No, but I will acknowledge where some democratic elements exist within even the DPRK, though they’re very thin and weak.

There are other forms of government that are a better match for describing the DPRK. One party dictatorship, for example.

If you want to apply the same logic to the US, calling it simply an oligarchy rings hollow, though there’s a stronger argument than DPRK+democracy I’ll admit. It’s a democracy with flaws, but those flaws are smaller than the democratic elements they weaken, so it still gets to be called a democracy.

Everyone can always call themselves whatever they want. But fear that people might use a kernel of truth to sell a lie isn’t a good reason to throw away even a tiny part of the truth.

Weirdly it’s not, except maybe gravity batteries where nice reservoirs happen to exist already. It should be but it’s not right now.

Li-ion has economy of scale right now. I do think molten metal etc will overtake eventually, but they’re currently playing catchup and li-ion has dropped in price so much over time that it’s surprisingly cheap even where it should make no sense.

Because democracy is not the best way to solve every problem.

The messy job of squeezing entire countries into a handful of words is fraught enough without throwing away up to half of the information.

As a more amusing answer: Dictatorships throw away 99.9% of the opinions, so should we let one arsehole decide which countries are called a dictatorship?

We can all agree on that, Clearly li-ion is a bad choice for static use cases.

But right now it’s the cheapest option, and it looks likely that will stay true for quite a while unfortunately.

Yes, great example. That would indeed be stretching the definition to breaking point. The fuzzy logic approach would be that you’ve described a 99% monarchy with 1% democracy.

Personally I’d put the US as a 60% democracy with a 40% oligopoly. The UK is similar since on the one hand we have more than 2 parties and are slightly better at avoiding gerrymandering and voter suppression, but on the other hand we have the silly rules for the House of Lords, and weaker freedom of speech (I don’t mind the theory of banning violent extremist speech, but I don’t like the application we’ve got at the moment, it prevents too much speech that isn’t unreasonable, free speech would be better).

Based on what you’ve said, I’m Sure you’d put it lower, but I don’t think you can justify putting 1% when it’s so easy to find worse countries even in the real world, that are still on the democracy spectrum.

Strongly disagree. Yes, all the problems you listed weaken a democracy. Some by a lot. But that’s “no true Scotsman” logic, and dangerous. Better to apply fuzzy logic than Boolean logic, countries are not perfect democracies or non democracies. They are on a sliding scale, and there’s not much point making a scale that is so idealistic that no existing country can get on the scale (or where only the best few can).

You can claim the US and UK are weak democracies, that’s justifiable if you define why (and you have, I see your point there). But calling them non democracies is just willfully twisting the meaning of words, in fact they’re unusually good democracies by some measures (both have unusually free and trustworthy elections compared to most in the world, and that has to be taken into account).

Or to put it another way, any scale needs space at the bottom.

Imagine an alternative USA where every single state was gerrymandered to hell by whoever won, where electors were routinely bribed by opposition parties to vote against their states results, where people were bullied at the polls or where minorities were entirely disenfranchised. That would be a worse place than our USA, but by your definition both would be the same. Clearly they are not the same, that one is a worse democracy. By my definition that hypothetical and awful democracy is still a democracy, just a very very bad one.

As a Brit, this all seems unhelpful. The only reason anyone cares how the US was “founded” hundreds of years ago is that they were a bit closer to having the right idea at the start than most countries. Doesn’t mean they did of course, but compare to how the UK was “founded”, or Greece, “the birthplace of democracy”, and suddenly it really doesn’t matter.

As for whether it is currently a democracy, a flawed democracy is still a democracy. Trumps a terrible choice but he did get a lot of votes by ordinary people, and whilst their system is skewed by being a shitty fptp setup (just like the UK sadly) and their crazy elector system, it is nonetheless fairly democratic, in the sense that most people can vote, they didn’t pressure or threaten voters much, they didn’t fake lots of votes, and the flaws can only influence and skew the result to some extent, rather than being the deciding factor. But it isn’t the best democracy in the world, we can all agree on that. I hope they manage to replace it in our lifetimes with something that would allow for more than 2 parties (UK too).