And the top 5% of the wage earners are in the top 10% of the wealth holders how, exactly?/
I strongly suspect the top 5% of the wage earners are being paid by the top 10% of the wealth holders. See, the wealth holders are just that...holders of wealth. They control vast empires of companies, and don't 'earn' hardly anything...the companies earn the money.
Exactly. I'd like everyone who's in favor of 'free trade' please, explain exactly what happened with Standard Oil. Because it sure looked like free trade to me. It's the textbook example of what happens when you have a monopoly...you can extend, at will, into other fields. A case can be made that Standard Oil would have taken over the entire economy, playing 'Who do we want to sell gas to today?', given enough time.
People who think businesses, in general, have too much regulation are on crack, and actually operating from a flawed assumption. Corporations have infinite regulation, because they are mere fictional creations of the government. You can't talk about the correct level of regulation of a thing that only exists by regulation! All you can talk about is the level of autonomy the officers of the corporation are given, how much they have to do what the government says, vs. how much they can randomly direct the thing.
And I doubt non-corporations are regulated too much in general. Maybe cases can be made for specific fields, but I can't really see how it would make an uneven playing field.
We do 3 sometimes without worrying about 2. The solution is free food for the kids. Not food stamps, which everyone knows can be resold, but actual food.
During the school year, it's easy, and in fact it's already done: Free lunches (and possibly breakfasts) for poor kids. (Works best if the school has a meal plan, so it's not blatantly obvious the kid is getting free food. Other kids can be cruel.)
As for 1, I have an idea I've never heard elsewhere: House loans. If someone loses a job, they should be able to submit their rent/mortgage payment to the government, who then gives them a loan, up to a certain amount, however long their money holds out. Maybe include the electric, water, and phone bill in there. Possibly car.
It can't be used for anything else, because the government will just pay the bill, not give out money. It keeps the person able to look for a job.
And, this is nice, it's a loan. Non-interesting bearing, at least for a year or two, but you have to pay it back, probably on your taxes, when you do get a job. But it's limited, to an average of six months of whatever is normal is in your area, for a house the size you need. (Not the size you have, the size you need for your family.) If your rent payment is smaller than normal, the money might last 7 or 8 months. Maybe you're only making three-fourths of what you need, so it will last two years, during which you can put yourself through night classes at a local technical college.
Yes, some people would never pay it back, but no ones pay welfare back, so it wouldn't be worse. If you link it up with taxes, you'd either have to lie about how much you were making, or actually never have a well paying job, to never be required to pay it back. If you don't pay it back, you just don't ever get it again.
And with it being a loan, honest hardworking people would be more likely to accept it. And they're eligable for it again when they give the money back, thus solving some of the obvious questions about how often you can go on unemployment: As much as you want, you just have to give the money back.
Note 'six months' is just a random guess. That might be too long, might be too short. I'd like there to be an 'automatic' number of months (And by months I, again, mean average-payments-in-your area per month. A cost-of-living for just a few specific bills.) that you can just get, no questions asked, by turning your bills in, and then the ability to extend that by convincing an actual person that you are being productive and working towards a goal.
As a bonus, it will stop crazy bill juggling. If you come up thirty dollars short one month, turn in your electric bill. Pay it back the next month, or even the next week, after you get paid.
That's exactly it. It has nothing to do with race. Poor people go to poor schools. Poor schools make you less likely to get into college in two ways: 1) You don't learn as much, 2) Even if you do, they're less likely to accept you. Combine that with 3) Poor people sometimes can't afford college and 4) A lot of rich people get into certain schools simply because of who they are.
Now, black and hispanic people are much more likely to be poor than white people. (How oriental people factor in I don't know. They just seem to value education more, so they'll make sure the kid does well even at a crappy school, and they'll go without food to pay for college.)
This has resulted in black and hispanic people being underrepresented in colleges, just like they are underepresented in gold ownership and house ownership.
But just like it would be silly to offer 'gold discounts' to black people, it's silly to offer cheaper school to them. The problem isn't that they are black and no one wants 'that kind of person' at the school. It's not racism. If there is any racism contributing, it's second order...maybe they aren't getting paid as much as a white person at the job they're working to get though school, but that's not the college's doing.
The problem is, simply, that they are poor! And, you know what? There are more poor white people than poor black people. (Which does not conflict with black people being more likely to be poor. There are less black people than white people, do the math yourself.)
The problem is that 'equality' in this county has come to have the completely absurd meanign of 'let's have everything exactly equal the correct percentage of the population'. The problem there is that you can't make the lower class smaller by randomly reaching in and pulling out a dozen black people a year! All you're doing is moving people around.
Possibly, after years and year of struggle, we can make the lower class have exactly the 'correct' percentage of black people, and the middle class, and the upper class, but someone will have to tell me what the hell the point is to that before I buy into it.
And if that's 'equality', I have to point out it won't ever happen in some fields. For example, we'll never have as many women firefighters as men. Men fit the physical requires much better than women, so there are a lot more of them. We don't need to start lowering the standards for women, or encouraging women to bulk up and take steroids, there's just no point.
At what point does a "life-forms in early stages of development" become a baby? I'd say at the point of conception. What would you say?
If you say a person is created at the point of conception, I hope you realize that something like 50% of fertilized eggs actually fail to stick to the uterus or trigger enough hormones, and thus get dumped out at the next period?
But, I'm sure it's okay that hundreds of thousands of people are dying every single day, as long as we didn't kill them.
Frankly, this is a much more serious problem than the minicule amount of abortions performed.
We're talking a hundred billion people or so thoughout history. (That's how many have ever lived, period. In reality, the number of deaths is higher, because better nutrition has lowered the percentage.) Stop worrying about the hundred million or so who've been aborted, you just look silly. Essentually every single person so you see walking the street had an unborn sibling who died the first month without anyone the wiser.
Of course, that's only true if you hold the rather loony idea that somehow a single cell is a person.
Yeah, a lot of what the religious right is sprouting is not actually supportable by the bible. For example, I can't find anything prohibiting sex outside of marriage in those words.
I see things like having to pay for, or marry, a girl if you have sex with her, I see places where you have to impegnate your brother's widow, I see all sorts of rather odd and strange rules, but I don't see what is rather assumed to be the rule:
Thou must only have sex inside of marriage with only your spouse[, which must be of the opposite gender]. (Last part optional for some denominations.)
That rule just doesn't seem to exist. And it seems like most of the rules are based on one of two assumptions:
A) Deflowering virgins damages their market value, which, frankly, is incredibly sexist. People do not have 'value'. I don't need someone else's permission to do something to a third party, I need the third party's permission. Women are nto property.
B) Continue family lines (and knowing who's part of what line) is important. Sleeping around is bad because then you might give your property to the wrong person.
While the modern interpetation 'don't have sex outside of marriage' seems reasonable and normal, you can use the exact same set of concepts and come up with the idea that, since women now own themselves, they can 'break' themselves whenever they want to, and that since we have DNA testing we can figure that other thing out, and we have child support laws, and thus anyone can have sex with anyone at any time.
People who interpet it the standard way seem about as goofy to me as those Jews who think it's a sin to make fire on the sabbath and thus won't use lights, when the point is to have a day of rest.
They're missing the forest for the trees, just like people who think sex outside of marriage is a sin. No, the sin was talking property away from her father or husband, and/or paying cuckoo with resulting babies. The first problem is not applicable to modern society, and the second problem is solved with DNA tests and child support.
And, if you're going to quote me some scripture written by Paul, you can just shut up now. Paul had rather unique and unsupported-by-anyone-else views about women.
They pander to the populace on abortion and gay issues just to get elected.
Have you read What's the Matter with Kansas? I can't imagine why I picked it up at the library, being in Georgia...I guess I wondered what the heck a book about Kansas was doing down here.
But read it, even if you live in California or Alaska or London or Omicron Persei 8. It explains exactly what the hell is going on with the Republican Party in America, and at the end I wasn't sure if the corporate Republicans were using the religious ones or vis versa.
But they have a sweet deal...the religious ones rant about 'liberal elite', and the corporate ones, who went to exactly the same colleges and were born with a silver spoon up their ass, who are 'elite' if that word ever had any meaning at all, nods and grin internally, and vote themselves tax breaks while they offshore businesses and put the people who voted for them out of a job. And the religious types scream and rant and rave about abortion and homos and flag burning and liberals running the media and liberals running the schools and the people run out and vote for people who deregulate the media and give more tax breaks to the rich...
It's actually rather surreal once you understand the process. Read the book. The Republican party is currently a fucking populist movement to help out the rich and powerful, so these other rich and powerful people, the liberal elite, lose power. And the gag is that there's only one rich and powerful group of people: The rich and powerful.
Oh, and I think point #1 got a little unclear with the analogy, so let me make another one:
I can set off a nuclear device in a city, kill 15 million people, slice my hand open while escaping, and not only can I pay someone to treat me for this, but emergency rooms are required by law to treat me, as are prisons. I can get stitches, although I do have to pay for them. And I'm certainly not prohibited from getting them.
Meanwhile, someone else, hopefully nowhere near that city, has a friendly roll in the hay, and ends up with the medical condition called 'pregancy'. You wish to prohibit by law anyone from altering that, because she 'engaged in an act knowing of the possible consequences'.
Riiight. Yeah, that makes sense.
Your little 'compasion' towards rape victims has clearly shown that what really is going on is that you don't care for people having sex outside marriage, and for some reason the Supreme Court refuses to let people make that illegal, so you just hope and pray they get punished in some other way. Like having to raise a kid, that'll teach those fornicating whores. Maybe they'll get married to the father and then everyone will be happy.
And thus we, as always, get to the 'punishment' place that most pro-lifers eventually get to. The woman should have known she was going to get pregnant, and thus she is responsible for the baby. (This is another way of saying that she sinned, and God punished her. See point #2 below if you don't believe me.)
Let's try this logic elsewhere. Let's, for the moment, compare the possibly immoral act of sex (Not sex outside of marriage, just sex. Married women have abortions too.) with one that is obviously actually immoral: Drinking and driving.
So, let's say someone drinks and drives, and gets in an accident by themselves. (Sex, even if immoral, doesn't harm anyone else, so we'll leave others out of this example also.) They run off the road into a ditch or something and break their leg. They are then rushed to the hospital. But wait! Driving into a ditch and breaking your leg is a natural and forseeable consequence of drunk driving. (Well, not that specifically, but something like that in general.)
So, obviously, by analogy, it should be illegal for the doctors to put a cast on the man's leg. He should just have to tough it. At least it's only going to take him a month or two, instead of nine.
Whoa, we just drove off the deep end there. That's a completely absurd law. Saying 'People who do 'bad things' should be legally barred from fixed any medical issues incured.' is just insane. It's even more absurd when the 'bad thing' isn't even something illegal! (Remember, the 'bad thing' in this example is the cause, aka, sex, not abortion.)
We have a perfectly functional court system where people who do things that are illegal, or things that hurt other people, can be brought up on charges and/or sued. We don't need to rely on 'karmatic justice'. If you want to make sex illegal, punishable by forcing someone through 9 months of pregnacy followed by 18 years of childrearing, you can write to your congressman and they'll vote on it. That's how the government works, it doesn't wait for criminals to have bad things happen to them and then disallow having others help them, which is the most surreal method of punishment imaginable. (And these people aren't criminals anyway. Sometimes they aren't even sinners, or at least not committing that specific sin.)
And that's completely ignoring the fact that there is, in theory, a child involved, who you are forcing to live inside a person who does not want it, and who will then, I must assume, continue to live with that person for 18 years after being born. This seems rather harse on the innocent child.
Point #2: I should point out that, just as some women having sex are apathetic about protecting themselves and thus get pregnant, some rape victims were apathetic also. I mean, where's the ethical difference between a woman who forgets her birth control pills and gets pregnant, and a woman who doesn't pay attention to her surroundings and walks down the wrong alley and is raped?
I'm not talking about the result, I'm just pointing out that both were negligent in basically the same manner, and one had a seriously bad thing happen to her and one had a minor bad thing happen to her. At this point, it has to be suspected we're letting the rape victim escape her fetal 'punishment' because she isn't a sinner. They both failed to do things that are normally minor and unimportant, but actually were in this instance.
And it can go even farther. Here's a really fun example: What about the married couple who uses birth control pills and condoms and natural rhythms, and still gets pregnant, compared to, say, a hooker who takes a client down an alley, demands he pays her and put on a condom, and he refuses and rapes her. Someone's going to scream bloodly murder because they don't understand what I'm saying, but the rape victim was much more careless there. She was in a dangerous profession, in a dangerous place, having sex with strangers, and a rape isn't exactly unexpected. (In fact, prostitutes are raped more than you'd think, an
The government shouldn't have any control over who can be in a union with whom, I just find the usage of "marriage" and the power of the government to grant it to people troubling.
This is what I always bring up to Christian friends when people talk about same sex marriages: So, do you think the government has the power to marry people in the eyes of God? Does it have the power to keep people from getting married in the eyes of God? (Think miscagenation laws here.) If the government looked back and realized someone's marriage certificate was invalid, does that mean they've been living in sin? The government recognizes marriages of other counties, some of which allow multiple wifes. Are those marriages okay because the government recognizes them?
And at that point most people who've been the most opposed to 'gay marriage' realize they're being conned, and the most obvious solution is for the government to get out of the marriage business altogether. I have an entirely different set of arguments for atheists.;)
Anyway, there are only three legitmate goals of marriage by the government: Child welfare, property ownership, and 'artifical' families.
The first, we have no solution to. Marriage doesn't magically make children have loving families, unless we want to go banning divorce. We can't make people only have kids in a marriage and we can't make them stay in the marriage.
The second is just money, and it seems really absurd to let people create fully artifical people called corporations, but two men can't pay taxes on a single form. And have no system with 200 years of case law to figure out their property when they seperate. (Yes, divorce is bad, but at least the system doesn't allow person A to just change the locks and dump the shared bank account into his, leaving person B flat on the street. That's what we'd have without divorce laws.)
The third is what gay people really care about, that's the right to say 'That's my wife, I can make medical decisions for her.'. It seems really petty to deny this to people. In fact, it seems rather stupid to require people to get married to do this. What if someone's estranged from their entire family and wants a friend to make those decisions? (No, power of attorny is not the same thing.) Maybe it's my brother who's estranged and I want any member of my family besides him to make medical decisions.
The obvious solution is to make the government do something called 'civil unions', and let churches or temples or Elvis impersonators do 'marriage'. (Yes, for all couples. We stopped that 'seperate but equal' crap a while back, everyone should have gotten a memo. We're not calling one 'marriage' and one 'civil union'.)
I'd be all for that, it's basically pretending your senators and representitives are the ones casting the electoral ballots, except for one word: gerrymandering.
It's really bad here in Georgia. If we suddenly switched over to that method, we'd already know the outcome of the vote...the one or two (I forget the number) Democratic strongholds in Atlanta would vote Democrat, and the rest Republican. Of course, I can't really see how it would be worse than the situtuation currently, where we know we're going to vote Republican.
It's especially bad with bookstores and libraries.
If at a murder scene there's a library book, of course the police should be able to make the library tell them whose book that is. No one really disputes that.
The problem with the 'PATRIOT' act is that it allowed the government to decide you were suspicious and find out what books you checked out, hoping to find something incriminating. Or even come up with 'incriminating' books and just see whoever's checked them out. (If they can't find any incriminating books, they can always just donate them anonymously.)
And apparently someone realized librarians are actually a lot more ethical and 'freedom-of-informationy' than popularly realized, and gave the police the ability to put a gag order on them so they can't tell anyone what's going on.
As librarians are ethical, of course, this has resulted in police being slightly less likely to solve crimes, because librarians are now purging records after books are returned, and will probably continue to do so, even without the 'PATRIOT' act. Luckily, most of the legit uses by police of libraries records are when they find a checked out book and ask who checked it out, but there are always a few crazy exceptions to the rules.
It's not just to protect privact we have the right to be secure in our papers...if we're sure they're secure, we're more likely to keep them. Which, in turn, makes it more likely legally asked questions with the backing of the court will get answered.
Which is just stupid. Psychological addiction is real, although it gets used in cases where there is no actual addiction.
But people don't get psychologically addicted to foods, at least nowhere near the levels of people with caffiene addiction.
But not that's not what Coke said at all. First they said caffeine is not addictive, which, I'm sorry, is just flat out wrong. But the rest of what they say doesn't support that.
Next they mention that it's been used for thousands of years, which has to be the stupidest way of 'proving' something's not addictive I've ever heard of. Alcohol and tobacco and cocaine and opium have all been used for thousands of years. So has trepanning.
Then they say caffeine is not similar to the use of drugs of abuse or dependence, whatever the hell that means. Presuming they mean 'caffeine use', they're correct. Patternwise, caffeine use by the addicted is nothing like any illegal drug by the addicted. It's obviously nothing like depressants, and stimulate addicts usually bob back and forth between them and depressants. Caffeine addicts just take it to get going and keep going.
But none of that makes their first sentence wrong. If they'd said 'The amount of caffeine in a Coke is not addictive', they could have been correct. But caffeine is physically addictive, period, and saying otherwise is just incorrect. There are measurable and predicatable changes in in someone's body when they don't get the caffeine their body is used to.
Which is sad, because both CIFS and NFS suck ass, although for different reasons.
NFS, for the simple reason the clients and server is designed to be Unix boxes with 5 9s and a perfect networks, breaks horribly when your network, server, or client is even slightly broken. It assumes you set up your network correctly and gave every user a login on every box, and, moreover, the same UID.
CIFS, on the other hand, is designed for P2P networks where computers go up and down. And you can go all the way from password protecting a share with a single password, to full-fledged domain security with single user login that actually works.
Note that last bit is almost the same as NFS, but it actually works in an enviroment of Windows boxes.
Oh, I never got around to telling people why CIS sucks. It sucks because it uses stupid-ass NetBIOS to find other machines. Hence it can be very hard to set up and is very easy to break.
However, you know what is a critical component? The ability to make images of disks, and write those images back out. An operating system is supposed to provide an interface to the hardware for other software and via direct user intervention. Like putting ISOs on a blank CD, or pulling them off. I understand if they don't want to provide full burner functionality, there's third party software that does that fine, but no support at all is absurd. XP finally gained some support...and it's only useful for writing files to CD-Rs, not ISOs.
It's amazingly how many non-OS things mysteriously come for free with Windows, but it still fails to have certain kinds of actual operating system components. Forget dd or cdrecord, has anyone else noticed Windows apparently lacks any GUI for diskcopy?
There will always be people who rob banks, there will always be con artists who make thousands of dollars a con, there will always be protection rackets extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars out of businesses.
What there shouldn't be is muggers and other petty criminals. The risks far outweigh any possibly benefits, and you have to take the risk repeatedly. It's a reverse lottery...spin the wheel, you can win twenty dollars, but there's a one on four chance you'll go to jail, and a one in ten chance you'll hurt someone, and go to jail for a looong time.
And thus the only logical conclusion is that said pretty criminals, at least some of them, see that as their only career path.
I got that message, did everything it said, got the message again, and figured MS was on crack, reporting problems that didn't exist.
It's good to know, instead of them being on crack, they're just failing to actually solve any problems, present any logical ways to solve them yourself, or even tell you exactly what is wrong, but there is actually a problem.
I guess you're supposed to search for the filename you weren't told and check and see if the version is higher than the vulnerable version you weren't told, so you can go and download updates from Microsoft's website at the URL that you weren't told.
It's certainly an interesting defination of 'Automatic Updates'. It's like a giant idiot light for your computer saying CHECK ENGINE, but it says UPDATE SOMETHING.
Re:Flying car will always be available, tomorrow
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NYT On Flying Cars
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No, you wouldn't merge up and down.
You'd have exit ramps and what not....you want go from a 'north' air space to an 'east' air space, you'd jog over a bit and take the east 'ramp' down.
Seriously, don't think about people flying around randomly. Think of it like a four 'parking lots', one for north, south, east, and west, which are maybe half a mile wide and all you can do is go in one direction. (And you don't have the north and south roads directly over each other.)
And there are well-defined ramps up and down to other levels at certain points, or even down to a surface interstate. And you could have a few 'custom' levels, that which change where they pointed depended on the area, and use those for going direct from city to city. And maybe even a few levels for just completely random flying, but at reduced speed to discourage use.
So, all the computers doing the flying (You don't think people would be doing it, do you?) would have to do is avoid running into people going in the same direction. Which is fairly trivial, even without air traffic control.
Free form driving would be a total disaster. If it's very easy to think of a workable system if you just pretend it's the current highway system and neither roads nor supports in midair cost anything.
The interesting thing is that most depeictions of flying cars realize this, and have traffic flow patterns, but absurdly limit these flying areas to normal road size. Both the Jetsons and Back to the Future 2 did that.
Voting was denied to blacks in many places, until the civil rights movement made some inroads, via what could euphamistically be called 'social pressure', instead of any laws.
Bill Clinton won the popular vote. He simply didn't win more than 50% of the popular vote. He got 45% or whatever, and the other side got 40% or whatever.
It's not the same situation at all. Quite a lot of presidents don't win the majority, very few of them don't win the popular vote.
I want to know who the hell is proposing internal combustion cars? No one's proposing that, people are proposing electric cars as an alternate to this crazy hydrogen car theory. (And, BTW, this article is about a car with an internal combustion engine, that burns hydrogen, thus combining the difficulties in getting hydrogen with the ineffency of a IC engine.)
I'm very confused as to how you read If we have hydrogen, we can effortlessly convert that to 100% clean electricity via burning. So why the hell don't we just do that at the power plant? and responded with Pollution: producing pollution in one place allows us to control and monitor it more easily, put it in the place where it is least harmful, and use technology to reduce it.. You must live in some sort of bizzaro world where that wasn't exactly what I asked.
Luckily, all research toward hydrogen cars except for the fuel cell are applicably towards plain battery powered electric cars. (Except this goofy 'burn hydrogen' car, which manages to combine all the difficulty in getting hydrogen with all the problems of IC cars.)
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I strongly suspect the top 5% of the wage earners are being paid by the top 10% of the wealth holders. See, the wealth holders are just that...holders of wealth. They control vast empires of companies, and don't 'earn' hardly anything...the companies earn the money.
People who think businesses, in general, have too much regulation are on crack, and actually operating from a flawed assumption. Corporations have infinite regulation, because they are mere fictional creations of the government. You can't talk about the correct level of regulation of a thing that only exists by regulation! All you can talk about is the level of autonomy the officers of the corporation are given, how much they have to do what the government says, vs. how much they can randomly direct the thing.
And I doubt non-corporations are regulated too much in general. Maybe cases can be made for specific fields, but I can't really see how it would make an uneven playing field.
During the school year, it's easy, and in fact it's already done: Free lunches (and possibly breakfasts) for poor kids. (Works best if the school has a meal plan, so it's not blatantly obvious the kid is getting free food. Other kids can be cruel.)
As for 1, I have an idea I've never heard elsewhere: House loans. If someone loses a job, they should be able to submit their rent/mortgage payment to the government, who then gives them a loan, up to a certain amount, however long their money holds out. Maybe include the electric, water, and phone bill in there. Possibly car.
It can't be used for anything else, because the government will just pay the bill, not give out money. It keeps the person able to look for a job.
And, this is nice, it's a loan. Non-interesting bearing, at least for a year or two, but you have to pay it back, probably on your taxes, when you do get a job. But it's limited, to an average of six months of whatever is normal is in your area, for a house the size you need. (Not the size you have, the size you need for your family.) If your rent payment is smaller than normal, the money might last 7 or 8 months. Maybe you're only making three-fourths of what you need, so it will last two years, during which you can put yourself through night classes at a local technical college.
Yes, some people would never pay it back, but no ones pay welfare back, so it wouldn't be worse. If you link it up with taxes, you'd either have to lie about how much you were making, or actually never have a well paying job, to never be required to pay it back. If you don't pay it back, you just don't ever get it again.
And with it being a loan, honest hardworking people would be more likely to accept it. And they're eligable for it again when they give the money back, thus solving some of the obvious questions about how often you can go on unemployment: As much as you want, you just have to give the money back.
Note 'six months' is just a random guess. That might be too long, might be too short. I'd like there to be an 'automatic' number of months (And by months I, again, mean average-payments-in-your area per month. A cost-of-living for just a few specific bills.) that you can just get, no questions asked, by turning your bills in, and then the ability to extend that by convincing an actual person that you are being productive and working towards a goal.
As a bonus, it will stop crazy bill juggling. If you come up thirty dollars short one month, turn in your electric bill. Pay it back the next month, or even the next week, after you get paid.
That reminds me. I need to pay my phone bill. ;)
Now, black and hispanic people are much more likely to be poor than white people. (How oriental people factor in I don't know. They just seem to value education more, so they'll make sure the kid does well even at a crappy school, and they'll go without food to pay for college.)
This has resulted in black and hispanic people being underrepresented in colleges, just like they are underepresented in gold ownership and house ownership.
But just like it would be silly to offer 'gold discounts' to black people, it's silly to offer cheaper school to them. The problem isn't that they are black and no one wants 'that kind of person' at the school. It's not racism. If there is any racism contributing, it's second order...maybe they aren't getting paid as much as a white person at the job they're working to get though school, but that's not the college's doing.
The problem is, simply, that they are poor! And, you know what? There are more poor white people than poor black people. (Which does not conflict with black people being more likely to be poor. There are less black people than white people, do the math yourself.)
The problem is that 'equality' in this county has come to have the completely absurd meanign of 'let's have everything exactly equal the correct percentage of the population'. The problem there is that you can't make the lower class smaller by randomly reaching in and pulling out a dozen black people a year! All you're doing is moving people around.
Possibly, after years and year of struggle, we can make the lower class have exactly the 'correct' percentage of black people, and the middle class, and the upper class, but someone will have to tell me what the hell the point is to that before I buy into it.
And if that's 'equality', I have to point out it won't ever happen in some fields. For example, we'll never have as many women firefighters as men. Men fit the physical requires much better than women, so there are a lot more of them. We don't need to start lowering the standards for women, or encouraging women to bulk up and take steroids, there's just no point.
If you say a person is created at the point of conception, I hope you realize that something like 50% of fertilized eggs actually fail to stick to the uterus or trigger enough hormones, and thus get dumped out at the next period?
But, I'm sure it's okay that hundreds of thousands of people are dying every single day, as long as we didn't kill them.
Frankly, this is a much more serious problem than the minicule amount of abortions performed.
We're talking a hundred billion people or so thoughout history. (That's how many have ever lived, period. In reality, the number of deaths is higher, because better nutrition has lowered the percentage.) Stop worrying about the hundred million or so who've been aborted, you just look silly. Essentually every single person so you see walking the street had an unborn sibling who died the first month without anyone the wiser.
Of course, that's only true if you hold the rather loony idea that somehow a single cell is a person.
I see things like having to pay for, or marry, a girl if you have sex with her, I see places where you have to impegnate your brother's widow, I see all sorts of rather odd and strange rules, but I don't see what is rather assumed to be the rule:
Thou must only have sex inside of marriage with only your spouse[, which must be of the opposite gender]. (Last part optional for some denominations.)
That rule just doesn't seem to exist. And it seems like most of the rules are based on one of two assumptions:
A) Deflowering virgins damages their market value, which, frankly, is incredibly sexist. People do not have 'value'. I don't need someone else's permission to do something to a third party, I need the third party's permission. Women are nto property.
B) Continue family lines (and knowing who's part of what line) is important. Sleeping around is bad because then you might give your property to the wrong person.
While the modern interpetation 'don't have sex outside of marriage' seems reasonable and normal, you can use the exact same set of concepts and come up with the idea that, since women now own themselves, they can 'break' themselves whenever they want to, and that since we have DNA testing we can figure that other thing out, and we have child support laws, and thus anyone can have sex with anyone at any time.
People who interpet it the standard way seem about as goofy to me as those Jews who think it's a sin to make fire on the sabbath and thus won't use lights, when the point is to have a day of rest.
They're missing the forest for the trees, just like people who think sex outside of marriage is a sin. No, the sin was talking property away from her father or husband, and/or paying cuckoo with resulting babies. The first problem is not applicable to modern society, and the second problem is solved with DNA tests and child support.
And, if you're going to quote me some scripture written by Paul, you can just shut up now. Paul had rather unique and unsupported-by-anyone-else views about women.
Have you read What's the Matter with Kansas? I can't imagine why I picked it up at the library, being in Georgia...I guess I wondered what the heck a book about Kansas was doing down here.
But read it, even if you live in California or Alaska or London or Omicron Persei 8. It explains exactly what the hell is going on with the Republican Party in America, and at the end I wasn't sure if the corporate Republicans were using the religious ones or vis versa.
But they have a sweet deal...the religious ones rant about 'liberal elite', and the corporate ones, who went to exactly the same colleges and were born with a silver spoon up their ass, who are 'elite' if that word ever had any meaning at all, nods and grin internally, and vote themselves tax breaks while they offshore businesses and put the people who voted for them out of a job. And the religious types scream and rant and rave about abortion and homos and flag burning and liberals running the media and liberals running the schools and the people run out and vote for people who deregulate the media and give more tax breaks to the rich...
It's actually rather surreal once you understand the process. Read the book. The Republican party is currently a fucking populist movement to help out the rich and powerful, so these other rich and powerful people, the liberal elite, lose power. And the gag is that there's only one rich and powerful group of people: The rich and powerful.
I can set off a nuclear device in a city, kill 15 million people, slice my hand open while escaping, and not only can I pay someone to treat me for this, but emergency rooms are required by law to treat me, as are prisons. I can get stitches, although I do have to pay for them. And I'm certainly not prohibited from getting them.
Meanwhile, someone else, hopefully nowhere near that city, has a friendly roll in the hay, and ends up with the medical condition called 'pregancy'. You wish to prohibit by law anyone from altering that, because she 'engaged in an act knowing of the possible consequences'.
Riiight. Yeah, that makes sense.
Your little 'compasion' towards rape victims has clearly shown that what really is going on is that you don't care for people having sex outside marriage, and for some reason the Supreme Court refuses to let people make that illegal, so you just hope and pray they get punished in some other way. Like having to raise a kid, that'll teach those fornicating whores. Maybe they'll get married to the father and then everyone will be happy.
Let's try this logic elsewhere. Let's, for the moment, compare the possibly immoral act of sex (Not sex outside of marriage, just sex. Married women have abortions too.) with one that is obviously actually immoral: Drinking and driving.
So, let's say someone drinks and drives, and gets in an accident by themselves. (Sex, even if immoral, doesn't harm anyone else, so we'll leave others out of this example also.) They run off the road into a ditch or something and break their leg. They are then rushed to the hospital. But wait! Driving into a ditch and breaking your leg is a natural and forseeable consequence of drunk driving. (Well, not that specifically, but something like that in general.)
So, obviously, by analogy, it should be illegal for the doctors to put a cast on the man's leg. He should just have to tough it. At least it's only going to take him a month or two, instead of nine.
Whoa, we just drove off the deep end there. That's a completely absurd law. Saying 'People who do 'bad things' should be legally barred from fixed any medical issues incured.' is just insane. It's even more absurd when the 'bad thing' isn't even something illegal! (Remember, the 'bad thing' in this example is the cause, aka, sex, not abortion.)
We have a perfectly functional court system where people who do things that are illegal, or things that hurt other people, can be brought up on charges and/or sued. We don't need to rely on 'karmatic justice'. If you want to make sex illegal, punishable by forcing someone through 9 months of pregnacy followed by 18 years of childrearing, you can write to your congressman and they'll vote on it. That's how the government works, it doesn't wait for criminals to have bad things happen to them and then disallow having others help them, which is the most surreal method of punishment imaginable. (And these people aren't criminals anyway. Sometimes they aren't even sinners, or at least not committing that specific sin.)
And that's completely ignoring the fact that there is, in theory, a child involved, who you are forcing to live inside a person who does not want it, and who will then, I must assume, continue to live with that person for 18 years after being born. This seems rather harse on the innocent child.
Point #2: I should point out that, just as some women having sex are apathetic about protecting themselves and thus get pregnant, some rape victims were apathetic also. I mean, where's the ethical difference between a woman who forgets her birth control pills and gets pregnant, and a woman who doesn't pay attention to her surroundings and walks down the wrong alley and is raped?
I'm not talking about the result, I'm just pointing out that both were negligent in basically the same manner, and one had a seriously bad thing happen to her and one had a minor bad thing happen to her. At this point, it has to be suspected we're letting the rape victim escape her fetal 'punishment' because she isn't a sinner. They both failed to do things that are normally minor and unimportant, but actually were in this instance.
And it can go even farther. Here's a really fun example: What about the married couple who uses birth control pills and condoms and natural rhythms, and still gets pregnant, compared to, say, a hooker who takes a client down an alley, demands he pays her and put on a condom, and he refuses and rapes her. Someone's going to scream bloodly murder because they don't understand what I'm saying, but the rape victim was much more careless there. She was in a dangerous profession, in a dangerous place, having sex with strangers, and a rape isn't exactly unexpected. (In fact, prostitutes are raped more than you'd think, an
This is what I always bring up to Christian friends when people talk about same sex marriages: So, do you think the government has the power to marry people in the eyes of God? Does it have the power to keep people from getting married in the eyes of God? (Think miscagenation laws here.) If the government looked back and realized someone's marriage certificate was invalid, does that mean they've been living in sin? The government recognizes marriages of other counties, some of which allow multiple wifes. Are those marriages okay because the government recognizes them?
And at that point most people who've been the most opposed to 'gay marriage' realize they're being conned, and the most obvious solution is for the government to get out of the marriage business altogether. I have an entirely different set of arguments for atheists. ;)
Anyway, there are only three legitmate goals of marriage by the government: Child welfare, property ownership, and 'artifical' families.
The first, we have no solution to. Marriage doesn't magically make children have loving families, unless we want to go banning divorce. We can't make people only have kids in a marriage and we can't make them stay in the marriage.
The second is just money, and it seems really absurd to let people create fully artifical people called corporations, but two men can't pay taxes on a single form. And have no system with 200 years of case law to figure out their property when they seperate. (Yes, divorce is bad, but at least the system doesn't allow person A to just change the locks and dump the shared bank account into his, leaving person B flat on the street. That's what we'd have without divorce laws.)
The third is what gay people really care about, that's the right to say 'That's my wife, I can make medical decisions for her.'. It seems really petty to deny this to people. In fact, it seems rather stupid to require people to get married to do this. What if someone's estranged from their entire family and wants a friend to make those decisions? (No, power of attorny is not the same thing.) Maybe it's my brother who's estranged and I want any member of my family besides him to make medical decisions.
The obvious solution is to make the government do something called 'civil unions', and let churches or temples or Elvis impersonators do 'marriage'. (Yes, for all couples. We stopped that 'seperate but equal' crap a while back, everyone should have gotten a memo. We're not calling one 'marriage' and one 'civil union'.)
It's really bad here in Georgia. If we suddenly switched over to that method, we'd already know the outcome of the vote...the one or two (I forget the number) Democratic strongholds in Atlanta would vote Democrat, and the rest Republican. Of course, I can't really see how it would be worse than the situtuation currently, where we know we're going to vote Republican.
If at a murder scene there's a library book, of course the police should be able to make the library tell them whose book that is. No one really disputes that.
The problem with the 'PATRIOT' act is that it allowed the government to decide you were suspicious and find out what books you checked out, hoping to find something incriminating. Or even come up with 'incriminating' books and just see whoever's checked them out. (If they can't find any incriminating books, they can always just donate them anonymously.)
And apparently someone realized librarians are actually a lot more ethical and 'freedom-of-informationy' than popularly realized, and gave the police the ability to put a gag order on them so they can't tell anyone what's going on.
As librarians are ethical, of course, this has resulted in police being slightly less likely to solve crimes, because librarians are now purging records after books are returned, and will probably continue to do so, even without the 'PATRIOT' act. Luckily, most of the legit uses by police of libraries records are when they find a checked out book and ask who checked it out, but there are always a few crazy exceptions to the rules.
It's not just to protect privact we have the right to be secure in our papers...if we're sure they're secure, we're more likely to keep them. Which, in turn, makes it more likely legally asked questions with the backing of the court will get answered.
But people don't get psychologically addicted to foods, at least nowhere near the levels of people with caffiene addiction.
But not that's not what Coke said at all. First they said caffeine is not addictive, which, I'm sorry, is just flat out wrong. But the rest of what they say doesn't support that.
Next they mention that it's been used for thousands of years, which has to be the stupidest way of 'proving' something's not addictive I've ever heard of. Alcohol and tobacco and cocaine and opium have all been used for thousands of years. So has trepanning.
Then they say caffeine is not similar to the use of drugs of abuse or dependence, whatever the hell that means. Presuming they mean 'caffeine use', they're correct. Patternwise, caffeine use by the addicted is nothing like any illegal drug by the addicted. It's obviously nothing like depressants, and stimulate addicts usually bob back and forth between them and depressants. Caffeine addicts just take it to get going and keep going.
But none of that makes their first sentence wrong. If they'd said 'The amount of caffeine in a Coke is not addictive', they could have been correct. But caffeine is physically addictive, period, and saying otherwise is just incorrect. There are measurable and predicatable changes in in someone's body when they don't get the caffeine their body is used to.
NFS, for the simple reason the clients and server is designed to be Unix boxes with 5 9s and a perfect networks, breaks horribly when your network, server, or client is even slightly broken. It assumes you set up your network correctly and gave every user a login on every box, and, moreover, the same UID.
CIFS, on the other hand, is designed for P2P networks where computers go up and down. And you can go all the way from password protecting a share with a single password, to full-fledged domain security with single user login that actually works.
Note that last bit is almost the same as NFS, but it actually works in an enviroment of Windows boxes.
Oh, I never got around to telling people why CIS sucks. It sucks because it uses stupid-ass NetBIOS to find other machines. Hence it can be very hard to set up and is very easy to break.
It's amazingly how many non-OS things mysteriously come for free with Windows, but it still fails to have certain kinds of actual operating system components. Forget dd or cdrecord, has anyone else noticed Windows apparently lacks any GUI for diskcopy?
There will always be people who rob banks, there will always be con artists who make thousands of dollars a con, there will always be protection rackets extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars out of businesses.
What there shouldn't be is muggers and other petty criminals. The risks far outweigh any possibly benefits, and you have to take the risk repeatedly. It's a reverse lottery...spin the wheel, you can win twenty dollars, but there's a one on four chance you'll go to jail, and a one in ten chance you'll hurt someone, and go to jail for a looong time.
And thus the only logical conclusion is that said pretty criminals, at least some of them, see that as their only career path.
The problem there is that all civil disobediene automatically benefits the first group.
I got that message, did everything it said, got the message again, and figured MS was on crack, reporting problems that didn't exist.
It's good to know, instead of them being on crack, they're just failing to actually solve any problems, present any logical ways to solve them yourself, or even tell you exactly what is wrong, but there is actually a problem.
I guess you're supposed to search for the filename you weren't told and check and see if the version is higher than the vulnerable version you weren't told, so you can go and download updates from Microsoft's website at the URL that you weren't told.
It's certainly an interesting defination of 'Automatic Updates'. It's like a giant idiot light for your computer saying CHECK ENGINE, but it says UPDATE SOMETHING.
You'd have exit ramps and what not....you want go from a 'north' air space to an 'east' air space, you'd jog over a bit and take the east 'ramp' down.
Seriously, don't think about people flying around randomly. Think of it like a four 'parking lots', one for north, south, east, and west, which are maybe half a mile wide and all you can do is go in one direction. (And you don't have the north and south roads directly over each other.)
And there are well-defined ramps up and down to other levels at certain points, or even down to a surface interstate. And you could have a few 'custom' levels, that which change where they pointed depended on the area, and use those for going direct from city to city. And maybe even a few levels for just completely random flying, but at reduced speed to discourage use.
So, all the computers doing the flying (You don't think people would be doing it, do you?) would have to do is avoid running into people going in the same direction. Which is fairly trivial, even without air traffic control. Free form driving would be a total disaster. If it's very easy to think of a workable system if you just pretend it's the current highway system and neither roads nor supports in midair cost anything.
The interesting thing is that most depeictions of flying cars realize this, and have traffic flow patterns, but absurdly limit these flying areas to normal road size. Both the Jetsons and Back to the Future 2 did that.
Voting was denied to blacks in many places, until the civil rights movement made some inroads, via what could euphamistically be called 'social pressure', instead of any laws.
Bill Clinton won the popular vote. He simply didn't win more than 50% of the popular vote. He got 45% or whatever, and the other side got 40% or whatever.
It's not the same situation at all. Quite a lot of presidents don't win the majority, very few of them don't win the popular vote.
Of course, that's not to say black people could vote...just that they were supposed to be able to.
I want to know who the hell is proposing internal combustion cars? No one's proposing that, people are proposing electric cars as an alternate to this crazy hydrogen car theory. (And, BTW, this article is about a car with an internal combustion engine, that burns hydrogen, thus combining the difficulties in getting hydrogen with the ineffency of a IC engine.)
I'm very confused as to how you read If we have hydrogen, we can effortlessly convert that to 100% clean electricity via burning. So why the hell don't we just do that at the power plant? and responded with Pollution: producing pollution in one place allows us to control and monitor it more easily, put it in the place where it is least harmful, and use technology to reduce it.. You must live in some sort of bizzaro world where that wasn't exactly what I asked.
Luckily, all research toward hydrogen cars except for the fuel cell are applicably towards plain battery powered electric cars. (Except this goofy 'burn hydrogen' car, which manages to combine all the difficulty in getting hydrogen with all the problems of IC cars.)
So...you think it's more logical to break down hydrocarbons into hydrogren, instead of just using the fricking hydrocarbons in the first place?