I don't see how that would help. The problem is that if you rig the system where the Democrats cannot win a specific district, than you operate a system where the real election is the primary. Which breaks everything.
Let's look at a non-Geryymandered normal district, in, let's say, a Republican state. 45% Republicans, 20% independents, and 35% Democrats. (Yes, even in the most 'biased' parts of the country, the 'majority' party rarely has an actual _majority_ registered voters.)
What happens in that district? The Democrat runs as a conservative Democrat, and the Republican runs as slightly right of center Republican. This is because the Democrat needs Republican votes, and the Republican needs to not completely lose the independents to the Democrat so can't go too far right. This produces, on average, reasonable electoral results. If either party strays too far in their direction, the other party will leap in and win.
But in a gerrymandered district, it has 55% Republicans (rigged to be exactly that, remember) and 35% Democrats and 10% moderates. Now Republicans don't need the votes of anyone but Republicans. So the points of the election are happening entirely within the Republican party, so the center has moved...
...but that's not the only problem.
Each party has a set of issues and they best talk about those issues from their direction. The 'center' of the Republican party might be at one point, but put two Republican equal-distance from the Republican center and the right-most one wins a debate, because the Republican party _speaks in those terms_. It is very hard for a Republican to fight from the left and still sound like a Republican..
And, on top of that, primary attract the most partisan voters. Someone who is barely a Republican is probably not going to vote in them.
So, in races where the other party cannot win, you get, on average, people who are much more extremist than the average of the party, or the average of the elected officials, would indicate they should be. It's just how the system works. (And everything I just said about Republicans applies to Democrats also. It's just they do less gerrymandering so end up in this stupid situation less.)
And then they win.
Having a runoff or transferable vote in the primary wouldn't help at all with this. The primary is electing the 'correct' people. The winner is the person that the vast majority of people _voting in the primary_ want elected. If anything, a runoff might make it worse, because in a few cases we've had moderatism Republicans win a Gerrymandered primary because the batshit crazy Republicans stole votes from each other. Making the election better reflect the will of the primary voters might well make things _worse_.
If you mean a runoff in the general...well, at that point you're talking about either the centerist Republican not running as a Republican, or the fringe Republican not running as a Republican...either of which they can already do. And neither of which they will do because their district is so heavily gerrymandered that whoever has a (R) after their name will win.
No, I don't see how transfering votes will help this at all. The obvious solution is to stop gerrymandering so, but, as I said, without gerrymandering, the Republicans don't end up with a majority in the House, so they clearly won't do that.
Now, what might help might be removing the primary altogether, like the California system, and just having the election between whoever gets the two highest sets of votes in a primary. But that is a very strange system to set up, and a good deal of the cause of the Gerrymandering is very partisan Republicans at the state level, and it seems unlikely they would go along with such a plan.
Of course, they might go along with it once their extremist candidates state losing elections, even in the carefully gerrymandered districts, because 10% of the Republican looked at th
Well, it was a series of mistake the Republicans made over the decades. Mistakes that made it harder and harder for the Republicans to shift their positions, and harder and harder to attract new people.
And demographics continued to happen. And then they elected George W. Bush, which sped things up by about half a decade. And it because clear, about 2000 or so, they'd either have to shift their positions or cheat.
They couldn't shift their positions. (In fact, the one policy failure of the Bush administration was the attempt to shift positions on immigration.) Their position had calcified. They had let too many people in their party based on attacking those societal shifts, and couldn't change those things now.
So...they 'cheated'. (Note I'm not saying there was any lawbreaking. I mean cheating in the sense of not playing by commonly accepted rules.)
1) They rigged things so that they'd stay in power with less and less people, via gerrymandering. (They've sorta been doing this for a while, but 2000 is where it took off.)
2) They started inventing completely amazing attacks on Democrats. The much-vaulted 'civility' completely disappeared at the hands of the Republicans. (This arguable started under Clinton.)
But this backfired horribly. Either of those alone might have been okay, but when you put them together, when you create Republican-safe districts and Republicans and Fox News yammers on and on about how evil anything to do with the Democrats are...
...you're going to end up getting challenges from the right.
And thus the Tea Party was born. In 2009, just in time to get elected to local government for the census, for more redistricting, making each district even more extreme.
The problem is...these victories just made the Republican's problems worse. Now they were even more extreme and had more of a problem. So, to keep power, we see stuff like reducing access to the ballot box, and nonsense like that.
And now you get a government shutdown to try to appease the extremists. Which will, of course, just makes things even worse electorally. To remain viable, the party must moderate itself, and it cannot moderate itself thanks to the system it set up to stay in power.
People think political parties die because they're no longer 'relevant'. But that's not really it. A political party die because instead of choosing to stay relevant, it tries (And succeeds for a short time) to rig the game to stay in power while continuing to be irrelevant, so it keep attracting less and less relevant people. Until the entire thing implodes.
The fact is...the Republican party is dead. It's thrashing around and can do massive harm as it goes down, but it really has no exit from where it is. I'm not entirely sure whether what's going on right now are the final death throes, but at this point, it's going to see its power reduced at basically every election. (Remember, it didn't even win a majority of votes cast for the House.)
What people haven't noticed is the total votes and how Boehner's behavior wouldn't make sense in a functioning political party.
Here are, roughly, the totals:
A) About 30-40 Republicans want a shutdown for some undefined reason.
B) About 150 Republicans do not want a shutdown, but will take whatever position Boehner takes, and will not be rebels.
C ) About 20 Republicans assert they will be rebels to stop the shutdown.
Now, look carefully at that. Remember the 'Hastert Rule', which was a way to enforce party discipline? Where bills only got to the floor the majority of Republicans liked them? Notice anything wrong here?
The vast majority, groups B and C, of Republicans want to fund the government. They would have voted for a CR at any point if Boehner had put it forward. (In fact, we'd probably had a little fight over the House wanting to continue the sequester and thus some Democrats would vote against it, but that's in an alternate universe where this isn't going on.) I mean, now there might be problems getting it to pass, now that some B-group Republicans have stuck their necks out trying to follow the party-line, but all Boehner had to do was put it up for a vote three weeks ago, tada, it passes, and we continue onward.
And it's not like Boehner was in group A. He's a perfectly reasonable person. There was no reason, in a functioning political party, for him not to put that bill forward. So why didn't it happen?
Because the Republican party is completely and utterly broken.
I don't mean broken in the sense of a 'pushing policies no one likes', although that is possibly true. It is broken because, thanks to gerrymandering, a large portion of this country has competing _Republican_ races, and that's it.
And that gerrymandering seemed liked a clever plan back when it was set up, but this is what we get. A party in a civil war, and Boehner picked the side with the biggest guns. (Although the least amount of people.)
Now, admittedly, there's not actually a way out of this. Republicans have to gerrymander like that. Without that, they wouldn't even control the House! So they're not going to stop that.
Basically, folks, this is how a political party fails. How it unravels.
In fact, there have been signs of that for a while. The Hastert Rule is something only a weak party would need to start with. The Republicans going full-bore anti-ACA instead of saying 'Hey, you finally agreed to _our_ health care plan.' All the incredibly weird bullshit getting spewed by the right.
Indeed. It's just damn high-speed rail, except in the air and put in a tube. Anyone who thinks we can't do that seems unaware we build bridges and subway tunnels, and it's not exactly rocket science to put a subway tunnel on a bridge.
Seems to me like it would be more expensive than HSR, but there do appear to be a lot of savings to offset the added costs. (I.e., being in a tube allows it to be propelled in a novel manner with a lot less air friction.)
And anyone who thinks this is somehow more at risk of earthquakes is an idiot. It's a tube. We can cheaply put sensors on it to detect damage...unlike HSR, where stuff could fall on the track and not be noticed. And putting structures in the air makes them more resistant to earthquakes, assuming they aren't built by idiots. It's the stuff directly on the ground that gets thrown around during an earthquake.
The only actual objection would be something like 'Musk can't do it that cheaply', and t would be more expensive in the long run. Maybe that's valid, maybe not, I don't know...but all other objections are stupid.
God in all his almighty powers and omnipresence and so probably just created the world some 6000 years ago, together with the whole universe and its history, making us believe it's much older than it really is.
No, he created it next Thursday, and once created, it will only _look like_ it's existed for billions of years.
I think the actual fact is God is up there laughing his ass off at idiots who have been wandering around claiming that a two random creation stories that ended up in the Bible are true. He's like "Guys, I was there, I set off this multi-billion year explosion thing, although I wasn't really paying attention for most of it because I had invented Angry Birds. Then I found a planet with some life on it, started screwing around, made people. (I made dinosaurs first, but couldn't figure out how to get them smart enough to talk to me, so I killed them and started over with the smartest creature, little lemur things.) The creation story things is just because all cultures had one, and whenever people asked me, I didn't want to confuse them so I was a little vague. I never expected anyone to write it down, much less write down _two_ versions of it, and then assert they are true over scientific evidence."
Actually, there's an even better example of 'all the world' as a problem. It's when Satan tempts Jesus by taking him to a mountain and Jesus can see 'all the nations of the world' below.
Now, that does say 'nations', not 'people' or 'land', so it can be argued Jesus doesn't need to see everywhere. But the Mayans, for example, had a perfectly functional 'nation' at the time, as did the Chinese, and there is nowhere on the planet or even in space that you can see Central America, China, and Israel at the same time.
And you think that God wrote the Bible because you've only be exposed to loud-mouth idiots on TV claiming to speak for Christians and idiotically claiming that everything in there is the literal truth.
Not only is that not the only opinion, it's not actually even the majority Christian opinion.
To seriously answer the question: God did not filled his book with logic traps to trick the people who want to believe in him because God did not write the Bible.
Human beings wrote the Bible, managing various degrees of accuracy for the stuff intended to be factual. Along with a lot of stuff that at no point was actually intended to be taken seriously. (Like the creation stories, or the Flood.) And, in fact, some stuff that is an outright fraud, like 1 Timothy.
They have no reason to be here... perhaps they where on exercise or got sent to the wrong address.
The police have no reason to be where? All I've seen a picture of police. An actual photograph, taken from human height not security camera height, not any sort of security camera still. Please note that during this raid they claim to have been asleep, so who the fuck was out there taking pictures?
Ah, yes, there was a 'reporter'. It's interesting how the only picture that the reporter got was a completely context-less photograph instead of them attempting to take down the door. And God only knows how CyberBunker is supposed to have gotten hold of this picture.
Incidentally, armed police do not sneak onto someone's property without a warrant, especially not by breaking through fences. And police officers with warrants do not just randomly walk away when they cannot get in.
If there aren't enough players to warrant a game, they close that table and send the dealer off to deal blackjack.
Except businesses don't work that way. Either that blackjack table should have _already_ been open, and hence having that dealer run poker instead is costing the casino money, or that blackjack table doesn't need to be open, and hence paying a dealer for _it_ is costing money.
There's no business that has magical total-staff demands where if the staff is needed in one place, they aren't needed in some other place. And if there's demand in both places, blackjack makes a _lot_ more than poker, because blackjack has morons who come in and blow $200 in five minutes. It makes _no_ sense to operate poker tables if there's a single person who wishes to play blackjack, or craps, or any of the dozen other games that the house can actually make real money off of stupid people.
Now, this system could make sense in reverse...if the blackjack tables or whatever are dead, and people want to play poker...sure, send one of the dealers over to do poker. The problem is, of course, that poker doesn't really operate unscheduled like the other games.
Poker rooms can (and do) make money for the house, since they take what would otherwise be an inconvenient storage room, pretty up the carpet and lights a little, and turn it from a "making no money" space into a "making a little money" space - plus the fact that many poker players will go and spend time playing blackjack until their seat is ready at a poker table.
Of course, actually _setting up the space_ costs money, as does using the space, as does the logistics of scheduling the room. A corporation that makes a half a million dollars a day would actually find it kinda stupid to spend time and effort setting up a room to add another $600 a day. It's sorta like asking why your lawyer doesn't have his assistant sell pencils off his desk. I mean, he's got plenty of space, _and_ he has pencils.
Casinos that do poker tables usually have entirely different motives than 'making money off poker'. They're in it to attract tourny players (And tournaments do make money), or because they have whales that come in and want to play poker in addition to dropping 40 thousand at blackjack, or they just rent the tables and dealer for an assload of money to private parties, or any combination of those things. They're not thinking 'Oh, wow, a tiny trickle of money! Let's get in on that!'
Well, let's do some basic math. First of all, the dealer himself need paying, so that's $10 a hour, minimum.
And let's assume a poker area of, let's say, four tables. And _you_ want it in some secluded places, which essentially means dedicated wait staff. So another $10 an hour, and is another area to monitor from security, so let's call that $15 an hour, $10 for a real security guy, and $5 worth of monitoring. And another let's say half a person for cleaning, so another $5 an hour.
Let's say that, for example, it has two tables playing, one with six people and one with three.
So that's between $90 and $120 dollars an hour. And we have the $20 of dealers, and the $10 waiter, and $15 security, and $5 cleaning, so that's $50 an hour that area is costing.
But wait. That's at good times. What happens when there are only four people there? Hey, look, money is possibly lost. Still need everything (Yes, they even need two dealers. Employees don't magically disappear off payroll during the day when work is slack.)
And note I'm _just_ talking payroll.
The problem with your thinking is that you think the casino operates on a slim margin, that it operates on the 'house advantage'. It does _not_. If a casino was full of people who came in and played perfect blackjack (Even without counting) and perfect craps, and even perfect roulette, they would, indeed, 'make money'...and _immediately_ go out of business, because you can't operate a fucking business exchanging paying staff to stand there and exchange $1.00 for $1.05 every five minutes and actually have _a payroll_ and _a building_.
Operating poker is asking them to do that.
In actuality, casinos operate because _everyone is horrifically bad at math_. Casinos con't care about people who pull out $100 and walk away with $90 left. Those people _cost_ them money, because they actually used more than $10 in casino resources! They're only nice to those people because everyone _thinks_ they're those people. They actually care about the vast majority of people who walk in with $100 and essentially hand it all immediately to the casino.
And the nice thing about it is you don't have to gamble, and yet can get all the amenities anyway. I often tell people that Vegas is a great vacation spot if you don't gamble...lots of shows, and even a lot of interesting places that are completely free.
Almost everything in Vegas is...well. not a 'loss leader', but not quite making as much money as it could be, because it's all designed as a big neon sign to suck people into a casino and hopefully gamble there. If half the people who go to see Blue Man Group stop in the casino on the way out and spend $50, they can reduce the ticket prices by $25. (And actually do reduce them by $15.) That's the reason that so many conventions are held there...they are charging less for convention centers and rooms than other equivalent places, on the correct assumption that the gamblers will make up the profits. And a lot of stuff actually is free.
The shops are expensive, but that's what you'd expect in a tourist town. Basically, the rule is that anything that might get people from the outside of the casino to the inside is cheaper, and other stuff, like restaurants, is just the normal level of tourist expensive, and then there's a 'super' layer of idiotically expensive stuff aimed at 'whales' who come in with a few million to blow.
So if you _don't_ gamble, Vegas rocks. I have never been to a casino outside of Vegas, though, so I don't know if other casinos are doing the same thing to pull people in. I think a lot of that is due to competition with other casinos.
Something I find a lot more ethically dubious than casinos are state-run lotteries. A casino, everyone seems to know they're going to be ripped off if they gamble. The lottery? Not so much. I think part of that is how how lotteries 'roll over' if no one wins, which is stupid logic, but there you go. But possibly it's just because where I live you have to drive two hours to get to a casino, but the lottery is everywhere.
So your solution is...to undo the laws that stop us from throwing toxic chemicals in landfills and allow us to do that? What are you talking about?
You do realize, that, under the law, all companies that sell stuff forbidden from landfills have to accept that stuff back for them to dispose of, right? We don't have to figure out where to dispose of batteries, because Duracell is required _by law_ to accept used Duracell batteries back and _they_ are in charge of what to do with them at that point.
The problem is _no one does that_. Because people are complete and utter morons who think it's more important keeping glass out of landfills than batteries, and setup entire government-operate infrastructure to do _that_. While _not_ setting up any sort of system to hand back the toxic stuff the companies required by law to accept it.
It's like if a community decided to try to keep people healthy, so decided to operate a task force dedicated to stopping people from being struck by lightning. With a nice big building and a trauma team that would show up to help after a lightning strike and a construction crew that runs around putting lightning rods on every tree and power pole and teaching all kids to stay inside during thunderstorms.
I'm like, uh, okay, technically that _is_ a health concern, and I have no actual objection to that. But, um, with all that funding, we could, you know, run a goddamn free clinic instead, and actually treat real health problems, instead of something that is not actually a problem in any meaningful sense.
Government resources are not infinite. The amount of environmental stuff you can make people care about is not infinite. The amount of hassle you can subject people to is not infinite.
We have wasted those on recycling completely harmless things instead, I dunno, _not poisoning the planet_.
Segregation has never actually been supported by the majority of the US population. It was just supported by a majority of the people that were allowed to vote. Or perhaps not even that.
More to the point, I didn't take issue with having unpopular political positions. That's the great question of representative government...are elected people supposed to do what they want, are they supposed to average what the people who voted for them want, or possibly are they supposed to average what everyone who they represent (Even people who voted against them) want? I have no objection to politicians falling anywhere on that line.
What I took issue with was the Republicans (and it's pretty much entirely the Republicans, with some conservative Democrats) having unpopular political positions so they then _lie about things_ to make those positions more popular. I.e., stuff like 'Death panels'. And the current nonsense about how the deficit is a huge problem, which even Democrats have bought into. (Fact: The deficit is actually dropping very rapidly, and without any changes at all, we'd probably have a balanced budget as soon as the recession goes away, especially since we're ending our wars and ending some tax cuts.)
It's one thing to stand up and say, despite the political climate, 'We should not have segregation because it is wrong'. It's another to stand up and say 'We should not have segregation because the Soviet Union can exploit the separation between the races to spread deadly genetically-engineered diseases.' or other crazy nonsense.
And, yes, I complain when Democrats do it also. I.e., during the debt ceiling crisis, when the Democrats kept talking about defaulting on our loans. I kept pointing out that, in actual fact, that's probably what we'd do _last_. We'd keep paying those, it's just the _rest_ of the stuff that would stop. (This wouldn't actually make the disaster any better, and in fact pointing out we'd end up repaying bonds held by the Chinese while letting our elderly starve to death actually sounds a good deal worse than 'defaulting on our loans'. So I don't know why Democrats kept saying it wrongly.)
The thing is, though, the Democrat's positions are vastly more popular, in almost every sense, than the Republican's. If voters are just asked their positions, or presented with positions without the context of what the parties are, they support Democratic policies something like 75% of the time. So even if both parties are equally willing to lie (I really don't know, and won't argue it.), the Republicans end up doing it more.
And often the lies are patently, almost surreally, stupid. Because the right has an echo chamber where lies get amplified, and then the lies escape, and everyone is like 'WTF?' and other Republicans are like 'It's true!' and they all look even stupider. (Like the whole 'rape rarely results in pregnancy' nonsense that keeps popping up, which is grounded in literally _nothing_. Nothing. No basis at all for the statement.)
In the _current_ world, the environmental movement's complete and utter apathy about stopping toxins from being put in landfill (As opposed to stopping paper from getting put in landfills, at which they've become very successfully.) is basically the reason that putting thing in landfills is even expensive at all.
Landfills should be often, they should be large, and they should be local. And they should be full of completely non-toxic stuff because the environmental movement should have been spending the last four decades teaching children to sort out toxic material for special pickup, instead of teaching them to sort out fucking glass and paper. Instead of little green and blue bins for recycling, we should all have yellow bins or whatever for 'crap that can't go in the landfill' and a day the trucks come by for that. We should have kids nagging parents about 'You can't throw that away, it has a battery in it and the chemicals will leak into the groundwater' instead of 'You can't throw that away, they'll have to grow a tiny fraction of a tree again to make more paper!'
But like I said, I have no objection to recycling anything. It's just a completely goddamn absurd priority, especially when there is actually something that it would be _much more useful_ to spend the time and effort keeping out of landfills.
But, then again, 'Completely goddamn absurd priorities' is the environmental movement's motto.
Yes, recycling paper saves a lot of energy and water due to the fact it doesn't have to be pulped again. (At least, not much.)
I will point out that, despite what people seem to think, the amount of _ bleaching_ is the same. Yes, this can be done in an environmentally responsible manner, or an environmentally irresponsible manner, but that has nothing to do with whether it's new or old. That's something you constantly hear about recycling that has no link to recycling at all.
And the air pollution thing is nonsense. Yes, if you have a piece of paper, and recycle it, it will produce less air pollution than if you did not.However, that completely ignores the fact that if you did not recycle it, you would have had to grow another tree, which would counter that air pollution. (And the inane comparison of carbon to methane. Yes, methane is worse, but _much much_ less of it is produced.)
The entire paper process is pulling carbon out of the air, moving it around, and then burying it, where slowly some of it escapes. The more you use recycling, the _less_ times you do of that process, and hence the _more_ carbon in the air.
I mean, seriously, it's like basic logic escapes people. Making trees out of CO2, killing the trees, and storing the dead trees is the literally the _opposite_ of releasing CO2 into the air. Even if the dead trees rot, that still only releases a tiny fraction back. (As can be easily demonstrated by the fact we have topsoil full of carbon from long dead trees.)
Recycling glass saves about 30% of the energy used to make it.
I have no idea how much of that is counteracted by the fact that someone has to drive a truck around picking up the glass, then put it in another truck and drive it to the glass making place. (Whereas the factories are usually located near a source of sand in the first place.)
I do know, however, that recycling glass is not actually _cost_ efficient. It only exists because it is subsided by local governments. While I have no problem with local government subsidizing environmental stuff, that somewhat indicates to me that the energy costs of recycled vs. new are somewhat comparable. (It could be that energy costs are slightly less but that's countered with more manpower costs or something.)
I don't really have an objection to glass recycling, however. I just have an objection to the completely pointless focus on all forms of recycling. It's a question of where we should be expending time, money, and social capital in environmentalism. There are _loads_ better things we could be doing instead of recycling glass.
Although, interestingly, this is becoming more of a moot point, and was more of a complaint back twenty years ago. More and more communities have dropped glass recycling, or at least glass pickup, for the reason that no one is willing to pay them for glass. (Whereas people will pay for aluminum and paper.)
Ah, that's actually something I typed but deleted.
Why _exactly_ do we care how much glass is in landfills? Because there's limited space.
Why is there limited space? Because no one wants landfills near them.
Why do people not want landfills near them? Because they leak toxic chemicals.
Why are their toxic chemicals in landfills? Because people throw them away despite not supposed to be doing that.
Why do people throw them away? BECAUSE COMMUNITIES ARE TOO BUSY FUCKING AROUND WITH IDIOTIC 'RECYCLING PICKUP DAY' TO HAVE A 'TOXIC CHEMICALS PICKUP DAY'.
I'll make a deal with people:
I will live in a world where the landfill is two miles down the road, and three times bigger than existing landfills, and is full of glass, and trucks come my house by every week and pick up paint and batteries and whatnot and dispose of them safely to keep them out of said landfill.
You live in a world where the landfill is twenty miles down the road, and the landfill is a microscopic one and is full of paint and mercury and whatnot leaking into the groundwater, and recycling trucks come by your house once a week and pick up fucking glass to keep _that_ out of the landfill.
But, apparently, I have to live in the second world also, because we've decided to dedicate fifty times more resources to protecting landfill from completely harmless glass! Instead of from PCBs that leak into the water supply, or dissolving antibiotics to create antibiotic resistance bacteria, or radioactive smoke detectors. And because people aren't stupid(1), they don't want those goddamn landfills anywhere near them.
If we _didn't_ put that shit in landfills, if we filled them with glass and aluminum and rotten food and paper...who the hell would care if the landfills were near them? Not right next door, of course, they'd still smell, but near-ish.
But, instead, they are full of horribly toxic stuff...but at least we've kept out those most dangerous of all things....glass and aluminum cans and *gasp* pieces of paper!
1) Note: This is a complete lie. People are, in fact, stupid.
Yes, but while the elected Democrats have stupid _members_, the party does not actually make stupid stands on things and back them up with stupid statements.
The Democrats do not have some sort of political position that troops in Guam are a bad idea, despite the fact that Guam troops are popular, so the Democrats do not have the need to run around telling people via MSNBC that Guam will tip over, or that landsharks walking around on Guam will eat them, or that Guam itself is a myth.
No, the Democrats apparently just elected a single fucking moron.
Which _sounds_ bad, but it's a fuckton better than having an entire political party taking unpopular political positions and making up nonsense to explain those positions, hoping that their propaganda outfit posing as a cable news network will convince enough people to get them reelected.
Incidentally, Hank Johnson claims he was basically making a metaphorical joke, and his other questions seem to indication he was rather worried about the environmental impart of raising the tiny island of Guam's population by such a large amount all at once. If he'd actually had concerns about the island tipping over, you'd think he'd need a bit more reassurances than 'We don't anticipate that' with no explanation as to _why_ they don't.
I mean, obviously the military didn't 'anticipate' the island tipping over. I don't mean 'obviously' in the sense 'islands don't tip over', I mean even if islands did tip over, the military wouldn't ask to move somewhere where they thought the island would tip over! Duh. Of course the military doesn't 'anticipate' it, that answer does not, in anyway, answer the question Hank Johnson was supposedly asking about the _risk_ of it doing so.
People are so busy assuming he meant that seriously that they have completely ignored the context. Imagine that in a context where the problem could actually happen, which would make Hank Johnson's exchange _incredibly fucking stupid_ sounding. Military: We're sending in a covert team to Russia to do X. Hank Johnson: But what if Russia catches them? Military: We don't anticipate that happening. Hank Johnson: Well, I guess the military thinking something won't happen is a good enough non-answer to quailed my concerns! Let's talk about something else!
In the real world, someone _actually_ concerned would have said something like 'And what exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean the odds of it happening are very very low, or do you mean that the military literally has no plans if it does happening? Assuming you mean the first thing, why do you think it won't happen? Has the military even considered it?'
That is the sort of reply that Hank Johnson would have made if he _actually_ thought there was a risk of Guam tipping over. So this looks less like an actual question and more like a dumb joke that person he was talking to didn't get so he just moved on. There are actual instances of Democrats saying actual dumb things, I just don't really think this is one.
However, my point is, even if you actually think he's dumb enough to think the island could tip over, that sort of thought from a single congressman is not the same as the entire Republican party running around repeating dumb things, in concert, that they know are untrue, to confuse low-information voters.
It is perhaps worth pointing out the obvious scientific fact that people are warm-blooded.
A rather significant fraction of the energy we, like all warm-blooded animals, use is to keep our body at exactly the correct temperature. Heating, cooling, all sorts of stuff.
The human body is not a car, or even a TV. It does not have an 'on' mode and 'off' mode. It is not even laptop where the processor can be turned down. (Which is how cold-blooded animals are.)
No, the human body is, uh, a desktop computer where the only variable in power use is whether or not the fan is on and the hard drive is spinning. (If your body is turning _off_ and you're still alive, you've probably accidentally fallen into a frozen lake and mammalian dive reflex has happened.)
Moreover, in addition to the human body not using much more energy when active, the amount of CO2 emitted is not directly proportional to that _anyway_. There are a lot of processes in the body where carbohydrates and whatnot are broken down to simpler things, and only part of that produces CO2. Humans are not actually powered _by oxygen_.
I consider myself an environmentalist, but all too often the environmental movement seems completely batshit crazy. And not in the way the political right seems to think it is...it's perfectly reasonable to have all sots of restrictions on all sorts of things, I have no objection to any of that.
No, the environment movement often is batshit crazy solely because they get one idea in their head and can't ever seem to change it under any circumstances. Meanwhile, other actual important things (Like, oh, the fact we're RUNNING COMPLETELY OUT OF GROUNDWATER) just have utterly passed over their heads. And let's not forget the acid we insist on putting in the air, which has resulted in ocean toxicity that has already killed a lot of fish.
Indeed, there are least two ideas they've come up with that _have helped caused global warming_.
I remember back two decades ago the big end all and be all was recycling, and no one took me seriously when I pointed out that glass recycling seems a bit pointless because it was _physically impossible_ for humans to run out of silicon dioxide. Likewise, recycling paper doesn't 'save trees' because we grow goddamn trees specifically for paper...talking about 'saving trees' is like talking about 'saving carrots' by refusing to eat carrots.
Sure, the recycling might save a little energy, but that's assuming a lot of transportation stuff that we're making assumptions about. Where's the glass recycling plant, where is the glass making plant, how much does sorting the glass cost, etc?
And, of course, the anti-nuclear stuff really pisses me off.
Someone is about to start rambling about renewable energy, but it's worth pointing out that when the anti-nuclear stuff start back in the 70s, there was absolutely _no possibility_ of supplying the world's energy except via nuclear or fossil fuels. It doesn't matter what could happen now, there was not even a _hypothetical_ way of doing in the in 70s. So, basically, all the fossil fuel burning power plants _now_ are thanks to the environmental movement. (And before anyone mentions radiation, goddamn coal mining released more radioactive than nuclear reactors ever have. It's called 'radon'.)
So, there you go. The environmental movement, thanks to total and utter stupidity, has kept us from having nuclear power plants, aka, kept us burning coal. And has pushed, as a cause, the idea we shouldn't _grow and bury trees_, aka, we should not do carbon sequestering that would reduce CO2. Oh, and let's no forget recycling plastic, which has, cleverly, saved more hydro-carbons from being safely contained in pieces of plastic, allowing us to instead...uh...burn them in car engines.
I just pointed out that B&N did not close 'their' online store, which was a completely silly assertions to make in a story that specifically talks about their online store! Obfuscant saying 'And yet, B&N closed their online store (Fictionwise)' was just completely nonsensical comment.
B&N closed the online store they bought for scraps, _their_ online store is just fine.
By 'it', do you mean Barnes and Noble? In which case I would suggest you're exactly backwards. If there actually I a genre that is selling, that's great for B&N.
If by 'it' you mean 'society', then yes. Yes it is.
I am the last person to judge people for the sort of fiction they enjoy. Especially fantasy. (I was a flipping Buffy fan. And a Harry Potter fan.)
But, honest to God, half those books are total crap. That genre is the...the...the new 1920 pulp sci-fi. Except with more sexism and crappier characterization and dumber story-telling.
And putting _more_ sexism in a book now than back then in 1920-1930s quite a trick. Especially when most of the damn writers are themselves female. Just...wow.
And unlike pulp sci-fi, this isn't some sort of new genre attempting to figure out what it wants. The romance genre already exists! The fantasy genre already exists! Both of them know how to aim at teenagers! There are plenty of 'teen paranormal romances' that long predate this slush that were pretty good.
But then goddamn Twilight came along and proved that anyone will buy any piece of crap. And thus pieces of crap were dutifully produced. (Or, rather, _shelved_. Crap books have always been produced.)
But I'm glad they ended up on their own shelve. All too often they end up cluttering 'urban fantasy' or just fantasy in general. (Hell, last time I was at B&N, they had sci-fi and fantasy together. Seriously?)
Hell, he doesn't appear to know anything about men's clothing, either. Who the hell buys jeans without trying them on? Men's pants' sizes are _less_ fucked up than women's (Which, from what I hear, are completely random from brand to brand.), but it doesn't mean jeans can be bought sight unseen, unless you've tried that exact size in the same brand.
Socks, yes. Underwear, yes. (In fact, you have to as you can't try those one.) Shirts, yes. Pants and shoes? Uh, no.
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I don't see how that would help. The problem is that if you rig the system where the Democrats cannot win a specific district, than you operate a system where the real election is the primary. Which breaks everything.
Let's look at a non-Geryymandered normal district, in, let's say, a Republican state. 45% Republicans, 20% independents, and 35% Democrats. (Yes, even in the most 'biased' parts of the country, the 'majority' party rarely has an actual _majority_ registered voters.)
What happens in that district? The Democrat runs as a conservative Democrat, and the Republican runs as slightly right of center Republican. This is because the Democrat needs Republican votes, and the Republican needs to not completely lose the independents to the Democrat so can't go too far right. This produces, on average, reasonable electoral results. If either party strays too far in their direction, the other party will leap in and win.
But in a gerrymandered district, it has 55% Republicans (rigged to be exactly that, remember) and 35% Democrats and 10% moderates. Now Republicans don't need the votes of anyone but Republicans. So the points of the election are happening entirely within the Republican party, so the center has moved...
Each party has a set of issues and they best talk about those issues from their direction. The 'center' of the Republican party might be at one point, but put two Republican equal-distance from the Republican center and the right-most one wins a debate, because the Republican party _speaks in those terms_. It is very hard for a Republican to fight from the left and still sound like a Republican..
And, on top of that, primary attract the most partisan voters. Someone who is barely a Republican is probably not going to vote in them.
So, in races where the other party cannot win, you get, on average, people who are much more extremist than the average of the party, or the average of the elected officials, would indicate they should be. It's just how the system works. (And everything I just said about Republicans applies to Democrats also. It's just they do less gerrymandering so end up in this stupid situation less.)
And then they win.
Having a runoff or transferable vote in the primary wouldn't help at all with this. The primary is electing the 'correct' people. The winner is the person that the vast majority of people _voting in the primary_ want elected. If anything, a runoff might make it worse, because in a few cases we've had moderatism Republicans win a Gerrymandered primary because the batshit crazy Republicans stole votes from each other. Making the election better reflect the will of the primary voters might well make things _worse_.
If you mean a runoff in the general...well, at that point you're talking about either the centerist Republican not running as a Republican, or the fringe Republican not running as a Republican...either of which they can already do. And neither of which they will do because their district is so heavily gerrymandered that whoever has a (R) after their name will win.
No, I don't see how transfering votes will help this at all. The obvious solution is to stop gerrymandering so, but, as I said, without gerrymandering, the Republicans don't end up with a majority in the House, so they clearly won't do that.
Now, what might help might be removing the primary altogether, like the California system, and just having the election between whoever gets the two highest sets of votes in a primary. But that is a very strange system to set up, and a good deal of the cause of the Gerrymandering is very partisan Republicans at the state level, and it seems unlikely they would go along with such a plan.
Of course, they might go along with it once their extremist candidates state losing elections, even in the carefully gerrymandered districts, because 10% of the Republican looked at th
And as for how this happened?
Well, it was a series of mistake the Republicans made over the decades. Mistakes that made it harder and harder for the Republicans to shift their positions, and harder and harder to attract new people.
And demographics continued to happen. And then they elected George W. Bush, which sped things up by about half a decade. And it because clear, about 2000 or so, they'd either have to shift their positions or cheat.
They couldn't shift their positions. (In fact, the one policy failure of the Bush administration was the attempt to shift positions on immigration.) Their position had calcified. They had let too many people in their party based on attacking those societal shifts, and couldn't change those things now.
So...they 'cheated'. (Note I'm not saying there was any lawbreaking. I mean cheating in the sense of not playing by commonly accepted rules.)
1) They rigged things so that they'd stay in power with less and less people, via gerrymandering. (They've sorta been doing this for a while, but 2000 is where it took off.)
2) They started inventing completely amazing attacks on Democrats. The much-vaulted 'civility' completely disappeared at the hands of the Republicans. (This arguable started under Clinton.)
But this backfired horribly. Either of those alone might have been okay, but when you put them together, when you create Republican-safe districts and Republicans and Fox News yammers on and on about how evil anything to do with the Democrats are...
And thus the Tea Party was born. In 2009, just in time to get elected to local government for the census, for more redistricting, making each district even more extreme.
The problem is...these victories just made the Republican's problems worse. Now they were even more extreme and had more of a problem. So, to keep power, we see stuff like reducing access to the ballot box, and nonsense like that.
And now you get a government shutdown to try to appease the extremists. Which will, of course, just makes things even worse electorally. To remain viable, the party must moderate itself, and it cannot moderate itself thanks to the system it set up to stay in power.
People think political parties die because they're no longer 'relevant'. But that's not really it. A political party die because instead of choosing to stay relevant, it tries (And succeeds for a short time) to rig the game to stay in power while continuing to be irrelevant, so it keep attracting less and less relevant people. Until the entire thing implodes.
The fact is...the Republican party is dead. It's thrashing around and can do massive harm as it goes down, but it really has no exit from where it is. I'm not entirely sure whether what's going on right now are the final death throes, but at this point, it's going to see its power reduced at basically every election. (Remember, it didn't even win a majority of votes cast for the House.)
What people haven't noticed is the total votes and how Boehner's behavior wouldn't make sense in a functioning political party.
Here are, roughly, the totals:
A) About 30-40 Republicans want a shutdown for some undefined reason.
B) About 150 Republicans do not want a shutdown, but will take whatever position Boehner takes, and will not be rebels.
C ) About 20 Republicans assert they will be rebels to stop the shutdown.
Now, look carefully at that. Remember the 'Hastert Rule', which was a way to enforce party discipline? Where bills only got to the floor the majority of Republicans liked them? Notice anything wrong here?
The vast majority, groups B and C, of Republicans want to fund the government. They would have voted for a CR at any point if Boehner had put it forward. (In fact, we'd probably had a little fight over the House wanting to continue the sequester and thus some Democrats would vote against it, but that's in an alternate universe where this isn't going on.) I mean, now there might be problems getting it to pass, now that some B-group Republicans have stuck their necks out trying to follow the party-line, but all Boehner had to do was put it up for a vote three weeks ago, tada, it passes, and we continue onward.
And it's not like Boehner was in group A. He's a perfectly reasonable person. There was no reason, in a functioning political party, for him not to put that bill forward. So why didn't it happen?
Because the Republican party is completely and utterly broken.
I don't mean broken in the sense of a 'pushing policies no one likes', although that is possibly true. It is broken because, thanks to gerrymandering, a large portion of this country has competing _Republican_ races, and that's it.
And that gerrymandering seemed liked a clever plan back when it was set up, but this is what we get. A party in a civil war, and Boehner picked the side with the biggest guns. (Although the least amount of people.)
Now, admittedly, there's not actually a way out of this. Republicans have to gerrymander like that. Without that, they wouldn't even control the House! So they're not going to stop that.
Basically, folks, this is how a political party fails. How it unravels.
In fact, there have been signs of that for a while. The Hastert Rule is something only a weak party would need to start with. The Republicans going full-bore anti-ACA instead of saying 'Hey, you finally agreed to _our_ health care plan.' All the incredibly weird bullshit getting spewed by the right.
So what magical new technologist do you mysteriously think it requires?
Can we build pylons? Check, we build bridges quite some distance.
Can we build metal tubes? Subways systems say check.
Can we build air turbines? Why, yes we can.
What exactly do you feel is the technologically implausible part of this proposal?
Indeed. It's just damn high-speed rail, except in the air and put in a tube. Anyone who thinks we can't do that seems unaware we build bridges and subway tunnels, and it's not exactly rocket science to put a subway tunnel on a bridge.
Seems to me like it would be more expensive than HSR, but there do appear to be a lot of savings to offset the added costs. (I.e., being in a tube allows it to be propelled in a novel manner with a lot less air friction.)
And anyone who thinks this is somehow more at risk of earthquakes is an idiot. It's a tube. We can cheaply put sensors on it to detect damage...unlike HSR, where stuff could fall on the track and not be noticed. And putting structures in the air makes them more resistant to earthquakes, assuming they aren't built by idiots. It's the stuff directly on the ground that gets thrown around during an earthquake.
The only actual objection would be something like 'Musk can't do it that cheaply', and t would be more expensive in the long run. Maybe that's valid, maybe not, I don't know...but all other objections are stupid.
God in all his almighty powers and omnipresence and so probably just created the world some 6000 years ago, together with the whole universe and its history, making us believe it's much older than it really is.
No, he created it next Thursday, and once created, it will only _look like_ it's existed for billions of years.
I think the actual fact is God is up there laughing his ass off at idiots who have been wandering around claiming that a two random creation stories that ended up in the Bible are true. He's like "Guys, I was there, I set off this multi-billion year explosion thing, although I wasn't really paying attention for most of it because I had invented Angry Birds. Then I found a planet with some life on it, started screwing around, made people. (I made dinosaurs first, but couldn't figure out how to get them smart enough to talk to me, so I killed them and started over with the smartest creature, little lemur things.) The creation story things is just because all cultures had one, and whenever people asked me, I didn't want to confuse them so I was a little vague. I never expected anyone to write it down, much less write down _two_ versions of it, and then assert they are true over scientific evidence."
Actually, there's an even better example of 'all the world' as a problem. It's when Satan tempts Jesus by taking him to a mountain and Jesus can see 'all the nations of the world' below.
Now, that does say 'nations', not 'people' or 'land', so it can be argued Jesus doesn't need to see everywhere. But the Mayans, for example, had a perfectly functional 'nation' at the time, as did the Chinese, and there is nowhere on the planet or even in space that you can see Central America, China, and Israel at the same time.
And you think that God wrote the Bible because you've only be exposed to loud-mouth idiots on TV claiming to speak for Christians and idiotically claiming that everything in there is the literal truth.
Not only is that not the only opinion, it's not actually even the majority Christian opinion.
To seriously answer the question: God did not filled his book with logic traps to trick the people who want to believe in him because God did not write the Bible.
Human beings wrote the Bible, managing various degrees of accuracy for the stuff intended to be factual. Along with a lot of stuff that at no point was actually intended to be taken seriously. (Like the creation stories, or the Flood.) And, in fact, some stuff that is an outright fraud, like 1 Timothy.
They have no reason to be here... perhaps they where on exercise or got sent to the wrong address.
The police have no reason to be where? All I've seen a picture of police. An actual photograph, taken from human height not security camera height, not any sort of security camera still. Please note that during this raid they claim to have been asleep, so who the fuck was out there taking pictures?
Ah, yes, there was a 'reporter'. It's interesting how the only picture that the reporter got was a completely context-less photograph instead of them attempting to take down the door. And God only knows how CyberBunker is supposed to have gotten hold of this picture.
Incidentally, armed police do not sneak onto someone's property without a warrant, especially not by breaking through fences. And police officers with warrants do not just randomly walk away when they cannot get in.
If there aren't enough players to warrant a game, they close that table and send the dealer off to deal blackjack.
Except businesses don't work that way. Either that blackjack table should have _already_ been open, and hence having that dealer run poker instead is costing the casino money, or that blackjack table doesn't need to be open, and hence paying a dealer for _it_ is costing money.
There's no business that has magical total-staff demands where if the staff is needed in one place, they aren't needed in some other place. And if there's demand in both places, blackjack makes a _lot_ more than poker, because blackjack has morons who come in and blow $200 in five minutes. It makes _no_ sense to operate poker tables if there's a single person who wishes to play blackjack, or craps, or any of the dozen other games that the house can actually make real money off of stupid people.
Now, this system could make sense in reverse...if the blackjack tables or whatever are dead, and people want to play poker...sure, send one of the dealers over to do poker. The problem is, of course, that poker doesn't really operate unscheduled like the other games.
Poker rooms can (and do) make money for the house, since they take what would otherwise be an inconvenient storage room, pretty up the carpet and lights a little, and turn it from a "making no money" space into a "making a little money" space - plus the fact that many poker players will go and spend time playing blackjack until their seat is ready at a poker table.
Of course, actually _setting up the space_ costs money, as does using the space, as does the logistics of scheduling the room. A corporation that makes a half a million dollars a day would actually find it kinda stupid to spend time and effort setting up a room to add another $600 a day. It's sorta like asking why your lawyer doesn't have his assistant sell pencils off his desk. I mean, he's got plenty of space, _and_ he has pencils.
Casinos that do poker tables usually have entirely different motives than 'making money off poker'. They're in it to attract tourny players (And tournaments do make money), or because they have whales that come in and want to play poker in addition to dropping 40 thousand at blackjack, or they just rent the tables and dealer for an assload of money to private parties, or any combination of those things. They're not thinking 'Oh, wow, a tiny trickle of money! Let's get in on that!'
Well, let's do some basic math. First of all, the dealer himself need paying, so that's $10 a hour, minimum.
And let's assume a poker area of, let's say, four tables. And _you_ want it in some secluded places, which essentially means dedicated wait staff. So another $10 an hour, and is another area to monitor from security, so let's call that $15 an hour, $10 for a real security guy, and $5 worth of monitoring. And another let's say half a person for cleaning, so another $5 an hour.
Let's say that, for example, it has two tables playing, one with six people and one with three.
So that's between $90 and $120 dollars an hour. And we have the $20 of dealers, and the $10 waiter, and $15 security, and $5 cleaning, so that's $50 an hour that area is costing.
But wait. That's at good times. What happens when there are only four people there? Hey, look, money is possibly lost. Still need everything (Yes, they even need two dealers. Employees don't magically disappear off payroll during the day when work is slack.)
And note I'm _just_ talking payroll.
The problem with your thinking is that you think the casino operates on a slim margin, that it operates on the 'house advantage'. It does _not_. If a casino was full of people who came in and played perfect blackjack (Even without counting) and perfect craps, and even perfect roulette, they would, indeed, 'make money'...and _immediately_ go out of business, because you can't operate a fucking business exchanging paying staff to stand there and exchange $1.00 for $1.05 every five minutes and actually have _a payroll_ and _a building_.
Operating poker is asking them to do that.
In actuality, casinos operate because _everyone is horrifically bad at math_. Casinos con't care about people who pull out $100 and walk away with $90 left. Those people _cost_ them money, because they actually used more than $10 in casino resources! They're only nice to those people because everyone _thinks_ they're those people. They actually care about the vast majority of people who walk in with $100 and essentially hand it all immediately to the casino.
And the nice thing about it is you don't have to gamble, and yet can get all the amenities anyway. I often tell people that Vegas is a great vacation spot if you don't gamble...lots of shows, and even a lot of interesting places that are completely free.
Almost everything in Vegas is...well. not a 'loss leader', but not quite making as much money as it could be, because it's all designed as a big neon sign to suck people into a casino and hopefully gamble there. If half the people who go to see Blue Man Group stop in the casino on the way out and spend $50, they can reduce the ticket prices by $25. (And actually do reduce them by $15.) That's the reason that so many conventions are held there...they are charging less for convention centers and rooms than other equivalent places, on the correct assumption that the gamblers will make up the profits. And a lot of stuff actually is free.
The shops are expensive, but that's what you'd expect in a tourist town. Basically, the rule is that anything that might get people from the outside of the casino to the inside is cheaper, and other stuff, like restaurants, is just the normal level of tourist expensive, and then there's a 'super' layer of idiotically expensive stuff aimed at 'whales' who come in with a few million to blow.
So if you _don't_ gamble, Vegas rocks. I have never been to a casino outside of Vegas, though, so I don't know if other casinos are doing the same thing to pull people in. I think a lot of that is due to competition with other casinos.
Something I find a lot more ethically dubious than casinos are state-run lotteries. A casino, everyone seems to know they're going to be ripped off if they gamble. The lottery? Not so much. I think part of that is how how lotteries 'roll over' if no one wins, which is stupid logic, but there you go. But possibly it's just because where I live you have to drive two hours to get to a casino, but the lottery is everywhere.
So your solution is...to undo the laws that stop us from throwing toxic chemicals in landfills and allow us to do that? What are you talking about?
You do realize, that, under the law, all companies that sell stuff forbidden from landfills have to accept that stuff back for them to dispose of, right? We don't have to figure out where to dispose of batteries, because Duracell is required _by law_ to accept used Duracell batteries back and _they_ are in charge of what to do with them at that point.
The problem is _no one does that_. Because people are complete and utter morons who think it's more important keeping glass out of landfills than batteries, and setup entire government-operate infrastructure to do _that_. While _not_ setting up any sort of system to hand back the toxic stuff the companies required by law to accept it.
It's like if a community decided to try to keep people healthy, so decided to operate a task force dedicated to stopping people from being struck by lightning. With a nice big building and a trauma team that would show up to help after a lightning strike and a construction crew that runs around putting lightning rods on every tree and power pole and teaching all kids to stay inside during thunderstorms.
I'm like, uh, okay, technically that _is_ a health concern, and I have no actual objection to that. But, um, with all that funding, we could, you know, run a goddamn free clinic instead, and actually treat real health problems, instead of something that is not actually a problem in any meaningful sense.
Government resources are not infinite. The amount of environmental stuff you can make people care about is not infinite. The amount of hassle you can subject people to is not infinite.
We have wasted those on recycling completely harmless things instead, I dunno, _not poisoning the planet_.
Segregation has never actually been supported by the majority of the US population. It was just supported by a majority of the people that were allowed to vote. Or perhaps not even that.
More to the point, I didn't take issue with having unpopular political positions. That's the great question of representative government...are elected people supposed to do what they want, are they supposed to average what the people who voted for them want, or possibly are they supposed to average what everyone who they represent (Even people who voted against them) want? I have no objection to politicians falling anywhere on that line.
What I took issue with was the Republicans (and it's pretty much entirely the Republicans, with some conservative Democrats) having unpopular political positions so they then _lie about things_ to make those positions more popular. I.e., stuff like 'Death panels'. And the current nonsense about how the deficit is a huge problem, which even Democrats have bought into. (Fact: The deficit is actually dropping very rapidly, and without any changes at all, we'd probably have a balanced budget as soon as the recession goes away, especially since we're ending our wars and ending some tax cuts.)
It's one thing to stand up and say, despite the political climate, 'We should not have segregation because it is wrong'. It's another to stand up and say 'We should not have segregation because the Soviet Union can exploit the separation between the races to spread deadly genetically-engineered diseases.' or other crazy nonsense.
And, yes, I complain when Democrats do it also. I.e., during the debt ceiling crisis, when the Democrats kept talking about defaulting on our loans. I kept pointing out that, in actual fact, that's probably what we'd do _last_. We'd keep paying those, it's just the _rest_ of the stuff that would stop. (This wouldn't actually make the disaster any better, and in fact pointing out we'd end up repaying bonds held by the Chinese while letting our elderly starve to death actually sounds a good deal worse than 'defaulting on our loans'. So I don't know why Democrats kept saying it wrongly.)
The thing is, though, the Democrat's positions are vastly more popular, in almost every sense, than the Republican's. If voters are just asked their positions, or presented with positions without the context of what the parties are, they support Democratic policies something like 75% of the time. So even if both parties are equally willing to lie (I really don't know, and won't argue it.), the Republicans end up doing it more.
And often the lies are patently, almost surreally, stupid. Because the right has an echo chamber where lies get amplified, and then the lies escape, and everyone is like 'WTF?' and other Republicans are like 'It's true!' and they all look even stupider. (Like the whole 'rape rarely results in pregnancy' nonsense that keeps popping up, which is grounded in literally _nothing_. Nothing. No basis at all for the statement.)
See this post for what I think about landfills.
In the _current_ world, the environmental movement's complete and utter apathy about stopping toxins from being put in landfill (As opposed to stopping paper from getting put in landfills, at which they've become very successfully.) is basically the reason that putting thing in landfills is even expensive at all.
Landfills should be often, they should be large, and they should be local. And they should be full of completely non-toxic stuff because the environmental movement should have been spending the last four decades teaching children to sort out toxic material for special pickup, instead of teaching them to sort out fucking glass and paper. Instead of little green and blue bins for recycling, we should all have yellow bins or whatever for 'crap that can't go in the landfill' and a day the trucks come by for that. We should have kids nagging parents about 'You can't throw that away, it has a battery in it and the chemicals will leak into the groundwater' instead of 'You can't throw that away, they'll have to grow a tiny fraction of a tree again to make more paper!'
But like I said, I have no objection to recycling anything. It's just a completely goddamn absurd priority, especially when there is actually something that it would be _much more useful_ to spend the time and effort keeping out of landfills.
But, then again, 'Completely goddamn absurd priorities' is the environmental movement's motto.
Yes, recycling paper saves a lot of energy and water due to the fact it doesn't have to be pulped again. (At least, not much.)
I will point out that, despite what people seem to think, the amount of _ bleaching_ is the same. Yes, this can be done in an environmentally responsible manner, or an environmentally irresponsible manner, but that has nothing to do with whether it's new or old. That's something you constantly hear about recycling that has no link to recycling at all.
And the air pollution thing is nonsense. Yes, if you have a piece of paper, and recycle it, it will produce less air pollution than if you did not.However, that completely ignores the fact that if you did not recycle it, you would have had to grow another tree, which would counter that air pollution. (And the inane comparison of carbon to methane. Yes, methane is worse, but _much much_ less of it is produced.)
The entire paper process is pulling carbon out of the air, moving it around, and then burying it, where slowly some of it escapes. The more you use recycling, the _less_ times you do of that process, and hence the _more_ carbon in the air.
I mean, seriously, it's like basic logic escapes people. Making trees out of CO2, killing the trees, and storing the dead trees is the literally the _opposite_ of releasing CO2 into the air. Even if the dead trees rot, that still only releases a tiny fraction back. (As can be easily demonstrated by the fact we have topsoil full of carbon from long dead trees.)
Recycling glass saves about 30% of the energy used to make it.
I have no idea how much of that is counteracted by the fact that someone has to drive a truck around picking up the glass, then put it in another truck and drive it to the glass making place. (Whereas the factories are usually located near a source of sand in the first place.)
I do know, however, that recycling glass is not actually _cost_ efficient. It only exists because it is subsided by local governments. While I have no problem with local government subsidizing environmental stuff, that somewhat indicates to me that the energy costs of recycled vs. new are somewhat comparable. (It could be that energy costs are slightly less but that's countered with more manpower costs or something.)
I don't really have an objection to glass recycling, however. I just have an objection to the completely pointless focus on all forms of recycling. It's a question of where we should be expending time, money, and social capital in environmentalism. There are _loads_ better things we could be doing instead of recycling glass.
Although, interestingly, this is becoming more of a moot point, and was more of a complaint back twenty years ago. More and more communities have dropped glass recycling, or at least glass pickup, for the reason that no one is willing to pay them for glass. (Whereas people will pay for aluminum and paper.)
Ah, that's actually something I typed but deleted.
Why _exactly_ do we care how much glass is in landfills? Because there's limited space.
Why is there limited space? Because no one wants landfills near them.
Why do people not want landfills near them? Because they leak toxic chemicals.
Why are their toxic chemicals in landfills? Because people throw them away despite not supposed to be doing that.
Why do people throw them away? BECAUSE COMMUNITIES ARE TOO BUSY FUCKING AROUND WITH IDIOTIC 'RECYCLING PICKUP DAY' TO HAVE A 'TOXIC CHEMICALS PICKUP DAY'.
I'll make a deal with people:
I will live in a world where the landfill is two miles down the road, and three times bigger than existing landfills, and is full of glass, and trucks come my house by every week and pick up paint and batteries and whatnot and dispose of them safely to keep them out of said landfill.
You live in a world where the landfill is twenty miles down the road, and the landfill is a microscopic one and is full of paint and mercury and whatnot leaking into the groundwater, and recycling trucks come by your house once a week and pick up fucking glass to keep _that_ out of the landfill.
But, apparently, I have to live in the second world also, because we've decided to dedicate fifty times more resources to protecting landfill from completely harmless glass! Instead of from PCBs that leak into the water supply, or dissolving antibiotics to create antibiotic resistance bacteria, or radioactive smoke detectors. And because people aren't stupid(1), they don't want those goddamn landfills anywhere near them.
If we _didn't_ put that shit in landfills, if we filled them with glass and aluminum and rotten food and paper...who the hell would care if the landfills were near them? Not right next door, of course, they'd still smell, but near-ish.
But, instead, they are full of horribly toxic stuff...but at least we've kept out those most dangerous of all things....glass and aluminum cans and *gasp* pieces of paper!
1) Note: This is a complete lie. People are, in fact, stupid.
Yes, but while the elected Democrats have stupid _members_, the party does not actually make stupid stands on things and back them up with stupid statements.
The Democrats do not have some sort of political position that troops in Guam are a bad idea, despite the fact that Guam troops are popular, so the Democrats do not have the need to run around telling people via MSNBC that Guam will tip over, or that landsharks walking around on Guam will eat them, or that Guam itself is a myth.
No, the Democrats apparently just elected a single fucking moron.
Which _sounds_ bad, but it's a fuckton better than having an entire political party taking unpopular political positions and making up nonsense to explain those positions, hoping that their propaganda outfit posing as a cable news network will convince enough people to get them reelected.
Incidentally, Hank Johnson claims he was basically making a metaphorical joke, and his other questions seem to indication he was rather worried about the environmental impart of raising the tiny island of Guam's population by such a large amount all at once. If he'd actually had concerns about the island tipping over, you'd think he'd need a bit more reassurances than 'We don't anticipate that' with no explanation as to _why_ they don't.
I mean, obviously the military didn't 'anticipate' the island tipping over. I don't mean 'obviously' in the sense 'islands don't tip over', I mean even if islands did tip over, the military wouldn't ask to move somewhere where they thought the island would tip over! Duh. Of course the military doesn't 'anticipate' it, that answer does not, in anyway, answer the question Hank Johnson was supposedly asking about the _risk_ of it doing so.
People are so busy assuming he meant that seriously that they have completely ignored the context. Imagine that in a context where the problem could actually happen, which would make Hank Johnson's exchange _incredibly fucking stupid_ sounding. Military: We're sending in a covert team to Russia to do X. Hank Johnson: But what if Russia catches them? Military: We don't anticipate that happening. Hank Johnson: Well, I guess the military thinking something won't happen is a good enough non-answer to quailed my concerns! Let's talk about something else!
In the real world, someone _actually_ concerned would have said something like 'And what exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean the odds of it happening are very very low, or do you mean that the military literally has no plans if it does happening? Assuming you mean the first thing, why do you think it won't happen? Has the military even considered it?'
That is the sort of reply that Hank Johnson would have made if he _actually_ thought there was a risk of Guam tipping over. So this looks less like an actual question and more like a dumb joke that person he was talking to didn't get so he just moved on. There are actual instances of Democrats saying actual dumb things, I just don't really think this is one.
However, my point is, even if you actually think he's dumb enough to think the island could tip over, that sort of thought from a single congressman is not the same as the entire Republican party running around repeating dumb things, in concert, that they know are untrue, to confuse low-information voters.
It is perhaps worth pointing out the obvious scientific fact that people are warm-blooded.
A rather significant fraction of the energy we, like all warm-blooded animals, use is to keep our body at exactly the correct temperature. Heating, cooling, all sorts of stuff.
The human body is not a car, or even a TV. It does not have an 'on' mode and 'off' mode. It is not even laptop where the processor can be turned down. (Which is how cold-blooded animals are.)
No, the human body is, uh, a desktop computer where the only variable in power use is whether or not the fan is on and the hard drive is spinning. (If your body is turning _off_ and you're still alive, you've probably accidentally fallen into a frozen lake and mammalian dive reflex has happened.)
Moreover, in addition to the human body not using much more energy when active, the amount of CO2 emitted is not directly proportional to that _anyway_. There are a lot of processes in the body where carbohydrates and whatnot are broken down to simpler things, and only part of that produces CO2. Humans are not actually powered _by oxygen_.
I consider myself an environmentalist, but all too often the environmental movement seems completely batshit crazy. And not in the way the political right seems to think it is...it's perfectly reasonable to have all sots of restrictions on all sorts of things, I have no objection to any of that.
No, the environment movement often is batshit crazy solely because they get one idea in their head and can't ever seem to change it under any circumstances. Meanwhile, other actual important things (Like, oh, the fact we're RUNNING COMPLETELY OUT OF GROUNDWATER) just have utterly passed over their heads. And let's not forget the acid we insist on putting in the air, which has resulted in ocean toxicity that has already killed a lot of fish.
Indeed, there are least two ideas they've come up with that _have helped caused global warming_. I remember back two decades ago the big end all and be all was recycling, and no one took me seriously when I pointed out that glass recycling seems a bit pointless because it was _physically impossible_ for humans to run out of silicon dioxide. Likewise, recycling paper doesn't 'save trees' because we grow goddamn trees specifically for paper...talking about 'saving trees' is like talking about 'saving carrots' by refusing to eat carrots.
Sure, the recycling might save a little energy, but that's assuming a lot of transportation stuff that we're making assumptions about. Where's the glass recycling plant, where is the glass making plant, how much does sorting the glass cost, etc?
And, of course, the anti-nuclear stuff really pisses me off.
Someone is about to start rambling about renewable energy, but it's worth pointing out that when the anti-nuclear stuff start back in the 70s, there was absolutely _no possibility_ of supplying the world's energy except via nuclear or fossil fuels. It doesn't matter what could happen now, there was not even a _hypothetical_ way of doing in the in 70s. So, basically, all the fossil fuel burning power plants _now_ are thanks to the environmental movement. (And before anyone mentions radiation, goddamn coal mining released more radioactive than nuclear reactors ever have. It's called 'radon'.)
So, there you go. The environmental movement, thanks to total and utter stupidity, has kept us from having nuclear power plants, aka, kept us burning coal. And has pushed, as a cause, the idea we shouldn't _grow and bury trees_, aka, we should not do carbon sequestering that would reduce CO2. Oh, and let's no forget recycling plastic, which has, cleverly, saved more hydro-carbons from being safely contained in pieces of plastic, allowing us to instead...uh...burn them in car engines.
Nice job breaking things, hero.
I didn't say they did it _well_.
I just pointed out that B&N did not close 'their' online store, which was a completely silly assertions to make in a story that specifically talks about their online store! Obfuscant saying 'And yet, B&N closed their online store (Fictionwise)' was just completely nonsensical comment.
B&N closed the online store they bought for scraps, _their_ online store is just fine.
By 'it', do you mean Barnes and Noble? In which case I would suggest you're exactly backwards. If there actually I a genre that is selling, that's great for B&N.
If by 'it' you mean 'society', then yes. Yes it is.
I am the last person to judge people for the sort of fiction they enjoy. Especially fantasy. (I was a flipping Buffy fan. And a Harry Potter fan.)
But, honest to God, half those books are total crap. That genre is the...the...the new 1920 pulp sci-fi. Except with more sexism and crappier characterization and dumber story-telling.
And putting _more_ sexism in a book now than back then in 1920-1930s quite a trick. Especially when most of the damn writers are themselves female. Just...wow.
And unlike pulp sci-fi, this isn't some sort of new genre attempting to figure out what it wants. The romance genre already exists! The fantasy genre already exists! Both of them know how to aim at teenagers! There are plenty of 'teen paranormal romances' that long predate this slush that were pretty good.
But then goddamn Twilight came along and proved that anyone will buy any piece of crap. And thus pieces of crap were dutifully produced. (Or, rather, _shelved_. Crap books have always been produced.)
But I'm glad they ended up on their own shelve. All too often they end up cluttering 'urban fantasy' or just fantasy in general. (Hell, last time I was at B&N, they had sci-fi and fantasy together. Seriously?)
Hell, he doesn't appear to know anything about men's clothing, either. Who the hell buys jeans without trying them on? Men's pants' sizes are _less_ fucked up than women's (Which, from what I hear, are completely random from brand to brand.), but it doesn't mean jeans can be bought sight unseen, unless you've tried that exact size in the same brand.
Socks, yes. Underwear, yes. (In fact, you have to as you can't try those one.) Shirts, yes. Pants and shoes? Uh, no.