Arguing that one is more red so the other can't be red is foolishness at it's finest.
That's actually a strawman argument. He didn't claim they were unbiased, he claimed they weren't equally biased.
You should make an effort to be more intelligent than them, learn to spot rhetorical fallacy, and learn to discuss topics without easy to read fallacies.
You really should not throw stones in your glass house.
The circumstancial evidence is that it is most likely genetic. Studies on indentical twins separated at birth found that if one was openly homosexual the other twin was about 80% likely to also be openly homosexual.
Just like Communism and Libertarianism work until you add people, I don't think your simple workaround has a chance in hell of working once it's actually exposed to irrational people. Here's the thing I realized nearly a decade ago, no lesbian bridezilla is ever going to be content with a civil union. Her childhood fantasies are about the perfect wedding, not a "civil union". And if you try to tell her she's not allowed to have her marriage, she will gut you like a fish before you can get the words "civil union" out of your mouth.
The emotional attachment is to the word marriage. Changing the name won't satisfy anyone who's already up in arms about not being allowed to marry (they'll just see it as continued discrimination). Worse, your plan will upset a lot heterosexual formerly married couples, and would give the populists something really big to rant about. They'd be all over the blogosphere, the TV, the radio and the newspaper screaming mad over how you (personally) stole the marriages of millions of decent Americans. You could become the most hated man in America.
Additionally step 4 is counter-productive. Religious ceremonies should have no impact on the state. Instead during or after the ceremony the couple signs the paperwork for their civil union and it gets sent to city hall for registration. Which, I think, is exactly what happens now.
So what you've done is incurred great cost in changing the words used, pissed off a lot of people who are going to vote to rescind your changes and you've accomplished nothing at all other than creating a lot of very angry people who hate you (specifically) and you've guaranteed that your political party won't be elected again for a generation. Is it really worth all that to try and appease a group who, if you plan actually succeeded, would simply start complaing that gays should be allowed to have civil unions?
Unfortunately, nobody seemed to want the federal government to start talking about civil unions, so now the federal government has adopted the second of two equally incorrect (incorrect because the federal government should not be allowed to opine on things related to sexual preference between consenting adults) stances on marriage.
Wouldn't the proper thing be for the Federal Government to simply recognize the marriages authorized by the states?
There's an even simpler solution. You don't allow gay couples to sue a church that refuses to perform a religious ceremony for them. I see no reason why a church should be forced to marry anyone as long as they can make a reasonable argument that the ceremony runs counter to their religion. I see no reason why any couple needs religious approval for a marriage, it's a civil matter. Churches are only in charge of the "religious ceremony" part of a marriage. The ceremony means nothing without the civil paperwork and the paperwork can be signed without a priest looking over your shoulder.
Of course, after a church has refused to many a couple, maybe the couple will take their faith and donations to a church that doesn't hate them.
Interestingly, the Heritage Foundation is a libertarian think tank and it ranks Hong Kong as the "freest" place on earth.
The Frasier institute puts it in the top 10 entirely based on the strength of it's economic freedom, on the personal freedom scale, Hong Kong's score is far below the U.S. score.
The Frasier Institute ranking appears to be an average of the personal and economic freedom scores. It's quite true that if only personal freedom were consider the rankings would be fairly different. Although Australia, New Zealand and Canada all rank higher than the United States on the Frasier Insitute's personal freedom scale.
Of course then we'd also have to add Ireland, Denmark, Japan, Estonia, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Spain, Portugal, the Bahamas, and Malta to the list of countries that score higher than the United States (making the U.S. the 17th most free country in the world).
Hmm, according to the Heritage Foundation, the U.S. ranks 10th, and according to the Fraser Institute the U.S. ranks 7th. Freedom House's ranking doesn't easily lend itself to ranking countries in the top category.
Heritage foundation top 10:
1 - Hong Kong
2 - Singapore
3 - Australia
4 - New Zealand
5 - Switzerland
6 - Canada
7 - Chile
8 - Mauritius
9 - Denmark
10 - United States
Fraser top 10 (Chapter 3, page 9):
1 - New Zealand
2 - Netherlands
3 - Hong Kong
4 - Australia
5 - Canada
6 - Ireland
7 - United States of America
8 - Denmark
9 - Japan
10 - Estonia
So they seem to be in agreement that Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Hong Kong are freer than the United States.
Actually, it's a troll, you just happen to agree with it, which is why you don't notice.
None of this levelling was predicted by the current models, even the head of the IPCC agrees that the models need to be re-worked.
Actually, both history and the models have many periods of a decade or longer where the temperature doesn't appear to be increasing. It's always a problem when you have multiple cyclical events and random noise overlapping the underlying trend.
So if heating is caused by the increase in CO2, where is the heat going?
Mostly the ocean, the atmosphere warms the ocean during La Nina periods and the ocean warms the atmosphere during El Nino periods.
What other mitigating factors are there that aren't being factored into the models?
It's possible that there are small mitigating and amplifying factors that have not been factored in the models, but the major ones are likely all accounted for at this point, because almost everything conceivably related has been looked at in detail.
Interestingly, we haven't had a strong El Nino since 1998 which is why you'll often see people say the temperature hasn't increased since then. Remember the warming trend is relatively small to our temperature scale, around 0.2 degrees per decade, and a strong El Nino will increase atmospheric temperatures by around 0.5 degrees for that year (conversely, a strong La Nina will drop the atmospheric temperature by 0.5 degrees for that year). Since 1998 was a strong El Nino year, a neutral year should still be about 0.2 degrees below 1998 (0.5 - (1.5 * 0.2)). Since 1998, we've had two years that were warmer than it and both were moderate El Nino years.
what we should be doing, is lowering our damage, and finding new technology that can keep or improve our quality of life and use less Carbon while doing this.
Which is actually what environmentalists want. Maybe you are a closeted environmentalist.
Except that you also have to figure in that the average iOS user spends more (20% more?) on apps than the average Android user.
Even using that number, you're still better off with Target Android's Jelly Bean users. 80% of 25% is 20% which is still more than 16%. And it seems likely that the users who spend the least on Apps for their Andriod phones are probably also the ones with the oldest versions of Android on their phones, so that comparison may be overly generous towards Apple.
That's only true as long as carbon access is the limiting factor for plant growth. After all, there is plenty of air-born carbon in a bonfire, but not much plant growth.
You've just given an opinion why a contract might not be valid, but that says nothing about the legality. I can work for someone without a contract. I can also agree to work for someone for non-monetary compensation.
Which the students did and in a court-of-law they proved the company failed to provide the required non-monetary compensation that had been promised.
I think that analogy over simplifies the problem. The real issue is that the interns were promised an internship which would teach them valuable movie production skills, and instead they were given no training and used as unpaid waiters. The bait and switch is on the type of work they were promised that they would be doing. The company broke the contract and now owes them monetary compensation because they failed to provide the agreed upon compensation (training in the art of movie production).
Would that this was true! But you set a false scenario because you are assuming that without public education they wont get an education at all. This is false.
Can you prove that claim? I believe that if you remove the public schools, there will be many children who do not get a basic education. The pithier libertarians may claim this is already the case, but I'm reasonably sure the situation would be quite a bit worse. My reason is simple, and relates to the reason the public education system exists in the first place, the bottom 40% of the America public owns about 0.2% of it's wealth, which seems to work out to an average of around $1000 each. How much education is $1000 going to buy spread over 13 years?
Really? You fail to see the difference between a consensual relationship, and a non-consensual one? The difference is clearly in whether or not each individual has the choice of whether or not to enter and remain in the relationship. The consequences of that difference is that consensual relationships inevitably offer a net value to all parties (otherwise consent is not granted or is withdrawn) while non-consensual relationships do not necessarily offer that value, as one or more parties is captive. It seems quite clear, and hardly a trivial distinction.
Is it your contention that you are a captive of America and not free to leave? Or is merely that you think the rent is too high where you choose to live?
Not at all. Derived ultimately from the band societies that humans lived in for roughly a quarter of a million years *before* the beginnings of the city states.
I'm not an anthropologist, but I recently read Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (who is an anthropologist) and according to several comments made in his book, bands didn't tend to have much society. Everyone in the band tended to be related to everyone else. When two bands came into conflict the victors tended to drive the losers out of the area, or if that wasn't an option, murder them (except for those women who could be forced into marriage). Even when the bands met peacefully to trade, it would not be uncommon for someone seeking vengeance to murder or be murdered over some greivance real or imagined. The rise of what we would call society can be jointly attributed to the rise of religion and larger political organizations such as chiefdoms and states. Even in modern hunter-gatherer societies the pattern has been repeated, the primary cause of death tends to be murder until missionaries and governments work together to pacify and settle the hunter-gatherers.
You should be careful not to fall into the trap of thinking of pre-state societies as noble savages.
And in the system I advocate, you could say that, while in the system you defend, you cannot. Or you can, but it wont fly, of course. Find a way to refuse (difficult in europe, where the money is nearly always taxed before you get it) and you will eventually see why we say the power of the state grows out of the barrel of the gun.
I think the problem is that you have a world view conflict here:
Libertarians tend to view taxes as armed robbery.
Statists tend to view taxes as paying the bills of society.
Most libertarians wouldn't think taking a pair of shoes from a store without paying for it was just or reasonable, but when it comes to paying the bills for society, it suddenly becomes just and reasonable to take without paying. Most often this double-standard is explained by claiming that society's bills are unjust or immoral (sometimes they legitimately are). Libertarians may dismiss the bills as incurred by "parasites" who feed off of the "good" people. Most often, this is a failure to understand that the majority of people maintain a difference of opinion on what a legitimate expense for the state is.
Europeans, for example, seem to believe that making sure people don't starve is a fundamental duty of the state. This may seem insane to most libertarians, you're taking money from good people and giving it to people who can't even feed themselves. However, Europeans think they have good reasons to believe that is a legitimate expense. Consider for a moment that they have a longer history than America has, and it has been filled with more famines, wars and death than most Americans are even going to be aware of. For instance, France knows what happens when too many people are left to go hungry. I'm sure their neighbours have learned equally costly lessons. Thus is they believe that it is the duty of the state to maintain a stable society, and that a stable society is fundamental to having a prosperous society, then it clearly must be a duty of the state to feed the people (at least to some minimum extent).
On the otherhand, I do understand the Libertarian argument that you're taking the fruits of someone's labour to pay for society. But I fail to see how it's any different than paying any other shareholder his fair share of the profits. It is at least as legitimate to look at taxes as simply the cost of a prosperous society. The libertarian argument that it is forced through the barrel of gun fails for me, because the payment of any bill is ultimately enforced through the barrel of a gun. If you take things, like the before mentioned shoes, and refuse to pay for them, you will go to jail. Only the anarchists who dispute the very idea that property can be owned can use that argument and remain self-consistent.
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Arguing that one is more red so the other can't be red is foolishness at it's finest.
That's actually a strawman argument. He didn't claim they were unbiased, he claimed they weren't equally biased.
You should make an effort to be more intelligent than them, learn to spot rhetorical fallacy, and learn to discuss topics without easy to read fallacies.
You really should not throw stones in your glass house.
Look at the TV News ratings. Soon enough no one will be watching anyway.
I suspect that Massachussetts is legally required to recognize that you have a permit to carry a concealed weapon in Texas.
The circumstancial evidence is that it is most likely genetic. Studies on indentical twins separated at birth found that if one was openly homosexual the other twin was about 80% likely to also be openly homosexual.
Just like Communism and Libertarianism work until you add people, I don't think your simple workaround has a chance in hell of working once it's actually exposed to irrational people. Here's the thing I realized nearly a decade ago, no lesbian bridezilla is ever going to be content with a civil union. Her childhood fantasies are about the perfect wedding, not a "civil union". And if you try to tell her she's not allowed to have her marriage, she will gut you like a fish before you can get the words "civil union" out of your mouth.
The emotional attachment is to the word marriage. Changing the name won't satisfy anyone who's already up in arms about not being allowed to marry (they'll just see it as continued discrimination). Worse, your plan will upset a lot heterosexual formerly married couples, and would give the populists something really big to rant about. They'd be all over the blogosphere, the TV, the radio and the newspaper screaming mad over how you (personally) stole the marriages of millions of decent Americans. You could become the most hated man in America.
Additionally step 4 is counter-productive. Religious ceremonies should have no impact on the state. Instead during or after the ceremony the couple signs the paperwork for their civil union and it gets sent to city hall for registration. Which, I think, is exactly what happens now.
So what you've done is incurred great cost in changing the words used, pissed off a lot of people who are going to vote to rescind your changes and you've accomplished nothing at all other than creating a lot of very angry people who hate you (specifically) and you've guaranteed that your political party won't be elected again for a generation. Is it really worth all that to try and appease a group who, if you plan actually succeeded, would simply start complaing that gays should be allowed to have civil unions?
If the government deals only with civil unions then the entire religious war issue is removed.
Until religious people start claiming that civil unions are defined by God? Then what?
Unfortunately, nobody seemed to want the federal government to start talking about civil unions, so now the federal government has adopted the second of two equally incorrect (incorrect because the federal government should not be allowed to opine on things related to sexual preference between consenting adults) stances on marriage.
Wouldn't the proper thing be for the Federal Government to simply recognize the marriages authorized by the states?
There's an even simpler solution. You don't allow gay couples to sue a church that refuses to perform a religious ceremony for them. I see no reason why a church should be forced to marry anyone as long as they can make a reasonable argument that the ceremony runs counter to their religion. I see no reason why any couple needs religious approval for a marriage, it's a civil matter. Churches are only in charge of the "religious ceremony" part of a marriage. The ceremony means nothing without the civil paperwork and the paperwork can be signed without a priest looking over your shoulder.
Of course, after a church has refused to many a couple, maybe the couple will take their faith and donations to a church that doesn't hate them.
Interestingly, the Heritage Foundation is a libertarian think tank and it ranks Hong Kong as the "freest" place on earth.
The Frasier institute puts it in the top 10 entirely based on the strength of it's economic freedom, on the personal freedom scale, Hong Kong's score is far below the U.S. score.
The Frasier Institute ranking appears to be an average of the personal and economic freedom scores. It's quite true that if only personal freedom were consider the rankings would be fairly different. Although Australia, New Zealand and Canada all rank higher than the United States on the Frasier Insitute's personal freedom scale.
Of course then we'd also have to add Ireland, Denmark, Japan, Estonia, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Spain, Portugal, the Bahamas, and Malta to the list of countries that score higher than the United States (making the U.S. the 17th most free country in the world).
Fraser top 10 (Chapter 3, page 9):
So they seem to be in agreement that Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Hong Kong are freer than the United States.
None of this levelling was predicted by the current models, even the head of the IPCC agrees that the models need to be re-worked.
Actually, both history and the models have many periods of a decade or longer where the temperature doesn't appear to be increasing. It's always a problem when you have multiple cyclical events and random noise overlapping the underlying trend.
So if heating is caused by the increase in CO2, where is the heat going?
Mostly the ocean, the atmosphere warms the ocean during La Nina periods and the ocean warms the atmosphere during El Nino periods.
What other mitigating factors are there that aren't being factored into the models?
It's possible that there are small mitigating and amplifying factors that have not been factored in the models, but the major ones are likely all accounted for at this point, because almost everything conceivably related has been looked at in detail.
Interestingly, we haven't had a strong El Nino since 1998 which is why you'll often see people say the temperature hasn't increased since then. Remember the warming trend is relatively small to our temperature scale, around 0.2 degrees per decade, and a strong El Nino will increase atmospheric temperatures by around 0.5 degrees for that year (conversely, a strong La Nina will drop the atmospheric temperature by 0.5 degrees for that year). Since 1998 was a strong El Nino year, a neutral year should still be about 0.2 degrees below 1998 (0.5 - (1.5 * 0.2)). Since 1998, we've had two years that were warmer than it and both were moderate El Nino years.
Are you sure about that?
"Environmentalists" Will not be happy until we live like we did back in the 1700's.
That's called a strawman fallacy.
what we should be doing, is lowering our damage, and finding new technology that can keep or improve our quality of life and use less Carbon while doing this.
Which is actually what environmentalists want. Maybe you are a closeted environmentalist.
Except that you also have to figure in that the average iOS user spends more (20% more?) on apps than the average Android user.
Even using that number, you're still better off with Target Android's Jelly Bean users. 80% of 25% is 20% which is still more than 16%. And it seems likely that the users who spend the least on Apps for their Andriod phones are probably also the ones with the oldest versions of Android on their phones, so that comparison may be overly generous towards Apple.
That's only true as long as carbon access is the limiting factor for plant growth. After all, there is plenty of air-born carbon in a bonfire, but not much plant growth.
You've just given an opinion why a contract might not be valid, but that says nothing about the legality. I can work for someone without a contract. I can also agree to work for someone for non-monetary compensation.
Which the students did and in a court-of-law they proved the company failed to provide the required non-monetary compensation that had been promised.
I think that analogy over simplifies the problem. The real issue is that the interns were promised an internship which would teach them valuable movie production skills, and instead they were given no training and used as unpaid waiters. The bait and switch is on the type of work they were promised that they would be doing. The company broke the contract and now owes them monetary compensation because they failed to provide the agreed upon compensation (training in the art of movie production).
Would that this was true! But you set a false scenario because you are assuming that without public education they wont get an education at all. This is false.
Can you prove that claim? I believe that if you remove the public schools, there will be many children who do not get a basic education. The pithier libertarians may claim this is already the case, but I'm reasonably sure the situation would be quite a bit worse. My reason is simple, and relates to the reason the public education system exists in the first place, the bottom 40% of the America public owns about 0.2% of it's wealth, which seems to work out to an average of around $1000 each. How much education is $1000 going to buy spread over 13 years?
Really? You fail to see the difference between a consensual relationship, and a non-consensual one? The difference is clearly in whether or not each individual has the choice of whether or not to enter and remain in the relationship. The consequences of that difference is that consensual relationships inevitably offer a net value to all parties (otherwise consent is not granted or is withdrawn) while non-consensual relationships do not necessarily offer that value, as one or more parties is captive. It seems quite clear, and hardly a trivial distinction.
Is it your contention that you are a captive of America and not free to leave? Or is merely that you think the rent is too high where you choose to live?
How do you imagine it would it be worse under libertarian rule?
Well, instead of bribing politicians for favours, the rich simply do what they please.
And? What is it you're afraid of? That they might spend money?
What are they currently bribing the government to do?
Not at all. Derived ultimately from the band societies that humans lived in for roughly a quarter of a million years *before* the beginnings of the city states.
I'm not an anthropologist, but I recently read Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (who is an anthropologist) and according to several comments made in his book, bands didn't tend to have much society. Everyone in the band tended to be related to everyone else. When two bands came into conflict the victors tended to drive the losers out of the area, or if that wasn't an option, murder them (except for those women who could be forced into marriage). Even when the bands met peacefully to trade, it would not be uncommon for someone seeking vengeance to murder or be murdered over some greivance real or imagined. The rise of what we would call society can be jointly attributed to the rise of religion and larger political organizations such as chiefdoms and states. Even in modern hunter-gatherer societies the pattern has been repeated, the primary cause of death tends to be murder until missionaries and governments work together to pacify and settle the hunter-gatherers.
You should be careful not to fall into the trap of thinking of pre-state societies as noble savages.
And in the system I advocate, you could say that, while in the system you defend, you cannot. Or you can, but it wont fly, of course. Find a way to refuse (difficult in europe, where the money is nearly always taxed before you get it) and you will eventually see why we say the power of the state grows out of the barrel of the gun.
I think the problem is that you have a world view conflict here:
Libertarians tend to view taxes as armed robbery.
Statists tend to view taxes as paying the bills of society.
Most libertarians wouldn't think taking a pair of shoes from a store without paying for it was just or reasonable, but when it comes to paying the bills for society, it suddenly becomes just and reasonable to take without paying. Most often this double-standard is explained by claiming that society's bills are unjust or immoral (sometimes they legitimately are). Libertarians may dismiss the bills as incurred by "parasites" who feed off of the "good" people. Most often, this is a failure to understand that the majority of people maintain a difference of opinion on what a legitimate expense for the state is.
Europeans, for example, seem to believe that making sure people don't starve is a fundamental duty of the state. This may seem insane to most libertarians, you're taking money from good people and giving it to people who can't even feed themselves. However, Europeans think they have good reasons to believe that is a legitimate expense. Consider for a moment that they have a longer history than America has, and it has been filled with more famines, wars and death than most Americans are even going to be aware of. For instance, France knows what happens when too many people are left to go hungry. I'm sure their neighbours have learned equally costly lessons. Thus is they believe that it is the duty of the state to maintain a stable society, and that a stable society is fundamental to having a prosperous society, then it clearly must be a duty of the state to feed the people (at least to some minimum extent).
On the otherhand, I do understand the Libertarian argument that you're taking the fruits of someone's labour to pay for society. But I fail to see how it's any different than paying any other shareholder his fair share of the profits. It is at least as legitimate to look at taxes as simply the cost of a prosperous society. The libertarian argument that it is forced through the barrel of gun fails for me, because the payment of any bill is ultimately enforced through the barrel of a gun. If you take things, like the before mentioned shoes, and refuse to pay for them, you will go to jail. Only the anarchists who dispute the very idea that property can be owned can use that argument and remain self-consistent.
So... Anyone who disagrees with your political opinion is clinically insane?
I guess we should subsidize the rich and the beautiful, then. What could possibly go wrong?