[geofft]

My life is markedly better for having those handful of people make those decisions. It is just that in a few cases, like repairing tractors, they get it wrong. That doesn't mean I want them gone, that just means I want them to stop being wrong, or at most I want different people to make those decisions and have that power over my life.

Rejecting the entire concept of having leadership and structure because these particular leaders aren't perfect is like writing in assembly for the rest of your life because C compilers optimize out unexpected things sometimes.

[itistoday2]

> Rejecting the entire concept of having leadership and structure because these particular leaders aren't perfect...

That's not what I'm suggesting at all.

I'm saying pick a structure and leaders that really do represent you. That's a very different thing from voting for pre-selected candidates whom you've never met and don't interact with, and then crossing your fingers.

[simoncion]

> That's a very different thing from voting for pre-selected candidates whom you've never met and don't interact with, and then crossing your fingers.

I'm a bit sick right now, thus either my math or my formulas might be off. I welcome any corrections. :)

So.

Copyright policy is decided at the Federal level. The people in charge of setting that policy are elected members of Congress.

Let's assume that you can declare someone "met and interacted with" with a single five-minute conversation.

According to Wikipedia, California is the most populous state and Wyoming is the least populous state.

The CA Secretary of State reports that ~17 million voters were registered to vote as of the date of the 2014 general election. The WY Secretary of State reports that ~240 thousand voters were registered to vote as of that same date.

There are 124,800 minutes in a standard 40-hour-per-week, no-vacations-or-holidays work year. (60x40x52)

For Wyoming, each Senatorial challenger would need to spend 48,000 minutes per election cycle speaking to each registered voter. (240,000/5) That's doable.

For California, a challenger would spend 3,400,000 minutes per election cycle on the same task. (17,000,000/5) For California, what you propose is not possible for Senatorial challengers... they'd have to do nothing but hold conferences for 27 years to get this task done. (3,400,000/124,800)

So, what's the largest state where this is feasible?

This might be South Dakota (the 46th most populous state) (with -I think- ~514,000 voters). [0] If it's not, it's definitely Alaska (the 48th) (with ~509,000 voters).

So, it is physically impossible to even pay lip service to what you propose in either fourty-six, or fourty-eight of the states in the US.

Before you get too cranky, I do acknowledge that the situation changes when one meets with one's Representative:

In California the 27-year workload would -roughly- be divided over 53 representatives, meaning that they'd only have to spend just over half of a year meeting every registered voter in the state. But... this assumes a five-minute meeting. If that constituent meeting balloons to ten minutes, we're right back in the realm of impossibility.

While the workload might be smaller in the smallest states, Representatives are apportioned by population, so I don't expect that the picture would vary very much from state to state.

In short, your idea is promising, and would be really great to do... but there just aren't enough hours in the day to make it happen. [1]

[0] I'm having a fuck of a time finding historical voter registration numbers for SD. So, that voter registration number is based off of what I'm pretty sure is current voter registration data. :/ (North Dakota doesn't even have voter registration!).

[1] Yes, my analysis ignores the fact that a campaign could conceivably be a multi-year thing. It's difficult to get good numbers on the length of an average Congressional campaign, but it's... difficult to believe that a campaign would run for longer than two years.

[rubberstamp]

all the more reasons why there should be a structure to not let our representatives make all the decisions for us. I'm sure we all had times when our representative is not actually representing our interests.

think tank mode: what if the current system is restructured in a way so that we will let them take decisions for us. But when we don't agree with his/her view point we can readily bypass it if the majority wants a different thing, like may be diagree button near to a decision and proposed alternative, which everyone can vote on or propose another alternative(only one alternative can be picked by a person). Its democratic, practical and doable right now. The alternative with which highest number of people agree is a clear win. This can be applied in all countries and any form of govt.

Its way better than any alternatives we currently have, like having to spend big time and effort on making petitions, or rally for cause, etc. Now a days even peaceful gathering gets violet due to govt mishandling the situation.

[geofft]

California has statewide referendums, which are generally pretty awful: state law is (for better or worse) pretty complex, and referendums never handle that complexity well. If successful, they'll impose some requirement without much regard for existing law in the area, and certainly without any regard for future laws. They're heavily lobbied, perhaps more so than regular laws, because easy appeals to regular people's sense of how government probably works are effective, regardless of the accuracy. Referendums can't be overturned except with another referendum. And you can fairly easily have conflicting referendums, which has given rise to court cases about which one prevails.

Here's the Economist complaining about it in 2009: http://www.economist.com/node/13649050 I can anecdotally confirm that my reaction to most of the referendums, a few years later, was "How should I know?"

This is not to say that such an approach won't work. You just need some mechanism for managing complexity. That could involve trusted organizations that like-minded people delegate these decisions to (sort of a cross between lobbying/activism organizations and political parties), which could work very well or could just turn out like an actually corporate version of the current party system. You could alternatively try to limit the inherent complexity of governing, but that seems very experimental.

[itistoday2]

> So, it is physically impossible to even pay lip service to what you propose in either fourty-six, or fourty-eight of the states in the US.

lol, that is the opposite of my proposal, and your post (thank you for it btw) just further solidifies my point.

When math says it's impossible for your representative to represent you, perhaps at that point we realize that the system has reached the end of its shelf life.

See the rest of my comments in this thread for a clearer understanding of what I'm saying (and my apologies for the comments that HN makes difficult to read due to downvotes ;).

[simoncion]

> When math says it's impossible for your representative to represent you...

That's not at all what I said, and it's a dramatic misinterpretation of my words. There are substantially better mechanisms available to us to figure out what people want and what they need than for a decision maker to ask them, one-on-one.

From what I understand, there's a whole raft of really good, reproducible research on how to tease out what people mean from what they say; people are surprisingly bad at both knowing what they want, and -even if they do happen to know- surprisingly bad at expressing that information coherently. It's trivial to structure queries in such a way to give different answers to what is effectively the same question. [0]

> ...perhaps at that point we realize that the system has reached the end of its shelf life.

This is narrow-minded. Based on this comment, you appear to be proposing that we dramatically increase the number of Federal representatives per citizen. [1] Go pick a country that you think is well run at the highest levels. Go look at their representative to constituent ratios. If they're like 10x or 100x greater than the US's ratios, [4] then you might have a point. If they're only 2x or 5x greater, you probably don't.

[0] A researcher wishes to discover what Presidential candidate a given person intends to vote for. He asks them "What Presidential candidate do you intend to vote for?". Most of the time, the answer to that question does not match what candidate that person actually votes for. The question to ask to get that information -most of the time- is actually "What Presidential candidate do you expect that most people will vote for?". Polling is full of crazy pitfalls like this!

[1] The other possible interpretation is either advocacy of voluntary expatriation of people who disagree with their Congressional representatives [2], or dismantlement of the Federal government. [3]

[2] Okay, sure. You do have the trouble of both finding a country that's governed in a way that you agree with, and will accept you as an immigrant, though.

[3] Ha. See the rest of the paragraph to which footnote #1 is attached.

[4] I'm fairly sure that's in the right direction. Again, I'm sick, sorry if my math is off.

[itistoday2]

> From what I understand, there's a whole raft of really good, reproducible research on how to tease out what people mean from what they say

Having a game of telephone for a government... sounds like it would result in the sort of legislation that can be found in the OP. XD

> Based on this comment, you appear to be proposing that we dramatically increase the number of Federal representatives per citizen.

Not at all. I again invite you to read my other comments.

[simoncion]

I read your other comments. Did you read the footnote attached to the quoted sentence?

[geofft]

Er, one of the specific values of the current system is that the people who (theoretically) represent me and make rules I must abide by also do so for millions of other people. This is genuinely advantageous, even for, perhaps especially for, copyright law. Things are in-copyright or out-of-copyright in a consistent way nationwide, fair use exceptions are defined the same way nationwide, public domain and author's rights exist or don't exist nationwide, etc.

If I have myself and a small number of people represented and ruled by a group of folks, the only way to get this result is for my group of people to form federations with other groups of people, and those federations to form meta-federations, and so forth, and have each group willingly delegate most of its authority upwards. But that's really similar to how I live now.