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Trump Orders Government To Stop Work On Y2K Bug, 17 Years Later (bloomberg.com)
The federal government will finally stop preparing for the Y2K bug, seventeen years after it came and went. Yes, you read that right. Bloomberg reports: The Trump administration announced Thursday that it would eliminate dozens of paperwork requirements for federal agencies, including an obscure rule that requires them to continue providing updates on their preparedness for a bug that afflicted some computers at the turn of the century. As another example, the Pentagon will be freed from a requirement that it file a report every time a small business vendor is paid, a task that consumed some 1,200 man-hours every year. Seven of the more than 50 paperwork requirements the White House eliminated on Thursday dealt with the Y2K bug, according to a memo OMB released. Officials at the agency estimate the changes could save tens of thousands of man-hours across the federal government. The agency didn't provide an estimate of how much time is currently spent on Y2K paperwork, but Linda Springer, an OMB senior adviser, acknowledged that it isn't a lot since those requirements are already often ignored in practice.
As another example, the Pentagon will be freed from a requirement that it file a report every time a small business vendor is paid, a task that consumed some 1,200 man-hours every year.
So they layed off one guy...whoopdedoo! Looks at those savings! Who wants a paper-trail of who the pentagon pays money too anyway?? What a zany idea.
Signed and dated: 6/15/17
Gotta keep track of those unsigned 32-bit int timestamps, they're going to creep up on you in 2038.
I don't trust Trump to make smart cuts. He's not a details and logic guy, and he or his minions favor "trickle down" solutions over those that benefit the little guy directly. He might accidentally get a few right, but so would blindfolded dart throwers.
Table-ized A.I.
:-D
The reason we need the small business paperwork: Before this rule came into effect those businesses were owned by big pocketed donors. Some of which were the ones charging $50 for a $5 screwdriver.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
The issue isn't that this is bad per-se. It's that it's not very good. As the article points out, no one was really applying these regulations. Ultimately, this is grand standing more than anything else.
I'm always happy to see redundant legislation go away, but don't get grand delusions that this is Trump somehow removing burdens and making the government magically super efficient.
That's on the desktop, of course. Amongst the serious computers Linux has, what, maybe 50% of the market share?
I suppose Android's been fixed.
No no no. Simply switching to a 64 bit linux will be enough for linux users to avoid the bug; a switch most already made.
The problem is going to be appliances, not just linux but *BSD too. And combined, the *nixes make up the majority of appliance computers, and many are 32 bit.
All sorts of things from routers to air conditioners might stop working. Or at least, operate at the wrong times until somebody changes the date.
I'm not ready to assume it has come and gone. My first question is; is this related to unpatched systems that are continuing to provide incorrect data? Don't jump to being credulous of narratives, there are always narratives offered.
By "gamed the system", you mean "followed the system in place for 200+ years", right? And, according to your losing candidate, questioning this system is âoehorrifyingâ and "talking down our democracy" as recently as 2 weeks before the election?
Got any other deep thoughts to share?
It is evident that you don't understand how the Governments work. Unneeded/unenforced are traps for people/organizations that are targeted. An unused or little known regulation can wreck havoc with "out of favor" people and organizations. Laws that aren't enforced should be removed so that people/organizations can live and work in a functional manner.
Y2K38 bug already leaked over into politics:
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/ar...
“I asked CBO to run the model going out and they told me that their **computer simulation crashes** in 2037 because CBO can’t conceive of any way in which the economy can continue past the year 2037 because of debt burdens,” said Ryan."
So the CBO's forecase software could get *up* to 2037, but not past it, i.e. it couldn't compute figures for 2038. What's the more logical explanation, a "does not compute" error, or that they were using Unix 32 bit time?
It's not hard to see how someone thinks if they have no filter
Luckily the century turned a year later...
Sig?
to get the main point:
" the Pentagon will be freed from a requirement that it file a report every time a small business vendor is paid"
I foresee a _lot_ of 'small business vendors" cropping up over the years now.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I suppose Android's been fixed.
Yes, but a super majority of users won't be able to get the patch.
Well, the Y2k stuff being removed is great. But the bit about reports for small business payouts? 1200 man hours == ~30 weeks of 40 hours/week work. Ie, you managed to cut one job That's great if it was redundant work--and honestly it should be. So great for Trump. Let me guess, I'm not leftist enough so it doesn't count?
One, Washington has been a massive partisan witch hunt since at least the 1990s (probably since 1790, but I can personally verify since the 1990s). Two, the rhetoric during Obama's years made him out to be the anti-christ. Not to say Bush's years were very stellar either--the Hitler references don't do anyone any good. You see a pattern here?
I can readily bring myself to admit that regulations, like these, should be eliminated. I have no problem with the notion that Trump can do good.
Because...?
Yep, President. And as President, he has a lot less power than he imagines. Unlike his claims about President Obama, Presidents aren't kings nor can they really act like them. There's two other branches of government which will quickly dispel the notion that one can just Executive Order one's way into doing whatever one wants. Since Congress is so dysfunctional, that general leaves the courts to challenge and establish the Executives powers.
Honestly, given the scope of surveillance the NSA, CIA, and FBI have done on the American people, the power of the President needs slam downed hard. Too bad the courts seem very unwilling to actually follow through on that.
PS - Really, if all you listen to are partisan hacks, you're part of the problem. But, yea, whatever. Obama spying on Trump was good because, you know, NSA surveillance is good. Except it's bad because the President [Trump] shouldn't have that power going forward.
Or maybe it's okay some of the time with a warrant. Particularly describing the things to be searched. Not a retroactive fishing expedition into the pre-recorded phone calls, internet searches, etc of all Americans. Seriously, if Trump is so against what Obama did,
he actually has the power to stop it from happening again for a long time. You know, instead of dick around in immigration law which is the purview of Congress.
And how many of them will be around in 18 years?
Maybe half of them will still be around then, I don't really know. We still find Amigas running HVAC systems.
If I'm a business owner and the badge reader on my warehouses work fine for 10 years, why would I replace them? I figured they would still work fine for another 10 years, only to find out that nobody can get into the building in 2038. And that's funny, all the repair people are too busy today to do anything about it. And I can't seem to leave a voicemail to the badge suppler because it keeps hanging up.
Hopefully the traffic lights work. Depends on if your particular state's government is competent or not.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Simply switching to a 64 bit linux will be enough for linux users to avoid the bug
Technically that's not a fix, it just delays the problem. Admittedly it's a delay of about 292 billion years but still...
"Unlike Android and Chrome OS, Fuchsia is not based on Linux—it uses a new, Google-developed microkernel called "Magenta." With Fuchsia, Google would not only be dumping the Linux kernel, but also the GPL: the OS is licensed under a mix of BSD 3 clause, MIT, and Apache 2.0."
https://arstechnica.com/gadget...
many of the bugs classified as Y2K bugs have NOT come and gone, they are still pending with various fixes that simply moved the milestone forward or known date limitations that will hit in the coming years. I don't know about any of the US systems but I am familiar with many of the systems in our country and personally know of several Y2K bugs that won't hit till the early 2020's
Seriously? Is there anything else they are preparing for that has already come and gone?
Well reputedly in 1803 the British government prepared for the potential invasion of Napoleon by creating a civil service position for someone to stand on the white cliffs of Dover with a spyglass and ring a bell if they saw Napoleon coming. The position was finally cancelled in 1945, 124 years after Napoleon died.
He most certainly not removing burdens with the new burden that government software will now have y2k problems again.
One thing the simpler man doesn't understand is that problems like Y2K (or 2038) don't go away once the date has passed. Too small storage containers used in already existing data won't magically transform. Someone needs to make that happen, each and every time old data is accessed. Do a study of things like census records, and you'll be hit by the Y2K bug.
The very preparation for Y2K caused additional problems. Uncoordinated preparation caused forms that suddenly changed from YY/MM/DD to mandatory YYYY/MM/DD at arbitrary dates in the late 90s.
This means that you'll run into the problem when handling and comparing data from the same sources from before 2000.
Relatedly, the "2038 problem" will also still be with us long after 2038, because of all the data stored in signed 32-bit time format won't magically transform. Someone needs to make sure it's done.
The regulations are probably too specific, and focus on the specific instance of the problem when a generic regulation[*] would have been better. But then again, politicians who couldn't see the bigger picture existed back then too.
[*]: Like "All data is to be converted to representations not subject to container size prior to processing, or a justification for and implications of the limited container size must be documented."
Among the effects, this could lead to a resurgence of BCD and CPUs who handle them natively again, which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
Not an american but you guys should seriously consider getting rid of the electoral college. I'm no expert on american political history but it is my understanding that the system was originally put into place to safeguard a takeover by a tyrant. That is, the founding fathers were smart enough to understand that there are times in which the democratic will of the people may be hijacked, and this is where the electoral college could step in and make a more rational choice.
However, has it ever actually worked that way? No. Has the electoral college ever actually had any will of their own? No. It's simply made american elections to be this weird-ass game in which it's possible to win by getting less of the popular vote b y playing essentially moneyball with the election as Trump successfully did. Twice in the 2000s the EC has resulted in the candidate with less votes winning the nomination. It's a catch 22: supposing the candidate that wins the popular vote wins the EC as well, the EC cannot then vote against the candidate even if there's good cause to suspect he/she is a risk to the nation because that would go against the will of the people. If the candidate that wins the EC and loses the popular vote as with Trump the EC still can't do its job and vote any differently because that would be seen as 'changing the system" and there'd be a massive outcry over a hijacked election.
Now think about it, Trump would have been a perfect case for the EC to step in: he's clearly an unstable individual, lacks any political experience and his 'proposals' are for the most part rather insane and there's a good case to be made that he may in fact be suffering from an onset of Alzheimer's (disjointed speech, erratic personality, highly limited covabulary and repeated use of generic words such as something, anything etc.). Less then third of the country actually supported him and the other candidate in fact got MORE votes, so the EC siding against Trump because he's unfit to rule and siding with the majority of the voters would be rationally and democratically justified. Like, a more clear-cut example case of why the electoral college exists cannot be found in recent history. However did they do it? No, because as I said the EC has just become a stamping mechanism which currently makes the votes of individuals count less in some states than in others. In fact when this possibility was brought up aqfter the elections it was held as layghable by most. "What, actually electing the person who got the most votes? Don't be kidding, we have to elect the unstable raving orange dude, I mean, he won 'the system'. Nothing we can do. Rules is rules." And because they cannot deviate from voting according to the rules of the game, the people in the EC might just as well be kicked out and the system changed so that votes are valued differently based on the states. I mean, it'd be de facto the same thing as the current model. It makes absolutely no sense from the point of view of democracy, and it does not further the benefit of the american people, from my view.
It should not be possible in a democracy for a person to be elected into the most powerful seat in the land by getting less votes. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...", if your vote counts less than someone else's because you live in California and not Ohio, you are not equal. The system that was originally pout in place to safeguard the republic from tyranny has now been morphed into something which actually makes it easier for any would-be tyrants to step in because you don't even have to win the popular vote.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
If it has systemd you wouldn't be able to read them anyway.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If the densely populated areas have more people then it stands to reason they'll have more votes. I assume you don't have a problem with the idea of "one person, one vote"?
The electoral college system is "one person, one-and-a-bit" votes, where the smaller the state's population the bigger the bit.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's ''wreak havoc''. If you wrecked all the havoc that would leave only order, implying that everything was A-1, tickety-boo, shipshape & Bristol fashion.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
What is your point? First you state that the democratic will of the people is sometimes wrong and the electoral college should correct it. Then you say that the populist vote should win no matter what in a democracy.
These are conflicting.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal
The declaration of independence is not a legal document. If it were, we would not have had a need for that pesky civil war. An honest mistake.
The electoral college system, like nearly all political systems, was put in place as a compromise of many views. Preventing tyranny, as you put it, was just one view. The most important part of the electoral college was its design in being an extension of the bicameral congress. One side represents states as population dictates, the other does not. Reasoning behind this is two fold:
The US is a federation. The president is elected by the states, not the people. It just so happens that everyone agrees in letting people have a say anyway, as opposed to many parliamentary systems where the leader is chosen by the winning party.
Small population states still matter and the people that live there deserve to be heard. If we went full democratic, only a handful of counties in the country out of thousands would have their values respected and listened to while the rest will be ignored or abused. Clearly not a good outcome, and so people in different states do have different weighting by design: to ensure the people that produce the food which everyone survives with gets to have their say in how the country is run.
No, I did not say that's what I think, I said I'm under the impression that that's the reason behind EC's existence. But to clarify yes the people can sometimes be cheated into voting for candidates that should not be allowed to rule because they hold immoral/unconstitutional views (see, third reich among other things, Adolf was democratucally elected). HOWEVER, this is not the case now as what's happened in the 2000s is that the EC does the reverse, helping to automatically nominate a person that gets less of the votes without it having anything to do with consideration of the candidates but simply following preset rules.
No they are not. See, what I'm saying is precisely that the EC does not prevent a populist from winning in is current shape, it makes it easier by shrinking the amount of the popular vote one needs to secure to win the nomination. The EC on paper is an organ of governance which is supposed to be able to affect the outcome of the election based on their own judgement of the candidates, but it does not do so under any circumstances so it's just become an automated engine for wannabe-populists to gain power by winning the 'right' votes. This makes no sense and is in contradiction with what I understand to be the point of something like the EC.
I never claimed it is legally binding, I just loaned the phrase from there to reflect the fact that i do not think the EC in its current function serves the american ideal of people being equal.
They won't be ignored or abused. In a popular vote the vote of everyone counts the same, no matter the location. The idea of a democracy is that everyone has an equal say in the matter on the vote. The fact that a city has millions of people living in it does not logically translate to 'therefore the people in the countryside need to have more votes." The geographical location you inhabit should not bear any weight in a democratic vote in my view, It doesn't do so here (Finland) or anywhere else in the west, and you don't see the people in the countryside being 'ignored or abused'. The people in the countryside hold power in proportion to their numbers and still have the local municipal governments to represent them on a national level.
But this turns the system on its head giving undue power to those people. Why should someone living on the countryside have any more say in who rules over the entire country? The people in the cities are just as much citizens as the people in the countryside. Just because someone lives in a sparsely populated area does not mean their opinion of who should rule should count any more. That's what equality means, that's what democracy as a decision making method means.
There are other means of making sure that the majority cannot override the rights of the minorities. That's why countries have constitutions which guarantee rights to people and protect them from being eaten by majority votes. You're arguing that in addition to this the people on the countryside deserve to get to choose the president moreso than the people in the cities, which makes no sense to me.
I understand why the system is the way it is, I just think it'
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Not a change, get rid of the Electoral college and a few big cities run the nation. Most of said cities being deeply in debt, with uncontrolled crime (despite ever more draconian gun laws).
The fact is the Electoral college worked exactly as it was supposed to. But if we did not have the Electoral college Trump would have campaigned differently and likely would have still pulled out a win. He knew CA and NY were automatic losses, so he didn't spend much time campaigning in those states (but he didn't totally ignore them). Meanwhile Clinton ignored several smaller states that had previously voted Democrat, and she lost in those states. Not visiting Wisconsin and other states hurt her and cost her those states. Trump campaigned to match the rules of the game and won the only popular vote that mattered; he won the popular vote in 30 different states earning those Electoral college votes, to Hillary winning 20 states (and DC). Thus he won more electoral college votes. The overall vote does not matter because even though we all vote on the same day we are not voting in a single election but in 51 elections (50 states plus DC).
The EC is not a static body as you seem to think with your comment that the EC should have stepped in. The Electors of each State are appointed by and from the Party that wins the election in that state. Thus the EC will represent the President. Except for the occasional faithless elector, of which there were more Democrat electors who chose to be faithless than Republican Electors. Funny the losing candidate was so bad that she had more electors refusing to vote for her than the Boorish and widely disliked President did.
I suggest you study our system a little better, you'll find out that it worked exactly as designed, ensuring a broad nationwide support for the President, not just a few High population centers. And there is no need at all to eliminate or modify it at all.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
No they won't. Get rid of the electoral college and everyone gets an equal say in who rules. The fact that more people live in place A than place B does not mean that the people in place B should be given more power in a democracy,
Please explain to me how having less than a third of the populace support the president translates to 'a broad, nationwide support'?
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
I would go further and remove the "Winner takes all" that is heavily biassed for a bi-party system. Politics should not be that you do what the majority wants, but to do what most people want. Yes, there is a differnce and in politics you should be able to negotiate to what you and others want.
There are plenty of countries where multi-party systems work. It also gives people who see some thinks they want in party 1 and also so,e things they want in party 2 a way to let their voice hear.
The obvious next big thing is to not only have a separation between state and chuch, but also state and business.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
so I I'm not buying insurmountable technical justifications other than simple lack of will.
It boils down to the fact that correctly handling time is complicated. Leap years, seconds, gregorian nonsense, .. the rules just pile up higher and higher. Nobody wants to touch that code and I dont blame them.
"His name was James Damore."
The electoral college is working as designed. If one were to ignore the votes in New York City and Los Angeles -- not even the states of New York and California, but just the two most populous cities across the fruited plain -- Trump wins by half a million votes.
The electoral college is an ingenious solution to the problem of small clusters of populations imposing their will on an entire nation.
This is very simple, actually. The problem statement is, "how to best conduct a single majority vote election across multiple, independent entities of varying sizes and densities of the population"? The answer is, "hold a majority election in every independent entity and the winner overall of each election is the winner overall of the race." But what if the entities are of _vastly_ different sizes and densities? Then the answer is, "weight the individual elections by population."
The Electoral College is a perfectly legitimate solution to the problem. Maybe you're getting confused by the notion of a "College". There is a body of people that forms a College, but exists only as a formality, because someone must keep a record and report the results of the election. The College, for example, is temporary and changes at every election. It is honorary.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
>...but it is my understanding that the system was originally put into place to safeguard a takeover by a tyrant...
The electoral college is an attempt to balance political power between rural and urban voters. Its an adjustment to a pure democracy designed to weaken the "Tyranny of the majority".
The biggest challenge the founding fathers faced was balancing power between urban and rural constituents. This is arguably our greatest challenge today. This is why each state has 2 senators regardless of population and representatives based on population. The number of electors in the electoral college in each state is the sum of its U.S. senators and its U.S. representatives.
In our last election, rural voters preferred Trump and that is why the rural voter trumped the urban voter to override the popular vote.
Greed is the root of all evil.
But the EC is NOT a deliberative body. It is an honorary one. There's the source of your misunderstanding, I think.
The members of the EC are picked by the winners. Membership is temporary, the entire EC is dissolved once the election results have been reported to Congress. In fact, the ACTUAL vote to confirm the election is done by Congress, not by the EC. And yes, it is an actual show-of-hands vote. The job of the EC is to simply report the official results of each state.
That is why any electors who don't report properly are called "faithless" electors. They literally make a promise to faithfully report the results when they are appointed.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I think you're forgetting all the servers.
The headline is literally a stab at Trump to make him look like an idiot for touching on something that's 17 years gone, but the fact that worthless required documentation is being removed from government should be celebrated as a move towards efficiency. A government that is willing to admit stuff is useless and scrap it is a lot more useful than a government that bloats itself with process.
I'm waiting for everyone to come in and tell me everything Trump has done wrong now, but that's not my point whatsoever, so enjoy. (I probably will!)
I tend to rant.
the EC does not prevent a populist from winning in is current shape, it makes it easier by shrinking the amount of the popular vote one needs to secure to win the nomination.
I largely agree with your comment and reasoning, but the above is false. The EC has nothing to do with securing the nomination. Party nominations are done through party-specific processes which admittedly include delegate systems that look sort of EC-ish, except that those delegates actually do exercise free will in casting their ballots, so function more like the EC was intended to function. But changing or abolishing the EC would have no effect on the nomination processes.
Personally, as a resident of a small state, I'd like it if the EC were retained but EC votes were allocated proportionally to the per-state popular vote. One of the theories behind the construction of the EC was that it would give slightly more weight to the opinions of the voters in low-population states. In practice, the method of allocating all of a state's votes as a bloc causes the system to do exactly the opposite, which is why it's always a handful of large "swing" states that decide the election. Proportional allocation would give the small states a larger voice, and motivate candidates to actually campaign in them.
Failing that, simply going to a pure popular vote would also improve the small states' voice, just not as much. But it's clear that the EC, in its current form and application, is bad for everyone.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The left considers violence wrong except in very specific circumstances.
Of course (Vol. I)!
From John Hawkins
1) "Michele (Bachmann), slit your wrist. Go ahead... or, do us all a better thing [sic]. Move that knife up about two feet. Start right at the collarbone." -- Montel Williams
2) “F*ck that dude. I’ll smack that f*cker’s comb-over right off his f*cking scalp. Like, for real, if I met Donald Trump, I’d punch him in his f*cking face. And that’s not a joke. Even if he did become president — watch out, Donald Trump, because I will punch you in your f*cking face if I ever meet you. Secret Service had better just f*cking be on it. Don’t let me anywhere within a block.”– Rapper Everlast on Donald Trump
3) “I have zero doubt that if Dick Cheney was not in power, people wouldn’t be dying needlessly tomorrow.I’m just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That’s a fact.” — Bill Maher
4) “I know how the ‘tea party’ people feel, the anger, venom and bile that many of them showed during the recent House vote on health-care reform. I know because I want to spit on them, take one of their “Obama Plan White Slavery” signs and knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads.” — The Washington Post’s Courtland Milloy
5) “F*** God D*mned Joe the God D*mned Motherf*cking plumber! I want Motherf*cking Joe the plumber dead.” — Liberal talk show host Charles Karel Bouley on the air.
Municipal night court judge Munroe Slemp of Snakebit, NV has already responded to a petition from COBOL programmers by blocking Trump's order, citing his lack of IT expertise. The Ninth Circuit is expected to review the decision by sometime in November.
get rid of the Electoral college and a few big cities run the nation
No they won't. Get rid of the electoral college and everyone gets an equal say in who rules.
Campaigning would only occur in major cities, so they would have a much larger impact than now.
The fact that more people live in place A than place B does not mean that the people in place B should be given more power in a democracy,
It's called federalism, and it was put in place for a reason. The founding fathers realized that even though we are one country, we are composed of several different cultures with different values. A law that might make sense in a metropolitan area might not make sense in a rural area, so you don't want the population centers making all the rules for everyone else.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
No matter what he does or how much sense it makes, the Democrats will find a way to bash Trump. This is an obsolete piece of regulation, but Democrats will somehow spin this into something bad. Washington is turning into a massive partisan witch Hunt thanks to the Democrats and their hatred for anything and everything Donald Trump does. There are regulations like this that need to be eliminated, but the left cannot bring themselves to admit that Trump might do something good. You leftists should be ashamed of yourselves. The American people have spoken and want Donald Trump as President. Get over yourselves.
If anything, this story shows Trump in better light than either Bush or Obama that he finally did something about it. The criticism of not overhauling this bureaucratic requirement can safely fall on bipartisan shoulders - both Bush Republicans and Obama Dems. In truth, I doubt any of the presidents themselves took the initiative here, although I wouldn't put it past Trump to have noticed it (the person who noticed the number of door hinges in his hotels might have caught this as well). Nonetheless, it's a welcome change that they noticed it
Yeah... you would think they could simplify it so every second is just incremented, and have some standard libraries to convert to human form...
Guess who the real cancer on efficiency is. it's not the Republicans.
Bullshit.
If anything Republicans are the architects of government inefficiency. Democrats are only marginally better since they generally don't do stupid shit like holding votes to repeal or gut the ACA when there is no way the Senate or POTUS would go along with it. If the politician's goal was efficiency they would be working together to hammer out compromises before putting bills to a vote.
Reid had every right to do what he did, just as Lott, Daschle, and Frist did before him and McConnell does now. Just because a member of the other tribe had control of it then doesn't make it a good or a bad thing. I do agree that having one guy able to hold things up is not good, but it needs to apply to both tribes.
The House passing a bill that is completely unpalatable to the opposition that controls the Senate and/or the POTUS is fucking stupid and a complete waste of time. Pass something that doesn't contain poison pill amendments completely unrelated to the bill. Pass something that doesn't contain items completely antithetical to the other tribe's view.
In other words: Work together for the people, you fucking fucks.
THE SOFTWARE, IT NO WORKY!!!
The electoral college is an attempt to balance political power between rural and urban voters.
That's what many US school history books say. However, US school history books have to be approved by groups of political appointees in every state who are kind of famous for not wanting any uncomfortable truths put into them.
Turns out we have extensive documentation over the constitutional deliberations on this matter. A simple plebiscite for President was preferred initially by some, but would not fly with the slave states. At the time, only land-owning (white) men were generally allowed to vote, and the plantation society in those states was centered around a very few big landowners and oodles of landless workers/slaves. This meant in a simple popular vote for POTUS, slave states would have almost no say. Northern free states with their small family farms and shopkeepers would vastly outvote them. Their only hope would be to enfranchise their slaves (which of course is essentially an oxymoron).
The Electoral College's entire purpose in its weird indirect design was to give slave states a voice in electing a POTUS proportional to their population, rather than to the amount of humans they actually allowed to vote. Slave states were even allowed to include their slaves (well, 3/5 of them) in this count. During elections, if some states didn't even have a vote for POTUS (and many didn't for the next 100 years) that was their business.
Certianly there are other justifications for the EC that you hear today (if there weren't we would have ditched it long ago). However, Slavery is the reason it came to be in the first place.
The real reason the EC was created was appeasement of slavers
No mod points, but this is exactly the reason. Remember that slaves (obviously) and other people who didn't own land weren't allowed to vote in most states. So in a flat vote, voters in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania alone would probably have overwhelmed the votes of all the slave states combined. However, once you rig up this weird system where slave states get to count great masses of people who they would never consider allowing to actually vote (slaves, sharecroppers, etc), then suddenly 5 of the first 6 POTUS were native to Virginia.
You make the mistake most of the others on here make. The Electoral College may not boost the power of the VOTERS in the small states, but it does boost the power of the states.
As conceived by the Framers of the Constitution, the voters of the United States do not decide who the President will be, the States do. The fact that all states currently allocate their Electoral College representatives based on the results of an election does not change the fact that the Constitution gives each state legislature complete freedom to select their EC representatives in any manner they so choose.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
As far as I am aware each state decides independently how their EC members are determined. They can do proportional, winner take all, a mix of the two or flip a coin. The only Federal rules are about how many representatives each state has in the EC. People who keep complaining about how the EC is run need to get out and push for reform on the State level, not the Federal.
As for a true popular vote, that is a failing solution on so many levels that it shouldn't even be mentioned in true electoral reform.
On just a pure size issue, a potential recount of 250 million votes would mean election results probably wouldn't be finalized until after inauguration day.
It also opens the floodgates for real voter fraud. Unlike the EC where local fraud has limited Federal impact (it can elect a single Congresspersons or even a Senator but could only impact a limited number of EC Presidential votes), in a popular vote system a few districts in a heavily populated areas could potentially impact the entire popular vote. The last election is a perfect example of this in that Hillary won the popular vote by upwards of 3 million votes but all of those votes came from a single state, California. In a pure popular vote system if a state that favors an R or D candidate decides to "loosen" their voter eligibility and let questionable voters cast ballots then potentially millions of votes would be illegally added to the federal count. Ignoring any of the as yet unproven claims about letting illegal immigrants vote in California, this type of relaxing of voter laws routinely happens even now in some districts (usually in the form of ignoring inmate rolls) but because of their limited impact nationally, all that usually happens is a couple of voter groups file lawsuits that go nowhere. If these votes were added to a federal tally then these lawsuits would most likely have to go all the way to the Supremes, adding even more time till a winner is determined.
The EC is not perfect but in a system made up of 50+ individual entities it may be as close as you're going to get.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!