themadryaner

I wanted more details on how this works. For those interested, I found an English pdf describing the full system [1]. The interesting part is Article 110, which discusses how the adjustment seats are allocated. Here is my best summary:

1. Using D'Hondt [2] on every party's national vote share, determine which party should be given the next seat. 2. For every constituency which has adjustment seats available, calculate the D'Hondt quotient of the first candidate in that party who has not already been elected using the constituency vote share. So if a party received V votes in a constituency and two party members were already elected from this constituency, their quotient would be V/3. 3. Elect the candidate with the highest quotient to fill an adjustment seat for their constituency. 4. Repeat until all adjustment seats have been given away.

There's arguably a step 0 here, which is determining how many constituency and adjustment seats every constituency gets, and this is done before the election is held. This is described in Article 10. It's pretty bad. First, the adjustment seats are hard-coded. Second, unlike the US where we reapportion after every census, Iceland appears to only reapportion the constituency seats when the constitution demands they do it. This happens when there are twice as many voters per seat in one constituency compared to another. Furthermore, they only adjust as few seats as possible to get back under this limit rather than actually recalculate a fair apportionment. I'm not sure what the logic of this was, maybe to minimize how often the number of seats in each place is changing? Either way, in the 2021 election this resulted in one constituency with 199% as many voters per seat as another and no changes were made [3].

[1]: https://www.stjornarradid.is/library/03-Verkefni/Kosningar/K...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Hondt_method

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Icelandic_parliamentary_e...

> So the entire system is biased away from local representation and towards party policy decided on a national basis.

> That policy is in turn heavily weighed towards the interests of geographic areas

Forgive me if I'm missing something, but these sound like contradictory claims to me?

As an American, I feel I'd prefer this system. The number of members of each party that make it to Congress is the main determinant of what policy gets passed. But I can only influence that indirectly, by choosing which party represents my local district. If I'm in a solid minority in the district I live in, I basically have 0 influence on the result of the election. Overall, those invisible lines let politicians crack and pack constituencies so a party with a minority of the votes still gets a majority of the seats.

In this system, the number of representatives of each party would be determined by the national popular vote, meaning I can more directly vote for which party gets the majority. Your vote does two things: it casts a vote for your party against the other parties in gaining them seats, and it casts a vote for your favorite party candidate over other candidates in the party (including those in other districts) to determine which candidates of the party earn the seats the party is given. It reduces the effect of the invisible line in weakening my vote. I'm okay with this meaning that sometimes my vote helps elect someone in a different district, since this would mean my district doesn't have enough members of my party to justify a representative of our own and because a lot of times the lines are arbitrary anyway. It would require bigger districts with multiple winners, and sometimes that the person with the 6th or 7th most votes in the district gets the 4th or 5th seat instead. This, in my mind, is the "gerrymandering correction:" it ensures those parties who were disadvantaged by the line drawing get their fair share of party members.

As for one vote counting twice as much as another, my understanding (and please correct me if I am wrong) is that the main cause of that is differences in turnout between the different districts and rounding representatives to the nearest whole number. Nothing can be done about the later (big problem in the US too -- people per district varies by hundreds of thousands of people, not to mention the disparity in the Senate). For the former, you could proportion representatives between districts based on turnout instead, but this is a bad idea since it makes it much harder to campaign in a district if you don't know how many seats are up for grabs.

It is possible! But with more than two dimensions, you have to allow deviations from perfect proportionality to guarantee a solution exists. The more dimensions, the worse it gets, until eventually proportionality breaks down entirely. [1] defines a method to do this and simulates the results on an election where district and party seats are distributed proportionally and divvied up by gender proportionally. The result is a better national proportionality at the expense of worse local proportionality.

[1]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2109305119

There's been a big push to develop modern standards in the IndieWeb community [0]. There are two important standards:

- WebMention, a W3C standard that is basically the equivalent of @ing someone on Twitter [1]. It is simply an http request to a discoverable endpoint with two pieces of data: the webpage being mentioned, and the webpage mentioning it. WordPress had a similar standard called Pingback and websites supporting WebMention often support both for backwards compatibility. - microformats2, an ad-hoc standard for adding metadata to webpages, meant especially for providing metadata for web mentions [2]. For instance, you can specify that the mention is a "like", "reply", or "reblog", and set the author name and avatar.

Independent websites that add support for this can then parse the WebMention to create a comment section and like counter and readers can follow the links to other blogs that talk about the blog post they just read. There are a decent number of personal sites that already support this, like those mentioned in [3]. With enough adapters, it might build the network effects necessary to become a viable social media alternative. Right now though, those in the network are predominantly tech oriented since there isn't a ton of third party support.

[0]: https://indieweb.org/ [1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/ [2]: http://microformats.org/ [3]: https://indieweb.org/Webmention#IndieWeb_Examples

You cannot prove the null hypothesis; you can only disprove it. The p-value is the probability that the null hypothesis is true. So if the null hypothesis is that there is no difference, and there is a low probability of that being true, then you have shown that there is a difference between the groups. If the p-value is high, you do not show that the null hypothesis is true. Instead, you show that you did not find a statistically significant difference. This can happen when the difference between the values is small or there is not enough data to make the difference clear, which is why a high p-value is not enough to reject the alternative hypothesis.

No. This is something entirely different entirely.

Mining a cryptocurrency goes something like this: spend a ton of money investing in a state of the art server farm, hook server farm up to mining pool to earn Bitcoin, withdraw Bitcoin for money, spend money to upgrade your now obsolete server farm.

In addition to being needlessly inefficient, server farms are causing significant harms to the environment in ways that traditional currency does not, and is causing increases in electronics and electricity prices due to their high demand.

Proof-of-Stake is a way to solve this. Instead of computing power determining who creates the blocks (and earns the transaction fees/block rewards), and instead of miners spending Bitcoin to make Bitcoin, miners put their cyrptocurrency in a form of a lottery, with the winner writing the block without using any computing power. The result is the same, but much more efficient and without the environmental cons. It also may make the network more secure, since an attacker would need 51% of the wealth in the network in order to compromise it. And even if someone gained 51%, they would not attack the network because they have the most value to lose.

This article is also about using a lottery, but for a very different purpose. Microtransactions are difficult with current solutions, because vendors like PayPal, Visa, and Cryptocurrencies usually institute minimum fees. This system get around this system through the use of a lottery. As an example, instead of paying $1 to 10 different sites (say in a pay-per-view of newspaper articles), you pay with a reverse lottery ticket. This lottery ticket has a one in ten chance of winning, and if it does you have to pay $10. The resulting payment is the same, but all your payments are in large sums so that transaction fees are taken care of. If the newspaper receives 10 reverse lottery tickets, they will receive equivalent profits to charging each customer $1. Therefore, the customers pay the same and the sellers receive the same, but without transaction fees eating up nearly as large a percentage of the transaction that a micro transaction would.

Both systems use a lottery powered by blockchain randomness, but the similarities end there. The purposes and the meaning of the lotteries are completely different. In the case of the latter, it is actually a lottery you don't want to win.

In theory, a miner could try to manipulate the hash of the future block to change the outcome. It is much more difficult with Bitcoin, where valid blocks are more rare and produce a high income, but with Ethereum blocks are so frequent that it might be possible to collude with the mining pools is done on a large scale.

Additionally, how does this deal with Proof-of-Stake algorithms? Ethereum is heading there, and as far as I am aware the blocks would no longer publish hashes.