This is very important: changing your mind is not hypocrisy. There is absolutely nothing wrong with acknowledging a mistake, it is not weak or shameful.
It is so important that people stop thinking this way.
The Shield Tablet uses the Tegra K1, the Switch uses the newer Tegra X1. Also, even though the Shield is now a few years old I still can't seem to find one for much less than $200, without a controller. The Switch looks like a steal by comparison.
All right, I realize you probably put some effort into your response so I don't want to just leave you hanging but... I'm not going to do this. This style of argument is unreadable and ridiculously time consuming.
I understand the temptation to quote a line that someone said, and then make an argument against that, and then go to the next line, etc. It feels thorough, like you're considering and addressing each point, but it kinda misses the forest for the trees. I only really said three things in my post above, and two of those were pretty unimportant.
I have a personal rule that I won't do the quote-and-respond thing more than once in any response that I write. It's not a hard and fast rule, but I think it's a good guideline that I set for myself. The line-by-line thing takes too long and it turns an argument into a battle of nitpicking.
Anyway, I wanted to tell you why I'm not responding so you don't feel like you've been ignored. That would be unnecessarily rude. I'm not ignoring you, I'm just not willing to do this.
Clinton was the preferred democratic candidate by any measure. If anything, the 2016 election taught us the wisdom of super delegates - they are there as a hedge against some corrupt populist making a lot of promises that can't be kept, and hurling a lot of insults to deflect from his own inadequacies. The Republicans didn't have super delegates, and look what happened.
In principle I agree that the idea of super delegates is contrary to the democratic ideal. In practice, well... here we are.
Your link just gives numbers for each congressman individually. You're telling me that you expect me to add all of those up to see which party receives more contributions from ISPs? It's Republicans. Who gives them money is a pretty trivial bit of information compared to what they actually do though - the congressional record is very clear that Republicans heavily favor eliminating net neutrality and Democrats are trying to preserve it.
I would like to know why though, this didn't used to be a partisan issue. The ISPs were losing and so they decided to spin it that way, and someone took the bait. Why did they take the bait? The campaign contributions that I'm seeing here just aren't enough to explain why a politician would adopt such a detrimental position.... I have some suspicions, but they're not flattering to Americans as a group.
Also the general legal lack of civilian access to firearms means that they're incapable of overthrowing their terribly corrupt and authoritarian government.
Incapable? Even if it did come down to that kind of violence, and even if the revolutionaries were totally incapable of acquiring weapons from outside the country (as almost always happens in those wars), haven't we learned anything from Iraq? Our soldiers suffered something like nine times as many casualties from improvised explosives than they did from bullets. And Iraq has no shortage of guns. A gun, which requires line-of-sight, just isn't as effective at guerilla warfare.
Yeah, some part of it is Netflix's fault at least. Good on Netflix. More to watch and better quality too - those thousands of movies that they used to have were mostly crap anyway. They're being replaced by Netflix's own mostly excellent content... and also more crap. So that part is a wash, but still: overall good.
There's just so much here... All right, from the top: "A lot of people don't understand what a PAC is and think it means big corporate money buying politicians." Okay, maybe. I don't know. I think that most people have at least heard of Sheldon Adelson or Tom Steyer, so I would guess that most people know that PACs aren't just a way for corporations to buy political influence - they're also there to increase the influence of rich individuals. That seems unimportant though, the main thing about PACs is that they only increase the influence of the wealthy. Anyone with less than ~$5,000 to donate has always been able to so by contributing directly to the campaigns, so the difference with PACs is that if you have more money you can now funnel unlimited amounts of it into those. This is the important point. If people are confused about rich corporations vs. rich individuals, I don't see that that matters. It's usually rich individuals who decide on corporate donations anyway.
Collecting signatures in order to get on the ballot has been the norm in... every state? Virtually every state? For... I don't know the history of that. I'm going to say, "For a long time." If someone tried the same thing but with funding and got too many candidates, they set their threshold too low. Collecting signatures may not be the best system, but it is time-tested. Regardless, the point was that elites don't decide who gets to run. I will accept your admonition that I shouldn't say it has never been suggested that only elites should decide things, so I will revise my statement: "people who want pure public funding with no contributions have almost never suggested a system which would leave it up to some elite who gets to run."
So, about Citizen's United: It is most certainly about candidates, donations, PACs, and running political ads within 60 days of an election. All of that, and more.
Citizen's United overturned a law which limited speech in the interest of preventing corruption. The court did not say that limiting speech for this purpose was unconstitutional, only that the law went further than necessary. In the opinion of the court, preventing communication between the donor and the candidate was sufficient for preventing corruption. Thus, any further restriction of speech was struck down.
This position has been upheld and expanded multiple times now including the case above, argued by the Institute for Justice, in which the law was opt-in and placed no limits on anyone's speech. That law was struck down anyway because, in the opinion of the court, it had a chilling effect on political donations since the law made donations less effectual.
So indeed: Following that decision, opt-in approaches are not the only approaches allowed by Citizen's United. There are no approaches allowed by Citizen's United.
I checked the dictionary because I thought you might be technically correct there, but no: going outside the legal system is not required. It might be technically inaccurate to call him a vigilante because it doesn't seem like he was really after justice, just revenge. This seems like an unimportant distinction though.
The parent claimed that his actions were justified because the results were positive, I said that isn't how it works.
Well, your ideas are fine but your criticisms of the other two that you mention seem to be misunderstandings. Yes, people who protest Citizen's United are employing the very tactics which they protest against... so what? If they succeed, then those tactics will no longer be legal and they'll go do something else. That's not a contradiction.
Also, people who want pure public funding with no contributions have never suggested a system which would leave it up to some elite who gets to run. I don't know where that came from. The suggested plan is usually something similar to the system we have now for getting on the ballet - you need a certain number of signatures to qualify, and everyone who qualifies gets funding.
Yes there are some big problems with opt-in approaches, but those are the only approaches allowed by the Citizen's United Decision. Or at least they were until the decision above, argued by the Institute for Justice, which said that even opt-in didn't allow for enough bribery.
The Institute for Justice is a libertarian group which fought against a law intended to equalize campaign funding between candidates. They used the argument, no exaggeration, that equal funding would have a chilling effect on speech because it would dissuade potential campaign donors. In other words: bribery is speech and so we can't have anything which might suppress bribery. They won this suit with an unsurprisingly 5 - 4 decision, split exactly as you'd expect.
I'm sure they do other things as well, and libertarians do tend to dislike things such as licensing, so I'll believe you that licensing is one of their pursuits. This is one small part of what they do, however.
The controversy surrounding the anti-Gawker lawsuit is not a defense of Gawker. Nobody liked Gawker. The controversy is that Thiel abused his money to bankrupt someone that he didn't like, over a personal vendetta. Hogan's position in that suit may have been justified, and note that it isn't Hogan getting flak for this, but without Thiel's money the suit would not have turned into what it was.
Certainly the outcome was positive, but the method highlighted a major issue with out legal system. Namely that rich people have greater sway, even though everyone is supposed to be equal before the law.
He actually only links to one study there, that's the first link, and it does claim that a decent number of people voted illegally and probably swung North Carolina for Obama in 2008. The problem is that the study authors didn't account for error. Here's a response to that study.
I don't know which Harvard study you're talking about, so I did a search for 'in-person voter fraud peer-reviewed study'. These were the first two links from Duck Duck Go:
That first link has many links of its own, to papers from NYU, Columbia University, Arizona State, etc. Nothing from Harvard though.
I appreciate your willingness to accommodate my distaste for video references, but I don't see how recordings of shenanigans are supposed to demonstrate anything. If you show me an hour's worth of video showing people committing fraud, and I show you nine hours of people voting without fraud, does that mean that 10% of votes are fraudulent? No. What If I show you ninety nine hours, does that mean it's 1%? No. So what have we actually demonstrated here? Nothing, it's just anecdote.
That's what the studies are for. If you see an event, you can't just assume that event is commonplace. That's something you have to measure, and that takes work.
I didn't watch your Youtube links, because that's pathetic, but not one of your other links seems to support your claim that people were voting in multiple polling places. There's also no indication here of widespread fraud, or anything about buses for that matter, only a few examples of individuals who were living the in the US and voting, despite only having green cards or being illegal residents.
No one has claimed that in-person voter fraud never happens, just that it's rare enough that it isn't an issue.
The trolling has certainly perpetuated the problem, but we have only ourselves to blame for creating it. Painting your political opponents as abjectly evil has been at the forefront of politics for a couple of decades now, and it's something which has happened on an occasional basis forever.
Aside from ferreting out shills, maybe an approach to addressing this is taking another stab at reforming our system to allow for more than two political parties. It's harder to vilify your opponents when you'll be forced to work with them after the election because no one party is able to get a majority of seats.
If you think there's only one plausible way to interpret the word as it was used in the second amendment, then you are making the same mistake.
In fact, with the way you're throwing around the word "freedom" I suspect that you're making a similar mistake there as well. Let's put this in non-gun terms: Which of the GPL or MIT license is more "free"? I don't want you to answer this question, rather I would like you to recognize that the answer isn't simple. There is more to freedom than individual rights.
I actually bothered to look this up, because 1) Like the parent, I'm wondering if it's possible for Trump to do something competent by accident at least. and 2) I believe that most of our experienced diplomats have been removed since Trump took office and replaced by... no one. Unless things have changed.
But no, as it turns out the ambassador to El Salvador is a woman appointed by Obama. At least we still have an ambassador to El Salvador.
One of the common strategies that dictators employ is the suppression of domestic dissent by creating foreign enemies. They don't have to be real enemies, that doesn't matter, they can just be imagined in the minds of locals. North Korea has been fighting a war against the United States internally, in the minds of its people, for decades now. With only their strong leadership there to fend off the threat. Or an example closer to home: "Those foreigners are taking our jobs! Support me and I will protect you from them."
Obviously this strategy doesn't endear you to your scapegoats, but that doesn't matter to the dictator. The point is, you shouldn't be asking why Russia systematically compromises it's international position, you should be asking why Russian leadership systematically compromises Russia's international position.
I found the top marginal tax rate to be interesting. I knew that it had spiked during the war, but I hadn't known that it was so high for so long. Really more from the New Deal than from the war, and that's basically the whole period where we had a growing middle class.
I like that, it's an informative set of charts and a good visualization... but interpreting it is certainly helped by having some awareness of what the economy was doing at the time.
Why did they get rid of their website and all of their accounts? What is the point in that? You're basically just telling everyone that you scammed them. Wouldn't it make more sense to just walk away and leave everything up, keep them guessing for a little while?
These certainly are deliberative exchanges. There is nothing semi-public about drafts, drafts are private by their nature - they have to be in order to serve their function. We saw the public part of what resulted from those exchanges.
This is just fishing. The only motivation for this is public anger over what the FCC is doing, it's basically harassment: hit them up with pointless requests in the hope that you'll get some tidbit of juicy gossip. It's exactly the sort of behavior that I'd expect from Gizmodo, but that's no reason to humor them.
Also: your claim that there's evidence that he's unsuitable and hopelessly corrupt is not valid. He's doing exactly what congress put him there to do, there's never been any question about what course he would take if he were put in charge. The FCC is functioning as intended.
Someone is hopelessly corrupt, and he may be as well, but that someone is not him.
Slashdot Mirror
This is very important: changing your mind is not hypocrisy. There is absolutely nothing wrong with acknowledging a mistake, it is not weak or shameful.
It is so important that people stop thinking this way.
The Shield Tablet uses the Tegra K1, the Switch uses the newer Tegra X1. Also, even though the Shield is now a few years old I still can't seem to find one for much less than $200, without a controller. The Switch looks like a steal by comparison.
All right, I realize you probably put some effort into your response so I don't want to just leave you hanging but... I'm not going to do this. This style of argument is unreadable and ridiculously time consuming.
I understand the temptation to quote a line that someone said, and then make an argument against that, and then go to the next line, etc. It feels thorough, like you're considering and addressing each point, but it kinda misses the forest for the trees. I only really said three things in my post above, and two of those were pretty unimportant.
I have a personal rule that I won't do the quote-and-respond thing more than once in any response that I write. It's not a hard and fast rule, but I think it's a good guideline that I set for myself. The line-by-line thing takes too long and it turns an argument into a battle of nitpicking.
Anyway, I wanted to tell you why I'm not responding so you don't feel like you've been ignored. That would be unnecessarily rude. I'm not ignoring you, I'm just not willing to do this.
Arguing about Apple is not the new Slashdot. That is very old Slashdot, that is Slashdot Classic. We know how to do Apple arguments real good.
Clinton was the preferred democratic candidate by any measure. If anything, the 2016 election taught us the wisdom of super delegates - they are there as a hedge against some corrupt populist making a lot of promises that can't be kept, and hurling a lot of insults to deflect from his own inadequacies. The Republicans didn't have super delegates, and look what happened.
In principle I agree that the idea of super delegates is contrary to the democratic ideal. In practice, well... here we are.
Your link just gives numbers for each congressman individually. You're telling me that you expect me to add all of those up to see which party receives more contributions from ISPs? It's Republicans. Who gives them money is a pretty trivial bit of information compared to what they actually do though - the congressional record is very clear that Republicans heavily favor eliminating net neutrality and Democrats are trying to preserve it.
... I have some suspicions, but they're not flattering to Americans as a group.
I would like to know why though, this didn't used to be a partisan issue. The ISPs were losing and so they decided to spin it that way, and someone took the bait. Why did they take the bait? The campaign contributions that I'm seeing here just aren't enough to explain why a politician would adopt such a detrimental position.
Also the general legal lack of civilian access to firearms means that they're incapable of overthrowing their terribly corrupt and authoritarian government.
Incapable? Even if it did come down to that kind of violence, and even if the revolutionaries were totally incapable of acquiring weapons from outside the country (as almost always happens in those wars), haven't we learned anything from Iraq? Our soldiers suffered something like nine times as many casualties from improvised explosives than they did from bullets. And Iraq has no shortage of guns. A gun, which requires line-of-sight, just isn't as effective at guerilla warfare.
Yeah, some part of it is Netflix's fault at least. Good on Netflix. More to watch and better quality too - those thousands of movies that they used to have were mostly crap anyway. They're being replaced by Netflix's own mostly excellent content... and also more crap. So that part is a wash, but still: overall good.
There's just so much here... All right, from the top: "A lot of people don't understand what a PAC is and think it means big corporate money buying politicians." Okay, maybe. I don't know. I think that most people have at least heard of Sheldon Adelson or Tom Steyer, so I would guess that most people know that PACs aren't just a way for corporations to buy political influence - they're also there to increase the influence of rich individuals. That seems unimportant though, the main thing about PACs is that they only increase the influence of the wealthy. Anyone with less than ~$5,000 to donate has always been able to so by contributing directly to the campaigns, so the difference with PACs is that if you have more money you can now funnel unlimited amounts of it into those. This is the important point. If people are confused about rich corporations vs. rich individuals, I don't see that that matters. It's usually rich individuals who decide on corporate donations anyway.
Collecting signatures in order to get on the ballot has been the norm in... every state? Virtually every state? For... I don't know the history of that. I'm going to say, "For a long time." If someone tried the same thing but with funding and got too many candidates, they set their threshold too low. Collecting signatures may not be the best system, but it is time-tested. Regardless, the point was that elites don't decide who gets to run. I will accept your admonition that I shouldn't say it has never been suggested that only elites should decide things, so I will revise my statement: "people who want pure public funding with no contributions have almost never suggested a system which would leave it up to some elite who gets to run."
So, about Citizen's United: It is most certainly about candidates, donations, PACs, and running political ads within 60 days of an election. All of that, and more.
Citizen's United overturned a law which limited speech in the interest of preventing corruption. The court did not say that limiting speech for this purpose was unconstitutional, only that the law went further than necessary. In the opinion of the court, preventing communication between the donor and the candidate was sufficient for preventing corruption. Thus, any further restriction of speech was struck down.
This position has been upheld and expanded multiple times now including the case above, argued by the Institute for Justice, in which the law was opt-in and placed no limits on anyone's speech. That law was struck down anyway because, in the opinion of the court, it had a chilling effect on political donations since the law made donations less effectual.
So indeed: Following that decision, opt-in approaches are not the only approaches allowed by Citizen's United. There are no approaches allowed by Citizen's United.
I checked the dictionary because I thought you might be technically correct there, but no: going outside the legal system is not required. It might be technically inaccurate to call him a vigilante because it doesn't seem like he was really after justice, just revenge. This seems like an unimportant distinction though.
The parent claimed that his actions were justified because the results were positive, I said that isn't how it works.
Well, your ideas are fine but your criticisms of the other two that you mention seem to be misunderstandings. Yes, people who protest Citizen's United are employing the very tactics which they protest against... so what? If they succeed, then those tactics will no longer be legal and they'll go do something else. That's not a contradiction.
Also, people who want pure public funding with no contributions have never suggested a system which would leave it up to some elite who gets to run. I don't know where that came from. The suggested plan is usually something similar to the system we have now for getting on the ballet - you need a certain number of signatures to qualify, and everyone who qualifies gets funding.
Yes there are some big problems with opt-in approaches, but those are the only approaches allowed by the Citizen's United Decision. Or at least they were until the decision above, argued by the Institute for Justice, which said that even opt-in didn't allow for enough bribery.
The Institute for Justice is a libertarian group which fought against a law intended to equalize campaign funding between candidates. They used the argument, no exaggeration, that equal funding would have a chilling effect on speech because it would dissuade potential campaign donors. In other words: bribery is speech and so we can't have anything which might suppress bribery. They won this suit with an unsurprisingly 5 - 4 decision, split exactly as you'd expect.
I'm sure they do other things as well, and libertarians do tend to dislike things such as licensing, so I'll believe you that licensing is one of their pursuits. This is one small part of what they do, however.
... Why? Why don't you see anything wrong with that? You're talking about a vigilante.
If I used my gobs of money to bankrupt you, would you have a problem with it then? There's probably someone out there who thinks you're evil.
The controversy surrounding the anti-Gawker lawsuit is not a defense of Gawker. Nobody liked Gawker. The controversy is that Thiel abused his money to bankrupt someone that he didn't like, over a personal vendetta. Hogan's position in that suit may have been justified, and note that it isn't Hogan getting flak for this, but without Thiel's money the suit would not have turned into what it was.
Certainly the outcome was positive, but the method highlighted a major issue with out legal system. Namely that rich people have greater sway, even though everyone is supposed to be equal before the law.
He actually only links to one study there, that's the first link, and it does claim that a decent number of people voted illegally and probably swung North Carolina for Obama in 2008. The problem is that the study authors didn't account for error. Here's a response to that study.
I don't know which Harvard study you're talking about, so I did a search for 'in-person voter fraud peer-reviewed study'. These were the first two links from Duck Duck Go:
But a look at the facts makes clear fraud is vanishingly rare, and does not happen on a scale even close to that necessary to “rig” an election.
In-person voter fraud ‘a very rare phenomenon’
That first link has many links of its own, to papers from NYU, Columbia University, Arizona State, etc. Nothing from Harvard though.
I appreciate your willingness to accommodate my distaste for video references, but I don't see how recordings of shenanigans are supposed to demonstrate anything. If you show me an hour's worth of video showing people committing fraud, and I show you nine hours of people voting without fraud, does that mean that 10% of votes are fraudulent? No. What If I show you ninety nine hours, does that mean it's 1%? No. So what have we actually demonstrated here? Nothing, it's just anecdote.
That's what the studies are for. If you see an event, you can't just assume that event is commonplace. That's something you have to measure, and that takes work.
I didn't watch your Youtube links, because that's pathetic, but not one of your other links seems to support your claim that people were voting in multiple polling places. There's also no indication here of widespread fraud, or anything about buses for that matter, only a few examples of individuals who were living the in the US and voting, despite only having green cards or being illegal residents.
No one has claimed that in-person voter fraud never happens, just that it's rare enough that it isn't an issue.
The trolling has certainly perpetuated the problem, but we have only ourselves to blame for creating it. Painting your political opponents as abjectly evil has been at the forefront of politics for a couple of decades now, and it's something which has happened on an occasional basis forever.
Aside from ferreting out shills, maybe an approach to addressing this is taking another stab at reforming our system to allow for more than two political parties. It's harder to vilify your opponents when you'll be forced to work with them after the election because no one party is able to get a majority of seats.
"Militia" doesn't mean what you think it means
If you think there's only one plausible way to interpret the word as it was used in the second amendment, then you are making the same mistake.
In fact, with the way you're throwing around the word "freedom" I suspect that you're making a similar mistake there as well. Let's put this in non-gun terms: Which of the GPL or MIT license is more "free"? I don't want you to answer this question, rather I would like you to recognize that the answer isn't simple. There is more to freedom than individual rights.
I actually bothered to look this up, because 1) Like the parent, I'm wondering if it's possible for Trump to do something competent by accident at least. and 2) I believe that most of our experienced diplomats have been removed since Trump took office and replaced by... no one. Unless things have changed.
But no, as it turns out the ambassador to El Salvador is a woman appointed by Obama. At least we still have an ambassador to El Salvador.
One of the common strategies that dictators employ is the suppression of domestic dissent by creating foreign enemies. They don't have to be real enemies, that doesn't matter, they can just be imagined in the minds of locals. North Korea has been fighting a war against the United States internally, in the minds of its people, for decades now. With only their strong leadership there to fend off the threat. Or an example closer to home: "Those foreigners are taking our jobs! Support me and I will protect you from them."
Obviously this strategy doesn't endear you to your scapegoats, but that doesn't matter to the dictator. The point is, you shouldn't be asking why Russia systematically compromises it's international position, you should be asking why Russian leadership systematically compromises Russia's international position.
I found the top marginal tax rate to be interesting. I knew that it had spiked during the war, but I hadn't known that it was so high for so long. Really more from the New Deal than from the war, and that's basically the whole period where we had a growing middle class.
I like that, it's an informative set of charts and a good visualization... but interpreting it is certainly helped by having some awareness of what the economy was doing at the time.
Why did they get rid of their website and all of their accounts? What is the point in that? You're basically just telling everyone that you scammed them. Wouldn't it make more sense to just walk away and leave everything up, keep them guessing for a little while?
These certainly are deliberative exchanges. There is nothing semi-public about drafts, drafts are private by their nature - they have to be in order to serve their function. We saw the public part of what resulted from those exchanges.
This is just fishing. The only motivation for this is public anger over what the FCC is doing, it's basically harassment: hit them up with pointless requests in the hope that you'll get some tidbit of juicy gossip. It's exactly the sort of behavior that I'd expect from Gizmodo, but that's no reason to humor them.
Also: your claim that there's evidence that he's unsuitable and hopelessly corrupt is not valid. He's doing exactly what congress put him there to do, there's never been any question about what course he would take if he were put in charge. The FCC is functioning as intended.
Someone is hopelessly corrupt, and he may be as well, but that someone is not him.