10 cases out of hundreds of millions of ballots cast is equal to zero statistically speaking.
No it's not. First, that's ten observed cases not ten total cases. Second, there are probably multiple ballots cast per case.
And need I note that most elections do not involve hundreds of millions of ballots? I don't know why people only focus on the presidential election when there are tens of thousands of elections going on during a cycle. Even if the effect is small to "zero" statistically speaking at the national level, it can still be significant in smaller elections.
Before you form a (very obviously) uninformed opinion, perhaps you should try to listed for two weeks straight.
Why don't you try to read Das Kapital for two weeks straight? It's not enough time to form a reasoned opinion, one only needs an hour or so for that. But it is enough time to warp your sense of reality.
It's solving a problem that doesn't exist. The folks that have been pushing photo ID have been able to come up with approximately 10 cases
You contradict yourself in the very next sentence where you claim the problem does exist. It might not be a large problem, but a small problem is not a non-existent problem.
If you don't, then this is an unnecessary (see point 1) expense
So you see no difference between being able to vote and not being able to vote? That makes it something other than unnecessary.
The party that pushed through these bills stated quite explicitly their purpose, namely to prevent people likely to vote for the other major party from voting.
I see you forgot to fill in the blanks. You mean the Republicans want to pass the law to prevent Democrats from exercising certain types of electoral fraud? That does sound pretty damning when you put it that way.
Well, I hope you don't mind another election where the exit polls have this consistent bias compared to the votes counted. If we're to have fair elections we'll have to abandon electoral fraud that happens to benefit our perceived side as well.
Is your theory that the omniscient democrats launched a state-wide conspiracy to reject a dozen Coleman votes here, two dozen there, somehow knowing that that would tip the scales?
I've heard a similar theory about casinos. That they try to get you drunk, say via free martinis, in order to get more money out of you. But who really believes that there's an omniscient casino industry out there which launched an industry-wide conspiracy to get you drunk in order to lower your inhibitions and judgment and thereby profit from it at the gaming table?
No you'd just be parroting what you heard from your chosen masters.
In the case above, all it takes for this so-called omniscience is a couple of good polls. That's all you need to see that the race was too close to call. And a state-wide "conspiracy" would be rather easy for a major party to implement.
And the fruits of the alleged conspiracy are that the Democrats would get a senate seat. We have the knowledge necessary to make the "conspiracy", the means to drop votes, and the motive for doing so.
Argument by conspiracy really only works, if the conspiracy is ridiculously hard to do and runs counter to the interests of the alleged members. When it's downhill all the way, one needs far better arguments than "It's a conspiracy theory, therefore you must be wrong."
And what happens to the material that is pushed around? It's going to bounce and collide a lot and generate impacts, perhaps a considerable number per incident.
I know it's weird to think of an entity lending money to itself, but it is a fairly normal practice.
Such entities also have to obey laws and regulations on how they report such practices. The US government doesn't. As a result there are tens of trillions of dollars of unreported liabilities just from Social Security. If you genuinely want the federal government to be able to do such things as loaning money to itself, then you need to put in accounting requirements so that the US citizenry understands what liabilities have been generated.
But that investment is perfectly safe (again, people invest in US Treasury bonds for exactly that reason; the US always pays its debts).
You ignore inflation, the standard way to default on US debt.
I've been paying SS and Medicare taxes for 45 years. I fucking paid for it.
That's interesting.
Congress kept borrowing from the money we PAID. Yes, we ARE entitled to that SS amd medicare.
Well, no you aren't. Congress kept borrowing from the money you paid? Then it's gone.
BTW, fuck everyone who is against my getting what I PAID FOR.
And the number one group on that list is the federal government of the past eighty years. The time to have done something about preserving what you paid in was decades ago not now. That's why I want to end Social Security. It's a con that has outlived the people who set it in motion. It has no purpose, even as a vehicle of theft, any more.
The SS trust fund is a separate entity from the Treasury.
The SS Trust fund doesn't exist at all. And there's many tens of trillions of dollars of liabilities in Social Security. When is that going to find its way into the federal accounting books?
Most government spending is an investment in the health and safety of our society.
In my view, most government spending is squandered money and just redistributes wealth to more politically connected parties.
But you act as if the government spends money by burning it, and we never see a positive benefit at all.
Social Security is such an example. It transfers wealth from young adults to wealthy elderly who simply don't need it as much since they aren't paying for education, new families, or establishing new lives.
Pensions and healthcare for retirees are important, but funding them with borrowed money is insane.
So let's cut them off and let them die while we take care of our debt issues. If any of them survive until our finances are in order, *then* we can take attend them. That's what civilized people do, don't you know - cast out their old and infirm, their non-contributors.
That's very helpful for dealing with morality we can't afford, but I gather there's a certain lack of sincerity in the suggestion. I suppose we could just dwell in hysteria as you appear to do above and not do anything until our economic failures become profound enough that the proffered pensions and health care have no meaning anymore. That would be the civilized way to commit societal suicide.
Worse than the exploding capacitors need to run the thing?
Well, how much energy would be stored in those capacitors at any given time? It's worth noting unless someone sends power to the ship (say, microwave beamed or a power line), the energy source will be on the ship. That could mean all that energy in a relatively dangerous form such as diesel fuel (not so much for nuclear power though).
a rapid fire rail gun with a 110 m range would be a great for defense.
Unless a highly populated region happens to be on the other side of the missile targets. The current Phalanx ammunition has the virtue that it loses a lot of its velocity quickly. That's why its range is so short. But in compensation one doesn't usually have to worry about massive random collateral damage.
and the people can do whatever the fuck they want to regulate said feudal lords in order to avoid the most outragous consequences of their actitions
What you're saying is that "the people" can "regulate" anyone for any reason (perhaps requiring them to paper over the action with the justification that they're regulating potential feudal lords or whatever). Aside from it not being true, I can't imagine why you'd want that.
They aren't a clueless group of fuck ups. They're a group who's acting in their own interests over society's interests. If you unquestioningly believe them when they say their decisions are what's best for society, I would ask YOU if you want a bridge with that order.
In other words, what you're looking at is the result of your belief that society's interests don't necessarily outweigh business interests: you get a society where (a select group) of people (businesses) get into power, and they profit, while everybody else (society) suffers.
In other words, you're in full bridge buying mode. Businesses are not the only parties that have figured out the blank check that is society's interests. And it's worth noting that businesses can't cash those checks without the contrivance of people who support society's interests unconditionally.
Of course, we're also assuming a working society, not the dysfunctional one we're looking at now.
Ah, the No True Working Society" fallacy. When societies don't fit into your narrow world view, it's because the society is no longer "working". I think your income is right-sized for three bridges, perhaps with an option to rent to own.
Those examples are examples of protecting society's interests. See, in a working society, respecting individual interests is one of society's interests, if not the most important one.
But the reality is that you can't respect everybody's individual interests. So society has to, one way or another, pick and choose. The result of that process is "societies' interests", which with few exceptions will trump an individual's.
And in practice, that means conflating society's interests with the interests of the people and interest groups in power. By providing limits to how so-called "society's interests" can override our own, we can mitigate the worst abuses of society.
Take your example of free speech of taking stuff without compensation: you're prioritizing one person's interest (the guy saying things, the guy who had the stuff taken) over another person's interests (the guy who doesn't like the things said, the guy who's took the stuff)
Yep. It's worth noting that this is a passive prioritization. The speech happened or the stuff was owned anyway. This just precludes certain government actions in response to the situation. We don't need to decide what society's interests are or how to support them at our expense.
What ever happened to morals you might ask? Morals stop existing the moment you claim that society's interests don't always trump individuals.
Think about it. Morality is not a social code. It is merely an assignment of right and wrong to certain behavior. The entity doing the assigning can be a number of things, not just a society (for example, a person or a belief system). So it is possible (and in practice happens almost universally) that morals exist outside of support by a society.
That gives individuals the power to deny any sort popular moral whenever it is not in that individual's best interests, whenever it is convenient for them to do so.
The individuals still have to deal with the consequences of their actions. Even in a society where there's no government punishment, one can always find ways to punish actions that one thinks are immoral, for example, assassination or boycott.
Considering the bandwidth voice data requires it is usually trivial to guarantee the needed quality especially in a system that has to be able to provide a reasonable service to a much wider bandwidth used by data connection nowadays.
The overcharging of voice data has no real justification and that is why phone companies around the world are so hostile towards VOIP.
Well, there's a great business opportunity then. Stop gabbing and start eating the telecoms' lunches.
You don't think that the outgassing viscous magmas collapsing and erupting from the flanks of a volcano are comparable?
Not at all. The mechanism here, if it exists, would be repeated freezing of CO2 in the soil and flashing into gas. There is no such mechanism on Earth comparable to that. It shouldn't need a large gradient (perhaps not any gradient at all, there might be a giant bowl of rounded gravel in the area that Curiosity is looking at, for example) any more than a stream does.
Nor does the phenomenon need to happen today even. If the conditions were right for half a billion years for frequent energetic disturbance of gravel from CO2 outgassing, even though they aren't now, you'd still see much of what we do.
Mars is remarkably Earth-like in its geological processes, but we need to remember that there will be big differences. I think atmospheric processes are going to be very different due both to the weaker oxidizing atmosphere (but it is still oxidizing with free oxygen, ozone, and perchlorates), far lower pressure (though that's about as high as it can get in the huge crater that Curiosity works in), and the particular physical properties of carbon dioxide (by far the principle component of the Martian atmosphere), including its relatively low melting point under pressure.
Society's interests surely outweigh any business's, no?
Would you like some bridges with that order? Look at who is deciding what society's interests are - just a clueless group of fuck ups. At least the business, the citizen, etc has a good idea what their interests are. Second, a society's interests don't necessarily outweigh a business's interests. The whole point of the US's Bill of Rights, to give a working example, is to delineate some of the more important situations where some subgroup's interests trump society's interests.
For example, you can't just shut someone up because you don't like their speech no matter how much in society's interests you think it is. Nor can you just take someone's stuff without compensation.
To elaborate on my previous point, there are no analogous terrestrial processes to carbon dioxide-triggered landslides. My thinking here is a billion years of alluvial material slowly getting knocked around by many, many landslides generated by carbon dioxide flashing to gas.
Ventifacts wouldn't be generated (or at least be a primary component) because most of the relevant erosion would be abrasion of rock against rock.
Try running a "tumbler" for a while and see how long it takes to round off gravel and cobbles (technical terms).
Not very long, if you ever tried it. Not sure what the point is here when Mars has a billion or more years to duplicate the erosion we can do in at most a few weeks of tumbling.
Most countries have a "911" number or its equivalent that's either free or costs much less than a regualr call.
Nothing is free particularly emergency services. And for some reason, most places want that 911-equivalent service, which piggy-backs on voice, to be pretty reliable.
Your mechanism of "flashing" CO2 ice to vapour would produce an up-force. But how would you get a sufficiently rapid change of system properties to cause this to happen enough times to round off all faces of a pebble.
And I imagine Mr. Sibal thinks that voice should be just as unreliable and as low priority as data services. After all, reporting a car accident with multiple injuries is just as important as delivering the latest cricket scores.
You have to remember that the person may have been too shocked to push the button.
For example, a NASA project launched by balloon damaged a bunch of property and endangered members of the public. This could have been avoided by the guy who was supposed to trip the failsafe release for the balloon. But he didn't do so even though it pulled a crane through a fence and an SUV. Story is that he was paralyzed by horror through the accident and just failed to act.
But as soon as you show exciting (read: scary) news on tv with any regularity, it's Chicken Little time.
The thing here is that people naturally fear and worry. My take is that these emotions are a sort of immune response to the adversity of life. If you have plenty of bad things happen to you, then you have plenty of legitimate worries to occupy your time.
If you don't, then you don't stop fearing and worrying. Instead, you start obsessing over imaginary or unlikely dangers. Fox News and other other such agencies give you blood, but my take is that they don't in themselves create the anxiety.
Slashdot Mirror
10 cases out of hundreds of millions of ballots cast is equal to zero statistically speaking.
No it's not. First, that's ten observed cases not ten total cases. Second, there are probably multiple ballots cast per case.
And need I note that most elections do not involve hundreds of millions of ballots? I don't know why people only focus on the presidential election when there are tens of thousands of elections going on during a cycle. Even if the effect is small to "zero" statistically speaking at the national level, it can still be significant in smaller elections.
Do we really want something as important as the gold market perturbed by the cumulative effect of Beck and other gold bugs like him?
Of course, we do. The disease is the cure.
Before you form a (very obviously) uninformed opinion, perhaps you should try to listed for two weeks straight.
Why don't you try to read Das Kapital for two weeks straight? It's not enough time to form a reasoned opinion, one only needs an hour or so for that. But it is enough time to warp your sense of reality.
It's solving a problem that doesn't exist. The folks that have been pushing photo ID have been able to come up with approximately 10 cases
You contradict yourself in the very next sentence where you claim the problem does exist. It might not be a large problem, but a small problem is not a non-existent problem.
If you don't, then this is an unnecessary (see point 1) expense
So you see no difference between being able to vote and not being able to vote? That makes it something other than unnecessary.
The party that pushed through these bills stated quite explicitly their purpose, namely to prevent people likely to vote for the other major party from voting.
I see you forgot to fill in the blanks. You mean the Republicans want to pass the law to prevent Democrats from exercising certain types of electoral fraud? That does sound pretty damning when you put it that way.
Well, I hope you don't mind another election where the exit polls have this consistent bias compared to the votes counted. If we're to have fair elections we'll have to abandon electoral fraud that happens to benefit our perceived side as well.
Is your theory that the omniscient democrats launched a state-wide conspiracy to reject a dozen Coleman votes here, two dozen there, somehow knowing that that would tip the scales?
I've heard a similar theory about casinos. That they try to get you drunk, say via free martinis, in order to get more money out of you. But who really believes that there's an omniscient casino industry out there which launched an industry-wide conspiracy to get you drunk in order to lower your inhibitions and judgment and thereby profit from it at the gaming table?
No you'd just be parroting what you heard from your chosen masters.
In the case above, all it takes for this so-called omniscience is a couple of good polls. That's all you need to see that the race was too close to call. And a state-wide "conspiracy" would be rather easy for a major party to implement.
And the fruits of the alleged conspiracy are that the Democrats would get a senate seat. We have the knowledge necessary to make the "conspiracy", the means to drop votes, and the motive for doing so.
Argument by conspiracy really only works, if the conspiracy is ridiculously hard to do and runs counter to the interests of the alleged members. When it's downhill all the way, one needs far better arguments than "It's a conspiracy theory, therefore you must be wrong."
Even when the ideology was purer, it was still a fight over resources, here, billions of people.
And what happens to the material that is pushed around? It's going to bounce and collide a lot and generate impacts, perhaps a considerable number per incident.
I know it's weird to think of an entity lending money to itself, but it is a fairly normal practice.
Such entities also have to obey laws and regulations on how they report such practices. The US government doesn't. As a result there are tens of trillions of dollars of unreported liabilities just from Social Security. If you genuinely want the federal government to be able to do such things as loaning money to itself, then you need to put in accounting requirements so that the US citizenry understands what liabilities have been generated.
But that investment is perfectly safe (again, people invest in US Treasury bonds for exactly that reason; the US always pays its debts).
You ignore inflation, the standard way to default on US debt.
I've been paying SS and Medicare taxes for 45 years. I fucking paid for it.
That's interesting.
Congress kept borrowing from the money we PAID. Yes, we ARE entitled to that SS amd medicare.
Well, no you aren't. Congress kept borrowing from the money you paid? Then it's gone.
BTW, fuck everyone who is against my getting what I PAID FOR.
And the number one group on that list is the federal government of the past eighty years. The time to have done something about preserving what you paid in was decades ago not now. That's why I want to end Social Security. It's a con that has outlived the people who set it in motion. It has no purpose, even as a vehicle of theft, any more.
The SS trust fund is a separate entity from the Treasury.
The SS Trust fund doesn't exist at all. And there's many tens of trillions of dollars of liabilities in Social Security. When is that going to find its way into the federal accounting books?
Most government spending is an investment in the health and safety of our society.
In my view, most government spending is squandered money and just redistributes wealth to more politically connected parties.
But you act as if the government spends money by burning it, and we never see a positive benefit at all.
Social Security is such an example. It transfers wealth from young adults to wealthy elderly who simply don't need it as much since they aren't paying for education, new families, or establishing new lives.
Pensions and healthcare for retirees are important, but funding them with borrowed money is insane.
So let's cut them off and let them die while we take care of our debt issues. If any of them survive until our finances are in order, *then* we can take attend them. That's what civilized people do, don't you know - cast out their old and infirm, their non-contributors.
That's very helpful for dealing with morality we can't afford, but I gather there's a certain lack of sincerity in the suggestion. I suppose we could just dwell in hysteria as you appear to do above and not do anything until our economic failures become profound enough that the proffered pensions and health care have no meaning anymore. That would be the civilized way to commit societal suicide.
Worse than the exploding capacitors need to run the thing?
Well, how much energy would be stored in those capacitors at any given time? It's worth noting unless someone sends power to the ship (say, microwave beamed or a power line), the energy source will be on the ship. That could mean all that energy in a relatively dangerous form such as diesel fuel (not so much for nuclear power though).
a rapid fire rail gun with a 110 m range would be a great for defense.
Unless a highly populated region happens to be on the other side of the missile targets. The current Phalanx ammunition has the virtue that it loses a lot of its velocity quickly. That's why its range is so short. But in compensation one doesn't usually have to worry about massive random collateral damage.
and the people can do whatever the fuck they want to regulate said feudal lords in order to avoid the most outragous consequences of their actitions
What you're saying is that "the people" can "regulate" anyone for any reason (perhaps requiring them to paper over the action with the justification that they're regulating potential feudal lords or whatever). Aside from it not being true, I can't imagine why you'd want that.
They aren't a clueless group of fuck ups. They're a group who's acting in their own interests over society's interests. If you unquestioningly believe them when they say their decisions are what's best for society, I would ask YOU if you want a bridge with that order.
In other words, what you're looking at is the result of your belief that society's interests don't necessarily outweigh business interests: you get a society where (a select group) of people (businesses) get into power, and they profit, while everybody else (society) suffers.
In other words, you're in full bridge buying mode. Businesses are not the only parties that have figured out the blank check that is society's interests. And it's worth noting that businesses can't cash those checks without the contrivance of people who support society's interests unconditionally.
Of course, we're also assuming a working society, not the dysfunctional one we're looking at now.
Ah, the No True Working Society" fallacy. When societies don't fit into your narrow world view, it's because the society is no longer "working". I think your income is right-sized for three bridges, perhaps with an option to rent to own.
Those examples are examples of protecting society's interests. See, in a working society, respecting individual interests is one of society's interests, if not the most important one.
But the reality is that you can't respect everybody's individual interests. So society has to, one way or another, pick and choose. The result of that process is "societies' interests", which with few exceptions will trump an individual's.
And in practice, that means conflating society's interests with the interests of the people and interest groups in power. By providing limits to how so-called "society's interests" can override our own, we can mitigate the worst abuses of society.
Take your example of free speech of taking stuff without compensation: you're prioritizing one person's interest (the guy saying things, the guy who had the stuff taken) over another person's interests (the guy who doesn't like the things said, the guy who's took the stuff)
Yep. It's worth noting that this is a passive prioritization. The speech happened or the stuff was owned anyway. This just precludes certain government actions in response to the situation. We don't need to decide what society's interests are or how to support them at our expense.
What ever happened to morals you might ask? Morals stop existing the moment you claim that society's interests don't always trump individuals. Think about it. Morality is not a social code. It is merely an assignment of right and wrong to certain behavior. The entity doing the assigning can be a number of things, not just a society (for example, a person or a belief system). So it is possible (and in practice happens almost universally) that morals exist outside of support by a society.
That gives individuals the power to deny any sort popular moral whenever it is not in that individual's best interests, whenever it is convenient for them to do so.
The individuals still have to deal with the consequences of their actions. Even in a society where there's no government punishment, one can always find ways to punish actions that one thinks are immoral, for example, assassination or boycott.
Considering the bandwidth voice data requires it is usually trivial to guarantee the needed quality especially in a system that has to be able to provide a reasonable service to a much wider bandwidth used by data connection nowadays.
The overcharging of voice data has no real justification and that is why phone companies around the world are so hostile towards VOIP.
Well, there's a great business opportunity then. Stop gabbing and start eating the telecoms' lunches.
You don't think that the outgassing viscous magmas collapsing and erupting from the flanks of a volcano are comparable?
Not at all. The mechanism here, if it exists, would be repeated freezing of CO2 in the soil and flashing into gas. There is no such mechanism on Earth comparable to that. It shouldn't need a large gradient (perhaps not any gradient at all, there might be a giant bowl of rounded gravel in the area that Curiosity is looking at, for example) any more than a stream does.
Nor does the phenomenon need to happen today even. If the conditions were right for half a billion years for frequent energetic disturbance of gravel from CO2 outgassing, even though they aren't now, you'd still see much of what we do.
Mars is remarkably Earth-like in its geological processes, but we need to remember that there will be big differences. I think atmospheric processes are going to be very different due both to the weaker oxidizing atmosphere (but it is still oxidizing with free oxygen, ozone, and perchlorates), far lower pressure (though that's about as high as it can get in the huge crater that Curiosity works in), and the particular physical properties of carbon dioxide (by far the principle component of the Martian atmosphere), including its relatively low melting point under pressure.
Society's interests surely outweigh any business's, no?
Would you like some bridges with that order? Look at who is deciding what society's interests are - just a clueless group of fuck ups. At least the business, the citizen, etc has a good idea what their interests are. Second, a society's interests don't necessarily outweigh a business's interests. The whole point of the US's Bill of Rights, to give a working example, is to delineate some of the more important situations where some subgroup's interests trump society's interests.
For example, you can't just shut someone up because you don't like their speech no matter how much in society's interests you think it is. Nor can you just take someone's stuff without compensation.
Ventifacts wouldn't be generated (or at least be a primary component) because most of the relevant erosion would be abrasion of rock against rock.
Try running a "tumbler" for a while and see how long it takes to round off gravel and cobbles (technical terms).
Not very long, if you ever tried it. Not sure what the point is here when Mars has a billion or more years to duplicate the erosion we can do in at most a few weeks of tumbling.
Most countries have a "911" number or its equivalent that's either free or costs much less than a regualr call.
Nothing is free particularly emergency services. And for some reason, most places want that 911-equivalent service, which piggy-backs on voice, to be pretty reliable.
Your mechanism of "flashing" CO2 ice to vapour would produce an up-force. But how would you get a sufficiently rapid change of system properties to cause this to happen enough times to round off all faces of a pebble.
A lot can happen in a billion years.
And I imagine Mr. Sibal thinks that voice should be just as unreliable and as low priority as data services. After all, reporting a car accident with multiple injuries is just as important as delivering the latest cricket scores.
Strike craft simply won't be able to carry big enough armaments to punch a hole in the armor
That just means they weren't going fast enough. A big, slow target is going to be a hot, many pieces, dead target.
You have to remember that the person may have been too shocked to push the button.
For example, a NASA project launched by balloon damaged a bunch of property and endangered members of the public. This could have been avoided by the guy who was supposed to trip the failsafe release for the balloon. But he didn't do so even though it pulled a crane through a fence and an SUV. Story is that he was paralyzed by horror through the accident and just failed to act.
But as soon as you show exciting (read: scary) news on tv with any regularity, it's Chicken Little time.
The thing here is that people naturally fear and worry. My take is that these emotions are a sort of immune response to the adversity of life. If you have plenty of bad things happen to you, then you have plenty of legitimate worries to occupy your time.
If you don't, then you don't stop fearing and worrying. Instead, you start obsessing over imaginary or unlikely dangers. Fox News and other other such agencies give you blood, but my take is that they don't in themselves create the anxiety.