Technically, those funds are "draining the budget" as well, but we don't blame them for the budget drain.
We typically blame the borrower (the government) for offering the debt. In the SS Trust Fund case it's the government doing the borrowing and the lending so it's kind of irrelevant...
I wouldn't say that I "blame" the SS Trust Fund for investing in US debt, rather I'm just pointing out that it does in fact invest it, and we pay interest on that. Some people are under the misapprehension that the SS Trust Fund has been raided by politicians, and there's no money left in it. These people typically say "Yeah well of course there's going to be a shortfall, the government stole all the money!!" That's just wrong. Those people don't know what they are talking about.
We could actually take a big bite out of the problem by adjusting the wage base [fas.org] without adjusting benefits.
I was including tax hikes like that in the "painful solutions" box, just like cutting benefits. The numbers are what they are... we either need to pay more or get less. Probably we'll get both.
One of the reasons a tax hike is particularly painful is that it represents the rape of my generation. It's even worse because as you say "The demographic problem was well known when the trust fund was put together." And yet look at historical SS tax rates (http://www.ssa.gov/oact/progdata/taxRates.html). I've been paying the full 15.3% (combined rate) for my ENTIRE CAREER. And that rate is probably going to go up even more. The people retiring today are pretty much freeloaders. They'll be drawing FULL benefits for the next 15-20 years, and probably won't feel the effects of any near-future SS tax hikes since their retirement income will be presumably much lower than their career income, and will die just in time to avoid the benefit collapse that my generation will face. Yay! Awesome!
So the government freely borrowed from SS and that's SS's fault? I think not.
Wrong, they did not freely borrow. They pay interest on that debt.
And no I don't say it's SS's "fault" but I'm pointing out that SS does impact the general budget. The more we save for SS, the more of a drain it is. You know how some people want to have no debt? If we did that, we'd have to raise SS taxes to make up for that interest deficit. So there's no use pretending it isn't real, and isn't a substitute for further taxes. In the meantime it's a drain on the general budget. How else can you look at it?
I would be in favor of SS funds being invested more aggressively, like other countries do. (Google "sovereign wealth fund"). Our SS Trust Fund could own half of China by now and we could cancel FICA and live off the dividends..
But then people would be whining about how risky the investment is and how it should all be kept domestically in US debt. You can't win.
Using money you saved in a planned way is not a shortfall. Running out of that saved fund is a shortfall.
In the common usage a shortfall is to "spend more than you take in" which is what I thought you were talking about. Completely burning through the trust fund and having to immediately cut benefits is more serious than a "shortfall" and I think you know that. I guess you used to the word to downplay the significant of what will happen.
There is a fix, it just means they might have to tax the rich again, like they used to do when the economy was less screwed and prosperity was growing.
Why does it just mean that? That's the only thing you can think of? I like my idea of more aggressively investing the money. I think it's a much better idea than just raising taxes. Barring that, how about we do some cost cutting like I was saying? Cut benefits, and give more incentives to do stuff like live with the kids. Provide access to cheap government housing. There's all kinds of stuff we can do to lower costs and save money.
Specious example. The daycare service is not providing a service or doing business with the child, but with the child's parents.
Specious reasoning. They are discriminating on the basis of the child's age. Would you be okay with them not enrolling children who are adopted, or who are mixed race, even though they are "not providing a service or doing business with the child?" Would you not consider it racial discrimination if they said "Black parents are fine, but black children, nope, no way!"
Should it be legal for them to refuse to enroll the child of black or gay parents?
In the example of daycare, I would say no, because the daycare is not interacting much with the parents so it doesn't really affect them. But you're really changing the subject here... I'm pointing out places where discrimination DOES happen and is fine with society, not making an argument about daycares in all types of discrimination. With daycares it's about age, not race or sexual orientation.
He couldn't have a sign saying "no blacks" and that's because it did happen.
Yes and as it turns out sometimes the laws are not very consistent. There are laws related to racism being modified or overturned now that the major problems are over. For instance, the Supreme Court recently overturned bits of the Voter Rights Act that subjected historically problematic state to increased scrutiny over redistricting -- basically a federal commission had to approve changes to ensure that minorities weren't unfairly impacted... a requirement that other states did not have to deal with.
So yeah... maybe 50 years ago a "no blacks" sign would have been widespread and a major problem, and laws were passed to react to that. 50 years from now I don't think such laws would be necessary, and our kids may well look on those laws as archaic and unfair, just like Americans today often criticize Europe's hate speech laws (especially laws against antisemitism) as violating our notion of free speech.
You've had to contrive to put in caveats such as cashiers don't normally make the rules etc to point out that it's unlikely, so what?
My point wasn't to weasel out of confronting the issue, it's that there is a qualitative difference when the business owner IS the business (i.e. a service business where the owner has to personally do something for the customer) versus a typical retail operation where the owner is off at the country club and couldn't care less if gays or blacks are giving their money to his cashier.
My point was to illustrate two far ends of the spectrum, and a hardware store where the owner isn't present day-to-day is farther out on that spectrum than a mom and pop store where the owner is the one dealing with the customers every day.
If not then why is it ok to discriminate in exactly the same way for some products but not others?
Hopefully you see the difference between a hammer and a wedding cake as political statements today. Gay marriage is a contemporary political issue where people are personally for or against it. Wedding cakes are symbols of marriage. If you are forced to put your time and energy into making a beautiful cake that says "Adam and Steve!" or whatever, then it's very close to forcing you to make political speech. I can't think of a contemporary political issue for hammers which is why I used them as a far end of the spectrum I was talking about...
Do we need to leave some jobs that are fine for homophobes so all the god fearing former hardware store owners have an alternative?
Yes, my whole point is that some people are homophobic and that there are some jobs where it's very obviously okay to express your homophobia (porn star), and some jobs that are more in the middle of the spectrum (wedding cake maker), and some jobs that it doesn't really make sense but it probably wouldn't have a big effect anyway (hammer vendor).
I don't see how what you said is related to the quote from me. What does "inconsequential" as you used it have to do with proving stuff in court? In fact if you have been wronged and can prove it in court, it is not at all inconsequential.. so you have completely changed what you originally said and what I responded to.
They refer to the paybacks as draining the budget.
They are draining the budget, because the SS Trust Fund is invested in US debt, and we are paying interest to the SS Trust Fund from the general budget.
Yes, in 2033 there is a projected shortfall. That gives them only 19 years to come up with an answer.
No... the shortfall (when they pay out more than they take in) is earlier than that. 2033 is when they exhaust the trust fund and cut benefits. Unless that's what you meant by the shortfall.
19 years is not enough time to come up with an answer if there is no answer. You just have to look at demographics... too many retirees, not enough workers. There's no non-painful way to address that. My generation is screwed, or the older generation is screwed, because SS is built on promises and assumptions that were bullshit.
Well, we're talking about budgets, so the number of soldiers and their cost is certainly still a key factor.
This article says: "For the U.S. Army in particular, between 42 and 45 percent of its total budget goes to salaries and benefits."
So that's pretty huge. If you pay your troops 1/5 as much as the other guy, that's more money to spend on weapons development, etc.
You are right about the US, India, and China not needing to fear each other, but it's not because they are nuclear powers. Nuclear is useless as a deterrent, unfortunately. Who is afraid of attacking the US because of our nukes? Iraq didn't lay down and submit in Gulf War 1 or 2. Pakistan harbored Bin Laden for a decade. Iran took over our embassy.. we had nukes and didn't use them. Iran took over a British war ship a few years ago... and did not get nuked. Pakistan continues to sponsor terrorism against India directly and via Kashmir. India does not nuke them. They have border skirmishes all the time and do not nuke each other.
I don't see why we should be afraid of India and China though. Both are awesome countries that are going to be focused on developing internally for quite some time.
Actually, my city experimented with that the other day. This [ajc.com] was the result (look at the video between noon and 2 PM).
That's funny, but I'm sure the snow and accidents and abandoned cars had something to do with it, not just the capacity of the roads.
The capacity of residential streets in front of people's houses is irrelevant; the capacity of bottlenecks is what's important.
Maybe if you're trying to travel a medium to long distance. If I'm going from my house to the grocery store 1.5 miles away, the bottlenecks are pretty minor and have no problem coping with my neighborhood and the 4 or 5 others that frequent that store.
Don't get me wrong, I love trains, and last time I visited Europe I came back wishing the US had an awesome passenger train system. Buses are not as cool but they have their place too. But the way America is spread out, implementing these systems properly would require unbelievable subsidies.
I don't know why we don't target routes that would be sustainable and profitable from day one. As an example, I'm pretty sure that a train from Raleigh to the beach, and a local bus service at the beach to take you to restaurants and hotels and other beaches, would be immensely popular. Especially if the trip time were 45 minutes with a high speed train instead of 2.5 hours in car (including the slow stretch at the end).
The second that business offers services to the open public they relinquish the right to refuse service to people on the basis of their age, gender, race, disability, and sexual identification.
There's no way you honestly believe that. For instance do you think it should be illegal for a daycare to not allow 20 year olds to enroll? Discrimination on age, check.
Should it be illegal for a portrait artist to only do portraits of women? (or only men?)
Should it be illegal for a prostitute (in areas where prostitution is legal) to deny service to people who are obese or have horrible disfigurements (or in general a disability)? What if they don't want to have sex with people of a certain race?
Who knows, maybe you don't agree with me on all of those, although I suspect the daycare one is pretty uncontroversial. But it does show that blanket statements about discrimination being bad are incorrect or at least debatable. Certainly not a given.
Health codes and regulations do infringe on the baker's personal right to be a slob. How is that in question? He, personally, cannot be a slob if he wants to bake, even if he is his own boss, even if he explicitly advertises his bakery as unregulated and unhygienic. You just can't do that in our society. The fact that a business is involved is irrelevant... even if you're personally baking and giving away food as a charitable act with no money changing hands, you have to meet those regulations.
We have to find a balance between personal rights and our duties to society. Maybe it's okay to restrict the personal right to be a slob in the food preparation business -- I don't think many people WANT to be slobs in that business, and lots of people want to feel safe buying food, so that's a pretty clear case.
I have no problem with discrimination in some kinds of business, especially service businesses where the person performing the service simply doesn't want to. If someone is a masseuse and doesn't want to give massages to obese people, I think that's fine. If someone is an artist, and doesn't want to paint portraits of nude men, but nude women are okay, good for him. How is it in society's interest to force him to paint things that he does not want to paint? It's not, which is why that kind of discrimination is not illegal. I don't know how it's worded legally, but I'm 100% sure that an artist can turn down a portrait request for people he doesn't want to paint, including "protected classes" like people of a certain gender or religion or with a physical disability.
Who are you to define what is inconsequential to someone else?
There's a sliding scale of how relevant a person's identity is to a business transaction.
If I sell hammers in a hardware store, whether my customer is gay or black or whatever doesn't really affect me. I'm not really even interacting with them unless I'm the cashier, and generally the cashier doesn't make the rules.
If I sell wedding cakes, and someone wants to pay me to make a wedding cake for a gay marriage, that's pretty close to paying me for political speech because I'm creating something to celebrate gay marriage in a way that a generic hammer does not.
Then when you get really personal, it's quite obviously fine. If I'm a porn star, I don't have to participate in gay scenes just because someone wants me to. I don't have to have sex with people of a certain race. I don't have to not discriminate against people over 40. Porn is too personal, so discrimination is an inherent and obvious right.
To me, someone who refuses to bake a cake celebrating gay marriage is well within their rights. It's personal enough that I think refusal to do business is protected. If a hammer store said "no gays" then that seems unfair, but on the other hand, does that actually happen in reality? How would the hammer store guy even tell? It's easy for the cake guy and the porn guy.
That's a red herring. First, the proper point of comparison would be cost per mile per year per capacity. Second, roads get an even bigger taxpayer subsidy than rails do!
Why per capacity and not actual usage? Anyway, you're drastically underestimating the capacity of roads. If everybody with a car got in and pulled out of their driveways, we'd have a significant part of the population on the roads simultaneously taking up a tiny fraction of the capacity (i.e. the space in front of their driveway).
According to http://www.fee.org/the_freeman... the subsidy per passenger-mile is less for cars than for rail and for public transportation in general.
NYC had a very bad problem with crime a few decades ago and went through a huge effort to fix it. Perhaps the pendulum is going to swing the other way again though.. some of their very aggressive anti-crime tactics are being questioned by the new mayor. Check out some recent news articles about their stop and frisk law being overturned.
Anyway, throw a dart on a map and the nearest city will not be so lucky (or rich). I suspect you've heard of the problems with inner city schools? Do you think those schools have problems because they're in nice, friendly, low-crime neighborhoods?
The projected problems for Social Security's budget assume full repayment of the US bonds that they *invested* their money in (it was not stolen... it's earning interest).
The SSA did start collecting extra money to pay for the population bulge, but they did not collect enough to fully cover it. The assumption was that taxes would go up again in the future, or benefits would be cut.
We need to go back to more a more traditional lifestyle for old people. In other words... they need to live with their kids, like in most countries. Then they don't need as much Social Security, and the budget is saved.
Not only did they have a better interface, they offered a ridiculous (at the time) amount of space. I used to use Yahoo mail, then they imposed a cap of 2MB (I think), and you had to pay to up that to 10MB. Gmail came out swinging at 1GB.
Depends why the 5% survived. If they were in little microclimates that were warmer, or they hid indoors, or whatever, then cold tolerance is not an issue.
Also, unless we start regularly getting polar vortexes, the cold tolerance could prove to be an "overoptimization" that makes them less competitive. The 0.1% of non-tolerant stink bugs will take over, and the next polar vortex will again have a 95% kill rate. Hypothetically.
In the part of Raleigh, NC where I live, the majority of people (including me) are from up north. I'm from Minnesota. I know a lot of people from Pennsylvania and New York. We all understand snow.
But northern drivers are some of the worst drivers in the South, because they have absolutely no idea what they're getting into and they're cocky as hell. They see a light dusting of snow and say "haha" and go. Well that light dusting of snow melted when it hit the warm road surface, then it kept snowing and cooled down the road, then it froze and kept snowing a bit more. Now you have a light dusting of snow over a solid sheet of ice that you can't see.
The problem for the companies you mentioned (except Google) is that they are infrastructure companies more than content companies. I don't understand your argument that city-owned fiber would increase competition among ISPs. Wouldn't it in fact replace the ISPs? Instead of Time Warner providing a link between you (consumer) and Disney (producer), the city provides the link, just like they provide roads and stuff.
I'm all for municipal fiber projects but let's call a spade a spade. Municipal fiber means the death of ISPs. I support that death because ISPs have been unwilling to invest in their networks and provide a product I want. Screw 'em.
I think there are at least 2 kinds of freedom. There's personal freedom, which is what you can do without regard for anybody or anything else. You can move around and think stuff, which pretty much encompasses everything that you can attempt in this life. Moving around includes stuff like moving your hand in a way that fashions a gun, points it at someone, and pulls the trigger. You have that freedom, because you can will it to happen. Then there's social freedom which is what you can do with the support of others, typically embodied as the social contract. A society agrees that people will have certain rights and responsibilities and the individuals of that society agree to help enforce those rights and responsibilities. If someone uses their personal freedom to kill you, then society will enforce the social contract on your killer and imprison/kill him.
You obviously cannot strip your personal freedom as I've defined it. It's just another name for your free will.
The social freedom, though, is defined by society. So you could have a society that allows contracts that strip you of your social freedoms, if people agree that it's a good thing. But if you were referring to this idea of a social freedom in your post, then you can't just say it exists. In fact it doesn't exist as far as I know. What society today lets you write contracts that strip your freedom irrevocably, and that other people in the society will step in to enforce based on the existence of that contract?
It occurs to me now that by "strip" you might be talking about voluntarily suppressing some freedom. Those are more legit, but of course they can be terminated at any time and your freedoms restored.
I'm not sure it makes sense to exclude productivity gains from technology. We can see from history that free men are more likely to make advances in technology than slaves, so why shouldn't they be credited with the corresponding productivity boost? Some technologies can then be appropriated by slave holders to increase their productivity, but it seems possible that there's a point where that breaks down. A slave can be forced to do manual labor, so any technological item that requires simple manual labor can be used in a slave workforce. But once the technological item requires creativity and complex thought, it's possible that the mental anguish of slavery would preclude the slave from being successful with that technology. There's also the possibility that when you educate your slaves to the level required to use the new technology, they would turn their wits to ending slavery.
You should search for "feminist mathematics" and you'll get some interesting reading.
I don't know how mainstream it is, but there is a feminist movement that accepts that male and female brains work differently, and that therefore different approaches are needed to include women in science and mathematics. For example, check out this preview of a paper which discusses a need for a new philosophy, pedagogy, and epistemology for mathematics. I don't have access to the full text, but for me it's previewing page 1 (just an intro) and page 276 which is dealing with pedagogy. This is one of the critiques for why current mathematical teaching is unsuitable for women:
Mathematics tends to be taught with a heavy reliance upon written texts which removes its conjectural nature, presenting it as inert information which should not be questioned. Predominant patterns of teaching focus on the individual learner and induce competition between learners. Language is pre-digested in the text, assuming that meaning is communicated and is non-negotiable. [...]
Like science, therefore, mathematics is perceived by many students and some teachers as "a body of established knowledge accessible only to a few extraordinary individuals" (Rosser, op.cit. p. 89). Indeed, the supposed 'objectivity' of the discipline, a cause for questioning and concern by some of those within it, is often perceived by non-mathematician curriculum theorists as inevitable....
I mean what do you think of that? Boys do pretty well, apparently, with this type of teaching and the view that mathematical theory is objective and that by writing things down we can communicate knowledge. But there are "feminist mathematician curriculum theorists" who think that's BS and that it's a social construct resulting from the influence of male thinking in mathematics. There's a better way to teach it to girls.
True? Or do you think these feminists are as crazy as the guy you responded to in thinking that just maybe men and women think differently? They are taking two different approaches (one criticizes the female brain for not understanding it as presented when the male brain has no problem doing so, the other criticizes the material and its presentation as unsuitable for the female brain) but the underlying message is the same. I'm curious what you think about this.
Aid to Israel isn't "imposed" on Americans, most Americans support aid to Israel.
Your mistake is in your first sentence -- leaving aside the "subjective" generalities about Muslims and Jews. We give aid to people we like, so subjective generalities are key, not something to be left aside.
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Technically, those funds are "draining the budget" as well, but we don't blame them for the budget drain.
We typically blame the borrower (the government) for offering the debt. In the SS Trust Fund case it's the government doing the borrowing and the lending so it's kind of irrelevant...
I wouldn't say that I "blame" the SS Trust Fund for investing in US debt, rather I'm just pointing out that it does in fact invest it, and we pay interest on that. Some people are under the misapprehension that the SS Trust Fund has been raided by politicians, and there's no money left in it. These people typically say "Yeah well of course there's going to be a shortfall, the government stole all the money!!" That's just wrong. Those people don't know what they are talking about.
We could actually take a big bite out of the problem by adjusting the wage base [fas.org] without adjusting benefits.
I was including tax hikes like that in the "painful solutions" box, just like cutting benefits. The numbers are what they are... we either need to pay more or get less. Probably we'll get both.
One of the reasons a tax hike is particularly painful is that it represents the rape of my generation. It's even worse because as you say "The demographic problem was well known when the trust fund was put together." And yet look at historical SS tax rates (http://www.ssa.gov/oact/progdata/taxRates.html). I've been paying the full 15.3% (combined rate) for my ENTIRE CAREER. And that rate is probably going to go up even more. The people retiring today are pretty much freeloaders. They'll be drawing FULL benefits for the next 15-20 years, and probably won't feel the effects of any near-future SS tax hikes since their retirement income will be presumably much lower than their career income, and will die just in time to avoid the benefit collapse that my generation will face. Yay! Awesome!
So the government freely borrowed from SS and that's SS's fault? I think not.
Wrong, they did not freely borrow. They pay interest on that debt.
And no I don't say it's SS's "fault" but I'm pointing out that SS does impact the general budget. The more we save for SS, the more of a drain it is. You know how some people want to have no debt? If we did that, we'd have to raise SS taxes to make up for that interest deficit. So there's no use pretending it isn't real, and isn't a substitute for further taxes. In the meantime it's a drain on the general budget. How else can you look at it?
I would be in favor of SS funds being invested more aggressively, like other countries do. (Google "sovereign wealth fund"). Our SS Trust Fund could own half of China by now and we could cancel FICA and live off the dividends..
But then people would be whining about how risky the investment is and how it should all be kept domestically in US debt. You can't win.
Using money you saved in a planned way is not a shortfall. Running out of that saved fund is a shortfall.
In the common usage a shortfall is to "spend more than you take in" which is what I thought you were talking about. Completely burning through the trust fund and having to immediately cut benefits is more serious than a "shortfall" and I think you know that. I guess you used to the word to downplay the significant of what will happen.
There is a fix, it just means they might have to tax the rich again, like they used to do when the economy was less screwed and prosperity was growing.
Why does it just mean that? That's the only thing you can think of? I like my idea of more aggressively investing the money. I think it's a much better idea than just raising taxes. Barring that, how about we do some cost cutting like I was saying? Cut benefits, and give more incentives to do stuff like live with the kids. Provide access to cheap government housing. There's all kinds of stuff we can do to lower costs and save money.
Specious example. The daycare service is not providing a service or doing business with the child, but with the child's parents.
Specious reasoning. They are discriminating on the basis of the child's age. Would you be okay with them not enrolling children who are adopted, or who are mixed race, even though they are "not providing a service or doing business with the child?" Would you not consider it racial discrimination if they said "Black parents are fine, but black children, nope, no way!"
Should it be legal for them to refuse to enroll the child of black or gay parents?
In the example of daycare, I would say no, because the daycare is not interacting much with the parents so it doesn't really affect them. But you're really changing the subject here... I'm pointing out places where discrimination DOES happen and is fine with society, not making an argument about daycares in all types of discrimination. With daycares it's about age, not race or sexual orientation.
He couldn't have a sign saying "no blacks" and that's because it did happen.
Yes and as it turns out sometimes the laws are not very consistent. There are laws related to racism being modified or overturned now that the major problems are over. For instance, the Supreme Court recently overturned bits of the Voter Rights Act that subjected historically problematic state to increased scrutiny over redistricting -- basically a federal commission had to approve changes to ensure that minorities weren't unfairly impacted... a requirement that other states did not have to deal with.
So yeah... maybe 50 years ago a "no blacks" sign would have been widespread and a major problem, and laws were passed to react to that. 50 years from now I don't think such laws would be necessary, and our kids may well look on those laws as archaic and unfair, just like Americans today often criticize Europe's hate speech laws (especially laws against antisemitism) as violating our notion of free speech.
You've had to contrive to put in caveats such as cashiers don't normally make the rules etc to point out that it's unlikely, so what?
My point wasn't to weasel out of confronting the issue, it's that there is a qualitative difference when the business owner IS the business (i.e. a service business where the owner has to personally do something for the customer) versus a typical retail operation where the owner is off at the country club and couldn't care less if gays or blacks are giving their money to his cashier.
My point was to illustrate two far ends of the spectrum, and a hardware store where the owner isn't present day-to-day is farther out on that spectrum than a mom and pop store where the owner is the one dealing with the customers every day.
If not then why is it ok to discriminate in exactly the same way for some products but not others?
Hopefully you see the difference between a hammer and a wedding cake as political statements today. Gay marriage is a contemporary political issue where people are personally for or against it. Wedding cakes are symbols of marriage. If you are forced to put your time and energy into making a beautiful cake that says "Adam and Steve!" or whatever, then it's very close to forcing you to make political speech. I can't think of a contemporary political issue for hammers which is why I used them as a far end of the spectrum I was talking about...
Do we need to leave some jobs that are fine for homophobes so all the god fearing former hardware store owners have an alternative?
Yes, my whole point is that some people are homophobic and that there are some jobs where it's very obviously okay to express your homophobia (porn star), and some jobs that are more in the middle of the spectrum (wedding cake maker), and some jobs that it doesn't really make sense but it probably wouldn't have a big effect anyway (hammer vendor).
I don't see how what you said is related to the quote from me. What does "inconsequential" as you used it have to do with proving stuff in court? In fact if you have been wronged and can prove it in court, it is not at all inconsequential.. so you have completely changed what you originally said and what I responded to.
They refer to the paybacks as draining the budget.
They are draining the budget, because the SS Trust Fund is invested in US debt, and we are paying interest to the SS Trust Fund from the general budget.
Yes, in 2033 there is a projected shortfall. That gives them only 19 years to come up with an answer.
No... the shortfall (when they pay out more than they take in) is earlier than that. 2033 is when they exhaust the trust fund and cut benefits. Unless that's what you meant by the shortfall.
19 years is not enough time to come up with an answer if there is no answer. You just have to look at demographics... too many retirees, not enough workers. There's no non-painful way to address that. My generation is screwed, or the older generation is screwed, because SS is built on promises and assumptions that were bullshit.
Well, we're talking about budgets, so the number of soldiers and their cost is certainly still a key factor.
This article says: "For the U.S. Army in particular, between 42 and 45 percent of its total budget goes to salaries and benefits."
So that's pretty huge. If you pay your troops 1/5 as much as the other guy, that's more money to spend on weapons development, etc.
You are right about the US, India, and China not needing to fear each other, but it's not because they are nuclear powers. Nuclear is useless as a deterrent, unfortunately. Who is afraid of attacking the US because of our nukes? Iraq didn't lay down and submit in Gulf War 1 or 2. Pakistan harbored Bin Laden for a decade. Iran took over our embassy.. we had nukes and didn't use them. Iran took over a British war ship a few years ago... and did not get nuked. Pakistan continues to sponsor terrorism against India directly and via Kashmir. India does not nuke them. They have border skirmishes all the time and do not nuke each other.
I don't see why we should be afraid of India and China though. Both are awesome countries that are going to be focused on developing internally for quite some time.
Actually, my city experimented with that the other day. This [ajc.com] was the result (look at the video between noon and 2 PM).
That's funny, but I'm sure the snow and accidents and abandoned cars had something to do with it, not just the capacity of the roads.
The capacity of residential streets in front of people's houses is irrelevant; the capacity of bottlenecks is what's important.
Maybe if you're trying to travel a medium to long distance. If I'm going from my house to the grocery store 1.5 miles away, the bottlenecks are pretty minor and have no problem coping with my neighborhood and the 4 or 5 others that frequent that store.
Don't get me wrong, I love trains, and last time I visited Europe I came back wishing the US had an awesome passenger train system. Buses are not as cool but they have their place too. But the way America is spread out, implementing these systems properly would require unbelievable subsidies.
I don't know why we don't target routes that would be sustainable and profitable from day one. As an example, I'm pretty sure that a train from Raleigh to the beach, and a local bus service at the beach to take you to restaurants and hotels and other beaches, would be immensely popular. Especially if the trip time were 45 minutes with a high speed train instead of 2.5 hours in car (including the slow stretch at the end).
The second that business offers services to the open public they relinquish the right to refuse service to people on the basis of their age, gender, race, disability, and sexual identification.
There's no way you honestly believe that. For instance do you think it should be illegal for a daycare to not allow 20 year olds to enroll? Discrimination on age, check.
Should it be illegal for a portrait artist to only do portraits of women? (or only men?)
Should it be illegal for a prostitute (in areas where prostitution is legal) to deny service to people who are obese or have horrible disfigurements (or in general a disability)? What if they don't want to have sex with people of a certain race?
Who knows, maybe you don't agree with me on all of those, although I suspect the daycare one is pretty uncontroversial. But it does show that blanket statements about discrimination being bad are incorrect or at least debatable. Certainly not a given.
Health codes and regulations do infringe on the baker's personal right to be a slob. How is that in question? He, personally, cannot be a slob if he wants to bake, even if he is his own boss, even if he explicitly advertises his bakery as unregulated and unhygienic. You just can't do that in our society. The fact that a business is involved is irrelevant... even if you're personally baking and giving away food as a charitable act with no money changing hands, you have to meet those regulations.
We have to find a balance between personal rights and our duties to society. Maybe it's okay to restrict the personal right to be a slob in the food preparation business -- I don't think many people WANT to be slobs in that business, and lots of people want to feel safe buying food, so that's a pretty clear case.
I have no problem with discrimination in some kinds of business, especially service businesses where the person performing the service simply doesn't want to. If someone is a masseuse and doesn't want to give massages to obese people, I think that's fine. If someone is an artist, and doesn't want to paint portraits of nude men, but nude women are okay, good for him. How is it in society's interest to force him to paint things that he does not want to paint? It's not, which is why that kind of discrimination is not illegal. I don't know how it's worded legally, but I'm 100% sure that an artist can turn down a portrait request for people he doesn't want to paint, including "protected classes" like people of a certain gender or religion or with a physical disability.
Who are you to define what is inconsequential to someone else?
There's a sliding scale of how relevant a person's identity is to a business transaction.
If I sell hammers in a hardware store, whether my customer is gay or black or whatever doesn't really affect me. I'm not really even interacting with them unless I'm the cashier, and generally the cashier doesn't make the rules.
If I sell wedding cakes, and someone wants to pay me to make a wedding cake for a gay marriage, that's pretty close to paying me for political speech because I'm creating something to celebrate gay marriage in a way that a generic hammer does not.
Then when you get really personal, it's quite obviously fine. If I'm a porn star, I don't have to participate in gay scenes just because someone wants me to. I don't have to have sex with people of a certain race. I don't have to not discriminate against people over 40. Porn is too personal, so discrimination is an inherent and obvious right.
To me, someone who refuses to bake a cake celebrating gay marriage is well within their rights. It's personal enough that I think refusal to do business is protected. If a hammer store said "no gays" then that seems unfair, but on the other hand, does that actually happen in reality? How would the hammer store guy even tell? It's easy for the cake guy and the porn guy.
That's a red herring. First, the proper point of comparison would be cost per mile per year per capacity. Second, roads get an even bigger taxpayer subsidy than rails do!
Why per capacity and not actual usage? Anyway, you're drastically underestimating the capacity of roads. If everybody with a car got in and pulled out of their driveways, we'd have a significant part of the population on the roads simultaneously taking up a tiny fraction of the capacity (i.e. the space in front of their driveway).
According to http://www.fee.org/the_freeman... the subsidy per passenger-mile is less for cars than for rail and for public transportation in general.
NYC had a very bad problem with crime a few decades ago and went through a huge effort to fix it. Perhaps the pendulum is going to swing the other way again though.. some of their very aggressive anti-crime tactics are being questioned by the new mayor. Check out some recent news articles about their stop and frisk law being overturned.
Anyway, throw a dart on a map and the nearest city will not be so lucky (or rich). I suspect you've heard of the problems with inner city schools? Do you think those schools have problems because they're in nice, friendly, low-crime neighborhoods?
Since we have a big military and they don't, the easier solution is to just start charging them for military defense.
To start with we should levy a tax on England because that would be pretty funny.
One thing to consider is that money goes further in China and India than in the US.
As one example, what's the average salary of a Chinese soldier vs an American soldier?
The projected problems for Social Security's budget assume full repayment of the US bonds that they *invested* their money in (it was not stolen... it's earning interest).
The SSA did start collecting extra money to pay for the population bulge, but they did not collect enough to fully cover it. The assumption was that taxes would go up again in the future, or benefits would be cut.
We need to go back to more a more traditional lifestyle for old people. In other words... they need to live with their kids, like in most countries. Then they don't need as much Social Security, and the budget is saved.
Not only did they have a better interface, they offered a ridiculous (at the time) amount of space. I used to use Yahoo mail, then they imposed a cap of 2MB (I think), and you had to pay to up that to 10MB. Gmail came out swinging at 1GB.
Depends why the 5% survived. If they were in little microclimates that were warmer, or they hid indoors, or whatever, then cold tolerance is not an issue.
Also, unless we start regularly getting polar vortexes, the cold tolerance could prove to be an "overoptimization" that makes them less competitive. The 0.1% of non-tolerant stink bugs will take over, and the next polar vortex will again have a 95% kill rate. Hypothetically.
In the part of Raleigh, NC where I live, the majority of people (including me) are from up north. I'm from Minnesota. I know a lot of people from Pennsylvania and New York. We all understand snow.
But northern drivers are some of the worst drivers in the South, because they have absolutely no idea what they're getting into and they're cocky as hell. They see a light dusting of snow and say "haha" and go. Well that light dusting of snow melted when it hit the warm road surface, then it kept snowing and cooled down the road, then it froze and kept snowing a bit more. Now you have a light dusting of snow over a solid sheet of ice that you can't see.
The problem for the companies you mentioned (except Google) is that they are infrastructure companies more than content companies. I don't understand your argument that city-owned fiber would increase competition among ISPs. Wouldn't it in fact replace the ISPs? Instead of Time Warner providing a link between you (consumer) and Disney (producer), the city provides the link, just like they provide roads and stuff.
I'm all for municipal fiber projects but let's call a spade a spade. Municipal fiber means the death of ISPs. I support that death because ISPs have been unwilling to invest in their networks and provide a product I want. Screw 'em.
I think there are at least 2 kinds of freedom. There's personal freedom, which is what you can do without regard for anybody or anything else. You can move around and think stuff, which pretty much encompasses everything that you can attempt in this life. Moving around includes stuff like moving your hand in a way that fashions a gun, points it at someone, and pulls the trigger. You have that freedom, because you can will it to happen. Then there's social freedom which is what you can do with the support of others, typically embodied as the social contract. A society agrees that people will have certain rights and responsibilities and the individuals of that society agree to help enforce those rights and responsibilities. If someone uses their personal freedom to kill you, then society will enforce the social contract on your killer and imprison/kill him.
You obviously cannot strip your personal freedom as I've defined it. It's just another name for your free will.
The social freedom, though, is defined by society. So you could have a society that allows contracts that strip you of your social freedoms, if people agree that it's a good thing. But if you were referring to this idea of a social freedom in your post, then you can't just say it exists. In fact it doesn't exist as far as I know. What society today lets you write contracts that strip your freedom irrevocably, and that other people in the society will step in to enforce based on the existence of that contract?
It occurs to me now that by "strip" you might be talking about voluntarily suppressing some freedom. Those are more legit, but of course they can be terminated at any time and your freedoms restored.
I'm not sure it makes sense to exclude productivity gains from technology. We can see from history that free men are more likely to make advances in technology than slaves, so why shouldn't they be credited with the corresponding productivity boost? Some technologies can then be appropriated by slave holders to increase their productivity, but it seems possible that there's a point where that breaks down. A slave can be forced to do manual labor, so any technological item that requires simple manual labor can be used in a slave workforce. But once the technological item requires creativity and complex thought, it's possible that the mental anguish of slavery would preclude the slave from being successful with that technology. There's also the possibility that when you educate your slaves to the level required to use the new technology, they would turn their wits to ending slavery.
You should search for "feminist mathematics" and you'll get some interesting reading.
I don't know how mainstream it is, but there is a feminist movement that accepts that male and female brains work differently, and that therefore different approaches are needed to include women in science and mathematics. For example, check out this preview of a paper which discusses a need for a new philosophy, pedagogy, and epistemology for mathematics. I don't have access to the full text, but for me it's previewing page 1 (just an intro) and page 276 which is dealing with pedagogy. This is one of the critiques for why current mathematical teaching is unsuitable for women:
Mathematics tends to be taught with a heavy reliance upon written texts which removes its conjectural nature, presenting it as inert information which should not be questioned. Predominant patterns of teaching focus on the individual learner and induce competition between learners. Language is pre-digested in the text, assuming that meaning is communicated and is non-negotiable. [...]
Like science, therefore, mathematics is perceived by many students and some teachers as "a body of established knowledge accessible only to a few extraordinary individuals" (Rosser, op.cit. p. 89). Indeed, the supposed 'objectivity' of the discipline, a cause for questioning and concern by some of those within it, is often perceived by non-mathematician curriculum theorists as inevitable....
I mean what do you think of that? Boys do pretty well, apparently, with this type of teaching and the view that mathematical theory is objective and that by writing things down we can communicate knowledge. But there are "feminist mathematician curriculum theorists" who think that's BS and that it's a social construct resulting from the influence of male thinking in mathematics. There's a better way to teach it to girls.
True? Or do you think these feminists are as crazy as the guy you responded to in thinking that just maybe men and women think differently? They are taking two different approaches (one criticizes the female brain for not understanding it as presented when the male brain has no problem doing so, the other criticizes the material and its presentation as unsuitable for the female brain) but the underlying message is the same. I'm curious what you think about this.
Aid to Israel isn't "imposed" on Americans, most Americans support aid to Israel.
Your mistake is in your first sentence -- leaving aside the "subjective" generalities about Muslims and Jews. We give aid to people we like, so subjective generalities are key, not something to be left aside.
Correlation is not causation. If people react to some random idiot the same way they reacted to Gandhi, it doesn't mean they're wrong.