You can disable any app in Android. Instead of "uninstall" you'll see a button to uninstall updates,
Most user loaded apps do not have a "disable" feature. It's either let it run as it wants or uninstall it lock, stock and barrel.
I wish they all had "disable", since there are apps (like Nook with at least 5, FileManager+ with one, Accuweather with 3 or 4) that run multiple services all the time, even when you haven't used the app for a month. And some of them simply won't go away when you kill them (Google Location Services service, I'm pointing at you.) It's a pain to have to uninstall apps and then reinstall them for just the amount of time you want to actually use them.
Those that do have "disable" can hide it behind a "uninstall updates", so if you want to disable it you have to uninstall the update. When you want to run it again, you have to enable and then often reload the update.
It's all designed to make it impossible, or as hard as possible, to stop whatever from gathering information about you and your files.
Try living on Venus and tell me how CO2 is working out there.
So you would force Goldilocks to eat the bowl of porridge that is too hot because she thinks one of the bowls is just right? If she says she thinks porridge is good, she should eat the "too hot" to prove it to you?
Screaming doom and blathering spittle-flecked hyperbole is why we got Trump.
I quoted that from a previous post for context.
The planet will fix itself. We may not survive, as a species,
Given the adaptability of the human species, and the huge variation of climates in which we already survive quite well, I would call the claim that AGW will lead to the extinction of the human species to be a bit hyperbolic. Don't you?
For example, I think the human species can survive quite well even if Florida is three feet under water (Schipol Airport has a reported elevation of between 9.8 and 11 feet below MSL; Amsterdam is close to 7 feet below). This applies to every coastal area.
People already live where is it ungodly hot. They already survive hurricanes and tornados. None of those would be mass extinction events.
Will we need to adapt to GW (whether you believe it is A or N)? Sure. Can we adapt to GW? Of course. Can we adapt to GC? Of course. The common thread to all of those questions is "can we adapt?", and the answer is always "yes".
The word "welfare" has several meanings, and the one in the Constitution is not "handing out money to people to pay for things they want or need." The adjective "general" might be a clue. Specific help to specific people is not "general".
Not all taxes are for that purpose. Some, if not many, purport to have that purpose but are truly just a means of either social engineering (e.g. "sin" taxes on alcohol, pot, booze, etc), or wealth redistribution (e.g. "carbon taxes", which are not intended to actually fix the "pollution" from carbon dioxide, but to give free money to people not based on on the impact upon them but on them being alive, taken from "evil corporations" -- rich people.)
The statement you replied to was specific to "taxes for redistribution", which excludes those that are truly applied to providing common infrastructure.
I don't think any of these laws have been tested in court, and I think them of at best questionable constitutionality.
Since Article II, Section 1 is explicit in saying that the electors shall be selected in the manner determined by the Legislature of each state, it would be a difficult argument to make that the Constitution does NOT pass control of the electors to the states explicitly, with the limited exceptions remaining in Article II, Section 1. There is nothing in the Constitution that prevents the Legislatures from deciding that the voting choice of the electors cannot be used to decide who the electors are.
And, yes, it's pointless. It was originally set up to give slave states more influence in who became President,
It was originally set up to lessen the imbalance that more populous states had over less populated ones in the selection of the President and Vice President -- the only election that selects a leader of the entire US. Every state gets two electors just for being a state, not just the slave states.
and in the hope that the electors would actually use some judgment.
"in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct". Where does it say the electors get to decide? Since it does not, then this is a state matter, and the states' Legislatures have been given sole authority here. If they say "you must vote the way the popular vote of the state tells you", the Constitution does not contradict that.
I think a close precedent would be the SCOTUS decision that stopped yet another recount in Florida, which was based on the same clause. The Florida legislature had determined the means of counting and recounting Florida votes and how the result would be certified, and SCOTUS ruled that it did not have authority to mandate yet another recount once those previously determined rules had been followed. The Florida legislature was responsible for the selection of the electors.
You forgot the third kind who just think the electoral college system is stupid, antiquated, and unjust
No, the "third kind" are really either just upset that their candidate lost and want the system changed under the assumption that their preferred candidate will win the next time under a different system. At which time, they will probably find fault with the new system when their candidate loses again, and the cycle will repeat. Or they are ignorant of the system and don't understand why it is the way it is.
and think it is silly to call ourselves a democracy
The United States is a confederation of states, as should be evident from the name of the country. The one election that selects a federal leader is conducted under a system that represents that political organization. All the other elections are simple plurality of the popular vote wins.
Since I understand the difference between a state of the US being composed of counties, and the US being composed of individual states, I have no problem with the Electoral College system. It is a rather intelligent means of factoring in both citizen and state interests in the federal leadership. And I have said that even when my candidate lost.
Personally, I find the argument that we should elect a President the same way we elect the local dog catcher because that's how we elect the dog catcher to be particularly unconvincing.
If you are going to make some citizens' vote count more
The system as it stands doesn't do that. Nobody sits down and says "we're going to make Joe Smith's vote count double Bill Brown's." It DOES include state interests when making the decision.
I would point out that ANY voting system makes some people's votes worthless. Anyone who votes for a losing candidate under ANY system has wasted their vote. The 49% of the people who voted for Joe Smith when Bill Brown wins with 51% might as well not have bothered voting. Does this disturb you? If you are disturbed by the losers having their vote count less in the Presidential election, then the entire voting system must drive you nuts. And before you talk about other voting systems, this applies to ANY system. Any system that has a winner and losers winds up with the people who voted for the losers having their votes made worthless. Even the system used in GB where districts elect MPs and the Prime Minister comes from the majority party (or coalition sans majority) results in every vote for losers counting for nothing.
You are saying 'the state' tells the electors who to vote for?
No, I didn't say that. Let me quote it again for you:
Electors who voted for Trump did so because they were selected by their States to cast their votes for Trump.
The electors are selected by the State, which is not "the state" telling them, it is the people of the state who have bothered to cast a ballot.
If that's the case then the elector system is even more pointless than I thought.
Since you don't understand how the electors of a state are selected and why they vote for the candidate they do, it is clear that your understanding of the Electoral College system is pretty minimal, and your arguments against it are based more in ignorance than in reason.
How can we be sure of that?
Whoosh. We don't look, that's how we can be sure of that. We don't look for vote fraud from ineligible voters, we don't look for it otherwise. Except now, because ineligible voters are likely to vote for the party that gives them free stuff (like the Daley machine in Chicago would hire people to vote multiple times, e.g.) and "otherwise" is the current excuse for why that same party's candidate lost this time. One kind of fraud preferentially helps one party, so anyone who wants to investigate and prevent it is "racist"; the other kind must be why they lost
You know, *exactly* like the GOP has been doing with gerrymandering,
Democrats have never gerrymandered? And I hate to remind you, gerrymandering has nothing at all to do with, nor any effect on, presidential elections.
... and the mass dropping of folks from the voting roles.... And there is *no* national system to move registrations when you relocate.
So in your last paragraph you lead with the reason why voter rolls need to be purged every so often. Or "massive dropping of folks" who no longer deserve to be able to vote in a district, as you put it.
Of course there is no national system to manage voter registrations. Voting is not a national process. It's managed at the county/parish level, with perhaps a state level of oversight. (In Oregon we register at Dept. Motor Veh., and that registration is forwarded to the county of residence for processing.) That's because it is a local function, and we have exactly ONE election that has a nationwide result. One. But many many at the state and lower levels.
Three People in an elevator hold an election, the two "poor" people elect one, who proposes a "Tax" on the Rich,
In other words, a democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.
Alexis de Tocqueville
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. -- misattributed to Alexis de Tocqueville, but true nonetheless.
We spend so much money making weapons and waging war while refusing to spend money to help our own people.
Maintaining a standing army is one of the few specific functions of the federal government, while charity is supposed to be a function of the states or the people. Yes, I, too, think states spend way too much money maintaining their standing armies (national guards).
We have a growing problem of people thinking we should just let people in need die of starvation rather than help them and I'm not even exaggerating.
Yes, you are. We have a number of people who think charity is not a government function and that private charity should be the fallback, not taxpayer funded ones. Funny how this is supported by the Constitution. We have a growing number of people who think the federal government should be responsible for people from cradle to grave, which is the actual problem.
It's a total lack of faith in civilian government
A faith that isn't supposed to be necessary, for a function that it isn't supposed to have.
but the most resilient are those with paper ballots, automatic voter registration starting at 16
No "voting system" that automatically registers people who have no expressed interest in participating is "resilient". It creates voter lists filled with usable identities for vote fraud, especially in a vote-by-mail system where all of those people are mailed a ballot whether they want them or not. Every ballot thrown out at the post office is a potential source of an invalid vote, and every unwanted ballot sent to a home is a potential ballot cast by the spouse or other resident. The necessary regular purging of moved/died/etc people who had no interest in voting anyway creates another opportunity for political bickering over one party trying to disenfranchise people -- people who had never voted and are no longer legal voters anyway.
But registration is not a "voting system", it is a registration system. The voting system is how those registered voters actually do their voting.
You know, we DO know about digital signing. And defense in depth. And chain of custody.
I'm interested in your ideas. Please tell me how I can digitally sign my ballot, and how we manage the chain of custody as it either sits overnight in the ballot drop-box or passes through the USPS system.
You have to win a majority of ALL the precincts.
In our local Senate district, it is quite common for the Republican candidate to win in a majority of the counties, yet a Democrat goes to Washington because he won the county with the big city in it. Of all the elections I know, none except the US Presidential election does anything more than summing all the votes for all the political subdivisions and the plurality takes all.
Didn't Trump actually lose the election in terms of the popular vote?
There is no popular vote for US President, so no, Trump didn't lose "the popular vote".
There are two kinds of people who fall back into "popular vote" mode when referring to the US Presidential elections. The first are those who see a huge mandate for some some specific political agenda that may or may not have been a major issue to the voters. The others are those who are unhappy that their candidate lost according to the rules in place and well known to all participants (at least those who didn't skip civics class the day the Electoral College was covered, and we don't care what ignorant people think). Neither group provides a significant reason to change the outcome.
If I were investigating the first thing I would do is look into the finances of the electors who voted for trump even though the popular vote was against him.
I see you skipped civics class. Electors who voted for Trump did so because they were selected by their States to cast their votes for Trump. What you just admitted is that you would waste the taxpayer's money investigating why someone did what they were expected and selected to do.
The second thing I would do would be to try to figure out how many popular votes were changed and which direction they were changed in.
You didn't get the memo. There is no vote fraud. Nothing to see here, move along.
Sounds like it's time for better security in the computerized part of the voting system.
Or maybe just a return to non-computerized systems. Yes, computers make finding out who won much faster and make counting easier. They also make miscounting easier.
Do you know what happens if we don't know who won an election for a week or two, instead of by 8:05PM election eve? Absolutely nothing.
If you think that's okay to have happened, then you can expect to see plenty of attempts in future elections.
Even if you don't think that's ok to have happened, you can expect to see plenty of attempts in future elections. What's your point?
Someone interested in democracy should want the election to occur without people trying to break into the election counting equipment and fiddle with the data.
And if wishes were horses then beggars would ride. Some people try to "break into" the election system every time there is an election. That applies to computerized systems, but it can also be as simple as an election worker with a bit of pencil hidden under a bandaid on a finger invalidating paper ballots by mismarking them while being counted. You can't stop people from trying. You can "want" all you want, but it will mean nothing in the long run.
No, I understand your intent quite well, as you go on to explain. You want to find any excuse to legalize drugs. You present the false dichotomy of people either having to buy from a nefarious illegal drug dealer or a clean-cut corporate drug dealer in a convenience store. You think I would choose "buy from a store clerk" when there is a valid, best option that you cannot imagine.
I guess to rephrase, if you found your kids with drugs, would you rather confront a drug dealer or a store clerk?
I thought I was rather clear on that. Let me rephrase: I would "confront" neither a drug dealer on a dark street corner nor a drug dealer standing behind a 7/11 counter. I would not suddenly start buying drugs for my kids when I find them using drugs. I would deal with my kids. What other "confront[ation]" do you imagine I would even consider? You think I'm going out to hunt down a drug dealer in some dark alley? Or "hunt down" a drug dealer in the local store who is now legally selling things? What is there to "confront" in the latter, unless I'm there to buy from him? You think I'm going to walk into the 7/11 with a baseball bat to "confront" the clerk for doing his job and obeying the law?
Thankfully, our kids never got involved in things like that.
Imagine the utopia that we'd have if your kids could pick up a couple of ludes and some Xtasy when they stop for a Slurpy on the way home from school. Legalized drugs, man, "who would you rather confront"? I think it is a good thing that prevention is dual-pronged, especially when dealing with teens whose decision making abilities are just developing. "Dad would ground us forever" and "we can't find anyplace to buy them" is better than "Dad's a fuddy-duddy for denying us something that is legal..."
Yes, really. You're assuming there will be a sudden new marketplace for all the newly legal drugs, that someone will be making and selling them to meet the demand, and that the production facilities will be monitored by some legal agency to maintain purity and sanitary standards. That's not necessarily a given. "PW1952 is now legal to possess..." first doesn't mean it is legal to produce or import, so you'll still have all the same backroom production in unknown and unmonitored labs producing it, and criminals selling it. And second, it doesn't mean that the people who use it will be any smarter about how much to use or when not to. I mean, if you have 13 year old kids being stupid and ODing on fancy new stuff because they got it from their friend, what makes you think they'll be smarter when they use what is now not illegal for them to own?
You don't believe for a minute that criminal manufacture and sale of pot has gone away just because it has been made legally available in a dispensary, do you?
During alcohol prohibition, people dying from tainted alcohol was a common occurrence.
Yep. And drinking the head off a distillation run will still make you go blind. Methanol is still methanol, pun intended.
Having alcohol become legal almost instantly improved the quality of the product,
No, having the previous manufacturers go back to making it improved the quality, as did the state regulation of sales. Neither is a given when someone says "decriminalize drugs", and just decriminalizing them isn't what will make the use of them safer. There is no certified, commercial lab making the PW32052 or whatever it was that killed those 13 year old kids, so making it legal to own tomorrow won't mean there will be anyone but the same backroom labs making tomorrow.
Also, if you had kids and discovered that they had drugs, would you rather deal with a drug dealer or a convenience store clerk.
If I discovered my kids had drugs, I would be dealing with neither a drug dealer nor a convenience store clerk. You really think that I'm going to suddenly start buying the stuff for them if I find them doing something that stupid? "Oh, you poor dears, it must be very frightening for you to go out in the dead of night to a street corner in the bad part of town to bravely buy the drugs you are sneaking into this house. Why of course I'll go buy them for you because I want you to be safe. Remember, only 10 micrograms of that stuff at a time, once a night. You do know what a microgram is, right, and can measure it? Before I go, can I get a hit of ludes from you?" Sure. Right. Really gonna happen.
Any currently illegal drug would be safer if they were legalized,
Don't be silly. Legalizing a drug doesn't make the drug safer. It only makes it a non-criminal act to possess it. That baggie of PW9352 or whatever it was that killed the kids doesn't magically change into something safer just because it isn't illegal. There is no magic "if only" that would bring MJ back to life "if only" fentanyl was legal for recreational use.
dollars to doughnuts those kid referenced in the summary would be alive today if they would have had easy access to pot.
It's easy to bet with other people's lives.
The kids were 13 years old. I have a feeling that even people who advocate legal pot put an age limit on it, just like there is for both tobacco and alcohol. They wouldn't have "easy access" to pot even were it legal in their state.
When they aren't able to get their mitts on pot, they'll do insane things like inhale glue, aerosols, or in this case, chinese made bath-tub chemicals of dubious providence.
The word is "provenance." But I believe you are wrong. They got this drug from a friend, so of course it was safe. Of course. And they knew the right amount to take because, well, because it was obvious. And you want to make it legal and easier for everyone to get access to this drug. Ok.
In Oregon: basically... a gram of pot costs about $5-10 dollars.
These kids have as easy access to alcohol in Utah as they would the cheap grams in Oregon. They didn't die from alcohol poisoning, they had already progressed to a designer drug. What makes you think they wouldn't have moved up from pot to the same thing if drugs in general were easily accessible to them? Pot is like so passe, so last generation. Hippies smoke pot, affluent teens do designer drugs.
Just simply plant a seed with the rest of the veggies in your garden, and voila!!
The discussion is about legalizing all drugs, not just pot. Implying that all drugs are as safe to use as pot is is, well, not worth continuing the discussion.
Oh wait, it went down. Because it turns out there's very little overlap between people who want cocaine and heroin but are deterred by prohibition.
I have no idea what the official numbers say, or if they are correct to start with. Your explanation does not tell us why the numbers went down, at best it explains why it wouldn't go up very much. ("Very little overlap" is not zero.) And, of course, this is limited to "cocaine and heroin", two drugs with unpleasant delivery systems. The claim is that legalizing ALL drugs will not cause in increase in use, but taking a pill is very different than injection or inhalation. If the use mode is the prime impediment, then no, legalizing use will not change much. If the use mode is as simple as popping a pill, then other impediments will be more significant. Like, for example, the impediment of having to find the dealer, meet with him somewhere he's got control of the situation, while you are carrying a load of cash, and he could turn out to be a narc so you go to jail. Normal people do worry about that kind of thing.
Prohibition is not, has never been, nor ever will be, a significant impediment to anyone who wants drugs,
Yes, for some, perhaps many, it surely is. No, it will not stop the truly determined user, but for many recreational or intermittent users the steps required to purchase and potential legal consequences of obtaining illegal drugs is a significant impediment.
even less so for the people likely to fall into abuse and addiction.
Susceptibility to "abuse and addiction" doesn't imply a greater likelyhood of seeking out that which one would find addicting. Addiction and abuse follow use, not precede it. You can't be addicted to a drug you've never had, so if you never have any abuse and addiction is very unlikely.
If you want to minimize the number of lives ruined by drugs, you provide legal access, to ALL drugs (no that doesn't mean at 7-11,
You prevent only the criminal charges, but if you believe that the only ruin to lives from drugs is a criminal charge then you are the only who is misinformed. The teens listed above have ruined not only their own lives but their parents', and "education and treatment" would have done nothing. I think it is a pretty sure bet that they knew "drugs bad, n'ok?", and they were looking for the newest bestest high (so "traditional" drugs wouldn't be good enough). In fact, the reason they got what they did was because it was not yet illegal, it would seem. Making it ALL legal would not reduce their demand or use. They would still choose the new stuff, because the "old school drugs" are so, well, old school. PQ8352 is cool and new, dontcha know?
and put it into education and treatment,
Educating people how to use drugs does not prevent it. If you aren't educating them how to use the more dangerous drugs, then you will still have lives ruined. Treatment is after-the-fact.
Perhaps I am old fashioned, but I've learned through living that it is much better to preclude the disasters altogether instead of go through them and then have to pick up the pieces, if the pieces can be picked up at all. This modern generation philosophy that anything goes and it can all be fixed if it goes wrong is, well, damaging in the long run. To put it mildly.
I don't know, but I am pretty sure that there isn't anyone who comes out of "treatment" who doesn't think their lives would have been much better if they hadn't started taking the drugs to start with. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they all think that the right way to live is get high, get treatment, get high, get treatment...
When he got his first package, it was the same drugs that he got at the local pharmacy.
Did you do a chemical analysis on both so you know this for a fact, or are you basing your claim of "same" on the fact they looked the same?
There are many cases of counterfeit sources of drugs from foreign countries that are "the same drugs", just they are made in unsanitary conditions, use inferior fillers and stabilizers, or don't contain the drug they claim to have or the amount.
You can't just look at a pill and know it is the same as another. It is trivial to use the same colors and print the same id numbers on them. And when you buy them from India or China you are simply too far away for the internal regulators to care, if they care at all.
Yes, some people will become addicted and their lives will be ruined, and some people will die.
If you can freely obtain an addicting drug, then do you not imagine that more people will become addicted and more people will die? If you think the numbers won't go up, then you must be ignoring the number of people who would not buy the drugs because of the legal consequences currently involved, or in the difficulty in obtaining it.
Would you seriously argue that the use of pot in states where there are now legal dispensaries for recreational use all over the place has gone down, or has it gone up? Who stops using recreational pot when it becomes trivial to buy, compared to having to know someone who knows someone who meets you in the middle of the night on a dark street corner? Certainly the numbers have gone up. Why would it be different for stronger, addicting drugs?
and the detox centers will be there for people who've gotten into trouble and want to get their lives straightened out.
What detox center should the parents of the teens reported in this story send their kids to? And would it help? Would making it easier for them to get the drug they od'd on mean they would be more intelligent in using it?
But criminalization has ruined far too many lives, too often those who aren't even involved,
The fact that one thing has "ruined far too many lives" is not a good reason to open the doors to even more lives being ruined.
drug addiction should be stigmatized and recognized as the disease it is.
Stigmatizing people for having diseases is a bad idea. But I think you meant the opposite. Anyway, drug addiction is one of those marvelous diseases where the victim is almost always self-created. Not getting an addiction to crack is quite easy: don't take it to start with. Decriminalizing it will lead to more people taking it (because they can get it) and thus increasing the demand for addiction services.
You could point to Prohibition as a failure and argue that "drug prohibition" would be as huge a failure, but there are two differences. First, Prohibition was enacted long after the use of alcohol became commonplace and widespread. Second, it was prohibition of something that is trivial to manufacture. It isn't quite as easy to make your own crack or heroin or fentanyl.
Legalize marijuana, decriminalize possession of anything else, and anyone arrested goes not to prison but to treatment centers.
Arrested for what? You've decriminalized use, so what's left? The only crimes you could be arrested for are crimes caused by or associated with use, like theft or smuggling or tax avoidance. Are we to believe that avoiding taxes is a disease and not a simple crime? (I assume you include "use" when you say "decriminalize possession", since there is no value to possession unless you use it, too. Nobody buys a dime bag of heroin just to put it on the mantle and look at it.)
All of this would keep people from dying in our streets
The kids in this article who overdosed would still have "died in the streets" because they didn't know what they were doing with a drug that was available to them. Making that drug more available won't fix stupid, it will only allow more stupid to take place. And the "replace incarceration with rehab" the OP calls for would do nothing to rehab those kids. I'm sure their parents would be very happy to learn that the drug their kids had taken was now legal to use but anyone who wants to get addiction treatment can do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, NPR is definitely right of center.
So you don't really listen to NPR. Or you're trying to be sarcastic. Can't tell.
You can disable any app in Android. Instead of "uninstall" you'll see a button to uninstall updates,
Most user loaded apps do not have a "disable" feature. It's either let it run as it wants or uninstall it lock, stock and barrel.
I wish they all had "disable", since there are apps (like Nook with at least 5, FileManager+ with one, Accuweather with 3 or 4) that run multiple services all the time, even when you haven't used the app for a month. And some of them simply won't go away when you kill them (Google Location Services service, I'm pointing at you.) It's a pain to have to uninstall apps and then reinstall them for just the amount of time you want to actually use them.
Those that do have "disable" can hide it behind a "uninstall updates", so if you want to disable it you have to uninstall the update. When you want to run it again, you have to enable and then often reload the update.
It's all designed to make it impossible, or as hard as possible, to stop whatever from gathering information about you and your files.
Try living on Venus and tell me how CO2 is working out there.
So you would force Goldilocks to eat the bowl of porridge that is too hot because she thinks one of the bowls is just right? If she says she thinks porridge is good, she should eat the "too hot" to prove it to you?
Screaming doom and blathering spittle-flecked hyperbole is why we got Trump.
I quoted that from a previous post for context.
The planet will fix itself. We may not survive, as a species,
Given the adaptability of the human species, and the huge variation of climates in which we already survive quite well, I would call the claim that AGW will lead to the extinction of the human species to be a bit hyperbolic. Don't you?
For example, I think the human species can survive quite well even if Florida is three feet under water (Schipol Airport has a reported elevation of between 9.8 and 11 feet below MSL; Amsterdam is close to 7 feet below). This applies to every coastal area.
People already live where is it ungodly hot. They already survive hurricanes and tornados. None of those would be mass extinction events.
Will we need to adapt to GW (whether you believe it is A or N)? Sure. Can we adapt to GW? Of course. Can we adapt to GC? Of course. The common thread to all of those questions is "can we adapt?", and the answer is always "yes".
for the general welfare
The word "welfare" has several meanings, and the one in the Constitution is not "handing out money to people to pay for things they want or need." The adjective "general" might be a clue. Specific help to specific people is not "general".
No, taxes are a payment to maintain society,
Not all taxes are for that purpose. Some, if not many, purport to have that purpose but are truly just a means of either social engineering (e.g. "sin" taxes on alcohol, pot, booze, etc), or wealth redistribution (e.g. "carbon taxes", which are not intended to actually fix the "pollution" from carbon dioxide, but to give free money to people not based on on the impact upon them but on them being alive, taken from "evil corporations" -- rich people.)
The statement you replied to was specific to "taxes for redistribution", which excludes those that are truly applied to providing common infrastructure.
I don't think any of these laws have been tested in court, and I think them of at best questionable constitutionality.
Since Article II, Section 1 is explicit in saying that the electors shall be selected in the manner determined by the Legislature of each state, it would be a difficult argument to make that the Constitution does NOT pass control of the electors to the states explicitly, with the limited exceptions remaining in Article II, Section 1. There is nothing in the Constitution that prevents the Legislatures from deciding that the voting choice of the electors cannot be used to decide who the electors are.
And, yes, it's pointless. It was originally set up to give slave states more influence in who became President,
It was originally set up to lessen the imbalance that more populous states had over less populated ones in the selection of the President and Vice President -- the only election that selects a leader of the entire US. Every state gets two electors just for being a state, not just the slave states.
and in the hope that the electors would actually use some judgment.
"in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct". Where does it say the electors get to decide? Since it does not, then this is a state matter, and the states' Legislatures have been given sole authority here. If they say "you must vote the way the popular vote of the state tells you", the Constitution does not contradict that.
I think a close precedent would be the SCOTUS decision that stopped yet another recount in Florida, which was based on the same clause. The Florida legislature had determined the means of counting and recounting Florida votes and how the result would be certified, and SCOTUS ruled that it did not have authority to mandate yet another recount once those previously determined rules had been followed. The Florida legislature was responsible for the selection of the electors.
You forgot the third kind who just think the electoral college system is stupid, antiquated, and unjust
No, the "third kind" are really either just upset that their candidate lost and want the system changed under the assumption that their preferred candidate will win the next time under a different system. At which time, they will probably find fault with the new system when their candidate loses again, and the cycle will repeat. Or they are ignorant of the system and don't understand why it is the way it is.
and think it is silly to call ourselves a democracy
The United States is a confederation of states, as should be evident from the name of the country. The one election that selects a federal leader is conducted under a system that represents that political organization. All the other elections are simple plurality of the popular vote wins. Since I understand the difference between a state of the US being composed of counties, and the US being composed of individual states, I have no problem with the Electoral College system. It is a rather intelligent means of factoring in both citizen and state interests in the federal leadership. And I have said that even when my candidate lost.
Personally, I find the argument that we should elect a President the same way we elect the local dog catcher because that's how we elect the dog catcher to be particularly unconvincing.
If you are going to make some citizens' vote count more
The system as it stands doesn't do that. Nobody sits down and says "we're going to make Joe Smith's vote count double Bill Brown's." It DOES include state interests when making the decision.
I would point out that ANY voting system makes some people's votes worthless. Anyone who votes for a losing candidate under ANY system has wasted their vote. The 49% of the people who voted for Joe Smith when Bill Brown wins with 51% might as well not have bothered voting. Does this disturb you? If you are disturbed by the losers having their vote count less in the Presidential election, then the entire voting system must drive you nuts. And before you talk about other voting systems, this applies to ANY system. Any system that has a winner and losers winds up with the people who voted for the losers having their votes made worthless. Even the system used in GB where districts elect MPs and the Prime Minister comes from the majority party (or coalition sans majority) results in every vote for losers counting for nothing.
You are saying 'the state' tells the electors who to vote for?
No, I didn't say that. Let me quote it again for you:
The electors are selected by the State, which is not "the state" telling them, it is the people of the state who have bothered to cast a ballot.
If that's the case then the elector system is even more pointless than I thought.
Since you don't understand how the electors of a state are selected and why they vote for the candidate they do, it is clear that your understanding of the Electoral College system is pretty minimal, and your arguments against it are based more in ignorance than in reason.
How can we be sure of that?
Whoosh. We don't look, that's how we can be sure of that. We don't look for vote fraud from ineligible voters, we don't look for it otherwise. Except now, because ineligible voters are likely to vote for the party that gives them free stuff (like the Daley machine in Chicago would hire people to vote multiple times, e.g.) and "otherwise" is the current excuse for why that same party's candidate lost this time. One kind of fraud preferentially helps one party, so anyone who wants to investigate and prevent it is "racist"; the other kind must be why they lost
You know, *exactly* like the GOP has been doing with gerrymandering,
Democrats have never gerrymandered? And I hate to remind you, gerrymandering has nothing at all to do with, nor any effect on, presidential elections.
... and the mass dropping of folks from the voting roles. ... And there is *no* national system to move registrations when you relocate.
So in your last paragraph you lead with the reason why voter rolls need to be purged every so often. Or "massive dropping of folks" who no longer deserve to be able to vote in a district, as you put it.
Of course there is no national system to manage voter registrations. Voting is not a national process. It's managed at the county/parish level, with perhaps a state level of oversight. (In Oregon we register at Dept. Motor Veh., and that registration is forwarded to the county of residence for processing.) That's because it is a local function, and we have exactly ONE election that has a nationwide result. One. But many many at the state and lower levels.
Three People in an elevator hold an election, the two "poor" people elect one, who proposes a "Tax" on the Rich,
We spend so much money making weapons and waging war while refusing to spend money to help our own people.
Maintaining a standing army is one of the few specific functions of the federal government, while charity is supposed to be a function of the states or the people. Yes, I, too, think states spend way too much money maintaining their standing armies (national guards).
We have a growing problem of people thinking we should just let people in need die of starvation rather than help them and I'm not even exaggerating.
Yes, you are. We have a number of people who think charity is not a government function and that private charity should be the fallback, not taxpayer funded ones. Funny how this is supported by the Constitution. We have a growing number of people who think the federal government should be responsible for people from cradle to grave, which is the actual problem.
It's a total lack of faith in civilian government
A faith that isn't supposed to be necessary, for a function that it isn't supposed to have.
but the most resilient are those with paper ballots, automatic voter registration starting at 16
No "voting system" that automatically registers people who have no expressed interest in participating is "resilient". It creates voter lists filled with usable identities for vote fraud, especially in a vote-by-mail system where all of those people are mailed a ballot whether they want them or not. Every ballot thrown out at the post office is a potential source of an invalid vote, and every unwanted ballot sent to a home is a potential ballot cast by the spouse or other resident. The necessary regular purging of moved/died/etc people who had no interest in voting anyway creates another opportunity for political bickering over one party trying to disenfranchise people -- people who had never voted and are no longer legal voters anyway.
But registration is not a "voting system", it is a registration system. The voting system is how those registered voters actually do their voting.
You know, we DO know about digital signing. And defense in depth. And chain of custody.
I'm interested in your ideas. Please tell me how I can digitally sign my ballot, and how we manage the chain of custody as it either sits overnight in the ballot drop-box or passes through the USPS system.
You have to win a majority of ALL the precincts.
In our local Senate district, it is quite common for the Republican candidate to win in a majority of the counties, yet a Democrat goes to Washington because he won the county with the big city in it. Of all the elections I know, none except the US Presidential election does anything more than summing all the votes for all the political subdivisions and the plurality takes all.
Didn't Trump actually lose the election in terms of the popular vote?
There is no popular vote for US President, so no, Trump didn't lose "the popular vote".
There are two kinds of people who fall back into "popular vote" mode when referring to the US Presidential elections. The first are those who see a huge mandate for some some specific political agenda that may or may not have been a major issue to the voters. The others are those who are unhappy that their candidate lost according to the rules in place and well known to all participants (at least those who didn't skip civics class the day the Electoral College was covered, and we don't care what ignorant people think). Neither group provides a significant reason to change the outcome.
If I were investigating the first thing I would do is look into the finances of the electors who voted for trump even though the popular vote was against him.
I see you skipped civics class. Electors who voted for Trump did so because they were selected by their States to cast their votes for Trump. What you just admitted is that you would waste the taxpayer's money investigating why someone did what they were expected and selected to do.
The second thing I would do would be to try to figure out how many popular votes were changed and which direction they were changed in.
You didn't get the memo. There is no vote fraud. Nothing to see here, move along.
Sounds like it's time for better security in the computerized part of the voting system.
Or maybe just a return to non-computerized systems. Yes, computers make finding out who won much faster and make counting easier. They also make miscounting easier.
Do you know what happens if we don't know who won an election for a week or two, instead of by 8:05PM election eve? Absolutely nothing.
If you think that's okay to have happened, then you can expect to see plenty of attempts in future elections.
Even if you don't think that's ok to have happened, you can expect to see plenty of attempts in future elections. What's your point?
Someone interested in democracy should want the election to occur without people trying to break into the election counting equipment and fiddle with the data.
And if wishes were horses then beggars would ride. Some people try to "break into" the election system every time there is an election. That applies to computerized systems, but it can also be as simple as an election worker with a bit of pencil hidden under a bandaid on a finger invalidating paper ballots by mismarking them while being counted. You can't stop people from trying. You can "want" all you want, but it will mean nothing in the long run.
I think you misunderstood my intent.
No, I understand your intent quite well, as you go on to explain. You want to find any excuse to legalize drugs. You present the false dichotomy of people either having to buy from a nefarious illegal drug dealer or a clean-cut corporate drug dealer in a convenience store. You think I would choose "buy from a store clerk" when there is a valid, best option that you cannot imagine.
I guess to rephrase, if you found your kids with drugs, would you rather confront a drug dealer or a store clerk?
I thought I was rather clear on that. Let me rephrase: I would "confront" neither a drug dealer on a dark street corner nor a drug dealer standing behind a 7/11 counter. I would not suddenly start buying drugs for my kids when I find them using drugs. I would deal with my kids. What other "confront[ation]" do you imagine I would even consider? You think I'm going out to hunt down a drug dealer in some dark alley? Or "hunt down" a drug dealer in the local store who is now legally selling things? What is there to "confront" in the latter, unless I'm there to buy from him? You think I'm going to walk into the 7/11 with a baseball bat to "confront" the clerk for doing his job and obeying the law?
Thankfully, our kids never got involved in things like that.
Imagine the utopia that we'd have if your kids could pick up a couple of ludes and some Xtasy when they stop for a Slurpy on the way home from school. Legalized drugs, man, "who would you rather confront"? I think it is a good thing that prevention is dual-pronged, especially when dealing with teens whose decision making abilities are just developing. "Dad would ground us forever" and "we can't find anyplace to buy them" is better than "Dad's a fuddy-duddy for denying us something that is legal..."
Oh really?
Yes, really. You're assuming there will be a sudden new marketplace for all the newly legal drugs, that someone will be making and selling them to meet the demand, and that the production facilities will be monitored by some legal agency to maintain purity and sanitary standards. That's not necessarily a given. "PW1952 is now legal to possess..." first doesn't mean it is legal to produce or import, so you'll still have all the same backroom production in unknown and unmonitored labs producing it, and criminals selling it. And second, it doesn't mean that the people who use it will be any smarter about how much to use or when not to. I mean, if you have 13 year old kids being stupid and ODing on fancy new stuff because they got it from their friend, what makes you think they'll be smarter when they use what is now not illegal for them to own?
You don't believe for a minute that criminal manufacture and sale of pot has gone away just because it has been made legally available in a dispensary, do you?
During alcohol prohibition, people dying from tainted alcohol was a common occurrence.
Yep. And drinking the head off a distillation run will still make you go blind. Methanol is still methanol, pun intended.
Having alcohol become legal almost instantly improved the quality of the product,
No, having the previous manufacturers go back to making it improved the quality, as did the state regulation of sales. Neither is a given when someone says "decriminalize drugs", and just decriminalizing them isn't what will make the use of them safer. There is no certified, commercial lab making the PW32052 or whatever it was that killed those 13 year old kids, so making it legal to own tomorrow won't mean there will be anyone but the same backroom labs making tomorrow.
Also, if you had kids and discovered that they had drugs, would you rather deal with a drug dealer or a convenience store clerk.
If I discovered my kids had drugs, I would be dealing with neither a drug dealer nor a convenience store clerk. You really think that I'm going to suddenly start buying the stuff for them if I find them doing something that stupid? "Oh, you poor dears, it must be very frightening for you to go out in the dead of night to a street corner in the bad part of town to bravely buy the drugs you are sneaking into this house. Why of course I'll go buy them for you because I want you to be safe. Remember, only 10 micrograms of that stuff at a time, once a night. You do know what a microgram is, right, and can measure it? Before I go, can I get a hit of ludes from you?" Sure. Right. Really gonna happen.
Any currently illegal drug would be safer if they were legalized,
Don't be silly. Legalizing a drug doesn't make the drug safer. It only makes it a non-criminal act to possess it. That baggie of PW9352 or whatever it was that killed the kids doesn't magically change into something safer just because it isn't illegal. There is no magic "if only" that would bring MJ back to life "if only" fentanyl was legal for recreational use.
dollars to doughnuts those kid referenced in the summary would be alive today if they would have had easy access to pot.
It's easy to bet with other people's lives.
The kids were 13 years old. I have a feeling that even people who advocate legal pot put an age limit on it, just like there is for both tobacco and alcohol. They wouldn't have "easy access" to pot even were it legal in their state.
When they aren't able to get their mitts on pot, they'll do insane things like inhale glue, aerosols, or in this case, chinese made bath-tub chemicals of dubious providence.
The word is "provenance." But I believe you are wrong. They got this drug from a friend, so of course it was safe. Of course. And they knew the right amount to take because, well, because it was obvious. And you want to make it legal and easier for everyone to get access to this drug. Ok.
In Oregon: basically... a gram of pot costs about $5-10 dollars.
These kids have as easy access to alcohol in Utah as they would the cheap grams in Oregon. They didn't die from alcohol poisoning, they had already progressed to a designer drug. What makes you think they wouldn't have moved up from pot to the same thing if drugs in general were easily accessible to them? Pot is like so passe, so last generation. Hippies smoke pot, affluent teens do designer drugs.
So, we should legalize pot?
I don't care what you do.
Just simply plant a seed with the rest of the veggies in your garden, and voila!!
The discussion is about legalizing all drugs, not just pot. Implying that all drugs are as safe to use as pot is is, well, not worth continuing the discussion.
Oh wait, it went down. Because it turns out there's very little overlap between people who want cocaine and heroin but are deterred by prohibition.
I have no idea what the official numbers say, or if they are correct to start with. Your explanation does not tell us why the numbers went down, at best it explains why it wouldn't go up very much. ("Very little overlap" is not zero.) And, of course, this is limited to "cocaine and heroin", two drugs with unpleasant delivery systems. The claim is that legalizing ALL drugs will not cause in increase in use, but taking a pill is very different than injection or inhalation. If the use mode is the prime impediment, then no, legalizing use will not change much. If the use mode is as simple as popping a pill, then other impediments will be more significant. Like, for example, the impediment of having to find the dealer, meet with him somewhere he's got control of the situation, while you are carrying a load of cash, and he could turn out to be a narc so you go to jail. Normal people do worry about that kind of thing.
Prohibition is not, has never been, nor ever will be, a significant impediment to anyone who wants drugs,
Yes, for some, perhaps many, it surely is. No, it will not stop the truly determined user, but for many recreational or intermittent users the steps required to purchase and potential legal consequences of obtaining illegal drugs is a significant impediment.
even less so for the people likely to fall into abuse and addiction.
Susceptibility to "abuse and addiction" doesn't imply a greater likelyhood of seeking out that which one would find addicting. Addiction and abuse follow use, not precede it. You can't be addicted to a drug you've never had, so if you never have any abuse and addiction is very unlikely.
If you want to minimize the number of lives ruined by drugs, you provide legal access, to ALL drugs (no that doesn't mean at 7-11,
You prevent only the criminal charges, but if you believe that the only ruin to lives from drugs is a criminal charge then you are the only who is misinformed. The teens listed above have ruined not only their own lives but their parents', and "education and treatment" would have done nothing. I think it is a pretty sure bet that they knew "drugs bad, n'ok?", and they were looking for the newest bestest high (so "traditional" drugs wouldn't be good enough). In fact, the reason they got what they did was because it was not yet illegal, it would seem. Making it ALL legal would not reduce their demand or use. They would still choose the new stuff, because the "old school drugs" are so, well, old school. PQ8352 is cool and new, dontcha know?
and put it into education and treatment,
Educating people how to use drugs does not prevent it. If you aren't educating them how to use the more dangerous drugs, then you will still have lives ruined. Treatment is after-the-fact.
Perhaps I am old fashioned, but I've learned through living that it is much better to preclude the disasters altogether instead of go through them and then have to pick up the pieces, if the pieces can be picked up at all. This modern generation philosophy that anything goes and it can all be fixed if it goes wrong is, well, damaging in the long run. To put it mildly.
I don't know, but I am pretty sure that there isn't anyone who comes out of "treatment" who doesn't think their lives would have been much better if they hadn't started taking the drugs to start with. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they all think that the right way to live is get high, get treatment, get high, get treatment ...
When he got his first package, it was the same drugs that he got at the local pharmacy.
Did you do a chemical analysis on both so you know this for a fact, or are you basing your claim of "same" on the fact they looked the same?
There are many cases of counterfeit sources of drugs from foreign countries that are "the same drugs", just they are made in unsanitary conditions, use inferior fillers and stabilizers, or don't contain the drug they claim to have or the amount. You can't just look at a pill and know it is the same as another. It is trivial to use the same colors and print the same id numbers on them. And when you buy them from India or China you are simply too far away for the internal regulators to care, if they care at all.
Yes, some people will become addicted and their lives will be ruined, and some people will die.
If you can freely obtain an addicting drug, then do you not imagine that more people will become addicted and more people will die? If you think the numbers won't go up, then you must be ignoring the number of people who would not buy the drugs because of the legal consequences currently involved, or in the difficulty in obtaining it.
Would you seriously argue that the use of pot in states where there are now legal dispensaries for recreational use all over the place has gone down, or has it gone up? Who stops using recreational pot when it becomes trivial to buy, compared to having to know someone who knows someone who meets you in the middle of the night on a dark street corner? Certainly the numbers have gone up. Why would it be different for stronger, addicting drugs?
and the detox centers will be there for people who've gotten into trouble and want to get their lives straightened out.
What detox center should the parents of the teens reported in this story send their kids to? And would it help? Would making it easier for them to get the drug they od'd on mean they would be more intelligent in using it?
But criminalization has ruined far too many lives, too often those who aren't even involved,
The fact that one thing has "ruined far too many lives" is not a good reason to open the doors to even more lives being ruined.
drug addiction should be stigmatized and recognized as the disease it is.
Stigmatizing people for having diseases is a bad idea. But I think you meant the opposite. Anyway, drug addiction is one of those marvelous diseases where the victim is almost always self-created. Not getting an addiction to crack is quite easy: don't take it to start with. Decriminalizing it will lead to more people taking it (because they can get it) and thus increasing the demand for addiction services.
You could point to Prohibition as a failure and argue that "drug prohibition" would be as huge a failure, but there are two differences. First, Prohibition was enacted long after the use of alcohol became commonplace and widespread. Second, it was prohibition of something that is trivial to manufacture. It isn't quite as easy to make your own crack or heroin or fentanyl.
Legalize marijuana, decriminalize possession of anything else, and anyone arrested goes not to prison but to treatment centers.
Arrested for what? You've decriminalized use, so what's left? The only crimes you could be arrested for are crimes caused by or associated with use, like theft or smuggling or tax avoidance. Are we to believe that avoiding taxes is a disease and not a simple crime? (I assume you include "use" when you say "decriminalize possession", since there is no value to possession unless you use it, too. Nobody buys a dime bag of heroin just to put it on the mantle and look at it.)
All of this would keep people from dying in our streets
The kids in this article who overdosed would still have "died in the streets" because they didn't know what they were doing with a drug that was available to them. Making that drug more available won't fix stupid, it will only allow more stupid to take place. And the "replace incarceration with rehab" the OP calls for would do nothing to rehab those kids. I'm sure their parents would be very happy to learn that the drug their kids had taken was now legal to use but anyone who wants to get addiction treatment can do so.