Products are ALWAYS about utility, it's just that in some case, the utility in question doesn't show up on a spec sheet. The utility of a status symbol is that it conspicuously communicates that you spend 10x-100x more for products than you need to. If that particular feature is meaningful to you it indicates a couple things: you primarily relate to people by trying to assert your superiority, your social circle (to the extent that it exists) probably consists of likeminded douchebags, and your checking account balance is higher than your self-esteem. Basically you willfully engage in the human equivalent of primate dominance displays.
More rational people would rather focus on purchases that are better optimized for cost - because every luxury car you buy represents, in a real and final sense, extra years of labor and dependence on employers. Buying a $10k car instead of a $100k car in your 20's, after the opportunity cost and compound interest are considered, could let you retire many years earlier. Or just save it up for immediate freedom: that kind of money could allow you to travel the world for a year or two. You could start a small business with that money, you could give it to charity and save hundreds of lives (given that $200 in mosquito nets or deworming medicine will save a life, based on the statistical evidence). A luxury car may not be the very worst way to spend tens of thousands of dollars, but you don't see lots of people arguing that cash-fueled bonfires are worthwhile.
Let's be honest, if you are going to have any sort of systematic moderation of content, you are going to have to have some sort of standards for what is and isn't allowable. Facebook isn't in this to create a platform for the free expression of ideas - they are there to sell advertising, and it's bad for business to have vitriolic hate speech all over people's news feeds.
So if you are going to draw up some standards to unambiguously draw lines for your paid moderation staff, how are you going to do it? Basing it primarily on classes that are legally protected isn't a bad start, at least in the sense that the law is intended to democratically codify our society's shared morality.
What's more, you have to figure out how intersections between sets is going to work - it becomes a problem of set theory and attribute inheritance between sets. The way they are doing it, where the intersection of a Protected set and Non-protected set becomes Non-protected, errs on the side of free speech, but I'd argue it's the only reasonable way to do it. So if you insult black people as a whole, you're over the line, but if you insult black children, you aren't. That seems odd, but think about the alternative - if any set intersecting with a protected class was itself protected, it would mean that you couldn't talk about the protected class in any context at all. I couldn't say anything bad about Christian terrorists or female serial killers or white supremacists or North Korean dictators... because they would each inherit the protection of religion, gender, race, or nationality, respectively.
Unsupported assertion. You live in a fantasy world where murdering people in power somehow leads to freedom and peace. In reality, this usage of personal firearms to liberate people from their governments has never once happened, and we've got no evidence that personal firearms play any part whatsoever in preventing oppression. The closest example might be the American Civil War - and how did that turn out? It was the bloodiest war in the nation's history, and the south still lost. On the other hand, we have lots of examples of peaceful protest being used to overcome oppressive governance - the liberation of India, for instance.
People driving cars kill people and we should not accept it just because we always have.
No shit. That's why we invest a ton of thought and money into regulating transport, gathering data, enforcing the rules, and developing technology to improve the safety of cars. It's had a huge impact too, considering that today, deaths per billion miles in the U.S. are half what they were in the 90's, and 1/5th of what they were in the 60's.
Surely you're in favor of taking the same approach to firearms?
Despite the noise that the vocal minority is making over this, I think you will find that most folks, if asked (assuming no one could find out the answer) would support a completed ban on Muslims in the country. Naturally, most folks are simply afraid of being a racist or other "ist" word.
Honestly, I do not know understand why it is an issue to dislike someone because they are Muslim. It's not like disliking a person because they are brown, or black or whatever color. Islam is a religion and an ideology. It is reasonable to not like a person based on what they choose to believe?
Here's a question for you: what, historically, has been the result of systemic discrimination based on demographic markers? Here's a hint - the violence and turmoil over religious discrimination in England was problematic enough to drive people to sell all their belongings, buy a one-way ticket to a different continent, and try their luck at surviving in the wilderness. The US was founded on principles of religious freedom because the bloodshed and insanity of religious discrimination was a recent memory for the nation's architects.
We've all got to use different heuristics to try to get by in a very complex world. You are asserting one, justified by your emotions and personal anecdotes: "All Muslims are bad". I'll assert a different one, which is based on what I know of history: "Discriminating against entire populations never goes well."
And yet cars provide an immeasurable social and economic benefit to society, and the technology is continually improved to reduce the number of deaths as much as possible. Guns aren't even comparable in either respect.
It doesn't make a lick of difference what they're designed to do. It doesn't matter if I run you over with a car, drown you in a bathtub, shoot you with a gun, or beat you to death with a wooden spoon; you're still just equally dead.
Wrong. The purpose matters because cars provide immeasurable benefit to society in terms of increased productivity, boosts to the economy, lives saved because of rapid transport... cars are transportation technology that happen to cause occasional harm. A huge portion of their continued development is focused on reducing the injuries and harm that they cause. Guns are a technology designed to cause injury, and any other benefits they have are secondary. Which technology, if removed from our society, would cause more economic, social, and personal harm?
That's an accurate description of virtually all American politicians. Trump, the Clintons, the Bushes, Obama... go back as far as you like. (Lincoln may have been honest).
False equivalency fallacy. Trump is of a different breed altogether than prior politicians - just look at politifact (or any fact-checking organization you choose) and you'll see that he is far and away less honest than any other modern politician, regardless of party.
This happens regularly, actually. At the most basic level, in families, when one member has a physical or mental illness that prevents work, or when somebody loses a job, what do you think happens? Somebody with extra space offers a couch or a basement for a while, etc. Parents support adult children, spouses live off of a single income for a while, etc.
The same thing happens in church communities and presumably other, similar groups - people pool resources to help those in need.
It's a fundamentally decent thing to do. Basic income isn't meant to be a freebie to allow free loaders to lay around, but to help people in a rough patch. In a similar way, families support members in need. In both cases, sometimes the system can be taken advantage of, but that's just an inherent part of human nature, and you do what you can to incentivize self-sufficiency.
Wrong. The only sensible way to implement UBI is with tax reform, and a sensible tax reform would cause all income past UBI to be taxed on a progressive scale. Or heck, you could even just implement a flat tax on all income past the UBI, which effectively acts as a progressive tax structure, with your tax rate starting at 0% (or actually negative, depending on how you want to define it) for somebody who earns nothing and lives purely off of UBI, and asymptotically approaching 25% for people that make more and more money. With a UBI of $12k/yr and though, that means that starting at $48k/yr, you are actually paying as much in taxes as you're getting from UBI so you're economically neutral. Anybody over that amount is contributing to the system.
So UBI multiplied by the # of working people is the wrong formula. A subset of the population will be drawing from the system, most people will be contributing (just as it is today). Add in the fact that welfare and social security could be done away with to reclaim ~$1.5T, and it becomes fairly easy to devise a set of parameters that make the system cash neutral or even have it come out as a net gain. Of course, the specific details depend on exactly how much you give for UBI and exactly how you implement taxation. At the end of the day though, the only thing that makes UBI fiscally unworkable is bad math.
What's wrong with cases favouring *robustly funded* science?
As always, the certainly of graft, corruption, and the pushing to the side of REAL science in the rush to prove some assertion is true regardless of facts.
That's quite an accusation - are you suggesting that publicly funded science is more prone to deliberate bias than privately funded science? What's the evidence for that supposed difference? And more importantly: what's the mechanism?
Government agencies generally fund science because it's a long-term social benefit, and fundamental research feeds back into the technology sector and the economy as a whole in many ways. Private corporations generally fund science either because they need a very specific answer to a very specific question (which is R&D, applied science, not really fundamental research) or because they are looking for someone to produce "alternative facts" to use in political campaigning.
What's more, far more fundamental research has been done publicly than privately - so if you really object to government funded science, you essentially object to fundamental research.
There are some really excellent movies by Pixar and Disney that explore fairly complex social themes and future technology development that absolutely deserve a place here, even if they are technically kid's movies:
WALL-E - This movie has surprising depth considering several major sequences have no dialogue whatsoever. Explores themes of advanced automation, sustained survival in space, and extrapolates the impact of current trends on human society (consumerism, anti-intellectualism, obesity, apathy). Several great references to sci-fi classics in here as well.
Big Hero 6 - A Disney movie that opens with an illegal underground robot battle and offers a more accurate portrayal of hobbyist and student garage engineering than most big-budget sci-fi flicks I've seen. If you pay attention, you'll notice McMaster-Carr catalogs and other little details that make any nerd feel at home.
I believe that my Internet provider has been selling data on how I use their service despite and ind defiance of existing laws. And repealing any regulation or law to prevent it will change little or nothing. Even accountability cannot be legislated in the current environment.
I don't understand all the excuses being made for Trump and the Republicans. They sell out the interests and rights of the individual to unethical companies, and you just say "it doesn't really change anything". That's like saying that murder is happening anyway, so might as well legalize it. People are going to murder each other either way, right? To strike a little closer to home - should we just go ahead and open the borders and let any immigrant in? After all, immigrants are already coming over illegally, and to borrow your terminology "any regulation or law to prevent it will change little or nothing."
Admit it, this is the Republicans giving carte blanche to ISPs to totally sell out their customer's privacy. Stop rationalizing it.
Whatever you think, Trump is either the cure or the symptom. He is not the disease, and he is not part of the problem. He may not be the solution, but he is not what came before. That alone is not a negative.
Trump is a self-centered demagogue and he's incompetent to boot, and it's shocking that anybody with the sense to put a coherent sentence together doesn't see right through it. Trump is the symptom, the disease, and a huge part of the problem, even if there are forces that have helped to get him to where he is. Just because Trump is different, does not mean that he is in any way better. Cancer is different than the cold or the flu, but that doesn't make it a remedy to either disease.
I understand that you are scared shitless of the word "terrorist" and not of "stepladder" but that doesn't make the latter's deaths any less important than the formers.
Have you personally used it for that? By my understanding of the technique, it helps you to memorize arbitrary lists of things, which is relevant to memorizing a story, or random digits of pi, or an arbitrary list of nouns. But nowhere do I see that you're capturing actual semantics or a working knowledge of these items, and in fact I could imagine it being counterproductive, because what you're really trying to do is create a bunch of arbitrary but creative and memorable associations with the list items. Which is inherently different than trying to learn the meaning of the items in question.
Anyhow, I'm legitimately curious, but that's the state of the research on this topic as I understand it (and most brain training research, to be honest) - you can certainly get better at any skill through practice, but it's not clear at all that any of those abilities are transferable. The onus is on the researchers to show that getting good at memorizing the order of a list has anything to do with cognition in day-to-day, practical matters. With enough effort I could learn to recite a list of 1000 words in Russian, but that wouldn't mean that I understood their meaning, proper syntactical usage, conjugation, or anything involved with using them effectively in conversation.
At the end of the day, this makes you good at memorizing and reciting long, random lists. That's not what learning a language is about, and it's not something that anybody really needs to do very often. In those cases where it is useful (think of the alphabet), we already have mnemonic devices established to help us out. And maybe there is some subset of people for whom memorizing the order of the periodic table would be really useful, or things like that, and it does sound like a good technique for students - but it's been in question for a while whether that kind of testing is actually a good evaluation of a student's real handle on the material. Rote memorization is just a very, very narrow application of the human mind's capabilities. Working memory seems to be much more broadly applicable, and even there it's an open question whether training really ends up being transferable in a useful way.
Subject says it all. Sure, if you want to be able to recite the Iliad around a campfire just like Homer, then spend hours a day practicing this technique and eventually you'll be able to do it. But you still need to put in the work for every additional item you want to remember, and that just isn't worth it for a lot of things. It's more of a curiosity than a widely applicable skill.
Hylandr doesn't actually understand his own sig, which quickly becomes apparent the moment you argue with him and he immediately resorts to ad-hominem. It's pretty entertaining.
Anything that increases productivity raises output, and therefore value, of the people producing. You'd expect that to make them richer.
That was the naive expectation in the early 1900's that caused people to project a 3-hour work week by 2000. They weren't wrong about productivity increases, but they forgot to factor in the tendency of the rich to hoard the fruits of that progress for themselves.
Part 1, pure hyperbole and Bullshit. If there is illegal activity due process will find it and prosecute it, and the Constitution provides the presumption of innocence. Leftists wanted that for their candidate.
Ok... so how is a desire to shut down the free press and a pattern of overt religious discrimination at all compatible with the first amendment? All you have to do is listen to Trump himself to see that he's outright hostile to many provisions of the Bill of Rights. By supporting Trump, the right has lost whatever credibility they once had with regard to being the party that respected the constitution. Under his leadership they are fast becoming authoritarians rather than conservatives.
Your Pelosi quote doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. No democrat has ever said that illegal immigrants cannot commit crimes. It's also frankly ludicrous to see this narrative that immigrants are somehow more crime-prone than any other citizen. The actual data suggests the opposite. Sure, there are serial killers that are immigrants. There are also serial killers that are citizens. The tendency towards violent crime is completely orthogonal to immigrant status, and only fearmongers trying to push a nationalist agenda will tell you otherwise.
Trump himself declared his intent for "a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on." It's a Muslim ban. Stop changing the facts. The whole thing is unconstitutional, and if you are going to claim this is ok, then you should just be honest that you want to abolish the first amendment protections of religion and make Christianity a state-sanctioned religion. That's reprehensible, but at least you'd be consistent then, rather than trying to pretend you give a shit about the constitution while simultaneously defending flagrant abuses by DJT.
Look at the facts on the ACA - it hasn't had a meaningful impact one way or the other on healthcare costs, but it has had a meaningful impact on uninsured numbers. Get away from anecdotes and partisan opinion pieces, look at data, and that's the only conclusion that can be made. It isn't the raging success that Democrats would like to take credit for, but it isn't the sole cause of our problems as Fox News has been claiming for the last several years. Many Republicans actually support the provision that allows coverage for those with pre-existing conditions, and some of the law's other aspects. Sure, health care costs are increasing, but who is at fault for that? Those who are refusing to do anything. Look at the numbers since 1960 and you'll see that our recent problem are just the culmination of a trend that's been building for a long, long time: http://hspm.sph.sc.edu/courses...
Healthcare is the single biggest economic issue facing the country right now. Wages generally grow linearly, at least on the scale of human lifetimes, but it's plain as day from that chart that healthcare costs are growing quadratically. This is a real, systemic problem, not just another political football, and people's lives and livelihoods are at stake.
The Democrats are in the minority. They literally have control over no branch of the government right now, so I'm not sure why it's even worth complaining about them. Instead, you should be looking to these Republicans who are so full of promises to actually follow through because they hold all the cards - but they've been playing opposition politics for so long that I'm doubtful that they will get anything meaningful done to address our real problems. I would love to be proven wrong.
Yes, the Republicans were obstructionist. The Dems are currently being obstructionist. We're agreed on both these points, right?
I certainly think both sides are willing to dig their heels in and seek to spin every new event in the way that is most favorable for them. That said, I think there's a big difference in degree.
They don't hold a candle to the obstructionism of the right:
John Boehner offering his plans for Obama’s agenda: “We're going to do everything — and I mean everything we can do — to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can.”
Mitch McConnell: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
If that's not putting political aims above the good of the country, I don't know what is.
Lets start with the declarations of impeachment that began back in November. How about the constant claims of racism, discrimination, islamaphobic, homophobic, xenophobic, and that anyone that does agree with their Leftism is one or all of those things.
To be fair, Trump's conflicts of interest, quantity of lawsuits, and anti-constitutional goals are all hugely concerning to anybody, or at least ought to be. Bill Clinton was vilified (and eventually impeached) for sexual behavior that doesn't even make the top 10 list for Trump's antics.
How about the claims that illegal immigrants are not, and can not be, criminals and that the American people must not only welcome criminals but transfer wealth to them.
Citation needed. I have never seen a claim that illegal immigrants can not be criminals. And Democrats haven't changed policy in the last several months over the period of time that their behavior is "driving people away". Their immigration policy is essentially similar to what it's been for the last decade.
How about the false claim that the moratorium on immigration was a "Muslim" ban
What was the basis of the ban then? Trump and his administration have explicitly stated that they prefer to help Christians. No refugees or immigrants from these countries have killed Americans with terrorist acts... the same cannot be said for many other countries that were not on the ban. Trump stated on the campaign trail that he wanted to ban Muslims from immigrating. The onus is on you to show that this ban had a basis in anything beyond religious discrimination.
How about them fighting against changes to the ACA even while the ACA has harmed far more Americans than it helped, with premiums up so far that middle class people can't pay, and deductibles going from on average 500/1000 to 5000/10000 for citizens.
Citation needed. The rate of increase in insurance premiums has not been substantially changed by the ACA, upwards OR downwards. It has, however, had a massive impact on uninsured numbers. And note: Trump himself has backpedaled on plans to repeal the ACA. Democrats have generally been willing to accept improvements to the law but are opposed to attempts to repeal. Compare that to Republicans, who were unwilling to work with Obama to improve the ACA because it might have made him look good.
The Democratic party has become the party of identity politics.
I don't think the Democrats are perfect, and I think this is a reasonable criticism. The way to fix their issue (and most of the problems they really care about) is with a populist economic platform focused directly at the middle and lower class, which is what got Bernie so far in the primaries. And ultimately, that's what got Trump elected. Again though, nothing new here - that's been their schtick for a while.
Overall, it sounds like you've been watching a lot of Fox News and reading a lot of Brietbart. Find something centrist to read, examine everything critically (especially the news that you WANT to agree with, which is when it is easiest to be deceived) and you will have a much clearer picture of our situation. The Democrats are being relatively cooperative, all things considered. Mitch McConnell was very explicit about his intent to oppose Obama in all things, whether they were good for the country or not, just to make sure he was seen as a failure. Democrats have said nothing of the sort.
The Democrats have voted in favor of many appointments, but it's pretty clear thanks to the issues with Flynn that extended questioning is warranted - Trump has been appointing people with dubious backgrounds, lackluster credentials, potential conflicts of interest, foreign ties, and extreme ideologies. In those cases, it's appropriate for Democrats and Republicans to scrutinize and possibly reject his appointments. But in the case when he appoints someone who is actually qualified (General Mattis, for instance) then there isn't any great difficulty getting the job done.
Slashdot Mirror
Products are not always about utility.
Products are ALWAYS about utility, it's just that in some case, the utility in question doesn't show up on a spec sheet. The utility of a status symbol is that it conspicuously communicates that you spend 10x-100x more for products than you need to. If that particular feature is meaningful to you it indicates a couple things: you primarily relate to people by trying to assert your superiority, your social circle (to the extent that it exists) probably consists of likeminded douchebags, and your checking account balance is higher than your self-esteem. Basically you willfully engage in the human equivalent of primate dominance displays.
More rational people would rather focus on purchases that are better optimized for cost - because every luxury car you buy represents, in a real and final sense, extra years of labor and dependence on employers. Buying a $10k car instead of a $100k car in your 20's, after the opportunity cost and compound interest are considered, could let you retire many years earlier. Or just save it up for immediate freedom: that kind of money could allow you to travel the world for a year or two. You could start a small business with that money, you could give it to charity and save hundreds of lives (given that $200 in mosquito nets or deworming medicine will save a life, based on the statistical evidence). A luxury car may not be the very worst way to spend tens of thousands of dollars, but you don't see lots of people arguing that cash-fueled bonfires are worthwhile.
Let's be honest, if you are going to have any sort of systematic moderation of content, you are going to have to have some sort of standards for what is and isn't allowable. Facebook isn't in this to create a platform for the free expression of ideas - they are there to sell advertising, and it's bad for business to have vitriolic hate speech all over people's news feeds.
So if you are going to draw up some standards to unambiguously draw lines for your paid moderation staff, how are you going to do it? Basing it primarily on classes that are legally protected isn't a bad start, at least in the sense that the law is intended to democratically codify our society's shared morality.
What's more, you have to figure out how intersections between sets is going to work - it becomes a problem of set theory and attribute inheritance between sets. The way they are doing it, where the intersection of a Protected set and Non-protected set becomes Non-protected, errs on the side of free speech, but I'd argue it's the only reasonable way to do it. So if you insult black people as a whole, you're over the line, but if you insult black children, you aren't. That seems odd, but think about the alternative - if any set intersecting with a protected class was itself protected, it would mean that you couldn't talk about the protected class in any context at all. I couldn't say anything bad about Christian terrorists or female serial killers or white supremacists or North Korean dictators... because they would each inherit the protection of religion, gender, race, or nationality, respectively.
An armed populace is a free populace.
Unsupported assertion. You live in a fantasy world where murdering people in power somehow leads to freedom and peace. In reality, this usage of personal firearms to liberate people from their governments has never once happened, and we've got no evidence that personal firearms play any part whatsoever in preventing oppression. The closest example might be the American Civil War - and how did that turn out? It was the bloodiest war in the nation's history, and the south still lost. On the other hand, we have lots of examples of peaceful protest being used to overcome oppressive governance - the liberation of India, for instance.
People driving cars kill people and we should not accept it just because we always have.
No shit. That's why we invest a ton of thought and money into regulating transport, gathering data, enforcing the rules, and developing technology to improve the safety of cars. It's had a huge impact too, considering that today, deaths per billion miles in the U.S. are half what they were in the 90's, and 1/5th of what they were in the 60's.
Surely you're in favor of taking the same approach to firearms?
Despite the noise that the vocal minority is making over this, I think you will find that most folks, if asked (assuming no one could find out the answer) would support a completed ban on Muslims in the country.
Naturally, most folks are simply afraid of being a racist or other "ist" word.
Honestly, I do not know understand why it is an issue to dislike someone because they are Muslim. It's not like disliking a person because they are brown, or black or whatever color.
Islam is a religion and an ideology. It is reasonable to not like a person based on what they choose to believe?
Here's a question for you: what, historically, has been the result of systemic discrimination based on demographic markers? Here's a hint - the violence and turmoil over religious discrimination in England was problematic enough to drive people to sell all their belongings, buy a one-way ticket to a different continent, and try their luck at surviving in the wilderness. The US was founded on principles of religious freedom because the bloodshed and insanity of religious discrimination was a recent memory for the nation's architects.
We've all got to use different heuristics to try to get by in a very complex world. You are asserting one, justified by your emotions and personal anecdotes: "All Muslims are bad". I'll assert a different one, which is based on what I know of history: "Discriminating against entire populations never goes well."
And yet cars provide an immeasurable social and economic benefit to society, and the technology is continually improved to reduce the number of deaths as much as possible. Guns aren't even comparable in either respect.
It doesn't make a lick of difference what they're designed to do. It doesn't matter if I run you over with a car, drown you in a bathtub, shoot you with a gun, or beat you to death with a wooden spoon; you're still just equally dead.
Wrong. The purpose matters because cars provide immeasurable benefit to society in terms of increased productivity, boosts to the economy, lives saved because of rapid transport... cars are transportation technology that happen to cause occasional harm. A huge portion of their continued development is focused on reducing the injuries and harm that they cause. Guns are a technology designed to cause injury, and any other benefits they have are secondary. Which technology, if removed from our society, would cause more economic, social, and personal harm?
That's an accurate description of virtually all American politicians. Trump, the Clintons, the Bushes, Obama... go back as far as you like. (Lincoln may have been honest).
False equivalency fallacy. Trump is of a different breed altogether than prior politicians - just look at politifact (or any fact-checking organization you choose) and you'll see that he is far and away less honest than any other modern politician, regardless of party.
This happens regularly, actually. At the most basic level, in families, when one member has a physical or mental illness that prevents work, or when somebody loses a job, what do you think happens? Somebody with extra space offers a couch or a basement for a while, etc. Parents support adult children, spouses live off of a single income for a while, etc.
The same thing happens in church communities and presumably other, similar groups - people pool resources to help those in need.
It's a fundamentally decent thing to do. Basic income isn't meant to be a freebie to allow free loaders to lay around, but to help people in a rough patch. In a similar way, families support members in need. In both cases, sometimes the system can be taken advantage of, but that's just an inherent part of human nature, and you do what you can to incentivize self-sufficiency.
Wrong. The only sensible way to implement UBI is with tax reform, and a sensible tax reform would cause all income past UBI to be taxed on a progressive scale. Or heck, you could even just implement a flat tax on all income past the UBI, which effectively acts as a progressive tax structure, with your tax rate starting at 0% (or actually negative, depending on how you want to define it) for somebody who earns nothing and lives purely off of UBI, and asymptotically approaching 25% for people that make more and more money. With a UBI of $12k/yr and though, that means that starting at $48k/yr, you are actually paying as much in taxes as you're getting from UBI so you're economically neutral. Anybody over that amount is contributing to the system.
So UBI multiplied by the # of working people is the wrong formula. A subset of the population will be drawing from the system, most people will be contributing (just as it is today). Add in the fact that welfare and social security could be done away with to reclaim ~$1.5T, and it becomes fairly easy to devise a set of parameters that make the system cash neutral or even have it come out as a net gain. Of course, the specific details depend on exactly how much you give for UBI and exactly how you implement taxation. At the end of the day though, the only thing that makes UBI fiscally unworkable is bad math.
What's wrong with cases favouring *robustly funded* science?
As always, the certainly of graft, corruption, and the pushing to the side of REAL science in the rush to prove some assertion is true regardless of facts.
That's quite an accusation - are you suggesting that publicly funded science is more prone to deliberate bias than privately funded science? What's the evidence for that supposed difference? And more importantly: what's the mechanism?
Government agencies generally fund science because it's a long-term social benefit, and fundamental research feeds back into the technology sector and the economy as a whole in many ways. Private corporations generally fund science either because they need a very specific answer to a very specific question (which is R&D, applied science, not really fundamental research) or because they are looking for someone to produce "alternative facts" to use in political campaigning.
What's more, far more fundamental research has been done publicly than privately - so if you really object to government funded science, you essentially object to fundamental research.
There are some really excellent movies by Pixar and Disney that explore fairly complex social themes and future technology development that absolutely deserve a place here, even if they are technically kid's movies:
WALL-E - This movie has surprising depth considering several major sequences have no dialogue whatsoever. Explores themes of advanced automation, sustained survival in space, and extrapolates the impact of current trends on human society (consumerism, anti-intellectualism, obesity, apathy). Several great references to sci-fi classics in here as well.
Big Hero 6 - A Disney movie that opens with an illegal underground robot battle and offers a more accurate portrayal of hobbyist and student garage engineering than most big-budget sci-fi flicks I've seen. If you pay attention, you'll notice McMaster-Carr catalogs and other little details that make any nerd feel at home.
Apparently the groupthink among denialists has graduated to Stage 4.
1. Deny the Problem Exists
2. Deny We're the Cause
3. Deny It's a Problem
4. Deny We Can Solve It
5. It's Too Late
Now the question is how long till the next stage?
I believe that my Internet provider has been selling data on how I use their service despite and ind defiance of existing laws. And repealing any regulation or law to prevent it will change little or nothing. Even accountability cannot be legislated in the current environment.
I don't understand all the excuses being made for Trump and the Republicans. They sell out the interests and rights of the individual to unethical companies, and you just say "it doesn't really change anything". That's like saying that murder is happening anyway, so might as well legalize it. People are going to murder each other either way, right? To strike a little closer to home - should we just go ahead and open the borders and let any immigrant in? After all, immigrants are already coming over illegally, and to borrow your terminology "any regulation or law to prevent it will change little or nothing."
Admit it, this is the Republicans giving carte blanche to ISPs to totally sell out their customer's privacy. Stop rationalizing it.
Whatever you think, Trump is either the cure or the symptom. He is not the disease, and he is not part of the problem. He may not be the solution, but he is not what came before. That alone is not a negative.
Trump is a self-centered demagogue and he's incompetent to boot, and it's shocking that anybody with the sense to put a coherent sentence together doesn't see right through it. Trump is the symptom, the disease, and a huge part of the problem, even if there are forces that have helped to get him to where he is. Just because Trump is different, does not mean that he is in any way better. Cancer is different than the cold or the flu, but that doesn't make it a remedy to either disease.
I understand that you are scared shitless of the word "terrorist" and not of "stepladder" but that doesn't make the latter's deaths any less important than the formers.
Don't you mean the ladder's deaths?
Thanks, I'll be here all week.
It's extremely applicable for learning languages.
Have you personally used it for that? By my understanding of the technique, it helps you to memorize arbitrary lists of things, which is relevant to memorizing a story, or random digits of pi, or an arbitrary list of nouns. But nowhere do I see that you're capturing actual semantics or a working knowledge of these items, and in fact I could imagine it being counterproductive, because what you're really trying to do is create a bunch of arbitrary but creative and memorable associations with the list items. Which is inherently different than trying to learn the meaning of the items in question.
Anyhow, I'm legitimately curious, but that's the state of the research on this topic as I understand it (and most brain training research, to be honest) - you can certainly get better at any skill through practice, but it's not clear at all that any of those abilities are transferable. The onus is on the researchers to show that getting good at memorizing the order of a list has anything to do with cognition in day-to-day, practical matters. With enough effort I could learn to recite a list of 1000 words in Russian, but that wouldn't mean that I understood their meaning, proper syntactical usage, conjugation, or anything involved with using them effectively in conversation.
At the end of the day, this makes you good at memorizing and reciting long, random lists. That's not what learning a language is about, and it's not something that anybody really needs to do very often. In those cases where it is useful (think of the alphabet), we already have mnemonic devices established to help us out. And maybe there is some subset of people for whom memorizing the order of the periodic table would be really useful, or things like that, and it does sound like a good technique for students - but it's been in question for a while whether that kind of testing is actually a good evaluation of a student's real handle on the material. Rote memorization is just a very, very narrow application of the human mind's capabilities. Working memory seems to be much more broadly applicable, and even there it's an open question whether training really ends up being transferable in a useful way.
Subject says it all. Sure, if you want to be able to recite the Iliad around a campfire just like Homer, then spend hours a day practicing this technique and eventually you'll be able to do it. But you still need to put in the work for every additional item you want to remember, and that just isn't worth it for a lot of things. It's more of a curiosity than a widely applicable skill.
Hylandr doesn't actually understand his own sig, which quickly becomes apparent the moment you argue with him and he immediately resorts to ad-hominem. It's pretty entertaining.
And walked uphill both ways? Your estimate is way high: https://eh.net/encyclopedia/ho...
Anything that increases productivity raises output, and therefore value, of the people producing. You'd expect that to make them richer.
That was the naive expectation in the early 1900's that caused people to project a 3-hour work week by 2000. They weren't wrong about productivity increases, but they forgot to factor in the tendency of the rich to hoard the fruits of that progress for themselves.
Part 1, pure hyperbole and Bullshit. If there is illegal activity due process will find it and prosecute it, and the Constitution provides the presumption of innocence. Leftists wanted that for their candidate.
Ok... so how is a desire to shut down the free press and a pattern of overt religious discrimination at all compatible with the first amendment? All you have to do is listen to Trump himself to see that he's outright hostile to many provisions of the Bill of Rights. By supporting Trump, the right has lost whatever credibility they once had with regard to being the party that respected the constitution. Under his leadership they are fast becoming authoritarians rather than conservatives.
Your Pelosi quote doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. No democrat has ever said that illegal immigrants cannot commit crimes. It's also frankly ludicrous to see this narrative that immigrants are somehow more crime-prone than any other citizen. The actual data suggests the opposite. Sure, there are serial killers that are immigrants. There are also serial killers that are citizens. The tendency towards violent crime is completely orthogonal to immigrant status, and only fearmongers trying to push a nationalist agenda will tell you otherwise.
Trump himself declared his intent for "a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on." It's a Muslim ban. Stop changing the facts. The whole thing is unconstitutional, and if you are going to claim this is ok, then you should just be honest that you want to abolish the first amendment protections of religion and make Christianity a state-sanctioned religion. That's reprehensible, but at least you'd be consistent then, rather than trying to pretend you give a shit about the constitution while simultaneously defending flagrant abuses by DJT.
Look at the facts on the ACA - it hasn't had a meaningful impact one way or the other on healthcare costs, but it has had a meaningful impact on uninsured numbers. Get away from anecdotes and partisan opinion pieces, look at data, and that's the only conclusion that can be made. It isn't the raging success that Democrats would like to take credit for, but it isn't the sole cause of our problems as Fox News has been claiming for the last several years. Many Republicans actually support the provision that allows coverage for those with pre-existing conditions, and some of the law's other aspects. Sure, health care costs are increasing, but who is at fault for that? Those who are refusing to do anything. Look at the numbers since 1960 and you'll see that our recent problem are just the culmination of a trend that's been building for a long, long time: http://hspm.sph.sc.edu/courses...
Healthcare is the single biggest economic issue facing the country right now. Wages generally grow linearly, at least on the scale of human lifetimes, but it's plain as day from that chart that healthcare costs are growing quadratically. This is a real, systemic problem, not just another political football, and people's lives and livelihoods are at stake.
The Democrats are in the minority. They literally have control over no branch of the government right now, so I'm not sure why it's even worth complaining about them. Instead, you should be looking to these Republicans who are so full of promises to actually follow through because they hold all the cards - but they've been playing opposition politics for so long that I'm doubtful that they will get anything meaningful done to address our real problems. I would love to be proven wrong.
Yes, the Republicans were obstructionist. The Dems are currently being obstructionist. We're agreed on both these points, right?
I certainly think both sides are willing to dig their heels in and seek to spin every new event in the way that is most favorable for them. That said, I think there's a big difference in degree.
They don't hold a candle to the obstructionism of the right:
John Boehner offering his plans for Obama’s agenda: “We're going to do everything — and I mean everything we can do — to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can.”
Mitch McConnell: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
If that's not putting political aims above the good of the country, I don't know what is.
Lets start with the declarations of impeachment that began back in November. How about the constant claims of racism, discrimination, islamaphobic, homophobic, xenophobic, and that anyone that does agree with their Leftism is one or all of those things.
To be fair, Trump's conflicts of interest, quantity of lawsuits, and anti-constitutional goals are all hugely concerning to anybody, or at least ought to be. Bill Clinton was vilified (and eventually impeached) for sexual behavior that doesn't even make the top 10 list for Trump's antics.
How about the claims that illegal immigrants are not, and can not be, criminals and that the American people must not only welcome criminals but transfer wealth to them.
Citation needed. I have never seen a claim that illegal immigrants can not be criminals. And Democrats haven't changed policy in the last several months over the period of time that their behavior is "driving people away". Their immigration policy is essentially similar to what it's been for the last decade.
How about the false claim that the moratorium on immigration was a "Muslim" ban
What was the basis of the ban then? Trump and his administration have explicitly stated that they prefer to help Christians. No refugees or immigrants from these countries have killed Americans with terrorist acts... the same cannot be said for many other countries that were not on the ban. Trump stated on the campaign trail that he wanted to ban Muslims from immigrating. The onus is on you to show that this ban had a basis in anything beyond religious discrimination.
How about them fighting against changes to the ACA even while the ACA has harmed far more Americans than it helped, with premiums up so far that middle class people can't pay, and deductibles going from on average 500/1000 to 5000/10000 for citizens.
Citation needed. The rate of increase in insurance premiums has not been substantially changed by the ACA, upwards OR downwards. It has, however, had a massive impact on uninsured numbers. And note: Trump himself has backpedaled on plans to repeal the ACA. Democrats have generally been willing to accept improvements to the law but are opposed to attempts to repeal. Compare that to Republicans, who were unwilling to work with Obama to improve the ACA because it might have made him look good.
The Democratic party has become the party of identity politics.
I don't think the Democrats are perfect, and I think this is a reasonable criticism. The way to fix their issue (and most of the problems they really care about) is with a populist economic platform focused directly at the middle and lower class, which is what got Bernie so far in the primaries. And ultimately, that's what got Trump elected. Again though, nothing new here - that's been their schtick for a while.
Overall, it sounds like you've been watching a lot of Fox News and reading a lot of Brietbart. Find something centrist to read, examine everything critically (especially the news that you WANT to agree with, which is when it is easiest to be deceived) and you will have a much clearer picture of our situation. The Democrats are being relatively cooperative, all things considered. Mitch McConnell was very explicit about his intent to oppose Obama in all things, whether they were good for the country or not, just to make sure he was seen as a failure. Democrats have said nothing of the sort.
The Democrats have voted in favor of many appointments, but it's pretty clear thanks to the issues with Flynn that extended questioning is warranted - Trump has been appointing people with dubious backgrounds, lackluster credentials, potential conflicts of interest, foreign ties, and extreme ideologies. In those cases, it's appropriate for Democrats and Republicans to scrutinize and possibly reject his appointments. But in the case when he appoints someone who is actually qualified (General Mattis, for instance) then there isn't any great difficulty getting the job done.