And what evidence exactly have we accumulated since then?
The biggest find was discovering planets outside of our solar system. Lots of them.
For most of the time that people thought life was unique to Earth, other planets had not been discovered. It seems odd to think about, but the first confirmed exo-planet didn't happen until 1988! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet#History_of_detection
About 72 percent of registered voters in Cantor’s district polled on Tuesday said they either “strongly” or “somewhat” support immigration reform that would....allow undocumented residents without criminal backgrounds to gain legal status
Polling in his district showed support for immigration reform though. http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/eric-cantor-poll-immigration-lose-107704.html
The money wasn't the issue so much as it was losing contact with his district. Cantor spent way too much time out of district dealing with national issues and campaigning for other Republicans. He lost touch with his people, and let Brat and others slowly push messaging with no counter for far too long.
The money difference would have had an impact if Cantor's people were specifically countering Brat's messages. But the majority of the 5 million was generic 'blah' advertising. By the time the Cantor group realized how effective Brat's messages were, it was too late. They didn't take Brat seriously.
I think history will paint this more as a screw up by an established campaign and not a win for the Tea Party.
Actually, the real problem is not the skill in gerrymandering, but their political decisions..
It was both. The skill of the gerrymandering was highly increased because the new census had just been released in 2010, which happened to coincide with a huge Republican win nationally, on the state and local levels, as well as lots of Governors. So armed with brand new accurate population data, and with large control over many districts, Republicans heavily re-drew the district boundaries.
You can only really gerrymander every 10 years when the census comes out. Republicans had a big win across the country, state, and local levels right before the census came out. Hence, they redrew A LOT of districts to extreme degrees.
I don't recall the last time Democrats were in power to a large'ish degre when a census came out.
Republicans are falling victim to their own success redistricting.
Totally agree. Many of them cannot deviate at all from ideology to compromise, even on common sense things, without facing primary challenges.
What fear do teachers have in parroting their lessons to the students?
Teaching evolution in a christian conservative town when it is the teacher vs the town + principal of the school? Being told by the school board that you can't teach sex ed unless it is abstinence only? Having many valuable books banned from certain conservative libraries but wanting to teach with them anyway? (Like Huckleberry Finn for instance).
Not saying that tenure is the right solution to this problem, but there are a lot of things that make parents, the principal, the town, etc.. mad at teachers, that the teachers are actually doing in the children's best interest (depending on your point of view of course.... which is central to this issue: who decides what a child should learn? Should society have a right to set some sort of baseline learning that we want citizens to have before becoming adults? Or leave it entirely up to parents and have no standards? How do you strike a balance? How much leeway should teachers have to modify curriculum? etc...).
Seems to me that strict government control over government funded education (i.e. public schools) is legitimate. I await your argument as to why it's not.
Bear in mind, I'm advocating loose government control instead of strict and not complete lack of control.
When you say "loose government control", some people hear, "anarchy". Just like when you say, "lower taxes", they hear, "elimination of all taxation". No intermediate states are contemplated, or even considered possible.
Goes the other way also. When someone proposes a carbon tax, or increased environmental regulations, conservatives often translate that to "nuke the economy to death".
This is a sling. It is using well targeted funds on small "under the radar" elections. The money won't be used to try to influence presidential races or big national senate seats.
Most small congressional district candidates spend very little (relatively speaking) on elections.
I prefer to correlate violence not with guns, but with income inequality, social safety nets (mental health, food stamps, etc..), and social mobility (ability to increase your economic status.. move up a rung).
As far as I've been able to tell, when inequality is high, social safety nets and social mobility are low, violence goes up.
Whistleblowers don't just release things that are illegal. Lots of really evil behavior is "legal".
It does make it tricky to know if someone is a whistleblower or just a criminal though. In a perfect society, who would decide, and using what process?
1. NSA employee releases tons of classified documents to people who do not have the legal right to possess that information. 2. Some of that material shows spy programs that are currently legal according to courts (mostly secret court rulings). 3. To the average person, it appears that NSA may be violating the constitution. But no court has ruled on that yet.
At this point, what, legally, should happen? Don't arrest Snowden, but set a court date to rule on whether the NSA violated the constitution? In the meantime, what becomes of the reporters and the "evidence" in question? Do the reporters, on good faith, hand the docs back, pending the outcome of the trial?
Or there needs to be a division between applied humanities, and theoretical and/or teaching humanity degrees. Sociologists, Anthropologists, etc.., could greatly benefit product research, marketing, design and ux, etc.. if they had a more applied/hands on series of courses instead of it being mostly theory.. followed by a few hands on projects towards the end.
But that would also take businesses realizing that they could benefit from staffing those skill sets. Something only the very largest companies generally do right now.
It's hard to believe the claims of job losses tied to the minimum wage.
You can look back at 50 years of minimum wage raises to see that there exists no proof of job loss. This is yet another conservative talking point driven by ideology rather than data.
We don't need a maximum wage. We just need to return to a more progressive tax system. People like Warren Buffet/Koch Brothers should be taxed on income and capital gains, and anything that increases their worth each year at a very high rate, like 90%. 100 billion vs 10 billion. I'm sure they would survive.
Then use that increased tax revenue to build infrastructure (create jobs when the market isn't), retrain workers that lost jobs due to those jobs disappearing, educate, create new fields that potentially will have jobs in the future by increasing funding to research and development, etc..
The vast majority of jobs in the US are low pay service jobs (restaurants, hotel cleaner, etc..) and low pay retail jobs (walmart).
Do you want the vast majority of the service workers reliant on government subsidies in one form or another, or would you rather have the base pay in the country be a livable wage?
It isn't right that many of Walmart's employees have to use food stamps to make ends meet. I would much rather respect the dignity of work and require Walmart to cut slightly into its profits and pay its workers a living wage, instead of subsidizing Walmart's profits with tax payer funds via food stamps and other government services.
At some point it becomes far to hard to maintain or understand so they contract out someone like me who moves it to a relational database with a web front end. Everyone is happy!
This work forms a major part of my work load don't fuck with it!
This still happens a lot? Holy cow.... I was doing that 16 years ago out of college. I would have assumed that the business world would be turning out new graduates that realize that spreadsheets are not databases... guess not.
Well good for you then. Pretty easy (technically) work, and people really are super happy to see their spreadsheets turned into websites.
You think we'll have candidates that make it through primaries and who also make it their main goal to dismantle the military/industrial/financial/intelligence complex?
We have to start by making it possible for 'real' people to make it in politics, without having the backing of the major financial players (wall street, etc..): https://mayday.us/
Which is sad because the country has quite a bit of history
It really is a shame. That part of the world used to be known for arts, sciences, and education. I wish that it were still that way...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achaemenid_Empire
Iraq also. And Egypt. Most of the middle and near east used to lead the world in enlightenment.
I'd love to travel to Iraq just to see the ancient ruins alone Babylon for instance. It is a huge shame. Places like the fertile crescent were where the world first saw modern cities and latter modern states. The first large scale irrigation, the first agriculture, the first writing, etc.. (there are some competing areas for 'oldest' in the far east depending on what you are looking at).
It seems like every 'source location' (birthplace of X) for any modern X is now a very unstable, unwelcoming place. Odd.
but i can't understand how I'd pull that shit off if publishers like Baen disappeared.
It seems like the real value of a publisher is to select decent enough writing, and for a publisher like Baen, of a particular type. When you buy something published by Baen, you know, generally, what type of stuff you are buying, what level of quality, etc..
Sites like Reddit, or any vote up/down user content raking sites, could serve to to provide a large portion of that value. I'd like to see 20-50 authors of a particular writing style (like sci-fi for instance) band together, make their own web site to distribute content, and incorporate a voting or ranking system. Of course, you would need some randomness to keep circulating new content to eyeballs, as well as some targeted promotion stuff to help get books on the bottom of the rankings a second chance to be looked at and/or upvoted.
Maintain them as pets or food in our society though and they'll live as long as we continue to do that.
There isn't any value to having an endangered species in a zoo or farm. The entire point of protecting species is to maintain their role in the ecosystem. Natural species die off is one thing, but the rapidity with which humans can disturb ecosystems makes it necessary to protect them when we can.
Removing a species from an environment can often have unintended consequences. Oftentimes for the worse.
You are assuming that the problems with the price of electric cars versus gasoline cars is economies of scale.
Look at how much it costs to buy a 20 mile range electric scooter in China now (over 400 million being used daily now). It is 300-700 bucks for most models. Of course economies of scale are going to tremendously change prices. Most large electric motors are wound by hand. The volt drive train costs 6000 dollars.... for basically an electric motor. Mass produce those in the million/hundred million range and the price will fall drastically.
We could build more wind and solar but that means energy prices triple, if we're lucky.
....where are you getting these figures? I live in one of many US states that has been slowly increasing wind (20% for us now with 25% mandated in about 5 more years iirc) and my prices have not increased at all (beyond normal inflation/normal increases).
Are you looking at charts like this http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/average-electricity-prices-kwh and looking at Germany? Because in the case of Germany there are a lot more factors involved in electricity cost than just the technology being used.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is Cantor's case considered one of the biggest political upsets in history? Because 9999 times out of 10000, you can buy a seat.
Think of how man congress folks have been elected since the start of the US, and how few were upsets.
And what evidence exactly have we accumulated since then?
The biggest find was discovering planets outside of our solar system. Lots of them.
For most of the time that people thought life was unique to Earth, other planets had not been discovered. It seems odd to think about, but the first confirmed exo-planet didn't happen until 1988! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet#History_of_detection
About 72 percent of registered voters in Cantor’s district polled on Tuesday said they either “strongly” or “somewhat” support immigration reform that would....allow undocumented residents without criminal backgrounds to gain legal status
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/eric-cantor-poll-immigration-lose-107704.html
Opposition to immigration is one of the few truly bipartisan things in the American electorate.
Got some numbers for that? Cantor's own district was for immigration reform...
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/eric-cantor-poll-immigration-lose-107704.html
Polling in his district showed support for immigration reform though. http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/eric-cantor-poll-immigration-lose-107704.html
It wasn't 100 million, try 5 million:)
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/06/11/320923373/brat-cooks-cantor-s-goose-in-virginia-primary
The money wasn't the issue so much as it was losing contact with his district. Cantor spent way too much time out of district dealing with national issues and campaigning for other Republicans. He lost touch with his people, and let Brat and others slowly push messaging with no counter for far too long.
The money difference would have had an impact if Cantor's people were specifically countering Brat's messages. But the majority of the 5 million was generic 'blah' advertising. By the time the Cantor group realized how effective Brat's messages were, it was too late. They didn't take Brat seriously.
I think history will paint this more as a screw up by an established campaign and not a win for the Tea Party.
Actually, the real problem is not the skill in gerrymandering, but their political decisions..
It was both. The skill of the gerrymandering was highly increased because the new census had just been released in 2010, which happened to coincide with a huge Republican win nationally, on the state and local levels, as well as lots of Governors. So armed with brand new accurate population data, and with large control over many districts, Republicans heavily re-drew the district boundaries.
You can only really gerrymander every 10 years when the census comes out. Republicans had a big win across the country, state, and local levels right before the census came out. Hence, they redrew A LOT of districts to extreme degrees.
I don't recall the last time Democrats were in power to a large'ish degre when a census came out.
Republicans are falling victim to their own success redistricting.
Totally agree. Many of them cannot deviate at all from ideology to compromise, even on common sense things, without facing primary challenges.
What fear do teachers have in parroting their lessons to the students?
Teaching evolution in a christian conservative town when it is the teacher vs the town + principal of the school? Being told by the school board that you can't teach sex ed unless it is abstinence only? Having many valuable books banned from certain conservative libraries but wanting to teach with them anyway? (Like Huckleberry Finn for instance).
Not saying that tenure is the right solution to this problem, but there are a lot of things that make parents, the principal, the town, etc.. mad at teachers, that the teachers are actually doing in the children's best interest (depending on your point of view of course.... which is central to this issue: who decides what a child should learn? Should society have a right to set some sort of baseline learning that we want citizens to have before becoming adults? Or leave it entirely up to parents and have no standards? How do you strike a balance? How much leeway should teachers have to modify curriculum? etc...).
Bear in mind, I'm advocating loose government control instead of strict and not complete lack of control.
When you say "loose government control", some people hear, "anarchy". Just like when you say, "lower taxes", they hear, "elimination of all taxation". No intermediate states are contemplated, or even considered possible.
Goes the other way also. When someone proposes a carbon tax, or increased environmental regulations, conservatives often translate that to "nuke the economy to death".
This is a sling. It is using well targeted funds on small "under the radar" elections. The money won't be used to try to influence presidential races or big national senate seats.
Most small congressional district candidates spend very little (relatively speaking) on elections.
I prefer to correlate violence not with guns, but with income inequality, social safety nets (mental health, food stamps, etc..), and social mobility (ability to increase your economic status.. move up a rung).
As far as I've been able to tell, when inequality is high, social safety nets and social mobility are low, violence goes up.
Whistleblowers don't just release things that are illegal. Lots of really evil behavior is "legal".
It does make it tricky to know if someone is a whistleblower or just a criminal though. In a perfect society, who would decide, and using what process?
1. NSA employee releases tons of classified documents to people who do not have the legal right to possess that information.
2. Some of that material shows spy programs that are currently legal according to courts (mostly secret court rulings).
3. To the average person, it appears that NSA may be violating the constitution. But no court has ruled on that yet.
At this point, what, legally, should happen? Don't arrest Snowden, but set a court date to rule on whether the NSA violated the constitution? In the meantime, what becomes of the reporters and the "evidence" in question? Do the reporters, on good faith, hand the docs back, pending the outcome of the trial?
Whistleblowing is tricky.
Or there needs to be a division between applied humanities, and theoretical and/or teaching humanity degrees. Sociologists, Anthropologists, etc.., could greatly benefit product research, marketing, design and ux, etc.. if they had a more applied/hands on series of courses instead of it being mostly theory.. followed by a few hands on projects towards the end.
But that would also take businesses realizing that they could benefit from staffing those skill sets. Something only the very largest companies generally do right now.
It's hard to believe the claims of job losses tied to the minimum wage.
You can look back at 50 years of minimum wage raises to see that there exists no proof of job loss. This is yet another conservative talking point driven by ideology rather than data.
We don't need a maximum wage. We just need to return to a more progressive tax system. People like Warren Buffet/Koch Brothers should be taxed on income and capital gains, and anything that increases their worth each year at a very high rate, like 90%. 100 billion vs 10 billion. I'm sure they would survive.
Then use that increased tax revenue to build infrastructure (create jobs when the market isn't), retrain workers that lost jobs due to those jobs disappearing, educate, create new fields that potentially will have jobs in the future by increasing funding to research and development, etc..
Or even better evidence: every minimum wage hike in the Country's history hasn't led to higher unemployment or sharp hikes in food/good prices.
Proof please.
Prior minimum wage increases did not have have effect.
The vast majority of jobs in the US are low pay service jobs (restaurants, hotel cleaner, etc..) and low pay retail jobs (walmart).
Do you want the vast majority of the service workers reliant on government subsidies in one form or another, or would you rather have the base pay in the country be a livable wage?
It isn't right that many of Walmart's employees have to use food stamps to make ends meet. I would much rather respect the dignity of work and require Walmart to cut slightly into its profits and pay its workers a living wage, instead of subsidizing Walmart's profits with tax payer funds via food stamps and other government services.
At some point it becomes far to hard to maintain or understand so they contract out someone like me who moves it to a relational database with a web front end. Everyone is happy!
This work forms a major part of my work load don't fuck with it!
This still happens a lot? Holy cow.... I was doing that 16 years ago out of college. I would have assumed that the business world would be turning out new graduates that realize that spreadsheets are not databases... guess not.
Well good for you then. Pretty easy (technically) work, and people really are super happy to see their spreadsheets turned into websites.
You think we'll have candidates that make it through primaries and who also make it their main goal to dismantle the military/industrial/financial/intelligence complex?
We have to start by making it possible for 'real' people to make it in politics, without having the backing of the major financial players (wall street, etc..): https://mayday.us/
It really is a shame. That part of the world used to be known for arts, sciences, and education. I wish that it were still that way...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achaemenid_Empire
Iraq also. And Egypt. Most of the middle and near east used to lead the world in enlightenment.
I'd love to travel to Iraq just to see the ancient ruins alone Babylon for instance. It is a huge shame. Places like the fertile crescent were where the world first saw modern cities and latter modern states. The first large scale irrigation, the first agriculture, the first writing, etc.. (there are some competing areas for 'oldest' in the far east depending on what you are looking at).
It seems like every 'source location' (birthplace of X) for any modern X is now a very unstable, unwelcoming place. Odd.
but i can't understand how I'd pull that shit off if publishers like Baen disappeared.
It seems like the real value of a publisher is to select decent enough writing, and for a publisher like Baen, of a particular type. When you buy something published by Baen, you know, generally, what type of stuff you are buying, what level of quality, etc..
Sites like Reddit, or any vote up/down user content raking sites, could serve to to provide a large portion of that value. I'd like to see 20-50 authors of a particular writing style (like sci-fi for instance) band together, make their own web site to distribute content, and incorporate a voting or ranking system. Of course, you would need some randomness to keep circulating new content to eyeballs, as well as some targeted promotion stuff to help get books on the bottom of the rankings a second chance to be looked at and/or upvoted.
Maintain them as pets or food in our society though and they'll live as long as we continue to do that.
There isn't any value to having an endangered species in a zoo or farm. The entire point of protecting species is to maintain their role in the ecosystem. Natural species die off is one thing, but the rapidity with which humans can disturb ecosystems makes it necessary to protect them when we can.
Removing a species from an environment can often have unintended consequences. Oftentimes for the worse.
http://www.fastcoexist.com/1681518/this-man-shot-40000-elephants-before-he-figured-out-that-herds-of-cows-can-save-the-planet
http://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s_deserts_and_reverse_climate_change
You are assuming that the problems with the price of electric cars versus gasoline cars is economies of scale.
Look at how much it costs to buy a 20 mile range electric scooter in China now (over 400 million being used daily now). It is 300-700 bucks for most models. Of course economies of scale are going to tremendously change prices. Most large electric motors are wound by hand. The volt drive train costs 6000 dollars.... for basically an electric motor. Mass produce those in the million/hundred million range and the price will fall drastically.
We could build more wind and solar but that means energy prices triple, if we're lucky.
....where are you getting these figures? I live in one of many US states that has been slowly increasing wind (20% for us now with 25% mandated in about 5 more years iirc) and my prices have not increased at all (beyond normal inflation/normal increases).
Are you looking at charts like this http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/average-electricity-prices-kwh and looking at Germany? Because in the case of Germany there are a lot more factors involved in electricity cost than just the technology being used.