First of all, I do not believe that it is a core principle of America. We are guaranteed equal protection under the law, but we are explicitly not guaranteed to be able to vote for our president, and we aren't guaranteed to have an equal vote for our president. We get our equal protection under the law by other means.
That said, no, it's not fair: if we were only ruled by the federal government. But we aren't. It is not "merely to preserve an artificially rurally skewed political stance." It is an attempt to maintain state's rights.
Many people really don't care about state's rights, and that's up to them. But simply weakening the presence of rural states is not fair enough. You'd have to go all the way, and go to a completely popular vote.
The point is, even if we end up with a more accurate representation of the will of the people in elections, it may not ultimately end up with what those people wanted, or what their future generations want, in the long run.
Sure, that may be the case, but pointing out one example isn't a very good way of proving it. That's why I suspected that you were just showing that looking at the past for ways things could have gone better or worse is not the most solid of foundations. For something that complicated, we really don't know.
Having the will of the people be more accurately represented could well be a very bad thing, too, considering the ignorance of the masses.
Roger that. But there have to be logical rules that explain the reasons we take control away from some people. We need to be able to explain it so that they are even happy to have the control taken away. Some feel that with the current system, we are already in that situation. This mathematical paper, and some of the really excellent posts in forum here take that point into consideration.
Iduno. If you're trying to suggest that Jim Lehrer is involved in anything that is less than perfect journalistic integrity, I don't believe you. And yes, their panelists are very frequently left of center. I'm willing to watch the show despite its (minor, imho) bias, because I know that they are presenting the facts, and they are not bought and paid for.
And if you're trying to suggest that militarism is counter to american liberalism, I'd suggest you reread your history books too:) Although I'm not sure I'd call Teddy a liberal either.
In Bush's defense, I don't think his exploitation of 9-11 is cynical. I think it's naive. Ashcroft is smarter, though. When he says his detractors are helping the terrorists, he's got to know what he's doing.
If the Democratic Party wins in California, then it sends *all* 54 electors from California. Nominally, those electors can vote for whomever they like. Of course, if they ever want to work in politics again, they will vote for the Democratic candidate. The only time that I know of this not occuring is one of Reagan's electors in one of his elections voted for his opponent. It didn't matter, he won in a landslide.
This gives rise to a system in which you could win just enough states to get the presidency, but if you only win them by a low margin, while you lose every other state by a huge margin, you could be president even though your opponent had a much larger popular vote. It's never happened quite like that, although this last round, Gore's popular vote was slightly larger, and there was another election when something similar happened, a long time ago.
While I agree with the general point you're making, the way you're making it is completely wrong.
Obviously, Montana and other rural states do not get screwed, as they selected the current president. If you subtrack all the bonus electors given to states independent of population, Gore would have won in a landslide.
Bush and Gore both used different quirks of the electoral system to attempt to win. Gore tried: Win by a Hair, and Lose by a Landslide. In the states he won, he did it by thin margins. In the states he lost, he did it by large ones (mostly:). Bush used another quirk: Small States Vote Twice. Since so many of the rural states share issues, it's *not* hard to campaign to them.
If you took away only one of the quirks, so that small states don't get their bonus, Gore would have won by like (I forget) 36 or 44 electoral votes. But the actual popular vote still would have been incredibly narrow. There's no reason we should give Gore his manipulation, and not Bush.
That's not the reason that we need the electoral college, though. As other posters have suggested, it's up to the Federalist papers to convince you of that:)
Um. I thought everyone agreed that the civil war broke out due to Abraham Lincoln's election. There might have been other events that could have caused a civil war later on, but not under Douglas. What's your reasoning?
Are you just making the point that looking back at what might have happened is unuseful? Because I didn't get the feeling that they were arguing that the plurality system was *worse* due to that outcome, just different. Your example seems to be arguing that one is worse than the other. Am I wrong?
The only place that you'll get news that isn't entertainment is PBS. Everyone else's ratings are driven by personalities and shock value. CSPAN is good too, and it's not as decidedly liberal. I feel like I get the same quality news from Jon Stewart as I do from any of the other commercial television news outlets. Newspapers are better.
But the reason this is a problem isn't because of the news outlets. The reason this is a problem is because most Americans aren't concerned about the world around them, and they aren't concerned about their liberty. They are only concerned by things that have immediate effect on them. Our elections/news/government will be excellent once that changes. ie never.
That's what always cracks me up about Libertarians/Anarchists. Sure, their systems might work better... if people cared about their liberties. But if their systems are as utopian as they profess, people would necessarily immediately become complacent and unconcerned with their liberty. And there's no reason people can't *choose* to sign away their liberties in the Libertarian/Anarchist utopias. We'd be worse than we started within a decade, even if everything went the way they planned.
Eck. Enough rambling. News sucks, but it's because of the flawed society. Like you said.
Maybe my post was unclear. I don't see anything wrong with the situation.
I don't think it's a conspiracy at all. And it's not paid advertisement either. The manner in which these Intel advertising dollars were spent is interesting. The byline is at the end of these two articles, but it's not at the end of the other articles I checked. I didn't check many, so it could be a general thing, but in this case it seemed like almost a commissioned piece. That's interesting.
I got confused on my crusade with pure electric cars.
Your crusade is over. You can relax now. No more EV1s are on the road, so you don't have to worry about any mass produced electric cars in the US. None of us are discussing electric cars.
You've got to be kidding. Oil is also the only real wealth that Kuala Lampur has. Look what they've done.
If we keep paying the Saudis (et al) to fund their hate goups, we're guaranteed to witness the birth of a religious extremist superstate. And we'll still need their oil.
If we stop paying the Saudis (et al) to fund their hate groups, we may or may not witness the birth of a religious extremist superstate. But we won't need their oil so badly.
Anyway. Nice troll. I hope the upmodders know that your opinion is widely discounted.
Right, but your original post implied (unintentionally, I assume) that the current crop of hybrids weren't more economical than regular cars.
They are. It's just that they aren't more economical than a used car. Your premise is correct, though: An thrifty consumer would be out of his/her mind to buy a new car, conventional, hybrid, whatever.
I want a car that's fun to drive, with tight steering, hot acceleration, and good brakes.
So you want an import?
Amen. Grandparent poster summed up every reason I'll never own an American car. And I'm as American as... American as... burritos.
With his whole "throaty V8" comment, I felt like he was quoting that lame Ford commercial they keep running. The one where the CEO is talking like the quintissential limp-dicked businessman about how he dreams of being on the open road in his Mustang. Eugh. Gimme my grandma's Audi any day.
Yes, artificially raised prices. They got in serious trouble for it. They gave IPO shares to companies based on their transaction fees to CSFB. So you had large banks selling and rebuying their entire position several times, so they could hike up their transaction fees, and get more IPO shares. This is illegal, although unrelated to the stock price.
They also only gave IPO shares on the condition that the companies that got IPO shares would also be required to purchase the same number of shares on the open market within the first two weeks of the IPO, and they were required to hold those shares for a specified duration (like three weeks or so). This meant that the stock price spike was predetermined, with or without help from individual investors. It also meant that the stock price stayed high for much longer than it would have normally. This strange behavior mislead many many investors.
Still think I was exaggerating? They got convicted of many many counts of securities violations, and paid large fines. Everyone suspected that other ibanks/consulting firms were doing similar things to make money off the dotcom craze.
The really funny thing to me was all the media buzz about the Mafia making fake dotcoms, when it turned out that the regular ibanks were doing similar things.
Right, that's why it was interesting, not wrong. I was absolutely not suggesting that the article was not factual. The article just wouldn't have been written if Intel hadn't paid for it. It's different from a paid advertisement, but it's still worth noting.
This article is about the future of tech journalism. Notice the byline at the end? "This article is the editorial opnion of gamespy network. Sponsored by the Intel Pentium 4"
Obviously, it was a well written and insightful article. And it was about all the reasons that new games will need bigger and faster processors. And Intel paid Gamespy to write it. Interesting, not wrong.
Well. Dan didn't mention the other things that the ibanks did that were thouroughly fucked up. CSFB got fined heavily for their behavior regarding the VA Linux IPO, but it seemed at the time that they probably weren't the only offenders.
They didn't just offload risk to the market, they artificially raised prices with several different methods. It was, imho, *almost* as bad as breaking down Aunt Tillie's door, taking her money, and giving her VA Linux shares for $200 a pop. The only real difference is that they didn't break her door.
many marketing companies in London regularly go around spray-painting music artist's names onto street furniture
We don't keep our furniture in the street, so it's really not relevant. If I left my furniture in the street, I'm sure I'd expect that sort of thing too.
Correct me, but, I think the only reason that they can't do that is market demand and lack of monopoly: If Cisco wanted to put something like this in a contract when they sold you hardware, they could. No one would accept that from Cisco, because they could go with a competitor. Everyone will apparently accept that from Microsoft, because they do not.
Freenet's de facto purpose is still it's original intended purpose: To allow communication that might otherwise be controlled. There is only one constitutional general exception to our first amendment right to free speech. That is the copyright clause. Since covert channels will not be necessary for most other types of communication, of course that may be one of its original purposes.
But it's not very good for MP3 sharing. It works, but not well. Larger files are harder to keep on the network. There is no automatic indexing.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, I do not believe that it is a core principle of America. We are guaranteed equal protection under the law, but we are explicitly not guaranteed to be able to vote for our president, and we aren't guaranteed to have an equal vote for our president. We get our equal protection under the law by other means.
That said, no, it's not fair: if we were only ruled by the federal government. But we aren't. It is not "merely to preserve an artificially rurally skewed political stance." It is an attempt to maintain state's rights.
Many people really don't care about state's rights, and that's up to them. But simply weakening the presence of rural states is not fair enough. You'd have to go all the way, and go to a completely popular vote.
The point is, even if we end up with a more accurate representation of the will of the people in elections, it may not ultimately end up with what those people wanted, or what their future generations want, in the long run.
Sure, that may be the case, but pointing out one example isn't a very good way of proving it. That's why I suspected that you were just showing that looking at the past for ways things could have gone better or worse is not the most solid of foundations. For something that complicated, we really don't know.
Having the will of the people be more accurately represented could well be a very bad thing, too, considering the ignorance of the masses.
Roger that. But there have to be logical rules that explain the reasons we take control away from some people. We need to be able to explain it so that they are even happy to have the control taken away. Some feel that with the current system, we are already in that situation. This mathematical paper, and some of the really excellent posts in forum here take that point into consideration.
Iduno. If you're trying to suggest that Jim Lehrer is involved in anything that is less than perfect journalistic integrity, I don't believe you. And yes, their panelists are very frequently left of center. I'm willing to watch the show despite its (minor, imho) bias, because I know that they are presenting the facts, and they are not bought and paid for.
:) Although I'm not sure I'd call Teddy a liberal either.
And if you're trying to suggest that militarism is counter to american liberalism, I'd suggest you reread your history books too
In Bush's defense, I don't think his exploitation of 9-11 is cynical. I think it's naive. Ashcroft is smarter, though. When he says his detractors are helping the terrorists, he's got to know what he's doing.
If the Democratic Party wins in California, then it sends *all* 54 electors from California. Nominally, those electors can vote for whomever they like. Of course, if they ever want to work in politics again, they will vote for the Democratic candidate. The only time that I know of this not occuring is one of Reagan's electors in one of his elections voted for his opponent. It didn't matter, he won in a landslide.
This gives rise to a system in which you could win just enough states to get the presidency, but if you only win them by a low margin, while you lose every other state by a huge margin, you could be president even though your opponent had a much larger popular vote. It's never happened quite like that, although this last round, Gore's popular vote was slightly larger, and there was another election when something similar happened, a long time ago.
While I agree with the general point you're making, the way you're making it is completely wrong.
:). Bush used another quirk: Small States Vote Twice. Since so many of the rural states share issues, it's *not* hard to campaign to them.
:)
Obviously, Montana and other rural states do not get screwed, as they selected the current president. If you subtrack all the bonus electors given to states independent of population, Gore would have won in a landslide.
Bush and Gore both used different quirks of the electoral system to attempt to win. Gore tried: Win by a Hair, and Lose by a Landslide. In the states he won, he did it by thin margins. In the states he lost, he did it by large ones (mostly
If you took away only one of the quirks, so that small states don't get their bonus, Gore would have won by like (I forget) 36 or 44 electoral votes. But the actual popular vote still would have been incredibly narrow. There's no reason we should give Gore his manipulation, and not Bush.
That's not the reason that we need the electoral college, though. As other posters have suggested, it's up to the Federalist papers to convince you of that
Um. I thought everyone agreed that the civil war broke out due to Abraham Lincoln's election. There might have been other events that could have caused a civil war later on, but not under Douglas. What's your reasoning?
Are you just making the point that looking back at what might have happened is unuseful? Because I didn't get the feeling that they were arguing that the plurality system was *worse* due to that outcome, just different. Your example seems to be arguing that one is worse than the other. Am I wrong?
The only place that you'll get news that isn't entertainment is PBS. Everyone else's ratings are driven by personalities and shock value. CSPAN is good too, and it's not as decidedly liberal. I feel like I get the same quality news from Jon Stewart as I do from any of the other commercial television news outlets. Newspapers are better.
But the reason this is a problem isn't because of the news outlets. The reason this is a problem is because most Americans aren't concerned about the world around them, and they aren't concerned about their liberty. They are only concerned by things that have immediate effect on them. Our elections/news/government will be excellent once that changes. ie never.
That's what always cracks me up about Libertarians/Anarchists. Sure, their systems might work better... if people cared about their liberties. But if their systems are as utopian as they profess, people would necessarily immediately become complacent and unconcerned with their liberty. And there's no reason people can't *choose* to sign away their liberties in the Libertarian/Anarchist utopias. We'd be worse than we started within a decade, even if everything went the way they planned.
Eck. Enough rambling. News sucks, but it's because of the flawed society. Like you said.
Maybe my post was unclear. I don't see anything wrong with the situation.
I don't think it's a conspiracy at all. And it's not paid advertisement either. The manner in which these Intel advertising dollars were spent is interesting. The byline is at the end of these two articles, but it's not at the end of the other articles I checked. I didn't check many, so it could be a general thing, but in this case it seemed like almost a commissioned piece. That's interesting.
O.k. you are right.
I got confused on my crusade with pure electric cars.
Your crusade is over. You can relax now. No more EV1s are on the road, so you don't have to worry about any mass produced electric cars in the US. None of us are discussing electric cars.
You've got to be kidding. Oil is also the only real wealth that Kuala Lampur has. Look what they've done.
If we keep paying the Saudis (et al) to fund their hate goups, we're guaranteed to witness the birth of a religious extremist superstate. And we'll still need their oil.
If we stop paying the Saudis (et al) to fund their hate groups, we may or may not witness the birth of a religious extremist superstate. But we won't need their oil so badly.
Anyway. Nice troll. I hope the upmodders know that your opinion is widely discounted.
If you're an environmentalist, you aren't buying a new car anyway. You're buying a high MPG used car. Donate the money you save to a cause.
Right, but your original post implied (unintentionally, I assume) that the current crop of hybrids weren't more economical than regular cars.
They are. It's just that they aren't more economical than a used car. Your premise is correct, though: An thrifty consumer would be out of his/her mind to buy a new car, conventional, hybrid, whatever.
With his whole "throaty V8" comment, I felt like he was quoting that lame Ford commercial they keep running. The one where the CEO is talking like the quintissential limp-dicked businessman about how he dreams of being on the open road in his Mustang. Eugh. Gimme my grandma's Audi any day.
Yes, artificially raised prices. They got in serious trouble for it. They gave IPO shares to companies based on their transaction fees to CSFB. So you had large banks selling and rebuying their entire position several times, so they could hike up their transaction fees, and get more IPO shares. This is illegal, although unrelated to the stock price.
They also only gave IPO shares on the condition that the companies that got IPO shares would also be required to purchase the same number of shares on the open market within the first two weeks of the IPO, and they were required to hold those shares for a specified duration (like three weeks or so). This meant that the stock price spike was predetermined, with or without help from individual investors. It also meant that the stock price stayed high for much longer than it would have normally. This strange behavior mislead many many investors.
Still think I was exaggerating? They got convicted of many many counts of securities violations, and paid large fines. Everyone suspected that other ibanks/consulting firms were doing similar things to make money off the dotcom craze.
The really funny thing to me was all the media buzz about the Mafia making fake dotcoms, when it turned out that the regular ibanks were doing similar things.
Right, that's why it was interesting, not wrong. I was absolutely not suggesting that the article was not factual. The article just wouldn't have been written if Intel hadn't paid for it. It's different from a paid advertisement, but it's still worth noting.
This article is about the future of tech journalism. Notice the byline at the end? "This article is the editorial opnion of gamespy network. Sponsored by the Intel Pentium 4"
Obviously, it was a well written and insightful article. And it was about all the reasons that new games will need bigger and faster processors. And Intel paid Gamespy to write it. Interesting, not wrong.
Well. Dan didn't mention the other things that the ibanks did that were thouroughly fucked up. CSFB got fined heavily for their behavior regarding the VA Linux IPO, but it seemed at the time that they probably weren't the only offenders.
They didn't just offload risk to the market, they artificially raised prices with several different methods. It was, imho, *almost* as bad as breaking down Aunt Tillie's door, taking her money, and giving her VA Linux shares for $200 a pop. The only real difference is that they didn't break her door.
many marketing companies in London regularly go around spray-painting music artist's names onto street furniture
We don't keep our furniture in the street, so it's really not relevant. If I left my furniture in the street, I'm sure I'd expect that sort of thing too.
On that tip:
;(
A rendezvous based chat solution that uses a public key/private key to do authentication.
I wonder if that'd be too much overhead
Correct me, but, I think the only reason that they can't do that is market demand and lack of monopoly: If Cisco wanted to put something like this in a contract when they sold you hardware, they could. No one would accept that from Cisco, because they could go with a competitor. Everyone will apparently accept that from Microsoft, because they do not.
I love Frank Miller's "Superman as a prissy bitch".
These chips will be big, I guarantee it, and not just for Apple.
Don't guarantee it 'till you see the prices for the chips. The G4 is pretty expensive.
I gave up on futurists when Alvin Toffler predicted that "in the future" we'd wear paper clothing.
I mean, maybe he's right. But who cares?
That's a steaming pile of bullshit.
Freenet's de facto purpose is still it's original intended purpose: To allow communication that might otherwise be controlled. There is only one constitutional general exception to our first amendment right to free speech. That is the copyright clause. Since covert channels will not be necessary for most other types of communication, of course that may be one of its original purposes.
But it's not very good for MP3 sharing. It works, but not well. Larger files are harder to keep on the network. There is no automatic indexing.