For some start-up, sure, being the CEO does require a lot of drive and intelligence. You don't put together a company from scratch without a lot of talent and smarts.
For some well-established company, no. A lot of those CEOs aren't all that intelligent. They got those jobs because of their networking skills; they went to the right colleges, joined the right fraternities, went to the right country clubs, developed the right contacts, etc. That's how they got those jobs. They don't have to be all that smart, they just have to be reasonably decent at picking VPs to do the hard work for them, and then just show up for all the functions they're supposed to show up for. Basically, a CEO at companies like that is little more than the public face of the company, a figurehead. A reasonably-intelligent and socially-skilled janitor could do it just as well.
The more people you have participating in an economy, the larger the economy is, the more wealth is created, and the more jobs there are (all other things being equal).
Dead people are bad for an economy, period. If the uber-capitalists really wanted to promote capitalist economies, they should be pouring money into research for life-extension and anti-aging therapies and technologies, plus of course way of increasing fertility and getting people to have more kids. However, having kids and raising them is a very large drain of resources (since it takes them ~2 decades to become productive economic units), so it's important to stave off death as long as possible so you get the most out of society's investment in each individual.
If Trump loses the nomination (and doesn't run as an independent), I wouldn't be too surprised to see a lot of Trump voters vote for Bernie. They're tired of establishment candidates and I don't see a lot of them voting for Rubio, who's as establishment as you can get.
Don't be so sure. You can say the exact same thing about Hillary, in fact I wonder if the hate/like ratio isn't higher with her. People on the right absolutely despise her, as do a bunch of people on the left who are Bernie fans. She might get some of the centrists but that's about it.
If it comes down to Trump vs. Hillary, I don't think there's any way to predict who'd win that one.
I don't know if one approach (treating college kids as adults) results in better or worse outcomes than the other approach (treating college kids as children). More likely than not, it's complicated.
Yep, anything dealing with humans is complicated; it's why psychology and sociology are such unscientific fields: it's basically impossible to do any rigorous, controlled experiments with humans.
But as for which is better or worse, I guess that depends on your values and your desired outcome. If you want your kids to break free of religion, then sending them to state school is definitely better. If you want your kids to stay brainwashed in your religious sect, the other approach is better. If you want your kids to be happier people in general (based on some measure of "happiness"), we'd have to do a big study. We could very well find out that in general, the religious approach is better; just look at Mormons, they seem to be really happy and successful people, despite their cuckoo religion. I suspect this is exactly why we have religion in human societies in fact: because it enforces a social order and makes people happier, in general. The problem is that when they're rigid, anyone who doesn't conform is going to be very unhappy, whereas in open, secular or at least pluralistic societies that tolerate different religions or no religion, the non-conformists are more able to be happy because they're not being oppressed and persecuted, though it seems to make the religionists less happy because they like having that order imposed on them and feeling like they're going with the program.
I'm an ex-Catholic. I guess I could have mentioned that one of the priests at the Catholic schools I went to went to jail for molestation, as did the priest at the church I went to in high school, as did the bishop who did my Confirmation.
I try to call things as I see them. My Catholic (grade) school experience wasn't bad, and luckily I never got molested, and I don't remember a whole lot of religiosity in Catholic school. I seem to remember some of the kids not being Catholic too. Aside from the few instances where we had to attend Mass for some reason, and them warning us not to play Dungeons and Dragons (some of you may remember the hysteria about that), I really don't remember any religion in the other classes.
However, the Catholic Church does need to come to grips with the fact that having a celibacy policy for its priests is inevitably going to lead to the sexual problems that we've all seen with their priests. Normal, well-adjusted people are not going to want the job, and if anyone was somewhat healthy when they started, after too many years of denial they're going to act out one way or another.
I wouldn't call them "Protestant", I'd call them "Evangelical", and I think the distinction is extremely important. Just look at the word, "evangelical"; those sects tend to be far more pushy about converting people and pushing religion than the non-evangelical sects (which include both Catholicism and many mainline Protestant denominations like Anglicanism and Presbyterianism). So in a sense, yes, those evangelical schools are training kids for ministry, they're training them to be good evangelicals.
There's a big problem with this analysis: the premise is shaky, so your conclusion is too.
Go hang around some forums filled with progressives, such as Reddit, where they're arguing about Bernie vs. Hillary. The vitriol there is 10x worse than here (and for good reason: Hillary is a neocon warhawk in the pocket of Wall Street). The Bernie supporters *hate* the Democratic party, especially its leadership by Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. The overall attitude is that the DNC will stop at nothing to push Bernie out and make sure Hillary gets the nomination.
So no, I don't buy this idea that "most Democrats tend to like their party".
As far as I can tell, most people on both sides hate their party.
Honestly, Hitler's regime probably would have been very successful if they had dialed down the aggression a lot. It was only when they invaded France that the Allies finally did something about it and went to war.
Imagine an alternate history where Germany never invaded Poland or France or Russia, and instead just stayed within its borders mostly and gave the middle finger to the Allies. Would've really sucked for the Jews and others probably (but it sucked for them anyway, the Allies were mostly too late to help them), but the war probably would not have happened. Even if they had just stuck with Poland, there probably wouldn't have been a war.
Anyway, as for Trump, his rhetoric is nationalist, but also seems to be a lot less interventionist than the other candidates (except Bernie of course). He just said in the last debate that the middle east would be better off if Saddam and Gadafi had been left alone.
What are you talking about? There's all kinds of records about him making statements in support of various policies that Republicans are completely against.
He said things in favor of Planned Parenthood not very long ago.
He talked about eliminating Obamacare and replacing it with "something great" (yeah, vague, I know) which would take care of everyone, and that "you can't have people dying in the streets". If it were up to the other Republican candidates, they'd repeal ObamaCare and change the laws so anyone who can't pay gets kicked out of ER and dies on the sidewalk.
He donated to Hillary's campaign in the past.
He used to be registered as a Democrat.
There's better lists out there with more of this stuff from his past. He's no leftist for sure, but he does not have a record of being some kind of far-right libertarian or Koch type at all; his record is more like a typical limousine-liberal Democrat.
A "shrill professional pol"? That's being a bit charitable. More like a shrill, corrupt neocon. There's really no difference between Rubio and Hillary that I can see.
What do you mean "foolish enough"? What are their choices? The other candidates are Bush-like neocons and theocrats. It's not like they have any genuinely good choices in there.
And then on the Dem side, we've got a woman who's another Bush-like neocon in the pocket of Wall Street, and an elderly man who the Democratic establishment and party are doing absolutely everything they can to get rid of so that the neocon can be the first female president and start another war.
Judging by the way we humans govern ourselves and run our societies, I think the most useful thing they could grow would be a vast army of Velociraptors, like in Jurassic Park.
It's doomed. When people like various people above are saying "Trump is the worst possible", they're implicitly claiming that a theocrat and a couple of corporatist war hawks are better choices. Even on the "left", we have people pushing Hillary as "progressive" even though she's blatantly in the pocket of Wall Street and a war hawk interested in further destabilizing the middle east and fanning the flames of Islamic fundamentalism, and they constantly chide the Bernie supporters that they need to get with the program and vote for Hillary "to make sure Trump doesn't win", and because "she's the realistic choice", and that "she'll get stuff done" (like more neocon shit).
Trump and Bernie have the numbers they do precisely because so many Americans are sick of the sociopathic, corrupt candidates they've been force-fed like Hillary and Rubio and the religious wackos like Cruz. So it doesn't really matter what Trump says or does at this point, anyone who's right-of-center who doesn't like neocons and theocrats is going to vote for him by default.
Do you not realize the official unemployment figures only count people who became unemployed within a certain (fairly short) timeframe and are still looking for work? It is not the same thing as "workforce participation", which is definitely a much higher number.
Someone who's been unemployed for a year will not show up as "unemployed" according to the government's numbers.
That's because it's a Catholic university and not an Evangelical Christian university like Liberty U. Catholics have long been very tolerant of other religions that way (they had some real problems back in the time of Galileo, but they've had centuries to improve), and have long been big promoters of education. Catholic grade schools are much the same: they take kids of all (or no) faiths and aren't real pushy about the religion angle.
I have no idea why your sister went there (I gather from your writing that she was Catholic or otherwise not quite of the same religious thinking as the majority of students there), but from what I've read, one big reason other non-evangelical students go there is because their parents basically force them to, such as by paying their tuition there but only there and not a decent state school, threatening to cut off all support if they don't go there, etc.
I don't fetishize the US Constitution; a lot of it (like the electoral college) is pretty half-assed. It's not surprising, because they didn't have a lot of models of a formal republican constitution to build upon. But the one thing about it that's really brilliant about the US Constitution is the notion of checks and balances. The powers you give the government are always dangerous, so you encumber their use by harnessing the natural instinct of institutions to guard their prerogatives. That's genius.
No, it's one of those things that sounds good in theory, but doesn't actually work out in practice. All the other western governments do not have a government like ours, they have Parliamentary systems where the executive is chosen by the Parliament (legislature). It's a much more efficient system, and prevents the deadlocks we have in this country from time to time because Congress and the President are at odds, because the People are incompetent at voting coherently. Does this lead to far more abuses in those nations? Apparently not, because they don't seem to have any more problems with government spying and corruption than we do, and in many cases, they have far less. Not to say they're perfect, but places like Norway are not exactly a bunch of backwards countries or totalitarian hellholes.
And yes, lots of other stuff in the Constitution is just a mess, especially the Electoral College bit. Face it, the document is archaic and needs to be replaced with something newer. It was a good try in the late 1700s when there weren't many other non-monarchy republics around, but other countries have had several centuries now to try out other stuff and they've found some better ways.
But if you plan to make a career of distributing software in violation of license agreements, good luck to you, you'll need it.
Nvidia has been distributing their proprietary drivers this way for well over a decade now.
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about. Computer science is not relevant here, only law, and the law is that people who have standing are the only ones who get to sue over license agreements. No one has bothered with Nvidia yet, nor AMD.
The Nvidia driver (nvidia.ko) lives in kernel space, and links to the kernel. It also links to a small GPL-licensed "shim" driver, because the Nvidia driver is a proprietary blob (and likely very close to their Windows driver architecturally), and the kernel changes frequently. So that they don't have to maintain a different proprietary blob version for every single kernel version out there (which would be a daunting task, given all the kernel versions and all the different subversions and variants made by all the distros), they have a single blob, and then the shim gets compiled for the kernel on the target system, and links the two.
Inter-process communication would be a disaster for something very high-performance like a 3D video driver.
What's wrong with pre-existing conditions? It's not insurance if you are able to wait to buy it until after you need it.
Because health insurance isn't like other insurance. If you have to change jobs, that means you need to change insurance, so now suddenly the new insurance doesn't have to cover the old condition? That's bullshit. That's why they outlawed it. The root of the problem is tying health insurance to employment, but I don't see the Repugs trying to fix that either.
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For some start-up, sure, being the CEO does require a lot of drive and intelligence. You don't put together a company from scratch without a lot of talent and smarts.
For some well-established company, no. A lot of those CEOs aren't all that intelligent. They got those jobs because of their networking skills; they went to the right colleges, joined the right fraternities, went to the right country clubs, developed the right contacts, etc. That's how they got those jobs. They don't have to be all that smart, they just have to be reasonably decent at picking VPs to do the hard work for them, and then just show up for all the functions they're supposed to show up for. Basically, a CEO at companies like that is little more than the public face of the company, a figurehead. A reasonably-intelligent and socially-skilled janitor could do it just as well.
-1 Ignorant about economics.
The more people you have participating in an economy, the larger the economy is, the more wealth is created, and the more jobs there are (all other things being equal).
Dead people are bad for an economy, period. If the uber-capitalists really wanted to promote capitalist economies, they should be pouring money into research for life-extension and anti-aging therapies and technologies, plus of course way of increasing fertility and getting people to have more kids. However, having kids and raising them is a very large drain of resources (since it takes them ~2 decades to become productive economic units), so it's important to stave off death as long as possible so you get the most out of society's investment in each individual.
No one likes people who rock the boat.
It doesn't matter if the boat is sinking, don't be the one to point it out or the other passengers will turn on you.
If Trump loses the nomination (and doesn't run as an independent), I wouldn't be too surprised to see a lot of Trump voters vote for Bernie. They're tired of establishment candidates and I don't see a lot of them voting for Rubio, who's as establishment as you can get.
Don't be so sure. You can say the exact same thing about Hillary, in fact I wonder if the hate/like ratio isn't higher with her. People on the right absolutely despise her, as do a bunch of people on the left who are Bernie fans. She might get some of the centrists but that's about it.
If it comes down to Trump vs. Hillary, I don't think there's any way to predict who'd win that one.
I don't know if one approach (treating college kids as adults) results in better or worse outcomes than the other approach (treating college kids as children). More likely than not, it's complicated.
Yep, anything dealing with humans is complicated; it's why psychology and sociology are such unscientific fields: it's basically impossible to do any rigorous, controlled experiments with humans.
But as for which is better or worse, I guess that depends on your values and your desired outcome. If you want your kids to break free of religion, then sending them to state school is definitely better. If you want your kids to stay brainwashed in your religious sect, the other approach is better. If you want your kids to be happier people in general (based on some measure of "happiness"), we'd have to do a big study. We could very well find out that in general, the religious approach is better; just look at Mormons, they seem to be really happy and successful people, despite their cuckoo religion. I suspect this is exactly why we have religion in human societies in fact: because it enforces a social order and makes people happier, in general. The problem is that when they're rigid, anyone who doesn't conform is going to be very unhappy, whereas in open, secular or at least pluralistic societies that tolerate different religions or no religion, the non-conformists are more able to be happy because they're not being oppressed and persecuted, though it seems to make the religionists less happy because they like having that order imposed on them and feeling like they're going with the program.
I'm an ex-Catholic. I guess I could have mentioned that one of the priests at the Catholic schools I went to went to jail for molestation, as did the priest at the church I went to in high school, as did the bishop who did my Confirmation.
I try to call things as I see them. My Catholic (grade) school experience wasn't bad, and luckily I never got molested, and I don't remember a whole lot of religiosity in Catholic school. I seem to remember some of the kids not being Catholic too. Aside from the few instances where we had to attend Mass for some reason, and them warning us not to play Dungeons and Dragons (some of you may remember the hysteria about that), I really don't remember any religion in the other classes.
However, the Catholic Church does need to come to grips with the fact that having a celibacy policy for its priests is inevitably going to lead to the sexual problems that we've all seen with their priests. Normal, well-adjusted people are not going to want the job, and if anyone was somewhat healthy when they started, after too many years of denial they're going to act out one way or another.
He's an evangelical, so yes, he thinks Catholics aren't Christians. It's a pretty common trait with them.
I wouldn't call them "Protestant", I'd call them "Evangelical", and I think the distinction is extremely important. Just look at the word, "evangelical"; those sects tend to be far more pushy about converting people and pushing religion than the non-evangelical sects (which include both Catholicism and many mainline Protestant denominations like Anglicanism and Presbyterianism). So in a sense, yes, those evangelical schools are training kids for ministry, they're training them to be good evangelicals.
There's a big problem with this analysis: the premise is shaky, so your conclusion is too.
Go hang around some forums filled with progressives, such as Reddit, where they're arguing about Bernie vs. Hillary. The vitriol there is 10x worse than here (and for good reason: Hillary is a neocon warhawk in the pocket of Wall Street). The Bernie supporters *hate* the Democratic party, especially its leadership by Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. The overall attitude is that the DNC will stop at nothing to push Bernie out and make sure Hillary gets the nomination.
So no, I don't buy this idea that "most Democrats tend to like their party".
As far as I can tell, most people on both sides hate their party.
Honestly, Hitler's regime probably would have been very successful if they had dialed down the aggression a lot. It was only when they invaded France that the Allies finally did something about it and went to war.
Imagine an alternate history where Germany never invaded Poland or France or Russia, and instead just stayed within its borders mostly and gave the middle finger to the Allies. Would've really sucked for the Jews and others probably (but it sucked for them anyway, the Allies were mostly too late to help them), but the war probably would not have happened. Even if they had just stuck with Poland, there probably wouldn't have been a war.
Anyway, as for Trump, his rhetoric is nationalist, but also seems to be a lot less interventionist than the other candidates (except Bernie of course). He just said in the last debate that the middle east would be better off if Saddam and Gadafi had been left alone.
What are you talking about? There's all kinds of records about him making statements in support of various policies that Republicans are completely against.
He said things in favor of Planned Parenthood not very long ago.
He talked about eliminating Obamacare and replacing it with "something great" (yeah, vague, I know) which would take care of everyone, and that "you can't have people dying in the streets". If it were up to the other Republican candidates, they'd repeal ObamaCare and change the laws so anyone who can't pay gets kicked out of ER and dies on the sidewalk.
He donated to Hillary's campaign in the past.
He used to be registered as a Democrat.
There's better lists out there with more of this stuff from his past. He's no leftist for sure, but he does not have a record of being some kind of far-right libertarian or Koch type at all; his record is more like a typical limousine-liberal Democrat.
A "shrill professional pol"? That's being a bit charitable. More like a shrill, corrupt neocon. There's really no difference between Rubio and Hillary that I can see.
What do you mean "foolish enough"? What are their choices? The other candidates are Bush-like neocons and theocrats. It's not like they have any genuinely good choices in there.
And then on the Dem side, we've got a woman who's another Bush-like neocon in the pocket of Wall Street, and an elderly man who the Democratic establishment and party are doing absolutely everything they can to get rid of so that the neocon can be the first female president and start another war.
Judging by the way we humans govern ourselves and run our societies, I think the most useful thing they could grow would be a vast army of Velociraptors, like in Jurassic Park.
It's doomed. When people like various people above are saying "Trump is the worst possible", they're implicitly claiming that a theocrat and a couple of corporatist war hawks are better choices. Even on the "left", we have people pushing Hillary as "progressive" even though she's blatantly in the pocket of Wall Street and a war hawk interested in further destabilizing the middle east and fanning the flames of Islamic fundamentalism, and they constantly chide the Bernie supporters that they need to get with the program and vote for Hillary "to make sure Trump doesn't win", and because "she's the realistic choice", and that "she'll get stuff done" (like more neocon shit).
Trump and Bernie have the numbers they do precisely because so many Americans are sick of the sociopathic, corrupt candidates they've been force-fed like Hillary and Rubio and the religious wackos like Cruz. So it doesn't really matter what Trump says or does at this point, anyone who's right-of-center who doesn't like neocons and theocrats is going to vote for him by default.
Do you not realize the official unemployment figures only count people who became unemployed within a certain (fairly short) timeframe and are still looking for work? It is not the same thing as "workforce participation", which is definitely a much higher number.
Someone who's been unemployed for a year will not show up as "unemployed" according to the government's numbers.
That's because it's a Catholic university and not an Evangelical Christian university like Liberty U. Catholics have long been very tolerant of other religions that way (they had some real problems back in the time of Galileo, but they've had centuries to improve), and have long been big promoters of education. Catholic grade schools are much the same: they take kids of all (or no) faiths and aren't real pushy about the religion angle.
I have no idea why your sister went there (I gather from your writing that she was Catholic or otherwise not quite of the same religious thinking as the majority of students there), but from what I've read, one big reason other non-evangelical students go there is because their parents basically force them to, such as by paying their tuition there but only there and not a decent state school, threatening to cut off all support if they don't go there, etc.
I don't fetishize the US Constitution; a lot of it (like the electoral college) is pretty half-assed. It's not surprising, because they didn't have a lot of models of a formal republican constitution to build upon. But the one thing about it that's really brilliant about the US Constitution is the notion of checks and balances. The powers you give the government are always dangerous, so you encumber their use by harnessing the natural instinct of institutions to guard their prerogatives. That's genius.
No, it's one of those things that sounds good in theory, but doesn't actually work out in practice. All the other western governments do not have a government like ours, they have Parliamentary systems where the executive is chosen by the Parliament (legislature). It's a much more efficient system, and prevents the deadlocks we have in this country from time to time because Congress and the President are at odds, because the People are incompetent at voting coherently. Does this lead to far more abuses in those nations? Apparently not, because they don't seem to have any more problems with government spying and corruption than we do, and in many cases, they have far less. Not to say they're perfect, but places like Norway are not exactly a bunch of backwards countries or totalitarian hellholes.
And yes, lots of other stuff in the Constitution is just a mess, especially the Electoral College bit. Face it, the document is archaic and needs to be replaced with something newer. It was a good try in the late 1700s when there weren't many other non-monarchy republics around, but other countries have had several centuries now to try out other stuff and they've found some better ways.
well, I guess it's hard to say that I feel vindicated when my face is next to yours under the boot.
I disagree. It always feels good to say "I told you so!!!!", even if you're in the same sinking boat.
-1 Stupid. Go learn about socialism and then look up what "Social Security" is.
But if you plan to make a career of distributing software in violation of license agreements, good luck to you, you'll need it.
Nvidia has been distributing their proprietary drivers this way for well over a decade now.
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about. Computer science is not relevant here, only law, and the law is that people who have standing are the only ones who get to sue over license agreements. No one has bothered with Nvidia yet, nor AMD.
Nope, not at all.
The Nvidia driver (nvidia.ko) lives in kernel space, and links to the kernel. It also links to a small GPL-licensed "shim" driver, because the Nvidia driver is a proprietary blob (and likely very close to their Windows driver architecturally), and the kernel changes frequently. So that they don't have to maintain a different proprietary blob version for every single kernel version out there (which would be a daunting task, given all the kernel versions and all the different subversions and variants made by all the distros), they have a single blob, and then the shim gets compiled for the kernel on the target system, and links the two.
Inter-process communication would be a disaster for something very high-performance like a 3D video driver.
What's wrong with pre-existing conditions? It's not insurance if you are able to wait to buy it until after you need it.
Because health insurance isn't like other insurance. If you have to change jobs, that means you need to change insurance, so now suddenly the new insurance doesn't have to cover the old condition? That's bullshit. That's why they outlawed it. The root of the problem is tying health insurance to employment, but I don't see the Repugs trying to fix that either.