I believe the problem with Israel's system is not that it has multiple parties, but that any change in alliances essentially forces a new P.M. to be elected. In the U.S., you serve out your term regardless of changes in political tone during the term.
And that's exactly what we see now. Neither the Dem's or Rep's have any desire to change the plurality system to something more fair. As long as one or the other is in power, status quo is maintained, and they're comfortable. This lends more credence to the "one party with two heads" idea. I call it the Duopoly.
However, the fact is that there are more than two points of view on any given topic, and certainly more than two points of view on "government" as a whole! The people that hold these views are just as entitled to a "fair vote" as anyone else. Why must they sacrifice liberty of conscience for political expedience (i.e. not voting for the "lesser of two evils" and not "throwing their vote away")?
I'd argue that having more than 2 influential parties would lead to a true majority because people of different parties would have to form coalitions to get things done. They'd have to compromise. There's "moderating influence" for you. Right now, either the Rep's or the Dem's "grab the ball" by mere advantage of numbers and then "run with it" for the length of the term, then there's an election and the cycle starts over again. There is intense pressure on legislators to forsake their conscience and vote the party line on many bills because of this.
The "winner takes all" method of allocating EC votes is distinct from the EC itself. It's a completely separate issue. Please learn the difference. I'm getting tired ofrepeatingthis. Petition your State legislature for a system more like Maine's or Nebraska's.
As I'vesaidelsewhere, the EC is the only way to balance the interest of the people and that States for election to a singular office (President). It is critical that we have the EC, or some system that can perform this function. I also mentioned in at least one of those links that I think "automatic" allocation of the EC votes might not be a bad idea (though I'd want to research the history to see exactly why we use actual human electors), and that "winner takes all" is a completely separate issue from the EC itself. Please read up on that, starting with the links above.
The only real drawback to the Condorcet system is its complexity, both in that voters must rank every candidate
Not true. Condorcet (as well as IRV, which has fatal flaws I won't discuss here) allows you to rank as few candidates as you like. All others will be assumed in a tie for last - i.e. if you don't rank them, all the candidates you did rank beat them. Voters who can't figure out how to rank candidates can get by simply marking their favorite - this would be equivalent to the current plurality system.
Condorcet is quite obviously the best system if you take the time to read all of them objectively, for the simple reason that it removes the "necessity" of voting strategy. Simply indicate who you prefer the most, which is what voting should be.
So your solution is to tax (ie, steal money from, backed by threat of gov't force) everyone. Nice. Thanks you so much.
If you're so concerned about the plight of these people, how about you individually donate as much money as you want? Either directly or through a charity, it doesn't matter to me.
But that would require a moral standard of actually caring for your fellow man. Gosh, shucks, I guess we can't do that! We can't simply trust people to do the right thing! Let's go back to forcing everyone to fork over the bucks.
Herein lies the problem. Government doesn't trust it's citizens to do "the right thing". So it assumes a one-size-fits-all standard of "right" and then compels everyone to adhere to it, under threat of force (fines, imprisonment). What about freedom? Government's job isn't to make sure everyone does "the right thing" it's to make sure our freedoms are protected, and leave the citizens to their own consciences and their own decisions. If the Smith's want to home school, let them! If the Jones's want to use the church school, let them! If the Barlow's want to use the school managed by the county, let them!
Long before there was tax-funded public education, America had a 99% literacy rate. I'm sure there were poor people then, too, but they still managed to get their kids an education. Maybe communities actually helped their neighbors. Maybe people actually donated time/money to their churches and religious schools. What I do know is that restricting freedom (as taxing someone for a service they don't use -- such as private- and home-schoolers who are still taxed for the public schools -- does) is immoral and wrong.
Look at it from a practical standpoint. Everybody puts in something, and everybody's kid gets an education. Why dictate where that money has to go? You can have school choice, and still everybody will be putting in something, so everybody's kids should still be getting taught. Where's the problem? Currently, only rich people get to choose how their children are educated. I don't think a gov't-established aristocracy is right, do you?
That's why you eliminate all taxes that pay for "free" public education. With the money you're not paying in taxes, you can easily afford to send your children to a private school of your choosing. You regain your economic and educational freedom. Pretty good deal.
Do you realize that taxes (income, social security, sales, etc) consume over 42% of a person's income? No wonder it takes two working parents to make it nowadays. The solution is simple...reduce taxes drastically. The income tax in particular is morally reprehensible, it's a slave tax. If we could save that money instead, to spend as we wished, think what a jump the economy would get! Instead of paying the overhead of government mismanagement, you could directly purchase the services you need at competitive free market prices. Even "poor" people could afford to save then, if they were slaves to the government from January through May.
I think it's because Cruithne and those have eccentric, inclined orbits. They merely have a resonance relationship with Earth. AA29 seems to follow Earth's orbit pretty closely, and stay near our orbital plane as well. This makes it more like the classical "Trojan" asteroid.
There was no "public" education until the mid-1800's. Before then nearly all education was "private" yet America had one of the highest literacy rates in the world. This is largely attributable to Americans being a religious people, who felt the need to be able to read the Bible for themselves. Christianity has been a major force for education worldwide, before civil governments ever got involved.
Libertarians realize that police are necessary. Militia are not police, and everyone knows that. The libertarian goal is to reduce government to it's necessary functions, not to eliminate gov't altogether. Police benefit everyone equally. Courts benefit everyone equally. Defense and roads, too. These are proper functions of government. Programs that target certain aspects of society usually are not. That's where it comes down to which special interest group can cry the loudest, and that's not right.
Force-based coercion is a poor foundation for civil government. I would gladly give time/money to help a worthy cause. That's my choice. But as soon as gov't steps in to say I must contribute time/money, even for a "good" thing, I've lost my freedom and somebody somewhere has gained power/control over that area.
You may say "but people won't voluntarily give" and I reply that yes, that's a definite problem. But it's a moral problem with individuals that bludgeoning all of society with restrictive laws cannot cure. Society needs to return to it's moral base. It's not morally right to be uncaring, but it's not morally right to force someone to "care", either.
By allowing freedom, some will choose to do an injustice to others. By restricting freedom, gov't does an injustice to everyone. Which do you think is worse?
School is expensive? Where are you getting that from? Most private schools spend about 40% as much per pupil as public schools, and produce students who excel on the SAT/ACT tests! Heck, public schools are overfunded! Where is all that money going?
Bad credit? Maybe if credit weren't so readily available, people would learn to save. But then, delayed gratification is a thing of the past, right? When CC rates are 19% and people have never learned financial self-restraint, it's no wonder that people have bad credit. (The elimination of the gold standard and creation of the Federal Reserve has greatly contributed to this problem.)
Who's to say they're unnecessary? I remember news recently (within the past year) of a bunch of eco-protestors showing up at a rally in a big gas hog SUV. "It was the only thing that would hold us and all our gear!" Yeah, so they're not always unnecessary, are they?
Let people drive what they need/want. If you're worried about pollution, figure out a way to make the ICE more efficient, or invent an acceptable (one that would survive on the free market without government subsidy) alternative. Don't attempt to control other people's lives.
A nice idea. I can see myself starting to read some random tech story and thinking, "This is really informative. I bet all the links are good resources too," and I'd click such a button to fetch them.
But how many pages are pure content? It's unlikely you'd want to prefetch all the pages that the nav links go to, and every page has some nav links. On a fat pipe it might be OK, but at 56k I'd probably be done reading the first page and all that got fetched in the meantime would have been the stupid nav links.
This is exactly how I get my morning news from Slashdot and WND. I use Opera, so I just Ctrl-Shift click all the headlines that look interesting, and click to the next section when that's done. I read all the opened pages, closing as I go. Then I am back to the original window which now has a new page, and I repeat.
Options to never prefetch on certain sites, or to prefetch every link on certain sites, would eliminate this step for me. But OTOH I'd be closing quite a few pages that I wasn't interested in. The "never on this site" option is a must, though, just like per-site cookie and JS filters. Some sites, no matter how reputable, are a little overzealous when applying new technology.
I'd like to see rel="next" links automatically used for prefetching just like rel="prefetch". Some pages (multi-page articles) already have these, so this feature would be useful immediately.
Exactly. That's why I stopped using it, too. Mozilla's prefetch hinting idea is really neat! I wrote Darin and suggested that "next" links be considered prefetch hints as well. These are quite likely to be candidates for prefetching, and using this wouldn't require everyone to update their pages. Of course, hardly any designers are even using LINK at all yet...
I know iCab has this feature already, for about 3 or 4 releases now. I also thought it was really slick, until I saw the first patch release to keep it from pre-fetching "logout" links. (Oops.) It seems like Mozilla has circumvented that problem, by requiring the designer to provide the hints. OTOH, iCab did have a GUI to [dis|en]able this feature. I think Mr. Clauss would do well to see how this feature goes over with the Mozilla crowd, and incorporate the "hinting" idea if it works. Pre-fetch with good hints would be a boon to my wife and I - we only have 56k at home. I would hope that I could add rel="prefetch" to A tags as well as LINK tags, too.
Yeah, I'd heard about that. Some judge must have ruled they were squatting and ordered them to give up the domain, eh? So much for first-come, first-serve among those who actually have a legitimate (even if mostly for parody) claim to a name. Money talks.
And the Greens want to enslave us to government with crushing taxes so they can save their trees and squirrels. No thanks.
Freedom means leaving power in the hands of the people from whom it is derived. If government wasn't so big, it couldn't pass so many laws that favor corporations so heavily. If people were left with their own hard-earned money, they'd have more freedom to spend where they wanted to and boycott the "evil corporations" if it was their choice to do so. I don't want or need any government telling me this or that company is "evil" - I'll do business with whom I want, and make my own moral choices. That is the nature of freedom.
Leave the people free, and they can build a large successful business that betters many lives. If that company gets out of hand, a free people can boycott it and cut it down to size. That's free enterprise. Libertarian ideals combined with a Judeo-Christian ethic work for everybody.
Voting libertarian will just make the [major] party you disfavor least lose.
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for evil.
If you don't vote for what you believe, you won't get what you want.
To change your government, change your vote.
The problem today is that people nowadays are unwilling to stand behind their values. Instead of making their own choice, they make the "strategic" choice based on what they think all the other sheep in their district will do. This is stupid - you don't know what other people will do or what they really want. What if they all really want the same third party you want? The rule is still the person with the most votes wins, so vote for who you want, and get others to join you! But I don't see that happening any time soon, so it's a good idea to get a preferential voting system like Condorcet enacted ASAP.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe the problem with Israel's system is not that it has multiple parties, but that any change in alliances essentially forces a new P.M. to be elected. In the U.S., you serve out your term regardless of changes in political tone during the term.
And that's exactly what we see now. Neither the Dem's or Rep's have any desire to change the plurality system to something more fair. As long as one or the other is in power, status quo is maintained, and they're comfortable. This lends more credence to the "one party with two heads" idea. I call it the Duopoly.
However, the fact is that there are more than two points of view on any given topic, and certainly more than two points of view on "government" as a whole! The people that hold these views are just as entitled to a "fair vote" as anyone else. Why must they sacrifice liberty of conscience for political expedience (i.e. not voting for the "lesser of two evils" and not "throwing their vote away")?
I'd argue that having more than 2 influential parties would lead to a true majority because people of different parties would have to form coalitions to get things done. They'd have to compromise. There's "moderating influence" for you. Right now, either the Rep's or the Dem's "grab the ball" by mere advantage of numbers and then "run with it" for the length of the term, then there's an election and the cycle starts over again. There is intense pressure on legislators to forsake their conscience and vote the party line on many bills because of this.
The "winner takes all" method of allocating EC votes is distinct from the EC itself. It's a completely separate issue. Please learn the difference. I'm getting tired of repeating this. Petition your State legislature for a system more like Maine's or Nebraska's.
As I've said elsewhere, the EC is the only way to balance the interest of the people and that States for election to a singular office (President). It is critical that we have the EC, or some system that can perform this function. I also mentioned in at least one of those links that I think "automatic" allocation of the EC votes might not be a bad idea (though I'd want to research the history to see exactly why we use actual human electors), and that "winner takes all" is a completely separate issue from the EC itself. Please read up on that, starting with the links above.
Hey, I thought the nick sounded familiar. I link to your Condorcet pages all the time in discussions like this. Thanks for putting that info online!
Not true. Condorcet (as well as IRV, which has fatal flaws I won't discuss here) allows you to rank as few candidates as you like. All others will be assumed in a tie for last - i.e. if you don't rank them, all the candidates you did rank beat them. Voters who can't figure out how to rank candidates can get by simply marking their favorite - this would be equivalent to the current plurality system.
Condorcet is quite obviously the best system if you take the time to read all of them objectively, for the simple reason that it removes the "necessity" of voting strategy. Simply indicate who you prefer the most, which is what voting should be.
So your solution is to tax (ie, steal money from, backed by threat of gov't force) everyone. Nice. Thanks you so much.
If you're so concerned about the plight of these people, how about you individually donate as much money as you want? Either directly or through a charity, it doesn't matter to me.
But that would require a moral standard of actually caring for your fellow man. Gosh, shucks, I guess we can't do that! We can't simply trust people to do the right thing! Let's go back to forcing everyone to fork over the bucks.
Herein lies the problem. Government doesn't trust it's citizens to do "the right thing". So it assumes a one-size-fits-all standard of "right" and then compels everyone to adhere to it, under threat of force (fines, imprisonment). What about freedom? Government's job isn't to make sure everyone does "the right thing" it's to make sure our freedoms are protected, and leave the citizens to their own consciences and their own decisions. If the Smith's want to home school, let them! If the Jones's want to use the church school, let them! If the Barlow's want to use the school managed by the county, let them!
Long before there was tax-funded public education, America had a 99% literacy rate. I'm sure there were poor people then, too, but they still managed to get their kids an education. Maybe communities actually helped their neighbors. Maybe people actually donated time/money to their churches and religious schools. What I do know is that restricting freedom (as taxing someone for a service they don't use -- such as private- and home-schoolers who are still taxed for the public schools -- does) is immoral and wrong.
Look at it from a practical standpoint. Everybody puts in something, and everybody's kid gets an education. Why dictate where that money has to go? You can have school choice, and still everybody will be putting in something, so everybody's kids should still be getting taught. Where's the problem? Currently, only rich people get to choose how their children are educated. I don't think a gov't-established aristocracy is right, do you?
That's why you eliminate all taxes that pay for "free" public education. With the money you're not paying in taxes, you can easily afford to send your children to a private school of your choosing. You regain your economic and educational freedom. Pretty good deal.
Do you realize that taxes (income, social security, sales, etc) consume over 42% of a person's income? No wonder it takes two working parents to make it nowadays. The solution is simple...reduce taxes drastically. The income tax in particular is morally reprehensible, it's a slave tax. If we could save that money instead, to spend as we wished, think what a jump the economy would get! Instead of paying the overhead of government mismanagement, you could directly purchase the services you need at competitive free market prices. Even "poor" people could afford to save then, if they were slaves to the government from January through May.
I think it's because Cruithne and those have eccentric, inclined orbits. They merely have a resonance relationship with Earth. AA29 seems to follow Earth's orbit pretty closely, and stay near our orbital plane as well. This makes it more like the classical "Trojan" asteroid.
There was no "public" education until the mid-1800's. Before then nearly all education was "private" yet America had one of the highest literacy rates in the world. This is largely attributable to Americans being a religious people, who felt the need to be able to read the Bible for themselves. Christianity has been a major force for education worldwide, before civil governments ever got involved.
Libertarians realize that police are necessary. Militia are not police, and everyone knows that. The libertarian goal is to reduce government to it's necessary functions, not to eliminate gov't altogether. Police benefit everyone equally. Courts benefit everyone equally. Defense and roads, too. These are proper functions of government. Programs that target certain aspects of society usually are not. That's where it comes down to which special interest group can cry the loudest, and that's not right.
Force-based coercion is a poor foundation for civil government. I would gladly give time/money to help a worthy cause. That's my choice. But as soon as gov't steps in to say I must contribute time/money, even for a "good" thing, I've lost my freedom and somebody somewhere has gained power/control over that area.
You may say "but people won't voluntarily give" and I reply that yes, that's a definite problem. But it's a moral problem with individuals that bludgeoning all of society with restrictive laws cannot cure. Society needs to return to it's moral base. It's not morally right to be uncaring, but it's not morally right to force someone to "care", either.
By allowing freedom, some will choose to do an injustice to others. By restricting freedom, gov't does an injustice to everyone. Which do you think is worse?
School is expensive? Where are you getting that from? Most private schools spend about 40% as much per pupil as public schools, and produce students who excel on the SAT/ACT tests! Heck, public schools are overfunded! Where is all that money going?
Bad credit? Maybe if credit weren't so readily available, people would learn to save. But then, delayed gratification is a thing of the past, right? When CC rates are 19% and people have never learned financial self-restraint, it's no wonder that people have bad credit. (The elimination of the gold standard and creation of the Federal Reserve has greatly contributed to this problem.)
Who's to say they're unnecessary? I remember news recently (within the past year) of a bunch of eco-protestors showing up at a rally in a big gas hog SUV. "It was the only thing that would hold us and all our gear!" Yeah, so they're not always unnecessary, are they?
Let people drive what they need/want. If you're worried about pollution, figure out a way to make the ICE more efficient, or invent an acceptable (one that would survive on the free market without government subsidy) alternative. Don't attempt to control other people's lives.
Looks like rel="next" links are already taken care of. That teaches me to read more carefully next time.
Looks like I was too hasty in reading the FAQ. "Next" links are already on the prefetch list!
A nice idea. I can see myself starting to read some random tech story and thinking, "This is really informative. I bet all the links are good resources too," and I'd click such a button to fetch them.
But how many pages are pure content? It's unlikely you'd want to prefetch all the pages that the nav links go to, and every page has some nav links. On a fat pipe it might be OK, but at 56k I'd probably be done reading the first page and all that got fetched in the meantime would have been the stupid nav links.
This is exactly how I get my morning news from Slashdot and WND. I use Opera, so I just Ctrl-Shift click all the headlines that look interesting, and click to the next section when that's done. I read all the opened pages, closing as I go. Then I am back to the original window which now has a new page, and I repeat.
Options to never prefetch on certain sites, or to prefetch every link on certain sites, would eliminate this step for me. But OTOH I'd be closing quite a few pages that I wasn't interested in. The "never on this site" option is a must, though, just like per-site cookie and JS filters. Some sites, no matter how reputable, are a little overzealous when applying new technology.
I'd like to see rel="next" links automatically used for prefetching just like rel="prefetch". Some pages (multi-page articles) already have these, so this feature would be useful immediately.
Exactly. That's why I stopped using it, too. Mozilla's prefetch hinting idea is really neat! I wrote Darin and suggested that "next" links be considered prefetch hints as well. These are quite likely to be candidates for prefetching, and using this wouldn't require everyone to update their pages. Of course, hardly any designers are even using LINK at all yet...
I know iCab has this feature already, for about 3 or 4 releases now. I also thought it was really slick, until I saw the first patch release to keep it from pre-fetching "logout" links. (Oops.) It seems like Mozilla has circumvented that problem, by requiring the designer to provide the hints. OTOH, iCab did have a GUI to [dis|en]able this feature. I think Mr. Clauss would do well to see how this feature goes over with the Mozilla crowd, and incorporate the "hinting" idea if it works. Pre-fetch with good hints would be a boon to my wife and I - we only have 56k at home. I would hope that I could add rel="prefetch" to A tags as well as LINK tags, too.
Yeah, I'd heard about that. Some judge must have ruled they were squatting and ordered them to give up the domain, eh? So much for first-come, first-serve among those who actually have a legitimate (even if mostly for parody) claim to a name. Money talks.
Wouldn't petabites.cc be a better domain for People Eating Tasty Animals?
Approval voting seems to me weaker than Condorcet but stronger than our current system. If we can't get Condorcet implemented, at least an Approval count method would be a step in a good direction.
The "government" usually fails. You cannot rely on the "government" to solve many problems.
And the Greens want to enslave us to government with crushing taxes so they can save their trees and squirrels. No thanks.
Freedom means leaving power in the hands of the people from whom it is derived. If government wasn't so big, it couldn't pass so many laws that favor corporations so heavily. If people were left with their own hard-earned money, they'd have more freedom to spend where they wanted to and boycott the "evil corporations" if it was their choice to do so. I don't want or need any government telling me this or that company is "evil" - I'll do business with whom I want, and make my own moral choices. That is the nature of freedom.
Leave the people free, and they can build a large successful business that betters many lives. If that company gets out of hand, a free people can boycott it and cut it down to size. That's free enterprise. Libertarian ideals combined with a Judeo-Christian ethic work for everybody.
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for evil.
If you don't vote for what you believe, you won't get what you want.
To change your government, change your vote.
The problem today is that people nowadays are unwilling to stand behind their values. Instead of making their own choice, they make the "strategic" choice based on what they think all the other sheep in their district will do. This is stupid - you don't know what other people will do or what they really want. What if they all really want the same third party you want? The rule is still the person with the most votes wins, so vote for who you want, and get others to join you! But I don't see that happening any time soon, so it's a good idea to get a preferential voting system like Condorcet enacted ASAP.