The whole US mobile market has been kept alive for ages by people who think getting a free iPhone in return for signing a $60 a month two year contract is a good deal.
There are two possibilities. One is that journalists are innumerate journalism school grads. The other is that they're highly numerate and in fact geniuses of the level of Ramanujan but have a twisted sense of humour. Each figure they toss out is designed to make one possible rationalisation of all the previous figures untenable, until at the end of the article a numerate reader is forced to declare one or more of the figures a typo and work with the rest. Though with a sneaking sense that the decision as to which figure to ignore in order to produce a self consistent narrative is subjective and thus quantitatively speaking the article is entirely meaningless.
An astute player of the game will obviously aim for the mathematically beautiful result that the largest possible consistent subset of the figures they have quoted is 1, i.e. each figure is inconsistent with all the other ones.
Maybe this is what people learn at journalism school.
Could be worse than that. Read your post apocalyptic literature.
If the US or any modern country crashed completely people in the cities are going to die off pretty badly due to crime, disease, hunger and so on. Cut off the water and sewage and you'll get spectacular disease outbreaks in a densely populated urban environment. The average densely populated urban environment in the US has unarmed bourgeois, domesticated types a few days walk at most (or a few hours drive) from an area with a lot of criminals, many armed. While civilisation holds, the police keep them apart. If it failed all hell would break lose.
And as people have observed civilisation is 'three meals from revolution'. Cities need to import food from the countryside.
People out in the country with an artesian well, solar panels, a stockpile of food, the land to grow more and a lot of guns to ward off scavengers/hunt game would fare better.
Arguably city dwellers like more government because they're dependent on government. Rural types are less dependent and therefore less keen. In a worst case scenario, it's pretty clear the rural types are better place to survive.
People divesting from the cities could be a leading indicator of collapse.
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Google Inc. employees took out their wallets and showed overwhelming support for the Democratic Party last year, according to a report Monday in USA Today.
A USA Today campaign finance analysis found that, of the company's overall political contributions, 98 percent went to Democrats, the biggest share among top tech donors.
The online search company's employees gave $207,650 to federal candidates during last year's election campaign, which includes the White House race between Democrat John Kerry and the winning incumbent Republican, President Bush. The contributions were up from just $250 in 2000 when Google was a start-up, according to the paper.
The paper said that 53 percent of the broader tech industry's $25.9 million went to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign finance.
I.e. criticize Google who own Youtube or the Democrats (a href="">who got 98% of Google employees donations) and your whole channel gets shut down for violating community guidelines. Upload weird paedobait and nothing happens. Until the advertisers start pulling ads - I bet that will make Google do something. StyxHexenHammer666's channel is back up, but I bet that's only because other Youtubers like The Thinkery made videos asking why his channel had been pulled. If he was less well known, his channel would probably have disappeared.
Soros is Jewish. He went to live with a non Jewish family and posed as a non Jew. And while he was doing that he worked collecting money from Jews. And even years later he doesn't seem to see anything wrong with what he did - see the 60 minutes interview I posted. It's really bizarre.
KROFT: My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted godson.
Mr. SOROS: Yes. Yes.
KROFT: Went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.
Mr. SOROS: Yes. That's right. Yes.
KROFT: I mean, that's -- that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?
Mr. SOROS: Not -- not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don't -- you don't see the connection. But it was -- it created no -- no problem at all.
KROFT: No feeling of guilt?
Mr. SOROS: No.
KROFT: For example that, 'I'm Jewish and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be there. I should be there.' None of that?
Mr. SOROS: Well, of course I c -- I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn't be there, because that was -- well, actually, in a funny way, it's just like in markets -- that if I weren't there -- of course, I wasn't doing it, but somebody else would -- would -- would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the -- whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the -- I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.
It's hard to imagine Karl Popper - who coined the term 'Open Society' which Soros named his Open Society Foundations after - having a similarly disconnected view of morality where it doesn't matter if you collaborate with evil because if you didn't do it someone else would.
David Miliband won every round but the last one and every constituency but the 'affiliated organisations' ie mostly trade unions and would have won outright in a single round FPTP contest.
His dorky brother Ed managed pick up second preference votes of other third, fourth and fifth most popular candidates who dropped out and came out 1.4% ahead. Arguably his whole campaign was aimed at offsetting the fact he wasn't particularly popular for first round votes by trying people to instead rank him second preference. He also offered the unions as many concessions as possible.
Ed wasn't seen as a credible PM by either members or MPs. David would have been which is why he won those constituencies, right up to the last round. Labour went on to lose to the Conservatives.
tl;dr - AV elected the wrong leader and Labour lost the election because of it. The only reason you would want a party to adopt it over FPTP is if you want them to lose.
Instant-runoff voting (IRV), also known as the alternative vote (AV) or transferable vote, is a voting method used in single-seat elections with more than two candidates. (It is also sometimes referred to as "ranked-choice voting" (RCV) and "preferential voting", although there are other preferential voting methods that use ranked-choice ballots.)
In political science, Duverger's law holds that plurality-rule elections (such as first past the post) structured within single-member districts tend to favor a two-party system and that "the double ballot majority system and proportional representation tend to favor multipartism".[1][2] The discovery of this tendency is attributed to Maurice Duverger, a French sociologist who observed the effect and recorded it in several papers published in the 1950s and 1960s. In the course of further research, other political scientists began calling the effect a "law" or principle.
In fact the strongest argument against FPTP is 'it is unfair to anyone but the first and second parties and this makes it hard for a third party to take over from them'. I.e. you end up with a cosy duopoly. And that seems to be the case. Voters general punish the party in government by voting for 'THE opposition', aka the second most popular party. In the UK system where the party leader becomes PM on winning an election opposition parties traditionally try to maximize the chance of this by having the leader of an unsuccessful opposition party resign on the party losing an election. A new leader takes over and rejigs the policies a bit and hopes that he or she will benefit from the PM's party losing popularity. In the US primaries mean parties automagically select the most popular candidate, at least internally, for their presidential nominee.
Of course this system is flawed. It's possible to imagine a policy which both of the two 'main' parties approve of but which is unpopular with the majority of the electorate. Up to the BREXIT vote for example, EU membership was unpopular but both Conservative and Labour (and in fact the Lib Dems) supported it. After the referendum both Labour and Conservative switched their policies to support BREXIT.
So the argument against FPTP is that by switching to a more proportional system it is easier for smaller parties to gain representation and hence power. Deutsch's point is that this tends to give the third largest party disproportionate influence and there is nothing the electorate can do to change this - only the fourth largest party taking over from the third largest party can change who has the undue influence, the undue influence itself is not possible to change, other than by convincing the government to change the electoral system to FPTP. Which would probably mean convincing them to hold a referendum and then winning it.
Deutsch also points out that FPTP fulfills what he calls 'Popper's Criterion' - i.e. that it is possible for the electorate to remove and replace the government peacefully. This is particularly important in a 'cabinet accountable to parliament' government system like the UK. Under FPTP if a party loses and election it normally loses all power. And if a party wins and election it normally gets a majority and a chance to implement its manifesto. Under a more proportional system, this is less likely to be the case - you normally get a coalition and an party which failed to get the most votes in an election might be able to form a coalition with the third largest party.
I think on balance I support FPTP, at least for the UK and for the moment. I could be persuaded to support a different system if it were more proportional for all parties and not just the third. E.g. STV with no additional threshold. That way you could imagine a 'left bloc' and a 'right bloc', rather like they have in Sweden
No single party has won a majority in the Riksdag since 1968. Political parties with similar agendas consequently cooperate on several issues, forming coalition governments or other formalized alliances. Two major blocs exist in parliament, the socialist/green R
IRV is another term for AV. And the argument for non FPTP voting systems is that they are more proportional. You measure 'proportionality' using the Gallagher Index. And AV has a lower Gallagher Index than FPTP
The Guardian, which supported AV say that it wouldn't affect the results of the 2010 election
Now a majority in the UK parliament is 326 seats. If you add up Conservative+Lib Dem and Labour+Lib Dem for each you find that only under FPTP is there one possible coalition partner for the Lib Dems, the third largest party, i.e. the Conservatives. Under all the other, lower Gallagher Index which is to say more proportional systems the Lib Dems would be able to form a coalition with either the Conservatives or Labour.
This is exactly the problem David Deutsch was pointing out here in his video opposing AV
In Germany for 49 years the FDP with <12.8% of the vote usually chose which party would govern, twice changing sides and 3 times putting the less popular party (measured by votes) into power. Meanwhile nothing the voters could do could oust the FDP leader from the Foreign Ministry. Only the 4th party finally did.
I.e. the third largest party can decide who is PM. The lower the Gallagher Index of an electoral system, i.e. the more proportional it is, the worse the problem becomes!
Russia and China are what happen when you have an alliance between the old media, new media and one political faction and they use that alliance to silence opponents of that faction.
That in itself should make you sceptical when social media companies aligned to the Democrats all get behind a 'grassroots' campaign for more government regulation. Actually the 'Russians under the bed' scare about the last election is the same thing - it's the Democrats and old media pushing new media to be even more censorious to stop 'foreign subversion'. They know FB's censorship is a blunt instrument and that intensifying it will catch a lot of other people as false positives.
Funnily enough Putin did exactly the same thing. He passed a foreign agents law, ostensibly to clamp down on US funded NGOs.
Of course in practice it caught organisations like Memorial, whose main sin seems to be exposing Soviet era mass murder of political opponents of the regime in concentration camps.
The third-world goat-herder who is now the head of the FCC
I bet the people here who say tell you not to listen to Weev because he's a racist won't have a problem with this. Even though Ajit Pai was actually born in the USA and neither he nor his parents were 'goat herders'.
The son of Konkani immigrants from India, Pai was born on January 10, 1973, in Buffalo, New York. He grew up in rural Parsons, Kansas. Both of his parents were doctors at the county hospital.
Pai attended Harvard University where he participated in the Harvard Speech & Parliamentary Debate Society. He earned a B.A. with honors in Social Studies from Harvard in 1994 and a J.D. from the University of Chicago in 1997, where he was an editor of the University of Chicago Law Review and won the Thomas J. Mulroy Prize.
Which shows that racism is not actually a bad thing to them, they just use accusations of it as an ad hominem argument to attack people they disagree with rather than addressing the arguments those people make.
The right solution here is to use some other voting method: IRV, range voting, approval voting, whatever. It doesn't require changing the Constitution or the Electoral College, but it does require teaching math concepts to the U.S. electorate and convincing the courts that this doesn't violate "one man, one vote".
David Deutsch explains why AV is a bad idea before the UK referendum on AV vs FPTP, which FPTP won -
In all but FPTP the third largest party would be able to decide who would be Prime Minister, i.e. exactly the problem Deutsch identifies with voting systems with a reduced Gallagher Index than FPTP.
And as he points out the experience of Israel and Germany shows this is a problem in practice
@drlobomalo "evidence that PR countriesâ¦more poorly governed?" In Israel religious parties typically hold the balance of power and extract subsidies unpopular with the great majority. In Germany for 49 years the FDP with <12.8% of the vote usually chose which party would govern, twice changing sides and 3 times putting the less popular party (measured by votes) into power. Meanwhile nothing the voters could do could oust the FDP leader from the Foreign Ministry. Only the 4th party finally did.
Also look at those simulated 2010 results. The number of MPs for the third largest party increases as the system becomes more proportional. However the number of MPs for the 'Other' parties does not change by as much. This is important because as Deutsch points out the only way to stop the third largest party choosing the PM and having disproportionate power is for the fourth largest party to take over as the third largest party. However the third largest party - who is always the one proposing electoral reform - will typically say something like 'our new system makes it harder for extremists to get seats because we have a threshold'. So something like STV might have a 10% threshold before seats are assigned.
This does keep out extremists. The problem is that it defines 'extremist' as 'any party with less support than the top 3'. I.e. 'proportional representation' is simply a way to grant disproportionate power to the third largest party.
The Russian domesticated red fox is a domesticated form of the red fox (Vulpes vulpes). They are the result of an experiment which was designed to demonstrate the power of selective breeding to transform species, as described by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species. The experiment was purposely designed to replicate the process that had produced dogs from wolves, by recording the changes in foxes, when in each generation only the most tame foxes were allowed to breed. In short order, the descendant foxes became tamer and more dog-like.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole US mobile market has been kept alive for ages by people who think getting a free iPhone in return for signing a $60 a month two year contract is a good deal.
There are two possibilities. One is that journalists are innumerate journalism school grads. The other is that they're highly numerate and in fact geniuses of the level of Ramanujan but have a twisted sense of humour. Each figure they toss out is designed to make one possible rationalisation of all the previous figures untenable, until at the end of the article a numerate reader is forced to declare one or more of the figures a typo and work with the rest. Though with a sneaking sense that the decision as to which figure to ignore in order to produce a self consistent narrative is subjective and thus quantitatively speaking the article is entirely meaningless.
An astute player of the game will obviously aim for the mathematically beautiful result that the largest possible consistent subset of the figures they have quoted is 1, i.e. each figure is inconsistent with all the other ones.
Maybe this is what people learn at journalism school.
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/...
Well I'm not American and don't live in America so none of this really affects my career.
You are another of these Russian troll cunts
Yeah right. I'm much more pro-US than I am pro Russia or China.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
E.g. I was pro US ABM deployments in Eastern Europe
https://politics.slashdot.org/...
And nothing I said was antisemitic - in fact I criticized Soros for selling out his own people.
Don't worry about the vegetarians and vegans. They won't be with us for long
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Could be worse than that. Read your post apocalyptic literature.
If the US or any modern country crashed completely people in the cities are going to die off pretty badly due to crime, disease, hunger and so on. Cut off the water and sewage and you'll get spectacular disease outbreaks in a densely populated urban environment. The average densely populated urban environment in the US has unarmed bourgeois, domesticated types a few days walk at most (or a few hours drive) from an area with a lot of criminals, many armed. While civilisation holds, the police keep them apart. If it failed all hell would break lose.
And as people have observed civilisation is 'three meals from revolution'. Cities need to import food from the countryside.
People out in the country with an artesian well, solar panels, a stockpile of food, the land to grow more and a lot of guns to ward off scavengers/hunt game would fare better.
Arguably city dwellers like more government because they're dependent on government. Rural types are less dependent and therefore less keen. In a worst case scenario, it's pretty clear the rural types are better place to survive.
People divesting from the cities could be a leading indicator of collapse.
It was Hungary were he was helping the Nazis round up Jews.
And he made his comments about guilt as an adult in 1998.
He was thirteen when he did it. I think I'd have known helping the Nazis round up my people was wrong when I was thirteen.
I screwed up that link about the Democrats getting a remarkable 98% of Google's employees donations compared the tech industry average of 53%
http://money.cnn.com/2005/02/1...
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Google Inc. employees took out their wallets and showed overwhelming support for the Democratic Party last year, according to a report Monday in USA Today.
A USA Today campaign finance analysis found that, of the company's overall political contributions, 98 percent went to Democrats, the biggest share among top tech donors.
The online search company's employees gave $207,650 to federal candidates during last year's election campaign, which includes the White House race between Democrat John Kerry and the winning incumbent Republican, President Bush. The contributions were up from just $250 in 2000 when Google was a start-up, according to the paper.
The paper said that 53 percent of the broader tech industry's $25.9 million went to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign finance.
They were too busy hunting down dangerous people like StyxHexenHammer666 who got his whole channel shut down for violating community guidelines.
StyxHexenHammer666 Has Been Terminated
What were the last videos he uploaded?
Google to Derank RT and Sputnik to Protect Users from Wrongthink
Democrat Meltdown Continues as Clinton and Obama Camps Begin to Attack One Another
Vermont Issues 127: Someone Destroyed 300 Gallons of Maple Syrup During a Robbery
I.e. criticize Google who own Youtube or the Democrats (a href="">who got 98% of Google employees donations) and your whole channel gets shut down for violating community guidelines. Upload weird paedobait and nothing happens. Until the advertisers start pulling ads - I bet that will make Google do something. StyxHexenHammer666's channel is back up, but I bet that's only because other Youtubers like The Thinkery made videos asking why his channel had been pulled. If he was less well known, his channel would probably have disappeared.
Soros is Jewish. He went to live with a non Jewish family and posed as a non Jew. And while he was doing that he worked collecting money from Jews. And even years later he doesn't seem to see anything wrong with what he did - see the 60 minutes interview I posted. It's really bizarre.
http://message.snopes.com/show...
KROFT: My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted godson.
Mr. SOROS: Yes. Yes.
KROFT: Went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.
Mr. SOROS: Yes. That's right. Yes.
KROFT: I mean, that's -- that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?
Mr. SOROS: Not -- not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don't -- you don't see the connection. But it was -- it created no -- no problem at all.
KROFT: No feeling of guilt?
Mr. SOROS: No.
KROFT: For example that, 'I'm Jewish and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be there. I should be there.' None of that?
Mr. SOROS: Well, of course I c -- I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn't be there, because that was -- well, actually, in a funny way, it's just like in markets -- that if I weren't there -- of course, I wasn't doing it, but somebody else would -- would -- would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the -- whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the -- I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.
It's hard to imagine Karl Popper - who coined the term 'Open Society' which Soros named his Open Society Foundations after - having a similarly disconnected view of morality where it doesn't matter if you collaborate with evil because if you didn't do it someone else would.
AV sucks for leadership elections too. E.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
David Miliband won every round but the last one and every constituency but the 'affiliated organisations' ie mostly trade unions and would have won outright in a single round FPTP contest.
His dorky brother Ed managed pick up second preference votes of other third, fourth and fifth most popular candidates who dropped out and came out 1.4% ahead. Arguably his whole campaign was aimed at offsetting the fact he wasn't particularly popular for first round votes by trying people to instead rank him second preference. He also offered the unions as many concessions as possible.
Ed wasn't seen as a credible PM by either members or MPs. David would have been which is why he won those constituencies, right up to the last round. Labour went on to lose to the Conservatives.
tl;dr - AV elected the wrong leader and Labour lost the election because of it. The only reason you would want a party to adopt it over FPTP is if you want them to lose.
It's easy to 'survive' if you help out the people doing the roundups
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
As opposed to being totally happy with being associated with Warcraft which is basically the video game equivalent of crack cocaine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Instant-runoff voting (IRV), also known as the alternative vote (AV) or transferable vote, is a voting method used in single-seat elections with more than two candidates. (It is also sometimes referred to as "ranked-choice voting" (RCV) and "preferential voting", although there are other preferential voting methods that use ranked-choice ballots.)
Duverger's Law suggests that FPTP leads to two party systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In political science, Duverger's law holds that plurality-rule elections (such as first past the post) structured within single-member districts tend to favor a two-party system and that "the double ballot majority system and proportional representation tend to favor multipartism".[1][2] The discovery of this tendency is attributed to Maurice Duverger, a French sociologist who observed the effect and recorded it in several papers published in the 1950s and 1960s. In the course of further research, other political scientists began calling the effect a "law" or principle.
In fact the strongest argument against FPTP is 'it is unfair to anyone but the first and second parties and this makes it hard for a third party to take over from them'. I.e. you end up with a cosy duopoly. And that seems to be the case. Voters general punish the party in government by voting for 'THE opposition', aka the second most popular party. In the UK system where the party leader becomes PM on winning an election opposition parties traditionally try to maximize the chance of this by having the leader of an unsuccessful opposition party resign on the party losing an election. A new leader takes over and rejigs the policies a bit and hopes that he or she will benefit from the PM's party losing popularity. In the US primaries mean parties automagically select the most popular candidate, at least internally, for their presidential nominee.
Of course this system is flawed. It's possible to imagine a policy which both of the two 'main' parties approve of but which is unpopular with the majority of the electorate. Up to the BREXIT vote for example, EU membership was unpopular but both Conservative and Labour (and in fact the Lib Dems) supported it. After the referendum both Labour and Conservative switched their policies to support BREXIT.
So the argument against FPTP is that by switching to a more proportional system it is easier for smaller parties to gain representation and hence power. Deutsch's point is that this tends to give the third largest party disproportionate influence and there is nothing the electorate can do to change this - only the fourth largest party taking over from the third largest party can change who has the undue influence, the undue influence itself is not possible to change, other than by convincing the government to change the electoral system to FPTP. Which would probably mean convincing them to hold a referendum and then winning it.
Deutsch also points out that FPTP fulfills what he calls 'Popper's Criterion' - i.e. that it is possible for the electorate to remove and replace the government peacefully. This is particularly important in a 'cabinet accountable to parliament' government system like the UK. Under FPTP if a party loses and election it normally loses all power. And if a party wins and election it normally gets a majority and a chance to implement its manifesto. Under a more proportional system, this is less likely to be the case - you normally get a coalition and an party which failed to get the most votes in an election might be able to form a coalition with the third largest party.
I think on balance I support FPTP, at least for the UK and for the moment. I could be persuaded to support a different system if it were more proportional for all parties and not just the third. E.g. STV with no additional threshold. That way you could imagine a 'left bloc' and a 'right bloc', rather like they have in Sweden
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
No single party has won a majority in the Riksdag since 1968. Political parties with similar agendas consequently cooperate on several issues, forming coalition governments or other formalized alliances. Two major blocs exist in parliament, the socialist/green R
IRV is another term for AV. And the argument for non FPTP voting systems is that they are more proportional. You measure 'proportionality' using the Gallagher Index. And AV has a lower Gallagher Index than FPTP
The Guardian, which supported AV say that it wouldn't affect the results of the 2010 election
https://www.theguardian.com/po...
However that's not actually true.
Here are the vote shares
Conservative: 36.10%
Labour: 29%
Lib Dem: 23%
Others: 11.90%
Under FPTP you got these numbers of seats. You can work out the Gallagher Index using the formula here
Conservative: 306
Labour: 258
Lib Dem: 57
Others: 28
Gallagher Index: 15.73
Under AV you'd get
Conservative: 281
Labour: 262
Lib Dem: 79
Others: 28
Gallagher Index: 13.30
Under AV+
Conservative: 275
Labour: 234
Lib Dem: 110
Others: 31
Gallagher Index: 9.36
Under STV
Conservative: 246
Labour: 207
Lib Dem: 162
Others: 35
Gallagher Index: 5.35
Now a majority in the UK parliament is 326 seats. If you add up Conservative+Lib Dem and Labour+Lib Dem for each you find that only under FPTP is there one possible coalition partner for the Lib Dems, the third largest party, i.e. the Conservatives. Under all the other, lower Gallagher Index which is to say more proportional systems the Lib Dems would be able to form a coalition with either the Conservatives or Labour.
This is exactly the problem David Deutsch was pointing out here in his video opposing AV
In Germany for 49 years the FDP with <12.8% of the vote usually chose which party would govern, twice changing sides and 3 times putting the less popular party (measured by votes) into power. Meanwhile nothing the voters could do could oust the FDP leader from the Foreign Ministry. Only the 4th party finally did.
I.e. the third largest party can decide who is PM. The lower the Gallagher Index of an electoral system, i.e. the more proportional it is, the worse the problem becomes!
Russia and China are what happen when you have an alliance between the old media, new media and one political faction and they use that alliance to silence opponents of that faction.
That in itself should make you sceptical when social media companies aligned to the Democrats all get behind a 'grassroots' campaign for more government regulation. Actually the 'Russians under the bed' scare about the last election is the same thing - it's the Democrats and old media pushing new media to be even more censorious to stop 'foreign subversion'. They know FB's censorship is a blunt instrument and that intensifying it will catch a lot of other people as false positives.
Funnily enough Putin did exactly the same thing. He passed a foreign agents law, ostensibly to clamp down on US funded NGOs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Of course in practice it caught organisations like Memorial, whose main sin seems to be exposing Soviet era mass murder of political opponents of the regime in concentration camps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Putin sees exposing that as being treasonous. Which makes you wonder how far he's willing to go to cling to power.
The third-world goat-herder who is now the head of the FCC
I bet the people here who say tell you not to listen to Weev because he's a racist won't have a problem with this. Even though Ajit Pai was actually born in the USA and neither he nor his parents were 'goat herders'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The son of Konkani immigrants from India, Pai was born on January 10, 1973, in Buffalo, New York. He grew up in rural Parsons, Kansas. Both of his parents were doctors at the county hospital.
Pai attended Harvard University where he participated in the Harvard Speech & Parliamentary Debate Society. He earned a B.A. with honors in Social Studies from Harvard in 1994 and a J.D. from the University of Chicago in 1997, where he was an editor of the University of Chicago Law Review and won the Thomas J. Mulroy Prize.
Which shows that racism is not actually a bad thing to them, they just use accusations of it as an ad hominem argument to attack people they disagree with rather than addressing the arguments those people make.
The right solution here is to use some other voting method: IRV, range voting, approval voting, whatever. It doesn't require changing the Constitution or the Electoral College, but it does require teaching math concepts to the U.S. electorate and convincing the courts that this doesn't violate "one man, one vote".
David Deutsch explains why AV is a bad idea before the UK referendum on AV vs FPTP, which FPTP won -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And note his argument would apply to any voting system which was more proportional (i.e. had a reduced Gallagher Index) than FPTP.
Here's the 2010 UK general election under various systems
https://i.imgur.com/YFhke.gif
In all but FPTP the third largest party would be able to decide who would be Prime Minister, i.e. exactly the problem Deutsch identifies with voting systems with a reduced Gallagher Index than FPTP.
And as he points out the experience of Israel and Germany shows this is a problem in practice
@drlobomalo "evidence that PR countriesâ¦more poorly governed?" In Israel religious parties typically hold the balance of power and extract subsidies unpopular with the great majority. In Germany for 49 years the FDP with <12.8% of the vote usually chose which party would govern, twice changing sides and 3 times putting the less popular party (measured by votes) into power. Meanwhile nothing the voters could do could oust the FDP leader from the Foreign Ministry. Only the 4th party finally did.
Also look at those simulated 2010 results. The number of MPs for the third largest party increases as the system becomes more proportional. However the number of MPs for the 'Other' parties does not change by as much. This is important because as Deutsch points out the only way to stop the third largest party choosing the PM and having disproportionate power is for the fourth largest party to take over as the third largest party. However the third largest party - who is always the one proposing electoral reform - will typically say something like 'our new system makes it harder for extremists to get seats because we have a threshold'. So something like STV might have a 10% threshold before seats are assigned.
This does keep out extremists. The problem is that it defines 'extremist' as 'any party with less support than the top 3'. I.e. 'proportional representation' is simply a way to grant disproportionate power to the third largest party.
Is he a Canadian by any chance? You can't trust those maple syrup guzzling seal clubbers!
The only redeeming quality about China is a lack of Muslims.
Uyghur, please.
The Russians did an interesting experiment with foxes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The Russian domesticated red fox is a domesticated form of the red fox (Vulpes vulpes). They are the result of an experiment which was designed to demonstrate the power of selective breeding to transform species, as described by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species. The experiment was purposely designed to replicate the process that had produced dogs from wolves, by recording the changes in foxes, when in each generation only the most tame foxes were allowed to breed. In short order, the descendant foxes became tamer and more dog-like.
Actually the National Review is pretty much the in house journal of Never Trump Republicans.
https://www.politico.com/story...
Still that doesn't make the law they cite any less real.
That was actually an interesting read.