Wasn't Mike Gravel promoting this idea in 2008?

If we elect a Mike Gravel / Ron Paul ticket in 2020, they can probably succeed in putting democracy on the blockchain (and back it with gold).

"the solution is magic coins which live in my computer" - that one guy

DIEBOLD

I can't avoid ****ing hearing about it
https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/24/liquid-democracy-uses-blockchain/

less irritating


https://aragon.org/

Skimming that first article a bit, direct democracy via the blockchain sounds like a terrible idea. You're basically one step away from transforming Congress into 4chan.

That said, maybe this will at last be what could make anime real.

Remember when advertising mattered in politics?

Liquid democracy sounds... interesting. At a first read I’m not sure how well it would work. I see potential churn problems around the actual drafting of legislation, and I’m pretty sure the Nash equilibrium is just a normal party system.

All you’d need is to start a ‘voting ring’ of compatible single issue voters willing to support each other in the areas they don’t care about, and willing to boycott legislation drafted from outside the voting ring system. In the long term, the winning strategy is joining or supporting the largest possible, best whipped ring, even if it means compromising severely on your secondary interests. When whipped properly, the ring could even hold its own votes on who the ‘real’ representatives are - ideally reverting to a fixed term representative democracy, but in practice these kinds of groups tend to degenerate to a loosely coupled highly stratified social group that enables the worst possible behaviour. So id bet my money on that being the ultimate outcome.

This sort of thing happens already in the direct democracies of user governed websites (like stack overflow) so it’s not obvious to me why it wouldn’t happen here. I guess there’s nothing stopping you from voting for an independent representative (even yourself), but... that goes for today, too.

I assume the people who came up with this system have some meaningful defense against political parties and other external social structures from forming on top of it. I’m not exactly that informed about the system. This is just a first impression.

Blockchain voting though, is that a joke? You can’t gamble your country on whether a foreign adversary can find hash collisions. That means it needs to be independently auditable, both by election monitors to ensure only eligible voters are counted, and by individual voters to ensure their vote wasn’t changed. In other words, bye-bye secret ballot, hello vote-buying. You might be able to stop your neighbors from finding out your vote, but the person you sold your vote to can check your vote just as easily as you can.

I know I’d vote for Schultz for a free Frappuccino. ****in love espresso frappuccinos. They’re even better knowing how much Starbucks employees hate making them. Mmm.

Anyway, I’m all for using computers to solve social problems. Use a computer to compute the maximally fair electoral districts, use a computer to figure out the best places to put polling stations so that people have the most opportunities to vote. **** like that. Stop trying to use ****ing computers for trust. Stop trusting them, period. Computers are garbage. Trusting computers will never improve anything. Never has, never will.

I have a friend who works at the EFF. I hear information about 0 days from time to time. When well-tested, bedrock software has as many software vulnerabilities as it does, then, yeah, nobody should ever trust any software ever. When you hear about it first hand you realize how frequently exploits pop up.

As if software could ever be truly security invulnerable. But yeah. Stop ****ing trusting software for sensitive areas, such as elections.

Someone should mention here how Republicans magically stopped losing elections in Georgia the same year they implemented electronic voting machines..

.

Oh yeah. Well:

https://medium.com/@jennycohn1/georgia-6-and-the-voting-machine-vendors-87278fdb0cdf

I'm not saying Republicans are rigging elections, I'm just saying we should absolutely dismantle any electronic voter machines ever, especially in states Republicans control with closer watch of who controls the ballots.

One of the dumbest things I've ever read that a scientist wrote.

Even better is the dumb-off between Neil Degrasse Tyson and Deepak Chopra in the comments.

Literally does not exist; and even if you think it does, the only way you can prove it is to show MC/DC sufficiency in terms of a software testing product that a former employer couldn't sell, combined with a technology that only exists on my computer, and mutation testing for longer than the universe has existed or will exist; and even if you have proof, being well tested doesn't mean your software is high quality, it only means you are able to write a regression test for any bug. I also feel like we've already discussed this at length, and the longer we discuss it again the more likely some natsec code janitor will stop by to let us all know that using Bullseye makes him a big man.

I ****ing hate medium.com

But there's no money in free and open elections. It would be bad for the economy, think of all the rent-seeking cash lost if Diebold Nixdorf went belly up.

Even more reason not to use software for many things.

Why's that?

Because they're a SV startup that is trying to monetize something as simple as an ordinary blog post by actually making it harder to read. Even uploading plain text to a webserver would be better than suffering through their waste of whitespace, constant reminders to sign up, and now, apparently, they won't even let me read the link you posted at all unless I give them my email address or open an incognito window.

Ah, yeah. Well everything is monetized now, and since the only thing salable on the internet are people's identities they're gonna try.

Even among the popular social media platforms, I think anything would be better than medium. They are regularly hated upon on Hacker News these days. I mean you could even put the article in an image and Tweet it and the user experience would be better than medium. It's also pathetic because uploading an ordinary piece of HTML without distracting your reader is literally the easiest thing you've been able to do on the web since the very beginning of its existence in the early 90s.

To be fair massive amounts of empty space and ****ty UIs is pretty standard web design these days. Partly because half of everything is optimized to be viewed on mobile.

You can thank Steve Jobs for that.

In case anyone thought Mike Rowe and "Dirty Jobs" wasn't a propaganda ploy to convince people to be satisfied with dangerous conditions and low pay.

Hey remember that time Mike Rowe conspired with the Koch brothers to blame American workers for the incompetence of American employers?

Edit: too lazy to dig up the point in the thread where I linked to academic research that confirmed the skills gap was actually caused by incompetent hiring practices.

Either way, good job Mike Rowe, you irredeemable class traitor ****. The whole point of Dirty Jobs wasn’t to show off how hard normal people work, it was to laugh at a prissy boy TV host wincing at getting **** on his hands. You’re a joke and your career is a joke, and you’re the only one not in on it. ****. You.

Was this the guy who got sued by Microsoft?

No, but that’s a great idea. I wonder how many kids he convinced to not take CS because his Koch paymasters needed more untrained retards to throw at the broken HR department they were too lazy and billionaire to fix. Probably cost Microsoft something.

Hell, for that matter, how many of those kids OD’d on fentanyl? Maybe murder charges are more appropriate.

btw I was alluding to that guy who registered MikeRoweSoft.com ( although I gather from your post you got that Edit: nm).

(The kid gave up the domain in exchange for an XBox, IIRC)

I don't know. I mean, I do agree that what you're citing is a contributing factor but you've back peddled somewhat from your view that Amazon didn't kill those stores but a lack of consumer time and money. You stated that there had already been cheaper alternatives to mall stores but I think the ease and selection that e-commerce brought to the masses along with generally lower prices played a far more significant role than you appear to believe. I could be wrong and I know that my experience is anecdotal but the stores I liked to browse in and occasionally buy things in became the stores that I browsed in and rarely bought things before they became the stores that used to be in the mall.



You know, I don't like Target or Walmart all that much but even though I generally don't like to go to Walmart I still generally feel like I'll have a better chance finding what I'm looking for there. Target just feels weird to me for some reason.



What do you consider a "centrist American"? Just curious.



I mean he advocates technical education which results generally in far less student debt and instant employability. I skimmed the items in that picture and I don't understand your take on it.

You're the kind that responds with "how high", if I had to guess.

Someone who feels like they have a stake in the global economy (either because they are successful professionals, or have a cosmopolitan outlook due to education or personal connection), and therefore have no real need to lurch to the right on social issues (which would ostracize them from their well-to-do social circles in their professional life) or to the left on economic issues (which seems scary to them and would potentially raise their taxes).

Elizabeth Warren, despite being mostly anti-Wall St., has said she is "capitalist to her bones", which I imagine appeals to such people (where Bernie scares them).

Ceteris paribus, if e-commerce saved customers measurable time and effort then e-commerce should be absorbing the implicit and explicit costs people used to pay to deal with that inconvenience. Retail spending is flat. So either e-commerce doesn’t save time/money/effort (we agree that it does); or ceteris paribus is a bad assumption, and something else has changed.

I haven’t backpedaled. I’m just not spending the effort to explain the extent of the problem to you.

Oh I know. And damn I mangled backpedaled. I can't believe I did that, actually. Oh well. Anyway, I think we agree it's more nuanced than you originally implied so you kind of did reverse sell things in the past.

The complicated part of the issue is working backwards from economic indicators, not necessarily the root cause. I haven’t changed my position and I’m not personally impressed by your flaccid attempts to convince yourself that I have.

Okay. Just, next time, don't try to claim that my explanations and observations that are completely different from your theory somehow aligns to your theory. Nothing I described related to your idea that stores failed because people don't have time or money to shop. But, hey, if the fauxialists get their way everyone will be employed by the government and have all kinds of time and money for shopping!

https://twitter.com/_waleedshahid/status/1092589787259781125?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1092589787259781125&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.elle.com%2Fculture%2Fcareer-politics%2Fa26142976%2Fhoward-schultz-people-of-wealth-comment%2F

Jesus Christ, it's almost as bad as:



BTW I just discovered the above, a billionaire literally compared the plight of billionaires to the holocaust.

You can't make this up. I thought Silicon Valley was the pioneer of that joke, but it was ****ing real.

I don't believe that having a lot of money is something one should inherit like genes, buuut if you don't want your children to be persecuted because they are victimized by their inherited wealth, I can think of a certain kind of tax that would resolve that problem.

Or maybe he's simply saying that the Nazis were bad, not because they murdered Jewish people, but because they took their money