Someone else had already addressed the comparison to the German economy (hint, reunification took the wind out of the sails of the German economy for considerably less than two decades). I was going to address several points to what you said. However, ultimately the gap between the economic situation in North and South Korea is so much greater than what existed between East and West Germany that it is hard to say how the Korea experience would compare to that of Germany.
That being said, my point remains, no matter how much like carrion crows "Western" (most likely South Korean) industrialists might be if allowed to intervene in North Korea, it is hard to imagine them making things worse than they already are.
By which you mean inviting in our economic hit men and accepting loans?
OK, what possible harm can these "economic hit men" do? It is not like it is possible to make the economic situation in North Korea any worse than it already is.
I had a discussion with three or four people who insisted on defending Chris Dorner, mostly with little information (at least two of them thought he was fired by the LAPD within the last year).
When I say that the victim was unreliable what I mean is that he had a tendency to answer "yes" to all yes-or-no questions. In addition, he described the officer who struck him as "almost black" with dark hair. The officer whom Dorner accused of kicking the victim was blonde with fair skin.
If Dorner had made these accusations in a rational manner (rather than the rambling insane "manifesto" which he released) and not after beginning a murderous rampage that included killing his own attorney's daughter and her fiance, I would be inclined to believe him, but considering the circumstances I am inclined to disbelieve him. This does not mean that I know and trust the LAPD, just that Dorner has demonstrated that, in this case, the LAPD acted appropriately in firing him.
He was fired in by the LAPD in 2008. Currently he appears to have killed his own attorney's daughter and her fiance as part of this rampage against the "injustice" of being fired over four years ago. His job with the LAPD appears to be his first job after completing his enlistment in the U.S. Navy. He waited over four years after he was fired to go on a rampage. As far as I can tell, he made no other attempts to get his allegations of police brutality addressed in the meantime. So, yes, I believe that it was just a matter of time until Dorner went on a killing spree, even if he was still a member of the LAPD. (Of course in that latter case, if his victims were not police officers, the LAPD would be covering up for him rather than attempting apprehend him).
And he sure as hell isn't going on a rampage of revenge over a merely satisfactory evaluation.
No, he is going on a rampage of revenge over getting fired. If he had made these allegations in a format that did not suggest that he was a loose canon, I would agree with you. The police have lost the benefit of the doubt (especially the LAPD). However, Dorner has made himself even less credible than the LAPD (and that takes some doing).
Dorner's actions in this rampage indicate that the LAPD made the correct choice in firing him. There are already too many police officers who believe that they have the right to use the power of their position to enact revenge against they perceive as having wronged them. Now if only the LAPD would fire the rest of the megalomaniac officers.
The victim was an unreliable witness because of his mental problems, the victim's father based his testimony on the victim's statements (meaning that the father's testimony was of limited value). That being said, those statements lend credibility to Dorner's complaint. However, weighed against that is the fact that he made the allegation two weeks after the incident and the day after his mentor had given him an evaluation that critiqued him for certain aspects of his learning to do the job (the mentor evaluated him as "satisfactory" but it is likely that when they explained his evaluation to him they explained to him that his shortcomings were critical and failure to improve them could cost him his job).
The difference being that in the U.S. the government has to justify going against the clear wording of the Constitution in order to limit speech: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech,..." There is no clause in there saying, "except in those cases where the government deems it necessary..." One can certainly argue about the way that the Constitution is applied, but the wording leaves no wiggle room. Actually, I would argue that the people of the U.S. have decided that they no longer care about the Constitution, they want a government that "gets things done" and have election after election voted for people who are willing to bend the Constitution until we have reached the point where the President can do what he likes as long as those responsible for following his instructions are willing to go along with it. For example, our current President has offered waivers to legal requirements that there is no legal basis for providing waivers to. He has stated that he is not going to enforce certain laws that he does not like. He has promised companies that the government will pay the penalties for not complying with certain laws where their compliance would have been politically detrimental to him. He has ordered people to pay for services that are a violation of their religious beliefs. Understand that these examples are merely to show that we have arrived at the point where the President no longer feels bound to give anything more than the most transparent lip service to the Constitution, not an indictment of this particular President. We got to this point bit by bit. This President's predecessor signed a law that he felt was unconstitutional because he felt it was politically necessary, stating at the time that he expected the Supreme Court to overturn the law.
Forcing everything to be done in the open and audited makes it obvious if you are corrupt and so it's far easier to stay straight.
That is not about regulations...and neither was the example given by the OP. They are about how the regulations are set up AND it is much easier to enforce open and honest regulation if there is not very much of it. When you have so many laws and regulations that no one person can possible know all of them, then you will see corruption increase.
So, in other words, "Your freedom of expression is absolute, except in those cases where the government deems it necessary to restrict it in order to protect children (necessary and protect being defined by the government)."
Regulation, when done well, is almost impossible to corrupt.
I'm sorry but that statement needs some evidence to support it, as my experience indicates that increasing government regulation always results in increasing corruption.
No, I stand by my original comparison. I find the "fit and finish" of Chrysler products to be extremely cheap looking. I find the order process to place an order from HP to be extremely byzantine, generally I give up before I figure out whether they even offer the configuration I am looking for.
You switched to HP because Dell's order process was so frustrating and complex? Isn't that like switching to Chrysler because you thinks GM's "finish" quality looks cheap?
There have been studies which show that caffeine is absorbed into the system more rapidly from coffee than from tea. However, the caffeine from coffee is also processed back out of the body faster when it comes from coffee than from tea (however, I do not know if the latter effect is anything more than the fact that the body cannot start filtering the caffeine out until after it is absorbed). I started drinking a cup of coffee first thing after I get up and a cup of tea when I get to work and have observed that I no longer get sleepy about an hour before lunch (although I still get sleepy about two hours after lunch).
I cannot find the study at the moment, but I remember reading a study a few years back that said that if you adjust for single parent vs married parent households, the discrepancy between whites and blacks when it comes to being arrested for crime disappears.
Members of government such as Barney Frank (among many many others in both Republican and Democrat parties) absolutely denied that a housing bubble existed when opposing legislation to do something about it.
What was great about that is that Barney Frank was chosen, along with one of the other more vocal deniers of the housing bubble, Chris Dodd, to draft the legislation to "fix" the banking problems that created the housing bubble in the first place.
My question is, why haven't they finished their homework by the time the public library closes? The public libraries around me are open until 9 or 10 pm. You should be able to finish your homework long before then.
And that is why nobody takes fact checkers seriously. Because Politifact only does that to Republicans. If it is a Democrat, all they worry about is whether the explicit fact stated is correct.
The problem is not the civil engineers (at least probably not). It is probably the fact that the political appointees over ruled the traffic experts for some political reason. What makes this especially difficult is that you can't just fix it by making it so the political appointees can't over rule the subject matter "experts" because than you have no way to hold those subject matter "experts" accountable. Either the political appointees (the people who answer to the people who answer to the voters) can fire the subject matter experts (and if they can do that, they make it be known that if the subject matter experts don't do it their way they will be fired) or the subject matter experts are not accountable to anybody.
If Harvard took cheating seriously, they would be investigating their faculty. They just discovered that their "Native American" professor lied about being Native American after she left to run for Senate. If she lied about that, how many other faculty members have lied about similarly difficult things to confirm, but which provide them with a step up? Her husband is still employed there and he almost certainly knew she was lying.
The "lie" was not that jeeps would be made in china. The lie was that "American jobs were being outsourced and lost because Chrysler would build Jeeps in China."
Except of course that nowhere did the ad say "American jobs were being outsourced and lost because Chrysler would build Jeeps in China." That is your opinion of what the ad meant to communicate. Your opinion may be correct, but it is not a statement of fact made in the ad. Therefore it is not the place of a fact checker to call the campaign on it. It would be perfectly acceptable for Politifact to express your opinion in something they called an opinion peice. It is not acceptable for them to take that position in a fact checking article.
See, now you are discussing what you believe that Romney should have said/how he should have made his point. That is not the question. The question is, was the statement, "Chrysler will build Jeeps in China" not just a lie, but the lie of the year? Not only was it not a lie, it was a fact. The theory of fact checkers is that they will check the facts that politicians use and point out when those facts are wrong. In this case, Politifact, as part of a "fact check", called that statement a lie?
You are failing to defend Politifact, you don't have a problem with them calling it a lie because you opposed Romney. This statement by Obama was a bigger lie, "I believe the only way to create an economy built to last is to strengthen the middle class, asking the wealthy to pay a little more so we can pay down our debt in a balanced way," At least by the standard you are using. By my standard, it could not be called so by a Fact Checker because it contains no facts, merely an opinion.
Right, the administration was hamstrung by Congress even though the Democratic Party controlled both Houses of Congress for two of Obama's four years so far and still control the Senate.
Prosecutions for violating existing federal gun laws are down significantly under Obama. Joe Biden said that they do not have the time and manpower in order to pursue violations of the law on background checks. If the Administration does not enforce existing laws, why should we believe that any new laws will make any positive difference?
Slashdot Mirror
Someone else had already addressed the comparison to the German economy (hint, reunification took the wind out of the sails of the German economy for considerably less than two decades). I was going to address several points to what you said. However, ultimately the gap between the economic situation in North and South Korea is so much greater than what existed between East and West Germany that it is hard to say how the Korea experience would compare to that of Germany.
That being said, my point remains, no matter how much like carrion crows "Western" (most likely South Korean) industrialists might be if allowed to intervene in North Korea, it is hard to imagine them making things worse than they already are.
By what definition would this be harm?
By which you mean inviting in our economic hit men and accepting loans?
OK, what possible harm can these "economic hit men" do? It is not like it is possible to make the economic situation in North Korea any worse than it already is.
I had a discussion with three or four people who insisted on defending Chris Dorner, mostly with little information (at least two of them thought he was fired by the LAPD within the last year).
When I say that the victim was unreliable what I mean is that he had a tendency to answer "yes" to all yes-or-no questions. In addition, he described the officer who struck him as "almost black" with dark hair. The officer whom Dorner accused of kicking the victim was blonde with fair skin.
If Dorner had made these accusations in a rational manner (rather than the rambling insane "manifesto" which he released) and not after beginning a murderous rampage that included killing his own attorney's daughter and her fiance, I would be inclined to believe him, but considering the circumstances I am inclined to disbelieve him. This does not mean that I know and trust the LAPD, just that Dorner has demonstrated that, in this case, the LAPD acted appropriately in firing him.
He was fired in by the LAPD in 2008. Currently he appears to have killed his own attorney's daughter and her fiance as part of this rampage against the "injustice" of being fired over four years ago. His job with the LAPD appears to be his first job after completing his enlistment in the U.S. Navy. He waited over four years after he was fired to go on a rampage. As far as I can tell, he made no other attempts to get his allegations of police brutality addressed in the meantime. So, yes, I believe that it was just a matter of time until Dorner went on a killing spree, even if he was still a member of the LAPD. (Of course in that latter case, if his victims were not police officers, the LAPD would be covering up for him rather than attempting apprehend him).
And he sure as hell isn't going on a rampage of revenge over a merely satisfactory evaluation.
No, he is going on a rampage of revenge over getting fired. If he had made these allegations in a format that did not suggest that he was a loose canon, I would agree with you. The police have lost the benefit of the doubt (especially the LAPD). However, Dorner has made himself even less credible than the LAPD (and that takes some doing).
Dorner's actions in this rampage indicate that the LAPD made the correct choice in firing him. There are already too many police officers who believe that they have the right to use the power of their position to enact revenge against they perceive as having wronged them. Now if only the LAPD would fire the rest of the megalomaniac officers.
The victim was an unreliable witness because of his mental problems, the victim's father based his testimony on the victim's statements (meaning that the father's testimony was of limited value). That being said, those statements lend credibility to Dorner's complaint. However, weighed against that is the fact that he made the allegation two weeks after the incident and the day after his mentor had given him an evaluation that critiqued him for certain aspects of his learning to do the job (the mentor evaluated him as "satisfactory" but it is likely that when they explained his evaluation to him they explained to him that his shortcomings were critical and failure to improve them could cost him his job).
The difference being that in the U.S. the government has to justify going against the clear wording of the Constitution in order to limit speech: "Congress shall make no law ...abridging the freedom of speech,..." There is no clause in there saying, "except in those cases where the government deems it necessary..." One can certainly argue about the way that the Constitution is applied, but the wording leaves no wiggle room. Actually, I would argue that the people of the U.S. have decided that they no longer care about the Constitution, they want a government that "gets things done" and have election after election voted for people who are willing to bend the Constitution until we have reached the point where the President can do what he likes as long as those responsible for following his instructions are willing to go along with it. For example, our current President has offered waivers to legal requirements that there is no legal basis for providing waivers to. He has stated that he is not going to enforce certain laws that he does not like. He has promised companies that the government will pay the penalties for not complying with certain laws where their compliance would have been politically detrimental to him. He has ordered people to pay for services that are a violation of their religious beliefs. Understand that these examples are merely to show that we have arrived at the point where the President no longer feels bound to give anything more than the most transparent lip service to the Constitution, not an indictment of this particular President. We got to this point bit by bit. This President's predecessor signed a law that he felt was unconstitutional because he felt it was politically necessary, stating at the time that he expected the Supreme Court to overturn the law.
Forcing everything to be done in the open and audited makes it obvious if you are corrupt and so it's far easier to stay straight.
That is not about regulations...and neither was the example given by the OP. They are about how the regulations are set up AND it is much easier to enforce open and honest regulation if there is not very much of it. When you have so many laws and regulations that no one person can possible know all of them, then you will see corruption increase.
So, in other words, "Your freedom of expression is absolute, except in those cases where the government deems it necessary to restrict it in order to protect children (necessary and protect being defined by the government)."
Regulation, when done well, is almost impossible to corrupt.
I'm sorry but that statement needs some evidence to support it, as my experience indicates that increasing government regulation always results in increasing corruption.
No, I stand by my original comparison. I find the "fit and finish" of Chrysler products to be extremely cheap looking. I find the order process to place an order from HP to be extremely byzantine, generally I give up before I figure out whether they even offer the configuration I am looking for.
You switched to HP because Dell's order process was so frustrating and complex? Isn't that like switching to Chrysler because you thinks GM's "finish" quality looks cheap?
There have been studies which show that caffeine is absorbed into the system more rapidly from coffee than from tea. However, the caffeine from coffee is also processed back out of the body faster when it comes from coffee than from tea (however, I do not know if the latter effect is anything more than the fact that the body cannot start filtering the caffeine out until after it is absorbed). I started drinking a cup of coffee first thing after I get up and a cup of tea when I get to work and have observed that I no longer get sleepy about an hour before lunch (although I still get sleepy about two hours after lunch).
I cannot find the study at the moment, but I remember reading a study a few years back that said that if you adjust for single parent vs married parent households, the discrepancy between whites and blacks when it comes to being arrested for crime disappears.
Members of government such as Barney Frank (among many many others in both Republican and Democrat parties) absolutely denied that a housing bubble existed when opposing legislation to do something about it.
What was great about that is that Barney Frank was chosen, along with one of the other more vocal deniers of the housing bubble, Chris Dodd, to draft the legislation to "fix" the banking problems that created the housing bubble in the first place.
My question is, why haven't they finished their homework by the time the public library closes? The public libraries around me are open until 9 or 10 pm. You should be able to finish your homework long before then.
And that is why nobody takes fact checkers seriously. Because Politifact only does that to Republicans. If it is a Democrat, all they worry about is whether the explicit fact stated is correct.
The problem is not the civil engineers (at least probably not). It is probably the fact that the political appointees over ruled the traffic experts for some political reason. What makes this especially difficult is that you can't just fix it by making it so the political appointees can't over rule the subject matter "experts" because than you have no way to hold those subject matter "experts" accountable. Either the political appointees (the people who answer to the people who answer to the voters) can fire the subject matter experts (and if they can do that, they make it be known that if the subject matter experts don't do it their way they will be fired) or the subject matter experts are not accountable to anybody.
If Harvard took cheating seriously, they would be investigating their faculty. They just discovered that their "Native American" professor lied about being Native American after she left to run for Senate. If she lied about that, how many other faculty members have lied about similarly difficult things to confirm, but which provide them with a step up? Her husband is still employed there and he almost certainly knew she was lying.
The "lie" was not that jeeps would be made in china. The lie was that "American jobs were being outsourced and lost because Chrysler would build Jeeps in China."
Except of course that nowhere did the ad say "American jobs were being outsourced and lost because Chrysler would build Jeeps in China." That is your opinion of what the ad meant to communicate. Your opinion may be correct, but it is not a statement of fact made in the ad. Therefore it is not the place of a fact checker to call the campaign on it. It would be perfectly acceptable for Politifact to express your opinion in something they called an opinion peice. It is not acceptable for them to take that position in a fact checking article.
See, now you are discussing what you believe that Romney should have said/how he should have made his point. That is not the question. The question is, was the statement, "Chrysler will build Jeeps in China" not just a lie, but the lie of the year? Not only was it not a lie, it was a fact. The theory of fact checkers is that they will check the facts that politicians use and point out when those facts are wrong. In this case, Politifact, as part of a "fact check", called that statement a lie?
You are failing to defend Politifact, you don't have a problem with them calling it a lie because you opposed Romney. This statement by Obama was a bigger lie, "I believe the only way to create an economy built to last is to strengthen the middle class, asking the wealthy to pay a little more so we can pay down our debt in a balanced way," At least by the standard you are using. By my standard, it could not be called so by a Fact Checker because it contains no facts, merely an opinion.
Right, the administration was hamstrung by Congress even though the Democratic Party controlled both Houses of Congress for two of Obama's four years so far and still control the Senate.
Prosecutions for violating existing federal gun laws are down significantly under Obama. Joe Biden said that they do not have the time and manpower in order to pursue violations of the law on background checks. If the Administration does not enforce existing laws, why should we believe that any new laws will make any positive difference?