Obviously, I meant to say that people should vote for a third party rather than voting for those who they consider to be a 'lesser evil.'
That's far from clear. When voting for a presidential candidate, you vote both for a party or general political viewpoint and a particular candidate. Just because I think a particular candidate sucks, he may still represent a party that is closest to my views. That's why you get so few third party votes. I happen to have voted third party, but that's because the third party candidate actually represented my views better, not to throw out Obama.
You are simply barking up the wrong tree. First of all, the presidential election shouldn't matter as much as it does. We are only in this mess because people like Obama have managed accumulate great powers to do things like change the health care system, hand out trillions of dollars in subsidies, and fly drone attacks. You will never get a single person that handles that kind of power responsibly; we need to cut back the power of the executive branch and the federal government, so that many of these decisions are made at the state and local level again. And to the degree that the president matters, the important decisions aren't made during the final presidential election, the important decisions are made during the primaries.
And that kind of reasoning is exactly why there is no hope for America. If you keep voting for what you don't want, you'll keep getting it. You have to realize that the differences between the two parties are negligible. Then you will be free to vote your conscience.
There is no difference between the two parties because the both seek out the political preferences to match voter preferences. The final vote only picks the party that has been slightly better at it. That is the way our political system is supposed to work.
The system works better than the European parliamentary system, in which a coalition of crackpot parties can hijack the government and parties generally don't give a f*ck what the majority wants.
I'm the only luddite here. Per Capita economic output does not mean people are more productive than they once were.
That's how productivity is commonly defined. But you can also look at amount of (insert good here) produced per worker, and it also has gone way up over time.
If a patent is declared invalid, the owner of the invalid patent should be obligated to pay back all royalties with interest. In addition, penalties proportional to the total revenue should be payable to the person having the patent invalidated. That way, as a patent becomes more and more significant, there is more and more incentive and reward for challenging it.
In addition, a strong presumption of validity should be dropped. The PTO should merely register the patent and it should only be nominally considered valid unless it actually survives court challenges. That way, the people interested in maintaining or challenging the patent would pay for its examination, small inventors could easily register their patents, and we wouldn't need a bloated and slow PTO.
I never knew that there was a badger crisis in the UK. I mean, here people have been worried about hurricanes, flooding, earthquakes, and the occasional terrorist attack, but WILL SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE BADGERS?
There is no NSA surveillance! There are no drones! There is no deficit! Obviously, there must be something wrong with you if invent such silly notions!
(It all depends on the meaning of "is", of course.)
I wish it was only a reaction, but anti-Americanism has a long and sordid history in Europe, and it is pushed by governments because it lets them cover up their own, far more serious failings. Whether it was monarchists, Hitler, Christian democrats, or socialists, when everything else fails, they resort to: "We have our problems, but at least things aren't as bad as in America! You wouldn't want to succumb to lawless capitalism like those poor oppressed masses over there!"
The main difference from my POV is that most other democracies don't tout their spying as being "caretekers of the Internet" or "a bulwark against international terrorism".
The US tried not to "tout" this at all, actually.
The spy and cheat and keep very quiet about it. When they get caught with their hands in someone else's cookie jar they do some low profile damage control and get back to business as usual.
So, when this happens in the US, it's a high profile scandal that immediately leads to congressional investigations and drafts of legislation. When it happens in Europe, it results in "low profile damage control" and "people going back to business as usual". Hence my conclusion that people outside the US aren't making a fuss about it; maybe some insignificant privacy groups, but neither politicians nor the public seem to care enough to make this a high profile issue.
People outside the US are making a fuss.
Yeah, they are making a holier-than-thou fuss about the NSA, while neglecting the privacy abuses in their own countries. I have been following Germany closely. This kind of spying has been going on since WWII and complies with Germany's laws. I know of no significant political efforts to change it.
Sure but then why didn't the US citizens throw out Obama after the 1st presidential term ?
Because the alternative didn't look all that different and so people went with the known evil.
A 2 party system is no better than a 1 party system especially when the 2 sides agree on almost everything that has to do with fucking the american citizen.
There was a great diversity of primary candidates, but people ended up playing it safe. And our parties are pretty weak compared to parliamentary systems; just look at the wide range of votes on many issues.
Do you seriously believe European or Asian governments aren't doing the same thing? They are actually closely collaborating with the US and exchanging spy data with each other on each others' population. The only differences are that (1) the NSA is technically better at it, and (2) in the US, people are actually making a fuss about it, and maybe it will change. The NSA spying is unconstitutional and we need to do something about it. Fortunately, we do have the legal means at our disposal in the US.
Nauru has not always been a marginal habitat nor a "barren rock".
Yes, it has always been marginal; most of the Pacific islands are. People don't make such dangerous voyages and settle on isolated rocks for fun, they do it because they don't have a choice.
A few hundred years ago, someone living on Nauru could live about as well, with pretty much all the same comforts as 99% of the rest of the human population.
In different words, their standard of living hasn't changed much, but they want what others have, but they want it delivered to their remote island. Good luck with that. Anyway, if you look at Nauru's per capita GDP, it's still better than many other nations, including India, Vietnam, and Pakistan.
It happens all the time in capitalistic "free market" corporations too.
That's the whole point of capitalism: you vote with your money; if you make good decisions, you get rewarded, if you make bad decisions, you get punished. With governments, that mechanism doesn't exist: if 51% of the population makes bad decisions, the other 49% of the population have to suffer the consequences as much as everybody else. The 51% will never even figure out that it was their fault because they don't suffer any more than the others. Bush voters didn't get preferentially punished for Bush's screwups, and Obama voters aren't getting preferentially punished for Obama's screw-ups.
Sounds like you have a doomsday scenario to me.
You proposed we adopt sustainability, which will invariably lead to economic collapse. I and many others are proposing to do nothing about climate change and deal with the consequences later, which at most leads to a small reduction in economic output many decades from now.
It's an argument you can't win, because any serious move towards sustainability has such grave economic consequences that any politician attempting it would be kicked out of office right away. The only carbon emission reductions we have actually had have been involuntary due to recession, and due to fracking. All the policies actually designed to reduce emissions have just ended up being corporate welfare and have had no effect on emissions.
*Less* violent? You historical ignorance is showing - medieval battle was pretty much hacking each other to bits until there were only a handful still standing
*More* intelligent? Again, You're apparently unaware of the level of thinking, intelligence, and education in parts of ancient Greece and Rome
A few exceptional thinkers don't tell you much about the population. Literacy rates were probably no more than about 10% in Greece and Rome at their best.
As moderns, we have this tendency to believe that we're smarter and better than our forbears, mostly becasue of technological hubris and arrogance.
You posted an anecdote, I posted news stories from reputable sources.
OMG THE SKY IS FALLING DUE TO OBAMACARE!!!
The sky isn't falling, it's just one long period of unemployment and economic malaise due to an incompetent president. Hopefully, the next one will be better.
Uh, what? You start out with a bogus Obamacare dig, then you link an article which shows no evidence
The article gives real rates for actual payers. You can check them yourself if you like.
I'm basing my viewpoint on real evidence, not the BS estimates you see all over the news. I'm mid-30's, healthy and working for a small company. Exactly the type of person who is "estimated" to pay more, and yet, I'm paying less.
That means nothing. You may simply have been on an uncompetitive rate plan or have had too much coverage. (Given how financially inexperienced you seem to be, that is actually likely.)
We're not talking about mom and pop shops, these are companies with more than 50 full-time employees. It also affects the entire market, so competitors all have to adjust and it works itself out.
Yes, it will work itself out: companies will fire employees, automate more, and move jobs overseas, where employees have full health care benefits at a fraction of the cost of Obamacare.
You can always make this rationalization. There will always be something better and cheaper down the line. It is easy to see that in hindsight they could have saved a couple billion dollars by waiting a few years, but the benefit is so large that a couple billion dollars is peanuts by comparison.
In fact, many people at the time thought that the human genome project was premature, and that the money would have been better spent on other programs until the cost of sequencing had come down. I see little reason to revise that opinion in hindsight.
Even if the multiplier is this high, it doesn't mean that a single company would get all of the benefits.
Not at all; lots of companies would have done the sequencing and made the data available at ever cheaper prices, until a few years later, the government would have redone the whole thing for a negligible amount of money.
The only people who will pay more are companies who are only now required to provide insurance to their employees and therefore have a 100% increase in healthcare costs.
That's simply false. Rates are going up for many people.
Furthermore, the businesses that have a "100% increase in healthcare costs" will pass that on to consumers and employees, and will reduce staff to make ends meet.
A positive economic impact is an economic gain. A negative economic impact is an economic loss. I really don't think anyone should fault the writers of this paper for assuming this was obvious.
The writers didn't say "positive economic impact", they said "economic impact", likely because they can't actually make a good case that the impact is entirely positive.
I am not sure if this study takes into account opportunity costs, but even if they didn't the study shows such a large return on investment that I doubt opportunity costs would erase it.
That's why the study is so manipulative: they throw a lot of big numbers at you and hope that you'll draw that conclusion. What you really should be concluding is that they are trying to bamboozle you with these big numbers because they don't really have any more concrete evidence that their spending was worth it.
Furthermore, "opportunity cost" also means whether the spending was needed at all. Was it really rational for the US government to engage in a race with a private company to sequence the human genome? Was it rational to do the sequencing using really expensive devices, when much lower cost sequencing would have been available a few years later anyway? Is NIH the right way of distributing this money? If the multiplier really is this high, why wouldn't private companies have a huge incentive to do this research without public funding? The whole analysis makes no sense.
As I was saying before, I think spending federal tax dollars on research is a good thing and we should increase it. But "studies" like this suggest that there is something wrong with the way the money is spent, and the people doing the spending know it.
what fairytale are you living in? humanity is just as bad as it always has been.
What fairytale are you living in? Humanity has become much less violent, much more intelligent, and much more productive over the last few centuries.
developing genetic technology to eliminate negative human psychological traits (such as the seven sins) will create a much more cooperative and productive society to achieve goals like space exploration much more efficiently
What you call "the seven sins" has important biological and social functions. And competition and self-interest are as important as cooperation for progress. The kind of people you are trying to design would be less efficient than what we currently have.
but that also introduces the possibility that we aren't really fit at all if we are stupid enough to engineer ourselves with unintended consequences that ultimately lead to our premature extinction.
Indeed. And you just gave a splendid example of that, because the way you think of human evolution and enhancement is like the old eugenicists.
293 billion dollars in paid salaries, and 277,000 highly-skilled jobs created or supported.
That's a plus only if these people are doing something useful. Otherwise, the government is taking 277000 highly skilled workers and wasting their talent on meaningless work, and the US government just sucked a trillion dollars in opportunity cost out of the economy.
That's why it's true to say that this is "economic impact", but nobody knows whether it's an actual gain or loss.
They said economic impact not economic activity. If they burned every house down and rebuilt every one of them, the net economic impact of spending trillions of dollars would be $0
"Economic impact" is an ambiguous weasel-word, and the thing they did not say was "economic gain".
In the case of people burning down their houses, you could actually subtract the losses from the gains, but the way these calculations are done, you'd still end up with nominal big overall gains, because the same dollar is counted many times in these calculations. Without that, you couldn't get such huge multipliers.
For most other forms of government activity, it's worse: the losses can't even be accounted for because they tend occur as externalities or opportunity costs.
Slashdot Mirror
That's far from clear. When voting for a presidential candidate, you vote both for a party or general political viewpoint and a particular candidate. Just because I think a particular candidate sucks, he may still represent a party that is closest to my views. That's why you get so few third party votes. I happen to have voted third party, but that's because the third party candidate actually represented my views better, not to throw out Obama.
You are simply barking up the wrong tree. First of all, the presidential election shouldn't matter as much as it does. We are only in this mess because people like Obama have managed accumulate great powers to do things like change the health care system, hand out trillions of dollars in subsidies, and fly drone attacks. You will never get a single person that handles that kind of power responsibly; we need to cut back the power of the executive branch and the federal government, so that many of these decisions are made at the state and local level again. And to the degree that the president matters, the important decisions aren't made during the final presidential election, the important decisions are made during the primaries.
There is no difference between the two parties because the both seek out the political preferences to match voter preferences. The final vote only picks the party that has been slightly better at it. That is the way our political system is supposed to work.
The system works better than the European parliamentary system, in which a coalition of crackpot parties can hijack the government and parties generally don't give a f*ck what the majority wants.
You become a "known criminal" by being convicted in a court of law of a criminal offense. Which of the candidates was?
Why don't you tell us what you meant instead of giving us this roundabout bullshit?
In your opinion, what should people have done in the 2012 presidential election to "throw out Obama"?
That's how productivity is commonly defined. But you can also look at amount of (insert good here) produced per worker, and it also has gone way up over time.
If a patent is declared invalid, the owner of the invalid patent should be obligated to pay back all royalties with interest. In addition, penalties proportional to the total revenue should be payable to the person having the patent invalidated. That way, as a patent becomes more and more significant, there is more and more incentive and reward for challenging it.
In addition, a strong presumption of validity should be dropped. The PTO should merely register the patent and it should only be nominally considered valid unless it actually survives court challenges. That way, the people interested in maintaining or challenging the patent would pay for its examination, small inventors could easily register their patents, and we wouldn't need a bloated and slow PTO.
I never knew that there was a badger crisis in the UK. I mean, here people have been worried about hurricanes, flooding, earthquakes, and the occasional terrorist attack, but WILL SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE BADGERS?
There is no NSA surveillance! There are no drones! There is no deficit! Obviously, there must be something wrong with you if invent such silly notions!
(It all depends on the meaning of "is", of course.)
I wish it was only a reaction, but anti-Americanism has a long and sordid history in Europe, and it is pushed by governments because it lets them cover up their own, far more serious failings. Whether it was monarchists, Hitler, Christian democrats, or socialists, when everything else fails, they resort to: "We have our problems, but at least things aren't as bad as in America! You wouldn't want to succumb to lawless capitalism like those poor oppressed masses over there!"
The US tried not to "tout" this at all, actually.
So, when this happens in the US, it's a high profile scandal that immediately leads to congressional investigations and drafts of legislation. When it happens in Europe, it results in "low profile damage control" and "people going back to business as usual". Hence my conclusion that people outside the US aren't making a fuss about it; maybe some insignificant privacy groups, but neither politicians nor the public seem to care enough to make this a high profile issue.
Yeah, they are making a holier-than-thou fuss about the NSA, while neglecting the privacy abuses in their own countries. I have been following Germany closely. This kind of spying has been going on since WWII and complies with Germany's laws. I know of no significant political efforts to change it.
Because the alternative didn't look all that different and so people went with the known evil.
There was a great diversity of primary candidates, but people ended up playing it safe. And our parties are pretty weak compared to parliamentary systems; just look at the wide range of votes on many issues.
Do you seriously believe European or Asian governments aren't doing the same thing? They are actually closely collaborating with the US and exchanging spy data with each other on each others' population. The only differences are that (1) the NSA is technically better at it, and (2) in the US, people are actually making a fuss about it, and maybe it will change. The NSA spying is unconstitutional and we need to do something about it. Fortunately, we do have the legal means at our disposal in the US.
Yes, it has always been marginal; most of the Pacific islands are. People don't make such dangerous voyages and settle on isolated rocks for fun, they do it because they don't have a choice.
In different words, their standard of living hasn't changed much, but they want what others have, but they want it delivered to their remote island. Good luck with that. Anyway, if you look at Nauru's per capita GDP, it's still better than many other nations, including India, Vietnam, and Pakistan.
That's the whole point of capitalism: you vote with your money; if you make good decisions, you get rewarded, if you make bad decisions, you get punished. With governments, that mechanism doesn't exist: if 51% of the population makes bad decisions, the other 49% of the population have to suffer the consequences as much as everybody else. The 51% will never even figure out that it was their fault because they don't suffer any more than the others. Bush voters didn't get preferentially punished for Bush's screwups, and Obama voters aren't getting preferentially punished for Obama's screw-ups.
You proposed we adopt sustainability, which will invariably lead to economic collapse. I and many others are proposing to do nothing about climate change and deal with the consequences later, which at most leads to a small reduction in economic output many decades from now.
It's an argument you can't win, because any serious move towards sustainability has such grave economic consequences that any politician attempting it would be kicked out of office right away. The only carbon emission reductions we have actually had have been involuntary due to recession, and due to fracking. All the policies actually designed to reduce emissions have just ended up being corporate welfare and have had no effect on emissions.
Historians and sociologists have looked at this question extensively and violence is clearly way down. E.g., http://reason.com/archives/2012/01/11/the-decline-of-violence
A few exceptional thinkers don't tell you much about the population. Literacy rates were probably no more than about 10% in Greece and Rome at their best.
No, mostly because it's true.
You posted an anecdote, I posted news stories from reputable sources.
The sky isn't falling, it's just one long period of unemployment and economic malaise due to an incompetent president. Hopefully, the next one will be better.
The article gives real rates for actual payers. You can check them yourself if you like.
That means nothing. You may simply have been on an uncompetitive rate plan or have had too much coverage. (Given how financially inexperienced you seem to be, that is actually likely.)
Yes, it will work itself out: companies will fire employees, automate more, and move jobs overseas, where employees have full health care benefits at a fraction of the cost of Obamacare.
In fact, many people at the time thought that the human genome project was premature, and that the money would have been better spent on other programs until the cost of sequencing had come down. I see little reason to revise that opinion in hindsight.
Not at all; lots of companies would have done the sequencing and made the data available at ever cheaper prices, until a few years later, the government would have redone the whole thing for a negligible amount of money.
Take off your partisan glasses and face reality:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/04/obamacare-rate-shock-how-big-is-it-does-it-matter.html
That's simply false. Rates are going up for many people.
Furthermore, the businesses that have a "100% increase in healthcare costs" will pass that on to consumers and employees, and will reduce staff to make ends meet.
Yeah.
http://reason.com/archives/2012/01/11/the-decline-of-violence
(And if you don't know who Steve Pinker is, go look it up.)
The writers didn't say "positive economic impact", they said "economic impact", likely because they can't actually make a good case that the impact is entirely positive.
That's why the study is so manipulative: they throw a lot of big numbers at you and hope that you'll draw that conclusion. What you really should be concluding is that they are trying to bamboozle you with these big numbers because they don't really have any more concrete evidence that their spending was worth it.
Furthermore, "opportunity cost" also means whether the spending was needed at all. Was it really rational for the US government to engage in a race with a private company to sequence the human genome? Was it rational to do the sequencing using really expensive devices, when much lower cost sequencing would have been available a few years later anyway? Is NIH the right way of distributing this money? If the multiplier really is this high, why wouldn't private companies have a huge incentive to do this research without public funding? The whole analysis makes no sense.
As I was saying before, I think spending federal tax dollars on research is a good thing and we should increase it. But "studies" like this suggest that there is something wrong with the way the money is spent, and the people doing the spending know it.
It's not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of fact, whether you look at homicide rates, executions, wars, violent crime, etc.
Again, it's a fact: per capita economic output is much higher than at any time in history.
I'd say you're a Luddite and a doomsayer.
Where do you think you are?
What fairytale are you living in? Humanity has become much less violent, much more intelligent, and much more productive over the last few centuries.
What you call "the seven sins" has important biological and social functions. And competition and self-interest are as important as cooperation for progress. The kind of people you are trying to design would be less efficient than what we currently have.
Indeed. And you just gave a splendid example of that, because the way you think of human evolution and enhancement is like the old eugenicists.
That's a plus only if these people are doing something useful. Otherwise, the government is taking 277000 highly skilled workers and wasting their talent on meaningless work, and the US government just sucked a trillion dollars in opportunity cost out of the economy.
That's why it's true to say that this is "economic impact", but nobody knows whether it's an actual gain or loss.
"Economic impact" is an ambiguous weasel-word, and the thing they did not say was "economic gain".
In the case of people burning down their houses, you could actually subtract the losses from the gains, but the way these calculations are done, you'd still end up with nominal big overall gains, because the same dollar is counted many times in these calculations. Without that, you couldn't get such huge multipliers.
For most other forms of government activity, it's worse: the losses can't even be accounted for because they tend occur as externalities or opportunity costs.