volkris @volkris@qoto.org
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)
Joined Dec 2022
Meh, I often see political donors being used as scapegoats.
At the end of the day, if you vote for the guy who does bad things because he chooses to sell out to political donors, maybe stop electing that guy.
I really always strive to emphasize voters' role in empowering officials. There's a danger to acting as if voters don't have a key place in the political process, one of those self-fulfilling claims.
If voters are convinced that they have no power, then they don't.
Meanwhile I emphasize, such and such a politician took a bribe? Well, his voters actively empowered a bribable person, and probably confirmed it by reelecting him!
Oh, I see what you mean.
I thought you were talking about better enforcement to really tax peoples' Bitcoin holdings.
I don't think that will ever happen, though, specifically because it would stop them from printing money.
Another day in the multiverse of echo chambers:
Democrats smugly saying Republicans are freaking out about the #Trump indictment and Republicans smugly saying Democrats are freaking out about how he's succeeding despite them.
Know thy enemy, they say. Well, if either of these groups actually followed that advice, maybe we could settle some things.
Well, all ya can do is appreciate the absurdity.
This isn't something that can be solved with a little tweaking, though.
As it is, we'd expect every post to be sent to every subscribed end user, by sending a copy to each relevant instance with a list of recipients. That's the core heart of the protocol, no matter what language software may be written in, how it organizes variables to save memory or whatever.
But that requires a load that increases as # of posts * instances.
It ends up looking awfully exponential, a graph that quickly explodes with increasing use.
It's no simple feat to tweak the system to arrest such a problem of exponential scaling, but switching to single user instances only drives the explosion faster.
@Natureshadow@floss.social @bengo @lrhodes @h@mymath.rocks @smallcircles @liaizon
They are only trustworthy if they're actually viewed, and I'm convinced they won't be.
Heck, we can see the nonsense surrounding recordings of Congress to see how that's failed to work out well.
The balance of considerations is a bit different in the representative branch, but the success of using video there to mislead would only be duplicated in the Court.
No, it's not an implementation issue but the design of the protocol itself, the way ActivityPub has instances address each other and send out per-instance messages.
The protocol allows bundling of messages to multiple users on one instance, but with one user per instance the messages would need to be duplicated, scaling with instance count.
@Natureshadow@floss.social @bengo @lrhodes @h@mymath.rocks @smallcircles @liaizon
I think it would go the other way.
Already people can read opinions for themselves if they actually cared about what goes on in the courts. So few do. I don't think there's much actual appetite for using A/V to build trust over what goes on in the Court.
BUT, out of context clips of lawyers and justices mugging for the camera would likely further harm the image of the Court.
Unfortunately, given human nature and the social environment, I tend to agree that that public A/V would only farther harm the image of the Court.
That gets the story backwards, though, missing what the case was really about.
The state and its challengers agreed that the map was NOT gerrymandered, and that was the problem. The challengers said that the map needed to BE gerrymandered to comply with the VRA and previous court rulings.
The state proposed race-neutral maps, and the Court said no, race must be taken into account as per the law.
The question before the court was whether it's right to ignore race.
There are downsides to that, though, particularly when it comes to scalability, under the ActivityPub design.
Some aspects of AP scale by instance more than user, so going with one user per instance can really increase resource costs of operating the system.
@Natureshadow@floss.social @bengo @lrhodes @h@mymath.rocks @smallcircles @liaizon
It's one of those cases where there is no perfect system, only tradeoffs among imperfect proposals.
Here, for example, you mention influence of a larger part of the voting body, but that runs counter to my preference of accountability to the smaller community over, perhaps, a national coalition.
But such goals and success metrics of any representative system are pretty subjective in the end, depending on how a person's values balance those tradeoffs of the imperfect options available.
Sure, and that's why I emphasize that mainstream conservative media has had such a huge impact, beyond the polling.
I'd consider the polling to be only a minor indicator since it has drawbacks, which is why I'm really not so interested in tracking down specific polls. The RCP trend is plenty for my purposes when it comes to polling.
@Spicewalla @dangillmor
If you read the opinion, that's not really what the case hinged on. It didn't really show that.
The major question was whether to consider race at all in districting. The state said they had to be race-neutral, and the Court said no, race had to be considered.
It didn't take new technologies to figure out that they could create a second majority black district. In fact, the state points out that the technological solutions to districting all generated the opposite, so long as the process was race-neutral.
Really the question here was whether to or not to gerrymander based on race. Tech didn't really change that legal question.
An illegal election can't elect legal representatives.
Anyone elected under an invalid system would have no legal claim to office.
It would be like me declaring myself the winner of an election and showing up to Congress. I wouldn't be admitted because I wouldn't have the legal claim to office.
Same here.
@gruntyfish@mastodon.social
Yes. Nonsensical submissions get rejected almost instantly, leaving governments without functional representative processes.
There are some pretty big downsides to proportional representation, though, especially in terms of personal accountability for representatives.
I think that would be going in the wrong direction.
We should be holding representatives MORE personally accountable than we do now.
I don't see GIS mentioned once in the ruling. Here it is for your interest.
As I'd summarize it, the Court merely reaffirmed its existing precedents, saying that while Alabama challenged the old rulings, no, the old rulings were legit.
It wasn't really about any new technology but just about reviewing old decisions and saying they had them right the first time.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-1086_1co6.pdf
The way I put it, Mastodon is centralized around instances, as opposed to decentralized down to users.
So I say it's federated, not decentralized.
How are taxes going to become real in the Bitcoin future?
@Natureshadow@floss.social
It's tricky because ActivityPub made design choices that put instances, not users, at the center of its operation.
It's really hard to fit distributed identities into such a system.
@h@mymath.rocks @pinkyfloyd @smallcircles @lrhodes @bengo @liaizon
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)
Joined Dec 2022
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