To keep the costs from going crazy due to all the extra kids brought into the system that the taxes can't cover?
The birth rate in Europe is about 1.8 children per woman. The birth rate you need to replace all the people who die in the previous generation is 2.1 per woman.
Single payer healthcare does not cause people to have large numbers of children. In fact, the birth rate has dropped every place that has gotten greater access to medical care. Because the parents know the kids are likely to survive.
Funny - my premiums and out of pocket costs went UP thanks to Obamacare...
Yeah, it was a really dumb idea for Democrats to pass a half-ass Republican health insurance reform plan and call it a health care plan. But Obama thought by proposing Bob Dole's reform plan he'd get some Republican votes.
Now if Obamacare was actually single-payer, that concern might be important. But it isn't.
I'll beg to differ and state that California's economy is NOT due to some schools back then being free. More that their location being on the west coast and ample port space allowing Asia-Pacific imports to come in. Nice try though.
How, exactly, do you make the largest economy in the US by taking boxes off boats and sending those boxes to Utah? I really want you to try and explain this economic model.
Also, we're not just talking about today. We're talking about, say, 1970. When CA already had the largest economy in the US, and a large number of highly-educated people concentrated around UC Berkeley, Stanford, UC Davis, and a few other smaller state schools and started working for the research arms of large companies like Xerox.....and then founding their own companies.
Option 3 - If you can't afford to have kids, don't.
And if you take a moment to pull your head out of your ass, you'd realize that people don't want kids for entertainment value. Making it financially impossible makes people unhappy. Unhappy people does not result in a stable political system.
And, btw, those non-existent kids mean there's nobody available to care for your ass when it becomes ancient. Which means you have an extremely vested interest in other people having kids, even if you don't want them.
Option 4 - Workfare. Those getting government benefits (welfare, food stamps, etc) and are able-bodied, should have to work for it
Depending on the state, 65-85% of the people on government benefits already have a job. And a large percentage of those that don't have a job are disabled.
See, it turns out when companies pay people shit wages, they can't afford to live on their income and they get government benefits. Wal-Mart receives massive subsidies in the form of food stamps for their employees. But they've done an excellent job convincing people as pliable as you that it's the problem of the workers, not the companies paying 1/2 the real wages they paid in 1965.
The biggest issue with such is that there would need to be ways to insure that people don't experience the issues that are prevalent in other socialized health care systems - i.e. waiting, govt doesn't want to pay for something? they let you die, etc
Ok, show that actually happening.
The single-payer systems do not just let people die. But our private insurance companies do. And the only "waiting" is for procedures that can wait - you save a ton of money if the OR isn't left empty just in case someone wanted a hip replacement TODAY.
Lastly your option 1 - part of the issue here is your violent correction. Luckily for us, most liberals/socialists are anti-gun...as such, don't have many weapons
Awwww.....the redneck thinks revolutions never happen without people already owning massive weapon stockpiles. How cute!!
Unfortunately for your naivete, that has never been the case in all of recorded history. The state and it's pets...er...allies such as yourself were always far more heavily armed.
Let's see them come to Texas and assault a conservative on the streets
Already happened. You tough guys fled back to Cracker Barrel.
There's these people called "Governors". They get to veto a state budget, so they exert significant influence over what happens in that budget.
Also, California has a robust proposition system where the voters themselves get to "pass laws". Proposition 13 crippled the state's ability to raise property taxes, creating a situation where spending cuts had to be made, even if they were not a good idea in the long run.
For example, male and female are a biological reality, yet there is a large anti-science political and social movement which teaches that they are just fluid social constructs. What do you do about that?
You teach people that the biological structures involved in reproduction are not created by the same genes that create the brain structures involved in gender. And since gene copying and expression is not completely accurate, sometimes those two don't match.
It's also the reason you can have people who have all the physical structures and brain structures of a woman, yet they are XY. The genes on their Y chromosome aren't working. Or XXY, or XYY, or XXYY or X_. YY can also happen, but that's fatal so it results in miscarriage.
You also teach them that life is a rather complicated system, mostly built around gradients. Such as the fact that there's no hard line between someone who is "tall" and someone who is "short".
What you don't do is be a passive-aggressive shithead pretending to pose questions when you find out your worldview did not encompass all of the complexity of our world.
Considering that a lot are owned by the same parent corporations I'd say it's very possible.
In the list of media organizations that poster provided, four of the twelve are owned by the same corporation: NBC and MSNBC are owned by one company, FOX and the Wall Street Journal are owned by a different company.
That's not a lot of overlap, and that poster's list is not at all exhaustive. And several of those organizations aren't even based in the US, so they're not particularly interested in serving the US government.
Give everyone an equal chance please, not equal outcomes.
Equal chance is not possible.
I'm well-paid enough that my wife is a stay-at-home parent. My kids will probably never go hungry. They'll have a stable place to live, probably never move, and have two parents very involved in their education.
That means my kids do not have "an equal chance". They have a far better chance than parents who are both working multiple jobs, have to move more frequently because they rent, sometimes can't feed the kids properly, and don't have time to sit down and do homework with the kids because they've got to get to job #3.
My kids will also have a worse chance than someone significantly more wealthy than me, because their parents will be paying for an elite private school, hiring tutors as necessary, and probably have better connections that can be leveraged to boost the kid's entry into the workforce. And have a few million to loan to to their kid to help them start out (Hi Donald Trump).
So no, we can't do the Randian fantasy world, because it's a fantasy world.
That also doesn't mean we have to be stupid about how we address inequality. Rent control only works as a very short-term solution. You fix high rents with things like zoning that causes higher density construction. 40% of the buildings in Manhattan could not be built today because they're too dense for current zoning laws - they're too tall or have too many apartments. Which means they aren't putting up new dense buildings and the rent is too damn high.
Your government cant even figure out that when they legislated that employers will provide health care to all full time (over 32 hours a week) workers, that everyone just got their hours cut.
The assumption was businesses would realize that having more part time workers costs a hell of a lot more money due to things like training and supervising more people. Unfortunately, businesses are generally dumb and don't realize what something costs unless the connection can be spotted by a 6-year-old.
But that's what we get for passing the Republican health care reform plan. ("Obamacare" is the plan created by the Heritage Foundation for Bob Dole to offer as an alternative to Bill Clinton's health care reform, with a few minor tweaks like where the subsidies cut off.)
Oil was formed many hundreds of millions of years ago, mostly from dead animal and plant life in shallow seas. Trees did not exist yet.
Around 300 millions years ago, some plants evolved the ability to produce a protein called lignin. Lignin is the primary structural component of wood. That allowed those plants to get taller than their neighbors and eventually evolve into trees.
At the time, there was nothing on the planet that could digest lignin. So, tree dies and falls over and it just sits there. It can't rot because nothing can eat it. And it did not help that the first trees had very shallow root systems, so a lot of them fell over. Eventually the dead trunks get buried by sediment and other tree trunks, get compressed into peat, which then got further buried and heated and compressed into coal.
It took about 60 million years for bacteria and fungi to appear that could eat lignin. So a whole lot of trees got piled up before any could rot.
Btw, there are still no animals that can digest lignin. Termites and carpenter ants have a species of fungi in their gut that digests lignin for them.
Planting trees is a no brainier tho. Option 1) let sun's heat be absorbed by ground warm things up. Option 2) let it be converted by solar panels, natural (leaves) or man-made, to drive other processes than heating things up. It's not all about carbon
It's all about carbon.
The sunlight hitting a leaf is still an energy input. The sugars made by the tree will be consumed and result in heat. It's similar with the solar panels - the electricity will be used to do something, and that process will release heat.
The released heat is not 100% of the energy input from sunlight, but 100% of the energy input from sunlight on dirt isn't released as heat either.
Property tax: poor person lives in cheap house, pays little in property taxes (directly or via rent). Rich person lives in expensive mansion, pays lots in property taxes.
Sales tax: poor person buys a lawnmower, pays sales tax. Rich person hires a lawn service, directly pays $0 in sales tax. The sales tax for the service's much more expensive lawnmower is spread over all of their customers, resulting in less sales tax per customer.
The poor and middle class tend to buy goods, which are subject to sales tax. The wealthy tend to buy services, which are not subject to sales taxes. Sales tax for the goods that are bought by those services is spread over more people, resulting in an overall lower sales tax rate.
USF was a fee that was only collected by telecoms who provided qualified buildouts to rural areas.
Which is all telecoms in the US.
And while it may have indeed added up to your claimed numbers, it represented a fraction of overall build costs, and was only collected from subscribers.
Subscribers who overwhelmingly did not live in those rural areas - that was the point, for the people with existing phone service to subsidize the installation and maintenance of phone service for other people.
Especially from all the people who got a monthly charge and didn't have, and couldn't get the service.
There are exactly zero people in this situation.
The ISP got government subsidies to build out their network. These subsidies were available to anyone, they were not a specific program for Chattanooga. Further, the spending from those subsidies is done. The only people paying bills now are subscribers. And unlike the USF, those subscribers are not subsidizing service for others.
It cost $300 million to build EPB's fiber network. Of that, $111 million, almost half, came from taxpayers outside of Chattanooga - people who can't get the service, but are required to pay for it.
Wow, rebuilding the network every year sure is expensive!!
Oh wait....that's not what's going on....and those ebil tax thefts you describe were subsidies for broadband service available to anyone that wanted to apply for them. It wasn't some terrible plot by Chattanooga that only could benefit Chattanooga.
Well yeah it damn well better be aftee taxpayers already paid for the vast majority of the expense, building the fiber network.
So I have some bad news. There's this thing called the Interstate Highway system.....
Little experiment for those at home: Look up the Kelly Blue Book value for a 5-year-old C-class Mercedes, and a 5-year-old Toyota Camry. If you don't want to look, you'll find out the Toyota costs more.
You're doing well and driving a paid-off Mercedes. And then shit hits the fan. Selling the Mercedes is a bad idea because resale value on luxury cars is terrible. Drive it into the ground, because it will last quite a few more years without maintenance and you've already paid it off.
Even though people like this poster will insist you must be committing welfare fraud because you are driving what was once an expensive car.
This is totally different from the far more prevalent welfare abuse, where recipients don't actually try to look for work as they are supposed to under the law, content to live a meaningless existence with the meager assistance that welfare provides.
This quote demonstrates just how dumb the various plans by Democrats to compromise on an issue so it will be "off the table" forever.
Bill Clinton and the Republicans in Congress ended Welfare. Yet you still believe it exists more than 20 years after it ended.
It was replaced with a program called "TANF". It has a lifetime limit of 5 years. So no, it's not possible to live a meaningless existence with the meager assistance that welfare provides. Because the money gets cut off. Even if you're unlucky enough to hit a "rough patch" more than once in your life. Or want to get a degree so you can do the whole "pull up by your bootstraps" thing. That typically takes more than 5 years since usually the person has to also work in order to support themselves because it turns out welfare never was much money.
But don't worry, soon there will be another time that a compromise with Republicans will take an issue off the table forever. Like Obamacare.
"The kids" who can't afford children or houses think they are entitled to those things
Nope. They think it was possible for us, and not possible for them.
This is yet another example of refusing to listen to their life experience.
The government gives tons of benefits for children, they get free insurance, free food, free school, and even straight up cash via tax deductions for anyone who is actually poor.
First, the vast majority of that is only available in most states if you are extremely poor. We're not talking about extremely poor. We're talking about the people who are "doing everything right", but only make $25-50k/year in a place it costs $20-40k/year to live.
Second, that money is actually a tiny fraction of the cost of raising a child.
Again, you are not interested in their lived experience.
Not to mention purchasing a condo is not much more than paying rent for an apartment.
First, down payments exist. Second, apartments are much more easily obtained by multiple people, aka roommates. Third, thanks to the efforts of previous generations, zoning laws greatly limit the supply of condos outside hyper-dense cities like New York City. And condos there are generally built as "luxury condos" that are waaaaaaaaaay out of their price range.
"The kids" choose not to study in school
We graduate 1.5 STEM students from college for every STEM job opening. Try again.
then after school choose to work less hours and fill that time with TV, Games, or Drinking
Actually, bars are dying. The industry is getting hit very hard times because "the kids" aren't going to them nearly as much as you did when you were young.
See, once again you are attempting to insert your lived experience into their lives. It's not the same.
Then they choose to wear overpriced brand name clothes
Oh please wander into the avocado toast stupidity......
go out to restaurants to get their food prepared for them every day
Nope. Just like bars, the restaurant industry is having difficulty attracting younger customers like they did when you were young. Because they can't afford to eat out like you did.
Tell me why I know single moms who work as waitresses at restaurants that can take care of 5 kids with no help from the dads but for some reason the rest of "the kids" can't seem to afford basic housing?
Because 1) you actually know nothing about their finances, 2) they actually get massive help from relatives/friends in "raising" those kids, and 3) those kids aren't being raised all that well beyond "not starving to death". They'll grow up with poor economic prospects due to the lack of support compared to the kids of the more affluent, and then you'll rant about how terrible they are for doing things they are not actually doing.
It's obviously because at some point and probably throughout their life they made the choices for immediate gratification over planning for their future.
See above comment about STEM degrees. That's the right thing to do, isn't it? Companies and the media are claiming there is a massive shortage of STEM workers, so clearly it's going to be in demand when they graduate in 4-8 years (gotta deal with the people going part-time too). So when they get out and hit that 1.5 graduates-per-opening problem, it's totally their fault for choosing the immediate gratification of spending 4-8 years getting a degree that is supposed to be very valuable.
Again, you have zero interest in their actual lived experience. Because if you actually saw it, you'd have to re-evaluate your worldview. And that's far too scary.
But you know what's scarier? What they are going to do to you for making it worse, old man.
Or you could actually learn what's going on. You're choice.
The problem is that everyone wants something for nothing.
No, the problem is people who recite trite phrases instead of actually looking around them.
Instead, they decide what they want the result to be (hence the trite phrase) and only look at the things around them that confirm that result.
For example, those of us who want single-payer medical care don't want "something for nothing". We believe medical care is so important that we all should all get it, and pay for it via taxes. Just like we all pay for the military, firefighters, police, roads and so on. As an added bonus, it costs less money than our current system.
How do you suppose that would translate at the college level if college were determined to be "free"?
We don't need to suppose. California already did it. For about 100 years, University of California and Cal-State schools were free for in-state students. Eventually they added some "fees", but that cost about 1 to 2 months of minimum-wage 40-hours-per-week work.
All it got California was the largest economy in the US, and created Silicon Valley. Not a bad deal.
It ended when Anti-tax Republicanism swept over the state. Now that the Boomers had their degrees, it was terrible that these freeloaders were getting free education. And, far more importantly, they decided that "taxation is theft!!!" was their new motto.
Be smart about it. Use community college (or high school) to get GE requirements done cheaply. Get a job to help offset some of the cost, don't just use the college loans to pay for 100% the cost. Use credit cards wisely and don't spend money you don't have. Don't eat out. Ramen noodles and PB&J are your friends.
And when they do all that and still look to a future of never affording a house or never being able to afford kids? Now what?
Fundamentally, the problem is productivity became decoupled from wages around 1978. Which means real wages have either stayed flat or gone far down for the vast majority of people for a very long time. Which results in "the American Dream" being out of reach of more people every year thanks to inflation. We're approaching a tipping point where something will be done about that.
Option 1, which you appear to support, is to blame the people getting screwed over by this basic economic fact and do nothing. Which will result in more people falling behind, more anger, more resentment, and eventually a violent correction. If you're lucky, you'll be able to push off the violence until after you've died of natural causes.
Option 2, which I support, is to start using the only peaceful tool available to make that correction: the government. Which means using the horrors of socialism to correct the worst problems and work to tip the economic playing field back towards the workers. You'll still be rich, just like people can still be rich in Europe. Just slightly less so. In return, your waitstaff will be able to afford to live on a 40-hour-per-week job instead of breaking out the guillotines.
"The kids" are looking at a future where it's financially impossible to ever own a home. The "American Dream" you so love and enjoyed is not at all possible. They're also not able to afford minor things like "children".
At this point, you will likely launch into an argument about majoring in gender studies, utterly unaware that even STEM majors can't find jobs. We graduate 1.5 STEM majors for every entry-level STEM job opening. Some simple math shows that's a problem for people who got the "right" kind of degree.
The fact is productivity and wages became decoupled in about 1978. That has resulted in massive wealth being built by a very small few, and the vast majority of people not benefiting from economic growth. That is not sustainable. It's going to be corrected. We can either correct that intelligently, or we can follow your plan of pretending that it doesn't exist until it is corrected through violence. And before you gaze longingly at violence as your desired result, you should remember you are massively outnumbered.
Those facts are not facts you like. So you pretend they don't exist. Displaying far more ignorance than those you attack.
Gotta love the people talking about life experience unable to actually listen to the life experience of those under discussion.
It was easy to see capitalism as good when it afforded most people a good life. Now, it doesn't look like "the kids" will be able to ever buy a house or afford children. That life experience is incredibly relevant to this discussion, yet you are unwilling to look at it.
Maybe they should not have racked up $200k for a degree in Transgender Studies.
We graduate 1.5 people with bachelor's degrees in STEM fields for every entry-level STEM job opening. That means a whole lot of people did "the right thing" as you define it, and got a "useful" degree. They still can't get a job in that field, thanks to basic math.
So no, it's not some strange-sounding major that is the problem. But that fantasy is very comforting when you want to avoid looking at what's broken.
Even though there's no firefighting bombs right now, there's already a ton of expertise with both thermobaric weapons (which require a very precise fuel/air mixture to work) and past designs for spreading chemical/biological agents, which also have dispersion requirements similar to retardants.
The difference is you're either not sending any soldiers into the area before dropping those bombs.
The firefighting aircraft frequently drop retardant or water on firefighters. Even "close air support" bombing is much further from the soldiers than firefighting.
You also completely ignore the issue of duds and turn around time when you attempt to talk about the technological problems.
I still disagree on payloads -- existing bomber designs have huge payloads, bigger than DC-10 tankers.
You're mistaking weight for volume. Bombs are relatively dense, so the aircraft can carry a heavy weight. That doesn't directly translate into carrying the same weight in firefighting equipment, even if it is bomb-shaped, because the density of the payload is much lower.
To put it another way, a B-52 can carry the weight of a MOAB. But MOABs are dropped from C-130s because it won't fit in a B-52.
I suspect the Air Force is pretty good at re-arming bombers and turning them back out again.
Last time I knew anything about it, it was expected that an air crew would do one bombing mission per day. 24 hours turn-around with 5 aircraft isn't a large boon to firefighting.
As such, these trees standing there are no different than drying timber before it is turned into lumber.
Only if you harvest it soon after it dies, and you can't really do that outside of a managed timber operation since you won't know when it died. As time passes and the ex-tree begins rotting, the wood will become weaker. Which makes it useless for structural purposes.
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To keep the costs from going crazy due to all the extra kids brought into the system that the taxes can't cover?
The birth rate in Europe is about 1.8 children per woman. The birth rate you need to replace all the people who die in the previous generation is 2.1 per woman.
Single payer healthcare does not cause people to have large numbers of children. In fact, the birth rate has dropped every place that has gotten greater access to medical care. Because the parents know the kids are likely to survive.
Funny - my premiums and out of pocket costs went UP thanks to Obamacare...
Yeah, it was a really dumb idea for Democrats to pass a half-ass Republican health insurance reform plan and call it a health care plan. But Obama thought by proposing Bob Dole's reform plan he'd get some Republican votes.
Now if Obamacare was actually single-payer, that concern might be important. But it isn't.
I'll beg to differ and state that California's economy is NOT due to some schools back then being free. More that their location being on the west coast and ample port space allowing Asia-Pacific imports to come in. Nice try though.
How, exactly, do you make the largest economy in the US by taking boxes off boats and sending those boxes to Utah? I really want you to try and explain this economic model.
Also, we're not just talking about today. We're talking about, say, 1970. When CA already had the largest economy in the US, and a large number of highly-educated people concentrated around UC Berkeley, Stanford, UC Davis, and a few other smaller state schools and started working for the research arms of large companies like Xerox.....and then founding their own companies.
Option 3 - If you can't afford to have kids, don't.
And if you take a moment to pull your head out of your ass, you'd realize that people don't want kids for entertainment value. Making it financially impossible makes people unhappy. Unhappy people does not result in a stable political system.
And, btw, those non-existent kids mean there's nobody available to care for your ass when it becomes ancient. Which means you have an extremely vested interest in other people having kids, even if you don't want them.
Option 4 - Workfare. Those getting government benefits (welfare, food stamps, etc) and are able-bodied, should have to work for it
Depending on the state, 65-85% of the people on government benefits already have a job. And a large percentage of those that don't have a job are disabled.
See, it turns out when companies pay people shit wages, they can't afford to live on their income and they get government benefits. Wal-Mart receives massive subsidies in the form of food stamps for their employees. But they've done an excellent job convincing people as pliable as you that it's the problem of the workers, not the companies paying 1/2 the real wages they paid in 1965.
The biggest issue with such is that there would need to be ways to insure that people don't experience the issues that are prevalent in other socialized health care systems - i.e. waiting, govt doesn't want to pay for something? they let you die, etc
Ok, show that actually happening.
The single-payer systems do not just let people die. But our private insurance companies do. And the only "waiting" is for procedures that can wait - you save a ton of money if the OR isn't left empty just in case someone wanted a hip replacement TODAY.
Lastly your option 1 - part of the issue here is your violent correction. Luckily for us, most liberals/socialists are anti-gun...as such, don't have many weapons
Awwww.....the redneck thinks revolutions never happen without people already owning massive weapon stockpiles. How cute!!
Unfortunately for your naivete, that has never been the case in all of recorded history. The state and it's pets...er...allies such as yourself were always far more heavily armed.
Let's see them come to Texas and assault a conservative on the streets
Already happened. You tough guys fled back to Cracker Barrel.
If the tree rots, you release all the carbon. You want a tree that can't rot for sequestration.
Isn't that shifting the goal posts a bit? I'm not sure how well we could digest most of what we eat without our gut bacteria.
We can digest everything we normally eat except cellulose. Which our gut bacteria do not digest either.
Anyway, it was intended to be an interesting side-note - that there is this massive food source and there's still almost nothing that can eat it.
Your example of California is ridiculous.
The State legislature
There's these people called "Governors". They get to veto a state budget, so they exert significant influence over what happens in that budget.
Also, California has a robust proposition system where the voters themselves get to "pass laws". Proposition 13 crippled the state's ability to raise property taxes, creating a situation where spending cuts had to be made, even if they were not a good idea in the long run.
For example, male and female are a biological reality, yet there is a large anti-science political and social movement which teaches that they are just fluid social constructs. What do you do about that?
You teach people that the biological structures involved in reproduction are not created by the same genes that create the brain structures involved in gender. And since gene copying and expression is not completely accurate, sometimes those two don't match.
It's also the reason you can have people who have all the physical structures and brain structures of a woman, yet they are XY. The genes on their Y chromosome aren't working. Or XXY, or XYY, or XXYY or X_. YY can also happen, but that's fatal so it results in miscarriage.
You also teach them that life is a rather complicated system, mostly built around gradients. Such as the fact that there's no hard line between someone who is "tall" and someone who is "short".
What you don't do is be a passive-aggressive shithead pretending to pose questions when you find out your worldview did not encompass all of the complexity of our world.
Considering that a lot are owned by the same parent corporations I'd say it's very possible.
In the list of media organizations that poster provided, four of the twelve are owned by the same corporation: NBC and MSNBC are owned by one company, FOX and the Wall Street Journal are owned by a different company.
That's not a lot of overlap, and that poster's list is not at all exhaustive. And several of those organizations aren't even based in the US, so they're not particularly interested in serving the US government.
Give everyone an equal chance please, not equal outcomes.
Equal chance is not possible.
I'm well-paid enough that my wife is a stay-at-home parent. My kids will probably never go hungry. They'll have a stable place to live, probably never move, and have two parents very involved in their education.
That means my kids do not have "an equal chance". They have a far better chance than parents who are both working multiple jobs, have to move more frequently because they rent, sometimes can't feed the kids properly, and don't have time to sit down and do homework with the kids because they've got to get to job #3.
My kids will also have a worse chance than someone significantly more wealthy than me, because their parents will be paying for an elite private school, hiring tutors as necessary, and probably have better connections that can be leveraged to boost the kid's entry into the workforce. And have a few million to loan to to their kid to help them start out (Hi Donald Trump).
So no, we can't do the Randian fantasy world, because it's a fantasy world.
That also doesn't mean we have to be stupid about how we address inequality. Rent control only works as a very short-term solution. You fix high rents with things like zoning that causes higher density construction. 40% of the buildings in Manhattan could not be built today because they're too dense for current zoning laws - they're too tall or have too many apartments. Which means they aren't putting up new dense buildings and the rent is too damn high.
Your government cant even figure out that when they legislated that employers will provide health care to all full time (over 32 hours a week) workers, that everyone just got their hours cut.
The assumption was businesses would realize that having more part time workers costs a hell of a lot more money due to things like training and supervising more people. Unfortunately, businesses are generally dumb and don't realize what something costs unless the connection can be spotted by a 6-year-old.
But that's what we get for passing the Republican health care reform plan. ("Obamacare" is the plan created by the Heritage Foundation for Bob Dole to offer as an alternative to Bill Clinton's health care reform, with a few minor tweaks like where the subsidies cut off.)
You're confusing a few things.
Oil was formed many hundreds of millions of years ago, mostly from dead animal and plant life in shallow seas. Trees did not exist yet.
Around 300 millions years ago, some plants evolved the ability to produce a protein called lignin. Lignin is the primary structural component of wood. That allowed those plants to get taller than their neighbors and eventually evolve into trees.
At the time, there was nothing on the planet that could digest lignin. So, tree dies and falls over and it just sits there. It can't rot because nothing can eat it. And it did not help that the first trees had very shallow root systems, so a lot of them fell over. Eventually the dead trunks get buried by sediment and other tree trunks, get compressed into peat, which then got further buried and heated and compressed into coal.
It took about 60 million years for bacteria and fungi to appear that could eat lignin. So a whole lot of trees got piled up before any could rot.
Btw, there are still no animals that can digest lignin. Termites and carpenter ants have a species of fungi in their gut that digests lignin for them.
Planting trees is a no brainier tho. Option 1) let sun's heat be absorbed by ground warm things up. Option 2) let it be converted by solar panels, natural (leaves) or man-made, to drive other processes than heating things up. It's not all about carbon
It's all about carbon.
The sunlight hitting a leaf is still an energy input. The sugars made by the tree will be consumed and result in heat. It's similar with the solar panels - the electricity will be used to do something, and that process will release heat.
The released heat is not 100% of the energy input from sunlight, but 100% of the energy input from sunlight on dirt isn't released as heat either.
They are the single most "regressive" tax we have
No, sales taxes are far more regressive.
Property tax: poor person lives in cheap house, pays little in property taxes (directly or via rent). Rich person lives in expensive mansion, pays lots in property taxes.
Sales tax: poor person buys a lawnmower, pays sales tax. Rich person hires a lawn service, directly pays $0 in sales tax. The sales tax for the service's much more expensive lawnmower is spread over all of their customers, resulting in less sales tax per customer.
The poor and middle class tend to buy goods, which are subject to sales tax. The wealthy tend to buy services, which are not subject to sales taxes. Sales tax for the goods that are bought by those services is spread over more people, resulting in an overall lower sales tax rate.
The same way you use the Interstates thousands of miles away from you: you don’t.
USF was a fee that was only collected by telecoms who provided qualified buildouts to rural areas.
Which is all telecoms in the US.
And while it may have indeed added up to your claimed numbers, it represented a fraction of overall build costs, and was only collected from subscribers.
Subscribers who overwhelmingly did not live in those rural areas - that was the point, for the people with existing phone service to subsidize the installation and maintenance of phone service for other people.
Especially from all the people who got a monthly charge and didn't have, and couldn't get the service.
There are exactly zero people in this situation.
The ISP got government subsidies to build out their network. These subsidies were available to anyone, they were not a specific program for Chattanooga. Further, the spending from those subsidies is done. The only people paying bills now are subscribers. And unlike the USF, those subscribers are not subsidizing service for others.
It cost $300 million to build EPB's fiber network.
Of that, $111 million, almost half, came from taxpayers outside of Chattanooga - people who can't get the service, but are required to pay for it.
Wow, rebuilding the network every year sure is expensive!!
Oh wait....that's not what's going on....and those ebil tax thefts you describe were subsidies for broadband service available to anyone that wanted to apply for them. It wasn't some terrible plot by Chattanooga that only could benefit Chattanooga.
Well yeah it damn well better be aftee taxpayers already paid for the vast majority of the expense, building the fiber network.
So I have some bad news. There's this thing called the Interstate Highway system.....
The rest of the country (at least the parts that Made America Great Again) have record unemployment.
Actually, rural America has a far higher poverty rate, food-stamp rate and use of TANF than those terrible coastal areas.
You're welcome for all the money we send you, by the way. Hope you guys use it well instead of blowing it on red hats.
Little experiment for those at home: Look up the Kelly Blue Book value for a 5-year-old C-class Mercedes, and a 5-year-old Toyota Camry. If you don't want to look, you'll find out the Toyota costs more.
You're doing well and driving a paid-off Mercedes. And then shit hits the fan. Selling the Mercedes is a bad idea because resale value on luxury cars is terrible. Drive it into the ground, because it will last quite a few more years without maintenance and you've already paid it off.
Even though people like this poster will insist you must be committing welfare fraud because you are driving what was once an expensive car.
This is totally different from the far more prevalent welfare abuse, where recipients don't actually try to look for work as they are supposed to under the law, content to live a meaningless existence with the meager assistance that welfare provides.
This quote demonstrates just how dumb the various plans by Democrats to compromise on an issue so it will be "off the table" forever.
Bill Clinton and the Republicans in Congress ended Welfare. Yet you still believe it exists more than 20 years after it ended.
It was replaced with a program called "TANF". It has a lifetime limit of 5 years. So no, it's not possible to live a meaningless existence with the meager assistance that welfare provides. Because the money gets cut off. Even if you're unlucky enough to hit a "rough patch" more than once in your life. Or want to get a degree so you can do the whole "pull up by your bootstraps" thing. That typically takes more than 5 years since usually the person has to also work in order to support themselves because it turns out welfare never was much money.
But don't worry, soon there will be another time that a compromise with Republicans will take an issue off the table forever. Like Obamacare.
Water is dense.
:facepalm:
What's the density of steel? Is it just a wee bit more dense than water? 'Cause steel is a large percentage of the weight of a bomb.
This could work out to be something as simple as water-filled polymer bombs that burst on impact.
Sweet! That 2 square feet of ground now has retardant on it. Now, how about the surrounding 500 acres?
Generally I think you're naysaying this for reasons we don't even know for sure would be a problem
You just implied that water is somewhat close to the density of steel. You can stop pretending you've got insight now.
"The kids" who can't afford children or houses think they are entitled to those things
Nope. They think it was possible for us, and not possible for them.
This is yet another example of refusing to listen to their life experience.
The government gives tons of benefits for children, they get free insurance, free food, free school, and even straight up cash via tax deductions for anyone who is actually poor.
First, the vast majority of that is only available in most states if you are extremely poor. We're not talking about extremely poor. We're talking about the people who are "doing everything right", but only make $25-50k/year in a place it costs $20-40k/year to live.
Second, that money is actually a tiny fraction of the cost of raising a child.
Again, you are not interested in their lived experience.
Not to mention purchasing a condo is not much more than paying rent for an apartment.
First, down payments exist.
Second, apartments are much more easily obtained by multiple people, aka roommates.
Third, thanks to the efforts of previous generations, zoning laws greatly limit the supply of condos outside hyper-dense cities like New York City. And condos there are generally built as "luxury condos" that are waaaaaaaaaay out of their price range.
"The kids" choose not to study in school
We graduate 1.5 STEM students from college for every STEM job opening. Try again.
then after school choose to work less hours and fill that time with TV, Games, or Drinking
Actually, bars are dying. The industry is getting hit very hard times because "the kids" aren't going to them nearly as much as you did when you were young.
See, once again you are attempting to insert your lived experience into their lives. It's not the same.
Then they choose to wear overpriced brand name clothes
Oh please wander into the avocado toast stupidity......
go out to restaurants to get their food prepared for them every day
Nope. Just like bars, the restaurant industry is having difficulty attracting younger customers like they did when you were young. Because they can't afford to eat out like you did.
Tell me why I know single moms who work as waitresses at restaurants that can take care of 5 kids with no help from the dads but for some reason the rest of "the kids" can't seem to afford basic housing?
Because 1) you actually know nothing about their finances, 2) they actually get massive help from relatives/friends in "raising" those kids, and 3) those kids aren't being raised all that well beyond "not starving to death". They'll grow up with poor economic prospects due to the lack of support compared to the kids of the more affluent, and then you'll rant about how terrible they are for doing things they are not actually doing.
It's obviously because at some point and probably throughout their life they made the choices for immediate gratification over planning for their future.
See above comment about STEM degrees. That's the right thing to do, isn't it? Companies and the media are claiming there is a massive shortage of STEM workers, so clearly it's going to be in demand when they graduate in 4-8 years (gotta deal with the people going part-time too). So when they get out and hit that 1.5 graduates-per-opening problem, it's totally their fault for choosing the immediate gratification of spending 4-8 years getting a degree that is supposed to be very valuable.
Again, you have zero interest in their actual lived experience. Because if you actually saw it, you'd have to re-evaluate your worldview. And that's far too scary.
But you know what's scarier? What they are going to do to you for making it worse, old man.
Or you could actually learn what's going on. You're choice.
The problem is that everyone wants something for nothing.
No, the problem is people who recite trite phrases instead of actually looking around them.
Instead, they decide what they want the result to be (hence the trite phrase) and only look at the things around them that confirm that result.
For example, those of us who want single-payer medical care don't want "something for nothing". We believe medical care is so important that we all should all get it, and pay for it via taxes. Just like we all pay for the military, firefighters, police, roads and so on. As an added bonus, it costs less money than our current system.
How do you suppose that would translate at the college level if college were determined to be "free"?
We don't need to suppose. California already did it. For about 100 years, University of California and Cal-State schools were free for in-state students. Eventually they added some "fees", but that cost about 1 to 2 months of minimum-wage 40-hours-per-week work.
All it got California was the largest economy in the US, and created Silicon Valley. Not a bad deal.
It ended when Anti-tax Republicanism swept over the state. Now that the Boomers had their degrees, it was terrible that these freeloaders were getting free education. And, far more importantly, they decided that "taxation is theft!!!" was their new motto.
Be smart about it. Use community college (or high school) to get GE requirements done cheaply. Get a job to help offset some of the cost, don't just use the college loans to pay for 100% the cost. Use credit cards wisely and don't spend money you don't have. Don't eat out. Ramen noodles and PB&J are your friends.
And when they do all that and still look to a future of never affording a house or never being able to afford kids? Now what?
Fundamentally, the problem is productivity became decoupled from wages around 1978. Which means real wages have either stayed flat or gone far down for the vast majority of people for a very long time. Which results in "the American Dream" being out of reach of more people every year thanks to inflation. We're approaching a tipping point where something will be done about that.
Option 1, which you appear to support, is to blame the people getting screwed over by this basic economic fact and do nothing. Which will result in more people falling behind, more anger, more resentment, and eventually a violent correction. If you're lucky, you'll be able to push off the violence until after you've died of natural causes.
Option 2, which I support, is to start using the only peaceful tool available to make that correction: the government. Which means using the horrors of socialism to correct the worst problems and work to tip the economic playing field back towards the workers. You'll still be rich, just like people can still be rich in Europe. Just slightly less so. In return, your waitstaff will be able to afford to live on a 40-hour-per-week job instead of breaking out the guillotines.
"The kids" are looking at a future where it's financially impossible to ever own a home. The "American Dream" you so love and enjoyed is not at all possible. They're also not able to afford minor things like "children".
At this point, you will likely launch into an argument about majoring in gender studies, utterly unaware that even STEM majors can't find jobs. We graduate 1.5 STEM majors for every entry-level STEM job opening. Some simple math shows that's a problem for people who got the "right" kind of degree.
The fact is productivity and wages became decoupled in about 1978. That has resulted in massive wealth being built by a very small few, and the vast majority of people not benefiting from economic growth. That is not sustainable. It's going to be corrected. We can either correct that intelligently, or we can follow your plan of pretending that it doesn't exist until it is corrected through violence. And before you gaze longingly at violence as your desired result, you should remember you are massively outnumbered.
Those facts are not facts you like. So you pretend they don't exist. Displaying far more ignorance than those you attack.
Gotta love the people talking about life experience unable to actually listen to the life experience of those under discussion.
It was easy to see capitalism as good when it afforded most people a good life. Now, it doesn't look like "the kids" will be able to ever buy a house or afford children. That life experience is incredibly relevant to this discussion, yet you are unwilling to look at it.
Socialism has never polled this well before. So it's not that same as when you were young.
Maybe they should not have racked up $200k for a degree in Transgender Studies.
We graduate 1.5 people with bachelor's degrees in STEM fields for every entry-level STEM job opening. That means a whole lot of people did "the right thing" as you define it, and got a "useful" degree. They still can't get a job in that field, thanks to basic math.
So no, it's not some strange-sounding major that is the problem. But that fantasy is very comforting when you want to avoid looking at what's broken.
Even though there's no firefighting bombs right now, there's already a ton of expertise with both thermobaric weapons (which require a very precise fuel/air mixture to work) and past designs for spreading chemical/biological agents, which also have dispersion requirements similar to retardants.
The difference is you're either not sending any soldiers into the area before dropping those bombs.
The firefighting aircraft frequently drop retardant or water on firefighters. Even "close air support" bombing is much further from the soldiers than firefighting.
You also completely ignore the issue of duds and turn around time when you attempt to talk about the technological problems.
I still disagree on payloads -- existing bomber designs have huge payloads, bigger than DC-10 tankers.
You're mistaking weight for volume. Bombs are relatively dense, so the aircraft can carry a heavy weight. That doesn't directly translate into carrying the same weight in firefighting equipment, even if it is bomb-shaped, because the density of the payload is much lower.
To put it another way, a B-52 can carry the weight of a MOAB. But MOABs are dropped from C-130s because it won't fit in a B-52.
I suspect the Air Force is pretty good at re-arming bombers and turning them back out again.
Last time I knew anything about it, it was expected that an air crew would do one bombing mission per day. 24 hours turn-around with 5 aircraft isn't a large boon to firefighting.
As such, these trees standing there are no different than drying timber before it is turned into lumber.
Only if you harvest it soon after it dies, and you can't really do that outside of a managed timber operation since you won't know when it died. As time passes and the ex-tree begins rotting, the wood will become weaker. Which makes it useless for structural purposes.