Are you against arresting kids for writing the word "gun"? I have to wonder because Hannity, O'Reilly and Limbaugh regularly rail against schools' substituting zero-tolerance policies for the use of common sense. The arrest of young Mr. Stone is anything but a reason to rail against Hannity, O'Reilly and Limbaugh.
We all know that Musk cares a lot about the environment. That's why he's Chairman of Solar City. So Musk's battery factory is not going to be a big polluter, and any regulatory regime that drives said factory out of the state is unreasonable.
California should make its regulations reasonable for all enterprises -- large and small, famous and obscure. Not only would that preclude accusations of "selling out"; it's just the right thing to do.
Your link contains an interesting graph, showing that CA unemployment has consistently been higher than the national average, since about 1990.
Imagine how much larger the surplus would be -- or how much lower tax rates could be, without impacting services provided by state government -- if CA unemployment had been consistently lower than the national average!
Reasonable regulations on fab plants are welcome. But if the parent post is correct (waste water from semiconductor plants must be cleaner than tap water), that's simply not reasonable. That would not be a case where the rest of the world ought to emulate California's unreasonable standards; it's a case where California ought to become reasonable.
the warzone is so small and densely packed with civilians that there is nowhere that Hamas can attack from that isn't near, more or less, civilian installations
Which is another very good reason why Hamas shouldn't attack Israel. (In addition to, you know, basic human decency.) Your fixation on the idea that Hamas should attack Israel, in spite of the certain misery this will bring upon its own citizens, reveals unsavory things about you.
Israel attacks anything, anytime, anywhere and doesn't care about the civilian casualties caused
You make that assertion with a straigt face even though you know Israel has dropped leaflets begging civilians to get away from military targets. Congratulations, you have just utterly ruined your credibility. (The men whom Tom Brokaw dubbed "The Greatest Generation" tried to maximize civilian casualties, and this leaflet campaign tries to minimize civilian casualties. A little application of logic would lead Brokaw to say the IDF is "greater than the Greatest Generation," but I won't hold my breath for that.)
You have the right to make the analogy less realistic, but I don't see how that's helpful. The reality is not a mere suspicion of rockets in a school, it's actual rockets in at least three actual schools:
(Reuters) - UNRWA said it found a rocket cache in one of its central Gaza schools on Tuesday, the third such incident.
Report them to the IDF? Are you insane? If you came and killed my child I would not report those trying to kill you to the police or army. I would do everything I could to support those trying to kill you.
That's a very bad analogy. It has led you to the wrong conclusion, as bad analogies often do.
A far better analogy: I live in Bellingham, Washington, and my government, the United States Government, stockpiles rockets in my child's school and starts firing them over the border into residential areas of Vancouver, British Columbia, for no good reason. To try to stop the rocket attacks, Canada launches some airstrikes on Bellingham.
In this situation, I would be completely ashamed of my government, the United States Government, and I would be rooting for the Canadians, because I'm a civilized person.
And then if the airstrikes failed to stop the rocket attacks, and Canadian troops arrived in Bellingham, you bet I'd help them find the jerks launching the rockets.
And if the Canadians dropped leaflets begging civilians to evacuate the school before they bomb the rocket-launching site, I would have even more admiration for the Canadians, because that type of concern for civilians is nearly unprecedented in warfare.
And if my child was killed because a school administrator obeyed the duplicitous order to stay put, would I suddenly lose my grip on logic and rationality, and lash out at the Canadians? Nope. My anger would be entirely directed at the Americans who instigated this conflict.
But you can't say that money spent on SpaceX contracts won't go to SpaceX. By definition, it does.
they have so-far demonstrated no ability to either reliably launch on-schedule, or leaunch at any sustained rate
The amazing thing about SpaceX is that even while their costs are at least an order of magnitude lower than ULA's, their development cycle is far more rapid and the capabilities they are adding are far more advanced. Fixing the things you are complaining about, if indeed they are a genuine problem, seems trivial compared to what they've already accomplished.
I suspect grandparent has ideological reasons for wanting to give money to a private contractor rather than a government agency. 80% of NASA's yearly budget will barely slow the deficit's rise, and it's a suspiciously/round/ number.
The private contractor has a track record of delivering far more bang for the buck than the government agency. Yes, I do have an ideology -- because I have observed time and time again that private enterprises operate far more efficiently than the government -- but it is a true ideology with a foundation of factual, objective observations. What is the foundation of your ideology?
Sorry for using a round number. I don't know why you'd be happier if I had said "apply the other 78.57% toward deficit reduction." Nobody has done a rigorous analysis of what the optimal percentage should be, so why pretend they have?
I'm one of the biggest spaceflight enthusiasts you'll find, and I've been saying for years: kill SLS. We'll get more results by using 20% of the money to expand SpaceX contracts, and applying the other 80% toward deficit reduction.
Musk isn't in it for the money; he enjoys the engineering challenges, and bringing launch costs down by one or more orders of magnitude is one of those challenges. (Yes I realize the irony; despite not being in it for the money, he has become quite wealthy.)
There isn't really an obvious prescription. You can educate people all you want about not saying offensive things, but a small handful of people will continue to say offensive things because they're trying to be offensive.
Sensitivity training teaches the insensitive exactly how to push the buttons of the sensitive. And that's about all it does.
There's an old prescription, that may still be the best available: "Do not feed the trolls."
A completely corrupt labor `bonus' system evolved to compensate valuable (not to be confused with `honest') employees despite government policy; something we see emerging today in our own corrupt government workforce.
Are you referring to VA workers who falsified patient wait-time records in order to earn bonuses?
the Russians are clearly supplying the separatists with weapons and trained crews
"Trained crew" is a stretch. A well-trained crew would have made a positive identification before launching. Perhaps there was an IFF signal that would have saved MH17, if it had been paid attention to. The Russians are supplying this assistance to hotheads with little regard for human life (they shoot at anything flying over their self-proclaimed "republic").
If Noriega prevails, Trey Parker and Matt Stone wuld likely owe damanges to the estate of Kim Jong Il, for their unflattering depiction of him in Team America: World Police.
I favor reducing spending and increasing taxes. That is because I am a fiscal conservative and we are currently running a wildly excessive deficit.
Do you want to increase tax revenue, or tax rates? The two are not necessarily the same, depending on which side of the Laffer Curve we currently occupy.
And don't write off other ways to reduce the deficit:
a revenue reduction concurrent with an even larger spending reduction. (Even during Bill Clinton's second term, when there was a healthy federal surplus, opinion polls of that era showed most Americans thought the government was spending too much. If spending was scaled back to Clinton Administration levels, in partial deference to that sentiment, we would instantly be back in surplus.)
the "Penny Plan," surprisingly endorsed by the liberal Lanny Davis (although one must wonder about the sincerity of that endorsement)
Gone are the days, when pursuit of happiness was understood as a natural right granted to each human being not by their government, but by the Creator.
If one state delegation refuses pork for its state, that state suffers. If all do, everybody's better off.
And we're never going to see all of them refuse, of their own accord. That's why legislation or a constitutional amendment is needed, making it illegal to advocate for money to be spent in their own district.
I can hardly believe your naiveté with that statement. They certainly will stay here. If 116 illegal immigrants who have been convicted of homicide are allowed to stay, why in the world would these kids be deported? They won't be. It is said that we urgently need to create a "path to citizenship" for them, and the reason for this is purely political: they and their descendents will reliably vote Democrat for generations to come.
Consider two brothers born in Beijing: Ming and Ling. Ming decides to enter the U.S. illegaly, and Ling decides to stay in the country of which he is a citizen. Which brother is more deserving of benefits paid for by U.S. taxpayers: Ming, who broke our immigration laws, or Ling, who obeyed our immigration laws? The answer is obviously Ling. And the other 1.3 billion citizens of China are equally deserving as Ling. But we don't provide those 1.3 billion people with any kind of social safety net. (It's fiscally impossible... merely doing so for the 0.3 billion U.S. citizens has recently created trillion-dollar deficits.) Yet you argue we should provide those benefits to the less-deserving brother, Ming. Are you starting to see why that position has no credibility?
There is plenty of room here for people who are willing to work and contribute at least as much as they take.
Again, your naiveté is amazing. If we were to become selective about who gets in, I'd be in favor of expanded immigration. Who wouldn't? But under our current policy of lax border enforcement, the vast majority of immigrants are unskilled, functionally illiterate, and disproportionately disposed to criminal behavior, with no hope of ever contributing more than they receive from the social safety net. Please, please try to reconcile that fact with your pie-in-the-sky ideology.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you against arresting kids for writing the word "gun"? I have to wonder because Hannity, O'Reilly and Limbaugh regularly rail against schools' substituting zero-tolerance policies for the use of common sense. The arrest of young Mr. Stone is anything but a reason to rail against Hannity, O'Reilly and Limbaugh.
If Tesla is only getting breaks on the sillier stuff it may be a good idea.
A better idea would be to give everyone breaks on the sillier stuff. I.e., repeal the sillier stuff.
We all know that Musk cares a lot about the environment. That's why he's Chairman of Solar City. So Musk's battery factory is not going to be a big polluter, and any regulatory regime that drives said factory out of the state is unreasonable.
California should make its regulations reasonable for all enterprises -- large and small, famous and obscure. Not only would that preclude accusations of "selling out"; it's just the right thing to do.
Your link contains an interesting graph, showing that CA unemployment has consistently been higher than the national average, since about 1990.
Imagine how much larger the surplus would be -- or how much lower tax rates could be, without impacting services provided by state government -- if CA unemployment had been consistently lower than the national average!
Reasonable regulations on fab plants are welcome. But if the parent post is correct (waste water from semiconductor plants must be cleaner than tap water), that's simply not reasonable. That would not be a case where the rest of the world ought to emulate California's unreasonable standards; it's a case where California ought to become reasonable.
I've been inside NORAD, and it was not as high-tech as portrayed in War Games (1983).
Word
the warzone is so small and densely packed with civilians that there is nowhere that Hamas can attack from that isn't near, more or less, civilian installations
Which is another very good reason why Hamas shouldn't attack Israel. (In addition to, you know, basic human decency.) Your fixation on the idea that Hamas should attack Israel, in spite of the certain misery this will bring upon its own citizens, reveals unsavory things about you.
Israel attacks anything, anytime, anywhere and doesn't care about the civilian casualties caused
You make that assertion with a straigt face even though you know Israel has dropped leaflets begging civilians to get away from military targets. Congratulations, you have just utterly ruined your credibility. (The men whom Tom Brokaw dubbed "The Greatest Generation" tried to maximize civilian casualties, and this leaflet campaign tries to minimize civilian casualties. A little application of logic would lead Brokaw to say the IDF is "greater than the Greatest Generation," but I won't hold my breath for that.)
You have the right to make the analogy less realistic, but I don't see how that's helpful. The reality is not a mere suspicion of rockets in a school, it's actual rockets in at least three actual schools:
(Reuters) - UNRWA said it found a rocket cache in one of its central Gaza schools on Tuesday, the third such incident.
Report them to the IDF? Are you insane? If you came and killed my child I would not report those trying to kill you to the police or army. I would do everything I could to support those trying to kill you.
That's a very bad analogy. It has led you to the wrong conclusion, as bad analogies often do.
A far better analogy: I live in Bellingham, Washington, and my government, the United States Government, stockpiles rockets in my child's school and starts firing them over the border into residential areas of Vancouver, British Columbia, for no good reason. To try to stop the rocket attacks, Canada launches some airstrikes on Bellingham.
In this situation, I would be completely ashamed of my government, the United States Government, and I would be rooting for the Canadians, because I'm a civilized person.
And then if the airstrikes failed to stop the rocket attacks, and Canadian troops arrived in Bellingham, you bet I'd help them find the jerks launching the rockets.
And if the Canadians dropped leaflets begging civilians to evacuate the school before they bomb the rocket-launching site, I would have even more admiration for the Canadians, because that type of concern for civilians is nearly unprecedented in warfare.
And if American leaders called those evacuation warning leaflets "psychological warfare, and urged people to stay put," my disgust for my own government would multiply.
And if my child was killed because a school administrator obeyed the duplicitous order to stay put, would I suddenly lose my grip on logic and rationality, and lash out at the Canadians? Nope. My anger would be entirely directed at the Americans who instigated this conflict.
If you look at military spending as a percentage of GDP, Israel spends 1.5x as much as the US.
If you look at military spending as a percentage of GDP, the U.S. in 1952 spent 2.5x as much as Israel does today: http://i.cfr.org/content/publi...
And in 1952, the threat of the U.S. homeland being invaded was much less than the current threat of the Israeli homeland being invaded.
it is awful to consider that Jewish people in Israel are today doing the same thing to others that they suffered in the not so distant past
Oh, I didn't realize that Israel was systematically exterminating other ethnic groups, by the millions, in gas chambers. Thanks for enlightening me.
Yes, pork-barrel spending is a huge problem; see http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
But you can't say that money spent on SpaceX contracts won't go to SpaceX. By definition, it does.
they have so-far demonstrated no ability to either reliably launch on-schedule, or leaunch at any sustained rate
The amazing thing about SpaceX is that even while their costs are at least an order of magnitude lower than ULA's, their development cycle is far more rapid and the capabilities they are adding are far more advanced. Fixing the things you are complaining about, if indeed they are a genuine problem, seems trivial compared to what they've already accomplished.
I suspect grandparent has ideological reasons for wanting to give money to a private contractor rather than a government agency. 80% of NASA's yearly budget will barely slow the deficit's rise, and it's a suspiciously /round/ number.
The private contractor has a track record of delivering far more bang for the buck than the government agency. Yes, I do have an ideology -- because I have observed time and time again that private enterprises operate far more efficiently than the government -- but it is a true ideology with a foundation of factual, objective observations. What is the foundation of your ideology?
Sorry for using a round number. I don't know why you'd be happier if I had said "apply the other 78.57% toward deficit reduction." Nobody has done a rigorous analysis of what the optimal percentage should be, so why pretend they have?
I'm one of the biggest spaceflight enthusiasts you'll find, and I've been saying for years: kill SLS. We'll get more results by using 20% of the money to expand SpaceX contracts, and applying the other 80% toward deficit reduction.
Musk isn't in it for the money; he enjoys the engineering challenges, and bringing launch costs down by one or more orders of magnitude is one of those challenges. (Yes I realize the irony; despite not being in it for the money, he has become quite wealthy.)
If we get really lucky we get commercial enterprises able to do end runs around them to actually make a little progress.
Then I guess we've been extremely lucky, because SpaceX has actually made a lot of progress.
There isn't really an obvious prescription. You can educate people all you want about not saying offensive things, but a small handful of people will continue to say offensive things because they're trying to be offensive.
Sensitivity training teaches the insensitive exactly how to push the buttons of the sensitive. And that's about all it does.
There's an old prescription, that may still be the best available: "Do not feed the trolls."
A completely corrupt labor `bonus' system evolved to compensate valuable (not to be confused with `honest') employees despite government policy; something we see emerging today in our own corrupt government workforce.
Are you referring to VA workers who falsified patient wait-time records in order to earn bonuses?
the Russians are clearly supplying the separatists with weapons and trained crews
"Trained crew" is a stretch. A well-trained crew would have made a positive identification before launching. Perhaps there was an IFF signal that would have saved MH17, if it had been paid attention to. The Russians are supplying this assistance to hotheads with little regard for human life (they shoot at anything flying over their self-proclaimed "republic").
If Noriega prevails, Trey Parker and Matt Stone wuld likely owe damanges to the estate of Kim Jong Il, for their unflattering depiction of him in Team America: World Police.
I favor reducing spending and increasing taxes. That is because I am a fiscal conservative and we are currently running a wildly excessive deficit.
Do you want to increase tax revenue, or tax rates? The two are not necessarily the same, depending on which side of the Laffer Curve we currently occupy.
And don't write off other ways to reduce the deficit:
Gone are the days, when pursuit of happiness was understood as a natural right granted to each human being not by their government, but by the Creator.
Everyone understands that this is a fundamental tenet of the founding documents of the United States, but that doesn't prevent it from being quietly ignored by those who, say, disparage the Constitution as "a charter of negative liberties."
I have my doubts that such an amendment would help. Over time, Congress critters would simply enter into quid pro quo relationships with each other.
That, too, should be made explicitly illegal, just as accepting bribes is illegal (and is occasionally prosecuted).
If one state delegation refuses pork for its state, that state suffers. If all do, everybody's better off.
And we're never going to see all of them refuse, of their own accord. That's why legislation or a constitutional amendment is needed, making it illegal to advocate for money to be spent in their own district.
That doesn't mean they get to stay here
I can hardly believe your naiveté with that statement. They certainly will stay here. If 116 illegal immigrants who have been convicted of homicide are allowed to stay, why in the world would these kids be deported? They won't be. It is said that we urgently need to create a "path to citizenship" for them, and the reason for this is purely political: they and their descendents will reliably vote Democrat for generations to come.
Consider two brothers born in Beijing: Ming and Ling. Ming decides to enter the U.S. illegaly, and Ling decides to stay in the country of which he is a citizen. Which brother is more deserving of benefits paid for by U.S. taxpayers: Ming, who broke our immigration laws, or Ling, who obeyed our immigration laws? The answer is obviously Ling. And the other 1.3 billion citizens of China are equally deserving as Ling. But we don't provide those 1.3 billion people with any kind of social safety net. (It's fiscally impossible... merely doing so for the 0.3 billion U.S. citizens has recently created trillion-dollar deficits.) Yet you argue we should provide those benefits to the less-deserving brother, Ming. Are you starting to see why that position has no credibility?
There is plenty of room here for people who are willing to work and contribute at least as much as they take.
Again, your naiveté is amazing. If we were to become selective about who gets in, I'd be in favor of expanded immigration. Who wouldn't? But under our current policy of lax border enforcement, the vast majority of immigrants are unskilled, functionally illiterate, and disproportionately disposed to criminal behavior, with no hope of ever contributing more than they receive from the social safety net. Please, please try to reconcile that fact with your pie-in-the-sky ideology.