And yet overall unemployment is currently around 5.5% which is about as good as it ever gets, in spite of massive automation across the entire industrial spectrum.
Not only that, but average levels of education have gone up as well.
Sure, your dire scenarios would come to pass if we replaced our workforce entirely with robots overnight, but thankfully, that would only happen in a fictional story.
Here's what I want to know: How do you work with raw rock, when there's no gravity?
You can't use conveyor belts. You can't brace your heavy equipment against the ground for stability and leverage.
Your rubble doesn't settle into neat piles near your work area, for easy disposal or use in some other project.
Every time you act on the work surface, your tools are pushed back into the outer darkness.
And thanks to the vacuum, you can't even use suction or other airflow techniques to manage your rubble.
Space industry, at the very least, will require huge amounts of reaction mass; also sturdier, bulkier, more complex machinery (think lids for all your power-shovel buckets, and enclosures for all your three-dimensional conveyor gears)--machinery that must first be manufactured on Earth, and then lifted into space.
Forget about terraforming! I want to know how we're supposed to work the asteroids!
========== Actually, I have an idea: nanotechnology. Say, a canister of tiny Von Neumann machines, which "disassemble" the asteroid, lock away its valuable raw materials in the body-structures of their newborn brothers, and when they're done, combine into one big ball and launch themselves at some orbital factory. At the factory, they could march happily into the new structures the asteroid was mined to build.
They're factions that act in the interests of the faction membership. Each party on its own doesn't act in the interest of all the people. Rather, each party acts in the interests of its own membership.
And of course they collude to prevent competition. It would be counter to the interests of the faction to sacrifice its own advantage in order to give a free ride to some other faction whose ideals were counter to the ideals of the first faction.
Government isn't about everybody getting their way. It's about everybody arguing about which way to go, and then some people getting their way and everybody else getting nothing until the next big argument, when they have another opportunity to convince their fellow citizens to change direction.
A parliamentary system won't change the fact that people disagree about politics, and no matter how you resolve that disagreement, somebody doesn't get what they want.
The parliamentary systems that have evolved organically reflect the cultural qualities of the people that evolved them. All of them have the same problem of addressing the demands of minority factions, which they resolve at the highest level. Their legislatures are coalitions of all the minority factions. Their legislators then form an Executive made up of members of the most powerful factions, and headed by a Prime Minister who is chosen by the most powerful faction.
A parliamentary system such as you describe would give us Tom DeLay as President. Anyway, I'm not sure a parliamentary system would make sense to Americans. After all, our own system was devised before the first parliamentary systems were born, when even England was still ruled by an autocratic king, to whom the Ministers were subordinate.
It seems to me that our own system resolves the problem of minority factions earlier in the process, uniting as many factions as can get along with each other under a couple of umbrella coalitions--the major parties--that each represent a near-majority of the population as a whole. There are various checks and balances at all levels to ensure that in general the majority gets its way, but the demands of the minority factions are still weighted beyond what their faction size would warrant.
I think the real problem with the Green party, for example, is that its platform is not comprehensive. If we were to elect a Green executive, each and every domestic and foreign issue would be interpreted through the single filter of environmentalism. While I'm sure some would believe this a utopia, I shudder at the thought of an Executive without a comprehensive world view. The Presidents we do get are already bad enough.
So I'm perfectly happy with our current system. It forces fringe groups and minority factions to ally themselves with an umbrella group that's capable of balancing competing minority interests and making political compromises when necessary, in order to further the general cause of the largest possible number of voters.
I'm not really interested in political systems that favor stronger minority factions, in place of systems that favor compromise, and reward moderation when the time comes to hand out high offices.
Maybe if America had started out with a king, and evolved a parliament from there, it might make sense to have one. As it stands, the men and women who could birth us a robust, stable parliamentary system from scratch are nowhere to be found.
If some third party wants to form a faction coalition capable of challenging the two major coalitions currently in play, they have my full approval. But it seems to me that none of them want to play that game. Rather, they want to preserve their ideals intact, make no compromises, and stay eternally true to their core constituency. The only problem is, no faction's core constituency is a majority. That's why the Republican membership covers the entire spectrum from the Religious Right to moderate conservatives. The Democratic membership similarly reflects the entire rainbow of leftist ideals.
The moderates on each side of the divide have to suck it
Political parties are associations of citizens that share a common interest. The purpose of the party is to serve the interests of its members. Thus, serving their own interests is identical to serving our interests.
Problems of funding, media access, and the incumbent's advantage are all much easier to overcome at the local level. Chalk it up to my youthful idealism, but I believe that energy and good ideas are enough to carry a local election.
For example, San Diego's mayoral elections produce a wide range of candidates. All of them are adequately funded, well-covered in the media, and fully prepared to challenge the incumbent. The same is true for county officials, school boards, and numerous other local offices where a third party could conceivably build up a deep and wide foundation of community values. You see this happening in San Francisco right now.
We both think there's a problem that keeps third parties from making the leap from "Mayor of San Francisco" to "President of the United States". You think the problem is that the major national parties won't let anybody else participate in the presidential campaign debates. I think the problem is that the third parties have no idea how to get from "Mayor of San Francisco" to "State Senator" or "Governor of California", let alone "President of the United States".
Your counter-argument seems to be "It shouldn't matter whether the third parties know what they're doing, they should still be treated like competent professionals". All I'm saying is, if they acted more like competent professionals, instead of impatient two year olds, they'd get the voter support they needed to become a major national party.
Show me a party that consistently gets twenty per cent of the vote, and I'll show you a party that consistently fails to convince eighty per cent of the citizens that the party's ideas are worthwhile. Does it seem fair to you to put such a party in power?
The bottom line is that it benefits the two major parties to maintain the status quo. Not being naive, I believe the two major parties do recognize and act on this fact. After all, why should they not do something that benefits them? Should they act to their own detriment, in order to benefit other factions which disagree with their ideals?
The reason I don't see this as an abuse of power is because I don't see any significant barrier to third parties joining this national power structure.
It seems to me that the most fruitful way of disrupting the Republican-Democrat status quo at the national level would be for third parties to first figure out how to consistently win their local and regional elections.
The bottom line is that there is no major party conspiracy to keep third parties out of the San Diego mayoral race debates, and yet third parties can't seem to win that election either. Let alone county elections, state legislature elections, or gubernatorial elections.
If the third parties can't deliver a compelling message that inspires and motivates a majority of their closest neighbors, when there is no The Man keeping them down, whose fault is that? And why should The Man take them seriously, when they are unable to command even a majority vote of their local PTA, let alone a plurality of the citizens nationwide?
The EASIEST way to deal with a conspiracy is to raise a body of concerned citizens at the local level, and work your way up from there. Your only limiting factors are the energy you bring to the task and the real value of your ideas to the people around you.
How about this: Your third parties demonstrate real political strength at the local and regional levels. If, after that, they're still not getting any national play, we'll talk about the conspiracy.
They're the two major parties. They're the only two parties with the experience, the infrastructure, and the proven national majorities to play politics on a major scale. Who else are they going to collude with?
Political parties only work together when they have to. If the Green party (or any other third party) were a major party, the other major parties would have to work with them. That, or the Green party would have a major political system of their own, geared towards their own ideas and constituencies, and capable of competing on a major scale with the Republicans and the Democrats.
Of course the major parties aren't going to complicate their system and weaken their own position by giving concessions to minor parties. It's up to the minor parties to become major parties. The customary way to become a major party is to develop a set of ideas that are appealing to a large number of citizens, who are then motivated to support your party on a major scale instead of one of the other major parties. It's not customary for minor parties to become major parties simply by saying they should be major parties.
Some metaphors:
If this was major league baseball, you'd be saying that your team doesn't get to the playoffs because the other pro teams don't want the extra competition. And I'd be saying that your team doesn't make it to the major league playoffs because they're barely able to compete in their local softball league.
If this were Thanksgiving dinner, you'd be saying that you have to sit at the Kid's Table because the Grown-Ups are colluding to keep you down. And I'd be saying you have to sit at the Kid's Table because you're not a Grown-Up yet.
I still say that if a third party bothered to get really good at winning local and regional elections, the conspiracy to keep them out of the presidential debates would magically disappear.
Tell me again why I should take Cobb seriously as a presidential candidate.
Has he ever been elected to local office? How many of his own neighbors has he convinced of the rightness of his vision? Has he made it to City Council of anything? Mayor? State legislator? Governor? U.S. Senate?
Has he ever secured the majority support of any group of citizens larger than the local school board?
I don't take a candidate seriously just because they're running for president. Any asshat can run for president, as I'm sure you'll agree. I take a candidate seriously because he's demonstrated a capability for serious politics at the national level.
By all means the Greens should speak out to the world. But until they can convince a majority of their local community at the county and state level that what they're saying is true and good, they're not going to get the national audience they crave.
Here's my advice: If you think the Green platform is so awsome, prove it. If it's as good as you say, it shouldn't be too hard to build up local support, and grow from there.
Political movements, unlike Athena, do not spring fully-grown from the fevered brow of some Olympian god. They have to be nurtured for years--sometimes generations--at the local level first.
And every presidential candidate you field only draws precious time and money away from the local campaigns that should be the foundation of your future national success.
San Diego is a conservative city in a liberal state. You can't even get in as Mayor here, but you want me to believe you have what it takes to get in as President?
I promise you, there is no big conspiracy to keep third parties down. There's simply a policy to keep the amateurs out of the pro league. If you spent more time developing a solid farm team, you'd have a much better shot at fielding a championship-caliber pro team.
How many of your preferred candidates have built up strong local support?
I think your problem is that you want your preferred party to compete on the national level, when chances are they haven't yet figured out how to compete even on the local level.
Tell you what: If the Greens ever secure a majority position in the California legislature, I'll start taking their Presidential candidates seriously. And so will the people who "control" the presidential campaign debates.
As it stands right now, though, the Greens can't even get a majority position on my local township school board, or city council, or what-have-you. Please explain the mystery behind their lack of national relevance. The whole thing seems pretty obvious to me.
Fair enough. I certainly see your point. My hunch, though, is that a dirty bomby wouldn't actually be as terror-tastic as its fan club might think.
I think people would mostly be more angry than afraid. Far from accomplishing the intended purpose of a terror attack--reducing the enemy's will to fight--I expect it would have the opposite effect: inflaming the enemy's will to fight.
I mean, look how thoroughly un-terrorized people were by 9/11. Angry and frightened, sure, but there was a distinct lack of that apres-terrorism "terror" that makes people curl up into a ball and wait passively for the end.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if an actual dirty bomb attack turned out to be the catalyst for a whole wave of public education about just how non-scary dirty bombs really are in the context of Technology for Death and Destruction.
As far as making people concerned about real nukes getting across our borders, great! Such concern might stimulate useful activities like actually securing the borders and eliminating state sponsors of terrorism. Which would, incidentally, be contra to the canonical goals of terrorism.
You'd call it nothing of the kind. World War 2 was a total industrial war. Bombing whole cities was the way that war was fought.
Bombing one enemy's cities to defeat them, with the added bonus of making another potential enemy think twice about fighting you, isn't a dirty strategy at all. It's exactly the sort of strategy good generals work very hard to put into practice.
Also, neither of the quotes you present actually give any evidence at all that the policy of the United States government was focused on intimidating Russia.
All you have here is one scientist saying what he thought (without giving any reason at all as to why he thought that way), and one government official acknowledging the bomb's propaganda value against Russia (without addressing one way or the other the bomb's strategic value against Japan).
In his written account of World War II, Churchill reproduces official written memoranda on almost every page. Perhaps you've seen the telegrams, meeting minutes, and other official notes that spell out the policy you claim was in effect. If so, would you mind quoting those, instead?
The bombs were dropped largely to intimiadte the USSR, not to force Japan to surrender
And it worked, too, didn't it? Two atomic bombs, demonstrated against an enemy belligerent in time of war, laid the foundation for a sound MAD doctrine. Neither Russia nor the U.S. ever felt the need to force the issue with nuclear weapons again.
Looks to me like yet another case of good strategy.
Okay, but closing off a small part of London for a long period of time would have had absolutely no effect on the war effort.
Remember, massive bombing of all of Great Britain's major population, industrial, and commercial centers did not actually win the war for Germany.
A dirty bomb might make an effective terror weapon today (though I doubt it), and it might leave a relatively small but long-lasting wound on a city (though, again, I doubt it), but during World War II it would have been about the worst possible application of limited resources as could be imagined. As far as I can tell, a dirty bomb would have been about the exact opposite of what a good general wants.
As far as the diagram showing plutonium, I've always heard that the Germans had their math wrong. Is it possible they hadn't yet gotten to the expermental stage where they discovered that plutonium wouldn't work for this particular design?
While this wouldn't be at all the same as "command training", it is a fact that U.S. Army Reservists are sent to two-week versions of the months-long training courses attended by their Active Duty counterparts.
Example: Intelligence Analyst is a specialty that takes about six months of in-depth training for Active Duty soldiers. But as a Reservist, I was allowed (required) to take the course as two two-week sessions, over two consecutive summers.
And yes, the two courses result in the exact same paper qualification. I was, in the eyes of the Pentagon, just as qualified to analyze intel and advise a unit commmander as the guy who'd spent six months of his life studying the subject.
You know, things like human rights come before other considerations, like profits.
Please tell me where you got the idea that people have a right to employment. Bonus points if you can explain the specific right to employment at IBM, in Europe, right now.
Also, if my right to employment trumps my employer's need for profit, wouldn't that result in a country full of failing companies who aren't allowed to generate positive cash flow by reducing their labor force? Oh, right... Europe. I almost forgot.
I reasonably understood that Blockbuster would no longer charge me an incremental daily fee for keeping their movies past their return date.
I also reasonably understood that Blockbuster would still charge me something--a flat fee after a certain amount of time had passed, as it turns out--for keeping their movie forever.
I admit, I was a little surprised at the "restocking" fee, but on consideration I decided it made sense: I keep the movie so long that you give up on ever getting it back, and update your records accordingly. Then I return the movie, and you have to do work to re-add it to your inventory records (over and above the work of just logging it back in and putting it back on the shelf).
Did you seriously believe that "no more late fees" meant "buy this new release movie for $4.99"?
When people take Blockbuster's movies and don't return them, Blockbuster loses money. Why are you so shocked to discover that their new policy, while more generous than the old one, does not actually allow customers to bankrupt them?
Think of it this way: "no more late fees" means "we won't charge you for returning a movie late, but we will still charge you for not returning a movie at all". It seems to me like you are trying to scam Blockbuster by tricking them into thinking that "nonreturn" and "late return" are the same thing. It's clear from their clearly written policy that they aren't going to fall for it.
All that aside, I find Blockbuster profoundly annoying and useless, and haven't been doing business with them at all for many months.
Okay, just for the record, I understood what "no more late fees" meant as soon as I heard it. I also intuited *immediately* that there would still be fees of some kind associated with keeping movies past their return date.
I don't know what you're talking about "fake" for. Anybody acting shocked that Blockbuster wouldn't actually let you keep their inventory indefinitely, free of charge, is either a moron or a scam artist or both.
That said, Blockbuster clearly failed to factor in the fact that 90%+ of their customers are, in fact, morons or scam artists or both. That's why their "no more late fees" program failed: Not because it was a "fake" program, but because their customer base is real asshats.
Another benefit of military spending is security. Military investments are made with the goal of securing other investments in order to guarantee that they pay off and the money spent is not wasted.
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And in that situation, out of the original 20 guys with hammers, only one of them still has a job. What happens to the other 19?
They take their chances in a cold, hard world, just like the rest of us?
And yet overall unemployment is currently around 5.5% which is about as good as it ever gets, in spite of massive automation across the entire industrial spectrum.
Not only that, but average levels of education have gone up as well.
Sure, your dire scenarios would come to pass if we replaced our workforce entirely with robots overnight, but thankfully, that would only happen in a fictional story.
Here's what I want to know: How do you work with raw rock, when there's no gravity?
You can't use conveyor belts. You can't brace your heavy equipment against the ground for stability and leverage.
Your rubble doesn't settle into neat piles near your work area, for easy disposal or use in some other project.
Every time you act on the work surface, your tools are pushed back into the outer darkness.
And thanks to the vacuum, you can't even use suction or other airflow techniques to manage your rubble.
Space industry, at the very least, will require huge amounts of reaction mass; also sturdier, bulkier, more complex machinery (think lids for all your power-shovel buckets, and enclosures for all your three-dimensional conveyor gears)--machinery that must first be manufactured on Earth, and then lifted into space.
Forget about terraforming! I want to know how we're supposed to work the asteroids!
==========
Actually, I have an idea: nanotechnology. Say, a canister of tiny Von Neumann machines, which "disassemble" the asteroid, lock away its valuable raw materials in the body-structures of their newborn brothers, and when they're done, combine into one big ball and launch themselves at some orbital factory. At the factory, they could march happily into the new structures the asteroid was mined to build.
They're factions that act in the interests of the faction membership. Each party on its own doesn't act in the interest of all the people. Rather, each party acts in the interests of its own membership. And of course they collude to prevent competition. It would be counter to the interests of the faction to sacrifice its own advantage in order to give a free ride to some other faction whose ideals were counter to the ideals of the first faction. Government isn't about everybody getting their way. It's about everybody arguing about which way to go, and then some people getting their way and everybody else getting nothing until the next big argument, when they have another opportunity to convince their fellow citizens to change direction. A parliamentary system won't change the fact that people disagree about politics, and no matter how you resolve that disagreement, somebody doesn't get what they want. The parliamentary systems that have evolved organically reflect the cultural qualities of the people that evolved them. All of them have the same problem of addressing the demands of minority factions, which they resolve at the highest level. Their legislatures are coalitions of all the minority factions. Their legislators then form an Executive made up of members of the most powerful factions, and headed by a Prime Minister who is chosen by the most powerful faction. A parliamentary system such as you describe would give us Tom DeLay as President. Anyway, I'm not sure a parliamentary system would make sense to Americans. After all, our own system was devised before the first parliamentary systems were born, when even England was still ruled by an autocratic king, to whom the Ministers were subordinate. It seems to me that our own system resolves the problem of minority factions earlier in the process, uniting as many factions as can get along with each other under a couple of umbrella coalitions--the major parties--that each represent a near-majority of the population as a whole. There are various checks and balances at all levels to ensure that in general the majority gets its way, but the demands of the minority factions are still weighted beyond what their faction size would warrant. I think the real problem with the Green party, for example, is that its platform is not comprehensive. If we were to elect a Green executive, each and every domestic and foreign issue would be interpreted through the single filter of environmentalism. While I'm sure some would believe this a utopia, I shudder at the thought of an Executive without a comprehensive world view. The Presidents we do get are already bad enough. So I'm perfectly happy with our current system. It forces fringe groups and minority factions to ally themselves with an umbrella group that's capable of balancing competing minority interests and making political compromises when necessary, in order to further the general cause of the largest possible number of voters. I'm not really interested in political systems that favor stronger minority factions, in place of systems that favor compromise, and reward moderation when the time comes to hand out high offices. Maybe if America had started out with a king, and evolved a parliament from there, it might make sense to have one. As it stands, the men and women who could birth us a robust, stable parliamentary system from scratch are nowhere to be found. If some third party wants to form a faction coalition capable of challenging the two major coalitions currently in play, they have my full approval. But it seems to me that none of them want to play that game. Rather, they want to preserve their ideals intact, make no compromises, and stay eternally true to their core constituency. The only problem is, no faction's core constituency is a majority. That's why the Republican membership covers the entire spectrum from the Religious Right to moderate conservatives. The Democratic membership similarly reflects the entire rainbow of leftist ideals. The moderates on each side of the divide have to suck it
Political parties are associations of citizens that share a common interest. The purpose of the party is to serve the interests of its members. Thus, serving their own interests is identical to serving our interests.
Problems of funding, media access, and the incumbent's advantage are all much easier to overcome at the local level. Chalk it up to my youthful idealism, but I believe that energy and good ideas are enough to carry a local election.
For example, San Diego's mayoral elections produce a wide range of candidates. All of them are adequately funded, well-covered in the media, and fully prepared to challenge the incumbent. The same is true for county officials, school boards, and numerous other local offices where a third party could conceivably build up a deep and wide foundation of community values. You see this happening in San Francisco right now.
We both think there's a problem that keeps third parties from making the leap from "Mayor of San Francisco" to "President of the United States". You think the problem is that the major national parties won't let anybody else participate in the presidential campaign debates. I think the problem is that the third parties have no idea how to get from "Mayor of San Francisco" to "State Senator" or "Governor of California", let alone "President of the United States".
Your counter-argument seems to be "It shouldn't matter whether the third parties know what they're doing, they should still be treated like competent professionals". All I'm saying is, if they acted more like competent professionals, instead of impatient two year olds, they'd get the voter support they needed to become a major national party.
Show me a party that consistently gets twenty per cent of the vote, and I'll show you a party that consistently fails to convince eighty per cent of the citizens that the party's ideas are worthwhile. Does it seem fair to you to put such a party in power?
I agree.
The bottom line is that it benefits the two major parties to maintain the status quo. Not being naive, I believe the two major parties do recognize and act on this fact. After all, why should they not do something that benefits them? Should they act to their own detriment, in order to benefit other factions which disagree with their ideals?
The reason I don't see this as an abuse of power is because I don't see any significant barrier to third parties joining this national power structure.
It seems to me that the most fruitful way of disrupting the Republican-Democrat status quo at the national level would be for third parties to first figure out how to consistently win their local and regional elections.
The bottom line is that there is no major party conspiracy to keep third parties out of the San Diego mayoral race debates, and yet third parties can't seem to win that election either. Let alone county elections, state legislature elections, or gubernatorial elections.
If the third parties can't deliver a compelling message that inspires and motivates a majority of their closest neighbors, when there is no The Man keeping them down, whose fault is that? And why should The Man take them seriously, when they are unable to command even a majority vote of their local PTA, let alone a plurality of the citizens nationwide?
The EASIEST way to deal with a conspiracy is to raise a body of concerned citizens at the local level, and work your way up from there. Your only limiting factors are the energy you bring to the task and the real value of your ideas to the people around you.
How about this: Your third parties demonstrate real political strength at the local and regional levels. If, after that, they're still not getting any national play, we'll talk about the conspiracy.
They're the two major parties. They're the only two parties with the experience, the infrastructure, and the proven national majorities to play politics on a major scale. Who else are they going to collude with?
Political parties only work together when they have to. If the Green party (or any other third party) were a major party, the other major parties would have to work with them. That, or the Green party would have a major political system of their own, geared towards their own ideas and constituencies, and capable of competing on a major scale with the Republicans and the Democrats.
Of course the major parties aren't going to complicate their system and weaken their own position by giving concessions to minor parties. It's up to the minor parties to become major parties. The customary way to become a major party is to develop a set of ideas that are appealing to a large number of citizens, who are then motivated to support your party on a major scale instead of one of the other major parties. It's not customary for minor parties to become major parties simply by saying they should be major parties.
Some metaphors:
If this was major league baseball, you'd be saying that your team doesn't get to the playoffs because the other pro teams don't want the extra competition. And I'd be saying that your team doesn't make it to the major league playoffs because they're barely able to compete in their local softball league.
If this were Thanksgiving dinner, you'd be saying that you have to sit at the Kid's Table because the Grown-Ups are colluding to keep you down. And I'd be saying you have to sit at the Kid's Table because you're not a Grown-Up yet.
I still say that if a third party bothered to get really good at winning local and regional elections, the conspiracy to keep them out of the presidential debates would magically disappear.
Tell me again why I should take Cobb seriously as a presidential candidate.
Has he ever been elected to local office? How many of his own neighbors has he convinced of the rightness of his vision? Has he made it to City Council of anything? Mayor? State legislator? Governor? U.S. Senate?
Has he ever secured the majority support of any group of citizens larger than the local school board?
I don't take a candidate seriously just because they're running for president. Any asshat can run for president, as I'm sure you'll agree. I take a candidate seriously because he's demonstrated a capability for serious politics at the national level.
By all means the Greens should speak out to the world. But until they can convince a majority of their local community at the county and state level that what they're saying is true and good, they're not going to get the national audience they crave.
Here's my advice: If you think the Green platform is so awsome, prove it. If it's as good as you say, it shouldn't be too hard to build up local support, and grow from there.
Political movements, unlike Athena, do not spring fully-grown from the fevered brow of some Olympian god. They have to be nurtured for years--sometimes generations--at the local level first.
And every presidential candidate you field only draws precious time and money away from the local campaigns that should be the foundation of your future national success.
San Diego is a conservative city in a liberal state. You can't even get in as Mayor here, but you want me to believe you have what it takes to get in as President?
I promise you, there is no big conspiracy to keep third parties down. There's simply a policy to keep the amateurs out of the pro league. If you spent more time developing a solid farm team, you'd have a much better shot at fielding a championship-caliber pro team.
How many of your preferred candidates have built up strong local support?
I think your problem is that you want your preferred party to compete on the national level, when chances are they haven't yet figured out how to compete even on the local level.
Tell you what: If the Greens ever secure a majority position in the California legislature, I'll start taking their Presidential candidates seriously. And so will the people who "control" the presidential campaign debates.
As it stands right now, though, the Greens can't even get a majority position on my local township school board, or city council, or what-have-you. Please explain the mystery behind their lack of national relevance. The whole thing seems pretty obvious to me.
Seeing as how your vote actually elects people, and everybody has one, I'd say your vote is more than equal to big $$$.
Fair enough. I certainly see your point. My hunch, though, is that a dirty bomby wouldn't actually be as terror-tastic as its fan club might think.
I think people would mostly be more angry than afraid. Far from accomplishing the intended purpose of a terror attack--reducing the enemy's will to fight--I expect it would have the opposite effect: inflaming the enemy's will to fight.
I mean, look how thoroughly un-terrorized people were by 9/11. Angry and frightened, sure, but there was a distinct lack of that apres-terrorism "terror" that makes people curl up into a ball and wait passively for the end.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if an actual dirty bomb attack turned out to be the catalyst for a whole wave of public education about just how non-scary dirty bombs really are in the context of Technology for Death and Destruction.
As far as making people concerned about real nukes getting across our borders, great! Such concern might stimulate useful activities like actually securing the borders and eliminating state sponsors of terrorism. Which would, incidentally, be contra to the canonical goals of terrorism.
You'd call it nothing of the kind. World War 2 was a total industrial war. Bombing whole cities was the way that war was fought.
Bombing one enemy's cities to defeat them, with the added bonus of making another potential enemy think twice about fighting you, isn't a dirty strategy at all. It's exactly the sort of strategy good generals work very hard to put into practice.
Also, neither of the quotes you present actually give any evidence at all that the policy of the United States government was focused on intimidating Russia.
All you have here is one scientist saying what he thought (without giving any reason at all as to why he thought that way), and one government official acknowledging the bomb's propaganda value against Russia (without addressing one way or the other the bomb's strategic value against Japan).
In his written account of World War II, Churchill reproduces official written memoranda on almost every page. Perhaps you've seen the telegrams, meeting minutes, and other official notes that spell out the policy you claim was in effect. If so, would you mind quoting those, instead?
The bombs were dropped largely to intimiadte the USSR, not to force Japan to surrender
And it worked, too, didn't it? Two atomic bombs, demonstrated against an enemy belligerent in time of war, laid the foundation for a sound MAD doctrine. Neither Russia nor the U.S. ever felt the need to force the issue with nuclear weapons again.
Looks to me like yet another case of good strategy.
Okay, but closing off a small part of London for a long period of time would have had absolutely no effect on the war effort.
Remember, massive bombing of all of Great Britain's major population, industrial, and commercial centers did not actually win the war for Germany.
A dirty bomb might make an effective terror weapon today (though I doubt it), and it might leave a relatively small but long-lasting wound on a city (though, again, I doubt it), but during World War II it would have been about the worst possible application of limited resources as could be imagined. As far as I can tell, a dirty bomb would have been about the exact opposite of what a good general wants.
As far as the diagram showing plutonium, I've always heard that the Germans had their math wrong. Is it possible they hadn't yet gotten to the expermental stage where they discovered that plutonium wouldn't work for this particular design?
Yep, that pretty much defines it for me. Wake me up when my trophy arrives.
While this wouldn't be at all the same as "command training", it is a fact that U.S. Army Reservists are sent to two-week versions of the months-long training courses attended by their Active Duty counterparts.
Example: Intelligence Analyst is a specialty that takes about six months of in-depth training for Active Duty soldiers. But as a Reservist, I was allowed (required) to take the course as two two-week sessions, over two consecutive summers.
And yes, the two courses result in the exact same paper qualification. I was, in the eyes of the Pentagon, just as qualified to analyze intel and advise a unit commmander as the guy who'd spent six months of his life studying the subject.
Please tell me where you got the idea that people have a right to employment. Bonus points if you can explain the specific right to employment at IBM, in Europe, right now.
Also, if my right to employment trumps my employer's need for profit, wouldn't that result in a country full of failing companies who aren't allowed to generate positive cash flow by reducing their labor force? Oh, right... Europe. I almost forgot.
So you say.
You may disagree with how the government spends your money, but at least NASA has to work for its pay.
This differs greatly from welfare, where you get paid for not working.
Wake me up when welfare recipients contribute half the science NASA does.
Enh. Still not thrilled with the idea of breeding our own kind simply to harvest them for medical supplies.
I reasonably understood that Blockbuster would no longer charge me an incremental daily fee for keeping their movies past their return date.
I also reasonably understood that Blockbuster would still charge me something--a flat fee after a certain amount of time had passed, as it turns out--for keeping their movie forever.
I admit, I was a little surprised at the "restocking" fee, but on consideration I decided it made sense: I keep the movie so long that you give up on ever getting it back, and update your records accordingly. Then I return the movie, and you have to do work to re-add it to your inventory records (over and above the work of just logging it back in and putting it back on the shelf).
Did you seriously believe that "no more late fees" meant "buy this new release movie for $4.99"?
When people take Blockbuster's movies and don't return them, Blockbuster loses money. Why are you so shocked to discover that their new policy, while more generous than the old one, does not actually allow customers to bankrupt them?
Think of it this way: "no more late fees" means "we won't charge you for returning a movie late, but we will still charge you for not returning a movie at all". It seems to me like you are trying to scam Blockbuster by tricking them into thinking that "nonreturn" and "late return" are the same thing. It's clear from their clearly written policy that they aren't going to fall for it.
All that aside, I find Blockbuster profoundly annoying and useless, and haven't been doing business with them at all for many months.
Okay, just for the record, I understood what "no more late fees" meant as soon as I heard it. I also intuited *immediately* that there would still be fees of some kind associated with keeping movies past their return date.
I don't know what you're talking about "fake" for. Anybody acting shocked that Blockbuster wouldn't actually let you keep their inventory indefinitely, free of charge, is either a moron or a scam artist or both.
That said, Blockbuster clearly failed to factor in the fact that 90%+ of their customers are, in fact, morons or scam artists or both. That's why their "no more late fees" program failed: Not because it was a "fake" program, but because their customer base is real asshats.
My favorite Stargate address:
P575309
(And yes, that is the correct naming convention for Stargate addresses.)
Hang on a minute.
A test pilot crashes a test plane, and you're not sure a "proper" investigation was made?
You may be a little unclear on the concept of "testing".
Ask yourself this question (answer below): Why does the B2 no longer crash all the time?
==========
Answer: because they investigated all the crashing that happened during their tests.
Another benefit of military spending is security. Military investments are made with the goal of securing other investments in order to guarantee that they pay off and the money spent is not wasted.