Many people say they support state rights. What is interesting is seeing what is so important to people that an entire state (or people in the state government) will defy the federal government.
In the 1800s there were many disagreements about states rights, but only one was so important that states rebelled to keep that, let's say "right".
The 1900s saw troops called out to enforce the federal anti-segregation bills and rulings,
So far this century, I recall one group of states defying the obergefell decision, and another group defying for environmental and (in this case) the internet. And only the first group of states trumpet "states rights".
So it's not fair to say the people who proclaim "states rights" are bigoted. But can you see why some people could make that connection?
And Americans are exceedingly polite. When you meet Americans, they will smile at you, eyeball you, and ask how you are. And expect you to be polite enough to not respond with truth.
Depend on your race. I'm guessing you are white. Things look rather different from other point of view.
But you are right that the politeness is usually the fiction, and the most polite people are often the worst assholes.
TFA says that this app doesn't measure a video coming to you; it connects to the speed tests which each of the major video services now have and tries them. So you are absolutely correct, and your statement is also completely irrelevant. This measures peak performance to these sites, and if peak performance varies widely, well, look for the commonalities between the poorly performing sites. It all of them are direct video competitors with your ISP, I think we know what's going on.
It is impossible to tell if ISP throttling is going on just from the download speed. For example this statement "YouTube to my iPhone at 6 Mbps, Amazon Prime video at 8 Mbps, and Netflix at 4 Mbps. It downloaded other data at speeds of up to 25 Mbps." seems to indicate ISP throttling, but can happen for many reasons
This is like when police find a body in the woods which is tied up, shot, stabbed in the back, and fell off of a high cliff. Any one of those could be a suicide or accident, maybe two of them, but when you get all of them you start suspecting that someone may have involuntarily helped them along.
Low performance with one of those video sites which directly compete with your ISP may be the fault of the site. When ALL of the direct competitors have crappy performance through your ISP, well...
Of course, English literacy in the USA has likely decreased in the 21st century due to immigration.
Seems unlikely; it's not like we never had immigrants in the past. My great-grandparents (or maybe g-g-gp), who came to Pittsburgh to work in the steel mills, only spoke Italian or German and probably could not read their own language. My wife's g-g-gp only spoke Polish. I doubt if current immigrants decrease the English literacy more than the 20th century immigrants did, though I can believe that we measure current literacy far better than we measured the literacy of the previous immigration waves.
Actually, I believe that the 1 Trillion increase to the deficit assumed annual GDP growth of 4%+, which is not going to happen. If growth is lower, then the 1T deficit increase will be far, far worse. In no case will it be lower than 1T; the GOP used every magic number they could getting it that low, and their estimates have been terribly incorrect
My taxes are going down for now, but it's not worth it.
Demonstration the necessity of stripping all debug information before shipping the applications - DOH!
That would be step 1, sure, but the more important things would be:
* Stop putting access functions for internal APIs in public clients.
* Don't allow access to internal APIs from externally.
* Don't allow access to internal APIs without proper credentials.
This is a sign of completely screwed up security and programming. I don't care if this is porn, IoT, finance, or anything else: this is a sign of many deeper problems.
I assume you hate the recent tax bill, then, since it adds lots of deductions. It's odd that politicians who talk about flat taxes and getting rid of loopholes and deductions always vote to add more deductions, and voters still vote for them.
I agree that the tax code is messed up, but of the roughly 70000 pages of tax code, maybe 50 cover the tax brackets while the other 69950 cover the various loopholes, deductions, and credits. A flat tax would remove about 40 pages; removing loopholes would remove a LOT more, so I'd prefer to focus on the loopholes.
I agree, but we don't need the whole free market for this. We only need the part where people want to take your money in return for doing something you cannot. Handling sales tax to every municipality is beyond the abilities of most small or medium businesses, but any large business could handle it easily and could charge for the service. Sure, it's another opportunity to rent-seek and to disadvantage small businesses, but if we want to stop THAT then this is the wrong place to start.
Let's say a state needs to raise $30 billion in taxes to fulfill the budget. They could set income taxes such that they raise $30B or sales taxes for $30B or property taxes for $30B. Or they could raise $10B from each of income/sales/property taxes. How is that last one worse than the others?
And I said that a mix was probably better for stopping tax cheats, if that is a goal. So what is wrong with a mix? I mean, I like steak, I like potatoes, and I like green beans. A small portion of each sounds like a good meal. Only a two-pound steak or only three potatos or only a bushel of beans sounds like a terrible meal to me, though tastes differ.
The real reason why this is problematic in the US is the crazy patchwork when it comes to sales tax. Not only does each of the 50 states have its own sales tax regime, so do smaller regions/counties and even cities. Unless someone provides a single large database and remittance system that covers all of that, it's not practical for a small electronic retailer to know that he needs to pay the county of bumfuck Louisiana 1.5% sales tax on items sent to an address in that county.
Sure, but that seems like something a large company will do in-house, and a small company will pay their credit-card handler to do. Ideally based on a database that the federal government or each state government would publish monthly.
You seem to have no faith in the free market. If this becomes law, I'm quite certain that the same companies which handle credit card transactions will happily start handling sales taxes too. They'll just pull the sales taxes out of their payments to each merchant, and will send each municipality one payment with the taxes from all of their merchants. And keeping track of what should be taxed at which rate is hard, but it seems like the sort of thing that a computer should be able to do easily enough.
Your quote sounds like something that was made up to (badly) prove a point...
But I don't really understand the hatred for multiple forms of taxation. Let's say a state needs to raise $30 billion in taxes to fulfill the budget. They could set income taxes such that they raise $30B or sales taxes for $30B or property taxes for $30B. Or they could raise $10B from each of income/sales/property taxes. How is that last one worse than the others?
In fact, if you get 100% of your tax income in one area, that makes it easier for people to game the system. Set your permanent address in a place with no income tax, buy large goods in a place with no sales tax. Only the wealthy can play those games effectively, but when one wealthy person does that, thousands of non-wealthy folks end up paying more to balance out. Having some taxes on each area makes it harder to avoid all taxes.
The USA has never been 100% free nor 100% not free. If income taxes are your major mark of "freedom", well, you can choose to be free! While Pennsylvania's budget is over $30B, Somalia's budget is less than $300M! (Less than 1% of a US state.) Yes, you can move to Somalia and pay almost no taxes and be almost completely free.
Wow that's very opposite America, for sure. Average Americans remind me of a two-year-old because "me first!" is foremost in their minds. It's like they're so insecure, they think that showing a little courtesy and respect is the same thing as kissing ass or showing weakness.
So its basically a smoking gun for Damore being treated worse for his politics.
This point always confuses me. I thought that conservative politics meant people who wanted less government regulation, less taxes, a smaller deficit, and more personal liberties. Maybe also the ability to practice their religion without government interference, more guns, and something about the federal reserve which confuses me.
So, is "women are incompetent at computers" a core conservative political belief?
That doesn't sound like a conservative or a political belief to me. I'd put it in the "bigoted belief" category, myself, but how would you categorize it? Do all conservatives have this belief? Do all liberals not have it?
An experiment which as been repeated many, many times is to take some resumes and send them out to many companies, randomizing the names in each batch. If companies focused on qualification, then you would expect the a particular resume to be equally successful no matter what the name attached was. Instead, we find that the success was instead tied to the name; names which implied white christian male did best and as names diverged to imply various minorities they do worse in a very nice curve. (This is true in the US no matter the race or gender of the hiring people).
So, trying to focus on qualification means "we give preference to white males". That's not the goal, but that is the result. Folks who claim they can ignore race are usually the worst, since they don't try to correct for their built-in biases.
So, given the built-in biases, how do you suggest we focus on qualification only? This is a serious question (and if you have a good answer, you can become very very rich).
Feefees of vulnerable classes can't be hurt and bigotry must not be given arguments, not even if those arguments are false. The truth must suffer for this agenda.
Not sure what a "feefee" is, but if the "arguments are false" then how can the truth suffer? It sounds like you are reciting (badly) something you read without understanding it. The truth is suffering, but not from vulnerable classes.
Wait, you don't try to disenfranchise your political opponents? Sad. I bet you don't put out obvious lies which your party faithful believe even though all facts point the other way, and you probably don't claim that all minorities are inferior but your people, despite having all of the political power, are the real downtrodden oppressed folks. You have soooooo much to learn!
You're not big on reading, understanding, and responding to comments, are you? You seem to pick out a few words, assume the rest, and then write a response to the assumed text. It's probably more efficient, I'll grant you that.
I am indeed arguing that most of the LAWs (why did you capitalize that?) for redistricting are terribly unfair, yes, as you would know had you actually tried reading what I wrote.
We started this with you claiming that redistricting was bi-partisan and that courts made sure it was fair. I sent links demonstrating that neither of those are correct. But since it seems that you won't let little things like facts get in the way of your opinion, I believe we are done here.
The courts don't rule that they are fair. The courts rule on whether they are legal. I assume that you don't believe that fair == legal? I think that laws that encode a reasonable definition of "fair" are usually better than ones that don't, and I hope that the Supreme Court decides that some reasonable definition of "fair" is the test for legality of redistricting, but to assume that judges are "fair" implies two things: One, you haven't been involved in many legal cases, and two, you are white. (Sorry, but that is a very clear tell. I'm white too, and I also thought that judges were usually fair, until I had some eye-opening experiences.)
Defining "fair" is always a tough thing; for any definition I can come up with 4 corner cases which break it. But an imperfect but mostly-good definition might be "the percentage of a party in a legislative body should be very similar to the number of people who voted fro someone of that party in the election." So, if 60% of voters voted for a Republican for a state house, and Republicans had 65% of the seats, that's probably "fair". But if Republicans get 40% of the seats, that's probably "unfair". Does that seem reasonable to you, as a first approximation?
I think your argument is "you can't detect voter fraud in the U.S., because you can't detect voter fraud in the U.S". Which might be good Zen, but is poor logic.
Why do you think you can't detect voter fraud? Because a lot of statisticians and voting experts think you can. Not 100% of the time, but a lot of the time.
Someone famous has said that millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 election. Sure, tracking down all of those millions would be impossible, but you should be able to find, say, 10000 out of "millions" (less than 1%) pretty easily, right? Or maybe 1000? Or even 100? I mean, some of those illegal voters may be as smart as Lex Luthor, but most won't be, so some of them will screw up and be caught. Or some would sell out their co-conspirators for money.
I don't know how many actual cases of voter fraud were found in 2016. Five? A dozen? Not enough to justify a claim of million or even thousands of fraudsters.
I have no idea what you are talking about. While I have problems with both the process used to draw districts and the courts which decide, my comment implied that your comment was completely incorrect.
First, you said "the district maps are drawn by bi-partisan groups". Wisconsin's 2011 redistricting was "created by Republican leaders virtually in secret", which is not bi-partisan.
Second, you said "tested in the courts to make sure they are fair". In a 2004 ruling, the Supreme Court "held that partisan gerrymanders were non-judiciable, and that courts could not intervene". Now, some courts are trying to fix that terrible ruling, and the Supreme Court is taking another look, but that is kinda the opposite of "making sure they are fair".
In that case, I apologize. A common accusation is that climate scientists "change data arbitrarily so it says whatever they want it to say". I read "didn't match what they thought it should be, recalibrated so it looked right" and thought you were repeating the common accusation. I misread.
I cannot predict where any given proton or electron will end up, but given enough cameras on baseball pitches I can reliably determine which balls are non-regulation.
In the same way, I cannot detect each person casting votes, but statistical regressions will detect the presence of most voting fraud (though it doesn't determine which exact votes are the fraudulent ones). And no study in the last few decades has detected a non-trivial amount of fraud. So first, you have to explain how the fraudsters are so incredibly organized that they have tweaked the final results in ways to avoid all detection.
Slashdot Mirror
Many people say they support state rights. What is interesting is seeing what is so important to people that an entire state (or people in the state government) will defy the federal government.
In the 1800s there were many disagreements about states rights, but only one was so important that states rebelled to keep that, let's say "right".
The 1900s saw troops called out to enforce the federal anti-segregation bills and rulings,
So far this century, I recall one group of states defying the obergefell decision, and another group defying for environmental and (in this case) the internet. And only the first group of states trumpet "states rights".
So it's not fair to say the people who proclaim "states rights" are bigoted. But can you see why some people could make that connection?
And Americans are exceedingly polite. When you meet Americans, they will smile at you, eyeball you, and ask how you are. And expect you to be polite enough to not respond with truth.
Depend on your race. I'm guessing you are white. Things look rather different from other point of view.
But you are right that the politeness is usually the fiction, and the most polite people are often the worst assholes.
TFA says that this app doesn't measure a video coming to you; it connects to the speed tests which each of the major video services now have and tries them. So you are absolutely correct, and your statement is also completely irrelevant. This measures peak performance to these sites, and if peak performance varies widely, well, look for the commonalities between the poorly performing sites. It all of them are direct video competitors with your ISP, I think we know what's going on.
It is impossible to tell if ISP throttling is going on just from the download speed. For example this statement "YouTube to my iPhone at 6 Mbps, Amazon Prime video at 8 Mbps, and Netflix at 4 Mbps. It downloaded other data at speeds of up to 25 Mbps." seems to indicate ISP throttling, but can happen for many reasons
This is like when police find a body in the woods which is tied up, shot, stabbed in the back, and fell off of a high cliff. Any one of those could be a suicide or accident, maybe two of them, but when you get all of them you start suspecting that someone may have involuntarily helped them along.
Low performance with one of those video sites which directly compete with your ISP may be the fault of the site. When ALL of the direct competitors have crappy performance through your ISP, well...
Of course, English literacy in the USA has likely decreased in the 21st century due to immigration.
Seems unlikely; it's not like we never had immigrants in the past. My great-grandparents (or maybe g-g-gp), who came to Pittsburgh to work in the steel mills, only spoke Italian or German and probably could not read their own language. My wife's g-g-gp only spoke Polish. I doubt if current immigrants decrease the English literacy more than the 20th century immigrants did, though I can believe that we measure current literacy far better than we measured the literacy of the previous immigration waves.
Actually, I believe that the 1 Trillion increase to the deficit assumed annual GDP growth of 4%+, which is not going to happen. If growth is lower, then the 1T deficit increase will be far, far worse. In no case will it be lower than 1T; the GOP used every magic number they could getting it that low, and their estimates have been terribly incorrect
My taxes are going down for now, but it's not worth it.
Demonstration the necessity of stripping all debug information before shipping the applications - DOH!
That would be step 1, sure, but the more important things would be:
* Stop putting access functions for internal APIs in public clients.
* Don't allow access to internal APIs from externally.
* Don't allow access to internal APIs without proper credentials.
This is a sign of completely screwed up security and programming. I don't care if this is porn, IoT, finance, or anything else: this is a sign of many deeper problems.
I've always seen it spelled baulky, not balky, though both seem to be valid spellings according to dictionaries.
I assume you hate the recent tax bill, then, since it adds lots of deductions. It's odd that politicians who talk about flat taxes and getting rid of loopholes and deductions always vote to add more deductions, and voters still vote for them.
I agree that the tax code is messed up, but of the roughly 70000 pages of tax code, maybe 50 cover the tax brackets while the other 69950 cover the various loopholes, deductions, and credits. A flat tax would remove about 40 pages; removing loopholes would remove a LOT more, so I'd prefer to focus on the loopholes.
I agree, but we don't need the whole free market for this. We only need the part where people want to take your money in return for doing something you cannot. Handling sales tax to every municipality is beyond the abilities of most small or medium businesses, but any large business could handle it easily and could charge for the service. Sure, it's another opportunity to rent-seek and to disadvantage small businesses, but if we want to stop THAT then this is the wrong place to start.
Huh? No, I said the exact opposite:
Let's say a state needs to raise $30 billion in taxes to fulfill the budget. They could set income taxes such that they raise $30B or sales taxes for $30B or property taxes for $30B. Or they could raise $10B from each of income/sales/property taxes. How is that last one worse than the others?
And I said that a mix was probably better for stopping tax cheats, if that is a goal. So what is wrong with a mix? I mean, I like steak, I like potatoes, and I like green beans. A small portion of each sounds like a good meal. Only a two-pound steak or only three potatos or only a bushel of beans sounds like a terrible meal to me, though tastes differ.
The real reason why this is problematic in the US is the crazy patchwork when it comes to sales tax. Not only does each of the 50 states have its own sales tax regime, so do smaller regions/counties and even cities. Unless someone provides a single large database and remittance system that covers all of that, it's not practical for a small electronic retailer to know that he needs to pay the county of bumfuck Louisiana 1.5% sales tax on items sent to an address in that county.
Sure, but that seems like something a large company will do in-house, and a small company will pay their credit-card handler to do. Ideally based on a database that the federal government or each state government would publish monthly.
You seem to have no faith in the free market. If this becomes law, I'm quite certain that the same companies which handle credit card transactions will happily start handling sales taxes too. They'll just pull the sales taxes out of their payments to each merchant, and will send each municipality one payment with the taxes from all of their merchants. And keeping track of what should be taxed at which rate is hard, but it seems like the sort of thing that a computer should be able to do easily enough.
Your quote sounds like something that was made up to (badly) prove a point...
But I don't really understand the hatred for multiple forms of taxation. Let's say a state needs to raise $30 billion in taxes to fulfill the budget. They could set income taxes such that they raise $30B or sales taxes for $30B or property taxes for $30B. Or they could raise $10B from each of income/sales/property taxes. How is that last one worse than the others?
In fact, if you get 100% of your tax income in one area, that makes it easier for people to game the system. Set your permanent address in a place with no income tax, buy large goods in a place with no sales tax. Only the wealthy can play those games effectively, but when one wealthy person does that, thousands of non-wealthy folks end up paying more to balance out. Having some taxes on each area makes it harder to avoid all taxes.
The USA has never been 100% free nor 100% not free. If income taxes are your major mark of "freedom", well, you can choose to be free! While Pennsylvania's budget is over $30B, Somalia's budget is less than $300M! (Less than 1% of a US state.) Yes, you can move to Somalia and pay almost no taxes and be almost completely free.
Wow that's very opposite America, for sure. Average Americans remind me of a two-year-old because "me first!" is foremost in their minds. It's like they're so insecure, they think that showing a little courtesy and respect is the same thing as kissing ass or showing weakness.
What's wrong with people acting presidential?
So its basically a smoking gun for Damore being treated worse for his politics.
This point always confuses me. I thought that conservative politics meant people who wanted less government regulation, less taxes, a smaller deficit, and more personal liberties. Maybe also the ability to practice their religion without government interference, more guns, and something about the federal reserve which confuses me.
So, is "women are incompetent at computers" a core conservative political belief?
That doesn't sound like a conservative or a political belief to me. I'd put it in the "bigoted belief" category, myself, but how would you categorize it? Do all conservatives have this belief? Do all liberals not have it?
And that is everyone's goal.
An experiment which as been repeated many, many times is to take some resumes and send them out to many companies, randomizing the names in each batch. If companies focused on qualification, then you would expect the a particular resume to be equally successful no matter what the name attached was. Instead, we find that the success was instead tied to the name; names which implied white christian male did best and as names diverged to imply various minorities they do worse in a very nice curve. (This is true in the US no matter the race or gender of the hiring people).
So, trying to focus on qualification means "we give preference to white males". That's not the goal, but that is the result. Folks who claim they can ignore race are usually the worst, since they don't try to correct for their built-in biases.
So, given the built-in biases, how do you suggest we focus on qualification only? This is a serious question (and if you have a good answer, you can become very very rich).
Feefees of vulnerable classes can't be hurt and bigotry must not be given arguments, not even if those arguments are false. The truth must suffer for this agenda.
Not sure what a "feefee" is, but if the "arguments are false" then how can the truth suffer? It sounds like you are reciting (badly) something you read without understanding it. The truth is suffering, but not from vulnerable classes.
Wait, you don't try to disenfranchise your political opponents? Sad. I bet you don't put out obvious lies which your party faithful believe even though all facts point the other way, and you probably don't claim that all minorities are inferior but your people, despite having all of the political power, are the real downtrodden oppressed folks. You have soooooo much to learn!
You're not big on reading, understanding, and responding to comments, are you? You seem to pick out a few words, assume the rest, and then write a response to the assumed text. It's probably more efficient, I'll grant you that.
I am indeed arguing that most of the LAWs (why did you capitalize that?) for redistricting are terribly unfair, yes, as you would know had you actually tried reading what I wrote.
We started this with you claiming that redistricting was bi-partisan and that courts made sure it was fair. I sent links demonstrating that neither of those are correct. But since it seems that you won't let little things like facts get in the way of your opinion, I believe we are done here.
The courts don't rule that they are fair. The courts rule on whether they are legal. I assume that you don't believe that fair == legal? I think that laws that encode a reasonable definition of "fair" are usually better than ones that don't, and I hope that the Supreme Court decides that some reasonable definition of "fair" is the test for legality of redistricting, but to assume that judges are "fair" implies two things: One, you haven't been involved in many legal cases, and two, you are white. (Sorry, but that is a very clear tell. I'm white too, and I also thought that judges were usually fair, until I had some eye-opening experiences.)
Defining "fair" is always a tough thing; for any definition I can come up with 4 corner cases which break it. But an imperfect but mostly-good definition might be "the percentage of a party in a legislative body should be very similar to the number of people who voted fro someone of that party in the election." So, if 60% of voters voted for a Republican for a state house, and Republicans had 65% of the seats, that's probably "fair". But if Republicans get 40% of the seats, that's probably "unfair". Does that seem reasonable to you, as a first approximation?
I think your argument is "you can't detect voter fraud in the U.S., because you can't detect voter fraud in the U.S". Which might be good Zen, but is poor logic.
Why do you think you can't detect voter fraud? Because a lot of statisticians and voting experts think you can. Not 100% of the time, but a lot of the time.
Someone famous has said that millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 election. Sure, tracking down all of those millions would be impossible, but you should be able to find, say, 10000 out of "millions" (less than 1%) pretty easily, right? Or maybe 1000? Or even 100? I mean, some of those illegal voters may be as smart as Lex Luthor, but most won't be, so some of them will screw up and be caught. Or some would sell out their co-conspirators for money.
I don't know how many actual cases of voter fraud were found in 2016. Five? A dozen? Not enough to justify a claim of million or even thousands of fraudsters.
I have no idea what you are talking about. While I have problems with both the process used to draw districts and the courts which decide, my comment implied that your comment was completely incorrect.
First, you said "the district maps are drawn by bi-partisan groups". Wisconsin's 2011 redistricting was "created by Republican leaders virtually in secret", which is not bi-partisan.
Second, you said "tested in the courts to make sure they are fair". In a 2004 ruling, the Supreme Court "held that partisan gerrymanders were non-judiciable, and that courts could not intervene". Now, some courts are trying to fix that terrible ruling, and the Supreme Court is taking another look, but that is kinda the opposite of "making sure they are fair".
In that case, I apologize. A common accusation is that climate scientists "change data arbitrarily so it says whatever they want it to say". I read "didn't match what they thought it should be, recalibrated so it looked right" and thought you were repeating the common accusation. I misread.
I cannot predict where any given proton or electron will end up, but given enough cameras on baseball pitches I can reliably determine which balls are non-regulation.
In the same way, I cannot detect each person casting votes, but statistical regressions will detect the presence of most voting fraud (though it doesn't determine which exact votes are the fraudulent ones). And no study in the last few decades has detected a non-trivial amount of fraud. So first, you have to explain how the fraudsters are so incredibly organized that they have tweaked the final results in ways to avoid all detection.