The provider you're talking about is the utility company. You might not know why the utility company provides the internet either. It's because before that they couldn't get the other companies (AT&T, Comcast, Hughe, Verizon) to offer good speeds and reasonable rates. The utility also doesn't take a profit. Mind you, those other companies still operate and no one is holding them back. They just decided that the profit margins weren't worth it, though they did lobby against NoogaNet.
It's not a monopoly. It's a city coming together and saying
Fuck you, give us good internet or we're going to build our own internet w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶b̶l̶a̶c̶k̶j̶a̶c̶k̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶h̶o̶o̶k̶e̶r̶s̶
And overnight all those companies increased their speeds. They found what they were happy with and NoogaNet still decided "fuck it, we're going to just be better." I really REALLY wish more people/cities would take this "fuck you, we'll do it ourselves" attitude. Waiting on others to fix our problems clearly isn't working.
It's weird that we keep seeing this happen and work but then it isn't more popular. Government services are typically inefficient, but so are private monopolies for almost exactly the same reasons. If you put them into competition with each other then they both have more competition and have to do better.
I think it is because it requires significant cooperation. And by significant, I mean size, not the actual amount of action required by an individual.
This is an interesting problem to me and seems to be quite a prolific issue. I think it is because everyone feels like they are a tiny meaningless cog in a giant machine. But this confuses me. Even tiny cogs play an important role. Even if your function is redundant, that redundancy is built in for a reason. I hear the common sentiment "you're replaceable" and I think people take this to be "perfectly" fungible. But you may be a replaceable worker, but that also doesn't mean replacing you is easy. They usually gotta look for someone new, pay them more, and then train them (this is why I'm also really confused why companies won't increase existing workers' salaries against new hires. Because your current workers likely have significantly more utility than a new worker. You lose money by doing this. Not to mention essentially give away your work practices to competitors, weirdly leveling the playing field).
But it infuriates me when there are things that are universally hated, have relatively easy solutions, AND no one does anything. Be it a boss/manager who just says no to pressing a button that enables functionality where all the work has already been done and tested. Or simply voting in a new politician when everyone hates the current one. Or how 1 in 4 Americans dislike both Trump and Biden. How the early primary states will not even use their advantage to push towards a different candidate because we're playing this stupid game of chicken where people act like the primaries aren't actually the BEST time to vote or signal for a different candidate. I just don't get it...
And I've always been a fan of government directly participating in the market. (Even though I generally like weaker/smaller governments.) They can set a baseline. Gov is always participating, regardless, since they do regulations and all that, so I don't buy those arguments. But there are many more things becoming natural monopolies as advantage is provided by scale. A government actor essentially is able to set pseudo regulations by participating. USPS helps make FedEx and UPS better, but now they get so many cuts that UPS uses them as last mile deliverers despite operating in the region. Still, USPS ensures mail gets to people who would otherwise not be able to even get mail. I don't see why we don't have similar services from broadband and telecommunications. They are essential services these days. Plus, it would create a lot of good quality jobs as not only those people needed to maintain the systems but even all the contractors to do the initial buildouts.
> Or simply voting in a new politician when everyone hates the current one.
Oh, we already know how this one works. People generally like their elected representative, because that's how they won in that district. The district has e.g. a large employer, and the representative makes sure those jobs for the people in the district aren't lost. Even though that's the very thing people in other districts are complaining about, and in order to get that one thing the representative had to betray the citizenry in 250 other subtle ways to get votes from 250 other districts.
This is why federal legislation was originally meant to be limited in scope and require approval from both the House and the Senate, the latter of which was meant to be appointed by the state legislatures and thereby more inclined to reject that kind of populist vote buying and expansion of federal power. But we changed all that without thinking it through and now we suffer the consequences.
> People generally like their elected representative
This is definitely part of it but not all of it. There's more. I hear people complaining about the exact people they vote for.
I think another part of the problem is simply parties. We vote along lines rather than actual beliefs. I actually believe we'd be better off without them. Or at least affiliations on ballots. Like how we do judges. Hand out a booklet, let people vote by mail and take their time. But don't give people the super lazy version. Some friction is good, too much is bad.
The issue I see is it just makes tribalism very easy. And it's very easy to abuse this. Even countries with more than two parties only effectively have two either via major parties or through coalitions. America just has their coalitions under two big umbrellas (Biden and AOC in the same party? Trump and Romney? Those would be different parties in many European countries, but under the same coalitions)
Parties are a naturally emerging phenomenon in representative democracies, though. Simply put, if you can band together to pool votes somehow (e.g. by agreeing to disagree on some matters to some extent), you consistently win over those who do not. So it's inevitable that someone will do just that, and then others will respond in kind.
Fundamentally, this is a problem with representative democracy in general. There's simply no way a single person in the House can meaningfully represent 750k diverse people (especially with crude grouping by location) in the first place.
In US, the original design of the system explicitly recognized that: "the number of representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand". The problem, of course, is that this wasn't sustainable as population grew, which is why it eventually became a fixed number of seats instead. Either way, even with 30k per representative, there's just no way one can well and truly vote on their actual beliefs in a consistent way. You have to compromise some of them for the sake of others, and then justify those compromises to yourself somehow. And the easiest way for our monkey brain to do that is to do the us-vs-them thing, and then justify the compromise by asserting that it is for the sake of "us".
I think that if we want actual democracy of beliefs, we need to seriously start looking into either more direct democracy (seems more viable with the state of instant communication these days), or else multi-level federated systems such as council democracy.
> Parties are a naturally emerging phenomenon in representative democracies, though.
My main point is about putting party affiliation on ballots. I have less of a problem with the existence of parties than I do as making it the only deciding factor in a person's decision to vote a certain way.
I want people banding together over ideas rather than labels. While this may be the intent of parties, we can observe that in our current form, labels are more important than ideas. So my point is about adding a rather minimal amount of friction between the two. So that we can better distinguish labels from ideas.
> Simply put, if you can band together to pool votes somehow (e.g. by agreeing to disagree on some matters to some extent), you consistently win over those who do not.
This leads to coalitions, not necessarily parties. And then the coalition changes as a result of elections, because a different combination of blocs can form a majority.
It also doesn't necessarily have to be the same set of people even within an election cycle. Suppose you have (representing ideologies rather than parties) 40 democrats, 40 republicans, 15 libertarians and 5 greens. The greens wouldn't have enough seats to do anything, and the democrats and republicans together could do whatever they wanted, but so could the libertarians and either of the democrats or republicans.
Then in the same session you might have a bill that eliminates mandatory minimum sentences favored by the democrats and libertarians, another that lowers taxes on small businesses favored by the republicans and libertarians, and a third that creates a new Medicare benefit favored by democrats and republicans.
Then in the next election one of the major blocs ends up with 48 votes, which is very different, because now a majority coalition is either them and anyone else including the smallest bloc, or not-them but all of the other blocs together.
> There's simply no way a single person in the House can meaningfully represent 750k diverse people (especially with crude grouping by location) in the first place.
There is no way for a policy to represent any plurality of distinct individuals, because they'll each want different things. But a representative can try to balance their interests as best they can, and an election using a less defective voting system than FPTP would actually impose consequences on pissing off significant parts of the district, because a candidate which is similar but different along that dimension could plausibly replace them in the next election.
> direct democracy (seems more viable with the state of instant communication these days)
Direct democracy is best when it's used to repeal or veto things or otherwise bind the government, acting as one of the checks and balances against corruption. Using it to create new crimes or spending programs leads to unchecked populism.
We have enough trouble with that as it is because we made it too easy to pass national laws without broad consensus. What you want instead is "laboratories of democracy" where different localities try different things and then everyone can see how each of them goes and make their own decision, and continue that way until the right answer is clear enough to achieve consensus and go through a much more deliberative process to pass a national law. Or, for that matter, just let each of the localities separately pass the law there is now consensus should exist.
Voter coalitions are just parties in their earliest proto-stage. Coalition politics necessarily requires some amount of tit-for-tat and trust building, which forms long-term connections, which lead to organizations like parties over the long term. You can't ignore human mass psychology here; working together towards a common goal is not something that can just be completely disregarded in the next electoral cycle.
There's no way for policy on one issue to represent a plurality of distinct individuals, but most issues are broadly orthogonal and not particularly strongly related in and of themselves. Any single candidate, however, is effectively a packaged bundle of policies on all those orthogonal issues. That bundling is the problem.
I think that any claim that representative democracy somehow does not also lead to "unchecked populism" has been disproven by experience of the past century or so. All this stuff about how it lets you have wise, even-handed leaders that "temper the mob sentiment" was ultimately just wishful thinking - it turns out that those kinds of leaders generally tend to lose elections to populists. If you're really lucky, you get someone who runs on a populist platform and then turns around and does the whole sage king thing.
We're in enough trouble as it is because we shoved most politics up to national level. On that level, any way to enact extensive policies will be problematic simply because broad consensus doesn't scale well to that level. I agree that the solution to that is indeed "laboratories of democracy" where highly localized decisions can be made tailored to the local wants and needs, and where people can easily vote their feet - somewhere around the municipal level is probably fine-grained enough for that, I think, although large metropolitan areas would need further breakdown (which is not a problem with multi-level federalism). But when you get to that level of decentralization, direct democracy works pretty well beyond just serving as a check on representative bodies, and can itself be made more deliberative with fewer people involved.
I also agree that it's generally too easy to pass "will somebody please do something?!" type legislation, but that is true in either representative or direct democracy, and so there need to be checks on that either way. Supermajority requirements & automatic sunsetting can help a lot there, especially if the sunsetting term is proportional to the amount of votes the law gets - so e.g. if it can barely pass, then it needs to be re-enacted every year, while something that has near unanimous support is kept around for decades.
> Voter coalitions are just parties in their earliest proto-stage. Coalition politics necessarily requires some amount of tit-for-tat and trust building, which forms long-term connections, which lead to organizations like parties over the long term.
The difference is that the majority coalition changes with every election, which prevents ossification. The positions of Democrats and Republicans are fairly stable over time; the positions of a majority coalition will depend entirely on its membership.
> Any single candidate, however, is effectively a packaged bundle of policies on all those orthogonal issues. That bundling is the problem.
The bundling is a feature, provided that similar but not identical candidates aren't suppressed by the voting system. It allows the candidate to find the compromise on each issue that best satisfies the district, or lose to someone who does.
> I think that any claim that representative democracy somehow does not also lead to "unchecked populism" has been disproven by experience of the past century or so. All this stuff about how it lets you have wise, even-handed leaders that "temper the mob sentiment" was ultimately just wishful thinking - it turns out that those kinds of leaders generally tend to lose elections to populists.
This happens when the representatives are all just proxy votes. The degenerate case is where you elect someone to represent you for the vote on a single bill and then elect a new representative whenever there is a new bill. Obviously that isn't going to act as much of a check on populism.
But now consider the original structure of the US Senate. Senators were appointed by state legislatures across staggered 6-year terms. In order to enact a populist federal policy, you have to capture a majority of state legislatures, then you had to hold that majority for six years to replace the majority of Senators. In order to enact a populist policy expanding federal power, you had to overcome the tendency for state legislatures not to appoint Senators favoring the expansion of federal over state power. It actually worked pretty well until the 17th Amendment broke it by causing Senators to be directly elected. After that populism was unavoidable whenever the majority party in the House matched the one in the Senate. By no coincidence did this then happen immediately.
Adopt a cardinal voting system so there are more than two viable parties and go back to Senators being elected by state legislatures and see what happens.
> But when you get to that level of decentralization, direct democracy works pretty well beyond just serving as a check on representative bodies, and can itself be made more deliberative with fewer people involved.
If you make the jurisdictions small enough then direct democracy works okay, modulo some constraints on what policies can be enacted so you don't have towns coming up with ways to abuse non-constituents, e.g. by imposing extractive tolls or fines on anyone who has to pass through. Or to pick an existing major problem, zoning to price out existing non-residents. But the hyper-local laws aren't usually the problem to begin with, because then people can viably vote with their feet and the jurisdictions are under significant competitive pressure. The main problem is what to do about federal laws.
That most often happens in one-party districts because the incumbent doesn't have to please the voters when the district would never go for the other party.
The two party system itself is caused by first-past-the-post voting. In that system if there are more than two parties, the two most similar parties split the vote and both lose, giving them the incentive to merge together instead of running against each other, until there are only two left. Score voting/approval voting fixes this.
It's not __caused__ by FPTP, but yeah that certainly doesn't help. But I am glad that my excessive campaigning on this site for Approval/Star/cardinal systems has had some effect :) (Very happy to see ordinal systems not being suggested)
There's much more complexity to it all, but yeah, voting systems are important. The cardinal systems are just about better embedding preference while minimizing the capacity to hack. But they still assume rational voters. These cardinal systems may make strategic voting less effective, but they don't prevent them. A major benefit to be though is transparency, since it is easier to understand the tallying. Especially when it is (parallel) column sum and argmax. Much easier to understand than multi-round elections. (Could you imagine the Arizona recount with RCV...)
But again, you can build more representation and transparency into the system but it doesn't remove the human component. Where name recognition is a major predictor in winner. Where people are not investing time to vote. This takes a much larger cultural shift to have things like giving people time to research their candidates. But a single extra day off is probably just going to be used to catch up on all the more immediate issues we have. We're all constantly playing catch-up and truth of the matter is that politics is much more abstract than these things and so it gets de-prioritized. Voting systems won't fix that (obviously I still actively advocate for cardinal systems though. I'm a firm believer in addressing problems from the bottom up)
Isn't it? FPTP makes it all but impossible to sustain a third party because of the vote splitting effect. Even when there have been new major parties in the past, they replaced one of the major parties instead of coexisting alongside them for any significant period of time. The most viable districts for minor parties like the Green Party are the ones where the least similar major party is completely out of the running and then the minor party serves the role of the second party rather than a third.
> Where people are not investing time to vote.
But these things are related. If you have a two party system then you typically either have a clear choice where you know without doing much investigation which party you favor, or you don't align with either of the major parties and then no party satisfies you and your choice is basically a coin flip. Neither of these promote investigation because either the choice is obvious or the choice is unsatisfying and equivocal.
Wheres if you had e.g. four viable parties, there would much more likely be one that does closely represent your interests, and another that could come close, giving voters the incentive to at least pay enough attention to distinguish them.
> Isn't it? FPTP makes it all but impossible to sustain a third party because of the vote splitting effect.
I guess it depends how you are using "cause." Is it a causal variable? Sure, I wouldn't push against that. But I want to stress rather that it is a pressure rather than the only contributing variable. That there are more variables with similarly strong pressures, such that by fixing voting we shouldn't expect to have a stable system with multiple parties overnight. Unfortunate as is, things are never that simple. Even more unfortunately, not being transparent about this seems to have the effect of making more progress because people will reframe things as "well we were promised x would fix y, and it didn't, so why should we expect z to be any different?"
But I want to be abundantly clear, I am very in favor of changing to cardinal systems and it is one of the few things I take very seriously when it comes to politics. It is hard to know me and not know about approval and star. You could call me annoying lol. But I want to also make clear that while this is an important step, it isn't the end. It is especially important to remember that democracies are not stable equilibria, but unstable. We will always need to take care and never get lazy. It's unfortunate, but that is the price of freedom. Luckily with most things, effort is low to maintain systems if you are consistent. Unluckily, we're really bad at maintenance and think it is best to fix things when they are problems rather than fixing things before they're broken (a much cheaper solution in money, time, and effort). We've been fooled by "don't fix what ain't broke." That's actually the best time to fix things.
> But these things are related.
I agree. And that's part of an even larger coupled system. The tyranny of coupled systems is that you can't solve the problem by solving one equation at a time. You have to solve them together.
I'll give you an added incentive for cardinal systems that you might not be aware of. They're also REALLY good for analysis. Much better than ordinal actually. Reason being exactly why they are good for voting too actually. It is all about how we embed information. Cardinal (with exception of approval) has the benefit of non-fixed distances being placed upon candidates. While this doesn't have infinite resolution, it can allow us to express how much more we like someone than someone else. You probably know this part but it needed be restated. The analysis part comes down to looking at all these interactions beyond who just wins an election. You have a much better idea about where your voters actual preferences are. You do likely have to end up doing some proxy estimations here (such as most of winning candidate A's voters who did not pick them as their primary candidate picked candidate B. This suggest A should shift more towards B's policy for proper representation! Not only do we pick a better candidate, but we have a clearer picture of where the actual public preference is. This can, and should, be used even down to a regional level to help candidates become the best representatives they can.
BUT like all things, this too can be hacked. You can of course become just enough representative. This might be a helpful video to visualize this issue[0]. I should also add that of course voter preference actually lies along a much higher dimensional manifold than the one we are expressing with any proposed voting system. I don't actually suggest increasing the dimensionality because you have to balance simplicity and transparency. But there is a problem that distances are far more complicated of a subject than many actually like to believe. This is actually at the core of the Curse of Dimensionality (the furthest point becomes more difficult to distinguish from the nearest point, which is why it is generally discussed with kNNs, but generally this isn't always stated or remembered). It's also important to remember that operations may not always be well defined. I am mentioning this because the issue being discussed in [0] can be exploited in any dimension and any distance function we set. This can better illustrate the point I made about unstable equilibria. And you'll notice their suggested defense explicitly depends on the public coming together to act as a coalition and to treat policy setters (government) as an adversary. Which we both have agreed in the past is a core American ideal. It is why I am against labeling and any form of tribalism. But we must admit this is a difficult task, even if it is a core concept of what makes civilization possible in the first place: considering your neighbors. So I just want to always stress that. Don't just consider what is best for you, or for your family. But make sure to always consider those around you, especially those you disagree with, because they are the ones that can be leveraged against you (and you against them!) to have a worse outcome for everyone.
The tyranny of the modern world is that it is complex and interconnected. That we've solved most of the simple problems. So the dangers that are presented to us generally are due to abstraction and complexity. There are not more "first order" (if this then that) problems. And anyone trying to sell you that is either naive or deceiving you. Even if that person is ourselves (it often is).
> But I want to stress rather that it is a pressure rather than the only contributing variable. That there are more variables with similarly strong pressures, such that by fixing voting we shouldn't expect to have a stable system with multiple parties overnight.
I'm not sure that's the case, at least if you're willing to extend "overnight" to something like "over two or three election cycles."
If we were to adopt e.g. approval voting, the immediate effect would be that existing third party candidates who currently get ~1.2% of the vote would be able to get 20-30%, because voters would no longer have to be concerned about "wasting" their vote on a non-major party candidate they might actually prefer. In a small number of districts, like Libertarians in parts of New Hampshire or Greens in parts of California, the third party candidate might even immediately win.
Which in turn would change the nature of the very next election, because the media would have no excuse to dismiss a candidate who got 30% approval in the previous election when the losing major party candidate only got 32% -- or 29%. Then third party candidates get into the debates and have the opportunity to turn their 30% into 55%.
Moreover, it doesn't take a lot of seats to make a difference. Suppose the Republicans have 48 seats, the Democrats have 49 and a third party has 3. Those 3 seats are all either of the major parties need for a majority, so the third party would have a significant amount of influence.
> You can of course become just enough representative. This might be a helpful video to visualize this issue
Isn't this exactly the thing which is solved by cardinal systems? If you put candidate A, B and C or policy A, B and C all on the ballot together and have people rate them, there is no longer an ordering problem because you're not holding separate votes for A vs. B and, B vs. C and C vs. A. If Policy A gets a higher average rating than Policies B or C then it will always win when they're all on the ballot until voter preferences change.
The people choosing which candidates or policies make it onto the ballot have a lot of power, but that's always the case. Even if 100% of voters agree that Policy A is the best policy, if the only policies on the ballot are B and C then nobody can vote for Policy A. Obvious solution is to allow any policy or candidate onto the ballot that can gather a threshold number of signatures, instead of giving control over this to some manipulative autocrats.
Why are you calling their municipal fiber internet a monopoly? Not only is it a utility, here is a list of 10 other broadband providers including att fiber, xfinity and verizon 300mb 5g:
