Do you have any particular reason why you think it wouldn't scale? I don't see any reason why it wouldn't, it works in Switzerland pretty well, and there are 7 million people (I suspect that you chose large city exactly for that reason). I would, for example, say that some human institution won't scale if it relies on bounded number of humans somewhere, or if the people cannot meet or know each other personally. But none if this is relevant in Switzerland.
I agree that not everything should be voted on, and I agree that voting should be about rules that hold for everybody (or everybody who has a particular behavior), and not a specific group or person.
Second, I also believe that very important and overlooked property of democracy should be reversibility, i.e. we can change the law back if we don't like the outcome. This is not a bad thing. People do learn by mistakes, and human societies are no different. This by itself prevents voting out some group of people.
Third, I think that competition of law systems is important. Switzerland has a rule that every law gets decided on the relevant level (federal, canton or local). That way some new law can be tested on small scale first and then, once the result is known, it can be (if people wish so) applied on the larger scale.
I don't know why are people so afraid of "will of the masses". That's exactly what democracy is about. If you don't like it, then you expect, by definition, that someone else will act in your interest. You have to trust that someone else, but you have no veto power over his decision. This is the difference between direct and representative democracy.
I am not saying direct democracy will solve all the world's problems, but I am saying it is gives better outcome over the time then representative government. It may happen that the interests of government (or some part, as you show in the second example) are aligned with your interests, and then it will decide in your interest. But that's no reason to give up the power of veto over the government's actions.
I am not saying that politicians are honest, I am saying that most people rely on their honesty. They expect someone to come in and solve their problem.
I like Linus Torvalds' quote: "People can trust me because they don't have to." With (semi)direct democracy, you wouldn't have to trust politicians, because you could decide the issue directly.
There are two kinds of democracies. Representative and direct. They go under the same name, but they are very different. Unfortunately, we are stick with the first type. People need to realize there is a difference between those types, and not rely on honesty of politicians.
Wallmart does not equal its customers. Wallmart is a middleman. It has a monopsony with respect to producers, but uses this monopsony to increase their own profits, not to decrease the price of service for customers.
Anyway, I don't see why lower price for some service is not beneficial. If you can force any economic entity to provide you same service for lower price, everybody wins, because the end result is strictly better allocation of resources.
"Create a service on your own" can mean to create your own corporation (with other customers), or it can ultimately mean create it as a service provided by government.
There isn't any technical difference between corporation and government - both are controlled centrally by the owners or by some proxy of the owners. Thus they can be effective the same. The difference is only who makes the decision making, in the ideal case, the owners, i.e. shareholders in the case of corporation and citizens in the case of government.
If all the consumers would decide they want such entity, then it would have exactly same effect as if the service would be provided by government. I don't see why it should be bad for the citizens. They would be real owners, and could decide on the price completely.
In other words, monopsony on the side of consumers isn't bad at all. It's important that consumers (people) can get goods and services for the lowest possible price. It's not that important if some company makes less (or no) profit as the end result of this. Because, the companies and free market are only means to end (people happiness), not the other way around.
Your complaint is why I see free market philosophy as a very fatalistic one.
Why don't you then collude with other consumers, and get some bargaining power over the price? Oh yeah, sure you don't want that, because everybody is supposed to act in their own interest, and not to care about what others are doing.
Or build a service of your own with the other customers? Oh yeah, you don't want that, because then you would effectively create a common ownership with some sort of elected oversight, i.e. democratic government, and you are not supposed to solve the problem this way, because as we all know, big governments are bad.
I agree. The thing with perfect knowledge is a good example of circular reasoning. The product price is the correct indicator only and only if you have the perfect knowledge. But if you have perfect knowledge, then you don't need the price as an indicator, and the whole free market idea (we can decide by price instead of other indicators) thus breaks down.
But it's even worse than that. Steve Keen has proven that free markets only work, as they write in the textbooks, for infinite amount of players. As long as the number of players is finite, then the "competition" tends to equilibrium with monopolistic price.
Unfortunately, most people don't realize that it is a big, unsolvable problem with free markets. They keep bitching about oligopolies, not realizing that it is a natural state of things, not just some exceptional state.
Exceptional state happens only if someone makes a new invention, or wants to eradicate the competition by price war. But everyone on the market wants generally to avoid price wars, just like normal people want to avoid normal wars.
In the end, price is all about bargaining power. Either become a shareholder and get a share of profits, or (co-)found some cooperative, which will provide you with a service at a price of the real cost only, or will have enough bargaining power to reduce the price. People in Europe have government to do this bargaining in some areas, so they have some basic things (such as health care) cheaper.
When I recalled something in a book I would recall where on the page it was and what was around it. I'd recall how far I had to flip into the book roughly before i'd have to turn individual pages.
You can do that with PDF too. There is a slider, and I often have my PDFs opened as a full page with paging, so I can flip page with the mouse wheel. It's almost like flipping pages of a real book, maybe even better. Go and get yourself a large monitor.
That wouldn't work, because if you write something in a wiki, it's not a publication. But textbook you can add as a publication and you are rewarded for publications in academia.
It's sad, really. Wikis would be very efficient way to do research, but they are not used at all. And contests like http://www.mathworks.com/contest/ show that even Wiki-style contribution can be measured.
If you consider this to be American dream, then you should know that the same thing is quite possible in Europe. I actually believe that in Europe, it's even more possible, I think the statistics would show that the social mobility in Europe is even higher than in the U.S.
Having done alot of projects "in the real world", it's rarely who put the project together who are the ones brainstorming how to make it fit more logcally without breaking the design. Those "finger in air"-documents, created by those with a simular attitude, without practical "hands on" knowledge *think* it's all fitting as a glove. I agree with that. I would force developers to take all the jobs needed in SW development, on rotational basis, depending on how skilled they are. So everyone would be, once in a while, coding, designing, testing, writing documentation and fixing bugs (level 2 support).
In my job, small team in a large American SW company, I am to certain extent allowed to do that (although I am doing mostly development now), and it proves very beneficial. The people who design the stuff are coding it along with me, and really helps to test it properly if you know the guts, so we assist QA too. My boss, who is manager, but former programmer of the product, would like to code too, if he wouldn't be buried in the meetings and other stuff.
I feel lucky, but it's sad that companies mostly don't get this.
I admit I was a bit misleading in calling it "latency", but I wanted to primarily point out that they are not the same, even though they use the same units.
Consider measuring "how much time it takes to download 1kb". On hard disk, if you do it as a random seek, most of this time really is the latency. However, if you are reading bytes continously, most of this time is inverted value of throughput.
Most of the laws in U.S. about initiative and referendum were passed as a result of progressive movement.
There is also a self-contradiction in your post. More government is not necessarily bad - as long as it is people's government, it's quite fine. I think this is quite obvious, otherwise an anarchy would be the best system.
Anyway, even if it would be invalid example, what you are claiming is obviously not true. The power of elites was lessened during the 20th century in both USA and Europe. Just look at all the suffrage, anti-discrimination, conservation, consumer-protection, worker-protection and freedom of information laws. We (normal people, not elites) definitely live in a more fairer world than in 1908 (who lived in a more fairer world than in 1808). There are some bumps along the road (last 20 years), but this trend will probably continue.
It's very simple what is broken. There are two kinds of democracies - representative and direct. They look same on the first sight, but they are in fact very different things.
In representative democracy, you have to trust the politician that he does what you want him to do. In direct democracy, you vote about the specific proposal, therefore, there is no question of trust.
Imagine someone would ask you to lend him 10000$. Representative democracy is like him going to you and telling you "just give me the money, I will return them back, I promise". Direct democracy is like "we will make a contract, and in that contract will be written that you borrowed $10000"; the contract here is the written law you vote about. In the first case, if the person breaks a promise, they won't break any law. In the second case, if they break their contract, they are actually breaking the law. In direct democracy, they would have to break the constitutional law if they would like to override the law that was installed by the will of the people. And as a bonus, there is no doubt if the law is broken, because it's written in a contract.
I like the quote from Linus Torvalds, who said: "People can trust me, because they don't have to trust me." That's the point - design the system so that people don't have to trust, and collect the nice bonus when they suddenly will trust.
In Switzerland, direct democracy works pretty well (more or less). And it has interesting side effects (politicians usually argue that the side effects are the cause that allows such system, but it's not true), for example, the politicians are largely unknown and irrelevant, and the real discussions are about issues.
Actually, what parent described is called range voting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_voting), and it's imho the best system - more intuitive than any ranking method, has simple interpretation and is completely resistant to tactical voting.
I don't know how in U.S., but I read that about 40% of homeless people in Czech Republic (my country, developed if you don't know) are mentally ill. So it's a question if they really are able to cope with that (even if leave the issue of money out).
They don't measure the same thing. To use a hard disk analogy, the bits per second is latency, while gigabytes per month is throughput. Over large files (streaming videos) the throughput dominates, but if you access a lot of small files (web pages), then the latency dominates.
I find it amusing that if Khavison and Neumann would discover the theorem say 10 years earlier (and Rhie would just apply their result), then they wouldn't become astrophysicists, they would be just mathematicians, as usual.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have any particular reason why you think it wouldn't scale? I don't see any reason why it wouldn't, it works in Switzerland pretty well, and there are 7 million people (I suspect that you chose large city exactly for that reason). I would, for example, say that some human institution won't scale if it relies on bounded number of humans somewhere, or if the people cannot meet or know each other personally. But none if this is relevant in Switzerland.
I agree that not everything should be voted on, and I agree that voting should be about rules that hold for everybody (or everybody who has a particular behavior), and not a specific group or person.
Second, I also believe that very important and overlooked property of democracy should be reversibility, i.e. we can change the law back if we don't like the outcome. This is not a bad thing. People do learn by mistakes, and human societies are no different. This by itself prevents voting out some group of people.
Third, I think that competition of law systems is important. Switzerland has a rule that every law gets decided on the relevant level (federal, canton or local). That way some new law can be tested on small scale first and then, once the result is known, it can be (if people wish so) applied on the larger scale.
Read the book. These issues are addressed there.
I don't know why are people so afraid of "will of the masses". That's exactly what democracy is about. If you don't like it, then you expect, by definition, that someone else will act in your interest. You have to trust that someone else, but you have no veto power over his decision. This is the difference between direct and representative democracy.
I am not saying direct democracy will solve all the world's problems, but I am saying it is gives better outcome over the time then representative government. It may happen that the interests of government (or some part, as you show in the second example) are aligned with your interests, and then it will decide in your interest. But that's no reason to give up the power of veto over the government's actions.
I am not saying that politicians are honest, I am saying that most people rely on their honesty. They expect someone to come in and solve their problem.
I like Linus Torvalds' quote: "People can trust me because they don't have to." With (semi)direct democracy, you wouldn't have to trust politicians, because you could decide the issue directly.
There are two kinds of democracies. Representative and direct. They go under the same name, but they are very different. Unfortunately, we are stick with the first type. People need to realize there is a difference between those types, and not rely on honesty of politicians.
There is an excellent book about direct democracy: http://www.democracy-international.org/book-direct-democracy.html
If you would hate just Sarkozy, it should be quite enough. Most French don't like him either (and no, not just because of filesharing).
Wallmart does not equal its customers. Wallmart is a middleman. It has a monopsony with respect to producers, but uses this monopsony to increase their own profits, not to decrease the price of service for customers.
Anyway, I don't see why lower price for some service is not beneficial. If you can force any economic entity to provide you same service for lower price, everybody wins, because the end result is strictly better allocation of resources.
"Create a service on your own" can mean to create your own corporation (with other customers), or it can ultimately mean create it as a service provided by government.
There isn't any technical difference between corporation and government - both are controlled centrally by the owners or by some proxy of the owners. Thus they can be effective the same. The difference is only who makes the decision making, in the ideal case, the owners, i.e. shareholders in the case of corporation and citizens in the case of government.
If all the consumers would decide they want such entity, then it would have exactly same effect as if the service would be provided by government. I don't see why it should be bad for the citizens. They would be real owners, and could decide on the price completely.
In other words, monopsony on the side of consumers isn't bad at all. It's important that consumers (people) can get goods and services for the lowest possible price. It's not that important if some company makes less (or no) profit as the end result of this. Because, the companies and free market are only means to end (people happiness), not the other way around.
Your complaint is why I see free market philosophy as a very fatalistic one.
Why don't you then collude with other consumers, and get some bargaining power over the price? Oh yeah, sure you don't want that, because everybody is supposed to act in their own interest, and not to care about what others are doing.
Or build a service of your own with the other customers? Oh yeah, you don't want that, because then you would effectively create a common ownership with some sort of elected oversight, i.e. democratic government, and you are not supposed to solve the problem this way, because as we all know, big governments are bad.
I agree. The thing with perfect knowledge is a good example of circular reasoning. The product price is the correct indicator only and only if you have the perfect knowledge. But if you have perfect knowledge, then you don't need the price as an indicator, and the whole free market idea (we can decide by price instead of other indicators) thus breaks down.
But it's even worse than that. Steve Keen has proven that free markets only work, as they write in the textbooks, for infinite amount of players. As long as the number of players is finite, then the "competition" tends to equilibrium with monopolistic price.
Unfortunately, most people don't realize that it is a big, unsolvable problem with free markets. They keep bitching about oligopolies, not realizing that it is a natural state of things, not just some exceptional state.
Exceptional state happens only if someone makes a new invention, or wants to eradicate the competition by price war. But everyone on the market wants generally to avoid price wars, just like normal people want to avoid normal wars.
In the end, price is all about bargaining power. Either become a shareholder and get a share of profits, or (co-)found some cooperative, which will provide you with a service at a price of the real cost only, or will have enough bargaining power to reduce the price. People in Europe have government to do this bargaining in some areas, so they have some basic things (such as health care) cheaper.
When I recalled something in a book I would recall where on the page it was and what was around it. I'd recall how far I had to flip into the book roughly before i'd have to turn individual pages.
You can do that with PDF too. There is a slider, and I often have my PDFs opened as a full page with paging, so I can flip page with the mouse wheel. It's almost like flipping pages of a real book, maybe even better. Go and get yourself a large monitor.
That wouldn't work, because if you write something in a wiki, it's not a publication. But textbook you can add as a publication and you are rewarded for publications in academia.
It's sad, really. Wikis would be very efficient way to do research, but they are not used at all. And contests like http://www.mathworks.com/contest/ show that even Wiki-style contribution can be measured.
Maybe you just answered your our question?
If you consider this to be American dream, then you should know that the same thing is quite possible in Europe. I actually believe that in Europe, it's even more possible, I think the statistics would show that the social mobility in Europe is even higher than in the U.S.
..differs for each coin.
Actually, I often use the "printer friendly" format to display the whole article in a single page, so I could store it on my computer.
In my job, small team in a large American SW company, I am to certain extent allowed to do that (although I am doing mostly development now), and it proves very beneficial. The people who design the stuff are coding it along with me, and really helps to test it properly if you know the guts, so we assist QA too. My boss, who is manager, but former programmer of the product, would like to code too, if he wouldn't be buried in the meetings and other stuff.
I feel lucky, but it's sad that companies mostly don't get this.
I admit I was a bit misleading in calling it "latency", but I wanted to primarily point out that they are not the same, even though they use the same units.
Consider measuring "how much time it takes to download 1kb". On hard disk, if you do it as a random seek, most of this time really is the latency. However, if you are reading bytes continously, most of this time is inverted value of throughput.
Most of the laws in U.S. about initiative and referendum were passed as a result of progressive movement.
There is also a self-contradiction in your post. More government is not necessarily bad - as long as it is people's government, it's quite fine. I think this is quite obvious, otherwise an anarchy would be the best system.
Anyway, even if it would be invalid example, what you are claiming is obviously not true. The power of elites was lessened during the 20th century in both USA and Europe. Just look at all the suffrage, anti-discrimination, conservation, consumer-protection, worker-protection and freedom of information laws. We (normal people, not elites) definitely live in a more fairer world than in 1908 (who lived in a more fairer world than in 1808). There are some bumps along the road (last 20 years), but this trend will probably continue.
Really? What about progressive movement?
It's very simple what is broken. There are two kinds of democracies - representative and direct. They look same on the first sight, but they are in fact very different things.
In representative democracy, you have to trust the politician that he does what you want him to do. In direct democracy, you vote about the specific proposal, therefore, there is no question of trust.
Imagine someone would ask you to lend him 10000$. Representative democracy is like him going to you and telling you "just give me the money, I will return them back, I promise". Direct democracy is like "we will make a contract, and in that contract will be written that you borrowed $10000"; the contract here is the written law you vote about. In the first case, if the person breaks a promise, they won't break any law. In the second case, if they break their contract, they are actually breaking the law. In direct democracy, they would have to break the constitutional law if they would like to override the law that was installed by the will of the people. And as a bonus, there is no doubt if the law is broken, because it's written in a contract.
I like the quote from Linus Torvalds, who said: "People can trust me, because they don't have to trust me." That's the point - design the system so that people don't have to trust, and collect the nice bonus when they suddenly will trust.
In Switzerland, direct democracy works pretty well (more or less). And it has interesting side effects (politicians usually argue that the side effects are the cause that allows such system, but it's not true), for example, the politicians are largely unknown and irrelevant, and the real discussions are about issues.
I would recommend you this excellent book on direct democracy: http://www.democracy-international.org/book-direct-democracy.html
Actually, what parent described is called range voting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_voting), and it's imho the best system - more intuitive than any ranking method, has simple interpretation and is completely resistant to tactical voting.
I actually prefer SuperTuxKart. But it is going to kick ass!
I don't know how in U.S., but I read that about 40% of homeless people in Czech Republic (my country, developed if you don't know) are mentally ill. So it's a question if they really are able to cope with that (even if leave the issue of money out).
They don't measure the same thing. To use a hard disk analogy, the bits per second is latency, while gigabytes per month is throughput. Over large files (streaming videos) the throughput dominates, but if you access a lot of small files (web pages), then the latency dominates.
I find it amusing that if Khavison and Neumann would discover the theorem say 10 years earlier (and Rhie would just apply their result), then they wouldn't become astrophysicists, they would be just mathematicians, as usual.
My Treo 680 also recharges over USB, I don't see a problem here.