Like Bruce @ 49, I'm in the US PacNW, and tip 20-25% for normally good service. I'll go higher, though, sometimes significantly higher, if I'm at an establishment where alcohol is a large revenue stream and I'm not drinking that night.
And it's fine for me now too. Thanks Abi!
There's a mal-formed link in comment 491 which makes everything following unreadable for me (Safari 2.0.4). I'm guessing it's okay for most other people, or it would have been fixed by now (at the least, there wouldn't have been another 100 comments!), but is there any chance someone with the proper powers could fix it anyway? I'm sure I'm missing good stuff!
The machines Teresa described sound like the ones which were used in Oklahoma City in my childhood. They are indeed hard to rig -- they're very simple machinery, and it's easy to understand how they work, and easy for the poll-workers to verify that they're configured correctly.
The double-listing thing she describes, however, I think is unique to New York state. Oklahoma in particular makes it very difficult for third parties and independent candidates to get on the ballot at all.
And as with everything when we talk about these details, they vary by state.
The state I grew up in (Oklahoma) (when I was there; I don't know if these details have changed) had a 1:1 correlation between precinct and voting place, typically public schools but in some places fire stations, city halls, and even churches (the church choice bothered me then and still does).
You'd vote by showing up at the single location between 7am and 7pm on the day of the election, signing the registration book by your name (I never needed an ID, but I would sadly not be surprised to hear that that was because I was white), filling in the ballot and sliding it into the ballot reader. The ballots were multi-page forms with broken arrows for each choice; you filled in the broken part of the arrows to make your selections.
Within my memory, but prior to my being voting age, voting was done on a mechanical machine where the voter would flip levers to make choices, then pull a big switch to record all the selections.
At 7pm, anyone who was already in line would be allowed to vote, but nobody could join the line. Once everyone had voted, the machines were 'closed out' and would print out a tally of all the votes. Those tallies would then be posted on the window of the polling place for any interested observers to read, and the boxes would be transported to thhe central county election board location, where county-wide totals were created.
If you had a 'valid reason' you couldn't make it to the polling place on election day, known sufficiently in advance, you could ask for an 'absentee ballot'. I never did that in Oklahoma and don't know what exactly the procedure was, but it was intentionally cumbersome and very restricted on what counted as valid reasons.
Candidates would frequently print up 'sample ballots' marked the way they would prefer -- not just on their race, but on other races and questions -- and mail them out for people to copy off of. I don't know how many people actually did, but considering how many candidates did it, I assume they believed it worked.
In Oregon and Washington, vote-by-mail is easy and common; in fact, it's the only way to vote in Oregon now, and is likely to be in Washington sometime soon. The ballots are essentially scan-tron forms like you'd use on a standardized test. Oddly, this is one place where I think the OK system is better -- with the scantron, there's no direct connection between the paper you're marking and the paper listing the choices you're making, so it's easy to make mistakes. On the other hand, both Oregon and Washington mail out ballot books, listing all the races and questions, with brief statements from the candidates and arguments, both pro & con, for the questions. In Oregon, anyone can have an argument (of limited size) placed in the ballot book for a pretty nominal fee ($50, I think).
After you mark the scantron form, you seal it in a 'security envelope' which has a few holes in it, so that you can tell there's a ballot inside but not read any of the choices. You then seal that inside another envelope, on which you place a signature and date, and put it in the mail. If I'm remembering properly, in Oregon, it had to be in the mail by election day while in Washington it has to arrive by election day, and of course the postal service makes no delivery guarantees. There are also various places you can drop the ballot off on election day (which can be anywhere in the right county), or for the moment in Washington, places you can vote in person. I think those are directly mapped to precincts, but I haven't done that here so I'm not sure.
As to what the ballots themselves look like, googling 'sample ballot' will find examples, such as these for Tulsa Oklahoma's general election in 2006.
The Wegman's shelves sound like these; I'm up to 18 of them, plus another 14 or so from Barnes & Noble's mail order catalog 15ish years ago; they're nearly identical, but their stacking mechanisms aren't compatible.
I'm using 2 of these CD/DVD cases for paperbacks; the depth is just about perfect and one set of possible heights (the one intended for DVDs, I assume) is acceptable.
Sarah S @104 we packed up all our VCR tapes and well over half our CDs (after putting the CDs onto our computer hard drives and backing up like crazy) and took them to Half Price Books.
If you've sold the CD, you might consider deleting your backup copies of it. Or not, it's your decision, but it's something to think about.
PurpleGirl @76 I wouldn't want a Constitutional Convention; everthing gets put on the table and you cannot control what happens. You might not like how it comes out. Our current Constitution was a "reformation" of the Articles of Confederation. They were only supposed to tweak the Articles but we got a whole new and different system instead.
Not only that, but the ratification procedure used was the one specified in the new Constitution, not the one in the Articles of Confederation. If the same thing happened again, there's not only no telling what the new constitution might look like, there's no telling what procedure, if any, might be available to stop it.
Meg @26: the procedure is different (there's not necessarily any direct public vote), but it's difficult in similar ways and for similar reasons.
First, the proposed amendment has to be passed by both houses of the (federal) Congress, by 2/3 majorities.
Next, it has to be passed by 3/4 of the states. There are two diferent ways this can happen, and Congress chooses which one will be used.
In the more common method, state legislatures will vote on it, and it has to pass there by simple majority. In states with two-house legislatures (all but one), it has to pass both houses.
In the less common method (used just once, for the 21st Amendment which repealed federal alcohol prohibition), voters in the states will elect members to attend a state convention, which will then vote just on the amendment. I assume the people running for the convention would run on either 'yes' or 'no' tickets, turning that into something reasonably close to a state-wide referendum.
The Constitution doesn't specify any time limit for 3/4 of the states to ratify the proposed amendments. Most of the recently proposed ones have included a 7 year limit in the text passed by Congress, but it's not clear to me if that can actually be binding, and since there haven't been any cases where it would make a difference I don't think a court has ever ruled on it.
There are currently 27 amendments, for an average of about 1 every 8 years. The first 10 (commonly called the "Bill of Rights"), however, were passed en masse almost immediately after the adoption of the Constitution itself. The most recently adopted was in 1992, having taken more than 200 years from being passed by Congress to being ratified by 3/4 of the states.
The most recent amendment which came close to passing was the Equal Rights Amendment, which was ratified by 35 states prior to its deadline being reached, three short of the 38 required. If three more states would ratify it, we could finally settle whether or not those deadlines are binding (we'd also have to settle the question of whether states can rescind their adoption; 5 of the 35 claim to have done so).
Meg @99 -- maybe someone with more expertise will come along, but I'm here and awake and I'll do my best.
#1: As with so many many things in the US, this varies state-to-state. My impression is that the number of positions which are directly elected is somewhat correlated with the newness of the state.
The state I grew up in (Oklahoma), which was the 46th or 50 current states (1907), has a truly impressive number of electoral bodies -- besides the ones you mentioned, there's the Corporation Comission (regulates utilities), the Insurance Commission, and I don't know what all. Much of the cabinet is also directly elected.
That came out of the progressive movement of the early 20th century which tried to address corruption and cronyism through the magic of democracy. Whether the trade-offs were worth it is a good question indeed.
2. The multiple layers is pretty much like the US, except that in some sense the states and the federal government are the only "real" layers. The smaller layers operate under delegated authority from the states, and the states could (and sometimes do) muck around in what would seem to be their internal affairs.
There are also more layers and more overlap, at least some places.
I'm part of a town, a county, a water district, a smog control district (that's not the real name, but I can't remember it right now), a school district, and a country. At previous locations, I've also been in library districts, fire control districts, ambulance districts and hospital districts. Most of those have some kind of independent control board for which I could vote and many of them had taxing authority of some sort.
4. You're basically right; there's no obvious unified leadership office for the party out of power. There are "minority leader" positions in the houses of congress, but they're house-specific, and correspond more closely with the majority leader position than the President.
There's also the head of the opposition party committee, but that's usually a consultant or advisor-type, not an actual politician. The only counter-example I can think of offhand is Haley Barbour who was head of the Republican National Committee in the 1990s and now is now governor of Mississippi.
That lack probably contributes some to our drawn-out Presidential primary system.
I've been slowly re-reading Consider Phlebas as my stuck-in-traffic-jam book, and wishing I had read it without knowing it was a "Culture novel". In the first 2/3 of it at least, the Culture is not portrayed any more sympathetically than the Idirans, and I would have liked to have read it at least once without being pretty sure who the "good guys" were and how the overall struggle would end.
On the other hand, if I'd read it first, I'm not sure I'd have read any more Banks. I like it, but it's not as instantly engrossing as The Player of Games, the first Banks I read, was.
As for Feersum Enjin, I'm one of those who sadly bounced, hard, off the dialect. I stare at the page and it just doesn't have any words on it.
Clifton @53: Just so everyone is clear, and not implying that you aren't, in the US you do not have to vote for either the Democrat or Republican
And of course, like so many other things in the American system, the details there differ on a state-by-state basis, and in some states you frequently do really only have those two choices.
Ballot Access News is an interesting, if frequently infuriating, source of information on the de jure methods the D and R parties use to maintain their de facto duopoly.
It doesn't look like the WRT54GC is much like the 3rd-party supported 54G, 54GS or 54GL models. It uses a completely different wireless chip and doesn't have much memory, so supporting it would be non-trivial in several different ways, and I'm not seeing anybody who's put the effort in.
Bill Blum @33 -- where are the MAC IP reserverations on your 54G? I can't find it on my 54GS stock firmware, but between their design and my occasional obliviousness that doesn't necessarily mean it's not there.
Patrick, as far as I can tell, all of the consumer-grade wireless routers are fundamentally unacceptable for one reason or anothers.
It's probably more geeky technical work than you're wanting, but one possibility is an older Linksys WRT54G or GS, or a current WRT54GL (but not a current WRT54GS) and one of the replacement firmware packages, such as OpenWRT or Tomato.
(My personal lazy half-assed current "solution" is a WRT54GS with the 'wrt54g' remote shell package set up so I can reboot it from my laptop when it forgets how to talk to the outside world, and an automated process on another machine which uses that to reboot it daily whether it needs it or not.)
I posted some links to some maybe-interesting pictures of the mid-December Oklahoma ice storm, but they got held up for moderation. There are lots of different ways the weather can find to bring down trees, it seems.
The plains-states ice storm in mid-December led to some spectacular pictures (and destruction) as well. These are all from the Oklahoma City area, but I think the storm was larger than that.
Closeups of ice on trees, so you can see just how coated they were:
http://flickr.com/photos/antonka/2101839690/
http://flickr.com/photos/antonka/2101623433/
http://flickr.com/photos/antonka/2101621693/
And the effects of so much ice on the trees, some of it beautiful, some of it heartbreaking:
http://flickr.com/photos/leia/2103519233/
http://flickr.com/photos/okcbob/2104174788/
http://flickr.com/photos/plmccordj/2103212371/
http://flickr.com/photos/bighams/2108137800/
http://flickr.com/photos/okcbob/2104173672/
Diatryma, I've never done the caucus thing -- the state I grew up in switched to primaries before I became voting age, and the states I've moved to are also primary states, so I just have book learning about how they work.
I was under the impression that in Iowa the viability threshold at the precinct level was generally 15%, although in small precincts it could be higher because there aren't enough delegates allocated to the precinct to divide up as finely as that might require. Since yours was spread across two floors of a building, I'm thinking it's not a small precinct? Does that mean that Clinton didn't get 15% of the first-choice votes in your precinct? (Or she officially didn't, but the official count was probably wrong?)
Thanks to the various folks for the art advice. Terry, where might one see some of your photographs?
Re: the Brand Names as our Culture particle: Ron English has done some superficially similar paintings, although I suspect with rather different intent. See for instance his Last Breakfast, this maybe-untitled one or this one of Homer Pollack.
While I'm thinking of it, and since this is an open thread and there are smart grown-up type people here...I'm starting to be at a point in my life where the thought of buying "real art" isn't rediculous, but that's one of those grown-up things I've never done before and don't know the procedure for. Do I just wander into galleries until I find one that happens to have something I like, and tell them I want it? Or, knowing I want Ron English, say, do I have to travel to one of the cities where he's exhibiting?
JESR, I still have occasional nightmares about how lost I got driving from the airport to my hotel in Beaverton, the night before a job interview in 1996. I eventually found it, and they hired me, but even after living & working in the Portland / Beaverton area for years, I was never able to figure out where I'd been that night.
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