In a real democracy, there are repercussions for fucking up. Most obvious, you don't get re-elected. Are you implying Bush didn't fuck up or that the US isn't a real democracy?
Cue the European slashdotters who will find some way to paint this as a moral and intellectual failing on the part of Americans. At least it cued you...
WHAT?? Let me explain. What this means is that the guy who wrote the comment is the owner of a hovercraft, and he's complaining that it's full of eels.
It's not a single list for the whole country. The country is divided into vote areas. I think in English such areas are called constituencies. You vote on a list for your constituency.
Each constituency has a fixed number of parliament seats. These seats are allocated to different parties according to how many votes were cast for each party within that constituency. If, for example, your preferred party gains five seats in your constituency, then the five top names on your list get these seats. They become your local representatives in the parliament.
However, if a representative lower down on the list in your constituency gets many individual votes, he or she replaces one of the five top names. The number of local representatives from the party is still five.
85% of the seats in the parliament are allocated this way. Due to rounding effects, usually the total allocation of all these seats will not accurately reflect the total vote percentages of the country as a whole. The remaining 15% of the seats are for adjustment. They are allocated to the parties using an algorithm that leaves the total party representation in the parliament closer to the total party votes of the country as a whole.
However, the representation is still not completely accurate, because in order to gain a seat in the parliament, a party needs to get at least 4% of the votes in the country as a whole.
And what happens to politicians who don't toe the party line and stand as independents? If you want to be fully independent from all existing parties, found a new party. Founding a party is simply the formality that you have to go through for candidacy. There's no limit on the number of parties.
If you want to act within an existing party, but still act largely independently from your party, then that's a matter partly between you and the party, and partly between you and your voters. If you act too much against your party they might exclude you or move you down on the next election list; in the latter case your voters might move you up by giving you individual votes.
The majority party gets to write the rules (laws) Not quite. The system is far more nuanced.
There is no single majority party. The largest party has only 35% * and is on the side that lost in the last election. On that side there are three parties. The winning side, and thus the government, is an alliance of four parties.
The winning alliance is somewhat to the right, the others are somewhat to the left. There are lots of other parties, but here I'm only including the seven that have seats in the parliament.
Our multi-party system is probably somewhat less efficient than the US two-party system, because of the need for constant haggling and give-and-take and compromise, but it has the important advantage that, as voters, we can nuance our votes by voting, not only for a preferred side, but also for one of the parties within that side.
Each voter can optionally nuance his vote further, by voting not only for a party, but also for one individual within the party that he votes for.
(The way this works is, by voting for a party you vote for a list of representatives, and optionally you can also mark one of the members of the list. Members with many such individual votes get precedence.)
What about hormones which possibly cause early puberty in girls? I've always been a fan of the FDA's finer, more subtle, accomplishments such as this. That's shocking! You're not supposed to feel attracted to them.
People are stupid, It's not the people who are stupid, it's the media who whip up scares. They love a scare and will do everything they can to mislead the public into believing that there's cause for concern. This sells papers and attracts viewers twice, first when whipping up the panic, and later when debunking it.
Okay, people are stupid too, for not choosing honest media, voting with their dollars. Speaking of media dishonesty, see my sig.
you're accusing our top military strategists, economists, financiers, and industrialists of outright incompetence. Now where would anyone get such ideas? Me, I feel quite confident that the US leadership has just the level of competence that they showed designing the Iraq exit strategy.
Given that we are the most violent society on the face of the planet, The US the most violent? You gotta be kidding. Iraq has political/religious terrorist murders almost every day, that's far more violent than the US.
Of course that's Iraq under the US military, but still...
Looking elsewhere, Darfur is much more violent than the US. Colombia too. Etc.
However I'm pretty sure the US is the most violent in the modern Western developed world. It may perhaps also qualify, among all countries, as the country with the most aggressively violence-prone foreign policy.
how, realistically, would one impose these sanctions? [...] What's left, political pressure? What's needed is of course persuasion, give-and-take, meeting halfway, international treatises, etc. Of course the current US administration would never think of such solutions, always preferring the bullying approach.
Regarding your theory, I think it may be spot-on, I seem to remember reading that studies have shown precisely this, that men with more frequent ejaculations run less risk of prostate cancer.
Regarding the very sudden disappearance of your sex drive, I think you should explore the cause, because it may be an early warning about far more serious problems building up without you noticing.
I think the suddenness indicates that it very likely it's due to (possibly unnoticed) severe stress. In that case the stress may be slowly damaging you severely, even though you may not notice the stress at all -- this can happen while you feel wonderful in all respects. Thus it might be a good idea to see a psychologist or psychiatrist, whatever the appropriate therapist is called in your country (the terminology varies). There's a lot you can do to prevent stress-induced deterioration just by seeing the right expert and learning a few methods. A specialist on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy would probably be ideal.
If stress is not the cause, several other possible causes would be urological, although in that case I would expect the change to be gradual (but I'm no expert). Then it would be a good idea to see a urologist. There are also lots of other possibilities, such as drugs, blood system, neurology etc, but your urologist should know all these possibilities, and can send you to the right expert if necessary.
Reversed Polarity is just change from + to - or south to north. Nothing magical about it. But of course. That's obvious. Which means it's a joke. How can anyone take such a comment seriously? On slashdot of all places? And it was modded down too!
I think we've been invaded by non-slashdotter aliens.
Who's going to provide this functionality, for that matter? Let's hope it's not Microsoft, or rewiring the traffic lights won't be enough, they'll also need to add lamps — red to stop, yellow to pay attention, green to go ahead, and Blue Light Of Death on system crash.
Oops! I missed your question at the end. Me, I was born in 1955, and I'm now 52 years old.
I guess we must both be new here, not yet having been transformed into the typical slashdotter youngsters living in our moms' basements...
Of course if Slashdot has that effect on people, I won't mind becoming a youngster again, not even if it means I have to live in my mom's basement...:-)
Sorry to disappoint you about your age, but you're 60. On your birthday in 2008 you'll be 61.
On your birthday, in every year that ends with a 7, your age ends with a 0. On your birthday, in every year that ends with an 8, your age ends with a 1.
Slashdot Mirror
On the contrary, the license is better.
If you'd take just a moment's glance at the story page you'd notice that this spiral is completely different.
WHAT?? Let me explain. What this means is that the guy who wrote the comment is the owner of a hovercraft, and he's complaining that it's full of eels.
Each constituency has a fixed number of parliament seats. These seats are allocated to different parties according to how many votes were cast for each party within that constituency. If, for example, your preferred party gains five seats in your constituency, then the five top names on your list get these seats. They become your local representatives in the parliament.
However, if a representative lower down on the list in your constituency gets many individual votes, he or she replaces one of the five top names. The number of local representatives from the party is still five.
85% of the seats in the parliament are allocated this way. Due to rounding effects, usually the total allocation of all these seats will not accurately reflect the total vote percentages of the country as a whole. The remaining 15% of the seats are for adjustment. They are allocated to the parties using an algorithm that leaves the total party representation in the parliament closer to the total party votes of the country as a whole.
However, the representation is still not completely accurate, because in order to gain a seat in the parliament, a party needs to get at least 4% of the votes in the country as a whole. And what happens to politicians who don't toe the party line and stand as independents? If you want to be fully independent from all existing parties, found a new party. Founding a party is simply the formality that you have to go through for candidacy. There's no limit on the number of parties.
If you want to act within an existing party, but still act largely independently from your party, then that's a matter partly between you and the party, and partly between you and your voters. If you act too much against your party they might exclude you or move you down on the next election list; in the latter case your voters might move you up by giving you individual votes.
There is no single majority party. The largest party has only 35% * and is on the side that lost in the last election. On that side there are three parties. The winning side, and thus the government, is an alliance of four parties.
The winning alliance is somewhat to the right, the others are somewhat to the left. There are lots of other parties, but here I'm only including the seven that have seats in the parliament.
Our multi-party system is probably somewhat less efficient than the US two-party system, because of the need for constant haggling and give-and-take and compromise, but it has the important advantage that, as voters, we can nuance our votes by voting, not only for a preferred side, but also for one of the parties within that side.
Each voter can optionally nuance his vote further, by voting not only for a party, but also for one individual within the party that he votes for.
(The way this works is, by voting for a party you vote for a list of representatives, and optionally you can also mark one of the members of the list. Members with many such individual votes get precedence.)
* Thank you furbearntrout for that link.
Okay, people are stupid too, for not choosing honest media, voting with their dollars. Speaking of media dishonesty, see my sig.
Of course that's Iraq under the US military, but still...
Looking elsewhere, Darfur is much more violent than the US. Colombia too. Etc.
However I'm pretty sure the US is the most violent in the modern Western developed world. It may perhaps also qualify, among all countries, as the country with the most aggressively violence-prone foreign policy.
"Spreading democracy" my ass.
I yearn for change. The US can be wonderful.
Regarding your theory, I think it may be spot-on, I seem to remember reading that studies have shown precisely this, that men with more frequent ejaculations run less risk of prostate cancer.
Regarding the very sudden disappearance of your sex drive, I think you should explore the cause, because it may be an early warning about far more serious problems building up without you noticing.
I think the suddenness indicates that it very likely it's due to (possibly unnoticed) severe stress. In that case the stress may be slowly damaging you severely, even though you may not notice the stress at all -- this can happen while you feel wonderful in all respects. Thus it might be a good idea to see a psychologist or psychiatrist, whatever the appropriate therapist is called in your country (the terminology varies). There's a lot you can do to prevent stress-induced deterioration just by seeing the right expert and learning a few methods. A specialist on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy would probably be ideal.
If stress is not the cause, several other possible causes would be urological, although in that case I would expect the change to be gradual (but I'm no expert). Then it would be a good idea to see a urologist. There are also lots of other possibilities, such as drugs, blood system, neurology etc, but your urologist should know all these possibilities, and can send you to the right expert if necessary.
Come on, this persistent adding of more and more features to the cellphones has got to stop! And you want to make it even worse by adding phone calls?
Much more important for the survival of our species, let's hope the SETI people on Earth aren't slashdot trolls sending goatse to the aliens.
I think we've been invaded by non-slashdotter aliens.
Reversed polarity? These scientists have seen too much Star Trek.
In those countries they have unusually large and heavy ID cards.
Next-generation spam:
Nice house you've got there. Wouldn't it be sad if all the appliances suddenly went wild?
He must be very, very new here.
Oops! I missed your question at the end. Me, I was born in 1955, and I'm now 52 years old.
:-)
I guess we must both be new here, not yet having been transformed into the typical slashdotter youngsters living in our moms' basements...
Of course if Slashdot has that effect on people, I won't mind becoming a youngster again, not even if it means I have to live in my mom's basement...
Sorry to disappoint you about your age, but you're 60. On your birthday in 2008 you'll be 61.
On your birthday, in every year that ends with a 7, your age ends with a 0. On your birthday, in every year that ends with an 8, your age ends with a 1.