Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/02/23/beyond-hashtag-resistance.html
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I would vote for that beard, if I had to cross state lines to do it!
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We need twenty voices speaking for San Francisco, which, with over 800,000 people should have one representative for every 40,000 people at least, not one person whomever that is, was, or will be.
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You, uh, do realize that the number of US Representative seats is allocated by state, not city, right? If SF got to elect 20 seats, the rest of California’s 38 million plus people would be left with 33. That would make a San Franciscan vote around 28 times as influential in the House as any other Californian resident. I think every Californian who isn’t in among 800,000 people living in the second most expensive housing market in the US might object to that arrangement.
I mean look, I’m not trying to be mean and I know you were just making a casual comment and not intentionally advocating hoarding all the Cali reps. But math is important.
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Yes as well to the beard.
I’m on the fence about the hair though - I can tell which way it is flowing and this confuses me as a voter.
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Oh Please San Francisco, stand up and elect this man and strike centrist Democrats in the heart.
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You, uh, do realise that he was making a broader point about lack of representation, with a specific reference to SF because that’s what the article is about. For most of its history, the number of representatives tracked the population
(numbers here).
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Relevant why?
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Because Pelosi is a dinosaur who wouldn’t know a serious tech issue if it bit her on the arse?
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Damn, it’s like you’re genetically engineered to appeal to Boingboing’s audience. I am neither from SF nor American, so no vote from me, but godspeed to you sir.
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I didn’t read that as saying SF should get an unreasonable share of the Cali representation.
I read that as saying there should be about one rep per 40,000 people, which is what the folks who wrote that document up, the one that calls for the representation, intended.
The original First Amendment (not yet ratified, but still amazingly open to be) read:
Article the first… After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.[13]
emphasis mine.
But maybe that was just someone who lacked numeracy as you suggest? Hard to know.
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They’re gonna need a bigger trough!
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Exactly! Like a conservative will tell you, the solution to pollution is dilution! (thats sarcasm) I mean they could never manage to buy that many reps!
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I’m surprised at how cheap a congressman or senator is. Some of those Lobby Payments seem derisory.
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Have you seen what you can get a State Rep for??
You don’t need to be a Putin or a Soros to have real influence 
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I’ll consider voting for him. How about an endorsement for Jane Kim for Mayor.
At the very least it would be an interesting experiment to see if a House of several thousand reps would work better or worse. Perhaps they could hire George Lucas to design their new meeting house.
I don’t believe I suggested anyone lacked numeracy. I extrapolated the consequences of the off-hand comment which contained a less thought-out argument than yours.
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I didn’t no. Curiously he omitted the link you provided, but I appreciate that you did. Frankly, I seriously doubt he’d thought it through that far. If he’d been advocating one of the reforms in the link you provided, the total number of reps would still be far below the number it would increase to if there was a rep for every 40,000; though I still don’t think he was advocating increasing the House size (whether by thousands or hundreds) as he made no mention of that.
And as I said in my reply to him, I know he wasn’t intentionally advocating rep hoarding, only that the math (absent a qualifier such as the link you provided) would work out that way.
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When she first entered Congress, the Internet had not been invented yet.
The government, it’s bureaucracy, Congress, legislating, and politics in general is a massively complicated system. As complex, if not more so, than the Internet. This Mr. Smith Goes to Washington treatment of legislating is absurd.
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I could be wrong, but I read the OP’s point (which I don’t entirely agree with at least in that it’s overly simplistic) to be that the internet changed society so much that a representative whose career began before it would be out of touch with society’s legislative needs, not that the internet made legislation intrinsically more complicated.
However, and it’s a big however, the OP’s facts are wrong. Even if one goes by the advent of the internet protocol suite, AKA TCP/IP, that was developed in 1982, five years before Pelosi first took office. There were precursors prior to that, but insofar as the technology of the internet has an invention date, that’s the most logical candidate. Assuming the OP didn’t just pull that statement out of their posterior, and actually learned the history of the internet, they were perhaps referring to the emergence of commercial ISPs in the late 80’s to early 90’s, which was neither an invention nor a single event, but a progression of removing regulatory restrictions on who could access the internet and how, culminating in the Eternal September of 1993.
To be clear, while Pelosi might be a perfectly nice person, I don’t support her conservative neoliberal policy positions. But I also don’t support bad history. And there was a whiff of ageism in the OP’s original polemical statement. Pelosi should be voted out because she’s a neolib, not because she’s old.
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