The most dangerous thing on a road is tailgaters like yourself, especially high-speed tailgaters.
Would you happen to have any studies or proof as to this accusation? All the empirical studies I've read show that road safety is a combination of road condition, car condition, and driver condition. Typically speed deltas (not top speed) are the main culprit, in which case being the jackass doing 50 in the left lane when the flow of traffic is doing 65 would make you the most dangerous thing on the road.
YOU are the reason that speed cameras even exist
Actually, revenue is why they exist.
or didn't even see you (and didn't really need to if you were behind him).
Thank you for proving that you're a terrible driver. A driver should and must at all times be aware of everything going on on the roads, front, back, and sides. Your world where you can ignore half the road and apparently "space out" is incredibly dangerous and immeasurably rude. Frankly, if someone doesn't have the attentiveness to recognize faster traffic approaching behind them, or if they want to simply zone out with the cruise control on, they don't belong in the left-most lane. Personally, I'd say they don't belong on the road, but that's a different argument.
Go for a drive on an Autobahn - I went there once and it was fabulous. Not the speed, the sheer courtesy of other drivers
How ironic that you follow up a paragraph telling people behind you on the to fuck off because you shouldn't have to give a thought (or even be aware of their presence) with a paragraph praising the drivers of the Autobahn for their courtesy. Hypocrite much? If you drove in Germany the way you drive back home, one of two things would happen:
1) They would start driving like "the nutters back home" trying to get around your rude and ignorant self
2) They'd lock you up in prison and/or take away your license for obstructing traffic and endangering everyone's lives
It is pure idiotic FUD to suggest that false dichotomy: that the only two options are 1. unrestricted global climate change or 2. economic armageddon and killing grandparents in florida.
Except that the extreme case is exactly what the AGW supporters are always pitching. They don't offer suggestions like "switch lightbulbs from incandescent to CFL". They instead bitch about how the US hasn't adopted Kyoto, which believe it or not is NOT a "gradual" concept and is in many aspects very close to the economic armageddon you make light of.
AGW "deniers" as they're refererd to around here exist in _exactly_ that "gray zone" between the two extremes. They recognize that steps are already being taken towards helping the environment. Things like the Clean Air Act, the Montreal Protocol, the hybrid cars initiative, the banning of incandescent light bulbs, etc, etc -- they are all _gradual steps_ towards "fixing" the problem. Yet AGW supporters insist that either no steps are being taken or that those steps are not enough -- then, when asked the quantify what "appropriate steps" are, they launch into the hyperbolic spiels you claim only drugged up hippies offer (~50% reduction in 5 years, end all coal power, sign Kyoto, etc, etc). Then when you try to call them on their unreasonableness, they make a post exactly like yours saying "oh, we only wanted reasonable stuff like hybrid cars and efficient light bulbs", all the while entirely ignoring that these things are already happening
Considering that 84% of the world believes in some kind of god , I'd say yours is an equally bad argument (as I doubt the Cthulu cult is anywhere near the same kind of devotion). Now I'm not saying that appealing to the crowd isn't a logical fallacy, but at a very minimum it leads me to give it more due diligence than Santa Clause and the other fictionary characters you'd attempt to compare.
Not as simple as you seem to be implying. Thing is while Apple has gotten large, it is by no means a major player in Microsofts fields. Apple has gained it fortune in portable devices, while Microsoft gained its fortune from its OS on computers (and is still the biggest player there by far), and Microsoft also is the biggest player in the home console market. These are 2 different companies that aren't really competing in the same market. Sure they've tried to overlap into the others field but they would come out at either a loss or never made a major dent.
I believe Microsoft has made attempts to branch into the portable music market (Zune anyone?). How is bundling iTunes to block MS out of the market any different than what MS was doing to Apple back in the day? And iTunes is just the tip of the iceberg -- Apple prides itself on providing a complete system with a whole slew of feature-bloated apps (just watch the commercials where they continually mock MS for not providing said usability software). That's one of the largest reasons MacOS has made inroads against PC users. So Apple is allowed to use all its applications in combination with its OS whereas if MS tries it, it's considered bundling/anti-competitive? Now explain that, especially considering Apple's market cap these days.
Of course they did. Yet clearly, not all of what Wikileaks released was actually OMG WE CAN'T KILL BIN LADEN ANY MORE!!!!111!! important. Wikileaks gave the government a chance to play along. The government took the position of "fuck off". Wikileaks fucked off and did it their own way. Clearly, the position of "fuck off" has its consequences
A "non-choice" is hardly a choice. If someone steals your house and then says "okay, okay, we'll work with you -- pick which room you'd like to live in", I bet you'd tell them to fuck off too. The government was completely correct: everything that was stolen was classified. It's not the responsibility or right of Wikileaks or any other third party arbiter to determine what out of that information should or shouldn't be released. They're pretty much holding the information for ransom and blackmailing the government with ultimatums (ala "play along or else"). Couple that with the fact that we know they're purposefully withholding information to maximize their time in the spotlight (and Assange is pushing for book deals...) and I'd say their ethics are highly dubious to say the least.
Ayn Rand was an extremist, a loon, and a terrible writer to boot. I'd hardly call her works "the Libertarian bible." But what you consider "typical Slashdot Libertarian" I don't agree with at all. I believe there are tons of assumptions made when some identifies as a Tea Partyist and/or Libertarian (loon, kook, Ayn Rand cultist, rich loving poor hater, etc, etc). My experience at Sladhot has shown most of the Libertarians here to be relatively sane people with a handful of kooks. Despite pushing relatively sane ideas (like reforming Medicare or pushing it to the state level, or privatizing Social Security), their opponents launch off into extreme assumptions about said ideas (like "omg you just want to destroy social programs and give the reclaimed money to the rich through tax cuts!!!")
the examples above just show that it can, generally speaking, be dealt with.
Not really though, as I'm sure you're well aware of the Proof by Example fallacy. I believe there's far too many factors in play at the "nation" level to generalize in such a manner, especially when the biggest success cases are relatively small countries (For all we know, size could be a bigger driving factor in the low corruption we are observing, rather than government type)
if you look at corruption ratings, the countries with lowest corruption are social democracies (Finland, New Zealand...).
Are you talking about the Transparency Corruptions Perception Index -- the index that is 100% based on subjective polls and changes year to year in how it is measured? That alone leads me to strongly question results it is producing. Also, how do you define a "social democracy"? For example, Canada spends about the same percentage of their GDP on social programs as does the United States. Yet Canada is ranked #6 and the US is down at #22. Just because Canada's programs are more effective, does that make them a social democracy and the US not one? One possible way to potentially justify why the US system isn't working is due to corruption. Though personally I would argue that Canada's healthcare system works because the federal government sets general guidelines and leaves each individual province to run their own programs (the equivalent of "state level" universal healthcare). It's in many ways perspective and difficult to summarily justify.
Partly this is achieved by decentralization - corruption is more likely when politicians are further removed from their electorate - e.g. in US bringing management of various things from federal down to state or municipal level makes the feedback loop shorter, and politicians implementing it much more responsive to it; personally, I think that it would be much better if states rather than feds ran Medicare etc
I 100% agree with your sentiment and conclusion. However, it puzzles me a bit, as I was under the impression that a "social democracy" by definition entails decision-making/implementation/spending at the federal level (as do the majority of the nation examples provided, and all the students of the philosophy seem to advocate...), not the state. If, on the other hand, a country could implement state-level social programs and still be labeled a "social democracy", I'd say that's little different than Constitutional Libertarianism, and in fact quite compatible.
Please point me to the party manifesto that promises to take ALL the rich people's money.
You seemingly missed my point entirely. I was using "take ALL the rich people's money" as an example of painting Democratic Socialism in an extreme, exaggerated (and incorrect) light. I was using this to illustrate that people are doing the exact same thing when they bash Libertarianism for being "selfish" simply because the core philosophy advocates minimal government. To further clarify, Libertarianism leaves room for altruism as well as limited government intervention (which includes social programs at a state level). By what yardstick do you declare the philosophy "selfish"? Just because people want to minimize the level of government influencing their lives, they're suddenly selfish?
It's generally true, but the problem is that libertarianism gives no recipe on how to avoid corporations.
Of course it does -- limited government. Libertarianism isn't anarchy. Most free market advocates I know embrace antitrust wholeheratedly because they recognize competition is necessary to make free markets work. "Limited" of course if the optimum word there -- people hear "libertarian" and assume "corporate loving shills"/"no regulation of any kind". But that kind of hyperbole simply has no place in debate.
And on the flipside of your same argument, social democracy (on whatever your "big government of choice" is) gives no recipe on how to avoid corruption at the top. Corporations, unlikely governments, don't have huge armies and the backing of law forcing you to do as they say.
Libertarian philosophy is just as stupid and selfish where ever it is.
EVERY philosophy is stupid and selfish when taken to their extremes. You think it isn't selfish to take all the rich people's money and give it to the poor? The problem is that you only choose to view Libertarianism by its extreme outliers and loons -- whereas whatever philosophy you side with you pan in a more moderate light, recognizing there are some crazies but yet there are still some good ideas.
The USA government relaxed all controls of the economy, decreased taxes, decreased control. Now you have the bill for it with the people (aka the government) have to pay: high unemployment, high national dept, "too large to fail" syndrome, high military spending, high dependency on oil, bubbles after bubbles.
Aside from high unemployment and bubbles, everything you mentioned there was a result of government interference -- yet somehow you're chalking up the blame to the free market? For example, the free market sure as hell didn't create oil subsidies -- the government did.
Why you have such problems now? Because the control of the Wall Street and the banks are non existent, the government is controlled by cooperation.
And in what dreamed up idealist world do you live in that the government would not be controlled be those with money and power? There's a reason our founders envisioned our federal government to be small and limited: because when you give unlimited power to a few people at the top, it has always and will always corrupt absolutely. You're once again chalking up a government failure and blaming it on the corporations. When government passes pro-corporate legislation at the behest of corporations, it is a failure of government, NOT the free market/corporations. And human beings aren't going to stop being greedy or selfish -- ever.
Did you ever asked yourself why you live in such a rich country? Because your government was strong and because your government did all that mentioned above in the first 100 years.
History doesn't agree with you. The government today is far, FAR larger than it was when we were developing into a superpower. Additionally the free market is far, FAR more restrained than it was back then as well.
If your first presidents believed in a free market without any government control
Such broad strokes are sensationlist and unfair -- no one is arguing for anarchy. this is a "quantity or degree of influence of government" debate.
This is a popular myth - most people are willing to do it themselves. They want to work. They want to provide for their families. They want to do well and earn a better standard of living.
That's an equally popular myth. Everyone out there has different aspirations and comfort levels. Not everyone is a "pie in the sky" dreamer constantly shooting for that 6 figure mark. Some people are comfortable settling far lower.
If I might provide a "for instance": teachers that marry teachers and then have a kid and then go single-income by leaving a parent at home. Everything in this equation was a choice: the career, the spouse, the kid, and the single-income. However, there's a very good chance this family unit won't survive with all those factors combined. Therefore, the taxpayers subsidize their "poverty" lifestyle. It's not a tragedy that their income is as it is, it's a choice of comfort -- and frankly, it makes me feel bad for the truly poor: households with two working adults and no children who still can't make ends meet due to some kind of tragedy.
Medicare, Medicaid, and SS are paid from separate taxes.
*blink* You say this as if it's relevant...
The Budget is "total taxes vs total federal expenditures". Just because the federal government has decided to label them as different taxes (political games) doesn't mean they're somehow excluded from the debt our country is generating.
One could argue that having social safety nets that are woefully ineffective and serve only to drive the country deep into debt is another great way to achieve 3rd world status. I'll never understand the love affair with SS/Medicare -- I know of no program that isn't a poorer example of bang-for-buck than those, and people embrace them like its no tomorrow.
Everyone who even mentions social security in the same breath as getting the budget under control should be utterly ignored in any discussion at all, because social security is not part of the fucking budget. This is constant FUCKING INSANE LIE that the media refuse to call people on.
Then I guess all the "secret war spending" shouldn't be mentioned either since it's not officially "part of the the budget." You're debating semantics -- a tax is a tax and an expense is an expense. Just because they divide it up into separate taxes of a damned government form doesn't somehow make it "not part of the budget". Look at the White House's own web page (http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget) and you'll see gigantic pictoral blocks clearly showing Social Security and Medicare as part of the budget.
So stop lying to yourself -- if I, average joe tax payer, am paying X dollars in income tax and Y dollars in social security/medicare taxes, the government could _very easily_ raise my income tax by Y dollars, eliminate my social security/medicare taxes, eliminate both programs, and use the dollars for something else.
The social programs are expensive, but they are mostly investments in a peaceful and productive society. The rest is mostly waste or worse.
And how are those "investments" working out for you? It's good to know that all Americans have the healthcare they need and are set for retirement due to those fantastic investments we're spending over half our budget on.
I think the question here is: why can't they do both?
4 years is a looooong time, and if I recall my college schooling correctly, it was laced with all manner of unrelated "humanities" and "core classes" that easily could have been swapped for something more practical that gives a college student at least some of the same kind of "career training" technical schools do.
Entirely circumstantial. I've had exactly the opposite experience -- all the CFLs I've purchased have burnt out long before my incandescents have historically. These are hardly solid statistics...
Because DRM is no longer only about stopping piracy. It has oh-so-many other advantages.
1) It kills second-hand sales.
2) It enables forced obsolescence (kill the registration servers and you can't play the game anymore)
3) It ensures a one-title, one machine policy. Own a lap-top AND a desktop? You can't play the game on both.
4) Online activation requires a user to be online and transmit data to the publisher. You can use this to collect valuable demographic info (also, since the customer has to be online anyway, you might as well push advertisements down his way to earn even more cash!)
5) It slowly pushes users to become more accepting of service-based licenses (e.g., subscription gaming) instead of single-sales.
6) It reassures investors that the publisher is protecting their property.
The funny (and sad) thing is that most of these concerns about DRM also apply to Steam (and other "digital over hard copy" distribution systems). Yet people will rave against DRM while singing the praises of Steam...
I think we're vastly overstating the impact of MUDs on the "current gaming landscape".
Considering the popularity of WoW and its predecessors (Everquest, Ultima Online, etc), I'd disagree with you. All of those aforementioned games are essentially MUDs with GUI front-ends. In fact, if I recall from discussions heard elsewhere, it is suspected that many of the devs borrowed heavily from MUD code.
An analysis of supply and demand of the type shown in introductory mainstream economics textbooks implies that by mandating a price floor above the equilibrium wage, minimum wage laws should cause unemployment
Economists disagree as to the measurable impact of minimum wages in the 'real world'. This disagreement usually takes the form of competing empirical tests of the elasticities of demand and supply in labor markets and the degree to which markets differ from the efficiency that models of perfect competition predict.
Some leading economists such as Kevin M. Murphy and Nobel laureate Gary Becker do not accept the Card/Krueger results,[60] while some others, like Nobel laureates Paul Krugman[61] and Joseph Stiglitz do accept them as correct
Nobel laureate James M. Buchanan responded to the Card and Krueger study in the Wall Street Journal, arguing:[65]...no self-respecting economist would claim that increases in the minimum wage increase employment
In a 2008 book, David Neumark and William L. Wascher described their analysis of over 300 studies on the minimum wage.[3] The studies were from several countries covering a period of over 50 years, primarily from the 1990s onward. According to the Neumark and Wascher, a large majority of the studies show negative effects for the minimum wage; those showing positive effects are few, questionable, and disproportionately discussed.
Until the 1990s, economists generally agreed that raising the minimum wage reduced employment. This consensus was weakened when some well-publicized empirical studies showed the opposite, although others confirmed the original view. Today's consensus, if one exists, is that increasing the minimum wage has, at worst, minor negative effects.[72]
According to a 1978 article in the American Economic Review, 90 percent of the economists surveyed agreed that the minimum wage increases unemployment among low-skilled workers
Ultimately, opinions are all over the board on the issue, which is exactly why I put it under the category of "simplistic solutions to complex problems". If it were truly that simple, we would just set everyone's minimum salary at 1 million. Problem solved.
The Dems never claimed the cost savings came from mandatory coverage
Yet they claimed the bill overall would save money...even the CBO says this. If the "added risk without compensation" cost was not taken into consideration when determining how much money this bill is going to "save" us, I would say that adequately fits the category of "do not think through the implications of their policies". It is my impression that they were more concerned with "getting everyone healthcare" and "keeping people from being denied" than they were with cost-savings. And the fact they claimed (and continue to claim) we're ultimately going to save money from this is tentative at best (and an outright lie at worst).
Social Security and medicare are the most successful social programs in American history. I challenge you to prove they have failed.
They've almost single-handedly driven our debt to the level it is right now and they'll still on the verge of insolvency. People still do not have adequate retirement money and people still can't afford healthcare. By what standards do you define "successful"? I challenge you to prove they succeeded.
I don't personally know about the others, but I do not trust any of your ex
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/26/patriot-act-extension-passes-senate_n_867736.html
Seems like he's trying to get our freedoms back to me.
Would you happen to have any studies or proof as to this accusation? All the empirical studies I've read show that road safety is a combination of road condition, car condition, and driver condition. Typically speed deltas (not top speed) are the main culprit, in which case being the jackass doing 50 in the left lane when the flow of traffic is doing 65 would make you the most dangerous thing on the road.
Actually, revenue is why they exist.
Thank you for proving that you're a terrible driver. A driver should and must at all times be aware of everything going on on the roads, front, back, and sides. Your world where you can ignore half the road and apparently "space out" is incredibly dangerous and immeasurably rude. Frankly, if someone doesn't have the attentiveness to recognize faster traffic approaching behind them, or if they want to simply zone out with the cruise control on, they don't belong in the left-most lane. Personally, I'd say they don't belong on the road, but that's a different argument.
How ironic that you follow up a paragraph telling people behind you on the to fuck off because you shouldn't have to give a thought (or even be aware of their presence) with a paragraph praising the drivers of the Autobahn for their courtesy. Hypocrite much? If you drove in Germany the way you drive back home, one of two things would happen:
1) They would start driving like "the nutters back home" trying to get around your rude and ignorant self
2) They'd lock you up in prison and/or take away your license for obstructing traffic and endangering everyone's lives
Except that the extreme case is exactly what the AGW supporters are always pitching. They don't offer suggestions like "switch lightbulbs from incandescent to CFL". They instead bitch about how the US hasn't adopted Kyoto, which believe it or not is NOT a "gradual" concept and is in many aspects very close to the economic armageddon you make light of.
AGW "deniers" as they're refererd to around here exist in _exactly_ that "gray zone" between the two extremes. They recognize that steps are already being taken towards helping the environment. Things like the Clean Air Act, the Montreal Protocol, the hybrid cars initiative, the banning of incandescent light bulbs, etc, etc -- they are all _gradual steps_ towards "fixing" the problem. Yet AGW supporters insist that either no steps are being taken or that those steps are not enough -- then, when asked the quantify what "appropriate steps" are, they launch into the hyperbolic spiels you claim only drugged up hippies offer (~50% reduction in 5 years, end all coal power, sign Kyoto, etc, etc). Then when you try to call them on their unreasonableness, they make a post exactly like yours saying "oh, we only wanted reasonable stuff like hybrid cars and efficient light bulbs", all the while entirely ignoring that these things are already happening
Richard Dawkins -- though the existence of religion doesn't necessitate a religious leader.
http://skeptics.meetup.com/
Considering that 84% of the world believes in some kind of god , I'd say yours is an equally bad argument (as I doubt the Cthulu cult is anywhere near the same kind of devotion). Now I'm not saying that appealing to the crowd isn't a logical fallacy, but at a very minimum it leads me to give it more due diligence than Santa Clause and the other fictionary characters you'd attempt to compare.
I believe Microsoft has made attempts to branch into the portable music market (Zune anyone?). How is bundling iTunes to block MS out of the market any different than what MS was doing to Apple back in the day? And iTunes is just the tip of the iceberg -- Apple prides itself on providing a complete system with a whole slew of feature-bloated apps (just watch the commercials where they continually mock MS for not providing said usability software). That's one of the largest reasons MacOS has made inroads against PC users. So Apple is allowed to use all its applications in combination with its OS whereas if MS tries it, it's considered bundling/anti-competitive? Now explain that, especially considering Apple's market cap these days.
I'm eager for the antitrust case against Apple. Anyday now......
A "non-choice" is hardly a choice. If someone steals your house and then says "okay, okay, we'll work with you -- pick which room you'd like to live in", I bet you'd tell them to fuck off too. The government was completely correct: everything that was stolen was classified. It's not the responsibility or right of Wikileaks or any other third party arbiter to determine what out of that information should or shouldn't be released. They're pretty much holding the information for ransom and blackmailing the government with ultimatums (ala "play along or else"). Couple that with the fact that we know they're purposefully withholding information to maximize their time in the spotlight (and Assange is pushing for book deals...) and I'd say their ethics are highly dubious to say the least.
Ayn Rand was an extremist, a loon, and a terrible writer to boot. I'd hardly call her works "the Libertarian bible." But what you consider "typical Slashdot Libertarian" I don't agree with at all. I believe there are tons of assumptions made when some identifies as a Tea Partyist and/or Libertarian (loon, kook, Ayn Rand cultist, rich loving poor hater, etc, etc). My experience at Sladhot has shown most of the Libertarians here to be relatively sane people with a handful of kooks. Despite pushing relatively sane ideas (like reforming Medicare or pushing it to the state level, or privatizing Social Security), their opponents launch off into extreme assumptions about said ideas (like "omg you just want to destroy social programs and give the reclaimed money to the rich through tax cuts!!!")
Not really though, as I'm sure you're well aware of the Proof by Example fallacy. I believe there's far too many factors in play at the "nation" level to generalize in such a manner, especially when the biggest success cases are relatively small countries (For all we know, size could be a bigger driving factor in the low corruption we are observing, rather than government type)
Are you talking about the Transparency Corruptions Perception Index -- the index that is 100% based on subjective polls and changes year to year in how it is measured? That alone leads me to strongly question results it is producing. Also, how do you define a "social democracy"? For example, Canada spends about the same percentage of their GDP on social programs as does the United States. Yet Canada is ranked #6 and the US is down at #22. Just because Canada's programs are more effective, does that make them a social democracy and the US not one? One possible way to potentially justify why the US system isn't working is due to corruption. Though personally I would argue that Canada's healthcare system works because the federal government sets general guidelines and leaves each individual province to run their own programs (the equivalent of "state level" universal healthcare). It's in many ways perspective and difficult to summarily justify.
I 100% agree with your sentiment and conclusion. However, it puzzles me a bit, as I was under the impression that a "social democracy" by definition entails decision-making/implementation/spending at the federal level (as do the majority of the nation examples provided, and all the students of the philosophy seem to advocate...), not the state. If, on the other hand, a country could implement state-level social programs and still be labeled a "social democracy", I'd say that's little different than Constitutional Libertarianism, and in fact quite compatible.
You seemingly missed my point entirely. I was using "take ALL the rich people's money" as an example of painting Democratic Socialism in an extreme, exaggerated (and incorrect) light. I was using this to illustrate that people are doing the exact same thing when they bash Libertarianism for being "selfish" simply because the core philosophy advocates minimal government. To further clarify, Libertarianism leaves room for altruism as well as limited government intervention (which includes social programs at a state level). By what yardstick do you declare the philosophy "selfish"? Just because people want to minimize the level of government influencing their lives, they're suddenly selfish?
Of course it does -- limited government. Libertarianism isn't anarchy. Most free market advocates I know embrace antitrust wholeheratedly because they recognize competition is necessary to make free markets work. "Limited" of course if the optimum word there -- people hear "libertarian" and assume "corporate loving shills"/"no regulation of any kind". But that kind of hyperbole simply has no place in debate.
And on the flipside of your same argument, social democracy (on whatever your "big government of choice" is) gives no recipe on how to avoid corruption at the top. Corporations, unlikely governments, don't have huge armies and the backing of law forcing you to do as they say.
EVERY philosophy is stupid and selfish when taken to their extremes. You think it isn't selfish to take all the rich people's money and give it to the poor? The problem is that you only choose to view Libertarianism by its extreme outliers and loons -- whereas whatever philosophy you side with you pan in a more moderate light, recognizing there are some crazies but yet there are still some good ideas.
Aside from high unemployment and bubbles, everything you mentioned there was a result of government interference -- yet somehow you're chalking up the blame to the free market? For example, the free market sure as hell didn't create oil subsidies -- the government did.
And in what dreamed up idealist world do you live in that the government would not be controlled be those with money and power? There's a reason our founders envisioned our federal government to be small and limited: because when you give unlimited power to a few people at the top, it has always and will always corrupt absolutely. You're once again chalking up a government failure and blaming it on the corporations. When government passes pro-corporate legislation at the behest of corporations, it is a failure of government , NOT the free market/corporations. And human beings aren't going to stop being greedy or selfish -- ever.
History doesn't agree with you. The government today is far, FAR larger than it was when we were developing into a superpower. Additionally the free market is far, FAR more restrained than it was back then as well.
Such broad strokes are sensationlist and unfair -- no one is arguing for anarchy. this is a "quantity or degree of influence of government" debate.
That's an equally popular myth. Everyone out there has different aspirations and comfort levels. Not everyone is a "pie in the sky" dreamer constantly shooting for that 6 figure mark. Some people are comfortable settling far lower.
If I might provide a "for instance": teachers that marry teachers and then have a kid and then go single-income by leaving a parent at home. Everything in this equation was a choice: the career, the spouse, the kid, and the single-income. However, there's a very good chance this family unit won't survive with all those factors combined. Therefore, the taxpayers subsidize their "poverty" lifestyle. It's not a tragedy that their income is as it is, it's a choice of comfort -- and frankly, it makes me feel bad for the truly poor: households with two working adults and no children who still can't make ends meet due to some kind of tragedy.
*blink* You say this as if it's relevant...
The Budget is "total taxes vs total federal expenditures". Just because the federal government has decided to label them as different taxes (political games) doesn't mean they're somehow excluded from the debt our country is generating.
One could argue that having social safety nets that are woefully ineffective and serve only to drive the country deep into debt is another great way to achieve 3rd world status. I'll never understand the love affair with SS/Medicare -- I know of no program that isn't a poorer example of bang-for-buck than those, and people embrace them like its no tomorrow.
Then I guess all the "secret war spending" shouldn't be mentioned either since it's not officially "part of the the budget." You're debating semantics -- a tax is a tax and an expense is an expense. Just because they divide it up into separate taxes of a damned government form doesn't somehow make it "not part of the budget". Look at the White House's own web page (http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget) and you'll see gigantic pictoral blocks clearly showing Social Security and Medicare as part of the budget.
So stop lying to yourself -- if I, average joe tax payer, am paying X dollars in income tax and Y dollars in social security/medicare taxes, the government could _very easily_ raise my income tax by Y dollars, eliminate my social security/medicare taxes, eliminate both programs, and use the dollars for something else.
And how are those "investments" working out for you? It's good to know that all Americans have the healthcare they need and are set for retirement due to those fantastic investments we're spending over half our budget on.
So you might say the Republicans are telling the Democrats they have to ride in the back? Oh wait...
I think the question here is: why can't they do both? 4 years is a looooong time, and if I recall my college schooling correctly, it was laced with all manner of unrelated "humanities" and "core classes" that easily could have been swapped for something more practical that gives a college student at least some of the same kind of "career training" technical schools do.
Entirely circumstantial. I've had exactly the opposite experience -- all the CFLs I've purchased have burnt out long before my incandescents have historically. These are hardly solid statistics...
The funny (and sad) thing is that most of these concerns about DRM also apply to Steam (and other "digital over hard copy" distribution systems). Yet people will rave against DRM while singing the praises of Steam...
Considering the popularity of WoW and its predecessors (Everquest, Ultima Online, etc), I'd disagree with you. All of those aforementioned games are essentially MUDs with GUI front-ends. In fact, if I recall from discussions heard elsewhere, it is suspected that many of the devs borrowed heavily from MUD code.
Where do you get your data? Even a bare minimum of fact checking (aka Wikipedia) speaks to the contrary: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Minimum_wage
An analysis of supply and demand of the type shown in introductory mainstream economics textbooks implies that by mandating a price floor above the equilibrium wage, minimum wage laws should cause unemployment
Economists disagree as to the measurable impact of minimum wages in the 'real world'. This disagreement usually takes the form of competing empirical tests of the elasticities of demand and supply in labor markets and the degree to which markets differ from the efficiency that models of perfect competition predict.
Some leading economists such as Kevin M. Murphy and Nobel laureate Gary Becker do not accept the Card/Krueger results,[60] while some others, like Nobel laureates Paul Krugman[61] and Joseph Stiglitz do accept them as correct
Nobel laureate James M. Buchanan responded to the Card and Krueger study in the Wall Street Journal, arguing:[65] ...no self-respecting economist would claim that increases in the minimum wage increase employment
In a 2008 book, David Neumark and William L. Wascher described their analysis of over 300 studies on the minimum wage.[3] The studies were from several countries covering a period of over 50 years, primarily from the 1990s onward. According to the Neumark and Wascher, a large majority of the studies show negative effects for the minimum wage; those showing positive effects are few, questionable, and disproportionately discussed.
Until the 1990s, economists generally agreed that raising the minimum wage reduced employment. This consensus was weakened when some well-publicized empirical studies showed the opposite, although others confirmed the original view. Today's consensus, if one exists, is that increasing the minimum wage has, at worst, minor negative effects.[72]
According to a 1978 article in the American Economic Review, 90 percent of the economists surveyed agreed that the minimum wage increases unemployment among low-skilled workers
Ultimately, opinions are all over the board on the issue, which is exactly why I put it under the category of "simplistic solutions to complex problems". If it were truly that simple, we would just set everyone's minimum salary at 1 million. Problem solved.
Yet they claimed the bill overall would save money...even the CBO says this. If the "added risk without compensation" cost was not taken into consideration when determining how much money this bill is going to "save" us, I would say that adequately fits the category of "do not think through the implications of their policies". It is my impression that they were more concerned with "getting everyone healthcare" and "keeping people from being denied" than they were with cost-savings. And the fact they claimed (and continue to claim) we're ultimately going to save money from this is tentative at best (and an outright lie at worst).
They've almost single-handedly driven our debt to the level it is right now and they'll still on the verge of insolvency. People still do not have adequate retirement money and people still can't afford healthcare. By what standards do you define "successful"? I challenge you to prove they succeeded.