoronline.org.au/. They don't have any seats in parliament though.

I don't know, how bad Labour is, but what I know is, that this kind of spying on everybody reminds me very much to that what the former DDR did, what was greatly criticized in Western Germany, after the fall of the wall. With one distinction: What they did, was a joke compared to what is going on today in many western countries.

The other thing is, that in my opinion, what ruined the country most in the long term was the reign of Miss Thatcher. The total sale of the state and the rise of the banks stripped the country from any other options (all other industry is in ruins today or sold to foreign (e.g. German) corporations) -- GB must give the banks a free hand, or crash. And when they do, we all in Europe loose (also GB).

I also read a statement from a Economist, who largely criticized Camerons idea of further reducing the states spending (as much I understood, by privatization). This makes the country even more vulnerable to crisis and I also see some very good examples in GB, how privatization can make public services worse.

    What they did, was a joke compared to what is going on 
    today in many western countries.

The Stasi had a unit whose job was to drive its victims mad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung). Their collaborators numbered in the hundreds of thousands (http://www.ted.com/talks/hubertus_knabe_the_dark_secrets_of_...). Be careful with those comparisons.

There may well be similar agencies operating clandestinely in regimes today. It probably wouldn't be hard to methodically push critics (or communities) just enough into the twilight zone to kill their credibility with targeted information campaigns. Pummel them with careful half-truths and convincing sources, then routinely expose their drifting worldview.

Total speculation of course, but I would be surprised if our governments didn't spend at least some of their time and energy sabotaging critics and hacking the public consciousness. Order is hard to maintain in a sprawling democracy.

>With one distinction: What they did, was a joke compared to what is going on today in many western countries.

The Stasi had a third of East Germans spying on the other two thirds, and to be fingered meant to disappear in the night. Don't exaggerate.

I don't know, how many people "disappeared" in the night. I don't think, that it where that many, but please correct me, when you have exact numbers. I know that many went to prison, but I just don't think, that to many "people just disappeared" -- the DDR was a bad state, but I just don't think that it was as bad, how some south american dictatorships where (where at times hundreds dissipated and where buried in mass graves).

I wrote that it was a joke, because what they used where paper folders of information, typed with typewriters. So they may have stored some GB of data about the people -- the NSA and other agencies store how much data? Petabytes? Or some magnitudes higher?

So the number of people spying may be less (and the methods still better -- remember: there are already cases, where ordinary people become victim of snatch squads in the US, because of some misunderstood Google searches), but the shear magnitude of data is much higher.

Miss Thatcher? Not Mrs? Or Ms?

I am sorry for my bad English! Mrs, I guess!

The comment is satire, in case you didn't get it. Not even David Cameron himself is that on-message.

Obviously the UK can't "run out of money", the Tories missed their own immigration target by a factor of 10, and joining the Euro was always a Conservative ambition (remember Black Wednesday?).

Austerity is a tool to prevent a sovereign default. It has never in history worked to reduce deficit and increase growth except for a few of the post-soviet countries who had huge governments.

I agree that the choices weren't that great but I'd rather see labour in charge.

> Last I heard the UK was outpacing Germany!

Short-term comparisons are always wrong.

Sorry, I am German, but still I must say that, because it is right. Don't believe in what your politicians tell you, I don't believe what our politicians are telling me! (many statistics are basically on the verge to lies, I know that, because our government is falsifying so many).

Outpaced most EU countries financially. My income has quadrupled since the tories got in office, but I still very much prefer the old days where the next guy actually gave a shit about you.

no-where IS perfect

Seriously. UK/US/EU/Aus/NZ/plus few others are just about perfect places. There's a reason they enjoy prosperity, stability, and fairness in general.

If it was perfect, than everyone would be happy.

UK/US/EU/Aus/NZ/plus few others are closer to being perfect place than pretty much any other place. Don't you agree?

Very funny.

I genuinely laughed while reading it.

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