A state can't succeed unilaterally, but in principle if it was a mutual separation, approved by congress... Well that hasn't been tested, but that doesn't seem outside the range of plausibility.
Of course, congress would never approve such a separation because, as the summary points out, California provides an awful lot of the nation's GDP. It would be a serious economic hit, in addition to all of the other issues that would raise.
The reason the electoral college exists is the same reason the Democratic party has super delegates: to keep a populist idiot from getting into office. Look how well that worked.
Your argument is that people in less populated states should have more voting power than people in more populated states because... "States are the unit of power?" Is that seriously your argument? I can't find a better one in what you wrote there. States are not the unit of power, votes are the unit of power. I shouldn't have to tell you that, it is fundamental to democracy.
Even if states were the unit of power, saying that is barely an argument. So what? You're basically saying, "It's the status quo, therefore it should not change."
I guess you have a second argument there: "doing it this way gives a small number of people a greater voice." and you leave out the implied corollary: "and as a result it gives a large number of people a smaller voice."
Trump won by appealing particularly to poor, uneducated
white males
A group which most certainly does not have all the power, or didn't anyway. The kind of racial profiling that you're doing here is what got us into this mess.
There's another point that people keep saying here: "[the Republicans] will get to appoint an ultra conservative to the Supreme Court"
Who says they will? The whole reason that seat is vacant is because the senate refused to vote on the nominee, based on the constitutional loophole which doesn't place a time limit on that vote. The Republicans still won't have a sixty seat majority in the senate, so there's no reason why the Democrats can't do the same thing for the next four years.
Of course they won't do that, and under normal circumstances I wouldn't want them too. That kind of flagrant obstructionism is no way to run a country, as we've seen all too readily over the last eight years. However, if they filibustered the new nominee with the condition that they wouldn't evaluate a new nomination until the old one had been dutifully considered (i.e.: the existing nomination must be dealt with regardless of who is currently president) then that just seems like good governance. Even though they would likely get a "no" vote and the result would be the same, this is something that's worth doing.
Only if you don't care about things like living wages, clean air, clean water, preventing corporate malfeasance, etc.
That does sound like Trump. The parent may have a point, if this is going to happen then that's likely how it will go. Though I wouldn't rule out tariffs in addition to that, he ran his campaign on protectionism and "regulation" is a fungible term - people who are opposed to regulation generally don't consider things which they agree with to be regulation.
But the bigger issue is that type of protectionism would push companies like Apple out of world markets due to not being able to be price competitive.
It's not a danger for Apple specifically, their profit margins are high enough that they could eat the difference without changing their pricing at all. It could be a danger for most everyone else though, no one else in the industry has profits like Apple's.
You seem to be asking a different question than the above. The reason why crooked is preferable to crazy is about incentives - a crooked person is at least rational, and in order to sustain their crooked ways they need the system to function. Maybe not function well, or function efficiently, but if things really break down then they have lost everything.
With a crazy person, sometimes you have no idea what they're going to do. Other times you do know, but what they're after is so contrary to the present working of government that the result is unpredictable or otherwise abhorrent.
The crook vs crazy thing has come up before, so I went looking for a reference to the 1991 gubernatorial race in Louisiana between the notoriously corrupt incumbent and the white supremacist... I found this article which does a pretty good job of covering it.
I'm sure it's been rephrased many times in many ways, but the way I know it is "should" rather than "will." People should favor crooked over crazy, but that doesn't always happen.
There's a rule that anger is the most effective way to spread a meme - people are more likely to talk about something which makes them mad than something which makes them happy.
The question is whether or not the bill is actually good. On the surface it seems fine, but when someone starts pouring money into a proposition that no one has any reason to oppose, that calls for digging a little deeper. The person in the summary is suggesting that it's an obstruction mechanism - slow the passage of legislation by introducing a delay before a bill can be voted on.
The additional footage from meetings might be similar - if every meeting is public and recorded then the legislators have to perform for the public all the time. Attacking each other constantly, declaring that the others are "for big government" or "in the pocket of big business", doing those farcical little legislative plays - "Look at this snowball! I have disproved global warming!" etc. Never an opportunity to compromise and actually accomplish something.
I don't know, if that's all they've got then it seems like weak opposition. But the money certainly raises my hackles a little, people don't spend that kind of money if they're not expecting to get something out of it, and that something is seldom altruistic. And if I knew anything about this guy it could perhaps make me more suspicious. There are certainly people whose politics are so blatant that it could provoke that kind of adverse response from me. I just don't know anything about California politics.
The format (extremely short videos with no substantive content) makes a lot more sense for porn than it does for just about anything else. But yes, it might look bad for a porn company to adopt a service with a large underage audience.
Even though, let's face it, minors are one the largest consumers of porn, that's not something that a porn company is allowed to publicly acknowledge.
Carlson said that Democrats give Newports to the homeless to get them to the polls.
Based on the evidence, Carlson is citing an isolated case where authorities were unable to prove that votes were traded for cigarettes, or that the cigarettes were an enticement.
On one occasion in Milwaukee, as many as three Democrats gave rides to homeless men to City Hall to cast absentee ballots. At some point, they gave some of the men cigarettes. There is no evidence that the cigarettes were Newports, and investigators did not find that the cigarettes were offered as an inducement to vote.
This is a pathetic citation. I'm sure there's shady business going on here and there, and that's especially true when your standard for evidence against a huge group is the slightly dubious actions of a few individuals, but even by that pretty worthless standard this example fails.
Well it may be true that no one can feasibly lay cable in a fiscally competitive way, but that isn't the only way to achieve a competitive marketplace. Redundant cable is really a pretty stupid way to do that - we could always just do what most countries do and implement unbundling access rules. In fact we have those rules on the books already, they were part of the telecommunications act of 1996, they just couldn't be exercised because of the FCC's stupid "third way" decision to classify ISPs as something other than telecommunications services. Now that they've reversed that decision, and once all of the lawsuits regarding that have been resolved, maybe we'll be able to have some competition among ISPs.
Subsidies don't always encourage overproduction, that's too simplistic. Subsidies are about promoting something, certainly, but how the subsidy is crafted depends on what it's trying to encourage. There are farm subsidies for leaving your field fallow, for example. That's the opposite of overproduction.
Also, when you say, "It depressed output, and pushed up prices." in the same sentence like that you're implying a causal relationship. You're implying that prices went up due to a supply and demand dynamic. This was not the case, prices went up by a great deal more than could be explained that way, generating huge profits for the oil companies.
Are you saying that our downward spiral is inexorable and so shouldn't even be discussed? I don't buy that. Even if we are doomed to a state of ever-increasing atrocities being committed in front of an audience with ever-increasing apathy, acknowledging this could perhaps slow that descent. But more than that: recognizing empathy and recognizing where it's missing in one scenario can have broader effects in how we think about it in other scenarios.
In other words: while fighting at extreme distance may divorce us from the suffering that we cause, acknowledging that problem and its consequences can help you appreciate the people that you have nearby. And this can be true even if, as you say, war will continue to become more and more divorced from our personal experiences.
Well, since you're asking about how it looks "in my eyes": I used to live in Canada and saw, and experienced, this with some regularity from French Canadians. My eyes don't see most kissing as sexual assault, whether or not it's welcome. My eyes don't see most kissing as sexual in nature, though obviously it can be.
Taking a more objective look at it though: that statement was sufficiently oddball that I read it as hyperbole, and I was proven correct when he met the woman and didn't start involuntarily kissing her. Even though he had said earlier that he "couldn't help himself." Really, he was relatively well behaved compared to his sycophant. That guy's behavior was just contemptible and by far the most uncomfortable part of that video for me.
Yeah, I don't get this scandal for this reason. His remark sounded more like commentary on our appalling culture of celebrity worship than it did any kind of non-consensual sexual contact. Not that I'm suggesting he intended it as social commentary, I'm sure he intended it to be a brag (because he's a scuzzbag) but none the less: I didn't see any implication of assault when I watched that video.
This hasn't always been the case. Michael Faraday had no formal degree and used hardly any math and yet contributed a great deal. I just watched a lecture series by him recently (reccomended) and was impressed by how much he was able to demonstrate through nothing but rigorous qualitative experimentation. I kinda have this impression, which I know to be completely false, that everyone prior to the modern era were total idiots who ascribed all natural phenomena to humorous vapors and spirits and the mumbling of witch doctors. To be able to learn something about the physical world from someone who's been dead for 150 years is somewhat revelatory.
Of course, most all of what can be learned that way has been learned that way. So you're not completely off base to say that you can't do science without math if you're talking about contributing to the sum of human knowledge, but a person who learns a thing through rigorous experimentation and application of the scientific method is still doing science, even if what they discover is already known to the broader scientific community.
What you've linked to here doesn't support what the grandparent is saying. It just says that if you don't fall into one of the recognized groups with social disadvantages (women are not among the listed groups), then you need to demonstrate your disadvantage. It doesn't say that anyone is disqualified based on gender or ethnicity.
Retaliation doesn't necessarily mean in kind. This sort of thing is much more likely to result in trade sanctions than it is in some kind of tit-for-tat pissing match.
I'm not sure what you mean by "the roles," but the essence of what you're saying seems to be: "There are some instances where the US government should just stand by and let foreign powers fuck with American people or organizations." Is that what I'm hearing here? Am I getting this right?
Why are you asking me that question? I already answered it: "It's the American government's job to protect not just itself, but all Americans and American interests from foreign powers."
So... what you're saying is that when someone punches you, the right response is to curl up into a little ball so it doesn't hurt as much? You certainly shouldn't punch back or call the police or something.... right? Or were you trying to imply something with that "private organization" comment that I missed? It's the American government's job to protect not just itself, but all Americans and American interests from foreign powers.
I read a suggestion that the Russian election hacks were more about sowing mistrust in our elective process, and the resulting chaos and dysfunction in the American government, than they were about supporting Putin's cheerleader. If that's the case then I wonder about those voting machines that so many states use... I can think of a few possibilities, but the easiest might be to just tamper with just one or two machines in a really obvious way, so that people notice and question the legitimacy of all of them. This would possibly force a reelection, but would more likely just split our already bitterly divided electorate - people who supported the winner(s) would say that a reelection wasn't necessary, since there's no evidence that the hacks were widespread enough to actually accomplish anything. And people who supported the loser(s) would declare that the election wasn't legitimate.
Russia could go further than that if they really were out to support specific candidates, but keeping the hacks small scale allows them to retain plausible deniability.
Slashdot Mirror
A state can't succeed unilaterally, but in principle if it was a mutual separation, approved by congress... Well that hasn't been tested, but that doesn't seem outside the range of plausibility.
Of course, congress would never approve such a separation because, as the summary points out, California provides an awful lot of the nation's GDP. It would be a serious economic hit, in addition to all of the other issues that would raise.
The reason the electoral college exists is the same reason the Democratic party has super delegates: to keep a populist idiot from getting into office. Look how well that worked.
Your argument is that people in less populated states should have more voting power than people in more populated states because... "States are the unit of power?" Is that seriously your argument? I can't find a better one in what you wrote there. States are not the unit of power, votes are the unit of power. I shouldn't have to tell you that, it is fundamental to democracy.
Even if states were the unit of power, saying that is barely an argument. So what? You're basically saying, "It's the status quo, therefore it should not change."
I guess you have a second argument there: "doing it this way gives a small number of people a greater voice." and you leave out the implied corollary: "and as a result it gives a large number of people a smaller voice."
Trump won by appealing particularly to poor, uneducated
white males
A group which most certainly does not have all the power, or didn't anyway. The kind of racial profiling that you're doing here is what got us into this mess.
There's another point that people keep saying here: "[the Republicans] will get to appoint an ultra conservative to the Supreme Court"
Who says they will? The whole reason that seat is vacant is because the senate refused to vote on the nominee, based on the constitutional loophole which doesn't place a time limit on that vote. The Republicans still won't have a sixty seat majority in the senate, so there's no reason why the Democrats can't do the same thing for the next four years.
Of course they won't do that, and under normal circumstances I wouldn't want them too. That kind of flagrant obstructionism is no way to run a country, as we've seen all too readily over the last eight years. However, if they filibustered the new nominee with the condition that they wouldn't evaluate a new nomination until the old one had been dutifully considered (i.e.: the existing nomination must be dealt with regardless of who is currently president) then that just seems like good governance. Even though they would likely get a "no" vote and the result would be the same, this is something that's worth doing.
Only if you don't care about things like living wages, clean air, clean water, preventing corporate malfeasance, etc.
That does sound like Trump. The parent may have a point, if this is going to happen then that's likely how it will go. Though I wouldn't rule out tariffs in addition to that, he ran his campaign on protectionism and "regulation" is a fungible term - people who are opposed to regulation generally don't consider things which they agree with to be regulation.
But the bigger issue is that type of protectionism would push companies like Apple out of world markets due to not being able to be price competitive.
It's not a danger for Apple specifically, their profit margins are high enough that they could eat the difference without changing their pricing at all. It could be a danger for most everyone else though, no one else in the industry has profits like Apple's.
I answered this in another comment, but in short: "crooked" does not mean malicious, it means self-serving.
You seem to be asking a different question than the above. The reason why crooked is preferable to crazy is about incentives - a crooked person is at least rational, and in order to sustain their crooked ways they need the system to function. Maybe not function well, or function efficiently, but if things really break down then they have lost everything.
With a crazy person, sometimes you have no idea what they're going to do. Other times you do know, but what they're after is so contrary to the present working of government that the result is unpredictable or otherwise abhorrent.
The crook vs crazy thing has come up before, so I went looking for a reference to the 1991 gubernatorial race in Louisiana between the notoriously corrupt incumbent and the white supremacist... I found this article which does a pretty good job of covering it.
I'm sure it's been rephrased many times in many ways, but the way I know it is "should" rather than "will." People should favor crooked over crazy, but that doesn't always happen.
There's a rule that anger is the most effective way to spread a meme - people are more likely to talk about something which makes them mad than something which makes them happy.
The question is whether or not the bill is actually good. On the surface it seems fine, but when someone starts pouring money into a proposition that no one has any reason to oppose, that calls for digging a little deeper. The person in the summary is suggesting that it's an obstruction mechanism - slow the passage of legislation by introducing a delay before a bill can be voted on.
The additional footage from meetings might be similar - if every meeting is public and recorded then the legislators have to perform for the public all the time. Attacking each other constantly, declaring that the others are "for big government" or "in the pocket of big business", doing those farcical little legislative plays - "Look at this snowball! I have disproved global warming!" etc. Never an opportunity to compromise and actually accomplish something.
I don't know, if that's all they've got then it seems like weak opposition. But the money certainly raises my hackles a little, people don't spend that kind of money if they're not expecting to get something out of it, and that something is seldom altruistic. And if I knew anything about this guy it could perhaps make me more suspicious. There are certainly people whose politics are so blatant that it could provoke that kind of adverse response from me. I just don't know anything about California politics.
The format (extremely short videos with no substantive content) makes a lot more sense for porn than it does for just about anything else. But yes, it might look bad for a porn company to adopt a service with a large underage audience.
Even though, let's face it, minors are one the largest consumers of porn, that's not something that a porn company is allowed to publicly acknowledge.
Carlson said that Democrats give Newports to the homeless to get them to the polls. Based on the evidence, Carlson is citing an isolated case where authorities were unable to prove that votes were traded for cigarettes, or that the cigarettes were an enticement. On one occasion in Milwaukee, as many as three Democrats gave rides to homeless men to City Hall to cast absentee ballots. At some point, they gave some of the men cigarettes. There is no evidence that the cigarettes were Newports, and investigators did not find that the cigarettes were offered as an inducement to vote.
This is a pathetic citation. I'm sure there's shady business going on here and there, and that's especially true when your standard for evidence against a huge group is the slightly dubious actions of a few individuals, but even by that pretty worthless standard this example fails.
Well it may be true that no one can feasibly lay cable in a fiscally competitive way, but that isn't the only way to achieve a competitive marketplace. Redundant cable is really a pretty stupid way to do that - we could always just do what most countries do and implement unbundling access rules. In fact we have those rules on the books already, they were part of the telecommunications act of 1996, they just couldn't be exercised because of the FCC's stupid "third way" decision to classify ISPs as something other than telecommunications services. Now that they've reversed that decision, and once all of the lawsuits regarding that have been resolved, maybe we'll be able to have some competition among ISPs.
Subsidies don't always encourage overproduction, that's too simplistic. Subsidies are about promoting something, certainly, but how the subsidy is crafted depends on what it's trying to encourage. There are farm subsidies for leaving your field fallow, for example. That's the opposite of overproduction.
Also, when you say, "It depressed output, and pushed up prices." in the same sentence like that you're implying a causal relationship. You're implying that prices went up due to a supply and demand dynamic. This was not the case, prices went up by a great deal more than could be explained that way, generating huge profits for the oil companies.
Could you elaborate a little on this? What was the promise that he made, exactly? I don't remember this one.
Are you saying that our downward spiral is inexorable and so shouldn't even be discussed? I don't buy that. Even if we are doomed to a state of ever-increasing atrocities being committed in front of an audience with ever-increasing apathy, acknowledging this could perhaps slow that descent. But more than that: recognizing empathy and recognizing where it's missing in one scenario can have broader effects in how we think about it in other scenarios.
In other words: while fighting at extreme distance may divorce us from the suffering that we cause, acknowledging that problem and its consequences can help you appreciate the people that you have nearby. And this can be true even if, as you say, war will continue to become more and more divorced from our personal experiences.
Well, since you're asking about how it looks "in my eyes": I used to live in Canada and saw, and experienced, this with some regularity from French Canadians. My eyes don't see most kissing as sexual assault, whether or not it's welcome. My eyes don't see most kissing as sexual in nature, though obviously it can be.
Taking a more objective look at it though: that statement was sufficiently oddball that I read it as hyperbole, and I was proven correct when he met the woman and didn't start involuntarily kissing her. Even though he had said earlier that he "couldn't help himself." Really, he was relatively well behaved compared to his sycophant. That guy's behavior was just contemptible and by far the most uncomfortable part of that video for me.
Unfortunately, they've never been translated to my knowledge from the original Latin, but you can read an English summary here [arxiv.org].
Hey, that's pretty neat. Thanks. Never even realized arXiv had a "history and philosophy of physics" section.
Yeah, I don't get this scandal for this reason. His remark sounded more like commentary on our appalling culture of celebrity worship than it did any kind of non-consensual sexual contact. Not that I'm suggesting he intended it as social commentary, I'm sure he intended it to be a brag (because he's a scuzzbag) but none the less: I didn't see any implication of assault when I watched that video.
This hasn't always been the case. Michael Faraday had no formal degree and used hardly any math and yet contributed a great deal. I just watched a lecture series by him recently (reccomended) and was impressed by how much he was able to demonstrate through nothing but rigorous qualitative experimentation. I kinda have this impression, which I know to be completely false, that everyone prior to the modern era were total idiots who ascribed all natural phenomena to humorous vapors and spirits and the mumbling of witch doctors. To be able to learn something about the physical world from someone who's been dead for 150 years is somewhat revelatory.
Of course, most all of what can be learned that way has been learned that way. So you're not completely off base to say that you can't do science without math if you're talking about contributing to the sum of human knowledge, but a person who learns a thing through rigorous experimentation and application of the scientific method is still doing science, even if what they discover is already known to the broader scientific community.
What you've linked to here doesn't support what the grandparent is saying. It just says that if you don't fall into one of the recognized groups with social disadvantages (women are not among the listed groups), then you need to demonstrate your disadvantage. It doesn't say that anyone is disqualified based on gender or ethnicity.
Retaliation doesn't necessarily mean in kind. This sort of thing is much more likely to result in trade sanctions than it is in some kind of tit-for-tat pissing match.
I'm not sure what you mean by "the roles," but the essence of what you're saying seems to be: "There are some instances where the US government should just stand by and let foreign powers fuck with American people or organizations." Is that what I'm hearing here? Am I getting this right?
Why are you asking me that question? I already answered it: "It's the American government's job to protect not just itself, but all Americans and American interests from foreign powers."
So... what you're saying is that when someone punches you, the right response is to curl up into a little ball so it doesn't hurt as much? You certainly shouldn't punch back or call the police or something.... right? Or were you trying to imply something with that "private organization" comment that I missed? It's the American government's job to protect not just itself, but all Americans and American interests from foreign powers.
I read a suggestion that the Russian election hacks were more about sowing mistrust in our elective process, and the resulting chaos and dysfunction in the American government, than they were about supporting Putin's cheerleader. If that's the case then I wonder about those voting machines that so many states use... I can think of a few possibilities, but the easiest might be to just tamper with just one or two machines in a really obvious way, so that people notice and question the legitimacy of all of them. This would possibly force a reelection, but would more likely just split our already bitterly divided electorate - people who supported the winner(s) would say that a reelection wasn't necessary, since there's no evidence that the hacks were widespread enough to actually accomplish anything. And people who supported the loser(s) would declare that the election wasn't legitimate.
Russia could go further than that if they really were out to support specific candidates, but keeping the hacks small scale allows them to retain plausible deniability.