Is Our Political Process Fair

Is Our Political Process Fair Many people would argue that the American political process is unfair, but they would say that for different reasons. Some people would say that the American political process does not accurately reflect the will of the people and that this is unfair. Other people would argue that it is not feasible for this to be the case and that certain people deserve more influence in American politics because of their greater contribution to society or because they are more qualified for the job. These two sides have been in conflict since the early days of the American political process. Pure Democracy The representative democracy of the United States does render the opinions of individual voters relatively unimportant. While voters and their votes do matter and candidates spend millions of dollars trying to sway the opinions of voters, many individual voters are frustrated with the fact that it barely seems to make a difference whether they vote or not and the  voting seems to be a matter of principle.However, the fact that every voter is in the same situation does seem to make the process fair in its own way. People have been arguing since the beginning that American democracy has to be representative. Pure democracy with no representatives is very rare when the voting public has hundreds of millions of people. It usually only works in much smaller societies. While some people would argue that this does not mean the situation is fair, they might still make a case for the system in a pragmatic sense. Democracy requires an educated middle class to be sustainable, or people will often vote for the very same individuals that democracies seek to eliminate. You may also like these articles: The Value of Academic Debate Womens Right to Education Combining Academic Knowledge and Practicality Torture Is Never Justified Is High IQ a Guarantee to Academic Success? In Principle and In Practice It should be noted that a lot of Americans functionally never vote for reasons beyond their control. Even getting to the polling booths or getting absentee ballots is tough in some areas, which is genuine discrimination against poorer people and people who live in certain regions. Disabled individuals often find it difficult to vote for various reasons, so their voice gets excluded from American politics. Some wealthy people argue that since they pay most of the taxes, they deserve a bigger voice in American politics. However, wealthy people pay fewer taxes in America than they do in other countries. Also, wealthy people have more control over American elections than almost anyone even though they each have one vote. Wealthy people can give campaign contributions to the candidates of their choice, so the candidates of their choice will have an advantage during the election. Elections are automatically slightly biased in favor of the wealthy on this basis alone. Wealthy people represent a small portion of the population, and the policies that favor lining their pockets further will directly go against the interests of most of the country. More and more wealth has been directed to the wealthy over the past thirty years, and campaign contributions towards certain candidates have had a huge impact on that. The situation involving wealthy people buying elections is reflective of faulty laws in the sense that there could be laws limiting campaign contributions. However, this situation does not directly reflect a problem with the baseline American political process or democratic structure itself. If anything, this problem demonstrates that the American political process is not working as it was intended. Wealthy people who have no political experience and who are acting purely in their own self-interest have more political power than many politicians. The overall system for American voters and the American representative democracy isnt perfectly fair, but having a direct democracy that was perfectly fair would be too difficult. However, the fact that wealthy people are able to subvert the political process and control it so substantially automatically taints the American political process, rendering it unfair even though there are no laws mandating that this should be the case. The disproportionate influence of the wealthy has made the American political process unfair, and not the representative democratic structure.

Tips for Multi-Resolution Delphi Applications

Tips for Multi-Resolution Delphi Applications When designing forms in Delphi, its often useful to write the code so that your application (forms and all objects) looks essentially the same regardless of what the screen resolution is. The first thing you want to remember early on in the form design stage is whether  youre going to allow the form to be scaled or not. The advantage of not scaling is that nothing changes at runtime. The disadvantage of not scaling is that nothing changes at runtime (your form may be far too small or too large to read on some systems if it is not scaled). If youre not going to scale the form, set  Scaled  to False. Otherwise, set the property to True. Also, set AutoScroll to False: the opposite would mean not changing the forms frame size at runtime, which doesnt look good when the forms contents do change size. Important Considerations Set the forms font to a scalable TrueType font, like Arial. Only Arial will give you a font within a pixel of the desired height.​  If the font used in an application is not installed on the target computer, then Windows will select an alternative font within the same font family to use instead. Set the forms Position property to something other than poDesigned, which leaves the form where you left it at design time. This usually ends up way off to the left on a 1280x1024 screen- and completely off the 640x480 screen. Dont crowd controls on the form- leave at least 4 pixels between controls  so that a one-pixel change in border locations (due to scaling) wont show up as overlapping controls. For single line labels that are alLeft or alRight aligned, set AutoSize to True. Otherwise, set AutoSize to False. Make sure there is enough blank space in a label component to allow for font width changes - a blank space that is 25% of the length of the current string display length is a little too much but safe. Youll need at least 30% expansion space for string labels if you plan to translate your app into other languages. If AutoSize is False, make sure you actually set the label width appropriately. If AutoSize is True, make sure there is enough room for the label to grow on its own. In multi-line, word-wrapped labels, leave at least one line of blank space at the bottom. Youll need this to catch the overflow when the text wraps differently when the font width changes with scaling. Dont assume that because youre using large fonts, you dont have to allow for text-overflow- somebody elses large fonts may be larger than yours! Be careful about opening a project in the IDE at different resolutions. The forms PixelsPerInch property will be modified as soon as the form is opened, and will be saved to the DFM if you save the project. Its best to test the app by running it standalone and edit the form at only one resolution. Editing at varying resolutions and font sizes invite component drift and sizing problems. Make sure that you set your PixelsPerInch for all your forms to 120. It defaults to 96, which causes scaling problems at a lower resolution. Speaking of component drift, dont rescale a form multiple times, at design time or runtime. Each rescaling introduces round-off errors which accumulate very quickly since coordinates are strictly integral. As fractional amounts are truncated off the controls origins and sizes with each successive rescaling, the controls will appear to creep northwest and get smaller. If you want to allow your users to rescale the form any number of times, start with a freshly loaded/created form before each scaling so that scaling errors do not accumulate. In general, it is not necessary to design forms at any particular resolution, but it is crucial that you review their appearance at 640x480 with large and small fonts, and at a high-resolution with small and large fonts, before releasing your app. This should be part of your regular system compatibility testing checklist. Pay close attention to any components that are essentially single-line TMemos- things like TDBLookupCombo. The Windows multi-line edit control always shows only whole lines of text- if the control is too short for its font, a TMemo will show nothing at all (a TEdit will show clipped text). For such components, its better to make them a few pixels too large than to be one pixel too small and not show any text at all. Keep in mind that all scaling is proportional to the difference in the font height between runtime and design time, not  the pixel resolution or screen size. Remember also that the origins of your controls will be changed when the form is scaled- you cant very well make components bigger without also moving them over a bit. Anchors, Alignment, and Constraints: Third party VCL Once you know what  issues  to bear in mind when scaling Delphi forms on different screen resolutions, you are ready for some coding. When working with Delphi version 4 or higher,  several properties are designed to help us maintain the look and layout of controls on a form. Use  Align  to align a control to the top, bottom left, or right of a form or panel and have it remain there even if the size of the form, panel, or component that contains the control, changes. When the parent is resized, an aligned control also resizes so that it continues to span the top, bottom, left, or right edge of the parent. Use  Constraints  to specify the minimum and maximum width and height of the control. When Constraints contains maximum or minimum values, the control can’t be resized to violate those constraints. Use  Anchors  to ensure that a control maintains its current position relative to an edge of its parent, even if the parent is resized. When its parent is resized, the control holds its position relative to the edges to which it is anchored. If a control is anchored to opposite edges of its parent, the control stretches when its parent is resized. procedure ScaleForm (F: TForm; ScreenWidth, ScreenHeight: LongInt) ;begin F.Scaled : True; F.AutoScroll : False; F.Position : poScreenCenter; F.Font.Name : Arial; if (Screen.Width ScreenWidth) then begin F.Height : LongInt(F.Height) * LongInt(Screen.Height) div ScreenHeight; F.Width : LongInt(F.Width) * LongInt(Screen.Width) div ScreenWidth; F.ScaleBy(Screen.Width,ScreenWidth) ; end;end;