I agree that it's not that surprising to see liberal protests. However, you go too far in the other direction...
This is the kind of behavior I feared that would flare up on the other side when Trump lost the "rigged" election and the faithful rose up in revolt.
Why? How often to conservatives or Republicans riot?
Not often. But American politics hasn't really seen the situation as it was right before this election, with a major party candidate explicitly claiming the results would be rigged, with polls showing that a majority of Republicans didn't believe their votes would be counted fairly, and a documented groundswell in militias practicing and preparing to mobilize -- for what, we'll likely never be sure now.
The idea that a Clinton victory would have been met with peace and quiet just seems to be the exact opposite of what Trump was encouraging.
And where are those Republican voters now questioning the outcome of the election, anyway? Where's Trump questioning the validity of the Electoral College (which he had deplored before)? Do you seriously think Trump and his supporters would be saying and doing nothing if the situation were reversed?
I disliked both of the major party candidates, so I'm not really on either "side" here. I just think it's naive for either side to think that there wouldn't be protests after the rhetoric of the past election cycle.
I now see by reading upthread that you were probably trying to see whether I disagree with you. I basically agree with your logic that representation of states was PART of the reason why the EC was apportioned the way it was. But that doesn't mean that it ever FUNCTIONED the way the Founders imagined it would, i.e., with electors basically as informed individuals voting freely for candidates before the era of political parties. Once parties emerged, the system became redundant rather than having any independent function.
If the sole goal of the EC nowadays is to "rubber stamp" the outcome of the popular vote in each state according to whatever scheme the government sets up, then why bother having "Electors" at all? We could just as easily just say each state gets "X votes" and let the governor or the state legislature certify that count.
The fact is the EC doesn't do what the Founders imagined it would, and it never did.
Please explain, in your view, why Electors were given for Senators, and not just Representatives.
In "my view"? Well, some of the Founders addressed that point directly. Basically, yes, the number of Electors was proportional to the number of government representatives. So the 2 Senate votes per state were likely added for the same reason that they were represented in the Senate in the first place, i.e., not to drown out the "voices" of the smaller and less populous states. (There was obviously a lot more to the whole Senate compromise to begin with, but the Electoral College numbers were just based off of the total number of reps, so that's an easy question.)
Also why, if there should be no winner of a majority in the Electoral College, each state receives an equal (i.e. one) vote in the House "run-off" election.
Because states were viewed as quasi-autonomous entities before the ratification of the Constitution. It's not unlike how nations vote in the UN or whatever -- the US was originally conceived of as a loose confederation of independent states. The Constitution made it much stronger than the original Articles of Confederation, but the logic of representation still stuck around... again, just as we don't apportion delegates to the UN according to population or whatever today. Each independent nation has a voice. That sort of logic justified the choice of President in event that consensus was not reached from the EC.
There is a clearer answer for why the run off goes to Congress. Note that Congress has always had an odd number of delegates. This is intentional to ensure that there cannot be a tie.
Uh, nope. In the event that there is no Electoral College majority, the vote goes to the House of Representatives, where every STATE DELEGATION gets merely ONE VOTE APIECE. Hence, you'd have 50 votes total, and it is quite possible to get a tie. In the event that the House is unable to come to a consensus before the President is required to assume office, the VP would become President (12th Amendment). In the event that the Senate also deadlocks in voting for VP, the Speaker of the House would become President (20th Amendment, and Presidential Succession Act of 1947).
Just because something is "working exactly as intended" doesn't make it fair.
Furthermore, there's no evidence that the system is "working exactly as intended." I've pointed this out numerous times in the last week, but the Electoral College basically NEVER worked as intended by the Founders. They created this system to deal with a collection of 13 individual states and no major political parties. The Electoral College was created because the assumption was that most voters would vote for a candidate from their home state, leading to a slate of a bunch of random candidates, no one with more than 10-20% of the vote. Aside from any qualms some of the Founders may have had about direct democratic votes in general, getting only 10-20% of the vote would not have resulted in an adequate "mandate" to govern.
Hence the Electoral College, where electors were required to vote for two people, one of whom had to be NOT from their home state. The idea being that the "native son" from the home state would get one vote, and the other would be for someone with regional consensus. The top 5 such candidates would float to the top, and Congress would make the final selection.
Within 12 years, that system failed due to the emergence of political parties, since that system didn't differentiate vote for President or VP (the most votes just became President, and the runner-up became VP). Hence the 12th amendment, which separated the votes for VP.
And yet still the Electoral College did not function as originally imaged by the Founders, since they imagined a group of educated folks with essentially free choice to elect the best person in their own view. Instead, more and more states started moving toward a "general ticket" structure where you'd just have a slate of partisan Electors who were designated to vote for their party candidate. By the 1830s, that was pretty much the norm everywhere.
So no, the system is NOT working as intended, and never really has. It was an idealistic and abstract system constructed before anyone had a clue what the electoral landscape of the new nation would look like -- and it basically became irrelevant (and redundant) the moment political parties emerged.
I really wish people would keep talking about this, because it emphasizes what's broken with our presidential election. The electoral system is useless. It does not serve the original function of independently choosing a president, nor does it serve to represent the popular vote.
Actually, talking about it RIGHT NOW mainly just makes Dems sound like sore losers. If the results had gone the opposite way (Clinton wins EC, Trump wins popular vote), I'm sure we'd have heard the same rhetoric from the other side, and Dems would be extolling the virtues of our Founders in choosing a system that would overturn a popular vote against someone like Trump.
The problem is that none of this will change unless we start getting people on BOTH SIDES to agree to change the system. That's not really a discussion anybody can have now rationally. Maybe in a year or two. Maybe if Trump's presidency implodes to the point Republicans also wish the results had been overturned.
Right now, I think most of this talk is just further alienating the Trump supporters who already felt so alienated by liberals that they voted in desperation for someone like Trump.
We are entering a zone where even the hardest of facts become debatableâ in the minds of conspiracy theorists. But Google, you are effectively a computer program with none of that supposed media bias, so Google programmers please do what you can to stop helping them spread lies. It only enhances our increasing distrust in all forms of media. Most important, itâ(TM)s really, really bad for the truth and for America.
While I agree that we seem to be entering into a "post-fact" era, I'm not sure that Google has ever tweaked their algorithm to emphasize TRUTH. Popularity, maybe. Relevance to a particular search term, sure. Number of 3rd-party links to a page, definitely.
But "truth" or "fact"? There has always been crap on the internet, and if this is the first time this person noticed a top hit linking to BS, this person must not spend a lot of time doing internet searches. Not saying I don't wish things were better, but attempting to tweak Google's algorithm to create "true" or "face-based" results is more than a trivial shift in the way they would need to operate.
But years go by and kids seem just so attached to their social personas that they can't just walk way.
But aren't their "personas" increasingly becoming THEM? We all live in a social reality we construct. Kids act one way at school, a different way at church, a different way with close friends, and a different way with parents. Facebook and other online interactions are yet another forum/venue where they construct their own version of themselves -- and it's becoming more prominent in social lives for kids every year. Just "walking away" for some of them would be like abandoning a large part of your social life. If you loved hanging out a bar for years and had dozens of friends there, and suddenly some annoying guy started showing up and harassing you, would you just "walk away" and stop going to the bar? Or would you want to figure out another way and still keep seeing your friends?
I get into an argument on facebook or whatever and I'll just close it if I get too worked up. And voila I stop thinking about it. But kids don't seem to have that capability and it makes me wonder why not.
Personally, I couldn't care less about my social "persona" on Facebook (where I'm rarely active and only stay there to keep in touch with a few people who don't seem to know how to use things like email), and I know some other adults who feel the same.
But I'm pretty sure we're the minority among social media users these days. Most people seem to spend more and more time participating in the social media "rat race," generating "likes" for their posts and showcasing their cool photos of cool activities. Some people may be able to just "close it down" temporarily, but few people I've seen who are on Facebook every day would be willing to just leave it behind completely.
And for kids whose social reality exists largely in such spaces now, it may be impossible to do so and maintain the kind of connections expected in peer groups. Most online bullying is not anonymous -- it happens among peers in established social settings... it's just those settings have moved online.
they wanted the most corrupt one they could find that wasn't in jail at the moment.
Unfortunately, given how BOTH Trump and Clinton have been under investigations (as well as many aids, new proposed members of the Trump cabinet and team, etc.), I think that should almost be a motto for the modern political system -- "Finding the most corrupt people who aren't in jail at the moment."
I hate to say it because it sounds elitist, but people as a whole are dumb. There's just no getting around it...the average person is much more likely to be swayed by something they see on their Facebook news feed.
I used to make this argument about people being "dumb," but I now think there's more to it than that. People are impressionable and can be manipulated. That's true. People like having their beliefs reinforced. That's also true. But I don't think a lot of this has to do with intelligence per se -- there are plenty of intelligent people over the centuries who have convinced themselves of dumb things, often despite clear evidence to the contrary.
Cognitive scientists and psychologists have identified a multitude of cognitive biases that cause humans to deviate from "rational" thinking and choices. Most of these operate unconsciously. Intelligence can help to overcome them, but often you also need a specific knowledge of the kind of bias and how it comes about... otherwise even really smart people can be taken in by them.
So, really, it IS a bit elitist to brand this argument as "smart" vs. "dumb." There are all sorts of reasons why people believe the things they do and make the (irrational) choices they sometimes make... and frequently it has little to do with intelligence alone.
I see no reason that Facebook cannot squelch bullshit wherever it comes from - impartially, transparently and fairly.
I see several reasons. First, I don't think anyone is "impartial" and "fair" in all circumstances. Everyone has biases. That doesn't mean we can't try to do this, but it's bound to be influenced -- even unintentionally -- but the people who set it up.
As for "transparently," are you suggesting that Facebook simply "flag" bad news or stuff it deems to be untruthful? While they might work in changing a few people's minds, I think if conservatives (or liberals, for that matter) see their news disproportionately branded as such, they'll simply start seeking out other "news" sources without that censorship. One of the biggest problems in politics right now is increasing polarization -- where the two sides don't even communicate to each other (aided by Facebook's "personalized" news feed that keeps feeding you the stuff you want to hear). If people just start going to other sources to share fake news, it's not going to help much.
Of course, if you don't do it "transparently," then you're censoring stuff without telling anyone... making it much more insidious and more likely to lead to other bad stuff (e.g., government or other groups putting pressure on Facebook to downplay certain stories, etc.).
Not saying no one should try -- but I can see lots of reasons why this system can be manipulated or even fail completely in improving things.
Plus the fact that Hillary won the popular vote (by +650K votes and still counting)
I really wish people would stop talking about this. I'm NOT a Trump supporter, but talking about the popular vote is emphasizing an irrelevant aspect of the data given how our system is set up.
Trump and Clinton did NOT campaign to win the popular vote. If they were doing so, they likely would have skipped rallies in many "swing states" and instead held them in places more likely to get out the maximum votes for their side. That could have led to a very different popular vote split.
It's kinda like playing a game of Monopoly and losing but saying, "But, but I had more properties! I should win! I had more properties!" Except Monopoly isn't about accumulating the most property, it's about accumulating more money and bankrupting the opponent. Those are the rules of the game. If you want to play by different rules, fine... but that's a different game. The US election is set up one way, and the candidates "played" to win by those rules (i.e., Electoral College).
By the way, I'm not defending the Electoral College either, and there are legitimate reasons to get rid of it. But the mismatch here isn't really a strong argument -- if you believe that campaigns and rallies and advertisements have ANY effect on voter turnout, then there's absolutely no guarantee that the numbers would have been the same if the candidates were trying to win the popular vote and made campaign choices based on that.
One last thing to note about life expectancy -- it's important to note that medical science 100 years ago was nowhere near as advanced as today. Thus, injuries were much more likely to result in death.
For every car-related fatality, there are nearly 100 injuries, and roughly 10 times as many serious injuries/hospital stays. Many of the latter result in serious disabilities or permanent health issues.
A century ago, most of those hospital stay cases would likely have resulted in death. Just because medical science can now save those people from dying doesn't (to my mind) make driving "safer" or "less dangerous." Fatality rates have gone down much more due to medicine's advances than because of increased safety measures... but many things are still quite "dangerous" even if they don't result in death as much.
The reason car accidents are leading is because we've made everything else so safe.
True. But just because we've gotten so much safer in most thing, does that mean we should stop and not worry about making things even better?
And even with cars, if you have a modern well maintained vehicle with ABS, airbags, crumple zones, wear seatbelts, don't drive drunk, speed, use you phone while driving, drive fatigued etc, you have next to no chance of being killed in a car accident (seriously look it up, you'll be surprised how many accidents could be avoided with these simple measures).
I'm well aware of such stats. One thing you should note, however, is that some of your things have to do with driving a well-maintained modern vehicle, and other things have to do with personal behavior choice (drunk driving, texting, driving fatigued, etc.) While the former mitigates your risk in all cases, you have less control over the latter in other drivers (or sometimes if you're a passenger, say a child being driven by an adult).
If there were more easy ways to avoid having such dangerous drivers at the wheel, it would save lives for OTHER people (passengers, other drivers, pedestrians) who still suffer risk based on OTHER'S behavior.
Before the invention of the car, the average life expectancy was about 40, that's how dangerous everything was only 100 years ago. The world is a much safer place now, even with cars in it.
Again, I completely agree. However, I do think it's worth pointing out that people are scared of all sorts of crap. They worry about all sorts of VERY unlikely events happening (plane crashes, terrorist acts, mass shootings, etc.) It's worth noting to most people that driving a car is perhaps the MOST DANGEROUS thing (relatively) that they do, so they realize the importance of actually doing the stuff you mention (like driving a well-maintained car, not driving while impaired, etc.).
Is it? I drive a fair bit, and sure it's more risky than lying on your couch, but not by much. I think the word 'danger' gets over-exaggerated these days considering how safe just about everything is relative to even 50 years ago.
Umm, yes, driving IS dangerous -- it's basically one of the most dangerous things people do. "Unintentional injury" is the leading cause of death in people age 1-44 (and the third highest after cancer and heart disease in people aged 45-64), according to CDC stats.
And of those causes classified as "unintentional injury" again according to the CDC, motor vehicle accidents are either the LEADING or second-highest cause of death for all of those age groups.
Bottom line -- being involved with cars (either as driver, passenger, or as a pedestrian around cars) is basically the MOST dangerous single activity people deliberately choose to do on a regular basis.
First let me be clear that I completely agree with "self-driving" features on cars so far likely save a LOT more lives than people injured. That said...
People are NOT as qualified to drive a car as a computer which checks its sensors hundreds of times per second.
I'd just change this slightly to people on average are not as qualified. If you look at stats, certain demographic groups and personality traits make up a disproportionate number of accidents. (For example, males in their late teens are something like seven times as likely as females in their late teens to drive drunk.)
Back when Google first started touting its numbers for how many miles driven without an accident, I polled a number of family members over a dinner. Yes, we tend to be reasonably careful, cautious drivers overall. But none of us were EVER at fault in an accident, and we were only involved in something like 2 or 3 minor accidents over several millions miles driven total. That's far below average. I'm definitely choosing my family members over AI cars for now and the near future.
Also, note that such numbers from Google et al. also explicitly don't take into account times when the human driver deliberately takes over to correct an AI error or because the driver already knows the road situation or conditions are something the AI isn't trained on. Self-driving cars are certainly improving all the time, but they are still nowhere near the level where I'd buy one and trust my life to the AI, considering my and my family's driving record.
Autonomous cars are the future, and Tesla is pushing that forward. There are going to be mistakes in the beginning, and people will die and be injured.
Yes, I feel like I say this every time an article like this comes up, but there's a real danger to this sort of behavior from self-driving car companies. We've already seen the media jumping on Tesla. This will only get worse as more accidents happen with other companies.
It won't matter that the self-driving features will save lives, at least in the short time. We live in a society driven by a sensationalist media and ligitious attorneys. The "evil robot car" that runs over a couple of kids and kills them -- even if those kids were behaving completely erratically, and few human drivers would likely have been able to avoid them -- will be the brunt of evening news "top stories," government regulation, and possibly even Congressional investigation (depending on how loud the media drumbeat could become). Drivers will continue to believe that they can "do better" in such a situation and if they're "in control," even if that belief is irrational.
I want self-driving cars as soon as possible, because I thoroughly believe what you say that many drivers are erratic and dangerous. But the standard for self-driving cars simply CANNOT be "they're better than the average human" or "the stats say they save more lives." That's not going to play in a sensationalist media if some horrible accident happens and kids die.
Self-driving cars need to be FAR better than the average human before they're allowed significant latitude on the streets. Otherwise, I worry that they'll be regulated out of existence or their widespread use postponed for years or even decades because some companies were too eager to "push things forward," as you put it.
And that's why -- all rational arguments aside -- I think Tesla's behavior and response has been reckless here. And their failure to acknowledge that a word like "autopilot" could be misconstrued (no matter how many of us nerds cite technical airline definitions or whatever)... it's just not sufficient. They are extremely lucky there haven't been more incidents so far, and all it would take is one of these cars to ram into a school bus or something, and the whole industry could come crashing down.
Be thankful you're counted at all. There's nothing in the Constitution saying that states need to hold elections to determine their Electors. They could simply appoint them, as many states did in early elections of the 1800s.
It's a mistaken idea that anyone has a "right to vote" for President. That doesn't exist in the Constitution. The Founders feared the "tyranny of the mob" and did their best to isolate election of the President from the populace as much as possible.
but I also think he didn't fully realize the extent to which the Founding Fathers believed that even the electorate needed to be held in check. That's why the original formulation produced only one directly and generally elected Federal body; the House of Representatives. The President was selected by an electoral college, the Senate was picked by the states, and the Supreme Court was selected by the Senate based on the President's nominees
Actually, you don't go far enough. I just wrote another post above explaining the original function of the Electoral College, but it was much more "anti-democratic" than you suppose. It wasn't a "check" on populism, since there's NOTHING in the Constitution which actually says how Electors are chosen -- they are appointed by the states in whatever manner the states dictate. For the first 30-40 years of the U.S., many states didn't bother holding popular votes for President at all.
The Electoral College was merely a way to get input from the states to create a "short list" of candidates which would then be sent to the House of Representatives in most elections to finally choose the President. The selection process was a LOT more removed from the populace than you think.
Yes, there were reasons -- unfortunately none of the ones you mention really are correct. They're the reasons that modern political analysts make up because they seem to make sense to them, based on how the system operates NOW.
But the Electoral College operated differently at the beginning, and if you read the various proposals and debates among the Founders, it's very clear that their motivations were quite different.
I'll try to sum it up briefly. There were some of the Founders who wanted Congress to choose the President. There were others who wanted more diverse voices from state government representatives. Few really wanted to entrust it to "the people," because they had all read their ancient Greek and Roman history and knew that democracies were largely disasters that eventually ended up putting tyrants into power.
There is NOTHING in the Constitution saying how Electoral College members are chosen, only that the state legislatures decide how. In the majority of states for the first few decades of the U.S., Electors were mostly chosen by state governments -- many states didn't even bother holding a popular vote AT ALL. Others had various hybrid systems. See the Wikipedia article on the Electoral College if you want more details.
Anyhow, how precisely did the Founders think things were going to work? Remember that there were no political parties at the beginning. They all assumed George Washington would be the first president, but they couldn't imagine consensus emerging after him. So the Electoral College was set up to create a "short list" of good candidates chosen by the states (according to whatever method the legislatures decided).
The Electors originally did not cast separate votes for President and Vice President -- they just had two votes, and at least one of them was required to be not for his home state. That was to prevent states from just deadlocking by electing people from home (since so much was invested in individual states at this time).
The idea was that most Electors would end up voting for someone from their home state, but also someone with more regional or even national consensus. And then those few names would float to the top -- and the "short list" would be sent to Congress to actually decide the election. Remember that originally the person with the most votes would be President, and the person with the 2nd-most votes would be VP.
The Founders -- living before political parties -- assumed that Congress (specifically the House of Representatives) would choose the President in most elections. The Electoral College only existed to create a "short list" based on representatives of state governments and thereby to guarantee more diversity than might come from an established body like Congress. (Also, Electors were required to meet SEPARATELY in their states, not en masse, to prevent the sort of collusion and "backroom dealing" that might happen in a body like Congress. That was another benefit.)
THOSE were the reasons why the Electoral College was created. It originally had nothing to do with most of the crap people say today. The concept that a "popular vote" would even be taken for President in most states wasn't even contemplated by the Founders, who just preferred to get input from state governments to narrow down the field, rather than letting Congress choose the President directly.
So now you know. The Founders were much more anti-"democratic" than you ever thought. And they introduced this complex mechanism to prevent centralized collusion and to get regional consensus around a short list of candidates in an era before parties and factions were assumed.
One last thing to note -- it requires a 2/3 majority in both houses of Congress to overturn a Presidential veto of any legislation. Thus, the only way Republicans in the legislature could actually pass laws without the President's support is if they got a rather large number of Democrats on their side to override a potential veto. Hence Presidents tend to be highly involved in crafting laws that will satisfy both the President and Congress.
I'm a Canadian, so the subtleties of US governance are lost on me; but isn't the President largely a figurehead, except perhaps when it comes to foreign affairs?
Well, the presidency was never quite a "figurehead," but historically it did have a lot less power. That was by design in the Constitution. (The revolutionaries had just left a king behind, so they didn't want another.)
However, over the centuries the Executive Branch of the federal government has grown to be HUGE compared to the others (Legislative and Judicial). All of the "departments" (of education, treasury, defense, interior, etc.) -- i.e., most of the government -- are run by the president, and the president basically gets to set the day-to-day regulations and policies that govern all that.
Yes, Congress ultimately has authority over passing a budget and can dictate laws and regulations, but we've gradually accepted the president's right to take unilateral action in a lot of cases where Congress hasn't explicitly weighed in. (Perhaps the most glaring case of this is in the war powers -- until the mid-20th century, Congress had sole power to declare war as outlined in the Constitution. But Congress has not declared war since, so all of the Vietnam, Gulf War, Iraq War, etc. have essentially been waged under unilateral presidential authority... though Congress has at times voted to "support" such actions.)
So, no, actually US Presidents now have huge amounts of power.
The Republicans control both Congress and the Senate, and both Congresscritters and Senators have a substantial degree of autonomy when it comes to voting and putting forth legislation, do they not? With the Republicans so much in power, does it really matter much if Trump, Cruz, Rubio, or some generic Republican occupies the White House?
Even in terms of legislation, presidents now frequently spend time proposing their own versions (since they have huge resources in all the executive departments to put together a staff and do so), and send them to Congress to get them to introduce the laws and approve them.
Yes, Congress can certainly choose to pass different legislation and often does, but there's a reason for example that we call the health care stuff "Obamacare" -- it was largely shaped from a plan coming from the President, which then was passed by Congress.
So, yes, there are some things that would happen with Republicans regardless of what Republican is in the president's office. But the President certainly has plenty of power to influence and shape things greatly if he wants.
Why should I trust the people you say I should trust to say who I should trust?
Not only that, but the example sources are a bit laughable. From TFS:
one quick trip over to Wikipedia,
Ah yes, the encyclopedia that ANYONE -- including vandals, trolls, morons, and folks with agendas -- can edit. Seriously??
Snopes,
The site that started out back in the day as somewhat reasonable, but which seems now to have issues. It's still better than most, but I've found crap on there in the past (not political stuff that's debatable, I'm talking scientific errors).
an academic journal
Uh, first, how many people head to academic journals to do fact checking? Second, how many people have access to those journals? Third, the purpose of academic journals is often to present research in progress, which is often not the final word or consensus on something, just a current scholar's or lab's particular result. You really need experts to interpret specialist literature.
And then the idea just keeps getting worse. Again from TFS:
What if your internet browser -- whether Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Opera or other -- was able provide an "information accuracy rating" of some sort when you visit a certain URL. Perhaps something like "11,992 internet users give this website a factual accuracy rating of 3.7/10.
Seriously? TFS just finished telling me of how millions of internet users are continuously hoodwinked by "inaccurate horsecrap," and now you want me to believe a rating system generated by those same internet users?!?
I could go on with detailed critiques, but let's cut to the chase:
Is this a good idea?
No.
Could it be made to work technically?
No.
Might a browser feature like this make the internet as a whole a "more factually accurate place" to get information from?
No. A browser feature doesn't magically make the internet "more factually accurate." Nonsense will always be out there no matter what.
I'm not opposed to someone trying to generate a browser plugin that tries to do something like this, though I can't imagine how it would be implemented to be useful. But definitely NOT a core browser function.
Fact-checking is REALLY hard work. And frankly, even the best sites make errors. How do you rate a webpage if it is largely accurate, but still has known (minor) fact errors? Or is this only for targeting sites that are known to disseminate nonsense and disinformation? What if those sites also carry some articles that are largely accurate?
I can't see how this ends up working without significant bias, overgeneralization, inaccuracy (in which case it's useless), and limited coverage. And even if it ends up roughly working well, what about all the "legends" that aren't in Snopes? -- like the way academic journals and experts sometimes have a different consensus about stuff than the interpretation you'd see in a book for a pop audience. We like to think the world can be easily parsed into self-contained "facts" that are objectively verifiable, but frankly there's a lot of interpretation that goes into most stuff.
This is a moral point (Facebook shouldn't be held responsible for discriminatory content posted by users)
Except it's not the ad content that is potentially discriminatory. It's not like we're talking about people running ads saying, "Apartment/job available. Whites applications only, please." That would be discriminatory content in the ad itself.
Instead, we're talking about a system deliberately designed to deliver ads to individuals (and not show them to other individuals) potentially based on their race. That system is created by Facebook. Facebook is potentially liable for misuse of such a system.
The advertisers couldn't deliver their ads to users of a particular race without Facebook's system. I agree that the legal arguments here are murky, but it's not at all obvious that Facebook is completely in the clear, given that they've explicitly created a system which is intended to make it easy to target people by race. (And no, this is NOT the same as traditional "ad targeting" where you play an ad on a particular channel or radio station or in a particular magazine which is known to have certain demographics. In those cases, the users of other races can still choose to view the ads. In this case, the system is non-transparent, and users don't have such clear choices to change how the system targets them.)
The discrimination for Ebony Magazine is behavioral, just like Facebooks. That is, nobody is keeping you from behaving in a way so that these ads are targeted at you.
Except Facebook's model is not transparent. You don't know what data they have on you. You don't know what groups you're in. You don't know how you're being targeted (or what ads you might never see).
Hence, you cannot know how you might change your behavior to see ads you don't even know exist, because you don't know what behaviors have caused Facebook's classifications.
Well, I don't use Facebook and I don't know how they target. On Google, however, you can see what information Google has inferred about you, and you can also turn off ad targeting.
That's nice. Hooray for Google. This is a discussion about Facebook, however, and its potential liability for the way it designs its system.
There are all sorts of reasons people have been complaining about Facebook's non-transparency in the way it collects data and the way it seems to be using that data. The U.S. also has loads of laws against businesses discriminating on the basis of race.
Again, the difference between traditional "ad targeting" and the present case is that it's one thing to advertise in places or media where a particular race might notice you more -- it's quite a different thing to only make that advertising visible to members of a particular race. (Again, I particularly foresee this creating legal problems in the future if services or deals or whatever are offered to one race but not another through Facebook's system.)
If Facebook was transparent about all this and allowed you to choose the way to target ads for you, or to turn it off, or whatever, it would be less insidious. Instead it's deliberately choosing to keep that information secret and proprietary; if that ultimately turns out to result in disciminatory business practices though, I expect more legal challenges to follow.
Ah, the perennial DST debate. While getting rid of it appeals to some nerds, it also has practical arguments in favor of it just like time zones.
Yes, the energy savings it originally was created for may no longer materialize. But there are lots of social benefits. What percentage of the population would actually get up at 4:30 or 5am in summer to make use of the early morning sunlight before work? Some, but not a lot. Most people really want that extra time in the summer to spend outdoors in evenings.
So, no, I really want to keep my DST, thank you very much. The question really then comes down to -- do we ever want to go back to standard time? And that's a harder question. The move back to standard time requires another move to DST in the spring, which many studies have shown produces things like more accidents, heart attacks, etc., as well as screwing up everyone's sleep. On the other hand, there are other studies that basically show benefits to the end of DST time that counterbalance these, so it's likely a wash. And keeping DST year-round may be better in terms of things like crime rates, since criminals are much less active in the morning hours, and any daylight going into the afternoon or evening when people are out is likely helpful.
But without a return to standard time, you have to deal with very late sunrises, which can be quite unpopular, particularly in areas farther away from the equator. England tried permanent DST a few decades back, as did Russia a few years ago, and they stopped the experiment after a few years due to unpopularity. (Other countries are using it, though.) There's something about late sunrises that can make things like SAD (or whatever you want to call it -- that depressing feeling when it's dark a lot of time in winter) worse when you don't get some sun in the morning. Yeah, it gets dark earlier, but most humans seem to need some morning sun to get our circadian rhythms going well.
I don't know -- but one thing I *do* know is that I'd prefer keeping year-long DST to no DST at all. The practical benefits are just too hard to ignore, and the only argument for permanent "standard" time is astronomical. But most people have been used to having the sun not be at zenith at precisely noon since time zones were invented anyway, so that doesn't seem a strong argument.
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This is the kind of behavior I feared that would flare up on the other side when Trump lost the "rigged" election and the faithful rose up in revolt.
Why? How often to conservatives or Republicans riot?
Not often. But American politics hasn't really seen the situation as it was right before this election, with a major party candidate explicitly claiming the results would be rigged, with polls showing that a majority of Republicans didn't believe their votes would be counted fairly, and a documented groundswell in militias practicing and preparing to mobilize -- for what, we'll likely never be sure now.
The idea that a Clinton victory would have been met with peace and quiet just seems to be the exact opposite of what Trump was encouraging.
And where are those Republican voters now questioning the outcome of the election, anyway? Where's Trump questioning the validity of the Electoral College (which he had deplored before)? Do you seriously think Trump and his supporters would be saying and doing nothing if the situation were reversed?
I disliked both of the major party candidates, so I'm not really on either "side" here. I just think it's naive for either side to think that there wouldn't be protests after the rhetoric of the past election cycle.
I now see by reading upthread that you were probably trying to see whether I disagree with you. I basically agree with your logic that representation of states was PART of the reason why the EC was apportioned the way it was. But that doesn't mean that it ever FUNCTIONED the way the Founders imagined it would, i.e., with electors basically as informed individuals voting freely for candidates before the era of political parties. Once parties emerged, the system became redundant rather than having any independent function.
If the sole goal of the EC nowadays is to "rubber stamp" the outcome of the popular vote in each state according to whatever scheme the government sets up, then why bother having "Electors" at all? We could just as easily just say each state gets "X votes" and let the governor or the state legislature certify that count.
The fact is the EC doesn't do what the Founders imagined it would, and it never did.
Please explain, in your view, why Electors were given for Senators, and not just Representatives.
In "my view"? Well, some of the Founders addressed that point directly. Basically, yes, the number of Electors was proportional to the number of government representatives. So the 2 Senate votes per state were likely added for the same reason that they were represented in the Senate in the first place, i.e., not to drown out the "voices" of the smaller and less populous states. (There was obviously a lot more to the whole Senate compromise to begin with, but the Electoral College numbers were just based off of the total number of reps, so that's an easy question.)
Also why, if there should be no winner of a majority in the Electoral College, each state receives an equal (i.e. one) vote in the House "run-off" election.
Because states were viewed as quasi-autonomous entities before the ratification of the Constitution. It's not unlike how nations vote in the UN or whatever -- the US was originally conceived of as a loose confederation of independent states. The Constitution made it much stronger than the original Articles of Confederation, but the logic of representation still stuck around... again, just as we don't apportion delegates to the UN according to population or whatever today. Each independent nation has a voice. That sort of logic justified the choice of President in event that consensus was not reached from the EC.
There is a clearer answer for why the run off goes to Congress. Note that Congress has always had an odd number of delegates. This is intentional to ensure that there cannot be a tie.
Uh, nope. In the event that there is no Electoral College majority, the vote goes to the House of Representatives, where every STATE DELEGATION gets merely ONE VOTE APIECE. Hence, you'd have 50 votes total, and it is quite possible to get a tie. In the event that the House is unable to come to a consensus before the President is required to assume office, the VP would become President (12th Amendment). In the event that the Senate also deadlocks in voting for VP, the Speaker of the House would become President (20th Amendment, and Presidential Succession Act of 1947).
Just because something is "working exactly as intended" doesn't make it fair.
Furthermore, there's no evidence that the system is "working exactly as intended." I've pointed this out numerous times in the last week, but the Electoral College basically NEVER worked as intended by the Founders. They created this system to deal with a collection of 13 individual states and no major political parties. The Electoral College was created because the assumption was that most voters would vote for a candidate from their home state, leading to a slate of a bunch of random candidates, no one with more than 10-20% of the vote. Aside from any qualms some of the Founders may have had about direct democratic votes in general, getting only 10-20% of the vote would not have resulted in an adequate "mandate" to govern.
Hence the Electoral College, where electors were required to vote for two people, one of whom had to be NOT from their home state. The idea being that the "native son" from the home state would get one vote, and the other would be for someone with regional consensus. The top 5 such candidates would float to the top, and Congress would make the final selection.
Within 12 years, that system failed due to the emergence of political parties, since that system didn't differentiate vote for President or VP (the most votes just became President, and the runner-up became VP). Hence the 12th amendment, which separated the votes for VP.
And yet still the Electoral College did not function as originally imaged by the Founders, since they imagined a group of educated folks with essentially free choice to elect the best person in their own view. Instead, more and more states started moving toward a "general ticket" structure where you'd just have a slate of partisan Electors who were designated to vote for their party candidate. By the 1830s, that was pretty much the norm everywhere.
So no, the system is NOT working as intended, and never really has. It was an idealistic and abstract system constructed before anyone had a clue what the electoral landscape of the new nation would look like -- and it basically became irrelevant (and redundant) the moment political parties emerged.
I really wish people would keep talking about this, because it emphasizes what's broken with our presidential election. The electoral system is useless. It does not serve the original function of independently choosing a president, nor does it serve to represent the popular vote.
Actually, talking about it RIGHT NOW mainly just makes Dems sound like sore losers. If the results had gone the opposite way (Clinton wins EC, Trump wins popular vote), I'm sure we'd have heard the same rhetoric from the other side, and Dems would be extolling the virtues of our Founders in choosing a system that would overturn a popular vote against someone like Trump.
The problem is that none of this will change unless we start getting people on BOTH SIDES to agree to change the system. That's not really a discussion anybody can have now rationally. Maybe in a year or two. Maybe if Trump's presidency implodes to the point Republicans also wish the results had been overturned.
Right now, I think most of this talk is just further alienating the Trump supporters who already felt so alienated by liberals that they voted in desperation for someone like Trump.
We are entering a zone where even the hardest of facts become debatableâ in the minds of conspiracy theorists. But Google, you are effectively a computer program with none of that supposed media bias, so Google programmers please do what you can to stop helping them spread lies. It only enhances our increasing distrust in all forms of media. Most important, itâ(TM)s really, really bad for the truth and for America.
While I agree that we seem to be entering into a "post-fact" era, I'm not sure that Google has ever tweaked their algorithm to emphasize TRUTH. Popularity, maybe. Relevance to a particular search term, sure. Number of 3rd-party links to a page, definitely.
But "truth" or "fact"? There has always been crap on the internet, and if this is the first time this person noticed a top hit linking to BS, this person must not spend a lot of time doing internet searches. Not saying I don't wish things were better, but attempting to tweak Google's algorithm to create "true" or "face-based" results is more than a trivial shift in the way they would need to operate.
But years go by and kids seem just so attached to their social personas that they can't just walk way.
But aren't their "personas" increasingly becoming THEM? We all live in a social reality we construct. Kids act one way at school, a different way at church, a different way with close friends, and a different way with parents. Facebook and other online interactions are yet another forum/venue where they construct their own version of themselves -- and it's becoming more prominent in social lives for kids every year. Just "walking away" for some of them would be like abandoning a large part of your social life. If you loved hanging out a bar for years and had dozens of friends there, and suddenly some annoying guy started showing up and harassing you, would you just "walk away" and stop going to the bar? Or would you want to figure out another way and still keep seeing your friends?
I get into an argument on facebook or whatever and I'll just close it if I get too worked up. And voila I stop thinking about it. But kids don't seem to have that capability and it makes me wonder why not.
Personally, I couldn't care less about my social "persona" on Facebook (where I'm rarely active and only stay there to keep in touch with a few people who don't seem to know how to use things like email), and I know some other adults who feel the same.
But I'm pretty sure we're the minority among social media users these days. Most people seem to spend more and more time participating in the social media "rat race," generating "likes" for their posts and showcasing their cool photos of cool activities. Some people may be able to just "close it down" temporarily, but few people I've seen who are on Facebook every day would be willing to just leave it behind completely.
And for kids whose social reality exists largely in such spaces now, it may be impossible to do so and maintain the kind of connections expected in peer groups. Most online bullying is not anonymous -- it happens among peers in established social settings... it's just those settings have moved online.
they wanted the most corrupt one they could find that wasn't in jail at the moment.
Unfortunately, given how BOTH Trump and Clinton have been under investigations (as well as many aids, new proposed members of the Trump cabinet and team, etc.), I think that should almost be a motto for the modern political system -- "Finding the most corrupt people who aren't in jail at the moment."
I hate to say it because it sounds elitist, but people as a whole are dumb. There's just no getting around it...the average person is much more likely to be swayed by something they see on their Facebook news feed.
I used to make this argument about people being "dumb," but I now think there's more to it than that. People are impressionable and can be manipulated. That's true. People like having their beliefs reinforced. That's also true. But I don't think a lot of this has to do with intelligence per se -- there are plenty of intelligent people over the centuries who have convinced themselves of dumb things, often despite clear evidence to the contrary.
Cognitive scientists and psychologists have identified a multitude of cognitive biases that cause humans to deviate from "rational" thinking and choices. Most of these operate unconsciously. Intelligence can help to overcome them, but often you also need a specific knowledge of the kind of bias and how it comes about... otherwise even really smart people can be taken in by them.
So, really, it IS a bit elitist to brand this argument as "smart" vs. "dumb." There are all sorts of reasons why people believe the things they do and make the (irrational) choices they sometimes make... and frequently it has little to do with intelligence alone.
I see no reason that Facebook cannot squelch bullshit wherever it comes from - impartially, transparently and fairly.
I see several reasons. First, I don't think anyone is "impartial" and "fair" in all circumstances. Everyone has biases. That doesn't mean we can't try to do this, but it's bound to be influenced -- even unintentionally -- but the people who set it up.
As for "transparently," are you suggesting that Facebook simply "flag" bad news or stuff it deems to be untruthful? While they might work in changing a few people's minds, I think if conservatives (or liberals, for that matter) see their news disproportionately branded as such, they'll simply start seeking out other "news" sources without that censorship. One of the biggest problems in politics right now is increasing polarization -- where the two sides don't even communicate to each other (aided by Facebook's "personalized" news feed that keeps feeding you the stuff you want to hear). If people just start going to other sources to share fake news, it's not going to help much.
Of course, if you don't do it "transparently," then you're censoring stuff without telling anyone... making it much more insidious and more likely to lead to other bad stuff (e.g., government or other groups putting pressure on Facebook to downplay certain stories, etc.).
Not saying no one should try -- but I can see lots of reasons why this system can be manipulated or even fail completely in improving things.
Plus the fact that Hillary won the popular vote (by +650K votes and still counting)
I really wish people would stop talking about this. I'm NOT a Trump supporter, but talking about the popular vote is emphasizing an irrelevant aspect of the data given how our system is set up.
Trump and Clinton did NOT campaign to win the popular vote. If they were doing so, they likely would have skipped rallies in many "swing states" and instead held them in places more likely to get out the maximum votes for their side. That could have led to a very different popular vote split.
It's kinda like playing a game of Monopoly and losing but saying, "But, but I had more properties! I should win! I had more properties!" Except Monopoly isn't about accumulating the most property, it's about accumulating more money and bankrupting the opponent. Those are the rules of the game. If you want to play by different rules, fine... but that's a different game. The US election is set up one way, and the candidates "played" to win by those rules (i.e., Electoral College).
By the way, I'm not defending the Electoral College either, and there are legitimate reasons to get rid of it. But the mismatch here isn't really a strong argument -- if you believe that campaigns and rallies and advertisements have ANY effect on voter turnout, then there's absolutely no guarantee that the numbers would have been the same if the candidates were trying to win the popular vote and made campaign choices based on that.
One last thing to note about life expectancy -- it's important to note that medical science 100 years ago was nowhere near as advanced as today. Thus, injuries were much more likely to result in death.
For every car-related fatality, there are nearly 100 injuries, and roughly 10 times as many serious injuries/hospital stays. Many of the latter result in serious disabilities or permanent health issues.
A century ago, most of those hospital stay cases would likely have resulted in death. Just because medical science can now save those people from dying doesn't (to my mind) make driving "safer" or "less dangerous." Fatality rates have gone down much more due to medicine's advances than because of increased safety measures... but many things are still quite "dangerous" even if they don't result in death as much.
The reason car accidents are leading is because we've made everything else so safe.
True. But just because we've gotten so much safer in most thing, does that mean we should stop and not worry about making things even better?
And even with cars, if you have a modern well maintained vehicle with ABS, airbags, crumple zones, wear seatbelts, don't drive drunk, speed, use you phone while driving, drive fatigued etc, you have next to no chance of being killed in a car accident (seriously look it up, you'll be surprised how many accidents could be avoided with these simple measures).
I'm well aware of such stats. One thing you should note, however, is that some of your things have to do with driving a well-maintained modern vehicle, and other things have to do with personal behavior choice (drunk driving, texting, driving fatigued, etc.) While the former mitigates your risk in all cases, you have less control over the latter in other drivers (or sometimes if you're a passenger, say a child being driven by an adult).
If there were more easy ways to avoid having such dangerous drivers at the wheel, it would save lives for OTHER people (passengers, other drivers, pedestrians) who still suffer risk based on OTHER'S behavior.
Before the invention of the car, the average life expectancy was about 40, that's how dangerous everything was only 100 years ago. The world is a much safer place now, even with cars in it.
Again, I completely agree. However, I do think it's worth pointing out that people are scared of all sorts of crap. They worry about all sorts of VERY unlikely events happening (plane crashes, terrorist acts, mass shootings, etc.) It's worth noting to most people that driving a car is perhaps the MOST DANGEROUS thing (relatively) that they do, so they realize the importance of actually doing the stuff you mention (like driving a well-maintained car, not driving while impaired, etc.).
Driving is dangerous,
Is it? I drive a fair bit, and sure it's more risky than lying on your couch, but not by much. I think the word 'danger' gets over-exaggerated these days considering how safe just about everything is relative to even 50 years ago.
Umm, yes, driving IS dangerous -- it's basically one of the most dangerous things people do. "Unintentional injury" is the leading cause of death in people age 1-44 (and the third highest after cancer and heart disease in people aged 45-64), according to CDC stats.
And of those causes classified as "unintentional injury" again according to the CDC, motor vehicle accidents are either the LEADING or second-highest cause of death for all of those age groups.
Bottom line -- being involved with cars (either as driver, passenger, or as a pedestrian around cars) is basically the MOST dangerous single activity people deliberately choose to do on a regular basis.
People are NOT as qualified to drive a car as a computer which checks its sensors hundreds of times per second.
I'd just change this slightly to people on average are not as qualified. If you look at stats, certain demographic groups and personality traits make up a disproportionate number of accidents. (For example, males in their late teens are something like seven times as likely as females in their late teens to drive drunk.)
Back when Google first started touting its numbers for how many miles driven without an accident, I polled a number of family members over a dinner. Yes, we tend to be reasonably careful, cautious drivers overall. But none of us were EVER at fault in an accident, and we were only involved in something like 2 or 3 minor accidents over several millions miles driven total. That's far below average. I'm definitely choosing my family members over AI cars for now and the near future.
Also, note that such numbers from Google et al. also explicitly don't take into account times when the human driver deliberately takes over to correct an AI error or because the driver already knows the road situation or conditions are something the AI isn't trained on. Self-driving cars are certainly improving all the time, but they are still nowhere near the level where I'd buy one and trust my life to the AI, considering my and my family's driving record.
Autonomous cars are the future, and Tesla is pushing that forward. There are going to be mistakes in the beginning, and people will die and be injured.
Yes, I feel like I say this every time an article like this comes up, but there's a real danger to this sort of behavior from self-driving car companies. We've already seen the media jumping on Tesla. This will only get worse as more accidents happen with other companies.
It won't matter that the self-driving features will save lives, at least in the short time. We live in a society driven by a sensationalist media and ligitious attorneys. The "evil robot car" that runs over a couple of kids and kills them -- even if those kids were behaving completely erratically, and few human drivers would likely have been able to avoid them -- will be the brunt of evening news "top stories," government regulation, and possibly even Congressional investigation (depending on how loud the media drumbeat could become). Drivers will continue to believe that they can "do better" in such a situation and if they're "in control," even if that belief is irrational.
I want self-driving cars as soon as possible, because I thoroughly believe what you say that many drivers are erratic and dangerous. But the standard for self-driving cars simply CANNOT be "they're better than the average human" or "the stats say they save more lives." That's not going to play in a sensationalist media if some horrible accident happens and kids die.
Self-driving cars need to be FAR better than the average human before they're allowed significant latitude on the streets. Otherwise, I worry that they'll be regulated out of existence or their widespread use postponed for years or even decades because some companies were too eager to "push things forward," as you put it.
And that's why -- all rational arguments aside -- I think Tesla's behavior and response has been reckless here. And their failure to acknowledge that a word like "autopilot" could be misconstrued (no matter how many of us nerds cite technical airline definitions or whatever)... it's just not sufficient. They are extremely lucky there haven't been more incidents so far, and all it would take is one of these cars to ram into a school bus or something, and the whole industry could come crashing down.
Be thankful you're counted at all. There's nothing in the Constitution saying that states need to hold elections to determine their Electors. They could simply appoint them, as many states did in early elections of the 1800s.
It's a mistaken idea that anyone has a "right to vote" for President. That doesn't exist in the Constitution. The Founders feared the "tyranny of the mob" and did their best to isolate election of the President from the populace as much as possible.
but I also think he didn't fully realize the extent to which the Founding Fathers believed that even the electorate needed to be held in check. That's why the original formulation produced only one directly and generally elected Federal body; the House of Representatives. The President was selected by an electoral college, the Senate was picked by the states, and the Supreme Court was selected by the Senate based on the President's nominees
Actually, you don't go far enough. I just wrote another post above explaining the original function of the Electoral College, but it was much more "anti-democratic" than you suppose. It wasn't a "check" on populism, since there's NOTHING in the Constitution which actually says how Electors are chosen -- they are appointed by the states in whatever manner the states dictate. For the first 30-40 years of the U.S., many states didn't bother holding popular votes for President at all.
The Electoral College was merely a way to get input from the states to create a "short list" of candidates which would then be sent to the House of Representatives in most elections to finally choose the President. The selection process was a LOT more removed from the populace than you think.
But really it is there for a REASON.
There was a reason we had it. Several actually.
Yes, there were reasons -- unfortunately none of the ones you mention really are correct. They're the reasons that modern political analysts make up because they seem to make sense to them, based on how the system operates NOW.
But the Electoral College operated differently at the beginning, and if you read the various proposals and debates among the Founders, it's very clear that their motivations were quite different.
I'll try to sum it up briefly. There were some of the Founders who wanted Congress to choose the President. There were others who wanted more diverse voices from state government representatives. Few really wanted to entrust it to "the people," because they had all read their ancient Greek and Roman history and knew that democracies were largely disasters that eventually ended up putting tyrants into power.
There is NOTHING in the Constitution saying how Electoral College members are chosen, only that the state legislatures decide how. In the majority of states for the first few decades of the U.S., Electors were mostly chosen by state governments -- many states didn't even bother holding a popular vote AT ALL. Others had various hybrid systems. See the Wikipedia article on the Electoral College if you want more details.
Anyhow, how precisely did the Founders think things were going to work? Remember that there were no political parties at the beginning. They all assumed George Washington would be the first president, but they couldn't imagine consensus emerging after him. So the Electoral College was set up to create a "short list" of good candidates chosen by the states (according to whatever method the legislatures decided).
The Electors originally did not cast separate votes for President and Vice President -- they just had two votes, and at least one of them was required to be not for his home state. That was to prevent states from just deadlocking by electing people from home (since so much was invested in individual states at this time).
The idea was that most Electors would end up voting for someone from their home state, but also someone with more regional or even national consensus. And then those few names would float to the top -- and the "short list" would be sent to Congress to actually decide the election. Remember that originally the person with the most votes would be President, and the person with the 2nd-most votes would be VP.
The Founders -- living before political parties -- assumed that Congress (specifically the House of Representatives) would choose the President in most elections. The Electoral College only existed to create a "short list" based on representatives of state governments and thereby to guarantee more diversity than might come from an established body like Congress. (Also, Electors were required to meet SEPARATELY in their states, not en masse, to prevent the sort of collusion and "backroom dealing" that might happen in a body like Congress. That was another benefit.)
THOSE were the reasons why the Electoral College was created. It originally had nothing to do with most of the crap people say today. The concept that a "popular vote" would even be taken for President in most states wasn't even contemplated by the Founders, who just preferred to get input from state governments to narrow down the field, rather than letting Congress choose the President directly.
So now you know. The Founders were much more anti-"democratic" than you ever thought. And they introduced this complex mechanism to prevent centralized collusion and to get regional consensus around a short list of candidates in an era before parties and factions were assumed.
One last thing to note -- it requires a 2/3 majority in both houses of Congress to overturn a Presidential veto of any legislation. Thus, the only way Republicans in the legislature could actually pass laws without the President's support is if they got a rather large number of Democrats on their side to override a potential veto. Hence Presidents tend to be highly involved in crafting laws that will satisfy both the President and Congress.
I'm a Canadian, so the subtleties of US governance are lost on me; but isn't the President largely a figurehead, except perhaps when it comes to foreign affairs?
Well, the presidency was never quite a "figurehead," but historically it did have a lot less power. That was by design in the Constitution. (The revolutionaries had just left a king behind, so they didn't want another.)
However, over the centuries the Executive Branch of the federal government has grown to be HUGE compared to the others (Legislative and Judicial). All of the "departments" (of education, treasury, defense, interior, etc.) -- i.e., most of the government -- are run by the president, and the president basically gets to set the day-to-day regulations and policies that govern all that.
Yes, Congress ultimately has authority over passing a budget and can dictate laws and regulations, but we've gradually accepted the president's right to take unilateral action in a lot of cases where Congress hasn't explicitly weighed in. (Perhaps the most glaring case of this is in the war powers -- until the mid-20th century, Congress had sole power to declare war as outlined in the Constitution. But Congress has not declared war since, so all of the Vietnam, Gulf War, Iraq War, etc. have essentially been waged under unilateral presidential authority... though Congress has at times voted to "support" such actions.)
So, no, actually US Presidents now have huge amounts of power.
The Republicans control both Congress and the Senate, and both Congresscritters and Senators have a substantial degree of autonomy when it comes to voting and putting forth legislation, do they not? With the Republicans so much in power, does it really matter much if Trump, Cruz, Rubio, or some generic Republican occupies the White House?
Even in terms of legislation, presidents now frequently spend time proposing their own versions (since they have huge resources in all the executive departments to put together a staff and do so), and send them to Congress to get them to introduce the laws and approve them.
Yes, Congress can certainly choose to pass different legislation and often does, but there's a reason for example that we call the health care stuff "Obamacare" -- it was largely shaped from a plan coming from the President, which then was passed by Congress.
So, yes, there are some things that would happen with Republicans regardless of what Republican is in the president's office. But the President certainly has plenty of power to influence and shape things greatly if he wants.
Why should I trust the people you say I should trust to say who I should trust?
Not only that, but the example sources are a bit laughable. From TFS:
one quick trip over to Wikipedia,
Ah yes, the encyclopedia that ANYONE -- including vandals, trolls, morons, and folks with agendas -- can edit. Seriously??
Snopes,
The site that started out back in the day as somewhat reasonable, but which seems now to have issues. It's still better than most, but I've found crap on there in the past (not political stuff that's debatable, I'm talking scientific errors).
an academic journal
Uh, first, how many people head to academic journals to do fact checking? Second, how many people have access to those journals? Third, the purpose of academic journals is often to present research in progress, which is often not the final word or consensus on something, just a current scholar's or lab's particular result. You really need experts to interpret specialist literature.
And then the idea just keeps getting worse. Again from TFS:
What if your internet browser -- whether Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Opera or other -- was able provide an "information accuracy rating" of some sort when you visit a certain URL. Perhaps something like "11,992 internet users give this website a factual accuracy rating of 3.7/10.
Seriously? TFS just finished telling me of how millions of internet users are continuously hoodwinked by "inaccurate horsecrap," and now you want me to believe a rating system generated by those same internet users?!?
I could go on with detailed critiques, but let's cut to the chase:
Is this a good idea?
No.
Could it be made to work technically?
No.
Might a browser feature like this make the internet as a whole a "more factually accurate place" to get information from?
No. A browser feature doesn't magically make the internet "more factually accurate." Nonsense will always be out there no matter what.
I'm not opposed to someone trying to generate a browser plugin that tries to do something like this, though I can't imagine how it would be implemented to be useful. But definitely NOT a core browser function.
Fact-checking is REALLY hard work. And frankly, even the best sites make errors. How do you rate a webpage if it is largely accurate, but still has known (minor) fact errors? Or is this only for targeting sites that are known to disseminate nonsense and disinformation? What if those sites also carry some articles that are largely accurate?
I can't see how this ends up working without significant bias, overgeneralization, inaccuracy (in which case it's useless), and limited coverage. And even if it ends up roughly working well, what about all the "legends" that aren't in Snopes? -- like the way academic journals and experts sometimes have a different consensus about stuff than the interpretation you'd see in a book for a pop audience. We like to think the world can be easily parsed into self-contained "facts" that are objectively verifiable, but frankly there's a lot of interpretation that goes into most stuff.
This is a moral point (Facebook shouldn't be held responsible for discriminatory content posted by users)
Except it's not the ad content that is potentially discriminatory. It's not like we're talking about people running ads saying, "Apartment/job available. Whites applications only, please." That would be discriminatory content in the ad itself.
Instead, we're talking about a system deliberately designed to deliver ads to individuals (and not show them to other individuals) potentially based on their race. That system is created by Facebook. Facebook is potentially liable for misuse of such a system.
The advertisers couldn't deliver their ads to users of a particular race without Facebook's system. I agree that the legal arguments here are murky, but it's not at all obvious that Facebook is completely in the clear, given that they've explicitly created a system which is intended to make it easy to target people by race. (And no, this is NOT the same as traditional "ad targeting" where you play an ad on a particular channel or radio station or in a particular magazine which is known to have certain demographics. In those cases, the users of other races can still choose to view the ads. In this case, the system is non-transparent, and users don't have such clear choices to change how the system targets them.)
The discrimination for Ebony Magazine is behavioral, just like Facebooks. That is, nobody is keeping you from behaving in a way so that these ads are targeted at you.
Except Facebook's model is not transparent. You don't know what data they have on you. You don't know what groups you're in. You don't know how you're being targeted (or what ads you might never see).
Hence, you cannot know how you might change your behavior to see ads you don't even know exist, because you don't know what behaviors have caused Facebook's classifications.
Well, I don't use Facebook and I don't know how they target. On Google, however, you can see what information Google has inferred about you, and you can also turn off ad targeting.
That's nice. Hooray for Google. This is a discussion about Facebook, however, and its potential liability for the way it designs its system.
There are all sorts of reasons people have been complaining about Facebook's non-transparency in the way it collects data and the way it seems to be using that data. The U.S. also has loads of laws against businesses discriminating on the basis of race.
Again, the difference between traditional "ad targeting" and the present case is that it's one thing to advertise in places or media where a particular race might notice you more -- it's quite a different thing to only make that advertising visible to members of a particular race. (Again, I particularly foresee this creating legal problems in the future if services or deals or whatever are offered to one race but not another through Facebook's system.)
If Facebook was transparent about all this and allowed you to choose the way to target ads for you, or to turn it off, or whatever, it would be less insidious. Instead it's deliberately choosing to keep that information secret and proprietary; if that ultimately turns out to result in disciminatory business practices though, I expect more legal challenges to follow.
Sure, kill Daylight Savings.
Ah, the perennial DST debate. While getting rid of it appeals to some nerds, it also has practical arguments in favor of it just like time zones.
Yes, the energy savings it originally was created for may no longer materialize. But there are lots of social benefits. What percentage of the population would actually get up at 4:30 or 5am in summer to make use of the early morning sunlight before work? Some, but not a lot. Most people really want that extra time in the summer to spend outdoors in evenings.
So, no, I really want to keep my DST, thank you very much. The question really then comes down to -- do we ever want to go back to standard time? And that's a harder question. The move back to standard time requires another move to DST in the spring, which many studies have shown produces things like more accidents, heart attacks, etc., as well as screwing up everyone's sleep. On the other hand, there are other studies that basically show benefits to the end of DST time that counterbalance these, so it's likely a wash. And keeping DST year-round may be better in terms of things like crime rates, since criminals are much less active in the morning hours, and any daylight going into the afternoon or evening when people are out is likely helpful.
But without a return to standard time, you have to deal with very late sunrises, which can be quite unpopular, particularly in areas farther away from the equator. England tried permanent DST a few decades back, as did Russia a few years ago, and they stopped the experiment after a few years due to unpopularity. (Other countries are using it, though.) There's something about late sunrises that can make things like SAD (or whatever you want to call it -- that depressing feeling when it's dark a lot of time in winter) worse when you don't get some sun in the morning. Yeah, it gets dark earlier, but most humans seem to need some morning sun to get our circadian rhythms going well.
I don't know -- but one thing I *do* know is that I'd prefer keeping year-long DST to no DST at all. The practical benefits are just too hard to ignore, and the only argument for permanent "standard" time is astronomical. But most people have been used to having the sun not be at zenith at precisely noon since time zones were invented anyway, so that doesn't seem a strong argument.