Well, to make seats as representative as those in Canada (about 125,000 people per seat), you'd need 2,400 seats (or, benches). It's not only a matter of representation, it's also a matter of available space and funding, and having 2,400 representatives is something not even the European Parliament has tried (and they have 700 or so).
First, I should say that I'm an American that has lived in Canada for the past 6 years as a political science student, so I've been following Canadian politics for a while now. Basically, the current situation in the States is a bit like how it was in Canada after Chretien left office: nobody cared that much about Martin and they just wanted to get on to the next thing, but even that's a weak comparison when examined next to the perfect storm of the '08 presidential campaign.
This year, things started so soon because of profound discontent with the Bush Administration, states moving up their primary schedule, and a field that is generally seen as stronger than we've had the past two elections: Clinton, Obama, Biden, Richardson, Paul, Huckabee.... all are either popular and, at worst, competent. Compare this with the "least bad" votes we had in 2000 and 2004. Few were really excited about Gore, Bush or Kerry, and people are excited now.
As for the rest of the premise, that we don't care about legislation, I think that's somewhat true. Americans have gotten tired of Pres. Bush's voice (although I did just hear him pronounce "nuclear" correctly for the first time that I can remember); they strongly dislike Congress; and they don't like the partisan bickering that will dominate the next 13 months. Nothing's running smoothly in Washington, and we don't have a Harper to cut the legs out from an already weak opposition. Everyone, except the candidates, are weak, and we desperately want to hold onto someone strong.
Some of the best satire he's done, at least that I've seen, came from his Oct. 31 show. He hit at a good number of the candidates right at their weak points (not too hard to do) but he did it with an uncharacteristic style. I'm unhappy that he won't be on the Democratic ballot, but I do hope he keeps 'campaigning'.
Well, think about it this way: if you're going to convince someone that you're right, it's a helluva lot easier to do that by talking to them face-to-face rather than through an email. It's not always about money or power politics. Usually, it's just about good old fashioned diplomacy checks, and you're free to make them too, as long as you're flexible with your dates so they can actually schedule you in.
Generally, it's not the representative that replies to those emails, it's usually a staffer. That doesn't mean it doesn't reach someone important, as staffers are oftentimes just as important as their elected boss, but it does mean that you probably won't reach the person you think you are. As for the issues you raised with your rep., my guess is that it was too narrow of a scope for whoever checks the emails at the person's office and, given a lack of talking points, couldn't formulate a proper reply.
The point of lobbying is to get face to face with someone and hold their attention. I've seen lobbyists change a legislative assistant from indifferent at best about a subject to being positively excited about it, but letters never do that. If those concerns you listed are important enough to you, arrange a meeting with your representative, their legislative assistant, or their chief of staff, and prepare a simple one page bulleted argument about why one of those topics is great and why the representative should care. That's how lobbying works, and it's just like convincing anyone else you don't know about something.
But yes, right, back to Google: if their enemies are doing political warfare, they'd better be duking it out, too.
I would've hoped for all-electric, but I'm not really a fan of H2/fuel cells. The problems of transporting and making hydrogen are too great, especially in terms of energy density. I'm glad we're seeing Toyota go over to hybrids, though, and hopefully there will be competition to be perceived to be the most environmentally friendly. Who knows: Honda or Ford might up and say that electric is the way to go. (Doubtful, though, given the flop of the EV-1.)
I thought about the idea of telephones, but then I found myself trying to explain 127.0.0.1 and IP addresses to someone one time and the analogy broke down. So here's what I came up with.
The internet is a means by which computer can communicate with one another. They know which is which because each computer has a "name", called an IP address. Individual computers talk to a central computer, whose name it knows, to find out the name of the computer it's trying to get to. The central computer directs its requests to where they're supposed to go. In this analogy, 127.0.0.1 is the equivalent of "me".
I think that Star Wars has become something of a cultural icon and certainly more than just a brand. Now, the Home Hardware stamps offered by Canada Post a few years ago - that felt like blatant advertising to me.
You forgot one part, though: I used to work for them. From my direct interaction with the Conservatives in Parliament, unless I need to hang out with Democrats more often, I'd say that they were conservative Democrats. During the election party in '06, it was really amusing to watch the cheers and boos when Republicans and Democrats (respectively) were shown winning. So, unless they themselves were buying into the hype, they are definitely more right-leaning than a goodly number of Democrats. Don't forget that there's a socialist in the Democrat caucus: it's more leftist than you think.
To actually give you something useful (man, and Canadians are supposed to be so nice!), the Conservative Party can be seen as conservative Democrat: sex issues (raising the age of consent from 14 to 16, defining marriage as man and woman, etc.), activist foreign policy (better funded military for its peacekeeping role), and more laissez-faire for business. Terrorism hasn't really come up that I've seen and I used to work for them. To Conservatives, government is a means of protecting the people; it gives the people a framework to fill in.
The Liberal Party can be seen as a kind of center-left Democrat, although really they have very few ideological anchors. Generally, they favor a more active federal government: help business directly, help minorities directly, help other nations directly, etc. To Liberals, government is the primary means of helping Canada; it gives the people a place to grow.
To answer the question about Conservative vs. Liberal support of this bill: odds are the Liberals brought it up to help protect children from the dangerous wilds of the Internet. Conservatives will oppose it simply because it's from the Liberals. It can also help make the Liberals look bad in Question Period, especially if the Conservatives can say it looks like the Patriot Act.
Well, one of the problems with governments is that they are so outdated. I was an intern staffer in the Canadian Parliament for a few months and one of my jobs was to hand-color a poster-sized map of a riding (district) with who won which polling area. Hand color. This was so that we could target our mail flyers to various parts of the riding where we were weaker, stronger, or in between. The process to send out these flyers required us to hand-write forms that would be sent to the mail room that said where we wanted it sent, and we needed one form for each 300 people, as that was the most that could be processed with one form. In other words, they'd been doing it this way since the 1950s.
Creating a change-log would be a good idea, but it would have to be for the public. In DC itself, you would have to get through to ridiculously busy legislative assistants and extraordinarily busier representatives who quite simply do not have spare time. The public could raise issue with things, and I'm sure there are some political geeks that would pore over that and write their local political blogger with something they found.
So: change-logging is a good idea, but it would be for the people to read first; the politicians would almost certainly come second.
I'd mod you up, but I can't, so instead I'll just argue the opposite.
Let's assume that all the money in the OECD spent by space agencies gets pumped into working on the aid shortfall, assuming the 0.7% GDP goal is the proper goal. That's about a $24 billion drop in a $50 billion bucket. The rest could be made up by a goodly chunk of Microsoft profit money, leaving them $10 billion. However, this is only assuming that the 0.7% is the only goal. There's also the problems of health care (that leftover $10 billion could give the 45 million uninsured Americans about $218 per year). Afterwards comes education, housing, and the impoverished in the OECD that would be overlooked by our 0.7%.
So the $24 billion would be a step in the right direction, but you forget what we buy with that money: a look over the next hill. The Chinese explored for a bit, arriving as far afield as East Africa and beginning colonies around their area of the world. They nearly dominated the East. After 30 years of this, they turned inwards and burned their fleets trying to achieved Confucian inner perfection. That insular behavior undid the progess achieved under their age of exploration. The Chinese never achieved the perfection they sought. In contrast, Europe achieved the wealth and power it sought, whether for good or ill, and now it and its transplant nations (the rest of the OECD) are the most prosperous in the world.
The $24 billion we spend wouldn't eliminate poverty if spent on poverty, but it may if it's spent on reaching upward and outward.
The problem is, when we do things about it, the media doesn't listen except on very, very rare occassions. Finding the most vitrioloc rhetoric coming from a Christian sells. When Bono talks about aid to Africa, people just see him as a celebrity rather than a Christian doing good work. I don't blame anyone for painting us in broad strokes; some people would rather have that than give normal Christians a voice. I would like to see the statement of intent to establish a theocracy from one of the Christian Right's big wigs you're referring to, though.
On topic, I don't blame Christians for this but overzealous parenting. I don't think the kids were doing the right thing (far from it), but the solution to that is good parenting, not litigation and jail time. If anything, that simply makes things worse! If there's one thing the Family Values types should be up in arms about it's the state trying to encroach on the family. I wonder who I could lobby...
Religious authorities should also be appalled at such a miscarriage of justice. When Christians embrace legalism rather than care you get crap like this. In my mind they've lost their faith in God and put it in the courts. I'm a Christian myself, and this sort of BS sickens me. I hope they can appeal.
Globalization gets sold as "it will make things cheaper," however that process occurs, and you just listed the ways. Globalizing makes the whole rest of the world available for those intelligent people to use when figuring out how to make things cheaper.
As for what this has to do with the **AA, their cost of production is in a couple areas, mostly staff and equipment costs. Outsourcing the non-musical office work and buying less expensive equipment from overseas, coupled with the economics of scale that they said would kick in, prices should go down.
(By the way, summarizing an argument is not tantamount to ignoring it - it just cuts out the crap that doesn't matter at the time.)
Well, the PR coup wouldn't be a bad thing. Microsoft needs it, and good PR is rarely deserved. Someone needs to pay for the piracy, but certainly not like this. Investigate the vendor and fine them for every computer sold to this point. Give the buyers options: buy a full copy of Windows Russia or cease using Windows and use Linux. It's not the harsh justice Russia's looking for but it's better than sending a teacher to a gulag for buying computers with pirated software when there probably wasn't even a way to buy them legit.
Yeah, that's a motivation to drive to Montreal with a camcorder and record a movie, just so I can stick it to the man. I live in Canada so I know that if you ask nearly anybody about the tax they'd give you a blank stare. Canadians don't resent it and, even if they did, it wouldn't drive them to piracy in protest. That's just stupid.
I thoroughly enjoy the idea of a watermark. Piracy is a problem but using DRM to restrict the usage of data tends to drive people towards pirates that know how to strip all that out. A watermark allows someone to maintain control over what they have purchased so they can make whatever fair use out of it that they can think of, rather than simply living with whatever fair use the companies think they can tolerate.
Slashdot Mirror
What's this about the Wii?
Well, to make seats as representative as those in Canada (about 125,000 people per seat), you'd need 2,400 seats (or, benches). It's not only a matter of representation, it's also a matter of available space and funding, and having 2,400 representatives is something not even the European Parliament has tried (and they have 700 or so).
It took me a few times to read it properly, too.
First, I should say that I'm an American that has lived in Canada for the past 6 years as a political science student, so I've been following Canadian politics for a while now. Basically, the current situation in the States is a bit like how it was in Canada after Chretien left office: nobody cared that much about Martin and they just wanted to get on to the next thing, but even that's a weak comparison when examined next to the perfect storm of the '08 presidential campaign.
This year, things started so soon because of profound discontent with the Bush Administration, states moving up their primary schedule, and a field that is generally seen as stronger than we've had the past two elections: Clinton, Obama, Biden, Richardson, Paul, Huckabee.... all are either popular and, at worst, competent. Compare this with the "least bad" votes we had in 2000 and 2004. Few were really excited about Gore, Bush or Kerry, and people are excited now.
As for the rest of the premise, that we don't care about legislation, I think that's somewhat true. Americans have gotten tired of Pres. Bush's voice (although I did just hear him pronounce "nuclear" correctly for the first time that I can remember); they strongly dislike Congress; and they don't like the partisan bickering that will dominate the next 13 months. Nothing's running smoothly in Washington, and we don't have a Harper to cut the legs out from an already weak opposition. Everyone, except the candidates, are weak, and we desperately want to hold onto someone strong.
Right, right: because Ron Paul isn't the best candidate in your opinion, but he is best in fact. Logically infallible fact.
Some of the best satire he's done, at least that I've seen, came from his Oct. 31 show. He hit at a good number of the candidates right at their weak points (not too hard to do) but he did it with an uncharacteristic style. I'm unhappy that he won't be on the Democratic ballot, but I do hope he keeps 'campaigning'.
Sneaking across the border into Canada.
Well, think about it this way: if you're going to convince someone that you're right, it's a helluva lot easier to do that by talking to them face-to-face rather than through an email. It's not always about money or power politics. Usually, it's just about good old fashioned diplomacy checks, and you're free to make them too, as long as you're flexible with your dates so they can actually schedule you in.
Generally, it's not the representative that replies to those emails, it's usually a staffer. That doesn't mean it doesn't reach someone important, as staffers are oftentimes just as important as their elected boss, but it does mean that you probably won't reach the person you think you are. As for the issues you raised with your rep., my guess is that it was too narrow of a scope for whoever checks the emails at the person's office and, given a lack of talking points, couldn't formulate a proper reply.
The point of lobbying is to get face to face with someone and hold their attention. I've seen lobbyists change a legislative assistant from indifferent at best about a subject to being positively excited about it, but letters never do that. If those concerns you listed are important enough to you, arrange a meeting with your representative, their legislative assistant, or their chief of staff, and prepare a simple one page bulleted argument about why one of those topics is great and why the representative should care. That's how lobbying works, and it's just like convincing anyone else you don't know about something.
But yes, right, back to Google: if their enemies are doing political warfare, they'd better be duking it out, too.
It's the British way of doing acronyms that are said as a word rather than spelled out.
I would've hoped for all-electric, but I'm not really a fan of H2/fuel cells. The problems of transporting and making hydrogen are too great, especially in terms of energy density. I'm glad we're seeing Toyota go over to hybrids, though, and hopefully there will be competition to be perceived to be the most environmentally friendly. Who knows: Honda or Ford might up and say that electric is the way to go. (Doubtful, though, given the flop of the EV-1.)
I thought about the idea of telephones, but then I found myself trying to explain 127.0.0.1 and IP addresses to someone one time and the analogy broke down. So here's what I came up with.
The internet is a means by which computer can communicate with one another. They know which is which because each computer has a "name", called an IP address. Individual computers talk to a central computer, whose name it knows, to find out the name of the computer it's trying to get to. The central computer directs its requests to where they're supposed to go. In this analogy, 127.0.0.1 is the equivalent of "me".
I think that Star Wars has become something of a cultural icon and certainly more than just a brand. Now, the Home Hardware stamps offered by Canada Post a few years ago - that felt like blatant advertising to me.
You forgot one part, though: I used to work for them. From my direct interaction with the Conservatives in Parliament, unless I need to hang out with Democrats more often, I'd say that they were conservative Democrats. During the election party in '06, it was really amusing to watch the cheers and boos when Republicans and Democrats (respectively) were shown winning. So, unless they themselves were buying into the hype, they are definitely more right-leaning than a goodly number of Democrats. Don't forget that there's a socialist in the Democrat caucus: it's more leftist than you think.
To actually give you something useful (man, and Canadians are supposed to be so nice!), the Conservative Party can be seen as conservative Democrat: sex issues (raising the age of consent from 14 to 16, defining marriage as man and woman, etc.), activist foreign policy (better funded military for its peacekeeping role), and more laissez-faire for business. Terrorism hasn't really come up that I've seen and I used to work for them. To Conservatives, government is a means of protecting the people; it gives the people a framework to fill in.
The Liberal Party can be seen as a kind of center-left Democrat, although really they have very few ideological anchors. Generally, they favor a more active federal government: help business directly, help minorities directly, help other nations directly, etc. To Liberals, government is the primary means of helping Canada; it gives the people a place to grow.
To answer the question about Conservative vs. Liberal support of this bill: odds are the Liberals brought it up to help protect children from the dangerous wilds of the Internet. Conservatives will oppose it simply because it's from the Liberals. It can also help make the Liberals look bad in Question Period, especially if the Conservatives can say it looks like the Patriot Act.
Well, one of the problems with governments is that they are so outdated. I was an intern staffer in the Canadian Parliament for a few months and one of my jobs was to hand-color a poster-sized map of a riding (district) with who won which polling area. Hand color. This was so that we could target our mail flyers to various parts of the riding where we were weaker, stronger, or in between. The process to send out these flyers required us to hand-write forms that would be sent to the mail room that said where we wanted it sent, and we needed one form for each 300 people, as that was the most that could be processed with one form. In other words, they'd been doing it this way since the 1950s.
Creating a change-log would be a good idea, but it would have to be for the public. In DC itself, you would have to get through to ridiculously busy legislative assistants and extraordinarily busier representatives who quite simply do not have spare time. The public could raise issue with things, and I'm sure there are some political geeks that would pore over that and write their local political blogger with something they found.
So: change-logging is a good idea, but it would be for the people to read first; the politicians would almost certainly come second.
I'd mod you up, but I can't, so instead I'll just argue the opposite.
Let's assume that all the money in the OECD spent by space agencies gets pumped into working on the aid shortfall, assuming the 0.7% GDP goal is the proper goal. That's about a $24 billion drop in a $50 billion bucket. The rest could be made up by a goodly chunk of Microsoft profit money, leaving them $10 billion. However, this is only assuming that the 0.7% is the only goal. There's also the problems of health care (that leftover $10 billion could give the 45 million uninsured Americans about $218 per year). Afterwards comes education, housing, and the impoverished in the OECD that would be overlooked by our 0.7%.
So the $24 billion would be a step in the right direction, but you forget what we buy with that money: a look over the next hill. The Chinese explored for a bit, arriving as far afield as East Africa and beginning colonies around their area of the world. They nearly dominated the East. After 30 years of this, they turned inwards and burned their fleets trying to achieved Confucian inner perfection. That insular behavior undid the progess achieved under their age of exploration. The Chinese never achieved the perfection they sought. In contrast, Europe achieved the wealth and power it sought, whether for good or ill, and now it and its transplant nations (the rest of the OECD) are the most prosperous in the world.
The $24 billion we spend wouldn't eliminate poverty if spent on poverty, but it may if it's spent on reaching upward and outward.
The problem is, when we do things about it, the media doesn't listen except on very, very rare occassions. Finding the most vitrioloc rhetoric coming from a Christian sells. When Bono talks about aid to Africa, people just see him as a celebrity rather than a Christian doing good work. I don't blame anyone for painting us in broad strokes; some people would rather have that than give normal Christians a voice. I would like to see the statement of intent to establish a theocracy from one of the Christian Right's big wigs you're referring to, though.
On topic, I don't blame Christians for this but overzealous parenting. I don't think the kids were doing the right thing (far from it), but the solution to that is good parenting, not litigation and jail time. If anything, that simply makes things worse! If there's one thing the Family Values types should be up in arms about it's the state trying to encroach on the family. I wonder who I could lobby...
Religious authorities should also be appalled at such a miscarriage of justice. When Christians embrace legalism rather than care you get crap like this. In my mind they've lost their faith in God and put it in the courts. I'm a Christian myself, and this sort of BS sickens me. I hope they can appeal.
Globalization gets sold as "it will make things cheaper," however that process occurs, and you just listed the ways. Globalizing makes the whole rest of the world available for those intelligent people to use when figuring out how to make things cheaper.
As for what this has to do with the **AA, their cost of production is in a couple areas, mostly staff and equipment costs. Outsourcing the non-musical office work and buying less expensive equipment from overseas, coupled with the economics of scale that they said would kick in, prices should go down.
(By the way, summarizing an argument is not tantamount to ignoring it - it just cuts out the crap that doesn't matter at the time.)
Yeah... isn't that the whole premise of globalization anyway? That stuff gets cheaper?
Well, the PR coup wouldn't be a bad thing. Microsoft needs it, and good PR is rarely deserved. Someone needs to pay for the piracy, but certainly not like this. Investigate the vendor and fine them for every computer sold to this point. Give the buyers options: buy a full copy of Windows Russia or cease using Windows and use Linux. It's not the harsh justice Russia's looking for but it's better than sending a teacher to a gulag for buying computers with pirated software when there probably wasn't even a way to buy them legit.
Yeah, that's a motivation to drive to Montreal with a camcorder and record a movie, just so I can stick it to the man. I live in Canada so I know that if you ask nearly anybody about the tax they'd give you a blank stare. Canadians don't resent it and, even if they did, it wouldn't drive them to piracy in protest. That's just stupid.
Looks like NASA is getting into the habit of blowing up its enemies, too. It'll be just like Iraq all over again!
I thoroughly enjoy the idea of a watermark. Piracy is a problem but using DRM to restrict the usage of data tends to drive people towards pirates that know how to strip all that out. A watermark allows someone to maintain control over what they have purchased so they can make whatever fair use out of it that they can think of, rather than simply living with whatever fair use the companies think they can tolerate.