Hate to break it to you, but affirmative action typically works AGAINST Asians, with them usually having in effect disproportionately lower rates of hiring and acceptance into university than similarly qualified whites, or other minorities.
Wow, that was an incredibly long list of FUD distortions. Let's tackle this one at a time, shall we?
1.His reform doesn't involve government taking over healthcare, it fines people who don't buy health care insurance. People still buy from private insurance providers. Having young, healthy people buy insurance is solves the problem ensures that young, healthy people won't freeload off the of system by buying insurance only when they get sick. Having everybody insured also reduces uninsured people freeloading by getting their healthcare in the emergency room, subsidized by other taxpayers.
2. His executive orders are for stricter enforcement of existing gun laws, something well within his power to do.
3. He doesn't want children to be killed by guns, and he doesn't want victims of rape and incest to carry their attackers' babies? That's just fine with me.
4. Taxes are the price of civilization. They ensure I have a military to protect my country, that the roads stay safe, that police and fire departments are there to protect, that snake oil stays out of the pharmacy, that the food I buy is free of melamine, and that I can drink water safely out of any tap in the country. It sure does matter to who they were raised on. Romney paid less taxes on his millions, using the carried interest loophole to count his commissions as dividends, than his janitor or secretary did. The janitor or secretary are far more likely to spend money on daily necessities, than to transfer gains off to the Cayman Islands. Oh, and during the period of our country's greatest economic boom following WW2, the top marginal tax rate was 90%.
6. The stimulus saved the car industry and brought it back to life. As for temporary jobs, it keeps people working and prevents them from joining the ranks of the "takers". If I had the choice between either losing my house and going out into the streets, or taking a temp job, I'd do the latter. I suppose you'd rather have the unemployed out in the streets (with no health care), because they're all just "takers" anyway.
7.If you don't believe economic theory, feel free to move to Europe where they're basically slashing government spending during a recession, and places like Spain have 20% unemployment among young people joining the workforce.
9. The number of food stamp recipients grew by 14.7 million under the Bush administration, more than under the Obama. And part of the reason it grew under Obama is that the administration expanded the number of households able to receive the benefit, while decreasing the benefit per household. Now, certain poor working families can continue qualify for food stamps, with ramping down benefits, which makes sense, as those people have an incentive to keep working to increase their personal income, rather than having the perverse incentive to not find a job to avoid losing benefits. As a result, unemployment has been steadily decreasing under the administration. Citation: http://www.nbcnews.com/business/report-15-americans-food-stamps-980690
Just be because someone wouldn't survive against a saber tooth tiger doesn't mean we're interfering with natural selection or that it reduces our survival rates. If we discarded our "weak" the way primitive societies did, we wouldn't have discovered people like Stephen Hawking and John Nash. Our species' altruism and shared survival gives us a much greater pool of potential skill, labor, and creativity to draw from, and these potential contributions help each member of our species as a whole survive better as a result. Just as we didn't know a millennia ago that one day Einsteins might be of more worth to our society than skilled hunters, we can't necessarily foresee what might help us in the future. What if the 'retards' you want to cull from our species turn out to be the only ones with genetic resistance to a future epidemic, for example?
If the fuel was created from carbon taken out of the air and powered by renewables, burning it and releasing it back into the atmosphere is carbon-neutral and doesn't create net pollution.
Read the original post. A cap on profits, not wealth. Profits can be reduced by reinvesting it in the company with hiring and capital spending, which is more useful than being paid out as dividends which get taxed at 15% rates to the rich and then sit in Cayman Island bank accounts.
Mitt paid 15% using the "carried interest" loophole, meaning he takes a percentage cut of his clients' gains and that gets taxed at 15%. In other words, it's not his invested money that he initially earned but his clients'. Regular salesmen at the local mall pay taxes on their commissions at the same rates their base pay, but Mitt (and other investment bankers) don't.
So having poor people automatically disqualifies a country in the geographic west, speaking a western language, believing in a western religion, ruled by a western style democratic government, and having a population of mostly white people from being Western? Or does West mean only rich Anglo-Saxon countries? I suppose it's far easier to assert Western superiority by including only the successful countries in the definition.
This. For the two centuries before the the World Wars, Iran/Persia basically alternated between being a British or Russian puppet, until the two decided to share and Russia got the north while the Brits got the south. This arrangement continued into World War 2 with the Ango/Russian invasion and occupation of Iran. Even in the second half of the twentieth century, the UK still had Iran by the balls. Iran was still stuck in a treaty with the UK that guaranteed the oil concessions on behalf of the Anglo-Persian Oil company until the 1990's (negotiated in the 1890's as a hundred-year treaty), with the split being something like 85% profits to the company and the rest to Iran (the usually being a 50-50 split). When the government tried to renegotiate this agreement, the UK and the CIA lead a coup against him that led to the overthrow of the constitutional monarchy and the installment of a puppet shah in `953.
The Anglo-Persian company has since gone on to do bigger and better things, like the Deepwater Horizon disaster, under its new name, British Petroleum, or BP.
1. Lebanon is not "Christian". The country was split out of the Ottoman Empire by the French, ostensibly for the purpose of protecting the Christian community there, but the French gerrymandered the territory to such an extent that Lebanon also ended up containing large Sunni, Shi'ite, and Druze communities. The Christians themselves are confusingly denominated among different branches, Catholic, Eastern (Greek) Orthodox, and Oriental (Syrian) Orthodox. Which explains why the whole Lebanese civil war was such a mess between Sunni vs Shiite vs Catholic vs Orthodox vs Druze vs Palestinian vs Israeli vs US vs communist.
2. What does the US (Christian) have to do in a conflict between Israel (Jewish) and Iran (Muslim)? Oh right, asserting its Christian influence! Oh wait....
Israel was hardly innocent in that conflict. Israel invaded southern Lebanon in response to the PLA having invaded there and used it as a base of operations to attack from. Israel then proceeded to occupy southern Lebanon for the next TWO DECADES, which also happened to have triggered the five-way civil war that pretty much tore apart the country, and continues to occupy a small strip of Lebanese land. Israel was also partially responsible for the notorious Sabra and Shtailla massacres during their occupation. Hezbollah was a Shii'ite (read, NOT Palestinian) militia formed during those years to combat the Israeli occupation. Wanting foreign invaders out of your country, or helping another people expel their occupies hardly requires religious fanaticism by any stretch of the imagination.
While Hezbollah has been accused of terrorism, for the most part they engage in military vs military combat, either as a conventional army or guerilla tactics, such as during the 2006 war, and they haven't been involved in suicide bombings since Israel left Lebanon. Some of their attacks, such as the rocket attacks during the 2006 war have hurt civilians, but their enemies are hardly innocent of that either and use tactics that, if done by non-countries, would be called terrorism. See the large amount of civilian damage in the bombings of Beirut, or assassinations of civilian Hezbollah politicians and leaders. Point being that the Lebanese were not the (initial) aggressors in the decades-long Israeli-Lebanese conflict.
The one area where the US (and the other industrialized countries in Europe, as well as Japan and South Korea) do not practice free trade is in agriculture. All these countries want to practice free trade for industrialized goods, so that they can sell their manufactured products at competitive prices, and also purchase raw materials and industrial goods cheaply, but they heavily subsidize agriculture. Often this is done in the name of "protecting farmers", "food safety", "national food security".
What this means in effect is that the poorer developing countries, where agriculture is the largest sector of the economy, and hoping to export their agricultural goods in order to get the money needed to build up their infrastructure and industrial base, are screwed. They have no way to compete on the international market with the cheap and heavily subsided farm goods of the industrialized countries, nor can they sell their products easily with all the trade barriers in place. The US has guaranteed prices for its farmers, and a lot of this is simply given away as food aid to countries. This helps feed them in times of famine of course, but it also means the poor farmers in those countries have a hard time making a living, as their crop prices have to compete against free.
Slashdot Mirror
but you might not get it.
Hate to break it to you, but affirmative action typically works AGAINST Asians, with them usually having in effect disproportionately lower rates of hiring and acceptance into university than similarly qualified whites, or other minorities.
I for one welcome our new, talking insect overlords.
is not incompatible with personal privacy.
Wow, that was an incredibly long list of FUD distortions. Let's tackle this one at a time, shall we?
1.His reform doesn't involve government taking over healthcare, it fines people who don't buy health care insurance. People still buy from private insurance providers. Having young, healthy people buy insurance is solves the problem ensures that young, healthy people won't freeload off the of system by buying insurance only when they get sick. Having everybody insured also reduces uninsured people freeloading by getting their healthcare in the emergency room, subsidized by other taxpayers.
2. His executive orders are for stricter enforcement of existing gun laws, something well within his power to do.
3. He doesn't want children to be killed by guns, and he doesn't want victims of rape and incest to carry their attackers' babies? That's just fine with me.
4. Taxes are the price of civilization. They ensure I have a military to protect my country, that the roads stay safe, that police and fire departments are there to protect, that snake oil stays out of the pharmacy, that the food I buy is free of melamine, and that I can drink water safely out of any tap in the country. It sure does matter to who they were raised on. Romney paid less taxes on his millions, using the carried interest loophole to count his commissions as dividends, than his janitor or secretary did. The janitor or secretary are far more likely to spend money on daily necessities, than to transfer gains off to the Cayman Islands. Oh, and during the period of our country's greatest economic boom following WW2, the top marginal tax rate was 90%.
5. Take out the big bailouts which passed under the Bush administration but took effect under Obama, and he's the most frugal spender since Eisenhower. Citation: http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/05/24/who-is-the-smallest-government-spender-since-eisenhower-would-you-believe-its-barack-obama/
6. The stimulus saved the car industry and brought it back to life. As for temporary jobs, it keeps people working and prevents them from joining the ranks of the "takers". If I had the choice between either losing my house and going out into the streets, or taking a temp job, I'd do the latter. I suppose you'd rather have the unemployed out in the streets (with no health care), because they're all just "takers" anyway.
7.If you don't believe economic theory, feel free to move to Europe where they're basically slashing government spending during a recession, and places like Spain have 20% unemployment among young people joining the workforce.
8. Energy prices grew under the Bush administration but remained stable during the current one. Citation: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_5_3
9. The number of food stamp recipients grew by 14.7 million under the Bush administration, more than under the Obama. And part of the reason it grew under Obama is that the administration expanded the number of households able to receive the benefit, while decreasing the benefit per household. Now, certain poor working families can continue qualify for food stamps, with ramping down benefits, which makes sense, as those people have an incentive to keep working to increase their personal income, rather than having the perverse incentive to not find a job to avoid losing benefits. As a result, unemployment has been steadily decreasing under the administration. Citation: http://www.nbcnews.com/business/report-15-americans-food-stamps-980690
Just be because someone wouldn't survive against a saber tooth tiger doesn't mean we're interfering with natural selection or that it reduces our survival rates. If we discarded our "weak" the way primitive societies did, we wouldn't have discovered people like Stephen Hawking and John Nash. Our species' altruism and shared survival gives us a much greater pool of potential skill, labor, and creativity to draw from, and these potential contributions help each member of our species as a whole survive better as a result. Just as we didn't know a millennia ago that one day Einsteins might be of more worth to our society than skilled hunters, we can't necessarily foresee what might help us in the future. What if the 'retards' you want to cull from our species turn out to be the only ones with genetic resistance to a future epidemic, for example?
One wonders if it was a quote from one of their "interviews".
If the fuel was created from carbon taken out of the air and powered by renewables, burning it and releasing it back into the atmosphere is carbon-neutral and doesn't create net pollution.
China has a strategic pork reserve, why doesn't the US?
WE MUST NOT ALLOW A BACON GAP!
Read the original post. A cap on profits, not wealth. Profits can be reduced by reinvesting it in the company with hiring and capital spending, which is more useful than being paid out as dividends which get taxed at 15% rates to the rich and then sit in Cayman Island bank accounts.
As opposed to the scumbag western rich who outsourced the manufacturing to that communist dictatorship in the first place?
Yes, after years of development, the Reality Distortion Field is now available on iOS apps!
President assassinates YOU!
Mitt paid 15% using the "carried interest" loophole, meaning he takes a percentage cut of his clients' gains and that gets taxed at 15%. In other words, it's not his invested money that he initially earned but his clients'. Regular salesmen at the local mall pay taxes on their commissions at the same rates their base pay, but Mitt (and other investment bankers) don't.
4 space indents, no tabstops, and opening braces on the same line as method declaration.
How does a non-citizen, non-resident commit treason against a country he owes no allegiance to?
So having poor people automatically disqualifies a country in the geographic west, speaking a western language, believing in a western religion, ruled by a western style democratic government, and having a population of mostly white people from being Western? Or does West mean only rich Anglo-Saxon countries? I suppose it's far easier to assert Western superiority by including only the successful countries in the definition.
That's why the army is now developing breast plate.
This. For the two centuries before the the World Wars, Iran/Persia basically alternated between being a British or Russian puppet, until the two decided to share and Russia got the north while the Brits got the south. This arrangement continued into World War 2 with the Ango/Russian invasion and occupation of Iran. Even in the second half of the twentieth century, the UK still had Iran by the balls. Iran was still stuck in a treaty with the UK that guaranteed the oil concessions on behalf of the Anglo-Persian Oil company until the 1990's (negotiated in the 1890's as a hundred-year treaty), with the split being something like 85% profits to the company and the rest to Iran (the usually being a 50-50 split). When the government tried to renegotiate this agreement, the UK and the CIA lead a coup against him that led to the overthrow of the constitutional monarchy and the installment of a puppet shah in `953.
The Anglo-Persian company has since gone on to do bigger and better things, like the Deepwater Horizon disaster, under its new name, British Petroleum, or BP.
They DO get buried away for millions of years. Where do you think petroleum and coal come from?
+1 Insightful
Most people don't realize that we have such maze of laws that the average American breaks three laws a day, often without even knowing it.
Two things:
1. Lebanon is not "Christian". The country was split out of the Ottoman Empire by the French, ostensibly for the purpose of protecting the Christian community there, but the French gerrymandered the territory to such an extent that Lebanon also ended up containing large Sunni, Shi'ite, and Druze communities. The Christians themselves are confusingly denominated among different branches, Catholic, Eastern (Greek) Orthodox, and Oriental (Syrian) Orthodox. Which explains why the whole Lebanese civil war was such a mess between Sunni vs Shiite vs Catholic vs Orthodox vs Druze vs Palestinian vs Israeli vs US vs communist.
2. What does the US (Christian) have to do in a conflict between Israel (Jewish) and Iran (Muslim)? Oh right, asserting its Christian influence! Oh wait....
Israel was hardly innocent in that conflict. Israel invaded southern Lebanon in response to the PLA having invaded there and used it as a base of operations to attack from. Israel then proceeded to occupy southern Lebanon for the next TWO DECADES, which also happened to have triggered the five-way civil war that pretty much tore apart the country, and continues to occupy a small strip of Lebanese land. Israel was also partially responsible for the notorious Sabra and Shtailla massacres during their occupation. Hezbollah was a Shii'ite (read, NOT Palestinian) militia formed during those years to combat the Israeli occupation. Wanting foreign invaders out of your country, or helping another people expel their occupies hardly requires religious fanaticism by any stretch of the imagination.
While Hezbollah has been accused of terrorism, for the most part they engage in military vs military combat, either as a conventional army or guerilla tactics, such as during the 2006 war, and they haven't been involved in suicide bombings since Israel left Lebanon. Some of their attacks, such as the rocket attacks during the 2006 war have hurt civilians, but their enemies are hardly innocent of that either and use tactics that, if done by non-countries, would be called terrorism. See the large amount of civilian damage in the bombings of Beirut, or assassinations of civilian Hezbollah politicians and leaders. Point being that the Lebanese were not the (initial) aggressors in the decades-long Israeli-Lebanese conflict.
Quite literally, yes. The oil companies got over $4 billion in tax breaks last year, and unlike NPR and PBS, these are for-profit companies already make quite a handsome profit.
The one area where the US (and the other industrialized countries in Europe, as well as Japan and South Korea) do not practice free trade is in agriculture. All these countries want to practice free trade for industrialized goods, so that they can sell their manufactured products at competitive prices, and also purchase raw materials and industrial goods cheaply, but they heavily subsidize agriculture. Often this is done in the name of "protecting farmers", "food safety", "national food security".
What this means in effect is that the poorer developing countries, where agriculture is the largest sector of the economy, and hoping to export their agricultural goods in order to get the money needed to build up their infrastructure and industrial base, are screwed. They have no way to compete on the international market with the cheap and heavily subsided farm goods of the industrialized countries, nor can they sell their products easily with all the trade barriers in place. The US has guaranteed prices for its farmers, and a lot of this is simply given away as food aid to countries. This helps feed them in times of famine of course, but it also means the poor farmers in those countries have a hard time making a living, as their crop prices have to compete against free.