Brave Tech World

November 1, 2006

    Michael J. Fox is right -- No, I'm not talking about Stem Cell research (he is right about that too) -- I'm talking about the phrase "What you do in Missouri matters for millions of Americans". Nobody will question the factual validity of that statement (wait, some idiot will). A Senator from Missouri will be voting on the same laws that a senator from any other state, and most of those laws will affect the entire nation.

    Now, I already said that "geography-based voting" is kind of wrong. So, when the US decides to invade or occupy a country, or when the US decides to apply importation taxes on another country's oranges so that local producers can better compete on price, or, when the US decides to build a fence on its border is a matter that affects the entire nation. Heck, it actually affects multiple nations. Sometimes the entire world is affected by US decisions. No question that US is the biggest (only) super power in the world today.

    Wouldn't be fairer if the entire world would be able to vote for the US president and senators?

    Now, to be fair, most of the decisions on Washington DC only affect US citizens (and foreigners living here), so, the entire world might have a weighted vote of, let's say, only 20%.

    For example, if candidate A got 51% of the vote inside the US and the world voted 25% to candidate A, then the weighted total vote for candidate A is 45.8% (51%x80% + 25%x20%), which means that candidate B wins the election.

    Now to be fair, this shouldn't be a change in the US election process only. Most countries have affects on their neighboors and trading partners, so the same type of logic some be used. Let's pick any country, like Belize in Central America. This is a small country that doesn't have a lot of international trade, so, less of the world vote should count, and probably only the direct partners and neighbors could have an influence.

    Tell me, wouldn't that be much more fair?

PS: Note to self: Can we use PageRank to calculate the weight of each country vote? Better yet, let's do a PeopleRank where each people is influenced by each other and that amount of influence defines how much he can influence back on the original person's life.

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