Nazi Germany and militarist Japan actually sustained murder rates considerably higher than the Soviet Union or Communist China. We took out the greatest threats in WWII, and that's why they didn't run up the numbers in the 1950s and 1960s.
What made Communism bad was primarily the totalitarian governments that didn't actually care about the people. Most countries that consider themselves Socialist are thriving democracies that do care about individuals. Saying that Socialism leads to Communism is like saying that Capitalism leads to Fascism. To make either move, you need to add a collectivist dictatorship based on nationalism or racism or classism or something like that.
"Sensible regulations" aren't a bogeyman. Are you rejecting all government control? That doesn't seem to work well. If not, it's all a matter of degree, and sensible regulations aren't a problem. Problems come from senseless regulation and such things.
A large government is not necessarily collectivist. Collectivism is the philosophy that the group matters rather than the individual. It doesn't mean that people can't work together through a government. The US is much closer to collectivism than any other developed country, since it's willing to deprive so many individuals of opportunities to live a reasonable life. Any other developed country would give them good health care and a better education, and they have a much less punitive criminal justice system, restoring opportunities to people who have committed minor crimes.
There is no obvious way that government control of infrastructure or providing opportunities or spending money on important things that the free market won't is detrimental. You're making that up.
In the first place, WWII ended over seventy years ago. Some countries that had their industry mostly trashed (like Germany and Japan) are economic powerhouses now.
In the second place, some of those countries were harder hit than you think.
In the third place, they consistently rank as better places to live than the US. The US may have a higher standard of living by some limited measure, but people are healthier, happier, and live longer in Scandinavia.
In the fourth place, dying empires tend to hold onto their military strength longer than their scientific or economic strengths.
Most credit score reports are for people (lenders and landlords) who expect you to pay money in the future. For them, what matters is how likely you are to pay the money, and financial responsibility is merely a proxy for that.
In most other cases, the party in question is likely to investigate a teeny bit further, and find whether your credit score is unimpressive because you have a history of not paying debts, or whether you have a history of not having debts. There may be other situations (employers?) but they tend to be iffy in the first place.
Financial responsibility is assuring, with a very high probability, that you will meet current and future obligations. It's perfectly possible to use a credit card responsibly.
Precincts to be spot-checked can be randomly selected after the election. The random selection can have observers. It would be possible to have individual candidates nominate precincts for spot checks.
In order to affect an election, enough votes have to be changed, and in an election with a large margin of victory, that would require sizable cheating in the average precinct, so spot checking with a reasonable number of precincts should find it. If it's a close election, so that only a small amount of cheating per precinct would be sufficient, in my state there will be automatic manual recounts.
So, it's possible to achieve a high degree of confidence with much less manual vote-counting.
If you want to encourage third parties, encourage your legislators to go to some sort of voting other than plurailty. Ranked choice will do, or approval voting, You might also want to encourage proportional representation by party. In the US, states determine how people are elected to the House of Representatives, and the Constitution, by my reading, does not require them to have separate districts. I don't have much hope for that in the near future.
However, I was addressing the problem of finding both parties too distasteful to vote for. The best way to address that is to try to change one party so that it's something you'd vote for.
I'm not sure what "other schemes" you're referring to.
The ones listed as anonymizing at the end of the Wikipedia article you referenced. At this point, I don't know quite what you're talking about.
If it's the idea about having lists of candidates by letter, and varied orders on the ballot, and markers that get both, that's not going to work in practice. Remember the Florida 2000 election? One county used a "butterfly ballot", with candidate names on the left and the right of the voting punches, and on statistical analysis it's virtually certain that over a thousand Gore voters accidentally voted for Robertson. Bush's name was at the top of the ballot, Robertson's name slightly below on the other side of the paper, then Gore's name. People apparently saw Gore's name just below Bush's, and punched the second punch-out box. Make ballots confusing and they will not express the will of the voter.
The butterfly ballot was a bipartisan mistake, as well as illegal, but the County officials apparently didn't realize that.
The scheme to fool the bribers and/or threateners appears to be to fill out several ballots, vote with one, and keep all the receipts. Again, that complicates the voting process.
Hand-counting the vote becomes immensely more difficult. Rather than just going through ballots and seeing which candidate was chosen for each, each ballot has to be looked up, and the lookup process has to be secure.
Sorry, your economics 101 is not working, In comparable establishments the prices for meals are the same and the wages for employees are the same.
My economics is fine. People typically work to get money (we'll leave volunteer work out of this). Suppose a server is going to earn $3K/month. Does it matter how much of that is salary and how much is tips?
In comparable establishments in the US, the prices for meals are similar, and you're expected to leave similar tips. The wages for employees will be similar, and the wages for people who get tips will be lower compared to people who don't get tips.
No, it is a gratitude for a service well done.
Not in the US, it isn't. You seem to fail to understand that. In the US, servers are expected to get tips, and diners are expected to provide tips. These are normally based on the cost of the meal times a certain fraction. A server must report a certain amount of tip income or justify it to the Internal Revenue Service. Restaurant operators pay servers less than you'd expect for the job, because they're expected to make it up on tips. There are special minimum wage laws for servers.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it's how it works in the US.
That has nothing to do with the price on the menu. You Sir, are an idiot.
In the US, it does. Add 15-20% to the menu price to get the expected tip amount. Vary from there, depending on service. I'm a citizen and resident of the USA; you'll have to decide for yourself whether that qualifies as being an idiot.
Religion took over lots of things in the last two books. I don't remember exactly, but I think "Father" is some form of address for a priest. Some of them have secular duties, such as commanding starships.
I finished it, and wouldn't be surprised if it didn't win next year's Hugo. There's a lot of odd stuff in the first two that becomes clear in the third.
Hyperion is a bunch of semi-related stories strung together, and these lead into the sequel, The Fall of Hyperion, which actually makes sense and ties things together. These aren't separate stories, and should really be labeled Volume I and Volume II. I'd skip the Endymion sequels, however. It veers off into bad mysticism and retcons the originals painfully.
Employees work for money. If the customers tip more, the restaurant can get by with paying them less. The IRS will assume a certain minimum number of tips, and servers owe income tax on that.
Most places in the US expect tips, and hence servers are seriously underpaid if not tipped. If you do tip, that's money you paid for that meal that wasn't included in the price on the menu.
The idea behind small claims court is that the formalities are skipped because the amount is too small to bother with them. There will be no discovery. Each side gets to show up with whatever evidence they've got, plead their cases quickly, and get notified by mail (in my county, anyway) within a few days.
It appeared to hand that off to other schemes, which don't look to me like they'll work.
If I can verify how my vote was counted, that gentleman sitting over there with the large wrench, or that other gentleman with the roll of $20 bills, can ask me to verify it.
You can get flawless accuracy with humans. The humans just have to put in the work. Machine reading of ballots is sometimes a bit iffy. In my state, manual counts sometimes are a bit different from the machine counts.
Really close elections do happen, such as the Minnesota Senate race of 2008. In that case, the margin was a few hundred votes, and the initial reports favored Coleman. The margin was sufficiently small that there was an automatic recount. As is common, there was something like a thousand-vote change between initially reported results and the final results, but in this case that made a difference.
In my state, there are randomly selected precincts that will do a manual count to spot-check the machine totals. There are other things that could be suspicious about the votes.
All voting systems have problems, as Arrow proved that no ranked-choice voting system can satisfy some criteria that look simple and desirable. There are more general results including different methods of voting, and it looks like there is no ideal voting system.
Ranked choice is probably as good as any other system. It's better than the plurality system we have now in most of the US.
The solution here is partisanship. Each major party supplies an observer for each precinct, and there's security precautions to make tampering while not under observation evident. If people are miscounting ballots, it's going to favor one party or another, and the observer from the wronged party calls the appropriate authorities, and the tamperers find out that interfering with a fair election is a serious felony.
I fail to understand what you mean by "strategic compromises", or why they are safe from random spot checks. The machines report the totals, and some precincts are randomly selected for a hand count (with observers, of course). If one precinct has a ridiculous amount of votes for one side, that's suspicious (and unlikely to change the winner in a state or federal election anyway).
Statewide elections usually end at a fixed time for all precincts, so there is no counting of official ballots that can affect voting. It is a problem in Presidential elections, since an 8 PM close of voting in the Eastern states allows Pacific coast voters to know the early results shortly after 5 PM, but it's possible to do fast hand counting for a single election anyway.
In my state, ballot boxes are sealed at the polling station and transported with care. Any significant action will have at least one observer from each major party. These are simple, effective, and understandable security measures.
Minor party candidates usually have to get on the battle by petition. If they can't scare up the necessary signatures, they're not going to have a hope in the general election in any case. At that point, they've got the same chances to get votes. The current voting scheme discourages third parties by making tactical voting important. If there's a Democrat, a Republican, and a Pirate Party candidate here, and I really like the Pirate candidate, am OK with the Democrat, and really want the Republican to not win, I vote Democrat. A ranked-choice voting system would be a big help for third parties.
Right to bear arms? Since 1986, it's been illegal for a civilian to buy a nice new infantry rifle. I consider this a violation of the Second Amendment.
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Nationalism does tend to be authoritarian, but modern socialism doesn't.
Nazi Germany and militarist Japan actually sustained murder rates considerably higher than the Soviet Union or Communist China. We took out the greatest threats in WWII, and that's why they didn't run up the numbers in the 1950s and 1960s.
Flowbees suck.
What made Communism bad was primarily the totalitarian governments that didn't actually care about the people. Most countries that consider themselves Socialist are thriving democracies that do care about individuals. Saying that Socialism leads to Communism is like saying that Capitalism leads to Fascism. To make either move, you need to add a collectivist dictatorship based on nationalism or racism or classism or something like that.
"Sensible regulations" aren't a bogeyman. Are you rejecting all government control? That doesn't seem to work well. If not, it's all a matter of degree, and sensible regulations aren't a problem. Problems come from senseless regulation and such things.
A large government is not necessarily collectivist. Collectivism is the philosophy that the group matters rather than the individual. It doesn't mean that people can't work together through a government. The US is much closer to collectivism than any other developed country, since it's willing to deprive so many individuals of opportunities to live a reasonable life. Any other developed country would give them good health care and a better education, and they have a much less punitive criminal justice system, restoring opportunities to people who have committed minor crimes.
There is no obvious way that government control of infrastructure or providing opportunities or spending money on important things that the free market won't is detrimental. You're making that up.
In the first place, WWII ended over seventy years ago. Some countries that had their industry mostly trashed (like Germany and Japan) are economic powerhouses now.
In the second place, some of those countries were harder hit than you think.
In the third place, they consistently rank as better places to live than the US. The US may have a higher standard of living by some limited measure, but people are healthier, happier, and live longer in Scandinavia.
In the fourth place, dying empires tend to hold onto their military strength longer than their scientific or economic strengths.
Most credit score reports are for people (lenders and landlords) who expect you to pay money in the future. For them, what matters is how likely you are to pay the money, and financial responsibility is merely a proxy for that.
In most other cases, the party in question is likely to investigate a teeny bit further, and find whether your credit score is unimpressive because you have a history of not paying debts, or whether you have a history of not having debts. There may be other situations (employers?) but they tend to be iffy in the first place.
Financial responsibility is assuring, with a very high probability, that you will meet current and future obligations. It's perfectly possible to use a credit card responsibly.
Precincts to be spot-checked can be randomly selected after the election. The random selection can have observers. It would be possible to have individual candidates nominate precincts for spot checks.
In order to affect an election, enough votes have to be changed, and in an election with a large margin of victory, that would require sizable cheating in the average precinct, so spot checking with a reasonable number of precincts should find it. If it's a close election, so that only a small amount of cheating per precinct would be sufficient, in my state there will be automatic manual recounts.
So, it's possible to achieve a high degree of confidence with much less manual vote-counting.
If you want to encourage third parties, encourage your legislators to go to some sort of voting other than plurailty. Ranked choice will do, or approval voting, You might also want to encourage proportional representation by party. In the US, states determine how people are elected to the House of Representatives, and the Constitution, by my reading, does not require them to have separate districts. I don't have much hope for that in the near future.
However, I was addressing the problem of finding both parties too distasteful to vote for. The best way to address that is to try to change one party so that it's something you'd vote for.
The ones listed as anonymizing at the end of the Wikipedia article you referenced. At this point, I don't know quite what you're talking about.
If it's the idea about having lists of candidates by letter, and varied orders on the ballot, and markers that get both, that's not going to work in practice. Remember the Florida 2000 election? One county used a "butterfly ballot", with candidate names on the left and the right of the voting punches, and on statistical analysis it's virtually certain that over a thousand Gore voters accidentally voted for Robertson. Bush's name was at the top of the ballot, Robertson's name slightly below on the other side of the paper, then Gore's name. People apparently saw Gore's name just below Bush's, and punched the second punch-out box. Make ballots confusing and they will not express the will of the voter.
The butterfly ballot was a bipartisan mistake, as well as illegal, but the County officials apparently didn't realize that.
The scheme to fool the bribers and/or threateners appears to be to fill out several ballots, vote with one, and keep all the receipts. Again, that complicates the voting process.
Hand-counting the vote becomes immensely more difficult. Rather than just going through ballots and seeing which candidate was chosen for each, each ballot has to be looked up, and the lookup process has to be secure.
My economics is fine. People typically work to get money (we'll leave volunteer work out of this). Suppose a server is going to earn $3K/month. Does it matter how much of that is salary and how much is tips?
In comparable establishments in the US, the prices for meals are similar, and you're expected to leave similar tips. The wages for employees will be similar, and the wages for people who get tips will be lower compared to people who don't get tips.
Not in the US, it isn't. You seem to fail to understand that. In the US, servers are expected to get tips, and diners are expected to provide tips. These are normally based on the cost of the meal times a certain fraction. A server must report a certain amount of tip income or justify it to the Internal Revenue Service. Restaurant operators pay servers less than you'd expect for the job, because they're expected to make it up on tips. There are special minimum wage laws for servers.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it's how it works in the US.
In the US, it does. Add 15-20% to the menu price to get the expected tip amount. Vary from there, depending on service. I'm a citizen and resident of the USA; you'll have to decide for yourself whether that qualifies as being an idiot.
Religion took over lots of things in the last two books. I don't remember exactly, but I think "Father" is some form of address for a priest. Some of them have secular duties, such as commanding starships.
I finished it, and wouldn't be surprised if it didn't win next year's Hugo. There's a lot of odd stuff in the first two that becomes clear in the third.
Hyperion is a bunch of semi-related stories strung together, and these lead into the sequel, The Fall of Hyperion, which actually makes sense and ties things together. These aren't separate stories, and should really be labeled Volume I and Volume II. I'd skip the Endymion sequels, however. It veers off into bad mysticism and retcons the originals painfully.
Employees work for money. If the customers tip more, the restaurant can get by with paying them less. The IRS will assume a certain minimum number of tips, and servers owe income tax on that.
Most places in the US expect tips, and hence servers are seriously underpaid if not tipped. If you do tip, that's money you paid for that meal that wasn't included in the price on the menu.
The idea behind small claims court is that the formalities are skipped because the amount is too small to bother with them. There will be no discovery. Each side gets to show up with whatever evidence they've got, plead their cases quickly, and get notified by mail (in my county, anyway) within a few days.
We hold municipal elections on odd-numbered years. It keeps the ballot size down.
It appeared to hand that off to other schemes, which don't look to me like they'll work.
If I can verify how my vote was counted, that gentleman sitting over there with the large wrench, or that other gentleman with the roll of $20 bills, can ask me to verify it.
And the number of people who can spill the beans scales as well, and all it takes is one.
You can get flawless accuracy with humans. The humans just have to put in the work. Machine reading of ballots is sometimes a bit iffy. In my state, manual counts sometimes are a bit different from the machine counts.
Really close elections do happen, such as the Minnesota Senate race of 2008. In that case, the margin was a few hundred votes, and the initial reports favored Coleman. The margin was sufficiently small that there was an automatic recount. As is common, there was something like a thousand-vote change between initially reported results and the final results, but in this case that made a difference.
In my state, there are randomly selected precincts that will do a manual count to spot-check the machine totals. There are other things that could be suspicious about the votes.
All voting systems have problems, as Arrow proved that no ranked-choice voting system can satisfy some criteria that look simple and desirable. There are more general results including different methods of voting, and it looks like there is no ideal voting system.
Ranked choice is probably as good as any other system. It's better than the plurality system we have now in most of the US.
The solution here is partisanship. Each major party supplies an observer for each precinct, and there's security precautions to make tampering while not under observation evident. If people are miscounting ballots, it's going to favor one party or another, and the observer from the wronged party calls the appropriate authorities, and the tamperers find out that interfering with a fair election is a serious felony.
I fail to understand what you mean by "strategic compromises", or why they are safe from random spot checks. The machines report the totals, and some precincts are randomly selected for a hand count (with observers, of course). If one precinct has a ridiculous amount of votes for one side, that's suspicious (and unlikely to change the winner in a state or federal election anyway).
Statewide elections usually end at a fixed time for all precincts, so there is no counting of official ballots that can affect voting. It is a problem in Presidential elections, since an 8 PM close of voting in the Eastern states allows Pacific coast voters to know the early results shortly after 5 PM, but it's possible to do fast hand counting for a single election anyway.
In my state, ballot boxes are sealed at the polling station and transported with care. Any significant action will have at least one observer from each major party. These are simple, effective, and understandable security measures.
Minor party candidates usually have to get on the battle by petition. If they can't scare up the necessary signatures, they're not going to have a hope in the general election in any case. At that point, they've got the same chances to get votes. The current voting scheme discourages third parties by making tactical voting important. If there's a Democrat, a Republican, and a Pirate Party candidate here, and I really like the Pirate candidate, am OK with the Democrat, and really want the Republican to not win, I vote Democrat. A ranked-choice voting system would be a big help for third parties.
Right to bear arms? Since 1986, it's been illegal for a civilian to buy a nice new infantry rifle. I consider this a violation of the Second Amendment.