If I woke up tomorrow and people were burning Wall Street to the ground I’d be less than shocked.
The more polarized people become between the two major parties the more deeply entrenched the duopoly becomes. People don't dare vote for anyone but D or R because otherwise the hated other side will win. It completely rules out any third party or independent.
Only two parties means there really isn't that much diversity of thought beyond a small number of hot-button issues, and it also reduces the work load for lobbyists and other influence peddlers. Fewer parties means fewer people that have to be begged, bribed, misinformed, or blackmailed to get whatever you want. It makes regulatory capture a lot easier to achieve.
I really don't think the American two party system is working. We need more of a parliamentary type system where you can have many parties and a greater variety of views can get a hearing.
What's remarkable to me is that very few people are even aware of the sheer mathematical/structural issues at hand: e.g. that we've expanded congressional representation from 1:(max)30000 citizens at the start, to 1:747184 as of 2017. We're engineers. We should understand scalability, and that _alone_ should be a giant red flag regarding its implications.
I can't imagine what would happen if it were comprised of 20 times the members with all kinds of minor political parties each with their own narrow agendas.
Personally I'm hoping at some point evidence based governance takes over. Which might mean it's not people doing it.
Voluntarily voting and scheduling voting on a weekday during work hours is also problematic, because largely only people with a strong motivation to vote (read: single-issue voters on the fringes) usually end up voting, which polarizes political discourse.
But agreed - proportional parliament allows for articulation of important non-majority views (such as the emergence of the Green party in Germany many years back).
If you assume engagement (and, thus, likeliness to vote) is driven in part by proximity of the nearest candidates positions to your own, and that political viewpoints are bimodally distributed, you'd actually expect FPTP to turn into a two-party system where parties, even if they start at some point close to each other, drift out toward the two peaks.
While still a gross simplification, this seems closer to reality in the US to the premises required for the Median Voter Theorem to work.
The political class just divides us and keeps us fighting over non-issues.
We're like crabs in a bucket, fighting with each other on the way to the pot of boiling water.
In reality, the poor and middle class are the crabs trying to escape the wealthy wanting to boil us is the best way I can put it.
Case 1: IQ tests are of the form:
100 + 20 x F_N^-1( F_R(R) )
Case 2: IQ tests are of the form
c1 + c2 x R
If what is actually done is case 1, then what you say is correct, and saying "IQ is normally distributed" has no empirical content.
If what is actually done is case 2, then saying "IQ is normally distributed" translates to "R is normally distributed" and has some empirical content. In particular, R (thus IQ) might not be normally distributed.
(The article seems to argue, but doesn't make the case that case 1 is the case.)
EDIT to add: dunno what the Variance is actually, might be 15^2 rather than 20^2.
However, a definition that differs from basically every empirical measurement of that quantity isn't a very good definition! That's like defining pi as 22/7 or the fine structure constant as 1/137 because it makes the math easier. Sure, that's true, and it makes it easier to explain to laypeople...but you're going to have problems when you try to predict or draw conclusions about the results of any experiments. Same with IQ - you can define it as the percentile rank converted to a scale with 100 as the mean and 15 as the stddev, but if that yields the prediction that children with a 175 IQ (5 stddev) are going to be 1 in 2 million while the observed frequency on say a Stanford Binet L-M is 1 in 10,000, you're going to draw drastically erroneous conclusions. (In practice the WISC3 and Stanford-Binet 5th ed aren't very useful for highly-gifted children anyway, because they ceiling out around 140 IQ, and basically all IQs over that are estimated with either the Binet L-M or early administration of the SATs.)
This sort of thing should be illegal, particularly when it is out-of-state interests injecting money. If you live in another state, vote out your own reps you don't like.
The harassment the poor woman has been put through lately is obscene.
Eliminating corporate personhood as a legal construct or adding a non-living entity construct as an amendment would help too.
Everybody refusing to pay their hospital bills en masse maybe?
The gears of the currently horrible insurance/healthcare fiasco are mostly normal, honest everyday people trying to get through life. With everyone trying to figure out how to get just a little bit bigger piece of pie. Gears in an out of control machine. And these gears are just doing their jobs and hoping for their bonus and hoping their homes keep appreciating and going home to their kids at night.
It's a horribly broken system in so many ways. But it does seem like the Health/Insurance complex (and maybe higher education) are among the most egregious offenders and are growing more outrageous by the year.
I think there is disagreement on what to burn down. Every level will insist vigorously that they aren't the problem, they are necessary and helping and that the problem is something else. It's not just the rich 1% either, the problem is also many of us at some level. If it weren't these things would be fixed.
As an aside, the only good thing about student loans being so egregious is that it will bring out the youth vote.
Edit: wow yall are incredibly divided on this comment. I'd love to see the internal statistics on the upvote/downvotes this got, but it seems like it's something like -12 and +12
Other insurances like car insurance and renters insurance seem slightly more reasonable (although they're all inherently a form of gambling) and I haven't heard any horror stories about them, but I wonder, if I had saved the money I put into car insurance, would it be sufficient by now to pay damages for any car accident I may be at fault for?
Except in the lower house of the national legislature (where the dominant party is still significantly overrepresented compared to the popular vote for that body), the dominant party in the political branches of the US government was not supported by a majority of voters in election to each body, even if you only consider major party votes.
These problems apparently go well beyond political moniker and I find it confusing that anyone who has been paying attention feels voting for a different color talking politician is going to fix them.
If you lived in another country with single payer healthcare, it would be the same, if not more of a push to cheaper drugs.
Well you could have had my man Bernie Sanders, if the DNC hadn't stabbed him in the back. So you know who to put first up against the wall.