People sell their votes for "free" health care; they sell them for subsidies in their industry (e.g. agriculture); they sell them for subsidized student loans; they sell them for "free" contraception; they sell them for fatter welfare checks.
What's really pathetic is that they don't even realize that their letting people buy their votes with their own money! The candidate says "Vote for me and I'll make sure you get this for free" when what he really means is "Vote for me and I'll take your money and give it back to you!" Or worse, in America today is "Vote for me and I'll make your kids pay for the "free" stuff you get today."
One way out of this is for English to become the official and only government interaction language for the US. Another is for all government interaction to be done in some electronic fashion with the screen displaying whatever language the user selects, probably up to and including Klingon.
Making English the official language is a good idea, but making it the "only government interaction language for the US" goes a bit too far. We still want to be able to interact with our government in various languages for purposes like dealing 911 operators, the police, and the fire department. On the other hand, making English the official language would say that a city or county can provide foreign language services if it wants to, it doesn't have to do so and can't be sued for not doing so. Services provided by the government should be required to be available in English, and English should be considered sufficient to say that the government did its job in providing the service, but there should be no bar to a government providing services in additional languages if there is a reason to do so.
I've long thought this was a good idea, but I was thinking about it recently and started to wonder about the practical problems:
How do you handle a situation where a voter looks at the receipt and it doesn't have what the voter expected? What if the voter just wants to changer his mind? What if the voter doesn't deposit the receipt but instead sticks it in his pocket?
Would some sort of two-phase commit protocol be necessary? Would the typical voter be capable of following such a protocol?
Which is why it makes so little sense to refer to international "law". Law implies enforcement. Law implies rules that apply to everyone (though the law itself may exclude certain people) . If some nation refuses to sign an agreement, or is not allowed to sign as agreement, then that law doesn't apply to them, that is unless there is some enforcement mechanism that the nation is unable to avoid.
It makes sense to refer to particular treaties and agreements to say what particular nations have agreed to. To say that America agreed to handled animals a certain way when it signed Convention on the International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES) is correct. To say that Taiwan must follow the same procedures makes no sense because the treaty was never presented to Taiwan for a signature. Taiwan is not part of the treaty, so the rules don't apply. And in fact Taiwan was able to take some Pandas from China despite CITES's rules against the giving (as opposed to lending) of endangered species.
To say that America agreed to handle nuclear materials a certain way when it joined the IAEA makes sense. To say, for example, that Taiwan has to handle nuclear materials the same way under "international law" makes sense because even though the countries that created the organization do not allow Taiwan to join the group, Taiwan has been forced to comply. About a decade ago Taiwan was shipping nuclear waste to N. Korea (basically paying N. Korea to dispose of the waste). There was a quite a bit of protest and America was able to use its pull as Taiwan's closest ally to end practice. So one could say that IAEA rules are actually laws and that America fills the role of law enforcement.
US has told Taiwan to shut up about independence, and has turned a blind eye to the KMT's return to de facto dictatorship by jailing political opponents. US only needs weapon sales to Taiwan, to feed the weapons industry lobby.
The UN is the smallest common denominator between sovereign states! The base of international laws is that all nations agree and later ratify.
Texas is not a sovereign nation. The United States is.
The UN doesn't even let all sovereign states join, so I'm not sure how you call it "the smallest common denominator between sovereign states". As for international law, the extent to which it even exists is not dependent on the UN but rather on the customs and treaties of civilized nations.
Because voter fraud bigger than a few percent leads to obvious statistical inconsistencies with voter registration, exit polls, etc.
Furthermore, it doesn't matter anyway. The election is already over because the election system has produced what it is meant to produce: two interchangeable middle-of-the-road compromise candidates. You don't have to go to the ballot box anymore.
That's a good thing. High voter turnouts usually occur in places with real social problems and threats to democracy. The fact that people feel pretty complacent indicates we're doing something right.
Getting two middle of the road candidates is good two. We don't want to have to choose between two extremists. When your competitions start producing the best, the differences become tiny.
Actually, I don't agree with you that we have two "middle of the road" candidates. We have two liberal candidates both promising to spend more money than we have in the past and to continue to spend more money than we collect (thus continuing to increase the debt). We don't have two middle-of-the-road candidates, we have two candidates who perfectly reflect the spendaholic nature of today's American people.
It depends on whether the mist system can outlast the dam. The mist system is only needed because of the dam. And the article's description of the system makes no reference to electricity or other human intervention for making the system work. The question is, if abandoned by the humans will the mist system continue working long enough to keep the frogs alive until the dam collapses and the original waterfall habitat returns.
While they are at it, why not introduce a direct popular vote for presidential elections? The current system put a very unhealthy focus on swing states' issues and ignores the problems of large parts of the country because they'll won't/will vote for the candidate anyway.
In 2000 remember all the trouble when we had to recount Florida. Now imagine having to recount the entire country!
So you regard your province Texas supreme to international law?
Yes. Yes! A thousand times YES!
When you live in Texas you get to vote for your state legislators, your state governor, and quite a few other state government positions. When was the last time you voted for Secetary General?
America is part of the UN you say and America gets to vote for Secretary General. How is that different from being a citizen of Texas and Texas voting for the President? The difference is that America is made up of 50 democratic states. The UN is made up of a huge number of organized criminal gangs (really, what is the government in a place like Zimbabwe? it's the most successful organized crime group).
So yes yes yes, Texas is superior to "international law" and to the UN and to most national governments around the world.
Not because they're international, but because they're election monitors. Not generally the types of people that we would expect to attempt to influence elections. After all, if you heard that Syria was barring international election monitors within 100 feet of polling places, would you give them the same benefit of the doubt?
No, I wouldn't. But Syria isn't Texas. A person and/or country's history plays a role in how much benefit of doubt you give them. Texas doesn't have the history of human rights violations that Syria does. A UN election monitor in Texas is about as likely to introduce voter fraud as to detect it. But a UN election monitor in Syria is more likely to detect voter fraud than to introduce it.
Even the most backward 3rd world countries allow independent and foreign election monitors to monitor their elections (well atleast the ones that dont try too hard to rig elections).
But are these monitors "independent"? They were invited by the ACLU and NAACP and sponsored by the UN. I wouldn't trust any of those groups.
An excellent example of "spin". A world in which people are not expected to follow state and local laws, simply because they are "international" and above such petty annoyances. Crazy, but here we are, eh?
Yep, here we are. Given that the international observers from the UN, the chance of the observers detecting corruption might be outweighed by the chance of the observers causing corruption.
If there is no paper trail, there is no audit. If there is no audit, there is no provable fraud. If there is no provable fraud, the election board has run a superbly clean election.
You made the mistake of thinking the Board of Elections wanted to prevent voter fraud when perhaps they just wanted to prevent anyone from finding voter fraud.
I do know how printers work. I don't understand why they can't have a hard copy paper trail.
You use the machine to cast your vote, you get a hard copy to review and put in a pile.
Audit a given number of sites to see that the machine count and paper count match.
You get the benefits of the automated system that can be reviewed by a human.
Captain Obvious strikes again and once again is ignored by the people in charge. How many election cycles have we gone through where this solution is suggested and ignored?
So a better system is to have two machines. One is used to fill in a vote which is both machine and human readable. Once printed, the voter can confirm the vote by looking at it and then lodge the vote for counting by another machine. OCR could even handle that. An audit can occur by hand counting the printed votes. All other controls that apply to older voting methods can still be applied such as incorrectly filled in votes and controls for fakes.
This is one of those solutions that is so obviously correct that it drives you crazy that it doesn't get talked about more. It's like the people running the elections don't even want a fair election. I'm generally not cynical enough to think they don't, but when a solution like this is never even publicly discussed I really have to wonder. Even the newspapers, on the rare occasion that I see an article on the subject, usually ignore this idea.
This sounds like a good idea for the House of Representatives, but we also need to have people who have demonstrated some real intelligence and ability (getting elected doesn't require a strong knowledge of math and science, but it does require a lot of intelligence of various kinds to beat out your competitors), and we even need some people with experience. We should keep the Presidential election the way it is, and either leave the Senate alone or make it appointed by the state government again (which would largely fix the broken federalism we currently have).
Once you get fraud down to within a few percentage points, it makes little difference, and the US is way below that.
How do you know we're way below that? Laws that would make voter fraud detectable, such as requiring voters to show a picture ID, are facing court battles and have been prevented from going into effect (at least for this election). It's a bit like the old argument that "no one who has been given the death penalty in America has ever been later proven to be innocent". Of course not, once the person was executed people stopped investigating. The same logic applies here. We're being told not to check for voter fraud because levels of voter fraud are so low.
The fact that we CAN audit people after the fact and at least in theory burn anyone for cheating is itself a deterrent.
Voting machine tampering is harder to detect.
Which is why so many people recommend that the voting machine spit out a piece of paper that the voter can verify has his vote recorded correctly, and drop that piece of paper into a separate box. In most cases the voting can be tallied efficiently electronically, but in a disputed election the paper ballots can be counted by hand.
I love it. I can totally imagine Scrooge McDuck as Obi-wan Kenobi. Old, wise, tough as nails. Huey, Duey and Louie as the new generation of Jedi bringing back the old ways of hard work and honor!
Schools are definitely worse today (IMO), then they were 20 years ago when I was in school. My kid in 7th grade math isn't even learning algebra yet. And they don't know the right way to do long division of multiple factor multiplication. My kids are pretty bright (I know I'm biased). I taught my 5th grader the right way to 2 digit multiplication, and she said "That was much easier then my teacher taught me, I hope I don't get in trouble for doing it you're way".
When I was in school a long time ago, we weren't able to take algebra until 8th grade. And kids a few years older than me hadn't even been able to take pre-algebra in 7th grade.
The schools I know of that have algrebra in 7th grade only allow a few kids to take it. It's not for everyone. I can see where a smaller school might not have enough students ready for algebra to allow for a class at that age.
I mean read the Bible and although the characters in it are unsurprisingly ignorant, they don't sound less intelligent.
Most of the people you read about in the old testament were leaders. Abraham owned flocks and had servants. The same is true of Isaac and Jacob. When you get into the monarchy you mostly read about the kings and other people in the court. Very little is said about the people who were servants. Of those who aren't necessarily leaders, most are prophets. It's a very select group.
In the new testament much of what you see was written about Jesus. The rest is mostly written by and about Paul who was extremely well educated by the standards of the day.
You mentioned Shakespeare but that was fiction. Interesting fiction usually usually has a lot of smarter than average characters.
I haven't encountered such people, though I did have a bad experience with some very unreasonable editors when I tried to edit a page related to global warming.
I think the behavior actually reflects the fact that so many articles have become good. When you work hard on something, spending time discussing and sometimes having heated arguments with other editors, you come to take a certain pride in your work and some relief in being "done". And if you have a good article, most of the edits will make the article worse so it becomes easy to get in a habit of reverting everything. Also, even some good attempts at editing may be making a change that has been tried, discussed - perhaps with a lot of bad feelings if the change is good enough to be worth arguing about - perhaps resulting in a compromise - and there can be a hesitation to re-open the topic.
I think a good editor will recognize a good faith effort and explain (on in the revert comment if there is space, or on the talk page if not) direct to the new editor to the talk page for further discussion. But I have seen editors who just don't have the patience.
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People sell their votes for "free" health care; they sell them for subsidies in their industry (e.g. agriculture); they sell them for subsidized student loans; they sell them for "free" contraception; they sell them for fatter welfare checks.
What's really pathetic is that they don't even realize that their letting people buy their votes with their own money! The candidate says "Vote for me and I'll make sure you get this for free" when what he really means is "Vote for me and I'll take your money and give it back to you!" Or worse, in America today is "Vote for me and I'll make your kids pay for the "free" stuff you get today."
But it works.
One way out of this is for English to become the official and only government interaction language for the US. Another is for all government interaction to be done in some electronic fashion with the screen displaying whatever language the user selects, probably up to and including Klingon.
Making English the official language is a good idea, but making it the "only government interaction language for the US" goes a bit too far. We still want to be able to interact with our government in various languages for purposes like dealing 911 operators, the police, and the fire department. On the other hand, making English the official language would say that a city or county can provide foreign language services if it wants to, it doesn't have to do so and can't be sued for not doing so. Services provided by the government should be required to be available in English, and English should be considered sufficient to say that the government did its job in providing the service, but there should be no bar to a government providing services in additional languages if there is a reason to do so.
I've long thought this was a good idea, but I was thinking about it recently and started to wonder about the practical problems:
How do you handle a situation where a voter looks at the receipt and it doesn't have what the voter expected? What if the voter just wants to changer his mind? What if the voter doesn't deposit the receipt but instead sticks it in his pocket?
Would some sort of two-phase commit protocol be necessary? Would the typical voter be capable of following such a protocol?
Which is why it makes so little sense to refer to international "law". Law implies enforcement. Law implies rules that apply to everyone (though the law itself may exclude certain people) . If some nation refuses to sign an agreement, or is not allowed to sign as agreement, then that law doesn't apply to them, that is unless there is some enforcement mechanism that the nation is unable to avoid.
It makes sense to refer to particular treaties and agreements to say what particular nations have agreed to. To say that America agreed to handled animals a certain way when it signed Convention on the International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES) is correct. To say that Taiwan must follow the same procedures makes no sense because the treaty was never presented to Taiwan for a signature. Taiwan is not part of the treaty, so the rules don't apply. And in fact Taiwan was able to take some Pandas from China despite CITES's rules against the giving (as opposed to lending) of endangered species.
To say that America agreed to handle nuclear materials a certain way when it joined the IAEA makes sense. To say, for example, that Taiwan has to handle nuclear materials the same way under "international law" makes sense because even though the countries that created the organization do not allow Taiwan to join the group, Taiwan has been forced to comply. About a decade ago Taiwan was shipping nuclear waste to N. Korea (basically paying N. Korea to dispose of the waste). There was a quite a bit of protest and America was able to use its pull as Taiwan's closest ally to end practice. So one could say that IAEA rules are actually laws and that America fills the role of law enforcement.
US has told Taiwan to shut up about independence, and has turned a blind eye to the KMT's return to de facto dictatorship by jailing political opponents. US only needs weapon sales to Taiwan, to feed the weapons industry lobby.
Even the arms sales are pretty limited.
The UN is the smallest common denominator between sovereign states! The base of international laws is that all nations agree and later ratify. Texas is not a sovereign nation. The United States is.
The UN doesn't even let all sovereign states join, so I'm not sure how you call it "the smallest common denominator between sovereign states". As for international law, the extent to which it even exists is not dependent on the UN but rather on the customs and treaties of civilized nations.
Because voter fraud bigger than a few percent leads to obvious statistical inconsistencies with voter registration, exit polls, etc.
Furthermore, it doesn't matter anyway. The election is already over because the election system has produced what it is meant to produce: two interchangeable middle-of-the-road compromise candidates. You don't have to go to the ballot box anymore.
That's a good thing. High voter turnouts usually occur in places with real social problems and threats to democracy. The fact that people feel pretty complacent indicates we're doing something right.
Getting two middle of the road candidates is good two. We don't want to have to choose between two extremists. When your competitions start producing the best, the differences become tiny.
Actually, I don't agree with you that we have two "middle of the road" candidates. We have two liberal candidates both promising to spend more money than we have in the past and to continue to spend more money than we collect (thus continuing to increase the debt). We don't have two middle-of-the-road candidates, we have two candidates who perfectly reflect the spendaholic nature of today's American people.
It depends on whether the mist system can outlast the dam. The mist system is only needed because of the dam. And the article's description of the system makes no reference to electricity or other human intervention for making the system work. The question is, if abandoned by the humans will the mist system continue working long enough to keep the frogs alive until the dam collapses and the original waterfall habitat returns.
While they are at it, why not introduce a direct popular vote for presidential elections? The current system put a very unhealthy focus on swing states' issues and ignores the problems of large parts of the country because they'll won't/will vote for the candidate anyway.
In 2000 remember all the trouble when we had to recount Florida. Now imagine having to recount the entire country!
So you regard your province Texas supreme to international law?
Yes. Yes! A thousand times YES!
When you live in Texas you get to vote for your state legislators, your state governor, and quite a few other state government positions. When was the last time you voted for Secetary General?
America is part of the UN you say and America gets to vote for Secretary General. How is that different from being a citizen of Texas and Texas voting for the President? The difference is that America is made up of 50 democratic states. The UN is made up of a huge number of organized criminal gangs (really, what is the government in a place like Zimbabwe? it's the most successful organized crime group).
So yes yes yes, Texas is superior to "international law" and to the UN and to most national governments around the world.
If all of the machines are rigged by Republicans, why do Democrats have the presidency and a majority of the senate?
Obviously because Republicans aren't as good at rigging elections as Democrats.
Not because they're international, but because they're election monitors. Not generally the types of people that we would expect to attempt to influence elections. After all, if you heard that Syria was barring international election monitors within 100 feet of polling places, would you give them the same benefit of the doubt?
No, I wouldn't. But Syria isn't Texas. A person and/or country's history plays a role in how much benefit of doubt you give them. Texas doesn't have the history of human rights violations that Syria does. A UN election monitor in Texas is about as likely to introduce voter fraud as to detect it. But a UN election monitor in Syria is more likely to detect voter fraud than to introduce it.
Even the most backward 3rd world countries allow independent and foreign election monitors to monitor their elections (well atleast the ones that dont try too hard to rig elections).
But are these monitors "independent"? They were invited by the ACLU and NAACP and sponsored by the UN. I wouldn't trust any of those groups.
An excellent example of "spin". A world in which people are not expected to follow state and local laws, simply because they are "international" and above such petty annoyances. Crazy, but here we are, eh?
Yep, here we are. Given that the international observers from the UN, the chance of the observers detecting corruption might be outweighed by the chance of the observers causing corruption.
If there is no paper trail, there is no audit. If there is no audit, there is no provable fraud. If there is no provable fraud, the election board has run a superbly clean election.
You made the mistake of thinking the Board of Elections wanted to prevent voter fraud when perhaps they just wanted to prevent anyone from finding voter fraud.
I do know how printers work. I don't understand why they can't have a hard copy paper trail.
You use the machine to cast your vote, you get a hard copy to review and put in a pile.
Audit a given number of sites to see that the machine count and paper count match.
You get the benefits of the automated system that can be reviewed by a human.
Captain Obvious strikes again and once again is ignored by the people in charge. How many election cycles have we gone through where this solution is suggested and ignored?
So a better system is to have two machines. One is used to fill in a vote which is both machine and human readable. Once printed, the voter can confirm the vote by looking at it and then lodge the vote for counting by another machine. OCR could even handle that. An audit can occur by hand counting the printed votes. All other controls that apply to older voting methods can still be applied such as incorrectly filled in votes and controls for fakes.
This is one of those solutions that is so obviously correct that it drives you crazy that it doesn't get talked about more. It's like the people running the elections don't even want a fair election. I'm generally not cynical enough to think they don't, but when a solution like this is never even publicly discussed I really have to wonder. Even the newspapers, on the rare occasion that I see an article on the subject, usually ignore this idea.
This sounds like a good idea for the House of Representatives, but we also need to have people who have demonstrated some real intelligence and ability (getting elected doesn't require a strong knowledge of math and science, but it does require a lot of intelligence of various kinds to beat out your competitors), and we even need some people with experience. We should keep the Presidential election the way it is, and either leave the Senate alone or make it appointed by the state government again (which would largely fix the broken federalism we currently have).
Given that Goldwater was pretty libertarian, such a scenario is hard to imagine.
Once you get fraud down to within a few percentage points, it makes little difference, and the US is way below that.
How do you know we're way below that? Laws that would make voter fraud detectable, such as requiring voters to show a picture ID, are facing court battles and have been prevented from going into effect (at least for this election). It's a bit like the old argument that "no one who has been given the death penalty in America has ever been later proven to be innocent". Of course not, once the person was executed people stopped investigating. The same logic applies here. We're being told not to check for voter fraud because levels of voter fraud are so low.
They also bring transparency.
The fact that we CAN audit people after the fact and at least in theory burn anyone for cheating is itself a deterrent.
Voting machine tampering is harder to detect.
Which is why so many people recommend that the voting machine spit out a piece of paper that the voter can verify has his vote recorded correctly, and drop that piece of paper into a separate box. In most cases the voting can be tallied efficiently electronically, but in a disputed election the paper ballots can be counted by hand.
I love it. I can totally imagine Scrooge McDuck as Obi-wan Kenobi. Old, wise, tough as nails. Huey, Duey and Louie as the new generation of Jedi bringing back the old ways of hard work and honor!
Schools are definitely worse today (IMO), then they were 20 years ago when I was in school. My kid in 7th grade math isn't even learning algebra yet. And they don't know the right way to do long division of multiple factor multiplication. My kids are pretty bright (I know I'm biased). I taught my 5th grader the right way to 2 digit multiplication, and she said "That was much easier then my teacher taught me, I hope I don't get in trouble for doing it you're way".
When I was in school a long time ago, we weren't able to take algebra until 8th grade. And kids a few years older than me hadn't even been able to take pre-algebra in 7th grade.
The schools I know of that have algrebra in 7th grade only allow a few kids to take it. It's not for everyone. I can see where a smaller school might not have enough students ready for algebra to allow for a class at that age.
I mean read the Bible and although the characters in it are unsurprisingly ignorant, they don't sound less intelligent.
Most of the people you read about in the old testament were leaders. Abraham owned flocks and had servants. The same is true of Isaac and Jacob. When you get into the monarchy you mostly read about the kings and other people in the court. Very little is said about the people who were servants. Of those who aren't necessarily leaders, most are prophets. It's a very select group.
In the new testament much of what you see was written about Jesus. The rest is mostly written by and about Paul who was extremely well educated by the standards of the day.
You mentioned Shakespeare but that was fiction. Interesting fiction usually usually has a lot of smarter than average characters.
I haven't encountered such people, though I did have a bad experience with some very unreasonable editors when I tried to edit a page related to global warming.
I think the behavior actually reflects the fact that so many articles have become good. When you work hard on something, spending time discussing and sometimes having heated arguments with other editors, you come to take a certain pride in your work and some relief in being "done". And if you have a good article, most of the edits will make the article worse so it becomes easy to get in a habit of reverting everything. Also, even some good attempts at editing may be making a change that has been tried, discussed - perhaps with a lot of bad feelings if the change is good enough to be worth arguing about - perhaps resulting in a compromise - and there can be a hesitation to re-open the topic.
I think a good editor will recognize a good faith effort and explain (on in the revert comment if there is space, or on the talk page if not) direct to the new editor to the talk page for further discussion. But I have seen editors who just don't have the patience.