"Instant Run-off Voting" has the great advantage that average people don't have any trouble understanding it... and it doesn't hurt that "Instant Runoff" sounds like some new kind of lottery ticket.
Pairwise voting schemes seem really peculiar to me -- I have the strong impression that they're the sort of thing that only an election geek can love.
I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but if you have six people running for one office, wouldn't you
need to vote on 36 pairs in order to settle it? If it was a dozen people running, then it would be
144 times, right? And the whole point of these voting schemes is to encourage more "third parties",
right?
Compare that to IRV, where the voter just needs to rank all the candidates once. It seems like it scales a lot more easily.
(Though on the other hand, pairwise voting might lend itself to paper-punch ballots a little better.)
The thing is, most of the exit polls at the end of the day didn't show any discrepency. For example, CNN's exit polls of Ohio show Bush winning the male vote and dead even on the female vote
Ah yes, the famous "corrected" exit polls, which were brought into line after the fact to match the officially reported results...
I tell ya, sometimes it seems like there's a conspiracy to make us paranoids paranoid.
Please explain where this gentleman provides a single cite, a single fact to back up his claims?
Hm... well how about this, eh? (from the same article, which you claim to have read):
In his attack on Robert Kennedy's article he has done the same thing once again -- trashing Kennedy's motives, and accusing him, essentially, of plagiarism: "Nothing here is new. If you've... read Mark Crispin Miller's 'Fooled Again,' you're already familiar with everything Kennedy has to say." That claim is quite false. Kennedy and Rolling Stone have given us a shattering new view of the Ohio travesty, based both on prodigious journalistic synthesis and remarkable firsthand research. Its interviews alone -- especially with Lou Harris, the polling eminence, who deems Ohio stolen by Bush/Cheney -- are, or ought to be, big news. While I am proud to say that Kennedy considers Fooled Again a major inspiration, I cannot claim that he derived much information from my book. His focus is entirely on Ohio, whereas Fooled Again devotes only some 15 pages (out of 350) to the crimes and improprieties committed in that state. My book deals with the election fraud committed nationwide in 2004 -- as Manjoo knows.
porkchop_d_clown (39923) wrote:
Apparently you believe "debunking" means "shouting down your opponents".
The "facts" listed in that article are all exaggerated, selective or distorted.
Wow. Every single one of them? Now that's impressive.
No examples spring to mind, eh?
I notice he didn't mention how the only actual convictions for interfering with the Ohio elections were Democrats charged with vandalizing Republican campaign sites and vehicles.
Do you have a link to back up this particular
non sequitur?
That sounds like a believably nasty little election dirty
trick, but doesn't it seem peculiar that google news can't
find any reports on the subject?
I tried googling up the "American Center for Voting Rights" itself.
It appears that there's some bloggers who are convinced this
is a bogus front group:
ACVR,
The Mystery Solved
So, my friend... it would appear that you have been
swift-boated... (unless you're just trying to swift-boat us, eh?).
Take "Democracy at Risk," the DNC report on the election in
Ohio, which came out in the summer of 2005. The document
appears to be a very damning study of Republican malfeasance
in Ohio. It offers many harrowing statistics, and some strong
firsthand accounts, of Democratic disenfranchisement
throughout the state -- only to deny that fraud had anything
to do with it. The problem, rather, was "incompetence," which
was somehow epidemic in Ohio on Election Day, and which,
stranger still, invariably helped Bush/Cheney and hurt
Kerry/Edwards. The report is not exactly readable, with long
abstruse equations covering page after page -- a haze of math
that does not quite conceal the bald self-contradictions that
distort the document like heavy cracks across a
windshield. For instance, the report confirms, in various
ways, that there were far too few machines only in Democratic
precincts, while the number of machines in GOP strongholds was
more than adequate. Then, out of nowhere, toward the end,
we're told that members of both parties were affected equally
by the statewide shortage of machines, so that the glitch did
not, of course, affect the outcome of the race.
The whole report is twisted thus, the authors tortuously
bending over backward to assure us that DeLay et al. were
right: "No voter disenfranchisement occurred in this election
of 2004." If we look deeper into the report (and also read the
pertinent exposés by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman at
freepress.org), we find that it is less an earnest study of
the fraud committed in Ohio than a political statement, meant
primarily to distance the committee, and the party, from John
Conyers and those other Democrats who had been so tactless as
to harp on the abundant evidence of systematic fraud by the
Republicans. This fact is highly relevant to Manjoo's attack
on Robert Kennedy, as Manjoo's case is heavily dependent on
the DNC report. Manjoo invokes it several times, accusing
Kennedy of quoting only certain parts of it and pointedly
ignoring all those later parts that clear the GOP of
fraud. Your reporter calls this a "deliberate omission of key
bits of data." And yet that charge is groundless, as the DNC
report is only partly accurate, and Kennedy, quite rightly,
quoted only its sound figures and ignored its weird
exculpatory spin.
porkchop_d_clown (39923) wrote:
I'd like to point out that Ohio's own Democratic party has a
web page set up that pretty much debunks these theories. Don't
you think that if 270,000 votes were suppressed, they would be
the ones to scream about it?
At the moment, I'm more interested in Republican actions than
Democratic psychology. One problem at a time.
I'm highlighting the fact that elections are controlled on a
very local level. I have no doubt there was fraud on election
day. Am I supposed to like the democrats more becuase they
were less successful then they were in 1960?
Here we come to issue you're so stressed out about.
Someone might actually dare to think that the Republicans
should be voted out of office. Oh my.
I'll have to vote third party, cause I couldn't live with
myself voting for either one.
Got it. They're all a bunch of crooks, so let's vote for Nader.
That's your recommendation? You think that's going to fix the problem?
If the republicans conspired on a national level to steal the
election, of course they should be punished, all the wrongs
should be righted ect, ect... But you actually have to prove
it was possible, and actually achived.
For that to happen, you'd actually have to be willing to
investigate the problem, not try to sweep it under the rug.
Exit polls are not relieable. See Florida 2000 for more info.
Um, allow me to gently call "bullshit". Try reading Freeman
and Bleifus on the subject. Why is it that an exit poll
discrepancy can mean something in the Ukraine but not in the
United States?
If all we needed
was exit polls, why actually vote? I think we agree that the
system is broke and needs to be fixed. I just have a higher
burden of proof.
Proof of what? Freeman and Bleifus think they've proved that
there are problems that need to be investigated.
Proving that the system needs to be fixed, that ain't hard...
all you need is a "conspiracy" scenario that looks plausible.
This is different from proving that someone should be thrown
in jail.
Remember, never assign to malice what can be easily explained
by mass stupidity.
But sometimes, corruption really happens. Sometimes you
actually run into a genuine "conspiracy". What happens then?
Where's the check that balances out that particular failure?
If the party in power refuses to investigate it's own
problems, then maybe you should vote them out of power.
No, no, "sheeple" is what you say when you want to sound like
a right-wing crazy... (the "tinfoil hats" line is good, too).
If you want to sound like a left-wing crazy you need to accuse
everyone of being a Nazi.
You may not care that bush stole the election,
You raise an interesting point here -- do people not
care about fair and unbiased elections? It would seem
that there are a large number of people who are comfortable
with winning one for their own side and they don't much care how:
God help the party, and devil take the country.
I mean, when you point out that there was chicanery in the
2004 election, why is it that the first question on everyone's
minds is "was the fraud large enough to throw the election?"
It doesn't bother you at all that there are people
trying to rig elections? I mean, if the election
wasn't stolen last time, wouldn't you be concerned that
it might be stolen next time?
but youd have to be a complete frickin idiot not to realise
that he did steal it.
No, not an idiot, just not paying very close attention.
The major media hasn't exactly done a great job of covering
the issues involved, you know?
Dodgy exit polls,
Check.
mathematical impossibilities,
Essentially.
thousands of accounts of one sided errors,
Yeah, essentially.
the voting machines manufacturer CEO PROMISED BUSH VOTES in a memo!!!
True, but this isn't really the strongest point. It helps
establish motive, but not really intent, if you know what I
mean.
I think a better point is that Diebold and ESS are both run by
two brothers, and between the two of them they controlled a
huge slice of the vote in 2004. That makes it start to look
much less like some whacky theory of an insanely wide-spread
conspiracy...
You can whinge about sources if you want, I dont give a crap,
most murdoch/GE/etc owned news companies lie through their
teeth, so the only place you CAN go for some of this news is
"less reputable" sites.... (eg look up "outfoxed" on google
video, a doco by ex fox news reporters,
Here we get down to another interesting point... how widespread a
"conspiracy" do you need to presume to explain the media's
behavior in recent years? The mainstream media has been
looking like it's in the government's pocket, but that could
easily be a sincere rallying-around-the-flag after the 9-11
attack.
I totally trust your descriptions of recent events even w/o a reference to a single news piece. But then again I doubt you read any yourself, probably just got some excerpts from Kos. Try peeking out of your echo chamber once in a while.
Well here are some news reports for you. It looks like the
main source on this is the Washington Post:
Oh, yes. Everyone knows Republicans aren't allowed to have voter registration drives. Republicans cheat, see, because they picked a name that some other obscure voter registration organization had already picked.
Acutally, the America Votes
organization is hardly obscure, certainly not to someone like
Nathan Sproul who's been involved with the election dirty tricks business for some time...
(try doing a web search on the guy's name).
That proves Bush stole the election. [/puke off]
Actually no, if you want something like "proof" of that you need to check some of the other references to the article. I might suggest reference #21:
Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?
by Freeman and Bleifuss.
I wouldn't asy the story is bogus outright, but I don't trust *any* of the political parties.
Who is asking you to trust anyone? The main thing we need at the moment is an election system
with a verifiable paper trail, so that it's at least possible to do fair recounts.
My relatives are election judges ( the members themselves are fairly fluid as to their political affiliation voting for regan, then bush I, clinton, Dole, Bush II, and then Kerry) who were discusted with what they saw in 2004 by both parties.
That's "disgusted". Anyway, even if we grant that there's some sort of moral equivalence at this point between the Republicans and the Democrats -- I used to think this, but the Bush Machine has done their best to convince me I was wrong -- the point then would be that we need genuinely non-partisian, independant officials in charge of the voting process, unlike, for example, the infamous Ken Blackwell of Ohio.
It was all local grass root partisan crap. Each Parties Observers kept challenging everything, the local party lawers were called in several times. It was weird stuff,
Sounds a lot like democracy to me...
[...] but I really couldn't blame any party more than the other.
Ah... so you think it was purely an accident that these mysterious exit poll discrepancies favor the Republicans in nearly every case?
IANAA (I Am Not An Australian), so I don't know how things work there, but maybe voting in at least presidental elections should be required to maintain your US citizenship.
Can someone explain to me what compulsory voting would do to improve the situation if the voting machines are rigged?
(It sure would be nice if all these "plus 5 insightfuls" could magically be changed to "off topic".)
If you want to learn how an election should be conducted, you could try looking up north to Canada. They use paper ballots that are counted in public... anyone who wants to observe the process can attend the count, and observe it in action.
Nice, simple, and very close to foolproof, which is perhaps why we fools are using Diebold and ESS machines instead...
Yeah, I just took a look at reference #6 myself, and I don't
see any problems with it either. The legal firm Sproul and
Associates claimed to have been hired by the non-partisian
group "America Votes", and they definitely haven't been.
They then tried to claim it was just an accident of some sort.
(And if you do some web searches, you'll see that "Nathan
Sproul" has been accused of involvement in a number of
different types of voter fraud.)
So, what we appear to have here is yet another example
of someone trying to blow smoke... (it's a little surprising to
see it from someone with such a low slash id though: 981.
This isn't one of the ones that got sold on ebay, was it?).
I have to say that I think the situation is even worse
than I thought it was... after the 2004 election, I had the
impression that the people who wanted to believe that it was
legit at least had some wiggle room, because it seemed like
there was some disagreement about the meaning of the exit
polls: there was that study at Berkeley that found a
discrepancy, but then the MIT study chimed in saying there
wasn't, so who do you believe?
The thing is, the MIT guys later admitted that they screwed
up: they used the "corrected" data, not the originally reported
exit poll results. The media never reported that development,
and I missed it myself...
Freeman and Bleifuss do a very thorough analysis of the
various theories that have been presented to cover the
discrepancy, and none of them seem to hold up. It's difficult
to see how anyone could read this book and not conclude that
phrasing the title as a question was excessively polite...
And it's impossible to see how you can come away from this
situation without seeing that we badly need reform of the
electoral system -- a paper trail that can actually be
recounted would be a nice start, eh? Even if you don't
believe the 2004 election was "stolen", how do you know the
next one isn't going to be?
And anyone who speaks out against that point, is speaking out
against Democracy itself, and needs to take a good long look
in the mirror to think about what kind of world they want to
live in.
(The "corrected" data by the way, is by definition "corrected"
so that the discrepancy goes away. So what good is it? Why
do people call it "corrected" and not, oh, say, "fudged"?)
If you like to use your own background color setting in firefox, you can't see the controls in the "Comments" panel. In fact, the background goes transluscent.
If you use "light" mode, the "Comments" panel overlaps some of the comment text (there's no empty left column for that comment panel to jerk about in).
I used to be able to open sub-threads in another tab, but now it's a javascript link, so that's busted (yeah, there's another way now, but the old one is still busted).
And my biggest complaint: Does anyone really want these features? I almost always
just cruise at plus 3, and hardly ever want to tweak the
setting. The one case I can think of is when trying to play
moderator, then I might want to flip it down to -1... but I'd do that
just once, not repeatedly. Why not just put the control panel
at the top of the page, and script the kludgey floating window? KISS, yes?
If anyone wants a serious answer to this question:
"If you cannot organize your finances, how are you going to responsibly organize yourself for a company? Organization is a ateasure of responsibility."
The answer is that screwing yourself over (a bad credit rating due to late payments or whatever) is psychologically different from screwing your employer over (neglecting long-range task planning, etc).
Me, I certainly have a bad credit rating at the moment -- mostly, leftover tax problems I've been lazy about clearing up, e.g. a state I used to live in thinks I owe them money for a year I no longer lived in the state -- but this has nothing to do with my attitude toward my job.
Also you know... companies that are having problems with employee retention might prefer hiring someone with a big debt load, they're likely to be more stable...
I am not a Republican. Hell, I'm not even a conservative.
Cool. And I'm not a Green. Neither am I a Democrat, though I am opposed
to crazed brainless monsters in office.
But you probably feel anyone to the right of Medea Benjamin to be a dangerous reactionary.
Last I heard, Medea Benjamin's big thing was to try and get the troops brought home from Iraq.
This would put her solidly in the mainstream, albeit to the left of our sort-of-elected leaders.
You are exactly the problem with the Bay Area liberalism.
So you mean the Republicans *haven't* had their brains eaten by crazed weasels from hell?
You consider Gavin Newson a "faux-liberal"? WTF?
Off the top of my head (without checking details):
Got into office on a "care not cash" campaign that cut benefits
and promised increased services that largely never materialized.
Pushed for gay marriages, scoring big points with a local voting block at
no political risk to himself... and without much risk that he would actually
suceed.
Dropped by hotel picket lines to express sympathy.
Vetoed a six month trial of extending the Sunday road closure in the park to Saturday,
for no reason that's easy to fathom.
Can you name me something that he's done that makes him a genuine liberal?
Preferably something involving restraining real estate development, since
that's what SF politics really revolves around.
You think that that's just a joke? Ken Blackwell, the secretary of state of Ohio has approved using machines from Diebold, and then did an "oops, I guess I own stock in that company!" Here's one version of the story.
Anyway, it appears that the three big "electronic voting" companies are Republican shills, just going by the 2004 election data (exit poll discrepancies were bigger in districts using electronic voting, and all discrepencies were in the favor of the Republicans, they weren't random).
It doesn't matter who wins anymore, or even by how much margin they win by. It started in the U.S., it spread to Mexico... it will spread all over, and it will not stop. Those who lose will not accept losing, it will always be challenged.
Listen: you really, really need to look into this more, because you've been suckered.
You think that all these complaints about the 2004 election are just whining by the losers, but there's more going on than sour grapes. Look up the current state of the analysis of exit poll data -- the media dropped the story when it was ambiguous how bad the problem was, if you look into it, I think you'll find it looks really, really bad.
If this kind of discrepancy happened in any other country (and then had been swept under the rug!) there would be no question in your mind that an election had been rigged. Seriously, this is like something out of Soviet Russia... Oops, the exit polls went one way, and the results went another? Oh wait, here let us "correct the data". See, now it matches!
I know that feeling too. But I have the opposite situation. I live in the ultra-progressive San Fransisco area, where everywhere you go it's anti-conservative this and stupid republicans that. The hatred here against conservatives is vicious.
Oh please. I live in "ultraliberal" San Francisco, too, and the faux-liberals (e.g. Gavin Newson) are pretty clearly ruling the town. Conservative whining about how persecuted they are is a really tiresome cliche at this point.
Republicans do not have a monopoly on bad behavior. Democrats are every bit as bad for not reining in their supporters.
Try looking really closely at the kind of crap your fellow Republicans have been getting away with of late. I used to be a "Republicans, Democrats, what's the difference?" kind of guy, but that was back before the Republicans had their brains eaten by crazed weasels from hell. What kind of patriotic Americans regularly attempts to rig elections?
It's kind of like television. You are not the
networks' customer. The ad companies are the
customer; you are the product that is sold to
them. Everything else is just flim-flam designed
to keep you in front of the tube.
That's a flawed analogy.
Well that would be a shock.
You can be as cynical as you want, but representatives in this
country are still elected.
Are they? That's the question. Pay attention to subject under
discussion, huh?
I think [Eric S. Raymond] has always been a realist that considers open source to be preferable, but if short-term compromises have to be made for open source software to succeed in the long term (essentially what this article suggests), he has no problems and I don't think he ever had.
Actually, I don't think that Richard Stallman is all that different in this respect, though you wouldn't always realize this from listening to his public pronoucements.
He sometimes goes a little far in swearing that you should aways use the free alternative, no matter
how inferior, and so on.
But what I like to point out to people is what RMS actually did when he started on the Gnu project:
he started working on dev tools, compilers, utilities, and so on... and did not let it disturb him that he
had to do all this on proprietary operating systems, at the outset. Software from the Free Software Foundation has almost always been as portable as they could manage to make it. The GPL places restrictions on distributing derived work, but says nothing about what kind of software you're allowed to use it with...
If this was the thing holding Linux back from being a massive success, Linspire would be selling millions of copies. That they aren't says something.
I would've said "Suse". I haven't messed with Suse myself, but I've seen it in action, and it
looks pretty slick. If you're indifferent to the proprietary vs. free issue I would think you'd
just run Suse and be done with it... and notably, Suse is doing fairly well.
The actual thing that seems peculiar with ESR here is that he thinks anyone needs to hear this...
there are lots of different linux distros, and quite a range of different attitudes and strategies,
and if all it takes is to back off on ideological fantacism slightly -- well, there are folks trying that.
If the idea is that there are too many distros out there, and it's all just confusing everyone,
well okay, maybe -- but what are you going to do about it? Is he trying to convince, say, Debian, to
drop the "nonfree" distinction? Good luck. Maybe he should go back to trying to herd kernel hackers.
(Now, if you ask me... WMP format doesn't work? Cool! No Flash player? Excellent!! It isn't just
that I'm not willing to *compromise*, it's that I genuinely don't care about most of the proprietary
crap. It would, admittedly, be difficult to live without some sort of mp3 player...)
Slashdot Mirror
Pairwise voting schemes seem really peculiar to me -- I have the strong impression that they're the sort of thing that only an election geek can love.
I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but if you have six people running for one office, wouldn't you need to vote on 36 pairs in order to settle it? If it was a dozen people running, then it would be 144 times, right? And the whole point of these voting schemes is to encourage more "third parties", right?
Compare that to IRV, where the voter just needs to rank all the candidates once. It seems like it scales a lot more easily.
(Though on the other hand, pairwise voting might lend itself to paper-punch ballots a little better.)
I tell ya, sometimes it seems like there's a conspiracy to make us paranoids paranoid.
This is a page from back in November 2004, before anyone barely had a chance to look at what had happened.
No examples spring to mind, eh?
Do you have a link to back up this particular non sequitur?Hm, there's nothing like that out on news.google.com, but just searching the web, I turned up this impressive looking report at the "American Center for Voting Rights": Five Democrat Operatives In Milwaukee Charged With Slashing Tires Of Republican Vans On Morning Of Election Day
That sounds like a believably nasty little election dirty trick, but doesn't it seem peculiar that google news can't find any reports on the subject?
I tried googling up the "American Center for Voting Rights" itself. It appears that there's some bloggers who are convinced this is a bogus front group: ACVR, The Mystery Solved
So, my friend... it would appear that you have been swift-boated... (unless you're just trying to swift-boat us, eh?).
From Some Might Call It Treason by Mark Crispin Miller:
porkchop_d_clown (39923) wrote: At the moment, I'm more interested in Republican actions than Democratic psychology. One problem at a time.So there.
If the party in power refuses to investigate it's own problems, then maybe you should vote them out of power.
I mean, when you point out that there was chicanery in the 2004 election, why is it that the first question on everyone's minds is "was the fraud large enough to throw the election?" It doesn't bother you at all that there are people trying to rig elections? I mean, if the election wasn't stolen last time, wouldn't you be concerned that it might be stolen next time?
No, not an idiot, just not paying very close attention. The major media hasn't exactly done a great job of covering the issues involved, you know? Check. Essentially. Yeah, essentially. True, but this isn't really the strongest point. It helps establish motive, but not really intent, if you know what I mean.I think a better point is that Diebold and ESS are both run by two brothers, and between the two of them they controlled a huge slice of the vote in 2004. That makes it start to look much less like some whacky theory of an insanely wide-spread conspiracy...
Here we get down to another interesting point... how widespread a "conspiracy" do you need to presume to explain the media's behavior in recent years? The mainstream media has been looking like it's in the government's pocket, but that could easily be a sincere rallying-around-the-flag after the 9-11 attack.-
Situation
Called Dire in West Iraq Anbar Is Lost Politically, Marine Analyst Says
-
Iraq?s Anbar province a lost cause?
Intelligence report pessimistic about controlling western province
-
Iraqi insurgents launch wave of sectarian attacks in Kirkuk
-
US intel report: Iraq's Anbar province 'politically lost'
Let us know any time you need some help with google news searches.Can someone explain to me what compulsory voting would do to improve the situation if the voting machines are rigged?
(It sure would be nice if all these "plus 5 insightfuls" could magically be changed to "off topic".)
If you want to learn how an election should be conducted, you could try looking up north to Canada. They use paper ballots that are counted in public... anyone who wants to observe the process can attend the count, and observe it in action.
Nice, simple, and very close to foolproof, which is perhaps why we fools are using Diebold and ESS machines instead...
(And if you do some web searches, you'll see that "Nathan Sproul" has been accused of involvement in a number of different types of voter fraud.)
So, what we appear to have here is yet another example of someone trying to blow smoke... (it's a little surprising to see it from someone with such a low slash id though: 981. This isn't one of the ones that got sold on ebay, was it?).
Anyway, I suggest reading reference #21, myself, the Freeman and Bleifuss book: Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?
I have to say that I think the situation is even worse than I thought it was... after the 2004 election, I had the impression that the people who wanted to believe that it was legit at least had some wiggle room, because it seemed like there was some disagreement about the meaning of the exit polls: there was that study at Berkeley that found a discrepancy, but then the MIT study chimed in saying there wasn't, so who do you believe?
The thing is, the MIT guys later admitted that they screwed up: they used the "corrected" data, not the originally reported exit poll results. The media never reported that development, and I missed it myself...
Freeman and Bleifuss do a very thorough analysis of the various theories that have been presented to cover the discrepancy, and none of them seem to hold up. It's difficult to see how anyone could read this book and not conclude that phrasing the title as a question was excessively polite...
And it's impossible to see how you can come away from this situation without seeing that we badly need reform of the electoral system -- a paper trail that can actually be recounted would be a nice start, eh? Even if you don't believe the 2004 election was "stolen", how do you know the next one isn't going to be?
And anyone who speaks out against that point, is speaking out against Democracy itself, and needs to take a good long look in the mirror to think about what kind of world they want to live in.
(The "corrected" data by the way, is by definition "corrected" so that the discrepancy goes away. So what good is it? Why do people call it "corrected" and not, oh, say, "fudged"?)
And my biggest complaint: Does anyone really want these features? I almost always just cruise at plus 3, and hardly ever want to tweak the setting. The one case I can think of is when trying to play moderator, then I might want to flip it down to -1... but I'd do that just once, not repeatedly. Why not just put the control panel at the top of the page, and script the kludgey floating window? KISS, yes?
Me, I certainly have a bad credit rating at the moment -- mostly, leftover tax problems I've been lazy about clearing up, e.g. a state I used to live in thinks I owe them money for a year I no longer lived in the state -- but this has nothing to do with my attitude toward my job.
Also you know... companies that are having problems with employee retention might prefer hiring someone with a big debt load, they're likely to be more stable...
Last I heard, Medea Benjamin's big thing was to try and get the troops brought home from Iraq. This would put her solidly in the mainstream, albeit to the left of our sort-of-elected leaders.
Off the top of my head (without checking details):
- Got into office on a "care not cash" campaign that cut benefits
and promised increased services that largely never materialized.
- Pushed for gay marriages, scoring big points with a local voting block at
no political risk to himself... and without much risk that he would actually
suceed.
- Dropped by hotel picket lines to express sympathy.
- Vetoed a six month trial of extending the Sunday road closure in the park to Saturday,
for no reason that's easy to fathom.
Can you name me something that he's done that makes him a genuine liberal? Preferably something involving restraining real estate development, since that's what SF politics really revolves around.Anyway, it appears that the three big "electronic voting" companies are Republican shills, just going by the 2004 election data (exit poll discrepancies were bigger in districts using electronic voting, and all discrepencies were in the favor of the Republicans, they weren't random).
If this kind of discrepancy happened in any other country (and then had been swept under the rug!) there would be no question in your mind that an election had been rigged. Seriously, this is like something out of Soviet Russia... Oops, the exit polls went one way, and the results went another? Oh wait, here let us "correct the data". See, now it matches!
Are they? That's the question. Pay attention to subject under discussion, huh?
But what I like to point out to people is what RMS actually did when he started on the Gnu project: he started working on dev tools, compilers, utilities, and so on... and did not let it disturb him that he had to do all this on proprietary operating systems, at the outset. Software from the Free Software Foundation has almost always been as portable as they could manage to make it. The GPL places restrictions on distributing derived work, but says nothing about what kind of software you're allowed to use it with...
The actual thing that seems peculiar with ESR here is that he thinks anyone needs to hear this... there are lots of different linux distros, and quite a range of different attitudes and strategies, and if all it takes is to back off on ideological fantacism slightly -- well, there are folks trying that.
If the idea is that there are too many distros out there, and it's all just confusing everyone, well okay, maybe -- but what are you going to do about it? Is he trying to convince, say, Debian, to drop the "nonfree" distinction? Good luck. Maybe he should go back to trying to herd kernel hackers.
(Now, if you ask me... WMP format doesn't work? Cool! No Flash player? Excellent!! It isn't just that I'm not willing to *compromise*, it's that I genuinely don't care about most of the proprietary crap. It would, admittedly, be difficult to live without some sort of mp3 player...)