You must not drive much. I have to fill up at least weekly, and I have to ask: are you counting the time it takes to go to the gas station and pay the bill?
My normal station is only two blocks away from work, and that adds at least two minutes. I pay at the pump and get gas from the pump in the parking lot of the grocery store I shop at. So 3 minutes isn't really an exaggeration. But you say something that makes me curious. You have to fill up at least weekly but you don't drive enough to need to recharge an electric every day. Do you 1) get really bad gas mileage 2) have a coke bottle for a gas tank or 3) exaggerate to make it sound like you won't have to plug in every day?
30 seconds is just an estimate; it could be half that with a good setup, and double or triple for a stupid one. In other words, it's just a number pulled out of the air to make your idea seem more palatable.
As for the downed mileage - it actually does lower your mileage; it's just not noticeable. What's not noticeable? 1 mile? 13? The latter is a 10% loss in the range of your vehicle. Now, this isn't exactly a EV battery but I wasn't trying to derive my entire driving energy from it. Earlier this year, my alternator died, but I made sure my battery had a full charge. I couldn't make it the 40 miles from my mom's house back home just firing the plugs, sensors and brake lights and that was before it got dark.
You also didn't address the issue of heat. It's a bitch to drive around in single digit weather three months of the year if your car doesn't have a heat source. To add another issue, there's "I just got home and have a message waiting saying my kid is in the hospital... only I have to wait a while for my car to charge rather than stop at the pump."
but a major difference between pouring gasoline into a car and charging the batter is that pouring gasoline pretty much needs to be an attended activity - charging a car you only need the 30 seconds or so to attach the plug, then remove it before you leave. It takes me about 3 minutes to fill my tank every 2 weeks or so. If it takes you 30 seconds to plug in and another 30 seconds to unplug (1 minute per charge event), you've caught up with me in just 3 charges. I live in NY... so unlike you, I'll have heat in my vehicle this time of year too. Also, driving at night doesn't down my mileage (not to mention secondary things that draw current like radios, cell chargers, etc).
Psst, back then the Democrats were as much the party of christians as the Republicans were. It wasn't until the Civil Rights movement in the 60s (when the northern (especially northeastern) Democrats and southern Democrats hated each other more than the other party) followed Nixon's "Southern Strategy" that the southern christians switched to Republicanism and Democrats turned more secular.
The Volstead Act was vetoed by Wilson but his veto was overridden by a supermajority in Congress(with dries in both parties outnumbering the wets by more than double). The 18th Amendment then passed and was ratified by every state except for Rhode Island.
Anyway, the point is, there was no "christian right" then. Everyone, regardless of party, was generally more conservative on social issues back then. Calling all of those people "the christian right" is about as meaningful as saying all cars in America have driver's side gas tanks, ignoring that plenty of cars have passenger side tanks(since this is Slashdot and I haven't seen a car analogy on this story) since it doesn't fit your predetermined bias.
Every time the law has been used as a club to force the public to accept a minority moral position, it's failed to have the desired effect. Remember learning about the prohibition? Prohibition, otherwise known as the Eighteenth Amendment, required 2/3rds of both houses of Congress, and 3/4ths of the states to pass it(Rhode Island was the only state to reject it). It was hardly the minority moral position. That said, it was subverted by the minority position, but not before we got the wonderfully powerful FBI to fight them. It was ultimately repealed with the Twenty First Amendment after twenty some years as citizens grew tired of the racketeering and other problems it was causing.
Also, I know it's common to confuse democracy and republicanism today, but we are a republic precisely to protect the rights of the minority from a simple plurality. As prohibition shows, it doesn't always stop the political winds of the day, but it's far better than simply changing things on the fickleness of the voters at any given time. For as much as you and I dislike the tactics of the RIAA and/or MPAA, remember, they're in bed with the rest of the media and could just as easily start a movement against something you hold dear (say, open source software) if we were a true democracy.
Sponsor: John Conyers (D-MI)
Co-sponsors: Howard Berman (D-CA), Steve Chabot (R-OH), Steve Cohen (D-TN), Tom Feeney (R-FL), Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), Darrell Issa (R-CA), Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX), Ric Keller (R-FL), Adam Schiff (D-CA), Lamar Smith (R-TX), Robert Wexler (D-FL)
The sponsorship is fairly bi-partisan. We'll see how the actual vote goes though. It's still in the House Judiciary Committee.
If you take a "I can neither confirm nor deny that" approach to everything, then everything is questionable whether or not it is genuine. The minute you start denying any particular document, story, etc there is a silent implication that if you don't deny another story, it must be because it is true. Also, if you deny the validity of the document, people are going to want to see the original so they can compare it to the fake to find the truth. Even then, you may not want to admit there is an original document.
That holds true whether you're a government, business dealing with trade secrets, etc.
1. I can say whatever the fuck I want, without worrying about the consequences of doing so, because, damnit, it's absolutely necessary to preserve my other rights. Free speech is NOT absolute. You do not have the right to yell fire in a crowded theater, you do not have the right to lie under oath, etc.
5. My words cannot be used against me in any court of law. If you intend to convict me of a crime, you need goddamn evidence. Testimony of any kind is UNRELIABLE no matter what. To ask someone to testify against themselves KNOWING: Your words absolutely CAN be used against you in a court of law (statements made to the police after waving your Miranda rights, a manifesto you've created ala the unibomber, a diary of yours they obtained via warrant, etc). What they can't do is force you to get on the stand and testify against yourself.
The problem the parent eludes to is that many developers think graphics are more important than the game. Graphics are nice, but if the game sucks, a polished turd is still a turd. I'd rather play a great game with decent graphics than a mediocre game that awes me with shiny for the 30 minutes I play until I decide that it sucks.
Is it patriotic to want to change the Constitution or should patriots want to keep it the same? Is it patriotic to support changes that have been made or to consider them corruptions of the Constitution? That depends on the change... would it be patriotic to America to amend the Constitution to turn the government into a theocracy? Would it be patriotic to America to amend the Constitution so that the federal government controls every facet of your life? Those ideas strive directly against the ideology this country was founded on... and thus would be unpatriotic.
If someone wants to live under the European ideology, nothing is stopping them from going to where it's already provided. For as much as some American Slashdotters bitch about how evil America is, you don't see a whole lot of them moving, do you? Sure, some do... but most people know they actually have it pretty well here and just want to whine because they don't get to impose their ideology on everyone else.
Because I'm interested in his source to see if the poll questions were leading or if they were fair? I said that it's possible to make polls say whatever you want them to say, not that 100% of polls are wrong.
And, your point, besides flawed, is? The Constitution was written over 200 years ago by people who had no concept of the issues faced by a modern society. My point isn't flawed, your ideology is. Either you support the Constitution (the embodiment of American ideals) or you don't. You want to scrap the entire thing to become Europe. America fought a war for independence because we no longer wanted to be an annex of Europe. If America sucks and Europe doesn't, go to Europe where you'll fit right in.
Further, those brilliant people who wrote the Constitution knew that they couldn't foresee everything America would face... and in their infinite wisdom, gave us a method to change the fundamentals of the government if we needed to. That process is known as amending the Constitution.
And what is it that our founding fathers shunned about Europe? They disliked powerful, centralized governments dictating what tools they were allowed to have access to, to whom and where they could ship their exports, what taxes they would have to pay, etc. Any time the government takes money from you, even under the guise of providing for you, it is taking your freedom away. The last thing American ideals support is a centralized government that could tell you when you could get health care (as well as what can be treated and who you have to see), control of the education of their children or allowing the government to steal from Bob to give to Joe.
Beyond that, it's now ignored on a regular basis by the "elected" officials so it is meaningless. The real basis of the US government is that real Americans value freedom above all else, and the Constitution no longer provides that freedom. It's time for a change. It is ignored because we, the people, no longer wish to hold politicians accountable. It's got nothing to do with the Constitution and everything to do with a disinterested, uneducated, lazy population. People vote for the party and they vote who is going to tax someone else to give them something "for free," the notion of voting for what's best for the country died decades ago.
Do your own research You made a claim... I called your bluff. Show me the source your stats, which you must surely have at hand to make such a claim.
I don't think it would be hard to find stats showing most people want some form of universal health care (or at the very least GOOD healthcare or even AFFORDABLE healthcare), better wages, more free time and more freedom. Polls are pretty bogus and you can make a poll get the result you want, regardless of what people really believe. Ask someone who is lost in the woods and starving if they think the government should be able to track them any time, anywhere they go if it means being able to rescue them and chances are, you'll get them to say yes. By the way, precisely because the people can be so easily persuaded, is why we have a limited republic with divided powers instead of an omnipotent direct democracy.
people vote for morons who are "prettier" than the others (Gee Dubya being the exception, but since he got in by massive fraud, we can let it slide) The fact that you're still arguing about it after 7 years shows exactly who the moron is... you understand neither the SCOTUS decision nor the idea of why selective recounts violate the Fourteenth Amendment
then they end up using ad hominem attacks like "you're un-American" on Slashdot. It's not an ad hominem if it accurately describes you... calling me "caucasian" isn't an ad hominem. Calling a fish "aquatic" isn't an ad hominem. Calling someone who believes the Constitution should be burned so we can be like Europe "un-American" isn't an ad hominem. It's a description of who you are. You may not like the term, but it is accurate. As for Slashdotters calling you un-American, that should tell you something... this site isn't exactly the Free Republic.
People like me who believe the US Constitution should be thrown out in its entirety and replaced with something more modern are shouted down as "un-American" As the Constitution is the basis for the entire United States government, by definition, if you reject the Constitution and want to replace it with something more modern/European, you are un-American and more pro-European.
I also reject your claim that "most of us would prefer a more European system." Citations or it's just your desires being projected onto everyone else to bolster your internal support for your ideology. Also, "statistics showing the US falling behind everyone else in terms of education, healthcare and standard of living" is the result of government meddling, not the result of too little government interference. Each of those standards have steadily decreased as government interference increased.
Kennedy after the Democrats swiftboated his first choice, Robert Bork That word does not mean what you think it means. You're right... in the case of Bork, they were unfairly smearing someone. In the case of Kerry, they were simply exposing the truth about his military record.
Alas, the facts have a well known liberal bias and when they don't, we'll just ignore them to slam Bush and conservatives anyway. Cognitive dissonance FTW! And that well known bias whoops your ass. Someone gets the facts utterly wrong and attacks conservatives... I point out that people shouldn't be so quick to blame conservatives without facts... so you completely change the topic so you can... bash conservatives. Hence my point proven that you guys don't care so much about the truth or the topic at hand, all you care about is bashing conservatives.
Does it hurt being such a tool for your party's masters?
The New York State Election Law mandates that there be at least one poll worker from each major party present at the polling place. Typically there's two Republicans and two Democrats. We schedule our breaks around this -- both Republicans don't go to lunch at the same time for example. Furthermore, if a voter requires assistance and we have to go into the machine with them, at least TWO inspectors have to go into the machine, one from each party. The Election Law defines the two major parties as the parties that had the highest and second highest vote counts in the last Governor's election. So in theory it need not even be the Democrats and Republicans. It doesn't always quite work out that way in practice though. There are usually 3-4 people working when I go to the polls, so I haven't seen it personally, but I've had friends go vote and find only one person staffing the poll at that time (I don't know where the others were, out to lunch, bathroom, whatever).
The biggest problem we face is the fact that nobody young bothers to volunteer to work as an Election Inspector. The overwhelming majority of us are old retirees. I will also attest to that. In the 12 years that I've been voting, I've never seen a poll worker under 50. Maybe 25% of the time, there will be someone who is of non-retirement age.
I've seen districts fall apart during primary elections with depressingly low turnout Primaries and school elections seem prone to poor turnouts. The only time I've ever seen a massive primary turnout was in 2005 when we had a town supervisor seat nomination that was hotly contested. Nearly 1000 people crammed into the high school gym (reference, tuesday's general election had about 700 people vote total). My town is a one party town by a margin of about 5-1 so whoever wins the primary of that party pretty much is guaranteed to win the general election too (actually, it's like that in the nearest city too... if you aren't a certain party, you flat out can't get elected for any reason, even if that party's candidate were Osama bin Laden and you are (insert saintly person of your choice)). Bonus points when the nominee for that one party picks up the nomination of the other party too, in order to make sure he runs uncontested (even though that other party didn't bother to put up a candidate in 5 of the 6 local races this year).
Um, the strict constitutionalists voted in favor of the little guy in the Kelo case.
Voted for the right of the state to take property to give to a private individual: Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer.
Voted against the state taking property to give to a private individual: O'Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas (with additional dissent written by Thomas).
Before you go blaming someone, at least get your facts straight. Also, neither (Alito and Roberts) of Bush 43's appointees heard the case. The five voting for it were put in by Ford(Stevens), Reagan (Kennedy after the Democrats swiftboated his first choice, Robert Bork), Bush 41 (Souter) and Clinton (Ginsburg and Breyer). Four of those five are consistently on the side of big government, Kennedy is a tossup depending on the issue.
Alas, the facts have a well known liberal bias and when they don't, we'll just ignore them to slam Bush and conservatives anyway. Cognitive dissonance FTW!
I, too, vote in NY and use the mechanical lever machines. The primary problems I've seen from them is that they are prone to mechanical failure (Don Alhart, a local tv anchor, broke the machine he used Tuesday) and that there is no way to separate votes are potentially corrupted.
In the case of the former, all machines run the risk of breaking down, be they mechanical, electronic or even pencil and paper (run out of ballots, pencils, etc)... as long as there is some type of backup system (perhaps an absentee ballot to use in place of the machine if there isn't a second machine available on-site), it isn't an issue.
As for the latter, the machine keeps running totals on vote per candidate and total voters. You can't go add a vote for someone without adding to the running total, which is supposed to match up with the election roll count (ie, we have 357 people who voted at this station today but the machine count shows a total of 413 voters). How do you know which of the 56 votes shouldn't count without invalidating all 357 legitimate votes? Not just that, but the machines are also prone to the poll workers, especially if there isn't someone from each party, deciding to vote on behalf of people who never chose to vote. I'm not sure there's a good solution to that (but, again, every voting system, short of tying your identification to your vote, is prone to that).
Basically, I trust the lever machines more than I would touch screen voting... and you can't screw up your voting, the machine, mechanically, won't let you overvote. I could accept optically scanning a paper ballot as a viable change if we really must.
I just wanted to say that, on whole, I like Ron Paul more than the rest of the candidates. He's principled, he believes in a lot of the stuff I believe in (primarily that the Constitution is the primary law of the land and that it specifies a small, mostly powerless federal government) and he actually votes for what he stands for.
The primary thing that he loses me on is that he's willing to cut and run from Iraq, regardless of the consequences. It's one thing to argue about whether or not we should have gone in (which is a moot point in this case but is valuable to future military actions) but I think it's shortsighted to up and leave without considering what that would do at this point, especially since our national security is directly tied to the stability of the middle east because of oil.
One more thing... The Democrats were the ones who originally voted to table the measure and just before voting ceased, a bunch of Republicans switched to voting to consider the measure. That would have forced a debate on whether or not Cheney should be impeached which would have force the Democrats to go hard left with Kucinich (alienating the moderates who hate to see impeachment period) or to go moderate (pissing off their hard left masters). It fell just short and was sent off to committee where it will die so the Democrats don't actually have to take a stand on something.
That's the risk of running on a platform of being "not the other guy" versus running on a platform of ideals and is indicative why the Democratic leadership really believes they won Congress. You can't talk out of both sides of your mouth forever and expect to not get caught, just ask Hillary.
What I don't think most leftists understand is that the Democrats didn't win 2006 based on their ideas... they won 2006 because they weren't Republicans. The Republicans were plagued with scandals (corruption, bribes, Mark Foley, etc) and the conservatives threw their arms up in the air (along with their support). Meanwhile, true moderates (Democrats aren't moderates in the US no matter how much they claim to be, this isn't Europe) wanted something other than the same old so they voted for the most viable candidate who wasn't a Republican.
Quite a few Republicans actually saw that as a win. Why? Because it would give Dems full control, and blame, of both houses of Congress for the next two years. People have decided they don't like this Congress either, even less than the last Congress. If the Democrats rail to the hard left, they will end up losing the moderate voters and re-invigorating the conservatives (which, after tossing out the bums last year, are already ready to make sure a Republican wins next year). If the Dems force our troops out of Iraq by cutting off the funding, they get the blame when the middle east erupts in chaos ala Cambodia and Laos. If the Dems get forceful on rolling back stuff like wiretapping, they get the blame if a terrorist attacks hits the US (because there hasn't been one since 2001). Basically, the Dems have everything to lose next year and need to thread a very fine needle to keep Congressional power.
The Presidency is another matter and every candidate has major flaws that could derail them if they are nominated. Hillary has massively high negative numbers (and a rash of other problems), conservatives will be loathe to vote for Guiliani despite Pat Robertson's endorsement today, Obama is too inexperienced, Romney has the Mormom problem, Thomspon isn't gaining traction, McCain is hated by a large chunk of the GOP and an increasing amount of Dems, Ron Paul says a lot of things people like and a lot of things people hate, etc. Next year is definitely shaping up to be one of the premier "lesser of two evils" election. As a conservative and Constitutionalist, I'm not happy with any of the choices on the right next year and I'm hoping, with much glee, for Hillary to win the Democratic nomination. I think anyone except David Duke can beat her. Ok, I'd really prefer a Kucinich race as long as the aliens (of the extra-terrestrial kind) can't vote.
There are people who will drive cars no matter what... not liking mass transportation doesn't doesn't mean they see it as socialism. As I previously enumerated, people like having the freedom to come and go as they please rather than according to someone else's schedule. People like having a way to get home when they have to work late or being able to get their kid to the doctor in the middle of the night for a non-critical problem that doesn't require an ambulance. Also, in the vast majority of the country (read everywhere but the cities and dense suburbs), mass transportation is more inefficient than owning your own vehicle.
There's about 100 miles of road to cover in my town (spread over 41 square miles of area). If a bus gets 10 mpg and it runs the entire 100 miles once an hour to pick people up so they don't have to walk 5 miles to the bus stop and does so from 5am until 11pm (18 hours a day), that's 1800 gallons of fuel a day to service 2693 housholds, just to shuttle them to the train or grocery store. Now, assuming every household drives that same 5 miles twice a day (once to work and once home), and their vehicle averages 30 mpg, that's 808 gallons of gas they use for the same route. If they're all idiots and make the trip twice because they didn't pick up something for dinner on the way home, we're still about 200 gallons per day ahead of the bus. In the end, the car ends up being better for the environment, preserves the people's independence and since they own a car, they might as well use it so things fit their schedule instead of planning around someone else's arbitrary one. To top it off, most of the country is way less dense than my semi-rural/outer-suburb town.
I don't care what public transportation looks like... the question is whether or not it can adequately suit my lifestyle (I ride the Metro in DC all the time because the hassle of driving isn't worth it) at a reasonable cost (and it's cheaper to own a car where I live (western NY) than force people to use mass transportation). If you really want to get the kneejerk "this is socialism and I won't be a part of it," force people to use mass transportation and take their cars away from them. For the most part, we don't care what the other guys do as long as we aren't forced to be part of it.
Peak oil has been just a decade away ever since the theory was first floated 50 years ago. Fact is, we keep finding new oil reserves and new ways of extracting oil that we didn't have the technology to get to before. Will oil run out eventually? Sure... but as it really does run out, we'll have the necessity to force us onto a new technology.
I've noticed a rash of people screaming peak oil at an increasing rate lately. Either people are just encountering it for the first time, there is a group strongly pushing it under the radar or else people are just suddenly reverting to their mantras of decades past. Probably a combination of all three. One troll on my local paper's website adds peak oil posts to stories about mundane offtopic things... "Some School loses football game. Peak oil troll at 11."
At the bottom it says "But overall, US adults have the biggest annual travel carbon footprint in the world at 7.8 tonnes, more than double France's 3.7 tonnes, which comes in at number two. Third on the list, at 3.1 tonnes, is Britain." -- the USA is a big jump ahead of France there!
For instance, "If one in 10 Americans used public transportation regularly, U.S. reliance on foreign oil could be cut by more than 40 percent--the amount we import from Saudi Arabia each year." (source). This notes that public transport use in America has now got back to the level it was at 50 years ago -- I don't know how much settlement density has changed in that time, maybe people have left cities a lot (?), but if it used to be possible, why isn't it possible any more?
I'd be surprised if 1 in ten Americans (30 million people) weren't using public transportation regularly. In NYC, it's a much larger hassle to have a car (fees, tolls, paying for parking, etc) than it is to take the subway. The same is true of nearly every city I've been to in the eastern half of the US (Seattle being the only city I've been to on the west coast and that was either walking or driving around with my girlfriend so I didn't check out their public transportation).
Outside of the cities (ie the vast majority of the US), public transportation just isn't possible. I live in a town of 7000 people with about 100 miles of road. We have a grocery store in town but I need to go 15 miles (one way) to get a decent selection of food at a reasonable price (a large national chain and another regional chain), to buy clothes, etc. I need to go 25 miles in another direction to get to specialty stores. It's not economically feasible to build a million little stores to service a couple dozen people each. It's also not feasible to expect people to walk up to 5 miles just to get to a public transportation station that will zip them off to those locations once an hour (damn, you missed it by 5 minutes and now have to wait almost an hour). Oh, double the buses, trains or whatever? Ok, you just doubled the carbon output (and costs) and halved the ridership of each transport. You certaintly can't solve the problem of distance to the station by running more transports around to pick people up (they'll be empty most of the time and will end up creating more carbon emissions than cars. For reference, it costs about $400k a year (not counting acquisition of new buses) to bus our kids to/from school on predetermined routes twice a day). The vast majority of the country (excluding dense, urban areas) is even far less dense than my town (190 people/mi^2 or 73.5/km2). I've been places where the distance to the nearest neighbor is measured in miles.
Finally, only half of the oil used by the United States goes to create gasoline. A quarter of it alone goes to home heating and most of the rest is used for farming and industrial purposes. If gasoline makes up 50% of our oil useage and 10% of Americans using public transportation means cutting oil consumption by 40%, that means that we'll see a 80% reduction in gasoline useage from a 10% increase in transportation. Why, at that rate, if we get 50% of people to use mass transportation, we'll not only stop using gasoline entirely, why we'll be creating 4 times more gasoline out of thin air than we consumed beforehand. Without looking at it, I'd say their numbers are flawed (or highly skewed to consider the 10% only those who use the most gasoline).
Why does the US use so much gas to get around? Again, it's a big place with a low density so mass transportation just can't work. People like having the freedom of getting in their car and going somewhere on their schedule rather than when some department of transportation decides they can move from point A to point B (and you're screwed if you miss the last ride of the night because you had to work late... it's not a matter of walking a mile pissing and moaning about your luck, you might be walking 50 miles or paying out the ass for a
Kyoto is fundamentally flawed in that the two biggest up and coming polluters (China and India) are exempt. If everyone else cleans up their act (by shipping all their dirty manufacturing to those countries), we haven't solved anything, just shifted the mess to someplace with fewer regulations.
People in the USA tend to drive massive, fuel-hungry cars and fly planes a lot, which looks bad.... My last remark in that comment was based on my immediate perception of the USA from Europe, sorry. Maybe you shouldn't believe everything you see in the movies and/or your papers. Millions of people, maybe 100 million, in the US have never even flown. We're also a big country (about 3000 miles from coast to coast, where the major commerce centers are located) and that necessitates air travel for some things. Just because you can drive from one side of Germany to the other in a couple hours doesn't mean I can get from New York to California that fast. Oh, and mass transit can't work in the vast majority of the US where the population density is miniscule so those people are going to have to have cars, trucks, etc to be able to live. Still, millions of adults (at least tens of millions), don't own a car at all.
Ok, ok, I'm kidding. Everyone in the US (kids too) drives a hummer and has a C-130 that they bring it onto so they can fly it cross-country. The BBC told me so.
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My normal station is only two blocks away from work, and that adds at least two minutes. I pay at the pump and get gas from the pump in the parking lot of the grocery store I shop at. So 3 minutes isn't really an exaggeration. But you say something that makes me curious. You have to fill up at least weekly but you don't drive enough to need to recharge an electric every day. Do you 1) get really bad gas mileage 2) have a coke bottle for a gas tank or 3) exaggerate to make it sound like you won't have to plug in every day? 30 seconds is just an estimate; it could be half that with a good setup, and double or triple for a stupid one. In other words, it's just a number pulled out of the air to make your idea seem more palatable. As for the downed mileage - it actually does lower your mileage; it's just not noticeable. What's not noticeable? 1 mile? 13? The latter is a 10% loss in the range of your vehicle. Now, this isn't exactly a EV battery but I wasn't trying to derive my entire driving energy from it. Earlier this year, my alternator died, but I made sure my battery had a full charge. I couldn't make it the 40 miles from my mom's house back home just firing the plugs, sensors and brake lights and that was before it got dark.
You also didn't address the issue of heat. It's a bitch to drive around in single digit weather three months of the year if your car doesn't have a heat source. To add another issue, there's "I just got home and have a message waiting saying my kid is in the hospital... only I have to wait a while for my car to charge rather than stop at the pump."
Psst, back then the Democrats were as much the party of christians as the Republicans were. It wasn't until the Civil Rights movement in the 60s (when the northern (especially northeastern) Democrats and southern Democrats hated each other more than the other party) followed Nixon's "Southern Strategy" that the southern christians switched to Republicanism and Democrats turned more secular.
The Volstead Act was vetoed by Wilson but his veto was overridden by a supermajority in Congress(with dries in both parties outnumbering the wets by more than double). The 18th Amendment then passed and was ratified by every state except for Rhode Island.
Anyway, the point is, there was no "christian right" then. Everyone, regardless of party, was generally more conservative on social issues back then. Calling all of those people "the christian right" is about as meaningful as saying all cars in America have driver's side gas tanks, ignoring that plenty of cars have passenger side tanks(since this is Slashdot and I haven't seen a car analogy on this story) since it doesn't fit your predetermined bias.
Also, I know it's common to confuse democracy and republicanism today, but we are a republic precisely to protect the rights of the minority from a simple plurality. As prohibition shows, it doesn't always stop the political winds of the day, but it's far better than simply changing things on the fickleness of the voters at any given time. For as much as you and I dislike the tactics of the RIAA and/or MPAA, remember, they're in bed with the rest of the media and could just as easily start a movement against something you hold dear (say, open source software) if we were a true democracy.
Sponsor: John Conyers (D-MI)
Co-sponsors: Howard Berman (D-CA), Steve Chabot (R-OH), Steve Cohen (D-TN), Tom Feeney (R-FL), Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), Darrell Issa (R-CA), Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX), Ric Keller (R-FL), Adam Schiff (D-CA), Lamar Smith (R-TX), Robert Wexler (D-FL)
The sponsorship is fairly bi-partisan. We'll see how the actual vote goes though. It's still in the House Judiciary Committee.
If you take a "I can neither confirm nor deny that" approach to everything, then everything is questionable whether or not it is genuine. The minute you start denying any particular document, story, etc there is a silent implication that if you don't deny another story, it must be because it is true. Also, if you deny the validity of the document, people are going to want to see the original so they can compare it to the fake to find the truth. Even then, you may not want to admit there is an original document.
That holds true whether you're a government, business dealing with trade secrets, etc.
The problem the parent eludes to is that many developers think graphics are more important than the game. Graphics are nice, but if the game sucks, a polished turd is still a turd. I'd rather play a great game with decent graphics than a mediocre game that awes me with shiny for the 30 minutes I play until I decide that it sucks.
If someone wants to live under the European ideology, nothing is stopping them from going to where it's already provided. For as much as some American Slashdotters bitch about how evil America is, you don't see a whole lot of them moving, do you? Sure, some do... but most people know they actually have it pretty well here and just want to whine because they don't get to impose their ideology on everyone else.
Because I'm interested in his source to see if the poll questions were leading or if they were fair? I said that it's possible to make polls say whatever you want them to say, not that 100% of polls are wrong.
Further, those brilliant people who wrote the Constitution knew that they couldn't foresee everything America would face... and in their infinite wisdom, gave us a method to change the fundamentals of the government if we needed to. That process is known as amending the Constitution.
And what is it that our founding fathers shunned about Europe? They disliked powerful, centralized governments dictating what tools they were allowed to have access to, to whom and where they could ship their exports, what taxes they would have to pay, etc. Any time the government takes money from you, even under the guise of providing for you, it is taking your freedom away. The last thing American ideals support is a centralized government that could tell you when you could get health care (as well as what can be treated and who you have to see), control of the education of their children or allowing the government to steal from Bob to give to Joe. Beyond that, it's now ignored on a regular basis by the "elected" officials so it is meaningless. The real basis of the US government is that real Americans value freedom above all else, and the Constitution no longer provides that freedom. It's time for a change. It is ignored because we, the people, no longer wish to hold politicians accountable. It's got nothing to do with the Constitution and everything to do with a disinterested, uneducated, lazy population. People vote for the party and they vote who is going to tax someone else to give them something "for free," the notion of voting for what's best for the country died decades ago. Do your own research You made a claim... I called your bluff. Show me the source your stats, which you must surely have at hand to make such a claim. I don't think it would be hard to find stats showing most people want some form of universal health care (or at the very least GOOD healthcare or even AFFORDABLE healthcare), better wages, more free time and more freedom. Polls are pretty bogus and you can make a poll get the result you want, regardless of what people really believe. Ask someone who is lost in the woods and starving if they think the government should be able to track them any time, anywhere they go if it means being able to rescue them and chances are, you'll get them to say yes. By the way, precisely because the people can be so easily persuaded, is why we have a limited republic with divided powers instead of an omnipotent direct democracy. people vote for morons who are "prettier" than the others (Gee Dubya being the exception, but since he got in by massive fraud, we can let it slide) The fact that you're still arguing about it after 7 years shows exactly who the moron is... you understand neither the SCOTUS decision nor the idea of why selective recounts violate the Fourteenth Amendment then they end up using ad hominem attacks like "you're un-American" on Slashdot. It's not an ad hominem if it accurately describes you... calling me "caucasian" isn't an ad hominem. Calling a fish "aquatic" isn't an ad hominem. Calling someone who believes the Constitution should be burned so we can be like Europe "un-American" isn't an ad hominem. It's a description of who you are. You may not like the term, but it is accurate. As for Slashdotters calling you un-American, that should tell you something... this site isn't exactly the Free Republic.
I also reject your claim that "most of us would prefer a more European system." Citations or it's just your desires being projected onto everyone else to bolster your internal support for your ideology. Also, "statistics showing the US falling behind everyone else in terms of education, healthcare and standard of living" is the result of government meddling, not the result of too little government interference. Each of those standards have steadily decreased as government interference increased.
Does it hurt being such a tool for your party's masters?
I was translating it into Kos-speak so Slashdotters could understand it. Republicans have referred to the same process as "Borking" since 1987.
Um, the strict constitutionalists voted in favor of the little guy in the Kelo case.
Voted for the right of the state to take property to give to a private individual: Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer.
Voted against the state taking property to give to a private individual: O'Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas (with additional dissent written by Thomas).
Before you go blaming someone, at least get your facts straight. Also, neither (Alito and Roberts) of Bush 43's appointees heard the case. The five voting for it were put in by Ford(Stevens), Reagan (Kennedy after the Democrats swiftboated his first choice, Robert Bork), Bush 41 (Souter) and Clinton (Ginsburg and Breyer). Four of those five are consistently on the side of big government, Kennedy is a tossup depending on the issue.
Alas, the facts have a well known liberal bias and when they don't, we'll just ignore them to slam Bush and conservatives anyway. Cognitive dissonance FTW!
I, too, vote in NY and use the mechanical lever machines. The primary problems I've seen from them is that they are prone to mechanical failure (Don Alhart, a local tv anchor, broke the machine he used Tuesday) and that there is no way to separate votes are potentially corrupted.
In the case of the former, all machines run the risk of breaking down, be they mechanical, electronic or even pencil and paper (run out of ballots, pencils, etc)... as long as there is some type of backup system (perhaps an absentee ballot to use in place of the machine if there isn't a second machine available on-site), it isn't an issue.
As for the latter, the machine keeps running totals on vote per candidate and total voters. You can't go add a vote for someone without adding to the running total, which is supposed to match up with the election roll count (ie, we have 357 people who voted at this station today but the machine count shows a total of 413 voters). How do you know which of the 56 votes shouldn't count without invalidating all 357 legitimate votes? Not just that, but the machines are also prone to the poll workers, especially if there isn't someone from each party, deciding to vote on behalf of people who never chose to vote. I'm not sure there's a good solution to that (but, again, every voting system, short of tying your identification to your vote, is prone to that).
Basically, I trust the lever machines more than I would touch screen voting... and you can't screw up your voting, the machine, mechanically, won't let you overvote. I could accept optically scanning a paper ballot as a viable change if we really must.
I just wanted to say that, on whole, I like Ron Paul more than the rest of the candidates. He's principled, he believes in a lot of the stuff I believe in (primarily that the Constitution is the primary law of the land and that it specifies a small, mostly powerless federal government) and he actually votes for what he stands for.
The primary thing that he loses me on is that he's willing to cut and run from Iraq, regardless of the consequences. It's one thing to argue about whether or not we should have gone in (which is a moot point in this case but is valuable to future military actions) but I think it's shortsighted to up and leave without considering what that would do at this point, especially since our national security is directly tied to the stability of the middle east because of oil.
One more thing... The Democrats were the ones who originally voted to table the measure and just before voting ceased, a bunch of Republicans switched to voting to consider the measure. That would have forced a debate on whether or not Cheney should be impeached which would have force the Democrats to go hard left with Kucinich (alienating the moderates who hate to see impeachment period) or to go moderate (pissing off their hard left masters). It fell just short and was sent off to committee where it will die so the Democrats don't actually have to take a stand on something.
That's the risk of running on a platform of being "not the other guy" versus running on a platform of ideals and is indicative why the Democratic leadership really believes they won Congress. You can't talk out of both sides of your mouth forever and expect to not get caught, just ask Hillary.
What I don't think most leftists understand is that the Democrats didn't win 2006 based on their ideas... they won 2006 because they weren't Republicans. The Republicans were plagued with scandals (corruption, bribes, Mark Foley, etc) and the conservatives threw their arms up in the air (along with their support). Meanwhile, true moderates (Democrats aren't moderates in the US no matter how much they claim to be, this isn't Europe) wanted something other than the same old so they voted for the most viable candidate who wasn't a Republican.
Quite a few Republicans actually saw that as a win. Why? Because it would give Dems full control, and blame, of both houses of Congress for the next two years. People have decided they don't like this Congress either, even less than the last Congress. If the Democrats rail to the hard left, they will end up losing the moderate voters and re-invigorating the conservatives (which, after tossing out the bums last year, are already ready to make sure a Republican wins next year). If the Dems force our troops out of Iraq by cutting off the funding, they get the blame when the middle east erupts in chaos ala Cambodia and Laos. If the Dems get forceful on rolling back stuff like wiretapping, they get the blame if a terrorist attacks hits the US (because there hasn't been one since 2001). Basically, the Dems have everything to lose next year and need to thread a very fine needle to keep Congressional power.
The Presidency is another matter and every candidate has major flaws that could derail them if they are nominated. Hillary has massively high negative numbers (and a rash of other problems), conservatives will be loathe to vote for Guiliani despite Pat Robertson's endorsement today, Obama is too inexperienced, Romney has the Mormom problem, Thomspon isn't gaining traction, McCain is hated by a large chunk of the GOP and an increasing amount of Dems, Ron Paul says a lot of things people like and a lot of things people hate, etc. Next year is definitely shaping up to be one of the premier "lesser of two evils" election. As a conservative and Constitutionalist, I'm not happy with any of the choices on the right next year and I'm hoping, with much glee, for Hillary to win the Democratic nomination. I think anyone except David Duke can beat her. Ok, I'd really prefer a Kucinich race as long as the aliens (of the extra-terrestrial kind) can't vote.
There are people who will drive cars no matter what... not liking mass transportation doesn't doesn't mean they see it as socialism. As I previously enumerated, people like having the freedom to come and go as they please rather than according to someone else's schedule. People like having a way to get home when they have to work late or being able to get their kid to the doctor in the middle of the night for a non-critical problem that doesn't require an ambulance. Also, in the vast majority of the country (read everywhere but the cities and dense suburbs), mass transportation is more inefficient than owning your own vehicle.
There's about 100 miles of road to cover in my town (spread over 41 square miles of area). If a bus gets 10 mpg and it runs the entire 100 miles once an hour to pick people up so they don't have to walk 5 miles to the bus stop and does so from 5am until 11pm (18 hours a day), that's 1800 gallons of fuel a day to service 2693 housholds, just to shuttle them to the train or grocery store. Now, assuming every household drives that same 5 miles twice a day (once to work and once home), and their vehicle averages 30 mpg, that's 808 gallons of gas they use for the same route. If they're all idiots and make the trip twice because they didn't pick up something for dinner on the way home, we're still about 200 gallons per day ahead of the bus. In the end, the car ends up being better for the environment, preserves the people's independence and since they own a car, they might as well use it so things fit their schedule instead of planning around someone else's arbitrary one. To top it off, most of the country is way less dense than my semi-rural/outer-suburb town.
I don't care what public transportation looks like... the question is whether or not it can adequately suit my lifestyle (I ride the Metro in DC all the time because the hassle of driving isn't worth it) at a reasonable cost (and it's cheaper to own a car where I live (western NY) than force people to use mass transportation). If you really want to get the kneejerk "this is socialism and I won't be a part of it," force people to use mass transportation and take their cars away from them. For the most part, we don't care what the other guys do as long as we aren't forced to be part of it.
Peak oil has been just a decade away ever since the theory was first floated 50 years ago. Fact is, we keep finding new oil reserves and new ways of extracting oil that we didn't have the technology to get to before. Will oil run out eventually? Sure... but as it really does run out, we'll have the necessity to force us onto a new technology.
I've noticed a rash of people screaming peak oil at an increasing rate lately. Either people are just encountering it for the first time, there is a group strongly pushing it under the radar or else people are just suddenly reverting to their mantras of decades past. Probably a combination of all three. One troll on my local paper's website adds peak oil posts to stories about mundane offtopic things... "Some School loses football game. Peak oil troll at 11."
At the bottom it says "But overall, US adults have the biggest annual travel carbon footprint in the world at 7.8 tonnes, more than double France's 3.7 tonnes, which comes in at number two. Third on the list, at 3.1 tonnes, is Britain." -- the USA is a big jump ahead of France there!
For instance, "If one in 10 Americans used public transportation regularly, U.S. reliance on foreign oil could be cut by more than 40 percent--the amount we import from Saudi Arabia each year." (source). This notes that public transport use in America has now got back to the level it was at 50 years ago -- I don't know how much settlement density has changed in that time, maybe people have left cities a lot (?), but if it used to be possible, why isn't it possible any more?
I'd be surprised if 1 in ten Americans (30 million people) weren't using public transportation regularly. In NYC, it's a much larger hassle to have a car (fees, tolls, paying for parking, etc) than it is to take the subway. The same is true of nearly every city I've been to in the eastern half of the US (Seattle being the only city I've been to on the west coast and that was either walking or driving around with my girlfriend so I didn't check out their public transportation).
Outside of the cities (ie the vast majority of the US), public transportation just isn't possible. I live in a town of 7000 people with about 100 miles of road. We have a grocery store in town but I need to go 15 miles (one way) to get a decent selection of food at a reasonable price (a large national chain and another regional chain), to buy clothes, etc. I need to go 25 miles in another direction to get to specialty stores. It's not economically feasible to build a million little stores to service a couple dozen people each. It's also not feasible to expect people to walk up to 5 miles just to get to a public transportation station that will zip them off to those locations once an hour (damn, you missed it by 5 minutes and now have to wait almost an hour). Oh, double the buses, trains or whatever? Ok, you just doubled the carbon output (and costs) and halved the ridership of each transport. You certaintly can't solve the problem of distance to the station by running more transports around to pick people up (they'll be empty most of the time and will end up creating more carbon emissions than cars. For reference, it costs about $400k a year (not counting acquisition of new buses) to bus our kids to/from school on predetermined routes twice a day). The vast majority of the country (excluding dense, urban areas) is even far less dense than my town (190 people/mi^2 or 73.5/km2). I've been places where the distance to the nearest neighbor is measured in miles.
Finally, only half of the oil used by the United States goes to create gasoline. A quarter of it alone goes to home heating and most of the rest is used for farming and industrial purposes. If gasoline makes up 50% of our oil useage and 10% of Americans using public transportation means cutting oil consumption by 40%, that means that we'll see a 80% reduction in gasoline useage from a 10% increase in transportation. Why, at that rate, if we get 50% of people to use mass transportation, we'll not only stop using gasoline entirely, why we'll be creating 4 times more gasoline out of thin air than we consumed beforehand. Without looking at it, I'd say their numbers are flawed (or highly skewed to consider the 10% only those who use the most gasoline).
Why does the US use so much gas to get around? Again, it's a big place with a low density so mass transportation just can't work. People like having the freedom of getting in their car and going somewhere on their schedule rather than when some department of transportation decides they can move from point A to point B (and you're screwed if you miss the last ride of the night because you had to work late... it's not a matter of walking a mile pissing and moaning about your luck, you might be walking 50 miles or paying out the ass for a
Ugh, it's Monday morning... you already lost me at "synergistic." It's going to be a long week.
People in the USA tend to drive massive, fuel-hungry cars and fly planes a lot, which looks bad.
Ok, ok, I'm kidding. Everyone in the US (kids too) drives a hummer and has a C-130 that they bring it onto so they can fly it cross-country. The BBC told me so.