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Posts Tagged ‘USA’

Random notes about San Francisco, California, the Universe and Everything.

Posted in Fun, Travel, tagged California, notes, San Francisco, USA on 24 December 2012| Leave a Comment »

The number of homeless people living in San Francisco is astounding. And they stay right there in the heart of the city, a few meters away from the chic luxury stores. One second you are looking at a Gucci shop window and the next thing you see is people playing dices for money on the street in front of an erotic club.
Only in California you can pay at a farmer’s market with a credit card.
You can find soft drinks and junk food in a sports equipment shop (and in many other places they don’t really belong to).
Having a walk in the bay area (any place beside San Francisco) feels weird. You are the only one walking and there is absolutely nothing but houses and fast foods for miles.
The weather is amazingly good.
Product features include a list of “No X”, where X can be just about anything. Does not matter whether “X” is provenly bad or not. I guess it’s very easy to start a collective psychosis: just put “No potatoes” on a product and everybody will start worrying about potatoes.
People are tall.
Cisco has offices in Cisco Way.
Traffic is awful. However when there is not traffic driving is great.
There are 2 kinds of people: those with an iPhone and those with some other smartphone. The latter are a minority.
Halloween is a serious thing. People don’t mind waiting hour-long queues to get into bars.
Everything come in XL size. 8 lanes highways, seriously?
Most beers taste like hop juice, let alone IPAs.
iPhone covers are used to express your personality.
Nobody drinks water. Only soft drinks, power drinks, energy drinks, sports drinks. At least it needs to contain added vitamins, colorants, and come in a grillion flavors.
When you go out for dinner you don’t choose the restaurant, you choose the nationality.
In San Francisco people stop you to tell you how much they appreciate your look.

Democracy in the USA

Posted in Musing, tagged democracy, election, politics, USA, voter turnout, voting on 7 November 2012| Leave a Comment »

People usually think the USA are the epitome of democratic republic.

Two things that might be not so known in Europe:

Election mechanism. People do not elect the president in USA, the electoral college does. The electoral college is just a bunch of people nominated by the party. You need 270 votes to become president. Each state has a number of members of the college allotted and they go to the party that wins the state.
For Italians, this is not dissimilar from our “proportional” system, but a bit more messy. Basically, a candidate can win by popular vote (number of people voting the candidate) but lose by electoral college because of how votes are quantized, and a person voting in California has not the same voting power as a person voting in Alaska.
Turnout. In the last 40 years, the voter turnout for presidential elections in USA has always been between 50% and 60%. I repeat, it has always been less than 60%. In Italy we went from 95% in the ’70s to 80% in the last elections, and we are terribly worried about abstention. Have a look at some voter turnout statistics and be ready for a surprise.

Something to think about next time you speak about democracy.

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