>Except the Iraq War did NOT make the transport of oil more secure, and did NOT lower the "true cost" of oil in anyway. It did the exact opposite. Failing at the goal doesn't mean you subsequently get to pretend that wasn't the goal. Just because the execution was terrible doesn't mean the plan wasn't bad as well.
>Colonialism involves colonies, where the inhabitants of the area in question are citizens of the mother country.
So according to your bizarre and unique (made up) definition - the Dutch colonies (which once spanned half the globe) were not colonies then. Since nobody in them were citizens of the mother country, the best you could hope for was 'employee of the corporation' - but most were simply 'slaves' or 'natives to be shoved aside'.
In fact, hardly any colonial power EVER granted citizens to the people of the colonies - that would mean you have to give those people RIGHTS and no colonial government wanted to do that. Citizens of the motherland who went to live in the colonies usually retained their citizenship - but the people being taken over never gained it. In the aftermath of colonialism a lot of colonial powers gave a path to citizenship for their former non-citizen subjects - which usually only consisted of some rules to make emigrating to the land that once ruled you a little easier than it is for other people. The levels of that vary greatly even within a single colonial power. For example citizens of former British colonies can get automatic citizenship in Britain - but not ALL former colonies. It does not apply to South Africans for example.
> The price of oil skyrocketed when war broke out in 2003, and remained high for more than a decade. That was pretty good for the oil companies.
You're assuming there are only one kind of subsidy. Subsidies can be tailored to reduce the price you pay for a product - or just to give money to those who produce it so they keep doing so. Just because it wasn't the former kind, doesn't mean it wasn't the latter kind.
Farm subsidies fit almost entirely in the latter category as well - they actually make food more expensive world-wide because farm subsidies in Europe and America make it impossible for farmers in other countries (which have more suitable climates) to actually compete despite their cost of production being lower. That actually means that, eventually those unsubsidized farmer start going out of business - forcing their countries to become food importers rather than exporters, which raises prices even in the countries that used to supply their own food with exports to spare. Nobody wins.
In fact- farm subsidies are so bad that, every year, farmers in Europe and America burn crops because the subsidies are contingent on keeping supply below a certain level - they burn so much produce every year that just the food burned could feed every hungry person on the planet. Nobody in the world needs to be hungry- we produce enough food to feed everybody on earth twice over but we burn so much that huge numbers of people still starve and a massive percentage of the global population have no food security - they may get enough food over time to survive but they never know if they will eat today.
Subsidies don't always bring prices down - many are DESIGNED to keep prices high. Some oil subsidies are in that category as well.
Hamilton and Madison however both also believed government should be as big as it can be, and democracy with it (which may have been an early stab at arguing for universal suffrage). Madison wrote in the federalist papers that making democracy and government as big as possible was a crucial vanguard against corruption (the exact opposite of what libertarians think) - because big organisations get filled with competing interests, and the more competing interests there is the harder corruption becomes - there is always somebody who will personally benefit or be able to advance the interests of his group by ratting you out.
The US government - even at it's barebones just-the-congress-and-white-house is already one of the largest on earth, and that's how it was STARTED. Two houses of congress, each with hundreds of members - the average parliament has half as many members as the house of representatives, and even in countries with two (common) that's still typically half the number of lawmakers. You appoint several representatives per state - two senators for example, while most countries get one representative per represented area (which, granted, is usually smaller regions - typically covering a city or such). Then there is the state governments below that, which are significantly larger and more powerful than the average provincial government - and the metro-level governments below that: ditto.
Same with welfare - having a welfare system has been part of the US since it's foundation - indeed it was one of the requirements for statehood, before a territory could become a state it would have to have a welfare system implemented. Andrew Jackson refused to sign Brigham Young's appeal to grant statehood to Utah until Utah had a welfare system that extended beyond the membership of the mormon church (and was not run by said church).
And frankly - they were right. The most corrupt governments in the world - are also the smallest and provide the least services, with the least number of government employees. The most corrupt government of all is the dictatorship - which ultimately shrinks the all the powers of government into a single person. The most successful nations on earth, with the highest standards of living and the lowest levels of corruption are also the nations where the governments are the largest, the markets the most heavily regulated and the government-services cover essential public needs the widest. In a small government like in the D.R.C. you can get a sitting president refusing to step down as he approaches a term limit - and the government unable to budge him leading to violent clashes in the streets as the citizens try to do the government's job for them (and come up against the loyalist parts of that government and it's military apparatus - so much for the gun-nuts assertion that in a revolution the soldiers would side with the people, the world is full of revolutions and that NEVER happens) - clashes which have killed tens of thousands in the last few months. Now imagine if Obama tried to pull that stunt? Not that he is likely to - I think he can't wait to get the fuck out of that house - but just imagine if he did. The republicans would be in uproar and they would remove him from the white house, by force, if needed - and they military would not obey him because there are enough republicans in the senior command of the pentagon. It would take seriously weird circumstances to even get to a civil war, in reality no president would try because the odds of success is just too low - the government organs set up to provide oversight over him are just too large and powerful to try and resist.
That is whats good about a big government - but one constrained by a constitution that strictly limits what they may apply their sides and power to. Competing interests - so that if anybody tries to abuse their position too much, there will be somebody else who can score big by busting their ass.
Of course, what Madison could not have predicted was a world where a wealthy elite could
Awww how cute, a conservative idiot who can't tell the difference between a cleverly poetic way of calling him an idiot and 'namedropping'.
If you spread bullshit theories that are supported by your ideology but disputed by the actual facts - you must be a conservative. Whether it's creationism, climate-change-denial, tax cuts for the rich, the relationship between gun-laws and mass shootings, the impact of race on police shootings, what REALLY happens when you deregulate things, how to get the best healthcare outcomes for the lowest investment, which race is most likely to kill each other (hint: it's white people, white-on-white murder outstrips all other races by a huge margin), what things actually cost (so they want to cut or avoid things for having a high price despite those things having a NEGATIVE cost [the ROI is higher than the price] and they end up actually cutting revenues when they attempt to cut costs - as with UBI and single payer healthcare), or how a company that is successfully doing something the company's they like told them can't be one is actually making it's money... if you do all that, you must be a conservative.
Which is not to say that there aren't bullshitters and idiots on the left - Jill Stein sadly has gone full retard this year for example, but at least there it's a fringe group - not the fucking party platform !
There were doctors who said this - but they had no confirmed diagnosis from before that time (since the disease didn't official get recognised) and after-the-fact diagnosis is not very hard evidence. The 'patient zero' theory was considered stronger on the evidence then available, and fitted with the a lot of people's preconceived biasses (that gays are too blame) which gave it staying power. The article speaks of 'widespread theories' - where do you think those came from ? From all the doctors who were saying "We had patients with all the symptoms of AIDS in 1970". What the gene study has proven is that those doctors were not mistakenly applying a more recent diagnosis to something they saw 20 years earlier, they were actually correctly identifying the mysterious disease that killed their patients back then.
>They are on average promiscuous on a level heterosexuals just don't get close to.
Not for lack of trying - the only difference is that half the gay men have not spent their whole lives being told that their total value as a person is dependent on how little they have sex, that if they enjoy it they have bad self respect etc. etc. in fact the gay male population is entirely made up of people who have been told all their lives that their value as a person is measured by how MANY people they have sex with.
The hetero version sort of cancels out - with one gender pushed to constantly seek sex and one pushed to constantly try and avoid it (that this is a fuckup in every possible sense aside - my only point is that it gets you fairly steady numbers), but in the gay community the 'avoid' conditioning doesn't exist. Interestingly lesbians tend not to be particularly promiscuous and the average lesbian has the same amount of sex and partners per year as the average heterosexual woman - which supports the idea that social conditioning is the major influencing factor.
What you are describing is called "forced obsolescence" and it's nothing new, hell it predates (personal) computers. G.M. invented it as a businessmodel back in the 1960s. The computer world copied it by the early 1990s. Remember when the i486 was the flagship intel CPU... for over a decade ?!
From the Pentium onwards they were bringing out new models almost every year with the previous year's model basically unusable within 3 years (partly because software requirements would chase the latest and greatest).
There actually seems to have been a slight shift to reduce that since about 2010 - at least in the PC market. I suspect the reason is the rise of tablets, smartphones, next-gen consoles and dedicated-use set-top boxes. All these things have reduced the market for PCs - people simply don't buy as many as they used to. So that gave the PC hardware companies a problem - if your PC fails after 2 years now - there's a very real risk you won't buy another. They have a better chance of selling you one if your last one has been going for 5 years. So suddenly interfaces are backwards compatible - you can plug a PCIe3 card into a PCIe2 slot with almost no noticeable performance loss. I am about to upgrade to the new nvidia GTX 1050TI - my current card is a GTX550, and it has served me well until now. It's only in the last year or so that I started feeling a real need to upgrade it. My 2013 model core-I5 CPU is still running everything I throw at it well, is overclocked and running at a stable temperature without hassle. I've expanded parts on this PC since I bought it in 2013 (like increasing the ram to 16Gb) but I've not yet replaced anything except one hard disk, which had been moved over from the PC before this one and was close to 5 years old when it failed.
Forced obsolescence as a business model only works if there isn't something else people will buy every year which can replace 90% of what you do and costs less. So PC's are actually becoming more stable and the companies are actually trying to maintain a perception of slowing change. Intel isn't even rebranding their next-gen chips anymore. You can buy a Core-I5 (same name as my computer has) right now - but it's a different chip, they haven't made mine since 2013. They are actually keeping the model names - while replacing the chips, to increase the apparent longevity of their products (not just in how long it's working but how long the company is supporting it).
It's a far cry from when the best chip in the world was the i486 for 10 bloody years, but it's a helluva lot better than it was circa 2005.
Your problem is you've fallen for a beloved fallacy of conservative politicians: conflating price with cost. Cost is defined as price minus return on investment.
You know what NASA, The G.I. Bill, Universal Healthcare and Universal Basic Income all have in common ? High prices with but NEGATIVE costs.
They are not expense at all. They are profit-generating investments.
Belief applies to opinions, not to facts. If it can be calculated it's a fact, not an opinion and if you believe something else you are just plain wrong.
Erm yes, absolutely. It is inappropriate for media concern to be significantly higher than the risk of an event - that will never change because if that's true the media is contributing to an unsubstantiated panic and panics are a PROVEN risk to public safety (and coincidentally, among the most common and severe public safety events). Mass hysteria kills people, hurts economies badly (which also kills people) and happen frequently.
A few years ago, a private fax from a secretary at the South African weather service to a friend mentioned casually that they were tracking some tornado-like cloud patterns (which is a pretty bad laymans misunderstanding of what her bosses were doing). The friend forwarded the fax on to dozens of people, including the media and it morphed into a massive e-mail, social-media and fax warning campaign that somehow ended up declaring that the weather service were warning people of a tornado expected later that day. Radio and TV were reporting it as an actual warning from the weather service (but somehow, despite being in daily communication with them for weather reports - none of them actually called the service for comment - which would have seen the myth debunked)
Schools were closed, businesses shut down and sent their workers home early. The single worst traffic jam in the history of Johannesburg happened that afternoon. The economy of this poor country is estimated to have lost 7-Billion rand that day as it's most important economic city came to a shutdown. Dozens of people died from heart attacks and other mundane emergencies while the emergency services were unable to get to them through the traffic.
All because of one fax which had a weather service letterhead mentioned the word 'tornado' in a country where those happen less than once in 30 years on average and never with warning.
Oh, by the way, the typical damage and death tolls from actual tornadoes in South Africa is far, far lower than the what was caused by that one day of panic. Media response being hugely out of proportion to the actual incidence of events is massively inappropriate because it kills and starves people.
>No, it wouldn't. In Japan the authorities have postponed the MMR by one year after the controversy broke out, and the new cases of autism immediately went down spectacularly. Later the government idiots resumed the original schedule and up it went again.
Correlation does not imply causation. The only fluctuations in autism cases in decades have all been caused by improved diagnostic criteria - there is no reason to believe the number of cases has changed at all. Moving the MMR vaccine later would have one and ONLY one effect. Far fewer people would be diagnosed with autism shortly after their vaccine - but the ONLY reason it would have that effect is that those people are now diagnosed a year before they get the vaccine.
>For the rest you call a lot of things bullshit in screaming and shouting capitals, but fail to supply any reference to any randomly placebo controlled double blind study in an epidemiologically relevant part of the population published in a peer reviewed journal, so I just as well call out bullshit on your claims. Which of the thousands ot studies that disproved this claim would you like a link to since you are apparently unable to use google to find anything that alters your expectations ? What does NOT exist is any study that supports your claim.
>As long as such a study has not been published my doubts regarding vaccination are justified and any claims to the contrary are unproven. No. That's not how it works. The burden of proof is not on vaccine makers to prove it doesn't cause autism, it's on those who claim it does to prove it does. Either way - it's been tested thousands of times and all the studies prove it doesn't.
No. Im just once again informing you that nobody ever claimed awareness influences likelihood. That is not what the sentence "if you see it on the news it will not happen to you" means. That sentence means the same thing as the one you agreed with. Just more poetically expressed. Your strict literal interpretation is simply false.
>I guess so, but you can't go from what you consider mathematically appropriate to what is appropriate. Sometimes there is only one answer. Those times are the times when one can be calculated mathematically.
>they are a domestic problem but one unlikely to grow larger with christian immigrants. [citation needed]
>Muslim terrorism is likjely to increase with muslim immigrants, so they should be discouraged. [citation needed]
Anyway, even if your unsubstantiated bullshit is true - you haven't dealt with the much bigger issue. The former problem is much more severe - and your proposed solution for the latter (much smaller) problem is provably aggravating the larger problem. That makes it a stupid plan. What makes it even stupider is that your explanation for the former problem - exactly applies to the latter. The Muslims who wish to enter the United states are fleeing oppression by fundamentalists within their own religion, just like your protestant ancestors did - and you would THINK then that those protestants would apply the Golden Rule - the single most important thing that their Jesus ever taught them and do unto others over there. Remembering that they got there after fleeing oppression by another sect of their own religion, should make them WANT to welcome other people doing the same.
Sorry, but this is the most insane idea ever that you are proposing because it fundamentally ignores human nature, both the best and the worst of it.
No. He doesn't. Does "I will end ISIS" sound isolationist to you ? Hint - boots on the ground in Syria or Iraq would be the worst thing America could do right now. That will mean war with Russia.
And besides, the results of Trump has already begun. This past week 3 terrorists were arrested in Kansas, they had built a pretty major bomb they were planning to set off in a place of worship, and had stockpiled over 2000 rounds of amunition which they were intending to use for a massacre. But you won't hear them called terrorists on Fox because they are white, male and christian. Only the official arrest report calls them that you know, not something reporters should tell the public or anything right ? People who plan to attack civilians for political or religious reasons are terrorists, it doesn't matter *what* religion.
All three are on record as wanting to vote for Trump (they may miss election day though on account of being in jail and rather unlikely to get bail).
In fact - if Trump was serious about terrorism he'd be going after rightwing white militias, not Muslims, since they are by far the biggest threat. Since 2002 far more Americans have been killed by Christian terrorist groups (aka rightwing white militias but lets call them what they are - radicalised Christian terrorists) than all other kinds of terror groups combined (yes, including Muslim terrorists). That's according to the FBI. A separate study by Westpoint Military academy rated radicalized Christian terrorists the single largest threat to American national security. The right wing tried very hard to censor that report with republican congressmen even threatening to cut their research funding if they didn't retract it.
Why is it that Trump won't even say the words "Radicalized Christian Terrorism" ? Is he in cahoots with them ? Unlike his claims about Obama causing ISIS he actually DOES have a measurable share of blame in this - these groups have gotten significantly more emboldened, dangerous and violent since his campaign started. He has given them a sense of legitimacy they lacked before. Since they were ALREADY the greatest threat to American lives from terror - his actions have pushed them into an entirely new category.
And that's just domestically. Globally - the world has not been in this much of a tightrope situation since 1914. The global powers are fucking itching for a fight. The last time the world was anything like this - it took just one assassination of the wrong person in the wrong place to set of the first world war. And nobody predicted THAT outcome - hell weeks afterwords the markets hadn't even shifted yet, the full horror of what began when the Archduke got shot didn't register until 3 months later when the body bags started returning. Some 10% of the global population was killed over the next 3 years.
Isolationism wouldn't work - for starters it would actually decrease the already extremely low odds of preventing another world war. The two biggest factors in doing so thus far has been the USA and the EU. The EU has been hugely weakened in recent months thanks to Brexit, that weakens their capacity to prevent another landwar in Europe (and they have been GOOD at that, under the EU Europe has had the longest period of peace in it's entire history). Now you want remove the other one ? AT the same time that Russia is flexing it's muscles ? Testing the willingness of other nations to honour treaties. The same time that China is flagrantly ignoring diplomacy and flat-out stealing teritory from other South Asian countries ? Those acts of invasion hasn't escalated yet - but any one could be the last straw. Already Trump's talks about NATO has caused some EU politicians to call for a European army to be created - because they fear they can no longer rely on the US to provide backup if they need to defend themselves against a power like Russia or China. And if you think isolationism means the US could let the world fight a war and stay out of it then you're really silly, they tried that - TWIC
Well seriously - nobody could claim that the board is overstepping their bounds if they revoke her license. She has a clear and long history of dangerous misinformation - which she gives weight to with the authority of her credentials, she is clearly aware that she is violating the code of conduct and has publicly stated that she continuous to do so. Surely any organisation has the right to remove their association with somebody who refuses to act according to the rules for membership of that organisation ?
My dad is an electrical engineer. Every employment contract he has ever taken included a clause specifically prohibiting him from doing private work - even in his own time, and the cited reason is professional liability. If he screws up a design he did privately, his employers are liable.
Slashdot Mirror
>Except the Iraq War did NOT make the transport of oil more secure, and did NOT lower the "true cost" of oil in anyway. It did the exact opposite.
Failing at the goal doesn't mean you subsequently get to pretend that wasn't the goal. Just because the execution was terrible doesn't mean the plan wasn't bad as well.
>Colonialism involves colonies, where the inhabitants of the area in question are citizens of the mother country.
So according to your bizarre and unique (made up) definition - the Dutch colonies (which once spanned half the globe) were not colonies then. Since nobody in them were citizens of the mother country, the best you could hope for was 'employee of the corporation' - but most were simply 'slaves' or 'natives to be shoved aside'.
In fact, hardly any colonial power EVER granted citizens to the people of the colonies - that would mean you have to give those people RIGHTS and no colonial government wanted to do that. Citizens of the motherland who went to live in the colonies usually retained their citizenship - but the people being taken over never gained it.
In the aftermath of colonialism a lot of colonial powers gave a path to citizenship for their former non-citizen subjects - which usually only consisted of some rules to make emigrating to the land that once ruled you a little easier than it is for other people. The levels of that vary greatly even within a single colonial power. For example citizens of former British colonies can get automatic citizenship in Britain - but not ALL former colonies. It does not apply to South Africans for example.
> The price of oil skyrocketed when war broke out in 2003, and remained high for more than a decade.
That was pretty good for the oil companies.
You're assuming there are only one kind of subsidy. Subsidies can be tailored to reduce the price you pay for a product - or just to give money to those who produce it so they keep doing so. Just because it wasn't the former kind, doesn't mean it wasn't the latter kind.
Farm subsidies fit almost entirely in the latter category as well - they actually make food more expensive world-wide because farm subsidies in Europe and America make it impossible for farmers in other countries (which have more suitable climates) to actually compete despite their cost of production being lower. That actually means that, eventually those unsubsidized farmer start going out of business - forcing their countries to become food importers rather than exporters, which raises prices even in the countries that used to supply their own food with exports to spare. Nobody wins.
In fact- farm subsidies are so bad that, every year, farmers in Europe and America burn crops because the subsidies are contingent on keeping supply below a certain level - they burn so much produce every year that just the food burned could feed every hungry person on the planet. Nobody in the world needs to be hungry- we produce enough food to feed everybody on earth twice over but we burn so much that huge numbers of people still starve and a massive percentage of the global population have no food security - they may get enough food over time to survive but they never know if they will eat today.
Subsidies don't always bring prices down - many are DESIGNED to keep prices high. Some oil subsidies are in that category as well.
Hamilton and Madison however both also believed government should be as big as it can be, and democracy with it (which may have been an early stab at arguing for universal suffrage). Madison wrote in the federalist papers that making democracy and government as big as possible was a crucial vanguard against corruption (the exact opposite of what libertarians think) - because big organisations get filled with competing interests, and the more competing interests there is the harder corruption becomes - there is always somebody who will personally benefit or be able to advance the interests of his group by ratting you out.
The US government - even at it's barebones just-the-congress-and-white-house is already one of the largest on earth, and that's how it was STARTED. Two houses of congress, each with hundreds of members - the average parliament has half as many members as the house of representatives, and even in countries with two (common) that's still typically half the number of lawmakers. You appoint several representatives per state - two senators for example, while most countries get one representative per represented area (which, granted, is usually smaller regions - typically covering a city or such). Then there is the state governments below that, which are significantly larger and more powerful than the average provincial government - and the metro-level governments below that: ditto.
Same with welfare - having a welfare system has been part of the US since it's foundation - indeed it was one of the requirements for statehood, before a territory could become a state it would have to have a welfare system implemented. Andrew Jackson refused to sign Brigham Young's appeal to grant statehood to Utah until Utah had a welfare system that extended beyond the membership of the mormon church (and was not run by said church).
And frankly - they were right. The most corrupt governments in the world - are also the smallest and provide the least services, with the least number of government employees. The most corrupt government of all is the dictatorship - which ultimately shrinks the all the powers of government into a single person. The most successful nations on earth, with the highest standards of living and the lowest levels of corruption are also the nations where the governments are the largest, the markets the most heavily regulated and the government-services cover essential public needs the widest.
In a small government like in the D.R.C. you can get a sitting president refusing to step down as he approaches a term limit - and the government unable to budge him leading to violent clashes in the streets as the citizens try to do the government's job for them (and come up against the loyalist parts of that government and it's military apparatus - so much for the gun-nuts assertion that in a revolution the soldiers would side with the people, the world is full of revolutions and that NEVER happens) - clashes which have killed tens of thousands in the last few months.
Now imagine if Obama tried to pull that stunt? Not that he is likely to - I think he can't wait to get the fuck out of that house - but just imagine if he did. The republicans would be in uproar and they would remove him from the white house, by force, if needed - and they military would not obey him because there are enough republicans in the senior command of the pentagon. It would take seriously weird circumstances to even get to a civil war, in reality no president would try because the odds of success is just too low - the government organs set up to provide oversight over him are just too large and powerful to try and resist.
That is whats good about a big government - but one constrained by a constitution that strictly limits what they may apply their sides and power to. Competing interests - so that if anybody tries to abuse their position too much, there will be somebody else who can score big by busting their ass.
Of course, what Madison could not have predicted was a world where a wealthy elite could
Awww how cute, a conservative idiot who can't tell the difference between a cleverly poetic way of calling him an idiot and 'namedropping'.
If you spread bullshit theories that are supported by your ideology but disputed by the actual facts - you must be a conservative. Whether it's creationism, climate-change-denial, tax cuts for the rich, the relationship between gun-laws and mass shootings, the impact of race on police shootings, what REALLY happens when you deregulate things, how to get the best healthcare outcomes for the lowest investment, which race is most likely to kill each other (hint: it's white people, white-on-white murder outstrips all other races by a huge margin), what things actually cost (so they want to cut or avoid things for having a high price despite those things having a NEGATIVE cost [the ROI is higher than the price] and they end up actually cutting revenues when they attempt to cut costs - as with UBI and single payer healthcare), or how a company that is successfully doing something the company's they like told them can't be one is actually making it's money... if you do all that, you must be a conservative.
Which is not to say that there aren't bullshitters and idiots on the left - Jill Stein sadly has gone full retard this year for example, but at least there it's a fringe group - not the fucking party platform !
Amazon still hasn't had one.
So I would advice backing SpaceX over whatever Bezos's rocket company is called.
There were doctors who said this - but they had no confirmed diagnosis from before that time (since the disease didn't official get recognised) and after-the-fact diagnosis is not very hard evidence. The 'patient zero' theory was considered stronger on the evidence then available, and fitted with the a lot of people's preconceived biasses (that gays are too blame) which gave it staying power.
The article speaks of 'widespread theories' - where do you think those came from ? From all the doctors who were saying "We had patients with all the symptoms of AIDS in 1970". What the gene study has proven is that those doctors were not mistakenly applying a more recent diagnosis to something they saw 20 years earlier, they were actually correctly identifying the mysterious disease that killed their patients back then.
And if it jumps to sheep, there goes Australia and Ireland.
Did you have a point ?
>They are on average promiscuous on a level heterosexuals just don't get close to.
Not for lack of trying - the only difference is that half the gay men have not spent their whole lives being told that their total value as a person is dependent on how little they have sex, that if they enjoy it they have bad self respect etc. etc. in fact the gay male population is entirely made up of people who have been told all their lives that their value as a person is measured by how MANY people they have sex with.
The hetero version sort of cancels out - with one gender pushed to constantly seek sex and one pushed to constantly try and avoid it (that this is a fuckup in every possible sense aside - my only point is that it gets you fairly steady numbers), but in the gay community the 'avoid' conditioning doesn't exist.
Interestingly lesbians tend not to be particularly promiscuous and the average lesbian has the same amount of sex and partners per year as the average heterosexual woman - which supports the idea that social conditioning is the major influencing factor.
He's not the patient, he's the disease.
Turning lead into gold is easy, but it's so expensive that really all you're doing is turning gold into less gold.
What you are describing is called "forced obsolescence" and it's nothing new, hell it predates (personal) computers. G.M. invented it as a businessmodel back in the 1960s. The computer world copied it by the early 1990s. Remember when the i486 was the flagship intel CPU ... for over a decade ?!
From the Pentium onwards they were bringing out new models almost every year with the previous year's model basically unusable within 3 years (partly because software requirements would chase the latest and greatest).
There actually seems to have been a slight shift to reduce that since about 2010 - at least in the PC market. I suspect the reason is the rise of tablets, smartphones, next-gen consoles and dedicated-use set-top boxes. All these things have reduced the market for PCs - people simply don't buy as many as they used to. So that gave the PC hardware companies a problem - if your PC fails after 2 years now - there's a very real risk you won't buy another. They have a better chance of selling you one if your last one has been going for 5 years.
So suddenly interfaces are backwards compatible - you can plug a PCIe3 card into a PCIe2 slot with almost no noticeable performance loss. I am about to upgrade to the new nvidia GTX 1050TI - my current card is a GTX550, and it has served me well until now. It's only in the last year or so that I started feeling a real need to upgrade it.
My 2013 model core-I5 CPU is still running everything I throw at it well, is overclocked and running at a stable temperature without hassle. I've expanded parts on this PC since I bought it in 2013 (like increasing the ram to 16Gb) but I've not yet replaced anything except one hard disk, which had been moved over from the PC before this one and was close to 5 years old when it failed.
Forced obsolescence as a business model only works if there isn't something else people will buy every year which can replace 90% of what you do and costs less. So PC's are actually becoming more stable and the companies are actually trying to maintain a perception of slowing change. Intel isn't even rebranding their next-gen chips anymore. You can buy a Core-I5 (same name as my computer has) right now - but it's a different chip, they haven't made mine since 2013. They are actually keeping the model names - while replacing the chips, to increase the apparent longevity of their products (not just in how long it's working but how long the company is supporting it).
It's a far cry from when the best chip in the world was the i486 for 10 bloody years, but it's a helluva lot better than it was circa 2005.
Your problem is you've fallen for a beloved fallacy of conservative politicians: conflating price with cost.
Cost is defined as price minus return on investment.
You know what NASA, The G.I. Bill, Universal Healthcare and Universal Basic Income all have in common ?
High prices with but NEGATIVE costs.
They are not expense at all. They are profit-generating investments.
Belief applies to opinions, not to facts. If it can be calculated it's a fact, not an opinion and if you believe something else you are just plain wrong.
Erm yes, absolutely. It is inappropriate for media concern to be significantly higher than the risk of an event - that will never change because if that's true the media is contributing to an unsubstantiated panic and panics are a PROVEN risk to public safety (and coincidentally, among the most common and severe public safety events). Mass hysteria kills people, hurts economies badly (which also kills people) and happen frequently.
A few years ago, a private fax from a secretary at the South African weather service to a friend mentioned casually that they were tracking some tornado-like cloud patterns (which is a pretty bad laymans misunderstanding of what her bosses were doing). The friend forwarded the fax on to dozens of people, including the media and it morphed into a massive e-mail, social-media and fax warning campaign that somehow ended up declaring that the weather service were warning people of a tornado expected later that day. Radio and TV were reporting it as an actual warning from the weather service (but somehow, despite being in daily communication with them for weather reports - none of them actually called the service for comment - which would have seen the myth debunked)
Schools were closed, businesses shut down and sent their workers home early. The single worst traffic jam in the history of Johannesburg happened that afternoon. The economy of this poor country is estimated to have lost 7-Billion rand that day as it's most important economic city came to a shutdown. Dozens of people died from heart attacks and other mundane emergencies while the emergency services were unable to get to them through the traffic.
All because of one fax which had a weather service letterhead mentioned the word 'tornado' in a country where those happen less than once in 30 years on average and never with warning.
Oh, by the way, the typical damage and death tolls from actual tornadoes in South Africa is far, far lower than the what was caused by that one day of panic. Media response being hugely out of proportion to the actual incidence of events is massively inappropriate because it kills and starves people.
>No, it wouldn't. In Japan the authorities have postponed the MMR by one year after the controversy broke out, and the new cases of autism immediately went down spectacularly. Later the government idiots resumed the original schedule and up it went again.
Correlation does not imply causation. The only fluctuations in autism cases in decades have all been caused by improved diagnostic criteria - there is no reason to believe the number of cases has changed at all. Moving the MMR vaccine later would have one and ONLY one effect. Far fewer people would be diagnosed with autism shortly after their vaccine - but the ONLY reason it would have that effect is that those people are now diagnosed a year before they get the vaccine.
>For the rest you call a lot of things bullshit in screaming and shouting capitals, but fail to supply any reference to any randomly placebo controlled double blind study in an epidemiologically relevant part of the population published in a peer reviewed journal, so I just as well call out bullshit on your claims.
Which of the thousands ot studies that disproved this claim would you like a link to since you are apparently unable to use google to find anything that alters your expectations ?
What does NOT exist is any study that supports your claim.
>As long as such a study has not been published my doubts regarding vaccination are justified and any claims to the contrary are unproven.
No. That's not how it works. The burden of proof is not on vaccine makers to prove it doesn't cause autism, it's on those who claim it does to prove it does. Either way - it's been tested thousands of times and all the studies prove it doesn't.
No. Im just once again informing you that nobody ever claimed awareness influences likelihood. That is not what the sentence "if you see it on the news it will not happen to you" means.
That sentence means the same thing as the one you agreed with. Just more poetically expressed. Your strict literal interpretation is simply false.
No, because NEITHER line means that.
>I guess so, but you can't go from what you consider mathematically appropriate to what is appropriate.
Sometimes there is only one answer. Those times are the times when one can be calculated mathematically.
>they are a domestic problem but one unlikely to grow larger with christian immigrants.
[citation needed]
>Muslim terrorism is likjely to increase with muslim immigrants, so they should be discouraged.
[citation needed]
Anyway, even if your unsubstantiated bullshit is true - you haven't dealt with the much bigger issue. The former problem is much more severe - and your proposed solution for the latter (much smaller) problem is provably aggravating the larger problem. That makes it a stupid plan. What makes it even stupider is that your explanation for the former problem - exactly applies to the latter. The Muslims who wish to enter the United states are fleeing oppression by fundamentalists within their own religion, just like your protestant ancestors did - and you would THINK then that those protestants would apply the Golden Rule - the single most important thing that their Jesus ever taught them and do unto others over there. Remembering that they got there after fleeing oppression by another sect of their own religion, should make them WANT to welcome other people doing the same.
Sorry, but this is the most insane idea ever that you are proposing because it fundamentally ignores human nature, both the best and the worst of it.
No. He doesn't. Does "I will end ISIS" sound isolationist to you ?
Hint - boots on the ground in Syria or Iraq would be the worst thing America could do right now. That will mean war with Russia.
And besides, the results of Trump has already begun. This past week 3 terrorists were arrested in Kansas, they had built a pretty major bomb they were planning to set off in a place of worship, and had stockpiled over 2000 rounds of amunition which they were intending to use for a massacre. But you won't hear them called terrorists on Fox because they are white, male and christian. Only the official arrest report calls them that you know, not something reporters should tell the public or anything right ? People who plan to attack civilians for political or religious reasons are terrorists, it doesn't matter *what* religion.
All three are on record as wanting to vote for Trump (they may miss election day though on account of being in jail and rather unlikely to get bail).
In fact - if Trump was serious about terrorism he'd be going after rightwing white militias, not Muslims, since they are by far the biggest threat. Since 2002 far more Americans have been killed by Christian terrorist groups (aka rightwing white militias but lets call them what they are - radicalised Christian terrorists) than all other kinds of terror groups combined (yes, including Muslim terrorists). That's according to the FBI.
A separate study by Westpoint Military academy rated radicalized Christian terrorists the single largest threat to American national security. The right wing tried very hard to censor that report with republican congressmen even threatening to cut their research funding if they didn't retract it.
Why is it that Trump won't even say the words "Radicalized Christian Terrorism" ? Is he in cahoots with them ? Unlike his claims about Obama causing ISIS he actually DOES have a measurable share of blame in this - these groups have gotten significantly more emboldened, dangerous and violent since his campaign started. He has given them a sense of legitimacy they lacked before. Since they were ALREADY the greatest threat to American lives from terror - his actions have pushed them into an entirely new category.
And that's just domestically. Globally - the world has not been in this much of a tightrope situation since 1914. The global powers are fucking itching for a fight. The last time the world was anything like this - it took just one assassination of the wrong person in the wrong place to set of the first world war. And nobody predicted THAT outcome - hell weeks afterwords the markets hadn't even shifted yet, the full horror of what began when the Archduke got shot didn't register until 3 months later when the body bags started returning. Some 10% of the global population was killed over the next 3 years.
Isolationism wouldn't work - for starters it would actually decrease the already extremely low odds of preventing another world war. The two biggest factors in doing so thus far has been the USA and the EU. The EU has been hugely weakened in recent months thanks to Brexit, that weakens their capacity to prevent another landwar in Europe (and they have been GOOD at that, under the EU Europe has had the longest period of peace in it's entire history). Now you want remove the other one ? AT the same time that Russia is flexing it's muscles ? Testing the willingness of other nations to honour treaties. The same time that China is flagrantly ignoring diplomacy and flat-out stealing teritory from other South Asian countries ? Those acts of invasion hasn't escalated yet - but any one could be the last straw.
Already Trump's talks about NATO has caused some EU politicians to call for a European army to be created - because they fear they can no longer rely on the US to provide backup if they need to defend themselves against a power like Russia or China.
And if you think isolationism means the US could let the world fight a war and stay out of it then you're really silly, they tried that - TWIC
The line you agreed with and the line you take issue with are two ways of saying the exact same thing. That was the whole point.
I've only had a few encounters with him - and he was pretty crazy each time. So you're saying he was saner in the past ? Must be the Trump effect.
Well seriously - nobody could claim that the board is overstepping their bounds if they revoke her license. She has a clear and long history of dangerous misinformation - which she gives weight to with the authority of her credentials, she is clearly aware that she is violating the code of conduct and has publicly stated that she continuous to do so.
Surely any organisation has the right to remove their association with somebody who refuses to act according to the rules for membership of that organisation ?
My dad is an electrical engineer. Every employment contract he has ever taken included a clause specifically prohibiting him from doing private work - even in his own time, and the cited reason is professional liability. If he screws up a design he did privately, his employers are liable.