If you make $10,000, you pay 17.2%--10% income and 7.2% social security, a total of $1,700/year. If we jack it up to 25%, you wind up paying $2,500/year, or $67/mo more. That's annoying if you're poor, and will cause a crisis; but the fact is the poor are largely consuming cigarettes and booze at a higher cost than that, and any general instability (a flat tire, or being scheduled for fewer hours at K-Mart) will cause the same problem.
That's right, if you take away nearly 10% of an already tiny income, and slice it into small enough chunks that turns it into pocket change. Heck $67 a month!? Well, really its only about 10 cents and hour! Not even a penny every five minutes! That's really nothing at all!
And besides - its just liquor and smokes money anyway! No matter how poor they are I know they still have too much because (I imagine) they are boozing and guzzling up a storm! Bad poor person for having vices in my imagination! They deserve to be punished for it!
And since they have tiny margin of stability they might topple from anyway, why not cut out another good chunk? After all if it is like a guy dangling by a rope - it is obviously stronger than it needs to be, and you can slice away a bit of it and he will still be fine (this can logically be applied indefinitely...).
Nobody is saying we shouldn't have ultra-rich people, and reducing the amount of poverty doesn't strike me as controversial.
Reducing poverty is not controversial. It is just that the rich feel that this should only be done by transfers of wealth from the Middle Class.
(And if their own burden drops a tad as "collateral damage" its just sweet candy that blamelessly fell into their pocket - seriously this is how Flat tax proponents effectively treat the matter.).
... high taxes on the poor drive up wages, which acts as an avoidable tax on the rich by way of reducing human resources--eliminating jobs--through process management)....
The "Trickle Up Theory"! OMG - I never thought I would see someone propose this counterpart of the "Trickle Down Theory" (except as a joke).
Yes indeed! The ideal system is don't tax the rich, but heavily tax the poor, and the exploding piles of cash at the top will motivate their owners to (avoidably!) shovel it out to the poor in salary!
Funding government services and managing inequality are separate problems.
This is absolutely true. But...
That doesn't mean that you can't address both with a single solution, but it's a good idea to keep in mind that they are separate so you don't insist on sub-optimal solutions merely because they target both problems if better solutions address the problems separately.
Taxation is the only mechanism that I can identify that exists on a scale to address inequality.
Taxation to fund government operations is the one essential use of taxing power - it has to be done, and only bizarre reality-detached legislators really believe that most government functions can be defunded wholesale (but we have had quite a few of those in the House recently).
If you aren't taxing to fund some government function or service, then you talking about direct cash redistribution. I don't have a problem with that but, like a tax on capital, it is hard to see how it could ever be implemented in the face of the effective veto the rich have over overall U.S. taxing policy and their venomous hatred of even the mildly progressive overall tax system under which they are rapidly increasing in wealth.
To be clear, the middle and lower class do not consume the most. The wealthy do. Their consumption is just not as high a proportion of their wealth or income....
...That's one thing that people often forget in these minimum wage/living wage debates: the employee still has to be productive enough to earn those wages....
No one is forgetting that, Coward, except maybe the corporations writing the paychecks.
Looking at the productivity vs compensation curves for Americans over the last 50 years there has been an enormous increase of average productivity (2.5 times increase) but virtually no corresponding in real average wages, and the real minimum wage has actually declined, and corporations like Walmart are making record profits ($127 billion for Walmart this year) so worker productivity is doing very, very well for the corporations. All of the evidence shows that corporations are squeezing workers compensation to pump money into the pockets of investors (mostly the already rich) and the executive suite, and have been doing so for two generations now. American workers at all levels, from the minimum-wage workers up are easily productive enough to have earned fat raises across the board.
Except that it was never common to own slaves. Slave ownership was primarily among Southern aristocrats--your average white Southerner wasn't rich enough to afford one.
Would you agree with the statement "it is not common in the U.S. today to own an SUV"?
In suspect most people would disagree with this, and say that SUV ownership is common. The average number of vehicles per household is about 1.9, and the fraction of passenger vehicles on the road that are SUVs is 11%, so we can estimate that one in five households in the U.S. owns a SUV.
In the slave holding regions of the U.S. one in three families owned slaves! In the seven states of the lower south there were as many slaves as there were white people, under such conditions how could it possibly be that ownership was rare?
I submit that the statement "slave ownership was primarily among Southern aristocrats" is essentially a tautology - it is true only if you consider most anyone owning a slave an "aristocrat".
Unfortunatly the cannabis produced today (skunk) is way more potent than that available in the nineteen seventies. Then, average THC content under 2%, now average THC content 20%.
No study anywhere has ever reported an "average THC content 20%". That would be about right for the most potent samples on record not for an average of anything. 14% THC sensimilla was available (and measured by the DEA) in 1975. Currently the DEA reports an average potency of all cannabis samples of 4.89% (2010, most recent released figures), only about twice as high as the average in 1987 (2.38%). And of course hash/hash oil was available in the 1970s that was 40% THC.
This "today's pot is totally different from the past" is a lie based on deliberately false comparisons, similar to claiming that today's whiskey is WA-A-Y more potent than yesterday's beer.
I do recommend reading it! It is a concerted effort to try to find problems with cannabis use in the mountains of research produced over the last 50 years, with scant results, requiring a fairly low bar for most of them to be admissible.
Lets look a couple of the claims:
"Regular cannabis smokers have a higher risk of developing chronic bronchitis."
What is the evidence they have for this? Well what their cited study (also a study of studies like theirs) actually found was "No consistent association was found between long-term marijuana smoking and airflow obstruction measures". "Chronic bronchitis" is a specific disease (bronchial tube inflammation) not their definition of "wheeze, sputum production and chronic coughs" and there is no support for this condition being associated with cannabis use. What their claim really is that self-report studies have found higher reports of coughing more who are long time smokers, no clinical evidence of problems. Casual users have improved lung function! That's the sum total of their scary respiratory scenario.
"Cannabis smoking by middle aged adults probably increases the risk of myocardial infarction."
What studies do they cite to support such a claim? Well, the studies cited actually are studies of people who already have heart disease, a long way from the "middle aged" association claim. To quote one of them: "Although marijuana use has not been associated with mortality in other populations, it may pose particular risk for susceptible individuals with coronary heart disease." I think people with a serious heart condition probably should refrain from pot smoking, just as they probably should from drinking. This is not a risk to the general population of middle aged people.
In general they are trying really hard to come up with harmful effects, and the dragnet is netting very little, so they are greatly overstating what little they have found.
These new images look more like what kids would make when they first discover what happens if you toss pigment on your hand. Not a lot of art going on but it's fun.
All of the criticisms of Cristobal Colon (and other renderings of his name) offered here are absolutely accurate, and I could throw in a few more that were missed.
But it is all beside the point. The reason that we celebrate the Voyage of Columbus is not for any sterling virtues of the man, it is that the voyage he organized directly changed the history of the entire world. Once he made the voyage, European contact with the New World never ended and only grew with time, and triggered long range voyages in all directions as a routine matter. Within 25 years European ships were sailing directly to China. 70 years after Columbus the Emperor of China was dependent on New World silver for currency stability, tobacco had become a vice in Mongolia, and European guns were shaping Japanese history.
No similar change in world affairs had ever occurred in so short a time, and this one was not at all transient.
Windows... not at all. It provides a familiar interface to a collection of hardware and software.
By changing it so that customers hate it, MSFT make people want to "upgrade" even less.
Worse than that for the Wintel duopoly - they are suppressing sales of new machines. I have a home Windows computer which I keep to run Windows-only apps for my family that I would like to upgrade, but no way am I buying a system with Windows 8. I could buy a system with Windows 7 still, but I have to pay extra for a limited selection - basically a "business system", when all I want is a cheap little box.
So that old system still limps along, waiting for the day when I can get a replacement that the family won't loathe, meanwhile Wintel are throwing away a sale.
Worth noting also that a machine with modern sensory equipment and software is going to be far far superior at spotting the "unusual" something as it makes it's way to point X.
A big part of the reason I'm not convinced is because of how much boosters of unmanned-only exaggerate the capabilities of such machines. There's no current machine that can beat a pressure-suited expert on the ground.
Can you cite a single manned space mission that conducted science that a similarly equipped robot mission could not?
Or are you just doing wishful thinking?
And merely having better sensory equipment (when that actually is the case) doesn't mean a better ability at spotting the unusual.
I wouldn't say "merely". Having better sensory equipment pretty much guarantees it will be better at spotting the 'unusual'
In the meantime, the current desultory effort at studying Mars, means we'll lose at least a whole generation of researchers long before we get to human-level science acquisition on Mars.
The Mars Science Laboratory mission (which included the Curiosity rover) cost $2.5 billion. The most optimistic plausible manned Mars scientific mission cost and timeline I have seen is $100 billion and 20 years. A large scale robotic scientific 'attack' on Mars could reduce the incremental cost of robot missions significantly, so in that same time frame 50 or more robotic missions could be mounted, each of which would have an expected operating life on Mars of a decade or so (based on current experience). The human mission might land 4 people on the planet for 18 months.
I submit that 500 years of operation of 50 sophisticated intrument platforms that never sleep, located all over Mars, would put the accomplishments of 6 man-years at one location to shame.
North America was successfully colonized with stone age technology. When the Europeans arrived, there were already people living in most every environment, even on the shores of the Arctic ocean, surviving with stone age technology.
The European colonists could just ask about the plants etc and the only advanced technology they needed to support their lifestyle was blacksmithing and ship waning (carpentry). What made it hard was that they showed up to steal and conquer an already occupied continent..
How can you compare colonizing Mars and colonizing N. America?
Right you are, but you are just scratching the surface.
The real problem with the English colonialists was that they were a group of English playboy-aristocrats and their man-servants arriving without any supplies or equipment. Seriously. These people had no relevant skills or equipment to survive. The fate of the colony was decided before they left port in England.
The Spanish, with their crews of illiterate seamen, did better - when they weren't abusing the natives to attack and kill them and deny them supplies.
The only colonization on Earth that remotely compares to the colonization of Mars is the colonization of the South Pole. There all supplies have to be flown in, you are entirely dependent on an enclosed base for survival, and if it is the wrong time of year, and you get sick, you might just die for lack of appropriate treatment.
Tibet is strategically important to China, and I don't foresee them just giving it up because some hippies are holding protests. Tibet holds a huge supply of freshwater that flows into China. It has nothing to do with religion or politics, just natural resources...
Because unless they subjugate Tibetans, imprison and torture them, and try to eliminate their culture the water won't flow into China anymore?
Imperialists (and their apologists) always have these "reasons", even when they are tissue thin fig leaves.
China could pull of Tibet entirely, and they would still get their water. If the Tibetans tried to cut it off in some way, for some god-knows-why reason, China could shut the project down with one short military operation, and make the Tibetans regret ever trying it.
Given the ever growing taxes in various countries (US included) I find it harder and harder to blame tax-evaders....
The overall US tax burden (all taxes, all levels of government), as a fraction of the GDP has shown no growth over the last 33 years. It has been 35% of the GDP, with ups and downs, but oscillating around this fixed line.
Sorry, but no matter how many times you repeat the "ever growing taxes" lie, it does not become true.
...You aren't a Republican by any chance, are you? Not being part of the "reality-based" community seems to be an indicator for that.
All of the talking points seem to be there:
"... the people who created my job. The latter have my thanks..." = You should be grateful the Job Creators even gave you a job.
"Shark Tank shows that business is alive and well. We don't have to work for them - we can compete with them..." = Or you should be a Job Creator yourself, reality TV proves there is nothing to it!
"If you can't compete with the company, and you can't compete with the indentured servant, then you must defend this question: In what way other than to the investor class are you valuable?" = You can't dethrone a corporation by yourself, and don't like having you wages depressed by admitted servitude, then you are worthless...
"I specifically reference Heinlein's "Time for the stars", where the irreplaceable are specifically replaceable. " = reference to Libertarian fiction to bolster case.
We have "Schizo-Affective Disorder" in which we get to claim that the various "schizophrenias" and the various mood disorders are just one big unhappy diagnosis!
Makes things easy for the diagnostician - just one diagnosis, and you can prescribe lithium and anti-psychotics to everyone. And then you can pile on more drugs to treat the side-effects from the drug combinations you started with. And then of course, there are the side-effects of the side-effect treating drugs. Eventually you can work your way up to one or two dozen drugs at once.
Seriously - I have relatives that have suffered from this sort of diagnostic abuse.
"Global Warming is Proven Science" -Today
"Global Cooling" - 1970s
Which "consensus" is right? Then or now? Or is it just another "immature fields of study" that needs more funding?
Ah, the false premise fallacy. Sorry, there was no "global cooling" consensus in the 1970s. Just one of many falsehoods trotted out by climate deniers.
The Wikipedia page on this exposes the lie nicely. But you will just keep repeating it won't you?
Your point with Piltdown Man certainly does not demonstrate "Consensus is often wrong, and glaringly so", it simply show that glaring error is possible, especially in immature fields of study. If all you've go is Piltdown, then your evidence is that such error is quite rare.
And, there you have an important piece of the global warming puzzle that many seem to miss.
Kids in chemistry class may have problems understanding basic chemistry. But, the experiments are laid out, the theories, the laws, the hypothesis are all there - everything is made available so that a juvenile layman who is willing to make the effort might become a novice chemist. And, the learning continues through the second year of chemistry, right on through their college and/or university years.
And notice that is is only after you taken those years of chemistry study that you are in a position to weigh-in on complex topics in chemistry, or the evaluate them at a serious level. But you can understand the basic facts of complex chemical issues at more elementary level with lesser degrees of learning, but only if you have applied yourself and learned.
Now - where can we find the layman's textbooks on manmade global warming?
The fundamental sub-disciplines of physics, chemistry, and statistics that go into the climate science all have readily available layman's textbooks (as you concede yourself). The IPCC report is an excellent place to understand the scientific evidence for AGM, it provides a comprehensive and accessible survey of the science of the field. If you haven't read it then you only have yourself to blame. If you have read it and you fail to understand by reason of ignorance (not hitting those layman's textbooks) you have only yourself to blame. If you read it and simply reject what it says because... why? You don't like its conclusions? Then again, you have only yourself to blame.
Oh - we have to take the word of the "consensus". Interesting. As has already been pointed out, the moment one stops doing science, and begins to preach to the masses, one is no longer a scientist, but a politician.
Really? Who "pointed this out"? Passing along scientific findings to "the masses" is what we call education. Interesting that you detest that. It explains a lot about your post.
Or, a priest of the new religion of Global Warming.
Thanks for tipping your hand - your mind is closed, and you blame others for your ignorance.
It is hard to believe that a near miss by a SAM would be given less attention by the captain than a malfunctioning coffee maker and even harder to believe that this incident was not reported. If a SAM exploded 20 seconds away from my DC-10 full of passengers whose lives I'm responsible for that would sure as shit get my attention if I was the captain and you can bet your bottom dollar I would report it to somebody....
It really is hard to believe, yes. For example, let's say it is the inclination of the pilot to day "we're okay" let's just forget about it. Does he know the airplane suffered no damage at all? How? When the plane goes in for maintenance are there going to the mysterious fragment holes in the tail or wings? These might endanger plane safety, and even if not the unreported incident that created them would end his career. Is he and the copilor going to bet that the plane really is unscathed?
What about the passengers? A warhead detonating nearby would be noticed by them. What happened to their reports/complaints?
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If you make $10,000, you pay 17.2%--10% income and 7.2% social security, a total of $1,700/year. If we jack it up to 25%, you wind up paying $2,500/year, or $67/mo more. That's annoying if you're poor, and will cause a crisis; but the fact is the poor are largely consuming cigarettes and booze at a higher cost than that, and any general instability (a flat tire, or being scheduled for fewer hours at K-Mart) will cause the same problem.
That's right, if you take away nearly 10% of an already tiny income, and slice it into small enough chunks that turns it into pocket change. Heck $67 a month!? Well, really its only about 10 cents and hour! Not even a penny every five minutes! That's really nothing at all!
And besides - its just liquor and smokes money anyway! No matter how poor they are I know they still have too much because (I imagine) they are boozing and guzzling up a storm! Bad poor person for having vices in my imagination! They deserve to be punished for it!
And since they have tiny margin of stability they might topple from anyway, why not cut out another good chunk? After all if it is like a guy dangling by a rope - it is obviously stronger than it needs to be, and you can slice away a bit of it and he will still be fine (this can logically be applied indefinitely...).
....
Nobody is saying we shouldn't have ultra-rich people, and reducing the amount of poverty doesn't strike me as controversial.
Reducing poverty is not controversial. It is just that the rich feel that this should only be done by transfers of wealth from the Middle Class.
(And if their own burden drops a tad as "collateral damage" its just sweet candy that blamelessly fell into their pocket - seriously this is how Flat tax proponents effectively treat the matter.).
... high taxes on the poor drive up wages, which acts as an avoidable tax on the rich by way of reducing human resources--eliminating jobs--through process management)....
The "Trickle Up Theory"! OMG - I never thought I would see someone propose this counterpart of the "Trickle Down Theory" (except as a joke).
Yes indeed! The ideal system is don't tax the rich, but heavily tax the poor, and the exploding piles of cash at the top will motivate their owners to (avoidably!) shovel it out to the poor in salary!
Funding government services and managing inequality are separate problems.
This is absolutely true. But...
That doesn't mean that you can't address both with a single solution, but it's a good idea to keep in mind that they are separate so you don't insist on sub-optimal solutions merely because they target both problems if better solutions address the problems separately.
Taxation is the only mechanism that I can identify that exists on a scale to address inequality.
Taxation to fund government operations is the one essential use of taxing power - it has to be done, and only bizarre reality-detached legislators really believe that most government functions can be defunded wholesale (but we have had quite a few of those in the House recently).
If you aren't taxing to fund some government function or service, then you talking about direct cash redistribution. I don't have a problem with that but, like a tax on capital, it is hard to see how it could ever be implemented in the face of the effective veto the rich have over overall U.S. taxing policy and their venomous hatred of even the mildly progressive overall tax system under which they are rapidly increasing in wealth.
To be clear, the middle and lower class do not consume the most. The wealthy do. Their consumption is just not as high a proportion of their wealth or income. ...
[Citation needed]
...That's one thing that people often forget in these minimum wage/living wage debates: the employee still has to be productive enough to earn those wages. ...
No one is forgetting that, Coward, except maybe the corporations writing the paychecks.
Looking at the productivity vs compensation curves for Americans over the last 50 years there has been an enormous increase of average productivity (2.5 times increase) but virtually no corresponding in real average wages, and the real minimum wage has actually declined, and corporations like Walmart are making record profits ($127 billion for Walmart this year) so worker productivity is doing very, very well for the corporations. All of the evidence shows that corporations are squeezing workers compensation to pump money into the pockets of investors (mostly the already rich) and the executive suite, and have been doing so for two generations now. American workers at all levels, from the minimum-wage workers up are easily productive enough to have earned fat raises across the board.
Except that it was never common to own slaves. Slave ownership was primarily among Southern aristocrats--your average white Southerner wasn't rich enough to afford one.
Would you agree with the statement "it is not common in the U.S. today to own an SUV"?
In suspect most people would disagree with this, and say that SUV ownership is common. The average number of vehicles per household is about 1.9, and the fraction of passenger vehicles on the road that are SUVs is 11%, so we can estimate that one in five households in the U.S. owns a SUV.
In the slave holding regions of the U.S. one in three families owned slaves! In the seven states of the lower south there were as many slaves as there were white people, under such conditions how could it possibly be that ownership was rare?
I submit that the statement "slave ownership was primarily among Southern aristocrats" is essentially a tautology - it is true only if you consider most anyone owning a slave an "aristocrat".
Unfortunatly the cannabis produced today (skunk) is way more potent than that available in the nineteen seventies. Then, average THC content under 2%, now average THC content 20%.
No study anywhere has ever reported an "average THC content 20%". That would be about right for the most potent samples on record not for an average of anything. 14% THC sensimilla was available (and measured by the DEA) in 1975. Currently the DEA reports an average potency of all cannabis samples of 4.89% (2010, most recent released figures), only about twice as high as the average in 1987 (2.38%). And of course hash/hash oil was available in the 1970s that was 40% THC.
This "today's pot is totally different from the past" is a lie based on deliberately false comparisons, similar to claiming that today's whiskey is WA-A-Y more potent than yesterday's beer.
Did and did.
I do recommend reading it! It is a concerted effort to try to find problems with cannabis use in the mountains of research produced over the last 50 years, with scant results, requiring a fairly low bar for most of them to be admissible.
Lets look a couple of the claims:
"Regular cannabis smokers have a higher risk of developing chronic bronchitis."
What is the evidence they have for this? Well what their cited study (also a study of studies like theirs) actually found was "No consistent association was found between long-term marijuana smoking and airflow obstruction measures". "Chronic bronchitis" is a specific disease (bronchial tube inflammation) not their definition of "wheeze, sputum production and chronic coughs" and there is no support for this condition being associated with cannabis use. What their claim really is that self-report studies have found higher reports of coughing more who are long time smokers, no clinical evidence of problems. Casual users have improved lung function! That's the sum total of their scary respiratory scenario.
"Cannabis smoking by middle aged adults probably increases the risk of myocardial infarction."
What studies do they cite to support such a claim? Well, the studies cited actually are studies of people who already have heart disease, a long way from the "middle aged" association claim. To quote one of them: "Although marijuana use has not been associated with mortality in other populations, it may pose particular risk for susceptible individuals with coronary heart disease." I think people with a serious heart condition probably should refrain from pot smoking, just as they probably should from drinking. This is not a risk to the general population of middle aged people.
In general they are trying really hard to come up with harmful effects, and the dragnet is netting very little, so they are greatly overstating what little they have found.
These new images look more like what kids would make when they first discover what happens if you toss pigment on your hand. Not a lot of art going on but it's fun.
The cave paintings in France are definitely art and were created around the same time.
The Sulawesi art is very definitely representational art not just "tossing pigments" around. The cave paintings in France have those same hand print patterns you try to dismiss as "not art". Your bias against this artwork seem unsupported by facts.
All of the criticisms of Cristobal Colon (and other renderings of his name) offered here are absolutely accurate, and I could throw in a few more that were missed.
But it is all beside the point. The reason that we celebrate the Voyage of Columbus is not for any sterling virtues of the man, it is that the voyage he organized directly changed the history of the entire world. Once he made the voyage, European contact with the New World never ended and only grew with time, and triggered long range voyages in all directions as a routine matter. Within 25 years European ships were sailing directly to China. 70 years after Columbus the Emperor of China was dependent on New World silver for currency stability, tobacco had become a vice in Mongolia, and European guns were shaping Japanese history.
No similar change in world affairs had ever occurred in so short a time, and this one was not at all transient.
Windows ... not at all. It provides a familiar interface to a collection of hardware and software.
By changing it so that customers hate it, MSFT make people want to "upgrade" even less.
Worse than that for the Wintel duopoly - they are suppressing sales of new machines. I have a home Windows computer which I keep to run Windows-only apps for my family that I would like to upgrade, but no way am I buying a system with Windows 8. I could buy a system with Windows 7 still, but I have to pay extra for a limited selection - basically a "business system", when all I want is a cheap little box.
So that old system still limps along, waiting for the day when I can get a replacement that the family won't loathe, meanwhile Wintel are throwing away a sale.
Worth noting also that a machine with modern sensory equipment and software is going to be far far superior at spotting the "unusual" something as it makes it's way to point X.
A big part of the reason I'm not convinced is because of how much boosters of unmanned-only exaggerate the capabilities of such machines. There's no current machine that can beat a pressure-suited expert on the ground.
Can you cite a single manned space mission that conducted science that a similarly equipped robot mission could not?
Or are you just doing wishful thinking?
And merely having better sensory equipment (when that actually is the case) doesn't mean a better ability at spotting the unusual.
I wouldn't say "merely". Having better sensory equipment pretty much guarantees it will be better at spotting the 'unusual'
In the meantime, the current desultory effort at studying Mars, means we'll lose at least a whole generation of researchers long before we get to human-level science acquisition on Mars.
The Mars Science Laboratory mission (which included the Curiosity rover) cost $2.5 billion. The most optimistic plausible manned Mars scientific mission cost and timeline I have seen is $100 billion and 20 years. A large scale robotic scientific 'attack' on Mars could reduce the incremental cost of robot missions significantly, so in that same time frame 50 or more robotic missions could be mounted, each of which would have an expected operating life on Mars of a decade or so (based on current experience). The human mission might land 4 people on the planet for 18 months.
I submit that 500 years of operation of 50 sophisticated intrument platforms that never sleep, located all over Mars, would put the accomplishments of 6 man-years at one location to shame.
North America was successfully colonized with stone age technology. When the Europeans arrived, there were already people living in most every environment, even on the shores of the Arctic ocean, surviving with stone age technology. The European colonists could just ask about the plants etc and the only advanced technology they needed to support their lifestyle was blacksmithing and ship waning (carpentry). What made it hard was that they showed up to steal and conquer an already occupied continent.. How can you compare colonizing Mars and colonizing N. America?
Right you are, but you are just scratching the surface.
The real problem with the English colonialists was that they were a group of English playboy-aristocrats and their man-servants arriving without any supplies or equipment. Seriously. These people had no relevant skills or equipment to survive. The fate of the colony was decided before they left port in England.
The Spanish, with their crews of illiterate seamen, did better - when they weren't abusing the natives to attack and kill them and deny them supplies.
The only colonization on Earth that remotely compares to the colonization of Mars is the colonization of the South Pole. There all supplies have to be flown in, you are entirely dependent on an enclosed base for survival, and if it is the wrong time of year, and you get sick, you might just die for lack of appropriate treatment.
Tibet is strategically important to China, and I don't foresee them just giving it up because some hippies are holding protests. Tibet holds a huge supply of freshwater that flows into China. It has nothing to do with religion or politics, just natural resources...
Because unless they subjugate Tibetans, imprison and torture them, and try to eliminate their culture the water won't flow into China anymore?
Imperialists (and their apologists) always have these "reasons", even when they are tissue thin fig leaves.
China could pull of Tibet entirely, and they would still get their water. If the Tibetans tried to cut it off in some way, for some god-knows-why reason, China could shut the project down with one short military operation, and make the Tibetans regret ever trying it.
No need for maintaining a brutal occupation.
U really have no clue. ... And u think that they will work together?
--
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What have got against the "y" and the "o" in "you"?
Given the ever growing taxes in various countries (US included) I find it harder and harder to blame tax-evaders....
The overall US tax burden (all taxes, all levels of government), as a fraction of the GDP has shown no growth over the last 33 years. It has been 35% of the GDP, with ups and downs, but oscillating around this fixed line.
Sorry, but no matter how many times you repeat the "ever growing taxes" lie, it does not become true.
Oops! Make that reference to Libertarian juvenile fiction to bolster case.
...You aren't a Republican by any chance, are you? Not being part of the "reality-based" community seems to be an indicator for that.
All of the talking points seem to be there:
We have "Schizo-Affective Disorder" in which we get to claim that the various "schizophrenias" and the various mood disorders are just one big unhappy diagnosis!
Makes things easy for the diagnostician - just one diagnosis, and you can prescribe lithium and anti-psychotics to everyone. And then you can pile on more drugs to treat the side-effects from the drug combinations you started with. And then of course, there are the side-effects of the side-effect treating drugs. Eventually you can work your way up to one or two dozen drugs at once.
Seriously - I have relatives that have suffered from this sort of diagnostic abuse.
"Global Warming is Proven Science" -Today "Global Cooling" - 1970s
Which "consensus" is right? Then or now? Or is it just another "immature fields of study" that needs more funding?
Ah, the false premise fallacy. Sorry, there was no "global cooling" consensus in the 1970s. Just one of many falsehoods trotted out by climate deniers.
The Wikipedia page on this exposes the lie nicely. But you will just keep repeating it won't you?
Your point with Piltdown Man certainly does not demonstrate "Consensus is often wrong, and glaringly so", it simply show that glaring error is possible, especially in immature fields of study. If all you've go is Piltdown, then your evidence is that such error is quite rare.
This notion of utility ("usefulness") has nothing to do with science, which requires nothing of the sort. Funding might, but not science.
And, there you have an important piece of the global warming puzzle that many seem to miss.
Kids in chemistry class may have problems understanding basic chemistry. But, the experiments are laid out, the theories, the laws, the hypothesis are all there - everything is made available so that a juvenile layman who is willing to make the effort might become a novice chemist. And, the learning continues through the second year of chemistry, right on through their college and/or university years.
And notice that is is only after you taken those years of chemistry study that you are in a position to weigh-in on complex topics in chemistry, or the evaluate them at a serious level. But you can understand the basic facts of complex chemical issues at more elementary level with lesser degrees of learning, but only if you have applied yourself and learned.
Now - where can we find the layman's textbooks on manmade global warming?
The fundamental sub-disciplines of physics, chemistry, and statistics that go into the climate science all have readily available layman's textbooks (as you concede yourself). The IPCC report is an excellent place to understand the scientific evidence for AGM, it provides a comprehensive and accessible survey of the science of the field. If you haven't read it then you only have yourself to blame. If you have read it and you fail to understand by reason of ignorance (not hitting those layman's textbooks) you have only yourself to blame. If you read it and simply reject what it says because... why? You don't like its conclusions? Then again, you have only yourself to blame.
Oh - we have to take the word of the "consensus". Interesting. As has already been pointed out, the moment one stops doing science, and begins to preach to the masses, one is no longer a scientist, but a politician.
Really? Who "pointed this out"? Passing along scientific findings to "the masses" is what we call education. Interesting that you detest that. It explains a lot about your post.
Or, a priest of the new religion of Global Warming.
Thanks for tipping your hand - your mind is closed, and you blame others for your ignorance.
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It is hard to believe that a near miss by a SAM would be given less attention by the captain than a malfunctioning coffee maker and even harder to believe that this incident was not reported. If a SAM exploded 20 seconds away from my DC-10 full of passengers whose lives I'm responsible for that would sure as shit get my attention if I was the captain and you can bet your bottom dollar I would report it to somebody....
It really is hard to believe, yes. For example, let's say it is the inclination of the pilot to day "we're okay" let's just forget about it. Does he know the airplane suffered no damage at all? How? When the plane goes in for maintenance are there going to the mysterious fragment holes in the tail or wings? These might endanger plane safety, and even if not the unreported incident that created them would end his career. Is he and the copilor going to bet that the plane really is unscathed?
What about the passengers? A warhead detonating nearby would be noticed by them. What happened to their reports/complaints?