By "they block everything that's not approved", I assume you're referring to some firewalling that prevents you from connecting to port 22? If that's the problem, why not just start up sshd listening to port 443 and be done with it?
I find your willingness to consider your email and the password to it public knowledge to be mystifying, but okay. In my mind the catastrophe of email being compromised outweighs the inconvenience of carrying around a phone or laptop by... oh, probably four or five orders of magnitude. So it may be that our values on this topic are just too different to convince one another of anything.
I came close to just up-modding hab136's parent to your post, but I'm genuinely confused about why you're angry, so I'm asking a question instead.
Why do you feel cheated if an item's price is dropped after you've purchased one? Presumably you bought it because you felt that the value it gave you exceeded the price they asked for it. What about that equation changes if the price for some other person or at some other time is different?
I think that the reason they didn't have iphones subsidized was just to minimize the leverage that cellular service providers would have over the situation, not because they thought that lowering prices would somehow be "BS". Unless you have some evidence that they were trying to avoid offending customers with lower prices, I believe that that's unrelated to the question at hand.
But the benefits of having your documents, you programs, your preferences and settings available to you everywhere, on any device running any platform, is at least a little interesting.
I'll sort of grant that (though I'll refer you to my earlier point that it's not "everywhere", it's "everywhere that you trust enough to give your passwords to".)
But if that's the goal, isn't it a bajillion times simpler to just use the network to distribute your documents and preferences, rather than trying to actually spread the running instance of an application over it?
You seem to keep aserting that real applications are going away and will soon all be replaced by web applications, but I seem to have missed the part where you support the truth of those assertions. Or, for that matter, explain why this would be a desirable thing.
I'd be happy to go first, if you like: I find the consistency and interconnectedness of my entire platform to be hugely valuable. Every text field in every application gets spellchecked by the same dictionary, making it worth my while to actually add context-specific words to it. Copy/paste and drag/drop work smoothly between essentially all entities in all contexts in all applications. When I change my interface theme, all applications change along with it. And on, and on, and on.
Using web applications means using some foreign application that loses all of this consistency and interconnectedness. Even if I were to move absolutely all of my computing to web applications and just declare the web to be my new platform, they would still all be different from each _other_. Unless they all came from the same provider, which brings up the last point:
Web applications nearly always force the bundling of software and service. What if I like gmail's interface but prefer someone else's storage backend? Or if I like Yahoo's map database but want to use my own front end for it? Too bad, they're bundled together. And just as in the case of tying cellphones to cell carriers, reducing the granularity of choice is usually bad.
So tell me again why I should be interested in this supposed web app revolution?
Unless I'm missing something, doesn't ssh and mutt/pine/elm/whatever also allow you to get to your mail from anywhere?
I do travel a fair bit, but I'm not willing to give my credentials and email to every random internet cafe machine I pass. And I have to admit, I'm kind of confused by people who are.
I'm really only willing to give my credentials to a machine that I trust, which mostly means a machine of my own. So webmail doesn't really allow me to get to my mail from significantly more places than I can just have a civilized client running anyway.
No, I really loathe gmail as well. (And I work for Google.)
But I'm afraid that I may disagree with you on the broader topic. The reason I hate gmail is that it's webmail, and thus inherently something that is awful and should not be done. And indeed even more broadly, "web applications" are a terrible idea; the web makes a really crappy platform.
I would much rather have an elegant, well-designed, rapidly evolving application platform of my choice on which to run a variety of clients speaking well-defined protocols than try to retroactively turn a simple and reliable content-delivery medium into an entire operating system.
When I saw this yesterday, I actually experienced a few seconds of excitement that there might someday be a good X11 mail client. But then I looked a bit further into what it is they've actually created here; functionality-wise, this mostly appears to be Thunderbird with a few of Eudora's icons pasted atop.
If you take a look at the list of bugs submitted by users, you'll notice that the vast majority of them are regarding the fact that this application behaves nothing like Eudora.
Very disappointing, I'm afraid. I hope that some day there will be X11 mail clients available that aren't simply clones of a clone of Outlook.
Maybe if they'd used it correctly. But their use of "blue shift" is completely inconsistent with the metaphor.
(A blue shift happens when things are getting closer to one another, not further apart. These supposed companies not accelerating would look exactly as red-shifted to the accelerating ones as vice versa.)
All of the additional fluff to which you refer just allows site designers to slather on additional layers of crap on the same content. More often than not, this actually impedes access to whatever content was there, worsening to utility of the site.
So if your argument is that bolting these things onto the elegant simplicity of html will make it easier to add cruft like javascript and css, you have only convinced me to be even more opposed to it. I have yet to see anything done in javascript that I actually want to have happen in my browser.
That 90% does not just vanish, so choosing to leave it out of your calculations mars the results. Just as with the half of SSI and Medicare that your employer nominally pays, it's still part of the cost of employing you.
With the particular numbers you've chosen, that comes to another 5.4%. The number would be higher for unmarried households, which have recently become a majority in the US.
Assuming you're an American, your taxes are at least that high already.
You're probably comparing 48% to the 28% that "income tax" tops out around in the US. Unfortunately, that overlooks the separately-listed Social Security and Medicare taxes: add in 15% for SSI and 3% for Medicare, and you're already just about at the total Canadian level cited here.
And given that the article says the rate varies from one province to another, it sounds as if they're including the equivalent of US state income tax. So add in another 5%-10% for most states, and the Canadians are already looking like winners.
But most importantly, this elides the cost of your insurance premiums. Whether "you" pay them or "your employer" pays them, it comes to the same thing: they're part of the cost of employing you, and money that your employer would otherwise probably be paying to you.
So no, even aside from the advantages of being more fairly distributed, every comparison indicates that nationalized healthcare is in fact far less expensive.
In Defcon's second year, channel 13 from Los Angeles sent a small contingent of reporters to do interviews. Unfortunately for them, attendees from outside the LA area were very leery of speaking to interviewers and cameras labeled KCOP.
You don't seem to have described any actual problems that you perceive with a windowing paradigm. You assert that there must be some other metaphor, but you don't say anything about the ways in which it would be beneficial for that metaphor to differ from this one. You assert that you want something "better", but don't say anything about what would be better about it or what is currently lacking.
You can't find a solution without understanding what the problem is.
It looks vaguely like a mac (though eesh, invest in some antialiasing), but the static looks of an interface are a relatively small part of what matters. I'd bet cash money that it doesn't work like a mac.
Sorry, I don't mean to disparage your choice of window dressing or imply that it doesn't work well for you. I'm just frustrated by the decades of people willing to steal the very simple superficial parts of another known-good system and declare, "okay, user interface problem solved!"
The mouse-movement that the menu costs you is a lot easier than the mouse movement for menus attached to windows - that's the point of putting the menus at the top of the screen.
That's just nonsense, unless ALL windows are opened immediately below the menu bar, and, even then, the per-application menu might be more compact horizontally than the top-of-screen menu. Any window that opens mid-display still has to have its menu accessed at the top of the screen. On a 640x480 Amiga, that was too far, and it's still too far on an 1024x768, or larger, Mac or Linux box.
He didn't say it was closer, he said it was easier. And the two are generally not the same thing.
He's referring to Fitt's Law, and one of its interesting corollaries. The relevant bit of the law is that the time it takes to point at a target is related to the size of that target. The interesting corollary is that targets at the edge of a display are infinitely large (given that you can overshoot them endlessly without missing them), and therefore vastly faster and easier to point at than any targets not at the edge of the display.
Moving to a mid-screen menubar requires far more precision, and is therefore much slower, even though it's a shorter distance to move.
...the Amiga had fast paging through applications screens, and I cannot find that on the Mac...
You mean just switching easily between the various windows of one application? How is that not covered by expose or command-` ?
Meanwhile, I know plenty of underemployed programmers in the Northeast and West Coast who Google could hire, and have met some of Google's foreigners who aren't as good.
Please encourage your underemployed developer friends to submit their resumes. Just on the west coast, we have substantial offices in Kirkland, Santa Monica, and obviously Mountain View. We are always interested in hiring additional gifted engineers.
As to the non-US Google employees you say you've met that aren't as good as your friends... Well, even if we accept that they really are less good, no one's hiring process is infallible. We invest considerable effort in finding the best engineers we can, but obviously we don't always make perfect choices. But if we end up hiring someone who's less than wonderful, it's because our hiring process has made a mistake, not because we knowingly hired a mediocre person just because they were cheap.
Google's culture is very geek-centric. There's a strong belief, top to bottom, that even if hiring the very best engineers is more expensive in salary, it's a very good investment, paid off by the higher quality of code that they produce. I have never heard anyone suggest that selecting engineers for cheapness would be a good deal for the company.
(Disclaimer: I do work for Google, and do occasionally provide input on the hiring of individual candidates, but I have no unusual insight into our nation-level hiring strategies. I'm not speaking for them in any official sense, just opining about what I've seen of the culture.)
Everything that I've see of Google's hiring practices indicates that their primary goal is acquiring the absolute best, most brilliant people possible. I'm sure at some point cost is a concern, but it's not a primary thing that drives the decision of whether to hire particular engineers.
Finding and hiring fantastic people is an astonishingly hard thing to do, and we invest substantial resources into doing it. We absolutely never have as many extremely-gifted candidates as we'd like, and probably never will. But every single hiring process discussion I've heard has been about "how can we find better candidates" or just "how can we find more candidates". I have definitely never heard anything even vaguely like "how can we find cheaper candidates".
If you posit that exceptionally talented engineers are equally distributed among all populations with access to at least a moderate level of technology, then probably about half of them in existence are non-American. (And even if you believe that they are unequally distributed, it's hard to dispute that at least some nontrivial number of them are non-American.) I believe that Google's interest is in getting access to that additional set of exceptionally talented engineers, not just getting more engineers of the same talent for less money.
Campaign funding is unfortunately a whole different set of problems. The incredible power of advertising is something that the US's architects never considered, so the structure of the government does not deal with it well. And while I'm flattered, I don't think I have any great insight into the solutions to that problem.
The problems I enumerated would be largely addressed by moving to a better voting methodology. Plurality voting does a terrible job of expressing the will of the electorate, and, just like layering lossy compression, stacking multiple plurality votes only gets worse. By the time we've made it through gerrymandering, primaries, general elections, and the electoral college, the outcome bears very little relationship to the general desires of voters.
Two substantially better systems are approval voting (in which you vote yes or no on every candidate, and whomever gets the most yesses wins) or a Borda count (in which you rank candidates in your order of preference, and the candidate with the highest total ranking wins). Both of these allow voters to express their desires much more concretely, including allowing a vote for a third-party candidate to be meaningful and not threaten the success of a still-acceptable and more viable candidate. So everyone really could vote meaningfully for Nader or Perot without taking votes away from Bush or Gore, for example.
I wish I could dig it up, but around 2001 I saw a study in which someone had attempted to reconstruct from polling data what the outcome of the 2000 presidential election would have been if either of these methods had been in place. And the answer was that we would fairly likely have elected John McCain.
Now, I'm not a huge McCain fan. I disagree with him about some significant issues. But I am confident that he would be a much better choice for the job than George W. Bush.
The reason this is interesting is that if you asked a Bush voter for their opinion on this outcome, a lot of them would say something like, "I'm not a huge McCain fan. I disagree with him about some significant issues. But I am confident that he would be a much better choice for the job than Al Gore."
A candidate who is everybody's second choice is a much better electee than a candidate who is 50% of voters' first choice and 50% of voters' over-my-dead-body choice.
The problem is not with Americans--you'll note that somewhere in the neighborhood of 78% of them are displeased with George II. The problem, I'm afraid, is a number of traits of the American electoral system.
1) Plurality voting (and stacked plurality voting, even worse) essentially guarantees having only two parties, and that those two parties will actually be very structurally similar to one another. Of necessity, the two parties differ only minorly on a few of their positions, and any third party cannot be adequately served by the electoral system. Third-party candidates in fact act only as spoilers for the major-party candidate who is closer to their positions, and thus there is a strong disincentive for them to even try.
2) Gerrymandering has successfully been used to turn the overwhelming majority of legislative positions into "safe seats". ie, that that party which will win that seat is absolutely certain. This means that the only real election of significance is the primary that will choose the particular member of that party who gets the seat. Given that primaries are voted in only by members of that party, this means that the most extreme and partisan candidates are the ones who have the greatest chance of success.
3) Legislation that passes with 50%+1 of congressional support is exactly as much a law as legislation that passes with 100% support. This, unfortunately, incentivises those two parties being an intentionally divisive as possible. Reaching across the aisle and finding compromises does not strengthen your bill, it only weakens your ability to campaign as an extremist next time around. Legislation is therefore frequently given radioactive riders that make it intentionally diffcult for members of the opposing party to support it. For example, the bill that created the Department of Homeland Security was intentionally saddled with some aggressive union-busting provisions, to discourage Democrat legislators from voting for it; this allowed Republicans to brand Democrats as anti-security, and served their purposes far better than actual bipartisan cooperation would have.
Unfortuately, changing these fairly fundamental structural things about the American electoral and legislative systems would require action by exactly the set of people who have figured out how to profit from the current broken systems. So we're deadlocked.
I'm certainly not going to suggest that all practices of all cultures are equally ethically justifiable. But I think it's oversimplifying mightily to suggest that anyone moves to a new country specifically to seek out opportunities for rape. While the degree to which societies frown on rape does (horrifyingly) vary, I don't think there are any actual human beings who plan their entire lives around it as a solution to their getting-laid problems.
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By "they block everything that's not approved", I assume you're referring to some firewalling that prevents you from connecting to port 22? If that's the problem, why not just start up sshd listening to port 443 and be done with it?
I find your willingness to consider your email and the password to it public knowledge to be mystifying, but okay. In my mind the catastrophe of email being compromised outweighs the inconvenience of carrying around a phone or laptop by... oh, probably four or five orders of magnitude. So it may be that our values on this topic are just too different to convince one another of anything.
I came close to just up-modding hab136's parent to your post, but I'm genuinely confused about why you're angry, so I'm asking a question instead.
Why do you feel cheated if an item's price is dropped after you've purchased one? Presumably you bought it because you felt that the value it gave you exceeded the price they asked for it. What about that equation changes if the price for some other person or at some other time is different?
I think that the reason they didn't have iphones subsidized was just to minimize the leverage that cellular service providers would have over the situation, not because they thought that lowering prices would somehow be "BS". Unless you have some evidence that they were trying to avoid offending customers with lower prices, I believe that that's unrelated to the question at hand.
I'll sort of grant that (though I'll refer you to my earlier point that it's not "everywhere", it's "everywhere that you trust enough to give your passwords to".)
But if that's the goal, isn't it a bajillion times simpler to just use the network to distribute your documents and preferences, rather than trying to actually spread the running instance of an application over it?
Organizing by thread has certainly been around in real clients for far longer than gmail has existed.
The first place I saw it was in mutt. I certainly use it every day in os x's Mail.app. I'm sure there are many other clients that offer it.
You seem to keep aserting that real applications are going away and will soon all be replaced by web applications, but I seem to have missed the part where you support the truth of those assertions. Or, for that matter, explain why this would be a desirable thing.
I'd be happy to go first, if you like: I find the consistency and interconnectedness of my entire platform to be hugely valuable. Every text field in every application gets spellchecked by the same dictionary, making it worth my while to actually add context-specific words to it. Copy/paste and drag/drop work smoothly between essentially all entities in all contexts in all applications. When I change my interface theme, all applications change along with it. And on, and on, and on.
Using web applications means using some foreign application that loses all of this consistency and interconnectedness. Even if I were to move absolutely all of my computing to web applications and just declare the web to be my new platform, they would still all be different from each _other_. Unless they all came from the same provider, which brings up the last point:
Web applications nearly always force the bundling of software and service. What if I like gmail's interface but prefer someone else's storage backend? Or if I like Yahoo's map database but want to use my own front end for it? Too bad, they're bundled together. And just as in the case of tying cellphones to cell carriers, reducing the granularity of choice is usually bad.
So tell me again why I should be interested in this supposed web app revolution?
Unless I'm missing something, doesn't ssh and mutt/pine/elm/whatever also allow you to get to your mail from anywhere?
I do travel a fair bit, but I'm not willing to give my credentials and email to every random internet cafe machine I pass. And I have to admit, I'm kind of confused by people who are.
I'm really only willing to give my credentials to a machine that I trust, which mostly means a machine of my own. So webmail doesn't really allow me to get to my mail from significantly more places than I can just have a civilized client running anyway.
Out of curiosity, why would one need webmail?
No, I really loathe gmail as well. (And I work for Google.)
But I'm afraid that I may disagree with you on the broader topic. The reason I hate gmail is that it's webmail, and thus inherently something that is awful and should not be done. And indeed even more broadly, "web applications" are a terrible idea; the web makes a really crappy platform.
I would much rather have an elegant, well-designed, rapidly evolving application platform of my choice on which to run a variety of clients speaking well-defined protocols than try to retroactively turn a simple and reliable content-delivery medium into an entire operating system.
When I saw this yesterday, I actually experienced a few seconds of excitement that there might someday be a good X11 mail client. But then I looked a bit further into what it is they've actually created here; functionality-wise, this mostly appears to be Thunderbird with a few of Eudora's icons pasted atop.
If you take a look at the list of bugs submitted by users, you'll notice that the vast majority of them are regarding the fact that this application behaves nothing like Eudora.
Very disappointing, I'm afraid. I hope that some day there will be X11 mail clients available that aren't simply clones of a clone of Outlook.
You're right that it had nothing to do with the content of your message, and I apologize for straying off-topic.
It does, however, seem quite germane to the format of your message.
Maybe if they'd used it correctly. But their use of "blue shift" is completely inconsistent with the metaphor.
(A blue shift happens when things are getting closer to one another, not further apart. These supposed companies not accelerating would look exactly as red-shifted to the accelerating ones as vice versa.)
You seem to be equating change with progress.
All of the additional fluff to which you refer just allows site designers to slather on additional layers of crap on the same content. More often than not, this actually impedes access to whatever content was there, worsening to utility of the site.
So if your argument is that bolting these things onto the elegant simplicity of html will make it easier to add cruft like javascript and css, you have only convinced me to be even more opposed to it. I have yet to see anything done in javascript that I actually want to have happen in my browser.
That 90% does not just vanish, so choosing to leave it out of your calculations mars the results. Just as with the half of SSI and Medicare that your employer nominally pays, it's still part of the cost of employing you.
With the particular numbers you've chosen, that comes to another 5.4%. The number would be higher for unmarried households, which have recently become a majority in the US.
Assuming you're an American, your taxes are at least that high already.
You're probably comparing 48% to the 28% that "income tax" tops out around in the US. Unfortunately, that overlooks the separately-listed Social Security and Medicare taxes: add in 15% for SSI and 3% for Medicare, and you're already just about at the total Canadian level cited here.
And given that the article says the rate varies from one province to another, it sounds as if they're including the equivalent of US state income tax. So add in another 5%-10% for most states, and the Canadians are already looking like winners.
But most importantly, this elides the cost of your insurance premiums. Whether "you" pay them or "your employer" pays them, it comes to the same thing: they're part of the cost of employing you, and money that your employer would otherwise probably be paying to you.
So no, even aside from the advantages of being more fairly distributed, every comparison indicates that nationalized healthcare is in fact far less expensive.
In Defcon's second year, channel 13 from Los Angeles sent a small contingent of reporters to do interviews. Unfortunately for them, attendees from outside the LA area were very leery of speaking to interviewers and cameras labeled KCOP.
You don't seem to have described any actual problems that you perceive with a windowing paradigm. You assert that there must be some other metaphor, but you don't say anything about the ways in which it would be beneficial for that metaphor to differ from this one. You assert that you want something "better", but don't say anything about what would be better about it or what is currently lacking.
You can't find a solution without understanding what the problem is.
It looks vaguely like a mac (though eesh, invest in some antialiasing), but the static looks of an interface are a relatively small part of what matters. I'd bet cash money that it doesn't work like a mac.
Sorry, I don't mean to disparage your choice of window dressing or imply that it doesn't work well for you. I'm just frustrated by the decades of people willing to steal the very simple superficial parts of another known-good system and declare, "okay, user interface problem solved!"
He didn't say it was closer, he said it was easier. And the two are generally not the same thing.
He's referring to Fitt's Law, and one of its interesting corollaries. The relevant bit of the law is that the time it takes to point at a target is related to the size of that target. The interesting corollary is that targets at the edge of a display are infinitely large (given that you can overshoot them endlessly without missing them), and therefore vastly faster and easier to point at than any targets not at the edge of the display.
Moving to a mid-screen menubar requires far more precision, and is therefore much slower, even though it's a shorter distance to move.
You mean just switching easily between the various windows of one application? How is that not covered by expose or command-` ?Please encourage your underemployed developer friends to submit their resumes. Just on the west coast, we have substantial offices in Kirkland, Santa Monica, and obviously Mountain View. We are always interested in hiring additional gifted engineers.
As to the non-US Google employees you say you've met that aren't as good as your friends... Well, even if we accept that they really are less good, no one's hiring process is infallible. We invest considerable effort in finding the best engineers we can, but obviously we don't always make perfect choices. But if we end up hiring someone who's less than wonderful, it's because our hiring process has made a mistake, not because we knowingly hired a mediocre person just because they were cheap.
Google's culture is very geek-centric. There's a strong belief, top to bottom, that even if hiring the very best engineers is more expensive in salary, it's a very good investment, paid off by the higher quality of code that they produce. I have never heard anyone suggest that selecting engineers for cheapness would be a good deal for the company.
(Disclaimer: I do work for Google, and do occasionally provide input on the hiring of individual candidates, but I have no unusual insight into our nation-level hiring strategies. I'm not speaking for them in any official sense, just opining about what I've seen of the culture.)
Everything that I've see of Google's hiring practices indicates that their primary goal is acquiring the absolute best, most brilliant people possible. I'm sure at some point cost is a concern, but it's not a primary thing that drives the decision of whether to hire particular engineers.
Finding and hiring fantastic people is an astonishingly hard thing to do, and we invest substantial resources into doing it. We absolutely never have as many extremely-gifted candidates as we'd like, and probably never will. But every single hiring process discussion I've heard has been about "how can we find better candidates" or just "how can we find more candidates". I have definitely never heard anything even vaguely like "how can we find cheaper candidates".
If you posit that exceptionally talented engineers are equally distributed among all populations with access to at least a moderate level of technology, then probably about half of them in existence are non-American. (And even if you believe that they are unequally distributed, it's hard to dispute that at least some nontrivial number of them are non-American.) I believe that Google's interest is in getting access to that additional set of exceptionally talented engineers, not just getting more engineers of the same talent for less money.
Campaign funding is unfortunately a whole different set of problems. The incredible power of advertising is something that the US's architects never considered, so the structure of the government does not deal with it well. And while I'm flattered, I don't think I have any great insight into the solutions to that problem.
The problems I enumerated would be largely addressed by moving to a better voting methodology. Plurality voting does a terrible job of expressing the will of the electorate, and, just like layering lossy compression, stacking multiple plurality votes only gets worse. By the time we've made it through gerrymandering, primaries, general elections, and the electoral college, the outcome bears very little relationship to the general desires of voters.
Two substantially better systems are approval voting (in which you vote yes or no on every candidate, and whomever gets the most yesses wins) or a Borda count (in which you rank candidates in your order of preference, and the candidate with the highest total ranking wins). Both of these allow voters to express their desires much more concretely, including allowing a vote for a third-party candidate to be meaningful and not threaten the success of a still-acceptable and more viable candidate. So everyone really could vote meaningfully for Nader or Perot without taking votes away from Bush or Gore, for example.
I wish I could dig it up, but around 2001 I saw a study in which someone had attempted to reconstruct from polling data what the outcome of the 2000 presidential election would have been if either of these methods had been in place. And the answer was that we would fairly likely have elected John McCain.
Now, I'm not a huge McCain fan. I disagree with him about some significant issues. But I am confident that he would be a much better choice for the job than George W. Bush.
The reason this is interesting is that if you asked a Bush voter for their opinion on this outcome, a lot of them would say something like, "I'm not a huge McCain fan. I disagree with him about some significant issues. But I am confident that he would be a much better choice for the job than Al Gore."
A candidate who is everybody's second choice is a much better electee than a candidate who is 50% of voters' first choice and 50% of voters' over-my-dead-body choice.
The problem is not with Americans--you'll note that somewhere in the neighborhood of 78% of them are displeased with George II. The problem, I'm afraid, is a number of traits of the American electoral system.
1) Plurality voting (and stacked plurality voting, even worse) essentially guarantees having only two parties, and that those two parties will actually be very structurally similar to one another. Of necessity, the two parties differ only minorly on a few of their positions, and any third party cannot be adequately served by the electoral system. Third-party candidates in fact act only as spoilers for the major-party candidate who is closer to their positions, and thus there is a strong disincentive for them to even try.
2) Gerrymandering has successfully been used to turn the overwhelming majority of legislative positions into "safe seats". ie, that that party which will win that seat is absolutely certain. This means that the only real election of significance is the primary that will choose the particular member of that party who gets the seat. Given that primaries are voted in only by members of that party, this means that the most extreme and partisan candidates are the ones who have the greatest chance of success.
3) Legislation that passes with 50%+1 of congressional support is exactly as much a law as legislation that passes with 100% support. This, unfortunately, incentivises those two parties being an intentionally divisive as possible. Reaching across the aisle and finding compromises does not strengthen your bill, it only weakens your ability to campaign as an extremist next time around. Legislation is therefore frequently given radioactive riders that make it intentionally diffcult for members of the opposing party to support it. For example, the bill that created the Department of Homeland Security was intentionally saddled with some aggressive union-busting provisions, to discourage Democrat legislators from voting for it; this allowed Republicans to brand Democrats as anti-security, and served their purposes far better than actual bipartisan cooperation would have.
Unfortuately, changing these fairly fundamental structural things about the American electoral and legislative systems would require action by exactly the set of people who have figured out how to profit from the current broken systems. So we're deadlocked.
Eh?
Whom are you suggesting supports the killing of which women?
Agenda, meet strawman. Strawman, agenda.
I'm certainly not going to suggest that all practices of all cultures are equally ethically justifiable. But I think it's oversimplifying mightily to suggest that anyone moves to a new country specifically to seek out opportunities for rape. While the degree to which societies frown on rape does (horrifyingly) vary, I don't think there are any actual human beings who plan their entire lives around it as a solution to their getting-laid problems.