Bay 12 Games Forum

• It's All About Me: Maxil is positively bored with the Doctor, and spends much of his screentime looking mildly offended or checking his nails. John Nathan Turner actually asked Colin Baker to tone it down, because the show was called Doctor Who and not Commander Maxil. Baker replied that no person would ever consider themselves a minor character in someone else's life, and so he played Maxil as someone convinced he was the main character of the story. Of course, Baker soon would become the main character, making the whole thing quite Hilarious in Hindsight.

Quote from: SealyStar on October 25, 2013, 02:08:01 pm

Quote from: RedKing on October 25, 2013, 02:03:09 pm

It's "nonpartisan", but if you look at the Wikipedia entry on it, all but one of the 49 members do have a party affiliation of either Democrat or Republican. And the Democrats are overwhelmingly concentrated in Omaha or Lincoln (the only two cities of more than 51,000 in the entire state).

Likewise, NC judicial elections are technically nonpartisan but candidates frequently dog-whistle their party affiliation by touting their "conservative" or "social justice" credentials. And they tend to receive partisan endorsements. (Don't ask me why we elect judges in the first place.)

A lot of elections are "non-partisan". My town, for example, is electing a new mayor this fall, and we actually have a mayor with a real job. It's theoretically "non-partisan", but both candidates are touting their business experience and support from the Michigan Right-to-Life PAC or whatever. So, really, it's like a primary election for a certain party which espouses these views that shall not be named.

Exactly. Just as gerrymandering is illegal, and yet everyone does it with a wink and a nod. Or how SuperPACs aren't allowed to coordinate with campaigns, but everyone knows they do. It's convenient fiction.

Quote from: Mephansteras on October 24, 2013, 06:39:26 pm

The problem with gerrymandering is that it is a decent idea taken to its corrupt conclusion.

The decent idea is that people should be grouped by population density so that rural areas can get a representative who actually cares about their votes. Otherwise you'd get situations where a bunch of people are basically ignored because no politician is going to worry about people who only make up a small percentage of their voting base. So, in theory, you'd have larger rural areas districted together (by total population) with much smaller urban districts and each district is then at least halfway reasonably represented.

Get a variation of the German system - voting districts elect direct candidates, and lists of people provided by the parties are used to add seats so that power distribution in the house corresponds to the popular vote. That even allows for third-party candidates to get into congress without winning a direct mandate!

Don't let people tell you that you won't get in, at least until you've tried. It's surprising what can happen.

Hell, Yale contacted me to see if I'd be interested in attending--all I did was score well on my ACT and get the second highest score in my school on some prestigious test or another, all utter bullshit; my grades were mediocre, hovering around a 3.8 GPA, and I participated in absolutely no extracurriculars, which is apparently the most important thing now, because uni is about socializing, not learning--but I avoided that like the plague for obvious reasons.

• You have to get into at least one extra-curricular, because colleges don't won't "closet cases" or whatever the terminology precisely is. As we all know, learning is a synonym for socializing, and study hall is synonymous with fraternity.
• "You must visit every college you apply for, to see if it's a good fit for you", followed by no information on what to do if you couldn't financially afford the luxury, thus indicating no such assistance programs existed. It's a sound concept sure (to the point where teachers understand if you're absent for it, yay!), but it seemed to have been invented while forgetting that the magic of transportation and temporary lodging is obtained by exchanging an arcane token of representation of material gain called "extra dollars".

I saw someone mention the IB program. Whoever it was, I'm sorry for you.

Quote from: misko27 on October 24, 2013, 08:30:19 pm

I knew Diane Feinstein. Also knew Speaker of the House being 2nd in line after the VP. Followed by the President Pro Tempore, or very simply the longest serving member of the Senate's currently serving majority party. I know this because a 84-yr old takes over the US should the top 3 die. Looking over the charts now, it amuses me that eventually the Secretary of Veteran's Affairs is tapped for the job.

As is, terrifyingly, the Secretary of HomeSec. Fortunately, a very large number of well protected people would have to all die in a very short time frame for that to happen.