No. I'm saying that the people who founded this country didn't want a direct vote. Nothing about the effects of the electoral college is unintentional.
The "Committee of Eleven", which included Benjamin Franklin, selected this method. They did consider and reject a direct popular vote. Reference
Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson disagreed with you and wrote in detail why. You need some serious weight behind your assertion or it's just whining.
BTW, the president is different because the power of a single senator or representative has external checks and balances in the form of how they get elected and how the houses interact with each other. The executive branch has no such structure (on purpose), so the checks and balances were built into the election process itself.
I live in New York. No presidential candidate has spent any meaningful time here in my lifetime. If we switched to a popular vote, the tune wouldn't change. My house is 450 miles from New York City and 350 miles from Cleveland. There is essentially no one here. It wouldn't make economic sense to campaign here or to propose policies to appease us.
With a popular vote, New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago would get more attention; Ohio would get less. It would be different, but not better. Candidates that have policies that appease voters in high-density population centers would be able to visit more of their constituents given the same time and budget. Policies like gun control and welfare would be easier to get votes out for, while pro-farming positions would become a political death sentence.
I live in New York, so I'm well aware of how the system affect voters in non-swing states. However, I'm confident that switching to a popular vote won't make the situation any better. A pure popular vote would favor a candidate with "take from the few and give to the many" policies - in other words, Democrats.
The argument you are making is a classic Politician's Fallacy - there is a problem, so something must be done; thing is something, so this must be done.
Famous quote: "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb arguing over what's for dinner". Our country was founded on a constitution guaranteeing certain freedoms and well-considered series of checks and balances designed to preserve those freedoms. Direct democracy was considered to be a risk to the freedoms of minorities and a potential pathway to future tyranny. The electoral college was one of many rules put in place to preserve those rights. The important lesson here is that the rights enshrined in the first ten amendments of the constitution are considered much more of the foundation of this country than the purity of our democracy.
I'm all for a discussion about such things... but using the fact that in two of the past five elections, the winner lost the popular vote is not valid support that our current system is flawed.
The "most votes wins" rule is much more in need of change than the electoral college. It encourages a two-party system and forces third party candidates into Mexican stand-offs with the people they are closest to in policy. Switching to IRV or Condorcet would benefit us much more than switching to a popular vote.
Who won the popular vote is irrelevant. This election was a contest with clear rules and both candidates knew those rules. They decided where to spend their time and energy based on developing a strategy to win more electoral votes. Neither candidate was trying to increase their share of the popular vote. Had this been an election decided by the popular vote, both candidates would have behaved differently and the outcome would have likely been different.
Mentioning that Clinton won the popular vote this year is like mentioning that a losing football team had more total yards than the winning team. Sure, it's a meaningful statistic, but maybe they wouldn't have punted that one time if they were going for yards instead of points.
The point of the electoral system is to make sure that candidates spread their effort around the country rather than doing a massive get out the vote effort in the handful of places where they are already popular.
Unfortunately, this product was an example of a "bad thing". Home automation has been stuck in its infancy for thirty years due to each vendor trying to create a locked-in ecosystem instead of focusing on creating better products. Progress will continue at a snails pace until interoperation is improved. If you read the article, one of his problems was trying to connect his new gadget (kettle) to his existing gadget (Amazon Echo).
There are conflicting statistics. I'm suggesting that the parent poster cherry picked a study that shows what he wanted to say, while ignoring other studies that show that red light cameras don't improve safety at all. The nonsense argument was presented as an argument that, even if the statistics were sound, perhaps it was more of a correlation than a cause-and-effect relationship.
The study cited also makes the mistake of considering the red light program as free. Taxpayers, who bear the cost in the form of tickets, would disagree that red light cameras "pay for themselves". Since a portion goes to the vendor, at best, it turns out to be a very inefficient way of paying for marginal safety. At worst, it's a cash-grab.
This makes no sense. The most dangerous red light violations are the ones where the runner is totally oblivious to the traffic light (sleeping, drunk, talking to a passenger, etc). A camera wouldn't help under those circumstances. Red light cameras only change behavior in those cases where the driver sees running as a choice - during the first few seconds or when there is obviously no one coming on the cross street. These aren't the dangerous cases.
She gets roles because she sells tickets. She got that rep when she was young and good looking. She isn't an example of acceptance of older actresses, she's an example of the acceptance of proven ticket sales. The fact that she happens to be a good actress is irrelevant.
Hollywood is the place where they cast one of the 10 most beautiful people in the world for a role of a homely older person and then spend three hours in makeup every day getting her to look just right. And, they do this while there is a line of talented, average looking, age appropriate women around the block looking for work.
Personally, I don't think they do it because of age discrimination. I think they do it because there's only a handful of actresses that will guarantee ticket sales just by casting them. But, it certainly looks like age discrimination when you look at a case in isolation.
... or when they are involved in a plane crash. Most of the safety regulations are there to protect the emergency responders that may come to the site of an accident.
Where I used to work, we couldn't air ship some of our chemotherapy drugs. They wouldn't explode or catch fire, but if a box of them were crushed, the people who breath the air could be seriously harmed.
I weigh 152 pounds. A side-effect of my losing 100 pounds last year is a very suppressed metabolism. Studies show that it takes a very long time for BMR to recover after extended periods of under-eating, sometimes more than five years.
Doesn't apply here. If anything, I had less muscle when I was injured due to the lack of activity. Before injury, I ate about 1800 calories a day and burned 1000 between the gym and my daily four mile walk at lunchtime. After the injury, I ate the same, but didn't go to the gym or walk. On the most extreme day, my FitBit recorded 181 steps. Those were probably almost all false positives from hand movement. Yesterday, I ate my 1800 calories, but did 30,000 steps. That's close to a typical day, and I probably won't lose any weight this week - not that I want to.
Muscle burns more calorie than fat. Just to stay alive. So even when you are doing nothing, a muscular body burns more calories than a fat one.
I'm probably 11% body fat and can bench press 150% of my weight, but my BMR is around 1000 calories a day.
Stress too, if you were particularly stressed about it (during stress, the body can either accumulate -reserves in case it lasts-, or on the contrary dissipate energy -make available, thus leading to elimination if not needed on the short term).
Doubt it. I'm not the kind of person that suffers from stress.
Plus it was only a week, so as your weight had been stabilized for some time, your body tends to try to keep some balance, and didn't store much of the surplus (it's not a process as basic and systematic as some Slashdotters want to believe, although it sure is the most important point to weight loss, in most cases).
Your digestion efficiency might have been affected by your injury too (down to diarrhea).
And finally, some drugs you might have taken, can also affect both weight gain and weight loss.
Wasn't diarrhea, because that's water weight and would come back a few days after getting healthy. It wasn't just for a week, I didn't walk for three weeks and got off crutches after four and a half. The only drug I was on was Hydrocodone, and that was only for about five days.
I absolutely lost muscle mass, but I'm back to my pre-injury strength and five pounds are still missing. I'm thin enough that losing five pounds of lean mass isn't something I can do easily or quickly.
If you're fit and muscular, you don't look at your BMI result thinking "I wonder if I'm fat?". Nearly everyone who is unsure if they should lose weight and has a high BMI should lose weight. Also, there is evidence that muscular people with a high BMI may share many health problems with fat people of the same BMI. For example, carrying extra weight is correlated with shorter lifespan and increased risk of heart disease, regardless of body composition.
Also, with carbs, it's really easy to underestimate the calorie content. It doesn't seem right that a lean chicken patty can easily contain fewer calories than the bun you put it in.
I've found that when I look at a meal and think to myself "What can I take away that will remove a significant number of calories, but reduce my enjoyment of the meal as little as possible", I almost always come to the conclusion that taking the high-carb portion out works out best. Fats my be calorie dense, but 35 calories of butter can add a lot of flavor to a meal.
Another virtuous feedback benefit relates to salt. You can reduce your blood pressure by reducing salt - and suffer bland food, or you can reduce your blood pressure by losing weight and getting fit - and eat much tastier food. My BP went from 120/80 when I was overweight (borderline high), to 85/55 now that I am normal weight and very fit.
Here's the consensus: Burn more calories than you consume and you will lose weight, and try to eat some vegetables every once in a while to ensure you get some vitamins. That's about it.
Even this is a little bullshit. I lost 100 pounds last year and I had similar experiences to yours. My weight has now been stable for about eight months. This year, I suffered an injury which changed my routine, causing me to burn about 7000 fewer calories per week than my pre-injury routine (I was completely bedridden). With my reduced calorie burn and no significant changes in intake, I lost about five pounds in a few weeks. Here I am six weeks later, and the weight loss was real and permanent. This weight loss completely baffles me and can't be explained by my mental model of weight management.
The "normal" way for a company to increase their minority composition is to go out and specifically try to get minority applicants. Then, through the normal hiring process, they usually end up with more minority hires. Simple things like sending a rep to the job fair at a university with mostly black students are pretty typical ways to accomplish this. You don't even have to analyze your data - just keep "doing more" and watch the numbers go up.
A given buyer usually doesn't use the numbers to learn that a full-size truck uses less fuel than a midsize sedan, they use them to compare the vehicles they are considering buying to each other, which are almost always vehicles of the same class. The assertion is that picking the lowest window sticker MPG among a group of vehicles in the same class is no better than guessing, and I wholeheartedly agree with it.
I think that all TOS should be illegal unless they were fully negotiated by lawyers on BOTH sides - or approved by a federal agency as something that a citizen can understand and agree to without a lawyer.
The alternative I prefer is to change the law so the entire EULA is invalid if any part of it "steps over the line". Of course, the success of this strategy would depend on the quality of the definition of "step over the line".
Smart watch vendors want the customers of regular watch vendors. Many of those customers won't convert unless they feel like they're not severely downgrading the service they get. I don't feel smug, I'm simply adding my anecdote to the conversation. Your attempt to read my mind was unsuccessful.
You were part of one of the more selective programs. I got an ME degree in 1993. Every year there was a weed-out class that nearly half of the students failed. Typical freshman class is 6000 and the university typically graduates 600 per year. Our idea of a big lecture hall was 500+ students. 200+ was typical for second year classes. By the third year, nearly everything was taught in 30 person or smaller rooms due to fewer students and those students branching out into specialties.
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No. I'm saying that the people who founded this country didn't want a direct vote. Nothing about the effects of the electoral college is unintentional.
The "Committee of Eleven", which included Benjamin Franklin, selected this method. They did consider and reject a direct popular vote. Reference
Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson disagreed with you and wrote in detail why. You need some serious weight behind your assertion or it's just whining.
BTW, the president is different because the power of a single senator or representative has external checks and balances in the form of how they get elected and how the houses interact with each other. The executive branch has no such structure (on purpose), so the checks and balances were built into the election process itself.
I live in New York. No presidential candidate has spent any meaningful time here in my lifetime. If we switched to a popular vote, the tune wouldn't change. My house is 450 miles from New York City and 350 miles from Cleveland. There is essentially no one here. It wouldn't make economic sense to campaign here or to propose policies to appease us.
With a popular vote, New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago would get more attention; Ohio would get less. It would be different, but not better. Candidates that have policies that appease voters in high-density population centers would be able to visit more of their constituents given the same time and budget. Policies like gun control and welfare would be easier to get votes out for, while pro-farming positions would become a political death sentence.
I live in New York, so I'm well aware of how the system affect voters in non-swing states. However, I'm confident that switching to a popular vote won't make the situation any better. A pure popular vote would favor a candidate with "take from the few and give to the many" policies - in other words, Democrats.
The argument you are making is a classic Politician's Fallacy - there is a problem, so something must be done; thing is something, so this must be done.
Famous quote: "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb arguing over what's for dinner". Our country was founded on a constitution guaranteeing certain freedoms and well-considered series of checks and balances designed to preserve those freedoms. Direct democracy was considered to be a risk to the freedoms of minorities and a potential pathway to future tyranny. The electoral college was one of many rules put in place to preserve those rights. The important lesson here is that the rights enshrined in the first ten amendments of the constitution are considered much more of the foundation of this country than the purity of our democracy.
I'm all for a discussion about such things... but using the fact that in two of the past five elections, the winner lost the popular vote is not valid support that our current system is flawed.
The "most votes wins" rule is much more in need of change than the electoral college. It encourages a two-party system and forces third party candidates into Mexican stand-offs with the people they are closest to in policy. Switching to IRV or Condorcet would benefit us much more than switching to a popular vote.
Who won the popular vote is irrelevant. This election was a contest with clear rules and both candidates knew those rules. They decided where to spend their time and energy based on developing a strategy to win more electoral votes. Neither candidate was trying to increase their share of the popular vote. Had this been an election decided by the popular vote, both candidates would have behaved differently and the outcome would have likely been different.
Mentioning that Clinton won the popular vote this year is like mentioning that a losing football team had more total yards than the winning team. Sure, it's a meaningful statistic, but maybe they wouldn't have punted that one time if they were going for yards instead of points.
The point of the electoral system is to make sure that candidates spread their effort around the country rather than doing a massive get out the vote effort in the handful of places where they are already popular.
Unfortunately, this product was an example of a "bad thing". Home automation has been stuck in its infancy for thirty years due to each vendor trying to create a locked-in ecosystem instead of focusing on creating better products. Progress will continue at a snails pace until interoperation is improved. If you read the article, one of his problems was trying to connect his new gadget (kettle) to his existing gadget (Amazon Echo).
There are conflicting statistics. I'm suggesting that the parent poster cherry picked a study that shows what he wanted to say, while ignoring other studies that show that red light cameras don't improve safety at all. The nonsense argument was presented as an argument that, even if the statistics were sound, perhaps it was more of a correlation than a cause-and-effect relationship.
The study cited also makes the mistake of considering the red light program as free. Taxpayers, who bear the cost in the form of tickets, would disagree that red light cameras "pay for themselves". Since a portion goes to the vendor, at best, it turns out to be a very inefficient way of paying for marginal safety. At worst, it's a cash-grab.
This makes no sense. The most dangerous red light violations are the ones where the runner is totally oblivious to the traffic light (sleeping, drunk, talking to a passenger, etc). A camera wouldn't help under those circumstances. Red light cameras only change behavior in those cases where the driver sees running as a choice - during the first few seconds or when there is obviously no one coming on the cross street. These aren't the dangerous cases.
On the other hand, red light cameras increase rear-end collisions at lights. http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
She gets roles because she sells tickets. She got that rep when she was young and good looking. She isn't an example of acceptance of older actresses, she's an example of the acceptance of proven ticket sales. The fact that she happens to be a good actress is irrelevant.
Hollywood is the place where they cast one of the 10 most beautiful people in the world for a role of a homely older person and then spend three hours in makeup every day getting her to look just right. And, they do this while there is a line of talented, average looking, age appropriate women around the block looking for work.
Personally, I don't think they do it because of age discrimination. I think they do it because there's only a handful of actresses that will guarantee ticket sales just by casting them. But, it certainly looks like age discrimination when you look at a case in isolation.
... or when they are involved in a plane crash. Most of the safety regulations are there to protect the emergency responders that may come to the site of an accident.
Where I used to work, we couldn't air ship some of our chemotherapy drugs. They wouldn't explode or catch fire, but if a box of them were crushed, the people who breath the air could be seriously harmed.
I weigh 152 pounds. A side-effect of my losing 100 pounds last year is a very suppressed metabolism. Studies show that it takes a very long time for BMR to recover after extended periods of under-eating, sometimes more than five years.
Muscle burns more calorie than fat. Just to stay alive. So even when you are doing nothing, a muscular body burns more calories than a fat one.
I'm probably 11% body fat and can bench press 150% of my weight, but my BMR is around 1000 calories a day.
Healing takes more energy than you might think.
Yea, that's my guess
Stress too, if you were particularly stressed about it (during stress, the body can either accumulate -reserves in case it lasts-, or on the contrary dissipate energy -make available, thus leading to elimination if not needed on the short term).
Doubt it. I'm not the kind of person that suffers from stress.
Plus it was only a week, so as your weight had been stabilized for some time, your body tends to try to keep some balance, and didn't store much of the surplus (it's not a process as basic and systematic as some Slashdotters want to believe, although it sure is the most important point to weight loss, in most cases).
Your digestion efficiency might have been affected by your injury too (down to diarrhea).
And finally, some drugs you might have taken, can also affect both weight gain and weight loss.
Wasn't diarrhea, because that's water weight and would come back a few days after getting healthy. It wasn't just for a week, I didn't walk for three weeks and got off crutches after four and a half. The only drug I was on was Hydrocodone, and that was only for about five days.
I absolutely lost muscle mass, but I'm back to my pre-injury strength and five pounds are still missing. I'm thin enough that losing five pounds of lean mass isn't something I can do easily or quickly.
If you're fit and muscular, you don't look at your BMI result thinking "I wonder if I'm fat?". Nearly everyone who is unsure if they should lose weight and has a high BMI should lose weight. Also, there is evidence that muscular people with a high BMI may share many health problems with fat people of the same BMI. For example, carrying extra weight is correlated with shorter lifespan and increased risk of heart disease, regardless of body composition.
Also, with carbs, it's really easy to underestimate the calorie content. It doesn't seem right that a lean chicken patty can easily contain fewer calories than the bun you put it in.
I've found that when I look at a meal and think to myself "What can I take away that will remove a significant number of calories, but reduce my enjoyment of the meal as little as possible", I almost always come to the conclusion that taking the high-carb portion out works out best. Fats my be calorie dense, but 35 calories of butter can add a lot of flavor to a meal.
Another virtuous feedback benefit relates to salt. You can reduce your blood pressure by reducing salt - and suffer bland food, or you can reduce your blood pressure by losing weight and getting fit - and eat much tastier food. My BP went from 120/80 when I was overweight (borderline high), to 85/55 now that I am normal weight and very fit.
Here's the consensus: Burn more calories than you consume and you will lose weight, and try to eat some vegetables every once in a while to ensure you get some vitamins. That's about it.
Even this is a little bullshit. I lost 100 pounds last year and I had similar experiences to yours. My weight has now been stable for about eight months. This year, I suffered an injury which changed my routine, causing me to burn about 7000 fewer calories per week than my pre-injury routine (I was completely bedridden). With my reduced calorie burn and no significant changes in intake, I lost about five pounds in a few weeks. Here I am six weeks later, and the weight loss was real and permanent. This weight loss completely baffles me and can't be explained by my mental model of weight management.
The "normal" way for a company to increase their minority composition is to go out and specifically try to get minority applicants. Then, through the normal hiring process, they usually end up with more minority hires. Simple things like sending a rep to the job fair at a university with mostly black students are pretty typical ways to accomplish this. You don't even have to analyze your data - just keep "doing more" and watch the numbers go up.
A given buyer usually doesn't use the numbers to learn that a full-size truck uses less fuel than a midsize sedan, they use them to compare the vehicles they are considering buying to each other, which are almost always vehicles of the same class. The assertion is that picking the lowest window sticker MPG among a group of vehicles in the same class is no better than guessing, and I wholeheartedly agree with it.
I think that all TOS should be illegal unless they were fully negotiated by lawyers on BOTH sides - or approved by a federal agency as something that a citizen can understand and agree to without a lawyer.
The alternative I prefer is to change the law so the entire EULA is invalid if any part of it "steps over the line". Of course, the success of this strategy would depend on the quality of the definition of "step over the line".
Smart watch vendors want the customers of regular watch vendors. Many of those customers won't convert unless they feel like they're not severely downgrading the service they get. I don't feel smug, I'm simply adding my anecdote to the conversation. Your attempt to read my mind was unsuccessful.
The crown fell off my Seiko 15 years after I bought it. They paid for shipping both ways to/from Japan and fixed it - at no charge to me.
You were part of one of the more selective programs. I got an ME degree in 1993. Every year there was a weed-out class that nearly half of the students failed. Typical freshman class is 6000 and the university typically graduates 600 per year. Our idea of a big lecture hall was 500+ students. 200+ was typical for second year classes. By the third year, nearly everything was taught in 30 person or smaller rooms due to fewer students and those students branching out into specialties.