depends on whether you are talking specifically about electricity/fossil fuels, or conservation in general. conservation is still critical, regardless of what you may think about electric bills. los angeles turned significant portions of california into a desert trying to meet the water needs of their rapidly growing artificial oasis. at one point there were concrete plans to divert the entire flow of the colorado river across the state to supply more water to l.a. (see the movie chinatown starring jack nicholson for a somewhat fictionalized account of some of the problems supplying water to southern california in the 1970's) eventually they realized that rather than draining most of the western united states they needed to start looking at ways to reduce their water consumption. now the same thing is starting to hapen in colorado as the front range of the rockies, and denver in particular, is one of the fastest growing areas in the united states. of course, as far as i can tell, the only thing people care about here is whether they'll have enough water to run the snow machines at vail, breckenridge, keystone, etc.
some studies have indicated that although use of pesticides and modified foods can increase the crop yield of a field substantially, the actual nutritional value of the food grown in the field does not change. in other words, although you may get twice as many bushels of corn from a field, you would have to eat twice as much of it to get the same nutritional content.
personally, i'm not sure how true this is- it something i heard secondhand, so i can't even cite the study. but it does make sense in that most nutrients in our crops come from the soil, which doesn't get more nutrients from the genetic modifications.
i think it is definitely an issue that deserves more oversight before we rush off to enhance all of our crops.
You never touched my fundamental point: A state deciding to split it's vote will be weakening it's own power on the national level. Why would any state do this, unless they knew that all the other states would be weakened at the same time?
First of all, you are once again treating states as atomic decision making units, which they are not.
Second, two states already made the decision to split their electoral vote a long time ago (maybe always? i'm not sure) and a third is about to vote on whether or not to do it. Whether or not they are big or small states is beside the point- you ask why any state would do it. Regardless of the why, the fact is it has happened, and may happen again soon. That is enough for me to believe it is possible for other states to do it as well.
Finally, i have never stated that i believe this to be likely to happen. i have only said that i believe it is more likely to happen than a constitutional ammendment. if you believe that the only acceptable improvement to the electoral system is a constitutional ammendment, than i believe you are going to be disappointed in the electoral system for a long time to come. i will be in support of such a constitutional ammendment if one is proposed, but i will also gladly support other measures to improve the electoral system in the meantime.
And, as a footnote... What, and give up being swing states? They LOVE it.
Apparently, in at least one swing state there are a significant number of voters who would rather have their votes count toward the candidate they support than to have the candidates hold a televised debate in their state.
Yes, it's a mix of people, of different parties. But one of those parties has the majority. In every state, there is always one party or the other with a majority of the legislature.
of course there is always one party or the other with a majority. but which party often changes over time. it's not always the same party in the majority. plus, such a law wouldn't have to be passed by the state legislature. most states (and i know california is one of them) allow the people to vote laws into effect on the ballot. so even if the democrats control the state legislature, there are enough republicans in the state that such a measure could be approved, especially if they were upset enough about something to turn out to vote in higher numbers than the democrats.
How can you imagine that any Democrat this year would be willing to give Bush the Whitehouse, just for the vague hope of encouraging a mildly fairer electoral system in the distant future?
it wouldn't have to be in favor of the republicans. suppose a republican state was the first to break. texas may be too much to hope for, but what of the other southern states. florida is pretty evenly divided right now, and bush has alienated an awful lot of traditionally conservative voters as well as pissing off an awful lot of democrats. a proposal to split the electoral vote could be popular there. and at any rate, it's probably too late for this to happen in any states that haven't already started considering it, so invoking bush is probably not relevant.
at any rate, states that usually go strongly one way or theother are not the states where this is likely to take hold. this isn't going to start out in states like california, new ork, texas or illinois. The places where this is going to start happening are in the swing states, where votors on both sides are more likely to get fed up with their state going all one way or all the other. states like colorado. and splitting the electoral votes a large swing state like florida or michigan right down the middle will have a much larger effect on the u.s. electoral system than splitting the votes of texas or new york 65/35.
one of the reasons i think that this is more likely to change on a state by state basis is that states can pass laws either through the legislature or by referendum, where amendments must be approved by both congress and the state legislatures (which are more likely to be interested in maintaining the status quo). it's also a change that i believe could happen in our lifetime, because it can start happening right now.
except california is not a person. california is a mix of people who have differing opinions and political beliefs. and california has not always voted democrat, either. for example, they have a republican governor now, or did you miss that? There are an awful lot of republicans in california too, and i'm sure that they would love to see their votes reflected more directly in the electoral college. (when i used to live there, i knew a lot of people who joked that california should be split accross the middle into democratic california and republican california, a la north and south korea.) yes, that would shift the balance of power accross the country in the short term, but it would also encourage other states to start doing the same thing. and it's far more likely to happen in our lifetime than a constitutional ammendment which requires 2/3 support of both houses and approval of 3/4 of the states.
colorado has an ammendment on the ballot this year that would split the electoral votes of the state according to the percentage of the popular vote effective this election. it was proposed by the democrats in a state that typically splits roughly 55/45 republican. the democrats are obviously hoping that in the future they can get a 5/4 vote for republicans rather than a 9/0 vote. but despite being sponsored by the minority, it's fairly popular, and may actually pass.
I've been hearing this "argument" for some years, probably since before I was able to vote. I could probably even be accused of having used it myself before. I don't specifically remember having used it, but it does sound like something I might use to try and dismiss an argument. It is a statement that is both factually correct and utterly meaningless, and so, like a lot of things we are likely to hear the politicians say during the upcoming debates, it is a good way of trying to dodge an issue that you don't feal like discussing, for whatever reason.
You did hit upon a very important issue here: A system in which people understand and respect the decision-making process is better than one which is less transparent, even if people ultimately agree with the decisions made in the second one.
i think that the problem with the current system is not lack of transparency, but lack of voter education. i was honestly surprized by the number of people after the last election who did not realize that a candidate could win the electoral vote, and hence the election, without winning the popular vote. i am surprized now by the number of people who still think that 2000 was the first time this happened. i think that overall the electoral system we use works pretty well- better than most people realize. i believe that the current implementation of it is a little flawed, but the concept is much better than most people give it credit for. maybe the reason for that is because i first learned about the electoral system when i was in 4th grade. i also studied it a great deal in college, and on my own time i've read a lot of the research regarding the statistical theory and how it (whether by design or by accident) prevents the abuse of minorities by an organized majority.
personally, i believe that, whether through amazing prescience or just damn good luck, the founding fathers came up with a pretty good system. of course i'm not the expert, but i have at least taken the time to try to understand how it works and why it works that way. if all of the armchair politicians out there calling for electoral reform would learn the current system and its strengths, rather than just yelling about its weaknesses (which it does have), we might make some actual progress in the area.
i'm not really sure most americans would consider this a "right that has been eroded".
i knew that such laws existed although i was not sure how many states actaully had them. regardless, the electors are human and can choose to break the law, either for personal gain or as a form of protest (the elector who cast a blank ballot in the 2000 election was from d.c.) and if they decide to vote for someone else, and get fined or imprisoned or beat to death by a mob of angry voters, that still doesn't change their vote. whether the state laws (or the constitution) allow the votes to be changed in that case, i am not sure.
since the 2000 election, everyone seems to have ideas of how the election process should be changed. but unless people actually learn the current system and its goals, instead of just focusing on its percieved shortfalls. for all the people clamoring for instant runoff or other alternative forms of voting- you can do it. there's nothing preventing a district or state from using instant runoff voting to choose how to allocate electoral votes. some places already use it for municipal elections. for people wishing that their state would split the electoral votes, it can be done (there is an issue on the ballot in colorado to do that effective this election). too many people are too anxious to throw out the electoral system because of it's flaws, flaws that many people including you and me believe are flaws of implementation rather than design, that they have never stopped to consider whether they can work with it instead.
There actually is a very distinct difference between the two systems. In a true democracy every decision is handled by a majority vote of the population. Of course getting everyone involved to vote on every issue that requires a decision is extremely impractical for any but the smallest groups of people, (as well as the inherent shortcoming in simple majority rule systems where sooner or later a group that is in the majority realizes that they can do whatever they want at the expense of everyone else) the idea of the republic was born, where rather than voting on every decision, the people elect representatives to make informed votes on every decision for them. and so, in the truest sense of both words, a democracy is not a form of republic, and a republic is not a form of democracy.
of course, there are no countries in the world (that i know of) that use a true democracy, so when people refer to the united states, or any other country, as a democracy, what they really mean is a country that is (more or less) run by democratic principles. in this light, the aforementioned 'meme' seems stupidly pedantic, but there is a valid point there.
mostly, i see this statement used as a response to something like "if the u.s. is a democracy, why isn't the president elected by the popular vote?" well, if the u.s. were a true democracy, we wouldn't be voting on a president at all. obviously it is not, so the question should be interpreted as "if the u.s. is a country that is (more or less) run by democratic principles, why isn't the president elected by the popular vote?" and to answer that, there are a number of different ways to select leaders that follow democratic principles- there is no rule that for a government to be democratic everything must be decided by majority rule.
saying that the u.s. isn't a democracy is just a mental shortcut for people who don't want to explain the flaw in the question (or don't know the flaw, and just latched onto the answer because they heard someone else say it)
2000 was the fourth election in which a candidate won the electoral vote while getting less popular votes than at least one of his opponents. I listed them in one of my other posts on this thread if you are interested in the specific elections.
That, and a constitutional amendment mandating the votes in the electoral college by a states members, must be apportioned according to the popular vote rather than the 50.000001% winner takes all that exists now
there's no reason that this has to be a constituional ammendment. (which requires like 3/4 support of both houses to pass, iirc) each state is allowed to decide how to hand out its electoral votes, and it can be passed by a simple majority in the state, just like any other state law. there is actually a proposal on the ballot in colorado to do just that, effective this election (which may get messy if it passes, because it seems to me, and apparently an awful lot of other people, that it would set a bad precedent to be able to change how the votes are decided on election day.)
i'm not sure i'm in favor of this particular proposal, partly because i don't like the idea that it is changing the way the votes are awarded on election day, and partly because i don't really like the idea of divvying the votes up according to popular vote in the whole state any more than sending the whole state one way or the other. personally, i would prefer the way they do it in new hampshire or nebraska, where one vote is given to the candidate who wins each congressional district and two votes got to the candidate who won the popular vote in the state. it would still encourage candidates to try to win states (and districts) rather than votes, but it would decrease the effect that large states like california and new york would have in turning close elections one way or the other.
if you could get the support to pass a constitutional ammendment changing the way electors are assigned, you probably have enough support to do away with it entirely. passing a constitutional ammendment is really hard, and intentionally so. changing the way electoral votes are awarded at the state level would be much easier, and could be done by working with the system as it was designed rather than trying to overthrow it.
(a) dishonest, because it implies they have ANY power beyond saying "Aye" to the man (or party) they were sworn to, when they really don't.
actually they do. the electors can vote for whoever they want, regardless of who wins the popular vote in their state. it doesn't happen often, and as far as i know it has never changed the course of an election, but it does happen. in fact it happened in 2000 when of of the electors from washington d.c. cast a blank vote (instead of a vote for al gore) in protest of the district's lack of congressional representation.
while i do some problems with the way the electoral college is run, i agree with the parent poster that the manner in which the campaigns are run currently does too much to hide the actual process that determines the outcome of the election from the american public. i was actually amazed in the 2000 election by the number of people i talked to who had no idea that a candidate could win an election without winning the popular vote. i thought it was something every kid learned about in grade school, or at least high school. (who knows, maybe everyone did and most chose to forget it.) and i am still amazed that in the four years since the last election i have only come across maybe three people who realize that the electors are not legally bound to follow the popular vote in their state, even though it happened in the last election.
this lack of voter understanding needs to change first. there's no point in changing the election process unless most of the people in the country understand how the current process works, and why, else we end up with something worse than what we started with.
how about the election of 1824 when john quincy adams was elected over andrew jackson despite losing the popular vote by a margin of 43.1% to 30.5%? (interestingly enough jqa was also the relatively inept son of a former president, and was distinguished from his father by his middle initial)
or 1876 when rutherford hayes "beat" samuel tilden by a margin of 48% to 51%?
or 1888 when benjamin harrison lost the popular vote but not the election to grover cleveland, 47.8% to 48.6%....
the united states president was never designed to be selected by popular vote. in many states in the early days of our country, the state legislatures decided who would get the electoral votes for their state. popular vote totals weren't even recorded until the above mentioned election of 1824. we don't live in a democracy, and never have- we live in a republic that greatly resembles a democracy. I'm not interested in getting into a debate right now about which is better, but it is important to notice that the election of 2000 was not without precedent.
He knows the statement is wrong, and he explains why the statement is wrong. However, he doesn't explain or even hint at the fact that the incorrect inference is a result of a simple logical mistake. Rather, he attempts to attribute the mistake to conflicting meta-data.
While I agree with (some of) his points, he could have chosen a much better way of arguing them. The syllogism was a good way of illustrating his point about how people make generalities ('People who live in Brooklyn speak with a Brooklyn accent'). However, when it comes to Meta-data, the section the two examples I cited came from, it is ineffective. I would presume that if someone were ever able to write a computer program complex enough to derive meaning from a series of statements like this, making it follow the rules of logic and deduction would be a trivial task in comparison. However, regardless of the author's poorly chosen example, you are still left with the much more difficult task of inferring context from the statements- in some senses Nike is a person (regardless of whether it is a US sitizen), and in others it is not. How is a computer program to know the difference, unless it is told on a case by case basis in which circumstance a applies and in which cases b applies....
At any rate my point was not that I disagree with what he was saying. I just think that he could have illustrated some of his points much better either without using syllogisms at all, or at least using ones that don't violate some of the more simple rules of logic- The Nike example could have written using any number of syllogisms that were actually valid and still illustrated the same point.
This guy must have failed his high school geometry course (possibly algebra and calculus as well). Basically every syllogism longer than two lines in the entire article contains some variation of one of the two following very basic logic flaws:
The conclusion is invalid because YOU happen to know that it's invalid. It certainly could be valid given only the rules presented
Not so. Look at the following statements:
a implies b
a implies c
c implies d
b is false
what can we conclude about the relationships between b and d? NOTHING!!! There is no correlation between the two, but that is what the author of the article tried to argue.
Personally, I think this was a better example of the author's logical shortfalls:
- US citizens are people
- The First Amendment covers the rights of US citizens
- Nike is protected by the First Amendment
You could conclude from this that Nike is a person, and of course you would be right.
Bzzzt. Wrong. Game over man. The only way you could conclude that Nike is a person is if the second statement said "The First Amendment ONLY covers the rights of US citizens". As they are written, the second and third statements taken together do nothing to imply that Nike is a U.S. citizen, which is what would be required to "prove" that Nike is a person.
It's actually a shame, because the author made a lot of good points. For example, if he hadn't ruined it with his poor reasoning skills, the point of Nike being a person in a "First Amendment Law" context but not a medical context is a good one. He should have left all of the nonsense about syllogisms out entirely, and focused on his two good points- the problems surrounding context and generalizations. The only incorrect deduction in the whole article that could still be made by following sound logical reasoning was the one about speaking in a brooklyn accent- which he promptly pointed out was due to the fact that "People who live in Brooklyn speak with a Brooklyn accent" being a generalization that is not completely true.
Take the actions of the "Florida 2000 fiasco". [...] Yet hardly any American's cared.
Lots of Americans cared. You think it was only covered in non-US media? But in the end of the day, we had two canidates running neck to neck; no matter who won, no great crime to democracy was done.
Exactly. It drives me crazy to still listen to people bitching four years later about Bush "stealing" the election. They're just sour because their guy didn't win. I don't like Bush either, but I, and most of the American public, can look back and acknowledge that the difference between the popular vote accross the entire country was within the margin of error of the mothods used to record and count votes. In the end, you had two candidates who had each received almost exactly 48% of the vote. It's time to get over it....
Take the 'War for Democracy' path the USA is taking now. Anyone who understands what Democracy is knows War is the failure of democracy. We are suppose to go to war if we can't figure out a democratic solution to the problem, That is what democracy is about so going to war for democracy is a contradiction.
I think you have your definitions mixed up. War is the failure of diplomacy. We are suppose to go to war if we can't figure out a diplomatic solution to the problem.
That said, I think 'War for Democracy' is a ridiculous idea, however, I don't see that it is necessarily a contradiction in terms.
Not really. What I would really be reinforcing is their belief that if you know about computers, you can make them work better. Which is true.
My parents already know that their computer runs better after I visit them. And they know that I don't have all of the problems they do because I know how to avoid doing things that will cause those problems, even with Internet Explorer. And if they don't have all of the problems that they hear everyone else complaining about and that they used to have themselves, they will just know that I did something to fix their computer so that they don't have those problems anymore. Which is true.
I already dealt with this problem once when helping my parents transition from aol to dsl, and it caused no end of confusion. To them, Internet Explorer is not a program that is used to view the Internet. It is the Internet. So I'm going to upgrade it....
It would be theoretically possible, as the icon or icons a program uses are stored at certain addresses in the executable. In theory, you could store the whole series of icons somewhere else in the excecutable, and each time the program runs overwrite the part of the executable where the main icon is stored with the next icon in the series.
You do run into a few complications with this, of course. The obvious one is the risk of corrupting your binary by trying to write to it while it's running. (shouldn't be a problem in a sane operating system, but in windows you never know....) The bigger issue, though, would probably be in dealing with the rather horrid and afaik little understood windows icon cache.
I lived in Chicago for eight years. There's not much else in Illinois, and more importantly in terms of this conversation, Chicago (and its suburbs) dominates the entire political landscape of Illinois so much so that it might as well be the state of Chicago.
Slashdot Mirror
People have no reason* to change their ways
depends on whether you are talking specifically about electricity/fossil fuels, or conservation in general. conservation is still critical, regardless of what you may think about electric bills. los angeles turned significant portions of california into a desert trying to meet the water needs of their rapidly growing artificial oasis. at one point there were concrete plans to divert the entire flow of the colorado river across the state to supply more water to l.a. (see the movie chinatown starring jack nicholson for a somewhat fictionalized account of some of the problems supplying water to southern california in the 1970's) eventually they realized that rather than draining most of the western united states they needed to start looking at ways to reduce their water consumption. now the same thing is starting to hapen in colorado as the front range of the rockies, and denver in particular, is one of the fastest growing areas in the united states. of course, as far as i can tell, the only thing people care about here is whether they'll have enough water to run the snow machines at vail, breckenridge, keystone, etc.
some studies have indicated that although use of pesticides and modified foods can increase the crop yield of a field substantially, the actual nutritional value of the food grown in the field does not change. in other words, although you may get twice as many bushels of corn from a field, you would have to eat twice as much of it to get the same nutritional content.
personally, i'm not sure how true this is- it something i heard secondhand, so i can't even cite the study. but it does make sense in that most nutrients in our crops come from the soil, which doesn't get more nutrients from the genetic modifications.
i think it is definitely an issue that deserves more oversight before we rush off to enhance all of our crops.
he ddn't say that they all leaned the same way. Just that they all leaned.
You never touched my fundamental point: A state deciding to split it's vote will be weakening it's own power on the national level. Why would any state do this, unless they knew that all the other states would be weakened at the same time?
First of all, you are once again treating states as atomic decision making units, which they are not.
Second, two states already made the decision to split their electoral vote a long time ago (maybe always? i'm not sure) and a third is about to vote on whether or not to do it. Whether or not they are big or small states is beside the point- you ask why any state would do it. Regardless of the why, the fact is it has happened, and may happen again soon. That is enough for me to believe it is possible for other states to do it as well.
Finally, i have never stated that i believe this to be likely to happen. i have only said that i believe it is more likely to happen than a constitutional ammendment. if you believe that the only acceptable improvement to the electoral system is a constitutional ammendment, than i believe you are going to be disappointed in the electoral system for a long time to come. i will be in support of such a constitutional ammendment if one is proposed, but i will also gladly support other measures to improve the electoral system in the meantime.
And, as a footnote...
What, and give up being swing states? They LOVE it.
Apparently, in at least one swing state there are a significant number of voters who would rather have their votes count toward the candidate they support than to have the candidates hold a televised debate in their state.
Yes, it's a mix of people, of different parties. But one of those parties has the majority. In every state, there is always one party or the other with a majority of the legislature.
of course there is always one party or the other with a majority. but which party often changes over time. it's not always the same party in the majority. plus, such a law wouldn't have to be passed by the state legislature. most states (and i know california is one of them) allow the people to vote laws into effect on the ballot. so even if the democrats control the state legislature, there are enough republicans in the state that such a measure could be approved, especially if they were upset enough about something to turn out to vote in higher numbers than the democrats.
How can you imagine that any Democrat this year would be willing to give Bush the Whitehouse, just for the vague hope of encouraging a mildly fairer electoral system in the distant future?
it wouldn't have to be in favor of the republicans. suppose a republican state was the first to break. texas may be too much to hope for, but what of the other southern states. florida is pretty evenly divided right now, and bush has alienated an awful lot of traditionally conservative voters as well as pissing off an awful lot of democrats. a proposal to split the electoral vote could be popular there. and at any rate, it's probably too late for this to happen in any states that haven't already started considering it, so invoking bush is probably not relevant.
at any rate, states that usually go strongly one way or theother are not the states where this is likely to take hold. this isn't going to start out in states like california, new ork, texas or illinois. The places where this is going to start happening are in the swing states, where votors on both sides are more likely to get fed up with their state going all one way or all the other. states like colorado. and splitting the electoral votes a large swing state like florida or michigan right down the middle will have a much larger effect on the u.s. electoral system than splitting the votes of texas or new york 65/35.
one of the reasons i think that this is more likely to change on a state by state basis is that states can pass laws either through the legislature or by referendum, where amendments must be approved by both congress and the state legislatures (which are more likely to be interested in maintaining the status quo). it's also a change that i believe could happen in our lifetime, because it can start happening right now.
actually it looks like i just used that statement this morning in one of my other replies to this thread. must have been before i had my coffee....
except california is not a person. california is a mix of people who have differing opinions and political beliefs. and california has not always voted democrat, either. for example, they have a republican governor now, or did you miss that? There are an awful lot of republicans in california too, and i'm sure that they would love to see their votes reflected more directly in the electoral college. (when i used to live there, i knew a lot of people who joked that california should be split accross the middle into democratic california and republican california, a la north and south korea.) yes, that would shift the balance of power accross the country in the short term, but it would also encourage other states to start doing the same thing. and it's far more likely to happen in our lifetime than a constitutional ammendment which requires 2/3 support of both houses and approval of 3/4 of the states.
colorado has an ammendment on the ballot this year that would split the electoral votes of the state according to the percentage of the popular vote effective this election. it was proposed by the democrats in a state that typically splits roughly 55/45 republican. the democrats are obviously hoping that in the future they can get a 5/4 vote for republicans rather than a 9/0 vote. but despite being sponsored by the minority, it's fairly popular, and may actually pass.
I've been hearing this "argument" for some years, probably since before I was able to vote. I could probably even be accused of having used it myself before. I don't specifically remember having used it, but it does sound like something I might use to try and dismiss an argument. It is a statement that is both factually correct and utterly meaningless, and so, like a lot of things we are likely to hear the politicians say during the upcoming debates, it is a good way of trying to dodge an issue that you don't feal like discussing, for whatever reason.
You did hit upon a very important issue here:
A system in which people understand and respect the decision-making process is better than one which is less transparent, even if people ultimately agree with the decisions made in the second one.
i think that the problem with the current system is not lack of transparency, but lack of voter education. i was honestly surprized by the number of people after the last election who did not realize that a candidate could win the electoral vote, and hence the election, without winning the popular vote. i am surprized now by the number of people who still think that 2000 was the first time this happened. i think that overall the electoral system we use works pretty well- better than most people realize. i believe that the current implementation of it is a little flawed, but the concept is much better than most people give it credit for. maybe the reason for that is because i first learned about the electoral system when i was in 4th grade. i also studied it a great deal in college, and on my own time i've read a lot of the research regarding the statistical theory and how it (whether by design or by accident) prevents the abuse of minorities by an organized majority.
personally, i believe that, whether through amazing prescience or just damn good luck, the founding fathers came up with a pretty good system. of course i'm not the expert, but i have at least taken the time to try to understand how it works and why it works that way. if all of the armchair politicians out there calling for electoral reform would learn the current system and its strengths, rather than just yelling about its weaknesses (which it does have), we might make some actual progress in the area.
i'm not really sure most americans would consider this a "right that has been eroded".
i knew that such laws existed although i was not sure how many states actaully had them. regardless, the electors are human and can choose to break the law, either for personal gain or as a form of protest (the elector who cast a blank ballot in the 2000 election was from d.c.) and if they decide to vote for someone else, and get fined or imprisoned or beat to death by a mob of angry voters, that still doesn't change their vote. whether the state laws (or the constitution) allow the votes to be changed in that case, i am not sure.
since the 2000 election, everyone seems to have ideas of how the election process should be changed. but unless people actually learn the current system and its goals, instead of just focusing on its percieved shortfalls. for all the people clamoring for instant runoff or other alternative forms of voting- you can do it. there's nothing preventing a district or state from using instant runoff voting to choose how to allocate electoral votes. some places already use it for municipal elections. for people wishing that their state would split the electoral votes, it can be done (there is an issue on the ballot in colorado to do that effective this election). too many people are too anxious to throw out the electoral system because of it's flaws, flaws that many people including you and me believe are flaws of implementation rather than design, that they have never stopped to consider whether they can work with it instead.
There actually is a very distinct difference between the two systems. In a true democracy every decision is handled by a majority vote of the population. Of course getting everyone involved to vote on every issue that requires a decision is extremely impractical for any but the smallest groups of people, (as well as the inherent shortcoming in simple majority rule systems where sooner or later a group that is in the majority realizes that they can do whatever they want at the expense of everyone else) the idea of the republic was born, where rather than voting on every decision, the people elect representatives to make informed votes on every decision for them. and so, in the truest sense of both words, a democracy is not a form of republic, and a republic is not a form of democracy.
of course, there are no countries in the world (that i know of) that use a true democracy, so when people refer to the united states, or any other country, as a democracy, what they really mean is a country that is (more or less) run by democratic principles. in this light, the aforementioned 'meme' seems stupidly pedantic, but there is a valid point there.
mostly, i see this statement used as a response to something like "if the u.s. is a democracy, why isn't the president elected by the popular vote?"
well, if the u.s. were a true democracy, we wouldn't be voting on a president at all. obviously it is not, so the question should be interpreted as "if the u.s. is a country that is (more or less) run by democratic principles, why isn't the president elected by the popular vote?" and to answer that, there are a number of different ways to select leaders that follow democratic principles- there is no rule that for a government to be democratic everything must be decided by majority rule.
saying that the u.s. isn't a democracy is just a mental shortcut for people who don't want to explain the flaw in the question (or don't know the flaw, and just latched onto the answer because they heard someone else say it)
I'd vote for a bagel over Bush just to see if it could run the country better, and even in that case I'd be more hopeful and optimistic than I am now.
funny, i said roughly the same thing about al gore last election, and look where it's gotten us....
Clinton was not, by any means, "lucky" to have presided over that boom, and I'll tell you why.
He may not have been lucky to preside over the boom, but he sure as hell was lucky that he got out of there when he did.
removing the electoral college would take a constitutional ammendment.
changing how the electors are assigned by each state can be done with state laws that only require a majority in each state.
of course, in either case, you are right, in that the president has essentially no influence on matters concerning the electoral college.
2000 was the fourth election in which a candidate won the electoral vote while getting less popular votes than at least one of his opponents. I listed them in one of my other posts on this thread if you are interested in the specific elections.
That, and a constitutional amendment mandating the votes in the electoral college by a states members, must be apportioned according to the popular vote rather than the 50.000001% winner takes all that exists now
there's no reason that this has to be a constituional ammendment. (which requires like 3/4 support of both houses to pass, iirc) each state is allowed to decide how to hand out its electoral votes, and it can be passed by a simple majority in the state, just like any other state law. there is actually a proposal on the ballot in colorado to do just that, effective this election (which may get messy if it passes, because it seems to me, and apparently an awful lot of other people, that it would set a bad precedent to be able to change how the votes are decided on election day.)
i'm not sure i'm in favor of this particular proposal, partly because i don't like the idea that it is changing the way the votes are awarded on election day, and partly because i don't really like the idea of divvying the votes up according to popular vote in the whole state any more than sending the whole state one way or the other. personally, i would prefer the way they do it in new hampshire or nebraska, where one vote is given to the candidate who wins each congressional district and two votes got to the candidate who won the popular vote in the state. it would still encourage candidates to try to win states (and districts) rather than votes, but it would decrease the effect that large states like california and new york would have in turning close elections one way or the other.
if you could get the support to pass a constitutional ammendment changing the way electors are assigned, you probably have enough support to do away with it entirely. passing a constitutional ammendment is really hard, and intentionally so. changing the way electoral votes are awarded at the state level would be much easier, and could be done by working with the system as it was designed rather than trying to overthrow it.
(a) dishonest, because it implies they have ANY power beyond saying "Aye" to the man (or party) they were sworn to, when they really don't.
actually they do. the electors can vote for whoever they want, regardless of who wins the popular vote in their state. it doesn't happen often, and as far as i know it has never changed the course of an election, but it does happen. in fact it happened in 2000 when of of the electors from washington d.c. cast a blank vote (instead of a vote for al gore) in protest of the district's lack of congressional representation.
while i do some problems with the way the electoral college is run, i agree with the parent poster that the manner in which the campaigns are run currently does too much to hide the actual process that determines the outcome of the election from the american public. i was actually amazed in the 2000 election by the number of people i talked to who had no idea that a candidate could win an election without winning the popular vote. i thought it was something every kid learned about in grade school, or at least high school. (who knows, maybe everyone did and most chose to forget it.) and i am still amazed that in the four years since the last election i have only come across maybe three people who realize that the electors are not legally bound to follow the popular vote in their state, even though it happened in the last election.
this lack of voter understanding needs to change first. there's no point in changing the election process unless most of the people in the country understand how the current process works, and why, else we end up with something worse than what we started with.
how about the election of 1824 when john quincy adams was elected over andrew jackson despite losing the popular vote by a margin of 43.1% to 30.5%? (interestingly enough jqa was also the relatively inept son of a former president, and was distinguished from his father by his middle initial)
or 1876 when rutherford hayes "beat" samuel tilden by a margin of 48% to 51%?
or 1888 when benjamin harrison lost the popular vote but not the election to grover cleveland, 47.8% to 48.6%....
the united states president was never designed to be selected by popular vote. in many states in the early days of our country, the state legislatures decided who would get the electoral votes for their state. popular vote totals weren't even recorded until the above mentioned election of 1824. we don't live in a democracy, and never have- we live in a republic that greatly resembles a democracy. I'm not interested in getting into a debate right now about which is better, but it is important to notice that the election of 2000 was not without precedent.
He knows the statement is wrong, and he explains why the statement is wrong. However, he doesn't explain or even hint at the fact that the incorrect inference is a result of a simple logical mistake. Rather, he attempts to attribute the mistake to conflicting meta-data.
While I agree with (some of) his points, he could have chosen a much better way of arguing them. The syllogism was a good way of illustrating his point about how people make generalities ('People who live in Brooklyn speak with a Brooklyn accent'). However, when it comes to Meta-data, the section the two examples I cited came from, it is ineffective. I would presume that if someone were ever able to write a computer program complex enough to derive meaning from a series of statements like this, making it follow the rules of logic and deduction would be a trivial task in comparison. However, regardless of the author's poorly chosen example, you are still left with the much more difficult task of inferring context from the statements- in some senses Nike is a person (regardless of whether it is a US sitizen), and in others it is not. How is a computer program to know the difference, unless it is told on a case by case basis in which circumstance a applies and in which cases b applies....
At any rate my point was not that I disagree with what he was saying. I just think that he could have illustrated some of his points much better either without using syllogisms at all, or at least using ones that don't violate some of the more simple rules of logic- The Nike example could have written using any number of syllogisms that were actually valid and still illustrated the same point.
This guy must have failed his high school geometry course (possibly algebra and calculus as well). Basically every syllogism longer than two lines in the entire article contains some variation of one of the two following very basic logic flaws:
a implies b
a implies c
therefore b implies c
or
a implies c
b implies c
therefore a implies b
The conclusion is invalid because YOU happen to know that it's invalid. It certainly could be valid given only the rules presented
Not so. Look at the following statements:
a implies b
a implies c
c implies d
b is false
what can we conclude about the relationships between b and d? NOTHING!!! There is no correlation between the two, but that is what the author of the article tried to argue.
Personally, I think this was a better example of the author's logical shortfalls:
- US citizens are people
- The First Amendment covers the rights of US citizens
- Nike is protected by the First Amendment
You could conclude from this that Nike is a person, and of course you would be right.
Bzzzt. Wrong. Game over man. The only way you could conclude that Nike is a person is if the second statement said "The First Amendment ONLY covers the rights of US citizens". As they are written, the second and third statements taken together do nothing to imply that Nike is a U.S. citizen, which is what would be required to "prove" that Nike is a person.
It's actually a shame, because the author made a lot of good points. For example, if he hadn't ruined it with his poor reasoning skills, the point of Nike being a person in a "First Amendment Law" context but not a medical context is a good one. He should have left all of the nonsense about syllogisms out entirely, and focused on his two good points- the problems surrounding context and generalizations. The only incorrect deduction in the whole article that could still be made by following sound logical reasoning was the one about speaking in a brooklyn accent- which he promptly pointed out was due to the fact that "People who live in Brooklyn speak with a Brooklyn accent" being a generalization that is not completely true.
Take the actions of the "Florida 2000 fiasco". [...] Yet hardly any American's cared.
Lots of Americans cared. You think it was only covered in non-US media? But in the end of the day, we had two canidates running neck to neck; no matter who won, no great crime to democracy was done.
Exactly. It drives me crazy to still listen to people bitching four years later about Bush "stealing" the election. They're just sour because their guy didn't win. I don't like Bush either, but I, and most of the American public, can look back and acknowledge that the difference between the popular vote accross the entire country was within the margin of error of the mothods used to record and count votes. In the end, you had two candidates who had each received almost exactly 48% of the vote. It's time to get over it....
Take the 'War for Democracy' path the USA is taking now. Anyone who understands what Democracy is knows War is the failure of democracy. We are suppose to go to war if we can't figure out a democratic solution to the problem, That is what democracy is about so going to war for democracy is a contradiction.
I think you have your definitions mixed up. War is the failure of diplomacy. We are suppose to go to war if we can't figure out a diplomatic solution to the problem.
That said, I think 'War for Democracy' is a ridiculous idea, however, I don't see that it is necessarily a contradiction in terms.
Not really. What I would really be reinforcing is their belief that if you know about computers, you can make them work better. Which is true.
My parents already know that their computer runs better after I visit them. And they know that I don't have all of the problems they do because I know how to avoid doing things that will cause those problems, even with Internet Explorer. And if they don't have all of the problems that they hear everyone else complaining about and that they used to have themselves, they will just know that I did something to fix their computer so that they don't have those problems anymore. Which is true.
I already dealt with this problem once when helping my parents transition from aol to dsl, and it caused no end of confusion. To them, Internet Explorer is not a program that is used to view the Internet. It is the Internet. So I'm going to upgrade it....
It would be theoretically possible, as the icon or icons a program uses are stored at certain addresses in the executable. In theory, you could store the whole series of icons somewhere else in the excecutable, and each time the program runs overwrite the part of the executable where the main icon is stored with the next icon in the series.
You do run into a few complications with this, of course. The obvious one is the risk of corrupting your binary by trying to write to it while it's running. (shouldn't be a problem in a sane operating system, but in windows you never know....) The bigger issue, though, would probably be in dealing with the rather horrid and afaik little understood windows icon cache.
I lived in Chicago for eight years. There's not much else in Illinois, and more importantly in terms of this conversation, Chicago (and its suburbs) dominates the entire political landscape of Illinois so much so that it might as well be the state of Chicago.