An important consideration for those who want to flip the switch for a chance to gain power:

Yes, there's a chance, however small, that you will be a special person and end up with gobs of power... but the same is true for all of those people that you do not like. And there's more people that you do not like than there are of you. Those who were bad people that masked it well to be in your good graces will have new opportunities to mistreat you for whatever reason happens to be handy, and those in power may yet yank the reigns tighter with their new-found advantages. When kicking the mana flow into overdrive, you're not playing the lottery, you're playing Russian roulette with yourself and everything you love and care about.

Just saying, keep that in mind.

Primate?
*Looks at his claws in confusion*

uh oh, guess those stories about the milkMAN may have had a kernel of truth. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

We're not post-awakening YET, buddy! There's no reports of dragons walking about, or super-intelligent apex animals of non-human make, I ain't taking the chance!

You must have missed me at the Philadelphia Geek Awards, then.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/clevergirlpho...157635164661372

That is the worst case of Chicken Pox I have ever seen.

~Dr. Vindaloo

Hey man, I was nominated for an award and Skeletor was presenting!

Spoken like a true advocate of limited suffrage. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

Churchill was an interesting man living in interesting times, but he was quite often misguided when he wasn't flat out in the wrong. This famous quote of his is popular because it is cheeky and memorable - a fine quip to bandy about - but it really isn't accurate to reality in any regard.

Democracy doesn't exist on any national scale. What we typically think of and refer to as "Democracy" is in fact a form "Republic". In a true Democracy, every citizen has a direct vote, and all votes are weighted equally. In a Republic, voting is conducted by elected Representatives who ostensibly vote on the behalf of large numbers of others, and typically the numbers or weights of votes are at least partly disproportionate to the number of citizens whose opinions are ostensibly being represented.

Republic has the benefits of logistical simplicity, in that it is far easier to tally the votes of a small group than of a large group. However, it has the supreme detriment of vote inequality, where the say of substantial numbers of individuals are not accurately represented. For example, in a district which has narrowly split opinion on a particular topic of concern, yet for which there can be only one vote cast by that district's representative, what would in reality be something like a 47/53 split of opinion gets reduced to a simple binary vote of 0/1 - in effect, distorting the truth of a narrowly divided populace into the fiction of a completely unified one.

Add in other problems like Gerrymandering, impartial representatives, non-proportional vote valuation, et cetera, and it becomes essentially impossible to accurately represent the true Democratic will of the people via a Republic. Instead of producing exact measures of public opinion and will, the system produces wildly inaccurate approximations that can be purposefully manipulated by corrupt parties. It turns what ought to be an absolute science of measuring the desires of the populace into a perverse exercise in game theory, with the prize being vested authority and power for whomever can exploit the flawed design of the system.

But hey, being an advocate of Representative government, I guess Churchill was fine with a rough approximation of reality that suited his own personal agenda rather than the actual thing. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/rotfl.gif)

/off topic

~Umi

Interestingly, Churchill also made the following statement

Well, to be fair to Churchill (not that one must be, of course), a genuinely representative government (which is in fact often known as a "representative democracy") was far less technologically feasible in his day, when telegraphs were still in routine use, and telephones were largely connected by hand. In our day, though, there is precious little reason that it couldn't be done (though many reasons that it won't be done, few of them good!).

His comment also made more sense when one was looking at democracy versus monarchy and aristocracy, with the change to a "proper" democracy being fairly recent. Sixty or more years on, it seems like many of the perceived advantages of democracy over that system have been eroded.

That said, a more direct democracy, genuinely representative of public opinion, might well be a very mixed bag, as watch polls of the public's opinions tends to suggest - government would likely be more open, less warlike, less imperialistic and perhaps fairer to enfranchised citizens. At the same time, it would frequently be wildly and dangerously irrational on scientific or rational matters (as dumb and corrupt as politicians can be on this, they are not as dumb as Joe Public), and would make some spectacularly bad knee-jerk decisions, all of which "seemed like a good idea at the time".

It would also be less vulnerable to traditional lobbying, wherein business (or other wealthy) interests target a few key individuals and crypto-bribe (or just straight-up bully) them into helping their agenda, but far more vulnerable to the less-traditional-in-the-US method of using private control of the press to strongly influence public opinion. It would also mean that the press' love of running with a nonsense-story because it sells papers (or click-thrus or whatever) would be a vastly larger problem. A good example of this is in the UK at the moment, where, thanks almost entirely to the press basically obsessing about and telling lies about immigration for the better part of a decade, immigration, which is in reality, a non-issue, has become an absolutely huge issue. For no good reason at all other than it winds people up and most of the British public is a bit racist (not viciously, but...). The whole thing basically started as an issue to distract people from the whole "Whoa bankers screwed the economy!" thing.

Of course, one upside is that if people were voting more directly, they might feel more responsible for their results of their action, so when people are being hurt because of a dumb law, they can't say "Well I voted for that party but just for tax reasons!", they'll have to own up to it. So perhaps we'd see fewer vicious/evil laws.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaanway, getting way off-topic but your point was interesting!



As for pushing the button, well, was it ever established if VITAS is connected to magic returning? I know HMHVV (or however it's spelled!) is. So anyone pushing the button now, rather than slowing things down is essentially murdering billions of people, pretty much at random. Which makes it more or less impossible to morally justify. Indeed, you'd be history's greatest monster by a pretty large margin! That's not even accounting for all the wars and so on.

So personally, assuming I know this stuff, I would push the slow-down button, not the speed up button. If I didn't know the consequences, I'd probably leave well enough alone, and just attempt to publicize what I knew, particularly about the artifact.

Fortunately, the average opinion of 100 people is more accurate than any single opinion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOucwX7Z1HU

OTOH, that only works in a true democracy. As you slide through republic and over into Oligarchy (which the USA is, according to Princeton), that "average" result gets more and more skewed.