Scott is completely correct, it is inhuman how we treat people and their illnesses.
Religion isn't even standing in the way, only fools who think they speak for God.
God provided us the ability to have free will, choice, and empowered us with the ability to take care of each other. We are our brother's keeper after all.
Scott's father was suffering, he is not committing a sin by using his free will and the help of family and doctors to end that suffering, he is celebrating his life and embracing the long dirt nap, as Scott said his father put it.
It is a crime how old people are treated in this country, more concerned with a pulse than with comfort and happiness.
You might be 100% correct, I have nothing with which to dispute you one way or another, but frankly...
Everything before the invention of the printing press is more legend than fact... too many people couldn't read, fewer people owned books, etc.
What was written down was done so by those in power or those they controlled. What makes you think what was written down more than 550 years ago and before that, going back thousands of years, remotely reflects what happened? I suspect it more reflects what those in power wanted to have happen. After all, history is written by the victor.
I'm not saying it couldn't be right, just saying that from what I see today and how much people can take the same "facts" and come up with completely and totally different views and options from the same "facts".
The irony is that I have no proof whatsoever that Aliens have not landed on Earth and are currently taking up thousands of square miles of desert in West Texas. They might be building military bases, or they might be having one heck of a party.
And they didn't invite me!!! Darn aliens!!!
The funny thing is, if they did do that, would anyone care? Maybe an alien party would be rather fun, so long as we're invited over to have dinner rather than be dinner.:)
The difference is that in Communist China, I can't start any business I want without asking permission first.
I can do that here, and I have done that... Anyone who wants to get ahead, more power to them.
If you have another idea, I'm happy to listen, but frankly I find it disgusting that we have hungry and homeless people in the same country that can build a 250 ship Navy and field a worldwide military that spends more than everyone else on Earth combined.
If we can do that, we should not have hungry people.
I don't claim to know all the solutions, frankly others probably have better ideas.
Slavery was once acceptable, today it is considered horrible. What will it take to make hungry people unacceptable? What will it take to consider treating our fellow human beings with anything less than compassion?
I know the world isn't perfect, but I think if we can afford the other things, we can afford to try.
How reliable is our English Bible today? Here's the real truth, NO ONE KNOWS.
All true, and you wrote more than I cared to, since most people have made up their minds already and don't really listen to random slashdotters anyway.:)
That being said, your point I quoted is very true, but it doesn't matter. Set it aside for a minute.
Work with me here:
Lets just say, lets pretend, for the sake of discussion, that the Bible is accurate, that no translation errors were made, that no edits were made with any ill intent. Lets say that the meanings of the words have someone been held intact perfectly.
Lets just give it that for a minute.
Fine, please provide third party independent citations for the events as they happened in the Bible from sources not associated with the Church.
And thus, the core of the problem reveals itself. Maybe it is all true, but we only have the Church's word for it and the texts that they copied and preserved.
We don't know what else was written down so very long ago and destroyed, we don't know what else might have happened, and frankly, we don't have any proof that most of what happened in the Bible... ever happened...
How many times do people on Slashdot say [Citation Needed]?
Again, it doesn't disprove anything, but if you believe in science at all, then some citations would be nice.
A major function of adolescence is forging a life apart from the parents' control.
That is true, to a point... it is also a nice theory, but when it hits the real world (today, vs. another time in history), you have to modify it to fit the times.
If my child is killed in a car accident because they were doing something stupid, then they didn't learn anything, now did they?
Yes, they need some freedom and the ability to make some decisions, but they also are minors until they are 18 and they live under my roof, thus there are rules to be followed.
If my 16 year old wants to move out, get a job, pay their own bills, then they don't have to listen to me one bit. But frankly they should, because I've been there and done that.
Since teenagers tend to think they have it all figured out, they don't like to listen, it isn't nearly as much fun as goofing off and doing whatever they want.
My kids will be able to drive, so they will have some independence. But they must also respect authority, which in this case, is me. I have rules, I expect them to be followed.
Do they always? No, but there are punishments for that (losing the TV, video games, etc.).
That being said, I'd consider that a change of word use more than anything else.
50 years ago, "gay" meant "happy" far more than it meant "homosexual".
Words have changed a lot over time, so using 21st century definitions to words that were written thousands of years ago is a bit insane.
That all being true, putting it aside, my primary problem with the Bible is a lack of citations. It is a nice bedtime story, but there is nothing to cite to show any of it really happened. The only other texts that could be used as sources are largely provided by the Church itself, thus are unreliably biased.
Note: This does not in any way make the Bible "wrong", it doesn't disprove anything. It is simply a point of fact, no more or less.
Actually, the Bible is the most studied book in history, a large number of experts of all stripes have tried to rip it apart.
The truth is, we have enough of the old texts that it has been shown that the actual edits in the bible are minor. They do exist, but the core of it is there.
The biggest problem with the Bible? It is like Wikipedia without proper citations, it is a self-referencing work that doesn't provide any evidence for anything within other than itself.
No one would accept such a source for anything else today, but for some reason the Bible is accepted as fact.
I'm a Republican, but I think the Republican leadership sold out, I'd fire the lot of them.
Frankly, I don't think the Democrat leadership is any better. The ideals of the Democratic party aren't evil, just some of the ways in which their leaders want to put them into place.
Both sides have good and bad ideas, neither side should have complete control.
The fact is, any government that doesn't provide for the people isn't going to last. People need to eat, need safety, need their general welfare provided for. Too many extreme right wing people believe that government should just let people fail. The mistake with that is that if too many fail, the government will go down with them.
Frankly, if the rich and powerful are going to hold most of the wealthy along with the means of production (in the form of automated factories), then perhaps the rich and powerful should also provide a basic income to everyone. I'm not in the 1%, but I'm in the top 5% of income in the US, so I say this as someone who would be doing the providing.
There is only one catch, one that many people won't like. In return for a monthly basic income and money for food, there must be a population control in there, or people will sit at home and make babies at an impressive rate. So perhaps a $3,000 a month basic income in return for having only one child, with the income being reduced by $500 a month for each additional child. If you can afford it, have all the kids you want, but having more kids shouldn't be making you more money, it should be costing you more money.
No, see my other reply. I copied the wrong number. I pay 25 cents.
Oh... I wonder where the 35 cent number comes from then, that is the number that Forbes provided. Does it vary much from one part of Germany to another?
Germany is generally a lot more energy-efficient. One of the reasons is that power is more expensive and the other reason is that we don't run A/C 24/7 and such stuff. A 4-person home is estimated to use on average 5000 kwh per year here.
It probably helps that your houses are smaller, it isn't as hot there in the summer, and generally you probably are more efficient due to the higher power costs.
When home builders here build homes, it has only been in the past 5 years that they even have talked about the energy efficiency features in homes, and a lot of those are lip service.
Right now it is about 35 degrees outside, but a nice and toasty 75 degrees inside. (2c outside/24c inside) I also have a 3,800sqft home (353sqm) that has large open spaces and tall 14ft ceilings (4.3m). My front door, if you put your hand on it, is very cold, so it is probably doing a terrible job of keeping the heat in. My house is 12 years old, so it isn't really out of date, just how we build houses here.
That is a lot of space to heat and cool, which is largely where our power goes.
In the winter, the cost to run our electrical needs is minor, less than $100 a month (we have natural gas for heat, hot water, cooking, etc). Thankfully natural gas is cheap here, the cost to keep the house at 75 degrees is about $150 a month. The cost to keep it 72 degrees in the summer when it is 105 degrees outside, about twice that price.
Frankly, one of the challenges of getting anyone in the US to care about being more energy efficient is that once you start using a lot of power, you don't care about the cost. With my new HVAC system I installed this past summer, my average electric/gas bill has dropped to under $400 a month. While that isn't "free", it is a minor overall cost to live here, compared to everything else we spend money on.
For me to get the power bill down to $200 a month, I'd have to spend a huge sum of money on energy efficient changes, new windows, new doors, spray foam insulation in the walls, double the insulation in the attic, etc.
The cost to do all of that would be many tens of thousands of dollars (new windows alone would be over $10,000). Yes, it pays itself back over time, but the period of payback is just too long.
If power was 25 cents a kwh, the math would look very different.
I buy a ton of stuff from Amazon, I of course have Prime, but most of the time I switch from 2 day shipping to standard shipping, I just don't need most stuff that fast. There are exceptions, but I'm happy with standard shipping most times.
I actually wouldn't mind the option at checkout to pay 50 cents more to give the worker who packs my item a bonus.
We must have a different idea of what TCO means. You don't get to a cheaper TCO until all the gas savings added up is more than the purchase price difference, plus the time value of money.
Why 30,000? Because that is 3% of the car market in the US, any less than that and you're in hobby numbers, 1% of the market doesn't really make a difference or matter. As it stands, it is about 0.3% of the market, which is why I called it a rounding error.
I see EVs taking off once the price comes down, when that happens, we will see an uptick in sales, I don't believe we will see one before then.
No, it may... They had indeed increased, about 2,000 were sold in January of this year, but frankly these are rounding error numbers.
The question is, will it grow to 30,000 a month within 5 years?
It might, I wouldn't discount that... But it isn't assured either.
As for TCO being less than the sticker price difference, you have to project a long time in the future for that to be true, and make a number of assumptions to do it. To the average car buyer, EVs TCO for them is higher in the time frame they will own it.
Try that link for some info on Germany, at least from the American perspective.
I did misquote one number, the German Environment minister said it would be one trillion euros over two decades, not one decade, if you follow your current plan. Still a lot of money, but not as bad as I feared.
The 35 cents per kwh is the real problem, a lot of poor people won't be able to afford to keep the lights on at that rate.
Did you know that 38% of your "biomass" is actually coming from wood? You're not only chopping down your own trees, you're importing trees from other countries to try and meet your targets?
Anyway, take the time to read that, it is well sourced with citations at the bottom of the article. Let me know if you think any of it is outright wrong, old, or in error. If you find something new that you didn't know, please let me know as well.
The thing is, the goals are good, if they are reasonable and sustainable, then I'm all for them. If they are just pretty paint on an ugly house of cards, then we should all be honest about that as well.
This may not occur to you but a lot of people dont want an SUV. They're slow, unwieldy and prone to rolling in an accident.
I totally get that not everyone wants one, no worries there...
But slow? Really? Have you driven one? It will do 0 to 60 in 6.5 seconds and the quarter mile at 90 mph in 15 seconds. The Toyota Camry V6 does 0-60 in 8.5 seconds and the quarter mile at 85 mph in 16.5 seconds. 403 horsepower and 417 lb-ft of torque can overcome all that weight, the only issue is fuel economy sucks, no way to sugar coat that one.
For a 3 ton truck, that isn't "slow". Actually, for anything that isn't "slow", it is quite reasonable. It isn't a sports car, but sports cars have their own limits and issues.
As for handling? You might be shocked, but it isn't that far off from the Toyota Camry V6 on it's skidpad numbers (less than 10% difference), it handles really well and has a tight turning radius, many people are shocked the first time they see it turn around on a 2 lane road without running off the other side.
Can it roll over? Of course, it is top heavy, that is a concern with such vehicles. You simply can't drive it like a small car, you have to leave a little more room and not try and drive the slalom with it, however if you want to try, it will do it at 54 mph, which is really good for a 3 ton top heavy truck. The Toyota Camry V6 will only do it at 59 mpg.
Well... not that bad, if someone wants to be left alone, I don't mind leaving them alone... but if they want protection from their next door bully, well, shouldn't we charge for that protection?
Police don't work for free, neither should we. That doesn't mean the police should create crime to create demand for their services, but they also shouldn't show up for real criminals if no one pays them either.
Ah, "daddy knows best", I hear that worked out really well for Native Americans, and then the African Americans.
Now that isn't fair, that was a long time ago and frankly, most reasonable Americans (including myself) admit that the way we treated people back then was wrong.
We did stop doing it, did we not?
That doesn't mean we're wrong today. It doesn't mean we're right either, it just means it was another time that doesn't really reflect post WWII reality.
And Americans wonder why people of other nationalities look at them funny?
Yes, and we also wonder why so many nations depend on us for defense without paying us for it.
If we pulled all our forces out of the world, a lot of countries that we current "protect" would find themselves defenseless.
Maybe we should do just that, cut our military in half and balance our budget and let the rest of the world provide for its own military protection.
If we charged nations for the protection we provide, how much income might that produce? Taiwan hasn't been invaded yet, would they be (by China) if we left and said "sorry, you're on your own now... unless you want to start paying us to be here of course".
That brings something up that has bothered me for awhile.
If China and Japan have the second and third largest economies in the world, why don't their military forces reflect that?
The USA has military forces that would completely swamp both nations in all respects, other than manpower.
Why do we have such forces and they don't? Are we kidding ourselves and just feeding the military-industrial complex, or is the military there to be world police?
Our Navy has 12 aircraft carriers, equal to every other country on Earth, and our carriers are actually good, compared to countries like Spain that have a small little jump jet carrier that is actually smaller than our old WWII carriers.
What do we have that for, if not to use it?
Perhaps we should either use it and get some return on that investment, or perhaps we should cut the military in half and balance our budget and leave everyone alone.
I might be ok with either solution, but it seems like we have a big expensive stick, then do nothing with it.
PS. The above might sound a bit crazy or rambling, it is more outloud thoughts rather than meant to push any one point. I'd be much happier if China and Japan would just get along.
Slashdot Mirror
Religion isn't even standing in the way, only fools who think they speak for God.
God provided us the ability to have free will, choice, and empowered us with the ability to take care of each other. We are our brother's keeper after all.
Scott's father was suffering, he is not committing a sin by using his free will and the help of family and doctors to end that suffering, he is celebrating his life and embracing the long dirt nap, as Scott said his father put it.
It is a crime how old people are treated in this country, more concerned with a pulse than with comfort and happiness.
Everything before the invention of the printing press is more legend than fact... too many people couldn't read, fewer people owned books, etc.
What was written down was done so by those in power or those they controlled. What makes you think what was written down more than 550 years ago and before that, going back thousands of years, remotely reflects what happened? I suspect it more reflects what those in power wanted to have happen. After all, history is written by the victor.
I'm not saying it couldn't be right, just saying that from what I see today and how much people can take the same "facts" and come up with completely and totally different views and options from the same "facts".
And they didn't invite me!!! Darn aliens!!!
The funny thing is, if they did do that, would anyone care? Maybe an alien party would be rather fun, so long as we're invited over to have dinner rather than be dinner. :)
I can do that here, and I have done that... Anyone who wants to get ahead, more power to them.
If you have another idea, I'm happy to listen, but frankly I find it disgusting that we have hungry and homeless people in the same country that can build a 250 ship Navy and field a worldwide military that spends more than everyone else on Earth combined.
If we can do that, we should not have hungry people.
I don't claim to know all the solutions, frankly others probably have better ideas.
Slavery was once acceptable, today it is considered horrible. What will it take to make hungry people unacceptable? What will it take to consider treating our fellow human beings with anything less than compassion?
I know the world isn't perfect, but I think if we can afford the other things, we can afford to try.
How reliable is our English Bible today? Here's the real truth, NO ONE KNOWS.
All true, and you wrote more than I cared to, since most people have made up their minds already and don't really listen to random slashdotters anyway. :)
That being said, your point I quoted is very true, but it doesn't matter. Set it aside for a minute.
Work with me here:
Lets just say, lets pretend, for the sake of discussion, that the Bible is accurate, that no translation errors were made, that no edits were made with any ill intent. Lets say that the meanings of the words have someone been held intact perfectly.
Lets just give it that for a minute.
Fine, please provide third party independent citations for the events as they happened in the Bible from sources not associated with the Church.
And thus, the core of the problem reveals itself. Maybe it is all true, but we only have the Church's word for it and the texts that they copied and preserved.
We don't know what else was written down so very long ago and destroyed, we don't know what else might have happened, and frankly, we don't have any proof that most of what happened in the Bible... ever happened...
How many times do people on Slashdot say [Citation Needed]?
Again, it doesn't disprove anything, but if you believe in science at all, then some citations would be nice.
You don't think thermal cameras would work just fine through brick walls in a house?
The idea that we can be really private is over, unless you really want to ditch the web.
A major function of adolescence is forging a life apart from the parents' control.
That is true, to a point... it is also a nice theory, but when it hits the real world (today, vs. another time in history), you have to modify it to fit the times.
If my child is killed in a car accident because they were doing something stupid, then they didn't learn anything, now did they?
Yes, they need some freedom and the ability to make some decisions, but they also are minors until they are 18 and they live under my roof, thus there are rules to be followed.
If my 16 year old wants to move out, get a job, pay their own bills, then they don't have to listen to me one bit. But frankly they should, because I've been there and done that.
Since teenagers tend to think they have it all figured out, they don't like to listen, it isn't nearly as much fun as goofing off and doing whatever they want.
My kids will be able to drive, so they will have some independence. But they must also respect authority, which in this case, is me. I have rules, I expect them to be followed.
Do they always? No, but there are punishments for that (losing the TV, video games, etc.).
I fully want this in the cars my kids drive in a few years. I recall very well my driving habits when I was 16, and they were terrible.
If my kids don't want this, they can buy their own cars and pay their own insurance. If they want to drive my cars... well... :)
Welcome to Daddy, "a.k.a. Big Brother". :)
That being said, I'd consider that a change of word use more than anything else.
50 years ago, "gay" meant "happy" far more than it meant "homosexual".
Words have changed a lot over time, so using 21st century definitions to words that were written thousands of years ago is a bit insane.
That all being true, putting it aside, my primary problem with the Bible is a lack of citations. It is a nice bedtime story, but there is nothing to cite to show any of it really happened. The only other texts that could be used as sources are largely provided by the Church itself, thus are unreliably biased.
Note: This does not in any way make the Bible "wrong", it doesn't disprove anything. It is simply a point of fact, no more or less.
The truth is, we have enough of the old texts that it has been shown that the actual edits in the bible are minor. They do exist, but the core of it is there.
The biggest problem with the Bible? It is like Wikipedia without proper citations, it is a self-referencing work that doesn't provide any evidence for anything within other than itself.
No one would accept such a source for anything else today, but for some reason the Bible is accepted as fact.
Frankly, I don't think the Democrat leadership is any better. The ideals of the Democratic party aren't evil, just some of the ways in which their leaders want to put them into place.
Both sides have good and bad ideas, neither side should have complete control.
The fact is, any government that doesn't provide for the people isn't going to last. People need to eat, need safety, need their general welfare provided for. Too many extreme right wing people believe that government should just let people fail. The mistake with that is that if too many fail, the government will go down with them.
Frankly, if the rich and powerful are going to hold most of the wealthy along with the means of production (in the form of automated factories), then perhaps the rich and powerful should also provide a basic income to everyone. I'm not in the 1%, but I'm in the top 5% of income in the US, so I say this as someone who would be doing the providing.
There is only one catch, one that many people won't like. In return for a monthly basic income and money for food, there must be a population control in there, or people will sit at home and make babies at an impressive rate. So perhaps a $3,000 a month basic income in return for having only one child, with the income being reduced by $500 a month for each additional child. If you can afford it, have all the kids you want, but having more kids shouldn't be making you more money, it should be costing you more money.
Birth control, of course, would be free.
Thoughts?
No, see my other reply. I copied the wrong number. I pay 25 cents.
Oh... I wonder where the 35 cent number comes from then, that is the number that Forbes provided. Does it vary much from one part of Germany to another?
Germany is generally a lot more energy-efficient. One of the reasons is that power is more expensive and the other reason is that we don't run A/C 24/7 and such stuff. A 4-person home is estimated to use on average 5000 kwh per year here.
It probably helps that your houses are smaller, it isn't as hot there in the summer, and generally you probably are more efficient due to the higher power costs.
When home builders here build homes, it has only been in the past 5 years that they even have talked about the energy efficiency features in homes, and a lot of those are lip service.
Right now it is about 35 degrees outside, but a nice and toasty 75 degrees inside. (2c outside/24c inside) I also have a 3,800sqft home (353sqm) that has large open spaces and tall 14ft ceilings (4.3m). My front door, if you put your hand on it, is very cold, so it is probably doing a terrible job of keeping the heat in. My house is 12 years old, so it isn't really out of date, just how we build houses here.
That is a lot of space to heat and cool, which is largely where our power goes.
In the winter, the cost to run our electrical needs is minor, less than $100 a month (we have natural gas for heat, hot water, cooking, etc). Thankfully natural gas is cheap here, the cost to keep the house at 75 degrees is about $150 a month. The cost to keep it 72 degrees in the summer when it is 105 degrees outside, about twice that price.
Frankly, one of the challenges of getting anyone in the US to care about being more energy efficient is that once you start using a lot of power, you don't care about the cost. With my new HVAC system I installed this past summer, my average electric/gas bill has dropped to under $400 a month. While that isn't "free", it is a minor overall cost to live here, compared to everything else we spend money on.
For me to get the power bill down to $200 a month, I'd have to spend a huge sum of money on energy efficient changes, new windows, new doors, spray foam insulation in the walls, double the insulation in the attic, etc.
The cost to do all of that would be many tens of thousands of dollars (new windows alone would be over $10,000). Yes, it pays itself back over time, but the period of payback is just too long.
If power was 25 cents a kwh, the math would look very different.
Amazon is working on fully automated warehouses, McDonalds is working on automatic burger making machines, etc.
At some point, there will just not be anything for millions of people to do, machines will do it all.
We will need to figure out another way to distribute resources at some point, having a job won't be it forever.
Amazon is working on it, it is just a matter of time.
I actually wouldn't mind the option at checkout to pay 50 cents more to give the worker who packs my item a bonus.
Why 30,000? Because that is 3% of the car market in the US, any less than that and you're in hobby numbers, 1% of the market doesn't really make a difference or matter. As it stands, it is about 0.3% of the market, which is why I called it a rounding error.
I see EVs taking off once the price comes down, when that happens, we will see an uptick in sales, I don't believe we will see one before then.
The question is, will it grow to 30,000 a month within 5 years?
It might, I wouldn't discount that... But it isn't assured either.
As for TCO being less than the sticker price difference, you have to project a long time in the future for that to be true, and make a number of assumptions to do it. To the average car buyer, EVs TCO for them is higher in the time frame they will own it.
Yikes that is high, but fair enough...
Just for comparison, I pay just under 11 cents per kwh, which is good, because last month my house used 1812 kwh, it would be expensive at 35 cents.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/10/04/should-other-nations-follow-germanys-lead-on-promoting-solar-power/
Try that link for some info on Germany, at least from the American perspective.
I did misquote one number, the German Environment minister said it would be one trillion euros over two decades, not one decade, if you follow your current plan. Still a lot of money, but not as bad as I feared.
The 35 cents per kwh is the real problem, a lot of poor people won't be able to afford to keep the lights on at that rate.
Did you know that 38% of your "biomass" is actually coming from wood? You're not only chopping down your own trees, you're importing trees from other countries to try and meet your targets?
Anyway, take the time to read that, it is well sourced with citations at the bottom of the article. Let me know if you think any of it is outright wrong, old, or in error. If you find something new that you didn't know, please let me know as well.
The thing is, the goals are good, if they are reasonable and sustainable, then I'm all for them. If they are just pretty paint on an ugly house of cards, then we should all be honest about that as well.
This may not occur to you but a lot of people dont want an SUV. They're slow, unwieldy and prone to rolling in an accident.
I totally get that not everyone wants one, no worries there...
But slow? Really? Have you driven one? It will do 0 to 60 in 6.5 seconds and the quarter mile at 90 mph in 15 seconds. The Toyota Camry V6 does 0-60 in 8.5 seconds and the quarter mile at 85 mph in 16.5 seconds. 403 horsepower and 417 lb-ft of torque can overcome all that weight, the only issue is fuel economy sucks, no way to sugar coat that one.
For a 3 ton truck, that isn't "slow". Actually, for anything that isn't "slow", it is quite reasonable. It isn't a sports car, but sports cars have their own limits and issues.
As for handling? You might be shocked, but it isn't that far off from the Toyota Camry V6 on it's skidpad numbers (less than 10% difference), it handles really well and has a tight turning radius, many people are shocked the first time they see it turn around on a 2 lane road without running off the other side.
Can it roll over? Of course, it is top heavy, that is a concern with such vehicles. You simply can't drive it like a small car, you have to leave a little more room and not try and drive the slalom with it, however if you want to try, it will do it at 54 mph, which is really good for a 3 ton top heavy truck. The Toyota Camry V6 will only do it at 59 mpg.
Police don't work for free, neither should we. That doesn't mean the police should create crime to create demand for their services, but they also shouldn't show up for real criminals if no one pays them either.
Give them the choice... spend billions on national defense, or hire the US to protect themselves.
If we charged them just $100 billion a year, I suspect that would be less expensive than having to do it all from scratch themselves.
If we did that all over the world, our military might even turn a profit! :)
Ah, "daddy knows best", I hear that worked out really well for Native Americans, and then the African Americans.
Now that isn't fair, that was a long time ago and frankly, most reasonable Americans (including myself) admit that the way we treated people back then was wrong.
We did stop doing it, did we not?
That doesn't mean we're wrong today. It doesn't mean we're right either, it just means it was another time that doesn't really reflect post WWII reality.
And Americans wonder why people of other nationalities look at them funny?
Yes, and we also wonder why so many nations depend on us for defense without paying us for it.
If we pulled all our forces out of the world, a lot of countries that we current "protect" would find themselves defenseless.
Maybe we should do just that, cut our military in half and balance our budget and let the rest of the world provide for its own military protection.
If we charged nations for the protection we provide, how much income might that produce? Taiwan hasn't been invaded yet, would they be (by China) if we left and said "sorry, you're on your own now... unless you want to start paying us to be here of course".
Just tossing out some thoughts...
If China and Japan have the second and third largest economies in the world, why don't their military forces reflect that?
The USA has military forces that would completely swamp both nations in all respects, other than manpower.
Why do we have such forces and they don't? Are we kidding ourselves and just feeding the military-industrial complex, or is the military there to be world police?
Our Navy has 12 aircraft carriers, equal to every other country on Earth, and our carriers are actually good, compared to countries like Spain that have a small little jump jet carrier that is actually smaller than our old WWII carriers.
What do we have that for, if not to use it?
Perhaps we should either use it and get some return on that investment, or perhaps we should cut the military in half and balance our budget and leave everyone alone.
I might be ok with either solution, but it seems like we have a big expensive stick, then do nothing with it.
PS. The above might sound a bit crazy or rambling, it is more outloud thoughts rather than meant to push any one point. I'd be much happier if China and Japan would just get along.