Links 68: fair voting systems, and nationalising AI

Action Network says:

Dear Andy Burnham: it’s time for a fair voting system

Our voting system is broken.

Over and over again, First Past the Post gives power to governments most people didn’t vote for, poisons our political culture, and breeds instability.

The situation is only getting worse. The next general election could deliver a majority government with under 30% of the vote. This is democracy on the brink.

For years, Andy Burnham has supported Proportional Representation and promised to break with business as usual. He’s said we need a “different type of politics” and “reform to the electoral system to enable less point-scoring, more problem-solving”.

We agree. So we’ve written an open letter asking him to deliver on that promise and make fixing our democracy a priority.

You can sign the petition here.

Gadget review reports:

A woman drives with both hands on the wheel. Her phone sits face-down on her lap. No officer pulls her over. No lights flash. Weeks later, a $1,251 ticket arrives in the mail. The evidence: a single frame from a Camera surveillance app. The charge: phone use while driving.

The underlying reason this happens is the authorities use fines as a revenue-raising device.

The fix for this is to have any fines levied to go to the national government, not to the local government issuing the fine. That way, local governments will only be incentivised to levy fines when there is really some problematic behaviour going on, and not to raise revenue.

There are many problems where to fix the problem, you need to fix the incentives acting on people. This is one of these.

TLDR News looks at Britain’s New Plan that Could Kill YouTube:

The government’s plan is to force YouTube to give higher prominence to certain channels, in particular BBC News, ITV News and Channel 4 News.

The problem with is is that it implies that independent channels, such as TLDR News, Map Men or B1M, get less prominence.

NYC Mayors office says:

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani and New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) Commissioner Samuel A.A. Levine announced sweeping new consumer protections that will crack down on junk fees and subscription traps, making it easier for New Yorkers to know the real price of what they are buying and to stop paying for the services they no longer want.

Following Mayor Mamdani’s Executive Orders 9 and 10, the City announced a proposed rule requiring transparent, all-in pricing that bans hidden junk fees, alongside a final “Click to Cancel” rule that guarantees consumers can cancel subscriptions as easily as they sign up for them.

“For years, companies have built their business model around making it harder for working people to hold onto their money,” said Mayor Mamdani. “Whether it’s hidden fees that suddenly appear at checkout or subscriptions that take one click to sign up for and a dozen steps to cancel, the result is the same: working people pay more while corporations profit. That ends now. If you can sign up with one click, you can cancel with one click.”

This is a good idea and I think some -- no, all -- UK political parties should take it up.

The Edinburgh Minute writes:

School leaders warn that Edinburgh’s classroom ‘violence is at a level we haven’t seen before’, with 21 incidents per day last year, according to new data gathered by Nicholas Malizia of Edinburgh Live. The council said it was ‘actively looking at what more we can do to support school staff’.

And The Scotsman reports:

A dramatic rise in violence in Edinburgh schools shows the Scottish Government’s action plan to tackle the problem is not working, a city MSP has claimed.

The number of violent incidents in the Capital’s schools increased from 2,879 to 4,127 between 2023/24 and 2024/25 - a rise of 43 per cent.

Teachers shouldn’t have to put up with being attacked by feral violent kids. And children who want to learn shouldn’t have to put up with disruption from those that don’t.

A teacher was asked a question by her pupils, answered it truthfully, and was sacked for telling the truth:

Sarah Morse, originally from the United States of America, was teaching at Arbroath High School after briefly stating her “Roman Catholic view” on abortion in response to pupils’ questions.

On November 19, she was working as a cover teacher with an S3 class when pupils began asking her informal questions about being American, such as about food, school systems and lockers, which she routinely answers at the start of classes.

Morse says the pupils “realised she would give her opinion on more controversial things” and one pupil asked the 66-year-old what she thought about abortion, to which she said she replied: “I am a faithful Roman Catholic, and I am against it.”

Morse claims she was fired from her post just hours later and is now taking legal action against Angus Council; her employment tribunal is due to start next month.

In Arbroath, telling the truth is evidently sehr verboten.

I have created Manifold markets for what vote and seat share the parties will get in the next Britian general election, which is due on or before August 2029.

For vote shares:

And for seat shares:

You can go onto the Manifold site and make predictions for either of both of these. It’s play money only so you can’t lose anything -- it’s just a fun way for people to collectively predict things.

The Telegraph says:

Housebuilding in England has fallen to its lowest level in 12 years, casting doubt over Labour’s pledge to build 1.5 million new homes by the end of the decade.

There were just 30,880 homes completed in England in the three months to September 2025, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), down from 34,000 during the same period in 2024.

[...] The figures are likely to pile further pressure on Sir Keir Starmer, who made Labour’s pledge to build 1.5 million homes by 2029 – a key plank of the party’s manifesto.

To meet this target, developers need to complete 300,000 new homes a year. However, just 175,290 homes were completed in England in the 15 months after Labour came to power in July 2024, according to figures from the ONS.

GB News adds:

Labour’s flagship promise to build 1.5 million homes is collapsing under a mountain of red tape, soaring taxes and spiralling building costs, leading experts warn.

The warning comes despite Labour making housebuilding one of its defining missions in government, with a pledge of £39billion over the next decade for affordable and social housing alongside sweeping planning reforms designed to accelerate development.

Despite this, housebuilding completions in England last year were 20.5 per cent lower than in 2022, marking a third consecutive annual decline, according to official figures.

This is partly due to red tape:

Professor Francis said ministers had piled so many extra rules, taxes and levies onto developers that viable building sites are simply disappearing.

He said it was not one individual policy causing the damage but the cumulative weight of more than ten separate regulations and charges introduced by different parts of government.

Each one may appear reasonable in isolation, he said, but together they are making many housing developments impossible to build.

Among the mounting burdens are biodiversity rules, nutrient neutrality requirements, tougher building regulations, higher employers’ National Insurance contributions, increases in the National Living Wage, the Building Safety Levy, new Future Homes Standards, soaring industrial energy bills and fresh steel import tariffs.

The Home Builders Federation estimates those additional costs now add around £76,000 to the cost of a typical new low-rise home built over the past five years.

Starmer wanted to increase housebuilding, but wasn’t able to. The government are pulling on the levers of power, but nothing is actually happening -- it is as if the levers are not in fact connected to anything!

Getting government to actually be able to deliver on its promises is a big underlying problem in how Britain is run. The British state seems unable to get things done.

Tomas Pueyo says clans are bad for society:

Clans are families made up of several generations of siblings and cousins. They can be quite big, if they have lots of children and maintain connections with family members for generations. They’re a pretty natural way for humans to organize, if you think about it: You share your assets with your blood relatives, whom you likely trust more than the average stranger.

Unfortunately, clans have many disadvantages. For example:

• By linking trust to blood, it makes cooperation between clans much harder.

• Cooperation with complete strangers is even harder, because justice is served within clans. If you can’t keep somebody honest because you don’t know their clan, how are you supposed to trust them?

• They prevent ambition, because the success of a single individual is shared across the entire clan. It’s like a huge tax, and taxes on labor reduce labor. Why would you work too hard if the fruits of your labor will be shared with others?

I’ve been reading The WEIRDest People in the World, which advances the idea that the Catholic Church eliminating cousin marriage ended up weakening clans, so people had to start building institutions to coordinate with unrelated people, and that created institutions like guilds, chartered towns, religious orders, universities, companies, or stockmarkets.

This is a reason to ban cousin marriage in the UK. Another reason is to prevent genetic abmormality.

Yahoo reports that most Americans want to seize the AI industry’s wealth:

A Majority of Americans Now Support Seizing Wealth From AI Industry

A new national survey from Versasight suggests that the majority of Americans are down for taking a drastic course of action.

According to the survey of 1,700 adults, an impressive 69 percent of US employees support forcing AI companies to transfer 50 percent of their stock into a public wealth fund, an idea that has been championed by senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT).

“In the eyes of the public, AI Sovereign funds are seen as a tool to distribute the gains from the AI industry back to broader society,” Verasight CEO Benjamin Leff told CNBC News.

69% is over 2/3rds. If America was a democracy this would clearly happen. But it is extremely unlikely to happen, demonstrating that America is not, in fact, a democracy.