The reality is that the muslim terrorists are a tiny minority of the billion+ muslims in the world.
If you think about it, that argument holds no water. Where do reputations come from? America has a reputation as bloodthirsty and imperial in much of the world (especially Muslim countries), do you think that means the average American has a personal empire and goes around killing and raping Muslims? No it comes from the actions of the government and our army which is a "tiny minority" of the 300+ million Americans in the world.
So when there are large groups of Muslims who are really crazy and violent and who get in the news every day for barbaric acts like suicide bombing, acid attacks, honor killings, church attacks, separatist movements, etc... they earn a well-deserved reputation of being a violent religion.
To label every muslim a terrorist on par with Al-Qaeda merely does three things:
Maybe I read a different post than you. GP didn't say that, merely made fun of the "peace loving muslim" meme that some tried to establish after 9/11 -- Islam meaning "peace" instead of "submission". Remember that?
1) It legitimizes the terrorists as the only real muslims.
How so?
Let's try this. "Pit bulls are dangerous." So in your world I'm actually saying "Only dangerous pit bulls are real pit bulls?"
2) It legitimizes and fuels their calls for a culture war by calling for a culture war yourself.
Buddy that ship has sailed. It's a given in some Muslim countries that the US hates Islam and wants to wipe out Islam and that anybody (politically especially) who doesn't denounce the US is actually an agent of the US. (Or India. Or Israel.)
3) It pisses off every muslim who just wants to get on with their lives
Oh, right, remind me when the filmmaker compelled Muslims around the world to watch the film? No, these are Muslims who are looking for something to be agitated about. The Muslims in Libya who went to work yesterday and participated in the economy instead of protesting outside an embassy are proof that your point is completely invalid.
It's no different than a white supremacist who purposely reads stories about black-on-white crime to get that rush of feeling just and righteous and angry. Well it's different -- I'm sure you'd have no problem seeing that a white supremacist is bad, whereas Muslim supremacists get a free pass from you for some reason.
So congratulations for doing exactly what the muslim terrorists want you to do. What a good little puppet you are.
Yeah, all the actors are just puppets of the hidden powers... sure.. and of course since it's a conspiracy there's no actual proof. Convenient for you!
1. If Poe was interested in 13 year old girls he wasn't a pedophile. Don't confuse "kids" in the legal sense with "kids" in the biological sense. 2. You think Mohammed was NOT REAL? What do you think of the huge number of historians and writers who say he is real?
To them, having to replace a tire means losing water or electricity for a week until they get it turned back on, then having to skip a few meals to pay for the late fees losing electricity cost them.
You have an overly romantic view of poverty in the US! This isn't the 1930s era Dust Bowl. Someone too poor to afford a tire is on welfare (or should be). How does skipping meals save you money when you're on food stamps? Why would your kids skip meals if they're in the national school lunch program?
Being poor is unfortunate and difficult but let's not pretend that people are out there starving or going without electricity because of inconveniences like flat tires. If someone is in that bad of shape that they have no heat and they skip meals it's probably because of drugs, alcohol, lottery tickets or other gambling, smoking, etc.
No it's more like, your house is 20 degrees warmer today than it was 8 months ago in the depths of winter. Clearly this is your fault and with that trend, by 2020 it will be uninhabitable! You better dedicate half your income to air conditioning so that the average temperature in the summer equals the average temperature in the winter, because you picked an arbitrary point and never want it to change from there.
Ronald Reagan ALSO made a large increase to the payroll withholding tax in order to finance benefits for the boomer generation. Something I happen to have been paying for 30 years.
It still wasn't a big enough tax increase to pay for your retirement. The cost difference is going to be made up on the backs of younger workers, while those same younger workers have their own benefits cut and delayed.
If you're a very late baby boomer and have been paying the higher tax rates the whole time then yeah you're in the same boat as the younger generations, except you're probably going to be protected from the same benefit cuts and age raises that we'll face.
Unfortunately Ronnie and Congress turned around and spent that on defense and tax cuts. And left IOUs in our stockings.
Whether the SS money was "put in a lock box" (and eroded through inflation) or invested in low yield government debt hardly makes a difference to the real problem -- baby boomers simply didn't pay their fair share.
FACT: Boomers paid all sorts of debts, including the financing of their parent's retirements, the Marshal Plan and the Cold War, which was a big pill to swallow. What the hell kind of privileged class do you think you are that you feel you can escape your responsibilities to the society you live in?
Fact: the boomers paid much less than what they racked up in new debt, which is why we have a problem.
What responsibilities do younger generations have toward the boomers? How do we balance that with our responsibilities to future generations?
That analogy makes no sense. I think you're alluding to standardized testing -- well guess what, to be an engineer you need an engineering degree, which comes from an accredited school, which becomes accredited by.. meeting national standards in what is taught and how it is taught. And then, when hiring an engineer, you might be interested to know... their gpa. It's one little number, but an unusual gpa invites further investigation into the person's knowledge. Another thing you might want to know is what school they went to and... how it is ranked. Yeah, some schools are better than others and people like attaching plain old numbers to them to represent their performance compared to other schools. If you know someone has a 4.0 from the #1 school for a particular engineering discipline, you already know a decent amount about them. You know there's a good chance they're more knowledgeable than someone with a 2.2 from the #104th ranked school for the same discipline.
At its core, the anti-vax movement is bad risk assessment for a few reasons.
Bad risk assessment for who? If the movement is small, it's pretty accurate. They will benefit from herd immunity and not have to deal with the cost or potential problems of vaccination. It's kind of like being the only guy who doesn't wear condoms.
Everybody takes risks that could lead to sickness or death every day. Some people have higher risk due to health problems, some because of age, some because of their own choices. Don't you just have to accept that you may have a higher risk than others, and you can't force other people to do things to reduce your own risk?
"I demand that everybody stop driving because I don't want to be hit by your car. Think of how many lives we'll save!"
I don't understand why such a big deal is made of herd immunity and the risk to people who can't be vaccinated for medical reasons. I'd love to see the actual numbers involved. How many people can't get vaccinated, what are their odds of death? How does that compare to the millions of other ways people can die due to other people's actions?
And then you have to weigh the cost of the solution. Forcing everybody to get vaccinations, or threatening to withhold services like public education, is way over the line for me in terms of what government should be doing. It's radical. Why not ban all use of nuts and nut products to help people with nut allergies? How is that cost to society less than the gross infringement of our rights? Why not institute a nationwide speed limit of 15 mph for cars with built-in engine limiters to enforce it? Imagine how many lives would be saved! Yet the convenience of driving fast apparently outweighs all those lives.
Really, who today would seriously suggest such a low nationwide speed limit to save lives? Yet the nutcases come out of the woodwork to suggest harsh punishments for people who refuse to vaccinate their children because someone else *might* get sick as a result.
I support vaccination but I'm horrified at what people suggest to "encourage" vaccination.
And without those bar charts, how do prove that America really is far superior to every single country in the world? Obviously we need the bar charts.
You're going way too far. I've never seen a chart, bar or otherwise, that shows America being the best in the world in education performance.
Perhaps the drive for quantification of education performance is related to our NOT being the best. How do we improve if we don't know where we are failing?
This is a hollow argument and ignores 3 decades of deregulation on banking, which allowed banks to mix trading in banking in the same place of business
I think the separation of retail banking and investment banking was a reaction to the Great Depression when banks lost customer money that had been deposited. We have the FDIC and stuff like that so it's not an issue. Why do you think the two businesses need to be separated?
allowed impossibly complex derivatives to be applied unilaterally to make regulation virtually impossible
1. Why do you think these derivatives are impossibly complex and even if they are, who cares? Think of... anything in finance involving math. 30 year mortgages. The average person doesn't know enough math to understand how their monthly payment is determined, let alone if you throw in variable interest rates, PMI, MIP, etc. So what? The point is that the *idea* is simple even if the details aren't. "Pay your loan back over a 30 year period." Mortgage backed securities? Anybody who's heard of mutual funds or participated in microfinancing (e.g. kiva.org) can understand the concept of reducing your risk by issuing small slices of debt to many people instead of big slices to a few people. Credit default swaps? "You know the PMI on your mortgage? It's like that but can apply to any loan not just mortgages."
2. Complexity doesn't make regulation impossible, I don't know what you even mean by that. Progress makes regulation difficult, though, since rules are generally targeted at what exists, not what is yet to be invented. Of course if you want to outlaw progress that would solve that.
If the government is guilty of the crime you describe, it is precisely because a lobbyist from the banking industry pushed said rules through to further the progress of the banking systems desire to make money, even in the face of predictable disaster.
Are you crazy? If it were up to banks they wouldn't make loans to people with bad credit AT ALL. They'd leave that to the "payday loan" class of banker -- i.e. they're not bankers at all, they're scam artists. There's a lobby group called National Community that you should read about. They're hugely influential in the government and their mission is... well.. here's a great example that I found hilariously sad: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/in-feds-move-on-capital-one-deal-a-test-of-dodd-frank/
Clarity, if not an answer, may have come inadvertently from National Community. The coalition argues that Capital One’s application to acquire ING Direct is suspect because Capital One refuses to lower its credit standards to extend Federal Housing Administration-insured loans to people with credit scores of 580. This is the lowest credit score allowed by the F.H.A. National Community contends that this is discriminatory against members of minority groups because they tend to have lower credit scores and have been hit harder by the financial crisis.
Capital One has responded by agreeing to lower its credit score requirements by 2012. For National Community, this is not enough, because Capital One’s F.H.A. loan volume is relatively flat in growth. Capital One is now a bit player with less than 1 percent of the F.H.A. loan market. National Community wants the combined entity to make more of these loans, since they help people who could not otherwise afford a mortgage.
So National Community is arguing that Capital One should take more risk when making home loans, but less risk in getting bigger and offering credit cards. Remember, the financial crisis was caused in significant part by excessive, and sometimes predatory, subprime lending. Capital One may not be predatory, but the borrowing National Community wants is lower down on the subprime scale and will create more risk.
Yes, punishing those behaviors is what civilized means to them. It's we who are uncivilized heathens in their eyes. If you read rhetoric from the Muslim world you don't see stuff like "Why can't they just let us be backwards and stupid and leave us alone?" It's "America has a huge domestic violence problem which we Muslims don't" and "rape is a pandemic in the West, unlike among good Muslims." They think they are better than us.
That relativism doesn't mean there's no such thing as being civilized, but that the greater civilization must win. Either civilize the others (they adopt your ideas) or destroy them (more difficult than most people think). But I don't think either reaction makes you uncivilized. It's just part of humanity. After all I don't think you'd call a computer "civilized" simply because it lacks all the vices of humanity. We should respect what makes us human.
I enjoy alcohol enormously and think that drink drivers are selfish, stupid twats. I get around this apparent contradiction by not fucking drinking and driving.
Who's the fucking moron? What you stated isn't an apparent contradiction.
If you have to drive to get a drink, move somewhere more civilised or drink at home or get a fucking taxi, whatever.
If you wet your pants at the thought of someone with a 0.05% BAC driving slowly down a deserted street, then move your own pansy ass.
The end customer pays for everything -- so a portion of the purchase price you pay for goods pays for adverts and a portion of that pays for the TV channel
That's true but the total cost with advertising may be cheaper than the cost without advertising. Advertising is done for a reason -- to make the company more money, which is supposed to give them a stronger product and better economy of scale. If you simply didn't know about any products except what the store put on display (through back deals etc) and never said "Hey why does this grocery store not carry brand X, it's much better" -- then you would potentially be stuck with an inferior, over-priced product. So you may be paying for advertising, but it may be saving you money to do so by increasing competition and giving the buyer more knowledge about the market.
I know people who say "I don't watch BBC so why should I pay a licence?" -- the counter argument is "I don't watch [much] commercial TV yet still pay an advertising premium when buying my shopping".
Almost every company advertises on TV, especially for the kinds of products you buy every day, but they don't all advertise equally in terms of cost. If you don't buy the big advertiser's product, you pay less. As one example, McDonalds was the official restaurant of the Olympics or so I've heard -- they spent a lot of money for that privilege. But that doesn't force you to eat at McDonalds and help them recoup the cost. So people who watched the Olympics but didn't eat at McDonalds got it for less than if everybody had to pay an equal amount.
1. Why would it need to be a 67% cut? Easier to start by increasing the retirement age a bit, especially for women since they live longer. Or start with a small cut like 5%. 2. Assign them all to a single class, not millions of separate lawsuits.
You're right, it should only be illegal to kill or hurt someone or cause property damage, regardless of whether you're drunk. The prevention part could be done through simple deterrence - automatic higher sentence if alcohol was involved.
I suspect the campaign against "drunk" driving (in reality, the laws apply long before you're drunk) is simply a holdover of prohibitionists who simply can't stand the thought of people enjoying alcohol period. I wonder if there are statistics comparing a healthy 30 year old male with a 0.05% BAC driving a Prius to a sober 17 year old male driving a Corvette in terms of accidents and safety and all that. I don't know, but I suspect, that there are some large classes of "drunk" drivers who are safer than large classes of sober drivers.
The question he didn't address is whether having more English and history majors and also having fewer people with basic mathematical knowledge is a net gain for society. Do we have a shortage of people with degrees in English? Not that I've ever heard. What happens to people who want to major in English but lack the math skills to do so? Are they more or less helpful to society than the same person with an English degree with no math requirement?
Your assumption is that the government has 100% faith in the economy, so if people don't invest in the economy it does on their behalf. What if there is really something wrong with the economy? Why should the government automatically dump money into it?
Some things don't need lots of money to fix. Say hypothetically there are too many environmental regulations so nobody wants to build factories that pump out cheap widgets. Just change the laws.
I think it would be interesting if the US had a sovereign wealth fund that invested internationally. I don't know, maybe it does, but I never hear about it.
People starting jobs today are paying 300% more than someone who started their career in the 60s. It's unfair NOT to cut benefits for people who are about to retire. They didn't pay their fair share into the system for most of their careers.
The Western world, mainly America, don't want to commit to polluting less than the Asians because they are worried that it will make them less competitive and "isn't fair".
Yup, it isn't fair. I don't know why that's in scare quotes.
We built up our status as the first world on the back of massive polution, but don't want China/India etc to be able to do the same: That isn't fair
That isn't fair either. Why do you agree with one and not the other?
The western world should pay back the 'polluting debt' we owe by giving money to countries that didn't pollute as much in the past.
That's ridiculous! What polluting debt? How do you put a dollar figure on that?
How much credit does the western world get for developing the economies of modern India and China? How would China be doing without those lovely export markets? In that sense we've already given them trillions of dollars. I mean, you do realize the US runs a trade deficit and China has a trade surplus. Are you factoring those numbers into your debt figure? Somehow I doubt it.
If we did that we could set fair and equal pollution limits on a global level.
That at least makes more sense than the political reality -- treaties like Kyoto completely exclude limits on the "developing" world. (How much longer can China and India be considered "developing" -- India has a space program for instance.)
Well, as I'm sure you know, the Crusades were not initiated by Christian nations.
Anyway, you might be right on the total death tally if only because there are more Christians than Muslims and the religion is older. And Christian societies are far more technologically advanced, which unfortunately enables large scale warfare and destruction -- seriously, in the early 20th century what Muslim country could even contemplate a world-wide war?
I don't see the point though since we're not talking about death tolls. I was talking about extremism and how much weight religion carries in different societies today. You didn't even try to dispute my point, just bring up stuff about war.
Slashdot Mirror
The reality is that the muslim terrorists are a tiny minority of the billion+ muslims in the world.
If you think about it, that argument holds no water. Where do reputations come from? America has a reputation as bloodthirsty and imperial in much of the world (especially Muslim countries), do you think that means the average American has a personal empire and goes around killing and raping Muslims? No it comes from the actions of the government and our army which is a "tiny minority" of the 300+ million Americans in the world.
So when there are large groups of Muslims who are really crazy and violent and who get in the news every day for barbaric acts like suicide bombing, acid attacks, honor killings, church attacks, separatist movements, etc... they earn a well-deserved reputation of being a violent religion.
To label every muslim a terrorist on par with Al-Qaeda merely does three things:
Maybe I read a different post than you. GP didn't say that, merely made fun of the "peace loving muslim" meme that some tried to establish after 9/11 -- Islam meaning "peace" instead of "submission". Remember that?
1) It legitimizes the terrorists as the only real muslims.
How so?
Let's try this. "Pit bulls are dangerous." So in your world I'm actually saying "Only dangerous pit bulls are real pit bulls?"
2) It legitimizes and fuels their calls for a culture war by calling for a culture war yourself.
Buddy that ship has sailed. It's a given in some Muslim countries that the US hates Islam and wants to wipe out Islam and that anybody (politically especially) who doesn't denounce the US is actually an agent of the US. (Or India. Or Israel.)
3) It pisses off every muslim who just wants to get on with their lives
Oh, right, remind me when the filmmaker compelled Muslims around the world to watch the film? No, these are Muslims who are looking for something to be agitated about. The Muslims in Libya who went to work yesterday and participated in the economy instead of protesting outside an embassy are proof that your point is completely invalid.
It's no different than a white supremacist who purposely reads stories about black-on-white crime to get that rush of feeling just and righteous and angry. Well it's different -- I'm sure you'd have no problem seeing that a white supremacist is bad, whereas Muslim supremacists get a free pass from you for some reason.
So congratulations for doing exactly what the muslim terrorists want you to do. What a good little puppet you are.
Yeah, all the actors are just puppets of the hidden powers... sure.. and of course since it's a conspiracy there's no actual proof. Convenient for you!
1. If Poe was interested in 13 year old girls he wasn't a pedophile. Don't confuse "kids" in the legal sense with "kids" in the biological sense.
2. You think Mohammed was NOT REAL? What do you think of the huge number of historians and writers who say he is real?
To them, having to replace a tire means losing water or electricity for a week until they get it turned back on, then having to skip a few meals to pay for the late fees losing electricity cost them.
You have an overly romantic view of poverty in the US! This isn't the 1930s era Dust Bowl. Someone too poor to afford a tire is on welfare (or should be). How does skipping meals save you money when you're on food stamps? Why would your kids skip meals if they're in the national school lunch program?
Being poor is unfortunate and difficult but let's not pretend that people are out there starving or going without electricity because of inconveniences like flat tires. If someone is in that bad of shape that they have no heat and they skip meals it's probably because of drugs, alcohol, lottery tickets or other gambling, smoking, etc.
No it's more like, your house is 20 degrees warmer today than it was 8 months ago in the depths of winter. Clearly this is your fault and with that trend, by 2020 it will be uninhabitable! You better dedicate half your income to air conditioning so that the average temperature in the summer equals the average temperature in the winter, because you picked an arbitrary point and never want it to change from there.
Ronald Reagan ALSO made a large increase to the payroll withholding tax in order to finance benefits for the boomer generation. Something I happen to have been paying for 30 years.
It still wasn't a big enough tax increase to pay for your retirement. The cost difference is going to be made up on the backs of younger workers, while those same younger workers have their own benefits cut and delayed.
If you're a very late baby boomer and have been paying the higher tax rates the whole time then yeah you're in the same boat as the younger generations, except you're probably going to be protected from the same benefit cuts and age raises that we'll face.
Unfortunately Ronnie and Congress turned around and spent that on defense and tax cuts. And left IOUs in our stockings.
Whether the SS money was "put in a lock box" (and eroded through inflation) or invested in low yield government debt hardly makes a difference to the real problem -- baby boomers simply didn't pay their fair share.
FACT: Boomers paid all sorts of debts, including the financing of their parent's retirements, the Marshal Plan and the Cold War, which was a big pill to swallow. What the hell kind of privileged class do you think you are that you feel you can escape your responsibilities to the society you live in?
Fact: the boomers paid much less than what they racked up in new debt, which is why we have a problem.
What responsibilities do younger generations have toward the boomers? How do we balance that with our responsibilities to future generations?
Social Security has been paying out more than it collects in revenue for a couple years now
Not only that, but the Social Security Trust Fund owns about 20% of the US debt. Interest payments on that debt come from the general fund of course.
That analogy makes no sense. I think you're alluding to standardized testing -- well guess what, to be an engineer you need an engineering degree, which comes from an accredited school, which becomes accredited by.. meeting national standards in what is taught and how it is taught. And then, when hiring an engineer, you might be interested to know... their gpa. It's one little number, but an unusual gpa invites further investigation into the person's knowledge. Another thing you might want to know is what school they went to and... how it is ranked. Yeah, some schools are better than others and people like attaching plain old numbers to them to represent their performance compared to other schools. If you know someone has a 4.0 from the #1 school for a particular engineering discipline, you already know a decent amount about them. You know there's a good chance they're more knowledgeable than someone with a 2.2 from the #104th ranked school for the same discipline.
At its core, the anti-vax movement is bad risk assessment for a few reasons.
Bad risk assessment for who? If the movement is small, it's pretty accurate. They will benefit from herd immunity and not have to deal with the cost or potential problems of vaccination. It's kind of like being the only guy who doesn't wear condoms.
Everybody takes risks that could lead to sickness or death every day. Some people have higher risk due to health problems, some because of age, some because of their own choices. Don't you just have to accept that you may have a higher risk than others, and you can't force other people to do things to reduce your own risk?
"I demand that everybody stop driving because I don't want to be hit by your car. Think of how many lives we'll save!"
I don't understand why such a big deal is made of herd immunity and the risk to people who can't be vaccinated for medical reasons. I'd love to see the actual numbers involved. How many people can't get vaccinated, what are their odds of death? How does that compare to the millions of other ways people can die due to other people's actions?
And then you have to weigh the cost of the solution. Forcing everybody to get vaccinations, or threatening to withhold services like public education, is way over the line for me in terms of what government should be doing. It's radical. Why not ban all use of nuts and nut products to help people with nut allergies? How is that cost to society less than the gross infringement of our rights? Why not institute a nationwide speed limit of 15 mph for cars with built-in engine limiters to enforce it? Imagine how many lives would be saved! Yet the convenience of driving fast apparently outweighs all those lives.
Really, who today would seriously suggest such a low nationwide speed limit to save lives? Yet the nutcases come out of the woodwork to suggest harsh punishments for people who refuse to vaccinate their children because someone else *might* get sick as a result.
I support vaccination but I'm horrified at what people suggest to "encourage" vaccination.
And without those bar charts, how do prove that America really is far superior to every single country in the world? Obviously we need the bar charts.
You're going way too far. I've never seen a chart, bar or otherwise, that shows America being the best in the world in education performance.
Perhaps the drive for quantification of education performance is related to our NOT being the best. How do we improve if we don't know where we are failing?
This is a hollow argument and ignores 3 decades of deregulation on banking, which allowed banks to mix trading in banking in the same place of business
I think the separation of retail banking and investment banking was a reaction to the Great Depression when banks lost customer money that had been deposited. We have the FDIC and stuff like that so it's not an issue. Why do you think the two businesses need to be separated?
allowed impossibly complex derivatives to be applied unilaterally to make regulation virtually impossible
1. Why do you think these derivatives are impossibly complex and even if they are, who cares? Think of... anything in finance involving math. 30 year mortgages. The average person doesn't know enough math to understand how their monthly payment is determined, let alone if you throw in variable interest rates, PMI, MIP, etc. So what? The point is that the *idea* is simple even if the details aren't. "Pay your loan back over a 30 year period." Mortgage backed securities? Anybody who's heard of mutual funds or participated in microfinancing (e.g. kiva.org) can understand the concept of reducing your risk by issuing small slices of debt to many people instead of big slices to a few people. Credit default swaps? "You know the PMI on your mortgage? It's like that but can apply to any loan not just mortgages."
2. Complexity doesn't make regulation impossible, I don't know what you even mean by that. Progress makes regulation difficult, though, since rules are generally targeted at what exists, not what is yet to be invented. Of course if you want to outlaw progress that would solve that.
If the government is guilty of the crime you describe, it is precisely because a lobbyist from the banking industry pushed said rules through to further the progress of the banking systems desire to make money, even in the face of predictable disaster.
Are you crazy? If it were up to banks they wouldn't make loans to people with bad credit AT ALL. They'd leave that to the "payday loan" class of banker -- i.e. they're not bankers at all, they're scam artists. There's a lobby group called National Community that you should read about. They're hugely influential in the government and their mission is... well.. here's a great example that I found hilariously sad: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/in-feds-move-on-capital-one-deal-a-test-of-dodd-frank/
Clarity, if not an answer, may have come inadvertently from National Community. The coalition argues that Capital One’s application to acquire ING Direct is suspect because Capital One refuses to lower its credit standards to extend Federal Housing Administration-insured loans to people with credit scores of 580. This is the lowest credit score allowed by the F.H.A. National Community contends that this is discriminatory against members of minority groups because they tend to have lower credit scores and have been hit harder by the financial crisis.
Capital One has responded by agreeing to lower its credit score requirements by 2012. For National Community, this is not enough, because Capital One’s F.H.A. loan volume is relatively flat in growth. Capital One is now a bit player with less than 1 percent of the F.H.A. loan market. National Community wants the combined entity to make more of these loans, since they help people who could not otherwise afford a mortgage.
So National Community is arguing that Capital One should take more risk when making home loans, but less risk in getting bigger and offering credit cards. Remember, the financial crisis was caused in significant part by excessive, and sometimes predatory, subprime lending. Capital One may not be predatory, but the borrowing National Community wants is lower down on the subprime scale and will create more risk.
Per
Yes, punishing those behaviors is what civilized means to them. It's we who are uncivilized heathens in their eyes. If you read rhetoric from the Muslim world you don't see stuff like "Why can't they just let us be backwards and stupid and leave us alone?" It's "America has a huge domestic violence problem which we Muslims don't" and "rape is a pandemic in the West, unlike among good Muslims." They think they are better than us.
That relativism doesn't mean there's no such thing as being civilized, but that the greater civilization must win. Either civilize the others (they adopt your ideas) or destroy them (more difficult than most people think). But I don't think either reaction makes you uncivilized. It's just part of humanity. After all I don't think you'd call a computer "civilized" simply because it lacks all the vices of humanity. We should respect what makes us human.
I enjoy alcohol enormously and think that drink drivers are selfish, stupid twats. I get around this apparent contradiction by not fucking drinking and driving.
Who's the fucking moron? What you stated isn't an apparent contradiction.
If you have to drive to get a drink, move somewhere more civilised or drink at home or get a fucking taxi, whatever.
If you wet your pants at the thought of someone with a 0.05% BAC driving slowly down a deserted street, then move your own pansy ass.
Isn't it civilized to punish people who do bad things?
The end customer pays for everything -- so a portion of the purchase price you pay for goods pays for adverts and a portion of that pays for the TV channel
That's true but the total cost with advertising may be cheaper than the cost without advertising. Advertising is done for a reason -- to make the company more money, which is supposed to give them a stronger product and better economy of scale. If you simply didn't know about any products except what the store put on display (through back deals etc) and never said "Hey why does this grocery store not carry brand X, it's much better" -- then you would potentially be stuck with an inferior, over-priced product. So you may be paying for advertising, but it may be saving you money to do so by increasing competition and giving the buyer more knowledge about the market.
I know people who say "I don't watch BBC so why should I pay a licence?" -- the counter argument is "I don't watch [much] commercial TV yet still pay an advertising premium when buying my shopping".
Almost every company advertises on TV, especially for the kinds of products you buy every day, but they don't all advertise equally in terms of cost. If you don't buy the big advertiser's product, you pay less. As one example, McDonalds was the official restaurant of the Olympics or so I've heard -- they spent a lot of money for that privilege. But that doesn't force you to eat at McDonalds and help them recoup the cost. So people who watched the Olympics but didn't eat at McDonalds got it for less than if everybody had to pay an equal amount.
1. Why would it need to be a 67% cut? Easier to start by increasing the retirement age a bit, especially for women since they live longer. Or start with a small cut like 5%.
2. Assign them all to a single class, not millions of separate lawsuits.
You're right, it should only be illegal to kill or hurt someone or cause property damage, regardless of whether you're drunk. The prevention part could be done through simple deterrence - automatic higher sentence if alcohol was involved.
I suspect the campaign against "drunk" driving (in reality, the laws apply long before you're drunk) is simply a holdover of prohibitionists who simply can't stand the thought of people enjoying alcohol period. I wonder if there are statistics comparing a healthy 30 year old male with a 0.05% BAC driving a Prius to a sober 17 year old male driving a Corvette in terms of accidents and safety and all that. I don't know, but I suspect, that there are some large classes of "drunk" drivers who are safer than large classes of sober drivers.
The question he didn't address is whether having more English and history majors and also having fewer people with basic mathematical knowledge is a net gain for society. Do we have a shortage of people with degrees in English? Not that I've ever heard. What happens to people who want to major in English but lack the math skills to do so? Are they more or less helpful to society than the same person with an English degree with no math requirement?
Your assumption is that the government has 100% faith in the economy, so if people don't invest in the economy it does on their behalf. What if there is really something wrong with the economy? Why should the government automatically dump money into it?
Some things don't need lots of money to fix. Say hypothetically there are too many environmental regulations so nobody wants to build factories that pump out cheap widgets. Just change the laws.
I think it would be interesting if the US had a sovereign wealth fund that invested internationally. I don't know, maybe it does, but I never hear about it.
Or, you know, the ACTUAL result will be that benefits will be cut to people who have paid into the system for decades. Yeah, that's fair.
That sounds unfair until you realize that historical taxes for some big entitlements were lower than they are today: http://www.ssa.gov/oact/progdata/taxRates.html
People starting jobs today are paying 300% more than someone who started their career in the 60s. It's unfair NOT to cut benefits for people who are about to retire. They didn't pay their fair share into the system for most of their careers.
The Western world, mainly America, don't want to commit to polluting less than the Asians because they are worried that it will make them less competitive and "isn't fair".
Yup, it isn't fair. I don't know why that's in scare quotes.
We built up our status as the first world on the back of massive polution, but don't want China/India etc to be able to do the same: That isn't fair
That isn't fair either. Why do you agree with one and not the other?
The western world should pay back the 'polluting debt' we owe by giving money to countries that didn't pollute as much in the past.
That's ridiculous! What polluting debt? How do you put a dollar figure on that?
How much credit does the western world get for developing the economies of modern India and China? How would China be doing without those lovely export markets? In that sense we've already given them trillions of dollars. I mean, you do realize the US runs a trade deficit and China has a trade surplus. Are you factoring those numbers into your debt figure? Somehow I doubt it.
If we did that we could set fair and equal pollution limits on a global level.
That at least makes more sense than the political reality -- treaties like Kyoto completely exclude limits on the "developing" world. (How much longer can China and India be considered "developing" -- India has a space program for instance.)
Ah, the it's all cyclic - meme. That's a rather new one, isn't it?
No, it comes up from time to time.
Well, as I'm sure you know, the Crusades were not initiated by Christian nations.
Anyway, you might be right on the total death tally if only because there are more Christians than Muslims and the religion is older. And Christian societies are far more technologically advanced, which unfortunately enables large scale warfare and destruction -- seriously, in the early 20th century what Muslim country could even contemplate a world-wide war?
I don't see the point though since we're not talking about death tolls. I was talking about extremism and how much weight religion carries in different societies today. You didn't even try to dispute my point, just bring up stuff about war.
So by "large chunks of the Muslim world" you mean "small populations of Muslims in countries where Islam is not dominant."
I agree with you in that context but calling it large is not correct.