By your logic, experiencing new kinds of pain is something to be valued, since those who don't are "missing out" on something. Since your point seems to be, whether or not you enjoy something, your life is enriched by experiencing it, then shouldn't pain fall into that category?
When I wash their age, I wash in shcool from sheven pm the night before to nine pm every shingle day! And I tell you what, shonny, I liked it and didn't need no shtinkin' coffee, no siree! And we didn't have no shtinkin' 24-hour time neither!
You know, considering how much money MS makes from getting their customers to upgrade to the latest versions of (e.g.) Windows and Office, it seems a little odd that they actually would be so anal about backward compatibility. It seems like once they had a monopoly, they'd want to decrease the amount of backward compatibility, in order to get more people to upgrade. Hmm.
I would probably happily ignore flash, except the company I work for (neopets.com) uses it for about half the games on our site, and a bunch of other stuff (even some of my PHP games have flash animations in them). And, hey, not all Flash apps are bad. I only see the ones I want to.:)
Indeed. I've been using the Flash-click-to-play plugin for a couple months now. Incredibly useful. It can be found here:
http://ted.mielczarek.org/code/mozilla/. Also useful is the "Nuke anything" plugin, which lets you vaporize annoying images, get rid of entire table cells, whatever. Great for getting rid of irritating banner ads (on pages that you are going to be staring at for a while, for example).
What I don't get is why the MPAA (and, in similar behavior, the RIAA) thinks that things like this will somehow bring them more money. Do they really have solid research showing that people who make copies of movies from broadcast TV *instead* of buying a copy at the store are even a drop in the bucket, compared to the professionals who mass-produce bootleg DVDs and sell them for profit? And if so, why haven't we ever seen such research? (I've never seen a reputable study that shows that eliminating casual piracy would result in increased sales, and most anecdotal evidence points the other way. As far as I know. Can anyone point at contrary evidence?)
Seriously, the MPAA would get so much more bang for their buck seeking out those who actually sell bootleg copies, rather than trying to prevent Joe Random from saving a movie he watched on HBO. It's just insane. (Well, we know the real reason behind it, which is that Jack Valenti is insane. This is the guy who, in 1982 or so, claimed that the VCR was to the movie industry what the Boston Strangler was to women; and then when someone asked him about that comment last year, in light of the billions of dollars of revenue home video sales had brought in, denied that he'd ever said any such thing. And not just denying it like "I don't remember ever saying that," but more along the lines of "That's crazy, I never would have said anything like that." The guy is delusional and psychologically ossified.)
such as the idea that all truth and knowledge comes from one source: the Savior Jesus Christ.
I'm curious, how is Jesus the source of knowledge that was gained by people before he was born, and how was he the source of knowledge that was gained long after he died? E.g. how exactly is Jesus the source of the semiconductor research of the 1960s? Did Jesus know anything about semiconductors before he died?
However if the current system were completely unresponsive to the desires of the electorate don't you think it would have caused a major crisis by now ?
I guess what I meant is that the parties aren't providing actual responsiveness, just the illusion of it. The presidential election process has become extremely stylized -- certain things have to happen, and who gets elected is only to a very small degree about whether or not they'll make a good leader. Unfortunately people focus on things like whether the candidate ever shows any emotions, whether he has nice hair, and tiny missteps get blown way out of proportion (and this is not justified by saying things like "But a tiny misstep as president could cause a war" -- all humans are fallible, and just because a candidate manages to get through an election year without making any visible public mistakes, is not an indicator of whether he will make good public policy decisions).
Nothing stops 3rd parties from forming in the US. Where ever you find a serious disconnect between the electorate and the major parties you see a fair amount of success for third parties at the local and occasionally even state elections. Case in point, the election of Jesse Ventura in Minnesota. Wrestling jokes aside, the guy was independent and he beat one of the most entrenched good ole boy systems in the US and the reason was that the major parties in control lacked sufficient contact with the people in that state.
It's a lot easier for a non-Dem/Rep candidate to make progress on the smaller scale of a city, county, or even state, mostly because at the scale of the whole country, Democrats and Republicans severely outnumber everyone else. I don't know what the numbers are like in Minnesota but I'm willing to bet that it has a higher proportion of voters registered as third-party or independent, compared to other states. (And Minnesota's governorship is back to a Republican.) Also, there's only one national office that the people vote for, whereas most states have multiple offices -- the parties can't always focus all their energy on one single election at the state/local level, like they can with the presidential elections.
And more than that, there's this inherent assumption that either a Democrat or Republican will always be President, and a lot of people (including the news media) therefore discount other candidates out-of-hand. It's sort of a self-reinforcing system: voters think that only Rep/Dem can win, so they want to see coverage about Rep/Dem candidates. The media obliges, and primarily show coverage of Rep/Dem candidates... which reinforces with voters the idea that only the Rep/Dem can win.
Sort of like the Republicans this year? What you first said is exactly true, although the second is, unfortunately, not. In addition, they don't even need to HAVE a primary election -- Bush has no Republican contenders, at the demands of the RNC.
Well, it's not quite exactly the same -- in my scenario, the hypothetical party holds the primary and then the Grand Poobah ignores the results and chooses someone else. In the current Republican scenario, there was no primary held at all, they simply chose Bush as their candidate.
As a conservative (though not a Rep) I am deeply offended by them assuming that Bush is the first choice of the majority of Republicans. It is probably the case, but they (ideally) could lose support by their lack of choice.
This hadn't really occurred to me. And by Godzilla, I hope you're right.:) I wonder to what degree non-Republican candidates will get votes from Republicans who don't like Bush enough that they'd rather see (e.g.) Kerry win. Or what number of Republicans will simply not vote because A) they don't want to vote for Bush, but B) can't bring themselves to vote Democrat (or any other party). I know such blind loyalty is a big part of many humans' natures, but it's still so disheartening.
Okay, so I did misunderstand:) Actually I think it was because your original post said:
Yes, people are influenced by how other people voted. It's not a good, but that's how it is.
I figured you meant to say "It's not a good system," since the current construction ("It's not a good, but that's how it is") is confusing.:)
Anyway, yeah, I agree with the latter part. It wasn't something I had really fully considered when I started posting last night, but the primaries are a method for the parties to figure out who they're nominating in the actual election. That said, as a registered Democrat, I still don't think the current system serves Democrats' interests all that well. It has two major problems: One, a candidate might not get early support, figure he has no chance, and drop out (even though later primaries might have given him the victory); and two, because of that, the later primaries' votes are essentially meaningless, because as you point out, the early primaries influence the results of the later ones, which is not a desirable result.
Or rather, it's not a desirable result for the people who vote in those primaries; it IS a desirable result for the party leadership, because as you point out, it lets the party build momentum and support for a candidate over a period of months. Perhaps a system where the order of the primaries is randomized for each election would minimize my main objection. Or maybe even simply shifted ten states at a time, in order to prevent a state from getting really unlucky and ending up with a late primary several times in a row. (Basically, the states that have the first ten elections in 2004 would have the last ten elections in 2008, and each group of ten states would move up one "slot". Or something similar, but you get the idea.)
You're right in that this is the Democratic National Party's chosen process for selecting a candidate. As a current registered Democrat, it bugs me a bit -- I would rather the "real" election process be changed so that the DNP's process wouldn't need to be the way it is. However:
The kind of antiseptic *pure* theoretical constructs of poli-sci professors lack any charm or character
I daresay that the charm and quirkiness of our political constructs should not even be among the top ten factors for deciding the worth of the system. Unless you think that the charm of the current system adequately compensates for the fact that 40% of the voters' votes are essentially worthless -- everyone whose primary is after Super Tuesday basically has no impact on the process. I take it you're not one of those people? Character is overrated when it comes to making sure our elections accurately represent the will of the people.
and given the track record of academic reformers would probably end up with unintended consequences that end up having more problems than the quirky traditions that evolved organically.
Well, "organic" processes gave us a system where only landed white men could vote. It took "reforms" to give minorities and women the right to vote. Of course, claiming that organic systems are always better or worse than "theoretical constructs" is absurd, and you should know that. The rational way to act is to examine all the options and determine which one best represents the will of the people -- whether or not we already have a vested interest in it remaining one way or the other.
Good post. I wanted to elaborate on something that occurred to me when reading the early part of your post, but first I wanted to disagree with the last paragraph:)
Its incestuous and not entirely perfect but so far it has served its purpose.
Well, so far it's served the purpose of helping entrench the two major parties at the expense of all other parties. As a result, most voters who might otherwise support a third party instead join one of the big two, and of course then everyone says, "Well, look, the big two parties have 99% of the voters, so obviously they accurately represent the majority of Americans." This is not necessarily true; once the two parties came to represent more than half of the populace, it was only a matter of time until almost everyone joined one or the other. Most people don't really feel like "wasting" their votes on third-party candidates who (due to the electoral system) already have little chance of winning, so they join the Reps/Dems and make it even more likely that the third-party candidates won't win!
The system is far from inviting for 3erd parties but there are several realities which bias america towards a two party system
What realities are these? And are those realities the cause of the two-party system, or is it that they stem from the two-party system? (In other words, are you positive that the cause-effect chain goes one way and not the other? Or even both ways?)
and it probably does more good than harm.
Since it's been more than a century since we had a system where third-party candidates were viable, I don't know that there's really enough evidence to make this statement.
So long as the two party system provides sufficient choice and responsiveness to americans as a whole it will likely remain in place.
I agree. But I think it's reasonably obvious that the two-party system has in fact not provided sufficient choice (let alone responsiveness) to Americans for quite some time now. The Democratic and Republican parties have converged significantly over the years. Granted there's still enough of a difference that I reregistered as Democrat (from Green) instead of Republican, but still.
All that said:) I realized upon reading the first part of your post that we may be misdirecting our energies here. As you pointed out, the primaries only exist to help the parties narrow down their candidates to the one they want to field in the real election. The primaries aren't "real" elections in that the "winners" of primaries aren't granted any office -- in fact the results of the primaries probably aren't even legally binding in any way. There's no real reason a political party couldn't have a rule that they'd hold elections, but then if the Grand Poobah In Charge decides he wants to overrule the results of the election, he can do so, and select whatever candidate he wants to be the candidate in the real election. (Of course, such a party would probably not do too well.)
If the party you choose to belong to isn't representing your interests, then you should bitch at that party to try and get them to do so -- but bitching at the Democratic National Party to change its primary method is unlikely to ever work. What would be more useful, and probably even infinitesimally more likely to succeed, would be to try and get the national election rules changed so that third parties actually do have a chance. Hmm.
It's patently absurd that the media manages to herd the general populace to one candidate before even 30% of the respective party voters have had their say.
I agree. Unfortunately suppressing speech is an avenue always fraught with danger, and I would much rather exhaust other options (such as changing the election process) before going within a stone's throw of muzzling the media. Most of them may be ratings-obsessed hacks, but that's not a road we want to start down.
the party's ultimate goal of having a well-supported candidate run for office
The point of the election is to serve the people, not the agenda of political parties. The current method does not serve the people; in fact about 40% of the people have their votes essentially trivialized because the nomination is usually secured by the elections of Super Tuesday. I'm not saying that I have all the answers, but I do think that having all the primaries on the same day would be a good start toward having the elections accurately represent the will of the people.
It's not a good, but that's how it is.
Maybe I misunderstand, but you appear to be saying that we should just accept the system the way it is and not try to change it. "That's the way it is" is never by itself an acceptable reason to leave a system alone. And you even say that the system's not good! How do you then justify supporting the status quo?
Remember how in elementary school the only way the teacher could get an accurate vote was if everyone put their heads down during the process? People are swayed by popular decision.
The current system allows for lesser known, poorly funded outsiders to make their case in smaller states that they have a chance of contesting.
Other changes to the electoral system could deal with this issue, such as Instant Runoff Voting. To be fair, I should have been more comprehensive in my post, and said something like, "Having all the elections be on the same day would be a good first step toward having elections actually represent the will of the people." There's no reason why the election method has to be either A) the way it is now or B) the way it is now, with the only change being my original post's idea of "all elections on the same day." In fact there's quite a lot that could (and should) be done to improve the voting process.
All that said, I also agree that the way the whole thing is covered by the media is fairly inane. In fact it's the media that makes the whole elections-held-weeks-apart thing a problem. The issue is that the results of the early elections influence the results of the later elections. If the media didn't report the results, people wouldn't be influenced by it. Well, that's not really going to change; we can't and shouldn't muzzle the media (even if they are all slowly being absorbed by Rupert Murdoch), and the alternative is to change the voting system. (Or somehow convince all the voters to avoid seeing news reports about the elections until everyone's voted.)
These elections run from January through June. This means on the first Tuesday of March, a candidate will pretty much know what his chances of winning the nomination really are.
Of course, the results of the earlier primaries and caucuses influence the results of the later ones, devaluing the votes of those who live in states that have later elections. How can anyone rationally claim that having elections for the same thing weeks apart is a good idea? All voting for a given election should happen on the same day. I don't know how feasible this is from a legal standpoint (could federal election laws be changed to require the states to have their presidential primaries on the same day?), but come on, this is absurd. Some voters change their votes to some degree based on who's already in the lead; rather than find out what people really think, the current process is designed to give a snowball effect to the candidates who get an early lead. Not to mention that some candidates drop out after only one or two primaries, even though in a fair election they might have done much better.
You didn't even read my comment. Evolutionary theory as it currently stands requires some form of abiogenesis to get started. It would NOT have good explanatory power for the life getting STARTED.
No, it doesn't. Evolutionary theory in general is distinct from abiogenesis. It covers how new species arise from older ones, not how species arise from inorganic soup.
A case in which they will almost certainly prevail!
I like the idea that SCO could sue themselves, and then somehow lose both sides of the case. Actually, thinking about SCO's history, they'd not only lose both sides, but the judge would sentence them all to death. Even in a civil case.
People who quibble because someone said something that someone else said in the books, or the Ents didn't decide to go to war and instead had to be convinced, etc., are UPTIGHT.
Not always. Some of us think the Ents should have decided to go to war on their own because it would have been better dramatically.:)
The second the Free Software community started trying to push their stuff on schools, governments, and corporations, every Free Software developer
Ah, so when OTHER people started "trying to push their stuff on schools, governments, and corporations," this somehow cause ME to earn a moral obligation? Even though I never tried to push anything I worked on on anyone?
What you actually meant was, anyone who pushes their stuff on schools, governments, and corporations thereby earns a moral obligation to make it good enough for those entities to use. If someone ELSE pushes THEIR software on a school, that does not affect the dinky program I wrote for my own purposes.
Free Software Developers either need to make their usable or they need to stop their lobbying and go back to the server closet they came from.
Clueless bystanders need to stop lumping every person who works on free software into the same category, as if we're all one big homogeneous mass.
I had better? Or else what? What exactly is depending on my listening to someone tell me the UI is crap? What, that nobody will use it if the UI sucks? Why do I care whether anyone else uses it or likes it?
Similarly, taking the time to make your user interface polished and intuitive is one of the best ways to end up with happy end users who tell other people how great your software is.
And when you've written a piece of software because you needed it in order to do something, and decided to make it available for free in case anyone else might find it useful -- and not because you're trying to sell it -- why do you care whether other people are happy with it?
Slashdot Mirror
Ha! I watched that movie two days ago. Unfortunately it's about forty minutes too long :)
By your logic, experiencing new kinds of pain is something to be valued, since those who don't are "missing out" on something. Since your point seems to be, whether or not you enjoy something, your life is enriched by experiencing it, then shouldn't pain fall into that category?
You know, considering how much money MS makes from getting their customers to upgrade to the latest versions of (e.g.) Windows and Office, it seems a little odd that they actually would be so anal about backward compatibility. It seems like once they had a monopoly, they'd want to decrease the amount of backward compatibility, in order to get more people to upgrade. Hmm.
I would probably happily ignore flash, except the company I work for (neopets.com) uses it for about half the games on our site, and a bunch of other stuff (even some of my PHP games have flash animations in them). And, hey, not all Flash apps are bad. I only see the ones I want to. :)
Indeed. I've been using the Flash-click-to-play plugin for a couple months now. Incredibly useful. It can be found here:
http://ted.mielczarek.org/code/mozilla/. Also useful is the "Nuke anything" plugin, which lets you vaporize annoying images, get rid of entire table cells, whatever. Great for getting rid of irritating banner ads (on pages that you are going to be staring at for a while, for example).
What I don't get is why the MPAA (and, in similar behavior, the RIAA) thinks that things like this will somehow bring them more money. Do they really have solid research showing that people who make copies of movies from broadcast TV *instead* of buying a copy at the store are even a drop in the bucket, compared to the professionals who mass-produce bootleg DVDs and sell them for profit? And if so, why haven't we ever seen such research? (I've never seen a reputable study that shows that eliminating casual piracy would result in increased sales, and most anecdotal evidence points the other way. As far as I know. Can anyone point at contrary evidence?)
Seriously, the MPAA would get so much more bang for their buck seeking out those who actually sell bootleg copies, rather than trying to prevent Joe Random from saving a movie he watched on HBO. It's just insane. (Well, we know the real reason behind it, which is that Jack Valenti is insane. This is the guy who, in 1982 or so, claimed that the VCR was to the movie industry what the Boston Strangler was to women; and then when someone asked him about that comment last year, in light of the billions of dollars of revenue home video sales had brought in, denied that he'd ever said any such thing. And not just denying it like "I don't remember ever saying that," but more along the lines of "That's crazy, I never would have said anything like that." The guy is delusional and psychologically ossified.)
And more than that, there's this inherent assumption that either a Democrat or Republican will always be President, and a lot of people (including the news media) therefore discount other candidates out-of-hand. It's sort of a self-reinforcing system: voters think that only Rep/Dem can win, so they want to see coverage about Rep/Dem candidates. The media obliges, and primarily show coverage of Rep/Dem candidates... which reinforces with voters the idea that only the Rep/Dem can win.
Anyway, yeah, I agree with the latter part. It wasn't something I had really fully considered when I started posting last night, but the primaries are a method for the parties to figure out who they're nominating in the actual election. That said, as a registered Democrat, I still don't think the current system serves Democrats' interests all that well. It has two major problems: One, a candidate might not get early support, figure he has no chance, and drop out (even though later primaries might have given him the victory); and two, because of that, the later primaries' votes are essentially meaningless, because as you point out, the early primaries influence the results of the later ones, which is not a desirable result.
Or rather, it's not a desirable result for the people who vote in those primaries; it IS a desirable result for the party leadership, because as you point out, it lets the party build momentum and support for a candidate over a period of months. Perhaps a system where the order of the primaries is randomized for each election would minimize my main objection. Or maybe even simply shifted ten states at a time, in order to prevent a state from getting really unlucky and ending up with a late primary several times in a row. (Basically, the states that have the first ten elections in 2004 would have the last ten elections in 2008, and each group of ten states would move up one "slot". Or something similar, but you get the idea.)
Looks like you were wrong: They're suing Autozone and Daimler-Chrysler.
All that said :) I realized upon reading the first part of your post that we may be misdirecting our energies here. As you pointed out, the primaries only exist to help the parties narrow down their candidates to the one they want to field in the real election. The primaries aren't "real" elections in that the "winners" of primaries aren't granted any office -- in fact the results of the primaries probably aren't even legally binding in any way. There's no real reason a political party couldn't have a rule that they'd hold elections, but then if the Grand Poobah In Charge decides he wants to overrule the results of the election, he can do so, and select whatever candidate he wants to be the candidate in the real election. (Of course, such a party would probably not do too well.)
If the party you choose to belong to isn't representing your interests, then you should bitch at that party to try and get them to do so -- but bitching at the Democratic National Party to change its primary method is unlikely to ever work. What would be more useful, and probably even infinitesimally more likely to succeed, would be to try and get the national election rules changed so that third parties actually do have a chance. Hmm.
All that said, I also agree that the way the whole thing is covered by the media is fairly inane. In fact it's the media that makes the whole elections-held-weeks-apart thing a problem. The issue is that the results of the early elections influence the results of the later elections. If the media didn't report the results, people wouldn't be influenced by it. Well, that's not really going to change; we can't and shouldn't muzzle the media (even if they are all slowly being absorbed by Rupert Murdoch), and the alternative is to change the voting system. (Or somehow convince all the voters to avoid seeing news reports about the elections until everyone's voted.)
What you actually meant was, anyone who pushes their stuff on schools, governments, and corporations thereby earns a moral obligation to make it good enough for those entities to use. If someone ELSE pushes THEIR software on a school, that does not affect the dinky program I wrote for my own purposes.
Clueless bystanders need to stop lumping every person who works on free software into the same category, as if we're all one big homogeneous mass.