It happens in the US occasionally, too. Ross Perot's presidential campaign in '92 caused both parties to push debt reduction to the front of their economic platforms. Of course that only lasted through the Clinton administration, after which we resumed throwing money around without regard to consequence.
Manual labor wouldn't have an effect on corn and squash. Both of those are mechanized crops. Illegals are used to pick labor intensive crops like berries.
And it's not so much that they would lose subsidies. Subsidies are paid at the market, so it wouldn't make sense to waste the crop. And for the most part you wouldn't have to let a field go fallow anyway, what you would do is set up a crop rotation. But a crop rotation adds complexity and cost. Instead of just growing corn and only having to pay for the equipment to plant and harvest corn, you have to invest in all of the equipment to grow each crop efficiently. Even with government subsidies low-volume farmers aren't making a profit unless they're debt free (extremely rare), and either way efficiency is extremely important when you're selling commodity crops. It's simpler and cheaper to just add fertilizer.
If you look back in time, "family farms" all grew at least a few crops and raised all sorts of livestock. It was its own little ecosystem. But the yields were way, way below what we can get now and the equipment has become much more complicated and expensive. If you're growing several types of crops and raising livestock in the modern era you're going to require huge amounts of both land and capital. Even if you're still technically a family farm it would be a very sophisticated operation dwarfing the farms of 100 years ago in terms of size and complexity. "Family farming" as we understood it in the past is a thing dead and gone.
Oh, I definitely agree that you still need math. I just think there needs to be a clear delineation between CS and SE. If you look at the way, say, mechanical engineering is structured you still take a ton of math and physics. It's just that they also teach you application at the same time. Whereas if you take a pure math program, they're going to teach you math in a more "mathy" way rather than relating it to engineering the way most engineers probably prefer.
Just look at the difference between a textbook that teaches Calculus from a science/engineering perspective and one that teaches it by analysis. It's an entirely different course. But it makes sense to teach mathematicians analysis, because they're thinking about the math in pure symbolic terms and aren't trying to relate it directly to engineering problems.
The problem isn't with the way they teach computer science. It's absolutely correct for them to teach CS in that way. Computation is math, and if you're getting a university-level math degree it should be taught in a rigorous way.
The problem is that there is no clear delineation between CS and software engineering in academia. Most people go through a CS program to become software engineers, and higher level computer science isn't really needed for that. I wish there was an option at more universities for a BS in software engineering, because it would be a much more useful degree for the majority of people that take CS.
What? What did killing the Crown Vic have to do with Al Gore? Ford still makes a police vehicle, just based on the Taurus chassis instead of the 30+ year old Panther.
Seeing as how Chrysler had to be bailed out and sold to Fiat while Ford successfully weathered the recession and just posted their highest profit since the 90s, I'm sure they will continue to ignore your advice.
Addiction *is* a mental illness. If I smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, my brain will become ill with nicotine addiction in the same way my body will become ill with the negative effects of inhaling smoke. The words addiction or illness do not imply a removal of personal responsibility. Illness means your mind is not healthy and addiction is a description of the *way* in which you are unhealthy.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Many rock climbers are very, very muscular. Mostly boulderers, but bouldering is probably the most popular type of rock climbing currently.
And even your other sports don't check out. Lebron James, for example is 6'8" 250 lbs. That's a BMI of 27.5 - overweight. Mike Trout (baseball player) is 6'2" 230 lbs. - 29.5 - borderline obese.
What's the most popular fitness activity in the US? Weightlifting. BMI was developed almost 200 years ago, when bloodletting was still standard medical procedure. We should be using body fat percentages if we do population-wide statistics, and not demonizing mass. Mass isn't the issue.
In my experience it's been the exact opposite. "Street smart" is usually used by less educated people to describe a skill that some dumbass with a fancy degree very obviously lacks.
It is true that the president doesn't have nearly as much power as people think, but he does have significant amounts of power. The two most significant are the military and international diplomacy. The president has nearly universal latitude in both of those areas to do whatever he likes. What power Congress has to oppose him in these areas has essentially been forfeited slowly over the last century or so. The President couldn't start a war with the UK or anything crazy like that, but for the most part he can authorize any lower scale use of force, even large-scale military intervention like in Libya. Congress *could* block it theoretically, but in practice the President always gets what he wants, and if there's a realistic chance of that happening he can always just send in the CIA or black ops.
And there are lots of other powers the President *usually* has, although many of them have been thwarted by the Republicans under the current administration. Federal appointments, for example. Normally a very underrated and subtle use of influence, and the Republicans have used Congress to block a huge portion of Obama's appointments. But in a properly functioning government (ie one not hell-bent on opposing the executive branch) that is a huge power.
Another underrated one is the decision *not* to pursue federal prosecution, as evidence by Obama not pursuing anyone responsible for the financial crisis, or any war crimes or perjury under the previous administration, and Bush/Clinton basically giving anybody casually associated with their adminstrations a free pass to skirt federal law.
I agree with what most of what you're saying, but something can't be "highly deterministic." It either is or it isn't. It is very, very difficult to show that a system is deterministic and chaotic rather than just random, but there *is* a distinct difference between the two.
Just think of how hard it would be to prove a software random number generator is deterministic if all you have to look at is the output. Even computer algorithms like that, which are provably deterministic, observationally will still have some fluctuation in their output due to uncontrollable variables (corrupted ram, design limitations, hardware errors a la Intel floating point thing) and that's in an environment that is precisely engineered to produce such determinism. Then contrast that with all the millions of social, behavioral, and environmental factors that are throwing noise at observation of the human brain and it becomes mind-boggling very, very quickly.
Any possible proof of the determinism of the human brain would first require that we come to a complete understanding of the chemical and biological processes that control human thought in addition to how environmental and genetic factors influence those internal processes. I think this particular question will stay in the realm of philosophy rather than science for an extremely long time.
You're absolutely wrong about this. We have succeeded as a society in bringing a massive caloric surplus to bear, but we have not in any way solved hunger.
It is possible to be starving while your neighbors are over fed, and indeed that is exactly what is happening. There are approximately 50 million people in the US that still deal with chronic hunger. There's a documentary out now called A Place at the Table. I highly, highly recommend that you check it out.
And you present it as an either/or, but it is possible to be both obese and malnourished. That is exactly what you find in a large percentage of the US population. If our poor are chronically malnourished because the only food they can afford makes them fat and sick, then what use is there in making the distinction between a nutrition problem and a hunger problem? In reality they are two sides of the exact same problem.
All of those $500 wines or $500 whiskeys are aged. It's less a matter of quality and more of rarity. And for the most part, those bottles are not worth what you're paying for. If you know what you're doing you can find a $80 bottle of whiskey that tastes as good as the $500, or a $40 bottle of wine that tastes as good as the $500. Most wines don't actually benefit by aging much if at all, and unless you have an incredibly well-developed palate you probably can't taste the difference between a good wine and an excellent one.
Beer, by its nature, is more ephemeral than wine or spirits. The best beer you'll ever have is fresh from the barrel at a good brewery, not stuck in somebody's cellar for 30 years.
Hitler was nominally a socialist, but that means a different thing than you seem to think. He was certainly not a Marxist. Remember that North Korea is nominally called the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea. It doesn't mean that they are a democracy.
And Germany implemented social security and universal health care in the 1880s. Hitler wasn't even born yet. If you want to avoid the more negative connotations of the word fascist, you could call the Nazi government a militaristic autarky. That's way more closer to the truth than socialist, but the word fascist exists for a reason.
Gas is cheaper in inflation-adjusted dollars than when I started paying attention to it. Commodity prices are cyclical. Fearing that they will go to infinity because you've only experienced on upswing is just like fearing the oceans will all boil during the first Summer of your life.
When did you start paying attention, 1980? That's the only time in the last 40 years the prices have been similar, and that was caused by decreased supply due to the Iranian revolution, subsequent embargoes and the Iran-Iraq war. We are at similar inflation-adjusted prices now with the whole world producing at maximum capacity. Imagine how high prices would go if we completely removed Iranian and Iraqi production from the market!
And commodity prices are not always cyclical. If production can not keep up with increased demand (as has been the case with oil for over a decade now) prices will continue to rise. There aren't going to be any more dramatic increases in oil production like we saw in the 1980s and 1990s as offshore platforms and Arctic oil came into their own. We're sucking it out of every place on earth. Demand will continue to outpace production until something displaces oil.
Your guess is as good as mine when that will happen, but it certainly isn't going to be any time soon. Even if the entire world decided to switch to some other technology *tomorrow* it would still take decades to get the infrastructure in place.
Actually, LA does have a much more dense population than Orange County, particularly around downtown. Orange County is similar in population density to The Valley or the western parts of IE. And if you drive into downtown from other parts of LA County on the 10, 5, or 405, you'll notice the same phenomenon you described coming up from Orange County.
And I don't have any data to back it up, but I guarantee that the number of cars going into LA proper is a lot smaller than the number leaving during the morning commute. Traffic is always always easier to manage the further you get from a major city center. If you look at other cities like Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, DC you see exactly the same problems.
Or maybe it's because there are 7 million more people in LA County than in Orange County?
You can't move a population of 10+ million people around every day by automobile without traffic jams. It's an impossible task. You can eke out tiny improvements, but just as quickly they are overtaken by increased usage and then you're looking at an even larger, more expensive and time-consuming upgrade to keep traffic moving . The 405 is a perfect example of this.
Auto travel does not scale efficiently and over the long term LA is going to have to significantly improve its mass transit (ie subway, light rail, street cars NOT buses) to have any chance of improving congestion. Thankfully the government understands this and is moving beyond 1950s urban planning policies.
But it's LA, and no place on earth is more beholden to the notion that a car is freedom and taking public transit is for the unwashed masses. Even when it's obvious to everyone involved that upgrading the freeway system is a huge, inefficient pain in the ass and a waste of public money you still get people like yourself clamoring that they should do *more* of it. It's absurd.
They definitely do. I don't really see the AG's point here. I switched to T-Mobile about a month ago and it was perfectly clear that if I received a phone I would actually be paying for it by installment. Zero complaints so far.
Don't forget that Eisenhower was the one responsible for transforming the CIA into its modern form (essentially a fifth armed service) with the deposition of the Shah in Iran and a massive escalation of US anti-communist activity in the Caribbean and South America.
And you may praise Eisenhower for staying out of Vietnam, but that is simply not true. He initially denied sending troops in to aid the French, but he did provide air support for them. During the interstitial time between wars the US clearly supported the South diplomatically and monetarily. Eisenhower articulated the "domino theory" policy that would guide the US into direct conflict in Vietnam, and by the time he left office the US had about 1,000 "military advisers" on the ground aiding the South Vietnamese. So the US was already very clearly committed to military involvement in Vietnam before Kennedy and Johnson took office.
Typing that way doesn't make your points any more salient.
It just makes it incredibly irritating to read.
The debt actually is being brought under control. Discretionary federal spending is the lowest it's been since the 1950s. We are spending less money than we have since Truman was president! Total government spending is back to early 1980s levels. The economy is recovering, and tax receipts are once again growing at a healthy rate. The deficit this year is 5.5% of GDP, which is a fairly healthy number taken by itself.
The problem then becomes how do we pay off the massive debt we have accumulated over the last dozen years, and move it to a healthier number as a percentage of GDP? Unfortunately there's only two ways: raise revenue or cut spending, and you can only do so much of either. Social security, medicaid, and the military industrial complex aren't going anywhere unless the citizens demand it, and they ain't demanding it. They also aren't demanding higher taxes.
Honestly, we're not in that bad of a position considering how poorly the last decade played out. Our debt is manageable at the current levels. If the economy hits another major recession we're screwed, but if it grows at healthy levels and future administrations don't repeat the clusterfuck that was Bush Jr.'s two terms, we should be just fine.
I think people are a bit more intelligent than you're giving them credit (some at least, I don't doubt that a fair amount of the electorate is truly tribal although that is a difficult thing to quantify). Politics is, well, politics. It's horse-trading. You sometimes vote for a candidate that holds views you dislike because he will advance certain agendas that you care about.
For example, I voted for Obama in the last election. It's not because I thought he was a great candidate. I hate many of his policies. It's because I thought he was the best choice available. On issues that I care deeply about (women's rights, gay rights, environmental protection) he was better than Romney, and on other issues where I have strong enough opinions that it would have changed my vote (the economy, the military, civil rights) I didn't think Romney provided an option that was better than Obama's. If the Republicans had run a candidate that was socially moderate and had a fiscally sound plan for bringing down the federal debt I probably would've voted for him.
So in this situation I voted for a candidate that I don't particularly care for in order to see progress in a few areas, even though in several ways Obama is the antithesis of what I would like (particularly in regards to civil rights and foreign military intervention). Am I part of the Democratic tribe? Honestly, I feel more like a Green or Socialist, but I feel I would be just as likely to vote for a Republican as a Democrat, and have in the past.
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It happens in the US occasionally, too. Ross Perot's presidential campaign in '92 caused both parties to push debt reduction to the front of their economic platforms. Of course that only lasted through the Clinton administration, after which we resumed throwing money around without regard to consequence.
Our desire to influence the politics of the Middle East never had much to do with the USSR. It's always been about oil.
Manual labor wouldn't have an effect on corn and squash. Both of those are mechanized crops. Illegals are used to pick labor intensive crops like berries.
And it's not so much that they would lose subsidies. Subsidies are paid at the market, so it wouldn't make sense to waste the crop. And for the most part you wouldn't have to let a field go fallow anyway, what you would do is set up a crop rotation. But a crop rotation adds complexity and cost. Instead of just growing corn and only having to pay for the equipment to plant and harvest corn, you have to invest in all of the equipment to grow each crop efficiently. Even with government subsidies low-volume farmers aren't making a profit unless they're debt free (extremely rare), and either way efficiency is extremely important when you're selling commodity crops. It's simpler and cheaper to just add fertilizer.
If you look back in time, "family farms" all grew at least a few crops and raised all sorts of livestock. It was its own little ecosystem. But the yields were way, way below what we can get now and the equipment has become much more complicated and expensive. If you're growing several types of crops and raising livestock in the modern era you're going to require huge amounts of both land and capital. Even if you're still technically a family farm it would be a very sophisticated operation dwarfing the farms of 100 years ago in terms of size and complexity. "Family farming" as we understood it in the past is a thing dead and gone.
Oh, I definitely agree that you still need math. I just think there needs to be a clear delineation between CS and SE. If you look at the way, say, mechanical engineering is structured you still take a ton of math and physics. It's just that they also teach you application at the same time. Whereas if you take a pure math program, they're going to teach you math in a more "mathy" way rather than relating it to engineering the way most engineers probably prefer.
Just look at the difference between a textbook that teaches Calculus from a science/engineering perspective and one that teaches it by analysis. It's an entirely different course. But it makes sense to teach mathematicians analysis, because they're thinking about the math in pure symbolic terms and aren't trying to relate it directly to engineering problems.
The problem isn't with the way they teach computer science. It's absolutely correct for them to teach CS in that way. Computation is math, and if you're getting a university-level math degree it should be taught in a rigorous way.
The problem is that there is no clear delineation between CS and software engineering in academia. Most people go through a CS program to become software engineers, and higher level computer science isn't really needed for that. I wish there was an option at more universities for a BS in software engineering, because it would be a much more useful degree for the majority of people that take CS.
What? What did killing the Crown Vic have to do with Al Gore? Ford still makes a police vehicle, just based on the Taurus chassis instead of the 30+ year old Panther.
Seeing as how Chrysler had to be bailed out and sold to Fiat while Ford successfully weathered the recession and just posted their highest profit since the 90s, I'm sure they will continue to ignore your advice.
Addiction *is* a mental illness. If I smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, my brain will become ill with nicotine addiction in the same way my body will become ill with the negative effects of inhaling smoke. The words addiction or illness do not imply a removal of personal responsibility. Illness means your mind is not healthy and addiction is a description of the *way* in which you are unhealthy.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Many rock climbers are very, very muscular. Mostly boulderers, but bouldering is probably the most popular type of rock climbing currently.
And even your other sports don't check out. Lebron James, for example is 6'8" 250 lbs. That's a BMI of 27.5 - overweight. Mike Trout (baseball player) is 6'2" 230 lbs. - 29.5 - borderline obese.
What's the most popular fitness activity in the US? Weightlifting. BMI was developed almost 200 years ago, when bloodletting was still standard medical procedure. We should be using body fat percentages if we do population-wide statistics, and not demonizing mass. Mass isn't the issue.
In my experience it's been the exact opposite. "Street smart" is usually used by less educated people to describe a skill that some dumbass with a fancy degree very obviously lacks.
How is a hamburger not a sandwich? That's like saying a butty isn't a sandwich.
It is true that the president doesn't have nearly as much power as people think, but he does have significant amounts of power. The two most significant are the military and international diplomacy. The president has nearly universal latitude in both of those areas to do whatever he likes. What power Congress has to oppose him in these areas has essentially been forfeited slowly over the last century or so. The President couldn't start a war with the UK or anything crazy like that, but for the most part he can authorize any lower scale use of force, even large-scale military intervention like in Libya. Congress *could* block it theoretically, but in practice the President always gets what he wants, and if there's a realistic chance of that happening he can always just send in the CIA or black ops.
And there are lots of other powers the President *usually* has, although many of them have been thwarted by the Republicans under the current administration. Federal appointments, for example. Normally a very underrated and subtle use of influence, and the Republicans have used Congress to block a huge portion of Obama's appointments. But in a properly functioning government (ie one not hell-bent on opposing the executive branch) that is a huge power.
Another underrated one is the decision *not* to pursue federal prosecution, as evidence by Obama not pursuing anyone responsible for the financial crisis, or any war crimes or perjury under the previous administration, and Bush/Clinton basically giving anybody casually associated with their adminstrations a free pass to skirt federal law.
I agree with what most of what you're saying, but something can't be "highly deterministic." It either is or it isn't. It is very, very difficult to show that a system is deterministic and chaotic rather than just random, but there *is* a distinct difference between the two.
Just think of how hard it would be to prove a software random number generator is deterministic if all you have to look at is the output. Even computer algorithms like that, which are provably deterministic, observationally will still have some fluctuation in their output due to uncontrollable variables (corrupted ram, design limitations, hardware errors a la Intel floating point thing) and that's in an environment that is precisely engineered to produce such determinism. Then contrast that with all the millions of social, behavioral, and environmental factors that are throwing noise at observation of the human brain and it becomes mind-boggling very, very quickly.
Any possible proof of the determinism of the human brain would first require that we come to a complete understanding of the chemical and biological processes that control human thought in addition to how environmental and genetic factors influence those internal processes. I think this particular question will stay in the realm of philosophy rather than science for an extremely long time.
You're absolutely wrong about this. We have succeeded as a society in bringing a massive caloric surplus to bear, but we have not in any way solved hunger.
It is possible to be starving while your neighbors are over fed, and indeed that is exactly what is happening. There are approximately 50 million people in the US that still deal with chronic hunger. There's a documentary out now called A Place at the Table. I highly, highly recommend that you check it out.
And you present it as an either/or, but it is possible to be both obese and malnourished. That is exactly what you find in a large percentage of the US population. If our poor are chronically malnourished because the only food they can afford makes them fat and sick, then what use is there in making the distinction between a nutrition problem and a hunger problem? In reality they are two sides of the exact same problem.
I can certainly imagine life without iOS, if that's what you mean.
All of those $500 wines or $500 whiskeys are aged. It's less a matter of quality and more of rarity. And for the most part, those bottles are not worth what you're paying for. If you know what you're doing you can find a $80 bottle of whiskey that tastes as good as the $500, or a $40 bottle of wine that tastes as good as the $500. Most wines don't actually benefit by aging much if at all, and unless you have an incredibly well-developed palate you probably can't taste the difference between a good wine and an excellent one.
Beer, by its nature, is more ephemeral than wine or spirits. The best beer you'll ever have is fresh from the barrel at a good brewery, not stuck in somebody's cellar for 30 years.
Hitler was nominally a socialist, but that means a different thing than you seem to think. He was certainly not a Marxist. Remember that North Korea is nominally called the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea. It doesn't mean that they are a democracy.
And Germany implemented social security and universal health care in the 1880s. Hitler wasn't even born yet. If you want to avoid the more negative connotations of the word fascist, you could call the Nazi government a militaristic autarky. That's way more closer to the truth than socialist, but the word fascist exists for a reason.
The worst was Ann Romney. At the RNC last year, she got a fucking standing ovation for saying that women work harder for their families than men.
When did you start paying attention, 1980? That's the only time in the last 40 years the prices have been similar, and that was caused by decreased supply due to the Iranian revolution, subsequent embargoes and the Iran-Iraq war. We are at similar inflation-adjusted prices now with the whole world producing at maximum capacity. Imagine how high prices would go if we completely removed Iranian and Iraqi production from the market!
And commodity prices are not always cyclical. If production can not keep up with increased demand (as has been the case with oil for over a decade now) prices will continue to rise. There aren't going to be any more dramatic increases in oil production like we saw in the 1980s and 1990s as offshore platforms and Arctic oil came into their own. We're sucking it out of every place on earth. Demand will continue to outpace production until something displaces oil.
Your guess is as good as mine when that will happen, but it certainly isn't going to be any time soon. Even if the entire world decided to switch to some other technology *tomorrow* it would still take decades to get the infrastructure in place.
Actually, LA does have a much more dense population than Orange County, particularly around downtown. Orange County is similar in population density to The Valley or the western parts of IE. And if you drive into downtown from other parts of LA County on the 10, 5, or 405, you'll notice the same phenomenon you described coming up from Orange County.
And I don't have any data to back it up, but I guarantee that the number of cars going into LA proper is a lot smaller than the number leaving during the morning commute. Traffic is always always easier to manage the further you get from a major city center. If you look at other cities like Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, DC you see exactly the same problems.
Or maybe it's because there are 7 million more people in LA County than in Orange County?
You can't move a population of 10+ million people around every day by automobile without traffic jams. It's an impossible task. You can eke out tiny improvements, but just as quickly they are overtaken by increased usage and then you're looking at an even larger, more expensive and time-consuming upgrade to keep traffic moving . The 405 is a perfect example of this.
Auto travel does not scale efficiently and over the long term LA is going to have to significantly improve its mass transit (ie subway, light rail, street cars NOT buses) to have any chance of improving congestion. Thankfully the government understands this and is moving beyond 1950s urban planning policies.
But it's LA, and no place on earth is more beholden to the notion that a car is freedom and taking public transit is for the unwashed masses. Even when it's obvious to everyone involved that upgrading the freeway system is a huge, inefficient pain in the ass and a waste of public money you still get people like yourself clamoring that they should do *more* of it. It's absurd.
They definitely do. I don't really see the AG's point here. I switched to T-Mobile about a month ago and it was perfectly clear that if I received a phone I would actually be paying for it by installment. Zero complaints so far.
is pretty fucking condescending. Grow up.
Don't forget that Eisenhower was the one responsible for transforming the CIA into its modern form (essentially a fifth armed service) with the deposition of the Shah in Iran and a massive escalation of US anti-communist activity in the Caribbean and South America.
And you may praise Eisenhower for staying out of Vietnam, but that is simply not true. He initially denied sending troops in to aid the French, but he did provide air support for them. During the interstitial time between wars the US clearly supported the South diplomatically and monetarily. Eisenhower articulated the "domino theory" policy that would guide the US into direct conflict in Vietnam, and by the time he left office the US had about 1,000 "military advisers" on the ground aiding the South Vietnamese. So the US was already very clearly committed to military involvement in Vietnam before Kennedy and Johnson took office.
Sentences aren't paragraphs.
Typing that way doesn't make your points any more salient.
It just makes it incredibly irritating to read.
The debt actually is being brought under control. Discretionary federal spending is the lowest it's been since the 1950s. We are spending less money than we have since Truman was president! Total government spending is back to early 1980s levels. The economy is recovering, and tax receipts are once again growing at a healthy rate. The deficit this year is 5.5% of GDP, which is a fairly healthy number taken by itself.
The problem then becomes how do we pay off the massive debt we have accumulated over the last dozen years, and move it to a healthier number as a percentage of GDP? Unfortunately there's only two ways: raise revenue or cut spending, and you can only do so much of either. Social security, medicaid, and the military industrial complex aren't going anywhere unless the citizens demand it, and they ain't demanding it. They also aren't demanding higher taxes.
Honestly, we're not in that bad of a position considering how poorly the last decade played out. Our debt is manageable at the current levels. If the economy hits another major recession we're screwed, but if it grows at healthy levels and future administrations don't repeat the clusterfuck that was Bush Jr.'s two terms, we should be just fine.
I think people are a bit more intelligent than you're giving them credit (some at least, I don't doubt that a fair amount of the electorate is truly tribal although that is a difficult thing to quantify). Politics is, well, politics. It's horse-trading. You sometimes vote for a candidate that holds views you dislike because he will advance certain agendas that you care about.
For example, I voted for Obama in the last election. It's not because I thought he was a great candidate. I hate many of his policies. It's because I thought he was the best choice available. On issues that I care deeply about (women's rights, gay rights, environmental protection) he was better than Romney, and on other issues where I have strong enough opinions that it would have changed my vote (the economy, the military, civil rights) I didn't think Romney provided an option that was better than Obama's. If the Republicans had run a candidate that was socially moderate and had a fiscally sound plan for bringing down the federal debt I probably would've voted for him.
So in this situation I voted for a candidate that I don't particularly care for in order to see progress in a few areas, even though in several ways Obama is the antithesis of what I would like (particularly in regards to civil rights and foreign military intervention). Am I part of the Democratic tribe? Honestly, I feel more like a Green or Socialist, but I feel I would be just as likely to vote for a Republican as a Democrat, and have in the past.