So you think North Korea was trying to start a war by sending that torpedo?
In order to start a war, they'd have to not be at war already.
A temporary cease-fire punctuated by periodic incidents of armed engagement isn't peace, even if it lasts for half a century.
OTOH, I think if North Korea didn't want to be in a permanent state of war (with intermittent, low-level combat and accepting the risk that that would escalate into higher-level combat), then they wouldn't still be at war.
I'd hate to tell you this, but no one cares about openness except a handful of geeks.
This is why when I flew last weekend I saw two groups of devices being handled by passengers flying. E-ink readers and iPads.
Not tablets, slates, netbooks. iPads and Kindles/nooks.
Or, maybe, you are generalizing from a non-representative experience. When I flew this past weekend, more than half the passengers waiting for their flights had laptops or netbooks -- mostly traditional laptops with a few netbooks -- and I didn't see any e-Readers or iPads out (some people using smartphones, though.) Now, I wouldn't generalize from that to say that no one cares about the features in iPads/eReaders (and I've certainly seen several people using eReaders in different places -- I've yet to see anyone actually using an iPad in person.)
eReaders are selling like hotcakes. Netbooks are selling like hotcakes. Slates (including the iPad) are selling rather poorly compared to either eReaders or netbooks, but the iPad is selling well for a single brand with a couple of models and Apple's marketing machine in getting it plenty of press.
Revolution isn't about what YOU as a super nerd can do with devices it's about what everyone can do with a device.
What everyone can do is, in large part, what super nerds are enabled to empower them to do, which is why the IBM-compatible PC with (in some respects, unintentional) hardware openness dominated the personal computer market -- a market in which, one might note, Apple was the first big player -- and quite likely part of the reason that Android phones, which provide greater freedom for hardware vendors, service providers, and developers (and, provided those preceding parties are on board with it, to end-users in terms of what can be done and what software can be used), are outselling iPhones in the market for the kind of phones that the iPhone popularized.
Apple is not selling the iPad as a PC or even as a computer. It's a device.
This is a false dichotomy. All computers are devices. Apple is, in fact, selling it as an alternative to netbooks and other highly portable computers.
They aren't calling it a computer, and the reasons they aren't are precisely the limitations they have imposed that make many people describe it as a poor alternative in the role they are marketing it for compared to the existing alternatives.
You have more computing power in a Toyota Prius and many other cars than you do in an iPad. Why aren't slashdotters demanding free development tools, etc. for cars?
When Toyota starts marketing the Prius as an alternative to a popular class of computers, that demand might be relevant.
It's hard to claim that was intended to start off any real fighting.
Torpedoing a warship is real fighting. Sure, they probably didn't prefer to provoke any retaliation, but, really, the attacked enemy not fighting back is almost always the best possible result from the point of view of the attacker.
Retaliation is usually a risk that is accepted in an attack, not a desired result (there are occasional exceptions, particular when the attacker is a terrorist group, but those are the exception, not the rule.)
If "us" includes South Korea, there's plenty of evidence that they've done so quite a few times since the big one a long time back, including quite recently.
I also am more of the opinion that Wikipedia should allow the article to be published. For the sake of avoiding confrontation, Wikipedia should probably chill and let it through.
Since when is "avoiding confrontation" a key component of Wikipedia's mission?
The government already funds software development and the past results of that funding predict the would-be future success of a government coding office
The whole point of the suggestion of a government coding office is to replace the current system of individual government agencies buying software development services.
So I don't think it makes a whole of sense to use as your whole argument agains the proposal the fact that the current system is broken. The fact that the current system is broken is why a fix is proposed.
The unstated assumption that government involvement in software production would improve, and not degrade, the quality of software is ludicrous in light of evidence from past results.
That's not the assumption. The government is already involved in software production. What is suggested is a centralization of the government involvement in software production to a central agency whose core competency is software production, rather than having it handled by units in other agencies where it is not the agencies core competency.
If you get your games through Steam, your are subjecting yourself to some nasty DRM that will eventually lock you out of everything (no company lasts forever).
Yeah, but neither does my interest in any particular game. As long as there is a overwhelming probability that Steam will outlast my interest in the Steam-linked game I'm buying, there's not a whole lot of reason for me to be concerned by this particular concerned.
Except it's blatantly obvious you *don't* realize all those things when repeat the mistaken assumption that they are more physical capital heavy than human capital heavy.
Uh, I didn't say they were more physical capital heavy than human capital heavy.
I said the functions they do are more physical capital heavy than software development, which in turn is more human capital heavy than what the GPO does.
That is, I was saying:
pc(GPO):hc(GPO) > pc(software):hc(software)
Which you apparently misread as:
pc(GPO):hc(GPO) > 1
(Now, I'll admit that what I actually said could be wrong, its based on intuition about the physical capital requirements of, e.g., the warehousing and related functions vs. archiving code and documentation and so on, not an actual detailed cost analysis. But, at any rate, the more relevant thing is I said is that the difference is irrelevant to the validity of the analogy. Arguing that the difference doesn't actually exist, would reinforce, rather than challenge, the idea that it is irrelevant.)
Except neither you, nor the author of the TFA, seems to realize that Government Printing Office isn't a printer (in the normal sense of the word, though it does print some things) - it' a publisher and book warehouse and a book distributor and a book seller. But that's not all - it's also sets standards, certifies vendors, and acts as an office supply closet (for government forms and such).
Actually, I do realize all of those things, it was just a lot easier to say "printing" than "the set of tasks that the GPO does". The analogy remains the same in terms of the case for centralized vs. individual agency needs, as does the difference (which remains irrelevant to the point of the analogy) that what the GPO does is somewhat more physical capital heavy than software development, whereas software development is more human capital heavy.
Its actually not: printing and software development are both services that most government agencies regularly need, but that in general most don't need the same subtype of the broader service enough to justify retaining the capacity to meet all their needs in-house without outsourcing, but where the needs of the government as a whole would be more able to justify maintaining resources centrally and then making them available to individual agencies.
The fact that the necessary resources in the case of printing involve a mix that is heavier on physical capital than human capital, while the resources in the case of software development is a mix that is heavier on human capital than physical capital is a difference, but its not a difference that is particularly relevant to the point of the analogy.
You'd probably have a better case if you argued that the "strategic software reserve" was a bad comparison. Software isn't an physical resource with an interruptible supply that you can horde in advance against a future crisis. OTOH, I can see a useful "strategic software reserve" in one sense -- not a reserve of software but of software-related IP. If you accept as a baseline the current US system of fairly strong software-related creator IP rights (copyright and patent, most particularly), it might make sense for the government to strategically exercise the power to acquire property for the public use by eminent domain with a payment of the fair market value to "buy out" existing IP rights where there is a substantial public good to be served by doing so. This might -- structured properly -- be a system that serves the public interest and the Constitutional purpose of IP protections better than either maintaining the status quo without such a system, or just weakening IP protections generally.
Google already has a social networking place called Orkut [orkut.com]. They also have Google Profiles which lacks a lot of social networking functionality, but it has some of the same features...
Google itself is a social network, with centralized login and large numbers of social apps -- both Google-generated and third-party -- status updates/microblogs (Buzz) with the ability to follow (and to access updates by other methods, including geographic search), full-blown blogs (Blogger), APIs for third-party apps, application hosting for third-party apps that can hook directly into the APIs (AppEngine), shared calendaring, messaging (instant and otherwise), shared documents (Google Docs), shared photo albums (Picasa), shared video (YouTube), and pretty much everything else a social network provides. And more user accounts than Facebook.
Its more subtle than Facebook, and less of a walled garden, so its a lot easier not to even notice it as a social network.
I kinda wonder why it's not possible to use these projects as backends for mysql and postgres.
You could, but as soon as you try to implement the features of SQL that they lack on top of them you'll end up making them peform far worse than existing backends that are designed from the ground up to provide these features, so what would be the point?
I don't know that comparing an RDBMS vs key-value storage is meaningful.
Since they are alternative approaches to implementing a backend store for an information system, and the decision between key/value and relational technology is in many cases a bigger decisions with greater risk involved in making the wrong choice than the decision between particular key/value or particular relational options (since the conversion between different systems using the same basic information model is cheaper than the conversion between system using different information models), I think it would be more important to have comparisons between, e.g., key/value stores, SQL-based RDBMSs, non-SQL (e.g., D -- the SQL-alternative relational language family, not the Digital Mars programming language)-based RDBMSs than to have comparisons between different members of the same family.
The DMCA safe harbor provision was intended for exactly this case.
Well, the question with "intended" is "intended by whom?"
Remember that its the media company lobbyists that largely wrote the DMCA and pushed for its adoption: I would expect that the safe harbor provision was intended merely as a sop to alleviate the potential fears of other powerful business interests (e.g., Google) that the DMCA would be expensive for them, so that there wouldn't be moneyed interests with a strong of a financial interest in fighting the DMCA as there were sponsoring it. It wasn't intended to actually protect anyone, although the risk that the media companies might not be able to overcome it in every case was accepted in order to get the rest of the DMCA passed.
So, in a sense, they might be correct that the provision wasn't intended (at least, by those lobbying for the law) to protect sites like YouTube, but it certainly was sold as protecting exactly the kind of redistributors of user-supplied content that YouTube is and it certainly does protect sites like that by its plain language.
The key word here is not "accountable", but "individually". It's true that you can't throw out B with also throwing out C and D who are below him on the list - at least in closed list systems - but is this a problem?
Yes, it is.
If a party nominates a bad politician, isn't that a problem with the party?
Yes, it is. But its a problem that is very difficult to directly deal with (or even for the general electorate to specifically identify to the party) when you aren't voting for specific candidates. That weakens the value of elections in straight party-list systems as inputs from the public on whose behalf the government nominally acts to the government that nominally acts on their behalf.
I think the party itself need to pay the price for it, not just the politician in question.
Having less seats is a price, so candidate-centered elections do make the party as well as the rejected individual pay a price.
What I think people in FPTP systems miss, is that we have better parties in PR systems.
Both more proportional and parliamentary systems have stronger parties compared to FPTP and separation of powers systems, respectively, and systems with effective proportionality on issues (which the strict proportionality on party preference provided by party list PR is but one of many ways to approach) have better overall satisfaction with government than systems where representation in the national legislature is less effectively proportional. Living in an country which has an FPTP (and presidential) system isn't really a barrier to being aware of the research on practical results of differing systems of government in modern democracies.
Because of Duverger's law, FPTP systems will gravitate towards two major parties.
Certainly that's true in any constituency; the degree to which it is true nationally varies a lot by factors in the structure of government outside just what system is used to elect members of the principal legislative body. Parliamentary systems with FPTP tend to have somewhat weaker tendency to national duopoly than FPTP presidential systems, for instance.
They don't get to do that here. "Back room deals" are not tolerated. If the central leadership tries to dictate local lists (or regional, if you insist: they are naturally somewhat larger districts than single-member), active members will desert them in droves.
Right. Parties are more accountable as parties in systems with more proportional representation, regardless of whether its acheived by party list or other means.
And they have no seats that are so "safe" that they can afford to offend local sensibilities - in a FPTP system, central leadership could dictate who the candidate will be in a 75% district, stepping on the toes of the locals.
Well, that, again, depends on factors aside from the general election system. If (as in, for instance, the US) candidate selection is by election by party members in the consitituency by the same or similar mechanism used by the general electorate in the general election, central leadership cannot dictate the nominee against the choice of the local party members (though they may be able to influence the selection by supplying campaign resources and related support.)
You seem mostly bent on arguing that PR is better than FPTP, on which we agree. I'm arguing that candidate-centered means of acheiving proportionality are in many respects better than party list systems (and, on top of that, are also an easier political sale in places that currently have FPTP candidate-centered elections, since they overcome one of the primary objections raised against party list systems.)
In other words, widescreen is rubbish for some purposes, and actually we'd prefer 4:3. Trying to "fix" the widescreen problem with software is just hacking around the fundamental lack of choice in screen formats now.
For laptops (especially netbooks and other small laptops), widescreen makes some sense even if its not really ideal for display considered on its own, because hacing a keyboard that shape makes sense, and neither adding extra depth to the bottom section to support a 4:3 monitor or having a smaller 4:3 monitor with dead space on either side of it makes much sense.
OTOH, for desktops, even with fairly small desktop monitors, you have plenty of real estate for controls no matter whether you have widescreen or 4:3 (personally, for anything but viewing widescreen video, I prefer a large, rotatable, 4:3 monitor to a widescreen one -- rotatable or not -- but I don't see it as a huge deal.)
Yes, straight party list systems (systems in which seats are assigned to parties simply in proportion to the number of votes cast for each party, and the individuals who get the seats are set by the order people are on lists determined by the parties participating in the election) reduce the direct accountability of individual elected officials to the general electorate, since people don't vote directly for individual candidates in the general election.
This is simply true by definition.
In PR systems, we know which regional seats are "in play", most likely to switch. The people on the marginal parts of the lists are undoubtedly most important - and we know who they are. But if the list top is unpopular, they will take a hit for it.
Right, the people on the list, taken together, do have an effect on outcomes. No sane person would argue that that isn't true.
But, the fact that the entire list is voted for together means that while all the individual candidates may have some effect on the general election outcome, none of the individual candidates are directly accountable individually to the general electorate.
There are usually a lot of "safe seats" in majoritarian systems as well, especially with gerrymandering.
Yes, that's true, and its a real problem (sometimes, for the party with more truly "safe seats", because that means that often they've been gerrymandered into being competitive in fewer districts than they otherwise would be. For instance, if you had only 5 districts and only two parties, and a party had a 75% majority in one district and a 49% minority in each of the others, they would have the only safe seat in the system, but they'd usually end up with fewer seats, despite making up a majority of the electorate.) Party list proportional and FPTP systems both have problems of different types. Candidate-centered, proportional elections in small multimember districts avoid the worst problems of both FPTP and party list systems.
This is true, but only if you define "pyramid scheme" in such a way that Social Security is not one.
If you are under 50 and expect to get a comfy retirement from Social Security you will likely be very disappointed.
If you are anyone -- including someone currently on Social Security -- and expect to get a comfy retirement from Social Security, you are guaranteed to be disappointed. Social Security is not setup to provide a comfortable retirement, it is setup to provide a minimal safety-net pension to mitigate (not eliminate) poverty among those who have worked but can no longer do so due to age or disability.
It will be too politically costly to let Social Security collapse completely. It seems likely that 'means testing' will be implemented.
Weak "means testing" is already implemented, since Social Security benefits are taxable income if your total income is above a certain point.
Those with pensions, 401Ks and other savings will get less money from Social Security
For the reasons in the preceding response, SS beneficiaries with other sources of income already get less money from Social Security. Since Social Security is insurance against poverty due to age or disability, this makes sense.
For those of us who have planned and saved diligently for retirement, the Social Security payment will be something less than a dollar each month.
We had a similar proportional representation movement in Canada. It failed. Particularly for many of the reasons you mentioned. The biggest and most fatal flaw of proportional representation, in my opinion, is the lack of direct representation as you mentioned.
Many systems of proportional representation feature local, direct representation. One model for this are mixed systems some of the seats in a legislative body are selected by direct election in mechanisms similar to those in FPTP systems, where the remainder are assigned from party lists to assure that the total makeup is proportional. Another is model where elections are by district in multimember districts, and the proportionality is within each district (this produces roughly proportional overall results, which while they are somewhat more sensitive to geographic distribution of support than party lists systems, but only slightly so, and makes all incumbents directly accountable to a specific district electorate.) A third is where elections are still in single-member districts, but a preference-based voting system is used which reduces the incentives for tactical voting (you provably can't eliminate them entirely, but FPTP has strong and simple incentives to select the least objectionable of the two apparently strongest candidates in the district), which improves proportionality slightly while maintaining single-member direct elections.
Since all the options being discussed in the UK are of the second or third models (as I understand it, the Lib Dems want Single Transferable Vote with small multimember districts which is an example of the second, and Labour wants a referendum Alternative Vote, which is the third), the distance pure party lists put between incumbents and direct accountability to the electorate are largely irrelevant to the immediate issue of "proportional representation", since party list systems (or even mixed systems) aren't being discussed.
under FPTP, parties are better off if they have concentrated support
That's not quite right either.
Under FPTP, parties are best off if they maximize the number of districts in which they are the strongest party. For the same share of the total electorate, they get worse off if they are more concentrated than is ideal (so that they have a smaller number of districts in which they are the strongest party, even though they are farther ahead of the competitors in those districts) or if they are less concentrated than the ideal (so they are present in a larger number of districts, but not the strongest in as many of them.)
Slashdot Mirror
In order to start a war, they'd have to not be at war already.
A temporary cease-fire punctuated by periodic incidents of armed engagement isn't peace, even if it lasts for half a century.
OTOH, I think if North Korea didn't want to be in a permanent state of war (with intermittent, low-level combat and accepting the risk that that would escalate into higher-level combat), then they wouldn't still be at war.
Or, maybe, you are generalizing from a non-representative experience. When I flew this past weekend, more than half the passengers waiting for their flights had laptops or netbooks -- mostly traditional laptops with a few netbooks -- and I didn't see any e-Readers or iPads out (some people using smartphones, though.) Now, I wouldn't generalize from that to say that no one cares about the features in iPads/eReaders (and I've certainly seen several people using eReaders in different places -- I've yet to see anyone actually using an iPad in person.)
eReaders are selling like hotcakes. Netbooks are selling like hotcakes. Slates (including the iPad) are selling rather poorly compared to either eReaders or netbooks, but the iPad is selling well for a single brand with a couple of models and Apple's marketing machine in getting it plenty of press.
What everyone can do is, in large part, what super nerds are enabled to empower them to do, which is why the IBM-compatible PC with (in some respects, unintentional) hardware openness dominated the personal computer market -- a market in which, one might note, Apple was the first big player -- and quite likely part of the reason that Android phones, which provide greater freedom for hardware vendors, service providers, and developers (and, provided those preceding parties are on board with it, to end-users in terms of what can be done and what software can be used), are outselling iPhones in the market for the kind of phones that the iPhone popularized.
This is a false dichotomy. All computers are devices. Apple is, in fact, selling it as an alternative to netbooks and other highly portable computers.
They aren't calling it a computer, and the reasons they aren't are precisely the limitations they have imposed that make many people describe it as a poor alternative in the role they are marketing it for compared to the existing alternatives.
When Toyota starts marketing the Prius as an alternative to a popular class of computers, that demand might be relevant.
OS updates on the iPhone (and I would presume the iPad) require using iTunes on the computer, they aren't done on the phone alone.
Reposted because inadvertently posted as AC.
Torpedoing a warship is real fighting. Sure, they probably didn't prefer to provoke any retaliation, but, really, the attacked enemy not fighting back is almost always the best possible result from the point of view of the attacker.
Retaliation is usually a risk that is accepted in an attack, not a desired result (there are occasional exceptions, particular when the attacker is a terrorist group, but those are the exception, not the rule.)
If "us" includes South Korea, there's plenty of evidence that they've done so quite a few times since the big one a long time back, including quite recently.
Not really. Isn't that how they lost the personal computer market to IBM compatibles after creating that market, too?
Since when is "avoiding confrontation" a key component of Wikipedia's mission?
They have. This is really just increasing the scope of the feature.
The whole point of the suggestion of a government coding office is to replace the current system of individual government agencies buying software development services.
So I don't think it makes a whole of sense to use as your whole argument agains the proposal the fact that the current system is broken. The fact that the current system is broken is why a fix is proposed.
That's not the assumption. The government is already involved in software production. What is suggested is a centralization of the government involvement in software production to a central agency whose core competency is software production, rather than having it handled by units in other agencies where it is not the agencies core competency.
Yeah, but neither does my interest in any particular game. As long as there is a overwhelming probability that Steam will outlast my interest in the Steam-linked game I'm buying, there's not a whole lot of reason for me to be concerned by this particular concerned.
Uh, I didn't say they were more physical capital heavy than human capital heavy.
I said the functions they do are more physical capital heavy than software development, which in turn is more human capital heavy than what the GPO does.
That is, I was saying:
pc(GPO):hc(GPO) > pc(software):hc(software)
Which you apparently misread as:
pc(GPO):hc(GPO) > 1
(Now, I'll admit that what I actually said could be wrong, its based on intuition about the physical capital requirements of, e.g., the warehousing and related functions vs. archiving code and documentation and so on, not an actual detailed cost analysis. But, at any rate, the more relevant thing is I said is that the difference is irrelevant to the validity of the analogy. Arguing that the difference doesn't actually exist, would reinforce, rather than challenge, the idea that it is irrelevant.)
In point of fact, they did a long time ago.
Actually, I do realize all of those things, it was just a lot easier to say "printing" than "the set of tasks that the GPO does". The analogy remains the same in terms of the case for centralized vs. individual agency needs, as does the difference (which remains irrelevant to the point of the analogy) that what the GPO does is somewhat more physical capital heavy than software development, whereas software development is more human capital heavy.
Its actually not: printing and software development are both services that most government agencies regularly need, but that in general most don't need the same subtype of the broader service enough to justify retaining the capacity to meet all their needs in-house without outsourcing, but where the needs of the government as a whole would be more able to justify maintaining resources centrally and then making them available to individual agencies.
The fact that the necessary resources in the case of printing involve a mix that is heavier on physical capital than human capital, while the resources in the case of software development is a mix that is heavier on human capital than physical capital is a difference, but its not a difference that is particularly relevant to the point of the analogy.
You'd probably have a better case if you argued that the "strategic software reserve" was a bad comparison. Software isn't an physical resource with an interruptible supply that you can horde in advance against a future crisis. OTOH, I can see a useful "strategic software reserve" in one sense -- not a reserve of software but of software-related IP. If you accept as a baseline the current US system of fairly strong software-related creator IP rights (copyright and patent, most particularly), it might make sense for the government to strategically exercise the power to acquire property for the public use by eminent domain with a payment of the fair market value to "buy out" existing IP rights where there is a substantial public good to be served by doing so. This might -- structured properly -- be a system that serves the public interest and the Constitutional purpose of IP protections better than either maintaining the status quo without such a system, or just weakening IP protections generally.
Google itself is a social network, with centralized login and large numbers of social apps -- both Google-generated and third-party -- status updates/microblogs (Buzz) with the ability to follow (and to access updates by other methods, including geographic search), full-blown blogs (Blogger), APIs for third-party apps, application hosting for third-party apps that can hook directly into the APIs (AppEngine), shared calendaring, messaging (instant and otherwise), shared documents (Google Docs), shared photo albums (Picasa), shared video (YouTube), and pretty much everything else a social network provides. And more user accounts than Facebook.
Its more subtle than Facebook, and less of a walled garden, so its a lot easier not to even notice it as a social network.
You could, but as soon as you try to implement the features of SQL that they lack on top of them you'll end up making them peform far worse than existing backends that are designed from the ground up to provide these features, so what would be the point?
Since they are alternative approaches to implementing a backend store for an information system, and the decision between key/value and relational technology is in many cases a bigger decisions with greater risk involved in making the wrong choice than the decision between particular key/value or particular relational options (since the conversion between different systems using the same basic information model is cheaper than the conversion between system using different information models), I think it would be more important to have comparisons between, e.g., key/value stores, SQL-based RDBMSs, non-SQL (e.g., D -- the SQL-alternative relational language family, not the Digital Mars programming language)-based RDBMSs than to have comparisons between different members of the same family.
Well, the question with "intended" is "intended by whom?"
Remember that its the media company lobbyists that largely wrote the DMCA and pushed for its adoption: I would expect that the safe harbor provision was intended merely as a sop to alleviate the potential fears of other powerful business interests (e.g., Google) that the DMCA would be expensive for them, so that there wouldn't be moneyed interests with a strong of a financial interest in fighting the DMCA as there were sponsoring it. It wasn't intended to actually protect anyone, although the risk that the media companies might not be able to overcome it in every case was accepted in order to get the rest of the DMCA passed.
So, in a sense, they might be correct that the provision wasn't intended (at least, by those lobbying for the law) to protect sites like YouTube, but it certainly was sold as protecting exactly the kind of redistributors of user-supplied content that YouTube is and it certainly does protect sites like that by its plain language.
Yes, it is.
Yes, it is. But its a problem that is very difficult to directly deal with (or even for the general electorate to specifically identify to the party) when you aren't voting for specific candidates. That weakens the value of elections in straight party-list systems as inputs from the public on whose behalf the government nominally acts to the government that nominally acts on their behalf.
Having less seats is a price, so candidate-centered elections do make the party as well as the rejected individual pay a price.
Both more proportional and parliamentary systems have stronger parties compared to FPTP and separation of powers systems, respectively, and systems with effective proportionality on issues (which the strict proportionality on party preference provided by party list PR is but one of many ways to approach) have better overall satisfaction with government than systems where representation in the national legislature is less effectively proportional. Living in an country which has an FPTP (and presidential) system isn't really a barrier to being aware of the research on practical results of differing systems of government in modern democracies.
Certainly that's true in any constituency; the degree to which it is true nationally varies a lot by factors in the structure of government outside just what system is used to elect members of the principal legislative body. Parliamentary systems with FPTP tend to have somewhat weaker tendency to national duopoly than FPTP presidential systems, for instance.
Right. Parties are more accountable as parties in systems with more proportional representation, regardless of whether its acheived by party list or other means.
Well, that, again, depends on factors aside from the general election system. If (as in, for instance, the US) candidate selection is by election by party members in the consitituency by the same or similar mechanism used by the general electorate in the general election, central leadership cannot dictate the nominee against the choice of the local party members (though they may be able to influence the selection by supplying campaign resources and related support.)
You seem mostly bent on arguing that PR is better than FPTP, on which we agree. I'm arguing that candidate-centered means of acheiving proportionality are in many respects better than party list systems (and, on top of that, are also an easier political sale in places that currently have FPTP candidate-centered elections, since they overcome one of the primary objections raised against party list systems.)
For laptops (especially netbooks and other small laptops), widescreen makes some sense even if its not really ideal for display considered on its own, because hacing a keyboard that shape makes sense, and neither adding extra depth to the bottom section to support a 4:3 monitor or having a smaller 4:3 monitor with dead space on either side of it makes much sense.
OTOH, for desktops, even with fairly small desktop monitors, you have plenty of real estate for controls no matter whether you have widescreen or 4:3 (personally, for anything but viewing widescreen video, I prefer a large, rotatable, 4:3 monitor to a widescreen one -- rotatable or not -- but I don't see it as a huge deal.)
Yes, straight party list systems (systems in which seats are assigned to parties simply in proportion to the number of votes cast for each party, and the individuals who get the seats are set by the order people are on lists determined by the parties participating in the election) reduce the direct accountability of individual elected officials to the general electorate, since people don't vote directly for individual candidates in the general election.
This is simply true by definition.
Right, the people on the list, taken together, do have an effect on outcomes. No sane person would argue that that isn't true.
But, the fact that the entire list is voted for together means that while all the individual candidates may have some effect on the general election outcome, none of the individual candidates are directly accountable individually to the general electorate.
Yes, that's true, and its a real problem (sometimes, for the party with more truly "safe seats", because that means that often they've been gerrymandered into being competitive in fewer districts than they otherwise would be. For instance, if you had only 5 districts and only two parties, and a party had a 75% majority in one district and a 49% minority in each of the others, they would have the only safe seat in the system, but they'd usually end up with fewer seats, despite making up a majority of the electorate.) Party list proportional and FPTP systems both have problems of different types. Candidate-centered, proportional elections in small multimember districts avoid the worst problems of both FPTP and party list systems.
This is true, but only if you define "pyramid scheme" in such a way that Social Security is not one.
If you are anyone -- including someone currently on Social Security -- and expect to get a comfy retirement from Social Security, you are guaranteed to be disappointed. Social Security is not setup to provide a comfortable retirement, it is setup to provide a minimal safety-net pension to mitigate (not eliminate) poverty among those who have worked but can no longer do so due to age or disability.
Weak "means testing" is already implemented, since Social Security benefits are taxable income if your total income is above a certain point.
For the reasons in the preceding response, SS beneficiaries with other sources of income already get less money from Social Security. Since Social Security is insurance against poverty due to age or disability, this makes sense.
This is scaremongering with no basis in reality.
Many systems of proportional representation feature local, direct representation. One model for this are mixed systems some of the seats in a legislative body are selected by direct election in mechanisms similar to those in FPTP systems, where the remainder are assigned from party lists to assure that the total makeup is proportional. Another is model where elections are by district in multimember districts, and the proportionality is within each district (this produces roughly proportional overall results, which while they are somewhat more sensitive to geographic distribution of support than party lists systems, but only slightly so, and makes all incumbents directly accountable to a specific district electorate.) A third is where elections are still in single-member districts, but a preference-based voting system is used which reduces the incentives for tactical voting (you provably can't eliminate them entirely, but FPTP has strong and simple incentives to select the least objectionable of the two apparently strongest candidates in the district), which improves proportionality slightly while maintaining single-member direct elections.
Since all the options being discussed in the UK are of the second or third models (as I understand it, the Lib Dems want Single Transferable Vote with small multimember districts which is an example of the second, and Labour wants a referendum Alternative Vote, which is the third), the distance pure party lists put between incumbents and direct accountability to the electorate are largely irrelevant to the immediate issue of "proportional representation", since party list systems (or even mixed systems) aren't being discussed.
That's not quite right either.
Under FPTP, parties are best off if they maximize the number of districts in which they are the strongest party. For the same share of the total electorate, they get worse off if they are more concentrated than is ideal (so that they have a smaller number of districts in which they are the strongest party, even though they are farther ahead of the competitors in those districts) or if they are less concentrated than the ideal (so they are present in a larger number of districts, but not the strongest in as many of them.)