Yeah, just avoid IRV completely.

Also, the thing you’re likely thinking of is Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, which only really applies to Ordinal (Ranked) systems. Cardinal (Rated) systems don’t suffer from the failings of Arrow’s Theorem.

I’m not really a fan of the multi-member district, I’d rather just shrink the size of the district until they are more homogonous, and then just send one rep from dozens or hundreds more districts.

Local democracy is more democratic after all.

That power grid thing is what will ultimately pop the bubble.

The lack of last mile fiber is what popped the dot com bubble.

Turns out, spending a fuckload of money on unusable infrastructure is a bad thing.

Too cautious, management wants movement on this, not deliberation. Setup a tiger team and give me an action plan asap.

Don’t forget his child porn image generator, what sort of training data did he use to get that result?

The claim is that a container ship could be used as a drone carrier.

This claim was used to justify attacks against Iranian shipping companies.

The truth is that it is possible to use a container ship this way, and the US might not see it coming in time to actually do anything about it.

Also important to note that the operator of that site has been editing archived pages, so who the fuck knows if anything still matches the original.

But yes, the malicious hijacking of people’s browser to launch a DDoS attack is worse.

He’s backed progressives in the recent state elections. I don’t know if he actually cares or not, but he seems to want to win, and that’s how you win these days.

There’s this interview;

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/democratic-national-committee-zohran-mamdani-endorsement-nyc-mayor-rcna237025

STAR uses ratings, not Rankings. There is Ranked Robin, but that’s not STAR.

Ranked Robin has more complexity in the count, but the good thing is that it always elects the Condorcet winner, because he sort of invented the system. Well, an early version. Ranked Robin is the formalized modern version, and you could argue that since equal ranks are allowed in Ranked Robin, it’s closer to ratings.

I used the word formalized because STAR and Ranked Robin both have specific written procedures for the ballot appearance, the counting, and basically everything else you need to run an election using the system.

It makes adoption easier when you don’t have to design anything, just follow directions for a fairly representative election.

I’d say it’s important to use the word “rating” when talking about STAR. This is actually by design. Introduce it to people by saying “Give the politician an honest rating 0-5 stars”. And if they’re all rated as ones and zeroes, I don’t see a problem.

Well, we’re in luck, the new chair of the DNC (Ken Martin) wants more candidates like Zohran Mamdani, and he has complete control over the DNC until August 2029.

He’s also pouring money into local races, supporting the local democratic parties the previous few DNC chairs mostly ignored.

STAR and Ranked Robin are definitively not RCV.

RCV, or IRV as it’s known elsewhere in the world, is an Ordinal voting system. That means spoiler effect and enforced two party dominance.

STAR and Ranked Robin are on the Cardinal side of things. No spoiler effect, because votes you can give equal support to multiple candidates.

If I really like two different candidates and don’t particularly care which one wins, I can say that on a STAR or Ranked Robin ballot.

In RCV I have to make a strategic choice, and if I get that choice wrong, it’s not just my guy who loses, but possibly my entire side.

So no, they are not the same. And it’s worse because of RCV’s lack of Monotonicity.

Non-negative responsiveness or monotonicity is a property of a social choice rule, which says that increasing a candidate’s rank on some ballots should not cause them to lose (or vice versa, that decreasing a candidate’s rank should not cause them to win).[1] This means rankings can be interpreted as ordering candidates from best to worst, with higher ranks corresponding to more support. Voting systems that violate non-negative responsiveness can be said to exhibit negative response,[2][3] perversity,[4] or an additional support paradox.[5]

And then explicitly;

Runoff-based voting systems such as ranked choice voting (RCV) are typically vulnerable to negative response. A notable example is the 2009 Burlington mayoral election, the United States’ second instant-runoff election in the modern era, where Bob Kiss won the election as a result of 750 ballots ranking him in last place.[16] Another example is given by the 2022 Alaska at-large special election.

So no, RCV is actually somehow worse than First Past the Post.

Also, that rule about needing more than 50% of the vote? Yeah, that too is a lie. Ballot exhaustion means that it’s 50% of the ballots that are left in the final round. If you didn’t guess correctly who made it to the final round, your ballot is just thrown away. It’s called ballot exhaustion.

Another popular lie is that your vote transfers in order on your ballot. It transfers in order to the candidates who are left. That’s why Bob Kiss won from being ranked last on various ballots. The people before him were eliminated before the first name on the ballot, so the vote skipped a bunch of names and transferred from the first name to the last.

All this because when you hold an RCV election, what you’re really doing is just holding a series of First Past the Post elections on the same ballot. You can’t fix the problems of First Past the Post by repeating First Past the Post a bunch of times.

Ranked Choice has a Monotonicity problem. i.e. it’s possible for a candidate to lose if a more people rank that candidate higher on their own ballot without changing any other ballots.

This has happened in recent RCV elections, and resulted in the candidate’s ideological opposition winning.

There’s a group called FairVote that’s been pushing RCV since the early 90s despite the many flaws of the system. Flaws that have been known since the system was first designed in 1788.

Seriously, Instant Runoff Voting was invented by the Marquis de Condorcet in 1788 as an example of a broken election system that can eliminate candidates preferred by a majority of voters.

It was later reinvented in the late 1850s by an Englishman who presumably never learned French.

Anyway a modern voting system for consideration is STAR, it was developed in 2014 by people who have read Condorcet, the the works of Kenneth Arrow from the 1950s. (Arrow’s Impossibility Theorium)

Find more info at www.equal.vote

The Kurds have never been part of ISIS or the Taliban.

No, the Kurds are the ethnicity that always sides with the US, and then the US abandons them.

Been happening since at least the 1920s.

That’s the personalized prices. That’s step two.

This one is the digital price tags that let the store manager or corporate office instantly raise prices throughout the store for everyone.

Oh, you want 20th century again? You didn’t like it in my original comment, but back to Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, proven definitively in 1950.

Arrow’s impossibility theorem is a key result in social choice theory showing that no ranked-choice procedure for group decision-making can satisfy the requirements of rational choice.[1] Specifically, American economist Kenneth Arrow showed no such rule can satisfy independence of irrelevant alternatives, the principle that a choice between two alternatives A and B should not depend on the quality of some third, unrelated option, C.[2][3][4]

The result is often cited in discussions of voting rules,[5] where it shows no ranked voting rule can eliminate the spoiler effect.[6][7][8] This result was first shown by the Marquis de Condorcet, whose voting paradox showed the impossibility of logically-consistent majority rule; Arrow’s theorem generalizes Condorcet’s findings to include non-majoritarian rules like collective leadership or consensus decision-making.[1]

Then a bit later, this important part;

Rated voting rules, where voters assign a separate grade to each candidate, are not affected by Arrow’s theorem.[17][18][19] Arrow initially asserted the information provided by these systems was meaningless and therefore could not be used to prevent paradoxes, leading him to overlook them.[20] However, Arrow would later describe this as a mistake,[21][22] admitting rules based on cardinal utilities (such as score and approval voting) are not subject to his theorem.[23][24]

The Spoiler Effect is when a voting system fails independence of irrelevant alternatives. This is what drives two party dominance, after all, if you’re punished for voting third party, third parties become actively harmful. This is why the major support for most third parties comes from their ideological opponents. Jill Stein being super cozy with Russia and Republican donors being the key recent example.

I’m falling for the mathematical truth.

We’ve known that Ordinal voting was bad since the 1780s, The Mathematician, philosopher and Girondian, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, the Marquis de Condorcet, wrote the seminal work on it; Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions (Essai sur l’application de l’analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues à la pluralité des voix). Found here in the original French

We haven’t fixed anything, because the voting method itself is broken. In any First Past the Post election, you have the Spoiler Effect, where just a few votes for a third party can guarantee that the person furthest from that candidate on the political spectrum wins. Look at Ross Perot securing Clinton’s win in 1992 and Ralph Nader securing Bush’s win in 2000.

None of that shit is fixed because we’re still using the broken system, a system that wasn’t actually ever really designed as such, it was just the default easiest way to do things and enables minority rule.

It’s a consequence of Ordinal voting methods, particularly First Past the Post.

Arrow’s Impossibility Theorium spells it out. https://electowiki.org/wiki/Arrow’s_impossibility_theorem

The tldr is that any ranked voting system will result in two parties.

This is really because all ranked voting systems are built around the word “Or”.

You support A or B. Which means that A and B have incentive to demonize each other, because every vote for A is one less potential vote for B.

The solution is abandoning Ordinal voting for a Cardinal system.

The simplest method is Approval.

Approval voting is a single-winner electoral system where each voter may select (“approve”) any number of candidates. The winner is the candidate approved by the largest number of voters. It is distinct from plurality voting, in which a voter may choose only one option among several (where the option with the most selections is declared the winner). It is related to score voting in which voters give each option a score on a scale, and the option with the highest total of scores is selected.

Another option is STAR.

www.starvoting.org

It’s been deliberately designed to make for better election results.

What it sounds like is the data centers are using untreated river water, and then are wanting to put that untreated (and now hot) water back.

This is better than using municipal water, which goes through expensive treatment to make it safe to drink.

I’d wager that Zelenski cares. But he’s waging the defense side of the war.

Putin has shown he doesn’t give a fuck.

Putting data centers in space is a good way to keep people from destroying them. Thermodynamics on the other hand, will have a field day with them.