My Opinions on Voting

I usually don't blog politics, but since it comes up with my opinions on Fedora lack of voters and some other items... I figured I should just go ahead and do it. Today I received a couple of emails from relatives and such trying to explain how bad the US budget is, and why it should be explained easier as that of a family. One set went to blame the politicians, another set blamed the special interests (tax and spend liberals, cut and spend conservatives). In the end, they both neglected to point out who the real culprits are.. the absentee landlord of the United States, the voter.

Look at the following revenue amounts.

1. Tax Revenue:    $2,170,000,000,000
2. Fed Budget:     $3,820,000,000,000
3. New Debt:       $1,650,000,000,000
4. National Debt: $14,271,000,000,000 

Now some people will cut off the zeros and then compare it to a family budget... or some will go on long screeds blaming the politicians or special interest groups. That misses the important part of democracy. In the end, the politicians are a proxy. They may be influenced by "monied" interests but the special interest they are mostly interested in is the voters who every 2-6 years say whether or not they will get to serve again.

To make this fair, let us change out the regular blamees to the people who actually are supposed to be responsible whether they like it or not.

1. Amount majority of US Voters Want to be taxed.
2. Amount majority of US Voters Want to spend.
3. Amount they are happy to borrow.
4. Amount the taxpayers has to pay back plus a lot of interest we didn't calculate.

Notice, I don't put in voters in the bottom. People who don't vote and most non-citizens in this country pay taxes so they get stuck with the bill whether or not they vote.


If you are outraged about the amount spent versus the amount taxed.. you need to do the following:

1. Register to Vote.
2. Research the candidates who will either up the amount taxed, lower the amount spent, or a combination of the two.
3. When the election occurs, vote for the candidate that fits your needs best. Remember always that there is no perfect candidate, you will have to make do with what you can get.
4. Watch whoever gets elected and ask why they voted for this or that. Keep them on their toes. People who know that they are watched are psychologically more likely to be honest and dependable. They are also more likely to follow the social norms of the people watching them. Most politicians get in trouble because the only people watching them are other politicians.
5. If you don't like how things occurred, vote for someone else the next time.
6. Talk to your neighbours and find out why they don't vote. Get them to register and vote too. They don't have to vote for the person you voted for, but they need to watch the elected just the same as you.
7. Keep at it. It took 20+ years to dig this whole, it will take 20+ years to dig out of it.

If you aren't registering to vote, you have lost any right to be taken seriously.

You can sit in a park, you can show up at the IRS office with bags of tea at the IRS office, or you can email me pithy statements about how horrible everyone else is, but you have given up your most important voice.. and the only one I will give credence to, the vote.

[PS Take the above as my opinion and my default answer when you email, blog, facepoke, etc about the dire straights of a nation. In my limited and very biased view, the above can be used for most nations.. the amount that people will happily borrow because they want it and don't want to save for it will always be larger than it should be. I don't have much sympathy for a bond market that doesn't take that into account in the interest rates and fees they initially charge.]

Wednesday 2011-11-16

Tasks for today

1. Phone call with various people around the world on PPC systems
2. Thanksgiving lunch with son.
3. Finish off rsync's off Fedora 13 and Fedora 14 to archives. Will redo 14 after EOL. Will also work with dgilmore on a clean hardlink of the entire archive tree.
4. Worked a bit on the Fedora Hosted FAD.
5. Finished off a budget.
6. Took a meme too far (with apologies to my friends in Ubuntu.. who are currently looking for eyebleach. Also apologies to anyone who uses the gimp professionally.. I butchered this badly.)
7. Read about SOPA. Having seen how badly the current DMCA and similar rules are abused regularly.. I figure this will it even worse.
8. Work out which systems I would abuse tomorrow.

How I deal with political blogs on Fedora Planet

I skip them :).

Really.

I agree with the right for people to say what they want as long as it does not harm others.. but Politics rapidly gets into the spot were our Ape brains start hooting and throwing jaw bones at each other. And watching monkeys through poo at each other isn't fun at the zoo, and it isn't fun to read. [And if you do find it fun to watch it.. well I have even less I want to read about.]

So in the end, if it turns out to be something political.. I skip it. It keeps me sane, and if you find yourself working yourself in a foaming lather because of some neo-conservative or social-progressive post.. its probably just a good idea to skip and go onto reading about things that matter...

like if Jesse's kid has gotten a root shell outside of parallels and is installing Fedora-X on Jesse's real computer.

Happy Birthday Fedora... sorry for being a grump.

Colbert foiled!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7074694.stm

US TV comedian Stephen Colbert appears to have failed in his attempt to enter the 2008 presidential election.

Despite stumping up a $2,500 (£1,250) deposit, Colbert's application to stand in South Carolina's Democratic primary was rejected by 13 votes to three.

...

And his "policy platform" won him instant notoriety when he promised to "crush" neighbouring Georgia if elected.

----

Personally I think that yes Colbert was playing SC for an act, but to be honest I think both parties were worried that too many people would vote for him than the current 'annointed' candidates. I looked at his candidacy as a 'none of the above' vote.. and if I were still living in SC would have voted for him on whatever ticket he had been on.
If for any reason, it was because he was addressing an important item I read in the school texts in State History: The creation of Georgia stole most of the territory that South Carolina had been 'granted'. Well not in so many words, but the various graphs of showing SC as stretching to the Pacific before Georgia ( a prison colony as pointed out several times in the text) and then just having a small strip in the far Northwest corner that was eventually stolen (sorry realigned) by Georgia later on.

Oh well, hopefully Ron Paul will still be on the ballot in NM by the time that primary rolls around.