CO2 is plant food. It's amazing how the spin has affected so many generations. Much much worse than that for the environment are particulates from incomplete combustion, NOx from poor combustion, et cetera.
Do you think the other ways in which people vote are better: selling your vote, picking a candidate for being presentable, picking a candidate for having the right complexion/religion/sexual orientation, picking a candidate for being married or having kids, picking a candidate because they are "smart", or poor or ... I could go on. Giving the right prompt which you find on the internet might give you a better choice than you might decide for on your own.
I think we don't do democracy because we think the masses are informed and make good decisions, but rather because it's the best system for ensuring peaceful transitions of power, thereby creating social stability which is conducive to encouraging investment in the future.
So uninformed people participating isn't an unfortunate side effect, but rather the point: making everybody feel included in the decision making processes, to make people more likely to accept political change.
"I think we do democracy not because we think the masses are informed and make good decisions, but rather because it's the best system for ensuring peaceful transitions of power, thereby creating social stability which is conducive to encouraging investment in the future.
I think people argue this but I don't think its true.
The lack of warlords leads to peaceful transitions. Trump can feel all he wants about the 2020 election but his sphere of influence was too small to take control.
This isn't the case for all those power struggles when a monarch dies. Each Lord had their own militia they could mobilize to take control and leads to stuff like War of the Roses.
We had this same issue going into the Civil War where the US army was mostly militias so it's pretty easy to grab the southern ones together and go fight the north. This isn't going to work so well post-1812 where a unified federal army exists. Of course, if you start selectively replacing generals with loyalists then you start creating a warlord.
I've held similar opinions in the past and debated them with friends. It's a tricky issue.
Why do need a licence to drive but not to vote? Except non-birth citizens effectively had to acquire a licence.
Philosophers have probably thought about this and can provide an answer. Unfortunately I'm not familiar with their literature.
I like Rawls' Veil of Ignorance as a principle for thinking about issues of fairness. Would I choose to live in a society where only informed citizens could vote even if that might preclude me? Probably. Hard to honestly put oneself behind that veil though.
For local elections, I have to frantically google on the day my ballot is due to figure out how to vote for. My criteria is pretty fixed: I want to vote for moderates but beyond a few high profile races I don't have a clue who the moderate option is. I can see using AI to summarize positions for more obscure candidates.
> For local elections, I have to frantically google on the day my ballot is due to figure out how to vote for.
what on earth??
practically every metropolitan area and tons of smaller communities have multiple news sources that publish "voting guides" in addition to voter pamphlets that go out before elections which detail candidates positions, ballot initiatives etc.
barring that you can also just... do your "frantic googling" before the election. it's not a waste of your time to put a little of it toward understanding the political climate of your area and maybe once in a while forming an opinion instead of whatever constitutes a "moderate" position during the largest rightward shift of the overton window in decades.
With the added bonus that a llm might not even be updated to the last developments of what happened politically and have outdated views or might not know about the candidate well enough to provide accurate info (or at least, more accurate than any voting phamplets or guides)
It isn’t that simple. You have a few top elections that are in the media enough to be very visible. Then you have…judges…school board members…port members…people who you want to choose carefully on but are completely missing from voter guides.
honest question, because i've only ever lived places that issue voter guides: do you live somewhere that doesn't have government-issued voter guides containing at least some information on all the candidates/ballot initiatives/etc? maybe i'm taking that for granted.
We have a voter guide, I don't really find it useful because people generally present themselves in the best light. This morning I had to fill out a ballot with 5 school board races (no idea why we have to vote for each one) and none of those were easy. For the top line elections, I knew what to do, for the lower line elections...I often just left entries empty because I didn't have time to figure out why I would prefer one candidate or the other.
without knowing whether you live in a tiny community (guessing no, since you mentioned port commissioners), i'd highly recommend you look into local news (including alternative news sources - if you really hate their political slant, you know you can always just vote against whatever they recommend). you'll get way more helpful information than anything an LLM can put together.
I follow local news for a big city in the PNW. No. Port commissioners and school board members never make the news here, city council members barely do either but at least they are more visible.
But... it's like asking a knowledgeable person. How are you sure she's giving you answers as your criteria demands, or whether she's been influenced to skew the answers to favor a candidate..
The third option that becomes more tantalizing every year in the US is to not have insurance, pay OOP for routine matters, and when something catastrophic happens let the medical debt go to collections and settle for pennies on the dollar. It doesn't feel right, but it's the direction the medical-pharmaceutical-insurance cartel is pushing us.
I'm not sure that democrats enact/write less laws. If they don't enact (or write) less laws, i cannot see how the aggregate number of laws reduces.
This, apparently, is a "hard" statistical (research) problem, even though i've seen reporting on this exact subject, along the lines of "number of lines in bills written by each party" or similar. but the top 2 are democrats. I think "enacted" is a different metric, but i'm still pretty certain that democrats lead on "enacted" legislation, at least in the last 25 years.
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