You would in fact be committing an injustice. The inherent "justice" of the system is that both sides get to tell their bit and present their evidence. The fact that you jumped to the right conclusion doesn't change the fact that you jumped to a (potentially invalid) conclusion. Let's take your example. Prosecution lays out all of this apparently overwhelming evidence. You make your conclusion, the guy is guilty, you tune out... and miss the defense proving conclusively that defendant was framed by a third party who faked the video, paid the witness, and tampered with the DNA (The police coerced the confession when they got a little over-enthusiastic about all the awesome evidence they had, nothing illegal to get it thrown out, but they leaned very hard and got the defendant to sign).
Unlikely? Of course. Not less possible or contrived than your example though. The whole point of the trial is for the jury to see the whole thing, both sides, and make a decision based on all the evidence that either party chooses to present.
It's really just an older definition of the term. "Peer" is mostly used the same way in Britain as it's used here, and the it can be used here to describe "peers" of other countries, perfectly accurately. Since blooded nobility means very little these days, even in countries that continue to have it, the old use of the term has fallen away except in historical records and fantasy novels.
To GP: The original use of the term "peer" had little to do with ability, and everything to do with birth. When the original English legal system was designed, the jury of one's peers assumed that a noble would not be judged by a jury of commoners. Of course in the US, since we recognize no blooded nobility, that means that a jury of your peers is synonymous with a jury of fellow citizens.
I love the theory of ear bud controls, but the practice seems to have a lot of flaws. I got a fancy set of ear buds with my iPhone that allow me to control the iPod functionality (and are also the mike when I use the phone function). If I'm just walking down the street they work great. They also work fine as a telephone headset. The problem comes when I attempt to jog with them, which as it happens, is the primary intended use for headphones on the device for me.
I start to sweat, and beads of water run down the cord to the mike/controller. Eventually enough water hits it to start shorting the switches that are supposed to control the music and I start getting random stops, pauses, plays, fast forwards, or rewinds. Now I have to keep to two sets of headphones. One for use while I'm working out, one for use when I need to use the phone hands free. It's a minor complaint, but I sure wish they'd do something about it.
Information that could "sink" you is not necessarily bad or illegal information. If you are betting the company on a new product, or service, or business plan, and that information is leaked to competitors it could "sink you" while still be perfectly legal and ethical. As to internal security, that's kind of the point isn't it. If I have perfect internal security, other than the fact that the Indian government has access to my VPN and encryption keys, then I don't really have perfect security do I? Especially given that the Indian Government is notoriously corrupt and bribes to get illegal access are common.
Businesses bend over to comply with China because of it's massive population that they can exploit. Either to harness them as cheap manufacturing or to get their Internet dollars. India can't compete on either count.
Bwa-huhn? China's population is greater than India's, true, but only by 150 million people or so. According to Wikipedia, China has 1.34 billion people vs. India's 1.19 billion. Granted 150 million people is a pretty big number (it's slightly under half the total population of the US), but as a percentage China's population isn't that much bigger than India's. Certainly they're close enough that the effort expended to separate people from their Rupees should be roughly equal to the effort expended to separate people form their Yen.
Realistically, while alcohol related deaths (due to accidents and such) are tragic, and rightfully much publicized in an attempt to raise awareness and prevent them, they are also statistically fairly insignificant. I'm citing this site, which is specifically dedicated to reducing alcohol traffic fatalities. If they have a bias it would be pump up the numbers rather than mitigate them. According to them around 14,000 people died do to alcohol related traffic accidents last year (in the US). Even if we doubled that number to account for other alcohol related accidents (which seems excessive), that's under 30,000 people. Compared to say, the number of people who died from heart disease, it's statistically nonexistent.
Read the article. Or the summary. Moderate drinkers live longest, heavy drinkers second longest, non-drinkers third longest. Assuming the accuracy of the study, if you wish to live the longest possible time, have a couple of beers (or better, glasses of wine) every night. You see, some of us are capable are read past the first two words of the summary, and thus comment on the entire article. Amazing, no?
Again, if you read the article, you will find that moderate drinkers outlive heavy drinkers (which is what the summary mentions), but even heavy drinkers (defined, apparently, as more than three drinks a day on average) live longer than non-drinkers. That was the more surprising part of the research. It's pretty well accepted that moderate drinkers outlive non-drinkers, and there's been some evidence that heavy drinkers outlive non-drinkers. This research:
1) Gives some confirmation to the second theory and 2) Seems to show that many of the more common explanations for the second theory are not viable.
(2) was tested for by looking at whether the specific teetotalers had previously been alcoholics, what social stratum they came from, how large their circles of family and friends were, and basically attempting to control for a great number of previously postulated explanations.
No one is mentioning blackouts or fifths of vodka. While the study found that non-drinkers had the youngest average death, the people who had the oldest were the moderate drinkers. Unless you're some kind of allergic or something, a beer or two is not going to give you blackouts or impair your functionality at all really.
They don't point out causation, just correlation. Essentially the study authors have no idea *why* heavy drinkers seem to outlive teetotalers, but they appear to do so. If you read the article, they have actually tried to factor for a remarkable number of factors, from social strata, to number of friends and family (and of course alcoholism in earlier life).
It's really a pretty interesting bit of research, and not just because it shows that doing the fun thing isn't always doing the worst thing.
It's a colo facility. Most likely there's been another story or two about for the "cool factor". Seriously I don't think they're down there for the "bunker". If the Swedish government is like most other governments when they sell off useless Cold War bunkers, the colo people probably got it for and song and realized it was perfect for servers. Since it was intended for medium to long term human habitation in the event of a total infrastructure failure, it's got built in pretty much everything you need, and it's easy to cool besides. Sound like they had to add some extra power generation, but otherwise it's perfect. Probably got it for less than a similarly equipped data center would cost to build too, 8and* you get to use the "cool factor" in your sales literature.
Wikileask may have chosen to host there for the symbolism, but I doubt that's why the data center is there.
Technically no. Votes to change the rules and procedures are simple majority votes. The Dems could in theory eliminate filibusters now if they wanted too, but they'd just be screwing themselves next year, or in two years, or four... eventually.
One reason was that the Republicans threatened to revise Senate rules to completely remove the filibuster. In some ways I rather wish they had. It was a fairly arrogant threat based on the premise that there had been a complete sea change in American politics and the Democrats would never regain a majority in the Senate. It would have probably resulted in even more laws getting through during the Republican majority, but it would have been kinda funny to watch after they lost the Senate.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, and I certainly wish they'd be more aggressive, but I think you have a serious misunderstanding of how filibusters currently work. It's not like in "Mr Smith goes to Washington" anymore. Essentially, all that is required is a motion that debate be extended. Once the motion has been made and seconded it takes sixty votes to bring the bill to a vote. No more sitting on the floor reading from the phone book desperately trying to maintain your spot on the floor. Once filibuster has been threatened, it's all but certain that unless you can get 60 votes it will happen. It doesn't even gum up getting other stuff done. They can move on to work on other things while the bill is technically still being debated, but is for all practical purposes tabled.
Democratic spinelessness not withstanding, without a supermajority they're unlikely to get any such bill passed. Republicans are extremely unlikely to cross the aisle on an issue so desperately important to their core constituency. Don't get me wrong, I think the Dems could use a nice does of spine, but at the moment their biggest problem is that they can't get stuff past an almost unswerving Republican filibuster. Even during the brief period that they had a supermajority it was so slim that any one Dem deciding they didn't care for a piece of legislation meant either months of compromise or outright death for the bill in question.
Your two implications are inherently self contradicting. If, as you imply in your oh so clever "Osama, Obama" inference, Obama is a closet conservative Muslim, then he would object to your second inference. Since conservatives Muslims, like conservative Christians, are generally anti-abortion.
Which is exactly what the second programmer mentioned in the summary is talking about. You're having to figure it all out again, instead of learning from the mistakes of your predecessors. You lost everyone with more than ten years experience. Assuming that you're no smarter than the smartest guy just lost, that means that in 6 years time (your current 4 years + 6 more makes 10) you will finally be about as a good as the guy that just left. Whereas if he'd been there showing you the mistakes he made and helping you navigate around them you might be there in in 2 or 3 years. Worse, if trends continue as they are, it quite likely that in 5 or 6 years you'll be leaving, or forced out, and the next crop of people won't benefit from *your* hard won experience either.
I don't think format has anything to do with it. If you're carrying around an authoritative source on your phone, it's still authoritative. A copy of the actual DSM-IV stored electronically on your phone is still the DSM-IV and is still considered an authoritative source on matters of psychological diagnosis, just like the physical copy in your bag. Similarly, whether you have a physical copy in your bag or an electronic copy on your phone, volume "P" of the Encyclopedia Britannica is *not* an authoritative source.
To suggest otherwise would be to say that one is better off relying on Wikipedia articles to make medical diagnoses over one's doctor.
Frighteningly I know a few people who come very close to making that claim. Why is that some people seem to think that random untested sources on the Internet are by definition more reliable than people who's licenses and credentials you can actually see; and who actually take the time to talk to you? I have a friend who all but makes a hobby out of second guessing everything her doctor tells her based on random information on websites.
Essentially, I could go into the Wikipedia entry on the DSM-IV right now and change all references to "clinical disorders" to "Bonkers", and until someone noticed and fixed it, it would stay that way. Sure, there's plenty of reliable facts on Wikipedia and for stuff like "evidence in an argument on Slashdot" it's probably a perfectly valid source 90-95% of the time. For a court case it's pretty damn loose evidence. Follow the little "citation" links at the end to *actual* DSM-IV and cite that.
As I posted elsewhere, I'm not normally a "The free market will solve all ills" kind of person, but in this case I think there's a reasonable argument for it. Television is a visual medium, there's no chemical analysis that only a qualified scientist can do, or fancy financial products that you need expertise to understand. There is no need for an expert to watch and say "That's OK, but that isn't". You watch it, if you like it you keep watching it. If it offends you or you don't like it for your kids, you don't watch it or don't let them watch it.
Of course you let kids watch TV by themselves sometimes (all the self righteous types above who claim you shouldn't are either morons or have a WHOLE lot of time of their hands), but the nice thing is that you can reasonably rely on it to stay roughly the same day to day. If you watch the same show with your kids for three days, it's pretty damned unlikely to degenerate into porn on the fourth day when they watch by themselves. Even if it did, chances are that other parents WERE watching with their kids that day and will complain in your stead.
I would imagine that if the FCC lost enforcement authority on this sort of thing you'd see changes. Mostly changes in certain channels and in certain time slots. Channels that have always billed themselves for kids will still be fine for kids. They'd be morons to do otherwise. What would Nickelodeon possibly gain by offending any significant subset of parents? Similarly, times that have always been set aside as "family friendly TV" would continue to be. Again, why would a network break a promise like that when it's perfectly obvious that anyone watching could tell. What you would get would more networks with adult themes (think like Spike TV only able to actually show whole boobs instead of bikini clad boobs), and late night TV would probably allow itself more leniency. You probably aren't letting you kids watch that stuff anyway.
You actually have 4 points here so I'll start with zero to address the first point and leave the others with their own numbers:
0) There was nothing inherently contradictory about my two points. The first point is gridlock, the second point assumes that you have solved gridlock in some sort of reasonable way, and then wonders OK, now what about this. Ignoring the second point doesn't answer it. If it's not about rule of the majority, and it's not about rule of oligarchs, then what is it about and how does it address the real threat of tyranny of the majority?
1) I understand that it's not per se about the United States, but the United States and similar entities is what you will have to deal with to implement the idea. Unless you expect the US Government to simply accept small communities simply breaking off to do their own thing by themselves. Eventually forming larger and larger groups. You can't just replace city, county, or state governments with your own alternate constructs. For one thing the current constructs have their own laws and law enforcement which will likely look askance at attempts to rewrite laws without their involvement. The only way that such a scheme could succeed without blood would be to elect leaders who then vote themselves out of power by redesigning city charters and such for group governance.
Those cities would still be under the state government and in turn the federal government until sufficient momentum was gained to have THOSE entities self disolve. Even *then* you'd be stuck getting no larger than national level until the movement spread to other countries which then had *their* governments self destruct. Even *then* the whole concept only works for representative democracies, because, say, the government of China or North Korea isn't elected in any meaning full way, so you'll never elect candidates willing to pull the government down. So while you're not per se talking about the US, you will have to work within the structure of the US or a similar country unless you can find a place to build your little Utopia.
2) Put simply, yes, budget legislation must be passed every year. Not matter how small a budget you're working with it must be spent in a reasonable and productive way, all the time. New laws must be passed to deal with new situations all the time. Does our government over-regulate? Almost certainly. Would virtually non-regulation serve better? Unlikely. Food and drug inspections, education for those who can't afford it, law enforcement, and yes building bridges all must be done and paid for at whatever level it gets done and paid for. Whether the county or the feds build the bridge, it must get built. Complicated contracts have to be written and signed by competent people. Cost must be controlled. All this must be done, and the larger the community the harder it is to get consensus.
3) OK, so what scale is reasonable? Let's look at the smallest possible entity, the city. But to make matters fun we can't use any city, we'll use New York. Now I think we can agree that New York can't be broken down into smaller organizational units (the Burroughs are too tightly interconnected), but that's 8.4 million (opinionated, outspoken, and thoroughly stubborn) people who have to be brought into some sort of reasonable agreement on all laws, budgeting, taxes, etc. I suppose it's easier to get roughly 50% agreement out of 8.4 million people than 330 million, but realistically I think once you get past a hundred thousand or so you're probably just spinning your wheels.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see Utopia. It would be great if we could all live in harmony under a fair and just system. The idea you're proposing just doesn't seem fleshed out or reasonable though. A lot of your answers seem to involve a sort of organic evolution of government structures that would require either an armed revolution or some sort of earth shattering cataclysm that left most of out electronic infrastructure intact while destroying most of our cultural infrastructure. Even in that event I'm not sure it would scale. Not even to New York City let alone the world.
I see this posted fairly often on any vaguely political story around here. I see a number of problems, but they basically boil down to two. How will you deal with:
1) Horrifying gridlock on all but the simplest decisions. Let's look at the Health Care bill. Agree with it or don't isn't the issue here, just look at it's level of complexity. 1000 some odd pages, and compromises everywhere to get first a majority of the 535 members of the House and them a super majority of the 100 members of the Senate to agree with it. It was a very well publicized operation, you have to figure that if it were opened to a "national vote" there'd have been at least 10% of the population looking to get in on it. How are you going to get 30 million people to read and understand a 1000 page bill, let alone figure out what compromises would cause more than half of them to vote for it? No law more complicated than "Don't kill people (unless you need too)" would ever get passed, and then we'd have to try to figure out what qualifies as "needing too".
2) Tyranny of the majority. It's one of the things that the Constitution was designed to combat (and while it doesn't do a perfect job, it's pretty good at it). People aren't always nice. If it were a matter of pure popular vote I'm not sure homosexuality wouldn't be illegal in this country. Or paganism. Or any number of other unpopular but generally harmless ideas. How is this prevented?
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You would in fact be committing an injustice. The inherent "justice" of the system is that both sides get to tell their bit and present their evidence. The fact that you jumped to the right conclusion doesn't change the fact that you jumped to a (potentially invalid) conclusion. Let's take your example. Prosecution lays out all of this apparently overwhelming evidence. You make your conclusion, the guy is guilty, you tune out... and miss the defense proving conclusively that defendant was framed by a third party who faked the video, paid the witness, and tampered with the DNA (The police coerced the confession when they got a little over-enthusiastic about all the awesome evidence they had, nothing illegal to get it thrown out, but they leaned very hard and got the defendant to sign).
Unlikely? Of course. Not less possible or contrived than your example though. The whole point of the trial is for the jury to see the whole thing, both sides, and make a decision based on all the evidence that either party chooses to present.
It's really just an older definition of the term. "Peer" is mostly used the same way in Britain as it's used here, and the it can be used here to describe "peers" of other countries, perfectly accurately. Since blooded nobility means very little these days, even in countries that continue to have it, the old use of the term has fallen away except in historical records and fantasy novels.
To GP: The original use of the term "peer" had little to do with ability, and everything to do with birth. When the original English legal system was designed, the jury of one's peers assumed that a noble would not be judged by a jury of commoners. Of course in the US, since we recognize no blooded nobility, that means that a jury of your peers is synonymous with a jury of fellow citizens.
I love the theory of ear bud controls, but the practice seems to have a lot of flaws. I got a fancy set of ear buds with my iPhone that allow me to control the iPod functionality (and are also the mike when I use the phone function). If I'm just walking down the street they work great. They also work fine as a telephone headset. The problem comes when I attempt to jog with them, which as it happens, is the primary intended use for headphones on the device for me.
I start to sweat, and beads of water run down the cord to the mike/controller. Eventually enough water hits it to start shorting the switches that are supposed to control the music and I start getting random stops, pauses, plays, fast forwards, or rewinds. Now I have to keep to two sets of headphones. One for use while I'm working out, one for use when I need to use the phone hands free. It's a minor complaint, but I sure wish they'd do something about it.
You just a succinct (I believe accurate) technical answer to a question about an Apple product on Slashdot... Is that allowed? :-)
Information that could "sink" you is not necessarily bad or illegal information. If you are betting the company on a new product, or service, or business plan, and that information is leaked to competitors it could "sink you" while still be perfectly legal and ethical. As to internal security, that's kind of the point isn't it. If I have perfect internal security, other than the fact that the Indian government has access to my VPN and encryption keys, then I don't really have perfect security do I? Especially given that the Indian Government is notoriously corrupt and bribes to get illegal access are common.
Businesses bend over to comply with China because of it's massive population that they can exploit. Either to harness them as cheap manufacturing or to get their Internet dollars. India can't compete on either count.
Bwa-huhn? China's population is greater than India's, true, but only by 150 million people or so. According to Wikipedia, China has 1.34 billion people vs. India's 1.19 billion. Granted 150 million people is a pretty big number (it's slightly under half the total population of the US), but as a percentage China's population isn't that much bigger than India's. Certainly they're close enough that the effort expended to separate people from their Rupees should be roughly equal to the effort expended to separate people form their Yen.
Realistically, while alcohol related deaths (due to accidents and such) are tragic, and rightfully much publicized in an attempt to raise awareness and prevent them, they are also statistically fairly insignificant. I'm citing this site, which is specifically dedicated to reducing alcohol traffic fatalities. If they have a bias it would be pump up the numbers rather than mitigate them. According to them around 14,000 people died do to alcohol related traffic accidents last year (in the US). Even if we doubled that number to account for other alcohol related accidents (which seems excessive), that's under 30,000 people. Compared to say, the number of people who died from heart disease, it's statistically nonexistent.
Read the article. Or the summary. Moderate drinkers live longest, heavy drinkers second longest, non-drinkers third longest. Assuming the accuracy of the study, if you wish to live the longest possible time, have a couple of beers (or better, glasses of wine) every night. You see, some of us are capable are read past the first two words of the summary, and thus comment on the entire article. Amazing, no?
Again, if you read the article, you will find that moderate drinkers outlive heavy drinkers (which is what the summary mentions), but even heavy drinkers (defined, apparently, as more than three drinks a day on average) live longer than non-drinkers. That was the more surprising part of the research. It's pretty well accepted that moderate drinkers outlive non-drinkers, and there's been some evidence that heavy drinkers outlive non-drinkers. This research:
1) Gives some confirmation to the second theory and
2) Seems to show that many of the more common explanations for the second theory are not viable.
(2) was tested for by looking at whether the specific teetotalers had previously been alcoholics, what social stratum they came from, how large their circles of family and friends were, and basically attempting to control for a great number of previously postulated explanations.
No one is mentioning blackouts or fifths of vodka. While the study found that non-drinkers had the youngest average death, the people who had the oldest were the moderate drinkers. Unless you're some kind of allergic or something, a beer or two is not going to give you blackouts or impair your functionality at all really.
They don't point out causation, just correlation. Essentially the study authors have no idea *why* heavy drinkers seem to outlive teetotalers, but they appear to do so. If you read the article, they have actually tried to factor for a remarkable number of factors, from social strata, to number of friends and family (and of course alcoholism in earlier life).
It's really a pretty interesting bit of research, and not just because it shows that doing the fun thing isn't always doing the worst thing.
"Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." - Attributed to Ben Franklin and I'm too lazy to verify it.
I don't find this information at all surprising, but I'm happy enough to hear it. make mine a double too.
It's a colo facility. Most likely there's been another story or two about for the "cool factor". Seriously I don't think they're down there for the "bunker". If the Swedish government is like most other governments when they sell off useless Cold War bunkers, the colo people probably got it for and song and realized it was perfect for servers. Since it was intended for medium to long term human habitation in the event of a total infrastructure failure, it's got built in pretty much everything you need, and it's easy to cool besides. Sound like they had to add some extra power generation, but otherwise it's perfect. Probably got it for less than a similarly equipped data center would cost to build too, 8and* you get to use the "cool factor" in your sales literature.
Wikileask may have chosen to host there for the symbolism, but I doubt that's why the data center is there.
Technically no. Votes to change the rules and procedures are simple majority votes. The Dems could in theory eliminate filibusters now if they wanted too, but they'd just be screwing themselves next year, or in two years, or four... eventually.
One reason was that the Republicans threatened to revise Senate rules to completely remove the filibuster. In some ways I rather wish they had. It was a fairly arrogant threat based on the premise that there had been a complete sea change in American politics and the Democrats would never regain a majority in the Senate. It would have probably resulted in even more laws getting through during the Republican majority, but it would have been kinda funny to watch after they lost the Senate.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, and I certainly wish they'd be more aggressive, but I think you have a serious misunderstanding of how filibusters currently work. It's not like in "Mr Smith goes to Washington" anymore. Essentially, all that is required is a motion that debate be extended. Once the motion has been made and seconded it takes sixty votes to bring the bill to a vote. No more sitting on the floor reading from the phone book desperately trying to maintain your spot on the floor. Once filibuster has been threatened, it's all but certain that unless you can get 60 votes it will happen. It doesn't even gum up getting other stuff done. They can move on to work on other things while the bill is technically still being debated, but is for all practical purposes tabled.
Democratic spinelessness not withstanding, without a supermajority they're unlikely to get any such bill passed. Republicans are extremely unlikely to cross the aisle on an issue so desperately important to their core constituency. Don't get me wrong, I think the Dems could use a nice does of spine, but at the moment their biggest problem is that they can't get stuff past an almost unswerving Republican filibuster. Even during the brief period that they had a supermajority it was so slim that any one Dem deciding they didn't care for a piece of legislation meant either months of compromise or outright death for the bill in question.
Your two implications are inherently self contradicting. If, as you imply in your oh so clever "Osama, Obama" inference, Obama is a closet conservative Muslim, then he would object to your second inference. Since conservatives Muslims, like conservative Christians, are generally anti-abortion.
Which is exactly what the second programmer mentioned in the summary is talking about. You're having to figure it all out again, instead of learning from the mistakes of your predecessors. You lost everyone with more than ten years experience. Assuming that you're no smarter than the smartest guy just lost, that means that in 6 years time (your current 4 years + 6 more makes 10) you will finally be about as a good as the guy that just left. Whereas if he'd been there showing you the mistakes he made and helping you navigate around them you might be there in in 2 or 3 years. Worse, if trends continue as they are, it quite likely that in 5 or 6 years you'll be leaving, or forced out, and the next crop of people won't benefit from *your* hard won experience either.
I don't think format has anything to do with it. If you're carrying around an authoritative source on your phone, it's still authoritative. A copy of the actual DSM-IV stored electronically on your phone is still the DSM-IV and is still considered an authoritative source on matters of psychological diagnosis, just like the physical copy in your bag. Similarly, whether you have a physical copy in your bag or an electronic copy on your phone, volume "P" of the Encyclopedia Britannica is *not* an authoritative source.
To suggest otherwise would be to say that one is better off relying on Wikipedia articles to make medical diagnoses over one's doctor.
Frighteningly I know a few people who come very close to making that claim. Why is that some people seem to think that random untested sources on the Internet are by definition more reliable than people who's licenses and credentials you can actually see; and who actually take the time to talk to you? I have a friend who all but makes a hobby out of second guessing everything her doctor tells her based on random information on websites.
Essentially, I could go into the Wikipedia entry on the DSM-IV right now and change all references to "clinical disorders" to "Bonkers", and until someone noticed and fixed it, it would stay that way. Sure, there's plenty of reliable facts on Wikipedia and for stuff like "evidence in an argument on Slashdot" it's probably a perfectly valid source 90-95% of the time. For a court case it's pretty damn loose evidence. Follow the little "citation" links at the end to *actual* DSM-IV and cite that.
As I posted elsewhere, I'm not normally a "The free market will solve all ills" kind of person, but in this case I think there's a reasonable argument for it. Television is a visual medium, there's no chemical analysis that only a qualified scientist can do, or fancy financial products that you need expertise to understand. There is no need for an expert to watch and say "That's OK, but that isn't". You watch it, if you like it you keep watching it. If it offends you or you don't like it for your kids, you don't watch it or don't let them watch it.
Of course you let kids watch TV by themselves sometimes (all the self righteous types above who claim you shouldn't are either morons or have a WHOLE lot of time of their hands), but the nice thing is that you can reasonably rely on it to stay roughly the same day to day. If you watch the same show with your kids for three days, it's pretty damned unlikely to degenerate into porn on the fourth day when they watch by themselves. Even if it did, chances are that other parents WERE watching with their kids that day and will complain in your stead.
I would imagine that if the FCC lost enforcement authority on this sort of thing you'd see changes. Mostly changes in certain channels and in certain time slots. Channels that have always billed themselves for kids will still be fine for kids. They'd be morons to do otherwise. What would Nickelodeon possibly gain by offending any significant subset of parents? Similarly, times that have always been set aside as "family friendly TV" would continue to be. Again, why would a network break a promise like that when it's perfectly obvious that anyone watching could tell. What you would get would more networks with adult themes (think like Spike TV only able to actually show whole boobs instead of bikini clad boobs), and late night TV would probably allow itself more leniency. You probably aren't letting you kids watch that stuff anyway.
You actually have 4 points here so I'll start with zero to address the first point and leave the others with their own numbers:
0) There was nothing inherently contradictory about my two points. The first point is gridlock, the second point assumes that you have solved gridlock in some sort of reasonable way, and then wonders OK, now what about this. Ignoring the second point doesn't answer it. If it's not about rule of the majority, and it's not about rule of oligarchs, then what is it about and how does it address the real threat of tyranny of the majority?
1) I understand that it's not per se about the United States, but the United States and similar entities is what you will have to deal with to implement the idea. Unless you expect the US Government to simply accept small communities simply breaking off to do their own thing by themselves. Eventually forming larger and larger groups. You can't just replace city, county, or state governments with your own alternate constructs. For one thing the current constructs have their own laws and law enforcement which will likely look askance at attempts to rewrite laws without their involvement. The only way that such a scheme could succeed without blood would be to elect leaders who then vote themselves out of power by redesigning city charters and such for group governance.
Those cities would still be under the state government and in turn the federal government until sufficient momentum was gained to have THOSE entities self disolve. Even *then* you'd be stuck getting no larger than national level until the movement spread to other countries which then had *their* governments self destruct. Even *then* the whole concept only works for representative democracies, because, say, the government of China or North Korea isn't elected in any meaning full way, so you'll never elect candidates willing to pull the government down. So while you're not per se talking about the US, you will have to work within the structure of the US or a similar country unless you can find a place to build your little Utopia.
2) Put simply, yes, budget legislation must be passed every year. Not matter how small a budget you're working with it must be spent in a reasonable and productive way, all the time. New laws must be passed to deal with new situations all the time. Does our government over-regulate? Almost certainly. Would virtually non-regulation serve better? Unlikely. Food and drug inspections, education for those who can't afford it, law enforcement, and yes building bridges all must be done and paid for at whatever level it gets done and paid for. Whether the county or the feds build the bridge, it must get built. Complicated contracts have to be written and signed by competent people. Cost must be controlled. All this must be done, and the larger the community the harder it is to get consensus.
3) OK, so what scale is reasonable? Let's look at the smallest possible entity, the city. But to make matters fun we can't use any city, we'll use New York. Now I think we can agree that New York can't be broken down into smaller organizational units (the Burroughs are too tightly interconnected), but that's 8.4 million (opinionated, outspoken, and thoroughly stubborn) people who have to be brought into some sort of reasonable agreement on all laws, budgeting, taxes, etc. I suppose it's easier to get roughly 50% agreement out of 8.4 million people than 330 million, but realistically I think once you get past a hundred thousand or so you're probably just spinning your wheels.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see Utopia. It would be great if we could all live in harmony under a fair and just system. The idea you're proposing just doesn't seem fleshed out or reasonable though. A lot of your answers seem to involve a sort of organic evolution of government structures that would require either an armed revolution or some sort of earth shattering cataclysm that left most of out electronic infrastructure intact while destroying most of our cultural infrastructure. Even in that event I'm not sure it would scale. Not even to New York City let alone the world.
I see this posted fairly often on any vaguely political story around here. I see a number of problems, but they basically boil down to two. How will you deal with:
1) Horrifying gridlock on all but the simplest decisions. Let's look at the Health Care bill. Agree with it or don't isn't the issue here, just look at it's level of complexity. 1000 some odd pages, and compromises everywhere to get first a majority of the 535 members of the House and them a super majority of the 100 members of the Senate to agree with it. It was a very well publicized operation, you have to figure that if it were opened to a "national vote" there'd have been at least 10% of the population looking to get in on it. How are you going to get 30 million people to read and understand a 1000 page bill, let alone figure out what compromises would cause more than half of them to vote for it? No law more complicated than "Don't kill people (unless you need too)" would ever get passed, and then we'd have to try to figure out what qualifies as "needing too".
2) Tyranny of the majority. It's one of the things that the Constitution was designed to combat (and while it doesn't do a perfect job, it's pretty good at it). People aren't always nice. If it were a matter of pure popular vote I'm not sure homosexuality wouldn't be illegal in this country. Or paganism. Or any number of other unpopular but generally harmless ideas. How is this prevented?