It's relatively easy to get a time-to-digital converter (TDC) with ~tens of picosecond timing granularity, and if you work hard enough, you can get down to ~10 ps resolution or so. If you do insane things, like use superconducting electronics, you can get down to ~few picoseconds or so.
For the simple ~tens of picosecond TDCs, a simple method is just a capacitor with a switched constant-current source. The capacitor charges at a fixed rate, and then the voltage is read out with an ADC. The limiting factors there are the speed of the switch.
That's not exactly true. The ideal output of most fusion cycles is stable. You get side production of tritium and a few other radioactive isotopes, though.
But fusion does, however, produce a large amount of radioactive waste. Not through the products of the reaction. Through the byproducts of the high level of irradiation.
The difference is that fission radioactive byproducts are long lived. Fusion radioactive byproducts are extremely radioactive, but very short lived, and therefore easier to deal with
I have no idea where the poster got the idea that the experiment would be broken - the article says nothing of the sort. It simply says that the experiment wouldn't have been able to detect certain organic molecules due to the fact that it was a gas chromatograph, and certain organic compounds - specifically, some that you might expect (well, with 30 more years of experience) to be on Mars - aren't volatile - i.e., easily turned into a gas.
The big summary of the article is this:
For these reasons, the Viking experiments do not exclude the possibility that the soil being tested contained organic carboxylic acids, especially benzenecarboxylic acids in substantial amounts.
It's not due to the fact that the experiment was broken. It's just the way it was designed.
it's due to the inflating dollar and/or inflating population.
This is units, not sales amounts.
As for inflating populations, Japan's population basically hasn't budged in the last 10 years (less than a 2% increase), and even back to 1980, it's only about an 8% total increase. You're not talking about a major correction here.
I think it's safe to say that the DS, even corrected for population sizes, would very likely easily stay on top.
As for the NES versus the DS? The Famicom only sold 500,00 units in its first two months. I think it's safe to say that the DS outsold it, considering it's selling that much in two weeks. Even corrected for inflation.
SNES had ~50M units to the Genesis's ~35M (Wikipedia is your friend). It did have a larger market share, but not a dominant one. Split pretty evenly is probably the most accurate, especially given generations since then.
Nor should there be. States are not merely administrative districts of the FedGov to be readjusted as needed, but sovereign states in their own right.
I'm not quite talking about readjusting them as needed: it's just that I don't think there's any way whatsoever to remove a state from the Union without that state seceding itself, and even that might not be legal. If Wisconsin literally explodes and inside Wisconsin's borders is nothing but Jim-Bob Stevens, Jim-Bob Stevens can take Wisconsin's Constitution and be a state all by himself.
Heck, the UN, which is a looser confederacy of sovereign nations, has the right to expel member states, by Article 6. The US Constitution has nothing of the sort.
On the other hand, Texas is a very rural state and is penalized heavily by the EC system.
Texas? Very rural? Geologically, maybe, but economically? Not really. Hence the reason why it has such a large population.
But the rationale you propose - ie. to protect rural voters from the tyranny of city-dwellers - doesn't hold water. Actually there are many instances where the EC actively discriminates against farmers. Rural people in New York State are effectively discriminated AGAINST twice by the EC system. First they happen to live in a highly populated state so the EC vote / population ratio is low. Second, they are bunched together with lots of city-dwellers and don't stand a chance of ever being heard within the state. Have you ever heard of a candidate visiting rural New York State
What you don't realize here is that you're not arguing for a strict popular vote. You're bringing up the specifics of one state and saying "this state doesn't fit your model".
That's true. It doesn't. The beauty of the current system is that each state is free to choose its own model for how its votes are distributed to best represent the needs of the state itself, rather than the people of the state.
Your points just say that certain state governments aren't doing their job.
Take California, for example... it is big enough, and diverse enough, to be several states (or a well-off country). The central valley is mostly a conservative, farm-oriented area. The northern area is, historically, a logging area (although now it seems to be skewing towards experimental agriculture). It's largely high-tech and biotech in the San Francisco region, largely media in the Los Angeles area.
Isn't that an argument that California should vote to split itself in two, or maybe three, or four?
Or, maybe we should let California decide how it wants to split its electoral votes? Oh wait - that's what we do.
If California would better be represented by four blocks of electoral votes, that's what their legislature should vote to do. Forcing the method of decision upon them is against the founding principles of the country, which is a delicate balance between a democracy and a republic.
The problem really isn't the 'winner take all' mentality. It's - as usual - the existence of political parties which manipulate the sovereignity of states.
Actually, it's more an argument for splitting New York and California into multiple states. If there's a huge disparity between the way that New Yorkers feel about voting for the executive branch, they probably don't agree on how to run the state itself - and in any case, if there's that much disparity, then you're screwing over certain segments of the state in terms of their representation in the Senate anyway.
Probably one of the big flaws in the Constitution is that there's no real way for the states to force a state to split or two states to merge, nor any incentive for them to do so to accurately represent their population. Right now there's a 66:1 population disparity between California and Wyoming, the largest and smallest states. When the country was founded, the largest population disparity was between Delaware and Virginia, and that was only 15:1. At some point you have to say "there's no way Wyoming should still be a state on its own" or "California is just too big to be just one state." And that ignores the political disparities that exist between those areas - just the populations.
What's funny is that the Civil War, which split Virginia, nicely split the state into a mining region (West Virginia) and an agricultural/trade region (Virginia). Unfortunately, that's not really an efficient way to merge Wyoming or split California.
1) That would be true if most presidential ads weren't national. They are.
2) While the grandparent said "campaigning", that's a poor choice of words. It's not quite campaigning - advertising alone won't win you the election if you're advertising "Vote for me, and I'll kill babies", regardless of how much advertising you put out. A popularly-elected president wouldn't care about the smaller states, and so his platform wouldn't contain any of the things they care about. Then, when he got into office, he wouldn't do any of the things they care about, because in the next election, again, he wouldn't need them.
The bigger issue is that a popularly-elected president means the president is representing a different nation than Congress is, which is why this is a brain-dead solution. If you want a real one, increase the size of the House of Representatives.
There's a world of difference between political rivalry like you describe, and pathological hatred, which is what's happening.
I'll still stick with the belief that it's incompetence (or lack of political power) that's at fault.
That happens anyway. Stem-cell research anyone? The only difference now is the electoral college reinforces that we cannot democratically remove the problem.
You're assuming that we won't elect a new President who will approve funding for stem-cell research in 2008. Given the plethora of public support from both sides (hence the reason it passed Congress!) I think that's extremely pessimistic. What I was talking about was a disagreement that would deadlock the government indefinitely.
It's difficult to use this administration to judge things - especially right now - considering the President's approval rating is in the toilet, indicating the majority of Americans don't agree with what he's doing. I don't think he'd win another election against a decent opponent right now.
Yes, yes we should.
If you believe that, electing a President popularly should be the least of your concerns.
Who says eliminating the electoral college would take the counting out of the hands of the states?
I didn't say that at all. It's just that if you manipulate, say, California, from a 55%/45% win to 100%/0% win, in a republic election, it doesn't change anything. You still only get California's electoral votes. In a popular election, however, it adds 45% of California's population to the vote total.
Like I said: harder to rig.
This is different from now how? Look at federal dollars going to states President Bush has openly stated he hates (Oregon has been baselessly compared to Lebanon by pretty much every member of the Bush family holding a political office).
I'm not going to agree with you there: plenty of federal dollars go to Johnstown, PA, which is represented by one of Bush's staunchest political rivals in Congress. Any disparity to Bush's political rivals would be occurring because of the incompetence of those representatives, who should be replaced.
Besides, that's not the problem I'm even talking about: what I'm talking about is a stalemate happening in the government where Congress, acting properly on behalf of those who elected them, can't get anything done with the President, even though he's acting properly on behalf of those who elected him. You're setting yourself up for a system that can deadlock even when it's working the way you want it to.
Let me be explicit here: suppose a majority of the districts in the US want to pass a law. Suppose the population of the US, centered in one state, don't want to pass the law. Congress gets elected, and tries to pass the law. The districts are happy. The president vetoes the law - the population is happy. Both Congress and the President get reelected, because their constituency is still happy. And it continues on.
Because we're not talking about the one person that sets the federal agenda and holds veto power over everyone else. The executive branch is where our system breaks down.
The executive isn't nearly as powerful as you think it is. If it is, we've already lost, and we should just up and start over again. The power of the government must lie in the legislature. Otherwise, we've just got an elected dictator - and at that point, who bloody cares how he's elected.
Yup, easier to massage votes that way. You work for Diebold, eh?
If you think it's easier to massage votes in a republic than in a democracy, you're crazy. In one case, you've got 50 individual elections you need to rig. In another, it's just one.
At least with one vote per person, there isn't any illusion of balance that doesn't exist in an unnecessary, outdated administrivia designed to put enough English-literate people in one spot to vote
With one vote per person, you have an executive which is representative of a different country than the legislature. Explain that one to me. You'll have a situation where the legislature and the executive never agree on some things because they're sponsored by two different populations.
I don't see how you can possibly hate the electoral college and yet support the relative sizes of the House and Senate. It's exactly the same thing. Proportionally, Wyoming will still have 3X the congressmen than California has.
Yes the states remain, and so do state governments, and indeed they still wield considerable power.
I think you're underestimating exactly how powerful state governments still are - grocery stores in Pennsylvania look considerably different than grocery stores in Ohio due to the complete lack of alcohol in Pennsylvania grocery stores. The gay marriage issue? States again (and contrary to what our President might think, states won't give up that right through an amendment, either). Speed limits? States. Sales tax? States. Education system? States. Police? States. Driver's licensing? States.
In fact, I'd say the areas where the government most impinges on a normal person's life are still coming directly from the states.
So where has the US become one big country? Internationally - which, of course, is where it's supposed to. The problem is that people forget much of the time that the president is supposed to handle domestic affairs as well as international ones.
Maybe we should split the executive up into two Presidents? One for international concerns, voted popularly, and one for domestic concerns, voted electorally.
I think this sort of proposal (popular vote for President) is stemming from the desire to do something about this clash of original intention with reality - you either need to change the voting structure to reflect reality, or change the reality to better reflect the original intent that lies behind the voting structure.
As I've stated elsewhere, if there really is a strong desire (and I'm not sure there is) to fix the system, there already is an easy fix. Expand the House of Representatives. Every argument for "underrepresentation" or "overrepresentation" applies equally well to the House. The House hasn't been expanded since 1911, when the US was a fraction of its current size. The House should probably be about 1000 members by now.
Yes, there is. An adjustable system that if taken to either extreme allows the "tyranny of the minority" and the "tyranny of the majority". Then, you just place the adjustable system right in the middle of the two, and you've got a system that's equally balanced between the two. And hey, if you want to be real smart, you set up two systems, one that's slightly dominated by the minority, and one that's slightly dominated by the majority, and check the two against each other, so that if the majority starts to dominate too heavily in one system, the other can reign it back, and vice versa.
Oh, wait. That's what we have.
If you think that the major population centers aren't getting a fair enough shake, argue for an increase in the size of the House of Representatives. That's what it's there for.
First, you do realize that the body that actually makes the laws - Congress - isn't proportional to population either? Why aren't you crowing to fix that as well? There are 250,000 Wyoming representatives to each Senator, and 500,000 to each Representative - California has 600,000 to each Representative, and 15 million to each Senator. Montana gets royally screwed: they've got only 1 representative per 900,000 people, which means Wyoming voters count nearly twice Montana voters!
The Senate is fixed (and unamendable) by the Constitution - the House of Representatives is not, though. And if any other system is flawed, we really should be abolishing states altogether.
The Electoral college doesn't stop the "mob rule" scenario. It just rewards a different mob.
You're wrong. The Electoral College system has one huge advantage over the "one vote per person" system. It's flexible. One vote per person is not.
Remember that the House of Representatives has an adjustable number of people in it: it hasn't been expanded since 1911, and all it takes is a congressional resolution to do so.
Taken to an extreme, if the House had 1 member for each person in the US, the Electoral College would essentially be "one vote per person". The difference that the two extra votes from the Senate give would be negligible. Thus, the Electoral College system (and, in fact, our entire government) has a nice, easily adjustable system that goes from "Democracy-like" to "Republic-like". Going purely to a popular-vote based system shoves that slider all the way to "Democracy-like".
If, right now, the Electoral College is favoring "mob rule" by smaller population states, that just tells you that the size of the House should be increased (which it should be). The ideal goal is a balance between the two.
I don't get it. You're crowing to change a system that fundamentally mimics the legislature. Why aren't you crowing to fix the legislature as well? Why is a democratic President so much more important than a democratic legislature?
You are advocating for a system that says a California citizen is worth 1/3 of a Wyoming citizen in deciding a state's representation in the Electoral College.
See above. Even if you fix this, a Montana citizen still has 1/2 the representation that a Wyoming citizen does in the House of Representatives, and a California citizen has a minimal representation in the Senate compared to a Wyoming citizen as well.
Why is this okay, but the Electoral College is not? Your argument essentially undermines the entire foundation of the country.
Which is fine, mind you! It might be the way to go - but it's not the way that the founders of this country wanted to go.
Yes, but especially in the older states. As you go out West, the dividing lines become increasingly arbitrarily drawn.
It's somewhat arbitrary. It's definitely geologically arbitrary - hence the straight lines. But geopolitically, and culturally (definitely culturally in the case of Utah), it's not so arbitrary. Some of the states in the west should probably be merged, and California should almost definitely be split into two states.
But the economy of Texas, for instance, is very different from the economy of Oklahoma, even though the two are right beside each other. And both are very different than the economy of, say, Wyoming, even though the divisions between Texas and Wyoming are all arbitrary geographically.
And to me, this is even better: it means people realized that the best people to decide how to use the land in Montana aren't the people in California or Texas. It's the people in Montana. This is very different than other countries, where huge areas of land go incredibly poorly used because the population is centered in a different location. It's very similar to the odd feature that many state capitols in the US aren't the largest city.
Though, honestly, if (essentially) nobody lived in a state, I doubt it would be able to maintain itself, and in all likelihood, they'd enter into discussions with a neighboring state (one that was most similar to their own culture) and merge with them. I think if a state is able to be self-sustaining and not need federal support for the same functions that other states manage on their own, they're fine. They're a functioning government on their own.
Surely it is more reasonable to deal out political power by the number of people who vote, instead of by artificial divisions of state?
Do you think it's more reasonable to deal out political power around the world based on people, instead of artificial divisions by nation?
Well, you might, but the problem there is that a lot of those "artificial divisions" aren't so artificial: island nations, different cultures, etc. naturally divide a lot of nations. And in the US, the same things happen - state divisions are actually pretty natural in a lot of places.
Eh. There are advantages to the current system (which constantly get ignored by those who think that a pure popular vote is the One True Way (tm)).
What you have to ask is "what do I want from the federal government?" As in, what's their job? What are they supposed to do? Are they supposed to be a true federal government, setting down laws for the people, framing their society based on their wishes? Or are they supposed to be a confederacy, letting smaller, more local governments frame society, and just setting up the rules for how those governments interact with each other?
The Electoral College's current approach is appropriate for the second - a popular vote is more appropriate for the first. I'm personally of the opinion that the United States federal government is intended to be more like the second approach - what with the delegation of duties downward to the states, and then to counties, etc.
Honestly, I don't get the "reform the electoral college" crap all the time. The solution is simple: 1) increase the size of the House of Representatives, and then 2) citizens from each state should whine and complain if they don't like the way their electors are forced to vote (or better yet, move to a state that does it in the way that you want it to).
1) doesn't require actions from the states, either. Just a resolution from the House. Easy as pie.
The difference between "mind prediction" and "mind reading" is one of definition, not evidence.
If you can't prove that there's an element to the mind that can't be predicted based on past information (which, as I stated, is a very strong statement) then there is no difference between mind prediction and mind reading. Observing all the past information (trends, behavior, etc.) would be exactly the same thing as "reading a person's mind", and any difference between the two would be purely semantic, because the person's thoughts would be stateful.
Imagine a blind person trying to see an object: he could easily use a binocular camera and a spectrograph which prints out the information, and then he reads it in. The blind person would now have exactly the same information that a sighted person would.
Likewise, if you can predict someone's thoughts with better-than-random chance, that's exactly the same information that a "paranormal" mind reader would have.
And at that point, any tests to disprove mind reading actually become a little awkward - you now have to put in controls to deal with your perception of "mind prediction" vs "mind reading" - which means that you're essentially now selecting an experiment to prove or disprove your perception of what mind reading would be. Given that you're trying to detect an unknown mechanism, that seems counterproductive.
What you're talking about is "mind prediction", which isn't the same thing, and isn't particularly unusual.
What I'm partially trying to point out is that the statement that "mind reading" and "mind prediction" are two different things is a very, very powerful statement that really should be shown rather than simply assumed a priori. What you're saying is that "there is an innate quality to the mind that cannot be predicted" - otherwise, sufficiently advanced "mind prediction" would be completely and utterly indistinguishable from mind reading, and any difference between the two is pointless.
If we have one person change his/her routine, and the other person fails to accurately predict the new routine, then we have distinguished it from mind reading.
If you force the other person (person B) to change his/her routine... (i.e. tell them to specifically do something else) then it makes sense that the other person (person A) would think person B is going to do something else, because that's what person B is thinking at the time anyway. If you tell person B "think about X" whereas person B wouldn't think about X on their own, then aren't you asking if person A can read your mind rather than person B's mind?
Mind reading implies the ability to use something other than our five known working senses to detect the thoughts of another person.
This is something other than the five known working senses. It's pattern recognition. In the absence of all sensory information, if you asked a spouse who's lived with someone for very, very long what the other person is thinking right now, that person could probably give a better answer than a random person. It's essentially "The Newlywed Game".
Isn't that the way you would evaluate whether or not mind reading existed? Whether or not the person is able to answer questions correctly regarding what the other person is thinking at a rate higher than a random person would?
Using your ears to notice your spouse's stomach is rumbling and guessing that they are thinking about food is not mind reading.
You don't have to hear your spouse's stomach rumble. If they've been together long enough, the wife might just know that her husband's hungry - based on how long it's been since a previous meal, based on how often her husband feels hungry, etc. Not one of the five standard senses there. Just knowledge of the other person. And isn't that the same thing as mind reading? If you know someone well enough to essentially know what they're thinking, if there's a difference between that and mind reading... that's actually a very powerful statement, as you're stating that there is a difference between predicted behavior and chosen behavior.
Slashdot Mirror
It's relatively easy to get a time-to-digital converter (TDC) with ~tens of picosecond timing granularity, and if you work hard enough, you can get down to ~10 ps resolution or so. If you do insane things, like use superconducting electronics, you can get down to ~few picoseconds or so.
For the simple ~tens of picosecond TDCs, a simple method is just a capacitor with a switched constant-current source. The capacitor charges at a fixed rate, and then the voltage is read out with an ADC. The limiting factors there are the speed of the switch.
That's not exactly true. The ideal output of most fusion cycles is stable. You get side production of tritium and a few other radioactive isotopes, though.
But fusion does, however, produce a large amount of radioactive waste. Not through the products of the reaction. Through the byproducts of the high level of irradiation.
The difference is that fission radioactive byproducts are long lived. Fusion radioactive byproducts are extremely radioactive, but very short lived, and therefore easier to deal with
The big summary of the article is this:
It's not due to the fact that the experiment was broken. It's just the way it was designed.
it's due to the inflating dollar and/or inflating population.
This is units, not sales amounts.
As for inflating populations, Japan's population basically hasn't budged in the last 10 years (less than a 2% increase), and even back to 1980, it's only about an 8% total increase. You're not talking about a major correction here.
I think it's safe to say that the DS, even corrected for population sizes, would very likely easily stay on top.
As for the NES versus the DS? The Famicom only sold 500,00 units in its first two months. I think it's safe to say that the DS outsold it, considering it's selling that much in two weeks. Even corrected for inflation.
SNES had ~50M units to the Genesis's ~35M (Wikipedia is your friend). It did have a larger market share, but not a dominant one. Split pretty evenly is probably the most accurate, especially given generations since then.
Syberia did have a sequel. Syberia II.
But Xbox is previous-generation (and Syberia/Syberia II were ports from the PC).
Know of any for the Xbox 360? Or any that have come out in 2005/2006?
Sony delayed dual-layer Blu-ray.
This is comparing formats which are available right now. Dual layer Blu-ray will be available in a little while.
Nor should there be. States are not merely administrative districts of the FedGov to be readjusted as needed, but sovereign states in their own right.
I'm not quite talking about readjusting them as needed: it's just that I don't think there's any way whatsoever to remove a state from the Union without that state seceding itself, and even that might not be legal. If Wisconsin literally explodes and inside Wisconsin's borders is nothing but Jim-Bob Stevens, Jim-Bob Stevens can take Wisconsin's Constitution and be a state all by himself.
Heck, the UN, which is a looser confederacy of sovereign nations, has the right to expel member states, by Article 6. The US Constitution has nothing of the sort.
On the other hand, Texas is a very rural state and is penalized heavily by the EC system.
Texas? Very rural? Geologically, maybe, but economically? Not really. Hence the reason why it has such a large population.
But the rationale you propose - ie. to protect rural voters from the tyranny of city-dwellers - doesn't hold water. Actually there are many instances where the EC actively discriminates against farmers. Rural people in New York State are effectively discriminated AGAINST twice by the EC system. First they happen to live in a highly populated state so the EC vote / population ratio is low. Second, they are bunched together with lots of city-dwellers and don't stand a chance of ever being heard within the state. Have you ever heard of a candidate visiting rural New York State
What you don't realize here is that you're not arguing for a strict popular vote. You're bringing up the specifics of one state and saying "this state doesn't fit your model".
That's true. It doesn't. The beauty of the current system is that each state is free to choose its own model for how its votes are distributed to best represent the needs of the state itself, rather than the people of the state.
Your points just say that certain state governments aren't doing their job.
Take California, for example... it is big enough, and diverse enough, to be several states (or a well-off country). The central valley is mostly a conservative, farm-oriented area. The northern area is, historically, a logging area (although now it seems to be skewing towards experimental agriculture). It's largely high-tech and biotech in the San Francisco region, largely media in the Los Angeles area.
Isn't that an argument that California should vote to split itself in two, or maybe three, or four?
Or, maybe we should let California decide how it wants to split its electoral votes? Oh wait - that's what we do.
If California would better be represented by four blocks of electoral votes, that's what their legislature should vote to do. Forcing the method of decision upon them is against the founding principles of the country, which is a delicate balance between a democracy and a republic.
The problem really isn't the 'winner take all' mentality. It's - as usual - the existence of political parties which manipulate the sovereignity of states.
Actually, it's more an argument for splitting New York and California into multiple states. If there's a huge disparity between the way that New Yorkers feel about voting for the executive branch, they probably don't agree on how to run the state itself - and in any case, if there's that much disparity, then you're screwing over certain segments of the state in terms of their representation in the Senate anyway.
Probably one of the big flaws in the Constitution is that there's no real way for the states to force a state to split or two states to merge, nor any incentive for them to do so to accurately represent their population. Right now there's a 66:1 population disparity between California and Wyoming, the largest and smallest states. When the country was founded, the largest population disparity was between Delaware and Virginia, and that was only 15:1. At some point you have to say "there's no way Wyoming should still be a state on its own" or "California is just too big to be just one state." And that ignores the political disparities that exist between those areas - just the populations.
What's funny is that the Civil War, which split Virginia, nicely split the state into a mining region (West Virginia) and an agricultural/trade region (Virginia). Unfortunately, that's not really an efficient way to merge Wyoming or split California.
1) That would be true if most presidential ads weren't national. They are.
2) While the grandparent said "campaigning", that's a poor choice of words. It's not quite campaigning - advertising alone won't win you the election if you're advertising "Vote for me, and I'll kill babies", regardless of how much advertising you put out. A popularly-elected president wouldn't care about the smaller states, and so his platform wouldn't contain any of the things they care about. Then, when he got into office, he wouldn't do any of the things they care about, because in the next election, again, he wouldn't need them.
The bigger issue is that a popularly-elected president means the president is representing a different nation than Congress is, which is why this is a brain-dead solution. If you want a real one, increase the size of the House of Representatives.
To quote myself,
I have a little more faith in the oldest federal constitutional government in the world.
There's a world of difference between political rivalry like you describe, and pathological hatred, which is what's happening.
I'll still stick with the belief that it's incompetence (or lack of political power) that's at fault.
That happens anyway. Stem-cell research anyone? The only difference now is the electoral college reinforces that we cannot democratically remove the problem.
You're assuming that we won't elect a new President who will approve funding for stem-cell research in 2008. Given the plethora of public support from both sides (hence the reason it passed Congress!) I think that's extremely pessimistic. What I was talking about was a disagreement that would deadlock the government indefinitely.
It's difficult to use this administration to judge things - especially right now - considering the President's approval rating is in the toilet, indicating the majority of Americans don't agree with what he's doing. I don't think he'd win another election against a decent opponent right now.
Yes, yes we should.
If you believe that, electing a President popularly should be the least of your concerns.
Who says eliminating the electoral college would take the counting out of the hands of the states?
I didn't say that at all. It's just that if you manipulate, say, California, from a 55%/45% win to 100%/0% win, in a republic election, it doesn't change anything. You still only get California's electoral votes. In a popular election, however, it adds 45% of California's population to the vote total.
Like I said: harder to rig.
This is different from now how? Look at federal dollars going to states President Bush has openly stated he hates (Oregon has been baselessly compared to Lebanon by pretty much every member of the Bush family holding a political office).
I'm not going to agree with you there: plenty of federal dollars go to Johnstown, PA, which is represented by one of Bush's staunchest political rivals in Congress. Any disparity to Bush's political rivals would be occurring because of the incompetence of those representatives, who should be replaced.
Besides, that's not the problem I'm even talking about: what I'm talking about is a stalemate happening in the government where Congress, acting properly on behalf of those who elected them, can't get anything done with the President, even though he's acting properly on behalf of those who elected him. You're setting yourself up for a system that can deadlock even when it's working the way you want it to.
Let me be explicit here: suppose a majority of the districts in the US want to pass a law. Suppose the population of the US, centered in one state, don't want to pass the law. Congress gets elected, and tries to pass the law. The districts are happy. The president vetoes the law - the population is happy. Both Congress and the President get reelected, because their constituency is still happy. And it continues on.
Because we're not talking about the one person that sets the federal agenda and holds veto power over everyone else. The executive branch is where our system breaks down.
The executive isn't nearly as powerful as you think it is. If it is, we've already lost, and we should just up and start over again. The power of the government must lie in the legislature. Otherwise, we've just got an elected dictator - and at that point, who bloody cares how he's elected.
Yup, easier to massage votes that way. You work for Diebold, eh?
If you think it's easier to massage votes in a republic than in a democracy, you're crazy. In one case, you've got 50 individual elections you need to rig. In another, it's just one.
At least with one vote per person, there isn't any illusion of balance that doesn't exist in an unnecessary, outdated administrivia designed to put enough English-literate people in one spot to vote
With one vote per person, you have an executive which is representative of a different country than the legislature. Explain that one to me. You'll have a situation where the legislature and the executive never agree on some things because they're sponsored by two different populations.
I don't see how you can possibly hate the electoral college and yet support the relative sizes of the House and Senate. It's exactly the same thing. Proportionally, Wyoming will still have 3X the congressmen than California has.
Yes the states remain, and so do state governments, and indeed they still wield considerable power.
I think you're underestimating exactly how powerful state governments still are - grocery stores in Pennsylvania look considerably different than grocery stores in Ohio due to the complete lack of alcohol in Pennsylvania grocery stores. The gay marriage issue? States again (and contrary to what our President might think, states won't give up that right through an amendment, either). Speed limits? States. Sales tax? States. Education system? States. Police? States. Driver's licensing? States.
In fact, I'd say the areas where the government most impinges on a normal person's life are still coming directly from the states.
So where has the US become one big country? Internationally - which, of course, is where it's supposed to. The problem is that people forget much of the time that the president is supposed to handle domestic affairs as well as international ones.
Maybe we should split the executive up into two Presidents? One for international concerns, voted popularly, and one for domestic concerns, voted electorally.
I think this sort of proposal (popular vote for President) is stemming from the desire to do something about this clash of original intention with reality - you either need to change the voting structure to reflect reality, or change the reality to better reflect the original intent that lies behind the voting structure.
As I've stated elsewhere, if there really is a strong desire (and I'm not sure there is) to fix the system, there already is an easy fix. Expand the House of Representatives. Every argument for "underrepresentation" or "overrepresentation" applies equally well to the House. The House hasn't been expanded since 1911, when the US was a fraction of its current size. The House should probably be about 1000 members by now.
Yes, there is. An adjustable system that if taken to either extreme allows the "tyranny of the minority" and the "tyranny of the majority". Then, you just place the adjustable system right in the middle of the two, and you've got a system that's equally balanced between the two. And hey, if you want to be real smart, you set up two systems, one that's slightly dominated by the minority, and one that's slightly dominated by the majority, and check the two against each other, so that if the majority starts to dominate too heavily in one system, the other can reign it back, and vice versa.
Oh, wait. That's what we have.
If you think that the major population centers aren't getting a fair enough shake, argue for an increase in the size of the House of Representatives. That's what it's there for.
First, you do realize that the body that actually makes the laws - Congress - isn't proportional to population either? Why aren't you crowing to fix that as well? There are 250,000 Wyoming representatives to each Senator, and 500,000 to each Representative - California has 600,000 to each Representative, and 15 million to each Senator. Montana gets royally screwed: they've got only 1 representative per 900,000 people, which means Wyoming voters count nearly twice Montana voters!
The Senate is fixed (and unamendable) by the Constitution - the House of Representatives is not, though. And if any other system is flawed, we really should be abolishing states altogether.
The Electoral college doesn't stop the "mob rule" scenario. It just rewards a different mob.
You're wrong. The Electoral College system has one huge advantage over the "one vote per person" system. It's flexible. One vote per person is not.
Remember that the House of Representatives has an adjustable number of people in it: it hasn't been expanded since 1911, and all it takes is a congressional resolution to do so.
Taken to an extreme, if the House had 1 member for each person in the US, the Electoral College would essentially be "one vote per person". The difference that the two extra votes from the Senate give would be negligible. Thus, the Electoral College system (and, in fact, our entire government) has a nice, easily adjustable system that goes from "Democracy-like" to "Republic-like". Going purely to a popular-vote based system shoves that slider all the way to "Democracy-like".
If, right now, the Electoral College is favoring "mob rule" by smaller population states, that just tells you that the size of the House should be increased (which it should be). The ideal goal is a balance between the two.
I don't get it. You're crowing to change a system that fundamentally mimics the legislature. Why aren't you crowing to fix the legislature as well? Why is a democratic President so much more important than a democratic legislature?
You are advocating for a system that says a California citizen is worth 1/3 of a Wyoming citizen in deciding a state's representation in the Electoral College.
See above. Even if you fix this, a Montana citizen still has 1/2 the representation that a Wyoming citizen does in the House of Representatives, and a California citizen has a minimal representation in the Senate compared to a Wyoming citizen as well.
Why is this okay, but the Electoral College is not? Your argument essentially undermines the entire foundation of the country.
Which is fine, mind you! It might be the way to go - but it's not the way that the founders of this country wanted to go.
Yes, but especially in the older states. As you go out West, the dividing lines become increasingly arbitrarily drawn.
It's somewhat arbitrary. It's definitely geologically arbitrary - hence the straight lines. But geopolitically, and culturally (definitely culturally in the case of Utah), it's not so arbitrary. Some of the states in the west should probably be merged, and California should almost definitely be split into two states.
But the economy of Texas, for instance, is very different from the economy of Oklahoma, even though the two are right beside each other. And both are very different than the economy of, say, Wyoming, even though the divisions between Texas and Wyoming are all arbitrary geographically.
And to me, this is even better: it means people realized that the best people to decide how to use the land in Montana aren't the people in California or Texas. It's the people in Montana. This is very different than other countries, where huge areas of land go incredibly poorly used because the population is centered in a different location. It's very similar to the odd feature that many state capitols in the US aren't the largest city.
Even if nobody lived in them?
Yes.
Though, honestly, if (essentially) nobody lived in a state, I doubt it would be able to maintain itself, and in all likelihood, they'd enter into discussions with a neighboring state (one that was most similar to their own culture) and merge with them. I think if a state is able to be self-sustaining and not need federal support for the same functions that other states manage on their own, they're fine. They're a functioning government on their own.
Surely it is more reasonable to deal out political power by the number of people who vote, instead of by artificial divisions of state?
Do you think it's more reasonable to deal out political power around the world based on people, instead of artificial divisions by nation?
Well, you might, but the problem there is that a lot of those "artificial divisions" aren't so artificial: island nations, different cultures, etc. naturally divide a lot of nations. And in the US, the same things happen - state divisions are actually pretty natural in a lot of places.
Eh. There are advantages to the current system (which constantly get ignored by those who think that a pure popular vote is the One True Way (tm)).
What you have to ask is "what do I want from the federal government?" As in, what's their job? What are they supposed to do? Are they supposed to be a true federal government, setting down laws for the people, framing their society based on their wishes? Or are they supposed to be a confederacy, letting smaller, more local governments frame society, and just setting up the rules for how those governments interact with each other?
The Electoral College's current approach is appropriate for the second - a popular vote is more appropriate for the first. I'm personally of the opinion that the United States federal government is intended to be more like the second approach - what with the delegation of duties downward to the states, and then to counties, etc.
Honestly, I don't get the "reform the electoral college" crap all the time. The solution is simple: 1) increase the size of the House of Representatives, and then 2) citizens from each state should whine and complain if they don't like the way their electors are forced to vote (or better yet, move to a state that does it in the way that you want it to).
1) doesn't require actions from the states, either. Just a resolution from the House. Easy as pie.
The difference between "mind prediction" and "mind reading" is one of definition, not evidence.
If you can't prove that there's an element to the mind that can't be predicted based on past information (which, as I stated, is a very strong statement) then there is no difference between mind prediction and mind reading. Observing all the past information (trends, behavior, etc.) would be exactly the same thing as "reading a person's mind", and any difference between the two would be purely semantic, because the person's thoughts would be stateful.
Imagine a blind person trying to see an object: he could easily use a binocular camera and a spectrograph which prints out the information, and then he reads it in. The blind person would now have exactly the same information that a sighted person would.
Likewise, if you can predict someone's thoughts with better-than-random chance, that's exactly the same information that a "paranormal" mind reader would have.
And at that point, any tests to disprove mind reading actually become a little awkward - you now have to put in controls to deal with your perception of "mind prediction" vs "mind reading" - which means that you're essentially now selecting an experiment to prove or disprove your perception of what mind reading would be. Given that you're trying to detect an unknown mechanism, that seems counterproductive.
What you're talking about is "mind prediction", which isn't the same thing, and isn't particularly unusual.
What I'm partially trying to point out is that the statement that "mind reading" and "mind prediction" are two different things is a very, very powerful statement that really should be shown rather than simply assumed a priori. What you're saying is that "there is an innate quality to the mind that cannot be predicted" - otherwise, sufficiently advanced "mind prediction" would be completely and utterly indistinguishable from mind reading, and any difference between the two is pointless.
If we have one person change his/her routine, and the other person fails to accurately predict the new routine, then we have distinguished it from mind reading.
If you force the other person (person B) to change his/her routine... (i.e. tell them to specifically do something else) then it makes sense that the other person (person A) would think person B is going to do something else, because that's what person B is thinking at the time anyway. If you tell person B "think about X" whereas person B wouldn't think about X on their own, then aren't you asking if person A can read your mind rather than person B's mind?
Mind reading implies the ability to use something other than our five known working senses to detect the thoughts of another person.
This is something other than the five known working senses. It's pattern recognition. In the absence of all sensory information, if you asked a spouse who's lived with someone for very, very long what the other person is thinking right now, that person could probably give a better answer than a random person. It's essentially "The Newlywed Game".
Isn't that the way you would evaluate whether or not mind reading existed? Whether or not the person is able to answer questions correctly regarding what the other person is thinking at a rate higher than a random person would?
Using your ears to notice your spouse's stomach is rumbling and guessing that they are thinking about food is not mind reading.
You don't have to hear your spouse's stomach rumble. If they've been together long enough, the wife might just know that her husband's hungry - based on how long it's been since a previous meal, based on how often her husband feels hungry, etc. Not one of the five standard senses there. Just knowledge of the other person. And isn't that the same thing as mind reading? If you know someone well enough to essentially know what they're thinking, if there's a difference between that and mind reading... that's actually a very powerful statement, as you're stating that there is a difference between predicted behavior and chosen behavior.