Hate to break it to you, Pollyanna, but the people who elected him would not re-elect him when they found out that he vetoed a bill to provide healthcare to wounded veterans. The average American voter is an easily manipulated moron.
He did the absolute best he could do to diminish the effect of the law, but there was nothing he could do to stop it. If you don't like it, then don't sit out the midterms. The idiot "liberals" who handed Congress over to the Repubs in 2010 by staying home are responsible for every bit of harm the GOP has done.
No, it was not. Go read it. Here's the link. Click on the PDF link for #7, which says "National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (Enrolled Bill [Final as Passed Both House and Senate]". Read Subtitle D, Section 1021, paragraph (e). It's on page 265. I'll repost it here for you so that you have no excuse not to read it, but by all means check the actual document as well so that you know I'm not lying.
(e) AUTHORITIES.—Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.
I can't make the truth any easier for you to see. This whole thing is just a smear intended to discredit Obama in the minds of his supporters, and the sad thing is, they're falling for it.
I suppose you always check the blueprints before driving across a bridge? As a friend of mine likes to say, you can't make a truly informed decision on what to have for breakfast. For every Cheerio you put in your mouth, you're trusting that hundreds of people did their jobs right and that there won't be any mold or arsenic or broken glass in it.
Nope I dont, but I have sure been in enough research labs. But if you have colon cancer how long are you going to wait to 'educate' yourself? How long do your doctors want you too? What type and how aggressive. Care to be Steve jobs?
And no they don't. They fall for snake oil all the time. ALL THE TIME.
If you have some terminal illness that is killing you so fast that you can't even take two weeks to do your homework and think on it, it seems like the risk:reward for potential snake oil might be quite attractive even thinking rationally. If you're already going to die soon otherwise then what's the worst that can happen?
The worst that can happen is you spend $50k on a treatment that doesn't buy you a single god-damned day of further life. Now, not only are you dead, but you get to go to your grave knowing that you've heaped an extra burden on your loved ones for nothing. But since at the time of making the decision you're still in the bargaining stage of grief, you don't think about that. The heartless scammers running these cons count on that.
You need protection and hand-holding just as much of the rest of us. Moreso, since you don't seem to realize it. If you're diagnosed with some terrible disease, you're not going to be thinking rationally. No one ever does.
Because desperate people don't think rationally, and will throw away huge amounts of money on drugs that don't do shit sold by heartless scammers. That already happens, there's no need to make it more common.
Hardcore libertarians always have this view of themselves as gods-made-flesh, always rational, always informed, always able to make the best decision for themselves, and HOW DARE anyone tell them otherwise. It's all feel-good bunk. Normal adults should be deprived of these decisions because normal adults will get ripped off and end up hurting themselves and their loved ones. It's in everyone's best interests to have impartial experts examine the facts and say "No, this drug is just going to make you worse" without having the consumer get competing "information" from "HowTheGovernmentIsKeepingYouSick.com".
First of all, I don't think the bill to take Joe's land would actually pass. People generally aren't that greedy. Somewhat ironically, greedy 1%-ers will claim that the rest of us just want to unjustly take their money, but I doubt you'll find many non-straw-based people who actually want such a thing. A lot of people think that they should pay at least as high a percentage as a middle class person, but very few people seriously argue for a return to the 80+% top marginal tax rates of the mid-20th century.
At any rate, crowdsourcing proposed laws doesn't mean that you don't still have a legislature. Many states have initiative and referendum systems, but they all still have traditional representative democracy alongside such systems. Why not crowdsource the drafting of a law and them submit it by initiative?
Those bills [are] being bought by one-percenters who think buying congresscritters is cheaper, easier, and more profitable than coming up with a business model that works in the Internet Age.
You say that like they're wrong. With voters so distracted by bigger concerns, it's definitely a buyers' market when it comes to copyright law.
My friends and I use G+, but not the way people use Facebook. It's more like an enhanced group email. We always used to have these email chains where someone would send out something interesting to everyone on the list, and people would just reply-all to that, either chatting or planning a party or whatever. Now we do the same thing on G+ since it makes it a bit easier. But I'd never "hang out" on the site (nor do I understand why people hang out on Facebook). I just log in from my phone, see if anything's happening, maybe fire off a reply, and log back off.
Heh, you consider the Lib Dems to be a major party. That's cute. Have they ever had more than 10% of the seats? I don't think so. And from what I've heard, their little coalition government has basically been "Give the Tories whatever they want, while disheartening all our own supporters". Shockingly similar to the American Democrats' modus operandi.
As a liberal, if it came down to it, I'd prefer to see Santorum in the White House over Romney.
Romney has already announced his plans to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, and then slash income taxes by an additional 20%, and eliminate estate taxes. He says he plans to do so without cutting Social Security, Medicare, or the military. That's $300B in cuts that will be heaped pretty much entirely on the poor and working class, right as we're recovering from the last disaster that his kind caused. And the Republicans will pass it, because that's exactly what they've been clamoring for. They'll also pass Paul Ryan's budget proposal, which shuts down Medicare and replaces it with a coupon system that is estimated to cover about 30% of the typical retiree's expenses, according to the CBO. It will basically be an unmitigated disaster for everyone not in the 1%.
Santorum will try to do all those same things, but he's also likely to do something self-defeating, like try to get Lawrence v Texas overturned or rehash the forced vaginal probing bill at the national level. That will take time, and ultimately be futile when the SCOTUS strikes it down. Hopefully he'd waste enough time on such things that he wouldn't get around to raping the economy.
In short, they're both evil men who want to pillage the country for their own benefit, but only one seems like he'd be competent at that task.
Not in a meaningful way. You'd need a bit rate a few orders of magnitude above 2e43 bps (based on the Planck time) to fully represent a real world signal. We call that "analog". Only after compressing that from 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 kpbs down to 1000 kbps do we call it "digital". If you call them both digital, then the term loses all meaning.
Of course, our brains can't pick up the difference between the two, but that's not because "the universe is digital". It's because by the time you get to the trillionth decimal point, the noise has long since swamped out the signal.
I wouldn't call the Santorum/santorum situation irrelevant. The term, and the website behind it, began several years before the man became a presidential aspirant, as a response to his medieval views on sex and his desire to get the government involved in it. Since he still espouses those same views, I'd say that lower-case "s" santorum is still very relevant.
Americans forget past transgressions by politicians far too quickly. How else to explain Newt Gingrich ever polling above 5%? Or Ollie Fucking North working in a job that doesn't involve busing tables? As soon as it stops getting ratings, the media moves on, and no one cares anymore. I'd like to see more "Google problems" haunting people like that, not fewer.
Companies will ship jobs overseas regardless of competition, so long as we allow them to. At least with fierce competition, the savings from using overseas labor end up in the consumers' wallets instead of the executives'.
Given the fact that the bishops in America have been making a fuss about the prospect of their non-religious employees having access to birth control from a third party, while frequently cited statistics claim that ~98% of Catholics use birth control, I'd say the inverse is true. The Catholic Church is presently a relative handful of idiots surrounded by a billion normal people.
Yeah, if they can't form a perfect representative democracy within a single year, then they deserve to live under dictatorial rule forever. It's high time we take up the white man's burden and show them how to live, because clearly they have no right to try to rule themselves.
Just out of curiosity, roughly how many fifths of a person would you say Arabs are?
What about in vitro fertilization using a surrogate? This would allow a woman who is infertile to still have a child carrying hers and her husband's DNA. Not the most important thing, I'll admit, but for the rare couple in such a situation, it would be nice to have.
Watching that video made me want to be an astronaut again. Haven't felt that way in a long time. We need cheap, publicly available space flight in the next 50 years or I'm gonna be very disappointed.
Apple, and their fans, have long insinuated that Macs don't get malware. It's a major part of their advertising campaign. Walk up to ten technically illiterate people and ask what the advantages are of Macs over PCs, and I'd wager at least half would say that they don't get viruses. I know that's why my sister bought one, as she flat out told me so (this was during the Vista era, so it wasn't worth correcting her). This belief didn't come from nowhere. Apple and their fans have carefully built it up over the years. Of course, whenever they're called out on this, they turn around and protest, "But we never actually said that it was immune."
It's dishonest marketing in the first place, but the real astounding dishonesty is to then deny it after the fact.
Simple versions are actually quite easy to make. All you need is some aluminum (i.e. foil), a weak radioactive source (available by mail order), a controllable current source (probably the most expensive bit), and something to give it shape. A cardboard tube would work fine. Now just point the tube towards the sun, throw the rest of that shit away, and voila! Hundreds of billions of neutrinos will be coming out the end of it every second, for you to do with as you please!
If you read the article (not recommended) you'll see that the authors don't have the best grasp on the English language. My guess is that they meant "will have increased", as in, by the time time we finish adding up our production this quarter, it should be around 145 Mu. Considering the writers are based in Taiwan, they can hardly be blamed for not having a complete grasp of the future perfect tense.
Obama is president, not king. He can't force companies to do anything unless Congress first gives him the power to do so, and there's no chance in hell that the current Congress would give him the Heimlich if he were literally dying in front of them, let alone pass a bill at his suggestion.
I already responded to the AC w.r.t. your qualification, but I want to add this, since it sounds like you may have taken offense at my post, which was never my intent. I am making no presumptions about you. I am not trying to say that you are bad for thinking the way you do, or anything like that. It's just that after having a lot of first hand experience with actual autistic people, and contrasting that with the way people treat the condition in popular culture (particular the self-diagnosing geeks who seem to want to be autistic), it makes me concerned that people are trivializing what is actually a very serious condition.
I'm not saying that you're trivializing it, at least not intentionally, but when you say things like "call it a disability if you must", it feeds into this common perception that autism is actually a beneficial condition that just comes with the cost of a bit of social awkwardness.
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Hate to break it to you, Pollyanna, but the people who elected him would not re-elect him when they found out that he vetoed a bill to provide healthcare to wounded veterans. The average American voter is an easily manipulated moron.
He did the absolute best he could do to diminish the effect of the law, but there was nothing he could do to stop it. If you don't like it, then don't sit out the midterms. The idiot "liberals" who handed Congress over to the Repubs in 2010 by staying home are responsible for every bit of harm the GOP has done.
No, it was not. Go read it. Here's the link. Click on the PDF link for #7, which says "National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (Enrolled Bill [Final as Passed Both House and Senate]". Read Subtitle D, Section 1021, paragraph (e). It's on page 265. I'll repost it here for you so that you have no excuse not to read it, but by all means check the actual document as well so that you know I'm not lying.
(e) AUTHORITIES.—Nothing in this section shall be construed
to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of
United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States,
or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United
States.
I can't make the truth any easier for you to see. This whole thing is just a smear intended to discredit Obama in the minds of his supporters, and the sad thing is, they're falling for it.
I suppose you always check the blueprints before driving across a bridge? As a friend of mine likes to say, you can't make a truly informed decision on what to have for breakfast. For every Cheerio you put in your mouth, you're trusting that hundreds of people did their jobs right and that there won't be any mold or arsenic or broken glass in it.
Nope I dont, but I have sure been in enough research labs. But if you have colon cancer how long are you going to wait to 'educate' yourself? How long do your doctors want you too? What type and how aggressive. Care to be Steve jobs?
And no they don't. They fall for snake oil all the time. ALL THE TIME.
If you have some terminal illness that is killing you so fast that you can't even take two weeks to do your homework and think on it, it seems like the risk:reward for potential snake oil might be quite attractive even thinking rationally. If you're already going to die soon otherwise then what's the worst that can happen?
The worst that can happen is you spend $50k on a treatment that doesn't buy you a single god-damned day of further life. Now, not only are you dead, but you get to go to your grave knowing that you've heaped an extra burden on your loved ones for nothing. But since at the time of making the decision you're still in the bargaining stage of grief, you don't think about that. The heartless scammers running these cons count on that.
You need protection and hand-holding just as much of the rest of us. Moreso, since you don't seem to realize it. If you're diagnosed with some terrible disease, you're not going to be thinking rationally. No one ever does.
Because desperate people don't think rationally, and will throw away huge amounts of money on drugs that don't do shit sold by heartless scammers. That already happens, there's no need to make it more common.
Hardcore libertarians always have this view of themselves as gods-made-flesh, always rational, always informed, always able to make the best decision for themselves, and HOW DARE anyone tell them otherwise. It's all feel-good bunk. Normal adults should be deprived of these decisions because normal adults will get ripped off and end up hurting themselves and their loved ones. It's in everyone's best interests to have impartial experts examine the facts and say "No, this drug is just going to make you worse" without having the consumer get competing "information" from "HowTheGovernmentIsKeepingYouSick.com".
First of all, I don't think the bill to take Joe's land would actually pass. People generally aren't that greedy. Somewhat ironically, greedy 1%-ers will claim that the rest of us just want to unjustly take their money, but I doubt you'll find many non-straw-based people who actually want such a thing. A lot of people think that they should pay at least as high a percentage as a middle class person, but very few people seriously argue for a return to the 80+% top marginal tax rates of the mid-20th century.
At any rate, crowdsourcing proposed laws doesn't mean that you don't still have a legislature. Many states have initiative and referendum systems, but they all still have traditional representative democracy alongside such systems. Why not crowdsource the drafting of a law and them submit it by initiative?
Those bills [are] being bought by one-percenters who think buying congresscritters is cheaper, easier, and more profitable than coming up with a business model that works in the Internet Age.
You say that like they're wrong. With voters so distracted by bigger concerns, it's definitely a buyers' market when it comes to copyright law.
Please not that. We've been down that road, and we know where it leads. HP will be selling 3D printer "ink" for $100 per microgram.
My friends and I use G+, but not the way people use Facebook. It's more like an enhanced group email. We always used to have these email chains where someone would send out something interesting to everyone on the list, and people would just reply-all to that, either chatting or planning a party or whatever. Now we do the same thing on G+ since it makes it a bit easier. But I'd never "hang out" on the site (nor do I understand why people hang out on Facebook). I just log in from my phone, see if anything's happening, maybe fire off a reply, and log back off.
Heh, you consider the Lib Dems to be a major party. That's cute. Have they ever had more than 10% of the seats? I don't think so. And from what I've heard, their little coalition government has basically been "Give the Tories whatever they want, while disheartening all our own supporters". Shockingly similar to the American Democrats' modus operandi.
As a liberal, if it came down to it, I'd prefer to see Santorum in the White House over Romney.
Romney has already announced his plans to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, and then slash income taxes by an additional 20%, and eliminate estate taxes. He says he plans to do so without cutting Social Security, Medicare, or the military. That's $300B in cuts that will be heaped pretty much entirely on the poor and working class, right as we're recovering from the last disaster that his kind caused. And the Republicans will pass it, because that's exactly what they've been clamoring for. They'll also pass Paul Ryan's budget proposal, which shuts down Medicare and replaces it with a coupon system that is estimated to cover about 30% of the typical retiree's expenses, according to the CBO. It will basically be an unmitigated disaster for everyone not in the 1%.
Santorum will try to do all those same things, but he's also likely to do something self-defeating, like try to get Lawrence v Texas overturned or rehash the forced vaginal probing bill at the national level. That will take time, and ultimately be futile when the SCOTUS strikes it down. Hopefully he'd waste enough time on such things that he wouldn't get around to raping the economy.
In short, they're both evil men who want to pillage the country for their own benefit, but only one seems like he'd be competent at that task.
Don't they mean My________?
Not in a meaningful way. You'd need a bit rate a few orders of magnitude above 2e43 bps (based on the Planck time) to fully represent a real world signal. We call that "analog". Only after compressing that from 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 kpbs down to 1000 kbps do we call it "digital". If you call them both digital, then the term loses all meaning.
Of course, our brains can't pick up the difference between the two, but that's not because "the universe is digital". It's because by the time you get to the trillionth decimal point, the noise has long since swamped out the signal.
I wouldn't call the Santorum/santorum situation irrelevant. The term, and the website behind it, began several years before the man became a presidential aspirant, as a response to his medieval views on sex and his desire to get the government involved in it. Since he still espouses those same views, I'd say that lower-case "s" santorum is still very relevant.
Americans forget past transgressions by politicians far too quickly. How else to explain Newt Gingrich ever polling above 5%? Or Ollie Fucking North working in a job that doesn't involve busing tables? As soon as it stops getting ratings, the media moves on, and no one cares anymore. I'd like to see more "Google problems" haunting people like that, not fewer.
Companies will ship jobs overseas regardless of competition, so long as we allow them to. At least with fierce competition, the savings from using overseas labor end up in the consumers' wallets instead of the executives'.
Given the fact that the bishops in America have been making a fuss about the prospect of their non-religious employees having access to birth control from a third party, while frequently cited statistics claim that ~98% of Catholics use birth control, I'd say the inverse is true. The Catholic Church is presently a relative handful of idiots surrounded by a billion normal people.
Yeah, if they can't form a perfect representative democracy within a single year, then they deserve to live under dictatorial rule forever. It's high time we take up the white man's burden and show them how to live, because clearly they have no right to try to rule themselves.
Just out of curiosity, roughly how many fifths of a person would you say Arabs are?
What about in vitro fertilization using a surrogate? This would allow a woman who is infertile to still have a child carrying hers and her husband's DNA. Not the most important thing, I'll admit, but for the rare couple in such a situation, it would be nice to have.
Watching that video made me want to be an astronaut again. Haven't felt that way in a long time. We need cheap, publicly available space flight in the next 50 years or I'm gonna be very disappointed.
Apple, and their fans, have long insinuated that Macs don't get malware. It's a major part of their advertising campaign. Walk up to ten technically illiterate people and ask what the advantages are of Macs over PCs, and I'd wager at least half would say that they don't get viruses. I know that's why my sister bought one, as she flat out told me so (this was during the Vista era, so it wasn't worth correcting her). This belief didn't come from nowhere. Apple and their fans have carefully built it up over the years. Of course, whenever they're called out on this, they turn around and protest, "But we never actually said that it was immune."
It's dishonest marketing in the first place, but the real astounding dishonesty is to then deny it after the fact.
Simple versions are actually quite easy to make. All you need is some aluminum (i.e. foil), a weak radioactive source (available by mail order), a controllable current source (probably the most expensive bit), and something to give it shape. A cardboard tube would work fine. Now just point the tube towards the sun, throw the rest of that shit away, and voila! Hundreds of billions of neutrinos will be coming out the end of it every second, for you to do with as you please!
If you read the article (not recommended) you'll see that the authors don't have the best grasp on the English language. My guess is that they meant "will have increased", as in, by the time time we finish adding up our production this quarter, it should be around 145 Mu. Considering the writers are based in Taiwan, they can hardly be blamed for not having a complete grasp of the future perfect tense.
Obama is president, not king. He can't force companies to do anything unless Congress first gives him the power to do so, and there's no chance in hell that the current Congress would give him the Heimlich if he were literally dying in front of them, let alone pass a bill at his suggestion.
I already responded to the AC w.r.t. your qualification, but I want to add this, since it sounds like you may have taken offense at my post, which was never my intent. I am making no presumptions about you. I am not trying to say that you are bad for thinking the way you do, or anything like that. It's just that after having a lot of first hand experience with actual autistic people, and contrasting that with the way people treat the condition in popular culture (particular the self-diagnosing geeks who seem to want to be autistic), it makes me concerned that people are trivializing what is actually a very serious condition.
I'm not saying that you're trivializing it, at least not intentionally, but when you say things like "call it a disability if you must", it feeds into this common perception that autism is actually a beneficial condition that just comes with the cost of a bit of social awkwardness.