Our Platform for Outlining Colorado’s Future

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books." Thomas Carlyle Ideas   We should allow users suggest  books  as  reasons to agree or disagree  with an idea. Now start thinking ahead what an  algorithm  could do, if someone says that a book agrees with their beliefs. Data is readily available from  Amazon  or  E-bay  or the  New York Times  best selling list of how well a book has sold.   So there would be three fields. One place where you submit the item that agrees or disagrees with the original idea. The second field would let you classify the object. Is it a  book , a website , or simply a  logical argument . The third field would be a place where the user explains why he thinks the book supports the conclusion that he/she has come to. Of course, people would be allowed to vote weather or not the book actually does support the side that the original user said that it w...

Please help me brainstorm the most probable interest of those who agree or disagree with Romney on each issue. Just leave what you think motivates each side in the comment section, and I will add it to the list. Also, tell me the percentage of those who agree with Romneyyou think are motivated by each motivation. I will try to put the most likely motivation towards the top of the list. The book  Getting to Yes , tells us that we need to focus on interest instead of positions. To understand why someone believes something we must understand their interest. What are their values? Different interest or values lead to different positions. Of course it is best when the author of an idea submits their interest. However others users of the website could submit and then vote on the most likely motivations of each side. We need to also classify interest as opposing interest or mutual interest.  Businesses interest might include low taxes and good infrastructure.

We need to have reasons to agree and disagree with Romney on the same page. We also need to have a post for each issue (that doesn't change topics), and then brainstorms all the reasons to agree and disagree with Romney, with the best reasons at the top of their respective list. Steven Write said; "A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking ." And it is true. People make decisions becaus they only heard part of the story, and they never examined all the reasons to agree and disagree. That is why I want to use the power of the internet to brainstorm all the reasons to agree and disagree with Romney. If we separate our reasons to agree and disagree, and classify the reasons we could do some pretty cool stuff with computer software. For instance we could create a computer algorithm that gives points to Romney's beliefs based on the number or reasons to agree with him. Then each reason can become its own post, with reasons to agree and disagree with it. Eve...

When wealthy people die, much of their money gets taxed. It is called the estate tax, by those who like the tax and the death tax by those who want to make the tax sound morbid. In nations that have the estate tax, rich people who spend their money on solar panels or wind turbines could avoid it, with all the money that they use for that equipment. This would stimulate the market for this equipment. Billions of dollars would get invested in this wind turbines and solar panels. And we wouldn't be going around the estate tax really, because when you die you are not transferring money, or houses. You give your kids a pile of solar panels or wind turbines. The "value" of these items do not get taxed. So instead of Paris Hilton getting access to offshore bank accounts when her father dies, she would get millions of dollars of solar equipment that her dad bought in 2010, that helped stimulate the economy, and that she can use to produce clean energy.

  Q: If one of your daughters asked you, "Daddy, did God really create the world in 6 days?" What would you say? A: What I believe is that God created the universe, and that the 6 days in the Bible may not be 6 days as we understand it. My belief is that the story that the Bible tells about God creating this magnificent Earth, that is fundamentally true. Now whether it happened exactly as we might understand it reading the text of the Bible, that I don't presume to know. But one last point--I do believe in evolution. I don't think that is incompatible with Christian faith. Just as I don't think science generally is incompatible with Christian faith. There are those who suggest that if you have a scientific bent of mind, then somehow you should reject religion. And I fundamentally disagree with that. In fact, the more I learn about the world, the more I know about science, the more I'm amazed about the mystery of this planet and this universe. And it strength...

Reasons  to agree: People hate smart kids. Americans are way over-fascinated with calling smart people nerds, and geeks. This is not done so much in other cultures. Background: "I try to avoid an either/or approach to solving the problems of this country. There are questions of individual responsibility and questions of societal responsibility to be dealt with. The best example is an education. I'm going to insist that we've got decent funding, enough teachers, and computers in the classroom, but unless you turn off the television set and  get over a certain anti-intellectualism that I think pervades some low-income communities, our children are not going to achieve ." ~ Meet The Press, NBC News Jul 25, 2004

Reasons  to agree: We should reward good behavior and punish bad behavior .  " Teachers are extraordinarily frustrated about how their performance is assessed. And not just their own performance, but the school's performance generally. So they're teaching to the tests all the time. What I have said is that we should be able to get buy-in from teachers in terms of how to measure progress. Every teacher I think wants to succeed. And if we give them a pathway to professional development, where we're creating master teachers, they are helping with apprenticeships for young new teachers, they are involved in a variety of other activities, that are really adding value to the schools, then we should be able to give them more money for it. But we should only do it if the teachers themselves have some buy-in in terms of how they're measured. They can't be judged simply on standardized tests that don't take into account whether children are prepared before they ge...

Reasons  to agree: Those students in Education departments across the country have had worse ACT, and SAT grades than other college departments. They even have worse grades than Criminal Justice departments (cops). It is sad that cops can know math, geography, history, and science, better than those that we put in charge of teaching our children. We need higher standards for teachers, if we are going to pay them more. I'm not saying every teacher is stupid. If you are a teacher, and you are offended, than you prove my point. You are stupid. The facts are the facts, and if you get mad because of the facts, than you are stupid. I'm from Idaho. I'm not offended when you say bad things about people from Idaho, in general, because I know that you are not talking about me specifically. Of course their are a lot of very smart people who are teachers. I thought about going into teaching. My father, whom I love and respect very much is a teacher. My mother in law is also a very go...

Reasons  to agree: "In a global economy where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity--it is a prerequisite. And yet, we have one of the highest high school dropout rates of any industrialized nation. And half of the students who begin college never finish. This is a prescription for economic decline.   So tonight, I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship. But every American will need to get more than a high school diploma. And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It's not just quitting on yourself, it's quitting on your country. That's why we will provide the support necessary for all young Americans to complete college and meet a new goal: By 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in th...

Reasons  to agree: "While the evidence tells me that the death penalty does little to deter crime, I believe there are some crimes--mass murder, the rape and murder of a child--so heinous that the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage by meting out the ultimate punishment. On the other hand, the way capital cases were tried in Illinois at the time was so rife with error, questionable police tactics, racial bias, and shoddy lawyering, that 13 death row inmates had been exonerated" The Audacity of Hope, by Barack Obama, p. 58 Oct 1, 2006

Reasons  to agree: "Obama had a 2002 bill to stop police abuse. Chicago had become infamous for use of torture by police to help frame innocent people. Thirteen innocent men on Death Row were exonerated and released, some of them victims of these tortured confessions. Illinois desperately needed some action to restore confidence in the police. Obama's proposal was to require videotaping of interrogations of suspects in capital cases. When Obama began, the idea of a bill was opposed by police, prosecutors, most of the senate and the governor. The governor was determined not to appear soft on crime, and had promised to veto any proposal for mandatory tapings. By the time Obama finished his work, the police and prosecutors embraced the bill, it passed in the Illinois Senate by a vote of 58-0. The governor took the unusual step of reversing himself to sign it, and Illinois became the first state to require such tapings." ~ The Improbable Quest, by John K. Wilson, p.145 Oct ...

Reasons  to agree: "I don't want to wake up four years from now and discover that we still have more young black men in prison than in college." ~ Barack Obama, fund-raiser in Harlem, NY, Nov. 29, 2007. "Simply untrue, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. There may be a case for arguing, as some Obama supporters have done, that the total number of black prisoners is slightly higher than the total number of black students. But I can only fact check the comparison the candidate actually made, which was between young black men in prison and in college. Rather than acknowledge the error, the Obama campaign declined to provide statistical support." Source: GovWatch on 2008 Pinocchio Awards for Biggest Fib of 2007 Jan 1, 2008. As GovWatch points out, there are more black men in prison (age 18 to 100 years old) than there are "young    black men" in college. However Obama said there were more young black men in prison than in college, which is f...

Reasons  to agree: Rich people use cocain. Poor people use crack. It is wrong to punish the poor people more.

"Obama will work to ban racial profiling" ~ Campaign booklet, "Blueprint for Change", p. 48-49 Feb 2, 2008 Reasons  to agree: Race should only be considered when it is used to describe a specific suspect in a specific crime and only when used in a manner like other physical descriptions (e.g., hair color, weight, distinguishing marks). This is often referred to as the "be on the lookout" (B.O.L.O.) exception. "If we know that in our criminal justice system, African-Americans and whites, for the same crime, receive--are arrested at very different rates, are convicted at very different rates, receive very different sentences. That is something that we have to talk about. But that's a substantive issue and it has to do with how do we pursue racial justice. If I am president, I will have a civil rights division that is working with local law enforcement so that they are enforcing laws fairly and justly. But I would expect a white president or a w...

Reasons  to agree: "How many times in the last year has this city lost a child at the hands of another child? How many times have our hearts stopped in the middle of the night with the sound of a gunshot or a siren? How many teenagers have we seen hanging around on street corners when they should be sitting in a classroom? How many are sitting in prison when they should be working, or at least looking for a job? How many in this generation are we willing to lose to poverty or violence or addiction? How many?" "Yes, we need more cops on the street. Yes, we need fewer guns in the hands of people who shouldn't have them. Yes, we need more money for our schools. Yes, we need more jobs and more job training and more opportunity in our communities." "But we also need families to raise our children. We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception. We need them to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child--i...

Reasons  to agree: "One of Obama's most poignant missed opportunities was in not using the historic $787 million stimulus package to reorder state and local government's spending priorities. As states and cities continue to spend ceaselessly and without results on education and healthcare, they're crowding out investments in the physical infrastructure that the private sector needs to rebuild the economy. "In the stimulus, of the more than $200 billion that went directly to states and cities, nearly 70% went to education and healthcare spending. Only 24% went to infrastructure spending. "But the states and cities in the most trouble already spend way too much on education and healthcare, pushing taxes up and sending private industry away. They don't spend nearly enough on infrastructure, which attracts the private sector and builds the real economy. "As David Walker, former comptroller general of the US, said at the Regional Plan Association'...