Yep, I had my data deleted. They told me so, but I don’t for a second believe it.

Doesn’t the Supreme Court limit the powers of the house and the presidency, like, a lot?

Ok

I’m afraid that I still don’t get it, most probably because I am thick.

Someone has to be eliminated. That’s the whole point of elections. OPV means that your choice counts, well your preferences do. It also means that you don’t have to vote for the person you don’t want to, but you can rank your preferences. It is very rare that I would rank a bunch of people the same value. It is generally easy to rank candidates.

In our senate we sometimes have to rank over 100 candidates. If you do that you must number every box and can’t make a mistake. Or, the parties have registered their preferences and you just tick one box for your chosen party and that’s it. So it’s either one box ticked or 100 or so. The optional thing is that you don’t have to pick all 100, but that changes sometimes due to party politics playing with the system. One the whole, our electoral system limits how much political parties can mess about with elections. For instance, no party chooses electoral boundaries. Gerrymandering doesn’t happen here anymore. It used to, but not now.

I shall have to investigate the STAR system.

Ok. But why rank them the same?

I don’t see the point. In preferential voting you choose your candidates in a ranked order, so if number 5 doesn’t make the cut in the final count, your next vote (number 4) kicks in, and so on. Not exactly - all number 1 votes are tallied, and the losers are eliminated and then the second vote from the loser candidate gets tallied and so on until the winner is chosen. In this way your ranked choice is never exhausted until a winner arises. Your number 3 choice may get voted in. All votes are potentially important. FPTP sounds like a crap shoot.

This story had no insights. Anybody alive during the last 9 years already knew all this.

Don’t the states choose the voting system for their particular state? If so, it will never happen.

Australia has optional preferential voting. If there is 10 candidates, you can list them in order you want, but you don’t have to pick them all. You can stop at any point. Pick 3 or 4 in order, or say 7, but you don’t have to rank the nazi at all.

Even worse, we have a nasty habit of informing on our fellows. Not for murder, or other serious crimes, but for breaking stupid council rules and such. We call it dobbing. We dobb.

Some people will pick a fight about anything. Ok, I’m wrong, you discovered the killer point in my entire thesis!

I’ve seen that phenomenon all over the world . Nobody loves them.

Too true…

This is more accurate than it looks like at first glance. As an Australian, we like to think that we are all larrikin individuals. Actually we are mostly law-abiding freaks even under the most ridiculous constraints.

I would say that you continue to litigate a point that I never made in the first place. I have no opinion about the rights or wrongs of Hancock’s theories/claims. My entire point - my only point - is that if he is making entertainment, so what? Not allowing him to film in national parks because it offends science is wrong on so many levels.

Lastly, I didn’t ask you to chime in, so I’m not bothered if you beg off. See ya!

As you like.

Sounds like a whole lot of butthurt to me?

Science isn’t perfect either, a fact which scientists tend to push under the rug.

I’m an old fart, so I can remember the great scientific scare campaign of the 1970. Global cooling. It didn’t come from the great unwashed masses either, it can from professional researchers in white coats and worried brows. They got it wrong, and contributed to the beginnings of scientific distrust we have today.

Spare me the whole diatribe about intellectual fraud. You guys need to get your act together and communicate better rather than just sit in the friggin clouds and tut tut against the hoi polloi.

So criticise Hancock’s theories. Nobody is saying that archeologists can’t do that scientifically.

What I’m suggesting is that acting all butthurt when confronted with alternate theories and banning amateurs from entering the field is akin to protecting the priesthood.

Once again, not defending Hancock’s ideas, but I’m being critical of science’s reaction to them. Anyway, you guys are not very adroit in doing so. We are about to start watching the third season and he’s using your actions to fuel the fire.

Very good explanation, and I respect your point of view.

Even with that in hand, scientists can still be sometimes too precious. Being the official and truth holder of all things can also keep gifted amateurs out of the running. I’m not anti-science, I’m a fan. There is a long history of professionals jealousy guarding a patch that is not necessarily always ethical.

Anyway, that is the exception.

You will have to point out where he was obnoxious or abusive. I’ve not seen either of these traits from watching the show.

That’s a good example. Another is from my country, Australia. The idea that the Aborigines were just nomad hunter gatherers was seriously upset by the discovered fish farming settlements in the north of the country as well as the remains of basic stone buildings. Settler farmers have been destroying the evidence of these artifacts for 150 years because they upset the politics of “peaceful European settlement”.