@Scrooge McDuck : Unless the voters come from a really deep pit I think abysmal voter turnout is what was meant ? ;-)
@Mikey : In Queensland in the 1970's and 80's there was a gerrymander ie. political manipulation of electoral boundaries in their unicameral system, perpetuated by the state's then premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen. He had flipped over a gerrymander that had previously favored his opponents. He became so good at it that it got it's own name : Bjelkemander. At it's peak it got to the stage where some electorates had twice the voting power per capita than others. Eventually even this did not deliver him to power and thus the incoming opposing party had the opportunity to correct the maldistribution and pass law to prevent it happening again. Anyway this perversion of democracy is rightly in the dustbin of history. I mention it as the trend of population increases is from the country to the cities in recent decades and thus with even proper redistributions the city-centric parties do very well ( which is OK on a one-person-one-vote basis ).
Another anomaly is the upper house in federal parliament : the Senate. The representation is equal per state ( a residue of the Federation formed in 1901 ) but as states differ widely in population, and have no redrawing of boundaries, it isn't one-person-one-vote for that upper chamber. Prime Minister Paul Keating once labelled it an 'unrepresentative swill'. Relatively few people live in Tasmania and it has a low tax base, so it is the most subsided state in Australia for receiving Federal monies. Most Australians don't care however because we like them and it's a great place for a peaceful holiday.
A major sadness is that we don't really teach 'civics' much in our schools, and the kids learn the biases of their particular teachers ( in addition to that of their parents ! ), almost certainly without any historical or contemporaneous contexts. This typically kicks off their voting career in one direction and sets them up to become no-information voters for life. Beware the party that wants to get at your children ! I consider myself lucky as neither of my parents cared much for politics and when they did they almost always disagreed. My teachers were unusually neutral in their expressions of politics in the presence of children. I don't entirely know why, but it just turned out that way. I look at my contemporaries from especially high school days and I see their arcs in life sometimes poorly aimed due to early bias learnt from adults. I think it is safe to say that the no-information voter doesn't recognise themselves as such, and thus also has no conscious information on why they became like that*.
Cheers, Mike.
* Also see the Dunning-Kruger effect.
( edit ) Anyhows, wish me luck ! I am in a lottery to win a rare 1965 Ford Mustang Fastback, worth ~ $150K AUD, to be drawn at midday.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
@Mikey : In Queensland in the 1970's and 80's there was a gerrymander ie. political manipulation of electoral boundaries in their unicameral system, perpetuated by the state's then premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen. He had flipped over a gerrymander that had previously favored his opponents. He became so good at it that it got it's own name : Bjelkemander. At it's peak it got to the stage where some electorates had twice the voting power per capita than others. Eventually even this did not deliver him to power and thus the incoming opposing party had the opportunity to correct the maldistribution and pass law to prevent it happening again. Anyway this perversion of democracy is rightly in the dustbin of history. I mention it as the trend of population increases is from the country to the cities in recent decades and thus with even proper redistributions the city-centric parties do very well ( which is OK on a one-person-one-vote basis ).
Gerrymandering is alive and well in the US and used every election to move voters from this district to that based on who's in power at the time. The US Supreme Court is the ultimate arbitrator of such lines and recently rules that one whole States lines must be redrawn as the State is over 60% Black yet they had less than 7% of the voting power!!
Quote:
A major sadness is that we don't really teach 'civics' much in our schools, and the kids learn the biases of their particular teachers ( in addition to that of their parents ! ), almost certainly without any historical or contemporaneous contexts. This typically kicks off their voting career in one direction and sets them up to become no-information voters for life. Beware the party that wants to get at your children ! I consider myself lucky as neither of my parents cared much for politics and when they did they almost always disagreed. My teachers were unusually neutral in their expressions of politics in the presence of children. I don't entirely know why, but it just turned out that way. I look at my contemporaries from especially high school days and I see their arcs in life sometimes poorly aimed due to early bias learnt from adults. I think it is safe to say that the no-information voter doesn't recognise themselves as such, and thus also has no conscious information on why they became like that*.
Cheers, Mike.
* Also see the Dunning-Kruger effect.
( edit ) Anyhows, wish me luck ! I am in a lottery to win a rare 1965 Ford Mustang Fastback, worth ~ $150K AUD, to be drawn at midday.
We teach civics in the US but not nearly to the extent it should be and in alot of cases it's an 'elective' meaning most kids choose recess or study hall instead, study hall is sitting quietly for the entire class and most kids do their homework during that time or just sleep.
There's no gerrymandering in Germany due to proportitional voting. The balance between MP seats of different parties is determined by the relative voting share of these parties. Half of the MPs are elected directly in their election districts. The other half is taken ("elected") from candidate lists set up by each party. If the first half of directly elected MPs change the proportional share of parties votes, then compensating seats are added, "electing" further candidates from same lists. Any attempts for gerrymandering will be compensated immediately. So, our system is better? No!
We don't have noticeably criminal, greedy or corrupt MPs. They get payments which most aren't capable to earn elsewhere. But today there are too many inexperienced candidates (many in their twenties... thirties) on parties' candidate lists, who so far had a career: school bench, lecture hall (MP's assistant at the same time), representatives bench, We vote for a directly elected MP which doesn't change balance of power between parties. Loosers are out at least? No, influential candidates are backed up on their parties' list too (from "safe seats" ... downto "unsafe seats"). So we vote for a parties' candidate list too. Even the ballot only names the first five of maybe 20..30 candidates. You chose the pig in the poke. The voter would have to inform himself days before about the list candidates of the party he intends to vote for. Few voters do this. Why should they? They can't change order anyway. Well informed voters read parties' election programm, not candidate lists. The program is forgotten as soon as a ruling coalition was formed. So, we vote for colourful clouds. We know the publicly advertised leading candidates of the 5...6 biggest parties who spend much money for election campaigns: posters on each street corner. But they run for a seat in their home state (of 16 federal states). With a probability of 15 out of 16 the publicly known leading candidate is not on your ballot's list. Still chosing the pig in the poke.
More and more of these list candidates never had a job outside political circles. Conversely, it became increasingly difficult for outsiders, mature people (>40), with life experience, self-employed, company owners, farmers, craftsmen and engineers to compete in such party hierarchies for nomination. Years of slavish work for the party counts, competence less. The political reality puts off outsiders. Party leaders greatly influence order on candidate lists. Many MPs today only utter hard-learned phrases of "party language", like a playback tape. A parliamentary session consist of boring speeches read from prepared sheets, few interventions, which can be denied (compared to true discourse in UK's House of Commons). Only a few MPs still master the art of political discourse instead of brushing off or ignoring dissenting questions.
Maybe I see it too negative. But that's the impression our political system presents to the well-informed voter.
There's no gerrymandering in Germany due to proportitional voting. The balance between MP seats of different parties is determined by the relative voting share of these parties. Half of the MPs are elected directly in their election districts. The other half is taken ("elected") from candidate lists set up by each party. If the first half of directly elected MPs change the proportional share of parties votes, then compensating seats are added, "electing" further candidates from same lists. Any attempts for gerrymandering will be compensated immediately. So, our system is better? No!
.....snip.....
I'm following along and sorta get what you, Scrooge, are saying. Then you through in a curve ball and I'm lost.
What is " proportitional voting "? And what are " MP " seats of different parties ?
When you say: " So, our system is better? No! " - I can't answer that until I have a better clarification of the above.
Yikes politics. There is only one simple answer, all governments are wrong. What makes you think we need to be governed at all? We just end up with thieves doing things for their own benefit.
So back to the original point, electricity costs too much. Nonsense. Many things cost more now, it's called inflation. But our wages are higher too. Everyone says food costs more, but I just worked out my food bill and it's only 50% more than it was 25 years ago. Seems about level with inflation to me. Electricity (ignoring the pandemic/Ukraine increases) is 60% more than my parents paid 35 years ago.
I'm following along and sorta get what you, Scrooge, are saying. Then you through in a curve ball and I'm lost.
What is " proportitional voting "? And what are " MP " seats of different parties ?
When you say: " So, our system is better? No! " - I can't answer that until I have a better clarification of the above.
Huuh, If you ask any Germans on the street, I bet they'll struggle to explain...
Our system is called "personalized proportional representation"
A ballot always provides two votes: "First vote" (a person) and "Second vote" (a party). The unspecific names conceal: only the second vote changes balance of power.
There are (in theory) 598 seats, half (299) of which are assigned through majority voting in the 299 constituencies in Germany ("First vote"). The "Second vote" assigns the remaining 299 to parties (their candidate lists). All "second votes" from a federal state are added up across all of its constituencies, then sorted by party. The proportional share of each party (#votes_party1 / all_valid_votes), (votes_party2 / all_valid_votes), ... determines which share of the 299 remaining seats is assigned* to each party. Seats are assigned in the order of the candidate lists. The first candidates most likely (so called "safe seats", lower ranked less likely: "unsafe seats", depending on the voting share of each party. It's done separately for each of the 16 states. Overall a complex mathematical algorithm is applied, different ones have been used over the decades. That's it? Not quite.
Majority voting in the 299 constituencies favors candidates of two largest parties, others win extremely rarely. BUT the composition of the parliament must represent the proportional voting share of all valid "Second votes" (which, thus, only change balance of power). Small parties which candidates won no or few constituencies therefore get compensatory seats which are assigned to further candidates from their lists according to their proportional voting share. Since last federal elections in 2021, we have 736 MPs of which 299 won their constituency, 299 get "elected" from candidate lists, and a further 138 get compensation seats for smaller parties. Crazy, isn't it? So Germans elected 299 MPs out of 736: 40.6% by name which won their constituency, the other 437 MPs (59.4%) were "elected" from parties' candidate lists (I called them: colourful Party clouds: the Purples, Reds, Greens, Yellows, Blacks, Blue ones). Our parliament is currently ~50% larger than U.S. Congress. 2nd largest on earth, only inferior to Chinese People's Congress. State parliaments are elected in a similar way.
*Parties with shares below a 5% treshold are discarded (wasted vote) to avoid fragmentation into too small factions (since 1949: 2nd republic: "Bonn republic").
Proportional representation was introduced after WW1 (1st republic: "Weimar republic"). Previously only majority voting in constituencies was used in the German Empire until 1918. However, citizens had different voting power, depending on their tax contribution (nobility, bourgeoisie, peasants), nobility and bourgeoisie being decisive.
So back to the original point, electricity costs too much. Nonsense. Many things cost more now, it's called inflation. But our wages are higher too. [...]. Seems about level with inflation to me. Electricity (ignoring the pandemic/Ukraine increases) is 60% more than my parents paid 35 years ago.
I can tell you: electricity in Germany costs too much... way too much. It will kill our industries. And I'm convinced prices will rise further... extensively. Our government issues gigantic "plans" for grid expansion, for hundreds of hydrogen ready gas turbine plants (lacking economic incentive: subsidized), offshore grids, hydrogen generators, thousands of high-amp car chargers, millions of heat pumps; a zoo of "plans" to be implemented ASAP for which there is no alternative, they say ... TINA. They teach us each day: We must... we have to... until... TINA. Nobody of them calculates economic costs, checks electrical feasibility, thinks about physical laws, or simply: alternatives; or let market principles work. Instead rainbows and unicorns... Pure propaganda.
The procurement price on European electricity exchanges won't rise further (perfectly working British-style liberal market economy). But grid usage fees, fees for offshore expansion, renewables subsidy fees, electricity taxes, switchable loads fee, further fees, ... and VAT, all government-regulated, will continue to rise (Soviet*-style planned economy) to multiples of the procurement price. I could write about German energy policy and its marvelous protagonists. But I'd be banned immediately violating half of the forum rules.
* What happens when introducing socialism in the Sahara? Nothing within the first ten years—after that sand becomes scarce.
I can tell you: electricity in Germany costs too much... way too much.
There is a limit to what they can charge. The point where you can make it yourself cheaper. Solar panels are cheaper than they used to be for example, and there are many other ways.
@Scrooge McDuck : Unless the
)
@Scrooge McDuck : Unless the voters come from a really deep pit I think abysmal voter turnout is what was meant ? ;-)
@Mikey : In Queensland in the 1970's and 80's there was a gerrymander ie. political manipulation of electoral boundaries in their unicameral system, perpetuated by the state's then premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen. He had flipped over a gerrymander that had previously favored his opponents. He became so good at it that it got it's own name : Bjelkemander. At it's peak it got to the stage where some electorates had twice the voting power per capita than others. Eventually even this did not deliver him to power and thus the incoming opposing party had the opportunity to correct the maldistribution and pass law to prevent it happening again. Anyway this perversion of democracy is rightly in the dustbin of history. I mention it as the trend of population increases is from the country to the cities in recent decades and thus with even proper redistributions the city-centric parties do very well ( which is OK on a one-person-one-vote basis ).
Another anomaly is the upper house in federal parliament : the Senate. The representation is equal per state ( a residue of the Federation formed in 1901 ) but as states differ widely in population, and have no redrawing of boundaries, it isn't one-person-one-vote for that upper chamber. Prime Minister Paul Keating once labelled it an 'unrepresentative swill'. Relatively few people live in Tasmania and it has a low tax base, so it is the most subsided state in Australia for receiving Federal monies. Most Australians don't care however because we like them and it's a great place for a peaceful holiday.
A major sadness is that we don't really teach 'civics' much in our schools, and the kids learn the biases of their particular teachers ( in addition to that of their parents ! ), almost certainly without any historical or contemporaneous contexts. This typically kicks off their voting career in one direction and sets them up to become no-information voters for life. Beware the party that wants to get at your children ! I consider myself lucky as neither of my parents cared much for politics and when they did they almost always disagreed. My teachers were unusually neutral in their expressions of politics in the presence of children. I don't entirely know why, but it just turned out that way. I look at my contemporaries from especially high school days and I see their arcs in life sometimes poorly aimed due to early bias learnt from adults. I think it is safe to say that the no-information voter doesn't recognise themselves as such, and thus also has no conscious information on why they became like that*.
Cheers, Mike.
* Also see the Dunning-Kruger effect.
( edit ) Anyhows, wish me luck ! I am in a lottery to win a rare 1965 Ford Mustang Fastback, worth ~ $150K AUD, to be drawn at midday.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
Mike Hewson wrote: @Mikey :
)
Gerrymandering is alive and well in the US and used every election to move voters from this district to that based on who's in power at the time. The US Supreme Court is the ultimate arbitrator of such lines and recently rules that one whole States lines must be redrawn as the State is over 60% Black yet they had less than 7% of the voting power!!
We teach civics in the US but not nearly to the extent it should be and in alot of cases it's an 'elective' meaning most kids choose recess or study hall instead, study hall is sitting quietly for the entire class and most kids do their homework during that time or just sleep.
GOOD LUCK ON THE DRAWING!!!
Zitat:Mike Hewson
)
Quote:Scrooge McDuck
)
Now that I think about it, some voters might come from the deep ocean floor - bottom feeders perhaps ?
No, that's the politicians ...... :x)
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
There's no gerrymandering in
)
There's no gerrymandering in Germany due to proportitional voting. The balance between MP seats of different parties is determined by the relative voting share of these parties. Half of the MPs are elected directly in their election districts. The other half is taken ("elected") from candidate lists set up by each party. If the first half of directly elected MPs change the proportional share of parties votes, then compensating seats are added, "electing" further candidates from same lists. Any attempts for gerrymandering will be compensated immediately. So, our system is better? No!
We don't have noticeably criminal, greedy or corrupt MPs. They get payments which most aren't capable to earn elsewhere. But today there are too many inexperienced candidates (many in their twenties... thirties) on parties' candidate lists, who so far had a career: school bench, lecture hall (MP's assistant at the same time), representatives bench, We vote for a directly elected MP which doesn't change balance of power between parties. Loosers are out at least? No, influential candidates are backed up on their parties' list too (from "safe seats" ... downto "unsafe seats"). So we vote for a parties' candidate list too. Even the ballot only names the first five of maybe 20..30 candidates. You chose the pig in the poke. The voter would have to inform himself days before about the list candidates of the party he intends to vote for. Few voters do this. Why should they? They can't change order anyway. Well informed voters read parties' election programm, not candidate lists. The program is forgotten as soon as a ruling coalition was formed. So, we vote for colourful clouds. We know the publicly advertised leading candidates of the 5...6 biggest parties who spend much money for election campaigns: posters on each street corner. But they run for a seat in their home state (of 16 federal states). With a probability of 15 out of 16 the publicly known leading candidate is not on your ballot's list. Still chosing the pig in the poke.
More and more of these list candidates never had a job outside political circles. Conversely, it became increasingly difficult for outsiders, mature people (>40), with life experience, self-employed, company owners, farmers, craftsmen and engineers to compete in such party hierarchies for nomination. Years of slavish work for the party counts, competence less. The political reality puts off outsiders. Party leaders greatly influence order on candidate lists. Many MPs today only utter hard-learned phrases of "party language", like a playback tape. A parliamentary session consist of boring speeches read from prepared sheets, few interventions, which can be denied (compared to true discourse in UK's House of Commons). Only a few MPs still master the art of political discourse instead of brushing off or ignoring dissenting questions.
Maybe I see it too negative. But that's the impression our political system presents to the well-informed voter.
Scrooge McDuck
)
I'm following along and sorta get what you, Scrooge, are saying. Then you through in a curve ball and I'm lost.
What is " proportitional voting "? And what are " MP " seats of different parties ?
When you say: " So, our system is better? No! " - I can't answer that until I have a better clarification of the above.
Proud member of the Old Farts Association
Yikes politics. There is
)
Yikes politics. There is only one simple answer, all governments are wrong. What makes you think we need to be governed at all? We just end up with thieves doing things for their own benefit.
So back to the original point, electricity costs too much. Nonsense. Many things cost more now, it's called inflation. But our wages are higher too. Everyone says food costs more, but I just worked out my food bill and it's only 50% more than it was 25 years ago. Seems about level with inflation to me. Electricity (ignoring the pandemic/Ukraine increases) is 60% more than my parents paid 35 years ago.
GWGeorge007 schrieb:I'm
)
Huuh, If you ask any Germans on the street, I bet they'll struggle to explain...
Our system is called "personalized proportional representation"
A ballot always provides two votes: "First vote" (a person) and "Second vote" (a party). The unspecific names conceal: only the second vote changes balance of power.
There are (in theory) 598 seats, half (299) of which are assigned through majority voting in the 299 constituencies in Germany ("First vote"). The "Second vote" assigns the remaining 299 to parties (their candidate lists). All "second votes" from a federal state are added up across all of its constituencies, then sorted by party. The proportional share of each party (#votes_party1 / all_valid_votes), (votes_party2 / all_valid_votes), ... determines which share of the 299 remaining seats is assigned* to each party. Seats are assigned in the order of the candidate lists. The first candidates most likely (so called "safe seats", lower ranked less likely: "unsafe seats", depending on the voting share of each party. It's done separately for each of the 16 states. Overall a complex mathematical algorithm is applied, different ones have been used over the decades. That's it? Not quite.
Majority voting in the 299 constituencies favors candidates of two largest parties, others win extremely rarely. BUT the composition of the parliament must represent the proportional voting share of all valid "Second votes" (which, thus, only change balance of power). Small parties which candidates won no or few constituencies therefore get compensatory seats which are assigned to further candidates from their lists according to their proportional voting share. Since last federal elections in 2021, we have 736 MPs of which 299 won their constituency, 299 get "elected" from candidate lists, and a further 138 get compensation seats for smaller parties. Crazy, isn't it? So Germans elected 299 MPs out of 736: 40.6% by name which won their constituency, the other 437 MPs (59.4%) were "elected" from parties' candidate lists (I called them: colourful Party clouds: the Purples, Reds, Greens, Yellows, Blacks, Blue ones). Our parliament is currently ~50% larger than U.S. Congress. 2nd largest on earth, only inferior to Chinese People's Congress. State parliaments are elected in a similar way.
*Parties with shares below a 5% treshold are discarded (wasted vote) to avoid fragmentation into too small factions (since 1949: 2nd republic: "Bonn republic").
Proportional representation was introduced after WW1 (1st republic: "Weimar republic"). Previously only majority voting in constituencies was used in the German Empire until 1918. However, citizens had different voting power, depending on their tax contribution (nobility, bourgeoisie, peasants), nobility and bourgeoisie being decisive.
Kate Ewart schrieb:So back to
)
I can tell you: electricity in Germany costs too much... way too much. It will kill our industries. And I'm convinced prices will rise further... extensively. Our government issues gigantic "plans" for grid expansion, for hundreds of hydrogen ready gas turbine plants (lacking economic incentive: subsidized), offshore grids, hydrogen generators, thousands of high-amp car chargers, millions of heat pumps; a zoo of "plans" to be implemented ASAP for which there is no alternative, they say ... TINA. They teach us each day: We must... we have to... until... TINA. Nobody of them calculates economic costs, checks electrical feasibility, thinks about physical laws, or simply: alternatives; or let market principles work. Instead rainbows and unicorns... Pure propaganda.
The procurement price on European electricity exchanges won't rise further (perfectly working British-style liberal market economy). But grid usage fees, fees for offshore expansion, renewables subsidy fees, electricity taxes, switchable loads fee, further fees, ... and VAT, all government-regulated, will continue to rise (Soviet*-style planned economy) to multiples of the procurement price. I could write about German energy policy and its marvelous protagonists. But I'd be banned immediately violating half of the forum rules.
Scrooge McDuck wrote:I can
)
There is a limit to what they can charge. The point where you can make it yourself cheaper. Solar panels are cheaper than they used to be for example, and there are many other ways.