Yes, and they hate us for our freedom. Seriously, you think people who spend their whole lives in the pursuit of power are looking only to die gloriously for allah, along with all of their countrymen?
childish. leaders of muslim countries like money and power just as much as leaders in all the other countries. they don't want it go away, ever. to believe they are all looking to live up to the ideals that low-level thugs believe or that are used by higher level thugs to keep the low level thugs going is just silly. You don't see Osama Bin Laden strapping on a suicide vest... and you never will.
hardly. for one target country, maybe. then his country will be a parking lot by morning.
is that a brilliant end game of any political leader you have ever heard of? only if their backs are against the wall. which is why you don't push countries with nukes back against walls. and THAT is why Iran wants nukes.
they rightfully understand it is the only way they can keep Russia, China, and the US at bay. They have countries on both sides that have been playgrounds for major power military operations for decades and they have been embroiled in their machinations as well. I think they want protection. and that is the only protection that counts, in the end.
hardly. learning to fly an airplane is trivial compared to becoming leader of a nation. going through any process as straightforward as that only requires enough brains to learn the material and pass the tests.
leading a nation takes much more than the ability to jump through a few hoops to pass a test.
as another poster pointed out, Kamikaze tactics among pilots was commonplace in WWII. Kamikaze countries, however, are not, have never been, and never will be.
but that does not matter. the leader cannot create a legion of NUCLEAR suicide bombers without committing suicide for his whole nation in a return strike, at least not if a nuclear armed country is his target.
that is why no nuclear armed powers have gone to war in over 50 years. and if Iran gets Nukes, the same will hold true. they might, like the US, bully non-nuclear nations with impunity, but they would *never allow* a strike against the US. that would be suicide, and leaders don't want to die. they want power.
nut cases, sure, I'd go so far as to say if you are willing to do what you must do in order to lead a country, and you think you are so awesome that you *should* lead the country, that you must be insane.
However "insane" does not mean "you want to die". niether hitler, nor any other world leader I am aware of has ever aspired to die nor to sacrifice his or her entire country for a singular "blaze of glory". Hitler may have had some overconfidence in his military, but you can rest assured faced with a nuclear armed opponent he would NOT have opted for mutually assured destruction. that was not his goal.
nor is it the goal of the theocracy of Iran. Perhaps some members of it, but those members are directed by the fellows who like power, not the fellows who like strapping bombs to their chests.
there is a difference though. removing germs from your body does not selectively breed them for enhanced resistance to antimicrobials, and most people do not wash their hands like a doctor so the removal is not perfect. and I think that's a good thing.
You can be squeamish about it if you like, but the fact is unless you shoot for a sterile environment, which I would say is a bad idea for your immune system's health (use it or lose it), we are both talking about dealing with an acceptable level of fecal matter and many other contaminants on our persons. I'm simply saying if you wash your hands a few times a day with regular soap, plus when you go to the bathroom, I think that should be plenty. But, you'll get some incidental contact with fecal matter and other contaminants that way I'm sure. Which is good, IMHO.
I'm not a doctor or anything, but then, most doctors I know are so institutionalized as to look for threats to their weaker patients everywhere and they shoot for damn near sterilization, which is bad for all of us. Ask them about the new crop of staph they built for us sometime. So I don't necessarily think their perspective is the best one either, by and large. They want to win a losing battle.
If your immune system was up to snuff, getting some fecal matter and germs on you, in normal concentrations, would not bother you at all, OCD Boy.
You keep it up to snuff by not using the goo.
wash your hands. with regular soap. a few times a day and after using the bathroom. Lessen but DO NOT ELIMINATE your contact with potential contaminants as you describe. Dilute but do not remove them.
So says the guy who's never had the flu. That's not really a credential but it sounds good;)
Most of "us liberals" don't think the amount of oil we'd get domestically is worth destroying the land it's buried under to get to.
I don't have control over Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Venezuela or Brazil. Oddly they haven't seen fit to give me a vote or a representative. But here, things are done in my name, with my tax dollars, in and to my country. this country is MY responsibility as it is all citizens. and racing to the bottom ecologically for a few scant years of cheaper oil doesn't make much sense to me. I'd rather have ANWAR. and if oil REALLY goes belly up... I'd rather have hundreds of years of access to moderately priced plastics than to burn it all up, but if we drill now, we're just going to set it all on fire, because once it's tapped it will always be cheaper to pump out the dregs for fuel than to use something else for fuel, until the dregs are basically a useless amount.
Oil is far too useful to burn it all. I don't want to see it tapped until we've figured out a better fuel source. then our plastics future can be guaranteed practically forever for much less drilling.
You cannot possibly provide enough for yourself to cover your medical bills if you get cancer.
all you can say is that you have provided enough for yourself "so far".
If you can afford insurance, that's great: except it's still very possible to go broke with insurance, or not to be able to afford it at all, especially if it's accessible to all (and thus more expensive).
I guess you can call "not letting people die in the streets" a moral crusade. I put it up there with "not letting people kill other people in the streets" and "running a functional governing system" in terms of basic goals of civilization: without it, what is the point? Just stockpile guns and take what you want then, if it's "all about you".
fair enough, I'm not for shoehorning this into the insurance paradigm anyway and I agree the difference is significant: I was thinking more of actual socialized health care.
Yes, just like all the other countries in the world who give socialized health care to their citizens. Doctors just DISAPPEARED FROM ALL THOSE COUNTRIES, it was the weirdest thing!
in all free countries, people are free to choose other vocations should they wish. Doctors in england, france, germany, canada (and on, and on, and on..) are hardly "enslaved". They freely chose the profession, knowing the situation and the cost/benefit situation. Apparently it's not too bad.
that doesn't mean it's right... "Company Stores" worked well for the elites back in the day too... but given the hurdles to becoming a doctor in most civilized nations, the compensation better be pretty good (whether financial or otherwise) for people to work that hard to do it. apparently it still is.
that's great, until you can't, or otherwise fail to. Then what?
Then we all have to deal with you, one way or another. Most of us have decided we're not ok with letting people die on the streets, or more accurately we have to deal with people who are faced with either dying on the streets OR doing other stuff that is unpleasant to others to avoid dying in the streets. Such as fraud, theft, murder, etc.
it would be great if, having failed to provide for yourself and all of your needs (including health care no one can afford), you just would decently wander off and shoot yourself in the head so as not to cause any more problems for anyone. Oddly though, that's not what people DO when they are faced with either bad luck or the results of their own bad decisions. No, they typically try to survive by any means necessary.
and if they fail, I am STILL not ok with watching them die in the streets. I guess I'm just one of those frail, lily-livered human beings, who thinks maybe the world is improved by reducing desperation as much as possible. There are downsides to that as well, but none as bad as the alternative.
dead zones are a result of fertilizer usage, not simply the use of a field to grow something.
and particulate matter is a concern, primarily of respiration. it can be solved by using good appliances, which could be required by law if these things were ever used in any density that really mattered.
you keep pointing at coal but it's not even close to the same. the problem with coal is not mostly particulates, it's things like mercury. wood is simply mostly inert particulate last I knew. they are not even remotely the same, and neither are the impacts of production of the fuel.
we have free speech enshrined as a constitutional right, here in america. that in many ways makes us different than many other western democracies.
regardless of whether you like hate crime leglislation or not, it does not tell us what we "can and cannot think". You can THINK anything you want. It does punish some violent crimes more severely than others: I'm not a fan of that, but neither does it do what you said. please edit your arguments in the future to be a bit less misleading.
none of what you say is true: campaign funding is already controlled by applicable state law in many states which have clean election funds, and they are subject to whatever restrictions the state requires. Of course, currently those limitations are used to keep any third parties off the ballot, but the idea is still sound and there is no reason why a clean elections fund need fund any campaign from any person who can file to run. There is also no reason why anything would change for write in candidate who would be just as incapable of winning them as now.
as long as the barrier to entry were not so high as to require a full party backing, or wealthy superstar status to qualify, it would allow for non-party candidates to run more easily than now... it couldn't possibly BE any harder than it is now.
the fact is, you can never keep money out of politics. but you can mitigate the damage that it does. right now if you want to run, you HAVE to fund your advertising.
I said I've leave the other part for "another day" because it's a big conversation all its own. but in short, there is no pure democratic system I am advocating. I would simply consider the idea of replacing representatives with direct democracy and/or transferable voting powers. the Executive and Leglislative branches would remain as checks and balances, and I would expect the vast majority of people to transfer their voting power to representatives still... just on their own timeframe, and overridable on particular votes (that is, your rep gets your voting power only if you do not use it yourself). I haven't finalized a full structure for the process but I think it could be workable.
Here, a middle of the road health insurance policy starts at about $350/month and if you've got a family you better have $850/month ready, or more... then be able to handle around $13k+ out of pocket should you actually need to USE it.. and hope that your treatments don't cross a calendar year or you'll double that number... never mind any treatments that are not covered.
I know this because I pay for health insurance for my family and four employees.
If you try to make insurance do the job of actually providing health care, insurance will get expensive. the only way to keep that from happening is to share the risks among us all, and that, my friend, is socialized medicine.
and unless you are really ok with people dying on the sidewalks because they are poor (or, as currently, being stabilized and sent home to die there), that is what it will take to change the situation.
count me amongst those "with insurance who think the system sucks".
not true. there are things that can be done. fixing the electoral system is a big one, for example, with both public funding of elections up to a basic threshold that minimizes the impact of additional money in the races, and with IRV.
with those two tools, the people have weapons to fight all the ills you discuss. I have more dreams than that, but those are the least radical and most practical of them. I'll save "make everyone their own representative with instantly transferable voting powers" for another day;)
nothing is perfect of course, but at least a system can be set up that allows for more flexibility in the response of the people to bad situations, and that minimizes the benefit of "going bad" in the first place.
uh, two parties DO co-operate to prevent smaller parties from gaining traction. Gerrymandering is one tool used. Since they control the legislature, they can also control ballot access rules and, in states with such programs, public election funds. They very often use this power to set very high bars that basically only wealthy and/or famous candidates could hit, in many states.
the major problem is the one vote, winner take all system though: IRV would solve a lot of issues.
while I agree with you that multiple party systems are not automatically superior (ask Italy), they do provide a VOICE to less popular opinions. That's important. the voice doesn't have to be, and maybe should not be a particularly strong one; however, with IRV guaranteeing that people can vote their actual desires instead of voting tactically, it should follow that the representatives of the people that result would BETTER REPRESENT the people. that's the entire point. not that some "fringe" people get left out.
Another major problem with our current system is that you cannot really hold any party truly accountable: they only get punished as long as the opposition party avoids major screw ups of their own. imagine today the democrats do what the republicans did... and everyone just goes back to the republicans? and it see saws back and forth.
Finally, if you want to run for major office "clean" in this country, you have to be independently wealthy, like Ross Perot. Otherwise you have to join the major party election machine to get your necessary funding. I also regard that as a problem.
being more efficient at a single task for a short term period is not helpful to learning math or even using it. it's a short term gain for a long term loss, if it's learned instead of learning the tricks, and worse if it turns the student off to math. If you're lucky, at least you'll be taught the tricks too.
But once you learn the tricks, you are just as fast for the simple multiplication as a memorizer (a fact I can attest to personally, having never memorized my multiplication tables), and much faster outside of the simple sets because the principles are the same. And, after learning the tricks, you will naturally remember the answers to common problems through regular use and repetition, without ever having had to try to sit down and memorize a long, boring list of answers. That is, you'll naturally develope competance and speed. and hey, people like that! it feels good! maybe they would like math more if they were allowed to learn it naturally instead of "cramming" numbers.
maybe if you "got your head out of your ass", you'd understand the goal is learn math as a whole so people can use it in their lives, not turn them off to it entirely. and again, if the multiplication tables are so awesome, why don't we learn addition tables, or division tables? Is there something magic about multiplication that makes it more 'table suited'?
Bull, shit. it's an anachronism and it needs to be destroyed for the sake of math as a whole.
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Yes, and they hate us for our freedom. Seriously, you think people who spend their whole lives in the pursuit of power are looking only to die gloriously for allah, along with all of their countrymen?
childish. leaders of muslim countries like money and power just as much as leaders in all the other countries. they don't want it go away, ever. to believe they are all looking to live up to the ideals that low-level thugs believe or that are used by higher level thugs to keep the low level thugs going is just silly. You don't see Osama Bin Laden strapping on a suicide vest... and you never will.
hardly. for one target country, maybe. then his country will be a parking lot by morning.
is that a brilliant end game of any political leader you have ever heard of? only if their backs are against the wall. which is why you don't push countries with nukes back against walls. and THAT is why Iran wants nukes.
they rightfully understand it is the only way they can keep Russia, China, and the US at bay. They have countries on both sides that have been playgrounds for major power military operations for decades and they have been embroiled in their machinations as well. I think they want protection. and that is the only protection that counts, in the end.
hardly. learning to fly an airplane is trivial compared to becoming leader of a nation. going through any process as straightforward as that only requires enough brains to learn the material and pass the tests.
leading a nation takes much more than the ability to jump through a few hoops to pass a test.
as another poster pointed out, Kamikaze tactics among pilots was commonplace in WWII. Kamikaze countries, however, are not, have never been, and never will be.
but that does not matter. the leader cannot create a legion of NUCLEAR suicide bombers without committing suicide for his whole nation in a return strike, at least not if a nuclear armed country is his target.
that is why no nuclear armed powers have gone to war in over 50 years. and if Iran gets Nukes, the same will hold true. they might, like the US, bully non-nuclear nations with impunity, but they would *never allow* a strike against the US. that would be suicide, and leaders don't want to die. they want power.
nut cases, sure, I'd go so far as to say if you are willing to do what you must do in order to lead a country, and you think you are so awesome that you *should* lead the country, that you must be insane.
However "insane" does not mean "you want to die". niether hitler, nor any other world leader I am aware of has ever aspired to die nor to sacrifice his or her entire country for a singular "blaze of glory". Hitler may have had some overconfidence in his military, but you can rest assured faced with a nuclear armed opponent he would NOT have opted for mutually assured destruction. that was not his goal.
nor is it the goal of the theocracy of Iran. Perhaps some members of it, but those members are directed by the fellows who like power, not the fellows who like strapping bombs to their chests.
and nobody who wants to die rises through a power structure to lead a nation.
Only people who like, and want, power get there. they do not want their power base to evaporate, nor do they want to die.
You are never going to have to worry about a national suicide bombing.
there is a difference though. removing germs from your body does not selectively breed them for enhanced resistance to antimicrobials, and most people do not wash their hands like a doctor so the removal is not perfect. and I think that's a good thing.
You can be squeamish about it if you like, but the fact is unless you shoot for a sterile environment, which I would say is a bad idea for your immune system's health (use it or lose it), we are both talking about dealing with an acceptable level of fecal matter and many other contaminants on our persons. I'm simply saying if you wash your hands a few times a day with regular soap, plus when you go to the bathroom, I think that should be plenty. But, you'll get some incidental contact with fecal matter and other contaminants that way I'm sure. Which is good, IMHO.
I'm not a doctor or anything, but then, most doctors I know are so institutionalized as to look for threats to their weaker patients everywhere and they shoot for damn near sterilization, which is bad for all of us. Ask them about the new crop of staph they built for us sometime. So I don't necessarily think their perspective is the best one either, by and large. They want to win a losing battle.
If your immune system was up to snuff, getting some fecal matter and germs on you, in normal concentrations, would not bother you at all, OCD Boy.
You keep it up to snuff by not using the goo.
wash your hands. with regular soap. a few times a day and after using the bathroom. Lessen but DO NOT ELIMINATE your contact with potential contaminants as you describe. Dilute but do not remove them.
So says the guy who's never had the flu. That's not really a credential but it sounds good ;)
Most of "us liberals" don't think the amount of oil we'd get domestically is worth destroying the land it's buried under to get to.
I don't have control over Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Venezuela or Brazil. Oddly they haven't seen fit to give me a vote or a representative. But here, things are done in my name, with my tax dollars, in and to my country. this country is MY responsibility as it is all citizens. and racing to the bottom ecologically for a few scant years of cheaper oil doesn't make much sense to me. I'd rather have ANWAR. and if oil REALLY goes belly up... I'd rather have hundreds of years of access to moderately priced plastics than to burn it all up, but if we drill now, we're just going to set it all on fire, because once it's tapped it will always be cheaper to pump out the dregs for fuel than to use something else for fuel, until the dregs are basically a useless amount.
Oil is far too useful to burn it all. I don't want to see it tapped until we've figured out a better fuel source. then our plastics future can be guaranteed practically forever for much less drilling.
You cannot possibly provide enough for yourself to cover your medical bills if you get cancer.
all you can say is that you have provided enough for yourself "so far".
If you can afford insurance, that's great: except it's still very possible to go broke with insurance, or not to be able to afford it at all, especially if it's accessible to all (and thus more expensive).
I guess you can call "not letting people die in the streets" a moral crusade. I put it up there with "not letting people kill other people in the streets" and "running a functional governing system" in terms of basic goals of civilization: without it, what is the point? Just stockpile guns and take what you want then, if it's "all about you".
I don't think I could possibly have been more sarcastic without an injection of some kind.
fair enough, I'm not for shoehorning this into the insurance paradigm anyway and I agree the difference is significant: I was thinking more of actual socialized health care.
http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/276540-poster594x420mm_eng.jpg
england has more doctors per capita than we do.
Yes, just like all the other countries in the world who give socialized health care to their citizens. Doctors just DISAPPEARED FROM ALL THOSE COUNTRIES, it was the weirdest thing!
in all free countries, people are free to choose other vocations should they wish. Doctors in england, france, germany, canada (and on, and on, and on..) are hardly "enslaved". They freely chose the profession, knowing the situation and the cost/benefit situation. Apparently it's not too bad.
that doesn't mean it's right... "Company Stores" worked well for the elites back in the day too... but given the hurdles to becoming a doctor in most civilized nations, the compensation better be pretty good (whether financial or otherwise) for people to work that hard to do it. apparently it still is.
that's great, until you can't, or otherwise fail to. Then what?
Then we all have to deal with you, one way or another. Most of us have decided we're not ok with letting people die on the streets, or more accurately we have to deal with people who are faced with either dying on the streets OR doing other stuff that is unpleasant to others to avoid dying in the streets. Such as fraud, theft, murder, etc.
it would be great if, having failed to provide for yourself and all of your needs (including health care no one can afford), you just would decently wander off and shoot yourself in the head so as not to cause any more problems for anyone. Oddly though, that's not what people DO when they are faced with either bad luck or the results of their own bad decisions. No, they typically try to survive by any means necessary.
and if they fail, I am STILL not ok with watching them die in the streets. I guess I'm just one of those frail, lily-livered human beings, who thinks maybe the world is improved by reducing desperation as much as possible. There are downsides to that as well, but none as bad as the alternative.
he might also know how to meditate.
I am watching, year by year, exposed rock in my yard being covered by moss, dirt, and grass. this is in a yard in maine.
I don't think it's as slow of a process as you think.
dead zones are a result of fertilizer usage, not simply the use of a field to grow something.
and particulate matter is a concern, primarily of respiration. it can be solved by using good appliances, which could be required by law if these things were ever used in any density that really mattered.
you keep pointing at coal but it's not even close to the same. the problem with coal is not mostly particulates, it's things like mercury. wood is simply mostly inert particulate last I knew. they are not even remotely the same, and neither are the impacts of production of the fuel.
we have free speech enshrined as a constitutional right, here in america. that in many ways makes us different than many other western democracies.
regardless of whether you like hate crime leglislation or not, it does not tell us what we "can and cannot think". You can THINK anything you want. It does punish some violent crimes more severely than others: I'm not a fan of that, but neither does it do what you said. please edit your arguments in the future to be a bit less misleading.
none of what you say is true: campaign funding is already controlled by applicable state law in many states which have clean election funds, and they are subject to whatever restrictions the state requires. Of course, currently those limitations are used to keep any third parties off the ballot, but the idea is still sound and there is no reason why a clean elections fund need fund any campaign from any person who can file to run. There is also no reason why anything would change for write in candidate who would be just as incapable of winning them as now.
as long as the barrier to entry were not so high as to require a full party backing, or wealthy superstar status to qualify, it would allow for non-party candidates to run more easily than now... it couldn't possibly BE any harder than it is now.
the fact is, you can never keep money out of politics. but you can mitigate the damage that it does. right now if you want to run, you HAVE to fund your advertising.
I said I've leave the other part for "another day" because it's a big conversation all its own. but in short, there is no pure democratic system I am advocating. I would simply consider the idea of replacing representatives with direct democracy and/or transferable voting powers. the Executive and Leglislative branches would remain as checks and balances, and I would expect the vast majority of people to transfer their voting power to representatives still... just on their own timeframe, and overridable on particular votes (that is, your rep gets your voting power only if you do not use it yourself). I haven't finalized a full structure for the process but I think it could be workable.
and when you do that, you get Maine's situation.
Here, a middle of the road health insurance policy starts at about $350/month and if you've got a family you better have $850/month ready, or more... then be able to handle around $13k+ out of pocket should you actually need to USE it.. and hope that your treatments don't cross a calendar year or you'll double that number... never mind any treatments that are not covered.
I know this because I pay for health insurance for my family and four employees.
If you try to make insurance do the job of actually providing health care, insurance will get expensive. the only way to keep that from happening is to share the risks among us all, and that, my friend, is socialized medicine.
and unless you are really ok with people dying on the sidewalks because they are poor (or, as currently, being stabilized and sent home to die there), that is what it will take to change the situation.
count me amongst those "with insurance who think the system sucks".
not true. there are things that can be done. fixing the electoral system is a big one, for example, with both public funding of elections up to a basic threshold that minimizes the impact of additional money in the races, and with IRV.
with those two tools, the people have weapons to fight all the ills you discuss. I have more dreams than that, but those are the least radical and most practical of them. I'll save "make everyone their own representative with instantly transferable voting powers" for another day ;)
nothing is perfect of course, but at least a system can be set up that allows for more flexibility in the response of the people to bad situations, and that minimizes the benefit of "going bad" in the first place.
uh, two parties DO co-operate to prevent smaller parties from gaining traction. Gerrymandering is one tool used. Since they control the legislature, they can also control ballot access rules and, in states with such programs, public election funds. They very often use this power to set very high bars that basically only wealthy and/or famous candidates could hit, in many states.
the major problem is the one vote, winner take all system though: IRV would solve a lot of issues.
while I agree with you that multiple party systems are not automatically superior (ask Italy), they do provide a VOICE to less popular opinions. That's important. the voice doesn't have to be, and maybe should not be a particularly strong one; however, with IRV guaranteeing that people can vote their actual desires instead of voting tactically, it should follow that the representatives of the people that result would BETTER REPRESENT the people. that's the entire point. not that some "fringe" people get left out.
Another major problem with our current system is that you cannot really hold any party truly accountable: they only get punished as long as the opposition party avoids major screw ups of their own. imagine today the democrats do what the republicans did... and everyone just goes back to the republicans? and it see saws back and forth.
Finally, if you want to run for major office "clean" in this country, you have to be independently wealthy, like Ross Perot. Otherwise you have to join the major party election machine to get your necessary funding. I also regard that as a problem.
being more efficient at a single task for a short term period is not helpful to learning math or even using it. it's a short term gain for a long term loss, if it's learned instead of learning the tricks, and worse if it turns the student off to math. If you're lucky, at least you'll be taught the tricks too.
But once you learn the tricks, you are just as fast for the simple multiplication as a memorizer (a fact I can attest to personally, having never memorized my multiplication tables), and much faster outside of the simple sets because the principles are the same. And, after learning the tricks, you will naturally remember the answers to common problems through regular use and repetition, without ever having had to try to sit down and memorize a long, boring list of answers. That is, you'll naturally develope competance and speed. and hey, people like that! it feels good! maybe they would like math more if they were allowed to learn it naturally instead of "cramming" numbers.
maybe if you "got your head out of your ass", you'd understand the goal is learn math as a whole so people can use it in their lives, not turn them off to it entirely. and again, if the multiplication tables are so awesome, why don't we learn addition tables, or division tables? Is there something magic about multiplication that makes it more 'table suited'?
Bull, shit. it's an anachronism and it needs to be destroyed for the sake of math as a whole.