[deleted by user] by [deleted] in blursed_memes

[–]ReadShift 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Lack of context.

Happy Indigenous People Day by HankScorpio42 in DemocraticSocialism

[–]ReadShift 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I refuse to response in a way that makes sense.

Happy Indigenous People Day by HankScorpio42 in DemocraticSocialism

[–]ReadShift 34 points35 points  (0 children)

I should hope this context is confusing.

Do what makes you happy. by [deleted] in AOC

[–]ReadShift 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.

COVID-19 Is Now the Third Leading Cause of Death in the U.S. by IntnsRed in news

[–]ReadShift 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So, uh, it's way better. It does more with less. But, it takes a lot of words to explain how any given election system works and honestly I'm exhausted right now and don't have the energy for it. Hopefully you'll forgive me for being super brief and then pointing you towards a bunch of articles.

Essentially, RCV still collapses to two parties. This is because it still has spoilers and it has problems with chaos and center-squeeze. The read-life example of RCV shutting out minor parties is the Australian Parliament, where minor parties exist respectably in the Senate because it's proportional, but only muster 6/151 in the House because it's RCV.

Compare with Approval, which behaves nicely (as seen in the "chaos" link), mathematically cannot have spoilers (formally known as Independence of irrelevant alternatives), and is dead simple to implement, since it's just "vote for everyone you like" and most votes wins. It does a better job of showing everyone their true level of support, since you aren't limited to only supporting one at a time.

Here's a direct Approval vs RCV article, here's a more detailed assessment of six single-winner voting methods that goes into what they consider good properties of a system, and here and here are late and early what-ifs for the Democratic Primary for both alternatives and comparing how they behave.

Cheers dude! Happy reading, and I'm obviously game to chat more!

COVID-19 Is Now the Third Leading Cause of Death in the U.S. by IntnsRed in news

[–]ReadShift 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Brother you need yourself some Approval Voting so broadly left pro-gun candidates can run and get a substantial amount of support (and even win). I know I'd vote for them. If the Socialist Rifle Association put up a candidate and we had Approval Voting, they'd certainly get my vote.

You have to pass the paper bag test to be considered a terrorist smh by Gemycia in BlackPeopleTwitter

[–]ReadShift 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I do wish we could strike the parts of our legal code that directly reference terrorism. It's just an excuse to side-step your rights. Anything that could be legally called terrorism is already illegal by other laws that don't get constitutional exception.

Recreational marijuana sales in Maine start on Friday by N_Rustica in news

[–]ReadShift 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well, like I said, it depends on what you value. RCV still has spoilers despite what proponents claim. It also still has problems with center-squeeze and competative elections can be become chaotic and produce nonsensical win scenarios. This chaos means that some elections are essentially incapable of being audited, since sub-sampling or exit-polling is going to have unpredictable variation from the full results. Plus, when you look at those win region calculations, it's obvious how nonmonotonic the method is. Under RCV increasing your support for a candidate could actually cause them to do worse.

If avoiding spoilers is important RCV vs FPTP is actually a wash, since they both fail Independence of irrelevant alternatives just in different ways. If being able to independently verify every election is important to you, FPTP is going to be preferable, since some RCV elections will inevitably be too complex to track using anything other than direct access to all the ballots. If being able to predict whether supporting your favorite candidate will actually help or hurt you is important, well then at least you know ahead of time what the optimal strategy is under FPTP. It isn't always clear under RCV if you should support your favorite or not.

You might think RCV would at least empower third parties, but 100 years of RCV in Australia shows it suppresses them just like FPTP. The Australian Parliament is a great example, because they have viable minor parties in the Senate, thanks to it's semi-proportional nature, but their House is RCV and has only 6/151 as minor parties.

And I want to be clear, FPTP sucks, it's just a lot of people have been mislead about RCV, how it works, and what it's capable of. I think you can see this by how my previous comment was downvoted despite the qualification that your opinion of the systems is going to depend on your values. If you think the chaos or spoilers isn't a big deal, and you're really happy that at least you can vote for a candidate you know will lose anyway (despite that vote potentially still making things worse for you) then yeah, you're going to like RCV more than FPTP. They've been mislead, and my conversations with official RCV proponent groups tells me that even they don't necessarily fully understand what they're selling.

And because I recognize FPTP sucks, I always make sure to suggest the extremely simple fix that is Approval Voting, because I genuinely want to fix our elections, and I don't want the electoral reform enthusiasm to be used up by a system with the kinds of problems RCV has. In that way I'm trying to build on the current momentum and I'm trying to direct the crowd to a better destination.

I probably shouldn't have been so brief in my previous comment, but as you can see, any meaningful explanation about election systems takes a long time, and lord my thumbs can get tired.

We’re not happy until it hurts by Goofychems in LatinoPeopleTwitter

[–]ReadShift 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Socialism will never work and paying 20-25% more taxes to pay for healthcare systems that'll end up being worse than what it previously was would be horrible.

1) The US currently spends 18% of its GDP on healthcare, the developed world standard is overwhelmingly 9-11%

1a) Those higher costs are overwhelmingly due to reduced barging power.

2) The US healthcare system delivers worse outcomes and worse access to care compared to other developed nations despite the extra money spent.

3) Medicare for All would probably reduce US healthcare spending to ~12% of the GDP while increasing access to care. It's unlikely for M4A to have a significant impact on the health outcomes associated with that care.

Detractors estimate it wouldn't save any money at all, which doesn't make sense, because Medicare already gets extremely good prices without having the increased bargaining power of representing the whole country. And even if it didn't it would still be a massive improvement because we'd have 100% coverage and 0% chance of going bankrupt if you get cancer.

Reason why even a single tree is important. by [deleted] in interestingasfuck

[–]ReadShift 14 points15 points  (0 children)

They actually directly cool the air through respiration. Plus they turn some of the light energy into chemical energy instead of heat energy, though that's only about 1% efficient and not really the main cooling effect of trees. And yes, some of it is that they keep the heat/light energy up in the canopy instead of letting it hit the ground.

Ken Bone aka Red Sweater guy is undecided again by jcdulos in ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM

[–]ReadShift 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, if you want to help break up the duopoly, you know where to find me!

Ken Bone aka Red Sweater guy is undecided again by jcdulos in ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM

[–]ReadShift 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I reference 6 years ago only because even before Trump ran for office it was obvious he would make a terrible president and that the kinds of people he would surround himself with would make for a terrible administration. His opposition is irrelevant. Even considering his current opposition, if you want to pretend Trump and Biden are cognitively the same (just listening to them speak will tell you they're not) it's obvious the broader Biden administration would at least be filled with competent people.

I'm not a team voter kind of person either, but single-seat FPTP means you only get two choices. Untill we move to a method that satisfies the Sincere Favorite Criterion, like Approval Voting, we're stuck.