What an incisive observation about probability.

While true, I believe this statement to be somewhat misleading. Democracies can probably tolerate 1% corruption, but when it's getting to be 15, 20, or 50 percent... When the advantages return to being mostly marginal, then it won't be so problematic. If we can find a geometric algorithm which is sensible and hard to game, or a structure such as an independent body, ok, but I think our goal should be reducing the advantages to something tolerable, not eliminating them (which is unlikely). The implication, that anything less than perfection means the effort isn't worth it, is wrong.

Dems have quite a good shot at taking back the house, but not so great a shot at taking back the senate. Having republicans vote for NN in a cynical vote, that could later be flip-flopped on when R is no longer the majority, does not help republicans and it especially wouldn't help Paul Ryan whose got to run for reelection if he refused to have a floor vote. Essentially, the republicans do not want a vote on this in the senate. Dems know it has little chance of reaching DJT's desk, and less of being signed there. Forcing a vote does have democratic value to the voters, and it has political value to the dems.

Your point is regulatory bodies shouldn't regulate?

We should infer nothing from his choosing to mention this particular fact? Just how stupid do you think we are?

I think you were responding to the more attractive alternative.

I'm sure you're just a troll, Russian, uneducated, or all of the above and this response is a waste of time. For those modding you up, the claim is the mean temperature goes up, the standard deviation goes up, hurricane strength goes up (not so much frequency), region climates will change, and temperature volatility goes up.

If science is right, we will have dramatic shifts in temperature, we will have record cold recorded, and the average temperature will be warmer. We will also observe dramatic shifts in climate per region. We're observing all of these effects.

What makes you anti-science is not that you disagree with science, but that you don't even know what the argument is.

What a wretched set of values guides those who seek to elevate themselves at the expense of others. If being slandered a jerk is my lot in life for holding such impoverishing culture in contempt, I'll wear the badge proudly.

What more would you need from the investigation to concern you? Put aside considerations of impeachment, criminality, or pure espionage, are you not at least mildly perturbed that Trump said ...?

Or that Trump's campaign knowingly worked with micro-targeting firms and coordinated propaganda releases with Russia?

How about the idea that Trump has taken an incredibly soft and conciliating approach to Putin on the world stage? You may think that Russia had little effective influence on the 2016 election, ... yet you are not pissed as a patriot that they tried to manipulate our system? Does it concern you that Trump isn't defending the digital invasion of our sovereignty by a state actor? What about his stated willingness to take Putin's word, over the consensus of the US intelligence community and the majority of the US senate, that Russia did not try to manipulate our election?

What about when Trump admitted in a TV interview that he was thinking about the Russia investigation when he fired Comey. Do you not value the tradition of trying to maintain a politically independent FBI?

If you have to pivot to saying all of this is untrue or trying to justify how none of this is illegal or beyond Trump's executive privilege, you aren't arguing in good faith (given that I'm asking if any of this concerns you), or one of us needs to find a better method for ascertaining basic facts.

I think you're right that we could all do a better job listening to each other. I think it's also important that we still attempt to have values, even as we recognize that they won't be shared by everyone. For me, the standard I try to live up to is to engage conversations in good faith.

Can we reject the hypothesis that social media is merely revealing our differences and forcing us to deal with the results of a long process of slowly building stratification? I'd be interested to see if the sense of stratification grows over the long haul.

In my youth, my southern Baptist grandfather didn't get a daily reminder of how awful I think his policies are, viz a viz homosexuality, and he didn't get a daily reminder that I am going to burn in hell. He went about his life hoping I was still going to church and thinking society was mostly like him, white and Christian. I got to forget the depressing xenophobia of rural regions in my urban, liberal enclave. Then Facebook came along and made it clear to both of us that there were many, many Americas full of people doing things I wish they weren't doing.

My attitude is: let's give this some time. It's kinda bruising to keep being a butthole on the internet, maybe we'll work it out well enough that the culture wars become a little less ridiculous. I hear anecdotes that more and more teenagers are confidently (and often casually) uninterested in their parents' culture wars but instead adopting a political position more likely to tolerate diverse groups and less likely to tolerate political positions that disenfranchise others. While this may be quite dogmatic from a certain perspective, it could mean a future where people aren't particularly interested in fighting culture wars instead of fighting over political policies.

I'd also question the idea that we're always susceptible to outrage. Does outrage media sell as well in multicultural societies that largely tolerate intra-group differences? Does it sell as well with gen Z? As an oft-maligned millennial, my experience is that the boomers feel outrage when politics aren't serving them, gen my generation is more likely to feel outraged when anyone is being excluded, and gen Z'ers can't wait for both of us to die off.

I'm sure people blamed the newspaper for encouraging people not to like the monarchy.

It's not about government control of the internet because the rules that it is trying to enforce are public, the actions it takes are public, and the rules are not designed to enable the government to censor speech. The rules as written are not designed to give the government the right to read or manipulate traffic, just the opposite. The loss of net neutrality is a much bigger window for the government to control the internet. Some parts of the government could now collude with the major telecom companies in order to shut down dissident speech. I find a government that isn't enforcing NN to be much more frightening to our freedoms.

Which would be fine if we all had the capacity to enforce contracts.

And, because they agreed everything is kosher, right? Who cares about the rule of law? The externalities on the market are beneath consideration? This logic also justifies things like indentured servitude and selling oneself into chattel slavery. Or, prostitution. There are a whole class of contracts we prevent between two consenting adults in order to protect a larger interest. Even if you do not consider it theft of the worker in question, it is a theft to society as a whole via the externality. It violates the law, and it is a crime. We don't even have to get into coercion, which is an excellent point Captain Splendid made that you sailed over like you're jumping a chasm in the General Lee.

Also, nice dog whistle.

No, they wouldn't, because the urban dwellers in Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas, Alaska, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, and on and on, add up to a whole helluva lot of people and they'd equally have the vote. Good lord, did they teach you how to count?

The EC doesn't just screw over California and New York, it screws over any dense urban population of every red state who will never get a say in who becomes president, and every lonely blue person in the bogs and bayous who keeps his or her mouth shut. There are more blues than reds and there are many many blues all over the US who do not get a meaningful vote.

If we manage to flip TX, the center will move radically towards the urban population and then the EC will be wedging the deep reds out of having any say anywhere in whose president. It's a pretty arcane, shitty system. We could use an update. Although, the senate will always be heavily prejudiced towards the Wyomings, the Dakotas, and the Rhode Islands.

City folk didn't purposefully elect a prick to screw with their political opposition. City folk don't want to screw over farmers. Nor is it in the farmer's best interests to screw over city folk, cuz we do things like eliminate polio, invent dwarf wheat, bring down the cost of manufactured goods, and raise the quality of life. We have also made it possible for the US to have the world's best military, because everyone has brave muscular men, but few have an unlocked GPS system.

We're all Americans and our votes should count equally.