I don't see anything inherently wrong with first past the post voting. There are disadvantages, sure, but there are also disadvantages to any alternative, such as second choices counting as half votes or something like that. And the options are really limited since a primary must be winner take all: you can't have a candidate as, say 60% Romney and 30% Ron Paul.
I think it would be worth considering switching to a parliamentary system, but changing the constitution to allow for it seems far less likely than voters simply outgrowing stupid partisan politics.
Ha, if I relied on American news I wouldn't know a bloody thing! Thankfully I'm a European (of sorts)
Implying what, that we Americans get our news from news channels?
If someone says they get their news from American Cable news, pretend they just said they get their news from the Sun, that's basically the same confession.
What if 50 million people in the US took to the streets in protest of the government?
Say what you will about the incompetence of the government, media, and law enforcement, but they NEVER let it get to that. They'd plant people in the protest to smash windows and poop on police cars LOOOONG before it reached that number, the media would gleefully roll footage non-stop to discredit the protesters, it would fizzle out, and the government would announce they had foiled a bomb threat where the protest was supposed to be anyway, so yay government.
If things still were too hot, a sacrificial low-level spokesperson or elected official would talk about gun control, would get slapped down by everyone else, and a large part of the country would feel that their freedoms were secure.
Only if you ignore the primaries. Which, of course, nearly everyone does.
Kind of like how here on slashdot, how everyone ignores slashdot's polite requests to participate in firehose (IE decide which stories get posted and which ones don't) and then bitches and whines about editors posting bad stories.
I think there's a bit more sensitivity on the individual's part towards society judging them and that is the difference. People judge other people here too, we just don't care.
That has positive and negative consequences, I'm not saying it's better our way.
No, I understood. I phrased it that way to try to make it clear I was setting up a joke, not criticizing IKEA or those who provide tents. And I accidentally called the IKEA shelters tents.
The video said the average family will be in these tents for ten years, while the durability of these tents is 3 years (up from 6 months from the old tents). That sounded odd to me until I realized I've been living for 6 years with Ikea furniture which felt like it would last two months.
Good on Ikea. Though I wish they had said what crazy swedish name they were going to call these things.
You're not really providing anything to back up your claim that Japan is overpopulated
If you really want to see the many and varied arguments about this, I presume you know how to use Google.
You made a statement I disagreed with and haven't provided any support for it, now you're telling me to do your homework for you. This is not a good way to convince people. The population of Japan is shrinking, they don't have mass starvation, and the power shortages are due to a transition from nuclear power that was caused by Fukushima, not overpopulation. Additionally, I've been to Japan three times and have seen with my own eyes that it's not overpopulated. If you want to convince me it is, show me data, not car metaphors.
There's a reason Steam is so popular now, and there's one word to describe it - indie.
I think it's more the 75% off sales. Or the fact that it's closest competitor, Origin, is too late to the game and doesn't really offer anything better than Steam, aside from a few exclusive EA games and a worse reputation. I don't think greenlight is that big of a draw for most people.
Already a leader in conservation, Japan consumes about half as much energy per capita as the United States, according to the United Nations Population Fund. But it has been pushed to even greater lengths since the nuclear disaster even as it tries to revive its economy. The accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant and the resulting backlash against nuclear power have left only 17 out of Japan’s 54 reactors online as the nation steels itself for August, the hottest month of the year.
You're saying Japan IS overpopulated, despite the fact that the population is shrinking? Japan still has a lot of room. The crowd is a cultural thing in Tokyo, outside of Tokyo, the cities and suburbs feel more similar to other parts of the world. There might not be the suburban sprawl of midwestern US cities, but it's not overcrowded. There's no fighting over resources, which is how most people would define "overpopulated." So aside from circular logic, what makes you say that?
If everyone hears this gospel and follows it, then you're right. However, we all know what's going to happen. Ad blocking methods are going to increase, and YOU PERSONALLY viewing the unintrusive ads is going to be as effective as you pissing at the edge of the Sahara desert to make it green. Except for that metaphor to work, you'd have to get sunburned on your dick while doing it.
Well, anyway, all you'd be doing is viewing annoying ads. The really annoying ones are still coming due to the tragedy of the commons, so you may as well block what ads you can.
You come on. They had to face pointed questions. Boo fucking hoo. If my employer, a hospital, started executing patients they had sworn to heal, I'd expect some questions even though I do research, and the only time I see patients is when they're walking into the building across the street. The NSA is supposed to exist to defend us and our rights, and did the exact opposite. They can fucking deal with the fallout or they can quit. Their bosses and directing politicians caused the problem, not the people who are trying to get answers.
Few people would call Japan overpopulated. It's dense in Tokyo, and living spaces are traditionally small, but people aren't scrounging for food or trampling each other. The population is shrinking as well.
Much simpler explanation: it's parents codling their sons. Says as much right in the summary: they live in their parent's house. You can't stay holed up in a single room unless you're being supported or have taken serious preparations. The parents are supporting the hermits and have been over sheltering of them to get them to that point. It's hardly a mystery. "Why are they refusing to leave their rooms?" Because they're weak and are being allowed to. Stop feeding them. They will find the strength within themselves to put on clothing and walk outside of their room.
With induced pluripotent stem cells, you could take fibroblasts from your arm, and culture them to make meat. Last I heard a few years ago, they had not gotten cultured muscle cells to organize into intact muscles, but I'm guessing you could make a hot dog of tissue derived from you. Would that be autocannibalism, and would said hot-self encased meat be kosher?
The current topic though would directly seem to counter your argument. Mubarak, the last guy was run out of office via force, yet the very next guy did the same thing. Being voted out or thrown out by force, there are no guarantees. At least elections are cleaner and easier.
The Government back then put people under surveillance, but not everything they said or read or wrote.
To be fair, I doubt our current government would if it weren't so easy, and I suspect the Nixon administration would have gone far far beyond PRISM.
Not that there's any points to be had for one administration being better than another in history, just pointing out that technical ability is probably the difference there, not will.
Constitutions are only worth more than the paper they're written on if they have been proven over time to work. Which is why no one holds the articles of confederation with much reverence in the US compared to the Constitution.
We also have a longer track record for being able to vote for who we want next election cycle than they do in Egypt. If we vote for some guy who says he's not going to spy on us, and he does, we say "Well, I'm not voting for him next time!" not "I'm going to support a military coup!" Because we know there WILL be a next election. Egyptian citizens on the other hand have much less reason to trust that their government won't say "Gee, we WERE going to hold elections as promised, but there's... uh... TERRORISTS that we have to deal with first." Or various other ways to prevent democracy.
This is not to say democracy in the US is perfect, just that voters have more faith in the process than they do in overriding the process, while Egyptians have more of a reason to trust protests and overthrowing the government than elections.
I support people being able to live in inherently unsafe places, the only time I get grumpy is when people get disaster relief and spend it on rebuilding in those places
Would you be less grumpy were it to be shown that relocating everyone would be more expensive than rebuilding and improving? Granted, rebuilding has direct and predictable costs to the taxpayers, while it's difficult to quantify and predict the expense of everyone in affected areas moving inland, so I don't know that we'll be able to get simple numbers on that.
You seem to be looking for a magic bullet that doesn't exist to a complex problem, then being unhappy with anything short of that magic bullet. Healthcare costs increasing have multiple causes. One is uninsured patients have to be treated and aren't left to die, but then they get to skip out on the bill. The mandate does address that problem. There are many other underlying problems as well, and obamacare has many other components BESIDES the mandate of course, addressing some of those other problems.
Obamacare won't solve the problem completely, but that doesn't mean it's not going to help.
Slashdot Mirror
I assume this undoubtedly trustworthy website the previous AC linked to had to do with horse fucking, and that wasn't just a personal observation?
I don't see anything inherently wrong with first past the post voting. There are disadvantages, sure, but there are also disadvantages to any alternative, such as second choices counting as half votes or something like that. And the options are really limited since a primary must be winner take all: you can't have a candidate as, say 60% Romney and 30% Ron Paul.
I think it would be worth considering switching to a parliamentary system, but changing the constitution to allow for it seems far less likely than voters simply outgrowing stupid partisan politics.
Ha, if I relied on American news I wouldn't know a bloody thing! Thankfully I'm a European (of sorts)
Implying what, that we Americans get our news from news channels?
If someone says they get their news from American Cable news, pretend they just said they get their news from the Sun, that's basically the same confession.
Hey, troll, I think the point was that's a comparatively safe protest, not that 30 lives don't matter. Troll.
What if 50 million people in the US took to the streets in protest of the government?
Say what you will about the incompetence of the government, media, and law enforcement, but they NEVER let it get to that. They'd plant people in the protest to smash windows and poop on police cars LOOOONG before it reached that number, the media would gleefully roll footage non-stop to discredit the protesters, it would fizzle out, and the government would announce they had foiled a bomb threat where the protest was supposed to be anyway, so yay government.
If things still were too hot, a sacrificial low-level spokesperson or elected official would talk about gun control, would get slapped down by everyone else, and a large part of the country would feel that their freedoms were secure.
Only if you ignore the primaries. Which, of course, nearly everyone does.
Kind of like how here on slashdot, how everyone ignores slashdot's polite requests to participate in firehose (IE decide which stories get posted and which ones don't) and then bitches and whines about editors posting bad stories.
I think there's a bit more sensitivity on the individual's part towards society judging them and that is the difference. People judge other people here too, we just don't care.
That has positive and negative consequences, I'm not saying it's better our way.
No, I understood. I phrased it that way to try to make it clear I was setting up a joke, not criticizing IKEA or those who provide tents. And I accidentally called the IKEA shelters tents.
The video said the average family will be in these tents for ten years, while the durability of these tents is 3 years (up from 6 months from the old tents). That sounded odd to me until I realized I've been living for 6 years with Ikea furniture which felt like it would last two months.
Good on Ikea. Though I wish they had said what crazy swedish name they were going to call these things.
You're not really providing anything to back up your claim that Japan is overpopulated
If you really want to see the many and varied arguments about this, I presume you know how to use Google.
You made a statement I disagreed with and haven't provided any support for it, now you're telling me to do your homework for you. This is not a good way to convince people. The population of Japan is shrinking, they don't have mass starvation, and the power shortages are due to a transition from nuclear power that was caused by Fukushima, not overpopulation. Additionally, I've been to Japan three times and have seen with my own eyes that it's not overpopulated. If you want to convince me it is, show me data, not car metaphors.
There's a reason Steam is so popular now, and there's one word to describe it - indie.
I think it's more the 75% off sales. Or the fact that it's closest competitor, Origin, is too late to the game and doesn't really offer anything better than Steam, aside from a few exclusive EA games and a worse reputation. I don't think greenlight is that big of a draw for most people.
Already a leader in conservation, Japan consumes about half as much energy per capita as the United States, according to the United Nations Population Fund. But it has been pushed to even greater lengths since the nuclear disaster even as it tries to revive its economy. The accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant and the resulting backlash against nuclear power have left only 17 out of Japan’s 54 reactors online as the nation steels itself for August, the hottest month of the year.
You're saying Japan IS overpopulated, despite the fact that the population is shrinking? Japan still has a lot of room. The crowd is a cultural thing in Tokyo, outside of Tokyo, the cities and suburbs feel more similar to other parts of the world. There might not be the suburban sprawl of midwestern US cities, but it's not overcrowded. There's no fighting over resources, which is how most people would define "overpopulated." So aside from circular logic, what makes you say that?
I lived in Japan for some time. They're no more merciless towards mistakes than any other society is in my opinion.
If everyone hears this gospel and follows it, then you're right. However, we all know what's going to happen. Ad blocking methods are going to increase, and YOU PERSONALLY viewing the unintrusive ads is going to be as effective as you pissing at the edge of the Sahara desert to make it green. Except for that metaphor to work, you'd have to get sunburned on your dick while doing it.
Well, anyway, all you'd be doing is viewing annoying ads. The really annoying ones are still coming due to the tragedy of the commons, so you may as well block what ads you can.
You come on. They had to face pointed questions. Boo fucking hoo. If my employer, a hospital, started executing patients they had sworn to heal, I'd expect some questions even though I do research, and the only time I see patients is when they're walking into the building across the street. The NSA is supposed to exist to defend us and our rights, and did the exact opposite. They can fucking deal with the fallout or they can quit. Their bosses and directing politicians caused the problem, not the people who are trying to get answers.
Few people would call Japan overpopulated. It's dense in Tokyo, and living spaces are traditionally small, but people aren't scrounging for food or trampling each other. The population is shrinking as well.
Much simpler explanation: it's parents codling their sons. Says as much right in the summary: they live in their parent's house. You can't stay holed up in a single room unless you're being supported or have taken serious preparations. The parents are supporting the hermits and have been over sheltering of them to get them to that point. It's hardly a mystery. "Why are they refusing to leave their rooms?" Because they're weak and are being allowed to. Stop feeding them. They will find the strength within themselves to put on clothing and walk outside of their room.
With induced pluripotent stem cells, you could take fibroblasts from your arm, and culture them to make meat. Last I heard a few years ago, they had not gotten cultured muscle cells to organize into intact muscles, but I'm guessing you could make a hot dog of tissue derived from you. Would that be autocannibalism, and would said hot-self encased meat be kosher?
Your wait has been over for a while. Here's a paper that used hESC. Here's one that uses human IPSC differentiated towards early neural stem cells.
The current topic though would directly seem to counter your argument. Mubarak, the last guy was run out of office via force, yet the very next guy did the same thing. Being voted out or thrown out by force, there are no guarantees. At least elections are cleaner and easier.
The Government back then put people under surveillance, but not everything they said or read or wrote.
To be fair, I doubt our current government would if it weren't so easy, and I suspect the Nixon administration would have gone far far beyond PRISM.
Not that there's any points to be had for one administration being better than another in history, just pointing out that technical ability is probably the difference there, not will.
Constitutions are only worth more than the paper they're written on if they have been proven over time to work. Which is why no one holds the articles of confederation with much reverence in the US compared to the Constitution.
We also have a longer track record for being able to vote for who we want next election cycle than they do in Egypt. If we vote for some guy who says he's not going to spy on us, and he does, we say "Well, I'm not voting for him next time!" not "I'm going to support a military coup!" Because we know there WILL be a next election. Egyptian citizens on the other hand have much less reason to trust that their government won't say "Gee, we WERE going to hold elections as promised, but there's... uh... TERRORISTS that we have to deal with first." Or various other ways to prevent democracy.
This is not to say democracy in the US is perfect, just that voters have more faith in the process than they do in overriding the process, while Egyptians have more of a reason to trust protests and overthrowing the government than elections.
I support people being able to live in inherently unsafe places, the only time I get grumpy is when people get disaster relief and spend it on rebuilding in those places
Would you be less grumpy were it to be shown that relocating everyone would be more expensive than rebuilding and improving? Granted, rebuilding has direct and predictable costs to the taxpayers, while it's difficult to quantify and predict the expense of everyone in affected areas moving inland, so I don't know that we'll be able to get simple numbers on that.
You seem to be looking for a magic bullet that doesn't exist to a complex problem, then being unhappy with anything short of that magic bullet. Healthcare costs increasing have multiple causes. One is uninsured patients have to be treated and aren't left to die, but then they get to skip out on the bill. The mandate does address that problem. There are many other underlying problems as well, and obamacare has many other components BESIDES the mandate of course, addressing some of those other problems.
Obamacare won't solve the problem completely, but that doesn't mean it's not going to help.