What argument would that be? I'm not claiming that proprietary software is worthless, I'm just saying that proprietary software is just as much about borrowing ideas as open source. Microsoft complains when OpenOffice copies Office, but they don't have a problem with XAML copying XUL, Avalon copying Quartz, or.NET copying Java.
You can argue that proprietary implementations are better than open source, (depends on the implementation in question) but you can't argue that they're more innovative--everyone is ripping off everyone else.
And to the average proprietary company, the only thing that really counts as innovation is making a half-assed, incomplete copy of some half-assed, incomplete prototype from academia, slapping software and design patents on it, and suing the crap out of anyone who complains.
The problem with socialism is that it punishes these people.
That's one way to look at it. The other view is that capitalism is just making sure the last few millionaires are pulling up the ladder once they finish their climb. Almost all of those millionaires, first generation though they may be (though I think the focus on inherited wealth ignores the real ways wealth is transfered--nepotism, social connections, education, even insulation from risk in entrepreneurship...) make most of their money through capital. It might be the capital of their own business, but its capital nonetheless. The problem is that almost everyone starts out making their money from labor. So the end result of this "don't punish wealth!" philosophy is shifting even more taxes toward labor rather than capital, which makes the hardest phase of becoming a millionaire (or even modestly well-off) all the more difficult.
The lessons of The Millionaire Next Door are certainly wise, but just because its possible to succeed in the current system doesn't mean we can't increase the probability of success with a different one. Most of the millionaires are self-employed. We can make self-employment vastly more accessible for millions of Americans with universal health care. Yes, this would raise the taxes of everyone, particularly the wealthy. But since we tax income rather than wealth, calling that a "punishment" is going too far--having more money still means you have more money. And since the first million is always the hardest to make, they're much more able to pay the taxes anyway.
It seems to me that we need to strike a balance between making the ladder climbable and keeping the ladder worth climbing. And America, with health insurance rates rising at double digit rates, ever rising disparity between incomes, and an ever decreasing percentage of self-employed workers, seems like its way on one end of that trade off.
Not to mention the larger issue of whether capitalist markets can continue to grow at exponential rates. The Malthusians may be exaggerating our situation (or perhaps they're dead on, its kind of hard for a non-geologist to have an opinion on that subject), but I don't think ANYONE expects us to be able to keep consuming the exponentially increasing amount of oil that we do for the rest of this century. I think we will have to either change Fossil Fuels as our dominant source of energy or Capitalism as our dominant social system--because pure capitalism is dependent on exponential growth in demand.
The irony of using the Millionaire Next Door to advocate public policy is that if economists are taken serious then frugality actually fails as a Kantian moral imperative! If everyone stopped buying things, people who make the things we buy would starve. Our nation's fiscal and monetary policies are not even capable of putting frugality into practice without triggering a Great Depression! We, as a nation, are doomed to becoming a Last-Generation Trillionaire. Don't you find it ironic that public policy makers who subscribe to a philosophy of rewarding wealth, as you advocate, also subscribe to an idea of "growing our way out of deficits", which completely ignores all the advice in this book? (I'm not saying you believe that, but certainly some people do.)
By the way, your points 1 and 2 will also apply to any American with sufficient health insurance. I fail to see how the current American system is remotely sustainable--the costs increase at double digit rates every year. It's like having a giant credit card bill.
Again, I can't stress how cool this is, but it doesn't really fill me with great confidence...
# glsa-check -l WARNING: This tool is completely new and not very tested, so it should not be used on production systems. It's mainly a test tool for the new GLSA release and distribution system, it's functionality will later be merged into emerge and equery.
But for every program that halts, there is a proof that it halts, correct? I think the idea with Proof Carrying Code is that the compiler (the thing that writes out the bytecodes in the first place) generates the proof, possibly with human programmer assistance. The virtual machine just verifies that the proof is correct.
I guess there are computability limitations on the kinds of robustness for which a proof cannot be found automatically, and I'm also guessing that not all robust programs will be provably robust for some definitions of robust.
But it's not just something I made up, you can google for Proof Carrying Code, or you can look at this.
Um...so far as I know Gentoo doesn't have a convenient way of just asking for security updates. You could just monitor the list of security warnings and just only emerge those instead of doing "emerge -uD world", but the newer versions with security patches tend to depend on the newest versions of all the other software anyway, so you'll just end up having to upgrade a huge crapload of packages one day and spend an entire day compiling--an entire day without the security fix.
When I first started using Gentoo back in 2001 or 2002, I did it on a lark and figured the system would just fly apart into a thousand pieces right in my face after a few weeks. I mean, I'm supposed to keep every package in the system updated every few days? Surely, at some point, something will go wrong, and I'll find myself in the unsolvable dependency hell I find myself in so frequently in with RPMs. Yet I ended up staying with that very installation until just recently I started over again with 2004.1 because it seemed like the easiest way to upgrade from gcc 2.95. And, up until the point that I couldn't find any packages that worked with gcc 2.95 anymore, I was always up to date with almost all software I ran on the system.
I've thought about switching to Debian a few times, because I'm really not particularly fond of linux configuration as a hobby (it gets old after 5 years or so, you know?) But it's always so disheartening to drop back a few versions on all the packages I'm running. And in the meantime I've gotten used to Gentoo's strange world, and now I guess it's a habit.
Still, hats off to the Gentoo development teams--for something that probably appeals to such a limited demographic, it works far more fantastically well then I ever would have thought.
My only wonder is--if.NET (mono) and Java really take off in the future with Just-In-Time compilation, will Gentoo become less interesting. Essentially, EVERY computer is going to start compiling optimized versions of its code for its particular needs. In fact, since the optimizations are at run-time, we can expect JIT to be even more machine-specific than Gentoo's optimization and USE flags. Like, if I install another Gig of memory future JIT compilers might gradually recompile all the bytecode on my system to unroll loops more often or something.
So, in the future, I think we'll be sitting somewhere halfway in between Gentoo and binary distribution--sending diffs of the bytecodes for my applications out instead of binary or source.
And while I'm dreaming, why don't we make those bytecodes proof carrying code. Like, for every piece of code executing on my system, I want to see either the automatically checked proof that the code won't explode my system, or the name of someone who signed the code claiming it won't explode my system. If neither of those are found, I want Future Gentoo to issue a big flashing red warning "WARNING THIS CODE WILL EAT YOUR PARENTS DO NOT INSTALLL!!!!!!!" Man, the future is going to be so awesome.
3) because a close national vote like 2000 will never be considered valid. 2000 was statistically a tie (49.3% to 49.8% in favor of Gore -- about 500,000 votes out of 100 million).
You can't just look at the raw percentages to say whether an election is close or not. Sure, if you add up the margins of error in each state it would be over 500,000, but the chance that they'd all go towards one side or the other in a recount is remote. Someone made a mathematical argument at some point that the Electoral College is good because it maximizes the chance that the election will hinge on one vote, and therefore the chance that your vote makes a difference is maximized, thus your vote is the most "valuable" with an EC system. Though the value of a vote in that argument is dubious, the mathematics was not--election-in-the-balance recounts are more likely with the Electoral College, and thus Point 3 is actually an argument against the EC.
Consider an election a sample from a random distribution, and a larger election a larger sample--the larger your sample size, the more accurate your result. Thus fewer recounts.
states still get to draw the district lines per census
Then you're ignoring a much larger problem than the Electoral College--gerrymandering. That 90% of House districts are considered "safe" is definitely not good for democracy at all. There should be a national, repeatable algorithm for drawing district lines after census counts. Every census that passes this becomes less likely, because the incumbents make themselves even more secure, and they have much to lose from algorithmic redistricting.
No, but he plans to break them this time. His own OMB projected that by the end of his next term deficits would be cut in half--IF his tax cuts are allowed to expire. But he's promised to continue those tax cuts.
Either the OMB is lying, or his campaign is lying--but both of those answer to Bush.
Actually, what am I talking about? He broke every promise from Last election, too. He promised to cut government spending, but has vastly accelerated it, even before 9/11. He promised to reform education and got the Dems to go along with NCLB, but then refused to fund it. He promised to bring credibility to the White House, but instead transplanted Clinton's personal life into dishonest economics (like unemployment staying constant while the overall number of jobs drops, or lying about the cost of Medicare prescription drugs) and dishonest foreign intelligence. He denounced nation building (in Kosovo), but launched a war with no other purpose than destroying a nation so we could rebuild it to suit our purposes.
Credibility, education, and the size of government, restraint in military adventurism. Those were probably the biggest themes of his "compassionate conservative" campaign--and he has delivered on not a single one of them.
You can claim Bush is justified in becoming a completely different person than he ran as--disregarding every single one of his campaign promises--with 9/11, if you wish. Still, one wonder what sort of crisis would justify becoming a completely different person once again after 2004, and breaking every single campaign promise AGAIN. Perhaps debt crisis?
Does Greg ever say anything particularly socially conservative on that show? I mean, he's a rich lawyer or something, right? Rich lawyers are compatible with everyone. Now if Greg were a tractor trailer driver, a member of the Christian Coalition, listening to patriotic country music songs all the time, and making comments about how we should turn the deserts to glass, I don't think it would work. Well, maybe. But it DEFINITELY will not work if the woman is the fundamentalist and the man is the hippy. Hippies and Fundamentalists are like Bears and Robots from Bob the Angry Flower. They will not cooperate until either the Messiah begins the holy millenium or Microsoft finally achieves the Singularity, or Ariel Sharon finally Immanentizes the Eschaton. Whatever. DO NOT MIX HIPPIES AND FUNDAMENTALISTS BUT RICH PEOPLE WITH CAN MIX WITH ANYONE that is the lesson for today kids.
Second, electoral rules have been rigged to make it increasingly difficult for the incumbent party to be ejected by the voters, absent a Depression-scale disaster, Watergate-class scandal or Teddy Roosevelt-style ruling party split.
Well, judging by how things are going, we can look to the future and be reassured: two out of three ain't bad. No trifecta, but not bad.
Yeah, so did I. I thought "I'm sure everything will be fine if I turn off Jon Katz. It's not like EVERYONE on slashdot will do that, right?" Horrifically, I now see how wrong I was!
Re:One, two, three, four, I declare a flame-war!
on
Assault Weapons Ban
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
BOTH sides in the assault weapon ban are being totally retardo. The GOP is retardo for obvious reasons--who the hell needs a machine gun? The Dems though are almost as retarded--in that there are plenty of guns just as dangerous as these, the only real objection is that these so called "assault weapons" look like nasty-ass guns you see in movies. Who the hell cares if I have a gun with a bayonette? Is there a great epidemic of criminal bayonette-ings? Sure, these guns are semi-automatic. LOTS of guns are semi-automatic. It's a pretty useful feature--you pull the trigger, a bullet comes out, no extra steps to shoot the next bullet, the loading mechanism ends up reducing some of the recoil--it's very useful.
But in the end, although people who get all worked up over this ban are fools, there are certainly factions that benefit from everyone being worked up. The NRA, of course, because it boosts their membership. The gun manufactuers, because they sell more guns.
But most of all, President Bush is the biggest beneficiary. Look at some of the states where the race is considered close--Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan. Places in which the last four years (or longer) have been economic hell. How could these masochists possibly consider voting for Bush?
There's something you gotta understand about guns. Sure, if you take a poll, most people want to get rid of assault weapons, and probably handguns while your at it. But the side of the country that wants to keep these guns DOESN'T CARE ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE. Guns are the archetypal single issue voter--completely unlike abortion which has an equal number of single-issue voters on both sides. NO ONE will vote for Kerry just because he opposes assault weapons. And, yes, Bush claims to support the ban, but obviously if he wanted to he could convince Senator Frist to force the issue in the Senate.
So all Bush has to do is make 20% of the country rich by making the other 80% poor, get 31% worked up into a lather over God, guns, and gays, and BANG, Bush has got himself a majority, and a mandate to continue his grand neoconservative experiment.
I suggest to Democrats that you just drop this issue--you'll save far more lives if Kerry can implement his health care reforms than the scant number saved by banning these ridiculous toys.
The article linked to in the slashdot submission claims that 10 judges have been blocked, and 198 have been accepted. I tend to agree with parent--middle of the road or otherwise acceptable judges would found if the law required it.
Gore wouldn't have invaded Iraq, Gore wouldn't have cut hundreds of billions in capital gains taxes while proclaiming we were at war. We'd live in a dramatically different world if Gore were elected president now, and the same will probably be true in 2008 regarding Bush v. Kerry. Sorry, I bought this "no difference between the parties" line back in 2000, but anyone who still buys into it is a sucker--maybe there is no difference between the parties, but there surely is a difference between Bush policies and the alternative.
Stop looking at what's happening from your narrow political ideological point of view (point of blindness?) and take a look at what's happening on the ground in our economy, in our foreign policy. Stop hiding your head in the sands of your pipe dreams, your castles in the sky, and deal with the world as it actually is.
However the submitter's usage doesn't seem to be either the incorrect (but common) usage or the correct usage.
It SORT OF does if you interpret the incorrect usage broadly--although the link defines the incorrect usage as ironic, it could simply be a statement said from someone else's point of view. Of course, this is only even remotely permissible if there can be no confusion that somebody actually said this. For example, if I said "The typical American must be thinking 'the only good arab is a dead arab'", I'm certainly not saying that any actual American ever used those words.
Indeed, I now see that my last sentence itself is an even better example of this--I'm hypothetically quoting something I said which I certainly did not say. The submitter's usage is probably similar to that--except the submitter failed to make clear that this was not an actual quote. If the submitter had merely added "Basically," or something similar, it would have worked.
Re:There's a reason for two parties -
on
Open the Debates
·
· Score: 1
Well, that's one side--the other side is that since in-state Indians didn't count for you because they aren't American citizens under American law, and slaves had no rights at all, they should count as 0/5ths of a person. The point is that America has probably spent most of its history just as if not more divided than we are right now.
Re:There's a reason for two parties -
on
Open the Debates
·
· Score: 1
I don't think any of the original architects of our two party system ever envisioned the current polarized society.
Yeah, um, you might want to look up why we have odd compromises like a bicameral legislature (which I think actually worked out pretty well, until computerized gerrymandering became popular for House seats) and absolutely bizarre things like slaves counting as 3/5 of a person. Our house has been divided against itself (can any housing contractors please explain to me what it means for a house to be divided against itself?) and if the founders didn't realize that, they were incredible fools.
Slashdot Mirror
What argument would that be? I'm not claiming that proprietary software is worthless, I'm just saying that proprietary software is just as much about borrowing ideas as open source. Microsoft complains when OpenOffice copies Office, but they don't have a problem with XAML copying XUL, Avalon copying Quartz, or .NET copying Java.
You can argue that proprietary implementations are better than open source, (depends on the implementation in question) but you can't argue that they're more innovative--everyone is ripping off everyone else.
And to the average proprietary company, the only thing that really counts as innovation is making a half-assed, incomplete copy of some half-assed, incomplete prototype from academia, slapping software and design patents on it, and suing the crap out of anyone who complains.
That's one way to look at it. The other view is that capitalism is just making sure the last few millionaires are pulling up the ladder once they finish their climb. Almost all of those millionaires, first generation though they may be (though I think the focus on inherited wealth ignores the real ways wealth is transfered--nepotism, social connections, education, even insulation from risk in entrepreneurship...) make most of their money through capital. It might be the capital of their own business, but its capital nonetheless. The problem is that almost everyone starts out making their money from labor. So the end result of this "don't punish wealth!" philosophy is shifting even more taxes toward labor rather than capital, which makes the hardest phase of becoming a millionaire (or even modestly well-off) all the more difficult.
The lessons of The Millionaire Next Door are certainly wise, but just because its possible to succeed in the current system doesn't mean we can't increase the probability of success with a different one. Most of the millionaires are self-employed. We can make self-employment vastly more accessible for millions of Americans with universal health care. Yes, this would raise the taxes of everyone, particularly the wealthy. But since we tax income rather than wealth, calling that a "punishment" is going too far--having more money still means you have more money. And since the first million is always the hardest to make, they're much more able to pay the taxes anyway.
It seems to me that we need to strike a balance between making the ladder climbable and keeping the ladder worth climbing. And America, with health insurance rates rising at double digit rates, ever rising disparity between incomes, and an ever decreasing percentage of self-employed workers, seems like its way on one end of that trade off.
Not to mention the larger issue of whether capitalist markets can continue to grow at exponential rates. The Malthusians may be exaggerating our situation (or perhaps they're dead on, its kind of hard for a non-geologist to have an opinion on that subject), but I don't think ANYONE expects us to be able to keep consuming the exponentially increasing amount of oil that we do for the rest of this century. I think we will have to either change Fossil Fuels as our dominant source of energy or Capitalism as our dominant social system--because pure capitalism is dependent on exponential growth in demand.
The irony of using the Millionaire Next Door to advocate public policy is that if economists are taken serious then frugality actually fails as a Kantian moral imperative! If everyone stopped buying things, people who make the things we buy would starve. Our nation's fiscal and monetary policies are not even capable of putting frugality into practice without triggering a Great Depression! We, as a nation, are doomed to becoming a Last-Generation Trillionaire. Don't you find it ironic that public policy makers who subscribe to a philosophy of rewarding wealth, as you advocate, also subscribe to an idea of "growing our way out of deficits", which completely ignores all the advice in this book? (I'm not saying you believe that, but certainly some people do.)
By the way, your points 1 and 2 will also apply to any American with sufficient health insurance. I fail to see how the current American system is remotely sustainable--the costs increase at double digit rates every year. It's like having a giant credit card bill.
Again, I can't stress how cool this is, but it doesn't really fill me with great confidence...
# glsa-check -l
WARNING: This tool is completely new and not very tested, so it should not be
used on production systems. It's mainly a test tool for the new GLSA release
and distribution system, it's functionality will later be merged into emerge
and equery.
That's cool, but my experience definitely differs from your on the latter issue.
I guess there are computability limitations on the kinds of robustness for which a proof cannot be found automatically, and I'm also guessing that not all robust programs will be provably robust for some definitions of robust.
But it's not just something I made up, you can google for Proof Carrying Code, or you can look at this.
Um...so far as I know Gentoo doesn't have a convenient way of just asking for security updates. You could just monitor the list of security warnings and just only emerge those instead of doing "emerge -uD world", but the newer versions with security patches tend to depend on the newest versions of all the other software anyway, so you'll just end up having to upgrade a huge crapload of packages one day and spend an entire day compiling--an entire day without the security fix.
I've thought about switching to Debian a few times, because I'm really not particularly fond of linux configuration as a hobby (it gets old after 5 years or so, you know?) But it's always so disheartening to drop back a few versions on all the packages I'm running. And in the meantime I've gotten used to Gentoo's strange world, and now I guess it's a habit.
Still, hats off to the Gentoo development teams--for something that probably appeals to such a limited demographic, it works far more fantastically well then I ever would have thought.
My only wonder is--if .NET (mono) and Java really take off in the future with Just-In-Time compilation, will Gentoo become less interesting. Essentially, EVERY computer is going to start compiling optimized versions of its code for its particular needs. In fact, since the optimizations are at run-time, we can expect JIT to be even more machine-specific than Gentoo's optimization and USE flags. Like, if I install another Gig of memory future JIT compilers might gradually recompile all the bytecode on my system to unroll loops more often or something.
So, in the future, I think we'll be sitting somewhere halfway in between Gentoo and binary distribution--sending diffs of the bytecodes for my applications out instead of binary or source.
And while I'm dreaming, why don't we make those bytecodes proof carrying code. Like, for every piece of code executing on my system, I want to see either the automatically checked proof that the code won't explode my system, or the name of someone who signed the code claiming it won't explode my system. If neither of those are found, I want Future Gentoo to issue a big flashing red warning "WARNING THIS CODE WILL EAT YOUR PARENTS DO NOT INSTALLL!!!!!!!" Man, the future is going to be so awesome.
You're absolutely right. There are plenty of young idiots voting for Bush and wise elders voting for Kerry. ;)
You can't just look at the raw percentages to say whether an election is close or not. Sure, if you add up the margins of error in each state it would be over 500,000, but the chance that they'd all go towards one side or the other in a recount is remote. Someone made a mathematical argument at some point that the Electoral College is good because it maximizes the chance that the election will hinge on one vote, and therefore the chance that your vote makes a difference is maximized, thus your vote is the most "valuable" with an EC system. Though the value of a vote in that argument is dubious, the mathematics was not--election-in-the-balance recounts are more likely with the Electoral College, and thus Point 3 is actually an argument against the EC.
Consider an election a sample from a random distribution, and a larger election a larger sample--the larger your sample size, the more accurate your result. Thus fewer recounts.
states still get to draw the district lines per census
Then you're ignoring a much larger problem than the Electoral College--gerrymandering. That 90% of House districts are considered "safe" is definitely not good for democracy at all. There should be a national, repeatable algorithm for drawing district lines after census counts. Every census that passes this becomes less likely, because the incumbents make themselves even more secure, and they have much to lose from algorithmic redistricting.
Either the OMB is lying, or his campaign is lying--but both of those answer to Bush.
Actually, what am I talking about? He broke every promise from Last election, too. He promised to cut government spending, but has vastly accelerated it, even before 9/11. He promised to reform education and got the Dems to go along with NCLB, but then refused to fund it. He promised to bring credibility to the White House, but instead transplanted Clinton's personal life into dishonest economics (like unemployment staying constant while the overall number of jobs drops, or lying about the cost of Medicare prescription drugs) and dishonest foreign intelligence. He denounced nation building (in Kosovo), but launched a war with no other purpose than destroying a nation so we could rebuild it to suit our purposes.
Credibility, education, and the size of government, restraint in military adventurism. Those were probably the biggest themes of his "compassionate conservative" campaign--and he has delivered on not a single one of them.
You can claim Bush is justified in becoming a completely different person than he ran as--disregarding every single one of his campaign promises--with 9/11, if you wish. Still, one wonder what sort of crisis would justify becoming a completely different person once again after 2004, and breaking every single campaign promise AGAIN. Perhaps debt crisis?
Does Greg ever say anything particularly socially conservative on that show? I mean, he's a rich lawyer or something, right? Rich lawyers are compatible with everyone. Now if Greg were a tractor trailer driver, a member of the Christian Coalition, listening to patriotic country music songs all the time, and making comments about how we should turn the deserts to glass, I don't think it would work. Well, maybe. But it DEFINITELY will not work if the woman is the fundamentalist and the man is the hippy. Hippies and Fundamentalists are like Bears and Robots from Bob the Angry Flower. They will not cooperate until either the Messiah begins the holy millenium or Microsoft finally achieves the Singularity, or Ariel Sharon finally Immanentizes the Eschaton. Whatever. DO NOT MIX HIPPIES AND FUNDAMENTALISTS BUT RICH PEOPLE WITH CAN MIX WITH ANYONE that is the lesson for today kids.
Like movie studios getting used to the inability of consumers to copy and send movies to each other instantly.
A wise man once told me, intellectual property is what you keep to yourself.
Well, judging by how things are going, we can look to the future and be reassured: two out of three ain't bad. No trifecta, but not bad.
Who said that in 2000?
That's kind of point. The ban is both harmless and worthless.
Yeah, so did I. I thought "I'm sure everything will be fine if I turn off Jon Katz. It's not like EVERYONE on slashdot will do that, right?" Horrifically, I now see how wrong I was!
But in the end, although people who get all worked up over this ban are fools, there are certainly factions that benefit from everyone being worked up. The NRA, of course, because it boosts their membership. The gun manufactuers, because they sell more guns.
But most of all, President Bush is the biggest beneficiary. Look at some of the states where the race is considered close--Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan. Places in which the last four years (or longer) have been economic hell. How could these masochists possibly consider voting for Bush?
There's something you gotta understand about guns. Sure, if you take a poll, most people want to get rid of assault weapons, and probably handguns while your at it. But the side of the country that wants to keep these guns DOESN'T CARE ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE. Guns are the archetypal single issue voter--completely unlike abortion which has an equal number of single-issue voters on both sides. NO ONE will vote for Kerry just because he opposes assault weapons. And, yes, Bush claims to support the ban, but obviously if he wanted to he could convince Senator Frist to force the issue in the Senate.
So all Bush has to do is make 20% of the country rich by making the other 80% poor, get 31% worked up into a lather over God, guns, and gays, and BANG, Bush has got himself a majority, and a mandate to continue his grand neoconservative experiment.
I suggest to Democrats that you just drop this issue--you'll save far more lives if Kerry can implement his health care reforms than the scant number saved by banning these ridiculous toys.
You're still here, and I'm still here, so I guess that doesn't say very nice things about us, eh? ;)
The article linked to in the slashdot submission claims that 10 judges have been blocked, and 198 have been accepted. I tend to agree with parent--middle of the road or otherwise acceptable judges would found if the law required it.
Stop looking at what's happening from your narrow political ideological point of view (point of blindness?) and take a look at what's happening on the ground in our economy, in our foreign policy. Stop hiding your head in the sands of your pipe dreams, your castles in the sky, and deal with the world as it actually is.
It SORT OF does if you interpret the incorrect usage broadly--although the link defines the incorrect usage as ironic, it could simply be a statement said from someone else's point of view. Of course, this is only even remotely permissible if there can be no confusion that somebody actually said this. For example, if I said "The typical American must be thinking 'the only good arab is a dead arab'", I'm certainly not saying that any actual American ever used those words.
Indeed, I now see that my last sentence itself is an even better example of this--I'm hypothetically quoting something I said which I certainly did not say. The submitter's usage is probably similar to that--except the submitter failed to make clear that this was not an actual quote. If the submitter had merely added "Basically," or something similar, it would have worked.
Well, that's one side--the other side is that since in-state Indians didn't count for you because they aren't American citizens under American law, and slaves had no rights at all, they should count as 0/5ths of a person. The point is that America has probably spent most of its history just as if not more divided than we are right now.
Yeah, um, you might want to look up why we have odd compromises like a bicameral legislature (which I think actually worked out pretty well, until computerized gerrymandering became popular for House seats) and absolutely bizarre things like slaves counting as 3/5 of a person. Our house has been divided against itself (can any housing contractors please explain to me what it means for a house to be divided against itself?) and if the founders didn't realize that, they were incredible fools.