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Ross Perot Has Died

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Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#121

Post by YinglingLight »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #89
madengr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He talked about a conspiracy by the Republicans to ruin his daughters wedding. I thought he was crazy at the time, but now I believe him. I remember his hour long presentations with the flip charts of how things were screwed up. Too bad he didn’t win. Instead we got the scumbag Clintons.

Bill Clinton left office with a 60+% approval rating, higher than Reagan when he left. Bill won both elections with 370+ electoral votes. I think the American people were mostly pleased.

Hindsight is a helluva thing

Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#122

Post by tunap »

steve19 wrote: post #10
gdubs wrote: post #2

Many remember Perot as the goofy rich guy who ran for president in 92, but what many don’t know is that he funded NeXT computer - Steve Jobs’ post-Apple venture that was later acquired by Apple and transformed computing for the next decade. Interface Builder and the NextStep core libraries were arguably one of the biggest catalysts of the iPhone App ecosystem. In many ways iOS exists because of NeXT. So while it was…

I remember him as the guy who did everything he could to save employees stuck in Iran, two of whom were imprisoned, during the revolution. He didnt go rescue them himself, but he funded the rescue and was personally invested in the rescue. Not many CEOs would do much more than pay some K&R firm to negotiate a ransom/bribe, while simultaneously getting the lawyers to work out how little each life is worth they need to…

He also flew into Iran during that time to visit the imprisoned employees to assure them he was doing everything in his power to get them out. If he had been spotted, he surely would have been arrested, too.

On Wings Of Eagles https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Wings_of_Eagles

Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#123

Post by agbell »

m1n1 wrote: post #114
5555624 wrote: post #113

Perot's Presidential candidacy is a good example of why we need the Electoral College and cannot simply go with the "winner" of the popular vote. Clinton had 370 Electoral College votes, Bush had 168, and Perot had 0. Not only did Clinton win easily, he had a majority of ALL the Electoral College votes. In the popular vote, it was 44,909,889 for Clinton, 39,104,545 for Bush, and 19,743,821 for Perot. While Clinton st…

Have people vote once by ranking candidates. Then the computer can do the rounds.

yeah, a ranked ballot solves this problem. The concept of a condorcet winner, is that the winner would win head to head against all non-winners and various ranked ballot schemes pass this condorcet criterion.

Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#124

Post by rtkwe »

jakamau wrote: post #118
5555624 wrote: post #113

Perot's Presidential candidacy is a good example of why we need the Electoral College and cannot simply go with the "winner" of the popular vote. Clinton had 370 Electoral College votes, Bush had 168, and Perot had 0. Not only did Clinton win easily, he had a majority of ALL the Electoral College votes. In the popular vote, it was 44,909,889 for Clinton, 39,104,545 for Bush, and 19,743,821 for Perot. While Clinton st…

I feel a bit like a broken record on this, but the topic deserves discussion. Electoral college is a valuable part of US elections but gerrymandering and winner-take-all states destroy the institutions usefulness. Alternative: 1. End "winner-take-all" allocations of electoral votes 2. Any party that gains the minimum population/electoral vote (Wyoming puts that at ~200k) in any state is guaranteed at least one electo…

> 4. If no majority winner exists, the party with the least number of electoral votes casts their vote to other party/ies and this repeats until a winner obtains 270. If a rather obstinate third party refuses to proxy their votes, those votes are dropped when calculating majority.

Why put this in the hands of the lowest vote getter when we can just ask the voters directly with ranked choice voting?

Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#125

Post by rtkwe »

omegaworks wrote: post #115
5555624 wrote: post #113

Perot's Presidential candidacy is a good example of why we need the Electoral College and cannot simply go with the "winner" of the popular vote. Clinton had 370 Electoral College votes, Bush had 168, and Perot had 0. Not only did Clinton win easily, he had a majority of ALL the Electoral College votes. In the popular vote, it was 44,909,889 for Clinton, 39,104,545 for Bush, and 19,743,821 for Perot. While Clinton st…

Abolish the electoral college, institute national ranked-choice.

Or in a way that would be less constitutionally difficult do national ranked choice and proportional electoral college. Most of the benefit without, probably, having to change the constitution. To completely remove the electoral college you'd have to amend the constitution because the constitution spells that out as the method for choosing the president.

Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#126

Post by logfromblammo »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #58
protomyth wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ranked choice might work for parliaments, but it would just create unwelcome surprises in the US. I cannot help but think what happened in a sport (NASCAR) with its switch from winner take all to a series of rankings would mean if it were something as important as voting. You might find sports is not a serious argument, but this is the US and the reaction shows some tendencies towards other aspects of life.

FPTP is one of the most efficient and fundamental enemies of democracy, plaguing the USA. Everyone agrees partisanship is bad, people looooove a “bipartisan” bill, but FPTP mathematically converges on a two party system, always. It fuels tribalism and us-vs-them mentality like nothing else and perpetuates a political aristocracy through perverse incentives and hamstrung competition. To see this in effect, consider th…

Approval voting eliminates the reduction of politics to the boardwalk ice cream vendor problem.

What's more, I'm tired of driving 7.5 hours to the boardwalk every time I want ice cream, and then not being able to find any parking spaces around the exact center of it, where the vendors tend to cluster.

Since FPTP mathematically converges on two parties, the two parties also mathematically converge on the perceived political center, and then advertise in opposite directions from the same spot. When the voting is structured to prioritize how far customers are willing to walk for the flavors they like, rather than going the shortest distance to the only flavor available (vanilla), we all get more choices.

Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#127

Post by cobbzilla »

defen wrote: post #36
protomyth wrote: post #20

You can call him "goofy", but he was anything but. I got to watch him give a speech in Fargo during the 92 campaign and it was amazing. At the time, I got into the habit of reading each candidates "book" they put out during the election. His was short, to the point, and very specific on what needed fixing. He was a serious man that ran into the establishment and got hammered.

Didn't he also "disappear" (from the public eye) during a crucial point in the campaign? My memory of this is hazy as I was only 12 at the time, but I recall my father being interested in his candidacy, but then around July or August he withdrew from the campaign. Then re-entered in September or October, so he came across as "flaky".

He dropped out of the race to get away from bad press, the establishment players kinda forced him out with dirt-digging.

I think he thought it would help, but when he re-entered he was worse off.

I also remember him doing well in the debates, but his VP pick, Admiral Stockdale, badly flubbed the VP debate.

Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#128

Post by cycrutchfield »

influx wrote: post #32
melling wrote: post #29

Remember his famous “Giant Sucking Sound” comment? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_sucking_sound

I'd say he was right: "We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, ... have no health care—that's the most expensive single element in making a car— have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but…

If you can build a car for cheaper elsewhere, why wouldn't you? If your goal is to keep people gainfully employed, well how about working on improving their skills so that a laborer in a developing country isn't more productive than they are?

Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#129

Post by dragonwriter »

logfromblammo wrote: post #126
nothrabannosir wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FPTP is one of the most efficient and fundamental enemies of democracy, plaguing the USA. Everyone agrees partisanship is bad, people looooove a “bipartisan” bill, but FPTP mathematically converges on a two party system, always. It fuels tribalism and us-vs-them mentality like nothing else and perpetuates a political aristocracy through perverse incentives and hamstrung competition. To see this in effect, consider th…

Approval voting eliminates the reduction of politics to the boardwalk ice cream vendor problem. What's more, I'm tired of driving 7.5 hours to the boardwalk every time I want ice cream, and then not being able to find any parking spaces around the exact center of it, where the vendors tend to cluster. Since FPTP mathematically converges on two parties, the two parties also mathematically converge on the perceived pol…

> the two parties also mathematically converge on the perceived political center

There is a mathematical theory about this, but it assumes a number of things that aren't true about real political behavior (basically, it ignores that political engagement that matters isn't limited to voting, and that voting behavior isn't simply “every eligible voter will vote, and will vote for the candidate nearest to them by some political distance function”; it may also ignore that distribution of political views is neither uniform nor unimodal with a central peak, but instead has peaks away from the center [0]), and empirically doesn't seem to predict the actual behavior of parties very well at all.

[0] it's not clear if it ignores this or just doesn't consider distribution because distribution wouldn't matter if the things it does ignore were true; certainly some of it's defenders seem to think that political views are unimodal and centrally-peaked and that that mitigates any problems from the other oversights, which it might, if it were true.)

Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#130

Post by projektfu »

Theodores wrote: post #26
uses wrote: post #18

What a quaint time when the oddball outsider candidate was a mentally stable human being calmly explaining ideas in a way anybody could understand.

Something about your comment makes me compare and contrast with the oddball outsider who did make it into the White House - the current occupant. At the time there were many people who cursed Perot for splitting the two party vote, however he did get 18.9% and that is pretty incredible considering how entrenched attitudes were at the time for voting Democrat to make sure the Republican didn't win and vice-versa. I ha…

The one ad I remember mocked our government for "wasting" money studying "gas emissions" from cows. Of course, the question of agricultural methane production is quite important from the standpoint of total greenhouse gas emissions, and there has been interesting research towards reducing methane emissions while maintaining production. It's also a negligible part of the budget, like almost all scientific spending. I was 13 years old and thinking, how stupid, is this guy saying he's going to go through picking and choosing these tiny little line items in the budget based on how they sound?

From a larger perspective, it shows that even sophisticated businessmen fall victim to the usual fallacies about government spending, thinking that there's a lot more waste that can be easily trimmed than there is, that you can cut a few unpopular programs and make a reduction in taxes or balance the budget, or that a national government should be run like a household, putting off spending when revenue is low and cranking it up while it is high.

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