Really glad he's dead. He was just another cheerleader for the unfettered greed and capitalism that is destroying the Earth. Good Riddance!
Ross Perot Has Died
211–220 of 222 posts
Re: Ross Perot Has Died
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Ranked voting actually does enable third party candidate wins (assuming they can garner sufficient public support) with ranked choice voting the stigma of voting third party is removed and people can safely vote primarily for who they want instead of primarily voting strategically.
> with ranked choice voting the stigma of voting third party is removed
That is a myth. Instant Runoff Voting does not eliminate the lesser evil (spoiler) problem. See this explained by a math PhD.
Re: Ross Perot Has Died
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Certainly - that doesn't mean that we can't have a system that's a bit better than we currently have, though. It just means there's not a perfect system.
No, it just means there is no ranked/ordinal voting system that satisfies Arrows criteria. It says nothing about score/cardinal voting. Arrow: "I’m a little inclined to think that score systems where you categorize in maybe three or four classes probably (in spite of what I said about manipulation) is probably the best."
Nailed it.
Re: Ross Perot Has Died
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It may not have been preventable, but he was absolutely correct on NAFTA. He was wrong on NAFTA, pushing the nationalist/mercantilist line that it would divert gains from the US to Mexico when the actual problem was that (as is generally the case for neoliberal “free” trade) that it drove gains to the capitalist class in both the US and Mexico (and internationally, as capital is largely globalized) to the relative…
So companies moved jobs away from the US to the detriment of American workers? How is he wrong then? That's exactly what he said would happen. The US would have been much better off with Perot as president. Both Bush and Clinton supported NAFTA, and Clinton ushered China into the WTO.
> So companies moved jobs away from the US to the detriment of American workers?
No, the US experienced strong economic growth (stronger than it would have without NAFTA) and likewise strong job growth (maybe stronger than it would have been without NAFTA, that's less clear), but less job (or at least wage) growth than would have been expected with similar economic growth without NAFTA. Insofar as there was a “sucking sound”, it wasn't of jobs or wealth being sucked to Mexico from the US, it was of relative economic position being pulled to capital from labor in both the US and Mexico (also Canada, FWIW.)
> The US would have been much better off with Perot as president.
Not, from any evidence, based on first-order policy impacts from the Administration. Perhaps based on missing the impacts on the partisan alignment from the pinnacle of neoliberal consensus and the subsequent rightward surge of the Republican Party as it sought to distinguish itself from the Clintonian neoliberalism in the Democratic Party that was virtually identical (but for comparatively small differences on some culture war issues, but even there Clinton was mostly a rightward divergence for the Democrats) to the pre-Clinton Republican position, sure. Maybe bases on the partisan realignment that would have resulted from the Perot faction displacing one of the major parties, sure.
Certainly based on Perot not having strong-but-failed bids in 1992 and then against with his Reform Party in 1996 which, by qualifying for matching funds, brought a number of opportunists to seek the 2000 Reform Party nomination, including David Duke and Donald Trump, the latter of which cited the risk of association with the former as a reason for dropping out, but courted the same White Nationalist constituency when he ran again, this time for a major party nomination, after a decade and a half of retooling his political image.
> Both Bush and Clinton supported NAFTA
On trade policy, Bush, Clinton, and Perot all favored the capitalist class.
Bush did so fairly nakedly, and chose policies well-supported by modern economics given that goal.
Perot also did so fairly nakedly, but work mercantilist policies th t both theory and evidence had shown were suboptimal for centuries.
Clinton was like Bush, but with some at least rhetorical recognition that supporting the capitalist class in ways which produced aggregate growth could be counterproductive for the larger working class and that at least modest active interventions were necessary to assure that aggregate growth resulted in general benefit.
If one agreed with his ideological focus, Bush was the least wrong on policy. Clinton was, at least rhetorically, the least wrong on what was necessary for durable broad progress, though in practical first-order policy terms probably not different enough from Bush to make much difference in outcomes, as his mitigation measures were far too modest. Perot was the most wrong.
Re: Ross Perot Has Died
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This is excellent criteria for finding a partner.
Re: Ross Perot Has Died
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then you might like working for Doctors Without Borders, who can actually answer yes to that.
They're a bit controversial, there's plenty of non-controversial groups doing the same work without the baggage.
To be fair, I work in the NGO space and MSF do outstanding work. Of all NGOs they do some of the hardest (Ebola, Syria etc) work out there. One of the few I happily give money to.
Re: Ross Perot Has Died
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's cherry picking numbers somewhat. Clinton never got a majority of the popular vote. A mere 43% in 1992 and 49.2% in 1996. Contrast that with Obama's 52.9% in 2008 and 51.1% in 2012. Or Reagan's 50.4% in 1980 and 58.8% smashing in 1984. Reagan was obviously a lot more popular with the electorate than Bill Clinton and it shows in the only way that ultimately matters: votes. Approval ratings are at best bullshit,…
> Clinton never got a majority of the popular vote. A mere 43% in 1992 and 49.2% in 1996.
Doesn't change your point, really, but for completion, a Clinton also got a non-majority 48.2% in 2016.
Re: Ross Perot Has Died
#218Unfortunately the media establishment discredited Ross Perot by painting him as "nutty" and focusing on his mannerisms, rather than what he was saying. Seeing Bush's and Clinton's smirks during the debates are embarrassing, and did nothing but baselessly discredit the man and his ideas. The media did the same to Ron Paul by framing him as a loon and someone to laugh at. This same strategy by the mainstream media back…
why "unfortunate"? maybe it is about time the fourth pillar finally gets what it deserves.
> why "unfortunate"?
I mean, the kids in cages might find it unfortunate. The farmers being hurt by tariff fights are also finding it somewhat unfortunate. I'm pretty sure the LGBTQ community, too.
(I could go on - there's a long list of groups this POTUS is hurting.)
Re: Ross Perot Has Died
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Arrow's is one of those theorems that is useful for its own purposes, but completely abused in a pop culture sense. All it proves is that you can't simultaneously meet those particular criteria, but it doesn't establish that those criteria are required in any sense. The IIA criteria is especially problematic. A lot of vote arguments comes down to a lack of consensus on what we're even trying to solve for. For instanc…
> but they're extremely passionate. Who should win? Being angry, even in a constructive fashion, shouldn't merit extra consideration. A vote is a signal of magnitude 1. Anything else means a person who is angrier gets more consideration. Now we have a market incentivizing anger, which is not how things are supposed to work. My opinion: lack of consensus on that is caused by lack of critical thinking.
I agree that moving away from one-person-one-vote creates a market that incentivizes passion, whether angry or not. Even false passion. The people that disagree tend to talk about "greater social utility". I just don't think there's a way to reliably measure degree of passion without falling into self-worth questions. Like, someone wise might want to avoid confrontation, someone idiotic might have a trumped-up sense of self-importance. (No pun intended honestly.) One-person-one-vote is the best way we've come up with to avoid that, treating every voter as having equal worth.
Re: Ross Perot Has Died
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
why "unfortunate"? maybe it is about time the fourth pillar finally gets what it deserves.
> why "unfortunate"? I mean, the kids in cages might find it unfortunate. The farmers being hurt by tariff fights are also finding it somewhat unfortunate. I'm pretty sure the LGBTQ community, too. (I could go on - there's a long list of groups this POTUS is hurting.)
i hate doing that, so i will be brief.
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cages - started with Obama.
farmers are hurt, other businesses benefit from production returning from China. to early to tell.
LGBT - news to me.
btw, you forgot to mention that he hates Jews too. sort of.
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peace