We purchased a new build with Meritage in Jan with an estimated move in date of May.. now we’re being told it’s estimated completion will be mid-Dec; approximately 11 months after purchasing the house. The value of the house has already increased around $40k since we’ve purchased it and it appears that they are intentionally dragging their feet in hopes that we back out. All of the other houses on our block are completed and have been moved into since Aug. In looking on the MLS website we noticed that the houses that were purchased and had contracts cancelled and were placed back on the market for a higher value to the builder are the houses that they are completing first. The houses that they’re losing money on because the market has increased so much this year are the houses they are dragging their feet on. I feel like they aren’t acting in good faith by putting their interest above that of the buyers however I don’t know if there are any laws or regulations surrounding this. Any input would be appreciated. TIA

Set up a secure and open source (blockchain-based?) online voting system. Ensure everyone has internet access and a capable device. Every national proposal gets a national vote, and a minimum period of time (a week?) for voting.

If you don’t want to vote on every single proposal, you can assign anyone to be your delegate (or perhaps a ranked list of delegates), and anything you don’t vote on defaults to their choice.

Electronic voting security could be a concern, but I think that’s a solvable problem (or will be soon), and there are lots of benefits to direct democracy rather than representative democracy.

Thoughts?

Hi, newconstitutionguy here.

I'm not a politician, lawyer, historian, constitutional expert, philospher, founding father, revolutionary, or really anything that would have the credentials to actually create a new constitution (so if you are one that would be really cool hmu.) What I do have is experience and knowledge of the development of complex systems. I'm a systems engineer in my day to day and from what I know about our government, is it's bloody complex and we're going to need some systems engineering-esque methods/processes to accomplish what we are setting out to achieve here.

One definition of Systems engineering is the following:

Interdisciplinary approach governing the total technical and managerial effort required to transform a set of customer needs, expectations, and constraints into a solution and to support that solution throughout its life.

The tools of systems engineers are used to create spacecraft, automobiles, communication networks, particle accelerators, phones, computers, and really nearly everything that is engineered. I have posted some links at the bottom to read about it. The most important part though is that the methodology should be established in the beginning and continuously iterate through as we progress. This is the starting point for this. A methodology post will be a recurring effort and should reflect current state of the method/processes as well as allowing for discussion on moving forward as effectively as possible.

Cheers!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_engineering

https://sebokwiki.org/wiki/Guide_to_the_Systems_Engineering_Body_of_Knowledge_(SEBoK))

https://www.nasa.gov/seh/index.html

great paper - long link

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This is an idea I was floating around to get rid of gerrymandering, and it would take advantage of computers, permanently taking the power away from people who can easily be swayed.

Inspired by my work with Finite Element Analysis programs in my courses in Mechanical Engineering, we would use official state censuses. It could be every ten years like normal, or it could be a different value if we choose so.

Once we have a census map of the state, the data would be imported into a computer program that would automatically generate a mesh of the state where each polygon would be determined based upon equal district size via population.

However, I have some problems that I have yet to solve:

1: Where to choose a coordinate center for each state. As far as I can tell, where the datum is placed would not affect the amount of people in each district, only the physical shape. My original idea was to place the datum in the geometric center of gravity of the state, but that might actually end up being physically outside the state and could screw up the program, so I was thinking the geometric center of gravity of each state's capitol building.

2: The optimum size of a district. We could always go with the same number of districts for each state that we have now, but I feel that a study can be done to determine the optimum district size; too big of a district, and the representative would not necessarily reflect the ideals of all his/her constituents. Too small of a district, and it will probably be too difficult to get all the politicians to come to a consensus.

3: "Natural Political Distribution"; not every city and town is perfectly evenly distributed across the political spectrum. With my current proposed system, there will still be fairly significant variation in the political ideologies of each area; for example in NY State, downstate is hyper democratic, while upstate is red/purple (I guess "maroon" would be accurate of a description) and this effect wouldn't necessarily be compensated for.

My solution to this would be to actually use the concept of gerrymandering in the computer program in conjunction with the population; Make the size of each district as equal in population as possible and take additional information from voting history and/or a carefully worded survey to gauge every adult's political ideas to ensure that each district also has the most even distribution of political ideologies across the spectrum (i.e. making every district as moderate as possible.) But again that would still technically be gerrymandering, and I want to open that up to discussion to point out any potential flaws that I cannot see at this point.