Rape and homicide by minorities were also up in 2015 over 2014 which is why women have flocked to guns for self protection, even when traveling on airplanes. The country is scared, the country is angry, and Trump will make America great again come Nov 2016.
somebody's doing the raping. it's illegal mexicans, sneaking in on airplanes,
Nice gallup poll from 2013 GrumpySteen. Typical strawman from a liberal lefty poster. The subject is 2015 get with the times grandpa unless you can't keep up.
Also....
It's pathetic they marked my original post as -1 flamebait when it's full of facts. Ok then here's some real flamebait if you want an example of how to properly label something:
Why am I not surprised liberal lefty slashdotters (drinkypoo a capital kool-aid drinking offender) marking my post as flamebait when they are too lazy to do the research themselves yet demanding citations not to mention the SJW attitude of if we bury his post at -1 that will silence his facts. This is a movement your lies and slander cannot bury. America will be made great again come Nov 2016 thanks to the hot mess Democrats have left this country in. There are no coattails for you to ride this time. No saxophones to play. Gender nor skin color will earn you free votes, and socialism is so cringe worthy this country vomits at the thought. You've made your bed, time to enjoy your nap while the adults clean up the mess liberal Democrats made yet again.
Normally I don't take posters to the toolshed like this but as a lurker it's disgusting watching how leftist registered posters manipulate the comments to silence facts on a daily basis not to mention the SJW articles that have zero point other than to push an agenda that goes in circles because thankfully not everyone is stupid enough to buy it hook line and sinker. This article being an example of one with your anti-gun agenda./flamebait
Actually, I suspect the reason for the increase is fairly innocuous. As concealed weapons permits become more and more common, more people are getting used to carrying around concealed weapons without really thinking about it. So when they tell a TSA agent that they forgot they had it, they're probably being honest. They probably got up that morning, went through their usual routine (including putting their weapon in its holster or in their purse) and didn't think about the fact that they would be flying that day (or maybe the need to fly out came up unexpectedly later in the day).
yeah, that's innocuous. "Hey honey have you seen my gun?"
Because that's easy. Volvos were already pretty much tanks on the roads. You do NOT want to get into a crash with a Volvo. Believe me that much. If you can either crash into a M1 tank or a Volvo, choose the M1. It sure is not only the softer target but also will cause less unnecessary damage on your car.
Take a look at some crash videos involving Volvos. Then ponder being in the "wrong" car. Not funny.
they didn't weigh that much. officially the 240 was a compact. i'm one of those dorks who weighs his car at truck scales out of curiosity, and a 240 with the usual amount of random junk in it (such as me) was less than 2900 lbs. my 7 year old honda civic weighs like 400 lbs more than that. but the passenger compartment indeed did not deform on impact. the front and rear might, but any further impact is going to be absorbed by the other car. the first clip here is a volvo station wagon turning an opel into tinfoil. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
i wish i could find it; i'm pretty sure i remember correctly a crash test of a mercedes sedan in the 80s where the car was so rigid that it just stopped instantly on impact, and the inertia made the seat rip out of the floor. modifications ensued.
And a paper/plastic bag blowing across the road is almost impossible to distinguish at speed with "sensors" and will cause your car to come to a screaming halt.
Or else it would similarly drive straight over the top of a toddler running out in front of you.
Personally, I think the car could be made safe. The driver behind you driving a "non-safe" car is what's going to kill you every time. And that will only be made worse if cars take it upon themselves to perform ever-more-drastic actions on the basis of sensor inputs.
i'd think a toddler whose IR signature matched that of a plastic bag might be past the point of life-saving.
First, there is NO such thing as 100% death proof. There have been 5 serious injuries/deaths in around 75,000 Model S.
1) a car thief that hit an old 1920's street light at over 100 MPH and split the car in half. He actually died a day later.
2) a car that went over a cliff and dropped over 300 feet.
3) another car that went over a cliff and bounced some 250 feet off the sides.
4) another one that had a head-on with a semi-truck that ran OVER the Tesla, crushing it.
5) the most recent in which an old man drove through a garage and put the car in a pool, but was unable to escape and drowned.
Beyond that, tesla is by far the safest car ever made and yet, it is NOT 100% safe. It is STILL possible to die in it.
the old volvo 240s were fatality free in the US until late in the 90s, a decade after they stopped making them. yeah, a lot of it has to do with demographics.
Do you really not know, or are you pretending not to understand? I'm not sure which is worse, ignorance or deliberate lies.
It used to be called "global warming". But, this term got discredited due to scientists abusing science in order to push a left-wing agenda. So, they rebranded as "climate change". It's the same as how "liberals" rebranded as "progressives". Old wine in new bottles. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Deep conspiracy? Why yes there is. It's not some crazy James Bond oval table with liberals cackling and stroking white cats. But there is indeed a general agreement, you might call it a hivemind, that does want to use global warming, I'm sorry climate change, to enact radical left-wing policies and use the excuse of global warming, I'm sorry again climate change, to get them passed without recourse to voting or any of that old-fashioned 20th century white people stuff.
and when did it get 'rebranded as "climate change"'? Was this before or after the establishment of the IPCC in 1988? or was it originally named the IPGW and they changed the name and only rightwingers noticed?
The warming of the earth causes the climate to change. Why do the nutjobs think they've stumbled on a deep conspiracy when they discover two different terms for different aspects of the same thing?
the fun part is hearing them rant about "gullible warmists" while they solemnly intone "when it stopped warming they changed the name to climate change from global warming" as they rant about the evil IPCC, and then asking them if they know what the CC in IPCC has stood for for the past 30 years. denialists will believe anything fed to them by an Approved Authority, no questions asked.
"Pickering concludes, 'What Evans apparently doesn't realize is that because of the thermal inertia of the oceans, within narrow bounds we can already predict what global temperatures will be in 2019, 2024, and 2029...' "
A major part of science is the ability to verify a theory by independently repeatable experiments and observations. Predicting the future is not "science". You can create a predictive model by retro-fitting current observations to past data, looking at trends and making certain assumptions, but it's still only a model. Such a model can be used, but it should never be "believed". That's the problem with the global warming *cough* "Climate Change" alarmists. They honestly think they KNOW what global temperatures are going to be over the next several decades based on their climate models. The same types of models from decades ago made all sorts of dire predictions that never came to fruition and the same is true of today's models.
look up "curve fitting" and "scientific model" and see if you can understand the difference.
then see if you can wrap your head around the fact that every scientific theory, hypothesis, etc. is a model. F=MA is a model of the kinetics of objects, based on past observations. If you don't feel it predicts future behavior of objects, that's your prerogative, but you can't say it's just curve fitting with no attempt to understand the underlying mechanism.
Here's a quick bullshit detector I've learned to use when dealing with science "revisions". Note that this has nothing to do with global warming, I developed this tool on unrelated topics. The tool is: "does the revision only go one way? Does it never go the other way? Does it support the politics of the person claiming it? If so then it's likely bullshit."
Apply that test and does it pass?
that's great, if you live in a world where scientific results "support the politics" of people. AGW was a perfectly established theory that explained the difference in surface temp between the earth and the moon for over 100 years before it became political, by the decision of the Koch brothers. http://www.newyorker.com/news/...
and the fact that we're pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. and the fact that CO2 absorbs IR. and the fact that the badly named "greenhouse effect" of the 280 PPM CO2 present before we started this grand experiment keeps the temperature of the Earth 33 degrees C higher than that of the moon, despite the same energy from the sun. as worked out well over 100 years ago by Arrhenius, whose calculations remain correct today.
Yeah, and NOAA's surface dataset is so incredibly broken (75% of the temperature sensors have gone offline since 2010 and many if not most of them are located within urban heat islands) they had to double the warming trend by lowering the temperatures pre-hiatus and jacking them up post-hiatus so that it would fit the alarmist narrative.
yeah yeah, we know, it's all a conspiracy to maintain the scientists' vast wealth and power.
bookmark this guy's post for reference the next time you read a denialist's post 'Nobody denies its warming, just that the cause might not be anthropogenic"
Of course, the angry redneck and the stupid sophomore both have one thing in common: You can't tell either one of them a damned thing right now which refutes their little dreams.
That's not limited to "the redneck and stupid sophomore". Damn near the entire population of the US is like that anymore. It's strange how we have better communication and more access to information than ever before in this country, and people are more narrow minded than ever.
I don't buy it. I think that most people are considered and reasonable. I think that the extremes are just more interesting and consequently receive disproportional attention.
Not everyone who votes Republican is a fundamental Christian NRA wingnut. Not everyone who votes Democrat is a tree hugging, socialist nutjob.
I believe that the truth (as is usually the case in my experience) is somewhere in the middle. Most people just want to live and not be hassled.
You may vote repub because you are fiscally conservative. You may vote dem because you care about social programs... I don't know the reasons people vote the way they do, but in my experience we all have the same basic desires.
Besides, our system of government doesn't really give all that much power to the president without the help of the other branches. So no matter who is president, you are pretty much guaranteed the same thing you have now.... for better or worse... I think that is by design.
Don't get me wrong, I definitely lean left and I think it would really say something about this country if Trump were to win, but I also know that even if he does, nothing will change. It will just be the same thing we have now (with slightly more comedy perhaps).... but nothing will really change...
I mean, think about the biggest thing Obama "rammed" through during his presidency... Obamacare... and now tell me how your life is now ruined because of it...
i'm afraid political parties are like sports teams and religions. you either stick with what your parents handed you, or you go in the opposite direction to show them they're not the boss of you.
Of course, the angry redneck and the stupid sophomore both have one thing in common: You can't tell either one of them a damned thing right now which refutes their little dreams.
That's not limited to "the redneck and stupid sophomore". Damn near the entire population of the US is like that anymore. It's strange how we have better communication and more access to information than ever before in this country, and people are more narrow minded than ever.
more information, but even less time to digest it and think. so a lot of that information which people respond to consists of people telling us what to think. and the authoritarian hierarchical types live by that stuff, while the data-driven individual deciders go nuts trying to keep up with the nearly infinite never ending flow of half digested factoids thrown at them. witness the "what's good for you, what's bad for you" hysterical news which masquerades as scientific information.
If you vote republican and accept Medicare and social security you are a hypocrite.
The trouble is, depending on your age, you almost HAVE to take them when you get to retirement age.
This money was forceably taken from my pay over many decades, rather than giving me a choice on how best to invest it for myself. If given that choice early on in my employment history, I could have e invested it and I'd be more well off by having that money grow more, and I could use it.
But when you get close to retirement age, well....you've thrown so much money into the pot, it makes no sense not to try to draw a little of it back from the well.
ah yes, if we could all invest our social security money we'd all become rich. much like the prior theory that we could all become rich by simply selling each other our houses at increasingly higher prices. certainly, those who invested their retirement money prudently and intelligently became rich, if they were lucky enough to pull it out before 2008. because the ones who didn't are now living on that social security money they weren't allowed to invest.
True communism has never been practiced on a major scale. Current communism countries get stuck at the command level economy setup stage. And to keep the peasants from revolting they give away a bunch of stuff.
Norway and Sweden are closer to true communism than China,Cuba or russia(was).
Both Norway and Sweden ditched command economic mode in favor of regulated capitalism.
That is the mode Bernie wants for the is and will a decent goal, won't happen with the number of hypocrite we have in this country. If you vote republican and accept Medicare and social security you are a hypocrite.
indeed if you asked Marx what he thought of the decline of communist countries, he'd ask you which countries had ever been communist? Russia and China and Cuba et all are communist the way the Holy Roman Empire was Christian. didn't penetrate below the mission statement,
That's because the poor (mostly white) southerners who take more government benefits as a group don't understand their own ideology.
My own brother was happily collecting benefits after drug-addicting, smoking and drinking himself into an umemployable wreck of a human being considered himself a "staunch" Reagan conservative up until his sad, but not unexpected, early death.
bigger than that; there's a certain lack of understanding in a large segment of the populace that the positions taken by politicians and the decisions they enact actually have consequences on life, more so than what football team you back and what the coach thinks about passing versus running. There was an article in the paper here the other day where they quoted some man-on-the-street as saying "I've been a Republican all my life, but I haven't liked anything they stood for since Reagan".
Then definitely don't vote for Hillary. I've never heard someone pander towards various demographics as much. Including that asshat Trump.
hillary's less pandering than pandered about. during her time in the public eye, the republicans have cast her as a card-carrying socialist, an out of touch plutocrat pawn of wall street, a bra burning feminist lesbian, an abused wife without the moxie to leave, a sick old woman with diminished mental capacity, an evil mastermind carrying out her devious complex plots on multiple continents over decades, a brilliantly successful career criminal, an incompetent bumbler, a war-crazed imperialist, a wimpy foreign policy apologist, etc etc.
He is not actually going to build that wall on the Mexican border, and whatnot.
Trump is representative of the lowest form of political pandering the system will support.
Let's all hope the bar doesn't ever get set any lower than that.
the thing is, he's not the cause of the idiocracy, he's the symptom. he's the guy who had the realization that he could ride the idiocracy to the top, based on his previous success at it on TV, and the lack of embarrassment to do so, based on other Republicans' previous success in this direction in a more limited way. the trump supporters were out there before him and if it weren't trump it would be some other clown. in the literal sense of the word.
What I can't understand is, giving the number of times Trump-controlled businesses have gone bankrupt and screwed their creditors, why does anyone still lend him money? Other than lucrative bribes, I can't think of any logical reason.
Having read up on him before, from what I remember he's never filed chapter 7, normally he's filed chapter 13. That means that the creditors still got their money back; just perhaps not as quickly or with as much interest as they would have otherwise gotten. Indeed, he's good at keeping his different businesses separate. So it's not actually Trump borrowing money, but company A, B, or C that's owned/run by Trump that's borrowing money.
In other words, he's still a good risk.
i think his businesses filed chapter 11. this restructures the debt; creditors get their money but they do give up something, like they get it over a longer time, or they get less interest. the big question here is, how many times does trump have to go bankrupt in the hotel/casino business before figuring out that it's too risky for the way he takes on loans and does business? he's the guy in the crowd around the three card monte game who keeps betting that this time he absolutely knows where the queen is.
And the biggest cost to labor is capital, mostly land.
If people didn't have to borrow half a career's income just to have a place to even sit and starve to death in peace, they could work for much cheaper. I live quite luxuriously off a budget that a full-time minimum-wage job could fund if it weren't for rent, and savings to eventually escape from rent, and taxes on the money I have to earn to pay for those things, adding up to almost 300% of what I actually need to consume for that comfortable lifestyle.
Fix the problem of rent (and interest) and get us to a world where people actually own the places they live outright and don't have to pay to borrow them (or money to buy them), and then labor costs can plummet, and the cost of business can plummet with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Rape and homicide by minorities were also up in 2015 over 2014 which is why women have flocked to guns for self protection, even when traveling on airplanes. The country is scared, the country is angry, and Trump will make America great again come Nov 2016.
somebody's doing the raping. it's illegal mexicans, sneaking in on airplanes,
Nice gallup poll from 2013 GrumpySteen. Typical strawman from a liberal lefty poster. The subject is 2015 get with the times grandpa unless you can't keep up.
Also....
It's pathetic they marked my original post as -1 flamebait when it's full of facts. Ok then here's some real flamebait if you want an example of how to properly label something:
Why am I not surprised liberal lefty slashdotters (drinkypoo a capital kool-aid drinking offender) marking my post as flamebait when they are too lazy to do the research themselves yet demanding citations not to mention the SJW attitude of if we bury his post at -1 that will silence his facts. This is a movement your lies and slander cannot bury. America will be made great again come Nov 2016 thanks to the hot mess Democrats have left this country in. There are no coattails for you to ride this time. No saxophones to play. Gender nor skin color will earn you free votes, and socialism is so cringe worthy this country vomits at the thought. You've made your bed, time to enjoy your nap while the adults clean up the mess liberal Democrats made yet again.
Normally I don't take posters to the toolshed like this but as a lurker it's disgusting watching how leftist registered posters manipulate the comments to silence facts on a daily basis not to mention the SJW articles that have zero point other than to push an agenda that goes in circles because thankfully not everyone is stupid enough to buy it hook line and sinker. This article being an example of one with your anti-gun agenda. /flamebait
somebody mod this down to -1. please.
Actually, I suspect the reason for the increase is fairly innocuous. As concealed weapons permits become more and more common, more people are getting used to carrying around concealed weapons without really thinking about it. So when they tell a TSA agent that they forgot they had it, they're probably being honest. They probably got up that morning, went through their usual routine (including putting their weapon in its holster or in their purse) and didn't think about the fact that they would be flying that day (or maybe the need to fly out came up unexpectedly later in the day).
yeah, that's innocuous. "Hey honey have you seen my gun?"
Air passenger thought experiment: a white hijacker with a gun; a black off duty cop with a gun; and George Zimmerman with a gun.
is a good man who remembers that he's carrying a gun.
Because that's easy. Volvos were already pretty much tanks on the roads. You do NOT want to get into a crash with a Volvo. Believe me that much. If you can either crash into a M1 tank or a Volvo, choose the M1. It sure is not only the softer target but also will cause less unnecessary damage on your car.
Take a look at some crash videos involving Volvos. Then ponder being in the "wrong" car. Not funny.
they didn't weigh that much. officially the 240 was a compact. i'm one of those dorks who weighs his car at truck scales out of curiosity, and a 240 with the usual amount of random junk in it (such as me) was less than 2900 lbs. my 7 year old honda civic weighs like 400 lbs more than that.
but the passenger compartment indeed did not deform on impact. the front and rear might, but any further impact is going to be absorbed by the other car.
the first clip here is a volvo station wagon turning an opel into tinfoil. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
i wish i could find it; i'm pretty sure i remember correctly a crash test of a mercedes sedan in the 80s where the car was so rigid that it just stopped instantly on impact, and the inertia made the seat rip out of the floor. modifications ensued.
And a paper/plastic bag blowing across the road is almost impossible to distinguish at speed with "sensors" and will cause your car to come to a screaming halt.
Or else it would similarly drive straight over the top of a toddler running out in front of you.
Personally, I think the car could be made safe. The driver behind you driving a "non-safe" car is what's going to kill you every time. And that will only be made worse if cars take it upon themselves to perform ever-more-drastic actions on the basis of sensor inputs.
i'd think a toddler whose IR signature matched that of a plastic bag might be past the point of life-saving.
First, there is NO such thing as 100% death proof. There have been 5 serious injuries/deaths in around 75,000 Model S. 1) a car thief that hit an old 1920's street light at over 100 MPH and split the car in half. He actually died a day later. 2) a car that went over a cliff and dropped over 300 feet. 3) another car that went over a cliff and bounced some 250 feet off the sides. 4) another one that had a head-on with a semi-truck that ran OVER the Tesla, crushing it. 5) the most recent in which an old man drove through a garage and put the car in a pool, but was unable to escape and drowned. Beyond that, tesla is by far the safest car ever made and yet, it is NOT 100% safe. It is STILL possible to die in it.
"The group said no drivers of '88 through '92 Volvo 240s were killed during those years [between 1989 and 1993]" http://community.seattletimes.... 5 people were killed in a 240 the next year, though, when they were hit head on. http://www.iihs.org/externalda...
the old volvo 240s were fatality free in the US until late in the 90s, a decade after they stopped making them. yeah, a lot of it has to do with demographics.
Do you really not know, or are you pretending not to understand? I'm not sure which is worse, ignorance or deliberate lies.
It used to be called "global warming". But, this term got discredited due to scientists abusing science in order to push a left-wing agenda. So, they rebranded as "climate change". It's the same as how "liberals" rebranded as "progressives". Old wine in new bottles. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Deep conspiracy? Why yes there is. It's not some crazy James Bond oval table with liberals cackling and stroking white cats. But there is indeed a general agreement, you might call it a hivemind, that does want to use global warming, I'm sorry climate change, to enact radical left-wing policies and use the excuse of global warming, I'm sorry again climate change, to get them passed without recourse to voting or any of that old-fashioned 20th century white people stuff.
and when did it get 'rebranded as "climate change"'? Was this before or after the establishment of the IPCC in 1988? or was it originally named the IPGW and they changed the name and only rightwingers noticed?
global warming *cough* "Climate Change"
The warming of the earth causes the climate to change. Why do the nutjobs think they've stumbled on a deep conspiracy when they discover two different terms for different aspects of the same thing?
the fun part is hearing them rant about "gullible warmists" while they solemnly intone "when it stopped warming they changed the name to climate change from global warming" as they rant about the evil IPCC, and then asking them if they know what the CC in IPCC has stood for for the past 30 years.
denialists will believe anything fed to them by an Approved Authority, no questions asked.
"Pickering concludes, 'What Evans apparently doesn't realize is that because of the thermal inertia of the oceans, within narrow bounds we can already predict what global temperatures will be in 2019, 2024, and 2029...' "
A major part of science is the ability to verify a theory by independently repeatable experiments and observations. Predicting the future is not "science". You can create a predictive model by retro-fitting current observations to past data, looking at trends and making certain assumptions, but it's still only a model. Such a model can be used, but it should never be "believed". That's the problem with the global warming *cough* "Climate Change" alarmists. They honestly think they KNOW what global temperatures are going to be over the next several decades based on their climate models. The same types of models from decades ago made all sorts of dire predictions that never came to fruition and the same is true of today's models.
look up "curve fitting" and "scientific model" and see if you can understand the difference.
then see if you can wrap your head around the fact that every scientific theory, hypothesis, etc. is a model. F=MA is a model of the kinetics of objects, based on past observations. If you don't feel it predicts future behavior of objects, that's your prerogative, but you can't say it's just curve fitting with no attempt to understand the underlying mechanism.
Here's a quick bullshit detector I've learned to use when dealing with science "revisions". Note that this has nothing to do with global warming, I developed this tool on unrelated topics. The tool is: "does the revision only go one way? Does it never go the other way? Does it support the politics of the person claiming it? If so then it's likely bullshit."
Apply that test and does it pass?
that's great, if you live in a world where scientific results "support the politics" of people. AGW was a perfectly established theory that explained the difference in surface temp between the earth and the moon for over 100 years before it became political, by the decision of the Koch brothers. http://www.newyorker.com/news/...
and the fact that we're pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. and the fact that CO2 absorbs IR. and the fact that the badly named "greenhouse effect" of the 280 PPM CO2 present before we started this grand experiment keeps the temperature of the Earth 33 degrees C higher than that of the moon, despite the same energy from the sun. as worked out well over 100 years ago by Arrhenius, whose calculations remain correct today.
Yeah, and NOAA's surface dataset is so incredibly broken (75% of the temperature sensors have gone offline since 2010 and many if not most of them are located within urban heat islands) they had to double the warming trend by lowering the temperatures pre-hiatus and jacking them up post-hiatus so that it would fit the alarmist narrative.
yeah yeah, we know, it's all a conspiracy to maintain the scientists' vast wealth and power.
bookmark this guy's post for reference the next time you read a denialist's post 'Nobody denies its warming, just that the cause might not be anthropogenic"
Of course, the angry redneck and the stupid sophomore both have one thing in common: You can't tell either one of them a damned thing right now which refutes their little dreams.
That's not limited to "the redneck and stupid sophomore". Damn near the entire population of the US is like that anymore. It's strange how we have better communication and more access to information than ever before in this country, and people are more narrow minded than ever.
I don't buy it. I think that most people are considered and reasonable. I think that the extremes are just more interesting and consequently receive disproportional attention.
Not everyone who votes Republican is a fundamental Christian NRA wingnut. Not everyone who votes Democrat is a tree hugging, socialist nutjob.
I believe that the truth (as is usually the case in my experience) is somewhere in the middle. Most people just want to live and not be hassled.
You may vote repub because you are fiscally conservative. You may vote dem because you care about social programs... I don't know the reasons people vote the way they do, but in my experience we all have the same basic desires.
Besides, our system of government doesn't really give all that much power to the president without the help of the other branches. So no matter who is president, you are pretty much guaranteed the same thing you have now.... for better or worse... I think that is by design.
Don't get me wrong, I definitely lean left and I think it would really say something about this country if Trump were to win, but I also know that even if he does, nothing will change. It will just be the same thing we have now (with slightly more comedy perhaps).... but nothing will really change...
I mean, think about the biggest thing Obama "rammed" through during his presidency... Obamacare... and now tell me how your life is now ruined because of it...
i'm afraid political parties are like sports teams and religions. you either stick with what your parents handed you, or you go in the opposite direction to show them they're not the boss of you.
Of course, the angry redneck and the stupid sophomore both have one thing in common: You can't tell either one of them a damned thing right now which refutes their little dreams.
That's not limited to "the redneck and stupid sophomore". Damn near the entire population of the US is like that anymore. It's strange how we have better communication and more access to information than ever before in this country, and people are more narrow minded than ever.
more information, but even less time to digest it and think. so a lot of that information which people respond to consists of people telling us what to think. and the authoritarian hierarchical types live by that stuff, while the data-driven individual deciders go nuts trying to keep up with the nearly infinite never ending flow of half digested factoids thrown at them. witness the "what's good for you, what's bad for you" hysterical news which masquerades as scientific information.
The trouble is, depending on your age, you almost HAVE to take them when you get to retirement age.
This money was forceably taken from my pay over many decades, rather than giving me a choice on how best to invest it for myself. If given that choice early on in my employment history, I could have e invested it and I'd be more well off by having that money grow more, and I could use it.
But when you get close to retirement age, well....you've thrown so much money into the pot, it makes no sense not to try to draw a little of it back from the well.
ah yes, if we could all invest our social security money we'd all become rich. much like the prior theory that we could all become rich by simply selling each other our houses at increasingly higher prices. certainly, those who invested their retirement money prudently and intelligently became rich, if they were lucky enough to pull it out before 2008. because the ones who didn't are now living on that social security money they weren't allowed to invest.
True communism has never been practiced on a major scale. Current communism countries get stuck at the command level economy setup stage. And to keep the peasants from revolting they give away a bunch of stuff.
Norway and Sweden are closer to true communism than China,Cuba or russia(was).
Both Norway and Sweden ditched command economic mode in favor of regulated capitalism.
That is the mode Bernie wants for the is and will a decent goal, won't happen with the number of hypocrite we have in this country. If you vote republican and accept Medicare and social security you are a hypocrite.
indeed if you asked Marx what he thought of the decline of communist countries, he'd ask you which countries had ever been communist? Russia and China and Cuba et all are communist the way the Holy Roman Empire was Christian. didn't penetrate below the mission statement,
New rule: If you can't tell the difference between socialism and communism, you can't comment on either.
the difference is, you can have social media, but you can't have communal media. i don't know what that means, but it's a sound bite.
That's because the poor (mostly white) southerners who take more government benefits as a group don't understand their own ideology.
My own brother was happily collecting benefits after drug-addicting, smoking and drinking himself into an umemployable wreck of a human being considered himself a "staunch" Reagan conservative up until his sad, but not unexpected, early death.
bigger than that; there's a certain lack of understanding in a large segment of the populace that the positions taken by politicians and the decisions they enact actually have consequences on life, more so than what football team you back and what the coach thinks about passing versus running. There was an article in the paper here the other day where they quoted some man-on-the-street as saying "I've been a Republican all my life, but I haven't liked anything they stood for since Reagan".
Then definitely don't vote for Hillary. I've never heard someone pander towards various demographics as much. Including that asshat Trump.
hillary's less pandering than pandered about. during her time in the public eye, the republicans have cast her as a card-carrying socialist, an out of touch plutocrat pawn of wall street, a bra burning feminist lesbian, an abused wife without the moxie to leave, a sick old woman with diminished mental capacity, an evil mastermind carrying out her devious complex plots on multiple continents over decades, a brilliantly successful career criminal, an incompetent bumbler, a war-crazed imperialist, a wimpy foreign policy apologist, etc etc.
He is not actually going to build that wall on the Mexican border, and whatnot.
Trump is representative of the lowest form of political pandering the system will support.
Let's all hope the bar doesn't ever get set any lower than that.
the thing is, he's not the cause of the idiocracy, he's the symptom. he's the guy who had the realization that he could ride the idiocracy to the top, based on his previous success at it on TV, and the lack of embarrassment to do so, based on other Republicans' previous success in this direction in a more limited way. the trump supporters were out there before him and if it weren't trump it would be some other clown. in the literal sense of the word.
What I can't understand is, giving the number of times Trump-controlled businesses have gone bankrupt and screwed their creditors, why does anyone still lend him money? Other than lucrative bribes, I can't think of any logical reason.
Having read up on him before, from what I remember he's never filed chapter 7, normally he's filed chapter 13. That means that the creditors still got their money back; just perhaps not as quickly or with as much interest as they would have otherwise gotten. Indeed, he's good at keeping his different businesses separate. So it's not actually Trump borrowing money, but company A, B, or C that's owned/run by Trump that's borrowing money.
In other words, he's still a good risk.
i think his businesses filed chapter 11. this restructures the debt; creditors get their money but they do give up something, like they get it over a longer time, or they get less interest.
the big question here is, how many times does trump have to go bankrupt in the hotel/casino business before figuring out that it's too risky for the way he takes on loans and does business? he's the guy in the crowd around the three card monte game who keeps betting that this time he absolutely knows where the queen is.
And the biggest cost to labor is capital, mostly land.
If people didn't have to borrow half a career's income just to have a place to even sit and starve to death in peace, they could work for much cheaper. I live quite luxuriously off a budget that a full-time minimum-wage job could fund if it weren't for rent, and savings to eventually escape from rent, and taxes on the money I have to earn to pay for those things, adding up to almost 300% of what I actually need to consume for that comfortable lifestyle.
Fix the problem of rent (and interest) and get us to a world where people actually own the places they live outright and don't have to pay to borrow them (or money to buy them), and then labor costs can plummet, and the cost of business can plummet with it.
and the cost of housing, whether rental or ownership, is a much larger fraction of people's overall expenses than in other countries. http://inflationdata.com/artic... . this has gotten worse over time. http://static1.squarespace.com...