Unfortunately that may be the key. Ideally by Super Tuesday it should be down to 3 candidates, and by the last week of March it should be down to 2 candidates, but I have extreme doubts this will happen.
Re:Hammerheads in Vermont
on
Carly Is Out
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Perhaps if you, and others who have views like yours, would thoughtfully consider both sides and come to your own conclusions about the merit of specific ideas, you might realize that the political spectrum is very multi-dimensional. The only ones who want it to be a choice between exactly two possibilities are the GOP and Democrats.
For example, I've always leaned conservative and very much tended to vote Republican. From that I know why I don't support minimum wage increases (it causes unemployment increases and reduces incentive to learn the skills required for just-above-minimum-wage positions, while unfairly targeting low-skill labor markets). I would even consider the idea of getting rid of it altogether. But instead of just blowing off the idea completely, I started looking into why people support it. Turns out, I also don't want many people dying of hunger or huge increases in homeless people in the streets and poverty-induced crime. So my current favorite solution is to satisfy both: direct government wealth redistribution from the richest to fund food, shelter, clothing, and other essentials for the poorest, combined with removing the minimum wage in order to increase employment and hence reinstate labor competition.
Not that any of that matters. Too many people like yourself only see black-and-white, unless you are willing to think for yourself.
Yes, clearly the difference between tiles and icons on an OS menu is the exact same as the difference between control interfaces of an object that has the ability to injure or kill you.
Besides, your premise "you have two mechanisms that act differntly yet you are now Making them look and feel the same" is flawed because nothing in Windows 10 looks the same as Windows 7 but acts differently.
Not that I like dysfunctional government, or the Republicans in control, but it's not like he listens to them either when he implements major laws via executive order.
On that note, let's not forget that each expansion of government power, no matter how tiny, accumulates and is passed on to future administrations. Donald Trump is already proclaiming those powers to be his if elected. Trump with that much power scares me a hell of a lot more than Obama.
Sure, but consider that you are talking mostly about the US public infrastructure system. Private infrastructure has different incentives to keep up maintenance. That assumes a reasonable level of competition, of course.
You don't need to build anything, because it's just the atmosphere.
You are ignoring costs such as: - pilot labor (hyperloop will probably be fully automated) - air traffic control (could be mostly or fully automated as well) - maintenance (not sure the maintenance requirements of hyperloop but surely not as extensive as aircraft maintenance) - security (the potential for terrorist damage is much smaller considering you can't fly one arbitrarily into a building)
You quickly wonder just how many thousands of miles of this stuff you'd need to build, and just how huge of an undertaking that would be.
Same concern with roads and railways, with the same answer: it only matters if the economic advantage isn't high enough.
That's nice, except this bricking appears to be irreversible. The hardware that you bought and paid for (or perhaps are still paying for) is useless, forever, and any data that has not been backed up is also lost forever.
Since sending materials to the moon is very expensive, sending robotic 3D printers that can build objects out of moon dust could significantly reduce the expense of such an operation. Some materials, no doubt, would need to come from earth.
Everybody uses health care whether they want to or not and therefore everybody needs to pay into the system to the extent they are able.
But this doesn't answer the question of whether health insurance as we know it in the US is best for everyone, or even for most people. Asserting that people need to pay does not assert how they need to pay.
Concierge medicine, where a patient decides not to use insurance but instead pays their doctor on a subscription plan, is an alternative to health insurance that may be much better for many people. Regulation tends not to address people who think outside the box, favoring a particular business model and forcing other possibilities out.
I like regulation, mind you. I just don't like how it often punishes those who might bring new and workable ideas to the table.
What is "real power" supposed to mean? When you have half a dozen squabbling parties in parliament, necessarily, none of them have real power; they need to make backroom deals and engage in horse trading for what they want. And small parties often end up contributing the key votes, giving them disproportionate amounts of power.
When 3 parties of near-equal strength exist, then it's impossible for any one party to have a majority rule. In the US two-party system, with very few exceptions the most polarizing legislation is decided purely along party lines. And those few exceptions are often backroom deals anyway.
You need to learn to read. Nowhere did I say that "The Third Reich" was a multiple-party system. The Weimar Republic was a multiple-party system, up to its very end, when it effectively voted to abolish itself and turn itself into "The Third Reich". After that, of course, it wasn't a "multiple-party system" anymore.
Exactly, it was never totalitarian while it was multi-party. It became totalitarian when it became single party.
But you seem to believe that multi-party was the direct cause of becoming totalitarian. That's not the case at all. Germany was very unstable, both politically and economically, after losing WWI. The Treaty of Versailles was harsh and it led to tough German life that was viewed as unfairly enforced by the allied powers. Folks wanted stability any way they could get it, and Hitler with the Nazis promised stability.
1920s multi-party Germany was very unstable. That's the reason Hitler rose to power. Stable multi-party government is a completely different story, and that's what I'm advocating.
Indeed. The US political system forces both parties towards the ideological center of the country, excluding any point of view that isn't substantial enough for either party to take serious to be excluded from being represented in Congress.
But that's not what I said and it's not what is happening. The parties are becoming polarized on the issues, not centralized, running smear campaigns and promising that every extreme point of view will make life better. They aren't centralized on the issues, not at all. Just the opposite. So long as the Rs can convince voters that voting for an R means a D doesn't get elected, and vice versa, both parties stay in power. This prevents their worst-case scenario, a viable third party interrupting things and showing voters that they don't have to stay within the two main parties.
The traditional conservative solution to those issues are subsidiarity and small government.
FTFY
The reason why people like you are obsessed with voting systems is because you want government to fix bigger and bigger problems (poverty, racism, inequality, pollution, wearing socks with sandals, whatever), problems it can't fix, and when it fails to do that, rather than recognizing your own folly, you blame voting systems for it (or the media or the Koch brothers or whatever).
You have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. I have almost always voted Republican and have never voted for a Democrat for any federal office. I do not believe that government should bail out people who makes stupid decisions. As I stated in my previous comment, I am an advocate for the Article V amendment process which ultimately allows the states to check the federal government (although, sadly, they've never once executed this authority).
I'm so sorry that you have fallen for this us-vs-them mentality, the exact thing I have been stressing is undermining democracy in our country, to the point that you feel that anyone who has a different opinion is the L-word. My position is not a liberal position, but one that prefers democracy over cronyism.
So your problem is that you don't think representative democracy works? It would have been helpful to state that in the beginning instead of allowing the thread to go so far about voting systems.
Anyway, you're pretty much wrong. Totalitarianism tends to form from single-party (or even no-party) systems of government. When multiple parties have real power, this doesn't happen. And I mean real power... a system that technically has multiple parties, but only one party actually has the power, is called a single-party system.
Hitler's Nazi Party became the strongest party prior in the years leading up to the Enabling Act of 1933, which essentially gave him dictatorial powers. Again, a single strong party is not a multiple-party system. A dictatorship is also not a multiple-party system. The Third Reich was absolutely not a multiple-party system. I don't understand why you would think it was.
The US is a two-party system (it has multiple parties but two parties share and trade most of the power). But the two parties seem more like two sides of the same coin. Many politicians have run for election or have been elected as both Republican and Democrat, switching sides as the tides turn. Politicians in both parties know that smear campaigns exploit the plurality system's biggest weakness, which is that people vote against the least likable candidate by voting for whichever other candidate is strongest, and thus prevents third parties from entering. This can sometimes lead to short-term losses, but in the end it's all about long-term gains. As time passes, more citizens in the US see the establishment as a de facto single ruling party. US totalitarianism is looking more feasible every day.
A new voting system would reduce or even eliminate the ability for two parties to hold onto power in that fashion. I would agree that it isn't the only answer. I also would like to see real movement in the Article V amendment process, and an appointment system for representatives as I mentioned in another thread.
Didn't George HW Bush promise men on Mars by 2011?
From what I can find, his goal was 2019. Frankly it wasn't a terrible estimate being 30 years away, but it assumed full support from future administrations (which didn't exactly happen).
I did specify my criteria of "better", to reduce strategic voting. Strategic voting is when someone does not vote for his or her preferred candidate, but votes for a different candidate, because the outcome is more preferable. For example, if your preferred candidate is third party but you cast your vote for one of the first party candidates simply to ensure that the other does not win. Another example, if your preferred candidate is Rand Paul, but you vote for Ted Cruz instead because Rand Paul has little chance of winning but you prefer Ted Cruz to Donald Trump. These problems in the US are pretty much a direct result of the plurality voting system.
This is well known and researched problem, and fixing it could be accomplished by several of the multitude of single-winner voting systems.
Indeed, there are different things to consider when electing a group of representatives instead of a position with a single seat.
A way to get what I think you are looking for is to actually change the system from election to appointment. You simply specify who you want to vote for you in the congress, and they will. That appointee gets one vote in congress for every person who appointed him/her, meaning that no longer do we have scenarios where 49% of the people don't get represented. And, there's no need for geographic apportionment.
Details such as how to put N+34 appointees in N seats could be figured out pretty easily (cutoffs or prelims would work).
"None of the above" is nice but doesn't really fix the problem of strategic voting. If we're going to change the ballot, I'd rather get rid of plurality voting altogether. Change it to a ranked, approval, or any of the numerous systems which are better than plurality.
My favorite site for explaining the problems and some of the potential solutions:
Slashdot Mirror
Also, I find it difficult to support a proposal to make something $x, but nobody can clearly explain why $x is the best.
But if I support them, then I'd get something like an Obama
This is, of course, not how it has to be. But our voting system doesn't allow it any other way. http://www.cgpgrey.com/politic...
Thank you for completely missing the only point of what I wrote by painting me into the other side of your black-and-white political spectrum.
If the others drop out soon
Unfortunately that may be the key. Ideally by Super Tuesday it should be down to 3 candidates, and by the last week of March it should be down to 2 candidates, but I have extreme doubts this will happen.
Perhaps if you, and others who have views like yours, would thoughtfully consider both sides and come to your own conclusions about the merit of specific ideas, you might realize that the political spectrum is very multi-dimensional. The only ones who want it to be a choice between exactly two possibilities are the GOP and Democrats.
For example, I've always leaned conservative and very much tended to vote Republican. From that I know why I don't support minimum wage increases (it causes unemployment increases and reduces incentive to learn the skills required for just-above-minimum-wage positions, while unfairly targeting low-skill labor markets). I would even consider the idea of getting rid of it altogether. But instead of just blowing off the idea completely, I started looking into why people support it. Turns out, I also don't want many people dying of hunger or huge increases in homeless people in the streets and poverty-induced crime. So my current favorite solution is to satisfy both: direct government wealth redistribution from the richest to fund food, shelter, clothing, and other essentials for the poorest, combined with removing the minimum wage in order to increase employment and hence reinstate labor competition.
Not that any of that matters. Too many people like yourself only see black-and-white, unless you are willing to think for yourself.
Yes, clearly the difference between tiles and icons on an OS menu is the exact same as the difference between control interfaces of an object that has the ability to injure or kill you.
Besides, your premise "you have two mechanisms that act differntly yet you are now Making them look and feel the same" is flawed because nothing in Windows 10 looks the same as Windows 7 but acts differently.
Not that I like dysfunctional government, or the Republicans in control, but it's not like he listens to them either when he implements major laws via executive order.
On that note, let's not forget that each expansion of government power, no matter how tiny, accumulates and is passed on to future administrations. Donald Trump is already proclaiming those powers to be his if elected. Trump with that much power scares me a hell of a lot more than Obama.
Trains are much easier to derail, yet don't have the levels of security that you speak of.
Sure, but consider that you are talking mostly about the US public infrastructure system. Private infrastructure has different incentives to keep up maintenance. That assumes a reasonable level of competition, of course.
You don't need to build anything, because it's just the atmosphere.
You are ignoring costs such as:
- pilot labor (hyperloop will probably be fully automated)
- air traffic control (could be mostly or fully automated as well)
- maintenance (not sure the maintenance requirements of hyperloop but surely not as extensive as aircraft maintenance)
- security (the potential for terrorist damage is much smaller considering you can't fly one arbitrarily into a building)
You quickly wonder just how many thousands of miles of this stuff you'd need to build, and just how huge of an undertaking that would be.
Same concern with roads and railways, with the same answer: it only matters if the economic advantage isn't high enough.
Some Reversible USB-C Cables/Adapters Could Cause Irreversible Damage
The irony that USB is finally reversible, yet the damage it causes is not...
That's nice, except this bricking appears to be irreversible. The hardware that you bought and paid for (or perhaps are still paying for) is useless, forever, and any data that has not been backed up is also lost forever.
Obama should get about the same amount of credit for future Mars missions as either Bush, who both proposed manned missions to Mars.
Since sending materials to the moon is very expensive, sending robotic 3D printers that can build objects out of moon dust could significantly reduce the expense of such an operation. Some materials, no doubt, would need to come from earth.
Something tells me that, assuming Hillary wins, all of this will be forgotten when Republicans start claiming voter fraud.
Everybody uses health care whether they want to or not and therefore everybody needs to pay into the system to the extent they are able.
But this doesn't answer the question of whether health insurance as we know it in the US is best for everyone, or even for most people. Asserting that people need to pay does not assert how they need to pay.
Concierge medicine, where a patient decides not to use insurance but instead pays their doctor on a subscription plan, is an alternative to health insurance that may be much better for many people. Regulation tends not to address people who think outside the box, favoring a particular business model and forcing other possibilities out.
I like regulation, mind you. I just don't like how it often punishes those who might bring new and workable ideas to the table.
It doesn't make the numbers meaningless. The meaning of the numbers are just different from what you seem to expect.
Windows 10 surpassed XP back in October.
It has now passed every OS other than Windows 7.
What is "real power" supposed to mean? When you have half a dozen squabbling parties in parliament, necessarily, none of them have real power; they need to make backroom deals and engage in horse trading for what they want. And small parties often end up contributing the key votes, giving them disproportionate amounts of power.
When 3 parties of near-equal strength exist, then it's impossible for any one party to have a majority rule. In the US two-party system, with very few exceptions the most polarizing legislation is decided purely along party lines. And those few exceptions are often backroom deals anyway.
You need to learn to read. Nowhere did I say that "The Third Reich" was a multiple-party system. The Weimar Republic was a multiple-party system, up to its very end, when it effectively voted to abolish itself and turn itself into "The Third Reich". After that, of course, it wasn't a "multiple-party system" anymore.
Exactly, it was never totalitarian while it was multi-party. It became totalitarian when it became single party.
But you seem to believe that multi-party was the direct cause of becoming totalitarian. That's not the case at all. Germany was very unstable, both politically and economically, after losing WWI. The Treaty of Versailles was harsh and it led to tough German life that was viewed as unfairly enforced by the allied powers. Folks wanted stability any way they could get it, and Hitler with the Nazis promised stability.
1920s multi-party Germany was very unstable. That's the reason Hitler rose to power. Stable multi-party government is a completely different story, and that's what I'm advocating.
Indeed. The US political system forces both parties towards the ideological center of the country, excluding any point of view that isn't substantial enough for either party to take serious to be excluded from being represented in Congress.
But that's not what I said and it's not what is happening. The parties are becoming polarized on the issues, not centralized, running smear campaigns and promising that every extreme point of view will make life better. They aren't centralized on the issues, not at all. Just the opposite. So long as the Rs can convince voters that voting for an R means a D doesn't get elected, and vice versa, both parties stay in power. This prevents their worst-case scenario, a viable third party interrupting things and showing voters that they don't have to stay within the two main parties.
The traditional conservative solution to those issues are subsidiarity and small government.
FTFY
The reason why people like you are obsessed with voting systems is because you want government to fix bigger and bigger problems (poverty, racism, inequality, pollution, wearing socks with sandals, whatever), problems it can't fix, and when it fails to do that, rather than recognizing your own folly, you blame voting systems for it (or the media or the Koch brothers or whatever).
You have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. I have almost always voted Republican and have never voted for a Democrat for any federal office. I do not believe that government should bail out people who makes stupid decisions. As I stated in my previous comment, I am an advocate for the Article V amendment process which ultimately allows the states to check the federal government (although, sadly, they've never once executed this authority).
I'm so sorry that you have fallen for this us-vs-them mentality, the exact thing I have been stressing is undermining democracy in our country, to the point that you feel that anyone who has a different opinion is the L-word. My position is not a liberal position, but one that prefers democracy over cronyism.
So your problem is that you don't think representative democracy works? It would have been helpful to state that in the beginning instead of allowing the thread to go so far about voting systems.
Anyway, you're pretty much wrong. Totalitarianism tends to form from single-party (or even no-party) systems of government. When multiple parties have real power, this doesn't happen. And I mean real power... a system that technically has multiple parties, but only one party actually has the power, is called a single-party system.
Hitler's Nazi Party became the strongest party prior in the years leading up to the Enabling Act of 1933, which essentially gave him dictatorial powers. Again, a single strong party is not a multiple-party system. A dictatorship is also not a multiple-party system. The Third Reich was absolutely not a multiple-party system. I don't understand why you would think it was.
The US is a two-party system (it has multiple parties but two parties share and trade most of the power). But the two parties seem more like two sides of the same coin. Many politicians have run for election or have been elected as both Republican and Democrat, switching sides as the tides turn. Politicians in both parties know that smear campaigns exploit the plurality system's biggest weakness, which is that people vote against the least likable candidate by voting for whichever other candidate is strongest, and thus prevents third parties from entering. This can sometimes lead to short-term losses, but in the end it's all about long-term gains. As time passes, more citizens in the US see the establishment as a de facto single ruling party. US totalitarianism is looking more feasible every day.
A new voting system would reduce or even eliminate the ability for two parties to hold onto power in that fashion. I would agree that it isn't the only answer. I also would like to see real movement in the Article V amendment process, and an appointment system for representatives as I mentioned in another thread.
I suggest watching at least the first video in the link I originally posted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Didn't George HW Bush promise men on Mars by 2011?
From what I can find, his goal was 2019. Frankly it wasn't a terrible estimate being 30 years away, but it assumed full support from future administrations (which didn't exactly happen).
I did specify my criteria of "better", to reduce strategic voting. Strategic voting is when someone does not vote for his or her preferred candidate, but votes for a different candidate, because the outcome is more preferable. For example, if your preferred candidate is third party but you cast your vote for one of the first party candidates simply to ensure that the other does not win. Another example, if your preferred candidate is Rand Paul, but you vote for Ted Cruz instead because Rand Paul has little chance of winning but you prefer Ted Cruz to Donald Trump. These problems in the US are pretty much a direct result of the plurality voting system.
This is well known and researched problem, and fixing it could be accomplished by several of the multitude of single-winner voting systems.
Indeed, there are different things to consider when electing a group of representatives instead of a position with a single seat.
A way to get what I think you are looking for is to actually change the system from election to appointment. You simply specify who you want to vote for you in the congress, and they will. That appointee gets one vote in congress for every person who appointed him/her, meaning that no longer do we have scenarios where 49% of the people don't get represented. And, there's no need for geographic apportionment.
Details such as how to put N+34 appointees in N seats could be figured out pretty easily (cutoffs or prelims would work).
"None of the above" is nice but doesn't really fix the problem of strategic voting. If we're going to change the ballot, I'd rather get rid of plurality voting altogether. Change it to a ranked, approval, or any of the numerous systems which are better than plurality.
My favorite site for explaining the problems and some of the potential solutions:
http://www.cgpgrey.com/politic...