The other option for my kids would be the military. Would you prefer that?
Would I appreciate it if they served their country in the military? Sure. If they do, tell them "thank you" from me.
Would I prefer they go into the military than go to Germany? I don't really care. I'll just say "thank you" either way -- either for service to their country or by not expecting a taxpayer-funded education.
That's probably the only way to ensure that money isn't horded, no matter who is doing the hording.
You don't understand what endowments are, or how the money is used.
First, the money is invested, so it is available for other people to borrow. It isn't just sitting in the basement of the admin building gathering dust.
Second, it is INTENDED to be a long-term, if not permanent, pot of money. That means you don't spend principle ever. You only spend the interest.
So they are spending almost three times as much on bankers to keep their money safe than on the education of students!
They are spending money to bankers to manage the endowments so there is an appreciable rate of return on the investment that CAN be used to fund University operations. According to the summary, 17% of the endowment income went to student things. (Out of $1B, $170M.) The rest went to other University programs, like research, salaries, etc.
What you, and the people who call for a mandatory spending of 8% of an endowment, don't seem to understand is that endowments are supposed to be self-sustaining long-term things, and the INTEREST is what gets spent for operations. Unless you get a return of 8% per year on an endowment, being forced to spend 8% of it per year means you have an ever-dwindling supply of money.
Or is this the old boys club where they are shoving student's money around
The price of college is based (loosely) on how much it costs to educate someone.
So loosely that it can be considered completely irrelevant. Most of the cost of a college education comes from the taxpayer. That has been dropping over the years, however, because of college loans. This federal taxpayer-funded system is causing state taxpayers to question how much of their money should be going to higher education, because the students are getting taxpayer-backed loans that they seldom repay (and are often suggested to be totally forgiven) so why shouldn't tuition go up to cover the difference?
As the costs of labor increase, wouldn't you expect that professors salaries would go up as well
Not at the same rate that the costs of labor for everyone goes up. The "cost of labor" is much more than just professor salaries, it's health care (in large part), union wages for trades, etc. And, BTW, professor salaries do go up.
I have two kids that in a few years will be looking at college, and I will encourage both of them to go to Germany.
I'm sure the German taxpayers will thank you profusely, and I, as a US taxpayer, will too. One of us will be sarcastic about it, the other honest. Can you guess which is which?
It would mean that we would all get regular PhD salaries, the kind you have to supplement by moonlighting at an Amazon warehouse.
No, it would mean the ONLY salary you'd get is by working at an Amazon.com warehouse, because there would be such a glut of PhDs that most of them would never find a job in their field. It's already hard for PhDs in some fields to get jobs. You think by increasing the supply there would be more jobs for them? Do you really think that a company that is looking for one PhD is going to split that one job into 18 part time jobs because 18 people applied for it?
i disagree with the statement "people tend to not value things that they don't think costs them anything".
i went to school basically free.
Personal anecdotal evidence does not contradict statistical trends.
There's a really stupid Allstate Insurance ad on that has a woman talking to a man about driving, and she asks him "so you say that men are better drivers than women? Then why did I get a good-driver check from Allstate..." This proves that Allstate Insurance has no clue when it comes to statistics, even though it is a business based on statistics.
History has shown that people who don't feel they have ownership of something don't care as much about it as people who do. If someone pays nothing for a car, for example by having a company car, he will typically not take as good care of it as if it were his own. Or rental cars. You don't know anyone who has expressed the idea that "it's a rental, I'm going to drive the shit out of it and I don't care"? I do.
An excellent example was the Cabrini-Green housing project in south Chicago. Low cost housing, nobody felt any pride of ownership, and the place was a drug-dealer, urinate-in-the-stairwell kind of place. This same concept is why Habitat for Humanity requires sweat equity from people who get houses from them.
i can tell you i sure valued that education.
Good for you, and I'm glad you got it. But I can walk about a block from where I am now and find buildings filled with frat boys and sorority sisters whose parents are paying for their college and for whom classes are a nuisance.
i consider the consequences, they are a nice life based on my degree and education.
Many people have a nice life without a degree or education. Some people drop out of high school without any regard for their future. You're at one end of a bell curve. The other end still exists.
to have a lot of bad habits, none of which are because they are college graduates. You're seeing a causal relationship when none exists. People who are motivated enough to better themselves through college educations are also motivated enough to wear seatbelts, volunteer, etc. In other words, they'd be doing all those "beneficial to society" things whether they have a free degree or not.
In fact, if you make college free, you'll probably see a decline in the percentages of all those good things, not an increase, as people who aren't motivated enough to go to college on their own money start using the free stuff the government is giving them.
However, the PDE4B-inhibited mice also showed less recall of a fearful event after several days than ordinary mice.
Perhaps being smarter enabled them to process the "fearful event", determine the cause of the fear, the amount of actual hazard and any risk mitigation actions they could take, and thus not be as "afeard" the next time that event happened?
That's what humans do. They get scared by something, realize that the fright was temporary and not based on an actual threat, and desensitize.
And my fist thought was "Flowers For Algernon", too.
Nope, you are. If there is no reason to have a mandatory, free id issued at the state level, there is absolutely zero justification for yet another unfunded mandate upon the states.
But the problem is, the feds cannot mandate voter ID because the feds do not control the state elections. So the state must create the law. But that's racist. Even if you make the cost $0, there's still the "issue" of forcing poor people to take time off work to prove they are citizens. (And we know from being told so many times, "poor" is a defining racial characteristic.) So if you can't have mandatory voter id, then you're back at the starting point and have no justification for requiring free ids.
It would also require them to know the registered address of the person as that is the other check that is done when you get your papers.
You said they don't have to show any papers to vote. Why would they get papers in someone else's name if they don't need to show them to vote in their name?
And getting someone's "registered address" isn't that hard. At least not in the US. One time I wanted to do a mailing to everyone on my street, and all I had to do was ask the city and they gave me the names and "registered addresses" for everyone.
As for the comment about uninformed people voting, I think if you had compulsory voting the push would move from convincing people to actually vote to convincing them that you are the right option.
Hardly. Compulsory voting would lead to more repetition of names so that a name stuck in the mind of the voter. The people who don't care aren't going to suddenly start listening to complicated descriptions of political platforms, they have already tuned those out. They don't care. Forcing them to vote won't make them care about voting anymore than forcing someone to go to school forces them to care about algebra.
I dont understand why the Feds dont pass a law that states all voting machine source code MUST be audited by professionals before an election and then compiled, checked and then uploaded to the machines.
Because the feds have no constitutional authority to tell the states how to select the electors for President, and even less authority to tell them how to run local elections.
Besides the issue of determining who the "professionals" are and who is authorized to audit such code.
I believe that you are insufficiently paranoid. There are people associated with the manufacture of voting machines who have boasted that their machine would give the election to party X.
He said no such thing. The actual quote can be found here:
COLUMBUS - The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
He said, pretty clearly, as a private individual, that HE was donating as a means of helping Republicans win an election. He didn't say the company was rigging the machines so they would give the election to anyone.
or that all the manufacturers who were that corrupt were arrogant enough to say so publicly,
There was no admission of corruption. Tempest in a teapot. Besides, didn't you know, vote fraud in the US is a fraud. We don't need to take protective measures to prevent it.
Many seem to be (well, have been) designed so that whoever has access to the machines can corrupt the vote.
It has been common knowledge, at least for most people who deal with computers, that "there is no security without physical security". Yes, that means that people who have access to a voting machine can corrupt the vote. Just like people who have physical access to a computer can break into it.
well if fat lazy stupid americans value convenience,
You're calling all the residents of Oregon "fat lazy stupid" because the state government decided that saving money and improving turnout by voting by mail was worth it. Wow. Talk about broad-brush stereotypes. We even eat watermelon here. What can you make out of that?
they get the government they deserve and should stop complaining
Here's a shocker for ya'. In federal elections we still get to vote by mail, so not only do WE get the government we deserve, but our electoral votes count just as much as other states where the slim energetic smart voters have to show up at a polling place! Anarchy, I say!
I don't see why you would think that. There is no linking your ID to your vote so it is all anonymous.
He would think that because you said that voting is mandatory and having an ID is, too. You must show up and show your papers. Whether your vote is anonymous or not, your name is checked off the registration list so they know who did, and did not, show up.
For those who don't want to vote for any of the candidates there is nothing stopping them from drawing a big cock on the voting form.
If you think that having to make a choice is the problem with mandatory voting in the US, well, that would be the least of the problems. Like I already said, having more ignorant voters is not going to result in better politicians.
That said there isn't any need to show ID in australia unless when you get to a polling station your name has already been crossed off.
So one guy can go into the polling place for a dozen people and nobody cares, unless one of those people shows up. Then the problem is fixed by, umm, how do you figure out which votes to pull back out of the box, mate? Pick one at random? Or do you let the late-comer vote and count them all?
But that happens so rarely it is usually just into double figures for the whole country.
I'm guessing you are counting absolute numbers and not percentages. And you're only counting the times it is caught. Who catches the people who vote for dead people who haven't been removed from the rolls yet?
It is just you have to turn up and get your name marked off.
Having to "turn up" is not going to fly in the US.
Australia actually makes a bit of a day of it. The polling stations are usually in the local schools, people put on BBQs and you grab your free sausage on the way out.
Bribing people to vote? Swell! I'll take a free sausage from the lib-dems and let the tories pour me a free beer. I'll vote for whoever has the best food.
Polling stations here used to be in local schools. But schools have a significant issue with having to allow all kinds of people just walk in the door. Now mine is at my kitchen table. Much more convenient, and I don't have to take time off work to vote.
The 47 cents I have to put on my ballot before I mail it is a POLL TAX! I'm being rePRESSed!
many homeless beggars are citizens who deserve equal representation
But who have no address to which the ballot can be mailed and therefore don't get one.
Making the non-driver ID free and easy is a good idea, of course, so why not focus on that before we talk about requiring it to vote?
Because there is no justification for yet another unfunded mandate upon the states without a requirement for the ID to vote. Once it is a requirement to vote, then pressure can be applied to get the cost eliminated.
Make voting compulsory and make having an ID compulsory. This solves your racist problem and improves the otherwise shocking turnout at US elections.
And increasing the already existing problem of ignorant voters picking the names they recognize without any other knowledge of what the candidates stand for. If you think that money influences politics today because money buys advertising time to express ideas, imagine when people who otherwise pay no attention to the process are required to go mark a ballot and all they do know is that they recognize the name... from an ad.
No, the correct way to solve the "racist problem" is to figure out that ID isn't a racial issue.
I'm quite happy with "shocking" turnouts at elections if that's because people who don't care don't bother to vote. I find "get out the vote" campaigns to be particularly dangerous to the democratic process, especially in college towns. Colleges are filled with people who are pre-determined to be temporary residents, who are getting to vote taxes upon the residents of the city and county because "they sound like a good idea" and they won't be around to pay them anyway.
It would be an interesting statistic to count college students who "voted for taxes on the local residents" and then say "I would have liked to live in this town after graduating but the cost of living is too high."
Your Chicago claim doesn't hold water. If there was any funny business surrounding the elections of mayor Daley (not Dailey) it's unlikely the books were cooked that particular way.
Anyone who lived anywhere near Chicago during the Daley era knows it was going on. That is just one way of committing election fraud.
And the voting dead claim doesn't even come from Daley's campains, it comes from JFK's 1960 election where the only people convicted of tampering were election workers, not ordinary citizens.
The voting dead weren't limited to JFK, and it isn't election workers who were voting using dead people's identities, and it wasn't ordinary citizens (who obey the law and vote once), it was and is criminals motivated by political gain.
You then go on to associate minorities with non-citizens, which is despicable.
Non-citizens are a minority in the US, and that you try to put words in my mouth about claiming that racial minorities are non-citizens is despicable. I didn't refer to racial minorities at all, only a minority that is defined as non-citizens. That's the only minority impacted by voter id laws -- they don't get to vote. Minorities defined using other characteristics are not prevented from getting ID, so the impact there is not racially-based. Nobody says "you're black, you cant' get ID" -- except the people who are trying to defend the racial minorities by claiming that they are too poor, lazy or stupid to be able to get an ID, so requiring them to get one is racism.
How DO they manage to get driver's licenses? It's harder to get a driver's license than a voting ID. For a DL, you need to have access to a car and pass a written and driving test, along with proving who you are. For voter's ID, it's just the latter.
Ask Oregon. That's how we do it out here. Your ballot arrives by mail a couple of weeks before the end of the election ("election day") and you can either mail it back or go find a drop-box.
I've heard that it is not uncommon to find unopened ballots in the wastebaskets at the post office. I've never cared enough to go look for myself, but I can believe it. People throw out their "junk mail" in a convenient place, and if they aren't going to vote the ballot is junk mail to them.
that's obviously moronic and should be overturned
Moronic or not, it is convenient and people tend to value convenience over security when it comes to their own lives. And with everyone telling us that there is no vote fraud from false identities to worry about, why should they worry about vote fraud from someone intercepting their ballot and voting it for them?
Of course, it makes other kinds of vote fraud much easier. If you vote in person and your ballot goes into the box without any identifying info on it, it is impossible to discard all the ballots from people registered to party X. When the ballot is processed "by mail", it comes with your name and address and registration info on the envelope. In the former, if your paper doesn't go into the box you can see that; in the latter, if your ballot is invalidated for any reason, you never know.
of course you can still fake votes with paper voting, but then you are talking about a crazy conspiracy involving delivery trucks and teams of people. it's a lot harder to hide
And yet, it happens.
Of course, in the modern age, it is much easier to sue to get the ballots thrown out after they have been counted and found to favor your opponent, or to sue to get yet another recount that would push the certification of the results past the deadline for them mean anything.
the poorest democracy and the most advanced democracy should all vote the same way
Why? If there were ever developed a secure proper electronic voting system, you think we all in the US should get our fingers dipped in indelible ink just because they do it that way in some poorer countries? I see no reason or justification for that.
the overriding point is legitimacy: people have to trust their vote counted.
There is another overriding concern: that only people who are authorized to vote in an election do so. You can't have "the will of the majority" if you don't know what "majority" you're talking about.
replacing paper and pencil with a black box of gears or electronics does not engender trust
Not automatically. But "paper and pencil" is remarkably easy to game, too. For example, poll workers of one party or the other have been known to have a bit of pencil lead concealed in a bandaid on a finger, and in the process of smoothing out a folded ballot paper they can either create votes where the original voter had not chosen, or invalidate ballots by making extra marks. My mother was a poll official for many years and that was just one of the things she got trained to detect and prevent.
And, of course, if the ballot consists of holes with pre-cut spots to punch out, it is remarkably trivial for a poll worker who is trying to determine "the intent of the voter" by looking for "dimples" to help the intent become clearer by "helping" the chad fall out of the hole. (Here's my rule for determining the intent of a voter in a system where he pokes a hole in a piece of paper: if there's a hole, that was his intent. If there wasn't a hole, that was his intent.)
The photo ID requirement is racist because (A) virtually no voter fraud occurs as a result of claiming false identity at the polls
Oh, please. The cemetaries in Cook County, IL used to empty out on voting day as Democrat political operatives would drive "dead" people around to different polling places so they could vote for Dailey and his associates. Unless you think those voters really were the people they were claiming to be, there was (and still is) plenty of vote fraud from false identity voting.
The reason it is hard to catch is because you actually have to look for it to find it. It wasn't "caught" in Chicago even though it was well known to be happening -- because the people in charge didn't want to look.
In other words: the sole meaningful result of a photo id requirement is that minorities are denied a vote.
It is perfectly acceptable to deny the minority of people in the US who are non-citizens the ability to vote, because they have no right to vote in the first place. Why do you believe they have one?
Part (A) is not hard to understand: changing the vote outcome by having people lie at the polls would require a conspiracy too vast to keep secret.
Nonsense. You think local polling systems are "too vast" to have anything illegal going on? This is fraud at the precinct level. And it isn't always a secret, as Chicago proves.
It's not a useful way to cheat at voting,
If you don't think that winning an election that would otherwise have been lost is "useful", we aren't speaking a common language. I'm using English -- what's yours?
Massachusett's Voter ID law lets you vote if you don't have a Voter ID - even if just provisionally.
But doesn't count the vote until you provide the identification that you should have had in the first place. You think "not able to vote" and "vote but not have it counted" are significantly different? Different enough to flame against Texas and hold Mass up as a shining example of how to do things right?
Texas's Voter ID law does not let you vote at all - if you don't have the ID.
IIRC, if you move to Oregon you are required to get an Oregon DL within 30 days of moving here. That's how Oregon deals with voter id. If you don't claim residence in Oregon why should you be voting in Oregon elections? Register where you do claim residence and vote there. Pretty simple.
...you do not care about anything EXCEPT racism. You yourself implied that you think the "lazy/stupid/poor" should not be able to vote.
Last time I checked, none of "lazy", "stupid" or "poor" were races protected by equal-opportunity acts.
In other words, yes, the very things you are claiming are not racist, the Supreme Court of the US declared to be racist
Wow. You've just entrenched some really insulting stereotypes as definitions of "race". Do you also include "eats watermelon" and "walks with a shuffle" in your list of racial definitions?
They want to make it harder for people that don't readily have ID to vote. Why?
Because voting is a right reserved for citizens of the US and the political subdivision holding the election. Stopping people who aren't citizens from voting is a good thing for all of us.
There are continuous claims that voting is ineffective because "my vote doesn't count" when it is because someone is voting for a losing candidate, why should we dilute the vote even further by letting everyone who walks into the polling place vote? Why SHOULDN'T voting be reserved for citizens?
You're right but if the e-mail provider is evil, it can store all the mail anyway even if told to "delete" it.
When one of my ISPs stopped doing in-house email and started contracting to gmail, I found several YEARS worth of email I thought had been deleted was now available for me (and google) to read again.
Then I honestly feel like using the less evil email with webmail would be more secure than using the evil email with a mail client.
We must all make choices between levels of privacy and trust.
The Home page can be changed in the preferences window.
Of course. I know that. But how do you get to the preferences window before you've started the browser for the first time and it runs off to report to Mozilla that there's another installation?
The issue isn't just that it HAS a start page set to that, it is that the DEFAULT start page is set to that and you can't change it until you've already been to the start page. As far as I know, there isn't even a profile before you run it the first time, so you can't edit a profile file to change the behaviour.
The default home page could be set to a file:// that has a link that says "if you want Mozilla to be your home page, click here", for example.
And yes, I know how to turn off the thumbnails, but the fact that it is on by default is another example of Firefox getting privacy WRONG. They get it wrong but you can jump through hoops to fix it. They should get it right by default.
Slashdot Mirror
The other option for my kids would be the military. Would you prefer that?
Would I appreciate it if they served their country in the military? Sure. If they do, tell them "thank you" from me.
Would I prefer they go into the military than go to Germany? I don't really care. I'll just say "thank you" either way -- either for service to their country or by not expecting a taxpayer-funded education.
That's probably the only way to ensure that money isn't horded, no matter who is doing the hording.
You don't understand what endowments are, or how the money is used.
First, the money is invested, so it is available for other people to borrow. It isn't just sitting in the basement of the admin building gathering dust.
Second, it is INTENDED to be a long-term, if not permanent, pot of money. That means you don't spend principle ever. You only spend the interest.
No, this is not "hoarding money".
So they are spending almost three times as much on bankers to keep their money safe than on the education of students!
They are spending money to bankers to manage the endowments so there is an appreciable rate of return on the investment that CAN be used to fund University operations. According to the summary, 17% of the endowment income went to student things. (Out of $1B, $170M.) The rest went to other University programs, like research, salaries, etc.
What you, and the people who call for a mandatory spending of 8% of an endowment, don't seem to understand is that endowments are supposed to be self-sustaining long-term things, and the INTEREST is what gets spent for operations. Unless you get a return of 8% per year on an endowment, being forced to spend 8% of it per year means you have an ever-dwindling supply of money.
Or is this the old boys club where they are shoving student's money around
Endowments are not student's money.
The price of college is based (loosely) on how much it costs to educate someone.
So loosely that it can be considered completely irrelevant. Most of the cost of a college education comes from the taxpayer. That has been dropping over the years, however, because of college loans. This federal taxpayer-funded system is causing state taxpayers to question how much of their money should be going to higher education, because the students are getting taxpayer-backed loans that they seldom repay (and are often suggested to be totally forgiven) so why shouldn't tuition go up to cover the difference?
As the costs of labor increase, wouldn't you expect that professors salaries would go up as well
Not at the same rate that the costs of labor for everyone goes up. The "cost of labor" is much more than just professor salaries, it's health care (in large part), union wages for trades, etc. And, BTW, professor salaries do go up.
I have two kids that in a few years will be looking at college, and I will encourage both of them to go to Germany.
I'm sure the German taxpayers will thank you profusely, and I, as a US taxpayer, will too. One of us will be sarcastic about it, the other honest. Can you guess which is which?
It would mean that we would all get regular PhD salaries, the kind you have to supplement by moonlighting at an Amazon warehouse.
No, it would mean the ONLY salary you'd get is by working at an Amazon.com warehouse, because there would be such a glut of PhDs that most of them would never find a job in their field. It's already hard for PhDs in some fields to get jobs. You think by increasing the supply there would be more jobs for them? Do you really think that a company that is looking for one PhD is going to split that one job into 18 part time jobs because 18 people applied for it?
i disagree with the statement "people tend to not value things that they don't think costs them anything". i went to school basically free.
Personal anecdotal evidence does not contradict statistical trends.
There's a really stupid Allstate Insurance ad on that has a woman talking to a man about driving, and she asks him "so you say that men are better drivers than women? Then why did I get a good-driver check from Allstate..." This proves that Allstate Insurance has no clue when it comes to statistics, even though it is a business based on statistics.
History has shown that people who don't feel they have ownership of something don't care as much about it as people who do. If someone pays nothing for a car, for example by having a company car, he will typically not take as good care of it as if it were his own. Or rental cars. You don't know anyone who has expressed the idea that "it's a rental, I'm going to drive the shit out of it and I don't care"? I do.
An excellent example was the Cabrini-Green housing project in south Chicago. Low cost housing, nobody felt any pride of ownership, and the place was a drug-dealer, urinate-in-the-stairwell kind of place. This same concept is why Habitat for Humanity requires sweat equity from people who get houses from them.
i can tell you i sure valued that education.
Good for you, and I'm glad you got it. But I can walk about a block from where I am now and find buildings filled with frat boys and sorority sisters whose parents are paying for their college and for whom classes are a nuisance.
i consider the consequences, they are a nice life based on my degree and education.
Many people have a nice life without a degree or education. Some people drop out of high school without any regard for their future. You're at one end of a bell curve. The other end still exists.
Persons with college degrees are less likely ...
to have a lot of bad habits, none of which are because they are college graduates. You're seeing a causal relationship when none exists. People who are motivated enough to better themselves through college educations are also motivated enough to wear seatbelts, volunteer, etc. In other words, they'd be doing all those "beneficial to society" things whether they have a free degree or not.
In fact, if you make college free, you'll probably see a decline in the percentages of all those good things, not an increase, as people who aren't motivated enough to go to college on their own money start using the free stuff the government is giving them.
However, the PDE4B-inhibited mice also showed less recall of a fearful event after several days than ordinary mice.
Perhaps being smarter enabled them to process the "fearful event", determine the cause of the fear, the amount of actual hazard and any risk mitigation actions they could take, and thus not be as "afeard" the next time that event happened?
That's what humans do. They get scared by something, realize that the fright was temporary and not based on an actual threat, and desensitize.
And my fist thought was "Flowers For Algernon", too.
You're putting the cart before the horse.
Nope, you are. If there is no reason to have a mandatory, free id issued at the state level, there is absolutely zero justification for yet another unfunded mandate upon the states.
But the problem is, the feds cannot mandate voter ID because the feds do not control the state elections. So the state must create the law. But that's racist. Even if you make the cost $0, there's still the "issue" of forcing poor people to take time off work to prove they are citizens. (And we know from being told so many times, "poor" is a defining racial characteristic.) So if you can't have mandatory voter id, then you're back at the starting point and have no justification for requiring free ids.
It would also require them to know the registered address of the person as that is the other check that is done when you get your papers.
You said they don't have to show any papers to vote. Why would they get papers in someone else's name if they don't need to show them to vote in their name?
And getting someone's "registered address" isn't that hard. At least not in the US. One time I wanted to do a mailing to everyone on my street, and all I had to do was ask the city and they gave me the names and "registered addresses" for everyone.
As for the comment about uninformed people voting, I think if you had compulsory voting the push would move from convincing people to actually vote to convincing them that you are the right option.
Hardly. Compulsory voting would lead to more repetition of names so that a name stuck in the mind of the voter. The people who don't care aren't going to suddenly start listening to complicated descriptions of political platforms, they have already tuned those out. They don't care. Forcing them to vote won't make them care about voting anymore than forcing someone to go to school forces them to care about algebra.
I dont understand why the Feds dont pass a law that states all voting machine source code MUST be audited by professionals before an election and then compiled, checked and then uploaded to the machines.
Because the feds have no constitutional authority to tell the states how to select the electors for President, and even less authority to tell them how to run local elections.
Besides the issue of determining who the "professionals" are and who is authorized to audit such code.
I believe that you are insufficiently paranoid. There are people associated with the manufacture of voting machines who have boasted that their machine would give the election to party X.
He said no such thing. The actual quote can be found here:
He said, pretty clearly, as a private individual, that HE was donating as a means of helping Republicans win an election. He didn't say the company was rigging the machines so they would give the election to anyone.
or that all the manufacturers who were that corrupt were arrogant enough to say so publicly,
There was no admission of corruption. Tempest in a teapot. Besides, didn't you know, vote fraud in the US is a fraud. We don't need to take protective measures to prevent it.
Many seem to be (well, have been) designed so that whoever has access to the machines can corrupt the vote.
It has been common knowledge, at least for most people who deal with computers, that "there is no security without physical security". Yes, that means that people who have access to a voting machine can corrupt the vote. Just like people who have physical access to a computer can break into it.
Is anyone surprised by that fact?
well if fat lazy stupid americans value convenience,
You're calling all the residents of Oregon "fat lazy stupid" because the state government decided that saving money and improving turnout by voting by mail was worth it. Wow. Talk about broad-brush stereotypes. We even eat watermelon here. What can you make out of that?
they get the government they deserve and should stop complaining
Here's a shocker for ya'. In federal elections we still get to vote by mail, so not only do WE get the government we deserve, but our electoral votes count just as much as other states where the slim energetic smart voters have to show up at a polling place! Anarchy, I say!
I don't see why you would think that. There is no linking your ID to your vote so it is all anonymous.
He would think that because you said that voting is mandatory and having an ID is, too. You must show up and show your papers. Whether your vote is anonymous or not, your name is checked off the registration list so they know who did, and did not, show up.
For those who don't want to vote for any of the candidates there is nothing stopping them from drawing a big cock on the voting form.
If you think that having to make a choice is the problem with mandatory voting in the US, well, that would be the least of the problems. Like I already said, having more ignorant voters is not going to result in better politicians.
That said there isn't any need to show ID in australia unless when you get to a polling station your name has already been crossed off.
So one guy can go into the polling place for a dozen people and nobody cares, unless one of those people shows up. Then the problem is fixed by, umm, how do you figure out which votes to pull back out of the box, mate? Pick one at random? Or do you let the late-comer vote and count them all?
But that happens so rarely it is usually just into double figures for the whole country.
I'm guessing you are counting absolute numbers and not percentages. And you're only counting the times it is caught. Who catches the people who vote for dead people who haven't been removed from the rolls yet?
It is just you have to turn up and get your name marked off.
Having to "turn up" is not going to fly in the US.
Australia actually makes a bit of a day of it. The polling stations are usually in the local schools, people put on BBQs and you grab your free sausage on the way out.
Bribing people to vote? Swell! I'll take a free sausage from the lib-dems and let the tories pour me a free beer. I'll vote for whoever has the best food.
Polling stations here used to be in local schools. But schools have a significant issue with having to allow all kinds of people just walk in the door. Now mine is at my kitchen table. Much more convenient, and I don't have to take time off work to vote.
Otherwise it's a poll tax --
The 47 cents I have to put on my ballot before I mail it is a POLL TAX! I'm being rePRESSed!
many homeless beggars are citizens who deserve equal representation
But who have no address to which the ballot can be mailed and therefore don't get one.
Making the non-driver ID free and easy is a good idea, of course, so why not focus on that before we talk about requiring it to vote?
Because there is no justification for yet another unfunded mandate upon the states without a requirement for the ID to vote. Once it is a requirement to vote, then pressure can be applied to get the cost eliminated.
Make voting compulsory and make having an ID compulsory. This solves your racist problem and improves the otherwise shocking turnout at US elections.
And increasing the already existing problem of ignorant voters picking the names they recognize without any other knowledge of what the candidates stand for. If you think that money influences politics today because money buys advertising time to express ideas, imagine when people who otherwise pay no attention to the process are required to go mark a ballot and all they do know is that they recognize the name ... from an ad.
No, the correct way to solve the "racist problem" is to figure out that ID isn't a racial issue.
I'm quite happy with "shocking" turnouts at elections if that's because people who don't care don't bother to vote. I find "get out the vote" campaigns to be particularly dangerous to the democratic process, especially in college towns. Colleges are filled with people who are pre-determined to be temporary residents, who are getting to vote taxes upon the residents of the city and county because "they sound like a good idea" and they won't be around to pay them anyway.
It would be an interesting statistic to count college students who "voted for taxes on the local residents" and then say "I would have liked to live in this town after graduating but the cost of living is too high."
Your Chicago claim doesn't hold water. If there was any funny business surrounding the elections of mayor Daley (not Dailey) it's unlikely the books were cooked that particular way.
Anyone who lived anywhere near Chicago during the Daley era knows it was going on. That is just one way of committing election fraud.
And the voting dead claim doesn't even come from Daley's campains, it comes from JFK's 1960 election where the only people convicted of tampering were election workers, not ordinary citizens.
The voting dead weren't limited to JFK, and it isn't election workers who were voting using dead people's identities, and it wasn't ordinary citizens (who obey the law and vote once), it was and is criminals motivated by political gain.
You then go on to associate minorities with non-citizens, which is despicable.
Non-citizens are a minority in the US, and that you try to put words in my mouth about claiming that racial minorities are non-citizens is despicable. I didn't refer to racial minorities at all, only a minority that is defined as non-citizens. That's the only minority impacted by voter id laws -- they don't get to vote. Minorities defined using other characteristics are not prevented from getting ID, so the impact there is not racially-based. Nobody says "you're black, you cant' get ID" -- except the people who are trying to defend the racial minorities by claiming that they are too poor, lazy or stupid to be able to get an ID, so requiring them to get one is racism.
How DO they manage to get driver's licenses? It's harder to get a driver's license than a voting ID. For a DL, you need to have access to a car and pass a written and driving test, along with proving who you are. For voter's ID, it's just the latter.
forced voting by mail? is that even legal?
Ask Oregon. That's how we do it out here. Your ballot arrives by mail a couple of weeks before the end of the election ("election day") and you can either mail it back or go find a drop-box.
I've heard that it is not uncommon to find unopened ballots in the wastebaskets at the post office. I've never cared enough to go look for myself, but I can believe it. People throw out their "junk mail" in a convenient place, and if they aren't going to vote the ballot is junk mail to them.
that's obviously moronic and should be overturned
Moronic or not, it is convenient and people tend to value convenience over security when it comes to their own lives. And with everyone telling us that there is no vote fraud from false identities to worry about, why should they worry about vote fraud from someone intercepting their ballot and voting it for them?
Of course, it makes other kinds of vote fraud much easier. If you vote in person and your ballot goes into the box without any identifying info on it, it is impossible to discard all the ballots from people registered to party X. When the ballot is processed "by mail", it comes with your name and address and registration info on the envelope. In the former, if your paper doesn't go into the box you can see that; in the latter, if your ballot is invalidated for any reason, you never know.
of course you can still fake votes with paper voting, but then you are talking about a crazy conspiracy involving delivery trucks and teams of people. it's a lot harder to hide
And yet, it happens.
Of course, in the modern age, it is much easier to sue to get the ballots thrown out after they have been counted and found to favor your opponent, or to sue to get yet another recount that would push the certification of the results past the deadline for them mean anything.
the poorest democracy and the most advanced democracy should all vote the same way
Why? If there were ever developed a secure proper electronic voting system, you think we all in the US should get our fingers dipped in indelible ink just because they do it that way in some poorer countries? I see no reason or justification for that.
the overriding point is legitimacy: people have to trust their vote counted.
There is another overriding concern: that only people who are authorized to vote in an election do so. You can't have "the will of the majority" if you don't know what "majority" you're talking about.
replacing paper and pencil with a black box of gears or electronics does not engender trust
Not automatically. But "paper and pencil" is remarkably easy to game, too. For example, poll workers of one party or the other have been known to have a bit of pencil lead concealed in a bandaid on a finger, and in the process of smoothing out a folded ballot paper they can either create votes where the original voter had not chosen, or invalidate ballots by making extra marks. My mother was a poll official for many years and that was just one of the things she got trained to detect and prevent.
And, of course, if the ballot consists of holes with pre-cut spots to punch out, it is remarkably trivial for a poll worker who is trying to determine "the intent of the voter" by looking for "dimples" to help the intent become clearer by "helping" the chad fall out of the hole. (Here's my rule for determining the intent of a voter in a system where he pokes a hole in a piece of paper: if there's a hole, that was his intent. If there wasn't a hole, that was his intent.)
The photo ID requirement is racist because (A) virtually no voter fraud occurs as a result of claiming false identity at the polls
Oh, please. The cemetaries in Cook County, IL used to empty out on voting day as Democrat political operatives would drive "dead" people around to different polling places so they could vote for Dailey and his associates. Unless you think those voters really were the people they were claiming to be, there was (and still is) plenty of vote fraud from false identity voting.
The reason it is hard to catch is because you actually have to look for it to find it. It wasn't "caught" in Chicago even though it was well known to be happening -- because the people in charge didn't want to look.
In other words: the sole meaningful result of a photo id requirement is that minorities are denied a vote.
It is perfectly acceptable to deny the minority of people in the US who are non-citizens the ability to vote, because they have no right to vote in the first place. Why do you believe they have one?
Part (A) is not hard to understand: changing the vote outcome by having people lie at the polls would require a conspiracy too vast to keep secret.
Nonsense. You think local polling systems are "too vast" to have anything illegal going on? This is fraud at the precinct level. And it isn't always a secret, as Chicago proves.
It's not a useful way to cheat at voting,
If you don't think that winning an election that would otherwise have been lost is "useful", we aren't speaking a common language. I'm using English -- what's yours?
Massachusett's Voter ID law lets you vote if you don't have a Voter ID - even if just provisionally.
But doesn't count the vote until you provide the identification that you should have had in the first place. You think "not able to vote" and "vote but not have it counted" are significantly different? Different enough to flame against Texas and hold Mass up as a shining example of how to do things right?
Texas's Voter ID law does not let you vote at all - if you don't have the ID.
IIRC, if you move to Oregon you are required to get an Oregon DL within 30 days of moving here. That's how Oregon deals with voter id. If you don't claim residence in Oregon why should you be voting in Oregon elections? Register where you do claim residence and vote there. Pretty simple.
...you do not care about anything EXCEPT racism. You yourself implied that you think the "lazy/stupid/poor" should not be able to vote.
Last time I checked, none of "lazy", "stupid" or "poor" were races protected by equal-opportunity acts.
In other words, yes, the very things you are claiming are not racist, the Supreme Court of the US declared to be racist
Wow. You've just entrenched some really insulting stereotypes as definitions of "race". Do you also include "eats watermelon" and "walks with a shuffle" in your list of racial definitions?
They want to make it harder for people that don't readily have ID to vote. Why?
Because voting is a right reserved for citizens of the US and the political subdivision holding the election. Stopping people who aren't citizens from voting is a good thing for all of us.
There are continuous claims that voting is ineffective because "my vote doesn't count" when it is because someone is voting for a losing candidate, why should we dilute the vote even further by letting everyone who walks into the polling place vote? Why SHOULDN'T voting be reserved for citizens?
You're right but if the e-mail provider is evil, it can store all the mail anyway even if told to "delete" it.
When one of my ISPs stopped doing in-house email and started contracting to gmail, I found several YEARS worth of email I thought had been deleted was now available for me (and google) to read again.
Then I honestly feel like using the less evil email with webmail would be more secure than using the evil email with a mail client.
We must all make choices between levels of privacy and trust.
The Home page can be changed in the preferences window.
Of course. I know that. But how do you get to the preferences window before you've started the browser for the first time and it runs off to report to Mozilla that there's another installation?
The issue isn't just that it HAS a start page set to that, it is that the DEFAULT start page is set to that and you can't change it until you've already been to the start page. As far as I know, there isn't even a profile before you run it the first time, so you can't edit a profile file to change the behaviour.
The default home page could be set to a file:// that has a link that says "if you want Mozilla to be your home page, click here", for example.
And yes, I know how to turn off the thumbnails, but the fact that it is on by default is another example of Firefox getting privacy WRONG. They get it wrong but you can jump through hoops to fix it. They should get it right by default.