Anyone who knows anything won't be scared by this. The problem the NSA has is the EXACT same problem as the STAZI or whatever secret police anywhere has had, mass surveillance doesn't work.
The fundamental problem is that as the size of your data set increases linearly, the number of false positives increases exponentially. More computers will not fix this because humans can't be reduced to a series of if/then statements, the computer will either miss gobs of important info or spit so many false positives at you to be worthless. It takes annalists to sift through data making connections and with this data deluge their scarce time and effort is wasted chasing dead ends.
How ineffective is mass surveillance? The Soviet Union and Warsaw pact nations back in the day could not stop the illegal drug trade operating within their borders despite trying as hard as they could to do so. Think about that, nations where you need to apply for a frigin passport to go to the town 10 miles over for a weekend could not interdict and stop the illegal drug trade even while monitoring a massive portion of the population.
What kept the population under control at this time was the government controlling the information the population received. Do you think the North Korean government would last 10 minutes if everyone there was suddenly made aware of living standards outside their country? Likewise in the Soviet Block, people there only had vague rumors of the living standards of the west that could easily be disregarded as exaggeration or propaganda.
Intelligence needs to be focused. Casting a bigger net doesn't do you any good when doing so gets you more bycatch than fish. Sure the intelligence agencies love it because it gets them big budgets, but it doesn't make them more effective. If anything, it makes them LESS effective.
I can carry enough gold in my pocket to walk into a dealership and drive out of there in a car. I can carry enough silver in my pocket to go and buy a 40" TV
Now, try to do the same thing with oil, wheat, or corn.
That is what they mean by "density". Significant purchasing power in a small volume makes it easily portable to use in transactions.
Not to mention one other important factor. Ease of detecting counterfeits.
Touchstones made ascertaining the quality of gold one was trying to use relatively straightforward in the old days. Cutting your gold with copper would get discovered right quick. Today, with Krugerands and 90% junk silver coins it is even simpler to detect a counterfeit. Drop a gold or silver coin from a few inches onto a table. Notice the sound? You don't get that with a copper, zinc, or steel coin. Coins made of those metals also don't have the density of gold or silver. Counterfeits made of plated lead have a "dead" sound to them and are also easy to spot.
I still have not seen convincing evidence that it was the Assad government that did this. The "attack" was in an area of no importance and Syrian military was not in a position to exploit the attack. I find the claims that it was the rebel fighters mishandling chemical weapons or artillery hit a store of industrial chemicals to be quite convincing given the limited information available.
I don't know either way.
The thing is though, tanks only work when there is infantry supporting them. The old saying of "The job of the tank is to protect the infantry and the job of the infantry is to protect the tank" is very much true. Just watch some of the videos from Syria. Tanks that are used properly with infantry support tear the rebels a new rectum while tanks that are deployed stupidly, without infantry support, get attacked and damaged/destroyed. What happens when one of those robo tanks gets disabled? Merc recovery team is gonna have to go recover it. How many are going to want to do that and at what price when every high place is gonna have someone with a 30-06 hunting rifle looking for a shot. That's assuming the robo tank hasn't had all it's ammunition and other goodies looted.
As for F-16 drones. Absent nuclear power, air power never has and never will win a war. There are always too few aircraft carrying too little ordinance to be anything other than an inconvenience. The Serbs in Kosovo played NATO like a cheap violin with stupidly low-tech countermeasures.
That may be true, but to offer a counterpoint, the STASI couldn't stop the illegal drug trade within its borders any better than we could. The problem then is the same as now. You can gather all the data you want, but faster computers can't tell you what's important. You need analysts to process the possible matches and the more noise you add to the system the less effective they are as they chase down dead ends.
What REALLY kept the population in line was keeping their citizens by and large ignorant of what things were like in the west. Glasnost sped up the demise of the Soviet Union as knowledge of Western living standards made the population increasingly intolerant of the shortages the Soviet system produced.
People in the US today don't really care much because the welfare state is still more-or-less functioning. Once the government is forced to default on Social Security and the rest of the welfare state once the world stops propping up the US economy people will again become intolerant of the governments actions.
Tell me you're trolling Hairy and not that stupid to believe the troofer nonsense. You're better than that
If the Gov was gonna stage 9/11 they would have put a van of explosives in the basement like they did in 93. All they would have to do is pay a structural firm to run an analysis, under the guise of preventing another such attack, and then have two or three guys build and plant the bomb.
You're gonna tell me that the gov that can't keep the NSA wiretapping thing under wraps and can't stop wikileaks has managed to keep this stuff quiet? Go to any number of the troofer debunking websites and you'll find more than enough answers to their claims. All the claims you make were answered by people who know what they are talking about, and not some dimwit playing with chicken wire, a few concrete blocks, and video camera, more than a decade ago.
Oh SURE they exploited what happened and did their best to cover the incompetence of the FBI etc from catching them, but actually pulling it off? Please.
Hairyfeet, seriously.step away from the keyboard because you're doing nothing but making yourself look stupid. You have your areas of expertize, but you know effectively nothing about economics and even less about history.
The "age of the robber barons" saw the standard of living of the average worker rise faster than at any point before or since. Sure conditions were poor for the workers in the factories, but that was because society itself was too technologically primitive to produce the goods we have today.
How about I sit you in front of a PC from 1988 and have you do your job from that computer? Would you lament about the poor condition of the PC world from that era as the result of "the age of unfettered capitalism" and attribute to today's PC world to the result of government regulation? Or would you recognize that things were that dismal and primitive because that was the best that-they could do at that time given the technology available to them?
Were things "primitive" on Gilligan's Island because Thurston had all the money? Or was it because the capital equipment to produce the goods that they were accustomed to did not exist on the island? If they took all of Thurston's money and distributed it to everyone else would they be better off in any way? Standards of living rise because productivity per worker wises, which is the result of capital investment and accumulation, not by redistributing money.
The "collusion and market rigging" are myths. The price of steel, kerosene, and other goods that the "robber barons" ruled during the latter part of the 19th century saw production skyrocket and prices FALL. Rockefeller brought the price of Kerosene down around 90%. Sure he drove a great many of his competitors out of business, but the average person benefited by now having a cheap fuel for illumination. Any attempts at collusion quickly fell apart because in a voluntary cartel, someone will soon start cheating and the whole system falls apart. Only TWO cartels have had any lasting impact or power without government support, the DeBeers diamond monopoly and the New York Stock exchange. Even OPEC can't permanently affect prices because all the member states have cheated on their quotas at one point or another. (BTW, the 1970's oil crisis was caused by US government price controls on oil, not OPEC. Had prices been allowed to rise slightly there would have been no shortages.) It is only by an overarching central government that cartels can last for any length of time.
As for violence against the workers, when you take stuff that isn't yours, I would hope that someone comes to crack your skull. Frequently, as in the Homestead strike, the workers had taken property that wasn't theirs and were the ones who first opened fire on the Pinkerton agents, whose assigned task was to simply secure the factory for the owners.
You also neglect the violence brought upon workers by the labor unions. Workers whose only crime was accepting terms of employment that the Union workers had rejected. If you won't fix PCs for less than $35 an hour and I will do it for $30, what right do you, or a Union, have to prevent me from freely agreeing to a contract that you, or the Union, had rejected?
Problems like company housing and the company store were temporary problems, partially resolved by the invention of the safety bicycle and completely solved by the mass produced automobile, which gave workers the ability to chose from dozens of employers instead of just the one within walking distance.
Nobody bothers responding to you on these issues anymore because these facts have been pointed out to you repeatedly and yet you continue blathering on as if nothing has happened. I really need to set up a "copy/paste" to use because your arguments NEVER change no matter what evidence is provided. (and I HAVE given far more detailed responses to you.) You blame religious folk for being closed minded. How about taking a little look in the mirror?
Diesels don't sell in the US because EPA emissions regulations discriminate against them heavily. Too expensive to bring them to market vs gasoline engines, thus only a few diesel vehicles on the market.
More of this peak oil lunacy? Get real. proven reserves are increasing all the time. It's just more expensive to extract these reserves so the price is simply going up in debased fiat currency. Price oil in a non-fiat currency like gold. You'll see a very small upward trend and lots of volatility, but overall the price has not significantly increased on average. Given the boom in natural gas production we will probably see an increase in CNG cars on the road in the next decade. Freeing up oil to be used for planes and other things.
You also forget the massive cost to build and maintain thousands of miles of rail capable of carrying 300 mph trains. Construction and maintenance equipment doesn't run on rainbows
Cargo is not transported by HSR. It is transported on 50 mph cargo trains that I drive by on the interstate doing 70 mph. This works great when you need to move 10,000 tons of coal, which you can do with one train. Not so great when you need to move 50 tons of people.
Yes those roads were built with private money in the form of gas taxes. Gas taxes would need to be raised 20 cents a gallon at most and all subsidies would be eliminated. That and Politicians would have to stop raiding those funds to build trains to nowhere, as they do now. If it wasn't gas taxes it would be toll roads and gas taxes are a lot easier to collect and far more convenient.
The amount of subsidy to roads is so infinitesimally small per passenger mile to be not even worth mentioning. All alternatives require grotesque amounts of subsidy per passenger mile Cars at worst operate at about a penny of subsidy per passenger mile. Trains and transit receive subsidies from about 25 cents to several dollars per passenger mile. So supporters of transit need to seriously STFU about subsidies to cars until it's the car that gets the bigger subsidy per passenger mile
Some places count property taxes used to fund roads as a subsidy, which is wrong. I think it's perfectly reasonable that if the city maintains the road in front of your house, and that you clearly use in some form or another, that you should pay for it. The only difference between that and a private company doing it is who you send the check to.
Ubuntu is on par with Windows 98, nothing more. Like windows 98, drivers sh*t themselves for no reason when you apply updates. Support for USB devices is hit and miss. Configuration often relies on editing config files manually or CLI. Can't play full-screen video worth a damm. Though to be fair. Windows 98 had a much more reliable audio subsystem.
The only thing is has over Windown 98 is that the UI is nicer looking. But then again, Windows 98 was made to run on 166 mhz processors.
For 20 years the market has spoken, people would rather steal Windows than use your product for free. In any other business people would be trying to figure out what they are doing wrong and trying to fix it. In the Linux community it's decades of denial and refusal to actually compete with Windows or OSX.
Google took Linux, told Linus and company to go fornicate themselves, and did in a couple of years what they should have done 20 years ago. Make a reliable, user friendly product.
Japanese nationalists, much like U.S. republicans are unwilling to accept that their country has ever done anything wrong,
Since when has Obama been a Republican? Last time I checked the Democrats have been just as happy to bomb third world countries as Republicans have. The only outspoken criticism of these policies are coming from Tea Party Republicans like Rand Paul. The problem is not Dem or GOP. It's a problem with the federal government.
What is hard about that? You'll have a good three or four days of warning. After that all you need are several independent diesel generators and a supply of diesel fuel. After the first few days the amount of cooling needed really drops off.
Just goes to prove what I've been saying for years, the absolute best way to move humanity forward towards peace and brotherhood....would be to take every religious text on the planet and throw them in a massive bonfire that blots out the sun.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. PLEASE read some serious philosiphy and stop making a fool of yourself. Even Atheist philosiphers know full well that going to a full Atheistic society will not solve the problems you describe. Friedrich Nietzsche recognized that, absent god, "everything is permitted". A world where there is no objective morality, no good, no evil, and humans have no intrinsic worth. Remember, this is the ATHEIST philosiphers saying this.
Why do you believe that a worldview that says humans are intrinsicly worthless, which is the Atheistic view, will result in peace, prosperity, and love for ones fellow man? Such a worldview would, and has, lead to the exact opposite. A world where there is no moral dilema to enslaving or slaughterting ones fellow man for ones personal gain. After all, if humans are just animals, why not use them like we do horses and cattle. If one is able to live like a Joseph Stalin, a life of luxury while millions die, why shouldn't you?
I've tried explaining the Moral Arguments for the Existence of God in the past and you seem to go out of your way to not understand it. (You're clearly intelegent enough to understand it if you wanted to.) Much like Richard Dawkins, you expose a worldview in which good and evil do not exist, then in the same breath make moral judgements that assume good and evil do exist. You have to sit in Gods lap to slap his face and anyone with a basic reading on the subject in the subject sees the incoherence of your words. Most of us just ignore your incoherent ramblings because we see clearly that you are talking on a subject in which you know less than nothing and there is nothing we can do to pull someone from that pit of ignorance, they have to do that themselves.
Rather sad that many Christians are better read on Atheist philosiphy than most Atheists.
Rather fitting. Those who supported slavery said slavery was in the best interest of blacks. Seems like those pushing Metric are using the same argument. Those against want people to be free to choose whatever they want.
Everywhere metric makes sense the switch has already happened voluntarily.
We use metric where it is convenient and don't use it where it isn't. Why should this come as any great surprise? Nobody is against using metric where its convenient. What people are against is being forced to use one arbitrary system over another.
Why is base 10 so great? Why do you count to 10 on your fingers like a 4 year old? I was taught when I was young by my parents how to count to 12 using the joints on my fingers and using my thumb to count
You use Metric because you, or your ancestors, had a gun put to your head and were thrown in jail if you didn't use it. I'd love to see English enforced in Metric countries with the same vigor and see how well that goes over with people.
Use whatever system works for the situation and leave everyone else alone.
According to whois, RonPaul.com was registered in 2000 while RonPaul.org was registered in 1999. The current owner of RonPaul.org is DN Capital Inc, a company based in Panama, while RonPaul.com is owned by WKF Corp, another company based in Panama.
This right here is sending up red flags. A "fan site" whose domain name is owned by some corporation in Panama? This isn't some Hary Alderson in Vermont who owns the domain name, as one might expect from a fan site. It is some company in Panama who, for all we know, may or may not be a shell company.
Second, Ron Paul DID NOT go to "The UN" for this, he went to the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center, whose JOB it is to settle disputes like this. There is nothing hypocritical about this. WIPO would exist absent the UN for this purpose. He may not LIKE the UN, but he is working within the system as it currently exists even though he would like that system changed. I don't like the city government where I live and wish it were set up differently, but you bet your butt I go to them when I have a problem or need something taken care of under their jurisdiction.
RP wanted only the domain name, yet the "owners" of the site wanted to sell him the whole thing for a huge chunk of cash? That's not "Fan site", that's "trying to hit up a public figure for money and cash out". Wanting to sell the whole nine yards so eagerly, and for so much, doesn't sound like any "fan site" I've ever heard of.
Sorry, the owners of ronpaul.com are looking awfully shady. Say what you want about Dr. Paul, the owners of the domain are not looking so innocent and it is looking that Dr, Paul may have a decent case for cybersquatting. We simply don't have enough information to be 100% sure. Considering Dr. Paul's past, I'm tending toward giving him the benefit of the doubt for now, but I would certainly like more information before definitively siding one way or the other on this. There is probably a lot of details that we don't know about.
The fact is, if we weren't here - by accident- then we wouldn't be talking about why we're here. Being here- for whatever reason including just chance- is a prerequisite to talking about why we're here.
How many times does this argument need to be beaten like a baby seal before people stop using it?
Suppose you are to be executed by a firing squad of 100 trained marksmen, all of them aiming rifles at your heart. You are blindfolded; the command is given; you hear the deafening roar of the rifles. And you observe that you are still alive. The 100 marksmen missed!
Taking off the blindfold, you do not observe that you are dead. No surprise there: you could not observe that you are dead. Nonetheless, you should be astonished to observe that you are alive. The entire firing squad missed you altogether! Surprise at that extremely improbable fact is wholly justified - and that calls for an explanation. You would immediately suspect that they missed you on purpose, by design.
Such amateur philosophy like yours won't fool anyone who ihas been given into a basic understanding in the subject. In fact, your objection is often one of the first things covered. The theist intellectual response to the new atheists has been brutal, Dawkins has been running like a scared puppy when intellectual heavyweights like Bill Craig challenge him to debates. They continue to pretend that their arguments have not been answered a hundred times. Their movement is slowly grinding to a halt.
So today we are facing a timebomb called global warming. It's going to go off, it IS going off and once it reaches past a certain point - a point which may be as close as 20 years hence, then there will be no turning it back, no magic technology is going to save us.
Might want to go back and check the science you claim to care so much about. No statistically significant warming over the last decade or so. It is the computer models that predict catastrophe and yet never match reality.
The conservative / insanely greedy and selfish mind and modern society are fundamentally incompatible. We cannot continue to permit the greedy and the religious head cases loaded down with sociopathic indifference to others to continue to exist on this earth. Full stop. Those are genetically mediate traits and it's at the level of genetics where;we need to acquire knowledge in order to eliminate them.
So you're advocating genocide I see. 100+ million corpses produced by the beliefs you advocate in the 20th century alone. Militant Atheism and Humanism has done more damage to the people of the world than Religion ever could. It promises only death and despair and delivers on those promises. Further up in your post, you fear that it would be the conservative and religions people who would use those advances for evil. Quite frankly it is your kind that would be the ones using it for such purposes. What you advocate would not eliminate the greedy and selfish, it would only entrench them at the top like in The Soviet Union.
The worst thing I could wish upon you is for you to get the world you want. Problem is we only have one.
Basic things like that yes, the finer details, no. How much Mercury does it take to poison someone? You can't say precisely because it affects people differently, the best thing you can do is give a range.
How is it a sloppy design? It seems to work quite well. By having the two connected one can breathe through the nose during normal activity, which does a great job of filtering out foreign contaminates, but also breathe through the mouth to increase airflow when the organism is engaged in strenuous activity and the increased airflow is more important than not breathing in foreign contaminates.
Designers frequently design one component to do multiple things. The front wheels on my car provide steering, but also transfer the engine power to the road. Thank goodness you don't design cars or else everything would be rear wheel drive.
So because something is sub-optimal means that it is not designed?
Are you going to claim that the Pinto was not designed because it had a poorly placed gas tank? Are you going to claim that the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was not designed because it fell apart after a few months? Scientists used to think that the human eye was sub-optimal design because the nerves are in front of the rods and cones, but it turns out that we find that the eye is like that so the rods and cones can have unimpeded access to their blood supply. So what looks like sub-optimal design may just look that way because we don't understand the system.
Furthermore, sub optimal according to who? The only way to claim something is "sub-optimal" is to know the intent of the designer. How do you know that there were not reasons for doing things they way they were?
I'll just quote William Lane Craig who nicely points out how your objection crashes and burns in numerous ways.
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Anyone who knows anything won't be scared by this. The problem the NSA has is the EXACT same problem as the STAZI or whatever secret police anywhere has had, mass surveillance doesn't work.
The fundamental problem is that as the size of your data set increases linearly, the number of false positives increases exponentially. More computers will not fix this because humans can't be reduced to a series of if/then statements, the computer will either miss gobs of important info or spit so many false positives at you to be worthless. It takes annalists to sift through data making connections and with this data deluge their scarce time and effort is wasted chasing dead ends.
How ineffective is mass surveillance? The Soviet Union and Warsaw pact nations back in the day could not stop the illegal drug trade operating within their borders despite trying as hard as they could to do so. Think about that, nations where you need to apply for a frigin passport to go to the town 10 miles over for a weekend could not interdict and stop the illegal drug trade even while monitoring a massive portion of the population.
What kept the population under control at this time was the government controlling the information the population received. Do you think the North Korean government would last 10 minutes if everyone there was suddenly made aware of living standards outside their country? Likewise in the Soviet Block, people there only had vague rumors of the living standards of the west that could easily be disregarded as exaggeration or propaganda.
Intelligence needs to be focused. Casting a bigger net doesn't do you any good when doing so gets you more bycatch than fish. Sure the intelligence agencies love it because it gets them big budgets, but it doesn't make them more effective. If anything, it makes them LESS effective.
Here is the "dense" argument in a nutshell.
I can carry enough gold in my pocket to walk into a dealership and drive out of there in a car. I can carry enough silver in my pocket to go and buy a 40" TV
Now, try to do the same thing with oil, wheat, or corn.
That is what they mean by "density". Significant purchasing power in a small volume makes it easily portable to use in transactions.
Not to mention one other important factor. Ease of detecting counterfeits.
Touchstones made ascertaining the quality of gold one was trying to use relatively straightforward in the old days. Cutting your gold with copper would get discovered right quick. Today, with Krugerands and 90% junk silver coins it is even simpler to detect a counterfeit. Drop a gold or silver coin from a few inches onto a table. Notice the sound? You don't get that with a copper, zinc, or steel coin. Coins made of those metals also don't have the density of gold or silver. Counterfeits made of plated lead have a "dead" sound to them and are also easy to spot.
I still have not seen convincing evidence that it was the Assad government that did this. The "attack" was in an area of no importance and Syrian military was not in a position to exploit the attack. I find the claims that it was the rebel fighters mishandling chemical weapons or artillery hit a store of industrial chemicals to be quite convincing given the limited information available. I don't know either way.
The thing is though, tanks only work when there is infantry supporting them. The old saying of "The job of the tank is to protect the infantry and the job of the infantry is to protect the tank" is very much true. Just watch some of the videos from Syria. Tanks that are used properly with infantry support tear the rebels a new rectum while tanks that are deployed stupidly, without infantry support, get attacked and damaged/destroyed. What happens when one of those robo tanks gets disabled? Merc recovery team is gonna have to go recover it. How many are going to want to do that and at what price when every high place is gonna have someone with a 30-06 hunting rifle looking for a shot. That's assuming the robo tank hasn't had all it's ammunition and other goodies looted.
As for F-16 drones. Absent nuclear power, air power never has and never will win a war. There are always too few aircraft carrying too little ordinance to be anything other than an inconvenience. The Serbs in Kosovo played NATO like a cheap violin with stupidly low-tech countermeasures.
That may be true, but to offer a counterpoint, the STASI couldn't stop the illegal drug trade within its borders any better than we could. The problem then is the same as now. You can gather all the data you want, but faster computers can't tell you what's important. You need analysts to process the possible matches and the more noise you add to the system the less effective they are as they chase down dead ends.
What REALLY kept the population in line was keeping their citizens by and large ignorant of what things were like in the west. Glasnost sped up the demise of the Soviet Union as knowledge of Western living standards made the population increasingly intolerant of the shortages the Soviet system produced.
People in the US today don't really care much because the welfare state is still more-or-less functioning. Once the government is forced to default on Social Security and the rest of the welfare state once the world stops propping up the US economy people will again become intolerant of the governments actions.
Tell me you're trolling Hairy and not that stupid to believe the troofer nonsense. You're better than that
If the Gov was gonna stage 9/11 they would have put a van of explosives in the basement like they did in 93. All they would have to do is pay a structural firm to run an analysis, under the guise of preventing another such attack, and then have two or three guys build and plant the bomb.
You're gonna tell me that the gov that can't keep the NSA wiretapping thing under wraps and can't stop wikileaks has managed to keep this stuff quiet? Go to any number of the troofer debunking websites and you'll find more than enough answers to their claims. All the claims you make were answered by people who know what they are talking about, and not some dimwit playing with chicken wire, a few concrete blocks, and video camera, more than a decade ago.
Oh SURE they exploited what happened and did their best to cover the incompetence of the FBI etc from catching them, but actually pulling it off? Please.
Hairyfeet, seriously.step away from the keyboard because you're doing nothing but making yourself look stupid. You have your areas of expertize, but you know effectively nothing about economics and even less about history.
The "age of the robber barons" saw the standard of living of the average worker rise faster than at any point before or since. Sure conditions were poor for the workers in the factories, but that was because society itself was too technologically primitive to produce the goods we have today.
How about I sit you in front of a PC from 1988 and have you do your job from that computer? Would you lament about the poor condition of the PC world from that era as the result of "the age of unfettered capitalism" and attribute to today's PC world to the result of government regulation? Or would you recognize that things were that dismal and primitive because that was the best that-they could do at that time given the technology available to them?
Were things "primitive" on Gilligan's Island because Thurston had all the money? Or was it because the capital equipment to produce the goods that they were accustomed to did not exist on the island? If they took all of Thurston's money and distributed it to everyone else would they be better off in any way? Standards of living rise because productivity per worker wises, which is the result of capital investment and accumulation, not by redistributing money.
The "collusion and market rigging" are myths. The price of steel, kerosene, and other goods that the "robber barons" ruled during the latter part of the 19th century saw production skyrocket and prices FALL. Rockefeller brought the price of Kerosene down around 90%. Sure he drove a great many of his competitors out of business, but the average person benefited by now having a cheap fuel for illumination. Any attempts at collusion quickly fell apart because in a voluntary cartel, someone will soon start cheating and the whole system falls apart. Only TWO cartels have had any lasting impact or power without government support, the DeBeers diamond monopoly and the New York Stock exchange. Even OPEC can't permanently affect prices because all the member states have cheated on their quotas at one point or another. (BTW, the 1970's oil crisis was caused by US government price controls on oil, not OPEC. Had prices been allowed to rise slightly there would have been no shortages.) It is only by an overarching central government that cartels can last for any length of time.
As for violence against the workers, when you take stuff that isn't yours, I would hope that someone comes to crack your skull. Frequently, as in the Homestead strike, the workers had taken property that wasn't theirs and were the ones who first opened fire on the Pinkerton agents, whose assigned task was to simply secure the factory for the owners.
You also neglect the violence brought upon workers by the labor unions. Workers whose only crime was accepting terms of employment that the Union workers had rejected. If you won't fix PCs for less than $35 an hour and I will do it for $30, what right do you, or a Union, have to prevent me from freely agreeing to a contract that you, or the Union, had rejected?
Problems like company housing and the company store were temporary problems, partially resolved by the invention of the safety bicycle and completely solved by the mass produced automobile, which gave workers the ability to chose from dozens of employers instead of just the one within walking distance.
Nobody bothers responding to you on these issues anymore because these facts have been pointed out to you repeatedly and yet you continue blathering on as if nothing has happened. I really need to set up a "copy/paste" to use because your arguments NEVER change no matter what evidence is provided. (and I HAVE given far more detailed responses to you.) You blame religious folk for being closed minded. How about taking a little look in the mirror?
Diesels don't sell in the US because EPA emissions regulations discriminate against them heavily. Too expensive to bring them to market vs gasoline engines, thus only a few diesel vehicles on the market.
I once heard the comment, "If the Soviet's had developed a laser that dissolved tape, NATO would have been f*cked."
More of this peak oil lunacy? Get real. proven reserves are increasing all the time. It's just more expensive to extract these reserves so the price is simply going up in debased fiat currency. Price oil in a non-fiat currency like gold. You'll see a very small upward trend and lots of volatility, but overall the price has not significantly increased on average. Given the boom in natural gas production we will probably see an increase in CNG cars on the road in the next decade. Freeing up oil to be used for planes and other things.
You also forget the massive cost to build and maintain thousands of miles of rail capable of carrying 300 mph trains. Construction and maintenance equipment doesn't run on rainbows
Cargo is not transported by HSR. It is transported on 50 mph cargo trains that I drive by on the interstate doing 70 mph. This works great when you need to move 10,000 tons of coal, which you can do with one train. Not so great when you need to move 50 tons of people.
Yes those roads were built with private money in the form of gas taxes. Gas taxes would need to be raised 20 cents a gallon at most and all subsidies would be eliminated. That and Politicians would have to stop raiding those funds to build trains to nowhere, as they do now. If it wasn't gas taxes it would be toll roads and gas taxes are a lot easier to collect and far more convenient.
The amount of subsidy to roads is so infinitesimally small per passenger mile to be not even worth mentioning. All alternatives require grotesque amounts of subsidy per passenger mile Cars at worst operate at about a penny of subsidy per passenger mile. Trains and transit receive subsidies from about 25 cents to several dollars per passenger mile. So supporters of transit need to seriously STFU about subsidies to cars until it's the car that gets the bigger subsidy per passenger mile
Some places count property taxes used to fund roads as a subsidy, which is wrong. I think it's perfectly reasonable that if the city maintains the road in front of your house, and that you clearly use in some form or another, that you should pay for it. The only difference between that and a private company doing it is who you send the check to.
That's really funny.
Ubuntu is on par with Windows 98, nothing more. Like windows 98, drivers sh*t themselves for no reason when you apply updates. Support for USB devices is hit and miss. Configuration often relies on editing config files manually or CLI. Can't play full-screen video worth a damm. Though to be fair. Windows 98 had a much more reliable audio subsystem.
The only thing is has over Windown 98 is that the UI is nicer looking. But then again, Windows 98 was made to run on 166 mhz processors.
For 20 years the market has spoken, people would rather steal Windows than use your product for free. In any other business people would be trying to figure out what they are doing wrong and trying to fix it. In the Linux community it's decades of denial and refusal to actually compete with Windows or OSX.
Google took Linux, told Linus and company to go fornicate themselves, and did in a couple of years what they should have done 20 years ago. Make a reliable, user friendly product.
Japanese nationalists, much like U.S. republicans are unwilling to accept that their country has ever done anything wrong,
Since when has Obama been a Republican? Last time I checked the Democrats have been just as happy to bomb third world countries as Republicans have. The only outspoken criticism of these policies are coming from Tea Party Republicans like Rand Paul. The problem is not Dem or GOP. It's a problem with the federal government.
What is hard about that? You'll have a good three or four days of warning. After that all you need are several independent diesel generators and a supply of diesel fuel. After the first few days the amount of cooling needed really drops off.
Just goes to prove what I've been saying for years, the absolute best way to move humanity forward towards peace and brotherhood....would be to take every religious text on the planet and throw them in a massive bonfire that blots out the sun.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. PLEASE read some serious philosiphy and stop making a fool of yourself. Even Atheist philosiphers know full well that going to a full Atheistic society will not solve the problems you describe. Friedrich Nietzsche recognized that, absent god, "everything is permitted". A world where there is no objective morality, no good, no evil, and humans have no intrinsic worth. Remember, this is the ATHEIST philosiphers saying this.
Why do you believe that a worldview that says humans are intrinsicly worthless, which is the Atheistic view, will result in peace, prosperity, and love for ones fellow man? Such a worldview would, and has, lead to the exact opposite. A world where there is no moral dilema to enslaving or slaughterting ones fellow man for ones personal gain. After all, if humans are just animals, why not use them like we do horses and cattle. If one is able to live like a Joseph Stalin, a life of luxury while millions die, why shouldn't you?
I've tried explaining the Moral Arguments for the Existence of God in the past and you seem to go out of your way to not understand it. (You're clearly intelegent enough to understand it if you wanted to.) Much like Richard Dawkins, you expose a worldview in which good and evil do not exist, then in the same breath make moral judgements that assume good and evil do exist. You have to sit in Gods lap to slap his face and anyone with a basic reading on the subject in the subject sees the incoherence of your words. Most of us just ignore your incoherent ramblings because we see clearly that you are talking on a subject in which you know less than nothing and there is nothing we can do to pull someone from that pit of ignorance, they have to do that themselves.
Rather sad that many Christians are better read on Atheist philosiphy than most Atheists.
Richard Dawkins Confirms The Moral Argument for God's Existence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3VQ2TkTuyM
Rather fitting. Those who supported slavery said slavery was in the best interest of blacks. Seems like those pushing Metric are using the same argument. Those against want people to be free to choose whatever they want.
Everywhere metric makes sense the switch has already happened voluntarily.
We use metric where it is convenient and don't use it where it isn't. Why should this come as any great surprise? Nobody is against using metric where its convenient. What people are against is being forced to use one arbitrary system over another.
Why is base 10 so great? Why do you count to 10 on your fingers like a 4 year old? I was taught when I was young by my parents how to count to 12 using the joints on my fingers and using my thumb to count
You use Metric because you, or your ancestors, had a gun put to your head and were thrown in jail if you didn't use it. I'd love to see English enforced in Metric countries with the same vigor and see how well that goes over with people.
Use whatever system works for the situation and leave everyone else alone.
That bridge collapsed because an overheight truck took out the structural supports. It was structurally sound before that..
Here is what I posted in the last thread on this:
According to whois, RonPaul.com was registered in 2000 while RonPaul.org was registered in 1999. The current owner of RonPaul.org is DN Capital Inc, a company based in Panama, while RonPaul.com is owned by WKF Corp, another company based in Panama.
This right here is sending up red flags. A "fan site" whose domain name is owned by some corporation in Panama? This isn't some Hary Alderson in Vermont who owns the domain name, as one might expect from a fan site. It is some company in Panama who, for all we know, may or may not be a shell company.
Second, Ron Paul DID NOT go to "The UN" for this, he went to the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center, whose JOB it is to settle disputes like this. There is nothing hypocritical about this. WIPO would exist absent the UN for this purpose. He may not LIKE the UN, but he is working within the system as it currently exists even though he would like that system changed. I don't like the city government where I live and wish it were set up differently, but you bet your butt I go to them when I have a problem or need something taken care of under their jurisdiction.
RP wanted only the domain name, yet the "owners" of the site wanted to sell him the whole thing for a huge chunk of cash? That's not "Fan site", that's "trying to hit up a public figure for money and cash out". Wanting to sell the whole nine yards so eagerly, and for so much, doesn't sound like any "fan site" I've ever heard of.
Sorry, the owners of ronpaul.com are looking awfully shady. Say what you want about Dr. Paul, the owners of the domain are not looking so innocent and it is looking that Dr, Paul may have a decent case for cybersquatting. We simply don't have enough information to be 100% sure. Considering Dr. Paul's past, I'm tending toward giving him the benefit of the doubt for now, but I would certainly like more information before definitively siding one way or the other on this. There is probably a lot of details that we don't know about.
The fact is, if we weren't here - by accident- then we wouldn't be talking about why we're here. Being here- for whatever reason including just chance- is a prerequisite to talking about why we're here.
How many times does this argument need to be beaten like a baby seal before people stop using it?
Suppose you are to be executed by a firing squad of 100 trained marksmen, all of them aiming rifles at your heart. You are blindfolded; the command is given; you hear the deafening roar of the rifles. And you observe that you are still alive. The 100 marksmen missed!
Taking off the blindfold, you do not observe that you are dead. No surprise there: you could not observe that you are dead. Nonetheless, you should be astonished to observe that you are alive. The entire firing squad missed you altogether! Surprise at that extremely improbable fact is wholly justified - and that calls for an explanation. You would immediately suspect that they missed you on purpose, by design.
Such amateur philosophy like yours won't fool anyone who ihas been given into a basic understanding in the subject. In fact, your objection is often one of the first things covered. The theist intellectual response to the new atheists has been brutal, Dawkins has been running like a scared puppy when intellectual heavyweights like Bill Craig challenge him to debates. They continue to pretend that their arguments have not been answered a hundred times. Their movement is slowly grinding to a halt.
So today we are facing a timebomb called global warming. It's going to go off, it IS going off and once it reaches past a certain point - a point which may be as close as 20 years hence, then there will be no turning it back, no magic technology is going to save us.
Might want to go back and check the science you claim to care so much about. No statistically significant warming over the last decade or so. It is the computer models that predict catastrophe and yet never match reality.
The conservative / insanely greedy and selfish mind and modern society are fundamentally incompatible. We cannot continue to permit the greedy and the religious head cases loaded down with sociopathic indifference to others to continue to exist on this earth. Full stop. Those are genetically mediate traits and it's at the level of genetics where ;we need to acquire knowledge in order to eliminate them.
So you're advocating genocide I see. 100+ million corpses produced by the beliefs you advocate in the 20th century alone. Militant Atheism and Humanism has done more damage to the people of the world than Religion ever could. It promises only death and despair and delivers on those promises. Further up in your post, you fear that it would be the conservative and religions people who would use those advances for evil. Quite frankly it is your kind that would be the ones using it for such purposes. What you advocate would not eliminate the greedy and selfish, it would only entrench them at the top like in The Soviet Union.
The worst thing I could wish upon you is for you to get the world you want. Problem is we only have one.
Basic things like that yes, the finer details, no. How much Mercury does it take to poison someone? You can't say precisely because it affects people differently, the best thing you can do is give a range.
How is it a sloppy design? It seems to work quite well. By having the two connected one can breathe through the nose during normal activity, which does a great job of filtering out foreign contaminates, but also breathe through the mouth to increase airflow when the organism is engaged in strenuous activity and the increased airflow is more important than not breathing in foreign contaminates.
Designers frequently design one component to do multiple things. The front wheels on my car provide steering, but also transfer the engine power to the road. Thank goodness you don't design cars or else everything would be rear wheel drive.
So because something is sub-optimal means that it is not designed?
Are you going to claim that the Pinto was not designed because it had a poorly placed gas tank? Are you going to claim that the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was not designed because it fell apart after a few months? Scientists used to think that the human eye was sub-optimal design because the nerves are in front of the rods and cones, but it turns out that we find that the eye is like that so the rods and cones can have unimpeded access to their blood supply. So what looks like sub-optimal design may just look that way because we don't understand the system.
Furthermore, sub optimal according to who? The only way to claim something is "sub-optimal" is to know the intent of the designer. How do you know that there were not reasons for doing things they way they were?
I'll just quote William Lane Craig who nicely points out how your objection crashes and burns in numerous ways.
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/natures-flaws-and-cruelties