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Ross Perot Has Died

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Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#151

Post by mieseratte »

pessimizer wrote: post #105
influx wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the winner, Bill Clinton, supported NAFTA, which went into effect on January 1, 1994. Which ultimately ended up damaging Mexican wages, too, because we showered Mexico with heavily subsidized corn (and other agricultural products) forcing rural Mexicans into the cities and the maquiladoras.

I’ve heard it argued that NAFTA set the stage for that increased immigration North as well.

Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#153

Post by unethical_ban »

sampo wrote: post #66
davidw wrote: post #25

> ran into the establishment What he ran into was the inevitable math of a first past the post electoral system. You want third parties, you need ranked choice voting or something similar. Even if you're fine with the main parties, RCV is probably better in terms of electing who most people want. You could argue that Bush senior might have won with it if the Perot voters ranked 1) Perot 2) Bush. Bush junior might hav…

> You want third parties, you need ranked choice voting or something similar. Ranked choice or similar would only give you an occasional third party win here and there, in some small number of electoral districts. It will not give you serious and viable third parties with long living organizations. What you'd need is, proportional voting for the House. Electoral districts the size of at least 10 House representatives…

Why not both?

* IRV or approval voting in the Presidency/executive

* Multi-member districts in the House.

MMD in the House, by State, would effectively end gerrymandering - there is no way state borders will change radically enough to affect electoral results. Combine that with breaking the two party duopoly and it's a huge win.

Side note: I know you don't (nor probably anyone in this thread; HN has fewer trolls) have any intention of subverting the idea, but when people online are supporting electoral reform of ANY kind, the first response should be "I agree".

I agree with electoral reform, and my ideas are X, Y, and Z.

If people squabble too early, it kills momentum. Furthermore, perhaps 1% of the population gives a damn about voting systems and its impact on the country. The rest don't know about it, or are part of the private powerhouse organizations known as the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee.

Support electoral reform first, then discuss options.

Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#154

Post by jeffrallen »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #94
baud147258 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading that book. In the end, I don't think they had to break people out of prison, but they still successfully extracted his staff from Iran

I think I'll add, "Are you willing and able to extract me from a country I'm located in (in the course of our work) while a revolution is actively in progress?" to my list of interview questions.

Then you might like working for Doctors Without Borders, who can actually answer yes to that.

Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#155

Post by cgy1 »

microtherion wrote: post #145
ccozan wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but even so, the (fictional) RoI on the start money is a few orders of magnitude. Which is not quite ordinary.

Sure, but how much was Perot being lucky vs. him being smart? If Apple had gone with acquiring Be instead of NeXT (which I think was a distinct possibility), Perot's investment could quite possibly have ended up a write-off.

He was basically betting on Steve Jobs so for me Perot was being smart.

Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#156

Post by unethical_ban »

espeed wrote: post #60
davidw wrote: post #25

> ran into the establishment What he ran into was the inevitable math of a first past the post electoral system. You want third parties, you need ranked choice voting or something similar. Even if you're fine with the main parties, RCV is probably better in terms of electing who most people want. You could argue that Bush senior might have won with it if the Perot voters ranked 1) Perot 2) Bush. Bush junior might hav…

> You want third parties, you need ranked choice voting or something similar. Arrow's Impossibility Theorem : "When voters have three or more distinct alternatives (options), no ranked voting electoral system can convert the ranked preferences of individuals into a community-wide (complete and transitive) ranking while also meeting a specified set of criteria: unrestricted domain, non-dictatorship, Pareto efficiency,…

Agree with all the other comments - no voting system can be "perfect", defined by a sufficient number of sometimes contradictory desirable attributes of the system.

Literally anything would be better than FPTP voting for single member districts than what we have now. And, the very act of fixing the system would be a political action, showing that systems can be changed when they are damaged or outdated.

Sure, approval voting might be better than IRV. But as I said elsewhere, the first thing to do when disagreeing with particulars of electoral reform is to agree loudly with the general motion - electoral reform.

Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#157

Post by Nelson69 »

projektfu wrote: post #130
Theodores wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's not a fallacy he fell victim to, that was campaigning and electioneering. It was hot on the tail of a big news expose about $600+ toilet seats and $40 bolts that the pentagon was buying. Plus America was starting to accelerate the the transformation in to a services and information based economy and we not just knew but were planning on sending manufacturing to Latin America. That waste had real resonance with workers and a lot of other folks at the time. "They're sending car manufacturing jobs to Mexico and the eggheads are studying cow farts.. (with some giant sounding number of dollars)" They still do this, you don't have to google far to find criticism over how much it cost for the Obamas to vacation in Hawaii or what the secret service spends at Mar-a-Lago.

Now there was no way Ross was going to go through the budget and pick out the crappy wasteful things, but that message had legs. Enough such that congress doesn't do a budget anymore...

Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#158

Post by cgy1 »

protomyth wrote: post #22
baud147258 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading that book. In the end, I don't think they had to break people out of prison, but they still successfully extracted his staff from Iran

No, the prison kind of broke down which caused quite a bit of chaos itself. Revolutions are not stable environments.

Apparently an Iranian EDS employee helped to lead the mob to break down the prison and helped to shepherd the imprisoned EDS employees to safety.

Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#159

Post by marzell »

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 really don't understand your argument FOR the electoral college. Yes, more than half did not vote for Clinton, but there were more than 2 options. The majority still voted for Clinton, and he had a fairly large lead over the next place (44.9M vs 39.1M). In which way does this make a case for electoral college vs popular vote?

In my estimation, the ONLY thing the electoral college vote is good for, is allowing for dishonest tactics like gerrymandering to impact the politics, propaganda, and ultimately the outcome of voting, while completely discarding what the majority of people vote for. I'm happy to be enlightened in this area if you have any other insights.

Re: Ross Perot Has Died

#160

Post by gowld »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #94
baud147258 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading that book. In the end, I don't think they had to break people out of prison, but they still successfully extracted his staff from Iran

I think I'll add, "Are you willing and able to extract me from a country I'm located in (in the course of our work) while a revolution is actively in progress?" to my list of interview questions.

Are you ready to have your mind blown?

Read this article from 20 years ago:

https://www.wired.com/1999/03/bezos-3/

Jeff Bezos:

"At a certain point I was sort of a professional dater," he explains about his years in New York. His systematic approach to the quest for a permanent relationship was to develop what he labeled "women flow," a play on the "deal flow" [...] "The number-one criterion was that I wanted a woman who could get me out of a Third World prison," he says.

"What I really wanted was someone resourceful. [...] ' If I tell somebody I'm looking for a woman who can get me out of a Third World prison, they start thinking Ross Perot - Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!"

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