Good government can do good. I don't know why so many Americans think government can do no good when it is the fact you had good government for many generations to thank for your general wealth and civil society.
I can answer this one. It's pretty simple: we don't have good government here. Our government can't do good, because it's a bad government.
If we could outsource our government to someone else, perhaps the Swedes, then governmental solutions would work here too. But as long as the people voting for government are big fans of Miley Cyrus, Honey Boo Boo, and Duck Dynasty, there's no way we're going to have a government that can do anything right at all.
Switzerland is a bit of an exception with its two languages. The other two are only spoken by very tiny minorities. Same goes for all your other examples. Your statement is like saying Pennsylvania Dutch is a significant language in the USA.
I see I've been modded Funny, but I'm entirely serious: if it's too expensive for janitors and waiters to live in a city (or commutable distance), something will happen. Either the wages for those jobs will go up, to get people to take those jobs, or the wealthy people living there will get sick of having nasty toilets and self-serve restaurants and dirty streets, and will move elsewhere, which means the cost of housing there will fall, so that poorer people can move back in.
Or, maybe they'll just learn to like dirty streets. Just look at NYC. There's lots of very wealthy people there who don't seem to mind that the sidewalks are all nasty and it smells like a sewer; they're all perfectly happy to pay ridiculous rents there for ramshackle little apartments and commute on an ancient, foul-smelling, noisy subway system that looks pathetic compared to subways in European cities.
Democracy only works on a very small scale. When it's expanded from sea to shining sea it becomes a tyranny throughout most the land, whether it's a tyranny for of most the people or not.
Exactly, which is why the country needs to be broken up into smaller, more homogeneous units. Those European countries with the highest standards of living in the world, and the least amounts of corruption, are all small and relatively homogeneous culturally. They don't constantly argue internally over issues like abortion, or the role of government, or socialized healthcare. Democracy is a good thing, compared to the alternatives, but as you say, it just doesn't work on a large scale. The only rational solution is to reduce the scale, by breaking apart the country.
No, there isn't. It does benefit some people who take advantage of the situation, but overall it's a loss for the community as a whole. If people don't like certain policies, they need to vote for better government representatives to enact policies they do agree with, instead of driving to the other side of an arbitrary line. Overall, it's a disaster as you have politicians on each side arguing about all kinds of things like who should pay for bridges linking the sides, and you get much worse services between the two. NYC and New Jersey are a great example of this, as the transit links between the two are terrible (compared to the transit links between Manhattan and the other boroughs; in every case you have to cross a river, but most of the other boroughs get fast and convenient subways).
Things have changed in 40 years. Not that much, but some: just look at the populations of cities in the rust-belt states then and now. They've shrunk. Southern states (east and west) have gained population. Phoenix, for example, is much, much larger than it was in the 70s.
Also, the 38-state plan was made by some college class. It was based on some really good principles and ideas, such as making sure no metro areas cross state lines, however it surely didn't involve actually going around the country and asking people everywhere which nearby areas they'd like to be in the same state as, or not. A real reorganization needs to have a lot more stakeholder input than that.
Why not? If the voters in those states fundamentally disagree with you (and most of the rest of the country) on basic matters such as healthcare and other important factors, why do you want to keep them as part of your country so you can continue to butt heads with them? Some European countries have had socialized medicine for over a century now. We're not going to get there any time soon as long as we have so much diversity of political thought in this country.
That's a fundamental philosophy that a lot disagree with
Right, and as long as you keep those people in your country instead of letting them go away and form their own country, you're going to continue fighting with them over these fundamental points of philosophy, and nothing will improve.
Why is it that the liberals bitch so much about conservatives and their regressive political views, but then when the conservatives propose removing themselves from the equation so the liberals can do whatever they want, the liberals start calling them "traitors"? It's always the liberals who are most anti-secession, when really, they'd have the most to gain from it. Liberals gripe and complain about the Southern states taking too much in tax money and not contributing much (because the South's economy sucks, quite frankly; it always has), but then when the Southerners start talking about seceding, the liberals are the first to bash this idea, call them traitors, and talk about how important unity is.
If you think unity is so important, then you need to stop complaining about the political opinions of those who you refuse to allow to leave, and you need to pass more laws to keep them happy (such as legalizing widespread fracking, banning abortion and contraceptives, making Christianity the official state religion, etc.).
It's a good idea, because California, all by itself, has the 8th largest economy in the whole world. It doesn't need the rest of America.
Maybe Oregon and Washington would like to join it, plus some of the other western states like Nevada. All together, they'd easily be the most economically powerful country on Earth, home of all the major tech industries, and free from the idiocy in Washington (DC; the state should rename itself to eliminate this association) and the east coast states, especially the South.
Fuck off. Yes, if you move to a different country, you should learn the language there. You shouldn't have to learn a new language when you haven't moved anywhere.
You seriously think Germans, Italians, Russians, Portuguese, Greeks, etc. would all be willing to learn a new language if some immigrants moved into their country and refused to learn the national language?
Uh-oh; then this probably won't work for BB. That's great if some low-performance Android apps can be installed on the BB phone, but if the games can't, then that's going to severely limit how many people want it. Worse, are they going to get into a situation where your BB phone can access the Google Play store, but only certain apps will work and others won't, and you won't know until you try? I can see Google trying to shut the BB phones out of their app store if this is the case, since it'll make Google look bad.
You have to speak Spanish to live in Miami, so a lot of Americans would have trouble moving there. It'd be a lot easier to move to other places close to NYC, such as Rochester, Buffalo, etc. Even other parts of NYC aren't that expensive, such as the Bronx and Brooklyn.
Actually, I don't see the problem here. If a city prices out all its low-paid workers who keep the toilets and streets clean and the buses running, then something will change. It's a self-correcting problem.
Apple is the biggest monopoly, more anti-competitive than Microsoft ever will,
I hate to defend Apple, but while you're probably right that Apple is more anti-competitive than MS (their ridiculous patent war with Samsung should be proof of this), they do not have the kind of monopoly that MS did. Apple is still a pretty small player on desktops and laptops, it's not even a player in the server market; their main area of strength is in mobile devices. However, even here, they have pretty strong competition from Android, and don't have anything approaching a monopoly. It's a good thing, too; things would really suck if the iPhone was our only realistic choice for a smartphone. Android has its shortcomings to be sure, but iOS has its own shortcomings, and monopolies are never good, as we saw with MS's Windows monopoly for so many years.
has been caught underpaying for labor
Doesn't every large company that manufactures in China do this?
has been proven to be a strip miner of global minerals
Isn't every company that manufactures electronics guilty of this? It's not like Apple is the only company that uses tantalum capacitors.
when in-fact he died of Pancreatic Cancer due to his swinger lifestyle popping LSD and contracting HIV/AIDS.
This sounds like a rather absurd allegation; any evidence? Lots of people get pancreatic cancer, for no particular reason. From what I read, Steve's real screw-up was refusing conventional medical treatment for it until it was too late.
Microsoft on the other hand was split into Micros~1 and Micros~2.
Huh? What are you talking about? MS is still a single company, as much as I would prefer they got broken up.
So which OS do you use on your PC? Windows (engineered in Washington, USA), Mac OS X (engineered in California, USA), or Linux (engineered by a lot of different people, and headed by Linus Torvalds who lives in the USA somewhere)?
Not sure about that. BlackBerry QNX-based OS is really good.
It doesn't matter how "good" it is. No one makes apps for QNX/BBOS. It's the same reason no one wants Windows Phones. If your phone OS doesn't work with one of the two major apps stores, then consumers aren't interested, no matter much technically better it supposedly is.
Each of these things, when sold, incur sales and export taxes that go to our state and federal governments.
No they don't. Items purchased for resale (like things a local retailer buys in bulk to sell individually to customers) and components used in the manufacture of goods for resale are exempt from sales tax.
Then stop running Hummers, and other gas guzzlers. I lived in the USA for a while, in Texas it looks like everybody has a big pickup truck with cargo capacity they don't need just to drive a single person to/back from work every day.
Yes, I saw the exact same thing when I used to live in Arizona. Everyone there has a pickup truck or SUV with a lift kit getting 10 mpg, and drives an hour or more every day at 75mph; do the math.
However, Boeings are made in Washington state, not TX or AZ. I haven't actually been to WA myself, but I have been to Oregon, and I didn't see that kind of silliness there. I live in the northeast now, and I don't see it up here either; most people drive normal-size cars up here.
You guys need lots of Nuclear energy now.
We have nuclear power. More isn't going to change much; our electricity costs are actually very low I believe. Our coal is domestically-produced, so it's pretty cheap, and we have lots of hydropower, plus some nuclear, and more and more solar and wind. The problem is our stupid vehicles all need fossil fuels. Nuclear power won't help here, until we're all driving Teslas.
I'm not so sure on that. Taxation is really different when you get into manufacturing and B2B. For instance, if you're build a Widget, and you have to buy a bunch of smaller components to assemble into that final Widget, you don't pay any sales tax on those components, because you get a resale exemption. Only your final customers have to pay any sales tax. Of course, there's a bunch of other taxes involved in any business, but there are breaks.
This also happens sometimes with variables, because in C you have to declare the variable up at the top to be portable, whereas the code that uses it may be at the bottom of the function, so the programmers often just use the #ifdef at the point of use without an #ifdef at the declaration.
In C, this is true. If it's C++, you can declare the variable at (or nearer to) the point of use, which handily avoids this problem.
I had started using things like an UNUSED parameter, but there were so many instances of this in the project that I gave up on it and disabled that warning instead. There are also things such as GCC __attribute__ but that's not portable.
It doesn't need to be. You can set up an UNUSED macro which uses non-portable methods, depending on the compiler used. Here's one I found somewhere which I use to avoid this warning:
// suppress warnings for unused arguments #ifdef UNUSED #elif defined(__GNUC__) # define UNUSED(x) x __attribute__((unused)) #elif defined(__LCLINT__) # define UNUSED(x)/*@unused@*/ x #else # define UNUSED(x) x #endif// example: void dcc_mon_siginfo_handler(int UNUSED(whatsig))
And of course, the majority of these warnings often come from third party libraries that come as source, many of which are riddled throughout with #ifdefs for the various options they provide or architectures they support.
That's the problem I've found. You can add stuff like the above to avoid warnings in your own code, but if you're #including a library from somewhere else, you're stuck with whatever's in there, and turning on extra warnings can give you loads of warnings for things you have no power to fix. I wonder if there's some kind of compiler option to ignore warnings in third-party libraries?
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Good government can do good. I don't know why so many Americans think government can do no good when it is the fact you had good government for many generations to thank for your general wealth and civil society.
I can answer this one. It's pretty simple: we don't have good government here. Our government can't do good, because it's a bad government.
If we could outsource our government to someone else, perhaps the Swedes, then governmental solutions would work here too. But as long as the people voting for government are big fans of Miley Cyrus, Honey Boo Boo, and Duck Dynasty, there's no way we're going to have a government that can do anything right at all.
Switzerland is a bit of an exception with its two languages. The other two are only spoken by very tiny minorities.
Same goes for all your other examples. Your statement is like saying Pennsylvania Dutch is a significant language in the USA.
I see I've been modded Funny, but I'm entirely serious: if it's too expensive for janitors and waiters to live in a city (or commutable distance), something will happen. Either the wages for those jobs will go up, to get people to take those jobs, or the wealthy people living there will get sick of having nasty toilets and self-serve restaurants and dirty streets, and will move elsewhere, which means the cost of housing there will fall, so that poorer people can move back in.
Or, maybe they'll just learn to like dirty streets. Just look at NYC. There's lots of very wealthy people there who don't seem to mind that the sidewalks are all nasty and it smells like a sewer; they're all perfectly happy to pay ridiculous rents there for ramshackle little apartments and commute on an ancient, foul-smelling, noisy subway system that looks pathetic compared to subways in European cities.
Democracy only works on a very small scale. When it's expanded from sea to shining sea it becomes a tyranny throughout most the land, whether it's a tyranny for of most the people or not.
Exactly, which is why the country needs to be broken up into smaller, more homogeneous units. Those European countries with the highest standards of living in the world, and the least amounts of corruption, are all small and relatively homogeneous culturally. They don't constantly argue internally over issues like abortion, or the role of government, or socialized healthcare. Democracy is a good thing, compared to the alternatives, but as you say, it just doesn't work on a large scale. The only rational solution is to reduce the scale, by breaking apart the country.
California has a huge agriculture industry, you idiot.
No, there isn't. It does benefit some people who take advantage of the situation, but overall it's a loss for the community as a whole. If people don't like certain policies, they need to vote for better government representatives to enact policies they do agree with, instead of driving to the other side of an arbitrary line. Overall, it's a disaster as you have politicians on each side arguing about all kinds of things like who should pay for bridges linking the sides, and you get much worse services between the two. NYC and New Jersey are a great example of this, as the transit links between the two are terrible (compared to the transit links between Manhattan and the other boroughs; in every case you have to cross a river, but most of the other boroughs get fast and convenient subways).
Things have changed in 40 years. Not that much, but some: just look at the populations of cities in the rust-belt states then and now. They've shrunk. Southern states (east and west) have gained population. Phoenix, for example, is much, much larger than it was in the 70s.
Also, the 38-state plan was made by some college class. It was based on some really good principles and ideas, such as making sure no metro areas cross state lines, however it surely didn't involve actually going around the country and asking people everywhere which nearby areas they'd like to be in the same state as, or not. A real reorganization needs to have a lot more stakeholder input than that.
Personally I can't see abandoning them
Why not? If the voters in those states fundamentally disagree with you (and most of the rest of the country) on basic matters such as healthcare and other important factors, why do you want to keep them as part of your country so you can continue to butt heads with them? Some European countries have had socialized medicine for over a century now. We're not going to get there any time soon as long as we have so much diversity of political thought in this country.
That's a fundamental philosophy that a lot disagree with
Right, and as long as you keep those people in your country instead of letting them go away and form their own country, you're going to continue fighting with them over these fundamental points of philosophy, and nothing will improve.
Why is it that the liberals bitch so much about conservatives and their regressive political views, but then when the conservatives propose removing themselves from the equation so the liberals can do whatever they want, the liberals start calling them "traitors"? It's always the liberals who are most anti-secession, when really, they'd have the most to gain from it. Liberals gripe and complain about the Southern states taking too much in tax money and not contributing much (because the South's economy sucks, quite frankly; it always has), but then when the Southerners start talking about seceding, the liberals are the first to bash this idea, call them traitors, and talk about how important unity is.
If you think unity is so important, then you need to stop complaining about the political opinions of those who you refuse to allow to leave, and you need to pass more laws to keep them happy (such as legalizing widespread fracking, banning abortion and contraceptives, making Christianity the official state religion, etc.).
6 pieces is really too much, I think. A better plan is to start with the 38 States proposal from the 70s, and update it a bit for the times.
It's a good idea, because California, all by itself, has the 8th largest economy in the whole world. It doesn't need the rest of America.
Maybe Oregon and Washington would like to join it, plus some of the other western states like Nevada. All together, they'd easily be the most economically powerful country on Earth, home of all the major tech industries, and free from the idiocy in Washington (DC; the state should rename itself to eliminate this association) and the east coast states, especially the South.
Fuck off. Yes, if you move to a different country, you should learn the language there. You shouldn't have to learn a new language when you haven't moved anywhere.
You seriously think Germans, Italians, Russians, Portuguese, Greeks, etc. would all be willing to learn a new language if some immigrants moved into their country and refused to learn the national language?
Uh-oh; then this probably won't work for BB. That's great if some low-performance Android apps can be installed on the BB phone, but if the games can't, then that's going to severely limit how many people want it. Worse, are they going to get into a situation where your BB phone can access the Google Play store, but only certain apps will work and others won't, and you won't know until you try? I can see Google trying to shut the BB phones out of their app store if this is the case, since it'll make Google look bad.
We could really use a law like that in New Jersey. California's property taxes are nothing like ours.
That's what I think of all the SF tech companies. They are all just advertising companies with a delusion of being innovative.
Actually, that seems to describe all the NYC tech companies to me.
You have to speak Spanish to live in Miami, so a lot of Americans would have trouble moving there. It'd be a lot easier to move to other places close to NYC, such as Rochester, Buffalo, etc. Even other parts of NYC aren't that expensive, such as the Bronx and Brooklyn.
Actually, I don't see the problem here. If a city prices out all its low-paid workers who keep the toilets and streets clean and the buses running, then something will change. It's a self-correcting problem.
Apple is the biggest monopoly, more anti-competitive than Microsoft ever will,
I hate to defend Apple, but while you're probably right that Apple is more anti-competitive than MS (their ridiculous patent war with Samsung should be proof of this), they do not have the kind of monopoly that MS did. Apple is still a pretty small player on desktops and laptops, it's not even a player in the server market; their main area of strength is in mobile devices. However, even here, they have pretty strong competition from Android, and don't have anything approaching a monopoly. It's a good thing, too; things would really suck if the iPhone was our only realistic choice for a smartphone. Android has its shortcomings to be sure, but iOS has its own shortcomings, and monopolies are never good, as we saw with MS's Windows monopoly for so many years.
has been caught underpaying for labor
Doesn't every large company that manufactures in China do this?
has been proven to be a strip miner of global minerals
Isn't every company that manufactures electronics guilty of this? It's not like Apple is the only company that uses tantalum capacitors.
when in-fact he died of Pancreatic Cancer due to his swinger lifestyle popping LSD and contracting HIV/AIDS.
This sounds like a rather absurd allegation; any evidence? Lots of people get pancreatic cancer, for no particular reason. From what I read, Steve's real screw-up was refusing conventional medical treatment for it until it was too late.
Microsoft on the other hand was split into Micros~1 and Micros~2.
Huh? What are you talking about? MS is still a single company, as much as I would prefer they got broken up.
Well, then it'll just be OS/2 all over again. A better DOS than DOS, a better Windows thant Windows, so why bother writing native apps?
No one writes native Android apps anyway: they're all in Java. This might actually work for BB.
So which OS do you use on your PC? Windows (engineered in Washington, USA), Mac OS X (engineered in California, USA), or Linux (engineered by a lot of different people, and headed by Linus Torvalds who lives in the USA somewhere)?
Not sure about that. BlackBerry QNX-based OS is really good.
It doesn't matter how "good" it is. No one makes apps for QNX/BBOS. It's the same reason no one wants Windows Phones. If your phone OS doesn't work with one of the two major apps stores, then consumers aren't interested, no matter much technically better it supposedly is.
Each of these things, when sold, incur sales and export taxes that go to our state and federal governments.
No they don't. Items purchased for resale (like things a local retailer buys in bulk to sell individually to customers) and components used in the manufacture of goods for resale are exempt from sales tax.
Then stop running Hummers, and other gas guzzlers. I lived in the USA for a while, in Texas it looks like everybody has a big pickup truck with cargo capacity they don't need just to drive a single person to/back from work every day.
Yes, I saw the exact same thing when I used to live in Arizona. Everyone there has a pickup truck or SUV with a lift kit getting 10 mpg, and drives an hour or more every day at 75mph; do the math.
However, Boeings are made in Washington state, not TX or AZ. I haven't actually been to WA myself, but I have been to Oregon, and I didn't see that kind of silliness there. I live in the northeast now, and I don't see it up here either; most people drive normal-size cars up here.
You guys need lots of Nuclear energy now.
We have nuclear power. More isn't going to change much; our electricity costs are actually very low I believe. Our coal is domestically-produced, so it's pretty cheap, and we have lots of hydropower, plus some nuclear, and more and more solar and wind. The problem is our stupid vehicles all need fossil fuels. Nuclear power won't help here, until we're all driving Teslas.
The tax on that alone is surely beyond $5B.
I'm not so sure on that. Taxation is really different when you get into manufacturing and B2B. For instance, if you're build a Widget, and you have to buy a bunch of smaller components to assemble into that final Widget, you don't pay any sales tax on those components, because you get a resale exemption. Only your final customers have to pay any sales tax. Of course, there's a bunch of other taxes involved in any business, but there are breaks.
This also happens sometimes with variables, because in C you have to declare the variable up at the top to be portable, whereas the code that uses it may be at the bottom of the function, so the programmers often just use the #ifdef at the point of use without an #ifdef at the declaration.
In C, this is true. If it's C++, you can declare the variable at (or nearer to) the point of use, which handily avoids this problem.
I had started using things like an UNUSED parameter, but there were so many instances of this in the project that I gave up on it and disabled that warning instead. There are also things such as GCC __attribute__ but that's not portable.
It doesn't need to be. You can set up an UNUSED macro which uses non-portable methods, depending on the compiler used. Here's one I found somewhere which I use to avoid this warning:
And of course, the majority of these warnings often come from third party libraries that come as source, many of which are riddled throughout with #ifdefs for the various options they provide or architectures they support.
That's the problem I've found. You can add stuff like the above to avoid warnings in your own code, but if you're #including a library from somewhere else, you're stuck with whatever's in there, and turning on extra warnings can give you loads of warnings for things you have no power to fix. I wonder if there's some kind of compiler option to ignore warnings in third-party libraries?
3Mbps isn't blazing fast, but it's not completely horrible (though I don't think it's quite fast enough for Netflix).
The problem is if you're trying to run an entire school on it, rather than a single person's apartment.