That's logical. If that's how you think you really have no business living in these United States.
What the US Legal system sees is that a) the Indian consultants could not hire people to fill some random job they made up, so they got H-1bs, and b) Disney hired the company as consultants. It is not likely to conclude those two facts are connected without specific legislation coming from Congress. Or, rather, it is not likly to conclude that it is allowed to make that leap without specific legislation from Congress. Obama could try, and there's a non-zero chance he'd succeed, but it's closer to 20% then 80%.
Since the Indian company and it's clients (including heavy-weight Disney) are involved in the political process, at least one Congressman will court them by adding BS to the system. If he's a Subcommittee or Committee Chair this makes things virtually impossible. because people won't want to to risk their agendas by pissing his ass off.
If you ever deal with lobbyists, or activists, they will tell you it takes at least 3-4 years to get anything worth passing passed because you just have to do so much groundwork convincing individual power-brokers that it's a good idea. Year 1 you get a couple guys, year two you're up to a dozen or three, you don't get to 218 in the House (or the 50 Senators plus 1 either other Senator or Biden) except under ridiculously exceptional circumstances.
In practice that would involve legislation. Which means Congress and Obama agreeing on something. The longer I live in the US, the more I admire the Canadian system, where the PM and the Parliament always have to agree on everything of import because as soon as the PM loses an important vote in Parliament he is either a) replaced by some Member who is able to get a Confidence vote, or b) there's a new election. Either way within six weeks they're all singing from the same damn choir sheet again.
Our laws are almost all very narrowly tailored because nobody can ram anything down anyone else's throat. You change one thing you'll piss a certain amount of Congressman off, and lose their votes, changing two things is much more difficult. The one you're talking about included no changes to how visas work, only changes to their numbers. Changing both at once would have been virtually impossible because a) that bill is Obama's H-1b reform bill and the GOP hates it on principle (passing it makes him look good), b) people who support half (ie: increasing the total number of visas), but don't care for the other half will actively try to sabotage this bill and get Congress to pass their half independently, etc.
In the long-term pretty much the only solution I can think of for the decay in the American working class is some sort of guaranteed income scheme. If everybody got a $500 check from the government every month a) becoming a parent would become a lot less of an economic disaster, b) that $9 an hour from Mickey-Ds would go a lot further, c) unemployment would suck a lot less, etc. Most importantly it would be a step towards getting us to the Star Trek economy, and since $6k a year per person only works out to 10-15% of the economy it would be economically feasible. But it'd be hell getting something like that through the US System.
So I suspect that 20 years from now it will be conventional wisdom that the underclass is now multi-racial, and everyone will still be extremely confused about what to do about them.
In business, doing perfectly, but costing more then a guy who'd half-ass it; is always grounds for being fired. Most private companies I've worked with do niot produce products that are "good enough for government work."
In theory the H-1B Visa-holding company proved it needed to import it's employees. Part of the application process is verifying that a) you have a job to fill, and b) attempts to hire Americans were unsuccessful.
It's just ridiculously easy to game the system. Create a fake job, pay half what an American would want, then make it clear during the application process that you don't like people who aren't from your exact village in Punjab, and you've got the paperwork necessary to justify an H-1B. Then you market your H-1B hires to new companies, and transfer their jobs to somebody whose paying.
Legally here's what happened: Some outsourcing company said it could only fill it's consultant ranks by hiring Indians. Since it knew the paperwork really well (and doing paperwork really well is an Indian core competency), it got them.
Then Disney hired the Indian firm to take over some functions at Disney.
Which means that Disney technically did not replace it's employees with H1B Visa holders (which would be ridiculously illegal). It replaced a business unit with a contractor (perfectly legal), and that contractor happened to use H1B Visa holders (also perfectly legal). Courts could rule that the consulting firm were gaming the system, but that's far from a gimme.
Which means you probably should get a new law passed restricting the use of H1B consultants to replace American workers. And you'd damn well better word it very, very carefully or they'll just maneuver around it some interesting way.
If he starts talking like he's an advocate for the Disney employees he clearly takes a side, which means the people who disagree with any aspect of his case (ie: the guys advocating for more H1B Visas, businessmen prone to see any government interference as evil, Republicans who hate Obama on principle, etc.) will not take him seriously.
If he just says something so obviously true that you can't disagree with it then he might get somewhere.
Doubt it. Walker's not a guy who'd enforce the contractor/employee rules vigorously, and the OP specifically stated: "But given that this particular state takes a hard line against misclassifying employees, this strikes me as profoundly hypocritical."
It's one of several forms that companies use to tell the IRS they paid you money.
Employees get something called a W2, which has a detailed breakdown of their total earnings, how much of those earnings were taxable for normal income tax, Social Security Tax, medicare tax, and state and local income taxes. It also includes lots of tax-relevent info like contributions to your retirement account, and some non-relevent info that the Feds have decided you should have (the bit of your health premium paid by your employer is one of many things that can appear in Box 12).
A 1099 is used by one business to report paying another business. If you're not an employee you're acting as a business, and you get a 1099. It has much less info because there's less to report (IIRC only the amount they paid you, and withholding for various units of government). As a business you are on the hook for your own Social Security and Medicare withholding, personal health insurance, etc. Many things an employer is require to compensate you for (such as work materials) are your own damn responsibility.
Which is pretty much what he'd get, even if he actually had a question to ask, so I strongly suspect he's the only person whose ever done an Ask Slashdot after reading Slashdot.
Detroit's transit system is (as I mentioned) chronically fucked up. The 80%+ Black City, and the largely 90%+ White suburbs refuse to coordinate on anything, because that might involve admitting they were wrong about Coleman Young in 1973. The local government is structured so there's a King Urban Black (the Mayor of Detroit), and King Suburban White (the Oakland County Executive); and King Suburban White's response to the '73 election of Coleman over a Detroit Police Chief whose major accomplishment was setting up a racist death squad* was to hire that guy to be Sheriff. It's possible that things will improve now that a white guy's Mayor, and King White (Brooks Patterson) is 76 so he'll kick off soon enough.
Here on the southeast side we haven't heard anything about RTA west side stations being trouble spots. I have actually seen an RTA Officer come to a station every day at the same time with his drug-sniffing dog when the local potheads got too annoying. I don;t doubt there's a crime problem in the areas you've mentioned, but as a native (and Detroit-proper) Detroiter it doesn't sound like gang activity. Gangs are highly organized organizations. They tend not to target non-criminals (because that brings police attention and gets 70 people arrested), and their business model is typically an actual business model (ie: come to this neighborhood where it's safe to buy great weed). Which means that if you're saying they start fights with random people for reasons other then profit it's not what a hardened Detroiter (or most criminologists) would call a "gang."
What you seem to have on the West Side is a bunch of punk kids who've taken "Punk Kid" to felonious levels. They steal shit because it's easier then a job, start fights with random people because they're bored, and boast about it all in on Youtube due to a combination of hopelessness (the guys in their High School class who got legitimate work probably make $9 an hour, part-time, and catch hell from the conventional world where everyone still acts like you can just show up at the UAW plant and make a good wage like the 60s), and stupidity.
Which is not a great thing, and clearly a problem for the RTA because they don't have the guys to staff all train stations 24/7, but it's also not something that anybody can actually fix.
*This is less of an exaggeration then you'd think. STRESS shot an awful lot of black men during the late 60s and early 70s, and the one member they managed to charge got off on the basis that working in John Nichols' police department would turn anyone into a psycho racist serial killer. He later got back pay and disability.
NYC is probably the biggest public transit user anywhere, and it's far from homogenous racially. My experience in the rust belt is that when you get a racially homogenous black city (Detroit is 83% black, and 10% white, and an awful lot of that 10% are Hispanics and Arabs spilling over from Dearborn), and equally racially homogenous suburbs, your public transit options are terrible largely because the white suburbs whole reason to exist is to shield their residents from the black City. That means no taxes to pay for trains, as few bus stops as can be managed without making national news as a racist mecca, etc.
OTOH in Cleveland (53% black, 37% white) we've got a train system that white people use, and a bus system that's reliable enough that you can get to work on it every damn day if you learn the bus schedule. It tasks three times as long as it would by car, but it exists, which is more then I can say for my hometown.
As for long-term trends, in an area with a growing highly-educated population you'll probably continue to get suburbanization, because the people who move to places tend to be the kind of people who a) want a nice little house with a pretty yard in a highly ranked (read: mostly upper-middle-class WASP, Jew, and/or Asian; the best way to up your district';s test scores is arrange it so that working class kids of all colors stay the fuck away) public school district, who can b) actually afford to make that shit happen. So even in the Rust Belt call the "Outer Ring" suburbs are doing great.
Everywhere else I suspect that the current WASP tendency to prefer a small apartment in a walkable neighborhood to yardwork and massive gasoline bills will screw the in Inner-Ring suburbs, while revitalizing some of the older neighborhoods back downtown.
I don't know which rust belt cities you're talking about with better transit then Cleveland. The only one I've ever lived in was Detroit, and the bus system there (especially DDOT's portion, part of the problem was the 'burbs and the City proper each insisted on their own separate systems) was chronically late.
The issues you bring up are things I've never encountered, despite being primarily on the bus in Cleveland for literally years. They have their own cops, who show up when their drivers call, so an RTA Station would be a terrible place for a gang to have a felonious initiation ceremony, even in East Cleveland. Especially if you posted it to Youtube, where the cops could watch the whole thing for witnesses, and get a warrant for your account info., etc.
And if people lived on flats in high rises they wouldn't need cars at all.
Seriously. Build a hi-rise 50 stories. Make it a 60-ft square. Each floor is now 3,600 sq ft. Even dividing each floor in half, and devoting a significant amount of space to elevators/ fire escapes/etc. you probably haven't lost that much square footage on a typical suburban ranch. Heating and cooling are probably cheaper then for a house because the surface area of the building is smaller per square foot. Yard work has gone away. Shoveling snow is a thing of the past. You can add a couple of floors of parking structure for minimal cost. You;ve got a lot shorter distance for sewer pipes/electrical/etc.
Like many things in America, our "problems" with transportation are caused pretty much entirely by our insistence on having shit both ways: everybody with the money to matter has to have both a House AND a centralized business district.
Keep in mind that almost all pro-car/anti-bus/anti-train articles are written by relatively wealthy people who really don't understand what goes on in your life when you think $12.50 an hour is an amazing wage. In Cleveland you either have to pay $1k-$1,500 a year for gas, plus insurance, plus maintenance, and deal with several local police forces funded virtually entirely by traffic tickets; or spend an hour and a half on the bus whenever you want to get anywhere that isn't right downtown. A place like NYC is much better because it lets you avoid all that without losing out on social life/opportunities/etc.
And I am the guy who finally managed that $12.50 an hour wage last year. My sister (who pulls in around $18k nannying in NYC) has better quality of life then me largely because they have a good public transit system so she can do things.
To illustrate the point: since Cleveland is car-obsessed the H and R Block job that let's me break that $12.50 wage always has mandatory meetings in places with great parking. It does not always have them in places that are on a bus line, and almost never has them in places that are one bus from my place. Many of them are not in the County, and the RTA Bus lines stop at the County line (NYC proper is technically five Counties, and transit system is coordinated across state lines). So I spent an hour-and-a-half on the bus yesterday riding to a semi-useful business meeting, and would have only managed to get home at 10 PM if some nice coworker hadn't been there to drive me back.
There is ample historical evidence that all systems eventually destroys themselves. In fact, in terms of not destroying itself, the best form of government is probably the British; which is so successful at totally remaking itself every few decades without a Revolution that it is quite literally impossible to pick a start-date. Even the one most of them would pick (1066) wasn't much of a change in governance structure for the vast majority of the population, it was just a change in the hereditary nobleman they had to deal with. And the Brits have never let education dictate where you stand, it's always been either heredity or your ability to get votes.
Typical Libertarian. Extremely strong on the theory (or at least aspects of the theory that support libertarian preconceptions), weak on the practice.
In theory the poor could all team up and vote themselves a Billionaire's money, and that would suck. But a) the drawbacks of your theory are even more horrifying (white supremacist Rhodesia, for example, technically allowed anyone of any race to vote if they had the proper education, it was just impossible to get said education if you weren't white, in the actual real world your proposal would have an inevitable tendency towards hereditary aristocracy where the educated get their kids in to school and only allow token representation to the peasants), and b) in practice that has not happened in a century or two of US Democracy because stealing Bill Gates money by statute would also steal from the Koch brothers and Soros, and their respective parties would fight the hell of that.
Dude, it's grammar, not a super-logical recursive function run by computers.
In the ACA case the Judges ruled that a Federal exchange set up in lieu of a state exchange was the logical equivalent of an "exchange set up by the state." This is no more irrational then telling your houseguest he can borrow the diesel car or the gasoline motorbike as long as he tops up the diesel, and expecting him to know you meant he fill up the bike with gasoline.
There's a reason multiple states chose to use the Federal Exchange, despite the fact that Conservative orthodoxy holds that made subsidies to their residents illegal.
And yet, never before, in the history of all history, has information been more readily available to voters.
And in my experience the real problem tends to be people who know lots of facts.
The guys who knows nothing's solution to every problem is take the proposals and split the difference. The guy who knows everything should (in theory) be miraculously smart and able to detect BS from a million miles away, in practice he's the purveyor of most of the BS because if he didn't have extremely strong ideological priors he wouldn't have waded through sufficient BS to become knowledgable.
Which is owned by an ex-Aussie, and is convinced that Obama's such a disaster that the rich are clamoring to leave.
And I won't be surprised if that gets them some takers. Particularly if the GOP can't get it together and start getting a consistent lead on Hillary.
There'll probably be a few more who do it because they want a rich democracy's passport,and don't like the fact the US taxes on global income (ie: if you make $1 Million in China and you;re Swedish you pay no Swedish taxes on it, just Chines; if you're American you pay both).
In theory it shouldn't be any harder then doing a different human language accent. In some ways it'll be easier, because if you screw up nobody's gonna right on the fan board "She's got a pretty good Midlands accent, but slips between East and West."
In practice it's really difficult because you it's hard to find people to practice with, so the only Betezed who uses the accent is Marina and by the time the films rolled around she'd forgotten the damn thing because she hadn't used it for years.
Didn't sound like any damn Romanians I've ever heard. Hungarians either, and a significant chunk of that province is ethnic Hungarian Szekely.
I have read that it was supposed to be the generic "Vampire" accent, but watching the few Nemoidian scenes that are on Youtube it sounds a lot more North Asian. In particular they're not differentiating clearly between "R" and "L," which is a characteristic of Japanese speakers because Japanese has no "R" sound.
I couldn't easily find a scene where they say something with a "v" in it to see if they're also mixing up their "V" and "W," which is pretty much the only consistant thing about Vampire accents.
Slashdot Mirror
Or "curious."
Either would make a lot more sense the spurious.
That's logical. If that's how you think you really have no business living in these United States.
What the US Legal system sees is that a) the Indian consultants could not hire people to fill some random job they made up, so they got H-1bs, and b) Disney hired the company as consultants. It is not likely to conclude those two facts are connected without specific legislation coming from Congress. Or, rather, it is not likly to conclude that it is allowed to make that leap without specific legislation from Congress. Obama could try, and there's a non-zero chance he'd succeed, but it's closer to 20% then 80%.
Since the Indian company and it's clients (including heavy-weight Disney) are involved in the political process, at least one Congressman will court them by adding BS to the system. If he's a Subcommittee or Committee Chair this makes things virtually impossible. because people won't want to to risk their agendas by pissing his ass off.
If you ever deal with lobbyists, or activists, they will tell you it takes at least 3-4 years to get anything worth passing passed because you just have to do so much groundwork convincing individual power-brokers that it's a good idea. Year 1 you get a couple guys, year two you're up to a dozen or three, you don't get to 218 in the House (or the 50 Senators plus 1 either other Senator or Biden) except under ridiculously exceptional circumstances.
In theory.
In practice that would involve legislation. Which means Congress and Obama agreeing on something. The longer I live in the US, the more I admire the Canadian system, where the PM and the Parliament always have to agree on everything of import because as soon as the PM loses an important vote in Parliament he is either a) replaced by some Member who is able to get a Confidence vote, or b) there's a new election. Either way within six weeks they're all singing from the same damn choir sheet again.
In theory if there was an IT Workers union they'd be the perfect people to tell about such abuses. Or labor regulators.
In practice...
Dude, this is the US.
Our laws are almost all very narrowly tailored because nobody can ram anything down anyone else's throat. You change one thing you'll piss a certain amount of Congressman off, and lose their votes, changing two things is much more difficult. The one you're talking about included no changes to how visas work, only changes to their numbers. Changing both at once would have been virtually impossible because a) that bill is Obama's H-1b reform bill and the GOP hates it on principle (passing it makes him look good), b) people who support half (ie: increasing the total number of visas), but don't care for the other half will actively try to sabotage this bill and get Congress to pass their half independently, etc.
In the long-term pretty much the only solution I can think of for the decay in the American working class is some sort of guaranteed income scheme. If everybody got a $500 check from the government every month a) becoming a parent would become a lot less of an economic disaster, b) that $9 an hour from Mickey-Ds would go a lot further, c) unemployment would suck a lot less, etc. Most importantly it would be a step towards getting us to the Star Trek economy, and since $6k a year per person only works out to 10-15% of the economy it would be economically feasible. But it'd be hell getting something like that through the US System.
So I suspect that 20 years from now it will be conventional wisdom that the underclass is now multi-racial, and everyone will still be extremely confused about what to do about them.
In business, doing perfectly, but costing more then a guy who'd half-ass it; is always grounds for being fired. Most private companies I've worked with do niot produce products that are "good enough for government work."
In theory the H-1B Visa-holding company proved it needed to import it's employees. Part of the application process is verifying that a) you have a job to fill, and b) attempts to hire Americans were unsuccessful.
It's just ridiculously easy to game the system. Create a fake job, pay half what an American would want, then make it clear during the application process that you don't like people who aren't from your exact village in Punjab, and you've got the paperwork necessary to justify an H-1B. Then you market your H-1B hires to new companies, and transfer their jobs to somebody whose paying.
Legally here's what happened:
Some outsourcing company said it could only fill it's consultant ranks by hiring Indians. Since it knew the paperwork really well (and doing paperwork really well is an Indian core competency), it got them.
Then Disney hired the Indian firm to take over some functions at Disney.
Which means that Disney technically did not replace it's employees with H1B Visa holders (which would be ridiculously illegal). It replaced a business unit with a contractor (perfectly legal), and that contractor happened to use H1B Visa holders (also perfectly legal). Courts could rule that the consulting firm were gaming the system, but that's far from a gimme.
Which means you probably should get a new law passed restricting the use of H1B consultants to replace American workers. And you'd damn well better word it very, very carefully or they'll just maneuver around it some interesting way.
Probably the understatement.
If he starts talking like he's an advocate for the Disney employees he clearly takes a side, which means the people who disagree with any aspect of his case (ie: the guys advocating for more H1B Visas, businessmen prone to see any government interference as evil, Republicans who hate Obama on principle, etc.) will not take him seriously.
If he just says something so obviously true that you can't disagree with it then he might get somewhere.
Doubt it. Walker's not a guy who'd enforce the contractor/employee rules vigorously, and the OP specifically stated:
"But given that this particular state takes a hard line against misclassifying employees, this strikes me as profoundly hypocritical."
It's one of several forms that companies use to tell the IRS they paid you money.
Employees get something called a W2, which has a detailed breakdown of their total earnings, how much of those earnings were taxable for normal income tax, Social Security Tax, medicare tax, and state and local income taxes. It also includes lots of tax-relevent info like contributions to your retirement account, and some non-relevent info that the Feds have decided you should have (the bit of your health premium paid by your employer is one of many things that can appear in Box 12).
A 1099 is used by one business to report paying another business. If you're not an employee you're acting as a business, and you get a 1099. It has much less info because there's less to report (IIRC only the amount they paid you, and withholding for various units of government). As a business you are on the hook for your own Social Security and Medicare withholding, personal health insurance, etc. Many things an employer is require to compensate you for (such as work materials) are your own damn responsibility.
He wants your musings on the situation.
Which is pretty much what he'd get, even if he actually had a question to ask, so I strongly suspect he's the only person whose ever done an Ask Slashdot after reading Slashdot.
Detroit's transit system is (as I mentioned) chronically fucked up. The 80%+ Black City, and the largely 90%+ White suburbs refuse to coordinate on anything, because that might involve admitting they were wrong about Coleman Young in 1973. The local government is structured so there's a King Urban Black (the Mayor of Detroit), and King Suburban White (the Oakland County Executive); and King Suburban White's response to the '73 election of Coleman over a Detroit Police Chief whose major accomplishment was setting up a racist death squad* was to hire that guy to be Sheriff. It's possible that things will improve now that a white guy's Mayor, and King White (Brooks Patterson) is 76 so he'll kick off soon enough.
Here on the southeast side we haven't heard anything about RTA west side stations being trouble spots. I have actually seen an RTA Officer come to a station every day at the same time with his drug-sniffing dog when the local potheads got too annoying. I don;t doubt there's a crime problem in the areas you've mentioned, but as a native (and Detroit-proper) Detroiter it doesn't sound like gang activity. Gangs are highly organized organizations. They tend not to target non-criminals (because that brings police attention and gets 70 people arrested), and their business model is typically an actual business model (ie: come to this neighborhood where it's safe to buy great weed). Which means that if you're saying they start fights with random people for reasons other then profit it's not what a hardened Detroiter (or most criminologists) would call a "gang."
What you seem to have on the West Side is a bunch of punk kids who've taken "Punk Kid" to felonious levels. They steal shit because it's easier then a job, start fights with random people because they're bored, and boast about it all in on Youtube due to a combination of hopelessness (the guys in their High School class who got legitimate work probably make $9 an hour, part-time, and catch hell from the conventional world where everyone still acts like you can just show up at the UAW plant and make a good wage like the 60s), and stupidity.
Which is not a great thing, and clearly a problem for the RTA because they don't have the guys to staff all train stations 24/7, but it's also not something that anybody can actually fix.
*This is less of an exaggeration then you'd think. STRESS shot an awful lot of black men during the late 60s and early 70s, and the one member they managed to charge got off on the basis that working in John Nichols' police department would turn anyone into a psycho racist serial killer. He later got back pay and disability.
NYC is probably the biggest public transit user anywhere, and it's far from homogenous racially. My experience in the rust belt is that when you get a racially homogenous black city (Detroit is 83% black, and 10% white, and an awful lot of that 10% are Hispanics and Arabs spilling over from Dearborn), and equally racially homogenous suburbs, your public transit options are terrible largely because the white suburbs whole reason to exist is to shield their residents from the black City. That means no taxes to pay for trains, as few bus stops as can be managed without making national news as a racist mecca, etc.
OTOH in Cleveland (53% black, 37% white) we've got a train system that white people use, and a bus system that's reliable enough that you can get to work on it every damn day if you learn the bus schedule. It tasks three times as long as it would by car, but it exists, which is more then I can say for my hometown.
As for long-term trends, in an area with a growing highly-educated population you'll probably continue to get suburbanization, because the people who move to places tend to be the kind of people who a) want a nice little house with a pretty yard in a highly ranked (read: mostly upper-middle-class WASP, Jew, and/or Asian; the best way to up your district';s test scores is arrange it so that working class kids of all colors stay the fuck away) public school district, who can b) actually afford to make that shit happen. So even in the Rust Belt call the "Outer Ring" suburbs are doing great.
Everywhere else I suspect that the current WASP tendency to prefer a small apartment in a walkable neighborhood to yardwork and massive gasoline bills will screw the in Inner-Ring suburbs, while revitalizing some of the older neighborhoods back downtown.
I don't know which rust belt cities you're talking about with better transit then Cleveland. The only one I've ever lived in was Detroit, and the bus system there (especially DDOT's portion, part of the problem was the 'burbs and the City proper each insisted on their own separate systems) was chronically late.
The issues you bring up are things I've never encountered, despite being primarily on the bus in Cleveland for literally years. They have their own cops, who show up when their drivers call, so an RTA Station would be a terrible place for a gang to have a felonious initiation ceremony, even in East Cleveland. Especially if you posted it to Youtube, where the cops could watch the whole thing for witnesses, and get a warrant for your account info., etc.
And if people lived on flats in high rises they wouldn't need cars at all.
Seriously. Build a hi-rise 50 stories. Make it a 60-ft square. Each floor is now 3,600 sq ft. Even dividing each floor in half, and devoting a significant amount of space to elevators/ fire escapes/etc. you probably haven't lost that much square footage on a typical suburban ranch. Heating and cooling are probably cheaper then for a house because the surface area of the building is smaller per square foot. Yard work has gone away. Shoveling snow is a thing of the past. You can add a couple of floors of parking structure for minimal cost. You;ve got a lot shorter distance for sewer pipes/electrical/etc.
Like many things in America, our "problems" with transportation are caused pretty much entirely by our insistence on having shit both ways: everybody with the money to matter has to have both a House AND a centralized business district.
Keep in mind that almost all pro-car/anti-bus/anti-train articles are written by relatively wealthy people who really don't understand what goes on in your life when you think $12.50 an hour is an amazing wage. In Cleveland you either have to pay $1k-$1,500 a year for gas, plus insurance, plus maintenance, and deal with several local police forces funded virtually entirely by traffic tickets; or spend an hour and a half on the bus whenever you want to get anywhere that isn't right downtown. A place like NYC is much better because it lets you avoid all that without losing out on social life/opportunities/etc.
And I am the guy who finally managed that $12.50 an hour wage last year. My sister (who pulls in around $18k nannying in NYC) has better quality of life then me largely because they have a good public transit system so she can do things.
To illustrate the point: since Cleveland is car-obsessed the H and R Block job that let's me break that $12.50 wage always has mandatory meetings in places with great parking. It does not always have them in places that are on a bus line, and almost never has them in places that are one bus from my place. Many of them are not in the County, and the RTA Bus lines stop at the County line (NYC proper is technically five Counties, and transit system is coordinated across state lines). So I spent an hour-and-a-half on the bus yesterday riding to a semi-useful business meeting, and would have only managed to get home at 10 PM if some nice coworker hadn't been there to drive me back.
There is ample historical evidence that all systems eventually destroys themselves. In fact, in terms of not destroying itself, the best form of government is probably the British; which is so successful at totally remaking itself every few decades without a Revolution that it is quite literally impossible to pick a start-date. Even the one most of them would pick (1066) wasn't much of a change in governance structure for the vast majority of the population, it was just a change in the hereditary nobleman they had to deal with. And the Brits have never let education dictate where you stand, it's always been either heredity or your ability to get votes.
Typical Libertarian. Extremely strong on the theory (or at least aspects of the theory that support libertarian preconceptions), weak on the practice.
In theory the poor could all team up and vote themselves a Billionaire's money, and that would suck. But a) the drawbacks of your theory are even more horrifying (white supremacist Rhodesia, for example, technically allowed anyone of any race to vote if they had the proper education, it was just impossible to get said education if you weren't white, in the actual real world your proposal would have an inevitable tendency towards hereditary aristocracy where the educated get their kids in to school and only allow token representation to the peasants), and b) in practice that has not happened in a century or two of US Democracy because stealing Bill Gates money by statute would also steal from the Koch brothers and Soros, and their respective parties would fight the hell of that.
Dude, it's grammar, not a super-logical recursive function run by computers.
In the ACA case the Judges ruled that a Federal exchange set up in lieu of a state exchange was the logical equivalent of an "exchange set up by the state." This is no more irrational then telling your houseguest he can borrow the diesel car or the gasoline motorbike as long as he tops up the diesel, and expecting him to know you meant he fill up the bike with gasoline.
There's a reason multiple states chose to use the Federal Exchange, despite the fact that Conservative orthodoxy holds that made subsidies to their residents illegal.
It's the low-information voters.
And yet, never before, in the history of all history, has information been more readily available to voters.
And in my experience the real problem tends to be people who know lots of facts.
The guys who knows nothing's solution to every problem is take the proposals and split the difference. The guy who knows everything should (in theory) be miraculously smart and able to detect BS from a million miles away, in practice he's the purveyor of most of the BS because if he didn't have extremely strong ideological priors he wouldn't have waded through sufficient BS to become knowledgable.
Which is owned by an ex-Aussie, and is convinced that Obama's such a disaster that the rich are clamoring to leave.
And I won't be surprised if that gets them some takers. Particularly if the GOP can't get it together and start getting a consistent lead on Hillary.
There'll probably be a few more who do it because they want a rich democracy's passport,and don't like the fact the US taxes on global income (ie: if you make $1 Million in China and you;re Swedish you pay no Swedish taxes on it, just Chines; if you're American you pay both).
Apparently "Wop" is the US version, and it only refers to Italians. I meant Wog.
One of the perils of remembering things you read on Wikipedia is that they all tend to run together at some point.
In theory it shouldn't be any harder then doing a different human language accent. In some ways it'll be easier, because if you screw up nobody's gonna right on the fan board "She's got a pretty good Midlands accent, but slips between East and West."
In practice it's really difficult because you it's hard to find people to practice with, so the only Betezed who uses the accent is Marina and by the time the films rolled around she'd forgotten the damn thing because she hadn't used it for years.
Didn't sound like any damn Romanians I've ever heard. Hungarians either, and a significant chunk of that province is ethnic Hungarian Szekely.
I have read that it was supposed to be the generic "Vampire" accent, but watching the few Nemoidian scenes that are on Youtube it sounds a lot more North Asian. In particular they're not differentiating clearly between "R" and "L," which is a characteristic of Japanese speakers because Japanese has no "R" sound.
I couldn't easily find a scene where they say something with a "v" in it to see if they're also mixing up their "V" and "W," which is pretty much the only consistant thing about Vampire accents.