Why aren't ALL states voting at the same time, like in the national election?
Because it would be a disaster.
A national primary guarantees that no candidate without either immense personal wealth or huge corporate backing could ever become the nominee. Since a national primary would consist entirely of fund raisers, tv studio interviews, commercials, and airport tarmac photo ops only those candidates backed by big bucks could compete and only those people handing out the cash would ever meet the candidates. Like them personally or not, the current system does allow a shoe string Huckabee outfit and nearly bankrupt McCain campaign a chance to emerge. A national primary would bring us umpteen variations on Romney versus Bloomberg.
Obviously you don't know what happens to broadcast TV stations who show nudity or say one of the seven dirty words.
Yes, they get fined. If it happens during one of the periodic morality frenzies it could be a substantial fine announced with great publicity to demonstrate to the public just how tough the FCC can be. No one ever loses their license.
Hell, even Fox News has been clamoring for an increase in standards for broadcast television!
Oh, are they done defending Christmas from the heathens now?
Might I recommend highly the Newshour with Jim Lehrer to all readers?
The Newshour is decent only relative to competition. True, they are willing to devote 15 or 20 minutes to a topic and don't yell over each other. However, they rarely ask tough questions and never force tough answers. Politicians know it is a safe place to spin.
If you look at the composition of guests on the Newshour your realize they are as bad as anyone else, just better behaved. The "experts" tend to be from the usual corporate funded think tanks. If anything, being in DC, it is worst than most shows in booking the standard power elite stooges. You can count on one hand the number of guests who might actually rock the boat or say something outside the Washington defined limits of the topic.
If your complaint is that our TV coverage is opinionated, then I've got news for you: it's always been that way. Newspapers have long held biases.
The difference is that newspapers are doing it with their presses, not my air waves. We let tv stations make billions every year because they are in part suppose to promote the public good. They used to held to a standard where they would be audited for such things every three years. Now they literally send in a license renewal by postcard once every 8 years and no one ever loses their license.
I understand. But in this case effective disenfranchisement of a subset of a group is being spun to sound as if it were legal disenfranchisement of the whole group and that was just not the case.
On the other side of the equation, if the argument is that 100% of a group must have no barriers to voting in order to be certified as legally enfranchised then no group in the US meets that criterion. We still experience systematic efforts to prevent voting today with various perpetrators targeting specific groups.
You're right, but black people did lose the vote again after the Civil War and only got it back less than 50 years ago.
No, they didn't. There were various schemes like the Poll Tax, which was outlawed by the 24th Amendment in 1964, but they were used mostly in the southern states and while primarily aimed at blacks were also written so they encompassed poor whites and virtually all immigrants. In general measures like these threw up roadblocks to voting but could not explicitly disenfranchise any group due to the 15th Amendment.
Trying to play the historical blame game based on political party is a fool's game. Parties aren't stagnant. The Democratic and Republican parties of the 60s and 70s, for instance, have effectively nothing to do with the present day alignments
Very few of you remember that a good portion of what used to be the Democratic party moved to the Republicans during the Reagan years. Prior to the 80s the South was entirely (very conservative) Democrats. They subsequently turned Republican. The people didn't change, they just changed parties.
Similarly, much of the liberal end of the Republican party moved to the Dems when the social conservatives took over their party. As has been noted many times, it is debatable whether Barry Goldwater would be a Republican today. Certainly the Rockefeller and so-called Eastern Establishment end of the party went Democratic in droves.
Viewing history based on a party label is preposterous. Look at the mindsets, personality types and philosophies involved in historical events for more meaningful analysis. They are the things that endure time, not party affiliation.
Privacy is up to end users and they are free to secure their own traffic by wrapping it in real crypto.
Sadly, Either the crypto has to be built into the product, in which case the gov will either outlaw it or demand back doors, or you are faced with the same situation that secure email has always been in i.e. for every person willing to encrypt there are a thousand who don't understand it, don't care, or just too lazy.
That might make care more affordable, but, at the cost of lowering the level of care attainable.
And it doesn't matter how great the care is if you can't afford it.
when people still often paid out of their own pockets for most of their medical needs...day to day stuff....medicine wasn't the bankrupter it is now.
It is not the day to day stuff that (generally) bankrupts people, it is the chronic illness or heart surgery or liver transplant. That bankrupts people with insurance. It is utterly out of reach for anyone without it.
On some level I respect your position but it is just unworkable. Health care costs are a complex issue. As a practical matter the market in and of itself cannot (certainly in any organized and timely way) bring order to insurance companies, big phama, the AMA, nurses, unions, trial lawyers, the medical instrument industry, hospitals, etc. Only government has the power to do that - and even that is probably a long shot given the political realities at the moment.
They (FBI) only recently, post 9/11, have a national security branch that has a primary directive of counter terrorism.
That statement plays quite loose with language. The FBI has a very spotty history starting with its origins in cracking down on anarchists in the 1920s. The term terrorism may not have been thrown about in every press release and the FBI may not have had a dedicated anti-terrorism mission but it has been in this line of work for a very long time. Substitute the word "dissident" for terrorist and you recognize this is true.
The FBI is like any other law enforcement agency, no better or worse, and attracts both good and bad people. It is a coin toss whether at any moment they are compiling files on Al Qaeda or your anti-war grandmother.
But by allowing gambling in certain protected areas, we are engaging in protectionism of the gambling industry from foreign competition.
There is a very important distinction to be made here: both gaming companies and gambling enterprises constitute the industry. The enterprises (largely state governments, casino corps, etc.) clearly benefit from the status quo and do not want competition. The gaming companies however would likely do quite well from selling their wares to a proliferation of new customers.
Other than Massachusetts, all state lotteries, for example, are contracted out to gaming companies like GTech and Scientific Games. Those companies have largely steered clear of the online gaming industry for fear of royally pissing off their existing customer base of state governments. However, one would not be surprised if they secretly hope the WTO thing goes through since they suddenly have an entirely new gambling universe to move into. They have the money and expertise to have a very good shot at picking up a huge percentage of the offshore companies action.
So does Fox News, just with a level of indirection. You think many of their corporate advertisers aren't sucking the public tit dry? That the farm bill doesn't subsidize ADM, or the perverse medicare prescription policy isn't a handout to Big Pharma, etc.?
The interstate highway system was sold, in part, to Congress and the public as an aspect of national defense, necessary for moving troops and material. That may be the ticket for high speed internet access as well. Or, as pretty much anything else these days, label it as necessary to combat terrorism. High speed networks have at least as much claim to Homeland Security funding as Petting Zoos and Peanut Museums.
I hope this isn't too painfully stupid or off point: how does one open a bank? I don't think that is a title in the Dummies series yet and I have been periodically curious about it. How realistic is it for a small group of people or a community to start a bank or credit union?
>> So please tell me how people today have more spending power.
Credit cards, mostly. Many people have no sense of how reliant upon them that they are nor the world of pain that will be theirs if the prime rate ever spikes up to 10% or they lose employment for six months.
Most people looking down their noses at people embroiled in the mortgage debacle have read their card agreements about as closely as the average sub-primer read the documents at their closings.
Except that nothing in economics is really so cut and dried, right?
The gold analogy sounds good as far as it goes. But precious metals are used for various manufacturing purposes in addition to being a value store. Sitting on a natural resource can be viewed as a perfectly good investment e.g. buying marginal oil properties on the cheap and waiting until price the of oil goes up enough to make it worthwhile to extract.
Stock purchases don't always produce much in the way of societal economic gains despite their common status as investments. Buying shares in a tech company that went public 10 years ago and still isn't producing a dividend is just sitting on a piece of paper waiting for it to gain value. Not terribly different from gold. The company got the money when they issued the stock but subsequent price fluctuations have only incidental bearing on the company (e.g. its valuation helps it borrow money) until it either buys some stock back or reissues more. The vast flow of "investment" money in and out of stock on any given day has only indirect and usually small consequences on the company, jobs, etc.
And bank savings, as someone noted, don't disappear into a black hole. The bank needs to get the interest it pays from somewhere so they invest the money and pocket the difference between what they make and what they pay.
Arguably the best investment an American could have made in the last six years is to buy some other currency. They would have made over 50% by buying Euros, a better return than the average 401k has gotten.
My point is that it is an incredibly complicated world. Really smart and experienced people lose lots of money all the time. Maybe we should be a little less judgmental about people who make very safe investments like bank accounts or CDs. It's entirely possible that is the most rational investment for them.
Think about it, all other things being equal, as we get smarter, more efficient with our production of goods prices should go down.
The "all other things being equal" portion is not insignificant. The production efficiencies can be easily be dwarfed when the production is overseas and the value of the consuming currency is dropping like a stone.
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And this is different from what we have now in what ways....
Orders of magnitude. No Jimmy Carter, no Paul Tsongas, no Pat Buchanan, no Ron Paul, no Jesse Jackson, no Gary Hart, no Joe Biden, etc.
I mean seriously, on the news you never really hear them talk about where the candidate stands on issues....only how much money each one has raised.
Agreed but it hasn't much to do with this topic since it would be exactly the same with a national primary.
Why aren't ALL states voting at the same time, like in the national election?
Because it would be a disaster.
A national primary guarantees that no candidate without either immense personal wealth or huge corporate backing could ever become the nominee. Since a national primary would consist entirely of fund raisers, tv studio interviews, commercials, and airport tarmac photo ops only those candidates backed by big bucks could compete and only those people handing out the cash would ever meet the candidates. Like them personally or not, the current system does allow a shoe string Huckabee outfit and nearly bankrupt McCain campaign a chance to emerge. A national primary would bring us umpteen variations on Romney versus Bloomberg.
Obviously you don't know what happens to broadcast TV stations who show nudity or say one of the seven dirty words.
Yes, they get fined. If it happens during one of the periodic morality frenzies it could be a substantial fine announced with great publicity to demonstrate to the public just how tough the FCC can be. No one ever loses their license.
Hell, even Fox News has been clamoring for an increase in standards for broadcast television!
Oh, are they done defending Christmas from the heathens now?
Might I recommend highly the Newshour with Jim Lehrer to all readers?
The Newshour is decent only relative to competition. True, they are willing to devote 15 or 20 minutes to a topic and don't yell over each other. However, they rarely ask tough questions and never force tough answers. Politicians know it is a safe place to spin.
If you look at the composition of guests on the Newshour your realize they are as bad as anyone else, just better behaved. The "experts" tend to be from the usual corporate funded think tanks. If anything, being in DC, it is worst than most shows in booking the standard power elite stooges. You can count on one hand the number of guests who might actually rock the boat or say something outside the Washington defined limits of the topic.
If your complaint is that our TV coverage is opinionated, then I've got news for you: it's always been that way. Newspapers have long held biases.
The difference is that newspapers are doing it with their presses, not my air waves. We let tv stations make billions every year because they are in part suppose to promote the public good. They used to held to a standard where they would be audited for such things every three years. Now they literally send in a license renewal by postcard once every 8 years and no one ever loses their license.
I understand. But in this case effective disenfranchisement of a subset of a group is being spun to sound as if it were legal disenfranchisement of the whole group and that was just not the case.
On the other side of the equation, if the argument is that 100% of a group must have no barriers to voting in order to be certified as legally enfranchised then no group in the US meets that criterion. We still experience systematic efforts to prevent voting today with various perpetrators targeting specific groups.
You're right, but black people did lose the vote again after the Civil War and only got it back less than 50 years ago.
No, they didn't. There were various schemes like the Poll Tax, which was outlawed by the 24th Amendment in 1964, but they were used mostly in the southern states and while primarily aimed at blacks were also written so they encompassed poor whites and virtually all immigrants. In general measures like these threw up roadblocks to voting but could not explicitly disenfranchise any group due to the 15th Amendment.
Consider that blacks only got the vote in USA in the last 50 years.
You might want to take a refresher course in US History and stimulate those neurons between the Civil War and Civil Rights.
The inclusion of Gun Control in this matrix is as peculiar as the absence of trade and labor issues.
Trying to play the historical blame game based on political party is a fool's game. Parties aren't stagnant. The Democratic and Republican parties of the 60s and 70s, for instance, have effectively nothing to do with the present day alignments
Very few of you remember that a good portion of what used to be the Democratic party moved to the Republicans during the Reagan years. Prior to the 80s the South was entirely (very conservative) Democrats. They subsequently turned Republican. The people didn't change, they just changed parties.
Similarly, much of the liberal end of the Republican party moved to the Dems when the social conservatives took over their party. As has been noted many times, it is debatable whether Barry Goldwater would be a Republican today. Certainly the Rockefeller and so-called Eastern Establishment end of the party went Democratic in droves.
Viewing history based on a party label is preposterous. Look at the mindsets, personality types and philosophies involved in historical events for more meaningful analysis. They are the things that endure time, not party affiliation.
Privacy is up to end users and they are free to secure their own traffic by wrapping it in real crypto.
Sadly, Either the crypto has to be built into the product, in which case the gov will either outlaw it or demand back doors, or you are faced with the same situation that secure email has always been in i.e. for every person willing to encrypt there are a thousand who don't understand it, don't care, or just too lazy.
That might make care more affordable, but, at the cost of lowering the level of care attainable.
And it doesn't matter how great the care is if you can't afford it.
when people still often paid out of their own pockets for most of their medical needs...day to day stuff....medicine wasn't the bankrupter it is now.
It is not the day to day stuff that (generally) bankrupts people, it is the chronic illness or heart surgery or liver transplant. That bankrupts people with insurance. It is utterly out of reach for anyone without it.
On some level I respect your position but it is just unworkable. Health care costs are a complex issue. As a practical matter the market in and of itself cannot (certainly in any organized and timely way) bring order to insurance companies, big phama, the AMA, nurses, unions, trial lawyers, the medical instrument industry, hospitals, etc. Only government has the power to do that - and even that is probably a long shot given the political realities at the moment.
They (FBI) only recently, post 9/11, have a national security branch that has a primary directive of counter terrorism.
That statement plays quite loose with language. The FBI has a very spotty history starting with its origins in cracking down on anarchists in the 1920s. The term terrorism may not have been thrown about in every press release and the FBI may not have had a dedicated anti-terrorism mission but it has been in this line of work for a very long time. Substitute the word "dissident" for terrorist and you recognize this is true.
The FBI is like any other law enforcement agency, no better or worse, and attracts both good and bad people. It is a coin toss whether at any moment they are compiling files on Al Qaeda or your anti-war grandmother.
everyone is attempting to say that the Democrats are going to take the election (and they might).
Hey, Democrats win elections, Republicans take them!
Aggh,someone had to ask it.
But by allowing gambling in certain protected areas, we are engaging in protectionism of the gambling industry from foreign competition.
There is a very important distinction to be made here: both gaming companies and gambling enterprises constitute the industry. The enterprises (largely state governments, casino corps, etc.) clearly benefit from the status quo and do not want competition. The gaming companies however would likely do quite well from selling their wares to a proliferation of new customers.
Other than Massachusetts, all state lotteries, for example, are contracted out to gaming companies like GTech and Scientific Games. Those companies have largely steered clear of the online gaming industry for fear of royally pissing off their existing customer base of state governments. However, one would not be surprised if they secretly hope the WTO thing goes through since they suddenly have an entirely new gambling universe to move into. They have the money and expertise to have a very good shot at picking up a huge percentage of the offshore companies action.
November 2nd is the filing deadline in New Hampshire.
Except NPR does it on the tax payers dime.
So does Fox News, just with a level of indirection. You think many of their corporate advertisers aren't sucking the public tit dry? That the farm bill doesn't subsidize ADM, or the perverse medicare prescription policy isn't a handout to Big Pharma, etc.?
And Lucent. Let's never forget the fine job she did there.
It's an astounding accomplishment to drive two of the world's premier engineering organizations into the ground within a decade. Truly Fox worthy.
How on earth did the US get their roads?
The interstate highway system was sold, in part, to Congress and the public as an aspect of national defense, necessary for moving troops and material. That may be the ticket for high speed internet access as well. Or, as pretty much anything else these days, label it as necessary to combat terrorism. High speed networks have at least as much claim to Homeland Security funding as Petting Zoos and Peanut Museums.
Thanks to everyone for the replies. There is some good information here.
I hope this isn't too painfully stupid or off point: how does one open a bank? I don't think that is a title in the Dummies series yet and I have been periodically curious about it. How realistic is it for a small group of people or a community to start a bank or credit union?
>> So please tell me how people today have more spending power.
Credit cards, mostly. Many people have no sense of how reliant upon them that they are nor the world of pain that will be theirs if the prime rate ever spikes up to 10% or they lose employment for six months.
Most people looking down their noses at people embroiled in the mortgage debacle have read their card agreements about as closely as the average sub-primer read the documents at their closings.
Investment, OTOH, creates wealth.
Except that nothing in economics is really so cut and dried, right?
The gold analogy sounds good as far as it goes. But precious metals are used for various manufacturing purposes in addition to being a value store. Sitting on a natural resource can be viewed as a perfectly good investment e.g. buying marginal oil properties on the cheap and waiting until price the of oil goes up enough to make it worthwhile to extract.
Stock purchases don't always produce much in the way of societal economic gains despite their common status as investments. Buying shares in a tech company that went public 10 years ago and still isn't producing a dividend is just sitting on a piece of paper waiting for it to gain value. Not terribly different from gold. The company got the money when they issued the stock but subsequent price fluctuations have only incidental bearing on the company (e.g. its valuation helps it borrow money) until it either buys some stock back or reissues more. The vast flow of "investment" money in and out of stock on any given day has only indirect and usually small consequences on the company, jobs, etc.
And bank savings, as someone noted, don't disappear into a black hole. The bank needs to get the interest it pays from somewhere so they invest the money and pocket the difference between what they make and what they pay.
Arguably the best investment an American could have made in the last six years is to buy some other currency. They would have made over 50% by buying Euros, a better return than the average 401k has gotten.
My point is that it is an incredibly complicated world. Really smart and experienced people lose lots of money all the time. Maybe we should be a little less judgmental about people who make very safe investments like bank accounts or CDs. It's entirely possible that is the most rational investment for them.
Think about it, all other things being equal, as we get smarter, more efficient with our production of goods prices should go down.
The "all other things being equal" portion is not insignificant. The production efficiencies can be easily be dwarfed when the production is overseas and the value of the consuming currency is dropping like a stone.