Of course, Marie Antoinette never said "Let them eat cake". It's historical fiction made up by pro-revolutionary historians and polemicists.

The "Learn" menu of Chava Energy consists of "Zero Point Energy", "Room Temperature Superconductors" and "Nikola Tesla".

I think I know exactly why Chava Energy went under and it's not the 2008 market crash.

You know I was thisclose to putting in the obligatory xkcd reference in my original post. I'm well aware that our space program wasn't 100% home grown (heck, maybe not even 50%), but we did put the resources into it to make it happen and didn't kill off or scare off our home grown engineers. You've got Arianespace, so kudos on your private space launch system...

I don't buy the climate change analogy. There's a big difference between a one-off $50 billion dollar expense (spread out among a half-dozen years) that has no big policy implications and could potentially be done by a single country and a multi-trillion dollar, decades long campaign that many claim requires a fundamental change in a wide range of policies (energy, economic, social) by nearly every country in the world. (For the record, I believe that AGW is real and requires action - I just think the analogy is flawed.)

In the course of about seven paragraphs, he manages to take a shot at America twice (good at blowing things up and not dealing with the fallout, if American politicians find out about an extinction level asteroid hitting in 100 years time they'll just kick the can down the road).

I'm not saying that those two observations are false in more general terms, but what evidence does he have that we act that way when dealing with real civilization threats or difficult engineering challenges? He's talking about the one country that has actually landed people on the moon and brought them back - we may have (sadly in my view) changed priorities since then, but we've shown we can do it if we want/need to. And we've generally picked the right side on civilization threats (against fascism, totalitarianism, etc.) - not a perfect record, of course, but compared to the other great powers of the past few centuries, certainly on the better side of the curve (which of the following have we been significantly worse than in the past two hundred years - British Empire, Soviet Union, Germany, Imperial Japan, China?).

The more likely scenario is having to deal with 15 different but legitimate theories and methods to perform the deflection (the gravity solution he prefers, changing the albedo, giving it a nudge, etc.) and either some analysis paralysis based off that or panicked politicians picking the wrong one. Even we Ammurkins have seen enough killer asteroid movies to know something should be done. Heck, if SpaceX marketed it right, it could be a self-financing private venture posing as a movie...

The Democrats do have a lot of wasted votes (wasted votes in poli-sci circles simply meaning any votes above 50% + 1) because of the concentration of Democrats in big cities. This is the major source of the popular vote vs. the number of representatives disconnect that has occurred since the 1950s. Republicans have more mildly Republican districts than Democrats do.

Incumbency confers a separate advantage of 5-7% of the vote (which is why when the House switches sides, it tends to stay switched for years). When Republicans come off "wave elections" (like 1994 and 2010), the incumbency advantage helps to explain the stickiness of that victory better than the gerrymandering theory.

This isn't to say that gerrymandering is good - I live in Illinois, home to the ear muff outlined 4th district and the "rabbit on a skateboard" 17th district. Both are bizarre and both have supposedly legitimate purposes (majority-minority Hispanic representation in the 4th, I forget the 17th). All the Illinois districts were designed by Democrats for the past two cycles - last cycle was expressly for getting rid of a couple of moderate Republican districts. They were successful at doing that - my moderately Republican town was moved into a heavily Democratic district while a heavily Democratic neighborhood was moved into my old district and swung the election to the Democrats. The gerrymandering can work but it's not perfect and both parties practice it making it a wash for the most part (Texas has killed some Democratic districts, Illinois and California have killed some Republican districts).

People tend to completely forget the biggest voter manipulation of all, though, because it seems so natural now - the complete dominance of Democrats in northern cities. This mostly took place in the 30s thru the 50s and now just seems like it's natural, but it was anything but at the time. The political machine in Chicago essentially removed the Republican party completely through a whole variety of legal, illegal and quasi-legal means. There is no real difference between the demographics of an Edison Park (Chicago neighborhood) and a Morton Grove (a suburb right outside the city) and yet you can't find a Republican in the former while they are rife in the latter (not a majority, but a sizable minority). But you wouldn't get your trash removed, get a building permit or get a pothole fixed in Edison Park for decades if you voted Republican, so everyone there is a Democrat. No one even blinks about that.

And don't even get me started on the sad state of third parties - be it Libertarian or Green or Reform or...

Look, I've already said that I am personally convinced in the reality of AGW and that I favor a policy (carbon taxes) that seeks to control it. I also am very interested in science, am a member of several environmental organizations, wrote for an environmental/alt-energy blog and follow a lot of interesting alt-energy companies (for instance, Cool Planet Fuels has a carbon negative fuel cycle and soil amendment process that seems very cool to me).

I simply think that using loaded terms to describe a range of people, from industry shills on one end to people who simply have policy differences on the other, is counterproductive. It alienates people you can work with and just gives ammunition to those you can't.

It's not "paranoid" to point out that newspapers have been running prominent op-eds making the Holocaust denial link for years - Ellen Goodman, George Monbiot, Peter Christoff , Joel Connelly and a host of others. Grist had to issue a retraction for an admittedly stupid piece calling for Nuremberg trials for denialists. Even one Holocaust survivor has jumped on the bus.

I'm a free speech absolutist - if people want to make analogies to Nazis, Stalinists, Pol Pot or the Psychlo Terl from Battlefield Earth, they have every right to do so. But it's the climate equivalent of fan service - it makes a tiny part of your audience cheer and the rest are either confused or roll their eyes...

I posted the wrong link - sorry about that. It seemed intuitively obvious to me that gerrymandering caused a lot of vote distortion but as I've been reading more deeply into political science research, I've seen that what's intuitively obvious ain't necessarily the truth.

In the article I meant to link, political scientists actually ran simulated elections based on gerrymandered and non-gerrymandered districts (taking actual vote totals and distributing them differently). There was very little effect, going all the way back to the 1950s. The biggest effect they could generate was 7 elections being tipped - and that was making some very generous assumptions on the pro-tipping side.

The big difference maker is incumbency - as a bunch of Republicans got swept into power during the 2010 Tea Party elections, those Republicans had the incumbency advantage in 2012 (post-gerrymandering). Surprise, surprise - they had approximately the same "incumbency effect" as Democrats - 5 to 7 points.

This "proposed" electoral college change was largely spit-balling - someone managed to get Reince Preibus to answer a question about it. He gave a non-commital "that sounds neat" type of answer. But the Republican governors all shot it down pretty fast - most of them are in hostile or 50/50 territory and have no desire to rock the boat.

Meanwhile, the Democratic-leaning National Popular Vote has actually passed in states controlling about 25% of the vote. This is an even more blatant attempt to rig the system (it's the law in - lo and behold - a bunch of solidly Democratic states) but you don't seem to be worried about that one.

Frankly, I don't like either proposal (I'm a libertarianish voter that spreads my vote all over - my last ballot had Democrats, Greens, Libertarians and one Republican on it). I believe federalism is a good thing and would rather it be strengthened than weakened even more.

As I said, it's fun to see the panic this has caused in the left. With the possible exception of Pennsylvania, the Republican governors have all shot this idea down. And the fear this caused is all just a mirage - when real poli-sci people look at it, the gerrymandering fear is bogus. Incumbency is the real problem.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/02/03/gerrymandering-is-not-whats-wrong-with-american-politics/

Absolutely. ;)

Except I'm neither a denier nor a skeptic. I accept AGW as reality - there are way too many independent data points (ocean acidification, growing zone and animal population movements, etc.) for it not to be happening.

I think many of the people you want to lump into the denier bucket are "deniers" not because they really believe nothing is happening but are pushing back over a series of policy proposals that they either dislike or think can't possibly work. For a long time, it was easier to attack the science (a flanking maneuver). Same thing happens on the other side over GMO crops. Increasingly, you will see a change to battling it out over policy - which was the proper place for this debate the entire time.

That one favors the GOP so it's evil. No really, the wonkish left has been in a panic recently over a proposal to do just that in a few of the swing states (Pennsylvania and Ohio, I think).

The National Popular Vote is assumed to favor the Democrats so it's all sweetness and light. Unless you're a Republican, where it's an obvious abrogation of the Founder's federalism.

And unless you bunch together a lot of small states, the populous state still has a lot more voting power (22 versus 4 - you need five and a half of those little states to equal that one populous state). The assumption is that all small states vote the same way and therefore give one side (the Republicans currently) a disproportionate boost.

You could also make the counter argument that a more directly elected government would only care about the urban centers and ignore the needs of the people who live in flyover country (and grow all of our food). Which is pretty much the argument the founders made and why we have the system we do. The current system was designed to provide a balance between the total populace and the distributed populace - if you look at a county level map, the entire freaking country is a sea of red with a bunch of blue dots scattered about. That those blue dots have a lot more people in them is important but there is also an importance to the sea of red.

That doesn't diminish or destroy the usefulness or correctness of the term "denier".

Of course it does. Everyone, on both sides, knows that "denier" is the chosen term specifically because it parallels "holocaust denier". It's argumentum ad Hitlerum and designed and used to make the AGW side feel morally superior. AGW has become a morality play rather than a discussion of how to get rid of a troublesome pollutant (I personally favor a carbon tax).

If you want to differentiate between legitimate skeptics and anti-AGW true believers, you could use any number of terms - from antagonists to refuters to truthers.

Except we have exactly one national election - the Presidency - while we have hundreds of state-centered ones (Senators, Representatives, Governors and other state offices, State Representatives, etc.).

While we certainly could create a parallel election system just for the Presidency, there are a number of reasons not to do it. The more important ones are federalism and triage - Slashdotters in general are unconvinced by the desirability or purpose of federal government (a unitary central state is so much more efficient - it's so clean from an engineering perspective!) and underestimate the worth of triage (we have had elections requiring recounts - a national recount would be a nightmare). The less important ones are cost and complexity - ever since the 2000 election we've been pouring money into electronic voting, better voter access, computerized counting systems, etc., etc. and the national voting system still sucks. Why does anyone think this would ever be done correctly?