[1096] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
Re: So That's Your Price?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jeremy H. Brown)
Wed Mar 13 11:04:42 2002
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Message-ID: <uv64rjkdg0p.fsf@suspiria.ai.mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 03:32:38 -0500
From: "Jeremy H. Brown" <jhbrown@AI.MIT.EDU>
To: MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <20020313081834.GS19606@innocuous.mit.edu>
Richard Tibbetts <tibbetts@mit.edu> writes:
> Not blinded by the dollar sign. Its ten dollars. Its not really that
> much money. Blinded by the joy of watching Rhett annoy people like you.
Oooh, I'm filled with the joy, and I can't even vote.
> Maybe Rhett should start soliciting donations from people who would
> like to see him buy more than 500 votes. Though it doesn't seem like
> he is going to run out of money any time soon.
I'm in. I'm a graduate student, so I'm kinda broke, but I'll add my
bit to the muddle: Rhett, I hereby pledge $10 to be added to the pot
if you win and disburse funds, so you can pay the 501st voter too.
Any other cruft want to join the party?
Jeremy
PS "Vote Apathy! Rinehart and Brown in '92!"
<http://www-tech.mit.edu/V112/N9/rinehart.09n.html>
PPS Seriously, read that link. What the UA is talking about hasn't
changed in 10 years. What's gotten done in ten years can be
measured in teaspoons.
The fact of the matter is, the UA structure is modeled on the US
government structure: executive, legislative, judicial. Checks
and balances are all very nice when there's real power involved,
but it makes it functionally impossible to do anything on a
student timescale.
This is why the GSC, which has almost none of the political
overhead of the UA, is actually occasionally an effective
organization.
Until someone manages to completely blow away the UA structure and
replace it with something simpler, the UA proper will remain a
shell-game built around the few subcommittees that do the
occasional teaspoonful of useful work.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Documentation on the use of the mailing lists mit-talk, all-talk,
mit-news, housing-talk, and the mit-talk Zephyr class is available at:
http://web.mit.edu/institvte/talk/
