VitalSigns posted:

6 out of the 10 participating states held popular votes for president in the very first election, the impossibility of counting votes wasn't the reason (obviously or you couldn't elect your congressional representatives).

And why would you have to transport votes to DC, do you think all your ballots for governor are physically transported to the state capitol to be counted there?

HootTheOwl posted:

Do you mean like states in the electoral college? Because I was just arguing this and as of 2010 (the last census) California as a whole loses about 2% of it's voting power, but that doesn't tell the whole story because California isn't D+100, and while it may be just 2% in California, but a state like Wyoming gets roughly a 0.5% boost in terms of power from having the electoral college. To go further, the 20 least populous states get 83 electoral votes to California's 55, but have about 10% of the population to California's 12. It's also 10% for 15% of the College, compared to California's 12% for 10%

Kale posted:

The electoral college was basically set up at a time when travelling the United States to vote in presidential election and transporting a bunch of votes to be validated and confirmed in D.C would have more or less been unfeasible so a representative was sent in the states stead to cast a vote on their behalf to make sure D.C and the other states were in sync on who voted for who and where.

Kale posted:

No hence why a validated group of electorates would be sent on a states behalf to cast their votes for that state. Also they'd meet in the state capital to cast their vote on behalf of the people of the state, not necessarily D.C my bad. Anyway as I understood it the electoral college was a matter of getting around logistics of having to send a bunch of people all over the countryside to cast votes and have them validated, but maybe that's just me trying to make more sense of it for the era during which it was created than there is. Apparently for their own reasons a lot of the founding fathers didn't trust direct democracy a whole lot and were worried that it could lead to a tyranny of the majority.

mystes posted:

The electoral college was set up because the founding fathers didn't care about boring stuff like democracy or having a popular vote for the president.

JasonV posted:

oh my god i am so suprised how did no one see this coming shock horror disbelief.

https://twitter.com/DavidCornDC/status/1070764438440083458

VitalSigns posted:

No it had nothing to do with logistics, again governors and congressional reps etc were elected by popular vote, if they couldn't validate votes then they couldn't validate those elections either (nor the popular presidential elections that most states actually held to choose the slate of presidential electors anyway).

It was 100% the second thing you said, the founders feared the mob might choose a president who would redistribute wealth from the upper classes and wanted to make sure aristocratic intermediaries with the wealth and connections to win dozens of individual Elector races (or better yet be selected by state legislatures) would be there to intervene on behalf of their class interests. And that's not supposition Hamilton spelled it out in the Federalist papers.

You're also correct that this idea of independent aristocratic Electors choosing one of their own didn't survive the inevitable formation of political parties and a bunch of the founders were still around to see a country bumpkin and proto-Trump become President Andrew Jackson

HootTheOwl posted:

The electoral college exists because of the same compromises that caused us to have both a house of representatives and a senate: An inflated value on the purpose of states, a way for slave states to count their slaves and own them too, and protections for smaller states. I didn't think this was a secret.
The Constitution was counterrevolutionary

Charlz Guybon posted:

Counter revolutionary compared to what? The Articles of Confederation?

fool_of_sound posted:

Yeah the FEC has basically said that they have no enforcement power at the moment. Literally the entire republican primary involved extensive blatant illegal coordination. Best you can hope for is this is another investigation on the pile and that dems will reinstate FEC enforcement powers. It's not a 'lol nothing matters' thing, but it's not going anywhere soon.

The Glumslinger posted:

Mueller is looking into the NRA connections because Russia was funneling money through them, and if you look back a page, Maria Butina who was extremely involved that whole scheme, might have flipped

VitalSigns posted:

I'm sorry, could you be specific about who is taking an 'L' if climate change is mitigated versus if it isn't, I'm struggling to think of a single person who wouldn't be materially better off by avoiding famines, extreme weather disasters, and war.

fool_of_sound posted:

Yeah I understand the investigation angle, and it's unambiguously good that the NRA is caught up in this poo poo, but the actual statutes violated don't have a normal enforcement mechanism at the moment.

The Glumslinger posted:

I was under the impression that FBI still had the ability to pursue legal action, they just generally differed to the FEC

mystes posted:

We can't even agree about stuff like ubi in a post scarcity economy. Of course we're not going to be able to decide how to put people out of work if we suddenly have to scale down the economy. It's hopeless.

rscott posted:

Maybe everyone can just like, work less

It'd be nice to work less than 55-60 hours a week personally

quote:

On Wednesday morning, after a closed-door meeting that lasted much of the night, both houses of Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled state legislature passed a comprehensive set of measures limiting the incoming Democratic administration’s power. The consequences of the many provisions are still coming into focus. Buried under controversial moves to curtail early voting and strip authority from Gov.-elect Tony Evers is a sweeping codification of welfare restrictions that Republicans across the country have long sought.

The new legislation enshrines in state law outgoing Gov. Scott Walker’s controversial policy of forcing many food stamp applicants to submit to drug testing. It also limits the incoming administration’s ability to walk back the state’s strict new work requirements for aid recipients. After Walker’s approval, Wisconsin will be the only state that requires drug testing for non-felon food stamp applicants.

The bill appears to defy federal policy regarding the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, as the food stamps program is now known. The U.S. Department of Agriculture does not allow states to impose certain eligibility limits, like drug testing, on SNAP applicants without explicit permission. Walker sued the Obama administration for permission to implement drug screenings back in 2015, but a judge threw out the lawsuit on procedural grounds. Walker then sought permission from the incoming Trump administration in 2016, but his letter went unanswered. (Leaked emails in April of this year showed that the USDA was considering allowing states to implement drug testing, but such a policy has not yet been announced.)

Lacking federal permission, the Walker administration announced a workaround last December: an administrative rule requiring drug screenings only for participants in the state’s Employment and Training Program. (The specific process involves a preliminary screening followed by testing in some cases.)

mystes posted:

We can't even agree about stuff like ubi in a post scarcity economy. Of course we're not going to be able to decide how to put people out of work if we suddenly have to scale down the economy. It's hopeless.

Lightning Knight posted:

Lightning Knight posted:

Buried in Wisconsin Republicans’ Lame-Duck Legislation: Drug Testing Requirements for Food Stamp Applicants

exploded mummy posted:

any chance that this stuff's getting struck down by the courts or probably not

The Glumslinger posted:

I don't understand why everyone freaks out about a tiny niche economy that is coal

Arbys employs more people than the coal industry

Government numbers from 2017 put the entire coal industry at 50,800 down from 170K 30 years ago.
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2017/jul/21/how-big-coal-mining-compared-other-occupations/

Journalism has lost double that many jobs in the last 15 years alone
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2017/m..._eid=e49f1168cb

When Toys R Us went bankrupt, 30K people lost their jobs
https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/16/news/companies/toys-r-us-employees/index.html

Sears alone fired more people that the entire coal industry last year
https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-sears-employee-cuts-store-closures-0324-story.html

Why the gently caress do we let one niche industry dictate our entire loving national policy, but we barely even think about all of the people getting fired from retail jobs despite it vastly dwarfing the job losses in coal? Was there a huge national debate about how to help horse and buggy drivers? How about asbestos miners? Or the lead miners when be banned leaded gas and paint?

Like, I know its callous as gently caress to just say fuckoff to 50K people, but economy does it all the loving time

evilweasel posted:

What he means is that due to urban areas being ludicrously democratic and rural areas being republican but less so, most maps that are drawn without utilizing any sort of data on voting patterns will tend to have a moderate republican gerrymander.

The Glumslinger posted:

I don't understand why everyone freaks out about a tiny niche economy that is coal

Arbys employs more people than the coal industry

Government numbers from 2017 put the entire coal industry at 50,800 down from 170K 30 years ago.
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2017/jul/21/how-big-coal-mining-compared-other-occupations/

Journalism has lost double that many jobs in the last 15 years alone
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2017/m..._eid=e49f1168cb

When Toys R Us went bankrupt, 30K people lost their jobs
https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/16/news/companies/toys-r-us-employees/index.html

Sears alone fired more people that the entire coal industry last year
https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-sears-employee-cuts-store-closures-0324-story.html

Why the gently caress do we let one niche industry dictate our entire loving national policy, but we barely even think about all of the people getting fired from retail jobs despite it vastly dwarfing the job losses in coal? Was there a huge national debate about how to help horse and buggy drivers? How about asbestos miners? Or the lead miners when be banned leaded gas and paint?

Like, I know its callous as gently caress to just say fuckoff to 50K people, but economy does it all the loving time

Silver2195 posted:

Some historians (e.g., Charles Beard) have argued precisely that. I don't think it's a very common view among historians today, though.

Charlz Guybon posted:

The government under the articles had way less power than the EU today. It was barely a government at all.

UCS Hellmaker posted:

Mainly because it is a red meat to the Appalachian states, Coal is still what people think about as a way to make a living with decent wages in those states, even though that hasn't been the case in a long long time. Coal was a working man job that let you provide for your family and made you basically set till retirement. For those states and areas thats all they had for a long time, as those jobs went away the whole areas that those mines and jobs uplifted fell apart. There is still the dream that those jobs will come back and that everyone will benefit.

Also for 75% of the population they believe the service industry is filled with lazy fuckheads and they deserve to lose their job. (gently caress these people)

Silver2195 posted:

Hence the lack of pro-AoC views among historians today, yes.

The Glumslinger posted:

https://twitter.com/joshuamckerrow/status/1070898889757212672

quote:

Ecuador's president, Lenin Moreno, said on Thursday that "the way has been cleared" for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to leave the country's embassy in London.

Assange, 47, has spent the last six years in Ecuador's embassy to avoid arrest and extradition to Sweden on allegations of sexual assault. Sweden has since dropped the case, and Ecuador says there are no pending extradition requests against him.

The Australian activist, who published huge caches of files belonging to the United States Department of State and the Pentagon in 2010, has repeatedly expressed fears that Britain may extradite him to the US. Moreno, however, said Britain guaranteed that Assange would not be extradited to a country where his life would be in danger.

"The British government has told us that the constitution of Great Britain bars extradition of a person to a place where his life is in danger or he faces the death penalty," Moreno said in a radio interview. Moreno added that Assange has to "serve a short sentence" in Britain for violating his bail conditions.

evilweasel posted:

It sounds like Ecuador has agreed to boot Assange out of their embassy as long as the UK requires the USA to take the death penalty off the table for any crimes they extradite him to the US for.

https://www.dw.com/en/ecuador-wikil...k&ICID=ref_fark

Fritz Coldcockin posted:

Fine, we'll just throw him in a deep, dark hole for the rest of his life.

haveblue posted:

So, not all that different from his current situation, except the guards speak English and his cat is getting better care.