I will never understand why reducing a government budget is considered good in and of itself. If you aren't talking about what specifically was cut, and whether that will or will not end up costing society more in the long run, saying "reduced the budget" is meaningless.
Why keep speculating about what impact changes like this will make? There are dozens of modern countries around the world with orders of magnitude (several orders) less gun deaths than the US. Surely we can examine them and see what works and what doesn't?
You sound like my grandpa in 1990. He swore he would never own power doors, locks, or windows on his trucks, because it was "just one more damn thing that will break".
I say that assuming you actually have power windows/doors/locks:)
Our digestive systems are not as good as cows' for processing that stuff.
Yes, but it's not orders of magnitude worse. To eat a cow, you have to grow it to the point where it's worth slaughtering before you cut it up and get some delicious sizzling steaks.
How many meals do you think the cow eats in that time?
Apparently they're slaughtered at between 3 and 16 weeks for good beef. How many meals do you think they eat in that time?
3-16 weeks? Cattle will be slaughtered at around 3 years age. Are you thinking of chickens?
Maybe thinking of the time spent in the field after initial purchase? I know we purchase a few cattle, fatten them up (takes less than one year) then slaughter.
One thing I *haven't* seen is a rational explanation of why a temporary ban on Muslim immigration isn't a common-sense response to an immediate problem. It's not unconstitutional, it's no less against "American Principles" than going to war on false premises, ordering the death of a citizen, or secret lists and laws. It's also fairly easy to implement - think it through a few minutes and you'll see that detection is relatively straightforward(**).
Because it is A) impossible to implement B) Alienates good Muslims C) drives moderate to borderline Muslims to the other side. D) And most importantly UNCONSTITUTIONAL.
YES it is UNCONSTITUTIONAL. It violates both the 1st and the 14th amendment, you know discriminating against someone based on their religion and making laws favoring one religion over the other...
But you are not really looking for a rational aurgiment against it so much as just trying to attack perople.
Good points. My main one is about this though:
common-sense response to an immediate problem
What is the problem we are trying to solve? Saving people from shootings and acts of terrorism in the US? White christian males shoot way more people in mass shootings than any wannabe muslim terrorist... so I guess that can't be the "immediate problem". If you want to talk about bombings, again, white christian males have bombed way more people in the US than muslim terrorists...so that can't be it.
I honestly do not know what this "immediate problem" is that has gotten the right all wound up and scared.
So more material used to construct per MWe and less full days of generation than other sources. But if you factor in that it has a free fuel source, how much would that balance out? Or zero pollution control needed, no waste storage, no long term health effetcts? Or or or... lots of factors to add up. It seems oddly skewed to only focus on those two factors.
I'd guess that anyone living in a big city has never actually had a fruit ripened on a tree.
There are a ton of farming towns in the US. Fresh fruit, peppers, veggies, all summer long. And if you live in a progressive city like Portland OR, there are 6-7 farmers markets inside the city all summer/early fall long.
I bet Hawaii was nice though, in that most stuff probably grows year round?
It's spread to website developers, where you have clowns suggest having a single site for both computers and mobile devices, rather than have different sites based on the device (like m.foo.com)
You are WAY behind the times (or do not work in web tech) if you think responsive websites can't handle mobile and desktop equally well (usually using a framework like Foundation or Bootstrap). It is true that there are a ton of crappy websites on the internet, but that has nothing to do with the capabilities of the technology.
There are a whole bunch of things the US needs to change to address gun violence. Unfortunately, no politician is proposing serious solutions to the problem, left or right.
I don't have time to look up the stats, but I'd assume that the Czech Republic has better mental health services, less income inequality, greater social mobility, ranks higher on happiness indexes, etc.. than the US.
But it we aren't going to address some of the root causes of the absurdly high rates of gun violence in the US, then I don't see lowering clip capacity and banning a few more rifles as that big a deal. We already drawn the line at machine guns, grenades, rpgs (for the average person), moving the line down another notch or two isn't a big deal.
'Assault' rifles and high capacity handguns are super fun to fire at a range (I just did last weekend), but they really have no purpose in a modern society.
If you can't defend your family or yourself with a six shooter, your society has bigger problems. Like, you must be living in a war zone or something.
That is what I was thinking. Maybe Trump is just moving the Overton window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window with the blessing and or coordination of the GOP.
I'm not sure it is racism. More about scale for me. When the 'natives' whale hunt, it is usually just 1 whale for ceremonial purposes. When countries with industrial fishing fleets do it, the kill numbers are a lot larger.
But besides that, countries like Japan really have no modern cultural defense of whaling. The vast majority of their population places no cultural value on whaling. It just tastes good and is an expensive treat in high-end dining. It isn't like the average Japanese person feels a cultural need to go whaling.
What is that one Northern Iceland/Norway/ culture that has the whale hunt each year, where boats drive the whales into shallow bays and the entire village goes out with knives and kills them? Gross... but I have way more respect for people following a tradition (assuming the numbers they take are sustainable and the kills are as painless as possible), getting their hands dirty, and celebrating their take from nature, than I do commercial whaling just for profit.
give up on affordable energy for the convenience of thousands living on Pacific atolls
You are making the assumption that renewables are more expensive. That may have been so in the past, but most of them either break even against coal or are even cheaper.
It should also be noted that the cost for wind and solar has dramatically reduced since 2006, for example, over the 5 years 2009-2014 solar costs fell by 75% making them comparable to coal, and are expected to continue dropping over the next 5 years by another 45% from 2014 prices.[35] Also, wind has been cheaper than coal since 2013, whereas coal and gas will only become less viable as subsidies may be withdrawn and there is the expectation that they will eventually have to pay the costs of pollution.
McVeigh's philosophies fell well in line with a lot of radical militias and separatist groups in the US. He may not have been a card carrying member, but those groups (militias, separatists, etc..) have books, manifestos, and other media that I'm sure he read and was influenced by. Like, he passed out and sold copies of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turner_Diaries . That sort of literature is very common in white supremacist, militia, and separatist groups.
Robert Dear - that one is easy: he believed himself to be deeply Christian. He used it to justify all sorts of bad behaviors according to people who knew him.
My brain has room for approximately 500 years of unedited memories; I don't know how it handles overload, but I suspect it will remove the least-used. The problem is memories aren't discrete: they're built out of piles of association, and removing one part of the memory removes a *lot* of memories.
Geriatrics to make you about 30-40 years old until you're about 300 would be cool. 1000-year lives would probably suck.
I don't know. I've forgotten a lot of stuff that happened 20 years ago already. And certainly in tech, I forget certain frameworks/languages that I no longer use. None of those missing memories are detrimental to me. We forget stuff all the time.
I think 1,000+ years old would be just fine for some people. Other people may just get tired of living and stop taking the life extension therapies.
There are about 10 other factors besides mental health that the US needs to fix as well. Income inequality, social mobility, city poverty cycles, vast differences in the quality of education, extremely expensive college, etc... For being the riches country on the planet, we sure score low on all sorts of social happiness indicators compared to other modern countries.
Why is the US different than other countries who have stricter gun laws and orders of magnitude less gun violence?
US citizens are just inherently more violent than people who live in Britain, France, Spain, Germany, etc, therefore the US needs good guys with guns? (And I'm not talking about the big headline killings like just happened in Paris. I'm talking about the thousands of regular shootings each year that are very high compared with most other modern countries).
While we are at it, why is the US so different that proven health care systems from around the world won't work here? Why is the US so different that increased use of solar panels/batteries won't work here? Why is the US so different that higher minimum wages won't work here? Why is the US so different that mandatory paternity and maternity leave won't work here? Why is the US so different that a minimum of 3 weeks vacation won't work here?
We have examples all over the world of things that work. Yet somehow none of these progressive things will work in the US.
I'm going target practicing in a couple days. I like guns, but it isn't a cut and dry issue. More or less guns alone isn't the answer. The US has a complicated melting pot culture, inner city poverty cycles that politicians seem to refuse to address, with a huge amount of income inequality, very low social mobility, very low mental health support, a pretty poor education system depending on where you live, very high college costs, and some of the most lax gun laws in the world. That is a bad combination. A pissed off population + lots of guns. http://www.happyplanetindex.org/data/
if logic is cast aside, then internal/external consistency aren't necessarily valid ways to judge a philosophy's validity.
Besides, it is my experience after 20 years of doing philosophy that people who refuse logic and mathematical method in general really just do so out of laziness, fear, and sometimes even hatred against things they believe they can't understand.
It has been my experience that people who cast logic aside do so because they lack sufficient intelligence and schooling to think logically. They cannot determine the validity of sources of information, so they tend to surround themselves with bad information that reinforces their ideology. If you ask one of these people why they believe X,Y, or Z, they will attempt to explain things in a way that is logically and internally consistent. They value logic just as much as the next person, and truly believe they are being logical. They just do not have the ability to see the error in their ways.
But you are right that, if challenged deeply, most of these illogical folks will react with either anger (I think out of embarrassment sometimes), fear, or laziness (in the form of "I don't have to prove it, I just know it!!! You prove it instead!)
A highly trained priest (like doctorate in religion X) can present a very logically consistent world view that is very hard for an average smart person to point out the logically inconsistencies. You almost need someone with a doctorate in philosophy to find and point out fundamental issues with that world view. Things like Pascal's Wager are still hard for the average person to argue against. At first glance, lots of things 'seem right'.
That is how intelligent design persists in some circles. A scientist, with a logical mind, who happens to also believe strongly in God, can fabricate a fairly logically consistent framework supporting intelligent design. It usually takes someone with a solid understanding in science to find and point out that the "internally consistent house" that the ID person created, is resting on shaking foundations.
Citation? I was just watching / reading something about Amsterdam having quite a lot of human trafficking issues. The difference is that the women are not chained in some house like people tend to think of trafficked women. They are licensed professional prostitutes, working in the windows of the red light districts, but under the control of basically pimps. Pimps who made false promises and transported them from eastern block countries. Typical slave labor tactics, like charging them transportation "fees" with interest that adds up faster than they can pay it off, etc..
These engineer-minded people who are pro-environment and pro-nuclear are correct about a lot of the pro's and con's of different sources of energy, but they sure as heck are not realistic about it.
(removed some comments on cost effectiveness.. I don't want to derail the main point:) NIMBY/Fukishima, etc... means it is a non-starter. It doesn't really matter how attractive the technology is at this point, waiting 20-30 years to change public opinion and finalize research on things like Thorium reactors or mini-buried-reactors, and another 20-30 years to even see the first new reactors completed, is just too late.
I know it is drastically disappointing that most of the American public is afraid of something they shouldn't be afraid of...but that is reality. Recognizing that fact is as realistic as it gets.
Solar/Wind/Geo/Wave/Pumped Storage/Batteries/Molten Salt reactors may not be as perfect as nuclear, but it is very realistic that it can help start mitigating climate change NOW. Not 20 years. Now. It can also create jobs, lots of jobs that regular/semi-skilled people can do. Just grunt work.
Slashdot Mirror
and they've reduced the budget.
I will never understand why reducing a government budget is considered good in and of itself. If you aren't talking about what specifically was cut, and whether that will or will not end up costing society more in the long run, saying "reduced the budget" is meaningless.
Why keep speculating about what impact changes like this will make? There are dozens of modern countries around the world with orders of magnitude (several orders) less gun deaths than the US. Surely we can examine them and see what works and what doesn't?
You sound like my grandpa in 1990. He swore he would never own power doors, locks, or windows on his trucks, because it was "just one more damn thing that will break".
I say that assuming you actually have power windows/doors/locks:)
Let the market decide.
Our digestive systems are not as good as cows' for processing that stuff.
Yes, but it's not orders of magnitude worse. To eat a cow, you have to grow it to the point where it's worth slaughtering before you cut it up and get some delicious sizzling steaks.
How many meals do you think the cow eats in that time?
Apparently they're slaughtered at between 3 and 16 weeks for good beef. How many meals do you think they eat in that time?
3-16 weeks? Cattle will be slaughtered at around 3 years age. Are you thinking of chickens?
Maybe thinking of the time spent in the field after initial purchase? I know we purchase a few cattle, fatten them up (takes less than one year) then slaughter.
One thing I *haven't* seen is a rational explanation of why a temporary ban on Muslim immigration isn't a common-sense response to an immediate problem. It's not unconstitutional, it's no less against "American Principles" than going to war on false premises, ordering the death of a citizen, or secret lists and laws. It's also fairly easy to implement - think it through a few minutes and you'll see that detection is relatively straightforward(**).
Because it is
A) impossible to implement
B) Alienates good Muslims
C) drives moderate to borderline Muslims to the other side.
D) And most importantly UNCONSTITUTIONAL.
YES it is UNCONSTITUTIONAL. It violates both the 1st and the 14th amendment, you know discriminating against someone based on their religion and making laws favoring one religion over the other...
But you are not really looking for a rational aurgiment against it so much as just trying to attack perople.
Good points. My main one is about this though:
common-sense response to an immediate problem
What is the problem we are trying to solve? Saving people from shootings and acts of terrorism in the US? White christian males shoot way more people in mass shootings than any wannabe muslim terrorist... so I guess that can't be the "immediate problem". If you want to talk about bombings, again, white christian males have bombed way more people in the US than muslim terrorists...so that can't be it.
I honestly do not know what this "immediate problem" is that has gotten the right all wound up and scared.
So more material used to construct per MWe and less full days of generation than other sources. But if you factor in that it has a free fuel source, how much would that balance out? Or zero pollution control needed, no waste storage, no long term health effetcts? Or or or... lots of factors to add up. It seems oddly skewed to only focus on those two factors.
I'd guess that anyone living in a big city has never actually had a fruit ripened on a tree.
There are a ton of farming towns in the US. Fresh fruit, peppers, veggies, all summer long. And if you live in a progressive city like Portland OR, there are 6-7 farmers markets inside the city all summer/early fall long.
I bet Hawaii was nice though, in that most stuff probably grows year round?
It's spread to website developers, where you have clowns suggest having a single site for both computers and mobile devices, rather than have different sites based on the device (like m.foo.com)
You are WAY behind the times (or do not work in web tech) if you think responsive websites can't handle mobile and desktop equally well (usually using a framework like Foundation or Bootstrap). It is true that there are a ton of crappy websites on the internet, but that has nothing to do with the capabilities of the technology.
There are a whole bunch of things the US needs to change to address gun violence. Unfortunately, no politician is proposing serious solutions to the problem, left or right.
I don't have time to look up the stats, but I'd assume that the Czech Republic has better mental health services, less income inequality, greater social mobility, ranks higher on happiness indexes, etc.. than the US.
But it we aren't going to address some of the root causes of the absurdly high rates of gun violence in the US, then I don't see lowering clip capacity and banning a few more rifles as that big a deal. We already drawn the line at machine guns, grenades, rpgs (for the average person), moving the line down another notch or two isn't a big deal.
'Assault' rifles and high capacity handguns are super fun to fire at a range (I just did last weekend), but they really have no purpose in a modern society.
If you can't defend your family or yourself with a six shooter, your society has bigger problems. Like, you must be living in a war zone or something.
"well, I was going to shoot a bunch of people but it would be against the law to take the guns our of the house, so I'm stuck"
"well, I was going to murder this person, but the laws against murder won't let me. I guess I'll just stay home"
So we should do away with laws because criminals might not obey them? What a bizarre worldview.
That is what I was thinking. Maybe Trump is just moving the Overton window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window with the blessing and or coordination of the GOP.
I'm not sure it is racism. More about scale for me. When the 'natives' whale hunt, it is usually just 1 whale for ceremonial purposes. When countries with industrial fishing fleets do it, the kill numbers are a lot larger.
But besides that, countries like Japan really have no modern cultural defense of whaling. The vast majority of their population places no cultural value on whaling. It just tastes good and is an expensive treat in high-end dining. It isn't like the average Japanese person feels a cultural need to go whaling.
What is that one Northern Iceland/Norway/ culture that has the whale hunt each year, where boats drive the whales into shallow bays and the entire village goes out with knives and kills them? Gross... but I have way more respect for people following a tradition (assuming the numbers they take are sustainable and the kills are as painless as possible), getting their hands dirty, and celebrating their take from nature, than I do commercial whaling just for profit.
give up on affordable energy for the convenience of thousands living on Pacific atolls
You are making the assumption that renewables are more expensive. That may have been so in the past, but most of them either break even against coal or are even cheaper.
It should also be noted that the cost for wind and solar has dramatically reduced since 2006, for example, over the 5 years 2009-2014 solar costs fell by 75% making them comparable to coal, and are expected to continue dropping over the next 5 years by another 45% from 2014 prices.[35] Also, wind has been cheaper than coal since 2013, whereas coal and gas will only become less viable as subsidies may be withdrawn and there is the expectation that they will eventually have to pay the costs of pollution.
source - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
McVeigh's philosophies fell well in line with a lot of radical militias and separatist groups in the US. He may not have been a card carrying member, but those groups (militias, separatists, etc..) have books, manifestos, and other media that I'm sure he read and was influenced by. Like, he passed out and sold copies of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turner_Diaries . That sort of literature is very common in white supremacist, militia, and separatist groups.
Robert Dear - that one is easy: he believed himself to be deeply Christian. He used it to justify all sorts of bad behaviors according to people who knew him.
I don't have time to look up the rest.
Shoudn't we go back even further to the crusades if we want to talk about 'first incidents'?
My brain has room for approximately 500 years of unedited memories; I don't know how it handles overload, but I suspect it will remove the least-used. The problem is memories aren't discrete: they're built out of piles of association, and removing one part of the memory removes a *lot* of memories.
Geriatrics to make you about 30-40 years old until you're about 300 would be cool. 1000-year lives would probably suck.
I don't know. I've forgotten a lot of stuff that happened 20 years ago already. And certainly in tech, I forget certain frameworks/languages that I no longer use. None of those missing memories are detrimental to me. We forget stuff all the time.
I think 1,000+ years old would be just fine for some people. Other people may just get tired of living and stop taking the life extension therapies.
Australia has a successful gun turn in program. We could do the same.
There are about 10 other factors besides mental health that the US needs to fix as well. Income inequality, social mobility, city poverty cycles, vast differences in the quality of education, extremely expensive college, etc... For being the riches country on the planet, we sure score low on all sorts of social happiness indicators compared to other modern countries.
Why is the US different than other countries who have stricter gun laws and orders of magnitude less gun violence?
US citizens are just inherently more violent than people who live in Britain, France, Spain, Germany, etc, therefore the US needs good guys with guns? (And I'm not talking about the big headline killings like just happened in Paris. I'm talking about the thousands of regular shootings each year that are very high compared with most other modern countries).
While we are at it, why is the US so different that proven health care systems from around the world won't work here? Why is the US so different that increased use of solar panels/batteries won't work here? Why is the US so different that higher minimum wages won't work here? Why is the US so different that mandatory paternity and maternity leave won't work here? Why is the US so different that a minimum of 3 weeks vacation won't work here?
We have examples all over the world of things that work. Yet somehow none of these progressive things will work in the US.
I'm going target practicing in a couple days. I like guns, but it isn't a cut and dry issue. More or less guns alone isn't the answer. The US has a complicated melting pot culture, inner city poverty cycles that politicians seem to refuse to address, with a huge amount of income inequality, very low social mobility, very low mental health support, a pretty poor education system depending on where you live, very high college costs, and some of the most lax gun laws in the world. That is a bad combination. A pissed off population + lots of guns. http://www.happyplanetindex.org/data/
if logic is cast aside, then internal/external consistency aren't necessarily valid ways to judge a philosophy's validity.
Besides, it is my experience after 20 years of doing philosophy that people who refuse logic and mathematical method in general really just do so out of laziness, fear, and sometimes even hatred against things they believe they can't understand.
It has been my experience that people who cast logic aside do so because they lack sufficient intelligence and schooling to think logically. They cannot determine the validity of sources of information, so they tend to surround themselves with bad information that reinforces their ideology. If you ask one of these people why they believe X,Y, or Z, they will attempt to explain things in a way that is logically and internally consistent. They value logic just as much as the next person, and truly believe they are being logical. They just do not have the ability to see the error in their ways.
But you are right that, if challenged deeply, most of these illogical folks will react with either anger (I think out of embarrassment sometimes), fear, or laziness (in the form of "I don't have to prove it, I just know it!!! You prove it instead!)
A highly trained priest (like doctorate in religion X) can present a very logically consistent world view that is very hard for an average smart person to point out the logically inconsistencies. You almost need someone with a doctorate in philosophy to find and point out fundamental issues with that world view. Things like Pascal's Wager are still hard for the average person to argue against. At first glance, lots of things 'seem right'.
That is how intelligent design persists in some circles. A scientist, with a logical mind, who happens to also believe strongly in God, can fabricate a fairly logically consistent framework supporting intelligent design. It usually takes someone with a solid understanding in science to find and point out that the "internally consistent house" that the ID person created, is resting on shaking foundations.
Citation? I was just watching / reading something about Amsterdam having quite a lot of human trafficking issues. The difference is that the women are not chained in some house like people tend to think of trafficked women. They are licensed professional prostitutes, working in the windows of the red light districts, but under the control of basically pimps. Pimps who made false promises and transported them from eastern block countries. Typical slave labor tactics, like charging them transportation "fees" with interest that adds up faster than they can pay it off, etc..
You can get an email account from Thunderbird? I always thought it was just an email client.
That was however a complete different beast than today is talked about.
So there is a proven, working, thorium reactor somewhere in the world right now? Or is it just still talk?
We don't have 30-40 years to work out the kinks for theoretical designs.
These engineer-minded people who are pro-environment and pro-nuclear are correct about a lot of the pro's and con's of different sources of energy, but they sure as heck are not realistic about it.
(removed some comments on cost effectiveness.. I don't want to derail the main point:) NIMBY/Fukishima, etc... means it is a non-starter. It doesn't really matter how attractive the technology is at this point, waiting 20-30 years to change public opinion and finalize research on things like Thorium reactors or mini-buried-reactors, and another 20-30 years to even see the first new reactors completed, is just too late.
I know it is drastically disappointing that most of the American public is afraid of something they shouldn't be afraid of...but that is reality. Recognizing that fact is as realistic as it gets.
Solar/Wind/Geo/Wave/Pumped Storage/Batteries/Molten Salt reactors may not be as perfect as nuclear, but it is very realistic that it can help start mitigating climate change NOW. Not 20 years. Now. It can also create jobs, lots of jobs that regular/semi-skilled people can do. Just grunt work.