For example - adjusted for inflation and cost-of-living changes, what the average 14th century English peasant earned in a year, would be equivalent to earning 20 thousand pounds a year today - that's a VERY comfortable salary.
The great poverty ever experienced in England happened during industrial revolution. Child mortality before 10 went up from about 50% in the 18th century to over 90% with starvation and worked-to-death being prime factors in the increase. More people were homeless or starving in 19th century English society than at any time before. It lasted until the end of World War 2 - when the welfare state (and critically the NHS) became a thing.
There are still people who remember what life before the welfare state was REALLY like - and none of THEM want to go back, and the libertarians who do - either don't know, or are so convinced of their own superiority that they are absolutely certain they would be in the top 5% and never experience the results of the policies they promote. A few of them, of course, have bought the bullshit that Murray Rothbard and co have been telling them about how getting rid of welfare and regulations will actually improve their lives - they are just in for a shock when they discover how austerity makes them even more poor. They'll end up looking back at the last few years as a heaven on earth compared to what their lives will be like if the Koch brothers and their pet-republicans get their way.
>given the evidence that your IQ is just enough to support a sporadic heartbeat and an occasional breath - leaving only enough electrical signals to spasm on your mothers keyboard from time to time
It's not his IQ that's the problem. It's that there is only enough energy available to his brain for those core essential functions and none left for higher cognitiion because his employer wouldn't let him have lunch breaks.
If the "person" is actually a BUSINESS -then ALL laws ARE sacrosanct and MUST be obeyed without question.
If it's an actual PERSON - then some laws may be wrong and may on occasion deserve to broken. A good example of a law that SHOULD be broken is a law that unjustly denies some people a right that others have. Like making Rosa Parks move to the back of the bus - it was right of her to break that law. The reason this rule of thumb is so uncannilly good at telling the difference is because there is a key difference between a person and a business: a business is not a human being and does not HAVE rights. The law cannot violate the rights of a business since it HAS none and never SHOULD have any.
>That's what Trump keeps saying about Mexicans. Is obeying laws right for some people and wrong for others?
Nevermind that what Trump says nicely ignores the fact that the only reason ANYBODY breaks that law is because it's filled with so much burocracy that it's physically impossible to follow it unless you are already rich (and then the odds of WANTING to go to America goes way down - why would ANY sane person CHOOSE to live in that crazy country where all your neighbours want to shoot you if you are RICH where you live ?)
But like I said, nevermind THAT. You may want to stop worshipping at the Trump temple now since he's clearing going to sell you out on that one. He just appointed the CEO of Karl's Junior to his cabinet - one of the largest users of immigrant labour, a man who has gone to massive lengths to avoid immigration enforcement over his businesses, has repeatedly and publicly stated that he PREFERS illiegal immigrants over American labour because their lack of legal status makes them basically indentured slaves (you can make them work for any price because they dare not complain for fear of being deported). And Trump just put him in the white house.
In what insanity can ANYONE EVER be exempt from breaks ?
You do realize that human bodies, like any other machine, requires energy to power it. We are not solar powered. We get our energy from eating food during breaks. The only people who could logically be exempted from breaks are those who work 3 hours a day - as they can reasonably get their meals in outside of work hours.
You expect people to work a full day without a lunch break ? You're going to have incredibly unproductive employees. And this applies to desk workers no less than manual labourers, brains use energy to function too. If the body is low on energy - the brain scales down operations and devotes that limited energy to essential survival functions making far less available for non-essential higher cognition functions. Just like your laptop when the battery gets low will start to save power by slowing down the CPU clock and dimming the screen.
Do you seriously think we figured out how to do powersaving in laptops - but 4 billion years of evolution hasn't figured out how to do that in brains which are trillions of times more advanced ?
The Swiss tend to be quite impressive. Their FOIA system is just mindblowing. Walk into any government office, fill in a request, and if they don't give you the document you demanded within an hour somebody WILL get fired. No cumbersome multi-month turn-arounds, not court appeals to be allowed to keep it secret.
Anything less than national security top-secret classification and if they don't give you the paperwork within the hour - they are breaking the law. Now that makes corruption almost non-existent, it makes government oversight easy and immediate and powerful.
Personally - if I could write a constitutional ammendment it would make it de facto illegal for a fine to have a fixed number. All fines would always be calculated as a percentage of your brute income the previous year. In the case of corporations only your last year's investor reports would be considered as income - basis (the thing where you have no incentive to ever lie it down because if you do your share price drops).
The idea of fixed or jury-determined fines flies in the face of equality before the law. Two people both get caught going 10mph above the speed limit. They each get say a 100 dollar fine. For one of them - that's 3 weeks wages, for the other - he'll never miss it. One of them is getting a severe punishment that will make it seriously hard to feed their kids this month, one of them will never notice. And it's the exact same crime.
But if each of them was fined 5% of their brute income - then the first person would have had a 20 dollar fine (which would hurt without starving) while the second one would pay 200-thousand dollar fine, which would hurt without starving. That's equality before the law.
Apply that accross the board. Of course having juries determine fines, especially for punitive measures does have it's virtues - but you simply change those so the juries are bound to use a percentage of brute income as well (and the regulations could, where appropriate, specify a minimum percentage). So the jury can never be fooled into considering the income of the plaintiff and being swindled by the "frivolous lawsuits" myth (the evidence is overwhelming that civil suits against companies are extremely rare and the average payout is a mere 55-thousand in the rare cases where they succeed) and getting emotionally manipulated to be opposed to giving some hick from the sticks a million bucks. Instead - they come back to "The defendent harmed the plaintiff, we've found the defendant guilty, now we should punish".
> once you own a plot of land and invested lots of work into it, you pretty much want to limit access to it (and its production),
Aaah the gold old flaws of using projection and 'common sense' to try and know things. There is documented proof that this is not true. It's not even obscure science - it's a book from that era that is still found in every hotel room in America !
*If a man walks over your field he is permitted to leave with all the food he can carry in his stomach. *The final harvest of the season may not be gathered, it must be left in the field for the widows and the orphans. * When you gather the harvest from your fields, do not gather from the edges of your fields. Do not gather the *gleanings of your harvest. * Do not gather *grapes from your *vineyard a second time. Do not pick up the *grapes that fell (to the ground). Leave them for poor people (to gather) and for foreigners (to gather). I am the *LORD (who is) your God.
Those are from the book of Leviticus, part of the mosaic code - one of the oldest set of societal laws of which we have a record. This is thousands of years*after* the invention of agriculture and, and this is important, still several thousand BEFORE the invention of monogamy (which was not invented until the 3rd century AD and even after that remained limited to only one religion for several more centuries).
There is no evidence that monogamy and agriculture is in any way link, and all the evidence we do have suggests that your idea of restricting access to the results of agriculture was utterly rejected (and indeed made illegal) in ancient societies. You can think of those verses as the Biblical era version of the modern welfare state.
This is also not unique to the Judeo-Christian history - I merely used that because it's well-known but you found similar rules and setups in the Aztec and Inca societies as well. Indeed, everywherre we have written records or other evidence to learn from - we find that agriculture was always a collective process which involved large sections of society and was shared quite freely within that society. The Inca version for example had no concept of money - they traded labour. If I wanted some of your pumpkins you would freely give them to me, and I would promise you a favour at some future date - perhaps helping you plow the field for your next batch of pumpkins.
>Patriotic correctness brought the US together during WWII to fight two fascist murdering governments on two fronts. Something that couldn't be done if the country was divided as it is today.
And now patriotic correct has turned you INTO one of them. Patriotism may have a place when you are fighting a horrifying enemy with great military power - as it was then. The rest of the time it's a solely harmful thing to embrace. Nationalism is always beloved of fascists - they have to get people to unite among the lowest common denominator (the country of birth) because otherwise those people may actually think for a second and realize the fascist is an idiot. Those who build their support on "the country we were born in" - only EVER does so because the policies they want to push are too stupid or evil to be defended in their own right.
>But now, thanks mostly to political correctness, race relations in the US are at a all time low Wrong. Race relations haven't declined at all. They've ALWAYS been this low or lower. What political correctness has done - is force the hidden suffering to the surface, forced people to confront that which they've been happy to be ignorant off for decades. BLM didn't get formed because of racist blacks - it got formed because of the systemic racism in the police structures of America which constantly kills black people and almost always under dubious to flagrantly unjustifiable circumstances.
>If you bring up that a certain cultures and races are having problems in America you are now raciest thanks to PC bullshit. Because such a claim is racist by definition - even the oldest definitions. You are generalizing across an entire culture - that can ONLY EVER be a racist statement. That's literally what "racist" MEANS.
>People are dying in Chicago because experts can't comment on what is wrong with out having their careers ended by PC backlash. Hiding facts in PC blinders never accomplishes anything, period. Any "solution" proposed by anybody whose career was ended by "PC" backlash... would not have worked, because a racist explanation of the problem cannot EVER be a TRUE explanation and any solution based on one CANNOT work. Now it may be true that a progressive's proposed solution might not work, but might not is a damn sight better than will not.
The fact that it is not a protected class is a consequence of the time when Title VII was written. No sane person would bet on that lasting. Quite frankly if anybody actually brought a case before the court arguing that the civil rights act should apply to non-heterosexual orientations, it's practically guaranteed the court would find that the intent behind Title VII makes it impossible *not* to add sexual orientation as a protected class.
The odds are utterly against them striking down the claim on those grounds. Now this may change - if Trump goes and puts one of those ultra-conservative judges in place who thinks he gets to legislate his personal moral choices from the bench (you know - the kind who claims they are 'originalist' [a contradiction in terms since nothing could be LESS in line with the original intent of the founders of the constitution than for the court to NOT apply it with a contemporary eye - a living, constitution was the intent and to treat it like a static document is the greatest deviation from intent possible], like Alito was) then the odds swing a bit. Not far enough that I would change my bet - it would still be a court with Roberts in the median chair. But there are good odds Trump will get to appoint at least one more judge in four years. RBG is a 78 year old cancer survivor. Two other judges are 80 or older. Then the picture changes.
A court where the majority of the judges are homophobes may not find that orientation should be (and should always have been) a protected class - but while such a decision becomes likely it remains nonsense legally.
Except that everything you predict is predicated on there being enough buyers that there isn't a noticeable shift in demand. When there are no buyers - a company goes bankrupt. Because guess what - a hell of a lot of a corporation's equity is in it's stocks. If enough people sell, soon everybody tries to sell because the price keeps dropping and they are worried they'll be left holding worthless shares.
You seem to think that share value drops don't hurt companies - that's just flagrantly untrue. But let's assume you were right, just for the sake of argument... what about those people known as the board of directors. That's made up entirely of the biggest shareholders. Those people have a considerable amount of their wealth determined by the price at which they could potentially sell their shares. A significant drop in demand for those shares - makes them personally poorer. Now they could short-sell the shares, but that only works if the rest of the market is NOT seeing a drop coming, it only works if other people are buying - it doesn't work when the reason for the drop is a gradual divestment program that has been achieving large numbers but over a period of a few years. When the market can see it coming, short-selling doesn't work because you don't get short-buyers.
You know what happens when your share price drops because of a big divestment ? The board of directors get very, very angry. They can fire the CEO - they can (and this has happened many times) even sue him in court for their losses. The CEO in other words suddenly has a huge inventive to change business plans. Historically the majority of these suits happened when CEOs were more ethical than their boards and the boards sued them for things like paying workers more than the bare minimum they possibly could. But the divestment suddenly gives the board a strong incentive to want the company to stop doing what is making people divest. And that gives the CEO exactly ZERO choice but to do just that.
Sufficient divestment and the oil companies will stop BEING oil companies, they will rapidly start investing their capital in other industries and themselves divesting from oil as a product. They will simply stop selling the stuff. They are already heavy investers in green energy, because they know the time will come when their current product will not have a market, they are preparing for that future, so if divestment forces a new business plan - the most likely choice is to accelerate the one they were already planning to do anyway.
As an unrelated aside. Do you know who started the oil divestment thing - long before it was a movement ? The royal family of the Netherlands. The Dutch royal family has divested themselves of all their shell shares many years ago. The company was called the "Royal" Dutch Shell Oil company because the Royal Family were the largest original investors -but this was long before climate change was a signficant science. When it started becoming obvious - the royal family divested. The name is not really appropriate anymore - there is nothing royal about the company and there hasn't been in a very long time. The people who STARTED the company felt they could not in good conscience remain investors in it. Now that is a pretty big signal to me that I should not be one either.
>Patriotic correctness when not taken to far serves to bring a nation and a people together
No it doesn't. Though mindless conformity and obedience certainly resembles togetherness, it is not the same thing.
>This is not a bad thing. That's highly debateable. Peaceful coexistence in celebration of difference is a good thing. But that is the opposite of what patriotic correctness seeks. Hell I have my doubt that being patriotic is a good thing. Oscar Wilde certainly didn't think so. He called it the virtue of the vicious.
>Political correctness serves no function other than to keep a few peoples feeling from being hurt. And while I know you really do believe that - it is simply not true. The purpose is to combat intolerance. Karl Popper proved that it's a logically impossible position to extend tolerance towards intolerant ideologies. The purpose is to actually bring people together by celebrating their differences rather than trying to erase them. Most of all it serves to establish the values of a society. What angers you about political correctness is not that it exists. It's the fact that the values of society has changed. Those known as "family values" were once deemed by the majority to be good things. Now the majority of Americans consider them evil - and those who still believe in those values do not like being told their values are evil.
The only problem is that this is objectively true. Those values *are* objectively evil - and continuing to embrace them with the knowledge available to us today - makes those who hold them evil as well. Nobody likes to be told they are evil. That doesn't however have any influence on the truthfulness of the claim.
Erm... why would the battery help nuclear ? Nuclear generation is pretty much constant - it gains no benefit from efficient storage - the plants don't store power anyway.
In the end though - nuclear builds are typically budgeted at 15 years and in practise generally take 20 or more to do. The price is in the billions. Solar of the same capacity is up and running in 2 years -for a fraction of the price.
The whole "but storage" and "but it gets dark" is a bullshit argument that no actual electrical engineer buys - and any of them that has the expertise to advise clients and do the maths and calculations are saying "go solar" because it wins on every front.
I have no problem with nuclear. Whlie it has it's own share of environmental problems it's not a climate change risk. The big problem with nuclear is that it's just not economically competitive. Frankly large centralized plants as an IDEA isn't economically competitive anymore. A million rooftops will always be cheaper, more efficient, more reliable and a hell of a lot easier to do - because you can do it peacemeal and get rewards every step of the way.
Yeah... the unsubstantiated claim of possibly buying... an appointment. That is an atrocity. Of course the president elect actually having used his foundation to bribe TWO different state attorney generals not to criminally charge him - is entirely acceptable right ?
Every other country where a leader like him became a tyrant had similar separations of power, they all had constitutions, they all had equivalents to the supreme court. That structure only works if the president plays by the rules. It assumes a measure of sanity. It assumes he won't drag every democrat in congress from their beds one night and shoot them. It assumes the same about supreme court judges.
A sufficiently determined leader, with sufficient public support, can dismantle the entire system in a week. It's happened over and over - including at least 6 times in the 20th century. It happened in Italy, in Germany, in Spain.
All the times it happened it followed the same pattern - and the first step was always a campaign like Trumps, always the EXACT same rhetoric as his, always the exact same campaign promises. Americans are rightfully afraid of the fascist who comes with a smile. But most of them don't. Most fascists come as screaming and shouting orators, bombastic demagogues who rile people up and say things others would consider beyond the pale (and then convince their spectators that the other people believe hte same things but are just too scared to say it). They all promise to be the one person who can fix whatever ails the nation. It's never "us" it's always "I".
They always sell the contradictory tale of the enemy who is both easy to defeat and an existential threat all at once. These two things cannot both be true - but they always claim it. Trump has followed this one to the letter. Half his speeches described ISIS as if they are far more dangerous to America than they actually are, the other half he spoke of how he will destroy them in a week. And, in a grand irony, like every fascist before him - he is doomed to lose every war, because fascists NEVER win the war -they can't as they are constitutionally incapable of accurately assessing the strength of their enemies. It's what happens when you believe them a powerful force intent and capable of your destruction - and a weak enemy that's easily defeated all at the same time. This is your Musolini. This is your Franco.
He is risen, and like many others - he did so through the electoral process.
Your argument is basically that we should pretend his campaign never happened, nothing he said was said. We should let him start with a clean slate, and only act after he's been in government a while... no. That's bullshit. The campaign DID happen. He DID make those speeches. He DID make those promises. He DID promise to violate EVERY amendment in the constitution except perhaps the second (his immigration policy alone would violate everything from the due process clauses to the 4th amendment). Assume he meant what he said - and realize that this makes him a Tyrant right now. And right now - he is still reasonably easy to defeat.
If your accuse somebody of a false dichotomy, you should present at least one example of a possible option they had excluded. Otherwise you are begging the question.
You think the shares Joe Average can buy in the Royal Dutch Shell Oil Corporation will ever get him enough votes to convince them to stop being an oil company ?
No hope there. But if Joe Average and a lot of his friends sell their shares, move their retirement funds to ones that won't invest in shell etc. etc. - that drives Shell's share price down, every time somebody divests - it increases supply without an commensurate increase in demand and the value of the company drops.
Enough people divest and the company goes out of business.
You wish. True to form - would be to do exactly what every other leader like him in history has done. As soon as his failures risk coming back to bite him - get rid of the institutions that exist to enforce the law upon him. He's already gotten a large chunk of the American electorate believing that the institutions are corrupt to the core - it would not be hard to convince them that the only reason these institutions are bringing charges against him is their corruption - and that this is grounds for dismantling them. It took less than year for a Trumpian candidate to usurp the position of the primary office in charge of restricting his power, kill every opposition member in parliament to turn it into a rubber-stamp and defang every court to the point where they had no more oversight power over government. If you think it can't happen in America then you haven't read the documents written by the founding fathers - they damn sure knew it could happen, and they were very worried about ensuring that if and when it does, the American people are prepared to remove the tyrant by the only means that has ever removed a tyrant: force.
The conservatives have been telling us for decades that they need their guns because what if a tyrant arises in America, what if they have to fight a war to remove him ? Well - here you go. It's happened. A tyrant has won the election. So why are you night fighting him ? You should be out in the street with the liberal protestors, and your gun, fighting the tyrant. Right now it's still easy. He isn't even inaugurated yet (his campaign has all the proof you need that he is and intends to be a tyrant), but he doesn't yet command the military and the police. Right now, if you rose up - the current administration would likely capitulate immediately and let you have a constitutional convention to update that document in order to protect yourself from the tyrant. In 6 months time... it may require a full scale war.
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Actually that's not quite as true as you think.
For example - adjusted for inflation and cost-of-living changes, what the average 14th century English peasant earned in a year, would be equivalent to earning 20 thousand pounds a year today - that's a VERY comfortable salary.
The great poverty ever experienced in England happened during industrial revolution. Child mortality before 10 went up from about 50% in the 18th century to over 90% with starvation and worked-to-death being prime factors in the increase. More people were homeless or starving in 19th century English society than at any time before. It lasted until the end of World War 2 - when the welfare state (and critically the NHS) became a thing.
This was Britain in the 1920s: http://www.newstatesman.com/po...
There are still people who remember what life before the welfare state was REALLY like - and none of THEM want to go back, and the libertarians who do - either don't know, or are so convinced of their own superiority that they are absolutely certain they would be in the top 5% and never experience the results of the policies they promote. A few of them, of course, have bought the bullshit that Murray Rothbard and co have been telling them about how getting rid of welfare and regulations will actually improve their lives - they are just in for a shock when they discover how austerity makes them even more poor. They'll end up looking back at the last few years as a heaven on earth compared to what their lives will be like if the Koch brothers and their pet-republicans get their way.
>given the evidence that your IQ is just enough to support a sporadic heartbeat and an occasional breath - leaving only enough electrical signals to spasm on your mothers keyboard from time to time
It's not his IQ that's the problem. It's that there is only enough energy available to his brain for those core essential functions and none left for higher cognitiion because his employer wouldn't let him have lunch breaks.
Then let me give you a very good rule of thumb.
If the "person" is actually a BUSINESS -then ALL laws ARE sacrosanct and MUST be obeyed without question.
If it's an actual PERSON - then some laws may be wrong and may on occasion deserve to broken. A good example of a law that SHOULD be broken is a law that unjustly denies some people a right that others have. Like making Rosa Parks move to the back of the bus - it was right of her to break that law.
The reason this rule of thumb is so uncannilly good at telling the difference is because there is a key difference between a person and a business: a business is not a human being and does not HAVE rights. The law cannot violate the rights of a business since it HAS none and never SHOULD have any.
>That's what Trump keeps saying about Mexicans. Is obeying laws right for some people and wrong for others?
Nevermind that what Trump says nicely ignores the fact that the only reason ANYBODY breaks that law is because it's filled with so much burocracy that it's physically impossible to follow it unless you are already rich (and then the odds of WANTING to go to America goes way down - why would ANY sane person CHOOSE to live in that crazy country where all your neighbours want to shoot you if you are RICH where you live ?)
But like I said, nevermind THAT. You may want to stop worshipping at the Trump temple now since he's clearing going to sell you out on that one. He just appointed the CEO of Karl's Junior to his cabinet - one of the largest users of immigrant labour, a man who has gone to massive lengths to avoid immigration enforcement over his businesses, has repeatedly and publicly stated that he PREFERS illiegal immigrants over American labour because their lack of legal status makes them basically indentured slaves (you can make them work for any price because they dare not complain for fear of being deported). And Trump just put him in the white house.
Sorry pal. Trump lied ... again.
In what insanity can ANYONE EVER be exempt from breaks ?
You do realize that human bodies, like any other machine, requires energy to power it. We are not solar powered. We get our energy from eating food during breaks. The only people who could logically be exempted from breaks are those who work 3 hours a day - as they can reasonably get their meals in outside of work hours.
You expect people to work a full day without a lunch break ? You're going to have incredibly unproductive employees. And this applies to desk workers no less than manual labourers, brains use energy to function too. If the body is low on energy - the brain scales down operations and devotes that limited energy to essential survival functions making far less available for non-essential higher cognition functions. Just like your laptop when the battery gets low will start to save power by slowing down the CPU clock and dimming the screen.
Do you seriously think we figured out how to do powersaving in laptops - but 4 billion years of evolution hasn't figured out how to do that in brains which are trillions of times more advanced ?
The Swiss tend to be quite impressive. Their FOIA system is just mindblowing. Walk into any government office, fill in a request, and if they don't give you the document you demanded within an hour somebody WILL get fired. No cumbersome multi-month turn-arounds, not court appeals to be allowed to keep it secret.
Anything less than national security top-secret classification and if they don't give you the paperwork within the hour - they are breaking the law. Now that makes corruption almost non-existent, it makes government oversight easy and immediate and powerful.
Personally - if I could write a constitutional ammendment it would make it de facto illegal for a fine to have a fixed number. All fines would always be calculated as a percentage of your brute income the previous year. In the case of corporations only your last year's investor reports would be considered as income - basis (the thing where you have no incentive to ever lie it down because if you do your share price drops).
The idea of fixed or jury-determined fines flies in the face of equality before the law. Two people both get caught going 10mph above the speed limit. They each get say a 100 dollar fine. For one of them - that's 3 weeks wages, for the other - he'll never miss it. One of them is getting a severe punishment that will make it seriously hard to feed their kids this month, one of them will never notice.
And it's the exact same crime.
But if each of them was fined 5% of their brute income - then the first person would have had a 20 dollar fine (which would hurt without starving) while the second one would pay 200-thousand dollar fine, which would hurt without starving. That's equality before the law.
Apply that accross the board. Of course having juries determine fines, especially for punitive measures does have it's virtues - but you simply change those so the juries are bound to use a percentage of brute income as well (and the regulations could, where appropriate, specify a minimum percentage). So the jury can never be fooled into considering the income of the plaintiff and being swindled by the "frivolous lawsuits" myth (the evidence is overwhelming that civil suits against companies are extremely rare and the average payout is a mere 55-thousand in the rare cases where they succeed) and getting emotionally manipulated to be opposed to giving some hick from the sticks a million bucks.
Instead - they come back to "The defendent harmed the plaintiff, we've found the defendant guilty, now we should punish".
Marriage yes, monogamy - not so much. Marriage in the Greco/Roman world was more of a business deal than anything about sex or romance anyway.
Festivals in honour of aphrodite were basically orgies.
I pulled all the cables out of mine, more secure than your solution and less labour required.
> once you own a plot of land and invested lots of work into it, you pretty much want to limit access to it (and its production),
Aaah the gold old flaws of using projection and 'common sense' to try and know things. There is documented proof that this is not true. It's not even obscure science - it's a book from that era that is still found in every hotel room in America !
*If a man walks over your field he is permitted to leave with all the food he can carry in his stomach.
*The final harvest of the season may not be gathered, it must be left in the field for the widows and the orphans.
* When you gather the harvest from your fields, do not gather from the edges of your fields. Do not gather the *gleanings of your harvest.
* Do not gather *grapes from your *vineyard a second time. Do not pick up the *grapes that fell (to the ground). Leave them for poor people (to gather) and for foreigners (to gather). I am the *LORD (who is) your God.
Those are from the book of Leviticus, part of the mosaic code - one of the oldest set of societal laws of which we have a record. This is thousands of years*after* the invention of agriculture and, and this is important, still several thousand BEFORE the invention of monogamy (which was not invented until the 3rd century AD and even after that remained limited to only one religion for several more centuries).
There is no evidence that monogamy and agriculture is in any way link, and all the evidence we do have suggests that your idea of restricting access to the results of agriculture was utterly rejected (and indeed made illegal) in ancient societies.
You can think of those verses as the Biblical era version of the modern welfare state.
This is also not unique to the Judeo-Christian history - I merely used that because it's well-known but you found similar rules and setups in the Aztec and Inca societies as well. Indeed, everywherre we have written records or other evidence to learn from - we find that agriculture was always a collective process which involved large sections of society and was shared quite freely within that society. The Inca version for example had no concept of money - they traded labour. If I wanted some of your pumpkins you would freely give them to me, and I would promise you a favour at some future date - perhaps helping you plow the field for your next batch of pumpkins.
>Patriotic correctness brought the US together during WWII to fight two fascist murdering governments on two fronts. Something that couldn't be done if the country was divided as it is today.
And now patriotic correct has turned you INTO one of them. Patriotism may have a place when you are fighting a horrifying enemy with great military power - as it was then. The rest of the time it's a solely harmful thing to embrace. Nationalism is always beloved of fascists - they have to get people to unite among the lowest common denominator (the country of birth) because otherwise those people may actually think for a second and realize the fascist is an idiot.
Those who build their support on "the country we were born in" - only EVER does so because the policies they want to push are too stupid or evil to be defended in their own right.
>But now, thanks mostly to political correctness, race relations in the US are at a all time low
Wrong. Race relations haven't declined at all. They've ALWAYS been this low or lower. What political correctness has done - is force the hidden suffering to the surface, forced people to confront that which they've been happy to be ignorant off for decades. BLM didn't get formed because of racist blacks - it got formed because of the systemic racism in the police structures of America which constantly kills black people and almost always under dubious to flagrantly unjustifiable circumstances.
>If you bring up that a certain cultures and races are having problems in America you are now raciest thanks to PC bullshit.
Because such a claim is racist by definition - even the oldest definitions. You are generalizing across an entire culture - that can ONLY EVER be a racist statement. That's literally what "racist" MEANS.
>People are dying in Chicago because experts can't comment on what is wrong with out having their careers ended by PC backlash. Hiding facts in PC blinders never accomplishes anything, period.
Any "solution" proposed by anybody whose career was ended by "PC" backlash... would not have worked, because a racist explanation of the problem cannot EVER be a TRUE explanation and any solution based on one CANNOT work. Now it may be true that a progressive's proposed solution might not work, but might not is a damn sight better than will not.
The fact that it is not a protected class is a consequence of the time when Title VII was written. No sane person would bet on that lasting. Quite frankly if anybody actually brought a case before the court arguing that the civil rights act should apply to non-heterosexual orientations, it's practically guaranteed the court would find that the intent behind Title VII makes it impossible *not* to add sexual orientation as a protected class.
The odds are utterly against them striking down the claim on those grounds. Now this may change - if Trump goes and puts one of those ultra-conservative judges in place who thinks he gets to legislate his personal moral choices from the bench (you know - the kind who claims they are 'originalist' [a contradiction in terms since nothing could be LESS in line with the original intent of the founders of the constitution than for the court to NOT apply it with a contemporary eye - a living, constitution was the intent and to treat it like a static document is the greatest deviation from intent possible], like Alito was) then the odds swing a bit. Not far enough that I would change my bet - it would still be a court with Roberts in the median chair. But there are good odds Trump will get to appoint at least one more judge in four years. RBG is a 78 year old cancer survivor. Two other judges are 80 or older. Then the picture changes.
A court where the majority of the judges are homophobes may not find that orientation should be (and should always have been) a protected class - but while such a decision becomes likely it remains nonsense legally.
Yeah but then they will shoot it from a low angle to make them look taller.
They should get the director from antz...
Except that everything you predict is predicated on there being enough buyers that there isn't a noticeable shift in demand. When there are no buyers - a company goes bankrupt. Because guess what - a hell of a lot of a corporation's equity is in it's stocks. If enough people sell, soon everybody tries to sell because the price keeps dropping and they are worried they'll be left holding worthless shares.
You seem to think that share value drops don't hurt companies - that's just flagrantly untrue. But let's assume you were right, just for the sake of argument... what about those people known as the board of directors. That's made up entirely of the biggest shareholders. Those people have a considerable amount of their wealth determined by the price at which they could potentially sell their shares. A significant drop in demand for those shares - makes them personally poorer. Now they could short-sell the shares, but that only works if the rest of the market is NOT seeing a drop coming, it only works if other people are buying - it doesn't work when the reason for the drop is a gradual divestment program that has been achieving large numbers but over a period of a few years. When the market can see it coming, short-selling doesn't work because you don't get short-buyers.
You know what happens when your share price drops because of a big divestment ? The board of directors get very, very angry. They can fire the CEO - they can (and this has happened many times) even sue him in court for their losses. The CEO in other words suddenly has a huge inventive to change business plans. Historically the majority of these suits happened when CEOs were more ethical than their boards and the boards sued them for things like paying workers more than the bare minimum they possibly could. But the divestment suddenly gives the board a strong incentive to want the company to stop doing what is making people divest. And that gives the CEO exactly ZERO choice but to do just that.
Sufficient divestment and the oil companies will stop BEING oil companies, they will rapidly start investing their capital in other industries and themselves divesting from oil as a product. They will simply stop selling the stuff. They are already heavy investers in green energy, because they know the time will come when their current product will not have a market, they are preparing for that future, so if divestment forces a new business plan - the most likely choice is to accelerate the one they were already planning to do anyway.
As an unrelated aside. Do you know who started the oil divestment thing - long before it was a movement ? The royal family of the Netherlands. The Dutch royal family has divested themselves of all their shell shares many years ago. The company was called the "Royal" Dutch Shell Oil company because the Royal Family were the largest original investors -but this was long before climate change was a signficant science. When it started becoming obvious - the royal family divested. The name is not really appropriate anymore - there is nothing royal about the company and there hasn't been in a very long time. The people who STARTED the company felt they could not in good conscience remain investors in it. Now that is a pretty big signal to me that I should not be one either.
>Patriotic correctness when not taken to far serves to bring a nation and a people together
No it doesn't. Though mindless conformity and obedience certainly resembles togetherness, it is not the same thing.
>This is not a bad thing.
That's highly debateable. Peaceful coexistence in celebration of difference is a good thing. But that is the opposite of what patriotic correctness seeks.
Hell I have my doubt that being patriotic is a good thing. Oscar Wilde certainly didn't think so. He called it the virtue of the vicious.
>Political correctness serves no function other than to keep a few peoples feeling from being hurt.
And while I know you really do believe that - it is simply not true. The purpose is to combat intolerance. Karl Popper proved that it's a logically impossible position to extend tolerance towards intolerant ideologies. The purpose is to actually bring people together by celebrating their differences rather than trying to erase them. Most of all it serves to establish the values of a society. What angers you about political correctness is not that it exists. It's the fact that the values of society has changed. Those known as "family values" were once deemed by the majority to be good things. Now the majority of Americans consider them evil - and those who still believe in those values do not like being told their values are evil.
The only problem is that this is objectively true. Those values *are* objectively evil - and continuing to embrace them with the knowledge available to us today - makes those who hold them evil as well. Nobody likes to be told they are evil. That doesn't however have any influence on the truthfulness of the claim.
That's what I said.
Erm... why would the battery help nuclear ? Nuclear generation is pretty much constant - it gains no benefit from efficient storage - the plants don't store power anyway.
In the end though - nuclear builds are typically budgeted at 15 years and in practise generally take 20 or more to do. The price is in the billions. Solar of the same capacity is up and running in 2 years -for a fraction of the price.
The whole "but storage" and "but it gets dark" is a bullshit argument that no actual electrical engineer buys - and any of them that has the expertise to advise clients and do the maths and calculations are saying "go solar" because it wins on every front.
I have no problem with nuclear. Whlie it has it's own share of environmental problems it's not a climate change risk. The big problem with nuclear is that it's just not economically competitive.
Frankly large centralized plants as an IDEA isn't economically competitive anymore. A million rooftops will always be cheaper, more efficient, more reliable and a hell of a lot easier to do - because you can do it peacemeal and get rewards every step of the way.
Yeah... the unsubstantiated claim of possibly buying ... an appointment.
That is an atrocity.
Of course the president elect actually having used his foundation to bribe TWO different state attorney generals not to criminally charge him - is entirely acceptable right ?
And you just put your finger on the nub of why nothing you can say about a 'company' is true of a 'corporation'.
Every other country where a leader like him became a tyrant had similar separations of power, they all had constitutions, they all had equivalents to the supreme court. That structure only works if the president plays by the rules. It assumes a measure of sanity.
It assumes he won't drag every democrat in congress from their beds one night and shoot them.
It assumes the same about supreme court judges.
A sufficiently determined leader, with sufficient public support, can dismantle the entire system in a week. It's happened over and over - including at least 6 times in the 20th century. It happened in Italy, in Germany, in Spain.
All the times it happened it followed the same pattern - and the first step was always a campaign like Trumps, always the EXACT same rhetoric as his, always the exact same campaign promises.
Americans are rightfully afraid of the fascist who comes with a smile. But most of them don't. Most fascists come as screaming and shouting orators, bombastic demagogues who rile people up and say things others would consider beyond the pale (and then convince their spectators that the other people believe hte same things but are just too scared to say it).
They all promise to be the one person who can fix whatever ails the nation. It's never "us" it's always "I".
They always sell the contradictory tale of the enemy who is both easy to defeat and an existential threat all at once. These two things cannot both be true - but they always claim it. Trump has followed this one to the letter. Half his speeches described ISIS as if they are far more dangerous to America than they actually are, the other half he spoke of how he will destroy them in a week.
And, in a grand irony, like every fascist before him - he is doomed to lose every war, because fascists NEVER win the war -they can't as they are constitutionally incapable of accurately assessing the strength of their enemies. It's what happens when you believe them a powerful force intent and capable of your destruction - and a weak enemy that's easily defeated all at the same time.
This is your Musolini. This is your Franco.
He is risen, and like many others - he did so through the electoral process.
Your argument is basically that we should pretend his campaign never happened, nothing he said was said. We should let him start with a clean slate, and only act after he's been in government a while... no. That's bullshit. The campaign DID happen. He DID make those speeches. He DID make those promises. He DID promise to violate EVERY amendment in the constitution except perhaps the second (his immigration policy alone would violate everything from the due process clauses to the 4th amendment).
Assume he meant what he said - and realize that this makes him a Tyrant right now. And right now - he is still reasonably easy to defeat.
2.6 Trillion last year, double that now... in what universe is 2.6 Trillion dollars "a few" ?
If your accuse somebody of a false dichotomy, you should present at least one example of a possible option they had excluded. Otherwise you are begging the question.
Not all dichotomies are false.
You think the shares Joe Average can buy in the Royal Dutch Shell Oil Corporation will ever get him enough votes to convince them to stop being an oil company ?
No hope there.
But if Joe Average and a lot of his friends sell their shares, move their retirement funds to ones that won't invest in shell etc. etc. - that drives Shell's share price down, every time somebody divests - it increases supply without an commensurate increase in demand and the value of the company drops.
Enough people divest and the company goes out of business.
It's literally how you bankrupt a corporation.
Who cares ?
Clinton is not the Clinton foundation. Nor is Clinton the president-elect.
You wish. True to form - would be to do exactly what every other leader like him in history has done. As soon as his failures risk coming back to bite him - get rid of the institutions that exist to enforce the law upon him. He's already gotten a large chunk of the American electorate believing that the institutions are corrupt to the core - it would not be hard to convince them that the only reason these institutions are bringing charges against him is their corruption - and that this is grounds for dismantling them.
It took less than year for a Trumpian candidate to usurp the position of the primary office in charge of restricting his power, kill every opposition member in parliament to turn it into a rubber-stamp and defang every court to the point where they had no more oversight power over government.
If you think it can't happen in America then you haven't read the documents written by the founding fathers - they damn sure knew it could happen, and they were very worried about ensuring that if and when it does, the American people are prepared to remove the tyrant by the only means that has ever removed a tyrant: force.
The conservatives have been telling us for decades that they need their guns because what if a tyrant arises in America, what if they have to fight a war to remove him ? Well - here you go. It's happened. A tyrant has won the election. So why are you night fighting him ? You should be out in the street with the liberal protestors, and your gun, fighting the tyrant. Right now it's still easy. He isn't even inaugurated yet (his campaign has all the proof you need that he is and intends to be a tyrant), but he doesn't yet command the military and the police. Right now, if you rose up - the current administration would likely capitulate immediately and let you have a constitutional convention to update that document in order to protect yourself from the tyrant. In 6 months time... it may require a full scale war.