https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116382212683078684
Didn't understand this. A search didn't give a helpful AI summary, which meant I had to actually read articles. This has a user poll, but after I voted and tried to give a fake email address, the results did not appear as promised
My system resources when I tried to use a browser that is not 4 years old to click the Continue button, with no better results; green is memory, purple is swap space usage, dark orange is disk reading while bright orange is disk writing (to swap space), 40 pixels = 400 sec:
Just an example of herd-like behavior: everyone has better computers, so resources used by software expands to match, even when the software is used on old computers that have not gotten any better. Just like rent increasing with higher incomes.
“We’ve had 15 to 20 (deminers) lose limbs, and around a dozen of our brothers were killed doing this job.”
A prosthetic limb costs over $3,000, far beyond the means of most survivors.
Background article about ranked voting being good:
https://fairvote.org/americans-think-democracy-isnt-working-ranked-choice-voting-can-help/
Only 19% of people in the US think that the US's democracy is a good example for other countries to follow. From article, "It’s no wonder young voters are among the strongest supporters of RCV."
So why would someone think it's bad? Answer:
Which links to, https://electionscience.org/research-hub/rcv-fools-palin-voters-into-electing-a-progressive-democrat
Instead, Palin voters got their worst outcome because they honestly ranked Palin first.
Assumption behind the argument is that the center candidate not winning is bad, and a critique of ranked-choice voting.
But what it really is, is defining the center candidate as conservative. The problem that people see is not that the center candidate didn't win; it's that someone whom they define as conservative didn't win.
If the goalpost for 'conservative' was changed, without any of the views of the candidates themselves being changed, then the center candidate could be defined as liberal, and the election is about one liberal candidate winning instead of a more central liberal candidate winning.
Should a center candidate always win? They don't in what the first of the above two articles calls plurality voting. The second article says this,
Just go ahead and hold onto those RCV claims. Here they are for reference:
You can always support your favorite without worry
Your second choice will come into play if your first choice can’t win
The winner will always get a majority
(Spoiler: none of these are true. Read on to see why.)
The critique of the third point is that some ballots did not list more than one candidate. But plurality voting also doesn't require that the winner gets a majority; that's why it's called plurality: "A number of votes for a single candidate or position which is greater than the number of votes gained by any other single candidate or position voted for, but which is less than a majority of valid votes cast."
If everyone agreed with the middle candidate in that election being 'conservative', and everyone who voted him preferred that a conservative candidate win over a liberal candidate, then all the votes from the eliminated middle candidate would have swapped to the remaining conservative candidate and she would have won.
It's true that supporters of that candidate would have preferred that the central candidate win, rather than the liberal candidate. But supporters of the liberal candidate preferred that she win over the central candidate. Can't look at this and say it was a bad outcome, because some people didn't get what they wanted, when it was because other people did get what they wanted.
Anyway, the question: should electoral systems choose a middle candidate?
Don't think of it as a single, 1-dimensional spectrum, from left to right. There is at least one other dimension, of a candidate's perceived suitability for a position. This might be competence or just like physical appearance:
https://www.google.com/search?q=data+physically+attractive+candidate+wins
https://wol.iza.org/articles/how-do-candidates-looks-affect-their-election-chances/long
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167268123004109
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pops.12940
(I'm not bothering to read any of these, but my recollection is that it varies a bit between female and male candidates, don't remember why; maybe depends on political orientation of voters, like Republican voters prefer attractive female candidates more)
So, should a very unsuitable candidate who is on the middle of the political spectrum win an election, just because they're in the middle?
What if that Alaskan election had used plurality voting? With the same three candidates, we would probably have gotten the same result, with the liberal candidate winning: so Ranked Choice would not be a threat to democracy as it would not change the outcome. If one of the two candidates that people define as conservative had quit: if the middle candidate had quit, same outcome. If the conservative candidate had quit, the middle candidate would have won. But what would have caused one of those conservative candidates to quit?
Possibility: primaries that allow only one conservative candidate to be in the final election, so it ends up being one conservative and one liberal candidate. Unless liberal voters were participating in the primary election for conservatives (voting for the central candidate), and I don't think this is how it works, then the central candidate would have lost that primary, based on the data. Result: Ranked Choice is still not a threat to democracy.
The correct way to think of the consequences for 'dishonest' tactical voting here are not that conservative voters would have harmed the liberal candidate if they voted for her, instead of the conservative candidate: it's that they would have helped the central candidate by not voting for the conservative candidate. If they wanted this outcome, of helping the central candidate, they could rank the central candidate first and the conservative candidate second.
Assumptions behind the belief that it would be best if a central candidate should win an election: basically, people's beliefs about conflicts, and how elections are supposed to reveal the desires of the majority. Thinking that a compromise candidate will reduce conflict, even the reality could be that they will just produce outcomes that are equally far from what both sides want.
If, instead, one views the political process as a way of testing outcomes to see what works best, then more extreme outcomes provide better data. If central candidates always get elected and policy never changes, then there is no way to judge whether policy should move slightly in one direction vs another direction.
I still basically view it as irrelevant; that no political candidates are identifying the important problems. People look at elections and think that the outcomes must reflect the desires of the majority of people (weighted by money, and not necessarily the best for a country if the majority is basically choosing to 'defect' in a prisoner's dilemma with minority groups, i.e. net loss for the country despite the majority benefiting), but just because politicians have the job of finding a solution that people will like does not mean they'll be successful.
Example, from 2011 because I don't really care about anything that's happened in politics since then: when US Congress raised the debt ceiling and most people thought that they shouldn't because the US was poor. I think of the comments from Yahoo news articles about the raised debt limit that I didn't include in any arguments, where it was like 2000 upvotes saying that the government was corrupt and less than 10 downvotes, but there is at least the survey questions here:
One-Step Plan to Eliminating Unemployment
Second question, first option: "The federal government should spend money to create jobs, even if it means it has to borrow the money to do so". This includes both borrowing money to be able to spend it (with people believing that the money would be borrowed from China, but in actuality most debt was internal, owned by people or companies in the US like the companies with record profits or their shareholders), and also raising taxes and then spending that money, without more debt. So it can be inferred that (if people were consistent in their beliefs, which they aren't) the number of people who wanted more money to be borrowed was less than 42%.
Federal Debt: Total Public Debt was at $14.8 trillion in Q3 2011, and at $38.5 trillion in Q4 2025. Have the actions taken by politicians been in alignment with what's best for the public, or with what people want?
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