"In both Party List and Mixed Member, the party controls access"
Anyone can start their own political party. Don't like an existing one, create your own. A party is needed to campaign effectively, nobody can do it on their own these days. The UK Independance Party is a good example, it is made up of those disaffected by the other main parties policies on joining the Euro. Under FPTP they are nowhere, 0 representatives, under PR they have 16% of the UK's seats in the European parliament and are using them effectively.
"If you want even more boring, partisan, homogeneous politics, I guess these are good ideas."
In fact, PR increases the breadth of politics making it more diverse and more representative, the existing system inevitably narrows to two parties who are both striving for the centre. The greens, the libertarians and other relatively small parties are basically irrelevant at the moment, that isn't the case under PR.
"Choice voting is a reasonable idea, but with an electorate that can't understand how to properly punch holes in a piece of paper"
This simply isn't a problem in the elections carried out across Europe, but then, they tend to be simpler, put a cross in a box, paper systems. Perhaps the US should simplify the system rather than trying to rely on gadgets.
"Why are these systems so party-centric? It seems to me that in American politics, parties and their battles are part of the problem rather than the answer. Representation should be elected on the merits, proposals and record of an individual, not based on how much favor an individual has curried with their party's state headquarters."
Ah, well thing is that the existing election systems both in the UK and the US make the assumption that you *are* electing an individual who has no party affiliation, party politics basically didn't exist when the British system was created, the US system just followed on with the simple first past the post system despite political parties having appeared by this time in Britain. Members of parliament banded into parties as the suffrage increased and the costs rose. You are no longer electing an individual, you are electing a party who go on to make use of block voting tactics, the system became non proportional, unrepresentative. The fact that these PR systems are so party centric is simply an expression of the political reality.
"finding ways to downplay the need for large sums of money in elections"
Great, but it means government funding of all political campaigns no matter how small. Newspapers and TV networks aren't going to provide free space and time for political adverts, especially when the number of parties and candidates increases with the lowered entry requirements, and that's *lots* of money. How much are the Republicans and Democrats spending? 222 million dollars and 170 million dollars respectively.
The evidence is fairly clear, across Europe 80 - 90% turnouts are common. The UK? 60%. The US? 50%.
In a proportional election, if you vote for a party, you *actually* increase their representation. In the US, or UK, unless the people you voted for actually win (and that has to be one of the big two), your vote is wasted.
The result is that there is a much wider spectrum of representation in Europe. This mirrors the beliefs of the electorate, both right wing and left wing which encourages people to engage with politics and politicians, this has the other result of keeping them honest.
I don't really believe that PR of any sort will be used in any major election in the US in the near future. The result will be a further increase in power of corporate lobbyists and erosion of democracy and democratic rights.
"The last election was decided by hundreds of votes."
Yup, a few thousand votes in swing states. There are millions of people in other states though who might as well not bother, and basically, they don't.
Except most of Europe kinda proves you wrong, perhaps American voters are just really stupid and European voters are really smart, but I think that in reality, proportional representation can be easily understood by the American electorate, (Not that Instant Runoff is really proportional representation).
One person one vote is hardly disenfranchising anyone. Why should 2000 square miles of empty space be given the same representation as a real live person?
Shame about the general election and the house of commons though, Labour get 42% of the votes, but 65% of the seats. Definitely not a proportional result.
Perhaps with the Conservatives support going into meltdown they'll start considering proportional representation. Their conference is coming up, I guess we'll see.
The olympic athletes stopped being amateurs several years ago (1981). In fact, now the only sport in the olympics where the contestants must be amateur is boxing.
Re:That's the definition I've always seen.
on
Amateur Revolution?
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· Score: 1
Because they are not being paid to write Linux code. They are still professional programmers. I don't see what the problem is though, the only thing that matters is the quality of the job that's done. If people want to do it for fun and not be paid, fine. I've seen lots of "professionals" produce crap because that's convenient for them, from programmers to electricians, mechanics, plumbers etc.
"People just don't care enough about politics and social entrepeneurship."
I think you'll find that's because their voices are unheard. In America, in Britain, your vote doesn't count. Turnout and engagement is correspondingly low.
If you take a look at the democracies of Europe however, people are far more engaged in politics and the turnouts during elections are on average far higher than the US or UK. That's because their voice can be heard, every vote counts...
The difference is proportional representation:
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/polit/damy/Beginnn in gReading/howprwor.htm
These are basically normal concrete sprayed over the inside of a balloon. You can also get foamed concrete which is made up largely of air, or vacuum I suppose if you expose it to space. Some of the attractions of it are, it's very light, as little as 50kg/m^3 and it's a very good insulator which is going to be extremely important in space in direct sunlight.
I suspect that 50kg/m^3 is probably still far too heavy for space usage, perhaps aerogels will be the materials best suited.
If you're looking at Echo, you should also have a look at Zope as well. It's a lovely development environment, I can throw business stuff together in hours which would take days/weeks in VB and Java. Brilliant for RSI sufferers. All that forgotten stuff which used to end up as a VB app accessing an Access database installed on every desktop machine now doesn't.
It's not like 99.9% of the population are going to be able to tell the difference between a decent copy and an original. Rather than being funny, it sounds like one of the better ideas.
"The obvious rebuttal, which has also been said many times, is that businesses are not going to commit significant amounts of money to space until they see the profit potential, and we're not there yet."
You want profit?
NASA's budget is what? 16 billion dollars? Say we just closed it all down and instead stuck half of that in the bank every year. 10, 11 years thats nearly 100 billion dollars just waiting to be collected if some enterprising companies or individuals manage to achieve whichever goals are set. 200 billion in 20 years.
Yes but we get the electricians to do that usually, yes, no, but then we use redundant networks.
1000 computers can use the same network architecture as 100 or 10, it's just bigger and you have what? Workstations... Out on the desks? I bet they even have local hard disks. How 1980s. No wonder you're firefighting.
Criminals already clone license plates from one vehicle and put them on stolen vehicles of the same make/model/colour. The innocent owner of the cloned plate is the person who gets all of the speeding tickets, London congestion charge and parking fines.
There's absolutely no reason you couldn't look for another car of your make/model/colour, grab the RFID number with your scanner and set up a transponder to return that number to the police/government scanner. To combat that you have to start using challenge/response systems and that needs a CPU and power supply to do the encryption/decryption on the license plate itself and that's getting ridiculous.
Um, bollocks, simply break the plate. Do you have any idea how many license plates get broken every year?
"Auto accidents still kill a tremendous number of people annually"
Despite the propaganda, only a tiny percentage of accidents are fully or even partially caused by speeding and the vast majority happen well within the speed limit.
You can set up and manage 1000 systems as easily as 100, if you know what you're doing and get the first 10 set up properly. If you don't then you end up firefighting all day.
Managing large numbers of systems isn't difficult as long as you take the right approach to it. The problem is that 90% of systems administrators have no idea how to do it and the system architecture ends up growing like a weed.
With a 95% monopoly they could hardly help popularising things. We're talking about innovation. They have never *innovated*. In fact, "Microsoft innovation" is a running joke in the IT industry. It's almost an oxymoron.
I mean, search Google for Microsoft and innovation, surely an MS site will be top of the list explaining everything they have invented? No, instead the top sites list things which other people invented but people assume came from Microsoft.
The service pack pertains directly to the full operating system. If you are given the patches and service packs for free you have no incentive to pay for a legal copy of the software. Denying the service pack to users of illegal versions increases the incentive to pay for the operating system and obtain a valid license, generating more revenue.
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"In both Party List and Mixed Member, the party controls access"
Anyone can start their own political party. Don't like an existing one, create your own. A party is needed to campaign effectively, nobody can do it on their own these days. The UK Independance Party is a good example, it is made up of those disaffected by the other main parties policies on joining the Euro. Under FPTP they are nowhere, 0 representatives, under PR they have 16% of the UK's seats in the European parliament and are using them effectively.
"If you want even more boring, partisan, homogeneous politics, I guess these are good ideas."
In fact, PR increases the breadth of politics making it more diverse and more representative, the existing system inevitably narrows to two parties who are both striving for the centre. The greens, the libertarians and other relatively small parties are basically irrelevant at the moment, that isn't the case under PR.
"Choice voting is a reasonable idea, but with an electorate that can't understand how to properly punch holes in a piece of paper"
This simply isn't a problem in the elections carried out across Europe, but then, they tend to be simpler, put a cross in a box, paper systems. Perhaps the US should simplify the system rather than trying to rely on gadgets.
"Why are these systems so party-centric? It seems to me that in American politics, parties and their battles are part of the problem rather than the answer. Representation should be elected on the merits, proposals and record of an individual, not based on how much favor an individual has curried with their party's state headquarters."
Ah, well thing is that the existing election systems both in the UK and the US make the assumption that you *are* electing an individual who has no party affiliation, party politics basically didn't exist when the British system was created, the US system just followed on with the simple first past the post system despite political parties having appeared by this time in Britain. Members of parliament banded into parties as the suffrage increased and the costs rose. You are no longer electing an individual, you are electing a party who go on to make use of block voting tactics, the system became non proportional, unrepresentative. The fact that these PR systems are so party centric is simply an expression of the political reality.
"finding ways to downplay the need for large sums of money in elections"
Great, but it means government funding of all political campaigns no matter how small. Newspapers and TV networks aren't going to provide free space and time for political adverts, especially when the number of parties and candidates increases with the lowered entry requirements, and that's *lots* of money. How much are the Republicans and Democrats spending? 222 million dollars and 170 million dollars respectively.
I'm not saying go out and vote.
I'm saying make every vote count. At the moment, yours probably doesn't.
The evidence is fairly clear, across Europe 80 - 90% turnouts are common. The UK? 60%. The US? 50%.
In a proportional election, if you vote for a party, you *actually* increase their representation. In the US, or UK, unless the people you voted for actually win (and that has to be one of the big two), your vote is wasted.
The result is that there is a much wider spectrum of representation in Europe. This mirrors the beliefs of the electorate, both right wing and left wing which encourages people to engage with politics and politicians, this has the other result of keeping them honest.
I don't really believe that PR of any sort will be used in any major election in the US in the near future. The result will be a further increase in power of corporate lobbyists and erosion of democracy and democratic rights.
"The last election was decided by hundreds of votes."
Yup, a few thousand votes in swing states. There are millions of people in other states though who might as well not bother, and basically, they don't.
Except most of Europe kinda proves you wrong, perhaps American voters are just really stupid and European voters are really smart, but I think that in reality, proportional representation can be easily understood by the American electorate, (Not that Instant Runoff is really proportional representation).
One person one vote is hardly disenfranchising anyone. Why should 2000 square miles of empty space be given the same representation as a real live person?
Shame about the general election and the house of commons though, Labour get 42% of the votes, but 65% of the seats. Definitely not a proportional result.
Perhaps with the Conservatives support going into meltdown they'll start considering proportional representation. Their conference is coming up, I guess we'll see.
The olympic athletes stopped being amateurs several years ago (1981). In fact, now the only sport in the olympics where the contestants must be amateur is boxing.
Because they are not being paid to write Linux code. They are still professional programmers. I don't see what the problem is though, the only thing that matters is the quality of the job that's done. If people want to do it for fun and not be paid, fine. I've seen lots of "professionals" produce crap because that's convenient for them, from programmers to electricians, mechanics, plumbers etc.
That's it. That's all there is to it.
There's the implication of better quality work or a better attitude, but in reality that has nothing to do with professional/amateur status.
"People just don't care enough about politics and social entrepeneurship."
n in gReading/howprwor.htm
I think you'll find that's because their voices are unheard. In America, in Britain, your vote doesn't count. Turnout and engagement is correspondingly low.
If you take a look at the democracies of Europe however, people are far more engaged in politics and the turnouts during elections are on average far higher than the US or UK. That's because their voice can be heard, every vote counts...
The difference is proportional representation:
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/polit/damy/Beginn
These are basically normal concrete sprayed over the inside of a balloon. You can also get foamed concrete which is made up largely of air, or vacuum I suppose if you expose it to space. Some of the attractions of it are, it's very light, as little as 50kg/m^3 and it's a very good insulator which is going to be extremely important in space in direct sunlight.
I suspect that 50kg/m^3 is probably still far too heavy for space usage, perhaps aerogels will be the materials best suited.
Or simply fill it up with expanding foam from the inside.
If you're looking at Echo, you should also have a look at Zope as well. It's a lovely development environment, I can throw business stuff together in hours which would take days/weeks in VB and Java. Brilliant for RSI sufferers. All that forgotten stuff which used to end up as a VB app accessing an Access database installed on every desktop machine now doesn't.
http://www.zope.org/
It's not like 99.9% of the population are going to be able to tell the difference between a decent copy and an original. Rather than being funny, it sounds like one of the better ideas.
"The obvious rebuttal, which has also been said many times, is that businesses are not going to commit significant amounts of money to space until they see the profit potential, and we're not there yet."
You want profit?
NASA's budget is what? 16 billion dollars? Say we just closed it all down and instead stuck half of that in the bank every year. 10, 11 years thats nearly 100 billion dollars just waiting to be collected if some enterprising companies or individuals manage to achieve whichever goals are set. 200 billion in 20 years.
Yes but we get the electricians to do that usually, yes, no, but then we use redundant networks.
1000 computers can use the same network architecture as 100 or 10, it's just bigger and you have what? Workstations... Out on the desks? I bet they even have local hard disks. How 1980s. No wonder you're firefighting.
Criminals already clone license plates from one vehicle and put them on stolen vehicles of the same make/model/colour. The innocent owner of the cloned plate is the person who gets all of the speeding tickets, London congestion charge and parking fines.
There's absolutely no reason you couldn't look for another car of your make/model/colour, grab the RFID number with your scanner and set up a transponder to return that number to the police/government scanner. To combat that you have to start using challenge/response systems and that needs a CPU and power supply to do the encryption/decryption on the license plate itself and that's getting ridiculous.
Because the UK police collect them.
http://www.safespeed.org.uk/lie.html
"impossible to speed over stretches of highway"
Um, bollocks, simply break the plate. Do you have any idea how many license plates get broken every year?
"Auto accidents still kill a tremendous number of people annually"
Despite the propaganda, only a tiny percentage of accidents are fully or even partially caused by speeding and the vast majority happen well within the speed limit.
This is *NASA* we're talking about here, not the RKA.
Tut... Some people...
Approx 1mx1mx1m of helium needed to lift each kg. How much does it weigh? 5kg, 10kg? That's a *big* balloon to have following you down the street.
You can set up and manage 1000 systems as easily as 100, if you know what you're doing and get the first 10 set up properly. If you don't then you end up firefighting all day.
Managing large numbers of systems isn't difficult as long as you take the right approach to it. The problem is that 90% of systems administrators have no idea how to do it and the system architecture ends up growing like a weed.
With a 95% monopoly they could hardly help popularising things. We're talking about innovation. They have never *innovated*. In fact, "Microsoft innovation" is a running joke in the IT industry. It's almost an oxymoron.
I mean, search Google for Microsoft and innovation, surely an MS site will be top of the list explaining everything they have invented? No, instead the top sites list things which other people invented but people assume came from Microsoft.
The secret to reducing commuting is. Put where you want to go near to (walking distance) where you are already.
The real question is... How do we tack that concept on to already zoned and planned cities?
The service pack pertains directly to the full operating system. If you are given the patches and service packs for free you have no incentive to pay for a legal copy of the software. Denying the service pack to users of illegal versions increases the incentive to pay for the operating system and obtain a valid license, generating more revenue.