Skip to main content

Is the American Constitution still workable? Can it meet the demands of our times?

The Constitution is still workable in that it continues to adapt.  Since the founding of this country, we have given eighteen-year olds the right to vote, abolished slavery, given women the right to vote, and allowed for the direct election of senators.  America has also had some bad ideas, such as prohibiting the consumption and sale of alcohol, but it repealed this with another amendment.  The Constitution is a living document.  The checks and balances system has served America for over two hundred years by maintaining a balance between the executive and legislative branches of government.  An impartial judiciary is supposed to safeguard the people's rights according to the Constitution.  The Founders did not provide for every situation explicitly in the Constitution; this allowed future generations of Americans to use the document as they saw fit.  While nothing last forever and the republics of Rome and Athens fell eventually, the U.S. Constitution provides enough safeguards in its Bill of Rights and its balance of power between the branches of government to appear stable enough to last for years to come.  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...

A man has a garden measuring 84 meters by 56 meters. He divides it into the minimum number of square plots. What is the length of the square plots?

We wish to divide this man's garden into the minimum number of square plots possible. A square has all four sides with the same length.Our garden is a rectangle, so the answer is clearly not 1 square plot. If we choose the wrong length for our squares, we may end up with missing holes or we may not be able to fit our squares inside the garden. So we have 84 meters in one direction and 56 meters in the other direction. When we start dividing the garden in square plots, we are "filling" those lengths in their respective directions. At each direction, there must be an integer number of squares (otherwise, we get holes or we leave the garden), so that all the square plots fill up the garden nicely. Thus, our job here is to find the greatest common divisor of 84 and 56. For this, we prime factor both of them: `56 = 2*2*2*7` `84 = 2*2*3*7` We can see that the prime factors and multiplicities in common are `2*2*7 = 28` . This is the desired length of the square plots. If you wi...