Right, but the meanings have changed. After all, we call the left "liberal" when historically they are nothing of the sort.
During the 19th century, classical liberals were most definitely on the left side of the political spectrum. In Europe at least. The migrated to the right side because conservatives died, social democrats took over the left side, and christian parties took over enough social ideas to end up somewhere between those two.
But in the end, the whole left-right thing doesn't work. Christian parties tend to be socially conservative, but economically progressive, liberal parties are economically conservative, but socially progressive, and other parties end up with yet other interesting mixes of ideas.
Actually, the thing to look at would be the changes in the dollar to euro exchange rate. Which shows that over the past 3 months or so (and especially the past couple of weeks), the dollar has been climbing vs the euro.
And now, for further enlightenment, zoom out to five years.
It's good to see the dollar climbing out of the hole it fell into over the past couple of years, but it's nowhere near where it once was. I don't think it'll ever get there.
The wealthy are important to the economy. The wealthy and the upper-Middle class business owners are the engine of American prosperity. How many poor people ever offered you a job?
How many rich people ever fixed your sink or baked your bread?
It's true that capital is important, but so is labour.
We've already bought more than $167 billion of Chinese goods than we have sold the Chinese. That is not an insignificant number, and that figure only takes into account the first 3/4ths of the year.
And most of that trade is funded by Chinese loans to the US. The current China-US relationship reminds me of the relationship the EU (and US?) have had with many developing countries: we lend them money that they can use to buy stuff from us. We get exports, they go into debt, and we end up owning their economy. China is now pulling that same trick with the US.
The US is really starting to resemble a third world country this way.
If China got pissed and cut off all exports to us... their economy would implode
Quite right. It's in China's interest to keep funding the US. But that doesn't mean the US can afford to keep getting deeper and deeper in debt. At some point, China may have to cut their losses and decide to export to someone with a more reliable economy, or China will simply end up owning quite a bit of the US. With the low stock values of today, there's lots of good deals to be head.
It's this type of stupid story that the media JUST LOVE to splatter about. They don't understand that they are CAUSING the mess. Guess what? NOTHING HAS CHANGED IN ICELAND. The farmer still grows his stuff. The geothermal energy is still coming from the ground. The snow is still white and cold. Nothing is different except the assumed value of a few sheets of paper.
The problem is that those sheets of paper are extremely important nowadays. If you have a mortgage, the ownership of your house is regulated by those sheets of paper. If something goes wrong, you suddenly find yourself without a home.
Lots of consumption and production is not local anymore. We import lots of stuff, and depend on exports to pay for it. And we need sheets of paper to figure out who gets what.
Without the global economy this crisis wouldn't have been nearly as big a problem, but we fucked up our global economy to the point that sheets of paper are more important than actual production.
But we produce everything we need to exist, food, housing, medicine.
The US doesn't produce all the oil it currently uses. Without the sheets of paper, most people won't be able to drive cars, and it's back to horse and carriage again.
So, again, I ask, what's the problem? If I'm hungry, can I get food? Yes.
Unless you don't have money to pay for it. Not everybody works on a farm.
If I need a place to stay, is there one? Yes.
Unless you just lost your home because you can't afford your mortgage anymore.
Buy local
Buying locally is a very good idea, but it's not how our global economy is organised at the moment.
Anyway, these are not bad times if you are smart and not stupid and buy into their stupid panic stories.
These are very good times if you are smart and have sufficient means to take advantage of the situation. Average Joe who can't afford his mortgage because his employer can't afford to pay him because the bank won't lend them any money, could be in serious trouble.
I'm not saying there's trouble for everybody (personally I'm not worried at all), but some people are in very real problems.
My father is a resident at an extended care facility. He cannot get dsl or broad band for any amount of money, and edge/3G based USB dongles don't seem to work reliably in his room. He has a MacBook and an iPhone. The iPhone seems to have better connectivity than the dongles.
That's odd. Dongles (or PCMCIA cards) should have exactly the same connectivity as the iPhone. Are they from the same provider or a different one? Not every provider has the same 3G coverage.
My biggest problem at the moment is actually GPS doesn't work half the time. UMTS not working might be explained by lack of coverage, but that excuse doesn't work for GPS: it covers every inch of this planet. So why does GPS fail me when I'm out of the city? That makes no sense.
He already bought $1500 of Apple hardware and has an AT&T contract (pays $30/mo for inet). I just can't understand why, having spent all that money, he can't take one small step and get satisfaction. I just kick myself for not getting the tethering app when it was available. This is a problem that just doesn't seem to have a solution, and it bothers me a lot.
There is a solution, although it might not be legal: jailbreak the iPhone and install a tethering application. And it's also supposed to be possible to install the tethering app by hand without jailbreaking, but I don't know how yet. (And I think that's still breach of contract.)
Does the modern environment - which is largely artificial - mean natural selection is over, or is the game going on, just under rather different rules?
Different rules, ofcourse. If rules (environment) stay the same long enough, it's possible that evolution seems to come to a halt, but that's simply because the population is as perfectly adapted to its environment as possible, and natural selection selects against any change from that perfect adaptation. (This is probably the case with sharks and crocodiles, who have existed virtually unchanged for millions of years.)
We have quite dramatically changed our own environment, however, and that means we'll probably evolving in a completely different direction than we did before we invented agriculture and computers and that sort of stuff).
I travel internationally fairly often, and I am far more concerned about having someone else pick up my laptop by mistake from the X-Ray machine (which almost happened about a year ago in Japan).
Those places are so crowded and confusing that I'm always amazed people don't lose half their stuff there.
You throw your wallet and other valuables in a plastic tray which is placed in plain sight in front of lots of strangers picking up similar trays while security people are busy looking at new arrivals and padding you down because you forgot to take off your belt. Despite the security it looks like a really easy place for theft.
It's hard to run away if the victim finds out in time, however.
The difference is, members of the regime are not subject to "enhanced" interrogation techniques. (I really do think that Congress dropped the ball on that one.)
If waterboarding is not torture, surely Bush and his people won't mind being subjected to that kind of interrogation, right?
Well I think capitalism is not the problem. The capitalists running it are.
But that's what you get with unregulated capitalism: capitalists running the system.
What surprised me a bit is that suddenly lots of people are pointing out that Karl Marx's analysis of capitalism was correct (though his ideas about government are still wrong). And not just in left-wing magazines, but in big capitalism-oriented newspapers. Apparently we're experiencing the end of Reagan/Thatcher-style neoliberal capitalism.
No, you have the logic of evolution backwards. I'll explain using your example:
In prehistoric times if someone was faulty, for example deaf[1], then they don't hear the bear coming and it eats them. If it gets them early enough, they don't reproduce.
These days, there aren't many bears around. Idiots in cars perhaps - but a lot less of a risk relatively speaking.
And that makes being deaf less faulty, in an evolutionary sense. From an evolutionary perspective, all that matters is whether you reproduce, and whether your kids reproduce. A deaf animal can be a smashing evolutionary success if it lives in an environment where sound is meaningless. Deafness is not a faulty mutation if it doesn't hurt your chances of reproduction.
Being very intelligent can be an evolutionary disadvantage if your intelligence makes you focus too much on other things than having sex and making babies. Being extremely intelligent can be a faulty mutation if it hurts your chances of reproduction.
But should Android or even a WinCE system get a few cool toys that apple explicitly forbids, that green light of envy will start to burn bright.
I'm not saying they don't exist, or that they are trivial; but please specify the types of "cool toys" that Apple explicitly forbid that aren't replacements for existing apps?
Tethering is explicitly forbidden by Apple. It's technically possible if you jailbreak it, but Apple bans apps that do it, and it's also explicitly forbidden in the contract, EULA or whatever.
You answered yourself with the second sentence; iPods and iPhones aren't targetted at geeks.
Who do you think the early adopters for iPods were? Geeks were definitely among them. At that time, no other mp3 player could hold so much music in such a small package. Now there are many alternatives ofcourse, and I definitely agree that the old full-size iPod is on its way out. People will either get an iPod Nano, or an iPod Touch or iPhone.
Speaking of the iPhone, again, the smallest general purpose computer with the largest screen, lots of applications availlable, etc. Again geeks are among the early adopters, and immediately jailbroke the thing in order to make use of its full potential.
PS. I'm not even American and I know that NPR is national public radio.
I didn't, and I still don't know what their bias is, but I do know Fox's bias, so that's where I assumed he was joking. (Although like I said, I once encountered someone who wasn't kidding about that.)
OK, I have a stupid question. How do you tell how much power a component is going to pull before you buy it?
I think Tom's Hardware has some articles on CPU power per Watt. Beyond that, check out Silent PC Review. They're goal may be silence, not energy, but wasted energy means extra heat, more fans and more noise, so they do give a lot of attention to energy efficiency.
I built a new system in July, Intel Core2Duo E8400, 2gb ram, ATI 3850, two hds (one's a raptor), and the box on idle pulls 81W.
I still think 81W is too much for doing nothing at all. Problem is, there are a lot of invisible energy wasters in a PC. I believe an E8200 idles around 3W and a HD3850 around 10W (I have them too), but memory and motherboard use a lot of power too, and each harddisk adds about 10W.
The most useless power wasters are graphics cards. I believe the 8800GT uses about 100W just to draw an empty desktop. Recent ATI cards are a lot better, but 10W is still a lot for drawing a desktop.
Well, at least I'm glad manufacturers are starting to pay attention to this.
Hate to agree with Anrego but it does sound like a lot of self serving Eco-nut preaching, without any basis in fact.
It's bad eco-nut preaching. I'm an eco-nut myself, and half the points in TFA made little sense to me. I've seen far better articles on how to save energy in computers.
I don't have any links with me, but here are a couple of easy points:
rule #1: get a good power supply. TFA is correct that some power supplies suck. TFA is not correct that it's hard to figure out how efficient PSUs are. 80+ rating is pretty common nowadays, and I believe they recently added some more granularity to that rating. Furthermore, make sure the PSU fits the actual power demand. They're most efficient when they run at 50%, so using a 600W PSU for a PC that runs at 100-200W wastes more energy than using a 300W PSU for that PC.
And when you're talking about servers, how is it possible that virtualisation isn't getting mentioned? A virtual server uses exactly as much power as it needs, and is never idling. Surplus processing power is used by other virtual servers. With enough virtual servers, it becomes a lot easier to predict when more physical servers are needed to handle the load.
I have no control over the heating in my apartment. Thus, I have to have an air conditioner running 24/7/365
Running AC and heating at the same time seems like the most useless and wasteful waste of energy to me. You can't help it ofcourse, and I wouldn't be surprised if you're not the only one in that situation. So instead of worrying about the energy used by idling servers, wouldn't it make more sense to simply fix the heating of badly designed buildings?
I heard they both pretty much did what was expected from them. Palin did well, but probably not good enough to matter. Biden demonstrated he knew what he was talking about without getting pedantic, and that he'd be an adequate choice as VP.
That's because you've been listening to liberal media like ABC and NPR.
I don't have access to ABC, and I've never even heard of NPR.
If you listened to an objective news source, like Access Hollywood or Fox, you'd realize how truly stunning Sarah's performance was.
Would you believe that I once heard someone name Fox as the only objective news source? And I fear that guy really meant it.
First, being black doesn't make a candidate a better choice.
It makes him the unconventional choice, which is why you wouldn't expect him to appear as the safe choice. Yet that's what we got.
Thirdly, he's the reason we're in this economic mess.
How the hell is Obama the reason behind the economic mess? That's truly the most impressive spin I've seen so far, and I'd love to read your reasoning behind it.
So the "safe choice" is either an uninformed opinion, or you're an idiot.
You're the idiot. I was talking about appearances. You cannot know in advance which is the safest choice, but McCain's panicky stunts tend to give him the impression of a loose cannon, which gives Obama the opportunity to assume the role of "safe choice" by staying calm and rational and staying away from anything too crazy. Which I think is a very effective strategy; everybody already knows he wants change, but they also want to know he's not some deranged loony.
I guarantee that 90% of the people who vote for Obama do so because that's what they're told to do by Colbert, Stewart, etc.
How exactly are you going to guarantee some crazy claim like that? And what do we get when you turn out to be wrong?
Slashdot Mirror
Historically, that _is_ conservative.
Right, but the meanings have changed. After all, we call the left "liberal" when historically they are nothing of the sort.
During the 19th century, classical liberals were most definitely on the left side of the political spectrum. In Europe at least. The migrated to the right side because conservatives died, social democrats took over the left side, and christian parties took over enough social ideas to end up somewhere between those two.
But in the end, the whole left-right thing doesn't work. Christian parties tend to be socially conservative, but economically progressive, liberal parties are economically conservative, but socially progressive, and other parties end up with yet other interesting mixes of ideas.
A two-dimensional Political compass would make a lot more sense.
Actually, the thing to look at would be the changes in the dollar to euro exchange rate. Which shows that over the past 3 months or so (and especially the past couple of weeks), the dollar has been climbing vs the euro.
And now, for further enlightenment, zoom out to five years.
It's good to see the dollar climbing out of the hole it fell into over the past couple of years, but it's nowhere near where it once was. I don't think it'll ever get there.
- "Democrats would have government invade your personal lives."
Well, at least when the Republicans do it, they're only doing it to terrorists.
No, they're doing it to anyone who might be a terrorist. Which is everybody.
The wealthy are important to the economy. The wealthy and the upper-Middle class business owners are the engine of American prosperity. How many poor people ever offered you a job?
How many rich people ever fixed your sink or baked your bread?
It's true that capital is important, but so is labour.
We've already bought more than $167 billion of Chinese goods than we have sold the Chinese. That is not an insignificant number, and that figure only takes into account the first 3/4ths of the year.
And most of that trade is funded by Chinese loans to the US. The current China-US relationship reminds me of the relationship the EU (and US?) have had with many developing countries: we lend them money that they can use to buy stuff from us. We get exports, they go into debt, and we end up owning their economy. China is now pulling that same trick with the US.
The US is really starting to resemble a third world country this way.
If China got pissed and cut off all exports to us... their economy would implode
Quite right. It's in China's interest to keep funding the US. But that doesn't mean the US can afford to keep getting deeper and deeper in debt. At some point, China may have to cut their losses and decide to export to someone with a more reliable economy, or China will simply end up owning quite a bit of the US. With the low stock values of today, there's lots of good deals to be head.
As an Australian I can only Marvel at America's national debt. You've all given up on the hope of ever paying it off, which is simply astounding.
The real problem comes when their moneylenders give up all hope of it ever getting paid off, because then the US can't lend any money anymore.
It's this type of stupid story that the media JUST LOVE to splatter about. They don't understand that they are CAUSING the mess. Guess what? NOTHING HAS CHANGED IN ICELAND. The farmer still grows his stuff. The geothermal energy is still coming from the ground. The snow is still white and cold. Nothing is different except the assumed value of a few sheets of paper.
The problem is that those sheets of paper are extremely important nowadays. If you have a mortgage, the ownership of your house is regulated by those sheets of paper. If something goes wrong, you suddenly find yourself without a home.
Lots of consumption and production is not local anymore. We import lots of stuff, and depend on exports to pay for it. And we need sheets of paper to figure out who gets what.
Without the global economy this crisis wouldn't have been nearly as big a problem, but we fucked up our global economy to the point that sheets of paper are more important than actual production.
But we produce everything we need to exist, food, housing, medicine.
The US doesn't produce all the oil it currently uses. Without the sheets of paper, most people won't be able to drive cars, and it's back to horse and carriage again.
So, again, I ask, what's the problem? If I'm hungry, can I get food? Yes.
Unless you don't have money to pay for it. Not everybody works on a farm.
If I need a place to stay, is there one? Yes.
Unless you just lost your home because you can't afford your mortgage anymore.
Buy local
Buying locally is a very good idea, but it's not how our global economy is organised at the moment.
Anyway, these are not bad times if you are smart and not stupid and buy into their stupid panic stories.
These are very good times if you are smart and have sufficient means to take advantage of the situation. Average Joe who can't afford his mortgage because his employer can't afford to pay him because the bank won't lend them any money, could be in serious trouble.
I'm not saying there's trouble for everybody (personally I'm not worried at all), but some people are in very real problems.
My father is a resident at an extended care facility. He cannot get dsl or broad band for any amount of money, and edge/3G based USB dongles don't seem to work reliably in his room. He has a MacBook and an iPhone. The iPhone seems to have better connectivity than the dongles.
That's odd. Dongles (or PCMCIA cards) should have exactly the same connectivity as the iPhone. Are they from the same provider or a different one? Not every provider has the same 3G coverage.
My biggest problem at the moment is actually GPS doesn't work half the time. UMTS not working might be explained by lack of coverage, but that excuse doesn't work for GPS: it covers every inch of this planet. So why does GPS fail me when I'm out of the city? That makes no sense.
He already bought $1500 of Apple hardware and has an AT&T contract (pays $30/mo for inet). I just can't understand why, having spent all that money, he can't take one small step and get satisfaction. I just kick myself for not getting the tethering app when it was available. This is a problem that just doesn't seem to have a solution, and it bothers me a lot.
There is a solution, although it might not be legal: jailbreak the iPhone and install a tethering application. And it's also supposed to be possible to install the tethering app by hand without jailbreaking, but I don't know how yet. (And I think that's still breach of contract.)
Does the modern environment - which is largely artificial - mean natural selection is over, or is the game going on, just under rather different rules?
Different rules, ofcourse. If rules (environment) stay the same long enough, it's possible that evolution seems to come to a halt, but that's simply because the population is as perfectly adapted to its environment as possible, and natural selection selects against any change from that perfect adaptation. (This is probably the case with sharks and crocodiles, who have existed virtually unchanged for millions of years.)
We have quite dramatically changed our own environment, however, and that means we'll probably evolving in a completely different direction than we did before we invented agriculture and computers and that sort of stuff).
I travel internationally fairly often, and I am far more concerned about having someone else pick up my laptop by mistake from the X-Ray machine (which almost happened about a year ago in Japan).
Those places are so crowded and confusing that I'm always amazed people don't lose half their stuff there.
You throw your wallet and other valuables in a plastic tray which is placed in plain sight in front of lots of strangers picking up similar trays while security people are busy looking at new arrivals and padding you down because you forgot to take off your belt. Despite the security it looks like a really easy place for theft.
It's hard to run away if the victim finds out in time, however.
The difference is, members of the regime are not subject to "enhanced" interrogation techniques. (I really do think that Congress dropped the ball on that one.)
If waterboarding is not torture, surely Bush and his people won't mind being subjected to that kind of interrogation, right?
Well I think capitalism is not the problem. The capitalists running it are.
But that's what you get with unregulated capitalism: capitalists running the system.
What surprised me a bit is that suddenly lots of people are pointing out that Karl Marx's analysis of capitalism was correct (though his ideas about government are still wrong). And not just in left-wing magazines, but in big capitalism-oriented newspapers. Apparently we're experiencing the end of Reagan/Thatcher-style neoliberal capitalism.
You have the logic backwards.
No, you have the logic of evolution backwards. I'll explain using your example:
In prehistoric times if someone was faulty, for example deaf[1], then they don't hear the bear coming and it eats them. If it gets them early enough, they don't reproduce.
These days, there aren't many bears around. Idiots in cars perhaps - but a lot less of a risk relatively speaking.
And that makes being deaf less faulty, in an evolutionary sense. From an evolutionary perspective, all that matters is whether you reproduce, and whether your kids reproduce. A deaf animal can be a smashing evolutionary success if it lives in an environment where sound is meaningless. Deafness is not a faulty mutation if it doesn't hurt your chances of reproduction.
Being very intelligent can be an evolutionary disadvantage if your intelligence makes you focus too much on other things than having sex and making babies. Being extremely intelligent can be a faulty mutation if it hurts your chances of reproduction.
"And that common ancestor was what, a donkey?"
Neither donkeys nor apes existed when humans and apes took divergent paths from the common human / ape ancestor,
Are you talking about parallel evolution of apes?
That's what it means if the common ancestor of chimps and gorillas (both apes) wasn't itself an ape.
Well yeah, the mechanism by which evolution has always worked is having lots of mutations; and ensuring that the 'faulty' mutations don't reproduce.
If they reproduce, they're not faulty. From an evolutionary point of view, at least.
But should Android or even a WinCE system get a few cool toys that apple explicitly forbids, that green light of envy will start to burn bright.
I'm not saying they don't exist, or that they are trivial; but please specify the types of "cool toys" that Apple explicitly forbid that aren't replacements for existing apps?
Tethering is explicitly forbidden by Apple. It's technically possible if you jailbreak it, but Apple bans apps that do it, and it's also explicitly forbidden in the contract, EULA or whatever.
You answered yourself with the second sentence; iPods and iPhones aren't targetted at geeks.
Who do you think the early adopters for iPods were? Geeks were definitely among them. At that time, no other mp3 player could hold so much music in such a small package. Now there are many alternatives ofcourse, and I definitely agree that the old full-size iPod is on its way out. People will either get an iPod Nano, or an iPod Touch or iPhone.
Speaking of the iPhone, again, the smallest general purpose computer with the largest screen, lots of applications availlable, etc. Again geeks are among the early adopters, and immediately jailbroke the thing in order to make use of its full potential.
I think you've been whooooooshed
PS. I'm not even American and I know that NPR is national public radio.
I didn't, and I still don't know what their bias is, but I do know Fox's bias, so that's where I assumed he was joking. (Although like I said, I once encountered someone who wasn't kidding about that.)
OK, I have a stupid question. How do you tell how much power a component is going to pull before you buy it?
I think Tom's Hardware has some articles on CPU power per Watt. Beyond that, check out Silent PC Review. They're goal may be silence, not energy, but wasted energy means extra heat, more fans and more noise, so they do give a lot of attention to energy efficiency.
I built a new system in July, Intel Core2Duo E8400, 2gb ram, ATI 3850, two hds (one's a raptor), and the box on idle pulls 81W.
I still think 81W is too much for doing nothing at all. Problem is, there are a lot of invisible energy wasters in a PC. I believe an E8200 idles around 3W and a HD3850 around 10W (I have them too), but memory and motherboard use a lot of power too, and each harddisk adds about 10W.
The most useless power wasters are graphics cards. I believe the 8800GT uses about 100W just to draw an empty desktop. Recent ATI cards are a lot better, but 10W is still a lot for drawing a desktop.
Well, at least I'm glad manufacturers are starting to pay attention to this.
Hate to agree with Anrego but it does sound like a lot of self serving Eco-nut preaching, without any basis in fact.
It's bad eco-nut preaching. I'm an eco-nut myself, and half the points in TFA made little sense to me. I've seen far better articles on how to save energy in computers.
I don't have any links with me, but here are a couple of easy points:
rule #1: get a good power supply. TFA is correct that some power supplies suck. TFA is not correct that it's hard to figure out how efficient PSUs are. 80+ rating is pretty common nowadays, and I believe they recently added some more granularity to that rating.
Furthermore, make sure the PSU fits the actual power demand. They're most efficient when they run at 50%, so using a 600W PSU for a PC that runs at 100-200W wastes more energy than using a 300W PSU for that PC.
And when you're talking about servers, how is it possible that virtualisation isn't getting mentioned? A virtual server uses exactly as much power as it needs, and is never idling. Surplus processing power is used by other virtual servers. With enough virtual servers, it becomes a lot easier to predict when more physical servers are needed to handle the load.
I have no control over the heating in my apartment. Thus, I have to have an air conditioner running 24/7/365
Running AC and heating at the same time seems like the most useless and wasteful waste of energy to me.
You can't help it ofcourse, and I wouldn't be surprised if you're not the only one in that situation. So instead of worrying about the energy used by idling servers, wouldn't it make more sense to simply fix the heating of badly designed buildings?
I heard they both pretty much did what was expected from them. Palin did well, but probably not good enough to matter. Biden demonstrated he knew what he was talking about without getting pedantic, and that he'd be an adequate choice as VP.
That's because you've been listening to liberal media like ABC and NPR.
I don't have access to ABC, and I've never even heard of NPR.
If you listened to an objective news source, like Access Hollywood or Fox, you'd realize how truly stunning Sarah's performance was.
Would you believe that I once heard someone name Fox as the only objective news source? And I fear that guy really meant it.
First, being black doesn't make a candidate a better choice.
It makes him the unconventional choice, which is why you wouldn't expect him to appear as the safe choice. Yet that's what we got.
Thirdly, he's the reason we're in this economic mess.
How the hell is Obama the reason behind the economic mess? That's truly the most impressive spin I've seen so far, and I'd love to read your reasoning behind it.
So the "safe choice" is either an uninformed opinion, or you're an idiot.
You're the idiot. I was talking about appearances. You cannot know in advance which is the safest choice, but McCain's panicky stunts tend to give him the impression of a loose cannon, which gives Obama the opportunity to assume the role of "safe choice" by staying calm and rational and staying away from anything too crazy. Which I think is a very effective strategy; everybody already knows he wants change, but they also want to know he's not some deranged loony.
I guarantee that 90% of the people who vote for Obama do so because that's what they're told to do by Colbert, Stewart, etc.
How exactly are you going to guarantee some crazy claim like that? And what do we get when you turn out to be wrong?