FPTP might be the worst, but IRV is a close second. Just like FPTP it gives significant artificial advantage to a certain kind of party. Specifically, IRV tends to elect a party that is most people's second-choice party.
You might think that's good because such a party will have to be more centrist than what FPTP is likely to elect, but centrist doesn't necessarily mean good. If there is no competitive pressure for a party to be good, it will not be good, centrist or not. It will be centrist but will become just as corrupt as the parties we have today, if not more.
That's because this centrist party will not actually face the higher level of political competition you'd expect from a non-FPTP system. It will get second-choice votes it needs for a win very reliably, because both right wing and left wing voters would rather take this centrist party they don't like than allow the other wing that they hate to win.
So with IRV you can easily end up with the same centrist party winning the election over and over and over again.
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Since we just had elections in Canada, fun fact: the last time around our future prime minister, leader of a centrist party, promised an election reform if elected. After his party was elected, he revealed that he only wanted IRV, and would not have anything else. Now you know why.
There is no such thing as a megacorp's indifference to increasing their profits and achieving their strategic goals.
You can't plausibly claim indifference when Google's business processes that took many millions of dollars to set up and optimize promote Google's success by harming Google's competitors and taming Google's existential threats in user-hostile ways that range from perhaps subtle to outrageously obvious.
They didn't start doing this yesterday. No amount of plausible deniability can cover a gaping void this large.
Google's behaviour is entirely consistent with a huge company exercising its monopolistic power in a largely unregulated environment. They do whatever they can get away with.
I think it's less about the difficulty of manual changes and more about the cost to verify that all of the changes actually work.
Dynamic typing on the language side, and a less than perfect test suite on the user side are not a good combination for large projects facing a project wide migration.
Yes, gmail, calendar, youtube, etc. are slow and sometimes broken for weeks in various ways in FF.
Of course there likely won't ever be hard evidence that they are doing this deliberately. There are many ways for them to achieve this outcome without explicitly instructing their developers to degrade FF experience.
They can successfully bullshit most users that way, but for me this is just more reason to use FF more and Google less. I just hope there are enough other people with the same attitude for us to matter.
> For more than two decades, McElroy was suspected of being involved in theft of grain, gasoline, alcohol, antiques, and livestock, but he avoided conviction when charges were brought against him 21 times—often after witnesses refused to testify because he allegedly intimidated them, frequently by following his targets or parking outside their homes and watching them.
> McElroy began stalking the Bowenkamp family, and eventually threatened Bo Bowenkamp in the back of his store with a shotgun in hand. In the ensuing confrontation, McElroy shot Bowenkamp in the neck; Bowenkamp survived, and McElroy was arrested and charged with attempted murder. McElroy was convicted at trial of assault, but freed on bail pending his appeal. Immediately after being released at a post-trial hearing, McElroy went to the D&G Tavern, a local bar, with an M1 Garand rifle with a bayonet attached, and made graphic threats about what he would do to Mr. Bowenkamp.
New Stalin style dictatorships are unlikely to arise in developed countries. A gradual descend into modern-Russia style governance is much more likely.
We have learned a lot about building stable power structures in the last 50 years. You don't need to have a death grip on everything in the country. A much softer touch is the technique of choice of modern oppressive regimes.
Why disallow other parties when you can just make sure the right party always wins?
Why get rid of capitalism if you can just pick the winners?
Why censor information when you can drown the airwaves in fake news?
Why purge dissidents if they have no power to change things?
Why control what people do when you can control what people want to do?
And yet despite the monopolies and despite the superstar compensation for top programmers at Google, mediocre programmer salaries did not suffer. Because everyone still needs mediocre programmers. Because they still provide a lot of value.
Fighting off monopolistic tendencies and the disproportionate influence of monopolists and oligopolists – both economic and political – is already one of the greatest challenges of capitalism.
Automation makes this problem worse because our political institutions are corrupt and incapable of fixing the rise of monopolies, not because automation is bad in itself. And unlike brand recognition, lobbying, and other barriers that monopolists put up to keep their moat safe, automation is generally available to everyone, so it doesn't make sense to penalize it.
Inequality is a product of market regulations, not automation. Put a 90% tax on income over $1M, make 20 hour work week / 12 weeks vacation the new standard, introduce a land value tax, make it impossible to hide wealth offshore, and find a good way to distribute all the extra revenue so that people don't starve but still have just enough incentive to work (in a world that needs much less work because of automation). That'll go a long way towards fixing excessive inequality in a heavily automated world. Half of this can be done to great positive effect even today.
I don't know, maybe that's "a whole new system" that the author theorized that we need. But really it's just turning a bunch of knobs on the existing system. We haven't tried even that much, and everyone's already spelling doom.
I don't think people do repetitive, automatable jobs because they can't do any other kind of job, but rather because our current market conditions make it a good choice for them.
And by market conditions I mean everything from wages to availability and cost of education to immigration policies and welfare benefits.
Once the dust has settled after major advances in automation I don't see why people wouldn't be able to work as managers, designers, programmers and engineers even if those were the only jobs left in the economy (but of course there are many more skilled jobs that will not be automated anytime soon). It's just a matter of training and expectations.
I don't think a world where people only need to work 20 hours a week, and where we have 5x the number of every kind of skilled specialists we have right now is a bad place to be. And it doesn't require ditching capitalism entirely, just regulating it differently (taxation, welfare, etc.).
It's only the transition to such a world that is worrying because it will happen faster than people can adjust, not the end result.
Personally I'm really annoyed with Scala community's obsession with Gitter. It's such an inferior tool.
Gitter search UI is the worst, and search itself is useless, often returning no results when you can spend an hour scrolling to find what you want manually.
This is inexcusable when Gitter is your project's de facto Q&A place instead of more structured places like StackOverflow or Github issues.
And so the users are left with a messy stream of collective consciousness that is impossible no search or navigate effectively.
Can you please explain which of these actually constrain your freedom of expression, with examples?
Do you send kiss emojis to your open source contributors? Call them little b*tches or refer to transgender people by a pronoun you know they are uncomfortable with?
Some corners of tech culture are really toxic, so I understand the need for CoCs. Now, what exactly is the problem with the lines you quoted?
> I really don't understand the west's fascination with these codes and statements. Why not just do your work and avoid drama?
And you will never understand it if you look at "the west" as a single organism. Its millions of people with different opinions. They don't have to be consistent with each other.
CoCs exist to promote desired (usually understood as "professional") communication and collaboration standards in open source projects. People who want to bring their political or religious agenda into those CoCs are indeed largely undesired even in "the west", that's why this particular CoC riled up so much attention.
> Why not just do your work and avoid drama?
I'd love that, and I'm doing that. But I'm not a "turn the other cheek" kind of person, and I'll call out bullshit when I see it. This here is bullshit.
> If Joseph Stalin or bin Laden wrote a great patch, I'd want it. We'd all be better for it.
That theoretical programmer-Bin-Laden would never contribute a patch to a project with SQLite's new CoC because it is incompatible with his faith. You said we would be better off if he did, so by your own logic such a religious CoC is detrimental to us, which is why it is a problem.
> It doesn't have to be the SQLite mailing list. It is not a sensible place to have these other types of ideological battles.
Indeed, it is not a sensible place because SQLite itself is not a sensible place for religion. But its author made it a place for religion, with very predictable consequences.
> Here in the third world life is hard.
> I find perhaps the greatest "white privilege" [...], is having the luxury of debating CoCs instead of supporting yourself and your family.
That's perhaps a bit of an overstatement, and definitely a false dichotomy. Moreover, here you are enjoying the same white privilege in the third world. A bit hypocritical to accuse others of something you yourself are engaging in, don't you think?
The author had a chance to make his CoC the golden rule. But instead he made a deeply religious statement. He has full right to do what he wants, but to also claim that this is somehow inclusive because you can close your eyes to things incompatible with you is nonsense, sorry.
All religions teach largely the same good things, but you generally won't see their devotees agreeing to any document that proclaims their love for a different God.
And yet atheists are expected to swallow that. No thanks.
Not necessarily. The least affordable housing markets tend to be bigger cities. Growing the cities further will not necessarily make housing in those cities more affordable. There's a positive feedback loop between cities being bigger being more desirable.
Consider Chromium Embedded Framework, or Sciter. These too let you define your UI with JS/HTML/CSS, but you're not shipping a node.js server with your app, which makes your app much lighter.
To put it in an even less flattening way, the real problem are developers, not the paradigm. Your company's code will be as good as your developers are regardless of the paradigm.
Microservices will not help you if your developers have the same level of skill and foresight as whoever wrote the monolith, which is probably true if those devs were selected by the same hiring process that your company has today, subject to the same organizational effectiveness, etc.
You might think that's good because such a party will have to be more centrist than what FPTP is likely to elect, but centrist doesn't necessarily mean good. If there is no competitive pressure for a party to be good, it will not be good, centrist or not. It will be centrist but will become just as corrupt as the parties we have today, if not more.
That's because this centrist party will not actually face the higher level of political competition you'd expect from a non-FPTP system. It will get second-choice votes it needs for a win very reliably, because both right wing and left wing voters would rather take this centrist party they don't like than allow the other wing that they hate to win.
So with IRV you can easily end up with the same centrist party winning the election over and over and over again.
---
Since we just had elections in Canada, fun fact: the last time around our future prime minister, leader of a centrist party, promised an election reform if elected. After his party was elected, he revealed that he only wanted IRV, and would not have anything else. Now you know why.