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According to Fox News:
Puerto Rico's governor announced that the U.S. territory has overwhelmingly chosen statehood in a nonbinding referendum Sunday held amid a deep economic crisis that has sparked an exodus of islanders to the U.S. mainland.
Nearly half a million votes were cast for statehood, more than 7,600 for free association/independence and nearly 6,700 for independence, according to preliminary results. The participation rate was just 23 percent with roughly 2.26 million registered voters, leading opponents to question the validity of a vote that several parties had boycotted.
Also covered by AP.
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Puerto Ricans Back Becoming 51st State
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
To stand and be still,
At the Birkenhead drill,
Is a damned tough bullet to chew.
-- Rudyard Kipling
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @09:55AM (30 children)
What in God's name does this have to do with technology? Puerto Ricans are people and tech nerds are people too?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @10:04AM (9 children)
$120B worth of additional debt onto the federal balance sheet would affect the tech sector and every other sector.
SoylentNews is people
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @10:08AM (8 children)
You know what else effects the tech sector? Food. We all gotta eat. Are we going to start swapping recipes now, dipshit?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @10:32AM (3 children)
Sure. I like a good roasted coward.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @10:43AM
It was my pleasure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @02:04PM (1 child)
Do you have a good recipe? they always end up a bit chewy for me
(Score: 3, Funny) by LoRdTAW on Monday June 12 2017, @02:24PM
Cook low and slow.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @11:09AM (1 child)
Yes and we would all be interested in geopolitical implications of a famine. Also in advances, regulation and IP issues around GM crops.
Not personally fond of shit dips but feel free to create an account and post the recipe to your journal.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @11:33AM
That was, um, that was a pretty weak comeback. I'm embarrassed for you actually.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @02:10PM
Yeah. In case you haven't noticed, we do that from time to time, though just in the comments.
If there are any developments in the state of the art of the culinary sciences, I'll make sure to submit an article.
Come to think of it, there's a new pepper that ought to be taking the world record (according to Guinness) here soon as hotter than even the Carolina reaper. I can also link a place that makes some really good tasting scorpion pepper sauce if you'd like. Had it with some chili the other day.
I'll keep you apprised.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 13 2017, @01:05AM
A few months ago I posted my recipe for Cranberry mead here. I'm still waiting for the other half of the swap.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 12 2017, @10:07AM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @10:10AM
Are you stupid?
(Score: 4, Touché) by bradley13 on Monday June 12 2017, @10:52AM (1 child)
Want more tech articles? Then do your part, and send some in...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @12:57PM
Most of the time it's just something that was already on Slashdot a day or two ago.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by krishnoid on Monday June 12 2017, @10:56AM (13 children)
It's at least in part a visual design/extensibility issue -- where are you gonna put the 51st star on the flag?
(Score: 4, Informative) by looorg on Monday June 12 2017, @11:32AM
If that is the only problem or issue you could just change the pattern again.
https://www.usflagstore.com/american_flag_history_1776_to_present_s/2205.htm [usflagstore.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @01:55PM (9 children)
Really? Changing the flag would be your reason for not letting them become a state? That's a pretty pathetic reason.
It's not like we haven't changed the number of stars on the flag dozens of times already. We can do it again. Here are just a few suggestions for flags with >50 stars, and we can always design another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_flags_of_the_United_States#Possible_future_designs [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @02:20PM
Ooh! I like the circular one. We haven't had a circular star arrangement since back in the day.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday June 12 2017, @04:56PM (7 children)
I think it's a perfectly valid reason. 51 is a terrible, odd number. We have too many states as it is. So I propose a solution: for any new states to be admitted, we have to either remove or combine existing states, so that we don't exceed 50. This development with PR could thus be a good excuse for cleaning up our screwed-up state borders and making things more efficient and reducing administrative overhead.
Here's a few quick fixes we could make to bring the number back down:
1) Combine Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine into a single state (probably give a bit of south NH and ME to Massachusetts since it's a bedroom community for Boston).
2) Eliminate Wyoming (pop. 500k) and break it apart, giving the pieces to surrounding states.
3) Eliminate Rhode Island, combining it with Connecticut and/or Massachusetts.
Doing all these will eliminate 4 or 5 states; we can mitigate this by breaking California and Texas in half. I'd also like to see NYC, Philly, and DC turned into city-states (and probably Boston too).
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday June 12 2017, @06:23PM (1 child)
In that case, I totally won't plug this movie [imdb.com] that I've been seeing a bunch of Youtube ads for, and actually have no idea how good it is/n't.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday June 12 2017, @06:27PM
I fail to see what that has to do with adding new states to the union.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @06:26PM (2 children)
I counter with Texas exercising it's still-valid right to break into 5 states.
IANAHistorian, and joking of course.
Something like that has less of a chance of becoming law then PR becoming a state, so good luck. But if so lets combine the states that are split by cardinal directions like North and South Dakota.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday June 12 2017, @06:50PM (1 child)
Something like that has less of a chance of becoming law then PR becoming a state,
Of course, but I still think it's a good idea. The current state borders make no sense and are merely accidents of history, and end up creating "schizophrenic" states with two very different populations at each others' throats. See Virginia for example; most of the state is Republican and conservative, but the few northern VA counties are Democrat and very liberal, but also extremely populous. Internal divisions like this make state politics a mess and keep things from getting done. The same thing is going on in NY, with NYC vastly different from "upstate". Same in Pennsylvania with Philly. Same in Illinois with Chicago. These cities should be turned into city-states, with their surrounding metro areas joined with them (even if they're in different states; this means New Jersey is eliminated, and maybe CT too). This would also eliminate the problem of people living in one state and working in another, and having the mess of dealing with taxation from two states, plus it'd make public transit better since public transit is always a big mess when it crosses state lines because of political problems.
The other problem is that states in this country vary too much in population, with each state getting the same 2 Senators. The states should be more roughly equal in population to fix this. So, for instance, if we break NYC and Philly into separate city-states (each combined with half of NJ), NYCS and PhillyS would now have I'm guessing about 10M each, but this would eliminate NYS and PA as the political juggernauts they are. The remainders of NYS and PA would still have plenty of population after this change, since upstate NY still has a bunch of cities (Buffalo, Rochester, Utica, Albany, etc.) as does PA (Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Erie, etc.) and both are geographically large with lots of rural area and small towns. Taking NoVA out of VA would cut it down in population a lot, but they could re-merge with WV to fix that.
As for ND/SD and NC/SC, that should work for the Dakotas (they're very low-population, the new combined population would be only 1.6M), but not the Carolinas: they're just too large. NC already has 10M, and SC 5M. We don't need a state with 15M people, especially with the already-present acrimony between the RTP area and the rest. Perhaps RTP should combine with Hampton-Roads into a new state, while the rest of NC can combine with SC or maybe northern GA or southwest VA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @07:04PM
With all the problems we see with gerrymandering I don't trust anyone to draw new state lines based on political reasons.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @06:34PM
And 49 wasn't? So we annexed Hawaii just so we could have a nice, round, 50 and no other reason at all?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @11:04PM
Boston's a city state, but not Chicago? There's an odd fantasy.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday June 12 2017, @02:16PM
Ah yes, vexillography, the grand art of flag design. SN's tribute to Sheldon Cooper's "Fun with Flags."
There's no great technical conundrum posed by placing a 51st star. The current flag has 8 rows of stars, but we could just revert to a 6-row design (as the 48-star flag had). Alternating rows of 8 and 9. 3*8+3*9=51. Easy. Done.
Though, if you wanted to, there's all sorts of innovative designs that have been proposed over the years. (Just search for 51-star flag. I was going to link an ABC story that came up on this topic, but the amount of scripts and ads and such to make it function make it offensive to me.)
(Score: 1) by realDonaldTrump on Monday June 12 2017, @08:23PM
I've been thinking a lot about my flag. Let me tell you, 51 stars is fine. It's great. Because 3 lines with 17 stars in each line comes to 51 stars. My branding experts tell me 17 + 17 + 17 comes to 51. We tried 39, but 51 is testing well. Very high ratings in the 18 to 49 demo. Which is a key demo, very important. So we can have 17 stars above my face, 17 stars to the left of my face, and 17 stars to the right of my face. Making a total of 51 stars. We don't need stars underneath my face because we'll put my name there. My name, gilded underneath my face. Everything I just said, gilded. A great red, white, blue and gold flag. Got it all worked out, folks. #TrumpFlag [twitter.com] #51Stars [twitter.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @11:07AM (1 child)
Whining isn't nerdish or technical or much of anything else. Just please stop.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @11:41AM
Neither is sucking cocks. Yet here you are.