Funnily enough, Apple wasn't the one complaining so much as Netscape. Go back and learn the history of what happened and what the problem was with Microsoft's anti-trust activities.
The OS costs more for an individual end user who is buying one copy than it is or a manufacturer who is buying hundreds of thousands - why would that be at all surprising?
Being a business means that they do have to care about maximising profit. Being a convicted monopolist simply means that they have to be careful about the practices they can engage in. The issue in question is not a anti-trust matter.
As for 'pulling numbers out their rear', this is one of the two big products for Microsoft (the other of course being Office) - do you really think they just pull numbers out of their rear for it, or do you think that maybe they sit down with some financial guys and work out what price will theoretically make them a lot of money? Why are you so concerned with margin being proportional to production costs? It's all about what the market will bear. And costs of making an OS is going to be a complex issue.
Prices are set to maximise profit, not to reflect production costs. Your question makes no sense unless you think Microsoft is a charity, not a business.
Germany and the USSR are so ideologically opposed and Stalin and Hitler so distrustful of each other, that no war between them is almost inconceivable.
Basically, if Linux on the desktop looked as nice as OSX and the user rarely needed to go to the CLI for anything it would be crushing OSX and be solidly competing with Windows. That's my estimation, anyway.
Right. Because applications mean nothing and usability is the same as having a pretty desktop.
I also just realised that my figures were off my an order of magnitude. It is currently 1 MP for every 100,000 people (roughly) or 1 per 74,000 registered voters. Going to the NI model of constituencies of 6 would mean 6 MPs shared between 600,000 people or 444,000 registered voters. Just a point of information.
I wont bother with the rest of it because we're going round in circles and you keep ignoring important points.
What have I ignored? I addressed your points as far as I can see. Don't think you've addressed mine though - do you still think FPTP is dictatorial?
But regarding constituencies, it's also a bit of a silly argument in favour of FPTP.
As I've repeatedly said, I'm not arguing for FPTP, I'm correcting your skewed perception of it as dictatorial. What part of 'I'm not saying [FPTP is] the best system - I actually like the fact that we use STV here in Northern Ireland.?' led you to the conclusion that I prefer FPTP to PR?
Since you're keen on important points not being ignored, could you reply to my rather important point about constituencies and representation which demonstrates that FPTP and PR are democratic in the same way because they are both about having a constituency represented, not the nation as a whole (unless you go for a one-nation constituency). Do you believe that the composition of parliament should be proportional to national popular vote with constituency representatives being determined by the results of national voting as a whole, or that parliamentarians should be sent by constituencies and that those sent by the constituencies should be representative of the individual constituencies? If the former, how do you address the problem of minority candidates representing a constituency in order to make up the 'correct' national proportion? If the latter, do you see that FPTP and PR are both democratic methods of selecting the representative, but differ in the number of representatives a constituency has?
What is the use having a local MP to represent you if the MP doesn't actually represent you because of major ideological differences, just as the relevant MPs don't represent the 19 million who threw their votes away in safe seat constituencies last election?
You're never going to get an MP who perfectly represents every member of his constituency on every issue, even if they voted for him. Each candidate pledges to make a stance on certain issues and whoever offers the most popular combination of stances then presents that to the national parliament. That's how representative democracy works. Would you rather than an MP came back and polled his constituency on every single issue and spent x proportion of his time advocating an issue and y proportion opposing it, where x:y is the ratio of constituents who advocate or oppose it?
Seriously, I'm not sure what you actually want in terms of how government would actually work. You seem to have certain ideals, but I don't see how they would work in practice.
The difference is, all people are actually represented because their constituency MP is one that actually cares what they think due to ideological similarities.
There isn't one constituency MP under PR, there are several, not all of whom represent any one voter. Did you read the Tory/Labour/Lib Dem example I gave where a party might have 50% of the popular vote yet a minority of seats and never be able to change that?
Forgot to say that here in NI we have 6-seat constituencies that work reasonably well so if our method of implemented UK-wide, you'd have about 108 constituencies in total, each representing about 60,000 people i.e. 60,000 people sharing 6 MPs as opposed to 10,000 having 1.
You're now arguing that PR is better than FPTP, which is something I'm not interested in debating. All I wanted to do was show that FPTP is not dictatorship and that some of the problems you accuse FPTP occur with PR as well.
It's a nice theory, but it hasn't actually managed to work like that on many issues.
In what way? I gave the worst case scenario (which you seemed to think was the best case) and the actual best case scenario. What instances are you thinking of that fell outside of this range? Or are you saying that the HoL should be able to block bills i.e. an unelected group having a veto on bills passed by the people's representatives?
Yes, I pointed this out, but as I also stated, it's only because they're fortunate enough that the electoral boundaries have allowed them to be lucky enough for this to happen
In other words, FPTP is not universally bad, as I was pointing out.
Luckily with PR that's not a problem, because the government never has effective 100% of the power anyway.
Which isn't a fundamental issue with FPTP either. The problem is the party whip, which is a feature of party politics and can apply to coalitions as well particularly if they do a deal such as 'you support our policy in this vote and we'll support yours in the next.' Representative democracy, as opposed to direct democracy, intrinsically has this problem.
Only in FPTP would you need to get rid of government with low approval ratings because then they have 100% of the power effectively.
That's naive. In PR you can have a coalition government formed that doesn't have majority approval, yet keeps on going until the next election.
No, democracy is about a government representive of the people, FPTP does not allow this in England because it's too disproportionately swung towards a specific minority.
FPTP is representative of the people on the scale of single-seat constituencies. This often leads to disproportionate results on the national scale, but it's not unrepresentative. The most popular party is very likely to be in power. For proportional government on a national scale (which is different to representative), you need multi-seat constituencies and therefore larger constituencies. This has the advantage of more proportionately representing people, but has the difficulty of it being harder to get to know all the candidates, confusing for many voters, voting strategies giving more weight to some votes than others and elected officials having a less intimate relationship with their constituencies because of their size. It's a trade-off between individually representing a small constituency or jointly representing a large constituency. Both systems are representative, but in different ways. It's not about representing the nation as a whole, but about representing the wishes of different constituencies within the nation.
Having multi-seat constituencies means that there is a certain lack of representation in that a candidate that a majority of the voters dislike can still get a sufficient quote to be one of their representatives. Obviously this does have the advantage of the minority being better represented.
Again, you still seem to misunderstand the fundamental difference between FPTP and PR.
I think you're the one who doesn't understand. FPTP in the UK is used to represent single-seat constituencies. PR is used to representative multi-seat constituencies. Both grant power in proportion to the wishes of constituencies, not according the wishes of the whole nation. That would end up with MPs representing nation wishes to their assigned constituencies, rather than bringing their constituency's wishes to the nation.
I am not saying no one should be able to govern without having support of at least 50% of the population,
You have best and worst confused: at worst, the House of Lords is a speedbump, at best at can convince the government ot scrap a bill. Someone in the middle is the possibility of suggested changes being accepted by the House of Commons.
Canada doesn't help you for tow reasons: it's FPTP, not PR; and I'm not aware of any mechanism which boots the government out once its approval rating drops below 50%, which was the crucial issue at stake.
As for the UK, a PR system could actually lead to a disproportionate in government over a period of time because we'd probably end up with is a permanent Labour/Lib Dem coalition. Conservatives could be locked out.
Democracy is about the people's choice. That requires the availability of options and the freedom to chose whichever option you want i.e. freedom for anyone within reason to put themselves up for election and freedom to vote for whoever you want combined with the most poplar choice winning. That is the case for both FPTP and PR, they just break things down differently - FPTP uses small constituencies with one representative; FPTP uses larger area with multiple representatives. There are arguments for and against both positions, but neither is a dictatorship.
I'm quite aware of the party whip, but it's hardly equivalent to a dictatorship. An MP is legally free to vote as they wish. As they vote against the party then it makes sense that they would be removed from it. They are free to join another party or go independent. A principled MP is free to vote according to principle and what I've described does happen from time to time. In a dictatorship there would be legal impediments to voting against the dictator's wishes or some sort of threat of jail, being thrown out of government entirely, etc. Additionally the issue of the whip is not unique to FPTP, but exists in any political system with parties including PR.
Neither is accountability a FPTP problem. Governments are held accountable in elections, general elections happen regularly under FPTP and interim elections allow for public opinion to be expressed e.g. Labour lost control of all their council recently. Under PR, you could have a coalition that is held accountable in the same way.
You seem to think that no-one should be able to govern without having the direct support of at least 50% of the population, but I fail to see how that is a requirement for democracy, especially since you haven't defined how long a grace period a government would have before it should be kicked out, how approval would be measured, how often it would be measured, whether it should apply to approval for each decision that government makes or to is overall performance, etc.
You say how they get to power isn't the issue, yet FPTP and PR are fundamentally about that. They're about how you count votes, not what elected people do.
I call them dictators because they're still getting in to power through a minority
Given voter turnouts, you're rarely going to have a situation where the majority of people eligible to vote have elected their rulers.
but politically the effect is identical. You have someone in power against the majority of the people who cannot be removed.
No. Laws are made by parliament, which the PM does not control. The military is nominally under the control of the monarchy and in practice by the DoD. The PM can be unseated by a vote of non-confidence and Gordon Brown has come close to being chucked out by his own party a few times now. Additionally MPs, including the PM face free and open elections every 4-5 years and elections can even be called earlier if there is insufficient support for the government. How is this politically equivalent to a dictatorship?
This is particularly prominent in the current situation where approval ratings for Brown and Labour have been put as low as 15% in some cases, but at most around 20%.
So? They have to call an election next year by law and certainly will, if not earlier. That is the constitutional law that they and every other government has abided by. Low approval is a rationale for going to the polls, but not a requirement. If you made it a requirement, governments would be paralysed by fear of ever doing anything unpopular even if it was for the good of the country. Not giving the government time to fix problems would create unstable quick-fix populist governments which would be far worse over the long term.
If 80%+ of the population are unhappy with the leadership and have no power other than to wait
A general election must be held every five years (or more frequently). Is this dictatorial? No. If an unpopular government proceeds with elections at the legally required time, are they being dictatorial? No. IF they don't hold elections earlier, are they being dictatorial? No, because they're not required to and the public will have the chance to see if the government can fix things and if not then send a clear message when the election does come around. In the mean time they can send a message by the way they vote in by-elections, council elections and European elections - as has just happened. Poor showings there makes the ruling party nervous, nearly leading to the PM facing a leadership challenge.
whilst they continue to push unpopular laws that do not have the support of the population
How do they push laws? Laws require a parliamentary majority i.e. more MPs must vote for it than against it. I don't recall Gordon Brown doing anything to change that. He's also had things sent back by the Lords on occasion.
is that really any different than a dictatorship politically?
Dictatorships are about the concentration of power. Constitutional monarchies have a rather different distribution of power. The popularity or otherwise of the government is neither here nor there.
I think it's wrong to assume a dictatorship is a violent bloody regime
Okay, but you're the first person to use that description. I merely talked about power.
yes that's a possibility but certainly some of the official defintions of dictator fit the description of Brown and his elite quite well
Dictatorships have some traits in common with plenty of forms of government. What you need in order to accuse Brown of being a dictator is to show what aspects of the government are distinctively dictatorial. So far your critique applies to parliamentary government and more generally to representative democracy.
the method of getting in isn't relevant to be defined as a dictator, merely the idea that a single person or small group of people
FPTP is flawed, but you're demeaning the plight of those who genuinely live under a dictatorship. Cameron (if he wins) will not be a dictator because he will have been elected as an MP and his party will have been elected to power. Brown is not a dictator because he was voted for as an MP as well and as leader of the governing party, is the PM. We don't elect PMs here, so if you're going to call him a dictator for no being elected to his particular position, then you'll have to call every PM a dictator (and still be wrong). You'll also notice than no posts on the cabinet are appointed by the public - that's not dictatorship either.
Incidentally, FPTP is more of an English problem that a British one - many elections in the rest of the UK are PR e.g. pretty much everything in Northern Ireland where incidentally Labour don't put up any candidates so we have a genuine grievance about being governed by a party that we could neither accept or reject. Utterly absurd.
He may not have flushed the point out all the way, but the fact of it is that educated people have smaller families generally than non-educated people.
I'm not disputing that; I'm questioning his comment about there being a genetic predisposition towards being logical and being logical leading to choosing education over family.
There's pretty good evidence and more than a few studies showing trends towards more educated people having few kids, and having them later in life, while poorer class and less educated people have more kids, and start having them at a much younger age.
Ah but that's not what you claimed. You said that there was some sort of genetic predisposition towards being logical and having a good attention span. You also suggested that being logical wold result in a person seeking more education rather than seeking to have a family. If you want to make such a claim, then show some evidence for it.
We're also selecting against logic and attention span. Those that have it choose education over family
Could you tell me which gene is the logic gene and explain the causative relationship between it and choosing education over family? What you posted sounded rather elitist/snobbish and lacking in evidence.
It sounds like your approach to the law is very subjective and about personal convenience. Where do you draw boundaries on which laws to follow? What about when other people decide not to follow certain laws which end up inconveniencing you? Laws exist in theory because they have been determined to be good for society as a whole. Deciding to speed because there are no obvious consequences is daft because you don't know everything about your current situation and don't know how it is going to evolve. You are better equipped to deal with surprises at lower speeds and less likely to cause damage. e.g. if a child runs out into the middle of the road, you're less likely to hit them and less likely to cause serious damage at 20 mph than 40 (taking the example of a school area with a 20 limit). Some limits exist because dangers have been evaluated by society rather than leaving it up to the judgment of individual drivers.
Assuming your definition of "driving good" is obeying all the laws, then that makes sense. My problem is less with other drivers, and more with the laws.
The majority of laws make a lot of sense. I was mainly thinking of things like maintaining a safe following distance, using indicators to let people know where you're going, using indicators before beginning your manoeuvre, cutting in on people, trying to drive alongside another car on a single-carriage road, not going through zebra crossings when there are people on them or waiting to cross etc.
do think the laws would be better if we abandoned this idea of using the law as a revenue source. Police departments are a loss, and are supposed to run at a loss. Structuring the laws such that the majority of the people break them so that all a police department or town needs to do is step up enforcement to help smooth over budget shortfalls simply amounts to a backdoor tax on the people.... and is a form of corruption.
I agree, but neither is that an excuse to for instance break speed limits where they exist for the purpose of safety e.g. 30 mph in residential zones, particularly near schools.
The majority of drivers drive in the manner that they are comfortable with
That doesn't mean they're safe. And just because one driver is comfortable doesn't mean that others are. Tailgaters make me very uncomfortable as a driver and ones who go round corners without indicating make me uncomfortable as a pedestrian.
and driving is an acceptably safe activity in the eyes of the majority of people.
In general, yes, but what relevance does that have to what we're discussing?
I will grant that obeying the law and changing it are different things, however, so is law and social convention.
That's the big problem really isn't it? People are capable of driving well to get their licence, but once they've got it, very few people bother any more.
When I took drivers ed, I got on the highway.
The daft thing in the UK is that learners can't go on motorways so people get their licence without having any experience. The situation is even worse here in Northern Ireland because we were used as guinea pigs for R-plates - for the first year after you get your licence, you have to have R-plates on your front and rear windscreens and are restricted to 45 mph, even on motorways where the limit is 70 mph. A law mandating that you drive 25 mph slower than legal drivers (and probably 30-40 mph slower than a good chunk of the traffic) is daft. They never brought in the law to the rest of the UK (because it's stupid), but left it here. I must confess that I have zero problem with an R-plate driver exceeding 45 mph on the motorway. 55 wouldn't be too bad since there are a fair few people in the inner lane who only do 60 instead of 70.
actually the law in most states is "go with the flow of traffic"
Interesting, I wasn't aware of that. The Highway Code here in the UK mandates that you stick to the safest speed with the speed limit for the road as an upper limit.
my father actually got out of a ticket for doing 80 in a 55 once (before the 55-limit-laws were repealed) - because every other driver on the road [all 20 of them] were doing it to.. of course it was 3 am and they were the only traffic on the road and the pod-dunk suburb served by 3 officers didnt' want to go up against 20-heavy machinery dealing-with guys:D
I suppose other safety considerations come into play in a situation like that...
I didn't. You claimed that an absentminded guy at the speed limit is as much of a problem as an absentminded guy speeding. I said that the guy speeding can be a greater danger.
Well, its a public place where everyone has to interact. So if I go to the movie theater opening night, and walk right past the line and cut in front right at the window... am I just "not giving in to the pressures of mob rule" when I ignore the people yelling at me to get in line?
There are laws against speeding and well accepted social conventions, often enforced in shops etc. where people take their turn in a queue.
People drive how they feel safe driving. I am advocating that speed limits be set based on the reality of the situation, and not some arbitrary numbers set for political and economic reasons as much as anywhere else.
Okay, but setting limits and obeying the limits are two different matters. It's the difference between changing the law and obeying it.
Why is it that states that allow cities to partol their sections of the highway and keep money from tickets have a strong tendancy to lower speed limits in the sections controlled by the city. Why is it also that states which don't allow cities to keep the revenue from tickets, well, don't do that?
Greed I would imagine, but I don't see what that has to do with anything I said.
The guy absentmindedly going down the road at the speed limit is just as much part of causing these situations as the people absentmindedly going as fast as they can.
No. Absentmindedness is a problem at any speed, but adding speeding to the situation makes things worse. Remember that there are more things that can cause accidents than other traffic and the faster you go, the less control you have and the less time you have to react.
The only difference is, the arbitrary "speed limit" is "the law" so only the person going over it (which is usually the majority of people on the road) who gets blamed. The guy going the speed limit causising a flow restriction for everyone else never gets stopped, he is totally unaware of the fact that he is causing a dangerous situation by not flowing with the traffic.
He's not the cause of the flow restriction; the people speeding are. You're acting as if mob rule should govern the roads. That doesn't work in the rest of society, so why should apply there?
From what I can recall, they've gone DRM free now. And they could hardly be accused of antitrust behaviour for stuff they no longer do. Neither is the selling of DRM-ed music an anti-trust worthy action when no-one is forced to buy from them and they do not prevent labels selling through others. If anything, the labels were putting pressure on Apple when they were selling their music cheaper through Amazon. Apple have a lot of clout over what happens in their own store, but minimal influence over what happens in other stores.
Slashdot Mirror
Funnily enough, Apple wasn't the one complaining so much as Netscape. Go back and learn the history of what happened and what the problem was with Microsoft's anti-trust activities.
The OS costs more for an individual end user who is buying one copy than it is or a manufacturer who is buying hundreds of thousands - why would that be at all surprising?
Being a business means that they do have to care about maximising profit. Being a convicted monopolist simply means that they have to be careful about the practices they can engage in. The issue in question is not a anti-trust matter.
As for 'pulling numbers out their rear', this is one of the two big products for Microsoft (the other of course being Office) - do you really think they just pull numbers out of their rear for it, or do you think that maybe they sit down with some financial guys and work out what price will theoretically make them a lot of money? Why are you so concerned with margin being proportional to production costs? It's all about what the market will bear. And costs of making an OS is going to be a complex issue.
Prices are set to maximise profit, not to reflect production costs. Your question makes no sense unless you think Microsoft is a charity, not a business.
Germany and the USSR are so ideologically opposed and Stalin and Hitler so distrustful of each other, that no war between them is almost inconceivable.
Proportionally, the green car as actually affected more: a whopping 25% increase in fuel consumption, compared with a mere 13% for the other car.
That's a bit of an exaggeration.
Right. Because applications mean nothing and usability is the same as having a pretty desktop.
I also just realised that my figures were off my an order of magnitude. It is currently 1 MP for every 100,000 people (roughly) or 1 per 74,000 registered voters. Going to the NI model of constituencies of 6 would mean 6 MPs shared between 600,000 people or 444,000 registered voters. Just a point of information.
What have I ignored? I addressed your points as far as I can see. Don't think you've addressed mine though - do you still think FPTP is dictatorial?
As I've repeatedly said, I'm not arguing for FPTP, I'm correcting your skewed perception of it as dictatorial. What part of 'I'm not saying [FPTP is] the best system - I actually like the fact that we use STV here in Northern Ireland.?' led you to the conclusion that I prefer FPTP to PR?
Since you're keen on important points not being ignored, could you reply to my rather important point about constituencies and representation which demonstrates that FPTP and PR are democratic in the same way because they are both about having a constituency represented, not the nation as a whole (unless you go for a one-nation constituency). Do you believe that the composition of parliament should be proportional to national popular vote with constituency representatives being determined by the results of national voting as a whole, or that parliamentarians should be sent by constituencies and that those sent by the constituencies should be representative of the individual constituencies? If the former, how do you address the problem of minority candidates representing a constituency in order to make up the 'correct' national proportion? If the latter, do you see that FPTP and PR are both democratic methods of selecting the representative, but differ in the number of representatives a constituency has?
You're never going to get an MP who perfectly represents every member of his constituency on every issue, even if they voted for him. Each candidate pledges to make a stance on certain issues and whoever offers the most popular combination of stances then presents that to the national parliament. That's how representative democracy works. Would you rather than an MP came back and polled his constituency on every single issue and spent x proportion of his time advocating an issue and y proportion opposing it, where x:y is the ratio of constituents who advocate or oppose it?
Seriously, I'm not sure what you actually want in terms of how government would actually work. You seem to have certain ideals, but I don't see how they would work in practice.
There isn't one constituency MP under PR, there are several, not all of whom represent any one voter. Did you read the Tory/Labour/Lib Dem example I gave where a party might have 50% of the popular vote yet a minority of seats and never be able to change that?
Forgot to say that here in NI we have 6-seat constituencies that work reasonably well so if our method of implemented UK-wide, you'd have about 108 constituencies in total, each representing about 60,000 people i.e. 60,000 people sharing 6 MPs as opposed to 10,000 having 1.
You're now arguing that PR is better than FPTP, which is something I'm not interested in debating. All I wanted to do was show that FPTP is not dictatorship and that some of the problems you accuse FPTP occur with PR as well.
In what way? I gave the worst case scenario (which you seemed to think was the best case) and the actual best case scenario. What instances are you thinking of that fell outside of this range? Or are you saying that the HoL should be able to block bills i.e. an unelected group having a veto on bills passed by the people's representatives?
In other words, FPTP is not universally bad, as I was pointing out.
Which isn't a fundamental issue with FPTP either. The problem is the party whip, which is a feature of party politics and can apply to coalitions as well particularly if they do a deal such as 'you support our policy in this vote and we'll support yours in the next.' Representative democracy, as opposed to direct democracy, intrinsically has this problem.
That's naive. In PR you can have a coalition government formed that doesn't have majority approval, yet keeps on going until the next election.
FPTP is representative of the people on the scale of single-seat constituencies. This often leads to disproportionate results on the national scale, but it's not unrepresentative. The most popular party is very likely to be in power. For proportional government on a national scale (which is different to representative), you need multi-seat constituencies and therefore larger constituencies. This has the advantage of more proportionately representing people, but has the difficulty of it being harder to get to know all the candidates, confusing for many voters, voting strategies giving more weight to some votes than others and elected officials having a less intimate relationship with their constituencies because of their size. It's a trade-off between individually representing a small constituency or jointly representing a large constituency. Both systems are representative, but in different ways. It's not about representing the nation as a whole, but about representing the wishes of different constituencies within the nation.
Having multi-seat constituencies means that there is a certain lack of representation in that a candidate that a majority of the voters dislike can still get a sufficient quote to be one of their representatives. Obviously this does have the advantage of the minority being better represented.
I think you're the one who doesn't understand. FPTP in the UK is used to represent single-seat constituencies. PR is used to representative multi-seat constituencies. Both grant power in proportion to the wishes of constituencies, not according the wishes of the whole nation. That would end up with MPs representing nation wishes to their assigned constituencies, rather than bringing their constituency's wishes to the nation.
You have best and worst confused: at worst, the House of Lords is a speedbump, at best at can convince the government ot scrap a bill. Someone in the middle is the possibility of suggested changes being accepted by the House of Commons.
Canada doesn't help you for tow reasons: it's FPTP, not PR; and I'm not aware of any mechanism which boots the government out once its approval rating drops below 50%, which was the crucial issue at stake.
As for the UK, a PR system could actually lead to a disproportionate in government over a period of time because we'd probably end up with is a permanent Labour/Lib Dem coalition. Conservatives could be locked out.
Democracy is about the people's choice. That requires the availability of options and the freedom to chose whichever option you want i.e. freedom for anyone within reason to put themselves up for election and freedom to vote for whoever you want combined with the most poplar choice winning. That is the case for both FPTP and PR, they just break things down differently - FPTP uses small constituencies with one representative; FPTP uses larger area with multiple representatives. There are arguments for and against both positions, but neither is a dictatorship.
I'm quite aware of the party whip, but it's hardly equivalent to a dictatorship. An MP is legally free to vote as they wish. As they vote against the party then it makes sense that they would be removed from it. They are free to join another party or go independent. A principled MP is free to vote according to principle and what I've described does happen from time to time. In a dictatorship there would be legal impediments to voting against the dictator's wishes or some sort of threat of jail, being thrown out of government entirely, etc. Additionally the issue of the whip is not unique to FPTP, but exists in any political system with parties including PR.
Neither is accountability a FPTP problem. Governments are held accountable in elections, general elections happen regularly under FPTP and interim elections allow for public opinion to be expressed e.g. Labour lost control of all their council recently. Under PR, you could have a coalition that is held accountable in the same way.
You seem to think that no-one should be able to govern without having the direct support of at least 50% of the population, but I fail to see how that is a requirement for democracy, especially since you haven't defined how long a grace period a government would have before it should be kicked out, how approval would be measured, how often it would be measured, whether it should apply to approval for each decision that government makes or to is overall performance, etc.
You say how they get to power isn't the issue, yet FPTP and PR are fundamentally about that. They're about how you count votes, not what elected people do.
Given voter turnouts, you're rarely going to have a situation where the majority of people eligible to vote have elected their rulers.
No. Laws are made by parliament, which the PM does not control. The military is nominally under the control of the monarchy and in practice by the DoD. The PM can be unseated by a vote of non-confidence and Gordon Brown has come close to being chucked out by his own party a few times now. Additionally MPs, including the PM face free and open elections every 4-5 years and elections can even be called earlier if there is insufficient support for the government. How is this politically equivalent to a dictatorship?
So? They have to call an election next year by law and certainly will, if not earlier. That is the constitutional law that they and every other government has abided by. Low approval is a rationale for going to the polls, but not a requirement. If you made it a requirement, governments would be paralysed by fear of ever doing anything unpopular even if it was for the good of the country. Not giving the government time to fix problems would create unstable quick-fix populist governments which would be far worse over the long term.
A general election must be held every five years (or more frequently). Is this dictatorial? No. If an unpopular government proceeds with elections at the legally required time, are they being dictatorial? No. IF they don't hold elections earlier, are they being dictatorial? No, because they're not required to and the public will have the chance to see if the government can fix things and if not then send a clear message when the election does come around. In the mean time they can send a message by the way they vote in by-elections, council elections and European elections - as has just happened. Poor showings there makes the ruling party nervous, nearly leading to the PM facing a leadership challenge.
How do they push laws? Laws require a parliamentary majority i.e. more MPs must vote for it than against it. I don't recall Gordon Brown doing anything to change that. He's also had things sent back by the Lords on occasion.
Dictatorships are about the concentration of power. Constitutional monarchies have a rather different distribution of power. The popularity or otherwise of the government is neither here nor there.
Okay, but you're the first person to use that description. I merely talked about power.
Dictatorships have some traits in common with plenty of forms of government. What you need in order to accuse Brown of being a dictator is to show what aspects of the government are distinctively dictatorial. So far your critique applies to parliamentary government and more generally to representative democracy.
FPTP is flawed, but you're demeaning the plight of those who genuinely live under a dictatorship. Cameron (if he wins) will not be a dictator because he will have been elected as an MP and his party will have been elected to power. Brown is not a dictator because he was voted for as an MP as well and as leader of the governing party, is the PM. We don't elect PMs here, so if you're going to call him a dictator for no being elected to his particular position, then you'll have to call every PM a dictator (and still be wrong). You'll also notice than no posts on the cabinet are appointed by the public - that's not dictatorship either.
Incidentally, FPTP is more of an English problem that a British one - many elections in the rest of the UK are PR e.g. pretty much everything in Northern Ireland where incidentally Labour don't put up any candidates so we have a genuine grievance about being governed by a party that we could neither accept or reject. Utterly absurd.
I'm not disputing that; I'm questioning his comment about there being a genetic predisposition towards being logical and being logical leading to choosing education over family.
Ah but that's not what you claimed. You said that there was some sort of genetic predisposition towards being logical and having a good attention span. You also suggested that being logical wold result in a person seeking more education rather than seeking to have a family. If you want to make such a claim, then show some evidence for it.
Could you tell me which gene is the logic gene and explain the causative relationship between it and choosing education over family? What you posted sounded rather elitist/snobbish and lacking in evidence.
It sounds like your approach to the law is very subjective and about personal convenience. Where do you draw boundaries on which laws to follow? What about when other people decide not to follow certain laws which end up inconveniencing you? Laws exist in theory because they have been determined to be good for society as a whole. Deciding to speed because there are no obvious consequences is daft because you don't know everything about your current situation and don't know how it is going to evolve. You are better equipped to deal with surprises at lower speeds and less likely to cause damage. e.g. if a child runs out into the middle of the road, you're less likely to hit them and less likely to cause serious damage at 20 mph than 40 (taking the example of a school area with a 20 limit). Some limits exist because dangers have been evaluated by society rather than leaving it up to the judgment of individual drivers.
The majority of laws make a lot of sense. I was mainly thinking of things like maintaining a safe following distance, using indicators to let people know where you're going, using indicators before beginning your manoeuvre, cutting in on people, trying to drive alongside another car on a single-carriage road, not going through zebra crossings when there are people on them or waiting to cross etc.
I agree, but neither is that an excuse to for instance break speed limits where they exist for the purpose of safety e.g. 30 mph in residential zones, particularly near schools.
That doesn't mean they're safe. And just because one driver is comfortable doesn't mean that others are. Tailgaters make me very uncomfortable as a driver and ones who go round corners without indicating make me uncomfortable as a pedestrian.
In general, yes, but what relevance does that have to what we're discussing?
That's the big problem really isn't it? People are capable of driving well to get their licence, but once they've got it, very few people bother any more.
The daft thing in the UK is that learners can't go on motorways so people get their licence without having any experience. The situation is even worse here in Northern Ireland because we were used as guinea pigs for R-plates - for the first year after you get your licence, you have to have R-plates on your front and rear windscreens and are restricted to 45 mph, even on motorways where the limit is 70 mph. A law mandating that you drive 25 mph slower than legal drivers (and probably 30-40 mph slower than a good chunk of the traffic) is daft. They never brought in the law to the rest of the UK (because it's stupid), but left it here. I must confess that I have zero problem with an R-plate driver exceeding 45 mph on the motorway. 55 wouldn't be too bad since there are a fair few people in the inner lane who only do 60 instead of 70.
Interesting, I wasn't aware of that. The Highway Code here in the UK mandates that you stick to the safest speed with the speed limit for the road as an upper limit.
I suppose other safety considerations come into play in a situation like that...
I didn't. You claimed that an absentminded guy at the speed limit is as much of a problem as an absentminded guy speeding. I said that the guy speeding can be a greater danger.
There are laws against speeding and well accepted social conventions, often enforced in shops etc. where people take their turn in a queue.
Okay, but setting limits and obeying the limits are two different matters. It's the difference between changing the law and obeying it.
Greed I would imagine, but I don't see what that has to do with anything I said.
No. Absentmindedness is a problem at any speed, but adding speeding to the situation makes things worse. Remember that there are more things that can cause accidents than other traffic and the faster you go, the less control you have and the less time you have to react.
He's not the cause of the flow restriction; the people speeding are. You're acting as if mob rule should govern the roads. That doesn't work in the rest of society, so why should apply there?
From what I can recall, they've gone DRM free now. And they could hardly be accused of antitrust behaviour for stuff they no longer do. Neither is the selling of DRM-ed music an anti-trust worthy action when no-one is forced to buy from them and they do not prevent labels selling through others. If anything, the labels were putting pressure on Apple when they were selling their music cheaper through Amazon. Apple have a lot of clout over what happens in their own store, but minimal influence over what happens in other stores.