An alternative would be to select representatives by lot. It would get rid of a political class, would automatically be representative (so no arguments about whether women, minorities, whoever are fairly represented) and not select for people who want power and it would mean people have the same amount of time as those in the current system.

> I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance.

The best way to do this is through a combination of subsidiarity and constitutional rights.

You have a central government but its primary purpose is to set out and uphold fundamental rights. It essentially sets out what the local governments can't do, so you can't have ex post facto laws, censor speech, detain people without trial, try to enforce local laws on actions performed in remote jurisdictions, etc.

In particular, the central government should not be in the business of regulating private conduct. Only the local governments do that.

Then you don't have to be worried about appropriations for road maintenance in some other county because you don't live there. Whereas the appropriations in your county are coming out of your pocket, and aren't such a far away thing that your vote is being diluted into irrelevance, so then maybe you want to be paying some attention to that.

>Is there such a thing as "unbiased public opinion" at all though?

Doesn't really matter except philosophically. There's something close enough to unbiased public opinion when there are no government propaganda campaings, censorship, press owned by conglomerates, and corporate messaging.

I think everyone can agree that having O(100M) people vote on every local initiative is absurd.

But a lot of countries are somewhere on the "direct" vs "representative" spectrum. The US actually abnormally lacking in direct mechanisms, for example. See

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

The Swiss succeeded in this, maybe we should look at their model and improve.

The best level of democracy is no democracy. The problem of voting for road repairs is a problem we created by democracy. We voted ourselves into a system we can't escape, just because people back in the days couldn't fully comprehend side effects of their collective decisions.

Very few people realize that there is option to not use government cohersion as a solution to everything.

I know this is unpopular opinion. The system is designed for this to be unpopular opinion.

But the problem is not the democracy, but the level of power we give to the government. If the only power of government would be to pick flag colors and national anthem, no one would care about it.

No one cares about UK having a king, because it doesn't change a thing.

> The idea of privacy will become associated with crime.

The risk is there but it is not a given. The debate is not new, it's been going on for decades. It's a permanent struggle.

Do you acknowledge that for many people and practically e2ee and crime are connected? e2ee is a very useful tool for crime and combined with crypto useful tool for monetizing crime. Criminals used to speak in code, meet clandestine, use burner phones and websites were easy to shut down. Now they don't need to.

The solution to privacy problem is not to shout while closing your ears but to make it clear that you see their side, how new tech create new problems, and help solve it in least privacy invasive ways.

Otherwise you will always be seen as somebody who has shady agenda. It's just reality. Ordinary people do not care about e2ee. Gotta read the room.

But chat control and age verification are different things.

Analogy:

Cancer surgery is an extremely important decision, directly affecting many people's lives.

What happened with Brexit was a analogous a bunch of salesmen on TV saying "that mysterious ache you have, don't listen to doctors who say it's fine, call our surgical team today! It's cancer! We can fix this quickly and you'll be back to your old self within a week!" for two decades, then the country agreeing, going to surgery, and waking up to find they'd had half their liver removed, the post-surgical biopsy results said it was fine and not cancerous at all, it took 6 months to recover and they could never drink alcohol again. And the ache was still there.

If it had been an honest "we know it will cost X, we are willing to spend this because otherwise what is the point of money", that would have been totally fair.

Instead, problems that weren't caused by the EU were blamed on it for decades, while the benefits of membership were treated as the natural state of the world to the extent that talk of losing them was equated with "being punished".

Should we also have a referendum on reducing the tax rate to zero? It would also be an extremely important decision, directly affecting everybody's life. If asking people about anything, then isn't that what it should be?

Not all referenda that might win a "yes" vote are sensible to propose.

The pro-remain campaign lied too and I would argue a great deal more. Take a look at the predictions of the immediate effect of Brexit vote (for 1017-18) on page 9 of the Treasury report: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a80772140f0b...

This whole argument is why we do not have more direct democracy. The people in power and people who benefit from the status quo do not want the hoi polloi taking the "wrong" decisions. We might end up nationalising things or taxing big business effectively or all sorts of terrible things. Better to just give people the illusion of choice by letting them choose between two "neo-liberal" parties.