I concur with your points, but have a few corrections to (3) and (4), as the best way to win an argument is to not allow any holes:

The "winner takes all" system means that all of a state's electors are pledged to the winner of the popular vote in that state, regardless of the margin. What happened in 2000 was that Bush won his states by narrower margins than Gore won his states, resulting in the "packing" situation that is the principle argument against an electoral college.

The electors in 2000 all voted as they were assigned. The controversy over Florida's electors was over who to assign them to vote, as the results were within the margin of error for the voting process. If electors were assigned proportionally, the "hanging chad" would have come down to the one odd elector, rather than all 25, and we would never have heard about it.

Separately, I think that (2) is one of the most important points, and the one that is least likely to see attention. I remember my frustration in the run-up to 2008's election to hear Howard Dean in an interview on NPR defend not only the primary system, but having different states vote different ways. If one of the more progressive voices at the time is married to that system, we have a long way to go to change it.

they were the ones beating the "FDR is a Commie" drum when he created Social Security, etc.

FDR was a Commie, though. We only see Social Security seven or eight decades after the fact, but the FDR administration completely overhauled the nation's economy, especially the agricultural sector, placing enormous swaths under extensive government control, with explicit production targets and price targets. The administration actively disbelieved in competition and a free market, and thought it could restore the nation to prosperity by paying people to fallow their land and by burning crops. By "disbelieved in a free market", I don't mean that they had a bunch of Regulators out there keeping Rich and Powerful People from doing Bad Things. I mean that they kept the Rich and Powerful People in business because they were rich and powerful friends of the FDR administration, and they did a lot to help them.

The FDR administration's interventions are a primary reason that the Great Depression was so Great. Fortunately, most of them were disassembled after World War II, resulting in an impressive game of catch-up as the nation returned to economic growth and prosperity (and unfortunately convincing some people that war is an economic catalyst instead of an exercise in spending valuable effort blowing stuff up, including some of the most economically valuable stuff out there, human lives).

Anyway. If you hate Big Agriculture, factory farms, and crop monocultures, then you should despise FDR, who erected the system which brought them upon us.

As for the rest, Social Security was the icing on the cake. It's an out-and-out wealth transfer in a way that the other programs, but at least it's an honest wealth transfer -- a generational wealth transfer, and future generations are likely to be richer. It makes a ton of economic sense as a transfer program (by tying your retirement pay to actually working it avoids the worst negative incentives of transfer programs, among other things). You just need to make sure the demographics and economic growth work out relative to the benefits -- easily doable. From an economic standpoint, it's wildly superior to the current health-care reform effort, which... let's just say it hasn't been a wild success at delivering its headline promise of cheaper health care for all.

Captain Planet Explains.

Maybe not now, but if you actually work on fixing broken people, you'd end up with a prison profile more like Norway's. That wouldn't happen overnight, naturally. The system we have now has resulted in an awful lot of broken people, and they just propagate their disorders to their children. Look at violent criminals now and in most cases I think you'll find someone who would not have been violent if they'd received help at an earlier stage of their lives. People don't become criminals for no reason. Someone doesn't just wake up one day and think "What a nice day, I think I'll go out and murder a bunch of people!" We always know about those people in advance.

Of course, my Socialist-Totaltarian regime has a multi-pronged approach to addressing this:

1. All children will be confiscated from their parents and birth and raised in sanitary state-run facilities. Processes will be put in place to insure that no violent or sexual abuse of the children will be possible.

2. All children will be reversibly sterilized at puberty. Anyone wishing to breed will be required to pass a parental competency test.

3. For anyone unable to pass a parental competency test, the state will choose a partner based on specially-designed algorithms designed to insure the happiness of the couple.

4. All religion will be illegal except for the state-run one, which will involve Smurfs. Non-Smurfy behavior will be dealt with harshly.

I predict that my society would reach the "Utopia" stage within three generations.

:-P

When I was a kid playing games on a PC was hard. You had to learn DOS, keep enough memory free, install sound card drivers after properly setting the DIP switches and avoiding COM port conflicts that made your mouse play music when you used it. Sometimes you had to tweak BAT files to get a game to install, others required manually using pkzip.

Then you learned how to make boot disks with a bare minimum system or crafted your own multiboot setup. JUST TO PLAY. We were motivated, we had to be. Now kids just tap an icon and punch in their password, done. There's no learning required. Sure they're comfortable with web pages but they don't just pick up HTML and JavaScript unless already inclined. Games no longer LEAD to understanding nor require it, they're simply diversions. As soon as they get bored it's back on Pinterest or Netflix.

I'm glad I got into computers when I did because at that time playing games truly lead to learning.

They usually just buy the up-and-coming company and turn it into shit with their Midas poo-touch.

Well, if we eliminate all the people who just wanted to get high quietly in the privacy of their own home and provided treatment instead of prison time for all the people who are in there as the result of alcohol and drug abuse, we could probably close all but one existing prison. Funnily many of the examples you provided are driven by the enforcement of white supremacy perpetuated by the anti-drug establishment. Which, by the way, is VERY good for the profits of the privatized prison system. Give someone in a community no opportunities other than being thugs and many of them will be thugs. This ought not to be surprising. Use lies and bad science to enact prohibition-style laws on substances no more harmful than alcohol and you'll see black markets arise, along with the violence associated with those black markets. Most people don't become broken for no reason, either. Address a few simple causes and you could significantly reduce the prison population in the country, the taxpayer burden associated with that population and increase the overall safety of the society. The for-profit prisons would really rather people didn't realize this.

They could just work their way through the EA game archive making each one not suck in exactly the way that EA made each one of them suck. Five years later, one of the two companies would still be alive...

This. The prison system is good money for the people who run it. The more people commit crimes again once they get out, the more money the prison system makes. The entire system is designed to encourage recidivism. The entire system is designed to incarcerate more people than any other country on the planet. The entire system is designed to turn a profit.

However, the focus at improving a task repetitively helped me enormously, and I have video games to thank for that.

The point you're making was a main plot point within The Running Man.

A police man was accused and convicted for murder based on edited police footage.

Talk about SciFi representing the future; we're starting to see/talk-through ideas suggested almost 30 years ago (that movie was released in 1987!).

You mean by using a std::shared_ptr? "Oh but that's inefficient!" I hear you cry! But if you're the kind of programmer who can't learn how to delete objects before they go out of scope, that's a trade off you're going to want to make. Of course, allocating objects on the heap is so 1990s-era C++ programming. You can allocate the object on the stack and if it needs to do any big heap management it can do it within the confines of the object. AND you can properly deallocate it when it goes out of scope and implement a move allocator for it if you want to potentially return it by copy (Returning std::move(object) will promise the compiler you won't use that object any more in the returning function.) If you do it correctly, your stack will only ever grow by the few bytes needed to store a couple of pointers, which it would have done anyway. And you're much more likely to clean up resources with RAII than anything java can manage. Having seen big companies have to reboot java servers every couple of days because their JMS service bleeds file handles, I'm not at all impressed with Java or its automatic GC. I've had C++ servers run on production system for months at a time without the process size ever growing.

I keep having to support jackasses who want to use it for system programming because it's "Write once and run anywhere!" To be fair it was never designed to be a system level programming language, but that really doesn't help you any when someone drops some horrible abomination in your lap and asks you to support it for the next 5 years.

The deeper I get into OO, the more I start to understand that getters and setters are just as bad as exposing members of your object to the public. If you have to expose the working data of your objects that regularly, you're not working at the correct level of abstraction. A lot of the coding style I see in java is geared toward "I'll need this in the future" or "I have no idea what I'm going to need in the future, so I'll make this bit so generic that it can do anything." Both of these habits are incredibly bad practices that have been superseded by refactoring. A lot of inexperienced programmers think that once they've designed and coded some shit, it's carved in stone forever after that. I've seen countless cases of companies wringing their hands and working around problems in code that can be fixed with trivial changes to program design and adjustments to half a dozen or so objects.

I have much the same problem with introspection as I do with getters and setters. People say "Oh we have to use introspection because someone might want to write something new and drop it in there and we don't know how it'll behave!" Again, that's limiting your current design because you don't know what will happen in the future. Design a solid and maintainable interface NOW and if you need to change it in the future, change it in the future. Don't build some twisty maze of introspection that delegates any real work 10 objects away from the functions that initiate it just because someone in the future might want to write something else! And quite frankly, no one EVER WILL, because that would require knowing implementation-level details of the ball of shit you rolled up to support that.

... by the school or using school equipment?

from the eat-all-your-pizza-crust dept.