I think this conservative, who would ordinarily disagree with you on military spending, might have to honestly concede that the current US procurement and R&D program for defense is insane. We need to actually ask some hard questions about military procurement and this is a debate worth having.
Yes, we know there is a cost in wear and tear due to the wars but the USAF and USN are not flying that many missions. I would question the Army spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a "Future Combat" system built around smaller vehicles than the M-1 tank, when the M-1 tank is the only survivable assett we have in theater. I would question why the US Navy needs to have a brand new F-35, when, it just re-armed itself with F-18 Superhornets, and those are honestly almost a brand new aircraft. Speaking of carriers, how many carriers do we need to have in peacetime. Yeah, its nice that we have about 12 active duty super carriers, but do people know that the 20 or so assault carriers operated by the US Marines are actually about the same in capability as the carriers of other countries? And what's up with the sudden replacement of Seawolf with Virgina, and why can we only build one submarine a year? Why does it cost so much to operate 20 submarines when scarcely two decades ago we operated 100? Why does the US Navy have more money than ever, but less ships than it did when even Jimmy Carter "ruined the Navy"? Why is it before we needed 600 ships to adequately patrol the world's oceans, but now, we can't even spare a ship to go take out some pirates? I thought the reduction in size of ships was ok because the more expensive ships were more capable.
And don't even get me started on the USAF, except for this. why we are still building two classes of advanced fighters when the most glaring problem with the usaf is an inability to supply the army from the air. Hello...
If you go to any asian country, you find stacks and stacks of CDs and DVDs filled with mislabelled stuff from Microsoft to Universal studios. So, the thought of Vietnam actually paying for a bunch of Windows licenses just seems rather remote to me.
I would be willing to bet that Microsoft has been quietly watching Windows get rolled out all across Vietnam, knowing that, they don't have but a dozen licenses for the entire country, and a million copies of Windows, and just let Vietnam build all of their infrastructure on top of it.
Then, once they see the Vietnamese are hooked, they sent in a salesteam to ask them to pay for it, or they will shut the country down. Vietnam of course issues its edict, but both they know and Microsoft know, that Vietnam now belongs to Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates.
Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon both roll over in their graves, and somewhere, on a dark night, the leaders of Microsoft enjoy a drink to celebrate the triumph with Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney and the Bushes. "Hey, we might have f--- up in Iraq, but we finally won Vietnam."
How long would it take to evolve differently? Bacteria evolve pretty quickly. In a scarce few years the form of life would likely be alien to anything on the earth, just through natural selection.
Thus, my experience would actually be a resounding proof of evolution itself, and add valuable insight to biology as it would allow for entirely new avenues of study. Quite frankly, this understanding might someday pave the way for cures for cancer, multiple sclerosis, and clogged arteries. And you want to halt all that, to see if there are bacteria that natively grew on a planet that is already proved dead by the Viking Experiments?
and conduct exploration of them so as to avoid their harmful contamination...ha ha
I read that clause, and my lawyers would say that that doesn't say that you can't put life on another planet. I could well argue that putting life on a dead planet is not harmful to it, because you can't harm a planet that is dead. Since you have not proven there is life on Mars, I am entirely within my legal rights to put life on it.
In fact, your insistence on autoclaving your probes before you launch them actually harms the planet by removing the likelihood of a natural cleanup through bacteriological action.
That's arguably not true at all. You could wind up with less jobs, or more jobs, but a net of zero effect is really rather unlikely. In your the simplest case, you assume that the government invests exactly as efficiently as the private sector, in which case, the number of jobs is the same. But, if the government invests -more- efficiently than the private sector, then, there will be more jobs than if the private sector would have invested it.
The problem we have right now, mind you, isn't so much as unsustainable lifestyles, but, a lot of bad investment by the private sector and now the government is picking up the lurch. That's ok in the short term but in the long term you want the private sector to take off again, not even from the libertarian ideological perspective, but from a government risk management one.
If the government taxes the output of all economic activity, it gets the benefit of the economic winners without having to determine them itself. When the government is doing the investing, its actually assuming the risk of failure that more properly ought to be born by private citizens doing the risk, not all of the people, whether that risk is by their consent or not.
Read the Treaty Text. The original poster is a retard. The original purpose of the outer space treaty was essentially a deal to keep a great power from "taking over" space, made at a time, when the military importance of space was recognized but no leading nation was willing to bet its future on it winning the space race.
There is absolutely nothing that precludes the deposit of life on other planets. Its legal to seed the moon, mars or any other body with life and to terraform it.
Finally, your signature, 'I prefer to buy Made In USA.' Why not be a real man and refuse to buy anything at all from outside the US and see how far that gets you?
You can't do that. But, what you can do is reward your local economy. My sig is not a statement of "American should build all the consumer goods in the world", it is, "I'm an American and I prefer to buy American stuff". I would expect that someone who is British would prefer to buy British stuff, French stuff from France, and so forth. I much rather miss the world where the British still made cars and employed British workers to make them just as much as I miss the idea of Detroit as a bedrock of the American economy.
You have to remember that the current economy of a few players making everything for the world is completely artificial. It exists because of patents and exists because of current trade laws and above all it relates to currency flows. The end game of automation and technology, is that we really don't need to have a single nation building cars at all. It is imaginable that every nation could build a car, if it wants to, and the only trade problem that there naturally is is the flow of raw materials across the planet.
If anything, you could say that some liberals would prefer religion was a lesser topic.
Well of course, but that's silly because your humanist ideology only works in times of increasing prosperity, and environmental constraints now render that impossible. Your early wave of medical miracles has come from a burning pace to a glacial pace, as bacteria and virii now seem to be capable at evolving faster than we can make drugs to fight them, and the wave of consumer electronics, which once promised to liberate people, now seems to be but just a fancy way to enslave them. Watch people's mileage via GPS, indeed.
We're in for a long period of gradual retrenchment of human economies. Even after this recession ends, once resource exhaustion plays itself out, energy is going to be more expensive and people are going to have less.
And it's healthy to be introspective and realize that across the entire earth, the USA, especially the neo conservatives, are very much in the global minority
I do realize that, and, if you genuinely look across the earth, you will realize that my religious based ideas are in much more the majority and increasingly so. Economic dislocation, poverty caused by resource exhaustion, all are going to lead to more religion, and not less. I think the collapse of the Doha round spelled a highwater mark for free trade and as economic uncertainty plays itself out, we'll see a retrenchment in that as well.
For the next hundred years out, liberalism looks to be doomed.
Should read. The IT sector has become so anti-consumer that it seems rather likely that some consumer protections by the federal government would restore public confidence in the sector and thus improve business as a whole. In other words, this could be a case where some prudent regulation by the Feds could make a playing field that the public trusts, and thus, buys stuff in.
I'm a Republican and I'm pretty cynical about Dems, obviously, but I think in this case you can expect them to improve things like consumer labelling and consumer rights. Usually where Dems screw up is to give consumers and workers so many rights that it is pointless to invest in a business in that sector because it is difficult and ultimately unprofitable. However, the IT sector has become so anti-consumer that it is hurting the business as a whole, it seems rather unlikely that a few years of some modest consumer protections by the government would improve the public's faith in IT and the business as a whole.
Let's just hope they don't open the door for lawsuits based on bugs in software by making it illegal to have that little clause we ALL stick in our licenses, both open and closed, that lets us off the hook if our software fails. Preventing a regulation like that from coming into being is something you would hope that Republicans would be smart enough to do, although sadly there's not too much evidence of my beloved GOP being smart about anything these days. [tongue firmly planted in cheek]
I think you could make the argument that a recession makes for extreme competition, and its quite likely that it could turn out that DRM simply has to be dropped because a) it requires more money to actually DRM enable a product, particularly in testing, and b) there might be enough of a critical mass of consumers shopping for content based on the absence of DRM.
We won't really have a complete victory, though, until we see Microsoft drop entering those silly license key numbers for its products.
Can you name any country that has been "taken over" by Islam in the last few hundred years, that hasn't had a majority Muslim influence prior?
For the last few hundred years, an early lead in calculus gave christian countries the nod up. During that time, christians destroyed and carved up the ottoman empire, and made colonies of many islamic nations. Now, the tables are turning.
I cannot fathom any of those happening in the United States.
I really don't stay up worry about it. Part of what I'm doing now is blowing away my Excellent Karma rating with a good old Troll, but I do think a religious state or an imperial state in the USA is inevitable for the following reasons.
a) undermined faith in elections. Democrats and their recounts are basically just undermining public faith in elections. It's so short sighted, because eventually Republicans are going to do the same thing to them and every close election is going to be one where the elected official lives under a cloud, and by definition that translates into more power for un-elected officials.
b) decreased world wealth. we're at an energy per capita technological plateau. Commodity prices are rising, and will rise even further when schemes like cap and trade are put into place. That translates into less stuff for each and every person, and that makes intangible things like heritage and culture more important.
c) Immigration from more religious countries. Third world countries tend to be more religious.
d) General breakdown of faith in science as an arbiter of the human condition. This is just any number of factors, from greed in the scientific community, things like universities holding patents, big public scientific arguments, guys on tv, political activities, all undermine the perceived impartiality of science. Then you have what might be conceived as scientific missteps. Viral illnesses have yet to be conquered, and the war against bacteriological illnesses is looking like Iraq 2006. And then you'll have technologies being created that people don't necessarily like, intrusive stuff, scanners, data miners, biodetectors, mind readers on the horizon, like who wants that, and finally, to top it all off, everyone gets to have less stuff to save the eco-system.
e) Darwin is religion's best friend. Most religions are male dominated, and that means babies. Make abortion a sin, take career options away from women, condone domestic violence, and boom your country is having so many babies your -average- age is 22. Population matters, despite what everyone argues to the contrary. Countries with the largest population will dominate the world economy, and within a country the demographics with the largest population will dominate elections. Right now, liberalists aren't having babies, but conservatives are, as their god commands. Eventually, that will catch up to liberalists.
If any religion could do that in a modern progressive democratic state, the fundies in the States would have done it already. And in fact, in the case of the stuff about abortion, gays and women you mentioned, the religious right have already tried.
They haven't really -tried-, because there's still abortion and still gay people running around. Yeah they make some noises at the ballot box but they still follow the democratic process. We go through another 100 years of people stealing elections and many folks will just say why bother and side with a dictator. Al Gore should be shot for establishing this precedent.
The reason they failed is that countries that have high standards of living, high literacy rates, free elections and judicial oversight of the government don't allow that shit.
Well, let's look at that. Standards of living are going to fall because of environmental legislation, of that there is no doubt, and along with it, literacy rates. Democrats|Republicans are already out there tampering with elections wherever they can, and with that comes the realization that judicial oversight is a joke. Liberalism always worked because it was linked to a science of capitalism and having more stuff for the people, and you take those two things off of the table, the rest of it is something people don't like. I mean, sure, people are going to put up with some cultural slights because they can always buy more stuff, but you throw carbon credits, ever stricter emissions controls, rising commodity prices, and next thing you know, someone making fun of your christmas tree is probably going to be getting his teeth kicked in.
He likely considers keeping people from praying to the wrong invisible sky-wizard
Actually, no. My point is more like, anyone with half a brain should fall in line with a sky wizard to worship and get on with the program. Sky wizard is going to win. Of course, I'd like it to be my christian sky-wizard, because I like my culture and want it to dominate, but ultimately some sky wizard is going to win and secular liberalism is going to lose.
Historically, organized religion has a pretty strong tradition of triumphing over other cultural systems. Male domination may not make the women happy, but it is pretty damn good evolutionary trait. Darwin doesn't care if women like their babies or not, only if they have them.
And logically, too, what's really to lose in following a sky-wizard. If there is no God, as you allude, there's nothing wrong with it, and its just evolution, so anything you can do for your culture to triumph is really on the table. If there is a God, then God sanctions your behavior with his Sky-wizardful mercilessness, and there's still nothing wrong with it.
What you don't get is this. Freedom comes from an ideology, yes, but it is also based on wealth. We are entering an age where people are going to be poorer, long term, because well, there's a cap on natural resources, soon to be caps on energy consumption, and, there's just going to be less and less to go around. For a time, you can make this argument that we should all equally accept less, learn to share, and what not, so that we can all put up with each other, but at some point, Sky-wizard is going to come along, and say that's a bunch of crap, let's just wipe out everyone who doesn't believe in our sky wizard, however many billions that is, and have the whole planet to ourselves, in much richer fashion.
Oh, and please, go on and bleed your heart about how terrible christianity is because its adherents do not follow the teachings of christ. There's plenty of "christians" that are more pagan now anyway - the old Catholic habit of making pagan gods saints to introduce people to christ has now the effect of people of christ being introduced to pagan gods. And I'll tell you, the pagan sky wizards have no "turn the other cheek" stuff to slow them down.
It will be just like Roman times, where Empires are made and formed with all the religious zeqal but without the judeao-christian conscience.
I'm specifically asking for *any* evidence of your claims and yet you keep saying 'because' with no facts to back it up
And I'm saying again. You have NO EVIDENCE of any sort of thought as to the consequences of what you are doing. There was no evidence that CO2 would screw the world up, not even 20 years ago, and some would argue not even now, there's still no smoking gun. They didn't have evidence about thalidomide, about DDT, about every other dumb thing humanity as done, until we did it.
But, there you go again.... "it's perfectly safe, because no one has proven otherwise, so let's build 7 billion of them."
You call me insane, but, the present problem we are in is because of a vast rollout of a technology with no assumed consequences, only to find out, that, in fact, there were serious consequences. Yep, do that SAME thing again. SAME dumb logic.
I'll take a few thousand nukes, over windmills and solar panels everywhere, any day of the week. You can go back to hiding from the "horrible nuclear fire", just like cavemen did from current fire.
If the liberals of this country made it possible for Islam to spread and then take over the USA, then watch all of their progress evaporate as women are disenfranchised, then kicked out of their jobs, abortion is banned, homosexuals are stoned, writers are jailed, directors shot, dancers raped, just like, well, every other country where Islam has taken over.
I'd trust Bush with them more, any day of the week. That's the whole point. I would argue this point with many conservatives. Sure, we know that Bush is only going to go after a bunch of muzzies and illegal aliens but you know that if Dems get the same powers, they are coming after us, just like they always have, but with much more power. The only compromise that is reasonable is a limited government.
The whole deal with Fiorina was that the conventional wisdom is that HP was dead as a PC company, the merger with Compaq was stupid, they should have focused on printers, and now look at them.
The printer business is nice for HP, but they are making loads of dough from enterprise business sales (thank you Compaq), and, they are, I think, the leader in PC sales overall, at least in notebooks.
You are using a ridiculous argument. You wave your hands and say, "see, there's trees everywhere, blocking the wind, so we can build a bunch of stuff too... in fact, we can build as much as we want." We've been doing that same dumb logic for three thousand years, and obviously, people like you are going to do it for three thousand more. Morons, all of you.
Just because the bear shit in the woods, does not mean that every human can go and shit in the woods. Just because a whale kicks out CO2, does not mean that we can go and build 4 billion cars, kicking out CO2. And just because you see some trees blocking the wind, or making shade on the ground, does not mean you can go and put up 4 billion windmills and 7 billion solar panels.
The lowest, environmentally impacting thing you can possibly due is to build nuclear power plants. It's the least change to the air, the water, and the land, of this planet. Yes, there is the risk that some accident might happen, but if you go and put out 7 billion windmills and 5 billion solar panels, (not to mention the other 50 billion windmills and 100 billion solar panels you will also put in the trash), then, you are definitely going to fuck something up. You don't even know what it is, and even worse, you don't even want to look.
You sound like a big three manager, who think that all of their problems are about marketing and customer perception, rather than better engineering and manufacturing.
American cars are better engineered and their quality is as good as any car in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this conservative, who would ordinarily disagree with you on military spending, might have to honestly concede that the current US procurement and R&D program for defense is insane. We need to actually ask some hard questions about military procurement and this is a debate worth having.
Yes, we know there is a cost in wear and tear due to the wars but the USAF and USN are not flying that many missions. I would question the Army spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a "Future Combat" system built around smaller vehicles than the M-1 tank, when the M-1 tank is the only survivable assett we have in theater. I would question why the US Navy needs to have a brand new F-35, when, it just re-armed itself with F-18 Superhornets, and those are honestly almost a brand new aircraft. Speaking of carriers, how many carriers do we need to have in peacetime. Yeah, its nice that we have about 12 active duty super carriers, but do people know that the 20 or so assault carriers operated by the US Marines are actually about the same in capability as the carriers of other countries? And what's up with the sudden replacement of Seawolf with Virgina, and why can we only build one submarine a year? Why does it cost so much to operate 20 submarines when scarcely two decades ago we operated 100? Why does the US Navy have more money than ever, but less ships than it did when even Jimmy Carter "ruined the Navy"? Why is it before we needed 600 ships to adequately patrol the world's oceans, but now, we can't even spare a ship to go take out some pirates? I thought the reduction in size of ships was ok because the more expensive ships were more capable.
And don't even get me started on the USAF, except for this. why we are still building two classes of advanced fighters when the most glaring problem with the usaf is an inability to supply the army from the air. Hello...
We could go on all day.
And fund our research instead.
They tested OpenBSD first but Vietnamese people and flames do not mix well.
It didn't help that they were using the "Napalm" release.
If you go to any asian country, you find stacks and stacks of CDs and DVDs filled with mislabelled stuff from Microsoft to Universal studios. So, the thought of Vietnam actually paying for a bunch of Windows licenses just seems rather remote to me.
I would be willing to bet that Microsoft has been quietly watching Windows get rolled out all across Vietnam, knowing that, they don't have but a dozen licenses for the entire country, and a million copies of Windows, and just let Vietnam build all of their infrastructure on top of it.
Then, once they see the Vietnamese are hooked, they sent in a salesteam to ask them to pay for it, or they will shut the country down. Vietnam of course issues its edict, but both they know and Microsoft know, that Vietnam now belongs to Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates.
Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon both roll over in their graves, and somewhere, on a dark night, the leaders of Microsoft enjoy a drink to celebrate the triumph with Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney and the Bushes. "Hey, we might have f--- up in Iraq, but we finally won Vietnam."
"Make my open office spreadsheet do [something just like excel], or, its the John McCain poke cage for you!"
Nope. It'd be terrestrial life on another planet
How long would it take to evolve differently? Bacteria evolve pretty quickly. In a scarce few years the form of life would likely be alien to anything on the earth, just through natural selection.
Thus, my experience would actually be a resounding proof of evolution itself, and add valuable insight to biology as it would allow for entirely new avenues of study. Quite frankly, this understanding might someday pave the way for cures for cancer, multiple sclerosis, and clogged arteries. And you want to halt all that, to see if there are bacteria that natively grew on a planet that is already proved dead by the Viking Experiments?
I see...
and conduct exploration of them so as to avoid their harmful contamination ...ha ha
I read that clause, and my lawyers would say that that doesn't say that you can't put life on another planet. I could well argue that putting life on a dead planet is not harmful to it, because you can't harm a planet that is dead. Since you have not proven there is life on Mars, I am entirely within my legal rights to put life on it.
In fact, your insistence on autoclaving your probes before you launch them actually harms the planet by removing the likelihood of a natural cleanup through bacteriological action.
Give me tons of money, or I'm chopping down this frakking tree!!!!!
You will get NO net jobs.
That's arguably not true at all. You could wind up with less jobs, or more jobs, but a net of zero effect is really rather unlikely. In your the simplest case, you assume that the government invests exactly as efficiently as the private sector, in which case, the number of jobs is the same. But, if the government invests -more- efficiently than the private sector, then, there will be more jobs than if the private sector would have invested it.
The problem we have right now, mind you, isn't so much as unsustainable lifestyles, but, a lot of bad investment by the private sector and now the government is picking up the lurch. That's ok in the short term but in the long term you want the private sector to take off again, not even from the libertarian ideological perspective, but from a government risk management one.
If the government taxes the output of all economic activity, it gets the benefit of the economic winners without having to determine them itself. When the government is doing the investing, its actually assuming the risk of failure that more properly ought to be born by private citizens doing the risk, not all of the people, whether that risk is by their consent or not.
Read the Treaty Text. The original poster is a retard. The original purpose of the outer space treaty was essentially a deal to keep a great power from "taking over" space, made at a time, when the military importance of space was recognized but no leading nation was willing to bet its future on it winning the space race.
http://www.state.gov/t/ac/trt/5181.htm
There is absolutely nothing that precludes the deposit of life on other planets. Its legal to seed the moon, mars or any other body with life and to terraform it.
And wouldn't you say it's a pretty huge downside?
Hey, wouldn't a successful transplant of an organism from one planet to another show that life is more possible?
It's the tiny difference between finding extraterrestial life, or not. In exchange for... Absolutely nothing!
Well, no, because, if you put life on Mars, there would be extraterrestrial life, now, wouldn't it?
Finally, your signature, 'I prefer to buy Made In USA.' Why not be a real man and refuse to buy anything at all from outside the US and see how far that gets you?
You can't do that. But, what you can do is reward your local economy. My sig is not a statement of "American should build all the consumer goods in the world", it is, "I'm an American and I prefer to buy American stuff". I would expect that someone who is British would prefer to buy British stuff, French stuff from France, and so forth. I much rather miss the world where the British still made cars and employed British workers to make them just as much as I miss the idea of Detroit as a bedrock of the American economy.
You have to remember that the current economy of a few players making everything for the world is completely artificial. It exists because of patents and exists because of current trade laws and above all it relates to currency flows. The end game of automation and technology, is that we really don't need to have a single nation building cars at all. It is imaginable that every nation could build a car, if it wants to, and the only trade problem that there naturally is is the flow of raw materials across the planet.
If anything, you could say that some liberals would prefer religion was a lesser topic.
Well of course, but that's silly because your humanist ideology only works in times of increasing prosperity, and environmental constraints now render that impossible. Your early wave of medical miracles has come from a burning pace to a glacial pace, as bacteria and virii now seem to be capable at evolving faster than we can make drugs to fight them, and the wave of consumer electronics, which once promised to liberate people, now seems to be but just a fancy way to enslave them. Watch people's mileage via GPS, indeed.
We're in for a long period of gradual retrenchment of human economies. Even after this recession ends, once resource exhaustion plays itself out, energy is going to be more expensive and people are going to have less.
And it's healthy to be introspective and realize that across the entire earth, the USA, especially the neo conservatives, are very much in the global minority
I do realize that, and, if you genuinely look across the earth, you will realize that my religious based ideas are in much more the majority and increasingly so. Economic dislocation, poverty caused by resource exhaustion, all are going to lead to more religion, and not less. I think the collapse of the Doha round spelled a highwater mark for free trade and as economic uncertainty plays itself out, we'll see a retrenchment in that as well.
For the next hundred years out, liberalism looks to be doomed.
Should read. The IT sector has become so anti-consumer that it seems rather likely that some consumer protections by the federal government would restore public confidence in the sector and thus improve business as a whole. In other words, this could be a case where some prudent regulation by the Feds could make a playing field that the public trusts, and thus, buys stuff in.
I'm a Republican and I'm pretty cynical about Dems, obviously, but I think in this case you can expect them to improve things like consumer labelling and consumer rights. Usually where Dems screw up is to give consumers and workers so many rights that it is pointless to invest in a business in that sector because it is difficult and ultimately unprofitable. However, the IT sector has become so anti-consumer that it is hurting the business as a whole, it seems rather unlikely that a few years of some modest consumer protections by the government would improve the public's faith in IT and the business as a whole.
Let's just hope they don't open the door for lawsuits based on bugs in software by making it illegal to have that little clause we ALL stick in our licenses, both open and closed, that lets us off the hook if our software fails. Preventing a regulation like that from coming into being is something you would hope that Republicans would be smart enough to do, although sadly there's not too much evidence of my beloved GOP being smart about anything these days. [tongue firmly planted in cheek]
I think you could make the argument that a recession makes for extreme competition, and its quite likely that it could turn out that DRM simply has to be dropped because a) it requires more money to actually DRM enable a product, particularly in testing, and b) there might be enough of a critical mass of consumers shopping for content based on the absence of DRM.
We won't really have a complete victory, though, until we see Microsoft drop entering those silly license key numbers for its products.
Can you name any country that has been "taken over" by Islam in the last few hundred years, that hasn't had a majority Muslim influence prior?
For the last few hundred years, an early lead in calculus gave christian countries the nod up. During that time, christians destroyed and carved up the ottoman empire, and made colonies of many islamic nations. Now, the tables are turning.
I cannot fathom any of those happening in the United States.
I really don't stay up worry about it. Part of what I'm doing now is blowing away my Excellent Karma rating with a good old Troll, but I do think a religious state or an imperial state in the USA is inevitable for the following reasons.
a) undermined faith in elections. Democrats and their recounts are basically just undermining public faith in elections. It's so short sighted, because eventually Republicans are going to do the same thing to them and every close election is going to be one where the elected official lives under a cloud, and by definition that translates into more power for un-elected officials.
b) decreased world wealth. we're at an energy per capita technological plateau. Commodity prices are rising, and will rise even further when schemes like cap and trade are put into place. That translates into less stuff for each and every person, and that makes intangible things like heritage and culture more important.
c) Immigration from more religious countries. Third world countries tend to be more religious.
d) General breakdown of faith in science as an arbiter of the human condition. This is just any number of factors, from greed in the scientific community, things like universities holding patents, big public scientific arguments, guys on tv, political activities, all undermine the perceived impartiality of science. Then you have what might be conceived as scientific missteps. Viral illnesses have yet to be conquered, and the war against bacteriological illnesses is looking like Iraq 2006. And then you'll have technologies being created that people don't necessarily like, intrusive stuff, scanners, data miners, biodetectors, mind readers on the horizon, like who wants that, and finally, to top it all off, everyone gets to have less stuff to save the eco-system.
e) Darwin is religion's best friend. Most religions are male dominated, and that means babies. Make abortion a sin, take career options away from women, condone domestic violence, and boom your country is having so many babies your
-average- age is 22. Population matters, despite what everyone argues to the contrary. Countries with the largest population will dominate the world economy, and within a country the demographics with the largest population will dominate elections. Right now, liberalists aren't having babies, but conservatives are, as their god commands. Eventually, that will catch up to liberalists.
If any religion could do that in a modern progressive democratic state, the fundies in the States would have done it already. And in fact, in the case of the stuff about abortion, gays and women you mentioned, the religious right have already tried.
They haven't really -tried-, because there's still abortion and still gay people running around. Yeah they make some noises at the ballot box but they still follow the democratic process. We go through another 100 years of people stealing elections and many folks will just say why bother and side with a dictator. Al Gore should be shot for establishing this precedent.
The reason they failed is that countries that have high standards of living, high literacy rates, free elections and judicial oversight of the government don't allow that shit.
Well, let's look at that. Standards of living are going to fall because of environmental legislation, of that there is no doubt, and along with it, literacy rates. Democrats|Republicans are already out there tampering with elections wherever they can, and with that comes the realization that judicial oversight is a joke. Liberalism always worked because it was linked to a science of capitalism and having more stuff for the people, and you take those two things off of the table, the rest of it is something people don't like. I mean, sure, people are going to put up with some cultural slights because they can always buy more stuff, but you throw carbon credits, ever stricter emissions controls, rising commodity prices, and next thing you know, someone making fun of your christmas tree is probably going to be getting his teeth kicked in.
He likely considers keeping people from praying to the wrong invisible sky-wizard
Actually, no. My point is more like, anyone with half a brain should fall in line with a sky wizard to worship and get on with the program. Sky wizard is going to win. Of course, I'd like it to be my christian sky-wizard, because I like my culture and want it to dominate, but ultimately some sky wizard is going to win and secular liberalism is going to lose.
Historically, organized religion has a pretty strong tradition of triumphing over other cultural systems. Male domination may not make the women happy, but it is pretty damn good evolutionary trait. Darwin doesn't care if women like their babies or not, only if they have them.
And logically, too, what's really to lose in following a sky-wizard. If there is no God, as you allude, there's nothing wrong with it, and its just evolution, so anything you can do for your culture to triumph is really on the table. If there is a God, then God sanctions your behavior with his Sky-wizardful mercilessness, and there's still nothing wrong with it.
What you don't get is this. Freedom comes from an ideology, yes, but it is also based on wealth. We are entering an age where people are going to be poorer, long term, because well, there's a cap on natural resources, soon to be caps on energy consumption, and, there's just going to be less and less to go around. For a time, you can make this argument that we should all equally accept less, learn to share, and what not, so that we can all put up with each other, but at some point, Sky-wizard is going to come along, and say that's a bunch of crap, let's just wipe out everyone who doesn't believe in our sky wizard, however many billions that is, and have the whole planet to ourselves, in much richer fashion.
Oh, and please, go on and bleed your heart about how terrible christianity is because its adherents do not follow the teachings of christ. There's plenty of "christians" that are more pagan now anyway - the old Catholic habit of making pagan gods saints to introduce people to christ has now the effect of people of christ being introduced to pagan gods. And I'll tell you, the pagan sky wizards have no "turn the other cheek" stuff to slow them down.
It will be just like Roman times, where Empires are made and formed with all the religious zeqal but without the judeao-christian conscience.
I'm specifically asking for *any* evidence of your claims and yet you keep saying 'because' with no facts to back it up
And I'm saying again. You have NO EVIDENCE of any sort of thought as to the consequences of what you are doing. There was no evidence that CO2 would screw the world up, not even 20 years ago, and some would argue not even now, there's still no smoking gun. They didn't have evidence about thalidomide, about DDT, about every other dumb thing humanity as done, until we did it.
But, there you go again.... "it's perfectly safe, because no one has proven otherwise, so let's build 7 billion of them."
You call me insane, but, the present problem we are in is because of a vast rollout of a technology with no assumed consequences, only to find out, that, in fact, there were serious consequences. Yep, do that SAME thing again. SAME dumb logic.
I'll take a few thousand nukes, over windmills and solar panels everywhere, any day of the week. You can go back to hiding from the "horrible nuclear fire", just like cavemen did from current fire.
If the liberals of this country made it possible for Islam to spread and then take over the USA, then watch all of their progress evaporate as women are disenfranchised, then kicked out of their jobs, abortion is banned, homosexuals are stoned, writers are jailed, directors shot, dancers raped, just like, well, every other country where Islam has taken over.
I'd trust Bush with them more, any day of the week. That's the whole point. I would argue this point with many conservatives. Sure, we know that Bush is only going to go after a bunch of muzzies and illegal aliens but you know that if Dems get the same powers, they are coming after us, just like they always have, but with much more power. The only compromise that is reasonable is a limited government.
The whole deal with Fiorina was that the conventional wisdom is that HP was dead as a PC company, the merger with Compaq was stupid, they should have focused on printers, and now look at them.
The printer business is nice for HP, but they are making loads of dough from enterprise business sales (thank you Compaq), and, they are, I think, the leader in PC sales overall, at least in notebooks.
You are using a ridiculous argument. You wave your hands and say, "see, there's trees everywhere, blocking the wind, so we can build a bunch of stuff too... in fact, we can build as much as we want." We've been doing that same dumb logic for three thousand years, and obviously, people like you are going to do it for three thousand more. Morons, all of you.
Just because the bear shit in the woods, does not mean that every human can go and shit in the woods. Just because a whale kicks out CO2, does not mean that we can go and build 4 billion cars, kicking out CO2. And just because you see some trees blocking the wind, or making shade on the ground, does not mean you can go and put up 4 billion windmills and 7 billion solar panels.
The lowest, environmentally impacting thing you can possibly due is to build nuclear power plants. It's the least change to the air, the water, and the land, of this planet. Yes, there is the risk that some accident might happen, but if you go and put out 7 billion windmills and 5 billion solar panels, (not to mention the other 50 billion windmills and 100 billion solar panels you will also put in the trash), then, you are definitely going to fuck something up. You don't even know what it is, and even worse, you don't even want to look.
It's just ignorant.
You sound like a big three manager, who think that all of their problems are about marketing and customer perception, rather than better engineering and manufacturing.
American cars are better engineered and their quality is as good as any car in the world.