Actually, I was waiting for the usual "why don't they solve all their social problems and get running water to the starving peasants before doing all that good technical stuff" posts.
I disagree. I know many Republicans who wanted to vote for Tom McClintock (who was arguably the better republican candidate from an experience and knowledge point of view) but voted for Swartzenegger so as not to waste their votes. The masses voted for the movie star, the more educated conservatives had to just watch the polls and go with the flow against their batter judgement.
I fail to see why people are so in love with the notion of a coalition. You know, "a camel is a race horse designed by a committee". A ship has one captain, a corporation has one CEO, and a country should have one party in control. Otherwise you have endless bickering on useless issues like what size an ISO standard apple should be.
Apples and oranges. A corporation needs to be able to make quick snappy decisions. A ship's captain, big responsibility as it is, does not have the same responsibility as a government and hence the consequnces of him making a bad decision are smaller. The purpose of a legislature is to slow down the process of legislation and to make it as difficult as possible to make laws so that rash decisions are not made. Coalitions do a very good job of this because they prevent extremist views making their way into law.
Like I said elsewhere, if you're only interested in stable and strong government at the expense of all other concerns, install a dictatorship.
I'd rather have a stable presidential system than an unstable, ever-collapsing parliamentary one, like the UK or Israel.
The UK system is pretty stable actually. In general elections there it is effectively a two-party system. The Liberal Democrats are a long way off overtaking the Conservatives as the main opposition party, although with the collapse in conservatism in the UK, maybe they're not far off.
However, if it's stability you want, there's nothing more stable than a dictatorship. The purpose of parliamentary systems that use proportional representation and hence rely on coalitions (like in the Irish Republic) is that they are inherently unstable and the government has to watch its step. No sooner does a government put a foot wrong than they get turfed out. It's a check / balance on their power.
However too much instability can also be a bad thing, as the Italian experience shows. There is a happy medium.
Lower costs, along with the savings from downsizing regulatory bureaucracy, will fund tax credits for those who establish Health Savings Accounts for themselves, their families, Medicare/Medicaid recipients, and the needy
I see this a lot on your website, how downsizing regulatory bureaucracy will bring all these savings. There's just one problem. Cutting red tape and reducing bureaucracy is something that all governments attempt all the time as part of the day-to-day order of business. Do you not think that proclaiming this magic wand solution as the answer to all our problems only marks you out as another political wannabe?
Every aspiring and inexperienced politician has thought of that one at some stage. Just look at Arnie down here in Kali-foonya. Despite his promise to solve the state's fiscal problems by 'cutting bureaucracy,' we're still in a mess. The former Conservative leader William Hague thought he could topple Tony Blair in the last British general election with that promise, but the educated electorate knew better than to swallow that one.
Why? Just about every other democracy in the world has one. The beauty of multi-party systems is that is the biggest party gets less than an overall majority, they have to form a coalition. The reason this would be difficult to implement in the USA is that a lot of the power lies in the hands of the President who has to be elected directly, and electoral systems like Single Transferable Voting (aka Proportional Representation) don't lend themselves to elections where a single post is open. Preferential voting is probably the answer there, then there'll be no votes wasted.
Where I'm from, on the shores of Lough Neagh, there are a gazzilion flies out in the air every night. They look like columns of smoke, so thick is the sky with them. Well a long time ago, an enterprising farmer laid very fine fishing nets down on the fields by the Lough shore. The flies that died and landed on them were all gathered up and used as fertiliser. His fields that year yeilded 50% more hay than normal. So there you go.
one has to wonder whether airing such a controvercial movie on the eve of an election helps or hurts the political process by influencing the vote with last-minute emotions rather than thoroughly contemplation
Yet it's okay to have a steady stream of propaganda from Fox News and a gazzilion redneck-infested talk radio stations 24 hours a day all year round? Let Moore have his 2 hours of fame.
Well you can forget about actually electing any third party candidate until you change the electoral system. You could start by getting a measure on the ballot in some local or state election to change the electoral system to Single Transferable Voting (aka Proportional Representation) where votes for small parties or independants are not wasted. If it gets adopted and is a success then word of this wonderful system will spread, more places might adopt it, and politics in the US would possibly become a lot less polarised than it is.
Presidential elections will always be a problem though, STV is pretty much useless for elections where there is only one position up for grabs. Only really works for the likes of Parliamentary or Congressional & Senate elections. As long as you have a system where you have one leader elected by popular vote, you're gonna have problems getting that person to represent a good spread of people in the country.
I have been scouring books, articles, and random conversation for some intelligent and fair discussion about the state of politics today.
The book shelves are full of grown-up, intelligent, consise, unemotional, and objective political commentaries. I mean, look at books like "Treason," "Slander," "Lies and the lying liars who tell them," "Stupid White Men," "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot" etc. Get with the programme, dude!
Yeah. I'd rather have a chart from the country that brought us Britney Spears, such prolific artists as Vanilla Ice, and a legion of sentimental teenage dramas.
But is this the stuff that they're gonna play as the definitive chart on Top of the Pops? Or are they gonna stick with the Gallup chart?
And is the Network Chart still around? Apart from being used by independent radio stations that syndicated David Jenson's show, and ITV's excellent DJ-free Saturday morning "The Chart Show," it wasn't really regarded as 'the' chart like the one on TOTP was.
I think you'd be best off writing your own stuff. MySQL + PHP.
Did you miss this part?
"Anybody out there have a solution that doesn't require me to take a year off to hand-code a replacement solution?"
Re:Next up: The East Palo Alto chipset
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Where's Alviso?
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Oakland may get a bad press but I have friends there who I stay with sometimes. It's actually kinda cool, Lake Merrit's a nice place to go for a walk and is pretty close to downtown, and the place is full of artistic and bohemian people that spill over from Berkeley. Shame how downtown's almost as dead as San Jose though.
All you have to remember is to deliver enabling technologies to your human resources in order to facilitate the concurrent development of an upside-down, inside-out, flat organisation that harnesses the synergy of the valuable employees in their various capacities with a view to consolidating the company's empowerment in all areas of the marketing mix so that........
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Actually, I was waiting for the usual "why don't they solve all their social problems and get running water to the starving peasants before doing all that good technical stuff" posts.
I disagree. I know many Republicans who wanted to vote for Tom McClintock (who was arguably the better republican candidate from an experience and knowledge point of view) but voted for Swartzenegger so as not to waste their votes. The masses voted for the movie star, the more educated conservatives had to just watch the polls and go with the flow against their batter judgement.
Like I said elsewhere, if you're only interested in stable and strong government at the expense of all other concerns, install a dictatorship.
However, if it's stability you want, there's nothing more stable than a dictatorship. The purpose of parliamentary systems that use proportional representation and hence rely on coalitions (like in the Irish Republic) is that they are inherently unstable and the government has to watch its step. No sooner does a government put a foot wrong than they get turfed out. It's a check / balance on their power.
However too much instability can also be a bad thing, as the Italian experience shows. There is a happy medium.
Every aspiring and inexperienced politician has thought of that one at some stage. Just look at Arnie down here in Kali-foonya. Despite his promise to solve the state's fiscal problems by 'cutting bureaucracy,' we're still in a mess. The former Conservative leader William Hague thought he could topple Tony Blair in the last British general election with that promise, but the educated electorate knew better than to swallow that one.
What makes you think you'll be any different?
No sunnier than usual.
Where I'm from, on the shores of Lough Neagh, there are a gazzilion flies out in the air every night. They look like columns of smoke, so thick is the sky with them. Well a long time ago, an enterprising farmer laid very fine fishing nets down on the fields by the Lough shore. The flies that died and landed on them were all gathered up and used as fertiliser. His fields that year yeilded 50% more hay than normal. So there you go.
Ah. The elusive 'liberal media' again. I wish I could tune into it on mainstream TV or radio...
When you lose an election by a couple of hundred votes (like Al Gore supposedly did in 2000), every vote counts.
Presidential elections will always be a problem though, STV is pretty much useless for elections where there is only one position up for grabs. Only really works for the likes of Parliamentary or Congressional & Senate elections. As long as you have a system where you have one leader elected by popular vote, you're gonna have problems getting that person to represent a good spread of people in the country.
[ducks]
But is this the stuff that they're gonna play as the definitive chart on Top of the Pops? Or are they gonna stick with the Gallup chart? And is the Network Chart still around? Apart from being used by independent radio stations that syndicated David Jenson's show, and ITV's excellent DJ-free Saturday morning "The Chart Show," it wasn't really regarded as 'the' chart like the one on TOTP was.
Oakland may get a bad press but I have friends there who I stay with sometimes. It's actually kinda cool, Lake Merrit's a nice place to go for a walk and is pretty close to downtown, and the place is full of artistic and bohemian people that spill over from Berkeley. Shame how downtown's almost as dead as San Jose though.
S'funny, I always considered Mountain View and Palo Alto to be part of Silicon Valley, and they're both north of 237.
Come off Hwy 101 in Sunnyvale, take Hwy 237 East and head for Milpitas. I think.
H Bombs, anyone?
go into any bookies' and you'll find four windows for paying in, only one window for paying out.
All you have to remember is to deliver enabling technologies to your human resources in order to facilitate the concurrent development of an upside-down, inside-out, flat organisation that harnesses the synergy of the valuable employees in their various capacities with a view to consolidating the company's empowerment in all areas of the marketing mix so that ........