docdeek

I don’t work for VLC but do live and work in France. I think you’re right on the reasons (and there are likely others) but of all the ones you mention, I think it is the family that is the biggest reason I stay. I could speak English and French elsewhere in Europe, have the right to live anywhere in the EU thanks for the Union’s freedom of movement, and I can ‘sort of’ vote, if only for local and European elections.

But with kids in school, relatives close by, and family links in the city and region whre we live, moving somewhere else is not yet on the cards no matter how large the tax bill and unsettled the politics - at least for the moment.

Understood and appreciate the reply. It’s a very high bar to clear, though.

In Australia where there is compulsory voting (and fines for not voting) the turn out in the most recent national election was about 91%. If you have to get 50% of the eligible voters this means attracting about 55% of the ones who do turn up and vote.

In that same country, only 1 (Sydney) of the 172 seats in the House of Represenatives was won by a candidate with more than 55% of the vote but turnout in that district was ‘only’ 87.4%. Even though the candidate won 55% of the 87% of eligible vote, she fell 3700 votes short of winning 50% of all eligible voters.

Australia make it compulsory to vote and easy to vote, too, and they still can’t get everyone to the polls. And even in the safest seat in the country, you still have the clear winner - the second place candidate was 34 points back! - falling short of the 50% of eligible voters mark.

Grandted, Australia is a different system to the US, but I would be interested to understand how you imagine you could get people to vote when the threat of fines and prosecution still sees countries like Australia fall 10% short of perfect attendance, and then why setting a higher bar than 50% + 1 vote results in a better system.

I suspect one way might be to make it very easy to vote, expensive (in fines or in criminal penalties) to not vote, and then to restrict the number of candidates to a two. But the downsides to that (forcing people to make a political choice or be fined, offering only two options in a complex world) seem significant, too.

> I think my idea for this is that a candidate doesn’t win the election unless they get more than 50% of all eligible votes, not 50% of the votes cast.

This would think out the representation significantly, and applied to presidential voting would be rather dificult. The highest share of eligible voters in US history to support a US President is 42.6% for Ulysees S. Grant (Harrison and McKinley both close behind with +40%). Not one President has ever broken the 50% of eligble voters mark, and even those presidents that won in relative landslides in the EC (Washington, Monroe, Roosevelt, Reagan, Nixon) all had shares of the eligible votes that were in the 30%’s.

More than 40 dead bodies in Lebanon would suggest the capacity described is far from hypothetical.

>> I'm confused what you think you're arguing with.

That the congresswoman has been investigated by the DOJ under different administrations, Democrat and Republican, is a fact. Your claims about the competence of the DOJ - whether true or not - don’t change that fact.

No, my implication is that this is not the first time that this congressperson has been investigated by the DOJ, and the last time it happened the DOJ was under the control of her own party’s president.

My first-year philsophy professor gave a similar warning. He offered words to the effect that if we (the students) started thinking that the philosophy we were reading made no sense, was idiocy, or just nonsense, pause for a moment and imagine whether we thought it was likely that Plato was an idiot and everyone hasd missed it for millenia, or that we might be misinterpeting something. There’s always the chance that we’ll have an insight that others might not have had, but there’s a reasonable chance the the philosophers we were to study might not be exclusively stupid.

>> I’ve heard people say, out loud, “he unalived himself”, in reference to someone dying by suicide.

I also grew up in the previous century and it is equally strange to hear ‘dying by suicide’ when it used to be more common to say ‘committed suicide’ or just ‘killed himself/herself’. The author does a reasonable job of explaining why people might use ‘unalive’ and why he thinks that is a bad idea, but what was the reason a person started ‘dying by suicide’ instead of ‘killing himself/hersself/themselves’?

We’ve interacted on r/peloton before - your father is a giant and I am glad the biography is out. :)

Love that this is on Hacker News! INRNG has some of the best commentary about professional cycling online, as well as book reviews and travel pieces around famous climbs and races. If you are a fan of professional cycling, it’s a must-read.