My manifesto: Domestic: 1. Rename my title from 'President' to 'Evil Overlord'. Honesty in advertising. 2. Legalize Guns, drugs, and prostitution. 3. Regulate & tax guns, drugs, and prostitution. 3a. The tax would be $1 per barrel, joint, or deposit;) 3b. Regulations would be that the guns don't explode, the drugs are cut with safe materials at consistant potency, and the hookers are clean. And partakers must be at least 18. 3c. Resultant taxes would go to fund gun safety courses, drug treatment centers, and hooker education and medical treatment. 4. $1B per year goes towards building new nuclear plants, one each of the new types approved. 4a. Each plant will be dedicated towards eliminating the dirtiest plant currently in operation. 4b. Some funding will go towards ensuring the necessary fuel is available. 4c. Once the plants are built, the funding will go towards reprocessing technologies and plants 4d. Heck with it, $1B to 'renewable electric power', with an additional $1B going towards whoever managed to produce the most kwh the previous year, relative to funding. So if solar/wind wins(probably will the first year), they get $2B the next year. The fourth year nuclear wins when their plants finally come online. 4e. The first project to be started on the renewable side will be the off-shore windfarm Kennedy killed. 5. ANWAR and the gulf are getting drilled; however I'll also dedicate $200M or so each towards developing cellulostic ethanol, biodiesel, and plankton fuel production. 6. $1B towards developing/deploying a functional PRT system in the cities, including cross-links. Gotta have something to put the new power towards. 7. Draw down corporate and personal welfare. I want results for the citizen's money. 8. Get rid of income taxes in favor of a sales tax such as fairtax. If people still need welfare to keep from starving, that should be provided directly with an eye towards getting them to be self sufficient. 9. Lock down the borders to prevent criminals from crossing. 10. Reform legal immigration to make it much easier. 11. Add gun safety to school courses along with driver and sex ed.
Foreign Policy: 1. I'm afraid that we're stuck in Afghanistan and Iraq for a while. I'd turn up pressure until incidents are low enough that I can start drawing down the troops. I figure we're stuck there for at least the next 2 decades, unless we want them to collapse like Afghanistan did and cause problems a couple decades down the road again. 2. Point out to foreign leaders that I'm in control of the nation's weapons, and that I LIKE big explosions. By the way, it's not 'President Firethorn', it's 'Evil Overlord Firethorn'. Hint Hint. 3. On the other hand, follow a strict policy of mutual benefit and keeping of promises/policies. 4. End world aid in favor of picking a country/area and improving it to at least 2nd world status before moving on to the next one. Pick the worst area we can reasonable help.
Nebraska realized this back in the '30s (when money was tight) and went unicameral.
Heh. Believe it or not, but there's a group trying to get them to go bicameral again. Problem is, they can't seem to present any solid evidence that it'd be superior.
Meanwhile we have a nice, never used, senate room in the capital building. Talk about 'they don't make it like they used to'!
I like the idea of giving the Senate back to the indivual state congresses. Might get a bunch in there to help limit federal power.
Maybe make the house proportional instead. Out of 435 members, you should be able to get somebody who represents you very well.
Some of this could also be attributed to China's relative lack of safety standards, resulting in more dead people suitable for organ 'donation'. But it's also that 'donation' is more or less mandatory there, and death penalty cases are not exempt.
With this in mind, I do not think Mr. Niven's idea is quaint or naive at all.
The only think preventing Niven's scenario being widespread today is a strong ethical background. The only reasons that it doesn't happen more is that the west has a strong ethical background, while areas that don't generally aren't up to transplanting organs.
Now, to approach from a more contrarian angle - a stronger organ donation requirement can save lives, so it could be considered ethical. Still, these are quandries to be decided on by boards of doctors, scholars, potential donors and patients.
This is partially why I welcome this development so much - It helps eliminate so many ethical concerns.
Sure, growing a pig* in special conditions to provide the donor structure** to grow a new heart or other organ is expensive, but this way we don't have to wait for a tragedy to provide a rescue. Once perfected, this could kill conventional organ transplants completely - Would you want to have to take immune suppression drugs for the rest of your life, and still risk rejection? Or have a heart grown from your own tissues, eliminating that risk?
When it comes down to it though, I wouldn't be surprised if they manage some sort of printing process for the organ structure - not need a donor organ to decell at all.
*or other suitable animal **While having the cells of a different animal is pretty much a sure path towards rejection, it is generally possible to transplant non-cellular structures like bone without rejection. If nothing else, it could be temporary as the body changes out the structure of the organ during normal 'maintenance', meaning you only need to take the drugs for a few months/years.
To say that Niven predicted that synthetical organs wouldn't be possible for hundreds of years
My point was that he didn't think of it. Just like how writers of the 50s tended to make computers huge, because the computers of the day were huge, and getting larger as their power increased.
Heck, if we went back to the days of analogue cell phones, when pagers outnumbered actual phones 100 to 1, and told you that your phone would eventually have a camera and a music player, and you could surf(selected parts, at least) the web with it, would you believe us?
We can't predict how life will be like hundreds of years in the future with any accuracy. Heck we're doing good to get a 50% rate in the next 10 years.
development still has a very long way to go before it will be truly useful.
You might be surprised. I wouldn't be surprised if it happens in my lifetime.
They noted that the hearts were beating within 8 days - while I presume it might take longer for effective beating, I could see specially prepared pig hearts be decelled and then reseeded with stem cells from the human patient. A month later, they transplant, with no lingering need for immune suppression drugs.
While fusion is still two decades away, at least to me this seems to be at the '10 year' point. They merely have to ensure effective pumping of blood and get the process to work with human cells.
While they're doing this, perform test transplants with pigs where you create a replacement heart for a pig, then transplant the duplicate into the pig and see how it works.
After that, it's time to find a potential human recipient.
In this case, I figure that the creator was going for serious SciFi, not just a mcguffin to make the story interesting. You just have to remember that even the most expert SciFi writer isn't going to be 100% of on the science of his day - much less how it'll play out in the future.
Wikipedia placed the publish date of "The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton" in 1976, The first successful kidney transplant was in 1954(for identical twins, so no rejection)and the first human heart & liver transplants were in 1967.
So, at the time the story was written - humanity seemed to be on a steady march towards being able to transplant more and more organs. Cloning hadn't made the news yet. Stem cells were hardly known to the public.
So I could see an author, in 1976, positing that eventually our desire for replacement organs might warp society a bit. The usage of convicts sentenced to death for this would be the mcguffin, as would the expansion of death penalty cases.
Meanwhile, 30 years later we're getting close to being able to clone (just)organs, we've discovered making computers fast and small is easier than large and smart, we have NOT conquered the human mind, space, or the sea like the writers of the '50s thought.
At least we aren't quite as screwed up as the author of 'soylent green' would have you believe.
he proposed solution is DRM-free high quality tracks, where *if* you leak it onto a file-sharing site, then you can be traced. How is this a bad thing?
Aside from the paranoids worrying about the RIAA framing people by faking watermarks or having stolen tracks posted up with watermarks intact, I think many think this is a very good thing.
I think that this is a very good thing.
Personally, I'm a bit interested in ways to crack/disable watermarks the same way that I'm interested in picking locks or breaking encryption. It's because it's a neat challenge.
How about the kitchen knife you threw away six months ago because you bought a better set?
There are indeed issues, but it's still leagues above DRM that restricts your ability to use your stuff.
Just make sure that if somebody steals your MP3 player that you report it stolen so the music companies are forced to shrug when they show up on the file sharing systems.
then if you have two files from two different users, you can bitwise-or, zero-out, or otherwise destroy the information wherever the bits differ between the files. Since they're necessarily in an insignificant part of the signal, the music probably won't sound noticeably different.
Better yet- go with 3 versions, and take the majority opinion on it.
As any such maneuver is going to have to leave the vast majority of the signal alone, you'd have relatively few intersecting bits that are part of the signal - and about as effective in court as a blood type match or extremely partial fingerprint as vs a DNA match or full fingerprint.
Yes, but we're most likely talking about decades here.
For example, if you cut the price of bio/petro diesel in half relative to gasoline, I could easily see 50% of the vehicles on the road being diesel within 5 years.
A diesel-electric hybrid would be capable of some scary efficiency and low emissions. Most pollution from diesels are from them operating out of their ideal powerband.
It's easy to design a diesel engine optimized for a constant RPM and load that'll last halfway to forever that gets high efficiencies. The electric motor can provide temporary boosts when you need more power.
First, unless there is some undiscovered land in the US, you will be paying more taxes on a state and local level by far then your federal income tax levels. If your worried about taxes, you should really be paying attention there.
Do you count North Dakota as 'undiscovered'?
Now, if you live in a state like New Hampshire that has shirked it's responsibilities to fund education and only provide 8-10 percent of their school funding relying on the federal contributions, claiming that federal funding is the majority of educational funding is outright misleading.
I didn't. I said 'almost as much'. IE the majority of the funding is state level, but a good chunck comes from the feds.
I don't know, but I do know that you would be in for a serious surprise in my state where the state funds the bulk of school funding and taxes at the local level outweigh the federal income tax by far.
Different states, different tax loads. Now, I don't want to go blaring out my tax sitation, and it's not final as I haven't filed yet, but my state withholding last year was 16% of my federal withholding. Add on real estate taxes(I own my house) increases it to 20%. Sales tax might get it up roughly to 50%. But not even matching.
We don't want politicians to represent people directly, there are often too many decisions that we don't have enough information on to achive a proper decision or the issues are too complex for us to understand in th context they come up in, or probably the most important reason, we all to often want to have things happen because of greed without consideration of others that might be effected.
The congresscritter's position in congress IS to represent us though, at least by proxy. Otherwise, why bother having elections?
You have touched way to many topic that I wish to address here. Now I agree with a lot of them and disagree with some. I even have some of them that I can explain away quite nicely. We are actually not that different on political stands.
It's a one paragraph brief of many of my views. I realize that we're going to disagree on some of them, I didn't get into nuances at all. You could critique them, of course, but beware that I have many reasons for my standpoints.
But the interesting thing about this is that I never get a guy that represents me entirely. My father probably never gets someone who represents him and he doesn't even know the difference. Your not alone in this at all.
I said stuff like 'good match', not perfect match. I'm not asking for somebody who agrees with me entirely, but one that hits 80% or so and doesn't give me the screeming heebies with the stuff they disagree with me on would be really nice.
I've also proposed having a house of repeals at times. The idea is that they only have the power to repeal law - so all the libertarian types run for those offices, and take a hacksaw to the budget each year, theoretically trimming out all the constitution and budget busting items.
[quote]Of course how do you elect people to represent people who aren't voting, I'm not sure honestly, but if it would be possible it would truly shake up the political world.[/quote]
Give their votes to their parents until they reach adulthood? At least most parents are looking out for their kid's best interests.
Personally, I don't have any problem with the apathy party not getting any representation, and kid's representation being folded into their parent's.
We already see far too much of 'It's for the CHILDREN!!!!'.
upscaled images would still be inferior to images from the original source at that scale.
One of my personal irks is the unlimited image enhancement many CSI type shows engage in. You can only upscale so much. Though the killer was the one movie that got details by rotating the viewpoint by 90 degrees.
The feds seems to be acting more important then they actually are.
I think that the deciding factor for me is that I pay more in federal income taxes than I do in state taxes, period.
That the local schools depend almost as much on federal money as they do on state money.
Etc...
As for proportional voting, I don't think it is a good idea at all. We elect our senate to represent us.
I consider myself a libertarian. I do this because it's the party that's closest to my beliefs(I still think that they're nuts in some ways). In a two party system regional system, any one candidate is unlikely to fit any one of those he represents very closely.
The idea of having a proportional Senate would be that, out of a 100 Senators I'm far more likely to have somebody who represents me.
I'm: for small government with a balanced budget, legalized®ulated drugs, legalized®ulated prostitution, pro-choice, pro-death penalty, ambivalent about religion(though those that let religion lead their actions scare me), pro-gun, pro-self defense, for high penalties for violent offenses, think that we need to seal our borders against illegals while fixing our legal immigration system(to make it much easier to come here legally), and think that we shouldn't be leaving Afghanistan or Iraq anytime soon, as I think we need to finish the job, no matter our starting cause, - and that includes getting the government strong enough to stand on it's own. That we need to draw down both the corporate and personal welfare systems, while retaining a safety net for those who're unavoidably struck by tragic circumstances(call it the widows&orphan fund). It should be a NET, not a hammock. Gay marriage - why is the government in the marriage business at all? Civil unions for all, if you want to consider yourself married, find a priest(or priestess or whatever else) willing to perform that religious ceremony. Use the opportunity to clean up the marriage/divorce law structure while you're at it. The fairtax looks like a really good idea to me, but simplifying the income tax would work as well.
I could go on, but given my views, how likely am I to have a representative that fits me under the regional two party system? I went to one of the presidential candidate sites - the closest match, out of a dozen candidates, was 66% percent! How much of a chance do I have of getting a good match under a regional system with only two contendors from the major parties? Pretty much none.
It's not clear to me that this was ever not the case.
For about the first hundred years it was quite possible for somebody to never have to deal with the federal government. It would mostly be government officials and larger businesses that dealt interstate that had to worry about it.
It actually wasn't until around WWI that it started changing to the point that State governments started having less impact than the feds in our daily lives.
How about leaving the house be geographically selected, and the Senate proportional?
That way you still have geographic representation for regional issues, yet also have a branch that's more concerned with national issues.
IE you could get more greens elected from the portion of the populace concerned with global warming, and more libertarians from those who want to see smaller government, etc...
Might help reign in the pork a bit. Senators X, Y, and Z won't be as beholden to bring pork back to any specific region, while members of the house of representatives wouldn't normally be too beholden to any one special interest group.
I think he was referring to a system very similar to the initial way the vice president was selected - the guy who placed second became vice.
The obvious problem is that you would often have very dissimilar president and vice president, I mean, can you imagine Bush with Kerry as a vice? I'd expect somebody to get killed!
As for me, a 1 vote, the top X make it, You could have representatives X1, X2, Y1, and Y2. Everybody in party X LOVES X1, likes X2. Everybody in party Y likes both Y1 and Y2. The state is ~70% X. They have 3 districts. I'm ignoring small parties and independents for the moment.
80% of party X vote for X1 - 56% of the vote 20% vote for X2 - 14% 50% of party Y vote for Y1 - 15% 50% vote for Y2 - 15%
1 X and 2 Y are chosen as representatives when state demographics would normally call for 2 X and 1 Y.
Nor can you go with a simple 'Vote for your top 3'. Then the majority is back to taking everything. I think that that's why in proportional systems you vote for the party or list instead of individuals.
This makes me wonder, what if we kept the house of representatives(435) regional, while throwing the Senate(100) to proportional voting.
IE if the libertarian part got 5% of the vote, they'd get 5 seats.
That way you'd still have regional representation, but even the little guys who're spread out over the country would get a voice.
On the other hand, I'm currently thinking that returning the senate to selection by the individual state's congresses might not be a bad idea. In the original system, the Senate was the voice of the state governments - which would tend to put some brakes on the expansion of federal power.
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Sorry, while I hang around on Oleg's boards a lot, my initials are not O.V., nor have I founded a training organization.
I simply believe in Oleg's cause enough to include a link in my sig.
My manifesto: ;)
Domestic:
1. Rename my title from 'President' to 'Evil Overlord'. Honesty in advertising.
2. Legalize Guns, drugs, and prostitution.
3. Regulate & tax guns, drugs, and prostitution.
3a. The tax would be $1 per barrel, joint, or deposit
3b. Regulations would be that the guns don't explode, the drugs are cut with safe materials at consistant potency, and the hookers are clean. And partakers must be at least 18.
3c. Resultant taxes would go to fund gun safety courses, drug treatment centers, and hooker education and medical treatment.
4. $1B per year goes towards building new nuclear plants, one each of the new types approved.
4a. Each plant will be dedicated towards eliminating the dirtiest plant currently in operation.
4b. Some funding will go towards ensuring the necessary fuel is available.
4c. Once the plants are built, the funding will go towards reprocessing technologies and plants
4d. Heck with it, $1B to 'renewable electric power', with an additional $1B going towards whoever managed to produce the most kwh the previous year, relative to funding. So if solar/wind wins(probably will the first year), they get $2B the next year. The fourth year nuclear wins when their plants finally come online.
4e. The first project to be started on the renewable side will be the off-shore windfarm Kennedy killed.
5. ANWAR and the gulf are getting drilled; however I'll also dedicate $200M or so each towards developing cellulostic ethanol, biodiesel, and plankton fuel production.
6. $1B towards developing/deploying a functional PRT system in the cities, including cross-links. Gotta have something to put the new power towards.
7. Draw down corporate and personal welfare. I want results for the citizen's money.
8. Get rid of income taxes in favor of a sales tax such as fairtax. If people still need welfare to keep from starving, that should be provided directly with an eye towards getting them to be self sufficient.
9. Lock down the borders to prevent criminals from crossing.
10. Reform legal immigration to make it much easier.
11. Add gun safety to school courses along with driver and sex ed.
Foreign Policy:
1. I'm afraid that we're stuck in Afghanistan and Iraq for a while. I'd turn up pressure until incidents are low enough that I can start drawing down the troops. I figure we're stuck there for at least the next 2 decades, unless we want them to collapse like Afghanistan did and cause problems a couple decades down the road again.
2. Point out to foreign leaders that I'm in control of the nation's weapons, and that I LIKE big explosions. By the way, it's not 'President Firethorn', it's 'Evil Overlord Firethorn'. Hint Hint.
3. On the other hand, follow a strict policy of mutual benefit and keeping of promises/policies.
4. End world aid in favor of picking a country/area and improving it to at least 2nd world status before moving on to the next one. Pick the worst area we can reasonable help.
I haven't seen any yet, but the primaries aren't even done yet, and most 3rd party movements only put one person up anyways.
Nebraska realized this back in the '30s (when money was tight) and went unicameral.
Heh. Believe it or not, but there's a group trying to get them to go bicameral again. Problem is, they can't seem to present any solid evidence that it'd be superior.
Meanwhile we have a nice, never used, senate room in the capital building. Talk about 'they don't make it like they used to'!
I like the idea of giving the Senate back to the indivual state congresses. Might get a bunch in there to help limit federal power.
Maybe make the house proportional instead. Out of 435 members, you should be able to get somebody who represents you very well.
Good point WhiteWolf.
Some of this could also be attributed to China's relative lack of safety standards, resulting in more dead people suitable for organ 'donation'. But it's also that 'donation' is more or less mandatory there, and death penalty cases are not exempt.
With this in mind, I do not think Mr. Niven's idea is quaint or naive at all.
The only think preventing Niven's scenario being widespread today is a strong ethical background. The only reasons that it doesn't happen more is that the west has a strong ethical background, while areas that don't generally aren't up to transplanting organs.
Now, to approach from a more contrarian angle - a stronger organ donation requirement can save lives, so it could be considered ethical. Still, these are quandries to be decided on by boards of doctors, scholars, potential donors and patients.
This is partially why I welcome this development so much - It helps eliminate so many ethical concerns.
Sure, growing a pig* in special conditions to provide the donor structure** to grow a new heart or other organ is expensive, but this way we don't have to wait for a tragedy to provide a rescue. Once perfected, this could kill conventional organ transplants completely - Would you want to have to take immune suppression drugs for the rest of your life, and still risk rejection? Or have a heart grown from your own tissues, eliminating that risk?
When it comes down to it though, I wouldn't be surprised if they manage some sort of printing process for the organ structure - not need a donor organ to decell at all.
*or other suitable animal
**While having the cells of a different animal is pretty much a sure path towards rejection, it is generally possible to transplant non-cellular structures like bone without rejection. If nothing else, it could be temporary as the body changes out the structure of the organ during normal 'maintenance', meaning you only need to take the drugs for a few months/years.
To say that Niven predicted that synthetical organs wouldn't be possible for hundreds of years
My point was that he didn't think of it. Just like how writers of the 50s tended to make computers huge, because the computers of the day were huge, and getting larger as their power increased.
Heck, if we went back to the days of analogue cell phones, when pagers outnumbered actual phones 100 to 1, and told you that your phone would eventually have a camera and a music player, and you could surf(selected parts, at least) the web with it, would you believe us?
We can't predict how life will be like hundreds of years in the future with any accuracy. Heck we're doing good to get a 50% rate in the next 10 years.
development still has a very long way to go before it will be truly useful.
You might be surprised. I wouldn't be surprised if it happens in my lifetime.
They noted that the hearts were beating within 8 days - while I presume it might take longer for effective beating, I could see specially prepared pig hearts be decelled and then reseeded with stem cells from the human patient. A month later, they transplant, with no lingering need for immune suppression drugs.
While fusion is still two decades away, at least to me this seems to be at the '10 year' point. They merely have to ensure effective pumping of blood and get the process to work with human cells.
While they're doing this, perform test transplants with pigs where you create a replacement heart for a pig, then transplant the duplicate into the pig and see how it works.
After that, it's time to find a potential human recipient.
In this case, I figure that the creator was going for serious SciFi, not just a mcguffin to make the story interesting. You just have to remember that even the most expert SciFi writer isn't going to be 100% of on the science of his day - much less how it'll play out in the future.
Wikipedia placed the publish date of "The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton" in 1976, The first successful kidney transplant was in 1954(for identical twins, so no rejection)and the first human heart & liver transplants were in 1967.
So, at the time the story was written - humanity seemed to be on a steady march towards being able to transplant more and more organs. Cloning hadn't made the news yet. Stem cells were hardly known to the public.
So I could see an author, in 1976, positing that eventually our desire for replacement organs might warp society a bit. The usage of convicts sentenced to death for this would be the mcguffin, as would the expansion of death penalty cases.
Meanwhile, 30 years later we're getting close to being able to clone (just)organs, we've discovered making computers fast and small is easier than large and smart, we have NOT conquered the human mind, space, or the sea like the writers of the '50s thought.
At least we aren't quite as screwed up as the author of 'soylent green' would have you believe.
he proposed solution is DRM-free high quality tracks, where *if* you leak it onto a file-sharing site, then you can be traced. How is this a bad thing?
Aside from the paranoids worrying about the RIAA framing people by faking watermarks or having stolen tracks posted up with watermarks intact, I think many think this is a very good thing.
I think that this is a very good thing.
Personally, I'm a bit interested in ways to crack/disable watermarks the same way that I'm interested in picking locks or breaking encryption. It's because it's a neat challenge.
Even after you've averaged three copies together?
Only what at least two copies have in common would remain intact.
We're talking bit comparisons here - massive redundancy gains you nothing.
On the other hand it's like how useful gun registration ideas are - when most of the guns used in crimes are stolen.
Sure, they can track it back to Joe homeowner... Who reported it stolen in a burglary six months ago.
How would you like to be sued for copyright infringement when somebody steals your iPod and uploads all your files.
Just the scenario is enough to make gaining convictions on that detail alone almost impossible.
How about the kitchen knife you threw away six months ago because you bought a better set?
There are indeed issues, but it's still leagues above DRM that restricts your ability to use your stuff.
Just make sure that if somebody steals your MP3 player that you report it stolen so the music companies are forced to shrug when they show up on the file sharing systems.
then if you have two files from two different users, you can bitwise-or, zero-out, or otherwise destroy the information wherever the bits differ between the files. Since they're necessarily in an insignificant part of the signal, the music probably won't sound noticeably different.
Better yet- go with 3 versions, and take the majority opinion on it.
As any such maneuver is going to have to leave the vast majority of the signal alone, you'd have relatively few intersecting bits that are part of the signal - and about as effective in court as a blood type match or extremely partial fingerprint as vs a DNA match or full fingerprint.
I seriously doubt every single byte is changed, but I can see each block of music being changed.
Still, the changes have to be tiny - especially if you're going to be creating millions of watermarks.
I'd tend to think that if you have at least 3 copies with different watermarks you'd be able to effectively strip the watermarking.
Just keep the sections that any two have, drop the third.
More copies would make it more robust, of course.
Do their cruise missiles even work without GPS?
Yes, they do.
Yes, but we're most likely talking about decades here.
For example, if you cut the price of bio/petro diesel in half relative to gasoline, I could easily see 50% of the vehicles on the road being diesel within 5 years.
A diesel-electric hybrid would be capable of some scary efficiency and low emissions. Most pollution from diesels are from them operating out of their ideal powerband.
It's easy to design a diesel engine optimized for a constant RPM and load that'll last halfway to forever that gets high efficiencies. The electric motor can provide temporary boosts when you need more power.
First, unless there is some undiscovered land in the US, you will be paying more taxes on a state and local level by far then your federal income tax levels. If your worried about taxes, you should really be paying attention there.
Do you count North Dakota as 'undiscovered'?
Now, if you live in a state like New Hampshire that has shirked it's responsibilities to fund education and only provide 8-10 percent of their school funding relying on the federal contributions, claiming that federal funding is the majority of educational funding is outright misleading.
I didn't. I said 'almost as much'. IE the majority of the funding is state level, but a good chunck comes from the feds.
I don't know, but I do know that you would be in for a serious surprise in my state where the state funds the bulk of school funding and taxes at the local level outweigh the federal income tax by far.
Different states, different tax loads. Now, I don't want to go blaring out my tax sitation, and it's not final as I haven't filed yet, but my state withholding last year was 16% of my federal withholding. Add on real estate taxes(I own my house) increases it to 20%. Sales tax might get it up roughly to 50%. But not even matching.
We don't want politicians to represent people directly, there are often too many decisions that we don't have enough information on to achive a proper decision or the issues are too complex for us to understand in th context they come up in, or probably the most important reason, we all to often want to have things happen because of greed without consideration of others that might be effected.
The congresscritter's position in congress IS to represent us though, at least by proxy. Otherwise, why bother having elections?
You have touched way to many topic that I wish to address here. Now I agree with a lot of them and disagree with some. I even have some of them that I can explain away quite nicely. We are actually not that different on political stands.
It's a one paragraph brief of many of my views. I realize that we're going to disagree on some of them, I didn't get into nuances at all. You could critique them, of course, but beware that I have many reasons for my standpoints.
But the interesting thing about this is that I never get a guy that represents me entirely. My father probably never gets someone who represents him and he doesn't even know the difference. Your not alone in this at all.
I said stuff like 'good match', not perfect match. I'm not asking for somebody who agrees with me entirely, but one that hits 80% or so and doesn't give me the screeming heebies with the stuff they disagree with me on would be really nice.
I've also proposed having a house of repeals at times. The idea is that they only have the power to repeal law - so all the libertarian types run for those offices, and take a hacksaw to the budget each year, theoretically trimming out all the constitution and budget busting items.
[quote]Of course how do you elect people to represent people who aren't voting, I'm not sure honestly, but if it would be possible it would truly shake up the political world.[/quote]
Give their votes to their parents until they reach adulthood? At least most parents are looking out for their kid's best interests.
Personally, I don't have any problem with the apathy party not getting any representation, and kid's representation being folded into their parent's.
We already see far too much of 'It's for the CHILDREN!!!!'.
upscaled images would still be inferior to images from the original source at that scale.
One of my personal irks is the unlimited image enhancement many CSI type shows engage in. You can only upscale so much. Though the killer was the one movie that got details by rotating the viewpoint by 90 degrees.
The feds seems to be acting more important then they actually are.
I think that the deciding factor for me is that I pay more in federal income taxes than I do in state taxes, period.
That the local schools depend almost as much on federal money as they do on state money.
Etc...
As for proportional voting, I don't think it is a good idea at all. We elect our senate to represent us.
I consider myself a libertarian. I do this because it's the party that's closest to my beliefs(I still think that they're nuts in some ways). In a two party system regional system, any one candidate is unlikely to fit any one of those he represents very closely.
The idea of having a proportional Senate would be that, out of a 100 Senators I'm far more likely to have somebody who represents me.
I'm: for small government with a balanced budget, legalized®ulated drugs, legalized®ulated prostitution, pro-choice, pro-death penalty, ambivalent about religion(though those that let religion lead their actions scare me), pro-gun, pro-self defense, for high penalties for violent offenses, think that we need to seal our borders against illegals while fixing our legal immigration system(to make it much easier to come here legally), and think that we shouldn't be leaving Afghanistan or Iraq anytime soon, as I think we need to finish the job, no matter our starting cause, - and that includes getting the government strong enough to stand on it's own. That we need to draw down both the corporate and personal welfare systems, while retaining a safety net for those who're unavoidably struck by tragic circumstances(call it the widows&orphan fund). It should be a NET, not a hammock. Gay marriage - why is the government in the marriage business at all? Civil unions for all, if you want to consider yourself married, find a priest(or priestess or whatever else) willing to perform that religious ceremony. Use the opportunity to clean up the marriage/divorce law structure while you're at it. The fairtax looks like a really good idea to me, but simplifying the income tax would work as well.
I could go on, but given my views, how likely am I to have a representative that fits me under the regional two party system? I went to one of the presidential candidate sites - the closest match, out of a dozen candidates, was 66% percent! How much of a chance do I have of getting a good match under a regional system with only two contendors from the major parties? Pretty much none.
This was built into the Constitution quite deliberately to get the smaller states on board back when the constitution was being developed.
Virginia was like the California of the time.
It's not clear to me that this was ever not the case.
For about the first hundred years it was quite possible for somebody to never have to deal with the federal government. It would mostly be government officials and larger businesses that dealt interstate that had to worry about it.
It actually wasn't until around WWI that it started changing to the point that State governments started having less impact than the feds in our daily lives.
How about leaving the house be geographically selected, and the Senate proportional?
That way you still have geographic representation for regional issues, yet also have a branch that's more concerned with national issues.
IE you could get more greens elected from the portion of the populace concerned with global warming, and more libertarians from those who want to see smaller government, etc...
Might help reign in the pork a bit. Senators X, Y, and Z won't be as beholden to bring pork back to any specific region, while members of the house of representatives wouldn't normally be too beholden to any one special interest group.
I think he was referring to a system very similar to the initial way the vice president was selected - the guy who placed second became vice.
The obvious problem is that you would often have very dissimilar president and vice president, I mean, can you imagine Bush with Kerry as a vice? I'd expect somebody to get killed!
As for me, a 1 vote, the top X make it, You could have representatives X1, X2, Y1, and Y2. Everybody in party X LOVES X1, likes X2. Everybody in party Y likes both Y1 and Y2. The state is ~70% X. They have 3 districts. I'm ignoring small parties and independents for the moment.
80% of party X vote for X1 - 56% of the vote
20% vote for X2 - 14%
50% of party Y vote for Y1 - 15%
50% vote for Y2 - 15%
1 X and 2 Y are chosen as representatives when state demographics would normally call for 2 X and 1 Y.
Nor can you go with a simple 'Vote for your top 3'. Then the majority is back to taking everything. I think that that's why in proportional systems you vote for the party or list instead of individuals.
This makes me wonder, what if we kept the house of representatives(435) regional, while throwing the Senate(100) to proportional voting.
IE if the libertarian part got 5% of the vote, they'd get 5 seats.
That way you'd still have regional representation, but even the little guys who're spread out over the country would get a voice.
On the other hand, I'm currently thinking that returning the senate to selection by the individual state's congresses might not be a bad idea. In the original system, the Senate was the voice of the state governments - which would tend to put some brakes on the expansion of federal power.