The Frying Pan - 2016-05-24 (page 3 of 4)

« first day (2084 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (2897 days later) »

9:00 PM

Blood donation specifically really does hinge a lot on free time, too. You can't do anything physically strenuous for a while, so it's not just the time it takes you to go to a blood drive or blood bank.

> The breakdown reveals that those with an annual income below £5,000 give an average of almost 4.5% to good causes, but that the proportion falls the higher the income. People earning £40,000 or more donate just over 2% to charity.

@Cerberus Yes, thank you. It's an interesting article, and now my statement seems quite misguided.

I'm sure it still applies in some subgroups, just not in general.

So even if you're inclined to give to charities in general, if you're unable to get time away from work and so on, it's hard to donate blood.

Good point.

9:01 PM

I know this comes up in surveys about voter turnout (people say too little free time is a reason they didn't get to the polls) so I'm sure it's huge for blood donation.

I consider myself "rich" in the sense that I live comfortably without having to worry about whether I can pay for stuff and having the freedom and time do pursue my hobbies

Really?

I don't remember this being a factor for me in donating blood.

But it takes only 10 minutes max to vote!

@Cerberus not in the us

Can take all day sometimes

9:02 PM

No preparation necessary, nor any travelling.

All day??

Okay all day is a huge anomaly.

We had that discussion before, don't tell people in other countries about the worst case, they'll think it's the norm.

lol just worst case scenario

hehe sorry :P

But it does potentially take a lot more than 10 minutes. Might be 20 minutes just to drive to the polling station and back, especially if it's rush hour.

Why can't they just go to the nearest voting station, or vote at the train station on their way home, spend 5 minutes there, then go home?

I don't know about Germany, but in Bulgaria voting is on weekends so people won't have to take time off work

9:03 PM

...because "just go" takes time

@Jefromi Maybe some people in the country might not live as close to a voting station, that may be true here as well. Although any small village will have one.

of course there are people who have to work on weekends, but it is not that large a percentage of the general population

Cerberus, I'm telling you as a fact that it takes time to get to the polling station.

I'm aware that's not ideal (and nor is weekday voting).

I hadn't read that line yet.

Oh, and I think some countries require voters to register themselves or something?

Yes, the US has voter registration, which can be an obstacle too.

9:05 PM

Go to some office several weeks before voting in order to be able to vote later?

But it's often not super hard, and managing to make time on election day ends up being a thing.

Most places you can do it by mail, and also get registered at the same time as getting your driver's license

Is a 20-minute drive normal?

I have no idea what the median is.

But it's totally possible for a 2-mile drive to be 15-20 minutes with rush hour traffic.

But why go during rush hour?

Because you have a job.

9:07 PM

Vote in the evening?

So when you get off work to go vote, it's rush hour.

Vote at the train station, near the office, near your house, or somewhere on your route?

You don't pick where you vote.

How do you mean?

You go to the designated polling station for your address.

9:08 PM

I realize that "having to work so many hours that taking 20 minutes off for a vote ro a blood donation is a significant problem" is a realistic scenario for poor people in the USA (and not only poor ones), but from my eurocentric point of view it is just a tiny side effect of the huge problem of "not being able to make a living wage without being mercilessly exploited".

Ohhhh.

I see.

And in any case, that doesn't necessarily help.

That complicates things.

When I was 2 miles from the polling station, it was the nearby one, and it was about the same distance from work

There are like 20 polling stations on my route to work.

9:09 PM

@Cerberus where do you vote? Are there voting stations on the train stops in the NL?

Yes.

I was only 4 or 5 miles from work, there weren't bonus polling stations.

Maybe not in all train stations.

Sounds like a solution which only works well in places like Benelux, with their immense population density

Don't they have stations in major buildings in Germany?

9:10 PM

I have never voted in Germany, because I don't have citizenship

Like a village library?

Oh, I see.

in Bulgaria, they usually set them up in schools

Also keep in mind that even if the lines aren't out of control, they will be longer at peak times outside of work.

So in any case, in the US (with an admittedly imperfect system), it does often take a bit of time to vote, and for people with fixed hours and families, that's a big deal.

Yes, schools too, elderly homes, everywhere.

If there are queues, then perhaps there aren't enough stations?

In some places, yes, that's true.

9:12 PM

we don't have them in elderly homes or train stations. So usually the density of schools and density of voting stations is the same. Or rather, there are less voting stations, because if you have two very close schools (for example a primary school and a highschool) they only set it up in one of them.

But it's also hard to make stations based on peak demand.

The longest queue I've seen is like 2 people in front of me, so perhaps it is a matter of not having as many stations per voter?

(and yeah ours are usually in schools too, or libraries, or whatever)

At least that's how they do it in Sofia, I suspect that in small villages, they may use the town hall or the mayor's building.

@Cerberus I'm sure that's some of it, but you personally also likely aren't voting at peak times, everyone can go to whatever station they want so the load probably gets spread out more, maybe other factors too.

And your median travel time is less because you don't have big spread out cities and suburbs, too.

9:15 PM

I've sampled a few villages, and it seems they have around 1 station per 1000 or 2000 inhabitants in the country.

rumtscho does have a point that this can be considered a side effect of the US having a lot of people struggling to get by.

I think it's really hard to find those numbers in the US, since it's state-by-state or even city-by-city.

@Jay How do I? I don't... I look at views (which are more a symptom of HNQ status) and then check the HNQ page to confirm.

oh

@Jefromi Oh, I have voted around rush hour, at various times during the day. I've never seen any queues on television either. I just don't think it is a thing. I could be wrong.

i thought there might be an easier way.

9:17 PM

But... number of precincts (I think precincts generally don't have more than one polling place) I found this doc that says it's in the 180-190k range, so that's one per 1800 people here too.

Perhaps it's the uneven distribution, then.

Depends which part you're talking about.

As I mentioned in the previous discussion in here about this, if you're looking at worst case lines, that's just because the US is big.

@Jay Not that I've found. But I'm pretty good at guessing whether something is or isn't. (on the sites I use).

(so you'll hear about a few of the worst from those 180k precincts)

If it's travel time, yes, the US is more spread out.

The Dutch government spends about €4 per eligible voter on parliamentary elections, I've just found out.

9:20 PM

Okay, here's a good doc.

eac.gov/assets/1/AssetManager/2004%20EAVS%20Chapter%2013.pdf

There's a table from the 2004 elections, including population per polling place and precinct by state.

It varies wildly, I think possibly with some correlation to population density.

And one insane outlier: oregon apparently had 59k people per polling place???

Oh, I see. They do elections entirely by mail.

Hmm.

But let people cast ballots at a few places anyway just in case, so it all gets lumped together.

It seems Canada spends 5.5 times as much on parliamentary elections as Holland does, with only twice the population.

...or maybe the numbers are lying and they're dividing total registered voters by number of (essentially unused) polling places, but yeah, not a real number.

@Cerberus Yeah, but somewhat more than twice the area.

> It illustrates that the total amount of public funding in past election cycles has ranged from about $73 million in 1976 to nearly $240 million in 2000. The total for the 2012 election cycle was $37.9 million, representing a more than $100 million decline from the previous presidential year's total of $139.5 million, the largest decline in spending from one cycle to the next.
The 2012 presidential election was the first time that the two major party nominees opted out of the public financing program for both the primary and general elections. Primary matching fund payouts in connection wi…

fec.gov/press/bkgnd/fund.shtml

9:25 PM

We're talking about campaign finance now?

But it's hard to find out whether this covers all of the same costs.

"Presidential Election Campaign Fund"

And the campaign is only about what the candidates do, not what the government does?

Yes, candidates campaign.

That fund is/was an attempt to make campaign funding more sane, by providing public funding to all "serious" candidates and placing spending limits on them in exchange.

Is Sanders campaigning for similar restrictions?

9:28 PM

But I'd expect elections to be more expensive to run in the US than Holland as well, again thanks to population density.

I was interesting in the comparative cost, but it seems hard to find.

The US and Canada may be outliers in the big direction, but small dense European countries are outliers in the other direction.

It's probably hard to find in the US since it's not entirely run by the federal government.

@Cerberus I think he supports reform, I don't know specifically what kind.

On the other hand, Canada is highly urbanised.

Canada 80%, Netherlands 83%.

@Jefromi Is it a hot topic among the public, how much candidates spend in elections?

I mean among average people.

Broadly yes.

Everyone hates how much money is involved in politics, and it's hard to change.

And urban isn't the same everywhere; presumably a lot of the people in that 80% in Canada are in physically large cities.

9:45 PM

if the same source gave the two figures, it would have used the same criteria for both countries?

Yes, but what I'm saying is that there are likely more lower-density cities and suburbs in Canada than in the Netherlands.

@rumtscho Oh, no, two different sources.

I'm not super super familiar with all the Canadian cities, but in general, if you have room to expand, you build more suburbs.

@Jefromi Then again, people will have more cars.

True?

What's your point?

(also car ownership is very income-dependent)

9:48 PM

It takes less time to travel to a farther station.

You remember how I was talking about taking 15-20 minutes to get to a station a couple miles away?

Cars aren't teleporters.

@Jefromi But is it also a major theme for people who vote for e.g. Trump and Sanders, like immigrants or free trade?

@Jefromi You haven't been reading the right scifi novels.

immigrants vote for trump?!

I dunno how much you can generalize about Trump; I think some people do like that he's ostensibly a more independent candidate, not beholden to the party/establishment and its money. (that's not actually true, he needs their funding, but okay)

and sure, lots of Sanders supporters probably also hate money in politics.

But I really did mean it, pretty much everyone hates money in politics.

@Jefromi except people with money.

9:51 PM

But not that many politicians have much incentive or willingness to do anything about it, so it can't actually help you vote much.

@rumtscho pretty much everyone, yeah (most people do not have the kind of money it takes to be a big deal in politics)

@rumtscho Noo that was a theme, not people.

@Jefromi that was meant as a funny interjection, not as an attempt to argue against your statement.

@Jefromi Yes, but it also needs to be a big theme, or nothing gets done.

Mhm.

I suspected as much...

That is, I haven't read about it as such in the papers.

While I have read about other hot themes in the present elections.

9:55 PM

It's a popular theme among people, but not as much in campaigns.

I'm sure I've seen it mentioned in the media now and then.

So if you look at what non-public-figure people commonly say, you'd see a lot more evidence of it.

I guess more in editorial pieces than in interviews with politicians or reports of news.

Yeah, it does get more coverage there. I'm really talking about down on the level of what everyday people will post on social media or say in casual conversation.

I have seen a lot of criticism on campaign spending, but not so much as part of the current elections. And only from the left.

9:58 PM

Or maybe what you'd see in a poll about campaign finance reform or lobbying reform.

I read somewhere that high campaign spending is not really as much of a problem as it seems

there is a correlation between high campaign spending and having a chance to win, for sure

What were the arguments?

@rumtscho It's definitely definitely a problem.

but it is partly explained by people only donating money when their favorite has a chance of winning

Elected officials spend a huge fraction of their time fundraising.

If you want the light version:

10:01 PM

PBS says lobbyists no longer pick up the phone when another senator calls.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Congressional Fundraising (HBO)

so to that extent, it is a consequence of being a popular candidate and not a cause, giving it less influence on the outcome of an election than it seems at first glance

I'm sure that will be a factor.

But still.

I forgot who was making the argument though, might have been a lobbyist or somebody paid by a lobbyist :)

In a winner-take-all system, you often only need very little leverage in order to win 100% of the power.

10:03 PM

@rumtscho The problem with this would seem to be that in a fair number of elections, a candidate from either major party could feasibly win.

@Cerberus I want instant run off elections so badly...

So if you want to win at least 5 of the 10 most contested senate seats to eke out a majority, you have a huge incentive to spend as much money as possible in those races.

these inserts of politicians complaining about raising money, are they real or a parody? (in the video)

@rumtscho He makes a lot of jokes but it's all real.

I wonder what the context is to this senator chanting "need the meds"

10:07 PM

@Catija What does that mean exactly?

@Jefromi Yeah, that is exactly the problem.

And the fundraising discussed in that clip is where a lot of that money comes from.

@Cerberus It's an election where you vote for more than one person and assign each candidate a ranking... works the same way elections here work, actually... ish. You pick your top three candidates... if your top candidate is eliminated, your vote passes to your second choice... until you run out of choices. CGP Grey has a great video on it...

Ah OK, preferential voting, right?

That may fix the problem. But isn't proportional representation a simpler solution?

The Alternative Vote Explained

@Cerberus Different things solve different problems.

10:11 PM

Preferential voting

Preferential voting may refer to: Ranked voting systems, all election methods that involve ranking candidates in order of preference Instant-runoff voting, referred to as "preferential voting" in Australia, is one type of ranked voting system. Range voting, in which voters assign points to each candidate Open list, sometimes known as "preferential voting" in Europe and nations such as Sri Lanka Bucklin voting, which was sometimes known as "preferential voting" when used in the United States...

So many options...

@Cerberus You can't proportionally appoint a president or mayor or governor.

And also I don't think changing the US Congress to not have state/district-based representatives is really an option.

@Catija True. But proportionally electing parliament would help a lot.

@Jefromi Do you think any serious change is a realistic option?

Not easy, but possible. And I think that campaign spending limits are a lot more likely than radically restructuring our legislature.

@Jefromi Besides, you don't even need to abolish district-based representatives technically, as long as they're allowed to transfer losing or superfluous votes into other districts.

10:17 PM

tl;dr changing to proportional representation is not a simple solution (nor does it necessarily solve everything)

It's a lot easier to change the ballot than to change the entire system.

If your party's candidate loses in district X, or if he wins but has superfluous votes, all of his votes are automatically transferred to your party's highest-scoring but losing candidate.

@Cerberus I don't think "my vote in my district might just get overridden by votes from other districts" is a popular option either.

Ad infinitum.

You're proposing systems that might sound simple in principle but are really far-fetched in reality.

10:19 PM

Not even if you sell it as "your vote can no longer be thrown away"?

I think any significant changes are far fetched at the moment...

um...

I think you need a huge majority among the population in order to change the voting system.

In Holland, it's even worse:

Your system is a fundamental change to the way in which people are actually allowed to choose their representation.

You'd need to change the constitution.

A lot of people won't like it.

10:21 PM

@Cerberus People in giant, rural areas would have big issues if their votes got overwhelmingly overturned by the immense number of people in the urban areas.

And yes, I'm sure would you'd need to change the constitution (possibly even a lot of state constitutions) to do something like that.

Making campaign finance laws might also require a constitutional amendment but would have broad popular support at least.

@Catija But the urban district would hold the same number of people as the rural district?

Changing the way a winner is selected within in a single district so as to take into account more of each person's preferences would also have stronger support, and be a less drastic change.

@Jefromi That doesn't surprise me. But it just seems like fighting the symptoms.

Allowing a 90% Democrat district to flip several 60% Republican districts (or vice versa) would be substantially more controversial.

10:23 PM

@Jefromi It would also have a far smaller effect in a two-party system...

I'm not saying that this stuff is easy to make progress on, let alone fix completely.

I'm just saying when we talk about it, it's not really productive for you to suggest even more difficult to enact solutions.

If there are only two serious candidates, I don't see how preferential voting would help much?

Unless your intent is to build the government for your fictional nation.

Relax.

We're just dreaming here.

Oh, okay.

I thought we were having a serious conversation, sorry.

When you said "But isn't proportional representation a simpler solution?" I thought it was an actual suggestion.

10:26 PM

It is an actual suggestion, but, like your suggestion and most other suggestions I've heard, unlikely to be realistic in the short or medium term.

Um.

Campaign finance reform is something that could actually happen.

@Cerberus You're implying that's the only option... it's rarely the case that there are only two options... and having something other than first past the post gives people the opportunity to vote for the candidate they actually want without strategic voting. "I'll vote for this person because I'm afraid of this other person but the person I actually want doesn't stand a chance."... is not a good way to vote...

There have been actual attempts made in Congress multiple times in my lifetime.

The success has been limited, but they've had support from both the public and a lot of politicians.

@Jefromi And then the Supreme Court declares corporations to be people.

So no, I don't think the things I've mentioned are on the same level of realism as "switch to proportional representation."

10:27 PM

@Catija "It's rarely the case that there are only two options": but I thought there were usually only two candidates who got more than, say, 25% of the votes?

Again, not completely trivial, but much more plausible than radical change to system of representation.

@Jefromi I meant preferential voting.

@Cerberus Yes... but that's because of FPtP...

Preferential voting is also much more feasible than changing system of representation. Maybe less so than campaign finance, but nonetheless.

Look at the current election... If both Clinton and Sanders were running against Trump, Trump would probably win because the votes from the liberals would be split... so we have to pick one of the two... but if we had preferential voting, all three could run, people could vote how they wanted, and the second-choice of the voters would actually matter.

10:29 PM

@Catija Do you really think there would be more winning candidates that weren't from either big party if people didn't feel they needed to vote strategically?

I think an even more helpful way to look at this is local elections.

@Catija But aren't the primaries much like preferential voting, except beforehand?

I suppose the electorate is different, only party members?

@Cerberus I don't remember if it was ever actually substantiated... but many people think that Gore would have won over Bush if it weren't for the third party candidate.

@Cerberus Ah okay, so we agree that my mention of campaign finance was much more realistic and your "proportional representation is much simpler" wasn't actually a helpful point to bring up.

@Catija Okay, but Gore is from one of the two big parties...

10:32 PM

@Cerberus Primaries aren't governmental events... they're run by the parties. If there were more parties, there'd simply be more than two primaries.

@Cerberus But the point is that it wasn't actually "safe" for people to vote for Nader.

@Cerberus But a lot of people thought he was a sure bet, so they felt comfortable voting for Nader.

So presumably even more people would've voted for him if they knew they could make Gore their second choice.

@Jefromi Exactly!

And then you're able to see more support for third parties in the general election, not just in polls.

10:33 PM

And then the third parties get more respect and more attention.

and it's more feasible to do things like the presidential election fund which you mentioned earlier, where you provide matching funding to "serious" candidates

(yes, getting that far down the track is an awful lot of work)

@Jefromi Let's focus on the content of the discussion, not on the people, OK? I know you don't mean this in a bad way, but I don't know how to respond to those remarks.

@Cerberus Well, I don't know how to respond when you make a pie-in-the-sky suggestion, I try to respond like it was serious, explain why it's not helpful, then you tell me "we're just dreaming"

By that I meant to say that both proportional representation and preferential voting didn't seem realistic in the short or mid term, I have already explained that.

Okay, so you were ignoring the fact that I'd been talking about campaign finance, and equating your really radical suggestion with Catija's less radical suggestion.

I understand now.

10:38 PM

And that I didn't see any problem in discussing solutions that weren't realistic at the moment, also because somewhat more realistic solutions don't seem to solve the root of the problem in my opinion.

Catija and I both thought we were discussing potentially realistic things.

@Jefromi I was not doing any of those things. I was just talking about various solutions, of varying realism.

It seems to me none of the solutions discussed here will happen in the next 5 years.

An attempt at campaign finance reform might well be made in that time scale, it's hard to say.

@Jefromi Yep... I don't personally see how preferential voting is that big of a change... I'm sure that our officials don't have the guts to actually do anything about it... or campaign finance... because they're too worried about losing their own jobs... but that's different.

Preferential voting has been used in some local/state elections, and it's plausible for that to expand.

10:42 PM

It failed in England, alas.

There are also lightweight versions of it, where elections without majorities result in runoffs.

So I would say preferential voting is clearly a realistic possibility in the US.

@Jefromi Yes, they do that for local elections a lot... the downside is that the turnout for the runoff is usually pitiful.

Yup. Which does hopefully mean that if they proposed asking, essentially, "who would you vote for in a runoff" people would be cool with it.

I wonder how many countries there are where presidential elections have only 1 round (and no preferential or transferrable voting).

Especially among countries with presidential (as opposed to parliamentary) systems.

user image

Magnificent!

I love those maps.

Too bad they don't show how the electoral colleges work.

They don't... they need to die. :P

10:53 PM

The maps? Or the colleges?

The colleges.

Ah OK.

Yeah, they result in even more votes cast in vain.

Which I presume is what you meant.

We have "electoral colleges" for the senate.

If the votes were assigned proportionally, that'd be one thing but assigning them all to the same candidate who "wins" a state is dumb.

Yeah.

Our colleges are at least proportional.

I wonder how much of a difference they make compared with direct proportional elections.

I think not that much.

Plus, there's a bunch of people who are citizens but don't actually get a vote at all.

10:57 PM

Washington?

DC?

DC, yes.

Or have they changed that already?

Yes.

According to another CGP Grey video, 11 million American citizens don't get a vote for president... DC does get to vote for president, though... since 1964, apparently.

@Catija what is the definition of getting a vote there?

10:59 PM

How the Electoral College Works

« first day (2084 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (2897 days later) »

Transcript for

May '1624

The Frying Pan

Sometimes hot, always heavy. (cooking.stackexchange.com)

join this room
about this room

00:00

06:00

12:00

18:00

all times are UTC

site design / logo © 2024 Stack Exchange Inc; legal

mobile