You say "voter suppression", I say "voter authentication". "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" doesn't imply that you should never drain the bathwater.
I'll concede that current laws need to be worked out to require that no-cost, low-hassle identification cards be made available to every registered voter.
You act as though ACORN has no blame, when a quick Google (no really... I didn't know anything about this until now) reveals that several dozen ACORN employees and ACORN itself have been convicted of crimes related to voter registration fraud.
Just like any crime, it's not how many we catch that worries me, it's how many have gotten away with it.
True, and the nature of their electoral process makes it instantly verifiable by all parties. Large elections with anonymous voting and close results can be the target of sophisticated election fraud.
In American presidential elections, I would like each vote to be anonymous but traceable. You randomly select a ballot that has a randomized code, and tear-off or write down the code. Then, no less than 3 groups should receive every vote (the official ballot counters and the two main parties, and any other groups who wants to tally the results). They would each post a website, or equivalent anonymous function, where you can enter your random code associated with your vote and check for yourself that your vote was transmitted properly (alerting each group when your vote appears incorrect). Then each group would individually tally the votes and confirm the election results.
Elections for high office should always be completely verifiable, and the identity of those who cast their ballot should be without doubt. In my opinion, the verification process for very important positions should be automatic and involve multiple competing groups.
When Microsoft announced Windows 8, I thought that was the entire point of the snap view. Every "Metro" app would be able to run as a tablet app or a Windows Phone 8 app, and snap view would run the phone mode on the tablet.
Then I was disappointed.
Microsoft keeps hinting that a near future version of Windows Phone will have apps that can be cross-compiled as tablet apps, but I'll believe it when I see it. For now, Ubuntu has taken the lead in this regard.
Right now most people still don't realize that many of the jobs are gone and will never be coming back and our society is not really trained for the kinds of work that is needed now.
This is a very capitalistic viewpoint. This contrasts with the viewpoint that government should bail out businesses and industries that are dying. Capitalism states that the market will correct itself without intervention, that some businesses will evolve and others will die to make room for replacements.
Yet the same conservatives tend to be pro death-penalty and pro war. So no, that isn't logical.
It isn't about "death". It's about "innocent death". Abortion kills those who can be nothing but innocent. But the death-penalty is aimed at those who are guilty of murder. Defensive war is about protecting our innocent from invasion, and even some offensive wars are about protecting the innocent of other countries from oppressive regimes.
This is where the terms "conservative" and "liberal" become politicized. Conservatism favors maintaining the status quo over the increased risk of change.
Therefore, when you said "return to a time of...", you were actually forming a liberal statement by changing the status quo. It disguises itself as a conservative thought process because people generally assume that enacting policies focused on returning to a past way of life would actually result in the life that people had before (but, such movements are typically in vain and never results in the goal).
And keep in mind that today's conservatives have a lot in common with yesterday's liberals.
America needs to wake up and understand that there are other election systems out there. Plurality voting, which results in "lesser of two evils", is killing our ability to function politically.
I'm starting to research the Modern Whig party. One thing that interests me is that they explicitly promote the Approval Voting system. It's not the best, but is much better than Plurality while making very little change to the current ballot system.
American conservatives are afraid to place their fates into the hands of the elected experts on human happiness.
Experts? No, these are the people who make it through a popularity contest every few years. Popularity is the only expertise most of them have.
Remember that giving a government too much control has really bitten us in the ass many times over many centuries... especially the last. Europeans should understand this, yet those who fail to learn history...
This is why those of us the US remember that our ancestors proved democracy is possible and led the way for freedom.
Sure, some aspects of your law and society are better, but it seriously pisses me off when people like you act as though we have a military dictatorship. (Especially while flaunting how your government has taken away certain freedoms in the name of "fairness".) I have more freedoms than some of you ever will.
Sure, that's fine. But my point is that parents don't get to choose a religious class over a science class, or a religious alternative during evolution week of biology class.
Look at it this way: if our education system required a class on morality instead of science, wouldn't you want your children to be able to skip the section that says that God created man and man owes our sense of morality to a supreme being?
It's only sad that they force this on the children.
I think this is the problem. Christian parents don't want their children being taught something that goes against their beliefs. This isn't all that different from the argument at hand, that believers of evolution don't want religion being taught to their kids.
Perhaps the solution is to not require kids to learn things against their parents' will (which could be argued to be a violation of the first amendment establishment clause).
That huge military complex is helping to protect the people of the United States (both poor and rich). It's also helping to protect Europe and the rest of the globe.
As a US citizen, I would love for more US tax dollars could be used for domestic social services. As it stands, Europe as a whole would rather keep their tax dollars at home and let the US police the world. (This is one reason it is unfair to compare tax rates and social benefits; Europeans seem to forget the foreign aid the receive in military support.)
How many of those up and coming teens wanted to be pro footballers or astronauts or the President but for whatever reason just didn't make the cut?
Everyone. That's because those jobs are extremely rare, famous, and pay a lot of cash. If they weren't rare, they wouldn't be famous... and they wouldn't pay nearly as well.
If everyone had those jobs, those jobs would suck and everyone would want some other job that only a very few people could ever obtain.
Ok, but do you really believe this is worse than 1913? That was the comparison being made.
Flipping burgers 40 hours a week making $8/hour sucks. But working on railroads, in mines, in the fields, and in harsh factory conditions for 16 hours a day, with no music to listen to or air conditioning or labor laws or adequate healthcare, for a few dollars a week sucked a lot more. And many more people today have office jobs and work-from-home conditions.
The US has three times the population it did in 1913, but there aren't three times as many meaningful jobs
What do you call "meaningful"? If the employee makes money, and the employer recoups that cost, it's meaningful. You get to survive.
Many more jobs have been added due to progress. Things have changed since 1913. We now allow women to work, and if they suddenly were removed from the workforce, we would be far underemployed. The unemployment rate certainly does not reflect "200 million extra people"; your definition of purposeful life is not the same as mine, or the rest of our population.
I wonder how many actually bothered to watch the video. That statement was stupid, of course, but it was just an added "fact" that really doesn't change the tone of the report that solar energy subsidies have resulted in very little output. We are throwing money away at failed companies.
I'm all for solar energy. But I'm not for throwing our money away. My thought: who is being held accountable for the money, and overseeing that it goes into productive use?
It was cheaper in the short term. In the long term, the government indicated that it is acceptable for very large companies to continue to make unwise decisions that could create new recessions in the future.
But, it makes people that try to bend anything to be racism as complete tools.
FTFY. Certain people want power, and they use these people to gain more of it.
I'm personally tired of being called a racist (by family no less!) for voting against Obama. Nevermind that I voted independent... if I promote any conservative idea, it means I hate liberals, therefore I hate Obama, therefore I hate blacks.
They don't even realize they are the ones doing the stereotyping.
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I apologize, I didn't notice the "to me" part until I had already hit submit. But still, I don't see any reason why it would be easier.
Makes much more sense to me to reverse that completely.
No, it doesn't. Please cite proof of your claim.
You say "voter suppression", I say "voter authentication". "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" doesn't imply that you should never drain the bathwater.
I'll concede that current laws need to be worked out to require that no-cost, low-hassle identification cards be made available to every registered voter.
You act as though ACORN has no blame, when a quick Google (no really... I didn't know anything about this until now) reveals that several dozen ACORN employees and ACORN itself have been convicted of crimes related to voter registration fraud.
Just like any crime, it's not how many we catch that worries me, it's how many have gotten away with it.
True, and the nature of their electoral process makes it instantly verifiable by all parties. Large elections with anonymous voting and close results can be the target of sophisticated election fraud.
In American presidential elections, I would like each vote to be anonymous but traceable. You randomly select a ballot that has a randomized code, and tear-off or write down the code. Then, no less than 3 groups should receive every vote (the official ballot counters and the two main parties, and any other groups who wants to tally the results). They would each post a website, or equivalent anonymous function, where you can enter your random code associated with your vote and check for yourself that your vote was transmitted properly (alerting each group when your vote appears incorrect). Then each group would individually tally the votes and confirm the election results.
Elections for high office should always be completely verifiable, and the identity of those who cast their ballot should be without doubt. In my opinion, the verification process for very important positions should be automatic and involve multiple competing groups.
But that's only 3 hundredths of a cent per pixel.
And anything that orbits the sun, by definition, orbits your mom.
When Microsoft announced Windows 8, I thought that was the entire point of the snap view. Every "Metro" app would be able to run as a tablet app or a Windows Phone 8 app, and snap view would run the phone mode on the tablet.
Then I was disappointed.
Microsoft keeps hinting that a near future version of Windows Phone will have apps that can be cross-compiled as tablet apps, but I'll believe it when I see it. For now, Ubuntu has taken the lead in this regard.
Right now most people still don't realize that many of the jobs are gone and will never be coming back and our society is not really trained for the kinds of work that is needed now.
This is a very capitalistic viewpoint. This contrasts with the viewpoint that government should bail out businesses and industries that are dying. Capitalism states that the market will correct itself without intervention, that some businesses will evolve and others will die to make room for replacements.
Yet the same conservatives tend to be pro death-penalty and pro war. So no, that isn't logical.
It isn't about "death". It's about "innocent death". Abortion kills those who can be nothing but innocent. But the death-penalty is aimed at those who are guilty of murder. Defensive war is about protecting our innocent from invasion, and even some offensive wars are about protecting the innocent of other countries from oppressive regimes.
This is where the terms "conservative" and "liberal" become politicized. Conservatism favors maintaining the status quo over the increased risk of change.
Therefore, when you said "return to a time of ...", you were actually forming a liberal statement by changing the status quo. It disguises itself as a conservative thought process because people generally assume that enacting policies focused on returning to a past way of life would actually result in the life that people had before (but, such movements are typically in vain and never results in the goal).
And keep in mind that today's conservatives have a lot in common with yesterday's liberals.
I would give you mod points if I could.
America needs to wake up and understand that there are other election systems out there. Plurality voting, which results in "lesser of two evils", is killing our ability to function politically.
I'm starting to research the Modern Whig party. One thing that interests me is that they explicitly promote the Approval Voting system. It's not the best, but is much better than Plurality while making very little change to the current ballot system.
American conservatives are afraid to place their fates into the hands of the elected experts on human happiness.
Experts? No, these are the people who make it through a popularity contest every few years. Popularity is the only expertise most of them have.
Remember that giving a government too much control has really bitten us in the ass many times over many centuries... especially the last. Europeans should understand this, yet those who fail to learn history...
This is why those of us the US remember that our ancestors proved democracy is possible and led the way for freedom.
Sure, some aspects of your law and society are better, but it seriously pisses me off when people like you act as though we have a military dictatorship. (Especially while flaunting how your government has taken away certain freedoms in the name of "fairness".) I have more freedoms than some of you ever will.
Sure, that's fine. But my point is that parents don't get to choose a religious class over a science class, or a religious alternative during evolution week of biology class.
Look at it this way: if our education system required a class on morality instead of science, wouldn't you want your children to be able to skip the section that says that God created man and man owes our sense of morality to a supreme being?
It's only sad that they force this on the children.
I think this is the problem. Christian parents don't want their children being taught something that goes against their beliefs. This isn't all that different from the argument at hand, that believers of evolution don't want religion being taught to their kids.
Perhaps the solution is to not require kids to learn things against their parents' will (which could be argued to be a violation of the first amendment establishment clause).
That huge military complex is helping to protect the people of the United States (both poor and rich). It's also helping to protect Europe and the rest of the globe.
As a US citizen, I would love for more US tax dollars could be used for domestic social services. As it stands, Europe as a whole would rather keep their tax dollars at home and let the US police the world. (This is one reason it is unfair to compare tax rates and social benefits; Europeans seem to forget the foreign aid the receive in military support.)
Oh, one more thing:
How many of those up and coming teens wanted to be pro footballers or astronauts or the President but for whatever reason just didn't make the cut?
Everyone. That's because those jobs are extremely rare, famous, and pay a lot of cash. If they weren't rare, they wouldn't be famous... and they wouldn't pay nearly as well.
If everyone had those jobs, those jobs would suck and everyone would want some other job that only a very few people could ever obtain.
Ok, but do you really believe this is worse than 1913? That was the comparison being made.
Flipping burgers 40 hours a week making $8/hour sucks. But working on railroads, in mines, in the fields, and in harsh factory conditions for 16 hours a day, with no music to listen to or air conditioning or labor laws or adequate healthcare, for a few dollars a week sucked a lot more. And many more people today have office jobs and work-from-home conditions.
The US has three times the population it did in 1913, but there aren't three times as many meaningful jobs
What do you call "meaningful"? If the employee makes money, and the employer recoups that cost, it's meaningful. You get to survive.
Many more jobs have been added due to progress. Things have changed since 1913. We now allow women to work, and if they suddenly were removed from the workforce, we would be far underemployed. The unemployment rate certainly does not reflect "200 million extra people"; your definition of purposeful life is not the same as mine, or the rest of our population.
Jail box.
I wonder how many actually bothered to watch the video. That statement was stupid, of course, but it was just an added "fact" that really doesn't change the tone of the report that solar energy subsidies have resulted in very little output. We are throwing money away at failed companies.
I'm all for solar energy. But I'm not for throwing our money away. My thought: who is being held accountable for the money, and overseeing that it goes into productive use?
It was cheaper in the short term. In the long term, the government indicated that it is acceptable for very large companies to continue to make unwise decisions that could create new recessions in the future.
But, it makes people that try to bend anything to be racism as complete tools.
FTFY. Certain people want power, and they use these people to gain more of it.
I'm personally tired of being called a racist (by family no less!) for voting against Obama. Nevermind that I voted independent... if I promote any conservative idea, it means I hate liberals, therefore I hate Obama, therefore I hate blacks.
They don't even realize they are the ones doing the stereotyping.