360
points
namlem
Joined 1,742 karma
- namlem parentYep. If eviction rules aren't loosened, these SROs will only be rented to people with >700 credit scores just like normal apartments. The people who need them most still won't get them.
- This would be such a dumb move on the government's part. "Lose the new space race" is ridiculous PR-brain. We are not racing to the same goal! China is trying to land on the moon, we are trying to establish a permanent presence. There is no value to merely returning to the moon to say we did it, and Starship is the only vehicle that can plausibly deliver huge quantities of cargo to the lunar surface.
- Well we mostly know what positions these groups were pushing for. It's possible that some influence went unnoticed.
That said, the US used to have quite a lot of juror bribery in the late 1800s and managed to successfully crack down on it with harsh penalties, sting operations, and other strategies. Attempting to bribe a juror can get you 15 years in federal prison in the US, it's not taken lightly.
- Voters thought Donald Trump and Joe Biden had merit. Clearly the voters are not a trustworthy source of discernment.
That is not because voters are stupid. It is because they are rationally ignorant. Why spend hours researching the issues and candidates for a 1 in 10 million chance of having an impact? It makes no sense. However, if we instead convened "elector juries" of a couple hundred randomly selected citizens and gave them the resources to carefully research and vet the candidates before deliberating on who is best, I think they would do a pretty good job.
- The French government and private interest groups alike attempted to manipulate the Citizens Convention for Climate back in 2019 and were not successful fwiw. When lobbyists tried to approach delegates outside the convention, they were quickly snitched on. Existing legal frameworks for preventing corruption among jurors and elected officials should suffice to protect assemblies from similar influence attempts.
- Elected representatives do not write laws. Their legislative aides write the laws. While some state governments have highly professionalized legislative aides, in the federal government, such positions are typically poorly paid stepping stone jobs filled by people in their late 20s/early 30s who have little domain expertise.
- There are many proposed models for how to incorporate sortition into governance. Some examples:
- A randomly selected lower house with an elected upper house (or the reverse)
- policy juries which deliberate only on one specific piece of legislation, which then must be approved by a separate oversight jury before taking effect
- election by jury, where candidates are chosen by "elector juries" who interview and vet the candidates before selecting one
- multi-layer representative selection based on the Venetian model where randomly selected bodies elect representatives, of whom a random subset are chosen to then appoint officials
Right now the lottocratic/sortition-based bodies that exist are purely advisory, though in some places like Paris and Belgium they have gained a good amount of soft power.
It wouldn't be that hard to implement a conservative version of one of these in certain US states though. For example, add "elect by jury" to the ballot, where if it wins the plurality, a grand jury is convened to select the winner (counties in Georgia already use grand juries to appoint their boards of equalization, so there is precedent).
- Actually, it's elections that are fundamentally undemocratic. Democracy literally means "rule by the public", which elections are not. Elections are merely rule by elites which have the nominal consent of the public. In practice, this consent is mostly illusory, as voters have no incentive to spend hours of time and effort becoming well-informed given how dilute their individual votes are. So really, elections are rule by influential groups such as media institutions and organized voting blocs.
You cite the UK as an example, but it's even less representative than the US. Parties often win majorities in parliament with only ~35% of the vote.
Sortition meanwhile, takes a representative sample of the public and offers them the time and resources to carefully research and deliberate. It's much closer to the democratic ideal of direct rule by the demos.
- Yep! I actually wrote a piece about how the Venetian system might be adapted for the modern day: https://open.substack.com/pub/unfacts/p/the-case-for-a-techn...
- Yep, thought the same thing when reading the article. Christian morality. I think it's a good thing for society to care for the poor and downtrodden, but when it reaches the point of self-flaggelation, it's gone too far. Imo, we need some form of institutionalization that's milder than what we have for the criminally insane, but still coercive.
- Sorry but the idea that such a system of personal involvement is a practical solution is a pipe dream. We need some system of involuntary confinement that isn't prison or psych hospitals imo. A place where we can put these people in humane conditions that is meant to transition them into being able to take care of themselves. A place where they can have private rooms and be given useful work to do, as well as counseling for their mental health issues.
- Yep. The problem is the system of elections itself. Biden and Obama also issued a lot of dubious pardons and commutations. The incentives of elections naturally favor short-termism and populism. Instead of having the people vote on candidates, we should randomly select citizens to an elector jury, which would carefully research and deliberate on the candidates before choosing.
- Supposedly the CIA was able to get remote viewing to work at significantly above chance in their experiments, but they weren't able to get it to work reliably enough to actually be useful.
And there are... downsides to messing with such forces. There was a cult called Leverage that tried to exploit magick and most of them ended up having psychotic breaks.