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[wierd]

No.

Refuse to build infrastructure or maintain infrastucture THAT THEY DO IN FACT USE, EVEN IF THEY DONT REALIZE IT, because "That's out in buttfuckistan. If they need roads and bridges, they can raise the money to build them themselves."

Nevermind that those roads and bridges are what convey the raw grain and produce to the processing centers, where they then get inspected, processed, and shipped to the cities for consumption, and without those roads and bridges, the city people dont eat.

No, the thinking never gets that far. It is always "That's where THEY live, THEY can pay for it-- My needs for more parking are vastly more important to ME, and THAT is how I want the money spent!"


Basically, the imbalance of blind men clustered around the elephant's trunk should not give those people more say about the nature of the elephant.  What the fewer blind people under its feet say is equally valid. The number of voices is the non-sequitur, not the messages.

[Rolan7]

Weight of guns and armor is a very suitable basis for weighting votes. It'd effectively give rural votes the power they need to compete with the urbanites while eliminating the goofiness of swing states.

Why do rural states need a handicap? If they want to have more votes, maybe they need to elect competent leaders to make their own homes livable. There's no innate reason that states should be equal. PEOPLE should be equal.

There's many reasons why people should not be equal, chiefly because farm states would have very little input into the political process otherwise (even worse than under the electoral college). The concerns of smaller regional areas are important, even if they are outnumbered population-wise. There are very good reasons why the Connecticut Compromise is one of the most important events in the construction of the American political system.

That's why all states have 2 senators, and amendments require 3/4 of the states (regardless of size/power) to ratify.
It doesn't explain why I have to share my house representative with 9 other people, compared to a citizen of South Dakota.  Or why their vote for president is worth several times more than mine either.

NC is a farming state too, it's just not mostly empty...  Why should I be so disenfranchised?

Of course there's the separate issue where my vote matters because NC is a swing state, whereas the vote in California is almost pointlessly predictable.  So NC gets more attention and money.  That's screwy.  But if South Dakota deserves to get in on that, shouldn't Charlotte NC?  They both have ~800,000 people!  Where are Charlotte's 2 senators?

Sorry, hyperbole...  In summary, the empty states are already way overenfranchised.  Farming states like NC are NOT.

[wierd]

"Empty" is incorrect.

They are populated-- farming is just land intensive.  They are less densely populated, and so have a lower total population because of limited real-estate.  That does not make the state "empty."

If the argument is that people are going unrepresented, casting loaded and offensive verbiage like "empty" around is not helpful. It innately implies that those people dont matter. When you double down and say "they are over enfranchised already" on top of it, you project the message of "You dont matter, and we resent that you even have as much voice as you do."

Not conducive to civil discourse kids.

[Rolan7]

Well yeah, you're right.  Seriously.  Just because I'm right about being underrepresented by a factor of 10, doesn't mean it helps to be upset and exaggerate about it.  I didn't realize "empty" was a loaded term for the Midwest, but sure, I'm apologizing.

I know farming is land intensive, though, my father's side has a long history of it here in NC.  The midwest doesn't have a monopoly on farming, but it does have dramatically unfair representation.  Which makes me a little upset when people call it underrepresented.
Edit:  And classify the issue as people ignoring farmers, when it's not farmers, it's big low-pop states.

This whole situation wasn't around when the constitution was drawn up...  These big less-dense states were a later occurrence.

[McTraveller]

This whole situation wasn't around when the constitution was drawn up...  These big less-dense states were a later occurrence.

Isn't that backwards? The entire population of the country in the 1770s was only about 2.5 million!  That is to say, comparatively, the entire country was "big, less dense states".

[Dorsidwarf]

This whole situation wasn't around when the constitution was drawn up...  These big less-dense states were a later occurrence.

Isn't that backwards? The entire population of the country in the 1770s was only about 2.5 million!

True but in the 1770s "America" was about a third of the size, with all the real population concentrated on the east coast. the gigantic empty plains of the midwest were all spanish mexico

[Egan_BW]

German federal election weight its votes too, and the number of sieges won decide the weight that you will have in the government, so it's pretty much the same concept.

German elections sound pretty metal.

[McTraveller]

True but in the 1770s "America" was about a third of the size, with all the real population concentrated on the east coast.

Right - but even though it was concentrated, the highest population density was way lower than we have now. What would be really interesting is to have a time machine to see how different the interests of the 'urban' vs 'rural' folks were back then - after all, even urban areas were much more agricultural than they are now; it's fun looking at maps of big cities even from just 100 years ago and seeing how close to the city centers farmland was located.

But that aside, one interesting question that just popped into mind is if there should actually be some kind of (more robustly defined perhaps than electoral college) diminishing returns for votes for a certain ideology? That is, what if "effective vote" was something like the square root of the raw vote?

That would do some interesting things... for instance, it would lessen the bandwagon effect, where people just vote for things because their neighbors vote that way (one of the big vocal things you here now about "blue cities" vs "red farmland"; where the cities would have "too much power" simply because they have more people that basically all vote the same way).  It would help the minorities get their viewpoints across, instead of just being washed away by the huge majorities - it would definitely help third parties gain traction.

It's kind of like the opposite of exponential growth - it means it takes a lot more effort to gain power than you would with a linear (or, god help us like with financial markets, exponential) vote value.

[Shadowlord]

There's many reasons why people should not be equal

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

[smjjames]

True but in the 1770s "America" was about a third of the size, with all the real population concentrated on the east coast.

Right - but even though it was concentrated, the highest population density was way lower than we have now. What would be really interesting is to have a time machine to see how different the interests of the 'urban' vs 'rural' folks were back then - after all, even urban areas were much more agricultural than they are now; it's fun looking at maps of big cities even from just 100 years ago and seeing how close to the city centers farmland was located.

But that aside, one interesting question that just popped into mind is if there should actually be some kind of (more robustly defined perhaps than electoral college) diminishing returns for votes for a certain ideology? That is, what if "effective vote" was something like the square root of the raw vote?

That would do some interesting things... for instance, it would lessen the bandwagon effect, where people just vote for things because their neighbors vote that way (one of the big vocal things you here now about "blue cities" vs "red farmland"; where the cities would have "too much power" simply because they have more people that basically all vote the same way).  It would help the minorities get their viewpoints across, instead of just being washed away by the huge majorities - it would definitely help third parties gain traction.

It's kind of like the opposite of exponential growth - it means it takes a lot more effort to gain power than you would with a linear (or, god help us like with financial markets, exponential) vote value.

How do you define 'ideology'? Who gets to pick the ideologies? Who gets to determine which ones have diminishing returns? How do you determine that someone fits ideology x? Too many ethical issues with that idea.

[Rockphed]

True but in the 1770s "America" was about a third of the size, with all the real population concentrated on the east coast. the gigantic empty plains of the midwest were all spanish mexico

The gigantic plains states, between the Missisipi and the Rockies, were Louisiana, not Mexico.  They were Spanish at that point, but were later given to France who sold them to the US.

[Rolan7]

This whole situation wasn't around when the constitution was drawn up...  These big less-dense states were a later occurrence.

Isn't that backwards? The entire population of the country in the 1770s was only about 2.5 million!  That is to say, comparatively, the entire country was "big, less dense states".

Totally, but I think the 13 founding states were *roughly* equal in population density...  Well, maybe.  Actually the southern ones like NC were probably less dense even then, but I actually don't know.

Actually I'm just going to look it up...  Hm!  There *were* two states with only one House representative back then, Rhode Island and Delaware.  I'm starting to remember hearing about that.  The whole minimum-representation thing (2 senators, at least one representative) was enacted with those states in mind, because they were unique and, despite their low population, their membership was courted.  Hence the compromise.

Yet now the situation is large, open, less-dense states with populations comparable to cities who decide the fate of the Union...  disproportionately.  Senate representation is one thing, by design, but House and Electoral College representation is another.

The Midwest is VERY important, obviously, but I'm sorry - individual farmers living there should not be 10X more important than farmers here in NC.  Maybe I've failed to be diplomatic about that.  I'm not complaining about farmers, AKA my family, I'm complaining about Midwestern states being over-represented and claiming to be under-represented.

[Reelya]

Isn't that backwards? The entire population of the country in the 1770s was only about 2.5 million!  That is to say, comparatively, the entire country was "big, less dense states".

No, because those lands weren't part of the country. Look at the ridiculously small size of many eastern states and you can see the reality being talked about
This source explains a lot of stuff nicely:
http://www.edstephan.org/Book/chap1/1.html
Basically, if you assume that the goal of administration is to optimize the effort needed to service any particular member of the population, then you can derive mathematical predictions about the relationship between density and area size (county, state, even nations). It turns out that changes in transport tech explains some "weird" borders. e.g. before rail and cars, subdivision proceeded in a certain fashion: land splitting into more efficient smaller lands until the optimize pop density vs region size was met. But when cars were introduced, that changed the equation and suddenly much larger administrative regions were more efficient in terms of manpower. But political inertia prevents the area being reformed, so you get borders "frozen" at the point they were, in the old subdivision process, even if reforming larger zones would be more efficient.

[smjjames]

True but in the 1770s "America" was about a third of the size, with all the real population concentrated on the east coast. the gigantic empty plains of the midwest were all spanish mexico

The gigantic plains states, between the Missisipi and the Rockies, were Louisiana, not Mexico.  They were Spanish at that point, but were later given to France who sold them to the US.

France didn't own them for very long though, only 30 or so years between the start of the Revolutionary War and the Louisiana Purchase.

[Reelya]

And to be honest they were about as practical as buying and selling real-estate on the moon. The preponderance of really straight borders which mark lattitude/longitude are a hallmark of areas that are basically empty (at least of Europeans). Straight borders are not normal.