I assume you were against the Civil Rights movement and support the argument that if citizens in as state or town had a referendum on driving black people outout then that was peachy and ok as it was the government doing *exactly* what it's citizens had asked?
Because your argument was the exact same argument many people made in the early - mid 20th century. There's rules and laws preventing the government from acting in all sorts of ways for (generally) a very good reason.
Saying that the majority of people demanded it so all further discussion is over is nothing but tyranny.
In EU waters (and most western waters) boats are only allowed to take species that they are licensed to take, and of course there are limits on what they can take and once they reach the limit on one type of fish / crustacean they face hefty fines if they *dont* throw them back - dead or alive.
I was watching an interesting doco a while ago where the captain of a prawn trawler was almost in tears as they had had two weeks of terrible prawn hauls so the crew were near mutiny (pay is directly related to how much the boat takes on) but were dragging in tonnes and tonnes of prime fish and under EU law had to throw it all back mostly dead, each time every time as to take it back to port risked him losing his boat.
So laws and regulations written by "well meaning" bureaucrats mandate that in many instance captains MUST take the action that you condemn and ironically you demand more laws and regulations made by the same to make them stop doing what the first set of laws forces them to do in the first place!
Nothings ever so simple as "they should just make a law". In this case they did, because people like you demanded that what they catch and how much they catch be regulated...and huge waste is largely a (now mandated by law) "unintended" consequence like the captains said it would be.
Not to mention, who are you to force anyone to do anything? They're supposedly free men who own fishing boats and catch fish. If you don't like it don't buy their fish or pay more for pet food so it doesn't *cost them* money to bring in junk fish just so you can feed your dog. Truly I hate to sound like a libertarian but you throwing around like phrases like "force them to turn their "bycatch" to dogfood," makes you look like an mini fascist. Just because they own a boat and supply something that you rely on doesn't suddenly make them your personal slaves. Tell us what industry you're in so we can start discussing "forcing" you to do various things that cost you huge sums of money just to satisfy our own personal attitudes.
I'm from Australia and most people use metric for most things but a persons height is often still giving in feet and inches.
Six foot is about the average height of a man, 5 foot for a woman. With that as a basis you can figure out anything when given a number in feet.
I have a far harder time visualising 200cm than six foot and there comes a point where units become non descriptive, saying 200cm is to much resolution and 2 meters not enough to make an instant visualisation of a persons height. It becomes even more apparent when saying 160cm, it's completely meaningless, you can't visualise 160 1cm segments or 1.6 meter segments it's impossible, but 5ft is immediate.
Same with inches, it's easier to visualise an inch than it is to visualise 30 mil when giving rough distances, and it's easier to visualise 10cm than 6 inches and so on.
Personally most people I know use them interchangably depending on what they're trying to describe, it's easier to say about an inch when describing something about 30mm and easier to say 10mm, 10cm or a meter when describing things of those sizes.
Also you only have to double lbs to get a reasonably close number in kilos.
The benefit of metric certainly isn't worth the flame wars and fanaticism that go on on this site. A great deal of it is little more than tired, trite US bashing if people were actually honest. And most countries still really use both more than some would like to admit.
The Poms and their "stones" on the other hand good grief;)
No group has ever tried to steal an election in any country in the history of the world, least of all America.
Thank god for hyper rational individuals like you who keep the hysterical dimwits who audaciously think that anybody might ever try such a thing under control.
What would we do without your superior intellect to protect us from our pathetic selves.
This administration made a big song and dance about transparency in government and how they'd publish all legislation online at least five days before your congress votes on it.
Have they even done it once?
In fact they've been worse on shoving midnight legislation down US representatives throats than the last lot, they weren't even sly about breaking their election promise. Not that you'd ever hear it mentioned in the US news media who seem to be more than a little infatuated.
They're not going to open up the voting process, in fact I'll take a wild stab in the dark and say in another 4 - 8 years it'll be even worse and more corrupted than it is now, and 8 years after that even worse still. But it'll seem normal to us then, we'll probably all still be sitting here on Slashdot talking about it like we have been for the last 9 years as though ever increasing corruption is a natural law, completely forgetting the time where it wasn't *quite* so bad as it is now and at some level assuming it can just go on for ever.
So goes the decline of the "post-democracy" west, a decline that is unstoppable at this stage save for a quarter of a century of war that might kick the survivors in the pants about the importance of true representative democracy as it did early - mid last century.
Without that the proles will never realise their own power and simply will never make enough of a fuss to truly reverse things.
In the west from 1900-1980ish the ugliest forms of ideology; Marxism, Facism, Eugenics, Totalitarianism were at one stage or another broadly and openly supported and advocated for by student bodies, senior faculty and universities in the west. Unapologetic support for the methods and madness of Mao, Lenin, Stalin, and yes - even Hitler (in the '20s and '30s before it became a faux pas to support him) accompanied loving gazes and embarrassing wistful looks over to Russia and China.
It was the "citizenry incapable of evaluating arguments and ignorant of history" aka "the average person" who kept *them* in check - the "useful idiots" as Lennon so lovingly referred to them were born out of western higher education.
As I've constantly found in my life a university degree in philosophy or social history in the hands of someone who doesn't have the experience of life to temper what they're being told often by "true believer" lecturers who like to try and be evangelicals for their own radical political beliefs causes more harm than good. Radical, violent support for Mao during the 60s and 70s among privileged middle and upper class kids in western universities while he was starving 30 million or more of his own country men out of their farms proves this indisputably.
Beware those who say that all education must be politicised, they *always* have a hidden agenda.
It's funny seeing the English talking up how great the NHS is compared to the US's system.
Where here in countries that also have some form of single payer system the NHS is considered to be at best on par with the US in advanced first world countries, it's considered to be the absolute worst out of all the government run systems. The biggest, most politicised, bureaucratic, dystopian, filthy healthcare system that one would want to end up in, compared to say, Germany, France or Australias systems.
But listening to you Poms you'd think the NHS was greatest thing in the world.
I've got news for you, (I can throw out personal anectdotes to!) I'm married to an English gal and she would *never* go back to the UK after living with our (Australian) system for the last 7 years, that includes having one child in the NHS and two over here in Australia. We can start with the fact that she was stuck in a ward with 8 women in the most filthy, decrepit room imaginable in England for her first...
Then again the English get their dental through the NHS as well and we *all* know the state of the average English persons teeth, perhaps the most perfect example of the NHS's capabilities.And probably why the Australian government despite copying swaths of our public policy from the mother country wouldn't touch the UK's version of public healthcare with a ten foot barge pole.
Assuming that "America" and "Americans" are a single entity as opposed to being many many differing states is as ignorant as making wide sweeping generalisations assuming that the member states that make up the European Union are also a single entity with singular ideals, practices and cultures.
Many American states have had and *still have* government sponsored monopolies in many areas that are fully endorsed and supported by their citizens.
It would seem that (from what I've read and heard over during my time here on the Internet) that what most "Americans" don't support is their federal government embarking on large commercial enterprises to the exclusion of the free market - something that is miles outside of its mandate. Of course it would seem that most "Europeans" feel exactly the same way about *their* federal government. Oh wait it's not federal yet...just another few months tho
I also wonder how "Europeans" are going to act when their federal government decides to take over all of it's member states health care and forms an all encompassing, all powerful, cross border police force, constantly expands into it's member states sovereignty and neighbouring countries lives and all the other lovely goodies that inevitably come with a huge central government...
(And don't get to smug just yet Norway, the EU isn't going to let you get away that easily).
I was trying to buy an expensive boutique computer the other day and I ended up coming home with nothing as there was this store that tricked me into going in with their shop as they have a logo that looks *just like Apples*. It turned out to be a bloody grocery store!! The nerve, a grocey chain using an Apple as their logo! Then I looked around and noticed that they're everywhere here in Australia and I mean *everywhere*.
I swear who does this grocery store with over 700 stores in Australia think they are using the same type of fruit as an obscure American computer companies logo. I mean Apple has a whopping three stores in this country!
Woolworths sells actual *apples* and holds about 55% of the grocery chain market in Australia.
Everybody, that is every.single.person in Australia knows who Woolworths are and what they sell.
On the other hand, from the point of view of the average man on the street who the fuck is this "Apple" company in comparison and what the hell do they sell? Computers?? With an apple for a logo? And they want to try and stop a massive Australian grocery chain from using an apple as their logo in Australia?
Given that globally Apple in total takes in half the revenue of Woolworths just in *Australia* per annum, Woolworths employs over 175,000 Australians while Apple employs 35,000 *WORLD WIDE*, Apple the pip squeak should perhaps shut it's mouth and not prod those with old money, old connections and household name recognition while visitors on their home ground.
1) Yes you are, you can't even grow enough food to feed yourselves. Or are you going to completely fill in the entire Island with wall to wall "houses" or what you English like to call houses which are actually called "flats" or "units" or tiny cramped apartments anywhere else in the world. And import 100% of your food (how very green of you) and then export....what exactly? More debt? More funny money hedge funds?
2) Who *ever* said anything about official sanctioned Asylum Seekers??
There's this concept of Illegal Immigrants you may have heard of. They're camping on your borders.
They're paying up to 15,000USD to get taken to the coast of France with the specific intention of sneaking into England because unlike the tyranical countries of France, Switerland, Germany and Italy that they pass through to get there (to those countries quiet delight) - once they're in England they can hop on benefits and the UK government will not deport them.
"Last year we searched over one million lorries and prevented a record 18,000 attempts by illegal immigrants to cross the channel.""
When someone illegally travels through Austria, Germany, Italy AND France, not stopping in any of these supposed "liberal democracies" to specifically to sneak into the UK your country has a significant problem, and they're NOT coming for the food, weather, people or (lol) English "culture".
Please explain to me what children should be learning but aren't because of this missing extra time in the American school system that we or our parents or grandparents didn't have to learn. Except of course the overload of often bizarre social indoctrination that has encroached further into the western classroom than ever.
Given that a huge percentage of children coming out western schools are functionally illiterate compared to thirty or fifty years ago I think a better case can be made for reducing the amount of time a child is being "educated" as kids spend more time at school than ever.
Finally I have an 8 year old stepson, his school books look like my kindergarten books (which my mother studiously kept for me). He can barely read but they spent a good full month this year learning the awful way aboriginals were treated by Europeans 200 years ago and how he should feel *personally* bad about it. No mention about the great and wonderful things Europeans culture has brought to the world and I won't hold my breath for it to come in the last term...
So he can barely read, but he knows all about how awful we Australians and Europeans are.
Is that what the extra time would be for? More of that sort of "education"?
Every generation looks to what *their* scientists are saying we should do with education and implements that.
And every generation looks at the last generations behavioral "science" as barbaric, ignorant pseudo-science to be completely overhauled (usually to fit in with the current popular idealogical trends) because now it's *real* science, not like the dinosaurs of the last generation. This has been going on for a hundred and fifty years.
Calling anything that comes out of that field "science" is a stretch as it's shown itself over and over and over again to be completely and unabashedly ready to push radical ideology supported by its own psuedo-science.
All compulsory schooling is based on the finest "science" of the day.
All manner of behavioural "scientists" and psychologists have been at the forefront of modern education revolutions in the last two centuries or so.
The fact that over and over they are shown to be absolute quacks practicing nothing but pseudo-science doesn't stop the next generation from listening their generations version of the same, as this time they're right and the last generations were surely nothing but ignorant idealists who did damage to a generation of children. But not us!
And each generation they say "Now give us your children for just another 2, 3 or 4 weeks a year and *that* will fix the problem". And each generation the problem gets worse, illiteracy rises and the level of education drops but conveniently the founding ideals of the modern compulsory education system are closer and closer to being met.
"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."
-Woodrow Wilson
"In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way."
- The first mission statement of Rockefeller's General Education Board 1906
My grandfather attended school for 3 partial days a week until year 8. He was the most articulate man I've known.
His father died when he and his brother were 7 and 10. They ran took over the running of the farm themselves, with a small amount of help from a nieghbour they sowed crop, harvested, raised livestock and took it all to market alone. The farm was successful until sold when my great-uncle was 65.
All a degree means is that you're possibly suitably middle class for middle class office jobs.
Because western compulsory government education was based entirely on the 18th century Prussian model, pushed into the cities first, modified slightly to gain acceptance and then pushed to the rural areas where parents would never in a million years have given up their children for 12 months a year to the government.
Given that schooling used to be voluntary for 2-3 days a week for the vast majority of children, making it mandatory with a strange and overbearing structure of forcing children to sit in classrooms all day listening to government teachers teaching government generated and approved curriculmn that parents had no say in had about as much chance of gaining acceptance as telling them that they were to give the government parental right over their children (which happened 50 years later anyway).
Concessions had to be made, "holidays" was one of them as there was strenuous opposition to compulsory government schooling everywhere it was introduced. It didn't used to be holidays of course, most schools only operated for part of the year.
The historic trend has been to take children at younger and younger ages and for longer into the system, this is just another step in that direction.
As usual of Monsantos defenders you neglect to mention that the seed he gathered was HIS SEED to start with on HIS LAND that was pollintated by the fancy new Monsanto Round Up Ready crop next door.
What should he have done? Burned his fields, dumped his seed stores and packed up and moved into town because someone planted a Monsanto crop next door? I'm sorry but there is a 100% chance of cross pollination and if you retain a percentage of your seed each harvest for next year then that's OBVIOUSLY going to contain "Monstantos gene" and why shouldn't he then breed for it. They GAVE IT TO HIM. If they didn't want him to have it then they should have kept it out of his crop.
Why is the burden on him to protect their patents??
His seed became contaminated - seed that he and his family had been cultivating for generations. Explain to me how he should have gone about un-contaminating it and preventing it from happening again. 100 foot walls around his fields?
I love the hubris of the middle class "techie" geeks.
50 years ago it would have been "Asbestos is just a mineral. get over it"
Corporate science has a pretty sordid history of ramming through harmful technology often ignoring and suppressing warning signs in their own research to make more money. It's far to early in GMs progress to determine whether it's harmful or not.
And given corporate backed sciences track record the only rational stance is to be critical and skeptical for many many years yet where GM is concerned, given that it's agri-giants who are behind the real push for it and stand to gain the most from it under current western patent laws.
Truly we have two absolutely morally bankrupt individuals here. You and R2 above.
How did he get hold of the seed then? Did he steal it from someone?
No, his fields *were* cross contaminated one year, he harvested HIS seed replanted HIS seed next year as is typical of 90% of cropping farmers and found that it had been cross pollinated with a RR crop.
Apparently according to Monsantos great defenders SEE and R2 he should have burnt his first years crop which WAS contaminated by his neighbours crop and dumped his own families seed - developed over generations to ensure that he wasn't "stealing" from Monsanto when he unknowingly harvested and kept his contaminated seed for next year. Or perhaps he should have gone through a billion seeds one by one in his silos testing each one for the round up ready gene? Whatever he did, he must NOT use his own seed ever again as surely an individual has less rights than a corp.
Or he should have sued his neighbour and ruined them both, all to protect some multi-nationals fucked up business model of patenting things that shouldn't be patentable. And he had his own seed, that he his family had been breeding for generations ruined thanks to Monsantos seeds contaminated it forever. Why shouldn't he continue using his own seed simply because someone else inserted a patent into their plant then planted next to his?
The ultimate submarine patents.
And got caught? Got caught doing what?? Using his own seed on his own property that Monsanto GAVE him by allowing their crop to be planted next to his having the wind blow little mini replicators all over his property and crop?
Why should he destroy his own crop on his own land and then sue his neighbour to protect the dubious patents of a multinational corporation?
Wheat, rape and roses are nothing like one another. If my Apple orchard suddenly started growing RD apples trees because of airborne pollination with my normal trees then we could talk. Specifically grafting from one tree to fifty others is a long labour intensive process. Cross pollentation of a crop by wind is not somtehing that can be prevented by humans. And your answer is for farmers to sue other farmers and for the victim to burn their crops when it happens - purely to protect Monsanto's business model.
Or be the member of a board for a corporation and buy everything except basic food on the Corp credit card, buy a house through the corp then rent it off the corp, own nothing and take a tiny salary. Then send the corporations profits to a shell account in the cayman islands then claim your expenses back as a cost at tax time claiming the corp is not profitable, your offshore account unreachable by the tax man to see if your lying or not.
Effectively paying no tax.
As many thousands of the upper class do.
Oh I forgot, then have misguided middle class individuals argue for your right to continue doing this. While lobbying your mates in government to increase the tax burden on them because your corp needs infrastructure built and a solid and expensive society to exist to continue being profitable in your highly "unprofitable" venture (wink wink).
Then laugh all the way to the bank come retirement.
Basic economics. People don't pay taxes. Taxes are a cost. Costs get passed on to employers who are corporations who (apparently) pay no taxes as they pass the cost onto customers, shareholders and employees who then pass the cost on to their employers who then (GOTO 1).
Irrational logic at its finest.
Meanwhile in the real world if a corporation has 1 billion dollars in a bank account named Stanleys Widgets, and that corp then has to pay the government 100 million in tax. Then yes the corporation has indeed just paid tax. And in a competitive market place what corp can jack up prices of its widgets purely based on its tax load??
Besides a monopoly that is.
This is not Atlas Shrugged. There in no "class" of amazing industrialists that us peons must give thanks too for bestowing the fruits of their labour upon us. Life would be nice if were that simple. We are the wealth creators and if the legal entity know as Stanleys Widgets disappeared that wouldn't instantly mean that the world will forever be without the particular widgets that they created. Just like if GM disappeared doesn't mean the world will be without cars...
So even with your disturbing attempted whitewash every point the grandparent made you still find yourself having to admit four out of five of those things were completely over the top, inappropriate and abuses of power.
Yet your post is an entire attempt to dismiss all concerns as uncalled for.
There was lots of complaining about the Patriot Act by the Democrats when Bush was in power and now it looks like they're going to renew most of it.
And what of the war in Iraq, where has the dissent on that from the Democrats gone? Where have the anti-war protesters gone? Or were they simply anti-republican?
Just adding a "the Democrats are just as bad" Ying to your "the Republicans are bad" Yang;).
Slashdot Mirror
I assume you were against the Civil Rights movement and support the argument that if citizens in as state or town had a referendum on driving black people outout then that was peachy and ok as it was the government doing *exactly* what it's citizens had asked?
Because your argument was the exact same argument many people made in the early - mid 20th century. There's rules and laws preventing the government from acting in all sorts of ways for (generally) a very good reason.
Saying that the majority of people demanded it so all further discussion is over is nothing but tyranny.
Just sayin.
Good grief where to start...
In EU waters (and most western waters) boats are only allowed to take species that they are licensed to take, and of course there are limits on what they can take and once they reach the limit on one type of fish / crustacean they face hefty fines if they *dont* throw them back - dead or alive.
I was watching an interesting doco a while ago where the captain of a prawn trawler was almost in tears as they had had two weeks of terrible prawn hauls so the crew were near mutiny (pay is directly related to how much the boat takes on) but were dragging in tonnes and tonnes of prime fish and under EU law had to throw it all back mostly dead, each time every time as to take it back to port risked him losing his boat.
So laws and regulations written by "well meaning" bureaucrats mandate that in many instance captains MUST take the action that you condemn and ironically you demand more laws and regulations made by the same to make them stop doing what the first set of laws forces them to do in the first place!
Nothings ever so simple as "they should just make a law". In this case they did, because people like you demanded that what they catch and how much they catch be regulated...and huge waste is largely a (now mandated by law) "unintended" consequence like the captains said it would be.
Not to mention, who are you to force anyone to do anything? They're supposedly free men who own fishing boats and catch fish. If you don't like it don't buy their fish or pay more for pet food so it doesn't *cost them* money to bring in junk fish just so you can feed your dog. Truly I hate to sound like a libertarian but you throwing around like phrases like "force them to turn their "bycatch" to dogfood," makes you look like an mini fascist. Just because they own a boat and supply something that you rely on doesn't suddenly make them your personal slaves. Tell us what industry you're in so we can start discussing "forcing" you to do various things that cost you huge sums of money just to satisfy our own personal attitudes.
Really?
I'm from Australia and most people use metric for most things but a persons height is often still giving in feet and inches.
Six foot is about the average height of a man, 5 foot for a woman. With that as a basis you can figure out anything when given a number in feet.
I have a far harder time visualising 200cm than six foot and there comes a point where units become non descriptive, saying 200cm is to much resolution and 2 meters not enough to make an instant visualisation of a persons height. It becomes even more apparent when saying 160cm, it's completely meaningless, you can't visualise 160 1cm segments or 1.6 meter segments it's impossible, but 5ft is immediate.
Same with inches, it's easier to visualise an inch than it is to visualise 30 mil when giving rough distances, and it's easier to visualise 10cm than 6 inches and so on.
Personally most people I know use them interchangably depending on what they're trying to describe, it's easier to say about an inch when describing something about 30mm and easier to say 10mm, 10cm or a meter when describing things of those sizes.
Also you only have to double lbs to get a reasonably close number in kilos.
The benefit of metric certainly isn't worth the flame wars and fanaticism that go on on this site. A great deal of it is little more than tired, trite US bashing if people were actually honest. And most countries still really use both more than some would like to admit.
The Poms and their "stones" on the other hand good grief ;)
"Tin foil hat".
No group has ever tried to steal an election in any country in the history of the world, least of all America.
Thank god for hyper rational individuals like you who keep the hysterical dimwits who audaciously think that anybody might ever try such a thing under control.
What would we do without your superior intellect to protect us from our pathetic selves.
This administration made a big song and dance about transparency in government and how they'd publish all legislation online at least five days before your congress votes on it.
Have they even done it once?
In fact they've been worse on shoving midnight legislation down US representatives throats than the last lot, they weren't even sly about breaking their election promise. Not that you'd ever hear it mentioned in the US news media who seem to be more than a little infatuated.
They're not going to open up the voting process, in fact I'll take a wild stab in the dark and say in another 4 - 8 years it'll be even worse and more corrupted than it is now, and 8 years after that even worse still. But it'll seem normal to us then, we'll probably all still be sitting here on Slashdot talking about it like we have been for the last 9 years as though ever increasing corruption is a natural law, completely forgetting the time where it wasn't *quite* so bad as it is now and at some level assuming it can just go on for ever.
So goes the decline of the "post-democracy" west, a decline that is unstoppable at this stage save for a quarter of a century of war that might kick the survivors in the pants about the importance of true representative democracy as it did early - mid last century.
Without that the proles will never realise their own power and simply will never make enough of a fuss to truly reverse things.
In the west from 1900-1980ish the ugliest forms of ideology; Marxism, Facism, Eugenics, Totalitarianism were at one stage or another broadly and openly supported and advocated for by student bodies, senior faculty and universities in the west. Unapologetic support for the methods and madness of Mao, Lenin, Stalin, and yes - even Hitler (in the '20s and '30s before it became a faux pas to support him) accompanied loving gazes and embarrassing wistful looks over to Russia and China.
It was the "citizenry incapable of evaluating arguments and ignorant of history" aka "the average person" who kept *them* in check - the "useful idiots" as Lennon so lovingly referred to them were born out of western higher education.
As I've constantly found in my life a university degree in philosophy or social history in the hands of someone who doesn't have the experience of life to temper what they're being told often by "true believer" lecturers who like to try and be evangelicals for their own radical political beliefs causes more harm than good. Radical, violent support for Mao during the 60s and 70s among privileged middle and upper class kids in western universities while he was starving 30 million or more of his own country men out of their farms proves this indisputably.
Beware those who say that all education must be politicised, they *always* have a hidden agenda.
It's funny seeing the English talking up how great the NHS is compared to the US's system.
Where here in countries that also have some form of single payer system the NHS is considered to be at best on par with the US in advanced first world countries, it's considered to be the absolute worst out of all the government run systems. The biggest, most politicised, bureaucratic, dystopian, filthy healthcare system that one would want to end up in, compared to say, Germany, France or Australias systems.
But listening to you Poms you'd think the NHS was greatest thing in the world.
I've got news for you, (I can throw out personal anectdotes to!) I'm married to an English gal and she would *never* go back to the UK after living with our (Australian) system for the last 7 years, that includes having one child in the NHS and two over here in Australia. We can start with the fact that she was stuck in a ward with 8 women in the most filthy, decrepit room imaginable in England for her first...
Then again the English get their dental through the NHS as well and we *all* know the state of the average English persons teeth, perhaps the most perfect example of the NHS's capabilities .And probably why the Australian government despite copying swaths of our public policy from the mother country wouldn't touch the UK's version of public healthcare with a ten foot barge pole.
Assuming that "America" and "Americans" are a single entity as opposed to being many many differing states is as ignorant as making wide sweeping generalisations assuming that the member states that make up the European Union are also a single entity with singular ideals, practices and cultures.
Many American states have had and *still have* government sponsored monopolies in many areas that are fully endorsed and supported by their citizens.
It would seem that (from what I've read and heard over during my time here on the Internet) that what most "Americans" don't support is their federal government embarking on large commercial enterprises to the exclusion of the free market - something that is miles outside of its mandate. Of course it would seem that most "Europeans" feel exactly the same way about *their* federal government. Oh wait it's not federal yet...just another few months tho
I also wonder how "Europeans" are going to act when their federal government decides to take over all of it's member states health care and forms an all encompassing, all powerful, cross border police force, constantly expands into it's member states sovereignty and neighbouring countries lives and all the other lovely goodies that inevitably come with a huge central government...
(And don't get to smug just yet Norway, the EU isn't going to let you get away that easily).
- Not an American
Yes,
I was trying to buy an expensive boutique computer the other day and I ended up coming home with nothing as there was this store that tricked me into going in with their shop as they have a logo that looks *just like Apples*. It turned out to be a bloody grocery store!! The nerve, a grocey chain using an Apple as their logo! Then I looked around and noticed that they're everywhere here in Australia and I mean *everywhere*.
I swear who does this grocery store with over 700 stores in Australia think they are using the same type of fruit as an obscure American computer companies logo. I mean Apple has a whopping three stores in this country!
There should be a law...
Woolworths sells actual *apples* and holds about 55% of the grocery chain market in Australia.
Everybody, that is every.single.person in Australia knows who Woolworths are and what they sell.
On the other hand, from the point of view of the average man on the street who the fuck is this "Apple" company in comparison and what the hell do they sell? Computers?? With an apple for a logo? And they want to try and stop a massive Australian grocery chain from using an apple as their logo in Australia?
Given that globally Apple in total takes in half the revenue of Woolworths just in *Australia* per annum, Woolworths employs over 175,000 Australians while Apple employs 35,000 *WORLD WIDE*, Apple the pip squeak should perhaps shut it's mouth and not prod those with old money, old connections and household name recognition while visitors on their home ground.
Unless they wish to get iSpanked.
1) Yes you are, you can't even grow enough food to feed yourselves. Or are you going to completely fill in the entire Island with wall to wall "houses" or what you English like to call houses which are actually called "flats" or "units" or tiny cramped apartments anywhere else in the world. And import 100% of your food (how very green of you) and then export....what exactly? More debt? More funny money hedge funds?
2) Who *ever* said anything about official sanctioned Asylum Seekers??
There's this concept of Illegal Immigrants you may have heard of. They're camping on your borders.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113088221&ft=1&f=1004
They're paying up to 15,000USD to get taken to the coast of France with the specific intention of sneaking into England because unlike the tyranical countries of France, Switerland, Germany and Italy that they pass through to get there (to those countries quiet delight) - once they're in England they can hop on benefits and the UK government will not deport them.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/5007578/Detention-centre-planned-for-illegal-immigrants-in-Calais.html
Also
"Last year we searched over one million lorries and prevented a record 18,000 attempts by illegal immigrants to cross the channel.""
When someone illegally travels through Austria, Germany, Italy AND France, not stopping in any of these supposed "liberal democracies" to specifically to sneak into the UK your country has a significant problem, and they're NOT coming for the food, weather, people or (lol) English "culture".
They don't speak Chav for starters.
Please explain to me what children should be learning but aren't because of this missing extra time in the American school system that we or our parents or grandparents didn't have to learn. Except of course the overload of often bizarre social indoctrination that has encroached further into the western classroom than ever.
Given that a huge percentage of children coming out western schools are functionally illiterate compared to thirty or fifty years ago I think a better case can be made for reducing the amount of time a child is being "educated" as kids spend more time at school than ever.
Finally I have an 8 year old stepson, his school books look like my kindergarten books (which my mother studiously kept for me). He can barely read but they spent a good full month this year learning the awful way aboriginals were treated by Europeans 200 years ago and how he should feel *personally* bad about it. No mention about the great and wonderful things Europeans culture has brought to the world and I won't hold my breath for it to come in the last term...
So he can barely read, but he knows all about how awful we Australians and Europeans are.
Is that what the extra time would be for? More of that sort of "education"?
Every generation looks to what *their* scientists are saying we should do with education and implements that.
And every generation looks at the last generations behavioral "science" as barbaric, ignorant pseudo-science to be completely overhauled (usually to fit in with the current popular idealogical trends) because now it's *real* science, not like the dinosaurs of the last generation. This has been going on for a hundred and fifty years.
Calling anything that comes out of that field "science" is a stretch as it's shown itself over and over and over again to be completely and unabashedly ready to push radical ideology supported by its own psuedo-science.
Absolute quackery.
All compulsory schooling is based on the finest "science" of the day.
All manner of behavioural "scientists" and psychologists have been at the forefront of modern education revolutions in the last two centuries or so.
The fact that over and over they are shown to be absolute quacks practicing nothing but pseudo-science doesn't stop the next generation from listening their generations version of the same, as this time they're right and the last generations were surely nothing but ignorant idealists who did damage to a generation of children. But not us!
And each generation they say "Now give us your children for just another 2, 3 or 4 weeks a year and *that* will fix the problem". And each generation the problem gets worse, illiteracy rises and the level of education drops but conveniently the founding ideals of the modern compulsory education system are closer and closer to being met.
"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."
-Woodrow Wilson
"In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way."
- The first mission statement of Rockefeller's General Education Board 1906
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/2i.htm
The presidents kids go to a private school where any legislation affecting school hours wouldn't apply.
That used to be what high school was for.
And before that what primary school was for.
My grandfather attended school for 3 partial days a week until year 8. He was the most articulate man I've known.
His father died when he and his brother were 7 and 10. They ran took over the running of the farm themselves, with a small amount of help from a nieghbour they sowed crop, harvested, raised livestock and took it all to market alone. The farm was successful until sold when my great-uncle was 65.
All a degree means is that you're possibly suitably middle class for middle class office jobs.
That is all.
Because western compulsory government education was based entirely on the 18th century Prussian model, pushed into the cities first, modified slightly to gain acceptance and then pushed to the rural areas where parents would never in a million years have given up their children for 12 months a year to the government.
Given that schooling used to be voluntary for 2-3 days a week for the vast majority of children, making it mandatory with a strange and overbearing structure of forcing children to sit in classrooms all day listening to government teachers teaching government generated and approved curriculmn that parents had no say in had about as much chance of gaining acceptance as telling them that they were to give the government parental right over their children (which happened 50 years later anyway).
Concessions had to be made, "holidays" was one of them as there was strenuous opposition to compulsory government schooling everywhere it was introduced. It didn't used to be holidays of course, most schools only operated for part of the year.
The historic trend has been to take children at younger and younger ages and for longer into the system, this is just another step in that direction.
As usual of Monsantos defenders you neglect to mention that the seed he gathered was HIS SEED to start with on HIS LAND that was pollintated by the fancy new Monsanto Round Up Ready crop next door.
What should he have done? Burned his fields, dumped his seed stores and packed up and moved into town because someone planted a Monsanto crop next door? I'm sorry but there is a 100% chance of cross pollination and if you retain a percentage of your seed each harvest for next year then that's OBVIOUSLY going to contain "Monstantos gene" and why shouldn't he then breed for it. They GAVE IT TO HIM. If they didn't want him to have it then they should have kept it out of his crop.
Why is the burden on him to protect their patents??
His seed became contaminated - seed that he and his family had been cultivating for generations. Explain to me how he should have gone about un-contaminating it and preventing it from happening again. 100 foot walls around his fields?
Absolutely gut wrenchingly ridiculous.
I love the hubris of the middle class "techie" geeks.
50 years ago it would have been "Asbestos is just a mineral. get over it"
Corporate science has a pretty sordid history of ramming through harmful technology often ignoring and suppressing warning signs in their own research to make more money. It's far to early in GMs progress to determine whether it's harmful or not.
And given corporate backed sciences track record the only rational stance is to be critical and skeptical for many many years yet where GM is concerned, given that it's agri-giants who are behind the real push for it and stand to gain the most from it under current western patent laws.
Truly we have two absolutely morally bankrupt individuals here. You and R2 above.
How did he get hold of the seed then? Did he steal it from someone?
No, his fields *were* cross contaminated one year, he harvested HIS seed replanted HIS seed next year as is typical of 90% of cropping farmers and found that it had been cross pollinated with a RR crop.
Apparently according to Monsantos great defenders SEE and R2 he should have burnt his first years crop which WAS contaminated by his neighbours crop and dumped his own families seed - developed over generations to ensure that he wasn't "stealing" from Monsanto when he unknowingly harvested and kept his contaminated seed for next year. Or perhaps he should have gone through a billion seeds one by one in his silos testing each one for the round up ready gene? Whatever he did, he must NOT use his own seed ever again as surely an individual has less rights than a corp.
Or he should have sued his neighbour and ruined them both, all to protect some multi-nationals fucked up business model of patenting things that shouldn't be patentable. And he had his own seed, that he his family had been breeding for generations ruined thanks to Monsantos seeds contaminated it forever. Why shouldn't he continue using his own seed simply because someone else inserted a patent into their plant then planted next to his?
The ultimate submarine patents.
And got caught? Got caught doing what?? Using his own seed on his own property that Monsanto GAVE him by allowing their crop to be planted next to his having the wind blow little mini replicators all over his property and crop?
Corporate lick-spittles.
You are completely sick.
Why should he destroy his own crop on his own land and then sue his neighbour to protect the dubious patents of a multinational corporation?
Wheat, rape and roses are nothing like one another. If my Apple orchard suddenly started growing RD apples trees because of airborne pollination with my normal trees then we could talk. Specifically grafting from one tree to fifty others is a long labour intensive process. Cross pollentation of a crop by wind is not somtehing that can be prevented by humans. And your answer is for farmers to sue other farmers and for the victim to burn their crops when it happens - purely to protect Monsanto's business model.
There is something wrong in your head my friend.
Or be the member of a board for a corporation and buy everything except basic food on the Corp credit card, buy a house through the corp then rent it off the corp, own nothing and take a tiny salary. Then send the corporations profits to a shell account in the cayman islands then claim your expenses back as a cost at tax time claiming the corp is not profitable, your offshore account unreachable by the tax man to see if your lying or not.
Effectively paying no tax.
As many thousands of the upper class do.
Oh I forgot, then have misguided middle class individuals argue for your right to continue doing this. While lobbying your mates in government to increase the tax burden on them because your corp needs infrastructure built and a solid and expensive society to exist to continue being profitable in your highly "unprofitable" venture (wink wink).
Then laugh all the way to the bank come retirement.
Basic economics. People don't pay taxes. Taxes are a cost. Costs get passed on to employers who are corporations who (apparently) pay no taxes as they pass the cost onto customers, shareholders and employees who then pass the cost on to their employers who then (GOTO 1).
Irrational logic at its finest.
Meanwhile in the real world if a corporation has 1 billion dollars in a bank account named Stanleys Widgets, and that corp then has to pay the government 100 million in tax. Then yes the corporation has indeed just paid tax. And in a competitive market place what corp can jack up prices of its widgets purely based on its tax load??
Besides a monopoly that is.
This is not Atlas Shrugged. There in no "class" of amazing industrialists that us peons must give thanks too for bestowing the fruits of their labour upon us. Life would be nice if were that simple. We are the wealth creators and if the legal entity know as Stanleys Widgets disappeared that wouldn't instantly mean that the world will forever be without the particular widgets that they created. Just like if GM disappeared doesn't mean the world will be without cars...
So even with your disturbing attempted whitewash every point the grandparent made you still find yourself having to admit four out of five of those things were completely over the top, inappropriate and abuses of power.
Yet your post is an entire attempt to dismiss all concerns as uncalled for.
Cognitive dissonance.
There was lots of complaining about the Patriot Act by the Democrats when Bush was in power and now it looks like they're going to renew most of it.
And what of the war in Iraq, where has the dissent on that from the Democrats gone? Where have the anti-war protesters gone? Or were they simply anti-republican?
Just adding a "the Democrats are just as bad" Ying to your "the Republicans are bad" Yang ;).