Hold on there, Mr. Limbaugh. A few giant misconceptions above:
1. You seem to think that the poorest people in the society are idle.
There's this idea that many people in this country have that there's a giant slice of the population that's poor but living high off of free welfare checks. This goes back to those old "welfare queen" myths that Reagan used to go on about. The reality is that living poor is much harder, and blank check welfare doesn't really exist. Consider this- if you are poor you are, statistically, paying more for food, paying more for credit, more subject to violence, probably less access to health care, the schools available to your children are terrible, etc. etc. This is often because of where you'll need to live if you're poor.
I know people involved in providing legal assistance to the poor, mostly people who've been cut off from public assistance or various other forms of aid in the drive to end welfare. For the most part (with a very occasional exception) these are people who are not lazy loafers, they're just people who have less money. They're not different from you and I.
You think a typical Public assistance recipient is someone living the high life who's only work is to collect their government check. A far more typical example is some 60 year old guy who worked for 40 years doing some physical labor and is at home living on SSI because he can't walk anymore, and then gets his benefits cut so the gov't can brag about how the numbers show they're cutting the public assistance rolls.
It is immoral, in my opinion, to place blame on the poor when you don't want to pay your taxes.
2. The canard about the "35%" of your paycheck Many people on the right seem to think that a third of your paycheck goes towards welfare. This is manifestly, completely, totally false. There are many sources on the net where you can view the federal budget and its breakdown. Here's one , if you don't like it you can find many more online, the federal gov't publishes as well (I admit I don't have the patience for it). There's even a nice pie chart in the booklet you get each year from the IRS. You do not need to take my word for it. Please go look at one before you make unsubstantiated statements. When you look at different presentations you also need to keep in mind what percentage is discretionary, can affect how the numbers appear. For example in this chart the 20% listed for health (which includes what you think of as all those poor people living high off the hog on welfare, also includes Medicare, a program which is not for the poor.
If you're worried about the percentage of your paycheck that disappears into the IRS I'd suggest you look at interest on the debt. 25 years of Republican tax-cuts (which of course never returned the promised revenue) have given us an enormous debt load (the federal deficit was around 1 trillion in 1980, it's now around 7 or 8). This means that something like 15% of your paycheck goes to paying off the interest on the credit card debt on the (historically recent) republican transfer of wealth to the rich. Merry Christmas.
I'd also like to point out that blaming the poor is a know-nothing response to what's been happening in our country.
The "pussification" business Is just dumb.
In a day and age when anyone can look up the raw data in minutes, there's no reason to accept someone else's word, including mine. The ideas you're spouting are based on urban myths.
I once had an interview for a largish organization in which I only spoke to the HR person (fair enough, he was presumably screening for the tech interview which would've followed). What made this interview notable was that he was largely questioning me on personality.
At the time I thought it was kind of rude, really. What business is it of yours if I "consider myself an outgoing person"? After asing me a few preliminary questions he left the room and had me fill out responses on a computer program. I specifically remember one screen with something like 50-100 checkboxes that asked you to check which ones you felt applied to your personality type. It was then followed by the identical screen, this time to be filled out with "how you thought people saw you". A good half hours worth, many more screens, a personal essay, by the end I was rather... pissed, actually spent about half of my time deciding whether to be polite or not (I'm sure the test was sensitive enough to detect this and needless to say they didn't call me back). At the time I thought the the HR guy had convinced the company to buy him a new toy and was busy tormenting all the new hires with it.
In any case I'd be curious to hear people's responses to such. Do you think this is fair? As is probably clear from the above, I think it's way out of bounds and personally intrusive.
Lest you think the Google stuff is all technical, here's a quote from the article:
"Some questions were factual: What programming languages are you familiar with? What Internet mailing lists do you subscribe to?
Some looked for behavior: Is your work space messy or neat?
And some looked at personality: Are you an extrovert or an introvert?
And some fell into no traditional category in the human resources world: What magazines do you subscribe to? What pets do you have?
"We wanted to cast a very wide net," Mr. Bock said. "It is not unusual to walk the halls here and bump into dogs. Maybe people who own dogs have some personality trait that is useful."
Ahh, hadn't seen it (here's the link, for anyone interested phoenix memo"). In any case, it doesn't support your use of the word "blocked", which implies an active role in supressing investigation. Negligent, incompentant? Absotlutely. Whaddelseyagot?
Blocked? I've seen lots of support for the notion that he was at the very least severely negligent pre-9/11. I'm not sure what constitutes "criminal" negligence, although I'd guess that it'd involve something like a clear dereliction of duty. Perhaps someone with more legal knowledge can chime in. In any case I'd imagine that criminal negligence would be extremely difficult to prove or to support as an article of impeachment, although it might be useful politically, underscoring the falsity of Bush's pursuit of Al Quaeda.
In any case, I've never seen any support (or even claim) that he actively tried to impede investigation into Al Quaeda. Citations please?
Given the high level of informedness and concern about civil liberties with this crowd, I think it's time for a poll. No really, I'd be curious to see the results-
"Do you think George Bush should be impeached for breaking the FISA law?"
-Yes
-No
-No, but impeached for something else
-No, just to take an unarmed stroll through any street in Baghdad
Ah, I guess I'd have to be counted among the DailyKOS folks and the crazies. I would dearly love to see an impeachment.
After what this bunch has done for the last 6 years I can't see how else they can be held even marginally accountable. Lost a major american city out of sheer *I don't give a shit* incompetance. Blown a huge surplus in candy giveaways to their patrons. And of course, the big one, Iraq.
The big issue, the BIG issue for me with Iraq, is that there's overwhelming evidence that they came in in 2000 wanting to go to Iraq, and used 9/11 as an excuse. Those sons of bitches were meeting on 9/12 while the smoke was still rising from a hole 3 miles from my house and where my kid goes to school talking about how to use this to get into Iraq. The sheer human tragedy that they've created out of hubris and stupidity is something we'll all be paying for in countless ways for the next 50 years. Fuck them. Send them all to Guantanamo, I'll chip in for the airfare.
What kind of accountability and dedication to truth do we have when we just let that slip through becuase it's not worth the upset? If these folks don't merit impeachment, who does, and for what?
I do think that there are nuts on the right and left.
There's a persistant meme of equating extremists of the left and right with the idea that extremism and the lack of civility in politics is the cause of our current predicament. There's a number of reasons I think this is completely wrong.
For one thing, the political pendulum has swung far to the right over the last 25 years or so. The Reagan folks were considered to be the fringe right when they came into power, and they essentially redefined the center - the center moved to the right in that ideas that were considered to be fringe became acceptable, on the conservative side of centrist (e.g. supply-side economics was considered nuts in 1979, now cited in the conventional wisdom). Historically, even what we're calling "centrist" in the "can't we all get along" argument, is pretty right wing. Most of Nixon's policies would be considered to the left of what we're now calling the center.
Mostly, though, this idea seems to me to be so wrong because the current Republican party is so deeply based on a culture of encouraging and feeding off of our worst impulses of paranoia and fear that I have to view them as the main source of the current political climate of mutual, er,... dislike. Sure, there's always been partisan fighting in congress. But it took the current republicans to elevate it to doing things like shutting the minority out of conference committees (remember the threats of the "Nuclear Option" in the senate?) It seems to me that the history of the last 5 years, politically, has been one of a bully constantly taking.. one.. more.. step.. to see if they'll be stopped yet. I really can't see anything similar on the left side, absent a few examples dredged up out of the woodwork about some nutty obscure academic(Yeah, O'Reilly is unfair, but what about that Ward Churchill, huh?)
There really is something in the viewpoint of conservatism, with its attraction of control and law and order that's closer to the demonization of your opponents. The black and white, us vs. them viewpoint is closer in spirit to conservatism and is why it is the philosophy attractive to those people who want to cheer along with Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter.
Ultimately, arguing that it's just everybody's extemism is avoiding responsibility. All those folks who voted for Bush are the ones who validated this war, this disastrous economic debt based policy, the torture, the erosion of our civil liberties. The folks who didn't have been pretty much shunted to the sidelines, and arguments that the country's in the place it's in because of those meanies at moveon.org are just full of it. sorry.
This ties in to another story I've seen floating around. Apparently there are a number of instances of military personnel apparently using their positions to endorse republican candidates, like
this.
Anyone out there with military experience know how out-of-bounds this kind of thing is?
Top 10 reasons why no one did anything:
1).Paralyzed by the bursting blood vessels in our brain.
2).The idea that roughly 50% of the country could vote for this man, after what he's done, convinced us all that our acid flashbacks were kicking in.
3).Already purchased our brown shirts, and the store has a no-return policy.
4).Democracy is highly overrated.
5).Secretly hoping to get our own middle-eastern person to torture.
6).Own Diebold stock
7).Own Halliburton stock
8).Hoping that after Iraq Bush will attack the country where the cousin we don't like lives.
9).Couldn't hear the news reports over the radio playing in my Hummer.
10).Sold soul to the devil along with Dick Cheney in a package deal.
Actually, it's the sheer helplessness. What, after all, do you do? When there are massive irregularities in swing states (Ohio, heavily documented) and even the Democratic "Challenger" doesn't want to make a fuss? When all the Bush lovers are busy watching Bill O'Reilly?
I want to address some of your points specifically.
1. name calling: You seem to be saying that since there are people on the left saying bad things about people on the right, and people on the right saying bad things about people on the left, they are equivalent, or maybe you can rank them based on which is meaner. I think there's a huge difference between calling someone a name to shut them up or to obfuscate, and calling someone a name as a way of labelling something so that it becomes more clear. Now I know you disagree with me, but if you believe ( as the original author does, and as I do) that the Bush administration is dangerous to us for the reasons specified, then calling them "fascist" actually clarifies-e.g. "look, not only do we not like what these people are doing but it is dangerous in that it resembles other historical precedents that are scary". If you look over at, say, Ann Coulter, you get someone who (has been clearly documented to) basically say whatever crap comes out of her mouth, and every other sentance starts with "liberal traitors".
In otherwords, the difference is not in the vehemence but in the truthfullness. Some things are just wrong.
2. How many times has our military toruted someone and done so without punishment?
I guess that makes it ok.
3. "Your socialist friends over in france" -That's just plain pathetic. How about "everyone who opposes Bush is unamerican"? Have we reached that point yet? Are you willing to say that?
Try not to let the freedom fries stain your brown shirt.
I was just reading this, and by coincidence I was at the Lincoln Memorial in D.C. today. A very intense place, and a memorial in every sense of the word, I think.
In any case,
On one wall is the text of his second inaugural, there was something there that this brought to mind-
It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.
I don't get your objection. I've seen this argument in print before, and it seems to me to be pretty straightforward-there are defining characteristics of fascism, our government is (inarguably) taking on those characteristics. The implication is that this is a bad thing.
Now, it seems to me that the parallels are clear and factual. Leader worship? check. Patriotic symbolism? Check. Common enemy? Check, disdain for human rights? Check. etc, etc, etc.
They don't say that the government is completely facist, only that it's headed that way. It looks to me as though you're willfully distorting the content of the (implied) argument. The name calling crap (far left-wing/liberal pansies) is sad and unpleasant. I mark anyone who responds this way as incapable of facing evidence of facts undermining their beliefs, intellectually brittle and insecure.
BTW, as a far left-wing/liberal pansy I can give you at least a few better practices/methods than our current government. How about "never start a war with falsified intelligence?" or maybe "torture sucks as a way of winning hearts and minds"? or "If you're going to do a drug plan, consider the needs of the people taking the drugs before the needs of the people selling them"? Try turning down the Rush Limbaugh.
"I state the issue.
They then rephrase the issue, adding something not really relevant to the issue but closely related to show how smart they are.
I, out of politeness, say oh that's interesting, or some other meaningless drivel to show them that I too understand basic Calculus, OSI, or traffic law, etc.
I then move on to state my idea for solving the issue."
No matter how smart you are, or how smart you think you are, you are never, never so smart that you are always right and don't have to listen to others. Going into a conversation knowing the answer means you're not really there. Not only is that rude, but it means if you're wrong you'll never know it. On top of that, people generally can tell (you didn't notice that because you weren't listening, right?) and won't be very happy about it.
I'm a consultant these days. I used to be pretty cocky, like I knew how to solve problems and those business folk just weren't as smart, but even someone as dumb as me figures out, after being thrust repeatedly into unfamiliar business situations (where the business people really do understand the problem domain better than me) that I don't know everything.
You sound like an interpersonal nightmare. I'd never want to work with a sysadmin who couldn't listen to the reasons he might be wrong. I'd much rather work with someone willing to work with the team, more interested in getting us all to the common goal than telling us how smart he is.
As for the racial thing, I know it exists,but my personal experience in IT and dev in NY is that it's been a meritocracy everywhere I've worked. One of the things, really, I've loved about the work. I've been on plenty of interviews where I didn't get hired, but absent feedback from the interviewer I can't see how I could ever make a statement as to why.
You know, you sound like you're a smart guy. The funny thing about this field (again one of the things I love about it) is how many smart guys there are in it. Whenever I start thinking about how smart I am, I meet someone smarter. As smart as you may be, there are smarter people out there. Unless you have recently won your third Nobel you ought to tone it down a bit, and think very seriously about what other people may have to offer you. Try listening.
The main thing I see among non-savvy computer users is that the thing is a mystery to them. By that I don't mean just that they don't understand it (we're assuming that we're talking about people that don't understand it) but that they ascribe to it such terrifying complexity that along with the lack of understanding goes the assumption that they will never scale its Olympian heights( Of course this does help us all get paid better).
But.
This is much like math anxiety. It's not just the subject, it's the fear. Most people so fully assume that it's beyond them that their first reaction is to fall helpless to the floor.
When I used to do tech support, I used to tell people that the thing wasn't complicated (at least not conceptually), just big. That is, there's just not, for the average MS Word user, much to figure out. Hit this button, that happens. Hit thatbutton, that other thing happens( repeat 1000 times). It's like dealing with a dishwasher with 1000 buttons. Nobody things they know what all the buttons do, but it's a dishwasher, for chrissakes, if you only know the 5 buttons you need you're fine and you don't give yourself an inferiority complex worrying about the other 995.
Thinking the thing is so deep is the problem. The knowledge domain for IS-type stuff is wide but shallow- lots of things to know, lots of disconnected facts, not much depth to them. Compare this to say, writing a novel, where the knowledge required is narrow (very few "things' to know-think of what you wnat to write and write it) but very deep. The wide knowledge looks hard to people when in fact it's conceptually very shallow.
And that's why most people think they can't use a computer but can and most people think they can write a novel but can't.
Right, except a bit harsh, I think. EJB has lots of flaws, things that people have pointed out over the years, and it certainly wasn't all that simple or transparent.
While better things have come along over the last few years, I think that some of those, at least, reflect the lessons people learned from EJB, and the reactions to it (too heavyweight, too obtrusive, too much of a hassle to configure, to slow....).I think banging on them too much is a bit of monday-morning quarterbacking. What would you have designed for a persistance framework in 1999?
I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it unnecessary, more like, it set out to solve problems that were bigger, or at least different, than the problems people had to actually solve most of the time.
As for the knowledgeability of the engineers, I've found that it's an easy temptation to fall into as a developer to think that you're smarter than everybody else (can't they see how much better your idea is than theirs?)
This is definately the question that affects my development process more than any other, as I do java development in small 2-3 month consulting assignments. For me the fairly well known frameworks are becoming a necessity if for no other reason that they tend to be required on the resume. FWIW,
On the plus side, they can possibly (and sometimes live up to the promise of) saving you the trouble of writing boilerplate code (e.g. db access,....). They're far better than what would be hand-coded at shops where competence is, shall we say, less than common. My relevant horror story here was a job I walked into that had no definitive version of the source, no source code control, and developers just out of school given open-ended assignments to make this or that work with no supervision or code review. Lots of random SQL in jsps, a real mess. In a situation like that any framework is a godsend (any kind of architecture is better than none). Another positive is that you can learn a fair amount about architecture and patterns from using them - one of the things that made a fair impression on me when reading about patterns was the statement that other professions, like architecture, train people by having them emulate and study the works of professionals, and the complaint that there were no software masterpieces to study. A budding architect studies Frank Lloyd Wright's FallingWater. What does a budding software developer study? Maybe frameworks are the beginning of an answer to this question, as you can absorb a fair amount of architectural principles through working with them.
On the minus side, I'm starting to see these things done as a sort of orthodoxy, and often they just add unnecassary layers to the code because "that's the way you're supposed to do it". You can often spend more time twiddling with the framework to get it to do what you want than it'd take you to write your own. My relevant story here is the day and a half I spent last week trying to figure out why my hibernate setup wasn't working properly, until I finally came upon a little note somewhere in the docs that it had problems with SQL Server and wasn't recommended. This is, BTW, for read-only access to the database, hardly worth the bother. (Of course, It's entirely possible that I was configuring it incorrectly in some way, didn't have the time to research it further, which is part of the point of the bother of it, there's a fair gap between learning it enough to get by and knowing it thorugh and through, and one rarely has time for the latter). Generally my problem with them is that they tend to black-box the solutions they provide (which I suppose is sort of the point) which is great if it works exactly the way it's supposed to and leaves you wasting enourmous amounts of time if it doesn't. A related issue is that they can make debugging and code tracing much harder. A Spring app, for example, links code through config files. Even if you understand the config files, you add a layer of indirection to code tracing. If you don't it can be almost impossible to figure out how this piece of data gets onto that page.
They're neccessary, I suppose, and good for something, but should be swallowed with a bit more salt than they generally are in the industry.
I'm sorry, I don't think this is OK. You are vilifying people who don't share your point of view with the "wacko yogurt-eating Birkenstock-shod lefty nutjobs" business. You apparently forgot to add "white-wine drinking, quiche-eating hollywood elitist".
Come on, you know this is childish, right? From the rest of your post it look slike you know how to substantiate an argument. It seems pretty reasonable and obvious to me that ---China's human rights record is far worse than ours, and ---The Bush administration is implementing many of these same practices on a smaller scale. Let's see -
Extraorinary rendition
People detained for years without charge (some subsequently determined later to be innocent)
torture in secret prisons
secret monitoring of its citizens
Not to mention the leader who speaks almost entirely in front of filtered crowds of supporters, or the paid media propagandists, or the cronyism, or the....
Of course China is worse, and of course it's true that you hear more about what's going on here becuase of the freedoms we do have. No argument there. But your argument, taken to its logical extreme, would brand as a "nutjob" anyone who criticizes the U.S up until we get to be as bad as China. I think that honesty would compel you to accept that the "yogurt-eating nutjob" might have a point or two.
Lots of posts on how maybe getting O'Reillys latest how-to doesn't seem very christ
masy. I kind of agree, also adding that it's pretty unlikely that in buying something like that for someone else you'd buy the correct/appropriate thing.
But
In the spirit of the first post, the mention of Goedel/Escher/Bach, I've found that there's lots of math titles that are fun for us programming types to read. I don't mean the really seriously technical titles, the ones that come in plain covers where you can't comprehend the title and the first words are "Let x...". But there's lots of titles I've found to be fun that sort of skirt the periphery. A few that I've liked:
Knuth: things a computer scientist rarely talks about (not math, but lovely) Surreal Numbers (also by knuth, does a sort of quasi-fictional walk through of "On numbers and games" (which I can't seem to get around to getting to far into))
Winning
ways for your mathematical plays(combinatorial games, really amateur math. In a similar vein collections by Martin Gardner are also fun). Conway
s "The book of Numbers" really about numbers and their character, can't reccomend to highly (although a professional mathematician might get bored. Mind Tools (Rudy Rucker)
There's also a few other books by Hofstader, there's an article collection that's very nice (Mathemagical Themas, I think? something like that, don't have the time to look it up). Also your avg. geek might like more general science writing, any of the collections of Stephen Jay Gould make good reading as well.
You're incorrect here, the house is only stacked in favor of populous states in the sense that NY has more overall votes than montana.
That's exactly the sense I mean. If there is an issue that is important to NY state, you guys have a much better chance of someone from your state being on a committee that can help.
There are some issues that are statewide (e.g. there's current arguments about NY vs national mileage standards) and some (farm policy) that are more district and region-type. NY statewide voting often features it's own urban vs. rural dynamic, as about half the state is rural ( by population).
Your arguments about how candidates would, under a country-wide system, tend towards high population areas make sense - I had not thought of that, and it seems perfectly true. On the other hand, there's a lot of lip-service paid to farm policy during the campaigns, I'd argue that there's no reason overrepresenting rural voters is in any way inherently fairer than overrepresenting urban voters, or even dead-even fairness.
Still, it seems to me that under the current system I'm very under-represented in comparison to a small-state voter; I don't think that argument goes away. Yes, there are some issues under which block voting by state might swamp that, but I think more commonly it's party-line- NY state has its share of republican congressmen, and they vote with the party.
I'm actually past age myself., I was pretty much just being snippy about the draft thing (Bush brings out the worst in me,sorry, guess it's the "divider not a uniter" thing) although I have to admit to some "we've always been at war with Oceania" images going through my head. A year ago I thought they might go the draft route because there was no other way they'd get the troops they need, what with the recruitment issues and the multiple rotations. At the moment Bush's stock is so low I don't think they can even consider thinking about the possibility of maybe floating a trial balloon to form a commission to consider the possibility of doing it in 10 years.
Still think we're royally fucked, though. Still hate Bush and his cronies for what they've done to us - 50 years from now my grandchildren will still be paying for the shit these people have done. 100 years. Bastards.
Best of luck to your brother, though, don't agree with the politics but it's a tough gig no matter what you believe.
(from weakest to strongest) It provides a last (theoretical!) check on "the will of the people." Even though being a faithless elector is against state law in many states, an elector can still choose to cast his vote for whomever and his vote will be federally binding.
- Not sure how I feel about that, I think in practice the "faithless elector" scenario is impossible on a meaningful scale. It brings up all sorts of things - for example, in 2000, the FL legislature was debating a bill that in essence said "the hell with all this, our electoral votes go to Bush". What does something like this do to a democracy?
The electoral college makes it highly improbable that a third-party candidate will win. Compare to Germany's recent mess, where it took a month just to figure out which party would actually be able to form a coalition.
-You're right, except that I think a viable 3d party would be a usefull antidote to many of our political ailments. At the very least it'd be possible to have a wider range of opinions in politics. Currently getting too far left makes you a pariah (it's been argued, and I agree, that the 2 party system leads to a situation where the range of acceptable opinion is quite narrow compared to other democracies- the rightward shift that we've seen in that last 25 years can then be understood as a shifting of the entire range somewhat to the right, while the width of the range has stayed relatively constant).
It balances population and geography. In the Legislative Branch, the House is stacked in favor of populous states; the Senate, in favor of less populous states. That was agreed upon for a reason: the smaller states wanted to balance the power of bigger states like... erm, New York. Similarly, the Electoral College allows a balance between population and geography in the presidential selection process. -You're incorrect here, the house is only stacked in favor of populous states in the sense that NY has more overall votes than montana. However, my individual vote is less powerfull in the house compared to an individual vote of a montana voter.Here's a good reference page I found.
I noticed that
a) A person in Wyoming's vote for president counts for about 3.8 times what mine does.
b) according to the wikipedia article you cited, if the electoral college would be made slightly more proportional (by removing the 2 votes per senator) so that it more accurately reflected population, Gore would've won in 2000.
The Electoral College isolates the consequences of voter fraud. Let's say someone commits fraud in New York City on election night. It would have to be massive (Republican!) fraud to actually make a difference in the outcome. By contrast, under a straight popular vote, just a small amount of fraud in every state could swing a tight race. Obviously, counterarguments could be made for fraud in tight states like FL in 2000 -- but the point is that regulators know where to look for the fraud, as opposed to having it distributed across the country. -True in the sense that god knows what we'd do about a national recount. False in that in 2000 (and in 2004 (link to GAO report included) a single state fraud magnified the results of fraud.
The electoral college provides that the candidates will have to make a genuine effort in many different states. If popular votes were the only consideration, candidates would promise and then enact policies favorable to high-population-density areas, and let the rest of the country go to hell. So to speak. -Disagree here, think you've got it exactly backwards. What's happened in the past is hot contention over battleground states - you get millions of candidate visits to Ohio, none to Alaska or Hawaii, and more noticeably a more partisan split- There's never any reason under the cur
You know, I was really, really tempted to write some really intense reply, all of the treacheries of the last few years, and you know how many people are really bitter about what's been happening.
I I can't really argue with what you say, though, it's certainly true that the 100 vote recount is sort of absurd in a state of 25 million. A statistician would probably tell you that you either have to revote the state or split the electoral 50/50, because it's essentially a tie. There were some absurd editorials at the time about how discounting the florida totals would be disenfranchisement, when in fact it'd be an accurate reflection of the vote (no advantage to either side, statistically a dead heat).
The electoral college, however, is another way that the elections are sort of slanted. There's been quite a bit written on how it slants to rural/western/southern states due to the addition of votes per senator. I live in NY, and (roughly, I don't remember the exact figures) a person in Wyoming or Alaska's vote for president counts for about twice what mine does, The electoral college also tempts people to game the census every 10 years (2, if you're in texas) and is the only reason we don't sensibly count statistically every 10 years. Counting per head also predominantly hides the urban poor,another way in which the census slants away from urban industrialized states.
A correction, though. The supreme court didn't just get "asked" to settle the matter-putting it this way makes it sound like arbitration. They were asked by the last guys to lose in the penultimate lower court (of course, this also reflects how people game the system-lawyers will look for a friendly court, and I'm sure Bush's lawyers suspected they'd get a good hearing from the current supreme court, Dems would've done the same. Personally I'll always remember that Renquist got his start keeping black people from voting in arizona, so it's nice to see that he stayed consistent.
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Time, I think, to declare viktery in the war against godless literacy and go home.
1. You seem to think that the poorest people in the society are idle.
There's this idea that many people in this country have that there's a giant slice of the population that's poor but living high off of free welfare checks. This goes back to those old "welfare queen" myths that Reagan used to go on about. The reality is that living poor is much harder, and blank check welfare doesn't really exist.
Consider this- if you are poor you are, statistically, paying more for food, paying more for credit, more subject to violence, probably less access to health care, the schools available to your children are terrible, etc. etc. This is often because of where you'll need to live if you're poor.
I know people involved in providing legal assistance to the poor, mostly people who've been cut off from public assistance or various other forms of aid in the drive to end welfare. For the most part (with a very occasional exception) these are people who are not lazy loafers, they're just people who have less money. They're not different from you and I.
You think a typical Public assistance recipient is someone living the high life who's only work is to collect their government check. A far more typical example is some 60 year old guy who worked for 40 years doing some physical labor and is at home living on SSI because he can't walk anymore, and then gets his benefits cut so the gov't can brag about how the numbers show they're cutting the public assistance rolls.
It is immoral, in my opinion, to place blame on the poor when you don't want to pay your taxes.
2. The canard about the "35%" of your paycheck
Many people on the right seem to think that a third of your paycheck goes towards welfare. This is manifestly, completely, totally false. There are many sources on the net where you can view the federal budget and its breakdown. Here's one , if you don't like it you can find many more online, the federal gov't publishes as well (I admit I don't have the patience for it). There's even a nice pie chart in the booklet you get each year from the IRS. You do not need to take my word for it. Please go look at one before you make unsubstantiated statements.
When you look at different presentations you also need to keep in mind what percentage is discretionary, can affect how the numbers appear. For example in this chart the 20% listed for health (which includes what you think of as all those poor people living high off the hog on welfare, also includes Medicare, a program which is not for the poor.
If you're worried about the percentage of your paycheck that disappears into the IRS I'd suggest you look at interest on the debt. 25 years of Republican tax-cuts (which of course never returned the promised revenue) have given us an enormous debt load (the federal deficit was around 1 trillion in 1980, it's now around 7 or 8). This means that something like 15% of your paycheck goes to paying off the interest on the credit card debt on the (historically recent) republican transfer of wealth to the rich. Merry Christmas.
I'd also like to point out that blaming the poor is a know-nothing response to what's been happening in our country.
The "pussification" business Is just dumb.
In a day and age when anyone can look up the raw data in minutes, there's no reason to accept someone else's word, including mine. The ideas you're spouting are based on urban myths.
At the time I thought it was kind of rude, really. What business is it of yours if I "consider myself an outgoing person"? After asing me a few preliminary questions he left the room and had me fill out responses on a computer program. I specifically remember one screen with something like 50-100 checkboxes that asked you to check which ones you felt applied to your personality type. It was then followed by the identical screen, this time to be filled out with "how you thought people saw you". A good half hours worth, many more screens, a personal essay, by the end I was rather ... pissed, actually spent about half of my time deciding whether to be polite or not (I'm sure the test was sensitive enough to detect this and needless to say they didn't call me back). At the time I thought the the HR guy had convinced the company to buy him a new toy and was busy tormenting all the new hires with it.
In any case I'd be curious to hear people's responses to such. Do you think this is fair? As is probably clear from the above, I think it's way out of bounds and personally intrusive.
Lest you think the Google stuff is all technical, here's a quote from the article:
"Some questions were factual: What programming languages are you familiar with? What Internet mailing lists do you subscribe to? Some looked for behavior: Is your work space messy or neat? And some looked at personality: Are you an extrovert or an introvert? And some fell into no traditional category in the human resources world: What magazines do you subscribe to? What pets do you have? "We wanted to cast a very wide net," Mr. Bock said. "It is not unusual to walk the halls here and bump into dogs. Maybe people who own dogs have some personality trait that is useful."
Ahh, hadn't seen it (here's the link, for anyone interested phoenix memo"). In any case, it doesn't support your use of the word "blocked", which implies an active role in supressing investigation. Negligent, incompentant? Absotlutely. Whaddelseyagot?
Blocked? I've seen lots of support for the notion that he was at the very least severely negligent pre-9/11. I'm not sure what constitutes "criminal" negligence, although I'd guess that it'd involve something like a clear dereliction of duty. Perhaps someone with more legal knowledge can chime in. In any case I'd imagine that criminal negligence would be extremely difficult to prove or to support as an article of impeachment, although it might be useful politically, underscoring the falsity of Bush's pursuit of Al Quaeda.
In any case, I've never seen any support (or even claim) that he actively tried to impede investigation into Al Quaeda. Citations please?
Given the high level of informedness and concern about civil liberties with this crowd, I think it's time for a poll. No really, I'd be curious to see the results-
"Do you think George Bush should be impeached for breaking the FISA law?"
-Yes
-No
-No, but impeached for something else
-No, just to take an unarmed stroll through any street in Baghdad
After what this bunch has done for the last 6 years I can't see how else they can be held even marginally accountable. Lost a major american city out of sheer *I don't give a shit* incompetance. Blown a huge surplus in candy giveaways to their patrons. And of course, the big one, Iraq.
The big issue, the BIG issue for me with Iraq, is that there's overwhelming evidence that they came in in 2000 wanting to go to Iraq, and used 9/11 as an excuse. Those sons of bitches were meeting on 9/12 while the smoke was still rising from a hole 3 miles from my house and where my kid goes to school talking about how to use this to get into Iraq. The sheer human tragedy that they've created out of hubris and stupidity is something we'll all be paying for in countless ways for the next 50 years. Fuck them. Send them all to Guantanamo, I'll chip in for the airfare.
What kind of accountability and dedication to truth do we have when we just let that slip through becuase it's not worth the upset? If these folks don't merit impeachment, who does, and for what?
There's a persistant meme of equating extremists of the left and right with the idea that extremism and the lack of civility in politics is the cause of our current predicament. There's a number of reasons I think this is completely wrong.
For one thing, the political pendulum has swung far to the right over the last 25 years or so. The Reagan folks were considered to be the fringe right when they came into power, and they essentially redefined the center - the center moved to the right in that ideas that were considered to be fringe became acceptable, on the conservative side of centrist (e.g. supply-side economics was considered nuts in 1979, now cited in the conventional wisdom). Historically, even what we're calling "centrist" in the "can't we all get along" argument, is pretty right wing. Most of Nixon's policies would be considered to the left of what we're now calling the center.
Mostly, though, this idea seems to me to be so wrong because the current Republican party is so deeply based on a culture of encouraging and feeding off of our worst impulses of paranoia and fear that I have to view them as the main source of the current political climate of mutual, er, ... dislike. Sure, there's always been partisan fighting in congress. But it took the current republicans to elevate it to doing things like shutting the minority out of conference committees (remember the threats of the "Nuclear Option" in the senate?) It seems to me that the history of the last 5 years, politically, has been one of a bully constantly taking .. one.. more.. step.. to see if they'll be stopped yet. I really can't see anything similar on the left side, absent a few examples dredged up out of the woodwork about some nutty obscure academic(Yeah, O'Reilly is unfair, but what about that Ward Churchill, huh?)
There really is something in the viewpoint of conservatism, with its attraction of control and law and order that's closer to the demonization of your opponents. The black and white, us vs. them viewpoint is closer in spirit to conservatism and is why it is the philosophy attractive to those people who want to cheer along with Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter.
Ultimately, arguing that it's just everybody's extemism is avoiding responsibility. All those folks who voted for Bush are the ones who validated this war, this disastrous economic debt based policy, the torture, the erosion of our civil liberties. The folks who didn't have been pretty much shunted to the sidelines, and arguments that the country's in the place it's in because of those meanies at moveon.org are just full of it. sorry.
Anyone out there with military experience know how out-of-bounds this kind of thing is?
It was a misprint. What I thought I wrote was "putting a tag around a whole page". The one time I don't preview....
I still wish you could surround an entire page with a tag. Just imagine.
Top 10 reasons why no one did anything:
1).Paralyzed by the bursting blood vessels in our brain.
2).The idea that roughly 50% of the country could vote for this man, after what he's done, convinced us all that our acid flashbacks were kicking in.
3).Already purchased our brown shirts, and the store has a no-return policy.
4).Democracy is highly overrated.
5).Secretly hoping to get our own middle-eastern person to torture.
6).Own Diebold stock
7).Own Halliburton stock
8).Hoping that after Iraq Bush will attack the country where the cousin we don't like lives.
9).Couldn't hear the news reports over the radio playing in my Hummer.
10).Sold soul to the devil along with Dick Cheney in a package deal.
Actually, it's the sheer helplessness. What, after all, do you do? When there are massive irregularities in swing states (Ohio, heavily documented) and even the Democratic "Challenger" doesn't want to make a fuss? When all the Bush lovers are busy watching Bill O'Reilly?
If you want to build it, count me in (although I think there's a project like this underway).
1. name calling: You seem to be saying that since there are people on the left saying bad things about people on the right, and people on the right saying bad things about people on the left, they are equivalent, or maybe you can rank them based on which is meaner. I think there's a huge difference between calling someone a name to shut them up or to obfuscate, and calling someone a name as a way of labelling something so that it becomes more clear. Now I know you disagree with me, but if you believe ( as the original author does, and as I do) that the Bush administration is dangerous to us for the reasons specified, then calling them "fascist" actually clarifies-e.g. "look, not only do we not like what these people are doing but it is dangerous in that it resembles other historical precedents that are scary". If you look over at, say, Ann Coulter, you get someone who (has been clearly documented to) basically say whatever crap comes out of her mouth, and every other sentance starts with "liberal traitors".
In otherwords, the difference is not in the vehemence but in the truthfullness. Some things are just wrong.
2. How many times has our military toruted someone and done so without punishment?
I guess that makes it ok.
3. "Your socialist friends over in france" -That's just plain pathetic. How about "everyone who opposes Bush is unamerican"? Have we reached that point yet? Are you willing to say that?
Try not to let the freedom fries stain your brown shirt.
In any case,
On one wall is the text of his second inaugural, there was something there that this brought to mind-
It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.
full text here
Now, it seems to me that the parallels are clear and factual. Leader worship? check. Patriotic symbolism? Check. Common enemy? Check, disdain for human rights? Check. etc, etc, etc.
They don't say that the government is completely facist, only that it's headed that way. It looks to me as though you're willfully distorting the content of the (implied) argument. The name calling crap (far left-wing/liberal pansies) is sad and unpleasant. I mark anyone who responds this way as incapable of facing evidence of facts undermining their beliefs, intellectually brittle and insecure.
BTW, as a far left-wing/liberal pansy I can give you at least a few better practices/methods than our current government. How about "never start a war with falsified intelligence?" or maybe "torture sucks as a way of winning hearts and minds"? or "If you're going to do a drug plan, consider the needs of the people taking the drugs before the needs of the people selling them"? Try turning down the Rush Limbaugh.
"I state the issue. They then rephrase the issue, adding something not really relevant to the issue but closely related to show how smart they are. I, out of politeness, say oh that's interesting, or some other meaningless drivel to show them that I too understand basic Calculus, OSI, or traffic law, etc. I then move on to state my idea for solving the issue."
No matter how smart you are, or how smart you think you are, you are never, never so smart that you are always right and don't have to listen to others. Going into a conversation knowing the answer means you're not really there. Not only is that rude, but it means if you're wrong you'll never know it. On top of that, people generally can tell (you didn't notice that because you weren't listening, right?) and won't be very happy about it.
I'm a consultant these days. I used to be pretty cocky, like I knew how to solve problems and those business folk just weren't as smart, but even someone as dumb as me figures out, after being thrust repeatedly into unfamiliar business situations (where the business people really do understand the problem domain better than me) that I don't know everything.
You sound like an interpersonal nightmare. I'd never want to work with a sysadmin who couldn't listen to the reasons he might be wrong. I'd much rather work with someone willing to work with the team, more interested in getting us all to the common goal than telling us how smart he is.
As for the racial thing, I know it exists,but my personal experience in IT and dev in NY is that it's been a meritocracy everywhere I've worked. One of the things, really, I've loved about the work. I've been on plenty of interviews where I didn't get hired, but absent feedback from the interviewer I can't see how I could ever make a statement as to why.
You know, you sound like you're a smart guy. The funny thing about this field (again one of the things I love about it) is how many smart guys there are in it. Whenever I start thinking about how smart I am, I meet someone smarter. As smart as you may be, there are smarter people out there. Unless you have recently won your third Nobel you ought to tone it down a bit, and think very seriously about what other people may have to offer you. Try listening.
But.
This is much like math anxiety. It's not just the subject, it's the fear. Most people so fully assume that it's beyond them that their first reaction is to fall helpless to the floor.
When I used to do tech support, I used to tell people that the thing wasn't complicated (at least not conceptually), just big. That is, there's just not, for the average MS Word user, much to figure out. Hit this button, that happens. Hit thatbutton, that other thing happens( repeat 1000 times). It's like dealing with a dishwasher with 1000 buttons. Nobody things they know what all the buttons do, but it's a dishwasher, for chrissakes, if you only know the 5 buttons you need you're fine and you don't give yourself an inferiority complex worrying about the other 995.
Thinking the thing is so deep is the problem. The knowledge domain for IS-type stuff is wide but shallow- lots of things to know, lots of disconnected facts, not much depth to them. Compare this to say, writing a novel, where the knowledge required is narrow (very few "things' to know-think of what you wnat to write and write it) but very deep. The wide knowledge looks hard to people when in fact it's conceptually very shallow.
And that's why most people think they can't use a computer but can and most people think they can write a novel but can't.
I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it unnecessary, more like, it set out to solve problems that were bigger, or at least different, than the problems people had to actually solve most of the time.
As for the knowledgeability of the engineers, I've found that it's an easy temptation to fall into as a developer to think that you're smarter than everybody else (can't they see how much better your idea is than theirs?)
On the plus side, they can possibly (and sometimes live up to the promise of) saving you the trouble of writing boilerplate code (e.g. db access, ....). They're far better than what would be hand-coded at shops where competence is, shall we say, less than common. My relevant horror story here was a job I walked into that had no definitive version of the source, no source code control, and developers just out of school given open-ended assignments to make this or that work with no supervision or code review. Lots of random SQL in jsps, a real mess. In a situation like that any framework is a godsend (any kind of architecture is better than none).
Another positive is that you can learn a fair amount about architecture and patterns from using them - one of the things that made a fair impression on me when reading about patterns was the statement that other professions, like architecture, train people by having them emulate and study the works of professionals, and the complaint that there were no software masterpieces to study. A budding architect studies Frank Lloyd Wright's FallingWater. What does a budding software developer study? Maybe frameworks are the beginning of an answer to this question, as you can absorb a fair amount of architectural principles through working with them.
On the minus side, I'm starting to see these things done as a sort of orthodoxy, and often they just add unnecassary layers to the code because "that's the way you're supposed to do it". You can often spend more time twiddling with the framework to get it to do what you want than it'd take you to write your own. My relevant story here is the day and a half I spent last week trying to figure out why my hibernate setup wasn't working properly, until I finally came upon a little note somewhere in the docs that it had problems with SQL Server and wasn't recommended. This is, BTW, for read-only access to the database, hardly worth the bother. (Of course, It's entirely possible that I was configuring it incorrectly in some way, didn't have the time to research it further, which is part of the point of the bother of it, there's a fair gap between learning it enough to get by and knowing it thorugh and through, and one rarely has time for the latter).
Generally my problem with them is that they tend to black-box the solutions they provide (which I suppose is sort of the point) which is great if it works exactly the way it's supposed to and leaves you wasting enourmous amounts of time if it doesn't.
A related issue is that they can make debugging and code tracing much harder. A Spring app, for example, links code through config files. Even if you understand the config files, you add a layer of indirection to code tracing. If you don't it can be almost impossible to figure out how this piece of data gets onto that page.
They're neccessary, I suppose, and good for something, but should be swallowed with a bit more salt than they generally are in the industry.
Come on, you know this is childish, right? From the rest of your post it look slike you know how to substantiate an argument. It seems pretty reasonable and obvious to me that ....
---China's human rights record is far worse than ours, and
---The Bush administration is implementing many of these same practices on a smaller scale. Let's see -
Extraorinary rendition
People detained for years without charge (some subsequently determined later to be innocent)
torture in secret prisons
secret monitoring of its citizens
Not to mention the leader who speaks almost entirely in front of filtered crowds of supporters, or the paid media propagandists, or the cronyism, or the
Of course China is worse, and of course it's true that you hear more about what's going on here becuase of the freedoms we do have. No argument there. But your argument, taken to its logical extreme, would brand as a "nutjob" anyone who criticizes the U.S up until we get to be as bad as China. I think that honesty would compel you to accept that the "yogurt-eating nutjob" might have a point or two.
But
In the spirit of the first post, the mention of Goedel/Escher/Bach, I've found that there's lots of math titles that are fun for us programming types to read. I don't mean the really seriously technical titles, the ones that come in plain covers where you can't comprehend the title and the first words are "Let x...". But there's lots of titles I've found to be fun that sort of skirt the periphery. A few that I've liked:
Knuth: things a computer scientist rarely talks about (not math, but lovely)
Surreal Numbers (also by knuth, does a sort of quasi-fictional walk through of "On numbers and games" (which I can't seem to get around to getting to far into)) Winning ways for your mathematical plays(combinatorial games, really amateur math. In a similar vein collections by Martin Gardner are also fun).
Conway s "The book of Numbers" really about numbers and their character, can't reccomend to highly (although a professional mathematician might get bored.
Mind Tools (Rudy Rucker)
There's also a few other books by Hofstader, there's an article collection that's very nice (Mathemagical Themas, I think? something like that, don't have the time to look it up). Also your avg. geek might like more general science writing, any of the collections of Stephen Jay Gould make good reading as well.
There are some issues that are statewide (e.g. there's current arguments about NY vs national mileage standards) and some (farm policy) that are more district and region-type. NY statewide voting often features it's own urban vs. rural dynamic, as about half the state is rural ( by population).
Your arguments about how candidates would, under a country-wide system, tend towards high population areas make sense - I had not thought of that, and it seems perfectly true. On the other hand, there's a lot of lip-service paid to farm policy during the campaigns, I'd argue that there's no reason overrepresenting rural voters is in any way inherently fairer than overrepresenting urban voters, or even dead-even fairness.
Still, it seems to me that under the current system I'm very under-represented in comparison to a small-state voter; I don't think that argument goes away. Yes, there are some issues under which block voting by state might swamp that, but I think more commonly it's party-line- NY state has its share of republican congressmen, and they vote with the party.
I'm actually past age myself., I was pretty much just being snippy about the draft thing (Bush brings out the worst in me,sorry, guess it's the "divider not a uniter" thing) although I have to admit to some "we've always been at war with Oceania" images going through my head. A year ago I thought they might go the draft route because there was no other way they'd get the troops they need, what with the recruitment issues and the multiple rotations. At the moment Bush's stock is so low I don't think they can even consider thinking about the possibility of maybe floating a trial balloon to form a commission to consider the possibility of doing it in 10 years. Still think we're royally fucked, though. Still hate Bush and his cronies for what they've done to us - 50 years from now my grandchildren will still be paying for the shit these people have done. 100 years. Bastards.
Best of luck to your brother, though, don't agree with the politics but it's a tough gig no matter what you believe.
(from weakest to strongest) It provides a last (theoretical!) check on "the will of the people." Even though being a faithless elector is against state law in many states, an elector can still choose to cast his vote for whomever and his vote will be federally binding.
- Not sure how I feel about that, I think in practice the "faithless elector" scenario is impossible on a meaningful scale. It brings up all sorts of things - for example, in 2000, the FL legislature was debating a bill that in essence said "the hell with all this, our electoral votes go to Bush". What does something like this do to a democracy?
The electoral college makes it highly improbable that a third-party candidate will win. Compare to Germany's recent mess, where it took a month just to figure out which party would actually be able to form a coalition.
-You're right, except that I think a viable 3d party would be a usefull antidote to many of our political ailments. At the very least it'd be possible to have a wider range of opinions in politics. Currently getting too far left makes you a pariah (it's been argued, and I agree, that the 2 party system leads to a situation where the range of acceptable opinion is quite narrow compared to other democracies- the rightward shift that we've seen in that last 25 years can then be understood as a shifting of the entire range somewhat to the right, while the width of the range has stayed relatively constant).
It balances population and geography. In the Legislative Branch, the House is stacked in favor of populous states; the Senate, in favor of less populous states. That was agreed upon for a reason: the smaller states wanted to balance the power of bigger states like ... erm, New York. Similarly, the Electoral College allows a balance between population and geography in the presidential selection process.
-You're incorrect here, the house is only stacked in favor of populous states in the sense that NY has more overall votes than montana. However, my individual vote is less powerfull in the house compared to an individual vote of a montana voter.Here's a good reference page I found. I noticed that
a) A person in Wyoming's vote for president counts for about 3.8 times what mine does.
b) according to the wikipedia article you cited, if the electoral college would be made slightly more proportional (by removing the 2 votes per senator) so that it more accurately reflected population, Gore would've won in 2000.
The Electoral College isolates the consequences of voter fraud. Let's say someone commits fraud in New York City on election night. It would have to be massive (Republican!) fraud to actually make a difference in the outcome. By contrast, under a straight popular vote, just a small amount of fraud in every state could swing a tight race. Obviously, counterarguments could be made for fraud in tight states like FL in 2000 -- but the point is that regulators know where to look for the fraud, as opposed to having it distributed across the country.
-True in the sense that god knows what we'd do about a national recount. False in that in 2000 (and in 2004 (link to GAO report included) a single state fraud magnified the results of fraud.
The electoral college provides that the candidates will have to make a genuine effort in many different states. If popular votes were the only consideration, candidates would promise and then enact policies favorable to high-population-density areas, and let the rest of the country go to hell. So to speak.
-Disagree here, think you've got it exactly backwards. What's happened in the past is hot contention over battleground states - you get millions of candidate visits to Ohio, none to Alaska or Hawaii, and more noticeably a more partisan split- There's never any reason under the cur
I I can't really argue with what you say, though, it's certainly true that the 100 vote recount is sort of absurd in a state of 25 million. A statistician would probably tell you that you either have to revote the state or split the electoral 50/50, because it's essentially a tie. There were some absurd editorials at the time about how discounting the florida totals would be disenfranchisement, when in fact it'd be an accurate reflection of the vote (no advantage to either side, statistically a dead heat).
The electoral college, however, is another way that the elections are sort of slanted. There's been quite a bit written on how it slants to rural/western/southern states due to the addition of votes per senator. I live in NY, and (roughly, I don't remember the exact figures) a person in Wyoming or Alaska's vote for president counts for about twice what mine does, The electoral college also tempts people to game the census every 10 years (2, if you're in texas) and is the only reason we don't sensibly count statistically every 10 years. Counting per head also predominantly hides the urban poor,another way in which the census slants away from urban industrialized states.
A correction, though. The supreme court didn't just get "asked" to settle the matter-putting it this way makes it sound like arbitration. They were asked by the last guys to lose in the penultimate lower court (of course, this also reflects how people game the system-lawyers will look for a friendly court, and I'm sure Bush's lawyers suspected they'd get a good hearing from the current supreme court, Dems would've done the same. Personally I'll always remember that Renquist got his start keeping black people from voting in arizona, so it's nice to see that he stayed consistent.