sansampersamp
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User ID: 751
sansampersamp
4mo ago
Was this justified along notionally originalist grounds? I know the role of president was a democratic palette-swapping out of the king to some extent, but sovereign immunity is easier to write off when those who enjoy it are alienated from actual political power/legitimacy.
sansampersamp
4mo ago
My admittedly light reading into it is that a lot of the consternation about exercise not yielding particularly encouraging fat-burning benefits for the effort is really only relevant for high-intensity exercise. Returns diminish hard beyond zone 2, so the platonic ideal exercise for weight loss is high-volume but relatively gentle and non-strenuous. In fact higher intensities may even yield negative returns to the extent longer recovery time cuts into time you could just be back on the bike, or probably more realistically as a weight-loss prescription, cause unfit people to bounce off it as unpleasant.
Diet-wise, though, I think it's easy to project your normal onto others. I'm similarly pretty lax about what we cook (I barely flinched at the insane amount of butter one apparently needs to make a good syrup for crepes suzette a few days back) but on the other hand it is largely all cooked by us. We just never have oreos etc in the house or are in the habit of 'snacking' in general -- the idea of a midnight snack is a bit odd to me, but some people clearly do otherwise.
sansampersamp
4mo ago
there are a few rivers near port hedland which has rail connections to the major pilbara ore mines
sansampersamp
5mo ago
yeah, a bayesian network lets you just specify the conditional probabilities directly between nodes (nodes being character features here).
https://pgmpy.org/detailed_notebooks/2.%20Bayesian%20Networks.html
While I'm inclined to agree with shamilton's take here that high renewable mix makes nuclear less likely to be economically feasible, not more, I do wonder if there's a play to stick a reactor in the pilbara to run an electric arc furnace. No one would care out there and it helps cut the primary fp knot of Australia being the only producer of iron ore worth talking about and China being the only buyer.
sansampersamp
5mo ago
IRV is simpler to tally and audit in low-tech scenarios because the votes themselves are the physical record of the count, an advantage it shares with FPTP. In FPTP, you sort and bundle votes into e.g rubber bands of 20 and boxes of 1000. You can easily verify a count by checking that a box indeed contains 1000 votes, and they've been sorted appropriately. It's easy to update your count report just by seeing you have X boxes and Y bands.
Approval voting, Score, Borda etc require you to maintain a store of the counts independent of the physical ballots, which introduces more room for human error and complicates recounts/verification. You need to increment up to N counts for a race with N candidates, and even approval voting has 2^N-1 ballot variations that complicates sorting.
If you're thinking of terms of low-tech boxes and counting processes, IRV is an intuitive extension of FPTP because you're just opening up eliminated boxes and resorting them. Practically, it's rare for this process to go particularly deep or be particularly sensitive, and the count of votes rarely exceeds twice the votes cast.
I think we're now able to have do much better than IRV and I think there are potentially clever ways you could do tear-off perforated ballots to make the counts under approval/range more reliable, but a lot of (sometimes conspiratorial) questions about the popularity of IRV miss that it was an intuitive and practical solution at the time. If Australian preschoolers can vote on schoolyard activities with IRV, I'm sure American adults can manage.
sansampersamp
5mo ago
In my view, elections do not improve governments by selecting high quality leaders, but by increasing the legitimacy of power
Big reason I'm a fan of compulsory voting (though I think it does moderate politics as well)
sansampersamp
5mo ago
That shouldn't matter, even if you have e.g. 45% D, 30% R, 15% L, 10% C in first preferences, minor parties get eliminated first and their votes are added to the R tally.
sansampersamp
5mo ago
Convincing them that voting constitution or libertarian is a valid option would throw races to the democrats where normally republicans are guaranteed to win.
Presuming they preference republicans ahead of dems, what is the assumed mechanism for this?
sansampersamp
5mo ago
Ranked Choice Voting describes a kind of ballot design where candidates are preferentially ranked, Instant-Runoff Voting describes one way to decide a winner from such ballots.
Australia's had RCV/IRV for federal elections since 1918, and voting in federal elections has been compulsory since 1925, so it's been around a while. There's definitely better ways to decide winners than IRV from a theoretic, Bayesian regret perspective, but what's often missed about the historical popularity of IRV (and particularly its enduring path-contingency in Australia) is that it's dead simple to administer and tally compared to otherwise better methods such as approval/range. IRV solves (or solved) many of the complexities handling preferential voting in simultaneous counts across multiple voting locations in an auditable, non-destructive way (which remains one of the advantages of FPTP, for that matter). Relatedly, Australia's always voted and counted by hand (no voting/counting machines) and has generally done so quite efficiently.
It's a perennial topic that tracks the election cycle, can't say I've noticed it getting particularly more air time this go around. While there have been a few higher-profile instances of election swinging against dems seemingly contingent on certain third party candidates, I don't think it would broadly advantage one party over another in any enduring sense. As long as gun rights and tax are highly salient and polarised (and as weed becomes less salient), I'd imagine most libertarians would preference the GOP even as Green party voters would preference the dems. The net result would likely be a wash, and the bigger impact would be intra-party, e.g. moderating dems by letting them shed extreme positions to a clientalised periphery.
So I don't think the partisan appeal of RCV/IRV tracks strategic advantage necessarily and is mostly just borne by cultural affinities where lib educated types are more interested in theorycrafting on the government as an institution and happier to knock over fences doing so.
The fact that it's largely an affectation of educated wonk types rather than strategically advantaging dems qua dems means that it's actually one of those issues that may be easier to implement obliquely/non-politically in a cross-partisan way, to the extent that wonkish types are relatively more present in the republican electeds than their base.
Yes, but part of that is the tools they have available. Trumps cabinet had the option of being obsequious or resigning, and without any real mechanism for removing him that didn't involve cosigning with the dems, they spent their energies on ever more creative legal theories on his criminal immunity as if he's Louis XVI. Australian politics proves if you give a politician a knife, they'll happily stick it someone's back, and while they can obviously get a bit stab-happy it's a genuine boon to have the privileges of leadership be conditional on the continual, sustained confidence of the led.
American journos are certainly more timid and status/access-conscious than Australians, which is why Jonathan Swan's interview stood out so much, and I'd definitely put that down to cultural over structural factors, so I'm sure there's a bit of both at play.
Reminds me of a presser I went to with Madeleine Albright and Julia Gillard in Sydney ages back. Questions addressed to Madeleine Albright, per her aide, should be prefaced only with 'Madam Secretary'. Questions directed to the prime minister, of course, were addressed to 'Julia'. It's hardly as simple as one country being more deferent to authority than the other.
sansampersamp
5mo ago
yeah, Australia also lacks the paranoid style, but that's always been idiosyncratically american in the anglosphere, going back to Hofstadter's 1964 essay and probably beyond
sansampersamp
5mo ago
Yeah, I think failure to model differences in culture and the political incentives at play led to a lot of bad external predictions. In reality the lockdowns were stop-start in response to new infections being detected. It wasn't surprising domestically to see covid powers dialled back because it had essentially already happened a few times by that point (and the publicly accepted rationale was buying time for vaccines)
sansampersamp
5mo ago
Better in what sense? The political discourse is absolutely better, and I would say our political institutions are much more stable and effective at the general business of government: running elections, writing and enforcing laws, handling the myriad edge cases and emergent problems that crop up constantly in complex systems.
Australians are more culturally authoritarian than Americans in one sense, but there is less perceived distance between citizenry and government. Where in the US the government is seen as oppositional to the citizenry in many respects (independent of party affiliation, e.g. with cops) and must be constrained via various 'checks and balances', an armed citizenry and so on, authoritarian stances taken by Australian government are parsed domestically as Australian society exerting its will over itself. This difference in perspective is why you had many people in the US (including some on this forum) convinced that the Australian government would never end Covid restrictions or freely give up Covid-era powers, and that our politicians who implemented lockdowns would pay a steep political price for it.
I still marvel occasionally at the fact that a solid third or more of the political discourse around the 2019 election revolved around minutiae regarding the refundability of tax credits attached to retiree superannuation accounts. Just weeks on weeks of it, probably lost Shorten the election. Australia may not be a particularly intellectual country imo, but the proverbial 'pub test' here presumes a baseline level of Tocquevillian political literacy/sophistication far beyond what most countries could hope for. I don't think that's necessarily because we're particularly special as a people (perhaps a little bit), but we have some very well-constructed institutions that curb some of our worse impulses.
sansampersamp
5mo ago
It may be preferable to have the democratic legitimation of the government to be a foregone conclusion, but as political actors have interests that extend beyond simple legitimacy I think we'd still be stuck with political campaigners for the time being.
While there are various obvious ways you can reduce the number of people who are statistically disenfranchised, for want of a better term, I think less examined is the way this can be compensated for to reduce alienation. It's not like parliamentary systems don't have safe seats.
Yes, though if you model political discourse across parties, politicians, media and voters as the emergent aggregation of various goal-oriented strategic activities to win elections and sway policy, then that discourse is constrained by political structures. These political structures mediate how different kinds of moves in the discursive space actually achieve political ends and which are more useful than others. My larger point above is that the US has political structures which incentivises various rhetorical moves which result in a political discourse that is particularly annoying.
e.g. the sentiment that this election is of truly existential, catastrophic import makes strategic sense when a party's marginal voter is someone who already agrees/aligns with the party but needs to hit a certain activation threshold to actually cast a vote. Propagating this sentiment does not make sense if a party's marginal voter is going to vote regardless but whose alignment between parties can be competed for. The structural factor of compulsory voting impacts what political messaging is more viable (and this calculus applies not only to politicians and the media, but activists on twitter as well).
Leaving aside for now whether either approach is more generative of good policy outcomes and a functioning government, the latter is certainly less annoying.
sansampersamp
5mo ago
Imagine how annoying they are if you'd prefer Biden to win.
One underrated thing about living in Australia with compulsory, ranked choice voting, is that our political discourse is blessedly free of this kind of self-indulgent signalling. We obviously have our own domestic foibles (per Walter Cronkite: too many journalists, not enough news) but more generally: structuralist comparative analyses of political discourses strikes me as something both rich and relatively understudied -- especially in wider conversations about polarisation, epistemic closure, radicalisation, new-media landscapes and so on. There's been some research on how the US primary system exerts a centrifugal force on candidates (e.g. adams/merrill), how polarisation necessarily sustains marginal turnout (e.g.), and so on but I haven't seen a holistic structuralist take on all the factors together in those conversations.
There's clearly some lensing/closure effects that makes these kind of sentiments in the US particularly annoying when mediated through social media and the Algorithm, but the actual underlying cause seems much more rooted in the inability of the political system to a) co-opt and recuperate extremists (or more broadly, those whose views aren't represented by mainstream parties) and b) handle and mitigate swathes of society whose potential votes are rendered statistically meaningless (both in reducing this alienation in absolute terms, and alleviating how it feels on the ground).
Australia has a few structural advantages in this regard that makes the political discourse significantly less annoying than America. RCV lets minor parties absorb fringe or special-interest positions, while necessarily funnelling their preferences inward to more major parties (effectively defuses the 'no one represents me' line and complaints about picking the lesser of two evils). Compulsory voting makes political expenditures targeted not at maintaining turnout in single-issue, activism-bound constituencies (abortion, guns, most obviously in the US) which allows these factions to be more effectively clientalised by major parties: ideological activism groups must be catered to in the US to avoid demoralising them as turnout engines. In Australia where they can't deliver turnout, these special-interest activism groups can be much more easily captured -- someone particularly interested in abortion might get upset when the libnats loosen access, but they're hardly going to preference labor over it.
sansampersamp
5mo ago
There's a bias towards the left-most response in likert scales, too (undoubtedly contingent on writing direction)
https://sci-hub.se/https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pfi.21800
sansampersamp
5mo ago
The EMP pulse is an electric field pulse, up to 50,000 volts per meter for the nuke scenarios. The longer the wire, the greater the voltage differential over the wire (up to the depth of the field pulse as it passes over a few nanoseconds). The biggest risk to a house is this voltage built up over the electrical network hitting the house, heating up wires and destroying appliances.
A whole-house surge protector is the simplest investment here but even with that isolation, it'd take just a single stretch of 10m x 2mm gauge copper parallel to the electric field to hit 500kV and heat up by some 50 degrees c more or less instantly, which is enough to pose fire risks.
sansampersamp
5mo ago
That's one of the most absurd products I've seen. A diesel generator is going to be absolutely fine, it's the wiring in your house you need to worry about. Zero need for a faraday cage to be more complicated than a metal box, either.
sansampersamp
9mo ago
A lot of the structural issues might get enough of a consensus together if it comes off the back of an especially catastrophic failure. The (frequently observed) tendency for the US government to shut down is addressed more or less completely in other systems by this being a trigger for snap elections until a coalition can form capable of funding the government. Similarly you could imagine the executive excess and some of the more creative theories on presidential criminal immunity to be punctured if something truly egregious in a cross-partisan sense occurred.
sansampersamp
9mo ago
Just preregistering their trades a week or so in advance would probably be sufficient.
I mean the obvious one here is that the vast majority of people in group A are loyally partnered with people in group B above and beyond abstract political commitments, though it's funny that "people care about their spouses" is an observation that has somehow failed to enter into the calculus here.
If you follow the political science lit and consider political cohesion and group conciousness as downstream of linked fate, it's going to take something drastic for an individual to see their fate as linked more to their sex or political party than their family unit.
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