Why I'm in favour of Proportional Representation

[andrewducker]

According to the BBC, the current polls show Lib Dems on 33%, Conservatives on 32%, Labour on 26%.
Which would give a seat allocation of Conservatives: 246, Labour 241, Lib Dems: 134.
Or, in a more easily digestible table format:

Party	Percentage	Seats
Lib Dems	33%	134
Conservatives	32%	246
Labour	26%	241

It should be pretty fucking obvious that this is an electoral system that is fucked in the head.

Comments

[cybik.livejournal.com]

FWIW, I agree with you. I also think there is going to be at least one BNP MP in less than a month even without PR.

[andrewducker]

Would you not have liked the Conservatives to have been getting their fair share of the vote for the last 13 years? Or weer you happy with them being horribly underweighted by the current system?

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

then the Electoral College system says that if 55% of a state votes one way, then 100% of the Electoral College votes go that way.

Usually but not necessarily. There's no overriding Constitutional principle involved; all the Constitution says is that each state shall appoint electors, and keeps mum about how those electors are chosen. Why so many states have gone with the winner-take-all method is a mystery to me, but they can change the system if they wish; both Maine and Nebraska use different systems, and the other states have the option to set up any laws they like.

Our system is strange, fascinating, and overly complex.

Re: for the slow american in the room

[skington.livejournal.com]

I think the salient point here is that America across the board is more right-wing than the UK, or indeed any European country. So yes, the Democrats, being the more left-wing party, get support from the unions, the poor and the deprived. That still puts them to the right of the Tories on most issues.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Grin, actually I knew that, as I seem to recall there was an interesting episode of Boston Legal where one of the electoral college had stated they weren't going to follow the winner-take-all and there was a constitutional question about whether the state had the power to compel that person to do so.

[skington.livejournal.com]

Quite how are you going to write a cross-platform that works on an Android phone, a Palm phone, and an iPad, though? It'll look rubbish on at least one of the platforms.

Also, for all that the initial "hey, anyone can write apps for the iPhone, they're called websites" line from Apple regarding iPhone development was spurious and insulting, I think it's more justified for iPads.

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

There's actually a whole Wikipedia article on what are called "faithless electors"--people who didn't vote for the same person or party that their state did.

That happened en masse once, in 1836, and ,a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector">the whole article is kind of fun reading.

Um, if you're a big ol' geek, anyway. :)

[skington.livejournal.com]

There is in fact an ongoing attempt to have states pass laws that say that they'll give their electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote, but only if enough states to make a majority of electoral votes have such a law on their books. (This is to avoid the practically impossibility of doing so by passing a Constitutional amendment.) So far it's been passed by statesrepresenting 23% of the required votes.

[skington.livejournal.com]

As I recall, Tony Blair was in favour of doing a deal anyway, but most of the Old Labour lot were of the opinion that they finally had a stonking huge majority and they weren't going to share it with anybody.

[andrewducker]

Why would it necessarily look rubbish? It might not look _standard_, but that's not the same as rubbish. Being able to have 95% of the code the same, with the UI layer using different button styles would make support and development massively easier.

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

Huh; that's interesting. Thanks for the link!

[skington.livejournal.com]

There's vastly more screen space on an iPad than a phone, though. If you try to blow an iPhone app to iPhone size, by all accounts it looks stupid. You pretty much want to start from scratch UI-wise when writing an iPad app.

And not looking standard is rubbish, when you're Apple and trying to launch a completely new type of user interface. Same reason as why the original Macintosh didn't come with cursor keys: you want to force people to think in a new way.

[andrewducker]

I don't give a damn what Apple thinks looks rubbish. _I_ get to make my own aesthetic judgements, thank you very much, and if Apple wants to restrict the applications that I run on my own appliance, based on what aesthetic judgements someone in Apple HQ makes, then they can frankly fuck off.

(ire not aimed at you, by the way, merely there to express the strength of my feeling on this issue.)

[oldbaldchris.livejournal.com]

I would prefer them to be underweighted as you put it and keep a basically two party system. I am not in favour of coalitions in the slightest and a stronger libdem/liberal or whatever the fuck they are called now party will just mean more coalitions in the future. We have one now in Germany and its a bloody waste of time.

[skington.livejournal.com]

Think of this another way.

Suppose you're a city council that has recently decided to replace all the pavements in the city centre with large slabs of real actual stone rather than tarmac or concrete. It looks great, but it also means that when utility companies decide to dig up the road they need to take the stone slabs out and carefully stack them so they can replace them once they're done.

One contractor decides "to hell with that", digs a hole in the ground, fills it in, and replaces the missing slab with tarmac. From now on, that bit of street looks a little bit worse, because in the middle of a nice stretch of stone pavement there's an ugly bit of tarmac.

Fans of the broken windows theory of policing would even say that it makes it more likely that in the future another utility company will also choose to cut corners / do what it does everywhere else, and fill in a hole with tarmac or concrete.

Either way, because some people chose to ignore the new rules, the overall effect of renovating the street was spoiled.

Apple have recently launched the iPad, which has a much larger screen than any other touch-screen phone, be it iPhone, various flavours of Android, or Palm. Apple-written versions of the iPhone apps are notably different, and use much more of the screen than if they were simply upscaled versions of their iPhone equivalents; hell, a number of the standard iPhone apps weren't ported, because they're so simple that they'd look silly on an iPad.

The iPad is significantly different from any other touch-screen system currently in existence, including the iPhone / iPod Touch. This is a very good reason to develop with the iPad in mind, rather than using some sort of intermediate compatibility layer.

And, at the moment, Apple's aesthetic judgement is better than yours. They've had the advantage of very smart people spending a lot more time than anyone else has, individually, on thinking about how applications on such a form factor with such a user interface should work, and their design decisions have fed into the overall OS and UI. They've provided APIs for providing the standard sort of interface that they'd expect most applications to use, or at least start with.

Suppose a company comes out with a new form factor and/or user interface, and says "hey, guys, we think this is the best way to use this new product of ours", and then follows up with "and we'd really rather that you only stuck to this way of developing applications, not the way you're accustomed to, because really we think that's much better". Perhaps you should think "hey, maybe they're up to something" rather than saying "screw them, I'll just do what I've always done".

[matgb]

Oh, absolutely; they all do. IT's the least worst of the calculators I've found because it allows you to plug in some factors for local effects through the tactical thing.

But essentially seat calulation under FPTP when there're three parties in contention is a mugs game; look at 1983 when Thatcher got a landslide on a reduced share of the vote, or indeed any election in Scotland.

If you find a calculator that doesn't come up with distortions, I'd love to see it.

Also, the whole "Lib Dems can't win" thing is reinforced by posts about how biased the system is. LDs can win big if they get just a few more points; try using any of them and put LDs on 36%+ and see what begins to happen.

Re: for the slow american in the room

[matgb]

Right of the Tories on most issues.

The Democrats under Dean, Pelosi and Obama are right of the Tories? SRSLY?

Have you looked at the Tory policy platform?

Re: for the slow american in the room

[skington.livejournal.com]

On health care, neither Pelosi nor Obama even seriously considered a single-payer system. (Dean did, to his credit, but then he's positioned himself to the left of the party as a general rule in the last few years.) David Cameron has promised that no matter what other drastic cuts he makes to other parts of the budget, he'll match and protect Labour's planned spending increases on the NHS.

Or, for that matter, the Tories want to let toffs hunt foxes again, but they're not proposing that just anyone be allowed guns.

Re: for the slow american in the room

[matgb]

Didn't consider it not necessarily because they didn't actually want it; they only just got the watered down basterdisation they ended up with passed. And several are saying it's distincly the first step, etc.

They've dragged US health care to the "left" of where it was, significantly. Cameron plans to drag it to the "right" significantly in a number of ways (some of which I approve of, mostly I don't).

The NHS is such a touchstone issue he can't afford to be seen to be attacknig it (but look up Dan Hannan's comments on it, or Douglas CArswells).

Politicians react to their home electorate, Tories largely want to do things that they know they can't get away with, although given the collapse of their campaign they seem to be lurching right anyway.

[andrewducker]

They possibly might be right. And if they want to put out good user guidelines then that's fine.

And if they want to say "Follow them or you can't write software for our platform" then I have no interest in it.

[skington.livejournal.com]

I completely understand your point, and I'm aware that what I'm about to say could easily leave me open to people paraphrasing Benjamin Franklin's point about people sacrificing a little freedom for a little security at me.

Having said that, how's Linux on the desktop doing these days?

Far more people than probably you or I would like put up with substandard computer systems because, eh, they don't care, or IT won't let them change. If said system is actually much more usable than the alternatives, then I'm not sure what the Right Thing to do is. Decide to develop for Android or WebOS or something, for purity's sake even though it's a far less interesting environment, at least at the moment?

[andrewducker]

Windows on the desktop is doing very well - and part of the reason for that is that anyone at all can write applications for it.

Android has trebled to 9% in the last few months. Apple is on 25%, so it's got a way to go, but it's doing pretty well, so far as I can tell. I'm getting an HTC Desire next, and last I heard Orange and O2 can't actually keep them on the shelves right now.