Try installing (or even legally acquiring) the top 10 most popular Android apps on an AOSP phone that doesn't have any of the Google services installed.
Not really surprising. After all, a bunch of people in Britain decided that they'd punish the political elite in London by voting to give them more power a few months ago...
I think the election results disprove that only 20% supported him
Not necessarily. There are at least three reasons for voting for Trump:
You think Trump will be a good President.
You think anyone on the Red Team is better than any alternative.
You think that anyone is better than Hilary.
Trump got around 60M votes. There are about 230M registered voters in the USA. That means that 26% of the eligible population actively voted for him. It's not too much of a stretch to assume that 6% did so for the second or third reason.
A laptop in 2016 that costs £4000 and comes with 16GB of RAM? Sorry, it's overpriced. My current MBP is three years old, so it's now at the point in our normal upgrade cycle where I'd be buying a new one. These are not a compelling upgrade. A 2TB SSD would be nice, but most of what I do is RAM limited and so an upgrade that doesn't increase it is not worth the money. The new model has the same maximum RAM as one from three years ago. That's just embarrassing.
No, democracy, by definition is rule by the people (literally, by the city, because the first places to practice it were city states). Democracies can allow the people to exercise that power in a variety of ways, ranging from electing a dictator periodically to directly voting on every issue.
As it is, the states have the sole authority to chose the manner in which their electors are chosen
And game theory tells them not to move away from winner takes all unless most other states do so at the same time, which is why this pledge is interesting. If your state votes as a bloc, then it has a lot more political power: changing the minds of the 10-20% swing voters in the state will give you all of the votes now. With a proportional representation system, it would only give you 10-20% of the votes. That dramatically reduces the incentive for candidates to support policies popular in your state.
They have a disproportionate influence because of the winner takes all system. Most of those states don't swing by more than 10% each election. This means that the total number of electoral college votes that you get for changing the mind of n voters is significantly higher in the larger states than the smaller ones, which means that candidates have an incentive to favour them.
The real solution for the US is probably to eliminate direct election of Senators and return them to being elected by state legislatures and make the presidential elections some form of AV or STV.
While I agree with most of what you say, please could you stop referring to authoritarian kleptocrats as 'progressives' please? There's nothing progressive about these people: they want stronger government intervention where it harms their competitors, less regulation where it helps their interests.
There's a big difference between Clinton and Trump. Both want to do things that are obviously against the interests of the majority of the population, but Clinton has the Washington experience to make deals to pass them and make them seem appealing. Trump doesn't. A successful Trump presidency would probably be a bit worse than a successful Clinton presidency, but the likelihood of Trump achieving any of his goals is a lot less.
How about Red states leach our nation's wealth while Blue states provide it.
While the facts on which that statement is based are true, it's misleading. The 'leaching' is required to keep the value of the US dollar roughly constant across the country (though the spending power of one dollar is still quite a lot more in the middle than the edges). See Greece and Germany what happens when you don't have such a mechanism within a single currency.
The result of this is that the US dollar is a lot weaker as a currency for the USA than it would be for just the coastal states. This, in turn, helps exports from those states to the rest of the world. Without this mechanism, it's highly likely that the coastal (mostly blue) states would see a sharp downturn in exports and a recession.
And they're the same ones that were pushing Hilary so hard, instead of someone who might have won for the Democrats. The Republicans put up the least popular candidate that they've ever run (and one who did worse in terms of received votes than their last two candidates). All of the opinion polls during the primaries showed that any one of the Democratic candidates other than Hilary would have easily won. So the DNC, backed by a lot of Silicon Valley money picked the one candidate who only had a 50:50 chance. Well done guys: you are responsible for Trump winning, you don't get to run away from it.
I am aware that Google and FB use the data I provide.
You're probably a minority. Most people seem to have very little idea of what Google and Facebook do with their data and are often quite shocked when they learn. The most common reaction I've seen is for people to disbelieve because they think that what Google and Facebook are doing must be illegal.
If that were true, the Trump wouldn't have won with fewer votes that Clinton and with fewer votes than the last two Republican Presidential candidates. Trump won because the DNC managed to pick the one candidate where people that weren't hard-core red or blue team supporters couldn't decide was the lesser of two evils.
If by 'majority' you mean Trump voters, then you might want to look at the popular vote (as opposed to electoral college vote) totals. The turnout was low and even if you only count the people that did vote, Trump voters were a minority.
I don't know where the extra Republican votes came from.
What extra votes? Trump got 59,265,360 votes. In 2012, Romney got 60,933,504 votes. Trump persuaded fewer people to vote for him than Romney. The difference is that the DNC put up the least electable candidate. There were two categories of voter in this election: people who voted for Trump and people who voted against Trump. Hardly anyone wanted to vote for Clinton. She got 59,458,773 votes (again, the US has elected a Republican President with a minority of the popular vote), but last time Obama got 65,915,795 votes (down from 69,498,516 in 2008). Around ten million people who voted for Obama in 2008 couldn't bring themselves to vote for Clinton this time, yet in 2008 McCain still got 59,948,323 votes - more than Trump.
Trump didn't win because he was popular: he got fewer votes than the last two Republican Presidential candidates, who both lost. He won because the DNC tried to ram an unpopular candidate through, which made enough potential Democratic voters not bother to turn up that Trump won.
For which we all thank the US electorate. The last four months have been weird and we're glad to be able to look down on the USA again. Now if only we could move from the number 2 spot...
If your state implements some form of proportional representation for the Presidential election (i.e. the delegates are split in proportion to the vote) then you effectively throw away your bargaining power. In every election, you will be sending around 40% of your delegates to vote Republican and 40% to vote Democratic, with only around 20% for the candidates to compete over. Maine has a total of 4 electoral college votes, and so you'd at most be fighting over 2. That means that it's basically not worth campaigning in Maine (it barely is if you stand to win 4). In a state like Texas or California, persuading 10% of the voters to change their mind will swing enough electoral college voters to decide most elections, so there's a big incentive to stand on a platform that favours at least one of these states. If, say, California switched to proportionally allocating their electoral college votes, then in 2012 instead of allocating 55 electors to Obama, they'd have allocated 34 to Obama and 21 to Romney. Effectively, the state would have been worth 13 votes to Obama, instead of 55. That means that Obama would have had a far smaller incentive to keep them happy.
The DNC was right to want to face Trump. In the Democratic primary, there was only one candidate that wasn't polling so far ahead of Trump that facing him would have guaranteed a Democratic President. Their mistake was picking the one candidate almost as unpopular as Trump. Congratulations DNC, your decision to rig the primaries for Clinton has rewarded you with a Republican President. Good call.
Hmm, I wonder if you offered $1m and immunity to prosecution to any ISIS soldier who killed all of his squadmates and defected how long ISIS would last...
It's not even a new thing. I remember talking to someone in the RAF back the early 90s. He was talking about a mission where the pilot of an Apache had popped up from behind a hill, targeted a convoy, fired a load of missiles at it, and destroyed it. In the debriefing, the officer in charge had pointed out to the pilot that each surface-to-air missile cost roughly five times as much as a truck and asked who he thought had won the engagement. It's possible that the trucks had been carrying something very expensive, but not that likely.
This is part of the argument in favour of drones: they a lot cheaper than fighters and a lot more likely to be reusable than missiles.
Actually, the main thing that it's for is to give control to channel owners at the expense of copyright owners. Which is weird, because the people who insist on it are copyright owners. The record labels insisted Apple include DRM on their music, so Apple ended up with complete control of digital music distribution until they allowed DRM-free music. The movie studios insisted that Netflix and Amazon include DRM in their streaming offerings. Initially that gave a lot of control to Microsoft and Adobe, who provided the DRM, now it's giving control to Netflix, Google, and Amazon (a huge number of consumer devices such as smart TVs run a Netflix, YouTube, or Amazon video app - if you won't sell your content DRM free, then you can't reach these people unless you go through one of these companies).
Eventually people will learn that not only doesn't DRM reduce piracy (it pisses off legitimate customers and it only takes one person to break the DRM and the DRM-free version can be infinitely pirated), but it also doesn't give any control to the people who insist on it.
The reason that the US no longer does it at the same time as the UK and EU is that George W Bush gave into lobbying from the Golf industry, who turn out to be the only people that notice the difference: if the summer time is longer, people play more golf in the evenings and they make more money.
The entire thing is weird though. A typical work day is 9-5, so you have three hours in the morning and five in the afternoon. Given that most people go straight to work when they wake up (give or take an hour or so) but have several hours of awake time in the evening, noon is already wildly off centre from a typical day.
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Why do you need to shift the paradigm? Closures have been part of OOP since Smalltalk. JavaScript is dumbed-down Self.
Try installing (or even legally acquiring) the top 10 most popular Android apps on an AOSP phone that doesn't have any of the Google services installed.
Yes, all of the competitors of Google that have 80% of the smartphone OS market are being investigated.
Exactly. If your party can't pick someone less unelectable than Trump to represent them, it's probably time to give up.
Not really surprising. After all, a bunch of people in Britain decided that they'd punish the political elite in London by voting to give them more power a few months ago...
I think the election results disprove that only 20% supported him
Not necessarily. There are at least three reasons for voting for Trump:
Trump got around 60M votes. There are about 230M registered voters in the USA. That means that 26% of the eligible population actively voted for him. It's not too much of a stretch to assume that 6% did so for the second or third reason.
A laptop in 2016 that costs £4000 and comes with 16GB of RAM? Sorry, it's overpriced. My current MBP is three years old, so it's now at the point in our normal upgrade cycle where I'd be buying a new one. These are not a compelling upgrade. A 2TB SSD would be nice, but most of what I do is RAM limited and so an upgrade that doesn't increase it is not worth the money. The new model has the same maximum RAM as one from three years ago. That's just embarrassing.
Democracy is by DEFINITION mob rule!
No, democracy, by definition is rule by the people (literally, by the city, because the first places to practice it were city states). Democracies can allow the people to exercise that power in a variety of ways, ranging from electing a dictator periodically to directly voting on every issue.
As it is, the states have the sole authority to chose the manner in which their electors are chosen
And game theory tells them not to move away from winner takes all unless most other states do so at the same time, which is why this pledge is interesting. If your state votes as a bloc, then it has a lot more political power: changing the minds of the 10-20% swing voters in the state will give you all of the votes now. With a proportional representation system, it would only give you 10-20% of the votes. That dramatically reduces the incentive for candidates to support policies popular in your state.
They have a disproportionate influence because of the winner takes all system. Most of those states don't swing by more than 10% each election. This means that the total number of electoral college votes that you get for changing the mind of n voters is significantly higher in the larger states than the smaller ones, which means that candidates have an incentive to favour them.
The real solution for the US is probably to eliminate direct election of Senators and return them to being elected by state legislatures and make the presidential elections some form of AV or STV.
While I agree with most of what you say, please could you stop referring to authoritarian kleptocrats as 'progressives' please? There's nothing progressive about these people: they want stronger government intervention where it harms their competitors, less regulation where it helps their interests.
There's a big difference between Clinton and Trump. Both want to do things that are obviously against the interests of the majority of the population, but Clinton has the Washington experience to make deals to pass them and make them seem appealing. Trump doesn't. A successful Trump presidency would probably be a bit worse than a successful Clinton presidency, but the likelihood of Trump achieving any of his goals is a lot less.
How about Red states leach our nation's wealth while Blue states provide it.
While the facts on which that statement is based are true, it's misleading. The 'leaching' is required to keep the value of the US dollar roughly constant across the country (though the spending power of one dollar is still quite a lot more in the middle than the edges). See Greece and Germany what happens when you don't have such a mechanism within a single currency.
The result of this is that the US dollar is a lot weaker as a currency for the USA than it would be for just the coastal states. This, in turn, helps exports from those states to the rest of the world. Without this mechanism, it's highly likely that the coastal (mostly blue) states would see a sharp downturn in exports and a recession.
And they're the same ones that were pushing Hilary so hard, instead of someone who might have won for the Democrats. The Republicans put up the least popular candidate that they've ever run (and one who did worse in terms of received votes than their last two candidates). All of the opinion polls during the primaries showed that any one of the Democratic candidates other than Hilary would have easily won. So the DNC, backed by a lot of Silicon Valley money picked the one candidate who only had a 50:50 chance. Well done guys: you are responsible for Trump winning, you don't get to run away from it.
I am aware that Google and FB use the data I provide.
You're probably a minority. Most people seem to have very little idea of what Google and Facebook do with their data and are often quite shocked when they learn. The most common reaction I've seen is for people to disbelieve because they think that what Google and Facebook are doing must be illegal.
If that were true, the Trump wouldn't have won with fewer votes that Clinton and with fewer votes than the last two Republican Presidential candidates. Trump won because the DNC managed to pick the one candidate where people that weren't hard-core red or blue team supporters couldn't decide was the lesser of two evils.
If by 'majority' you mean Trump voters, then you might want to look at the popular vote (as opposed to electoral college vote) totals. The turnout was low and even if you only count the people that did vote, Trump voters were a minority.
I don't know where the extra Republican votes came from.
What extra votes? Trump got 59,265,360 votes. In 2012, Romney got 60,933,504 votes. Trump persuaded fewer people to vote for him than Romney. The difference is that the DNC put up the least electable candidate. There were two categories of voter in this election: people who voted for Trump and people who voted against Trump. Hardly anyone wanted to vote for Clinton. She got 59,458,773 votes (again, the US has elected a Republican President with a minority of the popular vote), but last time Obama got 65,915,795 votes (down from 69,498,516 in 2008). Around ten million people who voted for Obama in 2008 couldn't bring themselves to vote for Clinton this time, yet in 2008 McCain still got 59,948,323 votes - more than Trump.
Trump didn't win because he was popular: he got fewer votes than the last two Republican Presidential candidates, who both lost. He won because the DNC tried to ram an unpopular candidate through, which made enough potential Democratic voters not bother to turn up that Trump won.
For which we all thank the US electorate. The last four months have been weird and we're glad to be able to look down on the USA again. Now if only we could move from the number 2 spot...
If your state implements some form of proportional representation for the Presidential election (i.e. the delegates are split in proportion to the vote) then you effectively throw away your bargaining power. In every election, you will be sending around 40% of your delegates to vote Republican and 40% to vote Democratic, with only around 20% for the candidates to compete over. Maine has a total of 4 electoral college votes, and so you'd at most be fighting over 2. That means that it's basically not worth campaigning in Maine (it barely is if you stand to win 4). In a state like Texas or California, persuading 10% of the voters to change their mind will swing enough electoral college voters to decide most elections, so there's a big incentive to stand on a platform that favours at least one of these states. If, say, California switched to proportionally allocating their electoral college votes, then in 2012 instead of allocating 55 electors to Obama, they'd have allocated 34 to Obama and 21 to Romney. Effectively, the state would have been worth 13 votes to Obama, instead of 55. That means that Obama would have had a far smaller incentive to keep them happy.
The DNC was right to want to face Trump. In the Democratic primary, there was only one candidate that wasn't polling so far ahead of Trump that facing him would have guaranteed a Democratic President. Their mistake was picking the one candidate almost as unpopular as Trump. Congratulations DNC, your decision to rig the primaries for Clinton has rewarded you with a Republican President. Good call.
Hmm, I wonder if you offered $1m and immunity to prosecution to any ISIS soldier who killed all of his squadmates and defected how long ISIS would last...
It's not even a new thing. I remember talking to someone in the RAF back the early 90s. He was talking about a mission where the pilot of an Apache had popped up from behind a hill, targeted a convoy, fired a load of missiles at it, and destroyed it. In the debriefing, the officer in charge had pointed out to the pilot that each surface-to-air missile cost roughly five times as much as a truck and asked who he thought had won the engagement. It's possible that the trucks had been carrying something very expensive, but not that likely.
This is part of the argument in favour of drones: they a lot cheaper than fighters and a lot more likely to be reusable than missiles.
Actually, the main thing that it's for is to give control to channel owners at the expense of copyright owners. Which is weird, because the people who insist on it are copyright owners. The record labels insisted Apple include DRM on their music, so Apple ended up with complete control of digital music distribution until they allowed DRM-free music. The movie studios insisted that Netflix and Amazon include DRM in their streaming offerings. Initially that gave a lot of control to Microsoft and Adobe, who provided the DRM, now it's giving control to Netflix, Google, and Amazon (a huge number of consumer devices such as smart TVs run a Netflix, YouTube, or Amazon video app - if you won't sell your content DRM free, then you can't reach these people unless you go through one of these companies).
Eventually people will learn that not only doesn't DRM reduce piracy (it pisses off legitimate customers and it only takes one person to break the DRM and the DRM-free version can be infinitely pirated), but it also doesn't give any control to the people who insist on it.
The reason that the US no longer does it at the same time as the UK and EU is that George W Bush gave into lobbying from the Golf industry, who turn out to be the only people that notice the difference: if the summer time is longer, people play more golf in the evenings and they make more money.
The entire thing is weird though. A typical work day is 9-5, so you have three hours in the morning and five in the afternoon. Given that most people go straight to work when they wake up (give or take an hour or so) but have several hours of awake time in the evening, noon is already wildly off centre from a typical day.