For me, it's a revolution just because it's the first product that has reached a critical mass point to make me less likely to use my laptop. I make my living from my laptop, and I'm kind of anchored to it, which affects my daily lifestyle. The iPhone reduces my need to open my laptop by about 60%. This changes my lifestyle dramatically. It's actually a bit traumatic (in a positive sense) and I haven't completely adjusted to it. I'm actually considering traveling more, taking more working vacations, taking up running... I don't know, it's like it has made *me* more portable without me having to discipline myself to be as such. The impact is difficult to measure.
The energy it takes to produce ethanol from corn is not portable. But ethanol is portable. That's an advantage.
It's the same diff with hydrogen. It takes more energy to create liquid hydrogen than the energy you get from liquid hydrogen. But it's seen as a good thing *there* because of the portability aspect. Why not with ethanol?
that's just a talking point. if you go back and read kos' clearly expressed reasons for supporting the candidates he supported, he knew they probably weren't going to win. it was more to give fuel to a message he supported. that message is more powerful than it was back then. long view versus short view.
planet of the apes was loosely considered an allegory on race relations, or at least recognized to have spurred discussion on race relations, (although I don't exactly see how anyone thought it would be a good idea to have it be suggested by using apes).
anyway if you categorized these things in terms of hierarchies or in terms of degrees of separation, and they wanted to boost the relevance of MLK stuff, they'd boost the levels of search depth to find connections, even tenuous connections, to make things that had even a remote connection to one of MLK's supercategories recommend the MLK media.
technology can make people look pretty damn stupid, but as a progressive, I'm pretty embarrassed by the progressives that were so sure they saw overt evidence of deliberate and corporate-sponsored racism in this. I'm not saying there wasn't a racist in wal-mart that thought it would be funny to manually link POTA to MLK, but it's not even close to the only possible explanation. All people have to do is remember the old grapevine game to realize how easily an intent or an idea can corrupt itself by just being passed three or four links down a chain.
Actually, Gonzales is considered more moderate than Rehnquist. But only because he's made vague comments about supporting Roe v. Wade, which may be misleading. But in general, the right-wingers are suspicious of him, more suspicious than of Roberts.
believe it or not, Kelo was correctly decided. The Court had several precedents to follow. That doesn't mean the majority *liked* making that decision. Changing the law of eminent domain would require an act of Congress, not an inappropriate Supreme Court decision. The minority in this case (including Rehnquist) was being activist.
well, they buy us time. coal/gas reserves will last longer than oil reserves, but not a lot longer. plus if you put on flexi-fuel tanks then you've got a lot of options.
maybe by then they'll either have fusion, or safe nuclear reactors that are *away* from population centers, creating hydrogen fuel.
Doesn't liquid hydrogen also take more energy to produce than it yields? So f'ing what?
The goal of ethanol isn't to invent energy out of nothing. What a stupid study. The whole benefit of ethanol is that it is PORTABLE, as a TRANSPORTATION FUEL.
In other words, the authors of the study Miss The Point Entirely, but also Deliberately, all to spread FUD.
Besides, ethanol from switchgrass is WAY more efficient than ethanol from corn.
a better option in the near term is to have cars that are plug-in hybrids with flexi-fuel tanks.
hybrids: like what you have now with the prius. They're not cost-effective yet, but will be in the next few years.
plug-in: like a hybrid, except that you can also plug it in at home to keep its battery charged - the fuel won't kick in until the battery needs recharging. saves fuel, and offloads the transporation cost from fuel (oil) to electricity (nuclear, coal, gas). The thought being that nuclear, coal, and gas will run out later than oil will.
flexi-fuel: allow more forms of fuel than normal gasoline. Yes, ethanol can sometimes use up more energy to create than it generates when you burn it. But so does hydrogen. It's not the point; the benefit of ethanol is that it's portable (like hydrogen). And some ethanol sources are far more efficient in conversion than corn. Like switchgrass.
Huh. Why *did* Obi-Wan lie to Luke? The only motivation I can think of is to protect him from heartbreak.
Maybe it's just that Obi-Wan firmly believes that Vader has to die, and that it would be more difficult for Luke if he knew he were his father. After all, Obi-Wan saw no evidence of Anakin's more human motivations, like saving Padme.
The Emporer didn't know that Vader had children - he thought Vader killed him. I think he was being honest there. The identity of the children were hidden, and Padme's funeral showed her still pregnant.
don't TELL them that! that way, when they try to pump their own gas and get arrested, they'll have more reason to want to stay away.:-)
Man, I practically got accosted for just taking the thing OUT of my car when they had forgotten about me. I had already paid. I really do think they are supposed to call the cops if you touch it.
ugh. I have never understood why people like these trackball things. The split keyboards are okay but they don't *really* help.
I've been programming for several years, with no carpal tunnel. I'm also a pianist. One of the main things you learn as a pianist is to minimize finger movement. It's all in the wrist and arm movement.
If you get too intent on individualized finger motion - big finger mobility with wrists and arms staying still - then you will get tendonitis really fast.
Trackballs are the worst. It forces ALL your motion to be just in your thumb and fingers. It's really hard on you.
And as for typing, the best thing to do is to KEEP YOUR WRISTS IN THE AIR, or at least get a good wristpad so your hands aren't craned backwards. A bunch of these split keyboards are awful because even though your wrists turn inward a bit (probably good), they are slanted up, which makes your hands crane backwards, which is really bad!
If you're skinny, watch your hands type - if you see the tendons/bones to your fingers pushing against the skin of the back of your hand while you're typing, you're not in a good position.
Besides, the actuaries that designed social security back in the 40's actually accounted for the growth in life expectency over the years, to the point that their projections for life expectancy in the 90's were accurate within one year. So this whole "but people live longer now!" argument is bogus.
That's not the point. Taking that money out removes trillions of dollars from the money that is supposed to go to today's seniors. Those trillions of dollars get added to the deficit that is already straining to the point where we're close to being in trouble. Look at the Euro.
Besides, this is more about how it reduces guaranteed pension payments. If someone who dies early is able to give their money to their heirs, then that's cold comfort to the person who outlives their life expectancy, runs out of their privatized money, and has a far smaller social security check than they would have had otherwise. Even if the privatization investments are high-performing and low-risk, it still reduces security.
A pyramid scheme falls apart because the potential size of the pyramid is finite. Eventually you run out of participants, and it falls apart.
In Social Security, continuing generations are infinite. So it doesn't fall apart.
That's hardly a minor difference. It makes *all* the difference.
Yes, if earth gets blown up from a meteor, then the younger folks who have paid payroll taxes will be screwed out of their social security. But somehow I don't think they'll care.
Regarding these counties that have mostly Democratic registration, and mostly went for Bush.
These are rural counties, and they are small counties. Baker borders Georgia on the northern edge of Florida. Rural means conservative. Small means the folks that live there have probably lived there a very, very long time. What does this mean?
It means Dixiecrat. Like Strom Thurmond. They are Bush's "base". They've been Democrat for years and have just never bothered to change their registrations.
And plus.... come on. Say you've got a county of 12,000 voters that is mostly Democratic. Are you really going to tip your hand by by flipping almost ALL of them to your guy? Isn't part of the aim of fraud to not get caught? People would catch it so fast.
Finally, I did a study that proved that Bush had more electoral support, and that the election result is in line with that. Check it out.
And by the way, I am a true-blue Democrat. If you doubt my credibility, you can read through the rest of my weblog.
First - clarify that your state constitution allows preference voting. Many actually make specific allowances for it.
Then, pass preference voting (the general category for all ranked-ballot counting systems: IRV, which sucks, IRR/Condorcet, which is better, and several IRV-Condorcet blends, which are good too) for local races to get the public used to it.
Eventually, get preference voting working for all statewide races, including - importantly - national representatives and Senators.
BUT NOT THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE.
The reason: even with preference voting, there's that 270-EV requirement. It sucks. For as long as the house is gerrymandered, the 270 requirements means that any tie, or any failure of any candidate to reach 270 - which is much more possible with third party candidates starting to get EVs - will lead to the GOP House electing a GOP President.
Don't suggest replacing the EC with the popular vote because it will never pass with Congress the way it is.
So, preference voting for Senate and House. The, run races for a few elections where third parties don't have to deal with the spoiler problem. Watch the House change to have more party representation than just Democrat and Republican.
Use this change in representation to build support for a different presidential voting system. A different Electoral College implementation, getting rid of it, whatever.
And, very importantly, IN PARALLEL, fight to implement nonpartisan district boundary redrawings for the house. Look up gerrymandering. Prevent it. Some states do fair redrawing already. Texas and several southern states do not.
When the House can costlessly elect candidates from several parties, and when the House will more accurately represent our population due to less gerrymandering, and when we have a presidential election system in place that is better than the EC, then and ONLY then can we have a presidential election with third party candidates that won't have the problems we have been having for the last several elections. The system creates the pattern, so you have to fix the system before you can change the pattern.
Or, you can just make like tinkerbell and clap louder. "Vote your conscience!" "All you have to do is believe!" Pretend the system isn't there, and the system will beat you every time. Remember, it's not enough to know yourself. You have to know yourself, AND know your enemy.
You say the gerrymandering doesn't come down in the GOP's favor, and then you immediately quote me saying Bush won the districts 239-196? You understand that most congressional districts are decided through a political process, designed with political interests in mind, and then claim that any GOP advantage has got to just be random? Do you think that the black representatives that routinely get 90% of the vote is a *random* occurrence? If they're that good, then why aren't there more black representatives?
This is pretty clearly an example of someone waving their hands and trying to distract people: "no problem here!"
Hey, in your diary you're on record as calling for Dan Rather's resignation. Are you going to call for Carl Cameron's resignation for inventing quotes for Kerry? Heck, that's bearing false witness, he broke a whole commandment. What about Fox treating "Communists For Kerry" as a real pro-Kerry group and featuring them in their articles yesterday, when they knew very well that it was a chapter of the college Young Republicans? You want anyone to get fired for that?
It would be a really bad idea, solely because the House of Reps is incredibly gerrymandered in the GOP's favor, which means the congressional districts are as well. The House is supposed to reflect the population. In 2000, the popular vote went to Gore. But Bush won the congressional districts 239-196. Bush would have won 2000 by a landslide.
Colorado's system isn't by congressional district, it's proportional, except it doesn't allow fractional EVs. Overall it's also a bad idea for states to adopt this approach just because of the mathematics of it. If one large state adopts the same scheme, then third party candidates get EVs easily, which means it would be much more likely for no one to reach 270 votes, which means the elections would much more likely go to the House of Reps, which, again, is gerrymandered by the Republicans...
Arrow's theorem and its relevance to these voting systems is a much more complicated matter than it seems at first. For instance, one of Arrow's "reasonable requirements" is the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives Criterian (IIAC), and it's been shown in many scenarios that failing the IIAC is actually what you want.
Condorcet fails Arrow's Theorem as do all other methods, but only when there isn't a Condorcet Winner. When there is, Condorcet is perfect. When there isn't a Condorcet Winner (like when there's a defeat loop, A over B, B over C, and C over A), then there are plenty of tiebreaker methods people can use that are "almost perfect". But in large elections, it's actually pretty rare that there isn't a Condorcet Winner.
So the Arrow argument isn't the smackdown that people take it to be.
Slashdot Mirror
For me, it's a revolution just because it's the first product that has reached a critical mass point to make me less likely to use my laptop. I make my living from my laptop, and I'm kind of anchored to it, which affects my daily lifestyle. The iPhone reduces my need to open my laptop by about 60%. This changes my lifestyle dramatically. It's actually a bit traumatic (in a positive sense) and I haven't completely adjusted to it. I'm actually considering traveling more, taking more working vacations, taking up running... I don't know, it's like it has made *me* more portable without me having to discipline myself to be as such. The impact is difficult to measure.
Look, so what if it's inefficient that way?
The energy it takes to produce ethanol from corn is not portable. But ethanol is portable. That's an advantage.
It's the same diff with hydrogen. It takes more energy to create liquid hydrogen than the energy you get from liquid hydrogen. But it's seen as a good thing *there* because of the portability aspect. Why not with ethanol?
What am I missing here?
that's just a talking point. if you go back and read kos' clearly expressed reasons for supporting the candidates he supported, he knew they probably weren't going to win. it was more to give fuel to a message he supported. that message is more powerful than it was back then. long view versus short view.
planet of the apes was loosely considered an allegory on race relations, or at least recognized to have spurred discussion on race relations, (although I don't exactly see how anyone thought it would be a good idea to have it be suggested by using apes).
anyway if you categorized these things in terms of hierarchies or in terms of degrees of separation, and they wanted to boost the relevance of MLK stuff, they'd boost the levels of search depth to find connections, even tenuous connections, to make things that had even a remote connection to one of MLK's supercategories recommend the MLK media.
technology can make people look pretty damn stupid, but as a progressive, I'm pretty embarrassed by the progressives that were so sure they saw overt evidence of deliberate and corporate-sponsored racism in this. I'm not saying there wasn't a racist in wal-mart that thought it would be funny to manually link POTA to MLK, but it's not even close to the only possible explanation. All people have to do is remember the old grapevine game to realize how easily an intent or an idea can corrupt itself by just being passed three or four links down a chain.
Actually, Gonzales is considered more moderate than Rehnquist. But only because he's made vague comments about supporting Roe v. Wade, which may be misleading. But in general, the right-wingers are suspicious of him, more suspicious than of Roberts.
believe it or not, Kelo was correctly decided. The Court had several precedents to follow. That doesn't mean the majority *liked* making that decision. Changing the law of eminent domain would require an act of Congress, not an inappropriate Supreme Court decision. The minority in this case (including Rehnquist) was being activist.
there's probably another study out there that shows that most iq test authors are men.
well, they buy us time. coal/gas reserves will last longer than oil reserves, but not a lot longer. plus if you put on flexi-fuel tanks then you've got a lot of options.
maybe by then they'll either have fusion, or safe nuclear reactors that are *away* from population centers, creating hydrogen fuel.
Doesn't liquid hydrogen also take more energy to produce than it yields? So f'ing what?
The goal of ethanol isn't to invent energy out of nothing. What a stupid study. The whole benefit of ethanol is that it is PORTABLE, as a TRANSPORTATION FUEL.
In other words, the authors of the study Miss The Point Entirely, but also Deliberately, all to spread FUD.
Besides, ethanol from switchgrass is WAY more efficient than ethanol from corn.
a better option in the near term is to have cars that are plug-in hybrids with flexi-fuel tanks.
hybrids: like what you have now with the prius. They're not cost-effective yet, but will be in the next few years.
plug-in: like a hybrid, except that you can also plug it in at home to keep its battery charged - the fuel won't kick in until the battery needs recharging. saves fuel, and offloads the transporation cost from fuel (oil) to electricity (nuclear, coal, gas). The thought being that nuclear, coal, and gas will run out later than oil will.
flexi-fuel: allow more forms of fuel than normal gasoline. Yes, ethanol can sometimes use up more energy to create than it generates when you burn it. But so does hydrogen. It's not the point; the benefit of ethanol is that it's portable (like hydrogen). And some ethanol sources are far more efficient in conversion than corn. Like switchgrass.
Huh. Why *did* Obi-Wan lie to Luke? The only motivation I can think of is to protect him from heartbreak.
Maybe it's just that Obi-Wan firmly believes that Vader has to die, and that it would be more difficult for Luke if he knew he were his father. After all, Obi-Wan saw no evidence of Anakin's more human motivations, like saving Padme.
The Emporer didn't know that Vader had children - he thought Vader killed him. I think he was being honest there. The identity of the children were hidden, and Padme's funeral showed her still pregnant.
assault on battery. :-)
don't TELL them that! that way, when they try to pump their own gas and get arrested, they'll have more reason to want to stay away. :-)
Man, I practically got accosted for just taking the thing OUT of my car when they had forgotten about me. I had already paid. I really do think they are supposed to call the cops if you touch it.
ugh. I have never understood why people like these trackball things. The split keyboards are okay but they don't *really* help.
I've been programming for several years, with no carpal tunnel. I'm also a pianist. One of the main things you learn as a pianist is to minimize finger movement. It's all in the wrist and arm movement.
If you get too intent on individualized finger motion - big finger mobility with wrists and arms staying still - then you will get tendonitis really fast.
Trackballs are the worst. It forces ALL your motion to be just in your thumb and fingers. It's really hard on you.
And as for typing, the best thing to do is to KEEP YOUR WRISTS IN THE AIR, or at least get a good wristpad so your hands aren't craned backwards. A bunch of these split keyboards are awful because even though your wrists turn inward a bit (probably good), they are slanted up, which makes your hands crane backwards, which is really bad!
If you're skinny, watch your hands type - if you see the tendons/bones to your fingers pushing against the skin of the back of your hand while you're typing, you're not in a good position.
Besides, the actuaries that designed social security back in the 40's actually accounted for the growth in life expectency over the years, to the point that their projections for life expectancy in the 90's were accurate within one year. So this whole "but people live longer now!" argument is bogus.
That's not the point. Taking that money out removes trillions of dollars from the money that is supposed to go to today's seniors. Those trillions of dollars get added to the deficit that is already straining to the point where we're close to being in trouble. Look at the Euro.
Besides, this is more about how it reduces guaranteed pension payments. If someone who dies early is able to give their money to their heirs, then that's cold comfort to the person who outlives their life expectancy, runs out of their privatized money, and has a far smaller social security check than they would have had otherwise. Even if the privatization investments are high-performing and low-risk, it still reduces security.
A pyramid scheme falls apart because the potential size of the pyramid is finite. Eventually you run out of participants, and it falls apart.
In Social Security, continuing generations are infinite. So it doesn't fall apart.
That's hardly a minor difference. It makes *all* the difference.
Yes, if earth gets blown up from a meteor, then the younger folks who have paid payroll taxes will be screwed out of their social security. But somehow I don't think they'll care.
Exit polls are NOT BASED OFF OF RANDOM SAMPLES.
Exit polls are NOT REPRESENTATIVE OF THE POPULATION.
Exit polls are designed to be used to be normalized by the election results, so we can find out more information about our electorate.
Regarding these counties that have mostly Democratic registration, and mostly went for Bush.
These are rural counties, and they are small counties. Baker borders Georgia on the northern edge of Florida. Rural means conservative. Small means the folks that live there have probably lived there a very, very long time. What does this mean?
It means Dixiecrat. Like Strom Thurmond. They are Bush's "base". They've been Democrat for years and have just never bothered to change their registrations.
And plus.... come on. Say you've got a county of 12,000 voters that is mostly Democratic. Are you really going to tip your hand by by flipping almost ALL of them to your guy? Isn't part of the aim of fraud to not get caught? People would catch it so fast.
Finally, I did a study that proved that Bush had more electoral support, and that the election result is in line with that. Check it out.
And by the way, I am a true-blue Democrat. If you doubt my credibility, you can read through the rest of my weblog.
It's not because of an evoting machine, but they've already found one example where Bush was given 4000 extra votes in Ohio. In one precinct.
It's just the wrong order.
First - clarify that your state constitution allows preference voting. Many actually make specific allowances for it.
Then, pass preference voting (the general category for all ranked-ballot counting systems: IRV, which sucks, IRR/Condorcet, which is better, and several IRV-Condorcet blends, which are good too) for local races to get the public used to it.
Eventually, get preference voting working for all statewide races, including - importantly - national representatives and Senators.
BUT NOT THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE.
The reason: even with preference voting, there's that 270-EV requirement. It sucks. For as long as the house is gerrymandered, the 270 requirements means that any tie, or any failure of any candidate to reach 270 - which is much more possible with third party candidates starting to get EVs - will lead to the GOP House electing a GOP President.
Don't suggest replacing the EC with the popular vote because it will never pass with Congress the way it is.
So, preference voting for Senate and House. The, run races for a few elections where third parties don't have to deal with the spoiler problem. Watch the House change to have more party representation than just Democrat and Republican.
Use this change in representation to build support for a different presidential voting system. A different Electoral College implementation, getting rid of it, whatever.
And, very importantly, IN PARALLEL, fight to implement nonpartisan district boundary redrawings for the house. Look up gerrymandering. Prevent it. Some states do fair redrawing already. Texas and several southern states do not.
When the House can costlessly elect candidates from several parties, and when the House will more accurately represent our population due to less gerrymandering, and when we have a presidential election system in place that is better than the EC, then and ONLY then can we have a presidential election with third party candidates that won't have the problems we have been having for the last several elections. The system creates the pattern, so you have to fix the system before you can change the pattern.
Or, you can just make like tinkerbell and clap louder. "Vote your conscience!" "All you have to do is believe!" Pretend the system isn't there, and the system will beat you every time. Remember, it's not enough to know yourself. You have to know yourself, AND know your enemy.
You say the gerrymandering doesn't come down in the GOP's favor, and then you immediately quote me saying Bush won the districts 239-196? You understand that most congressional districts are decided through a political process, designed with political interests in mind, and then claim that any GOP advantage has got to just be random? Do you think that the black representatives that routinely get 90% of the vote is a *random* occurrence? If they're that good, then why aren't there more black representatives?
This is pretty clearly an example of someone waving their hands and trying to distract people: "no problem here!"
Hey, in your diary you're on record as calling for Dan Rather's resignation. Are you going to call for Carl Cameron's resignation for inventing quotes for Kerry? Heck, that's bearing false witness, he broke a whole commandment. What about Fox treating "Communists For Kerry" as a real pro-Kerry group and featuring them in their articles yesterday, when they knew very well that it was a chapter of the college Young Republicans? You want anyone to get fired for that?
It would be a really bad idea, solely because the House of Reps is incredibly gerrymandered in the GOP's favor, which means the congressional districts are as well. The House is supposed to reflect the population. In 2000, the popular vote went to Gore. But Bush won the congressional districts 239-196. Bush would have won 2000 by a landslide.
Colorado's system isn't by congressional district, it's proportional, except it doesn't allow fractional EVs. Overall it's also a bad idea for states to adopt this approach just because of the mathematics of it. If one large state adopts the same scheme, then third party candidates get EVs easily, which means it would be much more likely for no one to reach 270 votes, which means the elections would much more likely go to the House of Reps, which, again, is gerrymandered by the Republicans...
Gerrymandering is a huge problem.
Arrow's theorem and its relevance to these voting systems is a much more complicated matter than it seems at first. For instance, one of Arrow's "reasonable requirements" is the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives Criterian (IIAC), and it's been shown in many scenarios that failing the IIAC is actually what you want.
Condorcet fails Arrow's Theorem as do all other methods, but only when there isn't a Condorcet Winner. When there is, Condorcet is perfect. When there isn't a Condorcet Winner (like when there's a defeat loop, A over B, B over C, and C over A), then there are plenty of tiebreaker methods people can use that are "almost perfect". But in large elections, it's actually pretty rare that there isn't a Condorcet Winner.
So the Arrow argument isn't the smackdown that people take it to be.