Americans get less vacation than most of the free world.
Americans also take home a lot more money than most of the free world. If you want a French or German lifestyle, you can choose to work less, spend less, and earn less. What you can't do is get European-style vacations and benefits, with American-style disposable income and spending habits.
For the rest, you very carefully guided yourself around my actual claim making sure not to touch it. I called for more pay **AND** less hours.
You can call for whatever you want to, there is not a shred of evidence that that would do anything to reduce obesity or improve health; it's complete fabrication on your part.
As for SNAP, it offers a very minimum budget to avoid actual starvation and not much more.
It's called the supplemental nutrition assistance program for a reason: you're not supposed to live on it full time. And average SNAP benefits are about $150/month/person, which in fact is enough for a reasonably healthy diet (though clearly nothing fancy) if you choose carefully and prepare it yourself.
I would support nearly unlimited access to fruits and vegetables in addition to the current benefit.
Why "in addition to"? What justification is there for tax payers to pay for people to buy unhealthy, expensive, corporate crap? The only nutritional assistance the government should hand out is for foods that are clearly and demonstrably nutritionally good, and at the same time inexpensive.
If you have me categorized as pro-corporate or crony capitalist in any manner, you must think you are talking to someone else.
I categorize you as the typical deluded progressive: you believe you're fighting the good fight, you think everybody who disagrees with your policy is doing so out of selfishness and ignorance, and in reality, you end up being the biggest crony capitalist and hurt the people your policies ostensibly are supposed to help.
So what is your final solution? Have the dept of sanitation toss them in the truck when they drop dead?
What is your "final solution"? Subject people to Mengele-like experimentation on their bodies to extend their lives by another few weeks or months, usually in agonizing pain, and then have the tax payer pay huge amounts of money to hospitals, insurance companies, and big pharmaceuticals for the privilege? Make them dependent for a lifetime on expensive, proprietary drugs produced by big corporations that alleviate the consequences of eating crap produced by other big corporations, both massively subsidized and protected by government? That's the kind of nightmarish world that "progressives" like you are propelling us into.
Also note, my suggestion was to raise the minimum wage and encourage shorter working hours. That leads to better choices and reduces the need for healthcare.
Working hours and minimum wage have steadily decreased in many countries while obesity keeps increasing. Your idea that increasing the minimum wage and encouraging shorter working hours leads to better choices is therefore contradicted by real-world observations. Even in the US, there is no correlation between income, education, and obesity (and for women it's pretty weak), http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db50.htm What you're trying to do is justify policies you desire for ideological reasons with fictions you create about the real world, fictions contradicted by fact.
In addition, precisely because we don't want low income to force people to make poor nutritional choices, we have SNAP. We could easily modify SNAP to stop paying for HFCS, trans fats, microwave meals, and ofther bad nutritional choices, while giving recipients nearly unlimited access to any fruits and vegetables they desire. But crony capitalists (and that's what you are whether you know it or not) who push SNAP and want people to become dependent on corporate products oppose such restrictions with the lame excuse that it would "stigmatize poor people".
Yes, it shall be like the good old days of the USSR. And those people who don't agree will be sent to reeducation camps in Siberia, and if that doesn't help, to insane asylums; after all, you'd have to be insane not to want to live in our "progressive world free of hate and bigotry".
Knowing someone who made good health choices, but had congestive heart failure anyway, and is now alive due to an LVAD (Left Ventricular Assist Device), I'd say that you don't have any clue about the real world.
Because, of course, a single anecdotal piece of evidence disproves decades of health care statistics and dozens of scientific studies!
Yes, some folks drink or smoke themselves sick, but guess what ? Parts fail.
It's easy to tell whether someone is obese (or drinks or smokes). If you are obese, you should have to pay for the consequences yourself.
We'll just leave you by the side of the ER when yours do...
I hope so. I do not want a heart transplant, artificial or human.
That couldn't possibly be because they're dead tired from scratching to make a living, could it?
No, it couldn't. My parents both worked far more than 40h, and so do we. We always cook.
Combine that with parents having no time to teach their kids how to prepare good food and no opportunity to develope a proper taste for good food and you've got a real problem.
And giving people free healthcare and artificial hearts is going to fix that... how? It's not, it's going to make it worse.
In the US, about 70% of cardiovascular disease is caused by obesity, and even more is probably preventable by good nutrition. It's better to keep the original in good working order than to try to replace it.
And now that we all are forced to pay for each other's medical care, this is also a question of money. Why should people who eat healthy and don't have these risks pay for the high cost of artificial hearts (or heart transplants) in people who made poor nutritional choices?
I'm not sure what gives you the idea that HIV is biologically unique or bizarre. There are lots of immune deficiencies, retroviruses, and persistent infections, both in animals and humans.
With all the research money poured into HIV research, it's taken them 20 years to notice this?
Because medical research is hard. What you ignorantly refer to as "noticing" requires a lot of skill, insight, and hard work to discover.
And this doesn't invalidate prior approaches to HIV treatment: targeting the virus has been rational and effective, no matter how it ultimately does its damage.
You live in a convenient fictional world in which the Nazis "came to power" and afterwards imposed their will through totalitarian rule. That's the kind of rewriting of history Germans like, because it makes the whole thing appear like the Nazis were something that just happened. In reality, Germans democratically elected the Nazis and democratically chose to enact the Enabling Act. Part of the reason the Nazis could get enough of a majority in parliament is because they could impose restrictions on political opponents before the Enabling Act. What happened after the passing of the Enabling Act is not relevant to discussions of free speech in a democracy, because Germany had ceased to be a democracy that point.
The whole thing started with your statement:
Europe has some rather strict hate crime laws because of a certain incident that happened during the 30s and 40s. It'd be nice if they had strong free speech laws, but their history has led them down a different path.
You still fail to grasp that it was these kinds of "strict laws" that allowed European democracy to self-destruct in the first place. You can't prevent totalitarianism by restricting liberty; the failure of the Weimar Republic illustrates that (although it is by no means the only example). And until "morons" (your word) like you in Europe grasp that, European democracies will continue to fail.
He never said that they ran on a racist platform, nor did I, so please don't put words in our mouths. Rather, as both you and he said, they appealed to the Southern racists, which is quite a bit different
This is what he said:
When they reformed, the Republicans eagerly took their place as the party of Southern racism, which is where they are today.
This is implies deliberate and strong intent to attract racist elements, and suggests that the Republican party as a whole espouses racist principles. The weasely language in which it is couched doesn't change that. Democrats should knock that sh*t off, it is offensive. And I say that as someone who has never voted for a Republican.
Are you serious? You believe that it is "commonly accepted" that the Republicans ran on a racist platform and are a racist party? Give me a break.
Republicans have a long-standing record of support for states' rights; the fact that this may have also appealed to Southern racists and that the Republican strategists probably counted on it doesn't make Republicans racist, any more than appealing to any of the unsavory groups that both parties appeal to means that the parties support those goals.
I have never voted for a Republican in my life. But people need to snap out of these simplistic caricatures of their political opponents if we want to make progress in this country. What matters is what parties promise each election, what they stand for, and what they actually deliver.
One fundamental logical error is to assume that because a small, decentralized government message may have appeal to racists (because they might hope to reintroduce racist policies in local and state elections) that that makes the message itself racist.
What you've just described is what they did afterwards.
Afterwards? After what? Every restriction on speech and liberty in Germany was democratically passed by German parliament, including the previous incarnations of several of the major parties today, until the very last restriction, the Enabling Act of 1933, in which parliament voluntarily gave Hitler total power. The justification was always that it was "for the good of the country". After that, Hitler merely exercised the executive power parliament had given him.
It's history, "motherfucker [sic]", you should read up on it.
Just because you don't know what those laws are, understand how or why they came about, or how their application works, doesn't mean they necessarily need to be reformed.
I do understand where they come from: they are part of a centuries-long tradition of repressing free speech and enforcing conformity and obedience to the ruling classes. They have been used by European monarchs, dictators, and totalitarians to establish and maintain their control over European nations, often resulting in genocide and war. And just because Europeans have been massively indoctrinated in their public education systems and media to believe that this is proper and good doesn't mean that it actually is.
That's not a "history lesson", it's a convenient Democratic rewriting of history. Democrats have simply adopted a political strategy of branding anybody a "racist" who doesn't agree with their particular form of racial and welfare politics.
There has to be a minimum agreed common ground in the social compact that is civilization and governance.
That "common ground" does not include protection from being offended, and it does not include protection from other people hating you or ostracizing you.
Europe has some rather strict hate crime laws because of a certain incident that happened during the 30s and 40s.
These kinds of laws would make sense if the problem in Nazi Germany had been that individuals were racist and committing crimes against each other while the German government was powerless to intervene. But that's not what happened.
What happened in Nazi Germany was that an overly powerful German government was passing laws restricting free speech, restricting political protests, restricting the right to bear arms, taking away property from minorities, and exercising its power to commit genocide on minorities. Nazi Germany happened because the state had too much power over the people, not too little.
If government power in Germany had been limited to the protection of individual rights (life, liberty, property, free speech, political participation), the genocide could not have happened because the genocide was something that required the German state and government as an essential component.
It'd be nice if they had strong free speech laws, but their history has led them down a different path.
Europe is on the same path it has always been; it just has been temporarily shamed into electing less murderous leaders. Don't count on that lasting.
Progressives are wrong in their support of Arabs, but right wingers are wrong in their support of Israel too. They are wrong because both sides try to manipulate the US and use US power to achieve political goals that we as a nation have no interest in. And using historically loaded terms like "antisemitism" to manipulate US political debates is just reprehensible.
However, your "free speech" can be noted by the bots that slurp data on social networks (even that marked private), flag you as "racist" and ensure a job-free future
Free speech is only supposed to guarantee that government doesn't abuse its power in response to what you say. Your fellow citizens (and that includes the businesses they run) are free to ostracize you if they don't like what you say. That is also part of a free society.
(And businesses would likely be less picky about this if they faced less liability for racist conduct by employees at work due to anti-discrimination and other laws.)
C++'s template system is equivalent to Lisp macros in that both give compilers a Turing-complete way to generate code. I'm not claiming that it's anywhere near as elegant.
Even printf+system("cc") is equivalent to the Lisp macro system at that level; we've been talking about language design.
C++'s template system was not intended as a Turing-equivalent compile-time code generator; that was something people figured out over time. In fact, many people saw that early on but refrained from using it because compilers couldn't handle it; they took it more as a sign that the C++ designers were screwing up than as a good language feature.
I'd be interested in knowing what languages in common use had something equivalent to STL containers, iterators, and algorithms, and what that was.
OCAML, F#, SML, CommonLisp, Smalltalk, Python, to name just a few. STL is a poor imitation.
The complexity is mostly on the implementation end, not the use end, and I don't see why you say it's bloated and complex.
Most of the algorithms and data structures it provides have don't belong in, and aren't useful in, in a general purpose library. And STL's pointer-like iterator abstraction makes things that should be easy to express in a container library tedious and cumbersome.
Dictators slaughtering their countries citizens and bleeding their countries treasury dry and retire to a tax haven after having laundered their citizens money. Political corruption, straight up bribes laundering and cleaned. Assassination payments laundered while you wait.
And that is different today... how? You're blowing smoke out your ass.
Illegal arms sales to enable the killing of millions, all facilitated and laundered spotlessly clean.
Of course, the arms trade is flourishing quite legally. And the same provisions keep the millions from arming and rebelling. If we wanted to stop shipping of arms, it would be sufficient to actually stop their shipment. Again, you're blowing smoke out your ass.
Tax evasion at, well, economic collapse levels.
History is quite clear on this: evasion doesn't cause economic collapse, excessive taxation does.
Seriously how dumb can you and your modders be.
How dumb can you be to keep saying the bullshit you keep saying.
Slashdot Mirror
Americans also take home a lot more money than most of the free world. If you want a French or German lifestyle, you can choose to work less, spend less, and earn less. What you can't do is get European-style vacations and benefits, with American-style disposable income and spending habits.
You can call for whatever you want to, there is not a shred of evidence that that would do anything to reduce obesity or improve health; it's complete fabrication on your part.
It's called the supplemental nutrition assistance program for a reason: you're not supposed to live on it full time. And average SNAP benefits are about $150/month/person, which in fact is enough for a reasonably healthy diet (though clearly nothing fancy) if you choose carefully and prepare it yourself.
Why "in addition to"? What justification is there for tax payers to pay for people to buy unhealthy, expensive, corporate crap? The only nutritional assistance the government should hand out is for foods that are clearly and demonstrably nutritionally good, and at the same time inexpensive.
I categorize you as the typical deluded progressive: you believe you're fighting the good fight, you think everybody who disagrees with your policy is doing so out of selfishness and ignorance, and in reality, you end up being the biggest crony capitalist and hurt the people your policies ostensibly are supposed to help.
Correction: "Even in the US, there is no correlation between income, education, and obesity for men (and for women it's pretty weak)"
What is your "final solution"? Subject people to Mengele-like experimentation on their bodies to extend their lives by another few weeks or months, usually in agonizing pain, and then have the tax payer pay huge amounts of money to hospitals, insurance companies, and big pharmaceuticals for the privilege? Make them dependent for a lifetime on expensive, proprietary drugs produced by big corporations that alleviate the consequences of eating crap produced by other big corporations, both massively subsidized and protected by government? That's the kind of nightmarish world that "progressives" like you are propelling us into.
Working hours and minimum wage have steadily decreased in many countries while obesity keeps increasing. Your idea that increasing the minimum wage and encouraging shorter working hours leads to better choices is therefore contradicted by real-world observations. Even in the US, there is no correlation between income, education, and obesity (and for women it's pretty weak), http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db50.htm What you're trying to do is justify policies you desire for ideological reasons with fictions you create about the real world, fictions contradicted by fact.
In addition, precisely because we don't want low income to force people to make poor nutritional choices, we have SNAP. We could easily modify SNAP to stop paying for HFCS, trans fats, microwave meals, and ofther bad nutritional choices, while giving recipients nearly unlimited access to any fruits and vegetables they desire. But crony capitalists (and that's what you are whether you know it or not) who push SNAP and want people to become dependent on corporate products oppose such restrictions with the lame excuse that it would "stigmatize poor people".
Yes, it shall be like the good old days of the USSR. And those people who don't agree will be sent to reeducation camps in Siberia, and if that doesn't help, to insane asylums; after all, you'd have to be insane not to want to live in our "progressive world free of hate and bigotry".
Because, of course, a single anecdotal piece of evidence disproves decades of health care statistics and dozens of scientific studies!
It's easy to tell whether someone is obese (or drinks or smokes). If you are obese, you should have to pay for the consequences yourself.
I hope so. I do not want a heart transplant, artificial or human.
No, it couldn't. My parents both worked far more than 40h, and so do we. We always cook.
And giving people free healthcare and artificial hearts is going to fix that... how? It's not, it's going to make it worse.
In the US, about 70% of cardiovascular disease is caused by obesity, and even more is probably preventable by good nutrition. It's better to keep the original in good working order than to try to replace it.
And now that we all are forced to pay for each other's medical care, this is also a question of money. Why should people who eat healthy and don't have these risks pay for the high cost of artificial hearts (or heart transplants) in people who made poor nutritional choices?
I'm not sure what gives you the idea that HIV is biologically unique or bizarre. There are lots of immune deficiencies, retroviruses, and persistent infections, both in animals and humans.
Because medical research is hard. What you ignorantly refer to as "noticing" requires a lot of skill, insight, and hard work to discover.
And this doesn't invalidate prior approaches to HIV treatment: targeting the virus has been rational and effective, no matter how it ultimately does its damage.
You live in a convenient fictional world in which the Nazis "came to power" and afterwards imposed their will through totalitarian rule. That's the kind of rewriting of history Germans like, because it makes the whole thing appear like the Nazis were something that just happened. In reality, Germans democratically elected the Nazis and democratically chose to enact the Enabling Act. Part of the reason the Nazis could get enough of a majority in parliament is because they could impose restrictions on political opponents before the Enabling Act. What happened after the passing of the Enabling Act is not relevant to discussions of free speech in a democracy, because Germany had ceased to be a democracy that point.
The whole thing started with your statement:
You still fail to grasp that it was these kinds of "strict laws" that allowed European democracy to self-destruct in the first place. You can't prevent totalitarianism by restricting liberty; the failure of the Weimar Republic illustrates that (although it is by no means the only example). And until "morons" (your word) like you in Europe grasp that, European democracies will continue to fail.
This is what he said:
This is implies deliberate and strong intent to attract racist elements, and suggests that the Republican party as a whole espouses racist principles. The weasely language in which it is couched doesn't change that. Democrats should knock that sh*t off, it is offensive. And I say that as someone who has never voted for a Republican.
Are you serious? You believe that it is "commonly accepted" that the Republicans ran on a racist platform and are a racist party? Give me a break.
Republicans have a long-standing record of support for states' rights; the fact that this may have also appealed to Southern racists and that the Republican strategists probably counted on it doesn't make Republicans racist, any more than appealing to any of the unsavory groups that both parties appeal to means that the parties support those goals.
I have never voted for a Republican in my life. But people need to snap out of these simplistic caricatures of their political opponents if we want to make progress in this country. What matters is what parties promise each election, what they stand for, and what they actually deliver.
There are plenty of explanations of what is wrong with that story; use Google.
http://dailycaller.com/2012/10/21/the-republican-party-isnt-racist/
One fundamental logical error is to assume that because a small, decentralized government message may have appeal to racists (because they might hope to reintroduce racist policies in local and state elections) that that makes the message itself racist.
Afterwards? After what? Every restriction on speech and liberty in Germany was democratically passed by German parliament, including the previous incarnations of several of the major parties today, until the very last restriction, the Enabling Act of 1933, in which parliament voluntarily gave Hitler total power. The justification was always that it was "for the good of the country". After that, Hitler merely exercised the executive power parliament had given him.
It's history, "motherfucker [sic]", you should read up on it.
I do understand where they come from: they are part of a centuries-long tradition of repressing free speech and enforcing conformity and obedience to the ruling classes. They have been used by European monarchs, dictators, and totalitarians to establish and maintain their control over European nations, often resulting in genocide and war. And just because Europeans have been massively indoctrinated in their public education systems and media to believe that this is proper and good doesn't mean that it actually is.
That's not a "history lesson", it's a convenient Democratic rewriting of history. Democrats have simply adopted a political strategy of branding anybody a "racist" who doesn't agree with their particular form of racial and welfare politics.
I think the only possible response to your drivel is that any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from sarcasm.
That "common ground" does not include protection from being offended, and it does not include protection from other people hating you or ostracizing you.
People like you are why people like Hitler and Stalin come to power.
These kinds of laws would make sense if the problem in Nazi Germany had been that individuals were racist and committing crimes against each other while the German government was powerless to intervene. But that's not what happened.
What happened in Nazi Germany was that an overly powerful German government was passing laws restricting free speech, restricting political protests, restricting the right to bear arms, taking away property from minorities, and exercising its power to commit genocide on minorities. Nazi Germany happened because the state had too much power over the people, not too little.
If government power in Germany had been limited to the protection of individual rights (life, liberty, property, free speech, political participation), the genocide could not have happened because the genocide was something that required the German state and government as an essential component.
Europe is on the same path it has always been; it just has been temporarily shamed into electing less murderous leaders. Don't count on that lasting.
Progressives are wrong in their support of Arabs, but right wingers are wrong in their support of Israel too. They are wrong because both sides try to manipulate the US and use US power to achieve political goals that we as a nation have no interest in. And using historically loaded terms like "antisemitism" to manipulate US political debates is just reprehensible.
Free speech is only supposed to guarantee that government doesn't abuse its power in response to what you say. Your fellow citizens (and that includes the businesses they run) are free to ostracize you if they don't like what you say. That is also part of a free society.
(And businesses would likely be less picky about this if they faced less liability for racist conduct by employees at work due to anti-discrimination and other laws.)
Even printf+system("cc") is equivalent to the Lisp macro system at that level; we've been talking about language design.
C++'s template system was not intended as a Turing-equivalent compile-time code generator; that was something people figured out over time. In fact, many people saw that early on but refrained from using it because compilers couldn't handle it; they took it more as a sign that the C++ designers were screwing up than as a good language feature.
OCAML, F#, SML, CommonLisp, Smalltalk, Python, to name just a few. STL is a poor imitation.
Most of the algorithms and data structures it provides have don't belong in, and aren't useful in, in a general purpose library. And STL's pointer-like iterator abstraction makes things that should be easy to express in a container library tedious and cumbersome.
And that is different today... how? You're blowing smoke out your ass.
Of course, the arms trade is flourishing quite legally. And the same provisions keep the millions from arming and rebelling. If we wanted to stop shipping of arms, it would be sufficient to actually stop their shipment. Again, you're blowing smoke out your ass.
History is quite clear on this: evasion doesn't cause economic collapse, excessive taxation does.
How dumb can you be to keep saying the bullshit you keep saying.