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Old 01-31-2018, 02:08 PM   #61
Agemegos
 
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Default Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems

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Earthworms are exotic in North America? Really?

What are these things digging around under my garden, then? Larval dragons?
An introduced species. "Exotic" does not mean "non-existent".
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Old 01-31-2018, 02:10 PM   #62
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Default Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems

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That is not the only meaning of exotic. E.g. Merriam-Webster also have "strikingly, excitingly, or mysteriously different or unusual".
Then several of the features that various thread participants have suggested are not exotic, and there is no reason to single this one out.
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Old 01-31-2018, 04:44 PM   #63
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Aww, I wanted them to be larval dragons. >pout<
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Old 01-31-2018, 06:52 PM   #64
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63. Vote and Antivote. A vote selects the top X canidates for a position. Then an antivote is held, with antivotes being who you don't want to be in the office. The canidate with the fewest antivotes wins.
I suspect the end result would not be so different from the systems used in most Western nations today, even if the road there was different.


Hereditary Monarchy/Aristocracy, no intermarriage: In this system power is held by the monarch and/or the aristocrats, in whatever combination, but the twist is that noble families and the royal family are forbidden to marry each other, or to marry out-of-realm. Any offspring of such a marriage are automatically disinherited, if not worse. Instead, all members of the royal and noble families are required to marry commoners.

This prevents several of the common tropes of hereditary systems, for good or ill. You can't cement an alliance by dynastic marriage, and fiefs can't be combined into ever-larger subrealms by marital maneuvering, either. OTOH, you can't combine fiefs into ever larger subrealms by marital maneuvering, which removes a recurrent possible threat to the crown. (In the Middle Ages, royal stability was knocked off-kilter m ore than once because noble families intermarried and gained control of so much territory and wealth that they rivaled the monarch in power and income. In England the thumb rule was the stability required that the crown have an annual income in hard currency at least twice that of the mightiest subject.)

It also helps protect the aristocratic class from the dangers of inbreeding.

Politics now gets into how the commoners are chosen. How do the nobles, and the Prince(ss) meet prospective mates? How do prospective mates compete for the attention of a noble (because they will)? What exactly constitutes a commoner? (Does the son of the Duke's third son count as royalty or a commoner for marriage purposes?)
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Old 01-31-2018, 07:00 PM   #65
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Originally Posted by Irish Wolf View Post
Aww, I wanted them to be larval dragons. >pout<
Well there are a lot of different species in there, and larval dragons would be just as invasive - unless they were able to hibernate for a 100 millennia or teleport through a mile of ice I suppose.
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Old 01-31-2018, 08:54 PM   #66
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To be precise, its very difficult to detect vote tampering.

The exact mechanism for assigning the number will be something people want to manipulate. How are the numbers assigned? We must run analysis to ensure that an equal number of men and women are assigned to each group! Lets use the first two numbers instead of the last two! Is there a difference in how naturalized citizens are assigned numbers as opposed to born citizens? Packing, cracking, and redistributing are still very possible. And I suppose packing and cracking are one thing they could call their versions of gerrymandering.

The devil is always in the details.
Minor note with this election idea: By randomly distributing people to districts, and by having a first-past-the-post system where you directly elect your representatives, you're effectively making it so that all representatives will be from the same party, since a true random sampling of people is very likely to vote very, very similarly to the percentages that vote for each party in the entire population.

In other words, if 52% of people vote for Party A and 48% vote for Party B in the entire population, then it's *very* likely that each randomly-assigned 'district' will also vote 52% for Party A and 48% for Party B, since they're effectively a random sample of the population. That means a very, very high percentage - possibly all - of the representatives elected would be from Party A even though the vote was nearly 50/50.
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Old 01-31-2018, 09:17 PM   #67
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Well, the problem tends to disappear in the Shadowrun concept where I've seen this before - the citizens of the Pueblo Corporate Council are issued a share of the company upon birth or citizenship and can purchase more (though it is extremly expensive as one is buying a share of an entire advanced nation's resources) and one's vote is 1+ the base 10 log of the number of shares one owns. So, if you have your one share you have one vote. If you have 11 shares you have 2 votes, so on and so forth. The idea of course is that one is investing in the nation and thus deserve more of a say in the running of the nation.

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Actually, no. In that formula, if aggregate lifetime taxes paid < arbitrary divisor, then the logarithm is a negative number. If, for example, you've earned 1/10 of the arbitrary divisor, then you get -1, and zero votes. And if you've earned literally nothing, ever, then you have 0/AD = 0, and log 0 = negative infinity. So whatever you vote for gets infinite votes against it. I think that would produce some seriously counterintuitive results.
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Old 01-31-2018, 09:57 PM   #68
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Default Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems

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Well, the problem tends to disappear in the Shadowrun concept where I've seen this before - the citizens of the Pueblo Corporate Council are issued a share of the company upon birth or citizenship and can purchase more (though it is extremly expensive as one is buying a share of an entire advanced nation's resources) and one's vote is 1+ the base 10 log of the number of shares one owns. So, if you have your one share you have one vote. If you have 11 shares you have 2 votes, so on and so forth. The idea of course is that one is investing in the nation and thus deserve more of a say in the running of the nation.
That's kind of odd for a corporate setup. Actual corporations give you one vote for each one share. If you had 11 shares you would get 11 votes.

In the thing you're proposing, is it possible, say, for a person who starts out with a share to sell parts of it? Because, then, if I sell 90% of my share, I own 1/10 share, and log(1/10) is -1, and 1 -1 is 0. Or if I sell 99%, I own 1/100, and log(1/100) is -2, and 1 -2 is -1, so my vote would be counted backward.

In other words, I'm really not interested so much in the basic concept, as in the exact implications of the specific mathematical formula, and whether as stated it yields perverse results. Though of course you could choose to have it do so; it isn't as if real world systems never yielded perverse results.
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Old 02-01-2018, 12:34 AM   #69
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Originally Posted by whswhs View Post
That's kind of odd for a corporate setup. Actual corporations give you one vote for each one share. If you had 11 shares you would get 11 votes.
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Actual corporations aren't governments. Note that a corporate state could follow the model of a publicly traded corporation, but could be a worker/consumer co-operative or a joint partnership or a family owned corporate entity.
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Old 02-01-2018, 12:50 AM   #70
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Actual corporations aren't governments. Note that a corporate state could follow the model of a publicly traded corporation, but could be a worker/consumer co-operative or a joint partnership or a family owned corporate entity.
Of course they aren't. But if you're talking about people having shares in their nation-state or city-state, that sounds like using actual corporations as a model. It's not the same as a "corporate state," which is not based on corporations but on industrial sectors, sort of a top-down variant of syndicalism.

In a broader sense, monarchy in general could be described as having the state be the property of a corporation closely held by a particular family. When you get outside of thinking in terms of business enterprises, a "corporation" is any organization that continues to exist and act after the original founders have died; for example, a multigenerational familial lineage, a church, or a science fiction convention could be described as a corporation. (I remember once seeing a leftist article that attacked France for being in the thrall of corporate fascism. The author apparently didn't know that in French "corporation" means a municipality, and an incorporated business is a "société anonyme.")
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