Re:Why do we /still/ have the Electoral College?
on
Nader off Florida Ballot
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· Score: 2, Insightful
1) Why is it important that your president represent the minority in your country and not the majority?
I fail to see the reasoning behind this, why are the people in wisconsin more important than the people in new york?
It might make a little bit sense that the large states doesn't completely dominate the senate, but in most cases the votes in the senate isn't about what military bases to close - it's about issues that are equally important to all.
2)Your system was created a long time ago, since then there has been serious advances in the theory of democracy - as it turns out the rest of the world has abandoned your system in favor of more democratic ones. Ever wonder why the europeans countries consistently turn up voter turnout in the high eighties to low nineties, while your america has problems racking up a 40% voter turn out?
Do you think that a system where most people don't feel they are represented becomes more stable than one where people do?
3) first off, there is no way to tell what the numbers whould have been if there had been a 90% turnout. Secondly your statistical argument is flawed as another poster pointed out.
thirdly, if we were to discuss votes for senate or house of representatives your argument is even more flawed... the fact that all elections are close is a GOOD THING! it makes it worthwhile to cast a vote... for most people in USA today, voting is verifiably a waste of time.
besides... why do you even wan't a system where it is important how the district lines are drawn? doesn't it sound like a flawed democracy to you, where something like that is important?
If the black voters want to be heard in an american election they all have to go live in the same place, otherwise their vote is unimportant.
Is that a good property?
That is probably the most agressive post I've ever seen in a scientific discussion. Are you sure you haven't got any issues? (that you might have learned about in a freshman psychology course?)
My point about the Einsteins principle of equivalence stands though... how would you distinguish the effects of free fall from the advanced effect of a machine generating a gravity field opposing earths?
Sure you can still measure how fast the two balls move towards each other, but I fail to see how that enables you to conclude anything.
Sure it is a good indication that the machine doesn't magically shield out gravity, but merely counteracts it with a homogenous field, but other than that?
The only place this is getting you is into some absurd discussion of what exactly is meant by zero-gravity... If you want to get anywhere with that you have to convince me that the only meaningful definition of that is being inside a completely gravity shielded room (whatever that means)... but that doesn't really match the common definition of the term though.
Einstein lived in vain apparently.
One of his points is that there is NO physical experiment that will distinguish the effect of a gravity-field and constant acceleration if you are locked in a box with no windows.
The constant acceleration being the free fall in this case.
So if there are no windows in the plane, there is no way to tell if they've invented some advanced anti-gravity machine and are using it on you, or if the plane is just falling...
If theres no way to tell the difference I don't really care what they do.
I can tell you it's not ordinary Iraqi citizens who have feel invaded and opressed. If that were the case, they wouldn't be attacking iraqi citizens who cooperated with Americans - they'd only be attacking the Americans.
I guess you could take a lesson from history here;
In my country there were a lot of "collaborator assasinations" during ww2, where the "ordinary" danish freedom fighters killed people who cooperated with the germans. They thought the collaborators were worse than the german soldiers because they had sold out
The Federal Reserve is a private corporation operated and owned by private banks and given special monopoly existence by congress back on Christmas Eve in 1913. This is a very scary monopoly that has (perhaps unconstitutionally) usurped Congress's power to coin, issue, and regulate the American money supply.
I can't get into wether it is constitutional or not (I'm not american), truth is that your federal reserve is doing one hell of a good job.
The federal reserve is actually one of my favourite examples of when too much democracy is a bad thing.
If congress had to make the decisions that Greenspan does, the regulation of economy would be determined by lobbyists and petty local concerns - something that would inevitably lead to economic ruin.
Just see what too much democracy did to the californian economy.
Running an economy is something that requires a steady hand, presidents, congress men and senators have to think primarily about getting elected and funded - doing what is best for the voter or the country isn't prioritized that high -
doing what is best for the american economy is the "only" thing alan greenspan has to worry about.
Because OBL doesn't care about the modern borders of saudi arabia. The holy lands has to do with the historic borders at the time of muhammed, which basically makes it all of the middle-east.
You're probably right.
If I made the effort to do a proper comparison I could probably hear the difference.
The quality of my phone is also much worse than my cd-player... point is I don't care. If I don't think about it and it never annoys me, I'm not going to spend the money to fix the problem.
As the age old/. battle continues, they need to work on making a better PHONE before working on the features OF THE phone.
You live in the US, right?
I live in europe, I have a GSM phone.
I can't hear the difference between my cell-phone and my home landline - I can't remember when I was out of coverage last.
I wouldn't spend the money to buy a cell phone that was better... I have NO complaints. They have to find some new feature I can't live without if they want me to buy a new phone. (although 3D games is probably not it in my case)
The technology is there, there is no problem except that you insist on using an inferior standard (yeah, yeah... I know in principle your system is smarter).
I say, go ahead - develop 3D games for the cell phones If people want to buy it.
I get what you are saying, and I entirely get the point... but he uses the number for more than that - he argues that the death sentence for murder makes sense from a cost-benefit point of view, and that THAT is the reason there's a death penalty for murder.
To put it on the edge, we can go through his reasoning with my number (0) instead:
a) Executing a murderer doesn't make any economic sense because it doesn't deter any future murderers.
b)Believe me when I say that the reason we execute murderers is because it makes economic sense.
c) Executing vermiscripters will save society a lot of money.
d) because the economic benefit of executing vermiscripters is larger than the economic benefit of executing murderers, then, per b), we should execute vermiscripters.
Without his 10 deterred murders in a) then b) seems unjustified. if b) is unjustified then theres is *no way* to reach the conclusion in d).
I am in NO WAY arguing that it doesn't make economic sense to punish vermiscripters harder, merely that economics has nothing to do with the death sentence.
He might as well have argued that substituting death penalty for life in prison would allow us to employ more guards, so we should drop the death sentence.
My point is that the death sentence has nothing to do with cost benefit analysis or employing prison guards, so neither way of reasoning makes sense.
His wildly exaggerated claim that each death sentence saves 10 lives, serves to justify the false claim that the death sentence is bounded in something rational.
no, not really.
He uses it to make the point that the reason so many states has the death penalty, is because it's rational - that it makes sense from a cost-benefit point of view.
My point is that the death penalty doesn't save any human lives - so there's no point trying to pretend it's rational.
If the death penalty isn't rational then you have to disagree with the rest of the article.
so, no all of his reasoning hinges on the 10 lives.
Let's do the math. What do we get out of executing a murderer? Deterrence. A high-end estimate is that each execution deters about 10 murders. (The highest estimate I've ever seen is 24 murders deterred per execution, but the closest thing to a consensus estimate in the econometric literature is about eight.) That's 10 lives saved...
Now, I'm no expert on these matters, but would there really be ten times more murders in america if capital punishment was substituted with life in prison?
That number sounds completely ridicoulous to me.
I would probably put that number lower than 2 and closer to 1... without taking the time to compare all 38 states with capital punishment to those who don't it doesn't look like theres anywhere near a factor of ten difference between them.
this article looks like yet another example of the fact that 86.2% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
As for myself, I hold that the government's job is to improve our lives, not to impose its morality. In this, I take my stand with the president of the United States, who, in a 2000 debate against Al Gore, said quite explicitly that nothing other than deterrence can justify the death penalty.
Well... that lack of morality might be what is causing said president problems in Iraq right now.:P
But, seriously, it was my impression that the president constantly mixed religion and politics... It doesn't get much more moral than that.
Isn't that the exact opposite of what the article says?
Asonov warned that his work was almost entirely based on the evidence from his experiments and that he has little or no theoretical information to back up his theories.
We find the intelligent civilization. We can communicate.' As agents of free-will, the aliens are self-aware of good and evil, thus convertible to some terrestrial religion
Odds are that if they are aware of good and evil and advanced enough to be space-faring then they will probably have higher moral standards than anything christianity has to provide...
High moral standards are what makes cooperation possible. Tolerance of differences is probably neccesary, and that certainly isn't taught by christianity.
Or maybe im just projecting my own standards onto aliens... but the christian concept of moral seems to be pretty low compared to what humanism can provide.
ok...
The hardware vendors won't use the resources to write linux drivers until linux is "mom and pop" ready.
mom and pop won't use linux until it works with EVERY single soundcard on the market... dang...
is it just me or is the detective work of trying to figure out what hardware to buy for the linux box one of the real problems?
I would love a database with information on what kernels supported what hardware... but yeah, yeah... i know: who would want to be responsible for doing something like that?
Georgia Tech physics professor Uzi Landman said he expects it will be five to 10 years before nanoscale "parts" are common in electronic devices; perhaps five to eight years for medical uses.
Translation:
We don't have a clue when our pet projects will be live up to the hype we've created, but if I say 5-10 years maybe people won't realize what we're doing no more useful for the industry/economy than what all the other physics geeks are doing.
Nobodys going to disagree with me because it's impossible to tell how the world will look in ten years... heck... we might have flying cars, cold fusion and Duke Nukem Forever.
Yeah, but what percentage of the population voted in the first place?
Even though I have very little respect for the current president, I *at least* have to respect that a majority of the voters disagree with me...
but in my book NOT voting is even worse than voting for Bush.
You're right, you are not all the same, but I have very little reason to respect 75% of your population.
Democracy is precious, and when you live in the worlds only superpower you might think to at least take the time to vote - Whatever you vote for (or doesn't vote for) will have a huge impact on the rest of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Why is it important that your president represent the minority in your country and not the majority? I fail to see the reasoning behind this, why are the people in wisconsin more important than the people in new york?
It might make a little bit sense that the large states doesn't completely dominate the senate, but in most cases the votes in the senate isn't about what military bases to close - it's about issues that are equally important to all.
2)Your system was created a long time ago, since then there has been serious advances in the theory of democracy - as it turns out the rest of the world has abandoned your system in favor of more democratic ones. Ever wonder why the europeans countries consistently turn up voter turnout in the high eighties to low nineties, while your america has problems racking up a 40% voter turn out?
Do you think that a system where most people don't feel they are represented becomes more stable than one where people do?
3) first off, there is no way to tell what the numbers whould have been if there had been a 90% turnout. Secondly your statistical argument is flawed as another poster pointed out.
thirdly, if we were to discuss votes for senate or house of representatives your argument is even more flawed... the fact that all elections are close is a GOOD THING! it makes it worthwhile to cast a vote... for most people in USA today, voting is verifiably a waste of time.
besides... why do you even wan't a system where it is important how the district lines are drawn? doesn't it sound like a flawed democracy to you, where something like that is important?
If the black voters want to be heard in an american election they all have to go live in the same place, otherwise their vote is unimportant. Is that a good property?
That is probably the most agressive post I've ever seen in a scientific discussion. Are you sure you haven't got any issues? (that you might have learned about in a freshman psychology course?)
My point about the Einsteins principle of equivalence stands though... how would you distinguish the effects of free fall from the advanced effect of a machine generating a gravity field opposing earths?
Sure you can still measure how fast the two balls move towards each other, but I fail to see how that enables you to conclude anything.
Sure it is a good indication that the machine doesn't magically shield out gravity, but merely counteracts it with a homogenous field, but other than that?
The only place this is getting you is into some absurd discussion of what exactly is meant by zero-gravity... If you want to get anywhere with that you have to convince me that the only meaningful definition of that is being inside a completely gravity shielded room (whatever that means)... but that doesn't really match the common definition of the term though.
Einstein lived in vain apparently.
One of his points is that there is NO physical experiment that will distinguish the effect of a gravity-field and constant acceleration if you are locked in a box with no windows.
The constant acceleration being the free fall in this case.
So if there are no windows in the plane, there is no way to tell if they've invented some advanced anti-gravity machine and are using it on you, or if the plane is just falling...
If theres no way to tell the difference I don't really care what they do.
I can tell you it's not ordinary Iraqi citizens who have feel invaded and opressed. If that were the case, they wouldn't be attacking iraqi citizens who cooperated with Americans - they'd only be attacking the Americans.
I guess you could take a lesson from history here;
In my country there were a lot of "collaborator assasinations" during ww2, where the "ordinary" danish freedom fighters killed people who cooperated with the germans. They thought the collaborators were worse than the german soldiers because they had sold out
The Federal Reserve is a private corporation operated and owned by private banks and given special monopoly existence by congress back on Christmas Eve in 1913. This is a very scary monopoly that has (perhaps unconstitutionally) usurped Congress's power to coin, issue, and regulate the American money supply.
I can't get into wether it is constitutional or not (I'm not american), truth is that your federal reserve is doing one hell of a good job.
The federal reserve is actually one of my favourite examples of when too much democracy is a bad thing.
If congress had to make the decisions that Greenspan does, the regulation of economy would be determined by lobbyists and petty local concerns - something that would inevitably lead to economic ruin.
Just see what too much democracy did to the californian economy.
Running an economy is something that requires a steady hand, presidents, congress men and senators have to think primarily about getting elected and funded - doing what is best for the voter or the country isn't prioritized that high - doing what is best for the american economy is the "only" thing alan greenspan has to worry about.
Because OBL doesn't care about the modern borders of saudi arabia. The holy lands has to do with the historic borders at the time of muhammed, which basically makes it all of the middle-east.
You're probably right.
If I made the effort to do a proper comparison I could probably hear the difference.
The quality of my phone is also much worse than my cd-player... point is I don't care. If I don't think about it and it never annoys me, I'm not going to spend the money to fix the problem.
By the way, the parent of your comment obviously means better "phone", not better "network".
No, he talks about better quality sound and connections.
Why try to fix the phones if it's the network that's broken?
As the age old /. battle continues, they need to work on making a better PHONE before working on the features OF THE phone.
You live in the US, right?
I live in europe, I have a GSM phone. I can't hear the difference between my cell-phone and my home landline - I can't remember when I was out of coverage last.
I wouldn't spend the money to buy a cell phone that was better... I have NO complaints. They have to find some new feature I can't live without if they want me to buy a new phone. (although 3D games is probably not it in my case)
The technology is there, there is no problem except that you insist on using an inferior standard (yeah, yeah... I know in principle your system is smarter).
I say, go ahead - develop 3D games for the cell phones If people want to buy it.
That's it exactly. Trying to make it up in monetary terms doesn't make sense in my eyes... But I realize that I haven't got a better alternative.
Still we seem to have a pretty good instinctive feeling for it anyway...
I get what you are saying, and I entirely get the point... but he uses the number for more than that - he argues that the death sentence for murder makes sense from a cost-benefit point of view, and that THAT is the reason there's a death penalty for murder.
To put it on the edge, we can go through his reasoning with my number (0) instead:
a) Executing a murderer doesn't make any economic sense because it doesn't deter any future murderers.
b)Believe me when I say that the reason we execute murderers is because it makes economic sense.
c) Executing vermiscripters will save society a lot of money.
d) because the economic benefit of executing vermiscripters is larger than the economic benefit of executing murderers, then, per b), we should execute vermiscripters.
Without his 10 deterred murders in a) then b) seems unjustified. if b) is unjustified then theres is *no way* to reach the conclusion in d).
I am in NO WAY arguing that it doesn't make economic sense to punish vermiscripters harder, merely that economics has nothing to do with the death sentence.
He might as well have argued that substituting death penalty for life in prison would allow us to employ more guards, so we should drop the death sentence.
My point is that the death sentence has nothing to do with cost benefit analysis or employing prison guards, so neither way of reasoning makes sense.
His wildly exaggerated claim that each death sentence saves 10 lives, serves to justify the false claim that the death sentence is bounded in something rational.
yup... you're absolutely right. wasn't trolling.. just didn't think it through until after I pressed submit :)
But I still think that the number is grasped completely out of the blue - and is way over the mark.
no, not really. He uses it to make the point that the reason so many states has the death penalty, is because it's rational - that it makes sense from a cost-benefit point of view.
My point is that the death penalty doesn't save any human lives - so there's no point trying to pretend it's rational.
If the death penalty isn't rational then you have to disagree with the rest of the article.
so, no all of his reasoning hinges on the 10 lives.
yup.. you're right... I thought of it the moment I hit the submit button.
I haven't got a clue to as meny murderers end up un death row.
Let's do the math. What do we get out of executing a murderer? Deterrence. A high-end estimate is that each execution deters about 10 murders. (The highest estimate I've ever seen is 24 murders deterred per execution, but the closest thing to a consensus estimate in the econometric literature is about eight.) That's 10 lives saved...
Now, I'm no expert on these matters, but would there really be ten times more murders in america if capital punishment was substituted with life in prison?
That number sounds completely ridicoulous to me. I would probably put that number lower than 2 and closer to 1... without taking the time to compare all 38 states with capital punishment to those who don't it doesn't look like theres anywhere near a factor of ten difference between them.
this article looks like yet another example of the fact that 86.2% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
more likely:
(a) Solves the problem
and
(b) Turns your country into a police state.
As for myself, I hold that the government's job is to improve our lives, not to impose its morality. In this, I take my stand with the president of the United States, who, in a 2000 debate against Al Gore, said quite explicitly that nothing other than deterrence can justify the death penalty.
:P
Well... that lack of morality might be what is causing said president problems in Iraq right now.
But, seriously, it was my impression that the president constantly mixed religion and politics... It doesn't get much more moral than that.
Yeah, watches powered by "wrist action" :)
So what were you doing last night?
you know, Surfing the web... "powering the watch".
viruii? :)
Is this some kind of attempt to compromise between the correct form "viruses" and the wrong "virii"?
"Of course, a whole lot of this is just theory."
Isn't that the exact opposite of what the article says?
Asonov warned that his work was almost entirely based on the evidence from his experiments and that he has little or no theoretical information to back up his theories.
We find the intelligent civilization. We can communicate.' As agents of free-will, the aliens are self-aware of good and evil, thus convertible to some terrestrial religion
Odds are that if they are aware of good and evil and advanced enough to be space-faring then they will probably have higher moral standards than anything christianity has to provide...
High moral standards are what makes cooperation possible. Tolerance of differences is probably neccesary, and that certainly isn't taught by christianity.
Or maybe im just projecting my own standards onto aliens... but the christian concept of moral seems to be pretty low compared to what humanism can provide.
ok...
The hardware vendors won't use the resources to write linux drivers until linux is "mom and pop" ready.
mom and pop won't use linux until it works with EVERY single soundcard on the market... dang...
is it just me or is the detective work of trying to figure out what hardware to buy for the linux box one of the real problems?
I would love a database with information on what kernels supported what hardware... but yeah, yeah... i know: who would want to be responsible for doing something like that?
Georgia Tech physics professor Uzi Landman said he expects it will be five to 10 years before nanoscale "parts" are common in electronic devices; perhaps five to eight years for medical uses.
Translation:
We don't have a clue when our pet projects will be live up to the hype we've created, but if I say 5-10 years maybe people won't realize what we're doing no more useful for the industry/economy than what all the other physics geeks are doing.
Nobodys going to disagree with me because it's impossible to tell how the world will look in ten years... heck... we might have flying cars, cold fusion and Duke Nukem Forever.
Remember - half of the US voters voted for Gore.
Yeah, but what percentage of the population voted in the first place?
Even though I have very little respect for the current president, I *at least* have to respect that a majority of the voters disagree with me...
but in my book NOT voting is even worse than voting for Bush.
You're right, you are not all the same, but I have very little reason to respect 75% of your population.
Democracy is precious, and when you live in the worlds only superpower you might think to at least take the time to vote - Whatever you vote for (or doesn't vote for) will have a huge impact on the rest of the world.