duncangh

+1 to encouraging an equal and educated society. You'd definitely want each batch of random citizens to be well informed and equipped to perform the legislative function.

I actually think some of the dysfunction is by design and what has made the dollar so stable throughout the last 25 years or so. No major legislation can get passed and thus anything too radical is ctrl-z'd by the next executive and we revert to mean and nothing ever changes writ large although the division and mutual contempt carries on

Fair enough. Any thoughts?

You're right to be cautious when placing optimism in captivating theories on governance. Venezuela is another instance of great rhetoric eventually deteriorating into devastation. But as things are in America I feel like it's nice to dream

Thanks for this. This is going to be a nice Wikipedia walk trailhead :)

I'm drawn to randomness as it's elegant, simple and wholesome. By the people for the people and being judged by a jury of peers in court also seemed to suggest a comfort in vesting power to ordinary citizens briefly as needed.

What really sold me is how this would obviate the need for election season polling and the tired prediction estimation and pontification for all those months leading up to elections.

Power and elected office almost certainly corrupts as well. Having brief and rare opportunities to perform this as an honor and duty would bring out the best in people and surface voices and considerations that would better reflect the concerns of the common people.

Idk it just seems like a nicer idea every time i come back to it. Most people here are good people. Yet we're governed by a consortium of the absolute worst (ironically this appears to be completely bipartisan).

Anyways thanks for sharing sortition and it's history here :) this is exactly what I was hoping to find in the discussion and why I enjoy HN

I'm thinking the terms would be several weeks max similar to jury duty. Families could be sequestered with them and could definitely work around civic pillars like school and harvest or tourism seasons maybe

Hi HN, I've been thinking about this for months now and with each pass I find myself more enamored with it as a mode of achieving representative democracy. Interested to hear your thoughts. I think this would be an entire constitutional re-write if implemented, but I am optimistic that random sequestered groups of our peers would work quite well as legislative representatives and do a decent job in earnest. Maybe each law would have an expiration date with varying lengths determined by degree of consensus. E.g foundational rights should consistently yield 100% support of Freedom of speech and would be due to renew once a decade while novel laws with smaller pluralities could be briefly trialed and discarded by default if not successful

Let's randomly summon citizens to serve brief terms as legislators. It's less crazy than it sounds and even if it weren't it still sounds better than what we've got. For the people by the people. You're already destined to be judged by such a group in the court of law. I offer that sequestered citizen legislators would perform their function radically better than our current system

Amazon will add any information to the UX like a hoarder adding trinkets to their collection from the gift store. It's kind of endearing, really

What is the best source of government data on the H1B program (e.g total visas per year, count by industry / job function, nationality of recipient counts)? Also, do you know of any original sources / documents which discuss the future of the program and how it will be assessed whether there is enough talent domestically in a given field of work. Thanks

Lmao this is great because on my "virtual on-site" final round of interviews at Amazon, the fire alarm of the person who was interviewing me went off. She switched to audio on the call and continued to try to work through the little coding challenge as she was shouting implementation details above the echo-y wails of a fire alarm raging in a crowded stairwell. Baffled, concerned for her safety and bewildered by her priorities, I hung up and pretended the call had dropped. No offer. No interest

This is absolutely incredible. I will not be working all day because of this. Neat seeing the different forms of civic infrastructure around the world. E.g. in Spain, they have traffic lights that blink on green when about to change. Could be helpful. Also funny seeing the different cultures of driving aggression

And I just cancelled all my Kubernetes side projects on GCP