Sorry, but the French people are absolutely accountable for their politicians, just as we dumb Americans are accountable for our idiotic politicians like Todd "legitimate rape" Akins. The people are the ones who vote for the politicians and allow them to remain in power, so they're to blame if anything goes wrong. If you guys don't like your government, why don't you dust off the guillotines and put them to use again, like the last time you got tired of your leaders?
Is it really linked with poverty? Or with a culture where you don't need to walk very much? Here in the US, there's tons of fat people in lower-class areas, but you'll also notice that all those people also have cars, and don't have to walk very much. Go to NYC and you don't see much obesity, since you have to walk everywhere (of course, the cost of living is high there too, but there's lots of people making middle-class incomes there and dealing with it by sharing tiny apartments). I imagine many parts of Europe are the same: there's lots of city-dwellers who don't own cars, and walk a lot. I've never heard about much obesity in Japan, and again that's another society where tons of people live in big cities and use public transit, and have to walk a lot.
If all the pizzerias in a town decided to do that, I think Google would happily delist them and let them founder. Maybe if all the restaurants in the NYC area did this, for instance, Google would sit up and take notice, but there's no way that's ever going to happen.
The fact is, Google is just like the phone books, except unlike the phone books, you don't have to pay an exorbitant fee to be listed there. Any business refusing this free advertising would be utterly stupid in doing so. It's doubtful there's enough money in the indexing business to make it worthwhile to pay off businesses to list them; if there were, someone would have made a business out of it ages ago. Instead, it's always businesses having to pay to advertise themselves. Google's only able to do it for free because they operate at such large volume and with such low costs that they can get money through targeted advertisement to pay for everything. Would pizzerias really want to make an issue out of it so they can get a check for $2/month?
You're right: fewer businesses are bothering with phone books, and fewer consumers use them (mainly just elderly people). Why is that?
Because everyone uses Google to find stuff now.
If I want to find a local pizzeria, I get on Google Maps and type in "pizza" and find everything near me. Then I can look at the reviews for them too. Why would I need a phone book?
However, if the pizzerias all decided to force Google to not list them, I wouldn't find them, and they'd no longer get any new business.
Yes, those are all good moves, because the voters are so stupid and gullible that they're easily swayed by campaign ads. My whole point here is that the voters' gullibility does not absolve them of the responsibility for the outcome caused by their votes, as so many responders here seem to think it does. It doesn't matter if a bunch of PACs convince people to vote against their own best interests: the voters are still responsible for that, and for whatever their chosen leaders do. Moves like the ones you list are designed to limit this effect, but if the people weren't so dumb, these measures wouldn't be necessary.
Voting machines do not take cash. Millions in campaign funds are irrelevent: it's the people who cast the votes and pull the levers. If they're dumb enough to be swayed by campaign ads, that's their own fault. They're still the ones in charge. If you're an adult voter, you're responsible for your own actions, including your votes.
Well, the answer I was looking for was a little more general: they didn't fix the problem at all, and the whole thing collapsed.
The Visigoths sacking Rome really was just a small part of a much bigger problem, of that society completely imploding as the Romans gave up on their advanced society and turned to Feudalism. Roman citizens gave up on living in cities and the whole idea of specialization of labor, and moved out to Feudal areas to work as serfs, because it was better than life in the cities by that point. The Empire even tried passing laws making it illegal to quit your job at an employer, for any reason at all, but it didn't help; I imagine the US government might try passing such a law eventually.
True, but it's also the people's fault for allowing the establishment to get away with it. Remember, at one time, we used to have adequate education on responsible citizenship, at least for a much larger portion of society than now.
It's not much different from Germany in the 20s and 30s: they used to have a strong, educated society, but then they allowed a bunch of maniacs to take power because they were mad about some economic problems, and then they did nothing while the maniacs ran amok or worse, helped them with their evil schemes. We don't have concentration camps just yet (except for Gitmo), though our prison-industrial complex is starting to look like that but without the gas chambers (dead prisoners can't be used for cheap labor), but there's a lot of parallels there.
Filling the interstitial space with nitrogen gets you close to R=2 and adds maintenance costs.
And there's also triple-pane windows out there, but those are probably well within the single-digit R-values as well. Meanwhile, a good old-fashioned wall made of timber frame and fiberglass insulation can have an R-value of over 13, and that's with some mediocre insulation. There's better insulation out there, and building with 2x6 studs gets you thicker walls that you can stuff more insulation into for a higher overall R-value.
You're forgetting those cold winter nights. No sun at night to get a greenhouse effect from, and windows have terrible insulation qualities (new ones aren't nearly as bad, but this house was probably made decades ago when windows were utter shit from an insulation point-of-view, and not much better than just having an open hole in the side of the house).
but I'm having trouble translating that into a viable plan for the US in the 21st century.
I think you're missing my point. The Roman Empire divided into two, and the western half ended up mostly collapsing, and later turning into the Holy Roman Empire, which really wasn't much of an empire at all (the power wasn't very concentrated, and instead Europe lived under Feudalism for a thousand years until the Renaissance, formed more modern nation-states, fought two horrible wars, and finally formed a loose union that's having lots of monetary problems). My prediction is the US will do something similar: break up, and part or all of it will collapse, and life in the US (or at least part of it, especially the "red state" part) is going to suck for a long time to come. It's not a "viable plan" for improvement, it's a prediction of things to come. The basic point is that when governments get really corrupt and crappy, they don't get fixed. Instead, they almost invariably end up collapsing or going through a bloody revolution or war. The only exception I can think of offhand is the British Empire/government: it's gone through a slow "morphing" over many decades, shedding its colonies and slowly removing power from the monarchy, to get to its present state (which still has a lot of corruption problems, but probably nowhere near as bad as the USA); there was no single point where everything went to hell in Britain. Usually, things are much more violent and severe, like the US revolution in the late 1700s, the bloody French revolution shortly after, the Ottoman Empire being crushed in a big war, the Third Reich being crushed in another big war, the Roman Empire decaying and collapsing, etc.
Sorry, but you're wrong. We DO elect the President. It's not a direct, popular election, but it's close enough: we elect the electors who elect the President in the Electoral College. Rarely have the results differed from what a direct popular election would have determined, but even then it was only between the two main party candidates, and it was extremely close. It's not like the people are all voting for Green and Libertarian candidates and the EC is choosing a Dem or Rep for President. The main problem with the EC is that it's a state-by-state winner-takes-all system where the winner of the popular vote in each state (except for 2, I think) gets all the electoral votes in that state, so the power of your vote varies relative to other citizens' based on which state you live in. But this doesn't change the fact that, ultimately, it's the people who make the choice, even if there's a level of indirection there.
Think about entertainment, compare it to the gladiators of Roman times, you know, the old, those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it... Of course, this is getting a little over the top, we stop short of killing people on TV but we definitely watch them live doing some insane stupid shit. We keep the masses entertained so they can ignore their problems.
Right, and whose fault is that? It's the peoples' fault for being dumb enough to be placated by bread and circuses and continuing to vote for the same people. You're all adults (speaking to voters here), this state of affairs is your fault and your responsibility. Stop trying to pass blame on to supposed puppet-masters. If you're being played like a puppet, it's your own stupid fault.
As for learning from history, you're exactly right. Remind me how the Roman people ultimately dealt with the problems their government had.
I don't see how. PACs can advertise all they want, but in the end it's the voting citizens who make the real decisions about who takes power.
If you let yourself get talked into committing a crime by some smooth-talker, who goes to jail for the crime? You do. The person who talked you into it may get punished too (they generally get punished a lot more if they manage to talk a bunch of people into it, like Charles Manson, rather than just one person), but your punishment is no less severe.
The political process is so ingrained in it's own traditions and voters in theirs that I honestly don't see what could be done in our lifetime, or even the next several, that will change that.
I think I have the answer to this one. For this, we just need to look at history, specifically the Roman Empire. What did the Romans do to fix the corrupt system of government they had, with crazy emperors and an overgrown military?
I disagree. Who are the people who hate the "spoilers"? They're fans of the two-party system, or one of those two parties. I'm pretty sure that if we had some better voting system (like Condorcet or Borda) when Perot and Nader were running, the result would have been the same: the winner would have been either a Democrat or a Republican. The only thing that would have been different would have been the percentage that Nader/Perot got; it would have been much higher, but still a loss.
It's just like all the Ron Paul voters complaining about the Republican primaries. Say what you will about Ron, "he's batshit crazy" etc, but he's no more batshit crazy than Romney and his policies. Yet, the Republican voters had the chance to elect someone who was anti-war, and what did they do? They elected someone who's all but promising a new war with Iran.
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Sorry, but the French people are absolutely accountable for their politicians, just as we dumb Americans are accountable for our idiotic politicians like Todd "legitimate rape" Akins. The people are the ones who vote for the politicians and allow them to remain in power, so they're to blame if anything goes wrong. If you guys don't like your government, why don't you dust off the guillotines and put them to use again, like the last time you got tired of your leaders?
Is it really linked with poverty? Or with a culture where you don't need to walk very much? Here in the US, there's tons of fat people in lower-class areas, but you'll also notice that all those people also have cars, and don't have to walk very much. Go to NYC and you don't see much obesity, since you have to walk everywhere (of course, the cost of living is high there too, but there's lots of people making middle-class incomes there and dealing with it by sharing tiny apartments). I imagine many parts of Europe are the same: there's lots of city-dwellers who don't own cars, and walk a lot. I've never heard about much obesity in Japan, and again that's another society where tons of people live in big cities and use public transit, and have to walk a lot.
unless everyone you know is 110lbs.
Outside the US, this isn't an unreasonable assumption. It's only in the US where everyone weighs at least 250 lbs.
I thought he was talking about the combined forces of Microsoft, Apple, the RIAA, and the MPAA.
If all the pizzerias in a town decided to do that, I think Google would happily delist them and let them founder. Maybe if all the restaurants in the NYC area did this, for instance, Google would sit up and take notice, but there's no way that's ever going to happen.
The fact is, Google is just like the phone books, except unlike the phone books, you don't have to pay an exorbitant fee to be listed there. Any business refusing this free advertising would be utterly stupid in doing so. It's doubtful there's enough money in the indexing business to make it worthwhile to pay off businesses to list them; if there were, someone would have made a business out of it ages ago. Instead, it's always businesses having to pay to advertise themselves. Google's only able to do it for free because they operate at such large volume and with such low costs that they can get money through targeted advertisement to pay for everything. Would pizzerias really want to make an issue out of it so they can get a check for $2/month?
You actually think Bing is going to pay these news sites to show summaries of their articles?
Maybe now they'll move to reopen Minitel, since the rest of the world isn't going along with their weird version of reality.
You're right: fewer businesses are bothering with phone books, and fewer consumers use them (mainly just elderly people). Why is that?
Because everyone uses Google to find stuff now.
If I want to find a local pizzeria, I get on Google Maps and type in "pizza" and find everything near me. Then I can look at the reviews for them too. Why would I need a phone book?
However, if the pizzerias all decided to force Google to not list them, I wouldn't find them, and they'd no longer get any new business.
Yes, those are all good moves, because the voters are so stupid and gullible that they're easily swayed by campaign ads. My whole point here is that the voters' gullibility does not absolve them of the responsibility for the outcome caused by their votes, as so many responders here seem to think it does. It doesn't matter if a bunch of PACs convince people to vote against their own best interests: the voters are still responsible for that, and for whatever their chosen leaders do. Moves like the ones you list are designed to limit this effect, but if the people weren't so dumb, these measures wouldn't be necessary.
Voting machines do not take cash. Millions in campaign funds are irrelevent: it's the people who cast the votes and pull the levers. If they're dumb enough to be swayed by campaign ads, that's their own fault. They're still the ones in charge. If you're an adult voter, you're responsible for your own actions, including your votes.
Well, the answer I was looking for was a little more general: they didn't fix the problem at all, and the whole thing collapsed.
The Visigoths sacking Rome really was just a small part of a much bigger problem, of that society completely imploding as the Romans gave up on their advanced society and turned to Feudalism. Roman citizens gave up on living in cities and the whole idea of specialization of labor, and moved out to Feudal areas to work as serfs, because it was better than life in the cities by that point. The Empire even tried passing laws making it illegal to quit your job at an employer, for any reason at all, but it didn't help; I imagine the US government might try passing such a law eventually.
True, but it's also the people's fault for allowing the establishment to get away with it. Remember, at one time, we used to have adequate education on responsible citizenship, at least for a much larger portion of society than now.
It's not much different from Germany in the 20s and 30s: they used to have a strong, educated society, but then they allowed a bunch of maniacs to take power because they were mad about some economic problems, and then they did nothing while the maniacs ran amok or worse, helped them with their evil schemes. We don't have concentration camps just yet (except for Gitmo), though our prison-industrial complex is starting to look like that but without the gas chambers (dead prisoners can't be used for cheap labor), but there's a lot of parallels there.
Filling the interstitial space with nitrogen gets you close to R=2 and adds maintenance costs.
And there's also triple-pane windows out there, but those are probably well within the single-digit R-values as well. Meanwhile, a good old-fashioned wall made of timber frame and fiberglass insulation can have an R-value of over 13, and that's with some mediocre insulation. There's better insulation out there, and building with 2x6 studs gets you thicker walls that you can stuff more insulation into for a higher overall R-value.
Compared to crappy old single-pane windows, sure. Compared to actual walls with insulation in them? Not so well.
And I don't know how old this house is, but I'm betting it predates double-pane windows.
I'm sure the bridge is enclosed and air-conditioned.
You're forgetting those cold winter nights. No sun at night to get a greenhouse effect from, and windows have terrible insulation qualities (new ones aren't nearly as bad, but this house was probably made decades ago when windows were utter shit from an insulation point-of-view, and not much better than just having an open hole in the side of the house).
but I'm having trouble translating that into a viable plan for the US in the 21st century.
I think you're missing my point. The Roman Empire divided into two, and the western half ended up mostly collapsing, and later turning into the Holy Roman Empire, which really wasn't much of an empire at all (the power wasn't very concentrated, and instead Europe lived under Feudalism for a thousand years until the Renaissance, formed more modern nation-states, fought two horrible wars, and finally formed a loose union that's having lots of monetary problems). My prediction is the US will do something similar: break up, and part or all of it will collapse, and life in the US (or at least part of it, especially the "red state" part) is going to suck for a long time to come. It's not a "viable plan" for improvement, it's a prediction of things to come. The basic point is that when governments get really corrupt and crappy, they don't get fixed. Instead, they almost invariably end up collapsing or going through a bloody revolution or war. The only exception I can think of offhand is the British Empire/government: it's gone through a slow "morphing" over many decades, shedding its colonies and slowly removing power from the monarchy, to get to its present state (which still has a lot of corruption problems, but probably nowhere near as bad as the USA); there was no single point where everything went to hell in Britain. Usually, things are much more violent and severe, like the US revolution in the late 1700s, the bloody French revolution shortly after, the Ottoman Empire being crushed in a big war, the Third Reich being crushed in another big war, the Roman Empire decaying and collapsing, etc.
I'm not exactly sure, but I think Richardson and others were only in some of the earlier primaries, and after a while dropped out for some reason.
Also, you're wrong about judges. Here in Arizona, judges are elected.
Sorry, but you're wrong. We DO elect the President. It's not a direct, popular election, but it's close enough: we elect the electors who elect the President in the Electoral College. Rarely have the results differed from what a direct popular election would have determined, but even then it was only between the two main party candidates, and it was extremely close. It's not like the people are all voting for Green and Libertarian candidates and the EC is choosing a Dem or Rep for President. The main problem with the EC is that it's a state-by-state winner-takes-all system where the winner of the popular vote in each state (except for 2, I think) gets all the electoral votes in that state, so the power of your vote varies relative to other citizens' based on which state you live in. But this doesn't change the fact that, ultimately, it's the people who make the choice, even if there's a level of indirection there.
Think about entertainment, compare it to the gladiators of Roman times, you know, the old, those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it... Of course, this is getting a little over the top, we stop short of killing people on TV but we definitely watch them live doing some insane stupid shit. We keep the masses entertained so they can ignore their problems.
Right, and whose fault is that? It's the peoples' fault for being dumb enough to be placated by bread and circuses and continuing to vote for the same people. You're all adults (speaking to voters here), this state of affairs is your fault and your responsibility. Stop trying to pass blame on to supposed puppet-masters. If you're being played like a puppet, it's your own stupid fault.
As for learning from history, you're exactly right. Remind me how the Roman people ultimately dealt with the problems their government had.
I don't see how. PACs can advertise all they want, but in the end it's the voting citizens who make the real decisions about who takes power.
If you let yourself get talked into committing a crime by some smooth-talker, who goes to jail for the crime? You do. The person who talked you into it may get punished too (they generally get punished a lot more if they manage to talk a bunch of people into it, like Charles Manson, rather than just one person), but your punishment is no less severe.
The political process is so ingrained in it's own traditions and voters in theirs that I honestly don't see what could be done in our lifetime, or even the next several, that will change that.
I think I have the answer to this one. For this, we just need to look at history, specifically the Roman Empire. What did the Romans do to fix the corrupt system of government they had, with crazy emperors and an overgrown military?
I disagree. Who are the people who hate the "spoilers"? They're fans of the two-party system, or one of those two parties. I'm pretty sure that if we had some better voting system (like Condorcet or Borda) when Perot and Nader were running, the result would have been the same: the winner would have been either a Democrat or a Republican. The only thing that would have been different would have been the percentage that Nader/Perot got; it would have been much higher, but still a loss.
It's just like all the Ron Paul voters complaining about the Republican primaries. Say what you will about Ron, "he's batshit crazy" etc, but he's no more batshit crazy than Romney and his policies. Yet, the Republican voters had the chance to elect someone who was anti-war, and what did they do? They elected someone who's all but promising a new war with Iran.
Good point; I should have mentioned it's the Presidential elections that get >50% turnout consistently; the off-year elections are pretty dismal.