You lost your full time jobs when you raise the price of full time employment. This was explained to you when you pushed this in the US. We warned you.
We said that if you forced companies to not only pay a higher wage, but also to provide health heavily regulated and very expensive health insurance, also provide workers insurance, and also you were not allow to fire employees arbitrarily after they became full time...
Well... why as an employer am I hiring you full time? It costs me a lot of extra money and I lose the flexibility to adjust my labor pool if circumstances change.
This is where the downsizing concept comes from. Downsizing lets you arbilitarly fire someone. So what you do if you want to let someone go that is a full time employee is that you not only fire them but you remove their job from the company entirely.
This also encourages companies to NOT rehire someone else but rather to shift the company structure around instead.
You've done this... You were warned the gun was loaded. You told us that we were liars... you put the gun in your mouth and blew jam all over the walls.
We didn't lie. It happened just the way we told you it would happen.
If you want to increase full time employment then lower the costs and regulations associated with it.
Do that or you are responsible for businesses shifting to part time labor.
You're saying that your issue with American gun owners is that they donn't know how to shoot properly or maintain their guns?
You appreciate that the mass shooters if they had such training would probably kill more people if anything?
And you appreciate that to my knowledge the entirely of the anti gun lobby has no interest in how skilled the users of the guns are but rather controlling who has them in the first place.
If I went into the inner city and gave all the gang bangers, went out into the country and gave all the red necks... all the people most likely to have guns... I gave them weapons training...
You'd suddenly be okay with them having "high capacity magazines"? I mean, the swiss have machine guns.
So why not let the people have fully automatic machine guns... With the correct training of course.
Do you know how many people the US government passes through its military every year? What if I just let retired US military have machine guns? That okay with you? Its okay with me.
You didn't think your argument out in advance. This is pathetic.
Quote where I said there was nothing of value or even implied there was nothing of value.
Dave, I've clearly gotten to you because you're not even trying to make sense anymore. You're writing little hit pieces. Its sad.
Look, my post was that talking about the hyperloop on MARS was premature. I think the hyperloop is a neat idea and I think it is superior to most high speed train concepts.
But don't talk to me about how it will be useful on mars when it can't be useful on mars because we have no need of high speed transit across the surface of mars with the price tag of building a heavy infrastructure on a world we struggle to send light probes to.
This notion that the redistribution isn't being pushed by socialists or marxists is undermined by the fact that the people pushing it often self describe as socialists and marxists.
As to the implication that Americans are stupid... You're insulting the intelligence of the people that designed the CPU you're using, the operating system, and the fucking website... If we're dumb, then we're the smartest dummies on this mud ball.
As to some kind of redistribution being common... sure... the context, extent, and conditions of it are relevant though.
As to the notion that no one is suggesting that automation be held up... fine then. If you don't stand in the way of it, then we shouldn't have any problems. Its already been held up long enough by similar horseshit. If that stops, then I'm fine.
As to your dream of a worker's revolution, it didn't happen. That's where the whole cultural marxism thing started. Marx believed there would be a worker revolution and it never happened because the societies were more stable and the people more content than he had anticipated. This is why we've been enduring crypto communists for generations. And again... self described communists. They don't hide anymore. And frankly they were pretty fucking obvious even when they were hiding. And before some retard says I'm being like McCarthy... I'm not trying to censor people or get them thrown in jail or black list them. I'm just calling a spade a spade. You can call someone an adherent of any other ideology and you don't get this weird gaslighting response. But if you call someone that is a self described communist a communist... suddenly you're being incendiary or lying or something. Never mind that that is quite literally impossible.
As to the relevance of the ideology, you are welcome to believe what you like. But once it is understood that you believe in Sharia law for example, it should be understood that your concerns for the US legal code will continue until the country resembles Saudi Arabia. And if you're a marxist, then your various comments are just going to progressive nudge the society until the economy sticks a sawed off shotgun in its mouth and blows its fucking brains out.
Its not a question of censorship or having opinions I dislike. Its a question of people saying that bird should be a fish... and that the first step should be for the bird to fucking drowned itself. Marxist ideas would involve a radical transformation of our society that would largely annihilate our culture in the process to say nothing of our rights and our freedoms and our property. And on top of that, marxism has always failed. So after sacrificing all of that... we're almost certainly likely to get nothing for it.
Its stupid.
As to the robotic automation thing solving all problems, now you're just strawmanning me. I didn't say it would solve all problems. I said it had to happen to maintain a modern and competitive economy.
As to revolutions without violence... a revolution does involve winners and losers. There is too much change for it to be otherwise. But you can't stop it. Would you argue against the agriculture revolution as a hunter gatherer? Would you argue against the industrial revolution as a farmer?
Don't argue against the information revolution. It is going to eat the industrial revolution whatever you do. The most you can accomplish is crippling your own country so that doesn't enter the new economy smoothly or quickly. Your people will be behind the curve and suffer for it.
The issue is that if you massage the numbers hard enough they'll say whatever you want. And often what is being done to them is so complicated that it is hard for anyone that isn't very familiar with the specific algorithms to even know what happened.
A big issue here is that it is very hard to audit this sort of science and if you are inclined to sensationalize your paper or make it appear more interesting than it would otherwise... it doesn't appear to be hard to do.
What I hope comes out of this education is clever young people that will hold their peers to reasonable standards and know the math well enough to spot nonsense when they see it.
This is why anyone that gives up their ability to defend themselves is a fool. Behind all your pretensions of doing the good thing or the right thing or the greater good.
"this" is what is behind everything you believe. A gun to the head of society with your hand out saying "give me your money".
Pull the trigger.
I welcome your revolution. It will eat itself as it always has and then whatever happens to me... YOU will be twice as fucked as you are now.
Because isn't of me, you're going to be dealing with comrade Stalin. And he's going to skull fuck your sister and send you to in a gulag because he feels like it.
All rights. Gone.
All law. Meaningless.
The wealth of the society. Utterly consumed by your elite which unlike mine produces nothing and has no competence besides its ability to dupe little cannon fodder fools to parrot nonsense for them.
Pull the trigger. Destroy yourself.
Again and again and again. You fools never learn. And what you don't seem to grasp is that the trajectory of our macro civilization hasn't changed throughout your foolishness. You just destroy yourselves and the heart moves to another nation where it burns on while you people eat each other.
I've been offered Australian citizenship several times actually, chuck.
And as to your opinions of my needs... I told you that you'd find my views incomprehensible. And you do. You don't even begin to understand me. I baffle you. And the fact that you don't even realize it only speaks to the degree of confusion.
The point of being dangerous is not to intimidate people that aren't meaning me any harm or being anything other than friendly. The vast majority of gun owners in the US are just normal nice people. They don't hurt anyone much less kill anyone.
That you immediately feel threatened because I have the ability to hurt you IF you come after me... well... how should I interpret that? To me, that sounds like you want to make it easy to fuck me over and the fact that I'm armed would be a threat to your plans.
Sound paranoid? I can't imagine why my ownership of guns would bother you. You could give me a nuclear weapon and I'd be less likely to ever use it than would... france. I'm not a psychopath. I'm just a normal nice guy. But I'm not a fan of being helpless or at your mercy.
This is actually a big issue with US investment firms as well. A lot of countries wonder why they don't get any investment. This is basically what it boils down to... they don't feel their interests would be protected. This is not a gun issue in this case but a legal issue. Eastern europe for example is not getting heavy US investment despite lots of pressure from the US state department to do just that because the eastern european countries still have a lot of soviet era judges and legal practices in place that mean if you invest in those countries your investment could be taken from you the instant it starts to become profitable.
This means you risk losing money if the investment doesn't work out and you risk losing everything if it does.
You can at best break even if it does "okay".
No one wants to invest under those circumstances. And that is despite many eastern european countries having a strategic national NEED for investment to keep Russia from eating them.
Every country is attached to its way of doing things. If you want the Americans to come... you have to do things in ways that we find acceptable.
No one is forcing you to change anything. If you don't want us. Don't accommodate us and we won't come.
The system doesn't exist to give you a job. It must advance this fast because it if doesn't then the businesses you want to give you a job will become obsolete and THEY will lose their jobs.
They must adapt. And if you can't keep up then you're going to be left behind. They have no choice.
They have competitors in Asia and Europe that are gunning for their market share all the time. They can either keep up... and ideally be ahead of the curve or die.
you're asking them to stop so you can catch up... and then they die for it... and when they die, you lose your job anyway.
Sound like a good idea or a dumb idea?
As to all jobs going away... no. Not unless you have no value to the economy at all. If you have value then there is a job for you.
Whether that job pays as well as you'd like it to is a question. I don't know.
A certain amount of disruption is expected here. We had disruption when we went from the agricultural phase to the industrial phase. we had child labor. we had people starving in the streets. We have flop houses. we had people a LOT more despriate for a job than anyone is these days. People would STARVE to death because they couldn't find work. They'd die in the frost.
That isn't happening this time. The transition is hard. I know.
It is not avoidable. It will happen. And it has to happen this fast or our economy loses its position.
Now tell me how anyone can make it better for you and that's an argument. But if you say "stop the progress"... The answer is NO.
This is a freight train with no breaks. It does not stop.
Fuck with the train and all that will happen is that you'll trigger more off shoring and more out sourcing.
This is like asking if maybe telepathy would work better on Uranus. Lets build the stupid hyperloop and see if it works anywhere... or build something on mars that you'd need high speed transit between... and then we can ask these questions.
As to why this is a thing... politics. various political groups... mostly progressives and various flavors of crypto marxists basically make the argument that the reason you don't have something is because someone else does.
As if they took it from you. That guy over there with a leer jet? The argument is that he stole that from you. And thus if you vote for slimy politician 1 through 20 the slimy politician will take that leer jet away from that guy... and sell it... and then divide the money he got from it up amongst everyone... likely through a serious of government programs that will ultimately fuel large union organizations that will also reliably vote for slimy politicians.
The term political correctness is a cue. That is a leftist term.
I am not saying all leftism is bad and I am CERTAINLY not endorsing anyone on the right because there are a lot of morons over there as well.w
Let me just say that again.
I am not endorsing EITHER side.
What I am saying however is that the attack on exceptional people and the very concept of political correctness is a leftist concept that literally comes out of literal marxism. If you doubt me, ask an eastern european about it.
There is a LOT of gaslighting going on about this on the internet. The wikipedia pages that touch on this have all been whitewashed. Ask an eastern european if you don't believe me. They recognize this stuff because they lived under it.
Sure I do. I've been dealing with little marxist twerps for the better part of my life. They're all over the place out here like ants at a picnic.
Doubtless you're going to say "oh that isn't marxist because specifics"... but the thing is that marxists themselves aren't strict adherents to the dictates of marxism themselves because most of them don't understand the ideology beyond the wishy washy shit.
And as a result, it all gets mixed together. And if you think it is wrong to associate the wishy washy marxists with the hardcore ones... tough. Without the wishywashy ones you'd have no political clout what so ever. Nearly all your power comes from the wishywashy moderates. And frankly dealing with them is more relevant than dealing with the hardcore. The hardcore is annoying but they're not especially dangerous because there aren't enough of them. The moderates are the ones pushing the legislation through.
In any case, Dave... if you want to have this discussion on what is and is not a Marxist... we can have that. If you want to trade unqualified insults... you can choke on horse smegma.;)
Choose. You'll fine I am fully capable of either keeping up a spirited debate or just smack talking you. Which ever you prefer.
As to being able to get the vitamins out of food... I really don't know what you're referring to there. We have not only the super markets, but whole foods, and the farmer's markets. Are you saying they're all bad? Or just the super markets? And how do you show a trend over time? What are you basing this on?
As to travel time from home to work, that is largely because of congestion and it is largely an issue localized in certain cities with bad urban planning issues.
As to the 1970s... you don't notice the coincidence that things started to go to shit around the time the great society program was started? Just saying. And look at all the places that the socialist stuff has been allowed to run wild... its destroyed all of them.
Detroit was ground zero for a lot of that stuff. one of the richest cities in the country... destroyed.
And look at Washington DC is you doubt it further... more money spent per student in the education system than anywhere else and some of the worst test scores.
Just saying... the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Certain things lead to prosperity. Others do not. The anti industry stuff kills jobs and ruins communities. The focus on subsidies and welfare turns what is left into a cess pit.
Where is the investment and the building happening these days? In the south... which is pathetic. The great industrial north is rusting and the business interests have done the math and found it is more economical to just start from scratch in the south.
grasp this. YOU CANNOT STOP the modernization.
All you can do is FUCK yourself over and your community by trying to stop it. Business interests will pull up stakes and abandon you. Leaving you with nothing but empty buildings and mortgage payments.
Stop fucking with business. Or business will do what it has been doing since ALWAYS... It will leave you to die in the cold. No looking back. No remorse.
Fucking new york bigotry... seriously... I'm from Los Angeles.:D
I deal with New Yorkers a lot and they just assume people outside of their little rat warren are stupid. We're not remotely stupid. I get told all the time by various new yorkers that I work with all the time "Oh people out here are so dumb"... and it sounds more like the "Oh its not like new york pizza" that new yorkers do whenever they encounter something different.
Sorry, you triggered me with the new york thing. The new yorkers are infamous in California for being insufferable. Just fyi.:P
As to the ennobling and enslaving aspects of capitalism. What do you think of unconscious intelligence? The way ant nests self organize. Simple rules applied by countless individuals from distinct perspectives gives rise to a cohesive structure.
What does any one ant know of the rest of the nest? Nothing really. They each respond to simple chemical signals genetically programmed into them like ten thousand walking neurons in a crawling brain.:)
As to the market dictating things... the market doesn't dictate morality but rather logistics. I mean... should we build a base on Mars? Sure... but can we afford it? Not really. So the market doesn't say you should do something it just says "you can't afford that."
As to the market being a tool, it is a tool but it is more than that. You don't wield the market anymore than it wields you. To interact with the market is to allow it to interact WITH you. And thus as you influence it, the market itself influences you as well. The interaction is two way. And of course, the market is not a singular entity as much as that is a convenient mental abstraction. It is rather a global consumer/producer gestalt.
As to why it was created, no one created it... so much as it dynamically arose from previous market conditions. This is a misconception often pushed by marxists to show equivalence between their system and capitalism. Their system was invented by ONE guy. Capitalism wasn't invented by anyone. It "evolved". Previous systems were improved upon incrementally. Capitalism is itself merely an updated version of mercantilism and no one invented that either. The Venetians as I remember were big into mercantilism.
As to means and ends... Let me throw a bit of philosophy at you that I believe in "the means ARE the ends". That is, the ends don't justify the means but rather the very process... the journey... is the result.
Consider the ethics and philosophy of capitalism and market theory. The POINT... the END... is the system itself. You are rewarded or punished as you go but the system is the means and the way you do a thing conditions the actual result.
As to exploring options and not wasting the intellectual benefits, the mistake here is assuming that everyone will, can, or even wants to do that.
I am quite adaptable. As I said... I have modes. Many of the people here will hit this from a purely political stand point. Full stop. They can't see it any other way because that is how they process things. They're very political creatures.
And if you want to fence with them then you must slip into that mode and understand what is relevant and what is not a purely political discussion.
Then there are those that have their various dogmas and philosophies. I probably fall into that more than I'd like to admit because I am a profoundly philosophical creature.
And then of course there are those that are interested in the simple exploration of knowledge. Which perhaps you credit yourself as a member of...
In any of these... you must shift to that mode and engage playing by the rules of each system of thought.
Appeals are fine so long as they're within reason and do not encumber the sentence.
If you need endless appeals it means you have low confidence in the judicial process and that means you need to reform the judicial process... not that you need to ban a specific type of punishment.
As to 8 percent... the stats I saw said 4 percent. 4 percent is still very high but statistics don't tell you what is going on. I'd need to look at HOW the court was coming to these sentences erroniously before I could issue an opinion.
This modern tendency to quote a statistic and then cite an opinion as if it is self evident from a single number is fallacious. You can't know what is going on without more detail.
That there are issues with the US legal system is obvious and I would very seriously be interested in looking into why we arrive at these false convictions. However, the problem is not the death penalty. As all these studies conclude, the number of false life time sentence convictions is likely much much higher because those cases get much less scrutiny. What is more, the plea bargain system likely needs to be reformed since it might be contributing to miscarriages of justice.
... so... you think "this" is a rebuttal? Sarcasm, strawmanning, and ad hominem?
Try again... this time with less idiocy. It is comments like yours that make me sympathize with some of the antics of old Diogenes. I believe he was famous for literally urinating on people that make statements like that, making eye contact, and smiling.
Your position is little more than pretense and deceit.
I'll respond to your argument because you're likely too childish to recognize how idiotic your argument was and will just devolve into insults.
So here we go...
I say "the west needs to maintain its population size to maintain its societies" and you respond "oh then fuck everyone else on the world"?
Exactly how does the West or the first world maintaining its population fuck over the rest of the planet? They're the ones that are outstripping their OWN ability to maintain themselves. We do not maintain ourselves at their expense. We grow our own food and are actually net exporters of food to the second and third world.
it is not our populations that have exceeded our ability to provide for them. It is the populations of OTHER countries that having a hard time maintaining their OWN population. And contrary to your stupid argument we actually try to help them. We give them FREE food and free medical care. Drugs, medical training, free doctors... and actually most of our help tends to make things worse because it just encourages more population growth that ultimatley isn't sustainable.
Now... how does the west reducing its population help the third world? It doesn't unless you want to give territory we currently occupy to the third world? What part of Europe would you like to give to give to Africa? What portion of the US would you like to give to south america? What portion of Japan should be given to India or China?
I said try again... but you're too ignorant to form a credible opinion at this point in your life. Listen more and speak less. Hopefully in another decade or so you'll have matured enough to be more interesting. At this stage in your life you're not worth any thinking person's time.
The military training aspect doesn't make someone less dangerous. That might teach proper use but your problem with guns is not that people don't know how to use them but what they might choose to do with them.
Proper instruction makes someone MORE dangerous... not less.
So your problem with US gun owners is that you think they'll "miss"? Because the military will of course teach how to be better marksmen and hit their target with some more consistency.
What bothers me about arguments like yours is that you're playing rhetorical tic tac toe. You're not thinking your moves out ahead which means you don't error check dumb arguments that will self destruct about 2 seconds after you make them.
Without tooting my own horn here... I play rhetorical chess. I'm not claiming to be a chess master here... but I am saying I think my argument out a few steps in advance. Which means I don't make arguments that will immediately self destruct. I also accurately anticipate counter arguments and fortify my position against such arguments before they're even made.
Now I don't know why I appear to almost f'ing unique in this quality on this board. Its frankly pretty shocking to me. But I first learned to do this when I was about 10 years old. A great uncle of mine asked me a question during a relative's funeral reception... of all places... and I answered his question immediately. He refused to accept the answer and said "you didn't think long enough"... He refused to listen to my answer until I had had about 10 minutes to think about it. Where upon my answer did actually change and develop a great deal more depth. He taught me a very important lesson on that day. That the first and immediate answer to any question is not the result of thinking but rather of guessing and memory. Your intelligence has no chance to actually influence your answer yet. You're not thinking long enough to actually think at all.
Thus... while it is impossible for me to ask you to do this without you taking any offense... I want you to humor me and think about answer a bit longer. Put aside the emotional responses and the bluster. That means nothing to me. Its at best pitiable... so just don't do it.
Think about your answer a good 30 seconds. Imagine what my counter response will be and try to improve your argument so that I don't walk through it like a curtain of fog. Once you've learned to do this you can distinguish in yourself when you are thinking and when you're just remembering prerecorded answers.
Only by thinking for ourselves do our opinions even have meaning. So many people with opinions never even formed them themselves at all. They just heard something, stored the opinion, and then when asked they play it back like parrots. We are controllable and easily manipulated if we allow other people to store opinions in our brains and have them be played back without consideration.
This is why they don't teach critical thinking in dictatorships. To be more than a drone you have to actually challenge these stored concepts. You can't even make them your own. That's just a way of saying you conformed. You need to make your own opinions from scratch. No more training wheels. No more cheat sheets. Think.
That is more a result of the government requiring that stable employment include lots of expensive benefits more than anyone wanting to control the workers.
Look at all the liability an employer has to deal with if you're full time? That's your culprit right there and the business leaders have told you that from the fucking start. You didn't listen. You put that gun against your forehead and played a game of Russian Roulette... raspberry jam got splattered all over the walls.
Want that to not happen again?
Stop listening to Marxists. Half of them are idiots and the other half are liars.
An odd reference and not actually true. Hitler only got supreme power because the politicians were afraid of the brown shirts. And the brownshirts were only a threat because they could intimidate people in a society where gun ownership was uncommon.
The primary holders of guns outside of the government were private armies that largely went back to Germany's Prussian past.
Had gun ownership been as common in germany as it is in the US... it is likely the brownshirts never would have been the problem they became and that the german legislature would thus not have felt compelled to make Hitler dictator.
Hitler didn't push the legislature to give him control by jew bashing. He got it by pointing a loaded gun against their heads and giggling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Elected judges was an attempt to put the judiciary under some kind of democratic control. Though it mostly doesn't work because no one pays attention to it. A big issue with our democracy is that people are often not involved enough and those that want to be involved are discouraged from doing so. And of course... lots of people that are already involved are either crazy, corrupt, or stupid.
As to elected prosecuters, I don't see a problem with that.
As to grand juries... explain your problem there, I can't even anticipate what your issue is there.
As to plea bargaining, bullshit... every legal system has that to some extent. You might differ on the form but the fact of it has been there since always. An old king could plea bargain with someone. This has never changed.
As to civil asset forfeiture, it is only a problem in a few places and it is a new problem. Mostly it effects the poor and very ignorant. It tends to backfire hilariously when they try it on anyone that actually knows their rights. A thing you have to appreciate is that the US government will exploit ignorance. It will TRY to get away with illegal things on the assumption that you're too ignorant to realize it is illegal. When challenged, these actions tend to fail in court.
As to police getting military gear... again a recent issue. Our Dear Leader is a deeply annoying fellow and I'd rather not get into it.
As to Reid, any tool can be misused. It doesn't mean the tool is wrong. This is a common philosophical issue that I run into all the time. People blame the tool or the technique instead of the practitioner. If you are a reasonable and honest police officer then the Reid method is fine. If you're not then lets be honest here and point out that anything the guy does is going to be tainted because he's a slimy person.
As to capital punishment... I see little difference between executing someone and throwing them in jail for 50 years. This obsession with the death penalty for capital crimes is really quite tiresome. The legitimate argument is that the justice system has problems and will arrive at false convictions. I find that to be a valid argument however this problem is not solved by doing away with capital punishment. It is rather solved by addressing the failings of the justice system itself.
As to getting trouble with the law, our system treats you humanly to the extent it is either ethical or fears reprisal. This is one of the reasons americans are so insistent on maintaining a deterrence. Our system is opportunistic and will exploit weakness. It does it all the time. Remember what I said about it exploiting ignorance? It does that with any kind of weakness. The US system could become quite tyrannical if the citizens stopped policing it and the elites stopped fearing us. I don't know what is going on in Australia but my cynicism leads me to believe this is a general human issue so I would need the government to fear me or to know that the people at large would mob to protect me.
I have no such confidence so I would feel very vulnerable.
As to elected school boards, the issue there is more the teacher's unions than it is the boards. But I agree our education system is fucked up beyond repair. We basically need an institution wide enema and then to compartmentalize the schools so they fail or succeed individually and not everything at once.
I saw your comment in the context of others and thus generalized to the extent that there are big gaps in your position that have to be assumed since you haven't specified a position to any great extent.
As to soapboxes... the issue is a soap box issue. We've only put off automation this long because people stood up on their soap boxes and shut it down. And that resulted more in outsourcing and offshoring than it did in saved jobs.
As to chilling out...
I don't do gradations. I do logically determined modes that are committed to until conditions shift to cause me to adopt a new mode of operation.
The current one assumes a rational argument where in two sides compete for which has the more sound position. Asking me to chill out suggests I am in the wrong mode and I should change my premise of what sort of discussion we're having.
I am aggressive and relentless in this mode. In this mode those are not only valid but desirable qualities.
Instead of me chilling out, why don't you warm up?:-)
As the farming statistics show we went from using 70~90 percent of our labor force for farming to about 2~4 percent with a net increase in production and wealth to society. Even if they don't get jobs, again the net production of the society went up because the robots are better at their jobs than they were.
Anything robots are better at, is something robots should do and humans should not. Concentrate the human labor on things that you need or want humans to do without "make work".
Which is what you people keep arguing for... you want some sort of brave new world disneyland where jobs are invented for you just to preserve social order without any consideration for whether you're actually any good at it.
You help no one with that. Not even the poor. You undermine the entire society for NOTHING.
It is foolish and naive.
Riddle me this, when has opposing technology ever saved jobs? its never happened. You only cost jobs and damage industries in the attempt. Get out of the way. You might well slow or stop the progress that must come but you'll only hurt the people you presume to protect in the process.
... i advocate no such thing. One already exists and you can't upset it by your means without destroying everything which will harm everyone... especially the poor.
What you need to do is maintain as much upward mobility as possible so that people can challenge the elites.
Having elites is fine and good. Some people are actually better than other people. I know... that isn't politically correct. However, some people are smarter, wiser, more motivated, have better fashion sense, are more artistic, are more creative, are braver, are whatever.
And society works best when those calling the shots have more of a clue.
Things get out of whack primarily when two things happen:
1. The elites use their power to prevent competition with them thus negating their need to actually be competent at doing anything besides suppressing competition.
2. If they prevent new talent from joining their ranks bringing new ideas, new energy, and new skills to the existing elite.
THAT is the great problem with most elites. They stop earning their status and instead exploit their status to sustain a state of incompetence.
Think of a collection of doctors. Do you begrudge them their status as arbiters of medical authority? No... they're competent at what they do and you're not.
Now imagine if rather than being any good at medicine, they merely used their status as doctors to exclude anyone from contradicting or competing with them but actually spent very little time or energy maintaining or even acquiring medical knowledge?
Suddenly they're a fucking problem because what they're doing is suppressing the medical field and not contributing anything of value to the system.
And THAT is the problem with most traditional elites. They get lazy and they exploit their power. Which is why any elite to be healthy over time must be challenged regularly and be supplanted and replaced by more competent people as they arise.
This does two things as cited above. First, the competition forces the elites to justify themselves on a regular basis which keeps them on their toes. They understand that if they slack off or lose competency they will lose their position. And secondly when they are inferior they will be replaced and their superiors will take their place.
I know your ideology is not capable of dealing with the fact that some people are superior to other people. I find the silliness of that as annoying as you find it cognitively dissonent. However, the fact that some are superior is self evident.
Are you going to compete with Issac Newton? Are you going to compete with Nikola Tesla? Are you going to compete with Michael Jordan? What about Picasso?
Some people are superior at doing some things than other people and everyone is happier with them doing what they're good at, being rewarded for it, and society at large profiting from the exchange.
You can't argue that point rationally. You ideology doesn't like that but your ideology is simplistic and obsolete so no cares.
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Actually it wasn't robots that did that.
You lost your full time jobs when you raise the price of full time employment. This was explained to you when you pushed this in the US. We warned you.
We said that if you forced companies to not only pay a higher wage, but also to provide health heavily regulated and very expensive health insurance, also provide workers insurance, and also you were not allow to fire employees arbitrarily after they became full time...
Well... why as an employer am I hiring you full time? It costs me a lot of extra money and I lose the flexibility to adjust my labor pool if circumstances change.
This is where the downsizing concept comes from. Downsizing lets you arbilitarly fire someone. So what you do if you want to let someone go that is a full time employee is that you not only fire them but you remove their job from the company entirely.
This also encourages companies to NOT rehire someone else but rather to shift the company structure around instead.
You've done this... You were warned the gun was loaded. You told us that we were liars... you put the gun in your mouth and blew jam all over the walls.
We didn't lie. It happened just the way we told you it would happen.
If you want to increase full time employment then lower the costs and regulations associated with it.
Do that or you are responsible for businesses shifting to part time labor.
This is officially sad. I feel sorry you. Really.
You're saying that your issue with American gun owners is that they donn't know how to shoot properly or maintain their guns?
You appreciate that the mass shooters if they had such training would probably kill more people if anything?
And you appreciate that to my knowledge the entirely of the anti gun lobby has no interest in how skilled the users of the guns are but rather controlling who has them in the first place.
If I went into the inner city and gave all the gang bangers, went out into the country and gave all the red necks... all the people most likely to have guns... I gave them weapons training...
You'd suddenly be okay with them having "high capacity magazines"? I mean, the swiss have machine guns.
So why not let the people have fully automatic machine guns... With the correct training of course.
Do you know how many people the US government passes through its military every year? What if I just let retired US military have machine guns? That okay with you? Its okay with me.
You didn't think your argument out in advance. This is pathetic.
Quote where I said there was nothing of value or even implied there was nothing of value.
Dave, I've clearly gotten to you because you're not even trying to make sense anymore. You're writing little hit pieces. Its sad.
Look, my post was that talking about the hyperloop on MARS was premature. I think the hyperloop is a neat idea and I think it is superior to most high speed train concepts.
But don't talk to me about how it will be useful on mars when it can't be useful on mars because we have no need of high speed transit across the surface of mars with the price tag of building a heavy infrastructure on a world we struggle to send light probes to.
This notion that the redistribution isn't being pushed by socialists or marxists is undermined by the fact that the people pushing it often self describe as socialists and marxists.
As to the implication that Americans are stupid... You're insulting the intelligence of the people that designed the CPU you're using, the operating system, and the fucking website... If we're dumb, then we're the smartest dummies on this mud ball.
As to some kind of redistribution being common... sure... the context, extent, and conditions of it are relevant though.
As to the notion that no one is suggesting that automation be held up... fine then. If you don't stand in the way of it, then we shouldn't have any problems. Its already been held up long enough by similar horseshit. If that stops, then I'm fine.
As to your dream of a worker's revolution, it didn't happen. That's where the whole cultural marxism thing started. Marx believed there would be a worker revolution and it never happened because the societies were more stable and the people more content than he had anticipated. This is why we've been enduring crypto communists for generations. And again... self described communists. They don't hide anymore. And frankly they were pretty fucking obvious even when they were hiding. And before some retard says I'm being like McCarthy... I'm not trying to censor people or get them thrown in jail or black list them. I'm just calling a spade a spade. You can call someone an adherent of any other ideology and you don't get this weird gaslighting response. But if you call someone that is a self described communist a communist... suddenly you're being incendiary or lying or something. Never mind that that is quite literally impossible.
As to the relevance of the ideology, you are welcome to believe what you like. But once it is understood that you believe in Sharia law for example, it should be understood that your concerns for the US legal code will continue until the country resembles Saudi Arabia. And if you're a marxist, then your various comments are just going to progressive nudge the society until the economy sticks a sawed off shotgun in its mouth and blows its fucking brains out.
Its not a question of censorship or having opinions I dislike. Its a question of people saying that bird should be a fish... and that the first step should be for the bird to fucking drowned itself. Marxist ideas would involve a radical transformation of our society that would largely annihilate our culture in the process to say nothing of our rights and our freedoms and our property. And on top of that, marxism has always failed. So after sacrificing all of that... we're almost certainly likely to get nothing for it.
Its stupid.
As to the robotic automation thing solving all problems, now you're just strawmanning me. I didn't say it would solve all problems. I said it had to happen to maintain a modern and competitive economy.
As to revolutions without violence... a revolution does involve winners and losers. There is too much change for it to be otherwise. But you can't stop it. Would you argue against the agriculture revolution as a hunter gatherer? Would you argue against the industrial revolution as a farmer?
Don't argue against the information revolution. It is going to eat the industrial revolution whatever you do. The most you can accomplish is crippling your own country so that doesn't enter the new economy smoothly or quickly. Your people will be behind the curve and suffer for it.
The issue is that if you massage the numbers hard enough they'll say whatever you want. And often what is being done to them is so complicated that it is hard for anyone that isn't very familiar with the specific algorithms to even know what happened.
A big issue here is that it is very hard to audit this sort of science and if you are inclined to sensationalize your paper or make it appear more interesting than it would otherwise... it doesn't appear to be hard to do.
What I hope comes out of this education is clever young people that will hold their peers to reasonable standards and know the math well enough to spot nonsense when they see it.
Violence.
I choose violence every time. Pull the trigger.
This is why anyone that gives up their ability to defend themselves is a fool. Behind all your pretensions of doing the good thing or the right thing or the greater good.
"this" is what is behind everything you believe. A gun to the head of society with your hand out saying "give me your money".
Pull the trigger.
I welcome your revolution. It will eat itself as it always has and then whatever happens to me... YOU will be twice as fucked as you are now.
Because isn't of me, you're going to be dealing with comrade Stalin. And he's going to skull fuck your sister and send you to in a gulag because he feels like it.
All rights. Gone.
All law. Meaningless.
The wealth of the society. Utterly consumed by your elite which unlike mine produces nothing and has no competence besides its ability to dupe little cannon fodder fools to parrot nonsense for them.
Pull the trigger. Destroy yourself.
Again and again and again. You fools never learn. And what you don't seem to grasp is that the trajectory of our macro civilization hasn't changed throughout your foolishness. You just destroy yourselves and the heart moves to another nation where it burns on while you people eat each other.
Pull it. I want you to so badly. Do it. Please.
I've been offered Australian citizenship several times actually, chuck.
And as to your opinions of my needs... I told you that you'd find my views incomprehensible. And you do. You don't even begin to understand me. I baffle you. And the fact that you don't even realize it only speaks to the degree of confusion.
The point of being dangerous is not to intimidate people that aren't meaning me any harm or being anything other than friendly. The vast majority of gun owners in the US are just normal nice people. They don't hurt anyone much less kill anyone.
That you immediately feel threatened because I have the ability to hurt you IF you come after me... well... how should I interpret that? To me, that sounds like you want to make it easy to fuck me over and the fact that I'm armed would be a threat to your plans.
Sound paranoid? I can't imagine why my ownership of guns would bother you. You could give me a nuclear weapon and I'd be less likely to ever use it than would... france. I'm not a psychopath. I'm just a normal nice guy. But I'm not a fan of being helpless or at your mercy.
This is actually a big issue with US investment firms as well. A lot of countries wonder why they don't get any investment. This is basically what it boils down to... they don't feel their interests would be protected. This is not a gun issue in this case but a legal issue. Eastern europe for example is not getting heavy US investment despite lots of pressure from the US state department to do just that because the eastern european countries still have a lot of soviet era judges and legal practices in place that mean if you invest in those countries your investment could be taken from you the instant it starts to become profitable.
This means you risk losing money if the investment doesn't work out and you risk losing everything if it does.
You can at best break even if it does "okay".
No one wants to invest under those circumstances. And that is despite many eastern european countries having a strategic national NEED for investment to keep Russia from eating them.
Every country is attached to its way of doing things. If you want the Americans to come... you have to do things in ways that we find acceptable.
No one is forcing you to change anything. If you don't want us. Don't accommodate us and we won't come.
It doesn't matter.
The system doesn't exist to give you a job. It must advance this fast because it if doesn't then the businesses you want to give you a job will become obsolete and THEY will lose their jobs.
They must adapt. And if you can't keep up then you're going to be left behind. They have no choice.
They have competitors in Asia and Europe that are gunning for their market share all the time. They can either keep up... and ideally be ahead of the curve or die.
you're asking them to stop so you can catch up... and then they die for it... and when they die, you lose your job anyway.
Sound like a good idea or a dumb idea?
As to all jobs going away... no. Not unless you have no value to the economy at all. If you have value then there is a job for you.
Whether that job pays as well as you'd like it to is a question. I don't know.
A certain amount of disruption is expected here. We had disruption when we went from the agricultural phase to the industrial phase. we had child labor. we had people starving in the streets. We have flop houses. we had people a LOT more despriate for a job than anyone is these days. People would STARVE to death because they couldn't find work. They'd die in the frost.
That isn't happening this time. The transition is hard. I know.
It is not avoidable. It will happen. And it has to happen this fast or our economy loses its position.
Now tell me how anyone can make it better for you and that's an argument. But if you say "stop the progress"... The answer is NO.
This is a freight train with no breaks. It does not stop.
Fuck with the train and all that will happen is that you'll trigger more off shoring and more out sourcing.
Its not stopping.
... I think the cart is in the f'ing future...
This is like asking if maybe telepathy would work better on Uranus. Lets build the stupid hyperloop and see if it works anywhere... or build something on mars that you'd need high speed transit between... and then we can ask these questions.
As of now... the question baffles me.
You're not getting the message of the video though... I think you need to listen to it again:
https://youtu.be/-RwkYY7wb08?t...
As to why this is a thing... politics. various political groups... mostly progressives and various flavors of crypto marxists basically make the argument that the reason you don't have something is because someone else does.
As if they took it from you. That guy over there with a leer jet? The argument is that he stole that from you. And thus if you vote for slimy politician 1 through 20 the slimy politician will take that leer jet away from that guy... and sell it... and then divide the money he got from it up amongst everyone... likely through a serious of government programs that will ultimately fuel large union organizations that will also reliably vote for slimy politicians.
The term political correctness is a cue. That is a leftist term.
I am not saying all leftism is bad and I am CERTAINLY not endorsing anyone on the right because there are a lot of morons over there as well.w
Let me just say that again.
I am not endorsing EITHER side.
What I am saying however is that the attack on exceptional people and the very concept of political correctness is a leftist concept that literally comes out of literal marxism. If you doubt me, ask an eastern european about it.
There is a LOT of gaslighting going on about this on the internet. The wikipedia pages that touch on this have all been whitewashed. Ask an eastern european if you don't believe me. They recognize this stuff because they lived under it.
Sure I do. I've been dealing with little marxist twerps for the better part of my life. They're all over the place out here like ants at a picnic.
Doubtless you're going to say "oh that isn't marxist because specifics"... but the thing is that marxists themselves aren't strict adherents to the dictates of marxism themselves because most of them don't understand the ideology beyond the wishy washy shit.
And as a result, it all gets mixed together. And if you think it is wrong to associate the wishy washy marxists with the hardcore ones... tough. Without the wishywashy ones you'd have no political clout what so ever. Nearly all your power comes from the wishywashy moderates. And frankly dealing with them is more relevant than dealing with the hardcore. The hardcore is annoying but they're not especially dangerous because there aren't enough of them. The moderates are the ones pushing the legislation through.
In any case, Dave... if you want to have this discussion on what is and is not a Marxist... we can have that. If you want to trade unqualified insults... you can choke on horse smegma. ;)
Choose. You'll fine I am fully capable of either keeping up a spirited debate or just smack talking you. Which ever you prefer.
As to quality of life, by what metric?
As to food quality, by what metric?
As to soil, by what metric?
As to being able to get the vitamins out of food... I really don't know what you're referring to there. We have not only the super markets, but whole foods, and the farmer's markets. Are you saying they're all bad? Or just the super markets? And how do you show a trend over time? What are you basing this on?
As to travel time from home to work, that is largely because of congestion and it is largely an issue localized in certain cities with bad urban planning issues.
As to the 1970s... you don't notice the coincidence that things started to go to shit around the time the great society program was started? Just saying. And look at all the places that the socialist stuff has been allowed to run wild... its destroyed all of them.
Detroit was ground zero for a lot of that stuff. one of the richest cities in the country... destroyed.
And look at Washington DC is you doubt it further... more money spent per student in the education system than anywhere else and some of the worst test scores.
Just saying... the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Certain things lead to prosperity. Others do not. The anti industry stuff kills jobs and ruins communities. The focus on subsidies and welfare turns what is left into a cess pit.
Where is the investment and the building happening these days? In the south... which is pathetic. The great industrial north is rusting and the business interests have done the math and found it is more economical to just start from scratch in the south.
grasp this. YOU CANNOT STOP the modernization.
All you can do is FUCK yourself over and your community by trying to stop it. Business interests will pull up stakes and abandon you. Leaving you with nothing but empty buildings and mortgage payments.
Stop fucking with business. Or business will do what it has been doing since ALWAYS... It will leave you to die in the cold. No looking back. No remorse.
Stop making the same mistake.
I hear what you're saying but I see no evidence of it.
It would be like if I started talking about goblins or unicorns or something. You'd understand what I was saying but you're regard it as fiction.
We have transitioned to different economies but you're implying a conspiracy that doesn't exist.
The elites had you more under their thumbs when you were a farmer than now.
Fucking new york bigotry... seriously... I'm from Los Angeles. :D
I deal with New Yorkers a lot and they just assume people outside of their little rat warren are stupid. We're not remotely stupid. I get told all the time by various new yorkers that I work with all the time "Oh people out here are so dumb"... and it sounds more like the "Oh its not like new york pizza" that new yorkers do whenever they encounter something different.
Sorry, you triggered me with the new york thing. The new yorkers are infamous in California for being insufferable. Just fyi. :P
As to the ennobling and enslaving aspects of capitalism. What do you think of unconscious intelligence? The way ant nests self organize. Simple rules applied by countless individuals from distinct perspectives gives rise to a cohesive structure.
What does any one ant know of the rest of the nest? Nothing really. They each respond to simple chemical signals genetically programmed into them like ten thousand walking neurons in a crawling brain. :)
As to the market dictating things... the market doesn't dictate morality but rather logistics. I mean... should we build a base on Mars? Sure... but can we afford it? Not really. So the market doesn't say you should do something it just says "you can't afford that."
As to the market being a tool, it is a tool but it is more than that. You don't wield the market anymore than it wields you. To interact with the market is to allow it to interact WITH you. And thus as you influence it, the market itself influences you as well. The interaction is two way. And of course, the market is not a singular entity as much as that is a convenient mental abstraction. It is rather a global consumer/producer gestalt.
As to why it was created, no one created it... so much as it dynamically arose from previous market conditions. This is a misconception often pushed by marxists to show equivalence between their system and capitalism. Their system was invented by ONE guy. Capitalism wasn't invented by anyone. It "evolved". Previous systems were improved upon incrementally. Capitalism is itself merely an updated version of mercantilism and no one invented that either. The Venetians as I remember were big into mercantilism.
As to means and ends... Let me throw a bit of philosophy at you that I believe in "the means ARE the ends". That is, the ends don't justify the means but rather the very process... the journey... is the result.
Consider the ethics and philosophy of capitalism and market theory. The POINT... the END... is the system itself. You are rewarded or punished as you go but the system is the means and the way you do a thing conditions the actual result.
As to exploring options and not wasting the intellectual benefits, the mistake here is assuming that everyone will, can, or even wants to do that.
I am quite adaptable. As I said... I have modes. Many of the people here will hit this from a purely political stand point. Full stop. They can't see it any other way because that is how they process things. They're very political creatures.
And if you want to fence with them then you must slip into that mode and understand what is relevant and what is not a purely political discussion.
Then there are those that have their various dogmas and philosophies. I probably fall into that more than I'd like to admit because I am a profoundly philosophical creature.
And then of course there are those that are interested in the simple exploration of knowledge. Which perhaps you credit yourself as a member of...
In any of these... you must shift to that mode and engage playing by the rules of each system of thought.
Appeals are fine so long as they're within reason and do not encumber the sentence.
If you need endless appeals it means you have low confidence in the judicial process and that means you need to reform the judicial process... not that you need to ban a specific type of punishment.
As to 8 percent... the stats I saw said 4 percent. 4 percent is still very high but statistics don't tell you what is going on. I'd need to look at HOW the court was coming to these sentences erroniously before I could issue an opinion.
This modern tendency to quote a statistic and then cite an opinion as if it is self evident from a single number is fallacious. You can't know what is going on without more detail.
That there are issues with the US legal system is obvious and I would very seriously be interested in looking into why we arrive at these false convictions. However, the problem is not the death penalty. As all these studies conclude, the number of false life time sentence convictions is likely much much higher because those cases get much less scrutiny. What is more, the plea bargain system likely needs to be reformed since it might be contributing to miscarriages of justice.
... so... you think "this" is a rebuttal? Sarcasm, strawmanning, and ad hominem?
Try again... this time with less idiocy. It is comments like yours that make me sympathize with some of the antics of old Diogenes. I believe he was famous for literally urinating on people that make statements like that, making eye contact, and smiling.
Your position is little more than pretense and deceit.
I'll respond to your argument because you're likely too childish to recognize how idiotic your argument was and will just devolve into insults.
So here we go...
I say "the west needs to maintain its population size to maintain its societies" and you respond "oh then fuck everyone else on the world"?
Exactly how does the West or the first world maintaining its population fuck over the rest of the planet? They're the ones that are outstripping their OWN ability to maintain themselves. We do not maintain ourselves at their expense. We grow our own food and are actually net exporters of food to the second and third world.
it is not our populations that have exceeded our ability to provide for them. It is the populations of OTHER countries that having a hard time maintaining their OWN population. And contrary to your stupid argument we actually try to help them. We give them FREE food and free medical care. Drugs, medical training, free doctors... and actually most of our help tends to make things worse because it just encourages more population growth that ultimatley isn't sustainable.
Now... how does the west reducing its population help the third world? It doesn't unless you want to give territory we currently occupy to the third world? What part of Europe would you like to give to give to Africa? What portion of the US would you like to give to south america? What portion of Japan should be given to India or China?
I said try again... but you're too ignorant to form a credible opinion at this point in your life. Listen more and speak less. Hopefully in another decade or so you'll have matured enough to be more interesting. At this stage in your life you're not worth any thinking person's time.
And Lee Harvey Oswald was trained to shoot by the US Marine corps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The military training aspect doesn't make someone less dangerous. That might teach proper use but your problem with guns is not that people don't know how to use them but what they might choose to do with them.
Proper instruction makes someone MORE dangerous... not less.
So your problem with US gun owners is that you think they'll "miss"? Because the military will of course teach how to be better marksmen and hit their target with some more consistency.
What bothers me about arguments like yours is that you're playing rhetorical tic tac toe. You're not thinking your moves out ahead which means you don't error check dumb arguments that will self destruct about 2 seconds after you make them.
Without tooting my own horn here... I play rhetorical chess. I'm not claiming to be a chess master here... but I am saying I think my argument out a few steps in advance. Which means I don't make arguments that will immediately self destruct. I also accurately anticipate counter arguments and fortify my position against such arguments before they're even made.
Now I don't know why I appear to almost f'ing unique in this quality on this board. Its frankly pretty shocking to me. But I first learned to do this when I was about 10 years old. A great uncle of mine asked me a question during a relative's funeral reception... of all places... and I answered his question immediately. He refused to accept the answer and said "you didn't think long enough"... He refused to listen to my answer until I had had about 10 minutes to think about it. Where upon my answer did actually change and develop a great deal more depth. He taught me a very important lesson on that day. That the first and immediate answer to any question is not the result of thinking but rather of guessing and memory. Your intelligence has no chance to actually influence your answer yet. You're not thinking long enough to actually think at all.
Thus... while it is impossible for me to ask you to do this without you taking any offense... I want you to humor me and think about answer a bit longer. Put aside the emotional responses and the bluster. That means nothing to me. Its at best pitiable... so just don't do it.
Think about your answer a good 30 seconds. Imagine what my counter response will be and try to improve your argument so that I don't walk through it like a curtain of fog. Once you've learned to do this you can distinguish in yourself when you are thinking and when you're just remembering prerecorded answers.
Only by thinking for ourselves do our opinions even have meaning. So many people with opinions never even formed them themselves at all. They just heard something, stored the opinion, and then when asked they play it back like parrots. We are controllable and easily manipulated if we allow other people to store opinions in our brains and have them be played back without consideration.
This is why they don't teach critical thinking in dictatorships. To be more than a drone you have to actually challenge these stored concepts. You can't even make them your own. That's just a way of saying you conformed. You need to make your own opinions from scratch. No more training wheels. No more cheat sheets. Think.
That is more a result of the government requiring that stable employment include lots of expensive benefits more than anyone wanting to control the workers.
Look at all the liability an employer has to deal with if you're full time? That's your culprit right there and the business leaders have told you that from the fucking start. You didn't listen. You put that gun against your forehead and played a game of Russian Roulette... raspberry jam got splattered all over the walls.
Want that to not happen again?
Stop listening to Marxists. Half of them are idiots and the other half are liars.
An odd reference and not actually true. Hitler only got supreme power because the politicians were afraid of the brown shirts. And the brownshirts were only a threat because they could intimidate people in a society where gun ownership was uncommon.
The primary holders of guns outside of the government were private armies that largely went back to Germany's Prussian past.
Had gun ownership been as common in germany as it is in the US... it is likely the brownshirts never would have been the problem they became and that the german legislature would thus not have felt compelled to make Hitler dictator.
Hitler didn't push the legislature to give him control by jew bashing. He got it by pointing a loaded gun against their heads and giggling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Elected judges was an attempt to put the judiciary under some kind of democratic control. Though it mostly doesn't work because no one pays attention to it. A big issue with our democracy is that people are often not involved enough and those that want to be involved are discouraged from doing so. And of course... lots of people that are already involved are either crazy, corrupt, or stupid.
As to elected prosecuters, I don't see a problem with that.
As to grand juries... explain your problem there, I can't even anticipate what your issue is there.
As to plea bargaining, bullshit... every legal system has that to some extent. You might differ on the form but the fact of it has been there since always. An old king could plea bargain with someone. This has never changed.
As to civil asset forfeiture, it is only a problem in a few places and it is a new problem. Mostly it effects the poor and very ignorant. It tends to backfire hilariously when they try it on anyone that actually knows their rights. A thing you have to appreciate is that the US government will exploit ignorance. It will TRY to get away with illegal things on the assumption that you're too ignorant to realize it is illegal. When challenged, these actions tend to fail in court.
As to police getting military gear... again a recent issue. Our Dear Leader is a deeply annoying fellow and I'd rather not get into it.
As to Reid, any tool can be misused. It doesn't mean the tool is wrong. This is a common philosophical issue that I run into all the time. People blame the tool or the technique instead of the practitioner. If you are a reasonable and honest police officer then the Reid method is fine. If you're not then lets be honest here and point out that anything the guy does is going to be tainted because he's a slimy person.
As to capital punishment... I see little difference between executing someone and throwing them in jail for 50 years. This obsession with the death penalty for capital crimes is really quite tiresome. The legitimate argument is that the justice system has problems and will arrive at false convictions. I find that to be a valid argument however this problem is not solved by doing away with capital punishment. It is rather solved by addressing the failings of the justice system itself.
As to getting trouble with the law, our system treats you humanly to the extent it is either ethical or fears reprisal. This is one of the reasons americans are so insistent on maintaining a deterrence. Our system is opportunistic and will exploit weakness. It does it all the time. Remember what I said about it exploiting ignorance? It does that with any kind of weakness. The US system could become quite tyrannical if the citizens stopped policing it and the elites stopped fearing us. I don't know what is going on in Australia but my cynicism leads me to believe this is a general human issue so I would need the government to fear me or to know that the people at large would mob to protect me.
I have no such confidence so I would feel very vulnerable.
As to elected school boards, the issue there is more the teacher's unions than it is the boards. But I agree our education system is fucked up beyond repair. We basically need an institution wide enema and then to compartmentalize the schools so they fail or succeed individually and not everything at once.
I saw your comment in the context of others and thus generalized to the extent that there are big gaps in your position that have to be assumed since you haven't specified a position to any great extent.
As to soapboxes... the issue is a soap box issue. We've only put off automation this long because people stood up on their soap boxes and shut it down. And that resulted more in outsourcing and offshoring than it did in saved jobs.
As to chilling out...
I don't do gradations. I do logically determined modes that are committed to until conditions shift to cause me to adopt a new mode of operation.
The current one assumes a rational argument where in two sides compete for which has the more sound position. Asking me to chill out suggests I am in the wrong mode and I should change my premise of what sort of discussion we're having.
I am aggressive and relentless in this mode. In this mode those are not only valid but desirable qualities.
Instead of me chilling out, why don't you warm up? :-)
Enguard!, motherfucker! :-D
Explain that please. I don't understand what you mean.
You're assuming equivilent production
As the farming statistics show we went from using 70~90 percent of our labor force for farming to about 2~4 percent with a net increase in production and wealth to society. Even if they don't get jobs, again the net production of the society went up because the robots are better at their jobs than they were.
Anything robots are better at, is something robots should do and humans should not. Concentrate the human labor on things that you need or want humans to do without "make work".
Which is what you people keep arguing for... you want some sort of brave new world disneyland where jobs are invented for you just to preserve social order without any consideration for whether you're actually any good at it.
You help no one with that. Not even the poor. You undermine the entire society for NOTHING.
It is foolish and naive.
Riddle me this, when has opposing technology ever saved jobs? its never happened. You only cost jobs and damage industries in the attempt. Get out of the way. You might well slow or stop the progress that must come but you'll only hurt the people you presume to protect in the process.
... i advocate no such thing. One already exists and you can't upset it by your means without destroying everything which will harm everyone... especially the poor.
What you need to do is maintain as much upward mobility as possible so that people can challenge the elites.
Having elites is fine and good. Some people are actually better than other people. I know... that isn't politically correct. However, some people are smarter, wiser, more motivated, have better fashion sense, are more artistic, are more creative, are braver, are whatever.
And society works best when those calling the shots have more of a clue.
Things get out of whack primarily when two things happen:
1. The elites use their power to prevent competition with them thus negating their need to actually be competent at doing anything besides suppressing competition.
2. If they prevent new talent from joining their ranks bringing new ideas, new energy, and new skills to the existing elite.
THAT is the great problem with most elites. They stop earning their status and instead exploit their status to sustain a state of incompetence.
Think of a collection of doctors. Do you begrudge them their status as arbiters of medical authority? No... they're competent at what they do and you're not.
Now imagine if rather than being any good at medicine, they merely used their status as doctors to exclude anyone from contradicting or competing with them but actually spent very little time or energy maintaining or even acquiring medical knowledge?
Suddenly they're a fucking problem because what they're doing is suppressing the medical field and not contributing anything of value to the system.
And THAT is the problem with most traditional elites. They get lazy and they exploit their power. Which is why any elite to be healthy over time must be challenged regularly and be supplanted and replaced by more competent people as they arise.
This does two things as cited above. First, the competition forces the elites to justify themselves on a regular basis which keeps them on their toes. They understand that if they slack off or lose competency they will lose their position. And secondly when they are inferior they will be replaced and their superiors will take their place.
I know your ideology is not capable of dealing with the fact that some people are superior to other people. I find the silliness of that as annoying as you find it cognitively dissonent. However, the fact that some are superior is self evident.
Are you going to compete with Issac Newton? Are you going to compete with Nikola Tesla? Are you going to compete with Michael Jordan? What about Picasso?
Some people are superior at doing some things than other people and everyone is happier with them doing what they're good at, being rewarded for it, and society at large profiting from the exchange.
You can't argue that point rationally. You ideology doesn't like that but your ideology is simplistic and obsolete so no cares.