Liz

Everything alive today is the pinnacle of evolution.

SPAV is specifically constructed to work with proportional representation. It iterates until all seats are filled.

Yes, that’s how it works. The first round is functionally identical to regular approval which is why I like using the two. Approval for single-winner, SPAV for multi-winner.

But in the US, by Constitutional law, it’s one seat per geographical district.

I’m pretty sure it’s just federal law, but I would have to double check. Not like Congress would change it anyway.

A traditional party primary would have nominated Palin, not Begich, and she would have lost anyways.

That’s pure speculation. But using the voting data from the general, we Begich was preferred to both Palin and Peltola in head-to-head matchups. Palin pulled enough votes from Begich to eliminate him in the first round and he lost to Peltola in the second. If Palin hadn’t run Begich would have won.

You can read more about it from the linked sources here.

Here’s the most relevant section:

Some social choice and election scientists criticized the election in published opinion pieces, saying it had several perceived flaws, which they technically term pathologies. They cited Begich’s elimination as an example of a center squeeze, a scenario in which the candidate closest to the center of public opinion is eliminated due to failing to receive enough first choice votes. More voters ranked Begich above Peltola, but Palin played the role of spoiler by knocking Begich out of contention in the first round of the run-off. Specialists also said the election was notable as a negative vote weight event, as those who voted for Palin first and Begich second instead helped Peltola win by pushing Palin ahead of Begich in the first round.

Elections scientists were careful to note that such flaws (which in technical terms they call pathologies) likely would have occurred under Alaska’s previous primary system as well. In that binary system, winners of each party primary run against each other in the general election. Several suggested alternative systems that could replace either of these systems.

You have to be careful analysing RCV results, because people tend to only look at what the election did, and fail to look at what it didn’t do. One of the good things about RCV is that it collects a fair bit of information, but then it usually ignores a fair bit of it. When trying to understand whether a candidate was a spoiler or not, you have to ask what would have happened if they didn’t run at all, which requires considering collected information the “unaltered” election didn’t take into account. If removing them from the election changes the winner of the race, then they were a spoiler. We know that removing Palin would have resulted in a Begich win over Peltola, so that makes Palin a spoiler. She’s a losing candidate that changed the winner of the race simply by entering, assuming voter preferences are stable.

Yeah, sucks doesn’t it?

He’s had to fill in with match footage because he lost access to the auction house guns after trying to set up that deal. He has access to a lot fewer old firearms these days.

Karl is still making videos, but Ian is not a part of IRTV anymore.

Proportional representation specifically refers to how parties divide the available seats

I apologize for not addressing that, but I didn’t think it required expanding on. Yes, that’s correct. I feel the preferred proportional method is Sequential Proportional Approval Voting

RCV doesn’t eliminate vote splitting, it only mitigates it. If two candidates have similar support in a non-final round, one can act as a spoiler for the other. The problem is that it’s harder to understand and FairVote used to lie about it, so a lot of people think it’s not a problem. The Alaska special election from a few years back is an example of a spoiler election. If Palin hadn’t run (or fewer Palin voters voted) the other Republican would have won. If you want to completely eliminate vote splitting you have to move to a cardinal voting method that satisfies the independence of irrelevant alternatives criterion, which is most of them, including approval voting.

Probably just needs entertainment while standing on the street corner all day.

Probably just needs entertainment while standing on the street corner all day.

There are lots of voting systems that make third parties less damaging to major parties. Approval, RCV, STAR, Score, to name a few. Approval is a better choice because it’s much easier to use and explain to people (RCV disenfranchises minorities, poor people, and under educated voters), while generally agreeing with RCV on the results. Plus, it’s much easier to expand to proportional representation, when we get there.

That linked data is collected from local American races. The winner is overwhelmingly the person who won the first round, which is the only round the majority of the time. When people claim RCV will break the two party system they are trying to claim it will change the winners. The evidence largely shows that no voting system can take a single-winner duopoly and break it.

Any new voting system would require only a simple bill from the legislature. “Ballots instructions for every election at every level shall direct voters to select any number of candidates. The candidates with the most votes wins their respective election.”

Changing the voting system has nothing to do with the parties in power. Also, it’s a referendum campaign. You’d be collecting signatures from the citizens in order to get it on the ballot. Pretty much all you have to do is find some primaries where the winner got like 25% percent of the vote and talk about how unacceptable that is. St. Louis uses approval for their primaries instead of the general. Approval asks what fraction of the population approved of a candidate, so the winner’s percentage is practically guaranteed to go up, demonstrating they actually do have broad support.

1. RCV and two-round runoff are very different in practice because the two round system encourages strategic voting, has a higher potential for spoilers (RCV has them too), and has an intermediate time where the advancing candidates have to fight over all the voters who didn’t pick them in the first round, which is meaningfully different from when they were a part of the pack.

2. France has some amount of proportional representation at the local level.

3. They’re not starting from an entrenched two party system.

4. They’re honestly simply one of the big exceptions, it’s fairly well-established that single-winner methods tend towards two parties pretty much no matter what you do. Typically when you see more than two parties at the national level, it’s because there are regional pockets where only two parties are competitive, but it’s not always the same two parties. I’m not familiar with the details about the French political situation, but yeah, they’ve got a very unusual number of parties for a single-winner dominated structure. Compare them with Australia, who have proportional representation at the national level, and it should be pretty clear they’re just plain exceptional. If you need more evidence, Texas, Mississippi, and Georgia already use a two round system for their legislatures but they still have a two party system.

I dunno how much you know about representation and voting systems, but the wiki article on two round systems is pretty good.

You start from the bottom and work your way up. Switch your local elections to approval with a referendum campaign, and by the time you get up to the state level you’ll have people in office who have already proven they can win under approval. I’m serious. You should run a referendum campaign.

For sure, which is why I only use Mint anyway. I need my hand held. But Linus was doing power-user things without power-user reading. You can’t really claim the car is no good when you opened the hood and started swapping hoses without checking to see what goes where.

Off the top of my head:

-Sold a bunch of merch that was comically oversized and left everyone stuck with unusable product.
-Tried to arrange a deal under the table on an auction gun he got a look at before it went up.
-Doesn’t help his teammates reset stages when at a shooting competition.
-Failed to stand up for Karl when ARFCOM was making up lies about him.
-Failed to give IRTV credit for organizing a 2GAC match, when that’s basically the only request they make for media.
-Took on Lucas Botkin as a sponsor.
-Copy-pasted brutality rules for his own spin-off match after falling out with Karl, and doing such a poor job he left in references to the venue or IRTV (I can’t remember which).
-When asked why he was selling merch with a picture of himself that he hated, shrugged and said “money.”
-Treats his wife more like “the help.”
-Generally just thinks he’s better than you and you don’t deserve his respect.
-Abuses copyright takedown requests.
-Removes comments critical of him on his YouTube channel but claims doing so for other people was not possible (Karl, when ARFCOM happened).
-Has expressed deep distain for his own audience.

There’s more but that’s all I can remember right now.

Edit: I should say that he’s generally pretty good at keeping this stuff out of the public eye, these are mostly only things you hear if you know the right people.

Forgotten Weapons: Used to have videos on very cool old guns with interesting historical backgrounds and whatever. Then he made a series of selfish decisions that demonstrated what kind of person he really was, and I no longer had any interest in even helping him through the algorithm.

I love guns, but… Bro… Don’t do that.

Too bad about him, his passion for old electronics made me interested when I don’t have any particular interest of my own.

Shad is constantly trying to get one over on his co-hosts to the point where it’s difficult to watch. Always has to win. I liked learning about how castles worked a hundred times more.

Linus uninstalled his desktop after ignoring the warning that said °hey, this will uninstall your desktop.°

Yeah absolutely zero newbies are going to buy a new computer in order to test out Linux.

I use KdenLive on Mint whenever I need to edit a video. I’ve never bothered to look for the other two because I use Darktable and GIMP for my photo editing, but I can check to see if they’re available if you want me to.

Just changing the voting system by itself won’t get rid of the two party system, we also need proportional representation. I much prefer Approval Voting and Sequential Proportional Approval Voting because the results are as good, if not better than RCV, they’re easier for the individual to understand, and it’s impossible to submit an invalid ballot using either method. Plus RCV doesn’t actually change the winner the vast majority of the time. Fargo and St. Louis both use approval voting and folks there appreciate being able to vote for everyone they like and know that their full ballot will always be counted.