Simplicity tends to sell better than complexity, and RCV is the one that’s known of already.

Agreed. And that’s why I think approval is such a big improvement over ranked choice.

“Tell us who you approve of, candidate with the most approval wins”

Is a hell of a lot simpler than

“Rank every candidate without ranking multiple as the same level, then we check if any candidate has a 50% majority, if not, the lowest candidate gets booted and the next wave of second choices comes in, repeat until there is 50% majority.”

And that’s before the peripheral benefits.

So far they’ve been more than happy to ignore everything except the status quo, unfortunately.

Agreed. It’s honestly sad.

My city/state has been warming up to these kinds of talks and candidates at least, which gives me a glimmer of hope. But for now it is not enough.

Arguably, RCV is just as complicated as STAR, and approval is simpler than RCV. And part of the difficulty in the heavy lift to get RCV is that it has some pretty rough flaws, flaws that don’t exist within the alternatives.

And the political environment is easing up to the idea of moving towards better voting methods. I’m not saying we should let perfection be the enemy of progress. All I am saying is that if we are going to be making changes, we should at least attempt the better options.

I absolutely agree with pushing the issue at a local level, however we should probably be aiming for approval or STAR voting:

https://dividedwefall.org/star-and-approval-voting/

RCV is way better than our current system, but even RCV has flaws.

We also need regulation requiring election reform within party primaries, because as of right now it is a clown show.

Yeah, the NPVIC is… I mean, let’s be honest here. It’s not great. It’s better than our current system, absolutely.

Agreed.

But it’s far, far inferior than rank choice.

I’d say it goes like

Approval >>> Ranked >>>>>>>>>>>>> FPTP (popular vote) >>> FPTP (electoral college)

Agreed.

We would need election reform for that to change, and while we are getting closer to that state by state, I don’t think we will ever get enough states to sign on for the laws to kick in.

I assume you’re talking about the NPVIC. But yeah, we are getting marginally closer to reform each year. And public sentiment towards FPTP voting is changing, which is good. The only downside is that it is slow, and people seem more keen on rank choice instead of approval (IMO the best).

And these changes will never happen with our current system in place, so it’s a catch 22. Can’t change the system without reform, can’t reform with our current system.

Honestly that’s the case with most problems in the U.S., it’s just a bunch of catch 22s the whole way down, and the whole way up.

Yeah, congress needs to be stacked with representatives that actually give a shit about protecting workers and democracy. And that’s never going to happen with a 2 party system and legalize bribery (“lobbying”).

And those things won’t get fixed until people start giving a shit and voting accordingly, and/or we have massive protests.

I don’t think that’s a starter.

I wasn’t being literal. There are a million things that need fixed, a few of them you’ve listed and I 100% agree with. The one I named was just one of them.

IIRC about 2/3rds of americans are living paycheck to paycheck. That is not an economy that is working for the people.

We need dramatic overhauls that Biden, and especially Trump will never deliver. We need employee ownership of companies for starters.

as “literally anyone except felons”

Oh don’t worry, they’re revising that part too. They want no limits whatsoever. They want felons to have guns.

That, and there is a lot more stabbing in the Klingon Empire.

During the rise of nazis in Germany, there were quite a few Americans who sympathized with the nazis, and there was even an American nazi party at one point.

WW2 just told them they needed to be quiet and stealthy. They didn’t really go anywhere, and their influence over the GOP has only grown.

Why is everyone always pretending that every American election will be the last one ever and the entire world is going to end if their party doesn’t win.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-hannity-dictator-authoritarian-presidential-election-f27e7e9d7c13fabbe3ae7dd7f1235c72

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-says-immigrants-are-poisoning-blood-country-biden-campaign-liken-rcna130141

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4310834-trump-goes-all-in-on-nazi-rhetoric-and-the-media-gives-him-another-free-pass/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/donald-trumps-january-6-media

Not really a mystery.

Which is still stupid, because the we already have this tech.

It’s worse than that.

It’s $40/month, and only for the 3 months of summer to make up for impoverished children not getting meals through school during the summer.

These people are ghouls.

The air is plenty clean as it is

Tell that to the people in East Palestine Ohio. Tell that to the people that live near coal plants.

as long as you don’t live in California

Doesn’t matter where you live if the planet is uninhabitable.

Wanting to breath clean air on a habitable planet isn’t insanity.

It’ll look like what we already have. Swaths of users self hosting, with lots of redundancy to deal woth instances that have problems.

And that might mean it needs to stay small, but that’s OK. Not all success is measured in popularity.

Embrace extend extinguish

Don’t federate with corps, it will only end badly

I will say, part of that ignorance, apathy, and laziness is an intentional part of our existing society. You can’t spend the time to research every single product you ever buy, because many are stuck working several job, basically everyone is juggling their work, family, and social life.

A couple months back, I tried putting some effort into finding a printer that had all of the qualifications I wanted.

• usb printing, no network needed

• laser

• color

• not a brand that will fuck you over (looking at you HP)

• within a reasonable budget of $300-$400

And such a product just doesn’t exist. Brother comes close, but the market straight up isn’t producing good things. So at the end of the day all I can do is either get shafted at the local print store, or suck it up and get an inferior product.

But going back to the OP, it’s so much worse with cars because we have a car-centric society. You NEED a car in this place to have a normal life. Our cities and transportation have been intentionally designed to fuck over everyone not in a car.

So there is inelastic demand. The manufacturers can do whatever the fuck they want and get away with it.

Enshitification isn’t solved by voting with your dollar. If it did, the printer market wouldn’t be the shit show that it is. You can’t vote for the good if all the manufacturers mutually agree to only produce shit. Only regulation will keep them in line.

(inb4 “brother is better”, I am aware that brother printers are generally better, but they are far from good.)