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Comment Re:Approval voting or Run-off voting. (Score 1) 163

I will argue that it [run-off voting] may be better, but still has problems (e.g., a centrist candidate who would beat either of two opposite wing candidates on a one-on-one election could be eliminated in the first round).

This happened twice in Alaska's congressional race with ranked choice voting.

If you want to do something about the current voting system give everybody a $500 refundable tax credit for voting so we have almost 100% turnout of eligible voters. Campaigns would need to persuade people instead of focusing on turning out their supporters.

Interesting, but tends to make a different problem worse. There is no actual individual incentive for voters to devote time and energy to becoming knowledgeable about candidates and issues. This would tend to increase the number of apathetic voters, rather than knowledgable voters.

If you want to do something about our unrepresentative house of representatives ratify the original proposed First amendment that was never ratified. It limited house districts to 50,000 people.

You want six thousand representatives?!?

I would have said that the problem with the House of Representatives is exactly the opposite: it has too many members, not too few. As for the original constitution, the first congress with all 13 states had 65 representatives. That's already a large number for an organization to debate rationally, but way better than what we now have, 435. That's unmanageable.

We need to drop the number of representatives, not increase it. (Likewise senate).

If passed there would be a group of over 6000 citizens whose approval would be required on legislation. They would not only represent us, they would be far more representative. As it is, every person in congress is part of a wealthy elite. The base salary in congress is almost three times the median household income. They aren't remotely connected to the typical American's lifestyle. And the typical citizen has no real access to them when they each represent almost a million people.

A congress of 6,800 members would mean each member would have pretty close to zero weight. And you wouldn't be able to pay them, so this would be a volunteer congress of part-timers who can afford to be not paid. They would never meet together, but that's ok, since there's no way 6,800 people could have a reasonable discussion.

I'd think this a worst case solution.

Comment Re:That secure feeling. (Score 1) 22

If they're using the enclaves built into Intel and AMD, there may be side-channel issues to deal with. ARM is closer to what Apple is trying with their enclave.

ARM's TrustZone is definitely more secure than the alternatives on Intel/AMD, but TrustZone is also subject to side-channel attacks. To a first approximation, it's impossible to run two workloads on the same CPU and keep them perfectly isolated from one another.

However, I don't think any of these secure enclave concepts are relevant in this case. The way you'd build a private AI cloud is not to run it in enclaves (which are essentially just security-focused VMs) on CPUs that are running other tasks, the way you'd do it is to devote a bunch of CPUs solely to running the private AI workloads. Then your isolation problem becomes the traditional ones of physical access control to the secure machines and securing data flowing into and out of those machines over network connections.

Comment Approval voting or Run-off voting. (Score 1) 163

Thanks for the reply. I'd point out that other countries with plurality-elections have managed to acquire more than two dominant (well, prominent) political parties. See Canada, for example.

Canada is a parliamentary system. Turns out to behave differently.

As for alternatives to plurality, approval voting might be better. Instant-runoff ranking might be even better still, but would require some changes to existing voting processes, and education of the electorate. Arrow's Impossibility Theorem shows that no voting method can be perfectly fair in all situations. However, I recall that runoffs are the best compromise.

Arrow's theorem doesn't actually cover approval voting, since it doesn't quite fit the requirements (short answer, Arrow's theorem has a built-in assumption that the choice function is deterministic based on individual voters' ordered preferences, while approval voting adds an additional voter preference that is not deterministic, the cut-off between "like" and "dislike". You can model this as an additional parameter, but all the ways I know of to modify Arrow's theorem in this way have problems.) Nevertheless, the basic point of Arrow's theorem is important: don't try to find a system that's perfect in every possible case, just look for one that works better in real-world cases.

Run-off voting is, indeed, much better than plurality-takes-all. I will argue that it may be better, but still has problems (e.g., a centrist candidate who would beat either of two opposite wing candidates on a one-on-one election could be eliminated in the first round). But, possibly more important, approval voting completely utterly simple.

Another system that is straightforward is simple numerical scoring: everybody scores all the candidates from zero to 10, and you add up all the scores, highest number wins. That is also trivial to explain. Fast to count votes (only one pass, consisting of addition) but can't be done without modifying existing equipment. (Oddly, this is mathematically identical to approval voting if voters are perfectly rational. But voters aren't, of course.)

Comment Re: the world should reward them (Score 1) 163

The US is a two party system.

I know what you mean, but strictly speaking, it's not a "system."

It is the net result of Duverger's law, which is a consequence of the voting system where the plurality takes all; which tends to suppress third parties.

If you want to see more than a binary choice, advocate for a system that does not squeeze out third parties. My choice would approval voting, a system which has the advantage of not needing any change whatsoever in the existing voting process, only requiring removing the current constraint that if a person votes for more than one candidate, their vote is discarded.

Comment Re:Woke AI education is now a thing :o (Score 5, Insightful) 62

"Woke" simply means "I'm conservative, and the thing I'm calling 'Woke' is something that I hate". It has no well-defined meaning beyond that. I've heard things as diverse as "the concept of the Metaverse" and "removing copyrighted content so you don't get sued" described as "woke".

Comment Re:Poor design, not impossible (Score 0) 88

A practical issue with a circle is that it is not a circle until it is finished,

That's not the reason at all, AFAIK. The reasoning is, okay, we want people to be able to move from one place to some distance place in the city at the maximum comfortable speed, which is limited by G-forces. You have some guaranteed G-forces from first accelerating and then decelerating. But if it's linear, that's your only G forces. If it's curved, however, you also have radial G-forces.

The Line's train going from one end to the other (170km) nonstop is supposed to do it in 20 minutes, aka with a mean speed of ~510 kph. Let's say a peak of 800 kph. Now if we shape that 170km into a circle, that's 54km diameter, 27km radius. From the centripetal force formula a=v^2/r, that's 222,22...^2 / 27000 ~= 1,83 m/s^2, or a constant ~0,2g to the side. This is on top of the G-forces from your acceleration and deceleration. You can probably deal with ~0,2g in a train if everyone is seated without much discomfort, though it's double what's acceptable for standing passengers. But you can eliminate that if the city is linear (at the cost of increasing the mean distance that the average person has to travel to go from one arbitrary point in the city to another)

That's not to defend this concept. Because the city doesn't need to be 170km long; you can just made it more 2d and have the distances be vastly shorter (at the cost of just needing some extra lateral travel within the city). Honestly, if I were building a "designer" city from the ground up, I'd use a PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) system rather than trying to make it super-elongated.

Comment Re:“You do realise the earth is spinning?&am (Score 1) 88

What got me is that I don't see why this isn't readily resolved by active damping, the same systems that many tall towers now use to resist earthquakes or resonant wind forces. Big heavy weight at the top (or in this case the bottom) hooked up to actuators that make it move in an inverse direction to the sway.

Again, this is not to defend this colossal waste of money. I just don't see why there aren't ready solutions for this specific problem.

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