How could you say that if I were in that position, I'm not being abused?
Like this: you're not being abused. You don't have to accept that person's offer, and if you don't you are in exactly the same position you were before. If you do accept the offer, then you are better off as a result (otherwise, you wouldn't accept). In no case are you made worse off by being offered what you consider to be an unfair deal. What you are really asking for is enforced charity.
It's still wrong to hire someone on a temporary basis, keep them around for YEARS because they think they'll eventually get hired full-time
Well, that depends. If the employees were told that they would definitely be made full-time at some point, then there would be a breach of contract. If they weren't lied to or made any false promises, then they are responsible for their choices. I don't know the details of this particular case, so I'm not going to declare Microsoft either guilty or innocent. However, I will say that wishing you had negotiated a better deal should not be grounds for unilaterally altering an employment agreement after the fact.
The solution is democracy in the form of government control.
This should never have been let in the hands of a private organisation. The US gov should take its responsabilities. Domain names are a public service and they should have a fair system. They would control the root servers and would control registration, at a flat fee, no reselling, no transfer allowed. This would just eliminate this ridiculous market of names.
Nice in theory, and completely unenforceable. I could buy up all the domains I wanted, then offer a web hosting service where my customers choose which of my domain names they want to appear under. I haven't resold or transferred any domain names, I'm just providing a service for my customers. I suppose you could try to fight by making me declare the purpose for each domain name I register and using a huge content monitoring system, at which point you run into the pesky problem of the Constitution.
The market is NOT the answer to everything.
True, but it's generally a better answer than "government bureaucracy".
I find it odd that so many posters are willing to hand control of broadband over to the government on the grounds they have only our best interests in mind and will protect us from the evil corporations. This is the same government that has come up with Carnivore, DMCA, and the Clipper Chip, and you want all net traffic to be required to go through them? The IRS and FBI would enthusiatically support this plan, which is why we should not.
The Mac has always been hackable- and one up on everything else, you can hack a COMPILED binary. This is great, and I'll miss Resedit if I EVER get around to using OSX.
Have you seen InterfaceBuilder? ResEdit lets you modify an app's appearance, InterfaceBuilder lets you modify appearance and behavior. For example, you can open OmniWeb (web browser) in InterfaceBuilder, add a button to the button bar, and wire it up to the same action as the "View Source" menu item. Then when you run OmniWeb you have a brand new view source button that just works.
I am totally in favor of hacking this sucker for useability. I've tried a few of the add-ons, but I really don't like the idea of having to boot my apple menu after I boot my OS. I'm not digging tacking an extra 64 megs onto RAM useage in order to boot Photoshop.
You can make the apple menu app a startup item so it will automatically come up. (I do agree that it should be built into OS X though). And since OS X is Unix, memory management is vastly better than OS 8/9...the manual memory allocation is probably the least defensible part of the classic Mac OS.
Between the Cubes and MacOSX, it looks like NeXT shall rise again... rather the present Mac user base likes it or not.
Mac OS X is definitely not NeXT. There are some NeXT concepts, but a lot of the cooler features were removed (like tear-off menus and a "real" dock).
Do you honestly think that Bush's conduct has been any better?
Yes. His position has consistently been that since there is no evidence of voter machine malfunctions, the machine recount is more impartial and fair than the manual recounts. Gore's position is "every vote must count...except those of the military...and really only the votes in heavily Democratic counties...and we'll make up the criteria for counting as we go along".
Personally, if Bush does ultimately win, I think the real winner is Hillary Clinton. I think Bush has shot himself in the foot for a 2nd term with his conduct. Gore may not be electable now due to public opinion (read: media opinion) -- and there really arent any other democrats of her prominance and national recognition/appeal. So if she proves to do well in her first couple years in the Senate, I wouldnt rule out her candidacy.
I hope you're right, because she would lose spectacularly. She is an extremely polarizing candidate and would provide enormous motivation for the Republicans. Remember, she ran for Senate in New York, the most liberal state she could find, and she only won by 11 points against a relatively unknown candidate while Gore carried the state by 25.
i agree that in some occasion (despite all the theorical arguments against it), multiple inheritance can be useful. in some case, i can use that little trick: you can declare an interface that has an innerclass which implements the functionality.
Interesting idea...but if I understand it correctly whatever implements the interface would still have to manually call the inner class methods, right?
despite how much i love linux, how much it is "old". the kernel is ok for me, it has all the feature i want from a kernel, but look at the mess in/etc. it would be so nice in xml.
You might be interested in Darwin. The mess in/etc is mostly replaced with XML configuration files, it uses "frameworks" to store libraries, headers, and other resources for components in one place instead of scattering them around the filesystem, and has some other interesting stuff.
Yes and no. Yes, Netscape's VMs suck, but Sun should never have put them in the position of having to write VMs for 87 different platforms. Instead, Sun should have provided Java plug-ins from the beginning, which would have eliminated the bugs and inconsistencies in browser VMs that have severely crippled the use of Java on web sites.
Well, they can't know how many machines you have behind a NAT (I think). In any case you could have one of the two machines itself be a NAT router for N others, thereby adhering to the letter of the (stupid) restriction.
Why can't we have a internet service that says "here's your IP number, here's 1.5 mb/s down and 0.5 mb/s up, do whatever you want with it".
Absolutely. If they're concerned about bandwidth problems caused by customers hosting porn sites or something, just have a limit on the bandwidth used per week or month that would never be reached in "normal" use, and charge a per-megabyte rate above that (or just cut them off).
Is it not suspicious that all this happens in a state where the BROTHER of one of the 'contestants' is the Governor?
Jeb Bush immediately recused himself from the proceedings in Florida. If you have any evidence that he fixed the election then present it; otherwise stop making such baseless accusations. (If in fact he had fixed it, GWB would have won by way more than 537 votes.)
The Secretary of State, is a Bush campainer, and is in line for an Ambassatorship if Bush wins?
The Secretary of State does nothing more than certify the results sent by the counties. The real power is held in the county canvassing boards that did the manual recounts, which are heavily Democratic.
the Republicans are seriously hipocritical. Not counting legal votes is a frickin' whitewash!!
You mean the military votes that Gore's lawyers specifically targeted for disqualification?
2. If you actually paid attention to the Florida Supreme Court decision, it wasn't partisan in the least. It reconciled two conflicting sections of Florida voting law. Open up your mind and think, OK?
Actually, the Florida SC fabricated a brand new certification schedule out of thin air, a textbook example of judicial activism with no basis in law.
6. Bush has been arguing against state's rights in the Florida & federal courts, when all the time he's claims that he wants to empower the states. He's lying to America right now and he's not even President yet!
Bush has been arguing precisely that the law as established by the Florida legislature should be upheld. The Florida Supreme Court chose to rewrite that law because they didn't like it, but even under their new schedule Bush has won.
7. According to mike, lawyers are un-American. On the other hand, screaming mobs of Republican partisans are democracy in action, I suppose.
Seems to me there's something in the Constitution about people peaceably assembling and petitioning for a redress of grievances. I know the Bill of Rights is out of favor with many liberals, but it is still the law.
I'm not for either candidate, I just want a *fair* count, not an arbitrary choice to not count arbitrarily hand counted ballots in favor of arbitrarily machine counted ballots of which nearly 5% were thrown out because confused voters accidentally punched two holes.
Machine counts are not 100% accurate, because no system is. However, they are at least impartial, which is more than can be said for the overwhelmingly Democratic manual vote counters. Statistically speaking, any machine errors will be evenly distributed for all the candidates, while manual recounts are subject to the conscious or unconscious biases of the counters. It's even less impartial when these recounts are done only in heavily Democratic counties, where ballots that the machines didn't catch are virtually certain to split favorably for Gore.
Gore got all the breaks in the recount, and he still lost. Game over.
Blanket statements like this aren't very useful. OS X has absolutely no speed problems on my G4/400, and is entirely usable on my Powerbook G3/300.
It has the overhead of
dealing with two OSs spliced together
Sort of, but not really. Legacy Mac apps run in a compatibility environment that is as a single OS X process running at low priority. The only reason you'd be likely to see performance degradation is if you don't have enough RAM to hold the OS 9 environment and have to swap a lot. That's why Apple says 128 MB is required for the beta, when really it is acceptable with 64 if you don't run legacy Mac apps.
To tell the truth, OSX would have been a lot more
interesting with a clean-slate internal design.
Which would push back the release another few years, and prevent it from taking advantage of existing BSD software (apache, ssh, perl, etc).
Hmm, and most kids' jobs won't require them to discuss the Magna Carta or the Roman Empire, so we might as well stop teaching history. School is supposed to be more than vocational training. It is supposed to develop thinking skills, and it is beneficial for students to be exposed to different environments.
Another counterpoint is that technology is constantly evolving, and what students use in school today is not what they will use in their jobs. For example, the Mac's System 7 would likely have been better "training" for Windows 9x than Windows 3.1 would have been.
I believe the initial comment in this thread has merit, and the Linux activists did aid in damaging the companies profitability. I don't think you should be proud of financially harming a company that did you no harm.
Pointing out the fact that a company's product can be used in alternative ways is not morally wrong. If Alice sells widgets for less than what Bob charges for identical widgets, should I not state this publicly because it will "financially harm" Bob? Markets depend on information to operate efficiently. The iOpener business plan was fundamentally flawed, and hopefully others will learn from its failures.
No - no Mac version at the moment. It will be along presently.
Actually, the Mac OS X Beta comes with a 1.3 VM with the HotSpot JIT. I believe the class library is still 1.2.2, but that should be updated in the next release.
The fundamental legal question is "was the will of the people thwarted?"
The legal question is "do the alleged mistakes constitue grounds for a challenge under Florida law?" And none of the three conditions you listed appear to be satisfied. There are no allegations of official misconduct, all candidates were eligible to hold office, and even if some voters made a mistake on their ballots I don't believe that renders them "illegal".
The ballot design was public far in advance of the election. There was plenty of time to challenge it beforehand.
That really doesn't strike me as a substantive reason to vote for someone. A more relevant tech issue would be that Gore continually supported (unconstitutional) restrictions on private use of encryption, while Bush opposed them.
Glad to hear that. I've considered voting for Bush, but I'm going with Browne also. (Although I'm in Texas, so it's not like Bush needs any help there.)
Okay, convince me. I know that Democrats are for more government (which I'm against) and Republicans general go for less (which I'm for), but at least in the case of the war on drugs Bush seems to place it as a very high priority. Gore hasn't seemed to mention it at all (I can't find anything about it on his website) but Bush seems to be making it a major part of his platform (see this).
Thanks for having an open mind. I won't attempt to defend Bush's drug policy because it's completely wrong. All I can suggest is that Gore is not an improvement. See this article. An excerpt:
Such analysis, however, is far from exculpatory of the Vice President. Under the Clinton-Gore administration, marijuana arrests increased from fewer than 350,000 in 1992 to more than 650,000 in 1998, 88% of which were for simple possession, according to the FBI's annual Crime in the United States report. On December 30, 1996, in the wake of California's passage of a medical marijuana initiative, the Clinton administration held a press conference to announce that they would aggressively prosecute doctors who so much as discussed medicinal marijuana with patients -- despite the fact that Vice President Gore recently admitted that his sister tried marijuana for relief of the pain and nausea associated with cancer.
As of yet, there's no hope of a rational drug policy from either of the two major parties. (Although Republican supporters of decriminalization are increasing in number, e.g. Gov. Johnson of New Mexico and William F Buckley).
The only candidates willing to end the war on (some) drugs are Ralph Nader (obviously unacceptable to libertarians) and Harry Browne. Compared to them, there's virtually no difference between Bush and Gore on this issue. Voting Democratic is going to have the opposite effect of what you want; if ending the drug war is that important, as I see it you have to vote for Browne.
If I don't trust Gore, why would I trust Gore _voters_ to vote for Nader in exchange for me voting for their guy?
Absolutely. It's an anonymous, one-shot prisoner's dilemna and the best strategy is to defect. Not that that's a bad thing, since "defect" in this scenario means to vote your conscience.
I'm a fiscal Republican but a social Democrat. I've yet to see a candidate that ever made me feel at all inspired.
What about Harry Browne?. By conventional standards the Libertarians are a bit extreme, but they're the only party which is consistently for liberty and against government intrusion in personal and economic issues.
Gore hasn't got the same joi-de-vivre as Clinton has, but at least he's an elegant and digified statesman, a boring but professional person.
I would disagree with this. Look at his performance in the debates; he was consistently interrupting, violating the agreed-upon rules, at one point literally getting in Bush's face as he was talking. That does not strike me as professional, and I would not want anyone with an attitude like that representing my country.
Bush is *no* statesman. The fact that he's leading in the polls arguably because more of the electorate things he'd be a more fun guy with whom to have a beer arguably proves the every dictator right: perhaps the people *aren't* smart enough to choose their own destiny after all.
Can't argue with the first statement, but I don't think people are quite that stupid. I think people are tired of the constant lies and scandals emanating from the White House (of which Gore played many integral roles), and are not buying Gore's hysterical claims that Bush's plans would destroy the economy, cause senior citizens to starve, or result in the earth being sucked into a black hole.
The point is that if you are not informed of the candidates and the issues, then you are not doing anyone a service by voting, including yourself. Yes, everyone should be at least somewhat aware of the candidate's positions and philosophies, but if you are not, I would much rather you stay home than cast a vote in ignorance.
Interesting theory on Nader btw. It would be fun to see mass infighting between principled socialists (Greens) and unprincipled near-socialists.
I normally vote Libertarian, but the closeness of this election has me a little nervous. I'm going to be (gag, choke) voting for Gore,
I beg you to reconsider this. In recent years the Democrats have shown equal or greater hostility to personal freedom than the Republicans, while coming up with unending ways to make the government larger and more expensive. Gore wants our military to be the world's peacekeepers (no matter how many innocent civilians we have to bomb in the process), and it's his administration that allowed Barry McCafferty to spread blatant lies and propaganda for the drug war. He is certainly no better than Bush on these issues. Also remember that Gore supported restrictions on encryption (opposed by Bush) as well as the whole Clipper Chip fiasco. From a libertarian perspective Gore is less desirable than Bush even if you ignore the economic issues on which Bush is much preferable.
Again, I strongly urge you to reconsider your vote. If you value liberty, Gore is the last person you should support.
Who says the rich are evil? And who says you have vote for Gore instead?
Sorry, I interpreted your original post as a standard liberal "tax cuts don't help anyone but the rich" mantra, which it wasn't. We are more in agreement than I thought.
Neither of these huckleberries is in the business of making LESS money for the government.
An excellent point. Bush promises to increase spending by "only" 800 billion as compared to Gore's 2.3 trillion or whatever he's up to by now.
But anyway, c'mon, man, it's the oldest trick in the political book. Everyone promises to lower taxes. They always have, always will, and it will always turn out to be a sham in one way or the other
Quite possibly true, but as I see it the expected value of after-tax income is substantially greater under Bush than Gore. Since Gore's vast array of new programs uses up the (alleged) surplus and then some, he's going to need additional sources of money. Not to mention his insistence on keeping everyone forcibly locked into Social Security which offers a return of roughly 0% for today's workers.
Of course, I'd rather vote for someone who doesn't want to punch me in the head at all, but I'm wacky like that.
No arguments here. Bush is far from an ideal candidate, that's why I'm voting for Harry Browne (who as far as I can tell is the only candidate who wants to reduce the size and power of government at all). But of the two candidates that have a chance of winning, I strongly prefer Bush.
Man, do you really believe that YOU will see more money if Bush gets elected?
Well, yes. Since Bush's plan calls for a tax cut for all taxpayers rather than Gore's "targeted" social engineering experiments, everyone who pays taxes will benefit. (Yes, this includes the evil rich, sorry.)
is a lousy few dollars in your pocket really worth the further erosion of our civil rights and environment that a Bush administration represents?
Good point. Let's elect Al Gore so we can use encryption freely...oops, I mean so we can end the war on (some) drugs...errr, I mean so we can stop government invasions of privacy like Carnivore and the Clipper Chip...hey, wait a minute...
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Like this: you're not being abused. You don't have to accept that person's offer, and if you don't you are in exactly the same position you were before. If you do accept the offer, then you are better off as a result (otherwise, you wouldn't accept). In no case are you made worse off by being offered what you consider to be an unfair deal. What you are really asking for is enforced charity.
It's still wrong to hire someone on a temporary basis, keep them around for YEARS because they think they'll eventually get hired full-time
Well, that depends. If the employees were told that they would definitely be made full-time at some point, then there would be a breach of contract. If they weren't lied to or made any false promises, then they are responsible for their choices. I don't know the details of this particular case, so I'm not going to declare Microsoft either guilty or innocent. However, I will say that wishing you had negotiated a better deal should not be grounds for unilaterally altering an employment agreement after the fact.
Nice in theory, and completely unenforceable. I could buy up all the domains I wanted, then offer a web hosting service where my customers choose which of my domain names they want to appear under. I haven't resold or transferred any domain names, I'm just providing a service for my customers. I suppose you could try to fight by making me declare the purpose for each domain name I register and using a huge content monitoring system, at which point you run into the pesky problem of the Constitution.
The market is NOT the answer to everything.
True, but it's generally a better answer than "government bureaucracy".
I find it odd that so many posters are willing to hand control of broadband over to the government on the grounds they have only our best interests in mind and will protect us from the evil corporations. This is the same government that has come up with Carnivore, DMCA, and the Clipper Chip, and you want all net traffic to be required to go through them? The IRS and FBI would enthusiatically support this plan, which is why we should not.
Have you seen InterfaceBuilder? ResEdit lets you modify an app's appearance, InterfaceBuilder lets you modify appearance and behavior. For example, you can open OmniWeb (web browser) in InterfaceBuilder, add a button to the button bar, and wire it up to the same action as the "View Source" menu item. Then when you run OmniWeb you have a brand new view source button that just works.
I am totally in favor of hacking this sucker for useability. I've tried a few of the add-ons, but I really don't like the idea of having to boot my apple menu after I boot my OS. I'm not digging tacking an extra 64 megs onto RAM useage in order to boot Photoshop.
You can make the apple menu app a startup item so it will automatically come up. (I do agree that it should be built into OS X though). And since OS X is Unix, memory management is vastly better than OS 8/9...the manual memory allocation is probably the least defensible part of the classic Mac OS.
Between the Cubes and MacOSX, it looks like NeXT shall rise again... rather the present Mac user base likes it or not. Mac OS X is definitely not NeXT. There are some NeXT concepts, but a lot of the cooler features were removed (like tear-off menus and a "real" dock).
Yes. His position has consistently been that since there is no evidence of voter machine malfunctions, the machine recount is more impartial and fair than the manual recounts. Gore's position is "every vote must count...except those of the military...and really only the votes in heavily Democratic counties...and we'll make up the criteria for counting as we go along".
Personally, if Bush does ultimately win, I think the real winner is Hillary Clinton. I think Bush has shot himself in the foot for a 2nd term with his conduct. Gore may not be electable now due to public opinion (read: media opinion) -- and there really arent any other democrats of her prominance and national recognition/appeal. So if she proves to do well in her first couple years in the Senate, I wouldnt rule out her candidacy.
I hope you're right, because she would lose spectacularly. She is an extremely polarizing candidate and would provide enormous motivation for the Republicans. Remember, she ran for Senate in New York, the most liberal state she could find, and she only won by 11 points against a relatively unknown candidate while Gore carried the state by 25.
Interesting idea...but if I understand it correctly whatever implements the interface would still have to manually call the inner class methods, right?
despite how much i love linux, how much it is "old". the kernel is ok for me, it has all the feature i want from a kernel, but look at the mess in /etc. it would be so nice in xml.
You might be interested in Darwin. The mess in /etc is mostly replaced with XML configuration files, it uses "frameworks" to store libraries, headers, and other resources for components in one place instead of scattering them around the filesystem, and has some other interesting stuff.
Yes and no. Yes, Netscape's VMs suck, but Sun should never have put them in the position of having to write VMs for 87 different platforms. Instead, Sun should have provided Java plug-ins from the beginning, which would have eliminated the bugs and inconsistencies in browser VMs that have severely crippled the use of Java on web sites.
Why can't we have a internet service that says "here's your IP number, here's 1.5 mb/s down and 0.5 mb/s up, do whatever you want with it".
Absolutely. If they're concerned about bandwidth problems caused by customers hosting porn sites or something, just have a limit on the bandwidth used per week or month that would never be reached in "normal" use, and charge a per-megabyte rate above that (or just cut them off).
Jeb Bush immediately recused himself from the proceedings in Florida. If you have any evidence that he fixed the election then present it; otherwise stop making such baseless accusations. (If in fact he had fixed it, GWB would have won by way more than 537 votes.)
The Secretary of State, is a Bush campainer, and is in line for an Ambassatorship if Bush wins?
The Secretary of State does nothing more than certify the results sent by the counties. The real power is held in the county canvassing boards that did the manual recounts, which are heavily Democratic.
the Republicans are seriously hipocritical. Not counting legal votes is a frickin' whitewash!!
You mean the military votes that Gore's lawyers specifically targeted for disqualification?
Actually, the Florida SC fabricated a brand new certification schedule out of thin air, a textbook example of judicial activism with no basis in law.
6. Bush has been arguing against state's rights in the Florida & federal courts, when all the time he's claims that he wants to empower the states. He's lying to America right now and he's not even President yet!
Bush has been arguing precisely that the law as established by the Florida legislature should be upheld. The Florida Supreme Court chose to rewrite that law because they didn't like it, but even under their new schedule Bush has won.
7. According to mike, lawyers are un-American. On the other hand, screaming mobs of Republican partisans are democracy in action, I suppose.
Seems to me there's something in the Constitution about people peaceably assembling and petitioning for a redress of grievances. I know the Bill of Rights is out of favor with many liberals, but it is still the law.
Machine counts are not 100% accurate, because no system is. However, they are at least impartial, which is more than can be said for the overwhelmingly Democratic manual vote counters. Statistically speaking, any machine errors will be evenly distributed for all the candidates, while manual recounts are subject to the conscious or unconscious biases of the counters. It's even less impartial when these recounts are done only in heavily Democratic counties, where ballots that the machines didn't catch are virtually certain to split favorably for Gore.
Gore got all the breaks in the recount, and he still lost. Game over.
Blanket statements like this aren't very useful. OS X has absolutely no speed problems on my G4/400, and is entirely usable on my Powerbook G3/300.
It has the overhead of dealing with two OSs spliced together
Sort of, but not really. Legacy Mac apps run in a compatibility environment that is as a single OS X process running at low priority. The only reason you'd be likely to see performance degradation is if you don't have enough RAM to hold the OS 9 environment and have to swap a lot. That's why Apple says 128 MB is required for the beta, when really it is acceptable with 64 if you don't run legacy Mac apps.
To tell the truth, OSX would have been a lot more interesting with a clean-slate internal design.
Which would push back the release another few years, and prevent it from taking advantage of existing BSD software (apache, ssh, perl, etc).
Another counterpoint is that technology is constantly evolving, and what students use in school today is not what they will use in their jobs. For example, the Mac's System 7 would likely have been better "training" for Windows 9x than Windows 3.1 would have been.
Pointing out the fact that a company's product can be used in alternative ways is not morally wrong. If Alice sells widgets for less than what Bob charges for identical widgets, should I not state this publicly because it will "financially harm" Bob? Markets depend on information to operate efficiently. The iOpener business plan was fundamentally flawed, and hopefully others will learn from its failures.
Actually, the Mac OS X Beta comes with a 1.3 VM with the HotSpot JIT. I believe the class library is still 1.2.2, but that should be updated in the next release.
The legal question is "do the alleged mistakes constitue grounds for a challenge under Florida law?" And none of the three conditions you listed appear to be satisfied. There are no allegations of official misconduct, all candidates were eligible to hold office, and even if some voters made a mistake on their ballots I don't believe that renders them "illegal".
The ballot design was public far in advance of the election. There was plenty of time to challenge it beforehand.
That really doesn't strike me as a substantive reason to vote for someone. A more relevant tech issue would be that Gore continually supported (unconstitutional) restrictions on private use of encryption, while Bush opposed them.
Your girlfriend is clearly a keeper :)
Thanks for having an open mind. I won't attempt to defend Bush's drug policy because it's completely wrong. All I can suggest is that Gore is not an improvement. See this article. An excerpt:
As of yet, there's no hope of a rational drug policy from either of the two major parties. (Although Republican supporters of decriminalization are increasing in number, e.g. Gov. Johnson of New Mexico and William F Buckley).
The only candidates willing to end the war on (some) drugs are Ralph Nader (obviously unacceptable to libertarians) and Harry Browne. Compared to them, there's virtually no difference between Bush and Gore on this issue. Voting Democratic is going to have the opposite effect of what you want; if ending the drug war is that important, as I see it you have to vote for Browne.
Absolutely. It's an anonymous, one-shot prisoner's dilemna and the best strategy is to defect. Not that that's a bad thing, since "defect" in this scenario means to vote your conscience.
What about Harry Browne?. By conventional standards the Libertarians are a bit extreme, but they're the only party which is consistently for liberty and against government intrusion in personal and economic issues.
Gore hasn't got the same joi-de-vivre as Clinton has, but at least he's an elegant and digified statesman, a boring but professional person.
I would disagree with this. Look at his performance in the debates; he was consistently interrupting, violating the agreed-upon rules, at one point literally getting in Bush's face as he was talking. That does not strike me as professional, and I would not want anyone with an attitude like that representing my country.
Bush is *no* statesman. The fact that he's leading in the polls arguably because more of the electorate things he'd be a more fun guy with whom to have a beer arguably proves the every dictator right: perhaps the people *aren't* smart enough to choose their own destiny after all.
Can't argue with the first statement, but I don't think people are quite that stupid. I think people are tired of the constant lies and scandals emanating from the White House (of which Gore played many integral roles), and are not buying Gore's hysterical claims that Bush's plans would destroy the economy, cause senior citizens to starve, or result in the earth being sucked into a black hole.
Interesting theory on Nader btw. It would be fun to see mass infighting between principled socialists (Greens) and unprincipled near-socialists.
I beg you to reconsider this. In recent years the Democrats have shown equal or greater hostility to personal freedom than the Republicans, while coming up with unending ways to make the government larger and more expensive. Gore wants our military to be the world's peacekeepers (no matter how many innocent civilians we have to bomb in the process), and it's his administration that allowed Barry McCafferty to spread blatant lies and propaganda for the drug war. He is certainly no better than Bush on these issues. Also remember that Gore supported restrictions on encryption (opposed by Bush) as well as the whole Clipper Chip fiasco. From a libertarian perspective Gore is less desirable than Bush even if you ignore the economic issues on which Bush is much preferable.
Again, I strongly urge you to reconsider your vote. If you value liberty, Gore is the last person you should support.
Sorry, I interpreted your original post as a standard liberal "tax cuts don't help anyone but the rich" mantra, which it wasn't. We are more in agreement than I thought.
Neither of these huckleberries is in the business of making LESS money for the government.
An excellent point. Bush promises to increase spending by "only" 800 billion as compared to Gore's 2.3 trillion or whatever he's up to by now.
But anyway, c'mon, man, it's the oldest trick in the political book. Everyone promises to lower taxes. They always have, always will, and it will always turn out to be a sham in one way or the other
Quite possibly true, but as I see it the expected value of after-tax income is substantially greater under Bush than Gore. Since Gore's vast array of new programs uses up the (alleged) surplus and then some, he's going to need additional sources of money. Not to mention his insistence on keeping everyone forcibly locked into Social Security which offers a return of roughly 0% for today's workers.
Of course, I'd rather vote for someone who doesn't want to punch me in the head at all, but I'm wacky like that.
No arguments here. Bush is far from an ideal candidate, that's why I'm voting for Harry Browne (who as far as I can tell is the only candidate who wants to reduce the size and power of government at all). But of the two candidates that have a chance of winning, I strongly prefer Bush.
Well, yes. Since Bush's plan calls for a tax cut for all taxpayers rather than Gore's "targeted" social engineering experiments, everyone who pays taxes will benefit. (Yes, this includes the evil rich, sorry.)
is a lousy few dollars in your pocket really worth the further erosion of our civil rights and environment that a Bush administration represents?
Good point. Let's elect Al Gore so we can use encryption freely...oops, I mean so we can end the war on (some) drugs...errr, I mean so we can stop government invasions of privacy like Carnivore and the Clipper Chip...hey, wait a minute...