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More Millennials Would Give Up Voting Than Texting (nypost.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the New York Post:
As the staggering national student loan debt tally sits at an all-time high of $1.33 trillion, according to the Department of Education, many millennials say they would go to extreme lengths to wipe their slate clean. According to a new survey from Credible, a personal finance website, 50 percent of all respondents (ages 18-34) said they would give up their right to vote during the next two presidential elections in order to never have to make another loan payment again.
Yet only 44% said they'd be willing to give up Uber and Lyft -- and only 13% said they'd be willing to give up texting.
Yet only 44% said they'd be willing to give up Uber and Lyft -- and only 13% said they'd be willing to give up texting.
For eight years I've heard Republicans screaming about the Obama Phone being iPhones and how those other people shouldn't have them. Never mind that no one could tell me where to sign up for a government-subsidized iPhone. Now that Obama is out of office, no one is talking about it.
Sounds like a lot of other Slashdot readers already get this, but the votes that matter most are for the people geographically closest to where you live.
The people we voted in as our city council members and mayor have already made more decisions that impact my life than anything Trump has done.
The President in America is only slightly less of a figurehead than than Queen of England, and that's been by design since the nation was founded. If you visit the Old Courthouse in Annapolis, MD - you can see the original letter General George Washington wrote when he declined the offer to become the first King of the USA, right after the Revolutionary War. He felt that control of the nation shouldn't be in the hands of just one individual like that, and just wanted to go back to farming his land. He wound up our first President, instead, by a unanimous vote.
When you really look back at the claimed "big accomplishments" of past Presidents, much of it had more to do with advisors and other staff members putting the ideas forward and convincing the President to get behind them. Ronald Reagan's "trickle down economics" was a great example. He didn't come up with that idea himself. He wasn't even a Finance guy ... just a former Hollywood actor. In other cases, we don't really know if a President really had a plan themselves or not -- but we do know that many changes they make just get watered down or reversed within a decade's time. (President Clinton was famous for his "welfare to work" policy, where he mandated time limits on how long welfare could be collected. In the years that followed, the states slowly dismantled that with exceptions to rules and changes - so today, none of that has any effect on how the system works.) Obama's presidency made a lot of claims about improving our economic and employment conditions - yet historically, we know the economy is cyclical. If you have a boom, you have a bust that follows it, and vise-versa. Become a president when the economy is poor and just hang in there, and you'll eventually be able to take credit for the inevitable turn-around.
I don't want to discount Presidential voting as irrelevant ... but choosing wisely in the Primaries is where you really get more control over who wins. By the time you're at the general election, you've literally got over a dozen contenders who didn't make it -- quite often for the wrong reasons. (Candidates with well known names often get automatic advantages over people nobody has heard of. And candidates pouring more money into trying to win the election can make some of the others look bad for just long enough to bump them out of the running. Reality might be that those "also rans" were actually more qualified candidates all along.)
Trump doesn't insult broad swaths of Americans? He called New Hampshire a drug infested den. To the president of Mexico for fuck's sake.
Trump is a sociopathic asshole who's only nice when it benefits HIM. He's been like this for at least the past 5 decades, and nothing will ever change that.
~X~
The Electoral College is not the Senate. The intention was a pseudo-popular vote, because the number of Electoral College votes is primarily tied to the number of House seats. But we stopped expanding the House in the 1910s. So now the 750,000 people per House district in California have the same representation as the 500,000 people in Wyoming.
That is not at all what was intended. What was intended was 100,000 people per House district. That would have resulted in an Electoral College that was far closer to the popular vote. Even if we had kept with the 200,000 people per district we had when the House stopped expanding, we would have had an Electoral College far closer to the popular vote.