they forgot that the party doesn't like Cruz either.
Where I live the media were running stories only a couple of weeks ago about how Cruz was hated by the Republican elite, almost as much as they hate Trump. Yesterday I read about how Cruz is teaming up with Kasich to stop Trump, and the Republicans love Cruz.
Oh Republicans hate Cruz, more than they hate Trump, more than they hate Obama, even more than they hate that illegally immigrated Islamic-Mexican transsexual abortion doctor named Osama.
But Cruz only loses them the election, Trump maybe loses congress and senate while firmly ensconcing slightly racist trolling white men as the base of the Republican party.
No-one seems able to explain how that was ever going to work, so of course it fell over at the first hurdle, and Trump won five more States. If Cruz has Fiorina as his running mate, what about Kasich?
None of this makes any sense unless you get no outright winner, and the Party can then insert their own man.
Seems like they needed to work that out before talking about it publicly.
The problem is that Cruz has an ideology that gives him a lower ceiling than Trump and Kasich has had his best success running as "None of the Above". Neither has a remote chance at getting another shot at the nomination so it's win or bust, and if the delegates are going to hand it to a not-Trump it's going to be the not-Trump who seems to be in charge.
And at least in NY that likely would have disproportionately older people (it seemed to hit people with old registrations more) and minorities (because they always get hit the worst by voting
Funny how Clinton's alleged base are the ones getting the tampering. Maybe they don't actually support her as much as claimed?
I think I get your logic.
Some Sanders supporters can't vote due to an administrative screwup: "See! It's proof that Clinton rigged the vote!!"
Some Clinton supporters can't vote due to an administrative screwup: "See! It's proof that Clinton rigged the vote!!"
The biggest gatekeepers are the two main parties themselves. They host their nominating process on the dime of the taxpayer, not all support the two party system.
1) I don't have a problem with the parties picking who they are going to run, anyway they want. I oppose it being funded by Tax payers. They should pay for it themselves.
2) Primaries should have all parties represented with their OWN (singular) candidate. This is to get to the top two candidates.
3) I am all for the electoral college. Imagine for a second, the top two California Candidates are Bernie(Socialist Party) and Hillary(DNC). And the top two Texas Candidates being Ted (TeaParty) and Donald (GOP) and really messing up the Electoral Collage being the ONLY candidates available for those two states in November. No GOP/Conservative in CA, and no Liberal/Socialist in TX. And the VP is the runner up (rather than party ticket) (like it was before)
The fact is PARTY(aka Group) politics has ruined this country, and there is no going back. I hate the fact that Parties are listed next to candidate's names as prima fascia evidence of divide and conquer of the elites who run the current system, trading favors for election cycle wins.
I think you might have it backwards, the fix for the US is to make the parties stronger, not weaker.
If you look at the parliamentary democracies that generally seem to do a better job of governance there's several significant differences.
1) The parties are far stronger. There's almost no need for a party whip, almost every vote in a parliamentary democracy is a party line vote without question.
2) The candidate is far less important, voters really only care about the party.
3) The party leader is really powerful.
I think this really improves the quality of governance.
The problem in the US is it's congress who really drives policy, and congress is run by a bunch of individual small-time politicians with a lot of autonomy. It's trivial for a big special interest to come in and individually overpower a bunch of key legislators or drive the media narrative with a big PR push. Or even without that it's hard for more reasonable candidates to withstand a primary challenger whose channelling a bunch of rhetoric.
But with a powerful party they have the ability to withstand the special interest groups and clearly communicate their platform to the voters. No one gives a crap about the NRA or union endorsements in other countries because people know what the parties stand for and the NRA doesn't get to dictate the terms of the gun control debate.
No matter what you do politics will be run by the elites. The only question is whether it's the somewhat idealistic elites who've gone into politics because they want to make things better or the cynical self-interested elites who want to run things behind the scenes.
The super delegates problem is a side effect of the same thing that has Clinton leading, which is that insiders chose their candidate years ago. Hillary is leading because the media, owned by that same insider group, plays her constant lip service and has for well over a year leading up to this election. Other owned politicians are similarly playing her lip service. There is little to no talk about the corruption in her public service, no talk about how she openly panders and lies to do so, and no talk about her political past as the first lady which would harm her campaign.
Or the insiders just generally think she's the best candidate, even despite those supposed shortcomings. Whether you think they should be even that extra influence of being a superdelegate is another matter entirely.
Early on, she won how many tie breakers by coin toss exactly? Winning because of votes my ass!
Seven or something, an utterly inconsequential number over the course of the campaign.
And why are you even talking about it? Do you have some bizarre conspiracy theory whereby the party anticipated a perfect tie in those caucuses, and so gave all the chairs special trick coins just in case?
And even if so it doesn't change the fact she has also won a ton more votes.
And at least in NY that likely would have disproportionately older people (it seemed to hit people with old registrations more) and minorities (because they always get hit the worst by voting issues). Aka Hillary's base.
Whatever you think of Hillary's politics she won because more people wanted to vote for her and more people did vote for her.
The door to this was left open when 191 million voter records were leaked, making re-registration with edited details trivial. The earlier scandal over the DNC voter records being open allow for specific targeting of those not supporting Clinton which is the demographic reporting issues.
Quite simply, yes, there's overwhelming signs that this election is being heavily rigged and in dirty
Ok, lets look at the first piece of evidence from that link.
Shelly Berry shared on Facebook that she had proof her New York voter registration was changed. Her registration was switched from Democrat to unaffiliated and she was told the change was made in 2012.
So Hillary's dastardly plan to rig the primary by specifically suppressing Bernie supporters began four years ago?
Otherwise do you have any idea how many people would need to be involved to mess with enough registration records to really affect the democratic primary? That's a 9-11 truther level of conspiracy theory.
Sure there are problems with the US's voting system, it's a disorganized mess, it may be worse this year or it might just look worse because of the extra scrutiny.
But voting issues + your favourite candidate not winning aren't the same as "overwhelming signs that this election is being heavily rigged and in dirty".
If they are trying to pay for something but it isn't available for sale, they aren't really exercising any sense of entitlement. The market has rejected them - and their money - so they are obtaining what they want some other way. There is no indication from this - and if anything counter indication - that they wouldn't pay for it if they could.
I'll occasionally download stuff I really want to see that is unavailable for online purchase and I'll readily admit it comes from a sense of entitlement. Morally if I'm going to view something I should view it in a way the creators/owners intended, usually by handing over some money, but I'm not prepared to fork over the amount of money it would take to get cable + HBO just so I can watch GoT.
Similarly if I'm going consume animal products I should make sure they're raised ethically. I'll buy free range eggs but the meat is too expensive.
Not doing the right thing because it's too inconvenient is a standard part of being human, I'd much sooner admit I'm imperfect than get into the habit of trying to rationalize the bad things I do as actually being right.
People only see and evaluate their experiences; what they have lived. If you put these same college students into another system for a couple months they might change their tune.
All it takes is a trip to Eastern Europe for any American to realize their world is pretty darn good. But given modern politics we might have to bring the Post-Soviet style problems to America firsthand before they can realize the situation.
Socialism, not communism. And realistically when they say socialism they probably don't really mean socialism but social democracy, aka the Nordic Model. Basically high taxes, a robust social safety net, and free markets (though people on both sides forget about that part).
"But if things do go wrong it's really easy for me to ssh in and figure out what's going on because the Linux ecosystem is actually designed to anticipate errors, as opposed to my Mac where I can't tell the difference between an error and stupid interface design."
Care to elaborate? From a SSHing in and fixing the issue standpoint I am not seeing any difference that you would encounter between a Darwin system and Linux distro that would fall into "regular userland issue".
From an application perspective Linux apps are generally designed with command line users in mind. You're a lot more likely to find human readable configuration files, online resources that explain how to fix things in the configs, a rich toolkit pre-installed, and if there's something extra you need there's a ton of troubleshooting apps trivially installable with yum or apt.
Sure there's fink and other package repositories for Apple but they're much sparser, not as well maintained, tend to conflict with eachother, and require a bunch hoops to install XCode and such. Basically Linux makes it way easier for me toubleshoot.
Oh, and on the topic of usability I just took another look at the App Store and found the El Capitan screen where I clicked a button that said "Download" and got no feedback, just some busy window indication forever.
Now there's a pretty picture of some mountains and the words "OS X El Capitan A refined experience... yadda yadda".
At the side there's a box that says "Downloaded".
Yay!! I did downloaded it! Now what next???
Hmm, underneath the pretty picture there's big letters "No Updates Available".
Ok, so I know I downloaded it... but how do I install it? There's no install button, there's no any button, just "Downloaded" and "No Updates", maybe that means it was installed? Do I have to go somewhere else to install?
Wait! I see some small text! It's a link! "Learn more"! Yay! Information!!
A new page comes up! And there's a button! There's only one button, this is Apple after all. But I can click it!
And the text on this wonderful button says.....
Download...
F U Apple and your El Capitan download mind games!!!!.
>>My Linux boxes much more usable and easy to troubleshoot when there is a problem.
you're missing the point.... for most users, not having the problem in the first place is worth far more than "ease of debugging" after the problem has happened. I run Linux on my own machines, and force it on my teenagers, but never in a million years would I try to pass it off on my elderly parents.
They'd probably do the same as my elderly mother does with Apple, she either doesn't do what she wants to do or finds some workaround until I show up and try to fix it.
The use-cases of an elderly parent aren't that complicated, read and send email, play videos from the email, browse the web, upload photos, print things, video chat.
Once you get things configured it's all point and click, they don't actually need a command line.
But if things do go wrong it's really easy for me to ssh in and figure out what's going on because the Linux ecosystem is actually designed to anticipate errors, as opposed to my Mac where I can't tell the difference between an error and stupid interface design.
Apple is one giant bubble that's starting to pop. I'm amazed at how many people are totally in love with Apple and are incapable of seeing things objectively. It's like investment decisions are all being made by Apple fanbois.
I was an Apple fanboy as a kid but I have to say in the past few years their interface is getting absolutely awful.
Sure it looks nice, but they've gone so far towards simplicity it's becoming unusable if you ever stray the tiniest bit off their standard use-case.
On my Android I have a button to bring up a configuration screen for any application, for iOS it's a mystery for each app.
My mother's iPad stopped ringing on incoming calls. Why? I haven't the foggiest idea.
I wanted to print to file from her iPad, it turned out to be hidden in some unlabelled button in an unlabelled expander.
The OS X seems to have gone to a model of zero feedback.
My laptop bugged me to upgrade to El Capitan, I clicked download, the download button greyed out, and I never got another piece of feedback. I don't know if it's downloading, downloaded, or simply stuck. I'm guessing it failed because the same thing happened a few months earlier. Same with importing photos from Mail to iPhoto, click to import, and no feedback, no idea if they imported or not, or to where.
I don't know what's gotten into their coolaid but I wouldn't consider them to be remotely user friendly. My Linux boxes much more usable and easy to troubleshoot when there is a problem.
The problem is this "trick" actually requires a ton of work and a bunch of risk, you've basically designed your life around working the tax laws and it requires enough wealth to invest in things like rental properties.
It's called being entrepreneur.
Which is the point I was trying to make. You're not actually talking about a normal taxpayer, you're talking about someone who has focused their life into becoming an investor and avoiding taxes.
Even then I want real entrepreneurs focusing on building businesses, not structuring their wealth to avoid taxes.
A small or medium sized business can't afford to open a separate office in Reno just to reduce their tax bill.
A small business don't need to run a physical office in Nevada. A PO box and a mail forwarding service can do the job for a few hundred bucks per year. Most states won't have a problem with it. California, of course, is always problematic because they're trying to collect revenue from everyone and anything that moves.
Apple doesn't have an office, they have some sort of subsidy. If nothing else this needs lawyers and accountants to make sure you're following the rules and extra bookkeeping to keep everything straight. If you don't know what you're doing you'll end up in legal trouble, and making sure you know what you're doing takes money.
And that's just for one trick, there's also deductions, grants, and all sorts of bookkeeping that's only feasible when you reach a certain size.
As we've learned from the new Social Justice Warriors movement, many people feel "harassed" just by comments or actions that aren't intended to be harassing... hell, I've probably scared at least three people to their safe place just by this post alone.
After reading the comments I think a lot of people here need someone to build them a safe place to protect them from Social Justice Warriors.
The point is, the normal taxpayer can't afford them - it's not gain at the margin for the taxes a little guy saves, but is for the big guys.
The little guy can do a variation of this. For example, start a Nevada corporation and open a corporate brokerage account (day trade or load up dividend-paying stocks) or own rental properties. Once the corporation makes a significant amount of money each year, you can draw a salary and open a qualified retirement to put away $54,000 each year (a combination of salary contributions plus corporate matching). Do that for a few decades, you will have a retirement account that will greatly exceed whatever you can put into an IRA/401K.
That's the real problem in my mind.
You need to change your thinking. The tax laws will never change to favor the small guy, so why not use them to your own advantage? The trick comes from converting earned income (taxed at highest rate) to portfolio (stocks) and/or passive (real estate) income (taxed at a lower rate). When portfolio/passive income exceeds earned income, you can stop working for someone else and work for yourself.
The problem is this "trick" actually requires a ton of work and a bunch of risk, you've basically designed your life around working the tax laws and it requires enough wealth to invest in things like rental properties. Personally I'd be better off just doing my own business on the side and actually contributing to the economy.
That's the problem with all these corporate subsidies and complex tax laws. Because they're so complex they're only really feasible to exploit once you're a massive organization. A small or medium sized business can't afford to open a separate office in Reno just to reduce their tax bill. They're stuck paying California tax and paying extra because they also have to cover the portion Apple skips out on!!
Telling us that prominent Jihadis are twice as likely to have studied STEM is informative, but doesn't really give us any extra insight.
Here's the full quote: Prominent jihadis are often well educated. Forty-six per cent of our sample went to university. Of these, 57 per cent graduated with STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine) degrees. This was double the number of jihadis taking Islamic studies.
That they're well educated isn't surprising, prominent people often are.
But does something about STEMM make you more likely to be a Jihadis? Well we don't know since it's only prominent Jihadis.
We also don't know how those ratios compare to the seed population of Arab Sunni males in those countries. Are those fields over-represented or under-represented?
And how is the breakdown among STEMM fields? Are some particularly over-represented? If so is it a result of them being extra-susceptible or extra-recruited?
It just bugs me since it's been known for a long time that prominent Jihadis come from STEMM, but no one ever seems to get around to investigating the interesting questions.
Not to say that real ones don't exist, but I've long been skeptical about the super-misogynistic Bernie Bros and (without getting overly conspiratorial) they've just felt false-flag to me.
You new to the Internet? Vocally super-misogynistic guys aren't hard to find and when they dabble in politics you can be assured it will be against the woman who's the big front runner.
Reading this makes me wonder if I wasn't just being silly thinking that.
Regardless of that and whether or not it has anything to do with the story, I follow a few pro-Clinton people who seem to have an almost clinical compulsion to attacking Bernie (ironically typically about how negative he and his supporters are)
Have you read these comments? The story is still pretty new and I already see
"Hillary is far and away the worst choice in the entire race." + 5
"Maybe a good start to be corrected is where did the six billion dollars that are missing from Hillary's State Department go? And why where favors given to foreign governments who gave to the Bill and Hillary so-called charity." + 5
Sure Hillary isn't an ideal choice for President but she's far from the worst, I'm not even sure I'd call her below average. Sure she changes her positions to match public opinion, not only does that make her the same as pretty much every politician on the planet I've always felt it's kind of a good thing when politicians actually try to do what the public wants.
There does need to be some kind of reform when it comes to campaigns and financing and all of that, but it is very difficult to do. See, we have this thing called the First Amendment. Finding the right set of rules that respect the First Amendment, and yet helps prevent money from completely dominating an election cycle, is not an easy thing.
Though I heard an interesting claim that it isn't the money during elections but the lobbyists between elections basically volunteering to do all the work who are the real problem.
Though I think the super PACs are still a major issue.
That said...
I would like to note that Bernie Sanders (note that I am not endorsing him) doesn't have a war chest even close to what Clinton has, and if it weren't for the super delegate system, he would be very close to winning the nomination.
Either way I think Sanders has been out-raising Clinton for a while based on small donations.
Or what about Trump (also not endorsing him)? Sure, he's rich, but he hasn't spent much money at all on ads or these kinds of organizations - he doesn't need to, he gets more free news coverage than anyone else, by far.
So it seems that money isn't everything if you have a popular message. Maybe we don't need these rules and laws which spawn these special organizations after all. Maybe all of these campaign finance laws are just there to stop the outsider types from having as good a chance.
Maybe.
It isn't an easy problem to solve and you'll never make everyone happy.
Trump isn't someone to draw a general rule from, if you want to win elections you need to spend some money if for no other reason than for voters to take you seriously.
In the Presidential election itself I don't think it matters that much since they have such a high profile, but in down ticket races and even primaries I think cash becomes I huge deal.
Sanders basically started his campaign as "not Hillary" and took a few states to build a war chest and a profile. If he had a bunch of cash to establish his presence at the start it might have been a very different campaign.
As for the corrupting influence of money the worst example I've seen was the "Sheldon Adelson primary" of the '12 Republican cycle when all the candidates went to win his support. Not only did Adelson single-handedly keep Newt Gingrich in the race for weeks but all the candidates basically assumed his policy positions. A single donor was able to write the policy of the Republican campaign.
Proposed change is divisive. And offensive to people of color. If you really want to put a woman of color, a historic personality, I would recommend to put Madam C.J.Walker. Rather than celebrating stubborn personas such as Rosa Parks, or a busybody Harriet Tubman, I would recommend putting C.J.Walker, who was black, former slave, however managed to be inspiration to others, create business and wealth. I guess it is too late, as it is already decided.
I don't understand why you think it is offensive to celebrate black people who fought for civil rights. Your idea of a black role model frankly sounds much more offensive, nothing against C.J. Walker who sounds inspirational, but to make her the centrepiece you're creating a distinction between "uppity blacks" and "good blacks". Not only does that imply that discrimination doesn't exist and black people just need to stop complaining and play by the rules, but you're actually applying that thinking to the 19th century when playing by the rules meant being subjected to legally encoded racism.
Oh, and Walker was born after the end of the civil war in 1867, I don't think she was a slave.
What is this with America's obsession with slavery. In large part of the Europe there was an equivalent of slavery - Serfdom. Serfdom is not romanticized in anyway and a lot of Europeans, pretty much have serfs in their genealogical tree, including myself. Serfdom and Slavery are identical in nature.
The US still talks about slavery in the context of racism because unlike serfdom the basis of slavery was racism.
I know it's ancient tradition and all, but it seems to me like people are probably one of the worst things you can put on your currency. No matter who you choose, it's going to piss off at least a third of the population immediately,
If you're offended by Harriet Tubman than you're pretty much digging for things to get offended by.
and there's a good chance that in fifteen to a hundred years you'll figure out that, by modern standards, the subject committed multiple atrocities.
Not really, in some cases there are sketchy episodes where we might find out more details, or there are terrible known things that the general public isn't really aware of (ie, all the stuff with Andrew Jackson). But even if Harriet Tubman was a cannibalistic serial killer who tortured puppies that's not something we're going to discover at this point.
A few years ago, if you had asked the average citizen to decide who was the least controversial person in American history, someone that would never ever be considered a villain, they might easily have suggested Bill Cosby.
Which is why you try to avoid naming things after people until the person's been dead for a while.
This just proves Breivik's point that Norway is too left-wing. I'd love to live in a utopian society where we can be just nice to everybody, where everybody's needs are covered and punishment is unnecessary. But in the real world, there will always be nihilists like this guy who ruin it for the rest.
So other than Breivik not being punished as harshly as you want what's the downside of this decision?
As for the upside I'm now very confident that prisoners in Norway are treated humanely.
A note to the poster of the original story, if you find yourself citing Russia Today as the primary source you should probably double check your facts.
A more nuanced primitive society with some nasty bits would be a more interesting movie, though that lack of subtlety is probably part of why it made so much money (while being completely unmemorable). People disparage blockbusters for a reason.
+ the obviously retarded "greed (business) is evil". Of course it's OK for James Cameron to hold these views since he has a private jet, 4 houses, a couple of yachts and his own helicopter. The rest of us, no, we're not allowed to cut down trees. My own personal opinion on this is we shouldn't, but that's not the point here. Anyway it's OK if James Cameron wants to build a 5th holiday home. It's just the usual tedious hypocrisy we get from people in the movies.
It's only hypocritical if Cameron made his money strip mining a jungle.
He wasn't arguing for socialism. He was arguing against exploitation, environmental devastation, and destructive corporate greed.
There's nothing in the movie to argue against rich people in general.
2) Why cannot individuals defend their privacy on their own property? If gun operation is allowed on their property normally, why is firing their gun at an intruder any more "reckless" than clay target practice?
You don't own the airspace above your property, nor is it always easy to tell if something in the sky is over your property or not, not to mention the obvious danger in shooting a gun into the air.
Now there obviously has to be some more/better defined restrictions on what drones can do, but having people shooting drones out of the sky isn't a solution.
3) Why are we talking about a 5 or 20 year JAIL sentence? Do they realize how much damage incarcerating people does to society and individual's lives? A felony and 5 year jail sentence can wreck entire lives. How is this appropriate for disrupting drone operation, especially over one's own property?
The 5 and 20 is the maximum, it would probably only ever be used if there were some major aggravating circumstances.
Second the FAA isn't passing new drone specific laws, they're saying they believe existing laws apply to drones, and those laws have 5 and 20 maximums respectively (though probably not for drones).
4) Why is someone shooting a drone on their property different than shooting an unoccupied vehicle trespassing on their property? These cases should be simply prosecuted under existing "destruction of property" statutes, which should not be felonies, and should not have multiple-year jail sentences.
Shooting a vehicle on the ground is a bit less dangerous than shooting things in the sky.
I think the FAA is also trying to head off an outbreak of people trying to shoot down drones. Better to freak people out a bit then for people to get the idea they can start playing target practice with drones without any real consequences.
Slashdot Mirror
they forgot that the party doesn't like Cruz either.
Where I live the media were running stories only a couple of weeks ago about how Cruz was hated by the Republican elite, almost as much as they hate Trump.
Yesterday I read about how Cruz is teaming up with Kasich to stop Trump, and the Republicans love Cruz.
Oh Republicans hate Cruz, more than they hate Trump, more than they hate Obama, even more than they hate that illegally immigrated Islamic-Mexican transsexual abortion doctor named Osama.
But Cruz only loses them the election, Trump maybe loses congress and senate while firmly ensconcing slightly racist trolling white men as the base of the Republican party.
No-one seems able to explain how that was ever going to work, so of course it fell over at the first hurdle, and Trump won five more States.
If Cruz has Fiorina as his running mate, what about Kasich?
None of this makes any sense unless you get no outright winner, and the Party can then insert their own man.
Seems like they needed to work that out before talking about it publicly.
The problem is that Cruz has an ideology that gives him a lower ceiling than Trump and Kasich has had his best success running as "None of the Above". Neither has a remote chance at getting another shot at the nomination so it's win or bust, and if the delegates are going to hand it to a not-Trump it's going to be the not-Trump who seems to be in charge.
And at least in NY that likely would have disproportionately older people (it seemed to hit people with old registrations more) and minorities (because they always get hit the worst by voting
Funny how Clinton's alleged base are the ones getting the tampering. Maybe they don't actually support her as much as claimed?
I think I get your logic.
Some Sanders supporters can't vote due to an administrative screwup: "See! It's proof that Clinton rigged the vote!!"
Some Clinton supporters can't vote due to an administrative screwup: "See! It's proof that Clinton rigged the vote!!"
The biggest gatekeepers are the two main parties themselves. They host their nominating process on the dime of the taxpayer, not all support the two party system.
1) I don't have a problem with the parties picking who they are going to run, anyway they want. I oppose it being funded by Tax payers. They should pay for it themselves.
2) Primaries should have all parties represented with their OWN (singular) candidate. This is to get to the top two candidates.
3) I am all for the electoral college. Imagine for a second, the top two California Candidates are Bernie(Socialist Party) and Hillary(DNC). And the top two Texas Candidates being Ted (TeaParty) and Donald (GOP) and really messing up the Electoral Collage being the ONLY candidates available for those two states in November. No GOP/Conservative in CA, and no Liberal/Socialist in TX. And the VP is the runner up (rather than party ticket) (like it was before)
The fact is PARTY(aka Group) politics has ruined this country, and there is no going back. I hate the fact that Parties are listed next to candidate's names as prima fascia evidence of divide and conquer of the elites who run the current system, trading favors for election cycle wins.
I think you might have it backwards, the fix for the US is to make the parties stronger, not weaker.
If you look at the parliamentary democracies that generally seem to do a better job of governance there's several significant differences.
1) The parties are far stronger. There's almost no need for a party whip, almost every vote in a parliamentary democracy is a party line vote without question.
2) The candidate is far less important, voters really only care about the party.
3) The party leader is really powerful.
I think this really improves the quality of governance.
The problem in the US is it's congress who really drives policy, and congress is run by a bunch of individual small-time politicians with a lot of autonomy. It's trivial for a big special interest to come in and individually overpower a bunch of key legislators or drive the media narrative with a big PR push. Or even without that it's hard for more reasonable candidates to withstand a primary challenger whose channelling a bunch of rhetoric.
But with a powerful party they have the ability to withstand the special interest groups and clearly communicate their platform to the voters. No one gives a crap about the NRA or union endorsements in other countries because people know what the parties stand for and the NRA doesn't get to dictate the terms of the gun control debate.
No matter what you do politics will be run by the elites. The only question is whether it's the somewhat idealistic elites who've gone into politics because they want to make things better or the cynical self-interested elites who want to run things behind the scenes.
The super delegates problem is a side effect of the same thing that has Clinton leading, which is that insiders chose their candidate years ago. Hillary is leading because the media, owned by that same insider group, plays her constant lip service and has for well over a year leading up to this election. Other owned politicians are similarly playing her lip service. There is little to no talk about the corruption in her public service, no talk about how she openly panders and lies to do so, and no talk about her political past as the first lady which would harm her campaign.
Or the insiders just generally think she's the best candidate, even despite those supposed shortcomings. Whether you think they should be even that extra influence of being a superdelegate is another matter entirely.
Early on, she won how many tie breakers by coin toss exactly? Winning because of votes my ass!
Seven or something, an utterly inconsequential number over the course of the campaign.
And why are you even talking about it? Do you have some bizarre conspiracy theory whereby the party anticipated a perfect tie in those caucuses, and so gave all the chairs special trick coins just in case?
And even if so it doesn't change the fact she has also won a ton more votes.
Actually, she's not winning free and clear; most of her significant wins have a cloud of large-scale voter suppression over them.
http://usuncut.com/politics/ne...
http://www.democracynow.org/20...
http://thinkprogress.org/polit...
And at least in NY that likely would have disproportionately older people (it seemed to hit people with old registrations more) and minorities (because they always get hit the worst by voting issues). Aka Hillary's base.
Whatever you think of Hillary's politics she won because more people wanted to vote for her and more people did vote for her.
The door to this was left open when 191 million voter records were leaked, making re-registration with edited details trivial. The earlier scandal over the DNC voter records being open allow for specific targeting of those not supporting Clinton which is the demographic reporting issues.
http://heavy.com/news/2016/04/...
Quite simply, yes, there's overwhelming signs that this election is being heavily rigged and in dirty
Ok, lets look at the first piece of evidence from that link.
Shelly Berry shared on Facebook that she had proof her New York voter registration was changed. Her registration was switched from Democrat to unaffiliated and she was told the change was made in 2012.
So Hillary's dastardly plan to rig the primary by specifically suppressing Bernie supporters began four years ago?
Otherwise do you have any idea how many people would need to be involved to mess with enough registration records to really affect the democratic primary? That's a 9-11 truther level of conspiracy theory.
Sure there are problems with the US's voting system, it's a disorganized mess, it may be worse this year or it might just look worse because of the extra scrutiny.
But voting issues + your favourite candidate not winning aren't the same as "overwhelming signs that this election is being heavily rigged and in dirty".
If they are trying to pay for something but it isn't available for sale, they aren't really exercising any sense of entitlement. The market has rejected them - and their money - so they are obtaining what they want some other way. There is no indication from this - and if anything counter indication - that they wouldn't pay for it if they could.
I'll occasionally download stuff I really want to see that is unavailable for online purchase and I'll readily admit it comes from a sense of entitlement. Morally if I'm going to view something I should view it in a way the creators/owners intended, usually by handing over some money, but I'm not prepared to fork over the amount of money it would take to get cable + HBO just so I can watch GoT.
Similarly if I'm going consume animal products I should make sure they're raised ethically. I'll buy free range eggs but the meat is too expensive.
Not doing the right thing because it's too inconvenient is a standard part of being human, I'd much sooner admit I'm imperfect than get into the habit of trying to rationalize the bad things I do as actually being right.
People only see and evaluate their experiences; what they have lived. If you put these same college students into another system for a couple months they might change their tune.
All it takes is a trip to Eastern Europe for any American to realize their world is pretty darn good. But given modern politics we might have to bring the Post-Soviet style problems to America firsthand before they can realize the situation.
Socialism, not communism. And realistically when they say socialism they probably don't really mean socialism but social democracy, aka the Nordic Model. Basically high taxes, a robust social safety net, and free markets (though people on both sides forget about that part).
"But if things do go wrong it's really easy for me to ssh in and figure out what's going on because the Linux ecosystem is actually designed to anticipate errors, as opposed to my Mac where I can't tell the difference between an error and stupid interface design."
Care to elaborate? From a SSHing in and fixing the issue standpoint I am not seeing any difference that you would encounter between a Darwin system and Linux distro that would fall into "regular userland issue".
From an application perspective Linux apps are generally designed with command line users in mind. You're a lot more likely to find human readable configuration files, online resources that explain how to fix things in the configs, a rich toolkit pre-installed, and if there's something extra you need there's a ton of troubleshooting apps trivially installable with yum or apt.
Sure there's fink and other package repositories for Apple but they're much sparser, not as well maintained, tend to conflict with eachother, and require a bunch hoops to install XCode and such. Basically Linux makes it way easier for me toubleshoot.
Oh, and on the topic of usability I just took another look at the App Store and found the El Capitan screen where I clicked a button that said "Download" and got no feedback, just some busy window indication forever.
Now there's a pretty picture of some mountains and the words "OS X El Capitan A refined experience... yadda yadda".
At the side there's a box that says "Downloaded".
Yay!! I did downloaded it! Now what next???
Hmm, underneath the pretty picture there's big letters "No Updates Available".
Ok, so I know I downloaded it... but how do I install it? There's no install button, there's no any button, just "Downloaded" and "No Updates", maybe that means it was installed? Do I have to go somewhere else to install?
Wait! I see some small text! It's a link! "Learn more"! Yay! Information!!
A new page comes up! And there's a button! There's only one button, this is Apple after all. But I can click it!
And the text on this wonderful button says.....
Download...
F U Apple and your El Capitan download mind games!!!!.
>>My Linux boxes much more usable and easy to troubleshoot when there is a problem.
you're missing the point.... for most users, not having the problem in the first place is worth far more than "ease of debugging" after the problem has happened. I run Linux on my own machines, and force it on my teenagers, but never in a million years would I try to pass it off on my elderly parents.
They'd probably do the same as my elderly mother does with Apple, she either doesn't do what she wants to do or finds some workaround until I show up and try to fix it.
The use-cases of an elderly parent aren't that complicated, read and send email, play videos from the email, browse the web, upload photos, print things, video chat.
Once you get things configured it's all point and click, they don't actually need a command line.
But if things do go wrong it's really easy for me to ssh in and figure out what's going on because the Linux ecosystem is actually designed to anticipate errors, as opposed to my Mac where I can't tell the difference between an error and stupid interface design.
Apple is one giant bubble that's starting to pop. I'm amazed at how many people are totally in love with Apple and are incapable of seeing things objectively. It's like investment decisions are all being made by Apple fanbois.
I was an Apple fanboy as a kid but I have to say in the past few years their interface is getting absolutely awful.
Sure it looks nice, but they've gone so far towards simplicity it's becoming unusable if you ever stray the tiniest bit off their standard use-case.
On my Android I have a button to bring up a configuration screen for any application, for iOS it's a mystery for each app.
My mother's iPad stopped ringing on incoming calls. Why? I haven't the foggiest idea.
I wanted to print to file from her iPad, it turned out to be hidden in some unlabelled button in an unlabelled expander.
The OS X seems to have gone to a model of zero feedback.
My laptop bugged me to upgrade to El Capitan, I clicked download, the download button greyed out, and I never got another piece of feedback. I don't know if it's downloading, downloaded, or simply stuck. I'm guessing it failed because the same thing happened a few months earlier. Same with importing photos from Mail to iPhoto, click to import, and no feedback, no idea if they imported or not, or to where.
I don't know what's gotten into their coolaid but I wouldn't consider them to be remotely user friendly. My Linux boxes much more usable and easy to troubleshoot when there is a problem.
The problem is this "trick" actually requires a ton of work and a bunch of risk, you've basically designed your life around working the tax laws and it requires enough wealth to invest in things like rental properties.
It's called being entrepreneur.
Which is the point I was trying to make. You're not actually talking about a normal taxpayer, you're talking about someone who has focused their life into becoming an investor and avoiding taxes.
Even then I want real entrepreneurs focusing on building businesses, not structuring their wealth to avoid taxes.
A small or medium sized business can't afford to open a separate office in Reno just to reduce their tax bill.
A small business don't need to run a physical office in Nevada. A PO box and a mail forwarding service can do the job for a few hundred bucks per year. Most states won't have a problem with it. California, of course, is always problematic because they're trying to collect revenue from everyone and anything that moves.
Apple doesn't have an office, they have some sort of subsidy. If nothing else this needs lawyers and accountants to make sure you're following the rules and extra bookkeeping to keep everything straight. If you don't know what you're doing you'll end up in legal trouble, and making sure you know what you're doing takes money.
And that's just for one trick, there's also deductions, grants, and all sorts of bookkeeping that's only feasible when you reach a certain size.
As we've learned from the new Social Justice Warriors movement, many people feel "harassed" just by comments or actions that aren't intended to be harassing... hell, I've probably scared at least three people to their safe place just by this post alone.
After reading the comments I think a lot of people here need someone to build them a safe place to protect them from Social Justice Warriors.
The point is, the normal taxpayer can't afford them - it's not gain at the margin for the taxes a little guy saves, but is for the big guys.
The little guy can do a variation of this. For example, start a Nevada corporation and open a corporate brokerage account (day trade or load up dividend-paying stocks) or own rental properties. Once the corporation makes a significant amount of money each year, you can draw a salary and open a qualified retirement to put away $54,000 each year (a combination of salary contributions plus corporate matching). Do that for a few decades, you will have a retirement account that will greatly exceed whatever you can put into an IRA/401K.
That's the real problem in my mind.
You need to change your thinking. The tax laws will never change to favor the small guy, so why not use them to your own advantage? The trick comes from converting earned income (taxed at highest rate) to portfolio (stocks) and/or passive (real estate) income (taxed at a lower rate). When portfolio/passive income exceeds earned income, you can stop working for someone else and work for yourself.
The problem is this "trick" actually requires a ton of work and a bunch of risk, you've basically designed your life around working the tax laws and it requires enough wealth to invest in things like rental properties. Personally I'd be better off just doing my own business on the side and actually contributing to the economy.
That's the problem with all these corporate subsidies and complex tax laws. Because they're so complex they're only really feasible to exploit once you're a massive organization. A small or medium sized business can't afford to open a separate office in Reno just to reduce their tax bill. They're stuck paying California tax and paying extra because they also have to cover the portion Apple skips out on!!
Bill Nye is no science guy, just a guy with a B.S. Degree.
Sure he is. He's not a scientist because he's not an active researcher, but he's certainly a "science guy".
Telling us that prominent Jihadis are twice as likely to have studied STEM is informative, but doesn't really give us any extra insight.
Here's the full quote:
Prominent jihadis are often well educated. Forty-six per cent of our sample went to university. Of these, 57 per cent graduated with STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine) degrees. This was double the number of jihadis taking Islamic studies.
That they're well educated isn't surprising, prominent people often are.
But does something about STEMM make you more likely to be a Jihadis? Well we don't know since it's only prominent Jihadis.
We also don't know how those ratios compare to the seed population of Arab Sunni males in those countries. Are those fields over-represented or under-represented?
And how is the breakdown among STEMM fields? Are some particularly over-represented? If so is it a result of them being extra-susceptible or extra-recruited?
It just bugs me since it's been known for a long time that prominent Jihadis come from STEMM, but no one ever seems to get around to investigating the interesting questions.
Climate change is a lie designed to get you to pay carbon taxes while reversing the industrial revolution (for you).
Forget the 1%. The top 100 wealthiest families in the world are using crap like this to enslave you. They need to be shot.
Yeah... because that totally makes sense as an evil plan.
Sorry, only got halfway through comment title.
Not to say that real ones don't exist, but I've long been skeptical about the super-misogynistic Bernie Bros and (without getting overly conspiratorial) they've just felt false-flag to me.
You new to the Internet? Vocally super-misogynistic guys aren't hard to find and when they dabble in politics you can be assured it will be against the woman who's the big front runner.
Reading this makes me wonder if I wasn't just being silly thinking that.
Regardless of that and whether or not it has anything to do with the story, I follow a few pro-Clinton people who seem to have an almost clinical compulsion to attacking Bernie (ironically typically about how negative he and his supporters are)
Have you read these comments? The story is still pretty new and I already see
"Hillary is far and away the worst choice in the entire race." + 5
"Maybe a good start to be corrected is where did the six billion dollars that are missing from Hillary's State Department go? And why where favors given to foreign governments who gave to the Bill and Hillary so-called charity." + 5
Sure Hillary isn't an ideal choice for President but she's far from the worst, I'm not even sure I'd call her below average. Sure she changes her positions to match public opinion, not only does that make her the same as pretty much every politician on the planet I've always felt it's kind of a good thing when politicians actually try to do what the public wants.
There does need to be some kind of reform when it comes to campaigns and financing and all of that, but it is very difficult to do. See, we have this thing called the First Amendment. Finding the right set of rules that respect the First Amendment, and yet helps prevent money from completely dominating an election cycle, is not an easy thing.
Though I heard an interesting claim that it isn't the money during elections but the lobbyists between elections basically volunteering to do all the work who are the real problem.
Though I think the super PACs are still a major issue.
That said...
I would like to note that Bernie Sanders (note that I am not endorsing him) doesn't have a war chest even close to what Clinton has, and if it weren't for the super delegate system, he would be very close to winning the nomination.
Not even close, in fact at this point one of Sanders' campaign managers is arguing that even if Sanders is losing the pledged delegate count that the superdelegates should give him the nomination.
Either way I think Sanders has been out-raising Clinton for a while based on small donations.
Or what about Trump (also not endorsing him)? Sure, he's rich, but he hasn't spent much money at all on ads or these kinds of organizations - he doesn't need to, he gets more free news coverage than anyone else, by far.
So it seems that money isn't everything if you have a popular message. Maybe we don't need these rules and laws which spawn these special organizations after all. Maybe all of these campaign finance laws are just there to stop the outsider types from having as good a chance.
Maybe.
It isn't an easy problem to solve and you'll never make everyone happy.
Trump isn't someone to draw a general rule from, if you want to win elections you need to spend some money if for no other reason than for voters to take you seriously.
In the Presidential election itself I don't think it matters that much since they have such a high profile, but in down ticket races and even primaries I think cash becomes I huge deal.
Sanders basically started his campaign as "not Hillary" and took a few states to build a war chest and a profile. If he had a bunch of cash to establish his presence at the start it might have been a very different campaign.
As for the corrupting influence of money the worst example I've seen was the "Sheldon Adelson primary" of the '12 Republican cycle when all the candidates went to win his support. Not only did Adelson single-handedly keep Newt Gingrich in the race for weeks but all the candidates basically assumed his policy positions. A single donor was able to write the policy of the Republican campaign.
Proposed change is divisive. And offensive to people of color. If you really want to put a woman of color, a historic personality, I would recommend to put Madam C.J.Walker. Rather than celebrating stubborn personas such as Rosa Parks, or a busybody Harriet Tubman, I would recommend putting C.J.Walker, who was black, former slave, however managed to be inspiration to others, create business and wealth. I guess it is too late, as it is already decided.
I don't understand why you think it is offensive to celebrate black people who fought for civil rights. Your idea of a black role model frankly sounds much more offensive, nothing against C.J. Walker who sounds inspirational, but to make her the centrepiece you're creating a distinction between "uppity blacks" and "good blacks". Not only does that imply that discrimination doesn't exist and black people just need to stop complaining and play by the rules, but you're actually applying that thinking to the 19th century when playing by the rules meant being subjected to legally encoded racism.
Oh, and Walker was born after the end of the civil war in 1867, I don't think she was a slave.
What is this with America's obsession with slavery. In large part of the Europe there was an equivalent of slavery - Serfdom. Serfdom is not romanticized in anyway and a lot of Europeans, pretty much have serfs in their genealogical tree, including myself. Serfdom and Slavery are identical in nature.
The US still talks about slavery in the context of racism because unlike serfdom the basis of slavery was racism.
I know it's ancient tradition and all, but it seems to me like people are probably one of the worst things you can put on your currency. No matter who you choose, it's going to piss off at least a third of the population immediately,
If you're offended by Harriet Tubman than you're pretty much digging for things to get offended by.
and there's a good chance that in fifteen to a hundred years you'll figure out that, by modern standards, the subject committed multiple atrocities.
Not really, in some cases there are sketchy episodes where we might find out more details, or there are terrible known things that the general public isn't really aware of (ie, all the stuff with Andrew Jackson). But even if Harriet Tubman was a cannibalistic serial killer who tortured puppies that's not something we're going to discover at this point.
A few years ago, if you had asked the average citizen to decide who was the least controversial person in American history, someone that would never ever be considered a villain, they might easily have suggested Bill Cosby.
Which is why you try to avoid naming things after people until the person's been dead for a while.
This just proves Breivik's point that Norway is too left-wing. I'd love to live in a utopian society where we can be just nice to everybody, where everybody's needs are covered and punishment is unnecessary. But in the real world, there will always be nihilists like this guy who ruin it for the rest.
So other than Breivik not being punished as harshly as you want what's the downside of this decision?
As for the upside I'm now very confident that prisoners in Norway are treated humanely.
A slightly less breathless account is at the Seattle Times:
http://www.seattletimes.com/se...
A note to the poster of the original story, if you find yourself citing Russia Today as the primary source you should probably double check your facts.
Well he engages in a kind-of noble savage fallacy
A more nuanced primitive society with some nasty bits would be a more interesting movie, though that lack of subtlety is probably part of why it made so much money (while being completely unmemorable). People disparage blockbusters for a reason.
+ the obviously retarded "greed (business) is evil". Of course it's OK for James Cameron to hold these views since he has a private jet, 4 houses, a couple of yachts and his own helicopter. The rest of us, no, we're not allowed to cut down trees. My own personal opinion on this is we shouldn't, but that's not the point here. Anyway it's OK if James Cameron wants to build a 5th holiday home. It's just the usual tedious hypocrisy we get from people in the movies.
It's only hypocritical if Cameron made his money strip mining a jungle.
He wasn't arguing for socialism. He was arguing against exploitation, environmental devastation, and destructive corporate greed.
There's nothing in the movie to argue against rich people in general.
2) Why cannot individuals defend their privacy on their own property? If gun operation is allowed on their property normally, why is firing their gun at an intruder any more "reckless" than clay target practice?
You don't own the airspace above your property, nor is it always easy to tell if something in the sky is over your property or not, not to mention the obvious danger in shooting a gun into the air.
Now there obviously has to be some more/better defined restrictions on what drones can do, but having people shooting drones out of the sky isn't a solution.
3) Why are we talking about a 5 or 20 year JAIL sentence? Do they realize how much damage incarcerating people does to society and individual's lives? A felony and 5 year jail sentence can wreck entire lives. How is this appropriate for disrupting drone operation, especially over one's own property?
The 5 and 20 is the maximum, it would probably only ever be used if there were some major aggravating circumstances.
Second the FAA isn't passing new drone specific laws, they're saying they believe existing laws apply to drones, and those laws have 5 and 20 maximums respectively (though probably not for drones).
4) Why is someone shooting a drone on their property different than shooting an unoccupied vehicle trespassing on their property? These cases should be simply prosecuted under existing "destruction of property" statutes, which should not be felonies, and should not have multiple-year jail sentences.
Shooting a vehicle on the ground is a bit less dangerous than shooting things in the sky.
I think the FAA is also trying to head off an outbreak of people trying to shoot down drones. Better to freak people out a bit then for people to get the idea they can start playing target practice with drones without any real consequences.