Actually I was referring to the UK. In Ireland they do use numbers. Depends on the voting system. UK is First Past the Post, Ireland is Single Transferable Vote.
You vote for a Member of Parliament about once every 5 years. The leader of the party that gets an overall majority of votes becomes Prime Minister. If there's no overall majority then parties may have to form a coalition government.
You vote for a councillor for the local government about once every 4 or 6 years.
On the occasions where that falls in the same year as a general election, they do both elections at the same time with two separate ballot papers.
Did Russia used e-voting in their last laughable election? No. The election was still plagued with fraud.
With a hand counted paper ballot system, everybody is capable of understanding how the entire system works, and how it might be cheated. With electronic voting systems, that's not true.
With hand counted paper ballots its reasonably obvious to observers to what extent they are straight or fraudulent. With evoting it's not. The world has a good idea to what extent the Russian election was fraudulent. With electronic voting no one would ever be able to tell the difference between a straight Russian election and a fraudulent one.
Same argument applies to every other country. e.g. To this day, there's no common agreement about the extent to which the 2004 US elections were fraudulent in areas that used Diebold voting machines.
It's the same argument with self driving cars. We won't accept a self driving vehicle system that reduces our accident rate even by half. The first death at the hands of a computer will result in a technological witch hunt, as will the first failed election.
Of course they'll be accepted. We've had self-driving trains and planes for years. But that's a completely different issue from electronic voting.
And that's the reason why American views on this story are not very valid. Ireland, like most of the world, have ballots with a single choice. The USA is unusual in having such complicated elections.
And no, this still isn't "e-voting". The ballot marking portion of the machine is exactly that; it prints a paper ballot that matches the selections made by the voter via the handicapped interface.
Then it's irrelevant to the counting process. That paper ballot can be scanned or hand counted.
Smudges are only a problem for optical scanners. Hand counted ballots typically use a system of marking with a cross. The centre of a cross is pretty accurate and unambiguous, even if smudged.
The polls are open from 6am to 9pm; we are mandated by law to be there 45 minutes before and after these times. There is no way that we can physically count hundreds of votes in 45 minutes. It would take several hours; now multiply this by our collective $41/hr salary ($11 for the chairman, $10 for each of the other three) and multiply that by the tens of thousands of election districts across New York State. Where is that money going to come from?
That's a, probably unintentional, straw man. No one is arguing that you should organise an election in the way you are proposing. Much of the world uses hand counted paper ballots, so clearly it's perfectly workable.
In Britain for example the ballots are not counted at the polling station, but taken to a central count, with a different team to do the counting from those that manned the polls.
Sure there's an extra salary cost on that one day every few years. But there's also a cost in the millions that get wasted on electronic voting systems. Paper ballots and pencils are cheap.
For sure it's more difficult for the USA, because they chose a complicated voting system, where the electorate are asked many questions. But this story was about Ireland, not the USA.
It doesn't have to be stupidity; a pen smudge that crosses into another column or row is an "ambiguous marking".
On a form designed for optical scanning machines it might be. But a hand counted paper ballot traditionally uses a cross to mark the chosen option. And the centre of a cross is accurate to something less than the width of a pencil line.
If you think white space is useless, you don't know much about style yourself. Any designer knows that whitespace is just as important as the items that are in it.
The reason why people have pointed out that anecdote is not data is because you stated that "The rail network in the UK is really quite poor" and then used your anecdotes to justify that statement.
It's similar to if someone said "The British Railways are dangerous. My Brother died in the Hatfield disaster".
Ah yes, the age old "change the argument, to try and cover up your fail" way of doing things. I suggest you go back and read what I actually said,
Now you're trying to accuse ME of changing the argument? What you actually said was "ã33bn ($50bn USD), for a new train line between only two cities, that wont be ready for 12 years, and when it does, shaves only a mere 20minutes or so off the journey." Which is completely wrong, Dickhead.
Each post that you made since then is similarly full of shit. Your latest one is "The speeds being put forward for the new system are best case headline speeds too". You don't know that, and indeed it's obviously not the case for a 225mph locomotive.
As I said, you're a liar and a troll. And you're the one that looks like a "'tard". Everyone can check your posts out and see that you are repeating nonsense that's already been pointed out to you is not true.
It doesn't take much effort to find that there are in fact trains that come in under 2hrs from Leeds to London. (Hint: there's one every single fucking morning at 7am).
That isn't "trains", it's "train". There is precisely one train that does it in under two hours, and that's that 7am train. And it takes 1 hour 59 minutes, not 1 hour 50 minutes as you claimed.
So what you are trying to do is compare the very fastest express that runs once per day, subtract 9 minutes from it's running time, and then compare it to the typical train time on the new route.
And you're complaining that the BBC got it's numbers wrong? You're a liar and a troll.
Well, spirituality is the practice of believing in things for which there is no evidence. There's nothing intrinsically good in that. For example the people who flew planes into the twin towers were very spiritual. I suggest Britain would be a better place if there were no spirituality in it at all.
Morality is a very different thing. Of course that's a good thing. And I see lots of morality around Britain. For example I've lost my wallet twice in my life, and on both occasions it was handed back with nothing missing, once via a taxi company, once via the police. I see people volunteering to run charity shops. etc. My Polish friend has been in Britain on and off for 7 years. She says when she came here she couldn't believe how nice everyone was to her, chatting to her in shops etc.
For sure if you judge Britain on what's in the news, you get a bad impression. But that's because British journalism don't believe there's such a thing as good news. For example, the gold standard metric for the crime rate is the British Crime Survey. Did you know that the crime rate has fallen virtually every year since 1995? But you won't hear that on the news. Instead they'll cherry pick a particular category of crime that's against the general trend, and report on that. Or they'll report the police reported crime stats without explaining that they often move in the opposite direction from actual crime rates.
Of course Britain does have it's problems. Last summer's riots and binge drinking for example. But who are we comparing with? What country doesn't have it's problems? Different problems for sure, but in most cases bigger ones.
The clue that you are ranting rather that talking knowledgeably is the fact that the time saving from Birmingham to London is 40 minutes not 20 minutes.
Certainly this is a Keynsian stimulus program in addition to any need for the line itself. But the primary action of such a program is to create work for domestic industries such as engineering and construction and thus reduce bankruptcies and unemployment and thereby reduce recession. It's not a scheme to increase inflation, although having people working rather than unemployed does of course tend to mean slightly higher inflation.
Basically your attitude is the now long discredited Thatcher monetarism argument: "Unemployment is a price worth paying [for low inflation]". Which itself was not too dissimilar from Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake".
You're only doing one side of the pros and cons list though. On the other side you've got:
Trains will get you there at a more predictable time. 90% of trains are on-time, road traffic is unpredictable, particularly on routes that you are unfamiliar with.
You don't have to find somewhere to park, or pay for parking.
Depending on the route, and how close you live to a station, the train can be quicker.
Even allowing for the occasional rail disaster, the train is much safer.
You can rest on the train. You can work on the train. You can read on the train. You can be more prepared for the thing you're travelling to.
You can't get done for drink-driving on the train.
But the ticket prices are indeed ridiculous. Rail should be re-nationalised and run for the public good. With rational and affordable pricing.
But then again your decision to move from rail to road might be an outlier too. Anecdotes not being data still applies.
Whenever I've seen a chart of passenger miles, it's going up (with the exception of the period of time around the great rail disasters of a decade ago.)
It'll be years before they get to the stage of starting to lay rails. There will be several years of NIMBYs attending public enquiries before anything practical starts.
14 years to complete just part of it?? It took only six years for the greatest mobilization in world history to defeat the Axis.
If it were done according to WWII rules, the ministry would make a decision on the most quick to construct route, there would be no consultation. There would be no health and safety considerations. Raw materials would just be commandeered, e.g. iron for the rails would be got by removing railings from outside people's homes and businesses without warning or permission.
And when complete, the trains would be able to run at about 50mph, not 225mph.
You bought the house and land. You didn't buy the view. You might think you did - you may have paid more because the view was there. And yet the view didn't belong to the person that sold you the property, so you did not buy it.
Your "view" belongs to other people. All those people who's property it is that you are looking at when you say "view".
If you get a perceptible reduction in daylight because of this wall, or significant noise from the trains, then for sure that deserves compensation. But loss (or degradation) of a view that never belonged to the householder in the first place shouldn't be compensated for, in my view.
Petrol price is also rising above general inflation, and the roads are ever more congested. How else are people going to do those journeys that are too long for bus/tram and too short for an aeroplane?
yet there are already trains that do it in 1hr 50mins (though iirc the official schedule is about 1hr 55mins, some do it quicker demonstrating that it's physically possible to do it on existing lines in less time easily)
Are you a troll? Not only have you misstated what the news has reported as time savings in other postings here, you are also stating completely the wrong times for current services from Leeds to London.
I've just checked the timetable and the shortest Leeds to London journey today is 2 hours 12 minutes. Whilst most are around the 2 hours 20 mark.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I was referring to the UK. In Ireland they do use numbers. Depends on the voting system. UK is First Past the Post, Ireland is Single Transferable Vote.
You vote for a Member of Parliament about once every 5 years. The leader of the party that gets an overall majority of votes becomes Prime Minister. If there's no overall majority then parties may have to form a coalition government.
You vote for a councillor for the local government about once every 4 or 6 years.
On the occasions where that falls in the same year as a general election, they do both elections at the same time with two separate ballot papers.
Did Russia used e-voting in their last laughable election? No. The election was still plagued with fraud.
With a hand counted paper ballot system, everybody is capable of understanding how the entire system works, and how it might be cheated. With electronic voting systems, that's not true.
With hand counted paper ballots its reasonably obvious to observers to what extent they are straight or fraudulent. With evoting it's not. The world has a good idea to what extent the Russian election was fraudulent. With electronic voting no one would ever be able to tell the difference between a straight Russian election and a fraudulent one.
Same argument applies to every other country. e.g. To this day, there's no common agreement about the extent to which the 2004 US elections were fraudulent in areas that used Diebold voting machines.
It's the same argument with self driving cars. We won't accept a self driving vehicle system that reduces our accident rate even by half. The first death at the hands of a computer will result in a technological witch hunt, as will the first failed election.
Of course they'll be accepted. We've had self-driving trains and planes for years. But that's a completely different issue from electronic voting.
And that's the reason why American views on this story are not very valid. Ireland, like most of the world, have ballots with a single choice. The USA is unusual in having such complicated elections.
And no, this still isn't "e-voting". The ballot marking portion of the machine is exactly that; it prints a paper ballot that matches the selections made by the voter via the handicapped interface.
Then it's irrelevant to the counting process. That paper ballot can be scanned or hand counted.
If you doubt the results of the machine you are free to volunteer your time to manually count each and every ballot.
Are you? What's the process by which that happens? Who is allowed to handle those papers? Under what circumstances?
Smudges are only a problem for optical scanners. Hand counted ballots typically use a system of marking with a cross. The centre of a cross is pretty accurate and unambiguous, even if smudged.
The polls are open from 6am to 9pm; we are mandated by law to be there 45 minutes before and after these times. There is no way that we can physically count hundreds of votes in 45 minutes. It would take several hours; now multiply this by our collective $41/hr salary ($11 for the chairman, $10 for each of the other three) and multiply that by the tens of thousands of election districts across New York State. Where is that money going to come from?
That's a, probably unintentional, straw man. No one is arguing that you should organise an election in the way you are proposing. Much of the world uses hand counted paper ballots, so clearly it's perfectly workable.
In Britain for example the ballots are not counted at the polling station, but taken to a central count, with a different team to do the counting from those that manned the polls.
Sure there's an extra salary cost on that one day every few years. But there's also a cost in the millions that get wasted on electronic voting systems. Paper ballots and pencils are cheap.
For sure it's more difficult for the USA, because they chose a complicated voting system, where the electorate are asked many questions. But this story was about Ireland, not the USA.
It doesn't have to be stupidity; a pen smudge that crosses into another column or row is an "ambiguous marking".
On a form designed for optical scanning machines it might be. But a hand counted paper ballot traditionally uses a cross to mark the chosen option. And the centre of a cross is accurate to something less than the width of a pencil line.
If you think white space is useless, you don't know much about style yourself. Any designer knows that whitespace is just as important as the items that are in it.
The reason why people have pointed out that anecdote is not data is because you stated that "The rail network in the UK is really quite poor" and then used your anecdotes to justify that statement.
It's similar to if someone said "The British Railways are dangerous. My Brother died in the Hatfield disaster".
Ah yes, the age old "change the argument, to try and cover up your fail" way of doing things. I suggest you go back and read what I actually said,
Now you're trying to accuse ME of changing the argument? What you actually said was "ã33bn ($50bn USD), for a new train line between only two cities, that wont be ready for 12 years, and when it does, shaves only a mere 20minutes or so off the journey." Which is completely wrong, Dickhead.
Each post that you made since then is similarly full of shit. Your latest one is "The speeds being put forward for the new system are best case headline speeds too". You don't know that, and indeed it's obviously not the case for a 225mph locomotive.
As I said, you're a liar and a troll. And you're the one that looks like a "'tard". Everyone can check your posts out and see that you are repeating nonsense that's already been pointed out to you is not true.
It depends. Sometimes increased competition is good, sometimes its bad. The world isn't black and white.
It doesn't take much effort to find that there are in fact trains that come in under 2hrs from Leeds to London. (Hint: there's one every single fucking morning at 7am).
That isn't "trains", it's "train". There is precisely one train that does it in under two hours, and that's that 7am train. And it takes 1 hour 59 minutes, not 1 hour 50 minutes as you claimed.
So what you are trying to do is compare the very fastest express that runs once per day, subtract 9 minutes from it's running time, and then compare it to the typical train time on the new route.
And you're complaining that the BBC got it's numbers wrong? You're a liar and a troll.
It's got a moral and spiritual wilderness.
Well, spirituality is the practice of believing in things for which there is no evidence. There's nothing intrinsically good in that. For example the people who flew planes into the twin towers were very spiritual. I suggest Britain would be a better place if there were no spirituality in it at all.
Morality is a very different thing. Of course that's a good thing. And I see lots of morality around Britain. For example I've lost my wallet twice in my life, and on both occasions it was handed back with nothing missing, once via a taxi company, once via the police. I see people volunteering to run charity shops. etc. My Polish friend has been in Britain on and off for 7 years. She says when she came here she couldn't believe how nice everyone was to her, chatting to her in shops etc.
For sure if you judge Britain on what's in the news, you get a bad impression. But that's because British journalism don't believe there's such a thing as good news. For example, the gold standard metric for the crime rate is the British Crime Survey. Did you know that the crime rate has fallen virtually every year since 1995? But you won't hear that on the news. Instead they'll cherry pick a particular category of crime that's against the general trend, and report on that. Or they'll report the police reported crime stats without explaining that they often move in the opposite direction from actual crime rates.
Of course Britain does have it's problems. Last summer's riots and binge drinking for example. But who are we comparing with? What country doesn't have it's problems? Different problems for sure, but in most cases bigger ones.
Why should it cost 5 times as much nearer the time of the train? It's still the same service.
The clue that you are ranting rather that talking knowledgeably is the fact that the time saving from Birmingham to London is 40 minutes not 20 minutes.
Certainly this is a Keynsian stimulus program in addition to any need for the line itself. But the primary action of such a program is to create work for domestic industries such as engineering and construction and thus reduce bankruptcies and unemployment and thereby reduce recession. It's not a scheme to increase inflation, although having people working rather than unemployed does of course tend to mean slightly higher inflation.
Basically your attitude is the now long discredited Thatcher monetarism argument: "Unemployment is a price worth paying [for low inflation]". Which itself was not too dissimilar from Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake".
You're only doing one side of the pros and cons list though. On the other side you've got:
Trains will get you there at a more predictable time. 90% of trains are on-time, road traffic is unpredictable, particularly on routes that you are unfamiliar with.
You don't have to find somewhere to park, or pay for parking.
Depending on the route, and how close you live to a station, the train can be quicker.
Even allowing for the occasional rail disaster, the train is much safer.
You can rest on the train. You can work on the train. You can read on the train. You can be more prepared for the thing you're travelling to.
You can't get done for drink-driving on the train.
But the ticket prices are indeed ridiculous. Rail should be re-nationalised and run for the public good. With rational and affordable pricing.
But then again your decision to move from rail to road might be an outlier too. Anecdotes not being data still applies.
Whenever I've seen a chart of passenger miles, it's going up (with the exception of the period of time around the great rail disasters of a decade ago.)
It'll be years before they get to the stage of starting to lay rails. There will be several years of NIMBYs attending public enquiries before anything practical starts.
14 years to complete just part of it?? It took only six years for the greatest mobilization in world history to defeat the Axis.
If it were done according to WWII rules, the ministry would make a decision on the most quick to construct route, there would be no consultation. There would be no health and safety considerations. Raw materials would just be commandeered, e.g. iron for the rails would be got by removing railings from outside people's homes and businesses without warning or permission.
And when complete, the trains would be able to run at about 50mph, not 225mph.
You bought the house and land. You didn't buy the view. You might think you did - you may have paid more because the view was there. And yet the view didn't belong to the person that sold you the property, so you did not buy it.
Your "view" belongs to other people. All those people who's property it is that you are looking at when you say "view".
If you get a perceptible reduction in daylight because of this wall, or significant noise from the trains, then for sure that deserves compensation. But loss (or degradation) of a view that never belonged to the householder in the first place shouldn't be compensated for, in my view.
Petrol price is also rising above general inflation, and the roads are ever more congested. How else are people going to do those journeys that are too long for bus/tram and too short for an aeroplane?
yet there are already trains that do it in 1hr 50mins (though iirc the official schedule is about 1hr 55mins, some do it quicker demonstrating that it's physically possible to do it on existing lines in less time easily)
Are you a troll? Not only have you misstated what the news has reported as time savings in other postings here, you are also stating completely the wrong times for current services from Leeds to London.
I've just checked the timetable and the shortest Leeds to London journey today is 2 hours 12 minutes. Whilst most are around the 2 hours 20 mark.
http://www.thetrainline.com/buytickets/combinedmatrix.aspx?Command=TimeTable
Either they got it wrong or you misremembered.
Birmingham journeys will be shorter by about 40 minutes. Leeds, Manchester and Scotland journeys by about 1 hour.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16473296