I'm with AC; I've only ever lived in Australia, but am fairly well-versed in variously waistline-expanding confection available here, and I've only ever heard of Tootsie Rolls from Americans.
If your government can infringe your rights because of the actions of others, you never really had any rights. Your government was just temporarily overlooking their ability to screw you.
They pay similar taxes. They earn similar pay. Their healthcare is more effective, more widely available, and cheaper too. Oh, and they have a fairly balanced budget.
But what's their military like? That's the single biggest distorting factor in the US budget. 40% of the world's military budget is spent by the US. You spend four times as much as the next biggest spender (China); if you convert that to a per capita rate, you outspend them by a factor of 16. The only countries that spend more than you as a fraction of their GDP are in the war-torn middle east. You have more capacity to project force than the rest of the world combined.
There's no way your government can provide similar benefits, at a similar tax-cost to other countries who don't spend 20% of their income on the military.
Got nothing to do with that - your Congress is still a bicameral system (two houses, lower and upper). Changing the rules governing the legislature so that certain events (say, repeated failure to approve appropriations bills) triggers a re-election for that branch doesn't violate the separation of powers.
We tended to think that putting all government employees in central locations, metaphorically under a giant banner that said "All terrorists attack here. Multiple high-value targets present. High level of success guaranteed." was so stupid that even Congress wouldn't do it.
I wouldn't exactly call a building full of bureaucrats "high value" - especially since they've all just been designated non-essential. Going after the nearest packed stadium would probably provoke more terror, especially since more people go to stadiums that work for the federal government.
Makes me wonder what the point of having a UK upper house is - especially since, I believe, the HoL can't introduce legislation either. I mean, I know that's sort of the point - you leave the aristocracy their positions as a sop, while removing any power they have - but it still basically removes any point of having a bicameral system.
If this happens in Australia (upper house repeatedly blocks bills from the lower house) we sack them all, and hold another election. It's called a double dissolution (because both houses are dissolved simultaneously).
Did you even read the summary, or did you just comment based on the title? The poster doesn't want a phone to keep his child occupied, he wants it so his kid can contact him if needed - he explicitly says he wants to be able to disable entertainment functionality.
Dude's (rather successfully) Kickstarting a LOGO-esque boardgame for the purpose of teaching kids the fundamentals of programming. He says it's for 3+, and has played it with his own 4-year old kids. Because it's pictorial, they don't even need to be able to read to start learning basic logic.
Hmm, gee, I wonder what the insurance agencies are going to say: "Very little risk, you shouldn't need to worry, definitely don't bother buying insurance." Yeah, right.
Secondly, even if they were impartial, their data is all about the effects (will the sea level rise enough to cause a risk to property) not the cause (is the sea level rising due to CO2 emissions)
The existing implementation looks complex because it codifies hundreds of special business rules, such as discounts for the boss's friends, special commission arrangements with a particular salesperson, etc. You can't just throw out those rules, so you end up maintaining the old system simultaneously with trying to implement the new system.
The issue isn't that setting up a new system is wrong; the issue is that there is no documentation or specification for the existing setup, therefore it's not actually possible to do anything with it. Generally, nobody in the business that is supposed to be responsible for or understand the business requirements are prepared to spend any time formulating them. What's left is for the implementers to determine business rules as best they can, due to apathy from management. Which turns into scapegoating when the system doesn't function according to the spec that existing in people's heads, but never anywhere the implementers could see it.
...as if the United States was the first, last, and only country to hold a government that spies on its own citizens in some way?
Nobody thinks that. But the United States was supposed to be different to the hundreds of abusive governments that had preceded it. This does demonstrate that the US is worse than any other government - it shows that it is exactly the same. And that's damning enough.
Geek doesn't necessarily mean hoarder. I've got three non-portable machines - a desktop for me and the wife, and one in the closet that runs all the other stuff. If I want to do something, the one in the closet is modern enough that it has the capacity to do pretty much anything I want, for personal/family needs. I'd rather manage one relatively modern machine than seven cranky old ones.
There are bedrock scientific doctrines - most notably, empiricism. If it turns out the universe is not actually empirical, then no scientific result can be trusted.
The students probably have their whole profile and all their posts public. I believe that's the default, and many probably didn't bother changing it. I really have no issue with this, as long as they're only accessing public profiles - if you're publishing information, it's up to you to limit your intended audience.
Except that all everyone cares about these days is CO2, which isn't really a pollutant - it's a natural component of the atmosphere, and even with us pumping dead dinosaurs into the air, it's fluctuating within historical (as in, geological-timeframe historical) bounds.
Our fixation on CO2 may mean other, more harmful emissions (CO, NO2, SO2, etc) escape notice.
In this case, fraud - they were buying counterfeits and selling them as if they were genuine. They were deceiving consumers into believing they were buying something they weren't. That's a definite attack on English consumers, even if it doesn't hurt their economy per se.
You led me to believe you had stricter standards when you wrote: "since they cared and were informed, they would have checked where their chosen party's preference flows would have gone."
That comment was in reply to your friends and law professor not being apathetic. It wasn't the criteria of who should be allowed to vote; I was just enumerating a logical syllogism:
they voted above the line AND they weren't apathetic or ill-informed THEREFORE they must be happy with where their preferences went
Lamingtons? You get lamingtons at your polling station... damn... where do you live?
Not at my current one, actually. But at the one in Kentlyn, which I used to work at occasionally, they did. Good lamingtons, but probably not worth the trip.
The most obvious solution, and the one which most offends my philosophical sensibilities, is simply to exhaust the vote after it has reached its last stated preference.
Uh, did you mean least offends your sensibilities? I'm all for offending people, but I'd really rather know which alternatives you think are good at this point in the discussion:P
Or we allocate the remaining preferences based on a knowledge base using statistical analysis of what other voters who had the same early preferences selected further down on their ballots.;)
I'm going to assume you know how I'd react to that. All hail our algorithmic overlords!
I thought it was all geese/geese. Are you trying to have your cake and eat it too, or did I simply confuse my animal analogy
I meant that this was another independent instance of foxes guarding henhouses - allowing incumbents to change the rules about how easy it is to vote them out of office results in incumbents who don't get voted out of office.
And yes, it probably should have been goose-run or something - I don't know the correct noun for a goose's farmyard domicile.
Sorry we'll have to agree to differ on that one. I think having the vote of 100% of the electorate, even if the lack the wherewithall or motivation to discover the registered preferences, is preferable
Except you don't even have that. You have 95% of registered voters (about 5% cop the fine each election), not factoring in the estimated ~10% of eligible voters who've never registered.
the putative 5% of voters who meet you criteria of "car[ing] and informed."
The only criteria I propose putting in place is being motivated enough to trundle your backside up to the polling place and make a mark on paper. Hell, give me an appropriately transparent and secure online voting mechanism, and you wouldn't even have to do that. Ideally that make you caring and informed, but not necessarily. Maybe you just like lamingtons.
My point is that it is precisely because people don't know whom the are voting for, or if you prefer because people are apathetic, that we can't leave it to political parties to make these kinds of decisions. That would be setting the fox to guard the geese.
No; as long as people can cast their preferences it is the geese guarding the geese. It's just that the vast majority of geese don't care about guard duty, and do it poorly. If people won't cast their preferences (and you know there are plenty who won't, even if we develop some sanity and go OPV above the line) then the only alternative is to let someone cast them for them (or revert to first-past-the-post).
If you don't want them to be the party they nominate, who would you delegate to distribute those preferences? Any option I can see is a more egregious case of vulpine poultry guardianship than the current setup.
My preference, as I've said, is allocate the guardianship only to those geese who show up for duty.
It's certainly on the cards, but there's no need to be fatalistic about it. The is the real discussion to be had at the moment.
And this is due entirely to your aforementioned fox-henhouse scenario. The people in charge of "reforming" the ballot process are the ones with the most to gain by excluding minorities. The only hope the minor parties have of deflecting the majors if they try this approach is to squawk loudly enough that public pressure will divert that course of action.
Of course, the media's been busily blacking the reputations of all the minor parties, so that nobody will care what they're squawking about...
Well voting above the line was only (umm showing my age here) introduced in the late 80s. Before that preference deal meant a negotiation between parties of how how-to-vote cards were to be set out (as it still does for the lower house).
I will amend my statement to say the major parties have been doing it for as long as it has been possible to do;P
It's about both. The former was foregrounded by the implosion of the Wikileaks party and the later by Abbott's wish to have a Senate free of minor parties (PUP & Greens included).
Both majors don't want anyone not aligned to them in power. The Greens are tolerated by Labor, but it'd still get rid of them if they could - as seen by their preference allocation in Melbourne.
Libertarianism as expressed by Rand, and economic theories based on or expounded by Libertarianism are flawed
Yes, well, assuming all Libertarians as Randites is like assuming Liberals are Marxists. Rand was not the founder of Libertarianism, just influential in some subsection of it.
But Libertarians these days spend their time demonizing government on all levels
And again, associating all Libertarians with the Anarchic variants. You're doing exactly what the GP pointed out as simplistic thinking.
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I'm with AC; I've only ever lived in Australia, but am fairly well-versed in variously waistline-expanding confection available here, and I've only ever heard of Tootsie Rolls from Americans.
If your government can infringe your rights because of the actions of others, you never really had any rights. Your government was just temporarily overlooking their ability to screw you.
Except for Ann Wagner
They pay similar taxes.
They earn similar pay.
Their healthcare is more effective, more widely available, and cheaper too.
Oh, and they have a fairly balanced budget.
But what's their military like? That's the single biggest distorting factor in the US budget. 40% of the world's military budget is spent by the US. You spend four times as much as the next biggest spender (China); if you convert that to a per capita rate, you outspend them by a factor of 16. The only countries that spend more than you as a fraction of their GDP are in the war-torn middle east. You have more capacity to project force than the rest of the world combined.
There's no way your government can provide similar benefits, at a similar tax-cost to other countries who don't spend 20% of their income on the military.
CAD's already been there
Got nothing to do with that - your Congress is still a bicameral system (two houses, lower and upper). Changing the rules governing the legislature so that certain events (say, repeated failure to approve appropriations bills) triggers a re-election for that branch doesn't violate the separation of powers.
We tended to think that putting all government employees in central locations, metaphorically under a giant banner that said "All terrorists attack here. Multiple high-value targets present. High level of success guaranteed." was so stupid that even Congress wouldn't do it.
I wouldn't exactly call a building full of bureaucrats "high value" - especially since they've all just been designated non-essential. Going after the nearest packed stadium would probably provoke more terror, especially since more people go to stadiums that work for the federal government.
Makes me wonder what the point of having a UK upper house is - especially since, I believe, the HoL can't introduce legislation either. I mean, I know that's sort of the point - you leave the aristocracy their positions as a sop, while removing any power they have - but it still basically removes any point of having a bicameral system.
Well, it would limit it to happening once a year, when they're hammering out the budget.
If this happens in Australia (upper house repeatedly blocks bills from the lower house) we sack them all, and hold another election. It's called a double dissolution (because both houses are dissolved simultaneously).
Did you even read the summary, or did you just comment based on the title? The poster doesn't want a phone to keep his child occupied, he wants it so his kid can contact him if needed - he explicitly says he wants to be able to disable entertainment functionality.
Well, at least one person's trying to fix it.
Dude's (rather successfully) Kickstarting a LOGO-esque boardgame for the purpose of teaching kids the fundamentals of programming. He says it's for 3+, and has played it with his own 4-year old kids. Because it's pictorial, they don't even need to be able to read to start learning basic logic.
Hmm, gee, I wonder what the insurance agencies are going to say: "Very little risk, you shouldn't need to worry, definitely don't bother buying insurance." Yeah, right.
Secondly, even if they were impartial, their data is all about the effects (will the sea level rise enough to cause a risk to property) not the cause (is the sea level rising due to CO2 emissions)
The existing implementation looks complex because it codifies hundreds of special business rules, such as discounts for the boss's friends, special commission arrangements with a particular salesperson, etc. You can't just throw out those rules, so you end up maintaining the old system simultaneously with trying to implement the new system.
The issue isn't that setting up a new system is wrong; the issue is that there is no documentation or specification for the existing setup, therefore it's not actually possible to do anything with it. Generally, nobody in the business that is supposed to be responsible for or understand the business requirements are prepared to spend any time formulating them. What's left is for the implementers to determine business rules as best they can, due to apathy from management. Which turns into scapegoating when the system doesn't function according to the spec that existing in people's heads, but never anywhere the implementers could see it.
I've been around that loop many times, too.
...as if the United States was the first, last, and only country to hold a government that spies on its own citizens in some way?
Nobody thinks that. But the United States was supposed to be different to the hundreds of abusive governments that had preceded it. This does demonstrate that the US is worse than any other government - it shows that it is exactly the same. And that's damning enough.
Geek doesn't necessarily mean hoarder. I've got three non-portable machines - a desktop for me and the wife, and one in the closet that runs all the other stuff. If I want to do something, the one in the closet is modern enough that it has the capacity to do pretty much anything I want, for personal/family needs. I'd rather manage one relatively modern machine than seven cranky old ones.
There are bedrock scientific doctrines - most notably, empiricism. If it turns out the universe is not actually empirical, then no scientific result can be trusted.
I know, right. Judas sold out cheap.
You have to bring your own bits to the table to make it work. Amazon did it with the Kindle Fire, and Google has Google Play.
Because an Operating System isn't an Operating System, unless you can get a bundled app store with it...
The students probably have their whole profile and all their posts public. I believe that's the default, and many probably didn't bother changing it. I really have no issue with this, as long as they're only accessing public profiles - if you're publishing information, it's up to you to limit your intended audience.
Except that all everyone cares about these days is CO2, which isn't really a pollutant - it's a natural component of the atmosphere, and even with us pumping dead dinosaurs into the air, it's fluctuating within historical (as in, geological-timeframe historical) bounds.
Our fixation on CO2 may mean other, more harmful emissions (CO, NO2, SO2, etc) escape notice.
In this case, fraud - they were buying counterfeits and selling them as if they were genuine. They were deceiving consumers into believing they were buying something they weren't. That's a definite attack on English consumers, even if it doesn't hurt their economy per se.
You led me to believe you had stricter standards when you wrote: "since they cared and were informed, they would have checked where their chosen party's preference flows would have gone."
That comment was in reply to your friends and law professor not being apathetic. It wasn't the criteria of who should be allowed to vote; I was just enumerating a logical syllogism:
they voted above the line AND they weren't apathetic or ill-informed THEREFORE they must be happy with where their preferences went
Lamingtons? You get lamingtons at your polling station ... damn ... where do you live?
Not at my current one, actually. But at the one in Kentlyn, which I used to work at occasionally, they did. Good lamingtons, but probably not worth the trip.
The most obvious solution, and the one which most offends my philosophical sensibilities, is simply to exhaust the vote after it has reached its last stated preference.
Uh, did you mean least offends your sensibilities? I'm all for offending people, but I'd really rather know which alternatives you think are good at this point in the discussion :P
Or we allocate the remaining preferences based on a knowledge base using statistical analysis of what other voters who had the same early preferences selected further down on their ballots. ;)
I'm going to assume you know how I'd react to that. All hail our algorithmic overlords!
I thought it was all geese/geese. Are you trying to have your cake and eat it too, or did I simply confuse my animal analogy
I meant that this was another independent instance of foxes guarding henhouses - allowing incumbents to change the rules about how easy it is to vote them out of office results in incumbents who don't get voted out of office.
And yes, it probably should have been goose-run or something - I don't know the correct noun for a goose's farmyard domicile.
Sorry we'll have to agree to differ on that one. I think having the vote of 100% of the electorate, even if the lack the wherewithall or motivation to discover the registered preferences, is preferable
Except you don't even have that. You have 95% of registered voters (about 5% cop the fine each election), not factoring in the estimated ~10% of eligible voters who've never registered.
the putative 5% of voters who meet you criteria of "car[ing] and informed."
The only criteria I propose putting in place is being motivated enough to trundle your backside up to the polling place and make a mark on paper. Hell, give me an appropriately transparent and secure online voting mechanism, and you wouldn't even have to do that. Ideally that make you caring and informed, but not necessarily. Maybe you just like lamingtons.
My point is that it is precisely because people don't know whom the are voting for, or if you prefer because people are apathetic, that we can't leave it to political parties to make these kinds of decisions. That would be setting the fox to guard the geese.
No; as long as people can cast their preferences it is the geese guarding the geese. It's just that the vast majority of geese don't care about guard duty, and do it poorly. If people won't cast their preferences (and you know there are plenty who won't, even if we develop some sanity and go OPV above the line) then the only alternative is to let someone cast them for them (or revert to first-past-the-post).
If you don't want them to be the party they nominate, who would you delegate to distribute those preferences? Any option I can see is a more egregious case of vulpine poultry guardianship than the current setup.
My preference, as I've said, is allocate the guardianship only to those geese who show up for duty.
It's certainly on the cards, but there's no need to be fatalistic about it. The is the real discussion to be had at the moment.
And this is due entirely to your aforementioned fox-henhouse scenario. The people in charge of "reforming" the ballot process are the ones with the most to gain by excluding minorities. The only hope the minor parties have of deflecting the majors if they try this approach is to squawk loudly enough that public pressure will divert that course of action.
Of course, the media's been busily blacking the reputations of all the minor parties, so that nobody will care what they're squawking about...
Well voting above the line was only (umm showing my age here) introduced in the late 80s. Before that preference deal meant a negotiation between parties of how how-to-vote cards were to be set out (as it still does for the lower house).
I will amend my statement to say the major parties have been doing it for as long as it has been possible to do ;P
It's about both. The former was foregrounded by the implosion of the Wikileaks party and the later by Abbott's wish to have a Senate free of minor parties (PUP & Greens included).
Both majors don't want anyone not aligned to them in power. The Greens are tolerated by Labor, but it'd still get rid of them if they could - as seen by their preference allocation in Melbourne.
Libertarianism as expressed by Rand, and economic theories based on or expounded by Libertarianism are flawed
Yes, well, assuming all Libertarians as Randites is like assuming Liberals are Marxists. Rand was not the founder of Libertarianism, just influential in some subsection of it.
But Libertarians these days spend their time demonizing government on all levels
And again, associating all Libertarians with the Anarchic variants. You're doing exactly what the GP pointed out as simplistic thinking.