Basing opinions of the US off of our news probably isn't the best approach as they feed off of sensationalism and broadcasting the loudest voices, not necessarily the most common voices. Basing it off of the news, I'm not sure if you could tell whether its 10%, 50%, or 90%. I'm sure it also varies wildly by region. I live in California and I find the 50% number shockingly high but I haven't lived in other areas of the country so I can't really speak for them.
I think the labels of "anti-intellectual" and "anti-education" are hyperbole and simply being dismissive. If he meant "unwilling to challenge strongly held beliefs based on scientific discoveries" then I would agree with him. I don't see that as the same thing as being "anti-education" and "anti-intellectual" though.
It's a bit like calling someone who doesn't eat pork a vegetarian.
If there is some study or poll to back up his claim then I will stand corrected. As it stands, it appears to be a gut feeling backed up by anecdotes.
Anyone know where his statement that 50% of the US population are anti-intellectual and anti-education comes from? Is he assuming that "doesn't believe in evolution" == "anti-intellecual and anti-education"?
I might be right about what? What claim did I make that you have all of these polls, elections, and counterexamples as evidence against? I claimed that there are people that would vote for a third party candidate if they didn't feel it risked the "greater of two evils" being elected. That means more people support third party candidates than the votes and polls show (my main point in my posts). I didn't claim it would change the outcome of elections or make third party candidates viable.
You should really take the time to read what you are commenting on and then respond to the content of the post.
The wording of the Gallop poll doesn't dodge the issue of people voting out of fear of letting the greater evil win. It asks who they are most likely to vote for, not who they would you like to see win. It is an important distinction.
Supposing that all of these candidates were on the ballot in your state, which one would you be most likely to vote for.
I can't speak for the other opinion polls (not sure exactly which you are referring to) but they may have similar issues with the way they ask the question. This doesn't mean changing the question would result in a huge difference but we won't know until we ask the question.
There are lots of people who will vote for a Democrat or for a Republican because they are afraid that voting for a third party will just waste their vote and give a victory to the greater of the two evils (Democrat or Republican). If they were able to vote in an IRV system they would be able to vote for their third party candidate without serious worries about giving a victory to the party they are most opposed to.
This might just mean third parties get 10% instead of 4% which will end up making no real difference. Then again, we might be surprised.
Woosh doesn't even begin to describe your complete lack of understanding. The point is, we don't need to reform our regulatory process, write new laws, and get into a national frenzy over something that caused 23 deaths and is already a violation of our current laws/regulations. 23 / 300,000,000 means that it isn't of significance to the country as a whole. How many people got the injection is irrelevant to this point.
It's like national news reporting a child who has been kidnapped. It is terrible and tragic but not national news worthy. Everyone knows children sometimes get kidnapped, reporting it on a national level is just free drama for the 24 hour news cycle and people who want to "watch their stories."
Seriously? There have been what, 23 deaths so far? Out of a population of over 300 million people that is nothing. It is horrible and tragic for those directly involved but this hardly calls for the kind of FUD that is being spread and the amount of fixes and reform that is being suggested. I'm not saying we shouldn't try to improve the system, we obviously should. What I am saying is we shouldn't bend over backwards and place excessive regulatory and inspection burdens on pharmacies that followed the laws, good practices, etc. to prevent a one off, unfortunate situation that happened in one pharmacy. Those types of over reactions tend to do more harm than good.
Let me ask this, if there were two violations under our current system, then why do we need to change things? Punish the two violations (enforce the laws, shocking I know) instead of creating more task forces, more laws, and more regulations.
What's a Star Wars force field? I've heard of Star Wars deflector shields but never any mention of force fields. Perhaps the author was thinking of Star Trek.
One of the issues with electric vehicles (particularly planes) is the weight of the batteries. Battery energy density is very low compared to fossil fuels. If we can create energy dense fuels from renewable sources, that would give us the advantage of larger travel distances all while using something that is renewable.
One question I have is whether or not we could derive other products from it as we do from oil. Meaning, asphalt, plastic, etc. It says "petrol" which I'm assuming is "gasoline" in Britain speak. If that is the case then the answer is probably no but I am far from a chemist.
Inflation _encourages_ you to invest money or see it whittled away. In the US, at the moment, the only investment option for 95% of the country is the stock market which is little more than gambling. Real investment opportunities are currently illegal unless you are rich (you can't group together and make small contributions to a big project). The JOBS act might help to improve this issue but it all depends on how it is interpreted and implemented. As things stand now, inflation dooms the middle class and poor to see their savings dwindle away to nothing and force them to rely on the government for everything in their later years. I know that is a Keynesian's idea of utopia but that doesn't sound like a satisfying existence to me.
As for Japan, I suppose it depends on your definition of a deflationary spiral. I take it to mean the continued deflation is caused by previous deflation (aka self reinforcing). There is no evidence that is the case in Japan. They have had 10 years of deflation but that doesn't mean that any of it was caused by previous years of deflation. Japan experienced high inflation in the past that led to a bubble bursting and then prices never really corrected themselves fully (that is what they are doing now). Japan has also opened up their markets more to international trade. Those two things in themselves have massive deflationary pressure. Here is an interesting article that touches on both sides: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Japan/LD07Dh01.html
Deflation is no more or less uniform than inflation, they both have benefits and detriments to different people in different circumstances. It is bad when there is a very high level of inflation/deflation or there is an unexpected change to the rate.
You are certainly correct that deflation helps people who have the most savings but these situations are still generally self stabilizing. There aren't many rich people who don't like living like rich people, to live like a rich person you have to spend lots of money and not hoard it. I tend to worry more about inflation because there are plenty of real world examples of hyper inflation destroying currencies and economies completely. There are no real world examples of deflationary spirals. Yes, there have been cases of damaging deflation with long lasting impacts but not of deflationary spirals.
The major issue with that line of reasoning is it ignores time preference. People need food now. People want TVs now. People want cars now. Potential future appreciation is not sufficient to guarantee someone will not spend now because they see having something now as being more beneficial than having it in the future.
BitCoin is different than normal money in several ways. First, no one is dependent on it for survival or every day needs and wants. They can survive and thrive without spending any of their BitCoins. Second, their choice is either to spend their US currency or their BitCoins. They know their US dollars are going down in value and their BitCoins are going up in value. Would you rather spend something that will have less value tomorrow or spend something that will have more value tomorrow? The choice is pretty clear.
The only way this will change is if people are reluctant to accept alternative currencies that are continually weakening (such as the US dollar) and people can buy whatever they want/need with bitcoins. Bitcoins are more limited, less convenient, and makes less financial sense to get rid of when you have dollars (and other currencies) to get rid of.
As for the great depression, the issue was that the Federal Reserve didn't do it's job and act as a lender of last resort to solvent banks that were run on. This caused a crash in the money supply. That job would have normally been done by the clearing houses but those were replaced by the Federal Reserve so there was no one for the banks to turn to. What really got us out of the great depression was our increased manufacturing capabilities relative to the rest of the world after WWII.
It is a combination of my fingers being trained to frequently type an apostrophe before a final 's' that is added onto a word and my lack of paying attention. In this case, it serves no purpose:P
I could try and make a lame argument about how I was implying a "taxi's services" in that context but the lack of an 'a' before taxis means it was plural and the apostrophe would go after the 's'. So it is wrong in either case.
Nope. Classics are things which everyone would like to have read but nobody wants to read. Most of it is glorified crap that bored English professors coaxed hidden meanings and interpretations out of. I only enjoyed To Kill a Mockingbird and Catch 22, most of the other books I was forced to read were terrible and almost ruined my love of reading. I really liked reading in grade school then began reading less and less as "classic literature" was forced down my throat and nearly ruined my appetite for reading all together.
This a thousand times over. It is important for everyone to have basic understandings of chemistry, physics, biology, etc. It is not important for most people to know which cell structures produce proteins, how many valence electrons some element has, or what Avogadro's number is. Higher level, more conceptual survey classes would help people gain basic understandings and help them understand what they may be interested in. It is important to know these things before you get to college so you can have a direction. Right now high school is mostly useless to most people and it is just a four year long test to see who gets to go to which, if any, college. Stopping the practice of forcing every student to learn intricate details of so many topics they have no use for, no interest in, and will soon forget could fix many problems with our current education system.
And then no one would use taxi's because they never move and the taxi drivers would go out of business...and there would be less taxis and things would start moving again. It's called a system with incentives and feedback mechanisms. Taxi drivers don't like sitting in gridlock just for fun just as people don't like sitting in taxi's that don't move and charge the money for the experience.
What is all this nonsense about Android being a walled garden? Have you never heard of the Amazon app store for Android? Have you never heard of loading any app you find on the internet onto your Android device? There must be something huge I'm missing here because there have been several articles popping up lately talking about Google's "walled garden" and it has me horribly confused. Will someone please enlighten me?
What exactly are all of these cases where I'm claiming to know what the founders thought? The only claims I recall (and can find):
1. the founders thought that the federal government should be bound by the Constitution
2. we should have to amend the Constitution to expand federal powers beyond what is already described in the Constitution
3. "bound by the Constitution" means that federal powers are enumerated in the Constitution and the federal government cannot do anything that is not enumerated
I am making no claims about whether they wanted big government, small government, were all libertarians, were all socialists, or anything of the sort.
I can't see how anyone can disagree with #1 without thinking writing the majority of the Constitution was pointless. If it doesn't bind the federal government, what does it do?
If #1 is true, then either #2 is true, they didn't think we should ever expand federal power, or there is some other process we are supposed to follow to expand the Constitution. I've never heard anyone argue for the second two possibilities so this seems to make #2 true.
For #3, why did they bother enumerating any powers if the intention wasn't to limit Congress to those powers? Why include a commerce clause if it was implied that Congress could do anything it wasn't expressly forbidden to do by the Constitution? I would need to do further research to really claim the founders all agreed on this point in theory. In practice, they did seem to all bend or break this concept. However, it isn't exactly uncommon for someone to believe in a general principle that applies to everyone else and then go and do something that goes entirely against that principle themselves.
I re-read the above post and I misinterpreted (yes, a bit ironic) your statement about Hamilton. I read your "too limited" as "too limiting to the federal governments power" whereas now I think you meant "too limiting to peoples rights" which is in line with Hamilton's views. Sorry about that.
My confusion was between the constitutionally granted powers to the federal government being too limited and the rights granted to people being too limited. I think enumerated powers in the constitution appropriately limits the government. You, and Hamilton, may be correct about enumerating Rights (in the Bill of Rights) as being too limiting to individual rights.
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Basing opinions of the US off of our news probably isn't the best approach as they feed off of sensationalism and broadcasting the loudest voices, not necessarily the most common voices. Basing it off of the news, I'm not sure if you could tell whether its 10%, 50%, or 90%. I'm sure it also varies wildly by region. I live in California and I find the 50% number shockingly high but I haven't lived in other areas of the country so I can't really speak for them.
I think the labels of "anti-intellectual" and "anti-education" are hyperbole and simply being dismissive. If he meant "unwilling to challenge strongly held beliefs based on scientific discoveries" then I would agree with him. I don't see that as the same thing as being "anti-education" and "anti-intellectual" though.
It's a bit like calling someone who doesn't eat pork a vegetarian.
If there is some study or poll to back up his claim then I will stand corrected. As it stands, it appears to be a gut feeling backed up by anecdotes.
Anyone know where his statement that 50% of the US population are anti-intellectual and anti-education comes from? Is he assuming that "doesn't believe in evolution" == "anti-intellecual and anti-education"?
I might be right about what? What claim did I make that you have all of these polls, elections, and counterexamples as evidence against? I claimed that there are people that would vote for a third party candidate if they didn't feel it risked the "greater of two evils" being elected. That means more people support third party candidates than the votes and polls show (my main point in my posts). I didn't claim it would change the outcome of elections or make third party candidates viable.
You should really take the time to read what you are commenting on and then respond to the content of the post.
Supposing that all of these candidates were on the ballot in your state, which one would you be most likely to vote for.
I can't speak for the other opinion polls (not sure exactly which you are referring to) but they may have similar issues with the way they ask the question. This doesn't mean changing the question would result in a huge difference but we won't know until we ask the question.
There are lots of people who will vote for a Democrat or for a Republican because they are afraid that voting for a third party will just waste their vote and give a victory to the greater of the two evils (Democrat or Republican). If they were able to vote in an IRV system they would be able to vote for their third party candidate without serious worries about giving a victory to the party they are most opposed to.
This might just mean third parties get 10% instead of 4% which will end up making no real difference. Then again, we might be surprised.
Actually, I think I would prefer throwing darts at a wall over our current system.
I found it covered most of the main points:
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2012/10221238-uranus-keck-photos.html
Woosh doesn't even begin to describe your complete lack of understanding. The point is, we don't need to reform our regulatory process, write new laws, and get into a national frenzy over something that caused 23 deaths and is already a violation of our current laws/regulations. 23 / 300,000,000 means that it isn't of significance to the country as a whole. How many people got the injection is irrelevant to this point.
It's like national news reporting a child who has been kidnapped. It is terrible and tragic but not national news worthy. Everyone knows children sometimes get kidnapped, reporting it on a national level is just free drama for the 24 hour news cycle and people who want to "watch their stories."
Seriously? There have been what, 23 deaths so far? Out of a population of over 300 million people that is nothing. It is horrible and tragic for those directly involved but this hardly calls for the kind of FUD that is being spread and the amount of fixes and reform that is being suggested. I'm not saying we shouldn't try to improve the system, we obviously should. What I am saying is we shouldn't bend over backwards and place excessive regulatory and inspection burdens on pharmacies that followed the laws, good practices, etc. to prevent a one off, unfortunate situation that happened in one pharmacy. Those types of over reactions tend to do more harm than good.
Let me ask this, if there were two violations under our current system, then why do we need to change things? Punish the two violations (enforce the laws, shocking I know) instead of creating more task forces, more laws, and more regulations.
Nope, an "energy shield" protected the second Death Star. Force field is Star Trek terminology ;)
That was referred to as an "energy shield", not a force field ;) Force field is Star Trek terminology, not Star Wars.
What's a Star Wars force field? I've heard of Star Wars deflector shields but never any mention of force fields. Perhaps the author was thinking of Star Trek.
One of the issues with electric vehicles (particularly planes) is the weight of the batteries. Battery energy density is very low compared to fossil fuels. If we can create energy dense fuels from renewable sources, that would give us the advantage of larger travel distances all while using something that is renewable.
One question I have is whether or not we could derive other products from it as we do from oil. Meaning, asphalt, plastic, etc. It says "petrol" which I'm assuming is "gasoline" in Britain speak. If that is the case then the answer is probably no but I am far from a chemist.
Tea Partiers don't want the government messing with their social security.
Inflation _encourages_ you to invest money or see it whittled away. In the US, at the moment, the only investment option for 95% of the country is the stock market which is little more than gambling. Real investment opportunities are currently illegal unless you are rich (you can't group together and make small contributions to a big project). The JOBS act might help to improve this issue but it all depends on how it is interpreted and implemented. As things stand now, inflation dooms the middle class and poor to see their savings dwindle away to nothing and force them to rely on the government for everything in their later years. I know that is a Keynesian's idea of utopia but that doesn't sound like a satisfying existence to me.
As for Japan, I suppose it depends on your definition of a deflationary spiral. I take it to mean the continued deflation is caused by previous deflation (aka self reinforcing). There is no evidence that is the case in Japan. They have had 10 years of deflation but that doesn't mean that any of it was caused by previous years of deflation. Japan experienced high inflation in the past that led to a bubble bursting and then prices never really corrected themselves fully (that is what they are doing now). Japan has also opened up their markets more to international trade. Those two things in themselves have massive deflationary pressure. Here is an interesting article that touches on both sides: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Japan/LD07Dh01.html
Deflation is no more or less uniform than inflation, they both have benefits and detriments to different people in different circumstances. It is bad when there is a very high level of inflation/deflation or there is an unexpected change to the rate.
You are certainly correct that deflation helps people who have the most savings but these situations are still generally self stabilizing. There aren't many rich people who don't like living like rich people, to live like a rich person you have to spend lots of money and not hoard it. I tend to worry more about inflation because there are plenty of real world examples of hyper inflation destroying currencies and economies completely. There are no real world examples of deflationary spirals. Yes, there have been cases of damaging deflation with long lasting impacts but not of deflationary spirals.
The major issue with that line of reasoning is it ignores time preference. People need food now. People want TVs now. People want cars now. Potential future appreciation is not sufficient to guarantee someone will not spend now because they see having something now as being more beneficial than having it in the future.
BitCoin is different than normal money in several ways. First, no one is dependent on it for survival or every day needs and wants. They can survive and thrive without spending any of their BitCoins. Second, their choice is either to spend their US currency or their BitCoins. They know their US dollars are going down in value and their BitCoins are going up in value. Would you rather spend something that will have less value tomorrow or spend something that will have more value tomorrow? The choice is pretty clear.
The only way this will change is if people are reluctant to accept alternative currencies that are continually weakening (such as the US dollar) and people can buy whatever they want/need with bitcoins. Bitcoins are more limited, less convenient, and makes less financial sense to get rid of when you have dollars (and other currencies) to get rid of.
As for the great depression, the issue was that the Federal Reserve didn't do it's job and act as a lender of last resort to solvent banks that were run on. This caused a crash in the money supply. That job would have normally been done by the clearing houses but those were replaced by the Federal Reserve so there was no one for the banks to turn to. What really got us out of the great depression was our increased manufacturing capabilities relative to the rest of the world after WWII.
[Most people] just won't listen if it doesn't fit their worldview.
FTFY
It is a combination of my fingers being trained to frequently type an apostrophe before a final 's' that is added onto a word and my lack of paying attention. In this case, it serves no purpose :P
I could try and make a lame argument about how I was implying a "taxi's services" in that context but the lack of an 'a' before taxis means it was plural and the apostrophe would go after the 's'. So it is wrong in either case.
Nope. Classics are things which everyone would like to have read but nobody wants to read. Most of it is glorified crap that bored English professors coaxed hidden meanings and interpretations out of. I only enjoyed To Kill a Mockingbird and Catch 22, most of the other books I was forced to read were terrible and almost ruined my love of reading. I really liked reading in grade school then began reading less and less as "classic literature" was forced down my throat and nearly ruined my appetite for reading all together.
This a thousand times over. It is important for everyone to have basic understandings of chemistry, physics, biology, etc. It is not important for most people to know which cell structures produce proteins, how many valence electrons some element has, or what Avogadro's number is. Higher level, more conceptual survey classes would help people gain basic understandings and help them understand what they may be interested in. It is important to know these things before you get to college so you can have a direction. Right now high school is mostly useless to most people and it is just a four year long test to see who gets to go to which, if any, college. Stopping the practice of forcing every student to learn intricate details of so many topics they have no use for, no interest in, and will soon forget could fix many problems with our current education system.
And then no one would use taxi's because they never move and the taxi drivers would go out of business...and there would be less taxis and things would start moving again. It's called a system with incentives and feedback mechanisms. Taxi drivers don't like sitting in gridlock just for fun just as people don't like sitting in taxi's that don't move and charge the money for the experience.
What is all this nonsense about Android being a walled garden? Have you never heard of the Amazon app store for Android? Have you never heard of loading any app you find on the internet onto your Android device? There must be something huge I'm missing here because there have been several articles popping up lately talking about Google's "walled garden" and it has me horribly confused. Will someone please enlighten me?
What exactly are all of these cases where I'm claiming to know what the founders thought? The only claims I recall (and can find):
1. the founders thought that the federal government should be bound by the Constitution
2. we should have to amend the Constitution to expand federal powers beyond what is already described in the Constitution
3. "bound by the Constitution" means that federal powers are enumerated in the Constitution and the federal government cannot do anything that is not enumerated
I am making no claims about whether they wanted big government, small government, were all libertarians, were all socialists, or anything of the sort.
I can't see how anyone can disagree with #1 without thinking writing the majority of the Constitution was pointless. If it doesn't bind the federal government, what does it do?
If #1 is true, then either #2 is true, they didn't think we should ever expand federal power, or there is some other process we are supposed to follow to expand the Constitution. I've never heard anyone argue for the second two possibilities so this seems to make #2 true.
For #3, why did they bother enumerating any powers if the intention wasn't to limit Congress to those powers? Why include a commerce clause if it was implied that Congress could do anything it wasn't expressly forbidden to do by the Constitution? I would need to do further research to really claim the founders all agreed on this point in theory. In practice, they did seem to all bend or break this concept. However, it isn't exactly uncommon for someone to believe in a general principle that applies to everyone else and then go and do something that goes entirely against that principle themselves.
Thanks for the linked reading, will take a look.
I re-read the above post and I misinterpreted (yes, a bit ironic) your statement about Hamilton. I read your "too limited" as "too limiting to the federal governments power" whereas now I think you meant "too limiting to peoples rights" which is in line with Hamilton's views. Sorry about that.
My confusion was between the constitutionally granted powers to the federal government being too limited and the rights granted to people being too limited. I think enumerated powers in the constitution appropriately limits the government. You, and Hamilton, may be correct about enumerating Rights (in the Bill of Rights) as being too limiting to individual rights.