No, you're way too optimisic about the likelihood of someone getting caught for voting pressure, and assuming way too much courage on the behalf of the majority of employees.
For the majority of employees, you are quite possibly correct. But the whole point of vote buying / intimidation schemes (and the key thing that makes them different from hacking electronic voting machines) is that if you want to make them work you have to involve a lot of people and you have to tell them what you are doing before the election. Even if almost all of them are too chicken to rat you out, it only takes a few (maybe even just one) and you're cooked.
Imagine if you had a plan to rob a bank. And it depended on you telling thousands of people what you planed to do, and how you planned to do it, weeks before you did it. Do you really think you'd get away with it?
A scatter shot response, because I don't have much time this morning:
Everyone is opposed to anything that they think is 'ill thought out', that's what that means. No one's in favor of doing things in an ill thought out manner, regardless whether it's because someone wants change for the sake of change, or because Congress was just really drunk.
You obviously need to get out more. Specifically, if this were not a public forum, I could give you a few names and numbers and would be willing to bet that by the third date (if you made it that far) the question would have devolved to which ill-thought out thing seemed less objectionable. You are right that reasonable people are never in favor of doing things in an ill-thought-out manner. You are wrong in assuming that all (or even most) people are reasonable.
However, nothing can be philosophy unless it explains why first, with that logically leading to a 'how'.
You left out a step that should (IMHO) come before the others: what should we change. Then comes why, and finally how. You keep misreading my definition of conservative as an answer to "How?" (which it is not) rather than as an answer to the "What?" question (which you aren't even asking). The whole point isn't to do things slowly, or carefully, but rather to refrain from changing things that are working. I am not saying "Fix things slowly" I'm saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
And yes, there are a great many people who set about trying to fix X for ideological reasons that have nothing to do with the "is it working?" question. So this is not a hollow distinction. In fact, my post on the "day walking vampires" thread outlines my main reason for thinking that many of the core Republicans are not conservative: they are deciding what to change based on their internal repressed desires and not on any objective conservative principle. At best, they could claim to be conservative only by saying something like "My personal self esteem is an important national asset, and must be maintained at all costs. Nothing matters more than my sense of self importance, and I am willing to trash everything this nation stands for to protect it" at which point I would say "OK, you're a conservative all right. And I respect your honesty. But your priorities are a tad out of whack."
To reiterate: conservatism is about what problems should be addressed, not about how.
Most of the rest of your points are aimed at this straw man you've constructed and not at my actual position, and my kids are calling, so I'll not respond to them now.
While you're almost certainly right about buying votes, that's not really the primary fear of voter verifiable records. Rather than the problem being "Candidate buys 10,000 votes", the problem is "My boss says I'm fired unless I vote for his favorite candidate and prove it."
But the exact same argument applies to this sort of pressure as well; it would be so easy for someone to catch them and so many people would have to know (if people don't know before the election that they are being pressured to vote for X, it won't have any effect) that no one would get away with it.
Your boss is pressuring you to vote for somebody? What better way to get back at the SOB havng getting him sent to federal penitentiary and getting a hefty cash compensation in your wrongful dismissal suit. The very existence of the public record makes it easy to prove exactly what happened and nail him.
Of course, if he wants a reduced sentence I'm sure the prosecutor would be willing to discuss the possibility of him ratting out whoever put him up to it, provided he agrees to talk before they have collected enough evidence from the other eight employers they nailed in the same way.
I'm not saying it won't happen--heck, people have held up stores on there way home from work, while still wearing their employee ID badge with their names clearly visible, and muggers have given their victims their address and demanded installment payments. People do all sorts of stupid things, and I'm not suggesting that they'll stop any time soon. But I am saying they won't get away with it nearly as easily as with e-voting, which is what really matters.
Why is this even news? I recall reading about this theory back in the late 80's. Nothing new, other than maybe they are saying we can now confirm it was concrete with modern analysis techniques.
The evidence was pretty conclusive even back then. IIRC, what tipped them off was the fact that there were organic inclusions in some of the blocks (not fossils, but actual bits of grass and wood) that they were able to date w. carbon dating techniques. I don't see how "modern analysis techniques" can add much to that.
Vote buying. We've been over this. If you've got some code that will allow you to determine from the published results how your vote was counted, then I can ask you to tell me your code as soon as you've voted (before the results are published), use it to verify your vote the same way you can, and reward/punish you accordingly. Knowing that I have the ability to do this, people without strong convictions will vote how I tell them in exchange for the reward I offer or to avoid the punishment I threaten.
Yes, that would be illegal, and if I'm caught, I'd be in trouble, unless I just got my friends elected to a position where they can get me off the hook.
"We" may have been over this before, but that doesn't mean you are correct, and it certainly doesn't mean you should be calling for people to be modded down just because you disagree with them.
Letting the voter verify that their vote was counted as cast, might, as you suggest, make vote buying easier. But it would also, as the GP points out, make stealing an election wholesale much harder. To make a rational choice between the two, you have to consider the relative risks, and doing so does not lead to the conclusion you're advocating. Even with receipts of some sort, vote buying is a very risky proposition, since by its very nature a lot of people would have to know about it before the election. If you want to buy ten thousand votes, at least ten thousand people will have to know about it, including who to vote for and what the payoff or threat is. If even a few of them blab, you're goose is cooked.
Conversely, without receipts, elections can be stolen by a small group of people with no witnesses except for the machines, and they can steal as many votes as they want--a million isn't that much harder than a dozen.
Part of the problem with the "paper trail" issue is that the idea keeps getting transformed, by gradual steps, into something that is totally useless. The paper gets put behind glass, printed on a roll, no recourse if it's too fant to read, etc. until there's no reason to suspect that it represents the voter's intentions and not some hacker's.
The ballot needs to be tangible, a physical object that the voter can inspect (handle, read and verify) and it should be the official record of the vote. If you want to have the touch screen machine give you an insta-count, fine (though I wouldn't) but the actual ballots should also be counted, every time, by hardware too dumb to hack, and if the counts differ the physical ballot count should be the one that is used.
Although objecting to torture and infringing various rights might just mean you are actually a human American, as opposed to elected Republicans, many who appear to be some sort of daywalking vampires.
Cute.
But the more likely explanation is that they are just a loose coalition of deeply repressed individuals (closet gays, S&M types, and other gender issues, people with cycle of abuse and authority problems, closet xenophobes, kleptomanics, etc.) What holds them together is a shared agreement to never, ever confront their deamons directly but rather to bundle them up and make a patchwork boogie man out of them on which they can play out their internal issues without personal risk. This explains pretty much the entire movement, especially when you consider that it makes them so easy to manipulate that they have no trouble picking up corporate puppet masters willing to foot the bills to get them in office.
Not as exciting as daywalking vampires, perhaps, but plenty scare enough for me.
Everyone is voting on where to take a trip, and you're in the 'As long as we drive carefully' category, and just personally want to go to Washington DC. Other people in your group want to go to New York or Seattle or Mexico.
You. Can't. Vote. Being. Careful. As. A. Destination.
Why not? It may not seem like a good way to vote to you, and your phrasing makes it sound silly, by what exactly is to stop me from looking over the various options and deciding between them solely on the basis of my assumed risk aversion? You flatly state that it isn't possible but I don't see how you plan to support it, let alone prove it to the point that it justifies Spelling. Out. One. Word. At. A. Time. Like. You. Think. I'm. Stupid.
Further, you keep mischaracterizing my position as favoring being slow and cautious, despite the fact that I have several times pointed out that I am not opposed to change, even rapid or risky change, but only to ill thought out change for the sake of change.
But more to the point, you keep doing this conservative=Republican=bad vs. progressive=Democrat=good gymnastics that leads to exactly the sort of mess we find ourselves in. Voting for a party that pays lip service to your beliefs is a sure road to hell. Vote for individuals based on your assessment of their actions, and keep tabs on 'em after they get in office. Otherwise they will play you for a patsy as sure as anything.
--MarkusQ
P.S. If something can't be a philosophy unless some political party runs on it as a platform, where does that leave existentialism? I'm just asking.
I'm a big fan of analogies, but you completely lost me there.
And, yes, I know you probably voted Democratic the last election, because, well, McDonalds has managed to burn down half the city. The problem is that you still consider yourself based in McDonalds, and you're waiting for them to fix their supposed problems with the pizza oven that they do not, in fact, possess.
Actually, I voted Democrat because:
Our governor, a Democrat, has been doing a good job while the Republican challenger is someone I know personally and wouldn't tust to wash my car.
Our representative, a Republican, was a major slimeball and obvious lunatic whose only claim to the job was his ability to rubber stamp any dumb idea put forward by the administration
Our senator, again a Republican, was almost as bad but not as obviously crazy; I voted against him but he won anyway.
And so on down the ticket.
None of them said anything about fixing a pizza oven, though I wouldn't put it past our ex-rep to babble something like that if he thought it would win him votes.
--MarkusQ
P.S. All joking aside, and giving your argument credit for intent if not clarity, the problem here seems to be that you are assuming that because I label myself in some way I will automatically vote for people who label themselves the same way; you are accusing me of red team/blue team thinking.
What in fact happens is that I evaluate the candidates and ballot issues on the merits, and don't pay much attention to what they call themselves, though the do get points off for lying (e.g. if you run as a Communist but support private property rights, you won't get my vote even if I agree with you because I don't like hypocrisy). My political philosophy guides my choices because I follow it not because other people claim to.
I agree with you, except for the fact you haven't noticed that the 'real-conservative' world view you think exists doesn't actually exist, and the only people actually promoting 'slowly but surely trying to solve problems' are the progressives.;)
I post therefore I am. You may be good, but I seriously doubt you can convince me that I don't actually exist, and since I have my world view you would be hard pressed to convince me that there isn't at least one person out there (or rather, out here, since it would be me) that holds my world view.
You are free to call me a deliberative progressive if you like. There are others that have called me a paleo-conservative, a western conservative, a libertarian democrat, a fool, a progressive fiscal conservative, a tightwad liberal, and more. For my part, I'll continue to call myself what I have always called myself, a conservative, and continue to support, vote for, and advocate candidates and causes that are consistant with my world view, regardless of what they call themselves and regardless of whether you think I exist or not.
You are conflating at least four different things: the concept of a conservative philosophy, the various consequences of following this philosophy in different contexts, the people who use the term to label themselves, and the question of when (if ever) a given instance of conservative philosophy would "work." In addition you appear to be falling into the labeling trap, which has been laid for you by the mass media to create a sense of conflict and discourage rational discourse.
If you don't like my definition, go to the dictionary and you'll find pretty much the same thing. "Conservative (n) One who, or that which, preserves from ruin, injury, innovation, or radical change; a preserver; a conserver."
The concept of a conservative philosophy as I outlined it perfectly describes all of the various things that are called "conservative"; they differ, however, in what they think is "something of value." This doesn't mean that the concept of conservation is somehow in doubt. You and I can both be collectors, even if I choose to collect stamps and you choose to collect model cars. Heck, you can even choose to collect canceled stamps, while I prefer to collect uncut sheets of them, putting us into exactly the sort of conflict you describe among conservatives and yet no reasonable person would take this to mean that we couldn't both be collectors, let alone saying that this somehow meant that there were no real collectors.
Likewise, the fact that people who describe themselves as conservative don't follow any discernibly conservative principles has no bearing on the question of whether or not such principles exist. Many people have claimed to be Napoleon over the years, and none is recent memory has been correct. But you can not deduce from that that Napoleon never existed.
As for the communism strawman, which has been well dissected elsewhere, I'll only point out that communism does work, as evidenced by the fact that almost all capitalists organize their households along strictly communist principles, rarely if ever charging their babies the fair market rate for food or demanding that they pay rent in strict proportion to the amount of space they use.
The philosophy I stated, "Don't throw out, risk, abandon, or dismantle something of value for vague or incoherent reasons, no matter how swell the flim-flam show," is markedly different than your rewording as "being 'against' change, or 'resisting' change, in general", which I trust you will recognize.
As for your claim that I am "actually a liberal" I could turn around and rebut you in kind, since the sort of meaning-denying attack you are launching on the word "conservative" was not too long ago used against the word "liberal" (thus it becoming known, for a while, as "the L word") but I will not. I objected to that attempt at new-speak just as strongly as I object to yours (being conservative, I tend to dislike the debasement of language for political ends).
What made it possible for Bush to get away with claiming against all logic to be a conservative was not the semantic content of the word (or lack thereof) but the corporate media that lets him get away with saying outlandishly false things and never calls him on them. cf. His claim that there isn't a civil war in Iraq and Al-Qaida is behind it. I have sometimes thought that he could claim to be a giraffe and they would print his claim without question.
But even if they did, I wouldn't deduce from that that giraffes didn't exist, merely that he was lying and the press were aiding and abetting him.
Nothing in what I said (or believe) requires that torture be stopped gradually (unless you hold that it is "something of value"). On the other contrary, as I see the high regard in which much of the world still hold America as something of great value, I would and do (consistent with my principles) advocate the immediate repudiation of
Although I did find the GP's explanation of the philosophical difference between progressives and liberals interesting (I had always assumed that a "progressive" was just a pretentious college-student word for "liberal").
Agreed. Interestingly, there is a sort of overlap between the real-conservative world view and that of the true progressive (I'm thinking Lord Macaulay style here): both are concerned with improving the world by making only well reasoned, justified changes and eschewing both change for the sake of change and a neo-Luddite stasis quo.
In short, they are in many ways closer together than either is to the poles of the dominant "corporate sponsored neo-fascist fundamentalists right wing" vs. "corporate sponsored neo-socialist loony fringe group left wing" spectrum as presented in the corporate owned media. Of course, you'll never hear that in the MSM.
While I generally agree with you on most points, I'll have to take exception to this one. The fact that people misuse a term to cloak their misdeeds does not mean that the term never had a cogent meaning, or that it is devoid of substance.
Would you say that "the word 'new' doesn't mean anything," for example, just because "New!" has been plastered all over thousands of products that weren't new at all? Or would you just say that the people who misused the word were lying?
I am a conservative. As such I have vocally opposed almost everything that this administration has done, since the spring of 2001 (at the time, it was Cheney's energy task force and their handling of the Florida recount that had me up in arms). If you google for my posts here and elsewere you will find a consistent pattern motivated by a single, clearly conservative theme:
Don't throw out, risk, abandon, or dismantle something of value for vague or incoherent reasons, no matter how swell the flim-flam show.
I'm against selling off the national parks.
I'm against invading other countries based on hearsay and wild ass guesses
I'm against running up debt by reducing taxes without reducing spending
I'm against giving up constitutional rights
I'm against new-fangled magic voting systems
I'm against secret prisons and torture
I'm against throwing out habeas corpus
And on and on. This isn't a recent rejection of Bush on his way down; I have been mad had him and his ilk far longer than 80% of his present critics, and on principled, conservative grounds. Google me if you want proof.
--MarkusQ, conservative curmudgeon and proud of it.
You could run regular CP/M-86 on a PC long before the DR release came out, though you had to do a fair amount of patching to link to the BIOS (not unusual for CP/M at the time) if you wanted any sort of I/O at all (e.g., text, write to the floppy, etc.). It mostly just amounted to moving things around so they were in the right registers, calling the hardware BIOS, and moving things back to where they were supposed to be for CP/M.
The problem was, pre-Google (heck, pre Gopher and news groups) it was a pain in the butt to find about how to do it.
This isn't evolutionary adaptation - it's much more simple than that. If you start killing all of the lizards with long legs, the ones with short legs are going to mate and have offspring with short legs.
Yes it is. It that is exactly what evolution is, and how it works. While the adaptation may be small (and, to your mind, negligible) it is the gradual accumulation of millions upon millions of such small changes that results in all of the difference we see between extant species. If you keep up the pressure for long enough this very change could lead to a transition to a new species of "pseudo-snake" which has no legs at all (much as happened with real snakes) or with highly modified legs such as happened with whales/dolphins when they split off from the hippos and horses (IIRC).
Note that, in each case, the initial changes resulted in changed circumstances that necessitated (or at least provided the pressure for) subsequent complementary changes. When you look at the combined effect of all these changes it may seem amazing that it all boiled down to this sort of "killing long legged lizards leaves more of the short leged ones to breed" but, just as with a large number that can be decomposed into the product a long list of much smaller prime factors, that is exactly what's going in.
It was about a year ago and a quick scan through my bookmarks failed to turn up a link, though I did find bookmarks to a few things he had linked to here and here which should help you get started. I'll post back if I come across the blog itself.
Cheese making, from the little I dabbled in it, seems to be quite fun. Be prepared to make some mistakes (I'd recommend < 1/2 liter batches to start) and to share your successes with friends while they're fresh.
It was about a year ago and a quick scan through my bookmarks failed to turn up a link, though I did find bookmarks to a few things he had linked to here and here which should help you get started. I'll post back if I come across the blog itself.
Cheese making, from the little I dabbled in it, seems to be quite fun. Be prepared to make some mistakes (I'd recommend --MarkusQ
The blogosphere is all about collective jerking off to their own made up sense of how famous and good they are.
Some, but not all of it. There are also the people who care deeply about a subject, and for whom the facts matter much more than the personalities. A year or so ago I decided to try my hand at cheese making. A little bit of google led me to a cheese makers blog, in which I found several years of detailed first hand accounts of his efforts at amature cheese making, along with interesting comments, questions, and (in a few cases) differing opinions from his readers.
This is where bogs really shine. Care about SCO v. IBM? Or the Plame outing and coverup? Interested in making your own Victorian christmas ornaments? Or a trebuchet? There's a blog out there for you. Ditto if you're dealing with some strange (to you) illness, trying to learn a new language, or planning a vacation off the beaten path.
Yes, there are a lot of bloggers whose sole topic seems to be "Look at me ma, I'm a blogger!" but they are easy to ignore. Don't cast out the interesting ones along with the loudmouths who have nothing to say.
Excuse me if I don't get it, but this story seems to be about the fact that some bloggers I never heard of got fired and some other blogger I never heard of thinks that some unnamed additional bloggers should have blogged about it before the NYT reported on it, and we know this because....
...he said so in his blog.
Ok, maybe I'm different from most blog readers, but I:
Tend not to read/trust/care about blogs I've never heard of
Use blogs as a source of information that I might not otherwise have encountered but not as proof that that information is factual or unbiased
Expect that there will be gaps in what I hear even if I had the time to read all the blogs on the planet every day
Not care a bit about meta-blogging, and even less about this sort of meta-meta blogging
Other than the fact that this item seems to fit the "blog related flamebait" template, I frankly don't see the point of it. Does anyone really expect that blogs will give them complete and accurate behind the scenes information about the blogging carriers of every blogger on the planet? Does anyone seriously want them to? (Other than this guy who obviously cared enough blog about it I mean.)
1) The storm surge that came up the Mississippi coast was 25 feet. It put entire counties under water. More than half a million Mississippians required FEMA assistance. Yet, somehow, their deaths were counted in the tens instead of the hundreds.
Storm surges typically last only days, or only hours, and subside on their own. Flooding of areas below sea level is esentially permanent, unless something is done.
The coast of Louisiana is about three times longer than that of Mississipi, and roughly ten times as many people live(d) on it.
A much larger fraction of the Mississipi population have access to private transportation.
Which counties, exactly, were entirely under water? If you didn't just make that "fact" up, I'd be interested in where you got found it, as all the sources I can find state otherwise.
The three coastal counties of Mississippi, populated by about 400,000 people had been mostly evacuated before the storm hit.
Dispite all this, there were at least 235 dead in Mississippi, which I suppose could be "counted in the tens" but it would be a tad disingenuous to do so.
2) The behavior of the press in New Orleans had a huge effect on the relief operation. Among other things, the National Guard (who you claim wasn't there) blocked the Red Cross from entering the area because of press reports of snipers and looters. - Snipers and looters who turned out to not exist.
As I said before, I have no intention ofd defending the press here.
I will, however, concede that I can't find the timeline document I read (I think wikipedia's been changed since then) that pointed out that Blanco had made calls in the press for more troops but never actually sent the legally required documents request Bush to deploy troops in her state, and she refused to give Bush and FEMA control of the Louisiana National Guard units, which meant he had no ability to command them.
I would assume it was removed because it wasn't true. The assertions are not only factually incorrect (she had in fact formally declared a state of emergency days earlier) but the implications drawn from them (that something more was needed from her for FEMA to act) were wrong as well.
It was, in short, a failed attempt at exculpatory propaganda by the Bush administration that fell by the wayside once people started checking the "facts" behind it.
and once she did, the guard was actively hampered by the press reporting imaginary riots and snipers which redirected the guard from actually helping people.
I'm not about to start defending our press (or rather, the entertainment industry hive mind corporate pod-people who replaced it while we were sleeping), and undoubtedly a few of them wasted time following up false leads. But many more (over a third of their number and about half their equipment) were unable to do anything because they were in Iraq.
Seriously, why do you think Mississippi, where the storm surge went right over the shore counties, didn't have the kinds of problems they had in New Orleans?
Perhaps because they were above sea level and thus not dependent on levies to keep them from flooding?
What you left out is that the reason Bush didn't send them in for a week is that the governor of Louisiana did not ask for a week - routing around idocy in state government is what this bill is about, being able to send in the national guard to assist without having to wait for the governor to say it is OK.
Specifically, Blanco had already declared a state of emergency on 26 August, and even if she hadn't, the Department of Homeland Security (under which FEMA operates) took over primary responsibility as of March 1 of 2005, needing only a Presidential declaration of Emergency, which they got on 29 August.
In case you don't remember, Homeland Security was the big federal Washington-knows-best project that was created specifically to deal with major disasters at the federal level, and cut the states out of the picture. So turning around and trying to blame the states because it didn't do its job just doesn't pass the laugh test.
This probably has more to do with the hurricanes and winter storms. During Katrina, the Feds were criticised for *not* bringing in the defence force to render aid.
The critics I heard were more aimed at the lack of national guard units, who are supposed to deal with this sort of thing, but could not because they were tied up in Iraq.
I don't think anybody was seriously saying "we need to have the Army, Navy, and Air Force ready and able to mobilize inside the US so that the National Guard can stay focused on invading foreign countries."
Slashdot Mirror
For the majority of employees, you are quite possibly correct. But the whole point of vote buying / intimidation schemes (and the key thing that makes them different from hacking electronic voting machines) is that if you want to make them work you have to involve a lot of people and you have to tell them what you are doing before the election. Even if almost all of them are too chicken to rat you out, it only takes a few (maybe even just one) and you're cooked.
Imagine if you had a plan to rob a bank. And it depended on you telling thousands of people what you planed to do, and how you planned to do it, weeks before you did it. Do you really think you'd get away with it?
--MarkusQ
A scatter shot response, because I don't have much time this morning:
Everyone is opposed to anything that they think is 'ill thought out', that's what that means. No one's in favor of doing things in an ill thought out manner, regardless whether it's because someone wants change for the sake of change, or because Congress was just really drunk.
You obviously need to get out more. Specifically, if this were not a public forum, I could give you a few names and numbers and would be willing to bet that by the third date (if you made it that far) the question would have devolved to which ill-thought out thing seemed less objectionable. You are right that reasonable people are never in favor of doing things in an ill-thought-out manner. You are wrong in assuming that all (or even most) people are reasonable.
However, nothing can be philosophy unless it explains why first, with that logically leading to a 'how'.
You left out a step that should (IMHO) come before the others: what should we change. Then comes why, and finally how. You keep misreading my definition of conservative as an answer to "How?" (which it is not) rather than as an answer to the "What?" question (which you aren't even asking). The whole point isn't to do things slowly, or carefully, but rather to refrain from changing things that are working. I am not saying "Fix things slowly" I'm saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
And yes, there are a great many people who set about trying to fix X for ideological reasons that have nothing to do with the "is it working?" question. So this is not a hollow distinction. In fact, my post on the "day walking vampires" thread outlines my main reason for thinking that many of the core Republicans are not conservative: they are deciding what to change based on their internal repressed desires and not on any objective conservative principle. At best, they could claim to be conservative only by saying something like "My personal self esteem is an important national asset, and must be maintained at all costs. Nothing matters more than my sense of self importance, and I am willing to trash everything this nation stands for to protect it" at which point I would say "OK, you're a conservative all right. And I respect your honesty. But your priorities are a tad out of whack."
To reiterate: conservatism is about what problems should be addressed, not about how.
Most of the rest of your points are aimed at this straw man you've constructed and not at my actual position, and my kids are calling, so I'll not respond to them now.
--MarkusQ
But the exact same argument applies to this sort of pressure as well; it would be so easy for someone to catch them and so many people would have to know (if people don't know before the election that they are being pressured to vote for X, it won't have any effect) that no one would get away with it.
Your boss is pressuring you to vote for somebody? What better way to get back at the SOB havng getting him sent to federal penitentiary and getting a hefty cash compensation in your wrongful dismissal suit. The very existence of the public record makes it easy to prove exactly what happened and nail him.
Of course, if he wants a reduced sentence I'm sure the prosecutor would be willing to discuss the possibility of him ratting out whoever put him up to it, provided he agrees to talk before they have collected enough evidence from the other eight employers they nailed in the same way.
I'm not saying it won't happen--heck, people have held up stores on there way home from work, while still wearing their employee ID badge with their names clearly visible, and muggers have given their victims their address and demanded installment payments. People do all sorts of stupid things, and I'm not suggesting that they'll stop any time soon. But I am saying they won't get away with it nearly as easily as with e-voting, which is what really matters.
--MarkusQ
The evidence was pretty conclusive even back then. IIRC, what tipped them off was the fact that there were organic inclusions in some of the blocks (not fossils, but actual bits of grass and wood) that they were able to date w. carbon dating techniques. I don't see how "modern analysis techniques" can add much to that.
--MarkusQ
"We" may have been over this before, but that doesn't mean you are correct, and it certainly doesn't mean you should be calling for people to be modded down just because you disagree with them.
Letting the voter verify that their vote was counted as cast, might, as you suggest, make vote buying easier. But it would also, as the GP points out, make stealing an election wholesale much harder. To make a rational choice between the two, you have to consider the relative risks, and doing so does not lead to the conclusion you're advocating. Even with receipts of some sort, vote buying is a very risky proposition, since by its very nature a lot of people would have to know about it before the election. If you want to buy ten thousand votes, at least ten thousand people will have to know about it, including who to vote for and what the payoff or threat is. If even a few of them blab, you're goose is cooked.
Conversely, without receipts, elections can be stolen by a small group of people with no witnesses except for the machines, and they can steal as many votes as they want--a million isn't that much harder than a dozen.
--MarkusQ
NIST:
/.:
/. readers:
/.:
/. readers:
/.:
/. readers:
--MarkusQ
Part of the problem with the "paper trail" issue is that the idea keeps getting transformed, by gradual steps, into something that is totally useless. The paper gets put behind glass, printed on a roll, no recourse if it's too fant to read, etc. until there's no reason to suspect that it represents the voter's intentions and not some hacker's.
The ballot needs to be tangible, a physical object that the voter can inspect (handle, read and verify) and it should be the official record of the vote. If you want to have the touch screen machine give you an insta-count, fine (though I wouldn't) but the actual ballots should also be counted, every time, by hardware too dumb to hack, and if the counts differ the physical ballot count should be the one that is used.
--MarkusQ
Cute.
But the more likely explanation is that they are just a loose coalition of deeply repressed individuals (closet gays, S&M types, and other gender issues, people with cycle of abuse and authority problems, closet xenophobes, kleptomanics, etc.) What holds them together is a shared agreement to never, ever confront their deamons directly but rather to bundle them up and make a patchwork boogie man out of them on which they can play out their internal issues without personal risk. This explains pretty much the entire movement, especially when you consider that it makes them so easy to manipulate that they have no trouble picking up corporate puppet masters willing to foot the bills to get them in office.
Not as exciting as daywalking vampires, perhaps, but plenty scare enough for me.
--MarkusQ
Why not? It may not seem like a good way to vote to you, and your phrasing makes it sound silly, by what exactly is to stop me from looking over the various options and deciding between them solely on the basis of my assumed risk aversion? You flatly state that it isn't possible but I don't see how you plan to support it, let alone prove it to the point that it justifies Spelling. Out. One. Word. At. A. Time. Like. You. Think. I'm. Stupid.
Further, you keep mischaracterizing my position as favoring being slow and cautious, despite the fact that I have several times pointed out that I am not opposed to change, even rapid or risky change, but only to ill thought out change for the sake of change.
But more to the point, you keep doing this conservative=Republican=bad vs. progressive=Democrat=good gymnastics that leads to exactly the sort of mess we find ourselves in. Voting for a party that pays lip service to your beliefs is a sure road to hell. Vote for individuals based on your assessment of their actions, and keep tabs on 'em after they get in office. Otherwise they will play you for a patsy as sure as anything.
--MarkusQ
P.S. If something can't be a philosophy unless some political party runs on it as a platform, where does that leave existentialism? I'm just asking.
I'm a big fan of analogies, but you completely lost me there.
Actually, I voted Democrat because:
None of them said anything about fixing a pizza oven, though I wouldn't put it past our ex-rep to babble something like that if he thought it would win him votes.
--MarkusQ
P.S. All joking aside, and giving your argument credit for intent if not clarity, the problem here seems to be that you are assuming that because I label myself in some way I will automatically vote for people who label themselves the same way; you are accusing me of red team/blue team thinking.
What in fact happens is that I evaluate the candidates and ballot issues on the merits, and don't pay much attention to what they call themselves, though the do get points off for lying (e.g. if you run as a Communist but support private property rights, you won't get my vote even if I agree with you because I don't like hypocrisy). My political philosophy guides my choices because I follow it not because other people claim to.
Excellent point.
--MarkusQ
I post therefore I am. You may be good, but I seriously doubt you can convince me that I don't actually exist, and since I have my world view you would be hard pressed to convince me that there isn't at least one person out there (or rather, out here, since it would be me) that holds my world view.
You are free to call me a deliberative progressive if you like. There are others that have called me a paleo-conservative, a western conservative, a libertarian democrat, a fool, a progressive fiscal conservative, a tightwad liberal, and more. For my part, I'll continue to call myself what I have always called myself, a conservative, and continue to support, vote for, and advocate candidates and causes that are consistant with my world view, regardless of what they call themselves and regardless of whether you think I exist or not.
--MarkusQ
Sorry, your argument doesn't hold water.
You are conflating at least four different things: the concept of a conservative philosophy, the various consequences of following this philosophy in different contexts, the people who use the term to label themselves, and the question of when (if ever) a given instance of conservative philosophy would "work." In addition you appear to be falling into the labeling trap, which has been laid for you by the mass media to create a sense of conflict and discourage rational discourse.
But even if they did, I wouldn't deduce from that that giraffes didn't exist, merely that he was lying and the press were aiding and abetting him.
Agreed. Interestingly, there is a sort of overlap between the real-conservative world view and that of the true progressive (I'm thinking Lord Macaulay style here): both are concerned with improving the world by making only well reasoned, justified changes and eschewing both change for the sake of change and a neo-Luddite stasis quo.
In short, they are in many ways closer together than either is to the poles of the dominant "corporate sponsored neo-fascist fundamentalists right wing" vs. "corporate sponsored neo-socialist loony fringe group left wing" spectrum as presented in the corporate owned media. Of course, you'll never hear that in the MSM.
--MarkusQ
While I generally agree with you on most points, I'll have to take exception to this one. The fact that people misuse a term to cloak their misdeeds does not mean that the term never had a cogent meaning, or that it is devoid of substance.
Would you say that "the word 'new' doesn't mean anything," for example, just because "New!" has been plastered all over thousands of products that weren't new at all? Or would you just say that the people who misused the word were lying?
I am a conservative. As such I have vocally opposed almost everything that this administration has done, since the spring of 2001 (at the time, it was Cheney's energy task force and their handling of the Florida recount that had me up in arms). If you google for my posts here and elsewere you will find a consistent pattern motivated by a single, clearly conservative theme:
Don't throw out, risk, abandon, or dismantle something of value for vague or incoherent reasons, no matter how swell the flim-flam show.
And on and on. This isn't a recent rejection of Bush on his way down; I have been mad had him and his ilk far longer than 80% of his present critics, and on principled, conservative grounds. Google me if you want proof.
--MarkusQ, conservative curmudgeon and proud of it.
You could run regular CP/M-86 on a PC long before the DR release came out, though you had to do a fair amount of patching to link to the BIOS (not unusual for CP/M at the time) if you wanted any sort of I/O at all (e.g., text, write to the floppy, etc.). It mostly just amounted to moving things around so they were in the right registers, calling the hardware BIOS, and moving things back to where they were supposed to be for CP/M.
The problem was, pre-Google (heck, pre Gopher and news groups) it was a pain in the butt to find about how to do it.
--MarkusQ
Yes it is. It that is exactly what evolution is, and how it works. While the adaptation may be small (and, to your mind, negligible) it is the gradual accumulation of millions upon millions of such small changes that results in all of the difference we see between extant species. If you keep up the pressure for long enough this very change could lead to a transition to a new species of "pseudo-snake" which has no legs at all (much as happened with real snakes) or with highly modified legs such as happened with whales/dolphins when they split off from the hippos and horses (IIRC).
Note that, in each case, the initial changes resulted in changed circumstances that necessitated (or at least provided the pressure for) subsequent complementary changes. When you look at the combined effect of all these changes it may seem amazing that it all boiled down to this sort of "killing long legged lizards leaves more of the short leged ones to breed" but, just as with a large number that can be decomposed into the product a long list of much smaller prime factors, that is exactly what's going in.
--MarkusQ
It was about a year ago and a quick scan through my bookmarks failed to turn up a link, though I did find bookmarks to a few things he had linked to here and here which should help you get started. I'll post back if I come across the blog itself.
Cheese making, from the little I dabbled in it, seems to be quite fun. Be prepared to make some mistakes (I'd recommend < 1/2 liter batches to start) and to share your successes with friends while they're fresh.
--MarkusQ
It was about a year ago and a quick scan through my bookmarks failed to turn up a link, though I did find bookmarks to a few things he had linked to here and here which should help you get started. I'll post back if I come across the blog itself.
Cheese making, from the little I dabbled in it, seems to be quite fun. Be prepared to make some mistakes (I'd recommend --MarkusQ
Some, but not all of it. There are also the people who care deeply about a subject, and for whom the facts matter much more than the personalities. A year or so ago I decided to try my hand at cheese making. A little bit of google led me to a cheese makers blog, in which I found several years of detailed first hand accounts of his efforts at amature cheese making, along with interesting comments, questions, and (in a few cases) differing opinions from his readers.
This is where bogs really shine. Care about SCO v. IBM? Or the Plame outing and coverup? Interested in making your own Victorian christmas ornaments? Or a trebuchet? There's a blog out there for you. Ditto if you're dealing with some strange (to you) illness, trying to learn a new language, or planning a vacation off the beaten path.
Yes, there are a lot of bloggers whose sole topic seems to be "Look at me ma, I'm a blogger!" but they are easy to ignore. Don't cast out the interesting ones along with the loudmouths who have nothing to say.
--MarkusQ
Excuse me if I don't get it, but this story seems to be about the fact that some bloggers I never heard of got fired and some other blogger I never heard of thinks that some unnamed additional bloggers should have blogged about it before the NYT reported on it, and we know this because....
...he said so in his blog.
Ok, maybe I'm different from most blog readers, but I:
Other than the fact that this item seems to fit the "blog related flamebait" template, I frankly don't see the point of it. Does anyone really expect that blogs will give them complete and accurate behind the scenes information about the blogging carriers of every blogger on the planet? Does anyone seriously want them to? (Other than this guy who obviously cared enough blog about it I mean.)
--MarkusQ
Be careful where you point that thing.
As I said before, I have no intention ofd defending the press here.
I would assume it was removed because it wasn't true. The assertions are not only factually incorrect (she had in fact formally declared a state of emergency days earlier) but the implications drawn from them (that something more was needed from her for FEMA to act) were wrong as well.
It was, in short, a failed attempt at exculpatory propaganda by the Bush administration that fell by the wayside once people started checking the "facts" behind it.
--MarkusQ
Wrong.
I'm not about to start defending our press (or rather, the entertainment industry hive mind corporate pod-people who replaced it while we were sleeping), and undoubtedly a few of them wasted time following up false leads. But many more (over a third of their number and about half their equipment) were unable to do anything because they were in Iraq.
Perhaps because they were above sea level and thus not dependent on levies to keep them from flooding?
--MarkusQ
And what you left out is that this claim has already been debunked.
Specifically, Blanco had already declared a state of emergency on 26 August, and even if she hadn't, the Department of Homeland Security (under which FEMA operates) took over primary responsibility as of March 1 of 2005, needing only a Presidential declaration of Emergency, which they got on 29 August.
In case you don't remember, Homeland Security was the big federal Washington-knows-best project that was created specifically to deal with major disasters at the federal level, and cut the states out of the picture. So turning around and trying to blame the states because it didn't do its job just doesn't pass the laugh test.
--MarkusQ
The critics I heard were more aimed at the lack of national guard units, who are supposed to deal with this sort of thing, but could not because they were tied up in Iraq.
I don't think anybody was seriously saying "we need to have the Army, Navy, and Air Force ready and able to mobilize inside the US so that the National Guard can stay focused on invading foreign countries."
--MarkusQ