You’re not wrong, not in the slightest. The benefit is the system allows concerned citizens to step in to make improvements at very little cost.
Democracy requires constant vigilance in many forms. This is one such form.
Matt, we salute you and your efforts! I hope this encourages others to get involved in improving their local government (and perhaps even creates reusable tooling for use at scale [“citizen oversight as code”]).
its not reliable? It can easily be forged/hidden/framed?
Again it confers power to those that understand how systems work. I'm not complaining, it benefits me but we continue to drift toward a class-based system where the technical class gains ever increasing benefits over the rest of the plebs.
We're sleepwalking into an increasingly stratified society.
I'm not denying that certain public systems work good or even great - there is Germany just next to my country with their excellent system (it's getting worse according to my German friends though, but I'm not sure about that, I don't have enough first-hand experience). I'm arguing that there is less motivation in a public system so it could easily lead to bad situations, but of course sometimes it doesn't.
Thank you, that's exactly my point: since the government isn't doing much anyhow, going over to a different system is almost definitely going to be an improvement.
Why are people downvoting this comment? Even if you think the current system is wrong, you should be thinking of how to fix it without losing the benefit outlined by this commenter.
If you don't think the system works, fix it. It is actually possible in a democracy, thankfully. Techno solutions do not solve the underlying human factor problems.
Again, I made no qualitative statement about whether the system is good or bad. I merely pointed out that there are costs.
You are arguing that the costs are worth it. Great. I don't want to have that conversation online again. You have acknowledged that there are costs. We are in agreement.
I’m just arguing that the concept is fine, and the implementation is corrupted. Removing the corruption would be great but the issue is not the concept itself.
When you understand that it’s based on checks, it makes perfect sense. Not that checks are a good system, but if the alternative is a check then it’s the same downside.
I think you are misunderstanding how our system works, perhaps if you read about how our system works you'd realise why this is not really a bad thing. However, our system is FAR from perfect (and I'm not claiming it to be).
I actually agree with you, completely. Many times I've wondered why we need this complex, inefficient mess of individual programs doing what a central system could do better.
But nonetheless, for now that's the way things are. Might as well do a good job in the meantime.
It isn't a value judgement, but I would certainly prefer a system that is structured to reward rational actors and execute the stated mission. The current design seems pretty ironic to me.
Democracy requires constant vigilance in many forms. This is one such form.
Matt, we salute you and your efforts! I hope this encourages others to get involved in improving their local government (and perhaps even creates reusable tooling for use at scale [“citizen oversight as code”]).
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