False dichotomy. Uncontrollable situations such as miscarriages are not the same as willful neglect.

Considering personhood is a legal concept, it's no more arbitrary than deciding when speech is free or not, when taxes are just or not, when marriage is allowed or not... it depends on whether the law in general has your respect.

Calling a 4-week old fetus a "baby" is kind of like calling a 4-month old boy a "man". Not really right, not really wrong... but that doesn't really matter anyway, it's not what the debate is about.

What matters is legal personhood. At what point in life does a person begin to have specific rights, and at what point does a person gain legal recognition as a party of civil and criminal actions? That's what it's about... not whether people call the human a "baby".

That might work. My concern would be, it might kill local representation altogether in the House. It could also lead to a very popular person, or a small group of 5 or 10, having so much voting power that the rest really don't matter.

I guess the same could happen in large states. Perhaps districts are still a good thing for this reason, but I think there might be merit in reducing the number of districts while increasing the number of representatives per district.

We transferred 2 from two different IVF cycles, so around either 14 months or 17 months.

No, the simple truth is that these are really the same folks no matter the letter beside their name. Some of them even switch the letter by their name when it becomes convenient, and the sad truth is, many people don't even realize it.

Yes, he is 4 months old now.

Yes.

My son was frozen through embryonic cryopreservation.

(I'm not actually equating the difficulty of resuscitation at embryonic stage with that of a live-born human. It's a complete difference in magnitude and difficulty, obviously.)

Aesthetically, I much prefer Windows 8 over 7, and Plasma 5 over 4.

Years ago, I remember similar outcries when XP introduced its bloated UI, and then Vista (and 7) made borders thicker and made things transparent. I'm sure there are some people who really truly have issues with reduced clutter in their UI, but for most people I have a feeling they just don't like things that aren't exactly what they are used to.

If only there were ways to mod the user interface...

Then perhaps you'll leave the driving to the computer system. The same computer which, by the time these systems are allowed to be sold, will be much safer than the human who cannot perform well when drowsy or distracted by the screaming baby in the back seat while having an argument with the wife.

Actually I fail to see how "motivate your employees to work harder" necessarily translates into "employees are happier". In many companies the two concepts are inversely correlated.

I prefer it when leadership gets paid in company stock. When the company does well, they get a reward. If the company performs poorly, they take a hit. When CEOs get a guaranteed salary with a nice severance agreement, that gives them less incentive to perform in the best interest of the company.

And I am aware of a few kinks that would need to be resolved. If you keep the current districts, there would need to be more seats as now there are multiple representatives per district. And what if 20 people run for a district and get votes, should all 20 get seats? Probably not.

Some possibilities:

- Reduce the number of districts.
- Limit the number of representatives allowed per district.
- Perhaps, just get rid of districts. If someone from across my state represents me better than someone local, then perhaps my appointment should not be limited by borders drawn for an election system that would no longer be in place.

Why do we even need to elect our representatives? Consider this: if a rep gets 51% of the vote in the district, then nearly half the people are not represented. On top of this we have gerrymandering. If 80 out of 100 districts are 51% for party A and 49% for party B, and the other 20 districts are 100% for party B, you can easily see that despite having a real majority, party B has no actual power. Pretty sucky if you ask me.

No... I have a different answer:

Appointing our representation. In this system, each representative carries one vote for every person who appoints him or her. Taking the above scenario, if 51,000 people appointed rep A and 49,000 appoint rep B, then rep A gets 51,000 votes in congress and rep B gets 49,000 votes. But consider what that does to the 100 districts... now party A has 4,080,000 votes and party B has 5,920,000 votes on every issue... exactly what it should be.

Appointment-based representation is fair, and it removes the power of gerrymandering.

Think about the thickness of a dollar bill. Imagine stacking dollar bills on top of each other... $100 is a bit less than half an inch, and $1 million is about 30 stories tall. $1 trillion reaches a little over 1/4 of the way to the moon.

Take that $1 trillion stack and imagine shrinking it again, back down to the height of a single dollar bill. Take 1 trillion of those, again creating a tower 1/4 of the way to the moon.

Go back and imagine the size of that original dollar bill now, shrunken so much. If the new tower represents 5000 light years, that original dollar bill represents a single mile.