If you have 10 parties for example, then you're going to have about five of them form a coalition government to dominate the other five which is generally how the parliamentary system works.
Basically what I've seen in the few live examples we have is that yes, there are power blocs, but they tend to shift more and it's easier for new factions to emerge. Additionally, some voting systems push towards the center rather than the extremes, ranked voting for example tends to produce "consensus" candidates more often than first past the post. *shrug* There is no perfect system, but I think some are better than what we have now.
We have two parties for the same reason that there were two sides in WW2. The only way to get more parties is to lower the stakes of power such that people feel comfortable to stand on principle.
I would argue it's more of an artifact of a first past the post voting system. Third parties act as spoilers and thus end up merging with one of the two dominant ones instead.
Snowden definitely deserves jail time.
Well, he's guilty of crimes that are usually punished by jail time. In this case I think what he deserves is a pardon and a presidential medal of freedom.
People work with people they hate, doing jobs they hate, wasting away their life, etc. because they need money and there's no other way for 99.9% of people to make a living in Obama's America. Slave away, slaves.
Wait, how does that have anything to do with Obama? Capitalism, sure, but Obama? Are you telling me it was happy fun land where no one ever did anything they didn't like for a paycheck when prior presidents were in office?
Flat file database with a COBOL front end.
The only thing a carbon tax is going to lead to is massive graft and pork projects (see Solyndra)
If it's a tax that reduces some behavior we don't like then that's still a net win. Generally when you tax something you get less of it. Forcing the re-internalization of externalized costs is a legitimate function of government.
Things are getting much simpler.
Not from where I'm sitting. Instead, the complexity goes up every year as they keep trying to do more with less. I'm fine with that as means I get paid more since they still need someone who understands how it all works.