I'm all for open systems, but there's a slight problem here: this is mainly about smartphones, not PCs, and there aren't exactly a lot of open options here.
Of course, you would think that with the size of the US Government, they could work out a deal with Samsung or one of the Android phone makers to supply bare phones which could then be flashed with a government-made version of Android or AOSP, similar to CyanogenMod. But by the same token, the government could certainly do this for their PCs too, making their own custom Linux distro.
But instead, the Government is doubling down on crippled, closed, proprietary platforms that the Government has almost zero control over: Windows 10 on PCs/laptops and Apple iPhones.
And it's not like other countries' governments are doing much better (though they wouldn't have the economies of scale the USG has, except maybe China). At best, we're seeing some European municipalities adopting Linux but that's about it.
That means the government is left with the option of imposing things when stuff gets out of whack, which it is in Canada right now. Most people I know who had cable up until a few years ago was paying $90/mo for 55 channels. Many dropped cable for netflix and so on.
I'm sorry, I don't see what the problem here is. Why does the pricing need to be regulated? Obviously, some smarter (ex-)customers have figured out the obvious solution to overpriced cable TV, as you noted here yourself. This doesn't need any government interference.
What *does* need government interference is high-speed internet access. That's a basic utility, just as important as telephony and electricity in modern society. Cable TV is not; it's a luxury. If you don't want to spend $90/month for it, then don't. I have no desire to spend thousands of dollars for a box seat at a sports arena, so I don't: I go find something better to do with my time.
This sounds good in (soft-libertarian) theory, but it doesn't work in practice in many cases. For many cases, yes, it's absolutely the right approach; it's effective in a market where there's competition to be had, and is less overbearing than price regulation.
However, this is about cable TV, which is a natural monopoly as it's a utility service. The barrier to entry is ridiculously high (you have to string cable to every residential home, and worse you have to deal with right-of-way issues, plus sabotage by your competitor). It just isn't something where you can decree that competition must exist. I suppose you could try to make it easier for other cable operators to compete in the same place, but with all the issues of dealing with local governments, easements, pole access, etc., it gets messy really fast. A national law banning any kind of contracts between municipalities and cablecos granting them explicit monopolies would probably be a good start though, but that's still a "build it and they will come" situation which usually doesn't work.
However, I will say I think this case is basically a waste of time, because cable TV is not only a completely unnecessary luxury service, but it's also woefully obsolete. The government absolutely should be taking strong steps to ensure competition and low prices for high-speed internet service, but for TV? Nope. We already have OTA broadcasts and that's good enough. Regulating the pricing of cable TV seems to me like regulating the pricing of lattes or tickets for sporting events.
That's the idea with the hash. If you have a better idea, or at least can explain why the idea won't work on a technical level, let's hear it. The idea here is for votes to remain anonymous while allowing people to check that they're correctly recorded; did you not understand that?
As for your church knowing how you vote, I don't have a problem with that one. You shouldn't be keeping any secrets from your church; if they demand to know something about you, then you should be happily providing them that information. If they want to install cameras in your house to make sure you aren't sinning, then you should be happily agreeing to this. If you don't like those terms, then why are you a member of that church? Unlike having parents, an employer, or a landlord, there's no requirement to have a church membership. If your church abuses you, that's your own dumb fault (like Mormons who give copies of their tax returns to their churches).
Or maybe they really were charging a ludicrous markup because the alternative is a 30-mile drive the nearest competitor. That canard about "personalized service" is just that. Mom-and-pop shops run the gamut, and a lot of them truly are horrible, with terrible customer service. Walmart pioneered the liberal return policies we enjoy today; with the old mom-n-pop stores, once you bought a product, you were stuck with it, even if you never opened it and realized you didn't need it. I for one don't want to go back to that time.
Some visionary busts his ass building a leading company in the business, and then he gets sick and dies and his kids fuck it up, or he sells it and some CEO fixes things for a record profit in a few quarters when his stock options become vested and who cares if it all comes crashing down the moment he cashes out and leaves the company, etc. It's a symptom of capitalism, really.
I have a solution for this: the ultra-rich capitalists need to invest a bunch of money into anti-aging research, so the visionary who busts his ass never gets sick and dies, leaving the company to his dumbass kids.
Imagine how things would be now if Hewlett and Packard never died, and still controlled HP, or Sam Walton still ran Walmart. Or look at Koch Industries: it's the 2nd-largest private corporation in the US, and would be #17 on Fortune 500 if it were public. Like them or hate them (and despite the fact that they're the sons of the founder, the founder got lucky I guess to not have kids that were morons), the Kochs are a good example of how a privately-owned company run by people who really care about it (rather than having a golden parachute) is a lot better than how most public corporations are run now. David Koch is 75 now, so he's not likely to be around that much longer; I wonder what'll happen to the company after he and Charles croak.
I'm not arguing in favor of the current (broken) system, I just stated what I understood to be the (crappy) electoral process as stated in the Constitution. Am I incorrect?
I'm all for eliminating the Electoral College. In fact, I'm all for eliminating the Constitution itself and replacing it with a better one. This one is completely broken. I think we should switch to a Parliament, like every other developed nation has, and at the same time implementing some type of better voting system for ALL elections.
That's your own opinion. The polls show otherwise. Hillary is obviously and horribly corrupt, has committed criminal actions, and is a war hawk. I'd rather have a supposedly "racist" bigmouth in the White House than another mideast war.
The paper auditing thing doesn't help me. If I walk into whatever government office has the ballots and demand to see them, are they going to give them to me to do my own audit? What if thousands of individuals do the same thing? And how does that prove that my vote was accurately recorded anyway? The ballot I filed yesterday doesn't have my name, or anything at all identifiable about me, on it, just my selection. The ballots are all anonymous, so you have no way of knowing if the ballot box was stuffed, or if the ballots are faked and the real ballots trashed, etc.
With something online, anyone can look up their vote and verify it.
Um, I'm not a lawyer like you, but I thought the problem with a wide-open 4-person (or more) race like what you're describing is that no one would win enough electoral votes, and then the House of Representatives would choose the President.
I'm not confusing the primaries with the actual election. That's great that some polls show Bernie as being favorable to a wide swath of American voters, but the problem is that our shitty Presidential election system isn't designed to capture the desires of mainstream voters, it's rigged to perpetuate a corrupt, two-party system and keep people like Bernie out. Bernie has to win the Democratic primaries in order to go to the general election, so people registered as Democrats need to vote for him to make that happen. If they don't, then he's out, or he has to run as an independent which is unlikely (I'm pretty sure he said he wouldn't do that). If there's one thing I don't like about Bernie, it's that he's much too soft on Hillary (as Ralph Nader noted in his blog). Maybe he'll change his mind; it'd be interesting to see a 3-way race between Hillary, Trump, and Bernie.
Bernie is old, but he's not that much older than Hillary or Trump. Bernie is 74, Trump is 69, and Hillary is 68. There's a 6-year difference between Bernie and Hillary. The age thing is a canard that anti-Bernie people are using to attack him. Maybe if you're a Cruz or Rubio supporter it's a somewhat valid charge, but if you're a Hillary shill, then no, it's not valid at all. Hillary has had a bunch of health problems and is likely to keel over sooner than Bernie.
However, I do thank you for pointing out that Obama was also losing after Super Tuesday, that's a very good point.
There is no solution, other than to put up with it as long as you can, try to vote to improve it, and jump off when the ship starts sinking too much, if you can find a better ship to take you.
Voting is the best thing you can do, but here you can only do as much as the system, and the other voters, allow. If the other voters are so dumb they're all going to vote for the corporate-owned candidate, and your non-establishment candidate can only muster up a third of the vote or so, well, you just have to live with that. Maybe the next election will be better. It does appear on the right-wing side that people have really woken up and gotten tired of the establishment candidates, though their non-establishment choice is rather questionable. But over on the left-wing side, it appears that people are strongly in favor of the corporate-owned war hawk.
-1 Stupid. The people on the far right are typically highly religious, and religion is the diametric opposite of rationality.
You do have a point about far-leftists whining about their feelings being hurt though. The other responders are right: the people in the middle will all be watching this wondering, "WTF is wrong with these crazies?"
From what I see, everyone on the right absolutely despises Hillary. I do *not* see Cruz voters, for instance, voting for Hillary over Trump. They might be saying now how much they dislike Trump, but when it comes down to Trump versus Mrs. Benghazi, I just don't see them voting for her. Similarly, there's a lot of Bernie voters who despise Hillary and have vowed to vote for Trump over her.
While I agree that this race will come down to Hillary vs. Trump (unless, as you said, she keels over during a Goldman Sachs speech--we can only hope), I think it could really go either way. Both Hillary and Trump have very high disapproval numbers, but as Trump has proven over and over now, you can't use these poll numbers to make any good predictions, which is why I don't think it's valid to predict a winner based on their relative disapproval numbers, just that the fact they're both high means lots of people are going to be voting *against* someone in this race, not for someone.
You might be right about the GOP getting even stronger in Congress though. I think the Democrats are really shooting themselves in the foot by pushing Hillary. There's a couple of scary scenarios here: 1) Hillary wins, and the GOP controls Congress, but not veto-proof. Congress impeaches her based on her prior actions (like the "damned emails"). The federal government grinds to a halt for 4 long years. This'll make MonicaGate look like a cake-walk. It could even lead to a Constitutional crisis, and a new Constitutional Convention of the states (which would actually be a good thing). 2) Hillary wins, but the GOP makes big gains and gets a veto-proof Congress. Hillary becomes mostly ineffectual and GOP pushes all kinds of regressive policies through by overriding her veto. Hillary refuses to enforce them, and makes a bunch of signing statements, and SCOTUS backs her, so Congress cuts off all funding for the government indefinitely, again grinding the government to a halt for 4 long years, leading to a Constitutional Convention.
If there is one thing that seems pretty clear it's that Sanders and Trump are both hated by the elite of their party and the sleeping giant of "None of the above" voters are starting to notice and believe they might be viable ways to strike back at them.
Only half true. The sleeping giant of "white people without a college degree" (and a bunch who do) are indeed waking up and voting for Trump in the primaries. It looks very much like Trump will win the GOP nomination.
However, on the Democratic side, it appears this isn't the case. While the Bernie supporters are putting up a good fight, it just isn't enough: outside of states that already aspire to be like Denmark and don't have any black people, the Democratic voters are voting for Hillary in droves, and apparently minorities are really leading the way here. It's great that roughly 1/3 of them are voting for Bernie, but that doesn't help when the other 2/3 are voting for Mrs. Goldman-Sachs. For some strange reason, the minorities (particularly blacks) are turning their backs on the guy who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr (in the "March on Washington" where King delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech) and instead voting for the woman who called young African-American men "super-predators" and helped push legislation that has destroyed black families. It's mind-boggling.
As best as I can tell, what we're seeing here is the dumb older generations of Democratic voters screwing over the younger generations because they're gullible enough to believe Hillary's lies and desperately want to see a female--any female--in the White House before they're dead, even if she's a blatantly corrupt, ultra-wealthy war hawk who'll sign disastrous trade deals like the TPP and further push policies to spy on Americans with the NSA, and most likely start yet another war in the middle east, destabilizing the area even more, increasing the power of ISIS/Boko Haram, and resulting in the deaths of millions.
Based on all this, Trump actually looks like the rational choice in November. At least he called Bush's Iraq war "stupid", unlike Hillary who voted for it.
That's a good idea, but it needs a tweak. Forget the logging in bit, all the data needs to be made completely public. With a hash, this can be done anonymously easily.
Give everyone a hash when they register to vote. Using voting machines to record the votes and correlate them with the hashes representing each person. Then after the vote, make available for download the entire data dump, showing (in CSV format perhaps) the voter's hash, and his voting choices. Interested voters just need to download the CSV file and search for their hash and verify the votes match what they chose at the voting booth.
Someone who knows a lot about crypto and math might want to correct me here about how to tweak this so that the government can't (intentionally or inadvertently) keep lists of voters' real IDs and their hashes, since this could be made public and peoples' votes therefore made public. I'm guessing there needs to be another step here.
Wrong. Trump is absolutely electable: he's sweeping all the GOP primaries right now. How can you possibly say he's not "electable"? That just defies reality.
Sanders, OTOH, while a great candidate IMO, is just not winning the primaries it appears, so no, it doesn't look like there's a good chance he'll be on the ballot in November.
My prediction is that Trump will win the election. He's winning the GOP primaries now, and will probably get the nomination. Then he'll be up against Hillary, and given how much everyone who leans even slightly right absolutely despises her, and combined with how much all the Sanders voters (esp. young people) despise her, this means that all these people will either vote for Trump or sit out the race (or write in Bernie's name or vote for Stein or something).
After robo-cars become common, I predict the next big aftermarket automotive accessory market will be some kind of device which projects an image of a white person in the driver's seat (still called a "driver's seat" because of historical convention at this point), so the black person can't be seen from the outside.
Already furniture (for example) is crappier than it was in my father's or grandfather's time, now mostly made of chipboard rather than solid wood because the world is running out of hardwood forests.
No, it's not, this is completely false. Furniture now is better than it was in your grandfather's time, or earlier. The problem is that you're buying cheap-ass furniture, instead of hiring a woodworker to make custom pieces for you. If you aren't paying thousands of dollars for a single piece of furniture, then you can't compare: back in the old days, people spent a fortune on furniture. They didn't have cars, only horses, so furniture and silverware was what they spent lots of money on. All those nice museum pieces you see from a couple centuries ago are the furniture pieces that ultra-wealthy people had commissioned, and then showed off to their rich friends when they had parties. Poor people didn't have furniture, or they had some crap that was just nailed together. All the old furniture you see today is the stuff the rich people bought, and survives; the crappy furniture was burned for firewood long ago. This is just another example of the old rule "95% of everything is crap".
These days, woodworkers get a lot of their hardwood from Africa, which wasn't available to your grandfather. And there's still plenty of hardwood coming from North America. Go to a lumber store and see for yourself. It isn't even that expensive. You can even buy pretty reasonably-priced furniture made of hardwood at places like Thomasville. It's not super high-end, and uses a lot of veneers, but it's all made of hardwood.
As for energy, people need less energy now to maintain the same lifestyle as before. Cars have much better fuel efficiency, HVAC is far more efficient (and we don't need to burn firewood any more), electrical things are far more efficient, etc. Get people to move closer together and stop buying SUVs and use electric robo-Ubers and their energy usage will be far, far less.
The big reason I could see is that municipalities would lose a lot of money in traffic tickets, and wouldn't be able to pull over and hassle black people so much.
Yes it will. One of the OTHER ways it will do this will be to take the pain out of commuting (e.g., you can watch TV instead of drive; you'll no longer feel as stressed when in traffic) so people will start living further and further out from their jobs again - should be great for the suburbs.
I think this effect will be minimal. You still only have 24 hours in a day, so just because the commute is less stressful doesn't mean you're going to want to spend another hour or two sitting in a car every day. Maybe if you're able to sleep in the car, but most people probably won't: you're not going to get restful sleep this way. You might also make the argument that you could read or watch TV or do work on a computer while the car is driving itself. To that argument, I counter with two words: "motion sickness".
What I wouldn't be surprised to see with robo-cars is people giving up car ownership en masse, and switching to Uber, Lyft, and who know how many competitors might spring up for them. Especially for commuting: if you work in a city downtown, parking can be a real problem, with with robo-Uber, you won't have that problem. It could very well be more cost-effective just to take robo-Uber to work (and they might even have some kind of car-pooling option to save money too), rather than to pay a car payment and insurance for your own personal car, plus the hefty parking expenses downtown, plus of course the hassle of finding a parking space if there aren't enough.
With taxis and Ubers, a good chunk of the cost of the ride is paying some guy for his time in driving you. With a robo-car, that cost goes away, so robo-Uber rides should be cheaper theoretically.
While this might mean people might go places more because it's cheaper (more passenger-miles total), this also probably means more people will forgo buying their own car, and just use robo-Uber instead. After all, people only have finite time to spend sitting in an Uber/robo-Uber car going someplace, but everyone needs transport at some point. If lots of people give up car ownership in favor of robo-Uber, that means fewer overall cars will be needed, and cars will be utilized a lot more, instead of sitting in garages or parking lots. This means less pollution and energy usage from car manufacturing. It also means less space wasted for parking lots.
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Basically, we're just a bunch of Rube Goldberg machines.
I'm all for open systems, but there's a slight problem here: this is mainly about smartphones, not PCs, and there aren't exactly a lot of open options here.
Of course, you would think that with the size of the US Government, they could work out a deal with Samsung or one of the Android phone makers to supply bare phones which could then be flashed with a government-made version of Android or AOSP, similar to CyanogenMod. But by the same token, the government could certainly do this for their PCs too, making their own custom Linux distro.
But instead, the Government is doubling down on crippled, closed, proprietary platforms that the Government has almost zero control over: Windows 10 on PCs/laptops and Apple iPhones.
And it's not like other countries' governments are doing much better (though they wouldn't have the economies of scale the USG has, except maybe China). At best, we're seeing some European municipalities adopting Linux but that's about it.
That means the government is left with the option of imposing things when stuff gets out of whack, which it is in Canada right now. Most people I know who had cable up until a few years ago was paying $90/mo for 55 channels. Many dropped cable for netflix and so on.
I'm sorry, I don't see what the problem here is. Why does the pricing need to be regulated? Obviously, some smarter (ex-)customers have figured out the obvious solution to overpriced cable TV, as you noted here yourself. This doesn't need any government interference.
What *does* need government interference is high-speed internet access. That's a basic utility, just as important as telephony and electricity in modern society. Cable TV is not; it's a luxury. If you don't want to spend $90/month for it, then don't. I have no desire to spend thousands of dollars for a box seat at a sports arena, so I don't: I go find something better to do with my time.
This sounds good in (soft-libertarian) theory, but it doesn't work in practice in many cases. For many cases, yes, it's absolutely the right approach; it's effective in a market where there's competition to be had, and is less overbearing than price regulation.
However, this is about cable TV, which is a natural monopoly as it's a utility service. The barrier to entry is ridiculously high (you have to string cable to every residential home, and worse you have to deal with right-of-way issues, plus sabotage by your competitor). It just isn't something where you can decree that competition must exist. I suppose you could try to make it easier for other cable operators to compete in the same place, but with all the issues of dealing with local governments, easements, pole access, etc., it gets messy really fast. A national law banning any kind of contracts between municipalities and cablecos granting them explicit monopolies would probably be a good start though, but that's still a "build it and they will come" situation which usually doesn't work.
However, I will say I think this case is basically a waste of time, because cable TV is not only a completely unnecessary luxury service, but it's also woefully obsolete. The government absolutely should be taking strong steps to ensure competition and low prices for high-speed internet service, but for TV? Nope. We already have OTA broadcasts and that's good enough. Regulating the pricing of cable TV seems to me like regulating the pricing of lattes or tickets for sporting events.
That's the idea with the hash. If you have a better idea, or at least can explain why the idea won't work on a technical level, let's hear it. The idea here is for votes to remain anonymous while allowing people to check that they're correctly recorded; did you not understand that?
As for your church knowing how you vote, I don't have a problem with that one. You shouldn't be keeping any secrets from your church; if they demand to know something about you, then you should be happily providing them that information. If they want to install cameras in your house to make sure you aren't sinning, then you should be happily agreeing to this. If you don't like those terms, then why are you a member of that church? Unlike having parents, an employer, or a landlord, there's no requirement to have a church membership. If your church abuses you, that's your own dumb fault (like Mormons who give copies of their tax returns to their churches).
Or maybe they really were charging a ludicrous markup because the alternative is a 30-mile drive the nearest competitor. That canard about "personalized service" is just that. Mom-and-pop shops run the gamut, and a lot of them truly are horrible, with terrible customer service. Walmart pioneered the liberal return policies we enjoy today; with the old mom-n-pop stores, once you bought a product, you were stuck with it, even if you never opened it and realized you didn't need it. I for one don't want to go back to that time.
Some visionary busts his ass building a leading company in the business, and then he gets sick and dies and his kids fuck it up, or he sells it and some CEO fixes things for a record profit in a few quarters when his stock options become vested and who cares if it all comes crashing down the moment he cashes out and leaves the company, etc. It's a symptom of capitalism, really.
I have a solution for this: the ultra-rich capitalists need to invest a bunch of money into anti-aging research, so the visionary who busts his ass never gets sick and dies, leaving the company to his dumbass kids.
Imagine how things would be now if Hewlett and Packard never died, and still controlled HP, or Sam Walton still ran Walmart. Or look at Koch Industries: it's the 2nd-largest private corporation in the US, and would be #17 on Fortune 500 if it were public. Like them or hate them (and despite the fact that they're the sons of the founder, the founder got lucky I guess to not have kids that were morons), the Kochs are a good example of how a privately-owned company run by people who really care about it (rather than having a golden parachute) is a lot better than how most public corporations are run now. David Koch is 75 now, so he's not likely to be around that much longer; I wonder what'll happen to the company after he and Charles croak.
I'm not arguing in favor of the current (broken) system, I just stated what I understood to be the (crappy) electoral process as stated in the Constitution. Am I incorrect?
I'm all for eliminating the Electoral College. In fact, I'm all for eliminating the Constitution itself and replacing it with a better one. This one is completely broken. I think we should switch to a Parliament, like every other developed nation has, and at the same time implementing some type of better voting system for ALL elections.
That's your own opinion. The polls show otherwise. Hillary is obviously and horribly corrupt, has committed criminal actions, and is a war hawk. I'd rather have a supposedly "racist" bigmouth in the White House than another mideast war.
The paper auditing thing doesn't help me. If I walk into whatever government office has the ballots and demand to see them, are they going to give them to me to do my own audit? What if thousands of individuals do the same thing? And how does that prove that my vote was accurately recorded anyway? The ballot I filed yesterday doesn't have my name, or anything at all identifiable about me, on it, just my selection. The ballots are all anonymous, so you have no way of knowing if the ballot box was stuffed, or if the ballots are faked and the real ballots trashed, etc.
With something online, anyone can look up their vote and verify it.
Um, I'm not a lawyer like you, but I thought the problem with a wide-open 4-person (or more) race like what you're describing is that no one would win enough electoral votes, and then the House of Representatives would choose the President.
Otherwise, I think your analysis is spot-on.
I'm not confusing the primaries with the actual election. That's great that some polls show Bernie as being favorable to a wide swath of American voters, but the problem is that our shitty Presidential election system isn't designed to capture the desires of mainstream voters, it's rigged to perpetuate a corrupt, two-party system and keep people like Bernie out. Bernie has to win the Democratic primaries in order to go to the general election, so people registered as Democrats need to vote for him to make that happen. If they don't, then he's out, or he has to run as an independent which is unlikely (I'm pretty sure he said he wouldn't do that). If there's one thing I don't like about Bernie, it's that he's much too soft on Hillary (as Ralph Nader noted in his blog). Maybe he'll change his mind; it'd be interesting to see a 3-way race between Hillary, Trump, and Bernie.
Bernie is old, but he's not that much older than Hillary or Trump. Bernie is 74, Trump is 69, and Hillary is 68. There's a 6-year difference between Bernie and Hillary. The age thing is a canard that anti-Bernie people are using to attack him. Maybe if you're a Cruz or Rubio supporter it's a somewhat valid charge, but if you're a Hillary shill, then no, it's not valid at all. Hillary has had a bunch of health problems and is likely to keel over sooner than Bernie.
However, I do thank you for pointing out that Obama was also losing after Super Tuesday, that's a very good point.
There is no solution, other than to put up with it as long as you can, try to vote to improve it, and jump off when the ship starts sinking too much, if you can find a better ship to take you.
Voting is the best thing you can do, but here you can only do as much as the system, and the other voters, allow. If the other voters are so dumb they're all going to vote for the corporate-owned candidate, and your non-establishment candidate can only muster up a third of the vote or so, well, you just have to live with that. Maybe the next election will be better. It does appear on the right-wing side that people have really woken up and gotten tired of the establishment candidates, though their non-establishment choice is rather questionable. But over on the left-wing side, it appears that people are strongly in favor of the corporate-owned war hawk.
-1 Stupid. The people on the far right are typically highly religious, and religion is the diametric opposite of rationality.
You do have a point about far-leftists whining about their feelings being hurt though. The other responders are right: the people in the middle will all be watching this wondering, "WTF is wrong with these crazies?"
I disagree completely. (I may be wrong though.)
From what I see, everyone on the right absolutely despises Hillary. I do *not* see Cruz voters, for instance, voting for Hillary over Trump. They might be saying now how much they dislike Trump, but when it comes down to Trump versus Mrs. Benghazi, I just don't see them voting for her. Similarly, there's a lot of Bernie voters who despise Hillary and have vowed to vote for Trump over her.
While I agree that this race will come down to Hillary vs. Trump (unless, as you said, she keels over during a Goldman Sachs speech--we can only hope), I think it could really go either way. Both Hillary and Trump have very high disapproval numbers, but as Trump has proven over and over now, you can't use these poll numbers to make any good predictions, which is why I don't think it's valid to predict a winner based on their relative disapproval numbers, just that the fact they're both high means lots of people are going to be voting *against* someone in this race, not for someone.
You might be right about the GOP getting even stronger in Congress though. I think the Democrats are really shooting themselves in the foot by pushing Hillary. There's a couple of scary scenarios here:
1) Hillary wins, and the GOP controls Congress, but not veto-proof. Congress impeaches her based on her prior actions (like the "damned emails"). The federal government grinds to a halt for 4 long years. This'll make MonicaGate look like a cake-walk. It could even lead to a Constitutional crisis, and a new Constitutional Convention of the states (which would actually be a good thing).
2) Hillary wins, but the GOP makes big gains and gets a veto-proof Congress. Hillary becomes mostly ineffectual and GOP pushes all kinds of regressive policies through by overriding her veto. Hillary refuses to enforce them, and makes a bunch of signing statements, and SCOTUS backs her, so Congress cuts off all funding for the government indefinitely, again grinding the government to a halt for 4 long years, leading to a Constitutional Convention.
If there is one thing that seems pretty clear it's that Sanders and Trump are both hated by the elite of their party and the sleeping giant of "None of the above" voters are starting to notice and believe they might be viable ways to strike back at them.
Only half true. The sleeping giant of "white people without a college degree" (and a bunch who do) are indeed waking up and voting for Trump in the primaries. It looks very much like Trump will win the GOP nomination.
However, on the Democratic side, it appears this isn't the case. While the Bernie supporters are putting up a good fight, it just isn't enough: outside of states that already aspire to be like Denmark and don't have any black people, the Democratic voters are voting for Hillary in droves, and apparently minorities are really leading the way here. It's great that roughly 1/3 of them are voting for Bernie, but that doesn't help when the other 2/3 are voting for Mrs. Goldman-Sachs. For some strange reason, the minorities (particularly blacks) are turning their backs on the guy who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr (in the "March on Washington" where King delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech) and instead voting for the woman who called young African-American men "super-predators" and helped push legislation that has destroyed black families. It's mind-boggling.
As best as I can tell, what we're seeing here is the dumb older generations of Democratic voters screwing over the younger generations because they're gullible enough to believe Hillary's lies and desperately want to see a female--any female--in the White House before they're dead, even if she's a blatantly corrupt, ultra-wealthy war hawk who'll sign disastrous trade deals like the TPP and further push policies to spy on Americans with the NSA, and most likely start yet another war in the middle east, destabilizing the area even more, increasing the power of ISIS/Boko Haram, and resulting in the deaths of millions.
Based on all this, Trump actually looks like the rational choice in November. At least he called Bush's Iraq war "stupid", unlike Hillary who voted for it.
That's a good idea, but it needs a tweak. Forget the logging in bit, all the data needs to be made completely public. With a hash, this can be done anonymously easily.
Give everyone a hash when they register to vote. Using voting machines to record the votes and correlate them with the hashes representing each person. Then after the vote, make available for download the entire data dump, showing (in CSV format perhaps) the voter's hash, and his voting choices. Interested voters just need to download the CSV file and search for their hash and verify the votes match what they chose at the voting booth.
Someone who knows a lot about crypto and math might want to correct me here about how to tweak this so that the government can't (intentionally or inadvertently) keep lists of voters' real IDs and their hashes, since this could be made public and peoples' votes therefore made public. I'm guessing there needs to be another step here.
Wrong. Trump is absolutely electable: he's sweeping all the GOP primaries right now. How can you possibly say he's not "electable"? That just defies reality.
Sanders, OTOH, while a great candidate IMO, is just not winning the primaries it appears, so no, it doesn't look like there's a good chance he'll be on the ballot in November.
My prediction is that Trump will win the election. He's winning the GOP primaries now, and will probably get the nomination. Then he'll be up against Hillary, and given how much everyone who leans even slightly right absolutely despises her, and combined with how much all the Sanders voters (esp. young people) despise her, this means that all these people will either vote for Trump or sit out the race (or write in Bernie's name or vote for Stein or something).
After robo-cars become common, I predict the next big aftermarket automotive accessory market will be some kind of device which projects an image of a white person in the driver's seat (still called a "driver's seat" because of historical convention at this point), so the black person can't be seen from the outside.
If I were to hazard a guess at a generalization, I'd say that raising taxes is a Democratic thing, and raising fees is a Republican thing.
Already furniture (for example) is crappier than it was in my father's or grandfather's time, now mostly made of chipboard rather than solid wood because the world is running out of hardwood forests.
No, it's not, this is completely false. Furniture now is better than it was in your grandfather's time, or earlier. The problem is that you're buying cheap-ass furniture, instead of hiring a woodworker to make custom pieces for you. If you aren't paying thousands of dollars for a single piece of furniture, then you can't compare: back in the old days, people spent a fortune on furniture. They didn't have cars, only horses, so furniture and silverware was what they spent lots of money on. All those nice museum pieces you see from a couple centuries ago are the furniture pieces that ultra-wealthy people had commissioned, and then showed off to their rich friends when they had parties. Poor people didn't have furniture, or they had some crap that was just nailed together. All the old furniture you see today is the stuff the rich people bought, and survives; the crappy furniture was burned for firewood long ago. This is just another example of the old rule "95% of everything is crap".
These days, woodworkers get a lot of their hardwood from Africa, which wasn't available to your grandfather. And there's still plenty of hardwood coming from North America. Go to a lumber store and see for yourself. It isn't even that expensive. You can even buy pretty reasonably-priced furniture made of hardwood at places like Thomasville. It's not super high-end, and uses a lot of veneers, but it's all made of hardwood.
As for energy, people need less energy now to maintain the same lifestyle as before. Cars have much better fuel efficiency, HVAC is far more efficient (and we don't need to burn firewood any more), electrical things are far more efficient, etc. Get people to move closer together and stop buying SUVs and use electric robo-Ubers and their energy usage will be far, far less.
Because he doesn't have the crony connections the CEO does, that's why.
The big reason I could see is that municipalities would lose a lot of money in traffic tickets, and wouldn't be able to pull over and hassle black people so much.
Yes it will. One of the OTHER ways it will do this will be to take the pain out of commuting (e.g., you can watch TV instead of drive; you'll no longer feel as stressed when in traffic) so people will start living further and further out from their jobs again - should be great for the suburbs.
I think this effect will be minimal. You still only have 24 hours in a day, so just because the commute is less stressful doesn't mean you're going to want to spend another hour or two sitting in a car every day. Maybe if you're able to sleep in the car, but most people probably won't: you're not going to get restful sleep this way. You might also make the argument that you could read or watch TV or do work on a computer while the car is driving itself. To that argument, I counter with two words: "motion sickness".
What I wouldn't be surprised to see with robo-cars is people giving up car ownership en masse, and switching to Uber, Lyft, and who know how many competitors might spring up for them. Especially for commuting: if you work in a city downtown, parking can be a real problem, with with robo-Uber, you won't have that problem. It could very well be more cost-effective just to take robo-Uber to work (and they might even have some kind of car-pooling option to save money too), rather than to pay a car payment and insurance for your own personal car, plus the hefty parking expenses downtown, plus of course the hassle of finding a parking space if there aren't enough.
With taxis and Ubers, a good chunk of the cost of the ride is paying some guy for his time in driving you. With a robo-car, that cost goes away, so robo-Uber rides should be cheaper theoretically.
While this might mean people might go places more because it's cheaper (more passenger-miles total), this also probably means more people will forgo buying their own car, and just use robo-Uber instead. After all, people only have finite time to spend sitting in an Uber/robo-Uber car going someplace, but everyone needs transport at some point. If lots of people give up car ownership in favor of robo-Uber, that means fewer overall cars will be needed, and cars will be utilized a lot more, instead of sitting in garages or parking lots. This means less pollution and energy usage from car manufacturing. It also means less space wasted for parking lots.