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from the push,-pull,-swipe,-turn-and-Pong dept.
Late for work in Manhattan, you push the crosswalk button and curse silently at the slowness of the signal change. You finally get a green light, cross the street, arrive at the office, get in the elevator and hit the close door (>|<) button to speed things along. Getting out on your target floor, you find that hurrying has you a bit hot under the collar, so you reach for the thermostat to turn up the air conditioning.
Each of these seemingly disconnected everyday buttons you pressed may have something in common: it is quite possible that none of them did a thing to influence the world around you. Any perceived impact may simply have been imaginary, a placebo effect giving you the illusion of control.
In the early 2000s, New York City transportation officials finally admitted what many had suspected: the majority of crosswalk buttons in the city are completely disconnected from the traffic light system. Thousands of these initially worked to request a signal change but most no longer do anything, even if their signage suggests otherwise.
[...] Today, a combination of carefully orchestrated automation and higher traffic has made most of these buttons obsolete. Citywide, there are around 100 crosswalk buttons that still work in NYC but close to 1,000 more that do nothing at all. So why not take them down? Removing the remaining nonfunctional buttons would cost the city millions, a potential waste of already limited funds for civic infrastructure.
More examples are quoted in linked article, and some suggestions how tech can make our lives more pleasant while waiting - Pong anyone?.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @10:10PM
That's nothing.
(Only) in America, they've got machines, and they've got buttons, and when you press them, you get a small piece of wonky paper out of it, apparently.
And then a group of augurs and haruspices gathers around to determine whether that should be interpreted as a Hanging Chad, a Pregnant Chad, or a Between-Libya-And-Nigèr Chad.
And then five out of nine people decide who becomes President of Florida.
Or something like that, anyway.
1) Have you seen the Butterfly Ballots [wikipedia.org]? True, the situation should never have gotten into that position in the first place, but I guarantee you've made mistakes in your past, too.
2) Okay, so you don't think the United States Supreme Court should decide. Fine. Then what do you propose instead? The sitting president decides between a political rival and his own Vice President? Congress votes, which will coincidentally match their party affiliations? The state Governers hold a caucus? A re-vote for Florida, where they have extra information the rest of the country didn't have? A re-vote across the whole country?
And more to the point, who should decide what happens next? If you don't like "five out of nine people" then please provide a better proposal.
(Score: 4, Funny) by sjames on Tuesday August 23 2016, @10:40PM
Florida re-votes. What harm does the extra information do? Voters should have as much information as possible. But, we also forcibly give everyone responsible a legal name change to "Chad" and hold a referendum about hanging Chad.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 24 2016, @04:13PM
Florida re-votes. What harm does the extra information do?
I expect your post was meant as a joke (and to be clear it is funny, albeit morbid, too), but in case you were being serious...
The harm of having extra information is that it biases the vote substantially. For example, consider the 1992 US presidential elections. Millions of people voted for Ross Perot. If they knew with 100% certainty that he would not win, how many do you think would change their vote to Bush or Clinton... and do you think it would affect the result?
Likewise, consider the Brexit vote. In the hours and days after the elections, how many people do you think would change their vote (or who had abstained but would want to vote)?
In terms of the current election cycle, how many people do you think will be writing in "no-one" or casting a protest vote (or for that matter, voting for a third party, or voting a proverbial "lesser of two evils")? Once the outcome is known (e.g. "Trump wins Florida"), how many people would change their vote to either support a third-party candidate, or away from a third-party candidate because "my vote actually does matter."
If the system was set up for everybody to have multiple votings, then it would make sense. If only a selected sub-group got to re-vote, it would bias the system and give them disproportionate amounts of power.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday August 24 2016, @10:11PM
In each of those cases the outcome of the elections (potentially) better reflects the will of the people, so while I see that things change, I disagree that those changes are bad.
In the case of the presidential election, I would prefer approval voting anyway. since it would also better reflect the will of the people.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Wednesday August 24 2016, @09:22AM
(1) You don't use machines for voting. You just don't. It's too important. The effort needed for fraud should not concentrate in the hands of few programmers like me and Diebold [wikipedia.org], but be spread out over all the vote counters and officials in all the polling stations. Nobody guards voting machines for the three years out of four that they're stored in some padlocked community shed filled with rusting gardening tools.
It's also a very important, but underappreciated, function of the process, that everyone of modest intelligence can understand how it works.
Blind people and people who can't move from their home or hospital should just be inconvenienced to trust someone to delegate doing the physical voting to. Sorry.
(2) You're right; the judicial branch should decide, because they should be the most a-political of the trias politica.
It was just VERY odd for us, 6 billion foreigners, that the richest and most powerful country in the world couldn't even add up the number of popular votes in one of their provinces without a whole floor show and rigmarole. Do you have any idea how famous the USA is for its lawsuits?