Nope, I pulled this out of my own ass, after being reminded of how the Founding Fathers envisioned the system. But if someone wants to run with it, I'll cheer 'em on:) (Actually, I've become a straight-up feudalist, but that's a dead concept in today's political world.)
I've noticed that the less truly responsible to the voters (and that tends to go with larger voting districts where the mob can more readily hold sway), the more likely the office-holder will kowtow to special interests rather than doing the will of the people. That trend needs to be reversed, and a direct chain of responsibility implemented that also limits authority. Right now office-holders tend to have authority without responsibility, which is the worst possible setup.
I agree... so how do we go about repealing the 17th Amendment?? Seriously, how do we get enough of a movement started that the people demand it, rather than doing that bristly "I wanna elect 'em myself!" thing??
That's an interesting perspective, and I think you're right -- it likely would have been better over the long term to just let slavery evolve out of existence, which was on its way regardless what with the invention of automation and labour-saving devices (frex, combines and harvesters of various sorts).
However, that wouldn't have given an instant economic advantage to Northern industrialists.
Or more accurately, about the rising class of Northern industrialists seeing a handy way to put the South out of the economic picture by removing its major labour force. Naturally, the South objected to being made economic pawns overnight. Everything else followed from that.
I stopped believing in democracy once I realised that after a certain point, it becomes mob rule by the LEAST informed. It works fine so long as the populace is fairly socially homogenous AND all of about the same education level, but the practical limit is probably about 5000 voters.
From a discussion under another article -- maybe what we need is a modified feudal system, where each level elects ONLY that level immediately above it, and is held resposible TO those below, *and* is held responsible FOR those above. So if A elects B and B elects C, and C fucks up, B is taken to task by A for being a moron about who B elected.
I'm not sure how the details would work out or how it would be enforced, but maybe if A does a recall election on C, B is also unelected, which gives B an incentive to select good people for level C, and C in turn has an incentive to work for A, lest both C and C's supporters in B get booted out.
Best case, it could result in a very cautious government that made damn sure it didn't fuck over any voting segment, lest the flaming pitchforks be unlimbered. OTOH, maybe it would just be a different type of moron filter.. at present it seems that everyone *but* the morons is being filtered out of having any say in gov't.
(In fact, I've come to believe the only completely workable system is the circular feudal system, where responsibility flows A to B to C to A, ie. where the peasants can put the flaming pitchforks to an abusive king.... but we've become entrenched in the notion that all men are equal to the point that every common man should have a say about everything, no matter how ignorant he may be about it:(
"Democracy: that ultimate triumph of quantity over quality." -- Peter H. Peel
So... does that mean I'd get a nice fat tax rebate check from the CA gov't, since it'd no longer be going to Washington??;) (Yes, I live here too..)
Ya know, if our taxes weren't being filtered through DC and skimmed down to pay for all those middlemen, chances are every state could pay its own way. How much does it take just to RUN the tax collecting-and-distributing system?? if it's like the average charity/fundraiser, it's somewhere around 80%. Meaning if we got rid of all that, our taxes should drop by a like amount.
Then why don't we elect Tom McClintock, who can be counted on to at least vote against *anything* that spends money?? That'd be ONE problem down, at least!
Well, there is always that money problem... and websites aren't as accessable-to-all as we online geek types would like to think.
I don't think there really IS a good solution so long as we have national voting and therefore national campaigns. But return everything to the localized system the U.S. started with, and I suspect most of the problem would go away.
Of course, THAT ain't gonna happen so long as the foxes are guarding the henhouse.
Seems to me what we really do is not elect a representative, but rather, we elect said rep's favourted lobbyists. Why not cut the middleman and just have lobbyists run for office?!
I don't see this as too much of a problem... if one or the other is willing to change their state of residence, the pairing would be allowed, and they'd still both have all that California name recognition.
[reads amendment closely] It occurs to me that this amendment could be sidestepped by the electors "from the same state" simply not voting -- which might be practical if a landslide was already likely.
I think you make a good point that it will be profit-driven, in that those companies already profitable will be willing to pay to maintain their profits (which won't change much for them); and those not already making money on the 'net will take it in the shorts.
So who is making the most money on the 'net? I'd guess it is indeed the porn industry, followed by advertising. So... the end effect will be that porn and ads are fast and readily available (or maybe unavoidable), and everything else is slow or absent.
What we started with was rather like a feudal system with voting added at each level. Each level is thereby made responsible both *to* those below it and *for* those above it.
But the system as it is today puts all the responsibility on the voters, but lets the office holders be responsible to *no one but each other*, with absolutely no responsibility to those "below" them. So once elected, they do as they damn well please, and so long as enough of the mob can be conned into re-electing them, everything is great -- for them.
That's an interesting thought -- let 'em run the first time on a certain limited amount of public funds (just to make sure everyone has a fair shot at being seen as a candidate), but for re-election to that same post, that they have to find their own funding, and CANNOT take time away from the current elected position for campaigning for ANY position (current or new).
Would change the game considerably. What it wouldn't fix is the kick-'em-upstairs that happens where there are term limits, tho that can be beneficial if the elected person is doing a good job -- so put him where he has more power to do more good.
I'm not sure this is progress either, but it's worth discussing.
Having lived in Montana during the Great Winters of the late 1960s/70s, when winter temps regularly hit -65F (and sometimes didn't get above -45F for several weeks in January)... livestock deaths due to cold are rare even among stock that spend the whole winter out on the range, and the real cause of death is usually not so much cold as starvation due to being trapped away from feed (either grass being too far under the snow, or the rancher being unable to get hay to them) following a major blizzard.
I never saw birds dying from -65F temps in Montana -- in fact those little chickadees (which must weigh all of 2 ounces) are around all winter, in large numbers. Now, birds getting caught in an ice storm might be another matter, but I never saw dead birds after such storms either, and we had plenty of 'em.
Nightcaps freezing to the bed?? Maybe if your roof leaked. Once in a while my fire would go out in the night, and when I woke up it'd be -10F in my house. Water jug would be partly frozen, but my nightcap certainly wasn't, let alone any other body parts.
Exposed thin tissues like the tips of cats' ears and chicken combs can get frostbitten (in which case the tips sortof dry up and fall off) and the same for human ears if you don't wear a hat. But merely zero temps generally won't suffice to do it.
Methinks it was not the severity at fault (after all, Scandinavia has much worse winters every year, and survives it!) but the lack of preparedness, given that this was an unusual cold for the era and area -- much as happens when Alabama gets an ice storm today.
"When it don't rain, the roof don't leak; when it rains, I cain't fix it no-how."
In fact, you may very dangerously break things, if you act based on a flawed model. This is why schemes to "halt global warming" (frex by blowing stuff into the atmosphere or the sea or what have you) are so scary -- it's meddling based on partial and possibly quite wrong information, for which any negative consequences might not be seen for decades, but could well be irreversable when they do come.
Actually, I don't think you're so far off. M$ has been itching to sell software by the hour ever since they first announced that intention at the Win2K rollout (end of 1999 -- I was at the L.A. presentation). I don't think it's at all unlikely that we'll see timeshared and time/bandwidth-tiered software in the future, geared toward sale to regular home users, for just a low monthly fee!!
Heh... having come to believe democracy is fundamentally flawed, largely because the unRoyal We IS so often wrong and so often rules by some form of mob... methinks a good many "outmoded" ideas may deserve to be revisted.
But sometimes the lynch mob operated AFTER the trial... having disagreed with the verdict.
If we had executioner-by-lot, how many would disagree with the verdict today? remember that can go both ways!
It's an interesting concept, regardless -- akin to someone's suggestion hereabouts a while back, that ALL public offices should be filled by rotation (or even by lot) rather than by election. One suspects at the very least it would improve most people's sense of responsibility to and involvement in running their communities, since at any time they might be called upon to serve.
I pay $35/mo. ($100 to install, and he earned every cent) for my fixed wireless, 1.5Mbit down, 256k up (I think.. I don't use up enough to care). My other option is 26k dialup... rural phone lines won't do any better than that. I know a lot of WISPs figure they've got you by the balls, but this one is trying to compete straight up with DSL, and is even getting some people in town to switch over.
It isn't supposed to suffer from weather dropout, but I've noticed it is sensitive to rain and snow. Fortunately neither is much of an issue here in the SoCal desert.
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Nope, I pulled this out of my own ass, after being reminded of how the Founding Fathers envisioned the system. But if someone wants to run with it, I'll cheer 'em on :) (Actually, I've become a straight-up feudalist, but that's a dead concept in today's political world.)
I've noticed that the less truly responsible to the voters (and that tends to go with larger voting districts where the mob can more readily hold sway), the more likely the office-holder will kowtow to special interests rather than doing the will of the people. That trend needs to be reversed, and a direct chain of responsibility implemented that also limits authority. Right now office-holders tend to have authority without responsibility, which is the worst possible setup.
I agree... so how do we go about repealing the 17th Amendment?? Seriously, how do we get enough of a movement started that the people demand it, rather than doing that bristly "I wanna elect 'em myself!" thing??
That's an interesting perspective, and I think you're right -- it likely would have been better over the long term to just let slavery evolve out of existence, which was on its way regardless what with the invention of automation and labour-saving devices (frex, combines and harvesters of various sorts).
However, that wouldn't have given an instant economic advantage to Northern industrialists.
Or more accurately, about the rising class of Northern industrialists seeing a handy way to put the South out of the economic picture by removing its major labour force. Naturally, the South objected to being made economic pawns overnight. Everything else followed from that.
I stopped believing in democracy once I realised that after a certain point, it becomes mob rule by the LEAST informed. It works fine so long as the populace is fairly socially homogenous AND all of about the same education level, but the practical limit is probably about 5000 voters.
From a discussion under another article -- maybe what we need is a modified feudal system, where each level elects ONLY that level immediately above it, and is held resposible TO those below, *and* is held responsible FOR those above. So if A elects B and B elects C, and C fucks up, B is taken to task by A for being a moron about who B elected.
I'm not sure how the details would work out or how it would be enforced, but maybe if A does a recall election on C, B is also unelected, which gives B an incentive to select good people for level C, and C in turn has an incentive to work for A, lest both C and C's supporters in B get booted out.
Best case, it could result in a very cautious government that made damn sure it didn't fuck over any voting segment, lest the flaming pitchforks be unlimbered. OTOH, maybe it would just be a different type of moron filter .. at present it seems that everyone *but* the morons is being filtered out of having any say in gov't.
(In fact, I've come to believe the only completely workable system is the circular feudal system, where responsibility flows A to B to C to A, ie. where the peasants can put the flaming pitchforks to an abusive king.... but we've become entrenched in the notion that all men are equal to the point that every common man should have a say about everything, no matter how ignorant he may be about it :(
"Democracy: that ultimate triumph of quantity over quality." -- Peter H. Peel
So... does that mean I'd get a nice fat tax rebate check from the CA gov't, since it'd no longer be going to Washington?? ;) (Yes, I live here too..)
Ya know, if our taxes weren't being filtered through DC and skimmed down to pay for all those middlemen, chances are every state could pay its own way. How much does it take just to RUN the tax collecting-and-distributing system?? if it's like the average charity/fundraiser, it's somewhere around 80%. Meaning if we got rid of all that, our taxes should drop by a like amount.
Actually, I suspect we (a set I do not belong to for this statement) DID elect Biden-Obama; we just don't know it yet. :/
Then why don't we elect Tom McClintock, who can be counted on to at least vote against *anything* that spends money?? That'd be ONE problem down, at least!
Well, there is always that money problem... and websites aren't as accessable-to-all as we online geek types would like to think.
I don't think there really IS a good solution so long as we have national voting and therefore national campaigns. But return everything to the localized system the U.S. started with, and I suspect most of the problem would go away.
Of course, THAT ain't gonna happen so long as the foxes are guarding the henhouse.
An AC says, "The Democratic Party would never get a landslide without CA."
Hmmm... how about kicking California out of the Union? that would fix any number of problems!
Yep, that would be the most accurate description.
Seems to me what we really do is not elect a representative, but rather, we elect said rep's favourted lobbyists. Why not cut the middleman and just have lobbyists run for office?!
I don't see this as too much of a problem... if one or the other is willing to change their state of residence, the pairing would be allowed, and they'd still both have all that California name recognition.
[reads amendment closely] It occurs to me that this amendment could be sidestepped by the electors "from the same state" simply not voting -- which might be practical if a landslide was already likely.
(BTW, thanks for the link -- good site.)
I think you make a good point that it will be profit-driven, in that those companies already profitable will be willing to pay to maintain their profits (which won't change much for them); and those not already making money on the 'net will take it in the shorts.
So who is making the most money on the 'net? I'd guess it is indeed the porn industry, followed by advertising. So... the end effect will be that porn and ads are fast and readily available (or maybe unavoidable), and everything else is slow or absent.
I foresee a return to the dialup BBS for anything that requires privacy** or might otherwise be throttled into nonexistence.
** Encrypted packets, you say? No problem, we just throttle all encrypted traffic.
What we started with was rather like a feudal system with voting added at each level. Each level is thereby made responsible both *to* those below it and *for* those above it.
But the system as it is today puts all the responsibility on the voters, but lets the office holders be responsible to *no one but each other*, with absolutely no responsibility to those "below" them. So once elected, they do as they damn well please, and so long as enough of the mob can be conned into re-electing them, everything is great -- for them.
That's an interesting thought -- let 'em run the first time on a certain limited amount of public funds (just to make sure everyone has a fair shot at being seen as a candidate), but for re-election to that same post, that they have to find their own funding, and CANNOT take time away from the current elected position for campaigning for ANY position (current or new).
Would change the game considerably. What it wouldn't fix is the kick-'em-upstairs that happens where there are term limits, tho that can be beneficial if the elected person is doing a good job -- so put him where he has more power to do more good.
I'm not sure this is progress either, but it's worth discussing.
My nightmare presidential ticket:
Feinstein and Boxer !!
I'll be very surprised if it never happens.
Then why do these idiots keep re-electing people like Feinstein? She's done nothing but raise taxes, vote away our rights, and spend money.
THIS California resident votes for whoever the hell runs against her, but it's a lost cause so long as she has all that name recognition.
"Democracy: that ultimate triumph of quantity over quality." -- Peter H. Peel
Having lived in Montana during the Great Winters of the late 1960s/70s, when winter temps regularly hit -65F (and sometimes didn't get above -45F for several weeks in January) ... livestock deaths due to cold are rare even among stock that spend the whole winter out on the range, and the real cause of death is usually not so much cold as starvation due to being trapped away from feed (either grass being too far under the snow, or the rancher being unable to get hay to them) following a major blizzard.
I never saw birds dying from -65F temps in Montana -- in fact those little chickadees (which must weigh all of 2 ounces) are around all winter, in large numbers. Now, birds getting caught in an ice storm might be another matter, but I never saw dead birds after such storms either, and we had plenty of 'em.
Nightcaps freezing to the bed?? Maybe if your roof leaked. Once in a while my fire would go out in the night, and when I woke up it'd be -10F in my house. Water jug would be partly frozen, but my nightcap certainly wasn't, let alone any other body parts.
Exposed thin tissues like the tips of cats' ears and chicken combs can get frostbitten (in which case the tips sortof dry up and fall off) and the same for human ears if you don't wear a hat. But merely zero temps generally won't suffice to do it.
Methinks it was not the severity at fault (after all, Scandinavia has much worse winters every year, and survives it!) but the lack of preparedness, given that this was an unusual cold for the era and area -- much as happens when Alabama gets an ice storm today.
"When it don't rain, the roof don't leak; when it rains, I cain't fix it no-how."
In fact, you may very dangerously break things, if you act based on a flawed model. This is why schemes to "halt global warming" (frex by blowing stuff into the atmosphere or the sea or what have you) are so scary -- it's meddling based on partial and possibly quite wrong information, for which any negative consequences might not be seen for decades, but could well be irreversable when they do come.
Actually, I don't think you're so far off. M$ has been itching to sell software by the hour ever since they first announced that intention at the Win2K rollout (end of 1999 -- I was at the L.A. presentation). I don't think it's at all unlikely that we'll see timeshared and time/bandwidth-tiered software in the future, geared toward sale to regular home users, for just a low monthly fee!!
Good thought -- just run ONE app, the shell or VM that runs all your OTHER apps.
Heh... having come to believe democracy is fundamentally flawed, largely because the unRoyal We IS so often wrong and so often rules by some form of mob ... methinks a good many "outmoded" ideas may deserve to be revisted.
But sometimes the lynch mob operated AFTER the trial... having disagreed with the verdict.
If we had executioner-by-lot, how many would disagree with the verdict today? remember that can go both ways!
It's an interesting concept, regardless -- akin to someone's suggestion hereabouts a while back, that ALL public offices should be filled by rotation (or even by lot) rather than by election. One suspects at the very least it would improve most people's sense of responsibility to and involvement in running their communities, since at any time they might be called upon to serve.
I pay $35/mo. ($100 to install, and he earned every cent) for my fixed wireless, 1.5Mbit down, 256k up (I think.. I don't use up enough to care). My other option is 26k dialup... rural phone lines won't do any better than that. I know a lot of WISPs figure they've got you by the balls, but this one is trying to compete straight up with DSL, and is even getting some people in town to switch over.
It isn't supposed to suffer from weather dropout, but I've noticed it is sensitive to rain and snow. Fortunately neither is much of an issue here in the SoCal desert.