They could be doing a lot more though if they were willing to hold certain Republican favored legislation hostage as a bargaining tool. Republicans want to extend Bush tax cuts? Well they need the Dems for that, and that give the Dems leverage. For whatever reason, the Democrats aren't doing that. And they are also certainly able to avoid passing bills altogether, like the Protect America Act extension with retroactive telecom immunity. There's no excuse for allowing that to pass, because they certainly do have the choice to simply say no - there's obviously no veto in the affirmative. So while you're right that 51% in the congress isn't all it's cracked up to be, they could be doing much, much more than they are and I think it's safe to say that they aren't doing what they were elected to do, and it's not because they can't.
Apparently the school council is run by the Illuminati. The bureaucrats that enacted this policy don't give two craps about what happens after the kids grow up and leave school ("not my problem"). They aren't trying to brainwash kids into becoming sheeple when they grow up because there's no reason for them to. How would the school principal and council benefit? Answer is they wouldn't. Yet for some reason people feel the need to claim broader conspiracies whenever cameras are involved? Life is not a science fiction book, and it's filled the lazy and shortsighted a lot more often than it's filled with the supervillainous.
Just out of curiosity, what didn't you like about Reagan? I was only born on the tail end of his presidency, but as I read many of his speeches, it all seems quite compelling. What am I missing?
You can't claim that racism props up Clinton's campaign without at the same time pointing out that it props up Obama's. If Obama weren't black, people would be able to see that he's totally, totally unqualified to be president. While it's ironic that most of Hillary's criticism about "lack of experience" applies pretty equally well to her, it is accurate criticism. The only thing he's run in his whole life is a law magazine at Harvard, and if the number of citations of the volume produced under him is a guide, he didn't run it that well. It's like people have forgotten how enormously important the presidency is, so even if it's a guy's first real job running something, hey what the hell let's let him start with the U.S. I mean, he gives great prepared speeches, and he sounds really well informed! I know I'm probably upsetting you right now, because you like Obama and because he's inspiring, but please be honest with yourself. If he was just some white guy, and the media didn't tell you that he was a credible candidate, would you really think he was?
And you do remember what happened the last time people elected someone unqualified because they liked him, don't you?
I'll ask this to any other supporters of the stimulus package: Being aware as you must be that we need to pay the money back that we use to fund the recent rebate, do you consider it a smart investment? If you don't have enough economics under your belt to answer that question, let me help you. One of the few but important services provided by recessions is that they rid the system of malinvestment. People make unprofitable and unsupportable ventures, and then they lose money on them so they stop. But here's the brilliance of the Bush tax cuts and the recent stimulus plan: people that make bad decisions don't have to experience failure and drive a recession if we mail them enough money to shore them up. Which brings me back to the idea of the stimulus as investment. We're borrowing money to shore up people who have used money stupidly, and expecting to get a return on that money that will at least be enough to repay it + interest. Sound smart to you? Unless we're going to sit on 6% inflation for the next 10 years so the debt evaporates (Which obviously has its own problems), we have pretty much a textbook case of kicking the can down the road (and probably actually worse than that).
Which I guess brings me back to the brilliance part. Can you guess if the people who get the checks, and then the people that pay them back are different groups?
What? Black and white aren't ethnicities, they're skin colors. If you'll take a very very careful look at Obama, I think you'll notice that he's black.
The fundamental right is the right to choose your healthcare (at least for a lot of us). I look at the recent case in the U.K., where a woman with breast cancer was refused Avastin, even though she could pay for it herself, because it wasn't what everyone else got, and those were just the rules. I have no problems with a low level universal health insurance that covers against a basic set of serious and catastrophic problems and protects against the uninsured ER walk-in problem we have now (I'm not advocating we turn those people away). I do, however, have a problem when I can't buy additional insurance above the government mandated one. So when it seems that that's the way things are going, I get uncomfortable.
Is the solution for what you are looking for, namely maximizing coverage for something with low marginal costs. But I'd also like to point out that your idea of a coin flip as optimal scarce resource distributor is total bullshit. If you have to choose who to save, you choose the most productive members of society. Productivity, however, at least in the U.S., has a very strong correlation with wealth, and people don't like to hear that...
I'm not saying abandon the non-wealthy (I'm not wealthy). But really, we can help more people by doing better than a coin toss.
Wouldn't it also act as a cure? If an infected individual is immunized and able to produce resistant T-cells, doesn't that imply that they are no longer auto immune deficient? HIV itself is still swimming around in them, but so what if they have a healthy immune system. Is there something I'm missing?
And if this genetic alteration doesn't allow people to _produce_ resistant cells, then it's no good as a vaccine either. Seems that it must be both cure and vaccine, or neither.
They don't need to sell the widget for cheap. If it's more valuable to consumers than the current system, they will charge more for it than they charge for the current system. Its the same reason why the OMG pharma hides cures line of thinking doesn't hold up. When you get a patent, you get to charge what the market will bear. If you used to sell treatment for some disease at 20k a year for 5 years, there is nothing stopping you from charging 110k for the cure. You see?
Go fuck yourself. The US gets its own troops killed all the time because they maintain an ROE that trades the safety of US troops for the safety of Iraqi civilians. I'd appreciate it if you didn't then compare them to people whose only purpose is wholesale slaughter of civilians. Call them immoral if you want, but don't call them terrorists.
We already have the problem of deliberate misinformation that you talk about - it exists all over the place in anonymous tips where someone will call an Army hotline and say "I've seen a weapons cache behind so and so building downtown" and when troops show up, there is an IED or an ambush. As a new vector for similar misinformation, cellphones aren't really a game changer, and the military is already aware that information they get leading to militant hideouts and so on can be "spurious" at best. So the problem you highlight gets handled like we handle anonymous tips, and troops go in with the foreknowledge that they may be heading towards a trap. I know you're probably not intending to paint the military as a house of fools, but they _can_ imagine that locational information from an insurgent phone leads them to something other than an unprepared insurgent.
No he did not. Not only is the quotation you are referring to probably apocryphal (it does not appear in any known records), but the word "corporazioni" that he is supposed to have used does not mean corporation. Feel free to do some actual research (the wikipedia page on corporatism would be fine) and you will see that the word means more like guild. So please stop spouting nonsense. Fascism has very little to do with corporatism and Mussolini was certainly no corporatist. He was, in fact, nearly the opposite. But I guess Orwell was right when he wrote that Fascism has come to mean little more than "something that I don't like," (writing in the 50's!), and here we see another example of people desperate to call something they hate Fascist, and they aren't going to let something like whether or not it actually has any of the aspects of Fascism (or Fascism of it) get in the way.
A chance to link to the J Curve! I'm so delighted.
In all seriousness though, it is fairly ironic that after decades of attempts to undermine and destroy Castro by any means necessary (except perhaps through friendliness), he resigns as one of the longest running heads of state in history. Excuse me while I go see how well we're doing beating up Al-Qaeda.
You become a lot less insightful when one realizes that it is possible to point at ANY country and find the US meddling in its recent past. So guess what, I can also point at any _successful_ nation and find recent US intervention. Germany, France, UK, Japan, Italy, Canada, and all the other dozens I don't have room to list. So really what you're saying is that not everything has worked out for all nations of the world.
No surprise there, and no need for the US as your super-villainous Bad Guy from whom all problems in the world stem.
Can't we get some polls on this instead of mucking around with your personal anecdotes? Recall both that people can smile and still be unhappy, and that the U.S. is the nation with unwanted Cuban immigrants, not the other way around. So if someone with stronger Google-fu than I can find some data on how happy the average Cuban actually is, that would be much more useful than you saying you've been there and it seems happy to you. After all, Iraq seemed like a safe place to John McCain, so it's not like people can't read what they want into a population that they only superficially interact with.
Isn't our policy to contain expansionist imperial powers? Your point that putting too much emphasis on an ultimately superficial ideology is valid, but then the implication is only that we engaged in the right policy for the wrong reason (and for all I know behind closed doors the reasoning behind containment was anti-imperialism not anti-communism). State religion Communism may have been, but that doesn't appear to imply that cooperation with China in the 50's and 60's would have been beneficial or even successful. What would we have done during the Great Leap Forward? Look the other way?
All kidding aside, you've just made exactly the (fairly astute IMHO) point Ted Kaczynski made in his manifesto available here Industrial Society and It's Future.
Pretty good read, even if what he decided to do about it was entirely deplorable.
Socialism, I'd like to point out, leads to something called a "deadweight loss." Value isn't transfered from one party to another, it's destroyed.
Beyond a discussion of "empathy" and how fair it is for me to have more or less money than someone else needs to exist the point that socialism (beyond a certain mild point) makes everyone poorer. That is because taxes - the only pragmatic way of enforcing greater standard of living and wealth equality - lead to underproduction. That statement is a fact. As work becomes more costly and less rewarding, people do less of it (no ideology required).
So not supporting tax-funded social programs need not in any way imply ambivalence towards your fellow man. At some point, a larger piece of a smaller pie is still a smaller piece. It's hard to argue that promoting policy that recognizes that fact is somehow black-hearted or selfish. And it's also irritating to those of us who do advocate low taxes and domestic spending for reasons other than our own selfishness.
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They could be doing a lot more though if they were willing to hold certain Republican favored legislation hostage as a bargaining tool. Republicans want to extend Bush tax cuts? Well they need the Dems for that, and that give the Dems leverage. For whatever reason, the Democrats aren't doing that. And they are also certainly able to avoid passing bills altogether, like the Protect America Act extension with retroactive telecom immunity. There's no excuse for allowing that to pass, because they certainly do have the choice to simply say no - there's obviously no veto in the affirmative. So while you're right that 51% in the congress isn't all it's cracked up to be, they could be doing much, much more than they are and I think it's safe to say that they aren't doing what they were elected to do, and it's not because they can't.
Apparently the school council is run by the Illuminati. The bureaucrats that enacted this policy don't give two craps about what happens after the kids grow up and leave school ("not my problem"). They aren't trying to brainwash kids into becoming sheeple when they grow up because there's no reason for them to. How would the school principal and council benefit? Answer is they wouldn't. Yet for some reason people feel the need to claim broader conspiracies whenever cameras are involved? Life is not a science fiction book, and it's filled the lazy and shortsighted a lot more often than it's filled with the supervillainous.
In fact, forget the interplanetary mission. And the blackjack. ...Somebody had to finish the joke.
Just out of curiosity, what didn't you like about Reagan? I was only born on the tail end of his presidency, but as I read many of his speeches, it all seems quite compelling. What am I missing?
You can't claim that racism props up Clinton's campaign without at the same time pointing out that it props up Obama's. If Obama weren't black, people would be able to see that he's totally, totally unqualified to be president. While it's ironic that most of Hillary's criticism about "lack of experience" applies pretty equally well to her, it is accurate criticism. The only thing he's run in his whole life is a law magazine at Harvard, and if the number of citations of the volume produced under him is a guide, he didn't run it that well. It's like people have forgotten how enormously important the presidency is, so even if it's a guy's first real job running something, hey what the hell let's let him start with the U.S. I mean, he gives great prepared speeches, and he sounds really well informed! I know I'm probably upsetting you right now, because you like Obama and because he's inspiring, but please be honest with yourself. If he was just some white guy, and the media didn't tell you that he was a credible candidate, would you really think he was?
And you do remember what happened the last time people elected someone unqualified because they liked him, don't you?
I'll ask this to any other supporters of the stimulus package: Being aware as you must be that we need to pay the money back that we use to fund the recent rebate, do you consider it a smart investment? If you don't have enough economics under your belt to answer that question, let me help you. One of the few but important services provided by recessions is that they rid the system of malinvestment. People make unprofitable and unsupportable ventures, and then they lose money on them so they stop. But here's the brilliance of the Bush tax cuts and the recent stimulus plan: people that make bad decisions don't have to experience failure and drive a recession if we mail them enough money to shore them up. Which brings me back to the idea of the stimulus as investment. We're borrowing money to shore up people who have used money stupidly, and expecting to get a return on that money that will at least be enough to repay it + interest. Sound smart to you? Unless we're going to sit on 6% inflation for the next 10 years so the debt evaporates (Which obviously has its own problems), we have pretty much a textbook case of kicking the can down the road (and probably actually worse than that).
Which I guess brings me back to the brilliance part. Can you guess if the people who get the checks, and then the people that pay them back are different groups?
What? Black and white aren't ethnicities, they're skin colors. If you'll take a very very careful look at Obama, I think you'll notice that he's black.
Didn't they raise the federal minimum wage?
The fundamental right is the right to choose your healthcare (at least for a lot of us). I look at the recent case in the U.K., where a woman with breast cancer was refused Avastin, even though she could pay for it herself, because it wasn't what everyone else got, and those were just the rules. I have no problems with a low level universal health insurance that covers against a basic set of serious and catastrophic problems and protects against the uninsured ER walk-in problem we have now (I'm not advocating we turn those people away). I do, however, have a problem when I can't buy additional insurance above the government mandated one. So when it seems that that's the way things are going, I get uncomfortable.
Is the solution for what you are looking for, namely maximizing coverage for something with low marginal costs. But I'd also like to point out that your idea of a coin flip as optimal scarce resource distributor is total bullshit. If you have to choose who to save, you choose the most productive members of society. Productivity, however, at least in the U.S., has a very strong correlation with wealth, and people don't like to hear that...
I'm not saying abandon the non-wealthy (I'm not wealthy). But really, we can help more people by doing better than a coin toss.
Wouldn't it also act as a cure? If an infected individual is immunized and able to produce resistant T-cells, doesn't that imply that they are no longer auto immune deficient? HIV itself is still swimming around in them, but so what if they have a healthy immune system. Is there something I'm missing?
And if this genetic alteration doesn't allow people to _produce_ resistant cells, then it's no good as a vaccine either. Seems that it must be both cure and vaccine, or neither.
They don't need to sell the widget for cheap. If it's more valuable to consumers than the current system, they will charge more for it than they charge for the current system. Its the same reason why the OMG pharma hides cures line of thinking doesn't hold up. When you get a patent, you get to charge what the market will bear. If you used to sell treatment for some disease at 20k a year for 5 years, there is nothing stopping you from charging 110k for the cure. You see?
Go fuck yourself. The US gets its own troops killed all the time because they maintain an ROE that trades the safety of US troops for the safety of Iraqi civilians. I'd appreciate it if you didn't then compare them to people whose only purpose is wholesale slaughter of civilians. Call them immoral if you want, but don't call them terrorists.
If war doesn't suck, then what's the problem?
We already have the problem of deliberate misinformation that you talk about - it exists all over the place in anonymous tips where someone will call an Army hotline and say "I've seen a weapons cache behind so and so building downtown" and when troops show up, there is an IED or an ambush. As a new vector for similar misinformation, cellphones aren't really a game changer, and the military is already aware that information they get leading to militant hideouts and so on can be "spurious" at best. So the problem you highlight gets handled like we handle anonymous tips, and troops go in with the foreknowledge that they may be heading towards a trap. I know you're probably not intending to paint the military as a house of fools, but they _can_ imagine that locational information from an insurgent phone leads them to something other than an unprepared insurgent.
No he did not. Not only is the quotation you are referring to probably apocryphal (it does not appear in any known records), but the word "corporazioni" that he is supposed to have used does not mean corporation. Feel free to do some actual research (the wikipedia page on corporatism would be fine) and you will see that the word means more like guild. So please stop spouting nonsense. Fascism has very little to do with corporatism and Mussolini was certainly no corporatist. He was, in fact, nearly the opposite. But I guess Orwell was right when he wrote that Fascism has come to mean little more than "something that I don't like," (writing in the 50's!), and here we see another example of people desperate to call something they hate Fascist, and they aren't going to let something like whether or not it actually has any of the aspects of Fascism (or Fascism of it) get in the way.
A chance to link to the J Curve! I'm so delighted.
In all seriousness though, it is fairly ironic that after decades of attempts to undermine and destroy Castro by any means necessary (except perhaps through friendliness), he resigns as one of the longest running heads of state in history. Excuse me while I go see how well we're doing beating up Al-Qaeda.
Cubans need Communism? Nothing like people accidentally being racists to give me a good laugh. Do the blacks still need plantations too?
You become a lot less insightful when one realizes that it is possible to point at ANY country and find the US meddling in its recent past. So guess what, I can also point at any _successful_ nation and find recent US intervention. Germany, France, UK, Japan, Italy, Canada, and all the other dozens I don't have room to list. So really what you're saying is that not everything has worked out for all nations of the world.
No surprise there, and no need for the US as your super-villainous Bad Guy from whom all problems in the world stem.
Can't we get some polls on this instead of mucking around with your personal anecdotes? Recall both that people can smile and still be unhappy, and that the U.S. is the nation with unwanted Cuban immigrants, not the other way around. So if someone with stronger Google-fu than I can find some data on how happy the average Cuban actually is, that would be much more useful than you saying you've been there and it seems happy to you. After all, Iraq seemed like a safe place to John McCain, so it's not like people can't read what they want into a population that they only superficially interact with.
Isn't our policy to contain expansionist imperial powers? Your point that putting too much emphasis on an ultimately superficial ideology is valid, but then the implication is only that we engaged in the right policy for the wrong reason (and for all I know behind closed doors the reasoning behind containment was anti-imperialism not anti-communism). State religion Communism may have been, but that doesn't appear to imply that cooperation with China in the 50's and 60's would have been beneficial or even successful. What would we have done during the Great Leap Forward? Look the other way?
In all seriousness though, the proper term is American. All this PC bullshit hinders, rather than helps, tolerance and assimilation.
If someone is an American, call them an American. Stop paying so much attention to the color of their skin.
Better mail university professors some bombs eh?.
All kidding aside, you've just made exactly the (fairly astute IMHO) point Ted Kaczynski made in his manifesto available here Industrial Society and It's Future.
Pretty good read, even if what he decided to do about it was entirely deplorable.
Socialism, I'd like to point out, leads to something called a "deadweight loss." Value isn't transfered from one party to another, it's destroyed.
Beyond a discussion of "empathy" and how fair it is for me to have more or less money than someone else needs to exist the point that socialism (beyond a certain mild point) makes everyone poorer. That is because taxes - the only pragmatic way of enforcing greater standard of living and wealth equality - lead to underproduction. That statement is a fact. As work becomes more costly and less rewarding, people do less of it (no ideology required).
So not supporting tax-funded social programs need not in any way imply ambivalence towards your fellow man. At some point, a larger piece of a smaller pie is still a smaller piece. It's hard to argue that promoting policy that recognizes that fact is somehow black-hearted or selfish. And it's also irritating to those of us who do advocate low taxes and domestic spending for reasons other than our own selfishness.
Yes you are correct (having seen the actual study). This was the reason the researchers found most compelling.