The good about democracy is that everyone can vote, and the bad about democracy is that everyone can vote.
Hence the need of proper education and unfiltered information, the first helping to digest and understand the second in order to know who you vote and why; if you tamper with those, you can have people vote for anyone, including a dictator.
Voting is a right, doing it knowledgeably is a duty, and so many people forget about the 2nd.
> the bad about democracy is that everyone can vote.
This is what needs to change. Recently there was a story that Reese Witherspoon was in a jury, and the other jury members thought she was a real lawyer because of Legally Blonde. These people are not qualified to serve on a jury let alone vote.
Why are we getting input from people that couldn't run a small low traffic corner store on how to run a country? It's ridiculous, and it's the reason the US is in the mess it is now.
I agree that many people are not.. well intelectually suited for voting and making important decisions.
But how do you decide who votes? The fairest is obviously to allow voting for everyone. As soon as you try to single out 'unsuitable' people, you run into a problems of how you would do so? You could try to give people a basic test, but these 'literacy' tests were historically used to supress all kinds of minorities.
That is the true problem of democracy, it sucks, but everything else is miles worse. The people voted, the people get what they voted for. If you want a different result, convince people to vote differently.
> You could try to give people a basic test, but these 'literacy' tests were historically used to supress all kinds of minorities.
That doesn't mean they would b e used to oppress minorities today. Except the minority that is deemed too ignorant to be granted a right to vote based on failing the test.
> That is the true problem of democracy, it sucks, but everything else is miles worse.
I don't think that's true, it's just that there is little motivation to come up with better alternative and people who try just get shit on for even trying as though it were an insurmountable goal.
With the current partisan deadlock, yeah, it would be kind of impossible to get anything passed. Ideally though the answer would be an independent, transparent body relying on solid research and making it's reasoning public and foolproof.
Ideally, the goal would be not for people to resent not passing thee test and being unable to vote, but being motivated to better themselves until they are able to vote.
There exists a whole discipline in political science and mathematics about optimality in decisional workflows. So: you advance the discipline as a priority, then you reform states.
> The fairest [would be] obviously to allow voting for everyone
Certainly not, you are playing on a shade of meaning of "obvious" (i.e. "apparent"): that is strongly unfair to the gifted, cultivated etc. - it is unfair in terms of merit. And it is unfair to those who want an optimal system at their residence, etc.
You introduce weighted votes. Your vote carries more weight, the higher educated you are and the younger you are. This could be as simple as adding (85-age)/100 points to a vote for age, and GPA(or higher education = 5)/5 as a bonus for intelligence.
Then, as duly, you ask "what is under scrutiny and test wrong with the draft proposal, and fix and improve, iteratively"... There are a number of clear weaknesses in the above post already.
Repeat: there is a whole academic discipline about optimal voting. But it must become a real concern...
> There are a number of clear weaknesses in the above post already.
You mean my post? I'd say the weakness in what I propose are no where near as bad as the weaknesses in the system we currently have.
> there is a whole academic discipline about optimal voting.
And I would never discard that or the results of the relevant research, but I genuinely think the system we have in place is too flawed, to fundamentally broken, to really make progress or fix things. Half the country literally considered anything from any legitimate source that clashes with their beliefs as 'fake news'.
How does academia suggest this problem should be addressed?
No, I meant that about «weighted votes» with heavily imperfect criteria for the weighing.
> no where near as bad
Never an excuse for skipping due diligence.
> suggest
I suggest the problem is taken into serious consideration, because already looking at phenomena like gerrymandering is astonishing, and anti-intellectualism is abasing on both sides (of the failed and the failing), etc. There are leaking faucets: stop ignoring them, plan and fix them. That means, find solutions, propose them, convince the public, have them implemented.
No, I said that once the legislative powers biased through the influence of party P implement solution S, then the burden of the other side is to repeal it. It's how things work, already without reforms...
If that «half the public outright denie[d] truth and fact, proudly» caused such «partisan deadlock» that «party P [couldn]'t implement solution S», what you had stated would be that no legislation would be passed...
Yes, and that's why democracy is honestly pretty terrible, despite all the championing it gets its still a tyranny of the majority. It can only really function with a well intentioned and educated population, and half or more of the US population is anything but.
Do you think that not considering Russia a main cyber threat is a wrong decision? Why?
Article gives no clear answer to why would it will make everything worse.
It does, however, speculate on how it may be a bad decision, but no one knows for sure.
This comes just weeks after security analysts sounded the alarm on Sandworm stealing credentials and data from American organizations. Sandworm is the operations wing of Russia's Military Intelligence Unit 74455, part of the GRU, that has been blamed for waging cyberwarfare against America's critical infrastructure.
That 'graph links directly to:
"Two Russians sanctioned over cyberattacks on US critical infrastructure" (22 July 2024)
Let's dispense with the asking of facile questions readily answered within the article itself or very proximate resources. It is at best strongly disingenuous.
Democracy works proportionally to the good implementation of sub-systems that maximize the quality of decisions (e.g. checks and balances, election of the electors, education etc.).
Otherwise, it is not a value per se: that would be a "tyranny of the majority".
It's always a tyranny of the majority, just hopefully with enough checks and restrictions in place to stop the worst crowd/mob impulses from having an effect.
Read the original as "[sheer] tyranny of the majority" then. But no, given correct conditions you will manage to have decision making which is collectively beneficial and acceptable.
> given correct conditions you will manage to have decision making which is collectively beneficial and acceptable.
Only if the population is sufficiently educated and good intentioned, and even then it's still the will of the majority, but because it's not a negative result it isn't considered a tyranny.
The crucial importance of education was mentioned in the original post, and "good intention" is implied as an effect of proper education. "Tiranny" in the intented context ("tiranny of the majority") is close to the actual meaning of the term, of "unfair power" (that of the usurper: illegitimate, hence dubious).
But the point is, a proper decision system boosts optimality at most "under inspiration" from the preferences of the voters, but not bound to that. Those voters may not even be a "majority"; there are many implementations (already forms of "ranked preferences") in which the idea of "majority" largely loses its meaning, etc.
> "Tiranny" in the intented context ("tiranny of the majority") is close to the actual meaning of the term, of "unfair power" (that of the usurper: illegitimate, hence dubious).
I mean it closer to 'unjust rule'. For example, Jim Crow laws were an example of tyranny of the majority, and that power was not sized illegitimately. If the majority really wanted to restore something like that, there isn't any system in place that would stop them, not ranked choice voting, nothing - we have to rely on good education so they wouldn't want to do that, but we would need a clean slate to do that as well.
To many people are poorly educated, and raise their kids to be skeptical of education. That's such an immense problem that I'm not sure the US can really recover.
If we were starting from a clean slate, where everyone was well educated, it should work in theory, but even so I think we can have a much better system to any form of democracy we have now.
The term "tyrant" historically was used for rulers who were not part of the recognized dynasty: usurpers. The term shifted to "arbitrary power" because the tyrant ruled without grounds founding an authority. We can say "tyranny of the majority" as it can be valued as unfair that anything (majorities included) have power without full substantial authority.
> If the majority really wanted ... there isn't any system in place that would stop them
That is false, because there can be systems that do not attribute powers to majorities. (In fact, the rule of minorities is quite extensive in history, and not all voting systems give powers to majorities - or, as already expressed, the idea of "majority" loses a direct sense in some even simple voting systems.)
Referendum or voting in their representatives. As an example, assume 80% want to introduce racial segregation in each of the UK, Australia, the US and Canada. What measures would stop them?
For example, the potential election of candidates within a subset that escapes that 80%, as enabled by systems similar to those listed, which have exactly the purpose of approximating optimal choice.
None of the systems you listed will protect against an 80% majority wanting to force through specific legislation. Through brute force they will get their way eventually and inevitably.
If you disagree, I hope you can give a more fleshed out example than, what seems to be, to be the vague handwaving you have been doing so far - no offense intended.
> None of the systems you listed will protect against an 80% majority wanting to force through specific legislation
Close to impossible to say without consideration of specific implementations of the exemplary sub-frameworks proposed.
> a more fleshed out example
A John Rawls like framework of common best interest in not appointing beasts, coupled with criteria to discriminate beasts? The point is not about providing a detailed solution here, but in pointing in a direction beyond simple, lacking forms of democracy, suboptimal in theory and in results. If you have naïve processes in place, faults will eventually show: the system must become resistant. A large number of possible improvements can be considered: the point remains that they must be studied - this has never been the "end of history", if only because in too many systems the fool and the bright have similar impact.
And I need to say: like in all systems, checking what went wrong, why it went wrong, and implementing solutions so that it will not go wrong again.
> Your Markdown- based content generates semantic HTML
HTML is far more expressive in semantics, so using markdown to get html means you will never be able to get most semantic things you actually wanted.
React couples the structure, styling into js components only if you make it so. You can just write style.css, import it and refer to it is classname as `className="my_custom_class"`.
And there is no clean separation of concern when it comes to html, css and js. You can force to separate them, but that would be a separation of technologies, not concerns - they are too intertwined to be separated.
And the example of island on the tutorials proves that:
```
<form @name="contact-me" @submit.prevent="submit" autocomplete="on">
```
There is no way to create a standard-first framework without introducing some form of DSL. This doesnt look like html, this doesnt look like js, and it is def not primarily css based anything.
___
The project is nice, using new features like starting style, view transition - instead of js based solutions is cool. There are a lot of experimental features, like popover api. The browser support is low and those things are not production-ready for everyone (maybe for some).
The approach is good, the site is good, the docs are good, but I dont like the distinction from competitors. Like I can use all those features in react/vue/astro/qwik. What makes you unique? Being able to apply web standard solutions? How about something along the lines - we create better primitives so you can create you website faster/easier?
I think this actually reveals the key misunderstanding. In a properly designed system, most of your codebase becomes CSS - often 90% or more when it comes to content-heavy websites written in Nue. The JavaScript handling pure functionality, HTML expressing semantic structure, and CSS doing the heavy lifting of systematic design and relationships.
This isn't separating technologies - it's letting each part focus on its core concern. HTML focuses on content structure and meaning. JavaScript handles true interactivity. And CSS becomes the primary engine for both design and sophisticated functionality through modern features like container queries, custom properties, and view transitions.
This natural separation produces systems that are both more powerful and dramatically smaller than JavaScript monoliths. The sophistication comes from systematic relationships, not artificial coupling.
I dont understand how you're making this claim with a straight face. You're either willfully ignorant, or pretending to be too abstract.
If your understanding on web-development is someone tweaking css values, I think you have a hug gap in your understanding.
You've drank the Apple/Linear/Dieter Ram kool-aid a bit too much, and you think throwing "less is more", "strip it down to the bare minimum" is all emblematic of that.
Good design is about making the complex simple. Not making the simple simple.
And the example is a blog. I think a lot of us would agree that React is a bad choice for a blog. But React is also used in a million other applications that need a lot more dynamism than a blog does. The idea that 90% of an app like that would be CSS makes no sense.
Opened a website.
Already got `Welcome to our website!` modal that block the content.
Through the modal's overlay can see the banner `Your product could be here`.
Well, that is annoying. Thank you so much, I would rather use anything that is less intrusive.
It is the same div soup for a screen reader, because there is no behavior attached to those new tags.
They can not be a landmark, there are not marked as headings, they have no roles.
Just a container with a text.
And to attach the behavior you need to use javascript.
So without js it wont work.
Why bother and try yo create half-baked non working solution if you can just use html?
Well, it easier to style, maybe. But hey, there is a class attribute.
Well, I'm inclined to interpret "Google Search can rarely depend on semantic meanings hidden in the HTML specification" as meaning exactly what it says. After all, Google's own pages are made of <div>-soup, so I'd hardly imagine that they discriminate against it in others' pages.
Unless you have explicit statements or hard evidence to the contrary?
No, they don't.
Aria roles are not for making one tag to work like another. (Otherwise what is the point of having different tags with different semantics?).
Aria is for making inaccessible html more accessible.
Links can not be disabled (buttons can) - so they dont rely on js to work;
Buttons rely on js (except for submitting the form).
There is no way to interchange one with another without sacrificing usability.
JSX is awesome. And it is optional.
React picked js-first approach. Everything inside curly braces is a valid js expression. So you can use more and more vanilla js features and be happy, while some angular-first frameworks forces you to use some strange semantics;
They also make you learn new pseudo attributes - ng-if, ng-for, etc. Those are not valid html attributes. And you cant translate that knowledge anywhere else.
With react you just need to remember to pass className instead of class and sometimes to pass key prop and you are good to go. Overhead is minimal.
Since jsx is optional, you can write <Component value={1} />, {Component({ value: 1 })} or createElement(Component, { value: 1 }), which gives you so much control.
Do you really suggest https://htmx.org/?
That thing has bold questions, like
> Why should only <a> and <form> be able to make HTTP requests?
And than you turn off your js in the browser and try to open a demo from the htmx. White screen of death. It doesnt even work without js. Why even bother to use it?
HTML is not perfect, but it is well tested, can work without js, also works with screenreader and you can create accessible web apps.
With htmx you can create something usable to some degree, but completely inaccessible, which may lead your company to be sued.
