I don't know what's more pathetic, your ignorance of what socialism is or the fact that you remember what my signature used to be. So since you gave your opinion of me, let me give my opinion of you:
You are a product of a failed government-run education system and idiotic parents who neglected their responsibly to teach you even the basic notions of individual liberty and personal responsibility, and allowed you to live your life guided by primitive emotions and hunter-gatherer instincts and controlled like a dog on a leash by the unscrupulous people who exploit cretins like you for their ends. In short you are not much more than a dumb animal, except without honesty.
Yes, I can tell that from one post - name calling without any explanation or reason is a dead giveaway, another hint being that you apparently support socialism.
Other than that I don't know or care to know anything you have to say and I wouldn't remember you if you were painted red and jumping up and down making monkey noises, which would actually be slightly more interesting than what you have to say. But feel free to keep track of my signatures. Some day maybe you'll understand but I wouldn't bet on it.
For some reasons, some US-Americans have a problem with grasping the difference between "public" and "governmental".
I have to admit that I do. Can you enlighten me as to what is the difference?
Some quotes from the wikipedia:
"Under the Royal Charter, the BBC must obtain a licence from the Home Secretary. This licence is accompanied by an agreement which sets the terms and conditions under which BBC is allowed to broadcast."
"The BBC Trust is [....] the governing body of the Corporation. [...] BBC Trustees are appointed by the British monarch on advice of government ministers."
"Within the United Kingdom its work is funded principally by an annual television licence fee [...] the level of the fee is set annually by the British Government and agreed by Parliament."
So it is licensed by the government subject to an agreement approved by the government of the terms and conditions under which it is allowed to broadcast, it's governing body is directly appointed by the government and it is funded by public money according to a fee set by the government. Yep, sounds totally independent to me.
I never watch CNN so you might be right but judging by their website they are just as biased towards the liberal causes as Fox is towards conservative. I bet you never watch Fox either and, like most liberals, you probably imagine it to be a lot worse than it is.
How cute that you think BBC and CNN are news organizations (except in a literal sense) rather than propaganda outlets for their owners, the British government and Ted Turner.
The Guilded Age was an age of economic growth, great increase in prosperity of ordinary people and of technological advances. I don't see why something like that would be a bad thing? Inequality of income is a natural consequence of the same system that historically creates the greatest increase in prosperity, namely economic liberty combined with strong rule of law and protection of private property. You know, the system that formerly impoverished socialist economies are these days moving towards and, as a result, experiencing huge growth.
The living standards have been getting better and still are, even in the western world. If you have some evidence to the contrary, I would like to see it. Oh you mean that the rich are getting richer so that makes you feel worse off in comparison even though you really are better off as well?
No, that's a given. The submitter's question is actually "What would you like to see at CES, apart from flying cars and personal jet packs?" but he reasonably omitted the redundant second half of the sentence.
USA badly needs some depussification if it is going to compete with China and other emerging economies in the long run. You have to take some risks every once in a while but you can't do that if there is a pack of lawyers watching like hawks and waiting for your slightest mistake to sue you out of business. Our extreme obsession with safety will lead to our destruction.
You have either never had any dealings with DOT or government in general, or else you are downright STUPID if you don't realize the enormous inefficiency and waste present at all levels of government. Government employees, on average, are paid 16% more than their equivalent private sector employees. Can you possibly imagine how huge the dollar amount of that 16% is given that the US government employs 10s of millions of people? Not to mention all the other forms of waste due to poor management, duplication of work, corruption, laws that give preference to certain in-state, union-only contractors even at much higher cost etc. etc. Road maintenance is one of the areas where a lot of taxpayers money is wasted in particular due to unions and the perceived need to keep those people employed even when there is no worthwhile work for them to do and at a much higher salary than the market rate.
Cuba is impoverished because of the systematic campaign of military, political, social, and economic terrorist waged against it by its nearest neighbour, the world's superpower, for the past half a century or so.
No, Cuba is impoverished because of the socialist policies but the Castro regime. The bottom line is that every centrally planned economy will fail, every time. And not just fail but fail spectacularly, as in cannot feed its population without outside help, as Cuba received for decades from USSR which paid for it's oh so wonderful (actually crumbling since the end of free money from Russians) medical system. How many examples do you need? Every single socialist country has failed, so how many chances do you need and how many corpses before you realize that this is an evil, inhuman, ideology?
Preemptive statement for idiots: "Socialist" actually means state owned and centrally planned economy. Yes, it really does, look it up in a dictionary if you must. No, Sweden does not have state owned, centrally planned economy, it has a capitalist, free market economy. Totally different thing, actually the opposite.
Due to short term thinking like that, Venezuela is a rotten country which, without the fortunate accident of having the largest oil reserves in the world, would be an impoverished hellhole like Cuba. 80% of Venezuela's exports are oil. Without oil, Venezuelans would be living on $20/month just like Cubans. Oh and did I mention that Venezuela has the 5th highest murder rate in the world and I'm not talking "among developed countries". People complain about the US rate of 4.2 per 100K, try Venezuelan rate of 45 per 100K.
Sure, you just have to force people to use it. Since just about every form of public transit in the US is running on government subsidies and cannot pay its own costs I think it's pretty conclusive that Americans don't want it.
It may well be that your government set up a bad deal
And of course, because they are Canadians, it is impossible that there is any corruption involved such as the politicians or their donors benefiting personally from the deal, Solyndra style. Yep, I guess they were just slightly stupid, it can happen to anyone. No harm done though, so there is no need too look for any accountability whatsoever or, God forbid, fire anyone. The taxpayers children will just have to eat a little bit less and everything will be just fine.
They were there for at least a month and a half before the camp was initially cleared and then restarted again later for few more months, for a total of almost 6 months. It's not as if the police stormed the camp on the first day. In fact the city was quite accommodating to the protesters and provided all sorts of services. At some point it just became too much for the local residents to bear: "residents at a community board meeting complained about inadequate sanitation, verbal taunts and harassment by protesters, noise, and related issues", not to mention assaults on police officers, widespread theft and drug use, vandalism and not least, enough reports of rape that "women only" separate tents were set up. Don't pretend that they were angels.
The fundamental problem with your reasoning is that you don't seem to understand that things are like this in those countries because the people in those countries like it that way.
The fundamental problem with your reasoning is that you don't seem to understand that not ALL the people in those countries like it that way. And no, I am not one of the morons who through Iraqi people would welcome us as liberators but I am one of the morons who thinks that Iraqis will be much better off in the long run as a result of the invasion and that other countries in the region will be better off as well as a knock off effects of the invasion, already visible in the "Arab spring" and protests in Iran. Yes "those people" are really just like us, they like freedom too. People act in accordance with cultural memes of the their time and place not by rational thinking. 500 years ego in Europe you would have probably said that people like the iron rule of the Church and burning of witches and if you had a poll they would have probably voted that way too, and yet that was changed. And no I do not support invading country after country, but I do support rejection of the prevailing chickenshit cultural relativism in the Western countries and for standing up for better and more human ways of organizing a society. Islamic countries are a black hole in the modern world when it comes to basic human rights and we are not doing them any favors by saying that that's ok.
Several things are wrong with your post but let me just point out three things: 1) you do not have to be perfect in order to pass judgment on evil (otherwise evil will always get a free pass) 2) we may not be perfect but we don't have laws requiring a raped woman to provide 4 male witnesses or else whip her for adultery and we do not hang gay people off cranes in public squares, so there are degrees of perfection you may wish to explore 3) Not being able to right every wrong does not mean you should not right at least some wrongs
The governments in these countries exist because they have popular support
Popular support is overrated. It does not make it ok for a government to deny citizens the rights that in my humble opinion and in the opinion of the signatories of the UN charter are universal. If 51% votes that the other 49% should be enslaved (as in the case of women in Islamic countries) or killed (as in the case of gays or Jews), that does not make it right or legal. Yes perhaps we (the civilized world) should in that case invade and protect the oppressed minorities.
Your entire post reveals that your knowledge of guns comes from either Hollywood or your dreams. Either way, it has no relation to reality. You cannot kill anything close to 30 people under any realistic situation with 30 rounds. Trained police officers miss more than 50% of shots fired even in close range engagements. In any case, one of the main purposes of gun ownership in this country, as per SCOTUS, is self-defense. The gun of choice of criminals in over 90% of cases is a semi-automatic. If you are willing to go against a 15 round Glock or a 30 round AK, wielding your grandfather's bolt action hunting rifle you will be one very brave dead liberal.
As it happens an AR makes a safer home defense weapon than, say a large caliber revolver (which nobody wants to ban) as the tiny rounds they use are less likely to over-penetrate and go out to the street or into your neighbor's house, whereas a.44 magnum will go clean through couple of houses and still kill a passer by on the other side.
his political opinions are the logical consequence of his economic beliefs to the best of his academic ability.
Thanks for that, I needed a laugh. If supporting the housing bubble that created the worst recession since the 20s represents the best of his academic ability than the Nobel prize committee made a pretty big mistake. Not to mention defending Obamacare as a cost saving program, openly lying about Ryan's voucher program ("it will kill people"), deliberate lies about "growing" income inequality even though he knows that it is not growing but staying the same or even shrinking, etc etc. He has zero credibility left except perhaps with deluded dailykos crowd.
I don't have a problem with the fact that his views differ from mine. I have a problem with dishonesty of a Nobel prize winning economist who misuses his column to push his own political agenda. It's easy to google many instances of deliberate twisting of facts and outright lies ("ACA will decrease rather than increase the deficit"), all without exemption leaning in the same political direction. If he was on MSNBC or Fox News it would be no problem. It is the pretense that his writing is a serious economic analysis distilled for popular reading rather than obvious and automatic pushing of a political agenda regardless of the facts that bothers me.
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I don't know what's more pathetic, your ignorance of what socialism is or the fact that you remember what my signature used to be. So since you gave your opinion of me, let me give my opinion of you:
You are a product of a failed government-run education system and idiotic parents who neglected their responsibly to teach you even the basic notions of individual liberty and personal responsibility, and allowed you to live your life guided by primitive emotions and hunter-gatherer instincts and controlled like a dog on a leash by the unscrupulous people who exploit cretins like you for their ends. In short you are not much more than a dumb animal, except without honesty.
Yes, I can tell that from one post - name calling without any explanation or reason is a dead giveaway, another hint being that you apparently support socialism.
Other than that I don't know or care to know anything you have to say and I wouldn't remember you if you were painted red and jumping up and down making monkey noises, which would actually be slightly more interesting than what you have to say. But feel free to keep track of my signatures. Some day maybe you'll understand but I wouldn't bet on it.
For some reasons, some US-Americans have a problem with grasping the difference between "public" and "governmental".
I have to admit that I do. Can you enlighten me as to what is the difference?
Some quotes from the wikipedia:
"Under the Royal Charter, the BBC must obtain a licence from the Home Secretary. This licence is accompanied by an agreement which sets the terms and conditions under which BBC is allowed to broadcast."
"The BBC Trust is [....] the governing body of the Corporation. [...] BBC Trustees are appointed by the British monarch on advice of government ministers."
"Within the United Kingdom its work is funded principally by an annual television licence fee [...] the level of the fee is set annually by the British Government and agreed by Parliament."
So it is licensed by the government subject to an agreement approved by the government of the terms and conditions under which it is allowed to broadcast, it's governing body is directly appointed by the government and it is funded by public money according to a fee set by the government. Yep, sounds totally independent to me.
I never watch CNN so you might be right but judging by their website they are just as biased towards the liberal causes as Fox is towards conservative. I bet you never watch Fox either and, like most liberals, you probably imagine it to be a lot worse than it is.
How cute that you think BBC and CNN are news organizations (except in a literal sense) rather than propaganda outlets for their owners, the British government and Ted Turner.
The Guilded Age was an age of economic growth, great increase in prosperity of ordinary people and of technological advances. I don't see why something like that would be a bad thing? Inequality of income is a natural consequence of the same system that historically creates the greatest increase in prosperity, namely economic liberty combined with strong rule of law and protection of private property. You know, the system that formerly impoverished socialist economies are these days moving towards and, as a result, experiencing huge growth.
The living standards have been getting better and still are, even in the western world. If you have some evidence to the contrary, I would like to see it. Oh you mean that the rich are getting richer so that makes you feel worse off in comparison even though you really are better off as well?
No, that's a given. The submitter's question is actually "What would you like to see at CES, apart from flying cars and personal jet packs?" but he reasonably omitted the redundant second half of the sentence.
USA badly needs some depussification if it is going to compete with China and other emerging economies in the long run. You have to take some risks every once in a while but you can't do that if there is a pack of lawyers watching like hawks and waiting for your slightest mistake to sue you out of business. Our extreme obsession with safety will lead to our destruction.
I think US Office Of Personnel Management has better data than your article: http://www.opm.gov/feddata/historicaltables/totalgovernmentsince1962.asp
So, federal government: 4.4 million employees
Plus, state and local, 16 million: http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/governments/cb12-156.html
You have either never had any dealings with DOT or government in general, or else you are downright STUPID if you don't realize the enormous inefficiency and waste present at all levels of government. Government employees, on average, are paid 16% more than their equivalent private sector employees. Can you possibly imagine how huge the dollar amount of that 16% is given that the US government employs 10s of millions of people? Not to mention all the other forms of waste due to poor management, duplication of work, corruption, laws that give preference to certain in-state, union-only contractors even at much higher cost etc. etc. Road maintenance is one of the areas where a lot of taxpayers money is wasted in particular due to unions and the perceived need to keep those people employed even when there is no worthwhile work for them to do and at a much higher salary than the market rate.
A fun fact for today: the "fiscal cliff" bill passed the other day includes a tax break for Hollywood movies and TV shows, $20 million per episode or per movie. Despite the fact that 2012 was the best ever year for movies
Cuba is impoverished because of the systematic campaign of military, political, social, and economic terrorist waged against it by its nearest neighbour, the world's superpower, for the past half a century or so.
No, Cuba is impoverished because of the socialist policies but the Castro regime. The bottom line is that every centrally planned economy will fail, every time. And not just fail but fail spectacularly, as in cannot feed its population without outside help, as Cuba received for decades from USSR which paid for it's oh so wonderful (actually crumbling since the end of free money from Russians) medical system. How many examples do you need? Every single socialist country has failed, so how many chances do you need and how many corpses before you realize that this is an evil, inhuman, ideology?
Preemptive statement for idiots: "Socialist" actually means state owned and centrally planned economy. Yes, it really does, look it up in a dictionary if you must. No, Sweden does not have state owned, centrally planned economy, it has a capitalist, free market economy. Totally different thing, actually the opposite.
Due to short term thinking like that, Venezuela is a rotten country which, without the fortunate accident of having the largest oil reserves in the world, would be an impoverished hellhole like Cuba. 80% of Venezuela's exports are oil. Without oil, Venezuelans would be living on $20/month just like Cubans. Oh and did I mention that Venezuela has the 5th highest murder rate in the world and I'm not talking "among developed countries". People complain about the US rate of 4.2 per 100K, try Venezuelan rate of 45 per 100K.
Sure, you just have to force people to use it. Since just about every form of public transit in the US is running on government subsidies and cannot pay its own costs I think it's pretty conclusive that Americans don't want it.
It may well be that your government set up a bad deal
And of course, because they are Canadians, it is impossible that there is any corruption involved such as the politicians or their donors benefiting personally from the deal, Solyndra style. Yep, I guess they were just slightly stupid, it can happen to anyone. No harm done though, so there is no need too look for any accountability whatsoever or, God forbid, fire anyone. The taxpayers children will just have to eat a little bit less and everything will be just fine.
They were there for at least a month and a half before the camp was initially cleared and then restarted again later for few more months, for a total of almost 6 months. It's not as if the police stormed the camp on the first day. In fact the city was quite accommodating to the protesters and provided all sorts of services. At some point it just became too much for the local residents to bear: "residents at a community board meeting complained about inadequate sanitation, verbal taunts and harassment by protesters, noise, and related issues", not to mention assaults on police officers, widespread theft and drug use, vandalism and not least, enough reports of rape that "women only" separate tents were set up. Don't pretend that they were angels.
The fundamental problem with your reasoning is that you don't seem to understand that things are like this in those countries because the people in those countries like it that way.
The fundamental problem with your reasoning is that you don't seem to understand that not ALL the people in those countries like it that way. And no, I am not one of the morons who through Iraqi people would welcome us as liberators but I am one of the morons who thinks that Iraqis will be much better off in the long run as a result of the invasion and that other countries in the region will be better off as well as a knock off effects of the invasion, already visible in the "Arab spring" and protests in Iran. Yes "those people" are really just like us, they like freedom too. People act in accordance with cultural memes of the their time and place not by rational thinking. 500 years ego in Europe you would have probably said that people like the iron rule of the Church and burning of witches and if you had a poll they would have probably voted that way too, and yet that was changed. And no I do not support invading country after country, but I do support rejection of the prevailing chickenshit cultural relativism in the Western countries and for standing up for better and more human ways of organizing a society. Islamic countries are a black hole in the modern world when it comes to basic human rights and we are not doing them any favors by saying that that's ok.
Several things are wrong with your post but let me just point out three things:
1) you do not have to be perfect in order to pass judgment on evil (otherwise evil will always get a free pass)
2) we may not be perfect but we don't have laws requiring a raped woman to provide 4 male witnesses or else whip her for adultery and we do not hang gay people off cranes in public squares, so there are degrees of perfection you may wish to explore
3) Not being able to right every wrong does not mean you should not right at least some wrongs
But if we did that it would cut off the world largest market for goat sex pornography: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=goat%20sex&cmpt=geo
The governments in these countries exist because they have popular support
Popular support is overrated. It does not make it ok for a government to deny citizens the rights that in my humble opinion and in the opinion of the signatories of the UN charter are universal. If 51% votes that the other 49% should be enslaved (as in the case of women in Islamic countries) or killed (as in the case of gays or Jews), that does not make it right or legal. Yes perhaps we (the civilized world) should in that case invade and protect the oppressed minorities.
The cause of theft: people carry items worth stealing!
The cause of rape: ?
Please follow the same logic and see how idiotic it is.
Your entire post reveals that your knowledge of guns comes from either Hollywood or your dreams. Either way, it has no relation to reality. You cannot kill anything close to 30 people under any realistic situation with 30 rounds. Trained police officers miss more than 50% of shots fired even in close range engagements. In any case, one of the main purposes of gun ownership in this country, as per SCOTUS, is self-defense. The gun of choice of criminals in over 90% of cases is a semi-automatic. If you are willing to go against a 15 round Glock or a 30 round AK, wielding your grandfather's bolt action hunting rifle you will be one very brave dead liberal.
As it happens an AR makes a safer home defense weapon than, say a large caliber revolver (which nobody wants to ban) as the tiny rounds they use are less likely to over-penetrate and go out to the street or into your neighbor's house, whereas a .44 magnum will go clean through couple of houses and still kill a passer by on the other side.
Thanks for the AR magazine link. You can't find those things anywhere.
his political opinions are the logical consequence of his economic beliefs to the best of his academic ability.
Thanks for that, I needed a laugh. If supporting the housing bubble that created the worst recession since the 20s represents the best of his academic ability than the Nobel prize committee made a pretty big mistake. Not to mention defending Obamacare as a cost saving program, openly lying about Ryan's voucher program ("it will kill people"), deliberate lies about "growing" income inequality even though he knows that it is not growing but staying the same or even shrinking, etc etc. He has zero credibility left except perhaps with deluded dailykos crowd.
I don't have a problem with the fact that his views differ from mine. I have a problem with dishonesty of a Nobel prize winning economist who misuses his column to push his own political agenda. It's easy to google many instances of deliberate twisting of facts and outright lies ("ACA will decrease rather than increase the deficit"), all without exemption leaning in the same political direction. If he was on MSNBC or Fox News it would be no problem. It is the pretense that his writing is a serious economic analysis distilled for popular reading rather than obvious and automatic pushing of a political agenda regardless of the facts that bothers me.