Rob Long is a member of the Screen Actor's Guild, but I think that's compulsory.

That may well be the case, but the antagonist placed special importance on the "elected officials" aspect, and The Logo is hoping to engage him on his own terms.

Well put. The book OU referenced below goes on to describe other good reasons to maintain it: it prevents national recounts (a nightmarish prospect), it forces candidates to campaign outside their high population comfort zones, it helps maintain a two-party system and the majority support it mathematically entails, etc.

Wow. A lot to cover.

1. Banter. We like it. A series of short comments punctuated by medium or long ones strikes us a lively and ricochet-y.

2. The number of comments necessary to form a good conversation. We're fine with conversations ranging from a handful of comments to the dozens. And sometimes the hundreds, although hundreds of comments can be hard to slog through.

We could make it easier to follow long conversations by moving to a two level conversation structure -- i.e., you could comment off a comment and the conversation would ramify. The advantage of the flatter, 1-level conversation structure is that each comment gets heard, akin to a round table discussion.

Although it's hard to see, the new Intel tab uses this two-level structure for its comments.  You start with a question, comment or provide answers, and then comment off each answer.

3. Navigational friction. We see a lot of this, not just in the way a comment kicks you back to page 1 but in how difficult it can be to keep up on active conversations. Not all of the fixes are easy, but we're trying to balance reducing these frictions with introducing new features and improving site performance.

4. The Intel tab. The post that introduced it is here.  Its intended purpose is much different than that of our conversations.  The purpose is to drive to something fairly focused -- one or more answers -- in contrast to the conversations which, happily, often meander and don't have this burden. It's still in beta, but we have plans to make it clearer when to Answer vs. Comment, and how to organize these for browsing or ad hoc searches. 

5. The software itself. The platform we're using is called eZ Publish. It's not a blogging platform, and outfits like the Asian Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, Elle, Cosmopolitan, and Car & Driver have built their businesses on it. We chose it because we think it will ultimately have more flexibility than a re-purposed blogging platform, although it also means that some blogging features don't come out of the box. 

6. Stuff coming up: Local feeds, because politics is not just international and national, but regional. 

Thank you for the post, Haakon.

Excuse me?

To your point, it's important to track individuals over time to truly understand the shifts. With our current set up, we can't do this.

For all we really know, all of Gingrich, Santorum, and Perry's supporters could have switched to the Romney camp, and vice versa -- the numbers we see at the aggregate level would be the same as if they'd have stayed in place.

The same technique is used to show inter-class income mobility, by the way.

Failing that, you can try the link that's embedded in the post right before the poll.  Next time, of course.

Monologue?  I see three -- make that four -- people talking.

We post the results the next day.  You can find the write-ups of the previous polls here:

Poll 1

Poll 2

Poll 3

Poll 4

Poll 5

Poll 6

Aargh.  It's a typo.  Thanks.

We hope it will be a resource for succinct answers to political questions.

The Logo apologizes if he wasn't very clear in his post.  We hope its purpose will get clearer as the content grows and we build organizing features around the Intel section.

Agreed, Peter.  During yesterday's shoot, the Law Talk gang repeatedly sang (not literally) EJ's praises. 

A related Ricochet conversation:

http://ricochet.com/main-feed/Markets-and-Morals

Good topic! There are three questions built in here, and it may be useful to repost these as separate items:

1. What's the conservative/libertarian position on fair trade advocacy?
2. Is it anywhere close to true that "most... chocolate is produced by child labor"?
3. To what extent is kidnapping, beating, and captivity used to facilitate child labor?

Lindzen is great.

Feel free, please, to consolidate these into a big list, Michael. Or anybody. 

There are a number of problems with this survey.  First, most geological researchers and geoscience faculty probably know next to nothing about the effects of atmosphere on climate.  Second, the preceding question frames the temperature increase as from the pre-1800s to the present.  Given that all of the climate change skeptics I recall acknowledge temperatures increasing due to the end of the "little ice age" (c. 1550-1850), the question hardly seems differentiating.  Third, at no point does it ask about the severity of future increases in temperature due to human activity.  

The surprise may be that 69.3% of the sample didn't answer such slam-dunk questions, and that 18% of those who did said, "no."