Why either/or? My experience is that Europeans (and those of other countries) want a stable, prosperous US which continues to be the powerhouse of the world economy, continues to keep the peace, continues to put out fires around the world through military or humanitarian efforts, and continues to drive a lot of technological and scientific progress.
Oddly enough, this is pretty much what I want too!
Think about it: if you were examining the candidates for, say, President of France, and chose the one who would be best for you and your country, is it not likely that this would also be the one best for them and their country? Same deal here.
Bingo! This was, in fact, the reason which convinced me to vote Obama instead of third party. Obama/McCain are more similar than different. Obama's main distinguishing trait is that he speaks well and differently. But Palin is dangerously incompetent and naive and should not be allowed anywhere near the national seat of power. People are talking about her being a strong force in Republican national politics for years to come and this is just plain scary.
Wrong. Being racist is believing differently about people based on race. Being a simple realist and stating a fact is not racist. For example, "black people are stupid" is racist. "Asians are good with math" is racist. But "black people make up a disproportionate amount of the jail population" is not.
There's no "technically" anything when it comes to race. Race is a fiction with no scientific basis. You can't take a cell sample from somebody and pop it in an analyzer and come back and say "this person is 93% black and 7% white".
The vast majority of "black" people in the US are actually interracial to one degree or another. There has been a great deal of mixing in the centuries since they've been here. Obama is not even slightly special in this regard.
I dunno, I have this weird idea that a poor single mother ought to put in the extra effort to give her children good food. Yeah, she doesn't have a lot of free time, but I never said that their life is easy.
Should eating well be easier than it is? Hell yes! But that is not the same as saying that poor people can only afford to eat junk.
The claim was that fattening junk food is cheaper than healthy food. As in, money. I think we can put that idea to rest now, if you're having to bring "time is money!" into it.
Many adults are ill-equipped to vote too, but we don't stop them.
I'm not particularly opposed to age as a criterion for voting, but my original point was simply that you'll find very few people who think that everybody should be allowed to vote, with the near-universal acceptance of the age criterion as proof.
Because when you examine 17-year-olds instead of 6-year-olds it becomes much less clear-cut.
Re:Oh, its us evil Republicans!
on
How We Used To Vote
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· Score: 2, Insightful
No, I'm claiming that age discrimination is essentially the same as all these other kinds. If you want to predicate the vote on cognitive ability then you ought to test for that. Otherwise you end up with intelligent 17-year-olds being denied the vote (try to tell me that is not the moral and logical equivalent of disenfranchising women!) and idiotic 18-year-olds voting for the guy with the better hair.
Lots of people over 18 do not possess the cognitive capabilities needed to understand politics. Lots of people aged 17 do. If cognitive capability is your marker then that's what you should require, not how many times the Earth has gone round the Sun since you popped out of a vagina.
Oh please. I cook from scratch constantly. And I do it for two reasons: first, I like to cook and I like the results. Second: it is vastly cheaper than buying everything pre-made.
I know what cheese costs per pound. About $4.50 when I buy it.
I wanted to inject some actual number into this, so I went to peapod.com and checked it out. They should be fairly representative, despite being a delivery service, as my impression is that they simply charge the same prices as the Giant stores which run the service.
The best price I could find on Kraft Mac and Cheese was $5 for 36.2oz, about 14 cents/oz. It contains 12 servings at 390 calories for about.1 cents per calorie.
Next up, store brand elbow macaroni, 16oz for $1.29 or 8 cents/oz. It contains 8 servings at 218 calories for about 0.08 cents/calorie Of course I would not limit myself to macaroni and would choose any pasta if I really wanted to save money, but this seems to be the best price for pasta on peapod.com anyway.
And now cheese. In the interests of preserving our health, I'll skip over the "cheese food" and go for the actual big chunks of real cheese that Giant sells for $4.33/pound if you buy it 2 pounds at a time. Packaging says 24 servings at 110 calories which works out to 0.16 cents/calorie.
So per calorie the Kraft package is a bit more expensive than the pasta and a bit less expensive than the cheese. Of course the Kraft package is mostly pasta, not cheese. It probably has some other stuff besides just cheese for the mix, but on the other hand there's absolutely no requirement to produce an identical meal to what you get from a box, just a serviceable one. Elbow macaroni and some cheese on top is not particularly nutritious, but it's at least better than the Kraft box. To cut costs further, substitute rice ($4 for 5 pounds on peapod, half that cost or better when bought in bulk from a better place) for the pasta. Put those savings into some carrots or other cheap vegetables and you still have a meal that costs less and is not horrendously bad for you. It may not taste as good, but so it goes.
Everybody I've ever met believes that not everyone should have the right to vote.
I've never met anyone who thinks that a 6-year-old child should be able to vote, for example.
Perhaps you think this is facetious, but what is so magical about the age of 18 that suddenly makes you competent to vote? Is it really that different from owning property, having a certain amount of money, or being male?
Limiting the franchise is pretty much universally agreed upon. It's just a question of where to draw the line.
The birth certificate does not say anything about where you are 18 years later.
Social security numbers are optional. You don't receive benefits and will have a very difficult time working without one, but benefits and working are also optional. Taxes are likewise optional, you only have to pay those if you actually make money.
Bottom line, it's feasible to be essentially off the grid. Unpleasant, as you'll probably be a street bum, but feasible. And such people still have the right to vote.
How is such an ID kept secure if you can just get one through the mail?
Serious question, here. If they are in fact done securely, I'd love to know how it actually works.
Keep in mind when considering applicability to the US that the US does not have any national identity card, national identity number, or indeed any sort of national citizenship registry on which such a thing could be based.
How is that not counter to "by the people, for the people"
Maybe it is, but who cares? This country isn't built on the idea that anything that 51% of the people can agree on should happen.
Ever notice the Bill of Rights? That sort of thing would be pointless, indeed obstructionist, if the intent was to let the populace do whatever they felt like.
True, direct, 100% democracy does not work. Democracy is two lions and a lamb voting on dinner. The US is not set up as a direct democracy and this is a feature, not a bug.
Last I checked, Mac and Cheese and all other boxed "instant" dinners were considerably more expensive than the individual raw materials they contain. You can just buy the pasta and some cheese, then use the leftover money to complete the meal with more nutritional materials.
Fattier meat isn't a problem for eating healthy, you can often remove a lot of that depending on how you cook it, and even if you can't, simply use less. In the end, meat is completely optional anyway.
You're correct that juice is more expensive than soda, but water is cheaper than both. Juice is also completely optional. Tap water is completely serviceable, and even if our hypothetical poor people somehow live in a place where the tap water is undrinkable, filters or cheap store-brand bottled water bought in bulk will still undercut soda by a huge amount.
Dessert is also optional. See where I'm going with this?
As for potatoes, beans, and vegetables being cheaper, I try to buy my vegetables for $1/pound or under, and always manage no more than $2/pound even on expensive weeks with no sales. I could easily manage less if I cared to eat more of my less preferred vegetables such as cabbage. Potatoes I rarely even see at over $1/pound, and often pick up for significantly less. Can't remember what I last paid for beans as I don't buy them that often, but it's in a similar range and they have the distinct advantage of being dry, and so weighing less for the same nutritional value.
And let's not forget rice. I buy good rice in bulk for fifty cents a pound. If you don't insist on stuff with Thai writing on it then you can get it for a fair bit less.
I can't recall ever seeing junk food sell for $1/pound. Most of the time it's more like $3-4/pound. Now I'll admit that they probably have more satiating power due to being mostly solid with little water content compared to vegetables, but even so I don't see it ever being cheaper to feed yourself on junk food.
As for Odwalla, do you believe the label on everything? "Health food company" means that they have realized that the people who were hippies in the 60s are now well-off but still gullible and are an excellent source of revenue, and that a lot of their children have inherited these traits and are also an excellent source of revenue. Drinking Odwalla doesn't make you healthier. It makes you poorer and more pretentious, nothing more. If you really want to get healthy, skip the insanely expensive orange juice and just eat the orange. Yes, oranges are expensive, but at the typical price my local store charges, oranges are still significantly cheaper than Odwalla.
I don't know any poor people who would spend $15 on juice either. I just saw one once. But I do know people who are poor or simply not very financially well off (but not to the extent that I'd call them poor) who suffer from far more financial difficulty than they need to because they tend to buy stuff like that, even if they don't go to that extreme.
There's certainly a lot of speculation, and I'll grant that your idea seems at least vaguely reasonable. (Although I don't really see why Apple would care about the bandwidth bills of podcasters they aren't even affiliated with.)
But it's all just speculation. Apple doesn't believe in communication outside of official events, and true to form they have not commented on their reasons in any way. Maybe it's bandwidth duplication, maybe it's because it does something iTunes does, maybe it's because Steve was having a bad day, we don't know and never will.
In the absence of a firm policy from Apple, it's reasonable to think that other apps which imitate Apple's apps may also be subjected to refusal on similar grounds.
What would be the point of shutting down Podcaster for making a podcast listening app that would cause some people to like their iPhone more? Who the hell knows, but that's what they did.
And honestly, it pisses me off in the pit of my stomach that you somehow feel privileged enough to get to critique a poor person's purchasing decision just because you make more. But I understand it is ignorance.
Well then you have misinterpreted me. I'm not criticizing a poor person's purchasing decision just because I make more. I would criticize anyone who buys two jugs of Odwalla juice at $7+ each. It's a dumb decision made by dumb people. But in this case not only is it dumb but she demonstrably cannot afford it. And she is using my money, and the money of all other local taxpayers, to fund this rather ridiculous luxury.
My main point being, food stamps obviously help people out a lot. Eating right is cheaper than eating junk food, so the argument that people on food stamps can't afford to eat right is junk. And if people are doing well enough on food stamps to buy gourmet juice, then the argument is really junk.
You're perfectly correct that everyone makes mistakes and goes on unnecessary splurges. And you're perfectly correct that poor people have far less margin for error. But that's precisely why they should regulate themselves much more carefully. Sure, it's only human to screw up. But when your income is sufficient to eat well and healthily but you can't because you instead spend your money on McDonald's and fancy juices and Doritos, well you certainly can't blame society for your failings.
In the end it's about responsibility. Do humans screw up? Sure. But that doesn't mean you can just go off and blame other people for your screwups.
I imagine there are plenty of poor people who are able to control themselves well enough to avoid buying ridiculously expensive juice. There are plenty of poor people out there who work hard, spend frugally, and live as well as they can in their circumstances. Honestly I think it's an insult to those folk to talk about them as being in the same situation as a person who uses government food support to buy vastly overpriced luxury items.
The difference is, if the government stopped taking in or distributing money tomorrow, my income goes up (ignoring for a moment the inevitable social collapse) and this person's income goes down.
In other words, I pay for my services. Not as much as I would if I took more deductions, but money still flows overall from me to them.
Whereas this food-stamp person most likely has a net flow from the government to her.
There's a big difference between a deduction and a direct payout.
Slashdot Mirror
What did change with FDR?
Oh right, the worst war the world has ever known, the creation of nuclear weapons, and the build-up of the military-industrial complex.
Yay FDR!
Why either/or? My experience is that Europeans (and those of other countries) want a stable, prosperous US which continues to be the powerhouse of the world economy, continues to keep the peace, continues to put out fires around the world through military or humanitarian efforts, and continues to drive a lot of technological and scientific progress.
Oddly enough, this is pretty much what I want too!
Think about it: if you were examining the candidates for, say, President of France, and chose the one who would be best for you and your country, is it not likely that this would also be the one best for them and their country? Same deal here.
Bingo! This was, in fact, the reason which convinced me to vote Obama instead of third party. Obama/McCain are more similar than different. Obama's main distinguishing trait is that he speaks well and differently. But Palin is dangerously incompetent and naive and should not be allowed anywhere near the national seat of power. People are talking about her being a strong force in Republican national politics for years to come and this is just plain scary.
Wrong. Being racist is believing differently about people based on race. Being a simple realist and stating a fact is not racist. For example, "black people are stupid" is racist. "Asians are good with math" is racist. But "black people make up a disproportionate amount of the jail population" is not.
OP's statement falls into the latter category.
You're missing two points:
I dunno, I have this weird idea that a poor single mother ought to put in the extra effort to give her children good food. Yeah, she doesn't have a lot of free time, but I never said that their life is easy.
Should eating well be easier than it is? Hell yes! But that is not the same as saying that poor people can only afford to eat junk.
The claim was that fattening junk food is cheaper than healthy food. As in, money. I think we can put that idea to rest now, if you're having to bring "time is money!" into it.
Many adults are ill-equipped to vote too, but we don't stop them.
I'm not particularly opposed to age as a criterion for voting, but my original point was simply that you'll find very few people who think that everybody should be allowed to vote, with the near-universal acceptance of the age criterion as proof.
Because when you examine 17-year-olds instead of 6-year-olds it becomes much less clear-cut.
No, I'm claiming that age discrimination is essentially the same as all these other kinds. If you want to predicate the vote on cognitive ability then you ought to test for that. Otherwise you end up with intelligent 17-year-olds being denied the vote (try to tell me that is not the moral and logical equivalent of disenfranchising women!) and idiotic 18-year-olds voting for the guy with the better hair.
Age is no more logical and I'd question as to whether it's really any more moral.
Lots of people over 18 do not possess the cognitive capabilities needed to understand politics. Lots of people aged 17 do. If cognitive capability is your marker then that's what you should require, not how many times the Earth has gone round the Sun since you popped out of a vagina.
Oh please. I cook from scratch constantly. And I do it for two reasons: first, I like to cook and I like the results. Second: it is vastly cheaper than buying everything pre-made.
I know what cheese costs per pound. About $4.50 when I buy it.
I wanted to inject some actual number into this, so I went to peapod.com and checked it out. They should be fairly representative, despite being a delivery service, as my impression is that they simply charge the same prices as the Giant stores which run the service.
The best price I could find on Kraft Mac and Cheese was $5 for 36.2oz, about 14 cents/oz. It contains 12 servings at 390 calories for about .1 cents per calorie.
Next up, store brand elbow macaroni, 16oz for $1.29 or 8 cents/oz. It contains 8 servings at 218 calories for about 0.08 cents/calorie Of course I would not limit myself to macaroni and would choose any pasta if I really wanted to save money, but this seems to be the best price for pasta on peapod.com anyway.
And now cheese. In the interests of preserving our health, I'll skip over the "cheese food" and go for the actual big chunks of real cheese that Giant sells for $4.33/pound if you buy it 2 pounds at a time. Packaging says 24 servings at 110 calories which works out to 0.16 cents/calorie.
So per calorie the Kraft package is a bit more expensive than the pasta and a bit less expensive than the cheese. Of course the Kraft package is mostly pasta, not cheese. It probably has some other stuff besides just cheese for the mix, but on the other hand there's absolutely no requirement to produce an identical meal to what you get from a box, just a serviceable one. Elbow macaroni and some cheese on top is not particularly nutritious, but it's at least better than the Kraft box. To cut costs further, substitute rice ($4 for 5 pounds on peapod, half that cost or better when bought in bulk from a better place) for the pasta. Put those savings into some carrots or other cheap vegetables and you still have a meal that costs less and is not horrendously bad for you. It may not taste as good, but so it goes.
Everybody I've ever met believes that not everyone should have the right to vote.
I've never met anyone who thinks that a 6-year-old child should be able to vote, for example.
Perhaps you think this is facetious, but what is so magical about the age of 18 that suddenly makes you competent to vote? Is it really that different from owning property, having a certain amount of money, or being male?
Limiting the franchise is pretty much universally agreed upon. It's just a question of where to draw the line.
Not to mention that a significant number of males do not register either. It's technically mandatory but not really enforced.
The birth certificate does not say anything about where you are 18 years later.
Social security numbers are optional. You don't receive benefits and will have a very difficult time working without one, but benefits and working are also optional. Taxes are likewise optional, you only have to pay those if you actually make money.
Bottom line, it's feasible to be essentially off the grid. Unpleasant, as you'll probably be a street bum, but feasible. And such people still have the right to vote.
How is such an ID kept secure if you can just get one through the mail?
Serious question, here. If they are in fact done securely, I'd love to know how it actually works.
Keep in mind when considering applicability to the US that the US does not have any national identity card, national identity number, or indeed any sort of national citizenship registry on which such a thing could be based.
How is that not counter to "by the people, for the people"
Maybe it is, but who cares? This country isn't built on the idea that anything that 51% of the people can agree on should happen.
Ever notice the Bill of Rights? That sort of thing would be pointless, indeed obstructionist, if the intent was to let the populace do whatever they felt like.
True, direct, 100% democracy does not work. Democracy is two lions and a lamb voting on dinner. The US is not set up as a direct democracy and this is a feature, not a bug.
Last I checked, Mac and Cheese and all other boxed "instant" dinners were considerably more expensive than the individual raw materials they contain. You can just buy the pasta and some cheese, then use the leftover money to complete the meal with more nutritional materials.
Fattier meat isn't a problem for eating healthy, you can often remove a lot of that depending on how you cook it, and even if you can't, simply use less. In the end, meat is completely optional anyway.
You're correct that juice is more expensive than soda, but water is cheaper than both. Juice is also completely optional. Tap water is completely serviceable, and even if our hypothetical poor people somehow live in a place where the tap water is undrinkable, filters or cheap store-brand bottled water bought in bulk will still undercut soda by a huge amount.
Dessert is also optional. See where I'm going with this?
As for potatoes, beans, and vegetables being cheaper, I try to buy my vegetables for $1/pound or under, and always manage no more than $2/pound even on expensive weeks with no sales. I could easily manage less if I cared to eat more of my less preferred vegetables such as cabbage. Potatoes I rarely even see at over $1/pound, and often pick up for significantly less. Can't remember what I last paid for beans as I don't buy them that often, but it's in a similar range and they have the distinct advantage of being dry, and so weighing less for the same nutritional value.
And let's not forget rice. I buy good rice in bulk for fifty cents a pound. If you don't insist on stuff with Thai writing on it then you can get it for a fair bit less.
I can't recall ever seeing junk food sell for $1/pound. Most of the time it's more like $3-4/pound. Now I'll admit that they probably have more satiating power due to being mostly solid with little water content compared to vegetables, but even so I don't see it ever being cheaper to feed yourself on junk food.
As for Odwalla, do you believe the label on everything? "Health food company" means that they have realized that the people who were hippies in the 60s are now well-off but still gullible and are an excellent source of revenue, and that a lot of their children have inherited these traits and are also an excellent source of revenue. Drinking Odwalla doesn't make you healthier. It makes you poorer and more pretentious, nothing more. If you really want to get healthy, skip the insanely expensive orange juice and just eat the orange. Yes, oranges are expensive, but at the typical price my local store charges, oranges are still significantly cheaper than Odwalla.
I don't know any poor people who would spend $15 on juice either. I just saw one once. But I do know people who are poor or simply not very financially well off (but not to the extent that I'd call them poor) who suffer from far more financial difficulty than they need to because they tend to buy stuff like that, even if they don't go to that extreme.
There's certainly a lot of speculation, and I'll grant that your idea seems at least vaguely reasonable. (Although I don't really see why Apple would care about the bandwidth bills of podcasters they aren't even affiliated with.)
But it's all just speculation. Apple doesn't believe in communication outside of official events, and true to form they have not commented on their reasons in any way. Maybe it's bandwidth duplication, maybe it's because it does something iTunes does, maybe it's because Steve was having a bad day, we don't know and never will.
In the absence of a firm policy from Apple, it's reasonable to think that other apps which imitate Apple's apps may also be subjected to refusal on similar grounds.
What would be the point of shutting down Podcaster for making a podcast listening app that would cause some people to like their iPhone more? Who the hell knows, but that's what they did.
Nobody gets fat because they eat frozen/canned vegetables instead of the fresh kind.
Nobody's been giving any provable figures and I'm not about to start.
And racist? What the fuck? I haven't even so much as mentioned race anywhere in my posts.
And honestly, it pisses me off in the pit of my stomach that you somehow feel privileged enough to get to critique a poor person's purchasing decision just because you make more. But I understand it is ignorance.
Well then you have misinterpreted me. I'm not criticizing a poor person's purchasing decision just because I make more. I would criticize anyone who buys two jugs of Odwalla juice at $7+ each. It's a dumb decision made by dumb people. But in this case not only is it dumb but she demonstrably cannot afford it. And she is using my money, and the money of all other local taxpayers, to fund this rather ridiculous luxury.
My main point being, food stamps obviously help people out a lot. Eating right is cheaper than eating junk food, so the argument that people on food stamps can't afford to eat right is junk. And if people are doing well enough on food stamps to buy gourmet juice, then the argument is really junk.
You're perfectly correct that everyone makes mistakes and goes on unnecessary splurges. And you're perfectly correct that poor people have far less margin for error. But that's precisely why they should regulate themselves much more carefully. Sure, it's only human to screw up. But when your income is sufficient to eat well and healthily but you can't because you instead spend your money on McDonald's and fancy juices and Doritos, well you certainly can't blame society for your failings.
In the end it's about responsibility. Do humans screw up? Sure. But that doesn't mean you can just go off and blame other people for your screwups.
I imagine there are plenty of poor people who are able to control themselves well enough to avoid buying ridiculously expensive juice. There are plenty of poor people out there who work hard, spend frugally, and live as well as they can in their circumstances. Honestly I think it's an insult to those folk to talk about them as being in the same situation as a person who uses government food support to buy vastly overpriced luxury items.
The difference is, if the government stopped taking in or distributing money tomorrow, my income goes up (ignoring for a moment the inevitable social collapse) and this person's income goes down.
In other words, I pay for my services. Not as much as I would if I took more deductions, but money still flows overall from me to them.
Whereas this food-stamp person most likely has a net flow from the government to her.
There's a big difference between a deduction and a direct payout.