@logiczombie reblogged this and brought it to my attention, which I appreciate, because this is becoming more important as governments are deprecated and decisions about necessities require our attention when governments don't make them for us anymore.

"Neither is technology hostile or evil in itself, nor are humans."

Given our recent discussions, note my assumption that stuff isn't conscious and therefore cannot be evil. However, humans sure are conscious, can be evil, and some are, so I both agree completely with one part of the statement and disagree completely with another. How do I rank that? In the movie 'The Gods Must be Crazy' the San people were afflicted by a coke bottle that fell from the sky. The salvation of the people required the coke bottle to be thrown off the edge of the world, not because it was evil, but because it was so good that people became evil to get it. The people were good, except in the presence of the lone coke bottle (presumably, had a six pack fallen from the sky, there'd have been the possibility to share them). Are people good or evil? Is crack or heroin evil?

I do not grade people on a scale from 1 - 7.5B on how evil they are, which, could I do it, would produce some grade I would think was most accurate. My scale is more like 1 - 5, with no one but me being 1 on the scale, and only Satan himself being 5. On second thought, I am not a 1 on the scale either, nor am I sure Satan doesn't feed his dog, bumping him up to a possible 4. I can't actually know people - even myself - to give them grades, and functionally resort to racism as a coping mechanism. Do I grade the Ossetians, the Georgians, the former Soviets, or Caucasians, when considering the conflict from 2008?

This is the problem I have with your experiment. Some of the questions cannot be given the hours of consideration necessary to actually relegate to them a specific ranking, and due to incomplete information and understanding I can't make a decision between midgrade scoring with absolute confidence. There's things I reckon necessary, things I reckon intolerable, and a grade or two in between at the level of consideration I am willing to undertake without objection.

This is the case with almost all consensus decisions we face in life. We have shit to do, and we can't wrangle over the myriad details and reasons we don't like Chinese food or do like German for days. Folks that simply support one thing they like and max dislike everything else can simply not find the other choices worthy of consideration and be willing to not participate at all if their one acceptable choice isn't available. The kids could just have gone hungry instead of eating nutriloaf, and Mom and Dad should have objected to that choice because of how their kids felt about it, rather than having no objection to it at all.

Then there's decisions in which our vote makes no difference at all. No one cares where I think the next battle in Ukraine should be held, nor that I think it shouldn't be held at all. I don't give these matters consideration because I think I can influence those decisions, but because understanding them best enables me to dodge the flailing of the wooden mannequins.

This is salient regarding political elections, when both candidates (in the USA we end up with two choices) are unacceptable, as they always are. Why discuss their platforms when both candidates are lying out their asses and will simply accept the fattest bribes to betray us? In Germany presently the Greens are a leading party. Is one of the planks of the platform of the Greens to war against Russia to the last Ukrainian, or another to destroy the German economy and drag Europe into an economic abyss after them? Neither of these questions are available to us to rank, but are the salient questions that are being answered in practice by duplicity of the evil Rand corporation and it's ilk.

If I had just considered your actual questions and answered them I'd have spent less time answering this post. Instead I have let us both down, and hopefully done something more useful by showing the potential to rank choices itself can be weaponized and used to prevent people from having useful options, such as having cryptocurrency instead of fiat and supporting corrupt government, rather than voting for either Trump or Bidet, AfD or the Greens. Your list doesn't avail me the option of choosing none of the above.

It's a trap.

Thanks!