I know several families that would be considered poor to lower middle class that send their kids to private school (most without our churches help) because they realize the value of a good education that's concerned less with how Johnny feels about himself and more with how well Johnny can think.
The solution to the problems with the education system may lie in private schools replacing public schools, but that doesn't solve the problem of how to make sure that everyone has access to a good school. The problem is that we don't pay teachers squat compared to what they can make in other jobs, and schools constantly decide to spend vast amounts of money on their sports programs instead of their academic programs. If parents want their kids to play sports, there are plenty of sports organizations out there for them to join. We need schools to teach kids better than they do now. We shouldn't have to import our skilled labor. It comes down to how much we're willing to spend on educating our children. I think Gore is willing to spend a lot more than Bush, but I'm not sure if he'll spend it in a way that will maximize the benefits. Paying teachers more would help at least. Then there's Bush, who seems extremely shady to me given his reluctance to give a straight answer to a straight question. (If I had to listen to him babble on about being a uniter and bringing sides together to come to a solution one more time I was going to puke) I just have to wonder why he so unwilling to be straight and honest with us.
Again, I would like to point out that it is our voting system that causes these sorts of dilemmas in the first place. If we would use a more sensible and fair system, such as the Borda count or approval voting, we could elect the candidate that is really the most desirable candidate to the most people. That won't happen now due to the way they screw with voting districts and the fact that a plurality vote is simply a bad way of electing someone when there are more than 2 people involved. I want to see a candidate stand up and point this out to everyone. I want to see him pull a Ross Perot and break out the graphs and pictures and explain it to everyone. This needs to be fixed.
Some may say they're bad parents for wanting to hide things from their kids, but it's their family.
Nobody cares if someone wants to install censorware on their personal computer at home to keep their own kids from getting at stuff that they don't want them to get at. That's fine. It's their kid. What everyone seems to have a problem with is the mandate that all schools and public libraries must install censorware on their computers to appease this particular sort of parent by imposing restrictions on everyone's kids.
Nobody bought me a mainframe to learn on, I didn't have any special advantages, I just went out and did it. Now I'm told that there are people who didn't and I should give them a portion of what I worked hard to earn because they didn't.
You probably didn't start with nothing either. I've seen poor. Poor is ugly. Poor is depressing. Poor is exhausting. Poor is a loss of hope. Poor is a downward spiral with little chance of climbing back up to a reasonable position without a good deal of help. I would agree that social programs need to be monitored carefully to guard against waste, but they are quite necessary to the country if we don't want to end up like some cyber-punkish vision of the country 50 years from now.
Should taxes be raised to cover for this? NO, government should be streamlined.
I don't recall Gore proposing to raise taxes. In fact he plans to cut them, but not as deeply as Bush plans to. Then Gore plans to use the money the government has to start paying down the debt.
It has taken on way too much and what it does take on, it does inefficently.
Something that it does whether the Republicans or the Democrats are in power. They just blow the cash in different areas. Democrats spend it on welfare and environmental protection plans and Republicans spend it on corporate welfare and trying to build "Star Wars." (that's exaggerated and generalized, yes, but wrong? I don't think so.)
However, I believe Bush will do a better job than Gore (based on policy and record)
Bush is full of crap. I live in Texas and he's not doing all that great a job here. He wouldn't even give a straight answer to many questions in the debate last night, which ticked me off. The crap about his "patient's bill of rights" is just that, crap. He's shielding the HMOs, plain and simple. People should be able to take their grievance to a court of law and have it decided by a jury of their peers. There were quite a few other instances where he evaded giving a real answer, but this thing is already getting long. Suffice it to say that I don't trust Bush one bit. I don't trust Gore all that much either really, but at least he wasn't doing nearly as much dodging of questions as Bush was. Any time Bush got asked something he would just go off about how he would bring the sides together and get something done. Gimme a break. He'll do just what he's done here in Texas. Bring both sides together and keep everything the same. Inneffective legislation does not count as "getting things done."
I'm going to vote in the way that I believe and I hope you do the same.
I'll be watching the pols here in Texas. If Bush ends up with a large lead, I may vote for Nader just to help that party get some cash for the next election. Maybe we could get at least one more candidate into the debates that way. If the race here is close, I'll vote for Gore in an attempt to help keep Bush out.
It does not take much of a farm or small business these days to equal 1 million dollars.
I agree with you, but I don't think that the inheritance tax should be done away with. I think that the limit should simply be set higher. 2 or 3 million perhaps. And then it should be reevaluated every year or two for adjustments, kind of like cost-of-living adjustments. Getting rid of it altogether is not a good idea IMO.
Taxes reduce that. Reduce wealth and you reduce the economy, thus hurting everyone, inluding those on the poorest end.
Taxes don't just reduce wealth. They also do many useful things, albeit at a somewhat inflated price usually. These things would likely not be done if they were not done by the government. Additionally, if you read what Brin was saying, he pointed out that the wealthy are quite good at dodging taxes (they can afford to hire lots of smart people to figure out the loopholes) and most of the money does not end up going to the government at all, but into charitable institutions that fund research and education and other worthy causes chosen by the donors themselves. This isn't reducing wealth, it's recirculating it. The upper few percent of people in this country already control vastly larger amounts of wealth than the bottom 70% or so. The average CEO in this country makes over 400 times what the average worker makes. Repeal the inheritance tax and that money will continue to pile up in the upper few percent's bank accounts while the rest have to work harder and harder to make a buck. It won't turn out well in the end.
I suppose we live in different countries. I live in the calm waters of the USA. Yes, we have a small faction of bandits who want to topple the government, but they are few and far between. Most Americans have it good. Make that...Very good.
Like I said, read some history. Waters don't stay calm forever. We've done pretty well so far, but this nation has only been around about 220 years. That's not very long really. There have been many empires that lasted much longer, but still went down in flames, it was just a matter of time. The founding fathers of this country knew this as well, and Jefferson said as much in his writings. Sooner or later, they believed that the government would likely become corrupt and need to be tossed out, which is one of the main reasons we have the 2nd amendment.
To "ward off" criminals, I always have lived in relatively safe communities and I watch my back (you know, the paranoia thing). I've never been held up at gunpoint, so I must be doing something right.
It's good that it's never happened to you. But there is a large percentage of the population of this country that can't afford to live in safe communities. Watching your back doesn't help much if you don't have a means to defend yourself when you realize you're going to be attacked. I could not, in good conscience deprive people of their means of self-defense.
Maybe I'm an optimist about our nation's future, that political matters will always work themselves out one way or another.
Even my relatively limited knowledge of history would lead me to believe you are one heck of an optimist.
It's just not clear cut which way is the best way to go in regards to whether ordinary folk should be able to possess military-style weapons. IMHO, there's danger in either direction.
I agree that there is danger in either direction, but I believe that the greater danger lies in the power of the government, which when sufficiently corrupted can become tyrranical enough to spark the sort of revolution that would require that the citizenship be armed and prepared to throw that government out and replace it with one that will once again be accountable to the people of this country. Corrupt governments rarely go without a fight.
if you look at it objectively, you KNOW that guns should be banned, however, because of the amazing amount of cash this industry represents nothing is done against it, and as a result 10 year olds are blowing each others heads off.
What a load of crap. You are obviously right, huh? Those of us who disagree must not be looking at it objectively, huh? That's insulting and it does nothing to support an argument against guns. This country wouldn't exist without guns, and we may need them again someday for that very reason. Then there is the issue of self-defense and defense of family and property. I would not deprive anyone of one of the most effective tools for self-defense. Quite often you don't even need to fire the weapon to deter a criminal.
It's already been demonstrated with the drug war and prohibition here in the U.S. that you can't prevent things from being brought into the country if there is a demand for them. You can just drive up the cost and create more criminal activity. Criminals will still get guns. Better to let non-criminals have an equally effective means of self-defense. The police are not there to defend you. They show up later and take pictures of your corpse.
I am not a gun owner, but I support people's right to own guns. For you to portray the issue as being black-and-white simply because some kids have been killed by the misuse of guns is disengenuous. In most of the cases involving children being killed, there was a lot more going on than just the kid getting ahold of a gun. It's not a simple issue and we don't yet have all the answers, but that does not mean that a ban is the answer. That was the answer that was tried with alcohol and didn't work. That was the answer that was tried with drugs, and here we are 20 years later and the country is still awash in drugs and our prisons are full. Bans are something that politicians use to get the weak-minded, uninformed voters all worked up and emotional so that they'll go out and vote for them. In reality they usually accomplish little towards a positive outcome, and often are counter-productive.
But really, can't we just hunt and protect ourselves with standard rifles and pistols? Why the military weaponry?
Seems to me that it depends entirely on what you might have to defend yourself against. If it's a burglar with a knife or pistol, then a standard pistol or rifle might be enough. Of course having an H&K MP5 handy would probably scare the hell out of the burglar and you wouldn't have to use it anyway.
Now, if it came down to revolution time (which, history tells us, does happen every few hundred years at least due to the tendency of governments to become increasingly corrupt over time), it would be good for the citizens of the country to be able to defend themselves against well-equiped police and military units when necessary. Now there are many arguments on this subject having to do with whether or not a civilian force can compete against M1A1 tanks and F-16 fighters if it came down to that. Well that's deceptive really. It wouldn't be a stand-up fight. It would be a guerilla war and it's quite likely that the military would be operating significantly under normal strength (due to those who would refuse to fight and/or resign/desert). I'm not advocating revolution here. I'm just pointing out that its historically inevitable that it will happen, and that we, as citizens, should not allow ourselves to be further disarmed by our government. I don't have a problem with violent felons being denied the right to purchase firearms. I do take issue with generally law-abiding citizens being denied that right.
Additionally, new weapons laws are quite likely to have little to no positive effect on murder rates or violence in general. Usually, criminals who use a gun to commit a crime have already broken half a dozen or more gun laws in the process. I think something on the order of 17 laws were broken in the Columbine killings. What difference would it make to these people if they break another law or two?
It's already been demonstrated with the drug war that you can't prevent things from being brought into the country if there is a demand for them. You can just drive up the cost and create more criminal activity. Criminals will still get guns. Better to let non-criminals have a means of self-defense. The police are not there to defend you. They show up later and take pictures of your corpse.
Next point. Gun accidents. Yes, they happen. No, a family member or friend is not more likely to be killed by the gun than an intruder or attacker unless you add in suicides and incidents where the attacker is a family member or "friend" (which, for the purposes of the study, usually translates to "someone whose name you know"). That assertion is just anti-gun propoganda.
All things considered, I believe that citizens should be allowed to own weapons, even automatic weapons. I've been thinking about the licensing and registration issues a bit. I'm definitely against registration due to the near inevitability that it will be used to aid in confiscation if the politacal winds begin to blow in that direction. Licensing is a bit tougher to decide on. I would prefer that gun-owners demonstrate some competency in using and taking care of their weapons. I don't want a license to be used to aid confiscation efforts by tying you to a particular gun purchase though. If there was a way to license people without helping the government to keep track of us and our purchases, I might support that.
This is why we need a revamp of the tax system in this country. We need to get rid of income taxes and just institute a national sales tax. Then when Bill Gates wants to buy a second yacht, he will pay a tax on that consumption. Just like I would pay a tax when I buy new computer parts. You consume more, you pay more taxes. That seems like a better way to do it.
There are now many exceptions to the orginal law that created the SSN. Businesses are allowed to require your SSN before doing business with you. You are not required to give it to them though. Your alternative is to go elsewhere. Sad, but true.
Haven't you considered the possibility that you might be desensitized because you don't think there's anything remotely wrong with having fun blasting people to bits.
Yes, I've considered that. Then I rejected it. I simply don't see the connection between playing Unreal Tournament with my friends and actually killing a human being. For me, there is no connection between the two whatsoever. I have no animosity towards anyone I play with, many of them are good friends of mine. I know I'm not harming anyone. The game is great fun. You get to play as a team and that alone makes it better than most single-player games. I also play paintball sometimes. I don't consider that to be violent either. The field owners go to great lengths to make sure nobody gets hurt. Players also take precautions and play by certain rules so that nobody gets hurt. There just isn't any sort of violent mindset involved as far as I can tell. It's more a spirit of cooperation, teamwork and sportsmanship like you'd find in other sports.
I think many of these video games are very similar to sports. Football is quite physically violent, but people don't get upset that millions of kids play football every day. Yet they do get upset that kids play "violent" video games together. Why do you think that is? Many people get injured, and once in a great while even killed, playing football. I don't know of anyone who has been injured or killed playing a video game. (well, aside from some wrist strain after playing for too long at a time.) Kids who play real sports are (in my own experience) often violent towards other kids. It's never the math geeks going around beating other people up. It's the football players, the basketball players, etc. I'm not saying there is a causal link between violent sports and violence against others, but it would probably be a lot easier to build a case for that than to build a case for video games causing violence.
Second, while the article certainly didn't prove (or even try to) that there was any connection between the drop in real violence and the increase in violent games, the drop in violence is real. People are becoming more and more hysterical about violence among children even as the number of incidents has been dropping steadily and substantially for years. Why do you think that is?
And it's not their religion which tells them to do it - it's their culture - what everyone around them says is tolerable or even the right thing. They've been desensitized.
They've been desensitized by real violence, not by pointing a mouse cursor at a character on their computer screen and firing a big green ball of lightning at him. People have grown up with such violence being a part of their everyday lives. The boys grow up to be like the men around them who are their role models. They see how the men treat the women and they do the same. That's what desensitizes them. Real life.
You don't change whole nations in one generation, you do it in a few steps. And you usually start with the kids.
It starts with adults. Kids learn from them. They learn to be like the adults. They don't grow up in a vacuum. They usually have plenty of people around them. It's those people who teach them how to act (or in some cases neglect them which leads to a whole separate set of problems which can also lead to violence). Perhaps if kids were raised without proper guidance and in a bad environment, they could learn bad things from tv, movies, music, games, etc. But I don't think those things are to blame. It's the fact that the child is growing up in an environment where he/she is not given the attention and guidance needed to grow up to be a well-adjusted adult.
Hmm, what sort of "goal" is it to blow someone up with a rocket launcher? Or sneak up on someone to shoot them in the back Rainbow 6 style? Does that help you build your socializing or "team" skills? Do you even understand how bad that sounds?
Seems to me that if you maintain even a casual relationship with reality, you would realize that you aren't really blowing people up with rocket launchers or shooting people in the back. You're playing a game in which your character is put in a position where such things are expected, and even necessary for that character's survival. It's not a real situation. It's not a real environment. Those aren't real people. It's nothing more than a game. If someone can't understand that, then they have larger problems and probably shouldn't be playing those sorts of games, but that's probably a decision to be made by a psychiatrist. I don't see games having any sort of desesitizing effect on normal, well-adjusted people. They understand that the game is not real, nor are the actions performed in the game something you would do in reality.
And that is why I don't buy the "media violence doesn't influence viewers" arguement. Violence is not entertaiment. If you think that it is, you should see a therapist. Now.
Thanks for your opinion doctor. Oh wait. You aren't a doctor, are you? I've played video games for as long as I can remember. Since I first got my hands on an atari. Everything from Combat to Unreal Tournament. Yet I've never harmed anyone. Don't even own a gun. Violence is not something that just seeps into you from playing a game. It requires hate and/or fear as well. I don't feel any of that when I play games. It's just fun and challenging to play with teams of people toward a common goal. I have a blast playing games. It doesn't make me angry or violent. I think it's ridiculous to even suggest such a thing. Perhaps you'd be more accurate saying that if video games make you angry or more prone to violence you should see a therapist.
Umm, am I missing something or did you just go and do the same thing by picking another easy target - the parents? *DING* You win 5 hypocrite points...
Well, maybe he's as sick as a lot of us are that parents don't seem to ever shoulder any of the blame when some kid hauls off and shoots somebody. As soon as it happens, reporters and cops and everyone else start digging to see what games the kid plays and whether he spends time on the internet or not. Nevermind that his mom is a crack addict and her boyfriend is a dealer who leaves guns laying around the house. Nah.. it's gotta be the video games.
Parents are supposed to take responsibility for their children. That includes deciding what games they should be allowed to play, what they should be able to watch on tv, what they should read, what they should be allowed to do. You can't just point your finger at the games and declare that they are to blame. Trying pointing at the parent for letting the child play the games or for not taking an interest in the child enough to know that there was a problem and trouble was coming. Parents seem to think they can just have all the kids they want and society is supposed to make sure they turn out alright. Time for them to wake up.
Secure handgun storage? Child safety locks? These aren't gun bans.
No, but they do effectively render the gun useless in the event of an emergency in which you need it (i.e. someone breaks into your house or your ex-spouse is trying to break in the door to kill you). Not much better than a ban really.
These two bills are intended solely to prevent children from reaching guns and hurting themselves/others with them.
While I can appreciate the intent, I can't condone their tactics. Education, training, and enforcement of existing laws would be a lot more likely to prevent such things from happening and we'd still have a means of self-defense that was worth a damn when we need it. Look at the situations where a kid gets ahold of a gun. Often the parents or others are fscked up beyond belief and leave the guns laying around for the kids to pick up and walk off with. Think more laws are gonna fix that problem?
That's a load of BS. It's only true if you include suicides, which is a stupid thing to include because it's intentional and self-inflicted. If there wasn't a gun handy, the person would prolly just down a bottle of pills or something.
Near as I can tell (unless I'm misreading this) the Constitution says that treaties override the Constitution and the laws of the states.
AND ALL TREATIES made, or which shall be made under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
onerously burdening him with a system which is useless even for the purpose for which it was created.
You'd have a point, except for the fact that the customer isn't buying the hardware for the purpose for which it was created. It was created to suit the RIAA, not the consumer. The consumer just has to use it because their won't be an alternative. Consumers won't care a bit if the system is cracked... the RIAA might though, but that's their problem. If they tried to make consumers buy yet another set of hardware, you'd REALLY see a backlash like none we've seen yet. I'm not talking about a Divx-like backlash where people just boycott the thing. I'm talking about something more along the lines of firebombing the RIAA headquarters in the middle of the night sort of backlash. Basically, they wouldn't be able to pull it off. So consumers would have a system that does what they want, but not what the RIAA wants. Sounds good to me.
Wholly absent from the debate seems to be a coherent vision of what the future should be, how corporations can survive in the digital age and still make money from their efforts.
There's actually been quite a bit of discussion about this. People know that corporations exist to make money. They know that there's no getting around that. Micropayments has been the most popular suggestion as near as I can tell. The problem is that corporations aren't just trying to adapt their business models to the digital way of doing things. They're looking at it as an opportunity to increase their control over their "intellectual property" to the point that we, as consumers, can't do anything with it that they don't want us to do and that we haven't paid through the nose for permission to do. Once they've got their laws in place and the technology to exploit those laws, they can increase their revenues significantly because there is no competition. Anyone who doesn't play their game is out in the cold.
They've screwed people enough with conventional tactics in the real world. They buy legislation to extend copyrights, even retroactively(which is my biggest gripe about them). They engage in price-fixing. They screw artists whenever possible. Now they're trying to screw us even harder in the digital world. They've gotten the DMCA passed (by a voice vote no less), UCITA is being adopted by the states (slowly though, but it won't matter since you will be dragged to the state of the corporation's choice and sued under that state's laws), and now they're breaking out the lawsuits to try out their newly acquired legislation.
These corporations have too damn much power and we should not let ourselves be beaten into submission by them. They are the enemy! Let there be no mistaking that. They are not just a company out to make an honest profit by providing consumers with a good product. They are a cartel out to monopolize a market and turn copyright law into a grotesque shadow of what it was intended to be. They are out to ensure that fair use becomes nothing but a fond memory and reverse engineering is made illegal. We should be doing everything in our power to stop them. The main barrier to this is the fact that the people lobbying for legislation such as the DMCA are the same people who control the media in all its forms. Most people are completely ignorant of what's going on because you don't hear about it on tv or read about it in the paper. As long as only a few know about and understand what is going on, the media industries can continue to plunder our rights.
Sure there's something wrong with it. It's giving the record industry free assistance in their attempts to increase their control over digital music, just as the movie industry is trying to do for digital video. Helping them acheive their goals is, IMO, wrong because those goals are wrong. Of course, obviously not everyone shares my opinion, or at least they are using some different logic to justify assisting the record industry by cracking SDMI.
I think politics should stay the hell out of the courts. If Microsoft broke the law, they deserve to be punished. We shouldn't let them get off with another slap on the wrist. That didn't work last time and I can't think of any reason it would work this time.
I use MS products because I choose them. Not because they are forced on me.
And you probably consider the fact that Dell, Compaq, etc, preinstall Windows on every desktop machine to be a convenience for you. Or at least you don't mind it. Whereas someone who does not want to use Windows cannot buy from any of the top ten or more major OEMs because they cannot purchase a computer without also purchasing Windows. The OEMs don't like this. The customers don't like this. So why is it done? Because Microsoft decided that's how it would be done.
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I know several families that would be considered poor to lower middle class that send their kids to private school (most without our churches help) because they realize the value of a good education that's concerned less with how Johnny feels about himself and more with how well Johnny can think.
The solution to the problems with the education system may lie in private schools replacing public schools, but that doesn't solve the problem of how to make sure that everyone has access to a good school. The problem is that we don't pay teachers squat compared to what they can make in other jobs, and schools constantly decide to spend vast amounts of money on their sports programs instead of their academic programs. If parents want their kids to play sports, there are plenty of sports organizations out there for them to join. We need schools to teach kids better than they do now. We shouldn't have to import our skilled labor. It comes down to how much we're willing to spend on educating our children. I think Gore is willing to spend a lot more than Bush, but I'm not sure if he'll spend it in a way that will maximize the benefits. Paying teachers more would help at least. Then there's Bush, who seems extremely shady to me given his reluctance to give a straight answer to a straight question. (If I had to listen to him babble on about being a uniter and bringing sides together to come to a solution one more time I was going to puke) I just have to wonder why he so unwilling to be straight and honest with us.
How many, indeed. And how many abortions are performed? If the latter is greater than the former your entire point is moot.
No, his point would not be moot. It just wouldn't cover abortion in all circumstances.
Again, I would like to point out that it is our voting system that causes these sorts of dilemmas in the first place. If we would use a more sensible and fair system, such as the Borda count or approval voting, we could elect the candidate that is really the most desirable candidate to the most people. That won't happen now due to the way they screw with voting districts and the fact that a plurality vote is simply a bad way of electing someone when there are more than 2 people involved. I want to see a candidate stand up and point this out to everyone. I want to see him pull a Ross Perot and break out the graphs and pictures and explain it to everyone. This needs to be fixed.
Some may say they're bad parents for wanting to hide things from their kids, but it's their family.
Nobody cares if someone wants to install censorware on their personal computer at home to keep their own kids from getting at stuff that they don't want them to get at. That's fine. It's their kid. What everyone seems to have a problem with is the mandate that all schools and public libraries must install censorware on their computers to appease this particular sort of parent by imposing restrictions on everyone's kids.
Nobody bought me a mainframe to learn on, I didn't have any special advantages, I just went out and did it. Now I'm told that there are people who didn't and I should give them a portion of what I worked hard to earn because they didn't.
You probably didn't start with nothing either. I've seen poor. Poor is ugly. Poor is depressing. Poor is exhausting. Poor is a loss of hope. Poor is a downward spiral with little chance of climbing back up to a reasonable position without a good deal of help. I would agree that social programs need to be monitored carefully to guard against waste, but they are quite necessary to the country if we don't want to end up like some cyber-punkish vision of the country 50 years from now.
Should taxes be raised to cover for this? NO, government should be streamlined.
I don't recall Gore proposing to raise taxes. In fact he plans to cut them, but not as deeply as Bush plans to. Then Gore plans to use the money the government has to start paying down the debt.
It has taken on way too much and what it does take on, it does inefficently.
Something that it does whether the Republicans or the Democrats are in power. They just blow the cash in different areas. Democrats spend it on welfare and environmental protection plans and Republicans spend it on corporate welfare and trying to build "Star Wars." (that's exaggerated and generalized, yes, but wrong? I don't think so.)
However, I believe Bush will do a better job than Gore (based on policy and record)
Bush is full of crap. I live in Texas and he's not doing all that great a job here. He wouldn't even give a straight answer to many questions in the debate last night, which ticked me off. The crap about his "patient's bill of rights" is just that, crap. He's shielding the HMOs, plain and simple. People should be able to take their grievance to a court of law and have it decided by a jury of their peers. There were quite a few other instances where he evaded giving a real answer, but this thing is already getting long. Suffice it to say that I don't trust Bush one bit. I don't trust Gore all that much either really, but at least he wasn't doing nearly as much dodging of questions as Bush was. Any time Bush got asked something he would just go off about how he would bring the sides together and get something done. Gimme a break. He'll do just what he's done here in Texas. Bring both sides together and keep everything the same. Inneffective legislation does not count as "getting things done."
I'm going to vote in the way that I believe and I hope you do the same.
I'll be watching the pols here in Texas. If Bush ends up with a large lead, I may vote for Nader just to help that party get some cash for the next election. Maybe we could get at least one more candidate into the debates that way. If the race here is close, I'll vote for Gore in an attempt to help keep Bush out.
It does not take much of a farm or small business these days to equal 1 million dollars.
I agree with you, but I don't think that the inheritance tax should be done away with. I think that the limit should simply be set higher. 2 or 3 million perhaps. And then it should be reevaluated every year or two for adjustments, kind of like cost-of-living adjustments. Getting rid of it altogether is not a good idea IMO.
Taxes reduce that. Reduce wealth and you reduce the economy, thus hurting everyone, inluding those on the poorest end.
Taxes don't just reduce wealth. They also do many useful things, albeit at a somewhat inflated price usually. These things would likely not be done if they were not done by the government. Additionally, if you read what Brin was saying, he pointed out that the wealthy are quite good at dodging taxes (they can afford to hire lots of smart people to figure out the loopholes) and most of the money does not end up going to the government at all, but into charitable institutions that fund research and education and other worthy causes chosen by the donors themselves. This isn't reducing wealth, it's recirculating it. The upper few percent of people in this country already control vastly larger amounts of wealth than the bottom 70% or so. The average CEO in this country makes over 400 times what the average worker makes. Repeal the inheritance tax and that money will continue to pile up in the upper few percent's bank accounts while the rest have to work harder and harder to make a buck. It won't turn out well in the end.
I suppose we live in different countries. I live in the calm waters of the USA. Yes, we have a small faction of bandits who want to topple the government, but they are few and far between. Most Americans have it good. Make that...Very good.
Like I said, read some history. Waters don't stay calm forever. We've done pretty well so far, but this nation has only been around about 220 years. That's not very long really. There have been many empires that lasted much longer, but still went down in flames, it was just a matter of time. The founding fathers of this country knew this as well, and Jefferson said as much in his writings. Sooner or later, they believed that the government would likely become corrupt and need to be tossed out, which is one of the main reasons we have the 2nd amendment.
To "ward off" criminals, I always have lived in relatively safe communities and I watch my back (you know, the paranoia thing). I've never been held up at gunpoint, so I must be doing something right.
It's good that it's never happened to you. But there is a large percentage of the population of this country that can't afford to live in safe communities. Watching your back doesn't help much if you don't have a means to defend yourself when you realize you're going to be attacked. I could not, in good conscience deprive people of their means of self-defense.
Maybe I'm an optimist about our nation's future, that political matters will always work themselves out one way or another.
Even my relatively limited knowledge of history would lead me to believe you are one heck of an optimist.
It's just not clear cut which way is the best way to go in regards to whether ordinary folk should be able to possess military-style weapons. IMHO, there's danger in either direction.
I agree that there is danger in either direction, but I believe that the greater danger lies in the power of the government, which when sufficiently corrupted can become tyrranical enough to spark the sort of revolution that would require that the citizenship be armed and prepared to throw that government out and replace it with one that will once again be accountable to the people of this country. Corrupt governments rarely go without a fight.
if you look at it objectively, you KNOW that guns should be banned, however, because of the amazing amount of cash this industry represents nothing is done against it, and as a result 10 year olds are blowing each others heads off.
What a load of crap. You are obviously right, huh? Those of us who disagree must not be looking at it objectively, huh? That's insulting and it does nothing to support an argument against guns. This country wouldn't exist without guns, and we may need them again someday for that very reason. Then there is the issue of self-defense and defense of family and property. I would not deprive anyone of one of the most effective tools for self-defense. Quite often you don't even need to fire the weapon to deter a criminal.
It's already been demonstrated with the drug war and prohibition here in the U.S. that you can't prevent things from being brought into the country if there is a demand for them. You can just drive up the cost and create more criminal activity. Criminals will still get guns. Better to let non-criminals have an equally effective means of self-defense. The police are not there to defend you. They show up later and take pictures of your corpse.
I am not a gun owner, but I support people's right to own guns. For you to portray the issue as being black-and-white simply because some kids have been killed by the misuse of guns is disengenuous. In most of the cases involving children being killed, there was a lot more going on than just the kid getting ahold of a gun. It's not a simple issue and we don't yet have all the answers, but that does not mean that a ban is the answer. That was the answer that was tried with alcohol and didn't work. That was the answer that was tried with drugs, and here we are 20 years later and the country is still awash in drugs and our prisons are full. Bans are something that politicians use to get the weak-minded, uninformed voters all worked up and emotional so that they'll go out and vote for them. In reality they usually accomplish little towards a positive outcome, and often are counter-productive.
But really, can't we just hunt and protect ourselves with standard rifles and pistols? Why the military weaponry?
Seems to me that it depends entirely on what you might have to defend yourself against. If it's a burglar with a knife or pistol, then a standard pistol or rifle might be enough. Of course having an H&K MP5 handy would probably scare the hell out of the burglar and you wouldn't have to use it anyway.
Now, if it came down to revolution time (which, history tells us, does happen every few hundred years at least due to the tendency of governments to become increasingly corrupt over time), it would be good for the citizens of the country to be able to defend themselves against well-equiped police and military units when necessary. Now there are many arguments on this subject having to do with whether or not a civilian force can compete against M1A1 tanks and F-16 fighters if it came down to that. Well that's deceptive really. It wouldn't be a stand-up fight. It would be a guerilla war and it's quite likely that the military would be operating significantly under normal strength (due to those who would refuse to fight and/or resign/desert). I'm not advocating revolution here. I'm just pointing out that its historically inevitable that it will happen, and that we, as citizens, should not allow ourselves to be further disarmed by our government. I don't have a problem with violent felons being denied the right to purchase firearms. I do take issue with generally law-abiding citizens being denied that right.
Additionally, new weapons laws are quite likely to have little to no positive effect on murder rates or violence in general. Usually, criminals who use a gun to commit a crime have already broken half a dozen or more gun laws in the process. I think something on the order of 17 laws were broken in the Columbine killings. What difference would it make to these people if they break another law or two?
It's already been demonstrated with the drug war that you can't prevent things from being brought into the country if there is a demand for them. You can just drive up the cost and create more criminal activity. Criminals will still get guns. Better to let non-criminals have a means of self-defense. The police are not there to defend you. They show up later and take pictures of your corpse.
Next point. Gun accidents. Yes, they happen. No, a family member or friend is not more likely to be killed by the gun than an intruder or attacker unless you add in suicides and incidents where the attacker is a family member or "friend" (which, for the purposes of the study, usually translates to "someone whose name you know"). That assertion is just anti-gun propoganda.
All things considered, I believe that citizens should be allowed to own weapons, even automatic weapons. I've been thinking about the licensing and registration issues a bit. I'm definitely against registration due to the near inevitability that it will be used to aid in confiscation if the politacal winds begin to blow in that direction. Licensing is a bit tougher to decide on. I would prefer that gun-owners demonstrate some competency in using and taking care of their weapons. I don't want a license to be used to aid confiscation efforts by tying you to a particular gun purchase though. If there was a way to license people without helping the government to keep track of us and our purchases, I might support that.
This is why we need a revamp of the tax system in this country. We need to get rid of income taxes and just institute a national sales tax. Then when Bill Gates wants to buy a second yacht, he will pay a tax on that consumption. Just like I would pay a tax when I buy new computer parts. You consume more, you pay more taxes. That seems like a better way to do it.
There are now many exceptions to the orginal law that created the SSN. Businesses are allowed to require your SSN before doing business with you. You are not required to give it to them though. Your alternative is to go elsewhere. Sad, but true.
Haven't you considered the possibility that you might be desensitized because you don't think there's anything remotely wrong with having fun blasting people to bits.
Yes, I've considered that. Then I rejected it. I simply don't see the connection between playing Unreal Tournament with my friends and actually killing a human being. For me, there is no connection between the two whatsoever. I have no animosity towards anyone I play with, many of them are good friends of mine. I know I'm not harming anyone. The game is great fun. You get to play as a team and that alone makes it better than most single-player games. I also play paintball sometimes. I don't consider that to be violent either. The field owners go to great lengths to make sure nobody gets hurt. Players also take precautions and play by certain rules so that nobody gets hurt. There just isn't any sort of violent mindset involved as far as I can tell. It's more a spirit of cooperation, teamwork and sportsmanship like you'd find in other sports.
I think many of these video games are very similar to sports. Football is quite physically violent, but people don't get upset that millions of kids play football every day. Yet they do get upset that kids play "violent" video games together. Why do you think that is? Many people get injured, and once in a great while even killed, playing football. I don't know of anyone who has been injured or killed playing a video game. (well, aside from some wrist strain after playing for too long at a time.) Kids who play real sports are (in my own experience) often violent towards other kids. It's never the math geeks going around beating other people up. It's the football players, the basketball players, etc. I'm not saying there is a causal link between violent sports and violence against others, but it would probably be a lot easier to build a case for that than to build a case for video games causing violence.
Second, while the article certainly didn't prove (or even try to) that there was any connection between the drop in real violence and the increase in violent games, the drop in violence is real. People are becoming more and more hysterical about violence among children even as the number of incidents has been dropping steadily and substantially for years. Why do you think that is?
And it's not their religion which tells them to do it - it's their culture - what everyone around them says is tolerable or even the right thing. They've been desensitized.
They've been desensitized by real violence, not by pointing a mouse cursor at a character on their computer screen and firing a big green ball of lightning at him. People have grown up with such violence being a part of their everyday lives. The boys grow up to be like the men around them who are their role models. They see how the men treat the women and they do the same. That's what desensitizes them. Real life.
You don't change whole nations in one generation, you do it in a few steps. And you usually start with the kids.
It starts with adults. Kids learn from them. They learn to be like the adults. They don't grow up in a vacuum. They usually have plenty of people around them. It's those people who teach them how to act (or in some cases neglect them which leads to a whole separate set of problems which can also lead to violence). Perhaps if kids were raised without proper guidance and in a bad environment, they could learn bad things from tv, movies, music, games, etc. But I don't think those things are to blame. It's the fact that the child is growing up in an environment where he/she is not given the attention and guidance needed to grow up to be a well-adjusted adult.
Hmm, what sort of "goal" is it to blow someone up with a rocket launcher? Or sneak up on someone to shoot them in the back Rainbow 6 style? Does that help you build your socializing or "team" skills? Do you even understand how bad that sounds?
Seems to me that if you maintain even a casual relationship with reality, you would realize that you aren't really blowing people up with rocket launchers or shooting people in the back. You're playing a game in which your character is put in a position where such things are expected, and even necessary for that character's survival. It's not a real situation. It's not a real environment. Those aren't real people. It's nothing more than a game. If someone can't understand that, then they have larger problems and probably shouldn't be playing those sorts of games, but that's probably a decision to be made by a psychiatrist. I don't see games having any sort of desesitizing effect on normal, well-adjusted people. They understand that the game is not real, nor are the actions performed in the game something you would do in reality.
And that is why I don't buy the "media violence doesn't influence viewers" arguement. Violence is not entertaiment. If you think that it is, you should see a therapist. Now.
Thanks for your opinion doctor. Oh wait. You aren't a doctor, are you? I've played video games for as long as I can remember. Since I first got my hands on an atari. Everything from Combat to Unreal Tournament. Yet I've never harmed anyone. Don't even own a gun. Violence is not something that just seeps into you from playing a game. It requires hate and/or fear as well. I don't feel any of that when I play games. It's just fun and challenging to play with teams of people toward a common goal. I have a blast playing games. It doesn't make me angry or violent. I think it's ridiculous to even suggest such a thing. Perhaps you'd be more accurate saying that if video games make you angry or more prone to violence you should see a therapist.
Umm, am I missing something or did you just go and do the same thing by picking another easy target - the parents? *DING* You win 5 hypocrite points...
Well, maybe he's as sick as a lot of us are that parents don't seem to ever shoulder any of the blame when some kid hauls off and shoots somebody. As soon as it happens, reporters and cops and everyone else start digging to see what games the kid plays and whether he spends time on the internet or not. Nevermind that his mom is a crack addict and her boyfriend is a dealer who leaves guns laying around the house. Nah.. it's gotta be the video games.
Parents are supposed to take responsibility for their children. That includes deciding what games they should be allowed to play, what they should be able to watch on tv, what they should read, what they should be allowed to do. You can't just point your finger at the games and declare that they are to blame. Trying pointing at the parent for letting the child play the games or for not taking an interest in the child enough to know that there was a problem and trouble was coming. Parents seem to think they can just have all the kids they want and society is supposed to make sure they turn out alright. Time for them to wake up.
Secure handgun storage? Child safety locks? These aren't gun bans.
No, but they do effectively render the gun useless in the event of an emergency in which you need it (i.e. someone breaks into your house or your ex-spouse is trying to break in the door to kill you). Not much better than a ban really.
These two bills are intended solely to prevent children from reaching guns and hurting themselves/others with them.
While I can appreciate the intent, I can't condone their tactics. Education, training, and enforcement of existing laws would be a lot more likely to prevent such things from happening and we'd still have a means of self-defense that was worth a damn when we need it. Look at the situations where a kid gets ahold of a gun. Often the parents or others are fscked up beyond belief and leave the guns laying around for the kids to pick up and walk off with. Think more laws are gonna fix that problem?
That's a load of BS. It's only true if you include suicides, which is a stupid thing to include because it's intentional and self-inflicted. If there wasn't a gun handy, the person would prolly just down a bottle of pills or something.
Hitler was elected. It doesn't make much difference when the majority of the people are sheep who are easily deceived.
Near as I can tell (unless I'm misreading this) the Constitution says that treaties override the Constitution and the laws of the states.
AND ALL TREATIES made, or which shall be made under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
onerously burdening him with a system which is useless even for the purpose for which it was created.
You'd have a point, except for the fact that the customer isn't buying the hardware for the purpose for which it was created. It was created to suit the RIAA, not the consumer. The consumer just has to use it because their won't be an alternative. Consumers won't care a bit if the system is cracked... the RIAA might though, but that's their problem. If they tried to make consumers buy yet another set of hardware, you'd REALLY see a backlash like none we've seen yet. I'm not talking about a Divx-like backlash where people just boycott the thing. I'm talking about something more along the lines of firebombing the RIAA headquarters in the middle of the night sort of backlash. Basically, they wouldn't be able to pull it off. So consumers would have a system that does what they want, but not what the RIAA wants. Sounds good to me.
Wholly absent from the debate seems to be a coherent vision of what the future should be, how corporations can survive in the digital age and still make money from their efforts.
There's actually been quite a bit of discussion about this. People know that corporations exist to make money. They know that there's no getting around that. Micropayments has been the most popular suggestion as near as I can tell. The problem is that corporations aren't just trying to adapt their business models to the digital way of doing things. They're looking at it as an opportunity to increase their control over their "intellectual property" to the point that we, as consumers, can't do anything with it that they don't want us to do and that we haven't paid through the nose for permission to do. Once they've got their laws in place and the technology to exploit those laws, they can increase their revenues significantly because there is no competition. Anyone who doesn't play their game is out in the cold.
They've screwed people enough with conventional tactics in the real world. They buy legislation to extend copyrights, even retroactively(which is my biggest gripe about them). They engage in price-fixing. They screw artists whenever possible. Now they're trying to screw us even harder in the digital world. They've gotten the DMCA passed (by a voice vote no less), UCITA is being adopted by the states (slowly though, but it won't matter since you will be dragged to the state of the corporation's choice and sued under that state's laws), and now they're breaking out the lawsuits to try out their newly acquired legislation.
These corporations have too damn much power and we should not let ourselves be beaten into submission by them. They are the enemy! Let there be no mistaking that. They are not just a company out to make an honest profit by providing consumers with a good product. They are a cartel out to monopolize a market and turn copyright law into a grotesque shadow of what it was intended to be. They are out to ensure that fair use becomes nothing but a fond memory and reverse engineering is made illegal. We should be doing everything in our power to stop them. The main barrier to this is the fact that the people lobbying for legislation such as the DMCA are the same people who control the media in all its forms. Most people are completely ignorant of what's going on because you don't hear about it on tv or read about it in the paper. As long as only a few know about and understand what is going on, the media industries can continue to plunder our rights.
Sure there's something wrong with it. It's giving the record industry free assistance in their attempts to increase their control over digital music, just as the movie industry is trying to do for digital video. Helping them acheive their goals is, IMO, wrong because those goals are wrong. Of course, obviously not everyone shares my opinion, or at least they are using some different logic to justify assisting the record industry by cracking SDMI.
I think politics should stay the hell out of the courts. If Microsoft broke the law, they deserve to be punished. We shouldn't let them get off with another slap on the wrist. That didn't work last time and I can't think of any reason it would work this time.
I use MS products because I choose them. Not because they are forced on me.
And you probably consider the fact that Dell, Compaq, etc, preinstall Windows on every desktop machine to be a convenience for you. Or at least you don't mind it. Whereas someone who does not want to use Windows cannot buy from any of the top ten or more major OEMs because they cannot purchase a computer without also purchasing Windows. The OEMs don't like this. The customers don't like this. So why is it done? Because Microsoft decided that's how it would be done.