The best way to get money out of politics is to get politics out of money. The government playing an outsized role in the economy is precisely what draws money into the political process in the first place.
This. If you're the trade group for a billion dollar industry you'd be not doing your job if you didn't buy both sides of the isle. With how powerful the government is you can't afford not to.
Approval voting seems to me to be worse on all counts that the previous commenter was levying against ranked-choice. To your point, the spoiler effect seems like it would be much worse with approval than with a ranked ballot, since highly partisan voters would have little reason to approve of any candidate other than the single candidate they want in office. Approving of anyone else lessens their candidate's chance of winning.
A ranked choice ballot at least requires you to assign a unique value to every candidate on the ballot: you can honestly rank your second choice without being concerned that doing so undermines your first.
>A ranked choice ballot at least requires you to assign a unique value to every candidate on the ballot: you can honestly rank your second choice without being concerned that doing so undermines your first.
That's highly implementation dependent. Where I live we have ranked-choice ballots for local primary elections, while the local general elections are FPTP. State and Federal elections are all FPTP for primary and general elections.
While I am free to rank up to five candidates when filling out my ballot, I am not required to use all five choices.
I can just ignore all that if I choose and just rank one candidate first and leave the rest of the ballot blank. Or I can rank multiple candidates, but I'm not required to "assign a unique value to every candidate on the ballot."
In fact, if there are more than five candidates for a particular office, I can only rank five of them.
All that said, I'm absolutely in favor of RCV and wish we had it for all elections, not just local primary elections.
> Get money out of politics (reverse citizens united) and enact
Citizens United was a case about a federal agency attempting to suppress the publication of a movie due to breaching "electioneering communications" rules first introduced in 2002. Contrary to the common narrative, it was more a case of the government arguing "speech is money" as a pretext to use its authority to regulate certain expenditures of money in order to control what information could be released into the media ecosystem. The court struck this down under a correct application of consistent first amendment jurisprudence, ruling that speech is always protected by the constitution, and cannot be suppressed under the guise of regulating spending.
The case and the ruling had nothing to do with campaign donations or funding of candidates. Overturning the Citizens United ruling would create a situation in which agencies under the authority of incumbent politicians would be able to control and curate public political discourse in the lead-up to elections. This is likely the exact opposite of what you intend.
> term/age limits for all public offices.
Term limits would have the effect of creating large incentives for office holders to use the prerogatives of office to set themselves up for their future careers after their terms expire. Term-limited politicians would be even more motivated than those in the status quo to hand out favors to potential future employers and business partners.
On top of that, it would be much more difficult for for politicians to establish notoriety and carve out a base of direct public support by building reputation in office. Instead, a steady stream of relative unknowns would require support from sponsors and entrenched party organizations to win office, making back-room players much more powerful than in the status quo. This is, again, likely to result in the exact opposite of what you intend.
> Given recent relevations re Epstein this is our best chance to reform corruption in generations.
Agreed, but that will require voters to abandon their reflexive partisan positions and accept that the institutions themselves are dysfunctional, irrespective of which people happen to be administering it at any given time. In the current cultural climate, that seems unfortunately unlikely.
Check out The Lounge (https://thelounge.chat) and Convos (https://convos.chat), web-based IRC clients with media previews, session persistence, and all the modern bells and whistles.
A AI summary reposted (sorry if this not allowed ?) below
Australian inventor Ric Richardson pioneered software activation in the early 1990s, developing a "try-before-you-buy" system (Demoware) using a unique machine fingerprint and key-code unlocking system, now used on billions of computers.
His 1992 patent (US5490216) resulted in a major legal victory against Microsoft, ending in a confidential settlement valued at over $530 million.
Key details of the Ric Richardson patent and dispute:
The Invention: Richardson created a method for software anti-piracy where, upon purchase, a user receives a code to unlock full functionality, addressing the need to try software before buying.
Uniloc Company: Richardson founded Uniloc to develop and market this copy-protection software.
The Microsoft Dispute: In 1993, Richardson demonstrated his technology to Microsoft, which subsequently developed a similar activation system for products like Office, Windows XP, and Windows Server.
Legal Battle: After eight years of litigation, a US court found Microsoft infringed on the patent (Number 5,490,216), resulting in a settlement estimated to be in the low 9 figures (after earlier awards of $388 million, then over $530 million).
Legacy: The technology is widely used globally, and Richardson continued to innovate in cybersecurity, developing new, secure operating system methods.
More to the point, it's why our political system does not give unilateral control over most of this stuff to the executive branch. That's the reason why the courts are regularly ruling against the administration -- they're pretending to legal authority they don't have in the first place.
> That's the reason why the courts are regularly ruling against the administration -- they're pretending to legal authority they don't have in the first place.
Lower courts. The track record of this administration at the SCOTUS is 90%.
> The track record of this administration at the SCOTUS is 90%.
Its not quite that high of cases (21 out of 25 where the administration is a party in 2025, per [0], with one additional loss since the beginning of 2026 (Tangipa v. Newsom [1] seeking an injunction barring the CA redistricting map, where the administration wasn't in the heading but was a party as a plaintiff-intervenor.) Note that all of the decided cases at issue are interim orders (orders concerning actions before the final decision on the case, where the Administration either wants an injunction or wants to not have an injunction against it, mainly), and reading the track record of the cases that actually get decided on the interim docket neglects the effect of the Administration's losses there on which cases it could appeal it chooses not to so they never reach the docket at all, as argued in [2].
The Republican majority on the SCOTUS announced that Trump is immune from all laws, which is insane and not supported by the Constitution in any way, but directly lead to what's happening. If you tell somebody they won't ever be held accountable for breaking laws, why follow them (except for your internal moral compass, and we've established that Trump doesn't have one).
> The Republican majority on the SCOTUS announced that Trump is immune from all laws
This is factually untrue; the Court, in Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593 (2024), held that the President has:
(1) absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for exercises of core constitutional powers,
(2) presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution for all official acts,
(3) no immunity from criminal prosecution for unofficial acts.
This is—while still problematic—very far from the President being “immune to all laws”.
Lower courts have a lot more activist judges than SCOTUS. SCOTUS has fewer activist judges than they used to, and are now busy interpreting the law based on the constitution, not on what their own personal grievances are.
Federalist society is supporting textualist interpretation of the law. If you want the law to be different, then change the constitution. Having overly expansive interpetations of the constitution to make the law what you want is being an activist. Textualism is just going by what the law says.
They decided that the 14th amendment prohibition on insurrectionists being able to hold Federal office did not apply to Trump because he is not an officer of the United States (despite the fact he holds the "Office of the Presidency"). If that isn't deliberately misreading the actual words of the statute to get the result you want, what is?
This was a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court and I think a large part of it was that an individual state could use this for political gain. As Kagan said during oral arguments: "I think the question that you have to confront is why a single state should decide who gets to be president of the United States..."
They're interpreting the law based on how much they can contort the constitution to divert as much power to King Trump as possible while not completely thrashing their credibility.
Importantly, they're using the shadow docket so that they don't need to decide officially, as that would bind their hands with a future Democratic administration.
Like, whatever happened to the Major Questions Doctrine?
> Importantly, they're using the shadow docket so that they don't need to decide officially
The Supreme Court doesn't choose which docket to “use”; the interim docket (sometimes calls the “emergency docket” or “shadow docket”) is where applications for immediate action on cases that have not reached a final decision in lower court are handled. Decisions on the interim docket are more likely to be unsigned orders, but that's as true of the ones the administration has lost as the ones it has won.
The fact that it’s possible at all to inject plausible doubt, for even a few weeks, means that counterparties will be much more wary.
They will simply have less goodwill when an American team is on the other side of the table, and give less benefit of the doubt. (as compared to say if a Swiss team is on the other side of the table)
I don't think the main objection that people have to Electron is that it includes HTML rendering functionality. A proper desktop application that includes an HTML renderer for content formatting is a very different thing from a framework that implements an application entirely as an encapsulated webapp.
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