Time for a maximum voting age?

Via NYRA, this study found that "older voters both seek out and recall less information about candidates" (starting in their mid-to-late 60's) and thus have a harder time voting "correctly", that is, choosing the candidate who share their positions and ideology. "By the time voters turn 90, the scholars’ models predict their correct level of voting will be roughly half of what it was when they were 20."

If the motivation for the minimum voting age is that young people can't be trusted to "understand politics" well enough to vote correctly, then clearly we should look into setting a maximum voting age as well. Senior citizens are well-known as an important voting bloc, though, so of course that won't happen.

One might conclude from the silence on this issue, however, that the motivation for the minimum voting age is not that young people can't be trusted to choose the candidate who best matches their positions and ideology, and thus wouldn't be accurately represented. Rather, the point of denying them the vote is that the older ruling class doesn't want young people to be accurately represented in government.

Piratbyrån's Rasmus Fleischer has a great essay at Cato Unbound about the future of copyright. Here's something I haven't really even thought of:

One early darknet has been termed the “sneakernet”: walking by foot to your friend carrying video cassettes or floppy discs. Nor is the sneakernet purely a technology of the past. The capacity of portable storage devices is increasing exponentially, much faster than Internet bandwidth, according to a principle known as “Kryder’s Law.” [7] The information in our pockets yesterday was measured in megabytes, today in gigabytes, tomorrow in terabytes and in a few years probably in petabytes (an incredible amount of data). Within 10-15 years a cheap pocket-size media player will probably be able to store all recorded music that has ever been released — ready for direct copying to another person’s device.

In other words: The sneakernet will come back if needed. “I believe this is a ‘wild card’ that most people in the music industry are not seeing at all,” writes Swedish filesharing researcher Daniel Johansson. “When music fans can say, ‘I have all the music from 1950-2010, do you want a copy?’ — what kind of business models will be viable in such a reality?”