All parties have the same barrier to enter, it's just that these two parties have neough people to overcome them easily.
No, not really. The two parties are in a monopoly position without any regulation.
disrespect for authority for the sake of disrespect for authority is crap.
I would say hold authority accountable, give respect to a person, not a position, when earned.
I mentioned disrespect for authority because humans are psychologically inclined to respect and trust authority figures more than they should. This was confirmed with some pretty interesting experiments a while back. So, it is not disrespect for disrespect's sake, but disrespect for the sake of balancing your unconscious, natural tendencies which shady authority figures could exploit. Your last sentence basically matches what I think.
Inform people of what? whose information? what you think they should hear? what I think?
Of alternative viewpoints on current events. I do not want to offend any of you, but your mainstream media offers basically one viewpoint on most issues, if that, because a lot of important issues simply get ignored. This might not seem like the case if you don't know how variety and proper public service news looks like, but it sure looks bad from a Japanese and European (especially the BBC)'s perspective.
So, you need to start debating and informing people about issues and facts, and start asking hard questions. How does the budget look like? What are you spending money on? How do you want to fix economic problems? What did other countries do in the world when faced with problem x,y,z? It is important that people get reminded that there are much more pressing issues than gay marriage. You need to ask these questions from the people and provide informative, alternative viewpoints and answers to these questions.
Ever wondered why tough questions and hard facts can only be presented by a comedian in the USA? You ought to know that Stephen Colbert isn't that popular because he's that funny, he's popular because he's cutting through the media silence.
In my country we call the bills that address multiple distinct issues salad bills and they are politically frowned upon. The moral thing to do is to vote no to any (salad) bills unless you agree with all of its provisions.
I'm not trying to defend McCain, just saying he might have voted against this bill for other reasons than supporting torture.
Ummm...I don't want to appear especially dense, but...why?
To put it bluntly because there are no laws against monopoly in politics and even if they were that's about as useful as worrying about security vulnerabilities from a root account on linux.It would be unworkable anyway from a civil liberty viewpoint.
Two party systems tend to form cartells on the long term, which means that the two parties do not offer alternatives on all fronts, which means basically you are being dictated in various matters instead of choosing: foreign policy, economic policy, military policy. Republicans and democrats have famously similar views on the two. Sure, they try to keep up the illusion of difference, but it's just a different coat of paint for the most part.
In order to have a democracy, you have to allow new parties to enter the political scene to cater to new and different viewpoints of the citizens.
While I agree that the average person is stupid and half of the people are even more stupid than that, but I think I'd take the unintentional cohesion of the majority over the organized dictatorship of a minority. It is always the majority that should be ruling, because you can't convince 51% of the people to kill the other 49%, because you'd have trouble reaching 10% against a 90% who is against violence he/she sees as threatening to him/herself.
We have a two party system because of the economy of votes and most voters being satisfied with one or the other party mostly; not because the system is built this way.
Well first of all, there is ample evidence that the system is built this way, and also there is ample evidence that most voters aren't satisfied with neither party. The voter turnout is spectacularly low in the USA, for one. There is no difference between the two political parties in many respect, for example it's two parties with one foreign policy, one defense policy, one tax policy. You get what you get no matter if you like it or not.
it doesn't serve my voting interests to vote for a third party unless those are the only issues I really care about. The result of going 3rd party means that the party with whom I share a lot of ideas with is going to lose out against a party that I share nothing with, and my 3rd party won't ever have the votes to get a President in, so it serves my interests more to vote Republican.
If you're completely satisfied with the republican party and cannot imagine a third party that you'd be more inclined to support, that is fine. However, if you can, I think Douglas Adams put it more eloquently than I ever could:
"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and
coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced
down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so
straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders
are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the
people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse,
"why don't people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got
the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government
they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they
want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong
lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
Extra funding for candidates helps, but the main reason the two party system exists is because small parties are prevented from gaining traction due to the first past the goalpost structure of elections, which prevents smaller parties from getting exposure and being able to build up trust, media presence and support. Public funding to major candidates most likely just makes the issue worse, but it isn't the root cause.
On a related note, here in Hungary all parties that get more than 1% percentage support in the general election's party list vote (we vote both for members of parliament and party lists) gets financial support from the government, although these funds aren't that much for the large parties, this helps the smaller ones to get started a lot.
I guess this would be a good time to point out that we live in a republic that uses democracy to elect officials, and the president isn't over the people as much as he is the states. You can't stop thinking states and think people because the role of the federal government is to govern the states, not the people. That is why the states elect the president.
From my viewpoint democracy is an attribute of country, it is not a tool. You aren't using "democracy to elect officials", you're living in a semi-democracy because of the way you elect your government. Whether your country is a republic or not is completely orthogonal to the issue. There are lots of federal republics (like the Argentine Republic, The Commonwealth of Australia, the Republic of Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Federative Republic of Brazil, the Federal Republic of Germany, etc.) that manage to be democratic and lots that don't.
Saying that a president is the president of states and not people is weak sophistry to say your country isn't as democratic as it claims to be. The role of your federal government is to protect the interests of the whole of the people of the USA, not just those in specific states.
You aren't seriously advocating making the world less free by mandating or somehow compelling everyone to voting because of some hypothetical that the world might become less free are you?
Most likely I wouldn't resort to mandate compulsory voting, but the idea isn't that mad itself. The finer points of a democracy can be argued upon and living in a democracy apart from having rights means having a different set of duties aswell compared to a dictatorship. Some countries and line of thinking say that people should actually participate in public life and that it's one of the duties of a citizen. Our word, "idiot" comes actually from the greek idiotés, which was the term used for people in the athenian democracy who refused to take part in public life, by voting and expressing their opinion at least. It is important to keep in mind that free and democratic are overlapping concepts, but they aren't the same.
There is no evidence though, that it would have weekended the law.
Yes, there is. What was a good decision in the case of press freedom would have had extremely devastating consequences for the VRA. Plausible deniability is what politicians thrive on.
I agree that quotas are a bad idea, because that makes things less democratic, but that wasn't the gist of the bill. Reagan only signed it because he had no other choice, but by looking at his actions he wasn't doing it willingly by any standards.
Well, except for those million dollar subs are largely being spent on American companies:) The military industrial complex consumes quite a bit of money, but so does the cosmetics industry. The point is that that "pork," while possibly wasteful for the country as a whole, is going to largely American jobs.
Give me 100 billion dollars then. I promise I'll spend it all in the USA. What you're advocating is a quite flimsy defense. If you want to keep american jobs, help to make them more viable by direct funds, instead of dump billions of dollars into a corporate moneyhole from which "some, might trickle back to the economy and create a few jobs". That way only some corporations get rich, for example see what kind of service is provided by Halliburton in Iraq and what you actually get for the stuff.
My point was to hilight the difference and that the constitutional justification for assigning the president veto power is weak, most likely it would be possible to interpret the constitution in ways which would say he doesn't actually have veto powers, or just in a very limited way.
A direct vote would be the worse thing possible. This would ensure that the largely concentrates population centers would forever dictate to the other states. Look at the red blue maps of the last two presidential elections. It worked the way it was supposed to because as you can see, the vast majority of the staes supported one candidate over the other. The idea that all of the east and west coast can dictate by population size, the course of events to the other 40 or so states is simply ridiculous.
Yeah, what would happen if the majority of the people would matter, like in a democracy, and not arbitrary appropriations in electoral seats. Clearly the world would end.</sarcarsm> Stop thinking in states and start thinking in people.
In a free world, you have a right to not have a say in who governs you.
In a free world, you have a choice to not say anything about who governs you. Important distinction. If people do this en-masse history shows that the "world" won't stay free for long.
Oh yea, why don't you list these critical portion Reagan wanted to remove.
Sure. I've already detailed it in another post. The gist of it is that Reagan wanted the VRA to only apply if it can be shown that the changes were made with the intent of causing discrimination. That would have weakened the law to almost nothing, because like the case of the press shows where such law (and interpretation of it) exist and most likely is a good thing (no responsibility for what you write unless deliberate lieing can be shown), it makes enforcing the law like that nearly impossible.
Except the constitution says the president has veto power.
The constitution was careful not to use the word "veto", but rather refers to the president's consent or something like that. Basically, the pres. doesn't have absolute veto powers.
However, I maintain that 19% is still way too much, especially if you consider that Iraq and Afghanistan are financed outside the scope of the regular military budget in a supplementary budget form and that military discretionary spending amounts to more than half of the total federal discretionary spending.[1]
I'd also note that lumping together Social Security, Medicaid, Unemployment and welfare is a bit unfair, because Social Security is a between-generations pay pension scheme (20.2%) and Unemployment + welfare constitutes 12.7% of the budget, which in my opinion leans more heavily on the unemployment side rather than welfare.
However, the real shocker is that only 0.8% of the budget is spent on science and technology.
That's a pretty serious accusation. Do you have any details on that? I googled this speech, which includes the following (...)
Reagan's civil rights record is pretty flimsy, but the issue is complex. Reagan attempted to gut the Voting Rights Act in 1982. I don't think I need to emphasize that whatever Reagan was saying in his speech - it doesn't matter, actions matter. Apart from the 1982 extension of the expiring sections of Voting Rights Act, which was made possible due to a 2/3rd majority support in Congress, Reagan tried to veto the Civil Rights Restoration Act in 1988 but failed to block the law which, "expands the reach of non-discrimination laws within private institutions receiving federal funds". Returning to the 1982 extension of the VRA though, I quote:
IN 1980, H0WEVER, the Supreme Court dealt voting rights enforcement a significant setback. In City of Mobile v. Bolden, the Court narrowly interpreted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, as well as the Voting Rights Act, holding that the government must prove that any change in voting practices that harm minorities was actually motivated by discriminatory intent in order to establish a violation.
WHEN IT RENEWED the Voting Rights Act in 1982, Congress overturned the Bolden ruling despite the objections of the Reagan administration.
But then again, I'm not sure what you'd expect from a President who said back in 1981, that "Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do."
Not that I would be a democrat, but the politically incited hatrade and terminology against a "welfare state" has always been unfounded.
Do you guys have any idea how small amount of money do the social programs consume compared to the military budget? The difference is likely around or more than a hundredfold. The size of the military budget in the USA stayed the same even under democrat controlled Congress and Senate and it stayed the same even after the collapse of the Soviet Union (ok, there was a 7% budget cut - almost nothing, but it was increased again later).
No, actually, it's really not inherently set up that way. Read this info about how loosely-organized parties are.
Party structure is an orthogonal issue really. I think I need to qualify that by "the system" I meant the structure of the state, the voting and legal processes. There is a winner takes all mentality, which favors large parties, but the winner takes all method only requires a relative majority. This means that looking at the trend (voter turnout, party popularity ratings) in the last few years, less than half of the citizens of the USA get represented. The food companies discovered in the 1960s that there isn't a single platonic "perfect" product that satisfies everyone, but rather there are multiple clusters of tastes. This observation is elusive until you realise it and then it seems really obvious.
Unfortunately the political system still didn't catch up to the idea of proportional representation. The President of the USA should be elected by direct vote aswell or by Congress/Senate, not by the ancient system of electors.
We do, but we usually either do it poorly or not at all -- most folks don't get classes in critical thinking until they're in college, and not all colleges require that students take a dedicated class in critical thinking, often feeling that critical thinking is something that students will pick up as they go along (yeah, right)
Critical thinking isn't a class you can complete and say, "oh I've got critical thinking V and enconomics IV", it is more of an attitude and worldview, one which should be, I agree, presented early in education, possibly at early highschool level.
Look through the link above, (it's above what I linked to) and check out that really means -- we have a two-party system because that's what it 'defaulted' to, not because anyone went out of their way to set it up that way.
Yes and no. It defaulted to a two party system because the rules were set up in a way that favors a two party system. I don't believe the goal was to set up a two party system, but rather the goal was to set up a very stable political system, which in turn meant fixing the system into concrete, which in turn favors a two party system. The ruling elite wanted a very stable system in their interests, because to put it bluntly, it is in their interests that the economy remains in their hands and so corporations, personal property, contracts are considered sacred even when in conflict with other fundamental rights. The system is a slow moving beast that has made some concessions towards the people only when it was absolutely necessary and the stability of the system demanded it, but in general it serves the interests of corporations and the elite, as it has always had.
You would think that such fundamental, hard won freedoms like the right to vote are universally respected today, but not that many people know that even though the civil war was partly fought due to abolitionist reasons, it wasn't until 1965 that black people received federal protection that guaranteed their ability to vote. Even later, under Reagan, he wanted to remove critical portions of the Voting Rights Act, because black people weren't likely to vote for him. Congress blocked his attempt.
You have a two party system because the system is built in a way to favor a two party system, smaller parties have huge barriers of entry and they cannot gain traction.
Of course as ultimately a society is determined by the people composing it, the responsibility belongs to the people for the state of matters, but the current sitation is different than just living in a two party system and most people accepting it.
Consider voter turnout, it is considered very low, even for a (sort-of) democratic country. People would vote for other parties, but those parties never get the chance to gain traction due to the built-in favorism in the system towards major power blocks. Ultimately, this is going to be an uphill battle for you guys, you need to change the way your system works and probably the most success you'd have is by going on a roundabout way on this matter: start from education, from history: do not worship your founding fathers because they established this system (even if it was considered enlightened in their age), teach critical thinking, disrespect for authority, establish independent information channels, inform, inform, inform. Tell people about things they don't want to hear: individual social responsibility, collective action for the individual (but overally positive-sum) good, etc.
It prevents Congress from becoming too radical. Go study "checks and balances"
All it does is give more power to the president. I guess I'm "radical" like Congress in wanting to ban this form of torture. I would say that I can't remember a single presidential veto that was a good thing in the past 50 years, but I can remember plenty of them that were bad. Checks and balances is a poor justification on this level, because the executive should not be overwriting the legislative in my opinion. I believe a nice compromise would be if the president could send the bill to the supreme court for a constitutionality check and suspend signing the bill into law until the court decides. That system works elsewhere with quite good results.
I think that a stronger Congress and a weaker president is better, because it makes things less radical and responsibility is divided more evenly. It would also make people able to vote for representatives locally who could eventually influence things, but while the president is too powerful change is not possible if you have to gain the presidential seat to actually do anything, given the state of media and related issues.
If you have 80 or more cores, I'd rather have 20 of them support specialty functions and be able to do them very fast (it would have to be a few (1-3) orders of magnitude faster than the general counterpart) and the rest do general processing. This of course needs the support of operating systems, but that isn't very hard to get. With 80 cores caching and threading models have to be rethought, especially caching - the operating system has to be more involved in caching than it currently is, because otherwise cache coherency won't be able to be done.
This also means that programs will need to be written not just by using threads, "which makes it okay for multi-core", but with cpu cache issues and locality in mind. I think VMs like JVM, Parrot and.NET will be much more popular as it is possible for them to take care a lot of these issues, which isn't or only possible in a limited way for languages like C and friends with static source code inspection.
Yeah, that's what they have. They agree to give us music and we agree to pay a dollar per song. It's fair because both parties agree to it. It would not be fair to say "no, you have to give me the music for free after you've made enough money", unless of course they agreed to it. Likewise it wound not be fair for them to say, "you have to give me a dollar". It's the fact that both sides agree to it that makes it fair. This is not rocket science.
"I will not shoot you unless you give me all your money" is a fair deal too, by this definition because both parties agree to it. Do not play wordgames with me please.
Saying that they have enough money, so they shouldn't make more is suggesting otherwise. Duh!
I didn't say they shouldn't make more - I said they have more than enough money and the deal from society's end has been fulfilled multiple times, so it is time the deed is fulfilled from the artist's side aswell. The deal is "the government grants you a monopoly on your work for limited times to promote the progress of science and useful arts". After the limited times is up, society receives it's compensation: the work lapses into the public domain.
Then don't pay it. They're not forcing you to buy it at gunpoint.
I didn't buy it, however I aquired it legally.
You could say that about any kind of property ownership. I don't see what it matters. I honestly don't see any reason copyright should ever expire (though in practice, it will basically expire once everyone who wants one has a copy, so there is a practical limit). Some people say that it should expire when the artist dies, but what it the artists wants to sell the future value of the work? They should be able to do that.
Copyright is not property, it is a license for a monopoly. In my opinion copyright should not exist or should expire within 5 years at the most, because only that allows society to create derivative works - which is important because all human progress is iterative - and a short copyright term would still allow the vast majority of profits to be made from a given copyrighted work. In case of abolished copyright people would just adapt to the changed economic conditions and continue to produce things as always.
If copyright would never expire that would be theft - society held up it's end of the bargain, authors should too. Copyright is given to create an incentive for creating things that eventually fall into the public domain and can be built upon. Perpetual copyright goes against the whole thing. An artist selling "the future value" of the work would commit theft, as it would steal the opportunity from society to create derivative works, to build upon the work, to archive it for the interests of historical record or do whatever it wants with the copyrighted work without any kinds of permission from the author - the lease time period is up and the author should hand the work back to society where it came from.
So if you are able to get buy on the wages you are making, you would turn down your next raise, right?
Getting a raise means that the employer considers it a fair deal to give me that raise. It means the agreement is mutually agreeable. I don't expect rich copyright holders who game the system to stop wanting to preserve the copyright system (which is what your false analogy supposed), but I would expect society as a whole (being the other party to the copyright agreement), to negotiate a fair deal, which is still agreeable to the artists, but much better for society.
Oh wait, we're not communists in this country
I very much doubt you're hungarian, so I'll assume you're talking about the USA. I'm not communist either, in fact my family and my country have been hurt by those people enormously.
so people expect to be paid what they're worth, not what they need.
This is why it is called a deal between two opposing interests and not a unilateral decision. I do not see who suggested otherwise.
This is America, it's from each according to his abilities to each according to his abilities in this country.
It saddens me that while not a citizen of the USA I probably know much more about the history of your country and the facts that make your statement so utterly false, than most people in your country.
If the music is worth a dollar to you, pay a dollar for it. If it's not, don't listen to it.
Some things are more complex than just price. Do I think the music is great? Yeah, I do. But what does it mean that the music is worth a dollar to me? Do I think the "seller" of the music deserves a dollar in compensation? No, I don't. Would I be willing to buy the particular music in a data format for $1? The answer is no again. I can get it legally, for free. I haven't paid anything for it and I'm still listening to it. I do not think that's immoral or wrong, after all someone (actually, a lot of someones) have already paid for this given piece of music and I didn't deprive those people of anything. They have merely passed this music on to me at no cost to The Beatles.
I advocate the renegotiation of the copyright deal between society and well, basically society (since everyone is a copyright holder, but only a very small percentage of us profit from it). The deal enforced by the government, so ultimately the people creates a monopoly on content for long decades, which is the exact opposite of "people expect to be paid what they're worth, not what they need", because it makes a fair deal impossible. Therefor either the monopoly has to be abolished or the government has to keep the interests of the people in mind and reneogiate the deal. Since the deal is ridiculously unfair and the government is not willing (or in case of my country - incapable) to renegotiate, the people have to take action to both change the government and oppose the deal.
It can be as simple as paying 10 euros per day when you are abroad.
It can be as simple as paying zero euros above the (already overpriced) phone charges when abroad. The same or very similar network is used to work on this principle and in a lot of cases not even based on usage. I'm sending this message using that network.
I can freely download any music or video files, even if they are under copyright protection. This is legally allowed because of a blanket tax on empty CDs, DVDs, memory disks, etc. 10% of that tax revenue goes away for administration costs and 90% is distributed based on national sales figures plus some black magic.
I haven't bought a single empty CD or DVD in the past 6 years, but I'm sure the local linux users group and system administrators are really glad they are supporting the one hit wonder of the day with their or their companies funds.
So yeah, the system is fucked and the still living Beatles members will never see a penny from the blanket tax that allows me to legally download their music for free, but then again if this action would be illegal I'd still do it.
I will break any and all laws that satisfy my little formulae with some added weights: (how strong I feel about the issue)*(my moral status on the issue) - (risk of punishment)*(severity of punishment) >= 0.
If a given action is legal and I'm morally okay about it, I'll do it. If it is illegal, it depends on how much I'm willing to sacrifice for the cause. Not all laws should be followed and there are laws that are just morally wrong. I use my own judgement primarily and I do not follow the law without thinking. That leads to facism.
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So, you need to start debating and informing people about issues and facts, and start asking hard questions. How does the budget look like? What are you spending money on? How do you want to fix economic problems? What did other countries do in the world when faced with problem x,y,z? It is important that people get reminded that there are much more pressing issues than gay marriage. You need to ask these questions from the people and provide informative, alternative viewpoints and answers to these questions.
Ever wondered why tough questions and hard facts can only be presented by a comedian in the USA? You ought to know that Stephen Colbert isn't that popular because he's that funny, he's popular because he's cutting through the media silence.
In my country we call the bills that address multiple distinct issues salad bills and they are politically frowned upon. The moral thing to do is to vote no to any (salad) bills unless you agree with all of its provisions.
I'm not trying to defend McCain, just saying he might have voted against this bill for other reasons than supporting torture.
I can't accept this explanation unless you can use it to explain multi-party broad spectrum political landscapes in various european countries.
Two party systems tend to form cartells on the long term, which means that the two parties do not offer alternatives on all fronts, which means basically you are being dictated in various matters instead of choosing: foreign policy, economic policy, military policy. Republicans and democrats have famously similar views on the two. Sure, they try to keep up the illusion of difference, but it's just a different coat of paint for the most part.
In order to have a democracy, you have to allow new parties to enter the political scene to cater to new and different viewpoints of the citizens.
That is a plutocracy you're talking about, not a democracy.
While I agree that the average person is stupid and half of the people are even more stupid than that, but I think I'd take the unintentional cohesion of the majority over the organized dictatorship of a minority. It is always the majority that should be ruling, because you can't convince 51% of the people to kill the other 49%, because you'd have trouble reaching 10% against a 90% who is against violence he/she sees as threatening to him/herself.
Extra funding for candidates helps, but the main reason the two party system exists is because small parties are prevented from gaining traction due to the first past the goalpost structure of elections, which prevents smaller parties from getting exposure and being able to build up trust, media presence and support. Public funding to major candidates most likely just makes the issue worse, but it isn't the root cause.
On a related note, here in Hungary all parties that get more than 1% percentage support in the general election's party list vote (we vote both for members of parliament and party lists) gets financial support from the government, although these funds aren't that much for the large parties, this helps the smaller ones to get started a lot.
Saying that a president is the president of states and not people is weak sophistry to say your country isn't as democratic as it claims to be. The role of your federal government is to protect the interests of the whole of the people of the USA, not just those in specific states. Most likely I wouldn't resort to mandate compulsory voting, but the idea isn't that mad itself. The finer points of a democracy can be argued upon and living in a democracy apart from having rights means having a different set of duties aswell compared to a dictatorship. Some countries and line of thinking say that people should actually participate in public life and that it's one of the duties of a citizen. Our word, "idiot" comes actually from the greek idiotés, which was the term used for people in the athenian democracy who refused to take part in public life, by voting and expressing their opinion at least. It is important to keep in mind that free and democratic are overlapping concepts, but they aren't the same. Yes, there is. What was a good decision in the case of press freedom would have had extremely devastating consequences for the VRA. Plausible deniability is what politicians thrive on.
I agree that quotas are a bad idea, because that makes things less democratic, but that wasn't the gist of the bill. Reagan only signed it because he had no other choice, but by looking at his actions he wasn't doing it willingly by any standards.
My point was to hilight the difference and that the constitutional justification for assigning the president veto power is weak, most likely it would be possible to interpret the constitution in ways which would say he doesn't actually have veto powers, or just in a very limited way.
You're right and I was ignorant. Sorry.
However, I maintain that 19% is still way too much, especially if you consider that Iraq and Afghanistan are financed outside the scope of the regular military budget in a supplementary budget form and that military discretionary spending amounts to more than half of the total federal discretionary spending.[1]
I'd also note that lumping together Social Security, Medicaid, Unemployment and welfare is a bit unfair, because Social Security is a between-generations pay pension scheme (20.2%) and Unemployment + welfare constitutes 12.7% of the budget, which in my opinion leans more heavily on the unemployment side rather than welfare. However, the real shocker is that only 0.8% of the budget is spent on science and technology.
Not that I would be a democrat, but the politically incited hatrade and terminology against a "welfare state" has always been unfounded.
Do you guys have any idea how small amount of money do the social programs consume compared to the military budget? The difference is likely around or more than a hundredfold. The size of the military budget in the USA stayed the same even under democrat controlled Congress and Senate and it stayed the same even after the collapse of the Soviet Union (ok, there was a 7% budget cut - almost nothing, but it was increased again later).
Unfortunately the political system still didn't catch up to the idea of proportional representation. The President of the USA should be elected by direct vote aswell or by Congress/Senate, not by the ancient system of electors. Critical thinking isn't a class you can complete and say, "oh I've got critical thinking V and enconomics IV", it is more of an attitude and worldview, one which should be, I agree, presented early in education, possibly at early highschool level. Yes and no. It defaulted to a two party system because the rules were set up in a way that favors a two party system. I don't believe the goal was to set up a two party system, but rather the goal was to set up a very stable political system, which in turn meant fixing the system into concrete, which in turn favors a two party system. The ruling elite wanted a very stable system in their interests, because to put it bluntly, it is in their interests that the economy remains in their hands and so corporations, personal property, contracts are considered sacred even when in conflict with other fundamental rights. The system is a slow moving beast that has made some concessions towards the people only when it was absolutely necessary and the stability of the system demanded it, but in general it serves the interests of corporations and the elite, as it has always had.
You would think that such fundamental, hard won freedoms like the right to vote are universally respected today, but not that many people know that even though the civil war was partly fought due to abolitionist reasons, it wasn't until 1965 that black people received federal protection that guaranteed their ability to vote. Even later, under Reagan, he wanted to remove critical portions of the Voting Rights Act, because black people weren't likely to vote for him. Congress blocked his attempt.
You have a two party system because the system is built in a way to favor a two party system, smaller parties have huge barriers of entry and they cannot gain traction.
Of course as ultimately a society is determined by the people composing it, the responsibility belongs to the people for the state of matters, but the current sitation is different than just living in a two party system and most people accepting it.
Consider voter turnout, it is considered very low, even for a (sort-of) democratic country. People would vote for other parties, but those parties never get the chance to gain traction due to the built-in favorism in the system towards major power blocks. Ultimately, this is going to be an uphill battle for you guys, you need to change the way your system works and probably the most success you'd have is by going on a roundabout way on this matter: start from education, from history: do not worship your founding fathers because they established this system (even if it was considered enlightened in their age), teach critical thinking, disrespect for authority, establish independent information channels, inform, inform, inform. Tell people about things they don't want to hear: individual social responsibility, collective action for the individual (but overally positive-sum) good, etc.
I think that a stronger Congress and a weaker president is better, because it makes things less radical and responsibility is divided more evenly. It would also make people able to vote for representatives locally who could eventually influence things, but while the president is too powerful change is not possible if you have to gain the presidential seat to actually do anything, given the state of media and related issues.
If you have 80 or more cores, I'd rather have 20 of them support specialty functions and be able to do them very fast (it would have to be a few (1-3) orders of magnitude faster than the general counterpart) and the rest do general processing. This of course needs the support of operating systems, but that isn't very hard to get. With 80 cores caching and threading models have to be rethought, especially caching - the operating system has to be more involved in caching than it currently is, because otherwise cache coherency won't be able to be done.
.NET will be much more popular as it is possible for them to take care a lot of these issues, which isn't or only possible in a limited way for languages like C and friends with static source code inspection.
This also means that programs will need to be written not just by using threads, "which makes it okay for multi-core", but with cpu cache issues and locality in mind. I think VMs like JVM, Parrot and
I didn't say they shouldn't make more - I said they have more than enough money and the deal from society's end has been fulfilled multiple times, so it is time the deed is fulfilled from the artist's side aswell. The deal is "the government grants you a monopoly on your work for limited times to promote the progress of science and useful arts". After the limited times is up, society receives it's compensation: the work lapses into the public domain. I didn't buy it, however I aquired it legally. Copyright is not property, it is a license for a monopoly. In my opinion copyright should not exist or should expire within 5 years at the most, because only that allows society to create derivative works - which is important because all human progress is iterative - and a short copyright term would still allow the vast majority of profits to be made from a given copyrighted work. In case of abolished copyright people would just adapt to the changed economic conditions and continue to produce things as always.
If copyright would never expire that would be theft - society held up it's end of the bargain, authors should too. Copyright is given to create an incentive for creating things that eventually fall into the public domain and can be built upon. Perpetual copyright goes against the whole thing. An artist selling "the future value" of the work would commit theft, as it would steal the opportunity from society to create derivative works, to build upon the work, to archive it for the interests of historical record or do whatever it wants with the copyrighted work without any kinds of permission from the author - the lease time period is up and the author should hand the work back to society where it came from.
No, I wasn't citing the Canadian Copyright Act, blank media tax/levy exists in a few other countries aswell other than Canada.
I advocate the renegotiation of the copyright deal between society and well, basically society (since everyone is a copyright holder, but only a very small percentage of us profit from it). The deal enforced by the government, so ultimately the people creates a monopoly on content for long decades, which is the exact opposite of "people expect to be paid what they're worth, not what they need", because it makes a fair deal impossible. Therefor either the monopoly has to be abolished or the government has to keep the interests of the people in mind and reneogiate the deal. Since the deal is ridiculously unfair and the government is not willing (or in case of my country - incapable) to renegotiate, the people have to take action to both change the government and oppose the deal.
Who said I didn't obey the law?
I can freely download any music or video files, even if they are under copyright protection. This is legally allowed because of a blanket tax on empty CDs, DVDs, memory disks, etc. 10% of that tax revenue goes away for administration costs and 90% is distributed based on national sales figures plus some black magic.
I haven't bought a single empty CD or DVD in the past 6 years, but I'm sure the local linux users group and system administrators are really glad they are supporting the one hit wonder of the day with their or their companies funds. So yeah, the system is fucked and the still living Beatles members will never see a penny from the blanket tax that allows me to legally download their music for free, but then again if this action would be illegal I'd still do it.
I will break any and all laws that satisfy my little formulae with some added weights: (how strong I feel about the issue)*(my moral status on the issue) - (risk of punishment)*(severity of punishment) >= 0.
If a given action is legal and I'm morally okay about it, I'll do it. If it is illegal, it depends on how much I'm willing to sacrifice for the cause. Not all laws should be followed and there are laws that are just morally wrong. I use my own judgement primarily and I do not follow the law without thinking. That leads to facism.