Study debunks journalistic image of rich 'Latte' Democrats, poor 'NASCAR' Republicans
Topic: Current Events
1:45 pm EDT, Mar 18, 2007
'Gross oversimplification'
"Our results suggest that the popular journalistic image of rich latte-drinking Democrats and poor NASCAR Republicans is a gross oversimplification," Park says. "Income varies far more within states than average income does between states, and it is these with-in-state variances that explain national voting patterns."
The bottom line, the study suggests, is that little has changed in terms of income's general influence on individual voting patterns: in every presidential election since 1952, the richer a voter is, the more likely that voter is to vote Republican, regardless of ethnicity, sex, education or age.
What's changing, the researchers argue, is how differences in income are playing out at the county and state levels. A key finding is that relative income is a much stronger predictor of voting preferences in poor states than it is in rich states.
"We find that income matters more in 'red' America than in 'blue' America," the researchers explain. "In poor states, rich people are much more likely than poor people to vote for the Republican presidential candidate, but in rich states (such as Connecticut), income has a very low correlation with vote preference."
In Connecticut, one of the nation's richer states, researchers found little difference between the voting patterns of the state's richest and poorest residents. In Mississippi, the nation's poorest state, they found dramatic income-related differences, with rich voters twice as likely as poor to vote Republican.
The study also documents changing income-related voting patterns in counties across the nation. Rich counties, a longtime bastion of Republican support, are generally shifting toward the Democrats. And while Republicans maintain an edge among rich counties in poor southern states, they're doing so with slimmer margins.
These regional differences may be especially important, the researchers suggest, in understanding why the national news media is especially vulnerable to the misperception of the typical Democrat as a rich liberal living in a wealthy urban metro area.
And let's just ban television, because there's no reason that we should tolerate a world where kids can turn on Cinamax at 10:30pm on a Saturday night and watch erotic trillers. Ahhh Skinamax... you gave me the porn before the Internet did...
Of course, violence is fine. That's not TV or internet, but the fault of video games.
CP80's solution would apply to the US only, of course, and their plan for dealing with international pornographers (who are unlikely to move to another port dictated by the US) is a simple but draconian one: consumers would ask ISPs to "simply block all IP addresses originating from a non-compliant country." Problem solved!
Grand. Utah, meet the humble Ostrich.
Fucking Utah.
My favorite Utah quote : "How the Mormon settlers looked upon this valley and felt that it was the promised land is beyond me. I don't know, maybe it looked different back then." --Stevo, SLC Punk
Viacom vs Google, or: How the DMCA stopped being something only 1337 hackers and pinko lawyers cared about.
Topic: Technology
6:01 pm EDT, Mar 15, 2007
Legal experts say the main points of contention also include how much knowledge the Internet companies have of specific examples of infringement. Viacom in its suit contends it can be impossible to look at YouTube without seeing specific examples of infringement, copyright video clips uploaded by users.
I'm kind of sidestepping the larger issues here to respond to just this statement, but i can say for certain that I frequently click through a half dozen YouTube clips without seeing anything that appears to be infringing. I would never argue that infringement doesn't happen, but I think it's equally absurd to claim that one CAN NOT use the site without encountering it.
As for the whole thing, I think the result will be far reaching and I wonder if the target state argues in favor of compulsory licensing. I see no good way to allow the content owners to maintain their iron fist approach to content control without absolutely stifling technological innovation. I don't see it.
Its bullshit that people need to hire lawyers to solve their problems. Its ridiculous that the law is written in such confusing and arbitrarily convuluted language that ordinary people can't understand their rights or laws that are meant to protect them.
I'm not sure I agree with this statement. I do agree that it would be nice if everything was simple and understandable, but I'm not at all comfortable with the implication that the world is particularly able to offer that simplicity.
In every field of human endeavor, we hire experts to handle things we do not have sufficient time, inclination or intelligence to learn how to handle on our own.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't strive to make the system as reasonable and accessible as possible, but the logical extension of that is not the elimination of subject matter expertise. You can no more do away with lawyers as with programmers or chefs.
That fundie guy uses the education he has recieved in science to (attempt to) dismantle its core assumptions and prove that his view of the world is correct. If I can do something analagous with my law degree, without convincing myself along the way that my core assumptions about humanity were wrong, then I will consider this lawschool thing a success.
I think this is a noble effort, but i worry that the last statement shows what I consider a flaw. If you are able to convince yourself that your core assumptions were wrong, then why should you consider that a failure? It implies that your current beliefs are absolutely correct, and that modifying them is unacceptable. This is a dangerous starting point, of course.
Without question, we can't just accept everything foisted upon us without analysis, else we end up as sheep. But I should think that the metric must rather be that we allow change at all times, after careful consideration. That is, the only failure possible is a failure to adequately try to understand the reasons we think a certain way.
