I wonder. It is obvious that completely protecting children from everything makes them grow up into weak morons who rely constantly on being protected from themselves (in some countries these people are referred to as Americans). Children need to be hurt, a little bit, frequently, in order to learn. I suspect that most of the hurt should be self-inflicted ("You probably won't hold a cup of scalding coffee in your lap while driving anymore, will you?") but knowing that the world will sometimes hurt you and that you have to juggle benefits vs. risks is a fundamental--and oft-neglected--part of growing up.
Can anyone point me to research on how much and what kinds of hurt tend to lead to good education? That would be a very hard study, since "good education" is so hard to measure, but surely someone has made at least an initial stab at it?
Very gracious, and the irony of you apologising to me for being rude is not lost on me. But it was all in good fun, I think. Maybe.
You have hit the nail on the head: my best understanding of the current research is that we are likely in very deep and very urgent trouble, and yours is different. Putting that (largely) aside for a moment, I will just beg one favour: go and watch a quick video addressing not so much whether global climate change is real, but what happens if you mix the possibility that something might be going on with a little basic risk management: How It All Ends.
For the record, I really hope you're right. Good luck to us all.
multiple people so far have read your post as defending these practices.
I am not surprised when I remember to look at how effective the American school system is at teaching kids how to read.
What you are writing here is basically a defense of the practice of invading another country's sovereign territory simply because you do not like their environmental policy. Unfortunately, in order for such a policy to hold weight in an ethical sense, you must be able to prove your core assertion
What nonsense! Apparently your school taught you no more about science than about reading comprehension. There is really no way ever to prove cause and effect beyond any doubt (outside of artificial systems like pure math). You can bound the probability of your assertion, and you can be more sure that you're right than you are that the sun will rise tomorrow, but you can't be absolutely, positively sure ever. When I am pretty sure that you are harming me, I will act. When I have a pretty strong suspicion that you are harming me and a pretty strong suspicion that if I do nothing everyone will die, then I will act. That is reasonable.
If you are standing in your back yard, shooting a gun off vaguely in my direction, should I wait for you to hit me before I start shooting back? When I feel a bullet pass through my leg, should I believe that it was from the gun that I saw you shooting a split second earlier, or should I question even that, and not act until I can do projectile forensics? Even then the bullet could be a plant, made to look like it came from your gun by chance or an unknown third party. There is no proof--only evidence. And it is completely reasonable to act on good evidence, and indeed pretty fucking stupid not to.
Climate change is the poster-child in this case, there are plenty of well written peer-reviewed journal articles supporting the idea that our activities are seriously harming the environment, and just as many citing proof that this is not the case.
Find me a couple, could you? They are pretty scarce, especially recently as evidence pours in that many current observations are actually significantly worse than the "cautious" models predicted. Actually, the vast majority of the scientific community is pretty scared, and I'd love to know where you got the idea that that is not the case.
The idea that a war in a country half-way across the world away because they're burning coal into air that "does not respect human boundaries" is patently ridiculous
Why?
What is your obsession with political boundaries? You ought to know that they are completely arbitrary, created by humans for their own ends. No country anywhere has borders based on laws of nature, and few were established in the first place without bloodshed, without displacing some other people against any idea of justice. They are capricious and arbitrary. Furthermore, borders can change without much affecting the environment. The converse is not true, however: global warming could easily bring down many of the political systems and boundaries that we have now (see http://securityandclimate.cna.org/report/ for one analysis), is quite likely to lead to famine and war on a scale never seen before, and has absolutely no concept of only punishing those who deserve it.
The longer we go without acting, the more devastating the solution will be, and the less likely to work. We will never have absolute proof of cause, and we will not have absolute proof of result until it is too late. However, as of now, we are pretty damn sure that we have a very good idea of what's going on.
It's pretty disgusting to watch us fuck ourselves over so thoroughly, knowing that we're doing it and how to make things better, and yet doing nothing.
Again, I suggest re-reading my post. I never mentioned Afghanistan or Iraq. I never even hinted that America was currently playing the role of eco-police. I said something about what needed to be done and claimed that we should be doing that, if anything.
I was just listening to a great talk in which the speaker was discussing how we tend to take our preconceived notions and find justifications for them. I can only assume that you are angry about the wars the USA is engaged in. Good! But a more careful reading of what you thought you were responding to might have been wise.
Have you just not noticed that air and water don't have much respect for human political boundaries? Your analogies are lovely and all, but irrelevant. I suggest more thoughtful reading of the post you're replying to.
The Constitution leaves that to the states, as it should.
That makes sense when pollution from one state only hurts that state. But we're too powerful: many of our activities have repercussions far beyond little political boundaries.
In an equitable system, there would be no "pollution allowance". Anyone whose person or property was damaged by pollution would have the right to demand damages from the culprit.
That'd be wonderful. Of course, it assumes that every piece of anything of value in the world is owned by someone. Who sues on behalf of the ocean floor in international waters, etc? For what value?
"Other people's business": you just aren't getting it, are you? There is only one atmosphere. If you dump shit into it, you're not dumping shit into your little piece of atmosphere. You are dumping shit into the atmosphere. That is very much my business. There are oceanic dead zones that are caused by people dumping trash into the ocean all over the world, and they affect us all. Rain forests cut down and burned in Brazil exacerbates global warming, in which even the name explicitly spells out that it is, um, global. Fertiliser runoff from one country affects another country. CFCs released in China cause skin cancer in Canada. I wish Americans would mind our own business too, but you have not yet grasped that when someone destroys a part of the planet that America and the world needs left intact in order to survive, that is America's business.
No. Consumers tend usually to choose the cheapest option for now, not the most responsible--I encourage you to examine spending trends. Producers tend to provide this by exploiting and permanently destroying common property, because if you can get 80 (or 5, usually) years of profit out of something before it is gone forever, mortals tend to choose that rather than a sustainable exploitation rate. Find me some examples where this is not the case--I dare you.
"Makes a lot more sense" how?? Resources can (maybe) be extracted faster, and when this is possible it often happens. As I said, corporations tend to work on about a 5- or 10-year timescale. They also tend to pollute and destroy common resources, precisely because consumers would usually rather have a "cheap" product than actually find out the ethics of all corporations in the supply chain of the one from whom they're buying.
They're not clean. They output the same amount of pollution, just that it's located at a central coal-to-electric factory instead of at the car.
As I said, clean energy is possible. And given the premise of my argument I'm surprised you ignored this fact.
Also the absolute cleanest cars in the world are the 70mpg Honda Insight and the Civic GX (and possibly the 88mpg VW Lupo 3L). Not an EV1 which is powered by 75% coal, 20% CNG, and 5% nuclear, and overall no cleaner than a Prius. Although it is better than an EV train; their frequent starts-and-stops means they only average 15mpg per person according to EPA.gov
Check out the Aptera. And, as I said, the EV1 is pretty clean to operate if you come by your energy honestly, although fuel cells are somewhat a problem to produce (they're getting better, though). And as for trains, they are not great in this country and their efficiency depends on occupancy, but I'm surprised you haven't figured out that trains can in principle start/stop much less frequently than cars, can use regenerative braking, etc. (all without fuel cells), and would have rather better coverage if we didn't have so many cars. Do you really lack the insight to see that trains do in fact work very well in some places? Not often in the USA, but the rest of the world is almost like a whole other country. Of course trains won't get you everywhere, but a system combining trains, buses, taxis, bikes, and feet can be stunningly effective, and pretty damn clean, if a society has the will to build it.
No instead you'd have trains collide head-on because the lazy engineer was text-messaging instead of watching the road, and therefore lots of lots of innocent passengers got killed. (referece recent U.S. accident). I feel a LOT safer when I'm behind the wheel. I drive on split-highways (safest mode of travel) and with extreme caution.
Then you are an idiot. Look at actual accident rates. Probably about 120 people died today in the USA in traffic accidents, and that's not counting victims of secondary effects--pollution, war, obesity encouraged by a society that simply despises healthy transportation. You have some control in your car, but even in the unlikely event that you are infallible, your attention never lapses, your equipment never lets you down, etc., someone else can kill you in a trice. And now we come back to the main point, which is that you are harming everyone a little bit every time you drive.
And remember: if we had fewer cars there would be much more room for not just trains but literally anything else you can possibly imagine. Or, as an interim measure, you could remember things like subways or overhead rail systems.
By that reasoning, the government could to confiscate your car, because your exhaust is FAR more polluting to my lungs, than a single cigarette.
Yup.
Fortunately for you, the Congress doesn't have the power to confiscate either cars or cigarettes.
Are you sure that that's fortunate for me? Do you really think that we'd be worse off if we had clean high-speed electric trains and buses and cars, and a truly bicycle-friendly civilisation, than we are now? No more global warming (depending on how we got the electricity, but clean energy is possible), no more traffic accidents (or at least many fewer), no more oil wars, no more urban sprawl, no more geriatrics' (and others') lives destroyed when they find out that they are no longer mobile because they can't drive anymore and have no alternatives, vastly decreased cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, depression,..... Sounds terrible!
I swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the U.S. Constitution as the ultimate voice of the people. If you want to amend the constitution, that's fine, but ignoring the constitution is not and never will be an option. It's the SUPREME Law of the Land, and laws do not exist simply to be ignored.
The Constitution would be a good start if politicians actually honoured it. I agree--I'd like to see it (1) amended to MANDATE, not just ALLOW, protection of nationally shared resources (and, for that matter, internationally shared resources; since we're going to play World Police (and apparently someone has to) we might as well be fighting the good fight), and (2) actually honoured (or at least memorised) by our politicians. Go take your oath and start fighting the warrantless wiretapping, and 100-miles-inside-the-border vehicle searches, NASA, the EPA, and all those other things that are unconstitutional.
Given your attitude towards the Constitution, you would have a hard time swearing an oath, since you so clearly disrespect the Will of the People as embodied by that document.
I can swear plenty of oaths (I already did; see my first sentence in my previous post;) But I will uphold what I believe is right, not some obsolete and insufficient legal document that is by and large ignored anyway. If you really think the US Constitution is the "Will of the People", you should figure out how many People have actually read it, and whether it reflects what They actually Want.
I'm really, truly glad that you have read the document. We'd be far better off if there were more people like you. But as I said, the Constitution ignores something that was a non-issue when it was written, but which is the one really crucial and urgent issue now: protection of large-scale commons.
Fuck the Constitution. It does not really include any explicit provision for managing commons, and this is the most important job of a government. The Founding Fathers were too absorbed in their own issues to deal with the larger picture.
Smoking doesn't really damage commons, but smoking upwind of me does: that was air that I wanted to breathe, and a government absolutely does have a place in telling people that they can't destroy a public resource.
That said, it's unconstitutional, as is all regulation of pollution, federally funded education, establishment of national parks,...
Is that the same "America" whose elections Jimmy Carter said he wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole because our voting system is so insane as to be beyond any hope?
Why would a creationist try to have websites in the USA banned? Creationism is more popular here than anywhere else in the world! As for Moslem vs. Christian, I don't really see a whole lot of difference. Of course, Oktar might...
If the federal elections are both close and acrimonious, then the problem is with society and the candidates, or with the system of government. If half your citizens are furious, an accurate count is useless. Boot out the morons who disagree with you and let them start their own country. Oh, wait--that's what the Constitution says: the state governments have most of the power, the federal government's role is tightly circumscribed.
Those who use faith rather than reason to judge others are worthy of contempt.
ps. What's wrong with developing a political leaning based on having thought about the issues? Why do you think I haven't? Is it so inconceivable that anyone could independently decide that homosexuality is ok?
For the last few years, Republicans have been allying themselves with the hardcore religious nutcases who glorify "faith" involving all kinds of superstitious hogwash, like creationism, the evil of sex outside of marriage, and that homosexuality is wrong. Whether this trend will continue is unknown, but Republicans get a large amount of their voter base from homophobes.
I believe I've also seen sports displayed all too prominently at (among others that elude me at the moment) Walnut Brewery, Old Chicago, BJ's, Connor O'Neill, possibly the Walrus (or several of that crowd),... Me, I usually go to a Sun on account of no TV.
I seem to recall that all kinds of completely harmless things can get you convicted as a sex offender. Like being naked where someone can see you. What is considered "(bad) sex" in the USA is bizarre and arbitrary, and often unrelated to any reasonable definition of "harmful", or even "sex". Would anyone here be surprised if the next Republican president tried to make homosexuality a "sex crime"?
It is not really very easy to harm children over the internet. The hard part, it seems, is for parents to actually educate their children and raise them to be responsible and thoughtful and wise.
I made that comment a little tongue-in-cheek, but what the hell, let's run with it...
Also, there are lots of computer-illiterate people who are well educated and have good access to news (say, my parents). Should they be barred from voting because they have something irrelevant to their understanding of politics in common with "bad voters"? If you should forbid "bad voters" from voting, make sure that what you test is their being "bad voters" (however you define it), not something that merely correlates with it.
Your opinion is based on the idea of justice. That's noble and all, but not quite necessary for a democracy. After all, the objective in running a country should be runing it wisely, not having everyone's ideas followed. No credit is given for individual votes. Absolutely, if something correlates with lack of wisdom (assuming that that could actually be defined and measured (HA) but bear with me), then it is a useful way of ruling out votes. Just because you will be ruling out people who are wise doesn't make this a bad thing, if you rule out more people who are unwise.
Think of it from another perspective: let's disallow everyone by default, and then start ruling people in. I'd argue that we should start with people who, as a class, are likely to make good decisions (again, assuming we could define and measure that). Say we take people who are trained in reasoning--tenured professors, for example. Tenure is not an absolute measure of wisdom, but merely correlated with it (I suspect). There will still be tenured morons. But since in a democracy the majority has its way, we need merely to rule in people who are likely to be wise (in a two-party system it is easy to see that any group more than "50% wise" on average should be ruled in).
Yes, this goes against the American ideal of "everyone gets a vote". But you've seen where that ideal has gotten us. People who are absolutely positively mentally incompetent, and trivial to manipulate, are allowed to vote.
In a representative democracy, we are already doing exactly what I suggest anyway, differing on one "small" detail. We vote on people, not ideas, with the assumption that the people are more capable than we are, and will work in the best interests of the world (or at least the country), unswayed by emotion and logical fallacy. They are the ones who vote on ideas, not us. We just measure their competence (through wondering which one we'd rather have a beer with, etc). How is this different from what I have just suggested? In the current system, the "measure of competence" is decided by people who are frequently incompetent. While no objective standard for competence exists, we have plenty of very very good approximations, and it's just madness not to use them. As evidence for that claim, I give you Bush.
People who are not computer-literate by and large are less well educated/informed than people who are. Do you think that better decisions would be made if we ignored the opinions of a class who tend to be uneducated? Do you think that making informed decisions is a bad objective for a government?
Also, you being well educated doesn't necessarily make you a "good voter"; it makes you knowledgeable about a particular topic. It makes you competent at informing public decision-making. But, as a part of politics, subjective value judgments need to be made. You can't educate yourself to "correct" values, only to know what the implications of a particular policy are going to be.
True, but seeing implications of policies is exactly what is required. Ethics are hard to judge and go in and out of fashion, but educated people are on average trained not on ethics but on reasoning, sorting fact from propaganda, etc. Sounds good to me.
The problem is that we don't have a way of directly measuring whether people are competent to vote. All we have are measures that indirectly get at the ability to understand evi
O'Reilly or Coulter, or whoever the left-wing equivalents are (I have trouble choosing a left wing figure who stands out the same way: they tend to be bland).
In this country they are bland, but how about any other petty religious dictator? Not that they usually want a warmongering religious nutcase in the Whitehouse, but they do share the same viewpoint and goals, and they can be quite, um, colourful about it.
I think that many of the TV-overendowed sports bars around here (Boulder) will be showing the debate. Of course, this ties in nicely with my theory that Republicans view politics as a sport--forget about who is right or wrong, wise or foolish, as long as the home team wins. Raaaa. It also ties in nicely with the new breed of drinking games that is springing up around this event. Hey, we should call it the World Series!
Why is it that whenever Americans use the word "socialist" it sounds like they think it's a bad thing? I can't put my finger on it, but somehow you don't sound like you believe socialism could have a good side. I can only assume you've never lived outside the USA?
Yes, any system can be hacked. But the idea here is that every vote is verifiable, and the count is verifiable, so to hack it every system would need to be hacked.
My methods could easily be explained to anyone. "Verify your vote using your password." "Count the votes yourself." Difficult?
With a password (which I forgot about during my initial post), how exactly is secrecy eliminated?
Your language is corrupt from it's [sic] roots, but I don't understand your comment. How is this corrupt?
Obviously, your objections along the lines of "but we don't have the political will" are valid, but I hardly see that as a reason to ignore the problem and not look for solutions. No change ever happens without political will, so this complaint is irrelevant to the discussion.
As for what I fail to account for: yes, laws mandate the current system, and it's obvious that laws would need to be changed. But that's required for any change.
Identity theft: assuming md5 (or whatever hash you like) is really one-way, how is this worse than the current system? There are easier ways to get social security numbers than cracking encrypted passwords, and it's easy enough not to tie the SSN to any other identifying information--make the hash based on SSN and password and nothing else.
Similar ideas have probably been thought of. Have they been tried? How do they fail? Claiming that something won't work just because nobody has tried it is disingenuous.
Trust me and my servers? The whole point of the idea was to make that unnecessary. Where do you need to trust me? Everyone would have access to all the potentially-verified raw data.
Nothing to solve the problem? Depends what the problem is. Perhaps the real problem is a bunch of shitwits without education being allowed to vote. Their votes are bought by flashy TV ads, not by good ideas, so they will simply vote for whomever spends the most money on them. Or perhaps the real problem is that we need Borda counts, or runoff votes, or something? Maybe you meant global warming, or ocean acidification, etc? Perhaps the problem is that humans are too stupid and petty to live? Or, um, what were you referring to?
Your checklist maybe assumes more familiarity with the issues than I have. Could you slow down and demonstrate specific problems and potential solutions?
Thanks for not burning my house down. Although with the current credit crisis such an event might be highly appreciated by many subprime mortgage holders.:)
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It's not that protecting children is a bad thing
I wonder. It is obvious that completely protecting children from everything makes them grow up into weak morons who rely constantly on being protected from themselves (in some countries these people are referred to as Americans). Children need to be hurt, a little bit, frequently, in order to learn. I suspect that most of the hurt should be self-inflicted ("You probably won't hold a cup of scalding coffee in your lap while driving anymore, will you?") but knowing that the world will sometimes hurt you and that you have to juggle benefits vs. risks is a fundamental--and oft-neglected--part of growing up.
Can anyone point me to research on how much and what kinds of hurt tend to lead to good education? That would be a very hard study, since "good education" is so hard to measure, but surely someone has made at least an initial stab at it?
Very gracious, and the irony of you apologising to me for being rude is not lost on me. But it was all in good fun, I think. Maybe.
You have hit the nail on the head: my best understanding of the current research is that we are likely in very deep and very urgent trouble, and yours is different. Putting that (largely) aside for a moment, I will just beg one favour: go and watch a quick video addressing not so much whether global climate change is real, but what happens if you mix the possibility that something might be going on with a little basic risk management: How It All Ends.
For the record, I really hope you're right. Good luck to us all.
multiple people so far have read your post as defending these practices.
I am not surprised when I remember to look at how effective the American school system is at teaching kids how to read.
What you are writing here is basically a defense of the practice of invading another country's sovereign territory simply because you do not like their environmental policy. Unfortunately, in order for such a policy to hold weight in an ethical sense, you must be able to prove your core assertion
What nonsense! Apparently your school taught you no more about science than about reading comprehension. There is really no way ever to prove cause and effect beyond any doubt (outside of artificial systems like pure math). You can bound the probability of your assertion, and you can be more sure that you're right than you are that the sun will rise tomorrow, but you can't be absolutely, positively sure ever. When I am pretty sure that you are harming me, I will act. When I have a pretty strong suspicion that you are harming me and a pretty strong suspicion that if I do nothing everyone will die, then I will act. That is reasonable.
If you are standing in your back yard, shooting a gun off vaguely in my direction, should I wait for you to hit me before I start shooting back? When I feel a bullet pass through my leg, should I believe that it was from the gun that I saw you shooting a split second earlier, or should I question even that, and not act until I can do projectile forensics? Even then the bullet could be a plant, made to look like it came from your gun by chance or an unknown third party. There is no proof--only evidence. And it is completely reasonable to act on good evidence, and indeed pretty fucking stupid not to.
Climate change is the poster-child in this case, there are plenty of well written peer-reviewed journal articles supporting the idea that our activities are seriously harming the environment, and just as many citing proof that this is not the case.
Find me a couple, could you? They are pretty scarce, especially recently as evidence pours in that many current observations are actually significantly worse than the "cautious" models predicted. Actually, the vast majority of the scientific community is pretty scared, and I'd love to know where you got the idea that that is not the case.
The idea that a war in a country half-way across the world away because they're burning coal into air that "does not respect human boundaries" is patently ridiculous
Why?
What is your obsession with political boundaries? You ought to know that they are completely arbitrary, created by humans for their own ends. No country anywhere has borders based on laws of nature, and few were established in the first place without bloodshed, without displacing some other people against any idea of justice. They are capricious and arbitrary. Furthermore, borders can change without much affecting the environment. The converse is not true, however: global warming could easily bring down many of the political systems and boundaries that we have now (see http://securityandclimate.cna.org/report/ for one analysis), is quite likely to lead to famine and war on a scale never seen before, and has absolutely no concept of only punishing those who deserve it.
The longer we go without acting, the more devastating the solution will be, and the less likely to work. We will never have absolute proof of cause, and we will not have absolute proof of result until it is too late. However, as of now, we are pretty damn sure that we have a very good idea of what's going on.
It's pretty disgusting to watch us fuck ourselves over so thoroughly, knowing that we're doing it and how to make things better, and yet doing nothing.
Again, I suggest re-reading my post. I never mentioned Afghanistan or Iraq. I never even hinted that America was currently playing the role of eco-police. I said something about what needed to be done and claimed that we should be doing that, if anything.
I was just listening to a great talk in which the speaker was discussing how we tend to take our preconceived notions and find justifications for them. I can only assume that you are angry about the wars the USA is engaged in. Good! But a more careful reading of what you thought you were responding to might have been wise.
Until I can verify that my vote was actually counted, I don't see much point in nitpicking about whether the machine understands my choice.
Have you just not noticed that air and water don't have much respect for human political boundaries? Your analogies are lovely and all, but irrelevant. I suggest more thoughtful reading of the post you're replying to.
The Constitution leaves that to the states, as it should.
That makes sense when pollution from one state only hurts that state. But we're too powerful: many of our activities have repercussions far beyond little political boundaries.
In an equitable system, there would be no "pollution allowance". Anyone whose person or property was damaged by pollution would have the right to demand damages from the culprit.
That'd be wonderful. Of course, it assumes that every piece of anything of value in the world is owned by someone. Who sues on behalf of the ocean floor in international waters, etc? For what value?
"Other people's business": you just aren't getting it, are you? There is only one atmosphere. If you dump shit into it, you're not dumping shit into your little piece of atmosphere. You are dumping shit into the atmosphere. That is very much my business. There are oceanic dead zones that are caused by people dumping trash into the ocean all over the world, and they affect us all. Rain forests cut down and burned in Brazil exacerbates global warming, in which even the name explicitly spells out that it is, um, global. Fertiliser runoff from one country affects another country. CFCs released in China cause skin cancer in Canada. I wish Americans would mind our own business too, but you have not yet grasped that when someone destroys a part of the planet that America and the world needs left intact in order to survive, that is America's business.
No. Consumers tend usually to choose the cheapest option for now, not the most responsible--I encourage you to examine spending trends. Producers tend to provide this by exploiting and permanently destroying common property, because if you can get 80 (or 5, usually) years of profit out of something before it is gone forever, mortals tend to choose that rather than a sustainable exploitation rate. Find me some examples where this is not the case--I dare you.
"Makes a lot more sense" how?? Resources can (maybe) be extracted faster, and when this is possible it often happens. As I said, corporations tend to work on about a 5- or 10-year timescale. They also tend to pollute and destroy common resources, precisely because consumers would usually rather have a "cheap" product than actually find out the ethics of all corporations in the supply chain of the one from whom they're buying.
They're not clean. They output the same amount of pollution, just that it's located at a central coal-to-electric factory instead of at the car.
As I said, clean energy is possible. And given the premise of my argument I'm surprised you ignored this fact.
Also the absolute cleanest cars in the world are the 70mpg Honda Insight and the Civic GX (and possibly the 88mpg VW Lupo 3L). Not an EV1 which is powered by 75% coal, 20% CNG, and 5% nuclear, and overall no cleaner than a Prius. Although it is better than an EV train; their frequent starts-and-stops means they only average 15mpg per person according to EPA.gov
Check out the Aptera. And, as I said, the EV1 is pretty clean to operate if you come by your energy honestly, although fuel cells are somewhat a problem to produce (they're getting better, though). And as for trains, they are not great in this country and their efficiency depends on occupancy, but I'm surprised you haven't figured out that trains can in principle start/stop much less frequently than cars, can use regenerative braking, etc. (all without fuel cells), and would have rather better coverage if we didn't have so many cars. Do you really lack the insight to see that trains do in fact work very well in some places? Not often in the USA, but the rest of the world is almost like a whole other country. Of course trains won't get you everywhere, but a system combining trains, buses, taxis, bikes, and feet can be stunningly effective, and pretty damn clean, if a society has the will to build it.
No instead you'd have trains collide head-on because the lazy engineer was text-messaging instead of watching the road, and therefore lots of lots of innocent passengers got killed. (referece recent U.S. accident). I feel a LOT safer when I'm behind the wheel. I drive on split-highways (safest mode of travel) and with extreme caution.
Then you are an idiot. Look at actual accident rates. Probably about 120 people died today in the USA in traffic accidents, and that's not counting victims of secondary effects--pollution, war, obesity encouraged by a society that simply despises healthy transportation. You have some control in your car, but even in the unlikely event that you are infallible, your attention never lapses, your equipment never lets you down, etc., someone else can kill you in a trice. And now we come back to the main point, which is that you are harming everyone a little bit every time you drive.
And remember: if we had fewer cars there would be much more room for not just trains but literally anything else you can possibly imagine. Or, as an interim measure, you could remember things like subways or overhead rail systems.
By that reasoning, the government could to confiscate your car, because your exhaust is FAR more polluting to my lungs, than a single cigarette.
Yup.
Fortunately for you, the Congress doesn't have the power to confiscate either cars or cigarettes.
Are you sure that that's fortunate for me? Do you really think that we'd be worse off if we had clean high-speed electric trains and buses and cars, and a truly bicycle-friendly civilisation, than we are now? No more global warming (depending on how we got the electricity, but clean energy is possible), no more traffic accidents (or at least many fewer), no more oil wars, no more urban sprawl, no more geriatrics' (and others') lives destroyed when they find out that they are no longer mobile because they can't drive anymore and have no alternatives, vastly decreased cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, depression, ..... Sounds terrible!
I swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the U.S. Constitution as the ultimate voice of the people. If you want to amend the constitution, that's fine, but ignoring the constitution is not and never will be an option. It's the SUPREME Law of the Land, and laws do not exist simply to be ignored.
The Constitution would be a good start if politicians actually honoured it. I agree--I'd like to see it (1) amended to MANDATE, not just ALLOW, protection of nationally shared resources (and, for that matter, internationally shared resources; since we're going to play World Police (and apparently someone has to) we might as well be fighting the good fight), and (2) actually honoured (or at least memorised) by our politicians. Go take your oath and start fighting the warrantless wiretapping, and 100-miles-inside-the-border vehicle searches, NASA, the EPA, and all those other things that are unconstitutional.
Given your attitude towards the Constitution, you would have a hard time swearing an oath, since you so clearly disrespect the Will of the People as embodied by that document.
I can swear plenty of oaths (I already did; see my first sentence in my previous post ;) But I will uphold what I believe is right, not some obsolete and insufficient legal document that is by and large ignored anyway. If you really think the US Constitution is the "Will of the People", you should figure out how many People have actually read it, and whether it reflects what They actually Want.
I'm really, truly glad that you have read the document. We'd be far better off if there were more people like you. But as I said, the Constitution ignores something that was a non-issue when it was written, but which is the one really crucial and urgent issue now: protection of large-scale commons.
Fuck the Constitution. It does not really include any explicit provision for managing commons, and this is the most important job of a government. The Founding Fathers were too absorbed in their own issues to deal with the larger picture.
Smoking doesn't really damage commons, but smoking upwind of me does: that was air that I wanted to breathe, and a government absolutely does have a place in telling people that they can't destroy a public resource.
That said, it's unconstitutional, as is all regulation of pollution, federally funded education, establishment of national parks, ...
no less democratic than America's
Is that the same "America" whose elections Jimmy Carter said he wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole because our voting system is so insane as to be beyond any hope?
Why would a creationist try to have websites in the USA banned? Creationism is more popular here than anywhere else in the world! As for Moslem vs. Christian, I don't really see a whole lot of difference. Of course, Oktar might...
If the federal elections are both close and acrimonious, then the problem is with society and the candidates, or with the system of government. If half your citizens are furious, an accurate count is useless. Boot out the morons who disagree with you and let them start their own country. Oh, wait--that's what the Constitution says: the state governments have most of the power, the federal government's role is tightly circumscribed.
Those who use faith rather than reason to judge others are worthy of contempt.
ps. What's wrong with developing a political leaning based on having thought about the issues? Why do you think I haven't? Is it so inconceivable that anyone could independently decide that homosexuality is ok?
For the last few years, Republicans have been allying themselves with the hardcore religious nutcases who glorify "faith" involving all kinds of superstitious hogwash, like creationism, the evil of sex outside of marriage, and that homosexuality is wrong. Whether this trend will continue is unknown, but Republicans get a large amount of their voter base from homophobes.
The rhetoric will, I am sure, make people more, er, thirsty, as it were. Politics is the new Pretzels!
I believe I've also seen sports displayed all too prominently at (among others that elude me at the moment) Walnut Brewery, Old Chicago, BJ's, Connor O'Neill, possibly the Walrus (or several of that crowd), ... Me, I usually go to a Sun on account of no TV.
I seem to recall that all kinds of completely harmless things can get you convicted as a sex offender. Like being naked where someone can see you. What is considered "(bad) sex" in the USA is bizarre and arbitrary, and often unrelated to any reasonable definition of "harmful", or even "sex". Would anyone here be surprised if the next Republican president tried to make homosexuality a "sex crime"?
It is not really very easy to harm children over the internet. The hard part, it seems, is for parents to actually educate their children and raise them to be responsible and thoughtful and wise.
Also, there are lots of computer-illiterate people who are well educated and have good access to news (say, my parents). Should they be barred from voting because they have something irrelevant to their understanding of politics in common with "bad voters"? If you should forbid "bad voters" from voting, make sure that what you test is their being "bad voters" (however you define it), not something that merely correlates with it.
Your opinion is based on the idea of justice. That's noble and all, but not quite necessary for a democracy. After all, the objective in running a country should be runing it wisely, not having everyone's ideas followed. No credit is given for individual votes. Absolutely, if something correlates with lack of wisdom (assuming that that could actually be defined and measured (HA) but bear with me), then it is a useful way of ruling out votes. Just because you will be ruling out people who are wise doesn't make this a bad thing, if you rule out more people who are unwise.
Think of it from another perspective: let's disallow everyone by default, and then start ruling people in. I'd argue that we should start with people who, as a class, are likely to make good decisions (again, assuming we could define and measure that). Say we take people who are trained in reasoning--tenured professors, for example. Tenure is not an absolute measure of wisdom, but merely correlated with it (I suspect). There will still be tenured morons. But since in a democracy the majority has its way, we need merely to rule in people who are likely to be wise (in a two-party system it is easy to see that any group more than "50% wise" on average should be ruled in).
Yes, this goes against the American ideal of "everyone gets a vote". But you've seen where that ideal has gotten us. People who are absolutely positively mentally incompetent, and trivial to manipulate, are allowed to vote.
In a representative democracy, we are already doing exactly what I suggest anyway, differing on one "small" detail. We vote on people, not ideas, with the assumption that the people are more capable than we are, and will work in the best interests of the world (or at least the country), unswayed by emotion and logical fallacy. They are the ones who vote on ideas, not us. We just measure their competence (through wondering which one we'd rather have a beer with, etc). How is this different from what I have just suggested? In the current system, the "measure of competence" is decided by people who are frequently incompetent. While no objective standard for competence exists, we have plenty of very very good approximations, and it's just madness not to use them. As evidence for that claim, I give you Bush.
People who are not computer-literate by and large are less well educated/informed than people who are. Do you think that better decisions would be made if we ignored the opinions of a class who tend to be uneducated? Do you think that making informed decisions is a bad objective for a government?
Also, you being well educated doesn't necessarily make you a "good voter"; it makes you knowledgeable about a particular topic. It makes you competent at informing public decision-making. But, as a part of politics, subjective value judgments need to be made. You can't educate yourself to "correct" values, only to know what the implications of a particular policy are going to be.
True, but seeing implications of policies is exactly what is required. Ethics are hard to judge and go in and out of fashion, but educated people are on average trained not on ethics but on reasoning, sorting fact from propaganda, etc. Sounds good to me.
The problem is that we don't have a way of directly measuring whether people are competent to vote. All we have are measures that indirectly get at the ability to understand evi
O'Reilly or Coulter, or whoever the left-wing equivalents are (I have trouble choosing a left wing figure who stands out the same way: they tend to be bland).
In this country they are bland, but how about any other petty religious dictator? Not that they usually want a warmongering religious nutcase in the Whitehouse, but they do share the same viewpoint and goals, and they can be quite, um, colourful about it.
I think that many of the TV-overendowed sports bars around here (Boulder) will be showing the debate. Of course, this ties in nicely with my theory that Republicans view politics as a sport--forget about who is right or wrong, wise or foolish, as long as the home team wins. Raaaa. It also ties in nicely with the new breed of drinking games that is springing up around this event. Hey, we should call it the World Series!
Why is it that whenever Americans use the word "socialist" it sounds like they think it's a bad thing? I can't put my finger on it, but somehow you don't sound like you believe socialism could have a good side. I can only assume you've never lived outside the USA?
Yes, any system can be hacked. But the idea here is that every vote is verifiable, and the count is verifiable, so to hack it every system would need to be hacked.
My methods could easily be explained to anyone. "Verify your vote using your password." "Count the votes yourself." Difficult?
With a password (which I forgot about during my initial post), how exactly is secrecy eliminated?
Your language is corrupt from it's [sic] roots, but I don't understand your comment. How is this corrupt?
Obviously, your objections along the lines of "but we don't have the political will" are valid, but I hardly see that as a reason to ignore the problem and not look for solutions. No change ever happens without political will, so this complaint is irrelevant to the discussion.
As for what I fail to account for: yes, laws mandate the current system, and it's obvious that laws would need to be changed. But that's required for any change.
Identity theft: assuming md5 (or whatever hash you like) is really one-way, how is this worse than the current system? There are easier ways to get social security numbers than cracking encrypted passwords, and it's easy enough not to tie the SSN to any other identifying information--make the hash based on SSN and password and nothing else.
Similar ideas have probably been thought of. Have they been tried? How do they fail? Claiming that something won't work just because nobody has tried it is disingenuous.
Trust me and my servers? The whole point of the idea was to make that unnecessary. Where do you need to trust me? Everyone would have access to all the potentially-verified raw data.
Nothing to solve the problem? Depends what the problem is. Perhaps the real problem is a bunch of shitwits without education being allowed to vote. Their votes are bought by flashy TV ads, not by good ideas, so they will simply vote for whomever spends the most money on them. Or perhaps the real problem is that we need Borda counts, or runoff votes, or something? Maybe you meant global warming, or ocean acidification, etc? Perhaps the problem is that humans are too stupid and petty to live? Or, um, what were you referring to?
Your checklist maybe assumes more familiarity with the issues than I have. Could you slow down and demonstrate specific problems and potential solutions?
Thanks for not burning my house down. Although with the current credit crisis such an event might be highly appreciated by many subprime mortgage holders. :)