Really, who can blame people? If you have a non-politically correct opinion, you face huge repercussions for voicing it. People lose their jobs for voicing the "wrong" opinion. Free speech in this country is in a horrible state, because it only applies in a very narrow way to government laws and actions. There's no protection from other people, unlike other rights. You can't be fired by a racist boss for being black, but you can be fired by a PC boss for being un-PC. It's not a protected group.
The trans woman could only make the decision to undergo gender transition on the basis on mental illness. Here we finally see the trans woman as the depraved serial killer in a woman suit she is.
1/4 of the country is mentally ill according to psychologists so I wouldn't take it so personally.
All I ever once was was a girl who was routinely abused by being exposed to testosterone against her will
I was curious about whether you tried testosterone therapy and it didn't work? I can't tell if that's what you're saying or if you feel like you were abused by yourself for producing testosterone.
Maybe these women weren't satisfied because they had to survive a full-on assault by charlatans who sought to reminder them at every goalpost that they never really would be women, despite what their hearts were telling them.
I'm curious about this statement too.. you're saying your heart may tell you you're a woman. What does that mean? Is there some feeling that all women have that men aren't supposed to feel?
If a woman asked me what it feels like to be a man because she wanted to know if she was supposed to be a man, I'd have absolutely no idea what to say. I'm sure women are the same way. So there's no way you described how you felt to a group of women and they said "Oh wow you're actually one of us." What was your realization process really like?
I don't understand this mentality. You think people who say that mean "A corporation is actually the mind of a real person floating around without a physical body?"
It just means everything a corporation does is actually being done by a person or a group of people, and those people don't lose their rights just because their "group" is a corporation. The corporation as a whole has a right to free speech because any group of people who collaborate to produce speech have the right to free speech. If corporations didn't have a right to free speech, then the government could also say "Well let's see now, Mr. Reporter, I see you're married. As it turns out, couples don't have the right to free speech, because couples aren't people, they're groups of people." I mean you see the problem with that right?
Your main argument has been that only people whose time is worthless don't pay more. That means you're proud to pay more because you link it with your time being more valuable than other people's. If it weren't a matter of pride you wouldn't use judgmental words like worthless.
(I'm ignoring the fact that you're wrong, but that's your argument.)
Long term storage has gotta be the dumbest idea for dealing with nuclear waste. I can't believe in this day and age there are STILL people who haven't heard of nuclear fuel reprocessing.
If the nuclear energy is the one solution to the worlds energy needs, then ALL countries, including Iran, Syria, and every single state in Africa will need its very own nuclear power industry.
Not true. Every country uses cars as well, but not every country has a car industry.
And every one of those countries realizes that a nuclear weapon would be the trump card that prevents them from being invaded by hostile neighbors, and it would make even GWB think twice about an attack.
But it's not a trump card.. which is why India and Pakistan have gone to war even after having nukes, even though they are nuclear armed. And they didn't blow each other up with nukes.
Anyway, even if you were right, if America started leaving countries like Syria, Libya, and Iraq alone.. wouldn't that actually be awesome?? Plenty of people think we shouldn't be spending a dime helping people in Syria or Egypt fight for a more Islamic government.
Every single country that has acquired nuclear weapons since the 1960s has hidden their work under the guise of nuclear power generation or "research" (and you wouldn't have much excuse for "research" if not for power).
And that hasn't stopped non-signatories to nuclear non-proliferation from developing nukes, such as the aforementioned India and Pakistan, who have both nuclear power and nuclear weapons. And looking at Iran's actions today, it's not like anybody is even willing to invade a country to stop them from developing nukes. Nuclear power and nuclear weapons aren't actually THAT difficult for a state-funded organization to achieve.
So nuclear proliferation essentially isn't an issue one way or another with respect to nuclear power in the West. It's a huge red herring that makes no sense at all when you think about it for 30 seconds. "Oh yeah, stopping ourselves won't stop them, because that whole 'master race' theory is incorrect and pretty much everybody WILL have nuclear weapons who wants them, eventually, especially since we're too pussy to invade anybody over it."
You must not have read the last paragraph of the article. Including ocean uranium there is a 60k year supply at current rates. With fuel reprocessing, there is a 30k year supply (not including ocean supplies) at current rates. 30k/200 * 60k = 9,000,000 year supply using ocean uranium and reprocessing.
Both of those options increase the cost of the uranium, but since fuel is a low percentage of the cost of a nuclear plant it doesn't make much difference to the total cost.
So instead of ending up at 15 years supply at the 50-60% range, it's more like a few million years.
I suspect we'll have fusion electricity generation within 500 years though.
Relocating the city itself would be really really hard and what's the point? Just expand existing cities a little bit and move the people. I mean really, America has such few large cities, it's embarrassing. We have 3 cities with more than 2 million people outside of NYC (China has around 50). If we spread NYC among the new top 10 (post-NYC) we'd have 8, which would be a nice improvement.
Then you'd have "Little New York" in several cities. That would be pretty cool actually.
Ooh general breakdown of society. That's when the rich hire a few poor guys and turn into warlords. The "nice" rich people who don't do that sort of thing get killed and their property taken over by other rich people or the most motivated and successful poor people who then become rich.
Then, oh then, the poor people suffer. Oh how they suffer and cry and wish that they could go back to the good old days when the "evil rich" were evil because they posted obnoxious Youtube videos about their 115 ft. yachts, instead of sending their armed thugs to round up all the 14 year old poor girls for a sex party.
But you're right. Despite the consequences, it would happen anyway, because most people just don't think ahead and understand what follows societal collapse and who it *really* hurts.
Where Israel became a Jewish state by majority vote, including Palestinians, rather than via a war of conquest?
War of conquest is legitimate.. but in any case as I'm sure you know it was British territory at the time and they pretty much gave the Jews a state out of pity for the Holocaust.
As to why the British were "allowed" to do what they wanted with land they conquered, see yourself: "A sense of entitlement to other people's land and property is bullshit"
WHOOSH. Of course every single attack from Native American's would have been called "terrorist attacks", if they used the same language then that we do now. But then as now, the occupiers cannot whine when the victims of land theft and systematic oppression dare to fight back.
I think you got confused with present and past tenses. If NOW, TODAY, the Sioux were regularly engaging in terrorism and justifying it based on some "stolen land" argument, I suspect a lot of people would be yelling at them.
I never called people who fought against Israel in 1948 terrorists.
Then the United States is the greatest terrorist state on the planet, followed by Israel.
That's not far off, actually, but I think it depends on how you define "greatest". Since the US is the biggest, most powerful, and richest country, and has the biggest military and probably the biggest intelligence agencies (budget-wise), it probably commits the most state terrorism. The US definitely does stupid stuff. Hell right now we're giving weapons to Syrian rebels who are terrorists. So that's state-supported terrorism.
That said, if you consider our total capacity (destroying the world) compared to what we actually do (arm terrorists in places we don't care about), it's a tiny ratio.
Compare that to Taliban Afghanistan. Their total capacity is small, but they dedicated a lot of that capacity to terrorism. So who's the "greater" terrorist?
I'd say that in both absolute and relative terms, though, Israel engages in less terrorism than the US simply because it isn't involved in as many countries or movements around the world.
So it was bullshit for Jews to go after Swiss banks and Nazi guards for actions that happened before the formation of Israel, much less the 1967 war? Or are you going for some "arbitrary time limit"?
Ummmm I'm not sure how that follows from what we were talking about regarding control of land. Did Nazi guards even exist at the point you're talking about? What land did they still control that the Jews wanted back?
Anyway, if you're talking about crime and punishment in general, victims deserve justice if they can identify the actual criminals involved. What you don't get to do is hurt innocent people because you were hurt in the past. For instance imagine some Jew today saying "My parents were hurt by Germany in general, so today in 2013 I want to reclaim all my family land in Germany, and any Germans living there have to get out." You know why it's different? The Germans living in your old house right now probably had nothing to do with it, especially 70 years down the road as we are. Even if the great grandson of Hitler himself is living in your old house, he had nothing to do with it.
A less emotional example might be a modern foreclosure victim who was foreclosed on in error. Say the bank already sold the house and someone else is living there and raising a family. If you prove that your house was taken away from you unfairly, what should happen? I don't think you have a right to throw out the family who lives there. The bank made the mistake, th
Why pay hardcover price for an ebook? Because you get it same day the hardcover comes out. If you want to pay paperback prices, wait a couple years for the paperback to come out and the ebook prices typically drop at the same time.
According to this it used to be about 1 year, and has actually decreased due to pressure from ebooks.
But really, even when paperbacks are out, it often costs more for an ebook today than the paperback version, which is ridiculous and probably what OP was referring to, not paying cheaper-than-paperback prices on release day.
How much of a hardcover price do you really think is physical costs? A 400 page hardcover is equivalent to 100 pages of double side letter paper. I can print that for 5c a page (or less) on a decent laser printer. So as a guy with basic consumer equipment my costs for for printing a hardcover book are $5 or less. Of course, a publishing house can do it for less. On a big run, I suspect their costs for printing, binding and shipping combined probably don't top that same $5.
Okay you've covered printing costs. You're forgetting major costs like physical distribution and storage which are nearly free for ebooks. Then the overhead at every retailer for physical storage. Then the deals that let sellers return unsold books to the publisher.
The rest of the hardcover costs? Pays for things like editing and typesetting (which is more work for a ebook than a traditional one)
On a typical hardcover [...] For cover design, typesetting and copy-editing, the publisher pays about 80 cents. Marketing costs average around $1 but may go higher or lower depending on the title. Most of these costs will deline [sic] on a per-unit basis as a book sells more copies. [...] So on a $12.99 e-book, the publisher takes in $9.09. Out of that gross revenue, the publisher pays about 50 cents to convert the text to a digital file, typeset it in digital form and copy-edit it. Marketing is about 78 cents. [...] At a glance, it appears the e-book is more profitable. But publishers point out that e-books still represent a small sliver of total sales, from 3 to 5 percent.
It costs less for ebooks than hardcovers. Now this article was written in early 2010 using numbers from 2009 -- since then the share of sales for ebooks has grown. According to this report for the entire year of 2012, ebook sales represented 20% of the market instead of 3-5%.
You know what that does to fixed costs? Instead of 50 cents per sale, it's like 10 cents per sale or less now.
I don't know why you thought editing and typesetting an ebook would be MORE expensive than what it costs for a physical book. That defies common sense, and real numbers seem to confirm that you're wrong. I'm curious if you have a source for your belief?
And if you feel that feeding authors and their editors is unreasonable, then fuck off.
If authors and their editors can't buy food, they need to get new jobs and write/edit on the side. Guess what, plenty of authors do have other jobs, or depend on support from family. That's life.
But I don't think that's more likely due to low price ebooks (which are much cheaper to produce), you're just exaggerating ridiculously to try to make an emotional point.
I think the real reason is it's easier for battery manufacturers to imply that their batteries have more capacity by having a bigger number.
For instance, I bought an external battery for my phone with a usb outlet. The Amazon page said 10,000mAh capacity! Great. So I get it. Turns out it's 10k mAh at 3.3V, whereas USB (the ONLY output option from the charger) is 5V (and this battery does produce the full 5V output required, not 3.3V). It really should have been advertised as 6,000mAh. If they're gonna lie to that extent why not say 33k mAh (at 1V). Well I'm sure some battery seller out there is doing that.. and they're not even wrong, just misleading to people who have been programmed that battery capacity = mAh.
I mean, not just for one student, but all the way across the board?
You wouldn't do it for a single student since that would make it obvious who benefited.
In other words, if there are 40 questions on the test, you'll have scores of 3 (rounded from 2.5), 5, 8 (rounded from 7.5), 10, etc. You will never have a score of 76 or 94 or 61.
Yeah but you wouldn't have a 97 or 99 either. The guy talks about this.. there are enough consecutive sequences of non-zero counts that it can't be due to rounding.
It's definitely possible that the missing numbers aren't malicious or evidence of someone having tampered with them, but if we assume that, there must be an awfully convoluted and/or buggy algorithm at work.
That's wrong, because "free" does not mean "without opportunity cost."
You can certainly install, operate, administrate, get support for, and get training for Linux for free. The opportunity cost of getting it for free is time and reliability though -- paying for support, for instance, will generally make it get done faster and more reliably.
In actual fact, the documentary evidence proves that it was a war of aggression by the US that attempted to annex Canada while the British were struggling against Napoleon.
From what I just read on Wikipedia, the US wanted to annex Canada, but there were several acts of war committed against the US that precipitated the war (including British impressment of US sailors, which is enslavement). The US didn't have to go to war over these provocations and I'm sure the desire for Canada played a role in choosing war over diplomacy, but you're making it sound like the US started the war with absolutely no justification. Enslaving another country's citizens is most definitely a legitimate cause for war.
Based on your link it looks like it can be a legal act of maritime war (as in, it's not a war crime to blockade a nation you're at war with). I don't see where it says it can be legal as in the blockaded country is "not allowed" to take military action against it.
The formation of Israel was impossible without massive land theft from the native population
Apparently it's not impossible because that's what happened.
Do you also spend a lot of time yelling at the Sioux for being pissed that the Black Hills were stolen from them?
If Native Americans were regularly engaging in terrorism and justifying it based on some "stolen land" argument, I suspect a lot of people would be yelling at them.
Still calling Nelson Mandela a terrorist because he resisted Apartheid?
Guess what, someone isn't a terrorist depending on whether you agree with their goals, they're a terrorist based on what they do. Nelson Mandela was a terrorist.
A sense of entitlement to other people's land and property is bullshit
Haha, I actually agree with that. So now that the Jews control the land, it's bullshit for the Palestinians to have a sense of entitlement to it. And if not now (because I can sense you're gonna impose some arbitrary time limit), then they just have to plug their ears and wait a century or two. Then the Jews will have lived there for centuries and the amoral sociopathic Palestinians will be the ones with a false sense of entitlement.
But the people murdered by Stern and Irgun were innocent. Those who lost homes and property were not even indirectly responsible.
You can't hold one side of a conflict to a different standard than another in the pursuit of justice. Any proposal to correct injustices done by Israel, without a corresponding correction to other parties, is simply compounding the injustice. And as time goes on and the generations change, it becomes a new injustice to hold the new generation responsible for any perceived crimes of the past.
"Troublemakers"? They were just born there, descendents of Ancient Greece, Phoenecia, Rome, Egypt, Sumer and - dare I say Judea. But that's "causing trouble".
What are you talking about? People are troublemakers for making trouble (like engaging in terrorism), not their ancestry.
"The Constitution is not a suicide pact" is a phrase in American political and legal discourse. The phrase expresses the belief that constitutional restrictions on governmental power must be balanced against the need for survival of the state and its people. It is most often attributed to Abraham Lincoln, as a response to charges that he was violating the United States Constitution by suspending habeas corpus during the American Civil War. Although the phrase echoes statements made by Lincoln, and although versions of the sentiment have been advanced at various times in American history, the precise phrase "suicide pact" was first used by Justice Robert H. Jackson in his dissenting opinion in Terminiello v. Chicago, a 1949 free speech case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. The phrase also appears in the same context in Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez, a 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision written by Justice Arthur Goldberg.
Thomas Jefferson offered one of the earliest formulations of the sentiment, although not of the phrase. In 1803, Jefferson's ambassadors to France arranged the purchase of the Louisiana territory in conflict with Jefferson's personal belief that the Constitution did not bestow upon the federal government the right to acquire or possess foreign territory. Due to political considerations, however, Jefferson disregarded his constitutional doubts, signed the proposed treaty, and sent it to the Senate for ratification. In justifying his actions, he later wrote: "[a] strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means."
tldr; liberal values are nice to have, but you have to know when to put them away
New al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri voiced support in an internet video for popular uprisings sweeping the Middle East, saying Arabs are no longer afraid of the United States, ten years after the country was targeted by the militant network.
Osama bin Laden was a surprising proponent of the Arab spring, according to documents found after his capture and released on Thursday.
In his last private letter written just a week before his death, he said the revolutions represented a “formidable event” and a turning point in the Arab world. Before the release of the 17 letters by the US government, the revolutions were viewed as a concern for bin Laden as they could cause instability and potential western involvement in the region.
That said, I wouldn't credit bin Laden with the victory. Their attempt to link 9/11 to the Arab Spring is a bit tenuous in my opinion, and I would give the Taliban more credit with the legitimization of America dealing with radical Muslim groups in Afghanistan than al Qaeda. Certainly our attempts to negotiate a peace with the Taliban must have made groups like the Muslim Brotherhood more confident that if they successfully took over, America would no longer come swooping in to save a Western-friendly dictator.
It's more like, bin Laden's dreams are being realized by others. He fought for these dreams but they weren't his alone. That's why it's not HIS victory.
"His" own people rejected his methods and goals.
I'm no expert on bin Laden but I doubt his goal was to get 100% of Muslims into al Qaeda. Bin Laden was a mujahideen and was fighting on behalf of other Muslims. It's like saying the goal of a general of the US army must be to get 100% of Americans into the army.
I guess if your definition of easy is that you shift the work to everybody else versus doing it for yourself then yes, shopping at Publix is easier than living off the land. OTOH if you look beyond the individual and look at the effort involved to enable one to shop at Publix versus living off the land, then a whole lot more work is involved.
No that's the whole point, less overall work is involved. Using trade and specialization allows people to live off each other with less effort than working individually. The total effort of everybody involved is lower, and the individual effort is lower. It's because when you work in an organized system, the same amount of effort goes further than working on your own.
What's going to be faster and easier.. 10 specialists building 10 houses together (a carpenter, a plumber, an electrician, some framers, etc), or 10 individuals building 10 houses separately with each one taking care of every facet? An organized system is more complex, but the individual effort is lower and the effect of the effort is higher.
The problem with terms like easy and hard is that they are subjective. Simpler and more complex, while still maintaining a modicum of subjectivity, are much more straight forward. By definition a simpler process is an easier process compared to a complex process, is it not?
A simpler process is easier to follow (as in understand intellectually) but not necessarily easier to do.
How to fly: 1. Find a huge bird and kill it 2. Strap the wings to your arms 3. Flap like a bird really really hard
Conceptually it's easy to understand and it's in fact possible if you had the power to weight ratio of a bird. But you don't. So it will never work.
How to fly: 1. Get an education... 10000. Get a job... 20000. Buy a plane ticket
It's thousands of times longer and more complex than the first list, but still easier to do.
Take food production, whether you grow your own or you purchase it at the store, the first step in the process is that it has to be grown. Then it has to be harvested and then stored. Both growing your own or purchasing it has these three basic steps. If you do grow your own, you are done until you wash it and cook it.
For something basic like fresh produce, you're right. It's simpler (though not easier) to grow your own.
As soon as you get more complex, though, the balance shifts. Say instead of growing an apple, we're talking about bread. Bread has more than one ingredient and it doesn't grow on trees, so now we're looking at the following basic steps: 1. Grow wheat 2. Harvest wheat 3. Grind wheat into flour 4. Raise a cow 5. Get the cow pregant 6. Milk the cow 7. Travel to the ocean 8. Harvest salt by evaporating water 9... I honestly don't know how you get yeast, I guess you'll need to search the Earth until you find some naturally occurring yeast 10. Build your own oven 11. Harvest wood for your oven... 20. Oh yeah, I think there's eggs in bread too, so raise some chickens... 30. Forgot the sugar. Umm. Travel to a climate where you can raise some sugar cane. 31. Get the sugar out of the cane, I'm not sure how.... 40. Is your flour still good? You may need to grow another crop of wheat...
I'm leaving out hundreds of substeps though. You don't just will a cow into existence, it has to come from somewhere (I guess travel somewhere and domesticate a cow-like animal, use selective breeding for 20 generations, maybe you end up with a cow?). You don't just grind wheat into flour with your teeth either, you'll need at least some wood or stone tools.
Now imagine a small community. Guy 1: 1. Grow lots of wheat 2. Harvest wheat 3. Sell wheat 4. Buy bread
Guy 2: 1. Raise cows 2. Sell milk and butter 3. Buy bread
Childbirth is easy. Millions of women all over the planet deliver babies every day and then go back to work in the fields. It is easy, but also very painful, but painful doesn't mean it is difficult (calculus is difficult).
Childbirth is an example of something that is not physically easy. Dealing with the death of a loved one is an example of something that is not emotionally easy. Calculus is an example of something that is not intellectually easy.
By calling childbirth easy, you're using your own definition of easy that doesn't take into account things that most people think of when using the word.
Living off the land is a lot simpler than shopping at Publix.
Shopping at Publix is actually simpler, which is why most people in the world don't live off the land when a Publix is available.
Living off the land is not necessarily easy, but when you compare what is truly involved in both methods, you will find that it is a lot less complicated than shopping at Publix.
It's like you're taking the mentality of living off the land, i.e. doing everything yourself, and then applying that to something that's really easy in a society (like a grocery store), and weighing the effort of each one as if it were done by an individual. But that's not how it works. I'm not concerned with the complexity of the economy, transportation, or education.. that was all done by others and I take advantage of it for free.
The availability of existing resources has to be taken into account when evaluating "easy" vs "hard" or "complex" vs "simple". Just like it would be simpler to live off the land in the Garden of Eden than it would be to live off the land on the Moon where you'd need a lot of modern technology to survive more than a few minutes, let alone live a normal life.
For me, it's not too hard to grow to like a person who I didn't immediately like. It's difficult, or maybe impossible, to become attracted to someone who wasn't immediately attractive.
That said, I find many different types attractive as long as they are within a certain range of age, weight, height, skin quality, etc. But if I'm not attracted right away, I probably never will be.
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Really, who can blame people? If you have a non-politically correct opinion, you face huge repercussions for voicing it. People lose their jobs for voicing the "wrong" opinion. Free speech in this country is in a horrible state, because it only applies in a very narrow way to government laws and actions. There's no protection from other people, unlike other rights. You can't be fired by a racist boss for being black, but you can be fired by a PC boss for being un-PC. It's not a protected group.
The trans woman could only make the decision to undergo gender transition on the basis on mental illness. Here we finally see the trans woman as the depraved serial killer in a woman suit she is.
1/4 of the country is mentally ill according to psychologists so I wouldn't take it so personally.
All I ever once was was a girl who was routinely abused by being exposed to testosterone against her will
I was curious about whether you tried testosterone therapy and it didn't work? I can't tell if that's what you're saying or if you feel like you were abused by yourself for producing testosterone.
Maybe these women weren't satisfied because they had to survive a full-on assault by charlatans who sought to reminder them at every goalpost that they never really would be women, despite what their hearts were telling them.
I'm curious about this statement too.. you're saying your heart may tell you you're a woman. What does that mean? Is there some feeling that all women have that men aren't supposed to feel?
If a woman asked me what it feels like to be a man because she wanted to know if she was supposed to be a man, I'd have absolutely no idea what to say. I'm sure women are the same way. So there's no way you described how you felt to a group of women and they said "Oh wow you're actually one of us." What was your realization process really like?
I don't understand this mentality. You think people who say that mean "A corporation is actually the mind of a real person floating around without a physical body?"
It just means everything a corporation does is actually being done by a person or a group of people, and those people don't lose their rights just because their "group" is a corporation. The corporation as a whole has a right to free speech because any group of people who collaborate to produce speech have the right to free speech. If corporations didn't have a right to free speech, then the government could also say "Well let's see now, Mr. Reporter, I see you're married. As it turns out, couples don't have the right to free speech, because couples aren't people, they're groups of people." I mean you see the problem with that right?
Your main argument has been that only people whose time is worthless don't pay more. That means you're proud to pay more because you link it with your time being more valuable than other people's. If it weren't a matter of pride you wouldn't use judgmental words like worthless.
(I'm ignoring the fact that you're wrong, but that's your argument.)
Long term storage has gotta be the dumbest idea for dealing with nuclear waste. I can't believe in this day and age there are STILL people who haven't heard of nuclear fuel reprocessing.
If the nuclear energy is the one solution to the worlds energy needs, then ALL countries, including Iran, Syria, and every single state in Africa will need its very own nuclear power industry.
Not true. Every country uses cars as well, but not every country has a car industry.
And every one of those countries realizes that a nuclear weapon would be the trump card that prevents them from being invaded by hostile neighbors, and it would make even GWB think twice about an attack.
But it's not a trump card.. which is why India and Pakistan have gone to war even after having nukes, even though they are nuclear armed. And they didn't blow each other up with nukes.
Anyway, even if you were right, if America started leaving countries like Syria, Libya, and Iraq alone.. wouldn't that actually be awesome?? Plenty of people think we shouldn't be spending a dime helping people in Syria or Egypt fight for a more Islamic government.
Every single country that has acquired nuclear weapons since the 1960s has hidden their work under the guise of nuclear power generation or "research" (and you wouldn't have much excuse for "research" if not for power).
And that hasn't stopped non-signatories to nuclear non-proliferation from developing nukes, such as the aforementioned India and Pakistan, who have both nuclear power and nuclear weapons. And looking at Iran's actions today, it's not like anybody is even willing to invade a country to stop them from developing nukes. Nuclear power and nuclear weapons aren't actually THAT difficult for a state-funded organization to achieve.
So nuclear proliferation essentially isn't an issue one way or another with respect to nuclear power in the West. It's a huge red herring that makes no sense at all when you think about it for 30 seconds. "Oh yeah, stopping ourselves won't stop them, because that whole 'master race' theory is incorrect and pretty much everybody WILL have nuclear weapons who wants them, eventually, especially since we're too pussy to invade anybody over it."
You must not have read the last paragraph of the article. Including ocean uranium there is a 60k year supply at current rates. With fuel reprocessing, there is a 30k year supply (not including ocean supplies) at current rates. 30k/200 * 60k = 9,000,000 year supply using ocean uranium and reprocessing.
Both of those options increase the cost of the uranium, but since fuel is a low percentage of the cost of a nuclear plant it doesn't make much difference to the total cost.
So instead of ending up at 15 years supply at the 50-60% range, it's more like a few million years.
I suspect we'll have fusion electricity generation within 500 years though.
And then there's this to consider: http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/grid-parity-new-mexico-style/
That's awesome if true, but I have to ask, why only 50MW if it's so price competitive? Why not scale it out to 5000MW?
Relocating the city itself would be really really hard and what's the point? Just expand existing cities a little bit and move the people. I mean really, America has such few large cities, it's embarrassing. We have 3 cities with more than 2 million people outside of NYC (China has around 50). If we spread NYC among the new top 10 (post-NYC) we'd have 8, which would be a nice improvement.
Then you'd have "Little New York" in several cities. That would be pretty cool actually.
Ooh general breakdown of society. That's when the rich hire a few poor guys and turn into warlords. The "nice" rich people who don't do that sort of thing get killed and their property taken over by other rich people or the most motivated and successful poor people who then become rich.
Then, oh then, the poor people suffer. Oh how they suffer and cry and wish that they could go back to the good old days when the "evil rich" were evil because they posted obnoxious Youtube videos about their 115 ft. yachts, instead of sending their armed thugs to round up all the 14 year old poor girls for a sex party.
But you're right. Despite the consequences, it would happen anyway, because most people just don't think ahead and understand what follows societal collapse and who it *really* hurts.
In some alternate universe where Jews made up 90% of the area's population in 1900, rather than less than 10%?
Nope not an alternate universe, of course I'm referring to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_land_purchase_in_Palestine
Where Israel became a Jewish state by majority vote, including Palestinians, rather than via a war of conquest?
War of conquest is legitimate.. but in any case as I'm sure you know it was British territory at the time and they pretty much gave the Jews a state out of pity for the Holocaust.
As to why the British were "allowed" to do what they wanted with land they conquered, see yourself: "A sense of entitlement to other people's land and property is bullshit"
WHOOSH. Of course every single attack from Native American's would have been called "terrorist attacks", if they used the same language then that we do now. But then as now, the occupiers cannot whine when the victims of land theft and systematic oppression dare to fight back.
I think you got confused with present and past tenses. If NOW, TODAY, the Sioux were regularly engaging in terrorism and justifying it based on some "stolen land" argument, I suspect a lot of people would be yelling at them.
I never called people who fought against Israel in 1948 terrorists.
Then the United States is the greatest terrorist state on the planet, followed by Israel.
That's not far off, actually, but I think it depends on how you define "greatest". Since the US is the biggest, most powerful, and richest country, and has the biggest military and probably the biggest intelligence agencies (budget-wise), it probably commits the most state terrorism. The US definitely does stupid stuff. Hell right now we're giving weapons to Syrian rebels who are terrorists. So that's state-supported terrorism.
That said, if you consider our total capacity (destroying the world) compared to what we actually do (arm terrorists in places we don't care about), it's a tiny ratio.
Compare that to Taliban Afghanistan. Their total capacity is small, but they dedicated a lot of that capacity to terrorism. So who's the "greater" terrorist?
I'd say that in both absolute and relative terms, though, Israel engages in less terrorism than the US simply because it isn't involved in as many countries or movements around the world.
So it was bullshit for Jews to go after Swiss banks and Nazi guards for actions that happened before the formation of Israel, much less the 1967 war? Or are you going for some "arbitrary time limit"?
Ummmm I'm not sure how that follows from what we were talking about regarding control of land. Did Nazi guards even exist at the point you're talking about? What land did they still control that the Jews wanted back?
Anyway, if you're talking about crime and punishment in general, victims deserve justice if they can identify the actual criminals involved. What you don't get to do is hurt innocent people because you were hurt in the past. For instance imagine some Jew today saying "My parents were hurt by Germany in general, so today in 2013 I want to reclaim all my family land in Germany, and any Germans living there have to get out." You know why it's different? The Germans living in your old house right now probably had nothing to do with it, especially 70 years down the road as we are. Even if the great grandson of Hitler himself is living in your old house, he had nothing to do with it.
A less emotional example might be a modern foreclosure victim who was foreclosed on in error. Say the bank already sold the house and someone else is living there and raising a family. If you prove that your house was taken away from you unfairly, what should happen? I don't think you have a right to throw out the family who lives there. The bank made the mistake, th
Why pay hardcover price for an ebook? Because you get it same day the hardcover comes out. If you want to pay paperback prices, wait a couple years for the paperback to come out and the ebook prices typically drop at the same time.
According to this it used to be about 1 year, and has actually decreased due to pressure from ebooks.
But really, even when paperbacks are out, it often costs more for an ebook today than the paperback version, which is ridiculous and probably what OP was referring to, not paying cheaper-than-paperback prices on release day.
How much of a hardcover price do you really think is physical costs? A 400 page hardcover is equivalent to 100 pages of double side letter paper. I can print that for 5c a page (or less) on a decent laser printer. So as a guy with basic consumer equipment my costs for for printing a hardcover book are $5 or less. Of course, a publishing house can do it for less. On a big run, I suspect their costs for printing, binding and shipping combined probably don't top that same $5.
Okay you've covered printing costs. You're forgetting major costs like physical distribution and storage which are nearly free for ebooks. Then the overhead at every retailer for physical storage. Then the deals that let sellers return unsold books to the publisher.
The rest of the hardcover costs? Pays for things like editing and typesetting (which is more work for a ebook than a traditional one)
Yeah right. I call bullshit. Let's look at some numbers.
On a typical hardcover [...] For cover design, typesetting and copy-editing, the publisher pays about 80 cents. Marketing costs average around $1 but may go higher or lower depending on the title. Most of these costs will deline [sic] on a per-unit basis as a book sells more copies.
[...]
So on a $12.99 e-book, the publisher takes in $9.09. Out of that gross revenue, the publisher pays about 50 cents to convert the text to a digital file, typeset it in digital form and copy-edit it. Marketing is about 78 cents.
[...]
At a glance, it appears the e-book is more profitable. But publishers point out that e-books still represent a small sliver of total sales, from 3 to 5 percent.
It costs less for ebooks than hardcovers. Now this article was written in early 2010 using numbers from 2009 -- since then the share of sales for ebooks has grown. According to this report for the entire year of 2012, ebook sales represented 20% of the market instead of 3-5%.
You know what that does to fixed costs? Instead of 50 cents per sale, it's like 10 cents per sale or less now.
I don't know why you thought editing and typesetting an ebook would be MORE expensive than what it costs for a physical book. That defies common sense, and real numbers seem to confirm that you're wrong. I'm curious if you have a source for your belief?
And if you feel that feeding authors and their editors is unreasonable, then fuck off.
If authors and their editors can't buy food, they need to get new jobs and write/edit on the side. Guess what, plenty of authors do have other jobs, or depend on support from family. That's life.
But I don't think that's more likely due to low price ebooks (which are much cheaper to produce), you're just exaggerating ridiculously to try to make an emotional point.
I think the real reason is it's easier for battery manufacturers to imply that their batteries have more capacity by having a bigger number.
For instance, I bought an external battery for my phone with a usb outlet. The Amazon page said 10,000mAh capacity! Great. So I get it. Turns out it's 10k mAh at 3.3V, whereas USB (the ONLY output option from the charger) is 5V (and this battery does produce the full 5V output required, not 3.3V). It really should have been advertised as 6,000mAh. If they're gonna lie to that extent why not say 33k mAh (at 1V). Well I'm sure some battery seller out there is doing that.. and they're not even wrong, just misleading to people who have been programmed that battery capacity = mAh.
I mean, not just for one student, but all the way across the board?
You wouldn't do it for a single student since that would make it obvious who benefited.
In other words, if there are 40 questions on the test, you'll have scores of 3 (rounded from 2.5), 5, 8 (rounded from 7.5), 10, etc. You will never have a score of 76 or 94 or 61.
Yeah but you wouldn't have a 97 or 99 either. The guy talks about this.. there are enough consecutive sequences of non-zero counts that it can't be due to rounding.
It's definitely possible that the missing numbers aren't malicious or evidence of someone having tampered with them, but if we assume that, there must be an awfully convoluted and/or buggy algorithm at work.
Nothing is ever free.
That's wrong, because "free" does not mean "without opportunity cost."
You can certainly install, operate, administrate, get support for, and get training for Linux for free. The opportunity cost of getting it for free is time and reliability though -- paying for support, for instance, will generally make it get done faster and more reliably.
How do you know that? Microsoft doesn't break out costs and profits for the individual products within EDD.
Did you mean to say "EDD has been a loss-leader for Microsoft..?"
In actual fact, the documentary evidence proves that it was a war of aggression by the US that attempted to annex Canada while the British were struggling against Napoleon.
From what I just read on Wikipedia, the US wanted to annex Canada, but there were several acts of war committed against the US that precipitated the war (including British impressment of US sailors, which is enslavement). The US didn't have to go to war over these provocations and I'm sure the desire for Canada played a role in choosing war over diplomacy, but you're making it sound like the US started the war with absolutely no justification. Enslaving another country's citizens is most definitely a legitimate cause for war.
Based on your link it looks like it can be a legal act of maritime war (as in, it's not a war crime to blockade a nation you're at war with). I don't see where it says it can be legal as in the blockaded country is "not allowed" to take military action against it.
The formation of Israel was impossible without massive land theft from the native population
Apparently it's not impossible because that's what happened.
Do you also spend a lot of time yelling at the Sioux for being pissed that the Black Hills were stolen from them?
If Native Americans were regularly engaging in terrorism and justifying it based on some "stolen land" argument, I suspect a lot of people would be yelling at them.
Still calling Nelson Mandela a terrorist because he resisted Apartheid?
Guess what, someone isn't a terrorist depending on whether you agree with their goals, they're a terrorist based on what they do. Nelson Mandela was a terrorist.
A sense of entitlement to other people's land and property is bullshit
Haha, I actually agree with that. So now that the Jews control the land, it's bullshit for the Palestinians to have a sense of entitlement to it. And if not now (because I can sense you're gonna impose some arbitrary time limit), then they just have to plug their ears and wait a century or two. Then the Jews will have lived there for centuries and the amoral sociopathic Palestinians will be the ones with a false sense of entitlement.
But the people murdered by Stern and Irgun were innocent. Those who lost homes and property were not even indirectly responsible.
You can't hold one side of a conflict to a different standard than another in the pursuit of justice. Any proposal to correct injustices done by Israel, without a corresponding correction to other parties, is simply compounding the injustice. And as time goes on and the generations change, it becomes a new injustice to hold the new generation responsible for any perceived crimes of the past.
"Troublemakers"? They were just born there, descendents of Ancient Greece, Phoenecia, Rome, Egypt, Sumer and - dare I say Judea. But that's "causing trouble".
What are you talking about? People are troublemakers for making trouble (like engaging in terrorism), not their ancestry.
Yes, we expect Israel to act like a liberal, enlightened western democracy.
If they did that, with no further requirements on how everybody else in the ME acts, then they would cease to exist. So that's dumb.
Here's one Western democracy's views: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Constitution_is_not_a_suicide_pact
"The Constitution is not a suicide pact" is a phrase in American political and legal discourse. The phrase expresses the belief that constitutional restrictions on governmental power must be balanced against the need for survival of the state and its people. It is most often attributed to Abraham Lincoln, as a response to charges that he was violating the United States Constitution by suspending habeas corpus during the American Civil War. Although the phrase echoes statements made by Lincoln, and although versions of the sentiment have been advanced at various times in American history, the precise phrase "suicide pact" was first used by Justice Robert H. Jackson in his dissenting opinion in Terminiello v. Chicago, a 1949 free speech case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. The phrase also appears in the same context in Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez, a 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision written by Justice Arthur Goldberg.
Thomas Jefferson offered one of the earliest formulations of the sentiment, although not of the phrase. In 1803, Jefferson's ambassadors to France arranged the purchase of the Louisiana territory in conflict with Jefferson's personal belief that the Constitution did not bestow upon the federal government the right to acquire or possess foreign territory. Due to political considerations, however, Jefferson disregarded his constitutional doubts, signed the proposed treaty, and sent it to the Senate for ratification. In justifying his actions, he later wrote: "[a] strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means."
tldr; liberal values are nice to have, but you have to know when to put them away
The man's whole dream for the Middle East went up in a puff of Arab Spring.
That's completely wrong, in fact al Qaeda claims some responsibility for the Arab Spring: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/8759968/Al-Qaeda-leader-supports-Arab-Spring-in-911-anniversary-video.html
New al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri voiced support in an internet video for popular uprisings sweeping the Middle East, saying Arabs are no longer afraid of the United States, ten years after the country was targeted by the militant network.
As for bin Laden himself: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a218eb16-9539-11e1-8faf-00144feab49a.html
Osama bin Laden was a surprising proponent of the Arab spring, according to documents found after his capture and released on Thursday.
In his last private letter written just a week before his death, he said the revolutions represented a “formidable event” and a turning point in the Arab world. Before the release of the 17 letters by the US government, the revolutions were viewed as a concern for bin Laden as they could cause instability and potential western involvement in the region.
That said, I wouldn't credit bin Laden with the victory. Their attempt to link 9/11 to the Arab Spring is a bit tenuous in my opinion, and I would give the Taliban more credit with the legitimization of America dealing with radical Muslim groups in Afghanistan than al Qaeda. Certainly our attempts to negotiate a peace with the Taliban must have made groups like the Muslim Brotherhood more confident that if they successfully took over, America would no longer come swooping in to save a Western-friendly dictator.
It's more like, bin Laden's dreams are being realized by others. He fought for these dreams but they weren't his alone. That's why it's not HIS victory.
"His" own people rejected his methods and goals.
I'm no expert on bin Laden but I doubt his goal was to get 100% of Muslims into al Qaeda. Bin Laden was a mujahideen and was fighting on behalf of other Muslims. It's like saying the goal of a general of the US army must be to get 100% of Americans into the army.
I guess if your definition of easy is that you shift the work to everybody else versus doing it for yourself then yes, shopping at Publix is easier than living off the land. OTOH if you look beyond the individual and look at the effort involved to enable one to shop at Publix versus living off the land, then a whole lot more work is involved.
No that's the whole point, less overall work is involved. Using trade and specialization allows people to live off each other with less effort than working individually. The total effort of everybody involved is lower, and the individual effort is lower. It's because when you work in an organized system, the same amount of effort goes further than working on your own.
What's going to be faster and easier.. 10 specialists building 10 houses together (a carpenter, a plumber, an electrician, some framers, etc), or 10 individuals building 10 houses separately with each one taking care of every facet? An organized system is more complex, but the individual effort is lower and the effect of the effort is higher.
The problem with terms like easy and hard is that they are subjective. Simpler and more complex, while still maintaining a modicum of subjectivity, are much more straight forward. By definition a simpler process is an easier process compared to a complex process, is it not?
A simpler process is easier to follow (as in understand intellectually) but not necessarily easier to do.
How to fly:
1. Find a huge bird and kill it
2. Strap the wings to your arms
3. Flap like a bird really really hard
Conceptually it's easy to understand and it's in fact possible if you had the power to weight ratio of a bird. But you don't. So it will never work.
How to fly: ... ...
1. Get an education
10000. Get a job
20000. Buy a plane ticket
It's thousands of times longer and more complex than the first list, but still easier to do.
Take food production, whether you grow your own or you purchase it at the store, the first step in the process is that it has to be grown. Then it has to be harvested and then stored. Both growing your own or purchasing it has these three basic steps. If you do grow your own, you are done until you wash it and cook it.
For something basic like fresh produce, you're right. It's simpler (though not easier) to grow your own.
As soon as you get more complex, though, the balance shifts. Say instead of growing an apple, we're talking about bread. Bread has more than one ingredient and it doesn't grow on trees, so now we're looking at the following basic steps: ... ... ... ...
1. Grow wheat
2. Harvest wheat
3. Grind wheat into flour
4. Raise a cow
5. Get the cow pregant
6. Milk the cow
7. Travel to the ocean
8. Harvest salt by evaporating water
9... I honestly don't know how you get yeast, I guess you'll need to search the Earth until you find some naturally occurring yeast
10. Build your own oven
11. Harvest wood for your oven
20. Oh yeah, I think there's eggs in bread too, so raise some chickens
30. Forgot the sugar. Umm. Travel to a climate where you can raise some sugar cane.
31. Get the sugar out of the cane, I'm not sure how.
40. Is your flour still good? You may need to grow another crop of wheat
I'm leaving out hundreds of substeps though. You don't just will a cow into existence, it has to come from somewhere (I guess travel somewhere and domesticate a cow-like animal, use selective breeding for 20 generations, maybe you end up with a cow?). You don't just grind wheat into flour with your teeth either, you'll need at least some wood or stone tools.
Now imagine a small community.
Guy 1:
1. Grow lots of wheat
2. Harvest wheat
3. Sell wheat
4. Buy bread
Guy 2:
1. Raise cows
2. Sell milk and butter
3. Buy bread
G
Childbirth is easy. Millions of women all over the planet deliver babies every day and then go back to work in the fields. It is easy, but also very painful, but painful doesn't mean it is difficult (calculus is difficult).
Childbirth is an example of something that is not physically easy. Dealing with the death of a loved one is an example of something that is not emotionally easy. Calculus is an example of something that is not intellectually easy.
By calling childbirth easy, you're using your own definition of easy that doesn't take into account things that most people think of when using the word .
Living off the land is a lot simpler than shopping at Publix.
Shopping at Publix is actually simpler, which is why most people in the world don't live off the land when a Publix is available.
Living off the land is not necessarily easy, but when you compare what is truly involved in both methods, you will find that it is a lot less complicated than shopping at Publix.
It's like you're taking the mentality of living off the land, i.e. doing everything yourself, and then applying that to something that's really easy in a society (like a grocery store), and weighing the effort of each one as if it were done by an individual. But that's not how it works. I'm not concerned with the complexity of the economy, transportation, or education.. that was all done by others and I take advantage of it for free.
The availability of existing resources has to be taken into account when evaluating "easy" vs "hard" or "complex" vs "simple". Just like it would be simpler to live off the land in the Garden of Eden than it would be to live off the land on the Moon where you'd need a lot of modern technology to survive more than a few minutes, let alone live a normal life.
For me, it's not too hard to grow to like a person who I didn't immediately like. It's difficult, or maybe impossible, to become attracted to someone who wasn't immediately attractive.
That said, I find many different types attractive as long as they are within a certain range of age, weight, height, skin quality, etc. But if I'm not attracted right away, I probably never will be.