It didnt work for ron paul. although i guess you could argue that privacy has more people up in arms than our monetary system. either way, i dont see the entrenched powers letting that happen from within.
it doesnt have to be a national party initially. If you took a pro-privacy, socially-liberal, fiscally conservative platform you could make a strong push in large urban centers across the nation. I know that the bay area would be accepting of this (accepting != elected, but it wouldnt get laughed at by the voters, only by the national media).
you just cant name it pirate party. In the us that would probably work against you.
I always thought a good compromise would be that you can sell genetically modified seeds (or eggs or whatever) but you shouldnt be able to own anything that is produced by those seeds. ie children, saplings etc
in other words, you own the process of genetically modifying an organism, not the genes.
I dont know how realistic or unrealistic this is, since ianal.
edit: someone else mentioned the monsanto ruling, which makes this idea sound unrealistic
> Yeah, it's an example of government as envisioned by the founders working as intended - when someone at the state level overreaches, a federal court strikes it down
Jeffersonian democrats certainly were against that idea, as evidenced by nullification, which was in issue up until the civil war.
Maybe the federalists, but it sounds extreme even for them.
It sounds like something that the northern politicians had in mind in the late 19th century or maybe early 20th century.
Washington and Hamilton -- the Federalists you mentioned -- desperately wanted a strong federal gov't with supremacy over state laws. Washington wanted the powers of the federal gov't enumerated in the constitution (and many of them), and his desire was for a unicameral legislature with direct popular representation.
That our constitution ended up vague on these issues-- and the existence of the Senate with its state-appointed representitives-- is owed to negotiation and comprimise. Of course, Washington presided over the congress on these issues, he was not himself a delegate, so you don't have a lot of direct quotes on these topics but what we know has been pieced together over the years from his (limited) correspondence and 2nd party accounts.
SF is only like 10% of the population of the SF/Oak/SJ bay area triangle. It may have the best brand in the area, but what happens when the housing prices drop in fremont/milpitas and then in santa clara/san jose and then starts working its way up the peninsula?
I think housing in SF is very dependent on 1) the tech boom and 2) the baby boomers who own property in the south/east bay (but wont sell because they missed out on the 2008 sales price). Both of which are temporal in nature.
SF may always be a enclave of the wealthy, but if the rest of the bay area goes to shit, prices will drop. It may not get massacred like SJ eventually will (after the baby boomers houses start hitting the market en masse), but even those wealthy enough to live there will feel it.
I'm part of one of those boomer families that have owned their house in the SF peninsula for many years (we're coming up on 25 years now), and many of us have no intention of ever selling because prop 13 has kept property taxes very low and selling would mean that we'd only be able to afford a much smaller/inconvenient place for the same upkeep cost.
What will change this is when the wave of deaths hit the boomer generation in the next 10-20 years. Once that hits, houses will be reassessed at current property values, and the house will often go on sale to settle estate taxes and to liquify the value in the house so that it can be split between the siblings.
However, the side effect will be that Peninsula housing rents will rise to adjust to the new higher property tax costs. That's right - we haven't soon the worst of rents with respect to single family homes yet... shudder
javascript has json though, which doesnt make it homoiconic, but it allows you to mimic homoiconicity in a lot of cases. When I write in javascript, I tend to store my data in json and and write code that is generic, with much abstraction that has a small foot print to manipulate the json.
That is scheme-like. That is psuedo-homoiconic.
(If anyone in the know wants to add or refute this, I would love to know whether my non-cs intuition is correct here.)
(also it is still a very mutable language, even with coffeescript/underscore)
Homoiconicity is when the code of a language is represented in a structure that is primitive to the language. It doesn't have to do with how data is stored, it has to do with how the program text itself is stored.
The advantage of homoiconicity is that the language itself is manipulable as a basic type in the language. In Scheme, this means that it's easy to generate, analyze, and modify Scheme code using simple procedures in Scheme. e.g. I could (although I wouldn't) generate a scheme expression to compute an arbitrary fibonacci number with[1]
Notice that I'm not just pushing strings together to write code. I'm actually manipulating data structures in the language to produce and modify code. That is homoiconicity.
