Structure, size, powers and election of Presidency, VP. (Debating)

[bore]

The main issue is that, fundamentally, no one cares who the SoIA and SoEA are or what they do.

[bore]

The VP is objectively more important than the SoIA, the SoEA, the GM and arguably the AG as well (because pretty much anyone can start any trial they want), at least as the game is currently played.

Not only is the VP the second in line to the throne which is very important in a country as prone to sudden resignations as atlasia, it also has what amounts to a vote in the senate. The other offices are largely about talking to themselves which is basically ignored by the rest of the population apart from when they are pretending to care to score a political point.

If we are abolishing cabinet offices (which we should) the VP should be one of the last to go.

[bore]

If we want to even think about bicameralism we need to go down to at least 2 regions. I know it wouldn't add any offices but we need to seriously cut the number of offices, not just tread water.

[bore]

Two regions is just too few to be practical on the other side and would deny us the ability to integrate newer players quickly, who would likely become zombie voters otherwise and eventually just fade away. We cannot contract so far as to shut out potential new membership and lock us into a death spiral, constitutionally. Right now, there are offices waiting to be taken. Their presence creates problems, but on the flip side there is tremendous opportunity for new players. Whereas if we contract to meet the current supply, we risk locking ourselves permenently at a lower level. We need to cut offices, cutting too man though, is suicide.

Given the fact that regions don't interact with each other there's no lower limit for "practicality" in terms of game mechanics, and experience shows its really easy to expand the number of offices, especially at a regional level so both of those concerns aren't relevant.

Anyway I don't disagree that there should be enough offices that most people can get one at the lower levels fairly easily, but even a two region plan would more than provide that. The truth, which people in this ConCon seem to keep on forgetting, is that atlasia is in really bad shape. Even in the glory days there were still many inactive officeholders and now there's probably only like 10/15 truly active ones.

[bore]

Nay

[bore]

Well Nix's senate rules reform was one of the best things we ever passed, because what went before it was completely unreadable.

Anyway I think we need to avoid doing an attorney general thing here where we randomly attach duties to a job. To take the attorney general as an example it had updating the wiki, a sort of SoIA style thing for the police, and prosecutions all rolled into one, but which require different skill sets. The only duty which people actually wanted was the prosecutions one, so the other two just didn't happen. Worse, in the wikis case no one else did it because it was the AG's job.

We need to remember that the VP is chosen for three main reasons, because they help the president get elected, in case the president resigns and to vote as the president would in the senate. None of these things have anything to do with running a legislative body. We need to avoid having a situation where the person running the legislatures is chosen not because they are good at that but for a completely different reason.

[bore]

Well whether the VP ran the senate or not wasn't really something that affected the length of the senate rules. As far as I remember, and this was debated at the time, the decision to put running the senate in the hands of a senator was taken, rightly or wrong, because it was seen as making the senate run better (for similar sort of reasons to the ones I mentioned), not because it made the rules slightly shorter.

To be honest I tend towards the view that the running of the senate should all be in one persons hands, it's far less confusing than 90 different threads ran by 90 different people, and the less people that need to  be relied on the less likely things are to go wrong.  So whatever we do it should be one person, not the PPT, the most senior senator and the VP who run things.

It's my opinion that the most important roles of the VP are, and will always be, the three I mentioned, and presidents will always select based on that, and that will lead to problems. That said, there is clearly a will here to give the VP this role, and there's no point fighting this.