Why do people feel the urge to tell a simplistic story of what happened? Claiming that the atomic bomb was seen as just another weapon simply isn't true. This doesn't have anything to do with hindsight, this has to do with the documents of the time clearly showing that this was not the case.
As a trained historian and scientist, this disturbs me. Very little was understood of radioactive substances in the 1940s. What was understood was that exposure to large quantities of exotic substances caused a kind of sickness - little more. This does not translate, scientifically or historically, into an understanding that a detonation would result in radiation deaths.
Without radiation deaths, the atomic bomb is just a really big bomb. That's it -- and that's what it was seen as by the US military and by Truman (who, if you'll recall, wasn't really in on the day to day goings on of the Roosevelt administration).
US troops on the ground after the detonations didn't know what the weapon did. Radiation poisoning was called "Disease-X" and we had no idea where it came from or how to stop it.
Ultimately, World War II was a total war. In such a war, great powers seek to destroy each other absolutely with whatever means are within their reach. Debating the morality of the atomic bomb in such a context is a historical error called anachronism - judging the actions of the past by the political, social, and scientific mores of the present. Debate the morality of total war all you like - but the atom bomb was just the latest and greatest in a series of hellish weapons developed by mankind.
Name one weapon before the atomic bomb - any weapon, so horrible that its use in warfare was taboo before it was ever deployed. Why should this case be different? What should have fired off in Truman's head saying that obviously this weapon is worse than poison gas, incendiary bombs, biological weapons and countless other innovations of human kind?
History is about more than just reading about the past -- it is about seeing the events and people of an era through their own eyes. If you fail to do that, you're not a historian.
Lets continue your analysis (acutaly, this would be a good Slashpole -- Editors? Catch that?) -- Who blocks Google Ads? Really?
I don't. I have Adblocker installed, I have it configured to display Slashdot's ads because I typicaly click on them on accident if I don't. I have doubleclick blacklisted because their ads are irritating.
In fact, no one I know blocks Google ads. They're unobtrusive, helpful, and direct me towards the products and services I'm allready looking for. Why would I block them? They're like a yellow pages for the internet.
So really, its the people that sell advertising space to herbal viagra vendors on their Disney fan site that are going to suffer, not people like Google.
Build ads that don't piss me off. I have never blocked an ad that didn't piss me off.
Quality costs money in places other than call centers though.
Seriously, look at the Credit Card system in place today. How many of us could do better with some rudimentary algorithems and a mid level background in networking at data security?
How about a credit card that uses public key encryption to generate a number based on its on private key, the public key of the funds recipiant, and contains a second key consisting of a date/time stamp, the public key of the recipiant, and a TTL encrypted with the card's private key and the public key of a known payment authorization system.
Sure, the cards themselves suddenly cost a bit more, but most of this stuff can be packed into a card for cheep. The infrastructure costs money, but isn't that what the Card Companies are supposed to be providing?
Fundamentaly decisions have been made at high levels to sacrifice customer security for higher profits. We can blame it on the call centers and the like, but a big part of it comes from an inherent unwillingnes to invest money in infrastrucutre that protects people.
And in the 1940s no one had any idea that the after affects of a nuclear weapon would be anything like that. It would be one thing if Truman was told this and ignored it, but no one knew at the time.
How can we draw a moral distinction and judge Truman based upon it if that moral distinction is based on scientific information that wasn't available 60 years ago
You're engaging in a falacy historians call Anacronism. Namely, you're judging the actions and decisions of the past by the standards of the present.
Consider the decisions made at the time in light of what was known at the time. Atomic Weapons were considered to be just really socking great explosive devices. The concept of radiation or radiation sickness was totaly unknown. Moreover, the idea that, after fission, these weapons could create this affect was beyond imagining.
Consider this -- the use of large quantities of high explosive devices and the use of large high explosive devices (MOABs) meet with little or no objection in modern warfare. Given that 1940's science did not distinguish between these weapons in terms of effect, why should 1940's morality distinguish between them?
I'm not disagreeing that Peral Harbor sucked and was an escalation that the United States wasn't expecting.
I'm not disagreeing that Japan did carry out a sneak attack (though on accident, they did try to deliver notice of the attack).
What I am disagreeing with is that it was unprovoked. The US had cut off Japanese oil supplies. Japan's military machine had a few short months in which to move before it was paralized by the oil embargo. Japan knew that any attempts to seize oil producing resources in S.E. Asia would meet with stiff resistance from the US and that war was coming. They sought to strike at Peral, paralizing our fleet long enough to establish an oil supply in the Pacific. Once established, and without Peral as a refuling depot, the Japanese fleet would be able to keep the American fleet at arms length, eliminating the possibilty of a Pacific front.
In short, the Japanse strike on Peral was actualy a great deal like the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagisaki -- though preemptive. Knock the opponent out of the game, doing minimal damage and risking minimal losses.
Unfortunately for Japan, the 3rd wave of planes never flew from the carrier strike force. Those planes were to target US fuel depots on Peral which housed roughly a years worth of oil for the fleet. Without that oil, US forces would have been forced to return to San Fransisco to refuel, severely curtailing effectiveness in the Pacific.
Yommomoto chose not to send the 3rd wave because the resistance on Peral was becoming too severe, particulary from US fighters defending the harbor.
In may historian's eyes, that decision cost Japan the war.
You're thinking of cancer as a symetrical sphere. It's not always (or even usualy) like that. For starters, a blood cancer (leukemia) makes up a good sized chunk of the cancer diagnoses each year. Chemo is extremely effective against leukemias.
Secondly, most cancers of which you speak can be addressed through radiological and surgical procedures, leaving only the outer fringe to be mopped up by Chemo.
1 - Foodstamps have nothing whatsoever in common with Farm Subsidies, save that people on Farms can get foodstamps. Farm Subsidies are when we give people (more correctly large multinational corporate farmers) money not to grow stuff... or, when we fix prices.
2 - You need to read Locke. Locke thinks you're full of crap when it comes to the roll of government.
I guess not you, but that leaves holes in your argument. If we're not talking about fraud cases, we're talking about people who have a legitimate claim to the assistance in question.
So the question comes to this -- given that there are people in the world who don't make enough to survive on, and given that some of them are citizens of our country, do we not have the responsibility to see that they are taken care of?
What is a government for but to protect those to weak (financialy, or physicaly) to protect themselves?
Cancer cells divide more rapidly than normal cells (that's part of what makes them cancer). To divide they need to synthesize DNA and to do that they need that tasty looking folate you talked about.
Thus, cancer cells absorb more folate than normal cells.
Traditional chemotherapy drugs attack dividing cells, exploiting the conditions present in a dividing cell to kill it. Because cancer cells are dividing more often than normal cells, they are disproportionately targeted. Poof -- chemo works.
This new technology incorporates the same kinds of drugs, but makes cancer cells more likely to absorb the drug, making it even more biased towards killing off cancer cells. Normal cells will absorb at a slower rate and will still be largely unaffected unless they are dividing. Cancer cells will absorb more, and be hit harder by the drug.
It basicly allows us to focus the drugs more. That's a good thing. More focus == less side affects. That means less weight loss, less hair loss, less vomiting, etc.
All those things mean increased dosages are possible - which means we can kill the cancer faster and more effectively.
The problem is that the poverty line is poorly constructed in this country and it's politicaly unwise to move it. Raising the poverty line (something that requires a move by the President, it's not a legislative function) instantly creates more poor people. More poor people looks bad come election time.
As a consequence, the poverty line is very poorly constructed and doesn't really encompass all those really living in poverty. Tieing MORE to this meaningless marker would not help things.
Tack on legislation requiring that poverty lines be evaluated by zipcode with a reasonable means of calculating them including things like rent, food, transportation, medicine etc and perhaps this will work -- but our existing poverty line isn't nearly as inclusive as it should be.
Fact: More than 80% of farm subsidies in this country go to AgriBuisnesses -- that's large corporations, not poor farmers. [Source: Vandanna Shiva]
Fact: Medical Industry Subsidies are done through state, not Federal money, and are the first on the chopping block when the cash gets tight.
Why do I know this? My wife works in sustainable agricultural development policy and I volunteer with childhood cancer patients. We see both.
Social programs are dieing in this country. Admittedly, there are people who abuse the system. I'll go ahead and appropriate an argument from a group that I disagree with, the NRA, to address this.
Welfare programs don't commit welfare fraud, people commit welfare fraud. Why cut the program, when it's the asshole fraudster that's commiting the crime? Welfare and medicare and medicaid benefit hundreds of thousands of people and make it possible for untold thousands to pick themselves back up from a bad financial fall and make something of themselves. Why kill the program because a few jerks abuse it? Why not just throw those jerks in prison like the law says we should?
There is value in money not being spent. Indeed, a person derives benefit from not spending money.
Viewing money as a means to consumerism and consumerism as an ultimate goal is short sighted. Consider
Money can be a safty net - I am more secure when I have $500,000 in the bank than when I have $500 in the bank. The presence of that money and my ability to spend it at will makes me safer and less concerned.
Want to talk fair tax? Fine - lets do that. What you're talking about is basicly a national sales tax so lets consider one reasonably and fairly.
The following items and categories of items have to be exempt form a national sales tax or tax of any kind
1 - Food (not resturant service, just groceries) 2 - Any used item 3 - Rent and/or Housing Expenses 4 - Medical Care
The following items and categories must be taxed, and should be taxed at a higher rate to ensure a non-regressive tax.
1 - Securities Purchases 2 - Interest 3 - Inheritance (excepting the above first set of categories in the inheritance of course)
A sales or VAT style tax could be fair, but in order for it to be fair we must exempt from it the kinds of goods and services which are necessities. The poor spend a greater precentage of their income on these kinds of goods and, as a consequence, will bear a greater portion of the tax burden than those more able to pay it.
Inheritance is the most important of these. This so called "fair tax" is nothing more than a means of taxing the transferance of value from one person to another. Inheritance is one such transferance. The ceiling should be high -- say 5 Million or more, and the first 5 Million should be tax free. But there exists an inherent value in the having of, say 5 Million in assets and, as long as we're taxing value transfers, we should tax that too.
Intenational Law addressed this issue when Europe started trying to carve up the Americas. The Treaty of London (1600) decreed that a colony was only yours if you could exert the military force to defend it.
In theory that creates a state of total anarchy outside of Europe, but in practice it meant that if you'd made a reasonable effort to set up defences, any attack on those defences was an attack on the parrent country and causus belli.
Google is a US corporation, held by (wait for it) mostly US stockholders with most of its buisness interests and target market in the US.
As a corporation it is legaly bound to do what is best for its shareholders. While rolling out Google 3d Europe might be warm fuzzies, it's not necessarily the most exploitable market. Moreover, if you're going to test out an infrastructure heavy technology, why not do it in your home city (San Fran for Google)
This comes down to money. Google thinks this will make them more money than rolling out more features to Europe.... that's why.
How can you think that way? Don't you know that our Brave Fighting Men and Women in Uniform need weapons like this one to defend our great country from the evil terrorist agressors? Armed with Soup Can Implosion Guns, our glorious military could wipe the evil Jihadists from the face of the earth and finaly bring lots of little American Flags, Big Macs, and Apple Pie to the middle east.
Do the people that provide you with day to day services not pay income tax?
Try this thought-experiement. Follow a dollar as it goes from your employer's pocket into your bank account. who gets it? Does nobody in the end, receive it in the form of a payment for services rendered? With the poss8ible exception of monies spent on tourism outside of your country, there's little chance it will not end up as straightforward income to someone else somewhere. It might, at worst, end up in a bank account, generating income to a bank, which is taxed......
Your argument doesn't stand because it relies upon us accecpting the premise that any given entity shouldn't have to pay income taxes because th taxes of all other entities will take up the slack.
The problem is that no -=single=- given entity is doing this - it's thousands, tens of thousands of corporations, avoiding any income taxes.
It's not that they don't work, but that they don't necessarily justify their own existance.
I did some research on this topic some time back and came up with a series of criteria that a DRE system must meet to be considered a viable replacement and investment for a county.
1 - Auditable: I.E. the system must provide some vote by vote means of tracking the number of votes for each given candidate (in the event of memory loss) while still preserving the anonymity of each voter. Most DRE systems fail in this because no paper trail exists.
2 - Encrypted: Verifiable strong encryption must be used to prevent unauthorized access to the differing components of the system. We want to make sure that real roll based security exists to prevent unauthorized access to the components of the system. Diebold's systems, for example, allowed the same person who set up the ballot options access to the source code -- bad idea. We also want to use a key system to authenticate individual voters.
3 - Inexpensive: Diebold's systems and most others are too expensive for statewide or nationwide roll outs. While it hasn't been tried formally in the Federal Court system - Bush v. Gore suggests that the use of differing voting technologies in differing counties may be a violation of Equal Protection as this would imply that the state values some votes more than others.
4 - Open Source: The way these systems work must be either publicly verifiable or at least open to inspection by an organ of the state. While the former is preferable, the latter is better than a totally closed source system. The ability to conceal of bit of malicious code in something as complex as a DRE system dwarfs such capability in every other voting system currently in use. The burden of proof must rest with the manufacturer, not the state or the people.
5 - Ubiquitous: Tyeing into the concept of "inexpensive" a DRE system must conform to a series of standards, making differences in the implementation and interface fairly minor between counties. This speaks more to the standards by which the machines and software are produced and less to the financial onus placed on each county.
Conveniently, those are your five vowels -- AEIOU.
DRE systems have the capability to make a real difference in the way we cast votes -- but until they conform to specifications like these it's just not a worthwhile investment, both of my tax dollars and my vote.
I heard a report about this on NPR in which they intereviewed a few high level experts in the field. Essentialy, the consensus is that trust is a complex ineraction of logic, chemicals/emotions, and environment. When asked if we're likely to see a "Trust" perfume anytime soon, the researchers responded "No"
Now -- that's not to say that gullible people won't buy "Trust" perfumes that contain this chemical -- just that they'll be getting riped off.
Basicly this is important because it may lead us to a better understanding of how the brain signals trust... which in and of itself it useful information.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do people feel the urge to tell a simplistic story of what happened? Claiming that the atomic bomb was seen as just another weapon simply isn't true. This doesn't have anything to do with hindsight, this has to do with the documents of the time clearly showing that this was not the case.
As a trained historian and scientist, this disturbs me. Very little was understood of radioactive substances in the 1940s. What was understood was that exposure to large quantities of exotic substances caused a kind of sickness - little more. This does not translate, scientifically or historically, into an understanding that a detonation would result in radiation deaths.
Without radiation deaths, the atomic bomb is just a really big bomb. That's it -- and that's what it was seen as by the US military and by Truman (who, if you'll recall, wasn't really in on the day to day goings on of the Roosevelt administration).
US troops on the ground after the detonations didn't know what the weapon did. Radiation poisoning was called "Disease-X" and we had no idea where it came from or how to stop it.
Ultimately, World War II was a total war. In such a war, great powers seek to destroy each other absolutely with whatever means are within their reach. Debating the morality of the atomic bomb in such a context is a historical error called anachronism - judging the actions of the past by the political, social, and scientific mores of the present. Debate the morality of total war all you like - but the atom bomb was just the latest and greatest in a series of hellish weapons developed by mankind.
Name one weapon before the atomic bomb - any weapon, so horrible that its use in warfare was taboo before it was ever deployed. Why should this case be different? What should have fired off in Truman's head saying that obviously this weapon is worse than poison gas, incendiary bombs, biological weapons and countless other innovations of human kind?
History is about more than just reading about the past -- it is about seeing the events and people of an era through their own eyes. If you fail to do that, you're not a historian.
Lets continue your analysis (acutaly, this would be a good Slashpole -- Editors? Catch that?) -- Who blocks Google Ads? Really?
I don't. I have Adblocker installed, I have it configured to display Slashdot's ads because I typicaly click on them on accident if I don't. I have doubleclick blacklisted because their ads are irritating.
In fact, no one I know blocks Google ads. They're unobtrusive, helpful, and direct me towards the products and services I'm allready looking for. Why would I block them? They're like a yellow pages for the internet.
So really, its the people that sell advertising space to herbal viagra vendors on their Disney fan site that are going to suffer, not people like Google.
Build ads that don't piss me off. I have never blocked an ad that didn't piss me off.
Quality costs money in places other than call centers though.
Seriously, look at the Credit Card system in place today. How many of us could do better with some rudimentary algorithems and a mid level background in networking at data security?
How about a credit card that uses public key encryption to generate a number based on its on private key, the public key of the funds recipiant, and contains a second key consisting of a date/time stamp, the public key of the recipiant, and a TTL encrypted with the card's private key and the public key of a known payment authorization system.
Sure, the cards themselves suddenly cost a bit more, but most of this stuff can be packed into a card for cheep. The infrastructure costs money, but isn't that what the Card Companies are supposed to be providing?
Fundamentaly decisions have been made at high levels to sacrifice customer security for higher profits. We can blame it on the call centers and the like, but a big part of it comes from an inherent unwillingnes to invest money in infrastrucutre that protects people.
And in the 1940s no one had any idea that the after affects of a nuclear weapon would be anything like that. It would be one thing if Truman was told this and ignored it, but no one knew at the time.
How can we draw a moral distinction and judge Truman based upon it if that moral distinction is based on scientific information that wasn't available 60 years ago
You're engaging in a falacy historians call Anacronism. Namely, you're judging the actions and decisions of the past by the standards of the present.
Consider the decisions made at the time in light of what was known at the time. Atomic Weapons were considered to be just really socking great explosive devices. The concept of radiation or radiation sickness was totaly unknown. Moreover, the idea that, after fission, these weapons could create this affect was beyond imagining.
Consider this -- the use of large quantities of high explosive devices and the use of large high explosive devices (MOABs) meet with little or no objection in modern warfare. Given that 1940's science did not distinguish between these weapons in terms of effect, why should 1940's morality distinguish between them?
I'm not disagreeing that Peral Harbor sucked and was an escalation that the United States wasn't expecting.
I'm not disagreeing that Japan did carry out a sneak attack (though on accident, they did try to deliver notice of the attack).
What I am disagreeing with is that it was unprovoked. The US had cut off Japanese oil supplies. Japan's military machine had a few short months in which to move before it was paralized by the oil embargo. Japan knew that any attempts to seize oil producing resources in S.E. Asia would meet with stiff resistance from the US and that war was coming. They sought to strike at Peral, paralizing our fleet long enough to establish an oil supply in the Pacific. Once established, and without Peral as a refuling depot, the Japanese fleet would be able to keep the American fleet at arms length, eliminating the possibilty of a Pacific front.
In short, the Japanse strike on Peral was actualy a great deal like the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagisaki -- though preemptive. Knock the opponent out of the game, doing minimal damage and risking minimal losses.
Unfortunately for Japan, the 3rd wave of planes never flew from the carrier strike force. Those planes were to target US fuel depots on Peral which housed roughly a years worth of oil for the fleet. Without that oil, US forces would have been forced to return to San Fransisco to refuel, severely curtailing effectiveness in the Pacific.
Yommomoto chose not to send the 3rd wave because the resistance on Peral was becoming too severe, particulary from US fighters defending the harbor.
In may historian's eyes, that decision cost Japan the war.
You're thinking of cancer as a symetrical sphere. It's not always (or even usualy) like that. For starters, a blood cancer (leukemia) makes up a good sized chunk of the cancer diagnoses each year. Chemo is extremely effective against leukemias.
Secondly, most cancers of which you speak can be addressed through radiological and surgical procedures, leaving only the outer fringe to be mopped up by Chemo.
1 - Foodstamps have nothing whatsoever in common with Farm Subsidies, save that people on Farms can get foodstamps. Farm Subsidies are when we give people (more correctly large multinational corporate farmers) money not to grow stuff... or, when we fix prices.
2 - You need to read Locke. Locke thinks you're full of crap when it comes to the roll of government.
I guess not you, but that leaves holes in your argument. If we're not talking about fraud cases, we're talking about people who have a legitimate claim to the assistance in question.
So the question comes to this -- given that there are people in the world who don't make enough to survive on, and given that some of them are citizens of our country, do we not have the responsibility to see that they are taken care of?
What is a government for but to protect those to weak (financialy, or physicaly) to protect themselves?
A little more background....
Cancer cells divide more rapidly than normal cells (that's part of what makes them cancer). To divide they need to synthesize DNA and to do that they need that tasty looking folate you talked about.
Thus, cancer cells absorb more folate than normal cells.
Traditional chemotherapy drugs attack dividing cells, exploiting the conditions present in a dividing cell to kill it. Because cancer cells are dividing more often than normal cells, they are disproportionately targeted. Poof -- chemo works.
This new technology incorporates the same kinds of drugs, but makes cancer cells more likely to absorb the drug, making it even more biased towards killing off cancer cells. Normal cells will absorb at a slower rate and will still be largely unaffected unless they are dividing. Cancer cells will absorb more, and be hit harder by the drug.
It basicly allows us to focus the drugs more. That's a good thing. More focus == less side affects. That means less weight loss, less hair loss, less vomiting, etc.
All those things mean increased dosages are possible - which means we can kill the cancer faster and more effectively.
The problem is that the poverty line is poorly constructed in this country and it's politicaly unwise to move it. Raising the poverty line (something that requires a move by the President, it's not a legislative function) instantly creates more poor people. More poor people looks bad come election time.
As a consequence, the poverty line is very poorly constructed and doesn't really encompass all those really living in poverty. Tieing MORE to this meaningless marker would not help things.
Tack on legislation requiring that poverty lines be evaluated by zipcode with a reasonable means of calculating them including things like rent, food, transportation, medicine etc and perhaps this will work -- but our existing poverty line isn't nearly as inclusive as it should be.
Fact: More than 80% of farm subsidies in this country go to AgriBuisnesses -- that's large corporations, not poor farmers. [Source: Vandanna Shiva]
Fact: Medical Industry Subsidies are done through state, not Federal money, and are the first on the chopping block when the cash gets tight.
Why do I know this? My wife works in sustainable agricultural development policy and I volunteer with childhood cancer patients. We see both.
Social programs are dieing in this country. Admittedly, there are people who abuse the system. I'll go ahead and appropriate an argument from a group that I disagree with, the NRA, to address this.
Welfare programs don't commit welfare fraud, people commit welfare fraud. Why cut the program, when it's the asshole fraudster that's commiting the crime? Welfare and medicare and medicaid benefit hundreds of thousands of people and make it possible for untold thousands to pick themselves back up from a bad financial fall and make something of themselves. Why kill the program because a few jerks abuse it? Why not just throw those jerks in prison like the law says we should?
There is value in money not being spent. Indeed, a person derives benefit from not spending money.
Viewing money as a means to consumerism and consumerism as an ultimate goal is short sighted. Consider
Money can be a safty net - I am more secure when I have $500,000 in the bank than when I have $500 in the bank. The presence of that money and my ability to spend it at will makes me safer and less concerned.
Want to talk fair tax? Fine - lets do that. What you're talking about is basicly a national sales tax so lets consider one reasonably and fairly.
The following items and categories of items have to be exempt form a national sales tax or tax of any kind
1 - Food (not resturant service, just groceries)
2 - Any used item
3 - Rent and/or Housing Expenses
4 - Medical Care
The following items and categories must be taxed, and should be taxed at a higher rate to ensure a non-regressive tax.
1 - Securities Purchases
2 - Interest
3 - Inheritance (excepting the above first set of categories in the inheritance of course)
A sales or VAT style tax could be fair, but in order for it to be fair we must exempt from it the kinds of goods and services which are necessities. The poor spend a greater precentage of their income on these kinds of goods and, as a consequence, will bear a greater portion of the tax burden than those more able to pay it.
Inheritance is the most important of these. This so called "fair tax" is nothing more than a means of taxing the transferance of value from one person to another. Inheritance is one such transferance. The ceiling should be high -- say 5 Million or more, and the first 5 Million should be tax free. But there exists an inherent value in the having of, say 5 Million in assets and, as long as we're taxing value transfers, we should tax that too.
Intenational Law addressed this issue when Europe started trying to carve up the Americas. The Treaty of London (1600) decreed that a colony was only yours if you could exert the military force to defend it.
In theory that creates a state of total anarchy outside of Europe, but in practice it meant that if you'd made a reasonable effort to set up defences, any attack on those defences was an attack on the parrent country and causus belli.
Google is a US corporation, held by (wait for it) mostly US stockholders with most of its buisness interests and target market in the US.
As a corporation it is legaly bound to do what is best for its shareholders. While rolling out Google 3d Europe might be warm fuzzies, it's not necessarily the most exploitable market. Moreover, if you're going to test out an infrastructure heavy technology, why not do it in your home city (San Fran for Google)
This comes down to money. Google thinks this will make them more money than rolling out more features to Europe.... that's why.
How can you think that way? Don't you know that our Brave Fighting Men and Women in Uniform need weapons like this one to defend our great country from the evil terrorist agressors? Armed with Soup Can Implosion Guns, our glorious military could wipe the evil Jihadists from the face of the earth and finaly bring lots of little American Flags, Big Macs, and Apple Pie to the middle east.
Why do you hate freedom?
Do the people that provide you with day to day services not pay income tax?
.....
Try this thought-experiement. Follow a dollar as it goes from your employer's pocket into your bank account. who gets it? Does nobody in the end, receive it in the form of a payment for services rendered? With the poss8ible exception of monies spent on tourism outside of your country, there's little chance it will not end up as straightforward income to someone else somewhere. It might, at worst, end up in a bank account, generating income to a bank, which is taxed.
Your argument doesn't stand because it relies upon us accecpting the premise that any given entity shouldn't have to pay income taxes because th taxes of all other entities will take up the slack.
The problem is that no -=single=- given entity is doing this - it's thousands, tens of thousands of corporations, avoiding any income taxes.
It is.
They are.
AND They are.
According to the Center for American Progress, most corporations (60%) don't even pay income tax. [Source
Try again?
It is.... you're confusing liberalism with Liberalism.
Liberalism is free health care, feeding the poor, caring for the elderly - liberty and justice for all.
liberalism is free trade, outsourcing, comparitive advantage, and institutional exploitation.
It's not that they don't work, but that they don't necessarily justify their own existance.
I did some research on this topic some time back and came up with a series of criteria that a DRE system must meet to be considered a viable replacement and investment for a county.
1 - Auditable: I.E. the system must provide some vote by vote means of tracking the number of votes for each given candidate (in the event of memory loss) while still preserving the anonymity of each voter. Most DRE systems fail in this because no paper trail exists.
2 - Encrypted: Verifiable strong encryption must be used to prevent unauthorized access to the differing components of the system. We want to make sure that real roll based security exists to prevent unauthorized access to the components of the system. Diebold's systems, for example, allowed the same person who set up the ballot options access to the source code -- bad idea. We also want to use a key system to authenticate individual voters.
3 - Inexpensive: Diebold's systems and most others are too expensive for statewide or nationwide roll outs. While it hasn't been tried formally in the Federal Court system - Bush v. Gore suggests that the use of differing voting technologies in differing counties may be a violation of Equal Protection as this would imply that the state values some votes more than others.
4 - Open Source: The way these systems work must be either publicly verifiable or at least open to inspection by an organ of the state. While the former is preferable, the latter is better than a totally closed source system. The ability to conceal of bit of malicious code in something as complex as a DRE system dwarfs such capability in every other voting system currently in use. The burden of proof must rest with the manufacturer, not the state or the people.
5 - Ubiquitous: Tyeing into the concept of "inexpensive" a DRE system must conform to a series of standards, making differences in the implementation and interface fairly minor between counties. This speaks more to the standards by which the machines and software are produced and less to the financial onus placed on each county.
Conveniently, those are your five vowels -- AEIOU.
DRE systems have the capability to make a real difference in the way we cast votes -- but until they conform to specifications like these it's just not a worthwhile investment, both of my tax dollars and my vote.
Didn't some lady get drilled in the head by one when she was sitting in her kitchen? I'm fairly sure I read that somewhere....
A house counts as a manned object doesn't it?
But the thread died with your post....
... oh dear, I've gone cross eyed.
But I replied to your post....
So the thread didn't die, except I replied to say taht it did die so my post doesn't count against it not dieing.
But a post is a post, and clearly we're having a discussion here and....
Now that it's been a major motion picture - how could a member of western society not know that joke?
I heard a report about this on NPR in which they intereviewed a few high level experts in the field. Essentialy, the consensus is that trust is a complex ineraction of logic, chemicals/emotions, and environment. When asked if we're likely to see a "Trust" perfume anytime soon, the researchers responded "No"
Now -- that's not to say that gullible people won't buy "Trust" perfumes that contain this chemical -- just that they'll be getting riped off.
Basicly this is important because it may lead us to a better understanding of how the brain signals trust... which in and of itself it useful information.
Trust me.