That would be an improvement over what we have now, yes. However, your first sentence is just wrong. There's lots of good reasons why a basic income is the better option. A handful of them: 1) Students can stay in school, and have the time to actually do their homework, instead of needing to work to support their family. When they enter the workforce, they'll be able to be much more productive. 2) Inventors, artists, researchers, and others whose work does not immediately / reliably turn a profit can afford to spend time on their craft. 3) In fact, people in general can afford to take economic risks that are currently unsafe for most, like starting their own business, moving with the hope of getting a better job, or going back to school. 4) People who have a good reason to drop out of the work force for a while (recuperation from injury or sickness, pregnancy and child rearing, mental illnesses that will take time to address, etc.) won't suffer for doing so (or need to go through a wastefully complex process to apply for assistance). 5) Less bureaucracy, since it really doesn't take much to manage a basic income system (certainly not by comparison to what it takes to manage directly employing such a massive labor force, even without the additional need to still provide a safety not for those who can't work).
Now, there are advantages of a job guarantee system too. For example, in a basic income system, you don't have to pay people a living wage but you do still pay them enough that it's worth their time to you. In a job guarantee system, you can pay people to perform work that is worthwhile (if not *particularly* valuable) to everybody - think about things like resurfacing side streets, or separating waste/recycling/compost/etc. properly - without needing an direct employer (other than the government, and by extension society as a whole) needing to be motivated to do so. Of course, there's no reason the government can't do that in a system with basic income as well... a lot of things become worth paying *somebody* to do, when you don't have to pay them minimum wage to do it.
I really don't know how to properly address all the misunderstandings in this post at once, so let's cut to the heart of the matter on something we can both agree on:
A basic income *does* reduce economic regulation and entitlement programs. It replaces the vast and inefficient bureaucracy that is our current social safety net with something that requires a bare minimum amount of administration. It eliminates the need for regulations like minimum wage and such because people aren't dependent on their job to pay a living wage. It ends the exploitation of those who cannot afford to ever miss a day of work, much less voluntarily quit, without risking being out on the street.
You want to talk about productivity? Consider this: a basic income means that even poor families can afford to see their kids educated, instead of the kids needing to work at minimum-wage jobs every moment they aren't legally obligated to be at school. Those kids will be able to get much better jobs afterward. A basic income means that you can hire more people and only pay them what the work is really worth, instead of hiring fewer people and overworking them just because you're trying to get minimum wage value out of them. A basic income means you can start your own company without worrying that you'll go broke if it doesn't work out, or doesn't work out *in time*. With a basic income, you could launch a startup that doesn't pay its people at all initially, except in equity or profit shares; if the company makes it big, the employees win big; if the company never gets anywhere, the employees just go do something else (it's not like they'll go broke if they quit / if the company folds).
Well, they're not a very big voting block, so they probably won't get that much. Living on the dole is not a glamorous existence... but it's a survivable one. Sure, there will be people pushing to increase that basic income (faster than inflation, I mean; it obviously should be indexed to inflation), but that money comes from somewhere, and (absent any other changes, such as reducing wasteful government spending in other areas) that means higher taxes. Higher taxes are not going to be popular with the workers who are paying those taxes, and those are the biggest part of the economy... at least, we are (OK, I am; no idea about you) now, and there's still time before that changes.
In the meantime, people will both have the opportunity and the incentive to improve their lot in life. A basic income doesn't actually eliminate the human urge to do something with your life (not to mention that whole "having more money than the minimum amount that any breathing body can get" thing). It keeps food in the fridge and the lights on while you take some classes so you can get a "real" job, or lets you take whatever job you can find because, when there's no minimum wage (and there wouldn't be; it's unneeded in this system) you can find a lot more jobs.
Of course, in the real world (where the perpetually unemployed are a tiny minority) what it does is even better. It lets parents come home from work to look after their kids instead of going to work at their second or third jobs in order to just keep the kids fed. It lets students focus on their studies instead of working at minimum wage every free moment. It lets people in terrible or abusive jobs quit without worrying about being able to make rent while they look for different work. It lets artists and inventors devote themselves to their passions even if they don't have savings to live off of before their works start to sell. It lets the little things (that aren't worth paying somebody even minimum wage for) get done by offering what the work is really worth, without being exploitive of the workers because, as mentioned above, they can safely quit at any time.
Exactly. Not sure why so many people are struggling with this. You don't need a minimum wage in this system, so you probably can't earn a *lot* of money on top of the basic income, but you don't need to. In fact, you don't *need* to earn anything on top of that basic income; that's the whole point. Everything above it is gravy, leading to a better standard living.
It also may make it easier to hire people for the kinds of jobs that ought to be done, but aren't important enough to pay people minimum wage to do them. You can offer people a couple bucks an hour to clear litter or sort waste/recycling bins or whatever... and nobody is being exploited for it, because nobody has to choose between doing that shit job for shit pay and starving on the street. You want to make a bit of extra money working a few hours a day? Yeah, we can find something for you to do.
That is, indeed, the central problem. On the other hand, that doesn't mean it's insurmountable. Every (successful) politician has been promising lower taxes for decades at least, yet we still pay taxes. Currently, they go into a bunch of things including a myriad set of social benefit programs, each with a bunch of overhead that determines who is eligible, how much to pay them, whether they are staying eligible, etc. It would be so much simpler to just pay everybody the same amount...
I don't believe that there should be a basic living stipend, unless everyone, even those who work, receive it.
This is probably an over-generalization, but I've got to say: only an American could so thoroughly miss the point of a basic / guaranteed income as to think this is even a question. (Yes, I'm an American too, I just spend a lot of time outside of our political echo chambers.) The whole point of this system is that *everybody* gets it.
It replaces a wide swath of other social programs and regulations. Social Security and Unemployment and so forth are the obvious ones, but it goes much further than that. Minimum wage goes away, and people are instead paid what the market will actually support for their work (without the risk that they will be left without enough to get by on). Food stamps (which go to people who are working, even working full-time, under the current system) go away.
Yes, this means Bill Gates gets as much from this program as an 18-year-old who is trying to get her garage band off the ground... but that's OK. Gates doesn't need the money, but it's not worth the overhead to make sure he doesn't get it; easier to just let *everybody* get it. As for the 18-year-old, she can pursue her art without worrying that she'll end up out on the street. It also addresses inequality, contrary to what The Economist claims; even though the absolute difference in their incomes doesn't change, the ratio sure as hell does.
It's incorrect. They can dock your pay (though you could take them to court over that if it appears unjustified) or fire you (same), or sue *you* for breach of contract, or press criminal charges (if they can convince the cops to do so) and hope the justice system will fine you for them, but they cannot unilaterally fine you. An employment contract does not give the employer that kind of authority over you; only the courts (civil or criminal) have that power.
Nice concept, but you realize the 20% limit just means that, if they're at their limit and want to extend another one, the "solution" (from their perspective) is to just issue another four gag orders to whoever they can possibly get one on, right? That's the problem with systems like this; when the system is already being abused (and if it can be abused, it will be) then the easiest solution any time they run into a soft limit like you describe is "more abuse".
... I could care less. I am as I am now and will use it to my fullest abilities.
If that constitutes your "fullest abilities", you were failed by your English teacher as well as your Science teacher. Here's a hint: the bolded part means exactly the opposite of what you probably wanted to say.
Nobody is talking about "kill all the zygotes" except you, you logic-impaired . The same chain of so-called "logic" you use there could equally be applied to men's sperm or women's ova; destroy all of them and you won't have any more children either. Yet, mysteriously enough, nobody seems to be calling denunciations down on every girl who ever has her period (wasting an ovum, unfertilized) or every boy who ever has a nocturnal emission (or "wet dream").
Yeah, try again. This time, consider actually thinking a little bit first.
Oh, and yes, we would continue to have oak trees; they live a long time, and they produce acorns many, many times. You'd have to destroy them all *continuously* for the entire fertile lifetime of all the currently-living trees. You could, of course, kill off all the oak trees *much* faster by eliminating all the *water* in the world... but that doesn't mean that water is an oak tree either.
I don't normally hold with quoting from fiction, but Firaxis had some damn sharp writers and this resonates *much* more today than it did in 1999.
As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
There have been plenty of security holes with Docker. Many of them were (and are) just simple misconfigurations, such as you could make with any security model (but Docker definitely doesn't inherently safeguard you from them, though its defaults have gotten better). Some were bugs in Docker itself, though they've gone pretty well there. Some were Linux bugs nobody had looked for / cared about until people started trying to do things like restrict root to not *actually* be root.
Don't get me wrong, the whole container idea is awesome, both in general and specifically as a security "sandbox on demand" deal. But Docker is not mature yet, and people who act as though it's a security panacea sufficient to render things like webservers running as root a minor concern... those people are part of the problem.
Agreed on that, yeah. You'd think the cellular, etc. providers would be all over it too, given all their complaining about heavy data users. Of course, it might cut into their revenue streams from people going overhead because they forget to limit the usage.
You're using a metered connection without using the "Metered Connection" feature built into Windows (which blocks large background downloads)? Pay the overage for your own foolishness.
Of course, Microsoft will just respond with "You should have used the 'Metered Connection' feature built into the OS, which prevents large background network usage and lets you control what gets downloaded automatically" and move to dismiss.
Should have been using Win8.1's "Metered Network" feature. You can mark a network as metered (just right-click on it in the network list) and then Windows won't use data on it without your authorization, including downloading updates. In fact, it's one way to block Win10 from downloading unwanted updates.
Out of curiosity, why? What makes an American student more worthy of education than a foreign one? We're all human. Why should the location of your birth privilege you or work against you? "That's just the way it is" isn't a valid answer, when you're arguing against something that is would change this situation; obviously that's not "just the way it is" because at that point, you're trying to *make* it that way.
With that said, if you want to favor education for US citizens, how about attacking the root of the problem? If the universities prefer foreign students because they get more money for them, maybe you should fix *that*. Of course, if you eliminate the per-student margins that universities currently enjoy of foreign students, then you are, in effect, just reducing each university's budget; they might no longer have an incentive to bring in foreign students, but they have less money to teach domestic ones with, too. You could try ensuring the universities get as much money (or more) for each domestic student as they get from foreigners, but if you want to do that and also make it so that more than the wealthy students can attend university then you're talking about massive government funding of education like some horrible socialist countries, and if you suggest that maybe not every American student actually needs a college degree then you're an elitist.
The suggestion was to make it so that the work visas currently available to graduating students don't expire (or are easier to renew, or something like that) *without* turning them into H-1Bs. Saying "the problem is that the way we can achieve Y is to do X" is pointless to the point of absurdity, when the discussion is centered on changing the rules.
Part of the problem is that, in effect, there's only two positions you can take on a petition: "Support" or "Not Present", and everybody does the second by default. There's no "Oppose", or even "Abstain" options.
In a poll (of almost anything, politics included), 100k responses is *HUGE* and easily enough to make highly accurate broad claims about the surveyed population (of course, said population may have been intentionally skewed, but you're still getting a far-more-than-representative sample of it). With the petitions, though, it's as though the pollsters kept calling until they got 100k of the responses they wanted, and then threw out all the others as though they never happened.
None of this is novel information, of course... but it does make it completely obvious that the petitions aren't actually intended to support any kind of direct democracy effort. The system isn't designed with any of the mechanisms that you'd put into any vaguely-competently-designed system attempting to achieve that.
Now, petitions *are* a useful way to address minority concerns. The percentage of the US population that needs to sign any given petition to put it over the threshold may seem tiny, but it's a pretty substantial absolute number. If you can get that many people behind anything that *isn't* one side of one of the Big Divisive Issues that the media and partisan talking heads love to go on about, that means there are a lot of people who are feeling unrepresented on an issue.
Not that the politicians need to give a flying fuck about the feelings of any given minority group, though... Not in a winner-take-all system, at least. They just need enough votes to get over the threshold, and fuck the rest.
Oh, bullshit. That's not even hyperbole, that's just idiocy. On the scale of "important things in our [so-called] democratic representative governance system", completely eliminating every case of voter fraud probably ranks somewhere below protecting mailmen from getting attacked by dogs while delivering the increasingly-obsolete voter information packets. Organized mass voter fraud would absolutely be a problem; I don't think anybody would ever try to argue otherwise. That's not happening, though, and "ONE case" of voter fraud has less impact on an election than three legitimate voters turned away because they don't have current forms of an ID that they don't have any other need for and that costs time (and usually money) to obtain.
If you want to argue for the integrity of the voting system, then you damn well better make sure that your proposed solution increases the accuracy of the vote outcomes. Turning away legitimate voters counts against that accuracy, in case you hadn't figured that out.
Do you have any actual rebuttal to eir point, or are you simply calling names? This isn't a kindergarten playground, for all that it occasionally resembles one; you need to actually respond to what somebody says if you want any respect. Be glad I'd already commented on this story so I can't moderate.
You actually still missed the point, though the point you're making may also be valid. It is illegal for Microsoft Ireland to turn over that data. The US court doesn't have jurisdiction over MS IRE, the Irish and EU courts do. Per EU law, that data cannot be given up. The US government needs to go through the local (in this case, Irish) government to get a warrant there.
This is like a state trooper in California getting a warrant to search my home (in Washington) for marijuana (which is legal here), on account of the fact that my grandfather lives in California. It's bullshit, and my grandfather would be breaking the law here if he let California cops into my home without a local warrant.
Without touching the privacy and spyware discussions, the problem here is straightforward: the data in question is physically in Ireland, involves foreign (European) people, and is subject to local (European) data protection laws. It is *ILLEGAL* for Microsoft Ireland to turn over that data, no matter what their corporate overlord (Microsoft here in the US) might say. Of course, the US has no jurisdiction in Ireland, and thus can't serve a warrant on Microsoft Ireland, so they served it on the company here in the US instead... even though that company does not and legally can not possess the information they seek.
Contrast sudo (apt-get|zypper) install palemoon
though... Plus then you can uninstall it equally easily. Good to know the contributed builds exist, but the whole thing could definitely still be better.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be an improvement over what we have now, yes. However, your first sentence is just wrong. There's lots of good reasons why a basic income is the better option. A handful of them:
1) Students can stay in school, and have the time to actually do their homework, instead of needing to work to support their family. When they enter the workforce, they'll be able to be much more productive.
2) Inventors, artists, researchers, and others whose work does not immediately / reliably turn a profit can afford to spend time on their craft.
3) In fact, people in general can afford to take economic risks that are currently unsafe for most, like starting their own business, moving with the hope of getting a better job, or going back to school.
4) People who have a good reason to drop out of the work force for a while (recuperation from injury or sickness, pregnancy and child rearing, mental illnesses that will take time to address, etc.) won't suffer for doing so (or need to go through a wastefully complex process to apply for assistance).
5) Less bureaucracy, since it really doesn't take much to manage a basic income system (certainly not by comparison to what it takes to manage directly employing such a massive labor force, even without the additional need to still provide a safety not for those who can't work).
Now, there are advantages of a job guarantee system too. For example, in a basic income system, you don't have to pay people a living wage but you do still pay them enough that it's worth their time to you. In a job guarantee system, you can pay people to perform work that is worthwhile (if not *particularly* valuable) to everybody - think about things like resurfacing side streets, or separating waste/recycling/compost/etc. properly - without needing an direct employer (other than the government, and by extension society as a whole) needing to be motivated to do so. Of course, there's no reason the government can't do that in a system with basic income as well... a lot of things become worth paying *somebody* to do, when you don't have to pay them minimum wage to do it.
I really don't know how to properly address all the misunderstandings in this post at once, so let's cut to the heart of the matter on something we can both agree on:
A basic income *does* reduce economic regulation and entitlement programs. It replaces the vast and inefficient bureaucracy that is our current social safety net with something that requires a bare minimum amount of administration. It eliminates the need for regulations like minimum wage and such because people aren't dependent on their job to pay a living wage. It ends the exploitation of those who cannot afford to ever miss a day of work, much less voluntarily quit, without risking being out on the street.
You want to talk about productivity? Consider this: a basic income means that even poor families can afford to see their kids educated, instead of the kids needing to work at minimum-wage jobs every moment they aren't legally obligated to be at school. Those kids will be able to get much better jobs afterward. A basic income means that you can hire more people and only pay them what the work is really worth, instead of hiring fewer people and overworking them just because you're trying to get minimum wage value out of them. A basic income means you can start your own company without worrying that you'll go broke if it doesn't work out, or doesn't work out *in time*. With a basic income, you could launch a startup that doesn't pay its people at all initially, except in equity or profit shares; if the company makes it big, the employees win big; if the company never gets anywhere, the employees just go do something else (it's not like they'll go broke if they quit / if the company folds).
Well, they're not a very big voting block, so they probably won't get that much. Living on the dole is not a glamorous existence... but it's a survivable one. Sure, there will be people pushing to increase that basic income (faster than inflation, I mean; it obviously should be indexed to inflation), but that money comes from somewhere, and (absent any other changes, such as reducing wasteful government spending in other areas) that means higher taxes. Higher taxes are not going to be popular with the workers who are paying those taxes, and those are the biggest part of the economy... at least, we are (OK, I am; no idea about you) now, and there's still time before that changes.
In the meantime, people will both have the opportunity and the incentive to improve their lot in life. A basic income doesn't actually eliminate the human urge to do something with your life (not to mention that whole "having more money than the minimum amount that any breathing body can get" thing). It keeps food in the fridge and the lights on while you take some classes so you can get a "real" job, or lets you take whatever job you can find because, when there's no minimum wage (and there wouldn't be; it's unneeded in this system) you can find a lot more jobs.
Of course, in the real world (where the perpetually unemployed are a tiny minority) what it does is even better. It lets parents come home from work to look after their kids instead of going to work at their second or third jobs in order to just keep the kids fed. It lets students focus on their studies instead of working at minimum wage every free moment. It lets people in terrible or abusive jobs quit without worrying about being able to make rent while they look for different work. It lets artists and inventors devote themselves to their passions even if they don't have savings to live off of before their works start to sell. It lets the little things (that aren't worth paying somebody even minimum wage for) get done by offering what the work is really worth, without being exploitive of the workers because, as mentioned above, they can safely quit at any time.
Exactly. Not sure why so many people are struggling with this. You don't need a minimum wage in this system, so you probably can't earn a *lot* of money on top of the basic income, but you don't need to. In fact, you don't *need* to earn anything on top of that basic income; that's the whole point. Everything above it is gravy, leading to a better standard living.
It also may make it easier to hire people for the kinds of jobs that ought to be done, but aren't important enough to pay people minimum wage to do them. You can offer people a couple bucks an hour to clear litter or sort waste/recycling bins or whatever... and nobody is being exploited for it, because nobody has to choose between doing that shit job for shit pay and starving on the street. You want to make a bit of extra money working a few hours a day? Yeah, we can find something for you to do.
That is, indeed, the central problem. On the other hand, that doesn't mean it's insurmountable. Every (successful) politician has been promising lower taxes for decades at least, yet we still pay taxes. Currently, they go into a bunch of things including a myriad set of social benefit programs, each with a bunch of overhead that determines who is eligible, how much to pay them, whether they are staying eligible, etc. It would be so much simpler to just pay everybody the same amount...
This is probably an over-generalization, but I've got to say: only an American could so thoroughly miss the point of a basic / guaranteed income as to think this is even a question. (Yes, I'm an American too, I just spend a lot of time outside of our political echo chambers.) The whole point of this system is that *everybody* gets it.
It replaces a wide swath of other social programs and regulations. Social Security and Unemployment and so forth are the obvious ones, but it goes much further than that. Minimum wage goes away, and people are instead paid what the market will actually support for their work (without the risk that they will be left without enough to get by on). Food stamps (which go to people who are working, even working full-time, under the current system) go away.
Yes, this means Bill Gates gets as much from this program as an 18-year-old who is trying to get her garage band off the ground... but that's OK. Gates doesn't need the money, but it's not worth the overhead to make sure he doesn't get it; easier to just let *everybody* get it. As for the 18-year-old, she can pursue her art without worrying that she'll end up out on the street. It also addresses inequality, contrary to what The Economist claims; even though the absolute difference in their incomes doesn't change, the ratio sure as hell does.
It's incorrect. They can dock your pay (though you could take them to court over that if it appears unjustified) or fire you (same), or sue *you* for breach of contract, or press criminal charges (if they can convince the cops to do so) and hope the justice system will fine you for them, but they cannot unilaterally fine you. An employment contract does not give the employer that kind of authority over you; only the courts (civil or criminal) have that power.
Nice concept, but you realize the 20% limit just means that, if they're at their limit and want to extend another one, the "solution" (from their perspective) is to just issue another four gag orders to whoever they can possibly get one on, right? That's the problem with systems like this; when the system is already being abused (and if it can be abused, it will be) then the easiest solution any time they run into a soft limit like you describe is "more abuse".
If that constitutes your "fullest abilities", you were failed by your English teacher as well as your Science teacher. Here's a hint: the bolded part means exactly the opposite of what you probably wanted to say.
Nobody is talking about "kill all the zygotes" except you, you logic-impaired . The same chain of so-called "logic" you use there could equally be applied to men's sperm or women's ova; destroy all of them and you won't have any more children either. Yet, mysteriously enough, nobody seems to be calling denunciations down on every girl who ever has her period (wasting an ovum, unfertilized) or every boy who ever has a nocturnal emission (or "wet dream").
Yeah, try again. This time, consider actually thinking a little bit first.
Oh, and yes, we would continue to have oak trees; they live a long time, and they produce acorns many, many times. You'd have to destroy them all *continuously* for the entire fertile lifetime of all the currently-living trees. You could, of course, kill off all the oak trees *much* faster by eliminating all the *water* in the world... but that doesn't mean that water is an oak tree either.
I don't normally hold with quoting from fiction, but Firaxis had some damn sharp writers and this resonates *much* more today than it did in 1999.
There have been plenty of security holes with Docker. Many of them were (and are) just simple misconfigurations, such as you could make with any security model (but Docker definitely doesn't inherently safeguard you from them, though its defaults have gotten better). Some were bugs in Docker itself, though they've gone pretty well there. Some were Linux bugs nobody had looked for / cared about until people started trying to do things like restrict root to not *actually* be root.
Don't get me wrong, the whole container idea is awesome, both in general and specifically as a security "sandbox on demand" deal. But Docker is not mature yet, and people who act as though it's a security panacea sufficient to render things like webservers running as root a minor concern... those people are part of the problem.
Agreed on that, yeah. You'd think the cellular, etc. providers would be all over it too, given all their complaining about heavy data users. Of course, it might cut into their revenue streams from people going overhead because they forget to limit the usage.
You're using a metered connection without using the "Metered Connection" feature built into Windows (which blocks large background downloads)? Pay the overage for your own foolishness.
Of course, Microsoft will just respond with "You should have used the 'Metered Connection' feature built into the OS, which prevents large background network usage and lets you control what gets downloaded automatically" and move to dismiss.
Should have been using Win8.1's "Metered Network" feature. You can mark a network as metered (just right-click on it in the network list) and then Windows won't use data on it without your authorization, including downloading updates. In fact, it's one way to block Win10 from downloading unwanted updates.
Are you running Enterprise edition? It doesn't get the offers to upgrade. Not from 8.0 to 8.1, and not from 7 or 8.1 to 10.
Out of curiosity, why? What makes an American student more worthy of education than a foreign one? We're all human. Why should the location of your birth privilege you or work against you? "That's just the way it is" isn't a valid answer, when you're arguing against something that is would change this situation; obviously that's not "just the way it is" because at that point, you're trying to *make* it that way.
With that said, if you want to favor education for US citizens, how about attacking the root of the problem? If the universities prefer foreign students because they get more money for them, maybe you should fix *that*. Of course, if you eliminate the per-student margins that universities currently enjoy of foreign students, then you are, in effect, just reducing each university's budget; they might no longer have an incentive to bring in foreign students, but they have less money to teach domestic ones with, too. You could try ensuring the universities get as much money (or more) for each domestic student as they get from foreigners, but if you want to do that and also make it so that more than the wealthy students can attend university then you're talking about massive government funding of education like some horrible socialist countries, and if you suggest that maybe not every American student actually needs a college degree then you're an elitist.
The point: ---->
You: ----------->
The suggestion was to make it so that the work visas currently available to graduating students don't expire (or are easier to renew, or something like that) *without* turning them into H-1Bs. Saying "the problem is that the way we can achieve Y is to do X" is pointless to the point of absurdity, when the discussion is centered on changing the rules.
Part of the problem is that, in effect, there's only two positions you can take on a petition: "Support" or "Not Present", and everybody does the second by default. There's no "Oppose", or even "Abstain" options.
In a poll (of almost anything, politics included), 100k responses is *HUGE* and easily enough to make highly accurate broad claims about the surveyed population (of course, said population may have been intentionally skewed, but you're still getting a far-more-than-representative sample of it). With the petitions, though, it's as though the pollsters kept calling until they got 100k of the responses they wanted, and then threw out all the others as though they never happened.
None of this is novel information, of course... but it does make it completely obvious that the petitions aren't actually intended to support any kind of direct democracy effort. The system isn't designed with any of the mechanisms that you'd put into any vaguely-competently-designed system attempting to achieve that.
Now, petitions *are* a useful way to address minority concerns. The percentage of the US population that needs to sign any given petition to put it over the threshold may seem tiny, but it's a pretty substantial absolute number. If you can get that many people behind anything that *isn't* one side of one of the Big Divisive Issues that the media and partisan talking heads love to go on about, that means there are a lot of people who are feeling unrepresented on an issue.
Not that the politicians need to give a flying fuck about the feelings of any given minority group, though... Not in a winner-take-all system, at least. They just need enough votes to get over the threshold, and fuck the rest.
Oh, bullshit. That's not even hyperbole, that's just idiocy. On the scale of "important things in our [so-called] democratic representative governance system", completely eliminating every case of voter fraud probably ranks somewhere below protecting mailmen from getting attacked by dogs while delivering the increasingly-obsolete voter information packets. Organized mass voter fraud would absolutely be a problem; I don't think anybody would ever try to argue otherwise. That's not happening, though, and "ONE case" of voter fraud has less impact on an election than three legitimate voters turned away because they don't have current forms of an ID that they don't have any other need for and that costs time (and usually money) to obtain.
If you want to argue for the integrity of the voting system, then you damn well better make sure that your proposed solution increases the accuracy of the vote outcomes. Turning away legitimate voters counts against that accuracy, in case you hadn't figured that out.
Do you have any actual rebuttal to eir point, or are you simply calling names? This isn't a kindergarten playground, for all that it occasionally resembles one; you need to actually respond to what somebody says if you want any respect. Be glad I'd already commented on this story so I can't moderate.
You actually still missed the point, though the point you're making may also be valid. It is illegal for Microsoft Ireland to turn over that data. The US court doesn't have jurisdiction over MS IRE, the Irish and EU courts do. Per EU law, that data cannot be given up. The US government needs to go through the local (in this case, Irish) government to get a warrant there.
This is like a state trooper in California getting a warrant to search my home (in Washington) for marijuana (which is legal here), on account of the fact that my grandfather lives in California. It's bullshit, and my grandfather would be breaking the law here if he let California cops into my home without a local warrant.
Without touching the privacy and spyware discussions, the problem here is straightforward: the data in question is physically in Ireland, involves foreign (European) people, and is subject to local (European) data protection laws. It is *ILLEGAL* for Microsoft Ireland to turn over that data, no matter what their corporate overlord (Microsoft here in the US) might say. Of course, the US has no jurisdiction in Ireland, and thus can't serve a warrant on Microsoft Ireland, so they served it on the company here in the US instead... even though that company does not and legally can not possess the information they seek.
Contrast
sudo (apt-get|zypper) install palemoon
though... Plus then you can uninstall it equally easily. Good to know the contributed builds exist, but the whole thing could definitely still be better.