That seems like a poor example given how many failed attempts to land something on Mars that took place before they got to designs that would get it right in the first go.
The Viking landers were the first attempt by the US to land on Mars. The Soviets actually soft-landed first on their second try but the lander failed after transmitting one corrupted image. There were certainly many failed Mars missions by various countries, but the Vikings at least got it right on the first go.
Yeah, this is a remarkably good score - for comparison Europe is at 0 out of 2. :P
The first one [1] actually landed but failed to send back any data (kinda like the soviet example) due to deployment failure.
But the second one will at least have an impact on future generations, with people being confused why there are two Shiaparelli[2] craters on Mars. ;-)
As someone with no knowledge of the topic, why was electrical reform needed? Wouldn't one assume that either party motivated to do it while in power would be doing it with the goal of positively affecting the outcome for their party in the future? It would seem weird for a candidate to reform how voting works knowing it could negatively affect their side, right?
> Canada uses a first past the post system for federal elections, which usually boils down to a two party state equilibrium
To be fair, that two-party equilibrium is the thing that keeps every minor political crisis from causing no-confidence votes and failed governments because all of the special interests involved break the coalition.
Other Parliamentary governments that don't have this kind of equilibrium end up with minor political parties holding massively outsized influence and concessions just to keep them in the coalition. See Denmark (this is pretty much the subject of every season of Borgen).
The only time a Finnish government coalition has failed due to a loss of confidence was in the early 80s. Prime ministers occasionally change mid-term and minor parties sometimes leave the coalition, but the coalition always continues until the next regular elections.
And the reason for this stability is trivial. If a party leaves a coalition and the coalition loses parliamentary majority, that party is effectively a major party. Potential prime ministers are rarely stupid enough or desperate enough to give small parties that kind of power. Instead, they prefer making the coalition a bit wider by adding another small party or two.
We also have the Swedish People's Party, which specializes as a reliable coalition partner. They are willing to collaborate with pretty much anyone. As long the coalition agrees to uphold the rights of the Swedish-speaking minority, they will give it another 4-5% support without too much drama.
Finland is also just about the most ethnically, religiously, demographically and linguistically homogenous nation you could pick from.
That affords you the social cohesion to avoid these things. Much moreso than Denmark and orders of magntitude moreso than Canada.
You just generally agree with each other more, in your own socially-distant, Finnish way. Kippis!
Also the comments about the Swedish-speaking minority interest are a bit weird in historical context -- Swedish used to be the dominant language in Finland until the Swedish-speaking nobility decided to promote the Finnish language and identity. It isn't exactly weird that their remnants today would be able to promote their own interests...
Your perception of Finland is stuck in the 20th century. Today's Finland is roughly 10% immigrants. If the current trend continues, the fraction should increase to ~15% by 2030. That would be comparable to the US.
As for the Swedish-speaking minority, it's mostly a result of colonization in the middle ages. Swedish became the dominant language in some coastal areas, while the rest of present-day Finland spoke a variety of Finnic languages. During both Swedish and Russian rule, Swedish was used as the administrative language, and the elites used it among themselves. But even among the elites, Swedish was often not their native language.
> Finland is also just about the most ethnically, religiously, demographically and linguistically homogenous nation you could pick from.
Considering it has pretty much had effectively two primary languages for the past several hundreds years that seems like a stretch? Two of the most famous Finns of all time like Linus Torvalds or Mannerheim didn't even speak Finnish as their first language. Not exactly a sign of "linguistic homogeneity"..
We use preferential voting and haven't had a minority government, that is a government formed by coalition as the result of an election since 2010. We still typically have 2 major parties and 3-4 minor parties that can (but by no means always) hold the balance of power, particularly in the senate. It means that the govt has to compromise more often to get bills passed, but the minority parties rarely hold legislation hostage (barring things like the Housing Future Fund, which was a dog's breakfast).
We have two left parties that votes are split across, and a single right party.
This means the conservative party often ends up getting more power since they're "first past the post" even though the majority of the population may not agree with them.
So? "The rules need to be changed because the wrong people keep winning" sounds very suspicious to me.
If the situation is as you describe, what really needs to change is that the two left parties need to merge, or one of them needs to become such a marginal player that it doesn't matter. If the leaders of those parties can't or won't do that, well, then you get the situation that you have.
Some believe that it’s better if representative democracies represent their constituents. Newer voting technology that permits a greater alignment of representative distribution with voter distribution is preferable to those people.
Personally, I find it galling that the massive Californian population of Republicans and Texan population of Democrats frequently go unrepresented.
You seem to believe in the primacy of FPTP voting in itself. That’s the difference.
That seems a misunderstanding of their argument. I suggest using an LLM, quoting the comment, and discussing with it till your comprehension matches that of the machine. They’re usually pretty good at it, and it appears better than you in this instance.
> So? "The rules need to be changed because the wrong people keep winning" sounds very suspicious to me.
That's not what they're saying. In Canada, we can easily end up with parliamentary majorities for parties that have less than 50% of the popular vote. Sometimes substantially less.
No, I got that part. That's true in any first-past-the-post system, and especially true in ones with more than two major parties. (The solution to that would be proportional representation rather than first-past-the-post.)
But the complaint seemed to be, not that it kept happening, but that it kept favoring the Conservatives. So, on the one hand, the fact that it keeps favoring one party is an issue. On the other hand, the way the complaint was made makes it sound like it's not coming from a position of objectivity.
I beg to differ, the polls say otherwise regarding who the population wants and more importantly, the unhealthy coalition of NDP / Liberals have been preventing the parliament from functioning, we would have had an election by now had NDP stopped propping the Liberal party by preventing the non confidence vote.
Canada has a FPTP system but multiple parties. This means that it becomes possible to form a distorted, outsized government (even a majority government!) with a remarkably little amount of the popular vote. In 2019 the Liberals won the election and took 46% of the seats with a mere 33% of the vote. That is a remarkable distortion.
The argument as to why electoral reform is needed is because of this distortion and the view that the FPTP system itself is resulting in peculiar outcomes that do not reflect the actual wishes of the voting public.
If it's only for the rich then the prices will be high. Meaning the capitalist mechanism of resource distribution will be even higher (more paid by the rich received as income by the non-rich). It will also take demand from existing airlines making fares lighter for everyone else. It also employs people. It also drives technology forward. And ultimately it does let people travel in less time, and why wouldn't we want that? To some extent emissions are not as bad as you'd think since they are being emitted over less time in the course of a shorter journey. Success in this category will also drive competition in every metric and work to bring cleaner, shorter flights to everyone over time.
There is a lot to love about the idea of supersonic flight.
> It will also take demand from existing airlines making fares lighter for everyone else.
That's not how airline economics work. The first class passengers (the ones who could afford to leave for supersonic) subsidize the economy seats[1]. If they left you would probably see worse prices, worse amenities or both.
There are airlines that don't have business or first class seats (e.g. Spirit), and they're generally a terrible experience.
On the other hand demand for premium seats would be down, lowering their price and making a nicer ride more accessible. Overall this would net to lower prices for the same distribution of amenities on a given plane ride. Supply and demand theory would seem to suggest that equal supply with lower demand leads to lower prices overall. Supply could of course adjust as more people move to supersonic, but that means more people are now getting a better product than before. And if supply of regular jets remains (they're pretty expensive to just have sit there and not try to use for income), lower-end fares and seat availability invite people at the lower end of the resource spectrum to now buy more plane tickets.
Not fully convinced by the "will make fares lighter for everyone else" argument. The economics of planes are heavily weighted towards the passengers up front - business & premium economy make more profit per sqft for the airline than seats at the back. So I'd imagine that a reduction in demand for premium seats could actually increase prices.
The flipside of this is that the passengers in the back, while not as profitable in the "$/sqft" equation, are what merit the airline buying a 777-300 or A350.
If all your focus is on those premium passengers, then you don't need as big an aircraft, and you end up with things beginning to approach JSX's (https://www.jsx.com/home/search) mode of operations.
Language is for both. Every concept is tied to a label that is a word. We identify pieces of reality by their common attributes while omitting their specific measurements, and attach these identifications to a label which is a word. It is a unique ability that we have as humans, which no other animal shares. It is essential for rational thought. Communication may have been an evolutionary forcing function on our ability to conceive generally (rather than simply perceive), but communication is still downstream from having concepts to communicate.
Take a detailed look at an abstract painting and you might form thousands of unlabeled concepts per second; examine life in a microscope; listen to complex instrumental music; taste spicy/tingly XiAn noodles; smell a forest in the fall after the rain: there is a ton of thought involved in common human function without the need or ability of using language. A serialized version of language is too slow to capture parallel complex ideas that can race through your brain in an emergency and save your life. Learning how to use words is useful but there are not enough combinations of words in the world for the richness of thought you can experience in a single morning, in a single breath. We have way too many smell receptors in our genome and way too few words formed for the smell combinations we experience daily. We can recollect experiences, or we can visualize generate experiences in our mind; I dont see a reason we would label every internal or external experience and we certainly dont have to forget or not imagine all the parts we havent labeled yet.
"It is a unique ability that we have as humans, which no other animal shares."
Dogs at least can learn that, too. Probably also cats. Using buttons to express themselves has proven that. Hell, even our dog, who never figured out the buttons, understood that "bed" meant "soft thing next to human's bed", not "the particular bed I usually sleep in".
Humans are merely a lot better at communicating this, having a more complex speech apparatus.
From what I have heard from Google employees, no one at Google really cares about it. It is used in one of their smart speakers and maybe another nest thing. I would not at all be surprised if it winds up in the google graveyard.
Contrast this to something like the Zig or FreeBSD Foundation, which are specifically created to further a technical system and immune to quarterly re-orgs.
Let's stop begging at the table of big-tech for software scraps.
> Let's stop begging at the table of big-tech for software scraps.
There's been plenty of HN readers on here over the years touting Fuschia as the next big thing to displace Linux/MacOS/Windows due to the Pure Microkernel Design(TM), mish-mash of C++/Golang/Rust in said microkernel, and the fact that it's a Google Product. All the things HN loves.
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