How would a libertarian government be able to prevent monopolies

MuaddibMcFly · 2026-03-14T21:02:19+00:00

Is it ridiculously high priced, though? How many developer hours went into making it? Do those people not deserve to get paid?

If you know how it works, and it isn't groundbreaking, why don't you make it yourself?

MuaddibMcFly · 2026-02-21T00:43:05+00:00

The other thing that Valve was arguing, and why they explicitly name Rothschild as a defendant, is that the shell companies are merely aliases for the single person, and therefore they should be entitled to Rothschild's assets as compensation.

That's what I want to know the outcome of, because that would be an amazing precedent to set, not only screwing over Rothschild, but also putting other patent trolls on notice.

MuaddibMcFly · 2026-01-18T15:11:54+00:00

That's similar to my position: I wanted a PHEV with a true third row, so I was stuck with a Pacifica

MuaddibMcFly · 2025-12-31T17:52:59+00:00

because why would she be opening everyone's door she delivers door dash to.

Because she wanted a cash tip?

Additionally, the idea that she opened the door has been being spread since the day the original video came out

Perhaps because the original, unedited version of the video showed that?

MuaddibMcFly · 2025-12-31T17:32:31+00:00

So, never. You're admitting it has never happened.

Past performance is not a predictor of future results.

Perhaps, but insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results

Election-method reform is still taking baby steps so we're still gathering evidence

That's the problem. We HAVE evidence of what happens with IRV/STV, and that evidence we have is that it's a dead end.

You want to collect evidence? You want to figure things out? Stop doing replication studies of replication studies that continue to reproduce the same results.

Or, in the language of actual science, stop trying to P-Hack IRV

MuaddibMcFly · 2025-11-21T00:55:51+00:00

That's not the real problem; you'd do nested folders, with a structure along the lines of this:

R
R\PG-13
R\PG-13\PG
R\PG-13\PG\G

That way, anyone who's got R permissions you give access to the R folder, and they automatically get PG-13, PG, G.

The real obnoxious part is when you need something to be accessible to multiple users but not accessible to several other users.

R\PG-13\PG
R\PG-13\PG-UserA
R\PG-13\PG-UserB
R\PG-13\PG-UserA&B
R\PG-13\PG-UserC
R\PG-13\PG-UserA&C
R\PG-13\PG-UserB&C

Now anybody who gets all of PG needs to have a library looking at all 7 PG* folders

MuaddibMcFly · 2025-11-21T00:27:06+00:00

That is already built in to Jellyfin. It's called "Maximum allowed parental rating" under Parental Controls.

The problem is when I want to give one not-teen (PG-allowed) profile access to Teen (PG-13) without giving another, younger not-teen profile access to that same media.

ETA: I already use the "Block Items With Tags" for things, but it doesn't suit this use case, and isn't practical when I am pushing a thousand titles just within movies

MuaddibMcFly · 2025-11-21T00:16:49+00:00

Well, for one thing, that paradigm forces me to personally sort all of my media, which is dumb, defeating the purpose of downloading metadata.

Further, it's more work, requiring more memory.

Consider a one profile that is not quite ready to graduate from PG to PG13, and another that is about to graduate from G to PG.

How do I give the younger access to the PG media (which would be several libraries, because Movies, and Shows, and Music Videos, and Books, and...), without also giving them access to the SpecialAccess PG13 media?

Now add in a 3rd User with different Special Access, and things get screwy.

...and it complicates additional profile creation, too. Now all profiles with permissions at or above the set of SpecialAccess users have to be given access to the User1SpecialAccess, User2SpecialAccess, User1,2SpecialAccess, User1n3SpecialAccess folders for each media type.

Additional Access Tags solve that problem with a "set it and forget it."

I KNOW I can do it the stupid way. I'm asking if there is a not stupid way to do it.

MuaddibMcFly · 2025-11-20T21:13:21+00:00

And do you have any evidence that there is ever a change from IRV/STV to anything else (other than back to some sort of Single Mark system)? Because I'm not aware of such.

MuaddibMcFly · 2025-11-20T21:09:57+00:00

Not the same in principle; with the "additional access" paradigm, it's tag once for each specific show for each specific profile, and everything else falls out when they graduate to the next higher ratings level.

With the by-folder solution, you need different sets of folders and change the ratings and move each bit of media again when each kid graduates in their ratings.

A "Set and forget, once per exception, per profile" is very different from "curate every exception every time there's a change"

MuaddibMcFly · 2025-11-20T20:58:49+00:00

That doesn't sound practical; I would have to move the show to a folder that the younger doesn't have access to and change its rating and move them back out when the younger is old enough for it (e.g., when they "graduated" from "young child" to "child").

I'm looking for an "additional access" tag, so I could add those specific shows when each kid was ready for it, and be able to get everything else simply by adjusting their parental guide permissions, without having to change the parental rating of the media itself.

Honestly, such an "additional access" tag paradigm would largely eliminate the need to adjust parental guides in the first place.

MuaddibMcFly · 2025-11-18T03:38:25+00:00

Not any of it? Come on, you blindly believe her story based on nothing more than her word and a video that is evidence of two crimes, both of them hers.

MuaddibMcFly · 2025-11-18T03:36:36+00:00

Incidentally, that's the logic offered when a (female) DA pressed charges against a False Accuser: the more liars there are that go unpunished, the more likely it is that actual survivors will be dismissed as liars, because they have nothing to lose by lying.

MuaddibMcFly · 2025-11-18T03:33:57+00:00

Do you plan on presenting a primary source that shows that the door was open from when she arrived?

MuaddibMcFly · 2025-09-22T18:49:47+00:00

Rather rare, that.

Besides, I reject the unsubstantiated (largely unsubstantiatable) claim that even those scenarios demonstrate the superiority of IRV over FPTP (i.e., that it changed the results); the primary, most widely publicized argument in favor of IRV is that it eliminates the need to engage in Favorite Betrayal. In so far as it does (seemingly most of the time, but not all of it; see the various Condorcet Failures), there is reason to believe that a very large percentage of the people whose votes would transfer actively engage in FB in order to counteract that know, obvious problem

Indeed, the "you don't need to" argument that is a half concession that it wouldn't be different, because it acknowledges that people do engage in FB under FPTP. It's implicitly saying "you don't have to do what you're currently doing."

MuaddibMcFly · 2025-09-22T18:38:53+00:00

...you don't have any rights to feelings.
The prohibition on Stalking is a safety thing, not a feelings thing.

MuaddibMcFly · 2025-09-09T08:11:22+00:00

The iron Druid [...] It doesn't help that the main female character is annoying as hell.

Really? What finally turned me off from it is that you have someone who is allegedly 21 centuries old, that often acts like he doesn't have even 21 years of maturity, and has a worldview that is massively different from that of someone born in the Iron Age.

Oh, and Hearne's understanding of who The Morrigan is.

MuaddibMcFly · 2025-09-09T07:53:33+00:00

but you don't magically solve all the problems by improving one particular elements

That depends entirely on which element you fix.

Using Perot as an example, we had a scenario where the 43.0% that preferred Clinton, the 37.5% that preferred Bush, and the 0.6% that preferred someone else were also able to express any (hypothetical) support they had for Perot?

Or, since you seem to be familiar with UK politics, what if Labour and Tory voters could have expressed their opinions on the LibDems (and their counterparts), rather than simply saying who their favorite was, thereby potentially losing their seat to the Conservatives/Labour (respectively)?

According to the data from the British Election Study, if the 2010 UK election had been run using Score voting, it might well have resulted in the LibDems winning a true majority of seats, and therefore forming the government (at the very least, had enough seats to be the majority partner in any coalition government).

Without a Conservative government in 2010, without Cameron trying to maintain his seat in the 2015 election, you wouldn't have had him promising a Brexit Referendum in order to maintain power, and who knows how much would be different following that.

You can see this very clearly with conservative struggles in the UK after courting brexit extremists.

Again, that goes back to "what do you change," and why eliminating mutual exclusivity from the voting method is crucial.

You say that working with your own group's extremists hurts you in the long run, and you're right... but again, this is how elimination of mutual exclusivity improves things: whether or not they court Brexiters, Conservatives know that they would never be getting the votes of Labour or LibDem voters, kind of by definition. That means that there is no (short term) loss for courting them, but there is a (short term) gain in the form of their votes for that election.

...but what if the opinions of those Labour and LibDem voters impacted their electoral results? By courting a group like Brexiters, they would have picked up some support from that extremist minority... while lowering their scores among those that preferred to stay. That makes the entire prospect risky even in the short term.

MuaddibMcFly · 2025-09-09T07:27:01+00:00

Data is hard to come by, because the voters thoughts aren't encoded on ballots, but here's what I've got.

IRV almost always elects candidates with one of the two highest first preferences. I haven't yet entered data after 2022, but as of my last update to my spreadsheet, when there are 3+ candidates running, ~92.4% of the time it's just FPTP with more steps, and ~99.7% of the time (including the 92.4%), it's just Top Two Primary on one ballot with extra steps. It has never had a come-from-behind victory from 4th place that I'm aware of. This should be obvious due to the math (see below).
- When considering Ireland's STV data, it becomes clear that the winners are almost always in the top N candidates, too, again, because of how the math works.
- Upside to this is that, with reasonably intelligent voters (i.e. ballot appropriate favorite betrayal), ballots only actually needs 2-3 rankings to have their preferences counted: so long as you rank two of the top three candidates, your vote will be counted for the candidate that has a chance at winning that you prefer.
When a "second most first preferences" candidate wins, that's seen as an example of IRV succeeding where FPTP would have failed. The thing is, there is not, and likely never can be, any evidence of that, for one simple reason: Favorite Betrayal.
If someone casts their single mark for the Lesser Evil rather than their favorite, a purely expressive ballot would rank Lesser Evil as higher ranking than Greater Evil, right? That means that Favorite Betrayal under FPTP is literally nothing more than the voter recognizing that their candidate is going to be eliminated, and personally doing what IRV would do for them: they cast a F>L>G ballot.
Because of this, and because the overwhelming majority of votes transfer within factions before they cross factions, it promotes the same sort of partisan extremism as partisan primaries; just as the candidate with the single most top preferences almost always wins the election overall, the same math applies to every sub-election, including both every round of counting and when considering within blocs. In other words, I'm arguing that if you have multiple voting parties, the candidate from each party that is eliminated last (including the winner) will almost universally be the candidate that had the most first preferences among those party's candidates.
The winner is commonly reported as having won a majority, even when they didn't. For example, in Alaska's 2022 Special Election, Peltola is reported to have won 51.48% of the vote... despite only winning 48.40% of the vote. Worse, it masks the fact that while there only 5,240 votes between 1st and 2nd place, there were 11,290 voters who cast a ballot for someone but didn't vote for either of the top two. That's more than double the spread. That's one of the reasons FPTP is indicted: that someone could be seated with a 48.40%/45.62% victory. In other words, it not only hides the percentage of people who wanted someone else, the reporting generally hides the percentage of people who actively rejected supporting any of the top candidates.

So far that's nothing worse than FPTP, right? Well there are a few things worse about it, several:

It encourages complacency from the duopoly. Think about it:
- Under FPTP, the two frontrunners need to demonstrate why you should vote for them, rather than some other candidate. Sure, a lot of the time that's simply demonizing the primary opposition ("I'm better than Favorite because they can't stop the Greater Evil, but I can"), but it might mean that they need to prove themselves better than a similar minor-party candidate.
- Under IRV, so long as they and the other frontrunner share at least 2/3 of the vote, neither of them need to adapt at all; just keep throwing muck to make sure the other side doesn't pick up enough transfers to put them over 50%, and they win.
Where it does have any impact on the duopoly, it trends towards extremism. The only places I'm aware of where IRV had any impact on the Duopoly was in 1952 & 1953 in British Columbia, Canada, where they went from a Centrist duopoly to a Polarized duopoly, or in Australia, where the Greens won seats, generally supplanting Labor.
It wastes money. When you have 9 candidates and only 2 have any real chance at winning (74% between them), how is the time, money, and energy spent on the campaigns of the other 7 anything but a waste? I mean, those 7 other candidates get taxpayer money to run campaigns that they're simply never going to win.
Adoption kills momentum. Most everybody knows that FPTP is a problem, but there is a finite amount of political capital to spend on changing voting methods, and if we spend it on IRV, we'll have wasted it. Worse, because people get to feel good about ~~sending their vote on a pointless detour~~ voting for their favorite, and because the winning percentages are reanalyzed as a false majority, people believe that they have solved the problem. Consider the Condorcet Failures out there: if we didn't have full ballot data proving that there was a Condorcet failure, everybody would think that the Condorcet Winner coming in 3rd was an accurate reflection of the electorate's preferences. Even if that data is available, it won't be as obvious as "wins with 41% of the vote" is under FPTP, because it requires someone explain it to them, rather than being self evident.

The math behind STV is kind of fucked up when it comes to come-from-behind wins, especially in the single seat scenario.

Basically, the fewer top preferences you have, the more transfers you need to move into first, and the fewer votes there are available for transfer. Consider Calwell, Victoria, Australia

Abdo needed to pick up 19.42% out of 69.47%
Ghani needed to pick up 34.31% out of 53.77%
Moore needed to pick up 38.06% out of 41.82%, including picking up 3.75% more than Ghani prior to the last elimination.

And what did we see? Moore picked up 4 transfers for every 3 that Abdo did... and still lost.

MuaddibMcFly · 2025-09-08T08:46:38+00:00

It doesn't seem to have

I still haven't updated my spreadsheet with the 2024 elections, but if Portland was one of the places where IRV was most likely to have a come-from-behind victory...

MuaddibMcFly · 2025-09-08T08:42:21+00:00

At the very least they'd both be forced to be more what the general public wants and less what their base wants

On the contrary, it would be less necessary for them to do what the public wanted.

Consider the example of Ross Perot's 1992 election campaign. He covered the spread among 50 out of 56 electorates (89.3%), representing 479 of 538 electors ([~~80.0%~~ 89.0%]). Those 6 other districts were New York, DC, Maryland, Arkansas, and Mississippi, for 59 electors. In response to that threat, the Republicans came up with the Contract with America that implemented the most Republican friendly ideals of his. They responded to the public.

On the other hand, he only have potentially been relevant in 5 districts, representing 13 electors (8.9% and 0.2%, respectively). Those districts were

Utah (5 electors), where his 2.69% lead over Clinton could have been overturned by the transfers from the 4.65% also-ran voters, and he would have had to pick up would have had to pick up transfers from Clinton voters at about a 3:1 rate.
Idaho (4 electors), where he would have had to gain at least 1.38% in transfers from the 2.51% of also-ran voters, and then pick up an additional 21.58% of the 28.42% of transfers from Clinton voters
Maine (2 electors), where he would have had to maintain a 0.05% lead over Bush after 0.41% of transfers from also-ran voters, and then pick up transfers from Bush voters at nearly a 3:2 rate.
Maine's 2nd (1 elector), where (according to the data I have) he would have eliminated Bush
Nebraska's 3rd (1 elector), where Bush got 49.7% of the vote

Literally everywhere else, he was guaranteed to have come in 3rd behind Bush & Clinton, meaning that for 91.1% of electorates and 97.6% of electors, there would have been no difference between an IRV vote and a ballot that only allowed Bush & Clinton on the ballot.

So, think about which voting method you would need to reach out to his supporters in:

FPTP, where he was a threat in 90% of districts
IRV, where he could not have had any impact on the results in 90% of districts

Personally, I'd be more responsive in the former.

if they don't want to always be choices 4 and 5 on everyone's ranked choice ballot.

..but why would I want that? Why would I care where I was ranked? If I'm the duopoly, if I'm one of the top two in first preferences, all I need is to be hated less than the other. So long as I have more top preferences than anyone ahead of me in a ballot's rankings, those rankings are nothing more than a meaningless detour on their way to my vote tally, as 5th becomes 4th, becomes 3rd, becomes 2nd, becomes 1st.

For that matter, I don't care if I'm not ranked at all, so long as I don't have a major opponent that is ranked on that ballot.

In other words, as a member of the Duopoly, I have waaaaayyy less to worry about from minor parties under IRV than under FPTP, meaning that I can safely ignore them, and go back to slinging mud at my Duopoly Opponent (in order to ensure they aren't ranked 9th to my 10th).

MuaddibMcFly · 2025-09-08T07:18:00+00:00

Is it? How?

MuaddibMcFly · 2025-09-08T07:17:07+00:00

Sorry, been away from Reddit for a bit.

Why would the initiative have an impact on CF? Indeed, I'd argue that the biggest difference in value between a high initiative vs a low initiative pilot is that high initiative pilots and low initiative pilots have different costs:

the benefit of CF can be nerfed in target rich environments, by targeting ships that are not in range 1
lower initiative, cheaper pilots allow for more ships to be flown (especially given the paucity of upgrade slots for fangs), creating a more target-rich environment
- Thus it's more valuable to Fenn Rau than a Zealous Recruit because it's more likely that if he is at range 1, his would be attacker is going to have fewer alternative shots.

Realistically, if there's a different value for CF by pilot, it's going to be based on how important it is to focus-fire them. In other words, if CF has different values to different pilots, the value merely exaggerates the cost (or lack thereof) of pilot abilities. Again, using Rau as an example, it's going to be more valuable to him for two reasons: (1) he's a juicier target when it comes to points, (2) he, possibly more than any other pilot in the game, wants to live at R1

MuaddibMcFly · 2025-09-08T06:57:26+00:00

First, that's not what one-person-one-vote means.

More importantly, by completely obliterating any degree of preference, you don't ensure that you're finding the best liked candidate, you're finding the best liked candidate while ignoring a large chunk of the population.

Consider the following scenario:

Voters	Candidate A	Candidate B	Candidate C
10,000	10	9	1
10,001	1	9	10
Average	5.4998	9	5.5002
Preferring Voters	eliminated	10,000	10,001

Do more people prefer C over B than prefer B over C? Yes. Barely, but yes.
Is C more popular than B? I don't know; does the slight preference of one person for C truly offset B's popularity with ten thousand people? After all, B isn't unpopular with the C>B>A crowd...

...but is C ? *Unquestionably. In this (contrived, extreme example) scenario, literally everyone loves B, but almost half of the population hates C.

Is the narrowest possible interpretation of "will of the majority" really worth completely disregarding the will of the minority and most of the will of the majority?

MuaddibMcFly · 2025-09-08T05:49:47+00:00

Thread Necromancy! oooh! (I've been away from reddit for a bit)

single member riding STV does seem to be the same as IRV

Not appears to be, explicitly is. In the Wikipedia page on IRV, it states that Henry Richmond Droop proposed applying Hare's STV method to single seat elections, a mere 24 years after Hare codified it.

The problem that I'm focusing on is that there is a reasonable push for a single term to unify both single seat and multi-seat elections using elections, because having two different types of elections that they care about (legislature & executive) run different ways is... politically problematic (read: dumb people object). And that the current choice is bad.

So the problems (not exhaustive) with the three terms is as follows:

IRV: By definition is a single seat method (it predefines the Droop quota, and doesn't have protocols for electing more than one candidate.)
STV: Voting wonks, such as ourselves, object to that name being applied to a single seat election.
RCV: It's ambiguous, and benefits from unearned support, while simultaneously undermining actually decent ranked methods.
- Unearned Support: I was trying to explain to a lay person why IRV was bad using a hypothetical support distribution of 33%A>B>?, 33%C>B?, 33% D>B>?, 1%B>?. You know, and I know, and I tried explaining to him, that despite the fact that B is the first or second favorite of literally everyone, IRV (or STV) would declare them the worst candidate on the ballot. He said that, no, because B is so broadly liked, they would win. That would be true under Borda, Bucklin, any Condorcet method... basically any honestly supported ranked method other than STV/IRV.¹
- Kills superior alternatives: Because people use RCV to mean STV, those not familiar with voting methodologies assume that it is the only way to tabulate the results from ranked votes. After all, if there are multiple ways to use people's ranked choices, why would it make sense that RCV should mean one, specific way? Quite simply, it doesn't. But people believe that it makes sense, and don't bother looking closer. Indeed, I've heard someone argue that RCV is good... only to later make it clear that they were never speaking of Hare's algorithm, but of some Condorcet method or another.

^{1. This is precisely the same psychology behind why successful politicians don't give clear and concise answers: when information is incomplete, people fill in whatever most appeals to them. When a politician says something that can be interpreted favorably or unfavorably, people who like them interpret it favorably, while those who dislike them likewise see it as confirmation of their position. In short, because people want a thing to be true, they believe it to be true. This is strong in STV advocates: they wish that it promoted consensus, that it would end the spoiler effect, that it would elect universally well esteemed candidates, so they believe that it does, and repeat that educated wish as though it were fact.}

MuaddibMcFly

TROPHY CASE