I'm absolutely gobsmacked at how incredibly stupid right-wingers are, and how they can be so easily convinced to vote against their own pecuniary interests.
Methinks that the white trash who do so ARE poor -- and deserve to be.
What the nerds (mostly of libertarian leanings, I notice) who frequent this site forget, is that there are lots of people out there are simply not that bright and haven't had access to the opportunities that they have; and that by structuring everything in society such that thick people can't make an honest living, then we are storing up massive trouble for ourselves. It's an arrogant and naive point of view to just assume that thick people are morally defective for being unemployed or on minimum wage, IMHO.
In the face of automation and cheap competition, we have a huge problem. On one hand, human civilization won't survive billions of people living in absolute squalor; we need economic development and productivity increases to get those societies up and beyond the demographic transition; OTOH, we don't want our own societies to turn into a dystopian hell, because the bottom 70% of society has become -- quite literally -- economically useless.
Closing the borders won't help; if you're not competing with an immigrant here, you're competing with them elsewhere (factor price equalization). And it's politically nearly impossible to consider radical options like a basic income when you see the absolute fucking travesty that America is so inept, that it can't even manage to give everyone a decent health plan, despite being the richest and most powerful nation on Earth.
I suppose we can conclude that productivity increases are required for the human race to survive the next 100 years; but niceties like meaningful employment are simply going to have to disappear. That in itself is a form of "poverty", albeit, not a material one.
It was a tough call. They had to use a high enough dose to make sure the women wired to the claymores would be knocked out sufficiently fast that they didn't time to set off their explosives.
Incredibly gutsy call to make. I'd hate to face the families of the innocents who died from gas poisoning.
Barely anybody apart from violent radical Muslims are getting explicitly labelled as terrorists, and you know it. It's dishonest and frankly stupid to attempt to claim otherwise.
But never mind me. I shouldn't interrupt the clueless internet-libertarian circlejerk here.
That nutter must've dropped too far out of the headlines. Maybe he's worried the cops will barge into the Ecuadorian Embassy now?
Anybody who does a regular spot on RT (basically Putin's Dr Goebbels), alongside other quislings and traitors like 'Gorgeous' George Galloway, and Yvonne Ridley (tellingly, Muslim converts), is basically telling the world what he thinks of his own people.
I wouldn't trust the guy as far as I could throw a bacon sarnie.
I could imagine the US being keen not to openly advertise the presence of these horrible weapons to the terrorists overrunning the place.
The reasons for wanting to keep it quiet are very pragmatic and sensible.
Iraq is already in a bad situation, with us having to wipe the arabs' stupid, corrupt and inept backsides for them as it is, without having to worry about additional complication of ISIS getting any more ideas, and trying to get their hands on Sarin and mustard gas.
The evil motherfuckers have already been experimenting with chemical and germ agents. Why push our luck any further?
Probably not that dumb. If it's a watering-hole attack to go after developers rather than end-users to steal IP or go after high-volume websites in a less-indiscriminate way, then that would make sense.
I read that phrase to mean, "I am too fucking lazy or stupid to get myself a cheap and easily-accessible" science education". It's a crank's version of sour grapes.
It doesn't matter. There is no such thing as absolute truth; only increasingly (and sometimes, as in the case of QM, extremely) accurate approximations of the truth. "Truth" is the ability of an idea to explain or predict. Now the meaning of the models concerns philosophy, not science, and has little bearing on how (say), the band gap in a transistor works. Here, we're discussing science, not philosophy. Let the philosophers wank themselves in public about the various interpretations of QM, as they have been for the last 50 years. It does *NOT* invalidate science, as weirdos and cranks would have us all believe.
Our best guess of how QM works, is that the world is inherently nondeterministic and random; it *doesn't* mean that the large-scale statistical behaviour of QM systems can't be modelled very, very accurately. So are far as we're concerned, it's "true", in the sense it's our best guess about how the real world works.
If recent news is anything to go by, religion has taught me that most religious people are cunts, and best serve the world by being turned into cheap fertilizer.
Not every opinion is of equal worth. Not every opinion is informed. Not every opinion is distinguishable from a feeling or hunch.
Democracy pertains to politics, where there is no objective reality -- only competing sets of values and subjective opinion.
In more objective areas of life, you live and die based on whether or not your ideas are objectively defensible. Science is a way of knowing: and the worth of an idea is usually based on its ability to explain or predict. That's the key ingredient that most people don't understand.
Then explain how white colonies in Africa became rich after settling with nothing but the clothes on their backs -- before Africans kicked them out penniless?
And explain how Spain ended up an impoverished basketcase for centuries, only a few short years after the colossal amount of gold and silver they looted from South America ran out?
Explain how Japan is so rich, despite having no natural resources, and despite being left utterly penniless and broken after WW2?
No -- you can't -- because you can't admit even to yourself that culture matters, and that our worth as human beings hinges on our culture and education, or lack thereof. CULTURE is real wealth. Money and resources are a fleeting, insignificant thing in comparison.
The last time people from 'rich' countries moved en masse to 'poor' countries, it was decried as colonialism, and rightly so.
(I suppose the fact that Western colonies full of actual Westerners thrive everywhere they go is awfully inconvenient for the 'blame-white-people-first' crowd. Contrast the Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Nigerian, Turkish, Moroccan colonies in Europe, which are invariably dysfunctional and dirt-poor, despite massive amounts of welfare spending.)
Plenty of ex-colonies are doing just fine. Plenty of shit countries are awash with guns. And there are places that do just fine even with the influence of the RC church -- I know some Irish and Catalans that'd like to have a word with you.
Your sneering attitude to Western culture marks _you_ out as the bigot. Not all cultures are made equal. And I don't care if you think I'm racist (if anything, you're outed yourself as a cultural Marxist). Name-calling your opponents doesn't change reality -- it all boils down to culture, and there's nothing to gain from denying that some cultures are simply better at fostering human wellbeing than others, and you're a fool if you think otherwise.
White countries are rich, because they have a large amount of social and cultural capital, which we maintain by having rules and norms that we enforce.
Third world countries are poor because of their lack of culture, lack of law and contract enforcement, lack of morals and respect at street level, and because of general filth, shittiness and decay.
Whitey didn't make you rape and rob each other, or throw rubbish in the streets, or rip each other off. This is readily apparent when you see the filth in Third World areas of major cities like London. The difference is like night and day.
Poor countries are poor _despite_ the influence of evil Whitey, not because of him.
You mean, greedy Third World swine with nothing to contribute, who think that they're "entitled" to live in a rich country because Whitey is rich and they are poor?
Truth be told, most "asylum seekers" are frauds and fakes who are just out to get the Third World equivalent of winning the lottery. The refusal rate in most countries with rigorous screening of "asylum seekers" is abysmally high, simply because most of these criminals and chancers are greedy frauds.
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I'm absolutely gobsmacked at how incredibly stupid right-wingers are, and how they can be so easily convinced to vote against their own pecuniary interests.
Methinks that the white trash who do so ARE poor -- and deserve to be.
... but amazed it hasn't happened sooner.
You have totally nailed it.
What the nerds (mostly of libertarian leanings, I notice) who frequent this site forget, is that there are lots of people out there are simply not that bright and haven't had access to the opportunities that they have; and that by structuring everything in society such that thick people can't make an honest living, then we are storing up massive trouble for ourselves. It's an arrogant and naive point of view to just assume that thick people are morally defective for being unemployed or on minimum wage, IMHO.
In the face of automation and cheap competition, we have a huge problem. On one hand, human civilization won't survive billions of people living in absolute squalor; we need economic development and productivity increases to get those societies up and beyond the demographic transition; OTOH, we don't want our own societies to turn into a dystopian hell, because the bottom 70% of society has become -- quite literally -- economically useless.
Closing the borders won't help; if you're not competing with an immigrant here, you're competing with them elsewhere (factor price equalization). And it's politically nearly impossible to consider radical options like a basic income when you see the absolute fucking travesty that America is so inept, that it can't even manage to give everyone a decent health plan, despite being the richest and most powerful nation on Earth.
I suppose we can conclude that productivity increases are required for the human race to survive the next 100 years; but niceties like meaningful employment are simply going to have to disappear. That in itself is a form of "poverty", albeit, not a material one.
Actually, probably not. The Americans are too slick to charge in with heavy weapons or poison gas like the Russians would.
And if we get unlucky, we may yet see how.
It was a tough call. They had to use a high enough dose to make sure the women wired to the claymores would be knocked out sufficiently fast that they didn't time to set off their explosives.
Incredibly gutsy call to make. I'd hate to face the families of the innocents who died from gas poisoning.
Libertarian basement-dweller crap.
Barely anybody apart from violent radical Muslims are getting explicitly labelled as terrorists, and you know it. It's dishonest and frankly stupid to attempt to claim otherwise.
But never mind me. I shouldn't interrupt the clueless internet-libertarian circlejerk here.
You're welcome.
If you want a libertarian Utopia, fuck off to Somalia. You'll be allowed to play with your guns there.
That nutter must've dropped too far out of the headlines. Maybe he's worried the cops will barge into the Ecuadorian Embassy now?
Anybody who does a regular spot on RT (basically Putin's Dr Goebbels), alongside other quislings and traitors like 'Gorgeous' George Galloway, and Yvonne Ridley (tellingly, Muslim converts), is basically telling the world what he thinks of his own people.
I wouldn't trust the guy as far as I could throw a bacon sarnie.
Insightful. Wish I had mod points. Dumping all that waste heat is nontrivial at best.
I could imagine the US being keen not to openly advertise the presence of these horrible weapons to the terrorists overrunning the place.
The reasons for wanting to keep it quiet are very pragmatic and sensible.
Iraq is already in a bad situation, with us having to wipe the arabs' stupid, corrupt and inept backsides for them as it is, without having to worry about additional complication of ISIS getting any more ideas, and trying to get their hands on Sarin and mustard gas.
The evil motherfuckers have already been experimenting with chemical and germ agents. Why push our luck any further?
Common sense, really.
Did they fuck up their units in that article?
They're talking about 100mW prototypes. I think they meant 100 _MW_...
Science reporting... huh.
Or a mail client and newsreader ;-)
Because Jesus.
It looks like the date for "peak cheap oil" just pushed out awhile, again.
FTFY.
If people end up with too much food waste; they'll find other ways of disposing of it. Like fly-tipping it.
Probably not that dumb. If it's a watering-hole attack to go after developers rather than end-users to steal IP or go after high-volume websites in a less-indiscriminate way, then that would make sense.
I read that phrase to mean, "I am too fucking lazy or stupid to get myself a cheap and easily-accessible" science education". It's a crank's version of sour grapes.
It doesn't matter. There is no such thing as absolute truth; only increasingly (and sometimes, as in the case of QM, extremely) accurate approximations of the truth. "Truth" is the ability of an idea to explain or predict. Now the meaning of the models concerns philosophy, not science, and has little bearing on how (say), the band gap in a transistor works. Here, we're discussing science, not philosophy. Let the philosophers wank themselves in public about the various interpretations of QM, as they have been for the last 50 years. It does *NOT* invalidate science, as weirdos and cranks would have us all believe.
Our best guess of how QM works, is that the world is inherently nondeterministic and random; it *doesn't* mean that the large-scale statistical behaviour of QM systems can't be modelled very, very accurately. So are far as we're concerned, it's "true", in the sense it's our best guess about how the real world works.
If recent news is anything to go by, religion has taught me that most religious people are cunts, and best serve the world by being turned into cheap fertilizer.
Not every opinion is of equal worth. Not every opinion is informed. Not every opinion is distinguishable from a feeling or hunch.
Democracy pertains to politics, where there is no objective reality -- only competing sets of values and subjective opinion.
In more objective areas of life, you live and die based on whether or not your ideas are objectively defensible. Science is a way of knowing: and the worth of an idea is usually based on its ability to explain or predict. That's the key ingredient that most people don't understand.
Then explain how white colonies in Africa became rich after settling with nothing but the clothes on their backs -- before Africans kicked them out penniless?
And explain how Spain ended up an impoverished basketcase for centuries, only a few short years after the colossal amount of gold and silver they looted from South America ran out?
Explain how Japan is so rich, despite having no natural resources, and despite being left utterly penniless and broken after WW2?
No -- you can't -- because you can't admit even to yourself that culture matters, and that our worth as human beings hinges on our culture and education, or lack thereof. CULTURE is real wealth. Money and resources are a fleeting, insignificant thing in comparison.
The last time people from 'rich' countries moved en masse to 'poor' countries, it was decried as colonialism, and rightly so.
(I suppose the fact that Western colonies full of actual Westerners thrive everywhere they go is awfully inconvenient for the 'blame-white-people-first' crowd. Contrast the Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Nigerian, Turkish, Moroccan colonies in Europe, which are invariably dysfunctional and dirt-poor, despite massive amounts of welfare spending.)
Plenty of ex-colonies are doing just fine. Plenty of shit countries are awash with guns. And there are places that do just fine even with the influence of the RC church -- I know some Irish and Catalans that'd like to have a word with you.
Your sneering attitude to Western culture marks _you_ out as the bigot. Not all cultures are made equal. And I don't care if you think I'm racist (if anything, you're outed yourself as a cultural Marxist). Name-calling your opponents doesn't change reality -- it all boils down to culture, and there's nothing to gain from denying that some cultures are simply better at fostering human wellbeing than others, and you're a fool if you think otherwise.
Nice straw man.
White countries are rich, because they have a large amount of social and cultural capital, which we maintain by having rules and norms that we enforce.
Third world countries are poor because of their lack of culture, lack of law and contract enforcement, lack of morals and respect at street level, and because of general filth, shittiness and decay.
Whitey didn't make you rape and rob each other, or throw rubbish in the streets, or rip each other off. This is readily apparent when you see the filth in Third World areas of major cities like London. The difference is like night and day.
Poor countries are poor _despite_ the influence of evil Whitey, not because of him.
You mean, greedy Third World swine with nothing to contribute, who think that they're "entitled" to live in a rich country because Whitey is rich and they are poor?
Truth be told, most "asylum seekers" are frauds and fakes who are just out to get the Third World equivalent of winning the lottery. The refusal rate in most countries with rigorous screening of "asylum seekers" is abysmally high, simply because most of these criminals and chancers are greedy frauds.