If a restaurant is filling the cup with ice and then adding 3 ounces of soda to fill the gaps, then that's the fault of the restaurant, and you should complain. You shouldn't need to order a 64 ounce drink in order to get a reasonable amount of actual liquid.
Advertisers spend half a trillion dollars every year to control you. Any one individual might be able to resist, but on the balance, advertising works. They wouldn't spend so much money on it if it didn't.
Drinks used to be served in smaller containers, and society survived just fine. Restaurants started using larger containers to exploit flaws in human psychology, allowing them to trick customers into buying more than they want or need. This is done to make more money, and to hell with the health of the general public.
Your free will isn't as all-powerful as you think it is. There are a great many people spending billions of dollars every year on cutting edge science to control your purchasing decisions, and you don't stand a snowflake's chance in hell against them. Only as a group can we fight back.
Well, honestly, he'd never be able to pass a life begins at conception amendment. That's just a pipe dream of the American Taliban. So I'm not worried about the pill getting outlawed, though the fact that he doesn't seem to realize that such an amendment would outlaw the pill is sort of worrisome.
But he will get to appoint justices to replace members of the current liberal wing of the SCOTUS, and the conservatives only need one more vote to overturn Roe v Wade. Abortion will be outlawed in a Romney presidency. Not necessarily because he's a religious fanatic (who can even tell what he believes?) but because he's beholden to them.
Are you serious? You can't think of a single issue on which Obama and Romney differ?
How about taxes? Romney's official plan is a 20% across the board cut, at a cost of $500B/yr, which will be paid for by *handwaves furiously*. Obama's plan is ditch the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, and bring capital gains taxes about halfway back towards where they were under Clinton.
How about healthcare? Romney's on the record saying things were alright pre-Obamacare, and he wants to go back to that. Obama, obviously, wants to keep Obamacare on the books.
How about military spending? Obama is trying to cut it by $100B/yr, while Romney's proposal is to raise it by $200B/yr.
How about Medicare? Obama wants to keep it mostly as is, making small adjustments to keep it solvent. Romney wants to make it a voucher system that would force senior citizens to turn to for-profit corporations for their healthcare.
How about abortion? Obama wants women to be in charge of their own bodies, Romney is on record supporting a life-begins-at-conception amendment and has pledged to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v Wade. Considering that a few of the current liberal justices are getting up there in years, he would almost certainly be able to have abortion outlawed nationwide.
That's just off the top of my head. Sure, if you only care about IP law and drone strikes, the two candidates are identical. But there are lots of very important issues on which the two candidates couldn't be more different.
I apologize then. There are plenty of people on this site who DO think that copyright should not exist in any form, so when your description of copyright involves a protracted anal rape analogy, I tend to lump you in with the crazies.
You do understand that without copyright, Pandora wouldn't give a single dime to the artists, right? Pandora is a business. They're not in the habit of giving away millions of dollars when they're not legally obligated to.
As long as wealth can be passed from generation to generation; taxation isn't applied to entrenched wealth but new wealth... it won't matter who is voted in or what form the government takes.
Funny you mention this. Here in the US, we have a tax on entrenched wealth being passed from generation to generation. It's called the "Estate Tax", or derisively referred to as the "death tax" by Republicans looking to get rid of it. It used to take ~50% of money in excess of $1M. Over the past several years, it's been watered down to just 35% of money in excess of $5M. Obama's trying to put it back to 2001 levels. Romney wants to remove it entirely.
Voting matters. The rich and powerful want you to give up. They rely on it.
I'll assume you're not just a Republican posing as an independent to post propaganda, even though you really seem like one, what with your pitch-perfect recitation of the talking points.
Romney has stated that he plans to slash income taxes by 20% and eliminate the estate tax -- a huge giveaway to the old rich that will cost $4.8T over ten years. He insists he'll pay for it all by closing loopholes, but that's mathematically impossible. Either he's going to raise taxes on the middle class, or run up the deficit, or he's just flat out lying.
Romney has stated that he plans to peg military spending to 4%, which is more than even the military is asking for. That will cost us an additional $2.1T over ten years. Against, no indication of how we're going to pay for it.
That's close to seven trillion dollars that Romney wants to spend, all to benefit the rich and powerful. Meanwhile, Obama is trying to cut military spending and bring taxes back closer to Clinton-era levels.
Sources: http://www.mittromney.com/issues/national-defense "Obama has already cut the projected defense budget by $487 billion. What is more, he proposed and signed into law a budget process that will result in an additional $492 billion of defense cuts over the next ten years.... Mitt Romney will begin by reversing Obama-era defense cuts and return to the budget baseline established by Secretary Robert Gates in 2010, with the goal of setting core defense spending... at a floor of 4 percent of GDP." -- Emphasis theirs.
http://www.mittromney.com/issues/tax " Make permanent, across-the-board 20 percent cut in marginal rates
Maintain current tax rates on interest, dividends, and capital gains
Eliminate taxes for taxpayers with AGI below $200,000 on interest, dividends, and capital gains
Eliminate the Death Tax
Repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT)"
Riiight, cause there's no difference between a single mom wanting help to feed her children and a billionaire wanting even more millions of dollars of spending cash each year. Clearly they're both being equally greedy.
Your freedom to swing your fist ends at my face. Your freedom shine a laser ends at my eyes. If you go farther than we as a society allow, then we as a society have the freedom to put you down. Welcome to the human race. Get along with others, or be removed from it.
Remove the CPU's heatsink from the motherboard, if you haven't. Those things are heavy, and the plastic screws typically holding them on are weak. The last thing you want is a big hunk of metal bouncing around inside the box.
There is no freedom without (some) security. Obviously, the pendulum is currently swinging too far to one side, and we need to correct that, but the opposite extreme is also to be avoided. If you spend every waking hour scrounging for food in a jungle while praying not to get caught by a roving warband, you are most certainly not free.
Remember Roosevelt's four freedoms: Freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. His particular statement of them was overly narrow (e.g. his freedom from fear applied only to fear of war), and the second can probably be rolled into the first, but the concept is sound, and much more useful than the vague "life, liberty, pursuit of happiness/money".
Ticketing bad drivers helps to free the rest of us from fear of being injured or killed on the roads, without excessive punishment for the offenders. That's a net gain. Tracking everyone's every move would free us from that fear of bad drivers even more... while simultaneously giving us reason to fear the government, not to mention costing a fortune (paid for by taxes), thus hurting our freedom from want. That's a pretty clear net loss.
Is Reagan responsible for the Iran-Contra scandal?
If "yes", then why are you whining about Democrats blaming him for it? If "no", then why are blaming Obama for Fast and Furious?
You're complaining about double-standards being applied by liberals while simultaneously using double-standards yourself.
Either the president is responsible for everything that happens in his administration, in which case you had best condemn everyone from Reagan to Roosevelt to Lincoln, or they're not, in which case you have no reason to be condemning Obama.
You're not making sense. Polls have nowhere near the precision required to predict the outcome of a senate race within a few hundred votes. Furthermore, you are positing that dozens of election officials all conspired to commit a fraud against the American people, which is a far cry from a few casino execs getting their customers to spend more money.
On top of that, if the Democrats have the means to cheat close elections, why only that one? There are plenty of close elections that they've lost.
You believe in this big evil liberal conspiracy because, at the time, you were upset and latched on to the first alternate theory presented, and now you're too invested in it to see reason.
The purpose of an election is to determine will of the majority (or at least plurality) of the voting public.
If Alice and Bob are running against each other, and an illegal immigrant casts a ballot for Alice, then the election is biased 1 vote towards her.
But in the same scenario, if one person who was planning to vote for Bob gives up due to long lines, then the election is also biased by 1 vote towards Alice.
The two situations have roughly the same impact, and there's no rational reason to worry about one over the other. So, if you want voter ID laws, you must prove that the number of false ballots that such laws stop exceeds the number of valid ballots that are also stopped.
So where is your evidence of widespread voter fraud? You don't have any, because it doesn't even make sense to commit that style of fraud. If you wanted to steal an election, you would bribe a few dozen people to stuff ballot boxes, not a few hundred thousand to cast false ballots. There's simply no way a conspiracy of such tremendous size could be kept secret.
We are unable or unwilling to accept that both happened because of shear stupidity, hubris, and incompetence. (and not necessarily in that order)
Why does it need to be our fault at all? Why can't it be the fault of the murderers?
I think you're falling into a sort of just-world fallacy. You're thinking that as long as the good guys are clever, they'll always win. Sadly, that's not the case.
Blah blah blah. No president does anything single-handedly. Lincoln didn't tear through the Confederacy like an action hero. FDR didn't paradrop into Nazi Germany. Obama didn't pull the literal trigger on Osama. But it was his decision to refocus efforts on finding OBL, it was his decision to go with troops on the ground rather than an airstrike, it was his decision to keep the Pakistanis out of the loop. All of those turned out to be the right choices, and Obama deserves credit for that.
All you Republicans claiming the credit should go exclusively to the military, ask yourself this: If the mission had ended with a dozen dead SEALs instead of a dead terrorist, would you be placing the blame solely on the military?
Franken won by ~225 votes. Most districts only had 10 or 20 ballots that Coleman was disputing. Is your theory that the omniscient democrats launched a state-wide conspiracy to reject a dozen Coleman votes here, two dozen there, somehow knowing that that would tip the scales?
No, you are just parroting what you have heard from your chosen masters, who have been having a temper tantrum for the better part of four years.
If Obama had called it terrorism immediately, you'd be accusing him of scaremongering. No matter what he does, you'll call it the wrong thing. Why should anyone even care what you think any more? You're openly trying to turn the murder of innocent people into a politcal cudgel. Fuck you.
When someone is as completely wrong-headed as the GGP, there's no point in telling them why you think they're wrong. If I told you that the Illuminati are planning to collect all the world's fish in a giant aquarium buried beneath Australia, would you try to reason with me? If yes, you're a fool. Some people are just broken. The internet makes it easy for such people to meet up with others who share their delusions and receive reinforcement for whatever crazy ideas they have.
For the rest of us, we can laugh at them and mock them to prevent their contagion from spreading to third parties, or we can roll our eyes and walk away. But we certainly can't reason with them. You can never reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
Slashdot Mirror
If a restaurant is filling the cup with ice and then adding 3 ounces of soda to fill the gaps, then that's the fault of the restaurant, and you should complain. You shouldn't need to order a 64 ounce drink in order to get a reasonable amount of actual liquid.
Advertisers spend half a trillion dollars every year to control you. Any one individual might be able to resist, but on the balance, advertising works. They wouldn't spend so much money on it if it didn't.
Drinks used to be served in smaller containers, and society survived just fine. Restaurants started using larger containers to exploit flaws in human psychology, allowing them to trick customers into buying more than they want or need. This is done to make more money, and to hell with the health of the general public.
Your free will isn't as all-powerful as you think it is. There are a great many people spending billions of dollars every year on cutting edge science to control your purchasing decisions, and you don't stand a snowflake's chance in hell against them. Only as a group can we fight back.
Well, honestly, he'd never be able to pass a life begins at conception amendment. That's just a pipe dream of the American Taliban. So I'm not worried about the pill getting outlawed, though the fact that he doesn't seem to realize that such an amendment would outlaw the pill is sort of worrisome.
But he will get to appoint justices to replace members of the current liberal wing of the SCOTUS, and the conservatives only need one more vote to overturn Roe v Wade. Abortion will be outlawed in a Romney presidency. Not necessarily because he's a religious fanatic (who can even tell what he believes?) but because he's beholden to them.
Whether Romney is pro-choice or pro-life depends seems to change every week: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldWDF1uQH4s
Are you serious? You can't think of a single issue on which Obama and Romney differ?
How about taxes? Romney's official plan is a 20% across the board cut, at a cost of $500B/yr, which will be paid for by *handwaves furiously*. Obama's plan is ditch the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, and bring capital gains taxes about halfway back towards where they were under Clinton.
How about healthcare? Romney's on the record saying things were alright pre-Obamacare, and he wants to go back to that. Obama, obviously, wants to keep Obamacare on the books.
How about military spending? Obama is trying to cut it by $100B/yr, while Romney's proposal is to raise it by $200B/yr.
How about Medicare? Obama wants to keep it mostly as is, making small adjustments to keep it solvent. Romney wants to make it a voucher system that would force senior citizens to turn to for-profit corporations for their healthcare.
How about abortion? Obama wants women to be in charge of their own bodies, Romney is on record supporting a life-begins-at-conception amendment and has pledged to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v Wade. Considering that a few of the current liberal justices are getting up there in years, he would almost certainly be able to have abortion outlawed nationwide.
That's just off the top of my head. Sure, if you only care about IP law and drone strikes, the two candidates are identical. But there are lots of very important issues on which the two candidates couldn't be more different.
I apologize then. There are plenty of people on this site who DO think that copyright should not exist in any form, so when your description of copyright involves a protracted anal rape analogy, I tend to lump you in with the crazies.
You do understand that without copyright, Pandora wouldn't give a single dime to the artists, right? Pandora is a business. They're not in the habit of giving away millions of dollars when they're not legally obligated to.
As long as wealth can be passed from generation to generation; taxation isn't applied to entrenched wealth but new wealth ... it won't matter who is voted in or what form the government takes.
Funny you mention this. Here in the US, we have a tax on entrenched wealth being passed from generation to generation. It's called the "Estate Tax", or derisively referred to as the "death tax" by Republicans looking to get rid of it. It used to take ~50% of money in excess of $1M. Over the past several years, it's been watered down to just 35% of money in excess of $5M. Obama's trying to put it back to 2001 levels. Romney wants to remove it entirely.
Voting matters. The rich and powerful want you to give up. They rely on it.
No, he proposed visual coding that gets compiled directly to machine code. Something akin to LabVIEW.
I'll assume you're not just a Republican posing as an independent to post propaganda, even though you really seem like one, what with your pitch-perfect recitation of the talking points.
Romney has stated that he plans to slash income taxes by 20% and eliminate the estate tax -- a huge giveaway to the old rich that will cost $4.8T over ten years. He insists he'll pay for it all by closing loopholes, but that's mathematically impossible. Either he's going to raise taxes on the middle class, or run up the deficit, or he's just flat out lying.
Romney has stated that he plans to peg military spending to 4%, which is more than even the military is asking for. That will cost us an additional $2.1T over ten years. Against, no indication of how we're going to pay for it.
That's close to seven trillion dollars that Romney wants to spend, all to benefit the rich and powerful. Meanwhile, Obama is trying to cut military spending and bring taxes back closer to Clinton-era levels.
Sources: ... Mitt Romney will begin by reversing Obama-era defense cuts and return to the budget baseline established by Secretary Robert Gates in 2010, with the goal of setting core defense spending ... at a floor of 4 percent of GDP." -- Emphasis theirs.
http://www.mittromney.com/issues/national-defense
"Obama has already cut the projected defense budget by $487 billion. What is more, he proposed and signed into law a budget process that will result in an additional $492 billion of defense cuts over the next ten years.
http://www.mittromney.com/issues/tax
" Make permanent, across-the-board 20 percent cut in marginal rates
Maintain current tax rates on interest, dividends, and capital gains
Eliminate taxes for taxpayers with AGI below $200,000 on interest, dividends, and capital gains
Eliminate the Death Tax
Repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT)"
Riiight, cause there's no difference between a single mom wanting help to feed her children and a billionaire wanting even more millions of dollars of spending cash each year. Clearly they're both being equally greedy.
Your freedom to swing your fist ends at my face. Your freedom shine a laser ends at my eyes. If you go farther than we as a society allow, then we as a society have the freedom to put you down. Welcome to the human race. Get along with others, or be removed from it.
Remove the CPU's heatsink from the motherboard, if you haven't. Those things are heavy, and the plastic screws typically holding them on are weak. The last thing you want is a big hunk of metal bouncing around inside the box.
Source: experience :(
There is no freedom without (some) security. Obviously, the pendulum is currently swinging too far to one side, and we need to correct that, but the opposite extreme is also to be avoided. If you spend every waking hour scrounging for food in a jungle while praying not to get caught by a roving warband, you are most certainly not free.
Remember Roosevelt's four freedoms: Freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. His particular statement of them was overly narrow (e.g. his freedom from fear applied only to fear of war), and the second can probably be rolled into the first, but the concept is sound, and much more useful than the vague "life, liberty, pursuit of happiness/money".
Ticketing bad drivers helps to free the rest of us from fear of being injured or killed on the roads, without excessive punishment for the offenders. That's a net gain. Tracking everyone's every move would free us from that fear of bad drivers even more... while simultaneously giving us reason to fear the government, not to mention costing a fortune (paid for by taxes), thus hurting our freedom from want. That's a pretty clear net loss.
It's actually quite nice to see a spade called a spade, instead of the typical media "all opinions are equally valid" bullshit.
Answer yes or no:
Is Reagan responsible for the Iran-Contra scandal?
If "yes", then why are you whining about Democrats blaming him for it?
If "no", then why are blaming Obama for Fast and Furious?
You're complaining about double-standards being applied by liberals while simultaneously using double-standards yourself.
Either the president is responsible for everything that happens in his administration, in which case you had best condemn everyone from Reagan to Roosevelt to Lincoln, or they're not, in which case you have no reason to be condemning Obama.
The second option seems far more sane to me.
You're not making sense. Polls have nowhere near the precision required to predict the outcome of a senate race within a few hundred votes. Furthermore, you are positing that dozens of election officials all conspired to commit a fraud against the American people, which is a far cry from a few casino execs getting their customers to spend more money.
On top of that, if the Democrats have the means to cheat close elections, why only that one? There are plenty of close elections that they've lost.
You believe in this big evil liberal conspiracy because, at the time, you were upset and latched on to the first alternate theory presented, and now you're too invested in it to see reason.
Very simple.
The purpose of an election is to determine will of the majority (or at least plurality) of the voting public.
If Alice and Bob are running against each other, and an illegal immigrant casts a ballot for Alice, then the election is biased 1 vote towards her.
But in the same scenario, if one person who was planning to vote for Bob gives up due to long lines, then the election is also biased by 1 vote towards Alice.
The two situations have roughly the same impact, and there's no rational reason to worry about one over the other. So, if you want voter ID laws, you must prove that the number of false ballots that such laws stop exceeds the number of valid ballots that are also stopped.
So where is your evidence of widespread voter fraud? You don't have any, because it doesn't even make sense to commit that style of fraud. If you wanted to steal an election, you would bribe a few dozen people to stuff ballot boxes, not a few hundred thousand to cast false ballots. There's simply no way a conspiracy of such tremendous size could be kept secret.
We are unable or unwilling to accept that both happened because of shear stupidity, hubris, and incompetence. (and not necessarily in that order)
Why does it need to be our fault at all? Why can't it be the fault of the murderers?
I think you're falling into a sort of just-world fallacy. You're thinking that as long as the good guys are clever, they'll always win. Sadly, that's not the case.
Blah blah blah. No president does anything single-handedly. Lincoln didn't tear through the Confederacy like an action hero. FDR didn't paradrop into Nazi Germany. Obama didn't pull the literal trigger on Osama. But it was his decision to refocus efforts on finding OBL, it was his decision to go with troops on the ground rather than an airstrike, it was his decision to keep the Pakistanis out of the loop. All of those turned out to be the right choices, and Obama deserves credit for that.
All you Republicans claiming the credit should go exclusively to the military, ask yourself this: If the mission had ended with a dozen dead SEALs instead of a dead terrorist, would you be placing the blame solely on the military?
Franken won by ~225 votes. Most districts only had 10 or 20 ballots that Coleman was disputing. Is your theory that the omniscient democrats launched a state-wide conspiracy to reject a dozen Coleman votes here, two dozen there, somehow knowing that that would tip the scales?
No, you are just parroting what you have heard from your chosen masters, who have been having a temper tantrum for the better part of four years.
If Obama had called it terrorism immediately, you'd be accusing him of scaremongering. No matter what he does, you'll call it the wrong thing. Why should anyone even care what you think any more? You're openly trying to turn the murder of innocent people into a politcal cudgel. Fuck you.
Monday morning quarterbacking sure is fun. And the best part is, you can never be wrong!
When someone is as completely wrong-headed as the GGP, there's no point in telling them why you think they're wrong. If I told you that the Illuminati are planning to collect all the world's fish in a giant aquarium buried beneath Australia, would you try to reason with me? If yes, you're a fool. Some people are just broken. The internet makes it easy for such people to meet up with others who share their delusions and receive reinforcement for whatever crazy ideas they have.
For the rest of us, we can laugh at them and mock them to prevent their contagion from spreading to third parties, or we can roll our eyes and walk away. But we certainly can't reason with them. You can never reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.