The voting period allotted for the October 2024 Heir Presumptive Referendum having expired, I hereby announce the results are as follows.

The question was on confirmation of Sir Txec Róibeard dal Nordselvă as Heir Presumptive to the Throne of Talossa.

70 ballots have been cast out of 126 citizens eligible to vote. The turnout is therefore 55.5%. 12 votes were cast publicly on Wittenberg; all others were cast privately via the referendum website, https://referendum.lucabad.in/, and no votes were received by email.

The votes in favour of confirmation are 54; the votes against are 8; 8 citizens have abstained.

Therefore, a majority of votes having been cast in favour, I hereby certify that Sir Txec Róibeard dal Nordselvă is duly confirmed and named Heir Presumptive to the Throne of Talossa.



Sir Lüc da Schir, UrB
Deputy Secretary of State

Voting is closed.

I voted through the Database as follows.

On RZ14, I vote Contră. Reading its plain language, the bill does not do what it purports to do, as is made blatant by comparing this clause in the preamble:

Quotechange the current rules so [deputies] may be allowed to succeed the SoS on his or her leaving

with this clause in the amended legislation:

Quotewith the ability to replace the Secretary should he become unavailable

and noting that unavailable does not mean the SoS has vacated his office.

This therefore would only serve to sow the seeds of a constitutional crisis if a DySoS were to decide the SoS was unavailable and act in their stead without any kind of delegation, such as the one I received to run the current referendum.

I suppose we needed confirming that people don't read what they vote in favour of.


On RZ15, I vote Contră. As I noted several times, I support the donation but vehemently disagree with this umpteenth botching of proper practice.

On RZ16, I vote Per.

On confidence, I vote Üc.

Yeah, I was worried about how servers would handle a new domain, we never really used talossa.com addresses before as the Chancery usually uses talossa.ca; there isn't really anything we can do about that I think, except to avoid being too spammy so the address is seen as legit. I just hope people who don't visit Witt regularly get one of three emails.

I do think things are going reasonably well, though. We're up to 48 votes (38%) halfway through, while the most recent midterm referendum only had 72 ballots cast (approximately 47-49% turnout based off the previous and following GE results).

(There's alternative ways of doing this, such as using dead keys, but I thought I'd keep it simple.

For Linux users, it's a little less standard as you probably have Xorg handling your keyboard layouts via XKB, but it depends on your distro. I simply bruteforced my way through it by translating the layout in the correct format and manually appending it to the italian keyboard layouts file in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols - yes it's ugly, yes there's more correct ways to do it, no I don't care, if by chance it gets overwritten by an impossibly rare update I'll just overwrite it back.)

Quote from: Miestră Schivă, UrN on October 09, 2024, 05:35:33 PM

Quote from: Sir Lüc on October 09, 2024, 12:49:36 PMI also use a custom keyboard that includes all necessary characters for Talossan

Point me to a quick tutorial on how to make a custom Windows kybd?

You need this tool: https://www.microsoft.com/en-US/download/details.aspx?id=102134

It will let you:
- create a completely new layout (probably not what you want)
- load a layout currently installed on your machine (eg. en-us) and edit it (File -> Load existing)
- load a .klc source file, like the ones Istefan shared, and edit them further (File -> Load source)

Once you do that you can simply select a "shift state" on the left hand side - that is, if you want to edit what characters you enter when Shift and/or AltGr and/or ctrl are pressed. You will typically want to edit what happens when AltGr is pressed, so you don't alter any of the normal functions of your keys, and then when AltGr+Shift are pressed, so you can enter the capitalised versions of the same characters.

Once you select a shift state, you just click on each key and assign a character to it by copypasting it from elsewhere. For instance, these are the characters I assigned to each key when AltGr is pressed:

You cannot view this attachment.

When you're done, head to the Project menu to give it a name, test/validate it, and finally build it into an installer (Build DLL and setup package). You can then use the installer to add the layout to your PC and any other Windows machine.

We're up to 30.9% turnout (39 voters) with 12 days and 6 hours to go. I'm planning on sending out a round of reminders tomorrow (10th), and on the 20th for the last day of voting.

Edit: The first reminder got sent out a few hours ago and we already have six new voters (plus one between the previous turnout report and the mailer being sent out), so 36.5% turnout.

I also use a custom keyboard that includes all necessary characters for Talossan, both on Windows and Linux; this was mostly necessary because I was too used to the symbol placements of the Italian keyboard layout, so US layout based custom layouts were a no-no.

(Of course, making a custom layout was a great excuse for including many useful characters for programming, like ` and ~, and capitalised accented letters - particularly sentence-starting verb "È", "It is" in Italian, which is often replaced with the hideous "E'")

Partiçipadréu glätsmint!

Quote from: Iac Marscheir on October 08, 2024, 09:49:51 AMHutsch, la cunxhuntivă cunxhuntïu neceßa reformaziun.

Créu ça nominadra 'n cervixhă, propi qe reformaziun :p

Quote from: Breneir Tzaracomprada on October 05, 2024, 04:29:15 PMI assumed that many translation service portals use some kind of AI in the background. And then made a further assumption that some kind of cheap AI service might be available. I could certainly be imagining all of this as a layperson.

Sadly the issue is that you need a humongous body of 1:1 translations for that to be possible, even before we get to how costly (computationally or econominally) it is to actually train a model. The situation hasn't really changed since the last time we discussed this, not on account of technology not advancing, but because there's no way we could ever amass enough training data.

I'm very sorry folks, this had to happen the first referendum day I was going to be away from my laptop for an extended time. The platform is up again.

Quote from: Breneir Tzaracomprada on October 03, 2024, 01:08:37 PMAgain, Luc, I will repeat this because it does not appear to be breaking through. As I have now mentioned three times my intent of proposing the bill was for it to be a separate expenditure not for it to fall within what you allocated in the budget.

Why did you not want to spend the money we allocated for BHAID?

QuoteYou are complaining because I did not do it the way you believe is preferable. That is what I think this is about. And I am repeatedly explaining that my intent, in the first place, was never to do it that way. This was intended as extra BHAID activity, to be supported or not, by the Government.

Two things:

1) we evidently disagree on what BHAID is, since by law it is supposed to be a part of the Government, so the concept of "extra BHAID activity, to be supported or not, by the Government" does not make sense under current practice;

2) the Government allocated money for you, BHAID, to use, as specifically mentioned in the budget bill, and you chose not to use it, for whatever reasons. Why?

QuoteAdd the Government's $50 budget allocation to my proposal and make it $100?

Well no, as I explained already, the $50 were $50 because we wanted Talossa to spend that much in aid spending.

Quote from: Breneir Tzaracomprada on October 03, 2024, 02:36:32 PMI really do recognize that the volume is annoying but the goal has been just one terpelaziun per Cabinet portfolio per month. The Seneschal, because they are legally allowed to answer any of them, may be hit with more than one. But one question per month seems reasonable to me.

The current volume is honestly not annoying at all, since it amounts to a couple of questions per position per month; I think no minister should complain about having to answer a few questions.

QuoteI would suggest a limit to just one "active" terpelaziun per responsible official which with supplementary questions could extend for the entire Clark.

This was kind of my first idea, since my intention was to avoid a minister be flooded with questions to reply to, but then I thought it would be annoying if people blocked one another from questioning someone because someone else already had an open question for that minister. Maybe we could explore the possibility of monthly threads of questions to ministers as I suggested earlier, but in any case, a hard cap was a bad idea when I thought of it and an even worse one now.

Estimat Túischac'h, further to the answer I gave last month, the preparation of the statement on income was delayed by my allocation of Talossan time and brainpower getting entirely diverted to the creation of the platform for the midterm Referendum. I still intend to deliver such a statement before my expected resignation from the Cabinet.

As for the second part of that answer, I have no progress to report on except to say, on a related note, I'm glad to reassure the Ziu I don't plan on seeking any reimbursment for hosting the referendum platform on my own server.

Quote from: Breneir Tzaracomprada on October 03, 2024, 02:18:56 PM

Quote from: Sir Lüc on October 03, 2024, 02:14:23 PMFor the record, this specific language was written in February when the shoe was on the other foot; I now see that this would allow the current Leader of the Opposition to ask just 7 questions per month (1 base + 2 for his seats + 4 for being leader), when he actually asked 9 this month so far, 10 last month and 6 the month before. This is a lot of questions, but with the important caveat that nobody submitted any others, so in my personal opinion this amount of questions by a single member was clearly warranted. My suggestion is that either we forget about the cap, or we make regular use of the provision in 1.2.1.4.3 that allows more Terps if the minister is ok with it (meaning the Government can refuse extra Terps at its own risk), or we add a "neutral pool" of, say, 5 questions per month that anyone is allowed to draw from once their allocation is over, first-come-first-serve, which should allow for all ministers to receive (more than) a question per month.
I was also thinking about an alternate way of capping questions, by holding monthly threads of questions to ministers, with a different set of ministers up for questioning each week and every MC/Senator allowed a question to each minister during that week; but maybe this is too complicated or too much of a departure to stick.

Yes, I disagree with the cap.
But I wholeheartedly agree that other members of the Opposition need to ask questions.
Until they do, I will continue to do what I believe is a vital function of our system of government.

That's absolutely fair and I will gladly remove the provision from the bill.

I realise it sounds implausible that this was thought of months ago, so for the sake of transparency feel free to check the draft history of the bill on Google Docs, which shows that language was inserted on January 29: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14SWtkR3C21hZlmrls-WSkI7hGUYzKV2ty30RcZwcPAY/edit?usp=sharing