Objectively intelligent.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

It is objectively unfair. The votes of different citizens have very different weights, depending on which states they live in. What you mean is that people who benefit from that differential treatment like it.

Pure democratic voting would be just as unfair for different reasons. People who wished to escape densely populated areas and live differently would be held to the whims of voters who happened to be in more populated areas.

Pure democratic voting would allow NY and CA to dictate to the rest of the country.

There is no way to make it truly fair. As it is, a farmer in Wyoming holds disproportionate sway over a hipster in Brooklyn. Reversing it so the people who live around the hipster get to control the farmer is guess incrementally better, but you still have one crowd controlling another based on certain characteristics of location. You're effectively just saying that people who choose to be more isolated shouldn't have as much say as those who choose to live together.

Of course you can argue that people in dense areas have the right to vote however they like and just happen to vote in ways very different than people from more isolated areas. But that's not what happens. People in dense areas tend to vote like a monolith because most are similarly situated and all want the same thing. (Sure, Park Avenue has a number of conservative voters, but most of NYC votes blue.) In every dense area you'll get a herding effect, and as a result, policies across the country will reflect the sensibilities of people living in dense areas.

It'd be true to say that this is still preferable because in dense areas people tend to be more tolerant, so the people in more sparsely populated locales won't be precluded from doing what they want. But in terms of economic policy, this is rarely the case. Would Berkeley vote to ban fracking in Pennsylvania if it could? Certainly.

I don't think Presidential elections can ever be fair. But we can get around this by limiting executive power and giving more control to local governments. If the federal laws were pared to allow dense areas to ignore the national policy edicts pushed by people in less populated areas, and vice versa, there could be detente.

The problem with this, as I see it, is the feds and states. The feds want to control the states with purse strings, and the states in turn use the same control on the locals. We need to give locals more power to ignore the states and the feds. Because, let's face it -- we're not a union. We are very different people based on geography and location, and we ought to be able to live as we want within our local communities and not be compelled to act otherwise by the feds or the states except in extreme circumstances.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Icky Thump

Really good stuff.

While I see the attraction of canceling all my work, and just strutting around the office for face-time and doing lunches being that my office was a slightly smaller superspreader event than Sturgis, gonna have to pass.

It's all a power thing. The milenial paralegals have left in droves and the ones who havent quit have refused coming into the office. So what do you do of you if you need someone to bully? You hunt for the weak and the old. You send emails like "You need to file the original documents in the files".

I'm with you. I was pretty solid politically. I could do face time quite well. But I felt like I wasn't really there. I mean, I was at the lunch, I was talking to the client, but I was always daydreaming. I'd be thinking, "What would these people look like naked?", "Suppose I just started screaming for no reason? How long before security took me away?" I used to get really bored during some meetings and actually have panic attacks from it. I'd just start thinking shit and couldn't stop.

Look at my suit. How about the hair? Here's a bunch of complex sounding words. I'll be economical, so you'll think I'm smart. You already do, because I've been listening while the others were talking. (I really want to pick my nose... I can feel this really crusty one just waiting to be plucked out.)

Now listen to me while I spin - ever so slightly - your dubious layman's litigation strategy. The managing partner is going to get excited too because he knows that's a really expensive idea, but it's yours, and we're making a sale, so it's okay to say we'll research it thoroughly. Ka-ching!

I'm taking notes. I'll throw them away afterward. Mostly gibberish. Maybe I'll put them in a file.

Let's walk through the place, shall we? Look at the people on those conference calls. That glass is really polished, isn't it? Stare into those offices -- be sure to check out Todd's. Todd's all fucked up. And not terribly bright. Future nervous breakdown. But doesn't he look studious?

You pay us to think. Oh, we're thinking. So much thinking. I'm thinking about fucking my girlfriend right now. I'm thinking those are terrible shoes.

Now let's get in the elevator and go get some shitty lunch in a place that has cushy booths.

Kill me.

But back to your point, if you need someone to bully, if that can't be helped and you can't go on without that fix, well... I don't care about you. I have no pity on you. I am enjoying the idea that you are going through withdrawal. Because I think everyone is redeemable, I hope you can get over that addiction and find a better life. But I don't care if you do or you don't because, to borrow from Roger Waters, "you're just another sad old man, all alone, and dying of cancer [or heart disease]."

If a person can't figure out how to enjoy life, if he can't early in youth surmise that time is the most important commodity, he's probably hopeless. I don't know what you do with that person.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

they say that to judge a high IQ you need to have a higher one. I get that. So to judge someone “playing dumb” I guess you have to be dumb?

It would be cool if you could do a MENSA story for The Moth.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Pure democratic voting would be just as unfair for different reasons. People who wished to escape densely populated areas and live differently would be held to the whims of voters who happened to be in more populated areas.

Pure democratic voting would allow NY and CA to dictate to the rest of the country.

People say this, but it's nonsense. We wouldn't be voting by state any more. There's no reason to cater to "California" because there is no value in winning it as a state.

Yeah, as things stand right now, that means that Dems will campaign hard in cities and the GOP will campaign in smaller towns are rural areas, because that's where the marginal voter are for each of them. But that's kind of what happens now, whereas without voting by state, Dems might actually show up in Houston, San Antonio and Austin and Rs might actually show up in the Central Valley, Orange County or Northern California.

Elections would still be won on the margins, but instead of parochial issues, those margins would be on policy and substance. That's fair. Wyoming getting a veto over national policy is not.

Reversing it so the people who live around the hipster get to control the farmer is guess incrementally better

You admit that it would be better. Why are you writing words?

You're effectively just saying that people who choose to be more isolated shouldn't have as much say as those who choose to live together.

No, we're effectively saying that people who choose to be more isolated have exactly as much say as those who choose to live together.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Pure democratic voting would be just as unfair for different reasons. People who wished to escape densely populated areas and live differently would be held to the whims of voters who happened to be in more populated areas.

I'm not sure what you mean by "pure democratic voting" or why you think it's unfair.

The Electoral College would be more fair if each state got a number of electors equal to it number of Representative, instead of that number plus two. There is no principled argument I'm seeing that it is more fair for people in smaller states to have their votes count more than people in bigger states.

A separate issue with the Electoral College, more inherent in its design, is that it privileges swing states, at the expense of states that lean hard to one party or another. A reliably Republican state like Wyoming or Utah will get ignored, relatively, in the Presidential election, as will reliably Democratic states like Hawaii or Vermont. The only people who think this is a good idea are the people who live in swing states and political journalists.

Pure democratic voting would allow NY and CA to dictate to the rest of the country.

Ah, the tyranny of the majority. Why is a tyranny of a minority somehow fairer?

There is no way to make it truly fair. As it is, a farmer in Wyoming holds disproportionate sway over a hipster in Brooklyn. Reversing it so the people who live around the hipster get to control the farmer is guess incrementally better, but you still have one crowd controlling another based on certain characteristics of location.

Now you've discovered the unfairness of living in a society with other people. If my wife and I decide to go to Tahoe for the weekend, and my son wants to go but my daughter doesn't, it's horribly unfair to her. I know this because I heard about it all weekend. But that doesn't mean we let her make the weekend plans for the rest of us, because that's an even worse outcome.

You're effectively just saying that people who choose to be more isolated shouldn't have as much say as those who choose to live together.

Only if there are fewer of them. Why do you hate democracy?

Of course you can argue that people in dense areas have the right to vote however they like and just happen to vote in ways very different than people from more isolated areas. But that's not what happens. People in dense areas tend to vote like a monolith because most are similarly situated and all want the same thing. (Sure, Park Avenue has a number of conservative voters, but most of NYC votes blue.) In every dense area you'll get a herding effect, and as a result, policies across the country will reflect the sensibilities of people living in dense areas.

You can imagine a world in which the system is rigged to disproportionately benefit cities. You can also imagine a world in which the opposite is true -- "Wisconsin," let's call it.

It'd be true to say that this is still preferable because in dense areas people tend to be more tolerant, so the people in more sparsely populated locales won't be precluded from doing what they want. But in terms of economic policy, this is rarely the case. Would Berkeley vote to ban fracking in Pennsylvania if it could? Certainly.

Now let's imagine a counterfactual where rural and suburban voters get lots of money spent on freeways, but urban mass transit is regularly shortchanged. Fun!

I don't think Presidential elections can ever be fair. But we can get around this by limiting executive power and giving more control to local governments.

Why do you think that the things that make Presidential elections unfair magically disappear in state and local elections?

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

It would be cool if you could do a MENSA story for The Moth.

Wouldn't go over. First the mob doesn't understand when I talk to my level, plus, as is clear over and over on these boards, my lessers are jel.

[Icky Thump]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

I'm with you. I was pretty solid politically. I could do face time quite well. ...
Kill me.

But now it's not just time-wasting, it has the potential to cause physical harm, for no real reason. Yeah, I was OK with getting up a little early to do the face time, driving in an hour and a half from a remote dep at 4:00 PM just to show my face, but NOW, in a place with no protective protocols, it's a little bit of a grim proposition to head down to superspreader II there to do something you can adequately do at home.

Also, now we are doing depositions and court appearances remotely using Zoom, Skype and a host of other platforms. But our computers at work do not have the equipment to participate. So the suggestion was to "bring your home equipment to work."

But back to your point, if you need someone to bully, if that can't be helped and you can't go on without that fix, well... I don't care about you. I have no pity on you.

That's not me, that's the folks singing the siren song of "come to the office". Yeah, I am lashed to my bed, Beats Pro X in my ears, realizing this is a hill I will make my stand on.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

So the suggestion was to "bring your home equipment to work."

That's too stupid to countenance with a response. Send them back a clip of Uncle Jeff from Veep laughing hysterically at Jonah.

That's not me, that's the folks singing the siren song of "come to the office". Yeah, I am lashed to my bed, Beats Pro X in my ears, realizing this is a hill I will make my stand on.

The "you" there is the pathetic old fucker begging you to come back to the office, not you you.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Amazed that I cannot get coverage of what is happening in Medford, Oregon.

[Oliver_Wendell_Ramone]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Amazed that I cannot get coverage of what is happening in Medford, Oregon.

My tiny little beach house is under level 3 evacuation orders (LEAVE NOW!!). Don't know if it will last the day. Thankfully nobody using it at the moment.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Pure democratic voting would be just as unfair for different reasons. People who wished to escape densely populated areas and live differently would be held to the whims of voters who happened to be in more populated areas.

Pure democratic voting would allow NY and CA to dictate to the rest of the country.

There is no way to make it truly fair. As it is, a farmer in Wyoming holds disproportionate sway over a hipster in Brooklyn. Reversing it so the people who live around the hipster get to control the farmer is guess incrementally better, but you still have one crowd controlling another based on certain characteristics of location. You're effectively just saying that people who choose to be more isolated shouldn't have as much say as those who choose to live together.

Of course you can argue that people in dense areas have the right to vote however they like and just happen to vote in ways very different than people from more isolated areas. But that's not what happens. People in dense areas tend to vote like a monolith because most are similarly situated and all want the same thing. (Sure, Park Avenue has a number of conservative voters, but most of NYC votes blue.) In every dense area you'll get a herding effect, and as a result, policies across the country will reflect the sensibilities of people living in dense areas.

It'd be true to say that this is still preferable because in dense areas people tend to be more tolerant, so the people in more sparsely populated locales won't be precluded from doing what they want. But in terms of economic policy, this is rarely the case. Would Berkeley vote to ban fracking in Pennsylvania if it could? Certainly.

I don't think Presidential elections can ever be fair. But we can get around this by limiting executive power and giving more control to local governments. If the federal laws were pared to allow dense areas to ignore the national policy edicts pushed by people in less populated areas, and vice versa, there could be detente.

The problem with this, as I see it, is the feds and states. The feds want to control the states with purse strings, and the states in turn use the same control on the locals. We need to give locals more power to ignore the states and the feds. Because, let's face it -- we're not a union. We are very different people based on geography and location, and we ought to be able to live as we want within our local communities and not be compelled to act otherwise by the feds or the states except in extreme circumstances.

All this is just absurd. Pure democratic voting means each vote is equal, none is disproportionate. Once getting to 40% in NY counts for something, you'll see much more Republican focus on the state and its voters. And once getting to 40% in Louisiana counts for something, suddenly Democrats will focus more on Louisiana's real needs.

The strange set of states we have is a result of political machinations around the electoral college. The main reason California is one big densely populated state while the plains states and Rocky Mountain states got split up into smaller, sparsely populated states revolves around the preservation of slavery before the Civil War and ensuring the continued dominance of the Republican Party during the period after reconstruction. What this leads to are policies that really don't make sense nationally, like farm subsidy programs, that play to the states created in order to have disproportionate political influence but don't necessarily do so in a cost-effective, well thought out way. Or a coronavirus strategy that says, fuck the blue states, it doesn't matter if we let the virus rage in states that aren't going to give the sitting President electoral college votes, where he doesn't care about increasing his vote share by 10% or 15% (though, of course, virus don't care, virus now rages in red states because it wasn't snuffed out when we had the chance).

It's also been a never ending source of tension that played a big role in triggering the civil war and that contributes mightily to the polarization we see in the country today.

And it virtually ensures a two party rather than multi-party system. One the occasions multi-party systems have emerged, like just before the Civil War, they quickly consolidated into two parties mostly because of electoral college politics.

That said, the electoral college won't be eliminated until there is a moment in time when it is irrelevant, because one party dominates the Presidency and both houses, and has a strong enough dominance to get through a constitutional amendment.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Oliver_Wendell_Ramone

My tiny little beach house is under level 3 evacuation orders (LEAVE NOW!!). Don't know if it will last the day. Thankfully nobody using it at the moment.

Fingers crossed for you. The sky is orange here, but the air quality isn't that bad because there's a layer of marine air underneath the smoke.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Oliver_Wendell_Ramone

My tiny little beach house is under level 3 evacuation orders (LEAVE NOW!!). Don't know if it will last the day. Thankfully nobody using it at the moment.

I'm sorry about that, hope it survives.

[Replaced_Texan]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

pure democratic voting would allow ny and ca to dictate to the rest of the country.

hey!!!

[Replaced_Texan]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Not only is it ridiculous for any law office to demand people come in to work, but it's counterproductive.

I can get done in surf shorts and a t-shirt in my home office the same amount of work I'd complete commuting to and from an office in half of the time. I had two offices at one point, and I never went to either except to meet with people, and even then I found that to be a waste of time.

I get the sales component of offices and in-person meetings. I'm told I'm pretty, I can speak convincingly, and I know how to close. I get that shit. People want to see and hear what they're buying. But after I'm done glad handing, Let Me Leave. Making me stay and hang out behind a desk saps my fucking soul.

I don't want to be in a fucking office with a bunch of people, sitting in artificial light, feeling like I have to get things done while I'm there. On my own schedule, I might work for a couple hours, then do a twenty minute erg piece, work again for an hour, then ride the bike a bit. This keeps the mind calm and allows creative solutions to complex issues to emerge in one's brain.

If I had a twenty for every time the solution to a complex legal question popped into my head while running on the elipitcal machine, I could buy several closets full of the highest quality corporate casual clothes people are compelled against their will to purchase to go to an office and hang out with old divorced dickheads and social invalids who have No Other Place To Be.

We aren't wired to live and die within office towers, artificially cleaved to people we'd never even look at, let alone speak to, but for a shared commercial endeavor. The lonely old men need to understand this. They need to grasp that some of us have internalized the rule that no one ever died wishing he'd spent more time at the office... and that it's a sad rule that no one should have to internalize.

We all perform so much better when left to work at our own pace. Particularly A Personalities, which, though I'd love to claim I wasn't, I unfortunately am. I've been up since 7 and already knocked off four of the eight things I needed to do today. Why the fuck do I need to get dressed, hop in a car, burn gas driving to work, wasting at least an hour of time, and then get arranged behind my desk, talk to a bunch of people I don't want to talk to, and do all of it within a building with an atrocious fossil fuel footprint?

My pet theory on offices is that people who like to avoid having metrics applied to them love to be in offices. They can act important at meetings, make political allegiances, gossip, and find ways to climb the ladder while the rest of us who actually create the dollars do the real work.

This attitude, along with intentional acts (refusing partnership and completely shifting careers/practice areas a few times), has cost me millions. I understand that. But it's also cost my employers. Had they allowed me to work as I felt like working, they'd have gotten a lot more out of me. Instead, they always want you to make it your life - make you do it the way they did it.*

I'd rather die.

________
* There's a hazing element to it. Old fucks demanding the kids suffer as they did. Well, count me out of that shit. I never hazed anyone when I was in a fraternity, and as I recall it, the guys who got off on doing that shit were always the biggest tools and losers. Maybe I'm nuts. It just seems that anyone who wants to make anyone else act a certain way, or exert power over another person, is somewhere between deeply strange and sociopathic.

We're supposedly working on a "one day a week" plan where we stagger back in once a week. No idea when this is supposed to start, but I imagine the next two weeks or so. I'm not adverse to the idea, just so I can get some affidavits signed on a regular basis without having to schedule three people to come in. But other than that, I have no real interest in a regular office time. I get so much more done here with my dogs instead.

If I know our country, we'll be back in lockdown by early October due to school and people being idiots. And we'll not try this ridiculousness for another few months.