Perhaps Obama supporting gay marriage isn't such a good thing

The Economist makes an interesting case why perhaps Obama supporting gay marriage is bad for gay rights overall.

The thinking is that until now gay marriage hasn't been seen as a partisan issue and several of the more liberal republicans have come over on the side of supporting gay marriage. With Obama's latest announcements this is going to be harder as they will now seem more left leaning than before Obama came out for this cause.

Also it is debatable if we want an election where gay marriage is again an important issue. Some right leaning evangelicals who would otherwise have been skeptical about voting for a Mormon might now feel more compelled to do so.

I still don't understand why anybody but gay people would feel that it is so important but that seems to be the world we live in. Myself I feel strongly about this issue because if you replace gay with for instance black it just becomes so obvious that this is discrimination against a minority (Remember it wasn't that long ago that interracial marriages were illegal too in many states).

What's wrong with US Politics: Part 1, Partisanship

I've decided that I'm going to start writing up things that I think are wrong with US politics and it's style of democracy in series of blog posts. I have a couple of topics I already want to tackle and I thought I would do one at a time instead of doing one huge post and keep going until I feel that I am done.

The first and one of the biggest problems as I see it with US democracy is how bipartisan it is. The problem should be pretty obvious to anybody who has been following US politics lately and it seems to be getting worse at least from what I can see.

I don't see this problem going away anytime soon and unfortunately due to how US elections are done it is as far as I know uniquely designed to exacerbate this problem. The problem starts with that all elections in the US is winner takes all. That means that you really can only have two major parties because if someone started another significant party on either the left or the right that would immediately lead to that side consistently loosing all elections since that side's votes would be split two ways (I am reminded of the interview by Bill Maher on Realtime where he urged Ralph Nader not to run for President in the Bush-Kerry election in 2004).

This problem is made even made worse by how how the candidates are selected during the primaries. Not that a lot of people vote in the elections in general, but only a very tiny minority of people vote in the primaries which choose the candidates. Also the people who do tend to participate in primaries are usually the ones that lean very far to the left or the right. This means that instead of getting two people who are fairly close to what most people might be OK with in the middle of the political spectrum we tend to end up with two candidates each of which are far to the left or to the right. And given that the winner takes all a difference of a few votes could be the difference between a very left leaning candidate and a very right leaning candidate. And then when they all go to Washington these very right and left leaning candidates need to try to compromise and we all know how well that is working out.

One way that I think this could be made better is if you stopped having representatives that all represent one specific district for each state. Instead of having a congressman represent some weird selection of counties in his state he would represent the whole state. And the election for congress would not be several winner takes all races, it would be allotted based on how much each of the political parties have won in that state. A candidate could still run by himself as now, but instead of having individual elections for the state the parties would run in the elections with a list specifying the order of the candidates that they will field. You could also add in some sort of weighting where you as a voter can pick certain candidates that you prefer on the list and they would be able to skip up the list if enough people did so (As we do now in Sweden). This way a larger state like California you could have a party that only has 10% of the vote but they would still successfully field around 5 representatives in congress since California has 53 delegates. I'm not certain, but I'm pretty sure that it is up to the individual states how you elect your representatives so this change could even be enacted by individual states.

But since everybody currently elected belongs to one of the two dominant parties why would they change the law to make it easier for smaller parties to be heard?

Don't Rush to judgement

"We've arrived at a point where the president of the United States is going to lead a war on traditional marriage" Rush Limbaugh said on his show Wednesday.

His first, second, third or fourth wife could not be reached for comment.

From George Takei's Facebook page

Another reason to loose weight

If you need another reason to loose weight a recent article published in Maternal and Child Health Journal seem to indicate that obese women seem to have children that are statistically worse in math and reading tests than other children when adjusted for other factors such as socioeconomics status, parental levels of education etc.

Going to start being a bit more active online

I'm doing an experiment with my online presence. I'm going to try to be a bit more active with my blog (Last post was in 2009 which is ridiculous). I don't think it will be that big of a change for me given that I was already usually emailing links I found interesting to people. I will just post them here instead from now on until I get tired of it.

Also as part of this I've spend a little while to set up so that whenever I post something on my blog here it should also be posted to Facebook, Twitter and also Google+. I've also added some connections to also share my media center automatically generated top-list with the world (Although I'm sure nobody cares).

All of this is handled by using some clever magic on IFTTT.com, a really cool site for automating stuff happening to you online. IFTTT is short for If This Then That and basically it allows you to define triggers and then an action that should be performed if triggered. As an example I have a rule for when I post here it should also duplicate that post on Facebook & Twitter.

Pebble is one of the coolest gadgets I've seen in a while

Pebble is one of the coolest gadgets I've seen in a while and I can't wait to get my hands on it. I unfortunately missed the "hacker" pre-release cut-off so September cannot come fast enough

I always thought it would be super cool to be able to write applications for something in the form factor of an iPod Nano and here it is, even better it has connectivity through Bluetooth and your cell phone, and it uses an E-Ink display which means you can easily read it in sunlight.

This is the first time I've ever used Kickstarter so I'm hoping it works out (And given that this is the highest funded project in it's history I'm sure it will).

Another week another Apple problem

Just have to share as a follow up to my latest post on not liking Macs. Yesterday my Mac broke down again. This time it unfortunately seems like it wasn't something easy that they could fix in the store.

Last time I was actually quite impressed by the couple of hours of turnaround that the Apple Store had to fix it. This was about what I expected from a major computer manufacturer and definately in line with what you get from for instance Lenovo or Dell.

This time around I was not that lucky and I was told they needed to ship the computer off to a separate repair facility and that it would take 1.5 to 2 weeks. This brings the level of service down to around what I got when I bought a laptop from Discount Laptops. They were great value, but as always (as long as you don't buy Apple) you get what you pay for.