Note that word "is". It indicates present tense, while you're talking about things that happened roughly fifty years ago. The leadership, membership, and philosophies of both parties have changed significantly in the interim. Of especial significance in this context is that the groups that used to be "Southern Democrats" or "Dixiecrats" have largely moved over to the Republican party in the last thirty years.
By your test, nothing is a threat unless it is actually carried out (everyone knew the identity of the person tweeting with such confidence? Like accountants can't kill people?) I suggest you look up what the term threat means, since your expectations are very unrealistic. We typically don't wait for someone to die before deciding that exceedingly risky behavior should be discouraged by way of law.
I do have to wonder -- did you read the article? All six pages? This was, in fact, one of the things talked about by the judges who ultimately reversed his conviction. The police themselves did not take his threat seriously, until someone suddenly decided that he needed to be made an example of. The fact that they didn't take the threat seriously indicated to the judges that the threat did not 'menace' anyone, as required by the law he was convicted under -- they stated that in order for there to be 'menace', someone actually has to be afraid. Since he wasn't actually doing anything, and there is no evidence or testimony that anyone was really afraid that he was going to, the court ruled that his tweet did not qualify as "menacing" under the statute.
If there had been real fear -- e.g., if the airport could have produced any evidence that anyone contacted them saying, "I think this guy's going to try to blow your airport up" -- then the statute would have applied. This seems to me like a reasonable standard, so long as the law considers the threshold to be what a "reasonable person" would consider threatening. Outlawing all threats, regardless of how much they might lack any credibility, leads to things like we see happening in the US right now, where elementary school students have been arrested for making "terroristic threats" for angrily saying they wanted to kill their teachers.
Actually, no, he doesn't. It's memory. It's random access. Therefore it's RAM. The terms you are looking for are "long term storage" and "working memory". RAM can be used for either; so can oxide on a surface. See, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum_memory
So... if something is limited in the time and space to which it applies, it can't be a scientific fact? Where do you draw the line?
It becomes a scientific fact when it can be reproduced by others reliably and consistently. The experiments we conduct today would have worked 200 years ago, or 2 million years ago, or many years from now. They are not time-sensitive, and they don't depend on the state of the observer (in this case, the cultural values of the observer), to be reproduced.
The correctly formulated version of the hypothesis -- "Women asking random men for sex are much more likely to get a positive response than men asking women, in the late 20th/early 21st century United States" -- can be reproduced by others reliably and consistently. Indeed, it has been. And this experiment doesn't depend on the observer's cultural values -- a Muslim Imam could be the observer, or an alien. The person asking for sex and the person being asked are experimental subjects who are being observed; they are not the observer, if the experiment is being conducted correctly.
And here's something else - a scientific experiment is supposed to be reproducible with the same results, so long as no significant variables are changed. In this case, culture of the test subjects is a significant variable. If you change it, you're no longer conducting the same experiment, and so your results are expected to be different.
To put it another way -- if you were in a physics lab, and the TA said, "Okay, today we're doing a lab on gravity and acceleration. If I drop a ball, it's going to accelerate at 9.8 meters per second squared..." would you immediately interrupt the TA to say that's not true, since if he dropped the ball on Mars it would be different? Or would you make the assumption that the TA is talking about the acceleration here and now, in the classroom where he's speaking?
People don't normally go around fully qualifying every statement of fact that they make, simply because it would take too much time. Now, the original poster was restating the results of the studies that he was talking about in an overly-general way... but that doesn't mean that those studies were not scientific. It just means that he's either overgeneralizing (which the first part of your post was an excellent counterpoint to), or that he's communicating poorly. In neither case does that affect the scientific standing of the studies that he's basing his statement on.
So... if something is limited in the time and space to which it applies, it can't be a scientific fact? Where do you draw the line? I can definitely see the merit in pointing out to the previous poster that his statement is not a universal -- but to say that it isn't a scientific fact is simply untrue. It's a scientific fact in the United States in the early 21st century.
There's no need for research - we already know why. Men have a Y chromosome. The Y chromosome does not carry the same genes as the X, which means that men wind up with only one copy of some genes. That in turn renders men more susceptible to mutations of those genes, and diseases caused by those mutations.
Further, men tend to be more aggressive and take more risks than women, and there's a good bit of evidence that this is genetic. Lastly, men in Western culture at least are more likely to lack a social support network, and many buy into the idea that "real men" don't talk about their feelings, don't try to get help with mental/emotional problems, etc. All of these things contribute to shorter average lifespans.
As Dogun points out, the executive office isn't bound by classification of documents. The President is Commander-in-Chief, and has supreme authority over the US military. That includes the ability to countermand any order, reclassify any document the military has classified, etc.
If you want a real example of treason, though, try the Iran-Contra affair. Negotiating with foreign powers and selling weapons to them without approval (remember that the President can negotiate treaties, but they must be approved by the Senate to take effect), then taking the proceeds from it and using it to back a war that Congress had voted for the US not to get involved in... especially when you toss in the fact that the weapons were being sold to a declared enemy of the United States. Of course, Reagan and Bush managed to successfully deny knowledge, which then allowed Bush to pardon the rest of the crew.
Anyone with a few thousand can create a damned good recording studio, cut an album
How should someone who writes and records an album verify that the songs he wrote don't accidentally infringe a third party's copyright?
Counter-question - how does working through/with the RIAA help with this problem? The examples that people are giving of artists who got sued for having a portion of a song be too similar to another artist's worked under the traditional model, but this didn't help them verify that they weren't accidentally infringing a third party's copyright.
Thus, it seems to me that your question is a non-sequitor -- unless the RIAA suddenly takes it into their head to start pursuing artists who aren't working with a label, it's no more of a concern than it would be if you were working under the traditional model.
Yeah - because the same amount of physical and psychological harm would result from, say, forcing someone to take out the trash. Let's just go through a few things:
First off, rape involves the possibility of disease transmission from the rapist to the victim. (Or vice-versa, for that matter, but that's both generally less likely, and the rapist is choosing to take that risk, where the victim gets no choice.) Second, male-on-male rape involves a forced intrusion of a body part, which can result in physical damage (tearing, etc.). This can result in incontinence, pain, bleeding, etc., and presents the possibility of infection. Of course, male-on-female rape presents the risk of pregnancy, which has huge potential consequences to the woman.
Adding in to that, the 'sex is different' thing isn't just religious - it's found across cultures, in every culture known. People want to be able to choose who their sex partners are, and have much, much stronger reactions to forced sex than to other things being forced on them. From an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense, given the possibilities of disease transmission, and of pregnancy when a woman is raped.
In Western culture, there's also a stigma associated with being the victim of male-on-male rape, with many people seeming to believe that if you're a male who's been raped, you must be gay, or be less of a man. In a prison, once it's known that someone's been raped once, it becomes much more likely that they'll be raped again, due to a combination of the stigma and other inmates believing that they must be easy marks, since someone else succeeded. Because of this, victims are very likely to fight back on at least their initial rapes, which adds a component of assault, with the corresponding extra damage to the victim.
The closest equivalent in 'forcing people to do things' would be something like forcing them to eat something that disgusts them -- and you'll find that people consider that to be very bad as well.
This reminds me of an idiot I knew once - one of those "I won't wear a seatbelt because I'd rather be thrown out of the car in a crash" people. When the state mandated driving with a seat belt, he took to pulling the belt out, putting it across himself, and then sitting on the buckle instead of actually buckling it in. That way any cops passing by would think he had his seat belt on.
Of course, he also then had to keep adjusting the belt every ten minutes or so, since vibration while driving would cause it to slowly shift out from under him.
Here in Florida, several years back, I got a ticket after having had my transmission redone. The cop told me I was doing 81; I told him that my speedometer had shown 71, and he asked me if I had new tires, had had transmission work, or anything like that. I told him I'd had the transmission redone, and he said that he'd still have to write me a ticket, but that I should go to a shop in Pensacola (forget the name of the shop now) that had a dynamometer and have my speedometer tested. If it really was that far off, the shop would give me a letter saying so, and if I took it to the judge, the ticket would be dropped.
I did, and it was -- even though my 71 was still six MPH over the limit where I was driving at the time - I'd been clocked on a big downhill, and 71 in a 65 zone wasn't something a ticket would normally be given out for, the judge said. Didn't have to pay any court costs or anything.
The cop also told me that the shop in question was where they got their own speedometers checked and adjusted, so they could certify that they were accurate when they did the "match speeds with the guy to see how fast he's going" thing.
So, yeah... there are fair and helpful cops around, if you're lucky and polite.
To explain more fully: I'd guess that you're buying the idea that "if the health plan covers contraception, and one of the employees gets contraception, that means that the employer is having to pay for contraception". Here's the thing: health care benefits are part of the employee's compensation. That money is no longer the employer's -- it's the employee's, and it's the employee's choice how to use it.
If that is the case, then why are Catholic employees being forced to pay for birth control coverage that they won't use? Shouldn't they have the choice to pick a plan that doesn't have birth control costs built in?
I'd agree that yes, they should have that choice. In point of fact, they do have that choice - at worst, they can refuse to participate in the employer's plan, and buy their own insurance. Of course, they might not be able to save money that way, due to the way insurers prefer to spread out risk by insuring groups rather than individuals and the tax advantages you mention below. Although, if a particular religious group really feels strongly about it, they could always form a co-op and negotiate with an insurance company to provide them as a group with insurance that doesn't feature the things they don't want. That wouldn't solve the tax issue, but it would solve the other.
Just because the health benefit portion of the employee's compensation isn't provided directly as money, that doesn't make it not the employee's. Allowing employers to arbitrarily restrict their employee's health plan because of their own religious views is, in essence, no different than allowing them to dictate how employees can spend their monetary compensation.
It would be simpler if employees were buying healthcare themselves rather than from their employer. Then this wouldn't be an issue. Unfortunately the tax code penalizes such behavior.
I'd agree with that. It ought to be possible to get a statement from your insurance company of how much you spent on your health insurance, and take a tax deduction for that. I don't see where it would be more complicated than, say, the way the mortgage interest deduction works right now.
Although, as noted above, it's not just the tax code that penalizes that -- insurance companies do as well, by not selling insurance to individuals at as favorable rates as they will to groups.
Since you don't specify, I assume that you're talking about requirements for employee health plans to pay for contraception. This in no way requires Catholics to violate the teachings of their religion.
To explain more fully: I'd guess that you're buying the idea that "if the health plan covers contraception, and one of the employees gets contraception, that means that the employer is having to pay for contraception". Here's the thing: health care benefits are part of the employee's compensation. That money is no longer the employer's -- it's the employee's, and it's the employee's choice how to use it.
Just because the health benefit portion of the employee's compensation isn't provided directly as money, that doesn't make it not the employee's. Allowing employers to arbitrarily restrict their employee's health plan because of their own religious views is, in essence, no different than allowing them to dictate how employees can spend their monetary compensation.
There is "Jew" the ethnicity, and "Jew" the religious appelation; although related, these are not the same.
To put it another way, this would be like saying that the fact that the Carpenters won't let you attend their family reunion because your father wasn't a Carpenter means they're trying to prevent you from practicing carpentry.
I'm sure that I remember reading about most trees being genetic mosaics more than ten years back. And I know for certain that I heard about a case of it happening in people at a conference on Neurofibromatosis more than ten years ago.
(Presentation at the conference had a bit about a family where several of the children had NF Type 1, even though neither of the parents did. NF1 is a genetically dominant mutation, but having two copies of the gene is lethal -- thus, if one parent has NF1, you expect that roughly half the children will... but if neither parent has it, the chance of a child having it should be very small. In this case, though, about half the children had NF1, even though tests said neither of the parents had the gene.
Eventually, it was discovered that part of the father's body had NF1 -- including the testes. Most of his body, however, did not have the gene. Thus, while tests using cells taken from other parts of his body showed him as not having NF1, for reproductive purposes, he did.
As I recall, at the time, the prevailing belief among the geneticists working on the disease was that neurofibromas - lumps on the nerves associated with NF1 - were themselves manifestations of cellular-level mutations. Essentially, when a nerve cell in the body mutated in such a way as to lose its working copy of the NF1 gene, a neurofibroma resulted. Not sure if that's still what's believed, though, since that was over a decade ago.)
EBITDA is short for "Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Depreciation, and Amortization". The profit that you're seeing referred to is after taking all of those things out.
Fiduciary duty is the duty to act in someone else's (in this case, the shareholders') best interest. The thing is, the law does not define what "best interest" is -- and that "best interest" does not have to be what the person on whose behalf you're acting wants. (Note that a lot of the legal theory under "fiduciary duty" comes from trusts, receivership, etc. -- places where the someone else's money is being placed into the actor's hands because that someone else is not considered competent to manage it themselves.)
It's quite easy to argue that growing the infrastructure *is* in the shareholders' best interests, since it will help to maintain and grow the business in the long term. Further, I'm willing to bet that one could easily persuade a judge that running the company into the ground in order to give the shareholders the maximum short-term profits is, in fact, the exact opposite of "fiduciary duty", even if it's what the shareholders want. It's just like, say, giving the twenty-one-year-old beneficiary of a trust all the money in the trust at once -- it might be what the beneficiary wants, but it's not necessarily what's in his/her best interest.
(Actually, the biggest traditional thing about "fiduciary duty" is that the thing being managed should be managed for the benefit of the "someone else", rather than for the benefit of the manager. Given the way CEOs, board members, etc. are compensating themselves these days, I'd say that's a much bigger violation of "fiduciary duty" than managing the business with long-term goals in mind could ever be.)
I can't speak for Israel, but regarding Switzerland, Swiss gun laws don't permit people to carry their guns around all the time, and don't allow carrying loaded weapons. Indeed, it's common for Swiss gun ranges to sell ammo, with the provision that the ammo must be used on-site before leaving. Thus, while gun ownership is high, someone walking into a liquor store to hold it up isn't going to find "half the customers" carrying weapons. Most likely none of them will be, and if anyone is, they won't have any ammo, which makes their weapon no better than a club.
I'll note further that Switzerland's rate of violent crime is about the same as that of Germany and Austria -- both of which have strict gun laws. Perhaps, then, it's not the widespread ownership of guns that keeps the violent crime rate low, but cultural factors of the region?
You might want to read that article yourself. There's nothing in there about the guns being made in tents, and it specifically states that the AK models made there are usually made from a mish-mash of AK parts from different suppliers... which means they're getting parts either from suppliers or from cast-off non-working guns and assembling guns from them. That's a far cry from making them "from scratch".
"Of course, having all these skills meant he never made much money".
Huh? How does B follow from A? My dad had the same skills -- and he spent 20 years in the Air Force, retired, worked construction for a few years, ran his own farm for a few, lost pretty much everything he had doing that... then moved back to the city, got a job as a school bus mechanic, rose up to be shop foreman there, and eventually retired again, this time with a house that's fully paid for, two retirement checks, some investment income, and plenty of savings.
Having a wide variety of skills doesn't prevent you from making money.
This, however, is only able to happen because of banks approving people who couldn't afford the loan. The bank is the business -- it's supposed to be the bank's job to be careful about whom they loan money. Upon the realization that the Fed would simply bail them out if they made too many bad loans, the big banks decided to take greater risks.
If the banks had to actually bear responsibility for their poor lending choices, you'd see it become much harder for people to get loans they can't actually afford. On the flip side, if the banks could no longer get bailouts or borrow money from the government at extremely low rates, they might return to paying decent interest rates on CDs, savings accounts, etc. As it stands, they don't need to compete to get *your* money when the Fed will give them money so easily.
We don't have artificial wombs yet, so if you clone 10 horses at once, you still need 10 different female horses... and there's a potential for differences there as well, since the prenatal environment of each clone won't be the same.
Once the ten clones are born, they each have to be raised up and trained. There'll be differences introduced there as well.
Cloning isn't like a copy machine. It's more like artificial twinning, with the additional complication that the twin may be implanted in a different mother, and may be much younger than the original.
Slashdot Mirror
Note that word "is". It indicates present tense, while you're talking about things that happened roughly fifty years ago. The leadership, membership, and philosophies of both parties have changed significantly in the interim. Of especial significance in this context is that the groups that used to be "Southern Democrats" or "Dixiecrats" have largely moved over to the Republican party in the last thirty years.
By your test, nothing is a threat unless it is actually carried out (everyone knew the identity of the person tweeting with such confidence? Like accountants can't kill people?) I suggest you look up what the term threat means, since your expectations are very unrealistic. We typically don't wait for someone to die before deciding that exceedingly risky behavior should be discouraged by way of law.
I do have to wonder -- did you read the article? All six pages? This was, in fact, one of the things talked about by the judges who ultimately reversed his conviction. The police themselves did not take his threat seriously, until someone suddenly decided that he needed to be made an example of. The fact that they didn't take the threat seriously indicated to the judges that the threat did not 'menace' anyone, as required by the law he was convicted under -- they stated that in order for there to be 'menace', someone actually has to be afraid. Since he wasn't actually doing anything, and there is no evidence or testimony that anyone was really afraid that he was going to, the court ruled that his tweet did not qualify as "menacing" under the statute.
If there had been real fear -- e.g., if the airport could have produced any evidence that anyone contacted them saying, "I think this guy's going to try to blow your airport up" -- then the statute would have applied. This seems to me like a reasonable standard, so long as the law considers the threshold to be what a "reasonable person" would consider threatening. Outlawing all threats, regardless of how much they might lack any credibility, leads to things like we see happening in the US right now, where elementary school students have been arrested for making "terroristic threats" for angrily saying they wanted to kill their teachers.
Actually, no, he doesn't. It's memory. It's random access. Therefore it's RAM. The terms you are looking for are "long term storage" and "working memory". RAM can be used for either; so can oxide on a surface. See, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum_memory
So... if something is limited in the time and space to which it applies, it can't be a scientific fact? Where do you draw the line?
It becomes a scientific fact when it can be reproduced by others reliably and consistently. The experiments we conduct today would have worked 200 years ago, or 2 million years ago, or many years from now. They are not time-sensitive, and they don't depend on the state of the observer (in this case, the cultural values of the observer), to be reproduced.
The correctly formulated version of the hypothesis -- "Women asking random men for sex are much more likely to get a positive response than men asking women, in the late 20th/early 21st century United States" -- can be reproduced by others reliably and consistently. Indeed, it has been. And this experiment doesn't depend on the observer's cultural values -- a Muslim Imam could be the observer, or an alien. The person asking for sex and the person being asked are experimental subjects who are being observed; they are not the observer, if the experiment is being conducted correctly.
And here's something else - a scientific experiment is supposed to be reproducible with the same results, so long as no significant variables are changed. In this case, culture of the test subjects is a significant variable. If you change it, you're no longer conducting the same experiment, and so your results are expected to be different.
To put it another way -- if you were in a physics lab, and the TA said, "Okay, today we're doing a lab on gravity and acceleration. If I drop a ball, it's going to accelerate at 9.8 meters per second squared..." would you immediately interrupt the TA to say that's not true, since if he dropped the ball on Mars it would be different? Or would you make the assumption that the TA is talking about the acceleration here and now, in the classroom where he's speaking?
People don't normally go around fully qualifying every statement of fact that they make, simply because it would take too much time. Now, the original poster was restating the results of the studies that he was talking about in an overly-general way... but that doesn't mean that those studies were not scientific. It just means that he's either overgeneralizing (which the first part of your post was an excellent counterpoint to), or that he's communicating poorly. In neither case does that affect the scientific standing of the studies that he's basing his statement on.
So... if something is limited in the time and space to which it applies, it can't be a scientific fact? Where do you draw the line? I can definitely see the merit in pointing out to the previous poster that his statement is not a universal -- but to say that it isn't a scientific fact is simply untrue. It's a scientific fact in the United States in the early 21st century.
Practice hell, they had their Gomorrahy down pat.
There's no need for research - we already know why. Men have a Y chromosome. The Y chromosome does not carry the same genes as the X, which means that men wind up with only one copy of some genes. That in turn renders men more susceptible to mutations of those genes, and diseases caused by those mutations.
Further, men tend to be more aggressive and take more risks than women, and there's a good bit of evidence that this is genetic. Lastly, men in Western culture at least are more likely to lack a social support network, and many buy into the idea that "real men" don't talk about their feelings, don't try to get help with mental/emotional problems, etc. All of these things contribute to shorter average lifespans.
I haven't read it, but I have seen the movie. And if it gets me Alexis Bledel, hell yeah sign me up.
As Dogun points out, the executive office isn't bound by classification of documents. The President is Commander-in-Chief, and has supreme authority over the US military. That includes the ability to countermand any order, reclassify any document the military has classified, etc.
If you want a real example of treason, though, try the Iran-Contra affair. Negotiating with foreign powers and selling weapons to them without approval (remember that the President can negotiate treaties, but they must be approved by the Senate to take effect), then taking the proceeds from it and using it to back a war that Congress had voted for the US not to get involved in... especially when you toss in the fact that the weapons were being sold to a declared enemy of the United States. Of course, Reagan and Bush managed to successfully deny knowledge, which then allowed Bush to pardon the rest of the crew.
Anyone with a few thousand can create a damned good recording studio, cut an album
How should someone who writes and records an album verify that the songs he wrote don't accidentally infringe a third party's copyright?
Counter-question - how does working through/with the RIAA help with this problem? The examples that people are giving of artists who got sued for having a portion of a song be too similar to another artist's worked under the traditional model, but this didn't help them verify that they weren't accidentally infringing a third party's copyright.
Thus, it seems to me that your question is a non-sequitor -- unless the RIAA suddenly takes it into their head to start pursuing artists who aren't working with a label, it's no more of a concern than it would be if you were working under the traditional model.
Yeah - because all the victims of male-on-male rape *must* be gay. So, are you a troll, or just an asshat?
Yeah - because the same amount of physical and psychological harm would result from, say, forcing someone to take out the trash. Let's just go through a few things:
First off, rape involves the possibility of disease transmission from the rapist to the victim. (Or vice-versa, for that matter, but that's both generally less likely, and the rapist is choosing to take that risk, where the victim gets no choice.) Second, male-on-male rape involves a forced intrusion of a body part, which can result in physical damage (tearing, etc.). This can result in incontinence, pain, bleeding, etc., and presents the possibility of infection. Of course, male-on-female rape presents the risk of pregnancy, which has huge potential consequences to the woman.
Adding in to that, the 'sex is different' thing isn't just religious - it's found across cultures, in every culture known. People want to be able to choose who their sex partners are, and have much, much stronger reactions to forced sex than to other things being forced on them. From an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense, given the possibilities of disease transmission, and of pregnancy when a woman is raped.
In Western culture, there's also a stigma associated with being the victim of male-on-male rape, with many people seeming to believe that if you're a male who's been raped, you must be gay, or be less of a man. In a prison, once it's known that someone's been raped once, it becomes much more likely that they'll be raped again, due to a combination of the stigma and other inmates believing that they must be easy marks, since someone else succeeded. Because of this, victims are very likely to fight back on at least their initial rapes, which adds a component of assault, with the corresponding extra damage to the victim.
The closest equivalent in 'forcing people to do things' would be something like forcing them to eat something that disgusts them -- and you'll find that people consider that to be very bad as well.
This reminds me of an idiot I knew once - one of those "I won't wear a seatbelt because I'd rather be thrown out of the car in a crash" people. When the state mandated driving with a seat belt, he took to pulling the belt out, putting it across himself, and then sitting on the buckle instead of actually buckling it in. That way any cops passing by would think he had his seat belt on.
Of course, he also then had to keep adjusting the belt every ten minutes or so, since vibration while driving would cause it to slowly shift out from under him.
Here in Florida, several years back, I got a ticket after having had my transmission redone. The cop told me I was doing 81; I told him that my speedometer had shown 71, and he asked me if I had new tires, had had transmission work, or anything like that. I told him I'd had the transmission redone, and he said that he'd still have to write me a ticket, but that I should go to a shop in Pensacola (forget the name of the shop now) that had a dynamometer and have my speedometer tested. If it really was that far off, the shop would give me a letter saying so, and if I took it to the judge, the ticket would be dropped.
I did, and it was -- even though my 71 was still six MPH over the limit where I was driving at the time - I'd been clocked on a big downhill, and 71 in a 65 zone wasn't something a ticket would normally be given out for, the judge said. Didn't have to pay any court costs or anything.
The cop also told me that the shop in question was where they got their own speedometers checked and adjusted, so they could certify that they were accurate when they did the "match speeds with the guy to see how fast he's going" thing.
So, yeah... there are fair and helpful cops around, if you're lucky and polite.
To explain more fully: I'd guess that you're buying the idea that "if the health plan covers contraception, and one of the employees gets contraception, that means that the employer is having to pay for contraception". Here's the thing: health care benefits are part of the employee's compensation. That money is no longer the employer's -- it's the employee's, and it's the employee's choice how to use it.
If that is the case, then why are Catholic employees being forced to pay for birth control coverage that they won't use? Shouldn't they have the choice to pick a plan that doesn't have birth control costs built in?
I'd agree that yes, they should have that choice. In point of fact, they do have that choice - at worst, they can refuse to participate in the employer's plan, and buy their own insurance. Of course, they might not be able to save money that way, due to the way insurers prefer to spread out risk by insuring groups rather than individuals and the tax advantages you mention below. Although, if a particular religious group really feels strongly about it, they could always form a co-op and negotiate with an insurance company to provide them as a group with insurance that doesn't feature the things they don't want. That wouldn't solve the tax issue, but it would solve the other.
Just because the health benefit portion of the employee's compensation isn't provided directly as money, that doesn't make it not the employee's. Allowing employers to arbitrarily restrict their employee's health plan because of their own religious views is, in essence, no different than allowing them to dictate how employees can spend their monetary compensation.
It would be simpler if employees were buying healthcare themselves rather than from their employer. Then this wouldn't be an issue. Unfortunately the tax code penalizes such behavior.
I'd agree with that. It ought to be possible to get a statement from your insurance company of how much you spent on your health insurance, and take a tax deduction for that. I don't see where it would be more complicated than, say, the way the mortgage interest deduction works right now.
Although, as noted above, it's not just the tax code that penalizes that -- insurance companies do as well, by not selling insurance to individuals at as favorable rates as they will to groups.
Since you don't specify, I assume that you're talking about requirements for employee health plans to pay for contraception. This in no way requires Catholics to violate the teachings of their religion.
To explain more fully: I'd guess that you're buying the idea that "if the health plan covers contraception, and one of the employees gets contraception, that means that the employer is having to pay for contraception". Here's the thing: health care benefits are part of the employee's compensation. That money is no longer the employer's -- it's the employee's, and it's the employee's choice how to use it.
Just because the health benefit portion of the employee's compensation isn't provided directly as money, that doesn't make it not the employee's. Allowing employers to arbitrarily restrict their employee's health plan because of their own religious views is, in essence, no different than allowing them to dictate how employees can spend their monetary compensation.
There is "Jew" the ethnicity, and "Jew" the religious appelation; although related, these are not the same.
To put it another way, this would be like saying that the fact that the Carpenters won't let you attend their family reunion because your father wasn't a Carpenter means they're trying to prevent you from practicing carpentry.
I'm sure that I remember reading about most trees being genetic mosaics more than ten years back. And I know for certain that I heard about a case of it happening in people at a conference on Neurofibromatosis more than ten years ago.
(Presentation at the conference had a bit about a family where several of the children had NF Type 1, even though neither of the parents did. NF1 is a genetically dominant mutation, but having two copies of the gene is lethal -- thus, if one parent has NF1, you expect that roughly half the children will... but if neither parent has it, the chance of a child having it should be very small. In this case, though, about half the children had NF1, even though tests said neither of the parents had the gene.
Eventually, it was discovered that part of the father's body had NF1 -- including the testes. Most of his body, however, did not have the gene. Thus, while tests using cells taken from other parts of his body showed him as not having NF1, for reproductive purposes, he did.
As I recall, at the time, the prevailing belief among the geneticists working on the disease was that neurofibromas - lumps on the nerves associated with NF1 - were themselves manifestations of cellular-level mutations. Essentially, when a nerve cell in the body mutated in such a way as to lose its working copy of the NF1 gene, a neurofibroma resulted. Not sure if that's still what's believed, though, since that was over a decade ago.)
EBITDA is short for "Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Depreciation, and Amortization". The profit that you're seeing referred to is after taking all of those things out.
If you'd like to be able to compare apples to apples, here's a list which has some average EBIDTA margins by industry.
Fiduciary duty is the duty to act in someone else's (in this case, the shareholders') best interest. The thing is, the law does not define what "best interest" is -- and that "best interest" does not have to be what the person on whose behalf you're acting wants. (Note that a lot of the legal theory under "fiduciary duty" comes from trusts, receivership, etc. -- places where the someone else's money is being placed into the actor's hands because that someone else is not considered competent to manage it themselves.)
It's quite easy to argue that growing the infrastructure *is* in the shareholders' best interests, since it will help to maintain and grow the business in the long term. Further, I'm willing to bet that one could easily persuade a judge that running the company into the ground in order to give the shareholders the maximum short-term profits is, in fact, the exact opposite of "fiduciary duty", even if it's what the shareholders want. It's just like, say, giving the twenty-one-year-old beneficiary of a trust all the money in the trust at once -- it might be what the beneficiary wants, but it's not necessarily what's in his/her best interest.
(Actually, the biggest traditional thing about "fiduciary duty" is that the thing being managed should be managed for the benefit of the "someone else", rather than for the benefit of the manager. Given the way CEOs, board members, etc. are compensating themselves these days, I'd say that's a much bigger violation of "fiduciary duty" than managing the business with long-term goals in mind could ever be.)
I can't speak for Israel, but regarding Switzerland, Swiss gun laws don't permit people to carry their guns around all the time, and don't allow carrying loaded weapons. Indeed, it's common for Swiss gun ranges to sell ammo, with the provision that the ammo must be used on-site before leaving. Thus, while gun ownership is high, someone walking into a liquor store to hold it up isn't going to find "half the customers" carrying weapons. Most likely none of them will be, and if anyone is, they won't have any ammo, which makes their weapon no better than a club.
I'll note further that Switzerland's rate of violent crime is about the same as that of Germany and Austria -- both of which have strict gun laws. Perhaps, then, it's not the widespread ownership of guns that keeps the violent crime rate low, but cultural factors of the region?
You might want to read that article yourself. There's nothing in there about the guns being made in tents, and it specifically states that the AK models made there are usually made from a mish-mash of AK parts from different suppliers... which means they're getting parts either from suppliers or from cast-off non-working guns and assembling guns from them. That's a far cry from making them "from scratch".
"Of course, having all these skills meant he never made much money".
Huh? How does B follow from A? My dad had the same skills -- and he spent 20 years in the Air Force, retired, worked construction for a few years, ran his own farm for a few, lost pretty much everything he had doing that... then moved back to the city, got a job as a school bus mechanic, rose up to be shop foreman there, and eventually retired again, this time with a house that's fully paid for, two retirement checks, some investment income, and plenty of savings.
Having a wide variety of skills doesn't prevent you from making money.
This, however, is only able to happen because of banks approving people who couldn't afford the loan. The bank is the business -- it's supposed to be the bank's job to be careful about whom they loan money. Upon the realization that the Fed would simply bail them out if they made too many bad loans, the big banks decided to take greater risks.
If the banks had to actually bear responsibility for their poor lending choices, you'd see it become much harder for people to get loans they can't actually afford. On the flip side, if the banks could no longer get bailouts or borrow money from the government at extremely low rates, they might return to paying decent interest rates on CDs, savings accounts, etc. As it stands, they don't need to compete to get *your* money when the Fed will give them money so easily.
We don't have artificial wombs yet, so if you clone 10 horses at once, you still need 10 different female horses... and there's a potential for differences there as well, since the prenatal environment of each clone won't be the same. Once the ten clones are born, they each have to be raised up and trained. There'll be differences introduced there as well. Cloning isn't like a copy machine. It's more like artificial twinning, with the additional complication that the twin may be implanted in a different mother, and may be much younger than the original.