Redistricting Videogame Shows Problems in the System

An anonymous reader writes "This is a cool redistricting game that was launched out of the capitol building in Washington DC last week. It was created by the USC Game Innovation Lab and has been getting lots of press. It's about time someone took on a tough issue like redistricting reform using the power of the internet." It's crazy that gerrymandering is actually good fodder for a video game.

Comments

Slashdotted...

[Raistlin77]

...before the summary even made it to the front page of Slashdot...

Re:Slashdotted...

[Anonymous Coward]

I see games come pre-slashdotted these days. When did this start to happen?!

Re:Slashdotted...

[Anonymous Coward]

considering this was on digg yesterday, i'd say sites became "pre-slashdotted" as digg's popularity grew.

Re:Slashdotted...

[Anonymous Coward]

considering this was on digg yesterday, i'd say sites became "pre-slashdotted" as digg's popularity grew.

Pedantic: Could you say they got dugg?

Re:Slashdotted...

[Anonymous Coward]

Obvious: why would he say "dugg" when his entire joke was the reuse of the word "pre-slashdotted"

Re:Slashdotted...

[Wisconsingod]

This was on TechDirt last week, I am quite dissapointed in /. for getting behind the times.

Re:Slashdotted...

[TranscendentalAnarch]

Here's a link to the offline version http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/866

Sure it's a game

[Red Flayer]

It's crazy that gerrymandering is actually good fodder for a video game.

Why is that crazy? Gerrymandering, and indeed, much of politics, is a game. It's just played for higher stakes than we're used to when we think of games.

Or did you think that American politics at the highest levels was actually about serving the public?

Re:Sure it's a game

[Adambomb]

So you're saying its more about the highest levels then?

Re:Sure it's a game

[Red Flayer]

So you're saying its more about the highest levels then?

Yeah. The grind sucks, and most of us never get out of it, but the content for people who've maxed out their level is fantastic.

Re:Sure it's a game

[Adambomb]

Plus, you get people contesting a raid schedule and it becomes all out war.

Re:Sure it's a game

[Anonymous Coward]

How I mine for oil?

Re:Sure it's a game

[moderatorrater]

However, even serving the public is a game. Games are, at the end, mostly resource management and getting the most benefit for what you do while there's always trade-offs. Politics are the same. Those with an income over $100,000 are obviously not going to need welfare, but for those who are stuck with a lower income and want to stop, welfare is a big help. As a politician who's trying to serve the public, you're trying to do what's best for the most people or, depending one your beliefs, your constituency. There's always going to be some downside to a particular policy. In addition, you have to manage your political party and allies. No matter how you run politics, it's a game.

Re:Sure it's a game

[Opportunist]

I think it's time to instance the world...

Re:Sure it's a game

[corbettw]

Gerrymandering, and indeed, much of politics, is a game.

Sweet! Got a link to the cheat codes?

Re:Sure it's a game

[BeanThere]

Why is that crazy? Gerrymandering, and indeed, much of politics, is a game

Your post getting +5 is a great example of how cynicism is often mistaken for intelligence. If you remove the "+5 Cynical", your post says nothing and contributes nothing to the discussion, in fact it's silly: Politics isn't a game, it's real and affects real peoples' lives.

Re:Sure it's a game

[Ucklak]

People who spend money tend to be lower class.
People who save money tend to be middle class.
People who invest money tend to be upper class.

People themselves and the decisions they make are the biggest obstacle they have to overcome.
As much as 'people' would like to obliterate `classes`, class warfare will always exist just as some people will like the color green over the color pink.

Re:Sure it's a game

[Anonymous Coward]

And where you do propose the lower class folks get money to invest? Or to save? Where do you propose the middle class folks get money to invest? Investing requires that you have enough money that you can LOSE some of it and be okay.

Re:Sure it's a game

[Red Flayer]

As a politician who's trying to serve the public, you're trying to do what's best for the most people or, depending one your beliefs, your constituency.

Hey, I'm pretty cynical, I think there's a problem with your first clause there. Politicians at the highest level aren't trying to serve the public; they are first and foremost focused on electability (that's how they got to the highest level) and then focused on washing the hand that washed them i.e., giving handouts to the companies and groups that got them elected. The political process in the US filters out the more altruistic politicians at the lower levels.

Re:Sure it's a game

[Anonymous Coward]

Your advice is trite unless you can find me someone upper-class who spends less than I do. And not as a percentage of their income -- of course a larger income would give anyone more money to spend on luxuries like wealth-building.

Re:Sure it's a game

[Red Flayer]

Here's one link
and here's another.

Of course, some people would say that gerrymandering is a cheat code as well.

Re:Sure it's a game

[Lars T.]

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1232

Re:Sure it's a game

[corbettw]

No, dude, The Prince is the walk through.

Re:Sure it's a game

[Anonymous Coward]

First you have to go find someone to teach you all the things you have to know to START the quest for oil. Then you have to do about a 100 quests each involving running from one end of the world to another to get things like mineral rights, epa studies, building permits, etc. Then you have to go buy a piece of land (that may or may not have what you) that is for sale, auction house sometimes has good selection, but availability is poor. Then you have to get lucky and actually find something on your property. Then you have to find someone with a transmute to convert the crude stuff you get out of the ground into oil. Now with the flood of non-like-you people doing the same thing, actually being able to sell the oil for a profit is very low. You're better off just ignoring this profession and buying the oil directly.

Re:Sure it's a game

[jedidiah]

There's an entire sub-genre of books about people like that. You may know a few and not even realize it. You might even think they are not-well-off.

Economic class is about how you get your money, not how freely you waste it.

Re:Sure it's a game

[truthsearch]

-1 for taking the post too literally. Game != unreal. Many politicians treat the system like a game. It's irrelevant whether or not you call it a game. That's part of his point.

Re:Sure it's a game

[t0rkm3]

I think what he's saying is that present behavior allows an estimate of past behavior, past behavior (to some extent) can be linked to current status and then used to predict future status.

Several economists and social scientists have done studies of the wealthy and found that great majority of them have elevated themselves from a lower wealth-class through smart money management. I, myself, started out very poor and have managed to work my way up to have some wealth. This while supporting my wife in a single income family and paying for her continuing education.

I have a high school education from a podunk school from a town of 3000 people. If I can do it, you have no excuses.

It's not how much you spend. It's how you spend it. I don't have cable(I don't watch TV at all), I have two vehicles that I paid cash for, I do all of my own home and car maintenance. I built a gym in my home rather than pay out monthlies. (The equipment paid for itself in 12mos.) I don't eat out much, I don't go to convenience stores except to buy gas. These decisions add up.

For instance, eating out, including StarSucks and QuickTrip, usually accounted for $100 per week in expenses, by eating food that I or my have prepared and avoiding 'convenience food' I am saving at least that much per week.

The "Millionaire Next Door" has several references for further research on the topic. It has survived the empirical evidence gathered from the several millionaires that I have met and do business with.

To change your position in life, you must change your behavior.

Re:Sure it's a game

[rifter]

The political process in the US filters out the more altruistic politicians at the lower levels.

So what you're saying is the power gamers and gold farmers have taken over the game and ruined it for everyone else :D.

Re:Sure it's a game

[Red Flayer]

your post says nothing and contributes nothing to the discussion, in fact it's silly: Politics isn't a game, it's real and affects real peoples' lives.

Just because it affects people doesn't mean it's not a game -- as I said, the stakes are far higher than what we're accustomed to seeing in what we think of as a "game".

Can you honestly say that there are not people involved in politics to whom "winning" isn't the most important aspect? That this type of attitude is not common at the level of presidential politics?

Do you really think that Karl Rove, for example, has a primary motivation other than winning? Or that the Democratic Party, as an institution, is anything more than a group that exists purely to get people elected? That's the nature of partisan politics in the US system.

This is what my post is saying, I'll spell it out so you can understand, since it appears that you're completely missing my point:

American politics at the highest level is dominated by those who treat it like a game. Hence, it becomes a game, where the effect on the outcome (future election results) taints every action taken, and is often a primary motivation for actions taken.

So how, exactly, is this not a point for discussion?

As for your opinion on cynicism, perhaps you misunderstand what cynicism is. It's pointing out the flaws of society because solving a problem is predicated by awareness of the problem. Apparently in your world, all politicians are motivated by the effect of their actions on the public -- I know better than that, and so should you.

Re:Sure it's a game

[BeanThere]

Don't put words in my mouth, I never made any claims about what politicians are like "in my world", how ridiculous, where did you get that? Stop blatantly making things up. Of course they "treat it" as if it's a game, but they know it's not, we know it's not, and it isn't, because by definition a friggin game does not affect the "real world". It can only be regarded as a "game" in the same way that EVERY OTHER HUMAN ACTIVITY ON THE PLANET can be regarded as a "game", in which case your remark is pointless. Relationships are also a game, war is also game, business is also a game, yada yada - so what insight does that offer? We all know these things are played like games sometimes, but nothing real *becomes* a game just because it is treated as such by some, sometimes.

Perhaps what you meant to say is that *to politicians* it is a game because they no longer feel anything for the negative effects their actions have in reality. But that still doesn't make it a game, and it isn't what you said.

Re:Sure it's a game

[BeanThere]

Perhaps what you meant to say is that *to politicians* it is a game because they no longer feel anything for the negative effects their actions have in reality. But that still doesn't make it a game, and it isn't what you said.

Nor is it even true, for that matter. If you honestly think that no politician is doing anything anymore that does serve people in some way, then sorry, you are just getting 'cynicism points', because that is ridiculous ... try seeing how long things keep going smoothly if you take away all the government services you take for granted that those elected officials are in the end responsible for maintaining.

Re:Sure it's a game

[Red Flayer]

Wow, lay off the coffee (or the crack, whatever it is that gets you so wound up).

Don't put words in my mouth, I never made any claims about what politicians are like "in my world", how ridiculous, where did you get that?

You based your entire argument off the fact that the actions of politicians affect the real world and real people. For politics to not be a game, then it must not be considered a game by any of the decision-makers in the system (the players). Hence, your position requires that politicians are motivated by the impacts of their actions on people, not the impact of their actions on the electoral cycle.

Maybe you misunderstand what a game is --

because by definition a friggin game does not affect the "real world".

You think it must be something that has no effect on the real world, this is false and destroys the rest of your arguments. Show me an accepted definition of 'game' that states that it must have no effect on the real world. Is poker a game? Without a doubt. Does it have an effect on the real world? Without a doubt, if money changes hands.

So, before you fly off the handle again, why not re-examine your assumptions and try again?

Re:Sure it's a game

[Ucklak]

It's not advice, it's socio-economic findings (read: FACTS) for the current and past generations.

People who spend money tend to be lower class.
People who save money tend to be middle class.
People who invest money tend to be upper class.

The above is actually taken from handouts which was transcribed from known studies on the subjects of class and economic standing. The handouts are given to school teachers in my district that have to attend a class that is to deal with the problem with illegal immigration and what to do with all the non english speaking children in schools.

Re:Sure it's a game

[smellsofbikes]

terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers.

Re:Sure it's a game

[jeffasselin]

But it's still a game, being real has nothing to do with it. That the outcome of the game has more significant consequences than say the outcome of a chess game is totally irrelevant to its nature. Imagine if instead of the cold war, the US and USSR had agreed to have the best chess player on each side and agree that the loser would let the winner invade without resistance. Would that have not been a game?

Now, it might depend on what you think a game is, but I tend to go with the mathematical definition. You might not know, but game theory is very relevant in the study of politics.

Re:Sure it's a game

[feepness]

To change your position in life, you must change your behavior.

Duh! This is so stupid. What good is being rich if you can't show it off to all your friends?

If you have to act poor, then you might as well be poor. Fight the power that's keeping you down brother!

Re:Sure it's a game

[allscan]

The shortcut is likely: "C:\Program Files\Diebold\votemach.exe" set developer 1 +set thereisnomonkey 1 +set cheats 1 +set ui_console 1

Re:Sure it's a game

[MeanderingMind]

In defense of being rich, you can potentially use that money to help people in need.

In defense of not caring about one's social status, I live how I live regardless of how much money I have. I'm content to not have the best of the best, and in fact I am quite happy.

In defense of laziness. If I could work fewer hours for a proportionally smaller amount of money, I would. I'd rather work late into my life having had the time to enjoy my youth rather than saving all my free time for when I'll spend most of it unable to do the things I like.

Re:Sure it's a game

[rifter]

"Why is that crazy? Gerrymandering, and indeed, much of politics, is a game"

Your post getting +5 is a great example of how cynicism is often mistaken for intelligence. If you remove the "+5 Cynical", your post says nothing and contributes nothing to the discussion, in fact it's silly: Politics isn't a game, it's real and affects real peoples' lives.

It depends on your definition of "game." American football is a game, but it's real and affects people's lives. It has a major effect on the economies of large cities. So your disqualification would seem not to work here. Real-world impact of a game's outcome has no bearing on the definition of a game, whether it be a game in the traditional sense like basketball, or a game like politics or the stock market, which are games according to sociological and philosophical observation.

As far as politics goes, at least some of the participants would seem certainly to have understood it as a game in the traditional sense of the word. That is, there are winners and losers, a defined set of rules, etc. In any event, sociological analysis and game theory would, in even the most rudimentary analysis, seem to reinforce this belief. One of the more famous books that analysed sociological and psychological games was Games People Play, which among other things discussed the aspects of common social interactions which fit basic requirements for the definition of the word "game."

It seems you have made the common error of associating frivolity with the idea of a game. In English, the concept of games has been linked, in some people's minds inextricably, with the concept of frivolity. But while play and games can be frivolous they do not have to be so and are not always seen that way by the players. This would especially be true in the case of games where there is a sense of extreme competition and real-world impact, which would seem to be the case here. It's probably true that some of the participants of this particular game view it somewhat frivolously, in the sense that they are simply having fun, without losing their sense of competition; this was the case with some of the more famous entrepeneurs of the late 19th and early 20th century as regards the game of wealth-building. But there are probably others in politics who view it as a game and treat it as such while also treating it very seriously. For them politics would be a game which they mean to win, which is incredibly competitive; this is no different from the first case, but the distinction in the second case lies in impact. For these players the cost of losing is very great because they would feel that failure to win the game of politics would mean failure in the larger game of the determinance of the fate of the human race, or at the very least their particular plitical unit (city, state, country).

I think it's important to analyse this particular case. If you think about it, even a sincere politician who believes fervently in their stated ends must realize that they will not have the chance of implementing their ideas without winning the game of politics. This would probably lead to even more extreme measures than would the contest of those who view the game frivolously. For them the game would be very much like the game of war, in which the result of the other team winning is horrible in itself to contemplate, and the repercussions of being the loser even more horrible because the winner is also winning the right to dominance in that particular case. In politics, as in war, the winner of the game determines the future of the loser, who is at his/her mercy, as is everyone the loser cares about. For someone who is sincere in their beliefs this would be completely unacceptable, and it is possible that such a person would then do anything to win, perhaps even thinhgs they might otherwise not do, like cheating.

In the case

Re:Sure it's a game

[rhakka]

I'm working the same path you are, and you're right.

That said, you made a very dangerous comment. "If I can do it, you have no excuses".

You have no idea what it's like being anyone but you. You can point at some particular behaviours and say "hey, those behaviours aren't serving you", but expecting everyone else to be like you, and to suffer when they are not, is a dangerous manifestation of a particularly subtle arrogance... that, in fact, they would be better off if they were like you.

They might be financially better off, but perhaps not better off from any other metric they value.

Your personality may make it easier for you to focus on something heavily and sacrifice where others would not. How many workaholics are simply using work as a drug to escape other areas of their life they do not like? Does that make them a role model to aspire to?

I'm not saying that you are conciously insinuating any of this. I am simply saying, be very careful of that attitude. You cannot judge others by your own internal standards, because your own internal standards were developed by you, in the life you lead, and simply do not apply with objective reliability to anyone but you.

Focus on particular behaviours. It is a fact that if someone spends $100 a week eating out instead of $25 eating in, that's a poor financial choice. Unless, the time spent shopping and cooking could have instead generated more than $75 in revenue. throw in whatever qualitative comparison or subjective comparison on top of that, that pleases you (if I eat in, I eat organic and healthy. Eating out, greasy and bad. determine health value..). But never, ever make the mistake that other people should be like you. If we all were, after all... well, you know your own shortcomings better than I. isn't it better that the world has variety? perhaps that variety means that we need people who make poor financial decisions... because they may also have some other strength we collectively or individually benefit from. I don't know. But, neither do you.

careful careful ;)

Re:Sure it's a game

[fodder69]

I agree with you for the most part, but I think you are disregarding quite a few advantages you have that others don't. ...podunk school from a town of 3000 people; I bet this means you are a white male, am I wrong? Right off the bat this means you have a number of advantages in American society today that a lot more than half the population do not.

And genetically, you probably have advantages as well, you are posting on slashdot so you're probably not entirely dumb. Did you know that almost half the population is of below average intelligence? Do you think they have the same opportunities to get rich as you do?

While I agree with a lot of your points, what I see missing from diatribes like yours is a lack of recognition of the innate advantages you were blessed with. Good for you for getting ahead in life and making good choices, but don't think that everyone in a bad/worse situation than you is there simply because of bad decisions. There are things such as opportunity and plain old luck that work for and against people.

You may not be a Christian, but you should still remember the phrase, "There but for the Grace of God go I".

Re:Sure it's a game

[NeilTheStupidHead]

You're better off just ignoring this profession and buying the oil directly. No, you're better off raiding to take the oil that belongs to others.

Re:Sure it's a game

[moderatorrater]

You didn't elaborate much on the point I would have: internal standards. I could make more money and save more money by changing things around in my life, but the truth of the matter is that I like my life right now and know that, even were I to like my life just as much after becoming a millionaire, it would take a few years of not liking life as much. Overall, I know I'll enjoy life the way it is now; trading it in doesn't make sense to me.

Re:Sure it's a game

[Richard Steiner]

People themselves and the decisions they make are the biggest obstacle they have to overcome.

Tell that to the corporate layoff machine. I know a LOT more people who've been severely hurt by that than I do people who hurt themselves by making stupid financial decisions...

Of course, coming from the IT segment in the airline industry, I've probably known more folks who've been laid off than most. Most of us are working now, but it took a while. 2002 was not a good year to be out of work...

Re:Sure it's a game

[MorpheousMarty]

If I can do it, you have no excuses. I'm sorry but I just have jump on this. I'm sure you meant "If I can do it, then most of you have no excuses." And by you, I hope you mean Slashdot users. But to make my point, what if you were dyslexic? or spent most of you childhood trying to survive instead of going to high school? What if you were just like you but living in New Orleans a couple of years ago? Shit happens, and although you can't use the government to fix bad luck, (or even stupid people, I mean 5$ for coffee...) you still need the government to try to help some of these people, because people with no where else to turn always cost more in the long run (see Nazis or Muslim extremists or Christian Fundamentalists [not the ones on TV but the ones who PAY the ones on TV])

Re:Sure it's a game

[RobertLTux]

yes its a game you see on a epic level Games are played on maps that are real and with dice made of human bones

Russian Roulette is a "game" is it not serious??

Re:Sure it's a game

[cayenne8]

"And where you do propose the lower class folks get money to invest? Or to save? Where do you propose the middle class folks get money to invest? Investing requires that you have enough money that you can LOSE some of it and be okay."

Middle class...live within your means...save money to invest. Don't spend every dime you have, living from paycheck to paycheck. Can't afford 1 or more kids? Don't have them. Don't purchase the most expensive car/house you can buy...get what you can afford, and save and invest leftover money.

Poor? Well, it is tough...obviously you made some SERIOUS vocational errors and bad life choices up to this point. But, this (in this case) is the US. You can better yourself. It is hard...but, you brought that on yourself. Don't buy a TV, you need to be studying and educating yourself during those 'free hours'. Better yourself, get that better job, and work hard to move up to middle class. It isn't easy, but it CAN be done...others have proved this to be the case. But, you gotta sacrifice to do this....but, that's the price you pay for blowing it early in life.

Re:Sure it's a game

[AndersOSU]

Sir, I'd like to subscribe to your social darwinism newsletter. Clearly the poor are that way because they deserve it.

Ever heard the phrase, "Where you start out in life is a good indication of where you'll finish?" Class mobility and the "American Dream" are largely hoaxes perpetrated by the rich on the middle and lower classes (kind of like the lottery, only you have to work much harder and invest much more, and the odds are much lower.) Sure some people were born dirt poor, and end up with money to burn, and some people are born with the silver spoon in their mouths and die on the streets, but the very vast majority of people will remain in the class they're born into for the rest of their lives. This is not a coincidence. (Read that last sentence again if you have to.) Another old gem is "It takes money to make money." and the poor don't have it.

All the personal motivation in the world might not overcome the socio-economic implications for being born poor, such as bad schools, dangerous environments, less leisure, and possibly most importantly the VP of Chase financial services doesn't live next door to you in section 8 housing - so you can't offer to mow his lawn when you're 7.

Why do you think single women *still* make less money than single men in the same jobs? Are they as a gender less motivated? That ignores the social consequences of being black or hispanic for instance, and the less opportunity at the same jobs, and with the increased probability of poverty, all of which are additive.

People can improve their stature in life, but the odds are stacked against them. While Paris will be just fine when she gets out of jail - and she doesn't have to give up TV. A poor person might never get a second (third?) chance for much less egregious missteps.

In short you're an ass, and you even give poor advice. For the middle class to get ahead they should buy the most expensive house they can afford (with a fixed interest mortgage).

Re:Sure it's a game

[genner]

Yeah I'm sick of getting ganked and ninja looted.

Re:Sure it's a game

[cayenne8]

"What if you were just like you but living in New Orleans a couple of years ago? Shit happens, and although you can't use the government to fix bad luck, (or even stupid people, I mean 5$ for coffee...) you still need the government to try to help some of these people, because people with no where else to turn always cost more in the long run "

Nope..can't use that one either....I was washed out of New Orleans by Katrina. I took advantage of the changes, and now am out of huge debt, better job, working for my own company fully now. There is a silver lining in most clouds, but, you gotta be able to roll with the changes...and proper planning helps too.

I wasn't a home owner in NOLA, but, really...if you had a house there and didn't pay for flood insurance, well, you've only got yourself to blame, and it isn't up to the govt. to 'bail you out' for your own stupidity.

It isn't like it was an big secret that NOLA was overdue for a flood. We just didn't expect the govt. designed and built levees were fscked up, poorly designed and built with corners cut....but, we always expected to get mighty wet at some point. No one lives in NOLA without that being drilled in their heads.

That being said...wherever there is disaster, there is also potential for success....

Re:Sure it's a game

[cayenne8]

"All the personal motivation in the world might not overcome the socio-economic implications for being born poor, such as bad schools, dangerous environments, less leisure, and possibly most importantly the VP of Chase financial services doesn't live next door to you in section 8 housing - so you can't offer to mow his lawn when you're 7.

Why do you think single women *still* make less money than single men in the same jobs? Are they as a gender less motivated? That ignores the social consequences of being black or hispanic for instance, and the less opportunity at the same jobs, and with the increased probability of poverty, all of which are additive."

Everyone gets a starting spot in life...and no, their not all equal. But, I've known many people that have started at combinations of all the disadvantages listed above, and some have been WAY more successful than I. If they can do it...anyone can do it. But, you have to be willing to open your eyes if disadvantaged...to be willing to work harder, to pursue education (realizing you aren't really ever going to be a millionaire ball player or rapper), and learn how successful society works and how you are expected to interact with it and the business world.

No, I don't buy it...if one can succeed, any normally intelligent able bodied person can do it.

Was reading about that book that someone else posted about The Millionaire Next Door. From that book/survey...MOST of the people with that kind of wealth in the US, did NOT start by inheriting it, they did it by living sensibly, within their means, saving so they could invest...using their means given to them to the best. No..I don't buy it..if you're able bodied and minded, you CAN do what it takes to succeed.

Re:Sure it's a game

[TuringTest]

If they can do it...anyone can do it.
Talk about non-sequiturs...

if one can succeed, any normally intelligent able bodied person can do it.
You mean, anyone that has exactly the same combination of sheer luck and specific contacts than the one who got special conditions, those that took him out of the expected outcome for their class?

if you're able bodied and minded, you CAN do what it takes to succeed.
Keep repeating your religious mantra, it doesn't make it more rational nor more true.

Re:Sure it's a game

[Anonymous Coward]

you see, this is what Americans don't understand.

Money has nothing to do with class.
Class is about breeding, and Quality.

You can be a billionaire and still be a bourgeoisie middle class sort of person, or you can be penniless but be Quality.

Money has nothing to do with it.

Re:Sure it's a game

[AndersOSU]

Everyone gets a starting spot in life...and no, their not all equal ... If they can do it...anyone can do it.

Just because person A with a less advantageous starting position can surpass person B doesn't mean that person C can surpass person B. Basically because someone succeeds doesn't mean anyone can succeed. In this post, as well as the other you make sweeping oversimplifications, there is more to socio-economic status than which income tax bracket you fall into, home life, neighborhood, and acquaintances all play major roles, and it cannot be said that just because one person hits 7's and 11's means that another superficially similar person has the same opportunities.

I've known many people that have started at combinations of all the disadvantages listed above, and some have been WAY more successful than I

That probably means that your economic status could be classified as middle-middle class or lower. Very, very few people can climb from the pit of upper-lower or below to upper-middle or above, and even if you knew one Rockefeller, it is nearly statistically certain that you don't know "many people" who have done so well (unless you work with professional athletes).

Mobility on the socio-economic ladder is normally distributed (actually probably log normal - meaning there is increasing resistance to movement the further from middle-middle you are). It is relatively easy to move from lower-middle to middle-middle, harder, but possible to move from lower-middle to upper-middle, quite difficult to go from lower-middle to lower-upper, damn near impossible to go from lower-middle to middle-upper, and going from lower-middle to upper-upper is a herculean task. Now if the starting point is middle-lower it is herculean to go to lower-upper, and it becomes a few in a hundred million chance to break into middle-upper.

Life isn't fair, and I'm never going to argue that government social programs can change that, but to say that anyone can succeed belies a great misunderstanding of poverty and wealth. I don't know what "that kind of wealth" referenced in The Millionaire Next Door is, but if most people got there by earning it then it isn't upper-upper class type of money, and probably not even upper-middle type money. A million bucks isn't what it used to be, and lots of families can get there just by buying a home and sitting on it for 20 years. More important is that earning your way into the millionaires club is still only the purview of people who start in the middle classes. It would be more instructive to talk about the people who rise 3 or more ranks (e.g. middle-lower to middle-middle) and then look at the opportunities available to them. If someone in the middle-lower class climbs three ranks then he can lower his chance of being killed by homicide, and maybe afford to send his kids to college (with student loans). If someone in the middle-middle climbs three ranks, he can afford to drive his S class to the country club.

The point is that avenues of investment and entrepreneurship that are open to the middle classes are barricaded against the poor. Hosts of people can't afford a house - the best first investment, and need to work menial jobs with little room for advancement to survive - you don't go from mail-boy to CEO simply by working your way up, not even Hollywood tries to sell that. The only ways you get middle-upper type money or above is investments (which the poor can't afford) or found a wildly successful (read fortune 1000) company (which the poor have neither the resources or the time for), or inherit it. You simply don't earn that kind of money by climbing a corporate ladder or even very successful entrepreneurship. Poverty is a self-defeating cycle - and to blame them for it is to endorse societies ills.

Re:Sure it's a game

[timeOday]

Several economists and social scientists have done studies of the wealthy and found that great majority of them have elevated themselves from a lower wealth-class through smart money management.

I'd be interested if you could find a cite, because I don't believe that. I think the #1 way of getting rich is by marriage and #2 by inheritance, since for each wealthy entreprenuer there is usually a wife (and often, ex-wives) and often children. Of the 10 richest Americans, 4 are Wal-Mart heirs.

Re:Sure it's a game

[MorpheousMarty]

Statistically some of you will turn any situation into a gold mine and some of you will end up with shit no matter how you play it. My point was that for the second group, it's not a good plan to say "you should have done better".

Re:Sure it's a game

[Anonymous Coward]

For the vintage 1960's edition, try L-B-J

Re:Sure it's a game

[Anonymous Coward]

naked with a bag of regs, and the world is your mollusc!

Re:Sure it's a game

[fractoid]

It's about time they released an MMO with some decent PVP.

Re:Sure it's a game

[cduffy]

Ever heard the phrase, "Where you start out in life is a good indication of where you'll finish?" Class mobility and the "American Dream" are largely hoaxes perpetrated by the rich on the middle and lower classes (kind of like the lottery, only you have to work much harder and invest much more, and the odds are much lower.) Sure some people were born dirt poor, and end up with money to burn, and some people are born with the silver spoon in their mouths and die on the streets, but the very vast majority of people will remain in the class they're born into for the rest of their lives. This is not a coincidence. (Read that last sentence again if you have to.) Another old gem is "It takes money to make money." and the poor don't have it.

You severely overstate your case. See the "income mobility" tab on this New York Times graphic. Only slightly over half of the families in the top fifth income bracket as of 1998 had been there since 1988; the remainder moved up from somewhere else -- and the percent who moved up from the bottom fifth was much larger than the percentage of lottery players who win. Indeed, while the rate of change in income level is slowing, 61% of all families moved up or down at least one quintile in the 1990s.

Also, "buy the most expensive house you can afford" is horrible advice -- at least for individuals with the discipline to invest on an ongoing basis. Certainly, there are places where the housing market has historically had outstanding returns -- but it's very much a gamble nonetheless. Why would you invest in something you're going to be paying interest on for the next three decades (and which you can lose entirely should you be unable to make payments at any point during that time, and which is not particularly liquid and which may well lose value) when you could invest in something which will be earning returns immediately (and for which you have a great deal more control over the amount of risk you choose to take)?

I own my home, but I don't delude myself about its value as an investment.

Re:Sure it's a game

[knodi]

No, gerrymandering isn't a cheat code. It's a 'sploit. There's a distinct difference between hacking the system, and merely exploiting its weaknesses.

(anyone else think that it's about time they release the government 2.0 patch, though?)

Re:Sure it's a game

[TempeTerra]

Are you implying that being a 'spender' causes you to be lower class? It's hard not to be when your income is the same as your fixed living costs.

Re:Sure it's a game

[CaptainCarrot]

This is flat-out untrue. My family on both sides were immigrants who arrived in the US in the late 1880s. I'll just trace what happened on my father's side.

The original immigrants, my great-grandparents, were oil refinery workers. That meant they had it relatively good, I admit -- most of the immigrants of the time from their ethnic group were coal miners.

My grandfather started out as an ordinary refinery worker, and through sheer hard work rose to management. He was, unfortunately, forced into a premature retirement in the early 1960s. His employer, Esso (now Exxon), decided to try out their new computers and reconcile their employee records, which is how they discovered he never had more than an 8th grade education but was doing a job that required at least a BA in Business Administration. My grandmother was a housewife, not counting her work as a child laborer in a silk mill. This was a common situation for women of her class and time, but her younger sister's career was not. She was the first woman to hold a management position at Western Electric. My grandmother's younger brothers were of an age to fight in WWII; they went to college on the GI Bill and ended up as professionals.

My father's generation all went to college, including his sister although she had no career in mind and became a housewife. This was again fairly typical for her time. The others were all professionals of one kind or another. It's noteworthy that it was only at this time that my family began to speak English at home. My father was the first to know the language before attending public school; his two older siblings and everyone who came before him did not.

My generation were all college educated if they wanted to be, which I think amounted to all of us but one. We are all, both men and women, academics, professionals, and business owners.

In four generations we rose from a class where it was not customary to be educated at all to the upper middle class of the United States, not because we were privileged in any way but because of a dedication to making a better life for descendants. And one or two generations before that? At least on my grandfather's side we were serfs; slaves in all but name. In the part of Europe we came from, serfdom was not abolished until almost 1850.

Taking the long view, insisting on instant equality is asking much. Should women be paid the same as men for the same work? Absolutely. But look at that timeline. My family was in this country for 80 years before it was usual for women to be employed outside the home. Women weren't even allowed to vote when my great-grandmother got off the boat at Ellis Island, and they were not enfranchised until 30 years later. In another 40 years a college education finally became almost as common for women as it was for men; another 40 years later the situation has actually reversed. It would be a bad thing if the injustice of sex-based pay inequity took another generation to be fully corrected, but relatively speaking there are far more oppressive injustices around than that. (At least now it's universally acknowledged that equal pay ought to be given for equal work regardless of sex. That wasn't a given not so long ago. Modern reactionaries who want to argue that there really is no injustice here are forced to the position that women usually don't do equal work, an absurdity on its face.)

There are a number of cultural issues standing in the way of minorities today, but a determination to make a better life can overcome just about anything. Perhaps my perceptions are skewed: the manager who hired me into the company where I now work was black ("was" because he retired since) and I've almost always had black co-workers. Not one of them was born into the middle class. They simply didn't give up until they achieved what they wanted, often in the face of opposition from all sides. Had they accepted that being born poor doomed them to poverty their entire lives, I'd have never met them let alone worked for them.

My own family is proof that even a language barrier need never be a serious obstacle.

So go ahead. Tell me it's a hoax. Just don't expect me to believe it.

Re:Sure it's a game

[Arterion]

This is marked as funny, but I think makes a very insightful statement about wealth distribution in the world.

Re:Sure it's a game

[sco08y]

Sure some people were born dirt poor, and end up with money to burn, and some people are born with the silver spoon in their mouths and die on the streets, but the very vast majority of people will remain in the class they're born into for the rest of their lives. This is not a coincidence.

It's a fact that the vast majority of millionaires+ are self-made (i.e. did not inherit substantial wealth) and that inherited wealth rarely lasts more than a few generations (because rich guy #1 passes it on to 20 heirs, who each pass it on to 20 heirs, and most heirs aren't particularly entrepreneurial). Almost everyone goes through several tax brackets in their life, starting out as dirt poor when they're young and accumulating a comfortable retirement by the time they're old. The tools to become wealthy are universally available: education and qualification can be had in any field imaginable and once you've made some money, it takes no special qualifications to invest it in any area you choose.

Class mobility and the "American Dream" are largely hoaxes perpetrated by the rich on the middle and lower classes

Explain this. What do "the rich" get from this hoax? How have they collectively perpetrated it? And virtually everyone in the middle class has a shot at it so why is it a hoax for them?

Re:Sure it's a game

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what "that kind of wealth" referenced in The Millionaire Next Door is, but if most people got there by earning it then it isn't upper-upper class type of money, and probably not even upper-middle type money. "Success" is subjective. Upper-middle-type money doesn't necessarily define it. If a dirt-poor boy grows up to make a modest but respectable income in a profession that satisfies him and provides even a slightly better chance for his kids, then I'd say he was successful, wouldn't you?

Re:Sure it's a game

[AndersOSU]

I'll admit to not using particularly scientific figures, but I don't think I am over-reaching too much. According to the wikipedia, referencing the US census ~1.5% of all households had incomes exceeding $250,000. That sort of income puts you in the lower-upper class. It is possible, but very very hard for someone born into poverty to crack the top 1.5%. According to your own (very interesting) link 1/40th of the population move from the bottom quintile to the top quintile - note that the bottom quintile probably includes portions of the upper-lower class, and the upper quintile includes mostly the the upper-middle (all of the upper class are ~5% of the population). So, according to the NY Times 1 in 40 people make it from the upper-lower to the upper-middle - I'd say that going from middle-lower to lower-upper could accurately be described as herculean.

Moving one quintile doesn't mean jack, especially if you move between any of the middle three quintiles you will still be squarely in the middle class. In fact you can move from the second to the fourth and still have very little wealth.

An expensive home is the best first investment, because even if the housing market tanks if you can still pay your mortgage (your income isn't strictly dependent on the housing market) you still have some place to sleep. Yes, you are paying interest, but there are very few places where in the last 50 years the house has appreciated slower than the going mortgage rate. Housing is a safe investment, and for someone with little other money to invest (the middle-class) you'd better make safe bets. If you stop making payments on your house you may lose it, but it's not like all the money you've been paying disappears. If you suddenly can't afford a home, you should sell it ASAP, and not wait for the bank to foreclose - that way you can still make money.

Re:Sure it's a game

[AndersOSU]

my great-grandparents, were oil refinery workers... My generation were all college educated if they wanted to be, which I think amounted to all of us but one. We are all, both men and women, academics, professionals, and business owners.

So it took your family 120 years and four generations to go from middle-lower to upper-middle? Congratulations. This is exactly what I was talking about when I said the American dream is a hoax. It's a hoax, because (1) you haven't achieved real wealth, and (2) it takes too long, and is too hard to climb the socio-economic ladder. The "American Dream" is a rags to (real) riches story, not a rags to relative comfort story. It shouldn't take four generations of hard-workers to be able to afford a few luxury items, and it wouldn't if the top 1% didn't hoard 38% of the wealth.

Yes, asking for instant change is asking for too much, and asking for eventual parity is unrealistic, and unfeasible, and probably undesirable. However, asking to change the status quo isn't asking too much, especially when the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is widening.

Making it into the middle class would be an acceptable goal, if the middle class controlled an acceptable portion of the pie. That *might* have been the case from the 50's to the 80's, but today the upper 1% control more wealth than they have at any time since the great depression, and that is what I consider unacceptable.

Oh, and BTW, asking for women to get paid the same as men in the same job yesterday isn't asking too much.

Re:Sure it's a game

[AndersOSU]

While true that the vast majority of millionaires are self made, it is also true that the vast majority of millionaires have less than 5 million. That means that the vast majority of millionaires are only in the lower-upper class.

Also those with a million are >1% of the population. Combining those facts leads to the conclusion that while most of the upper class may be self-made, most of the wealth controlled by the upper-class is not. Also self-made can mean a variety of things, it is not the same to say that a white male born in Connecticut to an upper-middle class family who earns a million (the demographic from which the vast majority of "self-made" millionaires arise) is the same as a Hispanic woman born in Harlem is self-made. Personally, I'm more interested in discussing the Hispanic woman.

What do the rich gain from the hoax? The rich control investments, and therefore are dependent on labor. Labor that buys into the "American Dream" works harder, complains less, and is less likely to raise a stink over things like safety or benefits. They believe that if they work really hard at making widgets one day they will own the widget making factory, while in reality they are just toiling to create wealth for the wealthy. The middle class have only a marginally better chance of making it into the middle-upper class or above than the lower class, and they are also, by and large, labor.

Re:Sure it's a game

[cduffy]

An expensive home is the best first investment, because even if the housing market tanks if you can still pay your mortgage (your income isn't strictly dependent on the housing market) you still have some place to sleep.

An inexpensive home gives you that advantage as well, and doesn't have you paying interest on the (much larger) initial balance as long -- and putting the money that would have gone into interest on a larger house into an investment account is quite certainly a win. For individuals who don't have the dicipline to do that, I'll grant that the expensive home can have some merit -- but it's still risky.

As discussed before, homes are not always particularly liquid -- and an economic climate in which they're not particularly liquid (without accepting a particularly bad deal which could well be a loss) correlate strongly with those where a typical homeowner is liable to be unable to make their mortgage; further, buying as much home as one can leaves uncomfortably little margin for error.

Moving one quintile doesn't mean jack, especially if you move between any of the middle three quintiles you will still be squarely in the middle class. In fact you can move from the second to the fourth and still have very little wealth.

I'm not motivated by the promise that if I work hard enough I'll somehow end up making $500K/yr, and while my CEO (an ER doc) has tried to promise millions if I stick with his startup all the way through, that promised reward doesn't jive with my reality enough to click. I'm motivated by the promise that if I work hard I'll pay my house off in under 10 years, be able to comfortably send the wife back to college, maintain a standard of living comparable to what my parents did, and provide well for our kids (when we get around to adopting some).

Moving from $20K/yr to... upward of that... has been rewarding (though not as much as I would have expected -- the house and the spouse are surprisingly effective money sinks); moving upward still, while only a small amount in the scheme of things, should continue to be rewarding. I'm not counting on a Horatio Alger story, though it would be nice if my stock in the aforementioned startup ends up worth something; rather, I just want a reasonably good life. Three quintiles may not mean jack, but it's good enough to serve as motivation (and a realistically fulfillable goal) for someone who spent some time at the bottom -- and that's the point, right?

Re:Sure it's a game

[AndersOSU]

So what you're saying is that because someone is poor they should temper their expectations? Now that may certainly be reality, but I wouldn't call it right.

Re:Sure it's a game

[CaptainCarrot]

So first you say that class mobility is a hoax, and then when I give you a concrete and fairly common example you change your story to say it's not fast enough. Of course it takes time. No one ever said it didn't, and I don't know by what standard your "too long" comes from there. The movies? If you want instant gratification in that area, you need to win the lottery. Otherwise, you work at it. If you can't make a better life for yourself, you can at least make one for your children. But even a hundred years is fast to someone coming from a situation where class mobility of any kind was next to impossible.

You're really attacking a strawman here. Yes, the American Dream is about "rags to riches", but riches compared to what? Compared to the situation of the European peasant, American middle class prosperity looked an awful lot like wealth. Even today, by the standards of most of the world's population our lower-middle class lives very comfortably. There aren't many people in the US, as a fraction of the population, who need to worry about where their next meal is coming from. That even a few should have that worry is too many in a country like this one, which throws away enough food to keep all of our hungry fed and then some. If you want to look for social failure then look there, not at the failure of instant gratification for class mobility. That frankly smells more of jealousy toward the super-rich than anything else. (It's not a zero-sum game anyway. Bill Gates' billions don't make me any poorer, or prevent me from making billions on my own.)

Actually, it took less time than 120 years for my family to reach upper-middle class. It was by and large achieved by my father's generation, as is clear from what I said about their work. If the ability to afford "a few luxuries" is how you measure entry to that class then it was my grandparents who made it, unless you have an unreasonably high standard about what constitutes a luxury. But I don't think that's a reliable measure. If "middle class" means anything, it points to a certain level of comfort, and comfort implies at least some minor luxuries.

Yes, morally and ideally pay parity for women ought to have been achieved yesterday. In the real world, it wasn't going to happen. Real people don't behave according to ideal morals, even those they espouse.

Re:Sure it's a game

[AndersOSU]

There was no social mobility yesterday, so we should be happy with what we can do today. Also the middle and lower classes are better off today than they were in feudal Europe, so we should be content. Is that what your saying? After all they're (mostly) not starving, so, let them eat cake.

We can and should do better. Wealth is, and always has been measured against those with the most. No, it isn't a zero sum game, but the money held by the wealthy for the express purpose of generating more wealth would better serve society if it were being spent. I'm all for letting people earn enormous sums of money - I'm against accumulation of more wealth by the wealthy. Am I jealous? Damn straight - but that doesn't make my position any less valid.

Just because reality is unkind to idealism (and I admit that my ideas are a bit to idealistic to be practical,) doesn't mean we should sit on our hands and be content with injustices.

If I had the option of being very wealthy and being able to give my kids every advantage, or being average and living in a world where kids succeeded on their own merits, and didn't need advantages, I'd choose the later.

Re:Sure it's a game

[jasonjacks0n]

I do all of my own home and car maintenance. I built a gym in my home rather than pay out monthlies. I don't eat out much, I don't go to convenience stores except to buy gas.

Ouch.. what's the point of having wealth, then? ;-)

Re:Sure it's a game

[t0rkm3]

I hate to respond to myself but I think this time it serves the conversation.

For those who have responded wondering about my lack of regard for ethnicity, personal medical issues, etc.

Those are all well and good, but none of them are excuses or reasons for failure. In my own family, schizophrenia and autism have shown themselves to be challenges. In the past Native American heritage made my progenitors difficult or impossible to employ. In my own personal history, I have made very poor decisions that have landed me a great deal of hardship. My first wife (I married at 19) had severe drug dependency issues that dovetailed nicely with my own codependency issues. It happens. We move on.

My 'no excuses' attitude is from life experience, I have seen successes and failures from every walk of life, don't think me so shallow as to assume that we all have the same path. I just insist that you would do more for yourself by walking than by sitting.

Re:Sure it's a game

[virg_mattes]

> Those are all well and good, but none of them are excuses or reasons for failure.

This is where your flaw surfaces. This statement contains two ideas, and taken as a single statement it's a failure. I agree that the reasons cited by the above posters should not generally be used as an excuse not to try to succeed, but in many cases, they are indeed a reason to fail. You continually fall into the assumption that because you personally managed to surmount the things that might hold you back, that everyone else can do the same and as a result, their failure to thrive in your fashion is because they didn't try hard enough. That's a bad road to travel, because it assumes that everything involving fortune is both surmountable and predictable. To give you a personal example from my own family:

My grandfather worked hard for his whole life. His family lived very cheaply, and they saved their money for a rainy day. By the time he reached retirement, he had a decent life savings built up, and worked to set himself up with his pension so that they would be self-reliant for the rest of their lives. They lived in a house they inherited from his wife's parents, so they had better luck than average in that regard. Shortly after he retired, my grandmother fell in the living room, functionally destroying her ankle in the process. Not only did the injury completely incapacitate her, but the resulting health challenges eventually caused her death. It took her more than a year to die, and in the interim they had to spend a huge amount of money making up for deductibles on insurance that was much better than industry standards, and on refitting their house. Shortly after her death he was diagnosed with asbestosis, and the only reason the insurance company paid up was because he was a long-standing member of the IBEW and so they sent in the lawyers for his benefit. The company he worked for had long ago disappeared, so they weren't a reasonable target for a lawsuit to pay the bills, and even with the insurance company paying more than 90 percent of his bills by the time he died, he passed away with less than the funds needed to bury him. The sale of their house netted virtually nothing because the neighborhood they lived in, while a wonderful place in my dad's youth, was in the middle of a major city and the area had deteriorated into a slum.

So, this man worked, scrimped and saved for his entire life, and in the end due to an injury, an illness and the deterioration of his neighborhood died penniless. Do you really think that such things as this are rare? If you really look at it, the one event that changed his fortunes was his wife's injury due to a fall, since his lung disease ended up not costing him much and would not have required refitting the house, and they weren't expecting to sell the house so the depreciation in value wouldn't have affected their lifestyle. If one simple accident can make the difference between living and dying with a good nest egg and having your kids footing the bill for your casket, you can see why I consider that it's disconcertingly arrogant of you to say that "...none of them are excuses or reasons for failure." Bad luck, even a single event of bad luck, can indeed make all the difference. Bully for you that your first wife didn't manage to drive you to bankruptcy (by, say, getting stoned and driving, and injuring someone who could then sue you into the poorhouse), and that you got lucky enough not to run afoul of healthcare insurance issues, but that doesn't make your way of life into a magical panacea for any problem that could crop up.

Virg

P.S. There are a number of people who lost a huge amount of money due to Katrina that had flood insurance. Due to governmental problems with reestablishing flood levels for reconstruction there were people who could not collect insurance money nor rebuild their homes and businesses for upwards of a year. Many small business owners who could not get insurance payouts due to this bureaucratic issue ended up going bankrupt. Do you think it's fair to say they were just too dumb or too lazy to solve the problem?

Re:Sure it's a game

[t0rkm3]

I am very happy living the way I do. I don't think anyway _has_ to live any particular to achieve any particular goals, unless those goals are important to them.

If they can find a better way to get there, more power to them. I was just offering a very simple way to address decision making so that you might have a little more coin at the end of the day. I find that simple discipline helps me in all things that I do, and I encourage everyone to cultivate it.

That being said, happiness is far more important than money... That's why I live in Tulsa, OK, rather than Las Vegas, or Los Angeles. The pay was much better out west, but I am a lot happier here.

Lessons taught through the difficult curve

[Applekid]

A good game has a well defined difficulty curve. What I found really interesting about this one is that the final stage is a hypothetical environment where redistricting reform is implemented and you're forced to define zones of near-equal population without any information provided for race or party affiliation.

That "final environment" is impossible to complete while keeping all the incumbents in their seats.

Which is the whole point, AFAIK, one I wholeheartedly agree with.

It's too bad there's no way to download the game and mirror it elsewhere or just hold onto a copy. Little gems like this are likely to disappear after a few months.

Re:Lessons taught through the difficult curve

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent says: "It's too bad there's no way to download the game and mirror it elsewhere or just hold onto a copy. Little gems like this are likely to disappear after a few months."

Agreed. Can we please abandon Flash as an interactive content-delivery platform? A lot of taxpayer money went into supporting this work, and there's no way for me to get a copy to demo to students when offline, or to make any changes, etc.

Re:Lessons taught through the difficult curve

[Notquitecajun]

You AGREE with incumbent protection? Unless I'm reading this wrong, you support the status quo. Argh.

Re:Lessons taught through the difficult curve

[Smight]

Embedded flash games can easily be copied and saved in firefox... for reference only of course. http://www.cruciallimit.com/blog/?p=20

Re:Lessons taught through the difficult curve

[Opportunist]

If I got him right he agrees with the impossibility to keep the incumbents in their seats. I.e. he thinks it's a good thing that you cannot "win" the last scenario.

Re:Lessons taught through the difficult curve

[porcupine8]

That "final environment" is impossible to complete while keeping all the incumbents in their seats.

No it's not. When I did it, the original map had 3 republicans and 1 democrat, and I finally got a map approved (by 3 out of 5 members of the committee, then rejected by the R state legislature, then approved by courts) that resulted in 2 R and 2 D seats.

Re:Lessons taught through the difficult curve

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm curious. Is it the word "incumbent" that you have trouble understanding, or is it the word "all"?

Re:Lessons taught through the difficult curve

[porcupine8]

Actually, it was the word "while," which apparently I read as "without." Doh!

Re:Lessons taught through the difficult curve

[jahudabudy]

Uh, you do realize that your anecdote does not disprove his assertion, right? Unless one of your Republicans switched to Democrat, all of your incumbents did not keep their seats.

Re:Lessons taught through the difficult curve

[rifter]

If I got him right he agrees with the impossibility to keep the incumbents in their seats. I.e. he thinks it's a good thing that you cannot "win" the last scenario.

I thought he meant that turnover in this particular game would be a good thing, i.e. the incumbants losing their seats would be good, especially when you consider that once this change is made to the districts the future winners of elections would have to appeal to a broader base of diverse people rather than the narrow base they can pander to now and still win.

Re:Lessons taught through the difficult curve

[frostband]

I very much agree with you about needing a well defined difficulty curve in video games. I also like how "political" video games are becoming more prevalent.

I too had an idea for a political video game, but it was about Virginia Tech and gun laws Basically, you are supposed to play as the shooter (there's already a dinky flash game out there like that) but the kicker is, before you begin, you're supposed to select the "difficulty" of the game

All "difficulties" would try to include realistic damage (headshots and center mass shots result in deaths, while other shots would be wounds...this would be important in the implementation)

Basically, you have to start out playing on "easy" mode which would mean that students are banned from taking guns on campus. So basically you'd be free to run around without opposition until the police arrived

Medium difficulty would still have guns banned from campus, but students would be more aware about protecting themselves. In this case, more would carry mace and be more resourceful about barring doors and escaping. (I never worked out all the details).

The last "hard" difficulty would have have no law banning guns from campus and several students would be carrying weapons.

So you're supposed to play through and see how many students you end up killing on each level of difficulty. The thought was you'd find that you are likely to be stopped by other students (or at least held off until the police arrive) and not be able to kill as many people without having the gun restrictions on campus.

Re:Lessons taught through the difficult curve

[Anonymous Coward]

That's an interesting concept but I don't think it will do much to convince people.

I imagine, not having actually discussed this with many of them, that even die-hard gun control advocates understand that having an armed student population would have limited the damage done. However they also believe that it would increase the rate of incidents, and do so more than it would limit the number of deaths, so that the overall change is harmful. Your game would illustrate how the number of deaths would be reduced, but it wouldn't address any of the larger question about why these people go nuts, how practical it is to stop them from getting weapons when they do, and what the best direction is for these tradeoffs.

Re:Lessons taught through the difficult curve

[wgaryhas]

When I played the last challenge the map had 1 R and 3 D before and after the redistricting.

Re:Lessons taught through the difficult curve

[nelsonal]

I think that's by design, Manny Pulative (the hint is in the name) is there only because of Gerrymandering. Remove the Gerrymander district and he can't continue to get elected. The people of the river valley thank you. Why did the R state legislature vote down the plan that gave them another seat.
Also, the whole concept puts an awful lot of pressure on the "independant" member of the comission (she didn't like my districts several times for being not compact enough but the final change was excedingly minor. I doubt the Tanner Act would change much from the current system.

Re:Lessons taught through the difficult curve

[Anonymous Coward]

Will the hard level have the other students shooting each other because they can't tell who the psycho with a gun is anymore???

Re:Lessons taught through the difficult curve

[Anonymous Coward]

Oops. Well, judging from your sibling posts it seems you weren't the only one.

Re:Lessons taught through the difficult curve

[porcupine8]

As I said an hour before you posted this, I seem to have read the word "while" as "without." Doh!

Re:Lessons taught through the difficult curve

[Applekid]

Never gotten less than 2 reps upset at me. Maybe I just suck? :)

Re:Lessons taught through the difficult curve

[jahudabudy]

Oh, sorry, I didn't see that post. I need to remember to refresh the page more often before posting...

I thought there already was a redistricting game..

[DogDude]

... It's called Qix!

Sim City

[Bizzeh]

isnt this somewhat similar to sim city?

Re:Sim City

[BeanThere]

No, it's nothing like SimCity.

Re:Sim City

[mooingyak]

Also quite similar to Pacman and Doom.

Works for Me

[MutualDisdain]

The game seems to load fine and work on my browser. Perhaps I am playing from the server...

yellow snow

[Mipoti Gusundar]

Most interesting subject and wery different from usual footballs/rollplaying/flightsim nonsence.

I for one am looking forward to EA Sports Enron and Nintendo bookskeeping.

Cool Little Intro...

[tomshaq]

That intro is fairly awesome... How can an animation of a map turning into a dinosaur and eating people not be the coolest thing? I want to get this redistricting game! When does it come out for the Wii? Also a plus of that introduction is the dramatic voice that accompanies that quote.

Re:Cool Little Intro...

[mlk]

It appears to be flash based, so it is out now for the Wii, go grab the Opera browser... :)

Re:Cool Little Intro...

[GeckoX]

Hmm, I immediately thought it was an alligator, and immediately thought that was definitely by intent.

Re:Cool Little Intro...

[jnaujok]

It's a salamander, thus the original name of "Gerrymander" because of Elbridge Gerry. From the Wikipedia article on Gerrymandering:

The word "gerrymander" is named for the Governor of Massachusetts Elbridge Gerry (July 17, 1744 - November 23, 1814), and is a blend of his name with the word "salamander," which was used to describe the appearance of a tortuous electoral district pressed through the Massachusetts legislature in 1812 by Jeffersonian democrats, in order to disadvantage their electoral opponents in the upcoming senatorial election, and reluctantly signed into law by Gerry.

Re:Cool Little Intro...

[GeckoX]

Hmm, except salamanders don't have teeth or attack things quite like that...though I agree that's probably the 'obvious' correlation to be found.

The tongue in cheek correlation I see is that of an alligator. Gerrymandering...alligator...swing state...surely not ;)

Re:Cool Little Intro...

[Aqua_boy17]

I also thought it was an aligator.

Then again, I'm from Florida where there is a real probability that in some precints you actually could be chased by a real gator while on your way to the polls.

Re:Cool Little Intro...

[rifter]

Hmm, except salamanders don't have teeth or attack things quite like that...though I agree that's probably the 'obvious' correlation to be found.

The tongue in cheek correlation I see is that of an alligator. Gerrymandering...alligator...swing state...surely not ;)

Not the real salamander, the mythological one which the name comes from. Salamanders were monsters that lived in hell or inside volcanoes, and might have teeth as well. In medieval times wizards and alchemists were thought to have traffic with salamanders and demons. The connotation of evil and of power granted by traffic with evil powers and giving oneself over to evil must surely have had more to do with the creation of the word Gerrymander than the real creature, which is completely harmless and has no negative connotation at all.

Re:Cool Little Intro...

[GeckoX]

So there's no way that that is a tongue in cheek poke at gerrymandering in Florida as well?

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it appears to be a nice little poke to me.

Re:Cool Little Intro...

[Dun Malg]

Hmm, except salamanders don't have teeth or attack things quite like that...though I agree that's probably the 'obvious' correlation to be found.

If you've seen the original political cartoon in which the term "Gerry-mander" was coined, yeah, the intent is fairly obvious and clearly intentional.

The tongue in cheek correlation I see is that of an alligator. Gerrymandering...alligator...swing state...surely not ;)

Yeah... probably not, since I have no idea what you're talking about.

So how long...

[hphoenix]

...before they hold a contest to see who can 'redistrict' the best? Nice cash prize for the top 'winners', and the politicos can then use the results to lobby for actual changes. I wonder which side will try it first?

Re:So how long...

[hansamurai]

Considering all the levels are just made up places, and that I'm sure each major party has literally hundreds of people on their payroll across the country doing exactly this, it's probably not necessary.

Re:So how long...

[Cannelbrae]

Please tell me the government has tools to automate something like this.

Re:So how long...

[Dun Malg]

Please tell me the government has tools to automate something like this. Given that redistricting is something that happens at the state level, and that there are generally no objective rules to districting, the extent of automation likely is no greater than exhibited by this game. Most districts are probably still drawn by hand.

Re:So how long...

[fishbowl]

"Given that redistricting is something that happens at the state level, and that there are generally no objective rules to districting, the extent of automation likely is no greater than exhibited by this game. Most districts are probably still drawn by hand."

It's also hardly the "strictly top-down, ham-handed authoritarian process dictated by some supreme power" that seems to be a persistent caricature in discussions such as this one. The people in the districts, in smaller representative groups, and sometimes even individuals, have a role in the process, which is one reason why it's so complicated, and one reason why it's not quite the tyranny it's purported to be.

Most people choose not to participate in any political process on any smaller scale than maybe a Presidential election. By the time they become aware that their Congressional district is being changed, it's because they have their opinion given to them by some sensationalized news coverage, after having ignored every opportunity for public participation and official comment, for months or years.

Some representatives and people who are prospective candidates are better than others at being involved in their communities, and some communities are more conducive to public involvement in local politics than others. Some of us have genuine relationships with the local politicians that represent us; others would be hard pressed to name one of their neighbors.

Participation is key. If you plug in to politics at your local level, you will probably be shocked at how easy it is to do -- because hardly anyone can actually be bothered.

If your voting district gets moved by your state legislature or city council and the first time you hear about it is election day, that's YOUR fault.

Re:So how long...

[NeMon'ess]

There are other variables I think are important to consider, or not. People living in a fertile valley may generally be farmers. If a district is created for them, while a neighboring district is just for the nearby city, then both seats have very different priorities. If it's possible to make both districts by population 50% city and 50% farming, then both politicians ought to care about the needs of both groups.

In the real world such a scenario probably can't happen too often while making honestly compact districts. For contest with real maps, I'd want my local area kept in one district. Finding a balance between following city boundaries and topographic features are two ways to do this. I'd consider them superior to dividing a state into nothing but rectangles for districts. Sure it increases the ability to tilt the balance of seats, but if courts actually enforced compactness, it wouldn't be such a big deal. People drawing up districts that follow city limits and topographic features but lack compactness should have to justify their deviations. If the deviations make a seat more "safe", then it probably shouldn't be allowed.

Pork Barrel Senator

[stoolpigeon]

LGF UD STRAT!!!

Re:Pork Barrel Senator

[Anonymous Coward]

Neocon rush KEKEKEKEKE!

Dumb game

[FuzzyDaddy]

It's WAY too easy.

Oh wait, I guess that's the point...

One has to ask...

[beef3k]

1. What... is redistricting?
2. What... is gerrymandering?
3. What... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?

Sincerely,
--
The English-as-a-second-language population

Re:One has to ask...

[jjacksonRIAB]

3. What... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow? American or your mom?

Re:One has to ask...

[Anonymous Coward]

3. What... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
African or European?

Re:One has to ask...

[Opportunist]

What... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?

A Republican or a Democrat?

Re:One has to ask...

[yellowalienbaby]

Oh, erm. ahh .. I dont know thaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh h h

Re:One has to ask...

[Red Flayer]

3. What... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?

What, no link?

Re:One has to ask...

[Belacgod]

3. Democrat or Republican?

Re:One has to ask...

[scuba964]

3. What... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
Democrat or Republican swallow?

Re:One has to ask...

[metlin]

Ummm, English 101? Wow, getting modded informative for posting the meanings of everyday words of the English language?

Gee.

Re:One has to ask...

[Alsee]

Republican or a Democrat?

Well, Democrat is 30 miles per hour...
and Republican is 44 feet per second.

Yes, there is a humorous cynical point in there.

-

Re:One has to ask...

[iabervon]

It's a good thing one has Wikipedia to ask, so one doesn't actually have to complain about slashdot articles.

Actually, somebody should probably make a Firefox extension that lets you left-click on a word and select a menu option to find out what it means without any fuss.

Re:One has to ask...

[Opportunist]

Ok, I admit I don't get it. Is the joke still funny after being explained?

Re:One has to ask...

[Alsee]

30 MPH *is* 44 feet per second.
"Republican or a Democrat?
With the implied the cynicism, same thing.

I assumed geeks around here would do the math converting MPH and feet per second and catch the "equal" part, but I realized my meaning from there would probably be easy to miss. Assuming that someone got the "equal" part, I hoped adding my explicit mention that it was a cynical point would be clue enough to get it.

It's probably not funny anymore, if it even was in the first place :)
Just another surreal turn piled on a thread of bizarre off the wall twists.

-

Re:One has to ask...

[Opportunist]

Gah, you and your dated imperial system. Get metric, man! :)

"40 km/h... or 11.11 m/s" and it would've been a riot. You ruined a perfectly good joke. :)

Re:One has to ask...

[Alsee]

Are you insane man!?
I was describing Democrats and Republicans. Metric would have been oxymoronic! :)

-

*sexy lady voice*

[starbuckr0x]

Reticulating splines... and demagogues.

Re:*sexy lady voice*

[CompSci101]

Dude, that's hilarious. Damn youngsters don't understand good humor when they read it anymore. (...grumble, grumble, curmudgeon, curmudgeon ...)

Excellent SC2K reference!

C

Grand Strategy Guide for Electoral Victory

[MSTCrow5429]

Step 1: Win an election

Step 2: Gerrymander your seats into safe districts

Step 3: Gerrymander your opponent's into insane districts

Step 4: Win an election

Step 5: Repeat as needed

Seriously, people find ethical lapses in a political system? How is that possible!

I'm looking forward to "ReDistricting 2: Earmarks, or buying of the votes."

Re:Grand Strategy Guide for Electoral Victory

[zippthorne]

If you win a majority in a legislative body, you shouldn't bother with redistricting. After all, the opposing party undoubtedly dabbled in it and look what it got them! Gerrymandering is the "lucky rabbit's foot" of politics.

You can change the districts to have:
1) greater majorities for your party members. You will probably lose some seats, but the remaining guys are secure.
or
2) slimmer majorities for your party members. You could gain some seats, but since the majorities are thinner, there's a greater chance you'll lose everything.

I imagine most parties don't pick two, and fail because of one.

Re:Grand Strategy Guide for Electoral Victory

[allanc]

What you're not taking into account is that usually the change in majority comes only from a major, major shift in public perception of the current bunch of weasels, faster than they can compensate for with redistricting. E.g., last Congressional election, and the "Republican Revolution" back in the 90s. And this last time, the new majority party just barely managed to squeak through with a majority. I don't recall how much the Republicans won back in the 90s, but I know that the election immediately following it had them just barely keeping their majority.

The congressional incumbancy rate was 98% in 2000.

Re:Grand Strategy Guide for Electoral Victory

[Homr Zodyssey]

Thats not really how it works. For simplicity, lets say we have 5 districts with 100 people each. This is how they voted in the last election.

District 1: R=60 D=40
District 2: R=60 D=40
District 3: R=60 D=40
District 4: R=40 D=60
District 5: R=40 D=60

Now, lets say we redraw districts #4 and #5 base on how people voted so that its more like:

District 4: R=60 D=40
District 5: R=20 D=80

Yay! The Rs picked up another seat! We don't have a slimmer majority anywhere...we just consolidated our opponents so that they can't get as many people in office.

Re:Grand Strategy Guide for Electoral Victory

[gurps_npc]

No. You missed #3.

3. There are 9 districts. Percentages republican are as follows: #1 = 90%, 2 = 80%, 3 = 70%, 4 = 60%, 5 = 50%, 6 = 40%, 7 = 30%, 8 = 20%, 9 = 10%.

Now change it as follows:

1 = 65%, 2 = 65%, 3 = 65%, 4 = 65%, 5 = 65%, 6 = 65%, 7 = 50%, 8= 5%, 9 =5%

You went from 3 certain, 3 in doubt, 3 definitely lost to 6 almost certain, one in doubt, 2 defitinely lost. Assuming a typical year, you go from an everage of 4.5 seats to an average of 6.5 seats. Two seat gain.

The only problem with this idea is that people MOVE and the data tends to be at least one year old. If you don't pay attention to trends, you gerrymandering works for about two years. If you do, you might be able to get 4 or 5 years out of it. Even then, it dies.

Re:Grand Strategy Guide for Electoral Victory

[iluvcapra]

Gerrymandering is the "lucky rabbit's foot" of politics.

You should play the game, you'd see you were wrong.

The funnest level is the one where you take one district away from the other party to yours. You just give all of his loyal supporters to his neighboring party-mate, who's happy to have them, and you push the border of the safe seat for your team a few miles your direction, putting your supporters in his district, and walla!

The most ironic level is the "reform" level, where you draw borders without regard for party and just try to get the districts right. It's easy, but its impossible for you to ever get your map approved, because nobody in the legislature will vote for it, because their seats get too risky, but you can't ever make the map suit them, because you can't see the demographic data. Hilarious!

Re:Grand Strategy Guide for Electoral Victory

[Teancum]

This is presuming that American voters are mindless robots that always vote straight ticket and toe the party line.... and can't see through these games when they are being played. I have seen strategies like this backfire precisely when it is obvious that blatant political manipulation of the basic government is occuring.

And as the previous post was trying to mention but didn't quite get it out, blatant gerrymandering doesn't work when you are in a position where one political party is growing and the one in power is shrinking. In that case you do have to give thinner and thinner margins to everybody until you finally "break", handing the whole apparatus to the "other" party. Very few people maintain the same political philosophy throughout their entire life and always vote "straight ticket", so historical voting patterns don't necesarily hold true in the following election.

I'm not saying that there isn't something broken with the current system, but the game, especially in the reform scenerio, misses much of the reasons for why things are done the way they are currently done, and doesn't address "real life" in terms of fickle voters, demographic changes, and changes in attitude toward a political philosophy.

What about multi-member districts with STV?

[ckd]

One of the big issues in redistricting is minority representation (or non-representation), which leads to districts that consist of urban regions connected by a thin corridor or other similarly bogus shapes. Instead of artificially trying to group minorities (or party strongholds, or whatever) into specific geographical areas, though, why not remove that layer and replace it with a system that inherently represents various groups proportionally?

Using a single transferable vote system like that used for Cambridge (MA) municipal elections could work quite well. In the city council race, there are 9 seats, and any group capable of generating at least 10% of the total votes can elect a councillor of their own, even if that group is spread from one end of Cambridge to the other. Some councillors do have unofficial "districts" where their support is strongest, but this is not a requirement in any way.

STV elections also avoid the "wasted vote" problem with independent or smaller-party candidates, since voters can put one of those as their #1 choice, and if they don't win, those votes transfer down the ballot to the #2 or later choice as necessary.

With the current breakdown of seats by state, a system with a maximum of 11 seats in a district would allow all but 11 states to operate as one large multi-member district; raising the threshold to 13 would add Georgia, New Jersey, and North Carolina to the single-election list.

To use Massachusetts as an example: the current 10 seats in the House are all held by the Democratic Party. I doubt there's any viable redistricting that would allow the Republicans to win even one seat. Under a 10 member STV system, though, the 13% of the state that's registered Republican could elect at least one, and with support from unenrolled voters, possibly more.

Re:What about multi-member districts with STV?

[butlerdi]

It seems funny that the state best known for it's part in the American revolution has an all democratic house ..... Are the Republicans too much like the king ....

Re:What about multi-member districts with STV?

[Anonymous Coward]

STV has a serious problem. It is the only seriously proposed voting system I've ever heard of which fails the monotonicity criterion. This means that voting for someone can cause them to lose. I.e., if you don't vote for them, they win; if you do vote for them, they lose (assuming everyone else votes the same way in both cases). This actually holds for any instant run-off systems (i.e., with more than one transfer). This is fucked up. Just say no to STV.

Re:What about multi-member districts with STV?

[Shakrai]

Some councillors do have unofficial "districts" where their support is strongest, but this is not a requirement in any way.

Right, so if we do that for House elections, who is my Congressman? Who do I write my concerns to? Who do I go to if I have a problem with a Federal agency? Is my Congressman going to ignore me if I'm obviously somebody who didn't vote for him because he doesn't have a "district" that I live in?

Re:What about multi-member districts with STV?

[MSTCrow5429]

Which State? I can't think of any whose entire House is filled with Democrats only. For best known for its part in the American Revolution, I'm thinking of a Commonwealth, not a State. In any case, everyone involved in the American Revolution has been dead for several hundred years (give or take a few years), and it's quite probable that the people around now do not share the ideals or principles of the American Revolution. Look at the Republican Revolution of 1994, didn't even take them more than a year or two to dump their commitment to limited and Constitutional government and go bonkers on bloating government spending and power as fast as possible. And those were many of the same people from 1994 to functional repudiation shortly thereafter. Very few people are principled or truly believe in ideas. When it comes to politicians, I can count them on one hand.

Re:What about multi-member districts with STV?

[Dun Malg]

It seems funny that the state best known for it's part in the American revolution has an all democratic house ..... Are the Republicans too much like the king .... yes, because neither the demographics of Massachusetts, nor the nature of the government have changed a bit in 231 years.

Re:What about multi-member districts with STV?

[arodland]

Er... with the current system there's pretty good odds that the only representative that's technically "yours" is a guy you didn't vote for and who doesn't agree with you. With multiple-member districts and proportional representation, there's a much better chance that at least one of the members from your district (whether that's a state or something a bit smaller) will be available to support you.

Take the example from the parent. Suppose you are one of the 13% of registered Republicans in MA. Who do you write to? The Democrat from your district, the Democrat junior senator, or the Democrat senior senator? But if MA was a single district with 10 seats, you'd end up with one guy who could argue your position on the floor, anyway. And representing the range of issues that people care about seems more important than representing purely geographical areas anyway. Especially when those geographical areas can be redrawn at will by those in power to represent purely political interests.

Re:What about multi-member districts with STV?

[segfaultcoredump]

The case you give is more likely in a 'regular' district. You are a democrat writing about an issue of interest to only a democrat and you happen to be writing to a republican congressman since you are in a 'red' state and thus in the minority (lets say 48% to 52%). They will know that you didnt vote for them and may blow you off. If, however, you have one of each, you can cherry pick which one to send the letter to based on the one that is more likely to care about your issue.

Compare this to the 1:1 ratio, and you can see the advantages of being able to route the letter to the elected official most likely to care about your case.

It also has some interesting games from the point of how many politicians to field. Lets say only the top 2 will be elected. Does your party field 2 candidates in the hopes of getting both but at the risk of loosing both (if the other party does the same) or do you only put up 1 and guarantee a spot? 3rd party candidates can also wreak havoc with this sort of setup (which is a good thing in my view)

Re:What about multi-member districts with STV?

[TubeSteak]

and any group capable of generating at least 10% of the total votes can elect a councillor of their own, even if that group is spread from one end of Cambridge to the other.

And that's the problem with your idea.

How do you bring jobs to your 'district' when its constituants are spread across the state? How do you solve problems for people living on the other side of the State? Do you know the officials in their county? Do those officials care who you are, if you only represent (single digit)% of their population?

Government, in its many forms, has almost always been about helping/ruling/oppressing people in a distinct geographic location.

Re:What about multi-member districts with STV?

[deanoaz]

>>> This means that voting for someone can cause them to lose.

I call bogus on this. In an instant runoff election you can vote for your true preference first. If they don't win, you haven't wasted your vote because your second preference comes into play if no candidate has achieved a majority.

The example shown in the parent's link does not impress me. It shows all voters with the same primary preference also having the same secondary preference to create an unlikely scenario. It also pretends that the candidate who ultimately lost did so because she gained support. This is not true. She lost because another candidate LOST support, thereby putting her voters' second choice into play. The same thing would have happened if those primary votes had gone to some another candidate not listed in the example.

This manufactured quibble is no reason to stay with the current system of voting for the lesser of two evils every time.

Re:What about multi-member districts with STV?

[Snarfangel]

Here is an interesting site which gives you some visualizations of voting methods. Take a look at IRV:

http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

Re:What about multi-member districts with STV?

[Red Flayer]

How do you bring jobs to your 'district' when its constituants are spread across the state?

It's a philosophical difference, but I would say that this is a net benefit -- state legislators don't exist to bring home pork to their district, they exist to resolve issues facing the entire state. If their 'district' consisted of their entire state, then maybe they would take actions to benefit the entire state, not just their district at the expense of the rest of the state.

Re:What about multi-member districts with STV?

[phlinn]

It's better put this way: Voting for someone ahead of your preferred candidate can alter who your candidate is in a runoff election against, and make it more likely for him to win. For instance, voting Green, Republican, Dem in an attempt to have the greens beat the dems when you know they won't beat the republicans.

Personally, I prefer approval voting. Losing monotonicity bothers me more than the flaws with approval. I don't recall the name of the criterion. Condorcet?

Re:What about multi-member districts with STV?

[mi]

It seems funny that the state best known for it's part in the American revolution has an all democratic house ..... Are the Republicans too much like the king ....

Corrupted by Catholics — Italians and Irish — would be my guess...

We may be screaming about "Latinos corrupting our culture" (and overburdening our law-enforcement) and passing laws establishing English as the official language, while forgetting those previous waves of immigration, who — while also almost entirely honest — have nonetheless given us the characters like those immortalized in "Godfather" (Italians), "Once Upon in America" (Jews), and "Departed" (Irish).

That's fiction. The Kennedy clan is like an ongoing soap opera cum reality show...

Other poster is right, however. The country and the parties have changed a lot since Governor Gerry of Massachusetts sign the "Salamander" into existence....

Re:What about multi-member districts with STV?

[deanoaz]

>>> Personally, I prefer approval voting.

After checking on the Approval method, which I hadn't seen before, I think I agree with you.

That or Borda might be better if for no other reason than this: people have become conditioned to throw a fit when they lose elections in recent years, and the complexities of IRV balloting would give them oh so much more excuse for throwing a fit even if none of the more unlikely results cases ever came up.

Re:What about multi-member districts with STV?

[Anonymous Coward]

Using a single transferable vote system like that used for Cambridge (MA) municipal elections could work quite well. In the city council race, there are 9 seats, and any group capable of generating at least 10% of the total votes can elect a councillor of their own, even if that group is spread from one end of Cambridge to the other. Some councillors do have unofficial "districts" where their support is strongest, but this is not a requirement in any way.

One thing I've noticed in my 12 years here is that the incumbent councillors who run for re-election almost never, ever lose their seat. I don't know whether it is an artifact of the system or the nature of politics here, but there it is.

To use Massachusetts as an example: the current 10 seats in the House are all held by the Democratic Party. I doubt there's any viable redistricting that would allow the Republicans to win even one seat. Under a 10 member STV system, though, the 13% of the state that's registered Republican could elect at least one, and with support from unenrolled voters, possibly more.

This is hard to put into practice because it benefits a political minority at the expense of the majority. This is also why almost all US states select presidential electors in a winner-takes-all system.

Re:What about multi-member districts with STV?

[Anonymous Coward]

The condorcet criterion means if a majority prefers a candidate to any other candidate, that candidate wins. I don't know if that's what you were thinking of.
In any event, approval (and average voting, which seem to be even better) aren't preferential voting systems (you don't say "I like this one best, then I prefer that one to that one", you say "I approve of/rate highly these, and disapprove of/rate badly these"), so the standard criterion analysis fails.

The state of the art in (Condorcet-satisfying) preferential voting is Ranked Pairs and Schulze; the latter is used by Debian in their elections.

Re:What about multi-member districts with STV?

[Anonymous Coward]

Borda did say "my scheme is intended for only honest men", and all other things equal, the party with the most candidates wins (even if all of their candidates have exactly the same positions, so all rank them equally).

So among the ones you choose, approval it is!

Re:What about multi-member districts with STV?

[complete loony]

In AU we have a preferential system in our lower house to elect a single person per seat. If you don't put a number against each candidate your vote is invalid. This means that no matter who you put first, it's the order you place the 2 main contenders that matter. There is no way to NOT vote for them, without throwing away your vote completely. It also tends towards a 2 party system like the US voting system. A 3rd party candidate for a particular seat has a lot of work to do to convince the majority of people to place them above the other 2 main candidates. Usually a person can only be elected as an independent candidate because they have been elected previously and have left their party, but have gained a significant reputation in their district.

Re:What about multi-member districts with STV?

[StikyPad]

Ka-Ping Yee makes my eyes hurt.

Re:What about multi-member districts with STV?

[phlinn]

That's the one. I was short on time when I wrote the original post, so I didn't get around to looking it up. Binary voting methods are still subject to examining various criterion. I would argue that binary systems are merely special cases of ranked voting systems with only 2 ranks.

In any case, it's possible in approval voting to have a candidate who beats all other candidates in paired votes, but loses in the approval system. Say you have 3 candidates, 3 voters, and each voter in approval only disaproves of their least favorite candidate. Given actual pre-vote preferences (A,B,C),(A,B,C), and (B,C,A). A beats both B and C in 2 man races. In aproval votes, B is the only candidate with 3 votes and would win. This fails the Condorcet criterion.

I prefer approval to average voting due to simplicity. Average bothers me a bit, as it weights different people's votes differently. This is basically the way it can fail the Majority Criterion.

Redistricting vs. politics as usual

[Howard2nd]

I live in Florida - 20 years ago we tried to setup a logical redistricting system and were run out of town. The Republicans and Democrats would prefer to abuse each other every census. Any changes might allow for a thrid party and that will unite them against the people they represent everytime.

Remember that most states have 'winner-take-all' electoral votes, because the Republicans got with the Democrats to stop Teddy Roosevelt and his Bull Moose party.

Re:Redistricting vs. politics as usual

[asphaltjesus]

Kudos to you sir in your knowledge of American history and participating in government. There are very few of us.

I live in Florida

Well, there's your first problem right there... It's a joke people.

Re:Redistricting vs. politics as usual

[packrat0x]

[Quote]
I live in Florida - 20 years ago we tried to setup a logical redistricting system and were run out of town. The Republicans and Democrats would prefer to abuse each other every census. Any changes might allow for a thrid party and that will unite them against the people they represent everytime.
[/Quote]

I live in Florida as well. Our "Redistricting" 20 years ago was done by 3 Federal Judges.

Florida law requires districts to be Contiguous and Compact. Well, the districts were contiguous, even if only a few feet wide in some places. They were definitely not compact. And this was done by supposedly independent and fair minded (Federal) judges. That redistricting plan was the ugliest in the history of Florida.

Remember, politics is not about what is best, politics is about the least objectionable alternative.

Re:Redistricting vs. politics as usual

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, there's your first problem right there... It's a joke people.

What -- your comment or Florida itself?

Re:Redistricting vs. politics as usual

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, how many people here haven't noticed that if a member of either party, or an independant, deviates from both the Democrat and Republican party lines they are immediately attacked by both parties?

Re:Redistricting vs. politics as usual

[kamapuaa]

Actually, most states went winner-take-all 50 years later, in a bid to make the state more important in voting. Candidates care more about, say, California (the first state to adopt the policy) when a 45% support rate means 0 electoral votes. Similarly, California recently moved its presidential primary forward, knowing that presidential candidates were more likely to pay attention to a state with early voting.

Abolishing winner-take-all would in no way make it more likely for a third party candidate to become president. It makes no sense. Perhaps you are thinking that if the US constitution recognized political parties and allowed them to assign candidates based on direct voting percentages, then there would be more third parties represented in the Congress. That would take a massive re-write of the Constitution. What you said about Florida gerrymandering was also untrue. Perhaps you should read a newspaper from time to time?

How would you ban gerrymandering?

[Palmyst]

Let us say you want to pass a state law or a national constitutional amendment that bars gerrymandering. How exactly would you word such a statute? It needs to remain flexible enough so that electoral districts can be changed in the future in response to population changes, but still not allow the "crazy shape" districts that are now common.

Any ideas? Schwarzenneger's proposal simply moves the redistricting authority from the elected representatives to a panel of appointed jurists. This gets rid of the conflict of interest issue to some extent, but not entirely, since jurists will also have party affinities, probably coinciding with that of the appointer. We should instead look for some prescriptive changes to the redistricting geometry itself.

My idea would be to say that districts should be drawn in such a way that the least number of smaller entities such as cities, towns or counties are split among them. For example, the law could prescribe that not more than one city, town, or county should be partially included in a district. I admit this is not a well thought out idea. It is something I am throwing out out there, and looking for new ideas from people.

Maybe it is impossible. Maybe not. Let us discuss and figure out.

Re:How would you ban gerrymandering?

[Anonymous Coward]

My proposal is to use already predefined areas of land and have a computer determine the most population equal arrangement of contiguous areas. Use zip codes, which aren't gerrymandered and don't really change, and have a computer with population census data set up which blocks of multiple contiguous zip codes are closest in population. Then, also it's quite easy to tell which district is yours, it's the one that includes your zip code.

Re:How would you ban gerrymandering?

[Dachannien]

To my thinking, the solution is simple: mandate convexity of the districts, with an exception for irregular district borders at state boundaries. Districting would then become a sort of Voronoi diagram over a non-uniform space due to population density. This would reduce the problem to one of choosing the centroids of each district, which would be much harder to manipulate inappropriately due to the complexity of the problem. Still, you could define the locations of the centroids based on some metric such as maximization of distance between the centroids.

Re:How would you ban gerrymandering?

[porcupine8]

In the game, at least, under the "reform" rules, the independent jury is made up of half Rs and half Ds plus one neutral, plus you don't get to see the political makeup of areas when you're drawing the map, only population. Unlike other levels, where you can see R voters and D voters and draw the maps to balance them out as you like. There was also a compactness rule - maps in the reform level can't have crazy-shaped districts that snake around each other, etc. It's hard to tell the details of that rule, though, your idea of limiting the number of towns/counties in one district might have something to do with it.

Re:How would you ban gerrymandering?

[mrchaotica]

Let us say you want to pass a state law or a national constitutional amendment that bars gerrymandering. How exactly would you word such a statute? It needs to remain flexible enough so that electoral districts can be changed in the future in response to population changes, but still not allow the "crazy shape" districts that are now common.

Define an algorithm that takes population distribution (but not race, age, political affiliation, etc.) as input, and tries to make districts of equal population while minimizing the ratio of circumference to surface area (i.e., trying to make the districts as close to circular as possible). Then just implement it and run it after every census.

Re:How would you ban gerrymandering?

[kebes]

People have proposed to specify a mathematical algorithm that would split a state into a set number of districts along population lines. Really it would be easy to have an 'approved' algorithm whose only input was population distribution (and NOT political affiliation).

One example from Wikipedia.

Re:How would you ban gerrymandering?

[Anonymous Coward]

Race has been mandated as a redistricting concern.
The basic rule for any solution needs to figure out the estimated split for each concern by population, then draw the districts such that a similar percentage of the represented appear over the entire population of districts. Simply stated, if a state is 70% white, 20% black and 10% other minorities, then the created districts need to represent those biases. The same for each of the political parties all the while avoiding strange district shapes.

An honest algorithm should be possible, but that will never be allowed without public outcry and a grass roots constitutional amendment campaign.

Majority rule is a dangerous thing.

Re:How would you ban gerrymandering?

[MightyYar]

Borrowed from a machine vision algorithm, I would make a 3D map of the district with geography on the xy axis and population on the z. Then I would have the computer divide the map into congressional districts, minimizing the total surface area. If there are multiple solutions (which I haven't worked out), then pick a solution at random.

Re:How would you ban gerrymandering?

[necro81]

This doesn't exactly ban or rule out the possibility of gerrymandering, but Iowa instituted a much fairer way of redistricting back in the early 80s. Instead of the legislature drawing the lines, an independent committee (4 appointments from each caucus, plus a chairperson) draws up three new redistricted maps with the following guidelines:

1 - population equality,
2 - contiguity,
3 - unity of counties and cities (maintaining county lines and "nesting" house districts within senate districts and senate districts within congressional districts), and
4 - compactness.

When you look at these guidelines, you'll find it tries to do the same thing that various mathematical algorithms, which others have suggested in response to the parent post, try to do. The three proposed maps are sent to the legislature, who attempt to choose one in a simple take-it-or-leave-it vote, with contingencies if the legislature can't decide on one.

The result is that four of five congressional districts in Iowa are consistently competitive and mirror the state's overall political makeup. Compare that to about 50 of 435 congressional districts nationwide being competitive, despite the nearly even split between Democrats and Republicans.

Some Iowa politicians grumble when they have to move their home to stay within their redrawn district, but by and large everyone feels that the system is fair and equitable. Neither party considers abusing the system, because they realize how blatant it would appear, and because they know that the next time the same abuse could be revisited on them.

Re:How would you ban gerrymandering?

[cdrguru]

You are assuming gerrymandering is bad.

The whole intent of districts in the Chicago area are to assemble the required number of black voters into a single district so a black candidate can be elected for that district.

Same thing happens for Hispanic voters as well.

This is how minorities get completely disproportional representation in government. It is to "right the wrongs" that have been done to these minorities. Of course it continues to enslave them by pretty much requiring them to live in substandard housing and in areas not well served commercially. If these people moved out of their ghettos they wouldn't have any representation at all.

Re:How would you ban gerrymandering?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are assuming gerrymandering is bad. The whole intent of districts in the Chicago area are to assemble the required number of black voters into a single district so a black candidate can be elected for that district.

And you think that's good?

Re:How would you ban gerrymandering?

[Dr. Mu]

After the census results are out, and for one year thereafter, allow any citizen of the state to propose a redistricting scheme. The rules are as follows:

1. The populations within the various districts have to be within 1% of each other.
2. The scheme with the smallest sum of district perimeters gets chosen.

Such a scheme would have been difficult to put in place when the Constitution was written. But now, with rapid communication and GIS software, it's not only objective and fair, but should be rather easy to implement.

Re:How would you ban gerrymandering?

[nelsonal]

Yeah but it wouldn't take a whole lot of study to make a few educated guesses (almost everyone in a state knows the conservative areas and the liberal areas). In the reform level, the independant rep got a free veto based on compactness that was undefined, you could still fit plenty of Gerrymandering within their definition but some seemingly legit methods of districting were refused for not being compact. I like the idea of allowing the committe to pick n points (alternate between D & R) and then do a regression around them minimizing the distance of the most households to their assigned point. It might take a night, but would be difficult to predict.

Proportional Representation

[Colin Smith]

Largely solves the redistricting problem.

Re:Proportional Representation

[ThosLives]

Exactly, but that's probably why nobody will ever implement proportional representation.

Yeah, I know that's cynical...

The other thing that would "fix" the system is keep authority within appropriate geographic extents; for instance, what is good for people and what people in California want is generally not the same as those in South Carolina - the only things that should be Federal are those that apply equally to everyone, and a lot of the current legislative system on the Federal lever has gone well beyond those boundaries.

It's not just the US, either; the EU has the same problem...

Re:Proportional Representation

[Anonymous Coward]

Proportional representation?

You mean like the House of Representatives?

Re:Proportional Representation

[Cappy Red]

You mean "proportional representation without legislative body size limits," right?

Hell we don't even have to go that far. Proportional to whom? What criteria or boundries determine the population were being proportional about? What makes those any less arbitrary than anything else?

Re:Proportional Representation

[Anonymous Coward]

The Weimar Republic had pure proportional voting - as a result, there where more than 20 parties in the Reichstag, and getting a government actually able to do anything was just about impossible. Now, I know Libertarians think this is just the way it is supposed to be, but in practice, a government unable to get anything done will be replaced by one that can - in case of the Weimar Republic, with the National Socialists. Which is why modern-day Germany has a system where half of the seats go to districts based on winner takes all, while the other half is voted on with a proportional system. In theory, this should produce stable governments without leaving the political minority completely without representation. Of course, the last German elections failed to produce a clear winner, leading to the current "Grand Coalition" that is anything but grand and also fails to get anything done. You'ld think that 7 years of broken election promises by the Social Democrats under Schröder should have led to a decisive conservative victory, but it seems German voters are just as dumb as their American counterparts. So perhaps the malaise afflicting Western democracies is not the result of suboptimal voting procedures, but an inherent problem of democracy itself.

Re:Proportional Representation

[Anonymous Coward]

Instant run-off voting is a better solution.

And for the hell of it you can tack on something simple like: district lines must be drawn with the shortest lines possible (reasonably following existing boundaries: roads, rivers, county lines) to evenly divide the population, preferably taking into account existing cultural/regional differences i.e; Madison becomes a district, and the rest of WI another, instead of 1/2 of the city and state in each.

Re:Proportional Representation

[Anonymous Coward]

Whole states would be good voting districts. This way there are enough seats to divide.

Re:Proportional Representation

[Teancum]

One huge problem with proportional representation is that it tends to lead to huge instabilities in the governments that use this method of representative government.

It does allow minority voices (speaking politically, not just ethnic minorities) to be represented in a clear manner. In other words, if you and your friends can dig up enough votes with the capability of voting for one representative, you will be able to get that one seat.... no matter how far in the fringe your political philosophy may be.

Proportional representation also has huge problems with trying to "form a government". In other words, it is seldom that you will have a "majority party" that will be able to run the government, but rather there are dozens of political parties with none of them able to command a majority. So instead you see coalition government form out of several of these parties. Minor party represenatives (such as is the current situation with Joe Lieberman and Jim Jeffords in the current U.S. Senate) get disproportional attention in such governments... and the situation is very common instead of situationally unusual as it currently is in the U.S. Senate.

For many European governments, notably the Italian parliment and the pre-WWII French parliment, the coalition that governs the country is not unusual to be formed in the morning and by the afternoon of the same day will "collapse" and require a whole new coalition to form.

In the whole history of the USA (well over 200 years), the "government" has only changed hands a little more than a dozen times and has been in the hands of only three parties, the Whigs, the Republicans, and the Democrats.

The point that I'm trying to make here is that the concept of a congressional disrict has an ability to stabilize the government and force the voters to come to a concensus about who should run the country. It may be hard to "overthrow" the party in power (the Whigs certainly outlasted their popular support but still retained political power well after they fell out of favor), but once they are out of power it is very hard to get it back.... as the Democrats are discovering at the moment. My point here is that the two kinds of represenation are simply different, not better, and that there are positive beneifits (even with gerrymandering) in terms of the general governance of a country. You just have to look a little bit deeper.

Re:Proportional Representation

[Colin Smith]

The Weimar Republic had pure proportional voting Proportional representation can be anything from the whole country being a district in which case you get hundreds of small parties, like Italy and Israel or, relatively small districts where perhaps 5-7 larger parties are able to gain seats. It can be tuned.

More than that though. It's the electoral system's job to provide representatives for the people, it isn't the electoral system's job to prevent a dictator gaining power, that's completely up to the politicians the people vote for.

You'ld think that 7 years of broken election promises by the Social Democrats under Schröder should have led to a decisive conservative victory, but it seems German voters are just as dumb as their American counterparts The difference? All of the German voters preferences are being represented. In America, maybe half. In Britain, about a third.

Re:Proportional Representation

[Colin Smith]

For many European governments, notably the Italian parliment and the pre-WWII French parliment, the coalition that governs the country is not unusual to be formed in the morning and by the afternoon of the same day will "collapse" and require a whole new coalition to form. Only if you insist that a coalition is formed. In Scotland for example, the SNP are governing with a minority government. They are unlikely to get all of their election promises passed, but then they don't have a mandate for that anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_government

My point here is that the two kinds of represenation are simply different, not better, I disagree, either your representative represent you or they don't. In a FPTP system in general they don't, so any legislation which is passed is not representative of the wishes of the majority of the people. In the UK for example, the Labour party won a clear majority in the parliament with only 34% of the popular vote. Any legislation passed by them does not have the backing of 66% of the population. That could never be called good governance no matter how strong the government itself is.

Re:Proportional Representation

[Cappy Red]

You're talking about something like a mashup of the House and the Senate in the U.S.: representation based on state, without distinct district representation within the states.

Problem: what makes state lines any less arbitrary than any other lines? Ignoring that, there is another problem: most states are large, geographically. Many states have areas within with differing needs. The needs of a farmer in the country are not the same as those of a business owner in the city. Further, the needs of those along the coast are different from those who live inland. By throwing them all into the same district, you end up with worse representation, not better.

Theoretically, districts are supposed to be drawn so that they all include the same number of people. Thus, the representation is supposed to be proportional already: cities have more people in a smaller area, and thus have more districts than rural areas, where the population density is lower. More districts means more representatives. The problem that the game in this article is concerned with is how to draw the lines that make those districts. They may be gerrymandered, so as to limit one's opposing party to a few districts wherein they have an overwhelming majority, leaving one's own party with control of all other districts. But assuming they aren't -- assuming that the redrawing of district boundaries is done with good intentions, how do you redraw them? Which subset of needs is most important? Which set of commonalities is most important?

Proportional Representation is micromanagement.

Re:Proportional Representation

[NeMon'ess]

I think California is a good candidate for proportional representation in its state Assembly, while keeping districts in the state Senate. There are just so many people in the state that each Assembly member represents something like 250,000 people. Senators represent 600,000 people. Those numbers are so large that they border on redundant. Representing part of the Bay Area in either body will involve similar concerns and priorities. The same with the Central Valley.

So I'd really like the Assembly to switch to proportional representation. That way the third parties will have a few seats and get some media coverage and mind-share. They'll become legitimate parties worth voting for. The Senators will still represent geographic districts.

With a system like this, I would bet within eight years a quarter or a third of the Assembly will be Greens, Libertarians, and possibly other 3rd parties.

Re:Proportional Representation

[Cappy Red]

Actually, members of the State Assembly represent at least 420,000 people each. State Senators represent approximately 846,791 people each. And I don't think redundant is the word you're looking for... unless you have a misunderstanding of how the bicameral legislature is setup.

There are two houses to balance out the power of highly populated areas -- the Assembly granting more power based on population, and the Senate apportioning based more on geography(at least in theory). If it were just the Assembly, there would be nothing to prevent a "tyranny of the majority," wherein the interests of those in less-populated areas would go unanswered.

Then again, your aim seems to be to in getting parties elected, not improving representation.

Re:Proportional Representation

[NeMon'ess]

Whoa, back up there.

I'm aware of the bicameral legislature, and it's good requiring both bodies to pass legislation. The Senate would still be district-based, thus offering a check. I also absolutely want gerrymandering to stop.

Don't you think that getting third parties into the Assembly will improve representation of ideas and political ideologies? If Greens and Libertarians get seats then they get heard and their votes matter in controversial bills. That's improving representation. It means Republicans in San Francisco get heard. It means Greens and Libs scattered throughout the state get someone representing their positions. In most of the world's democracies, national representation is done like this, instead of by district.

Re:Proportional Representation

[NeMon'ess]

Looking over your original post, I see you're more interested in representing local communities. Well that's a problem for California because 420,000 people per district is already wayyyy too many for that kind of hands-on approach you want. One solution is quadruple the number of Assembly members. That has it's own set of drawbacks. So because California is just too populated for it's own good, I think it's a good candidate for letting the minority parties get in the picture. The state is big enough that it can handle them, and they'll do more good than the current Assembly.

Re:Proportional Representation

[Teancum]

But my representative absolutely does represent my interests in the U.S. House of Representatives. But he represents my district instead of my political party.

And you had better believe that those representatives know who they represent too! You go to a congressional office (especially one more than 300 miles from Washington D.C.) and you will get "red carpet" treatment by your representative. A school trip to D.C. with a hundred high school students is assured to get a visit from the congressman who represents that school's congressional district... even if they are a ranking member, and especially if they are speaker of the House. You are likely to get support from districts closer to the national capital, but they are more likely to get regular visitors. For most citizen request, like trying to get some congressional help on visas or appointments to military academies, they really don't even care about political party at all... as long as you are from their district.

And to compare the stability of the Scottish Parliament to the U.S. Congress is totally comparing completely different situations. The Scottish Parliament isn't even a national legislature, and the independence moves are to succeed from the UK only to rejoin the EU as a separate state. That is almost like western Texas becoming a separate state in the USA (and something the enabling act of Texas permits).

You still havn't addressed the governmental stability issues that I brought up, which is where the district-based governments tend to seek broad concensus across the whole country, forcing political parties to think broadly in a geographical sense and not try to concentrate their political power in just one area like rural districts, urban areas, or even one or two major states. It minimizes the impact of cities like New York City and has allowed cities like Los Angeles to go from a small rural town to a major metropolis in less than 100 years (among other factors). The American form of government allows this sort of flexability and encourages broad means of geographical thinking.

Major political parties that ignore significant interest groups do so at their own peril, and find themselves quickly out of office in a dwindling position.

Re:Proportional Representation

[Cappy Red]

I don't believe that the election of third parties perforce improves representation... and I don't believe in parties enough to vote by slate.

Consider that one's party affiliation is(or, at least, should be) the smallest part of their political identity. Saying that one is a Republican or Democrat isn't actually saying much: the people within those parties tend to be anything from extreme conservative to moderate, or extreme liberal to moderate, respectively. That isn't to say that I believe these parties to be ideal... they could be the Federalists or the Whigs, so long as they hold a wide enough part of the political spectrum within them.

But I don't trust parties, I trust people(... when I trust them). I trust people, and I don't think they are so interchangeable that you can select any two from within a party and switch them, one for the other, without there being noticeable consequences of that switch. And I like to know the specific politics of the people who are specifically representing me. John McCain does not vote the same way as Newt Gingrich, and by electing a party slate, I have no voice in deciding which one of them is speaking for me.

And in the end, I take offense at the notion that I am defined by my party of registration, and can only be properly represented by a member of same.

Re:Proportional Representation

[Cappy Red]

Let third parties into the picture how?

If you mean within the Assembly, then how does that improve representation? The population per representative ratio does not improve, and you're just as likely, if not moreso, depending upon personal politics of the assemblyman, to find large numbers of people badly represented.

Otherwise... how do you intend to "let minority parties get in the picture?"

As you say, increasing the number of Assembly members carries its own problems. (If the US House of Representatives, for example, followed its original one-per-30,000 guideline today, there would be around 10,000 representatives) Still, at some point, I think there are going to have to be more assemblymen(and representatives). This might require the addition of further layers of government... but at some point, when the ratios of representation become so ridiculous, doesn't it become worth it?

Re:Proportional Representation

[NeMon'ess]

There's another way of representing someone than just by representing their district.

Congressman Rick Boucher of Virginia has been introducing bills ever since the DMCA to weaken it and improve fair use rights. By doing so he has been representing the views and interests of everyone in the United States who wants that to happen.

Thus Libertarians and Greens in the Assembly are more likely to represent the views and interests of the Libertarians and Greens throughout the state who voted for them. Sure the Libertarian voters won't always agree with how the elected Libertarians vote. Odds are really good though they'll agree with who they elected much more often than say, the Greens.

Let's say there's a voter named Joe. If compared to the Democrats or Republicans, a Libertarian in the Assembly is voting more closely to how Joe would vote if he was elected, then Joe is being better represented by the Libertarian.

For what it's worth, if I was writing the law, before the election I'd require the parties to release an ordered list of exactly who would fill each seat won. Meaning we would know that if the party wins only one seat, a specific person will get it. If the party wins two seats, that same person gets the first one, and another specific person gets the second one. That way we will know better what people might get elected.

Good, but part of the problem

[bahwi]

The game is good, making it easy for people to understand what is going on is great. But the whole political system is turning into a game. It's about winning, not the better policies. Remember those blogs after the 04 elections? "Seeing RED?!!" etc.. (Democrats do it too, just haven't been having big wins, once they do it'll be just as disgusting!)

It's about winning, which is what the last support of Bush is hanging on about right now, WE won, it's OUR victory, you can't say anything about it because YOU LOST. And it's really not about that. But making it a game, making it a badge "Proud Republican", "Texas Democrat" is not the way to go. If you're views are mostly in line with the Democrats there's a few republicans out there that you should vote for to stay in line with your views. And vice-versa.

It's the dumbing down of the process into a game. King of the Hill did it correctly when Bill said "I voted yesterday. I guessed right 4 out of 5 times." or something to that effect.

Oh, but this game is on the right track, explaining a complex concept to people in an easy to understand way is a great thing.

Serious Games

[JorgeSchmt]

It's nice to see a game that makes a serious statement about a political topic and doesn't suck! I hope the whole serious games industry is getting ready to be taken as valid social commentary.. and not just 'beat up bin laden' type of crap. I think eventually we will all be playing games like this the same way we watch documentaries or read non-fiction... as long as titles like this that actually have some polish continue to be released.

Too often...

[Notquitecajun]

Re-gerrymandering districts is more about incumbency protection (on BOTH sides of the aisle, often cooperating - there are stories about this that repeat themselves every ten years).

Georgia just completed its own cases...Louisiana had a particularly notorious case of blatantly obvious (even to the most hard-lined) one that literally snaked halfway around the state.

I don't necessarily agree with the "proportional" proposal unless there was some way to keep it local - I want someone who leaves nearby as my rep, not someone who is in the same party miles away. Neither the opposition NOR someone who doesn't live close by will have my political interests primarily at heart. Of course, someone who lives closely AND is in the same political boat probably won't, either...

Choose Our Own Districts By the Numbers

[Doc Ruby]

The best system for districting the US seems to me to be the one based on post offices. Each post office does define a community, especially in Federal services terms. It serves a small group of people who live very close, sharing mostly the same conditions other than those inside their private dwellings - which are also likely to be similar (and even homeless locals have the same access). It is the most common face of the Federal government, directly serving the community. And it already services election procedures like registration and delivery of election info.

I like the system where each person in a post office's service area (usually a ZIP code or two) selects the neighboring postal zones (up to the state border) to which they're most "connected" in order of "closeness" (as defined by the person selecting). Then all the responses are tabulated purely statistically to generate a map of the most interconnected regions, in a quantity equal to the number of representatives allowed in the state. There could be a second round to accommodate exceptions, like tiny islands (below some predetermined population size) or extremes of minimum/maximum populations in different districts, where the exceptional zones select their associations, as do the neighboring candidates for association to accept association with the exceptional zones.

We should choose our own fellow constituents who choose our mutual representatives. As long as the politicians themselves mediate the process with any discretion, the process will primarily serve them and their parties or other interest groups. We've got the stats and the sense of our neighbors to do it equitably and quickly. We should redistrict at least 10-20% of districts every odd-numbered year for reelection to the House of Representatives on the following year. After no more than a decade or two we should have equitable districts without a hasty conversion that will generate unmanageable sabotage from the existing order.

Re:Choose Our Own Districts By the Numbers

[EL_mal0]

While we're at it, let's switch over to metric time.

Re:Choose Our Own Districts By the Numbers

[Doc Ruby]

OK, now 1 second is 1 second long.

How insightful of you to notice that the redistricting plan I described would be that simple. But so much more effective.

Re:Choose Our Own Districts By the Numbers

[kebes]

The best system for districting the US seems to me to be the one based on post offices. Each post office does define a community, especially in Federal services terms.

Not to be a cynic (because the idea you present does have merit), but wouldn't this simply result in new political games where they work hard to open new post offices, and close old ones, so as to redefine political boundaries? This is bad in two ways: (1) it still allows for rigging the votes; and (2) it would impose severe inefficiencies into the postal system.

The proposals to have districting based on an approved mathematical algorithm (which takes population distribution as an input, but no other factors, like political affiliation, race, etc.) which generates the district boundaries is the only fair way. Leaving the districting in the hands of the people (with their inherent biases) will always cause problems. With an algorithm, anyone can verify that the presented distribution indeed matches what it's supposed to (assuming the input population data has not been tampered with).

Re:Choose Our Own Districts By the Numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

Principal Skinner: Not only are the trains now running on time, theyre running on metric time. Remember this moment, people: 80 past 2 on April 47th.

from "They Saved Lisa's Brain"

Re:Choose Our Own Districts By the Numbers

[Doc Ruby]

Maybe there are system games to be had in rigging the postal grid on which the maps are drawn. There is already a legal system to allocate postal districts that is so far not influenced by any gains in gerrymandering. So first that system has to be nailed down to prevent its hijacking by gerrymandering endrunners. That phase would also iron out some likely latent problems in the postal "grid" itself, even in purely postal terms.

Why is leaving the districting in the hands of all the people equally, requiring their mutual association, a real problem? We could say the same about the election of officials within those districts. Democracy is not the most efficient way of selecting the best performing choice. But its deficiencies in "intelligence" are overcompensated by equity, and most importantly by buy in by the people who have to live with the results. The bigger half of government is consent of the governed. Government by the people is the key to government of the people, which is all government for the people.

Re:Choose Our Own Districts By the Numbers

[Doc Ruby]

Sounds like Skinner's right, as usual. Just those lamebrained kids stuck in the past getting in the way of progress.

Or maybe we should redistrict in base 60.

Re:Choose Our Own Districts By the Numbers

[cdrguru]

The problem with any "fair" districting is that is specifically doesn't address the situations that people are trying to address. Why do we have oddly-shaped districts? Because this allows minorities to have "their own" representative. Supposedly this is to help correct for the years and years of slavery and oppression of the minorities by the Evil White Majority.

So you cannot have any fair way of computing districts because it would then lead right back to oppression of the minorities.

Re:Choose Our Own Districts By the Numbers

[Doc Ruby]

Gerrymandering isn't nearly drawn to disproportionately represent minority ghettoes at the expense of everyone else. It's nearly always drawn to perpetuate the political party in power at the time of the redrawing. Especially in the past 10-20 years, that redistricting has favored Republican majorities. Most recently in Texas, gerrymandering has explored the depths of partisan political disenfranchisement and system gaming.

If you want to call the mainly White Republican majorities the "Evil White Majority", I won't argue with you. We don't have to go back to slavery to find Republican oppression - Ohio 2004 was a pretty serious example, and there was probably another one this afternoon.

The fair redistricting would be independent of any party control. And with the trend towards nonpartisan registration/affiliation, there's little basis for fatalism about partisans monopolizing the districting. As the trend continues, accelerated by scams like gerrymandering, partisan registrations will eventually be the minority. Then there won't be the power to perpetuate partisan gerrymandering. The more prepared for that time we are with working plans, the sooner we'll get to implement them. And lock out that layer of partisan manipulation lest it rise again to control the country.

Re:Choose Our Own Districts By the Numbers

[argStyopa]

I like the idea.
In ANY case the ability to draw district lines needs to be removed from the hands of the people that DIRECTLY BENEFIT, ie. Congress. They've shown they are too incompetent to handle it.

Re:Choose Our Own Districts By the Numbers

[fishbowl]

"In ANY case the ability to draw district lines needs to be removed from the hands of the people that DIRECTLY BENEFIT, ie. Congress. They've shown they are too incompetent to handle it."

District lines are drawn with the participation (e.g., apathy) of the people in that district.

Public comment periods are often shockingly devoid of any input.

People do not object to these plans until they are done, and only then, after they are told to be angry by the TV news.

Re:Choose Our Own Districts By the Numbers

[Dun Malg]

We don't have to go back to slavery to find Republican oppression FWIW, given that Republican was the party of Lincoln, going back to slavery is the wrong place to look for Republican oppression. Democrat was the party of slavery. Heck, it was almost exclusively southern Democrats opposing civil rights legislation up into the 60's. Oppressive white jackasses are not a specific feature of either party, per se.

Re:Choose Our Own Districts By the Numbers

[Doc Ruby]

Like I said, if you have to go back to the 1860s, you're ignoring the oppression. Talking about these parties as if they're anything like their century and a half old incarnations is a convenient way to ignore their history of the past several generations, and the next years which that history predicts.

And I didn't say that oppressive White jackasses are a specific feature of one party. I said that the Republican Party is a party of oppressive White jackasses. Which even you have not been able to deny. And the Republican Party most certainly has an advantage in that composition, even if it's no monopoly.

Re:Choose Our Own Districts By the Numbers

[Dun Malg]

Like I said, if you have to go back to the 1860s, you're ignoring the oppression. Talking about these parties as if they're anything like their century and a half old incarnations is a convenient way to ignore their history of the past several generations, and the next years which that history predicts. Be that as it may, the wording of your statement "We don't have to go back to slavery to find Republican oppression" implies that if one does go back to slavery, one finds Republican oppression. Whatever you may have intended to say, this statement is highly misleading. The Democratic party was the party of slavery, and they Republican party was the anti-slavery offshoot of the Whig party. If you're talking about Republican oppression and looking to offer a 19th century example of it, mentioning slavery is getting it exactly wrong.

And I didn't say that oppressive White jackasses are a specific feature of one party. Sorry. Those who believe "Republicans=former slave owners" tend to be history-ignorant folks who think Democrats have always been the shining paragons of racial equality, while the Republicans have always been the oppressors of the colored folk. Perhaps your historically inaccurate slavery comment was merely a semantic error, but what came out made you sound like one of those ignorant folk.

I said that the Republican Party is a party of oppressive White jackasses. Which even you have not been able to deny. Shrug. Wasn't trying to deny it. I pointed it out, in fact. I hate all the bastards. I do, however, know my US history and feel compelled to offer corrections to misleading statements, whether they were intentionally misleading or not. I'm not addressing your main point because I don't disagree with it. I merely point out an implication that is greatly at odds with history.

Re:Choose Our Own Districts By the Numbers

[Doc Ruby]

You infer, I did not imply.

I replied to a comment that said that "leftists" compensate for slavery by favoring Black people. The other context is your creation. Mine was not a reference to Republican history, but to current events - so not historically inaccurate.

Re:Choose Our Own Districts By the Numbers

[Dun Malg]

You infer, I did not imply.

I replied to a comment that said that "leftists" compensate for slavery by favoring Black people. The other context is your creation. Mine was not a reference to Republican history, but to current events - so not historically inaccurate. You did imply. When one says "We don't have to go back to slavery to find Republican oppression", the implication is that if one does go back and look at slavery, one does find Republican oppression. Whether that implication was intentional is irrelevant. Your choice of words creates that implication regardless. My correction is intended for anyone who might take the same implication and believe it. Nothing more.

District Strength

[jshriverWVU]

How or what does a district really do? Perhaps I'm naive but isn't a vote a vote? What matters what district you're in? If 100 people vote, 51 for x and 49 for y. It shouldn't matter who voted where.

Re:District Strength

[mrchaotica]

Let's say you have 150 people, where 100 of them vote for political party X and the other 50 favor party Y. You want to put these people into 2 districts. But how do you distribute them?

First, lets assume that you favor party X. In that case, you want to put 50 X-type and 25 Y-type people in each district, allowing party X to win elections in both.

Now, assume you favor party Y. In this case, you want to put all 50 Y-types in one district, along with 25 X-types, allowing party Y to win that district. (The other district just gets 100% X-types; you don't have enough support to do anything about that.)

Anyway, the gist of it is that, depending on how you divide people, you can give an advantage to one or the other political party. That's the basis of gerrymandering. Get it now?

Re:District Strength

[jshriverWVU]

Somewhat, but in the end X still gets 100 votes to Y's 50. Who really cares who won what district since it's nothing but a fictional space to make up false statistics? At least to me the actual votes is all that matters. Under gerrymandering you could do all kind of weird restructuring just to get some fake statistics that say, X won 100% of 50 districts, versus Y who won 50% of 100 districts. But X has a lot more people than Y in each district or vice versa. Seems more like a way of just making up crap. How does this help the people, or produce anything useful for society.

But :) I do appreciate your response, at least I understand the concept now.

Re:District Strength

[Anonymous Coward]

because each district corresponds to a representative, so if 100 people vote for X and 50 vote for y, depending on how you gerrymander these two districts your legislature changes between XX and XY. And that changes what laws get passed.

Re:District Strength

[Anonymous Coward]

Who really cares who won what district since it's nothing but a fictional space to make up false statistics?

Fictional space? Is a country a fictional space? Is a state a fictional space? Is the city you live in a fictional space? Your city block? Your house?

If you think a district is a fictional space then I don't think you understand the concept of a district yet.

Re:District Strength

[T.E.D.]

How or what does a district really do? Perhaps I'm naive but isn't a vote a vote? What matters what district you're in? If 100 people vote, 51 for x and 49 for y. It shouldn't matter who voted where.

Well, say you are someone with a stake in the balance of power between the Reps and the Dems in the House of Representatives. For example, lets pretend you are ... I don't know ... the leader of one of the parties in the House. Let's further say that the House is closely divided. To you a couple of changed seats either way can mean the difference between being (arguably) the most powerful person in the US, and meerly being the lead whiner.

Now lets say you somehow, by hook or by crook, manage to get yourself in control of redistricting a nice big state ... like say ... Texas.

Now lets suppose this state happens to have a lot of close districts, 50/50 rep and dem. If you can get yourself access to the newest census data mining software, you can figure out where reps and dems are down to a really low resolution. So what you can do is take 5 or so 50/50 districts. Pick one, and split all its reps you can find into the other districts. Move something like %15 of the other 4 districts' dems into the first district. Now instead of 5 50/50 districts, you have 4 safely rep districts and 1 very safe dem district. Do this a couple of more times, and you can pick up a lot of seats.

Of course there's a price to pay for this. That new safe dem in the house is probably going to be very liberal now, where she perhaps couldn't get away with that before. However, the other 4 reps are going to be a bit more conservative, since they can now get away with that. The one liberal is in the minority, and can be labeled a kook and ignored. Another drawback is that you just made the House way more partisan. But what do you care? You're now the most powerful person in the US! Time to go have a talk with those rich lobbyists...

Re:District Strength

[jshriverWVU]

How does winning a district vs winning actual votes matter? Isn't the person elected the one who won the most votes?

Re:District Strength

[TenBrothers]

It's not fictional space. Not any more fictional than any county line or state line.

Districts define state representatives and national representatives.

Let's take a large city in America, say, top ten in population. Gerrymandering could divide the districts within the city such that there are not only more people to vote for party X within a district, but that there are also MORE districts that support party X. Resulting in more people of Party X going to the state assembly/Congress.

Re:District Strength

[cdrguru]

Good explanation, except you left out the part about "and elect a member of the House of Representatives". Since it is the House that really controls the budget process, this is incredibly important and not just a matter of political party power. This is how the members of the House are chosen. It has very little to do with electing a president which is somehow what people are focusing on.

Re:District Strength

[Sylver Dragon]

I'm going to assume you are not from the US (which is seeming like a better and better thing these days) or, at least, not very familiar with the workings of its government (which is normal for most of the US population); so, please forgive me if I bore you with detail.
Districts serve two purposes, both of which are essentially the same just at different levels of government. For the Federal Government, each State is broken up into smaller districts based, ostensibly, on population. Each district elects one of the State's representatives in the House of Representatives (The House). Ideally, this means that local populations are represented by someone local (e.g. a district which includes Los Angeles will be represented by someone from Los Angeles). The number of seats a State has in The House varies based on population (now relative population as the number is fixed at 435 [1]) This is why you will hear US residents talk about "their" representative; they are referring to the fact that the Representative was elected by the district to which the person talking belongs.
A similar function exists at the State level. As most State Governments are patterend after the US Federal Government, their structure is much the same, with a House and Senate. As such, States are further broken down into districts for electing representatives to the State's "House" (Names vary). Again, this is based on the argument of local representation.
The other side of all this is that, contrary to your statement that "If 100 people vote, 51 for x and 49 for y. It shouldn't matter who voted where." location does indeed matter. As a resident of a particular district, I only vote for the representative for my district, State and Federal. The exception here is that for Senatorial races, I vote for my State's two Senators. Though, this is the same thing on a larger scale. A resident of New York cannot vote for Florida's Senators.

Re:District Strength

[Incoherent07]

Each district represents one elected representative. So the drawing of the districts affects who gets elected from that district.

Re:District Strength

[Optic7]

I think that's the point. Gerrymandering IS a way of just making up and distorting stuff to make political gains.

By the way, the reason why this matters is that there a limited number of positions being voted on, so say for example in this fictional 100 X and 50 Y area there are two districts with two representatives. If you divide it so that 50 X and 25 Y in each district, X wins both positions and Y gets squat. But if you divide it as 75 X in one district and 25 X / 50 Y in the other district, X gets one position and Y gets another. See how it does make a difference? That's the motivation for gerrymandering, they will make all kinds of weird shapes of districts having no relation to actual population distribution just to give an advantage to X or Y to win that district.

Re:District Strength

[mrchaotica]

Somewhat, but in the end X still gets 100 votes to Y's 50.

But it's not -- those 150 votes are split into two completely separate elections. Party X is running candidates foo and bar in districts A and B respectively, while party Y is running baz and quux. If party X gerrymanders the districts, foo and bar win (getting two seats in [whatever]), while if party Y gerrymanders the districts, foo wins but bar loses (and quux wins instead).

Re:District Strength

[mrchaotica]

Well, gerrymandering applies to any sort of district-based voting, so it's not just the House, but also state legislature, local stuff, etc. as well.

Re:District Strength

[nelsonal]

Ah but this isn't about a national election. In the US, almost all elections are for regional representatives and each district will have a single representative in congress.

Re:District Strength

[Drantin]

Your vote helps decide (what/who) your district votes for. It's your district's vote that counts in the end, not yours...

Interoperability

[Rob T Firefly]

I heard that playing this videogame about political redistricting will affect any savegames of "Wall Street Kid" you may have going.

Mathematical modeling

[NeutronCowboy]

One answer: mathematical modeling of the shape. Topology is one area that is handmade for this stuff, and I believe Washington (working from memory here, so please correct me) already implemented something like that. Want to make a donut voting district? Complex topological shape, try again. The main problem is creating the mathematical model of the voting district. I'm sure lawyer-weasels can drag out the process of approving the mathematical model of the proposed district, rendering it rather ineffective.

Just short of that, I like Ahnuld's proposal, as it at least removes the main problem behind gerrymandering: conflict of interest. Judges might have party affiliations, but at least their jobs don't depend on the rejigging of voting districts.

On a side note, I'm astounded at the number of conflicts of interests that are allowed to persist in the current political system. People get to vote on their own salary increases? Get to vote on whether they need auditing of their finances? Am I the only one who sees this as just inviting abuse?

Re:Mathematical modeling

[Sylver Dragon]

I liked Schwarzenegger's plan, except for one fatal flaw: The panel was chosen by the State Legislature. How hard would it really be for them to find 3 retired judges who will gerrymander the districts for the incumbents? In the end, it would have just given the appearance of fairness, while still being just as broken as before.
Really, the only good solution (assuming our current voting method) was in a response just above yours. Use a computer program (open source only) to assign the districts by population and zip code. There will need to be algorithms for ensuring the "minority-majority" districts (again, assuming status-quo here); however, this should be possible without having too many safe districts (there will always be some, some people really like their current parasite...er, representative).

Why try to patch a broken system?

[Opportunist]

While I can see the need to patch a broken OS, every Windows user already knows where it ends. So why try the same in politics where you don't have to support "legacy applications"?

Gerrymandering is only possible (or rather, makes sense) because of an underlying "winner takes it all" system. If every vote counted, which is far from reality currently in the US, it would not matter at all in what district you cast it. It comes into the big, national pool and whether you're from Alabama or New York does not matter.

I can see the historical reasons for this kind of election, but frankly, we outlived this system by at the very least 50 years. With modern technology and information traveling around the globe in a second, there is no need for an electoral college and other forms of more indirection between the people and their representatives. And there is certainly no need for "all or nothing" situations anymore.

Of course, this change will not come from the two big parties who would have to deal with smaller groups eating away at their power base. Neither of them would willingly even think of abandoning that concept, and they will most likely team up against any attempt to change it. If such a change is to happen, it has to come from the "bottom" of the political pyramid. Unfortunately, that would require a LOT of people get off their rears and actually care about the country.

Re:Why try to patch a broken system?

[Control Group]

With modern technology and information traveling around the globe in a second, there is no need for an electoral college and other forms of more indirection between the people and their representatives.

It's a common fallacy to assume that the role of the electoral college was simply to overcome the shortcomings of communications methods of the time, but being common makes it no less a fallacy. The electoral college's primary purpose is specifically to ensure that even states with low populations have a say in the presidential election. The disproportionate weight of a vote cast in Montana compared to one cast in California is intentional - no matter how much the residents of the coasts may want to mock "flyover country," the founders recognized that denying "flyover country" an effective voice in government is a fantastic way to foster civil unrest.

This approach goes hand in hand with the intent to have separate states under a minimal federal government, rather than the curious inversion of the Constitution we have now.

Whether or not these are good goals is a different issue, of course.

But you're incorrect that it's the major parties which would most fight elimination of the electoral college. Rather, it's every state which has only two votes in the electoral college, since it's those states which would suffer in its absence.

Re:Why try to patch a broken system?

[SuiteSisterMary]

But all the Electoral College does is shift the power from the populous states to the unpopulous states. Instead of states with more votes getting the campaign attention, it's the states with more EC seats getting the attention.

Here's an interesting thought; randomize the EC.

Or, in this day and age, do away with it. After all, everybody who cares to can see the debates and what not on the TV or Radio, let alone the Internets.

Re:Why try to patch a broken system?

[starwed]

Right, the electoral college ensures that how much your vote counts depends on which state you're living in. If that's the purpose, you could do it explicitly by assigning a direct weight to each vote, and then count the votes at a national level.

Re:Why try to patch a broken system?

[drew]

But you're incorrect that it's the major parties which would most fight elimination of the electoral college. Rather, it's every state which has only two votes in the electoral college, since it's those states which would suffer in its absence.

In that case, there wouldn't be any opposition at all, since every state has at least 3 electoral votes.

Re:Why try to patch a broken system?

[Control Group]

Yes and no - it does shift power from the populous states to the unpopulous states, but not in such a fashion that the unpopulous states have more power than the populous. The electoral college implements a system such that electoral representation is proportionate to population with a "floor" value for representation. A more-populous state has more influence than a less-populous one - CA's 55 electoral votes certainly carry more weight than MT's 3, but not quite proportionately more weight.

As far as doing away with it because everyone can see the debates, you're missing the point. The EC isn't about making up for misinformation or poor communications, it's making sure that MT as a state has effective representation. The assumption is that the populous urban centers on the coasts will have different interests than the sparsely-populated interior, yet the interior deserves to have a voice in the governing of the country. Access to the internet doesn't change this.

Re:Why try to patch a broken system?

[Control Group]

You're right, of course - I was about to make a point about direct election of Senators, and had some mental crosstalk. Sorry for the error.

Re:Why try to patch a broken system?

[nelsonal]

These districts have very little to do with the Electoral College except in one or two states. These are House of Representitives districts.

Re:Why try to patch a broken system?

[nelsonal]

Actually it doesn't shift to the unpopulated states either (when was the last time a President had a whistle stop tour through the Rockys? It shifts attention to the biggest states that are closest to 50/50.

Re:Why try to patch a broken system?

[Alsee]

It's funny you attempting to clear up one fallacy with another. Your explanation for the electoral college is just as much a retroactive rationalization fiction as his was.

If you look back as the actual debates at the time, the actual arguments and considerations at the time, the actual letters and documents from the drafting of the constitution, there is exactly one clear and overriding explanation and justification for the electoral college.

It was a political conflict and political compromize over slavery. Each state got Representatives in the House based on their free population + 3/5 of their slave population, and then electoral votes based on Representatives + Senators, and the whole thing was no different than modern Democrat-vs-Republican gerrymandering. The slave state politicians and the non-slave state politicians were busy counting up their *then* current votes under different proposals and trying to stack their control of the presidency. The 3/5th counting of slaves lowered the "population" of slave states and lowered their power in the House, and then slave states with artificially low (3/5th) population counts had their power artificially bumped back up in the electoral college.

Nothing noble, nothing brilliant, the only "grand democratic plan for balancing power and protecting people in some states from other states" was the basest sort of political gerrymandering and horse trading "protecting" the slave and free states against each other. The only true explanation and justification for the electoral college is slavery.

The famous Founding Fathers were brilliant and noble men, but there were only a handful of them. They had to operate and draft the constitution in a political environment surrounded by countless run of the mill shortsighted self-serving political wonks. They needed to get the constitution ratified by that gaggle of shortsighted self-serving political wonks. And those politicians were involved in a political power struggle over slavery.

-

Re:Why try to patch a broken system?

[Anonymous Coward]

There needs to be also geographic influence, not only population center based one. Whole states as voting districts would solve this (along with proportional representation using the D'Hondt method).

Re:Why try to patch a broken system?

[Opportunist]

Well, if that's the case, give the votes in such small states more weigh and you're there again.

My biggest problem with the current system is that it's more likely than not that your vote is pointless. If you're a firm Republican living in an all Democrat neighborhood (or state), you can just as well not go to the ballot. It does not matter in any way. The same of course applies if it's the other way 'round. And if you're fed up with both parties, you can stay home altogether because voting for anyone else simply and plainly does not matter.

cheat codes!

[ILuvRamen]

They should make cheat codes where you can annex part of Mexico and Canada for new districts :P

Tried this in California already

[Fongboy]

Those of you from California might remember this from Schwarzenegger's last "special election". It was that thing about having retired judges do the redistricting instead of the politicians. Unfortunately, the politicians ran a bunch of FUD ads and scared the people of the state into believing that it was giving judges some mysterious power over them... and of course the ads conveniently never mentioned "redistricting" or what exactly the hell the judges were going to do. Heck, even that old People's Court judge/actor was hired to be a part of an ad. So you know... if this famous guy is saying it's bad... I have no idea what the hell he's talking about, but hey if he's famous he must be telling the truth! So the people of California, being the dumb sheep they are, voted down the redistricting proposition. Nice job Californians, you just screwed all of us over again. Sorry, I'm a bit bitter. =)

Sorry

[NotQuiteReal]

Politics is not about being effective.

Re:Sorry

[Doc Ruby]

Yes it is, though some effective politics depends on the ineffectiveness of your competition.

Giving up on politics only guarantees that those with the power will screw you without limit.

Re:Sorry

[NotQuiteReal]

Oh, you mean effective for the politicians, not the electorate.

Gotcha! ;-)

Re:Sorry

[Doc Ruby]

Political effectiveness, whether for the people or otherwise, depends on effectiveness of the politicians. And that politics, even to benefit the nonpolitician people, often depends on their politician opponents' ineffectiveness.

Like any competition, especially by proxy. Got it?

Here's a question...

[RingDev]

Why do we need districting anymore? Why not just use one representative per county and be done with it?

-Rick

Re:Here's a question...

[SydShamino]

Yeah! That way Iowa, with its 99 counties, can have more representatives than Florida, with just 67.

Or wait.. then the Florida legislature redraws the state to have 1000 counties! Woo hoo they run the country!

Re:Here's a question...

[RingDev]

Sorry, I should have clarified.

For the STATE representatives, just use the counties. For the FEDERAL representatives, just vote state wide.

Redrawing a county is a LOT harder. It would screw with numerous municipalities, courts, taxes, schools, and all sorts of other local government issues. There is a HUGE vested interest at the county level in not changing the counties. Sorry for the confusion.

-Rick

Re:Here's a question...

[SydShamino]

There are counties in Texas with as few as 60 residents.* What if one of them doesn't want to be a state legislator?

Why should those 60 people have as much say in the state's government as the 2.3 million people in Dallas or 1.7 million in Tarrant county?

* Loving County, from 2006 estimates

Go to proxy voting

[Anonymous Coward]

One big district, each politician gets as much political power as he gets votes. No gerrymandering, no primaries, very few wasted votes, and political parties would actually work against politicians, since they are more powerful if they don't split up support. Minor parties would also get representatives whose power accurately reflect their overall support -- you'd see Libertarians, Greens, Communists, Constitutionalists, Socialists, and what-have-you -- instead of splitting everything between Democrats and Republicans.

Flying arcade game machines

[frdmfghtr]

This is a cool redistricting game that was launched out of the capitol building in Washington DC last week.

Did anybody else get the image of a 80's-era arcade videogame chassis flying out the front door of the Capitol?

Re:Flying arcade game machines

[LanMan04]

This is a cool redistricting game that was launched out of the capitol building in Washington DC last week.

Did anybody else get the image of a 80's-era arcade videogame chassis flying out the front door of the Capitol? I did! Not the front door, but the top of the dome! launch=up in my brain

I, for one...

[Anonymous Coward]

... welcome our gerrymandering overlords.

what do you mean "nay"?

[mythar]

i am an artiste!

a dated practice which is not needed

[llZENll]

solution:
1) get rid of the electoral system, and use a popular vote
2) no more redistricting is needed
3) americans move on to more important issues

Re:a dated practice which is not needed

[cdrguru]

Yeah, right.

One small problem - what about the House of Representatives? These are folks that are elected by their "district" which is what this is all about.

No, there really aren't many more important issues. Because most of the real business of the government of the US is done by the House of Representatives. And getting people that would actually represent people might be a good thing.

Unfortunately, the current situation pushes things towards electing the properly connected people. So we end up with lawyers and such that have networks of friends through all levels of government.

Re:a dated practice which is not needed

[Teancum]

How about we get rid of this dated notion of democratic elections and a representative republic altogether?

All hail the Imperator Bob, may his dictatorship last 1,000 years!

BTW, this idea was tried very successfully in Germany in 1934. Redistricting was no longer needed and the German citizens were page to move on to other more important issues, like trying to figure out how to get more "Lebensraum".

When you discuss the concept of trying to perform major overhauls of a government, you have no idea what you will end up with. And sad experience in human history is that the resulting "new" government is often quite worse than what it replaced.

You also are presuming here that the only elective office that matters is the President of the United States. If that is your personal belief which is also shared with many others, no wonder why the USA is so screwed up and falling apart.

Re:a dated practice which is not needed

[mabhatter654]

you make the mistake that the USA is a pure democracy... it's NOT. the USA is a Republic. The smaller units of governerance elect representatives to the higher levels. This is done to allow greater accountablity for actions of the higer levels, but has been stripped by "democratic" ideals like yours. The original idea is that state governments elected Senators directly. Your governer or legislature could COMMAND your Senators to vote in a specific manner without any party interference... they represented the actual state government, not the people at large. In the same way Represenatives should represent elected units of government.. not "districts". That is the chief cause of our federal govt being so disconnected. Imagine if there was a clear chain of command to the Congress. From your city council voting ward, to the County officers, to the state legislature, to the Governer... to your Representives in Congress. Then you wouldn't write letters to random Congress people hoping they'd respond, you'd notify your local politican and they would pressure the next branch up in the manner their voters pushed for.. in the original system the lower governments even held the power of the VOTE and could even pull people out of office if they didn't vote how the voters told them too!!!

(Insert witty subject line here)

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Redistricting, or How To Group African Americans Into Groups So They Can Elect Themselves Their Very Own Representative, But Without Using The Word "They" Or The Phrase "You People", Now With Bonus Points If Those People Think Highly Of You

Too cynical? Sorry. I'm sure it's a mighty fine...game. To...play.

Re:(Insert witty subject line here)

[Anonymous Coward]

Redistricting, or How To Group African Americans Into Groups So They Can Elect Themselves Their Very Own Representative, But Without Using The Word "They" Or The Phrase "You People", Now With Bonus Points If Those People Think Highly Of You

Too cynical?

Nah, just too long, and with too many capital letters.

The Emergence of the Political Game?

[Billy the Mountain]

I was thinking about this idea a few months ago: You create a realistic sim-type game that when played, it encourages the player learn or develop a particular political point-of-view, simply by demonstrating how things work or don't work together. There was an old game from the mid-late 80's that sort of worked that way called Spheres of Influence.

BTM

Re:The Emergence of the Political Game?

[Alsee]

a realistic sim-type game that when played, it encourages the player learn or develop a particular political point-of-view

I've played a great many of the classic sim-strategy games, Civilization and Master of Orion and many more, and many obscure ones, and virtually all of them teach one thing in common...

crank your research way up.

-

I wrote my own redistricter too...

[Soong]

http://bolson.org/dist/

I think I've gotten pretty good results for CA, TX, IL, FL and PA

It tries to create impartial districts that keep people on average close to the center of their districts. It works pretty well, but is kinda computationally intense. It could almost become Redistricting@Home if there was interest in the approach.

Re:I wrote my own redistricter too...

[slothman32]

I did a similar thing, only for NY though, which was based on counties.
It tried to make each county entirely in one district of it's converse.
Each county would be divided into enough districts so that there are to few people left to form a new complete one.
That partial-district is combined with other counties' ones to form a new multi county district.
I had fun doing it with NY for Congress as well as it's 2 state senate and state assembly.
That method might work too but it does seem more convoluted and I wouldn't want to have Mr. Jasper represent me and my next-door neighbor get Mrs. Complo which seem more likely given that there probably arn't that many people right next to county edges.

P.S. Insert parishes for LA.
P.P.S. How many people can actually have fun doing that!
P.P.P.S. I don't get to use the exclamation point often.

Re:I wrote my own redistricter too...

[NotmyNick]

I'm guessing you don't live in California. People on the coasts(North, Central, South1 and South2) have different interests than people in the Central Valley than do the foothills of the Sierras than the Sacramento and Feather River drainage... California's geographic diversity doesn't follow population density well. Remember the story of the School District that owes IBM $5M? That poorest part of the East Bay is smack up against the richest part of the East Bay, separated by canyon roads. People in Modoc, Lassen and Plumas aren't going to be happy being represented by the 'city folk' from Redding. Fresno is going to be in civil war. Lumping people in the 50 corridor with the farmers of San Joaquin with the diaspora commuters to the Bay Area? Uh. Uh. It's a nice start, though.

Re:I wrote my own redistricter too...

[Anonymous Coward]

If such separation occurs today it is only because it benefitted the people drawing the lines. They will routinely cross such boundaries just to shift the average in one district to their favor while burning off some extra political clout in another district.

*Boggle* ...Then why do you care about the vote?

[Valdrax]

Somewhat, but in the end X still gets 100 votes to Y's 50. Who really cares who won what district since it's nothing but a fictional space to make up false statistics? At least to me the actual votes is all that matters.

Well, if you don't care who actually wins and gets the power, why do you care about the votes at all? Might as well draw straws or let the Inner Party decide if that's all you care about.

It'd be a good game if it wasn't so biased.

[kinglink]

So apparently the whole game tells me one thing, that if we take on the redistricting reform act that the game offers (forget the name, I played it yesterday, forgive me) that it's all going to be rolls of the dice. So instead of having equality, couple poor dice rolls and people are ignored, just like every election pretty much, except now it's random rather than obvious. There's a number of parts of the game that just feels "fake" to me, the politicians are all one sided, the complainers are annoying but inconsequential (they always lose unless you really screw up), the governor always sides on party lines, and so on.

That's great but it's like filibustering. The republicans could have removed filibustering before the election of the supreme court justices, and it would have been a good thing for them, and for america, however then when the next democrat gets into office they can't filibuster back. This is the game called politics, no one is going to fully support any gerrymandering reform that solve these problems because while it takes away a tool of the opposition, it also takes away a tool of the person's current party. Sadly that's the problem with a two party system. It doesn't mean it won't get votes, or people won't appear to support it, but the party as a whole knows that it's going to hurt as much as help them.

Re:It'd be a good game if it wasn't so biased.

[Teancum]

I agree that there are some presumptions here that I also don't necessarily agree with.

Most interestingly was the presumption that 3rd parties are completely meaningless, and that districting reform will have no impact upon them. And the idea that 3rd parties can be simultaneously "lumped into" undecideds as if they only help decide between the two major parties.

One other huge presumption is the idea that you will vote Democrat or Republican solely upon the basis of party affiliation, as if the personality of the candidate has absolutely no impact on a particular voter. Some candidates through sheer charisma can win over voters in what is arguably a district made primarily of voters from the "other" party. I can give very specific examples of this happening in the past, and surprisingly both times I was in districts where this happened, the district was "supposed to belong" to the other party when the redistricting took place. But very strong candidates prevailed of the "wrong" party and won the election... even if those same voters tended to vote for the "correct" party for the other races. Straight ticket voting is far less common than you would be led on to believe.

Still another huge presumption is that rural voters are identical to urban voters, with the only difference being the population density alone. Depending on the region of the country, a rural candidate from either party will get support over an urban candidate... particularly when you are talking about somebody running for the House. You could include other aspects including ethnic background or other factors.... and the ethnicity of the voter is not necessarily tied with the tendency to vote for a particular candidate. If that were true, we would have had only women as President of the USA since the passage of the 19th Ammendment.

The thing that struck me the most about the suggested "reform" proposal was after I made the supposedly "fair" districts (based exclusively on geometry and not taking any other issue under consideration including physical geography), was the process of submitting the proposal to the state legislature. The proposal that I submitted was flatly turned down by the legislature, yet the courts overruled the legislature. This to me is something very wrong, and a philosophy that I strongly disagree with. Why should I trust the judgement of a group of individuals who were put into their position by the body that they are overruling? This isn't just suggesting that the legislature can't have an act declared unconsitutional (so the courts will simply no longer enforce the law), but actively getting directly involved in politics in a way that is incredibly dangerous. And it misses the original concept of separation of powers, or what a legislative body is really supposed to be able to do. Or why legislative bodies ultimately wield nearly all government authority, and why the Bill of Rights has several clauses that start "Congress shall make no law...."

This is a fun game, and it does provide a good introduction to gerrymandering and why it happens, but it is at best a partial simulation missing some factors, and a political statement in the form of a game.

D vs. R?

[Rick Richardson]

I couldn't play because my party doesn't exist according to the game authors.

Easy...

[Bellum Aeternus]

The "game" is so easy. The only time it is difficult is when you want to get your party elected, or to keep the incumbents. If you ask me, all districts should be drawn by a computer who knows nothing of race, religion, or party affiliation - the only requirements should be compact format districts and roughly equal populations (with in, say, 2%).

How gerrymandering works.

[Valdrax]

How does winning a district vs winning actual votes matter? Isn't the person elected the one who won the most votes?

Yes. In that district.

Imagine that you have two parties, Red and Blue, running for control of a ten-seat legislature. Now imagine that 61% of the general population votes for Red and 39% votes for Blue. Here's how you divide up the districts to let Blue control the legislature in spite of Red having the popular vote:

Totals State-Wide -- 39,000 Blues; 61,000 Reds
Districts 1-4 -- No Blues; 10,000 Reds each.
Districts 6-10 -- 6,500 Blues; 3,500 Reds each.

The end result is that just over 3/5 of the population votes for Red, but 3/5 of the seats go to Blue. Blue has a solid majority to press their agenda despite the fact that the majority of people in the state sympathize with Red.

In the real world, this is the reason why the Civil Rights Act of 1964 required southern states that had a history of racial discrimination to have their districting plans reviewed to prevent attempts to marginalize the black vote. What you could do is make districts with a 90%+ black population and then spread out the remaining black vote within safe, white-dominated districts. This ensures that the white majority could never be threatened by the election of more than a handful of black politicians. Gerrymandering is a very real issue, and it's why Congress has only a handful of incumbents defeated each election cycle outside of major times of political unrest like 1994 and 2006. Gerrymandering makes sure that the voters are matched to the incumbent.

Gerrymandering also allows for victories at the state level to be translated into victories at the national level. Read about the 2003 Texas redistricting effort for more detail.

Keep in mind that while it's not the result of gerrymandering, George W. Bush beat Al Gore in 2000 despite losing the popular vote because most of the states he won were low population states which are given disproportionate voting strength in the electoral college. The composition of a district and its resulting voting power and voting biases is *extremely* important to the actual outcome of an election.

Somebody call Jack Thompson!

[Comboman]

If playing Grand Theft Auto encourages kids to become murdering auto thieves, then this game must encourage kids to become [shudder] politicians. I say, ban it.

Matlab programming contest

[Chris Shannon]

Matlab had a programming contest back in 2004 about Gerrymandering.

you are given the task of preparing for an upcoming election in the state of Rectanglia. As the director of redistricting, your job is to divide the state into N districts of equal population. Therefore, given a matrix A in which each element corresponds to the population in a given square mile, return a matrix B that indicates which voting district each square mile belongs in.

The best algorithms consisted of snaking, trimming, growing and refining.

Re:Easy... - Nope, challenge.

[Anonymous Coward]

Try to stack the seats in the "Voting Rights Act" round so that you win four of the five seats. It's doable.

Try asking an expert?

[Guppy]

3. What... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow? Well, seeing as this is a politics-related thread, perhaps we should try asking Monica?

this game SU0RZ!

[kemp0master]

no weapons - no explosions - my spanky new physX card is just sitting here like zzzzzzzzT! anyone got cheat codes??? i would suggest you at least be able to destroy something - i mean COME ON!

Think bigger

[Solandri]

One of the big issues in redistricting is minority representation (or non-representation), which leads to districts that consist of urban regions connected by a thin corridor or other similarly bogus shapes. Instead of artificially trying to group minorities (or party strongholds, or whatever) into specific geographical areas, though, why not remove that layer and replace it with a system that inherently represents various groups proportionally?

Using a single transferable vote system like that used for Cambridge (MA) municipal elections could work quite well. In the city council race, there are 9 seats, and any group capable of generating at least 10% of the total votes can elect a councillor of their own, even if that group is spread from one end of Cambridge to the other. Some councillors do have unofficial "districts" where their support is strongest, but this is not a requirement in any way.

STV elections also avoid the "wasted vote" problem with independent or smaller-party candidates, since voters can put one of those as their #1 choice, and if they don't win, those votes transfer down the ballot to the #2 or later choice as necessary.

You can't create a perfectly fair vote tallying system. Gerrymandering is just one problem facet of one voting system. All voting systems you can come up with will have problems, just on different facets. Yes some systems might be "better" than others, but proving that means an exhaustive mathematical search of the solution space to verify that their problems are indeed fewer than another system's. An anecdote describing how the proposed system is better in one specific situation doesn't cut it. Absent such proof, different election systems are just that - different. And settling on one means you just have to live with the consequences when the results contradict common sense.

Even if it were possible to design a perfect election system, there's another problem completely independent of how you tally the votes. Power is not proportional to number of votes. An example of an extreme case would be where a stockholder holds 50.1% of the shares in a company. When things come up for a vote, even though everyone else holds almost half the votes, they have zero power. The person with 50.1% of the votes holds 100% of the power.

You can design systems which mathematically try to equate power to number of votes, so that e.g. a party with 8% of the vote would on average affect the outcomes of 8% of the issues that come up for vote. But doing this breaks the X votes = 1 representative rule that seems ingrained in everyone's mind as "fair".

Anyone having problems with the last level?

[Leptok]

Damn politicos wont approve the plan.

The problem with personal responsibility

[spun]

Personal responsibility is an important concept. However, it is a dangerous concept as well. People will use it as an excuse not to change a corrupt or unfair system. They will use it to explain why they succeeded while others around them failed, and to excuse any impact their actions have on others.

Sometimes, a person is where they are because of poor choices. Other times, the socio-economic system they are a part of is at fault. There is no level playing field in life, and life is the type of game where once you are ahead, it becomes easier and easier to get further ahead. Conversely, if you start off behind,it is easier and easier to slip further behind.

Society is created by individuals, but individuals are created by society. It is a dynamic system. You can not isolate the individual components of the system and blame the emergent properties of the system itself on the individuals.

Sadly, the majority of people are only capable of doing what society expects of them. If society says they will fail, that is what they will do. And that hurts all of us.

Re:The problem with personal responsibility

[cayenne8]

"Sometimes, a person is where they are because of poor choices. Other times, the socio-economic system they are a part of is at fault. There is no level playing field in life, and life is the type of game where once you are ahead, it becomes easier and easier to get further ahead. Conversely, if you start off behind,it is easier and easier to slip further behind."

No..that's a pessimistic and self defeating point of view. If you start off behind, it ONLY means you have to work harder to get ahead. No, there is no level playing field, we all get started in different places, but, there IS opportunity out there. Some have to work harder and look more carefully to find and exploit it. But, the opportunity is out there for anyone. You have to be willing to do what it takes to make it.

"Sadly, the majority of people are only capable of doing what society expects of them. If society says they will fail, that is what they will do."

Look...people are given free will for a reason...NO ONE has to listen to what others (society) says. You gotta have personal responsibility for your actions, and one of them is thinking for yourself. In the US..there are opportunities for anyone of any social strata to 'make it'. But, you have to do what it takes. Get that education, avoid asshats that think selling drugs, pimping around is the way to make it. Have some sense to know that the odds are you will never play pro football or basketball or any other sport. Get an education, work those opportunities, learn to do what it takes to work within general society. If that means cleaning up your act, your personal appearance and language skills....do it. It can be done.

If you believe what society 'says'...then you will have a self fulfilling prophecy..but, that is your own fault.

Re:The problem with personal responsibility

[spun]

People do not have free will, that is an illusion. I want you to look carefully at the chain of causation as a thought or choice arises. Where did that choice come from? Did you choose to bring that choice into your consciousness? How? There is no individual self, there is only the system, infinite and eternal. Mental formations are no different from any sense formations such as sight or sound. Thoughts and feelings are fundamentally the same, even the feeling of, "Who is it that is sensing this?" That too is a mental formation.

The thing is, you are still caught in subject/object duality. You think "you" are an entity separate from the universe, observing it. You are not. There is no little homunculus or spirit inside your head looking out through your eyes and hearing through your ears. The sense of self is no different than any other sense, and there is no one having those sense experiences. They just are. What creates the sense of self is the correlation between the sense impressions.

The problem with your point of view is the same problem I have with books like the secret. They aren't FOR people who are behind to use to get ahead, they are for people who are AHEAD who want an excuse about how they made it. I mean, "I got where I am through hard work and determination, and so can you!" is a whole hell of a lot easier to accept than, "I worked hard but I also got lucky because the system was unfair in my favor."

People are not separate from their environment and their society. Would you be willing to accept that in the ultimate case, where someone is completely isolated from all social contact from birth, they will have absolutely nothing to contribute? Sadly, those experiments were done you know. Some nutty German thought isolated babies would naturally speak German. Then where do you draw the line of personal responsibility? If society can impact an individual to the point where that individual is no longer even truly human, is it that much of a stretch to say that some people are impacted by circumstance to the point that their possible choices become very limited?

The ability to rise above circumstance is in a large part genetic. Most people do not need that skill. In fact, if everyone were rising above their society, there wouldn't be any society. From the standpoint of the species, it is advantageous to have the majority be followers and a few be managers or leaders. Unfortunately, we do not get to choose what genes we are born with.

This is also not to say that this situation is ideal or immutable. People could be taught to rise above society and think for themselves. Then they would be doing what society tells them by thinking for themselves.

Your advice is good, but I have worked as an organizer in poor communities, and I can tell you, if you went into any poor ghetto in the world with that attitude, you would be scoffed at as a privileged individual who tells self-serving stories for their own benefit. I've seen too many organizers ruin a drive with attitudes like that.

Those kind of people do not want to empathize with others, or they don't have the ability. They don't want to look at the fact that other people's lives and experiences are very, very different from theirs. They just want to feel special, as if the choices they were presented with by random chance some how entitle them to look down on the rest of us from a pedestal. You do not know what it is like in anyone else's shoes, and with that attitude, it is obvious you don't want to know. You just want to go through life with the fundamental assumption that everyone is, or could be, like you if not for some inner failing. With an attitude like that, you will never be truly close to another human being.

I hope you aren't the type who uses the mantra of personal responsibility as a shield from having to take responsibility for your own actions. You know, the "Don't like it? That's your problem!" syndrome. Face it, you are a part of a system and what you do impacts others. Not everyone is at a pla

Re:The problem with personal responsibility

[UnknownSoldier]

> People do not have free will, that is an illusion.

* You have the choice to kill yourself, or to live...
* To eat, or to starve...
* To work, or not work...
* To complain, or think about ways of changing reality...
* To _do_ something about your situation, or do nothing...
* Even the act of not choosing, is still a choice...

You create your reality, and are forced to live with the consequences of your choices.

Fate and Free-Will are not mutually exclusive.

> "Hey, tough luck starving Ethiopian dude, but you must have chosen this life experience. Can't do anything for you, sorry."

You're ignorant of the person's Karma along with the Soul's purpose along for putting them in that experience in the first place. Life is completely fair; everyone gets what they deserve. It is only _your perception_ that makes it appear unfair, because you don't have all the facts, and reasons. The solution to a problem is easy, when you have a different paradigm.

--
It's not where you start, but where you end up, that determines your growth. Without opportunities to grow, you haven't proven you've passed the Test of Life.

Re:The problem with personal responsibility

[spun]

On one level, everything you say is true. On another, it is a complete cop out. You have the true knowledge, but that by itself is useless. A psychopath with the true knowledge is still a psychopath, he just knows that there is no arbitrary external reason why he shouldn't mass murder.

It is false to say that life is fair. Life is both fair and not fair. It is also, and at the same time, neither fair nor not fair. Fair is a human concept, and the universe does not play by human rules except where we make it.

There is no individual eternal soul to accumulate Karma. Everything is a part of the unbroken chain of cause and effect. Everything comes into being when the conditions around it support that arising, and everything ends when the conditions to not support its continued existence. Real Karma is merely the sum of the value judgments you have placed on the individual moments of your life. The similarity of a past moment to a present moment determines the value judgment you place on it now. That is the truth of past lives. Your past lives are the past judgments you have made, and they determine your present life, the judgments you place on the present moment.

Saying someone 'deserves' what they get is an nuclear way of putting it. It's not a moral issue, there is no arbitrary, external value scale of right and wrong. This is not some vast teaching machine, with everyone's special fuzzy life lesson all planned out. There is no plan, no entity can sit outside the infinite and look in.

Re:The problem with personal responsibility

[hr raattgift]

Hi Spun -

Sometimes, a person is where they are because of poor choices. Other times, the socio-economic system they are a part of is at fault.

"At fault" as in constrains available choices. Check.

Everything is a part of the unbroken chain of cause and effect

and

People do not have free will, that is an illusion. I want you to look carefully at the chain of causation as a thought or choice arises. Where did that choice come from? Did you choose to bring that choice into your consciousness? How? There is no individual self, there is only the system, infinite and eternal. Mental formations are no different from any sense formations such as sight or sound. Thoughts and feelings are fundamentally the same, even the feeling of, "Who is it that is sensing this?" That too is a mental formation.

My reaction to your argument about free will is that we do not have sufficient evidence of causality. We also cannot model causal interactions at certain energy levels at all right now, and those are of fundamental importance to any physical investigation of the question of "free will".

I'm a philosophical reductionist and do "look carefully at the chain of causation as a thought or choice arises" -- I tend to think that personality ("mind") is an emergent property of brain ("clump of organic matter") and am comfortable with neurobiology's work on making scientific predictions of the blackbox results of "mind" based on observations (with fMRI, MEG, ASL and dPET/SPECT, for example) of in vivo "brain". Those predictions seem likely to become more useful over time. The philosophers would call this positivist materialism instead of dualism, although at a political level I'm an anti-rationalist partly because of the low quality of analysis tools available now. I am definitely not in the legal positivism camp.

In standard cosmology, this is rooted in the Lambda-CDM model, whose timeline runs roughly like this: in the inflationary epoch, quantum fluctuations led to the cooling of the complexly/randomly distributed quark-gluon plasma into the array of particles in the standard model, which in turn formed more familiar forms of matter through ionized atomic nuclei, then nonionized atoms, and so forth, as well as dark matter. At this point gravity takes over the job of shaping the whole of the large scale structure of the universe, with atomic clouds condensing into molecular ones and selfgravitating into stars and galaxies and so forth.

Because of the difficulties of the two toolsets available to Lambda-CDM (quantum mechanics and general relativity) in dealing with highly curved spacetime (very massive or very energetic elements cause calculation difficulties in both models) we would be unable to make any sort of useful fine-grained prediction even knowing the full energy states of a volume of space during the early post-inflation universe. However, there are a variety of experimental toolsets which may solve some of these calculation problems, so it is not (totally) ridiculous to daydream about a scientifically predictable evolution from an observable state (CMBR) being plausible for cosmic and even small structure formation. Just as better toolsets for analysing the operation of the brain might be able to make useful predictions about the state changes of the body given particular stimuli ("mind reading")

Lots of people object to this almost by reflex ("neo-phrenology" and "neo-astrology" are the sorts of terms used). However the very heart of the objection is the question of whether causality is fundamentally true. We don't know (cf. Bell's inequality), we just take it for granted in energy and spacetime curvature realms in which classical physics works, and get frustrated with the slipperiness of quantum-mechanical causality, especially since QM behaviours probably relate in some fashion to our classical world.

Debates on the implica

Re:The problem with personal responsibility

[spun]

I'm having a hard time determining where you stand from this post. Are you just layout possibilities rather than taking a position? I don't buy your 'we haven't proved causality' bit. Free will needs causality to cause anything itself. And just because we can't predict something also does not make it free. I don't even understand what you mean by free will here. First you say you are a reductionist, that mind arises from the function of the brain. I'm with you. Then you go on to claim will is free, or could be. Which is it? If mind is determined by the brain, and the will is not separate from mind, then will is determined by the brain as well.

In fact, I can not picture a scenario where 'will' whatever that might be is acted upon by the universe, acts upon the universe, and is free. If it acts and is acted upon it is part of the chain of causality, whatever mechanism you postulate and wherever you place the seat of this will.

Free will comes from dualistic thinking, seeing the world as subject and object. There is no subject. Look at your own self awareness. When I do, and I look close enough, it disappears. There is no self awareness, only a stream of correlated thoughts. There is no thing that is aware of the thoughts, there are only thoughts that point to a thing which isn't there at all. People stuck in dualistic thinking are unable to even comprehend how this is possible, but it is what I have seen when I have looked.

Without self, the concept of free will is moot. So let me be more specific. Free will is meaningless because there is no self separate from conditions.

Excuses

[Mark_MF-WN]

I have a high school education from a podunk school from a town of 3000 people. If I can do it, you have no excuses.

So if I were, hypothetically, a bling quadriplegic, the fact that you come from a small town and graduated from college would somehow imply that I could be every bit as successful as you?!

No offense, but your underabundance of schooling shows.

Maybe what you meant was "If you have exactly the same mental and physical characteristics as I do, then you have no excuses other than misfortune, happenstance, and tragedy". You see, THAT would sound less moronic.

I have too have a high school education and come from a town of 4000.

I can support several dozen of computers in my spare time, and keep them all virus and spyware free, despite only needing to perform maintenance once every few months. So, by your logic, EVERYONE should be able to keep their computer running smoothly, assemble new PCs from parts, troubleshoot system failures, etc. I mean, I can it -- people without my genetic predisposition towards intelligence and mechanical aptitude should be able to do so as well, right?

Or how about this one -- I have a high school education, and come from a town of 4000. Yet I can pass my science courses in college without studying or doing assignments. Therefore, EVERYONE should be able to pass undergraduate science courses without studying or doing assignments. If they don't have a natural, intuitive understanding of it, that's their own moral failure -- they shouldn't be such stupid, awful, lazy people.

Here's an idea: you happen to be a naturally healthy, energetic person with exactly the right kind of metabolism and circadian rhythm to function optimally in our system, and have never had any major problems in your life -- like having your spinal cord inconveniently severed, or a tumor just kind of showing up in your cerebellum, or discovering a genetic predisposition towards severe anxiety disorder, or insomnia so severe that you lose your job, or an underactive thyroid gland (which is indistinguishable from intense laziness without a blood test).

People like you should be required to spend a year with schizophrenia before they can start dispensing their helpful "advice", so that they learn exactly how trivial the obstacles in their life were. The fun thing with schizophrenia is that even if you find a medication that works, it will probably cause hyperobesity, lethargy, and uncontrollable salivation. Good luck being successful when you have to choose between being completely insane and being a lazy fatass who drools on himself all day.

Besides -- even for healthy people, you're assuming that having lots of money is somehow the point. If people want to spend their money at Starbucks, how is that worse than saving up for a car? More than a few people will take the delicious stimulant over the metal coffin powered by exploding fossils.

Re:Excuses

[cayenne8]

"...people without my genetic predisposition towards intelligence and mechanical aptitude should be able to do so as well...you happen to be a naturally healthy, energetic person with exactly the right kind of metabolism and circadian rhythm to function optimally in our system, and have never had any major problems in your life -- like having your spinal cord inconveniently severed, or a tumor just kind of showing up in your cerebellum...People like you should be required to spend a year with schizophrenia before they can start dispensing their helpful..."

Come on...this guy and subsequent posts are directed to the MAJORITY of people out there that are healthy, and mentally fit with the IQ above that of a small soap dish. This isn't directed at the specialty cases. Everyone has their little problems, but, by and large, everyone has some kind of talents and knows enough to get out of traffic, and can therefore make something out of themselves. They just have quit being lazy, some have to work harder than others due to circumstances...but, the opportunities are there and it 'can' be done.

Re:Excuses

[rhakka]

You don't know that. You might be right, you might be wrong, but you're speaking with certainty, with answers to these people's problems.. so very sure you are!.. with nothing to base your certainty on except arrogance and a very narrow perspective.

What if their goals are not the same as yours?

What if their capabilities are not what YOU expect them to be, looking in from the outside? You don't know them. You don't know what it's like to be them. You might think you do, but you do not. Something as "small" as some depression from being sexually abused (which is NOT unusual) could make the difference between a person looking at a situation and thinking "it might work, worth a shot" to "no way, don't waste the time and get your hopes up". That's just one example. There are millions of permutations. I know several people that were never, ever, ever told good things about themselves growing up. Are they supposed to suddenly realize that they really are ok? That maybe they are good enough to do something worthwhile? Chances are they don't even understand themselves how their perspective is fucked from the get go. They don't know anything else.

That is why we are to "judge not", or "walk a mile in a man's shoes"... because you don't get it, plain and simple, unless you do. People don't generally CHOOSE to feel like shit and have nothing work for them, at least, not conciously. If they are apparently choosing that, then there is a reason. Either something is going on you are not aware of, don't understand, or maybe, just maybe, the person in question doesn't want to live the life you think they should live.

Hell, what does "make something of themselves" even mean? Working 40 hours a week at any job that will allow them to buy stuff they don't need? Amassing wealth for the sake of their next generation? Saving up enough cash that nothing short of a gigantic catastrophe could render them... without cash? That's all well and good, but if you have to work your whole life to achieve security... what are you securing?

You may have good answers to those questions, for you, in your life. But they are valid questions with more than one valid answer.

People

[Mark_MF-WN]

Could it just... MAYBE ... be that people who are lower class don't HAVE any money to save? And that people who are middle class can afford save, but can't afford to invest beyond maybe an RSP or something?

People themselves and the decisions they make are the biggest obstacle they have to overcome.

You see, this is just moronic. Go meet a low income single parent some time, look at how economically they live, and then try to tell me that it's their own fault for using their money to feed their children rather than investing it and letting their children starve.

There's an old chestnut about how it takes money to make money. You may have heard this before at some point. You can't save money if you need to spend 100% of your income and go into debt just to stave off death. You can't invest money if investment fees are so high that they would cost more than you expect to make back on interest ... and of course, you need to have disposable income to begin with.

It's easy to give stupid advice when you HAVE the disposable income and wealth necessary to invest. But try living at the subsistence level, and let's see how much you manage to invest.

Our economic system naturally balances itself in such a way that a very sizable portion of the population can never afford to invest. If they could invest, they could become wealthy enough to stop working, and eventually there would be no one to do the grunt work. This creates a negative feedback loop which gradually impoverishes people until there are enough wage-slaves to keep the system functioning.

Re:People

[Ucklak]

Cal Professor John Ogbu says it's all about attitude.

That's BS about spending 100% of money earned to feed a starving family. There are personal choices to be made as to what money goes where.
For the record, I have spent ~6 weeks at the subsistence level (in my dumb, young 20s with a poor attitude that I'm movin out to another state with no help). I used to sneak into a poorly secured office building to sleep and I knew when the guard would come around and figured out to avoid him. I figured out that hotel bathrooms are the most friendly to use if you enter in the back entrance. I used to eat left over pizza that I found.
The first 2 days you're in a destitute situation suck. You either become a victim or you get out of it.
All I had was a small suitcase. I seized the opportunity to help out moving companies move equipment then I used that to get a job transferring TV cameras and got really lucky as I seemed trustworthy and I got to use the company van. 9 months later, I was able to afford a car.

Our economic system naturally balances itself in such a way that a very sizable portion of the population can never afford to invest.

How so? It's all about education and discipline. Period. All it takes is 1 cent to save. It takes $100 to invest. Put it in an interest bearing savings account, bingo - you've invested.
A 17 year old teenager can earn $100 in a weekend waiting tables.

The following is a true story of motivation that occurred to a teenager I know:

He was told to get a job - whatever job he could get. He became picky, didn't want to do this or that, coming up with excuses for whater justification he needed. He managed to get 4 interviews in 2 weeks that he went to. He obviously projected that he really wasn't interested as it never went past that level.
He wasn't really interested in working and he decided to play a game. He called his mother and told her he got arrested - as a joke. That didn't go over too well.

The day was Wednesday and I was asked to help and offer advice.
I told the mother that he (the teenager) will be working on Monday and that is the attitude she needs to have with him as a parent. Be firm and definite. Monday, he works.
By Monday, he will have to have a job he picks or he will be working as a volunteer at the homeless shelter or nursing home giving baths and washing clothes as I would set it up for him.

He then had a choice to work for free as a volunteer on Monday, join the landscaping work pool near their home on Monday, or get a job on his own accord.
By Saturday, he had 13 interviews, he started a new job on Tuesday and we let him have the Monday off as his attitude changed for the better.

Attitude is everything. It's the cheapest thing that one can change that will have the biggest effect.
The number one reason that employers hire new people to replace old people with bad attitudes is that the new people have healthy attitudes.

Re:People

[jez9999]

By Saturday, he had 13 interviews, he started a new job on Tuesday and we let him have the Monday off as his attitude changed for the better.

Wow, you have 13 McDonalds's near where you live? :-)

Re:People

[stan_freedom]

I mostly agree with your approach to personal responsibility. However, through no fault of his own, my son was born with cerebral palsy and is moderately handicapped, both mentally and physically. In our meritocracy, he will always be at the bottom. Assuming he can even get a real job, hard work and personal responsibility are not going to reward him much beyond minimum wage. That's life. His only chance at economic viability is for my wife and I to continue to support him, which we will do as best we can.

I've come to realize that our version of meritocracy has multiple facets, of which hard work is only one component. Obviously intelligence is also a component. I've also come to realize that good looks, good health, and social skills are also key components. Fortunately, I'm reasonably blessed in those last three areas, but I know many people who aren't. These people will have a much harder time rising above the class they started in, regardless of their other merits. Again, that's life. But let's not pretend that hard work and personal responsibility are all it takes to succeed.

Re:People

[mfrank]

Many of the single parents I've met had enough money to smoke a pack a day, so there's a few thousand a year they could save or invest. And they usually have cable TV too.

Range Voting

[Anonymous Coward]

The Center for Range Voting has a solution to this problem here: http://rangevoting.org/GerryExec.html

They've got some other great ideas that just might work if they had enough people on board.

Javascript?

[Spikeles]

Heh. I loaded the page with Javascript disabled. Way to go web developers!

// Provide alternate content for browsers that do not support scripting // or for those that have scripting disabled. Alternate HTML content should be placed here. This content requires the Macromedia Flash Player. Get Flash

The obvious solution.

[Kaenneth]

The only fair way to prevent those born rich from staying rich is to confiscate all babies at birth, and randomly reassign them to other parents. (or raise them all in institutions).

Money can buy an advantage, in games, politics, life, employment, etc. etc. that's what money is FOR. If you couldn't improve the situation of you and yours with it, why would anyone want it?

Money is a unit of convienient conversion. A specific amount of money will buy a given amount of gasoline, electricity, time of a skilled professional, or more time of unskilled labor, ounces of gold, tons of granite, real estate...

It's a great improvment over the barter system, since if you have X hours of time available as a Web Developer, you can aquire Y slices of Pizza, even if noone who has excess Pizza needs a Web Designed.

If I have a loaf of bread, and you have a jar of jelly, we are both better off trading some bread for some jelly, and both having sandwiches. But if I have the bread, and I want butter on it, and you only have jelly... well, your fingers are gonna get sticky. Unless, you can give me something symbolic to represent the intrinsic value of an amount of bread, and I'll give you some bread, then take the symbolic object to someone with butter, and trade it for butter, then the butter guy gives you the object when he needs jelly...

Re:The obvious solution.

[AndersOSU]

I am in fact familiar with the concept of money...

The point here is social inequality. Money may be a proximate factor for social inequality, but I find it unlikely to be the ultimate cause. Money has been around a long time, and throughout that time there have been wide swings in social inequality - it seems desirable to minimize inequality, while maximizing both average and total wealth.

There are other ways to keep those born rich from staying rich, besides your modest proposal, such as inheritance and progressive taxes. These things exist today for that very purpose, but somebody's going to call any type of tax unfair. I think we could stand to be a tad more progressive, making things a little easier for the poor and a little harder for the rich and the corporation, especially in these days of increasingly consolidated wealth, shrinking middle class, and growing poverty.

Before anyone calls me a pinko commie, I think that that the promise of personal wealth is the greatest part of capitalism. However, the grubby capitalistic hand needs to be slapped from time to time to keep it from harding everybody else's cookies. Besides, while money necessarily provides an advantage, there is no reason why that advantage should pay such high dividends to the rich due mainly to its interest bearing nature, and yield such low returns to the poor.

Re:The obvious solution.

[cayenne8]

"There are other ways to keep those born rich from staying rich..."

You keep going on like there is something inheritly (no pun intended) wrong with being born rich?!?!

What is wrong with a parent, working their ass off....and wanting to hand down the fruits of their efforts to the generations of their proginy following them??

Are you seriously advocating that relatives can't give inheritance? That everyone has to start at zero??

Re:The obvious solution.

[AndersOSU]

Yes, there is something wrong with being born so rich that you never have to work a day in your life, and you can continue to become richer just by sitting on your *ahem* wealth.

There is nothing wrong with trying to improve your children's lives - there is something wrong with the piece of the pie the ultra-wealthy controls. While economics is certainly not a zero sum game, the fact remains every dollar in a private hedge fund is one less dollar available to the less well to do. The real problem is the hedge fund is so successful at increasing its worth - meaning while the poor work two jobs to pay rent, the rich do nothing and take their money.

I don't advocate any sort of workers revolution, I just think that it should be a little easier for the poor to hold onto their money, and a little harder for the rich.

Nice post, a few comments

[loqi]

All the personal motivation in the world might not overcome the socio-economic implications for being born poor, such as bad schools, dangerous environments, less leisure, and possibly most importantly the VP of Chase financial services doesn't live next door to you in section 8 housing - so you can't offer to mow his lawn when you're 7.

I would have modded your comment up had I the points, but instead I'll take minor issue with part of this paragraph, and add to it.

"All the personal motivation in the world" will actually overcome just about anything. That's why there are crazy success stories in the first place. But that sort of thing is rare by definition, so it has no place in a social-scale discussion. Seriously, should "personal motivation" be the sole deciding factor that lets us wash our hands of the issue? After all, personal motivation itself is a variable that's hugely affected by social status. It's an individual attribute, and it almost certainly follows some kind of bell curve like all the other individual attributes, which incidentially also have no place in a social-scale discussion. Exclusively focusing on the curve's outliers is just living in a fantasy world where what's possible for few is possible for all (on this point, I think I'm pretty much echoing you).

As for actual, tangible differences in environments, you missed nutrition, which is huge. If a child's nutrient intake is lacking during their critical developmental years, it will make them stupider in the long run. Yes, they're still an individual and responsible for their own individual actions and situation, but they've been handed an obvious and inhumane disadvantage on a social scale by economic disparity. I grew up largely in a trailer park. I was lucky, I had nice parents. My next-door neighbor was unlucky, his alcoholic dad kicked the shit out of him every night. He grew up predictably into an asshole, predictably went to the jail, predictably ended up with a shitty job at a fast-food restaurant (last I knew). If these sorts of situations are preventable in the long-run through reasonable social or economic policies, then focusing on the individuals (whose undesirable characteristics are largely systemic in origin) is just a form of clapping your hands over your ears and yelling.

Re: Districts by count

[Teancum]

Minnesota used to do it this way... in part because this was the way it was spelled out in the original state constitution. And until the 1970's, it was done this way. Senate districts were individual counties, and state house seats were proportional by population, and alloted on a county by county basis as federal seats are allocated by state. Congressional districts tended to also follow county lines as well at the time.

Unfortunately, when the U.S. Supreme Court introduced the "one person, one vote" philosophy (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote) this whole system was destroyed and went to the current state-level gerrymandering system. In part because of the tradition of using counties as boundaries, the state redistricting in Minnesota has tried to used county boundaries as much as reasonably possible, but it may cover multiple counties in rural areas and several districts in the Twin Cities metro area. House seats are allocated as two per Senate seat, so there is a confluence between the state house and senate seats, but the proportional representation is still preserved. It is usually much harder to gerrymander just two seats.

In other words, this is a nice idea, and has even been tried, but there are some problems to the concept and constitutional law that prohibits it from being used in practice.

Problems

[Mark_MF-WN]

This guy was fairly specific -- he said "anyone" can. You seem to have the same overgeneralizing tendency as well -- you write "by and large, everyone", and then "they just have [to] quit being lazy".

Do you know what the incidence of schizophrenia is? Approximately 0.5%. That's 1 out of every 200 people, right there, who have a barrier to success that can easily be insurmountable. No amount of good attitude can help someone not be insane, or let them function in the face of the hideous side-effects of antipsychotic medications.

Have you even heard of hypothyroid disorder? It's a fairly common glandular disorder, affecting around 1% of the population. Undiagnosed, people who have it seem really tired and lazy. No matter how much they want to work hard, they can't. Hard work is simply impossible for people with this condition. It's easily and effectively treated with thyroxine or synthroid, but it often goes undiagnosed, because it's so much easier to just condemn people as horrible lazy, immoral wretches.

It would never occur to judgemental assholes that -- just maybe -- the people they see as lazy, are actually suffering from problems that are more common and vastly more delibitating than anything that has ever graced their own perfect little lives.

So in our survey of diseases that can make productivity nearly impossible, we've already lost 1.5% of the population after considering just two disorders. Are you sure that "by and large, everyone ... can ... make something out of themselves"?

Overwhelming adversity is much more common than people like you would care to think. You just tell yourselves that it's fleetingly rare, since otherwise, your value system would seem unthinkably monstrous and unfeeling -- and Humans are nearly incapable of believing ANYTHING, no matter how obvious and well-supported by evidence, that would require them to rethink their value system. They're even less capable of believing anything that might give them a moral perogative to do things that are not in their own self-interest, like supporting social-programs or charities. That seems to be the trap that you are caught in. You can't acknowledge that the health and skills necessary to be fully productive are only held by -- at best -- a small majority of people.

Real People

[Mark_MF-WN]

It does indeed take $100 to invest ... but in a savings account?! At 1% interest? That's less than inflation. That's the opposite of investment. That's losing money, in any realistic sense. But suppose someone DOES save that 1 cent you mentioned, does so every day, and invests it yearly in a savings account. In fifty years they'll have a staggering $23000 saved. That'll be some retirement.

I like how you use a teenager living at home as your example of financial success. Now consider this story: a single mom with two kids, who earns $1500 a month. She rents a two bedroom apartment for $1200, which is pretty cheap in the rental market hereabouts. A transit pass costs $65 (she needs to actually GET to work). That leaves her $235 a month to feed her family, buy clothes and shoes and whatnot for growing children, sundries, maybe a phone line so that she can actually take telephone calls from work letting her know when her shifts are.

But, by YOUR estimation, she's just a lazy idiot, and should try to do all of that on $135, and save $100 -- the teenager with no children and no bills can do it, so why can't she?!

One of my co-workers is in almost exactly this situation -- two kids, her husband is permanently disabled and in an institution, and she has no marketable skills. She's in the position where she has to squeeze every last penny just to make ends meet.

Attitude is everything. It's the cheapest thing that one can change that will have the biggest effect. The number one reason that employers hire new people to replace old people with bad attitudes is that the new people have healthy attitudes.

I know it makes you feel better about yourself to believe that those who don't come out ahead in life are just lazy or have bad attitudes. My co-worker that I mentioned? She is one of the sweetest, hardest working people I've ever meet. When I was training her, I couldn't get anything done myself because she insisted on doing EVERYTHING. She's just a really driven, positive, hard-working girl who will do anything to keep her family housed, clothed, and fed. Yet it's irrelevant -- she's stuck at the subsistence level, and will never be able to rise above it (or at least not for 20 years when her kids leave home and she finally has time to go back to school or something).

You can't invest a good attitude. In most cases, all it means is the difference between subsistence and death (we've had to fire more than a few people in similarly bad situations who just wouldn't do the job).

Seriously -- a teenager living at home with a job that his family got for him? What the hell kind of stupid example is that?! Why not focus on real families that are actually out there trying to make it -- people facing REAL challenges. You were homeless because you're a moron: morons constitute just a small minority of the homeless. Drug addicts constitute another small majority. It turns out that the majority of homeless people have serious neurological and psychiatric problems -- not "bad attitudes".

Hell, a hateful psycho like you probably thinks that my coworker's husband -- the one with such severe brain-damage from a stroke that he can't even take care of himself -- just has a bad attitude, and if he would try harder he'd be out there making money and getting rich.

Single Parents

[Mark_MF-WN]

Then you haven't met any subsistence-level single parents. Not many people do, since they usually spend every last second of their time working, sleeping, or taking care of their kids.

Funny how you seem to think that the people that you meet on a daily basis are somehow a representative sample of society upon which to base judgements and condemnations of the poor.

Actually, the single parent I referred to in my post does have a computer with an internet connection. I suppose she could ditch that and invest the money. Of course, that's still basically the exact opposite of an investment since it would drastically reduce the chance's that her children would ever be able to do more than service-industry level shit-jobs. Saving that $360 a year would still only be $23,000 in 50 years, by which time she will have reached the typical life expectancy for women. Based on current inflation rates, getting rid of her internet connection will let her save enough money to pay for a single year's worth of tuition at a community college for her children WHEN THEY'RE 60 YEARS OLD.

Maybe you shouldn't judge people based on the fact that you personally know a few lazy people. That says more about who you associate with than it does about the realities of poverty in North American society.