Please, tell me how the decline of the American auto industry began the decline of civil liberties in this country. As far as I can tell, it's tied closely to the ideas of jingoism and mercantilism. Don't buy American, buy the best.
Sure, it certainly has. You get a country whose people are being told by the powers that be that they aren't good enough on the global scale, and some new power that be will come along and tell them that they are. I mean, you get a bunch of people that are already angry because their economic lives have been turned upside down, then, its pretty easy to throw a little fuel on the fire and let them go after some other enemy. Do you really think Americans would be so willing to invite nearly 30 years of constant warfare if it wasn't against a backdrop of continual economic adjustment and manufacturing decline? For a lot of families, being in the military and serving in a war is all they have as a source of pride.
I pay taxes, I vote. That should be enough. Buying American is just icing on the cake. In a capitalist system, I'm going to buy what I deem to be the better value, because...that's part of capitalism
That's alright then, just, don't bitch if other people don't believe that is good enough, or, if in turn, you can't get a job or get squeezed because someone else shops out your job overseas. It's all well and good to look at machinists and say they should retrain, but there's always some big advance around the corner that could toss a lifetime of your experience down the drain as well, or, force you down to $7/hr as well. If you wind up packing up your junk when they come to take your house, don't say that you couldn't see it happening to you, because you were warned.
Well, that's true. Say, how's the quitting smoking going? I've smoked a few since new years, only when I'm drinking, but otherwise doing pretty good. Thanks for asking, but, pretty horrible. The biggest problem is not driving my wife crazy for the first few days. Her mother is in the hospital right now with open heart surgery complications and so she can't deal with the stress of me going bonkers too. So, I'll probably send her off to Maine to visit a friend of hers for a week and go cold turkey then.
You mean a car company actually treats their employees well enough that they don't feel the need to pay out a percentage of their paychecks to some union brass evrey week? Let's see, GM workers are bringing in $20-$30 / hr, and Toyota US workers are bringing in $10/hr. GM, on the whole, is doling out $80/hr per worker, whereas Toyota is considerably less. Must be that you are reading Toyota management advertising a tad too much.
It's not the world's inability that's the problem. It's the cheap labor conservatives an their policy of doing anything to screw over the working man and make him desperate enough to put up with anything they dish out. You can bend over and spread for them if you like, but I'm not going to.
All I'm saying is, if you are choosing to buy a foreign car or work for a foreign company because the this or that is better, don't go crying because investors make the same choices as you. You can't whine about Walmart while at the same complain about GM being inefficient.
I drive a Subaru. Made in Lafayette, Indiana. Was your American car made in the US? I doubt it. Why don't you check that label again! The engine and tranny were made in Japan. They almost invariably are, with Japanese cars. All that's really done is final assembly, sorta like, Ikea but for cars. And besides, all the design work, pension benefits, shareholders, etc, all go back to Japan. We borrow to pay for the world's inability to create domestic demand for their own products. I'm sick of it.
I have no idea if you're trying to be funny-haha or funny-cuckoo. That scares me.
- it was a joke - of course, if you say anything on slashdot that even begins to make fun of people's political sensibilities, left or right, you'll be immediately taken seriously and modded down as angry people go back to their web sites and give Obama or Romney another $20 to really, really, let them know how much they care about the issues.
Talk about human support for mutiny is moot when even today in the United States our rights are being stripped out one thread at a time and nobody so much as blinks or turns away from American Idol or Walmart. Meanwhile, you're probably not driving an American car. Why should they be loyal to you when you aren't loyal to them? Where was all the outrage in the 1980s when Americans abandoned GM (and as a consequence, the Union), in droves? That was when the problem started, not now.
One worker might talk about it and wind up turned in (because he's a terrorist, obviously) and those that betray will be rewarded with coupons to McDonalds. Probably not McDonald's ever since that jerk pressured them into giving up SuperSize. Yeah, their burgers are still great.... But, now, if we throw in Wendy's Biggie Fries and Biggie Diet Coke to go with their killer double cheeseburger slathered with onions and melted cheddar cheese, dipped in their chili, and topped off with a frosty, well, I hope you like Gitmo!
Efforts to restrict industrial pollution have lowered the average particulate size created by man. These tiny pollution particles work their way into the earth's mantle, causing it to become more plastic, like a jar of marbles. Left to continue, the earth will become a giant wobbly mush, and we will be flung into space as the earth shakes violently, like a pizza dough spinning and warping. The only thing we can do is begin polluting more immediately, burning as much coal as possible and ripping off all of these pollution control filters.
Unfortunately, even though it would probably be a boon to my home town, I can't agree with bringing back coal. All of the evidence just seems to point to critical public safety issues due to the inevitable pollution. I'm a believer that, when the world changes, you change with it
This is a pretty simplistic answer to change, unfortunately, and it fails to speak to how terrorism can spread like wildfire. Sure, you can say that we should all switch to some other way of life because we are screwing the planet, but, at the end of the day, you are but a man with a can of tuna saying that the dozen people in the lifeboat have to share. No, they do not. they could throw you overboard and take your tuna. Or, they could just eat you.
Coal mining isn't inherently bad. No resource extraction really is. It's just that 6 billion people can't live the way a billion people used to, and that ultimately begs the question, what if the world only had a population of 400 million Americans, and there was nobody else?
I guarantee you that your coal miner would be tempted to nuke the rest of the planet and keep his job, rather than uproot his entire family because some other uppity pricks from DC want him to "change."
Actually, you aren't too far off the mark. Hubble is actually based a lot on the KH-11 package. The basic idea is, as you said, if we can read x,y,z on earth from space, we ought to be able to use a similar thing to see a,b,c in the galaxy. It's sort of a sinister spy sat for the technical good.
Doing whatever you want just for your own needs without thinking of others is pretty much the exact definition of selfish behavior. You want to force people to bend to your will just because you want some cheaper oil. Liberty requires personal responsibility. Responsibility to both yourself and others. Liberty means freedom from compulsion, but without personal responsibility all you are left with is a chaotic void.
Well now, that's a simplistic way of viewing life. Unfortunately, its wrong too, as it automatically treats everyone else as incapable. This is, of course, what liberals would have people believe, as, they want to disempower everyone so they can more easily become slaves!
The reality is much simpler : at some point, you have to assume that other people are competent, able to fend for themselves and so that any conflicts that may arise can be peaceable settled by two parties. Arguing that you need to have a big strong man make all the rules, and that we should feel obligated to listen to such strongmen is orwellian at best.
No doubt bullets can kill, but without good intel, bullets are kind of indiscrimant killers. Besides, FCS is full of firepower as well, so it's not just about lines of code. Go check out the briefing slides available from Boeing. Those are some killer fighting vehicles!
See, I'm not impressed with the new vehicles at all. A lot of the FCS vehicles are basically designed to shrink the size of the army down because M-1 tanks are too heavy to fly. The M-1 is a good tank, except that, it would do better on fuel and possibly maintenance with a diesel engine rather than the turbine that it has. My thought was, rather than doing the Rumsfeld thing of trying to shrink the Army down so that we can fit it into airplanes, why not just build bigger airplanes?
And back when semi-auto rifles were introduced, soliders didn't think it was worth the extra weight and hassle over their good old bolt-action rifles
First off, the M-16 is full auto with three round bursts, so, its not a semi-auto in the sense of the AR-15 is at all. In any case, the modern combat rifle actually weighs less than the bolt action rifle that preceded it, so, there goes that argument. And I would be more than willing to bet that a good broadsword actually weighs more than either a bolt action rifle or an automatic rifle.
And your argument is ridiculous anyway, because, every advance in weapon gives you additional killing power and the ability to defeat an adversary. A notebook computer doesn't. If the Army needs an upgrade in computers anywhere, its in its logistical chain. But seriously, if you look at the casualties from Iraq, they are overwhelmingly from IEDs. If our guys had a detector for IEDs, then, there would be far fewer wounded and far fewer killed, and that to me, is worth the billions in R&D needed.
The thing about FCS is that, when early versions of it have been tried in our present war, soldiers have found that the extra computerization is often not worth the weight of the computer. It seems to me that if the Army is going to be spending billions of dollars developing anything, they ought to be looking for a way to detect hidden explosives. FCS doesn't do a damn thing to aid against insurgencies whose primary weapon is the booby trap.
The robber barons were always self-serving. Difference is that in the days of yore they were in fear of God, or even society sanctions, so they invested without any self interest. Nowadays Gates will invest in education -- if you buy his software
Well, yes, that's the thing. Also, in the case of Rockefeller, they were deeply religious people in a sense, and so, while John D was an evil bastage, his son and his son's sons would later be the ones to reconcile their religious beliefs with their vast wealth and begin to use their resources to press for social justice. Sure, they too did some awful things, but I'm pretty sure that 100 years later, no one would ever question Jay Rockefeller's commitment to progressive liberalism. We on the right wing would say that he's a whack job, and he is, but, from where he's coming from, and his family history, I can't say that he could do any differently.
The one big point to make, is that, I'm hardly a big liberal, but, even I expect that the whole point of creating these ultra-rich people is so that they can in turn use their experience and knowledge and wealth to create institutions later in life that benefit society as a whole.
While I think the idea of nuclear vehicles has a lot of merit this is unfortunately the typical nuclear advocate outright lie. "Nuclear could be the best we could have so let us try something out and see if it works" is not an outright lie and would have been better.
There IS nothing better on the drawing boards for fast space flight. The NERVA rocket from the 1960s produced an ISP between 800 to 1000. This is roughly twice the efficiency of today's best chemical rockets. There's fundamental limits to what chemical rockets can do, as simply, binding energies between atomic parts are much lower than the binding energy between atomic parts. If you want to go somewhere quickly, you need energy to do that, and that means nuclear powered spacecraft.
Sure, you can make the argument on earth against nuclear power because, what you really want to do is to have people use less energy so that we don't need nuclear, and thus open the gate for things like solar power. But solar power isn't going to cut it in deep space flight. For one thing, the sun is literally not bright enough to really go far into space using solar power. Solar sails are out there, on the drawing board, but, no one's actually gotten one to work yet, and, they take much, much longer to accelerate a craft than a nuclear engine would.
Sorry, but physics is simply against you. It's simply a fact. Real space exploration means nuclear power, and as a consequence, anyone who is against nuclear power is ultimately working to keep humanity hopelessly earth-bound.
Gates, and humanity, would be better served if he acted like the real "Robber Baron" of American history.
The great robber barons - Carnegie, Rockefeller, and really, a lot more, all invested rather heavily in some basic infrastructure that continues to improve the USA to this day. All of the great robber barons ploughed their vast fortunes into libraries, universities, hospitals and other enterprises and essentially created, ironically, all of today's "liberal" institutions. While its admirable that he pours a lot of money in fighting HIV in Africa, if he actually built universities, vocational schools, or even just invested in existing ones, ultimately, the world would be much better served. Do you want humanity to genuinely improve? Good. Go set your school of choice up with an endowment so that they can buy a new supercomputer every couple of years.
While you are it, maybe these billionaires ought to do what Henry Ford did and pay their workers wages far above what everyone else was getting paid at the time. You know, maybe create a real middle class again!
The original Bush plan under Sean O'Keefe, to build nuclear powered spacecraft, and do JIMO, was ultimately the space program with the largest payoff. The solar system is -big-, and getting there means something more than chemical rockets. Nuclear is the best we have. Unfortunately, Zubrin and company convinced a Republican Congress and Bush that we should go back to the moon now, and to Mars now, which, at best will be the equivalent of sending two guys in a canoe across the Atlantic in the 11th century. Sure, you could do it, but it won't accomplish nothing. To really do Mars right, you need bigger and faster spaceships, and Prometheus is more of a stepping stone to that than Ares will ever be.
There is something that we agree on completely. The subsidies must end. No more corporate welfare. As for limited liability, I believe that it is on balance more positive than negative, but we obviously disagree on that point.
well, here's the thing. I don't disagree with you really that much at all. Mine is a rhetorical argument that wonders if the public definition of right and wrong changed, what would be the social implications? Like, let's say I convinced everyone to not pay their bills, then suddenly, our definition of what is fair ownership and what is not would change. Recall that at one point we were all property of the King (as serfs), back in the day...
Oh great... now we're going to get tabloids full of pictures of some guy in a rubber suit being called gravity waves, and he's going to be spotted driving a bus in Alaska.
Should be modded +5 Funny. I would add that there will probably be around 10 hours of Da Vinci Bible Big Foot Lost UFO Hunting Gravity Wave shows on the History Channel. Add the voice over: "Could the proliferation of aliens be caused by Gravity Waves? Did the ancients know about Gravity Waves?", with the obligatory reference to Stonehenge and the Pyramids...
Slashdot Mirror
Please, tell me how the decline of the American auto industry began the decline of civil liberties in this country. As far as I can tell, it's tied closely to the ideas of jingoism and mercantilism. Don't buy American, buy the best.
Sure, it certainly has. You get a country whose people are being told by the powers that be that they aren't good enough on the global scale, and some new power that be will come along and tell them that they are. I mean, you get a bunch of people that are already angry because their economic lives have been turned upside down, then, its pretty easy to throw a little fuel on the fire and let them go after some other enemy. Do you really think Americans would be so willing to invite nearly 30 years of constant warfare if it wasn't against a backdrop of continual economic adjustment and manufacturing decline? For a lot of families, being in the military and serving in a war is all they have as a source of pride.
I pay taxes, I vote. That should be enough. Buying American is just icing on the cake. In a capitalist system, I'm going to buy what I deem to be the better value, because...that's part of capitalism
That's alright then, just, don't bitch if other people don't believe that is good enough, or, if in turn, you can't get a job or get squeezed because someone else shops out your job overseas. It's all well and good to look at machinists and say they should retrain, but there's always some big advance around the corner that could toss a lifetime of your experience down the drain as well, or, force you down to $7/hr as well. If you wind up packing up your junk when they come to take your house, don't say that you couldn't see it happening to you, because you were warned.
How are you doing?
GM vs Toyota
It's not the world's inability that's the problem. It's the cheap labor conservatives an their policy of doing anything to screw over the working man and make him desperate enough to put up with anything they dish out. You can bend over and spread for them if you like, but I'm not going to.
All I'm saying is, if you are choosing to buy a foreign car or work for a foreign company because the this or that is better, don't go crying because investors make the same choices as you. You can't whine about Walmart while at the same complain about GM being inefficient.
Where's the UAW in Toyota plants?
I have no idea if you're trying to be funny-haha or funny-cuckoo. That scares me.
- it was a joke - of course, if you say anything on slashdot that even begins to make fun of people's political sensibilities, left or right, you'll be immediately taken seriously and modded down as angry people go back to their web sites and give Obama or Romney another $20 to really, really, let them know how much they care about the issues.
Efforts to restrict industrial pollution have lowered the average particulate size created by man. These tiny pollution particles work their way into the earth's mantle, causing it to become more plastic, like a jar of marbles. Left to continue, the earth will become a giant wobbly mush, and we will be flung into space as the earth shakes violently, like a pizza dough spinning and warping. The only thing we can do is begin polluting more immediately, burning as much coal as possible and ripping off all of these pollution control filters.
Unfortunately, even though it would probably be a boon to my home town, I can't agree with bringing back coal. All of the evidence just seems to point to critical public safety issues due to the inevitable pollution. I'm a believer that, when the world changes, you change with it
This is a pretty simplistic answer to change, unfortunately, and it fails to speak to how terrorism can spread like wildfire. Sure, you can say that we should all switch to some other way of life because we are screwing the planet, but, at the end of the day, you are but a man with a can of tuna saying that the dozen people in the lifeboat have to share. No, they do not. they could throw you overboard and take your tuna. Or, they could just eat you.
Coal mining isn't inherently bad. No resource extraction really is. It's just that 6 billion people can't live the way a billion people used to, and that ultimately begs the question, what if the world only had a population of 400 million Americans, and there was nobody else?
I guarantee you that your coal miner would be tempted to nuke the rest of the planet and keep his job, rather than uproot his entire family because some other uppity pricks from DC want him to "change."
Actually, you aren't too far off the mark. Hubble is actually based a lot on the KH-11 package. The basic idea is, as you said, if we can read x,y,z on earth from space, we ought to be able to use a similar thing to see a,b,c in the galaxy. It's sort of a sinister spy sat for the technical good.
Yes. Of course, you starve the livestock...
Ah Jerry/Elric, my sweet, thou art the champion eternal! Of course we know however, that for similar reasons, economic sanctions do not work either...
Arioch.
P.S. How do you really find a needle in a haystack? With a match.
So, does that mean, if you get all the hay there is, and burn it, you'll find all the needles?
Doing whatever you want just for your own needs without thinking of others is pretty much the exact definition of selfish behavior. You want to force people to bend to your will just because you want some cheaper oil. Liberty requires personal responsibility. Responsibility to both yourself and others. Liberty means freedom from compulsion, but without personal responsibility all you are left with is a chaotic void.
Well now, that's a simplistic way of viewing life. Unfortunately, its wrong too, as it automatically treats everyone else as incapable. This is, of course, what liberals would have people believe, as, they want to disempower everyone so they can more easily become slaves!
The reality is much simpler : at some point, you have to assume that other people are competent, able to fend for themselves and so that any conflicts that may arise can be peaceable settled by two parties. Arguing that you need to have a big strong man make all the rules, and that we should feel obligated to listen to such strongmen is orwellian at best.
No doubt bullets can kill, but without good intel, bullets are kind of indiscrimant killers. Besides, FCS is full of firepower as well, so it's not just about lines of code. Go check out the briefing slides available from Boeing. Those are some killer fighting vehicles!
See, I'm not impressed with the new vehicles at all. A lot of the FCS vehicles are basically designed to shrink the size of the army down because M-1 tanks are too heavy to fly. The M-1 is a good tank, except that, it would do better on fuel and possibly maintenance with a diesel engine rather than the turbine that it has. My thought was, rather than doing the Rumsfeld thing of trying to shrink the Army down so that we can fit it into airplanes, why not just build bigger airplanes?
Woah...talk about being behind the times. Information has replaced bullets in increasing combat power.
:-)
You can be in a room with your notebook, and I'll have my gun, and we'll see who wins in a fight.
And back when semi-auto rifles were introduced, soliders didn't think it was worth the extra weight and hassle over their good old bolt-action rifles
First off, the M-16 is full auto with three round bursts, so, its not a semi-auto in the sense of the AR-15 is at all. In any case, the modern combat rifle actually weighs less than the bolt action rifle that preceded it, so, there goes that argument. And I would be more than willing to bet that a good broadsword actually weighs more than either a bolt action rifle or an automatic rifle.
And your argument is ridiculous anyway, because, every advance in weapon gives you additional killing power and the ability to defeat an adversary. A notebook computer doesn't. If the Army needs an upgrade in computers anywhere, its in its logistical chain. But seriously, if you look at the casualties from Iraq, they are overwhelmingly from IEDs. If our guys had a detector for IEDs, then, there would be far fewer wounded and far fewer killed, and that to me, is worth the billions in R&D needed.
The thing about FCS is that, when early versions of it have been tried in our present war, soldiers have found that the extra computerization is often not worth the weight of the computer. It seems to me that if the Army is going to be spending billions of dollars developing anything, they ought to be looking for a way to detect hidden explosives. FCS doesn't do a damn thing to aid against insurgencies whose primary weapon is the booby trap.
The robber barons were always self-serving. Difference is that in the days of yore they were in fear of God, or even society sanctions, so they invested without any self interest. Nowadays Gates will invest in education -- if you buy his software
Well, yes, that's the thing. Also, in the case of Rockefeller, they were deeply religious people in a sense, and so, while John D was an evil bastage, his son and his son's sons would later be the ones to reconcile their religious beliefs with their vast wealth and begin to use their resources to press for social justice. Sure, they too did some awful things, but I'm pretty sure that 100 years later, no one would ever question Jay Rockefeller's commitment to progressive liberalism. We on the right wing would say that he's a whack job, and he is, but, from where he's coming from, and his family history, I can't say that he could do any differently.
The one big point to make, is that, I'm hardly a big liberal, but, even I expect that the whole point of creating these ultra-rich people is so that they can in turn use their experience and knowledge and wealth to create institutions later in life that benefit society as a whole.
While I think the idea of nuclear vehicles has a lot of merit this is unfortunately the typical nuclear advocate outright lie. "Nuclear could be the best we could have so let us try something out and see if it works" is not an outright lie and would have been better.
There IS nothing better on the drawing boards for fast space flight. The NERVA rocket from the 1960s produced an ISP between 800 to 1000. This is roughly twice the efficiency of today's best chemical rockets. There's fundamental limits to what chemical rockets can do, as simply, binding energies between atomic parts are much lower than the binding energy between atomic parts. If you want to go somewhere quickly, you need energy to do that, and that means nuclear powered spacecraft.
Sure, you can make the argument on earth against nuclear power because, what you really want to do is to have people use less energy so that we don't need nuclear, and thus open the gate for things like solar power. But solar power isn't going to cut it in deep space flight. For one thing, the sun is literally not bright enough to really go far into space using solar power. Solar sails are out there, on the drawing board, but, no one's actually gotten one to work yet, and, they take much, much longer to accelerate a craft than a nuclear engine would.
Sorry, but physics is simply against you. It's simply a fact. Real space exploration means nuclear power, and as a consequence, anyone who is against nuclear power is ultimately working to keep humanity hopelessly earth-bound.
Gates, and humanity, would be better served if he acted like the real "Robber Baron" of American history.
The great robber barons - Carnegie, Rockefeller, and really, a lot more, all invested rather heavily in some basic infrastructure that continues to improve the USA to this day. All of the great robber barons ploughed their vast fortunes into libraries, universities, hospitals and other enterprises and essentially created, ironically, all of today's "liberal" institutions. While its admirable that he pours a lot of money in fighting HIV in Africa, if he actually built universities, vocational schools, or even just invested in existing ones, ultimately, the world would be much better served. Do you want humanity to genuinely improve? Good. Go set your school of choice up with an endowment so that they can buy a new supercomputer every couple of years.
While you are it, maybe these billionaires ought to do what Henry Ford did and pay their workers wages far above what everyone else was getting paid at the time. You know, maybe create a real middle class again!
The original Bush plan under Sean O'Keefe, to build nuclear powered spacecraft, and do JIMO, was ultimately the space program with the largest payoff. The solar system is -big-, and getting there means something more than chemical rockets. Nuclear is the best we have. Unfortunately, Zubrin and company convinced a Republican Congress and Bush that we should go back to the moon now, and to Mars now, which, at best will be the equivalent of sending two guys in a canoe across the Atlantic in the 11th century. Sure, you could do it, but it won't accomplish nothing. To really do Mars right, you need bigger and faster spaceships, and Prometheus is more of a stepping stone to that than Ares will ever be.
There is something that we agree on completely. The subsidies must end. No more corporate welfare. As for limited liability, I believe that it is on balance more positive than negative, but we obviously disagree on that point.
well, here's the thing. I don't disagree with you really that much at all. Mine is a rhetorical argument that wonders if the public definition of right and wrong changed, what would be the social implications? Like, let's say I convinced everyone to not pay their bills, then suddenly, our definition of what is fair ownership and what is not would change. Recall that at one point we were all property of the King (as serfs), back in the day...
Oh great... now we're going to get tabloids full of pictures of some guy in a rubber suit being called gravity waves, and he's going to be spotted driving a bus in Alaska.
Should be modded +5 Funny. I would add that there will probably be around 10 hours of Da Vinci Bible Big Foot Lost UFO Hunting Gravity Wave shows on the History Channel. Add the voice over: "Could the proliferation of aliens be caused by Gravity Waves? Did the ancients know about Gravity Waves?", with the obligatory reference to Stonehenge and the Pyramids...
Gravity Waves, meet Bigfoot, and the Loch Ness Monster and flying saucers and santa claus..
Ain't no such thing.