Slashdot Log In
Internet Effects on Presidential Campaigns
Posted by
Roblimo
on Thu Jan 20, 2000 09:17 PM
from the trolling-for-your-vote dept.
from the trolling-for-your-vote dept.
nickdog writes "The upcoming presidential election will probably be the first to be significantly influenced by the Internet. According to a study by Media Quotient, Bill Bradley and John McCain are in the best position to win over voters who rely on Internet news sources."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Internet Effects on Presidential Campaign
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 179 comments
(Spill at 50!) | Index Only
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(1)
|
2
(1)
|
2
hmm... (Score:3)
But... how many people out there get most of their political news from the internet? Maybe that would make a good slashdot poll, because I know I don't, but I'm sure other people do. I know the Starr report was a very popular download, so maybe this will start to make a difference. Heck, ever since Byte disappeared from the shelves, I haven't really supported dead-tree media at all...
Oh, and for future reference: don't support anyone who thinks the flat tax will solve all of your problems. They're morons. All it does is change the current (progressive) bracket system with a simpler, flat/regressive one. A better solution would be a national sales tax with exemptions for food / clothing / books, but I don't think people realize how large it would have to be.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].
Re:hmm... (Score:3)
This, too, could be argued to be regressive (rich people doesn't spend a large of a percentage of their income as the rest of us -- with necessities exempted to protect the poor, it winds up mostly a tax on the middle). On the other hand, I think that, even though it's not a perfect solution, it's better than the current one. I see several advantages to a national sales tax in lieu of income tax:
(1) It's much harder to evade.
(2) It utterly relieves normal people of the burden of "doing their taxes". Businesses take on the additional burden, but they already have to do this for state sales tax, so this isn't really such a big deal. The majority of the work done by the IRS goes bye-bye! Massive paperwork reduction! Less headaches for us normal people.
(3) As an avid environmentalist, I'm all for consumption taxes. I think we ought to eliminate drivers license fees and license plate tab fees, etc, and bump up the gasoline tax instead. Many of us would pay less this way, although gas guzzlers would of course pay more.
Ultimately, all taxes suck, but this seems to suck less than any of the alternatives.
--
Let's see what OS their servers are running.. (Score:3)
A little portscan and I'm all right
nmap number five...
[root@athens jhaas]# nmap -sS -O www.algore.com -v
Remote operating system guess: Linux 2.2.0-pre6 - 2.2.2-ac5
Wow, Al might be running Linux! Maybe he really did invent the Internet. OK, let's try Bill Bradley, my favorite..
Remote operating system guess: Solaris 2.6 - 2.7
Hmm... robust, enterprise level Solaris. OK, it's UNIX at least. I can respect that. It doesn't look like they're actually running it, which also makes sense.
I made the shocking (shocking!) discovery that George W. Bush laughs the same way as his dear old dad, that weird, stuttered giggle. Unfortunately he's probably going to win.
Initiating SYN half-open stealth scan against www-01.georgewbush.com (206.104.218.130)
It's going incredibly slowly, so I'll come back to that later. As you can tell, I am an 31337 h4x0r, and I own these b0x3s. Let's move on to the aliens from outer space candidates, Keyes and Bauer..
Woah! George W's just finished.. no wonder it took so long -- there's scads of ports open.
TCP Sequence Prediction: Class=random positive increments
Difficulty=85 (Medium)
Sequence numbers: 25507B62 25507CFC 25507F35 255081B8 255083EC 2550866D
Remote operating system guess: Windows NT4 / Win95 / Win98
Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 465 seconds
Hah! Point for me. No surprise there that George W's campaign would probably be running NT or something icky like that. It just figures, you know? I suspect if Bradley's campaign was running their own box, it'd have Linux on it. And stiff old Gore would have Solaris or SCO or something like that. Anyway.. on to the space men..
Bauer doesn't seem to have a site up yet, according to bauer2000.com. nmap thinks it's running:
Remote operating system guess: BSDI BSD/OS 3.0
Hmm. Ok. Keyes... scan is going slowly.. maybe I'll do Hatch's for fun and giggles while that grinds away. Much better. Ooh, rail on the administration's abuses, Orrin. You go with your bad self.
Remote operating system guess: Solaris 2.6 - 2.7
No big surprise there. A buttoned down UNIX, if there is such a thing. Who thinks Hatch knows what a UNIX is?
Keyes server has shown us that port 80 is open (which I hadn't already figured out by going there with Netscape..), and is going about as quickly as Bush's. So we'll just ignore that, just like the voters will...
And last, Mr. Flat Tax himself, Steve Forbes. Solaris again. Hmm. Well, interesting. Gore and Bradley were reversed in my mind. Oh -- McCain.. nmap didn't know what to make of that one, so I'll be sending in the fingerprints. Hmm!
Amazing what you can learn while you're supposed to be beta testing something else.
Yes and No (Score:3)
Does it matter enough? Enough for what? To make a difference? Of course it will make a difference, it is one of the main news outlets (Smaller than TV and newspaper but larger than radio) for most of the US population. And we know media makes a huge difference in elections.
But, the nature of the internet (see what you want, at least more so than TV) makes it less helpful to candidates. So, yes it will make a difference in the sense it will be used like every other media outlet to spread propaganda. No, this isn't a revolution, just an evolution.
--Nick
Sales tax is definitly the way to go! (Score:3)
This, too, could be argued to be regressive (rich people doesn't spend a large of a percentage of their income as the rest of us -- with necessities exempted to protect the poor, it winds up mostly a tax on the middle).
You do not neded to do away with capital gains tax.. just income tax. The money needs to go someplace. I guess investment firms could be forced to deduct the tax automatically when you sell stuff, so individual people would not need to fill out taxes unless they actually took possetion of the stock. I suppose you would also need to keep things like inheretance tax.
(1) It's much harder to evade.
(2) It utterly relieves normal people of the burden of "doing their taxes". Businesses take on the additional burden, but they already have to do this for state sales tax, so this isn't really such a big deal. The majority of the work done by the IRS goes bye-bye! Massive paperwork reduction! Less headaches for us normal people. (3) As an avid environmentalist, I'm all for consumption taxes.
These are all good fine reasons, but you missed a very importent reason: people see how much they are paing every day (well companies may include it in the cost of the product, but prices go up when they rase it, so it is still better then the gov. hiding it via paycheck deductions and stuff).
Related to tax reform: It is also worth mentioning that we need to privatise social security, but not give some agency the power to effect the market by having lots of dollars to invest. I supposet he best way to do this would be to allow people to open up social security accounts with financial institutions. People would be allowed to transfer money they have paid to socail security in the past into these accounts. The social security administration would restrict how much money people could have in privatized accounts (you don't want everyone to take the money out now or we would have big problems), but there would be soo much preasure on them to let people have more of their money that they wuold need to keep raising the precentage every year. Eventually, we would have a nice mandatory private investment system which did not need to invest in gov. bonds. Medicare could be a mandatory inshurace attached to these private accounts.
Jeff
Gore '00 (Score:3)
- SD
Re:hmm... (Score:3)
What public transportation? The nearest bus stop is twenty miles further than my employer, in the opposite direction! And is riding a bicycle 90 miles/day actually feasable? Some of us still live in the great wasteland that is Suburbia because we can't afford $1,200/month apartments in the major cities.
Media Quotient missed the boat (Score:5)
I am not a statistic. I am not a number. I am a minority of one and so is each and every person reading this. Don't let the pollsters tell you what you are likely to do. Go out and read the candidates' web sites. Read the candidate comparisons that are going to appear all over the web over the next 10 months. And make an intelligent decision.
Too many media outlets pretend that nothing matters in a presidential race each the Democratic and Republican Party nominees and the photo ops. They don't dig. They tell the stories that will attract the biggest audiences. The net not only doesn't have to do that, there is really no way to constrain it to do that.
I suggested it here before, and I'll suggest it again. It would be interesting to see Slashdot polls about how Slashdot readers will be voting. I would be particularly interested if a few of us, and I'll volunteer, post links to useful web sites with analyses by a variety of interest groups of the candidates' positions. I'm as interested in what the people I wouldn't trust with a soggy match think of the candidates as I am in what the people I like think of them.
Let's give them participatory democracy and see what happens. I bet there are candidates who will love it. It will attract the underdogs, and probably the lunatic fringe as well... but what a show.