Before I Can Fix This Tractor, We Have to Fix Copyright Law

Case IH and New Holland are both under the CNH (Fiat) umbrella, so at least you don't have to choose between them.

> That's a very different thing from voting for pre-selected candidates whom you've never met and don't interact with, and then crossing your fingers.

I'm a bit sick right now, thus either my math or my formulas might be off. I welcome any corrections. :)

So.

Copyright policy is decided at the Federal level. The people in charge of setting that policy are elected members of Congress.

Let's assume that you can declare someone "met and interacted with" with a single five-minute conversation.

According to Wikipedia, California is the most populous state and Wyoming is the least populous state.

The CA Secretary of State reports that ~17 million voters were registered to vote as of the date of the 2014 general election. The WY Secretary of State reports that ~240 thousand voters were registered to vote as of that same date.

There are 124,800 minutes in a standard 40-hour-per-week, no-vacations-or-holidays work year. (60x40x52)

For Wyoming, each Senatorial challenger would need to spend 48,000 minutes per election cycle speaking to each registered voter. (240,000/5) That's doable.

For California, a challenger would spend 3,400,000 minutes per election cycle on the same task. (17,000,000/5) For California, what you propose is not possible for Senatorial challengers... they'd have to do nothing but hold conferences for 27 years to get this task done. (3,400,000/124,800)

So, what's the largest state where this is feasible?

This might be South Dakota (the 46th most populous state) (with -I think- ~514,000 voters). [0] If it's not, it's definitely Alaska (the 48th) (with ~509,000 voters).

So, it is physically impossible to even pay lip service to what you propose in either fourty-six, or fourty-eight of the states in the US.

Before you get too cranky, I do acknowledge that the situation changes when one meets with one's Representative:

In California the 27-year workload would -roughly- be divided over 53 representatives, meaning that they'd only have to spend just over half of a year meeting every registered voter in the state. But... this assumes a five-minute meeting. If that constituent meeting balloons to ten minutes, we're right back in the realm of impossibility.

While the workload might be smaller in the smallest states, Representatives are apportioned by population, so I don't expect that the picture would vary very much from state to state.

In short, your idea is promising, and would be really great to do... but there just aren't enough hours in the day to make it happen. [1]

[0] I'm having a fuck of a time finding historical voter registration numbers for SD. So, that voter registration number is based off of what I'm pretty sure is current voter registration data. :/ (North Dakota doesn't even have voter registration!).

[1] Yes, my analysis ignores the fact that a campaign could conceivably be a multi-year thing. It's difficult to get good numbers on the length of an average Congressional campaign, but it's... difficult to believe that a campaign would run for longer than two years.

No, it was a fully "democratic" takeover, in that they saw a small town, much of which was for sale, and tried to buy up enough of the town that they'd have a majority, and be able to vote in whatever hateful nonsense they deemed fit. What do you suppose the town's original, non-neo-Nazi inhabitants should have done if they'd succeeded? They aren't exactly being represented in this case, either.

I guess, as long as you're cognizant of the fact that the system you're espousing offers potential institutionalized hate as a means of conflict avoidance, I don't think there's much else to say.

EDIT: Or, hell, let's just take it straight to ludicrous-land. Imagine a group that believes it should be able to practice virgin sacrifice, and raises their sacrificial virgins from birth to believe that it's in their, and their society's interest to be placed upon the altar, so they aren't inclined to leave the society that believes it needs their mortal blood for its upkeep. Do the rest of us just sit by and say, "Well, they're over there in West Whack-a-doo. Nothin' to be done about it", and let them go about their business?

Er, one of the specific values of the current system is that the people who (theoretically) represent me and make rules I must abide by also do so for millions of other people. This is genuinely advantageous, even for, perhaps especially for, copyright law. Things are in-copyright or out-of-copyright in a consistent way nationwide, fair use exceptions are defined the same way nationwide, public domain and author's rights exist or don't exist nationwide, etc.

If I have myself and a small number of people represented and ruled by a group of folks, the only way to get this result is for my group of people to form federations with other groups of people, and those federations to form meta-federations, and so forth, and have each group willingly delegate most of its authority upwards. But that's really similar to how I live now.

> When math says it's impossible for your representative to represent you...

That's not at all what I said, and it's a dramatic misinterpretation of my words. There are substantially better mechanisms available to us to figure out what people want and what they need than for a decision maker to ask them, one-on-one.

From what I understand, there's a whole raft of really good, reproducible research on how to tease out what people mean from what they say; people are surprisingly bad at both knowing what they want, and -even if they do happen to know- surprisingly bad at expressing that information coherently. It's trivial to structure queries in such a way to give different answers to what is effectively the same question. [0]

> ...perhaps at that point we realize that the system has reached the end of its shelf life.

This is narrow-minded. Based on this comment, you appear to be proposing that we dramatically increase the number of Federal representatives per citizen. [1] Go pick a country that you think is well run at the highest levels. Go look at their representative to constituent ratios. If they're like 10x or 100x greater than the US's ratios, [4] then you might have a point. If they're only 2x or 5x greater, you probably don't.

[0] A researcher wishes to discover what Presidential candidate a given person intends to vote for. He asks them "What Presidential candidate do you intend to vote for?". Most of the time, the answer to that question does not match what candidate that person actually votes for. The question to ask to get that information -most of the time- is actually "What Presidential candidate do you expect that most people will vote for?". Polling is full of crazy pitfalls like this!

[1] The other possible interpretation is either advocacy of voluntary expatriation of people who disagree with their Congressional representatives [2], or dismantlement of the Federal government. [3]

[2] Okay, sure. You do have the trouble of both finding a country that's governed in a way that you agree with, and will accept you as an immigrant, though.

[3] Ha. See the rest of the paragraph to which footnote #1 is attached.

[4] I'm fairly sure that's in the right direction. Again, I'm sick, sorry if my math is off.