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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On October 04 2016 02:31 RvB wrote:
The problwm with this referendum and the Dutch one as well is that it's better for pro Europeans to not vote. In the Dutch one the treshold was 30% with the anti EU voters being more likely to vote. So instead of voting pro I'd rather not vote and try to make the vote go invalid. It was also a non binding referendum so a lot of people did not care either way but it still skews the results.
Why is it better not to vote than to win the referendum? This honestly reminds me of youngsters who don't vote because the system is fucked anyways, when the reality is that those who consistently vote usually get people to listen to them.
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That's what most referendums generally seem to be. In the Hungarian referendum something like 98% of the voters voted the same way. It's the democratic equivalent of a circlejerk
On October 04 2016 02:36 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On October 04 2016 02:31 RvB wrote:
The problwm with this referendum and the Dutch one as well is that it's better for pro Europeans to not vote. In the Dutch one the treshold was 30% with the anti EU voters being more likely to vote. So instead of voting pro I'd rather not vote and try to make the vote go invalid. It was also a non binding referendum so a lot of people did not care either way but it still skews the results. Why is it better not to vote than to win the referendum? This honestly reminds me of youngsters who don't vote because the system is fucked anyways, when the reality is that those who consistently vote usually get people to listen to them.
I think they don't want to legitimise the whole thing. It's like with Kim Jong Un, he looks sillier if he wins 100% of the votes than if he wins 70% of them
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
I dunno, doesn't seem harder to spin "98% of 45% of the voting population voted this way" than "70% of 65% of the voting population voted this way" despite it being a very similar number of voters in both cases.
Sounds like an attempt to subvert the more popular position by offering them a degree of unanimity which sounds really stupid.
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I don't think anybody is doubting that the critical attitude towards immigration policies is the more popular position in Hungary, to affirm this with such a loaded question is a farce anyway. I think abstaining in this case makes more sense than actually participating.
There is of course a problem with young people and pro-Europeans not participating though, but I think that's more important in the actual elections.
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On October 04 2016 02:36 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On October 04 2016 02:31 RvB wrote:
The problwm with this referendum and the Dutch one as well is that it's better for pro Europeans to not vote. In the Dutch one the treshold was 30% with the anti EU voters being more likely to vote. So instead of voting pro I'd rather not vote and try to make the vote go invalid. It was also a non binding referendum so a lot of people did not care either way but it still skews the results. Why is it better not to vote than to win the referendum?
That's what he was trying to tell you past the first sentence, the initiative on this type of referendum comes from the side more invested in the topic and thus is expected to have a higher turnout. So expecting the turnout won't be high enough for your option to have a chance of winning and because of how widespread this belief is, if you vote you practically increase the chances of the opposite choice winning in a technical manner. It's basic game theory akin to tactical voting, it happens regardless of whether the other side would have won in ideal conditions or not. Which in this particular case is pretty obvious.
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On October 04 2016 04:04 Dan HH wrote:Show nested quote +On October 04 2016 02:36 LegalLord wrote:On October 04 2016 02:31 RvB wrote:
The problwm with this referendum and the Dutch one as well is that it's better for pro Europeans to not vote. In the Dutch one the treshold was 30% with the anti EU voters being more likely to vote. So instead of voting pro I'd rather not vote and try to make the vote go invalid. It was also a non binding referendum so a lot of people did not care either way but it still skews the results. Why is it better not to vote than to win the referendum? That's what he was trying to tell you past the first sentence, the initiative on this type of referendum comes from the side more invested in the topic and thus is expected to have a higher turnout. So expecting the turnout won't be high enough for your option to have a chance of winning and because of how widespread this belief is, if you vote you practically increase the chances of the opposite choice winning in a technical manner. It's basic game theory akin to tactical voting, it happens regardless of whether the other side would have won in ideal conditions or not. Which in this particular case is pretty obvious.
Yes exactly. Thanks for explaining it better than I do.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
Was, for example, the Dutch referendum likely to have the anti-Ukraine Association side win with high turnout? If not, then it clearly represents a risky gambit where your opinion loses because you didn't vote for it. If it was likely to go as it did with high turnout, it looks suspiciously like an attempted subversion of majority opinion by technicality. It only seems to make sense if the government wants not to call the referendum in the first place (otherwise they will spin "overwhelming support of voters" into a victory) and to act against a majority opinion which the non voters do not support, which is clearly not the case in Hungary.
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On October 04 2016 04:13 LegalLord wrote:
Was, for example, the Dutch referendum likely to have the anti-Ukraine Association side win with high turnout? If not, then it clearly represents a risky gambit where your opinion loses because you didn't vote for it. If it was likely to go as it did with high turnout, it looks suspiciously like an attempted subversion of majority opinion by technicality. It only seems to make sense if the government wants not to call the referendum in the first place (otherwise they will spin "overwhelming support of voters" into a victory) and to act against a majority opinion which the non voters do not support, which is clearly not the case in Hungary.
It happens both when the non-initiating side can only not lose on a technicality and when they are likely to win with a high turnout. The latter happens precisely because when there's not a whole lot at stake the baseline for the turnout is low and energizing a high turnout is seen as somewhat more difficult to achieve than to pull this off.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
It just seems like a gamble that has the potential to backfire stupidly. Though it's always been true that people who care more about an issue vote for it more, and widespread near-ambivalence should not necessarily always outdo concentrated strong opposition. Maybe the gamble of trying to win outright is bigger.
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On October 04 2016 02:31 RvB wrote:
The problwm with this referendum and the Dutch one as well is that it's better for pro Europeans to not vote. In the Dutch one the treshold was 30% with the anti EU voters being more likely to vote. So instead of voting pro I'd rather not vote and try to make the vote go invalid. It was also a non binding referendum so a lot of people did not care either way but it still skews the results. That's hopeful thinking at best. Either Hungarian's pro Europeans are the most organized and fully aware people around to be able to not vote, or the most simple answer is correct (98% - 2%). Hungarians are heavily against forced immigration from the EU.
It's not binding, but sure it does reflect hungarian's will, we are not talking about a 60-40 with a 40% turnout here.
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On October 04 2016 04:07 RvB wrote:Show nested quote +On October 04 2016 04:04 Dan HH wrote:On October 04 2016 02:36 LegalLord wrote:On October 04 2016 02:31 RvB wrote:
The problwm with this referendum and the Dutch one as well is that it's better for pro Europeans to not vote. In the Dutch one the treshold was 30% with the anti EU voters being more likely to vote. So instead of voting pro I'd rather not vote and try to make the vote go invalid. It was also a non binding referendum so a lot of people did not care either way but it still skews the results. Why is it better not to vote than to win the referendum? That's what he was trying to tell you past the first sentence, the initiative on this type of referendum comes from the side more invested in the topic and thus is expected to have a higher turnout. So expecting the turnout won't be high enough for your option to have a chance of winning and because of how widespread this belief is, if you vote you practically increase the chances of the opposite choice winning in a technical manner. It's basic game theory akin to tactical voting, it happens regardless of whether the other side would have won in ideal conditions or not. Which in this particular case is pretty obvious. Yes exactly. Thanks for explaining it better than I do.
And that is why it is so bad to have minimum vote requirements with referendum. This system is so rigged on all sides.
I would say the system still favors the people who are against a certain referendum. Instead of voting they will simply not vote,and they will get all the other people that wont vote for one reason or another on their side. Normally with elections the votes of the non voters are split across all partys,they don't count at all,but with referendum with minimum vote reqwuirements they do count.
They should just make it a normal vote without tresshold.
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On October 04 2016 08:28 Godwrath wrote:Show nested quote +On October 04 2016 02:31 RvB wrote:
The problwm with this referendum and the Dutch one as well is that it's better for pro Europeans to not vote. In the Dutch one the treshold was 30% with the anti EU voters being more likely to vote. So instead of voting pro I'd rather not vote and try to make the vote go invalid. It was also a non binding referendum so a lot of people did not care either way but it still skews the results. That's hopeful thinking at best. Either Hungarian's pro Europeans are the most organized and fully aware people around to be able to not vote, or the most simple answer is correct (98% - 2%). Hungarians are heavily against forced immigration from the EU. It's not binding, but sure it does reflect hungarian's will, we are not talking about a 60-40 with a 40% turnout here.
We've had a referendum to impeach the president in 2012 where the 'no' side informally adopted this strategy. 'Yes' won by ~90% but with a turnout below the threshold, while polls were around 65/30 in favor of yes. He was quite unpopular at the time and 'yes' would have undoubtedly won regardless of how high the turnout would have been but no, 90/10 wasn't the correct answer but an exaggeration as a result of tactical abstaining by a majority of his supporters. And this was a binding referendum with much higher political stakes, which only makes it more difficult to apply this.
Given the loaded question, it's likely that the result of the Hungarian referendum is closer to reality than the example I gave with polls shortly before it being about 10/85.
In both cases the poll numbers seen in the media represent only the people that said they are certain to vote. The difference between polls and end result is mostly made by those on the other side or opposing the referendum that lied about their intention to vote. Among the general population there's a larger share of apathetics/undecideds and most relevant to this discussion - a sizable amount of people that oppose the referendum's existence more so than they prefer the other option. The unavoidable existence of this group of people in such referendums is a large part of what enables this tactic.
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Zurich15352 Posts
On October 01 2016 03:57 RvB wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2016 01:53 zatic wrote:On October 01 2016 00:18 RvB wrote:On September 30 2016 22:54 zatic wrote:On September 30 2016 16:20 RvB wrote:On September 30 2016 06:32 Thaniri wrote:On September 30 2016 06:04 RvB wrote:
It's always easier to imagine jobs disappearing than which new ones will be created. Nobody could imagine computer programmers or game designers before the computer got invented and brought on the market and yet they're huge now. AI might have the potential to completely substitute humans but I don't see that happening in the near future and if it does happen doesn't that just mean that humans don't have to work anymore? Game designers are part of entertainment, and the VAST majority of people who have made games these days won't get good money out of it. Open your phone app store or look at steam greenlight. The market is so saturated it's ludicrous. I also said computer programmers in general. Or take the tech sector in general. Do you think anyone expected Intel or Microsoft before conputers, apple being so huge before the smartphone or all the people working at airfields before the airplane? Or if you take it on a wider scale do you think anyone pre industrial revolution expected the vast majority of people working in industry just decades later? Or the people living pre ww2 that the services sector would grow so big after the jobs in the industrial sector started disappearing due to automation? It's incredibly hard to predict where future jobs will be but if we look at history they will be there. That's of course no guarantee for the future but I don't see why this time is so much different than the last. On September 30 2016 06:04 zatic wrote:On September 30 2016 04:53 Thaniri wrote:On September 30 2016 04:18 Nyxisto wrote:On September 30 2016 04:15 Thaniri wrote:
Chess has nothing to do with productivity though, it is entertainment. I only meant it as a demonstration of machine intelligence being superior to human's.
People will want human artists, human sportsmen, human poetry...
Despite the fact that there are machine learning programs that write movie and tv show scripts already, and presumably they will keep getting better and better. General point is that the 'human element' is something that people not always want to see substituted. Even if there's a superior robot lawyer or a robot doctor it's fairly likely that these machines will, just like the old ones, assist rather than completely replace labour. Lawyers and doctors are meant to win cases and make people healthy, not be your friend. I don't know the title for this job but robots are being used in analyzing large legal documents that typically junior employees would have to review. I saw a post on reddit a few weeks ago saying that robots can read mammograph scans for signs of cancer more accurately than doctors. I visited Seoul several months back, and when you walk into a store there are 5x more employees there than you would see in a european or north american store. It was unnerving to me to be essentially waited upon by service employees when doing simple stuff like picking out clothes. These are the only kinds of jobs that I can see coming about when people are out-competed by machines everywhere else. This wasn't true for every store in Korea, but it was true in Itaewon/Hongdae(one of these is a shopping district in Seoul I don't remember..), and outlet malls owned by companies like conglomerates like samsung, hyundai, lotte etc. edit: the reason I think these stupid jobs will be the only ones left is because people only give a shit about the top 1% of artists, musicians, and athletes. Anyone can name Lebron James or Michael Jordan if they never played basketball in their life, but name a single college basketball team? Everyone knows the names Ronaldinho, Messi, but might not even be able to name their own cities football team. Yoyo Ma and... literally any other cellist in the world? The list of examples is infinite. You mash up a lot of concepts but in generally I agree. Unless someone can really point out to me where all these new middle class jobs that will magically offset automation are supposed to come from this is a fairytale story. That's like someone in 1900 saying we will always have horses in everyday society - just look at the past 3000 years! Fairytale. No. What we're saying is that the invention replacing horses (the car) will create new jobs (taxi drivers, the guy fixing the car etc.) That's what I mean by fairytale. It worked in the past, so why worry about it for the present or future, even though we have all evidence that this will become a massive problem. To me this is just sticking your head in the sand and pretending some problems don't exists in the future on the basis that other problems didn't exist in the past. Then show me all that evidence please. You really need evidence that automation replaces human labor? But sure. The most relevant single piece would probably be the now infamous 2013 study on US occupations: http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdfWe examine how susceptible jobs are to computerisation. To assess
this, we begin by implementing a novel methodology to estimate
the probability of computerisation for 702 detailed occupations, using a
Gaussian process classifier. Based on these estimates, we examine expected
impacts of future computerisation on US labour market outcomes,
with the primary objective of analysing the number of jobs at risk and
the relationship between an occupation’s probability of computerisation,
wages and educational attainment. According to our estimates, about 47
percent of total US employment is at risk. We further provide evidence
that wages and educational attainment exhibit a strong negative relationship
with an occupation’s probability of computerisation. We distinguish between high, medium and low risk occupations, depending
on their probability of computerisation. We make no attempt to estimate
the number of jobs that will actually be automated, and focus on potential job
automatability over some unspecified number of years. According to our estimates
around 47 percent of total US employment is in the high risk category. We
refer to these as jobs at risk – i.e. jobs we expect could be automated relatively
soon, perhaps over the next decade or two.
Our model predicts that most workers in transportation and logistics occupations,
together with the bulk of office and administrative support workers, and
labour in production occupations, are at risk. These findings are consistent with
recent technological developments documented in the literature. More surprisingly,
we find that a substantial share of employment in service occupations,
where most US job growth has occurred over the past decades (Autor and Dorn,
44
2013), are highly susceptible to computerisation. Additional support for this
finding is provided by the recent growth in the market for service robots (MGI,
2013) and the gradually diminishment of the comparative advantage of human
labour in tasks involving mobility and dexterity (Robotics-VO, 2013). No I don't want evidence that technology replaces labour that was never the discussion. I want evidence that it causes unemployment, that the jobs which the new technology creates are less than the jobs it destroys. Show nested quote +Overall paid employment has risen in most countries. In the six considered here, only Japan has seen a decline.
This is driven by increasing participation of women, and increases in population, including immigration in some cases. It is also caused by the increasing demand for services, and the creation of completely new products and markets, often related to the application of electronics to communication. The statistics mainly point to reduction in employment in manufacturing in the developed countries, but this is often a small reduction. It coincides with an increase in output and an increase in robotics use except in the case of Japan. The extra number that have gained employment in the years 2000 to 2008 is far greater than the small numbers losing their jobs in manufacturing.
The new jobs have been in:
1) distribution and services, Some of the distribution jobs are the result of manufacturers outsourcing their distribution. In the past these jobs would have been classified as part of manufacturing.
2) and also in new manufacturing applications, particularly using technology advances to create new consumer products [mobile phones, computers, games etc]. In the industrialising countries, as could be expected, there has been a sharp
rise in employment in manufacturing, as well as increase in output. Productivity increases are not just caused by automation and robotics, but it is one of three main factors, along with increased size of manufacturing plants and the
globalisation of sourcing. Note: while the IFR numbers provide a clear basis from which to work, it has not always been possible to separate robotics from automation in our analyses.
Individual countries differ greatly, the importance of manufacturing is only 11% of employment in USA…but 24% in Germany and as high as 27% in more recently industrialising countries such as The Republic of Korea,
The level of robotics use has almost always doubled, in all of the six countries [except Japan] in the eight years covered by the study. The proportion of the workforce that is unemployed has hardly changed in this period. [see charts opposite and table overleaf]. www.ifr.orgFrom an article in the economist: Show nested quote +Automating a particular task, so that it can be done more quickly or cheaply, increases the demand for human workers to do the other tasks around it that have not been automated. Show nested quote +During the Industrial Revolution more and more tasks in the weaving process were automated, prompting workers to focus on the things machines could not do, such as operating a machine, and then tending multiple machines to keep them running smoothly. This caused output to grow explosively. In America during the 19th century the amount of coarse cloth a single weaver could produce in an hour increased by a factor of 50, and the amount of labour required per yard of cloth fell by 98%. This made cloth cheaper and increased demand for it, which in turn created more jobs for weavers: their numbers quadrupled between 1830 and 1900. In other words, technology gradually changed the nature of the weaver’s job, and the skills required to do it, rather than replacing it altogether. Show nested quote +The same pattern can be seen in industry after industry after the introduction of computers, says Mr Bessen: rather than destroying jobs, automation redefines them, and in ways that reduce costs and boost demand. In a recent analysis of the American workforce between 1982 and 2012, he found that employment grew significantly faster in occupations (for example, graphic design) that made more use of computers, as automation sped up one aspect of a job, enabling workers to do the other parts better. The net effect was that more computer-intensive jobs within an industry displaced less computer-intensive ones. Computers thus reallocate rather than displace jobs, requiring workers to learn new skills. This is true of a wide range of occupations, Mr Bessen found, not just in computer-related fields such as software development but also in administrative work, health care and many other areas. Only manufacturing jobs expanded more slowly than the workforce did over the period of study, but that had more to do with business cycles and offshoring to China than with technology, he says. Show nested quote +For example, the introduction of software capable of analysing large volumes of legal documents might have been expected to reduce the number of legal clerks and paralegals, who act as human search engines during the “discovery” phase of a case; in fact automation has reduced the cost of discovery and increased demand for it. “Judges are more willing to allow discovery now, because it’s cheaper and easier,” says Mr Bessen. The number of legal clerks in America increased by 1.1% a year between 2000 and 2013. Similarly, the automation of shopping through e-commerce, along with more accurate recommendations, encourages people to buy more and has increased overall employment in retailing. Show nested quote +Focusing only on what is lost misses “a central economic mechanism by which automation affects the demand for labour”, notes Mr Autor: that it raises the value of the tasks that can be done only by humans. Ultimately, he says, those worried that automation will cause mass unemployment are succumbing to what economists call the “lump of labour” fallacy. “This notion that there’s only a finite amount of work to do, and therefore that if you automate some of it there’s less for people to do, is just totally wrong,” he says. Those sounding warnings about technological unemployment “basically ignore the issue of the economic response to automation”, says Mr Bessen. www.economist.comThe economist article is behind a pay wall but you can read it if you create an account. But yeah man. Fairy tales...
The first part to me is the classic fairytale. It worked out in the past, so let's not worry about the future.
The second part is more interesting, but doesn't address (my) main concern. There are a number of ways in which future automatization will be different than past:
- The main driver will be software, not hardware. This has several effects:
- Pace of technological progress (in software) is about an order of magnitudes faster than past progress on machines. The Otto engine was invented in 1878. Full motorization in industrialized countries took until the 1960s. That's a 80 year transitionary period. The first successful DARPA grand challenge was in 2005. It took less than 10 years for completely automous vehicles driving daily. The automation of much of today's car fleet - and with it millions of jobs - is likely years, not decades away.
- Software can be copied and doesn't have to be rebuilt from scratch in every country. A few hundred engineers in Silicon Vallye have to potential to displace millions of jobs worldwide. I have no idea how significant this effect will play out to be since people like to reinvent the self-driving wheel, but it's a fundamental difference to the past.
- Countries "catching up" will likely in large parts skip the transitionary phase of moving work from manual labor into service sector jobs, and automate both at the same time.
But really, I am not even arguing that we will have unemployment necessarily as a result. My main concern is that human labor in general is required in two areas: Jobs that machines can't do, and jobs that machines are too expensive for (or/and can't do).
The first area was great for us humans in the past, because there was simply way more that machines couldn't do than that they could do. But this is the window I see closing at an accelerated pace. The jobs left will be either very well paying jobs that require a higher and higher skill set (think computer linguist), or jobs that require unique human elements (think nurse). The problem with the second category - as well as with jobs that machines are too expensive for - is that they generally pay shitty.
So yes, maybe we still will have jobs in the future. But the majority of those will pay shitty. What I am missing is where the millions of reasonably well paying jobs should come from that will likely be replaced. Thinking that they will just magically appear - within a few years no less - is to me believing in fairytales.
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On October 04 2016 04:13 LegalLord wrote:
Was, for example, the Dutch referendum likely to have the anti-Ukraine Association side win with high turnout? If not, then it clearly represents a risky gambit where your opinion loses because you didn't vote for it. If it was likely to go as it did with high turnout, it looks suspiciously like an attempted subversion of majority opinion by technicality. It only seems to make sense if the government wants not to call the referendum in the first place (otherwise they will spin "overwhelming support of voters" into a victory) and to act against a majority opinion which the non voters do not support, which is clearly not the case in Hungary.
I don't remember who was likely to win with a higher turnout but in the case of our referendum it wasn't binding and not a lot of people cared about the subject so turnout was gonna be low.
@godwrath: There's no wishful thinking. The no vote would've won regardless. All I'm saying is that the results are biased in their favour due to it being more attractive not to vote to invalidate the results for yes voters.
@pmh: Voter thesholds are there for a reason. The problem with low turnouts is that the most motivated voters have a disproportionate influence and that the vote isn't a reflection of the will of the people as Acrofales put it on the last page. A good example of how that works is the US where the Republicans win congress due to the low turnout while losing the presidential race where turnout is higher. This problem exists even with a high turnout but less so.
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Hundreds of refugees stranded in Serbia have begun walking from Belgrade towards the border with Hungary to protest against its closure for most people trying to reach the European Union.
More than 6,000 people remain stuck in Serbia following Hungary’s introduction this summer of strict limits on the number of refugees allowed to cross into the EU-member country and reinforced a razorwire border fence with heavy patrols.
The Balkan migration trail, used by nearly one million people fleeing wars and poverty last year, formally closed in March, forcing people to use alternative routes and pay smugglers to get them across.
On Tuesday, about 400 refugees chanted “open Hungary’s borders” and held banners saying “we don’t need food, water or anything, we want you to open the borders” as they marched north in a long column from Belgrade along a road leading toward the Hungarian border about 120 miles away.
Most of the refugees appeared to be young men and boys who stood little chance of getting into Hungary or other EU nations. Hankrim from Afghanistan, who gave only his first name, said he had been on the road for six months, sleeping on roads and parks. “Excuse me please, Hungarian government, please Hungary, open the border,” he said.
Serbia said on Tuesday it would not erect a wire border fence, but would deploy its army to seal off the borders with Macedonia and Bulgaria to stop refugees from coming in from those countries. “We will block the migrants the same way as the countries which did not erect the border fence,” said the Serbian president, Tomislav Nikolić.
Hungary has refused to accept any of the people the EU is trying to relocate from Italy and Greece. On Sunday voters there overwhelmingly rejected any future mandatory quotas for accepting refugees. The referendum was rendered invalid, however, because of low turnout.
Meanwhile, Romanian border police said they were investigating 16 Iraqi citizens, including six children, they found in two boats on the Danube river early on Tuesday. The Danube forms the border between southern Romania and Bulgaria. The people told police they had travelled through Turkey and then into Bulgaria and wanted to reach Germany. They said each family had paid €35,000 (£31,000).
Source
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On October 04 2016 20:35 RvB wrote:Show nested quote +On October 04 2016 04:13 LegalLord wrote:
Was, for example, the Dutch referendum likely to have the anti-Ukraine Association side win with high turnout? If not, then it clearly represents a risky gambit where your opinion loses because you didn't vote for it. If it was likely to go as it did with high turnout, it looks suspiciously like an attempted subversion of majority opinion by technicality. It only seems to make sense if the government wants not to call the referendum in the first place (otherwise they will spin "overwhelming support of voters" into a victory) and to act against a majority opinion which the non voters do not support, which is clearly not the case in Hungary. I don't remember who was likely to win with a higher turnout but in the case of our referendum it wasn't binding and not a lot of people cared about the subject so turnout was gonna be low. @godwrath: There's no wishful thinking. The no vote would've won regardless. All I'm saying is that the results are biased in their favour due to it being more attractive not to vote to invalidate the results for yes voters. @pmh: Voter thesholds are there for a reason. The problem with low turnouts is that the most motivated voters have a disproportionate influence and that the vote isn't a reflection of the will of the people as Acrofales put it on the last page. A good example of how that works is the US where the Republicans win congress due to the low turnout while losing the presidential race where turnout is higher. This problem exists even with a high turnout but less so.
In truth I think people underestimate non-binding referenda. Binding or not, it's hard to act against the results of the vote of the people, and the non-binding aspect serves mostly as an escape clause in case it truly proves to be unviable. Non-binding results seem to have a tendency to stick anyways.
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On October 05 2016 00:19 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On October 04 2016 20:35 RvB wrote:On October 04 2016 04:13 LegalLord wrote:
Was, for example, the Dutch referendum likely to have the anti-Ukraine Association side win with high turnout? If not, then it clearly represents a risky gambit where your opinion loses because you didn't vote for it. If it was likely to go as it did with high turnout, it looks suspiciously like an attempted subversion of majority opinion by technicality. It only seems to make sense if the government wants not to call the referendum in the first place (otherwise they will spin "overwhelming support of voters" into a victory) and to act against a majority opinion which the non voters do not support, which is clearly not the case in Hungary. I don't remember who was likely to win with a higher turnout but in the case of our referendum it wasn't binding and not a lot of people cared about the subject so turnout was gonna be low. @godwrath: There's no wishful thinking. The no vote would've won regardless. All I'm saying is that the results are biased in their favour due to it being more attractive not to vote to invalidate the results for yes voters. @pmh: Voter thesholds are there for a reason. The problem with low turnouts is that the most motivated voters have a disproportionate influence and that the vote isn't a reflection of the will of the people as Acrofales put it on the last page. A good example of how that works is the US where the Republicans win congress due to the low turnout while losing the presidential race where turnout is higher. This problem exists even with a high turnout but less so. In truth I think people underestimate non-binding referenda. Binding or not, it's hard to act against the results of the vote of the people, and the non-binding aspect serves mostly as an escape clause in case it truly proves to be unviable. Non-binding results seem to have a tendency to stick anyways.
No problem in France, the 2005 vote was ignored by most of the parliamentarians of the two government parties.
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On October 05 2016 00:25 TheDwf wrote:Show nested quote +On October 05 2016 00:19 LegalLord wrote:On October 04 2016 20:35 RvB wrote:On October 04 2016 04:13 LegalLord wrote:
Was, for example, the Dutch referendum likely to have the anti-Ukraine Association side win with high turnout? If not, then it clearly represents a risky gambit where your opinion loses because you didn't vote for it. If it was likely to go as it did with high turnout, it looks suspiciously like an attempted subversion of majority opinion by technicality. It only seems to make sense if the government wants not to call the referendum in the first place (otherwise they will spin "overwhelming support of voters" into a victory) and to act against a majority opinion which the non voters do not support, which is clearly not the case in Hungary. I don't remember who was likely to win with a higher turnout but in the case of our referendum it wasn't binding and not a lot of people cared about the subject so turnout was gonna be low. @godwrath: There's no wishful thinking. The no vote would've won regardless. All I'm saying is that the results are biased in their favour due to it being more attractive not to vote to invalidate the results for yes voters. @pmh: Voter thesholds are there for a reason. The problem with low turnouts is that the most motivated voters have a disproportionate influence and that the vote isn't a reflection of the will of the people as Acrofales put it on the last page. A good example of how that works is the US where the Republicans win congress due to the low turnout while losing the presidential race where turnout is higher. This problem exists even with a high turnout but less so. In truth I think people underestimate non-binding referenda. Binding or not, it's hard to act against the results of the vote of the people, and the non-binding aspect serves mostly as an escape clause in case it truly proves to be unviable. Non-binding results seem to have a tendency to stick anyways. No problem in France, the 2005 vote was ignored by most of the parliamentarians of the two government parties.
Same here in 2009, valid but never applied
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_parliamentary_reform_referendum,_2009
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
Fair enough, though that may go some ways in explaining why people are voting for the populists right now.
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On October 05 2016 00:41 LegalLord wrote:
Fair enough, though that may go some ways in explaining why people are voting for the populists right now.
It's the complete opposite. that was the work of populists and part of why they fell out of favor here. It was an incredibly sleazy move that went like this
- populist incumbent with low approval rating is up for reelection
- his office has the power to call a referendum
- he cynically calls a referendum to be held at the same time as the presidential election on the easiest possible topic to get support for, reducing the number of parliament members
- transparency/democracy NGOs are outraged that by doing this he's basically adding himself on the ballots a 2nd time with this 'hey guys I dislike politicians just like you' gimmick in addition to being a candidate
- wins the election by 0.6%
- his party (which he had strong control of) ran the government for the next 3 years but never applied the referendum.
Sketchy referendums are the weapons of choice of populists
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EPT
