Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@sj That does not look quite like the same thing; it still seems to work with applicants.

What makes the random-selection model work, going off experiments with this so far, is that there is nothing to apply or campaign for, there is no 'party reputation' to protect, it is essentially just a civil duty that is assigned - and so 100% of the focus is on researching the actual policy problem rather than on maintaining party politics.

Essentially, there is nothing to be gained or lost personally from drawing any particular conclusion, you get compensated for your work whatever the outcome is and that outcome has zero impact on future selections (not even in an increase in applicants from a particular party for example).

@Heidentweet Some important context here is that what I am describing is a more 'palatable' political model, in the sense that it is (or more accurately, *seems*) closer to what we already have - many of the details are the way they are because of that.

For example, the executive branch being elected is to pre-emptively address concerns of things getting messed up in implementation through bias; with a sufficiently functional policymaking system, this *should* not be necessary, but it is there as a 'defense in depth' type thing.

And to clarify, with 'policymaking' I don't necessarily mean the "figuring out the details of implementation" (that would be the implementation part), but rather the "what should the policy work towards, what are our goals", etc., which is currently determined by elected politicians. That's the part that would be done by a random selection.

In a healthier society, "involving the people who it affects" would be optimal - but it is extremely difficult to make happen in a society like we have that is already having severe problems with its political systems, because often it's not entirely clear upfront who *are* the people it affects, and bringing in people down the road requires an ability to anticipate quickly at scale, which we currently do not have.

Meanwhile, experiments with binding(!) citizen panels in many places have produced very positive results, where the more obscure concerns were also taken into account, because people approached the task as a job rather than as a political battle (after all, there was no re-election to fight over).

There do need to be structures in place so that those affected *can* be consulted effectively, and so that there are reliable sources of information to work from, but given these results, I'm not especially concerned about specific needs getting overlooked due to the people involved.

All in all, I think that in the society we have today, it's much easier to implement "randomly-selected committee consults whichever demographic becomes relevant/affected" than "committee changes over time as it becomes clear who is affected", just because of the predictability that it provides for the process.

Doesn't mean there shouldn't be a long-term effort to improve it further, of course - but again, what I'm describing here is a palatable approach, hopefully the first step on the way to an optimal model, but not the last one.

@sofia@chaos.social That sounds about right to me, and more or less matches what I've observed from local political parties.

@smveerman Ah yeah, just wanted to mention it, in case you (or someone else in NL) was looking for an option right now :)

@smveerman FWIW, I've already spotted a vegan Nutella clone at Lidl a while ago, I don't know if it's permanent or a temporary promo though

@sofia@chaos.social (Sidenote: these numbers would only apply when talking specifically about *politicians in mainstream parties*, as the poll described - for 'general population' I would estimate much much lower, simply because political positions tend to select for power-seeking traits)

@sofia@chaos.social I think it depends a lot on how it's framed. If it's 'disguised' and framed in a way that benefits those politicians (and the social class they exist in), I suspect it would be on the lower end of 75%-100, which is what I selected in the poll.

If it's more overt, and there's no immediate benefit being presented to said politicians, I suspect it'd be in the 25%-50% range.

(If you're not familiar with the history of this, try looking up their old "why no Rust in Chromium" docs page in the Wayback Machine, which said something to the effect of "Rust is too difficult to integrate, and we don't need memory safety anyway, we can do it safely with C++")

@astraluma @clarfonthey Look, if you want to be weirdly defensive of Yubico without actually engaging with the points made, that's your prerogative, but please do it somewhere that isn't my mentions, thanks

@Geoffberner Ah, just noticed that a particular bit of information isn't on that page, that was on the page that linked *to* it:

"We’re going to have maximise ventilation, monitor air quality, require masks indoors, and the place will be wheelchair accessible."

(Which I presume is meant specifically to deal with that)