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I don't even know what the fuck the problem was. If you don't want to go see the Ghostbusters reboot, don't go see it.

Men ARE from Mars.

And if you say you don't want to watch a Ghostbusters rema...rebo... restar... cynical cash grab then you are a sexist mysoginist buthurt baby child(?) salty regressive trans-hater.

You must also be one of those men (i.e. THE men) who sabotage female shows on imdb.
We know that cause you are pretending to ignore that "'The Angry Video Game Nerd,' a misogynistic web show whose sycophantic Wikipedia entry made me pine for hemlock in my coffee" even exists.
When it was after all, right there in the article featured right here.

BTW, all that was even before the movie which was promoted like this came out to fantastic reviews which keep talking about women and naysayers and ruined bro childhoods of little boys - and to a disaster at the box office.
Then again, The Nice Guys also had FANTASTIC reviews and yet it flopped... but the tone of the reviews is markedly different.

Now, take all that happening before the Twitter controversy and consider if there is perhaps a chance that the entire thing was blown out of proportion on purpose?
By a company known for faking reviews for marketing purposes.

But I see how so many people teaching are there because they passionately believe in it, and they'd get higher salaries elsewhere for their skillsets, and the reaching sector doesn't attract regular people who chose jobs that pay competitively. None of it is commensurate with how I think learning and teaching should be valued in our society. I'm glad I'll (just barely) be able to afford to send my three kids to a school that does pay enough salary.

If you're talking about a private school, most of those actually pay less than public schools.

That's Hollywood accounting though. The movie WILL make it's $100M and more, just not in the first weekend. Off course the studios will cry that it's a loss because it didn't make $1B the first weekend and thus they'll qualify for a number of government grants and bailouts while not paying their employees and artists. http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...

It WILL gain a following (all really bad movies and all superhero movies do after all) and it will make it up in DVD sales and later on TV. There is not a single movie in the last half century that has never made it's expenses back, you just can't believe what the studio tells you about it.

The poor people of Rio are paying for those games with their health and their lives. Sociopath is too strong a word but be honest: how they suffer doesn't bother you or anyone else living it up at the Olympic party at public expense. http://money.cnn.com/gallery/n... http://www.businessinsider.com... https://www.theguardian.com/sp... http://www.theatlantic.com/bus... http://www.economist.com/blogs...

The word he is looking for is Narcissism: the pursuit of gratification from vanity or egotistic admiration of one's own attributes. Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a long term pattern of abnormal behavior characterized by exaggerated feelings of self-importance, an excessive need for admiration, and a lack of understanding of others' feelings.

Hillary could simply perform worse.

She could — and probably still win. Which could explain why the Republican leadership is planning for a presidential comeback in 2020.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/the-2020-presidential-campaign-launches-in-cleveland/492206/

No, but I'm completely in favor of you Russian-paid trolls shutting the fuck up due to your idiocy. Treason? Get the fuck outta here with that shit.

The incredibly, deliciously ironic thing is that despite Clinton's crazy-high unfavorable ratings, shes going to win the election and it's going to be the efforts of trolls like you that turn the tide. I mean, people don't really like Clinton, but they HATE foreign powers fucking with their democracy.

You mean Hillary? Because Trump, despite all the mud being thrown this way, has done very little concrete evil in comparison.

Oh, I think Trump has done his share of evil. Let's put it this way: I wouldn't trust him with my money, much less my country:

http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...

This is not reflective of history when you consider executive orders.
" as the Commander in Chief of the armed forces, many presidents have sent troops to battle without an official war declaration (ex. Vietnam, Korea). " ...

"Executive Orders:
In times of emergency, the president can override congress and issue executive orders with almost limitless power. Abraham Lincoln used an executive order in order to fight the Civil War, Woodrow Wilson issued one in order to arm the United States just before it entered World War I, and Franklin Roosevelt approved Japanese internment camps during World War II with an executive order." - https://www.law.cornell.edu/we...

"The United States Congress has not formally declared war since World War II. All of our wars in the Middle East have been authorized using other means, which rather goes to the heart of the nature of those different conflicts. " - http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...

If someone tells you, "I'm the only one who can fix this problem", run away as fast as you can.

I'm glad so many people seem to agree with this sentiment.

Here is a quote from Trump's speech last night:

"I ALONE CAN FIX IT"

http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...

http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...

Liberal Democrats, illegally occupying a building, protected by AR-15s ....

It is all how you want to spin it ;)

He's not as bad as many Republicans on this particular topic, no, but he's hardly pro-gay.

He is not as enlighted on this issue as I wish he was, but I can with those issues. And I think there is some clear pro-gay elements as well. He has supported AIDS charities in 80s and 90s, seems to have gay friends and he has supported amending the 1964 Civil Rights Act to "include a ban of discrimination based on sexual orientation.".

And if I am not mistaken, Hillary is not completely spotless on gay issues either:

Hillary Clinton's Gay-Marriage Problem

Helicopter moms in action is what it did it for me. For instance, a bright but immature kid found some admin credentials that a sloppy vendor left behind on a network share. He basically used them to vandalize various internal services of a K-12. He got a two week enforced vacation from school for that. During his sabbatical, he called in bomb threats to another school to get a buddy of his out of class.

Helicopter mommy went into to overdrive and basically got the kid off with no almost no consequences. Well, he did lose some summer vacation to the juvie hall. Boo freaking hoo. I've seen what happens when chuckleheads like that hit adulthood. They do things like Occupy their Uni because the cafeteria isn't a free range farm to table exemplar. Though I DID love it when OSU threatened them with paddy wagons. Thoreau would have heaved his guts out seeing those little brats.

Obamacare is a conservative plan

Umm, no: http://www.politifact.com/pund...

Aside from the fact the Republican legislation you're referring to was from 1993 , it didn't even have a majority of Republicans behind it. And there remain differences between it and ACA in its current form. But 1993...really? You're trying to use 23 year old legislation as a barometer for current day conservatism? Do you want to look up Democrat stances from the early 90s? They backed wealthy tax cuts back then, and supported defense spending: http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...

Yes, dumb story.

Should have gone with a 'Is the Olympics a huge waste of money?' angle: http://www.theatlantic.com/bus... http://www.businessinsider.com... http://money.cnn.com/gallery/n... http://www.thenational.ae/spor...
Answer: No, if you're a pork-barrelling supplier, a politician or Olympic hanger on partying at the tax payers expense. Yes, if you're one of Brazil's poor threatened with poverty http://riotimesonline.com/braz... crime http://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/o... and disappearances http://www.ibtimes.com/road-ri...

The scientific method does not allow for intentional deception when practiced correctly

You need to emphasise the when practiced correctly because, let me see, around 40,000 MRI neurology papers are now considered invalid, there's something called The Decline Effect in medicine and there's a Replication Crisis is psychology.

So what, specifically, are you proposing here?

I'll see your few scholarly research papers, and raise you several violent protests that you have missed. Even leftists have to worry about leftists, as I stated.

Further, I can show that leftist people and groups support the protests.

Well, one way to reply to a post calling out confirmation bias ... is to double down on the confirmation bias.

You have a funny term to refer to what would properly be labeled as 'observation of leftists, on social media and in real life'.

Apparently I get to represent all liberals now

Only if you are unable to parse my phrase, "Should I follow suit, ...", which limits the following phrase to a hypothetical question. But I guess such subtlety is wasted on leftists. (See, that is using your inability to read to claim all leftists are ignorant as well.)

(or at least the ones you don't like, with that bit of no-true-scotsman mixed in under cover of "I didn't mean everybody").

I'm not allowed to clarify my point that you have such a hard time understanding? Considering my original post was simply comparing attitudes and actions of nondescript left-wingers and right-wingers in the post I replied to. Since I wasn't the one who established the general groups under discussion, I certainly feel I have the right to make that clarification. Sorry if that upsets you.

Let's get back to your original claim, which can be distilled to 'liberals conform more than conservatives'.

Oh, wait a minute. I begin to see your problem. After writing all that above, I realize upon re-reading this line, that you simply are trying to argue the wrong claim. You think it is a discussion of whether one group or the other conforms to the expected norm. But that wasn't Ungrounded Lightning's argument, nor mine. UL said that those on the left "apply social pressure to each other to conform", and in response to (I assume) your question about right-wingers, I voiced my support of UL's argument, and provided an example.

I stand by my claim that leftists do much more to force their views on society, even on other leftists, than rightists do. That has nothing to do with whether right-wingers (AKA conservatives) by their nature want to keep things the way they are (also known as 'to conserve', funny how that is implied in the label 'conservative').

You are arguing the wrong case.

How nice! To cite a western elitist site like The Atlantic, with its long record of warmongering propaganda on behalf of a section of USA elite

Thank you for that insight, Mr. Russian Government troll. Do go on.

Perhaps if the Russians weren't so fucking PARANOID, people wouldn't dislike Russia so much. No one wants to invade you. Russia doesn't have to worry about "fascists" coming from Germany or the Ukraine. The reason Russia's neighbors joined or want to join NATO is because they are AFRAID of Russia invading them under some "Sudetenland" pretext, not because the "West" wants to conquer the shithole that is Russia.

Thank you for that insight Mr. Russian government troll. Do go on.

http://www.theatlantic.com/nat...

Facebook is not even a significant percentage of the entire internet

That appears to be incorrect:
"[Facebook] drives a quarter of all web traffic."
-http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/04/facebook-is-eating-the-internet/391766/

I don't know what your preferences are politically, but you can definitely vote your conscience. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/pay-attention-to-libertarian-gary-johnson-hes-pulling-10-vs-trump-and-clinton/>Gary Johnson has 10% of the overall electorate vote today.

There are other third party candidates there, some are horrendous Marxists basically, like Stein, whatever. You can vote what you really think rather than taking a part in this false choice.

Shit, write in Darth Vader if that's your real preference.

Did Rice and Powell also use their private email server while their eponymous foundation accepted hundreds of millions of donations from foreign governments during their tenure at the State Department?

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballo...

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/new...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08...

The diamond ring and the family car are both 20th century inventions. I thought the rule was spending 52 weeks income on a car and 4 weeks income on a diamond ring. Now it's 21 weeks for a suburban necessity and 13 weeks for a shiny decoration. What strange priorities for a not so brave, new world.

Having a car as a 20th Century invention is rooted in the undeniable utility of having a vehicle that can transport people and goods long distances quickly.

The "requirement" that every marriage requires a large investment up-front in a diamond is purely the product of a marketing campaign by a diamond cartel (i.e. a price-fixing monopoly). Here is a brief, but honest as far as it goes, account by an organization dedicated to selling you diamonds. Note that the founding of the American Gem Society, in 1934, precisely coincides with the start of the De Beers cartel hard sell. It is striking that a trade organization, founded as part of a marketing scheme, does not try to hide its own origin.

Lengthier accounts of this bizarre pure luxury business are easy to find.

Regarding those "guidelines" (treated as "rules" by the industry) for how much to spend in a diamond ring - if you let marketing literature tell you what you should spend money on, you are perhaps typical, but still you are just being a patsy.

When I got married, no diamond was involved. It was a ridiculous waste of money, absolutely not an investment (they are virtually impossible to resell, the industry makes sure of that), and at that time a prop for the Apartheid regime. That last reason had ended, and recent "conflict diamond" rules have greatly reduced the tendency of diamond purchases to support mass murderers, but not ended that last problem entirely.

NSA buys their exploits on the black market just like all the other criminal skiddies do.

They even point and click to deploy their attacks, like skiddies using babby's first pre-packaged metasploit-ready exploit vector.

"Devious" is buying exploits from real black hat hackers? Pretty much, yeah.

With everything having such shit security there's not much incentive to spend a lot of money on "really neat projects" aside from running a fuzzer on new software, or fingerprinting a sysadmin's systems then deploying the existing library of vulns against them. Why crack the safe combination when the bank vault door is standing wide open?

NSA is having problems with recruiting. TFA is propaganda. It's a smidge better than their prior attempts though.

http://www.theatlantic.com/hea...

Yep. The fine should match the offender's income: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland-home-of-the-103000-speeding-ticket/387484/

Every large study I've seen has shown this is not the case, sports cost schools money. Money spent on sports is wasted from the standpoint of most tax payers and students. It enriches a minority.

That is very, very broken logic and shows the sickness that lies in the government.

You are very right. It is a sickness, and it shows, how outright tyranny can sip in, when the government is allowed to do as much as it currently is in the Western world.

We had the early warnings — things, the government could not force you to do straight, it forced you to do by attaching strings to the tax-based wealth-redistribution:

• States were forced to lower speed-limits and otherwise alter their own laws on pain of losing Federal highway funds. What a way to sidestep the 10th Amendment!
• Male students applying for financial aid were forced to register with Selective Service.
• Retirees applying for Social Security where forced to also switch to Medicaire — decades before the infamous "If you like your health insurance, you can keep your health insurance" lie.

The ultimate manifestation of this would be 100% taxation with the government kindly allowing you to pay less in exchange for obedience.

Can also take the approach into criminal justice system — saving billions in law enforcement costs — by making it illegal to live above, say, 20 years of age. The government would, of course, grant annual waivers to the well-behaved — those, who "maintain eligibility"... Scaremongering? You bet — but this idea is the same in principle with the current one: tax everyone, but spend the taxes only on the obedient.

The military works for us, not visa-versa

We did not elect Hiliary Clinton, we elected congress.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03... http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...

Not quite. My premise is that we as a society pay the most we can afford for good health care, rather than the least we can manage, because we like to stay alive, and not in pain if possible.

I can disprove this in one shot.

Circa 1950, 25% of the average family's income paid for discretionary spending and entertainment; circa 2003, 44% spent on same. Health care spending raised from 5% to 6%.

To put this clearly: the median family freed up 20% of their income and used it to buy plasma TVs and gameboys, rather than luxury-class healthcare. That's not even correct: housing dropped by about 50%, and we spent the additional 14% of our income *plus* 5% more on buying bigger houses.

So out of 39% of our income freed up over 50 years, we directed 1% to buying more and better healthcare. The other 38% went to buying more toys and bigger houses in which to put those toys.

The combination of our strong survival instinct and the profit motive ensure new research is capitalized, and thus a steady stream of expensive-at-first new breakthroughs.

"Expensive-at-first" doesn't means it'll hit the market as expensive as the last breakthrough. You have both the consumer's unwillingness to spend literally half their income on medical insurance (they might buy into the medical care itself when needed; and we can get even-more-expensive treatments into any market by amortizing those unlikely costs via insurance) and the advances in technology lowering the cost of newer technologies.

Remember I said we produced a furnace that made 80,000 tonnes of iron for the same cost as making 400 tonnes of iron prior? We now have machines to build complex machine parts, and even computers to aid engineers in designing complex machines. The cost to develop and produce a complex steel machine today--a new piece of technology--is much lower than the cost to develop and produce a similar complex steel machine in 1790. That's technical progress lowering the cost of newer technologies.

So the next big break through in medicine, what? Gene therapy? It'll be based on synthetic genetics and retroviral treatment, which will be cheaper thanks to more effective DNA synthesis and more reliable retroviral design. Clone organs? The advances in gene therapy and underlying technology will make the new developments allowing cloned organs cheaper--the same technology, if discovered today, will be much more expensive than if we discover it some years down the line when all the basic technology of mucking about with genetics has been streamlined, even though the immediate process is no simpler. This is the pattern of technical progress.

It actually becomes difficult to invent extremely-expensive new technology. You have to come up with completely new, alien processes built on things we can only barely do or can't do at all. Once we've gained the ability to carry out all the underlying tasks, an expensive new piece of technology is just a large amount of small labor, instead of a large amount of large labor. That means "expensive" becomes relative.

Not quite. My premise is that we as a society pay the most we can afford for good health care, rather than the least we can manage, because we like to stay alive, and not in pain if possible.

I can disprove this in one shot.

Circa 1950, 25% of the average family's income paid for discretionary spending and entertainment; circa 2003, 44% spent on same. Health care spending raised from 5% to 6%.

To put this clearly: the median family freed up 20% of their income and used it to buy plasma TVs and gameboys, rather than luxury-class healthcare. That's not even correct: housing dropped by about 50%, and we spent the additional 14% of our income *plus* 5% more on buying bigger houses.

So out of 39% of our income freed up over 50 years, we directed 1% to buying more and better healthcare. The other 38% went to buying more toys and bigger houses in which to put those toys.

The combination of our strong survival instinct and the profit motive ensure new research is capitalized, and thus a steady stream of expensive-at-first new breakthroughs.

"Expensive-at-first" doesn't means it'll hit the market as expensive as the last breakthrough. You have both the consumer's unwillingness to spend literally half their income on medical insurance (they might buy into the medical care itself when needed; and we can get even-more-expensive treatments into any market by amortizing those unlikely costs via insurance) and the advances in technology lowering the cost of newer technologies.

Remember I said we produced a furnace that made 80,000 tonnes of iron for the same cost as making 400 tonnes of iron prior? We now have machines to build complex machine parts, and even computers to aid engineers in designing complex machines. The cost to develop and produce a complex steel machine today--a new piece of technology--is much lower than the cost to develop and produce a similar complex steel machine in 1790. That's technical progress lowering the cost of newer technologies.

So the next big break through in medicine, what? Gene therapy? It'll be based on synthetic genetics and retroviral treatment, which will be cheaper thanks to more effective DNA synthesis and more reliable retroviral design. Clone organs? The advances in gene therapy and underlying technology will make the new developments allowing cloned organs cheaper--the same technology, if discovered today, will be much more expensive than if we discover it some years down the line when all the basic technology of mucking about with genetics has been streamlined, even though the immediate process is no simpler. This is the pattern of technical progress.

It actually becomes difficult to invent extremely-expensive new technology. You have to come up with completely new, alien processes built on things we can only barely do or can't do at all. Once we've gained the ability to carry out all the underlying tasks, an expensive new piece of technology is just a large amount of small labor, instead of a large amount of large labor. That means "expensive" becomes relative.

both France and Germany continue to reject the company's validity in their regions

This is such a great news for all the little Statists out there: a multi-billion corporation (spit!) loses to the government officials seeking to retain control of transportation — as well as the massive fees collected from and the influence over those already "in" the system.

Meanwhile, a Boston Uber driver filed a federal lawsuit

Is not it great, when a poor little Joe Shmoe can file a federal lawsuit against such a multi-billion dollar corporation on his own? Is this news not the right answer to the folks lamenting needing millions of dollars to legally fight such an opponent?

illegally classifying drivers as independent contractors to avoid providing full employee benefits

That a distinction even exists — allowing the enforcers from the Executive branch to make life hell for business-owners without even bothering with the Judiciary — is itself a major achievement for the Statism.

Of course, they only begin to complain about "overly strong government", when the wrong guy is about to take the reins. When it is their man, they wish he was a dictator — to do "more good quicker".

just "how sleazy" Uber really is.

There is that... Shortly after Uber hired David Plouffe (the guy instrumental to putting Obama into office), I started getting spam from the company. E-mails asking me, whether I know, how "Uber helps minority drivers" or "how Uber helps the environment". That really was as sleazy a Democratic campaigns get, but the above-mentioned Statists usually lap this sort of thing up — even if the spam campaign misfired in my case and I know begin searching for a ride with Lyft.

write some nonsense down on an application, take it to a judge who rubber-stamps a warrant, and then grab all of the information they can about you

Actually, no, it is not. You can challenge evidence obtained with such a warrant and avoid conviction.

There has to be checks and balances on the system.

Of course, there should be!

Once you even consider the idea, that having "too much" money is wrong, you've enabled a civil forfeiture somewhere...

It is not all lost — Nebraska, for one, has officially abolished civil forfeiture already. But it is certainly disheartening, that such an obvious injustice sprung up and continues to exist in the US, while people get fired up over complete nonsense and outright lies instead.

For a textbook world. But in the world we live in, things are never so clear cut. Ask a small business owner whose store was broken into whether they received justice when the perpetrator was allowed to walk after the evidence used to convict him was illegally obtained (pg. 3). Ask a woman if she receives justice when the man who rapes her is allowed to walk because illegally obtained evidence is suppressed from trial. As the previously quoted article from "The Atlantic" says, "It is highly important that we protect the constitutional rights of criminals. But it appears that we sometimes forget that the Constitution was meant to protect the rights of law-abiding citizens as well."

Another reason is that Posti recently launched a lawn mowing service which operates on Tuesdays.

http://www.theatlantic.com/int...

IT, however bad it is, is a bed of roses compared to driving a truck.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/05/truck-stop/481926/

Okay, now that I've had time to think.

I have no idea what that graph is trying to convey, but it does not address the demographic transition: that the more prosperous people are, the fewer children they have.

This doesn't support your argument. Your argument is, essentially, that certain demographics in a population exhibit a certain behavior; my argument is that a certain stimulus triggers a certain behavior.

Your argument completely ignores that a population with less scarcity can support more families. That means there can be more middle-class and rich families, or more poor families. There is physically more available to be distributed among each person without running out.

Notice here the relationship between GDP per capita in an area and the population (and population density) of that area.

Right. Hence, it makes sense that is desirable to increase their prosperity, so that they no longer are poor people who are, in your words, "breed like rats"

America has experienced huge prosperity increases. Take the past 100 years. Look at what the average family spent their money on.

1900: 43% of income spent on food; 14% on clothing. Housing (including shelter, maintenance, utilities) made up 23%. The average single-bedroom apartment was 400 square feet in this era.

1950: 30% food, 12% clothing, 28% on housing. I'll point out that the average new single-family home size in 1950 was 983sqft.

2003: 13% on food; 4% on clothing; 33% on housing, with an average new single-family home of 2,300 sqft. Your average American now spends more of his money on more and better healthcare, while also enjoying a much larger home and modern conveniences, and lots of non-essential discretionary spending. We eat out a lot more and cook in a lot less.

1900 United States population: 76,000,000. 1950: 152,000,000. 2003: 290,000,000.

Today, the average American family spends about 11% of our money on food and 3% on clothing. The United States population is 324 million.

The 1960 GDP per capita was $3,007. It was $39,677 in 2003, and is $53,041 today. These are inflation-adjusted numbers; GNP is unadjusted.

As America's prosperity has increased, so has its population. How do you explain this?

For years the so-called "progressives" have been arguing for a ban on "hate speech". It is already verbotten on most campuses.

On occasion, they may even threaten violence — while accusing "the haters" of making them "feel unsafe". Obviously, some hate is more equal than others.

When this generation graduates and goes on to work at businesses (including their legal departments), as well as government-institutions, they'll bring their notions with them.

Found the Russian troll.

As has been repeatedly stated, but you Russian trolls repeatedly ignore because it exposes your lies, the U.S. does not have an army of paid trolls spewing nonsense on social media like Russia does. We know Russia pays people, its citizens, to put out lies because one woman sued the Russian government over the practice.

But as always from Russian trolls there will be an excuse or an attempt at deflecting the truth just like when it is pointed out Russia has lost over 2,000 soldiers during its invasion of Ukraine, that Russian soldiers "on vacation" keep getting captured in Ukraine, that Russia funds the terrorists in Eastern Ukraine, that the takeover of Crimea has cost Russia untold amounts of money because supporting a peninsula isn't as easy as Putin said it would be, that Russia has stolen businesses from the people in Crimea and given them over to oligarchs aligned with Putin, that the Tartars of Crimea are forbidden from speaking their own language or having their own schools, that Tartar newspapers have been shut down because they don't post what Putin tells them to do.

All this, and much, much more, is the truth but Russian trolls always find an excuse to deny the truth. Because that is what they are paid to do.

So Greece laying about the budget deficit when joining EU was not Greece fault?

Isn't it true that Stefanos Manos (former Greece minister of finance) said " the Greek national railway was so poorly run and its public employees so overpaid that it would be cheaper for the state to shut down the railway entirely and give every customer taxi fare to their destination." ?

Isn't it true that Tassos Giannitsis (former minister of labor) said "When I told my colleagues in the cabinet about the reforms I was proposingâ"which mind you were not the toughest availableâ"the attitude I got was that I was spoiling the party, They were, like, âeverything is going great right now, why are you bothering us with a problem that may implode in a decade?"

Isn't it true that "the retirement age for Greek jobs classified as "arduous" is as early as 55 for men and 50 for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than 600 Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, musicians, and on and on and on" and "the Greek public-school system is the site of breathtaking inefficiency: one of the lowest-ranked systems in Europe, it nonetheless employs four times as many teachers per pupil as the highest-ranked, Finland's"

The last thing especially is a breathtaking reading. Greeks should not point fingers at anyone until they admit that they screwed up themselves too. Sure it was the upper class that screwed you, the little people. But who voted them in?

People who are trying to make it more complicated than that are just looking for ways to get government more involved in what goes on inside the home.

The problem is that by letting the phones, tv's and all of this data collection is just a step or 2 away from the government more involved in what goes on inside of the home. Do you think for a second that these devices won't be compromised once the government sees the need? And while we are at it, is the government really that much worse than google, microsoft, apple or now amazon? the FBI compiles a dossier on their citizens, and conspiracy theorist (/.ers) go crazy with indignation. The private data collection companies however, can tell you how you drive, what you watch, or just about any other aspect of your life and people seem strangely comfortable with it, almost ok. The misconception is that either the corporation is benign or that the government won't access that data.

ORLY? Wasn't the FBI created to hunt communists? Freedom of expression my arse.

In the past, America persecuted and arrested people for being communists. But those laws were declared unconstitutional, and we don't do that anymore. If you want to drag up stuff from the past, Europe looks a lot worse than America, so you shouldn't go there. You should criticise America for what it is, not what it was.

In other news, this week a German citizen was threatened with arrest for reading a poem.

But how much? And do the taxes on it cover the costs?

Debatable, to say the least.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08...

http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...

To be fair, Holder isn't going to work for the same banks .. not directly anyway. He's returning to the same law firm he left to take the Attorney General job:

http://www.alternet.org/news-a...

The fact that the law firm has those same banks as clients might perhaps explain how and why he got the Attorney General job in the first place, ne?

His replacement, Loretta Lynch, is no better:

http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...

Given that there are fewer and fewer jobs in farming and manufacturing (due to big technology advances)

Yeah, there's this chart, and it looks startlingly familiar if you were around circa 1840-1920 with factories replacing good old American farming.

The overall improvements in the past do not guarantee the same in the future and I'm sure that you're aware of the fact that the golden era of productivity increase is over.

We are not The Enlightened, and we do not have the end-all of all technology. We can manufacture gold from lead, but it's more expensive than digging it out of the ground; we make cesium and molybdenum by converting other elements using what's essentially a coat hanger stuffed in a glass jar. When our energy-production technology improves (e.g. more efficient nuclear, space solar, or quantum tunneling junctions used for geothermal energy production at 55% efficiency), the labor cost of creating gold from base matter will move downward toward the labor cost of digging it out of the ground. A dyson sphere would quickly make all material concerns moot, but there's no way we're building one in the foreseeable future--it's economically and technologically unfeasible.

Given that there are fewer and fewer jobs in farming and manufacturing (due to big technology advances) and that the service economy is not working for the large majority of our co-nationals (exactly because there is no intrinsic technology innovation solving their issues), I agree 100% with your sig.

Any form of basic income relies on productivity and production. All taxes take a percentage of the total income for a period, which represents the total production for that period. That is to say: all income (business and personal) represents everything produced and sold (even strategic reserves get turned over--their sale is *delayed*--and things produced and ultimately unsold represent a waste cost contributing zero productivity), and we take a portion of that wealth in the form of a portion of the money paid for it. A Basic Income levies a tax to capture a proportion of that wealth and redistribute it to provide everyone with a minimum standard of living (i.e. the capability to buy a minimum amount of stuff).

A Citizen's Dividend as I describe is essentially the pure form: I levy a flat income tax on all income to fund the Dividend, thus directly and stably collecting a percentage of the per-capita income (or GDP or whatever measure you want to use). If you require 1/n of the per-capita income to live at the intended minimum standard-of-living, then the percentage is 1/n--in 2013, that's 17%; in 1950, it's 32% and doesn't fucking work. This dedicated tax operates alongside a general fund tax: I slash the tax brackets so the rich are paying 26% instead of 39.6% (hence the disconcerting 43% upper tax bracket), and the rest of the classes down are paying something equal to or less than their current tax bracket minus 17%, thus retaining a progressive tax system.

If the economy collapses because we have tons of people but no jobs for them, the percentage required becomes *extremely* high. The amount of income is only what the employed labor force makes: 17% of the total income of 64% of the population (that's the 68% labor force minus UE4) can pay for 74% of the population (all adults), plus 1.4% for family welfare (children, from the general fund, on a sharply-reduced public aid system); but if it's only 32% employed, you need a 34% dividend tax, plus you have a *lot* more children needing welfare (bump that figure about 7-10 times--maybe 8% to 14%), plus you need to pretty much double the government's general fund taxes to keep shi

Read this and get back to me on that http://www.theatlantic.com/bus... [theatlantic.com]

Why should I? I mean, I mentioned union shenanigans AND that their target market has been in decline. I wasn't trying for an essay, so I didn't mention the other stuff like failure to adapt. Oh wait, I did that too.

I'm guessing they meant Hostess? Which went bankrupt a few years ago do to Union shenanigans.

Read this and get back to me on that http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...

A multitude of problems took down Hostess, bad union contracts, management not adapting to the changing American diet, VC team that took Hostess private saddled it with debt during Chapter 11 resulting in the Chapter 7 liquidation. Plenty of blame to go around.

I thought we invented money to fix the problems with barter?

Actually, not really. This is a myth made up by economists (well, specifically Adam Smith, though it ultimately goes back to Aristotle). Anthropologists have disputed this with exhaustive surveys for at least a century. It's really only economics textbooks that keep telling this fairy tale.

Money emerged in most societies as tokens to deal with pre-existing systems of credit. There's no historical evidence that barter in the classic sense (e.g., "I'll give you ten chickens for those two goats!" "Nah, but if you throw in twelve chickens and that nice basket, I'll take it!") has been a predominant form of exchange within a human society. It relies on a myth that people in primitive cultures would stockpile goods they didn't really need, ready to trade when a buyer arrived... but that sort of thing doesn't tend to happen in primitive societies. It also tends to depend on this weird idea that two people would always have exactly what others wanted -- e.g., "I'll give you bread for meat," but what if you don't need bread? So then you need a third or fourth or fifth party in this transaction until everybody gets something they want.

By the time you get people able to stockpile goods, you usually have a pretty elaborate system of credit going. Money then emerges as a way of denominating that credit. (Societies not advanced enough to have stockpiled goods generally just depend on gift transactions with elaborate notions of levels of indebtedness or rely on leaders to divvy up goods and resolve disputes, rather than requiring bartering for goods.)

Anthropologists have usually observed barter mainly in unusual transactions taking place BETWEEN societies, e.g., with a neighboring tribe you may not have much contact with and therefore can't trust within your usually systems of indebtedness. Barter sometimes also emerges on a limited scale in more advanced societies (who are used to money) when currency becomes scarce, though generally an alternative currency emerges and/or credit and debt-recording systems actually take over pretty quickly for most transactions.

Whether money emerged as a way of standardizing private debt transactions or as a leader/government-imposed way of regulating debt instruments is probably dependent on the society... but there's really no evidence that a full-fledged "barter economy" ever existed. (If you think I'm making all this up, there are plenty of articles and books out there -- mostly not written by economists, but by historians or anthropologists -- about this. A recent article in the Atlantic is perhaps one place to start. One reason this probably hasn't caught on among economists is that it challenges fundamental notions of capitalism, which rely on the idea that "free markets" will work correctly because we're all just "bartering" in the end, with currency as a medium of exchange... and like these mythical bartering transactions, monetary imbalances should ultimately level out to fair "markets" without intervention. If currency instead emerges as a debt standardization instrument, sometimes related to government intervention or regulation, that's a vastly different story to the beginning of economics.)

The much-discussed article about automation that was very good was in The Atlantic a few years back:
http://www.theatlantic.com/mag... [theatlantic.com] ...which dramatized the disappearance of manufacturing jobs with the story of young, smart Maddie Parker, who alas, did not get a post-secondary education. Her job was not quite automated yet, but was certainly next to go. She moved a machine part from A to B in the factory and got it set up for the next machine to handle. That job took more than two years of her salary to automate, and that was the economic criterion for it. Her job would go as soon as it got another 10 or 20 percent cheaper to automate.

And automation keeps getting cheaper to do, for more and more complex tasks. I'm not sure if the rate-of-change is a Moore's-Law-type exponential, because I'm not sure what the metric would be - but there's no question that automation is marching up the value-line, automating harder and harder jobs that pay more and more.

So the "minimum wage" component of this story only changed the outcome by a couple of years. The owners hardly said "we would never have done this if minimum wage were still $8"; they'd have done it a few years later, that's all.

They're just the kind of people to really hate minimum wage laws, and figured they'd take a shot at them in passing, though they're just not relevant to the larger story.

Yes. Out of 320,000,000 people, we've managed to narrow down the selection to these three gems; a communist, a proto-facsist, and a criminal. Yeah, pretty much fucked no matter how you look at it.

Then there's whoever the LP will nominate. They will be on the ballot in all 50 states. Gary Johnson, the likely nominee is currently polling at 11%, which is really big for a third party candidate this early in the election cycle. I imagine he would poll even higher if he were included in the Presidential debates this fall.