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by nothrabannosir 3517 days ago
That's significantly less important than voting. And the incentives are properly aligned: the bank is responsible for making its systems secure, and if they lose your money they have to refund it. Voting? Not so much. Lost ballots? "Woops :) sorry."

If the voting machine vendor executives faced actual personal serious jail time for botched counts, I might be more inclined to trust it. Then again, I bet you a tenner they'd suddenly have a lot more fail safes in place.

Aligned incentives is absolutely, 100% required for anything to work in our society. It's what we're built on. Otherwise you will always be swimming upstream.
2 comments
csallen 3517 days ago
> Aligned incentives is absolutely, 100% required for anything to work in our society. It's what we're built on.

I wish more people understood this simple fact of human psychology. It's astonishing how often people will support some system that incentivizes bad behavior, and then act surprised when people behave badly.

What's more, when faced with this situation, these same people will resort to shaming the bad actors rather than fixing the broken system.

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Ntrails 3517 days ago
Aligning incentives properly is hard. I think a good example is about how to best incentivise General Practice medical care centres (UK NHS system). Patients seen? Patients in catchment area? Mortality/Morbidity rates? Patient outcomes (how you measure these is a rabbit hole of perverse incentives)...

Each and every idea has a logical optimum strategy for the trust to maximise income, and all of them aren't quite what you're trying to achieve. So you really want to blend some of these (and others) together in just the right mix, but without creating hundreds of hours of admin just to support the metrics.

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colejohnson66 3517 days ago
> If the voting machine vendor executives faced actual personal serious jail time for botched counts, I might be more inclined to trust it.

Even with a threat like that, they'd probably still walk free by just using the DMCA to silence the security researcher

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Animats 3517 days ago
Which Diebold tried. They lost.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Policy_Group_v._Diebold....

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