Land ownership is one of the most insane and un-democratic ideas the human race has ever invented.
Unfortunately, everyone seems to think it is normal and fair.
I propose two acres, tax-free. For everyone, when they hit 18. It can be divided into no more than two pieces.
If you can demonstrate any extra land is actually use to produce things, you have fairly low taxes. Taxes that are not based on the specific value of the land, but rather on the price of that much land in general in that area. Houses are taxed separately, and usually not at all, except for impact fees and water and trash pickup and stuff like that.
Companies, we'll figure out some sort of way to debit HQs and whatnot from stockholders. They should mostly be fine unless they have empty factories.
All other land is taxed at whatever rate the owner wants, with the minor catch that anyone can walk in and pay five times that amount and own the land. Or we just forgo that and tax high.
Now, there are a lot of weird problems there, like, for example, malls. We could make it apply to just undeveloped land, but I want it to apply to houses. Malls could just switch over to condo mode, I guess.
OTOH, should someone really be able to pay no property taxes on two acres and sixty floors of apartments? We might need some sort of square-footage trigger too.
I needs a lot of work, but you see where I'm going. Up to a certain point, no one has to pay land or house taxes. Neither do people actually constructing things, like cars. (Although, obviously, we'd still tax the business in other ways.) But owning unused land is discouraged, and renting property is really discouraged.
But this is a fantasy since Democrats depend on the support of those who currently 'vote for a living' that they would upend heaven and earth in their efforts to defeat such a measure, even though it could (if implemented properly) almost totally eliminate poverty in one stroke. It would eliminate so much of the current government welfare machinery, itself a large fertile field of Democratic votes.
What the hell are you talking about?
Of course Democrats would oppose it. You've created a nonsensical system that doesn't actually accomplish anything, pretends to help the poor, will actually end up harming them, and used the Democrat's quite logical objection to it to demonstrate 'they don't really care about the poor, just the votes'.
Holy shit, you're an elected Republican, aren't you? This is actually the plan in 2007, isn't it?
Those guys on the bottom are not only getting their full meal, they're getting a free dessert, and the restaurant owner is simply putting it on the tab for the kids to pay.
Well, no. One of the guy leaped at the chance to improve his lot in life and is currently being shipped back from Iraq in a body bag.
Worse yet, from an economics perspective, in a purely capitalist system this disparity continually increases. Historically, this increases until the majority are in such bad shape they revolt, kill the wealthy and redistribute it. Then the cycle begins again.
Exactly. The problem is that a lot of people somehow think the ownership of property is some actual real thing.
Property you own is merely whatever the government will hurt other people if they take it away from you. That's...pretty much it. That's all there is to 'property'.
In the US, we have a government that is operated by the people. If rich people try to get the government to enforce their ownership of more and more property, hurting more and more people, well, at some point, the system will get replaced and the operated-by-the-people government will stop doing that.
In fact, an argument can be made this just happened. At least part of this last election was because of health care and poor people drowning because the government wouldn't spring for moving them.
Let's hope we just did that, because if we don't turn around now, we'll crash, and we'll crash bad. Either at the point where people flee this country to get basic services, or at the point where we vote in communists and start executing the rich, or both.
And when we reach that point, we'll be happy it is happening, because we'll be hungry.
No one gives a fuck about dates. If kids can list the civil war, westward expansion, industrial revolution, progressive era, world war 1, prohibition, stock market crash, great depression, world war two, cold war, Korea, Vietnam, hippies, within 20 years of the actual dates, they know enough dates.
What they need to focus on is why things happen. What caused the great depression? What caused prohibition? Why did the US hesitate to enter WWII? Why did Kent State happen?
And that's just American history.
Teaching the dates is a great way to pretend to teach someone history without actually teaching anything, just like teaching every isotope of every element is a great way to pretend to teach chemistry, or teaching how to build a keyboard is a great way to pretend to teach programming.
The idea of the ownership society was that instead of just getting payments, you'd accumulate wealth. People would earn returns off this wealth. The problem is, during your lifetime, there is no benefit to this, you just get more headaches. The difference is that when you die, your heirs would receive the wealth, because you owned assets, instead of getting a stream from the pension fund.
I can't believe you honestly think a useful way for society to operate is for 'everyone' to own wealth and magically generate returns from that wealth.
The only way you can make money off wealth is if you either sell it, which you obviously aren't talking about, or if you charge people for use. This is called 'rent-seeking behavior', and doesn't actually do anything. Only a small proportion of society can actually be a freeloader like that, owning enough property that others use that they can live without doing any work at all.
Incidentally, this is not what an 'ownership society' is. It is actually pretty close to the opposite of an 'ownership society'. The actual theory there is that society as whole should try to reduce rent-seeking behavior...everyone should own what they use, and not live off returns from the wealth. (At least, that's what Bush asserts he wants, although that pretty clearly isn't the case.)
Our society is vastly tilted towards a very few people owning almost everything and charging people of the use. You want to fix this by...having everyone own almost anything and charging people for the use. Huh? You don't see some sort of incredibly obvious flaw in that theory?
In fact, instead of that, let's just give everyone ten million dollars and they can live off the interest! That's basically the same concept.
Despite Bush's economic policies often making little sense, they aren't quite that screwy.
What prevents you or any citizen in a developed country (I guess Canada counts...haha again) outside of laziness and apathy from doing more or less the exact same thing I did?
Mold and bacteria don't grow without a source of food, and there should be none in a gallon of water. Therefore, while contamination in bottled, and even in tap, water are a serious health concern, you won't get much more of them if you let the water sit in an enclosed container.
There is absolutely added no danger to taking water that you normally would drink, bottling it, and drinking it a month or two later. Maybe six months or a year, sure, but not a few months.
If you have enough bacteria and mold and crap fr them to go on that your water is unsafe to drink after that period of time, you need to fix your plumbing, not blame bottling the water. Run it through a damn filter if it's that bad.
Now, you shouldn't let it set forever, as the plastic from the jug will slowly get into the water, and plastic is not very tasty, although the plastic in milk jugs is, at least, specially designed to be non-toxic. That's why I use a glass jug for the drinking water, and plastic jugs for everything else.
That's what you fools are tasting. Plastic, and flat water. It's not 'stale' or 'spoiled'.
Where I grew up we had our own well and a pump that would automatically fill a pressurized water tank whenever the pressure got too low. If we lost power when the pressure was low we'd end up with very little available water.
Yes, normal human beings grasp the idea that pressure tanks, you know, pressurize air to move water out, and thus actually require power to create a higher pressure. This is why cities pump water up high, so it doesn't require power to get it back.
The person we are talking to, however, must believe that pressure tanks pressurize water. Liquid water, of course, is the most dense form of H2O, and is almost the same density at all temperatures it is liquid, and hence 'pressurizing' liquid water is almost impossible. You could heat it up to steam and keep it at the same volume, which would pressurize it just fine. Except where it shoots boiling steam out the pipes at people. I think there'd probably be some lawsuits there. You could also, uniquely for water, try to pressurize it by lowering the temperature below freezing, but normal pipes could not contain that and the ice would burst out.
Or you can do what is actually done, where an inflated bladder of air is in the water tank. As more water gets used, the bladder gets more and more air pumped into it. If the power is off, as you discovered, the bladder inflates maybe 10% or 20% percent more before it's not strong enough to push any water out.
Of course, they could cause the bladder to be inflated more at all times, air is pretty compressible. The problem is that the water pump would have to constantly fight the bladder. So you might get another gallon out of the system with no power, but end up using 30% more electricity at all times. They try to put the minimal amount of air in the bladder instead, which means the minimal amount of water comes out.
Aside from the fact that it goes stale after a week or two (water *is* perishable)
I almost stopped reading at that point because I've never read anything so idiotic in my entire life that wasn't a political comment. No, water is not perishable, and no, it does not go stale. What would do, become less wet? Break down into hydrogen and oxygen?
No, water becomes flat, as in, loses the air bubbles suspended in it that we take for granted in how it tastes. There is a rather trivial way to get them back when it's time to drink the water. That way is: Pour it into some other container through the open air. As it's rather hard to drink out of gallon jugs anyway, that happens pretty much automatically. That's how it gets them in the first place!
most houses have a perfectly functional cold water tank which serves the dual purpose of ensuring a constant head of water (regardless of supply pressure, which can vary throughout the day as the load on the system from nearby houses changes) and providing sufficient drinking water for several days
I have no idea where the fuck you're living that this is true, but it's manifestly not America. I've never seen any house with a 'cold water tank'.
The closest thing is part of a well system (Which you can't be talking about as you mention 'nearby houses'.) but as someone who has a well, they can hold as little as one gallon, although most can hold three to five. But note 'can'. Pressure tanks are designed to reduce pump operation, and thus can sit half full or less for hours, waiting for the pressure to get so low they kick in.
But that's not the stupid thing. When the power goes out, the pressure goes away. Duh. It was inflating a bladder of air to push the water out, and when power goes out, it can't inflate it anymore. As the water isn't compressed, just the air, that means the air will expand just a little bit more and then not have enough force to push the water. A huge 80 gallon tank in the basement isn't going to do anything if the water can't get out. (Of course, the huge tanks tend to have a manual way to let the water out at the tank.)
I literally have less than a quart of water come out of my highest sink with no power. That's basically the bladder expanding a few cubic inches. If I had a two story house I could, in theory, open a sink on the bottom floor and the top floor's water would fall out, but I don't.
And I have no idea where you got the concept that people on municipal water had anything even vaguely like pressure tanks. They sometimes have buffer tanks in the system, not in people's houses, but those tanks have no pumps, and rely on pressure of the incoming water. If there is no pressure, they do not supply water. Now, on a power outage, there probably will be water for quite some time, because they have backup generators, and the water often is stored way up the air in the first place, but the power going out isn't what causes you to lost city water in the first place...it's pipes breaking. At which point you may, or may not, lose water pressure, but you shouldn't drink it even if you don't.
In other words, you're an idiot. There's no magical way to get clean water out of your system if you don't have incoming power, on a well, or dirty incoming water, on city water. It stops near instantly with a well, and you should stop instantly with dirty city water. (Well, not you personally. You feel free to drink whatever dirty sewage-laden water you want. At least it will be fresh.)
There is nothing in the house that is easy to access and stores water, with the sole exception of the back of the toilet, and that is usually dirty with sediment, and people don't want to drink out of it anyway. If you get to your water tank, and open it up, you might have a gallon, and if you do the same to your hot water tank, you'll have even more, but most of us do not actually have any sort of way to do that, especially compared to...opening up a gallon jug.
No they aren't. They're converting between digital and analogy, but are not modulating any signal.
It's a sound card, not a modem.
Although I'm really astonished they didn't combine this with a winmodem, which essentially is exactly the same thing: A sound card that talks to phone lines.
Although it does it to the POTS side and not the internal house wiring side. But, as you'd probably only need one of those at a time, it could work. (Unless you were absurdly trying to do VoIP, over dialup, by using your house phones.)
Every single house should have both a corded phone, for use in power outages, and a cordless phone for use during thunderstorms. You should also have a battery operated radio and a flashlight.
Of course, I'm always astonished at the people who go out and buy bottled water and other non-perishables when snow storms threaten. I mean, I understand stocking up on some food, but are there honestly people out there who don't have four or five gallon jugs of water stored somewhere?
Sometimes I think we need some sort of 'How to operate a house' class in high school for people whose parents didn't teach them obvious things.
That's not bugging, all phones do that. Phones don't stay in constant contact with the tower, unlike what people think. That would suck the batteries as much as a converstation.(1)
No, a cell phone, is 99% of time when not in use, merely a radio receiver, which uses a lot less power. They watch the incoming signal, and chat with the tower, or a new tower, whenever they don't have enough signal on the old one. (Actually, I think they chat with any new tower they see on general principles.) This makes sure the tower knows who they are. They also do this at apparently random intervals. That's the thingy causing interference in speakers.
When a phone call comes in, the last X towers that saw your phone go 'Hey, I've got a call for phone #8578289829.' or whatever. Hopefully some tower is still close enough for your phone to hear, which then causes your phone to immediately check back in with whatever tower it thinks is best and find out what's happening. It also does this check-in before an outgoing call, which is the major reason it takes two or three second before the phone at the other end starts ringing, and why you can cancel calls after you make them if you're fast enough, which is damn near impossible on land lines.
So, basically, that's your cell phone trying to hook up to the network, as opposed to just passively watching the cell tower strength. I actually think it's even more complicated than that, and your cell phone and tower have to negotiate a time slice and private frequency and all sorts of crap, at least for actually connecting calls to the phone. (It would be sorta stupid to have to do that just say 'I am here' and then disconnect.)
Aptly, my phone just did that while I was typing this.
1) Incidentally, that would be the way to figure out if your cell phone is bugging you. Talking to people usually takes about ten times as much power as not, so there's your test. You can probably get exact power meter software instead of having to use that little bar.
I want some fucking evidence that these people that need cell phones in movie theaters, these people that 'need' to be in contact at all times, are in contact at all times. I'm not even talking about the people who talk on them, I'm talking about the oh-so-righteous assholes on this site who have their phone vibrate, pull it out, look at it, and hurry out of the movie. Yes, that is also fucking distracting, although admittedly not as much as answering it in the theater.
Anyway, I want some evidence that these people are able to be contacted via the outside world at all times. They don't take planes, they don't drive through dead zones, they aren't ever in surgery, they take their cell phone into the crapper and shower, they never have their cell batteries die on them. I want some evidence that they literally can be reached, at the same number, at any point in time.
Because I suspect they can't. I suspect that they do, in fact, have times they cannot be reached, they just aren't considerate enough to make the movie theater one of them.
People that can always be reached probably number in the low hundred thousand in the entire world, which means the odds of them being in a movie theater with me are fairly low. And they aren't reachable via cell phones...they're reachable via their personal staff.
That would be exactly the same shortage we already have, then. Now it's just priced higher, and with socialized medicine it would be shortages. So, it's not really a function of socialized medicine per se, it's that we do not actually have enough medical facilities to tend to everyone who wants to be tended to.
And while there may be more people showing up, people, especially poor people, really don't randomly go and get medical care if it's free. Getting medical care is only an enjoyable thing to hypochondriac and new parents, and the first is containable and the second...well...they just need a lot of doctors ready to say 'No, it's perfectly normal to be 98.9 degrees.'. Everyone else dislikes getting checkups and whatnot, and people won't be able to just demand that they get surgery and other treatments, duh.
However, as the current system is extremely wasteful, a solution presents itself to help add more doctors: Take the reduced overhead, and pay doctors more.
Of course, part of the problem is medical malpractice insurance, which is reducing the amount of doctors, and doesn't have anything obvious to do with how the medical care is paid for, except that it's obviously helping the shortage along. I don't know what to do about that.
I suspect less mistakes would be made, though, if we got rid of the HMOs, simply because of the sheer amount of pressure and confusion they have introduced into the system. Have doctors much more able to refer to specialists, and get second opinions, and stuff like that.
I can't believe doctors have somehow gotten less competant over the years, and it's somehow unrelated to the current mess payment for medicine is. I have no idea what the link is, but I suspect if we fix the second, we will at least help the first.
And, with less malpractice premiums, there will be more doctors.
The 2nd Amendment is the GUARANTOR of all the other rights.
And the Democrats don't actually do anything about it. It's an invented wedge issue. Some Democrats want to limit access to certain guns in certain places. The party as a whole doesn't do anything about them, and almost no such legislation actually gets passed.
You might also note that the Democrats seem to be just fine selling us out to big businesses, and taxing us to death.
And they last taxed us to death...when, exactly? When did these horribly crippling taxes happen?
One thing for sure, they'll happen in the future, and probably under Democratic control. It won't be the Democrat's fault, though, it will be to pay off the drunk-sailor-in-a-whorehouse Republicans debts.
As far as 2), I know of zero candidates who have even MENTIONED advocacy of modern, equitable, accurate voting mechanisms. That's because the Republicans and Democrats aren't interested in reflecting their constituency, they're interested in maintaining their duopoly.
Well, that's an interesting theory you have there. That was in 2004, BTW. The Republicans ignored it. (Despite some of them cosponsoring it!) In 2007, thanks to the Democratic majority, she's taking over the 'Senate Rules and Administration Committee', which, of course, is in charge of rule making for elections. So, to recap: An important Democrat has been yelling about electronic voting machines for at least two years, with the support of, at least, Harry Reid, and now that the Democrats are in power she's immediately being appointed to, you know, run the elections, and the Democrats are vowing to hold hearings on it. Yeah, damn, it's like the Democrats don't care about voting machines at all.
Of course, you don't 'know' this because the media doesn't think it's even vaguely important to present Democratic ideas, and you're bought the lie that both parties are the same. We'll see how much you're paying attention over the next years as the Democrats actually attempt to solve problems, instead of shoveling money as fast as possible to their friends and pulling stunts to pander to the religious right.
I would like some explanation, any explanation, about how socialized medicine magically results in waiting lists.
I don't see any logical connection between who pays for care, and how long it takes to get it. It looks like countries with long waiting lists don't have enough medical facilities or staff, not that the government paying for something magically makes the wait longer.
If we had the government paying for medical treatment, would all the current hospitals sit on their ass all day, resulting in long lines?
Someone is going to have to help me see how you get from here to there. Long lines are an indication of a shortage in a socialized system, just like high prices are an indication in a free market system. Well, medical prices are going high, but it's not because of a medical 'shortage', it's because the system is flying apart. Absurd amounts of money are being spent on paperwork, and the actual people doing the medicine are getting less and less.
But even if there is a shortage, it's a shortage regardless of who's paying for it. If we truly have a medical shortage and for some reason can't fix it, I think rationing is a better solution than astronomical prices and some people not getting care at all.
OTOH, if people think there will be a waiting list because the government has to approve everything, you're living in crazy land. We should let doctors basically do whatever the hell they want. That's where professional organizations like the AMA come in.
A doctor should be able to justify any of his past medical procedures to other doctors. If it falls outside the standards, and is questioned, he should be able to stand in front of other doctors and say 'Yes, I tested for Y, which he didn't have, despite the fact the patient didn't possess any standard symptoms of Y, just of X, but he had worked a certain job for years which is associated with Y, Y sometimes doesn't have any symptoms, and X can be caused by Y, and, if it is and we just treat X, that can lead to Z, and blah blah.' and the other doctors nod and say 'Okay, that makes sense.' or 'No, that's stupid. You get another point against you.' and if he gets too many points, then he's on probation and has to start running non-standard things past other doctors first.
Having 'the government' replace HMOs in deciding what can and can't be done, and how much they get paid for it, would be an incredibly stupid suggestion. Doctors, and the organizations they belong to, are more than willing to police themselves.
And that's 'half' your rights? The first, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, thirteenth(1), fourteenth, and twenty-fourth(2) amendments together are as important as the second?
1) The US has purchased people in Afghan that have not charged with any crime, and shipped them to Guantanamo to be tortured as extras in the war on terror. They aren't prisoners, prisoners have rights and are not purchased as generic 'terrorists'. (Bounties are for named people that are already wanted by the legal system. They don't say 'We'll give you ten thousand dollars for each kidnapper you show up with. Go and find some, no evidence required!'.) 'Enemy Combatants' that were turned in, for money, with no evidence, is a slave trade by any definition of the word 'slave'. Which is why we can beat them.
2) At least, the Republicans in this state keep trying to implement a poll tax, aka, requiring people to purchase voter ID.
First of all, I've never said Democrats are good, and I've even said progressive ideas are sometimes rather dumb.
I will say Republicans, at this point, are bad, period, but it doesn't have a lot to with any sort of political philosophy, but rather the specific circumstances they have lead us into, with civil liberties thrown out the window and us throwing good money after bad. And, of course, bootstrapping a terrorist problem that will be with us for the next decade or more.
Actually, I take it back. It did have to do with a political philosophy. Specifically, the lack thereof. Didn't Republicans used to be non-interventionists? No, that's right, I forgot for a second, they're whatever they want to be, because there's no philosophy there.
And of course something can be a philosophy without it being a political one. Philosophies are premises, and conclusions to the premises, that govern behavior.
However, nothing can be philosophy unless it explains why first, with that logically leading to a 'how'. First it's 'What should our goals be?' and then 'So how should we get there?'.
People can disagree on the first. People can agree on the first and disagree on the second. However, agreeing on the second and not even considering the first doesn't appear to make a lot of sense, in a political philosophy or just a general one.
As you didn't get my direction analogy, I will use different political philosophies. They are very simple and mysteriously exist in a vacuum, but you get the point:
1) It is the job of society to care for people who cannot care for themselves, so a good thing to do is to keep unemployment low, which we can do by X.
2) Unemployed people are a drain on the economy, so a good thing to do is to keep unemployment low, which we can do by X.
3) It is the job of society to care for people who cannot care for themselves, so we should give all unemployed people free money and housing.
The first two philosophies, although starting with different 'whys', superficially line up the 'how'. The first and last start from the same 'why', and end up at different 'hows'. There's a rather large problem, though:
1) It is the job of society to care for people who cannot care for themselves, so a good thing to do is to keep unemployment low, which we can do by X, and for the people who still can't find work, get them some training and housing until they do.
2) Unemployed people are a drain on the economy, so a good thing to do is to keep unemployment low, which we can do by X, and for the people who still can't find work, we will shoot them.
3) It is the job of society to care for people who cannot care for themselves, so we should give all unemployed people free money and housing. As this is obviously expensive, we should try to find them work, which we can do by X.
See what happened? The two people who started with the same step fell completely apart. The two people who started with the same goal, however, got closer. The 'why' is a lot more important than the 'how'.
Someone carefully creating a fascist dictatorship step by step probably doesn't actually have anything in common with you, no matter how carefully they operate and test every change before moving on to the next step. You've labeled the political means, the means being 'reach the goal via careful deliberation and thought, followed by a slow implementation to get rid of the bugs', but you left out the goal.
1) Health insurance is broken, therefore, we need to deliberate and carefully and come up with a plan to fix that, which we will then phase in. (conservative?)
3) The executive branch doesn't have enough power, therefore, we need to deliberate and carefully and come up with a plan to fix that, which we will then phase in. (conservative?)
2) Health insurance is broken, therefore, let's first expand Medicare to cover people until they are 21 as a first step. (progressive)
See the rather goofy logic there? You can't say 'I
Okay, instead of analogies, let me try to explain.
You are in position of a set of political beliefs, as is everyone else. You refer to these beliefs as 'conservative'.
Unfortunately, 'conservative' is also used by people who have completely orthogonal beliefs to yours, and also by people who have completely opposite beliefs to yourself.
That doesn't really matter, though, except that the people who are 'conservative' leaders either don't grasp this, or do grasp it and deliberately don't bring it up. There are sub-categories that have been invented, but not by the actual politicians, and they aren't used by them.
Because this 'conservative' that they don't bother to explain is such an absurd contradictory mishmash of concepts, any behavior on their part can be called 'conservative' or 'not conservative'. (They often used 'liberal' to mean 'not conservative', confusingly enough.)
This is what I mean by 'There is no actual conservative philosophy. Conservative is whatever a popular Republican in office is doing or wants to do. If it's not a Republican, or if they have become unpopular, they magically become non-conservative.'.
It's actually gotten so absurd that behaviors that fit under no definition of conservative, like torture, are 'conservative' if conservative leaders do them.
I.e., 'conservative' does not exist. You can have whatever political philosophy you want, and call it whatever you want, just like you call trees 'flerbs'. However, communication requires some sort of mutual terminology, and 'conservative' is a null term. It is at the point it is 'Conservative is whatever conservative leaders define as conservative', and hence is not useful as a reference to anything. It might have been in the past, but by 'the past' I'm pretty certain I'm talking about the 1920s(1), not the 1980s.
The label you call yourself, politically, is not incredibly important. Anyone who votes labels is sorta silly.
The actual problem is, at some point, someone made up this hypothetical 'conservative' concept and, well, lied to you, asserting that it actually existed and the Republican party was it. As you're not an idiot, you soon realized that the Republican party was about as far from this 'conservative' as can be.
But you still hold this sort of false hope that these hypothetical 'conservatives' exist on the right, that somewhere, somehow, the right will find their way back to their true principles. This is helped by the fact that 'conservative' means 'good' for all people on the right, so you and a Christianist theocrat and a libertarian can all hear how someone's 'a conservative' and be happy, until, of course, he fails two or even three of you.
1) In the 1920s, it was a reaction to the Progressive Era, sorta like now, but it was only a reaction to that. No fake religion, no crazy economic theories, just the sole, simple concept that they did not like some of what the progressives were doing. (Which was fine, because some of those ideas were stupid. They had a lot of crazy utopia theories back then.)
The left is not that authoritian. You're probably confusing it with the boogie-man left, the ficitional entitity that the Republicans are fighting.
The worse that that Democrats, more specifically the progressive aspect of the Democrats, do is attempt to restrict guns. That's, well, pretty much it. It's stupid, and a violation of civil rights, but there it is.
Oh, and for some idiotic reason they sometimes want to label music and video games and other stuff.
Everything else 'the left' wants to do is, well, made up. Republicans scour the wackiest left-wing people they can find, and attribute the craziest things they say as if they are some sort of official position of the Democratic party. 'Look, this college profession said X, the Democrats want X!'. Um, no.
But, hey, the great thing is I don't need to convince you. There's no reason to even have a conversation about this. You just need to check back in in two years, and see exactly what rights of yours have vanished and whether the rights stolen by Bush have come back. In fact, some of them might be back in as little as two months.
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Land ownership is one of the most insane and un-democratic ideas the human race has ever invented.
Unfortunately, everyone seems to think it is normal and fair.I propose two acres, tax-free. For everyone, when they hit 18. It can be divided into no more than two pieces.
If you can demonstrate any extra land is actually use to produce things, you have fairly low taxes. Taxes that are not based on the specific value of the land, but rather on the price of that much land in general in that area. Houses are taxed separately, and usually not at all, except for impact fees and water and trash pickup and stuff like that.
Companies, we'll figure out some sort of way to debit HQs and whatnot from stockholders. They should mostly be fine unless they have empty factories.
All other land is taxed at whatever rate the owner wants, with the minor catch that anyone can walk in and pay five times that amount and own the land. Or we just forgo that and tax high.
Now, there are a lot of weird problems there, like, for example, malls. We could make it apply to just undeveloped land, but I want it to apply to houses. Malls could just switch over to condo mode, I guess.
OTOH, should someone really be able to pay no property taxes on two acres and sixty floors of apartments? We might need some sort of square-footage trigger too.
I needs a lot of work, but you see where I'm going. Up to a certain point, no one has to pay land or house taxes. Neither do people actually constructing things, like cars. (Although, obviously, we'd still tax the business in other ways.) But owning unused land is discouraged, and renting property is really discouraged.
But this is a fantasy since Democrats depend on the support of those who currently 'vote for a living' that they would upend heaven and earth in their efforts to defeat such a measure, even though it could (if implemented properly) almost totally eliminate poverty in one stroke. It would eliminate so much of the current government welfare machinery, itself a large fertile field of Democratic votes.
What the hell are you talking about?
Of course Democrats would oppose it. You've created a nonsensical system that doesn't actually accomplish anything, pretends to help the poor, will actually end up harming them, and used the Democrat's quite logical objection to it to demonstrate 'they don't really care about the poor, just the votes'.
Holy shit, you're an elected Republican, aren't you? This is actually the plan in 2007, isn't it?
Those guys on the bottom are not only getting their full meal, they're getting a free dessert, and the restaurant owner is simply putting it on the tab for the kids to pay.
Well, no. One of the guy leaped at the chance to improve his lot in life and is currently being shipped back from Iraq in a body bag.
Worse yet, from an economics perspective, in a purely capitalist system this disparity continually increases. Historically, this increases until the majority are in such bad shape they revolt, kill the wealthy and redistribute it. Then the cycle begins again.
Exactly. The problem is that a lot of people somehow think the ownership of property is some actual real thing.
Property you own is merely whatever the government will hurt other people if they take it away from you. That's...pretty much it. That's all there is to 'property'.
In the US, we have a government that is operated by the people. If rich people try to get the government to enforce their ownership of more and more property, hurting more and more people, well, at some point, the system will get replaced and the operated-by-the-people government will stop doing that.
In fact, an argument can be made this just happened. At least part of this last election was because of health care and poor people drowning because the government wouldn't spring for moving them.
Let's hope we just did that, because if we don't turn around now, we'll crash, and we'll crash bad. Either at the point where people flee this country to get basic services, or at the point where we vote in communists and start executing the rich, or both.
And when we reach that point, we'll be happy it is happening, because we'll be hungry.
I think we should teach history as a science.
No one gives a fuck about dates. If kids can list the civil war, westward expansion, industrial revolution, progressive era, world war 1, prohibition, stock market crash, great depression, world war two, cold war, Korea, Vietnam, hippies, within 20 years of the actual dates, they know enough dates.
What they need to focus on is why things happen. What caused the great depression? What caused prohibition? Why did the US hesitate to enter WWII? Why did Kent State happen?
And that's just American history.
Teaching the dates is a great way to pretend to teach someone history without actually teaching anything, just like teaching every isotope of every element is a great way to pretend to teach chemistry, or teaching how to build a keyboard is a great way to pretend to teach programming.
The idea of the ownership society was that instead of just getting payments, you'd accumulate wealth. People would earn returns off this wealth. The problem is, during your lifetime, there is no benefit to this, you just get more headaches. The difference is that when you die, your heirs would receive the wealth, because you owned assets, instead of getting a stream from the pension fund.
I can't believe you honestly think a useful way for society to operate is for 'everyone' to own wealth and magically generate returns from that wealth.
The only way you can make money off wealth is if you either sell it, which you obviously aren't talking about, or if you charge people for use. This is called 'rent-seeking behavior', and doesn't actually do anything. Only a small proportion of society can actually be a freeloader like that, owning enough property that others use that they can live without doing any work at all.
Incidentally, this is not what an 'ownership society' is. It is actually pretty close to the opposite of an 'ownership society'. The actual theory there is that society as whole should try to reduce rent-seeking behavior...everyone should own what they use, and not live off returns from the wealth. (At least, that's what Bush asserts he wants, although that pretty clearly isn't the case.)
Our society is vastly tilted towards a very few people owning almost everything and charging people of the use. You want to fix this by...having everyone own almost anything and charging people for the use. Huh? You don't see some sort of incredibly obvious flaw in that theory?
In fact, instead of that, let's just give everyone ten million dollars and they can live off the interest! That's basically the same concept.
Despite Bush's economic policies often making little sense, they aren't quite that screwy.
What prevents you or any citizen in a developed country (I guess Canada counts...haha again) outside of laziness and apathy from doing more or less the exact same thing I did?
Medical bills?
Um...no. Just no.
Mold and bacteria don't grow without a source of food, and there should be none in a gallon of water. Therefore, while contamination in bottled, and even in tap, water are a serious health concern, you won't get much more of them if you let the water sit in an enclosed container.
There is absolutely added no danger to taking water that you normally would drink, bottling it, and drinking it a month or two later. Maybe six months or a year, sure, but not a few months.
If you have enough bacteria and mold and crap fr them to go on that your water is unsafe to drink after that period of time, you need to fix your plumbing, not blame bottling the water. Run it through a damn filter if it's that bad.
Now, you shouldn't let it set forever, as the plastic from the jug will slowly get into the water, and plastic is not very tasty, although the plastic in milk jugs is, at least, specially designed to be non-toxic. That's why I use a glass jug for the drinking water, and plastic jugs for everything else.
That's what you fools are tasting. Plastic, and flat water. It's not 'stale' or 'spoiled'.
Where I grew up we had our own well and a pump that would automatically fill a pressurized water tank whenever the pressure got too low. If we lost power when the pressure was low we'd end up with very little available water.
Yes, normal human beings grasp the idea that pressure tanks, you know, pressurize air to move water out, and thus actually require power to create a higher pressure. This is why cities pump water up high, so it doesn't require power to get it back.
The person we are talking to, however, must believe that pressure tanks pressurize water. Liquid water, of course, is the most dense form of H2O, and is almost the same density at all temperatures it is liquid, and hence 'pressurizing' liquid water is almost impossible. You could heat it up to steam and keep it at the same volume, which would pressurize it just fine. Except where it shoots boiling steam out the pipes at people. I think there'd probably be some lawsuits there. You could also, uniquely for water, try to pressurize it by lowering the temperature below freezing, but normal pipes could not contain that and the ice would burst out.
Or you can do what is actually done, where an inflated bladder of air is in the water tank. As more water gets used, the bladder gets more and more air pumped into it. If the power is off, as you discovered, the bladder inflates maybe 10% or 20% percent more before it's not strong enough to push any water out.
Of course, they could cause the bladder to be inflated more at all times, air is pretty compressible. The problem is that the water pump would have to constantly fight the bladder. So you might get another gallon out of the system with no power, but end up using 30% more electricity at all times. They try to put the minimal amount of air in the bladder instead, which means the minimal amount of water comes out.
Aside from the fact that it goes stale after a week or two (water *is* perishable)
I almost stopped reading at that point because I've never read anything so idiotic in my entire life that wasn't a political comment. No, water is not perishable, and no, it does not go stale. What would do, become less wet? Break down into hydrogen and oxygen?
No, water becomes flat, as in, loses the air bubbles suspended in it that we take for granted in how it tastes. There is a rather trivial way to get them back when it's time to drink the water. That way is: Pour it into some other container through the open air. As it's rather hard to drink out of gallon jugs anyway, that happens pretty much automatically. That's how it gets them in the first place!
most houses have a perfectly functional cold water tank which serves the dual purpose of ensuring a constant head of water (regardless of supply pressure, which can vary throughout the day as the load on the system from nearby houses changes) and providing sufficient drinking water for several days
I have no idea where the fuck you're living that this is true, but it's manifestly not America. I've never seen any house with a 'cold water tank'.
The closest thing is part of a well system (Which you can't be talking about as you mention 'nearby houses'.) but as someone who has a well, they can hold as little as one gallon, although most can hold three to five. But note 'can'. Pressure tanks are designed to reduce pump operation, and thus can sit half full or less for hours, waiting for the pressure to get so low they kick in.
But that's not the stupid thing. When the power goes out, the pressure goes away. Duh. It was inflating a bladder of air to push the water out, and when power goes out, it can't inflate it anymore. As the water isn't compressed, just the air, that means the air will expand just a little bit more and then not have enough force to push the water. A huge 80 gallon tank in the basement isn't going to do anything if the water can't get out. (Of course, the huge tanks tend to have a manual way to let the water out at the tank.)
I literally have less than a quart of water come out of my highest sink with no power. That's basically the bladder expanding a few cubic inches. If I had a two story house I could, in theory, open a sink on the bottom floor and the top floor's water would fall out, but I don't.
And I have no idea where you got the concept that people on municipal water had anything even vaguely like pressure tanks. They sometimes have buffer tanks in the system, not in people's houses, but those tanks have no pumps, and rely on pressure of the incoming water. If there is no pressure, they do not supply water. Now, on a power outage, there probably will be water for quite some time, because they have backup generators, and the water often is stored way up the air in the first place, but the power going out isn't what causes you to lost city water in the first place...it's pipes breaking. At which point you may, or may not, lose water pressure, but you shouldn't drink it even if you don't.
In other words, you're an idiot. There's no magical way to get clean water out of your system if you don't have incoming power, on a well, or dirty incoming water, on city water. It stops near instantly with a well, and you should stop instantly with dirty city water. (Well, not you personally. You feel free to drink whatever dirty sewage-laden water you want. At least it will be fresh.)
There is nothing in the house that is easy to access and stores water, with the sole exception of the back of the toilet, and that is usually dirty with sediment, and people don't want to drink out of it anyway. If you get to your water tank, and open it up, you might have a gallon, and if you do the same to your hot water tank, you'll have even more, but most of us do not actually have any sort of way to do that, especially compared to...opening up a gallon jug.
No they aren't. They're converting between digital and analogy, but are not modulating any signal.
It's a sound card, not a modem.
Although I'm really astonished they didn't combine this with a winmodem, which essentially is exactly the same thing: A sound card that talks to phone lines.
Although it does it to the POTS side and not the internal house wiring side. But, as you'd probably only need one of those at a time, it could work. (Unless you were absurdly trying to do VoIP, over dialup, by using your house phones.)
Every single house should have both a corded phone, for use in power outages, and a cordless phone for use during thunderstorms. You should also have a battery operated radio and a flashlight.
Of course, I'm always astonished at the people who go out and buy bottled water and other non-perishables when snow storms threaten. I mean, I understand stocking up on some food, but are there honestly people out there who don't have four or five gallon jugs of water stored somewhere?
Sometimes I think we need some sort of 'How to operate a house' class in high school for people whose parents didn't teach them obvious things.
That's not bugging, all phones do that. Phones don't stay in constant contact with the tower, unlike what people think. That would suck the batteries as much as a converstation.(1)
No, a cell phone, is 99% of time when not in use, merely a radio receiver, which uses a lot less power. They watch the incoming signal, and chat with the tower, or a new tower, whenever they don't have enough signal on the old one. (Actually, I think they chat with any new tower they see on general principles.) This makes sure the tower knows who they are. They also do this at apparently random intervals. That's the thingy causing interference in speakers.
When a phone call comes in, the last X towers that saw your phone go 'Hey, I've got a call for phone #8578289829.' or whatever. Hopefully some tower is still close enough for your phone to hear, which then causes your phone to immediately check back in with whatever tower it thinks is best and find out what's happening. It also does this check-in before an outgoing call, which is the major reason it takes two or three second before the phone at the other end starts ringing, and why you can cancel calls after you make them if you're fast enough, which is damn near impossible on land lines.
So, basically, that's your cell phone trying to hook up to the network, as opposed to just passively watching the cell tower strength. I actually think it's even more complicated than that, and your cell phone and tower have to negotiate a time slice and private frequency and all sorts of crap, at least for actually connecting calls to the phone. (It would be sorta stupid to have to do that just say 'I am here' and then disconnect.)
Aptly, my phone just did that while I was typing this.
1) Incidentally, that would be the way to figure out if your cell phone is bugging you. Talking to people usually takes about ten times as much power as not, so there's your test. You can probably get exact power meter software instead of having to use that little bar.
conservatism is about what problems should be addressed, not about how.
And these are?
You know what I want?
I want some fucking evidence that these people that need cell phones in movie theaters, these people that 'need' to be in contact at all times, are in contact at all times. I'm not even talking about the people who talk on them, I'm talking about the oh-so-righteous assholes on this site who have their phone vibrate, pull it out, look at it, and hurry out of the movie. Yes, that is also fucking distracting, although admittedly not as much as answering it in the theater.
Anyway, I want some evidence that these people are able to be contacted via the outside world at all times. They don't take planes, they don't drive through dead zones, they aren't ever in surgery, they take their cell phone into the crapper and shower, they never have their cell batteries die on them. I want some evidence that they literally can be reached, at the same number, at any point in time.
Because I suspect they can't. I suspect that they do, in fact, have times they cannot be reached, they just aren't considerate enough to make the movie theater one of them.
People that can always be reached probably number in the low hundred thousand in the entire world, which means the odds of them being in a movie theater with me are fairly low. And they aren't reachable via cell phones...they're reachable via their personal staff.
That would be exactly the same shortage we already have, then. Now it's just priced higher, and with socialized medicine it would be shortages. So, it's not really a function of socialized medicine per se, it's that we do not actually have enough medical facilities to tend to everyone who wants to be tended to.
And while there may be more people showing up, people, especially poor people, really don't randomly go and get medical care if it's free. Getting medical care is only an enjoyable thing to hypochondriac and new parents, and the first is containable and the second...well...they just need a lot of doctors ready to say 'No, it's perfectly normal to be 98.9 degrees.'. Everyone else dislikes getting checkups and whatnot, and people won't be able to just demand that they get surgery and other treatments, duh.
However, as the current system is extremely wasteful, a solution presents itself to help add more doctors: Take the reduced overhead, and pay doctors more.
Of course, part of the problem is medical malpractice insurance, which is reducing the amount of doctors, and doesn't have anything obvious to do with how the medical care is paid for, except that it's obviously helping the shortage along. I don't know what to do about that.
I suspect less mistakes would be made, though, if we got rid of the HMOs, simply because of the sheer amount of pressure and confusion they have introduced into the system. Have doctors much more able to refer to specialists, and get second opinions, and stuff like that.
I can't believe doctors have somehow gotten less competant over the years, and it's somehow unrelated to the current mess payment for medicine is. I have no idea what the link is, but I suspect if we fix the second, we will at least help the first.
And, with less malpractice premiums, there will be more doctors.
The 2nd Amendment is the GUARANTOR of all the other rights.
And the Democrats don't actually do anything about it. It's an invented wedge issue. Some Democrats want to limit access to certain guns in certain places. The party as a whole doesn't do anything about them, and almost no such legislation actually gets passed.
You might also note that the Democrats seem to be just fine selling us out to big businesses, and taxing us to death.
And they last taxed us to death...when, exactly? When did these horribly crippling taxes happen?
One thing for sure, they'll happen in the future, and probably under Democratic control. It won't be the Democrat's fault, though, it will be to pay off the drunk-sailor-in-a-whorehouse Republicans debts.
As far as 2), I know of zero candidates who have even MENTIONED advocacy of modern, equitable, accurate voting mechanisms. That's because the Republicans and Democrats aren't interested in reflecting their constituency, they're interested in maintaining their duopoly.
Well, that's an interesting theory you have there. That was in 2004, BTW. The Republicans ignored it. (Despite some of them cosponsoring it!) In 2007, thanks to the Democratic majority, she's taking over the 'Senate Rules and Administration Committee', which, of course, is in charge of rule making for elections. So, to recap: An important Democrat has been yelling about electronic voting machines for at least two years, with the support of, at least, Harry Reid, and now that the Democrats are in power she's immediately being appointed to, you know, run the elections, and the Democrats are vowing to hold hearings on it. Yeah, damn, it's like the Democrats don't care about voting machines at all.
Of course, you don't 'know' this because the media doesn't think it's even vaguely important to present Democratic ideas, and you're bought the lie that both parties are the same. We'll see how much you're paying attention over the next years as the Democrats actually attempt to solve problems, instead of shoveling money as fast as possible to their friends and pulling stunts to pander to the religious right.
I would like some explanation, any explanation, about how socialized medicine magically results in waiting lists.
I don't see any logical connection between who pays for care, and how long it takes to get it. It looks like countries with long waiting lists don't have enough medical facilities or staff, not that the government paying for something magically makes the wait longer.
If we had the government paying for medical treatment, would all the current hospitals sit on their ass all day, resulting in long lines?
Someone is going to have to help me see how you get from here to there. Long lines are an indication of a shortage in a socialized system, just like high prices are an indication in a free market system. Well, medical prices are going high, but it's not because of a medical 'shortage', it's because the system is flying apart. Absurd amounts of money are being spent on paperwork, and the actual people doing the medicine are getting less and less.
But even if there is a shortage, it's a shortage regardless of who's paying for it. If we truly have a medical shortage and for some reason can't fix it, I think rationing is a better solution than astronomical prices and some people not getting care at all.
OTOH, if people think there will be a waiting list because the government has to approve everything, you're living in crazy land. We should let doctors basically do whatever the hell they want. That's where professional organizations like the AMA come in.
A doctor should be able to justify any of his past medical procedures to other doctors. If it falls outside the standards, and is questioned, he should be able to stand in front of other doctors and say 'Yes, I tested for Y, which he didn't have, despite the fact the patient didn't possess any standard symptoms of Y, just of X, but he had worked a certain job for years which is associated with Y, Y sometimes doesn't have any symptoms, and X can be caused by Y, and, if it is and we just treat X, that can lead to Z, and blah blah.' and the other doctors nod and say 'Okay, that makes sense.' or 'No, that's stupid. You get another point against you.' and if he gets too many points, then he's on probation and has to start running non-standard things past other doctors first.
Having 'the government' replace HMOs in deciding what can and can't be done, and how much they get paid for it, would be an incredibly stupid suggestion. Doctors, and the organizations they belong to, are more than willing to police themselves.
And that's 'half' your rights? The first, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, thirteenth(1), fourteenth, and twenty-fourth(2) amendments together are as important as the second?
1) The US has purchased people in Afghan that have not charged with any crime, and shipped them to Guantanamo to be tortured as extras in the war on terror. They aren't prisoners, prisoners have rights and are not purchased as generic 'terrorists'. (Bounties are for named people that are already wanted by the legal system. They don't say 'We'll give you ten thousand dollars for each kidnapper you show up with. Go and find some, no evidence required!'.) 'Enemy Combatants' that were turned in, for money, with no evidence, is a slave trade by any definition of the word 'slave'. Which is why we can beat them.
2) At least, the Republicans in this state keep trying to implement a poll tax, aka, requiring people to purchase voter ID.
Jesus Christ, you're living inside my head or something.
Everyone pretend I said this entire post word for word. Okay? Thanks.
But we're already paying for their healthcare. That's not really an argument against extending the support to all ages.
In fact, it's an argument for it, because keeping the workforce health is obviously a good idea.
I don't know where the $1000 dollar quote came from, but it is factually untrue.
I, myself, cannot get insured, period, unless I get group insurance.
First of all, I've never said Democrats are good, and I've even said progressive ideas are sometimes rather dumb.
I will say Republicans, at this point, are bad, period, but it doesn't have a lot to with any sort of political philosophy, but rather the specific circumstances they have lead us into, with civil liberties thrown out the window and us throwing good money after bad. And, of course, bootstrapping a terrorist problem that will be with us for the next decade or more.
Actually, I take it back. It did have to do with a political philosophy. Specifically, the lack thereof. Didn't Republicans used to be non-interventionists? No, that's right, I forgot for a second, they're whatever they want to be, because there's no philosophy there.
And of course something can be a philosophy without it being a political one. Philosophies are premises, and conclusions to the premises, that govern behavior.
However, nothing can be philosophy unless it explains why first, with that logically leading to a 'how'. First it's 'What should our goals be?' and then 'So how should we get there?'.
People can disagree on the first. People can agree on the first and disagree on the second. However, agreeing on the second and not even considering the first doesn't appear to make a lot of sense, in a political philosophy or just a general one.
As you didn't get my direction analogy, I will use different political philosophies. They are very simple and mysteriously exist in a vacuum, but you get the point:
1) It is the job of society to care for people who cannot care for themselves, so a good thing to do is to keep unemployment low, which we can do by X.
2) Unemployed people are a drain on the economy, so a good thing to do is to keep unemployment low, which we can do by X.
3) It is the job of society to care for people who cannot care for themselves, so we should give all unemployed people free money and housing.
The first two philosophies, although starting with different 'whys', superficially line up the 'how'. The first and last start from the same 'why', and end up at different 'hows'. There's a rather large problem, though:
1) It is the job of society to care for people who cannot care for themselves, so a good thing to do is to keep unemployment low, which we can do by X, and for the people who still can't find work, get them some training and housing until they do.
2) Unemployed people are a drain on the economy, so a good thing to do is to keep unemployment low, which we can do by X, and for the people who still can't find work, we will shoot them.
3) It is the job of society to care for people who cannot care for themselves, so we should give all unemployed people free money and housing. As this is obviously expensive, we should try to find them work, which we can do by X.
See what happened? The two people who started with the same step fell completely apart. The two people who started with the same goal, however, got closer. The 'why' is a lot more important than the 'how'.
Someone carefully creating a fascist dictatorship step by step probably doesn't actually have anything in common with you, no matter how carefully they operate and test every change before moving on to the next step. You've labeled the political means, the means being 'reach the goal via careful deliberation and thought, followed by a slow implementation to get rid of the bugs', but you left out the goal.
1) Health insurance is broken, therefore, we need to deliberate and carefully and come up with a plan to fix that, which we will then phase in. (conservative?)
3) The executive branch doesn't have enough power, therefore, we need to deliberate and carefully and come up with a plan to fix that, which we will then phase in. (conservative?)
2) Health insurance is broken, therefore, let's first expand Medicare to cover people until they are 21 as a first step. (progressive)
See the rather goofy logic there? You can't say 'I
Okay, instead of analogies, let me try to explain.
You are in position of a set of political beliefs, as is everyone else. You refer to these beliefs as 'conservative'.
Unfortunately, 'conservative' is also used by people who have completely orthogonal beliefs to yours, and also by people who have completely opposite beliefs to yourself.
That doesn't really matter, though, except that the people who are 'conservative' leaders either don't grasp this, or do grasp it and deliberately don't bring it up. There are sub-categories that have been invented, but not by the actual politicians, and they aren't used by them.
Because this 'conservative' that they don't bother to explain is such an absurd contradictory mishmash of concepts, any behavior on their part can be called 'conservative' or 'not conservative'. (They often used 'liberal' to mean 'not conservative', confusingly enough.)
This is what I mean by 'There is no actual conservative philosophy. Conservative is whatever a popular Republican in office is doing or wants to do. If it's not a Republican, or if they have become unpopular, they magically become non-conservative.'.
It's actually gotten so absurd that behaviors that fit under no definition of conservative, like torture, are 'conservative' if conservative leaders do them.
I.e., 'conservative' does not exist. You can have whatever political philosophy you want, and call it whatever you want, just like you call trees 'flerbs'. However, communication requires some sort of mutual terminology, and 'conservative' is a null term. It is at the point it is 'Conservative is whatever conservative leaders define as conservative', and hence is not useful as a reference to anything. It might have been in the past, but by 'the past' I'm pretty certain I'm talking about the 1920s(1), not the 1980s.
The label you call yourself, politically, is not incredibly important. Anyone who votes labels is sorta silly.
The actual problem is, at some point, someone made up this hypothetical 'conservative' concept and, well, lied to you, asserting that it actually existed and the Republican party was it. As you're not an idiot, you soon realized that the Republican party was about as far from this 'conservative' as can be.
But you still hold this sort of false hope that these hypothetical 'conservatives' exist on the right, that somewhere, somehow, the right will find their way back to their true principles. This is helped by the fact that 'conservative' means 'good' for all people on the right, so you and a Christianist theocrat and a libertarian can all hear how someone's 'a conservative' and be happy, until, of course, he fails two or even three of you.
1) In the 1920s, it was a reaction to the Progressive Era, sorta like now, but it was only a reaction to that. No fake religion, no crazy economic theories, just the sole, simple concept that they did not like some of what the progressives were doing. (Which was fine, because some of those ideas were stupid. They had a lot of crazy utopia theories back then.)
The left is not that authoritian. You're probably confusing it with the boogie-man left, the ficitional entitity that the Republicans are fighting.
The worse that that Democrats, more specifically the progressive aspect of the Democrats, do is attempt to restrict guns. That's, well, pretty much it. It's stupid, and a violation of civil rights, but there it is.
Oh, and for some idiotic reason they sometimes want to label music and video games and other stuff.
Everything else 'the left' wants to do is, well, made up. Republicans scour the wackiest left-wing people they can find, and attribute the craziest things they say as if they are some sort of official position of the Democratic party. 'Look, this college profession said X, the Democrats want X!'. Um, no.
But, hey, the great thing is I don't need to convince you. There's no reason to even have a conversation about this. You just need to check back in in two years, and see exactly what rights of yours have vanished and whether the rights stolen by Bush have come back. In fact, some of them might be back in as little as two months.