>In actual fact, one of the biggest contributors to lower life expectancy is obesity, and one of the biggest identifiable causes of obesity is government policy: corn subsidies and bad federal nutritional guidelines.
Something Obama made a serious effort to act on early in his presidency, he desperately tried to regulate that industry - make sure consumers are informed of what's in their food and encourage companies to improve the quality of what they sell. Only to have it scuppered by the republican congress. So if there is any blame on government - then by your own reasoning - that blame lies with the republican party.
But, you can't have poor people dying because they can't afford healthcare... and an individual cannot really negotiate with a large corporation - especially when the price for turning down their offer is to die.
So what can we do... mmm well we could pool a lot of people's money together. They could negotiate prices as a group - which can be on equal footing with the suppliers, and the group as a whole isn't "about to die" so the negotiations are no longer happening under duress. Then you can also use standard actuarial table structures to spread risk around so that those with little risk right now can help cover those with high risk - and get better results for all. Of course, such systems work better the larger the pool - so you will want to get EVERYBODY in on it (that's a fundamental attribute of actuarial tables - they only WORK if they are BIG). Ideally - you want the pool to be available, in it's entirety, to pay for healthcare - so it should probably not be profit driven.
There was a system, very much like that, in Scottland in the 19th century - it was actually the first ever use of actuarial tables to spread risk, instituted by the Scottish church to help the wealthier congregations assist the poorer ones in their care duties. But it doesn't seem ideal to have a religious organisation run this - after all, people don't all have the same religion and it would cause friction that would limit the pool of potential contributors.
Mmm we could set up a massive, non-religiously affiliated organisation to collect dues and manage the fund, handle the negotiations and take care of the payments when we need it ! Seems like a huge amount of effort to get set up and convince everybody to sign on though - and a bit of a chicken/egg problem since the greatest benefits (the negotiation power) only comes when you have lots of members, but to get lots of members you need to offer the benefits.
If only there was some organisation that was already established, had lots of negotiation power, the infrastructure to collect and manage dues with an already existing tiered-structure to scale your dues to your income, capacity to handle payments, no profit motive and no religious affiliation which we could leverage to run this national insurance scheme for us... I know we can use our government ! They're perfect ! This is EXACTLY the sort of thing we invented them for !
Oh wait, we just invented single payer healthcare.
The horrors do not end there. If Air Force one crashes into the atlantic tomorrow with both Trump and Pence on board... the presidency goes to the speaker of the House. In this case Paul Ryan - a man who has run several times and was never able to get the nomination. He's saner than either the president- or vice-president elect but his own brand of ultra-selfcentered, classist asshole. When he accepted the speakership it was only on condition of being allowed a minimum number of weeks a year to spend with his family - he is clearly in favor of the idea of family vacations... for rich people, because he also repeatedly fought and voted against making America NOT be one of the only countries on earth without protected, paid family leave. Only in America is a couple of weeks a year to spend with your family, rest up a bit, get out of town a bit - without worrying about losing your job or lost wages NOT considered an essential right for a well-functioning society. Paul Ryan has gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that these things remain the privilege of the rich and wealthy - or at least those with rare enough job skills to be able to personally negotiate them contracts.
>Besides, relatively business savvy isn't saying he's good, just that he's better than a lot of politician/legislators we have had in the past - which is a low bar indeed.
But considering that government does not, never can and by god never ever SHOULD resemble a business - that's not at all a bad thing. You CAN be good at both - but nothing you learn about one is helpful to the other. Being good at both is a bit like getting a double PHD in art history and astrophysics. Sure it can be done, but it's a rare person indeed who can master such utterly disparate disciplines and they know how to keep them separate in their heads.
Take the money he inheritted, take his net worth today (the one he claims to have - which is almost certainly exagerated by 2 orders of magnitude). Factor in inflation. Had he stuck all his money way back when into an index-tracking fund he would be richer now than he is - a LOT richer.
This is such a terrible businessman he can't even do (nearly) as well as the AVERAGE of the stock market - in a period that included 3 major recessions including the largest one since the great depression ! And that's working with how much he CLAIMS to have, all the evidence suggests he is a LOT less rich than that.
He's got TWO ex goldman sachs employees in his cabinet - INCLUDING the treasury secretary.
At least Clinton had been forced to make promises to the progressive wing of the democratic party to get the Sanders supporters on-board, which would have precluded her being that bad. It doesn't MATTER whether you believe she would WANT to be. She wouldn't be ABLE to - because she had been forced to make promises against that, which she would have to keep if she wanted another term.
Trump on the other hand is sucking the wall street dong like no other president before ever has ! Hell his taxplan will give wallstreet moguls 6 trillion dollars - which you will have to make up with YOUR taxes.
In theory - prices reflect the value of companies and price shifts reflect altered perceptions of which companies are producing the most value. There is no fucking way that the value a company produces can change in microsecond timeframes. There is no way that the price shfit can reflect an actual change in the state of the market- the perception therefore is entirely divorced from reality. This REDUCES the efficacy of the market's price mechanism by INCREASES the difference between perceived and actual value of companies.
HFT does not increase market liquidity, it does not help shift resources to where they are most valuable - it actively counteracts and undermines those very processes !
DC straight to the bloodstream - one volt can easily kill you. One volt / the resistance of blood gives you a current stronger than the nervous system - and it's a solid current- passing straight through the heart. Where it overwhelms the autonomic nervous system and basically causes the heart to cease up. My dad wrote his dissertation on the topic.
To be fair, when Chrighton wrote the original book 24-odd years ago, it was NOT 'science fiction' - it was definitely viable science based on the knowledge of the day. Amber was known to preserve soft-tissue, mosquitos and other blood-sucking insects from the dinosaur era had been found in amber and DNA had been recovered from amber. It seemed entirely within the realm of what would be possible in the next few years.
In the intervening period a few things happened: 1) It was found that the DNA from the original species in the amber decayed 2) The human genome project was completed -and came with a massively shocking discovery: human DNA was far simpler than that of animals we'd genotyped years earlier like frogs (indeed - an order of magnitude fewer genes), which when we had to explain how that's possible turned our entire view of how DNA works upside down. The current view is that DNA is not a blueprint for a species, but a set of instructions for building a member of one - which makes assumptions. The more advanced the species is, the more assumptions can be made and the fewer conditionals have to be specified in the code. It's like stripping off the 'if arch == x86' part of your code because nobody uses a 32-bit computer anymore. Frogs have DNA to repond to various temperature ranges, humity levels etc. etc. basically to adjust the growth of the fetus to the ever-changing conditions in the pond all the time. Humans have a womb with very fixed conditions - so none of those are needed. 3) With this realization - we actually genotyped the DNA recovered from amber - and it turned out to be from (much later) external contamination (mostly bacterial DNA).
Those things shifted the Jurassic park scenario firmly into the science fiction region - but one should be fair to a brilliant writer with some pretty solid scientific credentials (in the field of medicine), when it was written it was in the realm of highly conceivable science fiction. He also updated his writing to reflect changes in the field. His last book "Timeline" also deals with genetics - and is set firmly in the areas of genetics where active research is happening right now, and dealing with the (very significant) social and legal questions that is raised by such ridiculous concepts as allowing companies to patent genes.
He can't argue his point, because that would require proving a negative - which is logically impossible.
When your argument would require doing something logically impossible in order to defend it - that's usually not a good sign for the likelihood of you being right.
Oh - and powerwolf has *never* been played on any radio or tv station in my country and even if it had I wouldn't have heard it because I haven't listened to either in more than a decade - I can't stand the crap they play 200 times a day.
Well let me tell you how I discovered my favorite band. I have had a love for powermetal for a long time, which began with Manowar back in the early aughts.
One day, I had some friends over and wanted some background music without effort - so I typed "powermetal collection" into youtube and left it playing. At some point a song came on which stopped me in mid-sentence to turn around and go turn it up... because it blew my mind. It was the first time I ever heard Powerwolf. Who is signed with a fairly small indie label in Europe that only does powermetal and is where most powermetal bands go to get signed because they get a good deal from a company that won't fuck with their sound.
I've had powerwolf dominating my playlists ever since. They are just unbelievably good.
Mind you- the US music industry does seem to have gotten a lot less conservative about sex anyway (odd shift). I saw one of those 'kids watch' a while ago where a bunch of young teenagers were shown some Nirvanna videos, most had never heard of them (one had and was apparently a fan), a few had some vague idea of Kurt Cobain having killed himself. You know the drill.
But one thing was interesting: more than half the kids expressed astonishment at the fact that the people in the videos were fully dressed.
There's nothing wrong about sex and sexuality in music - it's part of life and should be part of music, but it isn't *all* of life and shouldn't be *all* of music.
The metal scene is actually still mostly like that. Perhaps less so in America but there metal was basically killed by the hair-metal movement anyway and became extremely small ever since. Ignore the Nu-metal stuff - since mostly they are of the sausage-factory variety, but you did also have Slayer, Death and Manowar who wrote their own stuff, experimented with new ideas (Manowar basically invented the combination of choral and metal music), produce their own stuff, play their own instruments and push boundaries. Even metallica has had periods where they created real art and their the most commercial metal band America ever had (and the best-selling world-wide of all time).
This is a LOT bigger in Europe - the best metal for two generations have come out of the Slavic countries - Norway, Germany and Finnland in particular and the generation before it was Britain. Priest and Maiden were fantastic and Maiden is still fantastic, still touring, still innovative - they may have grown old but they never grew stale (I saw them live a few months ago and it was one of the best shows I've ever been at). The German scene started out with bands like Accept, which was a one-hit-wonder in the US but had a long and illustrious career back home, and moved into legends like Hammerfall and Blind Guardian. Later they and their neighbours would birth bands like Amon Amarth, Children of Bodom, Korpiklaani, Nightwish - all of which had their own unique approaches to a very wide genre which had already significantly innovated from other metal subgenres (a focus on singable lyrics, low-use of bass but heavy use of rhythm guitars, extremely rapid double-bass-drum patterns, elements of opera, choral and classicalmusic mixed). And most of them are unknown outside their home countries. Meanwhile Norway gave birth to black-metal which is one-part music one part polical protest against the dominance of the state-church, and then Armenian/German band Powerwolf took the stylistics of black metal, mixed it with the musical stylings of powermetal and based their lyrics on the mythology of the Holy Roman Empire for a completely unique sound and style.
There are still great bands out there pushing boundaries, combining absurdly different influences into truly unique music - they just aren't in the USA anymore. In many ways the country is just too conservative. Every time you have an artist actually pushing boundaries, trying different things, exploring a different approach to theatrics - there's a million protesters blaming them for every ill in society. In the 1980's they burned Maiden's records (though the band didn't mind because, in their words: 'before they could burn the record - they had to buy it first'), in the 1990s they blamed Manson for Columbine (even though neither of the shooters listened to the band), a few months ago buzzfeed blamed Slipknot for the racism of Trump supporters (so it's not just the rightwingers who do that), and a judge had to tell law enforcement that listening to Insane Clown Posse does not automatically make you a gangster (so it's not just metal bands either).
That's why it doesn't happen anymore - because in America any band that doesn't toe the line very carefully will never get airplay, never get on radio - just face a constant barrage of harassment and horror. So while bands and musicians may be brave - the record companies aren't, they will have one or two controversial acts (because controversy also sells) but they won't risk anything more.
Back in the mid-1990s Oasis was planning a tour in the US which was struggling to sell, Bon Jovi at the time said "Oasis will never be very successful here, because America is too conservative" And that's coming from the least controversial, least metal, musician to ever play hair-metal about a band that, honestly, was just a fairly average British pop-rock band who did nothing particularly original or special memorable in their music and whose sole claim to notoriety was once outselling the Bible and calling themselves "Greater than god" - which they stole from the Beatles anyway.
There's another possibility, They actually agree on some common standards - and make it so every piece of VR software runs on every device, and you compete by making your device run it better. So sticking my phone in a cardboard will run it weakly, but spending on one of the big boys it runs very well - but they all run the same stuff.
That is what the market needs right now. As it stands the fragmented gaming market hurts consumers, you have 3 major console makers none of whom are compatible with each other - so only AAA titles appear on more than one, you got PC which is not compatible with any of them - and you got valve trying to create PC-compatible consoles at three times the price of a PC or a console. You got linux gaming growing rapidly but you still get AAA-titles that can't run on wine - even ones that used to work (the new SkyrimSpecialEdition is entirely impossible to run on wine - at least if you got it via steam because steam is a 32-bit only app and the new skyrim is 64-bit only and wine doesn't support running 32-bit and 64-bit programs in the same engine).
But that sort of works because everybody who wants to game buys *something*.
VR is trying to build on top of that market - but it's new, the tech is expensive and the content supply much smaller. It isn't likely to work. The best thing they can do is to maximize the content by agreeing on a common standard so every device runs every piece of content- preferably on every platform.
That pre-US anti-immigrant hysteria, as was prevalent in several native tribes, has the distinction if being the only example in all of human history that was true. You said nothing to disprove my point though bevause I spoke if tradition. I said nothing about the law.
Firstly it's 1.6 Billion - not 2.08 nice bit of exaggeration there.
Secondly if your contention is that the desire for theocracy makes Muslims unsuitable to be Americans - do you also extend that to the vast number of Americans who want a theocracy ? The dominionists as they refer to themselves? How do you feel about the fact that the senator from Texas is one ? And the new vice-president elect ?
Actually, many churches simply take it literally: that it's a christian duty to pay your damn taxes without grumbling about it.
I know that's how the church of my youth taught it. Government has a right to charge taxes regardless of whether they share your faith, you have a duty to pay those taxes and complaining about it is an act of rebellion which is specifically prohibited by numerous other passages in the new testament. The bible is pretty clear that the ONLY time a christian can disobey any law is if that law would demand they violate one of god's commands.
That by the way rules out supporting the Trump approach to immigration - since the bible gives very clear orders about how to treat immigrants (and makes no distinction between 'legal' or 'illegal') once the 'stranger' is 'in your land' your duty is to treat him as a brother. You don't get to kick him out because you don't like how he got there. You don't get to help government do so either - that violates the order to treat the stranger in your land as a brother.
Building a wall doesn't violate any clauses I can think off... except all the ones in proverbs against being bloody foolish.
>The ACLU does act against Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism, but I've never read of them daring to lift a finger against Islam
Because absolutely nobody has ever suggested erecting a quran on a plaque outside a state court.
It's ONLY unconstitutional if 1) Tax dollars fund it or 2) It's on public land (which includes government buildings).
If somebody DID try to declare the Quran their state book (as three red states tried to do with the bible last year) you BET the ACLU would get on that.
The rest of your post is filled with even more bullshit than that part.
Sorry, but if you get to judge the Qu'ran by any particular passage you grab out of context, I get to assume all Christians are in favor of slavery, believe in killing people by stoning if they work on a Sunday, will force their daughters to marry their rapists, maintain the right to sell said daughters into slavery - and believe that eradicating all people of different faiths is their religious duty, as was given to Israel before they arrived in the promised land (a duty they took very seriously as they set out on a path of destruction, war and genocide against all the many peoples who once lived there).
All THOSE things are called for in the Bible as well. Hell go read the story of Dinah in Genesis - nice ending that. Let's slaughter an entire tribe, man women and child... at a fucking peace summit !
In a nation made up of 100% immigrants it's imposssible to be a 'traditional' member of that nation and not also support 100% open borders (which, contrary to Trump's claims, means basically no politician in the USA at all meets the criteria for 'traditional' American, but then very few citizens do).
To support the OPPOSITE - to want hugely restricted immigration (even on religious grounds), to turn away refugees fleeing for their lives, to want to deport millions of people - even when that means tearing appart families because some members are citizens... that is as far removed from 'traditional' as any American can ever be. It's an anti-American as you could possibly become.
Slashdot Mirror
>In actual fact, one of the biggest contributors to lower life expectancy is obesity, and one of the biggest identifiable causes of obesity is government policy: corn subsidies and bad federal nutritional guidelines.
Something Obama made a serious effort to act on early in his presidency, he desperately tried to regulate that industry - make sure consumers are informed of what's in their food and encourage companies to improve the quality of what they sell. Only to have it scuppered by the republican congress.
So if there is any blame on government - then by your own reasoning - that blame lies with the republican party.
But, you can't have poor people dying because they can't afford healthcare... and an individual cannot really negotiate with a large corporation - especially when the price for turning down their offer is to die.
So what can we do... mmm well we could pool a lot of people's money together. They could negotiate prices as a group - which can be on equal footing with the suppliers, and the group as a whole isn't "about to die" so the negotiations are no longer happening under duress. Then you can also use standard actuarial table structures to spread risk around so that those with little risk right now can help cover those with high risk - and get better results for all.
Of course, such systems work better the larger the pool - so you will want to get EVERYBODY in on it (that's a fundamental attribute of actuarial tables - they only WORK if they are BIG). Ideally - you want the pool to be available, in it's entirety, to pay for healthcare - so it should probably not be profit driven.
There was a system, very much like that, in Scottland in the 19th century - it was actually the first ever use of actuarial tables to spread risk, instituted by the Scottish church to help the wealthier congregations assist the poorer ones in their care duties.
But it doesn't seem ideal to have a religious organisation run this - after all, people don't all have the same religion and it would cause friction that would limit the pool of potential contributors.
Mmm we could set up a massive, non-religiously affiliated organisation to collect dues and manage the fund, handle the negotiations and take care of the payments when we need it !
Seems like a huge amount of effort to get set up and convince everybody to sign on though - and a bit of a chicken/egg problem since the greatest benefits (the negotiation power) only comes when you have lots of members, but to get lots of members you need to offer the benefits.
If only there was some organisation that was already established, had lots of negotiation power, the infrastructure to collect and manage dues with an already existing tiered-structure to scale your dues to your income, capacity to handle payments, no profit motive and no religious affiliation which we could leverage to run this national insurance scheme for us... I know we can use our government ! They're perfect ! This is EXACTLY the sort of thing we invented them for !
Oh wait, we just invented single payer healthcare.
The horrors do not end there.
If Air Force one crashes into the atlantic tomorrow with both Trump and Pence on board... the presidency goes to the speaker of the House. In this case Paul Ryan - a man who has run several times and was never able to get the nomination. He's saner than either the president- or vice-president elect but his own brand of ultra-selfcentered, classist asshole.
When he accepted the speakership it was only on condition of being allowed a minimum number of weeks a year to spend with his family - he is clearly in favor of the idea of family vacations... for rich people, because he also repeatedly fought and voted against making America NOT be one of the only countries on earth without protected, paid family leave.
Only in America is a couple of weeks a year to spend with your family, rest up a bit, get out of town a bit - without worrying about losing your job or lost wages NOT considered an essential right for a well-functioning society. Paul Ryan has gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that these things remain the privilege of the rich and wealthy - or at least those with rare enough job skills to be able to personally negotiate them contracts.
>Besides, relatively business savvy isn't saying he's good, just that he's better than a lot of politician/legislators we have had in the past - which is a low bar indeed.
But considering that government does not, never can and by god never ever SHOULD resemble a business - that's not at all a bad thing. You CAN be good at both - but nothing you learn about one is helpful to the other. Being good at both is a bit like getting a double PHD in art history and astrophysics. Sure it can be done, but it's a rare person indeed who can master such utterly disparate disciplines and they know how to keep them separate in their heads.
Take the money he inheritted, take his net worth today (the one he claims to have - which is almost certainly exagerated by 2 orders of magnitude). Factor in inflation.
Had he stuck all his money way back when into an index-tracking fund he would be richer now than he is - a LOT richer.
This is such a terrible businessman he can't even do (nearly) as well as the AVERAGE of the stock market - in a period that included 3 major recessions including the largest one since the great depression !
And that's working with how much he CLAIMS to have, all the evidence suggests he is a LOT less rich than that.
He's got TWO ex goldman sachs employees in his cabinet - INCLUDING the treasury secretary.
At least Clinton had been forced to make promises to the progressive wing of the democratic party to get the Sanders supporters on-board, which would have precluded her being that bad.
It doesn't MATTER whether you believe she would WANT to be. She wouldn't be ABLE to - because she had been forced to make promises against that, which she would have to keep if she wanted another term.
Trump on the other hand is sucking the wall street dong like no other president before ever has ! Hell his taxplan will give wallstreet moguls 6 trillion dollars - which you will have to make up with YOUR taxes.
In theory - prices reflect the value of companies and price shifts reflect altered perceptions of which companies are producing the most value.
There is no fucking way that the value a company produces can change in microsecond timeframes. There is no way that the price shfit can reflect an actual change in the state of the market- the perception therefore is entirely divorced from reality.
This REDUCES the efficacy of the market's price mechanism by INCREASES the difference between perceived and actual value of companies.
HFT does not increase market liquidity, it does not help shift resources to where they are most valuable - it actively counteracts and undermines those very processes !
DC straight to the bloodstream - one volt can easily kill you. One volt / the resistance of blood gives you a current stronger than the nervous system - and it's a solid current- passing straight through the heart. Where it overwhelms the autonomic nervous system and basically causes the heart to cease up. My dad wrote his dissertation on the topic.
To be fair, when Chrighton wrote the original book 24-odd years ago, it was NOT 'science fiction' - it was definitely viable science based on the knowledge of the day. Amber was known to preserve soft-tissue, mosquitos and other blood-sucking insects from the dinosaur era had been found in amber and DNA had been recovered from amber.
It seemed entirely within the realm of what would be possible in the next few years.
In the intervening period a few things happened:
1) It was found that the DNA from the original species in the amber decayed
2) The human genome project was completed -and came with a massively shocking discovery: human DNA was far simpler than that of animals we'd genotyped years earlier like frogs (indeed - an order of magnitude fewer genes), which when we had to explain how that's possible turned our entire view of how DNA works upside down. The current view is that DNA is not a blueprint for a species, but a set of instructions for building a member of one - which makes assumptions. The more advanced the species is, the more assumptions can be made and the fewer conditionals have to be specified in the code. It's like stripping off the 'if arch == x86' part of your code because nobody uses a 32-bit computer anymore. Frogs have DNA to repond to various temperature ranges, humity levels etc. etc. basically to adjust the growth of the fetus to the ever-changing conditions in the pond all the time. Humans have a womb with very fixed conditions - so none of those are needed.
3) With this realization - we actually genotyped the DNA recovered from amber - and it turned out to be from (much later) external contamination (mostly bacterial DNA).
Those things shifted the Jurassic park scenario firmly into the science fiction region - but one should be fair to a brilliant writer with some pretty solid scientific credentials (in the field of medicine), when it was written it was in the realm of highly conceivable science fiction.
He also updated his writing to reflect changes in the field. His last book "Timeline" also deals with genetics - and is set firmly in the areas of genetics where active research is happening right now, and dealing with the (very significant) social and legal questions that is raised by such ridiculous concepts as allowing companies to patent genes.
You're not, actually, entirely wrong- though it's more like a dead parrot's great-great-great-great-great-great...-great-grandmother.
We finally get a Jurassic Park remake with feathered velociraptors ?
RealityTV taken to a whole new level...
There actually IS such a show ?
He can't argue his point, because that would require proving a negative - which is logically impossible.
When your argument would require doing something logically impossible in order to defend it - that's usually not a good sign for the likelihood of you being right.
Oh - and powerwolf has *never* been played on any radio or tv station in my country and even if it had I wouldn't have heard it because I haven't listened to either in more than a decade - I can't stand the crap they play 200 times a day.
Well let me tell you how I discovered my favorite band. I have had a love for powermetal for a long time, which began with Manowar back in the early aughts.
One day, I had some friends over and wanted some background music without effort - so I typed "powermetal collection" into youtube and left it playing. At some point a song came on which stopped me in mid-sentence to turn around and go turn it up... because it blew my mind. It was the first time I ever heard Powerwolf. Who is signed with a fairly small indie label in Europe that only does powermetal and is where most powermetal bands go to get signed because they get a good deal from a company that won't fuck with their sound.
I've had powerwolf dominating my playlists ever since. They are just unbelievably good.
Mind you- the US music industry does seem to have gotten a lot less conservative about sex anyway (odd shift). I saw one of those 'kids watch' a while ago where a bunch of young teenagers were shown some Nirvanna videos, most had never heard of them (one had and was apparently a fan), a few had some vague idea of Kurt Cobain having killed himself. You know the drill.
But one thing was interesting: more than half the kids expressed astonishment at the fact that the people in the videos were fully dressed.
There's nothing wrong about sex and sexuality in music - it's part of life and should be part of music, but it isn't *all* of life and shouldn't be *all* of music.
The metal scene is actually still mostly like that. Perhaps less so in America but there metal was basically killed by the hair-metal movement anyway and became extremely small ever since. Ignore the Nu-metal stuff - since mostly they are of the sausage-factory variety, but you did also have Slayer, Death and Manowar who wrote their own stuff, experimented with new ideas (Manowar basically invented the combination of choral and metal music), produce their own stuff, play their own instruments and push boundaries. Even metallica has had periods where they created real art and their the most commercial metal band America ever had (and the best-selling world-wide of all time).
This is a LOT bigger in Europe - the best metal for two generations have come out of the Slavic countries - Norway, Germany and Finnland in particular and the generation before it was Britain. Priest and Maiden were fantastic and Maiden is still fantastic, still touring, still innovative - they may have grown old but they never grew stale (I saw them live a few months ago and it was one of the best shows I've ever been at). The German scene started out with bands like Accept, which was a one-hit-wonder in the US but had a long and illustrious career back home, and moved into legends like Hammerfall and Blind Guardian. Later they and their neighbours would birth bands like Amon Amarth, Children of Bodom, Korpiklaani, Nightwish - all of which had their own unique approaches to a very wide genre which had already significantly innovated from other metal subgenres (a focus on singable lyrics, low-use of bass but heavy use of rhythm guitars, extremely rapid double-bass-drum patterns, elements of opera, choral and classicalmusic mixed). And most of them are unknown outside their home countries. Meanwhile Norway gave birth to black-metal which is one-part music one part polical protest against the dominance of the state-church, and then Armenian/German band Powerwolf took the stylistics of black metal, mixed it with the musical stylings of powermetal and based their lyrics on the mythology of the Holy Roman Empire for a completely unique sound and style.
There are still great bands out there pushing boundaries, combining absurdly different influences into truly unique music - they just aren't in the USA anymore. In many ways the country is just too conservative. Every time you have an artist actually pushing boundaries, trying different things, exploring a different approach to theatrics - there's a million protesters blaming them for every ill in society. In the 1980's they burned Maiden's records (though the band didn't mind because, in their words: 'before they could burn the record - they had to buy it first'), in the 1990s they blamed Manson for Columbine (even though neither of the shooters listened to the band), a few months ago buzzfeed blamed Slipknot for the racism of Trump supporters (so it's not just the rightwingers who do that), and a judge had to tell law enforcement that listening to Insane Clown Posse does not automatically make you a gangster (so it's not just metal bands either).
That's why it doesn't happen anymore - because in America any band that doesn't toe the line very carefully will never get airplay, never get on radio - just face a constant barrage of harassment and horror. So while bands and musicians may be brave - the record companies aren't, they will have one or two controversial acts (because controversy also sells) but they won't risk anything more.
Back in the mid-1990s Oasis was planning a tour in the US which was struggling to sell, Bon Jovi at the time said "Oasis will never be very successful here, because America is too conservative"
And that's coming from the least controversial, least metal, musician to ever play hair-metal about a band that, honestly, was just a fairly average British pop-rock band who did nothing particularly original or special memorable in their music and whose sole claim to notoriety was once outselling the Bible and calling themselves "Greater than god" - which they stole from the Beatles anyway.
There's another possibility, They actually agree on some common standards - and make it so every piece of VR software runs on every device, and you compete by making your device run it better.
So sticking my phone in a cardboard will run it weakly, but spending on one of the big boys it runs very well - but they all run the same stuff.
That is what the market needs right now. As it stands the fragmented gaming market hurts consumers, you have 3 major console makers none of whom are compatible with each other - so only AAA titles appear on more than one, you got PC which is not compatible with any of them - and you got valve trying to create PC-compatible consoles at three times the price of a PC or a console. You got linux gaming growing rapidly but you still get AAA-titles that can't run on wine - even ones that used to work (the new SkyrimSpecialEdition is entirely impossible to run on wine - at least if you got it via steam because steam is a 32-bit only app and the new skyrim is 64-bit only and wine doesn't support running 32-bit and 64-bit programs in the same engine).
But that sort of works because everybody who wants to game buys *something*.
VR is trying to build on top of that market - but it's new, the tech is expensive and the content supply much smaller. It isn't likely to work. The best thing they can do is to maximize the content by agreeing on a common standard so every device runs every piece of content- preferably on every platform.
Erm... A century contains 36500 days... not 365. That's a year. And every 4th year has 366 days.
So that's 25*366 +75*365 = 36575 days in a century.
You may want to correct the rest of your maths to account for there being more than 100 times more days in that period than you counted.
That pre-US anti-immigrant hysteria, as was prevalent in several native tribes, has the distinction if being the only example in all of human history that was true.
You said nothing to disprove my point though bevause I spoke if tradition. I said nothing about the law.
Firstly it's 1.6 Billion - not 2.08 nice bit of exaggeration there.
Secondly if your contention is that the desire for theocracy makes Muslims unsuitable to be Americans - do you also extend that to the vast number of Americans who want a theocracy ? The dominionists as they refer to themselves? How do you feel about the fact that the senator from Texas is one ? And the new vice-president elect ?
Actually, many churches simply take it literally: that it's a christian duty to pay your damn taxes without grumbling about it.
I know that's how the church of my youth taught it. Government has a right to charge taxes regardless of whether they share your faith, you have a duty to pay those taxes and complaining about it is an act of rebellion which is specifically prohibited by numerous other passages in the new testament. The bible is pretty clear that the ONLY time a christian can disobey any law is if that law would demand they violate one of god's commands.
That by the way rules out supporting the Trump approach to immigration - since the bible gives very clear orders about how to treat immigrants (and makes no distinction between 'legal' or 'illegal') once the 'stranger' is 'in your land' your duty is to treat him as a brother. You don't get to kick him out because you don't like how he got there.
You don't get to help government do so either - that violates the order to treat the stranger in your land as a brother.
Building a wall doesn't violate any clauses I can think off... except all the ones in proverbs against being bloody foolish.
>The ACLU does act against Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism, but I've never read of them daring to lift a finger against Islam
Because absolutely nobody has ever suggested erecting a quran on a plaque outside a state court.
It's ONLY unconstitutional if
1) Tax dollars fund it or
2) It's on public land (which includes government buildings).
If somebody DID try to declare the Quran their state book (as three red states tried to do with the bible last year) you BET the ACLU would get on that.
The rest of your post is filled with even more bullshit than that part.
Sorry, but if you get to judge the Qu'ran by any particular passage you grab out of context, I get to assume all Christians are in favor of slavery, believe in killing people by stoning if they work on a Sunday, will force their daughters to marry their rapists, maintain the right to sell said daughters into slavery - and believe that eradicating all people of different faiths is their religious duty, as was given to Israel before they arrived in the promised land (a duty they took very seriously as they set out on a path of destruction, war and genocide against all the many peoples who once lived there).
All THOSE things are called for in the Bible as well. Hell go read the story of Dinah in Genesis - nice ending that. Let's slaughter an entire tribe, man women and child... at a fucking peace summit !
In a nation made up of 100% immigrants it's imposssible to be a 'traditional' member of that nation and not also support 100% open borders (which, contrary to Trump's claims, means basically no politician in the USA at all meets the criteria for 'traditional' American, but then very few citizens do).
To support the OPPOSITE - to want hugely restricted immigration (even on religious grounds), to turn away refugees fleeing for their lives, to want to deport millions of people - even when that means tearing appart families because some members are citizens... that is as far removed from 'traditional' as any American can ever be.
It's an anti-American as you could possibly become.