You falsely claimed that the crisis was prompted by spending was therefore an example of an individual's propensity to spend wealth rather than accumulate it. In fact the crisis was prompted at every level by the individual's desire to accumulate wealth. That's the "point" that you apparently have "lost track of."
Bullshit. A stock/share is quite literally a share in the ownership of a company. When you buy stock, you are purchasing a percentage of a corporation. If you want to use the word "investing" to describe that activity, that's fine, but you're still spending in order to invest.
I am going to insist we call the purchase of stock "investing" because that's what it is.
I didn't ask about legality. I seem to remember both Clinton and Bush unveiling grand plans for "minority families" to own homes. What their plans boiled down to was, essentially, "give 'em loans whether they qualify or not". The fact that Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac were federally-sponsored corporations only compounded the problem.
Ok, what you said is this:
my understanding was that most of the problem was caused by a federal mandate to offer mortgages to individuals who didn't qualify for them. Am I misinformed on that point?
So if this "mandate" that "required private lenders to make billions of dollars of bad loans to unqualified customers" wasn't a law, then pray tell what form was this "mandate" made? Stern advice? And if this mandate wasn't a law, then why did lenders decide to bankrupt themselves adhering to it?
In point of fact, the subprime meltdown was caused by private lenders acting on their own and by the completely unregulated $62 trillion market for credit default swaps which made the problem exponentially worse. Lenders weren't acting generously at the behest of some government figure, they were dishing out subprime loans because they were making money hand-over-fist on each one. The quasi-governmental entities of Freddie and Fannie had nothing to do with creating subprime loans. The definition of a "subprime" borrower is somebody who does not legally qualify for a Freddie and Fannie loan. And I think your willingness to pin the blame of the economic crisis on a bunch of defaulting minorities when you don't even understand the basic facts of the situation is shameful.
Banks are not parents. They should not have to treat their clients like children. If people are about to buy a house, I assume they are adults, who know what responsibility is.
Well that depends doesn't it? Banks choose who they loan money to. If they loan money to responsible adults then they should treat their clients like adults. If banks loan money to clowns, then should treat their clients like clowns. But loaning money to clowns and then blubbering about how irresponsible and profligtate they are is just the whining of desperate losers who have no concept of risk management and should never ever be trusted with real money.
3/ IANAB, but doesn't the Federal Reserve [wikipedia.org] tell the banks how much money they are allowed to invest in the economy? (by allowing people to buy a house) If the banks have run out of money, the Federal Reserve has set up bad rules.
Are you talking about the Fractional Reserve Banking? Nobody has argued that the crisis was instigated because the fractional-reserve requirements were too low.
But this line of argument is very telling. Like a true conservatives you believe culprit must be the public and the government. For some reason the terms "accountability" and "responsibility" are never brandished against the very institutions that took extraordinary risk and now are being bailed out for 7*10^11 dollars.
You expect private banks to "treat their clients like adults" and therefore should be exonerated for all the risks they have taken. But you also believe the Federal Reserve should not treat banks "like adults", but rather babysit major corporations like infants and make sure they never jeopardize their own solvency. Apparently our banks are just helpwess widdle babies who have to wlend to evwee idiot who walks through the door unwess Big Government Papa Bernanke says "no". Banks can't take wesponsibility for any of their actions. wah-wah-wah.
So much for private enterprise.
1) The word you are looking is not "lend", it is "borrow".
2) It is the job of the bank to protect it's assets, not the job of the customer. The primary role of banks is to asses people's creditworthiness. If banks naively lend out money depending on the good faith of their clients then they are losers and idiots and they rightfully deserve to be run out of business.
3) We're not in this crisis because people maxed out their credit cards, we're here because banks gave out billions of dollars in loans that they knew customers couldn't afford.
I'm sorry, but I fail to see how spending money on stocks is "not spending".
I know you don't see the difference. That's why I'm strongly recommending you stop spreading your ignorance and familiarize yourself with a little economic system we call "Capitalism"
I don't know how you define spending, but by my definition it would be something like "the exchange of currency in return for goods or services". It doesn't matter whether you buy a car, or buy some stocks - you're still spending. The only difference is that you expect your car to go down in value, while everyone always inexplicably expects stocks to go up.
1) Stocks are neither goods nor services so by your own definition they don't constitute spending.
If instead of buying stocks they had blown their money in a casino, would you also consider that to be "investment"?
No.
Also - and I could be wrong here - but my understanding was that most of the problem was caused by a federal mandate to offer mortgages to individuals who didn't qualify for them. Am I misinformed on that point?
Yes. You in fact are misinformed. There is actually no federal law or mandate requiring private lenders to make billions of dollars of bad loans to unqualified customers. Rejecting loan applications was, in fact, legal.
The parent has it 180 degrees backwards. We are in this crisis because people invested too aggressively, not because they spent too much.
As for the original claim - he's absolutely right. Most people don't accumulate wealth, they spend it. That's part of the reason why the US is in such a hole right now - because people like living beyond their means.
All the agents involved in this crisis, the Homebuyers, Lenders, Bankers, and Hedge Funds, all displayed a textbook propensity for extreme accumulation of wealth. As every fool who has every taken econ 101 knows, investment is the exact opposite of consumption.
Greed was certainly a large motivator, but it there were others, namely envy and fear. Otherwise rational people got invested simply because they couldn't stand that other people were out performing them and getting larger returns.
At the very bottom of the pyramid fear was a significant factor. Many of them jumped on the bandwagon because they felt they were slowly slipping behind America's cruel economic barriers. The saw the price of homes ascending beyond their reach, taking with them their shot at the American Dream.
People didn't in general buy because they are prodigal retards, they bought because they were very conscious of the acutely widening gap between the haves and the have-nots that the OP alluded to, and they desperately wanted to be and the side of the haves.
Mammoths were one of the many large mammal and bird species that went extinct coinciding with the global expansion of man. Even our ancestral cousins, the Neandertals, disappeared abruptly when Cro-Magnon man arrived on the scene. A wave of extinctions descended down through America at about the same time people arrived. The most likely conclusion is that one our Cro-Magnon predecessors learned how to hunt in groups, they tended to kill everything large almost everywhere they went.
The toxicity really depends. Homeopathic specialists recommend imbibing moderate amounts of plasmatic heavy metals for a number of ailments. Mine had me start taking cadmium-mercury with a 45000W vortex arc generator. It cleared up my acne in a flash.
What prevents a government plan from having copays, and unreimbursed treatments and prescription drugs? In any case, for the vast majority of people, the opportunity cost of going to the doctor is a sufficient cost to prevent them from pursuing excessive care.
Hypochondriacs aside, investments in health care pay diminishing returns implying a concave utility function wrt medicine. So intuitively it seems it shouldn't be that hard to design a system which controls costs.
re: your proposal. I see why it's appealing. From expected utility theory we know that the benefit of insurance is that it protects us from unlikely outcomes that could be costly. But it's only economical to insure yourself against risks, not known expenses.
Here's an issue with your proposal. We have known for quite some time that preventative care is the most economical way of treating illness. This is the "routine low-cost treatment" that you reasonably expect people to afford by themselves. But at the same time you've introduced a moral hazard which discourages people from living a healthy lifestyle and pursuing preventative care by insuring them treatment against catastrophic illness.
In your proposed plan people have to pay out of pocket to get the polio vaccine, but if they actually get Polio then the government will pay for them to be on a ventilator for the rest of their life. This seems backwards to me. It's a lot cheaper to immunize people for free but tell that that if they skip the vaccination and get polio then they are on their own.
If you were convinced that giving out vaccines for free significantly reduced health care costs, would you be in favor of doing so?
Our current national health care system, aka "give the emergency room a fake name", shares the incentive structure of your proposal. Because preventative care is expensive and the ER is free, many people use the ER for primary care. This abuse of the emergency room is hugely inefficient; it is both expensive and provides poor quality care. If we incentivize preventative care then we can improve health and reduce total health care expenditure.
A customer makes a connection to the bank via SSL. How does the customer know whether or not this encryption succeeds or fails? He has no idea and he has no way of finding out.
The 1% error rate of paper ballots can be read here and many other places. Google "paper ballot error rate".
Also, I have my doubts about the methods from the paper, though I haven't read it. For example, how resistant is the technique with respect to attacks on votes that have been cast by people who, for some reason (such as low technical skills), cannot check the correctness of the result? If someone else is going to do that for them, won't this compromise anonymity of their vote?
There are many techniques out there. Some allow for a voter to verify that his own vote has been counted correctly. Universally verifiable systems allow for a voter to verify that everyone's vote has been counted correctly. No, this does not in general compromise the anonymity of the vote.
Also, don't you feel a bit silly arguing against hypothetical weaknesses of cryptosystems when you haven't even bothered to read the basics? Here's another good paper by Microsoft. Here's another good one from Carnegie Mellon.
Please read these papers. You will see they have carefully thought through the issues you are raising.
Most of these systems operate on a server/client basis. The client can use whichever implementation he desires as long as it implements the algorithm. He can use Microsoft Voter or GNU Vote or whatever he wants. You're not forced to sit down at a voting booth with software you don't trust.
Virtually nobody who goes to the bank online knows how SSL works. They just do it and understand that the connection is "encrypted" so people can't "listen in." They have absolutely no idea whether or not the cryptography is working. They would only find out if it failed after their bank account has been emptied. They operate the system on trust.
Despite all these people looking over other people's shoulder, paper ballots aren't even close to perfect. The best paper ballot system still has an error rate of about 1% before deliberate tampering with ballots. With a proper cryptosystem we could get an error rate of exactly zero. And should anything go amiss you will be instantly able to prove it and so will everyone else.
Obviously many people have neither the time nor aptitude to understand basic cryptography. Similarly most people don't have time to sit around in a voting office looking over people's shoulder validating ballot counts. But people believe that there exist people who do count votes and people believe that there are smart people who solve problems in clever ways.
Why is it so hard to consult medical experts and clearly define a policy which meets people's 99% of people's basic needs and tell people that if they need additional care then they can obtain it for themselves on the free market? This is exactly how private insurance ostensibly works, yes? Private insurance is in fact already "judging" how people's "needs" are or are not met.
If they keep redefining "need" to be less and less, than the government may be able to meet that criteria. Is medical research a "need"? How much medical research is needed, and how much is just frivolous? Is a doctor needed for all medical treatment, or is a nurse sometimes good enough? Is access to a doctor at 2am a need?
Ok.
I suppose if the government just acquiesced to every demand arbitrarily labeled medical necessity by some unqualified halfwit then we would quickly degenerate into an economic dystopia where all of society's resources would be squandered by people who abuse the medical system. But no politician anywhere is proposing such a system; that's just a convenient strawman fantasy invented by laissez faire ideologues.
What's your point? You could have a city with only 5 people that vote the same way and if the rest of the country was 50-50 then it would rule. Not very convincing.
I think the real problem you have is that the current system disenfranchises people in heavily populated states and you happen to reallly like it that way.
Traditionally, cities are places with diverse political opinions -- much more diverse than small towns. The reason that one party, the Democratic party, gets so much support from urban areas is the other party, the Republican party, routinely trashes city-dwellers as out-of-touch, decadent, godless elitists. It's the same reason Republicans don't have support from gays, blacks, single women, muslims, atheists, Latinos, and people with advanced degrees. If the Republicans would just stop waging a culture war against urban Americans and started appealing to urban Americans with policies that work better than the Democratic policies, then urban-dwellers would vote Republican. Look at Mayor Bloomberg: He's not a Democrat but he's exceptionally popular in New York simply because he fixes problems, he runs a clean ship, and he doesn't spit on the electorate.
The Republicans need to stop using people as punching bags to rile up the base and start listening to their problems. But the only thing Republicans know how to do anymore is cut taxes, fearmonger, and appeal to bigotry.
I think it would be a huge boon for our democracy if the Republican party actually had to appeal to an honest majority of Americans for its political survival.
Why am I so "hung-up" on replacing paper ballots? Wow, that's like asking why I'm so "hung-up" on Democracy. Paper ballots have an error rate of at least 1% even if nobody is deliberately tampering with the election. Cryptosystems have an error of 0% and if somebody does tamper with them it is immediately obvious to all observers because the math would fail.
And a well designed crytosystem would really, honest-to-god, expose tampering regardless of stupid people's opinions on the matter. In Physical Science there is a difference between theory and reality.
Finally, I want to remind you that it wasn't the stupid people that defeated our current iteration of E-Voting (which I oppose since it isn't a cryptosystem). It was smart people that fought long and hard to expose the inherent weaknesses and publicize the scandals due to E-Voting that finally managed to defeat it. The stupid people accepted E-Voting because they were told it was safe. Stupid people accept what they are told because they are too stupid to use critical thinking skills.
Cryptographic schemes *MAY WORK*, but we should NEVER USE THEM--because most people would never really be sure they were honest.
Do people "understand" any cryptography? Do they understand how SSL works when they bank online? Do they even understand how their bank works?
No, most people don't understand anything about most of the technology and institutions they rely on. And they don't need to understand cryptography; they only need to understand that it's something smart people came up with that works 100% of the time with no errors and is independently verifiable with some math.
And your portrayal of paper ballots as a technology that works 100% perfectly of the time is just laughably false: The number of ballots almost never matches the number of people who voted except in tiny districts. Recounts always yield different results. We know that even in an election without deliberate tampering paper ballots have an error rate of about 1%. Paper ballots aren't a fix. We have the technology to fix the problem. We just need to use it.
You're arguing against a strawman with irrelevant cliches you learned in econ 101.
Nobody is proposing that people are given infinite medical coverage for free. The healthcare proposal is whether or not the government should provide an affordable health insurance option for basic care when the private sector refuses to do so.
We have the resources in this country to provide basic health care that covers 99% of people's medical needs. We're just not doing it because of an inefficient allocation of resources. Except for government run medicare, we spend most of our medical dollars on administrative costs and insurance company profits. It's the role of government to develop policies that promote an efficient allocation of resources.
Yo this is a shout out to my EBT. You stamps were there for me when I was down and out! Man, nothing takes the edge off of being broke and unemployed like the US government food assistance program. Once you have access to the food you need, you can focus on other things like getting a job.
It's a specious argument that could be equally applied to every government function.
You have a Right to Invade Iraq. What you do NOT have is a right to force others to pay for it.
You could say the same thing about schools, roads, police, firemen, missile defense, water quality, nuclear non-proliferation, and every other function the government performs. Anarchism doesn't work. We all need government and it's only fair that everyone pays for it. Blasting taxes as inherently evil just makes you look naive and infantile.
The president of Brazil is elected directly in a country with a population of about 200 Million. There's no reason why a system that works for 200 Million people can't work for 300 Million people.
In any case, the entire premise of the question is flawed. The simplicity of localized recounts was the primary criteria the OP gave in favor of the electoral college system and it's not even relevant: A recount doesn't need to be national -- it can be local to the regions that need to be recounted.
When you say that the implementation of electoral college is "analog vs. digital" you're basically conceding that the ideal solution is to count all the votes, but you argue that it is just logistically too difficult to count all those pesky little votes. Nonetheless, you argue that states are too "low resolution". You want congressional districts because those are higher resolution.
You know what would be the highest resolution? Counting everyone's vote. This obvious solution is exactly what we do for elections of senators, congressmen, mayors, and every other elected office in the land except the presidency.
In the name of "smoothing things out" you are perfectly willing to introduce a huge amount of error into the vote. Not because it's fairer -- you seem to acknowledge that it's less fair -- but just because it's easier. Dictatorship would be even easier, which is probably why it was so popular back in the day. But there's a reason why have a Democracy and morally we need to count everyone's vote, not count some people's votes and give them all the votes of other people simply because they happen to constitute a majority in an arbitrary geographical region which was gerrymandered by the political class in the first place.
Here's an idea: instead of taking for granted that we have a flawed election system, let's fix it. Let's invest in our election system to make it reliable and secure. There are cryptographic methods to that can verifiably ensure a secure, private, and perfect tally. That would address all your concerns about the integrity of the tally without arbitrarily disenfranchising people.
And also, how can you be sure that politicians implemented the correct procedure, if you don't understand it?
Let me be more specific. The references that I referred to demonstrate a cryptographic algorithm. If the algorithm is implemented incorrectly then it will fail and everyone will be able to prove it independently.
Of course people probably won't work out the math themselves, they'll have a client that implements the algorithm etc. People can use whatever client they wish, an open source or MicroSoft Voter or whatever. But an open source version would no doubt exist and people could feel free to use that.
With a paper ballot what you can see is your ballot go into a box. You have no guarantee that your vote is counted or that the ballot box wasn't stuffed with fraudulent ballots.
Also, did you even read the references I gave? You seem to be under the impression that what I am proposing is that some smart math guys look at Diebold code and say "yup, looks good to me!". I'm talking about specific practical voting schemes. If somebody has not implemented the algorithm correctly then it won't work and everybody will be able to prove it. That's the whole point of using a proper cryptographic system.
People believe in lots of things that they don't understand. For instance, most people have no clue how the banking system works, yet they place all their money in financial institutions. People believe in the constitution, but couldn't accurately describe what is in it. They don't understand regular encryption, but they trust it to send sensitive information online.
The problem with electronic voting is not that people believe it's insecure, the problem is that it is insecure and numerous experts have testified to that fact and problems have cropped up all over the place. If we could produce a system that didn't have problems that experts could verify then we would be set.
You can verify the algorithm has been implemented correctly because it would be standardized and open source. Just like SSL on Firefox.
Also, we don't need nanoreplicators to fraudulently manipulate a ballot box. Ballot boxes have a history of manipulation. The custodian of the box can open the box. Or he can stuff the box with fake votes. Paper ballots can never offer us a mathematical guarantee of correctness.
Electronic voting does offer us this guarantee when done right. You will be able to prove whether or not your vote will be counted.
If your proof of security can not be easily understood by a person with an IQ of 80 upon the first time you demonstrate that proof in 30 seconds or less then your proof is not valid.
Period.
Well, I guess virtually the entire field of mathematics is invalid. Shucks. There was some good stuff in there. I don't know how I'll get by without the Pythagorean theorem. Too bad all those stupid people invalidated all of mathematics by being too dumb to understand it.
Because, much as you believe that e-voting is the way to go, you are missing the point.
It isn't about proof, It isn't about "mathematical guarantees". It is all about perception. If a significant protion of people have no faith in the system, then the system will fail.
Here I was thinking that science was the study of reality. Now I see that reality is formed by the perceptions of the most remedial strata of our population. Thanks for the lecture in metaphysics!
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You falsely claimed that the crisis was prompted by spending was therefore an example of an individual's propensity to spend wealth rather than accumulate it. In fact the crisis was prompted at every level by the individual's desire to accumulate wealth. That's the "point" that you apparently have "lost track of."
I am going to insist we call the purchase of stock "investing" because that's what it is.
Ok, what you said is this:
So if this "mandate" that "required private lenders to make billions of dollars of bad loans to unqualified customers" wasn't a law, then pray tell what form was this "mandate" made? Stern advice? And if this mandate wasn't a law, then why did lenders decide to bankrupt themselves adhering to it?
In point of fact, the subprime meltdown was caused by private lenders acting on their own and by the completely unregulated $62 trillion market for credit default swaps which made the problem exponentially worse. Lenders weren't acting generously at the behest of some government figure, they were dishing out subprime loans because they were making money hand-over-fist on each one. The quasi-governmental entities of Freddie and Fannie had nothing to do with creating subprime loans. The definition of a "subprime" borrower is somebody who does not legally qualify for a Freddie and Fannie loan. And I think your willingness to pin the blame of the economic crisis on a bunch of defaulting minorities when you don't even understand the basic facts of the situation is shameful.
Well that depends doesn't it? Banks choose who they loan money to. If they loan money to responsible adults then they should treat their clients like adults. If banks loan money to clowns, then should treat their clients like clowns. But loaning money to clowns and then blubbering about how irresponsible and profligtate they are is just the whining of desperate losers who have no concept of risk management and should never ever be trusted with real money.
Are you talking about the Fractional Reserve Banking? Nobody has argued that the crisis was instigated because the fractional-reserve requirements were too low.
But this line of argument is very telling. Like a true conservatives you believe culprit must be the public and the government. For some reason the terms "accountability" and "responsibility" are never brandished against the very institutions that took extraordinary risk and now are being bailed out for 7*10^11 dollars.
You expect private banks to "treat their clients like adults" and therefore should be exonerated for all the risks they have taken. But you also believe the Federal Reserve should not treat banks "like adults", but rather babysit major corporations like infants and make sure they never jeopardize their own solvency. Apparently our banks are just helpwess widdle babies who have to wlend to evwee idiot who walks through the door unwess Big Government Papa Bernanke says "no". Banks can't take wesponsibility for any of their actions. wah-wah-wah. So much for private enterprise.
1) The word you are looking is not "lend", it is "borrow".
2) It is the job of the bank to protect it's assets, not the job of the customer. The primary role of banks is to asses people's creditworthiness. If banks naively lend out money depending on the good faith of their clients then they are losers and idiots and they rightfully deserve to be run out of business.
3) We're not in this crisis because people maxed out their credit cards, we're here because banks gave out billions of dollars in loans that they knew customers couldn't afford.
I know you don't see the difference. That's why I'm strongly recommending you stop spreading your ignorance and familiarize yourself with a little economic system we call "Capitalism"
1) Stocks are neither goods nor services so by your own definition they don't constitute spending.
No.
Yes. You in fact are misinformed. There is actually no federal law or mandate requiring private lenders to make billions of dollars of bad loans to unqualified customers. Rejecting loan applications was, in fact, legal.
The parent has it 180 degrees backwards. We are in this crisis because people invested too aggressively, not because they spent too much.
All the agents involved in this crisis, the Homebuyers, Lenders, Bankers, and Hedge Funds, all displayed a textbook propensity for extreme accumulation of wealth. As every fool who has every taken econ 101 knows, investment is the exact opposite of consumption.
Greed was certainly a large motivator, but it there were others, namely envy and fear. Otherwise rational people got invested simply because they couldn't stand that other people were out performing them and getting larger returns.
At the very bottom of the pyramid fear was a significant factor. Many of them jumped on the bandwagon because they felt they were slowly slipping behind America's cruel economic barriers. The saw the price of homes ascending beyond their reach, taking with them their shot at the American Dream.
People didn't in general buy because they are prodigal retards, they bought because they were very conscious of the acutely widening gap between the haves and the have-nots that the OP alluded to, and they desperately wanted to be and the side of the haves.
Mammoths were one of the many large mammal and bird species that went extinct coinciding with the global expansion of man. Even our ancestral cousins, the Neandertals, disappeared abruptly when Cro-Magnon man arrived on the scene. A wave of extinctions descended down through America at about the same time people arrived. The most likely conclusion is that one our Cro-Magnon predecessors learned how to hunt in groups, they tended to kill everything large almost everywhere they went.
The toxicity really depends. Homeopathic specialists recommend imbibing moderate amounts of plasmatic heavy metals for a number of ailments. Mine had me start taking cadmium-mercury with a 45000W vortex arc generator. It cleared up my acne in a flash.
What prevents a government plan from having copays, and unreimbursed treatments and prescription drugs? In any case, for the vast majority of people, the opportunity cost of going to the doctor is a sufficient cost to prevent them from pursuing excessive care.
Hypochondriacs aside, investments in health care pay diminishing returns implying a concave utility function wrt medicine. So intuitively it seems it shouldn't be that hard to design a system which controls costs.
re: your proposal. I see why it's appealing. From expected utility theory we know that the benefit of insurance is that it protects us from unlikely outcomes that could be costly. But it's only economical to insure yourself against risks, not known expenses.
Here's an issue with your proposal. We have known for quite some time that preventative care is the most economical way of treating illness. This is the "routine low-cost treatment" that you reasonably expect people to afford by themselves. But at the same time you've introduced a moral hazard which discourages people from living a healthy lifestyle and pursuing preventative care by insuring them treatment against catastrophic illness.
In your proposed plan people have to pay out of pocket to get the polio vaccine, but if they actually get Polio then the government will pay for them to be on a ventilator for the rest of their life. This seems backwards to me. It's a lot cheaper to immunize people for free but tell that that if they skip the vaccination and get polio then they are on their own.
If you were convinced that giving out vaccines for free significantly reduced health care costs, would you be in favor of doing so?
Our current national health care system, aka "give the emergency room a fake name", shares the incentive structure of your proposal. Because preventative care is expensive and the ER is free, many people use the ER for primary care. This abuse of the emergency room is hugely inefficient; it is both expensive and provides poor quality care. If we incentivize preventative care then we can improve health and reduce total health care expenditure.
A customer makes a connection to the bank via SSL. How does the customer know whether or not this encryption succeeds or fails? He has no idea and he has no way of finding out.
The 1% error rate of paper ballots can be read here and many other places. Google "paper ballot error rate".
There are many techniques out there. Some allow for a voter to verify that his own vote has been counted correctly. Universally verifiable systems allow for a voter to verify that everyone's vote has been counted correctly. No, this does not in general compromise the anonymity of the vote.
Also, don't you feel a bit silly arguing against hypothetical weaknesses of cryptosystems when you haven't even bothered to read the basics? Here's another good paper by Microsoft. Here's another good one from Carnegie Mellon.
Please read these papers. You will see they have carefully thought through the issues you are raising.
Most of these systems operate on a server/client basis. The client can use whichever implementation he desires as long as it implements the algorithm. He can use Microsoft Voter or GNU Vote or whatever he wants. You're not forced to sit down at a voting booth with software you don't trust.
Virtually nobody who goes to the bank online knows how SSL works. They just do it and understand that the connection is "encrypted" so people can't "listen in." They have absolutely no idea whether or not the cryptography is working. They would only find out if it failed after their bank account has been emptied. They operate the system on trust.
Despite all these people looking over other people's shoulder, paper ballots aren't even close to perfect. The best paper ballot system still has an error rate of about 1% before deliberate tampering with ballots. With a proper cryptosystem we could get an error rate of exactly zero. And should anything go amiss you will be instantly able to prove it and so will everyone else.
Obviously many people have neither the time nor aptitude to understand basic cryptography. Similarly most people don't have time to sit around in a voting office looking over people's shoulder validating ballot counts. But people believe that there exist people who do count votes and people believe that there are smart people who solve problems in clever ways.
Why is it so hard to consult medical experts and clearly define a policy which meets people's 99% of people's basic needs and tell people that if they need additional care then they can obtain it for themselves on the free market? This is exactly how private insurance ostensibly works, yes? Private insurance is in fact already "judging" how people's "needs" are or are not met.
Ok.
I suppose if the government just acquiesced to every demand arbitrarily labeled medical necessity by some unqualified halfwit then we would quickly degenerate into an economic dystopia where all of society's resources would be squandered by people who abuse the medical system. But no politician anywhere is proposing such a system; that's just a convenient strawman fantasy invented by laissez faire ideologues.
What's your point? You could have a city with only 5 people that vote the same way and if the rest of the country was 50-50 then it would rule. Not very convincing.
I think the real problem you have is that the current system disenfranchises people in heavily populated states and you happen to reallly like it that way.
Traditionally, cities are places with diverse political opinions -- much more diverse than small towns. The reason that one party, the Democratic party, gets so much support from urban areas is the other party, the Republican party, routinely trashes city-dwellers as out-of-touch, decadent, godless elitists. It's the same reason Republicans don't have support from gays, blacks, single women, muslims, atheists, Latinos, and people with advanced degrees. If the Republicans would just stop waging a culture war against urban Americans and started appealing to urban Americans with policies that work better than the Democratic policies, then urban-dwellers would vote Republican. Look at Mayor Bloomberg: He's not a Democrat but he's exceptionally popular in New York simply because he fixes problems, he runs a clean ship, and he doesn't spit on the electorate.
The Republicans need to stop using people as punching bags to rile up the base and start listening to their problems. But the only thing Republicans know how to do anymore is cut taxes, fearmonger, and appeal to bigotry.
I think it would be a huge boon for our democracy if the Republican party actually had to appeal to an honest majority of Americans for its political survival.
Why am I so "hung-up" on replacing paper ballots? Wow, that's like asking why I'm so "hung-up" on Democracy. Paper ballots have an error rate of at least 1% even if nobody is deliberately tampering with the election. Cryptosystems have an error of 0% and if somebody does tamper with them it is immediately obvious to all observers because the math would fail.
And a well designed crytosystem would really, honest-to-god, expose tampering regardless of stupid people's opinions on the matter. In Physical Science there is a difference between theory and reality.
Finally, I want to remind you that it wasn't the stupid people that defeated our current iteration of E-Voting (which I oppose since it isn't a cryptosystem). It was smart people that fought long and hard to expose the inherent weaknesses and publicize the scandals due to E-Voting that finally managed to defeat it. The stupid people accepted E-Voting because they were told it was safe. Stupid people accept what they are told because they are too stupid to use critical thinking skills.
Do people "understand" any cryptography? Do they understand how SSL works when they bank online? Do they even understand how their bank works?
No, most people don't understand anything about most of the technology and institutions they rely on. And they don't need to understand cryptography; they only need to understand that it's something smart people came up with that works 100% of the time with no errors and is independently verifiable with some math.
And your portrayal of paper ballots as a technology that works 100% perfectly of the time is just laughably false: The number of ballots almost never matches the number of people who voted except in tiny districts. Recounts always yield different results. We know that even in an election without deliberate tampering paper ballots have an error rate of about 1%. Paper ballots aren't a fix. We have the technology to fix the problem. We just need to use it.
You're arguing against a strawman with irrelevant cliches you learned in econ 101.
Nobody is proposing that people are given infinite medical coverage for free. The healthcare proposal is whether or not the government should provide an affordable health insurance option for basic care when the private sector refuses to do so.
We have the resources in this country to provide basic health care that covers 99% of people's medical needs. We're just not doing it because of an inefficient allocation of resources. Except for government run medicare, we spend most of our medical dollars on administrative costs and insurance company profits. It's the role of government to develop policies that promote an efficient allocation of resources.
Yo this is a shout out to my EBT. You stamps were there for me when I was down and out! Man, nothing takes the edge off of being broke and unemployed like the US government food assistance program. Once you have access to the food you need, you can focus on other things like getting a job.
It's a specious argument that could be equally applied to every government function.
You have a Right to Invade Iraq. What you do NOT have is a right to force others to pay for it.
You could say the same thing about schools, roads, police, firemen, missile defense, water quality, nuclear non-proliferation, and every other function the government performs. Anarchism doesn't work. We all need government and it's only fair that everyone pays for it. Blasting taxes as inherently evil just makes you look naive and infantile.
he gets it
The president of Brazil is elected directly in a country with a population of about 200 Million. There's no reason why a system that works for 200 Million people can't work for 300 Million people. In any case, the entire premise of the question is flawed. The simplicity of localized recounts was the primary criteria the OP gave in favor of the electoral college system and it's not even relevant: A recount doesn't need to be national -- it can be local to the regions that need to be recounted.
When you say that the implementation of electoral college is "analog vs. digital" you're basically conceding that the ideal solution is to count all the votes, but you argue that it is just logistically too difficult to count all those pesky little votes. Nonetheless, you argue that states are too "low resolution". You want congressional districts because those are higher resolution.
You know what would be the highest resolution? Counting everyone's vote. This obvious solution is exactly what we do for elections of senators, congressmen, mayors, and every other elected office in the land except the presidency.
In the name of "smoothing things out" you are perfectly willing to introduce a huge amount of error into the vote. Not because it's fairer -- you seem to acknowledge that it's less fair -- but just because it's easier. Dictatorship would be even easier, which is probably why it was so popular back in the day. But there's a reason why have a Democracy and morally we need to count everyone's vote, not count some people's votes and give them all the votes of other people simply because they happen to constitute a majority in an arbitrary geographical region which was gerrymandered by the political class in the first place.
Here's an idea: instead of taking for granted that we have a flawed election system, let's fix it. Let's invest in our election system to make it reliable and secure. There are cryptographic methods to that can verifiably ensure a secure, private, and perfect tally. That would address all your concerns about the integrity of the tally without arbitrarily disenfranchising people.
the greater NYC/Chicago/LA metro areas do not constitute the majority of the US population.
Let me be more specific. The references that I referred to demonstrate a cryptographic algorithm. If the algorithm is implemented incorrectly then it will fail and everyone will be able to prove it independently.
Of course people probably won't work out the math themselves, they'll have a client that implements the algorithm etc. People can use whatever client they wish, an open source or MicroSoft Voter or whatever. But an open source version would no doubt exist and people could feel free to use that.
Hope that clarifies.
With a paper ballot what you can see is your ballot go into a box. You have no guarantee that your vote is counted or that the ballot box wasn't stuffed with fraudulent ballots. Also, did you even read the references I gave? You seem to be under the impression that what I am proposing is that some smart math guys look at Diebold code and say "yup, looks good to me!". I'm talking about specific practical voting schemes. If somebody has not implemented the algorithm correctly then it won't work and everybody will be able to prove it. That's the whole point of using a proper cryptographic system.
People believe in lots of things that they don't understand. For instance, most people have no clue how the banking system works, yet they place all their money in financial institutions. People believe in the constitution, but couldn't accurately describe what is in it. They don't understand regular encryption, but they trust it to send sensitive information online.
The problem with electronic voting is not that people believe it's insecure, the problem is that it is insecure and numerous experts have testified to that fact and problems have cropped up all over the place. If we could produce a system that didn't have problems that experts could verify then we would be set.
You can verify the algorithm has been implemented correctly because it would be standardized and open source. Just like SSL on Firefox.
Also, we don't need nanoreplicators to fraudulently manipulate a ballot box. Ballot boxes have a history of manipulation. The custodian of the box can open the box. Or he can stuff the box with fake votes. Paper ballots can never offer us a mathematical guarantee of correctness.
Electronic voting does offer us this guarantee when done right. You will be able to prove whether or not your vote will be counted.
Well, I guess virtually the entire field of mathematics is invalid. Shucks. There was some good stuff in there. I don't know how I'll get by without the Pythagorean theorem. Too bad all those stupid people invalidated all of mathematics by being too dumb to understand it.
Here I was thinking that science was the study of reality. Now I see that reality is formed by the perceptions of the most remedial strata of our population. Thanks for the lecture in metaphysics!