I've known someone who was ranting about those "damn liberals and their socialist programs, trying to push socialist health care on us now" *while* filling out forms to apply for Medicare.
People kind of have a taste for meat though. I don't think anyone is selling this as "the solution to oil dependence" or anything, but it *is* a way to recycle waste from a food production process that will occur anyways. Other than people liking short sound-bitey things I don't know why everyone has this need for there to be a single tech that solves all energy problems in the work.
Combustible liquid fuels powering ICE-powered cars is the situation for the near future. Given that, anything that lets us turn waste from one process ro another into supplemental fuel without doing so at a loss (as in more energy from converting waste->fuel than we get from the fuel, as in you don't get to count the energy spent to produce whatever the waste is the waste from -- you aren't raising chicken for fuel [that would be ridiculous], you're raising chickens for food and using the waste from that process for fuel) is a good thing.
"Personally, I'm against abortion in principle unless it's an unusually dangerous pregnancy for the mother or the result of rape or incest."
That's more or less my stance on the issue, if you throw in a "However, I don't feel it's my right to enforce my moral view on everyone else using the force of government -- accordingly I'm pro choice if only because I feel that it's a grave moral choice that belongs to the woman and no one else. Making it illegal won't stop it, merely make it less safe."
Some of the cheeses sold in Amish country are decent, but don't trust any from a place where noone on the staff has the surname Yoder, cause there's a few places that sell "Amish" cheese, and should feel bad that they don't do finger quotes every time they say it.
Yes yes, churches toe the line dangerously closely to being a political organization most of the time. They still aren't *really* a political organization in any sense, and can actually lose their tax-exempt status for directly pushing a political agenda (rare, but it has happened).
There's a difference between legitimate disability and "welfare families", and I've personally known people in both cases.
You work around disabilities where possible and include them in the program to whatever degree they are physically capable of. If they are honestly "totally disabled", at that point it's OK to exclude them entirely, but that's the exception, not the rule.
Hence the comment about letting nonprofits and/or local gov't have them on request. If you think local gov'ts have salaried people doing everything that needs done, I can tell you haven't been in small town anywhere anytime recently. There's always litter to pick, meters to read, groundskeeping, or something that isn't kept up to par.
Even then, the goal isn't entirely about getting too much useful work out of them, but rather about making seeking legitimate employment preferable because it's bound to be easier and/or better pay than what we're offering as welfare.
You make it sound as though one party is the very educated leading around the poor and the other is the very successful leading around the not quite as poor but still having an income several digits smaller -- both cases to push their own beliefs.
In the case that you are very educated and very successful, you can go either way.
Remmeber, one side is a bunch of theocrats who want to actively subvert the Constitution to create a fascist police state and the other is a bunch of baby murderers who want to actively subvert the Constitution to steal your guns.
Might I propose a Constitutional Amendment that elects politicians to office by lottery of the general public? It can't be much worse! =p
Spending cuts from wherever it's not absolutely necessary (and I hate to say this, but defense has a significant bit of fat to trim -- I'm not saying anything extreme and ridiculous like that we don't need a military, or our troops don't need body armor or something, just that we go to excess in the name of funneling money into defense contractors currently).
Make all the "welfare" programs into "workfare" -- there's always some public work somewhere we can throw people at, and if all else fails let smaller governments (as in local) as well as nonpolitical nonprofits (churches, charities, and the like) request laborers from the pool; the whole point being to make them work for their living, even if their on the government dole. Specifically we don't want it to be nice work (we want people to prefer having a "legitimate" job), we want it to be a "I have no other choice, but at least picking litter off the interstate is better than going hungry."
No tax cuts, at least not for a while. Cutting expenses doesn't help reduce debt if you also cut revenue. Devise a specific plan for debt reduction, and do not reduce taxes until we've got it back under control.
Require a budget be balanced on average. Running a deficit during a recession helps recovery, but it's only a good endeavor if you then pay down the deficit once the economy has recovered. Persistent debt is not desirable in any way.
Because his first thought wasn't "I can take away features they already have at the current price and charge them extra to get them back?" That's business logic for you. =)
...as opposed to access that is a fraction of the speed it could be because the only competition is between one DSL and one cable provider who have no desire to upgrade in any form because the other guy hasn't already?
"Sigh... but that still won't stop people from screeching to the heavens about the gubmint stealin' thar medicare." -- while at the same time screaming about the evils of socialized medicine and how the very concept needs to be fought and/or destroyed at every turn, while filling out the medicare forms, no less.
Really, the solution there is to have government ownership of the lines, with each participator in the market paying a percentage of the upkeep of the lines relative to marketshare. Infrastructure is one of those things that really *should* be in the hands of government, not because government is necessarily better at handling them, but because infrastructure is one of those things that needs to exist for the common good. Specifically because it *is* unreasonable to run a half dozen sets of pipes for each utility, and if the lines themselves are privately owned, guess who has a massive market advantage sufficient to squelch all competition?
You'll have the same 2-ish options you have now, except Google will need to have a higher revenue somehow because you won't be able to connect to Google at a reasonable speed unless Google pays your ISP as well for the honor of letting you connect to them without having their connection degraded.
It'll all but kill ad-supported web services entirely.
Personally, I'd offer the ISPs the option to be a common carrier -- if you're a common carrier by definition you can't tinker with the connection based upon it's contents, source, or destination but you also aren't responsible for those contents. If you aren't, then you, as the ISP, are now legally liable for everything your customers do on your connection -- in altering the connection in a content/source/destination sensitive way you are claiming responsibility for that content.
That'd be the fastest way to ensure net neutrality while still giving the ISPs the option to ignore the concept entirely.
"I trust the party enough that I don't even consider knowing who they put forward relevant, just that he's the Democrat/Republican/whatever" is quite frankly one of our biggest problems.
Presumably you'd show him the "fake" result if you weren't really going to vote for his guy -- again though, how do I know the "fake" result will be the result the guy who is paying/threatening me wants to see?
My biggest complaint with our ballots lies with the two things I feel shouldn't be on ballots whatsoever -- there shouldn't be a "fill in this bubble for a straight party ticket" option, and the parties of the candidates should not be mentioned on the ballot. It should be as difficult as possible for someone whose stance is "I have no real opinion, but I'm a , so I'll vote for their guy" to vote. You should at *least* have to know who "their guy" is.
In WV we do something similar. They look you up in the register and tear off a stub with your number in the register on it, and write the ballot number on that, then hand you a paper scantron ballot in a plastic privacy folder. You go into a little booth that resembles a lectern with privacy screens to fill it out, then hand your stub and ballot (in the folder) to the scantron operator. He checks that the ballot you handed him matches the stub, places the folder against the input slot on the machine, and pushes the ballot in via a tab cut out of the other end of the folder for that purpose. If the ballot fails to scan, it is returned. If it scans successfully it is deposited by the machine in a locked storage box, and your stub is dropped in a separate locked box.
The net result is that we can do significant auditing, but we have a layer of indirection where you have to have the ballots, the register, and the stubs all three to know who voted for whom, and all three are simply not used together like that, since you can check for stuffed ballots, or illegitimate voters using only 2/3.
A flight boards in the US going to another target in the US. How do you prioritize who gets "extra" attention?
Next thing you know, you'll tell me that in practice the Arizona law wasn't going to be preferentially enforced against those of Mexican descent, especially given that they went out of their way to refer to something that sounds an awful lot like probable cause without saying probable cause because that phrase has some underlying legal baggage.
Heh, the only text adventures I really played heavily were the so called Time & Magik trilogy. I remember playing enough to beat 2/3 (Lords of Time and Red Moon), but I'd always get killed, age to death, or go insane trying to get through the Price of Magik.
Obvious question given your final example, but prior to 9/11/2001, we should have been strip searching all the white american christian males and letting those of arab descent pass through unmolested, right? Since prior to 9/11/2001, the largest terrorist act performed against the US was done so by a white american christian male, specifically timothy mcveigh, correct?
Seems to me like the logical extension of "search all the brown people, let everyone else through."
Slashdot Mirror
I've known someone who was ranting about those "damn liberals and their socialist programs, trying to push socialist health care on us now" *while* filling out forms to apply for Medicare.
People kind of have a taste for meat though. I don't think anyone is selling this as "the solution to oil dependence" or anything, but it *is* a way to recycle waste from a food production process that will occur anyways. Other than people liking short sound-bitey things I don't know why everyone has this need for there to be a single tech that solves all energy problems in the work.
Combustible liquid fuels powering ICE-powered cars is the situation for the near future. Given that, anything that lets us turn waste from one process ro another into supplemental fuel without doing so at a loss (as in more energy from converting waste->fuel than we get from the fuel, as in you don't get to count the energy spent to produce whatever the waste is the waste from -- you aren't raising chicken for fuel [that would be ridiculous], you're raising chickens for food and using the waste from that process for fuel) is a good thing.
Wife Husbandry?
"Personally, I'm against abortion in principle unless it's an unusually dangerous pregnancy for the mother or the result of rape or incest."
That's more or less my stance on the issue, if you throw in a "However, I don't feel it's my right to enforce my moral view on everyone else using the force of government -- accordingly I'm pro choice if only because I feel that it's a grave moral choice that belongs to the woman and no one else. Making it illegal won't stop it, merely make it less safe."
Some of the cheeses sold in Amish country are decent, but don't trust any from a place where noone on the staff has the surname Yoder, cause there's a few places that sell "Amish" cheese, and should feel bad that they don't do finger quotes every time they say it.
Yes yes, churches toe the line dangerously closely to being a political organization most of the time. They still aren't *really* a political organization in any sense, and can actually lose their tax-exempt status for directly pushing a political agenda (rare, but it has happened).
There's a difference between legitimate disability and "welfare families", and I've personally known people in both cases.
You work around disabilities where possible and include them in the program to whatever degree they are physically capable of. If they are honestly "totally disabled", at that point it's OK to exclude them entirely, but that's the exception, not the rule.
Hence the comment about letting nonprofits and/or local gov't have them on request. If you think local gov'ts have salaried people doing everything that needs done, I can tell you haven't been in small town anywhere anytime recently. There's always litter to pick, meters to read, groundskeeping, or something that isn't kept up to par.
Even then, the goal isn't entirely about getting too much useful work out of them, but rather about making seeking legitimate employment preferable because it's bound to be easier and/or better pay than what we're offering as welfare.
You make it sound as though one party is the very educated leading around the poor and the other is the very successful leading around the not quite as poor but still having an income several digits smaller -- both cases to push their own beliefs.
In the case that you are very educated and very successful, you can go either way.
Remmeber, one side is a bunch of theocrats who want to actively subvert the Constitution to create a fascist police state and the other is a bunch of baby murderers who want to actively subvert the Constitution to steal your guns.
Might I propose a Constitutional Amendment that elects politicians to office by lottery of the general public? It can't be much worse! =p
1. They probably waived liability to be in the test to begin with.
2. It sounds like the alteration in learning ability is temporary, but the ability to recall what was learned in that time is lasting.
3. How long before we have "electrify your learning" helmets, or does this process require opening the skull?
Spending cuts from wherever it's not absolutely necessary (and I hate to say this, but defense has a significant bit of fat to trim -- I'm not saying anything extreme and ridiculous like that we don't need a military, or our troops don't need body armor or something, just that we go to excess in the name of funneling money into defense contractors currently).
Make all the "welfare" programs into "workfare" -- there's always some public work somewhere we can throw people at, and if all else fails let smaller governments (as in local) as well as nonpolitical nonprofits (churches, charities, and the like) request laborers from the pool; the whole point being to make them work for their living, even if their on the government dole. Specifically we don't want it to be nice work (we want people to prefer having a "legitimate" job), we want it to be a "I have no other choice, but at least picking litter off the interstate is better than going hungry."
No tax cuts, at least not for a while. Cutting expenses doesn't help reduce debt if you also cut revenue. Devise a specific plan for debt reduction, and do not reduce taxes until we've got it back under control.
Require a budget be balanced on average. Running a deficit during a recession helps recovery, but it's only a good endeavor if you then pay down the deficit once the economy has recovered. Persistent debt is not desirable in any way.
Because his first thought wasn't "I can take away features they already have at the current price and charge them extra to get them back?" That's business logic for you. =)
...as opposed to access that is a fraction of the speed it could be because the only competition is between one DSL and one cable provider who have no desire to upgrade in any form because the other guy hasn't already?
"Sigh... but that still won't stop people from screeching to the heavens about the gubmint stealin' thar medicare." -- while at the same time screaming about the evils of socialized medicine and how the very concept needs to be fought and/or destroyed at every turn, while filling out the medicare forms, no less.
Really, the solution there is to have government ownership of the lines, with each participator in the market paying a percentage of the upkeep of the lines relative to marketshare. Infrastructure is one of those things that really *should* be in the hands of government, not because government is necessarily better at handling them, but because infrastructure is one of those things that needs to exist for the common good. Specifically because it *is* unreasonable to run a half dozen sets of pipes for each utility, and if the lines themselves are privately owned, guess who has a massive market advantage sufficient to squelch all competition?
Because it won't work like that.
You'll have the same 2-ish options you have now, except Google will need to have a higher revenue somehow because you won't be able to connect to Google at a reasonable speed unless Google pays your ISP as well for the honor of letting you connect to them without having their connection degraded.
It'll all but kill ad-supported web services entirely.
Personally, I'd offer the ISPs the option to be a common carrier -- if you're a common carrier by definition you can't tinker with the connection based upon it's contents, source, or destination but you also aren't responsible for those contents. If you aren't, then you, as the ISP, are now legally liable for everything your customers do on your connection -- in altering the connection in a content/source/destination sensitive way you are claiming responsibility for that content.
That'd be the fastest way to ensure net neutrality while still giving the ISPs the option to ignore the concept entirely.
"I trust the party enough that I don't even consider knowing who they put forward relevant, just that he's the Democrat/Republican/whatever" is quite frankly one of our biggest problems.
Presumably you'd show him the "fake" result if you weren't really going to vote for his guy -- again though, how do I know the "fake" result will be the result the guy who is paying/threatening me wants to see?
Prove to me that the false vote will be the one the guy intimidating/paying me wants to see, and not the "wrong" false vote.
My biggest complaint with our ballots lies with the two things I feel shouldn't be on ballots whatsoever -- there shouldn't be a "fill in this bubble for a straight party ticket" option, and the parties of the candidates should not be mentioned on the ballot. It should be as difficult as possible for someone whose stance is "I have no real opinion, but I'm a , so I'll vote for their guy" to vote. You should at *least* have to know who "their guy" is.
In WV we do something similar. They look you up in the register and tear off a stub with your number in the register on it, and write the ballot number on that, then hand you a paper scantron ballot in a plastic privacy folder. You go into a little booth that resembles a lectern with privacy screens to fill it out, then hand your stub and ballot (in the folder) to the scantron operator. He checks that the ballot you handed him matches the stub, places the folder against the input slot on the machine, and pushes the ballot in via a tab cut out of the other end of the folder for that purpose. If the ballot fails to scan, it is returned. If it scans successfully it is deposited by the machine in a locked storage box, and your stub is dropped in a separate locked box.
The net result is that we can do significant auditing, but we have a layer of indirection where you have to have the ballots, the register, and the stubs all three to know who voted for whom, and all three are simply not used together like that, since you can check for stuffed ballots, or illegitimate voters using only 2/3.
A flight boards in the US going to another target in the US. How do you prioritize who gets "extra" attention?
Next thing you know, you'll tell me that in practice the Arizona law wasn't going to be preferentially enforced against those of Mexican descent, especially given that they went out of their way to refer to something that sounds an awful lot like probable cause without saying probable cause because that phrase has some underlying legal baggage.
Heh, the only text adventures I really played heavily were the so called Time & Magik trilogy. I remember playing enough to beat 2/3 (Lords of Time and Red Moon), but I'd always get killed, age to death, or go insane trying to get through the Price of Magik.
Obvious question given your final example, but prior to 9/11/2001, we should have been strip searching all the white american christian males and letting those of arab descent pass through unmolested, right? Since prior to 9/11/2001, the largest terrorist act performed against the US was done so by a white american christian male, specifically timothy mcveigh, correct?
Seems to me like the logical extension of "search all the brown people, let everyone else through."