experience of people of Eastern Europe shows how greedy for power were the Commies.
How do they compare to the power-hungriness of the fascists? Or are the labels "communist" & "fascist" just a red herring, and you can label their essential characteristics as "power-hungry"?
That means he doesn't need to know the nuts and bolts of computer tech support, but instead how to connect the people that do know how to fix things to the people that have problems.
Would you expect someone to be a good manager if they didn't have some basic understanding of the jargon that the people they are managing use? I wouldn't.
I don't understand why you think it's a good idea to give the President such a fine level of control over the legislative process. With a Constitutional line-item veto, the President could pretty much MAKE Congress do whatever he wanted, unless he pissed 2/3 of the Congress off enough so that they would override every single line-item veto he tried.
I think you'll agree that, regardless of how you feel about the current President, there have been Presidents in the past who were so aggressive about using their political power, that having a tool like a line-item veto ("if you don't vote the way I tell you to, your state will never see an ounce of federal money ever again") would have devastated the system of checks & balances (however clunky the current system is).
This amendment would address a systemic ill that encourages over spending.
If you want to address a systemic over-spending habit, and you're assuming that you can pass a Constitutional Amendment, then why aren't you considering a Balanced Budget Amendment? - basically, requiring that the government not be allowed to spend more than it has taken in through revenue or what it saved from a previous fiscal period.
As I stated before, I applaud your motivation, but your solutions seem to be very indirect ways of achieving your goals. If you assume that you can pass a Constitutional Amendment, then its power is pretty much absolute in the U.S. legal system (as long as it can be enforced) since it constrains all three branches of government. So you don't need to be indirect about your solutions - just pick a simple, enforceable solution. (See Prohibition for an example of a Constitutional Amendment which couldn't be enforced...
In essence, this is a rule against unrelated amendments. Unrelated amendments prevent debating an idea on its merits. They are also the main method of passing pork. I suggest word count as the mechanism because it replaces the subjective arguments over what is or is not 'related' with an objective metric.
I think it's too arbitrary a metric - the metric doesn't have anything directly to do with the goal of restricting unrelated amendments, and would encourage the kind of word-weaseling & loopholes that the legislature already has enough of. You'd get like laws that end up sounding like like "The detailed implementation of this law are described in the My-Favorite-Lobbyist Newsletter", or "All decisions having to do with this issue will be left up to the industry association". Both statements are well short of your word limit, but I think you'd agree don't constitute good law.
You'd probably also see the legal language strained & butchered as legislators try to fit things into the word limit, much like lazy students will destroy an essay to either try and make it meet a minimum or maximum # of words.
If you're looking for a systemic way of encouraging clarity & brevity (although it won't necessary solve the problems I listed previously), how about this: a legislator must propose the full text of the bill orally, and completely by memory. Amendment proposals must also restate the full modified law orally, and completely by memory. That kind of rule would encourage laws that are easier to remember, and might get rid of a few legislators whose brain cells have stopped functioning too well.
We need a constitutional amendment that disallows text in a law that doesn't fit the spirit of the law's title.
The basic problem with bill titles is that you don't have a disinterested 3rd-party examining the bill's contents & deciding on the title of the bill - instead you have the people with a vested interested in the bill's passage basically designing the bill's title for best marketing effect.
Not sure you can enforce a Constitutional amendment for something as vague as what you're suggesting. You'd probably be able to get rid of a LOT of shenanigans by just having very strong Balanced Budget Constitutional amendment - make sure that the Congresscritters are only allowed to spend whatever came in as tax revenue & whatever they managed to save from the last year. I can only imagine what kind of fights would break out if the Congresscritters actually had to think about where they were going to get the money for their pork.
A Constitutionally-mandated expiration requirement might be nice too...
While I applaud your motivation, I doubt your solutions would do anything useful, and would actually probably cause more of a problem.
Your A amendment is useless simply because a short law doesn't necessarily mean it's a good law, and/or does nothing to stop Congress from passing many more bills with all the pork they want.
Your B amendment merely shifts more legislative power to the President, which means that Congress will have to kowtow to the President's every desire if they want to get anything of theirs passed. I suppose if you have absolute trust the President's motivation & competence, then that'd be fine - but if you had THAT much trust, then you might as well go to a dictatorship.
there's nothing more odd and disturbing that Japanese characters speaking in American accents.
Dunno, at least to the eyes of foreigners, anime characters don't really look "Japanese" - or even Asian, except when they are deliberately drawn with exaggerated Asian features (usually to emphasize Chinese-ness).
I think people who watch a lot of anime have just gotten used to the child-like voices & the linguistic "rhythms" of Japanese speech that the voice actors & actresses use with most of the characters, so when a dub uses "normal" English voices & voice patterns, it feels very awkward.
It's not the Republicans to blame for this crap, it's the neo-cons masquerading as Republicans.
Whatever...it's the rank & file Republicans who helped vote those assholes into power, all in the name of party loyalty. They don't get a pass by claiming that the people they voted into office "aren't real Republicans".
is it impossible in America to go to the movies and bring your own food and drinks?
They try to stop you, since they want you to buy the food & drink they are selling you at massive markups.
I don't really blame the theaters though, since they're trying to pay for their overhead (which is pretty substantial considering how big their building usually is) & the huge costs that they are being charged to be allowed to show the various blockbuster hits. As far as I know, most theaters operate at pretty slim profit margins, unlike the main Hollywood industry players.
Even if you are absolutely certain that the bulk of all terrorists in the world look Middle-Eastern, the number of such terrorists is SO small compared to the total innocent Middle-Eastern population, using racial profiling to choose search victims is a completely useless tactic, and pretty much just ends up pissing off the innocent Middle-Eastern-looking population.
It's like knowing that the digit 6 comes up 10% more frequently than random chance in a 12-digit lottery number selection. Sure, you might be able to exploit that information to have slightly better odds than everyone else, but the odds are still so ridiculously against you, only an idiot would suddenly think that the lottery was a sure-thing payoff.
If the artists got all of the money that they are entitled from the sale of their creative works, then they would be able to afford to pay all those entities for services rendered - instead of the labels taking what they want, and letting the artists try and pay everyone else with whatever's left over (if the label's "creative accounting" doesn't arrange for there to be nothing left over).
I would imagine that anything which caused a lot of the security cameras to get blanked out at a casino or any similar place would cause a massive security sweep until they found out who was causing it & threw them out (maybe with a little discreet beating out back).
This kind of thing will only be useful if the person running the cameras don't want to identify themselves.
If it is really an issue of National Security concering "sensitive" information covering up misuse/loss/theft/etc is ALREADY a criminal activity. Voting is NOT that kind of life/death issue of national security.
I disagree with your assertion that voter fraud is "merely" a criminal act - I think the current U.S. administration has already demonstrated how voter fraud can result in compromised national security.
Unless they are doing formal proofs on the software or testing every possible path and range of inputs no one can say for certain the software is perfect.
The issues of voting are _not_ that complicated, compared to something like the avionics for the space program, and we have many, many real-world examples of solutions that were successful or unsuccessful throughout history.
If they have to do formal proofs and/or test every single possible input & output, and/or pay armies of hackers to try and break the system in any way possible, then they should do so. Systems which are used to make decisions which can have catastrophic effects on a society should be as near perfect is it is humanly possible to create.
"It's too much trouble" is the excuse of people who either don't care, or who have ulterior motives.
I don't think it's unreasonable for employers to demand that their employees keep a security information quiet.
When it involves matters of national security (yes, I consider being able to subvert our voting system a matter of national security), employers trying to cover up security issues should be thrown into jail.
I don't have a large library of such documents or links on hand, but you might try something like this (found near top of search list by by Google w/"large jury awards frequency" search):
They are a little old, but I haven't heard any evidence to dispute that the trends have changed since then.
You'll note that although they do say that size of punitive damage awards is going up, they also say that "Despite the attention they have received from policymakers and from the media, punitive damages are rarely awarded". Rand isn't well-known for being a liberal think tank.
Many of the other links are heavily biased & seem to be oriented toward manipulating public perception - often by pointing out the increasing size of jury awards, and then stating without proof that both size AND frequency of jury awards are going up, and that's why we need tort reform.
Here's a link that is admittedly selected because it supports my viewpoint, but seems to list some cases to back up their claims:
I think the government should be constitutionally required to provide equal legal representation to EVERYONE, and they would have to take the cost of that representation into account when they were drafting legislation.
Combine that with a balanced budget requirement, and I have a feeling that the legal system would be greatly simplified with an big eye toward practicality, since the government would bust the budget (not to mention leave nothing left for pork) if they didn't take into account the potential legal representation costs of every law.
Of course, a lot of existing lawyers would have to find something useful to do instead of being parasites on a bloated body of law, but it's a sacrifice that I'm willing for them to make.
The seemingly-crazy imbalance in the courts is scarcely all going one direction.
That's called backlash - what you get when you get a bunch of normal citizens being referees for a David-and-Goliath match, and they collectively make up their minds that Goliath's representatives are mind-boggling assholes. It's the kind of result you might expect in a society where there are huge class differences, but you still have the remnants of a jury-by-common-citizen system.
I think if you looked carefully at the statistics though, this kind of citizen backlash occurs infrequently compared to the times when the common citizen gets screwed over by entities with lots of money & legal representation.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if anyone has used the concept in a code-obfuscation contest.
How do they compare to the power-hungriness of the fascists? Or are the labels "communist" & "fascist" just a red herring, and you can label their essential characteristics as "power-hungry"?
Of course, that made me curious enough to go look up the y-combinator.
o mb.html
Found this:
http://www.ece.uc.edu/~franco/C511/html/Scheme/yc
My head hurts...
Would you expect someone to be a good manager if they didn't have some basic understanding of the jargon that the people they are managing use? I wouldn't.
Unfortunately at that point, I think the West will be more interested in determining whether _it_ will survive...
I don't understand why you think it's a good idea to give the President such a fine level of control over the legislative process. With a Constitutional line-item veto, the President could pretty much MAKE Congress do whatever he wanted, unless he pissed 2/3 of the Congress off enough so that they would override every single line-item veto he tried.
I think you'll agree that, regardless of how you feel about the current President, there have been Presidents in the past who were so aggressive about using their political power, that having a tool like a line-item veto ("if you don't vote the way I tell you to, your state will never see an ounce of federal money ever again") would have devastated the system of checks & balances (however clunky the current system is).
If you want to address a systemic over-spending habit, and you're assuming that you can pass a Constitutional Amendment, then why aren't you considering a Balanced Budget Amendment? - basically, requiring that the government not be allowed to spend more than it has taken in through revenue or what it saved from a previous fiscal period.
As I stated before, I applaud your motivation, but your solutions seem to be very indirect ways of achieving your goals. If you assume that you can pass a Constitutional Amendment, then its power is pretty much absolute in the U.S. legal system (as long as it can be enforced) since it constrains all three branches of government. So you don't need to be indirect about your solutions - just pick a simple, enforceable solution. (See Prohibition for an example of a Constitutional Amendment which couldn't be enforced...
I think it's too arbitrary a metric - the metric doesn't have anything directly to do with the goal of restricting unrelated amendments, and would encourage the kind of word-weaseling & loopholes that the legislature already has enough of. You'd get like laws that end up sounding like like "The detailed implementation of this law are described in the My-Favorite-Lobbyist Newsletter", or "All decisions having to do with this issue will be left up to the industry association". Both statements are well short of your word limit, but I think you'd agree don't constitute good law.
You'd probably also see the legal language strained & butchered as legislators try to fit things into the word limit, much like lazy students will destroy an essay to either try and make it meet a minimum or maximum # of words.
If you're looking for a systemic way of encouraging clarity & brevity (although it won't necessary solve the problems I listed previously), how about this: a legislator must propose the full text of the bill orally, and completely by memory. Amendment proposals must also restate the full modified law orally, and completely by memory. That kind of rule would encourage laws that are easier to remember, and might get rid of a few legislators whose brain cells have stopped functioning too well.
The basic problem with bill titles is that you don't have a disinterested 3rd-party examining the bill's contents & deciding on the title of the bill - instead you have the people with a vested interested in the bill's passage basically designing the bill's title for best marketing effect.
Not sure you can enforce a Constitutional amendment for something as vague as what you're suggesting. You'd probably be able to get rid of a LOT of shenanigans by just having very strong Balanced Budget Constitutional amendment - make sure that the Congresscritters are only allowed to spend whatever came in as tax revenue & whatever they managed to save from the last year. I can only imagine what kind of fights would break out if the Congresscritters actually had to think about where they were going to get the money for their pork.
A Constitutionally-mandated expiration requirement might be nice too...
Ah, while the Iraq war is taxpayer money well-spent. Good to have that cleared up.
While I applaud your motivation, I doubt your solutions would do anything useful, and would actually probably cause more of a problem.
Your A amendment is useless simply because a short law doesn't necessarily mean it's a good law, and/or does nothing to stop Congress from passing many more bills with all the pork they want.
Your B amendment merely shifts more legislative power to the President, which means that Congress will have to kowtow to the President's every desire if they want to get anything of theirs passed. I suppose if you have absolute trust the President's motivation & competence, then that'd be fine - but if you had THAT much trust, then you might as well go to a dictatorship.
Dunno, at least to the eyes of foreigners, anime characters don't really look "Japanese" - or even Asian, except when they are deliberately drawn with exaggerated Asian features (usually to emphasize Chinese-ness).
I think people who watch a lot of anime have just gotten used to the child-like voices & the linguistic "rhythms" of Japanese speech that the voice actors & actresses use with most of the characters, so when a dub uses "normal" English voices & voice patterns, it feels very awkward.
Whatever...it's the rank & file Republicans who helped vote those assholes into power, all in the name of party loyalty. They don't get a pass by claiming that the people they voted into office "aren't real Republicans".
They try to stop you, since they want you to buy the food & drink they are selling you at massive markups.
I don't really blame the theaters though, since they're trying to pay for their overhead (which is pretty substantial considering how big their building usually is) & the huge costs that they are being charged to be allowed to show the various blockbuster hits. As far as I know, most theaters operate at pretty slim profit margins, unlike the main Hollywood industry players.
Even if you are absolutely certain that the bulk of all terrorists in the world look Middle-Eastern, the number of such terrorists is SO small compared to the total innocent Middle-Eastern population, using racial profiling to choose search victims is a completely useless tactic, and pretty much just ends up pissing off the innocent Middle-Eastern-looking population.
It's like knowing that the digit 6 comes up 10% more frequently than random chance in a 12-digit lottery number selection. Sure, you might be able to exploit that information to have slightly better odds than everyone else, but the odds are still so ridiculously against you, only an idiot would suddenly think that the lottery was a sure-thing payoff.
Well, except for the "Party" members. Obviously, they would be above suspicion.
If the artists got all of the money that they are entitled from the sale of their creative works, then they would be able to afford to pay all those entities for services rendered - instead of the labels taking what they want, and letting the artists try and pay everyone else with whatever's left over (if the label's "creative accounting" doesn't arrange for there to be nothing left over).
I would imagine that anything which caused a lot of the security cameras to get blanked out at a casino or any similar place would cause a massive security sweep until they found out who was causing it & threw them out (maybe with a little discreet beating out back).
This kind of thing will only be useful if the person running the cameras don't want to identify themselves.
I disagree with your assertion that voter fraud is "merely" a criminal act - I think the current U.S. administration has already demonstrated how voter fraud can result in compromised national security.
The issues of voting are _not_ that complicated, compared to something like the avionics for the space program, and we have many, many real-world examples of solutions that were successful or unsuccessful throughout history.
If they have to do formal proofs and/or test every single possible input & output, and/or pay armies of hackers to try and break the system in any way possible, then they should do so. Systems which are used to make decisions which can have catastrophic effects on a society should be as near perfect is it is humanly possible to create.
"It's too much trouble" is the excuse of people who either don't care, or who have ulterior motives.
When it involves matters of national security (yes, I consider being able to subvert our voting system a matter of national security), employers trying to cover up security issues should be thrown into jail.
I don't have a large library of such documents or links on hand, but you might try something like this (found near top of search list by by Google w/"large jury awards frequency" search):
. html
/ 08-30-05-opinion-merck/talkback/1125443244/discuss ionitem_view
http://www.rand.org/publications/RB/RB9025/RB9025
http://www.rand.org/publications/CT/CT143/
They are a little old, but I haven't heard any evidence to dispute that the trends have changed since then.
You'll note that although they do say that size of punitive damage awards is going up, they also say that "Despite the attention they have received from policymakers and from the media, punitive damages are rarely awarded". Rand isn't well-known for being a liberal think tank.
Many of the other links are heavily biased & seem to be oriented toward manipulating public perception - often by pointing out the increasing size of jury awards, and then stating without proof that both size AND frequency of jury awards are going up, and that's why we need tort reform.
Here's a link that is admittedly selected because it supports my viewpoint, but seems to list some cases to back up their claims:
http://cms.bio-itworld.com/newsitems/2005/Aug2005
I'll match up a good pair of scissors against a DRM-enabled zipper any time.
This might be a case where technology-induced annoyance causes a cultural fashion shift to trousers as the default clothing choice.
Why would there need to be more than one button? :-P
I think the government should be constitutionally required to provide equal legal representation to EVERYONE, and they would have to take the cost of that representation into account when they were drafting legislation.
Combine that with a balanced budget requirement, and I have a feeling that the legal system would be greatly simplified with an big eye toward practicality, since the government would bust the budget (not to mention leave nothing left for pork) if they didn't take into account the potential legal representation costs of every law.
Of course, a lot of existing lawyers would have to find something useful to do instead of being parasites on a bloated body of law, but it's a sacrifice that I'm willing for them to make.
That's called backlash - what you get when you get a bunch of normal citizens being referees for a David-and-Goliath match, and they collectively make up their minds that Goliath's representatives are mind-boggling assholes. It's the kind of result you might expect in a society where there are huge class differences, but you still have the remnants of a jury-by-common-citizen system.
I think if you looked carefully at the statistics though, this kind of citizen backlash occurs infrequently compared to the times when the common citizen gets screwed over by entities with lots of money & legal representation.