Is it ironic that the first article you linked is disparaging some Republicans for making a bigger deal out of the quote that it merits? Obama said that about one issue on a list after agreeing to work with the Republicans on the rest of the list, and yet here you are trying to make a big deal out of it. Although, I have no idea why you would link to an article that criticizes people like you for trying to make a big deal out of it. Hell, even the Republicans who were there say it wasn't a big deal.
You're doing exactly what Weaselmancer said was happening. Congratulations on providing an excellent case in point.
Religion is a collection of belief systems, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values
It's not much of collection if it only contains one belief: "There is no god". In the same way that most people wouldn't call a single brick "a house" even if houses are made of bricks, I wouldn't call athiesm a religion.
In my mind, Russia's athiesm was an instrument used to promote communism. Religion was explicitly seen as an impediment to proper communism, so it was opposed not because it was thought to be false, but because it was thought to be a tool of oppression used by the elite against the common man. In that case, it was not a root cause. I'm not even sure it was used as an excuse, it seems atheism was enforced because it was supposed to benefit communism.
If that's the case, then that's not at all the same situation as using religion as a cover for other issues. If religion adds legitimacy to illegitimate conflicts, is that not bad? Is that not a harmful effect of religion? A key difference here is that I find it hard to believe that you could ever rally thousands of atheists to riot under the pretense that the god they don't believe in has been insulted (or not sufficiently insulted). Atheism can be used a policy to harm theists, but I can't say I've run into anyone who could be motivated to do anything more than prattle on about how smart they are by their atheism.
Additionally, as others have pointed out previously, both communism and libertarianism (and probably many other -isms) are pretty much godless religions. They have sets of beliefs that their adherents must believe, and they even have their own "holy" books. They may belong to a superset that includes them and religion that is occasionally the problem.
Technically speaking religion is a belief and homosexuality is a sexual orientation. There's a difference between being born with a sexual attraction to the same sex and thinking that magic underwear makes you pure. You are free to call him a bigot for thinking that religion is doing more damage than good, however, it looks to me like you're devalueing the words "bigot" and "bigotry" when you use them in that fashion.
I find the argument carries as much weight as it would if you tried to tell me someone who says that whole wheat bread is more nutritious than white bread is bigoted.
Can you provide ONE example of his Bigotry? I can name thousands of example how Religions around the world are Bigots to non-believers!
Calling all religious believers "delusional" by definition, meets your criteria fully.
I would like to point out that most of the people that Dawkins is allegedly bigoted against agree with him about most of the other people. The difference between Dawkins and most religious people is that they think that believing in any one of a thousand different gods is delusional, while he believes that believing in any one of a thousand and one different gods is delusional.
I think the point is that Stalinist Russia is more commonly know for some other -ism that isn't atheism. The implication is, of course, that the other -ism is the real reason for the persecution of religion in Stalinist Russia.
I'm sure if you spend some more time studying the subject you will figure it out. While it's true that USSR was officially atheist, the question you need to answer is why it was atheist and why they persecuted religion.
The idea that not using first past the post discourages strategic voting is ill considered. Only one person or party can be in charge.
This is true for Presidential elections and party leadership, however, it is not actually true for the houses of government. Americans may not be familiar with this, but it is possible to run a successful government with no one person on group in charge. It's called a minority government, they can be ineffectual, but I doubt anyone is going to claim that the current U.S. government is a paragon of effectiveness.
Suppose the US suddenly abolished the electoral college (which I agree is kind of silly) in this election. What changes? Virtually nothing,
except that now every state is a swing state and none of the strategic voters feel safe voting their conscience.
I agree with you there, except I think that abolishing the electoral college (or at leas the winner-takes-all nature of the electoral college in most states) would change the way presidential elections are run. Currently presidential candidates focus most of their efforts on less than a dozen states that are likely to change their electoral college vote because of a few percentage points in popular support.
What about voting in rounds? That's better... you might feel secure voting for a third party candidate in the first round, but there's still a huge incentive to vote for the first or second in the second round.
I think voting in rounds is expensive and still has problems because order of elimination can determine the victor. Preferential balloting is essentially the same thing, but you vote all the rounds at once and assuming you're using a Condorcet of similar procedure, order of elimination doesn't matter and therefore can't change the end result. You can put the major two parties as far back on the ballot as you want, and if you're vote can't elect your first choice it will be passed to you second choice and so on until either it helps elect someone or you run out preferences.
How about if you elect the legislative houses based on direct proportion of the vote (or one of the various multiple tallying systems? If the most important thing to you is that the other guys don't get majority control you're still best off voting for (or giving all your votes to) the second (or first) place party, not a third party. Third parties "steal" votes, no matter what system you're using.
In a proportional system, there's much less "vote stealing". Only the votes between the minimum needed to elect the number of representatives elected and the number actually received are "stolen" from a major party, and again if you are using a preferential system then those votes could flow over to the voters' other preferred parties.
Additionally a proportional system would make control of the state legislatures a lower priority for both parties, currently state legislature control effectively determines federal congressional seats through gerrymandering. Estimates are that the victorious party in more than 90% of congressional seats are predetermined before the election starts (which is why people are often advised to vote in the primaries where the result is less likely to be pre-determined).
The real problem is party discipline. Do things to severely weaken it. The greatest advantage of representative legislatures is that you're electing someone to represent you. A person. Someone from your community, who you can actually know, if you want to. Someone who lives in (if your laws are written correctly) and is directly responsible to your community. Voters should vote for whichever person they feel would best represent them, and the elected representative should be free to vote to best represent his constituents, regardless of party affiliation.
That is the advantage of representative systems, and one of the reasons I like them. Although I'
It's possible that I'm overestimating the effect a proportional and/or preferential balloting system would have, however, I'm more interested in allowing people to vote their conscience than in changing who they vote for. I don't like the spoiler effect that voting for third parties has under first-past-the-post.
In the midterm US senate election the third party (Libertarian) scraped up 1.14% of the popular vote. That would translate into one (completely ignored) seat if you had proportional voting. The Libertarians (again third party) scraped together 1.16% of the popular vote for the house of representatives, which would give them 5 ignored seats in the house
Those numbers would likely change under a proportional representation system. With the rankorous politics in the U.S. and the nearly even split between the Democrats and the Republicans and the virtual certainty that no other party can win, many voters will be discouraged from voting for a third party that can never achieve even a minor victory. Especially when voting for a third party would generally hurt the chances of your most preferred of the major parties from winning.
Meanwhile LOTS of other democracies have representative systems and have thriving third, fourth, fifth, etc. parties.
It is a common, but not universal, feature of democratic political systems with single-member legislative districts, and tends to promote two-party competition.
You're arguing against Duverger's Law when you argue that the voting system isn't a major determinant in the number of parties in a system. While it's true that there are a few examples of countries with first-past-the-post voting that haven't fallen into a two-party system like the United Kingdom, Canada and India, the majority of countries with first-past-the-post do have two party systems. It might be more effective to question what is unusual about the UK, Canada and India rather than what is unusual about the U.S.
It seems to be popular to blame your two party system on voting systems, but the numbers don't hold up and examples from the rest of the world don't support that hypothesis either. There's something else about the US that causes the vast majority of you to vote for one of two parties.
It's certainly true that the voting system isn't the only reason, but it is a major reason. It discourages third parties and the major parties like it that way.
1) It's probably easier to get rich by exploiting people than it is by helping other people get rich.
2) Probably. In general, most of the people who are rich were simply lucky. Some had the right idea at the right time, people who had the exact same idea before or after them often ended up penniless, but more often they were born into a situation that allowed them to succeed. They had family fortunes and family connections that allowed them to prosper. They are people who got there by hard work and their own skills, but they tend to be millionaires, not billionaires.
That means most of the very rich are more concerned with having more than their peers, they really won't care about you in any significant way until the mob shows up to burn their homes.
Your problems won't be fixed by getting rid of the electoral college or some sort of proportional representation in the legislative houses.
You are probably correct about the electoral college, there's only one President, so you can't do much about that. However, a proportional representation system would transform the U.S. from a two-party system into a system with 6 or 7 parties with significant representation in Congress in less than a decade and that's why it won't happen unless millions of American demand it by marching in the streets, and making sure that only politicians who support that reform can be sure of (re-)election.
The brainwashing into voting for "their" party is a symptom of the systems which produced the two party system. To the faithful all of the countries problems are blamed on the "other" party and all it's successes are attributed to "their" party. If there are a half dozen parties that brainwashing won't work nearly as well. There are two many targets and not enough time to reinforce the hatred against each of them.
There are two looming issues that would break the two-party lock. Often people don't vote for third parties because it doesn't advance their interests in shoft-term and second there's a lot of Americans who don't vote. Combine those two factors together and you would have a very unpredictable outcome from the first proportional voting outcome.
However, I would choose a preferential balloting system is addition or instead of a proportional system. That truly allows people to vote their conscience and have their votes flow over to the next-best choice if there first choice (or second, or third, or...) can't win.
It's interesting but it's doubtful that it will see much use (at least in the near term). I'd bet this will always be significantly more expensive than our current most expensive source of conventional oil (tar sands). So it can only be viable in the face of high carbon taxes and/or sequestion subsidies or when conventional oil sources can no longer meet demand. When we are in the full blown energy crisis then it could be embraced fully, but I would bet it will either fill a niche roll or be discarded completely. I doubt we will collectively choose to continue to prop up our existing fossil fuel infrastructure at that point, we'll decide to switch to electric and make the necessary cultural changes to adapt in the face of the costs. This process is essentially a way to convert renewable energy into a format that work with conventional infrastructure. My bet is that this process (or a similar one) will end up as the primary fuel supplier for hobbyists, rich dillettants, and other groups (planes? nascar?) that have a special need for fossil fuels.
Howeer, this might be a dead end technology if a competing technology proves to be fundamentally more efficient (and thus cheaper), for example, it might be more efficient to capture the carbon from methane released from rotting compost and sewage treatment.
So according to you, the mainstream press is secretly liberal because it publically labels itself liberal but it is not actually liberal, but only liberal because when it secretly-publicly calls itself liberal, it's not using the normal definition of liberal?
How do you manage to keep all that double-think straight?
That's the two-party system. You need more than recall elections to fix that. Why would any politician fear being recalled if he's going to immediately land in a cushy job?
That problem has never been solved, and with closed ballots can never be solved.
What if you can track the ballots to the people who issued them (not voted on them)? In Canada, the ballots have serial numbers on them. Two poll workers issue a ballot to a voter, and confirm that a valid serial number is returned after the vote is cast by checking the serial number against the list of currently active ballots. In practice, they have a pad that they tear the ballots off of. The pad has a serial number above and below the tear, and poll workers check that the serial number on returned ballot matches the top number on one of the pads. If it does, the ballot is placed (unread) in the voting box and the stub on the ballot is marked returned.
As I understand it, at counting time each ballot is once again verified against the the pads which have been signed and notorized by the poll workers and scrutineers. The ballots are counted at the polling place in front of the scrutineers and by the polling staff from a different section. If there are more ballots then there are valid voters, then either the extra ballots should not be traceable back to a valid pad from which the ballot originated, you have a multi-party conspiracy, or several people royally screwed up.
In short, you need a valid chain of custody on the ballots to ensure that the ballots haven't been tampered with, so you should probably go the extra step to make sure you can identify any trivial attempts to stuff the ballot box. In theory, you could determine how someone voted by memorizing their ballot number, but generally speaking, the scrutineers don't get to look at an individual's serial number while voting and the poll workers who do see it aren't allowed to count the ballots that they issued. It seems to work pretty well, I can't remember ever hearing of a Canadian issue with ballot stuffing.
In my opinion, "non-core promises" should be allowed, but politicians and parties should be expected to layout which promises are "core" promises and which are not ahead of time. A while ago, I saw an interesting suggestion that the law should be modified to allow politicians to make binding promises (not required, allowed). This way they could make election promises that they intend to keep and if they fail to uphold the promise an automatic removal-from-office procedure could begin. The key part is that the promises would be voluntarily made and the restrictions attached would be voluntarily accepted, at the time the promise is made. You might wonder why choose to do so, it's simple, it's the race to the bottom. Any promise that has actual consequences attached for not upholding it is going to get more attention from the media and the public than empty promises with no consequences attached.
In theory, the binding promises would end up being the only ones that carried any weight with the public.
It would be more convincing if you cited the actual report rather than a political screed about the report. The bi-partisan stimulus package was broken into 3 parts. Economic stimulus, Tax cuts (a Republican demand), and mandatory spending (unemployment insurance, welfare, etc). Each component represented roughly a third of the spending. So The cost "to date" of the economic stimulus was roughly $92,500 per job. Or at the time $30,833 per job per year. Of course, it's important to remember that the stimulus portion wasn't exclusively spent on wages either. Parts of it were spent on materials and equipment, and further more some states took the State portion of the stimulus funding and used it pay down debt instead of as stimulus funding thus diluting the economic impact of the stimulus program. If we assume that it was equally spent on materials, wages and other costs, then you're looking at about $10,000 per job per year. I'm not sure that's the correct number but it's probably reasonably accurate for an off-the-cuff calculation. Notice, that by looking at the issue impartially we see that a number that at first seems unreasonable is not actually so. Mark Twain was found of saying "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics". You would do well to remember that if you don't know the full story, someone's probably trying to manipulate you.
Additionally, there is the consideration of whether the work done by the stimulus package was actually necessary work. Ideally, it should be infrastructure work which needs to be done anyway. That way, you're not putting on debt for uneccessary work, you're only really paying the interest on the debt to time shift the work to a point when it should actually be cheaper and more economically beneficial to have it done. Of course, that requires a political climate where surpluses are generated in the good years and used to pay down the debt accumulated during the bad years (a situation which may not be present in the United States). Additionally, an interest thing to note is that the amount of money actually spent on the jobs appears to be close to the taxes the government collects on those jobs. Which raises the question of how much less money the government would have collected if it had not saved those 2.4 million jobs. That would help pinpoint the actual cost of the program, by identifying what the alternative(s) would have cost.
With few exceptions, tobacco use does not have a direct detrimental effect on workers' performance. In fact studies have generally shown smokers to be more productive than their non-smoking counterparts. (Though nobody is saying that smoking is the actual cause of that.)
From a quick Google of that, I found that most of the articles go the other way. Most of the studies seem to find (unsurprisingly) that smokers are slower at their tasks, take more breaks, and take more sick days than non-smokers. I found exaclty one article that mentioned a study that reached the opposite conclusion (that smokes were more productive). Furthermore, one of the studies found that when individual employees quit smoking their own productivity levels increased.
Jews, Chrisitans, Muslims and Mormons all worship the same god, they just disagree on which prophets are true prophets and consequently what that God actually wants. Jews believe that Moses was the ultimate prophet and don't recognize Jesus. Mohammed or Smith as real prophets. Christians believe that Jesus was the ultimate prophet and that Mohammed and Smith weren't real prophets. Muslims believe that Mohammed was the ultimate prophet and that Smith wasn't a real prophet. Mormons believe that Smith was the ultimate prophet and Mohammed wasn't a real prophet.
That seems like a reasonable argument, but the question is where do you draw the line?
The article indicates the researchers have already provided 52,000 pages of documentation to BP. BP wants more. Where do we draw the line? the drafts of the reseach papers? official correspondance about the research? Personal email (just in case they reference the work)? Minute meetings from any meetings about the research? Should the scientists be forced to take minutes at every meeting? Should we force them to work in big brother style lab with cameras so that we can record their everyone move to be analyzed for hints of fraud? Require them to wear GPS trackers so we know where they are at all times, in case they sneak off to have clandestine research discussions?
My biggest problem is that I think we should be talking about science, not the researchers. The researchers should be immaterial to the process. As long as the data, methodology and conclusions are published. It should be possible to have the research independently repeated and determine whether it's valid. I think the problem is we don't do enough validation and reproduction of results.
Oh, I can name several business owners I personally know who will swear up and down that they have neither received, nor want help from society or the government while at the time taking advantage of education, grants, business tax credits, deposit insurance, electricity, sewage, water, roads, and the educated workers they employ. They are islands unto themselves who have built up "incredible businesses" with "absolutely no help" from anyone else, because the start up money from their parents and investors don't count either, and their employees (who do the actual work) are mooches and their customers (who pay them well to do the work) are clueless idiots.
Now the question is whether anything you or they say is actually true. In all the cases I've observed the speaker has been engaged in political myopia. I'm reminded of the guy from Mississippi who swore up and down the government never did nothing for him and that's why he's voting Republican, despite the fact that he gets food stamps and is on welfare in a state the receives more money from the federal government that it contributes. If you allow it to, what you believe can cloud what you see.
Can you think of a use for which Obama stands alone?
I'll grant you that as a politician, author, or a professor of law, Obama would have very little value by himself. What good is a politician with no one to lead, an author with no readers, a professor with no students or lawyer with no clients. But it seems to me that in that case he has about as much value as you. How would your guitar shop (luthery) function with no customers?
I think you need to give up the blinding rage and consider carefully. I don't care whether you like Obama or not, but nobody likes a raging idiot. Be gracious and admit that your business benefits immensely from society and even government and then you can go back to arguing that government does too much, infringes too many freedoms or costs too much for what it provides.
As long as he doesn't mind looking like an ignorant jackass in public, nothing.
Local taxes and state taxes from the BUSINESS OWNERS POCKET as well as the other locals built the road.
So you're saying that by paying their taxes the small business owner has contributed to the society around him? I agree.
It's beside the point. No apologists allowed to add kool-aid weak apologies for an obvious hater of the small businessman
Personally, I think the comment is directed at a particular point of view put forth by some people (especially Republicans) that businessmen are entirely responsible for their own success. That government, society, and even employees are ever been a hindrance to them. I've seen that particular point of view referred to as "Ayn Rand Syndrome" among less flattering names. I seriously doubt that Obama hates small businessmen, if you like to make the case for it, go ahead, but pointing out that governments and society have done much to aid every small business owner is not "hate".
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Is it ironic that the first article you linked is disparaging some Republicans for making a bigger deal out of the quote that it merits? Obama said that about one issue on a list after agreeing to work with the Republicans on the rest of the list, and yet here you are trying to make a big deal out of it. Although, I have no idea why you would link to an article that criticizes people like you for trying to make a big deal out of it. Hell, even the Republicans who were there say it wasn't a big deal.
You're doing exactly what Weaselmancer said was happening. Congratulations on providing an excellent case in point.
Religion is a collection of belief systems, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values
It's not much of collection if it only contains one belief: "There is no god". In the same way that most people wouldn't call a single brick "a house" even if houses are made of bricks, I wouldn't call athiesm a religion.
In my mind, Russia's athiesm was an instrument used to promote communism. Religion was explicitly seen as an impediment to proper communism, so it was opposed not because it was thought to be false, but because it was thought to be a tool of oppression used by the elite against the common man. In that case, it was not a root cause. I'm not even sure it was used as an excuse, it seems atheism was enforced because it was supposed to benefit communism.
If that's the case, then that's not at all the same situation as using religion as a cover for other issues. If religion adds legitimacy to illegitimate conflicts, is that not bad? Is that not a harmful effect of religion? A key difference here is that I find it hard to believe that you could ever rally thousands of atheists to riot under the pretense that the god they don't believe in has been insulted (or not sufficiently insulted). Atheism can be used a policy to harm theists, but I can't say I've run into anyone who could be motivated to do anything more than prattle on about how smart they are by their atheism.
Additionally, as others have pointed out previously, both communism and libertarianism (and probably many other -isms) are pretty much godless religions. They have sets of beliefs that their adherents must believe, and they even have their own "holy" books. They may belong to a superset that includes them and religion that is occasionally the problem.
Technically speaking religion is a belief and homosexuality is a sexual orientation. There's a difference between being born with a sexual attraction to the same sex and thinking that magic underwear makes you pure. You are free to call him a bigot for thinking that religion is doing more damage than good, however, it looks to me like you're devalueing the words "bigot" and "bigotry" when you use them in that fashion.
I find the argument carries as much weight as it would if you tried to tell me someone who says that whole wheat bread is more nutritious than white bread is bigoted.
I would like to point out that most of the people that Dawkins is allegedly bigoted against agree with him about most of the other people. The difference between Dawkins and most religious people is that they think that believing in any one of a thousand different gods is delusional, while he believes that believing in any one of a thousand and one different gods is delusional.
I think the point is that Stalinist Russia is more commonly know for some other -ism that isn't atheism. The implication is, of course, that the other -ism is the real reason for the persecution of religion in Stalinist Russia.
I'm sure if you spend some more time studying the subject you will figure it out. While it's true that USSR was officially atheist, the question you need to answer is why it was atheist and why they persecuted religion.
The idea that not using first past the post discourages strategic voting is ill considered. Only one person or party can be in charge.
This is true for Presidential elections and party leadership, however, it is not actually true for the houses of government. Americans may not be familiar with this, but it is possible to run a successful government with no one person on group in charge. It's called a minority government, they can be ineffectual, but I doubt anyone is going to claim that the current U.S. government is a paragon of effectiveness.
Suppose the US suddenly abolished the electoral college (which I agree is kind of silly) in this election. What changes? Virtually nothing,
except that now every state is a swing state and none of the strategic voters feel safe voting their conscience.
I agree with you there, except I think that abolishing the electoral college (or at leas the winner-takes-all nature of the electoral college in most states) would change the way presidential elections are run. Currently presidential candidates focus most of their efforts on less than a dozen states that are likely to change their electoral college vote because of a few percentage points in popular support.
What about voting in rounds? That's better... you might feel secure voting for a third party candidate in the first round, but there's still a huge incentive to vote for the first or second in the second round.
I think voting in rounds is expensive and still has problems because order of elimination can determine the victor. Preferential balloting is essentially the same thing, but you vote all the rounds at once and assuming you're using a Condorcet of similar procedure, order of elimination doesn't matter and therefore can't change the end result. You can put the major two parties as far back on the ballot as you want, and if you're vote can't elect your first choice it will be passed to you second choice and so on until either it helps elect someone or you run out preferences.
How about if you elect the legislative houses based on direct proportion of the vote (or one of the various multiple tallying systems? If the most important thing to you is that the other guys don't get majority control you're still best off voting for (or giving all your votes to) the second (or first) place party, not a third party. Third parties "steal" votes, no matter what system you're using.
In a proportional system, there's much less "vote stealing". Only the votes between the minimum needed to elect the number of representatives elected and the number actually received are "stolen" from a major party, and again if you are using a preferential system then those votes could flow over to the voters' other preferred parties.
Additionally a proportional system would make control of the state legislatures a lower priority for both parties, currently state legislature control effectively determines federal congressional seats through gerrymandering. Estimates are that the victorious party in more than 90% of congressional seats are predetermined before the election starts (which is why people are often advised to vote in the primaries where the result is less likely to be pre-determined).
The real problem is party discipline. Do things to severely weaken it. The greatest advantage of representative legislatures is that you're electing someone to represent you. A person. Someone from your community, who you can actually know, if you want to. Someone who lives in (if your laws are written correctly) and is directly responsible to your community. Voters should vote for whichever person they feel would best represent them, and the elected representative should be free to vote to best represent his constituents, regardless of party affiliation.
That is the advantage of representative systems, and one of the reasons I like them. Although I'
I fyou haven't already, you might also want to read the entry on theMicromega rule and FPTP Criticism.
It's possible that I'm overestimating the effect a proportional and/or preferential balloting system would have, however, I'm more interested in allowing people to vote their conscience than in changing who they vote for. I don't like the spoiler effect that voting for third parties has under first-past-the-post.
In the midterm US senate election the third party (Libertarian) scraped up 1.14% of the popular vote. That would translate into one (completely ignored) seat if you had proportional voting. The Libertarians (again third party) scraped together 1.16% of the popular vote for the house of representatives, which would give them 5 ignored seats in the house
Those numbers would likely change under a proportional representation system. With the rankorous politics in the U.S. and the nearly even split between the Democrats and the Republicans and the virtual certainty that no other party can win, many voters will be discouraged from voting for a third party that can never achieve even a minor victory. Especially when voting for a third party would generally hurt the chances of your most preferred of the major parties from winning.
Meanwhile LOTS of other democracies have representative systems and have thriving third, fourth, fifth, etc. parties.
The second line in Wikipedia's First past the post voting article says:
You're arguing against Duverger's Law when you argue that the voting system isn't a major determinant in the number of parties in a system. While it's true that there are a few examples of countries with first-past-the-post voting that haven't fallen into a two-party system like the United Kingdom, Canada and India, the majority of countries with first-past-the-post do have two party systems. It might be more effective to question what is unusual about the UK, Canada and India rather than what is unusual about the U.S.
It seems to be popular to blame your two party system on voting systems, but the numbers don't hold up and examples from the rest of the world don't support that hypothesis either. There's something else about the US that causes the vast majority of you to vote for one of two parties.
It's certainly true that the voting system isn't the only reason, but it is a major reason. It discourages third parties and the major parties like it that way.
1) It's probably easier to get rich by exploiting people than it is by helping other people get rich.
2) Probably. In general, most of the people who are rich were simply lucky. Some had the right idea at the right time, people who had the exact same idea before or after them often ended up penniless, but more often they were born into a situation that allowed them to succeed. They had family fortunes and family connections that allowed them to prosper. They are people who got there by hard work and their own skills, but they tend to be millionaires, not billionaires.
That means most of the very rich are more concerned with having more than their peers, they really won't care about you in any significant way until the mob shows up to burn their homes.
I hope you understand there's another possibility: He begins the work that his successors may eventually complete.
Your problems won't be fixed by getting rid of the electoral college or some sort of proportional representation in the legislative houses.
You are probably correct about the electoral college, there's only one President, so you can't do much about that. However, a proportional representation system would transform the U.S. from a two-party system into a system with 6 or 7 parties with significant representation in Congress in less than a decade and that's why it won't happen unless millions of American demand it by marching in the streets, and making sure that only politicians who support that reform can be sure of (re-)election.
The brainwashing into voting for "their" party is a symptom of the systems which produced the two party system. To the faithful all of the countries problems are blamed on the "other" party and all it's successes are attributed to "their" party. If there are a half dozen parties that brainwashing won't work nearly as well. There are two many targets and not enough time to reinforce the hatred against each of them.
There are two looming issues that would break the two-party lock. Often people don't vote for third parties because it doesn't advance their interests in shoft-term and second there's a lot of Americans who don't vote. Combine those two factors together and you would have a very unpredictable outcome from the first proportional voting outcome.
However, I would choose a preferential balloting system is addition or instead of a proportional system. That truly allows people to vote their conscience and have their votes flow over to the next-best choice if there first choice (or second, or third, or ...) can't win.
Did you actually think that through? What are the consequences of having zero pollution enforced by lawsuit?
This is why I don't like Libertarianism. Few libertarians ever consider the rational consequences of the policies they advocate for.
It's interesting but it's doubtful that it will see much use (at least in the near term). I'd bet this will always be significantly more expensive than our current most expensive source of conventional oil (tar sands). So it can only be viable in the face of high carbon taxes and/or sequestion subsidies or when conventional oil sources can no longer meet demand. When we are in the full blown energy crisis then it could be embraced fully, but I would bet it will either fill a niche roll or be discarded completely. I doubt we will collectively choose to continue to prop up our existing fossil fuel infrastructure at that point, we'll decide to switch to electric and make the necessary cultural changes to adapt in the face of the costs. This process is essentially a way to convert renewable energy into a format that work with conventional infrastructure. My bet is that this process (or a similar one) will end up as the primary fuel supplier for hobbyists, rich dillettants, and other groups (planes? nascar?) that have a special need for fossil fuels.
Howeer, this might be a dead end technology if a competing technology proves to be fundamentally more efficient (and thus cheaper), for example, it might be more efficient to capture the carbon from methane released from rotting compost and sewage treatment.
So according to you, the mainstream press is secretly liberal because it publically labels itself liberal but it is not actually liberal, but only liberal because when it secretly-publicly calls itself liberal, it's not using the normal definition of liberal?
How do you manage to keep all that double-think straight?
That's the two-party system. You need more than recall elections to fix that. Why would any politician fear being recalled if he's going to immediately land in a cushy job?
That problem has never been solved, and with closed ballots can never be solved.
What if you can track the ballots to the people who issued them (not voted on them)? In Canada, the ballots have serial numbers on them. Two poll workers issue a ballot to a voter, and confirm that a valid serial number is returned after the vote is cast by checking the serial number against the list of currently active ballots. In practice, they have a pad that they tear the ballots off of. The pad has a serial number above and below the tear, and poll workers check that the serial number on returned ballot matches the top number on one of the pads. If it does, the ballot is placed (unread) in the voting box and the stub on the ballot is marked returned.
As I understand it, at counting time each ballot is once again verified against the the pads which have been signed and notorized by the poll workers and scrutineers. The ballots are counted at the polling place in front of the scrutineers and by the polling staff from a different section. If there are more ballots then there are valid voters, then either the extra ballots should not be traceable back to a valid pad from which the ballot originated, you have a multi-party conspiracy, or several people royally screwed up.
In short, you need a valid chain of custody on the ballots to ensure that the ballots haven't been tampered with, so you should probably go the extra step to make sure you can identify any trivial attempts to stuff the ballot box. In theory, you could determine how someone voted by memorizing their ballot number, but generally speaking, the scrutineers don't get to look at an individual's serial number while voting and the poll workers who do see it aren't allowed to count the ballots that they issued. It seems to work pretty well, I can't remember ever hearing of a Canadian issue with ballot stuffing.
In my opinion, "non-core promises" should be allowed, but politicians and parties should be expected to layout which promises are "core" promises and which are not ahead of time. A while ago, I saw an interesting suggestion that the law should be modified to allow politicians to make binding promises (not required, allowed). This way they could make election promises that they intend to keep and if they fail to uphold the promise an automatic removal-from-office procedure could begin. The key part is that the promises would be voluntarily made and the restrictions attached would be voluntarily accepted, at the time the promise is made. You might wonder why choose to do so, it's simple, it's the race to the bottom. Any promise that has actual consequences attached for not upholding it is going to get more attention from the media and the public than empty promises with no consequences attached.
In theory, the binding promises would end up being the only ones that carried any weight with the public.
It would be more convincing if you cited the actual report rather than a political screed about the report. The bi-partisan stimulus package was broken into 3 parts. Economic stimulus, Tax cuts (a Republican demand), and mandatory spending (unemployment insurance, welfare, etc). Each component represented roughly a third of the spending. So The cost "to date" of the economic stimulus was roughly $92,500 per job. Or at the time $30,833 per job per year. Of course, it's important to remember that the stimulus portion wasn't exclusively spent on wages either. Parts of it were spent on materials and equipment, and further more some states took the State portion of the stimulus funding and used it pay down debt instead of as stimulus funding thus diluting the economic impact of the stimulus program. If we assume that it was equally spent on materials, wages and other costs, then you're looking at about $10,000 per job per year. I'm not sure that's the correct number but it's probably reasonably accurate for an off-the-cuff calculation. Notice, that by looking at the issue impartially we see that a number that at first seems unreasonable is not actually so. Mark Twain was found of saying "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics". You would do well to remember that if you don't know the full story, someone's probably trying to manipulate you.
Additionally, there is the consideration of whether the work done by the stimulus package was actually necessary work. Ideally, it should be infrastructure work which needs to be done anyway. That way, you're not putting on debt for uneccessary work, you're only really paying the interest on the debt to time shift the work to a point when it should actually be cheaper and more economically beneficial to have it done. Of course, that requires a political climate where surpluses are generated in the good years and used to pay down the debt accumulated during the bad years (a situation which may not be present in the United States). Additionally, an interest thing to note is that the amount of money actually spent on the jobs appears to be close to the taxes the government collects on those jobs. Which raises the question of how much less money the government would have collected if it had not saved those 2.4 million jobs. That would help pinpoint the actual cost of the program, by identifying what the alternative(s) would have cost.
With few exceptions, tobacco use does not have a direct detrimental effect on workers' performance. In fact studies have generally shown smokers to be more productive than their non-smoking counterparts. (Though nobody is saying that smoking is the actual cause of that.)
From a quick Google of that, I found that most of the articles go the other way. Most of the studies seem to find (unsurprisingly) that smokers are slower at their tasks, take more breaks, and take more sick days than non-smokers. I found exaclty one article that mentioned a study that reached the opposite conclusion (that smokes were more productive). Furthermore, one of the studies found that when individual employees quit smoking their own productivity levels increased.
Jews, Chrisitans, Muslims and Mormons all worship the same god, they just disagree on which prophets are true prophets and consequently what that God actually wants. Jews believe that Moses was the ultimate prophet and don't recognize Jesus. Mohammed or Smith as real prophets. Christians believe that Jesus was the ultimate prophet and that Mohammed and Smith weren't real prophets. Muslims believe that Mohammed was the ultimate prophet and that Smith wasn't a real prophet. Mormons believe that Smith was the ultimate prophet and Mohammed wasn't a real prophet.
That seems like a reasonable argument, but the question is where do you draw the line?
The article indicates the researchers have already provided 52,000 pages of documentation to BP. BP wants more. Where do we draw the line? the drafts of the reseach papers? official correspondance about the research? Personal email (just in case they reference the work)? Minute meetings from any meetings about the research? Should the scientists be forced to take minutes at every meeting? Should we force them to work in big brother style lab with cameras so that we can record their everyone move to be analyzed for hints of fraud? Require them to wear GPS trackers so we know where they are at all times, in case they sneak off to have clandestine research discussions?
My biggest problem is that I think we should be talking about science, not the researchers. The researchers should be immaterial to the process. As long as the data, methodology and conclusions are published. It should be possible to have the research independently repeated and determine whether it's valid. I think the problem is we don't do enough validation and reproduction of results.
Oh, I can name several business owners I personally know who will swear up and down that they have neither received, nor want help from society or the government while at the time taking advantage of education, grants, business tax credits, deposit insurance, electricity, sewage, water, roads, and the educated workers they employ. They are islands unto themselves who have built up "incredible businesses" with "absolutely no help" from anyone else, because the start up money from their parents and investors don't count either, and their employees (who do the actual work) are mooches and their customers (who pay them well to do the work) are clueless idiots.
Now the question is whether anything you or they say is actually true. In all the cases I've observed the speaker has been engaged in political myopia. I'm reminded of the guy from Mississippi who swore up and down the government never did nothing for him and that's why he's voting Republican, despite the fact that he gets food stamps and is on welfare in a state the receives more money from the federal government that it contributes. If you allow it to, what you believe can cloud what you see.
Can you think of a use for which Obama stands alone?
I'll grant you that as a politician, author, or a professor of law, Obama would have very little value by himself. What good is a politician with no one to lead, an author with no readers, a professor with no students or lawyer with no clients. But it seems to me that in that case he has about as much value as you. How would your guitar shop (luthery) function with no customers?
I think you need to give up the blinding rage and consider carefully. I don't care whether you like Obama or not, but nobody likes a raging idiot. Be gracious and admit that your business benefits immensely from society and even government and then you can go back to arguing that government does too much, infringes too many freedoms or costs too much for what it provides.
What's it to him, if that's the context?
As long as he doesn't mind looking like an ignorant jackass in public, nothing.
Local taxes and state taxes from the BUSINESS OWNERS POCKET as well as the other locals built the road.
So you're saying that by paying their taxes the small business owner has contributed to the society around him? I agree.
It's beside the point. No apologists allowed to add kool-aid weak apologies for an obvious hater of the small businessman
Personally, I think the comment is directed at a particular point of view put forth by some people (especially Republicans) that businessmen are entirely responsible for their own success. That government, society, and even employees are ever been a hindrance to them. I've seen that particular point of view referred to as "Ayn Rand Syndrome" among less flattering names. I seriously doubt that Obama hates small businessmen, if you like to make the case for it, go ahead, but pointing out that governments and society have done much to aid every small business owner is not "hate".
Yes it does and Torvalds has (grudgingly) apologized for not recognizing a joke.