1 person 1 vote is how we elect everyone to office in the U.S. that is, unless you are talking about the president. In that election, private groups decide for themselves who will be allowed to vote for the president. The number of electors is not representative of the population but rather population density among imaginary lines on a map. So, some peoples votes have more weight that other people. If you live in Wyoming, you get a great deal of vote power. If you live in New York your vote has much less weight. I have been saying that for this election we should do what we do for every other election and hold it by popular vote only.
I am not advocating direct democracy at all. that is sill and unworkable.
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I came to say this… the boomers were an incredibly large cohort of voters, across the board. Millennials are pretty large, too. But Gen X was rather small compared to both and most of us are now middle aged.
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Do they not?!
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From 1983 until now – 34 years – the governor of California has been Republican for all but 10 years.
Right now the governor is a Democrat. Are you really saying that Republicans in California are such big babies that losing a political seat for 6 years is enough to throw them into a permanent funk?
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I often wonder why exurban voters are more conservative than urban voters. They may have more space between them and their neighbors, but they have every single convenience and technological advance that urban voters do. Electricity, plumbing, connections by telephone and the internet, public roads, access (by car rather than walking/public transportation) to modern hospitals, stores, schools, work, etc. Perhaps they are rugged, individualistic types, who use a sit-upon lawn mower, chop their own wood, and have a horse in the back 10 acres. But they are just as much urban as city dwellers in terms of standard of living. Why the difference in attitude?
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But realistically she’s not wrong. Look at North Carolina and the fact that your blue counties are the RDU and Charlotte areas. And it’s not just those are your “urban” cities, it’s the fact you have a whole lot of non-native NC people living there. When I was living in Apex, right outside of Cary (which is a suburb of Raleigh basically), I stopped in the local TGI Friday’s to pick up a to-go order. At the bar were five younger business professionals and from their banter they all worked together. As I sat there and listened in the question was raised by someone, where are you from? None of the five were from NC and they remarked they knew of no one who was…
So if these voters never leave their urban utopia how do they know what the other 90+ counties endure? How are they to make a rational decision about the good of the state when they don’t even understand where they live?
As I sat there and listened in the question was raised by someone, where are you from? None of the five were from NC and they remarked they knew of no one who was…
You ran into people in town on business travel, and therefore the electoral college is good? I’m not sure I’m understanding this correctly. Even if these were residents, do residents not have a right to representation unless they’ve lived somewhere long enough?
And, if rural voters never leave their rural utopias can people make a rational decision about the good of the state? You cite 90+ counties, as if that’s evidence that people in ‘urban utopia’ don’t understand the majority of the state. 60% of the state lives in three major urban centers.
The responsibility to know what the other has to ‘endure’, as you put it, isn’t a one-way. My in laws are constantly kicking up a fuss about the unsafe big city, and how I need to get my kids out before they’re raped in the streets by roving packs of thugs. And they vote accordingly - ‘tough on crime’ candidates, harsher criminal penalties, more criminal offenses on the books. They have a responsibility to learn about what the actual challenges facing me are, rather than voting to turn cities into police dystopias because Fox News scared them.
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There are actually pretty solid geopolitical reasons for this. Propping up the price of locally grown rice insures that they maintain land under cultivation and maintain agricultural infrastructure to the point where, if push came to shove, they could keep their people from starving even without imports. If you rely on imported food to avoid famine, then the countries you import from, as well as anyone who could disrupt shipping, have you by the balls.
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23,000 people isn’t a city. It’s not even a sold-out ballgame.
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How can you have been the first to join something that didn’t exist until more than one state joined it?
Insularity. When you have to live in close proximity to and interact with lots of people who may be quite unlike yourself you’re more likely to be able to empathize with their points of view. For instance, look how support for gay rights has climbed the more people come out of the closet; suddenly they’re not some distant Other doing perverted things in a San Francisco bathhouse, they’re brothers and sisters and sons and daughters. Or people who actually work with undocumented Mesoamericans — they’re not the ones agitating for a wall, because farmers know how much their businesses depend on low-paid migrants, and they see firsthand that the racist stereotype of the lazy Mexican is a lie.
(It works the other way around, too, to an extent. City dwellers who rarely come into contact with any country folk are more likely to dismiss them all as meth-addled incest-prone yokels.)
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That would work for me and my neighbors, but it hardly seems fair to the rest of you.
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Your statement “they may have more space between them and their neighbors” provides a clue. The automobile-centric lifestyle encourages less day-to-day contact with others and diverse Others. The life focus is on the immediate household and family and maybe a handful of neighbours – beyond that you’re suddenly in the world of work or commerce.
Many of the original postwar suburbs were officially segregated, using racial and religious convenants to keep Others out. That’s now illegal, and what segregation remains is de facto, but it’s an example of the impetus of isolating oneself in a peaceful bubble in the burbs.
Urbanites exist in a different sort of bubble, but they tend to bump up against Others every single day. That fosters more tolerance, if not embrace, of diversity.
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Because they moved out there to get as far away as possible from “urban” types without losing any of the perks of living near a major urban area. (Source: quite a few of my relatives.)
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If you read @anon62122146’s response above, you would see a good example of how to present a counter argument about that same quote without being personally insulting.
I’m not going to flag your post because I think it serves as an excellent example of how not to engage on a thread.
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The definition of city appears to be “Whatever that state’s/country’s government says is a city”. There are eight cities in the UK with a lower population than Andorra la Velle (incuding the City of London).
Out of interest, where would you say the cut-off line should be in this list
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Somewhere above Wells.
Something something something because we said so? (sung to the tune of “we built this city”) 
I have to admit Delaware is full of pretention concerning the nation’s founding; the statue of Caesar Rodney is a gross misrepresentation of history.
But again, we United with the other States on terms that were not spectacularly in our favor, and it seems pretty lame for people in States that already don’t and can’t support themselves to say “oh, we’re going to force renegotiation of the already rigged deal so that we can exploit you even more, but you aren’t allowed to leave the Union because we’re bigger and more populous than you and we will beat you up”.
Izzat better?
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Imagine if the lib dems had actually had a spine and got PR? Who knows where we’d be at now
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While that may have something to do with some of the original tariffs being put in place its actually even more complicated.
Japan is no where near being food self sufficient and cant actually be. Part of the reason is due to other agricultural laws which restrict the sizes of land under cultivation by any one owner. This is a relic of the Meiji restoration to break up the feudal land holding system. Now its biting us in the ass as it prevents efficient use of agricultural land.
As an example of the above, my family has had a small plot of agricultural land for a very long time but its not being used. We cant even rent it to the owners of any of the surrounding plots as they are all too old to work any more than they already have. We cant sell it either as there are no viable buyers so the land just remains fallow over the decades.
The rice tariffs also serve simply to keep domestic strains available (partly due to the reason above). People here really prefer domestic over other rice strains and will pretty happily pay more.
EDIT: I believe the land ownership limits were actually extended during the GHQ period as well. BoingBoing friend Joi Ito has written about/told me how that affected his family directly.
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