In a first-past-the-post system, an independent only ends up stealing votes from the mainstream candidate that’s closest to their position. He’d undermine the Democratic candidate, making a Republican win more likely. He’s smart enough not to want to do that.

I agree, but I wish there were some way to ensure that voters were making an informed choice.

In the case of Bobby Sands, I assume they were. That was a high profile case. It’s even vaguely possible to make the case that he was a political prisoner.

But, almost daily I see interviews with Trump voters who seem to have lost their connection with reality. And, it’s not even a wrong but consistent worldview. It’s just a bunch of incoherent conspiracy theories that fall apart under the most gentle questioning. Unfortunately, there’s probably no way to restrict voting to only sane and well informed voters, because any restriction you put in place could be abused.

Probably not.

The army wouldn’t go along with it. Even in countries with dictators, they need to purge the army before they try anything too radical. And, often, the generals retain a lot of power.

Especially given that prosecutions are often racially biased, and sometimes politically biased.

If an opponent with a criminal record can’t run, you incentivize an immoral president to have their political opponents charged with anything they can think of.

OTOH, the American electorate is filled with idiots. You would hope that people would see through a purely political conviction and not let that stop them. But, the reality is probably the opposite, a serial killer who ate his victims could run, and if the party got behind that candidate, half the electorate would not know he was a serial killer, or they’d vote for him anyhow, or they’d think his conviction was just a psy-op and his victims were crisis actors.

What does any of that have to do with presidential immunity? He could have done that at any time if he wanted to, but he doesn’t want to because he deeply believes in the system, and because people wouldn’t do it even if he called for it to happen.

He could murder congresspeople, but he can’t dissolve congress.

Immunity from prosecution doesn’t mean he can pass laws.

Theoretically he could murder members of the other branches of government until the remaining ones did what he wanted, but it doesn’t let him pass new laws or unilaterally change the constitution.

Especially when the alternative is a glass of poison. A warm, flat beer is not going to kill you, even though it might taste disgusting.

The worst thing is that you don’t get to choose whether you’re drinking the warm, flat beer or the poison. Depending on where you live your vote might not even matter. A bunch of uninformed and misinformed idiots in a few random states will decide for you which you’re drinking.

Make it so felons cannot run for president

How does immunity let him do that?

Doing that would require changing the constitution. Legally, this would let him go and scribble new words on the paper version of the constitution. He would be immune from the charge of vandalism. But, that wouldn’t actually change the constitution.

1. Those aren’t things that would otherwise be crimes. He doesn’t have immunity from procedure, he has immunity for crimes. He kill the justices, or kidnap them and lock them up in some undisclosed location. He has immunity in those cases. But expanding the court would require passing a law. Passing a law is not an action that the President takes, regardless of any presidential immunity. As for felons not being able to become presidents, any law congress passed to say that would be unconstitutional, because the constitution lays out the only requirements to become a US president. The constitution also limits the ways in which the constitution could be changed, and none of that is within the powers of a president. He could kill Trump, but he can’t change the rules about who’s allowed to be president.

2. He still believes that the system works. He thinks the checks and balances work. He believes that, regardless of the recent Supreme Court ruling, that he’s not immune, so he won’t commit crimes like that. The result might be that the final president of the Republic thought it was more important to follow tradition and live the values that he thought the president should hold, than to do what was necessary to prevent the Republic from becoming a dictatorship.

The interesting thing is that these days the maps people most use are digital ones. They can be updated instantly for everyone who uses them. But, even in that world you have problems.

In many countries it’s a legal requirement that the maps reflect the country’s definition of its borders. That means that in some cases Google Maps has 3 versions of a map, the one shown to users in country X (say India), the one shown to users in country Y (say China) and the one shown to users in the rest of the world, where the border is marked as disputed.

Changing the electoral system means passing laws.

The people who pass laws are elected representatives.

The current electoral system works well for the current elected representatives (kinda by definition, because it’s what got them elected).

So, the laws won’t get changed because the people who have the power to pass the new law aren’t going to pass a law that disadvantages them.

Case in point, the Liberal Party of Canada promised that if elected they’d reform the electoral system and get rid of first past the post. But, of course, FPTP is a massive advantage for the two main parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives. So, when they won the election, they quickly backed out of that promise. The only parties still promising to get rid of FPTP are the smaller parties who would have a big advantage if FPTP went away – but, of course, these small parties can’t win elections because of FPTP, so their promises to get rid of it are empty because they will never be in a position to make that change.

Even just the map of the world is outdated pretty much by the time it’s taught.

In 2023 Micronesia made a fairly minor change from the former name, “Federated States of Micronesia”. But, in 2022 Turkey now wants you to use its metal name: Türkiye.

Then there’s the new country of South Sudan, Bougainville on its way to splitting from Papua New Guinea. And Kosovo shows another problem – whether its an independent country or not depends on who you ask. That includes regions like South Ossetia, Transnistria, Catalonia and Taiwan.

Then there are things that students are taught that we’ve known are wrong for over a century, but the fully correct version is too complex for anything below a university course. Like, Newton’s laws are appropriate for high school, but they’re known to be incorrect and are simplifications of Einstein’s refinements. But, they’re close enough for most purposes, and understanding Einstein’s stuff is pretty hard. Same with models of the atom.

And, history is another subject where the deeper you dig, the more the generalizations you’re taught are shown to be wrong. The names and dates might be the same, but the reason X happened is often a whole lot more complex than the simple reasons given in high school.

However many the AI decides to give me.

So, it’s not really a good use case of an LLM.

The slippery slope thing is definitely an issue. If you have a dishonest, biased moderator (say someone from Fox News) they could really twist things. Even if you have a moderator who is trying as hard as possible to be unbiased, they’re bound to have some unconscious biases. On the other hand, fact checking is a pretty solved problem in reputable media. Not everything can be fact-checked, but even when facts are in dispute, they can often say what the source of the claim is. The problem is that they’re not used to doing it in real time. Proper fact checking often takes hours, not seconds.

Maybe one idea would be to have a rule at the debate saying that if you were planning to cite any statistic at all, you had to provide a source ahead of time to the moderator. They could then pre-emptively fact check all those statistics, and if they came up during the debate, the moderator could instantly fact-check them. If the candidate used a statistic they hadn’t had pre-approved the moderator would interrupt them, just like a judge in a case where a lawyer was trying to talk about something they hadn’t entered into evidence.

The modern debate format is pretty much useless. It’s too bad that the TV networks need the debate more than the candidates need it. Otherwise, the TV networks could impose restrictions like real-time fact checking, moderators who could (and would) mute candidates, tough questions that candidates didn’t like, following up and asking a question again if a candidate dodged a question, and so-on.

The rules are pretty loose (the width can be anywhere between 46 and 91 metres wide), but in practice real pitches are almost always between 64 and 69m wide and between 102 to 106m long. Even with the loosest possible interpretation of the rules, if you had the biggest legal pitch, you could fit at most 2 legal pitches on it if you subdivided it.

It would actually be really interesting for a team looking for an edge to use an extremely unusual pitch shape to make it hard for visiting teams to adapt.

Everyone capable of thought should have opinions.