You're missing the point. It's the voting system itself that forces the 3rd parties to the fringes, not any inherent weakness of that candidate/party/platform.
Say you have two polar opposite candidates, A and Z, with large (nearly equal) followings (due to cult of personality, name recognition, incumbency, strong party apparatus, whatever). And one middle-of-the-road guy, M, who's not well known or any of that other stuff. In the current system, it's obviously down to A and Z in the runoff stage, and one of them wins in the general.
But in a system where voters can describe their preferences more completely, the A folks would obviously rank their choices A, M, Z. The Z supporters would rank their choices Z, M, A. The (few) M voters would choose either M, Z, A or M, A, Z - let's say that's an almost even split.
Now let's analyze who is the most preferred.
Comparing A to Z is almost a wash...depending on how exactly the M voters break, how good the turnout is, etc...it's not clear which would win. Might as well choose between them randomly. Let's say A, 50.1 to 49.9.
Comparing A to M, we see that all the Z voters would rather have M than A, so there's clearly a numeric advantage for M (55 to 45 for the sake of discussion).
Comparing M to Z is similar - all the A voters would rather take M than Z, so M wins again. (55 to 45 again.)
So really, Mr. Moderate is the most preferred. But your system would write him off at the first step. And his policies would arguably be better for the people overall, since they would not completely alienate large blocks of the populace. Remember, plurality voting is just that - plurality. You may "win" with 45%, but that means that 55% do not want you. Not necessarily a ringing endorsement, is it? You can artificially winnow the field down to two candidates so you never have that problem, but is that really honest? Having to do that points to a different problem that you're not really solving.
Under our current system, the M voters would say "Why bother, because we can't win. Suppose I better not ``throw my vote away`` supporting my true preference, but instead vote the lesser-of-two-evils, even though there's not much difference between them." Any system that suborns honest voting for tactical considerations is a bad system!
The inherent problem with preferential/runoff voting, is that it throws away part of the voters' preferences at every step. How can your vote be accurately summed up if part of it is throw out? You have to evaluate all the voter's preferences simultaneously, not sequentially. That's why you need a Condorcet method. Same voting casting, different vote counting, that doesn't discard any portion of your preference.
I do think moving away from a winner-take-all system is a good idea, I'm really getting tired of the two party system, and winner-take-all makes anything else impossible.
Where's the ARM-based mini-ATX boards? I thought ARM netbooks were supposed to be taking the market by storm in 2010, so small form ARM mobos couldn't be far behind. I've yet to see either.
Government, not private industry, created the conditions for the scenario to happen. So yeah, when gov't screws up, private business has to fix it, and sometimes it takes awhile.
Similarly, Exxon Valdez was caused because gov't, caving to environmentalist pressure, decided to block construction of a pipeline across land, creating the possibility of more shipping disasters.
With all the gov't meddling, regulation, and bungling, it's amazing private business manages to get anything worthwhile accomplished.
Awesomebar is symbolic for all that is wrong with Firefox.
Such as how it is growing into a behemoth like the Mozilla Suite, which it was supposed to be the "slimmed-down replacement" for? It's not as bad as it could be...imagine if the 25 or 50 most popular plugins were built in (including the 20-45 that you personally have no use for)...but it would be great if things like "awesomebar" could be a plugin, too.
The only hope you have of overturning it is, ironically, with a variation of the 10th Amendment; the argument that in this case, a state is usurping a federal role, not the other way around.
Only, in this case, the state is resuming the authority that it delegated to the federal government when joining the union. If the FedGov is abdicating its role, the States have an obligation to their citizens to fulfill it. That's a strength of a two-tiered federal system like this. Hopefully at least one will stand up for the citizens and tell the other to bug off if it's out of line.
I've been using Netscape and then Thunderbird for news since the mid-90s. What Cox provided has been fine for the past several years. Most other people have been drifting to web forums, so I've (reluctantly) followed. But I think NNTP is a lot simpler and can do the job just as well. Time was that Usenet wasn't a premium service, it was considered pretty basic, like email.
News readers are a lot more lightweight than web browsers, can deal with the format intelligently. That's what I'll miss when Cox (my ISP) drops Usenet. How big are browsers now, to make use of the all the funky Ajax features, that basically just simulate what I could do with trn in a terminal window 20 years ago?
Didn't older Unixen have a 8-char password length limitation? Did that actually prevent the entry of > 8 chars, or just truncate the input to 8 and use only that?
That's just another good reason to uncouple health insurance from employment. Most of us need transportation to get to work. Do we expect our employer to provide car insurance? But nobody's screaming about a car insurance dilemma. Maybe that's because that model, a contract directly between you and your insurer without third-party involvement, actually works better.
I'd like to see a NetBSD powered ARM tablet, myself. Or ARM netbook. My guess is you could squeeze it in a smaller footprint, thus have more resources for user apps.
What if the guy walked away from his car, and his step-kid hopped in, started it up, and killed herself in a crash? That's more like the situation here.
A felony gun charge means this man won't ever be able to legally own a gun again. That's a good thing as far as I can tell.
So, a man who does not intentionally do anything wrong--no malice aforethought--deserves to be stripped of effective self-defense tools for the rest of his life? Because of a lapse of judgment that will already be haunting him for the rest of his life? Say what you want about step-parents being less concerned with their step-children, but it is not easy for anyone with any conscience at all to take a life, even in justified self-defense. For most people, being responsible for the death of another person weighs very heavily upon them.
I use gccfss and it's great. Handles GNU-ish code, and yields highly-optimized binaries. Unfortunately (for me), the last available version for Sol9 has a nasty bug in it that the team has no intention of fixing.
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You're missing the point. It's the voting system itself that forces the 3rd parties to the fringes, not any inherent weakness of that candidate/party/platform.
Say you have two polar opposite candidates, A and Z, with large (nearly equal) followings (due to cult of personality, name recognition, incumbency, strong party apparatus, whatever). And one middle-of-the-road guy, M, who's not well known or any of that other stuff. In the current system, it's obviously down to A and Z in the runoff stage, and one of them wins in the general.
But in a system where voters can describe their preferences more completely, the A folks would obviously rank their choices A, M, Z. The Z supporters would rank their choices Z, M, A. The (few) M voters would choose either M, Z, A or M, A, Z - let's say that's an almost even split.
Now let's analyze who is the most preferred.
Comparing A to Z is almost a wash...depending on how exactly the M voters break, how good the turnout is, etc...it's not clear which would win. Might as well choose between them randomly. Let's say A, 50.1 to 49.9.
Comparing A to M, we see that all the Z voters would rather have M than A, so there's clearly a numeric advantage for M (55 to 45 for the sake of discussion).
Comparing M to Z is similar - all the A voters would rather take M than Z, so M wins again. (55 to 45 again.)
So really, Mr. Moderate is the most preferred. But your system would write him off at the first step. And his policies would arguably be better for the people overall, since they would not completely alienate large blocks of the populace. Remember, plurality voting is just that - plurality. You may "win" with 45%, but that means that 55% do not want you. Not necessarily a ringing endorsement, is it? You can artificially winnow the field down to two candidates so you never have that problem, but is that really honest? Having to do that points to a different problem that you're not really solving.
Under our current system, the M voters would say "Why bother, because we can't win. Suppose I better not ``throw my vote away`` supporting my true preference, but instead vote the lesser-of-two-evils, even though there's not much difference between them." Any system that suborns honest voting for tactical considerations is a bad system!
The inherent problem with preferential/runoff voting, is that it throws away part of the voters' preferences at every step. How can your vote be accurately summed up if part of it is throw out? You have to evaluate all the voter's preferences simultaneously, not sequentially. That's why you need a Condorcet method. Same voting casting, different vote counting, that doesn't discard any portion of your preference.
Condorcet method, FTW!
Condorcet voting, FTW!
Where's the ARM-based mini-ATX boards? I thought ARM netbooks were supposed to be taking the market by storm in 2010, so small form ARM mobos couldn't be far behind. I've yet to see either.
Government, not private industry, created the conditions for the scenario to happen. So yeah, when gov't screws up, private business has to fix it, and sometimes it takes awhile.
Similarly, Exxon Valdez was caused because gov't, caving to environmentalist pressure, decided to block construction of a pipeline across land, creating the possibility of more shipping disasters.
With all the gov't meddling, regulation, and bungling, it's amazing private business manages to get anything worthwhile accomplished.
Such as how it is growing into a behemoth like the Mozilla Suite, which it was supposed to be the "slimmed-down replacement" for? It's not as bad as it could be...imagine if the 25 or 50 most popular plugins were built in (including the 20-45 that you personally have no use for)...but it would be great if things like "awesomebar" could be a plugin, too.
Only, in this case, the state is resuming the authority that it delegated to the federal government when joining the union. If the FedGov is abdicating its role, the States have an obligation to their citizens to fulfill it. That's a strength of a two-tiered federal system like this. Hopefully at least one will stand up for the citizens and tell the other to bug off if it's out of line.
If you're going to say such things, at least post some URLs...
And here I was just wondering if I could find an ARM-based mini-ITX board for a project. I didn't think I'd be seeing an Apple logo on it, though.
I've been using Netscape and then Thunderbird for news since the mid-90s. What Cox provided has been fine for the past several years. Most other people have been drifting to web forums, so I've (reluctantly) followed. But I think NNTP is a lot simpler and can do the job just as well. Time was that Usenet wasn't a premium service, it was considered pretty basic, like email.
News readers are a lot more lightweight than web browsers, can deal with the format intelligently. That's what I'll miss when Cox (my ISP) drops Usenet. How big are browsers now, to make use of the all the funky Ajax features, that basically just simulate what I could do with trn in a terminal window 20 years ago?
Didn't older Unixen have a 8-char password length limitation? Did that actually prevent the entry of > 8 chars, or just truncate the input to 8 and use only that?
Lame, that, BTW.
That's just another good reason to uncouple health insurance from employment. Most of us need transportation to get to work. Do we expect our employer to provide car insurance? But nobody's screaming about a car insurance dilemma. Maybe that's because that model, a contract directly between you and your insurer without third-party involvement, actually works better.
I'd like to see a NetBSD powered ARM tablet, myself. Or ARM netbook. My guess is you could squeeze it in a smaller footprint, thus have more resources for user apps.
Whence do you derive a positive right to safety?
There were 40,150 vehicular deaths in 1993 as well.
Guns are about the right to self-defense. You know, protecting the right to life itself. Cars are "only" about the right to travel freely.
What if the guy walked away from his car, and his step-kid hopped in, started it up, and killed herself in a crash? That's more like the situation here.
So, a man who does not intentionally do anything wrong--no malice aforethought--deserves to be stripped of effective self-defense tools for the rest of his life? Because of a lapse of judgment that will already be haunting him for the rest of his life? Say what you want about step-parents being less concerned with their step-children, but it is not easy for anyone with any conscience at all to take a life, even in justified self-defense. For most people, being responsible for the death of another person weighs very heavily upon them.
Never buy the 1.0 model...
I'd be happy with 4.3.0, or maybe even 4.2.1...stuck at 4.2.0 now. The __ffssi2 bug bites me occasionally.
I use gccfss and it's great. Handles GNU-ish code, and yields highly-optimized binaries. Unfortunately (for me), the last available version for Sol9 has a nasty bug in it that the team has no intention of fixing.
The way we're pinching pennies at my house in this economy...yes it is.
Good enough for me.
Unless I'm ripping a ringtone for my phone, then it's 64 kb/s MP3. I tried dropping it to 48, but it became truly, truly horrid.