And for the record - I never even claimed Obama WAS somebody who wished to build a brand rather than appease a donor - the GP claimed that, I never did.

>You've stated opinion as fact
I did absolutely nothing of the kind. I stated only a generic probability. That somebody who wishes to build a brand will likely not fuck you over as badly as somebody who wishes to appease a donor.
I stated no facts nor even an opinion - I merely told you which outcome is more likely. Even if you DO prove that Obama didn't follow that pattern it wouldn't prove me wrong even a little because I never said "that is what happens" - I said "that is what is more likely to happen".
On holed dice it is more likely to roll a 6 than any other number because the 6-side has the most holes and is thus slightly lighter than the other sides, but people throw other sides all the time - even on dice with holes.
An increased probability is not a guarantee, showing an instance where it didn't happen doesn't disprove the probability.

I'm not the one who claimed Obama was only interested in Hollywood branding, I merely responded generically to the guy who did.
Now as for what you're saying - I don't actually think you're right. Personally I'm not a huge fan of the ACA - single-payer universal healthcare is the one I would have wanted but you have to be a completely ignorant head-in-a-bucket fox-news-only viewer to not realize it's still orders of magnitude better than the craphole the US healthcare system was before this.

That however is not the really interesting part of your post. You're suggesting that Obama went with that plan to appease insurance companies and expects payback. You may be right, time will tell - but I strongly suspect you're very wrong. We know Obama also favoured single-payer, it was during the healthcare reform negotiation period that the plan changed to Romneycare... why ? Well the official story is that it was an attempt be non-partisan, to push healthcare reform in a way the republicans would actually go for, a solid compromise between hell and single-payer, which was actually conceived BY a republican (and the very same republican who ran against him in the next election).

Now it's perfectly possible that you're right and the official account is wrong - that even the very minutes of sessions in congress are nothing but elaborate fakery designed to maintain the ruse (though it seems odd if that was the case that teh republicans were so extremely partisan to this day about something THEY invented !) but I wouldn't hold my breath about it.
Just because something is possible doesn't mean it's likely.

It's worth noting, for how it may impact those hypothetical historians that Obama even now in the position of lame-duck president has the highest approval rating of any president in the second half of his second term for a hundred years - more than twice what Bush 2 had at the same time.

Yes, anything the USSR did is evil by default no matter who else does it, or how else it is done.
Typical American rightwing stupid.

A mandatory voting system with only one party you can vote for is not exactly the same as how it is done in all the free world countries that have it. It's not, in fact, even similar, as the election is entirely pre-determined and purely for show.

That had nothing to do with it being mandatory, only with it being one-party.

The USSR also had a space program before you - clearly Kennedy was a communist for starting the moon-landing plan !

That isn't the biggest problem with money, not by a long shot.

Bernie Sanders sums it up very nicely what the real problem is.
The problem is that to get noticed at all you need a massive budget. To get that budget you have to pander to wealthy donors, big corporations, superpacs, special interests and lobby groups.
To get them to pay you, you have to make promises - most notably about the things you will NOT talk about and NOT address.

Yes sometimes the best funded candidates still lose, but in most cases the lobbyists paid BOTH the major candidates a fortune. They don't care who WINS - they bought the results they wanted. They bet on BOTH outcomes and they win no matter what and the population at large loses.

This is why normal welfare gets cut but corporate welfare never does - even when it is ten times the normal welfare. This is why Detroit is basically stealing the pension plans government workers paid into all those years even though their corporate welfare expenses in just ONE MONTH could eradicate their debts and that same welfare over a year could pay those expenses a hundred times over ! It's not like they can say "we need incentives to keep businesses in our state" - clearly those incentives are not working, the businesses are just using detroit as a money-making machine and still employing from elsewhere.
The same pattern happens all over.

Climate change is an interesting case as it appears that the two parties genuinely diverge there - but clearly not enough for anything meaningful to happen, in fact just enough to make me think that the only reason democrats speak in support of, you know, evidence-based science is because that way they can get lobby money from the greens, environmentalists and renewable energy companies while STILL taking lobby money from the oil companies to never actually DO anything about it and blame the republicans for it.

So in the end US elections end up being decided by things like "pro-life or pro-choice" even though there is no way the pro-life people can actually get a pro-life law passed as it's been ruled unconstitutional. So it's an utterly meaningless debate and the only nasty side effect is a crapload of laws at the state level to make abortions harder to get (which just annoys women and goes flat out against the supposed republican credo of staying out of your personal life). They get decided on things like "do you support gay marriage" - which should be a non-discussion point of "duh it's the 21st century, who you marry is none of our business - marry the same sex, marry 5 different people - as long as it's all done with proper consenting adults we don't care".
While real issues like the NSA spying barely get mentioned in the debates and the biggest issues of all never get mentioned at all. Nobody debates cuts to corporate welfare (Which even libertarians claim to oppose - although all the wealthy lobbyists who claim to be libertarians are massive recipients of this thing they claim to oppose).

A million tiny things determine the elections - things that are truly and utterly unimportant while things that actually matter never get discussed.

In my country voting isn't mandatory. I don't vote however but not because of apathy - I am extremely politically active in many other ways, I don't vote because I have a genuine "none of the above" believe about all the current parties (we don't vote for individuals - we vote for parties who then appoint candidates based on their number of votes - one of the things I don't approve off).
Along with a few other things like floor-crossing I have serious problems with the voting system, so I don't vote.

Now I would PREFER to do spoilt ballots and thus voice my displeasure clearly but we don't COUNT spoilt ballots. If they were counted and the number publicised I would do that, but since they aren't, it would be a meaningless waste of my time.

Only if the fraudster shows up before the legitimate person - and since he knows upfront what would happen if he tried, the odds are the fraudster wouldn't show up at all.

>It just so happens that that party is the one with the most to gain from voter fraud, but I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

Just like it's mere coincidence that the party with the most to gain from making voting harder is the party that keeps saying there *is* widespread voter fraud of course.
Then again, only one of these parties have a long and proud history of ridiculous degrees of gerrymandering to ensure they keep their seats no matter what by making sure everybody who is likely to vote for the other party's candidates are somehow magically not in their districts.

I think you're right, but I would much rather have the guy who cares about hollywood branding than the guy who cares about keeping his promises to the oil company that funded his campaign.

He is simply a lot less likely to fuck things up and when he does fuck up the fuck-ups won't be as big.

>Polls are commonly open at least 11 hours a day. Very few people are working the whole time the polls are open.

The average working-poor person I mentioned in my other comment spends 16 hours a day at work, commute-time included. Most of them have two jobs. In welfare-to-work states they often can't get foodstamps if they have less than two jobs. And the work is in the rich neighbourhoods where they can't afford to live so 4 hour commutes are not unusual.

>"Societies grunts" don't have jobs so they have no excuse for not voting. It's more like a useful way of weeding out the people who don't really care enough about voting to spend half an hour doing it.

Actually no, it's mostly a useful way to weed out the people who earn minimum wage and don't get paid time off - because for them taking half a day off work to go vote is the difference between having dinner that evening or going hungry.
It is, in fact, the most effective way of disenfranchising the working poor you could possibly imagine.
Most civilized countries have voting on a mandatory public holiday - where nobody is ALLOWED to work or to ask anybody else to work. Exceptions are made only for emergency services (like police officers, doctors, nurses and the like) and special arrangements are made to ensure they get a chance to vote as well.

>Linux Mint is hardly the first, nor the most prominent Linux distro to do this. Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, etc... all do this.
Oh I know, I wasn't suggesting it is - I even spoke of the long history of this in another comment. I was merely using it as an example based on my day to day experience.

>The big difference is, Linux distros usually (almost always) do it for stability/security reasons,
Something google has been lax about, I hope that will improve with this.

> as a compromise distros also will host and maintain unofficial repos, AUR on Arch, testing/unstable on Debian, etc...
I mentioned that in my other comment as well - not all of them do, but even if they don't nothing stops you from using third-party repos or even compiling from source or even installing binaries yourself.

>Google has a well known, highly publicized history of pulling apps for terribly sketchy reasons
True, though it's better than apple's (by a long margin) but again - the fact is, they may control their appstore but they don't prevent sideloading or other marketplaces from operating. It would take a massive redesign to try to do so - including removing the ability to root phones by any means (which even apple couldn't manage) and to install custom android builds - many of the phone companies have tried to make that hard (but with limited success) and google has, so far at least, actively encouraged it. The licensing of the large amount of non-google code in android would make such a change very difficult and there is almost no profit potential there - it's rarely wise to remove the major thing differentiating your product from competitors. I'm not saying it never happens or can't happen - I was a happy Playstation customer before the combined rootkit scandal and removing the linux support feature from the PS3s which shipped with it - it drove me to become an xbox customer instead. Sometimes companies do evil and stupid things, but I am saying we have no evidence that, that is what's happening HERE.

> One well known example is Adblock.
Which proves my point - I am running the latest adblock on my cyanogenmod phone right now. Removing it from the playstore had zero impact on my ability to do so.

>You can't compare OSS projects -- which go out of their way to make sure unapproved software is easily accessible -- with Google who is leveraging its position as the pre-bundled app market.
I think I can. Being the preloaded default isn't a limitation, adding limitations would upset me - making it hard to do so would upset me. There was a lot MORE than merely preloading IE wrong with microsoft during the antitrust case. It was preloading IE AND corrupting java AND making IE capable of features that other companies were blocked from adding to their browsers and..and..and..
Now does this have potential to be abused ? Sure, but we haven't got any evidence it's BEING abused - at least not yet. This has apparently been in place for months and I've seen no difference in my playstore line up. Like most people these days, I also only run a very small selection of apps in practice. The days when we loaded lots of them are over, these days people install things they use and only things they use.

Yes !
Also I demand that LinuxMint stops restricting what goes in their official repositories ! I demand that my linux desktop gives me the same spyware experience that my windows-using friends have !

Curating software is always evil regardless of how or why it's done and whether or not I am limited to what the curators recommend.

I am not as it happens. I do sometimes go outside the official mint repositories, for example I installed VirtualBox and PlayOnLinux from their own repositories as those update faster and since I use these programs so heavily I want them to always be on bleeding edge releases.
But I knew the risks doing so, I know that a release there hasn't been tested on my distro - might break something.

Google is just starting to do the same thing LinuxMint does. Their version of PoL is often a few releases behind - because they test it specifically against their software set on more hardware for a purpose.
I have the means to get it sooner elsewhere.
I have access to any program that runs on the OS regardless of the fact that Mint devs don't host all of them.

Google does not, to my mind,appear to be doing anything differently here. Other app stores exist, you can still get an entirely custom built version of the OS from third-parties like cyanogenmod. You can get one with no google apps at all (including no playstore).
Nothing is restricting what users can do, google is ONLY limiting what google does here.
That's not a bad thing, and it's nothing like what the apple appstore does.

The summary is a bit sensationalist and trying to make it sound similar but it really isn't.

Curated software collections have been standard practise in the Linux world since debian launched in the early 1990s.
There were probably even earlier ones on other unixes and maybe even on some earlier OS's than that.

FreeBSD has repositories and macOS is based on that so apple had been working with versions of the idea for ages, many distributions have both curated and uncurated repositories (in some cases the latter is not part of or hosted by the distribution however).

The only thing Apple did was to actively prevent access to any repositories EXCEPT their own - which google is STILL not doing (nothing in here announced their imminent blocking of the amazon appstore for example).

The appstore wasn't an invention at all - it was merely an already ancient idea being added to a cellphone OS and it wasn't even the first to do THAT - blackberry had an appstore-like feature years earlier.

The only change here is the addition of curation. Now we can debate whether the nature of that curation is good or bad for consumers. Distributions usually curate as well - checking submissions for malware is common -and many have additional levels (for example checking for license compliance or limiting approval to software under a pre-chosen subset of acceptable licenses).
Some even curate content - education marketed distros for example will generally not allow adult content programs in their repositories while a distro like debian will usually let it through.