Me to! My problem is that my ideas never make money. But that's ok - I do it for my own satisfaction. Here are two others I'm playing with...
www.ExpertVoter.org
www.UnitedDemocraticNations.org
So needless to say I won't be quiting my day job anytime soon.
gary
Why Republicans on top? Alphabetical order would place Democrats first, so I'm interested in the ordering. Also, the clips I watched reminded me of the fair and balanced nature of Fox News.
However, your United Democratic Nations amuses me. Democracy, as a concept, violates its own basic principle when it is pushed onto people, especially those unwilling to take it. In the history of the world, the only fully-functional non-parlimentary, full representation democracy to last more than a hundred years is the United States. Every single other example has failed within a century.
Democracy works relatively well in the US, I'll grant you that. The US was founded and based largely on British principles, and Britain was, historically, the most democratic of post-Roman European nations. Democracy fails and crashes most other places within a matter of a few years. Take Italy, which has constantly had trouble since the end of WWII- I read in the New York Times yesterday, after their government failed- again- that they've had 62 governments since the war. I only use Italy as an example because its fresh in my mind.
Britain always had a very strong sense of right, fair, and lawful. The British legal code is the inspiration for most western legal systems, ours included. Britain's system is carefully designed to prevent things like voter fraud, heavily overseen by watchgroups that are passionately against it. The US also has a very very carefully designed system to prevent voter fraud, and the commitment of people within the system to the honesty of it is incredible. In most other countries, however, democracy has a big stumbling block in front of it, and that is the essential honesty, and trusting nature, of the people living within it.
In our country, our military is symbolically tasked with only one thing. To serve, protect, and defend not the president, nor the people, but the Constitution of the United States. Every official in our governments first responsibility is always towards nothing more or less than to the proper upholding of the document on which our government is based. If the document is against the best interests of the people, before the best interests of the people can be served, the document must be amended by a two thirds majority of representatives chosen by those people. This concept is unusual.
In other countries, the respect and belief in the new system of government is never as strong as here. People automatically assume that the government is corrupt, inept, and fraudulent. Power-hungry people take advantage of loopholes in the system, recreate positions in their interest, and change the system to something resembling a dictatorship.
It varies as to whether this dictatorship is good or bad. Some of them are very good. There have been a long line of dictators who have truly had the best interests of their countries and its people in mind, who rule well, restore order, and genuinely do a damned good job. Hugo Chavez, had he been able to get the people to put him into the position he was aiming for, seems to be a good example.
In other countries, such as Sweden, other forms of government work better than American-style democracy ever could. People within the US are generally selfish, and think of themselves first, their family second, and the good of the people around them a very distant third. For that reason, democracy is the best we can do here. In other countries, however, the dedication of its people towards the common good allow for other, more effective, governments to flourish, such as socialism. Socialism, and especially communism, are exceptionally good forms of government when they are properly and honestly implemented. Please don't go into rants about the Soviet Union, because it was not in any way an example of proper communism.
Your problem is that you see things through your eyes, and assume that from what you see, you can implement ideas on an entire range of things you haven't seen. Your PRT project makes sense, given your experience with mass transit. You've never seen a well-run, well-implemented, well-executed mass transit network. Mass transit networks only work given proper implementation- they need to serve a wide variety of destinations from a wide variety of points of origin, with frequent, rapid, and reliable service. If it doesn't, it is only useful to people whose origin and destination are convenient precisely to the system. As a result, usage is limited.
Your experience with California trying to re-create a public transportation network out of nothing in a densely populated area is a massive, difficult, and almost impossible undertaking. New York works because it was never dismantled. It was built as it was needed over the course of about 100 years. They need more service now, so they are building another line currently, to supplement a dozen other lines that criss-cross lower Manhattan very effectively. To build a system as extensive as New Yorks will cost billions of dollars. To assume the concept of Mass Transit can not be the solution because your local system is not yet comprehensive enough to be useful is naive. To assume democracy can work worldwide because it works here is likewise naive.
