this "endorsement" does not reflect the actual preferences of the voter, it reflects a hope that the party will treat their vote with respect.
It reflects the fact that they didn't even bother to lookup how their party's preferences would be distributed - that is, they were apathetic about their vote. That's what happens when you compel a few million people to vote.
No one I know who voted above the line, and that includes our prof (Law), is apathetic nor was their vote necessarily "ill-thought-out."
Then, since they cared and were informed, they would have checked where their chosen party's preference flows would have gone, and presumably, were happy with that.
Voting above the line doesn't mean you were apathetic and or unthinking - voting above the line and then bitching that your preferences went where you didn't want them to go is.
What we need is a system that allows voters to express their preferences. Our (federal) voting system no longer achieves this objective. The option to vote preferentially above the line, possibly non-exhaustively, would go some way to repairing this.
I agree. But if there's a move for senate reform, you know what we're actually going to get is something that makes it more difficult for minor parties to register, or win an election.
It's not like doing dodgy preference deals is anything new; the major parties have been doing it forever - like the Labor party endorsing the ideologically-opposed "Rise Up Australia" party, or the Greens (well, they're sort of major) preferencing the "Climate Skeptics" party. This blow-up isn't about dodgy preference deals, it's about the "wrong people" being elected, where "wrong" means "not aligned to one of the major parties".
As are individual Liberal Party members (Malcolm Turnbull, for instance). There's a streak of libertarian influence in the Australian Liberal Party, too (economic conservatism). It just lacks the social aspects.
That means that we will have a senator elected not on the will of the people (or any significant portion thereof), but as a result of ballot orderings made by political parties and preference exchange deals made between parties.
Uh, no. A vote above the line means "I endorse this party's preference list". It's just as valid a set of preferences as if you vote below the line. Just because it's an ill-thought-out, apathetic vote doesn't mean it's not valid.
And if you need to remove ill-thought-out, apathetic votes from the system, you should probably start by not compelling apathetic people to vote in the first place. Most of these issues (people taking shortcuts on preferences, donkey votes, people being confused by names) derive from the fact that most people voting just don't give a stuff.
I voted below the line, but I didn't know what half the parties were. I think I allocated my first 30 or so votes based on who I actually wanted in, went backwards from 110 for the ones I really didn't want, put Labor and Liberal somewhere in the middle, and all the rest were more or less arbitrary.
We can definitely improve the system (optional preferential vote, preferences above the line, etc), but all the complaints that the minor parties were cheating because people didn't want to allocate their preferences is just dumb. Moreover, the system that encourages that sort of behaviour was implemented by the major parties (albeit, none of the actual members of those parties now up for election) not the minor parties. What do they expect the minor parties to do? Just not allocate their preferences cause it might be too confusing?
No, I think most parties still give their ideological partners high placement. There's some exceptions in that, if a popular party offers to do a preference swap (ie: they preference you highly, and you preference them highly) you might put them above someone close to you ideologically, but less popular.
In reality, there aren't any ideologically-compatible parties that are close enough to the majors to be real competitors (closest is the Greens with Labor, and they're not all that compatible, and are far from being a real competitor to Labor).
The issue people have with preferences, is that it's hard to see where they go, because when minor parties preference each other, there's a lot of churn, because they are frequently eliminated from the race. Their votes might end up with someone ideologically opposed to them, just because their preferences have to go somewhere.
That's likely what happened with the Sports party in this election. All the minor parties directed their preferences to Sports before they directed them to the major parties, because that's just what they do - preference minors before majors. After all, they're trying to break the duopoly the majors hold. It's just that because all the minor parties directed their preferences to Sports (because they were basically harmless and unlikely to win) the confluence pushed them far up enough to take the vote.
But you know what the ultimate solution is if you're not happy with how your party distributes your preferences? Vote below the line, and distribute them yourself. Yeah, it takes longer than one vote above the line. Democracy is worth 10 minutes of your time.
If the PUP candidates "bought" their seats, then so did every Labor and Liberal candidate - both the major parties spent far more on advertising than PUP did. The only difference was that a significant fraction of the major party's advertising was paid for by the state.
To be honest, Wikileaks shot themselves in the foot with the NSW preferences scandal and ensuing fall-out.
For those who don't know, one of the state branches of the Wikileaks defied the party leadership, and lodged their ballot paper in NSW giving preferences to the conservative parties instead of to the progressive parties the leadership had decided on. A significant number of highly ranked members left the party because of it.
They used the system as it was designed to be used. The major's are just pissed because they intended that it only be them that got to play that game. If you want electoral reform, you need to be elected under the corrupt system before you can vote to change it. Refusing to participate accomplishes nothing.
There's three reasons for that: - The lower house determines who the PM is, which is the thing everyone really wants to know - We only elect half the Senate at a time, so there's less of a shift than there is in the lower house where everything's up for grabs - The new Senators don't take their seats for almost a year
Yeah, only the major parties should be allowed to manipulate preferences - like Liberal directing all preferences away from the Greens to try and unseat them in Melbourne.
I think perhaps the most egregious outcome is the probable election of a WA Senator who received less the 0.25% of the primary vote!
As much as I like exhaustive preferential voting on principle, the time has come to give voters the right to vote optionally preferentially above the line (if not also below it), so that votes are not cast against the voters actual preferences.
I am totally for optional preferences above the line, but I think it's dubious to think of the primary vote as somehow indicative of a party's validity. We have a preferential system for a reason, and that's because first-past-the-post is unrepresentative - it forces the vote into a two-party system.
We need to get people allocating their preferences themselves, not suggesting that preferences are somehow less valid that the primary vote.
Actually, the reason we don't have a republic was that the referendum was Monarchy vs Republic with a Politically-Appointed President, which eliminated anyone who wanted a popularly elected president from the debate.
Since they do not create new markets they are taking sales from somebody, which means they are driving their competition out of business.
Well, yes. Every business ever does that, or dies. There is a finite amount of money. If your cash flow is increasing, there's money being spent on your products/services that isn't being spent on other companies. This hold true even if they are create new markets. There's always something that money isn't buying.
Which would be highly illegal, and very difficult to un-do. I don't know that Bezos is actually gonna do anything quite this unethical/illegal, but I'm not entirely comfortable just trusting him to not be evil.
Which puts you in a bit of a bind, cause that's pretty much the basis of society. I don't know my neighbour's not going to burn my house down when I'm a way; I don't know that the guy down the road isn't going to shoot me as I walk past his house. I have to trust them not to be evil. I can't just go getting them pre-emptively arrested because they have the capacity to do me harm.
In many cases they actually continue to cultivate consumers long after they become monopolies, by screwing everyone else in their industry. For example, if Amazon sells all the stuff it wants to sell it will have a huge proportion of the of the shipping market in the country it could easily drive either UPS or FedEx out of business, so it can demand massive price cuts from them.
Amazon can't actually drive UPS or FedEx out of business, or their logistics would shut down and they'd fail. Sure, they can put pressure on them to drop prices, but that's exactly what the system is designed to do - it forces prices to the the equilibrium point where they are as low as possible, while still being high enough to keep the provider afloat. In this situation, if either one of UPS or FedEx are driven out of business because they can't operate as efficiently as the other, then that's a feature, not a bug.
Now you're right that abusive use of monopoly power can harm consumers - that's why we have anti-trust laws. But there's nothing wrong or deserving of punishment about gaining a monopoly by dint of out-competing your competitors, and punishing people before they've done anything wrong is contrary to the fundamental principles of justice. You say it's difficult to un-do a monopoly, but it's been done many times in fairly recent history.
As for Amazon, my complaint was more that Amazon was on the verge of engaging in anticompetitive practices by leveraging their monopsony in the wholesale market to destroy the publishers, which would, in turn, boost their own self-published eBooks business.
You mean, Amazon was guilty of precrime? It wasn't what they had done, it was what you feared they might do.
Blergh, I got my model numbers wrong. I meant N800, N810 and N900. That's what I get for posting at 2am.
Besides which, I qualified my statement with "what we now consider" smart phones deliberately. Smart phone is a marketing label that's meant many different things over the years. The original http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericsson_R380">Smartphone would be considered a feature phone these days.
Nokia's first internet tablet, the N770 was released in 2005, 2 years before the iPhone. It had the same basic idea as an iPhone, Nokia just never gave it the polish, the attention to detail or the simple, user-friendly UI which all combined to make Apple's offering a deal-breaker.
I don't know what you're talking about - Nokia's early foray into what we now consider smartphones was with stuff like the n880 and n890. They didn't even *have* phone capacity. It wasn't until the n900 that they added phone capacity into what had been, up until then, basically glorified PDAs.
Yep, nobody cared about aluminium bodies, or capacitive gorilla glass screens. What the non-tech savy majority wanted was Apple's in-house operating system - that's what did the trick.
Android isn't a phone - it's an Operating System. You can innovate (blergh, I hate that word) at the hardware level, while using the industry standard to stay competitive in software. Especially if, as with Nokia, your strength has historically been with hardware rather than software.
Press and hold the main Android button to open up the list of all running programs for easy switching between them. I haven't used an N9, but the difference in speed between swipe-and-tap, and press-and-tap can't be particularly huge.
Listen up and listen up good. There are plenty of things I do that I prefer not to do and screw you if you think I just have to suck it up with out doing what ever I can do to change it and if I bloody wish, spend the rest of my life continuing to attempt to change it.
Whilst the GMail user has agreed to have the privacy reamed the other person or persons at the end of the email or those who replay to a GMail address have not, thus an extreme invasion of privacy.
If you send an email to gmail.com, gmail.com can read it. Is this really a big surprise in a technical forum? In fact, gmail.com must be able to read the email in order to deliver it to the right mailbox. It must be able to read the body of the email if you want it to perform spam detection. It's the same for pretty much every domain, as almost everyone uses some form of spam detection.
Only the naive or the wilfully ignorant could claim that they didn't expect Google to be able to read emails sent to their servers (or Microsoft/Hotmail, Yahoo, etc)
so at which point does the sender own the rights to privacy
Until they voluntarily transmit it onto another computer system.
Especially consider this on the reply, fuck Google, just because I send an email to a GMail address does absolutely not mean, I gave them the right to have my privacy reamed by the to their greedy and perverted little heart's content.
Yes, yes it does. If you don't sending your emails to Google, don't send your emails to Google. If you want to use their services (including communicating with their account holders), you abide by their conditions.
Slashdot Mirror
this "endorsement" does not reflect the actual preferences of the voter, it reflects a hope that the party will treat their vote with respect.
It reflects the fact that they didn't even bother to lookup how their party's preferences would be distributed - that is, they were apathetic about their vote. That's what happens when you compel a few million people to vote.
No one I know who voted above the line, and that includes our prof (Law), is apathetic nor was their vote necessarily "ill-thought-out."
Then, since they cared and were informed, they would have checked where their chosen party's preference flows would have gone, and presumably, were happy with that.
Voting above the line doesn't mean you were apathetic and or unthinking - voting above the line and then bitching that your preferences went where you didn't want them to go is.
What we need is a system that allows voters to express their preferences. Our (federal) voting system no longer achieves this objective. The option to vote preferentially above the line, possibly non-exhaustively, would go some way to repairing this.
I agree. But if there's a move for senate reform, you know what we're actually going to get is something that makes it more difficult for minor parties to register, or win an election.
It's not like doing dodgy preference deals is anything new; the major parties have been doing it forever - like the Labor party endorsing the ideologically-opposed "Rise Up Australia" party, or the Greens (well, they're sort of major) preferencing the "Climate Skeptics" party. This blow-up isn't about dodgy preference deals, it's about the "wrong people" being elected, where "wrong" means "not aligned to one of the major parties".
As are individual Liberal Party members (Malcolm Turnbull, for instance). There's a streak of libertarian influence in the Australian Liberal Party, too (economic conservatism). It just lacks the social aspects.
Exactly. Which is why they're closer to Republicans than the Liberal Democrats, who have.
You:
The Parent said Liberals i.e. the Liberal Party, not the Liberal Democrats.
GP:
And this Liberal Democratic party is closer to your republicans.
You're wrong.
That means that we will have a senator elected not on the will of the people (or any significant portion thereof), but as a result of ballot orderings made by political parties and preference exchange deals made between parties.
Uh, no. A vote above the line means "I endorse this party's preference list". It's just as valid a set of preferences as if you vote below the line. Just because it's an ill-thought-out, apathetic vote doesn't mean it's not valid.
And if you need to remove ill-thought-out, apathetic votes from the system, you should probably start by not compelling apathetic people to vote in the first place. Most of these issues (people taking shortcuts on preferences, donkey votes, people being confused by names) derive from the fact that most people voting just don't give a stuff.
I voted below the line, but I didn't know what half the parties were. I think I allocated my first 30 or so votes based on who I actually wanted in, went backwards from 110 for the ones I really didn't want, put Labor and Liberal somewhere in the middle, and all the rest were more or less arbitrary.
We can definitely improve the system (optional preferential vote, preferences above the line, etc), but all the complaints that the minor parties were cheating because people didn't want to allocate their preferences is just dumb. Moreover, the system that encourages that sort of behaviour was implemented by the major parties (albeit, none of the actual members of those parties now up for election) not the minor parties. What do they expect the minor parties to do? Just not allocate their preferences cause it might be too confusing?
No, I think most parties still give their ideological partners high placement. There's some exceptions in that, if a popular party offers to do a preference swap (ie: they preference you highly, and you preference them highly) you might put them above someone close to you ideologically, but less popular.
In reality, there aren't any ideologically-compatible parties that are close enough to the majors to be real competitors (closest is the Greens with Labor, and they're not all that compatible, and are far from being a real competitor to Labor).
The issue people have with preferences, is that it's hard to see where they go, because when minor parties preference each other, there's a lot of churn, because they are frequently eliminated from the race. Their votes might end up with someone ideologically opposed to them, just because their preferences have to go somewhere.
That's likely what happened with the Sports party in this election. All the minor parties directed their preferences to Sports before they directed them to the major parties, because that's just what they do - preference minors before majors. After all, they're trying to break the duopoly the majors hold. It's just that because all the minor parties directed their preferences to Sports (because they were basically harmless and unlikely to win) the confluence pushed them far up enough to take the vote.
But you know what the ultimate solution is if you're not happy with how your party distributes your preferences? Vote below the line, and distribute them yourself. Yeah, it takes longer than one vote above the line. Democracy is worth 10 minutes of your time.
If the PUP candidates "bought" their seats, then so did every Labor and Liberal candidate - both the major parties spent far more on advertising than PUP did. The only difference was that a significant fraction of the major party's advertising was paid for by the state.
To be honest, Wikileaks shot themselves in the foot with the NSW preferences scandal and ensuing fall-out.
For those who don't know, one of the state branches of the Wikileaks defied the party leadership, and lodged their ballot paper in NSW giving preferences to the conservative parties instead of to the progressive parties the leadership had decided on. A significant number of highly ranked members left the party because of it.
They used the system as it was designed to be used. The major's are just pissed because they intended that it only be them that got to play that game. If you want electoral reform, you need to be elected under the corrupt system before you can vote to change it. Refusing to participate accomplishes nothing.
There's three reasons for that:
- The lower house determines who the PM is, which is the thing everyone really wants to know
- We only elect half the Senate at a time, so there's less of a shift than there is in the lower house where everything's up for grabs
- The new Senators don't take their seats for almost a year
Yeah, only the major parties should be allowed to manipulate preferences - like Liberal directing all preferences away from the Greens to try and unseat them in Melbourne.
I think perhaps the most egregious outcome is the probable election of a WA Senator who received less the 0.25% of the primary vote!
As much as I like exhaustive preferential voting on principle, the time has come to give voters the right to vote optionally preferentially above the line (if not also below it), so that votes are not cast against the voters actual preferences.
I am totally for optional preferences above the line, but I think it's dubious to think of the primary vote as somehow indicative of a party's validity. We have a preferential system for a reason, and that's because first-past-the-post is unrepresentative - it forces the vote into a two-party system.
We need to get people allocating their preferences themselves, not suggesting that preferences are somehow less valid that the primary vote.
Actually, the reason we don't have a republic was that the referendum was Monarchy vs Republic with a Politically-Appointed President, which eliminated anyone who wanted a popularly elected president from the debate.
The Australian Liberals are closer to the US Republicans.
Unless I'm mistaken, the Republicans haven't been campaigning on a platform of drug legalisation and gay marriage of late...
Since they do not create new markets they are taking sales from somebody, which means they are driving their competition out of business.
Well, yes. Every business ever does that, or dies. There is a finite amount of money. If your cash flow is increasing, there's money being spent on your products/services that isn't being spent on other companies. This hold true even if they are create new markets. There's always something that money isn't buying.
Which would be highly illegal, and very difficult to un-do. I don't know that Bezos is actually gonna do anything quite this unethical/illegal, but I'm not entirely comfortable just trusting him to not be evil.
Which puts you in a bit of a bind, cause that's pretty much the basis of society. I don't know my neighbour's not going to burn my house down when I'm a way; I don't know that the guy down the road isn't going to shoot me as I walk past his house. I have to trust them not to be evil. I can't just go getting them pre-emptively arrested because they have the capacity to do me harm.
In many cases they actually continue to cultivate consumers long after they become monopolies, by screwing everyone else in their industry. For example, if Amazon sells all the stuff it wants to sell it will have a huge proportion of the of the shipping market in the country it could easily drive either UPS or FedEx out of business, so it can demand massive price cuts from them.
Amazon can't actually drive UPS or FedEx out of business, or their logistics would shut down and they'd fail. Sure, they can put pressure on them to drop prices, but that's exactly what the system is designed to do - it forces prices to the the equilibrium point where they are as low as possible, while still being high enough to keep the provider afloat. In this situation, if either one of UPS or FedEx are driven out of business because they can't operate as efficiently as the other, then that's a feature, not a bug.
Now you're right that abusive use of monopoly power can harm consumers - that's why we have anti-trust laws. But there's nothing wrong or deserving of punishment about gaining a monopoly by dint of out-competing your competitors, and punishing people before they've done anything wrong is contrary to the fundamental principles of justice. You say it's difficult to un-do a monopoly, but it's been done many times in fairly recent history.
As for Amazon, my complaint was more that Amazon was on the verge of engaging in anticompetitive practices by leveraging their monopsony in the wholesale market to destroy the publishers, which would, in turn, boost their own self-published eBooks business.
You mean, Amazon was guilty of precrime? It wasn't what they had done, it was what you feared they might do.
Blergh, I got my model numbers wrong. I meant N800, N810 and N900. That's what I get for posting at 2am.
Besides which, I qualified my statement with "what we now consider" smart phones deliberately. Smart phone is a marketing label that's meant many different things over the years. The original http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericsson_R380">Smartphone would be considered a feature phone these days.
Nokia's first internet tablet, the N770 was released in 2005, 2 years before the iPhone. It had the same basic idea as an iPhone, Nokia just never gave it the polish, the attention to detail or the simple, user-friendly UI which all combined to make Apple's offering a deal-breaker.
I don't know what you're talking about - Nokia's early foray into what we now consider smartphones was with stuff like the n880 and n890. They didn't even *have* phone capacity. It wasn't until the n900 that they added phone capacity into what had been, up until then, basically glorified PDAs.
Yep, nobody cared about aluminium bodies, or capacitive gorilla glass screens. What the non-tech savy majority wanted was Apple's in-house operating system - that's what did the trick.
Android isn't a phone - it's an Operating System. You can innovate (blergh, I hate that word) at the hardware level, while using the industry standard to stay competitive in software. Especially if, as with Nokia, your strength has historically been with hardware rather than software.
Press and hold the main Android button to open up the list of all running programs for easy switching between them. I haven't used an N9, but the difference in speed between swipe-and-tap, and press-and-tap can't be particularly huge.
What's incredible is that I haven't seen any mention of the shareholders or board of directors attempting to sue Elop's ass off for malfeasance.
Listen up and listen up good. There are plenty of things I do that I prefer not to do and screw you if you think I just have to suck it up with out doing what ever I can do to change it and if I bloody wish, spend the rest of my life continuing to attempt to change it.
Yep. You give those windmills what for, Quixote.
Whilst the GMail user has agreed to have the privacy reamed the other person or persons at the end of the email or those who replay to a GMail address have not, thus an extreme invasion of privacy.
If you send an email to gmail.com, gmail.com can read it. Is this really a big surprise in a technical forum? In fact, gmail.com must be able to read the email in order to deliver it to the right mailbox. It must be able to read the body of the email if you want it to perform spam detection. It's the same for pretty much every domain, as almost everyone uses some form of spam detection.
Only the naive or the wilfully ignorant could claim that they didn't expect Google to be able to read emails sent to their servers (or Microsoft/Hotmail, Yahoo, etc)
so at which point does the sender own the rights to privacy
Until they voluntarily transmit it onto another computer system.
Especially consider this on the reply, fuck Google, just because I send an email to a GMail address does absolutely not mean, I gave them the right to have my privacy reamed by the to their greedy and perverted little heart's content.
Yes, yes it does. If you don't sending your emails to Google, don't send your emails to Google. If you want to use their services (including communicating with their account holders), you abide by their conditions.