It's never the original problem, it's always the cover-up. Seems like an interesting project for an ambitious Assistant U.S. Attorney.
California Public Utilities Commission fired director who exposed missing $200M
81–90 of 275 posts
Re: California Public Utilities Commission fired director who exposed missing $200M
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US actually had quite a few cities with proportional voting in the early-mid 1900s. NYC for example had it from 1936 to 1947 when it was eliminated via referendum[1]. [1] https://www.fairvote.org/new_york_s_proportional_representat...
Proportional, and also ranked, that's awesome. Assigning ranks seems like a much more "high fidelity" way of describing what I want. The article's graph of vote vs representation is striking. "[R]epeal advocates blamed proportional representation for the election of communists to the city council. While the communist issue might have doomed proportional representation, the true deathblow came when the Republicans joi…
The strategy of a small child: if I can't play in the pool anymore, I'll just shit in it.
Re: California Public Utilities Commission fired director who exposed missing $200M
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like in many accounting controversies, the fundamental problem here is how to account for future expectations. If you’re owed a big sum of money but you know for sure payment is coming soon, your accounting statements should show you as much wealthier than the actual money you have on hand, because receiving a payment you already knew you’d get shouldn’t change how you measure your financial status. The commission sa…
> you know for sure payment is coming soon and there-in lies the catch - you cannot know for sure something that hasn't happened yet. There can not be accounting practises that count money that has yet to be received on hand.
Would you say the same thing about debt? Just leave it out of the books, because the repayments haven't happened yet?
Re: California Public Utilities Commission fired director who exposed missing $200M
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As a European I ask myself why there’s no proportional voting system at all in the US. Because change in voting systems has well-studied partisan and ideological impacts, and many of the people who know enough to understand the way that our current voting system contributes to widely-recognized problems in governance also have studied the issue well enough to understand those impacts, and many of them, even while a…
California does have some less-common voting systems in play - on my San Francisco ballots, the two interesting things I've seen: - IRV is commonly used for local positions - Other positions seem to use a system where all the political parties have the same primary, and then only the top two candidates are on the ballot for the general election. Wikipedia describes it well: > Under California's non-partisan blanket p…
>Every senate election I can recall in California has been Democrat v Democrat by the general election
Which is the point of the system. Republicans only have a shot if they don't compete with each other, and no third party candidate ever has a chance.
Re: California Public Utilities Commission fired director who exposed missing $200M
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
That of course is why one of the two US political parties is staunchly against abolishing the electoral college.
Sadly, if not surprisingly, partisan support flipped in 2016, making this less ideological than tactical. https://news.gallup.com/poll/320744/americans-support-abolis...
The public's opinion is irrelevant, both parties will continue propping up systems that prevent any other competition from having a shot.
Re: California Public Utilities Commission fired director who exposed missing $200M
#86The sad part is that CA remains a one party state and this will just get swept under the rug. The power is too unchecked.
As a European I ask myself why there’s no proportional voting system at all in the US. The states should be independent enough to introduce one for themselves, and there are also referendums.
> As a European I ask myself why there’s no proportional voting system at all in the US.
As a European, the elections in my country are:
-- Presidential: uninominal majority (of course).
-- Assembly: uninominal majority.
-- Senate: no universal vote, voters emanate (mostly) from municipal councils majorities.
-- Regional: allegedly proportional lists, but in fact a majority vote, since the leading list gets a majority bonus of 25% of the seats, and then only proportional applies (and still, it is a two-round vote in which lists under 12.5% are evicted from the first round, and then can be evicted again at the second round, even from proportional). So in practice the leading list is always granted more than 50% of the seats.
-- Departmental: uninominal majority
-- Municipal: in large towns, allegedly proportional lists, but in fact a majority vote, since the leading list gets a majority bonus of 50%!!! so there is not even a slight theoretical possibility of having a balance; in villages: plurinominal majority (so a list where every member gets 50%+1 votes gets 100% of seats).
So, not a single actual proportional election, even in those which purport to be such.
(That's France, if you wonder.)
As a practical note, I would like to add that concerning the Assembly, the uninominal voting system used to produce a sort of balanced result, because of differences in history, culture, sociology, traditions and so on in different voting districts; but at present the populations are mixed, the medias are national, everything is more standardised, and so votes are more uniform, and as a consequence a party who has a small lead now has it almost everywhere and can get an overwhelming majority of seats despite only having that small lead.
Re: California Public Utilities Commission fired director who exposed missing $200M
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that more money probably means more backroom deals. This seems simple to me: One party wants to regulate, the other de-regulate. Which of those platforms attracts the most money?
Deregulate the environment and you will be drinking polluted water, and breathing polluted air. Your food will be likely exposed to pollution too. Deregulate labor and you'll have exploited workers working 100 hours per week, being constantly harassed by their employers, people being discriminated at the workplace, as well as people exposed to poor safety conditions where they can get injured or killed. Deregulate co…
Regulation raises the barrier of entry for startups. Fewer startups means less competition. Less competition means less incentive for the incumbents to do "the right thing" in any field, be that hiring, ecological impact, consumer rights and so on.
When it comes to the economy, we should legislate and tax externalities. For everything else regulation is uniformly bad.
Re: California Public Utilities Commission fired director who exposed missing $200M
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As a European I ask myself why there’s no proportional voting system at all in the US. Because change in voting systems has well-studied partisan and ideological impacts, and many of the people who know enough to understand the way that our current voting system contributes to widely-recognized problems in governance also have studied the issue well enough to understand those impacts, and many of them, even while a…
That of course is why one of the two US political parties is staunchly against abolishing the electoral college.
Democratic voters are opposed to the electoral college, but the leadership knows that without it, some backwater state would report 4x its population voted for trump and we’d have a constitutional crisis
Re: California Public Utilities Commission fired director who exposed missing $200M
#89TRUTH is always suppressed in the name of trust/loyalty/compliance/privacy/conspiracy/discipline/patriotism/sedition/job/national security/unity/intellectual property
Re: California Public Utilities Commission fired director who exposed missing $200M
#90The real graft was stealing that money from citizens in the first place.