Interesting approach, but I doubt that it has been tested in the real world. I think it would become a name recognition game, as long as the name wasn't recognized for something horribly negative. In particular, I think #PresidentTweety could have won in such a system because he had YUGE name recognition and almost no relevant track record (as regards politics).
Interesting idea, but I don't see how the accountability would work. The winners of the elections might fail to live up to the promises they had made.
Also still subject to abuse from the appeal to single-issue voters. That's actually how the GOP is getting a lot of votes these days. Just tell them you agree with THE issue.
Actually I favor this one, but not the way you're thinking. I think the Senate should be apportioned based on federal taxes paid. The House would be directly responsible to the voters, but the Senate would be based on the distribution of wealth and respond on that basis. Not sure I'd want to go as far as having a senior senator from Amazon, but the basis of power should be different.
The original idea was that the Senate would be more responsible to long-term interests if it were more separated from direct elections. Actually seems like a good idea and the move to direct popular vote without changing the basis of apportionment of the Senate seems to me like a mistake.
Not computer-related, but I kind of like it. Unfortunately, the politicians votes are too few to matter in elections. Any manipulation of the elections, with or without computers, can safely ignore the politicians own votes.
Seems to be the first actual new idea of interest in the discussion. The progress bar indicates I'm about 1/4 of the way through the visible comments. There have been some comments that might be replies or responses to interesting ideas, but they must be from ACs and I can't see them. (My vote against ACs.)
If I understand your idea, it seems to be a form of direct democracy with delegation. The complexity would clearly require computer support, but even then I think it would be tough to implement. However my main concern would be about reactions triggered by panicked mobs. There is a wisdom in crowds, but it depends on keeping the inputs isolated to prevent mass phenomena such as a panic.
Still, it's kind of interesting to think about. Back to reading the comments...
Not sure if you're just taking the Luddite perspective, but I'd like to try to persuade you how the computerized voting could be done in a way that would satisfy me.
The voting screen would be interactive to allow for such things as asking for help, even such specific things as "Show me the 50-word summary submitted by each candidate on the second listed issue." After the voter finished, it would print the ballot with two forms (because redundancy helps). The voter would be able to read how he voted in human-readable form, and the ballot would have something like a QR code for more rapid recounting with machines. The voting machine would also collect totals for fast reporting of the results, but with a safe one-way transfer mechanism, NOT a two-way connection to the Internet. In the even the election is challenged, the paper ballots will be easily recounted and also checked to make sure the QR codes match the text versions.
That actually would help with all three of the specific proposals I suggested, but so far I haven't found any improvements in the comments I've read so far. Mostly I searched by the keywords of my proposals.
However, what I was really looking for was better ideas, and so far I haven't found any with my usual searches. Not sure what keywords will help, but there's a lot of stuff to read here... Evidently a topic of substantial interest, and I have seen a number of thoughtful comments and I would like to thank those people for their efforts.
Even better if you have a constructive suggestion to offer.
Excuse me for not wasting the time to see if you've ever written anything worth reading.
If Slashdot had some mechanism to aggregate and display the public reputation that you'd earned, I'd probably consider lowering yours. Oh, wait. If I could filter based on earned public reputation I'm pretty sure that I'd never see your comments in the first place.
That comment is about the best Slashdot can do for insight these years? Obvious response is that the self-driving cars don't need no stinkin' human buyers OR human drivers.
We need to rethink the entire economy in terms of human time. We also need to adjust the rules in favor of companies that employ CUSTOMERS so they don't need anything like food stamps to prevent starvation. Another way to word that is the rules should penalize companies that put profits ahead of everything else.
Oh wait. I forgot capitalism is dead. All we have now is corporate cancerism. I've said it too often, but there is no gawd but profit.
Whoops. I should have checked the content as well as the grammar. It appears that it was a corned beef sandwich, not ham. At least it seems unlikely to be a religious violation.
Much as I like "Funny" comments, it feels disrespectful to fish for the mod with this kind of cheap bait.
Having said that, I wish someone had some funny anecdotes to share. It sounds like he had a sense of humor, but so far I haven't heard a version of the sandwich story that adequately captures the humor of it. Something like "Pigs in Space", but the "First ham sandwich in space!"
You seem to be the guy to ask: Was he also involved in the Mercury Program? I know his first actual flight was in Gemini, but I wonder if he might have caught the tail end of Mercury, too?
Provoked by Japanese reporting, though maybe it was bad translating. There were four generations of manned space flight (in America), but at least in translation it came off as something like "He was involved in all three."
And I strongly agree with you, but I think we need to do that through a variation of "following the money" to break the motivation of the gerrymandering politicians. I think any attempt to tweak the rules of the redistricting process will only create a new game for them to play. We need to change the game in such a way that gerrymandering itself is counterproductive so they might as well district on some rational and nonpartisan basis, such as minimizing the lengths of the borders between districts that divide the voting population equally.
Exactly my question, but I'll never see a mod point to give you.
Looked like a surprisingly active topic, so I stopped by in my usual futile quest for "Funny" or "Insightful" comments. I guess that means I actually square or cube your "WHY?" Not only 'why do this' but 'why were so many people on Slashdot interested enough to comment on it' (without generating any "Funny" or "Insightful" mods (to date)).
As regards your sig I've heard that Honest Abe is the most frequently used source for bogus quotes. However I wonder if his strong reputation can survive what today's so-called Republicans and their ignominious leader have been doing. Maybe you'll feel obliged to change your sig to say it was Shakespeare?
I considered your first ideas, but every angle I could think of was just subject to some new form of gaming. The problems with your second idea are that the approach doesn't scale and that technology has changed so much since the Constitution was written. In general, that's why I think we need to focus on scaleable solutions that have negative feedback loops against the gaming. With guest voting, the harder they gerrymander, the worse the gerrymandering will work and the harder it will become to predict (or manipulate) the election results.
This is actually a case where electronic voting makes sense, too. Rather than having to print lots of extra ballots, you just have an electronic ballot that branches when the voter says "I want to guest vote". However, I did think of a way to do it with paper. After the candidates for your default district, there could just be a box for "No vote here. Guest voting." Then there would be a note for where the guest districts are listed, where you'd also get the instruction to vote in only one district.
However, that paper ballot idea gave me a new crazy wrinkle. Maybe you should be allowed to divide up your vote among as many of the neighboring districts as you are interested in? The computers can handle the fractions quite well enough, and what those neighboring legislators do in their districts does affect you to some degree. Again, the more they gerrymander the more the complexities of the actual elections may cancel out their best gerrymandering.
Who are the moronic moderators who wasted 5 mod points making this AC moron visible? More of Putin's paid trolls with their herds of mod-point-wielding sock puppets?
Remember the passage where Mark Twain wrote about sieving his pilot's blood after the epic swearing at the other boat? Let me quote it here:
This was a red rag to the bull. He raged and stormed so (he was crossing the river at the time) that I judge it made him blind, because he ran over the steering-oar of a trading-scow. Of course the traders sent up a volley of red-hot profanity. Never was a man so grateful as Mr. Bixby was: because he was brim full, and here were subjects who would talk back. He threw open a window, thrust his head out, and such an irruption followed as I never had heard before. The fainter and farther away the scowmen’s curses drifted, the higher Mr. Bixby lifted his voice and the weightier his adjectives grew. When he closed the window he was empty. You could have drawn a seine through his system and not caught curses enough to disturb your mother with.
Imagine the same operation on ALL the sock puppets and ACs. Not a bit of credibility to be found and nothing to pay attention to.
Now I'm curious what you did. There is a setting that is useful against ACs, but most of the settings are not really related to the earned reputation of the author. What I'm actually advocating would be linked more directly to an improved and more symmetric version of karma.
If Slashdot had a better mechanism for aggregating and displaying and filtering based on public reputation, then I would adjust my settings to render such trolls (possibly a paid professional?) invisible. (I think you're referring to 5161731? Probably just a fresh sock puppet, but I'd also tweak my setting to deal with fresh sock puppets.)
Is there an older account than Caesar's report on dividing and conquering? However the tactic is much older than Rome.
Putin divided and conquered the Democratic Party before he did it to America as a whole. Count me as one of the suckers who was conned into donating to Sanders before the New York primary when I should have donated to the Democratic Party in Michigan.
However Putin doesn't actually deserve much credit for merely harvesting the mindless mushrooms. He just noticed that we'd cultivated a huge crop of them by destroying the public education system. Too bad we did that ourselves with our own American divide and conquer strategy. Now we have a tiny number of good public schools, basically to dangle as hope for the parents who are sufficiently concerned to play that lottery. Most of the schools have become obedience schools you wouldn't send your dog to. The goal is not the creation of wise and thoughtful voters, but docile employees (and inmates) who will obey the ads selling toothpaste or political candidates.
Now for the punchline. I used to think public education was destroyed because stupid (or religious zealot) parents were most concerned with making sure their kids were as stupid as they were, but now I've realized they were just useful idiots. Follow the money. Public education was mostly funded by property taxes, and rich real estate investors (like #PresidentTweety) have always hated property taxes. One way to cut property taxes is by slashing the public schools to death.
You need a sarcasm tag for that one. If you're NOT being too subtle, then the "other threshold" should be set one notch above what you can satisfy.
Let me clarify that I do have the mechanistic perspective of seeing all human beings as UTMs. There is a fundamental equality in that, though each UTM is unique and different. We just have to accept that some of the UTMs are too slow to make the best possible voting decisions on any scheduled election day.
I think this story could have been bundled into the recent story about abuses of technology. We could be using computers to increase our freedoms and give us more and better choices, but over-controlled elections are NOT helping. Why bother to vote when the outcome has already been so heavily manipulated?
Let me focus on the specific problem of gerrymandering that this technology would obviously support (too well). Partisan redistricting has two principles, and both of them are based on predicting how people will vote next time. So far the main data has been prior voting patterns, but this will help YUGEly. Principle 1 is making your districts safe, which usually means a cushion around 5%. Principle 2 is wasting your opponent's votes in concentrated sacrificial districts, which is normally required because you would barely need to tweak the districts if you actually had more voters. The worse abuses of partisan gerrymandering are when actual minorities of the voters get to "win" the legislatures. (We've actually seen that in recent elections for the House of so-called Representatives, thanks to diabolical gerrymandering in such states as Texas.)
So let me switch angles to a possible computer-based solution in two parts:
Part 1: Guest voting. If you don't like your own district (for example because it is so gerrymandered that your vote is meaningless), then you would be able to reject your ballot and vote as a guest in one of the neighboring districts. The more they gerrymander the districts, the MORE options voters would have and the LESS predictable the outcomes of the elections.
Part 2: Allocate the voting power based on the actual outcome of the election. Easiest to make this clear with a simple example using three districts, A, B, and C. Assume half the voters of District A decide to vote as guests in Districts B and C, with one quarter going to each district. Then whoever wins A only gets 1/2 vote in the legislature, and the legislators from B and C get 1-1/4 votes each. The total of the 3 districts is still 3 votes in the legislature, but each voter gets truly equal voting power in the legislature. (Non-voters, too. Each non-voter gets the same 0% representation, but that's true now, too.)
An amusing side effect is that the winner still has incentive to actually represent ALL of the voters who voted for AND against him, because even those negative votes still contributed to his influence in the legislature. Also the voters are motivated to vote because they know they are increasing the voting power in whichever district they pick.
So let me be the first to admit that it will never happen. Certainly not via an evolutionary path, much as I prefer evolution to the alternatives. No "Fantasy" mods on Slashdot, eh?
If I ever saw a mod point, I think I'd give yours a "Funny", though I can't explain why. Substantively, I, too, am amazed that Twitter hasn't gone away. Can I safely defy anyone to name one good or useful thing Twitter has accomplished? Even if you came up with something, I would respond thusly: #PresidentTweety.
My separate comment (above in the discussion, assuming the usual trolls haven't trash-moderated it into invisibility) is much more substantive than this one. However it wasn't prepared for Slashdot, but just pasted in and edited a bit. The level of discussion on today's Slashdot is generally quite comparable to the "best" ( = worst ) of Twitter.
As usual, I searched the comments and found little food for thought. However, the story is still young. Maybe things will improve as the topic matures into beautiful comments? ROFLMAO.
The article was much easier to read by looking for what wasn't there: NOTHING about the stock markets or share prices. Actually, there were implicit considerations of the capitalization of the deathwatch companies, but almost no explicit consideration of the financial situations. (There is a little bit in the Uber entry.)
The most vulnerable companies right now are the ones most exposed to burps in the stock prices. Considering how the electronic stock exchanges work these days, you can be sure that there are some burps coming. A useful deathwatch list would consider how much of a stock-price burp it would take to sink the threatened companies.
However the GIGANTIC threat is not a burp, but an actual crash caused by a bursting of the bubble that market caps are now living in. The stock prices have become completely divorced from realities and underlying values and even the companies' wildest dreams. The stock prices are just one computer's "opinion" that some other computer will offer a higher price for the shares. Each computer is programmed to think it's the smartest computer in the world. When has that ever failed!
Face it. Capitalism is deader than communism ever was. What we have now is corporate cancerism and stock prices are like taking the temperature of a tumor. The creed of corporate cancerism is quite simple: There is no Gawd but profit, and is Gawd's prophet. Too many prophets of fake profits are about to spoil the soup.
Pick ANY company. Estimate how volatile the stock price is and what could trigger a big drop. Then look to see who (and whose computer) is ready for the quickest leveraged buyout.
However it would seem that I'm the only person to feel that way so far. I also searched for happy and some related terms. Maybe I should have tried schadenfreude?
Anyway, I'm always delighted to hear about anything that reduces the spam. At the same time, it makes me sad that the email spam problem persists after all these years. I think that's almost entirely due to the "Live and let spam" practices of the major email providers.
If you've been paying attention, then you've noticed that certain categories of spam have been cured. For example, you almost never see pump-and-dump stock scam spam these days. The authorities were able to solve that problem by attacking the scammers business models, and the problem went away.
If you haven't been paying attention, then you haven't noticed how many false positives you've lost over the years. You've still been forced to pay attention to the false negatives, but the main thing about filtering is that the spammers don't mind.
Oh well. I'd be glad to help solve the problem, but my capabilities are too limited in isolation. Feel free to politely ask for more detailed suggestions. Maybe I'll even notice and answer.
Another highly active topic. Another massive Slashdot fail. However, if I ever had a mod point to give, I might have given it to your comment.
Oh wait. As I understand the broken rules of moderation, if I did that I would be unable to make this comment.
Can anyone remember that the original intention of moderation had something to do with helping you find the kinds of comments you want to read? Maybe there are some "Funny" comments here, but I found none among the few with that mod. A few of the ones moderated "Insightful" did show glimpses of insight, but not much.
My text searches of the visible comments (to evade the broken moderation) focused on "example" and "robot". The "example" search was for aspects of "making an example" of the prankster or of the overly militarized and over-reactive police SWAT teams. The "robot" search was for possible solutions (which was also my main hope from the "Insightful" search).
Your comment is the only visible mention of robot, so I decided to reply here. Enough with the meta. Now to the ACTUAL topic.
I also had the idea of sending in a robot first. However you know that they will wind up arming the robots and then the wrongful deaths will come from programming bugs. Actually, we've already had an example of a robot used to blow up a shooter. Remember that sniper in Dallas? If there were any hostages involved, the robot may well cause their deaths.
Initially my main concern was that they make an example of the prankster, but I'm confident he'll face justice. My newer concern is that the SWAT team also learn something from their mistakes, but I rather doubt that they will.
Time to go meta-rogue again? More searches from that perspective? Naw, today's Slashdot ain't worth the effort and I've already wasted too much time this morning.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting approach, but I doubt that it has been tested in the real world. I think it would become a name recognition game, as long as the name wasn't recognized for something horribly negative. In particular, I think #PresidentTweety could have won in such a system because he had YUGE name recognition and almost no relevant track record (as regards politics).
Interesting idea, but I don't see how the accountability would work. The winners of the elections might fail to live up to the promises they had made.
Also still subject to abuse from the appeal to single-issue voters. That's actually how the GOP is getting a lot of votes these days. Just tell them you agree with THE issue.
Actually I favor this one, but not the way you're thinking. I think the Senate should be apportioned based on federal taxes paid. The House would be directly responsible to the voters, but the Senate would be based on the distribution of wealth and respond on that basis. Not sure I'd want to go as far as having a senior senator from Amazon, but the basis of power should be different.
The original idea was that the Senate would be more responsible to long-term interests if it were more separated from direct elections. Actually seems like a good idea and the move to direct popular vote without changing the basis of apportionment of the Senate seems to me like a mistake.
Not computer-related, but I kind of like it. Unfortunately, the politicians votes are too few to matter in elections. Any manipulation of the elections, with or without computers, can safely ignore the politicians own votes.
Seems to be the first actual new idea of interest in the discussion. The progress bar indicates I'm about 1/4 of the way through the visible comments. There have been some comments that might be replies or responses to interesting ideas, but they must be from ACs and I can't see them. (My vote against ACs.)
If I understand your idea, it seems to be a form of direct democracy with delegation. The complexity would clearly require computer support, but even then I think it would be tough to implement. However my main concern would be about reactions triggered by panicked mobs. There is a wisdom in crowds, but it depends on keeping the inputs isolated to prevent mass phenomena such as a panic.
Still, it's kind of interesting to think about. Back to reading the comments...
Not sure if you're just taking the Luddite perspective, but I'd like to try to persuade you how the computerized voting could be done in a way that would satisfy me.
The voting screen would be interactive to allow for such things as asking for help, even such specific things as "Show me the 50-word summary submitted by each candidate on the second listed issue." After the voter finished, it would print the ballot with two forms (because redundancy helps). The voter would be able to read how he voted in human-readable form, and the ballot would have something like a QR code for more rapid recounting with machines. The voting machine would also collect totals for fast reporting of the results, but with a safe one-way transfer mechanism, NOT a two-way connection to the Internet. In the even the election is challenged, the paper ballots will be easily recounted and also checked to make sure the QR codes match the text versions.
That actually would help with all three of the specific proposals I suggested, but so far I haven't found any improvements in the comments I've read so far. Mostly I searched by the keywords of my proposals.
However, what I was really looking for was better ideas, and so far I haven't found any with my usual searches. Not sure what keywords will help, but there's a lot of stuff to read here... Evidently a topic of substantial interest, and I have seen a number of thoughtful comments and I would like to thank those people for their efforts.
Feel free to ask if you can't understand.
Even better if you have a constructive suggestion to offer.
Excuse me for not wasting the time to see if you've ever written anything worth reading.
If Slashdot had some mechanism to aggregate and display the public reputation that you'd earned, I'd probably consider lowering yours. Oh, wait. If I could filter based on earned public reputation I'm pretty sure that I'd never see your comments in the first place.
That comment is about the best Slashdot can do for insight these years? Obvious response is that the self-driving cars don't need no stinkin' human buyers OR human drivers.
We need to rethink the entire economy in terms of human time. We also need to adjust the rules in favor of companies that employ CUSTOMERS so they don't need anything like food stamps to prevent starvation. Another way to word that is the rules should penalize companies that put profits ahead of everything else.
Oh wait. I forgot capitalism is dead. All we have now is corporate cancerism. I've said it too often, but there is no gawd but profit.
Whoops. I should have checked the content as well as the grammar. It appears that it was a corned beef sandwich, not ham. At least it seems unlikely to be a religious violation.
Much as I like "Funny" comments, it feels disrespectful to fish for the mod with this kind of cheap bait.
Having said that, I wish someone had some funny anecdotes to share. It sounds like he had a sense of humor, but so far I haven't heard a version of the sandwich story that adequately captures the humor of it. Something like "Pigs in Space", but the "First ham sandwich in space!"
You seem to be the guy to ask: Was he also involved in the Mercury Program? I know his first actual flight was in Gemini, but I wonder if he might have caught the tail end of Mercury, too?
Provoked by Japanese reporting, though maybe it was bad translating. There were four generations of manned space flight (in America), but at least in translation it came off as something like "He was involved in all three."
And I strongly agree with you, but I think we need to do that through a variation of "following the money" to break the motivation of the gerrymandering politicians. I think any attempt to tweak the rules of the redistricting process will only create a new game for them to play. We need to change the game in such a way that gerrymandering itself is counterproductive so they might as well district on some rational and nonpartisan basis, such as minimizing the lengths of the borders between districts that divide the voting population equally.
Exactly my question, but I'll never see a mod point to give you.
Looked like a surprisingly active topic, so I stopped by in my usual futile quest for "Funny" or "Insightful" comments. I guess that means I actually square or cube your "WHY?" Not only 'why do this' but 'why were so many people on Slashdot interested enough to comment on it' (without generating any "Funny" or "Insightful" mods (to date)).
As regards your sig I've heard that Honest Abe is the most frequently used source for bogus quotes. However I wonder if his strong reputation can survive what today's so-called Republicans and their ignominious leader have been doing. Maybe you'll feel obliged to change your sig to say it was Shakespeare?
I considered your first ideas, but every angle I could think of was just subject to some new form of gaming. The problems with your second idea are that the approach doesn't scale and that technology has changed so much since the Constitution was written. In general, that's why I think we need to focus on scaleable solutions that have negative feedback loops against the gaming. With guest voting, the harder they gerrymander, the worse the gerrymandering will work and the harder it will become to predict (or manipulate) the election results.
This is actually a case where electronic voting makes sense, too. Rather than having to print lots of extra ballots, you just have an electronic ballot that branches when the voter says "I want to guest vote". However, I did think of a way to do it with paper. After the candidates for your default district, there could just be a box for "No vote here. Guest voting." Then there would be a note for where the guest districts are listed, where you'd also get the instruction to vote in only one district.
However, that paper ballot idea gave me a new crazy wrinkle. Maybe you should be allowed to divide up your vote among as many of the neighboring districts as you are interested in? The computers can handle the fractions quite well enough, and what those neighboring legislators do in their districts does affect you to some degree. Again, the more they gerrymander the more the complexities of the actual elections may cancel out their best gerrymandering.
Who are the moronic moderators who wasted 5 mod points making this AC moron visible? More of Putin's paid trolls with their herds of mod-point-wielding sock puppets?
Remember the passage where Mark Twain wrote about sieving his pilot's blood after the epic swearing at the other boat? Let me quote it here:
This was a red rag to the bull. He raged and stormed so (he was crossing the river at the time) that I judge it made him blind, because he ran over the steering-oar of a trading-scow. Of course the traders sent up a volley of red-hot profanity. Never was a man so grateful as Mr. Bixby was: because he was brim full, and here were subjects who would talk back. He threw open a window, thrust his head out, and such an irruption followed as I never had heard before. The fainter and farther away the scowmen’s curses drifted, the higher Mr. Bixby lifted his voice and the weightier his adjectives grew. When he closed the window he was empty. You could have drawn a seine through his system and not caught curses enough to disturb your mother with.
Imagine the same operation on ALL the sock puppets and ACs. Not a bit of credibility to be found and nothing to pay attention to.
Now I'm curious what you did. There is a setting that is useful against ACs, but most of the settings are not really related to the earned reputation of the author. What I'm actually advocating would be linked more directly to an improved and more symmetric version of karma.
If Slashdot had a better mechanism for aggregating and displaying and filtering based on public reputation, then I would adjust my settings to render such trolls (possibly a paid professional?) invisible. (I think you're referring to 5161731? Probably just a fresh sock puppet, but I'd also tweak my setting to deal with fresh sock puppets.)
Is there an older account than Caesar's report on dividing and conquering? However the tactic is much older than Rome.
Putin divided and conquered the Democratic Party before he did it to America as a whole. Count me as one of the suckers who was conned into donating to Sanders before the New York primary when I should have donated to the Democratic Party in Michigan.
However Putin doesn't actually deserve much credit for merely harvesting the mindless mushrooms. He just noticed that we'd cultivated a huge crop of them by destroying the public education system. Too bad we did that ourselves with our own American divide and conquer strategy. Now we have a tiny number of good public schools, basically to dangle as hope for the parents who are sufficiently concerned to play that lottery. Most of the schools have become obedience schools you wouldn't send your dog to. The goal is not the creation of wise and thoughtful voters, but docile employees (and inmates) who will obey the ads selling toothpaste or political candidates.
Now for the punchline. I used to think public education was destroyed because stupid (or religious zealot) parents were most concerned with making sure their kids were as stupid as they were, but now I've realized they were just useful idiots. Follow the money. Public education was mostly funded by property taxes, and rich real estate investors (like #PresidentTweety) have always hated property taxes. One way to cut property taxes is by slashing the public schools to death.
You need a sarcasm tag for that one. If you're NOT being too subtle, then the "other threshold" should be set one notch above what you can satisfy.
Let me clarify that I do have the mechanistic perspective of seeing all human beings as UTMs. There is a fundamental equality in that, though each UTM is unique and different. We just have to accept that some of the UTMs are too slow to make the best possible voting decisions on any scheduled election day.
I think this story could have been bundled into the recent story about abuses of technology. We could be using computers to increase our freedoms and give us more and better choices, but over-controlled elections are NOT helping. Why bother to vote when the outcome has already been so heavily manipulated?
Let me focus on the specific problem of gerrymandering that this technology would obviously support (too well). Partisan redistricting has two principles, and both of them are based on predicting how people will vote next time. So far the main data has been prior voting patterns, but this will help YUGEly. Principle 1 is making your districts safe, which usually means a cushion around 5%. Principle 2 is wasting your opponent's votes in concentrated sacrificial districts, which is normally required because you would barely need to tweak the districts if you actually had more voters. The worse abuses of partisan gerrymandering are when actual minorities of the voters get to "win" the legislatures. (We've actually seen that in recent elections for the House of so-called Representatives, thanks to diabolical gerrymandering in such states as Texas.)
So let me switch angles to a possible computer-based solution in two parts:
Part 1: Guest voting. If you don't like your own district (for example because it is so gerrymandered that your vote is meaningless), then you would be able to reject your ballot and vote as a guest in one of the neighboring districts. The more they gerrymander the districts, the MORE options voters would have and the LESS predictable the outcomes of the elections.
Part 2: Allocate the voting power based on the actual outcome of the election. Easiest to make this clear with a simple example using three districts, A, B, and C. Assume half the voters of District A decide to vote as guests in Districts B and C, with one quarter going to each district. Then whoever wins A only gets 1/2 vote in the legislature, and the legislators from B and C get 1-1/4 votes each. The total of the 3 districts is still 3 votes in the legislature, but each voter gets truly equal voting power in the legislature. (Non-voters, too. Each non-voter gets the same 0% representation, but that's true now, too.)
An amusing side effect is that the winner still has incentive to actually represent ALL of the voters who voted for AND against him, because even those negative votes still contributed to his influence in the legislature. Also the voters are motivated to vote because they know they are increasing the voting power in whichever district they pick.
So let me be the first to admit that it will never happen. Certainly not via an evolutionary path, much as I prefer evolution to the alternatives. No "Fantasy" mods on Slashdot, eh?
If I ever saw a mod point, I think I'd give yours a "Funny", though I can't explain why. Substantively, I, too, am amazed that Twitter hasn't gone away. Can I safely defy anyone to name one good or useful thing Twitter has accomplished? Even if you came up with something, I would respond thusly: #PresidentTweety.
My separate comment (above in the discussion, assuming the usual trolls haven't trash-moderated it into invisibility) is much more substantive than this one. However it wasn't prepared for Slashdot, but just pasted in and edited a bit. The level of discussion on today's Slashdot is generally quite comparable to the "best" ( = worst ) of Twitter.
As usual, I searched the comments and found little food for thought. However, the story is still young. Maybe things will improve as the topic matures into beautiful comments? ROFLMAO.
Twitter can't die fast enough.
Amen, brother, but...
The article was much easier to read by looking for what wasn't there: NOTHING about the stock markets or share prices. Actually, there were implicit considerations of the capitalization of the deathwatch companies, but almost no explicit consideration of the financial situations. (There is a little bit in the Uber entry.)
The most vulnerable companies right now are the ones most exposed to burps in the stock prices. Considering how the electronic stock exchanges work these days, you can be sure that there are some burps coming. A useful deathwatch list would consider how much of a stock-price burp it would take to sink the threatened companies.
However the GIGANTIC threat is not a burp, but an actual crash caused by a bursting of the bubble that market caps are now living in. The stock prices have become completely divorced from realities and underlying values and even the companies' wildest dreams. The stock prices are just one computer's "opinion" that some other computer will offer a higher price for the shares. Each computer is programmed to think it's the smartest computer in the world. When has that ever failed!
Face it. Capitalism is deader than communism ever was. What we have now is corporate cancerism and stock prices are like taking the temperature of a tumor. The creed of corporate cancerism is quite simple: There is no Gawd but profit, and is Gawd's prophet. Too many prophets of fake profits are about to spoil the soup.
Pick ANY company. Estimate how volatile the stock price is and what could trigger a big drop. Then look to see who (and whose computer) is ready for the quickest leveraged buyout.
However it would seem that I'm the only person to feel that way so far. I also searched for happy and some related terms. Maybe I should have tried schadenfreude?
Anyway, I'm always delighted to hear about anything that reduces the spam. At the same time, it makes me sad that the email spam problem persists after all these years. I think that's almost entirely due to the "Live and let spam" practices of the major email providers.
If you've been paying attention, then you've noticed that certain categories of spam have been cured. For example, you almost never see pump-and-dump stock scam spam these days. The authorities were able to solve that problem by attacking the scammers business models, and the problem went away.
If you haven't been paying attention, then you haven't noticed how many false positives you've lost over the years. You've still been forced to pay attention to the false negatives, but the main thing about filtering is that the spammers don't mind.
Oh well. I'd be glad to help solve the problem, but my capabilities are too limited in isolation. Feel free to politely ask for more detailed suggestions. Maybe I'll even notice and answer.
And a special tip of the hat to the mindless mushroom moderators who worked so double-plus unhard to prove my main points.
Another highly active topic. Another massive Slashdot fail. However, if I ever had a mod point to give, I might have given it to your comment.
Oh wait. As I understand the broken rules of moderation, if I did that I would be unable to make this comment.
Can anyone remember that the original intention of moderation had something to do with helping you find the kinds of comments you want to read? Maybe there are some "Funny" comments here, but I found none among the few with that mod. A few of the ones moderated "Insightful" did show glimpses of insight, but not much.
My text searches of the visible comments (to evade the broken moderation) focused on "example" and "robot". The "example" search was for aspects of "making an example" of the prankster or of the overly militarized and over-reactive police SWAT teams. The "robot" search was for possible solutions (which was also my main hope from the "Insightful" search).
Your comment is the only visible mention of robot, so I decided to reply here. Enough with the meta. Now to the ACTUAL topic.
I also had the idea of sending in a robot first. However you know that they will wind up arming the robots and then the wrongful deaths will come from programming bugs. Actually, we've already had an example of a robot used to blow up a shooter. Remember that sniper in Dallas? If there were any hostages involved, the robot may well cause their deaths.
Initially my main concern was that they make an example of the prankster, but I'm confident he'll face justice. My newer concern is that the SWAT team also learn something from their mistakes, but I rather doubt that they will.
Time to go meta-rogue again? More searches from that perspective? Naw, today's Slashdot ain't worth the effort and I've already wasted too much time this morning.