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Citizens' chambers: towards an activism of selection by lot
Posted on November 27, 2018 by Nicholas Gruen
In a paper, previously linked to on this blog, James Fishkin identifies some potential shortcomings of citizen's chambers which justify his own preference for ad hoc, and temporary citizens' panels. I think he makes some good points. I think his arguments need further exploration which I do in the first half of this post before articulating a more general unease at where Fishkin and many protagonists of sortition are coming from.
His central concerns with a citizen's chamber are that it might:
have insufficient technical expertise
be susceptible to corruption and
not maintain the high quality "conditions for deliberation" that have been achieved in more ad hoc citizens' juries.
These are legitimate concerns. But they have a 'theoretical' ring to me. Firstly Fishkin doesn't provide much evidence that these problems would arise or if they did how bad they'd be. Secondly, he also fails to compare the likely problems with existing similar problems in the existing chambers. I'll go through these arguments regarding each of the claims in a little more detail below before proceeding to my more general concern.
If someone can suggest a means by which one or two hundred people can represent the polity and not lack expertise in all the functions of government, I'll be interested to hear it. Perhaps a random selection from the great unwashed will be less technically expert than elected representatives. For instance, in wealthy countries today, over 90 percent of elected political representatives are university educated compared with around half the population. But that greater level of education comes with its own blind spots as we're discovering. Moreover, a university graduate in law or psychology won't be much help in steering fiscal policy and in that regard, the people's elected representatives often rely in such matters on delegation to independent experts and being advised by experts. But this comes with the territory.
Another skill is humility – knowing and conceding the limits of one's knowledge. It is also morally worthy and important to compromise between perspectives and interests which is the essence of democracy. My guess is that those chosen by sortition would be more attuned to the limits of their own expertise – and, one can also hope, to the limits of expertise itself – both because of they were relatively less educated but also because they had not sought the job and had nothing to prove.
It's possible that less well-educated people would dismiss expertise altogether. However, for the best part of the last decade elected politicians, particularly on the right in the US and Australia began habitually discounting what appears to be robust climate science whilst they and their fellow travellers received generous funding from vested interests which benefited from such stances.
It is unclear to me that ordinary citizens are more susceptible to corruption than our elected representatives. Indeed elected representatives are actually inured to a soft kind of corruption and careerism by which I mean not just party discipline overriding their consciences but also in the access politics now gives to post-politics career opportunities. Ex-politicians are already well connected with existing ones giving them advantages in lobbying their former colleagues. But it's worse than this. Certain vested interests which can make or lose billions depending on government decisions (for instance banks and providers of privately funded infrastructure) are already gaining a reputation for looking after ex-politicians who have previously treated them well.
To the extent that members of citizens' chambers turn over more often than career politicians and have less direct access to ministerial decision making the risk from the citizens' chamber seems correspondingly less. Their influence as lobbyists is also likely to be less given their lack of connection with a political party and establishment.
I also think they'd be more resistant to soft corruption. I recall when Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull faced down parliamentarians from 'micro-parties' in the Senate (unlikely politicians who managed to scrape into parliament on very slender primary votes by doing deals with other parties). The hard-heads in the Press Gallery suggested that this was a masterstroke because it would give them a career interest in supporting the Prime Minister's agenda. But the Press Gallery were judging these political newbies by the standards of career politicians. Representatives from the micro-parties proved more resistant to such blandishments and threats based on their political interests than career politicians.
Maintaining good conditions for deliberation
Fishkin makes his third point – that a citizens' chamber might be antithetical to the careful deliberation as follows:
If the roles and behaviors of randomly selected full-time legislators were anything like the ones we are familiar with for legislators in modern society, then there would be a host of behaviors outside any such deliberative structure. There would be many individual meetings, caucuses, efforts at coalition building or even caucus or party formation, and meetings with lobbyists, staff, and constituents. Individual representatives might deliberate or they might not. But we have no institutional design to predict reliably that they would.
This is holding a citizens' chamber to an infinitely higher standard than elected representatives all around the world whose collective conduct has more or less comprehensively emptied deliberation from their chambers thus traducing the meticulous designs of their founders – for instance of the founders of the United States Constitution. There are negotiation and coalition building on the rare occasions where the government doesn't have the numbers or there's a conscience vote, but otherwise, the system we have is all declamation rather than deliberation to arrive at a better position.
Towards sortition as activism
More generally, I fear a kind of squeamishness in Fishkin's arguments, that he's making the best to be the enemy of the good. Right now we have a terrible deliberative deficit in representative democracy. I think it's self-evident that greater use of sortition can address that in a powerful way. It won't be perfect, but then we're talking about democracy – so it can't be. Even if caucusing and coalition building became the norm within a citizens' chamber, it would all be in the service of a collectively deliberative purpose. In each and every case, conduct within the chamber and in its corridors or offline would all be directed towards the ultimate goal of persuading those who'd not yet decided, a great rarity today in elected chambers today.
I agree with what I presume Fishkin thinks – that a critical role of sortition is to help guard against excessive polarisation in our politics. But, thinking of great political leaders – whether activists outside mainstream party politics like Martin Luther King or those within it like Abraham Lincoln – we need to vigorously assert the alternative legitimacy we claim. When King stood on the bridge at Selma, when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation they were doing that – simply asserting an alternative legitimacy to the one that had dominated politics until that time.
There were no trials to be run and no presumption that they could comfortably roll out this new world without struggle and without problems which needed to be addressed as they arose. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt called for "bold persistent experimentation" something our existing system now renders incredibly difficult if that experimentation treads on important toes or can be easily traduced and misrepresented in political combat, he was asserting the urgency of that need and the impossibility of meeting it with perfect safety. As he put it to the graduating students he was talking to that day "As you have viewed this world of which you are about to become a more active part, I have no doubt that you have been impressed by its chaos, its lack of plan."
For me, until I see evidence that sortition won't do what we all think it can, I want to find ways of asserting its legitimacy against the legitimacy and power of the current system, not in order to replace it, but to introduce itself as a check and balance, and so to heal it as we move towards a more mixed constitution (with representation by election and sortition each contributing). That's why I proposed a 'Brexit Deliberation Day' and actually got quite close to getting it funded. But of course it didn't fit anyone's agenda because, though I think we know what it would have shown – a swing on deliberation away from Brexit – I couldn't guarantee what the outcome would be to any funder and I didn't want it to be an anti-Brexit exercise in any event. The goal was to surface the considered will of the people on such a critical matter, whatever it might be. I also couldn't get funding from the promoters of sortition because they don't want to rock the boat too much. Note how the citizens' jury that was run on Brexit was assiduous in seeking to avoid re-litigating Brexit, assiduous in other words in not asserting the legitimacy of sortition to challenge the status quo.
I agree that coalition building, caucuses of groups and so on within the citizens' chamber could charge the atmosphere somewhat. But I see these things as part of making an idea real. Of course, it'll have costs, as any unfolding of sortition into the harsh reality of navigating real politics will. But it will also have benefits and I think they'll outweigh the costs.
For instance for as long as we are concerned by these things we'll stay in charge of the process. We'll govern it, and if it's to mature into a successful contributor to our politics it must begin to govern itself. So I'd like to see the issue of factionalism and also the question of how those with less advantages get a fair say being owned by those in the chamber rather than managed by facilitators from outside. In that regard, one might provide services to the citizens' chamber and seek its own input on establishing systems of governance to deliver such things – if the chamber itself considers them valuable, which I have little doubt it would.
The kinds of mechanisms practiced today to keep citizens' juries in deliberative mode, which seem to be the ones Fishkin is appealing to given his emphasis on sticking with tried and tested experience seem to position the citizens' chamber as no more than advising the lawmakers, the real politicians – in the executive and in the legislature (which, I might add is already failing to hold the executive to account.)
Our existing policy system is so degraded in deliberative capability, so riven with careerism and manipulation from the top that Australia recently abolished carbon pricing against the better judgement of what I would imagine was over three-quarters of its parliamentarians. The UK is engineering something similar with Brexit against the better judgement of its parliamentarians, political polling now underway and against the best evidence of what citizens appear to think once they've deliberated on the question. So I want citizens' chambers to come to challenge the status quo at its worst.
One of the ways that has to happen is that an eco-system has to develop around sortition which can take up that challenge. Fiskin acknowledges this where he talks about needing mechanisms that are "connected enough to the political fray that the selected proposals have actual proponents advocating them to the electorate". I can't see how sortition can come of age until this stage is reached. I don't know whether Fishkin has in mind that these advocates coming from within the sortition body or outside, but I think of the body as a field in which some people will come to be leaders. I hope the way they emerge will reflect what I think of the ethos of community service rather than self-assertion. We may not agree on which ones are good and which bad – in a democracy that's a feature not a bug.
If one is concerned at giving too much power to such a body early on it can be made advisory only. If one is still concerned that it sets a precedent or otherwise prejudices the way we develop these ideas, we can subject it to sunset clauses, establishing a citizens' chamber for the life of a legislature after which it would lapse unless extended. And one can expand their power and the tenure of the chamber and/or its members as one gains experience. When we have it we can proceed (conservatively) according to the evidence we generate.
I couldn't see Fishkin mention super-majorities but surely this is the way to deal with concerns that a chamber might not be sufficiently representative. It's certainly how we deal with it in juries – requiring very ample majorities to be dispositive. If over 60 percent of a randomly selected chamber of 200 people think something I'm comfortable that it represents the considered will of the people. I also think giving a super majority of a citizens' chamber the power to impose a secret ballot on a chamber it disagrees with offers a safety valve. It's saying nothing more than that a super-majority representing the considered will of the people has a right to insist that if the contrary view of another chamber is to have force it tolerably represents not just the state of party discipline but also the private wisdom of the chamber. I can't see what there's not to like.
Finally we can't really ever run proper experiments with giving such bodies real power and influence until we do so as power and influence change the game. So we have to have some minimal level of boldness. I'll finish by quoting the same speech in which Roosevelt called for "bold persistent experimentation" ditching what fails and capitalising on what works:
Probably few will disagree that the goal is desirable. Yet many, of faint heart, fearful of change, sitting tightly on the roof-tops in the flood, will sternly resist striking out for it, lest they fail to attain it. Even among those who are ready to attempt the journey there will be violent differences of opinion as to how it should be made. So complex, so widely distributed over our whole society are the problems which confront us that men and women of common aim do not agree upon the method of attacking them. Such disagreement leads to doing nothing, to drifting. Agreement may come too late.
Filed under: Academia, Sortition |
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Roger Knights, on November 27, 2018 at 6:46 pm said:
Re corruption, two points:
1. Would-be bribers, especially if established big businesses with lots to lose, could be in very hot water from attempting to bribe, or even just attempt to sway privately, a cit-rep, if they approached a target who declined and blabbed about it to the media, or who clued in the secretariat, which then "wired" all potential targets and set a trap for bribers. This would greatly discourage attempted bribery.
2. The secretariat could employ "fake" bribers (perhaps recruited from convicted con-men) to test cit-reps, who would be harshly penalized if they failed to report such an attempt, as they had been told they must do. This would greatly discourage "real" bribers from making any attempt.
tbouricius, on November 27, 2018 at 11:38 pm said:
While I agree with much of your rebuttal of Fishkin's concerns, there are also many points you make that I disagree with.
The crux of my view is that the model of an all-purpose legislative chamber is a poor design choice for sortition, (and is also a terrible choice for an elected legislative process — though for different reasons). Anyone interested in a fuller explanation of why it would be better to have an array of single-issue sortition bodies, rather than a single one modeled on existing elected chambers can read about it in a paper I published :
"Why Hybrid Bicameralism Is Not Right for Sortition," in the Journal _Politics & Society_, Vol. 46 Iss. 3, Sept. 2018 ( slightly longer earlier version of this paper is available without a pay wall at Academia.edu here:
https://www.academia.edu/37578530/Why_Hybrid_Bicameralism_is_Not_Right_for_Sortition
Below is the abstract for that paper I mentioned above. Although the abstract focuses on the negative effects of maintaining an elected chamber along side a sortition one, the paper also discusses why an all-purpose chamber is a mistake for sortition even if there is no elected chamber in addition.
"This paper examines structural problems with pairing two chambers, one selected by election and the other by sortition, into a traditional bicameral system. I argue that utilizing an all-purpose legislative chamber, modeled on existing elected chambers, is a mismatch for sortition, and that purported benefits of maintaining partisan elections alongside sortition are illusory. I then argue that any alleged benefits of a hybrid bicameral system are outweighed by a variety of harmful effects. Furthermore, even if these harms are not substantiated, the continued existence of an elected chamber will likely result in the delimitation of the sortition chamber. I argue that combining many different sorts of mini-publics with different characteristics and functions is preferable, and present a possible multi-body sortition legislative system. Finally, I propose an alternative way forward for sortition by peeling away individual topic areas from elected bodies and transferring them to sortition bodies."
Roger Knights, on November 28, 2018 at 12:16 am said:
tbouricius>: I agree 100%. Another benefit: topical specialization is needed to provide publics with a something finely divided enough for them to master; and to enable mere citizens to serve in their spare time, over the Internet, as their electees. (If a system involving elected legislators is installed.)
PS to my comment above on corruption: Targets of bribery and/or intimidation could not only be penalized for failing to report such events, but also rewarded for doing so.
Nicholas Gruen:> "… over 90 percent of elected political representatives are university educated compared with around half the population. But that greater level of education comes with its own blind spots as we're discovering. … Another skill is humility – knowing and conceding the limits of one's knowledge. It is also morally worthy and important to compromise between perspectives and interests which is the essence of democracy. My guess is that those chosen by sortition would be more attuned to the limits of their own expertise – and, one can also hope, to the limits of expertise itself …."
Nicholas Gruen:> ".. I think of the body as a field in which some people will come to be leaders. I hope the way they emerge will reflect what I think of the ethos of community service rather than self-assertion.
Humility—modesty would be a better term—is something that is lacking in all-too-many politicians. It's not only because they are partisanly arrogant (they think they and their party have "The Answers") and personally ambitious; "The System" requires them to aggressively "seek the office" and "win" their seats, which usually gives them an immodest swelled head and the illusion of having a mandate to do as they and their party please. A modesty-enhancing sortition-based System would in comparison tend to "seek the man" and bestow the office.
Needing to strive to achieve a "one-up" status—and what comes along with achieving it (long-term nemesis)—is what's wrong with the world. The world must be turned upside down. Giving the Fates a vote, via sortition, is a necessary step toward righting the world. Humanity must step away from "being in charge" and settle for "having an influence." I.e., it must give up on being one-up or "number one." Something similar in spirit is, "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."
Another step toward reversing the polarity of politics occurred to me last month. I'll favor y'all with it when the moon comes over the mountain.
Fishkin:> "there would be a host of behaviors outside any such deliberative structure. There would be many individual meetings, caucuses, efforts at coalition building or even caucus or party formation, and meetings with lobbyists, staff, and constituents."
This could be avoided by requiring assemblies to assemble only online, where members would be identifiable only by their user-names and avatars. and by prohibiting members from attempting to communicate with one another elsewhere than on the cit-reps' forum. Cit-reps would be required to report attempted communications from cit-rep insiders as well as from outsiders (as described in my comment on corruption above).
Fishkin:> "Individual representatives might deliberate or they might not. But we have no institutional design to predict reliably that they would."
Nicholas Gruen:> "… for as long as we are concerned by [should be "about"] these things we'll stay in charge of the process. We'll govern it, and if it's to mature into a successful contributor to our politics it must begin to govern itself. So I'd like to see the issue of factionalism and also the question of how those with less advantages get a fair say being owned by those in the chamber rather than managed by facilitators from outside."
Terry Bouricius's Rules and/or Oversight mini-publics could handle the job. Plus, there'd be the safety, in the initial period, of procedures not being cast in concrete, and with the assembly's explicit charter stating that it can expect some outside body to make in-flight corrections. I suggest also that sociologists or political scientists or their students be inserted as observer-sensors in the assembly as reporters to the Overseers.
"… Facilitators from the outside" will arouse suspicions of bias among some in the general public, especially in regards to selection of what informational material will be presented, particularly in value-laden areas of controversy. Outsider-partisans and cranks will howl if their "information" isn't presented at all, and seek to delegitimize the system. So such outside facilitators should be supplemented by providing a way for outsiders to at least get a word in edgewise.
I suggest that the assembly deputize an ad hoc committee (by BalLotery), or assign to the Oversight mini-public, the task of allotting time- (for videos) and space-slices for material not proposed by facilitators. This objection to facilitators will be a stumbling block, so even though I believe that facilitators would rarely choose unwisely, and that fringe input would mostly be unwise and disruptive, I also believe the it must be allowed in, to a limited extent. (Forcing fringe promoters to be concise would often assist actually their cause.) If and when the cit-reps in the assembly and/or Oversight bodies become more fringy themselves, more such material would be added to the background information packet.
Nicholas Gruen:> "Franklin Delano Roosevelt called for 'bold persistent experimentation.' …
Right! Ready-squad, fire-away, and aim (by adopting the aiming point of whoever best hit the target)! Let's deliberately, at say the State level, implement different sortition-type organizational arrangements at the county and city levels. Then our states will be truly "laboratories for democracy."
States could also decide to deliberately differentiate their own-level initial implementations of citocratic features from what earlier-adopting States had chosen, for experimental purposes. Political scientists and statisticians could advise them on how to do this most usefully.
Nicholas Gruen:> "… until I see evidence that sortition won't do what we all think it can, I want to find ways of asserting its legitimacy against the legitimacy and power of the current system, not in order to replace it, but to introduce itself as a check and balance, and so to heal it as we move towards a more mixed constitution (with representation by election and sortition each contributing)."
YES! It's a stepwise, tentative journey from where we are now. A home-improvement project, not a raze-and-replace operation. I.e., by not eliminating elections of some sort, at least not initially.
Nicholas Gruen:> "an eco-system has to develop around sortition …. Fishkin acknowledges this where he talks about needing mechanisms that are 'connected enough to the political fray that the selected proposals have actual proponents advocating them to the electorate.' I can't see how sortition can come of age until this stage is reached. I don't know whether Fishkin has in mind that these advocates coming from within the sortition body or outside …."
My "Demarchy …" thread here on EBL proposes that proponents of both alternative and in-place policies and personnel regularly appear in the inter-election period (for topic-specialized cit-legislators) before their cit-electors. That's one way to handle it. "Fringe" and small-minority advocates would get less time, as described above. They'd eventually win larger shares of time, in accordance with their place in the ranked-choice-type voting cit-electors would perform. (Citizen-electors might even perform time-slice-only ranked-choice voting after each inter-electoral gathering.)
My thread also proposes an infrastructure of Ancillary groups, all balancing and checking and influencing one another—and the cit-electors too, to some degree.
Nicholas Gruen:> "… super-majorities … surely .. is the way to deal with concerns that a chamber might not be sufficiently representative. It's certainly how we deal with it in juries – requiring very ample majorities to be dispositive."
Great minds …
Nicholas Gruen:> If over 60 percent of a randomly selected chamber of 200 people think something I'm comfortable that it represents the considered will of the people.
60% seems like a high bar, maybe too high. How about 57%? People (e.g., Obama) are familiar with Heinz's 57 varieties.
Nicholas Gruen:> "Right now we have a terrible deliberative deficit in representative democracy. I think it's self-evident that greater use of sortition can address that in a powerful way." "Roosevelt … was asserting the urgency of that need …." "That's why I proposed a 'Brexit Deliberation Day' …."
An indirect strategy, which I prefer, would be surround the political system with citocratic social structures. For instance, why can't a group of sortitionistas among professors try to get a group of colleges to agree to serve as coordinated testing labs for what could be sold as the Next Big Thing in politics: sortitionism. Administrators or pol.-sci. departments would likely give the green light, and the student body (or the student council) could be then asked to agree. (Or maybe those entities should be asked first, and the academics second.) It shouldn't be hard. Students mostly view student councils and their members as nerds and pests.
(I once participated in promoting a successful, low-effort petition to actually abolish an ivy-league college's student government. So a less radical, and explicitly temporary, and "for (political) science" endeavor should have an even easier task, especially if endorsed by the college's relevant academic departments.)
Next target: citocratic oversight bodies (COBs) in the workplace. I can see this possibly becoming a cause taken up by many partisan groups and sweeping the nation in the blink of Miss Liberty's eye (e.g., two years to get to 15% penetration, say—representing over a thousand organizations), after which the nascent megatrend would be clear to all, and serious sortitionizing in the political domain would ensue.
Nicholas Gruen:> "It won't be perfect, but then we're talking about democracy – so it can't be."
Beautifully put.
keithsutherland, on November 28, 2018 at 2:24 pm said:
Nick:> Fishkin identifies some potential shortcomings of citizen's chambers which justify his own preference for ad hoc, and temporary citizens' panels.
OK, but that doesn't mean that the role of latter should be purely advisory. The working examples from antiquity (the 4th century nomothetic panels) and modernity (Fishkin's Zegou DP) indicate that ad hoc temporary panels can exercise (de facto) statutory powers in an intelligent and responsible manner. Terry has provided convincing reasons why general-purpose legislatures are sub-optimal and the notion of a general-purpose allotted legislature is nothing more than a thought experiment based on a flawed template. Fishkin has over two decades experience with ad hoc allotted bodies and has argued at length that such bodies are the best (or, possibly, the only) way of discovering the informed preferences of citizens in large multicultural states. So we should encourage him to pursue his research programme to its obvious conclusions.
tbouricius, on November 28, 2018 at 2:52 pm said:
So many thoughts are triggered, but in this post I will just touch on two of them…
On transition to sortition:
A good way to transition to a sortition-based democracy is by peeling away one issue area at a time from the elected legislature, and vesting final authority in an allotted body instead. Politicians would simply no longer be involved in those policy areas. For example, a nation's healthcare system could be democratically governed using sortition. The elected politicians might even happily be rid of certain issues. This is the camel's nose under the tent flap. Yoram Gat has suggested one likely initial field for sortition being oversight of politicians in terms of ethics and corruption with power to punish or remove. It might also be opportune to place control of NEW areas needing democratic control under sortition instead of bodies appointed by politicians… such as control of a region's street corner video surveillance cameras (that are widespread in many areas, and create the risk of a turn-key totalitarianism if the government goes bad).
The idea is to peel away issue areas over time until the elected chambers are dealing with fewer and fewer public policy issues. The elected legislature might persist, but like the monarchies of Europe become rather toothless over time.
On the issue of super-majorities:
Often failing to reach a super-majority to make a decision IS making a decision (to maintain the status quo), so a super-majority rule simply enshrines minority rule and is undemocratic. The better procedure if an allotted mini-public makes a very close vote, is to convene another mini-public, (probably larger to assure statistical representativeness) to examine the issue again, and if it comes to the same decision, it passes. Each mini-public must use a 50%+ majority threshold. In this case that minority can only delay, but we keep the vital majority rule. The only possible role for a super-majority threshold is an accelerated process, or defeating a veto if some such procedure is provided.
Yoram Gat, on November 29, 2018 at 6:28 am said:
> More generally, I fear a kind of squeamishness in Fishkin's arguments, that he's making the best to be the enemy of the good.
I think you are being a quite bit too generous here. This is not about aiming for the best. It is about dread of democracy.
Fishkin, and many others of similar mind, are unhappy with the status quo, but they are certainly unwilling to replace it with democracy. So they are on a quest to fix certain aspects of the status quo while making very sure that power is not equalized. They want elite rule, but it has to be the right elite, so their proposals are about empowering a certain kind of elite by giving them the legitimacy of popular support. In the past, elections were exactly this legitimization mechanism. However, Fishkin et al. feel that currently elections can no longer be relied upon to empower the right people and so the mechanism must be changed. But whatever mechanism is proposed it is not aimed at being a democratization mechanism but rather a mechanism for elite empowerment.
keithsutherland, on November 29, 2018 at 7:48 am said:
Yoram:> Fishkin, and many others of similar mind . . . want elite rule, but it has to be the right elite, so their proposals are about empowering a certain kind of elite by giving them the legitimacy of popular support.
Presumably this is a reference to Fishkin's reliance on exogenous expert advocacy to provide 'balanced' information to the deliberative forum. But, given that we are proposing that the DP verdict should have statutory power — with a decision that is binding on everybody, not just the few hundred randomly-selected members — what is the alternative? If you take the case of a binary decision like Brexit, on which UK citizens appear to be evenly divided, it is essential that the advocacy matches this. In my proposal advocacy would be provided by the two official camps approved by the Electoral Commission, and the preservation of balance would be in the hands of the judge appointed to chair the proceedings. Your competing model would (presumably) be to select a random sample and then leave it to the allotted members to decide on the information and expert guidance they choose. But given that most citizens are poorly informed on most political issues and the inevitable imbalance between the perceived status and persuasiveness of different members of the assembly, how will you ensure that the resultant deliberations would accurately reflect the informed preferences of the target population? So why should the vast majority of citizens excluded from the process agree to be bound by the decision?
>they are certainly unwilling to replace [the status quo] with democracy.
That's because Fishkin, like his mentor Robert Dahl, is aware that the achievement of democracy in large multicultural states is a complex matter. I agree with Andre that Fishkin is a democrat (unlike Habermas, Dryzek and others who believe in pure deliberation).
Nicholas Gruen, on November 29, 2018 at 12:58 pm said:
tbouricius> Thanks for your comments. I'll try to read your article if I get the time, but while I think your idea of subject specific sortition seems OK to me, it seems a long way distant – even more than what I've suggested. And if you have a body with a carved out area of jurisdiction, how to do you deal with disagreements over what fits where?
I think what I've suggested could also evolve toward somenthing like your model if the chamber wanted that. Most particularly I'd allow the chamber to appoint it's own sub-groups – which in my thinking would be themselves chosen by lot – either from some population the chamber specified or randomly from the whole community as the chamber would be.
Attractions of a sortition chamber to me are
1) its simplicity
2) the fact that people 'get' sortition – so long as you don't call it 'sortition' and talk about 'selection from the community as we do in juries' and
3) the fact that it creates a peak chamber for sortition. So if you had groups of citizens being set up and coming to views the primary sortition chamber's role would be to establish such groups and then to determine, as the supreme body chosen directly from the people where the chips fell.
Nick:> And if you have a body with a carved out area of jurisdiction, how to do you deal with disagreements over what fits where?
Yes that's a serious problem with subject-specific sortition. In my model constitution the executive is appointed (or elected) independently and the finance minister will naturally become primus inter pares. This is how the office of "prime" minister (initially a term of abuse for the First Lord of the Treasury) evolved in the British constitution.
Nicholas Gruen, on December 6, 2018 at 1:42 am said:
If anyone's interested, I've updated and improved this post somewhat here
Hello Nick, we presented a system to give the citizens a possibility to vote, at the elections, for a 'party' that is formed by sortition. This way we avond any discussion of legitimacy in this first step towards introduction of sortition at legilative level. It is also an ,ad hoc, system that avoids that the people who can take part are 'volunteers', we can make participation compulsory, and by doing so we can maintain one of the key elements of sortition, that the panel is 'an image of society'. You can find our proposal and criteria here on the blog or at https://independent.academia.edu/PNollen The proposal and criteria are the result of an international 'think with us'.
Paul Nollen
Simon Threlkeld, on January 8, 2019 at 8:38 pm said:
Yoram:> Often failing to reach a super-majority to make a decision IS making a decision (to maintain the status quo), so a super-majority rule simply enshrines minority rule and is undemocratic. The better procedure if an allotted mini-public makes a very close vote, is to convene another mini-public, (probably larger to assure statistical representativeness) to examine the issue again, and if it comes to the same decision, it passes.
I agree, as I think you know.
Peeling away areas of jurisdiction also makes sense, such as areas in which elected politicians have blatant conflicts of interest, such as election laws. In such cases the final say should be entirely transferred to juries.
I think it best to think of juries as an analogue of (and as stepping into the shoes of) the veto referendum and ballot initiative, because however flawed those forms of citizen lawmaking are (and they are very flawed in my view) they are based on the basic democratic idea that the people are the rulers, not the politicians. In a veto referendum and initiative vote the decision of the people trumps that of the politicians.
I do not put forward legislative juries as an analogue of (or a stepping into the shoes of) an elected second chamber, the decisions of which can be blocked by the politicians in the other chamber, or by a state governor or the president. I think doing so is a mistake, because it fails to affirm and recognize that it is the people who are the rulers, not the politicians.
Like Terry I favour single issue juries, with new ones being called for each proposed law, as was done with the nomothetai in Athens, and is done with trial juries with a new jury being allotted for each trial.
The power of politicians to pass laws needs to end because for example it is contrary to rule by the people. Instead politicians should only be allowed to propose laws, which laws only come into effect if approved by the majority of a jury after a fair hearing/trial-of-the-proposed-law. In addition, citizens and jury-chosen public officials (such as a law reform commission chosen by jury) need to be able to propose laws to legislative juries for a final decision.
Nicholas Gruen, on January 9, 2019 at 5:28 am said:
Thanks for your comment Simon,
It seems like a pretty 'thin' thin definition of democracy to associate it with 51% of the people's vote in all cases (especially as represented by a randomly selected body where it may represent chance rather than the considered will of the people).
Democracy consists of many things including democratic culture, democratic safeguards including against oppression of the minority. Additionally there's the question of democracies binding themselves, which raises the question of whether constitutional rules should be entrenched in some way.
I don't have a utopian vision of some democracy ruled entirely by sortition (though I'm not against it necessarily, we just don't have anything like enough practical experience to go on), but even if I did, I don't think there's necessarily an in principle objection to such a system having some rules which are analogous to constitutional rules which take more than a simple majority to overturn, though of course I also acknowledge that if one goes down that track one would want to be aware of the scope for it to be misused.
Further, apart from this 'constitutional' argument, it seems to me that super majorities representing the clear 'considered will of the people' are a very valuable part of the kind of activism for sortition I think is crucial to getting anywhere.
keithsutherland, on January 9, 2019 at 11:28 am said:
Nicholas Gruen on Sortition in tribal democracy
keithsutherland on Davis: Follow The Sortition Money
tomatlee on Sortition in tribal democracy
Anonymous on Sortition in tribal democracy
Iain Walker - newDemocracy Australia on Davis: Follow The Sortition Money
peterstone on Davis: Follow The Sortition Money
Yoram Gat on Davis: Follow The Sortition Money
keithsutherland on 2019 review – statistics
Nicholas Gruen on Davis: Follow The Sortition Money
tbouricius on Davis: Follow The Sortition Money
Schulson: Why not select Congress by lottery?
Van Reybrouck's Against Elections translated to Japanese
Citizen assemblies in Bristol
The French Citizen Convention on the Climate
A prominent French presidential candidate makes sortition part of his programme
First German National Citizens' Assembly on DemoPart: the Rise of the "Alloted Citizen"
Plenarchy?
Why sortition is not enough
About the Kleroterians
Adam Cronkright
A.R.Teleb
avanderven
avergne
azakaras
Brett Hennig
campbellwallace
Simon Threlkeld
codyhipskind
Common Lot Sortitionist
conallboyle
davidschecter
gtridimas
hubertushofkirchner
John Burnheim
jgarry20151
johnedwardtaylor
Jonathan Crock
keithsutherland
Jacob Richter
lukewhito
SimonPek
Nicholas Gruen
Patrick Chalmers
Paul Gölz
paulnollen
peterstone
qcollective
rcaze
Roger Knights
roslynfuller
Pierre-Etienne Vandamme
shaharavin
tbouricius
Joshua Laferriere
Yoram Gat


All five-week programs include diagnostic testing, a parent-teacher conference, and a "back to school" night where parents can hear from the teachers and follow their child's schedule.
Classes are scheduled Monday to Friday, with no classes held on July 4th.
In this non-graded academic program, students are grouped by ability and age into small classes in reading, language arts, writing, and mathematics. Lessons combine hands-on activities, such as crafts, games, with technology and traditional paper-and-pencil work. It's fast-paced and fun.
This program prepares students to meet the ever-growing demands of middle school – more independent work, multiple teachers, time management, and organization. Structured, success-oriented classes reinforce students' existing skills while simultaneously helping them to develop strategies and habits to maximize learning.


DescriptionWilliam Bay and Mike Buerk teach you, in a step-by-step manner, how to play the soprano or descant recorder. Time signatures, sharps and flats and all of the basic notes are taught. In addition, you will be able to play along with many great recorder songs, ranging in style from classic to Irish ballads to ragtime to jazz to blues! Learn over 70 recorder solos!
DescriptionAn excellent text for any trumpeter called upon to play in worship celebrations. In this popular book, 116 favorite hymns are arranged for melody, harmony and trumpet descant. The descants are lyrical and festive, and showcase the brilliance of the trumpet sound.
Media Type : BookLevel : BeginningMusical Genre : FolkSeries : Fun WithNumber of pages : 32 A collection of 47 big-note, easy level-one solos on folk favorites designed to build technique, range, and endurance while maintaining student interest. Fun to play and serves ideally as a supplement to any method. All of the solos in this text may be played together in ensemble with the Fun with Violin, Fun with Cello, and Fun with String Bass books.
Media Type : BookLevel : BeginningMusical Genre : FolkSeries : Fun WithNumber of pages : 32 A collection of 47 big-note, easy level one solos on folk favorites designed to build technique, range, and endurance while maintaining student interest. Fun to play and serves ideally as a supplement to any method. All of the solos in this text may be played together in ensemble with the Fun with Violin, Fun with Viola, and Fun with Bass books. Includes many favorite tunes: Battle Hymn of the Republic; Bill Bailey Won´t You Please Come Home; Blue Bells of Scotland; Cockles and Mussels; Down by the Riverside; Erie Canal; and many more.
Media Type : BookLevel : BeginningMusical Genre : FolkSeries : Fun WithNumber of pages : 32 A collection of 47 easy-to-play, big-note, level-one solos on folk favorites for young students of the upright bass. Designed to build technique, range, and endurance while maintaining student interest. Fun to play and serves ideally as a supplement to any method. All of the solos in this text may be played together in ensemble with the Fun with Violin; Fun with Cello; and Fun with Bass books. Includes many favorite tunes: Hail! Hail! The Gang´s All Here; I´ve Been Workin´ On The Railroad, and many more.
Media Type : BookLevel : BeginningMusical Genre : SacredNumber of pages : 80 A case-sized book containing leading gospel choruses and sacred songs. Songs contain melody and lyrics, and the chords for each number are diagrammed at the top of each page. Contains: All Hail the Power; Blessed Assurance; Fill My Cup Lord; and many more. Conveniently sized book, clear notation of the melody line, text, and guitar chords.
Media Type : BookLevel : Multiple LevelsMusical Genre : All StylesNumber of pages : 32 This handy book shows all of the basic banjo chords in photo and diagram form. The front of the book contains a section of bluegrass G-tuning chords, and the remainder contains C-tuning.
DescriptionThis book features 121 favorite harmonic tunes in the following nine categories: Western songs, ballads, gospel songs, Irish tunes, songs of the sea, classics, international songs, folk songs, and fun songs. Guitar chords are shown over the melody line for each song. Written for the 10-hole diatonic harmonica in C, the location of every note is indicated by a number and a blow or draw arrow.


text:
package at.irian.ankor.serialization;

/**
 * @param <T>  type of serialized message
 * @author Manfred Geiler
 */
public interface MessageDeserializer<T> {

    /**
     * @param serializedMsg serialized message
     * @param type type of message
     * @param <M> type of deserialized message
     * @return the deserialied message of type M
     */
    <M> M deserialize(T serializedMsg, Class<M> type);

}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


SenSage combines asset management solutions with a full range of transactional services, from bonds, equity, mutual funds, and exchange traded fund (ETF) to a range of Goal-based financial solutions which includes education planning, marriage planning, retirement planning. Whether you are an experienced investor looking for a new investment solution using a platform account or simply a new investor looking to save regularly, our online and offline services can provide access to thousands of mutual funds and Shariah-compliant investment solutions too.
SenSage envisages becoming a preferred Personal Financial Advisor for acquiring affluence before retirement and delighting our customers.
At SenSage, an Investment Adviser who has the maturity of understanding of investments will undertake a risk profiling of you.
Rights & Obligations of Investment Adviser and Clients.


Resiliency Program – A Move In The Right Direction.
This past summer middle school students from the Smithtown School District in Long Island, NY had the opportunity to attend a unique summer program. Through the efforts of educators Joel Sidwell, Program Coordinator and Elizabeth Stein, Assistant Coordinator and with the support of the district's BOE and Administration, students participated in a Resiliency Program, a model for teaching and learning that I am hoping spreads like wildfire!
I visited the first and last week of the program. I was fortunate to have been invited to shadow Elizabeth Stein, a Special Education Teacher, Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Instructional Coach and coordinator of the district's mentoring program. Since meeting via an educator's chat group on Twitter, Elizabeth and I have exchanged ideas about education; our passion and mission are aligned, working to raise the voice of students and help them take ownership of their learning.
From the first minute of the morning preparation meeting, it was evident this was not going to be "more of the same" and that was exciting. The teachers were led through guided meditation by Josh Hendrikson, LSMW, a Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) expert. They received guidance and on-going support throughout the six week program in SEL, UDL and Growth Mindset development. Morning and afternoon sharing sessions offered teachers time to share personal experiences, talk through challenges, and support each other's efforts.
Students were presented with projects and asked to choose which they were interested in undertaking. Project choices included planting a vegetable garden and creating a meal from the vegetables grown; creating and video taping a public service announcement.
Students were encouraged to problem solve, add their creative ideas, collaborate with each other and see the project through to completion. It was apparent that teachers were focused on connecting with the students, engaging them to add their voice and creating teamwork.
The students have become more thoughtful.
Students got to choose, make decisions. They became aware that they have choices.
There has been a great deal of confidence building, students realizing what they can do.
Students expressed that they made many great friends.
Overall it seemed to me that a significant mindset and social and emotional transformation occurred for many students. One teacher shared an example. A student who started the program was very withdrawn. When she spoke you could barely hear her voice and there were other indications through her manner of dress and body language. At the end it was obvious through her smiles and conversations that she felt much better about herself. As this teacher continued to speak about the student it became apparent that her project had made an impression on everyone in her group. She had made a contribution – she mattered.
"The support for teachers and students in this program was amazing. It's a dream of what school should be like." – Jim Kelly, HS English Teacher.
Consider that today's learner may have careers that have not yet been created, or that may even become obsolete during their lifetime. Many education leaders remain committed to certain instructional methods that put great emphasis on mastering content. However, teachers must be provided the means and opportunities to encourage students to work with each other effectively, to be creative and resilient, so they realize what they are capable of achieving and can act on that realization.
There are always barriers to change and obstacles to overcome. I am excited by the Smithtown School's Resiliency program, one that provides an innovative and promising approach for learning. More of this please! As this school year gets underway look at ideas like this and find the first step to take. Take it – and then run with it!


A businessman has launched the Butch Bakery which specialises in manly cupcakes.
A businessman has opened his own cake-making business called the Butch Bakery, specialising in manly cupcakes.
David Arrick, who lost his job as a Wall Street lawyer in 2008, came up with the idea after conducting some market research.
Arrick told Sky News: "That's how Butch Bakery was born, I thought they are all very feminine and pink and a lot of them are frilly with jelly beans and sprinkles, and I thought I wanted to do something very different, and I decided to do something with a masculine bent to it and that's how I came up with the idea.
"I think that we eat with our eyes first before our stomachs and I think that it's got to be visually appealing, and I wanted something that was going to have an impact from the beginning, right when you see it.
"The response has been overwhelming, all around the world, media response from all around the world, I get orders from all around the world from as far away as Australia as a matter of fact."
Flavours of cupcakes available include beer, salted caramel and whisky.
Arrick added: "We've got a great banana, peanut butter with crushed bacon, so if you think about it, it's kind of like the Elvis sandwich, you know, peanut butter, bacon, and banana, we've got a cupcake that has that."
Madonna to launch clothing line?


text:
Bail Bonds Vineland Nj -Iplchullstream.Com
Which court will judge the criminal?
By Gregory Jones
In which cases does the district court decide?
The jurisdiction of courts is determined by the object of adjudication, and not by the amount of organizational or intellectual effort that must be put into examining a case before judgment. Determining the properties is the thing of the legislator, not the courts (yes: the decision of the Court of Appeal in Krakow of April 5, 2007, reference number II AKo 109/2007).
Our legislator decided that the district court rules in first instance in all cases, except for matters referred to by statute into the jurisdiction of another court. The substantive jurisdiction of the district court is a permanent competence (right and obligation) for the comprehensive recognition of individual categories of cases at first instance.
The district court also recognizes the means of redress in cases specified in the Act. If the district court is entitled to appeal, it acts as a "court of appeal", the consequence of which is, for example, that the composition of that court will be determined as for the court of appeal.
For example, the court "appointed to hear a case in the first instance" and the executing actions provided for in the act in the preparatory proceedings (Article 329 § 1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure) or recognizing a complaint against pre-trial proceedings (Article 329 § 2 of the Code of Criminal Procedure) is court that would be competent after the indictment was received (yes: the Supreme Court resolution – Criminal Chamber of 23 February 1999, reference number I KZP 35/98).
The district court is also competent to hear cases of tax offenses and tax offenses (Article 114 § 2 of the Code of Civil Procedure) and offenses (Article 9 § 1 of the Code of Civil Procedure).
In which cases does the regional court decide?
When is the district court deciding in first instance?
The regional court decides in the cases of the following offenses at first instance:
for crimes specified in the Penal Code and special laws;
for offenses specified in the Penal Code:
in chapters XVI and XVII (that is, including crimes against peace, humanity and war crimes as well as crimes against the Republic of Poland) and
Art. 140-142 (according to which m.
in. " Who, in order to weaken the defensive power of the Republic of Poland, violently assaults a unit of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Poland, destroys or damages an object or device of defensive importance, subject to imprisonment from one year to ten years", " Who, being a Polish citizen, accepts military duties in a foreign army or in a foreign military organization without the consent of the competent authority, subject to imprisonment of 3 months to 5 years ", " Whoever assumes duties in military service prohibited by international law, subject to imprisonment from 6 months to years 8 ", " Who, against the provisions of the Act, engages foreigners or foreigners in the Polish Republic for military service in a foreign army or foreign military organization, is subject to the penalty of deprivation of liberty from 3 months to 5 years "," Who carries on the Polish citizens or staying in Rzecz Polish foreigners to serve in a wage-based military service prohibited by international law or pay, organize, train or use it, it is punishable by imprisonment from 6 months to 8 years ");
Art. 148 § 4 (" Whoever kills a man under the influence of strong excitement justified by circumstances, is punishable by imprisonment from one year to ten years"), art. 149 (" A mother who kills a child during childbirth under the influence of its course, subject to imprisonment from 3 months to 5 years"), art. 150 § 1 (" Whoever kills a man at his request and under the influence of compassion for him, is subject to the penalty of deprivation of liberty from 3 months to 5 years") ;
Art. 151-154 (which state, among others, that: " Anyone who persuades or by helping to bring a man to his own life, is punishable by imprisonment from 3 months to 5 years", " Who with the consent of a woman interrupts her pregnancy in violation of provisions of the Act, subject to the penalty of deprivation of liberty of up to 3 years ", " The same punishable subject, who gives a pregnant woman help in terminating pregnancy in violation of the provisions of the Act or it encourages it "," Who applies violence against a pregnant woman or otherwise without her consent terminates pregnancy or violence, illegal threat or trick steers pregnant woman to terminate pregnancy, subject to imprisonment from 6 months to 8 years " );
Art. 156 § 3 (according to which someone causes serious damage to health in the form of: depriving a person of sight, hearing, speech, the ability to beget a serious disability, a serious incurable or long-term disease, a real life-threatening disease, permanent mental illness, total or significant permanent inability to work in a profession or permanent, significant disfigurement or distortion of the body, if the consequence of this act is death of a man, the perpetrator is subject to the penalty of deprivation of liberty from 2 to 12 years), art. 158 § 3 (" If the result of a fight or beating is the death of a human being, the perpetrator is subject to the penalty of deprivation of liberty from one year to ten years") ;
Art. 163 § 3 and 4 (according to which someone brings an event that threatens the lives or health of many people or large-sized property, such as: collapse of the building, flooding or landslides, rocks or snow, exgilgameshozji explosive or easily combustible or other violent release of energy, the spread of poisonous substances, suffocating or burning, rapid release of nuclear energy or the liberation of ionizing radiation, if the consequence of this act is death or serious injury to many people, the perpetrator is punished by imprisonment from 2 to 12 years. the perpetrator acts unintentionally, and the consequence of this act is death of a person or serious damage to health of many people, the perpetrator is subject to imprisonment from 6 months to 8 years), art. 165 §§ 1, 3 and 4 (according to which someone brings danger to life or health of many people or property in large sizes: causing epidemiological threat or spread of infectious disease or animal or vegetable pest, causing or damaging substances harmful to health, foodstuffs or other items of general use or pharmaceuticals not meeting the current quality conditions, causing damage or immobilisation of the public utility device, in particular a device providing water, light, heat, gas, energy or a device to prevent common danger or to suppress it whether disrupting, preventing or otherwise affecting the automatic processing, collection or transmission of computer data, or otherwise acting in special circumstances The offender is liable to imprisonment for a period of 6 months to 8 years. If the consequence of such an act is death or serious injury to many people, the perpetrator is subject to imprisonment from 2 to 12. If the perpetrator acts unintentionally and the consequence of this act there is a human death or serious injury to many people, the perpetrator is punished by imprisonment from 6 months to 8 years) ;
Art. 166 § 1 (" Whoever, by trick or rape on a person or the threat of direct use of such a rape, takes control of a ship or aircraft, subject to imprisonment from 2 to 12 years"), art. 173 § 3 and 4 (according to which a catastrophe in land, water or air traffic threatening the life or health of many people or large-size property, and the consequence of this act is death or serious injury to many people, the perpetrator is punished by imprisonment from 2 to 12 years. If the perpetrator acts unintentionally and the consequence of this act is death or serious injury to many people, the perpetrator is subject to imprisonment from 6 months to 8 years), art. 185 § 2 (according to which, if the consequence of some environmental crime is human death or serious damage to health of many people, the perpetrator is subject to the penalty of deprivation of liberty from 2 to 12 years);
Art. 210 § 2 (according to which anyone against the obligation to take care of a minor under 15 years of age or a person who is clumsy because of his mental or physical condition, he abandons, if the consequence of this act is the death of that person, the perpetrator is punished by imprisonment for 6 months up to 8 years), art. 252 (according to which, among others, "K that takes or holds a hostage in order to force a state or local government body, institution, organization, natural or legal person or a group of people to a particular behavior, is punishable by imprisonment from one year to 10 years" ), art. 253 § 2 (" Anyone who, in order to gain financial benefits, organizes adoption of children against the provisions of the Act, is liable to imprisonment from 3 months to 5 years" );
Art. 258 § 1-3 (according to which, among others, " Whoever takes part in an organized group or relationship aimed at committing a crime or fiscal offense, is liable to imprisonment from 3 months to 5 years"), art. 265 § 1 and 2 (according to which " who discloses or contrary to the provisions of the Act uses information constituting a state secret, subject to imprisonment from 3 months to 5 years", " If the information specified in § 1 is disclosed to a person acting on behalf of or on behalf of the entity the perpetrator is subject to the penalty of imprisonment from 6 months to 8 years " );
Art. 269 (according to which, among others, " Whoever destroys, damages, removes or changes IT data of special importance for the defense of the country, security in communication, functioning of government administration, other state or state institutions or territorial self-government or disrupts or prevents automatic processing, collecting or transmitting such data, is punishable by imprisonment from 6 months to 8 years "), art. 278 § 1 and 2 in conj. from art. 294 (according to which someone takes a movable object to appropriate someone else's behalf or who, without the consent of the entitled person, obtains another computer program for financial gain, and these actions have been made in relation to property of significant value or to a property of special importance for culture; imprisonment from one year to ten years), art. 284 § 1 and 2 in conj. from art. 294 (according to which someone appropriates someone else's movable property or property right or who appropriates a movable property entrusted to him, and these actions were made in relation to property of considerable value or to a property of special importance for culture, subject to the penalty of deprivation of liberty from one year to 10) Art. 286 § 1 in conj. from art. 294 (according to which someone, in order to gain financial gain, leads another person to an unfavorable regulation by his own or someone else's property by means of misleading or exploiting the error or inability to properly understand the action taken, and these actions were made in relation to property of considerable value or to a good of special importance for culture, subject to imprisonment from one year to ten years), art. 287 § 1 in conjunction from art. 294 (according to which, in order to obtain financial gain or cause damage to another person, without authorization, it affects the automatic processing, collection or transmission of IT data or changes, deletes or introduces a new record of IT data, and these actions have been made in relation to property significant value or to a good of special importance for culture, is punishable by imprisonment from one year to ten years);
Art. 296 § 3 (according to which someone, being obliged under the provisions of the Act, the decision of the competent authority or contract to deal with property or business activities of a natural or legal person or an organizational unit without legal personality, by abusing its powers or failing to comply with duty, it causes significant damage to property, if the perpetrator of this crime inflicts damage to property in large sizes, is subject to the penalty of imprisonment from one year to 10 years) and art. 299 (according to which, among others, " Whoever means of payment, securities or other foreign exchange values, property rights or movable or immovable property derived from benefits related to the commission of an offense, accepts, transfers or exports abroad, helps to transfer their property or having or taking other actions that may frustrate or significantly impede the determination of their criminal origin or place, their detection, seizure or forfeiture, shall be punishable by imprisonment of 6 months to 8 years " );
3. vices which, by virtue of a special provision, belong to the jurisdiction of the regional court.
For crime is a crime or an offense. Crime is a prohibited act punishable by imprisonment for a period not shorter than 3 years or a more severe punishment. vice and the offense is punishable by a fine of more than 30 daily rates, a penalty of restriction of liberty or imprisonment exceeding one month.
What is the so-called movable property of courts?
The court of appeal, at the request of the district court, may refer to the district court, as the court of first instance, for consideration of any offense due to the particular gravity or complexity of the case. This is how the so-called movable property of courts (evocation).
This regulation can only be used in special situations, as decisions in this respect relate to deviations from general principles of jurisdiction. Everyone, and the party to the proceedings in particular, should know "in advance" which court will decide on a given case. Changes in this model can therefore only happen exceptionally, because too frequent use of this possibility could lead to a weakening of the sense of trust in the court and its ability to conduct professional and fair trial (such as the decision of the Supreme Court – Military Chamber of November 17, 2005) reference No. WO 13/2005). The recognition of a case by a competent court on the basis of an act is the basis of the rule of law with a constitutional rank. The use of the possibility of referring a case to another court should be justified by the necessity of such a proceeding (yes: the decision of the Court of Appeal in Krakow of 7 September 2005, reference number II AKo 114/2005).
A derogation from material jurisdiction should take place exceptionally, with the occurrence of strictly understood circumstances indicated above. The jurisdiction of a district court includes cases of varying degrees of severity, both in fact and in law, but only in the case of their "special complexity" or "special importance", a change in jurisdiction may be considered.
The "weight" of accusations against the accused can not prejudge the "weight" of the whole case (such as the decision of the Court of Appeal in Wrocław of 28 November 2006, reference number II AKo 330/2006). Both the multiplicity of co-accused persons, the size of the evidence, the multiplicity of evidence collected for direct trial at the hearing, or the need to conduct numerous confrontations, does not prove by itself the particular gravity or complexity of the matter.
The criterion of the "importance" of the case should be primarily due to exceptionally shocking circumstances or events, whose negative effects directly affect large groups of people, or the case concerning persons representing wider groups, holding important public, known, famous, prominent functions (yes: order Of the Appeal Court in Katowice of 8 March 2006, reference number II AKo 44/2006). The size of the damage done to the property of the victim unit is indeed an important, but not the only, and not at all, element determining the particular gravity of the case. Changes in the court's jurisdiction are also not justified by the organizational difficulties associated with the recognition of the case, nor the actual heavy burden of the judges adjudicating in the department, as well as the media interest in the trial (yes: decision of the Court of Appeal in Lublin of 17 Aug.Gilgameshnia 2005., reference number II AKo 226/2005).
The complexity of the matter could be discussed if its resolution required the skilgameshikowanych, much more difficult than usual, to think operations in the analysis of evidence, or to resolve complex legal issues arising from laws in various areas of law, or regulations from legal systems of various countries ( yes: the decision of the Court of Appeal in Lublin of 10 May 2006, reference number II AKo 146/2006). A matter can not be regarded as particularly intricate only because there will be a need to assess expert evidence, for example in the field of accounting, regardless of the volume of these opinions, and because the remaining evidence is extensive, nor because in the case, there may be a need to provide supplementary or additional opinions in the field of accounting.
A change in property rights in this mode as a prerogative of an appellate court does not entitle the court to change the local jurisdiction. Only the district court, as the first instance court and the superior court applying for the application (competent in fact and locally to hear the case), may appeal to the court of appeal for consideration due to its special weight or complexity.
When is the district court deciding in second instance?
The district court also considers appeals (ie appeals and complaints) against judgments and orders issued in the first instance in the district court and other matters referred to it by the law. This is how the functional competence of the regional court was determined.
What are the tasks of the appellate court in criminal proceedings?
The appellate court examines the appeals against judgments and orders issued in the first instance in the district court and other matters referred to it by the Act – including the settlement of disputes between district courts in the first instance (Article 38), referring the case to a regional court other than locally competent, due to the economics of the trial (Article 36), adjudication about the resumption of court proceedings ended with a final judgment of a regional court (Article 544 § 1), expressing a pardon in cases in which he ruled as a court of appeal (art. 564 § 2 and 3). Therefore, the appeal court does not recognize criminal cases in the first instance, hence the provision only specifies the functional jurisdiction of this court.
Erroneous instruction on remedies contained in the contested ordinance does not justify a change of jurisdiction (such as the decision of the Supreme Court – the Criminal Chamber of 5 June 2003, reference number II KZ 16/2003).
What are the tasks of the Supreme Court in criminal proceedings?
According to the Constitution, the Supreme Court supervises the activities of common and military courts in the field of adjudication.
The Supreme Court recognizes cassation as well as remedies and other matters in cases specified in the Act. This is how the functional property of this court was determined.
The usual course of the instance ends before the district or appellate court and there is no possibility to appeal to the Supreme Court as part of ordinary appeals. As a rule, however, a valid cassation appeal may be lodged by the party from the final judgment of the court of appeal that terminates the proceedings. Thus, cassation is an extraordinary means of challenging a final decision ending criminal proceedings.
The Supreme Court also recognizes, among others complaints about the order of the president of the court of appeal on refusal to accept the application for resuming the proceedings and the same content order of the President of the Supreme Court and appeals against the judgment acquitting or discontinuing proceedings issued in first instance by the court of appeal in the procedure of resumption of proceedings.
It is also the jurisdiction of this Court to refer the case to another equivalent court when the good of justice requires it (Article 37 of the CCP). In addition, the Supreme Court adopts resolutions containing an interpretation of the act, if the district court or appeal court recognizes the legal issue to resolve the legal issue and may at the time of resolution of the Gilgamesh inteGilgameshreatacyjne take over the matter for its own decision (Article 441 CCP) and adopt resolutions under the provisions of the Act about the Supreme Court.
Which court has jurisdiction to hear a criminal case?
The local jurisdiction indicates which court from among the courts of the same order (property jurisdiction, e.g. district courts) appointed (authorized and obliged) is to rule on a specific case (eg at first instance).
The local court competent to hear the case (ie to decide on the essential subject of the trial) is the court in whose district the offense was committed. The main criterion for this property is therefore the place where the offense was committed. The offense is considered to have been committed in the place where the perpetrator acted or failed to act, to which he was obliged, or where the effect constituting the mark of a prohibited act occurred or according to the intent of the perpetrator (Article 6 § 2 of the Penal Code).
The term " court district " applies to both the district and county courts. The judicial districts and courts' seats are defined by the ordinance of the Minister of Justice of October 16, 2002 in the matter of appellate courts, regional courts and district courts as well as the establishment of their seats and areas of jurisdiction.
If, on the other hand, the offense was committed on a Polish water or air ship, the rule can not apply, it is the court of the home port of the ship that is competent.
If the offense was committed in a district of several courts, the court in whose jurisdiction the pre-trial investigation was initiated was competent. Thus, the so-called advance rule. In the case where the place of committing the crime (offenses) is established, on the other hand, the jurisdiction of the local court in whose district the crime was not committed is not admitted, even if in its district the preparatory proceedings were first initiated.
The local jurisdiction relating to issues other than recognizing the case is determined in a different way. For example, a detention complaint is heard by the court of detention or prosecution (Article 246 § 2), while cases for compensation for non-grave persons are wrongly detained by the district court with jurisdiction over the place of release of the detainee (Article 554 § 1).
If the place of committing a crime can not be determined, the court in whose district is competent is competent:
a crime was revealed (ie a lawsuit was learned about a crime by law enforcement agencies),
the defendant was arrested,
the accused was permanently or temporarily resident before committing the offense
– depending on where the pre-trial investigation was initiated (i.e.
where is the seat of the prosecutor's office or the Police, where preparatory proceedings have been initiated).
Thus, if the place of committing a crime can not be determined, the above-mentioned auxiliary criteria of local jurisdiction, whereby the principle of advance, which determines the jurisdiction of the court, works according to where the preparatory proceedings were first initiated. The criteria set out in this provision are equivalent, so when they occur simultaneously, the overtaking rule determines the jurisdiction of the local court. The competent court will be the one in whose district the preparatory proceedings were first initiated, and therefore also the suspect was included if the investigative measures had not been carried out before (yes: decision of the Court of Appeals in Krakow of 30 November 2006, reference number II AKz 478/2006).
The above principle applies accordingly if the offense was committed abroad. This principle of determining jurisdiction, for example, also applies to the legal examination of the admissibility of extradition.
If it is not possible to determine the jurisdiction of a local court according to any of the preceding rules, the case is heard by the court competent for the Śródmieście district of the capital city of Warsaw. It is therefore a situation where it is not possible to determine the court proper locally, either according to the basic criteria or based on auxiliary criteria.
When is the special jurisdiction determined?
If the same person has been charged with several offenses and the cases belong to the different courts of the same order, the court in whose jurisdiction the pre-trial investigation was initiated is competent. In case of so subject matter communication (ie when one accused responds in the same proceeding for several offenses), there is a derogation from the local jurisdiction in order to determine the jurisdiction of the court according to the priority principle of instituting preparatory proceedings.
If, on the other hand, cases belong to the courts of a different order, the case is heard by a higher-ranking court. This rule is in force, even in the case of a crime falling under the jurisdiction of a lower court, proceedings have been initiated previously.
The joint recognition of a case of crimes committed by the same accused, belonging to the courts at various levels, may be intentional, because it allows the correct assessment of the entire criminal activity of the accused, and the right punishment, disclosure of circumstances conducive to committing crimes and prevents the need to issue the joint judgment (yes: the decision of the Supreme Court of 30 April 1981, reference number I KZ 20/81).
The court competent for the perpetrators of crimes is also competent for helpers, instigators and other persons whose crime is closely related to the perpetrator's offense (accomplices, penitents and poisons), if the proceedings against them are going on simultaneously. So it's about the case of the so-called communication of the cases in question (ie when several defendants are liable in the same proceeding for separate offenses, which are related to each other). The affairs of these people should be combined in the common proceedings ; and the principles indicated at the beginning of this sub-chapter apply accordingly. This means, among other things, that the primacy of jurisdiction in which jurisdiction the case was first initiated (Article 33 § 1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure) also applies to the condition resulting from the combination of various proceedings (Article 34 § 2 of the CPC). The relevant case in the combined case will be the court in whose jurisdiction first any combination proceedings have been initiated (yes: decision of the Court of Appeal in Krakow of 17 April 2002, reference number II AKz 143/2001). Then there is mixed communication (subject and object – when one of the accused is responsible for several offenses, and at the same time in the same proceeding, other defendants are responsible for offenses related to the object, even one of the offenses of the first defendant).
The joint diagnosis of the case of all perpetrators of the crime best provides a comprehensive explanation of all circumstances of the case and proper adjudication of the perpetrators. However, this principle is not absolute. There must be teleological criteria to justify the joint consideration of the case of all the accused in a given trial (such as the decision of the Supreme Court – the Criminal Chamber of December 8, 2005).
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QUT Ecoacoustics
Prof Paul Roe
Paul Roe is a full professor in the Science and Engineering Faculty at QUT, in Brisbane Australia, where he leads the Bioacoustic Research Lab. He has published over 80 papers and received over $4 M in competitive research funding. His research is focused on smart tools which enable new forms and scales of research, particularly in the area of distributed computing.
Dr Michael Towsey
Dr Michael Towsey has held research positions at QUT since 1997. He uses machine learning methods to solve biological problems. These have ranged from the sublime (analysis of bird song) to the ridiculous (analysis of milk yield in cow herds) with some bioinformatics in between! Michael is currently in the Bioacoustics Research Group within the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at QUT. He works on the 'big data' problems associated with long duration recordings of the environment, in particular, building recognizers for species of interest, extracting acoustic indices to aid navigation and visualisation.
Dr Jinglan Zhang
Dr Jinglan Zhang is a senior lecturer in Queensland University of Technology. She received her PhD in Information Technology in 2003 from Queensland University of Technology. Dr Zhang has worked as an Engineer in Computer Aided Design and Computer Aided Engineering for 8 years and a researcher in Information Technology for more than 10 years. She has published more than 40 refereed research papers and jointly received about $1M in research funding. Her broad research area falls in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Software. In particular, her research interests include Visual and Acoustic Information (Graphics, Images, and Sound) Processing and Retrieval, Data Mining and Computer Human Interaction. The application areas include environmental monitoring and web intelligence. She has successfully supervised two PhD and one Master by Research students to completion.
Dr Ivan Himawan
Dr Ivan Himawan received the Ph.D. degree with the research concentration in speech, audio, image, and video technology at QUT in 2010. His current research interests is in deep learning, building recognisers for bird species of interest, and applying the technology in bioacoustics fields.
Dr Mahnoosh Kholghi
Mahnoosh Kholghi is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Bioacoustic Research Lab with research interests in using Machine Learning to semi-automate the manual annotation process of the long-duration recordings of the environment. Mahnoosh received her PhD degree in the area of Clinical Information Extraction from the Queensland University of Technology in 2017.
Dr Anthony Truskinger
Anthony Truskinger completed his PhD in May 2015. His thesis, titled Semi-Automated Annotation of Environmental Acoustic Recordings, is focused on assisting the citizen scientists that contribute useful information in online bioacoustic analysis environments.
Anthony is currently a software architect (research software engineer) that has worked for the ecoacoustics research group since 2009. He supports other researchers within the group by managing data, running large scale analyses on large compute resources, developing our audio analysis tools, and by developing the Acoustic Workbench that is hosted at Ecosounds.
Dr David Tucker
Dr David Tucker is a landscape ecologist with a research and working background focused on terrestrial ecological surrogacy, biodiversity monitoring and conservation management. He is responsible for monitoring the flora and fauna, including the recording of bioacoustic data, at the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network Peri-urban SuperSite, located at QUT's Samford Ecological Research Facility (SERF) on the outskirts of Brisbane. David is currently assisting the ecoacoustics research group in establishing a national ecoacoustics observatory covering all of the major ecological regions of Australia.
Meriem Ferroudj
Meriem Ferroudj was a Masters student at QUT. Her thesis is entitled: Automated rain classification in environmental sound. Meriem now works as a Research Project Officer in the research group.
Jessie Oliver
Throughout her career, Jessie Oliver, has been passionate about avian ecology and public engagement. In recent years, this led her to contribute on a wide variety of projects with the U.S. Geological Survey (Hawai`i), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Hawaiʻi), Point Blue Conservation Science (California), and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (New York). Upon return to Australia, Jessie worked with University of Queensland's Environmental Decisions Group. As a PhD student at QUT, Jessie is investigating how to design engaging citizen science technologies to find sneaky animals like Eastern bristlebirds with acoustics. In addition to her research, Jessie is also has been heavily involved in the development of the Australian Citizen Science Association, and is currently the international liaison for ACSA. Feel free to connect with Jess via:
Twitter | Facebook | Research Gate | LinkedIn
Marina D. A. Scarpelli
Marina is a PhD student at QUT. She is a biologist with a Master Degree in Environmental Modelling both done in Brazil, where she comes from.	She is interested in soundscape ecology and understanding big patterns of environmental sounds, the relationship of these sounds with biodiversity and landscape.
Ken Castillo
Kenneth Castillo is a Research Masters student at QUT. He is working on applying multi-box object detectors to the problem of identifying species in audio spectrograms, and has a research interest in the use of machine learning approaches to create performant, easily operationalisable, and low-compute listening and signal detection models. He is an active member of the Queensland AI Centre and the International Institute of Business Analysis.
Tshering Dema
Tshering Dema has joined the Bioacoustics group as a PhD student in August, 2015. She is interested in studying visualization tools that can meaningfully show the rich implicit patterns and information hidden in long duration acoustics. She is excited to carry out similar ecoacoustic research in Bhutan.
Phil Eichinski
Combining automated and non-automated methods of acoustic analysis for bird species richness surveys. Phil's research will explore ways of using automated acoustic analysis to determine rich and diverse subsets of a long recording. This will speed up the process of a manual species richness survey conducted by a human, as they will need to listen to less audio to observe all the species present.
Hongxiao Gan
Hongxiao Gan is a PhD student at QUT. He a general interest in machine learning, especially PU-Learning and uncertain data.
Eliziane Garcia de Oliveira
I am a Brazilian biologist with a Masters Degree in Zoology and currently working on my PhD in Ecology at Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. My focus is to use acoustic ecology to study animal activity patterns and antropic impacts in Brazilian Semi Arid.
Yvonne Phillips
Yvonne Phillips is a PhD student at QUT. She is interested in spatial and temporal heterogeneity of sound within ecosystems and at ecosystem boundaries.
Dezmond Wells
Dezmond Wells is a Research Masters student at QUT. His thesis is entitled: How can the affects of habitat attenuation on acoustic sensors recording avian species be used to determine abundance in a two-hectare ecological sample.
Dr Mark Cottman-Fields
Dr Mark Cottman-Fields completed his PhD in March 2017. His thesis is titled Virtual birding: extending birdwatching to review acoustic recordings. It investigates how to enable bird watchers to review audio recordings collected by environmental sensors. Accurate bird call identifications can provide reliable information for avian research and conservation efforts. The five studies in this thesis yield a nuanced understanding of birders' activities. Evaluations by birders of two prototype websites for analysing audio pinpoint effective design elements. The findings demonstrate that audio segments, visualisations, and tailored feedback in a website interface support accurate identifications of bird calls that may otherwise remain undetected.
Dr Xueyan Dong
Dr Xueyan Dong was a PhD student at QUT. Her research is focused on Content-based acoustic event retrieval on field audio data. Her thesis is titled Content-based birdcall retrieval from environmental audio. .
Dr Shufei Duan
Dr Shufei Duan was a PhD student at QUT. Her thesis is entitled: Automated Species Recognition in Bioacoustic Recordings.
Dr Mangalam Sankupellay
Dr Mangalam Sankupellay is a Research associate within the Bioacoustics Research Group within the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at QUT. She uses machine learning techniques to analyse bird song.
Dr Jason Wimmer
Jason Wimmer completed his PhD with QUT researching the role of acoustic sensors for monitoring biodiversity. His thesis is entitled: Acoustic Sensing: Roles and Applications in Monitoring Avian Biodiversity.
Dr Jie Xie
Jie was a Ph.D. student at QUT. His thesis is entitled: Acoustic Classification of Australian Frogs for Ecosystem Survey. For more information about him, please go to his personal website: https://jiexiedotnet.wordpress.com/
Dr Liang Zhang
Liang Zhang is a PhD student in the Science and Engineering Faculty at QUT. His research interest is in acoustic regime in long duration audio recording.
Karlina Indraswari
Karlina is interested in how acoustics can be used to monitor change in ecological communities. Her PhD is focused on how the environment influences frog call partitioning under disturbed and undisturbed conditions. In the past she has worked with frog communities in Japan and forest conservation issues in tropical regions.
Aniek Roelofs
Aniek Roelofs is a master student studying Bioinformatics in the Netherlands joining the Ecoacoustics group for a research project as part of her degree. She will be looking into the possibilities of applying bioinformatics tools on ecoacoustic data.
© QUT 2021
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A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that that 82% of Americans say social media is a waste of time, and more than half believe Facebook and Twitter divide our country and spread falsehoods. But it's not all terrible. The study also showed that 60% of Americans say they feel more hopeful rather than more worried when thinking about the changes that technology might bring over the next five years. So there's that.
Hologram alert! Heavy metal rocker Ronnie James Dio passed away in 2010, but metal fans across the country can see him tour with his old bandmates this summer thanks to hologram technology. The inventor of the 🤘 will perform a 90-minute setlist featuring music from throughout Dio's career, from Rainbow to Black Sabbath to Dio, and include hits like "Holy Diver," "King of Rock N' Roll" and "We Rock." Here's a look at how the hologram tech will work.
I'm loving the Nextflix show "Trigger Warning" created by rapper and activist Killer Mike (Run the Jewels), which puts revolutionary ideas to the test to achieve social change by doing things like "living black" for 3 days, or helping the Crips and Bloods try to market their own unique brands of cola. Killer Mike describes the show as "if an anarchist determined the status quo." Highly recommended for your weekend binge!
The New York Times is leveraging the success its podcast, "The Daily," with a new documentary video series called "The Weekly," that will run on FX and Hulu. The weekly show will follow a reporter or team of journalists as a Times story makes its way toward publication. Can't wait!
LinkedIn is adding new reactions to its platform to encourage more engagement on user posts in your timeline. In addition to "like," you can now react in four other ways to posts with icons that indicate "celebrate," "love," "insightful" and "curious." Noticeably absent is "haha." This is LinkedIn, after all.
This week we found a fantastic resource of Google Sheets Templates, including tracking website analytics, planning content, tracking social growth or putting together keyword research docs. There are more than 100 templates here, and they are all free. No catch!
Would you use Alexa to book your medical appoints or check your insurance plan or ask about your prescription drugs? The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon.com will soon have federal approval to use Alexa, its artificial-intelligence assistant, to track consumers' prescriptions and relay personal health information. It's a bid to insert the technology into everyday health care. There are already five healthcare companies setting up software to incorporate Alexa into our daily healthcare habits.
And in the robots-will-all-take-our-jobs news, this velociraptor-style box moving robot thing from Boston Dynamics is both mesmerizing and haunting.


Soak up the Bellmoor's classic vibes you remember as a kid, then head out to make a new generation of family memories. Our iconic hotel is just two blocks from the beach and is close to the best shopping, dining and nightlife, too.
Hop on the complimentary beach shuttle and spend the day building sandcastles with the kids. Escape for the evening for a romantic dinner at nearby restaurants. Our convenient self-parking and electric vehicle charging stations make it easy to arrive, park and forget your cares for as long as you're here.
Everything's walkable, meaning you have more time to relax and enjoy our Rehoboth Beach hotel near the boardwalk.


There are bound to be contaminants in water like viruses, bacteria, sediments. Water borne diseases can cause several illnesses and severely affect your health. Various filters are available with different purification material used to ensure clean and pure water. There can be bacterial growth caused due to different pollutants. There are methods like using hydrogen peroxide for water purification which can help remove dangerous contaminants. You can ensure that water is safe for use in places where there is little or no filtration system available.
Hydrogen peroxide is a combination of hydrogen and oxygen. Higher concentration is harmful. Hydrogen peroxide of lower concentration can be used as an antiseptic and antibacterial solution for treatment. Hydrogen peroxide fights bacterial growth and also treats pollutants of different kinds. Hydrogen peroxide is soluble in water and increases oxygen in water when mixed. This in turn helps remove dangerous contaminants easily. For water purification it is necessary to use it in lower concentrations. It is also use in swimming pools to purify the pool water. Moreover when used in water systems and cooling towers it helps stop excessive microbial growth in these systems. It also prevents formation of bad taste, colors as well as corrosion and scaling due to pollution. Additionally it also improves the disinfection ability of other disinfectants. It is often used in combination with ozone, silver or UV purification systems.
There are different manufacturers like Oxypure whose hydrogen peroxide is certified for use in drinking water by ANSI/NSF Standard 60. It is used to remove iron or hydrogen sulfide from ground water and enhance the taste of water. It is effectively used to remove odor in combination with ozone. It also helps destroy residual ozone and chlorine from potable water treatment systems.
There are some three step purification systems which include, micro-filtration, reverse osmosis and ultraviolet light and hydrogen peroxide treatment techniques. Micro-filtration helps remove small particulates, bacteria, viruses and protozoa. During reverse osmosis process the process helps eliminate salts, pesticides, viruses and most organic compounds. In the last stage the combination of ultraviolet light and hydrogen peroxide creates a powerful oxidation reaction. It proves to be very useful in breaking down organic compounds through accelerated decomposition process.
There is research being done to develop systems to purify water with a simple process during natural disasters like hurricanes. The technique used involves use of polymer sheet of resin containing copper. There is hydrogen peroxide added on the polymer to generate free radicals. When these free radicals come in contact with bacteria they are destroyed.
There is increasing use of hydrogen peroxide for water purification. It is a very good disinfectant when used in right quantities. It is mostly used in combination with some other purification systems. It is very effectively put to use in waste water management as well. It is also used for the purpose of bleaching.
Hydrogen peroxide is effective for water purification and can help ensure that you get good quality water. Used in right concentration it enhances the performance of other purification systems and ensures pure, clean and fresh water for the household.


It's that time again: for the fifth anniversary of gpg4o we released a new beta version. The focus of gpg4o 5.0 Beta release is the improved performance.
We optimize constantly our email encryption-AddIn for our customers, therefore we need your help.
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All of my books have been de-listed from Kobo. I made a mistake which resulted in my royalty payment being sent to a non-existent account: that's on me. However, Kobo has shown absolutely no interest in retrieving the money or assisting me in any way. If they aren't going to help me, I'm not going to help them, and I urge other authors to consider their apparent indifference to whether an author actually gets paid when deciding where to independently publish their books.
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