The Online Nation

[JMJones0424]

The interesting thing is that in the first 2 structures all males had a democratic vote on the motions put forward by the executive and in the last two structures (the second due to the war) the public services were deficient as all public monies were either dedicated to the war effort or, in the final structure, dedicated to suppressing the people.

 

Forgive my ignorance, but at what age did one become one of the "all males" that had a democratic vote. Likewise, what proportion of the residents actually qualified as members in the "all males" group?

[LaurieAG]

Hi JMJones0424,

 

Forgive my ignorance, but at what age did one become one of the "all males" that had a democratic vote. Likewise, what proportion of the residents actually qualified as members in the "all males" group?

It was actually all adult males, excluding male homosexual prostitutes at some times, and the age of adulthood varied. How long is a piece of string?

 

The treatment of males by females and females by males in the ancient religions changed over time according to Robert Graves 'Greek Myths'.

 

http://www.24grammata.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Robert-Graves-The-Greek-Myths-24grammata.com_.pdf

[cal]

Occupy Oakland devolved into a horrible mess when the it got invaded by the Anarchists and Trotskyites, who shouted down the folks who had reasonable goals and political smarts. Jane Hamsher was one of the last holdouts among the Progressive blogosphere to keep supporting them (because she supported the movement more strongly than anyone), but the hard news from the front finally withered even her support.

I think you misunderstood the point of my reference. I don't care if there are dissenting parties in this system, and this system also doesn't care about dissenters, because people who dissent from this type of government won't be citizens, and so they will have no political say in this system, because they can't vote or make laws or do any of the things that anyone who is a citizen could give a [LOL] about.

 

 

The problem with direct democracy is that the people with the most time to devote to both casting votes and lobbying come from extremes (usually single issue, but not always), and their rise in control causes apathy to increase leading to government decisions that have little resemblance to the will of the people.

Well, we assume this, because according to Clay, no system of direct democracy ever existed, so anything you say on its outcomes is really all conjecture. Lol. I think your point here is actually the only real concern I have left about this system that hasn't been accounted for in my version of the constitution (that I still haven't uploaded soz), being that what decisions are automated by the system is not elastic enough to account for a drop in voter turn-out for a given voting session. Let's say for example people have jobs, school, etc. and can not find time in their month to read up on national laws being proposed so they can vote on them, and thus just tend to never vote. If they still vote without reading the laws themselves, then that vote is based on some interest groups telling them how to vote, right? This system does not let voters go in blind like that. They are required to read each law before being allowed to vote on said law (similar to how you have to scroll to the bottom of EULA agreement sometimes before you can continue) and then re-type the single sentence purpose of the law that was stated at the top, so they at least know exactly what they are voting on. If they choose to not vote, there is a minimum able-voter percentage that must be met in order for a law to be approved or disapproved. There was also some other safety that I can't remember cause I'm super tired, but it's in the constitution, so I've stopped caring because it's not a problem if people choose not to vote. OH I remember now lol, if you don't vote on anything in four voting sessions, your right to vote is revoked and you must re-apply in order to vote again. So semi-mandatory voting is invoked to insure a good percentage of able-voters consistently turning out. And some other stuff, so tired, college is eating my brain mushies.

 

 

Let's take just one timely example: Should we put fertilizer plants with large quantities of anhydrous ammonia next door to schools? What should the minimum distance be? What should the threshold amount of anhydrous ammonia be for a given distance? Should we require builders of plants to register with the government to record their compliance? When should they be required to file their registration? Should there be public notification and a review process that's open to public comment? Do we have a board to review registrations? Should we inspect plants to make sure that they aren't exceeding the limits they registered? How often do we inspect them? What should the penalties be for fining non-compliance? Should we require them to have safety systems in place like sprinklers or emergency pressure release valves, and if so what devices and where are they going to be required? Should they be required to have emergency response staff (firefighters) on premises? If not, do we need to hire/support additional public emergency response facilities? If it blows up and the insurance limits set turn out to be inadequate, who has the liability for any damages? Should we require the plant to maintain liability coverage? How much coverage should they be required to have?

Okay, this has already been covered, not only in this thread, but in the first one. Small area-specific issues like that aren't tackled by everyone in the nation, they are tackled by the people of that specific area (solidarity if there wasn't voting) and because you're including a business, it's also a profession-specific law, meaning there is a weighted overall vote from two voter groups. This is already covered. What might be a problem is if all those individual questions were not individual laws put into one code, but a single bill presented to be voted on all at once. I think people will find in this system that the logic used should be akin to a scripting language and not a programming language, smaller pieces of the same cookie and you get the item eventually. In this system, if people tak on fifty different laws into one bill like that, the thing will always fail, no matter what the issue covers, because you have the option of making ten individual issues to be voted on, where each issue can be debated and compromised on separately, each being put into law-code when agreement is met, versus a giant bill that cannot be compromised on without re-writing the entire thing eighty times, at which point it's removed from the system anyways.

 

Oh god, what am I even saying, my brain has stopped... I hope some of this makes slight sense, and I hope I remember to format it all correctly on my version of the constitution so I can finally upload it and have this all make sense... lols.

 

 

In a true direct democracy, every one of those questions (and the multitude of additional ones just on this one issue excised for brevity) would have to be put up for a vote, because all of them have potential impacts on every citizen. And a lot of the answers are not "yes/no" they're "500 feet/1000 feet/12,932 feet..." upon which your average citizen needs to be extremely engaged in order to have a clue as to the answer (a point where I agree with C1ay).

I don't remember if I touched on this or not from the last quote in this post, but things dealing with specifications of laws like the feet given there would be decided on by the profession-specific vote and the body of law-reviewers before it is put onto the voting session, whereupon the area-specific populous then decides if it's legit. Dissenting opinions are also going to be posted under the con section of a proposed law, and then up/down voted for which comments best represent dissenting reasoning. I may have not mentioned that bit at all ever in this thread... hmmm, so yea, I should also explain that whole thing about laws having pro and con sections created by the users, but whatevs brain-brain is mushy mushy. Will get back to that some time eventually maybe.

 

 

It's this gradual march from delegating decision making on extremely technical questions that ultimately puts us right up to the high level threshold of representative democracy where the citizen gets asked "Should we try to make sure that dangerous manufacturing facilities are regulated so they don't kill a whole lot of people? Yes/No" and even then, most of them are overwhelmed and it's the small minority of people who care about that specific issue that decide for the majority who mostly say "I dunno."

Only the people affected by a law have a say on it, and I know that starts to sound odd because you could argue that people on the third floor of a building are affected by laws that required certain machinery to be loud on the fourth floor, but I mean direct effect, by area of people. I've said this already yes? Area-specific laws, things of that nature, read the constitution I posted, probably solved most of these problems already I think.

 

 

(which I think is really the motivation for your proposal)

It's not, but if it helps to confuse you on my intent, nobody can buy-out congressmen in this system, because all the people vote, not just an elected congressman.

 

Also, from what I'm told by my physics teacher, an African Swallow could potentially carry a cocoanut. Just sayain.

 

 

 

Let's not. Having dug a little further I couldn't find any evidence of any true democracies. Athenian was the closest and it failed but it was not even a true democracy since only the elite were allowed to participate.

I can only see this as a good thing, because it means this new system will be that much more pure, direct, and focused, more so than any other government ever (according to you, since this type of government has never been used).

 

 

So there will be no central point of funding for public services likes schools and highways? Emergency services like police, fire and rescue? There will be no government provided services of any kind?

That's not what I said, now was it? I said there is no public treasury, because there is no place to keep currency, because no hard currency exists in this system. You wouldn't ask the creator of bitcoin where his treasury is, as it'd be the same as asking the person who sells you plant seeds where he/she keeps all his/her sold lawns.

 

If you read the thing I just posted about tax codes, I think that answers your question, but in case you decided to skip that entire page of the conversation, here's a link to the specific post in which I discuss the use of credit interactions by this system - Shared Pool for programs.

[C1ay]

I think you misunderstood the point of my reference. I don't care if there are dissenting parties in this system, and this system also doesn't care about dissenters, because people who dissent from this type of government won't be citizens, and so they will have no political say in this system, because they can't vote or make laws or do any of the things that anyone who is a citizen could give a [LOL] about.

Wow, that looks like a good description of elitist mob rule. I would think dissent to be a necessary part of any political system, one side of the checks and balances that successful systems require to protect the rights of minorities from unjust whims of a majority. If a majority in your system supported something like slavery would the dissenters be stripped of their citizenship?

[cal]

Wow, that looks like a good description of elitist mob rule. I would think dissent to be a necessary part of any political system, one side of the checks and balances that successful systems require to protect the rights of minorities from unjust whims of a majority. If a majority in your system supported something like slavery would the dissenters be stripped of their citizenship?

 

I bet if you put all those straws together, you could build a whole man.

 

We weren't talking about voter dissent, we were talking about those who dissent to this system of government entirely. Also, slavery perverses the principles of liberty on the most fundamental levels. The principles of liberty are the only thing that the citizens can't change in this system, making it's perversion apparent if perversion occurs.

[Buffy]

I think you misunderstood the point of my reference. I don't care if there are dissenting parties in this system, and this system also doesn't care about dissenters, because people who dissent from this type of government won't be citizens, and so they will have no political say in this system, because they can't vote or make laws or do any of the things that anyone who is a citizen could give a [LOL] about.

Wow, that looks like a good description of elitist mob rule. I would think dissent to be a necessary part of any political system, one side of the checks and balances that successful systems require to protect the rights of minorities from unjust whims of a majority. If a majority in your system supported something like slavery would the dissenters be stripped of their citizenship?

Actually this is and excellent example of Fascism, in which the "unworthy" are basically systematically and/or indirectly disenfranchised. Sorry to appear to invoke Godwin's Law, but if we're going to be strict in our usage of words, it's unfortunately appropriate.

 

While Fascism obviously became anathema due to 30's German and Italian Fascist governments starting WWII and Germany's holocaust, it is still a mainstay of far right parties everywhere (Italy, France, Holland and our own Tea Party here in the US), and in its current form focuses primarily on identifying groups of "others" who are either "not from around here" (immigrants, usually of different ethnicities although simply saying "illegal aliens" is a great way to hide actual racism as well as other bête noires like "homos" and "women") as well as those opposed to the the group's ideas ("librul commie facists," "dirty f%^&ing hippies" and other moderates on the political scale). And while in the past half century we've mostly seen these groups try to suppress "others" by publicity that strives to deligitimize them through negative (and mostly untrue) themes, along with playing up the seriousness of real threats (e.g. immigrants taking jobs), recently we have seen a very significant push to explicitly disenfranchise minorities through restrictions on voting rights that are not much different from Reconstruction in the south after the Civil War.

 

That's what make what you're saying here so disturbing, because it sounds like you're trying to get away with "government without representation" by simply saying "anyone is free to opt out."

 

Which brings up a major theme of the questions so far in this thread, because it does sound like you're designing a government that really can't do anything, because if you're going to treat the "opt outs" fairly, no law that you pass can affect them. Otherwise you're just a Fascist Oligarchy lording over serfs who by definition are anyone who doesn't agree with you.

 

I don't think that's your intent here, but you are at risk of falling into a trap that most designs for a governmental system that is "of/by/for the people" fall into.

 

... I think your point here is actually the only real concern I have left about this system that hasn't been accounted for in my version of the constitution (that I still haven't uploaded soz), being that what decisions are automated by the system is not elastic enough to account for a drop in voter turn-out for a given voting session. Let's say for example people have jobs, school, etc. and can not find time in their month to read up on national laws being proposed so they can vote on them, and thus just tend to never vote. ... If they choose to not vote, there is a minimum able-voter percentage that must be met in order for a law to be approved or disapproved. There was also some other safety that I can't remember cause I'm super tired, but it's in the constitution, so I've stopped caring because it's not a problem if people choose not to vote. OH I remember now lol, if you don't vote on anything in four voting sessions, your right to vote is revoked and you must re-apply in order to vote again. So semi-mandatory voting is invoked to insure a good percentage of able-voters consistently turning out...

There are indeed many democracies where voting is required, oddly enough, often in countries with "single party democracies" where turnout is necessary to prove the legitimacy of the party that "always wins." Since this sounds onerous in more open democracies, the penalties are usually not severe and they allow for "mostly voting" to avoid action, but even then, this is only dealing with voting once every 2-4 YEARS. Now the problem here is that a direct democracy you're already talking about "once a month" voting, and in most states in the US these days we've already got one, two, three or more DOZEN "questions" or "amendments" that people have to vote on even WITH representative democracy.

 

In a direct democracy, you're only going to have that number go through the roof, making it harder and harder for average people to participate, especially with the fact that not only are you going to require them to vote to maintain their full citizenship, but they're going to have to at least cursorally prove they understand what they're voting for without also losing their voting rights:

 

If they still vote without reading the laws themselves, then that vote is based on some interest groups telling them how to vote, right? This system does not let voters go in blind like that. They are required to read each law before being allowed to vote on said law (similar to how you have to scroll to the bottom of EULA agreement sometimes before you can continue) and then re-type the single sentence purpose of the law that was stated at the top, so they at least know exactly what they are voting on.

Sounds like a great recipe for people who these days work two jobs and try to take care of their kids on serf-like wages to be excluded from the elite "true citizens."

 

Okay, this has already been covered, not only in this thread, but in the first one. Small area-specific issues like that aren't tackled by everyone in the nation, they are tackled by the people of that specific area (solidarity if there wasn't voting) and because you're including a business, it's also a profession-specific law, meaning there is a weighted overall vote from two voter groups. This is already covered.

This is the descent into representative democracy, but made even worse by allowing those who are "directly interested" in it to make all the decisions. In the example I gave of regulating manufacture of poisonous substances, who gets to vote on this? Just the manufacturers? Or if we include the folks that "might be affected" do we write a new law and revote every time a new plant is built because there is a "new group" that's affected?

 

What might be a problem is if all those individual questions were not individual laws put into one code, but a single bill presented to be voted on all at once. I think people will find in this system that the logic used should be akin to a scripting language and not a programming language, smaller pieces of the same cookie and you get the item eventually. In this system, if people tak on fifty different laws into one bill like that, the thing will always fail, no matter what the issue covers, because you have the option of making ten individual issues to be voted on, where each issue can be debated and compromised on separately, each being put into law-code when agreement is met, versus a giant bill that cannot be compromised on without re-writing the entire thing eighty times, at which point it's removed from the system anyways.

And this is where things get overwhelming. I agree with you that "omnibus" bills are a horrible problem, but this just proliferates the number of issues that people will have to individually absorb (and then have to retype of course to prove they understood it).

 

Have you run any simulations that might indicate how many individual laws the "average" citizen (taking into account that they won't have to vote on things they are not "affected" by into account) will have to vote on in the course of a year? How many hours they're going to have to devote to justifying their continued legitimacy as a "citizen?"

 

Seems like that'll be an important detail to have a handle on up front so that people who opt in know what they're getting into before they give up their citizenship in their country of birth.

 

...things dealing with specifications of laws like the feet given there would be decided on by the profession-specific vote and the body of law-reviewers before it is put onto the voting session, whereupon the area-specific populous then decides if it's legit. Dissenting opinions are also going to be posted under the con section of a proposed law, and then up/down voted for which comments best represent dissenting reasoning....

Richard Darman who was GHW Bush's Director of the OMB once said "He who owns the document owns the policy." He wasn't saying that if you wrote it you could avoid accepting changes you didn't want, it was that you could lead the direction of any discussion on the document by it's initial construction, and then through "interpretation" of the comments that go into making modifications.

 

So here you've got the people who are most affected by them writing them ("profession-specific vote") and a "body-of-law-reviewers" (who picks them?) who will have more influence on what laws get enacted than anyone voting for them, in addition to those most affected with the most time probably ending up with the most comments and thus being the most influential in the "public discussion."

 

 

It's not, but if it helps to confuse you on my intent, nobody can buy-out congressmen in this system, because all the people vote, not just an elected congressman.

Only the hoi polloi among the 1% have to worry about "buying-out congressmen". The real powers *deliver the votes* to get the congressman they totally own elected. Read up on "Boss" Tweed....

 

 

And that's the thing that's really missing from the thinking behind this Constitution: it's really lacking seemingly any comprehensive effort to address the real world issues of governing, relying on a theoretically-based process without dealing with the fact that what governments have to do is to manage humans as psychological and sociological beings who are quite often not rational actors, but are driven by instincts and tribal forces that are in constant conflict.

 

It was interesting to me that you used a Javascript analogy above, because I see the problem here as very much like what happens when working on web sites: the people who want them built assume that the biggest problem is the technology, when really 90% of the effort goes into content.

 

Scaling up these ideas is not about having the technological infrastructure, but rather the incredibly difficult problems of taking a large group of people with almost definitionally opposing points of view and keeping them from killing one another.

 

 

Conflict is going to happen whether you want it or not. People will butt heads. Sometimes when you least expect it, :phones:

Buffy

[CraigD]

Finally, a question unrelated to your proposed tax code, Snax: have you read the novels Snow Crash and Diamond age?

No I have not lol, but they look badass. I have such a huge backlog on my reading list it's upsetting, but I'm definitely adding those.

I mention these moderately old novels because both are in large explorations of ideas of government like the one proposed in the start of this thread. I’ve always found it helpful to consider previous explorations of an idea when discussing it again, so will give a very brief synopsis of some key “online nation” themes in the first of these 2 novels.

 

Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, published in 1992, is set mostly in early 21st (it could easily be 2013) North America. The US and various US state governments still exist, but are much reduced in importance, most of their services and revenues now being provided and collected by “Franchise-Owned Quasi-National Entities” – “FOQNEs” or “franchise nations”. The story’s main protagonist (named, so there can be no mistaking this, “Hiro Protagonist”) is citizen of one, “Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong”, which figures importantly early in the story.

 

How FOQNEs get revenues from their citizens isn’t explained in Snow Crash – my impression is that one pays a flat monthly or yearly due, like many present day social clubs – but the services they provide are, and their the services most of us expect from our local and national governments – protection against crime, fair rules governing business, a stable currency, etc. The key feature of these nations is that, unlike most present day ones, they’re voluntary – one is not automatically a citizen due to ones place of birth or nationality of ones parents, but must chose, and in some fashion pay (for Lee’s Hong Kong payment is monetary – its hinted that for others, payment (and privilege, as it affords near guaranteed employment of last resort) includes being subject to a military draft), for the privileges and duties of citizenship.

 

Stephenson’s fictional FOQNEs are very unlike nearly all present day nations, which are rooted in the idea of territorial sovereignty. For example, I’m a member of a croquet club. In exchange for paying yearly dues and following its rules, I can attend regular croquet tournaments and nice parties. Unlike the fictional, Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong, the Croquet Club doesn’t provide embassies to shelter me from arrest by local jurisdiction, courts to decide disputes with other members, or police, courts, and jails to protect me from criminals. Local, state, and the US government do those things, regardless of my Croquet Club membership or lack of it, or even my US citizenship or lack of it. These governments are sovereign – their laws and powers apply to everyone within their geographical borders, except for small zones afforded to the embassies of recognized foreign nations.

 

From post #1, Snax’s Online Nation appears at first glance to be voluntary (it has “members”), and proposes to be sovereign (once it has “amassed a large quantity of members”, “all they have to do to dissolve their physical government is stop adhering to their laws”). However, unlike Stephenson’s FOQNEs, and like present day nations like the US, it doesn’t appear to allow the existence of competitors. Once 51% of the people in some geographic extent join the Online nation, the nation previously sovereign there is “dissolved”. I’m unsure if, under the proposed scheme, citizenship would remain voluntary then.

 

Something like Stephenson’s FOQNEs seem more likely to me to actually occur than something like Snax’s Online Nation, because they are more easily, and to some extent, have already been, implemented. For example, in many small towns where the governments can no longer provide services such as trash collection, people subscribe to private trash collection service. People unhappy with government-provided police services employ private security companies. Charter schools have replaced some directly-government run public schools.

 

Further, the political right wings in nations such as the US have openly espoused a “starve the beast” strategy of disempowering government and privatizing many of its customary functions, and enjoyed some success. If this trend continues, the world imagined by Stephenson (not surprisingly, as he wrote of them during a upswing for the US political right, during the Presidency of Ronald Regan), in which many franchises compete to provide the customary functions of government, seems plausible to me.

 

The fictional universe of Cory Doctorow’s 2003 Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (as, like most of Doctorow’s work, this is available online for free via a CC BT-NA-SA license, the first novel from a major writer so licensed, you’ve no excuse not to read it right away, Snax ;)), is I think relevant to this thread’s conversation. However, I believe what it describes essentially not new democracies or voluntary governments, but post-scarcity anarchy.

 

Personally, I’m a proponent of post-scarcity (I prefer the term “abundance”) economics, and consider it plausible, which disposes me to anarchistic leanings, and suspicions of any proposal for non-voluntary nations or compulsory laws. Having grown up an atheist among a majority of fundamentalist Christians, making me a sort of protected minority, I’m profoundly mistrustful of direct democracies, as had my childhood been in a state with such a government, my atheism would have almost certainly been illegal. As C1ay alludes to in his last post, I believe The tyranny of the majority is a real – and I hope not imminent – threat to personal liberty.

[C1ay]

We weren't talking about voter dissent, we were talking about those who dissent to this system of government entirely.

Really? You advocate a purely voter driven system and then you try to distinguish the system as different from a voter driven system. You realize you're logic is rather circular there don't you?

[cal]

Actually this is and excellent example of Fascism, in which the "unworthy" are basically systematically and/or indirectly disenfranchised. Sorry to appear to invoke Godwin's Law, but if we're going to be strict in our usage of words, it's unfortunately appropriate.

No? If people don't want to vote they don't have to, that's all... All I'm saying is that I'm not forcing people to be citizens (the opposite of fascism) and I'm not forcing people to vote, because this isn't Sweden ffs, it's the internet. Also, both of the arguments you quoted and gave are based on the anti-principles of freedom, which leads me again to think that you are missing the core concept of what this system pursues (the principles of freedom, in case you're still not getting that). Also, I lol'd when I read Godwin's Law, funny cause true.

 

 

That's what make what you're saying here so disturbing, because it sounds like you're trying to get away with "government without representation" by simply saying "anyone is free to opt out."

But a Direct Democracy is a government without "representation"... This isn't a republic, the only person who represents you is you. And it would be much, much worse if people weren't free to opt-out, wouldn't it? Because then this system would be able to force people into doing things against their will (anti-liberty btw).

 

 

Which brings up a major theme of the questions so far in this thread, because it does sound like you're designing a government that really can't do anything,

Just because you feel that's the theme, does not make it so. The theme of the questions here (besides yours) seems to be on the specifics of handling certain situations, not whether or not it can handle them in the first place.

 

 

if you're going to treat the "opt outs" fairly, no law that you pass can affect them. Otherwise you're just a Fascist Oligarchy lording over serfs who by definition are anyone who doesn't agree with you.

SO MUCH WOT. In fact, I think I get that you're just messing with me now, but in case you're not and you really are that oblivious to what liberty is and how it functions, I'll tackle this quote seriously to amuse your humor. What you're describing is analogous to someone choosing not to vote in America, and then saying that because he/she didn't vote, the laws don't apply to them (first sentence in quote). (Second sentence ->) How can there be a fascist oligarchy lording over serfs/dissenters if there is no ruling class? There are no rulers, so who would be ruling over? These arguments don't even make sense, they're nonsensical to the point that either you read the constitution and entirely missed the core concept, or you didn't read the constitution which is a whole 'nother issue.

 

 

There are indeed many democracies where voting is required, oddly enough, often in countries with "single party democracies" where turnout is necessary to prove the legitimacy of the party that "always wins." Since this sounds onerous in more open democracies, the penalties are usually not severe and they allow for "mostly voting" to avoid action, but even then, this is only dealing with voting once every 2-4 YEARS. Now the problem here is that a direct democracy you're already talking about "once a month" voting, and in most states in the US these days we've already got one, two, three or more DOZEN "questions" or "amendments" that people have to vote on even WITH representative democracy.

Well I mean it doesn't have to be every four months, it can be set to 4 years being the cutoff for voter-revoking. None of this is set in stone yet lol. And yea, those dozens of questions/amendments are every few years, meaning that the number people would vote on would be significantly smaller due to the much short voting cycle. You're describing a problem that doesn't seem to apply to this system? That problem doesn't sound like an issue, rather than something to be happy about.

 

 

In a direct democracy, you're only going to have that number go through the roof, making it harder and harder for average people to participate, especially with the fact that not only are you going to require them to vote to maintain their full citizenship, but they're going to have to at least cursorally prove they understand what they're voting for without also losing their voting rights:

...

Sounds like a great recipe for people who these days work two jobs and try to take care of their kids on serf-like wages to be excluded from the elite "true citizens."

Every Scotsman in this system is a True Scotsman lol. Seriously though, if they don't have time to vote, then they don't have time to vote, I don't see why it's a bad thing that we aren't forcing them to vote. Plus if they only get their voting revoked after like two years (or whatever we make it) then so what? It would only take five minutes to log on and get it back. Really all the things you're describing as "problems" are more like "not problems" because these safeties stop all the stupids from voting. I mean can you honestly say it's a good thing to have people voting on laws that they don't know about? Why would you tell people to vote on something that they have no understanding of, that's what the founders of America were afraid of, that's why we have the legislative branch, but I'm proposing a more efficient way of cutting out the stupid, so don't ding me for being innovative.

 

 

Okay, this has already been covered, not only in this thread, but in the first one. Small area-specific issues like that aren't tackled by everyone in the nation, they are tackled by the people of that specific area (solidarity if there wasn't voting) and because you're including a business, it's also a profession-specific law, meaning there is a weighted overall vote from two voter groups. This is already covered.

This is the descent into representative democracy, but made even worse by allowing those who are "directly interested" in it to make all the decisions. In the example I gave of regulating manufacture of poisonous substances, who gets to vote on this? Just the manufacturers? Or if we include the folks that "might be affected" do we write a new law and revote every time a new plant is built because there is a "new group" that's affected?

Did I not answer that directly in what you quoted? Both the people of the area and the people of that entire industry vote on the issue, with the people of the area having the greater weight in the voter calculation. On top of this, whoever wrote the law regarding that situation has to get the law passed during the examination phase of the voting cycle, in which the law is scrutinized by a third party of people (law-makers) and another group of people I've failed to add to the public constitution, ON Economists (ONE's?). While these government economists don't have a say in the vote until the law goes into the voting session (where everyone would normally have a say), they do have a say in whether or not a proposed law is reasonably feasible and if the monetary amounts described in it are legitimate, their approval/dissent will be featured with the law for the law-makers to up-vote or down-vote. The reason the economists are included at all is because I'm assuming greed is the basis of your argument, where business will want to maximize profit etc. Couldn't the businesses just buy-out the economists then you ask? Well since the currency system is entirely digital, the system would see that government employees are getting credits from a business, which would then be stop and the business shut down, as it is constitutionally illegal to do so. Stop thinking of these problems in relation to past ones, solutions to future problems are often strange and out of our current perception.

 

As far as the "new group" problem goes, I'd think that after enough plants are put up, people would be smart enough to just make it a province-wide law... but if they want to keep it area-specific, then they may, it's their choice.

 

 

And this is where things get overwhelming. I agree with you that "omnibus" bills are a horrible problem, but this just proliferates the number of issues that people will have to individually absorb (and then have to retype of course to prove they understood it).

Retyping a sentence isn't a big issue... And there doesn't necessarily have to be a large body of people voting on this stuff, the percent of people needed is adjustable.

 

 

Have you run any simulations that might indicate how many individual laws the "average" citizen (taking into account that they won't have to vote on things they are not "affected" by into account) will have to vote on in the course of a year? How many hours they're going to have to devote to justifying their continued legitimacy as a "citizen?"

Zero to none? Let's say we're going with the initial four cycles I said a post or two back, then they would have to vote on one law every five-ish months, which worst case would take a whole hour to read and then vote? And the word "have" here is used lightly, because they don't have to vote. It's okay to get your voting-license (I guess we'll call it that) revoked, because you can get it back at any time if you want it. The reason voting rights are revoked is to keep the system clean and easier to regulate, it's simply only for government transparency so it's easier for citizens to see what's going on. And for voter turn-out percentages to laws are passed by the people voting, not by a stale voter populous.

 

 

Seems like that'll be an important detail to have a handle on up front so that people who opt in know what they're getting into before they give up their citizenship in their country of birth.

What part of dual-citizenship do you not understand? Also you used a buzz word here- country. I don't think I ever called the Online Nation a country, and I'm not saying you're claiming I am, but I would like to note that this system isn't really a country. Even if it gets land to call host to its nation, that land is just a province in the system. Aren't countries faction-type structures? Iunno.

 

 

Richard Darman who was GHW Bush's Director of the OMB once said "He who owns the document owns the policy." He wasn't saying that if you wrote it you could avoid accepting changes you didn't want, it was that you could lead the direction of any discussion on the document by it's initial construction, and then through "interpretation" of the comments that go into making modifications.

This whole argument assumes modifications would be allowed, so you are automatically wrong. Discussion on the proposed law is on whether or not the law is right or should be voted on, that is all. If people feel their are problems with a law, it doesn't make it through the examination session (review session? I forgot what I called it) and it stays dead until someone, probably the original uploader, re-uploads a new document. No two same documents can be passed through the system after a certain number of times, I'm pretty sure that part is in the public constitution.

 

 

So here you've got the people who are most affected by them writing them ("profession-specific vote") and a "body-of-law-reviewers" (who picks them?) who will have more influence on what laws get enacted than anyone voting for them, in addition to those most affected with the most time probably ending up with the most comments and thus being the most influential in the "public discussion."

Anyone can write a law, like anyone can vote (after applying of course). The "law-reviewers" are just the law-makers voting on laws during the review session. They don't pick anyone to do anything. Also, only one comment is allowed per person, and only two comments will be displayed in each pro & con section below a proposed law. If people want to read more, they can. People can't dilute the top comment either, because you are only allowed to up or down vote either the pro or con section, not both, and you must pick if you are for a law or against it before you can up/down vote comments.

 

 

And that's the thing that's really missing from the thinking behind this Constitution: it's really lacking seemingly any comprehensive effort to address the real world issues of governing, relying on a theoretically-based process without dealing with the fact that what governments have to do is to manage humans as psychological and sociological beings who are quite often not rational actors, but are driven by instincts and tribal forces that are in constant conflict.

You tell me this government does nothing to handle irrational people and their conflicts, and then tell me in the same post that this government handles them too well because not everyone is allowed to vote on everything. Naw dawg, you go down this road and I'll probably just stop responding to you.

 

 

It was interesting to me that you used a Javascript analogy above, because I see the problem here as very much like what happens when working on web sites: the people who want them built assume that the biggest problem is the technology, when really 90% of the effort goes into content.

I actually don't remember doing that, could you link the quote cause iunno what you're talkin' 'bout. Also, I don't know js so it was probably a C++ analogy, but programming nonetheless. And yea, I agree with you, which is why my worries isn't in programming the system, I could care less about that aspect of it because I know the only way it won't get done is if the programming team is super incompetent. I'll just get new programmers to replace them, no biggy.

 

 

Scaling up these ideas is not about having the technological infrastructure, but rather the incredibly difficult problems of taking a large group of people with almost definitionally opposing points of view and keeping them from killing one another.

Now you're struck something here, the killing part. I don't think a group's ideology can ever stop an individual from killing another individual, this is a problem that I would argue is beyond government, because all the concept of government can do is say, "If this guy shoots someone, you should put him/her in jail for a few years." Whether or not people follow what the government prescribes is a different issue, one that is out of the government's control. Generally speaking though, people like having rules, and since government regulate rules, they will usually enforce those rules, so this is another issue that I don't think is substantial once criminal code is passed.

 

 

Conflict is going to happen whether you want it or not. People will butt heads.

It's a good thing we now have a proposed system that can equally handle all the differing views then, huh?

[Buffy]

No? If people don't want to vote they don't have to, that's all... All I'm saying is that I'm not forcing people to be citizens (the opposite of fascism) and I'm not forcing people to vote, because this isn't Sweden ffs, it's the internet. Also, both of the arguments you quoted and gave are based on the anti-principles of freedom, which leads me again to think that you are missing the core concept of what this system pursues (the principles of freedom, in case you're still not getting that).

Here's the fundamental issue:

 

What good is a government when anyone can opt out?

 

You got laws against murder? Cool, but there are certain people I think I'd like to kill, so I'll opt out, and you don't like it? Tough patootie. I don't gotta go in your jail for even a day.

 

Craig's books have some interesting points on this issue, because they point out the fact that what you end up with in parallel governments (your dual citizenship) is something akin to clubs, or the more desirable "post-scarcity anarchy" where bad stuff doesn't happen simply because everyone has everything they could ever want (except for those folks whose only desire is to control others, where even that type of society breaks down).

 

Craig also touches on the fact that you seem to be saying in earlier posts that at some point everyone does have to be part of this society once some majority is passed, and if that's the case, all the complaints I posed about--lets not say representation since that's not the issue--enforcement without enfranchisement, and tyranny of the majority (which C1ay also points out) do indeed come into play.

 

Based on your last post though, it sounds like you completely disavow that interpretation, and that this is all completely voluntary.

 

And that brings up my objection at the top of this post: Governments that are literally geographically interspersed with non-citizens aren't really good for much UNLESS there is either a strong tie to the geographically based "dual-citizenship governmental counterpart" OR the voluntary government does impose it's will on those who refuse to join.

 

I used to live in a community where there were two security firms that people could opt into. While armed, they were highly proscribed in how they could use their weapons mostly because of insurance liability issues if they shot the wrong person. As a practical matter, they actually directly interacted with thieves more often simply on patrol than responding to requests from "citizens under their jurisdiction" (AKA "customers"), so not only people who opted out, but people who joined the *other* security company benefited without paying "taxes" (fees) to that security company.

 

But the problem is that they could not enforce anything, and sometimes the police or prosecutor from the geographic government would refuse to prosecute because of any of a number of inadequacies in proof of a crime.

 

Gangs of course are far more effective because they impose their will on anyone to the benefit of all who pay for "protection."

 

Oh but there's that freedom thing. We can't have a government that will not impose sanctions on those who opt out.

 

All snarkiness aside, what IS this government going to do and what benefit would it bring its citizens? How is it going to deal with stuff that's "outside" whether it's your next door neighbor who opted out or the other outside (and geographically based or not) governments?

 

The theme of the questions here (besides yours) seems to be on the specifics of handling certain situations, not whether or not it can handle them in the first place.

Unfortunately the "specifics of handling certain situations" is where the rubber meets the road. If you're going to limit the discussion to "do we have a mechanism that would handle a very abstractly defined problem that doesn't handle how these situations play out in the real world, then you're counting the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. Dealing with abstract theoretical issues at the level of "if we have an issue to deal with, we'll just vote on it" rather than, "in cases where there are conflicts of interest and interested parties can manipulate the system, how do we make sure that 'just voting' doesn't harm some segment of our citizenry?"

 

You seem to sort of get this because you're already trying to give unequal weight to participants in order to improve outcomes, but the problem is that that tinkering can often lead to the OPPOSITE of what you intend.

 

I really have no intention to say you *want* to create a Fascist society, but I am pointing out how you can fall into it accidentally.

 

If you've taken PoliSci 101, you should have learned about the "Law of Unintended Consequences". It's really the most important thing to think about when doing any law making (including constitution writing), because the real world is complex enough that you rarely get the logical results you're honestly seeking.

 

Well I mean it doesn't have to be every four months, it can be set to 4 years being the cutoff for voter-revoking. None of this is set in stone yet lol. And yea, those dozens of questions/amendments are every few years, meaning that the number people would vote on would be significantly smaller due to the much short voting cycle. You're describing a problem that doesn't seem to apply to this system? That problem doesn't sound like an issue, rather than something to be happy about.

Now if you're saying that this government really isn't going to do much at all, I begin to understand some of these numbers. But geez, have you ever looked at a full set of the U.S.C.? Tax Code? State laws? Now just for the heck of it, I'll give you a complete pass on the fact that you're starting a government from scratch, so at day zero you have no laws at all, and we'll just keep it to the run rate, but if you look at just the US Congress over the last ten years you've got an average of 8000-10000 bills considered of which 300-600 get passed (and the last ten years has been dramatically less productive than the previous century). That of course does not count the multitude of bills that deal with state and local issues. And of course the vast majority of the ones that get passed are the omnibus bills that you earlier proscribed that contain hundreds of issues.

 

Now if your government isn't intended to do much, then maybe a few dozen things to vote on every few months (or years, I'm not completely clear on what you're saying about this) would really happen. I think to not even consider the practical implications of dealing with very large quantities of bills, and how to deal with the fact that larger quantities open up the likelihood that special interests will get laws passed with tiny numbers of votes for things that actually may be bad for large numbers of citizens. Or if you're going to really require minimum votes to be cast, whether you'll end up with a situation that due to voter burnout, you'll simply not pass many laws that are in fact needed (albeit not by everyone).

 

Seriously though, if they don't have time to vote, then they don't have time to vote, I don't see why it's a bad thing that we aren't forcing them to vote. Plus if they only get their voting revoked after like two years (or whatever we make it) then so what? It would only take five minutes to log on and get it back.

Then what's the point of "revoking their voting rights?" You've just gone to great lengths to try to describe a scheme for encouraging people to vote by threatening to take away their voting rights and now you're saying that all they gotta do to get their rights back is...vote? Why do you even bother having the loss of voting rights rule in the first place?

 

Really all the things you're describing as "problems" are more like "not problems" because these safeties stop all the stupids from voting. I mean can you honestly say it's a good thing to have people voting on laws that they don't know about? Why would you tell people to vote on something that they have no understanding of, that's what the founders of America were afraid of, that's why we have the legislative branch, but I'm proposing a more efficient way of cutting out the stupid, so don't ding me for being innovative.

Oh I admire your innovation, but the unintended consequence here is disenfranchisement. Seriously, who decides who "Teh Stupids" are? If you ask a Tea Partier, it's anyone to the left of Sarah Palin. I don't like slippery slope arguments, but what really bothers me about what you've proposed is there are these vague definitions of who is "an interested party" who gets more influence over things, and the fact that the obstacles to "teh stupids" voting aren't really material and allow for lots of vote "buying," and in fact actually seems to encourage it.

 

Note that vote buying does not have to be money, just quid pro quo that can easily drift into "vote this way or you'll lose your job" (if you read the papers that actually happened last fall), or "vote this way or you'll lose your teeth/house/life"...

 

Both the people of the area and the people of that entire industry vote on the issue, with the people of the area having the greater weight in the voter calculation. On top of this, whoever wrote the law regarding that situation has to get the law passed during the examination phase of the voting cycle, in which the law is scrutinized by a third party of people (law-makers) and another group of people I've failed to add to the public constitution, ON Economists (ONE's?). While these government economists don't have a say in the vote until the law goes into the voting session (where everyone would normally have a say), they do have a say in whether or not a proposed law is reasonably feasible and if the monetary amounts described in it are legitimate, their approval/dissent will be featured with the law for the law-makers to up-vote or down-vote. The reason the economists are included at all is because I'm assuming greed is the basis of your argument, where business will want to maximize profit etc. Couldn't the businesses just buy-out the economists then you ask? Well since the currency system is entirely digital, the system would see that government employees are getting credits from a business, which would then be stop and the business shut down, as it is constitutionally illegal to do so. Stop thinking of these problems in relation to past ones, solutions to future problems are often strange and out of our current perception.

Now you're getting into some serious "make it go away with the wave of your hand." Not a monetary problem, and you are not at all considering the actions of those who are "outside the system" and yet can still be nefarious actors. And you've just described here the need for neutral "third parties" waltzing right over the fact that picking such people is really difficult, because they can indeed be influenced.

 

And the whole big enough to drive a truck through is the issue that enforcement really seems almost voluntary.

 

Increase the scope of government and you've got both the complexity of direct democracy not scaling as well as the unstated and uncontrollable interactions with parallel "other" governmental entities with "dual citizenship", or you make the scope of government very small, in which case it just becomes a "club."

 

This whole argument assumes modifications would be allowed, so you are automatically wrong. Discussion on the proposed law is on whether or not the law is right or should be voted on, that is all. If people feel their are problems with a law, it doesn't make it through the examination session (review session? I forgot what I called it) and it stays dead until someone, probably the original uploader, re-uploads a new document. No two same documents can be passed through the system after a certain number of times, I'm pretty sure that part is in the public constitution.

And "resubmitting" is somehow different than a "revision"? Other than a possibly longer timescale due to extra overhead, this is exactly the dilemma I've described. What constitutes "same document"? Can I insert a "This page Intentionally Left Blank" in the middle and it's different? Change the order of a few sections? Randomly change the wording of a few lines with the same meaning using my Thesaurus? If it's something that is really important but really contentious--or has a powerful interest group--it'll never get passed. Some people think this is a good thing (and it is for the really stupid laws), but again the unintended consequence is that a lot of really important issues never get decided.

 

"That'll never happen" is not an appropriate response to that objection.

 

 

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, :phones:

Buffy

[cal]

From post #1, Snax’s Online Nation appears at first glance to be voluntary (it has “members”), and proposes to be sovereign (once it has “amassed a large quantity of members”, “all they have to do to dissolve their physical government is stop adhering to their laws”). However, unlike Stephenson’s FOQNEs, and like present day nations like the US, it doesn’t appear to allow the existence of competitors. Once 51% of the people in some geographic extent join the Online nation, the nation previously sovereign there is “dissolved”. I’m unsure if, under the proposed scheme, citizenship would remain voluntary then.

Competitors are allowed, I mean what are you qualifying as a competitor, cause technically every other country on the planet is a competitor. Also the 51% thing was just a metaphorical thing, it would probably take upwards of 80% of a country's citizens to become a part of the Online Nation in order to claim that country's land as a province, if the citizens even want it to become a province.

 

 

Something like Stephenson’s FOQNEs seem more likely to me to actually occur than something like Snax’s Online Nation, because they are more easily, and to some extent, have already been, implemented.

What says this system can't be used like the FOQNEs? An online government is not limited by geographical borders. Sure it won't replace your trash service, but once it has enough members, it could fight for your new rights in court and do various other legal actions. If it was extremely large in populous I suppose the law enforcement aspect could be invoked as well. It's all up to the citizens.

 

 

Personally, I’m a proponent of post-scarcity (I prefer the term “abundance”) economics, and consider it plausible, which disposes me to anarchistic leanings, and suspicions of any proposal for non-voluntary nations or compulsory laws. Having grown up an atheist among a majority of fundamentalist Christians, making me a sort of protected minority, I’m profoundly mistrustful of direct democracies, as had my childhood been in a state with such a government, my atheism would have almost certainly been illegal. As C1ay alludes to in his last post, I believe The tyranny of the majority is a real – and I hope not imminent – threat to personal liberty.

To be honest, I'd much more prefer a world without currency at all, post-scarcity is the ideal economy type (especially since they had it in Star Trek: TNG) and I'm hoping my crediting system will provide a smooth transition into no monetary system at all. This nation is totally voluntary btw. I've more than tripled the constitution document's length at this point, I should probably upload some of it lol, but no one can be born into this system. Also, the principles of liberty don't allow one group to be treated differently than another based matters as trivial as opinion. The principles of liberty (in relation to all others, I guess that's altruism really) is why this government was made and should be implemented. I don't think we can have a nice transition out of strong government into pure solidarity without everything riding on liberty. Note I am not saying freedom, because freedom is a concept you cannot enforce, otherwise it's not freedom anymore. Every law in this system is based on whether or no someone has the liberty to do something. Most of the revised (un-uploaded) constitution focuses on that. As far as the majority problem goes, I think I've fairly delt with it, what with all the safeties for all the stupids out there.

 

All this talk is boiling down to a bunch of baseless conjecture. I'd like to actually give this system a test run so we could silence all the haters, but alas I've found that I can't learn python on my own, scripting languages are too much of a bore for me. I need a programmer who will prototype an alpha build of this system for free, and that probably won't happen either. What say you on any solutions you may have in mind?

[cal]

What good is a government when anyone can opt out?

Plenty good.

 

 

You got laws against murder? Cool, but there are certain people I think I'd like to kill, so I'll opt out, and you don't like it? Tough patootie. I don't gotta go in your jail for even a day.

Who says that? You expect to commit an action against the state and not expect the state to commit action back?

. The citizens of this nation are protected by the laws within. It's like when people are deported after fleeing to a new country to evade murder charges.

 

 

... you end up with in parallel governments (your dual citizenship) is something akin to clubs ...

Good...

 

 

... where bad stuff doesn't happen simply because everyone has everything they could ever want (except for those folks whose only desire is to control others, where even that type of society breaks down).

Yea but at least it won't be breaking down from a governmental infrastructure point of view (cause no rulers). You're giving an example of something that is out of government control and then making it seem like my proposed system is a bad one because of this non-sequitur factor. gg gf gj mate.

 

 

Craig also touches on the fact that you seem to be saying in earlier posts that at some point everyone does have to be part of this society once some majority is passed, and if that's the case, all the complaints I posed about--lets not say representation since that's not the issue--enforcement without enfranchisement, and tyranny of the majority (which C1ay also points out) do indeed come into play.

You're assuming a lot more than what's explicitly written down here. And even if it is, it's just writing, it can be changed. No one has to be a citizen at any point. I said that if the populous of a country wants to get rid of their current government, all they need do is not adhere to it. Of course that only works if the majority of that country's rule decides to stop adhering to it, but you get the point. Land would only be added to the Online Nation as a province if all persons (100% of the peoples) in that land are citizens of the ON and vote to have it added as a province. I think as this form of government becomes more popular, people will stop thinking of country borders as things that cannot overlap. Stop thinking of past examples to deal with future issues. I'm pretty sure two congruent online government can have separate citizens living in the same area. Why not have overlapping geographical countries? The only reason we haven't done it before is because wars were fought with people on land, wouldn't an online nation fight wars via competitive shooters like Counter-Strike? If it even fights a war at all...

 

 

Based on your last post though, it sounds like you completely disavow that interpretation, and that this is all completely voluntary.

I'm trying to make it up to the will of the individual as much as possible. The citizen has to be at liberty to call him/herself a citizen, and if they cannot, then they are not. The principles of liberty and the principles of freedom and availability of information are pretty much the personal biases I am trying to push onto this system.

 

 

And that brings up my objection at the top of this post: Governments that are literally geographically interspersed with non-citizens aren't really good for much UNLESS there is either a strong tie to the geographically based "dual-citizenship governmental counterpart" OR the voluntary government does impose it's will on those who refuse to join.

Citizenship won't be forced, and yes that may make it seem useless to have this government at all, at least in that area, because it's laws wouldn't be enforced, right? Why would laws all of a sudden just stop being enforced though? If something happens to a citizen of this government, the police force of this government will respond to bring court justice to the offender, just like the normal courts do, but with limitations on who it can provide "justice" for, as justice is only defined by the users of this systems citizenship. I guess this creates a new problem though doesn't it? Even though it seems to be a compromise of your two problems, it creates its own problem, being that it may apprehend a non-citizen that the non-citizens government tries to protect. What happens then? Does the ON then use force to fight the other country's police or military? No, if military-like action is implied, the ON will stop current pursuit of a criminal, but will pick it back up as soon as the other government relinquishes resistance to the apprehension of its citizens. I think that is another compromise, I guess, I mean I really don't know what I'm saying anymore, it's two in the morning again and I just marathoned five hours of Blacklight lol.

 

 

But the problem is that they could not enforce anything, and sometimes the police or prosecutor from the geographic government would refuse to prosecute because of any of a number of inadequacies in proof of a crime.

I'm pretty sure the online system would recognize it's own legality and allow it's law-enforcement the proper channels to prosecute criminals. With third party law-enforcement like what you're describing, maybe they could follow proper procedure so they didn't have those issues?

 

 

Gangs of course are far more effective because they impose their will on anyone to the benefit of all who pay for "protection."

 

Oh but there's that freedom thing. We can't have a government that will not impose sanctions on those who opt out.

I've never said this. Liberty applies to all people on the planet, no matter what country they're in and no matter what government claims them as citizens. As soon as someone infringes on that liberty, they're in the wrong. As soon as someone infringes on the ON's citizens' liberties, they best back up before they get smacked up.

 

 

All snarkiness aside, what IS this government going to do and what benefit would it bring its citizens? How is it going to deal with stuff that's "outside" whether it's your next door neighbor who opted out or the other outside (and geographically based or not) governments?

No matter what answer I give to this question, you seem to never accept it. What does this government do and how is it any better to its citizens than any other government? This is like when Rade decides to just totally ignore everything I say and just use a definition that doesn't apply to a word at all, but he uses it anyways because he just doesn't give a [LUL]. As soon as you become a citizen of the Online Nation, you are immediately granted with equal political power in relation to every other citizen, which is more political power than you could ever have in any other nation (granted that you aren't prime minister of Aus or something like that). On top of truly equal political power, this system gives way to incrementally transitioning peoples out of physical governments (and by extension, physical borders even) and into a singular world nation, peacefully. If you simply choose not to value the principles of a united planet and the principles of liberty and equal policy powers in a government, then I know not how to answer your question.

 

As to the second part of the quote above, it deals with them very carefully. That's all I can say right now (and I think I kinda answered this above your quote). How do you think they should be dealt with in this kind of a system?

 

 

Unfortunately the "specifics of handling certain situations" is where the rubber meets the road. If you're going to limit the discussion to "do we have a mechanism that would handle a very abstractly defined problem that doesn't handle how these situations play out in the real world, then you're counting the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. Dealing with abstract theoretical issues at the level of "if we have an issue to deal with, we'll just vote on it" rather than, "in cases where there are conflicts of interest and interested parties can manipulate the system, how do we make sure that 'just voting' doesn't harm some segment of our citizenry?"

Conflicts of interest and interested parties that can manipulate the system, being able to harm the citizenry in the process, is just as abstract to say as any of the things I've said in this whole thread, if not more. Don't accuse me of unlikely issues when you present them more-so yourself. And I still don't see why we have to constantly protect all of the citizens from anything outside their votes. If they get disenfranchised because someone successfully utilized the system, then it is the voters' faults for passing the law(s) that allowed the disenfranchisement to happen to them. This aspect of the government is pretty similar to our current American government from what I can tell, except that citizens have direct say, rather than hoping their reps vote similar to how they would.

 

 

If you've taken PoliSci 101, you should have learned about the "Law of Unintended Consequences". It's really the most important thing to think about when doing any law making (including constitution writing), because the real world is complex enough that you rarely get the logical results you're honestly seeking.

My poly sci class was terrible, they only taught American political science, and nothing else. I realize a lot of unintended stuffs might and probably will happen if and when this system gets implemented, which is why I'm glad a lot of this issues are being accounted for here and now, being fixed by you all and added to the constitution by me. I'm crowd-sourcing it for a reason. The road will be bumpy, but at least it will hit the ground running, rather than breaking its shins on impact and never making it further than five feet.

 

 

Now if you're saying that this government really isn't going to do much at all, I begin to understand some of these numbers. But geez, have you ever looked at a full set of the U.S.C.? Tax Code? State laws? Now just for the heck of it, I'll give you a complete pass on the fact that you're starting a government from scratch, so at day zero you have no laws at all, and we'll just keep it to the run rate, but if you look at just the US Congress over the last ten years you've got an average of 8000-10000 bills considered of which 300-600 get passed (and the last ten years has been dramatically less productive than the previous century). That of course does not count the multitude of bills that deal with state and local issues. And of course the vast majority of the ones that get passed are the omnibus bills that you earlier proscribed that contain hundreds of issues.

It will not start with no laws, I've already written a mock tax code and will be outlining legal code and drug code, as well as business and professional practice codes, court system rules and regulations, etc. Most of these I will probably aggregate into bills and either have them started with this government, or have them presented as the first laws for review once the government is active. Like I said, hit the ground running. You mention that a lot of cheddar is thrown around with the gouda, and I expect nothing different in an online system, probably much more garbage than real laws. All this means though is that we have another safety to balance the system out. If someone who is a registered Law-Maker has proposed more then ten laws into the review session, and have had all laws voted out of the system, then their law-making privileges will be temporarily revoked, or something like that. We can get creative with solving these kinds of issues. I also realize that my proposed safety won't be enough since there will still be tons of legitimate laws being proposed. I suppose their will be a whole bunch of laws that just don't get very much attention, but I feel that will be the nature of this beast. A lot of laws in this system will probably be suspended and re-proposed in the next cycle due to lack of voting I'm guessing. Maybe there will be way less laws proposed, as law-making is not a paid position? Law-reviewing, however, is a paid government position, so I think we could warp that into another safety. I need to add this to the constitution (which I guess I'll have to split up into the Const. and a bunch of bills now lol).

 

 

I think to not even consider the practical implications of dealing with very large quantities of bills, and how to deal with the fact that larger quantities open up the likelihood that special interests will get laws passed with tiny numbers of votes for things that actually may be bad for large numbers of citizens. Or if you're going to really require minimum votes to be cast, whether you'll end up with a situation that due to voter burnout, you'll simply not pass many laws that are in fact needed (albeit not by everyone).

Bingo. Freedom was needed by the slaves in America, and plantation owners needed someone to pick the cotton. I think the things that are needed will sort themselves out over time, and a direct democracy allows those things to be sorted out.

 

 

Then what's the point of "revoking their voting rights?" You've just gone to great lengths to try to describe a scheme for encouraging people to vote by threatening to take away their voting rights and now you're saying that all they gotta do to get their rights back is...vote? Why do you even bother having the loss of voting rights rule in the first place?

Well they get a time penalty as well. Like I said, none of this is in stone, yet. How about a six month period before they can test to register for their voting privileges again? What do you think a fitting punishment would be for ignoring to vote?

 

 

Oh I admire your innovation, but the unintended consequence here is disenfranchisement. Seriously, who decides who "Teh Stupids" are? If you ask a Tea Partier, it's anyone to the left of Sarah Palin. I don't like slippery slope arguments, but what really bothers me about what you've proposed is there are these vague definitions of who is "an interested party" who gets more influence over things, and the fact that the obstacles to "teh stupids" voting aren't really material and allow for lots of vote "buying," and in fact actually seems to encourage it.

 

Note that vote buying does not have to be money, just quid pro quo that can easily drift into "vote this way or you'll lose your job" (if you read the papers that actually happened last fall), or "vote this way or you'll lose your teeth/house/life"...

The stupids are the people who don't know/haven't read what they're voting on. Which means yes, anyone can be a stupids at times. I don't think you've earned the right to judge something before you get to know it, especially when it comes to policy making, and thus the citizenship of the ON must know what it is talking about before it is allowed to talk (speaking about voting at least). I am totally okay with disenfranchising the people who disenfranchise thought-out and informed voter choice. This still follows the principles of liberty, where you lose the liberty to do something when you've interfered with someone else's liberty.

 

Also how would a company know how one of its employee's voted on something? Just because the government is totally transparent doesn't mean its citizens are. The voter record of individuals is totally private unless they choose to make it publicly available (I have fixed this in the revised constitution) and the government can still report exact voting percentages without having to give away specifically who those votes were; citizens have the right to total anonymity. You might then say, what if a company requires its employees to make their voting records publicly available then? I would answer with, "that's illegal." Because it is. A company cannot force its employees to do anything with their citizenship status. You can still argue that companies/interest groups will pay people to vote one way or another, but again since the economy of this system is based on digital crediting, the software would be able to immediately catch when a company is paying people not under its employ. And if they payed their employees extra without being able to see how they actually vote, then really they're just giving their employees bonuses with false hopes of voter fraud. I think this issue has also been accounted for as of writing this.

 

 

Now you're getting into some serious "make it go away with the wave of your hand." Not a monetary problem, and you are not at all considering the actions of those who are "outside the system" and yet can still be nefarious actors. And you've just described here the need for neutral "third parties" waltzing right over the fact that picking such people is really difficult, because they can indeed be influenced.

People outside the system can't pay in credits, meaning whatever they use to influence people is valueless to this government. Picking economists doesn't really matter, they don't have a final say in any of it.

 

 

And the whole big enough to drive a truck through is the issue that enforcement really seems almost voluntary.

Isn't it for any government? What are the LAPD enforcing? Well they agree to enforce a set of rules established by the system they decided to adhere to, as well the police force in the ON system. Enforcement of any government is voluntary by those who are enforcing. I recognize that the "law" is really just an opinion with a gun, but as long as that opinion is based on the principles of liberty, then the gun is as well, meaning it only fires when fired upon.

 

 

Increase the scope of government and you've got both the complexity of direct democracy not scaling as well as the unstated and uncontrollable interactions with parallel "other" governmental entities with "dual citizenship", or you make the scope of government very small, in which case it just becomes a "club."

Clubs are fine.

 

 

And "resubmitting" is somehow different than a "revision"?

Yea. A revision would be an altered form of the document, where something has been changed. A resubmission would be the same document that was either suspended for the next review cycle, or the same document that waited out it's cool-down period (which I think was made like sixth months or something) and then was re-proposed in the review session.

 

 

Other than a possibly longer timescale due to extra overhead, this is exactly the dilemma I've described. What constitutes "same document"? Can I insert a "This page Intentionally Left Blank" in the middle and it's different? Change the order of a few sections? Randomly change the wording of a few lines with the same meaning using my Thesaurus? If it's something that is really important but really contentious--or has a powerful interest group--it'll never get passed. Some people think this is a good thing (and it is for the really stupid laws), but again the unintended consequence is that a lot of really important issues never get decided.

I'm sure an algorithm can be coded that scans the submitted plain text to see if it's the same document re-worded. If it's the same document, but re-phrased then it is technically a new document because rephrasing legal codes can often mean very different legal codes. Inserting junk text to circumvent the system is a reportable offense by reviewers of the proposed law and enough reports will lead to a temporary suspension of a citizen's law-making privileges, if not a permanent one. You seem to be describing a sort of gridlock, cool, but so what? I'm not making this system to get rid of gridlock, in fact this is one of the trivial things you seemed to mock me for initially. This idea is above that, this government is being made to fix even more fundamental issues with governing principles. If there is gridlock, so be it, at least it's citizen induced gridlock.

[Buffy]

What good is a government when anyone can opt out?

Plenty good.

I see. Doesn't sound like you want to elaborate on that.

 

Something you might want to consider though is that if you are going to actually get people to join in, they need some sort of motivation to do so. If there's no obvious benefit from joining this government, then there's no point in doing so.

 

Unfortunately at this point it's really become clear that you really are interested solely in the Constitution and the implementation of the process as abstract ideas. That's fine, but the problem is that most people really don't care what form of government they have as long as it does something that makes their lives better.

 

Both democracy and communism became popular not because of specific details of the governmental systems they proposed, but because they promised a better life, more security, self determination, and so forth. Direct vote versus representative vote? Whatever. In fact if you asked the average former Eastern Communist Bloc resident what was wrong with Communism, you'd hear that their main complaint is that it simply didn't deliver as nice a life as the Western Democracies. Voting? Eh.

 

Now, you're lucky here because you've got some poli-sci wonks who actually study this stuff and have fun talking about it. But he REALLY fun part of it is dealing with the real world issues of human psychology that make coming up with a form of government so hard to do. So stuff like whether people will be punished for not voting are very interesting issues: it's not the *exact* amount of time that you'd keep people from voting, but whether you'd want to do it *at all*, and if you did, would you make it "hard" or "easy" to get back in? And most importantly, ask the question, "how is that going to affect how people act toward this government, and are the outcomes ones we want or don't want?" On that particular issue, you seem to be belittling the whole thing as an implementation issue where people will just decide what they want to do, as if the general approach could have dramatic effects on whether the government succeeds or fails.

 

The trap here is in believing that direct democracy is *intrinsically* better than other forms, when all of them have their problems: in designing a government you are always making trade-offs between competing goals (the required voting penalty issue is a great one to think about), scarce resources (in direct democracy, people's time spent governing), and efficient mechanisms of governing (having people vote on laws while ignoring the conflicting and complex enforcement mechanisms and environment is just nuts). For even us wonks, you're gonna have to put some thought into why some of these issues that cause governments to fail aren't going to happen to yours.

 

After that of course, realize you're unlikely to get more than the wonks to join in unless you come up with some bread and circuses. What got America going was not our constitution, but the Declaration of Independence. Ditto everyone who likes it reads The Communist Manifesto, Soviet Constitution, not so much.

 

 

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer, :phones:

Buffy

[LaurieAG]

That's the problem with constitutions Buffy,

 

They all have some sort of voting system underneath them no matter how well they are written.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_systems

 

According to the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem, no voting system can be immune to strategic manipulation in all cases, but certainly some systems will have this problem more often than others.

[C1ay]

That's the problem with constitutions Buffy,

 

They all have some sort of voting system underneath them no matter how well they are written.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_systems

Not necessarily true. One could easily have a constitutional monarchy with no elements of democracy. I don't think constitutions in and of themselves are problematic.

 

What is problematic is letting people vote for things they don't understand the consequences of. Polling systems can be implemented to reduce such consequences but advocating to let people vote for everything is inherently a bad idea in my opinion. It reduces good decision making to nothing more than a beauty contest.

[cal]

Plenty good.

I see. Doesn't sound like you want to elaborate on that.

Didn't think I had to, it seems pretty obvious to me.

 

 

Something you might want to consider though is that if you are going to actually get people to join in, they need some sort of motivation to do so. If there's no obvious benefit from joining this government, then there's no point in doing so.

How many times do I have to say, "No matter what answer I give to this question, you seem to never accept it. What does this government do and how is it any better to its citizens than any other government? This is like when Rade decides to just totally ignore everything I say and just use a definition that doesn't apply to a word at all, but he uses it anyways because he just doesn't give a [LUL]. As soon as you become a citizen of the Online Nation, you are immediately granted with equal political power in relation to every other citizen, which is more political power than you could ever have in any other nation (granted that you aren't prime minister of Aus or something like that). On top of truly equal political power, this system gives way to incrementally transitioning peoples out of physical governments (and by extension, physical borders even) and into a singular world nation, peacefully. If you simply choose not to value the principles of a united planet and the principles of liberty and equal policy powers in a government, then I know not how to answer your question." before you listen?

 

 

Unfortunately at this point it's really become clear that you really are interested solely in the Constitution and the implementation of the process as abstract ideas. That's fine, but the problem is that most people really don't care what form of government they have as long as it does something that makes their lives better.

I'm not interested solely in the constitution, but since that's what this thread is about and what my questions have been about - is the proposed constitution good enough - then I can see why you'd think that. I can't see how this system would make lives worse, in communism you still have rulers, communism collapses on the rulers. Actually in every other form of government, there are rulers, and it always collapses with them (or by virtue of their extended actions). Let me ask you the reverse, how could this form of government not make lives better? I'd argue it even betters the lives of those who have to step down from power, so please, tell me what it truly is that makes you so against what I'm proposing. Is it simply because I'm the one proposing it? You seem to be immovably against anything I say, bias much?

 

 

Now, you're lucky here because you've got some poli-sci wonks who actually study this stuff and have fun talking about it. But he REALLY fun part of it is dealing with the real world issues of human psychology that make coming up with a form of government so hard to do. So stuff like whether people will be punished for not voting are very interesting issues: it's not the *exact* amount of time that you'd keep people from voting, but whether you'd want to do it *at all*, and if you did, would you make it "hard" or "easy" to get back in? And most importantly, ask the question, "how is that going to affect how people act toward this government, and are the outcomes ones we want or don't want?" On that particular issue, you seem to be belittling the whole thing as an implementation issue where people will just decide what they want to do, as if the general approach could have dramatic effects on whether the government succeeds or fails.

I do want to do it... That's how a voting system works, the vote itself must be a prided thing, otherwise you've stripped the motivation of the populous to vote. You can instill desire of voting privileges by making it just that- a privilege. Privileges can be suspended, meaning they will have to earn it back (granted if it is too difficult to earn back, all of a sudden the problems you were all discussing of a super-majority would come about), which is why citizens have to re-apply and go through a process in order to vote again. You seem to have completely ignored my questions, although I can't blame you because they were of the "if you have a better idea, say it" nature, but, if you have a better idea, say it. You cannot give criticism without offering a better alternative, otherwise it is just categorized as complaining.

 

 

The trap here is in believing that direct democracy is *intrinsically* better than other forms, when all of them have their problems: in designing a government you are always making trade-offs between competing goals (the required voting penalty issue is a great one to think about), scarce resources (in direct democracy, people's time spent governing), and efficient mechanisms of governing (having people vote on laws while ignoring the conflicting and complex enforcement mechanisms and environment is just nuts). For even us wonks, you're gonna have to put some thought into why some of these issues that cause governments to fail aren't going to happen to yours.

It is intrinsically better, even if it outright fails a thousand times in a row, it's principally better. Democracy is the worst form of government ever tried, except for all the other forms of government ever tried. A direct democracy, based on all the rights of people, as derived from the principles of liberty (not just some outlined in a document, but any right you can derive from liberty), is the freest form of government possible, by definition. I think it's odd to say it's "better" or "worse" like it is to say it's "right" or it's "wrong", because it just is. It's an option that has not been tried yet, and whether or not it succeeds is directly the fault of its citizens, not it's political leaders, which makes it intrinsically better because your fate is not dictated by a bunch of old men in a room 2000 miles away. Your fate is dictated by you directly, and the aggregate of your peers.

 

 

After that of course, realize you're unlikely to get more than the wonks to join in unless you come up with some bread and circuses.

You keep assuming I want everyone in on this. This system is based on logic and designed to educate it's populous by following the second set of principles it's written on- the freedom of information and knowledge. It's very much an elitist nation in that sense, where the educated are respected. When this system is started, I would much more appreciate that only the wonks be interested enough to join in. It'll make it significantly more efficient in terms of passing the initial legal codes needed for a society to function (your road work and education problems and similars). Not to mention that with a bunch of like-minded intelligent people, this system is almost guaranteed to be successful in it's designed purpose, at least initially. If the intellectual elites join in, and the nation is successful, that is the bread of the circus, the marvel of this new type of governance that shines through. It will get notice that way and so that's how we can market it to other people. <- Assuming we care to have other people join.

[cal]

What is problematic is letting people vote for things they don't understand the consequences of.

Literacy tests of their native tongue, scientific literacy tests, legal code understanding tests, and law-specific test on the individual laws they vote on greatly reduce the problem you describe here. I acknowledge that it doesn't completely eradicate the problem, but so what? Majority rules, and as long as the majority is educated on the topic, the problem isn't very problematic.

 

 

Polling systems can be implemented to reduce such consequences but advocating to let people vote for everything is inherently a bad idea in my opinion. It reduces good decision making to nothing more than a beauty contest.

You mean beauty contest in the sense that proposed laws that look good, but aren't actually good, will cause problems, right? If that's what you mean by it, then that's a problem with every form of government, not just democracies. And I don't think blanket problems like that are valid reasons why this specific government is somehow not as good as other governments, because those other governments experience this same problem.

 

Also it is becoming apparently that I have to re-type a bunch of stuff I have already said, because people are understandably forgetful. This government is not like the US government, no where in this system's constitution does it say that more than half the GDP will be spent on national security. The main focus of this government (beyond instilling rights and the outlines for laws to be enforced, as every government does) is the education of the populous. Admittedly some of that has not made it yet onto the public gdoc, but it's in there, trust me.

 

I should probably elaborate on what this government will do any differently to try to instill logical (and rational) reasoning skills in it's citizens. Logic and Ethics classes will be required subjects before the high-school age. Philosophy will no longer be a college specific domain. I also have hopes of implementing a very different education format than the current American one. I think video-game design is crucial to an efficient and much more successful classroom, as shown

. Finland consistently ranks first place in education, because they use game theory. Granted it's cold as balls in Finland so they don't really have anything better to do, but you get my point. A dramatic restructuring of school would get rid of the problem of having your schooling get in the way of your education. But this aspect is out of my control until we get this government started and I get a bill with this education format submitted and voted on. Edited May 10, 2013 by Snax