yea becouse I'd believe anything coming out of Iran... not./. is really stretching here.
Right, because Iran has no one capable of doing studies like this, since it's a country in the Dark Ages. All of the Iranians among graduate students and faculty at top US universities are then...ghosts?
.....these mayors rule, they too will be without a job. The Paris accord is a farce for a global agenda and would end our sovereignty. This accord would do little to help the climate. Good that President Trump nixed this farce.:)
You mean all those urbanite hipster coal miners and oil rig workers? Right, they'll move to a city where they can still go down the local coal mine after doing some shopping at the Whole Foods across the street.
Ditto. The IM features in Skype were always secondary, and only served to support the primary uses you list (e.g. leave a message when one's there, tell the person you'll be there in 5 minutes, send a link/document/picture so you can both look at it during your conversation, etc.). No one I know has ever used Skype for day-to-day instant messaging...other apps have always been used for that. ICQ/MSN Messenger and the like in the past, Viber/WhatsApp and the like today. Skype is and was a VoIP app, with video. If they try to make it something else, they will fail.
The whole thing is just for show. He wants to stir up some noise and stick it (symbolically) to the establishment and the environmentalists.
...and this is the problem arising from making climate change policy an ideological issue. Instead of a facts- and evidence-based issue. It's like arguing over whether clean drinking water is a "right-wing" or "left-wing" thing. Nuts. The Left is just as much to blame here as is the Right, except that the Right maybe started it, due to being beholden to corporate fossil fuel interests.
Note: there are both "right-wing" (market-based) and "left-wing" (state-action, regulation-based) approaches to dealing with climate change and CO2 emissions. How best to deal with climate change can be a right/left point of contention. However making belief in climate change a right/left thing is completely insane.
Which is why we need better laws to protect us from corporations, so that people (including the government) cannot simply buy the data from them. Also, if you are giving your information away, that's your own fault. There is no need to use sites like facebook.
You are quite correct in saying there is no need to use Facebook. That is why I do not use Facebook. However, the situation is a bit more complicated than "it's your fault you're giving information away". If I use a "free" service like Facebook or Gmail, it is reasonable to expect that I "paying" for this in some other way. Using the data I generate on these sites to serve me relevant ads for example. However, if I am using Windows 10 - something I paid $150 for - then it is certainly not reasonable for me to think that the OS will collect my data and use it for advertising. "It's my own fault" does not apply - perhaps I need to use Windows 10 for work and have no choice in the matter. Even for "free" services there should be some standard of "reasonableness" for what the provider of the service does with my data. Analyze it to serve me ads? Fine. Sell it off to third parties who then sell it off to who knows who...? Not fine.
So yes, I wholeheartedly agree about the data protection laws - and no, companies should not be able to hide behind 45-page EULAs that no one reads.
It's not the government that is tracking everything you do, it's corporations.
How is that, in practice, any different? I can't see how anyone can say "the government isn't tracking you" post-Snowden. They might not be tracking everyone actively, but they have the means to access information about you more or less instantly, even when Google or Facebook are doing the actual tracking.
Actually, the fastest boarding is done without any order at all. Everyone rushes to the gate and you board and take whatever seat you want. You can board an entire plane very quickly, but the passenger dissatisfaction is very high. It's actually the fastest way to board a plane. Of course, dissatisfaction is very high since there's no order and structure and if you're near the end, the chances of finding a set of contiguous seats is low.
I think I read a paper (? or something like that) once which simulated the scenarios and concluded that the most efficient way of boarding is by seat number, that is, first all of the window seats, then the middle the seats, then the aisle seats, and all of them back to front (relative to the door, i.e. if the door is at the front). This does not require people having pre-assigned seats, but it does require people taking the seats up in order (and not whichever one they like) even if they enter the plane at random. It makes sense.
But this probably wouldn't help, because usually the bottleneck is on the plane, where passengers are finding their seats and loading the overhead compartments. Frequently there is a line in the jetway of passengers whose boarding passes have been scanned, who are waiting for a chance to get into the plane.
For medium-sized and large aircraft, the cause is this bottleneck is usually the order in which people board. If people entered the plane in an optimal way, it would go faster. People loading up their luggage would not be a problem, since there would be no one (or a minimal amount of people) waiting to get past them. Airlines try to do this via boarding by zones, but it's a bit like herding cats. The guy who should have boarded first maybe shows up last at the gate, thus screwing up the process, and so on.
Uhm, no. I can say that about a gazillion things as well. Don't like the government tracking everything you do? Well, you can live in isolation on a mountain top disconnected from the rest of the world, with no electronic devices whatsoever, and no contact with any other human being. It's totally up to you.
whereas most states just protect the term "Professional Engineer" (or similar).
This also, btw, is nonsense. A "professional engineer" is someone who practices engineering professionally. Yet tons of people do this, but legally can't use such a title, while people who do not but have taken the exams (and are now in a different field of work, or retired) can. There's zero logic to it. The government should not - and from a moral, linguistic, and logical perspective, cannot - regulate the usage of such simple words. The title that is protected should be something like "Licensed Engineer", "State Licensed Engineer", since this is not only a title, but actually describes a factual, objective reality. If you didn't pass the exams proscribed by the Licensing Board or the Board did not issue you a license, you are, factually, NOT a Licensed Engineer. Calling yourself one would be lying - fraud. That makes sense. Allowing a licensing board to decide on the usage of the simple word "engineer" however, makes zero sense.
Now it turns out that if you read the letter of the law in Oregon, they have pretty restrictive laws on referring to oneself as an "engineer"--whereas most states just protect the term "Professional Engineer" (or similar). However those laws are clearly not enforced, or enforced very asymmetrically, because it would take 5 minutes on LinkedIn to find 10,000 violators.
Obviously. I find it insane that people are arguing against this guy instead of this ridiculous law which is being enforced in this case for one reason and one reason only - to shut down criticism of the government. "Hey, look, some guy is complaining about traffic lights - shut him up, he's a pain in the ass." That's all this is, nothing else, and is obvious after reading the first article on the subject. Yet people defend it. Lunacy.
I am also wondering who the hell gave the State of Oregon the right to arbitrarily define words in the English language to their own liking? The word "engineer" has multiple meanings in English. You know, like the guys who drive trains? They're also "engineers".
That completely removes the state input in the process and turns it into just another version of the current fictional "popular vote".
And how does it do that? It is still, 100% in line with the constitutional provision that states decide how to split up the electoral votes. And how exactly do "states" have input now? The states, as institutions, as governments - i.e. the governor, the legislature - have right now zero input on the actual, particular voting process in a particular election. The states leave it up to the people - the voters - to decide to whom the electoral votes go to. This is decided by - wait for it - the POPULAR VOTE within each state! If a state decides to split the votes proportionally instead of using winner takes all, how does it "remove the input" of that state? It doesn't. Are you saying that Maine and Nebraska, who decide some of their electoral seats via congressional district-based popular vote rather than state-wide popular vote (and thus do not use state-wide winner-take-all), have "removed" their own "input" into the presidential election?
Are you also aware that in the past, some states elected presidential electors via districts, the same way that US Representatives are elected? That was,
in fact, the intention and assumption of many of the authors of the Constitution, yet, today, this is not done anywhere any more?
Furthermore, why do you feel compelled to write popular vote in quotes, and call it "fictional"? It's not fictional, it's an actual, existing thing. As I said above, right now it's just an interesting statistic, nothing more. However, it's real. Saying it's fictional is like saying that the yards run by a player in a football game statistic is fictional. It's not fictional; it's real. Of course, we all know football games are decided by the number of field goals and touchdowns made by each side, not the yards run. That however, does not make those yards non-existent.
And the effective difference is exactly what? A bit more granular vote total, but essentially the fictional "popular vote" decides the result, and the wisdom and courage of the founders in designing a federation of states is thrown away.
If you put it that way, what is then the effective difference then between the current system and what I propose above? Is it not just "granularity", then? The states have a number of EC seats that is relative to their respective populations, with the small states over-represented in that respect. Even with winner-take-all in 48 states, isn't it just a matter of granularity as well? Winner takes all provides a less granular vote total than proportional representation.
Also, I don't know if you've noticed, but a lot of the wisdom and courage of your founding fathers has withered away long, long, ago. The US has become a lot more centralized, and the federal government a lot more powerful than envisioned by them. Did they also envision the US being an imperialistic power bent on world domination? I bet most of them didn't. A lot of them also didn't like the idea of having a professional, standing army. Or a central bank. Or a welfare state, at least on the federal level. Yet reversing all of those in normal, peacetime conditions today would be impossible.
Not to mention that things change. Why does something designed by 18th century wisdom, which maybe made perfect sense at the time and was quite warranted (I can see why the EC was a great idea for a big, sparsely populated country in the 1700s), have to be the answer to things today? Is the USA the same country it was in 1800? Of course not. Does it grapple with the same issues? With some, yes. With a lot, no. Remember, the US started with the Articles of Confederation - basically a union of 13 independent states, with no federal executive (almost). That didn't really work very well, so the Constitutional Convention was called.
Furthermore, the "wisdom" of the founding fathers was often not wisdom, but compromi
And that collaboration is also unlikely because the electoral college currently favors one party, since 2 of the last 3 Republican victories would have been losses without it. I don't see Republicans giving up that edge (I wouldn't see Democrats doing it either if the roles were switched).
People say this often but there is no way to prove that...none. The popular vote in U.S. presidential elections is currently nothing but an intriguing statistic. That's all. It's otherwise irrelevant.
If the previous three elections were contested by popular vote (or the system I propose above), who knows what the results would've been. The campaigning strategies of both sides would've been completely different. Voting patterns would be different. More Republicans would vote in California. More Democrats in Texas. Less intensive campaigning would've been done in the swing states, so maybe less people would've voted there. Et cetera. We've no way of proving what the outcome would have been.
Of course I agree with you that the change needs to be done nationwide, and also, that it's unlikely. Every stable political system creates entrenched interests, so that any major changes are opposed by the majority of the political elite. Such changes are only made when systems break down. The US isn't there yet, although some would argue it's getting there...
Our electoral systems works just fine. It is designed to get the majority of power, and of electing the president based on the unit of STATES. This is so that each state has a relative voice in who is elected president which should force the candidates to take in all state issues (which vary greatly with geography), into mind when campaigning....otherwise, you'd have our presidents decided by pretty much 2-3 populous states on each end of the country which do not even come close as bearing a somewhat representative view of the US and our policies of the country as a whole.
The problem with your system is not the electoral college, the problem is how the states assign electoral college votes. Almost everyone in the USA is caught up in the electoral college vs. popular vote argument, and to my astonishment misses this key point.
48 (right?) out of 50 states use "first past the post" a.k.a. "winner takes all" to assign the electoral college seats. If 51% of votes in Florida vote Democrat, ALL of Florida's E.C. seats go to the Democrats. 49% of the voters who voted Republican are left WITHOUT A VOICE. This is repeated all over the place. This causes problems like:
Spending months to figure out how to deal with "hanging chads" and the like, since a few hundred votes in one polling station can swing the entire election.
Solidly red and blue states are ignored during the general election, since it doesn't matter whether you win a state with 45%, 55%, or 85% of the vote - the end result is the same.
Disproportionate attention is given the to the "swing states", where 1-10% of a vote change basically determines who wins the national election. This may be great if you're Ohio or Florida, but essentially the rest of the country is held hostage by these states. Politically, then, if you are solidly and reliably red or blue as a state, you're stupid, the best strategy is to be a swing state, then you get showered with all the attention.
Large discrepancies between popular vote and electoral vote are possible, leading to endless discussions such as this one.
People in the solidly blue/red states that are in the minority get discouraged from voting. What's the point of voting in a presidential election if you're a Republican in California or Vermont, or a Democrat in Texas or Alabama?
The solution? Have each state assign E.C. seats proportionally. If you win 45% of the vote in Missouri, you get 45% of the seats. The next person who won 40%, wins 40% of the seats, the person who won 5%, gets 5% of the seats. Of course, there are some caveats - if a state has 20 E.C. seats, you need to win 5% of the vote to get a seat. If it has 5, you need to win 20%. Seats left "hanging" due to candidates failing to reach this threshold are reassigned to the ones who surpassed it, proportionally. This is a solved problem. It's called the modified D'Hondt system. It's used everywhere.
The beauty of this?
The E.C. vote is more or less guaranteed to closely follow the popular vote - large discrepancies are highly unlikely (only in the event where turnout is hugely lopsided, i.e. you get three times the turnout in half the states that you get in the other half). However, small states still have disproportionately more say, thus preserving the system where it is about States, not just large metropolitan areas.
Requires no constitutional amendment. States are free to assign E.C. seats as they please. Easy to implement.
Cases like Florida 2000 become inconsequential - the difference then was so small, that the seats would've been split 50/50 regardless of whether Bush or Gore came ahead by a few hundred votes.
The "solid red/blue" states, i.e. the majority of the country, will have a bigger say. Now the Democrats can't just take California for granted, since winning 51% or 65% of the votes there will make a big difference in the election. Republicans could now "attack" California, since grabbi
That is not "hacking". That is called campaigning.
Well, yes, sure. But it should still be alarming to you that foreign powers are 'campaigning' - rather successfully it seems - for one side.
You are aware I hope that the US government actively "campaigns" in foreign elections routinely, supporting sides in another country's election which it deems friendly to US interests? That US ambassadors act as de-facto viceroys in many countries, with a veto on who can take power and who cannot? Keeping that in mind, the fact that the Russians seemed to have influenced slightly the US election seems like a bit of cosmic justice, no?
Indeed. It's amazing how humans will be ready to do some complicated thing to alleviate the bad effects of some other thing which has a simple solution (stop doing it).
Doctor: You have a high sugar level. You should really stop eating all that chocolate and all those maple syrup candies.
Patient: But I found this rare tropical weed chewed on by the tribesmen of the Exotica rainforest! It reduces blood sugar level by like a factor of two if you chew it 7 times a day! I can eat all the chocolate I want! Filled with maple syrup!
Same thing with climate change.
Problem: Too much CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere.
Solution: Pump less CO2 into the atmosphere.
Bunch of proposed solutions: Do some crazy thing to mitigate, maybe, the fact that too much CO2 is being pumped into the atmosphere. Keep pumping CO2.
Open more oil wells.
The first PC that was truly mine (as opposed to really being my dad's computer, on which I occasionally played games or used drawing software) was an Atari ST - sadly I don't remember which model exactly. I got it for my 7th birthday. It had a small monochrome gray monitor, an "odd" two-button mouse (as most IBM PC mice at the time I had seen were "standard" three-button models), no hard drive and two external 3.5'' floppy drives.
I once hooked it up to my small colour TV in order to play some of the games in colour (although not all of them were "compatible" - some just used a monochrome palette). I had some word processing program (forget the name) which was in fact for Macintosh - so loading it was a lengthy procedure of several floppy disks whereby first a Macintosh emulator for Atari was loaded, and then the program itself on top of that. The mouse cursor would turn into a bomb when things went wrong. I was afraid of that as I thought my computer would literally burn out or something unless I shut it down fast enough:)
I had a strange emotional attachment to the Atari brand because of this, and I kept hoping throughout the 90s that they would make a come-back out of the blue (I mean, that someone who owned/bought the Atari brand would do so) using some blazing line of PowerPC processors or something like that.:)
The funny thing is that years later at university, I would first learn assembly programming on a Motorola 68k, the same CPU that powered my first PC.
Ever notice how prolific JS users rarely defend the language? Of course it's badly designed. We use it because it's pragmatic to use the lingua franca of programming.
This is however a bit of a chicken and egg problem, no? If we keep using something because "it's the thing everyone uses", we'll keep on using it forever and never fix it, no matter how bad it is (and you admit it's bad). In order to come up with alternatives and push on them people, we need folks who will keep telling us how bad the status quo is and why. It's not a sufficient condition, but it is a necessary one. Don't tell me dominant or widespread languages can't be replaced - whatever happened to the proliferation of FORTRAN, Pascal/Delphi, or various flavours of BASIC? Things won't happen over night (cf. the Shockwave/Flash to HTML5 transition) but it can be done provided that a better set of alternatives to JS emerge.
...that one can devise a clever way to fool what is essentially a sophisticated gigantic pattern-recognition and classification system. Since that is all artificial neural networks are essentially.
Well, you're absolutely right that a lot of tourism dollars go to liberal-minded coastal places (NYC, California). However, Arizona gets a lot of tourists. Nevada too. Nashville. Memphis (I transferred at Memphis airport once - I remember all the signs being in English and Japanese). Detroit. Wyoming. Utah. Etc. It's not like only the blue states benefit.
We have people literally dying to come across our borders to get here. If the US is THAT bad, why are they coming?
You are mixing apples and oranges. The people dying to get to the US are dirt poor folk from third world countries. The US happens to be an advanced, rich, first-world country next door. You are the closest rich place. Thus they come to you. If Mexico shared a border with Canada, and not the US, Mexicans would try to illegally cross into Canada. If they shared a border with Germany, they'd try to cross over into Germany. Why aren't there a lot of Syrian asylum seekers in the US? They think the US is crap and don't want to come there? Or is it maybe because they are tens of thousands of kilometres away from the nearest US border? There do happen to be millions of them in Turkey though....I guess Turkey being next door to Syria has something to do with it.
What GP is trying to tell you is that "extreme vetting" and the like will do little to discourage desperate illegals (one, they are desperate, two, they are already trying to cross the border without bothering with such things as visas and passports and ETAs) but will do much to annoy legitimate travellers from rich countries, coming temporarily to spend money in the US. You will soon see that yes, you indeed care (as a nation, as an economy), because you will be losing out. On tourism dollars first, and then on business opportunities and investment after that. Treat every passenger as a potential terrorist and piss them off by subjecting them to ridiculous procedures, and guess what, you'll end up pissing off the 99,999...99% of passengers that aren't terrorists. Why would I want to go to a place where I might have my phone searched at the border? Why would I want to be submitted to the humiliation of explaining what every photo in my phone is about to some stranger trained to see a potential deadly threat in every person he comes across? So I can see the Grand Canyon? I can look at pictures of the canyon instead. Better that than some inane border guard looking over all my personal pictures.
Slashdot Mirror
yea becouse I'd believe anything coming out of Iran ... not. /. is really stretching here.
Right, because Iran has no one capable of doing studies like this, since it's a country in the Dark Ages. All of the Iranians among graduate students and faculty at top US universities are then...ghosts?
.....these mayors rule, they too will be without a job. The Paris accord is a farce for a global agenda and would end our sovereignty. This accord would do little to help the climate. Good that President Trump nixed this farce. :)
You mean all those urbanite hipster coal miners and oil rig workers? Right, they'll move to a city where they can still go down the local coal mine after doing some shopping at the Whole Foods across the street.
Ditto. The IM features in Skype were always secondary, and only served to support the primary uses you list (e.g. leave a message when one's there, tell the person you'll be there in 5 minutes, send a link/document/picture so you can both look at it during your conversation, etc.). No one I know has ever used Skype for day-to-day instant messaging...other apps have always been used for that. ICQ/MSN Messenger and the like in the past, Viber/WhatsApp and the like today. Skype is and was a VoIP app, with video. If they try to make it something else, they will fail.
The whole thing is just for show. He wants to stir up some noise and stick it (symbolically) to the establishment and the environmentalists.
...and this is the problem arising from making climate change policy an ideological issue. Instead of a facts- and evidence-based issue. It's like arguing over whether clean drinking water is a "right-wing" or "left-wing" thing. Nuts. The Left is just as much to blame here as is the Right, except that the Right maybe started it, due to being beholden to corporate fossil fuel interests.
Note: there are both "right-wing" (market-based) and "left-wing" (state-action, regulation-based) approaches to dealing with climate change and CO2 emissions. How best to deal with climate change can be a right/left point of contention. However making belief in climate change a right/left thing is completely insane.
Which is why we need better laws to protect us from corporations, so that people (including the government) cannot simply buy the data from them. Also, if you are giving your information away, that's your own fault. There is no need to use sites like facebook.
You are quite correct in saying there is no need to use Facebook. That is why I do not use Facebook. However, the situation is a bit more complicated than "it's your fault you're giving information away". If I use a "free" service like Facebook or Gmail, it is reasonable to expect that I "paying" for this in some other way. Using the data I generate on these sites to serve me relevant ads for example. However, if I am using Windows 10 - something I paid $150 for - then it is certainly not reasonable for me to think that the OS will collect my data and use it for advertising. "It's my own fault" does not apply - perhaps I need to use Windows 10 for work and have no choice in the matter. Even for "free" services there should be some standard of "reasonableness" for what the provider of the service does with my data. Analyze it to serve me ads? Fine. Sell it off to third parties who then sell it off to who knows who...? Not fine.
So yes, I wholeheartedly agree about the data protection laws - and no, companies should not be able to hide behind 45-page EULAs that no one reads.
Actually, I had no idea Mythbusters did this :)
It's not the government that is tracking everything you do, it's corporations.
How is that, in practice, any different? I can't see how anyone can say "the government isn't tracking you" post-Snowden. They might not be tracking everyone actively, but they have the means to access information about you more or less instantly, even when Google or Facebook are doing the actual tracking.
Actually, the fastest boarding is done without any order at all. Everyone rushes to the gate and you board and take whatever seat you want. You can board an entire plane very quickly, but the passenger dissatisfaction is very high. It's actually the fastest way to board a plane. Of course, dissatisfaction is very high since there's no order and structure and if you're near the end, the chances of finding a set of contiguous seats is low.
I think I read a paper (? or something like that) once which simulated the scenarios and concluded that the most efficient way of boarding is by seat number, that is, first all of the window seats, then the middle the seats, then the aisle seats, and all of them back to front (relative to the door, i.e. if the door is at the front). This does not require people having pre-assigned seats, but it does require people taking the seats up in order (and not whichever one they like) even if they enter the plane at random. It makes sense.
But this probably wouldn't help, because usually the bottleneck is on the plane, where passengers are finding their seats and loading the overhead compartments. Frequently there is a line in the jetway of passengers whose boarding passes have been scanned, who are waiting for a chance to get into the plane.
For medium-sized and large aircraft, the cause is this bottleneck is usually the order in which people board. If people entered the plane in an optimal way, it would go faster. People loading up their luggage would not be a problem, since there would be no one (or a minimal amount of people) waiting to get past them. Airlines try to do this via boarding by zones, but it's a bit like herding cats. The guy who should have boarded first maybe shows up last at the gate, thus screwing up the process, and so on.
Uhm, no. I can say that about a gazillion things as well. Don't like the government tracking everything you do? Well, you can live in isolation on a mountain top disconnected from the rest of the world, with no electronic devices whatsoever, and no contact with any other human being. It's totally up to you.
whereas most states just protect the term "Professional Engineer" (or similar).
This also, btw, is nonsense. A "professional engineer" is someone who practices engineering professionally. Yet tons of people do this, but legally can't use such a title, while people who do not but have taken the exams (and are now in a different field of work, or retired) can. There's zero logic to it. The government should not - and from a moral, linguistic, and logical perspective, cannot - regulate the usage of such simple words. The title that is protected should be something like "Licensed Engineer", "State Licensed Engineer", since this is not only a title, but actually describes a factual, objective reality. If you didn't pass the exams proscribed by the Licensing Board or the Board did not issue you a license, you are, factually, NOT a Licensed Engineer. Calling yourself one would be lying - fraud. That makes sense. Allowing a licensing board to decide on the usage of the simple word "engineer" however, makes zero sense.
Now it turns out that if you read the letter of the law in Oregon, they have pretty restrictive laws on referring to oneself as an "engineer"--whereas most states just protect the term "Professional Engineer" (or similar). However those laws are clearly not enforced, or enforced very asymmetrically, because it would take 5 minutes on LinkedIn to find 10,000 violators.
Obviously. I find it insane that people are arguing against this guy instead of this ridiculous law which is being enforced in this case for one reason and one reason only - to shut down criticism of the government. "Hey, look, some guy is complaining about traffic lights - shut him up, he's a pain in the ass." That's all this is, nothing else, and is obvious after reading the first article on the subject. Yet people defend it. Lunacy.
I am also wondering who the hell gave the State of Oregon the right to arbitrarily define words in the English language to their own liking? The word "engineer" has multiple meanings in English. You know, like the guys who drive trains? They're also "engineers".
That completely removes the state input in the process and turns it into just another version of the current fictional "popular vote".
And how does it do that? It is still, 100% in line with the constitutional provision that states decide how to split up the electoral votes. And how exactly do "states" have input now? The states, as institutions, as governments - i.e. the governor, the legislature - have right now zero input on the actual, particular voting process in a particular election. The states leave it up to the people - the voters - to decide to whom the electoral votes go to. This is decided by - wait for it - the POPULAR VOTE within each state! If a state decides to split the votes proportionally instead of using winner takes all, how does it "remove the input" of that state? It doesn't. Are you saying that Maine and Nebraska, who decide some of their electoral seats via congressional district-based popular vote rather than state-wide popular vote (and thus do not use state-wide winner-take-all), have "removed" their own "input" into the presidential election?
Are you also aware that in the past, some states elected presidential electors via districts, the same way that US Representatives are elected? That was, in fact, the intention and assumption of many of the authors of the Constitution, yet, today, this is not done anywhere any more?
Furthermore, why do you feel compelled to write popular vote in quotes, and call it "fictional"? It's not fictional, it's an actual, existing thing. As I said above, right now it's just an interesting statistic, nothing more. However, it's real. Saying it's fictional is like saying that the yards run by a player in a football game statistic is fictional. It's not fictional; it's real. Of course, we all know football games are decided by the number of field goals and touchdowns made by each side, not the yards run. That however, does not make those yards non-existent.
And the effective difference is exactly what? A bit more granular vote total, but essentially the fictional "popular vote" decides the result, and the wisdom and courage of the founders in designing a federation of states is thrown away.
If you put it that way, what is then the effective difference then between the current system and what I propose above? Is it not just "granularity", then? The states have a number of EC seats that is relative to their respective populations, with the small states over-represented in that respect. Even with winner-take-all in 48 states, isn't it just a matter of granularity as well? Winner takes all provides a less granular vote total than proportional representation.
Also, I don't know if you've noticed, but a lot of the wisdom and courage of your founding fathers has withered away long, long, ago. The US has become a lot more centralized, and the federal government a lot more powerful than envisioned by them. Did they also envision the US being an imperialistic power bent on world domination? I bet most of them didn't. A lot of them also didn't like the idea of having a professional, standing army. Or a central bank. Or a welfare state, at least on the federal level. Yet reversing all of those in normal, peacetime conditions today would be impossible.
Not to mention that things change. Why does something designed by 18th century wisdom, which maybe made perfect sense at the time and was quite warranted (I can see why the EC was a great idea for a big, sparsely populated country in the 1700s), have to be the answer to things today? Is the USA the same country it was in 1800? Of course not. Does it grapple with the same issues? With some, yes. With a lot, no. Remember, the US started with the Articles of Confederation - basically a union of 13 independent states, with no federal executive (almost). That didn't really work very well, so the Constitutional Convention was called.
Furthermore, the "wisdom" of the founding fathers was often not wisdom, but compromi
And that collaboration is also unlikely because the electoral college currently favors one party, since 2 of the last 3 Republican victories would have been losses without it. I don't see Republicans giving up that edge (I wouldn't see Democrats doing it either if the roles were switched).
People say this often but there is no way to prove that...none. The popular vote in U.S. presidential elections is currently nothing but an intriguing statistic. That's all. It's otherwise irrelevant.
If the previous three elections were contested by popular vote (or the system I propose above), who knows what the results would've been. The campaigning strategies of both sides would've been completely different. Voting patterns would be different. More Republicans would vote in California. More Democrats in Texas. Less intensive campaigning would've been done in the swing states, so maybe less people would've voted there. Et cetera. We've no way of proving what the outcome would have been.
Of course I agree with you that the change needs to be done nationwide, and also, that it's unlikely. Every stable political system creates entrenched interests, so that any major changes are opposed by the majority of the political elite. Such changes are only made when systems break down. The US isn't there yet, although some would argue it's getting there...
Our electoral systems works just fine. It is designed to get the majority of power, and of electing the president based on the unit of STATES. This is so that each state has a relative voice in who is elected president which should force the candidates to take in all state issues (which vary greatly with geography), into mind when campaigning....otherwise, you'd have our presidents decided by pretty much 2-3 populous states on each end of the country which do not even come close as bearing a somewhat representative view of the US and our policies of the country as a whole.
The problem with your system is not the electoral college, the problem is how the states assign electoral college votes. Almost everyone in the USA is caught up in the electoral college vs. popular vote argument, and to my astonishment misses this key point.
48 (right?) out of 50 states use "first past the post" a.k.a. "winner takes all" to assign the electoral college seats. If 51% of votes in Florida vote Democrat, ALL of Florida's E.C. seats go to the Democrats. 49% of the voters who voted Republican are left WITHOUT A VOICE. This is repeated all over the place. This causes problems like:
The solution? Have each state assign E.C. seats proportionally. If you win 45% of the vote in Missouri, you get 45% of the seats. The next person who won 40%, wins 40% of the seats, the person who won 5%, gets 5% of the seats. Of course, there are some caveats - if a state has 20 E.C. seats, you need to win 5% of the vote to get a seat. If it has 5, you need to win 20%. Seats left "hanging" due to candidates failing to reach this threshold are reassigned to the ones who surpassed it, proportionally. This is a solved problem. It's called the modified D'Hondt system. It's used everywhere.
The beauty of this?
Well, yes, sure. But it should still be alarming to you that foreign powers are 'campaigning' - rather successfully it seems - for one side.
You are aware I hope that the US government actively "campaigns" in foreign elections routinely, supporting sides in another country's election which it deems friendly to US interests? That US ambassadors act as de-facto viceroys in many countries, with a veto on who can take power and who cannot? Keeping that in mind, the fact that the Russians seemed to have influenced slightly the US election seems like a bit of cosmic justice, no?
Repetitio est mater studiorum (repetition is the mother of learning), goes the old Latin adage.
Indeed. It's amazing how humans will be ready to do some complicated thing to alleviate the bad effects of some other thing which has a simple solution (stop doing it).
Doctor: You have a high sugar level. You should really stop eating all that chocolate and all those maple syrup candies.
Patient: But I found this rare tropical weed chewed on by the tribesmen of the Exotica rainforest! It reduces blood sugar level by like a factor of two if you chew it 7 times a day! I can eat all the chocolate I want! Filled with maple syrup!
Same thing with climate change.
Problem: Too much CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere.
Solution: Pump less CO2 into the atmosphere.
Bunch of proposed solutions: Do some crazy thing to mitigate, maybe, the fact that too much CO2 is being pumped into the atmosphere. Keep pumping CO2. Open more oil wells.
The first PC that was truly mine (as opposed to really being my dad's computer, on which I occasionally played games or used drawing software) was an Atari ST - sadly I don't remember which model exactly. I got it for my 7th birthday. It had a small monochrome gray monitor, an "odd" two-button mouse (as most IBM PC mice at the time I had seen were "standard" three-button models), no hard drive and two external 3.5'' floppy drives.
I once hooked it up to my small colour TV in order to play some of the games in colour (although not all of them were "compatible" - some just used a monochrome palette). I had some word processing program (forget the name) which was in fact for Macintosh - so loading it was a lengthy procedure of several floppy disks whereby first a Macintosh emulator for Atari was loaded, and then the program itself on top of that. The mouse cursor would turn into a bomb when things went wrong. I was afraid of that as I thought my computer would literally burn out or something unless I shut it down fast enough :)
I had a strange emotional attachment to the Atari brand because of this, and I kept hoping throughout the 90s that they would make a come-back out of the blue (I mean, that someone who owned/bought the Atari brand would do so) using some blazing line of PowerPC processors or something like that. :)
The funny thing is that years later at university, I would first learn assembly programming on a Motorola 68k, the same CPU that powered my first PC.
Ever notice how prolific JS users rarely defend the language? Of course it's badly designed. We use it because it's pragmatic to use the lingua franca of programming.
This is however a bit of a chicken and egg problem, no? If we keep using something because "it's the thing everyone uses", we'll keep on using it forever and never fix it, no matter how bad it is (and you admit it's bad). In order to come up with alternatives and push on them people, we need folks who will keep telling us how bad the status quo is and why. It's not a sufficient condition, but it is a necessary one. Don't tell me dominant or widespread languages can't be replaced - whatever happened to the proliferation of FORTRAN, Pascal/Delphi, or various flavours of BASIC? Things won't happen over night (cf. the Shockwave/Flash to HTML5 transition) but it can be done provided that a better set of alternatives to JS emerge.
...that one can devise a clever way to fool what is essentially a sophisticated gigantic pattern-recognition and classification system. Since that is all artificial neural networks are essentially.
Pizza flavour is the best flavour :) sadly usually lacking in North America
Can't Elon Musk and some other Tesla shareholders
1) Sell a bunch of Tesla shares
2) Use so obtained money to start a new company called Tesla Dealerships, Inc.
3) Have the new company open dealerships in all states which prohibit direct sales
4) Make a franchise agreement or whatever it needs to be called between Tesla Motors and Tesla Dealerships, Inc.
5) Run the operation so that it's essentially direct sales
and thereby effectively circumvent these laws, while still respecting them?
Well, you're absolutely right that a lot of tourism dollars go to liberal-minded coastal places (NYC, California). However, Arizona gets a lot of tourists. Nevada too. Nashville. Memphis (I transferred at Memphis airport once - I remember all the signs being in English and Japanese). Detroit. Wyoming. Utah. Etc. It's not like only the blue states benefit.
We have people literally dying to come across our borders to get here. If the US is THAT bad, why are they coming?
You are mixing apples and oranges. The people dying to get to the US are dirt poor folk from third world countries. The US happens to be an advanced, rich, first-world country next door. You are the closest rich place. Thus they come to you. If Mexico shared a border with Canada, and not the US, Mexicans would try to illegally cross into Canada. If they shared a border with Germany, they'd try to cross over into Germany. Why aren't there a lot of Syrian asylum seekers in the US? They think the US is crap and don't want to come there? Or is it maybe because they are tens of thousands of kilometres away from the nearest US border? There do happen to be millions of them in Turkey though....I guess Turkey being next door to Syria has something to do with it.
What GP is trying to tell you is that "extreme vetting" and the like will do little to discourage desperate illegals (one, they are desperate, two, they are already trying to cross the border without bothering with such things as visas and passports and ETAs) but will do much to annoy legitimate travellers from rich countries, coming temporarily to spend money in the US. You will soon see that yes, you indeed care (as a nation, as an economy), because you will be losing out. On tourism dollars first, and then on business opportunities and investment after that. Treat every passenger as a potential terrorist and piss them off by subjecting them to ridiculous procedures, and guess what, you'll end up pissing off the 99,999...99% of passengers that aren't terrorists. Why would I want to go to a place where I might have my phone searched at the border? Why would I want to be submitted to the humiliation of explaining what every photo in my phone is about to some stranger trained to see a potential deadly threat in every person he comes across? So I can see the Grand Canyon? I can look at pictures of the canyon instead. Better that than some inane border guard looking over all my personal pictures.