I did vote on an electronic machine in Ohio, and I didn't see any paper trail. Elsewhere, I read something that suggested that they print the paper trail at the end of the night. Since the printed paper trail is never reviewed by the voter, this is essentially worthless IMO.
I don't have any personal knowledge of how Diebold's machines work, so I'm not going to make any claims. I will point out that the Las Vegas Gaming Commission was asked to review the various election machines under consideration in Las Vegas and rejected the Diebold machines for security reasons. These were serious professionals skilled in detecting ways to compromise machines and without an ideological ax to grind.
Personally, I have serious issues with any election method that does not admit the possibility of a human readable ballot that can be recounted in the case of a mistake. In other words, as far as I'm concerned, if there isn't a paper ballot involved, I am unsatisfied with that method.
All that said, shouldn't we be waiting until *after* the audit to argue? Personally, I think that auditing the machines is a *good* thing. I just wouldn't hold out high hopes that it will say anything that Kerry supporters want to hear.
I suspect that the Kerry/Edwards campaign will wait until after the audit as well. They have until December 13th to protest the vote results. If the audit confirms the original results, that will be a good time for Kerry to renew his call for reconciliation and unity.
"I thought I read Bush got 51 percent of the popular vote."
He did. Are you confusing the vote with his approval rating? It seems that more people voted for Bush than approve of the way that he has handled the country. An interesting result. Of course, the same polls indicated that those people weren't going to vote for Bush. This suggests that the polls may have simply been wrong.
Larry King of CNN gave the example of a Florida candidate for Governor who conceded but won. Al Gore conceded in 2000 but contested the election afterwards. You aren't going to find much more legal precedent than that.
The concession has no formal meaning. It's just Kerry saying that Bush has more votes. At best it suggests that Kerry does not plan to legally contest the election results. However, it doesn't even guarantee that (see Gore's behavior in 2000). If, for example, I found out that my precinct didn't show any votes for Kerry, I could inform the Kerry campaign and they could contest the Ohio vote based on the fact that my vote for Kerry was not getting counted.
The only way it makes a difference is in how it suggests that he will be acting in the future. Last night, his campaign was suggesting that if the Ohio ballots were closer (they were hoping for a 50,000 vote margin), they would vigorously contest the election results in Ohio and demand recounts to try to get the margin down further. Conceding suggests that he is not going to do this.
"The one thing this nation needs is another drawn out court battle to decide the presidency."
There won't be one. The Supreme Court made it clear last time that they will hold to the deadlines. Any court battle would have to be decided prior to December 10th, IIRC.
"I'd prefer to rally for the abolishment of the IRS, all income taxes, and the institution of FairTax."
I really thought that Kerry missed a trick here. He could have easily argued for a flat tax, a conservative favorite, on the idea that it would *raise* taxes on the rich.
Prior to Bush, there actually was a system that effectively gave a flat tax rate. High income people had to pay the Alternative Minimum Tax of 28%. In other words, even if deductions would decrease their effective tax rate below 28%, they still had to pay 28% of income. Thus, those in the 28% and higher tax brackets usually paid 28% (unless they had an incompetent accountant).
The really neat thing is that 28% was also the marginal rate that those in the 15% tax rate pay if you include social security and medicare:
(.15 +.0765 +.0765) / 1.0765 =.28
Note that this includes the employer contribution as income. The reason for this is that from the employer's perspective, it is part of the employee's compensation in the same way that health care benefits, etc. are. In any case, Kerry could have run on a flat tax rate of 28%, eliminated the social security and medicare taxes, increased the income exemptions (to lower taxes on the middle class), and *still* increased taxes on the "rich." All while instituting the conservative "Flat Tax." Bush would have been stuck arguing that the "rich" really should pay half the tax rate that the middle class does.
"What I'm saying is, he's planning to spend less than Kerry."
Yes, but Kerry would have spent less than he wanted. He would have had a Republican Congress opposing him. By contrast, Bush has a supportive Republican Congress. Bush will be able to increase spending far more than Kerry would have been able.
"Liberals (for whatever reason) that come from conservative environments concentrate in certain areas which has the effect of deluting their representation based on the electoral college system."
Yet, the electoral college system was the one that came *closest* to allowing Kerry (the liberal, at least by US standards) to win. If 200,000 liberals had moved from Texas to Ohio, then Kerry wins the election. Liberals would have been better off *more* concentrated not less. It was the conservatives who were concentrated, frequently giving Bush double digit leads in many of the states he won: that's why he won the popular vote.
"Those unoccopied states still get a minimum of 3 electors, which gives a small state voter more power than a large state dweller."
That would explain why Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida got such attention. Oh...wait. Those are the 6th, 5th, and 4th biggest states? What happened, I thought that they weren't important? Actually, the thing is that without the bias towards smaller states, there would be an even larger bias towards larger states. Where would you rather campaign: Wyoming, with miles between households; or New York City, with multiple families per building? I strongly suspect that all the 3 electoral vote states *together* have a smaller population than that single urban area (particularly if you count suburban commuters). Heck, you might be able to throw in the 4 electoral vote states against the greater NYC area.
Despite the cries of small state bias, it was still the large states that everyone watched. Bush won two (Florida, Ohio) out of the three battleground states (Kerry won Pennsylvania) and won the election.
"If the election were decided by congressional district, the party in power in each state legislature would simply draw the districts to favor their own party."
This would make absolutely no difference, since they *already* do that to win House seats. Adding the Presidential election to this would not have much effect otherwise. However, that's not to say that that modification of the electoral college makes sense either. It would tend to give the same result as the House/Senate elections. If we were going to do that, why not save the trouble of a national election and replace the position of President with a Prime Minister appointed by simple majority vote of the combined Congress. It would save a lot of work.
It's also worth noting that Bush almost certainly won this as well. Kerry actually had his best chance with the Electoral College. In fact, if you changed the Ohio vote by 200,000 votes and left everything else the same, Kerry would have won the electoral college vote (and the election) while losing the popular vote.
"they did claim that Wyoming had 56 electoral votes."
"This is a good indication why Wiki is so terribly flawed. Too many people have agendas that they push."
I find it somewhat unlikely that marking Wyoming as having 56 electoral votes was an agenda. It sounds more like a copying error. If you would rather pay Brittanica to do the error checking for you, feel free.
Btw, it is quite possible to change it in the HTML. Just click File > Save As; save it as something; open the file with Notepad or any text editor; find the 56 and change it to a 3; save; maybe rename the file (sometimes autosaves as.txt; just change back to.html if it does); double click the file and it should open in your browser; print normally. Takes longer to write out than to do. For that matter, there is probably a way to do it in Wiki; it's a collaborative project after all.
"why doesn't a business owner start non-smoking restaurants and bars?"
Your boss smokes and offers to have lunch with you. You don't smoke and normally only go to non-smoking establishments. What do you do? Substitute potential girlfriend for boss. Substitute friend for boss. Remember that both the boss and potential girlfriend have other candidates they can ask (some of whom may smoke).
Non-smokers will sometimes go to a smoking restaurant. Smokers can't go to a non-smoking restaurant. Expand out to friends and do the math. Establishments can not generally afford to give up on that many customers.
Bars also don't ban smoking because they can sell smokes (good profit) and because smokers drink more when they can smoke at the same time.
"the smoke getting injected into the smoker's lungs"...through a filter usually. It's also worth noting that the non-smoker may be a non-smoker because they *can't* smoke. For example, if they are asthmatic.
As a final point, by that argument, we should completely ignore smokestack emissions. By the time anyone breathes them, they are far more diffuse than second hand smoke from multiple cigarettes in an enclosed space (like a restaurant or bar).
"Do you realy think that they spent a cent for this?"
Cigarette companies would love to have a non-smoking nicotine delivery mechanism if they could keep the price similar to that of an actual cigarette. Remember, they are in the nicotine delivery business, not the smoking business.
Note that Microsoft has a module for interacting with Unix networks so that people can use their MS Windows box on a network with all unix servers.
Microsoft doesn't invest in Linux and tobacco companies do not invest in the patch because they remove their respective markets. If their business models still worked, they would just adopt the other technology.
While I would generally agree on your "More opposite?" points (what the heck, here's another: both claim to be able to fix the health care system by eliminating "waste"), I would point out that Kerry is far more likely to get international support for his foreign policy than will Bush. Even if their plans are otherwise identical, it is more likely that Kerry will be able to successfully carry them out. Particularly regarding terrorism, since Bush's policy in Iraq has made him recruitment poster material for Muslim terrorists.
Finally, the number one reason to vote for Kerry in my mind: Kerry will have a Republican Congress that will restrain him; Bush would have a Republican Congress that will amplify him. Which would you prefer?
Note: in the following discussion, I use the word "you" frequently. I am not trying to single you out here. This is a general criticism of people who feel complacent because nothing seemed wrong. In reading it, it comes off harsher than I mean it. I just couldn't find a softer way that still made my point sufficiently.
How would you know? Did you go in and examine the electrons in the memory core to make sure your vote was stored correctly? Did you have access to the previous results to make sure that your vote updated them appropriately? Did it tell you in what precinct you were voting? Would you have been able to tell if it was wrong (i.e. do you know in what precinct you were supposed to be voting)?
If you voted electronically without a human readable paper ballot (as I did), there is no way to know if your vote was counted properly or not. You are merely assuming that there was no confusion or fraud because none was obvious to you. Of course, in 2000, thousands of Floridians thought they voted for Gore when they actually voted for Buchanan. They didn't think any confusion or fraud occurred...not until later. On the bright side, if any confusion or fraud occurred, you will probably never know. Electronic voting results are not reviewable. This will save a lot of arguments later, as there will not be any proof of election fraud. Even if the fraud existed. Convenient that.
Of course, the election monitors wouldn't have been able to determine this anyway. Electronic voting without an audit trail is worrisome exactly because potential vote fraud is invisible to the observer.
Voted in Ohio without challenge, since you asked. There was some confusion in regards to the voter in front of me. He was given a voter slip without making him sign the voter book. The election monitors could have caught that, but there is no evidence that any fraud would have occurred. They just would have been a signature short if they hadn't caught it.
"Somehow we British manage to keep buying and selling stuff on the world market without having a dominant currency"
And so will we (Americans), when we stop having the dominant currency. That's beside the point. The issue is that the short term balance (currently a consistent trade deficit) will change (to a trade surplus) and the effect that change will have.
"The US trade deficit/surplus is defined by the value of your imports vs the value of your exports"
You are missing the point, as many do. The trade deficit is matched by a currency exchange *surplus*. If the dollar stops being the dominant currency, then there will no longer be a reason for people to stockpile dollars. If people are no longer interested in stockpiling dollars, we won't be able to trade dollars for goods. We would then have to switch to other currencies if we wanted to buy stuff. However, what can we use to get the other currencies? Goods. Services. Just like everyone else. Further, people would still have stockpiles of dollars. What would they do with them? Buy American goods or services.
The net effect would be a currency exchange deficit (we would receive more dollars than we send out, and probably more of other currencies as well), which would have to be matched by a trade *surplus*. The surplus would need to continue until the foreign stockpiles of dollars were matched by American stockpiles of other currencies. At that time, trade and currency exchange would move to a rough balance (with swings either way; that's the whole purpose).
"which currency those imports/exports are traded in has absolutely zero impact."
WRONG. Completely, totally wrong. The US gains great advantages from trading in dollars. Foremost, the US doesn't have to worry about exchange rate swings. Since we trade in our own currency, we do not need to fear that the exchange rate will change in between the time of agreement and the time of payment. We can allocate X dollars and be sure that we will only pay X dollars.
If trades were denominated in euros, then we would have to worry about the possibility that the dollar would fall against the euro. We would either have to make the currency exchange immediately and be unable to use the currency in the meantime or face the possibility that the rate would be different by the time we made the trade. By the nature of percentages, the danger of raises is worse that the benefit of falls (.9 of.9 is.81; 1.1 of 1.1 is 1.21; average is 1.01 because the gain of.19 from the falls was less than the loss of.21 from the raises). Further, it is possible that the higher price might prevent one from doing something that was otherwise planned. It would be hard to arrange equivalent contingencies to take advantage of a fall. Corporations normally handle this by buying currency options, which reduce the net profit of the transaction (while shielding from risk).
The other issue is that the US can print dollars. We cannot print euros. Thus, if the country is short of dollars as a whole, we can easily print a few more dollars. If the country is short of euros, printing dollars is useless: it will just cause the dollar to fall against the euro. We would have to exchange more goods for euros, which will reduce our effective domestic production (production - exports + imports).
"You are currently the most indebted country in the world,"
This is a side effect of the trade deficit. Essentially, we are trading currency for goods (imports). What can people do with the currency? They can either send it back to us for goods (exports), loan it to us (in the form of stock or bond purchases generally), or sit on it and do nothing. Simple math shows that the amount that people loan to us or sit on is imports minus exports (the trade deficit). Because of this, our interest rates are very close to being *negative* in real (inflation adjusted) terms. I.e. we are very close to be
"Its funny at the time liberals complained that Bush didn't go in and finish off Saddam because of the atrocities he had committed in the past and would commit in the future but now I hear them saying that it was the right thing to do."
I remember that as well. However, I can rest easy in that I thought that it was the right thing to do then and I still think it was the right thing to have done now.
"You are probably right that Congress will block anything big that either of these guys try to do."
Bush could potentially push something through. He just doesn't want to do so. Kerry wants to do so but will likely be unable to do so.
http://www.johnkerry.com/issues/health_care/heal th _care.html is the page describing Kerry's plan for any who are interested. I would suggest reading that rather than news articles derived from press releases.
Incidentally, I'm voting for Kerry tomorrow. Presenting me with more info on his plans could only have a negative effect at this point.
"Many people who voted for Nader in 2000 got a hard lesson in why choosing the lesser of two evils is important."
Outside of Florida, it didn't matter. It wouldn't have mattered in Florida if the ballots had been designed properly. It may not have mattered even so (it's hard to say exactly how the Florida voters would have broken; nationally, Nader voters went about equally for each side).
I actually know a couple who voted for Nader last election but who are voting for Bush tomorrow. Many of those who wanted to vote for Nader but preferred Gore over Bush voted for Gore. That's why Nader's support dropped from 5-6% in polls to 2.74% in the election. Most of the polling data suggesting Nader voters preferred Gore to Bush came from the pre-election polling, which included people who ended up voting for Gore anyway.
And will never be implemented either. I completely ignore health care rhetoric, as neither side has any interest in actual solutions. If they did, Clinton would have implemented it in '93 when he had a unified government. In '92, people were talking about the harm that the pre-existing condition clauses cause. Twelve years later, people are still talking about the same clauses. Unless Kerry stops talking about government health care and starts talking about improving the existing system, I am going to assume that nothing will happen (the Republican Congress will block government health care; Kerry doesn't seem interested in doing anything else).
>> a democrat controlled congress (it could happen next election in 2006)
(Responding to your parent here to save posts): This is ridiculous. There have seldom been mid-term elections that did not lean *away* from the incumbent. If Bush is reelected, the Congress might go Democrat in 2006. However, if Kerry is elected, the Congress will almost certainly become *more* Republican in 2006 (as it did in '98 and '94). One of the reasons why I am voting for Kerry tomorrow is that I expect it to result in a more Republican Congress (although the overriding one relates to my belief that his foreign policy initiatives will be more effective than Bush's and that he is less likely to get us involved in another war).
Btw, Kerry isn't Clinton. While Kerry's announced positions for this election may be relatively moderate (by American standards; right wing by world standards), he was a relatively liberal senator.
"If we're not careful managing the world opinion of our country, the oil market could change from using the dollar to using the euro."
Which Saddam was trying to do... The France/Iraq oil agreements were denominated in euros.
It's also worth noting that the oil market switching from dollars to euros would tend to push other markets from dollars to euros. If that happened, we would lose our trade deficit (the trade deficit is based on our ability to buy foreign goods with dollars because we have the de facto world currency; if we stop having the de facto world currency, then there is no reason for people to accept dollars for their goods). Further, we might have to run a trade surplus, since people would tend to want to switch their old dollars for the new world currency.
Some might argue that it would be good to run a surplus: jobs all around! What they are missing is that the goods we could trade are not the ones in industries where people are out of work. Further, we would have less goods to distribute, so our wages would fall (causing additional layoffs in service industries like retail).
I think what most people are missing that if a Justice really expected to retire in the near future, that Justice could retire now and be guaranteed of getting replaced by Bush. By not doing so, the Justices are either hoping to be replaced by Kerry (if liberal or moderate) or saying that they don't really want to retire within the next four years (conservatives).
If Kerry is elected, he will probably replace a couple of the liberals and moderates with left-leaning moderates (the Republican Senate can block liberals). He will only replace a conservative if one dies.
I would describe Zogby as accuracy leaning. He has a strong tendency to be closer to the final result than other pollsters. In 1996, this meant that he had the most Republican of the polls, as most of the error was in the Democrats favor.
Zogby is just very good at interpreting the poll results. He adjusts for such things as undecideds tending to vote for the challenger (about 2 to 1) and Republican voters not being home to answer the phone where others do not. His polling also seems to be more professional than that of other pollsters (more consistent, with fewer jumps and less bias).
Zogby himself seems to be a democrat, but that doesn't seem to have impacted the accuracy of his polls.
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I did vote on an electronic machine in Ohio, and I didn't see any paper trail. Elsewhere, I read something that suggested that they print the paper trail at the end of the night. Since the printed paper trail is never reviewed by the voter, this is essentially worthless IMO.
I don't have any personal knowledge of how Diebold's machines work, so I'm not going to make any claims. I will point out that the Las Vegas Gaming Commission was asked to review the various election machines under consideration in Las Vegas and rejected the Diebold machines for security reasons. These were serious professionals skilled in detecting ways to compromise machines and without an ideological ax to grind.
Personally, I have serious issues with any election method that does not admit the possibility of a human readable ballot that can be recounted in the case of a mistake. In other words, as far as I'm concerned, if there isn't a paper ballot involved, I am unsatisfied with that method.
All that said, shouldn't we be waiting until *after* the audit to argue? Personally, I think that auditing the machines is a *good* thing. I just wouldn't hold out high hopes that it will say anything that Kerry supporters want to hear.
I suspect that the Kerry/Edwards campaign will wait until after the audit as well. They have until December 13th to protest the vote results. If the audit confirms the original results, that will be a good time for Kerry to renew his call for reconciliation and unity.
"I thought I read Bush got 51 percent of the popular vote."
He did. Are you confusing the vote with his approval rating? It seems that more people voted for Bush than approve of the way that he has handled the country. An interesting result. Of course, the same polls indicated that those people weren't going to vote for Bush. This suggests that the polls may have simply been wrong.
Or the vote was.
Larry King of CNN gave the example of a Florida candidate for Governor who conceded but won. Al Gore conceded in 2000 but contested the election afterwards. You aren't going to find much more legal precedent than that.
The concession has no formal meaning. It's just Kerry saying that Bush has more votes. At best it suggests that Kerry does not plan to legally contest the election results. However, it doesn't even guarantee that (see Gore's behavior in 2000). If, for example, I found out that my precinct didn't show any votes for Kerry, I could inform the Kerry campaign and they could contest the Ohio vote based on the fact that my vote for Kerry was not getting counted.
The only way it makes a difference is in how it suggests that he will be acting in the future. Last night, his campaign was suggesting that if the Ohio ballots were closer (they were hoping for a 50,000 vote margin), they would vigorously contest the election results in Ohio and demand recounts to try to get the margin down further. Conceding suggests that he is not going to do this.
"The one thing this nation needs is another drawn out court battle to decide the presidency."
There won't be one. The Supreme Court made it clear last time that they will hold to the deadlines. Any court battle would have to be decided prior to December 10th, IIRC.
"I'd prefer to rally for the abolishment of the IRS, all income taxes, and the institution of FairTax."
.0765 + .0765) / 1.0765 = .28
I really thought that Kerry missed a trick here. He could have easily argued for a flat tax, a conservative favorite, on the idea that it would *raise* taxes on the rich.
Prior to Bush, there actually was a system that effectively gave a flat tax rate. High income people had to pay the Alternative Minimum Tax of 28%. In other words, even if deductions would decrease their effective tax rate below 28%, they still had to pay 28% of income. Thus, those in the 28% and higher tax brackets usually paid 28% (unless they had an incompetent accountant).
The really neat thing is that 28% was also the marginal rate that those in the 15% tax rate pay if you include social security and medicare:
(.15 +
Note that this includes the employer contribution as income. The reason for this is that from the employer's perspective, it is part of the employee's compensation in the same way that health care benefits, etc. are. In any case, Kerry could have run on a flat tax rate of 28%, eliminated the social security and medicare taxes, increased the income exemptions (to lower taxes on the middle class), and *still* increased taxes on the "rich." All while instituting the conservative "Flat Tax." Bush would have been stuck arguing that the "rich" really should pay half the tax rate that the middle class does.
"What I'm saying is, he's planning to spend less than Kerry."
Yes, but Kerry would have spent less than he wanted. He would have had a Republican Congress opposing him. By contrast, Bush has a supportive Republican Congress. Bush will be able to increase spending far more than Kerry would have been able.
"Liberals (for whatever reason) that come from conservative environments concentrate in certain areas which has the effect of deluting their representation based on the electoral college system."
Yet, the electoral college system was the one that came *closest* to allowing Kerry (the liberal, at least by US standards) to win. If 200,000 liberals had moved from Texas to Ohio, then Kerry wins the election. Liberals would have been better off *more* concentrated not less. It was the conservatives who were concentrated, frequently giving Bush double digit leads in many of the states he won: that's why he won the popular vote.
"Those unoccopied states still get a minimum of 3 electors, which gives a small state voter more power than a large state dweller."
That would explain why Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida got such attention. Oh...wait. Those are the 6th, 5th, and 4th biggest states? What happened, I thought that they weren't important? Actually, the thing is that without the bias towards smaller states, there would be an even larger bias towards larger states. Where would you rather campaign: Wyoming, with miles between households; or New York City, with multiple families per building? I strongly suspect that all the 3 electoral vote states *together* have a smaller population than that single urban area (particularly if you count suburban commuters). Heck, you might be able to throw in the 4 electoral vote states against the greater NYC area.
Despite the cries of small state bias, it was still the large states that everyone watched. Bush won two (Florida, Ohio) out of the three battleground states (Kerry won Pennsylvania) and won the election.
"If the election were decided by congressional district, the party in power in each state legislature would simply draw the districts to favor their own party."
This would make absolutely no difference, since they *already* do that to win House seats. Adding the Presidential election to this would not have much effect otherwise. However, that's not to say that that modification of the electoral college makes sense either. It would tend to give the same result as the House/Senate elections. If we were going to do that, why not save the trouble of a national election and replace the position of President with a Prime Minister appointed by simple majority vote of the combined Congress. It would save a lot of work.
It's also worth noting that Bush almost certainly won this as well. Kerry actually had his best chance with the Electoral College. In fact, if you changed the Ohio vote by 200,000 votes and left everything else the same, Kerry would have won the electoral college vote (and the election) while losing the popular vote.
"they did claim that Wyoming had 56 electoral votes."
.txt; just change back to .html if it does); double click the file and it should open in your browser; print normally. Takes longer to write out than to do. For that matter, there is probably a way to do it in Wiki; it's a collaborative project after all.
"This is a good indication why Wiki is so terribly flawed. Too many people have agendas that they push."
I find it somewhat unlikely that marking Wyoming as having 56 electoral votes was an agenda. It sounds more like a copying error. If you would rather pay Brittanica to do the error checking for you, feel free.
Btw, it is quite possible to change it in the HTML. Just click File > Save As; save it as something; open the file with Notepad or any text editor; find the 56 and change it to a 3; save; maybe rename the file (sometimes autosaves as
"why doesn't a business owner start non-smoking restaurants and bars?"
Your boss smokes and offers to have lunch with you. You don't smoke and normally only go to non-smoking establishments. What do you do? Substitute potential girlfriend for boss. Substitute friend for boss. Remember that both the boss and potential girlfriend have other candidates they can ask (some of whom may smoke).
Non-smokers will sometimes go to a smoking restaurant. Smokers can't go to a non-smoking restaurant. Expand out to friends and do the math. Establishments can not generally afford to give up on that many customers.
Bars also don't ban smoking because they can sell smokes (good profit) and because smokers drink more when they can smoke at the same time.
"the smoke getting injected into the smoker's lungs" ...through a filter usually. It's also worth noting that the non-smoker may be a non-smoker because they *can't* smoke. For example, if they are asthmatic.
As a final point, by that argument, we should completely ignore smokestack emissions. By the time anyone breathes them, they are far more diffuse than second hand smoke from multiple cigarettes in an enclosed space (like a restaurant or bar).
"Do you realy think that they spent a cent for this?"
Cigarette companies would love to have a non-smoking nicotine delivery mechanism if they could keep the price similar to that of an actual cigarette. Remember, they are in the nicotine delivery business, not the smoking business.
Note that Microsoft has a module for interacting with Unix networks so that people can use their MS Windows box on a network with all unix servers.
Microsoft doesn't invest in Linux and tobacco companies do not invest in the patch because they remove their respective markets. If their business models still worked, they would just adopt the other technology.
While I would generally agree on your "More opposite?" points (what the heck, here's another: both claim to be able to fix the health care system by eliminating "waste"), I would point out that Kerry is far more likely to get international support for his foreign policy than will Bush. Even if their plans are otherwise identical, it is more likely that Kerry will be able to successfully carry them out. Particularly regarding terrorism, since Bush's policy in Iraq has made him recruitment poster material for Muslim terrorists.
Finally, the number one reason to vote for Kerry in my mind: Kerry will have a Republican Congress that will restrain him; Bush would have a Republican Congress that will amplify him. Which would you prefer?
"No confusion and/or "fraud" that happened."
Note: in the following discussion, I use the word "you" frequently. I am not trying to single you out here. This is a general criticism of people who feel complacent because nothing seemed wrong. In reading it, it comes off harsher than I mean it. I just couldn't find a softer way that still made my point sufficiently.
How would you know? Did you go in and examine the electrons in the memory core to make sure your vote was stored correctly? Did you have access to the previous results to make sure that your vote updated them appropriately? Did it tell you in what precinct you were voting? Would you have been able to tell if it was wrong (i.e. do you know in what precinct you were supposed to be voting)?
If you voted electronically without a human readable paper ballot (as I did), there is no way to know if your vote was counted properly or not. You are merely assuming that there was no confusion or fraud because none was obvious to you. Of course, in 2000, thousands of Floridians thought they voted for Gore when they actually voted for Buchanan. They didn't think any confusion or fraud occurred...not until later. On the bright side, if any confusion or fraud occurred, you will probably never know. Electronic voting results are not reviewable. This will save a lot of arguments later, as there will not be any proof of election fraud. Even if the fraud existed. Convenient that.
Of course, the election monitors wouldn't have been able to determine this anyway. Electronic voting without an audit trail is worrisome exactly because potential vote fraud is invisible to the observer.
Voted in Ohio without challenge, since you asked. There was some confusion in regards to the voter in front of me. He was given a voter slip without making him sign the voter book. The election monitors could have caught that, but there is no evidence that any fraud would have occurred. They just would have been a signature short if they hadn't caught it.
"Somehow we British manage to keep buying and selling stuff on the world market without having a dominant currency"
.9 is .81; 1.1 of 1.1 is 1.21; average is 1.01 because the gain of .19 from the falls was less than the loss of .21 from the raises). Further, it is possible that the higher price might prevent one from doing something that was otherwise planned. It would be hard to arrange equivalent contingencies to take advantage of a fall. Corporations normally handle this by buying currency options, which reduce the net profit of the transaction (while shielding from risk).
And so will we (Americans), when we stop having the dominant currency. That's beside the point. The issue is that the short term balance (currently a consistent trade deficit) will change (to a trade surplus) and the effect that change will have.
"The US trade deficit/surplus is defined by the value of your imports vs the value of your exports"
You are missing the point, as many do. The trade deficit is matched by a currency exchange *surplus*. If the dollar stops being the dominant currency, then there will no longer be a reason for people to stockpile dollars. If people are no longer interested in stockpiling dollars, we won't be able to trade dollars for goods. We would then have to switch to other currencies if we wanted to buy stuff. However, what can we use to get the other currencies? Goods. Services. Just like everyone else. Further, people would still have stockpiles of dollars. What would they do with them? Buy American goods or services.
The net effect would be a currency exchange deficit (we would receive more dollars than we send out, and probably more of other currencies as well), which would have to be matched by a trade *surplus*. The surplus would need to continue until the foreign stockpiles of dollars were matched by American stockpiles of other currencies. At that time, trade and currency exchange would move to a rough balance (with swings either way; that's the whole purpose).
"which currency those imports/exports are traded in has absolutely zero impact."
WRONG. Completely, totally wrong. The US gains great advantages from trading in dollars. Foremost, the US doesn't have to worry about exchange rate swings. Since we trade in our own currency, we do not need to fear that the exchange rate will change in between the time of agreement and the time of payment. We can allocate X dollars and be sure that we will only pay X dollars.
If trades were denominated in euros, then we would have to worry about the possibility that the dollar would fall against the euro. We would either have to make the currency exchange immediately and be unable to use the currency in the meantime or face the possibility that the rate would be different by the time we made the trade. By the nature of percentages, the danger of raises is worse that the benefit of falls (.9 of
The other issue is that the US can print dollars. We cannot print euros. Thus, if the country is short of dollars as a whole, we can easily print a few more dollars. If the country is short of euros, printing dollars is useless: it will just cause the dollar to fall against the euro. We would have to exchange more goods for euros, which will reduce our effective domestic production (production - exports + imports).
"You are currently the most indebted country in the world,"
This is a side effect of the trade deficit. Essentially, we are trading currency for goods (imports). What can people do with the currency? They can either send it back to us for goods (exports), loan it to us (in the form of stock or bond purchases generally), or sit on it and do nothing. Simple math shows that the amount that people loan to us or sit on is imports minus exports (the trade deficit). Because of this, our interest rates are very close to being *negative* in real (inflation adjusted) terms. I.e. we are very close to be
"Its funny at the time liberals complained that Bush didn't go in and finish off Saddam because of the atrocities he had committed in the past and would commit in the future but now I hear them saying that it was the right thing to do."
I remember that as well. However, I can rest easy in that I thought that it was the right thing to do then and I still think it was the right thing to have done now.
Of course, I'm not a liberal.
"You are probably right that Congress will block anything big that either of these guys try to do."
l th _care.html is the page describing Kerry's plan for any who are interested. I would suggest reading that rather than news articles derived from press releases.
Bush could potentially push something through. He just doesn't want to do so. Kerry wants to do so but will likely be unable to do so.
http://www.johnkerry.com/issues/health_care/hea
Incidentally, I'm voting for Kerry tomorrow. Presenting me with more info on his plans could only have a negative effect at this point.
"I'll be voting them back out of office in 2008 with even more enthusiasm than I voted them in."
Amen, brother. Amen.
"Many people who voted for Nader in 2000 got a hard lesson in why choosing the lesser of two evils is important."
Outside of Florida, it didn't matter. It wouldn't have mattered in Florida if the ballots had been designed properly. It may not have mattered even so (it's hard to say exactly how the Florida voters would have broken; nationally, Nader voters went about equally for each side).
I actually know a couple who voted for Nader last election but who are voting for Bush tomorrow. Many of those who wanted to vote for Nader but preferred Gore over Bush voted for Gore. That's why Nader's support dropped from 5-6% in polls to 2.74% in the election. Most of the polling data suggesting Nader voters preferred Gore to Bush came from the pre-election polling, which included people who ended up voting for Gore anyway.
"The morons there claim that Wyoming has 56 electoral votes."
g e#History says 3 to me, boss. What page are you reading?
It looks like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Electoral_Colle
> Kerry's health plan is the to right of Nixon's.
And will never be implemented either. I completely ignore health care rhetoric, as neither side has any interest in actual solutions. If they did, Clinton would have implemented it in '93 when he had a unified government. In '92, people were talking about the harm that the pre-existing condition clauses cause. Twelve years later, people are still talking about the same clauses. Unless Kerry stops talking about government health care and starts talking about improving the existing system, I am going to assume that nothing will happen (the Republican Congress will block government health care; Kerry doesn't seem interested in doing anything else).
>> a democrat controlled congress (it could happen next election in 2006)
(Responding to your parent here to save posts): This is ridiculous. There have seldom been mid-term elections that did not lean *away* from the incumbent. If Bush is reelected, the Congress might go Democrat in 2006. However, if Kerry is elected, the Congress will almost certainly become *more* Republican in 2006 (as it did in '98 and '94). One of the reasons why I am voting for Kerry tomorrow is that I expect it to result in a more Republican Congress (although the overriding one relates to my belief that his foreign policy initiatives will be more effective than Bush's and that he is less likely to get us involved in another war).
Btw, Kerry isn't Clinton. While Kerry's announced positions for this election may be relatively moderate (by American standards; right wing by world standards), he was a relatively liberal senator.
"If we're not careful managing the world opinion of our country, the oil market could change from using the dollar to using the euro."
Which Saddam was trying to do... The France/Iraq oil agreements were denominated in euros.
It's also worth noting that the oil market switching from dollars to euros would tend to push other markets from dollars to euros. If that happened, we would lose our trade deficit (the trade deficit is based on our ability to buy foreign goods with dollars because we have the de facto world currency; if we stop having the de facto world currency, then there is no reason for people to accept dollars for their goods). Further, we might have to run a trade surplus, since people would tend to want to switch their old dollars for the new world currency.
Some might argue that it would be good to run a surplus: jobs all around! What they are missing is that the goods we could trade are not the ones in industries where people are out of work. Further, we would have less goods to distribute, so our wages would fall (causing additional layoffs in service industries like retail).
I think what most people are missing that if a Justice really expected to retire in the near future, that Justice could retire now and be guaranteed of getting replaced by Bush. By not doing so, the Justices are either hoping to be replaced by Kerry (if liberal or moderate) or saying that they don't really want to retire within the next four years (conservatives).
If Kerry is elected, he will probably replace a couple of the liberals and moderates with left-leaning moderates (the Republican Senate can block liberals). He will only replace a conservative if one dies.
"Zogby (who some think is democrat-leaning)"
I would describe Zogby as accuracy leaning. He has a strong tendency to be closer to the final result than other pollsters. In 1996, this meant that he had the most Republican of the polls, as most of the error was in the Democrats favor.
Zogby is just very good at interpreting the poll results. He adjusts for such things as undecideds tending to vote for the challenger (about 2 to 1) and Republican voters not being home to answer the phone where others do not. His polling also seems to be more professional than that of other pollsters (more consistent, with fewer jumps and less bias).
Zogby himself seems to be a democrat, but that doesn't seem to have impacted the accuracy of his polls.