Looking at my attempted login entries in my logs for my home machine, I think it would give just about every human a reason to never visit Russia, eastern europe or China.
And what makes this really sad and petty is that if they can't come to an agreement, NO ONE will make money.
Honestly I won't pay money for any Star Control that isn't developed by Ford/Reiche, so I'm not really sure that this is a good use of Stardock's time or money. I do not know what they were thinking when they bought the rights, but if they had actually PLAYED star control 3, they'd realize this was damaged goods and that fans of star control 2 are probably very wary of any sequel. There are quite a few game titles in this category: Ultima, Wing Commander, SimCity, etc. The people who made them great have moved on, what remains is utter crap. If those people think they can put the band back together again, I might be inclined to take a risk, but failing that I'm ignoring it. Damaged goods are damaged goods, and EA/Activision/Stardock are purveyors are absolutely awful at everything they do.
Given the choice between working one employee twice as hard or hiring another employee, they will work the existing one twice as hard every time. Free work.
The right way to do this is to disperse the team, have the architects break down their idea into a bunch of pieces, create a spec, and have each on its own being mostly benign. Then they assemble them, file bug reports where the pieces don't match spec, and eventually end up with the final project done with no one the wiser.
They evidently have a core team who absolutely doesn't give a fuck about ethics, they just messed up because there was a turd in the punchbowl.
I don't like the logic of "Because a lot of people did this bad thing, I am going to do this bad thing to someone." The end result is awful.
The one catch that I can accept for ghosting is to ensure continuous health care coverage, and life insurance if you do not get it elsewhere. Most tech companies have a policy of walking you out on the day of your resignation if they have reasonable suspicion you are going to a competitor. Your paycheck and benefits may be terminated on that day.
I'm not sure that it really makes sense for otherwise healthy, young people, but it might be a reasonable concern for others. Generally it's really not hard to say "It's been a good run boss, but I'm done here.", and accept that you may get walked out that day, or your boss will expect you to work for 2 more weeks. Usually you get that 2 weeks, the boss needs it more than you do in most cases.
Don't be a douche. Reasonable people would want functional VR if it existed. It does not. What has been released is visually amazing, but not very functional.
You don't want what's out there right now. I get it. Now crawl back in your hole.
VR in movie format is something no one wants. Functional VR everyone wants, it is just very limited in authenticity due to the fact that we still exist in the physical world, and falling down the stairs breaks actual bones.
The space in between is unfortunately mostly limited to simulators and fixed shooters.
I'm in Texas and you're right, we don't want smarter, sexier, better California types moving in and fucking our ugly women in Texas. It's hard enough keeping them in the barn as is, and we're mostly all related.
You know, one thing that Texas has in abundance, that I wish I had growing up in California or New York, are pretty women. They are everywhere.
There's lots of bad here: the roads are grossly inadequate for the volume of traffic, there does not seem to exist the concept of city planning or traffic planning, shit just gets built wherever and the roads never really can grow large enough; The heat is crippling, a summer in Austin is equivalent to the deepest darkest winter in Antarctica, you just stay inside in the AC and hibernate until November arrives; good food selection is primarily limited to tex-mex and a limited few BBQ places; there are more pickup trucks than there is lumber to haul, most of them are far too nice to actually put to work, they're just for show or "to feel safe on the road"; and finally the redneck coalition is strong when you step foot outside of a city.
But one thing that is not a fair criticism of Texas or particularly Austin, is the number of pretty women. Anyone moving here from the sausage fest that is the bay area would be in for quite a treat.
I don't know where you actually live, but it isn't Austin.
Do you live here? Next to Apple's campus at Riata is Oracle, up the street is Flextronics. Cadence has a building in that general area, IBM has a few locations, Synopsys is down on Mopac near Intel, ARM is down the street from them (I think they're still there, they were moving to a larger building I thought a few years ago). AMD has a huge ass campus down south, along with Freescale. Dell is all up and down I-35. Those are just a few.
Texas made the choice of attracting out of state businesses with low taxes, at the expense of normalizing its politics with the rest of the US. It was a very profitable decision, particularly within Austin. It is unfortunate perhaps for some of the natives, that educated workers tend to lean left, in spite of making well above average salaries and having more to lose by wretched socialism. But yes, it will drive Texas back towards the center. Arizona is going to have the same problem in another ten years.
You're free to move to the south-east, they have firmly decided they want no money and would rather hold true to their values, although I would not include Florida in that, they are far too intertwined with the rest of the world to remain reliably conservative.
1) Don't assume running 15 miles and being in good health and good shape makes you safe, it makes you in a low risk group. I had a coworker who although 10 years older than me, biked 10 miles to and from work (real biking, up and down some nice Austin hills) and could kick my ass up and down the street without breaking a sweat. Had lunch with him one day, he was dead 2 days later from a heart attack. He had a chicken salad for lunch, in case you were wondering. He was a pretty healthy person, except apparently he had a bad ticker.
2) Heart attacks are scary because they're fairly asymptomatic from the victims perspective, at least until they get critical. But the list of early warning signs is long and unreliable. Any of them (like tingling fingers, "chest" pain) could be, and probably are, something else.
3) At least in my family heart attacks aren't sudden. In all cases the person who had one didn't feel well in the morning, and was in the hospital later that evening. While I am not sure it will be the case, if somehow the watch was able to quantify what the victim was feeling in a meaningful way, and direct him to a doctor, and a real ECG could confirm, that's great. Of course if a million people charge the ER demanding an ECG because of a false positive, we're going to have a deadly problem.
Until it gets used, who knows. It could be snake oil, it could be a life saver. We're going to find out I guess.
It's worse than that usually. The amount of encoding, transcoding, decoding, re-encoding, and every other horrifying thing you can think of between content producers and seeing it on your tv set makes one wonder how we can see any of it properly. But that's mostly a different problem, and the results vary wildly by broadcaster.
The motion smoothing on some TVs however bothers me so much that I get literally, physically ill and want to vomit. It is the first thing I turn off. But he should be careful about what he blames. Many encoding techniques rely on some degree of frame interpolation to do their job, but they're better at it since they actually have the source frames to work with and are making informed choices during encode to ensure decode looks good. TV motion compensation doesn't know anything, it is inventing something where nothing existed based upon, at best, an informed statistical model.
I would only charge my kids rent if they were lazy and unemployed. You don't stop being a parent just because your kid turns 18, and, unfortunately for many of us, you don't stop being a kid just because you turn 18. Some people need a bit more time and some encouragement.
But rich or poor, unless I was barely able to put food on the table while they were growing up, it seems as though my costs wouldn't have increased any to let them stay around until they chose to move out, or I approach retirement. Then they can take care of me. If THAT doesn't motivate them to move out, then there's no problem to solve.
MOVE the fuck out, struggle, live poor until you can make it, that's what the rest of us have done for modern history till now.
This is the single dumbest thing I've read in a while. IF you get along with your parents, AND they are offering/allowing a sweet deal, it makes significant financial sense to live with them until preconditions are violated. You can put a lot of money away like this. A lot of people have done this through history, and in some other countries this is the norm. I think this became common in the US about 80 years ago many more urban jobs were opening while rural jobs were in massive decline. But things have changed, I see kids living with their parents being much more common for a while.
And no, if you want to succeed and build salary and position, it is NOT going to be with the company you are at. Learn to job shop, keep your interview skills up....and be willing to MOVE to where the jobs are.
20 years ago, when I graduated from the university, companies would pay for my move. It was just assumed. I happened to work in a local job for a while that, at the time was an amazing deal . A few years later something better came along that offset not only what I was saving on rent, but then some, in a good area. So I moved, and had quite a lot saved up in the interim.
These days though, getting your future employer to cover your moving expenses is not obvious. Some simply will not, others require VP approval, and a few of the richest and most successful will cover a fraction, maybe enough to justify the cost.
The thing to remember is, by the time you move, they may no longer need you. I have seen several people caught in the space of 6 weeks, move across country and then find they had no job afterall. It is a risk to be wary of. 3 years ago I'd have said take the risk. Right now the market is tapering off and I think we'll be hitting a recession in 6 months, it's about the last moment to make this move if you can do it quickly.
I don't understand the sense of moral obligation we are placing on children to leave the nest. They will want to do so for personal reasons, but it isn't necessarily the smartest choice.
The market of people who use windows does not, apparently, include the market of people who might potentially develop for Windows and send the first market application software.
Growing up with someone who, is now recently deceased, who would have benefitted from this, I absolutely am adamantly opposed to 90% of the arguments i hear about "ethics". Most of them are disingenuous efforts by people who want to keep the technology under wraps, practiced only in secret back rooms available to the rich. Many more are religious fruitcakes and their ideas about their chosen gods will, he's not my god, I'm not interested in his opinion.
However, there are reasonable concerns about first, yes I have something that will cure say, cystic fibrosis, but it also may cause cancer @40, or a few dozen other very unpleasant side-effects. And while *I* may find it acceptable, will the life that I create agree with my decision 40 years hence. That's a valid concern, but I don't know of any way of resolving it, but by doing it, seeing the fallout and either refining it or removing it as a legal technique. We don't actually know what we don't know, and we shouldn't let us stop it.
Then there's a concern about what happens to our survivability if the entire population is running around with edits to their genes, and whether we can continue to live without it. Is it our heroin? It should be a concern. I am not sure it should stop us, but we should consider how we want to approach availability and legality of some of the more superficial edits (i.e. every man wants to be blond haired, blue eyed an wielding a 12" wang, the latter of which may actually be problematic to our long term survival, particularly if edits cause him to be infertile 75% of the time).
I advise you to slow down and relax a bit, particularly in your last year. 20 years later, I look back at this and wish I had taken more time. I had reasons, and perhaps you do too but take time and examine them. If one of them is a hot new job paying big bucks, think harder. Either that job will still be there next year, or, and this is important, you really didn't want it anyway. This is particularly troublesome in technology.
I didn't cheat, so I must be a savant. I got my MSEE in 4.5 years for less than $60k with scholarship.
I do not recommend a 24 credit courseload, I regret it now, the extra 1 year wouldn't have killed me and I've had enjoyed life more. But in 1999 the salaries for someone with my degree were unbelievable. In 2018, they are still very, very good if you are in the proper subfield (i.e. anything not exported to China, and/or anything that requires large amounts of skilled labor, such that even China/India cannot produce enough).
I'm not sure I agree with the theory that university is outmoded. I think the entire mantra when I was in HS was "get a degree in anything, and you'll be better off" is being shown to be completely false, which, if you had a brain, you probably realized back then. If you are not in a field where a high level of education is required, then it's not clear why you'd pay for one unless you simply have money to spend (and some do, care of trusts set up by relatives). Still, as long as I draw breath I'm going to encourage my kids to pursue education that support high paying careers, and if those aren't interesting or an option, pursue a reasonable trade to fall back on if their other ambition doesn't pan out (writing, art, whatever).
Trade education can make some sense, although there aren't and good schools that aren't an obvious rip-off, and the usual approach is to apprentice to some expert. Sometimes that is even written in to law in various regions. I discourage this only because that system is set up to be every bit as abusive as the usual student visa->PhD path.
Super majority would guarantee no laws are passed unless they were absolutely not controversial. I'm not sure anything that matters is not controversial.
I do like some of your idea though. A law is passed by majority, and all laws have a mandatory sunset period (2 years sounds good) then it gets voted on again, once again by simple majority. If it passes the second time, it gets a 6 year sunset period for revote (always thereafter). This can help us stop some of the knee-jerk stuff and remove political capital involved in revoking ancient laws that serve no purpose any longer.
I think having laws expire will take a lot of the wind out of the sails of corporate purchased laws like this one. Of course it does have the potential of weighing congress down into a perpetual cycle of renewal.
Hmm... If we all chip in, you think we could afford a politician that actually works for us for a change?
During the benighted campaign in which we finally found both a giant douche and a turd sandwich so foul that whoever won was certain to be the ruination of us all, I considered this. Why did we end up with two candidates who were provably not in the best interests of the general public, could we outbid their respective PACs to get a better agenda from one of the candidates?
I think the answer is probably no, not effectively. Even if we could raise the money, which is a complex topic itself, the idea that we could direct that money at a single politician whose agenda aligns well enough with ours is provably impossible: we can't even pick the best of two in a contest that doesn't eventually boil down to a coin toss. We have no consensus, and while on each issue alone we probably can pick the best choice with some degree of authority, when all the issues are boiled together and marketed, we fall on our faces.
Take all the major issues that political campaigns focus on and divide us. Then add in all the ACTUAL issues that we should be paying attention to instead. Hold a vote, let the general public decide what the best policy is on each of these issues. Then build a platform that encompasses these results, then purchase, not one, but as many politicians as it takes to make this platform viable. Determine the amount of money that will be required to purchase these politicians over their superPAC contributors (about $2bln, in 2016), and ask each person who voted to pay their fair share. What I think will happen is that the issues will so sharply divide and alienate voters that the surviving fraction of people who can swallow the resulting platform will have to pay a huge amount per person, possibly an impossible amount for your average earner. And that's just to outbid at 2016 levels, you bet your ass that these superPACs can afford a whole lot more, they simply don't need to. Then add on how many of them can offer politicians more personal value: insider information, retirement plans, nice dinners at expensive places, etc. It's too much.
Slashdot Mirror
Looking at my attempted login entries in my logs for my home machine, I think it would give just about every human a reason to never visit Russia, eastern europe or China.
And what makes this really sad and petty is that if they can't come to an agreement, NO ONE will make money.
Honestly I won't pay money for any Star Control that isn't developed by Ford/Reiche, so I'm not really sure that this is a good use of Stardock's time or money. I do not know what they were thinking when they bought the rights, but if they had actually PLAYED star control 3, they'd realize this was damaged goods and that fans of star control 2 are probably very wary of any sequel. There are quite a few game titles in this category: Ultima, Wing Commander, SimCity, etc. The people who made them great have moved on, what remains is utter crap. If those people think they can put the band back together again, I might be inclined to take a risk, but failing that I'm ignoring it. Damaged goods are damaged goods, and EA/Activision/Stardock are purveyors are absolutely awful at everything they do.
Given the choice between working one employee twice as hard or hiring another employee, they will work the existing one twice as hard every time. Free work.
The right way to do this is to disperse the team, have the architects break down their idea into a bunch of pieces, create a spec, and have each on its own being mostly benign. Then they assemble them, file bug reports where the pieces don't match spec, and eventually end up with the final project done with no one the wiser.
They evidently have a core team who absolutely doesn't give a fuck about ethics, they just messed up because there was a turd in the punchbowl.
Money, uh, finds a way.
Nobody but you and beauhd cares about religious bullshit.
ftfy. 0 fucks given.
The exit interview is the best part!
I don't like the logic of "Because a lot of people did this bad thing, I am going to do this bad thing to someone." The end result is awful.
The one catch that I can accept for ghosting is to ensure continuous health care coverage, and life insurance if you do not get it elsewhere. Most tech companies have a policy of walking you out on the day of your resignation if they have reasonable suspicion you are going to a competitor. Your paycheck and benefits may be terminated on that day.
I'm not sure that it really makes sense for otherwise healthy, young people, but it might be a reasonable concern for others. Generally it's really not hard to say "It's been a good run boss, but I'm done here.", and accept that you may get walked out that day, or your boss will expect you to work for 2 more weeks. Usually you get that 2 weeks, the boss needs it more than you do in most cases.
Don't be a douche. Reasonable people would want functional VR if it existed. It does not. What has been released is visually amazing, but not very functional.
You don't want what's out there right now. I get it. Now crawl back in your hole.
VR in movie format is something no one wants. Functional VR everyone wants, it is just very limited in authenticity due to the fact that we still exist in the physical world, and falling down the stairs breaks actual bones.
The space in between is unfortunately mostly limited to simulators and fixed shooters.
I'm in Texas and you're right, we don't want smarter, sexier, better California types moving in and fucking our ugly women in Texas. It's hard enough keeping them in the barn as is, and we're mostly all related.
You know, one thing that Texas has in abundance, that I wish I had growing up in California or New York, are pretty women. They are everywhere.
There's lots of bad here: the roads are grossly inadequate for the volume of traffic, there does not seem to exist the concept of city planning or traffic planning, shit just gets built wherever and the roads never really can grow large enough; The heat is crippling, a summer in Austin is equivalent to the deepest darkest winter in Antarctica, you just stay inside in the AC and hibernate until November arrives; good food selection is primarily limited to tex-mex and a limited few BBQ places; there are more pickup trucks than there is lumber to haul, most of them are far too nice to actually put to work, they're just for show or "to feel safe on the road"; and finally the redneck coalition is strong when you step foot outside of a city.
But one thing that is not a fair criticism of Texas or particularly Austin, is the number of pretty women. Anyone moving here from the sausage fest that is the bay area would be in for quite a treat.
I don't know where you actually live, but it isn't Austin.
Do you live here? Next to Apple's campus at Riata is Oracle, up the street is Flextronics. Cadence has a building in that general area, IBM has a few locations, Synopsys is down on Mopac near Intel, ARM is down the street from them (I think they're still there, they were moving to a larger building I thought a few years ago). AMD has a huge ass campus down south, along with Freescale. Dell is all up and down I-35. Those are just a few.
Texas made the choice of attracting out of state businesses with low taxes, at the expense of normalizing its politics with the rest of the US. It was a very profitable decision, particularly within Austin. It is unfortunate perhaps for some of the natives, that educated workers tend to lean left, in spite of making well above average salaries and having more to lose by wretched socialism. But yes, it will drive Texas back towards the center. Arizona is going to have the same problem in another ten years.
You're free to move to the south-east, they have firmly decided they want no money and would rather hold true to their values, although I would not include Florida in that, they are far too intertwined with the rest of the world to remain reliably conservative.
I was in my home and in bed by 9. My apps are disappoint.
1) Don't assume running 15 miles and being in good health and good shape makes you safe, it makes you in a low risk group. I had a coworker who although 10 years older than me, biked 10 miles to and from work (real biking, up and down some nice Austin hills) and could kick my ass up and down the street without breaking a sweat. Had lunch with him one day, he was dead 2 days later from a heart attack. He had a chicken salad for lunch, in case you were wondering. He was a pretty healthy person, except apparently he had a bad ticker.
2) Heart attacks are scary because they're fairly asymptomatic from the victims perspective, at least until they get critical. But the list of early warning signs is long and unreliable. Any of them (like tingling fingers, "chest" pain) could be, and probably are, something else.
3) At least in my family heart attacks aren't sudden. In all cases the person who had one didn't feel well in the morning, and was in the hospital later that evening. While I am not sure it will be the case, if somehow the watch was able to quantify what the victim was feeling in a meaningful way, and direct him to a doctor, and a real ECG could confirm, that's great. Of course if a million people charge the ER demanding an ECG because of a false positive, we're going to have a deadly problem.
Until it gets used, who knows. It could be snake oil, it could be a life saver. We're going to find out I guess.
It's worse than that usually. The amount of encoding, transcoding, decoding, re-encoding, and every other horrifying thing you can think of between content producers and seeing it on your tv set makes one wonder how we can see any of it properly. But that's mostly a different problem, and the results vary wildly by broadcaster.
The motion smoothing on some TVs however bothers me so much that I get literally, physically ill and want to vomit. It is the first thing I turn off. But he should be careful about what he blames. Many encoding techniques rely on some degree of frame interpolation to do their job, but they're better at it since they actually have the source frames to work with and are making informed choices during encode to ensure decode looks good. TV motion compensation doesn't know anything, it is inventing something where nothing existed based upon, at best, an informed statistical model.
I would only charge my kids rent if they were lazy and unemployed. You don't stop being a parent just because your kid turns 18, and, unfortunately for many of us, you don't stop being a kid just because you turn 18. Some people need a bit more time and some encouragement.
But rich or poor, unless I was barely able to put food on the table while they were growing up, it seems as though my costs wouldn't have increased any to let them stay around until they chose to move out, or I approach retirement. Then they can take care of me. If THAT doesn't motivate them to move out, then there's no problem to solve.
MOVE the fuck out, struggle, live poor until you can make it, that's what the rest of us have done for modern history till now.
This is the single dumbest thing I've read in a while. IF you get along with your parents, AND they are offering/allowing a sweet deal, it makes significant financial sense to live with them until preconditions are violated. You can put a lot of money away like this. A lot of people have done this through history, and in some other countries this is the norm. I think this became common in the US about 80 years ago many more urban jobs were opening while rural jobs were in massive decline. But things have changed, I see kids living with their parents being much more common for a while.
And no, if you want to succeed and build salary and position, it is NOT going to be with the company you are at. Learn to job shop, keep your interview skills up....and be willing to MOVE to where the jobs are.
20 years ago, when I graduated from the university, companies would pay for my move. It was just assumed. I happened to work in a local job for a while that, at the time was an amazing deal . A few years later something better came along that offset not only what I was saving on rent, but then some, in a good area. So I moved, and had quite a lot saved up in the interim.
These days though, getting your future employer to cover your moving expenses is not obvious. Some simply will not, others require VP approval, and a few of the richest and most successful will cover a fraction, maybe enough to justify the cost.
The thing to remember is, by the time you move, they may no longer need you. I have seen several people caught in the space of 6 weeks, move across country and then find they had no job afterall. It is a risk to be wary of. 3 years ago I'd have said take the risk. Right now the market is tapering off and I think we'll be hitting a recession in 6 months, it's about the last moment to make this move if you can do it quickly.
I don't understand the sense of moral obligation we are placing on children to leave the nest. They will want to do so for personal reasons, but it isn't necessarily the smartest choice.
The market of people who use windows does not, apparently, include the market of people who might potentially develop for Windows and send the first market application software.
Fair enough. He's not going to do that either.
Growing up with someone who, is now recently deceased, who would have benefitted from this, I absolutely am adamantly opposed to 90% of the arguments i hear about "ethics". Most of them are disingenuous efforts by people who want to keep the technology under wraps, practiced only in secret back rooms available to the rich. Many more are religious fruitcakes and their ideas about their chosen gods will, he's not my god, I'm not interested in his opinion.
However, there are reasonable concerns about first, yes I have something that will cure say, cystic fibrosis, but it also may cause cancer @40, or a few dozen other very unpleasant side-effects. And while *I* may find it acceptable, will the life that I create agree with my decision 40 years hence. That's a valid concern, but I don't know of any way of resolving it, but by doing it, seeing the fallout and either refining it or removing it as a legal technique. We don't actually know what we don't know, and we shouldn't let us stop it.
Then there's a concern about what happens to our survivability if the entire population is running around with edits to their genes, and whether we can continue to live without it. Is it our heroin? It should be a concern. I am not sure it should stop us, but we should consider how we want to approach availability and legality of some of the more superficial edits (i.e. every man wants to be blond haired, blue eyed an wielding a 12" wang, the latter of which may actually be problematic to our long term survival, particularly if edits cause him to be infertile 75% of the time).
I advise you to slow down and relax a bit, particularly in your last year. 20 years later, I look back at this and wish I had taken more time. I had reasons, and perhaps you do too but take time and examine them. If one of them is a hot new job paying big bucks, think harder. Either that job will still be there next year, or, and this is important, you really didn't want it anyway. This is particularly troublesome in technology.
I didn't cheat, so I must be a savant. I got my MSEE in 4.5 years for less than $60k with scholarship.
I do not recommend a 24 credit courseload, I regret it now, the extra 1 year wouldn't have killed me and I've had enjoyed life more. But in 1999 the salaries for someone with my degree were unbelievable. In 2018, they are still very, very good if you are in the proper subfield (i.e. anything not exported to China, and/or anything that requires large amounts of skilled labor, such that even China/India cannot produce enough).
I'm not sure I agree with the theory that university is outmoded. I think the entire mantra when I was in HS was "get a degree in anything, and you'll be better off" is being shown to be completely false, which, if you had a brain, you probably realized back then. If you are not in a field where a high level of education is required, then it's not clear why you'd pay for one unless you simply have money to spend (and some do, care of trusts set up by relatives). Still, as long as I draw breath I'm going to encourage my kids to pursue education that support high paying careers, and if those aren't interesting or an option, pursue a reasonable trade to fall back on if their other ambition doesn't pan out (writing, art, whatever).
Trade education can make some sense, although there aren't and good schools that aren't an obvious rip-off, and the usual approach is to apprentice to some expert. Sometimes that is even written in to law in various regions. I discourage this only because that system is set up to be every bit as abusive as the usual student visa->PhD path.
Super majority would guarantee no laws are passed unless they were absolutely not controversial. I'm not sure anything that matters is not controversial.
I do like some of your idea though. A law is passed by majority, and all laws have a mandatory sunset period (2 years sounds good) then it gets voted on again, once again by simple majority. If it passes the second time, it gets a 6 year sunset period for revote (always thereafter). This can help us stop some of the knee-jerk stuff and remove political capital involved in revoking ancient laws that serve no purpose any longer.
I think having laws expire will take a lot of the wind out of the sails of corporate purchased laws like this one. Of course it does have the potential of weighing congress down into a perpetual cycle of renewal.
Hmm... If we all chip in, you think we could afford a politician that actually works for us for a change?
During the benighted campaign in which we finally found both a giant douche and a turd sandwich so foul that whoever won was certain to be the ruination of us all, I considered this. Why did we end up with two candidates who were provably not in the best interests of the general public, could we outbid their respective PACs to get a better agenda from one of the candidates?
I think the answer is probably no, not effectively. Even if we could raise the money, which is a complex topic itself, the idea that we could direct that money at a single politician whose agenda aligns well enough with ours is provably impossible: we can't even pick the best of two in a contest that doesn't eventually boil down to a coin toss. We have no consensus, and while on each issue alone we probably can pick the best choice with some degree of authority, when all the issues are boiled together and marketed, we fall on our faces.
Take all the major issues that political campaigns focus on and divide us. Then add in all the ACTUAL issues that we should be paying attention to instead. Hold a vote, let the general public decide what the best policy is on each of these issues. Then build a platform that encompasses these results, then purchase, not one, but as many politicians as it takes to make this platform viable. Determine the amount of money that will be required to purchase these politicians over their superPAC contributors (about $2bln, in 2016), and ask each person who voted to pay their fair share. What I think will happen is that the issues will so sharply divide and alienate voters that the surviving fraction of people who can swallow the resulting platform will have to pay a huge amount per person, possibly an impossible amount for your average earner. And that's just to outbid at 2016 levels, you bet your ass that these superPACs can afford a whole lot more, they simply don't need to. Then add on how many of them can offer politicians more personal value: insider information, retirement plans, nice dinners at expensive places, etc. It's too much.
I will buy it just as soon as I get around to CBS all access.