The points of the Electoral College when it was made appear to have been to give slave states more influence on the Presidential election and to keep people like Trump out of the White House. Any other reason is ex post facto.
The Electoral College allows a coalition of large states to elect a President with absolutely no input from the small ones. In a popular vote contest, the candidates would pick up votes where they could, but with the EC there's absolutely no point in doing that.
Also, every number has a unique prime factorization. Consider 1 prime and you get the prime factorizations of 10 being 2*5, 1*2*5, 1*1*2*5, etc. Also, if 1 is prime, then 1 = 1 * 1, so 1 is the multiple of two primes. It's much easier to consider 1 neither prime nor composite, just the multiplicative identity.
That depends on the issues. Given a ballot box, there's only three ways to tamper: add ballots, remove ballots, or change ballots. Use a tamper-evident seal and store them somewhere secure and you've pretty much got those things covered. If all operations that happen when the seal isn't there are done with bipartisan (or, in better systems, multipartisan) observers, the security is pretty good.
Electronic systems are not as easily understood. We've shown time and time again that we don't understand the attack surfaces on digital systems. If there's a voting machine sitting there with a tamper-evident seal, we really don't know whether there's a way to affect the votes therein that bypasses the seal. Even if the seals cover all the I/O, we still don't know if there's something an intruder might possibly be able to do.
I'm not convinced that electronic systems are going to be better. If nothing else, they've got a larger attack surface. We understand the ways paper ballots can be messed with, while we keep seeing new ways to break digital systems. We can examine a paper ballot system and see that it meets spec, and electronic systems are far harder to audit (to the point that nobody seems to bother). If someone comes up with a paper voting scheme, we can evaluate it a lot more easily than an electronic one. It's much easier to convince someone that a paper system is secure than an electronic system, and that influences the perceived legitimacy of elections.
Voting is unlike most things we do electronically. Votes are anonymous and irreversible. In other fields, security problems can often be addressed retroactively. It's more expensive and messier, but it can be done. If someone takes advantage of a bank vulnerability to drain my account, the bank knows who to work with (me) and can put money back. If my vote is changed from Lincoln to Douglas, then nobody can check with me to see if that was legit, and there's no way to reverse it. If a casino screws up and I win big based on a software fault, they won't pay me the money. Voting systems have to be more secure than financial systems, and they have to be seen to be so.
I've been looking at other options. So have other people. I know of a couple of writers who used Patreon as support to quit the day job (Jemisen might be beyond needing that, now that she's got back-to-back Hugos). I haven't found one.
Some of the advantages of the current system:
Money is allocated according to people's preferences through the market system, not the political system..
Money is raised voluntarily.
Customers can vary the amount they pay depending on what they get.
The customer doesn't have to decide to buy or not with inadequate information.
It cuts down on the free rider problem.
It's possible to make significant money, meaning the artist can go full-time.
It allows the artist to make significant money on his or her first released work.
There's no limit on how successful the artist can be (cf. J.K. Rowling). (This means we pay less for art, since people will work harder for the possibility of hitting it big.)
It pays people who do the grunt work, like editing a book or mixing sound for music.
It rewards artists for doing the not-so-fun stuff (like rewriting a book).
It supports distribution networks.
It scales for all sorts of artistic endeavors, from stories to blockbuster movies.
I haven't seen anything comparable. Patreon allows free riders, won't work unless the artist is already known, and doesn't scale. Nobody's going to make an expensive movie because of Patreon or Kickstarter; the money just isn't there. Expecting volunteer efforts means that the grunt work doesn't get done. Creating is fun, refining and editing and the like less so. There's all sorts of problems with having the government collect and distribute money on subjective grounds. Old-fashioned patronage doesn't work as well as it used to, and I already mentioned the crowd-funded version.
I haven't come up with an idea that works anywhere near as good. I haven't seen one that works anywhere near as good. I'd really like to see suggestions as to what would be a better system rather than be told that there is one out there somewhere among the unicorns.
Differently. Job applications were largely done in person or by mail, for example, instead of being available on the web. Similarly, before cell phones people used public pay phones, which are darn few on the ground nowadays.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that those untold number of monuments included a lot of unconstitutional activity, specifically favoring a particular religion. Others were opposed by people peaceably assembling and petitioning the government, like it says in the First Amendment.
The government is not anti-religion. There was some confusion at first while the First Amendment started to be enforced, but restricting any sites based on religious content would violate two clauses of the First. No court is going to order such censoring for anyone. It would be unconstitutional. (Okay, a court might. The appeals court would strike that down so fast the original judge would get whiplash.) It would also be unconstitutional to block pornhub, since porn has First Amendment protection. Note that this would apply to a government-run ISP, while a private one, in the absence of regulation, could block any site it liked.
Read the goddam First Amendment sometime. You're making up unconstitutional straw men.
Do you realize that "It is not the government's job to give us everything we want." doesn't actually disagree with "These are the sort of problems that the government should be responsible for."?
The biggest argument for single-payer is that, in the US, health care costs about 50% more per capita than any other country, and more advanced countries with universal health care have better public health statistics.
You seem very fuzzy about the First Amendment. Discriminating against sites on the basis of religion is unconstitutional.
You really don't seem to have arguments. Apparently, it's legal for the city to do this. You haven't told us why it shouldn't be. You just seem to dislike municipal broadband on the basis that "gubmnt bad".
So you'd be an arsonist, and possibly a murderer, because a private organization you have no legal connection to you doesn't have its members risking their lives on your behalf?
Nobody said the spying was acceptable. Stinerman said that he'd prefer Obama was running a domestic spying operation than Trump, not that either were acceptable.
Since you're distracted by the "attractive", here's a replacement question: would you prefer to be raped by a more violent attacker or a less violent attacker? I'd guess that (a) you'd rather not be raped, and (b) if you were raped, you'd prefer the less violent rapist.
Doubtless some are. That's one reason the data gets adjusted - somebody builds something and the thermometer is a little warmer. It's desirable to keep a thermometer at the same place, but we know it will read higher than it actually is.
Climate change is a real problem, regardless of what politicians do or do not do.
Nuclear energy does cause pollution. Thorium is not known to be a good source of nuclear energy, and won't be until we have some experience with full-scale thorium reactors. I do favor research into thorium fission, but right now it's research and development.
The fact that you don't like what's going on with renewable energy sources doesn't mean that you're necessarily right, or that governments investigating it are wrong. If nothing else, government interest does show that governments consider it a good idea to move from burning fossil fuels, because that creates problems.
Nobody has called for financial penalties for people sufficiently stupid not to believe the evidence of global warming. The lawsuits were against companies that knew perfectly well it was going on, and denied it anyway in order to help their businesses. Intentional lying for commercial gain is called "fraud", and that appears to be what was going on.
which, if I am using the expression right, is begging the question.
Nope. Climate change has a more statistical influence on weather. It may have affected the chances we'd get a hurricane like that. If we have reason to believe that it increased the chance, then, yes, while it can't be attributed to global warming it can serve as a reminder.
Suppose the chance of a hurricane above X level goes from 50% a month in hurricane season to 60%. We've got 20% more such hurricanes, but the chance that any individual such hurricane is due to global warming is 17%.
The science is pretty definite. We're warming up the surface of the Earth, and this will continue. People who don't accept the science are not usually doing it because they've considered the evidence and are not persuaded, but because they've decided that AGW isn't happening or isn't continuing or isn't serious for some other reason. Deniers have been known to throw all sorts of accusations at climate scientists rather than accept the possibility that the science is right. Actual skeptics tend to accept the evidence when they look at it.
This means that deniers are denying the truth because they don't like it, and that at least verges on a moral issue. If they're against spending money on climate change research because they don't like it, they're potentially hurting the rest of us.
I'm not as impressed with medical science. The use of the phrase "evidence-based" is significant. Scientific studies are always evidence-based, so if all the recommendations were scientific there would be absolutely no need to say "evidence-based".
Also, when CO2 levels were a whole lot higher, the Sun was cooler. It's slowly warming up, and will render Earth completely uninhabitable within a billion years unless we do something about it. (I don't know what we'd do, but we may develop options over the next hundred million years.)
However, there is labor involved in the replacement, and a certain amount of risk (it's possible to break something, and then the customer gets a replacement phone). How long does it take a tech to change the battery? (I really don't know.) I doubt the fully burden cost of a tech is under $40/hour.
$20 likely wouldn't cover all that on an ongoing basis but as the employees are already on the payroll, the building is already there, etc..
You seem to be assuming that the employees would be doing nothing instead of replacing batteries. If replacing batteries takes them away from other necessary functions, Apple has to hire additional people. If they have to hire too many additional people, they run out of room and have to pay more for the space.
Look up "opportunity cost". Every employee replacing a battery isn't doing something else.
If artists don't get compensated for their work, we'll get less art out of them. If nothing else, they won't have the option to quit the day job. Many arts benefit from not-particularly-creative actions, such as recorded musing and literature. Those guys are going to want to get paid.
Now, when do we compensate everyone who works on some artistic endeavor? And where does this compensation come from?
With limited-term copyright, we can have a deal whereby people who want a work of art can pay a small amount which recompenses the artist and technicians. In that way, the compensation comes from people who like the art, and is distributed according to how much people like what. This is, in my opinion, the best compensation method I've seen.
I do believe that copyrights should be a lot more limited than they are now. The US Constitution allows them to promote creative activity, and so terms longer than that should be unconstitutional. I can't see anyone deciding to work on art or not based on possible income thirty years into the future, myself, so the old 14+14 system was decent.
You don't have a right to listen to any music you like, any way you want.
However, the music industry has a vested interest in me listening to music. If they make it more awkward or difficult or expensive, fewer people will listen to the music and their revenues go down. If they make it easy to buy legit copies of music, they'll make more money. GP feels that the music industry doesn't want him or her listening, and may well be driven away from buying music.
No; you'll find Democrats opposing electronic voting machines. The Republicans are almost always the ones trying to destroy trust in government (currently, anyway; these things change over time).
Paper systems have a very large advantage: they're easy to understand. We've been using paper ballots approximately forever, and we know how to secure them from fraud. Electronic systems are not easy to understand in detail, and there's more attack surfaces than we expect.
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The points of the Electoral College when it was made appear to have been to give slave states more influence on the Presidential election and to keep people like Trump out of the White House. Any other reason is ex post facto.
The Electoral College allows a coalition of large states to elect a President with absolutely no input from the small ones. In a popular vote contest, the candidates would pick up votes where they could, but with the EC there's absolutely no point in doing that.
Also, every number has a unique prime factorization. Consider 1 prime and you get the prime factorizations of 10 being 2*5, 1*2*5, 1*1*2*5, etc. Also, if 1 is prime, then 1 = 1 * 1, so 1 is the multiple of two primes. It's much easier to consider 1 neither prime nor composite, just the multiplicative identity.
In other words, we need to keep the article from becoming runoff?
That depends on the issues. Given a ballot box, there's only three ways to tamper: add ballots, remove ballots, or change ballots. Use a tamper-evident seal and store them somewhere secure and you've pretty much got those things covered. If all operations that happen when the seal isn't there are done with bipartisan (or, in better systems, multipartisan) observers, the security is pretty good.
Electronic systems are not as easily understood. We've shown time and time again that we don't understand the attack surfaces on digital systems. If there's a voting machine sitting there with a tamper-evident seal, we really don't know whether there's a way to affect the votes therein that bypasses the seal. Even if the seals cover all the I/O, we still don't know if there's something an intruder might possibly be able to do.
I'm not convinced that electronic systems are going to be better. If nothing else, they've got a larger attack surface. We understand the ways paper ballots can be messed with, while we keep seeing new ways to break digital systems. We can examine a paper ballot system and see that it meets spec, and electronic systems are far harder to audit (to the point that nobody seems to bother). If someone comes up with a paper voting scheme, we can evaluate it a lot more easily than an electronic one. It's much easier to convince someone that a paper system is secure than an electronic system, and that influences the perceived legitimacy of elections.
Voting is unlike most things we do electronically. Votes are anonymous and irreversible. In other fields, security problems can often be addressed retroactively. It's more expensive and messier, but it can be done. If someone takes advantage of a bank vulnerability to drain my account, the bank knows who to work with (me) and can put money back. If my vote is changed from Lincoln to Douglas, then nobody can check with me to see if that was legit, and there's no way to reverse it. If a casino screws up and I win big based on a software fault, they won't pay me the money. Voting systems have to be more secure than financial systems, and they have to be seen to be so.
I've been looking at other options. So have other people. I know of a couple of writers who used Patreon as support to quit the day job (Jemisen might be beyond needing that, now that she's got back-to-back Hugos). I haven't found one.
Some of the advantages of the current system:
I haven't seen anything comparable. Patreon allows free riders, won't work unless the artist is already known, and doesn't scale. Nobody's going to make an expensive movie because of Patreon or Kickstarter; the money just isn't there. Expecting volunteer efforts means that the grunt work doesn't get done. Creating is fun, refining and editing and the like less so. There's all sorts of problems with having the government collect and distribute money on subjective grounds. Old-fashioned patronage doesn't work as well as it used to, and I already mentioned the crowd-funded version.
I haven't come up with an idea that works anywhere near as good. I haven't seen one that works anywhere near as good. I'd really like to see suggestions as to what would be a better system rather than be told that there is one out there somewhere among the unicorns.
As another example, when I bought my last car it came with a forty-eight month zero-interest loan.
Differently. Job applications were largely done in person or by mail, for example, instead of being available on the web. Similarly, before cell phones people used public pay phones, which are darn few on the ground nowadays.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that those untold number of monuments included a lot of unconstitutional activity, specifically favoring a particular religion. Others were opposed by people peaceably assembling and petitioning the government, like it says in the First Amendment.
The government is not anti-religion. There was some confusion at first while the First Amendment started to be enforced, but restricting any sites based on religious content would violate two clauses of the First. No court is going to order such censoring for anyone. It would be unconstitutional. (Okay, a court might. The appeals court would strike that down so fast the original judge would get whiplash.) It would also be unconstitutional to block pornhub, since porn has First Amendment protection. Note that this would apply to a government-run ISP, while a private one, in the absence of regulation, could block any site it liked.
Read the goddam First Amendment sometime. You're making up unconstitutional straw men.
Do you realize that "It is not the government's job to give us everything we want." doesn't actually disagree with "These are the sort of problems that the government should be responsible for."?
The biggest argument for single-payer is that, in the US, health care costs about 50% more per capita than any other country, and more advanced countries with universal health care have better public health statistics.
You seem very fuzzy about the First Amendment. Discriminating against sites on the basis of religion is unconstitutional.
You really don't seem to have arguments. Apparently, it's legal for the city to do this. You haven't told us why it shouldn't be. You just seem to dislike municipal broadband on the basis that "gubmnt bad".
So you'd be an arsonist, and possibly a murderer, because a private organization you have no legal connection to you doesn't have its members risking their lives on your behalf?
Nobody said the spying was acceptable. Stinerman said that he'd prefer Obama was running a domestic spying operation than Trump, not that either were acceptable.
Since you're distracted by the "attractive", here's a replacement question: would you prefer to be raped by a more violent attacker or a less violent attacker? I'd guess that (a) you'd rather not be raped, and (b) if you were raped, you'd prefer the less violent rapist.
Doubtless some are. That's one reason the data gets adjusted - somebody builds something and the thermometer is a little warmer. It's desirable to keep a thermometer at the same place, but we know it will read higher than it actually is.
Climate change is a real problem, regardless of what politicians do or do not do.
Nuclear energy does cause pollution. Thorium is not known to be a good source of nuclear energy, and won't be until we have some experience with full-scale thorium reactors. I do favor research into thorium fission, but right now it's research and development.
The fact that you don't like what's going on with renewable energy sources doesn't mean that you're necessarily right, or that governments investigating it are wrong. If nothing else, government interest does show that governments consider it a good idea to move from burning fossil fuels, because that creates problems.
Scott Adams can be funny. That's his main contribution. He's made it perfectly clear that he doesn't understand science.
Yup. Where do you think I got the inspiration for my current signature?
Nobody has called for financial penalties for people sufficiently stupid not to believe the evidence of global warming. The lawsuits were against companies that knew perfectly well it was going on, and denied it anyway in order to help their businesses. Intentional lying for commercial gain is called "fraud", and that appears to be what was going on.
Nope. Climate change has a more statistical influence on weather. It may have affected the chances we'd get a hurricane like that. If we have reason to believe that it increased the chance, then, yes, while it can't be attributed to global warming it can serve as a reminder.
Suppose the chance of a hurricane above X level goes from 50% a month in hurricane season to 60%. We've got 20% more such hurricanes, but the chance that any individual such hurricane is due to global warming is 17%.
The science is pretty definite. We're warming up the surface of the Earth, and this will continue. People who don't accept the science are not usually doing it because they've considered the evidence and are not persuaded, but because they've decided that AGW isn't happening or isn't continuing or isn't serious for some other reason. Deniers have been known to throw all sorts of accusations at climate scientists rather than accept the possibility that the science is right. Actual skeptics tend to accept the evidence when they look at it.
This means that deniers are denying the truth because they don't like it, and that at least verges on a moral issue. If they're against spending money on climate change research because they don't like it, they're potentially hurting the rest of us.
I'm not as impressed with medical science. The use of the phrase "evidence-based" is significant. Scientific studies are always evidence-based, so if all the recommendations were scientific there would be absolutely no need to say "evidence-based".
Runaway heating? Somebody's claiming runaway heating?
Also, when CO2 levels were a whole lot higher, the Sun was cooler. It's slowly warming up, and will render Earth completely uninhabitable within a billion years unless we do something about it. (I don't know what we'd do, but we may develop options over the next hundred million years.)
However, there is labor involved in the replacement, and a certain amount of risk (it's possible to break something, and then the customer gets a replacement phone). How long does it take a tech to change the battery? (I really don't know.) I doubt the fully burden cost of a tech is under $40/hour.
You seem to be assuming that the employees would be doing nothing instead of replacing batteries. If replacing batteries takes them away from other necessary functions, Apple has to hire additional people. If they have to hire too many additional people, they run out of room and have to pay more for the space.
Look up "opportunity cost". Every employee replacing a battery isn't doing something else.
If artists don't get compensated for their work, we'll get less art out of them. If nothing else, they won't have the option to quit the day job. Many arts benefit from not-particularly-creative actions, such as recorded musing and literature. Those guys are going to want to get paid.
Now, when do we compensate everyone who works on some artistic endeavor? And where does this compensation come from?
With limited-term copyright, we can have a deal whereby people who want a work of art can pay a small amount which recompenses the artist and technicians. In that way, the compensation comes from people who like the art, and is distributed according to how much people like what. This is, in my opinion, the best compensation method I've seen.
I do believe that copyrights should be a lot more limited than they are now. The US Constitution allows them to promote creative activity, and so terms longer than that should be unconstitutional. I can't see anyone deciding to work on art or not based on possible income thirty years into the future, myself, so the old 14+14 system was decent.
However, the music industry has a vested interest in me listening to music. If they make it more awkward or difficult or expensive, fewer people will listen to the music and their revenues go down. If they make it easy to buy legit copies of music, they'll make more money. GP feels that the music industry doesn't want him or her listening, and may well be driven away from buying music.
No; you'll find Democrats opposing electronic voting machines. The Republicans are almost always the ones trying to destroy trust in government (currently, anyway; these things change over time).
Paper systems have a very large advantage: they're easy to understand. We've been using paper ballots approximately forever, and we know how to secure them from fraud. Electronic systems are not easy to understand in detail, and there's more attack surfaces than we expect.