Ford averaged 61,500 Ford Focuses sold per quarter in 2012 just in the US. 5,000 cars is a rounding error in the car market. For a boutique car 5,000 units is fine, but nobody should be pretending that it's changing the car market.
Except in the early days of motoring electric cars DID have the advantage, in both reliability and cost, and was overtaken by the internal combustion engine.
Electric cars will suck forever for the simple fact that batteries never have and never will have the energy density of liquid fuels do. Battery energy density needs to increase by a factor of 40 to match what a gallon of gasoline can do, but physics says that is impossible.
Wrong. Those transit systems were hemorrhaging money and bankrupt. GM bought up the bankrupt streetcar lines and replaced them with buses, which were cheaper, more versatile, more reliable, and faster than streetcars. GM only got in trouble because they didn't allow other bus makers to sell buses to those transportation systems.
Stop getting your history from "Who Framed Roger Rabbit".
As the price of car ownership fell further, intercity bus travel too became unprofitable. Intracity bus travel was always profitable and never went away. It is seeing a resurgence thanks to Chinatown bus services cutting costs.
I would gladly forgo any right to Social Security, Medicaid, or Medicare as well as forfeit all taxes paid into those programs thus far if it means I did not have to pay those taxes anymore from today forward. Yet if I try to do that, men with guns will show up and throw me in jail.
So yes, it is theft. I am being forced to pay for something that I do not want with no choice to opt out.
If you're gonna live by that line of logic, then you are going to die by it.
Following your logic means that everyone in the US is culpable for, and participants in, government actions, meaning civilians are legitimate targets for the enemies of the US government. After all, getting behind the enemy lines and attacking the logistics personnel is a perfectly legitimate strategy, attacking non-combatant civilians would be nothing more than attacking further up the supply chain.
So are you going to follow your logic where it leads and say the Boston Marathon Bombing was a legitimate attack against the US government? Or are you going to cherrypick only for when it is convenient for you? Best bet would be for you to abandon it entirely.
They were being deliberately stupid on that show when trying to make BP, that is the only conclusion I can come to because they should have been able to make good BP with only 15 minutes of research on how to do it.
No, violence is a means to and end. The problem is when violence becomes and end unto itself.
Why to Arabs attack us? They've told us repeatedly, because they view our interventions in the region as an assault on their culture and right to self rule. So they attack us in retaliation. The leaders at home don't blame their bad foreign policy, but say that they are attacking because "they hate us for our freedom" and so they attack the Arabs back, which only makes it all the easier for the Arabs to recruit new members to attack again. Our "leaders" are trying to put out a fire by pouring gasoline onto it.
Now you of course you may ask, If they know we're going to strike back, why do they attack us if they want us to leave them alone? Because they know that the American government won't leave them alone no matter how many times they say please, so they attack knowing that we will try to go after them. Their violence is simply a means to an end, that end is to bankrupt the American Military-Industrial complex so the US government is forced to leave because they are defeated economically. They know that we have to spend $1000 in the middle east to counter every dollar they spend. They know that every bullet we fire, every bomb we drop, every solider we send, brings them one step closer to victory. Sure some of them say they want the world to all be ruled by Islam, but they're practical people and realize that they're not gonna launch an invasion of the mainland US.
The correct thing to do is give them what they want, leave them along and let people buy the oil at whatever price it is selling for. The number of people they can send over to us is little more than a lethal nuisance and can be easily dealt with here. With us gone, the many Arab factions will lose a common enemy and within a decade they will go back to fighting each other like they have done for hundreds of years and not give us a second thought.
And WWI was great for the defense industry, not so great for those sucking mustard gas...your point?
Translation: Someone called you on your economic ignorance and your only option is to change the subject.
Your argument there is a red herring. If you're gonna live by that argument, you're also gonna die by it because I can do the same thing in regards to labor unions, just cite one of the many examples of Unions working to make it illegal to hire blacks in order to protect white workers.
You continually yammer on and on about how the evil businessmen are exploiting the workers and not one peep about how it is the tens of thousands of pages of regulations that keep those large firms in place by making it impossible for small start-ups to compete. You look at businesses gaming the system and never once question the system itself.
Sure, you've pointed to the fact that the government is blowing massive bubbles into the economy, but that's about all you have right. Your knowledge and understanding about the economic history of the 19th century is embarrassingly bad, reminiscent of what I remember from high school. Overly simplistic and presented from the point of view that the government can do no wrong. A great many other people stopped reading history and economics after the 10th grade too, but what makes me shake my head is that you are clearly a well read and intelligent person in the area of computers and technology. You're investigated one side of an issue and then the other and come to your conclusion. That's great. Yet it's as if your brain shifts into neutral when it comes to history or economics and you resort to some 10th grade textbook understanding of history and economics.
I was always into non-fiction so I was always reading history books when I was young. With the advent of the internet, the ability to read alternate views became much easier. One could have one window open with one point of view of history and in another have the other sides attempt at a rebuttal. If one rebuttal was unconvincing, a little searching would turn up another. I went back and forth on several major issues over several years as I weighed the arguments and counter arguments. Some issues I have become totally convinced about, others are tentative, and others I recognize as imperfect, but the best practical option. The point I'm making here is that with the internet it is not that hard to investigate different views, provided you actually read the alternative views as written by those expounding them and not just a paraphrase by someone else, which can be quite a task at times.
You've been repeatedly corrected by me and others and yet it makes no impact. You don't read up, you don't even get more sophisticated in your argumentation. It's the same stuff over and over again. I read your posts and wish someone else would respond, but I realize that they are thinking the same thing I am, "Why bother, he's not going to respond with anything new." Reminds me of a discussion on another forum with someone who was expounding the Venus Project's "Resource based economy". They were asked how their system solves the Economic Calculation Problem. Not only did they not understand the problem, they made no effort TO understand the problem despite repeated attempts to explain and clarify the problem. Eventually people just gave up and ignored that person when they posted about economics, though they did have insightful things to say on other topics.
It's just frustrating because you're better than that.
So what do you do if the police don't show up? Remember, they are under no legal obligation to arrive in a timely manner or even help you if they do. Let the bad guys load your house into a U-haul? Sorry, but not everyone has the luxury.
I should also mention the book "The Failure of the “New Economics”: An Analysis of the Keynesian Fallacies" which is a point by point refutation of Keynesianisim. It is available for free as a PDF or ebook. Any time a Keynsian says something, you'll almost certainly find the refutation in here.
Once that book was published Kensianisim was definitively killed intellectually. It only stumbles on because it gives politicians the cover they need to do what they want to do anyway.
Keynesian economics belongs in the trash bin of history. It has several fatal flaws. Just to list a couple.
1. It assumes that central planning by government can outperform the market in a crisis. This was refuted by Ludwig von Mises in 1920 with his posing of the economic calculation problem. It is also refuted by history. The Depression of 1920 was as severe as the crash in 29-30, yet was over in under 2 years. 29 comes along and government tries to fix things and the result is 15 years of economic stagnation and high unemployment that only ended when those policies were abandoned after WWII.
“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. And an enormous debt to boot!” Henry Morgenthau Jr. — close friend, lunch companion, loyal secretary of the Treasury to President Franklin D. Roosevelt — and key architect of FDR’s New Deal. The date: May 9, 1939. Those words are still true today.
2. It treats the economy in terms of useless aggregates, "Investment" and "consumption" are treated as giant homogeneous lumps which is completely useless, since the problems to be solved in an economy are to figure out exactly what to invest in and produce and how much to produce. A recession is the markets way of correcting misallocation of resources, but as we have seen, all government intervention does is prevents those reallocation from taking place and thus the depression continues until those reallocation are allowed to happen. With hindsight one can see that the last decade plus has been one long depression, with stagnation in the breadwinner jobs. The government keeps blowing bubbles to paper over the mistakes that exist in the economy, but now the bubble is in the dollar and bonds. When that bursts we are going to feel the pain that we should have felt in 2001, 2008 along with the pain caused by the mistakes from the last five years.
If Keynsian theory was sound, you would think that their predictions would match reality. Problem is that those predictions have a track record of being nearly 100% wrong. When your theory doesn't match reality all the hand-waving in the world isn't going to save it.
If you really want to be clever without having to use crypto, use a USB interface to go from the computer to whatever interface you use in the front to control the PC. Then, somewhere along the line, you put in a USB hub and a flash drive, separate from the computer. You mount it as a hidden partition and have it save a copy of the data stream. If the cops yank the computer, you just take the car home and lift the back seat or reach under the dash and take out the drive and you now have a copy of what went on.
Reminds me about a saying regarding engine design. You can design an engine for horsepower or torque. If you design an engine for torque, horsepower will take care of itself. Likewise here, if your business focuses on the customers, the stock price will ultimately take care of itself.
I was thinking along the lines of the many for-profit intercity buses between cities, they are just fine. Intracity busses, yea, they aren't that great to ride even here in ND.
People here will drive anything that will physically move rather than use the bus. Only people I have ever seen on it are the elderly or blind. Heck, one guy I knew when working retail would rather walk than take the bus, even when it was -20F.
Of course they weren't against the 40 hour week, but they didn't have anything meaningful to do with it, as evidenced by the much more heavily unionized European workers getting the 8 hour day long after American workers did. It was rising productivity made possible by the capitalists that enabled wages to rise to the point where workers had the option to accept more free time instead of higher wages. Workers were willing to accept slightly lower wages in exchange for an 8 hour day, so the capitalists did indeed freely oblige. Before that point, wages had not risen enough and people needed the extra income that working a 10 hour day brought them. Today I bet every single person would love to work a 20 hour week. The problem is that they couldn't life on the wages that a 20 hour week would bring them. Likewise in the early 19th century in regards to the 50 and 60 hour week.
Since you obviously don't read your history, what the labor unionists wanted was "8 hour day for 10 hour pay". THAT is why there was such "resistance" to the 8 hour day. Workers that wanted 8 hour day for 8 hour pay had no problem getting an 8 hour day.
As Henry George wrote in the nineteenth century, "Those who tell you of trades unions bent on raising wages by moral suasion alone are like those who would tell you of tigers that live on oranges." The result of union activity, therefore, is to reduce the number of jobs in an industry and to raise the money wages of union labor, while at the same time relegating many workers, driven out of this line of work by the decreased quantity of labor demanded there, to other lines of work, whose money wages must decrease as a result of the greater supply of workers now forced to compete for them.
The net result is that the gains to certain workers are more than offset by the disabilities inflicted upon other workers. When union activity reduces the number of people who can be profitably employed in skilled trades, it correspondingly increases the number of skilled laborers who are forced to find work in fields that are well below their level of competence. The outcome of this displacement of skilled labor is no different from a situation in which laborers never possessed these skills in the first place. If union privilege prevents some workers from putting their skills to their proper use, the effect is the same as if they had never gone to the trouble to acquire them at all. Thus society produces below its potential, and wealth that would otherwise have been created never sees the light of day.
Unions do not help the workers, they help some workers get some wages by lowering the wages of all other workers. They rely on violence and coercion to prevent the employer from simply finding workers willing to work at the terms offered. You know a Union is being unreasonable in its demands when it has to resort to picketing and assaulting replacement workers. If the Unions demands were reasonable then the owner would not be able to find enough replacement workers willing to work for him and a picket would be unnecessary.
This idea, that workers without unions will inherently have a disadvantage in bargaining power relative to employers, is the basis for most individuals' support of unionism and is picked up again in the Wagner Act. But that disadvantage is a hoary myth. A worker's bargaining power depends on the worker's alternatives. If a worker either works for Employer A or does not work (i.e., if Employer A is a monopsonist), the worker has little bargaining power. If the worker has several employment alternatives, he has strong bargaining power. There may have been instances of monopsony or oligopsony in the 19th century, but they were short-lived. Monopsony has not been a significant factor in the American labor market since the introduction and widespread u
Ugh, so busy at work, so little time to respond to posts. I'll have to do just this one.
Well said. This is not a left right issue. Whatever your political views it should be very clear that the current system has no interest in what is best for the people.
When it comes to economics and politics, Hairyfeet and I are polar opposites on many issues, but we both agree that government needs to work in the interests of THE PEOPLE. Where we differ is how we go about achieving that, but at least people like him and I realize that politics is not a dammed football game, so we can at least sit down and discuss what WE think should be done, not debate what Nancy Pelosi and Mitt Romeny think should be done. I wish I could take the time to have a detailed debate in some threads, but nowhere will you see either of us defending the two parties like a frigin sports team.
So much of this crap should NOT be a left/right issue. I will repeat, "POLITICS IS NOT A DAMMED FOOTBALL GAME."
It doesn't matter if you're a borderline Communist or a Free-Market Libertarian, You should be against ANY politician who engages or protects those who engage in false flag operations, as their only purpose is to do what the people would not ordinarily support or allow. Every single member of Congress should have demanded Holder be removed at the very least and refused to pass anything until that was done.
You should be against the disarmament of the population regardless of political leanings. The only purpose of such a move is to make exploitation of the people easier. Seriously, what would you do if someone asked you to remove all the fire extinguishers from your home because the fire department will take care of everything? You'd rightfully think, "What the hell are you planning that you don't want me to have a fire extinguisher?"
Making the issue of guards in school a left right issue is simply shameful. Hairyfeet is 100% correct. Why the hell is this a left/right issue? This is a common sense issue. Every single mass shooting, except one, over the last 50 years was done in a "gun free zone". If only all our problems were this simple to solve. We found out in the 70's that aluminum wiring causes house fires, what did we do? Stop using aluminum wiring in houses. Likewise here, we find that crazy nutcases like to attack places where victims are disarmed and can't fight back. Solution, stop having places where victims are disarmed. Stop pretending that people want to hand out M-16's to every teacher.
The issue of drones should be a common sense issue as well. We have bombed rescue workers on several occasions. Think about that for a minute. We are using the exact same tactics that the terrorists we are supposedly fighting are using and being even more indiscriminate than them at times. We are killing people based on the president assuring us that he has evidence that these are bad people, but of course he won't let anyone see this evidence. What the farking hell? This is 3rd world Banana Republic crap and you people are going along with it? Are you that dense to NOT see how supporting this WILL bite you in the ass in some future administration? They have shown, clear as day, that they cannot be trusted with them.
These people are serving THEIR OWN INTERESTS, the majority of them couldn't give a sh*t about you me or your family. Their actions don't serve the people's interests in the short or long term, regardless of your political views. They use our troops like they are playing a game of "Risk". They ignore the ticking time bomb that is our entitlement programs, they would rather let the system collapse all at once, leaving millions destitute, rather than discuss solutions that will minimize the hardship endured and risk their re-election. Hell, the entitlement programs are nothing more than a gigantic vote buying scheme to keep people from criticizing the Federal government. Just go look at how the South effectively got jack shit during the New Deal, even though they were the
You remember incorrectly. By the end of the 19th century Unionization was still in the single digits percentage wise, perhaps low double digits in some places. They were in no position to make such demands. Just look at the 3rd world today. Why do children there work? Because ALL the parents suck? Or is it because they are so poor that if the children don't work, the family starves.
They had nothing to do with the 40 hour week either. That was part of the natural progression of rising wages and people choosing to work fewer hours and employers accommodating this. The much more heavily Unionized European workers had their wages rise slower and got the 8 hour day much later than their effectively non-unionized american counterparts.
You, by contract, whitewash the blatant racism of Labor Unions that continues to this day, whose efforts to keep blacks from competing for the jobs of whites kept so many on the sharecropping plantation and keep so many blacks today unemployed.
They were called "robber barons" by their competitors, whom they drove out of business by increasing productivity and efficiency. Labor unions by contrast produce nothing, they are pure parasites on the productive sector of the economy. They don't produce a single bushel of what, a single car, a single drop of oil.
The 19th century Socialist talking points are worthless because they don't match reality. I've already cited a well researched book on the subject and that view is gaining traction with historians because the evidence is too overwhelming.
Actually not even that, only one train line in Japan is profitable. Tokyo to Osaka. All the other lose money. Even in Europe they drive only a few percentage points less than Americans do in terms of miles per year. Roads and cars are so much cheaper than trains. If you need fast, you have airplanes, if you need cheap you have buses. Passenger rail in most areas is as obsolete as vacuum tube computers. Sure they are cool to look at in museums though..
That period of the 19th century you lament so much saw the largest rise in wages and standards of living that workers had ever seen, increase in safety (as technology allowed), and the effective elimination of the 10,000 year history of child labor by allowing parents to earn enough money that the children did not have to. Workers went from 14 hour days 6 days a week on the farm to 12 hour days in the factories, which soon went to 10 and eventually 8, all the while earning more than they could have at 16 hours on a farm thanks to the capital equipment at their disposal. Things were rough and primitive because the technology available was rough and primitive compared to today. They did the best with what they had just like we did 10 or 20 years ago with computers.
The problem of pollution was a problem caused by government refusing to enforce private property rights. Not to mention that one of the largest polluters was government agencies or organizations, especially municipal water systems.
Before the mid and late 19th century, any injurious air pollution was considered a tort, a nuisance against which the victim could sue for damages and against which he could take out an injunction to cease and desist from any further invasion of his property rights. But during the 19th century, the courts systematically altered the law of negligence and the law of nuisance to permit any air pollution which was not unusually greater than any similar manufacturing firm, one that was not more extensive than the customary practice of fellow polluters.
As factories began to arise and emit smoke, blighting the orchards of neighboring farmers, the farmers would take the manufacturers to court, asking for damages and injunctions against further invasion of their property. But the judges said, in effect, "Sorry. We know that industrial smoke (i.e., air pollution) invades and interferes with your property rights. But there is something more important than mere property rights: and that is public policy, the 'common good.' And the common good decrees that industry is a good thing, industrial progress is a good thing, and therefore your mere private property rights must be overridden on behalf of the general welfare." And now all of us are paying the bitter price for this overriding of private property, in the form of lung disease and countless other ailments. And all for the "common good"
Not to mention that the long term effects of some of these chemicals were not known at the time, so even if there was an EPA in 1870, they would have just dumped them in a hole anyway.
It's not like Libertarians haven't been thinking about these things, it's that the solutions don't fit into a 30 second sound bite. No solution is going to be perfect, so we are going to have to chose which imperfections we are most willing to deal with.
You're missing the point, the content isn't being served up from some malware server in Kazakhstan, the ads are. If you're visiting a trusted site, like newgrounds, the risks from flash are minimal. With flash ads from 3rd parties, who the hell knows where that ad is being served from. Yes flash has its problems, it also has its uses. Much like fire, Flash is very useful when properly controlled and dammed dangerous when it isn't. The websites and ad providers have screwed themselves and it is up to them to change.
How so? The Federal Highway Trust Fund is routinely looted for mass transit projects, meaning car users are paying for mass transit riders.
If I could sue GM, Ford and Toyota out of existence for the harm they've caused people, then they'd be out of business. Instead they're protected by courts.
Translation: The courts keep throwing my bullshit lawsuits out.
What harm are you talking about? Henry Ford alone did more to improve the life of the working man than every Union leader combined. By giving the working man access to cheap transportation, horses and transit were too expensive for them to afford, they were no longer hostage to living in tenements within walking distance to the local factory. They now had options. Instead of having to work for the factory 1 mile or less from home he could drive to any factory or employer within 20 miles of home. Instead of having the choice of one or two employers, he now could have over a dozen possible employers to chose to work for and those employers had to compete to get the best workers. The company store became a distant memory as workers could drive to other stores to buy what they needed at competitive prices. If conditions in one local area became bad they could easily pile all their important belongings into the car and drive somewhere else.
Have there been negatives from the advent of the automobile? Certainly, but you're going to have one hell of a time making the case that the overall effect has not been positive.
As for subsidies for roads, I agree, lets get rid of them. But subsidies for roads only amount to about a penny per passenger mile. Increasing gas taxes a few cents would mean the elimination of road subsidies. Mass transit however is subsidized by tens of cents per passenger mile, sometimes close to a dollar per passenger mile. Eliminate subsidies there and mass transit would dissapear almost instantly.
What we need to do is spend our money wisely and not just bury our heads in the sand and pretend that gasoline works without costs that are very extreme, yet ignored because they don't hit you right in the face.
Nobody is saying that gasoline doesn't have costs. However, it is the best technology that we have today. What are these "extreme" costs you keep spouting off about? Environmental damage? Yea, there's that, but the West has that that largely under control. Any alternative is either unworkable or causes more environmental damage than what we have now. What are you suggesting? That 5 billion people just sit down and die by not using fossil fuels for transportation? What is your alternative?
Personally I see Alge diesel being perfected sometime in the next few decades, we have at several hundred years of fossil fuels of all types left so there is time. Throwing money at projects trying to do the equivalent of, building a 747 in the year 1908, are just going to be a waste. There are plenty of other problems that need to be addressed using technology we already have. Expand road capacity where needed to reduce fuel wasted in gridlock. (Make sure this is done only with user fees so the mass transit twits can't bitch.) Employ congestion pricing to reduce traffic during peak times. Build new Generation III nuclear reactors so we can retire or at least be less reliant on our old Generation II reactors. Reprocess the waste to get the long half life useable fuel out of them, the 3% left that is waste can be easily buried for the 300-400 years it takes to decay to save levels. Encourage Gasoline/CNG dual-fuel vehicles to take advantage of the abundance of natural gas in the US. Any number of things can be done with current technology in the US that are far more cost effective.
Except ironically the crazy science actually has evidence to back it up, whereas the Jewish Zombie doesn't even have concrete evidence that he even drew a single breath. The Romans frankly made the Nazis look lazy when it came to record keeping, we can tell you all kinds of things about what was going on back then because of how anal retentive Romans were at keeping tabs...yet a guy that walked on water, raised no less than 2 people counting himself from the dead, even re-attached a soldiers severed ear gets NO writeup, if nothing else a "WTF is this then?" kind of write up?
He did get several write ups. Josephus and Tacitus are two of the major ones, but there are others who mention him. You need to realize that that 85% of everything written in antiquity has been lost. We are at the mercy of whatever has survived.
Jerusalem was completely destroyed in 70 AD. Any records there would have been destroyed. Records kept elsewhere in that area very likely would also have been destroyed in the war. Word traveled very slowly in those days and Jesus's ministry lasted only about 3 years. It did spread widely in the local area as the NT records, but there simply wasn't enough time for word about him to spread much beyond that before the crucifiction occurred, given the primitive communications of the day.
Thanks to how good the modern telescopes are getting we can actually look pretty far back into the past there are even plausible theories on how nothing exploded, IE the possibility that one of the other dimensions leaked into ours,
hairy, stop, just stop. You're making a complete fool out of yourself. "how nothing exploded" are you reading what you are writing?
"IE the possibility that one of the other dimensions leaked into ours"
1. Another universe is not "nothing"
2. That theory of an infinite universe has been proven false by philosophy for hundreds, if not thousands of years, because it leads to logical absurdities, and proven false by science since 2003 with the Borde Guth Vilenkin Theorem.
The philosophical problem is the problem of an infinite regress here is a 6 minute rundown of the problem. The problem applies to the multiverse theory as well
......but other than a single book, a book that has more errors and contradictions than you can shake a stick at BTW, which means that God was worse than your average fan fic writer when it comes to telling a cohesive narrative,
Do a bit of research and you will find that these "contradictions" are simply apparent contradictions, not actual contradictions. They tend to be the result of either misunderstanding, mis translation, time compression on the part of the author, or cultural/geographical ignorance. Sometimes they are secondary details which we would expect to differ slightly in historical documents written by different authors. If all the documents were unanimous in every detail, non believers would then deride them for all saying the exact same thing.
If you have an afternoon to spare, here is a lecture series looking at the gospels from a historians perspective. There are other lectures, but I am only going to list the ones that go over the larger supposed "contradictions" and shows how they are not.
The guy is a devout Mormon, which is a variant of Christianity.
Ahhh, no. Mormonism is not Christian because it denies one or more of the essential doctrines of Christianity. Here is a basic list of what true Christianity teaches as essential doctrine.
There is only one God in all existence (Exodus 20:1-4; Isaiah 43:10; 44:6,8; 45:5).
Jesus is divine (John 1:1;14; 8:24; Col. 2:9)
Forgiveness of sins is by grace alone without works (Eph. 2:8-9; Rom. 3:28; 4:1-5)
Jesus rose from the dead physically (John 2:19-21; Luke 24:39)
The gospel is the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus (1 Cor. 15:1-4)
Mormonism denies that there is only one God in all existence and also denies the forgiveness of sins alone in Christ alone. Therefore, it is outside Christianity. It is not a Christian religion.
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Ford averaged 61,500 Ford Focuses sold per quarter in 2012 just in the US. 5,000 cars is a rounding error in the car market. For a boutique car 5,000 units is fine, but nobody should be pretending that it's changing the car market.
Except in the early days of motoring electric cars DID have the advantage, in both reliability and cost, and was overtaken by the internal combustion engine.
Electric cars will suck forever for the simple fact that batteries never have and never will have the energy density of liquid fuels do. Battery energy density needs to increase by a factor of 40 to match what a gallon of gasoline can do, but physics says that is impossible.
Wrong. Those transit systems were hemorrhaging money and bankrupt. GM bought up the bankrupt streetcar lines and replaced them with buses, which were cheaper, more versatile, more reliable, and faster than streetcars. GM only got in trouble because they didn't allow other bus makers to sell buses to those transportation systems.
Stop getting your history from "Who Framed Roger Rabbit".
As the price of car ownership fell further, intercity bus travel too became unprofitable. Intracity bus travel was always profitable and never went away. It is seeing a resurgence thanks to Chinatown bus services cutting costs.
http://marketurbanism.com/2010/09/23/the-great-american-streetcar-myth/
I would gladly forgo any right to Social Security, Medicaid, or Medicare as well as forfeit all taxes paid into those programs thus far if it means I did not have to pay those taxes anymore from today forward. Yet if I try to do that, men with guns will show up and throw me in jail.
So yes, it is theft. I am being forced to pay for something that I do not want with no choice to opt out.
If you're gonna live by that line of logic, then you are going to die by it.
Following your logic means that everyone in the US is culpable for, and participants in, government actions, meaning civilians are legitimate targets for the enemies of the US government. After all, getting behind the enemy lines and attacking the logistics personnel is a perfectly legitimate strategy, attacking non-combatant civilians would be nothing more than attacking further up the supply chain.
So are you going to follow your logic where it leads and say the Boston Marathon Bombing was a legitimate attack against the US government? Or are you going to cherrypick only for when it is convenient for you? Best bet would be for you to abandon it entirely.
They were being deliberately stupid on that show when trying to make BP, that is the only conclusion I can come to because they should have been able to make good BP with only 15 minutes of research on how to do it.
No, violence is a means to and end. The problem is when violence becomes and end unto itself.
Why to Arabs attack us? They've told us repeatedly, because they view our interventions in the region as an assault on their culture and right to self rule. So they attack us in retaliation. The leaders at home don't blame their bad foreign policy, but say that they are attacking because "they hate us for our freedom" and so they attack the Arabs back, which only makes it all the easier for the Arabs to recruit new members to attack again. Our "leaders" are trying to put out a fire by pouring gasoline onto it.
Now you of course you may ask, If they know we're going to strike back, why do they attack us if they want us to leave them alone? Because they know that the American government won't leave them alone no matter how many times they say please, so they attack knowing that we will try to go after them. Their violence is simply a means to an end, that end is to bankrupt the American Military-Industrial complex so the US government is forced to leave because they are defeated economically. They know that we have to spend $1000 in the middle east to counter every dollar they spend. They know that every bullet we fire, every bomb we drop, every solider we send, brings them one step closer to victory. Sure some of them say they want the world to all be ruled by Islam, but they're practical people and realize that they're not gonna launch an invasion of the mainland US.
The correct thing to do is give them what they want, leave them along and let people buy the oil at whatever price it is selling for. The number of people they can send over to us is little more than a lethal nuisance and can be easily dealt with here. With us gone, the many Arab factions will lose a common enemy and within a decade they will go back to fighting each other like they have done for hundreds of years and not give us a second thought.
Fun fact, McVeigh called those children "Collateral Damage".
What has the Obama administration called children killed in drone strikes?..........Collateral Damage.
You're describing the u.s funded ira
He's describing current US drone policy.
And WWI was great for the defense industry, not so great for those sucking mustard gas...your point?
Translation: Someone called you on your economic ignorance and your only option is to change the subject.
Your argument there is a red herring. If you're gonna live by that argument, you're also gonna die by it because I can do the same thing in regards to labor unions, just cite one of the many examples of Unions working to make it illegal to hire blacks in order to protect white workers.
You continually yammer on and on about how the evil businessmen are exploiting the workers and not one peep about how it is the tens of thousands of pages of regulations that keep those large firms in place by making it impossible for small start-ups to compete. You look at businesses gaming the system and never once question the system itself.
Sure, you've pointed to the fact that the government is blowing massive bubbles into the economy, but that's about all you have right. Your knowledge and understanding about the economic history of the 19th century is embarrassingly bad, reminiscent of what I remember from high school. Overly simplistic and presented from the point of view that the government can do no wrong. A great many other people stopped reading history and economics after the 10th grade too, but what makes me shake my head is that you are clearly a well read and intelligent person in the area of computers and technology. You're investigated one side of an issue and then the other and come to your conclusion. That's great. Yet it's as if your brain shifts into neutral when it comes to history or economics and you resort to some 10th grade textbook understanding of history and economics.
I was always into non-fiction so I was always reading history books when I was young. With the advent of the internet, the ability to read alternate views became much easier. One could have one window open with one point of view of history and in another have the other sides attempt at a rebuttal. If one rebuttal was unconvincing, a little searching would turn up another. I went back and forth on several major issues over several years as I weighed the arguments and counter arguments. Some issues I have become totally convinced about, others are tentative, and others I recognize as imperfect, but the best practical option. The point I'm making here is that with the internet it is not that hard to investigate different views, provided you actually read the alternative views as written by those expounding them and not just a paraphrase by someone else, which can be quite a task at times.
You've been repeatedly corrected by me and others and yet it makes no impact. You don't read up, you don't even get more sophisticated in your argumentation. It's the same stuff over and over again. I read your posts and wish someone else would respond, but I realize that they are thinking the same thing I am, "Why bother, he's not going to respond with anything new." Reminds me of a discussion on another forum with someone who was expounding the Venus Project's "Resource based economy". They were asked how their system solves the Economic Calculation Problem. Not only did they not understand the problem, they made no effort TO understand the problem despite repeated attempts to explain and clarify the problem. Eventually people just gave up and ignored that person when they posted about economics, though they did have insightful things to say on other topics.
It's just frustrating because you're better than that.
So what do you do if the police don't show up? Remember, they are under no legal obligation to arrive in a timely manner or even help you if they do. Let the bad guys load your house into a U-haul? Sorry, but not everyone has the luxury.
I should also mention the book "The Failure of the “New Economics”: An Analysis of the Keynesian Fallacies" which is a point by point refutation of Keynesianisim. It is available for free as a PDF or ebook. Any time a Keynsian says something, you'll almost certainly find the refutation in here.
https://mises.org/document/3655
Once that book was published Kensianisim was definitively killed intellectually. It only stumbles on because it gives politicians the cover they need to do what they want to do anyway.
Keynesian economics belongs in the trash bin of history. It has several fatal flaws. Just to list a couple.
1. It assumes that central planning by government can outperform the market in a crisis. This was refuted by Ludwig von Mises in 1920 with his posing of the economic calculation problem. It is also refuted by history. The Depression of 1920 was as severe as the crash in 29-30, yet was over in under 2 years. 29 comes along and government tries to fix things and the result is 15 years of economic stagnation and high unemployment that only ended when those policies were abandoned after WWII.
Why You've Never Heard of the Great Depression of 1920
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czcUmnsprQI
“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. And an enormous debt to boot!” Henry Morgenthau Jr. — close friend, lunch companion, loyal secretary of the Treasury to President Franklin D. Roosevelt — and key architect of FDR’s New Deal. The date: May 9, 1939. Those words are still true today.
2. It treats the economy in terms of useless aggregates, "Investment" and "consumption" are treated as giant homogeneous lumps which is completely useless, since the problems to be solved in an economy are to figure out exactly what to invest in and produce and how much to produce. A recession is the markets way of correcting misallocation of resources, but as we have seen, all government intervention does is prevents those reallocation from taking place and thus the depression continues until those reallocation are allowed to happen. With hindsight one can see that the last decade plus has been one long depression, with stagnation in the breadwinner jobs. The government keeps blowing bubbles to paper over the mistakes that exist in the economy, but now the bubble is in the dollar and bonds. When that bursts we are going to feel the pain that we should have felt in 2001, 2008 along with the pain caused by the mistakes from the last five years.
If Keynsian theory was sound, you would think that their predictions would match reality. Problem is that those predictions have a track record of being nearly 100% wrong. When your theory doesn't match reality all the hand-waving in the world isn't going to save it.
Keynesian Predictions vs. American History
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XbG6aIUlog
The Problems with Keynesian Solutions to the Current Depression
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmYtyl8s05w
If you really want to be clever without having to use crypto, use a USB interface to go from the computer to whatever interface you use in the front to control the PC. Then, somewhere along the line, you put in a USB hub and a flash drive, separate from the computer. You mount it as a hidden partition and have it save a copy of the data stream. If the cops yank the computer, you just take the car home and lift the back seat or reach under the dash and take out the drive and you now have a copy of what went on.
Reminds me about a saying regarding engine design. You can design an engine for horsepower or torque. If you design an engine for torque, horsepower will take care of itself. Likewise here, if your business focuses on the customers, the stock price will ultimately take care of itself.
I was thinking along the lines of the many for-profit intercity buses between cities, they are just fine. Intracity busses, yea, they aren't that great to ride even here in ND.
People here will drive anything that will physically move rather than use the bus. Only people I have ever seen on it are the elderly or blind. Heck, one guy I knew when working retail would rather walk than take the bus, even when it was -20F.
Wow, way to construct a straw man.
Of course they weren't against the 40 hour week, but they didn't have anything meaningful to do with it, as evidenced by the much more heavily unionized European workers getting the 8 hour day long after American workers did. It was rising productivity made possible by the capitalists that enabled wages to rise to the point where workers had the option to accept more free time instead of higher wages. Workers were willing to accept slightly lower wages in exchange for an 8 hour day, so the capitalists did indeed freely oblige. Before that point, wages had not risen enough and people needed the extra income that working a 10 hour day brought them. Today I bet every single person would love to work a 20 hour week. The problem is that they couldn't life on the wages that a 20 hour week would bring them. Likewise in the early 19th century in regards to the 50 and 60 hour week.
Since you obviously don't read your history, what the labor unionists wanted was "8 hour day for 10 hour pay". THAT is why there was such "resistance" to the 8 hour day. Workers that wanted 8 hour day for 8 hour pay had no problem getting an 8 hour day.
Forgotten Facts of American Labor History
http://www.lewrockwell.com/woods/woods135.html
As Henry George wrote in the nineteenth century, "Those who tell you of trades unions bent on raising wages by moral suasion alone are like those who would tell you of tigers that live on oranges." The result of union activity, therefore, is to reduce the number of jobs in an industry and to raise the money wages of union labor, while at the same time relegating many workers, driven out of this line of work by the decreased quantity of labor demanded there, to other lines of work, whose money wages must decrease as a result of the greater supply of workers now forced to compete for them.
The net result is that the gains to certain workers are more than offset by the disabilities inflicted upon other workers. When union activity reduces the number of people who can be profitably employed in skilled trades, it correspondingly increases the number of skilled laborers who are forced to find work in fields that are well below their level of competence. The outcome of this displacement of skilled labor is no different from a situation in which laborers never possessed these skills in the first place. If union privilege prevents some workers from putting their skills to their proper use, the effect is the same as if they had never gone to the trouble to acquire them at all. Thus society produces below its potential, and wealth that would otherwise have been created never sees the light of day.
Unions do not help the workers, they help some workers get some wages by lowering the wages of all other workers. They rely on violence and coercion to prevent the employer from simply finding workers willing to work at the terms offered. You know a Union is being unreasonable in its demands when it has to resort to picketing and assaulting replacement workers. If the Unions demands were reasonable then the owner would not be able to find enough replacement workers willing to work for him and a picket would be unnecessary.
This idea, that workers without unions will inherently have a disadvantage in bargaining power relative to employers, is the basis for most individuals' support of unionism and is picked up again in the Wagner Act. But that disadvantage is a hoary myth. A worker's bargaining power depends on the worker's alternatives. If a worker either works for Employer A or does not work (i.e., if Employer A is a monopsonist), the worker has little bargaining power. If the worker has several employment alternatives, he has strong bargaining power. There may have been instances of monopsony or oligopsony in the 19th century, but they were short-lived. Monopsony has not been a significant factor in the American labor market since the introduction and widespread u
Ugh, so busy at work, so little time to respond to posts. I'll have to do just this one.
Well said. This is not a left right issue. Whatever your political views it should be very clear that the current system has no interest in what is best for the people.
When it comes to economics and politics, Hairyfeet and I are polar opposites on many issues, but we both agree that government needs to work in the interests of THE PEOPLE. Where we differ is how we go about achieving that, but at least people like him and I realize that politics is not a dammed football game, so we can at least sit down and discuss what WE think should be done, not debate what Nancy Pelosi and Mitt Romeny think should be done. I wish I could take the time to have a detailed debate in some threads, but nowhere will you see either of us defending the two parties like a frigin sports team.
So much of this crap should NOT be a left/right issue. I will repeat, "POLITICS IS NOT A DAMMED FOOTBALL GAME."
It doesn't matter if you're a borderline Communist or a Free-Market Libertarian, You should be against ANY politician who engages or protects those who engage in false flag operations, as their only purpose is to do what the people would not ordinarily support or allow. Every single member of Congress should have demanded Holder be removed at the very least and refused to pass anything until that was done.
You should be against the disarmament of the population regardless of political leanings. The only purpose of such a move is to make exploitation of the people easier. Seriously, what would you do if someone asked you to remove all the fire extinguishers from your home because the fire department will take care of everything? You'd rightfully think, "What the hell are you planning that you don't want me to have a fire extinguisher?"
Making the issue of guards in school a left right issue is simply shameful. Hairyfeet is 100% correct. Why the hell is this a left/right issue? This is a common sense issue. Every single mass shooting, except one, over the last 50 years was done in a "gun free zone". If only all our problems were this simple to solve. We found out in the 70's that aluminum wiring causes house fires, what did we do? Stop using aluminum wiring in houses. Likewise here, we find that crazy nutcases like to attack places where victims are disarmed and can't fight back. Solution, stop having places where victims are disarmed. Stop pretending that people want to hand out M-16's to every teacher.
The issue of drones should be a common sense issue as well. We have bombed rescue workers on several occasions. Think about that for a minute. We are using the exact same tactics that the terrorists we are supposedly fighting are using and being even more indiscriminate than them at times. We are killing people based on the president assuring us that he has evidence that these are bad people, but of course he won't let anyone see this evidence. What the farking hell? This is 3rd world Banana Republic crap and you people are going along with it? Are you that dense to NOT see how supporting this WILL bite you in the ass in some future administration? They have shown, clear as day, that they cannot be trusted with them.
These people are serving THEIR OWN INTERESTS, the majority of them couldn't give a sh*t about you me or your family. Their actions don't serve the people's interests in the short or long term, regardless of your political views. They use our troops like they are playing a game of "Risk". They ignore the ticking time bomb that is our entitlement programs, they would rather let the system collapse all at once, leaving millions destitute, rather than discuss solutions that will minimize the hardship endured and risk their re-election. Hell, the entitlement programs are nothing more than a gigantic vote buying scheme to keep people from criticizing the Federal government. Just go look at how the South effectively got jack shit during the New Deal, even though they were the
You remember incorrectly. By the end of the 19th century Unionization was still in the single digits percentage wise, perhaps low double digits in some places. They were in no position to make such demands. Just look at the 3rd world today. Why do children there work? Because ALL the parents suck? Or is it because they are so poor that if the children don't work, the family starves.
They had nothing to do with the 40 hour week either. That was part of the natural progression of rising wages and people choosing to work fewer hours and employers accommodating this. The much more heavily Unionized European workers had their wages rise slower and got the 8 hour day much later than their effectively non-unionized american counterparts.
You, by contract, whitewash the blatant racism of Labor Unions that continues to this day, whose efforts to keep blacks from competing for the jobs of whites kept so many on the sharecropping plantation and keep so many blacks today unemployed.
They were called "robber barons" by their competitors, whom they drove out of business by increasing productivity and efficiency. Labor unions by contrast produce nothing, they are pure parasites on the productive sector of the economy. They don't produce a single bushel of what, a single car, a single drop of oil.
The 19th century Socialist talking points are worthless because they don't match reality. I've already cited a well researched book on the subject and that view is gaining traction with historians because the evidence is too overwhelming.
The Free Market: Fallacies and Facts | Thomas E. Woods, Jr
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jByMs8tKGI
Actually not even that, only one train line in Japan is profitable. Tokyo to Osaka. All the other lose money. Even in Europe they drive only a few percentage points less than Americans do in terms of miles per year. Roads and cars are so much cheaper than trains. If you need fast, you have airplanes, if you need cheap you have buses. Passenger rail in most areas is as obsolete as vacuum tube computers. Sure they are cool to look at in museums though..
I've pointed out to you before that your view is largely a myth. I'll just leave this here for anyone interested.
The Myth of the Robber Barons: A New Look at the Rise of Big Business in America
http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Robber-Barons-Business-America/dp/0963020315
That period of the 19th century you lament so much saw the largest rise in wages and standards of living that workers had ever seen, increase in safety (as technology allowed), and the effective elimination of the 10,000 year history of child labor by allowing parents to earn enough money that the children did not have to. Workers went from 14 hour days 6 days a week on the farm to 12 hour days in the factories, which soon went to 10 and eventually 8, all the while earning more than they could have at 16 hours on a farm thanks to the capital equipment at their disposal. Things were rough and primitive because the technology available was rough and primitive compared to today. They did the best with what they had just like we did 10 or 20 years ago with computers.
The problem of pollution was a problem caused by government refusing to enforce private property rights. Not to mention that one of the largest polluters was government agencies or organizations, especially municipal water systems.
The Libertarian Manifesto on Pollution
https://mises.org/daily/5978/The-Libertarian-Manifesto-on-Pollution
Before the mid and late 19th century, any injurious air pollution was considered a tort, a nuisance against which the victim could sue for damages and against which he could take out an injunction to cease and desist from any further invasion of his property rights. But during the 19th century, the courts systematically altered the law of negligence and the law of nuisance to permit any air pollution which was not unusually greater than any similar manufacturing firm, one that was not more extensive than the customary practice of fellow polluters.
As factories began to arise and emit smoke, blighting the orchards of neighboring farmers, the farmers would take the manufacturers to court, asking for damages and injunctions against further invasion of their property. But the judges said, in effect, "Sorry. We know that industrial smoke (i.e., air pollution) invades and interferes with your property rights. But there is something more important than mere property rights: and that is public policy, the 'common good.' And the common good decrees that industry is a good thing, industrial progress is a good thing, and therefore your mere private property rights must be overridden on behalf of the general welfare." And now all of us are paying the bitter price for this overriding of private property, in the form of lung disease and countless other ailments. And all for the "common good"
Not to mention that the long term effects of some of these chemicals were not known at the time, so even if there was an EPA in 1870, they would have just dumped them in a hole anyway.
It's not like Libertarians haven't been thinking about these things, it's that the solutions don't fit into a 30 second sound bite. No solution is going to be perfect, so we are going to have to chose which imperfections we are most willing to deal with.
You're missing the point, the content isn't being served up from some malware server in Kazakhstan, the ads are. If you're visiting a trusted site, like newgrounds, the risks from flash are minimal. With flash ads from 3rd parties, who the hell knows where that ad is being served from. Yes flash has its problems, it also has its uses. Much like fire, Flash is very useful when properly controlled and dammed dangerous when it isn't. The websites and ad providers have screwed themselves and it is up to them to change.
The same applies to gasoline combustion vehicles.
How so? The Federal Highway Trust Fund is routinely looted for mass transit projects, meaning car users are paying for mass transit riders.
If I could sue GM, Ford and Toyota out of existence for the harm they've caused people, then they'd be out of business. Instead they're protected by courts.
Translation: The courts keep throwing my bullshit lawsuits out.
What harm are you talking about? Henry Ford alone did more to improve the life of the working man than every Union leader combined. By giving the working man access to cheap transportation, horses and transit were too expensive for them to afford, they were no longer hostage to living in tenements within walking distance to the local factory. They now had options. Instead of having to work for the factory 1 mile or less from home he could drive to any factory or employer within 20 miles of home. Instead of having the choice of one or two employers, he now could have over a dozen possible employers to chose to work for and those employers had to compete to get the best workers. The company store became a distant memory as workers could drive to other stores to buy what they needed at competitive prices. If conditions in one local area became bad they could easily pile all their important belongings into the car and drive somewhere else.
Have there been negatives from the advent of the automobile? Certainly, but you're going to have one hell of a time making the case that the overall effect has not been positive.
As for subsidies for roads, I agree, lets get rid of them. But subsidies for roads only amount to about a penny per passenger mile. Increasing gas taxes a few cents would mean the elimination of road subsidies. Mass transit however is subsidized by tens of cents per passenger mile, sometimes close to a dollar per passenger mile. Eliminate subsidies there and mass transit would dissapear almost instantly.
http://www.buses.org/files/Summary%20-%20Federal%20Subsidies%20for%20Passenger%20Transportation%20final.pdf
http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=5002
What we need to do is spend our money wisely and not just bury our heads in the sand and pretend that gasoline works without costs that are very extreme, yet ignored because they don't hit you right in the face.
Nobody is saying that gasoline doesn't have costs. However, it is the best technology that we have today. What are these "extreme" costs you keep spouting off about? Environmental damage? Yea, there's that, but the West has that that largely under control. Any alternative is either unworkable or causes more environmental damage than what we have now. What are you suggesting? That 5 billion people just sit down and die by not using fossil fuels for transportation? What is your alternative?
Personally I see Alge diesel being perfected sometime in the next few decades, we have at several hundred years of fossil fuels of all types left so there is time. Throwing money at projects trying to do the equivalent of, building a 747 in the year 1908, are just going to be a waste. There are plenty of other problems that need to be addressed using technology we already have. Expand road capacity where needed to reduce fuel wasted in gridlock. (Make sure this is done only with user fees so the mass transit twits can't bitch.) Employ congestion pricing to reduce traffic during peak times. Build new Generation III nuclear reactors so we can retire or at least be less reliant on our old Generation II reactors. Reprocess the waste to get the long half life useable fuel out of them, the 3% left that is waste can be easily buried for the 300-400 years it takes to decay to save levels. Encourage Gasoline/CNG dual-fuel vehicles to take advantage of the abundance of natural gas in the US. Any number of things can be done with current technology in the US that are far more cost effective.
Except ironically the crazy science actually has evidence to back it up, whereas the Jewish Zombie doesn't even have concrete evidence that he even drew a single breath. The Romans frankly made the Nazis look lazy when it came to record keeping, we can tell you all kinds of things about what was going on back then because of how anal retentive Romans were at keeping tabs...yet a guy that walked on water, raised no less than 2 people counting himself from the dead, even re-attached a soldiers severed ear gets NO writeup, if nothing else a "WTF is this then?" kind of write up?
He did get several write ups. Josephus and Tacitus are two of the major ones, but there are others who mention him. You need to realize that that 85% of everything written in antiquity has been lost. We are at the mercy of whatever has survived.
Jerusalem was completely destroyed in 70 AD. Any records there would have been destroyed. Records kept elsewhere in that area very likely would also have been destroyed in the war. Word traveled very slowly in those days and Jesus's ministry lasted only about 3 years. It did spread widely in the local area as the NT records, but there simply wasn't enough time for word about him to spread much beyond that before the crucifiction occurred, given the primitive communications of the day.
Thanks to how good the modern telescopes are getting we can actually look pretty far back into the past there are even plausible theories on how nothing exploded, IE the possibility that one of the other dimensions leaked into ours,
hairy, stop, just stop. You're making a complete fool out of yourself. "how nothing exploded" are you reading what you are writing?
"IE the possibility that one of the other dimensions leaked into ours"
1. Another universe is not "nothing"
2. That theory of an infinite universe has been proven false by philosophy for hundreds, if not thousands of years, because it leads to logical absurdities, and proven false by science since 2003 with the Borde Guth Vilenkin Theorem.
The philosophical problem is the problem of an infinite regress here is a 6 minute rundown of the problem. The problem applies to the multiverse theory as well
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/3994011/william_lane_craig_the_absurdity_of_an_infinite_regress_of_things/
......but other than a single book, a book that has more errors and contradictions than you can shake a stick at BTW, which means that God was worse than your average fan fic writer when it comes to telling a cohesive narrative,
Do a bit of research and you will find that these "contradictions" are simply apparent contradictions, not actual contradictions. They tend to be the result of either misunderstanding, mis translation, time compression on the part of the author, or cultural/geographical ignorance. Sometimes they are secondary details which we would expect to differ slightly in historical documents written by different authors. If all the documents were unanimous in every detail, non believers would then deride them for all saying the exact same thing.
If you have an afternoon to spare, here is a lecture series looking at the gospels from a historians perspective. There are other lectures, but I am only going to list the ones that go over the larger supposed "contradictions" and shows how they are not.
04a Alleged Historical Errors in the Gospels (Matthew & Mark)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKzSV8bWKk0
04b Alleged Historical Errors in the Gospels (Luke & John)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5kJuTkUo0w
05a Alleged Contradictions in the Gospels
The guy is a devout Mormon, which is a variant of Christianity.
Ahhh, no. Mormonism is not Christian because it denies one or more of the essential doctrines of Christianity. Here is a basic list of what true Christianity teaches as essential doctrine.
There is only one God in all existence (Exodus 20:1-4; Isaiah 43:10; 44:6,8; 45:5).
Jesus is divine (John 1:1;14; 8:24; Col. 2:9)
Forgiveness of sins is by grace alone without works (Eph. 2:8-9; Rom. 3:28; 4:1-5)
Jesus rose from the dead physically (John 2:19-21; Luke 24:39)
The gospel is the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus (1 Cor. 15:1-4)
Mormonism denies that there is only one God in all existence and also denies the forgiveness of sins alone in Christ alone. Therefore, it is outside Christianity. It is not a Christian religion.