11th November 2016, 11:08 PM
Quote:but instead let's focus on that electoral college workaround. (That MUST be in the public eye, and talked about on the major comedy shows for months to come, or it'll be forgotten. That's reality.)Yeah, we need to make sure to not let this fact go. In fact, Hillary might end up winning by a million votes, which is more than Gore beat Bush by in '00! We won't know the final margin for a week or two, since those mail-in ballots out West take time to arrive, provisional ballots nationwide are heavily Democratic in most places but have mostly not yet been counted, etc., but it could end up that high.
Quote:This is only a skeleton of an idea, but I've been thinking about setting up a plan of support that resembles the circulatory system somewhat. Rather than a small town in trouble only being able to petition the capital of their state for aid, small towns would have a network of aid they could call on from towns and cities close to them. Proximity is everything here. They would be people they might have seen passing through, or people they've met going to those towns themselves now and then. They would know each other, and since it would be a group of towns offering aid, the burdon would be split. This would extend on up branches with the capital of that state as a main artery. Similarly, states could ask the immediately surrounding states for aid with a much more direct system in place before needing to directly petition the US government for aid. Heck, such a system would make people naturally interested in the welfare of those around them on a larger scale, which is something humans struggle with.Air for what, disasters and such? That's what we have a federal government for...
Quote:Additionally, bringing jobs back home has always been a major complaint of small towns, and they're right. Without actual work, they can't really sustain themselves, and factories are where that work come from. Set some real limits on how many jobs US based companies can send overseas. This sounds isolationist, but at the same time it also puts pressure on countries like China to fix their own humanitarian issues. If American companies are forced by US law to pay workers, no matter the country, the same wages whether they do it overseas or here, chinese companies lose a little of that motivation to treat their own employees so badly to keep those wages down in the first place.The issue of trade and open v. closed borders is a very complicated one, and I've never been very good at economics so I don't have a strong position myself, really; I do think the TPP sounds bad, and generally free trade agreements do seem to have done more harm than good, but on the other hadn they probably have brought some benefits too, particularly to the other nations more so than to America itself. America may have been hurt by NAFTA for example, but has Mexico benefited more than we have hurt? I don't know, but if you care about humanity as a whole instead of just us that is a question that matters.
As for China though, that's hard because they make SO much stuff that getting into a trade war with China seems like a sure way to hurt the global economy. There are a lot of very good reasons to greatly dislike the Chinese government, but how can you start economically attacking them when they're so important in world trade? And the same goes for the US, biggest economy on Earth and all. On the other hand, everyone deserves decent working conditions and a better environment, and without pressure how can you try to convince governments which do not care to change? So yeah, there are good arguments both ways here. We should be tougher on China, but wrecking the world economy probably is not a good idea...
Quote:Along those lines, while my own state did vote against that ridiculous "right to farm" law that's been making the rounds lately (it basically would let farmers, or more accurately the companies that pay the farmers, to sue away regulation after regulation on farming practices), there should be an actual set of laws protecting farmers. Not from regulations, exactly, but from companies that exploit them. I was disgusted to find out how many farmers actually would prefer NOT to torture their livestock if they could help it, but are essentially forced to by draconian requirements of the massive companies that hire their services. Since those massive companies are practically the only way small time farmers can even sell their goods any more, they're pushed into a corner in a lot of ways.So even Republican-dominated Oklahoma opposes bad bills sometimes? That's good to hear.