deciplex

It seems to me that in FPTP you end up with both parties trying to calculate the absolute minimum they have to promise to their base in order to get just enough of their vote to win the election by 50%+1. And, after the election, trying to calculate what is the minimum amount of promises they have to keep, without depressing voter enthusiasm so much that they lose the next election. (The Democrats seem especially bad about this, and I say this as someone who votes Democratic and volunteers for Democratic causes and candidates.)

In others words in FPTP you have politicians trying to figure what is the bare minimum they have to do in order to not get fired. These are perverse incentives, and they do not tend to attract the sort of person I want to vote for.

Ranked choice voting seems to go a long way toward addressing this: I simply rank candidates in the order that they match my preferences, perhaps also accounting for their perceived trustworthiness as well. And, more or less, the candidate who best matches the aggregated preferences of the voters will win.

Let's change this slightly:

> First past the post works because it is simple, understandable and it forces politicians to do the deals before voters have expressed their will - or suffer the consequences of being ignored entirely.

Your way is much less democratic.

If you create a universe which is indistinguishable from our own, even in a quantum sense (i.e. you recreate the quantum state that our universe is in), then you'll necessarily have created a universe with an indistinguishable copy of yourself in it. But in fact that's the only way to create an indistinguishable copy of yourself in the first place! You can't reduce the problem any further than this.

In other words, this entire "paradox" boils down to a vague understanding of the word "identity".

It is: http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans-smart-...

And, somewhere in our brain, we probably have just such a periodic event generator, although it's probably a bit flawed in the implementation like most things generated by evolution typically are, but it does the job well enough for us to arrive at a sense of time that very roughly agrees with more rigorously-derived measurement devices.

Ultimately time is a shorthand for cause and effect, and the fact that causes propagate to their effects at roughly the same speed (relative to a reference cause and effect) everywhere we measure them (relativistic effects notwithstanding). If you have evidence this is not the case, I would love to see it, because it implies some new physics. You would win a Nobel prize for this, easily, if you could prove it.

I get it, but I can't quite wrap my head around a mathematical universe with no substrate. As though any internally consistent ontology with self-aware structures (and, it seems to me, also those without) just "exists" apropos of nothing. What's doing the math?

The rich and powerful in China have nothing to fear from this.

In fact Feynman's IQ was merely "above average" according to Feynman himself, who got a look at his score after taking the test in school.

But if you're using "IQ" as a proxy for actual, you know, intelligence then yeah, I agree :-)

Edit: from your original post it also occurs to me you might think union leadership is never elected? But it almost always is (usually by law, in fact).

Not to mention a lot of the good mods are still on like 1.6 or something because obviously no one is going to diligently update their mod over the course of ten years or however long Mojang wants to keep this up.

With the exception of perhaps some bug fixes if necessary, KSP 1.3 is done. Stick a fork in it and start work on something else.

Find some new, better friends.

That's the thing: so much of modern conservatism is just cargo-cult thinking. Lower taxes (esp. wrt the mythical Laffer Curve which is making a comeback now), deregulation, market economies as an intrinsic good as opposed to a tool (which conveniently shields them from criticism). And so on. And that's just on the economics side.

If you operate according to the maxim "that government is best which governs least" the logical conclusion of that is "that government is best which governs not at all", which is basically what we're getting from conservative politics these days.

Hopefully exit the OS business altogether and focus on Office. I kid, of course, but a man can dream.