How are mail-in ballots protected from fraud? I keep hearing that fraud is not a problem, but I'm wondering (a) how do we know there is little fraud; and (b) what mechanisms make it safe from fraud?
Mail-in ballots are linked to a voter permit (outer envelope) which serves the purpose of maintaining the pollbook, that is, ensuring that each voter casts only one vote. This prevents ballot stuffing.
Mail-in ballots are sealed in a tamper evident fashion inside of the permit, to prevent modification. Because opening the envelope would probably damage it, a duplicate enveloped (forged permit) would need to be produced to modify the ballot. In most cases a duplicate ballot would also be needed, which presents its own obstacle, although ballots are not generally intended to be protected against forgery.
The postal service is backed by a particularly strong set of criminal laws which generally make a felony to interfere with the mail. This is of course on top of laws protecting the voting system from tampering.
The outer envelope (permit) is a sworn statement and signing for someone else's ballot would be perjury, a felony, in addition to other laws around voting that likely exist in the state.
None of these measure are perfect, but combined they make vote-by-mail fraud difficult to achieve on a meaningful scale. Remember that, to be effective, voter fraud needs to be successfully committed not once, but many times. The difficulty of each case and general history of harsh prosecution of small-time fraud creates a significant disincentive to try.
Fraud isn't impossible, just difficult to do on a scale that would matter in most elections. In NC, an election had to be redone because someone working for the GOP candidate had fraudulently collected absentee ballots (from registered Democrats I think), preventing those ballots from being counted or possibly tampered with them, and it was a close race.
So obviously the voter needs to be careful to place the mail-in ballot correctly into the USPS and then the USPS has to be trusted to deliver the ballots correctly.
Beyond that, the mail-in ballots are checked against the registered voter rolls. So the state has to maintain clean voter rolls.
But this is not much different really from in-person voting. In theory, I could go to my local polling location and claim to be one of my neighbors, sign their name, and take their vote. They'd only notice if they showed up to vote later. But I'd likely get caught if they'd already voted. Or maybe the poll worker would recognize me. There are lots of scenarios you could imaging getting away with a handful of fraudulent votes. But it would hard to be able to do anything significant enough to affect the outcome of most elections.
One thing I really don't get is the voter registration thing in the US. All European countries I know of simply require residents to register their primary and secondary residencies. You get voting papers to your primary residency. That's it. No registration as a voter, no party affiliation. You can be a party memebyer, but that information isn't public.
Same in Europe. With the notable exception of local elections, like mayors and so on. Thing is, you cannot purge a voter role, as the voter role is the residents role. But then we have ID requirements.
"Bored mailman convicted for altering 8 ballot request forms" suggests that they are secure. Even if he wasn't caught, there should have been time for the ballots to be replaced.
Those claims have been shown to be largely incorrect, with even the foundation retracting the article. An unreturned ballot does not mean fraud, the registered voter may have chosen to vote in person or not vote in that election. Several states send ballots to every registered voter, and that's how the number reached 28 million.
What are the consequences to people in Tulsa who aren't tribe members? Landowners who aren't tribe members? Can the tribe expel them and confiscate the land?
You need to have federal drug laws because the one thing the federal government is supposed to do is manage the borders and relationships with other countries. If you don't have federal drug laws then bringing drugs across the border stops being a crime and we could end up with the fiasco of drug lords that Mexico has where journalists get beheaded for even reporting on it.
Mexico only has drug lords because US drug laws fuel their black market.
If you are skeptical of this, there are academic papers on the topic. You could also examine the history books regarding the rise of organized crime there. (For that matter, the rise of organized crime in the US was largely fueled by the prohibition of alcohol as far as I understand it.)
I am confused about what you mean. First, the federal government clearly has authority over international commerce. Second, the price of drugs in legal markets would be much lower, which would likely reduce revenue for criminal gangs in foreign lands. Third, the U.S.-Mexico border is long and it's hard to enforce smuggling laws, anyway. And fourth, Americans are quite capable of producing drugs on their own, and even more so if they were legal.
Cigarette smuggling is a thing because regulated cigarettes are more expensive than unregulated cigarettes. Why would that be any different for other drugs?
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
That would keep the pesky federal government out of our personal affairs.
The interstate commerce clause made for a fine end run around the spirit of that bit in the end.
If we do ever manage to address the interstate commerce clause, we'll have to account for the fact that our day to day functioning has come to depend on a number of large federal regulatory bodies whose legitimacy is derived from it (ex FDA, FCC, etc).
> we'll have to account for the fact that our day to day functioning has come to depend on a number of large federal regulatory bodies whose legitimacy is derived from it (ex FDA, FCC, etc).
The simplest way to deal with that would be to have those bodies continue to exist and publish "suggested" rules, which all the states could then adopt wholesale if they don't want to be bothered to do anything different.
Or a state could do something different, if they wanted to, which is kind of the point.
That doesn't solve interagency problems. What do you do when someone is drugrunning on two sides of a border? Just run two completely independent investigations and hope that California agents aren't worried about Oklahoma agents getting the credit?
This is how the state health and labor departments work right now.
When the CDC recommends action for workplace safety in light of a strain E. Coli found in a crop grown in one state and sold in many, state health departments and state labor departments have full autonomy on how to handle the issue in their respective states.
I don’t really think that a lot of day to day functioning depends on FDA. FDA definitely has a lot to say about a lot of things, and, arguably, without it, some undesirable things would happen more often, but all in all, we would be mostly fine.
I don't have the time or energy to synthesize an exhaustive list of concerning examples on the spot. If the prospect of an under regulated food supply doesn't concern you I would strongly suggest reading "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair. (Or for a lighthearted example, see: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chemical-infused-watermelons-ex...)
Yeah, imagine having to negotiate the EULA of every single grocery item to check for “fitness for consumption” clauses, what a Libertarian dream would that be! Of course the Market will eventually average out the bad players, thanks to the compound effect of billions of Rational Choices... eventually we’ll also be dead as that John Maynard guy once said. Perhaps sooner rather than later in this scenario ;)
There are few rational choices given the lack of current transparency and future information that hasn't happened yet. There is no Market without immediate consequences. Dole Foods often has salad recalls due to ppl getting sick with e coli... Are they really a bad actor? Or just a poor one that can do better? Do you have time to make your own rating of which company, manufacturing plant, farm it was supplied from? What's a credible dinner alternative given your context and available time and guests? A bad actor can last a long time.
Funny how daring americans were flying planes for almost 20 years, no EULA needed, and planes didn't drop out of the skies at all.
If anything, the problem is that when there are no rules, some people (pilots) themselves were reckless and can endanger others. That is something to be solved by criminal courts, though.
Sure, but then federal support of state projects gets tied to whatever the federal government wants the state to do. The state isn’t bound, but it’s political suicide to turn down money.
This is a powerful weapon that can be used for both good and bad.
This is why direct taxation (16th Amendment) was a mistake. It allows the federal government to take away the citizens' money first, and then give it back to the states, with conditions.
If the federal government had to collect from the states, then there would be more oversight and power for states to say "wait a minute, why are we giving you money and then begging to get it back".
In theory, the result could be the same. Congress could still pass spending bills and give the money over with conditions. But in practice I think states would be in a more powerful negotiating position.
Though I'm not necessarily disagreeing, eliminating direct taxation is more complex than just giving oversight to states. If a state can say, "no, not giving you money unless we get it back", it becomes a lot harder for the country to function. Money from Connecticut helps pay for numerous programs in other states. At a high-level, we like to say that states would make the right decisions, but would they? Or would Connecticut say they'd rather have the money to sustain their state better? Of course, is the federal government making the right decisions?
Think about it this way: collecting taxes from states was a two-party relationship. The states were compelled to pay in this transaction, but it's still two parties on opposite sides of the table, and their are other topics to negotiate later. If the federal government were to play an obvious game of taking money and then giving it back with conditions, then states would have exerted their power in other transactions. For instance, with senators who were chosen by the state legislature (the same body paying the taxes). Additionally, the state is a stronger entity to fight back against this kind of abuse than an individual citizen.
Now, let's change the picture to directly-elected senators and direct taxation. Now, the money is collected directly from the citizens first, and then the government's relationship with the state is entirely different. Now, the state and the federal government are cooperating, and the sucker is the one not in the room: the citizen whose money is being passed around. The state just becomes a node in a hierarchy, rather than a formidable agent with its own powers and responsibilities.
It's actually very similar to negotiations with a public employees' union. The government and the union are "negotiating", but they are really on the same side of the table. The sucker is the citizen who's paying for it all, but isn't even in the room.
I don't think the alternative is voluntary donations by states to the federal government vs direct taxation of individuals, but compulsory contributions from the states to the federal government.
The reason it would have a different outcome is because in a debate between 51 people, the chair doesn't have that much more power than the individuals. The federal government might be agree to set contributions according to fixed dollar values that the states can watch inflate down to a more palatable value, or they might agree to ignore certain sources of wealth in their calculations.
Discussions and disagreements will take on a very different flavor compared to the discussions and disagreements between a third of a billion players.
It is not apparent to me why this should result in an end to regulation of drugs as this subthread seems to imply it should. States can be just as interested in preventing drug use as the federal government - even more interested.
The drug regulation question isn't theoretical. There's currently a difference of opinion between more than half of the states, compared to the Federal government, on whether or not to consider cannabis a illicit substance with no legitimate use.
I don't know that an end to regulation of all drugs is in order, but if a majority of states (which make up the Federal government) believe cannabis has legitimate use, why then, is it still Federally illegal?
> At a high-level, we like to say that states would make the right decisions, but would they?
What magic method does the Federal government have to only make the right decision? The Federal government is just as likely to make the wrong decision as a given State. Probably more so, if a big government makes a mistake it is harder to correct than when a small government makes the mistake. And the effects are more far-reaching.
The Federal Government just makes decisions slower, that is by design. Sort of a brake effect. Look at Prohibition for example, some states enacted laws. Eventually the movement gained national ground and the amendment was passed. It took 13 years for it to be repealed.
I would posit that America has less of a pot culture then it did a drinking culture. The history reads similar. First states took up the banner of morality.
>In the West, the first state to include cannabis as a poison was California. The Poison Act was passed in 1907 and amended in 1909 and 1911, and in 1913 an amendatory act was made to make possession of "extracts, tinctures, or other narcotic preparations of hemp, or loco-weed, their preparations and compounds" a misdemeanor.[6] There is no evidence that the law was ever used or intended to restrict pharmaceutical cannabis; instead it was a legislative mistake, and in 1915 another revision placed cannabis under the same restriction as other poisons.[6] In 1914, one of the first cannabis drug raids in the nation occurred in the Mexican-American neighborhood of Sonoratown in Los Angeles, where police raided two "dream gardens" and confiscated a wagonload of cannabis.[19]
Other states followed with marijuana laws including: Wyoming (1915); Texas (1919); Iowa (1923); Nevada (1923); Oregon (1923); Washington (1923); Arkansas (1923); Nebraska (1927);[20] Louisiana (1927); and Colorado (1929).[21] -Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_history_of_marijuana_in_...
Now states are removing their laws and with an eventual push the Federal government will change their laws as well.
The real mistake was to make Senators elected rather than appointed by the states as they originally were. Representation of the general population is the purpose of the House, the Senate was meant to represent the states in the federal government.
The biggest flaw when reasoning about government is overestimating how well democracy works as a method of solving problems.
If everyone agrees about the major stuff, and you just need to finally make a decision on what color to paint the bike shed, democracy is great. A decision gets made, enough people are happy, and you move on.
But when you have real differences, you need a way to protect minorities against large coalitions of voters. Even if you aren't in a minority today, shifting politics (and divide-and-conquer politicians) will ensure that you are in a minority soon enough.
And it's even worse when society is polarized, because the coalitions form too quickly and too strongly.
But limiting the power of the majority is hard. The Constituion is genius because they recognized that and divded the power so many different ways. The protection of political minorities is much more important than the small amount of additional abstract fairness you get with direct elections.
Have y'all forgotten the entire reason the 16th amendment was passed? It wasn't because of fairness, it was because the state legislatures couldn't agree on people to elect. And when they could there were concerns about corruption and seats being sold.
So let the seats be empty. That will make the constituents mad and they'll vote out the incumbents and replace them with somebody who will appoint Senators. Or they won't. People get the government they deserve.
And if there are "concerns about corruption" then investigate the corruption and put the perpetrators (if any) in prison.
It's strange to say this when you are proposing to take away their direct vote on the matter. If anything, the current system is what gives people the government they deserve, by having voted on it.
And in the 4 years where the seats are empty? Or the year where the state can pass no state level legislation? (Both of those actually happened, hence the immense popular support by the states for adopting the 17th amendment)
Not to mention that the holdover/compromise from the original way things worked (replacement appointment by the Governor) resulted in perhaps the most famous recent example of executive misconduct by a Governor: Rod Blagojevich.
> And in the 4 years where the seats are empty? Or the year where the state can pass no state level legislation?
But whose problems are these? The people who elected the state legislators who did them, right? There is a preexisting solution for that problem.
The voters can vote for representatives who are willing to compromise and appoint a moderate, or they can vote for representatives who are willing to engage in brinkmanship and then get nothing, and either way they got what they voted for.
> Not to mention that the holdover/compromise from the original way things worked (replacement appointment by the Governor) resulted in perhaps the most famous recent example of executive misconduct by a Governor: Rod Blagojevich.
...who then went to prison. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
> But whose problems are these? The people who elected the state legislators who did them, right? There is a preexisting solution for that problem.
We see federal representatives rewarded for brinkmanship. What makes you think state level electorates would act differently? (And in fact I expect there's lots of examples of brinkmanship in state electorates as well, I just don't follow them closely).
A representation system that fails to represent is dysfunctional and should be changed. When the same system consistently fails to represent its constituency, for the same reason, across various constituencies at various times, you can no longer fault the people. The constituents should not be punished for being born into a dysfunctional system.
Don't place the founders on a pedestal. They made tons of mistakes. The 3/5ths compromise was terrible, but it was encoded into the constitution. We learned from it and improved. State managed senators, while less overtly awful, were still quite problematic. Celebrate that the constitution can be changed.
> So what if they do? It's what their constituents voted for. Who's to say brinkmanship is never an optimal strategy?
If you're going to argue that "it's what their constituents voted for" you have to apply that evenly: the consituents got so fed up with this issue that they elected legislators who changed the constitution. No easy feat.
> So change it by voting for different state legislators.
They did, they made it such an issue that their legislators ended up ratifying a constitutional amendment.
> Just because something can be done doesn't make it a good idea.
This applies equally in both directions. "It was that way first" isn't a merit, especially when "It was that way first" also applies to slavery.
> If you're going to argue that "it's what their constituents voted for" you have to apply that evenly: the consituents got so fed up with this issue that they elected legislators who changed the constitution. No easy feat.
It's two different questions -- does the system do what the constituents want (possibly yes), and what do we as the present day constituents want? The answer to which is not, from what I can gather, the status quo.
> They did, they made it such an issue that their legislators ended up ratifying a constitutional amendment.
Technically they didn't. It was the then-appointed Senate who approved the amendment (and by and large without having been replaced with different people), and they only did so out of fear of rising populist sentiment and what would happen if there was a constitutional convention in that climate. So they were basically doing their job and moderating populist sentiment, but apparently the anti-populist safeguards weren't strong enough to constrain populist sentiment from weakening them even further in that way.
> This applies equally in both directions. "It was that way first" isn't a merit, especially when "It was that way first" also applies to slavery.
Your argument was "celebrate that the constitution can be changed" as if any change is inherently good. But change can make things worse too. Before there was slavery there was not slavery.
Your main criticism also seems to be that the seats were going vacant, so the solution I would offer would be to hold a popular election but only if there has been no appointment within six months. Then the seat can't go vacant long but you're not, in the common case, taking away the seat of the states in the federal government.
Or just have the legislatures vote. The two candidates with the higher number of votes get to represent that state. With some luck, every state will be represented by one Republican and one Democratic senator. That should help to remove some of the party politics out of the senate.
TL;DR: Just use range voting and put in the candidate with the highest rating. (Note that Senators' terms are staggered so there aren't two up from the same state at the same time, but if there were you could easily send the two with the highest ratings instead of the one.)
I'm not American, but if the Senate is meant to represent the states, then it makes sense to have them appointed by the states, or elected by the state legislatures (this is for example how the Dutch senate (Eerste Kamer) is elected, though it's still proportional to the population of the provinces, unlike the two per state no matter how big or small).
But if you want your country to be democratic and representing the people, then the people's representation (the House) should hold most of the power, and the representation of the states (the Senate) should only really be involved in states-related issues. For example, not being able to create laws, but only deciding whether an issue is a federal issue or a states issue.
Merely making senators appointed by states isn't going to fix all of the problems with the senate.
You missed the nuance of GP. If senators represent states, they should not be given the power to create laws about people, but instead only about the interactions between states, leaving laws about people up to the House.
This would make the Senate more akin to the Supreme Court, though empowered to craft legislation instead of just rule on existing issues.
Wow, this is the first time I have ever seen anyone other than me express this opinion.
I understand some of the reasons changes were made, look forward to reading the this thread!
My quick thoughts on the matter is that since the changes, people have stopped paying as much attention to local(State politics) and focus more on Federal politics.
Edit to add information to support my thoughts: Look at the disapproval rating for congress, around 64%. But a large majority are incumbents. The feeling I get when talking to people is that the Senator from state X is the worst but my Senator from state Y is perfect/has flaws but brings value to my state.
I am completely incapable of understanding this argument.
The only interests states have are the interests of their constituents. States don't need representation, their people do - because states don't have interests, people who live in them have interests.
It should be noted that the original ideal, at the time the national framework was drafted, was for the Senate to represent the interests of oligarchs, couched in the language of it serving as a representative of the interests of the states. In that respect, it's still doing a rather swell job.
> The only interests states have are the interests of their constituents.
So then it shouldn't matter, right? The constituents elect the state legislatures who represent their interests, one of those interests is having US Senators who represent their interests, so their elected representatives appoint those US Senators. If your theory is correct then this should have the exact same result as directly elected Senators, because the states don't have interests separate from those of their constituents.
But it isn't, because elected officials do have their own interests. So then the question is, which process produces Senators that represent their constituents better?
US Senators have a personal conflict of interest in expanding the scope of the federal government in excess of what's in the interest of their constituents, because the federal government is subject to their control, and they personally want to control more stuff. State legislatures have the opposite conflict -- they want more state control, for the same reasons.
If you have directly elected Senators, there is no check on that conflict of interest and federal scope expands without bound. If you have Senators appointed by the state legislatures, these conflicts more or less cancel out. The US Senator still has the personal incentive to increase the scope of the federal government, but now they're directly accountable to the state legislatures with the opposite interest, and the result is closer to the true interest of the constituents.
Meanwhile the House is still directly elected, which is a countervailing check on the power of "oligarchs" or what have you, because a federal law has to pass both.
Thank you for explaining this point. I disagree with it, but I see your motivation for it.
> The US Senator still has the personal incentive to increase the scope of the federal government, but now they're directly accountable to the state legislatures with the opposite interest
State legislatures are only interested in a decreased scope of federal government when the federal government is not giving them what they want, much like how the States Rights party only cares about states rights when those rights concern themselves with what their base wants.
So, I don't think you're going to get that kind of check and balance. What you're probably going to get is similar to my original thesis - that it shouldn't matter...
Except that it does.
If you have the state legislatures appoint a truly terrible senator, there's no personal blowback against any of the members of the legislature - because responsibility is diffused. The office would become:
1. A perfect reward for connected party insiders, who, compared to the status quo, don't even have to win an election.
2. That would not be accountable to the public.
3. And where the people the public can hold accountable (The people making the appointments) are two steps removed from their behaviour.
Consider, for the sake of argument, supreme court appointments. Consider that a man who turned out, after the fact, to be an absolute monster was appointed. Then consider, what kind of blowback would the senators who made the appointment be subjected to?
They wouldn't be any. Just like how there's currently no blowback against Senate Republicans for the crazy train ride that Mitch McConnell takes them on. Everyone can shrug their shoulders, shirk responsibility, and blame the rest of the collective (preferably the guys holding safe seats) for the disastrous appointment.
Consider, also, all the bellyaching that people on this forum have about overreach by appointed bureaucrats running federal agencies? You'd have this exact problem, except it would be even more difficult to hold them to task, and they'd have even more collective power than executive bureaucrats currently do - where they couldn't even be overruled by the legislature - because they are the legislature.
> State legislatures are only interested in a decreased scope of federal government when the federal government is not giving them what they want.
Which is to say that they are interested in it at all other times, which is more than there is otherwise.
Meanwhile, what is it that you expect them to want from them? The federal government taxes their citizens (which they can do themselves) and then sends the money back with strings attached. What value to the state of the strings?
> If you have the state legislatures appoint a truly terrible senator, there's no personal blowback against any of the members of the legislature - because responsibility is diffused.
The vote should be public so there would be blowback against everyone voting in favor of it.
> Consider, for the sake of argument, supreme court appointments. Consider that a man who turned out, after the fact, to be an absolute monster was appointed. Then consider, how will the careers of the senators that approved the appointment would be impacted by such an appointment?
This is exactly the sort of thing that hasn't happened to the Supreme Court in practice.
> You've surely heard all the bellyaching that people on this forum have about overreach by appointed bureaucrats running federal agencies? You'd have this exact problem, except it would be even more difficult to hold them to task, and they'd have even more collective power, and you won't even have anyone to task for their behaviour.
They would be held in check by the House which would have to sign onto every law they want to pass unlike appointed bureaucrats in the executive (which by itself solves nearly the entire problem), and if they're really so bad then most state legislatures are elected every two years rather than every four for the POTUS so the backlash comes quicker, and the problems you're describing don't even sound that serious or different from ordinary politics:
> 1. A perfect reward for connected party inspiders.
Sounds a lot like getting to be the party's candidate in a safe district, and doesn't inherently imply anything good or bad about what kind of Senator they'll be.
> 2. That would not be accountable to the public
This is a feature. It gives a veto to a body that isn't directly subject to populist fervor.
> 3. And where the people the public can hold accountable are a step removed from that behaviour.
In other words they are still ultimately accountable to the public.
> Which is to say that they are interested in it at all other times, which is more than there is otherwise.
Politicians have agendas. Those agendas consist of things they want done. Nobody's agenda, (as we've seen from how the States Rights party actually behaves, when push comes to shove) actually consists of 'reduce federal power'. That's because 'reduce federal power' doesn't accomplish anything in particular. Nobody gets re-elected because they reduced federal power. People get re-elected for getting stuff done. 'Reduced federal power' does not actually tie into getting anything in particular done.
As such, it's occasionally a tool that you can use, for some particular goal, but is not an end in itself. (It may be an end in itself for you, but your viewpoint is not one that politicians do anything but pay lip service to, to get your vote.)
> The vote should be public so there would be blowback against everyone voting in favor of it.
Name one embarrassing senatorial appointment that resulted in serious blowback to the people voting for the appointment.
Just one.
You won't be able to - because political parties aren't ran by fools. They've made laundering unpopular blowback for group failures onto safe-district candidates into an art form.
> This is exactly the sort of thing that hasn't happened to the Supreme Court in practice.
In practice, it has happened to cabinet appointments. And again, in practice, nobody who votes for an appointment actually gets blamed for a disastrous one, for three reasons.
1. The appointee is their own person - the people voted for him can't predict the future, and aren't actually micromanaging his behaviour. When he does something awful, it's not directly their fault.
2. The appointee is everyone's responsibility, which is to say, he's no-one's responsibility.
3. Blowback laundering, see above. Safe-district candidates actively take credit for controversial, or unpopular decisions, to shield the rest of their party.
> They would be held in check by the House which would have to sign onto every law they want to pass unlike appointed bureaucrats in the executive (which by itself solves nearly the entire problem),
The House has just as much way to control the bureaucrats, if it chose to. By doing their job - legislating. If they are shirking this responsibility, considering that, perhaps, it may actually be happy with the job the bureaucrats are doing?
It is mind-boggling that you recognize that the power of appointed, unelected individuals is a problem, but think that the solution is to increase the number of, and power of appointees, and also giving them legislative power.
Note that the best contemporary example of a functioning federal democracy with state-appointed federal legislators is Germany. There, the state premiers and some members of cabinet are members of the Bundesrat, the upper house of federal parliament.
As an empirical matter, it certainly seems as if their interest is in increasing federal power, since that gives them more power against their own state legislature. If they want a bill passed, they can use their federal power to create an obligation on their state parliament to pass a bill.
Consequently, the very clear direction of power shift in Germany has been - much more so than in the English speaking federations - an increase in federal power. (Also, a more recent prohibition on state deficits even accelerated that trend. State governments became enthusiastic about trading a little power for some extra money.)
When, as in the US, state lines run through the middle of metropolitan areas, cities and even small towns, and generally serve more to divide than to unite, it is not at all obvious that an increase of federal power compared to state power is such a bad thing. I think it would be better to redraw the map and then for the states to have powers that make sense. But I think that is about as likely as a Democrat and a Republican to agree on the color of the sky on a clear day.
> As an empirical matter, it certainly seems as if their interest is in increasing federal power, since that gives them more power against their own state legislature. If they want a bill passed, they can use their federal power to create an obligation on their state parliament to pass a bill.
You already explained the reason this happens in Germany:
> the premier has an interest in transferring power from the state governments since their power as a member of the federal upper house is greater than their power as a member of the state lower house.
Solution: Don't put the same person in both houses.
> When, as in the US, state lines run through the middle of metropolitan areas, cities and even small towns, and generally serve more to divide than to unite, it is not at all obvious that an increase of federal power compared to state power is such a bad thing.
State lines that run through the middle of metropolitan areas are the best kind, because they give people the greatest choice. If you don't like your state government and voting hasn't gone your way you don't even have to move across the country to change jurisdictions, only across the street.
Moving things to the federal level does the opposite. Things haven't gone your way? Too bad, there's nowhere to run.
The Premier of a German state is also the head of majority-party in the state legistlature. Also, they are sitting members of the state legistlature.
That being the case, state prime ministers have a huge amount of power and influence, directly through mandates and indirectly through party politics. And usually, they want to to retain the maximum amount independence for their states.
And as far as federal legislation is concerned, one state prime minister is not enough to pass, or trigger, anything by himself. For state legislation, they don't have to pass through the federal goernment anyway, holding the parliamentary majority anyway (minority governments are extremely rare in Germany).
"Democracy" and "the will of the people" are abstractions, and pretty crude ones, at that.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't have democracy, but we should acknowledge that it is far from perfect. As Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."
Democracy is also not a scale-free process. Very different dynamics play out in a democracy the size of a city versus a state versus the size of a nation.
It's hard to explain briefly, but basically all of these separations of powers are designed to avoid some of the worst aspects of democracy. They happen to look less "fair" in an abstract sense, but it's more important to have some practical safeguards than abstract fairness.
A lot of our most heated political battles are playing out at the federal level (and have been for a long time), and I think that's a consequence of the 16th and 17th Amendments. If some of these battles were playing out in the states, I think our society would be a lot less polarized.
I think that was the inevitable consequence of terms for Senators. It is clear that a person appointed by a red governor cannot represent the blue governor who administers the purple state for several years starting six months later. State-appointed senators with fixed terms have little natural legitimacy; it is not a sustainable model.
If you want the senate to represent the states, you need the German system - there, the Bundesrat (Federal Council) has as its members the premier of the state (and, depending on the state's size, some number of ministers). Its members and balance can change whenever there is a state election (which are not tied, US style, to federal elections).
Now, while they will represent the interests of the state governments quite well, be aware of this - the premier has an interest in transferring power from the state governments since their power as a member of the federal upper house is greater than their power as a member of the state lower house. They can use their federal role to create an obligation for themselves as state ministers, and then tell state parliament "Oh, we have no choice; the federal government has said so. Please fall in line with this policy that I want and you do not want."
The paliamentary system is repugnant to the American sense of the separation of powers. But since American separation of powers prefers to give legislative power to the executive, it's less obvious that making governors members of the Senate is repugnant. This would multiply the problems above.
Perhaps having a recallable delegate who is effectively a member of the state cabinet without portfolio would be palatable; but still, such a delegate would be entirely at the mercy of the state governor (or it would work), and we then would still see the benefits to the state governor of creating legislative obligations that state congress still has to fulfil.
To me, it seems that the Australian senate does a good job of representing the people of each State. Since the interests of States can be said to be the interests of the people of each State (rather than the interests of the State governments) it therefore discharges its responsibilities adequately. The key here is in having many five or members per state elected at once using a proportional method like STV optimised for small electorate magnitudes. Since the majority of any state will be made up of a roughly equal number of blues and reds it encourages them to work together at the expense of the small number of extremists or against each other with centrists and sometimes fringe members. Constantly changing coalitions (per bill) mean negotiation skills become important. But how adaptable it is to a federation of 50 states - I don't know.
> It is clear that a person appointed by a red governor cannot represent the blue governor who administers the purple state for several years starting six months later.
The purpose of the Senate isn't to represent the existing representatives in a state, it's to represent the interests of the state in the abstract. Having a red US Senator in a state with a blue Governor is no more a problem than having a red state legislature in a state with a blue Governor.
> But since American separation of powers prefers to give legislative power to the executive, it's less obvious that making governors members of the Senate is repugnant.
This is largely only true at the federal level and for a very specific reason. The federal government was not structured for the level of responsibility it has taken on as a result of the direct election of Senators removing the state veto on increasing federal scope.
In state governments you have an elected governor and legislature, but also elected school boards, treasurers, sheriffs etc. There are no elected positions in the Federal Department of Education, nor the Federal Reserve, nor the FBI. The constitution didn't contemplate that the federal government would grow to cover so many things, so they all fall under executive control. But the source of the problem isn't pushing too many things to the executive, it's pushing too many things to the federal government to begin with.
The only case where elections aren't accurate for this is if the state government is non democratic. The state is just a bunch of people -- representation of the state is covered by how many representatives are sent per state. To my knowledge, the general population of the colonies and so on don't get representation in the Senate, only people that live in states
If you didn't have a fairly strong federal government, the US would become like the EU, basically unable to enact change in any even slightly controversial topic.
Federal drug laws were upheld on the grounds that they are regulating interstate commerce ("regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;").
The idea that growing plants on your own land for your own consumption would some how fall under this legislative power is ridiculous. It's not "flexibility", it's fraud.
I've been wondering for a while whether the concept of "open source" and its connection to freedom are becoming meaningless.
Source code has been a dynamic thing for a while, and I think that's part of the reason the GPL (at least v2) is not very popular any more. I mean, nobody really even wants source code, it's just a maintenance headache.
Even after complexity started to take over, there was still the argument that you could audit your computer if it was doing something funny, or ask a different company to maintain it for you, instead. But that seems less and less practical as time goes on. The company that wrote the software is really the only game in town to keep it useful.
Snaps are a logical extension of this phenomenon. They cross a line in the sand, perhaps, but basically just continue a trend already going on.
Also, the unix security model seems fundamentally bad. The idea that any code you execute can delete everything in your home directory is insane. It imposes a huge burden of trust on your software distribution system for the most trivial things. That reduces the practicality of using third-party sources.
I'm not really defending snaps and I will probably avoid them as long as I can. But I sort of feel like the battle might already be lost.
I'm donate to project vesta yearly. Personally, I think the lack of attention is due to its relatively slow pace (compared to the typical news cycle) and the fact that it's simply not going to ever be a revenue generator.
What is the financing and implementation plan? Will it be donor-funded, publicly-funded, or are they looking into some revenue options?
If I donate now, what will the money be used for? Will it put green sand on beaches, or be used for bureaucratic paperwork, or be used for marketing to raise awareness?
Hi, Project Vesta is a non-profit focused on advancing the science and logistics for deployment of coastal enhanced olivine weathering. Right now, your money will be going to fund our Phase I experiments focused on demonstrating the safety of the process, along with weathering rate and dissolution kinetics. The goal of our Phase I experiments is to use the data to create an open-source model that brings all of the relevant parameters together into a single model. We plan to create an algorithm called the Coastal Enhanced Weathering Integrated Assessment Model (CEWIAM) that will be able to take inputs related to a specific beach site, and combine the Weathering Rate and Safety Data with a Life Cycle Assessment so that it can output a "Net $ cost per tonne of CO2 removed per year" from a given site. The model will be open-sourced and peer-reviewed by the scientific community, in additional to having it validated by 3rd parties so that it can be the foundation for an entirely new field of carbon dioxide removal. It is our belief that once this model exists and is validated and demonstrated successfully, massive projects would be financed by the private sector potentially for carbon dioxide removal credits, etc, as well as enabling governments to deploy this on potential gigatonne scales as beach nourishment projects that also help them make up for the shortfall in their Paris Agreement emissions commitments.
Correcgt! We have already generated $250,000 in revenue from our first customer, Stripe. Even though we are a non-profit focused on advancing the science, we can still generate all the revenue required, and we hope our project will be self-sustaining...
Thank you for your kind words! We have been getting a decent amount of attention lately, but we are very much heads down, working on our science and deployment of our experiments. We announced in April, on Earth Day, that we have found a pair of bays in the Caribbean where we will run our first experiment(s). And in May, Stripe announced their selection of CDR purchases and we were selected for 3333.33 tonnes @ $75.
There was a lot going on in the world at the time when it was announced (and for whatever reason Stripe's post or the following article didn't receive traction on HN), but
that announcement made it into Reuters-> Stripe picks $1 million in carbon-removal projects to spur industry
https://www.reuters.com/article/climate-change-stripe/stripe...
This was our first bigger article, that came from our poster in December at the American Geophysical Union with our plan to take our coastal enhanced weathering "from the lab to the beach"-> Could putting pebbles on beaches help solve climate change?
https://www.sfchronicle.com/environment/article/Could-puttin...
And more are on the way! That said, we are working really hard right now to have our pilot projects and foundational research completed, published, peer-reviewed, and CDR process certified in time for the UN IPCC's first global stocktake in 2023. At that time, countries will have to take account for how they will meet their targets and update their plans. We are working to make sure our process is ready to go by then for deployment.
>"The Paris Agreement offers a dynamic but durable framework for increasing climate action over time. One of the sources for this dynamism is the “global stocktake“ – a moment every five years for all countries to pause and account for what has been achieved so far, and what must still be done, to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement."
https://www.wri.org/blog/2017/05/insider-designing-global-st...
Can you please explain where all the olivine is found? I can't think where I have seen any amount of it, other than on a few beaches in Hawaii. Descriptions of the project seem to suggest it is extremely abundant somewhere. Where?
Just hearing about this from the thread, I'm getting a IPFS vibe from this. It would be interesting to see that tech get more native integration with the browser from this idea.
