...but there's still a convolution of "fair"; the poor can afford living and don't pay taxes, but the working and middle classes bear the brunt of whatever gets shifted off the wealthy. It may not mean losing your house, but it's still quite a sting for your typical American family. (15% wouldn't be nearly enough to keep our government running--it'd probably need to be closer to 25-30%. I don't have figures, I'm just looking at the current tax brackets and mentally extrapolating from there...)
Now, I think that our tax system is in desperate need of a pretty serious overhaul, but I don't think the solution lies in shifting taxes from the leisure classes to the working classes. It just isn't healthy for a nation to have a large disparity between classes; it breeds animosity, elitism, and discontent. I don't think that we're there right now, but I also don't think it's a good idea to push ourselves in that direction.
goldspider makes a good point. Government just takes our money. Our money is competed over in the private sector. Only those that are honest, quick servicing, and cost-efficient get money from people in the private sector.
Oh, come on! Did you just sleep through the past few years' worth of corporate scandal? Enron is honest, quick servicing, and efficient? Arthur Andersen? The honest businessman has a hard time holding his own against the one who's just out to make money, damn the ethics.
Happier citizens? Freedom and prosperity makes people happy. History and human nature shows us this.
History also shows us that when the divide between the classes grows too great, you get great, big, violent, bloody revolts. Human nature shows us that we're opportunistic, fault-riddled beings who are capable of committing mind-bogglingly heinous acts of violence and fraud against one other in the name of power and wealth.
Better roads and better transit? Bullshit! Have you ever compared private roads to socialized ones? Have you ever compared Disney's roads to socialized ones? What about Disney's monorail? Efficient, clean, and cost-effective. Socialized transportation is wretched, and fails in so many ways. In a socialized system, to get more money, transporation agencies just have to be slow and take longer to get the roads or rails repaired. In the private sector, to get business, they have to do it quickly and for a relatively small amount of me.
As a matter of fact, I have. The trains in France and Germany are simply amazing--fast, reasonably priced, efficient, and a far cry better and more complex than anything Disney runs. Likewise, the roads are in excellent shape, though I rarely used them, as the trains were so good. The UK, well, the trains aren't all that great there. In fact, they're atrocious. Odd, really, seeing as they were privatized some years ago. Must just not have hit their stride yet.
Waitaminnute. Disney? You're honestly comparing a theme park's infrastructure with that of an industrialized nation? Crimony, why not just hand the nation over to Michael Eisner? We'll have Main Street, USA parades in every city, every day! and fireworks, too! Hurrah!
Strong social structure has nothing to do with the inherent corruption of socialized anything. Strong social structure isn't about inefficient centralization, or slowly going bankrupt (European countries, like France and the Netherlands or Canada) on account of their socialized systems, but rather on actually local social structures developed and maintained by people doing so of their own free will -- something that no government can create, simply because governments coerce.
In case you hadn't noticed, we're quickly going bankrupt. We're living way beyond our menas. We may not pay as much in taxes, but we owe shitloads to the likes of China, and the private sector has, as of yet, been recalcitrant in lowering profit expectations. Net effect: you and I get to digest massive increases in the cost of living, by way of things like insurance and health care costs. We get to watch our cities slowly decay.
Of course governments coerce. You're going to have coercion in any human interaction. Free enterprise coerces, too. If Barnes and Noble moves in next to Your Happy Bookstore and starts undercutting your prices, you think that isn't coercion? Either you try to play the margins game with a behemoth, you provide legendary customer service, you move to fill a very specific niche, or you go out of business. At which point, you go after an hourly position to work the information desk at Barnes and Noble so you can keep paying your mortgage and feeding your family.
Echoing the other reply to your post in some respects, but are you a communist? Why should the wealthy pay a higher percentage than anyone else? Do you want to see a situation where no matter what anyone does for a living, they take home $x and that is it? Why would anyone bother to go to school for years on end to learn when they will get no reward besides a pat on the back and "good job" for making sure every high school drop out gets money for menial work?
Dammit, are you really suggesting that I'm some idiot who sees economic policy as some light switch? You think I live in some black-and-white, Hardcore Anarchy vs. Big Brother in your Bathroom world? Or are you just trying to thrust me into some convenient mold so you can smear me with whatever the talking points tell you to say? And what the hell is up with that 'are you a communist' crap? Are you some wild-eyed McCarthyist or something? You think I'm gonna go all shakey in the knees 'cuz you're insinuating I'm some bass-ackwards god-damned Red who wants to destroy America and shit on her apple pie?
Here's a novel idea for you. I'm interested in using government, a government made by the People, for the People, to actually help the fucking people. That's the whole fucking point of society. You think you were just born into a place that happened to somehow magically become the greatest nation on earth one day? Do you know anything of our history? Do you know anything about human nature? You really think that tweaking a government so that it caters to the ambition and greed of the individual is a good fucking long-term plan?
You think you stand to gain from your position? You and I, friend, are fucking peons to the people who have real wealth and real power. Given opportunity to take even more wealth and power, I assure you that they'll beat the likes of us senseless in getting it. We are the schmucks who -should- be making $60,000-75,000 a year. We're the poor bastards who get to look at annual double-digit-percent insurance premium increases and actually wonder if it's worth gambling on whether or not we'll fall ill this year...and maybe next year... Does that strike you as sensible? Do you really want to tip the scales to favor frighteningly rich people who are in it to take your money for their own personal gain? That's what you want from society?
Do you even understand the statistics you bandy about? Of course the people who make over $50k are going to pay the vast majority of our income tax--they've got the vast majority of the fucking money! You're going to see the same kinds of numbers when you apply a flat tax! Go ahead--try it! Whip out Excel and run some simple scenarios, then scratch your head in wonderment when those same long-suffering rich folks get "stiffed" over and over again!
You and I are chattle. In the grand scheme of American power and wealth, we're the unwashed plebes. The more power and wealth we willingly cede to the individuals who already posess most of the power and wealth, the less opportunity we're going to have to get a piece of it, and the less they'll want to give it back. If you're gonna advocate 'every man for himself', be damn sure that the guys standing behind you with the machine guns are on your side.
OK, did some more hunting, found a more useful and more recent figure: Real median household money
income for 2002. The nationwide real median household money income for 2002 was $42,409. (For definitions, visit the link at the bottom of my post.)
Fair's fair, right? If you think the average black household--real median household money income: $29,177--should be paying $4,376 a year in taxes, that's cool. They're just bearing the same burden as the rest of us.
"Fair" is tricky. Fifteen percent looks fair on the surface, but when you're that typical black American family, it seems a whole lot less fair that you need to give up money you'd use to buy food and a roof over your head when the rich family across town needs to give up money that they could have used to spend on an extra week on a yacht in Barbados.
In fairness, the benefits are subtle and hard to measure. You'd get safer cities. You'd get happier citizens. You'd get better roads, better transit. You'd get a better-educated and more informed populace. You'd have healthier citizens. Personally, you won't get much. So if you're in it for yourself, then no, it doesn't behoove you to support a strong social structure.
I do advise you watch your back, though. You and I are small fucking fish in a big ocean, and the sharks have very, very few qualms about swallowing the likes of us whole. Your government cares far more about your personal happiness and success than the private sector ever will. Be quick, be smart, and whatever you do, don't fall on hard times.
That is a way to 'get the word out', but I'm not convinced that it fits the model of a grassroots movement. The power of a grassroots movement is that it gains momentum over time, and that if it can maintain that momentum, it is difficult (if not impossible) to stop it. Running a presidential candidate is an attempt to vault to the front; even if he performs admirably well, unless there's enough critical mass to sustain the Green Party in any given community, it'll peter out and fail. It just seems that this sort of 'thrust for coverage' builds an unstable and fickle base, whereas taking what gains they've already made and nurturing them into something like a governorship or two would be real, solid, productive progress.
In my opinion, a Green presidential run is premature and an inefficient use of Green resources. Once the Greens start locking in state-level offices in the same way they've succeeded with municipal-level offices now, then set sights on the presidency.
As of the 2000 census, the average American makes $57,045. An American making $75,000 a year falls into the top 1/4 of Americans, income-wise.
Thus, a (comparatively well-to-do) American making $75,000 a year would probably be expected to pay a fairly hefty tax rate, say 30-35%. It'd keep you from buying a lot of nifty toys, and you'll probably need to settle on a humbler house than you'd otherwise want, but it's not really not that hard a price to pay.
The first of the ten key values of the Green Party is "Grssroots Democracy". Over the past few years, the American Green Party has made significant steps forward, but (as best I can tell) is still growing at a local level. While I understand the appeal of national coverage, is running a presidential campaign really in the spirit or the best interests of the party? Wouldn't those funds be more effective in campaigning for more local offices, or launching a statewide candidate in an area where the Greens have a solid foothold? Isn't that how grassroots is supposed to work--from the bottom up and not from the top down?
Crippling the DMV? That's on par with outsmarting a bar stool.
The 'dozen experts' have decided that 'fresh software' is the best way to remedy it - probably means re-installing Windows, but have they considered Linux?
Oh, brilliant idea. Why, they could have their entire statewide system gutted, upgraded to Linux, re-designed, re-written, tested, debugged, deployed, up and running in the time it takes Gentoo to boot!
That means that in order to be harmless, it'd have to be built out in the middle of the sea. They're actually seriously suggesting they use a ship/platform as the base.
Or, y'know, a small island. Assuming they can find a small island in the middle of the ocean.
If it's so goddamn far from everything else, it's not going to make for a very efficient means of getting stuff from "civilization" to space, now is it?
Wait a minute. You think shipping goods an extra few hundred kilometers via container ship is somehow economically prohibitive? It's obscenely inexpensive and easy to ship goods by sea. It's the getting it to space part that's tricky.
They're entirely serious when they say, "Oh, we won't have to worry about the part that doesn't fly off into orbit, because we'll put it in the middle of the ocean." Right. That doesn't create its own problems, no, not at all.
Of course it creates its own problems. Namely, that we'd need to restrict air and sea traffic in a certain area, we'd need to find a suitable island for the project, and we'd need to create a special shipping lane for spacebound cargo. You seem to view these problems as showstoppers; I don't really see anything prohibitively challenging about the examples you cite.
When will you people get it through your heads that space elevators won't work?
Probably never. Then again, odds are I'm too dense to see the nuanced wisdom in your above statements, and my responses are all hideously naive.
Well, look at what Google has managed to accomplish thus far: they came from nowhere to become the indisputed king of 'Net searches. (Even more amazing, they've held that title for years--something virtually unheard of in an industry that measures product lifespans in months.) They've created a mail service so popular that an entire cottage industry of Ponzi schemes has sprung up for distributing Gmail invites--and this is still only in beta. Their corporate motto is "Don't be evil", and they've done admirably at sticking to it. They hire brilliant engineers, shun glitz and gimmickry, and care more about making good tech than they care about maximizing profits.
I'd say they can compete against anything--private sector, open source, whatever. They've already proven their mettle as one of the biggest fish in the sea, and I don't see any reason why one shouldn't take a browser gambit from Google seriously.
There was a time when Andrew Sullivan could have conceivably been labeled a conservative, but it's passed.
I disagree. Sullivan does focus heavily on gay rights (goshIwonderwhy,) but he's still very much a 'classic' conservative. While gay rights may be his biggest cause, he continues to make a lot of noise over things like fiscal responsibility, smaller government, keeping government out of private spheres, and accountability. He's decidedly gone out of step with Bush's neoconservatism, but frankly, I'd say that Bush is the one who left conservatism--not Sullivan.
For example, his current front-page articles include:
18 posts about the Iraq war, from a variety of angles
4 posts about gay rights and marriage
4 posts castigating Dan Rather and the forged memos
2 posts regarding unbecoming political conduct in the GOP
a smattering of random stuff
While it's fair to say that he's big on gay rights, it's disingenuous to dismiss him as single-minded and 'no longer conservative'. Andrew Sullivan is decidedly conservative, even if a lot of other conservatives out there would rather not count him among their numbers...
Running a presidential candidate gives visibility to the party, helping all those local and state candidates win their races.
You assume that visibility engenders help. This is not true; there is such a thing as bad press when it comes to politics, and if your party develops a reputation of being "out there", you're not going to derive much benefit from it. "Who? Oh, yeah, I heard of him--didn't he get, like, less than one percent of the vote? Didn't he say something about kicking the UN out of America? Nu-uh, no thanks. . o 0 (Wacko!)"
Running a doomed presidential campaign is a waste of party resources. A far, far better use of that money would be to help win two or three governorships, or a majority in a state house--you know, gain some real political power and momentum. Unfortunately, this is decidedly less glamorous than a national campaign.
If these individuals truly wanted change and progress more than they desire recognition and power, they'd run for an office that wasn't completely out of reach. As it stands, they'd rather spend their lives pitching sound bites to cameras than rolling up their sleeves and doing the important but unglamorous work of a lower-level public official.
Take a look at the current fossil fuel situation We're bumping right up against maximum output, and China's energy needs are growing rapidly--and showing no signs of letting up any time soon. (Same goes for the rest of Asia, for that matter.)
You think China -or- the US wants to duke it out over $100+ barrels of oil in the next few years?
The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
Federalist Paper #51
Humans are, by nature, ambitious creatures. Humans are also primarily concerned with their own survival over the survival of others. It is noble yet naive to believe that power is best entrusted to the individual and not the community.
While there is much that needs improvement in our government, it serves a vital role in protecting the less powerful. We've already seen in our own country what happens when we trust the individual with the custody of the community; we get plutocracy. We get the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. We get The Jungle. We get Tammany Hall. In short, we get powerful men who are not averse to advancing their own power at society's cost.
We are neither angels nor devils, but until we can magically exercise control over those few who would lessen society for their own gain, we need a powerful government--more specifically, powerful laws which govern those in government and society. In an age where words circle the globe instantly and billions of dollars change hands without the bat of an eyelid, we must remain even more vigilant. What once took years now takes seconds, but our nature remains unchanged; never has it been so essential that we protect the good of the nation over the ambitions of the powerful.
People dislike him so much for various reasons they ar e willing to place a worse leader into office.
I dislike Bush because he has taken what should have been a great and noble act of liberalism (the liberation of Iraq) and bungled it horribly.
Because he has no patience, he alienated our best allies rather than encouraging them. Instead of engaging in detente with our less eager allies, these allies were rudely dismissed as "old", "wrong", and "against us". Because he has no taste for discussion or dissent, he opted to insult and exclude those whose help we would end up needing most.
Because he was fixated on invading Iraq, he attacked just when inspections were gathering speed (and, not coincidentally, beginning to yield firmer evidence that there were no WMDs in Iraq.) Instead of honestly assessing what tenuous intelligence we had and presenting it as it was, he cherry-picked the choicest morsels and doomsday scenarios, ignored the qualifications, and pressed forward with the scariest evidence he could find. He knew exactly what he wanted to do; thus, he treated our intelligence not as a means of informing his decision, but as a device to reinforce his plan.
He utterly failed to prepare for the post-invasion period. Our march to Baghdad was glorious, brilliantly executed, and as close to flawless as one could ever hope a military action might be. Once this was over, however, it became immediately apparent that he had given virtually no thought to what would be done once Hussein was deposed. We stood idly by as Iraq was literally torn to shreds by unruly mobs and looters. We dragged our feet for months on implementing democratic reforms. We failed miserably at protecting Iraqi infrastructure (besides, shockingly, the oil fields, pipelines, and oil ministry facilities.) Even today electricity and water are unreliable. Our front man, Chalabi, turned out to be an opportunistic charlatan; it was discovered all too late that he'd been blowing smoke up our asses so that he could return to Iraq and claim power. Bush had little more than a cosmetic understanding of the tribal nature of the Sunni, the fervor and oppression of the Shia, the fierce independence of the Kurds, and the volatile nature of their union as an Iraqi state. Instead of shoring up existing Iraqi institutions, Bush decided to essentially scrap the extended government structure and start from scratch on a model of private enterprise. Tens of thousands of foreign civilian contractors were poured into an active war zone to reshape Iraq in accordance with PNAC's vision of what Iraq should be. Only now are Iraqi voices genuinely beginning to re-take control of their country's destiny.
I understand the appeal of Bush's strong words, clear vision, and unshakable resolve. We are indeed a great nation, the greatest on the face of the planet, and we should spread democracy far and wide. We need to do it properly, though, and while I don't pretend to know all the ins and outs of how to pull this off, I'm convinced that what Bush has been doing is doing growing, lasting harm to our nation. His leadership has been imperious, impertinent, and arrogant. Those who question or dissent are ridiculed, insulted, smeared, and ignored. He thinks and acts in broad, powerful, absolute strokes--regardless of what any given situation calls for. He is folksy, plain-talking and simple-minded, which makes for great neighbors and drinking buddies but lousy world leaders. He is obsessively shielded from protest; those reporters who ask tough questions are conspicuously avoided in the future; he is heavily shielded by his advisors, and the buck has yet to stop at him.
Bush is not the 'lessor' evil; he isn't evil, and neither is Kerry. Bush is, however, a man of strong conviction--too strong. His convictions, while often good and right, have proven disastrously wrong on many occasions. In spite of this, he has demonstrated no introspection, and he has never wavered in his certitude that what he does is right beyond question. He favors faith over thoug
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Now, I think that our tax system is in desperate need of a pretty serious overhaul, but I don't think the solution lies in shifting taxes from the leisure classes to the working classes. It just isn't healthy for a nation to have a large disparity between classes; it breeds animosity, elitism, and discontent. I don't think that we're there right now, but I also don't think it's a good idea to push ourselves in that direction.
Oh, come on! Did you just sleep through the past few years' worth of corporate scandal? Enron is honest, quick servicing, and efficient? Arthur Andersen? The honest businessman has a hard time holding his own against the one who's just out to make money, damn the ethics.
Happier citizens? Freedom and prosperity makes people happy. History and human nature shows us this.
History also shows us that when the divide between the classes grows too great, you get great, big, violent, bloody revolts. Human nature shows us that we're opportunistic, fault-riddled beings who are capable of committing mind-bogglingly heinous acts of violence and fraud against one other in the name of power and wealth.
Better roads and better transit? Bullshit! Have you ever compared private roads to socialized ones? Have you ever compared Disney's roads to socialized ones? What about Disney's monorail? Efficient, clean, and cost-effective. Socialized transportation is wretched, and fails in so many ways. In a socialized system, to get more money, transporation agencies just have to be slow and take longer to get the roads or rails repaired. In the private sector, to get business, they have to do it quickly and for a relatively small amount of me.
As a matter of fact, I have. The trains in France and Germany are simply amazing--fast, reasonably priced, efficient, and a far cry better and more complex than anything Disney runs. Likewise, the roads are in excellent shape, though I rarely used them, as the trains were so good. The UK, well, the trains aren't all that great there. In fact, they're atrocious. Odd, really, seeing as they were privatized some years ago. Must just not have hit their stride yet.
Waitaminnute. Disney? You're honestly comparing a theme park's infrastructure with that of an industrialized nation? Crimony, why not just hand the nation over to Michael Eisner? We'll have Main Street, USA parades in every city, every day! and fireworks, too! Hurrah!
Strong social structure has nothing to do with the inherent corruption of socialized anything. Strong social structure isn't about inefficient centralization, or slowly going bankrupt (European countries, like France and the Netherlands or Canada) on account of their socialized systems, but rather on actually local social structures developed and maintained by people doing so of their own free will -- something that no government can create, simply because governments coerce.
In case you hadn't noticed, we're quickly going bankrupt. We're living way beyond our menas. We may not pay as much in taxes, but we owe shitloads to the likes of China, and the private sector has, as of yet, been recalcitrant in lowering profit expectations. Net effect: you and I get to digest massive increases in the cost of living, by way of things like insurance and health care costs. We get to watch our cities slowly decay.
Of course governments coerce. You're going to have coercion in any human interaction. Free enterprise coerces, too. If Barnes and Noble moves in next to Your Happy Bookstore and starts undercutting your prices, you think that isn't coercion? Either you try to play the margins game with a behemoth, you provide legendary customer service, you move to fill a very specific niche, or you go out of business. At which point, you go after an hourly position to work the information desk at Barnes and Noble so you can keep paying your mortgage and feeding your family.
Dammit, are you really suggesting that I'm some idiot who sees economic policy as some light switch? You think I live in some black-and-white, Hardcore Anarchy vs. Big Brother in your Bathroom world? Or are you just trying to thrust me into some convenient mold so you can smear me with whatever the talking points tell you to say? And what the hell is up with that 'are you a communist' crap? Are you some wild-eyed McCarthyist or something? You think I'm gonna go all shakey in the knees 'cuz you're insinuating I'm some bass-ackwards god-damned Red who wants to destroy America and shit on her apple pie?
Here's a novel idea for you. I'm interested in using government, a government made by the People, for the People, to actually help the fucking people. That's the whole fucking point of society. You think you were just born into a place that happened to somehow magically become the greatest nation on earth one day? Do you know anything of our history? Do you know anything about human nature? You really think that tweaking a government so that it caters to the ambition and greed of the individual is a good fucking long-term plan?
You think you stand to gain from your position? You and I, friend, are fucking peons to the people who have real wealth and real power. Given opportunity to take even more wealth and power, I assure you that they'll beat the likes of us senseless in getting it. We are the schmucks who -should- be making $60,000-75,000 a year. We're the poor bastards who get to look at annual double-digit-percent insurance premium increases and actually wonder if it's worth gambling on whether or not we'll fall ill this year...and maybe next year... Does that strike you as sensible? Do you really want to tip the scales to favor frighteningly rich people who are in it to take your money for their own personal gain? That's what you want from society?
Do you even understand the statistics you bandy about? Of course the people who make over $50k are going to pay the vast majority of our income tax--they've got the vast majority of the fucking money! You're going to see the same kinds of numbers when you apply a flat tax! Go ahead--try it! Whip out Excel and run some simple scenarios, then scratch your head in wonderment when those same long-suffering rich folks get "stiffed" over and over again!
You and I are chattle. In the grand scheme of American power and wealth, we're the unwashed plebes. The more power and wealth we willingly cede to the individuals who already posess most of the power and wealth, the less opportunity we're going to have to get a piece of it, and the less they'll want to give it back. If you're gonna advocate 'every man for himself', be damn sure that the guys standing behind you with the machine guns are on your side.
Fair's fair, right? If you think the average black household--real median household money income: $29,177--should be paying $4,376 a year in taxes, that's cool. They're just bearing the same burden as the rest of us.
"Fair" is tricky. Fifteen percent looks fair on the surface, but when you're that typical black American family, it seems a whole lot less fair that you need to give up money you'd use to buy food and a roof over your head when the rich family across town needs to give up money that they could have used to spend on an extra week on a yacht in Barbados.
(Link: US Census Bureau publication: Income in the United States: 2002)
I do advise you watch your back, though. You and I are small fucking fish in a big ocean, and the sharks have very, very few qualms about swallowing the likes of us whole. Your government cares far more about your personal happiness and success than the private sector ever will. Be quick, be smart, and whatever you do, don't fall on hard times.
In my opinion, a Green presidential run is premature and an inefficient use of Green resources. Once the Greens start locking in state-level offices in the same way they've succeeded with municipal-level offices now, then set sights on the presidency.
Thus, a (comparatively well-to-do) American making $75,000 a year would probably be expected to pay a fairly hefty tax rate, say 30-35%. It'd keep you from buying a lot of nifty toys, and you'll probably need to settle on a humbler house than you'd otherwise want, but it's not really not that hard a price to pay.
Thank you for taking our questions.
The first of the ten key values of the Green Party is "Grssroots Democracy". Over the past few years, the American Green Party has made significant steps forward, but (as best I can tell) is still growing at a local level. While I understand the appeal of national coverage, is running a presidential campaign really in the spirit or the best interests of the party? Wouldn't those funds be more effective in campaigning for more local offices, or launching a statewide candidate in an area where the Greens have a solid foothold? Isn't that how grassroots is supposed to work--from the bottom up and not from the top down?
The 'dozen experts' have decided that 'fresh software' is the best way to remedy it - probably means re-installing Windows, but have they considered Linux?
Oh, brilliant idea. Why, they could have their entire statewide system gutted, upgraded to Linux, re-designed, re-written, tested, debugged, deployed, up and running in the time it takes Gentoo to boot!
I guess I'll just need to labor on under the oppressive yoke of iTunes' Draconian Rights Mangle-ment (get it? DRM! Hyuk!)
Or, y'know, a small island. Assuming they can find a small island in the middle of the ocean.
If it's so goddamn far from everything else, it's not going to make for a very efficient means of getting stuff from "civilization" to space, now is it?
Wait a minute. You think shipping goods an extra few hundred kilometers via container ship is somehow economically prohibitive? It's obscenely inexpensive and easy to ship goods by sea. It's the getting it to space part that's tricky.
They're entirely serious when they say, "Oh, we won't have to worry about the part that doesn't fly off into orbit, because we'll put it in the middle of the ocean." Right. That doesn't create its own problems, no, not at all.
Of course it creates its own problems. Namely, that we'd need to restrict air and sea traffic in a certain area, we'd need to find a suitable island for the project, and we'd need to create a special shipping lane for spacebound cargo. You seem to view these problems as showstoppers; I don't really see anything prohibitively challenging about the examples you cite.
When will you people get it through your heads that space elevators won't work?
Probably never. Then again, odds are I'm too dense to see the nuanced wisdom in your above statements, and my responses are all hideously naive.
Meh. That'll teach me to trust my memory. It keeps changing stuff.
Can't a guy get a little creative?
Well, look at what Google has managed to accomplish thus far: they came from nowhere to become the indisputed king of 'Net searches. (Even more amazing, they've held that title for years--something virtually unheard of in an industry that measures product lifespans in months.) They've created a mail service so popular that an entire cottage industry of Ponzi schemes has sprung up for distributing Gmail invites--and this is still only in beta. Their corporate motto is "Don't be evil", and they've done admirably at sticking to it. They hire brilliant engineers, shun glitz and gimmickry, and care more about making good tech than they care about maximizing profits.
I'd say they can compete against anything--private sector, open source, whatever. They've already proven their mettle as one of the biggest fish in the sea, and I don't see any reason why one shouldn't take a browser gambit from Google seriously.
Were he still alive, Andre the Giant would have something to say about this sentence.
Eh, I just wanted to be pedantic. *grin*
Yes.
("English for Geeks" Tip of the Day: To obtain verbose output, include the keyword how at the beginning of your query.)
I disagree. Sullivan does focus heavily on gay rights (goshIwonderwhy,) but he's still very much a 'classic' conservative. While gay rights may be his biggest cause, he continues to make a lot of noise over things like fiscal responsibility, smaller government, keeping government out of private spheres, and accountability. He's decidedly gone out of step with Bush's neoconservatism, but frankly, I'd say that Bush is the one who left conservatism--not Sullivan.
For example, his current front-page articles include:
While it's fair to say that he's big on gay rights, it's disingenuous to dismiss him as single-minded and 'no longer conservative'. Andrew Sullivan is decidedly conservative, even if a lot of other conservatives out there would rather not count him among their numbers...
You assume that visibility engenders help. This is not true; there is such a thing as bad press when it comes to politics, and if your party develops a reputation of being "out there", you're not going to derive much benefit from it. "Who? Oh, yeah, I heard of him--didn't he get, like, less than one percent of the vote? Didn't he say something about kicking the UN out of America? Nu-uh, no thanks. . o 0 (Wacko!)"
Running a doomed presidential campaign is a waste of party resources. A far, far better use of that money would be to help win two or three governorships, or a majority in a state house--you know, gain some real political power and momentum. Unfortunately, this is decidedly less glamorous than a national campaign.
If these individuals truly wanted change and progress more than they desire recognition and power, they'd run for an office that wasn't completely out of reach. As it stands, they'd rather spend their lives pitching sound bites to cameras than rolling up their sleeves and doing the important but unglamorous work of a lower-level public official.
Mars still needs women...
You think China -or- the US wants to duke it out over $100+ barrels of oil in the next few years?
The annual National Geographic Survey had thrown up the sad fact that only 23 out of 56 young Americans knew the whereabouts of the Pacific Ocean
Oh, cry me a river--like the Pacific Ocean is some big, important thing. I mean, you need to drive all the way to Sweden just to see it!
Federalist Paper #51
Humans are, by nature, ambitious creatures. Humans are also primarily concerned with their own survival over the survival of others. It is noble yet naive to believe that power is best entrusted to the individual and not the community.
While there is much that needs improvement in our government, it serves a vital role in protecting the less powerful. We've already seen in our own country what happens when we trust the individual with the custody of the community; we get plutocracy. We get the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. We get The Jungle. We get Tammany Hall. In short, we get powerful men who are not averse to advancing their own power at society's cost.
We are neither angels nor devils, but until we can magically exercise control over those few who would lessen society for their own gain, we need a powerful government--more specifically, powerful laws which govern those in government and society. In an age where words circle the globe instantly and billions of dollars change hands without the bat of an eyelid, we must remain even more vigilant. What once took years now takes seconds, but our nature remains unchanged; never has it been so essential that we protect the good of the nation over the ambitions of the powerful.
I dislike Bush because he has taken what should have been a great and noble act of liberalism (the liberation of Iraq) and bungled it horribly. Because he has no patience, he alienated our best allies rather than encouraging them. Instead of engaging in detente with our less eager allies, these allies were rudely dismissed as "old", "wrong", and "against us". Because he has no taste for discussion or dissent, he opted to insult and exclude those whose help we would end up needing most.
Because he was fixated on invading Iraq, he attacked just when inspections were gathering speed (and, not coincidentally, beginning to yield firmer evidence that there were no WMDs in Iraq.) Instead of honestly assessing what tenuous intelligence we had and presenting it as it was, he cherry-picked the choicest morsels and doomsday scenarios, ignored the qualifications, and pressed forward with the scariest evidence he could find. He knew exactly what he wanted to do; thus, he treated our intelligence not as a means of informing his decision, but as a device to reinforce his plan.
He utterly failed to prepare for the post-invasion period. Our march to Baghdad was glorious, brilliantly executed, and as close to flawless as one could ever hope a military action might be. Once this was over, however, it became immediately apparent that he had given virtually no thought to what would be done once Hussein was deposed. We stood idly by as Iraq was literally torn to shreds by unruly mobs and looters. We dragged our feet for months on implementing democratic reforms. We failed miserably at protecting Iraqi infrastructure (besides, shockingly, the oil fields, pipelines, and oil ministry facilities.) Even today electricity and water are unreliable. Our front man, Chalabi, turned out to be an opportunistic charlatan; it was discovered all too late that he'd been blowing smoke up our asses so that he could return to Iraq and claim power. Bush had little more than a cosmetic understanding of the tribal nature of the Sunni, the fervor and oppression of the Shia, the fierce independence of the Kurds, and the volatile nature of their union as an Iraqi state. Instead of shoring up existing Iraqi institutions, Bush decided to essentially scrap the extended government structure and start from scratch on a model of private enterprise. Tens of thousands of foreign civilian contractors were poured into an active war zone to reshape Iraq in accordance with PNAC's vision of what Iraq should be. Only now are Iraqi voices genuinely beginning to re-take control of their country's destiny.
I understand the appeal of Bush's strong words, clear vision, and unshakable resolve. We are indeed a great nation, the greatest on the face of the planet, and we should spread democracy far and wide. We need to do it properly, though, and while I don't pretend to know all the ins and outs of how to pull this off, I'm convinced that what Bush has been doing is doing growing, lasting harm to our nation. His leadership has been imperious, impertinent, and arrogant. Those who question or dissent are ridiculed, insulted, smeared, and ignored. He thinks and acts in broad, powerful, absolute strokes--regardless of what any given situation calls for. He is folksy, plain-talking and simple-minded, which makes for great neighbors and drinking buddies but lousy world leaders. He is obsessively shielded from protest; those reporters who ask tough questions are conspicuously avoided in the future; he is heavily shielded by his advisors, and the buck has yet to stop at him.
Bush is not the 'lessor' evil; he isn't evil, and neither is Kerry. Bush is, however, a man of strong conviction--too strong. His convictions, while often good and right, have proven disastrously wrong on many occasions. In spite of this, he has demonstrated no introspection, and he has never wavered in his certitude that what he does is right beyond question. He favors faith over thoug