Everyone acts like the electoral college was a blunder. The founding fathers studied the democracies of ancient Greece, and they made a very intentional choice to guard against unfettered democracy. You were supposed to be involved in local politics, where you could actually know and evaluate your representatives. Those representatives were supposed to make national decisions on your behalf, including choosing the president.
I'm not qualified to know who will make a good president. You probably aren't either. Pushing the process further into American Idol territory would make it worse, not better.
> Those representatives were supposed to make national decisions on your behalf, including choosing the president.
This is, incidentally, how we massively screwed up the federal government. In the original design US Senators were elected by the state legislatures, the premise being that they would prevent federal overreach into the regulatory domain of the states because they would be directly accountable to the state governments.
Then populists who wanted to do everything at the federal level pushed for the 17th Amendment which eliminated the state governments' representation in the federal government and people stopped caring about local politics because it started feeling like an exercise in futility when federal law could preempt anything you wanted to do and the thing meant to keep that in check was deleted.
And the federal government was supposed to have enumerated (i.e. narrow, limited) powers. It doesn't have the scaffolding for people to hold it accountable. You can elect the local dogcatcher but the only elected office in the entire federal executive branch is the President of the United States. Which is fine when the main thing they're doing is negotiating treaties and running the Post Office but not fine if you're trying to do thousands of pages of federal regulations on everything from healthcare to banking to labor to energy.
That's somewhat ahistorical, the 17th amendment happened because state legislatures were frequently deadlocked and could not appoint senators, meaning states went without senate representation entirely.
In a fifteen year period 46 senate elections were deadlocked in 20 states, at one point Delaware had an open senate seat for four years due to this.
That said the proper reform to this would've been the abolition of the senate, as it has always been and will always be an anti-democratic force, not moving for senators to be elected by the people.
> That's somewhat ahistorical, the 17th amendment happened because state legislatures were frequently deadlocked and could not appoint senators, meaning states went without senate representation entirely.
That seems more like an excuse than a legitimate reason. If that was actually the problem you could solve it by adopting a mechanism to break ties, putting the vote to the public only in the event of a tie, having the state legislatures use score voting which makes two candidates getting exactly the same score far less likely, etc.
But if they want to do a power grab then they get further by saying "we have to do something about these deadlocks" than by saying "we want to do a power grab".
> That said the proper reform to this would've been the abolition of the senate, as it has always been and will always be an anti-democratic force
It's supposed to be an anti-democratic force, like the Supreme Court, the existence of Constitutional rights and the entire concept of even having a federal government instead of allowing local voters to have full plenary power over local laws. Unconstrained direct democracy is a populist whirlwind of impulsive reactionary forces.
> Unconstrained direct democracy is a populist whirlwind of impulsive reactionary forces.
This is a great point as is the point that the existence of a federal government itself is anti-democratic.
The Senate was initially created as a body that was incentivized to promote federalism itself (especially through their power to approve federal judges) & a federalist republic seems to be the most democratic system because it incentivizes a balance between individual liberty & the ability to restrict someone else's liberty through law.
Right now, the balance of power is too centralized which makes for radical changes every time a different political party takes control of government.
> I'm not qualified to know who will make a good president. You probably aren't either. Pushing the process further into American Idol territory would make it worse, not better.
Randomly-selected citizens would have outperformed what we’ve gotten in the last few elections at minimum.
>I'm not qualified to know who will make a good president. You probably aren't either. Pushing the process further into American Idol territory would make it worse, not better.
I reject this premise. I'm not omniscient but I have a pretty good idea.
That doesn't really fit the math. At the time of the founding the largest colony was Virginia and of the original 13 colonies, 9 were in the North and only 4 were states that ended up in the Confederacy, i.e. it was the slave states that were underrepresented in the electoral college and the Senate.
That's independent of the EC. They could have given the slave owners 3/5ths of a vote for each slave without the EC. And obviously that part of the system is no longer in operation, whereas the part Democrats complain about is that each state gets +2 electoral votes regardless of its population.
Which nominally gives slightly more weight to the lower population rural states, but that isn't even the primary consequence of the EC. The primary consequence is that it gives significantly more weight to swing states, which by definition don't favor any given party.
> They could have given the slave owners 3/5ths of a vote for each slave without the EC
Yes, I suppose if you could accept the idea of a ludicrous hypothetical alternative that would have zero chance in reality of being implemented you can contort yourself enough to ignore that the EC is part of the compromise on slavery that forms the Constitution.
It's ludicrous by modern standards because the premise of owning other people is ludicrous by modern standards. Giving states more votes based on them having people there who can't actually vote is exactly the same amount of ludicrous, but that's also the part that isn't there anymore.
The primary thing the electoral college does in modern day is allow -- not even require -- states to allocate all of their state's voting power to the candidate that wins the majority of the state. With the result that they mostly do that and then states like New York and Texas get ignored in Presidential elections because nobody expects them to flip and getting 10% more of the vote is worthless when it doesn't flip the state.
Ironically it's the partisans who are effectively disenfranchising the people in their own state. If the states that go disproportionately for one party didn't want to be ignored then all they'd have to do is allocate their electoral votes proportionally according to what percent of the vote the candidate got in that state. Then getting 10% more of the vote in a big state would be as many electoral votes as some entire states. But the non-swing states are by definition controlled by one party and then they're willing to screw over their own population to prevent the other party from getting any of that state's electoral votes.
Virginia was a slave state at that time (I think it was 8 slave states to 5 non). The states that eventually joined the confederacy are different from those that had legalized slavery when the Constitution was signed.
Indeed Virginia was a slave state at the time, and was later part of the Confederacy, and it was the most underrepresented state in the Senate and electoral college at the founding, since those bodies cause higher population states to be underrepresented relative to their population.
> The states that eventually joined the confederacy are different from those that had legalized slavery when the Constitution was signed.
All of the states had legalized slavery when the Constitution was signed. But it was already gathering detractors even then. The states that wanted to keep it the most were the ones that ended up in the Confederacy and they were both a minority of the original colonies and a minority of the states at the time of the civil war.
> Pushing the process further into American Idol territory would make it worse, not better.
Not for nothing, but the party that bangs on hardest about the sanctity and infallibility of the Electoral College is the one that is far and away the worst for "American Idol-type politicians". In recent times:
Then we must repeal the state laws criminalizing electors not voting in line with the states popular vote allocation, and directly elect electors to ensure they are people of sound morals and judgement rather than partisan hacks. Because at the moment the electoral college serves no function besides distorting the popular vote. Any other possible function has been removed by law.
Is "founder" the right word for living off of savings for 8 years while trying various things? I haven't done anything more impressive, but I also don't describe myself as a founder. If someone killed me tomorrow, I'd be "murdered", not "assassinated".
Preventing the traffic from being distinguished is the whole premise. Port 23 gets blocked because everyone uses it for telnet, and everyone expects bad actors to know that. If everything moves to 433, we'll end up with a variety of routing systems and no focal point for attack. The only alternative is to disallow port filtering in core internet infrastructure.
We can either have a standard and accept that bad actors will use it against us, or we can accept the chaos that results from abandoning it.
> The only alternative is to disallow port filtering in core internet infrastructure
I think this is an acceptable alternative. In the same way that your mail service is legally required to deliver your mail as part of their universal service obligation (without reading it).
I've only ever built something that worked by first building a couple of things that didn't. No amount of theory or specification can replace what you learn by actually building and interacting with a system. Accept that there will be a version 2.
It's also the most valuable part of the entire article, and is true whether you're using waterfall, scrum, Extreme Programming, Kanban, or whatever. It's also the only thing that reliably works - the better you are at breaking down your work the better your estimates will be. As you said though, breaking down the work is oftentimes the largest part of the work because it requires _starting_ the work in the first place.
Americans pay a pretty hefty health insurance penalty when they leave steady employment to start their own business. There have definitely been better times to be an entrepreneur in this country.
Game development has been seeing cuts on the order of 10k+ jobs/year for a couple years now and investment in studios/titles has dried up. It's extremely competitive now and the deals being signed are for smaller amounts of money with worse terms.
Europe/ (Anecdotally India, I have seen some good health insurances for what 50$ here?) might have a better time for being business owners as well.
One of the issues in these countries is usually Funding. I am unable to understand how people get money to fund the projects & have people be willing to pay when there are alternatives which will cut you down as well probably burning through their funding in the first place.
Suppose, I want to create a cloud provider, A) ownership costs went up due to ramflation, B) there are now services which are using VC money which will burn insane amount of money to give users for free.
As a person without VC money or without wishing to seek VC money to simply burn it, (I personally much much prefer seedstrapping and bootstraping), the idea of business ownership becomes difficult as well.
Plus don't forget the fact that the idea of getting a customer becomes hard in the first place given how organic mediums are being overwhelmed (like Show HN etc.) and personally the idea of marketing doesn't really click with me of things like paying for this as if its a rent to the overlords like google and facebook smh but I guess if someone's a business owner, they might be forced to play this game.
The ratio of the length of the diagonal of a pentagon to one of its sides is the golden ratio -- easiest visualization is with similar triangles. Draw a regular pentagon (sides of length 1 for simplicity) and pick a side, make an isosceles triangle with that side as the base and two diagonals meeting at the opposite point. Go one side length down from the opposite point and mark that (F below). Convince yourself that triangle DCF is similar to CAD (symmetry gets you there).
Now we wish to find the length of, say, CA. From similarity CD/CA = FC/DF, and CD = DF = 1, and CA - FC = 1, so the ratio simplifies to... CA^2 - CA - 1 = 0 which yields the golden ratio.
A
.'.
.' | `.
.' | | `.
B.' | | `.E
\ F| | /
\ | | /
\ | | /
\|_____|/
C D
I pulled beanstalkd into a legacy PHP/MySQL application several years back and was very pleased with it. It's probably not the right choice for a modern Rails application, but if you already don't have a framework, it's a straightforward solution to drop in.
I genuinely went looking for an "off" button, and was very confused when the snowflake icon changed the background color instead. I didn't even notice that the snow stops being generated until I read your comment and tried again. I'm both impressed and annoyed.
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