Many of us statists have endlessly tried making intelligent counter-arguments to people who use the term "statist". After many years I've stopped beating my head against the wall. This article explains why: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/marxism-of-the-right/
Doing a ctrl-x on girlfriends is where sanity comes from. Maybe Sheldon Cooper has it right, but most of the rest of us suffer from certain weaknesses.
You would make a brilliant bureaucrat/politician. I'm not saying you are one, or even that you have the slightest inclination towards such sleazy behavior, but you certainly understand how they think.
No one is surprised, but what about spying on other people's sexting (or whatever you call it when people send revealing pictures of themselves via email). If you really want the general public to get properly outraged over this stuff, forget the 4th Amendment, and find cases of Carly sending interesting pictures of herself to her boyfriend, with the expectation of privacy (forget the technical aspects of whether that expectation is reasonable - human decency says you don't read other people's mail).
It's actually better if Carly, and a bazillion others are at least 18. Otherwise it would degenerate into a discussion of "child pron", whether it was reported, individual criminals at NSA, yada, yada, yada. 18+ women sending revealing pictures of themselves to boyfriends/husbands, and people at the NSA checking them out, is exactly the sort of Peeping Tom behavior that would get the whole country up in arms.
I think this is a terrible problem with education in America. People are afraid of the market, don't understand it, don't want to understand it, but that's due to simple lack of education.
It's not due to lack of education, but due to the simple fact that the stock market really is scary, and that's exacerbated by the fact that people have less faith in our basic financial institutions than they used to.
The stock market is scary because it can swing up and down wildly. The only sound advice for most people (myself included) is that over the long term (decades) it almost always has a better yield than other investments. Buy some low cost index stocks and hang on to them. If you think you can do better than that, you better make sure it's not just vanity, or a few lucky outcomes feeding your confirmation bias. Very few people can beat the market with pick and choose. Timing? Even Warren Buffett avoids that. He's a long term value investor, but really doing that well takes serious research (that's what he and Charlie do all day).
It doesn't help that people have lost faith in our basic financial institutions either. I don't think that rationally applies as much to the stock market. HFT raises a lot of eyebrows (likely for good reason) but for any long term investment its effect is very small. Banks (investment and depository), insurance companies, etc. are another story. There is no secret that major banks and insurance companies got bailed out by the Treasury, and even more, the Federal Reserve. The capitalists, who preach free markets and rugged individualism, got saved by nanny government. To add insult to injury, they were largely being saved from problems that they had created themselves. Both Bush and Obama bent over backwards not to prosecute criminal activity (see William K. Black for details). Meanwhile everybody else lost their houses and their jobs, and the job situation still ain't looking too good. While that isn't, at least strictly speaking, the stock market, is it any wonder that people don't trust financial markets and think the game is rigged.
Are we so intent on class warfare
"Class warfare" gets my vote for the most hackneyed and ultimately meaningless term of the century. What exactly is "class warfare"? From it's reflexive overuse, I can only infer that it means that any discussion of economic conflicts of interest between people of different wealth and income levels should be forbidden as crass, petty, uninformed, counter-productive, and most importantly, something that people who use the term "class warfare" don't want to discuss.
graduated in Chicago, wrote for Harvard and Yale, and on and on with liberal institution after liberal institution
You do realize that Roberts and Scalia went to Harvard, and Thomas to Yale, right?
He was a clerk for Thurgood Marshal. I see, we can ignore everything else in his history because a single sliver of his life might have been conservative.
Marshall, a conservative? That's news to everyone else.
He was a liberal? So was Ronald Reagan at one time. Seidman clerked for Marshall 42 years ago. If he ever was a liberal (clerking for a justice doesn't exactly guarantee one shares the same political convictions) then he is, like so many, a convert.
A NYT writer makes an opinion that the government should IGNORE the parts of the Constitution he doesn't like and uphold the parts he does like.... This is your typical liberal thinking.
The author of that op-ed is a conservative. You were saying?
Whenever these stories come out, I am uncomfortably reminded of conservative constitution-worship.
Why? The point here is that the Constitution has been ignored. With more genuine fealty to it, we wouldn't have this problem. If ever there was an example of why the Constitution should be obeyed, and the dangers of conveniently ignoring the parts someone doesn't like, this is it.
OTOH it says total dioxin emissions from US incinerators has, since 1987 (when regs were first adopted) dropped from 8,905.1 grams to 83.8 grams. So even if the small plants are 83% of the current problem, that's 83% of a problem that has been reduced by about 99%. In other words the total from small plants is not quite 1% of what the problem used to be.
The bottles are stripped of labels, cleaned, and reused up to 50 or so times IIRC, before they're recycled.
Gotta love that new tech. When I was a kid that was commonly done in the US with milk and soda bottles (maybe others). It is the ultimate in recycling though - just use it again! It's kind of like recycling plates, bowls and flatware - an old tradition that works great.
Handy indeed. It seems the old "keep digging and you'll get to China" is only true in Argentina and Chile, but at least it's drier than almost all the other antipodes.
Slashdot Mirror
Many of us statists have endlessly tried making intelligent counter-arguments to people who use the term "statist". After many years I've stopped beating my head against the wall. This article explains why: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/marxism-of-the-right/
Archaic, nothing - the metric system is for people who can't do arithmetic.
Doing a ctrl-x on girlfriends is where sanity comes from. Maybe Sheldon Cooper has it right, but most of the rest of us suffer from certain weaknesses.
Good point. Probably the only ethical thing about the NSA is that they're an equal opportunity employer.
You would make a brilliant bureaucrat/politician. I'm not saying you are one, or even that you have the slightest inclination towards such sleazy behavior, but you certainly understand how they think.
No one is surprised, but what about spying on other people's sexting (or whatever you call it when people send revealing pictures of themselves via email). If you really want the general public to get properly outraged over this stuff, forget the 4th Amendment, and find cases of Carly sending interesting pictures of herself to her boyfriend, with the expectation of privacy (forget the technical aspects of whether that expectation is reasonable - human decency says you don't read other people's mail).
It's actually better if Carly, and a bazillion others are at least 18. Otherwise it would degenerate into a discussion of "child pron", whether it was reported, individual criminals at NSA, yada, yada, yada. 18+ women sending revealing pictures of themselves to boyfriends/husbands, and people at the NSA checking them out, is exactly the sort of Peeping Tom behavior that would get the whole country up in arms.
Wow, ever heard of something called "comma"?
Wow, ever heard of something called a "comma"?
I also don't find that commas make that paragraph any more readable.
Sounds like a great business opportunity. I'm sure they'd be happy to let you take it home for free.
When fire was invented, I guarantee only 20-30% of hominins back then had what it took (mentally, genetically) to safely use fire. [emphasis added]
If you think you can make such guarantees, then you're the last person I'd want designing a nuclear plant.
I think this is a terrible problem with education in America. People are afraid of the market, don't understand it, don't want to understand it, but that's due to simple lack of education.
It's not due to lack of education, but due to the simple fact that the stock market really is scary, and that's exacerbated by the fact that people have less faith in our basic financial institutions than they used to.
The stock market is scary because it can swing up and down wildly. The only sound advice for most people (myself included) is that over the long term (decades) it almost always has a better yield than other investments. Buy some low cost index stocks and hang on to them. If you think you can do better than that, you better make sure it's not just vanity, or a few lucky outcomes feeding your confirmation bias. Very few people can beat the market with pick and choose. Timing? Even Warren Buffett avoids that. He's a long term value investor, but really doing that well takes serious research (that's what he and Charlie do all day).
It doesn't help that people have lost faith in our basic financial institutions either. I don't think that rationally applies as much to the stock market. HFT raises a lot of eyebrows (likely for good reason) but for any long term investment its effect is very small. Banks (investment and depository), insurance companies, etc. are another story. There is no secret that major banks and insurance companies got bailed out by the Treasury, and even more, the Federal Reserve. The capitalists, who preach free markets and rugged individualism, got saved by nanny government. To add insult to injury, they were largely being saved from problems that they had created themselves. Both Bush and Obama bent over backwards not to prosecute criminal activity (see William K. Black for details). Meanwhile everybody else lost their houses and their jobs, and the job situation still ain't looking too good. While that isn't, at least strictly speaking, the stock market, is it any wonder that people don't trust financial markets and think the game is rigged.
Are we so intent on class warfare
"Class warfare" gets my vote for the most hackneyed and ultimately meaningless term of the century. What exactly is "class warfare"? From it's reflexive overuse, I can only infer that it means that any discussion of economic conflicts of interest between people of different wealth and income levels should be forbidden as crass, petty, uninformed, counter-productive, and most importantly, something that people who use the term "class warfare" don't want to discuss.
I meant for actual crimes, as opposed to trumped up political scandals about absolute nonsense.
graduated in Chicago, wrote for Harvard and Yale, and on and on with liberal institution after liberal institution
You do realize that Roberts and Scalia went to Harvard, and Thomas to Yale, right?
He was a clerk for Thurgood Marshal. I see, we can ignore everything else in his history because a single sliver of his life might have been conservative.
Marshall, a conservative? That's news to everyone else.
But at least back then there was a threat of prosecution.
Bush, Cheney and Gingrich are liberals? Who knew.
He was a liberal? So was Ronald Reagan at one time. Seidman clerked for Marshall 42 years ago. If he ever was a liberal (clerking for a justice doesn't exactly guarantee one shares the same political convictions) then he is, like so many, a convert.
During the Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearings, Seidman also attracted attention as an outspoken liberal detractor, writing a scathing response to Sotomayor's claims that she simply applies the law to the facts
Nixon wasn't so bad. At least he had enough respect for the law and the citizens to break in at night.
And enough sense of shame to resign. The more recent politicians are quite literally shameless.
A NYT writer makes an opinion that the government should IGNORE the parts of the Constitution he doesn't like and uphold the parts he does like. ... This is your typical liberal thinking.
The author of that op-ed is a conservative. You were saying?
Whenever these stories come out, I am uncomfortably reminded of conservative constitution-worship.
Why? The point here is that the Constitution has been ignored. With more genuine fealty to it, we wouldn't have this problem. If ever there was an example of why the Constitution should be obeyed, and the dangers of conveniently ignoring the parts someone doesn't like, this is it.
It's already being used on a commercial scale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification_commercialization
Even cooler though is plasma gasification, which is cleaner than incinerators, and is starting to be used on a commercial scale.
OTOH it says total dioxin emissions from US incinerators has, since 1987 (when regs were first adopted) dropped from 8,905.1 grams to 83.8 grams. So even if the small plants are 83% of the current problem, that's 83% of a problem that has been reduced by about 99%. In other words the total from small plants is not quite 1% of what the problem used to be.
Which lends credence to the idea that they don't.
The bottles are stripped of labels, cleaned, and reused up to 50 or so times IIRC, before they're recycled.
Gotta love that new tech. When I was a kid that was commonly done in the US with milk and soda bottles (maybe others). It is the ultimate in recycling though - just use it again! It's kind of like recycling plates, bowls and flatware - an old tradition that works great.
Handy indeed. It seems the old "keep digging and you'll get to China" is only true in Argentina and Chile, but at least it's drier than almost all the other antipodes.
put R&D into incineration techniques
I'm all in favor of additional R&D, but enough has already been done to overcome most of the objections above. You'll find it being used on an industrial scale in, amongst other places, the Netherlands: http://www.triplepundit.com/2010/06/a-tour-of-amsterdam%E2%80%99s-waste-to-energy-plant/