They've heard it before, usually from conservatives using it as an excuse to punish teachers for not being productive members of society. So yes, when you walk up and say "I'd like to talk to you about a new pay system" they'll treat you like a Mormon knocking on the door during dinner.
I'll throw this one at you - do you seriously think if the school district hired someone well above scale for a computer science job, that the union would allow that?
Yes. They have no choice. They have no say in the matter. All they can do is sue the government, and the government would have to agree to being sued to have the case heard. It's illegal for the teacher's union to strike in Texas.
I've a Samsung Galaxy S3. It was bought relatively recently, as the prices drop when the new phones come out, and the S4 was out, and I think the S5 was announced, but it may have only been officially hinted. And I've never received a single patch or update. 2 years, no patches. Either it was perfect, or Samsung sucks at patches and updates. Though that's still no worse than my wife's iPhone 3GS. It had its last patch less than a year from date of last sale. Sure, that's over two from release date, but from last sale, it got less than a year of patches. Discontinued June 7, 2010, last patch November 22, 2010.
So I fail to see how this is an "android" problem.
Isn't 4.4 the patch for a 4.3 flaw? Oh, your carrier won't update your phone? That's a carrier problem. Google did patch the flaw, it's just a X.X patch, not a X.X.X.X, or whatever level patch.
They can "agree" to it, but the employer will over-pay in order to meet the employer-negotiated, employer-signed contract. The union doesn't "get" anything that the employer doesn't sign.
IF you raise the pay, you have to raise it for EVERYONE who qualifies, the union contract requires everyone be paid exactly the same, regardless of performance, education, and other qualifications.
The Employer requires everyone be paid the same. Whether that's what the union asked for or not is irrelevant to the fact that it's the employer, and not the union, that sets the pay and pays it.
If something is not important to me I don't want to have my money stolen from me so your idea of 'important' can be realised while I have a barrel of a gun pointed at my head by the government.
Yes, you aren't opposed to taxes, or gun-barrel government. You just want to make sure it's spent on things you want. You want a benevolent dictatorship run like how you'd run it. I suggest you move to North Korea.
Your worst fear is a democracy, where people get to vote on things, and those votes can cause change.
Nope. First test in Honors physics in college (honors being the top 5% of students, based on entry exams), I got two problems marked wrong on a test. I talked to the professor after. He marked them wrong because my method of solving the problem "shouldn't have" worked. I whipped out a mathematical proof in his office (as a college freshman) and proved the assumption I made durring the test (calling it an assumption, because I didn't show my work on the proof in the test, just solved it in my head, showing all the physics work properly for full credit, but not the justification behind the equation I used. He knew it wasn't possible to solve it in the manner I did. It wasn't possible using the assumptions he used. I simplified his complex calculus problem to an algebra problem. He never saw that before, and assumed that because he stressed the complex calculus means, and set up the problem for a straight-forward integral, that I solved geometrically.
The other question he marked wrong, I skipped a few steps, and he thought I didn't understand what I did.
No, experienced teachers don't know how to deal with students like us. When I was on high school, I brought in puzzles from home and did jigsaw puzzles in the back of the room, until the principal found out and decided it looked bad for the school to have a student "authorized" to not pay attention in class. After that, I must have developed a bowel problem, as I got a bathroom pass every class, until I was banned from the bathrooms. Then I just failed to go to class. I never scored less than 100% on any test. I should have been granted credit for the class (I took calculus in college in a special program, but the office screwed up and didn't give me credit I deserved).
Nope, the school system has no clue what to do with a student who walks in day-1 capable of scoring a 100% on the final exam for that class. Wasn't the first time, but it was the time I was most able to do something about it. Near the end, the principal was coming to class every day to make sure I was sitting at my desk. Threatened to fail me in all subjects if my absences were too high. Mainly to cover up her previous mistake.
In the time I worked as a tutor in college, I tutored people in subjects that I didn't know. It's not as hard as you think.
The Hanging Chad issue in Florida was evidence of vote tampering. It is almost impossible for a hanging chad to happen on properly tuned machines with single ballots. It is almost always possible when trying ballot stuffing, which is why they used punch based voting in Florida in the first play (trying to avoid ballot stuffing). But you won't find any of the (R) or (D) complaining, because they both do it and to expose the other is kind of like mutually assured destruction nuclear war.
Both knew both were cheating. Both helped both cover it up, because if the actual level of cheating was widely understood, then there'd be no confidence in the vote, and we'd need the UN to step in and monitor our elections.
Though hanging chads are possible with properly functioning machines. The voter presses the pin through the hole and doesn't punch out the vote. They either think that a small touch is sufficient to mark it (never underestimate the stupidity of the voter), or they change their mind as they were voting. In either case, you can break one or more sides of the square. Then, when handled in the ballot box and for the recount, it's possible for the "damaged" chad to detach from two more sides, leaving it attached by only one.
Florida 2000. There are many books and web articles about the irregularities. And the mismatch between the exit polls and vote result happens most in places with "extra" votes.
It's called an "analogy". His assertion was that something *like* a "free" AOL disk isn't "free", despite everyone using "free" in a manner that allows for that definition.
Notice the quotes didn't quote him. It's your reading error, not a quoting error by me.
Yes, in places where vote tampering is legal, an open ballot is much more likely to be abused. Or are you saying that the US political situation is no more stable than 1900s Chile?
Then we have open voting now. At least until naked voting is required by law. Otherwise, I can take a photo of a completed ballot showing how I voted as "proof" for a 3rd party. When I'm able to prove it to someone else, then it's not secret, right? So why do you prefer an open voting system called "secret" with all the fraud of both secret and open voting, over a "pure" open voting system that would eliminate all the frauds possible in a secret ballot system?
And even if it were not, nostalgia for a bygone historical era is irrelevant in the face of current practice. The holes in non-secret ballots have long been exploited, and that genie is not going to go back into the bottle.
And continue to be exploited. You left out that piece.
Besides which, you have still failed to state why non-secret ballots are any better. What purpose do they serve, other than to make it possible to pressure people to vote the way that some other party wants them to?
I've said it many times. The "purpose" is that it's the *only* way for a person to ensure that their vote was counted as they intended. In Florida 2000, they idenfitied some ballots that weren't lined up right. A mix of user error and bad design. And for some vote patterns the voter would think they had voted one way, and the ballot verification machines that are often used (but weren't for Florida) would have counted it as a "valid" ballot. But the vote wouldn't have been counted as intended by the voter.
Such errors are common, and in a "secret" balloting, impossible to gauge.
My question back is, "Why is secrecy more important than accuracy?" For a stable society, no "other party" cares enough to force people to vote a particular way. It just doesn't happen. And the places people point to to show tampering happened, most of them tampering wasn't illegal. If tampering is illegal, and that law is enforced at all, then open voting has much much less fraud and error than secret ballots.
Congress is open ballots, and when 435 Representatives vote on a bill, never have they recorded 500 votes. Though that has happened in regular votes, where more votes were counted than registered voters. Open voting is 100% secure (for the recording of the votes). The problem of vote buying doesn't exist. The problem of coercion doesn't exist. And the people that insist that the US will change to make those common and accepted are the ones asserting irrational things without any evidence at all.
The voting block thing would never be a single nation-wide vote. The president isn't voted on by people, but by states. And someone in Alaska has no vote for the representative from Texas. The vote is local for a reason. I hadn't thought that people thought there'd be a single nation-wide vote for all offices (why does someone in Florida vote for the sheriff in California?). That is a different thing from what I assumed. The cipher block would replace *local* elections (the only kind of votes, even for national offices). It would likely be illegal to do with any less than about 60 chains. The 51 states (DC is a "state" for most purposes). Puerto Rico gets non-voting representation, so it needs a chain, along with all the non-resident citizens (ex-pats), and absent resident citizens (usually military), who can have different voting rules from the 51 states. I haven't looked into the voting in Guam, Midway, Samoa, and other territories, they may or may not need separate chains for themselves.
And all that is for federal elections only. When you count that in some places, the ballots are per-precinct, and there are thousands of precincts, you'd need thousands of chains, and then tally the chains separately, then add in the totals to find a result.
I see some problems in it, but human psychology isn't high on the list.
So, you are asserting that what you describe is what you'd expect to have happen in North Korea, should they move to a closed secret vote?
From your other posts, you seemed quite out of touch with reality, but I didn't realize how much.
Also, the system you describe assumes infallibility so much so that it doesn't work for any errors.
If you think it has any error handling, please tell me what happens when a precinct-level result shows 80% votes for candidate A, when the exit polls show 60% for candidate B, and the total number of votes is twice the elligible voters (about 4 times the number who were marked off in the rolls as having voted)? In practice "around here" they count all the votes, and give the win to candidate A, knowing that most of the votes in the box *must* be invalid. It many be "Secret", but it is most certainly not "secure".
Read your own question. Do you have evidence that I didn't eat tacos last Tuesday? No, because that's impossible. Proving the negative after the fact is impossible. Though I do have plenty of evidence. The discussions in the states adopting the secret ballots in the US after the Civil War, none of them mention the widespread fraud before the Civil War. Had it been happening, there would have been some mention.
And yes, I recognize that you refuse to accept reality when it doesn't agree with you. Can you prove there was widespread vote fraud when the US had open voting (prior to the war and civil unrest that caused its repeal)? No, you can't. You'll just throw out another ad hominem, or state that it's me who's required to prove my point, but you don't have to prove yours.
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They've heard it before, usually from conservatives using it as an excuse to punish teachers for not being productive members of society. So yes, when you walk up and say "I'd like to talk to you about a new pay system" they'll treat you like a Mormon knocking on the door during dinner.
I'll throw this one at you - do you seriously think if the school district hired someone well above scale for a computer science job, that the union would allow that?
Yes. They have no choice. They have no say in the matter. All they can do is sue the government, and the government would have to agree to being sued to have the case heard. It's illegal for the teacher's union to strike in Texas.
There have already been attempts to sell votes in the US even though no one can prove how they voted.
I've not see any vote selling things reported on, though it's trivial to prove how you voted. Yes, even today, with secret ballots.
I've a Samsung Galaxy S3. It was bought relatively recently, as the prices drop when the new phones come out, and the S4 was out, and I think the S5 was announced, but it may have only been officially hinted. And I've never received a single patch or update. 2 years, no patches. Either it was perfect, or Samsung sucks at patches and updates. Though that's still no worse than my wife's iPhone 3GS. It had its last patch less than a year from date of last sale. Sure, that's over two from release date, but from last sale, it got less than a year of patches. Discontinued June 7, 2010, last patch November 22, 2010.
So I fail to see how this is an "android" problem.
Isn't 4.4 the patch for a 4.3 flaw? Oh, your carrier won't update your phone? That's a carrier problem. Google did patch the flaw, it's just a X.X patch, not a X.X.X.X, or whatever level patch.
They can "agree" to it, but the employer will over-pay in order to meet the employer-negotiated, employer-signed contract. The union doesn't "get" anything that the employer doesn't sign.
They are all for it, but disagree over the details of what "performance" means and how to measure it.
How about you? Have you done it, or just made assumptions?
No government is a military dictatorship. If not today, then tomorrow. And usually one with 100% taxes, depending on your local warlord.
The union only squashes that which the employer signs, and no more. The employer is 50% responsible, if not more.
People (union and otherwise) have come out in support of performance pay. The question is, how do you define performance.
IF you raise the pay, you have to raise it for EVERYONE who qualifies, the union contract requires everyone be paid exactly the same, regardless of performance, education, and other qualifications.
The Employer requires everyone be paid the same. Whether that's what the union asked for or not is irrelevant to the fact that it's the employer, and not the union, that sets the pay and pays it.
I don't understand. Aren't the agreements signed by two parties, the unions, and the employers?
Why is it that the unions get 100% of the blame (for bad things) and the employers get 100% of the credit (for good things)?
In Texas, where the union is "illegal" (they can meet, they can talk. They can't demand, and they can't strike), the situation is no better.
If something is not important to me I don't want to have my money stolen from me so your idea of 'important' can be realised while I have a barrel of a gun pointed at my head by the government.
Yes, you aren't opposed to taxes, or gun-barrel government. You just want to make sure it's spent on things you want. You want a benevolent dictatorship run like how you'd run it. I suggest you move to North Korea.
Your worst fear is a democracy, where people get to vote on things, and those votes can cause change.
Nope. First test in Honors physics in college (honors being the top 5% of students, based on entry exams), I got two problems marked wrong on a test. I talked to the professor after. He marked them wrong because my method of solving the problem "shouldn't have" worked. I whipped out a mathematical proof in his office (as a college freshman) and proved the assumption I made durring the test (calling it an assumption, because I didn't show my work on the proof in the test, just solved it in my head, showing all the physics work properly for full credit, but not the justification behind the equation I used. He knew it wasn't possible to solve it in the manner I did. It wasn't possible using the assumptions he used. I simplified his complex calculus problem to an algebra problem. He never saw that before, and assumed that because he stressed the complex calculus means, and set up the problem for a straight-forward integral, that I solved geometrically.
The other question he marked wrong, I skipped a few steps, and he thought I didn't understand what I did.
No, experienced teachers don't know how to deal with students like us. When I was on high school, I brought in puzzles from home and did jigsaw puzzles in the back of the room, until the principal found out and decided it looked bad for the school to have a student "authorized" to not pay attention in class. After that, I must have developed a bowel problem, as I got a bathroom pass every class, until I was banned from the bathrooms. Then I just failed to go to class. I never scored less than 100% on any test. I should have been granted credit for the class (I took calculus in college in a special program, but the office screwed up and didn't give me credit I deserved).
Nope, the school system has no clue what to do with a student who walks in day-1 capable of scoring a 100% on the final exam for that class. Wasn't the first time, but it was the time I was most able to do something about it. Near the end, the principal was coming to class every day to make sure I was sitting at my desk. Threatened to fail me in all subjects if my absences were too high. Mainly to cover up her previous mistake.
In the time I worked as a tutor in college, I tutored people in subjects that I didn't know. It's not as hard as you think.
The Hanging Chad issue in Florida was evidence of vote tampering. It is almost impossible for a hanging chad to happen on properly tuned machines with single ballots. It is almost always possible when trying ballot stuffing, which is why they used punch based voting in Florida in the first play (trying to avoid ballot stuffing). But you won't find any of the (R) or (D) complaining, because they both do it and to expose the other is kind of like mutually assured destruction nuclear war.
Both knew both were cheating. Both helped both cover it up, because if the actual level of cheating was widely understood, then there'd be no confidence in the vote, and we'd need the UN to step in and monitor our elections.
Though hanging chads are possible with properly functioning machines. The voter presses the pin through the hole and doesn't punch out the vote. They either think that a small touch is sufficient to mark it (never underestimate the stupidity of the voter), or they change their mind as they were voting. In either case, you can break one or more sides of the square. Then, when handled in the ballot box and for the recount, it's possible for the "damaged" chad to detach from two more sides, leaving it attached by only one.
What if you want to sniff your own keyboard?
Florida 2000. There are many books and web articles about the irregularities. And the mismatch between the exit polls and vote result happens most in places with "extra" votes.
It's called an "analogy". His assertion was that something *like* a "free" AOL disk isn't "free", despite everyone using "free" in a manner that allows for that definition.
Notice the quotes didn't quote him. It's your reading error, not a quoting error by me.
Yes, in places where vote tampering is legal, an open ballot is much more likely to be abused. Or are you saying that the US political situation is no more stable than 1900s Chile?
Then we have open voting now. At least until naked voting is required by law. Otherwise, I can take a photo of a completed ballot showing how I voted as "proof" for a 3rd party. When I'm able to prove it to someone else, then it's not secret, right? So why do you prefer an open voting system called "secret" with all the fraud of both secret and open voting, over a "pure" open voting system that would eliminate all the frauds possible in a secret ballot system?
And even if it were not, nostalgia for a bygone historical era is irrelevant in the face of current practice. The holes in non-secret ballots have long been exploited, and that genie is not going to go back into the bottle.
And continue to be exploited. You left out that piece.
Besides which, you have still failed to state why non-secret ballots are any better. What purpose do they serve, other than to make it possible to pressure people to vote the way that some other party wants them to?
I've said it many times. The "purpose" is that it's the *only* way for a person to ensure that their vote was counted as they intended. In Florida 2000, they idenfitied some ballots that weren't lined up right. A mix of user error and bad design. And for some vote patterns the voter would think they had voted one way, and the ballot verification machines that are often used (but weren't for Florida) would have counted it as a "valid" ballot. But the vote wouldn't have been counted as intended by the voter.
Such errors are common, and in a "secret" balloting, impossible to gauge.
My question back is, "Why is secrecy more important than accuracy?" For a stable society, no "other party" cares enough to force people to vote a particular way. It just doesn't happen. And the places people point to to show tampering happened, most of them tampering wasn't illegal. If tampering is illegal, and that law is enforced at all, then open voting has much much less fraud and error than secret ballots.
Congress is open ballots, and when 435 Representatives vote on a bill, never have they recorded 500 votes. Though that has happened in regular votes, where more votes were counted than registered voters. Open voting is 100% secure (for the recording of the votes). The problem of vote buying doesn't exist. The problem of coercion doesn't exist. And the people that insist that the US will change to make those common and accepted are the ones asserting irrational things without any evidence at all.
The voting block thing would never be a single nation-wide vote. The president isn't voted on by people, but by states. And someone in Alaska has no vote for the representative from Texas. The vote is local for a reason. I hadn't thought that people thought there'd be a single nation-wide vote for all offices (why does someone in Florida vote for the sheriff in California?). That is a different thing from what I assumed. The cipher block would replace *local* elections (the only kind of votes, even for national offices). It would likely be illegal to do with any less than about 60 chains. The 51 states (DC is a "state" for most purposes). Puerto Rico gets non-voting representation, so it needs a chain, along with all the non-resident citizens (ex-pats), and absent resident citizens (usually military), who can have different voting rules from the 51 states. I haven't looked into the voting in Guam, Midway, Samoa, and other territories, they may or may not need separate chains for themselves.
And all that is for federal elections only. When you count that in some places, the ballots are per-precinct, and there are thousands of precincts, you'd need thousands of chains, and then tally the chains separately, then add in the totals to find a result.
I see some problems in it, but human psychology isn't high on the list.
So, you are asserting that what you describe is what you'd expect to have happen in North Korea, should they move to a closed secret vote?
From your other posts, you seemed quite out of touch with reality, but I didn't realize how much.
Also, the system you describe assumes infallibility so much so that it doesn't work for any errors.
If you think it has any error handling, please tell me what happens when a precinct-level result shows 80% votes for candidate A, when the exit polls show 60% for candidate B, and the total number of votes is twice the elligible voters (about 4 times the number who were marked off in the rolls as having voted)? In practice "around here" they count all the votes, and give the win to candidate A, knowing that most of the votes in the box *must* be invalid. It many be "Secret", but it is most certainly not "secure".
That would be a problem if it happened, but it didn't.
Read your own question. Do you have evidence that I didn't eat tacos last Tuesday? No, because that's impossible. Proving the negative after the fact is impossible. Though I do have plenty of evidence. The discussions in the states adopting the secret ballots in the US after the Civil War, none of them mention the widespread fraud before the Civil War. Had it been happening, there would have been some mention.
And yes, I recognize that you refuse to accept reality when it doesn't agree with you. Can you prove there was widespread vote fraud when the US had open voting (prior to the war and civil unrest that caused its repeal)? No, you can't. You'll just throw out another ad hominem, or state that it's me who's required to prove my point, but you don't have to prove yours.