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Hi there. Immigrant to the US from Canada here. I figured I'd just respond to the parent (mostly a troll) and some of the siblings here.

Immigration to the United States requires a significant amount of money and time. First, you have to qualify for either one of the immigrant visa categories, or come across on what's called a dual intent visa and then adjust status to Permanent Resident. These processes variously require interviews with USCIS and a significant wait for certain categories (more than a decade in a few, months to years for most), not to mention that the filing and other fees for the whole process can run into the thousands of dollars. (Did you know that USCIS, like the Post Office, doesn't take taxpayer dollars and instead is self-funded from filing fees? Good for you, not great for immigrants.)

If you came over on a nonimmigrant visa, like a visitor, work, or educational visa, you're likely going to have to return home before you can start the real immigration process, unless it's "dual intent" like the K-1 fiance(e) visa as I mentioned before.

Reason has a very good overview of the various paths available.

No, we aren't required to take a test on civics and English. That is required when one naturalizes, or becomes a United States citizen. This has a prerequisite of legally residing continually in the US for three or five years, depending on the visa category in which you entered. (Oh, and another thousand dollars, thanks.) The process, like other USCIS processes, takes about a year in wait and processing time. The process is also entirely not required; one can continue to be a permanent resident for as long as one likes, as long as one continues to file for an extension of one's Permanent Resident status (i.e. green card).

I personally plan to become a US citizen (well, dual citizen) as soon as possible though, because it allows one to obtain a US Passport (faster border travel), means one is done with USCIS forever (barring very specific, very rare circumstances), and allows one to vote.

So I guess what I'm saying is, the next time you want to make assumptions about legal immigration, look into it first. It's quite complicated, expensive, and not for the faint of heart.

"Give me your tired, your poor"? Not so much.

====
Back to the original topic, the birth rate. Here is my point of view. Demand a standard of living that is above realistic. That is, expensive vacation cruises, Highly mortgaged homes on one acre lots, private schools, private medicine, must have new cars after 3-4 years, high cost of education and the latest electronic toys. So what is it, a new toy or unnecessarily lifestyle, or children?
If you establish a need of restaurant living, high life styles, no savings, and debt for the toys, where is the moeny for that second or third child? And while I am not a follower of a religion that frowns on contraception, look to your own conjugal practices. In my province, 50 years ago 85% of couples married with a religious ceremony. Today, 52% are cohabiting without religion in the house. The provincial law now stipulates that a couple, cohabiting and with a child, are, after two years together, legally married. They do not require a justice of the peace to sign papers. So, when you look at why the birthrate is low, you need only look at the society's value system.
New or devout religious families are having 7 to 8 children on the low side, and 15 to 18, on the high side. Many do not have TVs, or enjoy American style vacations. Their vacation is measured as success of their children.
   

Hi there. Immigrant to the US from Canada here. I figured I'd just respond to the parent (mostly a troll) and some of the siblings here.

Immigration to the United States requires a significant amount of money and time. First, you have to qualify for either one of the immigrant visa categories, or come across on what's called a dual intent visa and then adjust status to Permanent Resident. These processes variously require interviews with USCIS and a significant wait for certain categories (more than a decade in a few, months to years for most), not to mention that the filing and other fees for the whole process can run into the thousands of dollars. (Did you know that USCIS, like the Post Office, doesn't take taxpayer dollars and instead is self-funded from filing fees? Good for you, not great for immigrants.)

If you came over on a nonimmigrant visa, like a visitor, work, or educational visa, you're likely going to have to return home before you can start the real immigration process, unless it's "dual intent" like the K-1 fiance(e) visa as I mentioned before.

Reason has a very good overview of the various paths available.

No, we aren't required to take a test on civics and English. That is required when one naturalizes, or becomes a United States citizen. This has a prerequisite of legally residing continually in the US for three or five years, depending on the visa category in which you entered. (Oh, and another thousand dollars, thanks.) The process, like other USCIS processes, takes about a year in wait and processing time. The process is also entirely not required; one can continue to be a permanent resident for as long as one likes, as long as one continues to file for an extension of one's Permanent Resident status (i.e. green card).

I personally plan to become a US citizen (well, dual citizen) as soon as possible though, because it allows one to obtain a US Passport (faster border travel), means one is done with USCIS forever (barring very specific, very rare circumstances), and allows one to vote.

So I guess what I'm saying is, the next time you want to make assumptions about legal immigration, look into it first. It's quite complicated, expensive, and not for the faint of heart.

"Give me your tired, your poor"? Not so much.

Thats all well and good but only the minority of immigrants do that.

Most cross over from mexico, have a baby born in the US and automatically become citizens. Then you have all the ones who come here and do absolutely nothing but get free everything that most american born citizens cant afford. Or the ones who work the system in other ways.

So basically yeah, give me the the poor is our countries motto. Well its more like "Give me your poor, your tax dodging, your freeloading, your lazy, your ignorant and your people who cant/refuse to speak english so they may gradually over time bleed this country dry".

And you dont have to look into it much when your a normal guy like myself who works in manual labor and see this kind of thing day in and day out. Youre just trying to take the pretentious high road to justify your pretty little speech that doesnt really say much of anything. Do yourself a favor and stay in canada, we have enough wanna be armchair government know it alls already in this country, we dont need to import more from countries that are only known for being cold and having hockey.

So bottom line is, youre doing it the hard way. Which is the suckers way.

Hi there. Immigrant to the US from Canada here. I figured I'd just respond to the parent (mostly a troll) and some of the siblings here.

Immigration to the United States requires a significant amount of money and time. First, you have to qualify for either one of the immigrant visa categories, or come across on what's called a dual intent visa and then adjust status to Permanent Resident. These processes variously require interviews with USCIS and a significant wait for certain categories (more than a decade in a few, months to years for most), not to mention that the filing and other fees for the whole process can run into the thousands of dollars. (Did you know that USCIS, like the Post Office, doesn't take taxpayer dollars and instead is self-funded from filing fees? Good for you, not great for immigrants.)

If you came over on a nonimmigrant visa, like a visitor, work, or educational visa, you're likely going to have to return home before you can start the real immigration process, unless it's "dual intent" like the K-1 fiance(e) visa as I mentioned before.

Reason has a very good overview of the various paths available.

No, we aren't required to take a test on civics and English. That is required when one naturalizes, or becomes a United States citizen. This has a prerequisite of legally residing continually in the US for three or five years, depending on the visa category in which you entered. (Oh, and another thousand dollars, thanks.) The process, like other USCIS processes, takes about a year in wait and processing time. The process is also entirely not required; one can continue to be a permanent resident for as long as one likes, as long as one continues to file for an extension of one's Permanent Resident status (i.e. green card).

I personally plan to become a US citizen (well, dual citizen) as soon as possible though, because it allows one to obtain a US Passport (faster border travel), means one is done with USCIS forever (barring very specific, very rare circumstances), and allows one to vote.

So I guess what I'm saying is, the next time you want to make assumptions about legal immigration, look into it first. It's quite complicated, expensive, and not for the faint of heart.

"Give me your tired, your poor"? Not so much.

as a parent. Congrats. And good job of standing up to the Therapeutic State.

Well, they're begging the question - human CFCs didn't cause ozone depletion either :)

http://reason.com/blog/2007/09/27/ozone-hole-science-revisited

The question is, "can volcanoes (and hey what the hell, oceans) increase CFC concentration in the atmosphere"? The assumption of the "detection of CFCs means detection of intelligent life" depends on a lack of CFC generation by any natural means. We've already shown this is simply not the case, and unfortunately, our measurement network and duration for CFC concentrations in our own atmosphere is terribly limited.

"Those" billions? It's one billion, singular.

The US government spends 19% on defense, 19% on social security, and 20% on healthcare. The last two items are expected to grow much faster than the first.

That percentage always grow in civilised countries. Luckily!

"Those" billions? It's one billion, singular.

The US government spends 19% on defense, 19% on social security, and 20% on healthcare. The last two items are expected to grow much faster than the first.

Useless? Do you know what a "contested sea zone" is and how it affects commerce? No? Yeah, that's what I thought, and the reason why is overwhelming dominance. Assuming, of course, you like imported coffee at the hip indie coffeeshop and hipster fruits like the Durian instead of that crap domestically made junk.

If you recall from 04, this same thing was going on, only in the opposite direction. Slashdot even linked a map proposing separating the "united states of canada" being the blue states joined with canada, and the rest being "jesusland"

This isn't the same map, but closely resembles it.

http://reason.com/assets/mc/_external/2012_11/jesusland-vs-united-states-of.gif

The real story behind the movie is even more interesting. Escalante did a ton of work to change the curriculum at all grade levels, for one thing. Check out one account : http://reason.com/archives/2002/07/01/stand-and-deliver-revisited

Oooh, they finally managed to kill one man half way around the world from me! I feel so much safer now that Bin Laden is gone... the chance of dying from a terrorist attack may have been well below 0.00001% before but... I bet it's down to, like, half of that now!

Say... how much did it cost to wage the war that killed this one man?

Almost 25% of what Bush's tax giveaway to the rich cost. Although that one's ongoing.

Oooh, they finally managed to kill one man half way around the world from me! I feel so much safer now that Bin Laden is gone... the chance of dying from a terrorist attack may have been well below 0.00001% before but... I bet it's down to, like, half of that now!

Say... how much did it cost to wage the war that killed this one man?

If you leave the US you won't have to pay US taxes.

Nope, the US is about the only country in the world that taxes non-residents the same as residents.

Eritrea is the only other.

FU idiot Yanks. I'm a Brit and can vote with my feet (until Schumer's proposed reichsfluchtsteuer kicks in).

See you by the pool.

Good thing our alternative, Obama, is not dishonest.

Except.. didn't he promise to shut down Guantanamo, end warrantless wiretaps, and restore habeas corpus? Perhaps your +5 Insightful is evidence Obama is a better liar than Romney.

My goal is to have a safe environment for myself and my family to live in.

This is my goal as well. I want your family, and every family to be secure against abuses of power by police.

I'd like to think that the other side cares enough about my family (even if only in the abstract) that they would not push their ideas without thought to how it would negatively affect people.

I would too. Have you thought about how allowing the police to walk through my property without a warrant or any sort of probable cause might negatively affect my safety?

I am not willing to trade abstract ideas of freedom for the lives of my family.

I think you already are making such a trade. Specifically, you're exchanging the security of your family against government aggression for the authoritarian ideal that law is right because its the law and every law breaker is a bad person.

In my experience, I have found very few instances where an individual vehemently was against a particular law, when they were not already breaking that law, or intended to. I would like to protect my family from these people.

Why do you assume that because someone is breaking a law that they are a threat to your family?

What moron modded this troll?
http://reason.com/archives/2011/02/21/the-mind-of-a-police-dog/1

You might find this story interesting.

What is the risk of being killed in a terrorist act?

Taking these figures into account, a rough calculation suggests that in the last five years, your chances of being killed by a terrorist are about one in 20 million. This compares annual risk of dying in a car accident of 1 in 19,000; drowning in a bathtub at 1 in 800,000; dying in a building fire at 1 in 99,000; or being struck by lightning at 1 in 5,500,000. In other words, in the last five years you were four times more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a terrorist.

http://reason.com/archives/2011/09/06/how-scared-of-terrorism-should

Vs. http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancerbasics/lifetime-probability-of-developing-or-dying-from-cancer

1 in 20 million vs even a .1% increase in the risk of cancer which at best is 1 in 5000

Quite the contrary. There's a reason our flagship magazine is called "Reason" ;) Environmentalism and Libertarianism get along quite well. If you want something from a less partisan source, go read Thoreau, or Wendell Berry. Neither were self identified libertarians, but the intellectual roots are similar, and most of their arguments about land-care ethic and small government can be transplanted into a libertarian frame of reference without any difficulty. And Wendell Berry's take on property rights is great.

I posted this link in this conversation already but.....voting for them won't have any more or less of an effect than voting for anyone else. Your vote doesn't matter.

Ah yes, that bone-headed article that might be relevant if it were whispered to a handful of people but as a massively consumed and overly quoted piece of tripe it eliminates all of its own arguments.

Your vote doesn't count regardless of who you vote for. Might as well vote for someone you like.

Darn! You beat me to linking to that article. Even after reading that article, I still feel really good about voting for Gary Johnson even though I know it won't make much of a difference. But I can't in good conscience support the two major bafoons.

I posted this link in this conversation already but.....voting for them won't have any more or less of an effect than voting for anyone else. Your vote doesn't matter.

Your vote doesn't count regardless of who you vote for. Might as well vote for someone you like.

With increased fuel efficiency people will travel more than they usually do because for the same amount of money they can travel more miles thus not really reducing the overall demand for gas. http://reason.com/archives/2012/07/17/the-paradox-of-energy-efficiency

Currently, the only thing keeping Mr Assange from torture and death is the public spotlight.

Torture and death from whom? It wouldn't be the US. Not that they were legally torture under US law as determined at the US Department of Justice, but the US only waterboarded three terrorists, the most recent in about 2003, (although it continues to routinely waterboard its own pilots and special forces members for training - thousands of them), and President Obama stopped enhanced interrogations, so no "torture" by the US. The US hasn't put a spy to death in the 60 years since the Rosenbergs, and that was over nuclear weapons secrets. (Even the disastrous John Walker only got life in prison, and he enabled the Soviets to break American codes, enabling them to know where American submarines were, among many other things.) Assange has been prolific, to be sure, but nowhere as dangerous as handing the power of nuclear weapons and the locations of American submarines to a sworn enemy. So, he faces no torture, and very unlikely death.

The biggest risk Assange faces with any real certainty is ennui in a Swedish prison, although he might yet end up facing charges in the UK after that for jumping bail and fleeing the law. If the rumored secret grand jury investigation in the US pans out, he might have more serious charges filed against him, but then it is a strictly legal matter, and they have to figure out how to get him legally, which may not be easy or possible. Even then, they still have to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt, and the worst he is likely to face is more prison time.

These people ignored the law, destroyed the man's business, and handed the assets over to a foreign government who will never return them. How about I kick in your door in the middle of the night, steal all your assets and hand them over to the Chinese government and say it's punishment for all the slave labor that goes into producing half the goods you and your family use to survive?

As opposed to the United States where they can perform no-knock raids in the middle of the night and kill innocent little kids and former marines with zero consequences?

What we're trying to do is grow SPECIFIC plants that are useful to people. We have never cared much if at all that what we are really doing is converting areas that grow one kind of plant to grow another kind of plant. If we were trying to increase primary production, no doubt we could do that, but we would be up against the same things that limit agriculture now: mainly water availability. But if you built a lot of greenhouses and water recycling systems we could probably increase primary production substantially.

Well, that's a nice theory, but its simply not true.

The amount of land dedicated to farming has not substantially increased, (in fact it has decreased) as farming becomes more efficient. Vast tracts of the
midwest have returned to forest because there is simply no economic need to keep these lands under the plow.

This whole theory is nothing but a huge rehash of the Limits To Growth, cited in TFA. Yet 40 years hence, LTG has been proven wrong in just about every single prediction they made. Their methodology and assumptions were simply wrong.

Measurement of plant tonnage via satellite imagery has revealed that plants still grow just about everywhere they ever did. Wow. Major revelation.

Yet the satellites seem to miss the fact that global food production has more than tripled since 1961, and worldwide, we are only using 7% more land in the process. In North America Europe, and Russia, we are actually cultivating less land, and producing vastly more food. Marginal lands have fallen fallow, and returned to prairie or forest of a 2 hundred years ago.

Measuring the area covered by plants says nothing about the tonnage harvested every year off of that land. Nor does it say anything about the reduced pollution produced in the process, and the return of natural flora coverage. The total forest area in the U.S. has been relatively stable for the last 100 years (currently about 747 million acres). The species may change (they always have over time). But its not because we have converted the land to farming. For the last 100 years, the biggest threat to forests has been housing development, not farming.

It's like a cult with you guys isn't it?
The governments are wrong, and handwaving weirdos selling you advice, like Atkins and Taubes know better, it's like the New Age thing all over.

Why don't you read the first two hits on google:
http://reason.com/archives/2003/03/01/big-fat-fake
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2011/05/16/thin-body-of-evidence-why-i-have-doubts-about-gary-taubess-why-we-get-fat/

Everybody knows no-carb diets are a quick fix for fat people wanting to become thin. But the question is, at what price?
It's like putting oxygen on a fire and then wondering why the surroundings are burning along with the BBQ.
Even if you feel comfortable risking your life, it's not ethical to go around telling others to do the same.

why obesity follows malnourished populations as well as over-nourished populations

The vast majority of the populations in the world is overnourished. The malnourished clearly look it, so I don't understand what you're trying to say (Hint: you don't need to be thin to look malnourished).

The government advice is widely ridiculed by anyone who pays any attention to the nutritional research.

Scientists frequently ridicule certain nutritional researchers, since the area of nutritional "research" contains such a large amount of loud self-proclaimed experts.
All their so called research falls flat because there is no reliable metric by which to measure the rate of health degradation based on foods, on spans shorter than 3 decades.
Proper research may surprise you. Have you read books like The China Study?

Um, yes you do. Where the hell did you ever get the idea that the USA is a "free country", or that there's freedom of assembly here? Did you never hear of "free speech zones"? In case you didn't know, it's now illegal to protest anywhere the Secret Service may be; taking part in a protest against the government will now make you a felon and earn you a 10-year prison sentence.

Mathematicians are smarter than this. They have developed models that take the current environment into account. (google "value added score") There's certainly still debate on its accuracy, but the current model in education is to do no effective teacher assessments whatsoever. Currently, if there are teachers all over the country where everyone knows that they are ineffective. The students know it. The parents know it. Other teachers know it. The administration knows it. And, union rules say that nothing can be done. (ok not nothing. The union rules will be written in such a way as to make it extremely unlikely for the administration to to anything about it. (this page has a link to a pdf that documents the old process for firing a teacher in the new york city school system. If you haven't seen it before, it's stunning: http://reason.com/archives/2006/10/01/how-to-fire-an-incompetent-tea)) Summary: Administrators and mayors want to be able to make personnel decisions in schools. Unions want guaranteed employment for life, regardless of job performance. Since so much research has been coming out that shows that the union position is unhelpful, educationally, they have been losing ground in district after district around the country.

and say they want a 30% increase over 2. They are already some of the best paid urban teachers in the whole country. Insane.

http://reason.com/reasontv/2012/09/15/the-deep-logic-of-the-chicago-teachers-s

Don't want to be held accountable, even opposing Obama's merit-based suggestions in favor of tenure, etc.

I'll say what I always said: it's about the children, alright, about using the children.

If they didn't comply by end of today, they would be held in contempt of court.

Mmmm, I wonder where is that contempt of court when TSA ignores the ruling they lost? Took court a year to reiterate that their ruling should be followed
And Twitter has until the end of day??

The majority of Republicans (and Democrats, I daresay) certainly have been bad about internet rights. But I do not think it true of the Paul (Ron and Rand, not Ryan who's something else entirely) wing of the party. They've become a more vocal and powerful minority in the party mostly through a dedicated following who knows Robert's Rules and they really do take internet freedom as a civil right. The same can't be said of the party as a whole, but the party is willing to throw language like this in just to get the Paul wing to shut up.

Still, although powerful enough to add planks to the party platform, the Paul wing remains small and mostly marginalized. We can't say they've really taken charge from the old Neo-con and the Rockefeller Republican wing until they can overcome the hawkishness of the Republican party and get rid of the terrorism scare tactics used to infringe upon civil liberties.

But I mean to give credit when it is due. In the long run, the Paul wing may not succeed in creating a pro-internet-and-civil-freedom party. It may not succeed in creating a party which, when speaking of foreign relations, says "all options are on the table" includes peace and diplomacy among those options. In fact, I fear in the long run they may only succeed in enacting pro-corporate policies that their Neo-con and Rockefeller colleagues would have approved of anyway. Be that as it may, I will praise a positive step where I see it. I will further refuse to give in to the old "this side" and "that side" narrative, that only results in two bad sides. As parties, both the Republican and the Democratic do more harm than good. But I will praise any republican or any democrat who supports peace, civil rights and liberties (including on the internet), breathable air and potable water, and policies which would further localize power, empowering communities rather than corporations, and leading to a broader distribution of wealth and property. (Still looking for a politician who cares about the latter.)

>>> I'm thinking we start with a "No Vaccination" list, like a sex offender list.

Yeah because the Sex Offender list has been oh-so-fair. There are people who have downloaded, for example, bestiality photos and served their 10 years in jail for the so-called "crime". Or they had sex as a teenager and served their 5 years for the "crime" of statutory rape. - Then they get out but because they are on the S.O. list they cannot rent an apartment. Or buy a house. Or even stay at a hotel.

The sex offender list is like the old Scarlett Letter A, that makes a person "untouchable" and punishes them for the rest of their life. They never have an opportunity to become a rehabilitated functional member of society, but instead become homeless/poor and barely able to get by. It is a cruel system.

Read more here: http://reason.com/archives/2011/08/19/a-false-remedy-for-sex-offende
 

The odds of being in an accident for the average person each year is 1 in 6,500.

Wrong, according to that article, those are the odds of dying in a car accident per year. Nobody died in the Google car, or likely would have died if it carried passengers.

According to passenger vehicle stats from NHTSA (2009) and Wikipedia, I calculate that there is a 1 in 49 chance that a particular passenger vehicle will be in an accident in a year (5.211 million accidents to 254.4 million registered vehicles). That means that the odds of any vehicle being in an accident in 23 years is close to half.

But seriously, the accident was not likely preventable anyway. Give the car a break.

The average (human) driver logs about 1,100 miles per month. So google's car has about 23 years of driving, if it were an average person. The odds of being in an accident for the average person each year is 1 in 6,500. Google's car has already been in one car accident.

I'm not impressed with those odds.

Space exploration tests a very different human quality than the Olympics does.

What quality would that be? The ability to sink vast amounts of money into an inefficient bureaucracy?

This happens with citizens all the time.

http://reason.com/archives/2010/01/26/the-forfeiture-racket/singlepage (Behind a paywall, bu the first paragraph will give you the gist.)

You get arrested for a crime. Your assets are seized. Charges are dropped or you are found not guilty. They don't give you your assets back.

Now if only the USA had a Loser Pays system like just about every other country in the world. Aside from the patent system, the American rule is what enables patent trolls.

I shouldn't have said "charge," I should have said "sue," as it is a civil proceeding. In a suit against property, the owner of that property may mount a successful defense only upon presenting a preponderance of evidence that it is not subject to forfeiture. The property is legally considered subject to forfeiture unless it is proven otherwise, contrary to the typical burden of proof in both civil and criminal proceedings against persons.

Whether you believe me or not is irrelevant, as it has been occurring for years in the United States. I don't recall any of the case citations offhand, so I'm going to go the easy route and link an article about the process. Even some cursory research will show it is true. The Forfeiture Racket

Responding to two comments:

I am located in the north east. A number of counties have begun to disclose teacher pay and it as shocking to see many over 100K and a very large number > 75K. A quick search shows this with the various medians for 2009. Please remember median = just as many lower as higher.

Consider further that teachers have, give or take a week, three months off during the summer during which time they can, if they so chose, to do other work - teaching or something else. Teachers, like students, get a considerable number of holidays and vacation breaks. In this area, the 2012-13 calendar has 36 days of holidays and breaks. That is more than the average employee gets in a full calendar year.

Oh.. and I don't sing me the song about teachers moaning that they do work at home, on weekends or on holidays or vacation days. So do the vast majority of salaried professionals in this country.

As to test scores I refer you to this and quote this:

A NAEP summary last year reports that the average score on the reading test in 1971 was 285 points out of a possible 500 and that it rose all the way to 286 points by 2008

.

And why is it that we have such a large prison population?

Well, many people break the law, then get arrested, sentenced and sent to jail.

While there are far too many innocent people in jail, most of the prison population did commit a crime.

It would be much better (and cheaper) if people didn't break the law. This has two components:

1. Sane laws, such as raiding Gibson guitars for using wood of the wrong thickness, contrary to the laws of India.

2. A better behaving population.

The idea that QWERTY was designed to slow us down, and that DVORAK is significantly better are both surprisingly long standing urban legends. Liebowitz and Margolis wrote the definitive article debunking this (in 1990!) with loads of research. The jamming issues were sorted out before QWERTY became standard, and it actually won out over a number of other layouts over a period of years. Additionally, the studies show DVORAK is better generally came from Dvorak himself. Independent studies (like one done in 1956) show there's no appreciable difference. This is probably the main reason DVORAK hasn't really made much ground, even though it's been around since 1936.

http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html (1990)

They wrote a follow up in 1996 showing how this myth keeps propagating, and how authors keep referring to each other, making the myth sound legitimate. Having 25 citations certainly makes it sound like it's true.

http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors (1996)

My guess is DVORAK users may have some form of "sunk cost" bias, considering they spent the time and energy converting to the new layout. Possibly some affirmation bias on the old studies. Not sure how else you could justify the costs of using a non-standard keyboard with no conclusively proven gains in speed.

Kerry wrote NONE of the PATRIOT act.
In fact, he worked hard to restrict it.
It was John ASHCROFT's team, who authored it clear back in may 2001 (i.e. BEFORE 9/11).

The real issue is that you neo-con astro-turfers are here to scream that Obama or the dems did all of the neo-cons dirty deeds.
There are PLENTY of things to find wrong with the dems and Obama.
But to keep conjuring up lies by you people does little good.
All it does is show how truly evil you neo-cons are.

BTW, I am a registered Libertarian. I vote against BOTH of your parties.
But, I really disdain you neo-cons for being some of the foulist scum on this earth.
You have more in common with Communist USSR or China, then you do with America, or the GOP.

I really wouldn't trust AP as an unbiased news source just because they are privatized. At this point, in the US, privatized basically means "an excuse to hand out government contracts." That's mainly just a bitch against the right-wing, though, my main point was this article in which the AP version differed from other version, in favor of US interests.

Only Government can spy on citizens, hold you without trial, and bomb your house if they suspect you as a terrorist...or knock down your door and shoot your dogs for minor offenses. Didn't you know that? Chuck Schumer cares about your privacy and rights, unless he's violating them in which case it's the "proper role" of government.

The reluctance of people in the 'educated' world to have kids is wierd[sic].

Weird? Only if you ignore the economic implications of having children. Educated people still love their children and don't want them to suffer and have a decent quality of life. Uneducated people don't tend to think in economic terms, meaning, well the kid is there, they give minimum care (best they can, I'm not saying they don't love their children) and you end up with another uneducated child. Contrast to the educated people, who invest in their children and depending on the talent of the child, may still end up with an uneducated child.

I've heard that in the educated world, kids are more and more considered "status symbols" because you need to make quite a lot to actually sustain a family.

I like the idea of thinking of children as colonizing the future, but don't overdo the Nietzsche.

For markets to work, it is only necessary to punish bad behaviour. Belief in hell would satisfy that.

http://reason.com/blog/2010/03/11/more-on-the-ny-salt-ban-bill

only the distractions have changed over time

The original driving distraction controversy was the car radio. There were a number of attempts to ban them. More.

Friendly Societies: Voluntary Social Security and More:

Working class families had a "safety net" long before Uncle Sam became involved. Our grandparents and even great-grand-parents had benefit plans that protected them when they were sick, injured, out of work, or too old to work. Millions of workers belonged to "friendly societies."

Various forms of friendly societies have existed since ancient China, Greece, and Rome. In Britain, they arose out of the guild system. Daniel Defoe wrote in 1697 that friendly societies were "very extensive" in England. In the mid-18th century, as the Industrial Revolution hastened the growth of British towns, the friendly society system became well established. Sometimes they were called fraternal societies, mutual aid societies, or benefit clubs. Similar organizations developed in the United States in the 19th century.

The Shortcomings of Government Charity:

For large charities such as the Salvation Army and smaller local charities run by churches and other private organizations, the fight against poverty has been going on for the past 150 years. Tragically, standing in their way has been the federal government. Besides an effort to wage "war" on poverty beginning in the 1960s, the federal government has attempted to intercede and dole out aid since the beginning of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. These interventions have proven costly and yielded disastrous results. By continually siphoning funds away from the private sector, lawmakers and bureaucrats further diminish the ability of civil society to deal with the problem of poverty. (As Charles Murray shows in Losing Ground, poverty was declining steadily through the 1950s and 1960s up until the Great Society programs kicked in during the early 1970s.)

If the plight of the poor is to be truly addressed, Americans should study the lessons of the past. Earlier in the twentieth century, private charities offered a more effective cure for chronic indigence, and it was through mutually beneficial activities and voluntary funding that the spirit of American compassion was unleashed. In the best interests of the poor, the government should withdraw itself completely from all activities designed to help them and allow civil society its full range of motion.

And here's a side-by-side comparison of what happens to groups who end up on the government dole vs. groups allowed to take care of themselves. Government Creates Poverty:

The government has made most Indian tribes wards of the state. Government manages their land, provides their health care, and pays for housing and child care. Twenty different departments and agencies have special "native American" programs. The result? Indians have the highest poverty rate, nearly 25 percent, and the lowest life expectancy of any group in America. Sixty-six percent are born to single mothers. ...

Consider the Lumbees of Robeson County, N.C. -- a tribe not recognized as sovereign by the government and therefore ineligible for most of the "help" given other tribes. The Lumbees do much better than those recognized tribes.

Lumbees own their homes and succeed in business. They include real estate developer Jim Thomas, who used to own the Sacramento Kings, and Jack Lowery, who helped start the Cracker Barrel Restaurants. Lumbees started the first Indian-owned bank, which now has 12 branches.