I could see real advantages to having a quite large Supreme Court where the justices who hear and decide a case are a subset of the total and the ones who hear a case are selected at random from the pool. Similar such systems already exist in the circuit courts and it helps to prevent gaming of the system. It's much harder to game out who you need to appeal to in your arguments when you don't know for sure who's going to hear your case. Also makes it possible for them to hear more cases. I think Congress also ought to use their power and tell the Supreme Court that no, actually you DON'T get to say our laws are unconstitutional. That was wrong back when you started doing it and its wrong now.
In a state like South Carolina, Republican lite is probably about the best you can expect, at least for now. Remember that alot of these people have been indoctrinated since they were kids to think anything even a little bit left is from the devil and will lead to poverty and oppression. Undoing that takes time.
That location opened a few years ago. He started saying that after we gave them ALOT of grief over building a second location.
We're part of why he started saying that. Colorado had one location and they're trying to build a second in Palmer Lake/Monument (little town along I-25 between Colorado Springs and Denver). They got ALOT of blowback over it because the location is very rural and across the street from a massive wildlife reserve. A giant Bucees there would seem very out of place. Also, it will be on nonrenewable well water. They tried to get annexed by the city of Palmer Lake (actual town is quite some distance from where the Bucees would go) but somebody realized that the money from Bucees would barely cover the cost of drilling new wells, in addition to all the pushback. So that got canned. But they're STILL trying to build it. Looks like they might even succeed.
Probably getting rid of Citizen's United, taxing the wealthy correctly, getting rid of the electoral college, reworking the makeup of the Supreme Court, and ranked choice voting would do most of it. All hard but doable.
Theoretically we could end the electoral college next year. There's a thing called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. We now have trifectas in enough states for it to go in effect, should a few more states join. We also have Congress too (needed because they'll have to approve it). It's unlikely the federal government can force the states to do ranked choice voting without a Constitutional amendment. But we could implement it on a state by state basis. The Supreme Court could be reshaped by the next President and a willing Congress - the needed precedent is already there in the circuit courts. Citizen's United is trickiest. The straightforward approach requires either a Constitutional amendment or the Supreme Court to overturn itself. But it's possible there's some tricky alternate paths to accomplish the goal. One of them is convincing enough states to ban corporate spending on political speech. Since corporations are a state creation, they alone have that sort of power. Problem is even one non cooperating state could possibly ruin that. But there might be other ways too.
I've heard iVPN is supposed to be good. Haven't heard anything bad about that one. At least not yet.
iVPN is supposed to be good.
That's part of it. But only a small piece. These people have been plotting this sort of return since after WWII, at least (arguably before too, see the Business Plot). The Nazis never really went away - they just went underground. I'd trace this particular resurgence to Ronald Reagan. That's where we lost the battle against the oligarchs and when organizations like the Heritage Foundation got their start. What we're seeing now is the culmination of all that. I don't really doubt that, if we succeed in resuming progress, the people behind all this will go back in the shadows and plot their return.
I don't view these bigots as separate from the ultra wealthy. They're all birds of a feather and they're all the same problem, just with different manifestations. I doubt we'll ever fully be rid of them. But we can bust them back down again and pick up progress again. We've done it before and we can do it again. Progress is never guaranteed - it must always be fought for. It's also not linear - sometimes regressions happen. I'd argue they're the price for showing us what we have to do, because sometimes we forget.
I'd argue the complacency of the 90's is how we got here. We assumed the bigots would just go away and sort of just brushed them under the rug. Well, they didn't go away and plotted their return. And here we are. I think maybe we needed a reminder that these people exist, might just always exist, and we need to fight them to make progress - it's not just some inevitable thing. It sucks to see it, to be sure though. Hopefully we can get through it. We did it before, we can do it again.
Yeah, probably, at least most people. Though I suspect that real world holodeck technology looks more like the braindance from Cyberpunk than anything. No reason we know of we can't build a computer to brain interface. Building a system capable of creating some sort of odd form of matter or projecting advanced forcefields (Star Trek uses both explanations) is, well, we don't know if science even permits that in a practical manner. But I could see most people spending alot of their time in their own virtual world. Why not? You can make your real world existence very simple and spend your time in the virtual world living the most incredible life you can imagine - the sort of thing that real world constraints say only a few can actually experience for real. Or even stuff far beyond what you could or would do in the real world.
Yeah, one of the few Black Mirror episodes with a "happy" (well for Black Mirror) ending. There's also a sequel, USS Callister: Into Infinity.
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