[mindwok]

British democracy and government is cool. It's not enshrined in some document they got together and wrote down like the US constitution, it's this organic thing that they've stumbled towards over the last ~800 years with small changes like this one gradually evolving them into a modern liberal democracy.

[s_dev]

If cool means interesting then yes, it is cool because it's archaic and different but it's not effective. It's the equivalent of a verbal contract. It's simply not as clear or coherent as a written one.

Irish democracy in contrast uses STV voting and a written constitution and is modeled between the best of what the UK, the US and France had to offer when it was drafted and is a very representative democracy with many political parties compared to the duopolies in the US and the UK. It's also why Ireland is largely immune to hard shifts to the left or right relative to the UK and US.

[kimos]

I love this about Ireland because they are such a young republic. And democratic systems are a technology. Something that we understand better over time, and somewhere new can pick and choose from what is best, where it is _extremely_ hard to change existing systems in established countries.

[xp84]

Yes, it's in my opinion one of the great tragedies of our time that some of our established countries are so hard to change. I don't mean this as the policy needs change, everyone will differ on those. I just mean the technology of government like you're saying. Efficient and more fair ways of voting on laws and electing representatives do exist.

For example my own (US) has a political system basically frozen in amber from a time before many of the political and policy challenges of our day were not even thought of yet. And they did their best to create a change mechanism, but I think anyone being truly fair of any political persuasion has to admit that while it has prevented nearly every harmful extremist constitutional amendment (I'd say Prohibition is the main one that sneaked in), it has proven to, within the lifetimes of most living Americans, be so hard to attain as to set the status quo in stone.

The framers didn't realize that most changes would be blocked by at least one party, out of fear that it would advantage the other guys. Same reason we stopped admitting states before letting Puerto Rico in, an absolutely absurd situation.

[trimethylpurine]

> "The framers didn't realize that most changes would be blocked by at least one party, out of fear that it would advantage the other guys."

Check out some of the founders' essays. This is no accident, or oversight. It's absolutely intentional and for good reason.

The Constitution grants power to all three branches of government, which is the same as granting power to none of them. The more they disagree, the less power they have. In this way power can only be wielded through cooperation (selflessness).

It's a honey pot for the power hungry.

[Affric]

Working very well as we can see currently.

[kelnos]

It's worked well as a honeypot, but I don't think it's working well as a device for paralysis. The executive has seized an alarming amount of power (with the tacit approval of the party in control of the legislature), and the constitution isn't doing much of anything to stop it.

[hunterpayne]

Do you not understand why PR isn't a state? Seems like you don't. Support for PR statehood is only about 50% (on the island). That largely has to do with the fact that their taxes would increase if they became a state. Additionally, they would have to switch to English (along with Spanish) which makes things a lot more complicated. They are already US citizens and can move to anywhere in the US if they want to vote in federal elections (and half of them do but mainly for work). They don't want independence either. So the current limbo state is actually desirable to them.

Even if the citizens of PR wanted statehood, you have to get both parties to agree. This means probably 2 states at the same time (one red, one blue). Since there isn't another potentially red state (Alberta but that's probably never going to happen) to join, that's hard to do. Look at US history, statehood has always worked this way. It has nothing to do with whatever you are implying.

PS The 27th amendment was 1992, probably during your lifetime. You would expect the rate of new amendments to slow overtime so the average of a new amendment about every 15-20 years seems about right.

[xp84]

You just explained in your second paragraph how one party would block PR statehood for no valid reason, not because it shouldn't be one, but because it would presumably advantage Dems. That is literally what I said: any change gets blocked for fear it would advantage the other guys. And whether it's "always worked that way" doesn't make it right. A fair system would have said that an existing territory with enough people that can organize a government and vote to join the union must be admitted, to avoid those shenanigans. Leaving them unrepresented is embarrassing.

And your first paragraph sounds like it's quoted from an anti-statehood propaganda flyer. PR has high taxes today -- an 11.5% sales tax, and a high local income tax, because PR has to pay for everything itself, and because Congress screws them over, such as refusing bailouts when natural disasters devastate the island. Many states receive significant money from the Federal government that PR doesn't get. If it were a state, some people would have to pay some federal income tax, but it would not be automatically a worse tax burden.

Same for language, there's nothing in the constitution that mandates that. PR already has two official languages. And nothing lawmakers decide will stop people from choosing to speak Spanish all day long if they want. If you don't agree with me, walk around any city in California, Arizona, or Texas.

[TheCoelacanth]

27th amendment was about congressional salaries and had basically no effect on governance.

26th amendment lowered the voting age to 18 for state and local elections and had no effect on national elections (statute already set the national voting age as 18, but courts prevented it from applying to state and local elections).

25th clarified presidential succession to work exactly how everyone had already assumed it to work for over a century, so for practical purposes did nothing.

24th in 1964, which outlawed poll taxes as a criteria for voting, was the last amendment with any effect on national governance.

[queuebert]

New and shiny is not always better. Science has spoiled us in the last century, but it has little to say about how a good government should operate.

Many of us have a popular set of ideals that we think are superior and have attempted to overlay those on every aspect of modern life, but they have little to no data behind them and are ultimately just beliefs that make us feel good. As such, there is no reason to expect they are optimal for governing either.

[xp84]

Look, just let us get rid of first-past-the-post as the only voting method, and I'll be happy. I'm not asking for voting via Neuralink, holographic VR Presidential debates, or flying car taxis to the polling places.

[justonceokay]

It’s true. In the long arc of history I have no doubt that our current government systems will be considered childish

[troad]

>> For example my own (US) has a political system basically frozen in amber from a time before many of the political and policy challenges of our day were not even thought of yet.

Please, please, please go read the Federalist papers. The Founders thought of a lot more than you realise.

The design of a constitution is the design of the distribution of power. The nature of power hasn't changed.

[xp84]

Things they appear to have not thought of:

1. Any voting system other than the disastrous FPTP which forces a two-party system and punishes any attempt to break this duopoly.

2. What if Congress is composed entirely of weasels and just, though formal law-passing or by sheer inaction, cedes nearly all their power to the executive branch?

3. What if the Supreme Court has at least 5 partisans who will say just about anything to keep in power the party (or even the individual) who put them there? What if they say stupid things like "A President has absolute criminal immunity for any act that falls within his 'conclusive and preclusive' constitutional authority, and presumptive immunity for all other official acts."

4. Even if SCOTUS is basically working as intended, what if the President just...ignores them?

5. What if a President is mentally incompetent due to age, and his whole party refuses to acknowledge it? (This one is Biden, arguably - I'm disgusted with both parties)

I do get checks and balances, I know that a big part of the whole "they can't pass anything" is a feature and not a bug. But come on, it's got out of hand when every single term we have multiple debt limit hostage negotiations -- and now BOTH parties are doing it!

[troad]

That's a lot of what ifs, some more fanciful than others. There is no political system that could withstand a such a barrage of bad intentions and corruption. But I'd note that despite how bad things seem, the things you describe for the most part haven't actually happened? The executive is generally complying with SCOTUS decisions, e.g. tariffs. The US remains a robust if fractious democracy, unlike much of the rest of the world.

More broadly, go look at other countries' politics. The facade of stability is being held up in a lot of places by restrictions on speech, on assembly, on political organisation of a kind that would be unthinkable in the US. It's borderline illegal to assemble for Palestine in Britain. Is that society less divided than the US, or just more controlled? And that's a democratic peer country. Things get much worse - Hungary, Russia, Iran, etc

[Anthony-G]

Also, one of the reasons for choosing proportional representation with a single transferable vote (PR-STV) was to ensure that the substantial unionist minority (who wanted to maintain the link with the UK/Britain) would still have have their views represented in the new parliament. This system works for other minority views and provides new political parties with a chance to grow in a way that wouldn’t be possible in a first-past-the-post system.

[roryirvine]

The parliament of Northern Ireland also used STV for the same (er, well, inverted) reasons from 1921 until the Unionist majority forced a change to FPTP for most seats in 1929.

More generally, STV was the default choice for assemblies throughout the British Empire (and became known as 'the British system' as a result) from the late 19th century onwards.

It was even agreed on for use in Westminster in 1919 - though only the university seats ever actually used it - making it "more traditional" than the current single-member FPTP system which dates only from 1949. The failure to actually implement it was part of a more general reactionary movement in the aftermath of the war, when Lloyd George's promise of a "land fit for heroes" was thoroughly betrayed.

The Irish system seems to work well, and can be used as a comparator for considering what the UK might look like if that betrayal hadn't happened.

[Anthony-G]

Huh! I didn’t know any of that. I presumed that Stormont elections had always been FPTP and that gerrymandering – particularly in Derry – was the worst abuse of the democratic process in Northern Ireland.

That’s really interesting that the British promoted STV within their sphere of influence and had intended to use it for elections to Westminster. Thanks for the informative comment and useful historical context.

[tshaddox]

Note that even though the U.S. has a Constitution, the entire U.S. government is still, like the UK, highly reliant on inexplicit norms many of which go back hundreds of years before the U.S. was founded. They’re both still English common law systems.

[tialaramex]

> It's simply not as clear or coherent as a written one.

No. As you have surely seen, the US written constitution just gets contorted to "clearly" mean whatever it is the partisan Justices decided suits their current purpose. The effect is extremely corrosive - they even decided it means their guy is above the law.

I agree that using a better voting system (STV) is a meaningful benefit and worth replicating elsewhere, but I don't agree that having a written constitution is better. I think Ireland would be in roughly the same place if it had the same arrangement as in Westminster in that respect.

For example when Ireland wrote a constitutional amendment saying abortion is illegal under basically any circumstances, the people the Irish were electing would also have voted against legislation allowing abortion, but by the time the poll was held to amend to say abortion must be legal, the legislators elected were also mostly pro-choice. So if there was no written constitution my guess is that roughly the outcome is the same, in 1975 an Irish woman who needs an abortion has to "go on holiday" abroad and come back not pregnant or order pills and hope they're not traced to her, and in 2025 it's just an ordinary medical practice. Maybe the changes happen a few years earlier, or a few years later.

Edited: Clarify that the abortion prohibition was itself an amendment, as was the removal of that prohibition.

[JCattheATM]

The power of a constitution is in it being the highest law in the land, that legislation can't just override. It's only recently in the US that there is a blatantly corrupt kakistocracy who feels free to ignore it.

[hunterpayne]

Counterpoint, the recent ruling on the Tariffs.

[JCattheATM]

Too late and too weak a response.

[t43562]

Documents are meaningless. In rotten countries they simply get rewritten or ignored. Nothing beats an electorate who value honesty over being told what they want to hear and who punish corruption.

[williamdclt]

> duopolies in the US and the UK

for better or worse, the duopoly is disappearing in the UK. Both Tories and Labour are getting passed by Reform and the Greens

[laughing_man]

But it's not that the duopoly is disappearing. It's just that the previous two parties are being eclipsed by two different parities. That's occurred previously in both the UK and US.

[hunterpayne]

The last time it happened in the US was 1856 and its only happened 2x in US history. The US democratic party is the oldest existing political party in the world. For reference, the UK is actually only about 90 years older than the Democratic party.

[t43562]

with first past the post there will only ever be a duopoly. It forces you into voting AGAINST your least favorite choice.

[foldr]

I’m not sure if you can talk about a duopoly of parties in the UK at present.

[kergonath]

> It's not enshrined in some document they got together and wrote down like the US constitution

It’s also very brittle and one charismatic populist away from unraveling like the American government. Too much depends on gentlemen agreements and people trusting other people to do the right thing. It works in a stable environment, but shatters the moment someone with no shame and no scruples shows up.

[laughing_man]

There's really no way around the possibility that whatever you've written down in your constitution will be ignored in the heat of the moment, or become degraded over time.

[Jensson]

But you don't need to put the military under the direct command of the civilian president like US does, if parliament can take military action against the civilian president and civilian action against the military leader then they have ways to deal with both.

American president is too powerful to deal with since he controls both the civilian and the military side.

[marcus_holmes]

This is the one argument left for monarchy; that the military in the UK (and technically Australia) swear loyatly to the monarch, not the Prime Minister. In the event of an obviously-lunatic elected official ordering the troops into civilian areas to "pacify" civilian populations, the monarch could (in theory) countermand that order.

[r14c]

Isn't that worse? You don't even get to elect the commander in chief, its just some random guy who was born into it?

[ChocolateGod]

The monarch being Commander in Chief is ceremonial. Everything is done on the advice of the Prime Minister and their cabinet.

The chance of the monarch overriding said request is less than 1%.

Even then, parliament is sovereign. Whilst the logistics are complicated due to how things are introduced to the house, if parliament says no to a prime ministers decision, it overrides anything the prime minister who has no absolute power like a president does.

[marcus_holmes]

I didn't say it was a good argument ;)

Personally I love the idea that the codes for nukes are surgically implanted in a volunteer, and in order to issue the order to fire the nukes, the CIC must personally carve the codes from that person's chest with a knife, killing them in the process. Or the variant on that idea, that the codes are implanted in their own forearm, and to order the nukes they must cut the codes from out of their own flesh.

We could do the same for all military deployment orders.

[laughing_man]

There's a mechanism by which Congress can remove the president if he gets out of control.

[subscribed]

This just happened.

The government, unilaterally, against the country's prevalent feelings towards this illegal war of aggression, permitted USA to use British bases, and if I'm not mistaken, without as much as the parliament vote.

[hardlianotion]

Most western democracies have exactly the same fault, maybe having unscrupulous, shameless legislators are the end state of the current models of democracy being practiced.

[philistine]

While no democratic system is completely protected from tyrants, at least the UK (and the Commonwealth nations who inherited their principles) uses the living tree doctrine in its courts, which means that the written text is not sacrosanct and the intention and usage is to be considered. That and unwritten tradition has force of law and can be challenged in court. Look at Boris Johnson's reversal of his prorogation as an example.

[tshaddox]

> It’s also very brittle and one charismatic populist away from unraveling

All sufficiently large governments (really all organizations of any kind) are necessarily like this, from the most successful attempts at open societies to the most autocratic. They all require constant vigilance both to perform their intended function and to preserve themselves into the future.

[petesergeant]

Strong disagree. It's uncontested that supreme authority lies with parliament, not with the leader of the day. PM can't do shit if parliament doesn't want him to, because they can always simply change the rules on him.

[throwaway85825]

Constitution and laws are just pieces of paper. They only matter if the population acts as if they matter. Liberia has the same Constitution as the US.

[brailsafe]

But they're cycled through much more rapidly, and seem generally more vulnerable than the dictators in the U.S or otherwise. A small concession to be sure.

It seems like a fundamental failure of government that in many cases, there are no consequences for deliberately or accidentally screwing your people. You either get murdered eventually or the country is just left to fix itself later, which disproportionately affects people with little resources.

[charcircuit]

Being able to vote in a strong leader to fix things directly is a feature. Democracy is not always the answer and when it is it can be too slow when time matters.

[Someone]

For “fixing things” there are well-defined mechanisms such as state of emergency declaration of war.

Those give the leader extra powers, but do not give them carte blanche to do as they wish. Those extra powers are limited to handle specific problems.

[subscribed]

I think it's quite obvious now how this leads to the erosion of rights and laws, looking at the current state of the affairs.

[charcircuit]

That's the point? Adding laws and rights is not necessarily a good thing. People tried to work towards a local maxima but it turns out that the approach is no good so it needs to be torn down and another direction of hill climbing needs to be tried. Or circumstances where a law made sense are no longer the same. Problems that the law makers did not foresee may come into the picture.

[01jonny01]

Britain's problems are due to uncharismatic Blairite socialist.

[ordinaryradical]

This comment may or may not be wrong but it is quintessentially low effort.

The point of HN is to discuss, not to tweet about your political enemies.

[01jonny01]

I'm parroting back the opposite of the original reply, which was upvoted

That leaves me to conclude HN is a left leaning circle jerk echo chamber, much like reddit. With any dissent to the right triggering the non-hateful liberal lefties.

[kitd]

A populist far-right racist would fix all the potholes and bring HS2 in under budget? Got it.

[01jonny01]

You don't understand the core issue at heart in Britain.

The real distraction is the economic argument. The truth of the matter is natives feel like a stranger in their own country. I say this as someone who is mixed race and 2nd gen before you try and label me a racist. Yawn.

[kitd]

You need to change your social media algorithm.

[skibble]

All of them? Hmmm.

[b00ty4breakfast]

I don't know much about UK politics but I definitely know enough to know that there's no such thing as a "Blairite socialist".

[pjc50]

I go back and forth on this. It's a lot like the palace of Westminster itself: charming, whimsical, historical, connected to the past, hopelessly impractical, postponing repairs until things break, and at significant risk of being burned down.

On the other hand it avoids the illusion that power resides in a text and that you can legal-magic your way past a power structure.

[bartread]

There is something to be said for your written constitution though: having the fundamental principles on which your nation is founded enshrined in that way should, at least in theory, make it a lot easier to settle arguments (though in practice, and particularly recently, that does seem not to be the case). Constitutional wrangling in the UK is always really fraught though because it's all done by precedent and is therefore incredibly hard work to get to a clear understanding of what the situation really is.

[runako]

The USA's written constitution should not be used as an exemplar of written constitutions in general because the founders didn't even enforce it the day after it was ratified. It took a civil war to even turn towards the words as written. The document itself was more aspirational than a reflection of how the founders intended to live and govern.

As a result of all of that, we have developed a culture of sophistry around simple words. We pretend the Constitution binds us, but in practice the structures that govern the country are much more opaque and therefore more difficult to change.

(This is why every so often we have to ratify a new amendment codifying rights that are clearly enumerated in the articles of the Constitution or in an earlier amendment. At some point, the sophistry tips over and we have to amend it to say what was plainly written in at some earlier point.)

[inglor_cz]

Well, SCOTUS sometimes produces really weird Humpty-Dumpty explanations for very common words.

Such as that growing marijuana plants in your own home for your own consumption influences interstate commerce and is therefore within powers of the Congress to regulate/ban.

[wileydragonfly]

Well, they used that same logic to force integration… so.. sometimes good sometimes bad?

[laughing_man]

That's ultimately the result of the threats FDR made to pack the court if they didn't do what he wanted.

[scj]

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was established in 1982. We're still in the process of figuring out what it means (and as a living document, the interpretation will change over time).

It's messy. But I'd much rather that than need to ask "What would Pierre Trudeau think of this situation?"

[protocolture]

I see brits describing it as "Dictatorship with Democratic characteristics" and "3 weasels leading the 4th rabid weasel around by the tail" it doesnt seem "cool" by any stretch, except maybe if it was fictional and the people it hurt were not real.

[anon291]

England's 'democracy' is cool insofar as the freemasons are cool. Old men in goofy hats sound fun until they end up raping some kid on an island somewhere in their old colonial posessions.

[themafia]

It's significantly ruined by automated royal assent. The balance that's meant to protect the realm has not functioned for decades.

[zrn900]

What part of hereditary aristocrats and religious and otherwise lifetime appointees being able to send back bills to the parliament an infinite number of times until they are changed as they want them. There are cases in which they sent bills back as many as 60 times until they got them changed.

[JCattheATM]

> gradually evolving them into a modern liberal democracy.

And yet, they are still not quite there.

There is something to be said for design over stumbling.

[t43562]

The stumbling is natural - it's a sort of stable thing deriving out of the state of now.

Design is something put out there which may not stand up to the test of how people actually behave i.e. it may not be stable.

[JCattheATM]

It's fine to stumble initially, like discovering fire, but design gets us lighters and ovens. Good design allows for some flexibility without leaving everything to chance like pure stumbling does.

[rvz]

> British democracy and government is cool.

Oh sweet summer child.

The government there does not care about you and will promise anything to get another 5 years in power despite causing the issues they promised to solve in the first place.

You are essentially voting in the same party to be in government and progress there moves in the hundreds of years; hence the riddance of the scam that is unelected hereditary nobles which it took more than 700 years to remove them.

[pjc50]

In fairness, this is not unique to Britain. For America read "4" instead of "5".

[rvz]

Are there unelected hereditary nobles somewhere in the US that is entitled to having a seat in congress and can vote against laws being passed?

Nope. I don't think so, not even the length of the term is the same.

[xp84]

unelected hereditary nobles

Let's break down what Senators are:

> Unelected

In most states a single party will always win statewide elections, so our Senators are what I'd call "marginally elected" since they only have to face a quiet low-turnout primary election and then they sail to an easy re-election. They're nearly always guaranteed to win their primaries as long as The Party supports them, and they'll do so as long as you're loyal to The Party agenda.

> Hereditary

Many of them come from generational wealth, and a few suspiciously just happen to become wildly wealthy while in office, including through their stock trades, which has been decided to be 100% not illegal even when they know things the public does not know.

> nobles

Ours are called "elites," but most things are the same - they tend to all have gone to the top 2-4 colleges, and you can't 'break into' this set unless you were born into old money. Seems close enough from the perspective of those of us who aren't nobles or elites.

So, you can think of the Senate as the House of Lords lite.

[hunterpayne]

Just checking, but you do realize that this kind of unhinged, populist takes are exactly the kind of propaganda you use to destroy a democratic system. You know that right?

Only a couple of states are like you describe and none of them are red. The governor of KY (the reddest state) for example is a Dem. One of the Senators for Montana is a Dem, etc. In fact, if you want the Dems to win the presidency in 2028, one of those folks is your best bet. The other thing we can do it get rid of gerrymandering but that's unlikely and the most recent gerrymandering attempts are likely to end up blowing up in the face of the party drawing the lines. Politics is nothing if not ironic.

PS Look at who is running for governor of CA right now and ask yourself if any of those folks actually represents CA in any real way. Also, ask yourself why there is only 1 Dem in that race?

[xp84]

You can't destroy a democratic system that isn't democratic and already doesn't serve the people. The Senate was never designed to be democratic in the first place. The House was, but its main problem is just campaign finance decadence that means to the extent those guys do any governing during their 2-year terms, it's a part-time gig in between fundraising. And together, the legislative branch has become a joke. They now just fart around, either rubber-stamping whatever the President says, or shutting down the government whenever the party out of power can't accept that the public has rejected their policies. So I hope I can be forgiven for being pessimistic about whether this "democratic system" even serves any purpose at this point.

But back to the Senate. Jon Tester was defeated in 2024. There is a peppering of Democrats in statewide office here and there -- Fetterman and Beshear, and the Virginia and Georgia Democrats, the latter of which got really lucky to both run in the election that was a referendum on Trump's COVID chaos, and the one getting to run against a proud child molester. They are also the exact kind of politicians that don't get support from the blue-state Democrats in primaries for national elections, because they are too moderate. If you don't check every box, the primaries will destroy you. To be fair, Republicans have the exact same problem. Blue-state moderates certainly could have been persuaded to support say, Jeb Bush, but the party only supports... well, since the phenomenon became locked in, they have only given their support to one man. Sorry to ramble, my point is that the practice of split-ticket voting is dying off faster than discounted DRAM.

There used to be a lot of these cross-party appeal people like Bill Clinton, Ann Richards, Jon Tester, Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson, and on the Republican side George Pataki, Mitt Romney, Chris Christie. But this is now massively the exception, and trending down.

BTW I'm all for getting rid of gerrymandering, but the Democrats have set that cause back by 100 years by selling out their supposed deeply held beliefs last year in California. Now we're just being honest that it's only about power.

I don't remember who's running for governor in California, but I am guessing there is only one Dem running it's because the California Democratic Party is powerful and disciplined in ways neither national party is, and has told everybody but the party's favorite to sit down and shut up. That's speculation - let me know if I'm wrong.

[BigTTYGothGF]

In the US our unelected hereditary nobility just buys candidates.

[fc417fc802]

And yet all of your objections apply to us in equal measure. Almost as though hereditary nobles don't have much to do with them.

[pjc50]

Not hereditary, but SCOTUS functions somewhat worse than the House Of Lords: unelected, unremovable, life appointments, but ability to change the law. Hence the decades spent shifting the balance to reverse Roe v Wade.

A lot of important US freedoms only came from the courts in spite of the legislatures, which I think is an under appreciated problem of the system.

The US system skews much older for some reason too. The only president born after 1946 was Obama. Like being stuck in a time warp.

[t43562]

The governments don't really cause the issues. The big issues are just things that face the country no matter who is in control - how to pay for everything, how to deal with population aging etc.

It's not a simple country - it's a machine with millions of complicated parts and therefore it's difficult to come up with simple things to do that will make everyone happy.

The public don't all have a 10000 foot view, which I don't think any 1 person could comprehensively understand anyhow, and are susceptible to being sold "simple solutions" by politicians - in fact they won't elect anyone who doesn't pretend at least to offer simple solutions.

[tjpnz]

What on earth are you talking about? They were elected in 2024. If anything its the issues caused over the previous 14 years which must be fixed.

[jongjong]

No idea why this was down-voted, it's true. It's replacing one hereditary system based on inheritance of titles with another hereditary system based on inheritance of capital.

[pseudalopex]

> No idea why this was down-voted

> Oh sweet summer child.

And Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[jongjong]

You need to have a very cynical worldview already to find my comment boring; as in; no information content. I really don't think most people are there yet.

[pseudalopex]

> You need to have a very cynical worldview already to find my comment boring; as in; no information content.

Boring does not mean no information content. But the part of your comment about comment voting was boring and noise.

[koakuma-chan]

I think that guideline means that if your own comment gets downvoted, don't reply complaining about it. A "why was this downvoted? it's true" from another user is fine, I think.