I'd be skeptical of a report from Tom DeLay's office. For example, those statistics about red light incident reductions: how do we know they didn't go right back up a week later when people got used to the new timing? Maybe there is a real problem, and maybe there isn't.
DeLay uses his position as chair of the House Transportation Committee to stymie efforts at mass transit in his home area of Houston. Why? Because his district is a rich suburb where everyone (that matters to him) has cars. So instead he wants money to go to building roads.
Looks like he'll do anything that will make it easier for his constituents to speed into Houston without paying taxes that support HPD or Houston's roads.
There is no excuse for excessive speed in a residential neighborhood...especially when that exceeded by a factor of four.
Yeah seriously, why was he even going 60mph as he claimed? He better have had a damned good excuse. Going 5 over in a multi-lane road is usually understandable, but 60 on streets that (at least here) have a speed limit of 30? I rarely even go 30 on streets lined with residences of one sort or another because there's such a great risk of someone walking out into the road. You don't need to be a materials engineer to understand that the faster you're going, the less effective your brakes will be in cutting your speed quickly.
Maybe it's because you're looking for housing in the middle of a city where it's expensive. Get further away where land prices are cheaper and you'll get cheaper housing.
And yes, housing costs keep rising. It's called inflation. It happens to everything, even if temporary price drops obscure it.
The value of the dollar has jack shit to do with the cost of housing in America. Construction materials are heavy: if they come from abroad, it's from Canada. The labor is also all paid in dollars of course. What really affects housing costs are interest rates, which are actually very low right now. That means more people can afford mortgages, and this is driving up the prices of housing.
You got it mostly right. It's easier to look at it the other way: when foreigners want to invest in the US, they need dollars. Thus the demand for dollars increases, and the price level of the dollar will rise. (This is of course in an idealized world where that's the only thing going on at the time--ceteris peribus, as economists would say.) A similar thing happens when people in other countries want to buy American goods and services.
When the "value" (price) of the dollar goes up, it means Americans (who own lots of dollars) can afford to buy more PS2s because it takes fewer dollars to buy a yen than before. Unfortunately, the Japanese can't buy so many, uh, whatever they buy from us because it takes more yen to buy a single dollar. So our imports go up and our exports go down when we have a "strong" (high priced) dollar.
When the factors reverse, we have a weak dollar, and the opposite happens. We export more and import less. (Before you assume this is ideal, think what happens to the prices of consumer goods when competition from overseas is lessened.) As you might guess, the ideal value of the dollar relative to the yen (remember, the dollar might get stronger against the yen but weaker against the euro at the same time) is something the US and Japan might not agree on.
Now, about worker efficiency. Economists have a term for this: productivity. It's not just a buzzword: productivity can be measured in terms of product per man-hour. To find a (somewhat meaningless) national productivity, divide the GDP by the total number of hours worked. For a time in the 90s some economists in the Federal Reserve (which influences the economy, but that's beyond the scope of this post) thought that technology advances were pushing up productivity faster than usual, allowing the "natural rate of growth" of the American economy to increase. (Some even talked about the "end of the [boom-bust] business cycle", in the same way people talked about the "end of history" and other such nonsense.) So instead of aiming to grow GDP at say 3%, they though they could get away with 5%. The result of this was an economy that starting moving faster than the Fed could control it, finally spiraling into a recession. The truth of the matter is there's very little hard data to suggest that overall productivity grew any faster during the last ten years than at any other time in the postwar period.
Finally, consider that there are other major causes for this recession. For example, a collapse in consumer and business confidence. This has been caused partially by the post-9/11 hysteria, fueled by FOX News and color-coded alerts. Also contributing is the government's increasing deficits. Gingrich and his radicals forced Clinton to balance the budget, and that worked great in good times. Now that bad times have hit, the government is going a little crazy with deficit spending--some is good, but it should be targeted spending, not tax cuts to people who already have lots of discretionary income. Government deficits have all sorts of reprecussions in the economy, few of them good. Another cause has been the amount of corporate crime that has recently been revealed (e.g. Enron). Businesses have been getting away with more and more under the last 4 presidents, and it sure doesn't give people confidence to think "my company could be next--where will the food come from if I'm out of work?". So people are saving more, and an economy built on rising amounts of consumer debt is collapsing.
In the long run the current shake-up in the economy is health. That sure isn't comforting to the man on the street, though. If you don't like what's being done about it, remember to vote in 2004. That's the only way you'll get people in power that share your views, whatever they may be, on what should or should not be done for the economy in tough times.
The Egyptians did record all sorts of nasty things, but it was always propaganda for the rulers. That, or it wasn't in stone. (They did use papyrus, after all, and they had a large number of scribes. But most of that didn't last to us.)
I agree with you that they probably never were in Egypt. But there is a very small possibility that if they were, we've missed the evidence of it. And after all, would the Egyptians bother to record the enslavement of a few hundred people? It might have been numbers on that scale that we're talking about.
In any case, there's enough other evidence against the Bible's history and science that the Egypt question is moot. Until we do find evidence, there's no reason to think it was any more than a myth, just like about everything else.
The Egyptians only recorded good things in stone. Supposing the Biblical story to have been true, it would not have been carved into stone.
Now, that doesn't mean it's the least bit true, and I don't happen to think it is, but the lack of evidence in surviving Egyptian writing is hardly damning. The fact that the Hebrews didn't take credit for the pyramids they must surely have been building in a set of books that is otherwise filled with propaganda is a bit more damning. I mean if you had helped build the pyramids, even under duress, don't you think you'd at least brag about it?
(I hesitate to call those people Jews--if they even did exist in that period of time. Rabbinical Judaism as we know it did not even begin to form until the Roman diaspora (c 70 AD from memory). Back then they had a religion of priests and temples that modern Jews would not recognize in the least.)
Nah, the problems with UFOs is that they fly at night. At night, it's cold. And thanks to NASA's brilliant management, we've found out twice what happens to spacecraft in the cold.
Damn shame 14 people had to die in the process though.:(
If they wanted to become rich and powerful, they sure failed over the long term. I mean, when you say "Jews" my mental association isn't "people who've never been given any trouble".
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity. Or ignorance. Or brain-washing. Or any of the other reasons religions have become popular.
The only way we will get humans to Mars will be using nuclear propulsion and nuclear power sources(RTGs). Period.
Oh, really? We've sent probes to Mars just fine without nuclear propulsion. It's quite possible that we could build a large craft in orbit or on the moon and that it could reach Mars without nuclear propulsion. It would almost certainly be heavier and more expensive, but it could be done. We didn't have any trouble getting people to the moon without nuclear propulsion, did we? It just takes a lot of conventional thrust.
Yes, NASA has launches probes powered by radioactive decay. There's a big difference between that and a rocket with an active nuclear reaction in its engine. What if the rocket blows up? What if it's cold and the O-ring on a control rod cracks, causing the reactor to overheat? What if the launch has to be aborted before the rocket has reached orbital velocities and the reactor has to fall to earth? I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's certainly not a proven system yet.
Number of doggie bags you've filled since dinner. Less than 3, true illness.
Re:DVT? Just increase the fucking legroom.
on
The Buttocks Have It
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Yeah, US airlines tend to cram people into economy. (Unless you buy "full price economy", which is actually just first class but named otherwise so businesses will comp it.) On 747s it's usually 3-4-3 in economy, and 3-3 on most of the medium jets. It's a matter of price. Most Americans just won't pay what it costs jfor more room. It's uncomfortable, but it's cheaper.
As to service, maybe I'm just used to it but I rarely have anything to complain about. The flight attendants at least pretend to be friendly, and they're actually less classist than most non-Americans airlines I've flown. (BA is a great example of an airline that does have a class system on board.) What you have to realize is that on American airlines, the expectations of service are lower. They usually hire just enough staff to take care of the planned routine of flight--serving drinks and maybe food. If you ask for an extra glass of water they'll oblige, but if you keep making requests they'll start to see you as a pest. (Not that if you have a real need for lots of drinks they won't be happy to help you, but if you just didn't bother to get liquids with your breakfast they won't be too pleased.)
...is how easy stock manipulation is these days. I wouldn't be surprised if the rumor were incited by someone who had just purchased lots of ATI stock. This sort of thing happens all the time, and is rarely prosecuted. Look at what SCO is doing for an example of stock manipulation being done by the company itself--a "pump and dump" scheme for the executives.
You might want to note that the article you linked to is a teaser for a book whose table of contents includes an appendix titled "HIV is Not the Cause of AIDS", a view he shares with few people except Falwell and Mbeki. He's also written a book about "orgones", some sort of pseudoscientific chi energy thing. (I became suspicious when I noticed a white American blaming all the ills of humanity on Africa and Asia, and singling out England in particular as a last European bastion of "matrism".) Not such an intellectual it seems. But, lest you rightly accuse me of attacking one work on the faults of another, I've read his article and I can poke some big holes in it:
We have no reason to believe violence is something that developed in humans. We see all sorts of other animals, from beetles to chimpanzees, being mortally wounded in fights over mates. When a new lion becomes leader of the pride, he kills all the cubs so he can impregnate the lionesses with his own genes. When times are tough, groups of primates will systematically attack and kill other groups of their own species to reduce competition. Why should we think humans haven't been doing the same things from the start?
The dessication of the Sahara 6000 years ago was certainly not the first severe multi-generation length drought humans have experience in (say) the last 20000 years. Why did this drought supposedly lead to the spread of patrism where previous droughts did not?
Many of the practices he lists as belonging to "patrist" societies--no matter how horrible they seem today--can be explained by the advantages they provided to societies of the time they were introduced. For example, female genital mutilation (removal of the clitoris) and the female premarital sex taboo both make it less likely that unmarried females will have children; in those societies, mothers without husbands were a drain on society. The incest taboo served (and still serves) a purpose, as any high school biology student can explain: sex between close relatives increases the likelihood that a disease-causing recessive gene is expressed in the offspring. (See the European royal families for numerous well-documented examples. Is it just chance they had so much hemophilia?) Slavery provides numerous benefits for the people commanding or owning the slaves. Contraception and abortion not only allow unmarried females to prevent unwanted children, but also allow even married ones a control over how large a family they want--too many children, and the odds of any given one surviving to reproductive age decrease. Property inheritance encourages people to develop property. Prostitution gives work to women that have been abandoned by society and would otherwise starve. Class/caste stratification and controlling priests both prevent disorder that might threaten a society's survival. Now I'm not arguing for some of the things in this paragraph that I consider to be quite terrible, but I would say that we can find simple explanations for the rise of most societal practices and traditions--the good, the bad, and the ugly.
He claims that patrism spread to the New World beginning with the Pacific coast, where it presumably came from the Old World. Furthermore, he suggests that parts of the Americas didn't become patrist until after 1492. But even the oldest archaeological evidence we have from the Americas suggests patrism as much as matrism. We have plenty of evidence that the pre-Columbus Americans engaged in the full range of patrist behaviors, including bloody wars, massacres, ritual sacrifies, and so on.
In summary, as compelling as his argument sounds at first, I'm going to need to see proof--not just logical explanations accompanied by evidence that seems entirely one-sided, before I'll accept DeMeo's theory of patrism and matrism. As tempting as it is to accept a theory that supposedly explains all of human suffering and blames it on authoritative men who repress and abuse women and children, it just isn't that simple.
Slashdot Mirror
It's your car, but the roads are public.
Well, supposing his wheels lifted off as part of the accident. Unlikely if he was going 30mph, but I suppose it's possible.
I'd be skeptical of a report from Tom DeLay's office. For example, those statistics about red light incident reductions: how do we know they didn't go right back up a week later when people got used to the new timing? Maybe there is a real problem, and maybe there isn't.
DeLay uses his position as chair of the House Transportation Committee to stymie efforts at mass transit in his home area of Houston. Why? Because his district is a rich suburb where everyone (that matters to him) has cars. So instead he wants money to go to building roads.
Looks like he'll do anything that will make it easier for his constituents to speed into Houston without paying taxes that support HPD or Houston's roads.
Maybe it's because you're looking for housing in the middle of a city where it's expensive. Get further away where land prices are cheaper and you'll get cheaper housing.
And yes, housing costs keep rising. It's called inflation. It happens to everything, even if temporary price drops obscure it.
Servents get paid. The word you're looking for is "slaves".
The value of the dollar has jack shit to do with the cost of housing in America. Construction materials are heavy: if they come from abroad, it's from Canada. The labor is also all paid in dollars of course. What really affects housing costs are interest rates, which are actually very low right now. That means more people can afford mortgages, and this is driving up the prices of housing.
IANAE
You got it mostly right. It's easier to look at it the other way: when foreigners want to invest in the US, they need dollars. Thus the demand for dollars increases, and the price level of the dollar will rise. (This is of course in an idealized world where that's the only thing going on at the time--ceteris peribus, as economists would say.) A similar thing happens when people in other countries want to buy American goods and services.
When the "value" (price) of the dollar goes up, it means Americans (who own lots of dollars) can afford to buy more PS2s because it takes fewer dollars to buy a yen than before. Unfortunately, the Japanese can't buy so many, uh, whatever they buy from us because it takes more yen to buy a single dollar. So our imports go up and our exports go down when we have a "strong" (high priced) dollar.
When the factors reverse, we have a weak dollar, and the opposite happens. We export more and import less. (Before you assume this is ideal, think what happens to the prices of consumer goods when competition from overseas is lessened.) As you might guess, the ideal value of the dollar relative to the yen (remember, the dollar might get stronger against the yen but weaker against the euro at the same time) is something the US and Japan might not agree on.
Now, about worker efficiency. Economists have a term for this: productivity. It's not just a buzzword: productivity can be measured in terms of product per man-hour. To find a (somewhat meaningless) national productivity, divide the GDP by the total number of hours worked. For a time in the 90s some economists in the Federal Reserve (which influences the economy, but that's beyond the scope of this post) thought that technology advances were pushing up productivity faster than usual, allowing the "natural rate of growth" of the American economy to increase. (Some even talked about the "end of the [boom-bust] business cycle", in the same way people talked about the "end of history" and other such nonsense.) So instead of aiming to grow GDP at say 3%, they though they could get away with 5%. The result of this was an economy that starting moving faster than the Fed could control it, finally spiraling into a recession. The truth of the matter is there's very little hard data to suggest that overall productivity grew any faster during the last ten years than at any other time in the postwar period.
Finally, consider that there are other major causes for this recession. For example, a collapse in consumer and business confidence. This has been caused partially by the post-9/11 hysteria, fueled by FOX News and color-coded alerts. Also contributing is the government's increasing deficits. Gingrich and his radicals forced Clinton to balance the budget, and that worked great in good times. Now that bad times have hit, the government is going a little crazy with deficit spending--some is good, but it should be targeted spending, not tax cuts to people who already have lots of discretionary income. Government deficits have all sorts of reprecussions in the economy, few of them good. Another cause has been the amount of corporate crime that has recently been revealed (e.g. Enron). Businesses have been getting away with more and more under the last 4 presidents, and it sure doesn't give people confidence to think "my company could be next--where will the food come from if I'm out of work?". So people are saving more, and an economy built on rising amounts of consumer debt is collapsing.
In the long run the current shake-up in the economy is health. That sure isn't comforting to the man on the street, though. If you don't like what's being done about it, remember to vote in 2004. That's the only way you'll get people in power that share your views, whatever they may be, on what should or should not be done for the economy in tough times.
The Egyptians did record all sorts of nasty things, but it was always propaganda for the rulers. That, or it wasn't in stone. (They did use papyrus, after all, and they had a large number of scribes. But most of that didn't last to us.)
I agree with you that they probably never were in Egypt. But there is a very small possibility that if they were, we've missed the evidence of it. And after all, would the Egyptians bother to record the enslavement of a few hundred people? It might have been numbers on that scale that we're talking about.
In any case, there's enough other evidence against the Bible's history and science that the Egypt question is moot. Until we do find evidence, there's no reason to think it was any more than a myth, just like about everything else.
I was watching the end of a crappy movie on USA (The Patriot) with someone a couple months ago. As the credits rolled, the announced came on:
And now, on USA Instant Replay, The Patriot, starring... [emphasis mine]
Needless to say, we got quite a kick out of that.
The Egyptians only recorded good things in stone. Supposing the Biblical story to have been true, it would not have been carved into stone.
Now, that doesn't mean it's the least bit true, and I don't happen to think it is, but the lack of evidence in surviving Egyptian writing is hardly damning. The fact that the Hebrews didn't take credit for the pyramids they must surely have been building in a set of books that is otherwise filled with propaganda is a bit more damning. I mean if you had helped build the pyramids, even under duress, don't you think you'd at least brag about it?
(I hesitate to call those people Jews--if they even did exist in that period of time. Rabbinical Judaism as we know it did not even begin to form until the Roman diaspora (c 70 AD from memory). Back then they had a religion of priests and temples that modern Jews would not recognize in the least.)
Nah, the problems with UFOs is that they fly at night. At night, it's cold. And thanks to NASA's brilliant management, we've found out twice what happens to spacecraft in the cold.
:(
Damn shame 14 people had to die in the process though.
If they wanted to become rich and powerful, they sure failed over the long term. I mean, when you say "Jews" my mental association isn't "people who've never been given any trouble".
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity. Or ignorance. Or brain-washing. Or any of the other reasons religions have become popular.
And on the front, Mr. Radar.
Oh, really? We've sent probes to Mars just fine without nuclear propulsion. It's quite possible that we could build a large craft in orbit or on the moon and that it could reach Mars without nuclear propulsion. It would almost certainly be heavier and more expensive, but it could be done. We didn't have any trouble getting people to the moon without nuclear propulsion, did we? It just takes a lot of conventional thrust.
No, but the types of accidents some people have in the tunnel sure make me wonder if you have extra heads because they have fewer than normal.
Yes, NASA has launches probes powered by radioactive decay. There's a big difference between that and a rocket with an active nuclear reaction in its engine. What if the rocket blows up? What if it's cold and the O-ring on a control rod cracks, causing the reactor to overheat? What if the launch has to be aborted before the rocket has reached orbital velocities and the reactor has to fall to earth? I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's certainly not a proven system yet.
I believe in God because the Bible tells me so.
The Bible is true because it is the word of God.
What? Why are you looking at me like that? It makes perfect sense!
No, but I can prove conclusively that if they are aliens, they're not advanced aliens.
Number of doggie bags you've filled since dinner. Less than 3, true illness.
Yeah, US airlines tend to cram people into economy. (Unless you buy "full price economy", which is actually just first class but named otherwise so businesses will comp it.) On 747s it's usually 3-4-3 in economy, and 3-3 on most of the medium jets. It's a matter of price. Most Americans just won't pay what it costs jfor more room. It's uncomfortable, but it's cheaper.
As to service, maybe I'm just used to it but I rarely have anything to complain about. The flight attendants at least pretend to be friendly, and they're actually less classist than most non-Americans airlines I've flown. (BA is a great example of an airline that does have a class system on board.) What you have to realize is that on American airlines, the expectations of service are lower. They usually hire just enough staff to take care of the planned routine of flight--serving drinks and maybe food. If you ask for an extra glass of water they'll oblige, but if you keep making requests they'll start to see you as a pest. (Not that if you have a real need for lots of drinks they won't be happy to help you, but if you just didn't bother to get liquids with your breakfast they won't be too pleased.)
...is how easy stock manipulation is these days. I wouldn't be surprised if the rumor were incited by someone who had just purchased lots of ATI stock. This sort of thing happens all the time, and is rarely prosecuted. Look at what SCO is doing for an example of stock manipulation being done by the company itself--a "pump and dump" scheme for the executives.
Oh, and you think by 2007 the Pentagon will be content with controlling every square centimeter of this planet?
You might want to note that the article you linked to is a teaser for a book whose table of contents includes an appendix titled "HIV is Not the Cause of AIDS", a view he shares with few people except Falwell and Mbeki. He's also written a book about "orgones", some sort of pseudoscientific chi energy thing. (I became suspicious when I noticed a white American blaming all the ills of humanity on Africa and Asia, and singling out England in particular as a last European bastion of "matrism".) Not such an intellectual it seems. But, lest you rightly accuse me of attacking one work on the faults of another, I've read his article and I can poke some big holes in it:
In summary, as compelling as his argument sounds at first, I'm going to need to see proof--not just logical explanations accompanied by evidence that seems entirely one-sided, before I'll accept DeMeo's theory of patrism and matrism. As tempting as it is to accept a theory that supposedly explains all of human suffering and blames it on authoritative men who repress and abuse women and children, it just isn't that simple.