Hell yea. I'm also disappointed that they won't do a REAL survivor and strand 10 people on an island with one knife and say "We're coming back in 6 months and only one person is coming back with us".
I think if we collected the members of PETA and left them stranded in the wilderness with no supplies, they'd become quite rational about eating animals or harming animals in self defense when said animals want a nice tasty PETA dinner.
Yes, just like how they have to monitor your phone calls and emails to stop people from being robbed and murdered, not to spy on you and abduct people who disagree with them - they'd NEVER do that.....
You're still not grasping that those lower people will NOT know every detail required. As I said, they might know the gist of it and be able to keep things from imploding, but it's not even close to being the same as a replacement.
They shouldn't have quotas for employment, admissions, lower standards for admissions, scholarships / grants based on gender / race, or anything else. It should be about who earns it. It doesn't matter if they're male or female, black, white, asian, hispanic, martian, vulcan, or anything else. That's the whole point of our society - that anyone can succeed if they work hard. Rewarding people for NOT working hard screws everything up and causes motivated people to give up because they bust their ass and get nothing while others sit back and do very little and get handed free money.
Show me any business who has this. Sure, some people might know the general idea and can do damage control in an emergency, but it's not even remotely the same as your claim of having a backup person for every major position.
Actually I'd say the issue is more due to German labor laws that cause higher unemployment regardless of industry than not wanting to hire a woman. German labor laws make it hard to get rid of a bad employee, which makes them more cautious about hiring new employees.
That's because you're assuming that kids don't get better grades because no one taught them how to learn / study. For many, they have all the necessary tools - they just simply don't care to put out the effort and take the time to do the homework / study.
I'll keep it short for an AC troll - no one has said that reducing emissions will harm the economy. It's the way you want to go about reducing them that will harm the economy. Also, your "mountain of evidence" relies on the completely baseless assumption that humans have anything to do with changes in the climate (despite the fact that we have long records of climate changes, both warm and cold, for thousands of years before the evil technology came and angered Gaia).
So you'd rather have every society on the planet go back 10,000 years and return to living in stick & mud huts, spending every day hoping to survive to the next, just because your druidic religion demands it? People like you are just as bad as the ones who go out of their way to pollute just because they can. You can slowly make changes to improve things without financially raping people and destroying society as we know it.
Except that one still needs to GET to London, if they don't live there already, in order to use the public transportation. Then there's the fact that you can only cram so many people into each car on the train. Carbon dioxide emissions are just a red herring - once we go all electric, they'll still want to do similar taxes. It's about money and making sure that you know your place in the social order - meaning that you WILL have a lower quality of life than the ruling elite, and they'll pass as many laws as necessary to make it so.
Do children cause mothers to drop out? Yes. Not in every case, but it's much more likely to see a girl drop out of school because she's pregnant than just because she feels like it.
Does dropping out cause maternity? Not exactly, but a woman is much more likely to have children if the cost of being at home to raise children is a $7 / hr job vs if her education allowed her the option of a $25 / hr job.
So the short answer to both of your questions is "yes".
Bingo. Studies all over the world show that a woman's level of education is negatively correlated to the number of children she has. Women with high levels of education have options and opportunity costs to raising children that don't exist for someone with low levels of education.
The problem is that people like GPLHOST-Thomas have a devout religious belief that people MUST procreate as much as possible, thus any attempt to persuade people to have fewer children is equivalent to murder in their eyes.
Without knowing the details of the plan (if there is an actual one), here's some ways in which it would screw over the citizens:
Transportation (public or private) costs more, meaning that not only does it cost you more to get to work or travel, but it also costs more to move goods, which means that everything you buy will cost more due to higher transportation costs. Higher energy prices will mean that all stores will raise prices to compensate for their increased energy bills. Businesses will have less money to hire employees / provide raises due to increased costs of doing business and higher costs of constructing facilities and maintaining them (heating, cooling, electricity). The higher prices of goods due to increased energy costs means that exports will suffer because goods made in that country will cost more. Then if the tax is applied to foreign businesses wanting to import items, that will increase the costs of imports / lower profits for trading partners, making them less likely to trade with the country as well as continuing to raise prices for consumers of the country.
That's just a brief explanation of why it will harm the economy. As one person put it, the whole point of the congestion tax for driving in London during business hours is to decrease the number of cars on the road - however, people are only going there because they're travelling to work. Therefore the only way for the congestion tax to be effective is to make it so expensive that you no longer gain money by going to work.
Yes, a pension is really different. A 401k you pay into yourself and companies often (but not always) will put in a certain amount for every dollar you put in (up to a certain amount). However, that still requires you to put in money. Pensions for government workers are usually 100% paid for with tax dollars without the employee contributing a single cent. They also get to collect these pensions at an earlier age.
Regarding inflated pay - the issue isn't whether or not they make a lot of money in and of itself. It's how much do they make compared to someone who ISN'T in a union doing the same job. THAT is the problem - I've had friends who were government employees and then changed to being a contractor with the government - they literally did the exact same job in the exact same office, but since they were no longer a government employee they took a 30% pay cut (not to mention the lack of a government funded pension). Or when you look at teachers - if someone is a teacher for 20 years already and has had their masters degree for 10 years (or more), then their teaching ability has pretty much peaked. They aren't going to be learning much each year to increase their productivity and their education isn't changing either, so their aren't gaining new skills. Yet they still get raise after raise where in the private sector a worker would normally see their wages flatten out by that point in their career. Depending on your state, you might be able to access information on what each teacher earned each year for the last decade or so (I know you can for my state). One of the teachers, who I know quite well, is in her late 50's and over the last 7 years has had a 54% raise going from the mid $50,000's to the mid $70,000's. That is absurd when their teaching hasn't improved anywhere near that much over that time period and you also have to remember that every extra dollar given to a government employee means a smaller paycheck for everyone else.
The FairTax eliminates all Federal level taxes and replaces them with a national sales tax that is collected on all new items or services provided at the time of sale. It also has a "prebate" paid at the beginning of each month that covers how much the typical family of your household size (single person, married couple, couple with three children, etc) would be paying in national sales tax for the month on necessary items (food, clothing, shampoo, etc). As such, the poor who buy more items used wouldn't pay tax on anything purchased second hand and if they spend wisely, they can actually MAKE money off the prebate system. The wealthy won't stop throwing large parties, buying new homes, buying new expensive cars, etc so they WILL pay a large amount of tax without any way to use loopholes to avoid it. It also means that people won't have to ever worry about spending time and money on preparing their taxes ever again, which is a huge benefit to everyone.
As the previous poster said though, there's too many uninformed people running around spouting off crap without actually reading the proposed law, which is why I rarely bother to mention it anymore as well.
One man should not be allowed to vote away the freedoms of another.
Sadly we already allow this to happen. Bans on smoking in private establishments are a wonderful example. That place is private property and no one forces you to go there - if they allow smoking and you dislike it, then go somewhere else and call / write a letter / email saying why you won't do business there. My state passed a smoking ban a few years back and I tried explaining this to some of my friends and they arrogantly think that they have a "right" to go there and that everyone ELSE should change to suit their desires.
Well at minimum a person should be required to pass a test on the US Constitution before they should be allowed to vote. Tests on reading comprehension and basic logic skills wouldn't be a bad idea either.
People do a good job of looking out for their own interests when it's ONLY their interests - when you start letting them make decisions for others, then it ends up badly. Hence why the founding fathers wanted as little government interference in people's lives as possible - so that each person would be able to decide how to take care of themselves without trying to force others to live the same way.
I'm undoing mod points here because I felt the need to respond. I disagree that class requirements exist to make people "well rounded". The well rounded things (literature, writing skills, math, history, etc) should have all been covered in the previous 12 years of your education. General ed classes normally don't cover much more than what was covered in a high school level class, it's just done at a faster pace. While some people do need to do remedial classes due to their high school being crap, they should simply take those remedial classes and not force every student to do it. I strongly believe that there are two justifications for having general ed classes: 1) to provide more money to the school by forcing students to spend more time there, thus paying more for tuition and 2) because many of those departments, such as Philosophy and English, have so few students majoring in their field that the only way the school can financially justify keeping the faculty around is to force every student to take low level classes in that field.
I'm not saying that those subjects are useless - far from it. I'm simply saying that there's no realistic need to force students to go through that when they have already been exposed to it and it will have little or no impact on their future career (which despite the "well rounded person" bullshit, is the real reason almost every person goes to college - those who have the luxury of never having to work for a living get to go to school to become a "well rounded person"...the rest of us have to work for a living).
They drop them because they are hard AND they have never been academically challenged ever before.
Very true. I had several friends drop classes when we were close to graduating because "the teacher is too hard" or "he's a jerk". In reality, he just really wanted you to work hard and learn the material - sure, it required a lot of studying, but if you did the work you'd do just fine and you'd learn a lot along the way.
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Hell yea. I'm also disappointed that they won't do a REAL survivor and strand 10 people on an island with one knife and say "We're coming back in 6 months and only one person is coming back with us".
It's generally animals that come across as being closer to humans in their intelligence / emotions that people are averse to eating.
I think if we collected the members of PETA and left them stranded in the wilderness with no supplies, they'd become quite rational about eating animals or harming animals in self defense when said animals want a nice tasty PETA dinner.
Yes, just like how they have to monitor your phone calls and emails to stop people from being robbed and murdered, not to spy on you and abduct people who disagree with them - they'd NEVER do that.....
Just one - it's just that Starbuck fracks so hard, she'll literally rock your world.
You're still not grasping that those lower people will NOT know every detail required. As I said, they might know the gist of it and be able to keep things from imploding, but it's not even close to being the same as a replacement.
They shouldn't have quotas for employment, admissions, lower standards for admissions, scholarships / grants based on gender / race, or anything else. It should be about who earns it. It doesn't matter if they're male or female, black, white, asian, hispanic, martian, vulcan, or anything else. That's the whole point of our society - that anyone can succeed if they work hard. Rewarding people for NOT working hard screws everything up and causes motivated people to give up because they bust their ass and get nothing while others sit back and do very little and get handed free money.
Show me any business who has this. Sure, some people might know the general idea and can do damage control in an emergency, but it's not even remotely the same as your claim of having a backup person for every major position.
Actually I'd say the issue is more due to German labor laws that cause higher unemployment regardless of industry than not wanting to hire a woman. German labor laws make it hard to get rid of a bad employee, which makes them more cautious about hiring new employees.
That's because you're assuming that kids don't get better grades because no one taught them how to learn / study. For many, they have all the necessary tools - they just simply don't care to put out the effort and take the time to do the homework / study.
I'll keep it short for an AC troll - no one has said that reducing emissions will harm the economy. It's the way you want to go about reducing them that will harm the economy. Also, your "mountain of evidence" relies on the completely baseless assumption that humans have anything to do with changes in the climate (despite the fact that we have long records of climate changes, both warm and cold, for thousands of years before the evil technology came and angered Gaia).
So you'd rather have every society on the planet go back 10,000 years and return to living in stick & mud huts, spending every day hoping to survive to the next, just because your druidic religion demands it? People like you are just as bad as the ones who go out of their way to pollute just because they can. You can slowly make changes to improve things without financially raping people and destroying society as we know it.
Except that one still needs to GET to London, if they don't live there already, in order to use the public transportation. Then there's the fact that you can only cram so many people into each car on the train. Carbon dioxide emissions are just a red herring - once we go all electric, they'll still want to do similar taxes. It's about money and making sure that you know your place in the social order - meaning that you WILL have a lower quality of life than the ruling elite, and they'll pass as many laws as necessary to make it so.
Do children cause mothers to drop out? Yes. Not in every case, but it's much more likely to see a girl drop out of school because she's pregnant than just because she feels like it.
Does dropping out cause maternity? Not exactly, but a woman is much more likely to have children if the cost of being at home to raise children is a $7 / hr job vs if her education allowed her the option of a $25 / hr job.
So the short answer to both of your questions is "yes".
Bingo. Studies all over the world show that a woman's level of education is negatively correlated to the number of children she has. Women with high levels of education have options and opportunity costs to raising children that don't exist for someone with low levels of education.
The problem is that people like GPLHOST-Thomas have a devout religious belief that people MUST procreate as much as possible, thus any attempt to persuade people to have fewer children is equivalent to murder in their eyes.
Without knowing the details of the plan (if there is an actual one), here's some ways in which it would screw over the citizens:
Transportation (public or private) costs more, meaning that not only does it cost you more to get to work or travel, but it also costs more to move goods, which means that everything you buy will cost more due to higher transportation costs. Higher energy prices will mean that all stores will raise prices to compensate for their increased energy bills. Businesses will have less money to hire employees / provide raises due to increased costs of doing business and higher costs of constructing facilities and maintaining them (heating, cooling, electricity). The higher prices of goods due to increased energy costs means that exports will suffer because goods made in that country will cost more. Then if the tax is applied to foreign businesses wanting to import items, that will increase the costs of imports / lower profits for trading partners, making them less likely to trade with the country as well as continuing to raise prices for consumers of the country.
That's just a brief explanation of why it will harm the economy. As one person put it, the whole point of the congestion tax for driving in London during business hours is to decrease the number of cars on the road - however, people are only going there because they're travelling to work. Therefore the only way for the congestion tax to be effective is to make it so expensive that you no longer gain money by going to work.
Yes, a pension is really different. A 401k you pay into yourself and companies often (but not always) will put in a certain amount for every dollar you put in (up to a certain amount). However, that still requires you to put in money. Pensions for government workers are usually 100% paid for with tax dollars without the employee contributing a single cent. They also get to collect these pensions at an earlier age.
Regarding inflated pay - the issue isn't whether or not they make a lot of money in and of itself. It's how much do they make compared to someone who ISN'T in a union doing the same job. THAT is the problem - I've had friends who were government employees and then changed to being a contractor with the government - they literally did the exact same job in the exact same office, but since they were no longer a government employee they took a 30% pay cut (not to mention the lack of a government funded pension). Or when you look at teachers - if someone is a teacher for 20 years already and has had their masters degree for 10 years (or more), then their teaching ability has pretty much peaked. They aren't going to be learning much each year to increase their productivity and their education isn't changing either, so their aren't gaining new skills. Yet they still get raise after raise where in the private sector a worker would normally see their wages flatten out by that point in their career. Depending on your state, you might be able to access information on what each teacher earned each year for the last decade or so (I know you can for my state). One of the teachers, who I know quite well, is in her late 50's and over the last 7 years has had a 54% raise going from the mid $50,000's to the mid $70,000's. That is absurd when their teaching hasn't improved anywhere near that much over that time period and you also have to remember that every extra dollar given to a government employee means a smaller paycheck for everyone else.
Because the one thing all politicians can agree on is that they want more of your money.
The FairTax eliminates all Federal level taxes and replaces them with a national sales tax that is collected on all new items or services provided at the time of sale. It also has a "prebate" paid at the beginning of each month that covers how much the typical family of your household size (single person, married couple, couple with three children, etc) would be paying in national sales tax for the month on necessary items (food, clothing, shampoo, etc). As such, the poor who buy more items used wouldn't pay tax on anything purchased second hand and if they spend wisely, they can actually MAKE money off the prebate system. The wealthy won't stop throwing large parties, buying new homes, buying new expensive cars, etc so they WILL pay a large amount of tax without any way to use loopholes to avoid it. It also means that people won't have to ever worry about spending time and money on preparing their taxes ever again, which is a huge benefit to everyone.
As the previous poster said though, there's too many uninformed people running around spouting off crap without actually reading the proposed law, which is why I rarely bother to mention it anymore as well.
One man should not be allowed to vote away the freedoms of another.
Sadly we already allow this to happen. Bans on smoking in private establishments are a wonderful example. That place is private property and no one forces you to go there - if they allow smoking and you dislike it, then go somewhere else and call / write a letter / email saying why you won't do business there. My state passed a smoking ban a few years back and I tried explaining this to some of my friends and they arrogantly think that they have a "right" to go there and that everyone ELSE should change to suit their desires.
Well at minimum a person should be required to pass a test on the US Constitution before they should be allowed to vote. Tests on reading comprehension and basic logic skills wouldn't be a bad idea either.
Well now that they're easing the requirements to do an absentee ballot, it's getting easier. But yes, you have a great point.
People do a good job of looking out for their own interests when it's ONLY their interests - when you start letting them make decisions for others, then it ends up badly. Hence why the founding fathers wanted as little government interference in people's lives as possible - so that each person would be able to decide how to take care of themselves without trying to force others to live the same way.
I'm undoing mod points here because I felt the need to respond. I disagree that class requirements exist to make people "well rounded". The well rounded things (literature, writing skills, math, history, etc) should have all been covered in the previous 12 years of your education. General ed classes normally don't cover much more than what was covered in a high school level class, it's just done at a faster pace. While some people do need to do remedial classes due to their high school being crap, they should simply take those remedial classes and not force every student to do it. I strongly believe that there are two justifications for having general ed classes: 1) to provide more money to the school by forcing students to spend more time there, thus paying more for tuition and 2) because many of those departments, such as Philosophy and English, have so few students majoring in their field that the only way the school can financially justify keeping the faculty around is to force every student to take low level classes in that field.
I'm not saying that those subjects are useless - far from it. I'm simply saying that there's no realistic need to force students to go through that when they have already been exposed to it and it will have little or no impact on their future career (which despite the "well rounded person" bullshit, is the real reason almost every person goes to college - those who have the luxury of never having to work for a living get to go to school to become a "well rounded person"...the rest of us have to work for a living).
They drop them because they are hard AND they have never been academically challenged ever before.
Very true. I had several friends drop classes when we were close to graduating because "the teacher is too hard" or "he's a jerk". In reality, he just really wanted you to work hard and learn the material - sure, it required a lot of studying, but if you did the work you'd do just fine and you'd learn a lot along the way.