POLITICS The Collapse of the RNC BEGINS TODAY
-
@xaade said in POLITICS The Collapse of the RNC BEGINS TODAY:
Then we did the same thing Iran did in our primaries...
And I think Democrats (oh the irony) came up on top. Turns out politics work better when you don't let people decide.
-
@dkf said in POLITICS The Collapse of the RNC BEGINS TODAY:
@xaade said in POLITICS The Collapse of the RNC BEGINS TODAY:
then we let their manchurian leader into the UN
Sometimes the best way to get what you really want is to let others talk, and the whole purpose of the UN is to let senior politicians from around the world talk. Not so much to each other of course, but even so…
As Winston Churchill once put it, "better 'jaw, jaw' than 'war, war.'"
-
@mott555 said in POLITICS The Collapse of the RNC BEGINS TODAY:
That argument holds no weight because the Democrats were in control of Congress and not a single Republican voted for the bill.
Which is why they had to make the bill appeal to the moderate democrats too, and they had to remove the public option part to do exactly that...
-
-
@AyGeePlus said in POLITICS The Collapse of the RNC BEGINS TODAY:
I don't much care about where the money comes from, my point is that universities are pretty good at spending the money efficiently
Ok...so are they coming up with New drugs with their great efficiency?
-
@asdf said in POLITICS The Collapse of the RNC BEGINS TODAY:
This is not an excuse for the fuckup that the ACA has become, but it was mostly your party who insisted on fucking it up.
That's ludicrous. It was a democrat bill from start to finish.
-
@boomzilla said in POLITICS The Collapse of the RNC BEGINS TODAY:
@asdf said in POLITICS The Collapse of the RNC BEGINS TODAY:
This is not an excuse for the fuckup that the ACA has become, but it was mostly your party who insisted on fucking it up.
That's ludicrous. It was a democrat bill from start to finish.
Mitt Romney claimed to have invented it.
-
@ben_lubar said in POLITICS The Collapse of the RNC BEGINS TODAY:
Mitt Romney claimed to have invented it.
Which is relevant how? Did he somehow force them to secretly write a similar law to what he did or something?
-
http://www.ibj.com/articles/60119-hoosiers-face-higher-premiums-fewer-choices-for-obamacare-coverage
Insurance companies have said that without steep increases in premiums, they would have to leave the market.
Higher premiums? Fewer choices? Is today Opposite Day?
-
@lolwhat said in POLITICS The Collapse of the RNC BEGINS TODAY:
Hoosiers
-
@HardwareGeek IRONY ALERT
-
@boomzilla said in POLITICS The Collapse of the RNC BEGINS TODAY:
@AyGeePlus said in POLITICS The Collapse of the RNC BEGINS TODAY:
I don't much care about where the money comes from, my point is that universities are pretty good at spending the money efficiently
Ok...so are they coming up with New drugs with their great efficiency?
Yes, actually. That's a big part of the scandal of it all: most of the drugs that pharmaceutical companies are charging people an arm and a leg for, (even though they can't afford it, because they can't afford not to buy stuff that their life depends on,) and claiming that their high prices are necessary to offset high R&D costs, were developed with public funding in the first place!
-
@AyGeePlus said in POLITICS The Collapse of the RNC BEGINS TODAY:
Alcohol is taxed because
drunk people break stuff and wake up hungoverpoliticians are addicted to taxes.FTFY.
edit: if alcohol taxes in fact have anything to do with the cost of drunk people breaking stuff, please tell me how I can get the government to use some of that money to reimburse me for the cost of fixing stuff that drunk people broke. Perhaps whoever downvoted this post would like to speak up?
I could see how you could justifiably claim that "Alcohol is taxed because drunk people fuck and make babies", since a significant part of the tax is allegedly used to benefit schools. But "drunk people break stuff and wake up hungover"? Has absolutely nothing to do with it. No.
-
@cartman82 The problem is, on top of the "stealing votes from the person I hate less and the person I hate more wins" argument, is that even if Gary Johnson, Jill Stein or some third party candidate won, they'd have no one in Congress or Senate from their party. I definitely want more than two parties, but it has to start at the lower levels and work its way up.
-
@campkev said in POLITICS The Collapse of the RNC BEGINS TODAY:
I definitely want more than two parties
That would be healthy. Even if it was just in a few cities or at state level, that would be good for stopping the two big parties from assuming that they can just come to a cozy agreement with the other away from the public gaze.
-
Back in 2003, I was living in Argentina and they had a Presidential election. There were several major candidates, and 5 (I believe; it's been a while) received a non-trivial amount of votes. Carlos Menem won the vote, with Néstor Kirchner coming in a close second. Very close, like, "margin of victory is smaller than the margin of error" close.
With the horrendous mess that was the aftermath of the 2000 US election still relatively fresh in mind, I kind of wondered how they'd resolve that. What they decided to do was to hold a runoff election a few weeks later between only Menem and Kirchner, which I found far more sensible than the endless rounds of re- re- re- recounts we'd had in the USA.
The runoff ended up not happening, though, as polls determined pretty early on that the guys who had voted for Menem before were almost the only ones likely to vote for him in the runoff, and almost everyone else was going to vote for Kirchner. So Menem conceded, and that was that.
All in all, it was a really good way to run an election. Unfortunately, you can only pull it off if you have lots of major candidates to begin with.
-
@masonwheeler STV, but only if the first round is really close?
-
@Jaloopa What's a STV?
-
@masonwheeler Single Transferrable Vote. You vote for your preferred candidate, the one with the least votes is eliminated and everyone who voted for them gets to vote again for one of the remaining candidates. Continue until someone has over 50%
-
@masonwheeler said in POLITICS The Collapse of the RNC BEGINS TODAY:
What's a STV?
Sexually Transmi… maybe not. ;)
-
@Jaloopa Interesting theory, but I don't think it was done that way in practice. More like, there were a lot of people who didn't want to see Menem in the Pink House, (yes, that's what they call the Presidential mansion, la Casa Rosada,) but couldn't agree on who they'd rather have.
-
@masonwheeler said in POLITICS The Collapse of the RNC BEGINS TODAY:
Did you hear about the homeopathic terrorist?
He threatened that unless his demands were met, he'd put a single drop of cyanide in the city's water supply!
This isn't the first time I've seen this sort of misunderstanding, so I'll correct it. An extremely dilute poison, according to homeopathic theory, is supposed to become a cure, not a poison.
In other words, you take a natural substance that, in a healthy person, would produce a particular set of symptoms. You then dilute it to the point where there's effectively none of it in the dilution, and use it to treat those symptoms. Any actual improvements from this treatment are basically just due to the placebo effect.
Hahnemann is reported to have joked that a suitable procedure to deal with an epidemic would be to empty a bottle of poison into Lake Geneva, if it could be shaken 60 times.[ref]
Of course, the likelihood of a dilution containing even a single molecule of the poison is slim at the dilution levels typically used. However, this does not matter to them because they believe that, by shaking the mixture at each step, part of the essence of the poison is transferred to the water itself.
-
@anotherusername said in POLITICS The Collapse of the RNC BEGINS TODAY:
by shaking the mixture at each step, part of the essence of the poison is transferred to the water itself
-
@ben_lubar said in POLITICS The Collapse of the RNC BEGINS TODAY:
@boomzilla said in POLITICS The Collapse of the RNC BEGINS TODAY:
@asdf said in POLITICS The Collapse of the RNC BEGINS TODAY:
This is not an excuse for the fuckup that the ACA has become, but it was mostly your party who insisted on fucking it up.
That's ludicrous. It was a democrat bill from start to finish.
Mitt Romney claimed to have invented it.
And Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet, with about as much justification. I don't remember anyone blaming him for .
-
@anotherusername said in POLITICS The Collapse of the RNC BEGINS TODAY:
@ben_lubar said in POLITICS The Collapse of the RNC BEGINS TODAY:
@boomzilla said in POLITICS The Collapse of the RNC BEGINS TODAY:
@asdf said in POLITICS The Collapse of the RNC BEGINS TODAY:
This is not an excuse for the fuckup that the ACA has become, but it was mostly your party who insisted on fucking it up.
That's ludicrous. It was a democrat bill from start to finish.
Mitt Romney claimed to have invented it.
And Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet, with about as much justification. I don't remember anyone blaming him for .
Can we blame Al Gore for ? Please?
-
@ben_lubar well, is all down to him
-
@masonwheeler said in POLITICS The Collapse of the RNC BEGINS TODAY:
Back in 2003, I was living in Argentina and they had a Presidential election. There were several major candidates, and 5 (I believe; it's been a while) received a non-trivial amount of votes. Carlos Menem won the vote, with Néstor Kirchner coming in a close second. Very close, like, "margin of victory is smaller than the margin of error" close.
With the horrendous mess that was the aftermath of the 2000 US election still relatively fresh in mind, I kind of wondered how they'd resolve that. What they decided to do was to hold a runoff election a few weeks later between only Menem and Kirchner, which I found far more sensible than the endless rounds of re- re- re- recounts we'd had in the USA.
The runoff ended up not happening, though, as polls determined pretty early on that the guys who had voted for Menem before were almost the only ones likely to vote for him in the runoff, and almost everyone else was going to vote for Kirchner. So Menem conceded, and that was that.
All in all, it was a really good way to run an election. Unfortunately, you can only pull it off if you have lots of major candidates to begin with.
That's actually how French presidential elections work all the time. First round, there are several candidates (the first time I voted in one, there were no fewer than 16 - it's still the record, I believe, and it didn't end well). If one gets over 50 % of the votes, he's elected right then; if not, the 2 candidates with the most votes participate in a second round (2 weeks later) and the winner of that is elected. Other single-seat elections (lower house elections, for instance) function that way, except that all candidates who meet some threshold of expressed votes and/or registered voters (which varies by election type) participate in the second round (and it's only 1 week later); if there are more than 2 candidates, the second round is FPTP.
-
@Jaloopa: Also, .