Bob

So I thought cherry MX stood for that plus shape interface between the switch and the keycaps, is there more to it than that?

Oh my god! Yes! This is exactly what I need. Thank you!

Okay, I'll take a look at those! I've found a new websites with lots of listings, but none with any decent filtering mechanics beyond general categories.

Yeah, if it's on a Kbin instance they're called magazines, not communities. Honestly I find Kbin weird because it tries to mix two different organization styles, but whatever. So, for that user it uses an m even though it's originally a Lemmy instance.

I'm 100% for adding in walking and biking protection, but those planters pictured were asphalt grey. That's just asking for trouble.

No, the high-viz reflectors aren't enough. Those planters should have been red, or yellow, or orange. Anything but asphalt grey!

They can hit the button, but Beehaw won't register the downvote. In fact, as best I can tell it changes them into upvotes. I use Jeroba, so when I'm looking at Beehaw I still see the downvote button, but when I try to use it, I get error messages.

Oh wow, thank you. I was thinking the second cat was blending into the first!

Beehaw just got rid of downvotes entirely. I'm mildly convinced that's the way to go, but I don't hold strong opinions about it.

Great question!

For any non-shit voting method (damn near anything other than FPTP) the results are usually the same or comparable. This is the case for basically kind of election, be it single-winner, multi-winner, or proportional. Yes yes, there are differences, but honestly they're kind of small.

To make this point, compare these calculated win regions for four voting methods. Approval isn't in that video so here's a link of the same calculations including approval. Anyway, big differences, right? Well, in real-world polling data it seems... Eh. Not so much. You can find polling data which claims big differences, but it's unclear how good that date is. If we take that data to be valid? Well, approval does very well.

Okay so let's at least just pretend that the results we get from our fancy new voting methods are all basically the same. What are the differences, then?

Well, now it's an administrative and user experience question. How easy is it to run your election, how easy is it to verify the results, and how easy is it for the voter to understand what's going on?

I think it's worth mentioning that as far as the preceding paragraph is concerned, First Past The Post does extremely well. The only problem is that the results are total shit.

As far as these questions go, it doesn't get better than approval. I mean, seriously, how could you possibly mess it up? Where are you going to get confused. Vote for everyone you like, most votes wins.

The ease of administration and understanding applies to the multi-winner and proportional methods too. The instructions are the same, vote for everyone you like. With party proportional, your ballot is divided up evenly amongst the parties you voted for. Vote for three parties, and they each receive 1/3 of a vote. You get the idea. With multi-winner, the winners are selected round-by-round. After every round, if you voted for the winner in that round, your ballot weight is reduced according to the harmonic series (1, ½, ⅓, ¼, ⅕, …). You can use any reduction list you like, but the harmonic series is a good compromise.

Since, as the other commenter pointed out, multi-winner elections would be a better fix to our democracy, it's important we move to a voting system that's easy to implement and easy to understand no matter what kind of representation system we use. That's approval voting, it's dead simple.

If you need convincing to recognize why simplicity is important, I think the large amounts of complaints about Mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin being too complicated is a great example. For a social network it doesn't matter if some people are excluded because they don't understand how it works, but for a voting system? It has to work for everyone.

But okay, you've read this short essay and you're thinking, "mmm, but I'm more concerned with the system mechanics. I'm smart enough to understand voting systems and I want one that works really well."

Great luck! Approval has great voting theory properties too. It passes the Sincere Favorite Criterion, meaning it's always safe to vote for your favorite, which isn't actually true under RCV. It fails Later No Harm, which means it discourages voting for candidates you don't actually like (again, unlike RCV). Finally, spoilers are mathematically impossible under the Independence of irrelevant alternatives and, you guessed it, this isn't true under RCV.

Is anything better than FPTP? Yes, and so we should fix it right the first time, especially since we'll ultimately plan to move to multi-winner and/or proportional elections.

Oh my god, yes! A plan ready to go! If we could make Driftless National Park a thing we could reintroduce bison west of the Mississippi!

Weird. We're going to have teething issues, that's for sure.

Does Kbin not label posts by what instance they come from? Jeroba (Lemmy Android app) will tell me which instance the post is from in the listing and I believe they're planning to extend that to accounts.