My rant...

The wife and I have been discussing voter qualifications. The US started out allowing only (male, but we won't go there) land-owners.

I think the forefathers had a good idea.

But musing, I've come up with an interesting idea... your vote should count _proportional_to_the_income_taxes_you_pay_.

Isn't that an engineer's natural feedback equation? Self limiting :-) ...Jim Thompson

Well, sorta. But it violates the principle of organized theft to begin with.

Umm, not all BSEEs become hardware designers. Very few, in fact (which is a good thing ;).

There is nothing magic about the last 25 years. I've heard the same thing about the business since I've been in it. I'm sure Jim has too (though he worked his way of from dirt, some time after the invention of rocks).

My FIL was very well read too. He was a history teacher (and president of the NEA chapter, a couple of years), but was dangerous around tools; totally useless. I'd spend my vacations fixing up his house. ;-)

My mother had her wits about her until about the last year. She was living by herself in an apartment (in a retirement home) until February of '08, when she moved in my brother and SIL. She died at 95 in December '08.

SWMBO can't, at *all*. Her sense of direction is horrible, though it's understandable. She has zero spatial abilities at all. When we moved I bought her a GPS. She would have been *totally* lost in NE Ohio.

Never bothered.

Hi Keith,

That's certainly a good point -- which again raises the question of... did all those BSEEs who didn't become hardware designers really need four or five years of college?

---Joel

I regularly made Dean's List at MIT, but I certainly wasn't in the top tier... those people went on to become "nobody's", either no productivity whatsoever, or they became professors ;-)

Now-a-days Course VI, at MIT, is not called simply electrical engineering, it's called EECS (electrical engineering and computer science... to me a bit of an oxymoron :-) ...Jim Thompson

So, most retirees and anyone out of work couldn't vote? Talk about lighting the fuse, to start a revolution.

Think about it Michael... if you're on the dole, any dole, you have no vote ;-) ...Jim Thompson

Except wit a pitchfork and a flaming torch.

Something for you to think about. You could end up in my place in a single heartbeat. No longer able to work, and watching your savings completely evaporate in a little under two years.

There is *far* more to EE than hardware design. Less than 1/4 of the EEs at my CPoE are hardware designers. I'd guess that that number was even lower at my PPoE; more like 5%, perhaps even

No system where one group can beset another will long endure, so I understand his frustration, but all that solution does is shuffle the winners and losers around.

The problem is not 'the vote', per see. It's the gradual, now dizzyingly fast, abandonment of the Constitution centralizing all power and money in Washington so that it becomes the corruption clearinghouse where 'special interests' and thieves come to get 'their cut' of the loot and decide on who to rob next. And with the system destroyed *then* 'the vote' becomes a gangland rivalry for control of the mob.

A stroke of the 'regulatory' pen and entire industries cease to exist or their profits are erased, or Obama decides to take them over and strip investors of their investment, or dictates salaries. Why is anyone 'surprised' they lobby? And that's just the tip of the iceberg. No one is free of "do what we want or we'll change your taxes," told what to eat, what car to buy, what your house must be like, and how you must suffer the cost of 'skyrocketing electricity rates', gasoline taxes and shortages, and on and on. Get an abortion or don't. It doesn't matter what you think because the 'winner' will make it law. That's how "democracy" works: The biggest group gets to dictate. Just ask Pelosi. No need to even read the bills. They "rule" so to hell with you and your idiot representatives too.

Only 'they' will be taxed and you will get a 'cut' so gather round me hearties or else next time we'll come for you. Yo ho ho and a bottle of scum.

I see long-term positive feedback.

make it all taces, and make it proportional to the square root and that could keep it off the rails.

--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: snipped-for-privacy@netfront.net ---

That came out more harsh than I intended.

But! Should "receivers-only" be able to vote on the amount of the "take"? That's part of what got us into this national mess in the first place... the "sucking class" voted Obama into oligarchy :-( ...Jim Thompson

wrote

Are you forgetting that I worked most of my life?

I was pissed off when the welfare queens were protesting for bigger checks, as well as those on SS demanding more money.

wrote

driver's

That's a tough thing to handle. Maybe make it cumulative? that'd work :-)

I for "bigger" guns myself ;-)

Maybe a "weenie-specific" bullet ?:-) ...Jim Thompson

es a

driver's

or hold

US

rs.

ould

ing :-)

k about

no

in a

IMHO, your situation is why we should have a social safety net.

If that net were only used by those who truly needed it instead of being a career path for single teen moms it would work so much better, and wouldn't kill the rest of us funding it.

James Arthur

The Constitution was really a brilliant design by some of the most brilliant men who ever lived.

I didn't get that until just recently, when I saw through the words to the architecture, and finally appreciated the mechanism, the feedbacks, the safeties, the workings of the machine. Absolutely brilliant. We'll have to get a nice frame for it.

The problem with things that live and breathe is that, eventually, they die.

The more powerful government becomes, the inevitably more corrupt--the more they regulate business, the more essential it is for business to curry favor, for..favorable regulations. Positive feedback. That quickly degenerates into crony capitalism / fascism, an unholy alliance between the governors and the governed. Like GM. Like UPS. Like Wall Street. Etc.

James Arthur