There was a podcast I listened to some time back where one of the people was describing exotic pets, particularly lions and tigers, and how their uncle had kept some, and they were told to never let the cats play bite, because they would keep doing it into adulthood, and then you'd have a dead owner.
This is why Joe Exotic's "Tiger petting zoo" had such a high body count. Turns out that meth and tigers shouldn't mix.
We're not quite there yet, but we will be in a few more years.
It will likely kick off with China against Russia. See, China is also in the midst of a massive years long drought, and just on the other side of Mongolia is the largest freshwater lake on the planet.
China actually had a bottling plant being built on the shores of the lake until Russia said no.
Hell, Eastern Russia has a lot of resources that China really needs. So while the two countries are currently allies, the alliance is an uneasy one.
Now it's openly full of Nazis, because Musk unbanned them.
But you're right, it is a private company, and thus not subject to any definition of free speech.
Here's the thing. People do have free speech and can publicly say that they think the new twitter is a Nazi fulled dumpster fire run by a racist man-baby who got rich off of an Apartheid era emerald mine.
The "censorship" from before Musk took over was mostly banning hate speech, death threats, and calls for violence. Sometimes all three were in the same tweet.
Now it's banning union organizing and people wanting to be paid a fair wage for a day's work. Totally the same.
Government policies have included the arbitrary detention of Uyghurs in state-sponsored internment camps,[11][12] forced labor,[13][14] suppression of Uyghur religious practices,[15] political indoctrination,[16] severe ill-treatment,[17] forced sterilization,[18] forced contraception,[19][20] and forced abortion.[21][22]
Seems like elimination is the goal. Failing that, forced assimilation and banning of any cultural identity.
Okay, you take two of the worst parts of IRV and pretend they're somehow good. That's mind-boggling.
Ballot exhaustion is not solved by compulsory preferential voting. It only hides the fact that you now have to rank all the candidates. So when your middle preferences are eliminated before your first is, you've now been forced to elect your most hated option.
And again, later-no-harm is still a “did you vote for this person? They might win” criterion. Because if you don't like someone, don't vote for them.
Finally, you still have no clue how STAR works. It's not 1-5. It's 0-5. And the Automatic runoff part is pretty important, that part of it means that your vote goes to the finalist who you rated higher, not to merely the person who got the most points in the first round.
IRV is a terrible system, I know in another comment you said it was your favorite, but it's almost as bad as First Past the Post, and actually worse in a few areas.
And seriously, Later-no-harm is meaningless. It's basically a "did you vote for this person? They might win". It's like, no shit, that's how elections work.
If you want an actual issue with elections, look at the Monotonicity criterion. IRV fails this one. You can actually almost guarantee your most hated candidate wins, by voting for your favorite in the first round.
This brings up the issue of ballot exhaustion again. If your first round pick survives multiple rounds before being eliminated, your ballot suddenly doesn't have any valid candidates on it. This means your ballot might as well have been empty.
If you had not voted for your favorite, your vote could have gone to one of the others and helped them win, instead no, all that information about your preferences is just thrown out because of a stupid, arbitrary rule. If every single voter puts Candidate B as their second choice, Candidate B has 100% approval, and yet, under IRV, Candidate B is the first eliminated.
Another issue. Ranking candidates in order tells us nothing about how you actually feel about them. We know you like number 1, but number 2 could be anything between Jesus and Hitler. There's no information there, just that you like them less than 1.
Later-no-harm is sort of a meaningless criterion that was invented by a group called Fairvote to push IRV under the name Ranked Choice.
They invented it to say that Cardinal voting systems don't let you rank preferences. Which is sort of the entire point of cardinal systems. It's not much of an issue in the real world, because if you're happy with A or B, then you put down a vote for A and B. In any large scale election, there will be enough people who have a set preference that they only chose A or B and not both. The point being, a vote for one does nothing to impact a vote for the other, because you count the votes independently of each other.
The problems of IRV are many and varied. It has to be counted in a single centralized location, which leads to problems and security issues. It still has favorite betrayal, and the more viable candidates you have, the worse it gets. This means that you have to have some strategy while voting, but it's much harder for the average voter to know if their strategy will do any good.
Then there's the issue of exhausted ballots. Again, the more viable candidates you have, the worse it gets. Most of my data is from US elections that use the system, but the city of San Francisco sees about 18% of ballots thrown out due to ballot exhaustion. That alone is horrific.
Now, switching to another plot here, STAR is not approval. Star lets you voice your true preferences for candidates in a way that Approval and even IRV do not. Take a look at this graphic again.
First off, the average person sees it and says oh, it's a 5-star review. I know how those work. Then they rate each candidate on the scale of 0-5 stars. That's actually one of the most common ways people fuck up an IRV ballot. They think it's a 5-star review and give multiple candidates the same number.
So the next part of STAR is the automatic runoff. You take the two highest scored candidates and then put them head to head, but you use the preferences on the ballots to do it. If A is rated higher than B on that ballot, then the vote goes to A. If A and B are the same rating, then that ballot is counted as "No Preference". And the number of those ballots is also released at the end.
STAR gives you so much more information about candidates than any other system. You have an instant approval rating in the form of a 5-star average for every candidate.
The problem with multi-member districts (which are required for proportional voting) is the fact that to get rid of an incumbent, you need a vast majority to actively vote against them. For example, in a 5 member district, you need over 80% of the vote against one bad incumbent to get rid of them.
Proportional voting also explicitly makes political parties part of government. The goal is to not do that.