[ExI] My prediction

Tue Jan 6 22:12:41 UTC 2026

From: John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> 

>… If it wasn't for the electoral college Al Gore would have been president and we would not have had the Iraq war….

Of course, but there is some finite probability that unlimited nuclear war would have broken out between US and Russia.  If we assign that risk to 1%, a short war with Iraq is preferrable to a 1% risk of unlimited nuclear war.  John recall your prediction in 2016 about the risk of nuclear war.

>…And it has nothing to do with the weather, the electoral college was put in place to protect slave states….

Now, the EC protects us FROM the slave states.

>…Black people are a minority, so should a black person get 10 votes in presidential elections but a white person only get one?

All they need to do is move to Alaska or Wyoming.

The problem with that line of reasoning is that no one has figured out an objective way to determine who is and who is not black.  This is my ancestral regions results from AncestryDNA.  Results were similar from 23&Me.  

Given this result, how many votes would I get?

Our branch of the family had lost the history on where this Nigerian DNA came from.  We know now.

>…After all a black man can't turn into a white man, but if a man….

Can we define the term “man” please?  If not, can we define the term “black”?  We can’t.  Irony: our DNA is either configured as XX or XY in about 99.98% of humans and yet we allow people to define their own gender.  Then we somehow get to the stunningly illogical conclusion that a person cannot choose their own race, even when it is genetically ambiguous in nearly all cases.  If we go back far enough, we are all Africans.

>…  Wyoming should have less power than California because almost nobody lives in Wyoming…

That’s right, it does.  Wyoming gets 3 EC votes, California gets 54.  Both states have one state government.

>… nobody believes that cows and sheep should get to vote….

That’s right, they don’t get to vote.

>…rural areas tend to be more conservative than urban areas….

Sure.  Why is that?

>…I don't understand why you can't just admit the truth and say the electoral college is ridiculous….

Because it isn’t.  The EC is not ridiculous, it protects minorities, such as people who live in low population states.

>…but it favors Republicans more than Democrats….

It favors both over Libertarians, however it doesn’t make me reject the notion of the EC.  I see no significant difference between the two mainstream parties, nothing that matters.  Neither show a bit of interest in balancing the federal budget.  But the federal budget will soon balance them.  Stand by: if the singularity doesn’t happen, in 2033, everything changes.

>…so you don't want to change it….. John K Clark

Sure don’t.  Even if it favors the mainstream parties over the other parties, it is still a great system.  A democratic republic is more stable than a democracy.  In any democracy, the majority of the voters vote themselves an ever larger share of the commonwealth.  Fortunately the USA is not a democracy.  

I am surprised you are tripping over it John, being an S-alpha2.  By that reasoning, there are no more POTUS elections in the future, or if so, they are irrelevant, since AI will be really running everything.

spike

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20260106/ee397f85/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image002.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 17598 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20260106/ee397f85/attachment.jpg>