the tea party started out being all about limited government..
This is 100% true. They were actually anti-bush. Fox News would routinely denounce them as lunatics. That all changed once Obama was elected. Once the target of anti-government sentiment was directed against a democrat, then Fox News and the Koch brothers could get behind them. Once Sarah Palin became the figurehead of the tea party, anyone with half a brain left. Even the Libertarian party is no co-opted by republicans. Bob Barr? Wayne Allen Root? seriously?
and i think for the most part still is.
They are all about the limiting the government's ability to make them pay taxes and regulate their guns. That's about it. If you are only fighting for the freedoms that benefit you, you are not a libertarian, you are just a selfish asshole.
Ask you average teabagger if they support decriminalizing/legalizing drugs. Ask your average teabagger how they feel about gay marriage or plural marriage/polyamory. Ask your average teabagger's opinion on immigration. On each of these topics you are likely to get a typical republican answer and maybe even some racism thrown in for free.
i didn't mean to lump you in with anyone, but i disagree with the source you linked to. i think there are many more sources that highlight that obama is a much bigger spender than bush. having said that, bush was as much a big government socialist as obama.
I think you must be confusing me with someone else. I never linked to any sources regarding this subject.
If you think we are in a dystopia *now* because we have Obama as a president as opposed to Bush, you're a fucking idiot.
What lavish gifts did Obama buy his family? Ipads? Ferraris? How do you know it was "government money"?
What was happening at these parties to make them "debauched"?
I didn't even vote for Obama, but you are full of shit. You believe some retarded anti-Obama blogs because they tell you what you want to hear. Did you believe in all that secret muslim and birth certificate bullshit too?
Oh so you're one of these adorable ignorant sheeple that still believes the US government is orchestrating mock elections. Do you really think that the aliens that are stealing the world's gold supply and replacing it with gold plated tungsten care about human governments or elections? All they care about is scaring more people into distrusting the monetary system to stimulate the mining of gold. Once all the world's gold is mined, the aliens can take it back to their own planet where they will finally have a currency that is stable.
I am a (small L) libertarian. Please don't lump me in with these poser tea party dumbfucks. They are just republicans who like to dress up in costumes. They don't give a shit about real freedom. They would basically be happy if we lived in a theocracy with no income tax and a white president.
Ayn Rand advocated rational self interest, and a society which would celebrate and foster it. Is rational self interest the same as selfishness? Well I think that's a semantic issue. In any case Ayn Rand did not advocate the kind of selfishness that most people imagine. If you take Atlas Shrugged for instance, there were lots of people in her books that a typical person might call selfish that were actually villains, and many of the actions of the protagonists one might deem generous if they weren't constantly proclaiming the selfish reasons for their actions.
Another example is in John Galt's crazy long speech, he says something like how even giving to charity can be in one's rational self interest, if one derives pleasure or a sense of purpose from helping people, as opposed to being forced to give to charity (e.g. via coercion form the state). Some people might object to this idea by saying it's not true altruism if the altruistic person is somehow benefiting, but if this is the case, then I don't think true altruism actually exists.
There are definitely some areas of Ayn Rand's philosophy that probably deserve some criticism, including her ideas of rational self interest, but I think many people tend to oversimplify her position when they reduce it to "She advocates selfishness".
No, the comparison is correct: gravity is not being denied, despite multiple theories vying for the explanation. None of those theories go out and say "gravity does not exist". With evolution, the fundamental notion of evolution is being challenged; we're not at the same level at all. This would be more like multiple theories for how, say, traits are passed along were to arise: a specific element of the greater theory being put into question, but not entirely changing the premise.
My point is that when people say "Evolution is just a theory", the appropriate response is not to say "Gravity is just a theory too" really sarcastically. This is for a few reasons. 1. "Evolution" is not a theory. Evolution by natural selection is a theory. 2. When you say "Gravity is just a theory too", it is almost implying that if you disagree with the theory of gravity, you are denying that gravity exists, which is not true. You would actually be denying the correctness of Newton's theory of gravity (i.e. Newton's explanation of gravity). I think this comes because most people, including science advocates, don't really understand science or the scientific method.
The gravity you see at that level is F=mg, which is entirely uncontested.
The formula for gravity is actually F= G * m1 * m2 / r^2, and it is exactly this formula that was contested by Modified Newtonian Dynamics.
I learned about relativity in high school physics 18 years ago, I don't see how MOND or dark matter are harder concepts to understand than relativity. More importantly I think it is important to teach the [real] controversies of science to show children the scientific method in action. It would be so much more valuable to see competing hypotheses surviving and failing observational tests, than to just see a bunch of correct information presented as if it's gospel.
The problem is that when you entered into a contract (either with a customer or an employer), chances are this kind of mechanism wasn't stipulated. If ti were, then they would have presumably had to pay you a much higher salary to get you to agree.
Any reasonably complex software is a product that is with almost certainty going to contain bugs. If you are willing to be on the hook to fix every future bug discovered for free, you'd better charge enough up front to make this deal worth it.
If you think charging to do something is worse than banning it completely, then I have a serious objection to your ethical standards. Taxes are an established way to ameliorate the "Tragedy of the commons" and this is a prime example of the "Tragedy of the commons" (see wikipedia). Sound is a clear common good that people can abuse, turning silence into a cacophony.
In certain cases (including this one), yes. Usually when you tax people to *ameliorate* the tragedy of the commons, the money is supposed to go to actually ameliorating it, rather than just going to the government.
So if you tax smoking, you are supposed to use this money to help offset the cost smokers might put on the healthcare system or educate young people to the dangers of smoking. If you just tax smoking and put the money in the general fund, then it's just a money grab.
Taxing airplane phone calls alone is not ameliorating anything.
Or, if you want to make it a money maker, pass a law that requires airlines to collect a $5 per minute tax for phone calls made in flight - and allow the airlines to add their own fee on top of that, up to a maximum of $20 per minute.
To me this seems just as unamerican bad as banning it. In fact I think it is actually worse.
I think the "american" way to do it would be to allow airlines to make their own rules. If customers feel so strongly about banning phone calls in the air, then they have every reason to make this against the rules. Let the airlines figure out what customers want. Congress should stay out of it ompletely.
Up until a few decades there was a controversy around gravity. There were some discrepancies between the current model for gravity and observations. 2 leading hypotheses emerged. One proposed to change the model, Modified Newtonian Dynamics (or MOND), and the other proposed to change the observations, the existence of dark matter. In recent years it seems the dark matter hypothesis has the clear advantage.
The "controversy of gravity" is not *that* gravity exists, but rather with the correctness of the explanation for gravity as demonstrated by the ability to make accurate predictions. The dark matter hypothesis is currently "winning" because it is making better predictions than MOND in circumstances where the predictions of both models diverge (e.g. galaxy collisions).
I would also like to point out the difference between the two concepts of "evolution" (*that* life evolves), and "the theory of evolution by natural selection", originally proposed by Charles Darwin and later improved by others which is an explanation of *how* life evolved. There really isn't any controversy regarding "evolution" (*that* it happened). Evolution by natural selection is also on very firm ground, although there are lots of holes to fill in, to improve our understanding of the specifics of evolution by natural selection. Maybe there is some controversy somewhere in the study of evolution, but hypotheses that are unfalsifiable (e.g. creationism, and intelligent design, etc) are not valid as opposing hypotheses in any controversy.
So we should absolutely *not* "teach the controversy" of evolution in regards to intelligent design, because it is just fabricated. However, we should not attempt the reductio ad absurdum of "teaching the controversy of gravity", given that ther actually *was* a controversy regarding gravity in the recent past, and this controversy probably should have been taught given that it was legitimate.
Also, gravity is the last of the 4 primary forces yet to be made compatible with quantum mechanics. because of this, our understanding of gravity is currently known to be incomplete. There absolutely is controversy in our understanding of gravity, and I think teaching it would be a great way to show the scientific method in action.
That's true, but if you live in a foreign country and want to watch American TV, you are pretty much in the same boat whether this TV show is the olympics or not.
So if I have nothing. And then I get 3 apples. I still have 0 apples because the 3 apples were consumed by the void and can never leave? What do you call this kind of math again?
118 years is a long time. It's not the same tradition. It is a tradition with the same name. There is a reason that a distinction is made between the ancient olympic games and the modern olympic games. And in fact the first modern olympics which took place in 1896 is referred to as the first olympiad. (i.e. they didn't continue where the ancient olympiad number left off and call it the 1171th olympiad)
Here are a few differences with the ancient olympic games:
1. Only young free men were allowed to compete (i.e. no women, no old people and no slaves)
2. Only people from Greece and greek colonies competed
3. The men competed nude
4. Women were forbidden to watch the games under penalty of death.
The on demand streaming is new. I am comparing what you can get over the air now, with what you could get over the air in the past. It's basically the same. There is more total coverage than before but there is also more commercials and profile pieces and analysis. I think the amount of sports over the air is the about the same.
I don't see why people are complaining that *now* you can *also* watch more olympics on premium cable channels *and* streaming online. It seems better in every way than the past.
Some people would argue that "capitalism" *is* the system driven by greed but correctly maintained through proper regulations, and as such not doomed so long it is well maintained (like any political or economic system).
This is a semantic difference in terms of whether you are willing to call the pathological version of capitalism the typical version.
But as I said, you can take the pathological version of any system and say "See it doesn;t work, and all the versions of this system will be doomed to this".
What you are doing is no different than the conservatives saying that helping the poor even a little bit is dooming us to a soviet style economic collapse.
I got AT&T Uverse 3 years ago (no contract), and I got Time Warner this year (no contract). If you are outside the US, then you are dealing with someone other than NBC and American cable companies.
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the tea party started out being all about limited government..
This is 100% true. They were actually anti-bush. Fox News would routinely denounce them as lunatics. That all changed once Obama was elected. Once the target of anti-government sentiment was directed against a democrat, then Fox News and the Koch brothers could get behind them. Once Sarah Palin became the figurehead of the tea party, anyone with half a brain left. Even the Libertarian party is no co-opted by republicans. Bob Barr? Wayne Allen Root? seriously?
and i think for the most part still is.
They are all about the limiting the government's ability to make them pay taxes and regulate their guns. That's about it. If you are only fighting for the freedoms that benefit you, you are not a libertarian, you are just a selfish asshole.
Ask you average teabagger if they support decriminalizing/legalizing drugs. Ask your average teabagger how they feel about gay marriage or plural marriage/polyamory. Ask your average teabagger's opinion on immigration. On each of these topics you are likely to get a typical republican answer and maybe even some racism thrown in for free.
i didn't mean to lump you in with anyone, but i disagree with the source you linked to. i think there are many more sources that highlight that obama is a much bigger spender than bush. having said that, bush was as much a big government socialist as obama.
I think you must be confusing me with someone else. I never linked to any sources regarding this subject.
If you think we are in a dystopia *now* because we have Obama as a president as opposed to Bush, you're a fucking idiot.
What lavish gifts did Obama buy his family? Ipads? Ferraris? How do you know it was "government money"?
What was happening at these parties to make them "debauched"?
I didn't even vote for Obama, but you are full of shit. You believe some retarded anti-Obama blogs because they tell you what you want to hear. Did you believe in all that secret muslim and birth certificate bullshit too?
Oh so you're one of these adorable ignorant sheeple that still believes the US government is orchestrating mock elections. Do you really think that the aliens that are stealing the world's gold supply and replacing it with gold plated tungsten care about human governments or elections? All they care about is scaring more people into distrusting the monetary system to stimulate the mining of gold. Once all the world's gold is mined, the aliens can take it back to their own planet where they will finally have a currency that is stable.
I am a (small L) libertarian. Please don't lump me in with these poser tea party dumbfucks. They are just republicans who like to dress up in costumes. They don't give a shit about real freedom. They would basically be happy if we lived in a theocracy with no income tax and a white president.
Ayn Rand advocated rational self interest, and a society which would celebrate and foster it. Is rational self interest the same as selfishness? Well I think that's a semantic issue. In any case Ayn Rand did not advocate the kind of selfishness that most people imagine. If you take Atlas Shrugged for instance, there were lots of people in her books that a typical person might call selfish that were actually villains, and many of the actions of the protagonists one might deem generous if they weren't constantly proclaiming the selfish reasons for their actions.
Another example is in John Galt's crazy long speech, he says something like how even giving to charity can be in one's rational self interest, if one derives pleasure or a sense of purpose from helping people, as opposed to being forced to give to charity (e.g. via coercion form the state). Some people might object to this idea by saying it's not true altruism if the altruistic person is somehow benefiting, but if this is the case, then I don't think true altruism actually exists.
There are definitely some areas of Ayn Rand's philosophy that probably deserve some criticism, including her ideas of rational self interest, but I think many people tend to oversimplify her position when they reduce it to "She advocates selfishness".
No, the comparison is correct: gravity is not being denied, despite multiple theories vying for the explanation. None of those theories go out and say "gravity does not exist". With evolution, the fundamental notion of evolution is being challenged; we're not at the same level at all. This would be more like multiple theories for how, say, traits are passed along were to arise: a specific element of the greater theory being put into question, but not entirely changing the premise.
My point is that when people say "Evolution is just a theory", the appropriate response is not to say "Gravity is just a theory too" really sarcastically. This is for a few reasons. 1. "Evolution" is not a theory. Evolution by natural selection is a theory. 2. When you say "Gravity is just a theory too", it is almost implying that if you disagree with the theory of gravity, you are denying that gravity exists, which is not true. You would actually be denying the correctness of Newton's theory of gravity (i.e. Newton's explanation of gravity). I think this comes because most people, including science advocates, don't really understand science or the scientific method.
The gravity you see at that level is F=mg, which is entirely uncontested.
The formula for gravity is actually F= G * m1 * m2 / r^2, and it is exactly this formula that was contested by Modified Newtonian Dynamics.
I learned about relativity in high school physics 18 years ago, I don't see how MOND or dark matter are harder concepts to understand than relativity. More importantly I think it is important to teach the [real] controversies of science to show children the scientific method in action. It would be so much more valuable to see competing hypotheses surviving and failing observational tests, than to just see a bunch of correct information presented as if it's gospel.
The problem is that when you entered into a contract (either with a customer or an employer), chances are this kind of mechanism wasn't stipulated. If ti were, then they would have presumably had to pay you a much higher salary to get you to agree.
Any reasonably complex software is a product that is with almost certainty going to contain bugs. If you are willing to be on the hook to fix every future bug discovered for free, you'd better charge enough up front to make this deal worth it.
Also, there is no federal law banning conversations in movie theaters. This is a regulation set by the movie theaters themselves.
So yes? You favor banning conversations in planes?
If you think charging to do something is worse than banning it completely, then I have a serious objection to your ethical standards. Taxes are an established way to ameliorate the "Tragedy of the commons" and this is a prime example of the "Tragedy of the commons" (see wikipedia). Sound is a clear common good that people can abuse, turning silence into a cacophony.
In certain cases (including this one), yes. Usually when you tax people to *ameliorate* the tragedy of the commons, the money is supposed to go to actually ameliorating it, rather than just going to the government.
So if you tax smoking, you are supposed to use this money to help offset the cost smokers might put on the healthcare system or educate young people to the dangers of smoking. If you just tax smoking and put the money in the general fund, then it's just a money grab.
Taxing airplane phone calls alone is not ameliorating anything.
What about banning conversations between people on the plane? Why should this be permitted?
Or, if you want to make it a money maker, pass a law that requires airlines to collect a $5 per minute tax for phone calls made in flight - and allow the airlines to add their own fee on top of that, up to a maximum of $20 per minute.
To me this seems just as unamerican bad as banning it. In fact I think it is actually worse.
I think the "american" way to do it would be to allow airlines to make their own rules. If customers feel so strongly about banning phone calls in the air, then they have every reason to make this against the rules. Let the airlines figure out what customers want. Congress should stay out of it ompletely.
Up until a few decades there was a controversy around gravity. There were some discrepancies between the current model for gravity and observations. 2 leading hypotheses emerged. One proposed to change the model, Modified Newtonian Dynamics (or MOND), and the other proposed to change the observations, the existence of dark matter. In recent years it seems the dark matter hypothesis has the clear advantage.
The "controversy of gravity" is not *that* gravity exists, but rather with the correctness of the explanation for gravity as demonstrated by the ability to make accurate predictions. The dark matter hypothesis is currently "winning" because it is making better predictions than MOND in circumstances where the predictions of both models diverge (e.g. galaxy collisions).
I would also like to point out the difference between the two concepts of "evolution" (*that* life evolves), and "the theory of evolution by natural selection", originally proposed by Charles Darwin and later improved by others which is an explanation of *how* life evolved. There really isn't any controversy regarding "evolution" (*that* it happened). Evolution by natural selection is also on very firm ground, although there are lots of holes to fill in, to improve our understanding of the specifics of evolution by natural selection. Maybe there is some controversy somewhere in the study of evolution, but hypotheses that are unfalsifiable (e.g. creationism, and intelligent design, etc) are not valid as opposing hypotheses in any controversy.
So we should absolutely *not* "teach the controversy" of evolution in regards to intelligent design, because it is just fabricated. However, we should not attempt the reductio ad absurdum of "teaching the controversy of gravity", given that ther actually *was* a controversy regarding gravity in the recent past, and this controversy probably should have been taught given that it was legitimate.
Also, gravity is the last of the 4 primary forces yet to be made compatible with quantum mechanics. because of this, our understanding of gravity is currently known to be incomplete. There absolutely is controversy in our understanding of gravity, and I think teaching it would be a great way to show the scientific method in action.
You attempted to take shorthand english (BTW, a popular slogan in punk's heyday) and treat it as a mathematical equation. So yeah, abused.
I really don't give a shit if the nonsense you spouted was unoriginal
My math is probably better than yours since my hint that 'nothing' might mean an additive version of epsilon went way over your head.
Nothing you have said thus far makes me thing your math is better than mine.
Your literalism is not my problem.
Your shitty non-literal math is not my problem.
That's true, but if you live in a foreign country and want to watch American TV, you are pretty much in the same boat whether this TV show is the olympics or not.
I abused symbol manipulation?!
I am the one who used it correctly.
You are the one who abused algebraic symbols by saying this:
Talk - action = nothing.
Sure, it's cutsie and all but it makes no real point.
I could say the same about your original post
My point is that you shouldn't try to turn math into a political tool unless you know how to do math.
So if I have nothing. And then I get 3 apples. I still have 0 apples because the 3 apples were consumed by the void and can never leave? What do you call this kind of math again?
118 years is a long time. It's not the same tradition. It is a tradition with the same name. There is a reason that a distinction is made between the ancient olympic games and the modern olympic games. And in fact the first modern olympics which took place in 1896 is referred to as the first olympiad. (i.e. they didn't continue where the ancient olympiad number left off and call it the 1171th olympiad)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Olympic_Games
Here are a few differences with the ancient olympic games:
1. Only young free men were allowed to compete (i.e. no women, no old people and no slaves)
2. Only people from Greece and greek colonies competed
3. The men competed nude
4. Women were forbidden to watch the games under penalty of death.
I'm in the camp that would see this particular publicly funded wealth transfer from governments to corporations stop entirely.
I would agree, but I don't think this is specific to the olympics or NBC.
I would agree with that.
You're right. I'm sorry. What was nothing again? -infinity or something?
You just wait... There's hidden variables that will make it all analog again.
The on demand streaming is new. I am comparing what you can get over the air now, with what you could get over the air in the past. It's basically the same. There is more total coverage than before but there is also more commercials and profile pieces and analysis. I think the amount of sports over the air is the about the same.
I don't see why people are complaining that *now* you can *also* watch more olympics on premium cable channels *and* streaming online. It seems better in every way than the past.
Some people would argue that "capitalism" *is* the system driven by greed but correctly maintained through proper regulations, and as such not doomed so long it is well maintained (like any political or economic system).
This is a semantic difference in terms of whether you are willing to call the pathological version of capitalism the typical version.
But as I said, you can take the pathological version of any system and say "See it doesn;t work, and all the versions of this system will be doomed to this".
What you are doing is no different than the conservatives saying that helping the poor even a little bit is dooming us to a soviet style economic collapse.
I got AT&T Uverse 3 years ago (no contract), and I got Time Warner this year (no contract). If you are outside the US, then you are dealing with someone other than NBC and American cable companies.