I've already given the example in the last time stupid-ass approval voting came up. It's here.
That's not even some stock example from somewhere, I just made that one up with two minutes of thought.
Feel free to come up with how that example is wrong...like I said, switch some parties around, and it was the 1992 election. It's a universe where more than a third of the voters would rather see a specific third party in office than either of the two main parties, but would rather see one of the two main parties in office than the other. (You know, much like our actual universe.) And one of the two main parties wins, because there was no way to rank votes.
Yes, yes, the some of the people voting D-L and R-L should have voted just L...and now you're back to 'strategic voting'. They need to vote for one or two people depends on how well that person does during the vote (Or, technically, how well they think that person will do.), and not how they actually feel.
If they think their third party has more support than it does, they won't include one of the major parties, which can result in The Other Guy being elected. If they think their third party has less support than it does, they'll include the major party guy on the ballot, which can cause their real choice to lose.
Of course, with approval voting, you'd never be able to prove that was the case, and thus we see how approval wins over IRV. Both approval and IRV result in the wrong person being elected, but it's obvious with IRV, and you'll never know it with approval, which is exactly like under our current system. IRV is not much more stupid than approval or our current system, it's just transparently stupid, whereas with approval or our system you have to hypothosis what voters really meant, but couldn't express.
It astonishes me that people claim Concodent is more complicated. Under Concodent, you never have to base your vote on how you think other people are going to vote. Under every other system proposed, you do.
And, frankly, I don't think the concept is that confusing, anyway. News programs always want to run little charts and graphs, anyway. They'll have a field day comparing every candidate to every other candidate. You can jsut watch the screen until your candidate comes up, and see how he's doing compared to everyone else.
(Of course, Congress isn't really the right place to deciding how states elect presidents but whatever.)
It would accomplish nothing it all. Third parties are still as marginalized, except now you can vote for them and not be penalized...as long as they can't win.
Once they can win, you're back to the same strategic voting crap as today, except now you're trying to decide if you want to vote for your third party and one of the major ones, or just your third party. Which manages to have exactly the same spoiler effect.
IRV is exactly the same, except moreso. That system is so dumb you can hurt people by voting for them.
Concordet is the only system that actually make any fucking sense to bother to change to. Every other system would result in the same crap we have to put up with third parties. It satisfies all the requirements for a fair voting system unless the voters end up with circular preferences, aka, they want A over B over C over A, which is odds are pretty low of happening. (And we have no 'fair' method of deciding on, anyway.)
Unlike approval voting, which has 'edge cases' that look much like the election in 1992...a strong third party is an 'edge case'.
Many people think that, but no. All transitional means is that you don't have to move all your formatting over to CSS. All XHTML is supposed to fail if malformed, just like all XML is. Thank God.
Whereas now, of course, it's California that's ignored by presidental candidates. At state which, by itself, controls something like 1/5th of America's economy.
I don't live in California, I live in Georgia, a state which is also ignored, despite basically being the economic base of the entire South. We get ignored, and Florida gets courted, when, in reality, Florida is almost completely unimportant by an objective standard, consisting almost entirely of old people, vacationers, and escaped Cubans, while Georgia remains grows and transports huge amounts of food, and is really, still, the transportation hub of the entire bottom right quarter of the country. (Hartfield is still the busiest airport in the world.)
If you were to magically remove the entire contents of Florida, almost no one would notice. If you were to magically remove the entire contents of Georgia, the South would fall apart.
But ignoring California is just so completely absurd I used that as an example. If you were to magically remove the entire contents of California, the US would fall apart.
Re:Bayesian Filter Will Stop Working Soon
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DSPAM v3.2 Released
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That doesn't confuse the hell out of anything, although spammers apparently think it does. Bayesian filters don't work that way.
The only way spammers could slip under the radar of Bayesian filters is to start sending mail that is completely identical to legit mail you get. Which would be rather pointless, unless you're legitimately getting a lot of ads.
What Schneier does talk about, and I think what the grandparent was talking about and people missed, is there is absolutely no corrolation between what liberty we're currently being asked to give up, and security.
I.e., while 'security vs liberty' may be a useful choice, what we're often faced with is 'control by authorities vs liberty', and the first part is just claimed to be secure.
For example, the adminstration recently said that people who are wrongly stopped at airports because their names are on terrorist watchlists should start using middle initials or Jr or III after their name. Which good for a great 'What the fuck?' moment after twenty seconds of thought. The watchlists have absolutely no relation to security at all.
If the news had broken last week I'm sure it would have gotten into the month's CRYPTO-GRAM.
I'd just like to amend my second to the last sentence: And the companies should have to pay income tax on all non-American workers.
That is really only relevant when talking about income that otherwise disappears into the great unknown. There are some places, like towns that are located in America and Mexico, when the money quite obviously will circulate back to the US. I'm not trying to make all 'foreign' worker basically pay income tax twice because they live in one country and commute to work in another country.
In fact, that's probably the best test right there: Location. Let's make companies pay income taxes for their foreign workers based on their distance from the US, based on the concept that money is less likely to be taxed again by the US government anytime soon, so we need to extract the taxes from it now.
I understand what you're saying, but I can't figure out where I suggested otherwise. I didn't say anything about getting more, or less, product. I was just talking about the flow of money. Before, it was producer, consumer, producer, in an endless loop, with both taking something way from it.
Under outsourcing, the consumer still pays the producer, but the producer keeps half the money he would have spent before (Or, yes, the company reduces prices, which is slightly less screwage.), and the rest of the money goes to someone in another country, breaking the cycle, because they don't buy things from American companies or use American labor when they order a pizza.
Yes, in the long run, we're just getting other countries to create wealth for us, and thus we're not actually getting poorer. In fact, we can create even more wealth, become money goes farther.
However, the ultimate problem with oursourcing is that it's adding to the wealth of large companies, without giving any money to local workers to purchase said wealth. Which, yes, will eventually solve itself when either we raise up all third world countries in the world to our economic level, or lower ourselves to theirs...but the first will take forever, and the second is not something people would logically want to happen.
And it raises lots of interesting questions about 'trickle down economies'. My entire life, I've heard that if you pay companies more and workers less, they'll just pay workers less. Well, that becomes amazingly irrelevant if their workers aren't paying taxes in the first place. I.e, if we're going to let companies do this, they need to pay more taxes, because their workers are playing less.
In fact, a lot of the laws in the country are based on the concept that consumers are workers, and thus helping consumers at the expense of companies is stupid. Well, if they aren't workers anymore...it's time to fuck companies over. Who's it going to hurt? The rich owners? Companies are rapidly throwing away the one thing that made anyone give a damn about their wants and needs. Companies are here to serve us, if they have no purpose, let's beat them about the head until they have a purpose again or die.
As for your suggestion I'm somehow protectionalist...I have no problem with other countries actually making things cheaper than us. The problem is when they do so in ways that would be illegal under US law for quite legitmate reasons, and it just pisses me off when it's American companies doing it. I mean, we can't police every trinket factory in China, but we're supposed to be able to police American companies.
Hiring people in other countries under minumum wage, in unsafe working conditions, ought to be as legal as it is to do here. And the companies should have to pay income tax on all non-American workers. That would be a nice start.
Yeah, this state is rather rare, but if we go back Democrat again, I think it only makes sense. I mean, poof, a few Democratic votes gained out of nowhere, the Democrats win.
And with the Republicans, we might actually have a presidental candidate show up here on his way to Florida, instead of just completely ignoring the state. They won't like the loss of votes, but maybe they can see it's to the state's benefit.
And I'm not even going to comment on Miller. Miller managed to get the whole state pissed at him, Democrats and Republicans both.
Luckily for him, we're all too busy being pissed at Sonny right now to worry about him right now, who made a hell of a lot of promises to get into office, from un-'fixing' education, to removing cronyism in the state government, to giving us all free pie on Sunday.(I can't actually remember everything he promised, but I'm sure that was in there somewhere.), and has managed to do exactly none of them.
No, I'm thinking under approval voting that...okay, here's the example:
Let's pretend there are only the Democrats, the Republicans, and the Libertarians, to make the math simple.
And there are six groups of people: Three who only approve of one party, and three who approve of two of them. (The people who approval of all of them are just being silly, and the people who approve of none don't get counted.)
So let's make a table:
R: 30%
D: 28%
L: 5%
R-D: 2%
R-L: 20%
D-L: 10%
Tell me, smart guy, who won that election? The Republican. He got 52% of the vote, the Democrat got 40% of the vote, and the Libertarian got 35% of the vote. If you'd look, you'll realize this isn't an entire improbably voting spread, assuming the LP starts getting some support. (Swapping R for D and L for Reform, it could pass for the 1992 election, if we'd done approval voting.)
Of course, if this was our universe, you'd realize that all the people who vote R-L and probably the D-L people wanted the L first, and the D or R second. When you combine that with the people who just voted L, that's 35% of the vote, which would have beaten both the R and the D alone. In other words, the people who voted for L prefered them, and voted for D or R to 'keep the other guy out', which is a pretty reasonable assumption.
Of course, that assumption might be wrong...but you'd never be able to tell with simple approval voting. You could with Concodent. You probably even could with IRV.
That's where people are confused. Sure, there's no advantage to a swing state changing how they vote...and that's because they're a swing state.
Which is why the logical states to change how they vote are non-swing states. Suddenly, they're back in the game, they're important again.
For example, my state, Georgia, votes Republican. 13 votes. If we were to switch to proportional, though, we'd probably vote about 9-4, but we could vote anywhere from 8-5 to 11-2.
Suddenly, we'd be worth three votes, and maybe presidental candidates would find it worthwide to address our concerns, or at least come by and say 'hi'.
Now that I'm mentioned this, I'm actually considering making this concept more serious,and writing someone in the Georgia senate. While the state votes Republicion nationally, it's been Democratic locally for quite some time, at least until the last election, and almost no one's happy with those results, so it will likely go Democratic again.
Um, the problem isn't people coming here to work. I, honestly, have absolutely no problem with that, even if they enter illegally. If I knew where some honest, hardworking Mexicans were hiding, and INS specifically came knocking and asked for directions to their hideout, I send them halfway across the county.
Anyone who makes an issue out of that and takes that stand would lose my vote. I don't give a flying fuck if someone's in the country illegally. I think they should pay taxes, just like normal people, but considering they often get less then minimum wage, it's not like there's a vast amount of taxes they are failing to pay.
However, a failing of the system is farmers and builder who employ people at less than minimum wage, with no taxes. That's something I take issue with, because it's nearly identical to the other big problem. Outsourcing.
The actual economic problem is when a company employs people who do not live in America (or, with illegal immigrants, barely live in this country, and whose family don't) and sells the products to people who live in America. That produces a net imbalance in employment vs. people buying things, which probably would have some technical term if I was an economics major.
But what basically happens is, on average, it gives people in other countries, say, 3 dollars more money a month, and it gives people in American, say, 10 dollars less money a month. (Because in the other country, there are more people working at a slightly higher paying job, and in the US, there are more people laid off.)
Where does the rest of the money go? Into the companies wallets. And as a bonus, they don't have to worry about their worker's income tax. And people in ther countries have no unions, lax labor laws, and lower expectations. (I'm not dissing those people, BTW, I have no quarrel with them.) Everyone wins!
Give me a candidate who'll do something about that and I'll vote for him.
So, in your hypothetical world, people can't afford the now-legal drugs?
In a world created by intelligent people, we wouldn't tax addictive substances so high that addicts couldn't afford them. Let me use heroin as an example:
I don't think you quite understand the amount of markup on illegal drugs. Heroin costs, on the street, let's call it $100-200 a gram, depending on where they are, which is about the max you can take at one, with a dose four times a day. But most users don't use more than 1/3 of a 'gram' per hit, once or twice a day. So let's call it half a 'gram'.
In addition, a 'street gram' of heroin, on average, contains about 1/3 gram of heroin, and 1/2 gram of other stuff. (Which, yes, doesn't add to a gram...a 'gram' is rarely a gram.)
Ergo, most heroin addicts are using about 1/6th of a gram a day, and paying $50-$100 for it.
Heroin is not legal in the IS at all, but in other countries it can be prescribed, such as the UK, where it goes under the name 'diamorphine'. The NHS purchases it for about 10 dollars a gram.
That's about 2 dollars a day. That's less than the cost of food. That's the price right now in England it costs the government to get it, and that's completely ignoring the fact that something like 9/10th the money England is spending is to protect the poppies and shipment from thieves. (I mean, we don't need armed guards around aspirin factories or willow trees, do we?)
It's entirely reasonable to imagine heroin prices dropping to the price of allergy medicine. Allergy medicine is actually much more expensive to make.
Worrying about some hypothetical taxes on drugs is stupid. There could be 1000% tax on drugs and it prices would be nowhere near the current costs. Almost all 'classic' drugs like heroin (as opium), cocaine, pot, are incredibly easy to make, because otherwise they would't have been discovered. It's the weird-ass designer drugs that are much more expensive and much more dangerous. And those drugs only exist because the drug war made the classics harder to find.
There are actually a lot of drugs that are completely unavailable in certain locations, I was just counting on the post I was responding to not knowing that.
The reason you can't get them, however, isn't due to war on some drug's success, but lack of demand. The global demand for LSD is near zero. (When you think about it, it can't have anything to do with the success of the drug war...LSD is a thousand times easier to carry than the equivalent value of than cocaine, a milliontimes easier than pot, and it's a damn sight harder to detect with drug dogs, being almost completely odorless.)
You can, however, always find the local hard drug(s) of choice, usually meth, PCP, or cocaine, and both E and pot. If it's a city you can find heroin.
That is the stupidest post I've ever read by a person who claims to understand the drug war.
Drugs ARE allowed to flow freely. There is no person in the US who couldn't purchase some illegal drug within the next 24 hours, except people who live in Alaska and couldn't get to town in that time. And I'm including people in prisons and children. Anyone can purchase any drug given a week lead time.
We already are the next person a drug addict sees after shivering in his apartment. He then mugs us. The question is: Would you rather him be trying to afford something that costs 30 dollars a day, or something that costs 30 dollars a year? Because, logically, he's going to do a hell of a lot less muggings for the later. In fact, he might even be able to afford his rent on his current salary.
Wait, I forgot, in your universe, addict=person who only wants the drug, instead of the correct defination, a person who needs the drug to function normally. As long as addicts get the drugs, they can be and historically have been perfectly functioning members of society. (They actually tend to function a lot better than, say, alcohol addicts.) It's when you make what they need illegal that they start acting crazy.
And this '10%'; figre you just pulled out of your ass. Why the hell would people sell their cars to afford drugs, when drugs are now cheap due to legalization. That makes absolutely no sense at all. Do people sell their cars to pay for their caffeine addiction?
And, you're also wrong in your last statement. While addiciton is, in general, bad, some addictions aren't health problems, even of hard drugs. Heroin addiction, for example, is less of a health concern than caffeine addiction.
Ah, yes, this is the educational legacy of the war on drugs. At least you've managed to shrugg off the brainwashing about pot, now it's time for you to look up some facts about heroin and cocaine. Hint: We have documented cases of people with cocaine or heroin addictions perfectly normal lives for decades. Both drugs also have recreational uses. Although 'recreational use' for heroin is almost entirely limited to the severally depressed.
That's not to say that either of those is the safest drugs...they weren't lying when they said the first hit of cocaine you take can stop your heart, although that's really only relevant to people with weak hearts. And heroin withdrawal is no fun at all. Taking them at the same time (a speedball) is bad, but taking stimulents and depressants at the same time is always a stupid idea.
As for crystal meth, speed, PCP, etc...those are drugs people started using because of the war on drugs. We don't really know how dangerous they are, because they've almost always been illegal for human use, and thus anyone taking them is almost automatically in poor health, and they're cut with crap and in varying doses. So we have no valid long term studies at all.
Oh no! The kernel in the microwave hit a bad combination of spinlocks, and overcooked the food.243 seconds. Meanwhile, the fridge let the temperature drop to 39.993 degrees before cutting on. (I used to have a microware with a turn dial. Couldn't get any more accurate than 15 seconds. And my fridge is set slight about 'MED'.)
Even avionics doesn't need hard real time systems. Nothing that needs a hard real time operating system could have ever been done manually.
The only real reason I can thing to have a hard real time OS is someone built a system without flow control and buffers. Something that was originally circuitry to directly pass a signal through, but is now a general purpose computer for some reason.
And anyone who thinks that's paranoid, remember that, from what we can piece together about it, is exactly how Echelon operates. The US intelligent community gets other governments to spy on Americans, because they, themselves, are forbidden from doing it. And they collect the data.
In return, we spy on Canada's, England's, Australia, and New Zealand's citizens, and turn the information over to them.
I know, I'm completely amazed people think Kerry's testimony is a 'fable'.
Um, hello? Maybe I just went to an amazingly liberal public school (here in the mountains in Northeast Georgia), but, um....I thought we all knew some seriously fucked up shit happened during the Vietnam war.
I'm baffled as to why Kerry would have testified about it if it wasn't true. According to right-wing kooks, what, exactly, would have been his new motives for fighting a war that he volunteered for? Did he read Karl Marx while drifting lazily along in his swift boat and decide to become a bleeding-heart liberal? So he faked some war wounds and came home to protest?
That is, any new motive besides the obvious one of 'He discovered the horror of the war and what it was causing normal people to do.'. That obviously can't have anything to do with anything.
I mean, honestly people, it happened so much it's a fucking cliche. Be patriotic, go to Nam, see some crazy stuff done by both sides, come home, protest against the war. To finish the cliche up he should have been disowned by his family, spit at by other protesters, gotten clinically depressed, and ended up on the street.
Even though I have never heard that quote before, it's talking about stem cell research. Bush opposes it, and it actually could do all those things, or hell, it might not. No one knows.
Pretending that it's some sort of insane promise about the future is idiotic. It's saying 'Vote for Kerry, because he supports stem cell research, and stem cell research is good for these reasons:'.
But, unlike you, I don't think sending someone who screwed up, did his time, and then gets arrested for some absurd thing to prison for several years is always a good idea.
Yes, most of the time, it's is a good idea. However, while you claim the point of it is to remove career criminals from society, the point I'm making is that it's sucking in people who have, in fact, stopped being criminals.
There are thousands of criminals in jail for 25 to life who committed two felonies years ago and then randomly commited another felony...and people don't realize that a felony is just any crime that has punishment over a year. A lot of things are felonies.
A man named Santo Reyes, who had commited bulgary once as a kid and a robbery as an adult, in 1981 and 1987 respectively, and presumably did his time, was sentenced to 26 years in jail this year this last year for committing another felony. His third strike? Taking the written portion of a driver's license test for someone else. Sure glad we got him off the street.
In a sane justice system, of course, a judge wouldn't have appled three strikes to him. He's not still on some burglary career. He should get punished for the crime, of course, it's apparently a serious matter in California, but not sent to jail for 26 years.
However, that choice has been taken away from the judge in many places. That's the real problem.
And examples like that, BTW, show the stupidity of the third strike laws in the first place, even assuming that stupid stuff like that didn't happen. There are plenty of examples of people who, a long time ago, commited two felonies that count as strikes, and then live for 20 years or more without committing anymore, which raises the obvious question: How many people who commit three legitimate strikes would have stopped there? For Santo Reyes, it only took two times though jail before he went straight...how many people would have learned it in three?
The real problem, once you start getting into 'protecting society', is that a hell of a lot of people go though jail and do stop, and sometimes it does take two or three times. So...should those people be in jail? Right now? Or do they only become 'dangerous' after taking a helping out an illiterate cousin get a driver's license?
And, yes, obviously the drug laws need reform. If we'd have drug law reform, three strikes never would have existed, because it's trying to solve the 'revolving door' on some prisons, and the only reason said door exists is overcrowding due to drug crimes. Then you don't have to worry about increasing mandatory penalties...the system used to work, and it will work again when we get crackheads out of it. Prisons will actually ask themselves 'Should we let this person out?' instead of 'Who can we let out, because we've got people coming in?'.
And like I said, I'm all for increasing penalties, anyway. You walk out the prison door and immediately rob another bank, you're going to be in there longer. (Hell, why wait till they do it thrice?) However, this concept of sticking anyone who first does two 'violent' (Which apparently doesn't mean what I would think it means.) felonies and then one felony of any type, over any span of time, away 'forever', is just idiotic, and unfairly places a large segment of the population a knife's breath from 25 years in prison. (And the deterrent effect doesn't work, because no one carries a list around of 'felonies'. I don't know if Santo Reyes knew helping someone cheat on a driver license test was a felony, but I think it's a safe assumption he didn't.)
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Feel free to come up with how that example is wrong...like I said, switch some parties around, and it was the 1992 election. It's a universe where more than a third of the voters would rather see a specific third party in office than either of the two main parties, but would rather see one of the two main parties in office than the other. (You know, much like our actual universe.) And one of the two main parties wins, because there was no way to rank votes.
Yes, yes, the some of the people voting D-L and R-L should have voted just L...and now you're back to 'strategic voting'. They need to vote for one or two people depends on how well that person does during the vote (Or, technically, how well they think that person will do.), and not how they actually feel.
If they think their third party has more support than it does, they won't include one of the major parties, which can result in The Other Guy being elected. If they think their third party has less support than it does, they'll include the major party guy on the ballot, which can cause their real choice to lose.
Of course, with approval voting, you'd never be able to prove that was the case, and thus we see how approval wins over IRV. Both approval and IRV result in the wrong person being elected, but it's obvious with IRV, and you'll never know it with approval, which is exactly like under our current system. IRV is not much more stupid than approval or our current system, it's just transparently stupid, whereas with approval or our system you have to hypothosis what voters really meant, but couldn't express.
It astonishes me that people claim Concodent is more complicated. Under Concodent, you never have to base your vote on how you think other people are going to vote. Under every other system proposed, you do.
And, frankly, I don't think the concept is that confusing, anyway. News programs always want to run little charts and graphs, anyway. They'll have a field day comparing every candidate to every other candidate. You can jsut watch the screen until your candidate comes up, and see how he's doing compared to everyone else.
(Of course, Congress isn't really the right place to deciding how states elect presidents but whatever.)
It would accomplish nothing it all. Third parties are still as marginalized, except now you can vote for them and not be penalized...as long as they can't win.
Once they can win, you're back to the same strategic voting crap as today, except now you're trying to decide if you want to vote for your third party and one of the major ones, or just your third party. Which manages to have exactly the same spoiler effect.
IRV is exactly the same, except moreso. That system is so dumb you can hurt people by voting for them.
Concordet is the only system that actually make any fucking sense to bother to change to. Every other system would result in the same crap we have to put up with third parties. It satisfies all the requirements for a fair voting system unless the voters end up with circular preferences, aka, they want A over B over C over A, which is odds are pretty low of happening. (And we have no 'fair' method of deciding on, anyway.)
Unlike approval voting, which has 'edge cases' that look much like the election in 1992...a strong third party is an 'edge case'.
The entire universe can be explained by the obvious 'That's the way it is.', but not the simpliest explanation at all, it's just the laziest one.
Many people think that, but no. All transitional means is that you don't have to move all your formatting over to CSS. All XHTML is supposed to fail if malformed, just like all XML is. Thank God.
I don't live in California, I live in Georgia, a state which is also ignored, despite basically being the economic base of the entire South. We get ignored, and Florida gets courted, when, in reality, Florida is almost completely unimportant by an objective standard, consisting almost entirely of old people, vacationers, and escaped Cubans, while Georgia remains grows and transports huge amounts of food, and is really, still, the transportation hub of the entire bottom right quarter of the country. (Hartfield is still the busiest airport in the world.)
If you were to magically remove the entire contents of Florida, almost no one would notice. If you were to magically remove the entire contents of Georgia, the South would fall apart.
But ignoring California is just so completely absurd I used that as an example. If you were to magically remove the entire contents of California, the US would fall apart.
The only way spammers could slip under the radar of Bayesian filters is to start sending mail that is completely identical to legit mail you get. Which would be rather pointless, unless you're legitimately getting a lot of ads.
I.e., while 'security vs liberty' may be a useful choice, what we're often faced with is 'control by authorities vs liberty', and the first part is just claimed to be secure.
For example, the adminstration recently said that people who are wrongly stopped at airports because their names are on terrorist watchlists should start using middle initials or Jr or III after their name. Which good for a great 'What the fuck?' moment after twenty seconds of thought. The watchlists have absolutely no relation to security at all.
If the news had broken last week I'm sure it would have gotten into the month's CRYPTO-GRAM.
That is really only relevant when talking about income that otherwise disappears into the great unknown. There are some places, like towns that are located in America and Mexico, when the money quite obviously will circulate back to the US. I'm not trying to make all 'foreign' worker basically pay income tax twice because they live in one country and commute to work in another country.
In fact, that's probably the best test right there: Location. Let's make companies pay income taxes for their foreign workers based on their distance from the US, based on the concept that money is less likely to be taxed again by the US government anytime soon, so we need to extract the taxes from it now.
What universe do you live in? I can think of dozens of instances where honest people had to hide form a corrupt government.
Unless you're trying to suggest that being an honest person means you can't lie, instead of it meaning you don't want to.
Under outsourcing, the consumer still pays the producer, but the producer keeps half the money he would have spent before (Or, yes, the company reduces prices, which is slightly less screwage.), and the rest of the money goes to someone in another country, breaking the cycle, because they don't buy things from American companies or use American labor when they order a pizza.
Yes, in the long run, we're just getting other countries to create wealth for us, and thus we're not actually getting poorer. In fact, we can create even more wealth, become money goes farther.
However, the ultimate problem with oursourcing is that it's adding to the wealth of large companies, without giving any money to local workers to purchase said wealth. Which, yes, will eventually solve itself when either we raise up all third world countries in the world to our economic level, or lower ourselves to theirs...but the first will take forever, and the second is not something people would logically want to happen.
And it raises lots of interesting questions about 'trickle down economies'. My entire life, I've heard that if you pay companies more and workers less, they'll just pay workers less. Well, that becomes amazingly irrelevant if their workers aren't paying taxes in the first place. I.e, if we're going to let companies do this, they need to pay more taxes, because their workers are playing less.
In fact, a lot of the laws in the country are based on the concept that consumers are workers, and thus helping consumers at the expense of companies is stupid. Well, if they aren't workers anymore...it's time to fuck companies over. Who's it going to hurt? The rich owners? Companies are rapidly throwing away the one thing that made anyone give a damn about their wants and needs. Companies are here to serve us, if they have no purpose, let's beat them about the head until they have a purpose again or die.
As for your suggestion I'm somehow protectionalist...I have no problem with other countries actually making things cheaper than us. The problem is when they do so in ways that would be illegal under US law for quite legitmate reasons, and it just pisses me off when it's American companies doing it. I mean, we can't police every trinket factory in China, but we're supposed to be able to police American companies.
Hiring people in other countries under minumum wage, in unsafe working conditions, ought to be as legal as it is to do here. And the companies should have to pay income tax on all non-American workers. That would be a nice start.
And with the Republicans, we might actually have a presidental candidate show up here on his way to Florida, instead of just completely ignoring the state. They won't like the loss of votes, but maybe they can see it's to the state's benefit.
And I'm not even going to comment on Miller. Miller managed to get the whole state pissed at him, Democrats and Republicans both.
Luckily for him, we're all too busy being pissed at Sonny right now to worry about him right now, who made a hell of a lot of promises to get into office, from un-'fixing' education, to removing cronyism in the state government, to giving us all free pie on Sunday.(I can't actually remember everything he promised, but I'm sure that was in there somewhere.), and has managed to do exactly none of them.
Let's pretend there are only the Democrats, the Republicans, and the Libertarians, to make the math simple.
And there are six groups of people: Three who only approve of one party, and three who approve of two of them. (The people who approval of all of them are just being silly, and the people who approve of none don't get counted.)
So let's make a table:
R: 30%
D: 28%
L: 5%
R-D: 2%
R-L: 20%
D-L: 10%
Tell me, smart guy, who won that election? The Republican. He got 52% of the vote, the Democrat got 40% of the vote, and the Libertarian got 35% of the vote. If you'd look, you'll realize this isn't an entire improbably voting spread, assuming the LP starts getting some support. (Swapping R for D and L for Reform, it could pass for the 1992 election, if we'd done approval voting.)
Of course, if this was our universe, you'd realize that all the people who vote R-L and probably the D-L people wanted the L first, and the D or R second. When you combine that with the people who just voted L, that's 35% of the vote, which would have beaten both the R and the D alone. In other words, the people who voted for L prefered them, and voted for D or R to 'keep the other guy out', which is a pretty reasonable assumption.
Of course, that assumption might be wrong...but you'd never be able to tell with simple approval voting. You could with Concodent. You probably even could with IRV.
Which is why the logical states to change how they vote are non-swing states. Suddenly, they're back in the game, they're important again.
For example, my state, Georgia, votes Republican. 13 votes. If we were to switch to proportional, though, we'd probably vote about 9-4, but we could vote anywhere from 8-5 to 11-2.
Suddenly, we'd be worth three votes, and maybe presidental candidates would find it worthwide to address our concerns, or at least come by and say 'hi'.
Now that I'm mentioned this, I'm actually considering making this concept more serious,and writing someone in the Georgia senate. While the state votes Republicion nationally, it's been Democratic locally for quite some time, at least until the last election, and almost no one's happy with those results, so it will likely go Democratic again.
Anyone who makes an issue out of that and takes that stand would lose my vote. I don't give a flying fuck if someone's in the country illegally. I think they should pay taxes, just like normal people, but considering they often get less then minimum wage, it's not like there's a vast amount of taxes they are failing to pay.
However, a failing of the system is farmers and builder who employ people at less than minimum wage, with no taxes. That's something I take issue with, because it's nearly identical to the other big problem. Outsourcing.
The actual economic problem is when a company employs people who do not live in America (or, with illegal immigrants, barely live in this country, and whose family don't) and sells the products to people who live in America. That produces a net imbalance in employment vs. people buying things, which probably would have some technical term if I was an economics major.
But what basically happens is, on average, it gives people in other countries, say, 3 dollars more money a month, and it gives people in American, say, 10 dollars less money a month. (Because in the other country, there are more people working at a slightly higher paying job, and in the US, there are more people laid off.)
Where does the rest of the money go? Into the companies wallets. And as a bonus, they don't have to worry about their worker's income tax. And people in ther countries have no unions, lax labor laws, and lower expectations. (I'm not dissing those people, BTW, I have no quarrel with them.) Everyone wins!
Give me a candidate who'll do something about that and I'll vote for him.
If you're going to change the system, at least change it to something useful.
In a world created by intelligent people, we wouldn't tax addictive substances so high that addicts couldn't afford them. Let me use heroin as an example:
I don't think you quite understand the amount of markup on illegal drugs. Heroin costs, on the street, let's call it $100-200 a gram, depending on where they are, which is about the max you can take at one, with a dose four times a day. But most users don't use more than 1/3 of a 'gram' per hit, once or twice a day. So let's call it half a 'gram'.
In addition, a 'street gram' of heroin, on average, contains about 1/3 gram of heroin, and 1/2 gram of other stuff. (Which, yes, doesn't add to a gram...a 'gram' is rarely a gram.)
Ergo, most heroin addicts are using about 1/6th of a gram a day, and paying $50-$100 for it.
Heroin is not legal in the IS at all, but in other countries it can be prescribed, such as the UK, where it goes under the name 'diamorphine'. The NHS purchases it for about 10 dollars a gram.
That's about 2 dollars a day. That's less than the cost of food. That's the price right now in England it costs the government to get it, and that's completely ignoring the fact that something like 9/10th the money England is spending is to protect the poppies and shipment from thieves. (I mean, we don't need armed guards around aspirin factories or willow trees, do we?)
It's entirely reasonable to imagine heroin prices dropping to the price of allergy medicine. Allergy medicine is actually much more expensive to make.
Worrying about some hypothetical taxes on drugs is stupid. There could be 1000% tax on drugs and it prices would be nowhere near the current costs. Almost all 'classic' drugs like heroin (as opium), cocaine, pot, are incredibly easy to make, because otherwise they would't have been discovered. It's the weird-ass designer drugs that are much more expensive and much more dangerous. And those drugs only exist because the drug war made the classics harder to find.
There are actually a lot of drugs that are completely unavailable in certain locations, I was just counting on the post I was responding to not knowing that.
The reason you can't get them, however, isn't due to war on some drug's success, but lack of demand. The global demand for LSD is near zero. (When you think about it, it can't have anything to do with the success of the drug war...LSD is a thousand times easier to carry than the equivalent value of than cocaine, a milliontimes easier than pot, and it's a damn sight harder to detect with drug dogs, being almost completely odorless.)
You can, however, always find the local hard drug(s) of choice, usually meth, PCP, or cocaine, and both E and pot. If it's a city you can find heroin.
Drugs ARE allowed to flow freely. There is no person in the US who couldn't purchase some illegal drug within the next 24 hours, except people who live in Alaska and couldn't get to town in that time. And I'm including people in prisons and children. Anyone can purchase any drug given a week lead time.
We already are the next person a drug addict sees after shivering in his apartment. He then mugs us. The question is: Would you rather him be trying to afford something that costs 30 dollars a day, or something that costs 30 dollars a year? Because, logically, he's going to do a hell of a lot less muggings for the later. In fact, he might even be able to afford his rent on his current salary.
Wait, I forgot, in your universe, addict=person who only wants the drug, instead of the correct defination, a person who needs the drug to function normally. As long as addicts get the drugs, they can be and historically have been perfectly functioning members of society. (They actually tend to function a lot better than, say, alcohol addicts.) It's when you make what they need illegal that they start acting crazy.
And this '10%'; figre you just pulled out of your ass. Why the hell would people sell their cars to afford drugs, when drugs are now cheap due to legalization. That makes absolutely no sense at all. Do people sell their cars to pay for their caffeine addiction?
And, you're also wrong in your last statement. While addiciton is, in general, bad, some addictions aren't health problems, even of hard drugs. Heroin addiction, for example, is less of a health concern than caffeine addiction.
That's not to say that either of those is the safest drugs...they weren't lying when they said the first hit of cocaine you take can stop your heart, although that's really only relevant to people with weak hearts. And heroin withdrawal is no fun at all. Taking them at the same time (a speedball) is bad, but taking stimulents and depressants at the same time is always a stupid idea.
As for crystal meth, speed, PCP, etc...those are drugs people started using because of the war on drugs. We don't really know how dangerous they are, because they've almost always been illegal for human use, and thus anyone taking them is almost automatically in poor health, and they're cut with crap and in varying doses. So we have no valid long term studies at all.
Yeah, we've started doing it with more than data. Like people.
Even avionics doesn't need hard real time systems. Nothing that needs a hard real time operating system could have ever been done manually.
The only real reason I can thing to have a hard real time OS is someone built a system without flow control and buffers. Something that was originally circuitry to directly pass a signal through, but is now a general purpose computer for some reason.
In return, we spy on Canada's, England's, Australia, and New Zealand's citizens, and turn the information over to them.
Um, hello? Maybe I just went to an amazingly liberal public school (here in the mountains in Northeast Georgia), but, um....I thought we all knew some seriously fucked up shit happened during the Vietnam war.
I'm baffled as to why Kerry would have testified about it if it wasn't true. According to right-wing kooks, what, exactly, would have been his new motives for fighting a war that he volunteered for? Did he read Karl Marx while drifting lazily along in his swift boat and decide to become a bleeding-heart liberal? So he faked some war wounds and came home to protest?
That is, any new motive besides the obvious one of 'He discovered the horror of the war and what it was causing normal people to do.'. That obviously can't have anything to do with anything.
I mean, honestly people, it happened so much it's a fucking cliche. Be patriotic, go to Nam, see some crazy stuff done by both sides, come home, protest against the war. To finish the cliche up he should have been disowned by his family, spit at by other protesters, gotten clinically depressed, and ended up on the street.
Even though I have never heard that quote before, it's talking about stem cell research. Bush opposes it, and it actually could do all those things, or hell, it might not. No one knows.
Pretending that it's some sort of insane promise about the future is idiotic. It's saying 'Vote for Kerry, because he supports stem cell research, and stem cell research is good for these reasons:'.
But, unlike you, I don't think sending someone who screwed up, did his time, and then gets arrested for some absurd thing to prison for several years is always a good idea.
Yes, most of the time, it's is a good idea. However, while you claim the point of it is to remove career criminals from society, the point I'm making is that it's sucking in people who have, in fact, stopped being criminals.
There are thousands of criminals in jail for 25 to life who committed two felonies years ago and then randomly commited another felony...and people don't realize that a felony is just any crime that has punishment over a year. A lot of things are felonies.
A man named Santo Reyes, who had commited bulgary once as a kid and a robbery as an adult, in 1981 and 1987 respectively, and presumably did his time, was sentenced to 26 years in jail this year this last year for committing another felony. His third strike? Taking the written portion of a driver's license test for someone else. Sure glad we got him off the street.
In a sane justice system, of course, a judge wouldn't have appled three strikes to him. He's not still on some burglary career. He should get punished for the crime, of course, it's apparently a serious matter in California, but not sent to jail for 26 years.
However, that choice has been taken away from the judge in many places. That's the real problem.
And examples like that, BTW, show the stupidity of the third strike laws in the first place, even assuming that stupid stuff like that didn't happen. There are plenty of examples of people who, a long time ago, commited two felonies that count as strikes, and then live for 20 years or more without committing anymore, which raises the obvious question: How many people who commit three legitimate strikes would have stopped there? For Santo Reyes, it only took two times though jail before he went straight...how many people would have learned it in three?
The real problem, once you start getting into 'protecting society', is that a hell of a lot of people go though jail and do stop, and sometimes it does take two or three times. So...should those people be in jail? Right now? Or do they only become 'dangerous' after taking a helping out an illiterate cousin get a driver's license?
And, yes, obviously the drug laws need reform. If we'd have drug law reform, three strikes never would have existed, because it's trying to solve the 'revolving door' on some prisons, and the only reason said door exists is overcrowding due to drug crimes. Then you don't have to worry about increasing mandatory penalties...the system used to work, and it will work again when we get crackheads out of it. Prisons will actually ask themselves 'Should we let this person out?' instead of 'Who can we let out, because we've got people coming in?'.
And like I said, I'm all for increasing penalties, anyway. You walk out the prison door and immediately rob another bank, you're going to be in there longer. (Hell, why wait till they do it thrice?) However, this concept of sticking anyone who first does two 'violent' (Which apparently doesn't mean what I would think it means.) felonies and then one felony of any type, over any span of time, away 'forever', is just idiotic, and unfairly places a large segment of the population a knife's breath from 25 years in prison. (And the deterrent effect doesn't work, because no one carries a list around of 'felonies'. I don't know if Santo Reyes knew helping someone cheat on a driver license test was a felony, but I think it's a safe assumption he didn't.)