A recent report from McKinsey, a management consultancy, argues that the lagging performance of the country's school pupils, particularly its poor and minority children, has wreaked more devastation on the economy than the current recession.
I wonder if that's still true. The negative economic effects of a poor education system are enormous and last for a generation; it's good that economists are finally taking an interest in this area, since government unfortunately tends to respond better to economic arguments that contract a complex world into a single dollar/euro value.
I would expect the presence of books in the home to be correlated with parent intelligence, not necessarily parental involvement. Parent intelligene is strongly correlated with child intelligence. I suspect that student intelligence is actually the biggest factor, but this factor is either not studied or not published in the results, because it goes against widely held politically correct ideals.
Actually it has been well researched. If I remember correctly, Freakonomics spends two whole chapters on a readable summary of the research into child test scores. And if I remember correctly, parenting itself has no observable effect on test scores, which is surprising for most people to hear.
The most interesting conclusion here is one that many modern parents may find disturbing: Parenting technique is highly overrated. When it comes to early test scores, it's not so much what you do as a parent, it's who you are.
It is obvious that children of successful, well-educated parents have a built-in advantage over the children of struggling, poorly educated parents. Call it a privilege gap. The child of a young, single mother with limited education and income will typically test about 25 percentile points lower than the child of two married, high-earning parents.
So it isn't that parents don't matter. Clearly, they matter an awful lot. It's just that by the time most parents pick up a book on parenting technique, it's too late. Many of the things that matter most were decided long ago - what kind of education a parent got, how hard he worked to build a career, what kind of spouse he wound up with and how long they waited to have children.
The privilege gap is far more real than the fear that haunts so many modern parents - that their children will fail miserably without regular helpings of culture cramming and competitive parenting. So, yes, parents are entitled to congratulate themselves this month over their children's acceptance letters. But they should also stop kidding themselves: The Mozart tapes had nothing to do with it.
The linked to article is just an overview, there's a lot more content in the actual book.
Read the story again. The argument is for a longer school year, and not necessarily more hours in school.
Bingo. I've thought for a long time that the system of long holidays in school is detrimental to education. I remember being a kid and working hard for tests at the end of the year. Then the summer holidays come, you spend almost 2 months away from school, and forget all the stuff that you were doing before you left. Is it really necessary to have 13 weeks holiday per year? Is it really the best schedule to educate and retain knowledge?
University is even more ridiculous - at an age when many people are working full time jobs, a student gets, or rather is forced, to take 22 weeks a year holiday (we had three terms of ten weeks each). It was very irritating knowing that if the schedule were better managed you could've finished the degree a whole year earlier, still worked fewer hours per week, and been substantially less indebted.
I have known people who look at porn at work, but I find it difficult to be outraged about it. Why? Those guys are paid to do a job, supposed to be 9-5 but the porn entertainment tended to be a way of relaxing when they were still in the office working at 10pm. Nobody actually cared, even the bosses, because the employees were being paid to do a job, which they did well. As long as watching porn doesn't impact your work or offend colleagues, then why should it be considered any worse than surfing YouTube, Facebook, or even Slashdot? It's just pictures of people having sex.
You know that Bush's advisors were smart guys, certainly smart enough not to put him on YouTube waving a Bible, so the absence of such a video means nothing other than political practicalities lead to religion being less visible in the West. Just because Bush doesn't go on YouTube waving a Bible, it doesn't mean that his actions weren't influenced by religion.
Honest. This isn't a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.
Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their "common faith" (Christianity) and told him: "Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East... The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled... This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins."
Of course, you are still free to believe that all of these people are lying, and that Bush's actions were completely uninfluenced by religion...
Belgium, Holland and France were far more damaged than was Germany by the first world war.
You don't need to change societies that are already like yours. Belgium, Holland and France were not likely to pose a future risk to world peace. One of the acknowledgements of the Marshall Plan was that economic prosperity would, over the long term, produce a more stable world, and the recognition that the Nazi party had been able to use the economic situation that Germany was placed in following WWI to their own advantage.
Scorched earth never happened at the end of WW1.
Physically, maybe not, but it could be argued that The Treaty of Versailles scorched the earth economically. And historically the Treaty has been blamed in part for the tensions and problems that led to WWII.
Nope, I wasn't making any extended argument at all, just pointing out the incorrectness of your statement about "suicide bombers that walk into crowded markets to blow up 30 of their own innocent people just to wound or kill 2 innocent civilians"
Not true. At one point the USA was the #1 supplier to the Iranian airforce. Even after decades of sanctions the Iranian airforce still consists of over 1/3rd USA planes. Grep for USA here and here
The Iranian civilian airliner DID take off from a military airport
Bandar Abbas is used by civilian and military aircraft. So is the Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. I'm sure you wouldn't think that shooting down an Israeli civilian airliner was okay, just because it shared an airport with military aircraft, so why would it be okay to shoot down an Iranian civilian airliner?
and was flying damn close to a conflict area and no-fly zone.
Where do you get this stuff from? The US Navy's own report into the incident, written by Admiral William Fogarty, states:
"[Iran Air Flight 655] was on a normal commercial air flight plan profile, in the assigned airway, squawking Mode III 6760, on a continuous ascent in altitude from take-off at Bandar Abbas to shoot-down."more
So, according to the US Navy, the flight was where it was meant, in a protected corridor of international airspace, squawking a civilian ID, and on a continuous ascent, not diving like an F14 in attack vector would. Why do you doubt the US Navy's own analysis of the incident?
Finally, Iran can't possibly develop enough nuclear weapons or launch systems to "defend itself" against the U.S. The idea is ludicrous.
If you think that Iran can develop weapons to attack Israel, then it can effectively defend itself from the US, since the US won't attack Iran if it knows the response will destroy Israel. If you think that Iran can't develop weapons that threaten Israel, then why are people worried about it?
A nation attacked, but ultimately victorious still is expected to bear the burden of repairing the attacker as well as themselves.
Because after WWI, we learnt that the cost of not rebuilding a society in our image, is that someone else will rebuild it in theirs.
The concurred peoples often come out with better facilities than they had before, but have learned that making war has no lasting consequences other than direct casualties.
Funny how the German people are now one of the nations most averse to war. By your logic, they should be the opposite.
No, since you said "walk into crowded markets to blow up 30 of their own innocent people just to wound or kill 2 innocent civilians". That statement does not apply to Israel since the Israeli and Palestinian populations are mostly segregated. Even if you were trying to apply it to other countries, you will find it is not true (hint: the insurgency in Iraq was sectarian in nature, the groups do not consider the population on the other side of the divide as "their own innocent people" any more than the KKK consider African Americans to be "their own innocent people")
The Shah dictator signed the NPT, and he was later overthrown by the current regime in a violent revolution. Saying that the current regime should honour the agreements of the leadership it overthrew in revolution is like saying that the Founding Fathers should have honoured agreements made by the British when north America was part of the British Empire. I can understand that there may be some legal framework issues here, but the fundamental issue - that a country is bound by treaties made by an overthrown dictator - makes no sense.
1) They signed a treaty saying they would not do these things; they must be held accountable.
Actually they didn't. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, unpopular dictator and friend of the West, signed the treaty.
And it's worth considering the analogous situation that the US was a signatory to the 1967 United Nations Treaty on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space which prohibits the militarisation of space at the same time as it was developing it's Star Wars programme.
Towards the end of 2000, the United Nations General Assembly had a vote on a resolution called the "Prevention of Outer Space Arms Race." It was adopted by a recorded vote of 163 in favor to none against, with 3 abstentions. The three that abstained were the Federated States of Micronesia, Israel and the United States of America. The US is developing space based weapons platforms and aircraft, and is still a signatory to the 1967 United Nations Treaty on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. There is certainly an argument that insisting other states should live up to their international treaty obligations whilst exercising such hypocrisy undermines the use of international treaties for such purposes. It is also worth noting that one of the pillars of the NPT is disarmament, a step which historically the US and other Western countries have shown no inclination to work towards.
Iran, on the other hand, has repeatedly declared it's desire for the total annihilation of the the nation of Israel (among others).
To be more precise, some people in Iran have said some things about Israel. There is a debate over who says what, and what it actually means. Some people are against the state of Israel. There are even anti-Zionist Jews who are against the state of Israel. This is not the same thing as wanting to kill all Jews, and it is worth pointing out that there are 25,000 Iranian Jews, Jews who actually choose to live in Iran despite having the option of living in Israel, who are legitimate citizens of Iran, and who enjoy the protection of the Iranian state. Interesting article: Iran's proud but discreet Jews. They even have a representative in the Iranian parliament. As one Iranian Jew says in that article "Imam Khomeini made a distinction between Jews and Zionists and he supported us".
Combine that with the fact that Iran flares enough natural gas daily to more than meet its internal energy generation requirements, pardon me for being a bit skeptical about their motives.
The Bush-era claim that there is no need for Iran to invest in nuclear power because it is already self-sufficient due to natural fossil fuels was discredited a long time ago, and is no longer part of the US stance against a nuclear Iran. Wikipedia used to say:
"The U.S. maintains that Iran does not need nuclear power due to its abundant oil reserves since nuclear power is more expensive for the Iranians to generate than oil-fired power. This argument has been contradicted by studies conducted by the National Academy of Sciences in the US [63], and by an investigation by the British Parliament.[64] It is also contradicted by former policies of the United States government which encouraged and supported Iran's nuclear program [65]"
Now that the claim has been discredited it isn't made any more by the US and this section has been removed.
If Iran proceeds with this, they are basically demanding Israel attack them, possibly with their own nuclear weapons.
People said the same thing about India when Pakistan developed a nuclear weapon. And the same with the U.S. and North Korea. History suggests that when a nation acquires nuclear bombs, it's neighbours will also acquire them. The fact that Israel has nuclear weapons is the biggest driving force in nuclear proliferation of the Middle East. History also suggests that once all of the relevant states have acquired nuclear weapons, MAD comes into force as a very strong deterrent against them being used. - despite nuclear proliferation, the United States remains the only country to have ever detonated a nuclear weapon in war.
You are talking about a country run by people who have repeatedly stated that it is the duty of all muslims to work towards being in a position to start Armageddon (or Ragnarok, basically the apocalyptic battle at the end of the world). In addition to these statements, they have also expressed their own desire to trigger said battle.
Exactly how does MAD deter people who wish to start an end of the world battle?
By deterring the majority of rational people who don't wish to start the end days. It should be noted that the same concerns have been expressed about evangelical Christians in the USA who want to bring about the end days. e.g. the Concerned Christians who planned terrorist attacks in Israel to try and start Armageddon. These people believe that they must destroy the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem so that Jesus can return. Some of them finance settlers because they believe this is the quickest way to start a war between the Arabs and Jews that will lead to Jesus returning. Many religions prophesize the End days, and there are a minority of followers in all of those religions who want the war to start so the Saviour will return and take them to Heaven. Hopefully, the rational people will prevail.
In a nuclear war, America is the only state capable of defeating China or Russia.
It depends on how you define defeat. One definition is defeat: an unsuccessful ending to a struggle or contest. The UK alone has 200 nuclear warheads. Assuming they all hit (and most would), that's 200 Chinese or Russian cities destroyed, millions killed outright, and the survivors will suffer terribly from the radiation. To me, that outcome constitutes a defeat.
Of course, the UK would be obliterated by the Soviet counterstrike. But then again, so would the USA - Russia has around 2,500 nuclear warheads, more than enough to wipe out every city in the US.
If you're an ally, we'd rather you didn't have them but there's not much we can do to stop you acquiring them (India, Pakistan).
What? Pakistan was an ally when it acquired nukes? You may not remember this, but the press was pushing the same stories when Pakistan was busy acquiring the bomb as they do now with Iran. There was massive international condemnation. The same voices were banging on about the "dangers of an Islamic nuke". There were the same stories about Dr. AQ Khan and an underground nuclear black market smuggling network putting the world at risk of nuclear war. The same stories about the dangers of terrorists acquiring those nuclear weapons and using them on Israel or other Western friendly countries. The same voices calling for preemptive military strikes to stop all this happening.
The black market will always exist to exploit differences in taxation policy between national and international markets. But that is not an acknowledgement that the $100 tax would have failed - taxes are only meant to manage externalities in the legitimate market, because obviously the black market doesn't pay taxes. In this case, if every person switched supply source to the black market, then consumption in the legitimate market would indeed have fallen as expected. Taxes regulate the legal market, law enforcement regulates the illegal market. As I said, the argument isn't really about "sin taxes", it's about who pays for the externalities.
The cigarette import scams, the largest being Montenegro's cigarette smuggling trade run by the legitimate government to finance the nation, cost the EU hundreds of millions of Euros every year in lost taxes. However, if the cigarettes had been taxed at manufacture source, rather than being marked for export and therefore 0% tax, the scam wouldn't have been possible.
You could argue that in this case, the black market would begin to grow it's own tobacco in illegal farming operations akin to cannabis cultivation now. That would only happen if the tax were substantially higher than the associated costs of running illegal tobacco farms - even with the high taxes on cigarettes in EU nations, there are no illegal farming operations - so far this has only happened when the product is completely prohibited like cannabis. There are also high taxes on distilled alcohol, and yet there are no illegal distilleries operating on a commercial basis. The legitimate market, even with the inefficiency of tax, is more economically viable than the black market. Obviously there is a point where this would no longer be true, but we are not at that point yet (indeed, alcohol by measures of affordability has actually become many times cheaper over the last few decades).
Re:And yet they do nothing to discourage the car
on
The Fresca Rebellion
·
· Score: 1
though highways do have posted, if rarely enforced, minimums
There could only be a very, very small minority of highways in the world where it would be legal to cycle and there is a minimum speed requirement. In fact, having never seen one, I am not convinced that there are any. The majority of highways in the world have no minimum speed, and those that do (e.g. motorways) are unlikely to permit cycling.
A 150lbs lump of meat on top of a 2d trapezoid with wheels, vs a 3000lbs partially armored 110KW mobile power plant
So what? In a collision between a car and an articulated lorry (or semi-trailer truck) the car will come off worse, and at high speeds a fatality is likely. By your logic, car drivers should not drive cars on the highway, because there is some possibility of being in such a collision. 43,313 drivers and occupants of motor vehicles were killed in collisions in the USA in 2008. Should everyone stop using cars because there is some risk? If your answer is no, then why should cyclists stop cycling because there is some risk? 4,749 pedestrians were struck and killed by motor vehicles in the USA in 2008. Should people stop walking across roads because there is some risk?
A study in New York showed that 70-92% of drivers were at-fault in accidents where pedestrians and cyclists had been killed, but 74% didn't even get a ticket. The real problem here is people like yourself, who consider getting in a vehicle akin to putting on a suit of armour, and the justice system, which fails to enforce laws against aggressive drivers who put the lives of others at risk.
$100 tax to a bottle of water. In the short run it would lower the sales, but the end would cause either massive inflation, or a massive black market, or both.
Or, more likely, people would just drink tap water. The options are more complex than people consuming or not consuming a product. There's a whole world of vices - if drugs cost more, people spend money on hookers instead, if soda costs more, people will drink cordial or fruit juice.
Slashdot Mirror
Good article. The bit that caught my eye was:
A recent report from McKinsey, a management consultancy, argues that the lagging performance of the country's school pupils, particularly its poor and minority children, has wreaked more devastation on the economy than the current recession.
I wonder if that's still true. The negative economic effects of a poor education system are enormous and last for a generation; it's good that economists are finally taking an interest in this area, since government unfortunately tends to respond better to economic arguments that contract a complex world into a single dollar/euro value.
I would expect the presence of books in the home to be correlated with parent intelligence, not necessarily parental involvement. Parent intelligene is strongly correlated with child intelligence. I suspect that student intelligence is actually the biggest factor, but this factor is either not studied or not published in the results, because it goes against widely held politically correct ideals.
Actually it has been well researched. If I remember correctly, Freakonomics spends two whole chapters on a readable summary of the research into child test scores. And if I remember correctly, parenting itself has no observable effect on test scores, which is surprising for most people to hear.
Here's an extract:
The most interesting conclusion here is one that many modern parents may find disturbing: Parenting technique is highly overrated. When it comes to early test scores, it's not so much what you do as a parent, it's who you are.
It is obvious that children of successful, well-educated parents have a built-in advantage over the children of struggling, poorly educated parents. Call it a privilege gap. The child of a young, single mother with limited education and income will typically test about 25 percentile points lower than the child of two married, high-earning parents.
So it isn't that parents don't matter. Clearly, they matter an awful lot. It's just that by the time most parents pick up a book on parenting technique, it's too late. Many of the things that matter most were decided long ago - what kind of education a parent got, how hard he worked to build a career, what kind of spouse he wound up with and how long they waited to have children.
The privilege gap is far more real than the fear that haunts so many modern parents - that their children will fail miserably without regular helpings of culture cramming and competitive parenting. So, yes, parents are entitled to congratulate themselves this month over their children's acceptance letters. But they should also stop kidding themselves: The Mozart tapes had nothing to do with it.
The linked to article is just an overview, there's a lot more content in the actual book.
Read the story again. The argument is for a longer school year, and not necessarily more hours in school.
Bingo. I've thought for a long time that the system of long holidays in school is detrimental to education. I remember being a kid and working hard for tests at the end of the year. Then the summer holidays come, you spend almost 2 months away from school, and forget all the stuff that you were doing before you left. Is it really necessary to have 13 weeks holiday per year? Is it really the best schedule to educate and retain knowledge?
University is even more ridiculous - at an age when many people are working full time jobs, a student gets, or rather is forced, to take 22 weeks a year holiday (we had three terms of ten weeks each). It was very irritating knowing that if the schedule were better managed you could've finished the degree a whole year earlier, still worked fewer hours per week, and been substantially less indebted.
I have known people who look at porn at work, but I find it difficult to be outraged about it. Why? Those guys are paid to do a job, supposed to be 9-5 but the porn entertainment tended to be a way of relaxing when they were still in the office working at 10pm. Nobody actually cared, even the bosses, because the employees were being paid to do a job, which they did well. As long as watching porn doesn't impact your work or offend colleagues, then why should it be considered any worse than surfing YouTube, Facebook, or even Slashdot? It's just pictures of people having sex.
You know that Bush's advisors were smart guys, certainly smart enough not to put him on YouTube waving a Bible, so the absence of such a video means nothing other than political practicalities lead to religion being less visible in the West. Just because Bush doesn't go on YouTube waving a Bible, it doesn't mean that his actions weren't influenced by religion.
Bush says God chose him to lead his nation
Bush, Gog and Magog
A French Revelation, or The Burning Bush
Honest. This isn't a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.
Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their "common faith" (Christianity) and told him: "Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East... The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled... This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins."
Of course, you are still free to believe that all of these people are lying, and that Bush's actions were completely uninfluenced by religion...
Belgium, Holland and France were far more damaged than was Germany by the first world war.
You don't need to change societies that are already like yours. Belgium, Holland and France were not likely to pose a future risk to world peace. One of the acknowledgements of the Marshall Plan was that economic prosperity would, over the long term, produce a more stable world, and the recognition that the Nazi party had been able to use the economic situation that Germany was placed in following WWI to their own advantage.
Scorched earth never happened at the end of WW1.
Physically, maybe not, but it could be argued that The Treaty of Versailles scorched the earth economically. And historically the Treaty has been blamed in part for the tensions and problems that led to WWII.
Nope, I wasn't making any extended argument at all, just pointing out the incorrectness of your statement about "suicide bombers that walk into crowded markets to blow up 30 of their own innocent people just to wound or kill 2 innocent civilians"
The U.S. was never a major seller of arms to Iran
Not true. At one point the USA was the #1 supplier to the Iranian airforce. Even after decades of sanctions the Iranian airforce still consists of over 1/3rd USA planes. Grep for USA here and here
The Iranian civilian airliner DID take off from a military airport
Bandar Abbas is used by civilian and military aircraft. So is the Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. I'm sure you wouldn't think that shooting down an Israeli civilian airliner was okay, just because it shared an airport with military aircraft, so why would it be okay to shoot down an Iranian civilian airliner?
and was flying damn close to a conflict area and no-fly zone.
Where do you get this stuff from? The US Navy's own report into the incident, written by Admiral William Fogarty, states:
"[Iran Air Flight 655] was on a normal commercial air flight plan profile, in the assigned airway, squawking Mode III 6760, on a continuous ascent in altitude from take-off at Bandar Abbas to shoot-down." more
So, according to the US Navy, the flight was where it was meant, in a protected corridor of international airspace, squawking a civilian ID, and on a continuous ascent, not diving like an F14 in attack vector would. Why do you doubt the US Navy's own analysis of the incident?
Finally, Iran can't possibly develop enough nuclear weapons or launch systems to "defend itself" against the U.S. The idea is ludicrous.
If you think that Iran can develop weapons to attack Israel, then it can effectively defend itself from the US, since the US won't attack Iran if it knows the response will destroy Israel. If you think that Iran can't develop weapons that threaten Israel, then why are people worried about it?
A nation attacked, but ultimately victorious still is expected to bear the burden of repairing the attacker as well as themselves.
Because after WWI, we learnt that the cost of not rebuilding a society in our image, is that someone else will rebuild it in theirs.
The concurred peoples often come out with better facilities than they had before, but have learned that making war has no lasting consequences other than direct casualties.
Funny how the German people are now one of the nations most averse to war. By your logic, they should be the opposite.
You might like to tell these Iranian guys that they are Muslim, apparently they forgot.
No, since you said "walk into crowded markets to blow up 30 of their own innocent people just to wound or kill 2 innocent civilians". That statement does not apply to Israel since the Israeli and Palestinian populations are mostly segregated. Even if you were trying to apply it to other countries, you will find it is not true (hint: the insurgency in Iraq was sectarian in nature, the groups do not consider the population on the other side of the divide as "their own innocent people" any more than the KKK consider African Americans to be "their own innocent people")
Well, the 2009 estimate here is 2825 total (or 2,300).
The Shah dictator signed the NPT, and he was later overthrown by the current regime in a violent revolution. Saying that the current regime should honour the agreements of the leadership it overthrew in revolution is like saying that the Founding Fathers should have honoured agreements made by the British when north America was part of the British Empire. I can understand that there may be some legal framework issues here, but the fundamental issue - that a country is bound by treaties made by an overthrown dictator - makes no sense.
Bush: God Told Me to Invade Iraq (sourced from The Independent)
God told me to invade Iraq, Bush tells Palestinian ministers
George Bush: 'God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq'
1) They signed a treaty saying they would not do these things; they must be held accountable.
Actually they didn't. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, unpopular dictator and friend of the West, signed the treaty.
And it's worth considering the analogous situation that the US was a signatory to the 1967 United Nations Treaty on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space which prohibits the militarisation of space at the same time as it was developing it's Star Wars programme.
Towards the end of 2000, the United Nations General Assembly had a vote on a resolution called the "Prevention of Outer Space Arms Race." It was adopted by a recorded vote of 163 in favor to none against, with 3 abstentions. The three that abstained were the Federated States of Micronesia, Israel and the United States of America. The US is developing space based weapons platforms and aircraft, and is still a signatory to the 1967 United Nations Treaty on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. There is certainly an argument that insisting other states should live up to their international treaty obligations whilst exercising such hypocrisy undermines the use of international treaties for such purposes. It is also worth noting that one of the pillars of the NPT is disarmament, a step which historically the US and other Western countries have shown no inclination to work towards.
The new shift is from a foreign currency reserve of US dollars to Euros.
Iran, on the other hand, has repeatedly declared it's desire for the total annihilation of the the nation of Israel (among others).
To be more precise, some people in Iran have said some things about Israel. There is a debate over who says what, and what it actually means. Some people are against the state of Israel. There are even anti-Zionist Jews who are against the state of Israel. This is not the same thing as wanting to kill all Jews, and it is worth pointing out that there are 25,000 Iranian Jews, Jews who actually choose to live in Iran despite having the option of living in Israel, who are legitimate citizens of Iran, and who enjoy the protection of the Iranian state. Interesting article: Iran's proud but discreet Jews. They even have a representative in the Iranian parliament. As one Iranian Jew says in that article "Imam Khomeini made a distinction between Jews and Zionists and he supported us".
Combine that with the fact that Iran flares enough natural gas daily to more than meet its internal energy generation requirements, pardon me for being a bit skeptical about their motives.
The Bush-era claim that there is no need for Iran to invest in nuclear power because it is already self-sufficient due to natural fossil fuels was discredited a long time ago, and is no longer part of the US stance against a nuclear Iran. Wikipedia used to say:
"The U.S. maintains that Iran does not need nuclear power due to its abundant oil reserves since nuclear power is more expensive for the Iranians to generate than oil-fired power. This argument has been contradicted by studies conducted by the National Academy of Sciences in the US [63], and by an investigation by the British Parliament.[64] It is also contradicted by former policies of the United States government which encouraged and supported Iran's nuclear program [65]"
Now that the claim has been discredited it isn't made any more by the US and this section has been removed.
If Iran proceeds with this, they are basically demanding Israel attack them, possibly with their own nuclear weapons.
People said the same thing about India when Pakistan developed a nuclear weapon. And the same with the U.S. and North Korea. History suggests that when a nation acquires nuclear bombs, it's neighbours will also acquire them. The fact that Israel has nuclear weapons is the biggest driving force in nuclear proliferation of the Middle East. History also suggests that once all of the relevant states have acquired nuclear weapons, MAD comes into force as a very strong deterrent against them being used. - despite nuclear proliferation, the United States remains the only country to have ever detonated a nuclear weapon in war.
You are talking about a country run by people who have repeatedly stated that it is the duty of all muslims to work towards being in a position to start Armageddon (or Ragnarok, basically the apocalyptic battle at the end of the world). In addition to these statements, they have also expressed their own desire to trigger said battle.
What is the source for these statements? Whatever it is, it is not an official position of the Iranian government. Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa that the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islam and that Iran shall never acquire these weapons.
Exactly how does MAD deter people who wish to start an end of the world battle?
By deterring the majority of rational people who don't wish to start the end days. It should be noted that the same concerns have been expressed about evangelical Christians in the USA who want to bring about the end days. e.g. the Concerned Christians who planned terrorist attacks in Israel to try and start Armageddon. These people believe that they must destroy the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem so that Jesus can return. Some of them finance settlers because they believe this is the quickest way to start a war between the Arabs and Jews that will lead to Jesus returning. Many religions prophesize the End days, and there are a minority of followers in all of those religions who want the war to start so the Saviour will return and take them to Heaven. Hopefully, the rational people will prevail.
In a nuclear war, America is the only state capable of defeating China or Russia.
It depends on how you define defeat. One definition is defeat: an unsuccessful ending to a struggle or contest. The UK alone has 200 nuclear warheads. Assuming they all hit (and most would), that's 200 Chinese or Russian cities destroyed, millions killed outright, and the survivors will suffer terribly from the radiation. To me, that outcome constitutes a defeat.
Of course, the UK would be obliterated by the Soviet counterstrike. But then again, so would the USA - Russia has around 2,500 nuclear warheads, more than enough to wipe out every city in the US.
If you're an ally, we'd rather you didn't have them but there's not much we can do to stop you acquiring them (India, Pakistan).
What? Pakistan was an ally when it acquired nukes? You may not remember this, but the press was pushing the same stories when Pakistan was busy acquiring the bomb as they do now with Iran. There was massive international condemnation. The same voices were banging on about the "dangers of an Islamic nuke". There were the same stories about Dr. AQ Khan and an underground nuclear black market smuggling network putting the world at risk of nuclear war. The same stories about the dangers of terrorists acquiring those nuclear weapons and using them on Israel or other Western friendly countries. The same voices calling for preemptive military strikes to stop all this happening.
The black market will always exist to exploit differences in taxation policy between national and international markets. But that is not an acknowledgement that the $100 tax would have failed - taxes are only meant to manage externalities in the legitimate market, because obviously the black market doesn't pay taxes. In this case, if every person switched supply source to the black market, then consumption in the legitimate market would indeed have fallen as expected. Taxes regulate the legal market, law enforcement regulates the illegal market. As I said, the argument isn't really about "sin taxes", it's about who pays for the externalities.
The cigarette import scams, the largest being Montenegro's cigarette smuggling trade run by the legitimate government to finance the nation, cost the EU hundreds of millions of Euros every year in lost taxes. However, if the cigarettes had been taxed at manufacture source, rather than being marked for export and therefore 0% tax, the scam wouldn't have been possible.
You could argue that in this case, the black market would begin to grow it's own tobacco in illegal farming operations akin to cannabis cultivation now. That would only happen if the tax were substantially higher than the associated costs of running illegal tobacco farms - even with the high taxes on cigarettes in EU nations, there are no illegal farming operations - so far this has only happened when the product is completely prohibited like cannabis. There are also high taxes on distilled alcohol, and yet there are no illegal distilleries operating on a commercial basis. The legitimate market, even with the inefficiency of tax, is more economically viable than the black market. Obviously there is a point where this would no longer be true, but we are not at that point yet (indeed, alcohol by measures of affordability has actually become many times cheaper over the last few decades).
though highways do have posted, if rarely enforced, minimums
There could only be a very, very small minority of highways in the world where it would be legal to cycle and there is a minimum speed requirement. In fact, having never seen one, I am not convinced that there are any. The majority of highways in the world have no minimum speed, and those that do (e.g. motorways) are unlikely to permit cycling.
A 150lbs lump of meat on top of a 2d trapezoid with wheels, vs a 3000lbs partially armored 110KW mobile power plant
So what? In a collision between a car and an articulated lorry (or semi-trailer truck) the car will come off worse, and at high speeds a fatality is likely. By your logic, car drivers should not drive cars on the highway, because there is some possibility of being in such a collision. 43,313 drivers and occupants of motor vehicles were killed in collisions in the USA in 2008. Should everyone stop using cars because there is some risk? If your answer is no, then why should cyclists stop cycling because there is some risk? 4,749 pedestrians were struck and killed by motor vehicles in the USA in 2008. Should people stop walking across roads because there is some risk?
A study in New York showed that 70-92% of drivers were at-fault in accidents where pedestrians and cyclists had been killed, but 74% didn't even get a ticket. The real problem here is people like yourself, who consider getting in a vehicle akin to putting on a suit of armour, and the justice system, which fails to enforce laws against aggressive drivers who put the lives of others at risk.
$100 tax to a bottle of water. In the short run it would lower the sales, but the end would cause either massive inflation, or a massive black market, or both.
Or, more likely, people would just drink tap water. The options are more complex than people consuming or not consuming a product. There's a whole world of vices - if drugs cost more, people spend money on hookers instead, if soda costs more, people will drink cordial or fruit juice.