US Prices to Skyrocket?

[NHKitesurfer]

The cats are going to get fat sipping up all the spilt milk the losers are crying over. Like as if ranting about the Electoral College will change anything now. And I find it ironic (and moronic) that the silicon Valley execs who are throwing public tantrums over the results are the very same people who developed the technology making it possible for all Americans, whether you live in Idaho or NYC to have a voice. And in 2016 that voice was heard loud and clear.

[edt]

Where do you guys get that the electoral college was to keep average people from voting. I love people that misinterpret things to make their point. The reason the electoral college was created and was ingenious is that early Americans didn't have easy access to telephones

Just read the Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton it will shed light on this. For instance, Federalist No 68, Wed March 12, 1788:

"It was desirable that the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided. This end will be answered by committing the right of making it, not to any preestablished body, but to men chosen by the people for the special purpose, and at the particular conjuncture. It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations. It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder. This evil was not least to be dreaded in the election of a magistrate, who was to have so important an agency in the administration of the government as the President of the United States. But the precautions which have been so happily concerted in the system under consideration, promise an effectual security against this mischief. The choice of several, to form an intermediate body of electors, will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements, than the choice of one who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes. And as the electors, chosen in each State, are to assemble and vote in the State in which they are chosen, this detached and divided situation will expose them much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people, than if they were all to be convened at one time, in one place."

Once you get past the old-timey words, the meaning is clear. The People Can Not Be Trusted To Elect The President. That is why we have the electoral college. The fact is now it operates in a lot different way from how the founding fathers imagined. Today the college rewards rural areas with disproportionate power and it also tends to give a stronger result for the final election than the otherwise razor thin popular election results. But make no mistake the meaning is quite clear, the founding fathers did not like direct democracy they did not trust direct democracy what they believed would be good for the new USA is something we have today something called representative democracy where the voters don't vote directly on the issues but instead for the president on electors and in the case of congress senators and representatives. The founding fathers knew quite well what direct democracy was they had examples of it in ancient greece and the lack of telephones was no impediment instead they took as their example for our system of government, pre-empire Rome that is pre-Caesar.

Again I do like the electoral college, not because I distrust direct democracy but because there are some side effects of the college that are quite nice. We often have elections with razor thin majorities. Any time this happens in a non-electoral college election you would have to have a massive recount. Every single vote would have to get recounted. And in our distributed system it's not clear how you can do that fairly. Wisconsin would recount their votes differently from florida each state having different standards. The electoral college for all of it's flaws presents us with a clear winner and when there is a messy recount like the Florida recount in 2000 it is usually just a single state. Now imagine a recount that is just as volatile as the 2000 Florida recount but it happens at every state and at every election. So yeah, give me the electoral college. At least as long as we have these sorts of systems (winner take all style) which promotes a binary party system.

As for who would have won what well if we had a direct democracy instead of an electoral college maybe Trump would have campaigned differently remember he went to Wisconsin and Michigan to deliberately try to win these states while Clinton didn't really campaign in my state she thought she had it in the bag so there's to many "what ifs" for me to say that the direct election would have had a different result or not.

[tegirinenashi]

It would take a trivial amount of effort to set up voting database, and vote through the internet. Any vote recount is a trivial SQL query. A database can be open to any external audit in much more transparent way than anything else.

Compare it with news election coverage from Bay Area: they collected some floppy discs (err SSD) from individual poll sites in the bags, sealed them, etc. In Silicon Valley?

[edt]

It would take a trivial amount of effort to set up voting database, and vote through the internet. Any vote recount is a trivial SQL query. A database can be open to any external audit in much more transparent way than anything else. Compare it with news election coverage from Bay Area: they collected some floppy discs (err SSD) from individual poll sites in the bags, sealed them, etc. In Silicon Valley?

There is nothing trivial about this. States have certain powers which are reserved for them and not the federal government, and one of the most important powers is how exactly each state holds their elections. Now it is true that the federal government can pass a law to take away the power of each state to hold its own election article 1 section 4

"The times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing Senators."

One of the reasons that voter fraud is so difficult in the United States is that in order to defraud the entire vote you have to go into each state and cheat each state with all of their own mechanisms for voting. A single voting system all residing on a single SQL Table . . . I don't have to go into the risks you know them as well as I do. You are making the votes easier to be defrauded by a central authority and taking away power from the states and giving it to a central authority, you are putting all of the voting data into a single point of failure. When states are in control of voting and count their own votes they get a handle about how many votes for each candidate should be from each county and city, but with a single national database you have some guy that doesn't live in the local region seeing data pop up, he has no idea if it's good or bad.

There are security risks to worry about, state vs fedral powers to worry about and perhaps most of all the politics of it all. Centralization of authority into a single election author which is going to be run elector commissioners who will have to be selected from the two political parties . You get all sorts of things going on at the local level voting times places gerrymandering, now put that all in the hands of a single national committee. It can be done of course but trivial is not the word I would use.

[tegirinenashi]

Security by obscurity and complexity is wrong idea. Banks maintain billions of customer balances in SQL databases; this is well understood and robust mechanism. Yes, bank transactions are not quite transparent to everyone, but recently an open system (distributed ledger) has been proven to work as well. To put it another way, if you insist that founder fathers established the ideal system, which can't possibly be improved, then you give too little credit to intelligence of your contemporaries.

[edt]

That's fine tegir. I just want to bring out some of the issues that have to be solved if this is to be implemented. I am in favor of decentralization because it reduces the amount of power in the hands of the federal government, not necessarily because it is more complex or obscure. Remember that one of the greatest fears of the founding fathers was that a centralized government (in their case the king in our case, an orange haired pussy grabber, or if the election had gone the other way, Hillary) would be able to establish itself as the sole power over a nation and to ensure this didn't happen they set the states against the federal government, the senate against the house, the president against congress and the judicial system as a last check. Reducing the entire voting system into a streamlined (oh and so much more efficient) one runs counter to this idea of checking the power of an executive state. It's not all about how efficient it is. As for banks, well I think we know what happens to banks when they are "self-regulating" we went through that a little while ago. It's not just about the SQL database it's about power.

[lovethepirk]

As for banks, well I think we know what happens to banks when they are "self-regulating" we went through that a little while ago.

Respectfully speaking here brother, but you seem extremely against The Donald's bankruptcies even though it is a wicked, wicked, wicked risky business he's in...he's not selling insurance or alcohol, playing the safe game like Warren Buffet...he's building shit, putting massive amounts of people to work when successful. When he fails, lenders get short term pain for longer term sweetened deals...when a company comes out of bankruptcy and eventually succeeds the lenders are typically better off than had their investment just provided timely interest payments.

Back to the point of your banking statement...those failed banks should have gone bankrupt against your complete distaste for another, more risky industry doing so. Yea, there would have been pain, but long term we'd have smaller locally responsible banks that could actually articulate their holdings to a depositor. Walk into a large bank and ask the smartest guy there to explain their holdings and I'll grab the popcorn.

[edt]

Yeah I agree in principle, going bankrupt is usually a sign that you are a good entrepreneur. How many times does it take to fail at starting a business before you actually start one? Lots usually, most people don't hit it out of the park on their first try like Steve Jobs, it's usually failure after failure until you finally succeed. I admit I detest Trump. So yeah, it's not really about the bankruptcies, it's that I feel like he's just a con man. All of these bankruptcies and failures, failure is good, that's how we learn, it's that when he fails, Trump never admits that he fails. How can you learn from failure if you never admit to yourself that you have failed?

[pākihiroa]

How about Moronland

Nah, need to keep that in reserve for those who have just voted against their own self interests. I should say "may have voted" because only time will tell. It depends on which Trump shows up January/2017 and what he is going to do when cold hard reality sets in.

Hey, I am all in favour or sticking it to the establishment. I just wish it would have been a choice between Donald and Bernie.

[pākihiroa]

If Trump is elected President, he warned, “the millions of people who voted for him and believe that he represents their interests will learn what anyone who deals closely with him already knows—that he couldn’t care less about them.”

Quote from Tony Schwartz who co-wrote The Art of the Deal (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/ ... -tells-all)