Now how much of that $287 billion was paid by the top 1% of income earners. Sure, THEY are paying way more than they receive in services. But to extend that to the entire state, including the poor who vote Democrat?? It's ridiculous.
Sounds like a bluff to me. If the professor is so sure he can "catch" the cheaters, but is also so kind-hearted, why not just make the cheaters plus a small number of false positives retake the test? Or force them to retake it, and let everybody else retake it optionally and keep the higher grade?
If we take him at his word that he knows all the cheaters, then I think anger directed at him is well deserved.
No probably not. America is a scapegoat in Muslim countries and that wouldn't change just by "leaving them alone" (whatever that means).
It's also pretty clear that they would continue hating us if we left them alone but our allies didn't.
Pakistanis are very pissed that the US said it would back India for a permanent seat on the UN security council before the Kashmir issue is "resolved" (and it won't be "resolved" until Pakistan gets things exactly how they want, of course). You think if we stopped sending drone strikes across their borders suddenly they would love us and say "Yeah sure support India all you want?"
Israel is another quite obvious one.
Then you have stuff like... is it "leaving them alone" if we allow free speech that they consider blasphemous, like the Mohammed cartoons or the Burn The Koran Day thing? Or does "leaving them alone" mean we need to start policing ourselves to their standards? Or do you imagine that once we "leave them alone" they just won't care about little issues like that anymore?
How about the huge number of radical Muslims already living in the West, mostly Europe -- Sweden, England, Denmark -- that are already drawing *local* opposition such as the Swiss minaret ban, the French headscarf ban, etc? Does "leaving them alone" mean we have to completely change local policies as well to suit them?
Please elaborate. When you think about how intertwined the Muslim and Western worlds are these days, I think you'll agree that "leaving them alone" is a ridiculous suggestion, and in fact almost meaningless since it's impossible to completely separate us from them.
I see what you're saying. Clearly a reaction to a terrorist threat has to be more general than the precise mode of attack that succeeded. But you have to be careful in how much you abstract away the details. Your line of logic is why we cannot bring nail clippers onto planes, even though that's completely retarded.
Similarly, it's completely retarded to abstract away "fanatic Muslim men" to become "any human being on Earth regardless of age and gender."
Middle class white males and females with liberal political leanings are more likely to be environmental or animal rights terrorists than other groups. It would make sense to single out that group for more screening at... animal testing labs. Not airports.
Muslim men are far more likely than other groups to be involved in plane hijackings. It would make sense to single them out for more screening... at airports. Not animal testing labs! Get it?
1. More terrorist attacks have been carried out in the USA by white guys than brown ones.
Plane-based terrorist attacks? I doubt it. Context is important. There have been a lot of white guys (and gals) in environmental terrorist attacks. I'm not very worried about an environmental terrorist attack on a plane, most of them are at animal testing facilities and the like. And yeah, I bet you anything if you worked at an animal testing lab, and you saw a group of white, middle class, hippie-looking college students hanging out in the parking lot after dark, you WOULD be worried. And there's nothing wrong with that.
2. Eating bacon or anything else that proves you are not a muslim so you can attack your enemy is acceptable practice, there is no rule against it in this case.
However, it is believed that most mosques in the country are already being monitored. Eating bacon is easy, never associating with mosques in your entire life is not so easy.
I don't have any hard numbers about government expenses due to these projects but taking what you said you can construct a reasonable scenario where the county ends up losing money.
Presumably, the cost of local services in the county increase when the population increases. Normally that is offset by an increase in property tax revenue (income tax goes to the state, not the county). The property tax burden is split between businesses and people. Since the business tax portion will not be collected, the new revenue requirements will not necessarily be fully met.
From some of the PR on the counties' website http://datacentersites.com/ it seems like they are counting on the initial presence of these companies luring other companies into the same area, but without all of the same tax incentives. So maybe these projects really are loss-leaders. If the new companies don't materialize, it will be a gamble that didn't pay off.
Like I said, no hard numbers but it's at least a reasonable possibility.
Not only that but I think they hope there will be a cluster effect in the future. It's like if you gave one gas station a big incentive knowing that within a few years there will be 3 more gas stations on the same block. When a McDonalds opens up, a Burger King is sure to follow.
Most alcohol-related deaths are not the people who are drinking, but the people who they are crashing into when driving drunk. Alcohol is one of those drugs where the damage to society is in general higher than the damage to the user.
Fair enough, I was looking at health effects based on activities inside the bar (smoking, drinking, etc), not their wider ramifications. When you start saying "x affects y affects z, z is bad, so let's BAN x" then you are basically living in a nanny state.
That is not the same as saying your business should be illegal and should be regulated, please don't mistake that. It is not illegal to have a girlfriend, but you don't have a right to a girlfriend, either.
Okay I definitely misunderstood what you meant. I guess you're seeing what I said as an entitlement to run a pub, guaranteed by the government, which I'm not saying. I'm talking about the right to do it at all.
And here's the thing. Indirect regulation is just as harmful as direct regulation. It's like if you don't make possession of alcohol illegal, but the transportation, production, consumption, and distribution of alcohol are illegal, then say "but we didn't actually ban alcohol!!" It's the same thing. If it turns out that smoking is an activity that is so prevalent in the business of running a pub that banning smoking results in most pubs losing money and shutting down, then banning smoking in pubs is the same thing as outright banning pubs.
and you don't have a right that society builds its laws around your business
Okay true but I am part of society so it's perfectly fair to want laws that allow me to exist happily and peacefully. I think when people bring up things like pubs going out of business due to the smoking ban, it's to alert society that there have been potentially unintended consequences to the law and maybe we should take another look. Personally I think smoking bans are absolutely retarded, but if I did support them and I was under the impression that a huge part of society is avoiding going out because of second hand smoke, then suddenly these restaurants and bars start going out of business, I would reconsider.
If you're willing to make a scene you could pee in your pants while they're touching you.
Re:Shrug, either you have security or you don't
on
TSA Pats Down 3-Year-Old
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Google "drugs in diapers". People HAVE used children before to break the law. Why not again?
Who cares? People have not used children to hijack planes before. Context is everything. The crime of smuggling drugs just doesn't come close to hijacking and suicide bombing. It doesn't warrant the same response and certainly can't be used to justify a harsher response to the more serious crimes.
Yup your typical white American mom and dad with their 3 year old daughter definitely has a history in the last 2 decades of hijacking planes and generally engaging in terrorism. Thank GOD we don't profile or we might have missed this horrible threat.
That may help other countries with their domestic terrorists. But if you missed the memo, plenty of anti-US terrorists are wealthy (Osama), well-educated (all the 9/11 hijackers), have high connections (Times Square bomber links to Pakistan air force), etc.
It's a false assumption that people will like us if we just edumacate them and give them jobs.
It's already well known that Muslim men attract more scrutiny than 4 year old white females, for instance. And yet terrorists don't seem to have been able to just draft a bunch of 4 year old white females to hijack planes. Why do you think that is, in your world view?
I mean hell, why haven't terrorists just recruited a bunch of American pilots to become terrorists? They have a lot less screening, and anyway they are flying the plane so they don't need to smuggle anything onboard, they can just do it 9/11 style.
Your argument just doesn't make sense. Muslim terrorists are going to work with what they have, and that's largely Muslim males.
How exactly are you calculating these chances? There have been 0 hijackings by nuns. There have been more than 0 hijackings by Muslim males. I get that we're just making up numbers, but the leap from zero to non-zero is huge.
And if it's soooo easy to recruit "light-skinned female terrorists" then there would have been more hijackings by them. It's quite obvious and quite well known that Muslim men attract more security attention, despite whatever laws and regulations against profiling exist. And yet every single hijacker is a Muslim male. Go figure!
The limits of liberty are usually when you personally are injuring other people. Having a bar does not hurt other people. Only people who drink too much or too regularly are hurt, and they are doing it to themselves. Your argument is so widespread that it would allow the government to regulate every aspect of your life, from forcing you to exercise to banning religions that require fasting to outlawing sex acts that may lead to infection.
If you want to discuss what I say, please do so. If you want to invent analogies that I disagree with, assert tha they are my opinion, then demonstrate that my opinion is wrong because your analogy is flawed, let me know so I can stop wasting time.
Sorry that I offended you. I think your examples are flawed because you are comparing requirements that enable access TO brick and mortar stores with requirements that enable access to all of the content WITHIN an online site, and basically saying "if stores can do it, so can sites." In reality, the latter is more work than the one-time cost of installing a ramp, etc. Sites are much more dynamic than buildings after all. I don't see how you are missing the obvious lack of parity there.
So from the other direction I extend your example to saying okay, then everything inside brick and mortar stores should also be accessible. If every image on a website need a descriptive alt tag, then every book inside Barnes and Noble needs a braille version. Explain to me why that logic doesn't work in your world view. To me it's clear that access to a store (ramps, etc) corresponds to access to a website (net neutrality, etc), and access to the content of a website (alt tags, etc) corresponds to access to the content of a store (braille books, etc). Explain why that's wrong.
That's an absurd statement. The physical equivalent is to claim that stairs are accessible to people in wheelchairs because there exist some prototypes that are expensive and don't work well that traverse stairs. While technically true, it most certainly isn't equal access.
No it's not absurd, it's an important point to consider, especially when drafting legislation. 35 years ago when ADA was created, mechanized stair-climbing robotic wheelchairs were science fiction. Are you claiming that the ability to parse a webpage is as far out of reach as that?
Hobbyist virus writers routinely steal information from browsers, even on bank websites that go out of their way to obfuscate the PIN entry, etc. Were hobbyist roboticists toying around with stair-climbing robots that could support a full grown person 35 years ago? I don't think so. Your comparison is really lopsided.
If you're just writing a simple list of requirements like that then it's trivial to add "ability to handle second hand cigarette smoke." Does that change your outlook, if it's explicitly added as a job requirement?
Not only that, but by splitting the market you'll get specialty sites that cater to the smaller, ignored demographics and provide them with a better, more targeted experience. Everybody wins.
How about if you have a bar and one of your employees has a religion injunction about being around alcohol? Do you suggest that the bar stop serving alcohol?
It makes no sense. You say "substitute until you get it" but you can also substitute until it's totally absurd.
But mines ARE risky to work in. The sooner we have fully robotic mines, the better. What are you trying to argue, that we should bend over backwards to ensure that human-based mining can continue forever in the safest manner possible?
You know what? Smoking sections don't work. They might, I suppose, if you installed an airlock or something... But they don't. So you still get smoke even in your non-smoking section. And for my wife, who has a serious problem with cigarette smoke, that meant we could basically not dine out anywhere.
What about the guy who's been addicted to smoking since he was 6 and can't go more than 30 minutes without lighting up? Now HE basically can't eat out anywhere.
Does it just come down to whichever group is bigger? More victim-looking? I don't see how it's fair for the government to impose a 100% ban, just like it wouldn't be fair to impose a 100% requirement FOR having smoking sections. Why can't there just be some restaurants that are non-smoking and others that allow it?
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Now how much of that $287 billion was paid by the top 1% of income earners. Sure, THEY are paying way more than they receive in services. But to extend that to the entire state, including the poor who vote Democrat?? It's ridiculous.
Sounds like a bluff to me. If the professor is so sure he can "catch" the cheaters, but is also so kind-hearted, why not just make the cheaters plus a small number of false positives retake the test? Or force them to retake it, and let everybody else retake it optionally and keep the higher grade?
If we take him at his word that he knows all the cheaters, then I think anger directed at him is well deserved.
No probably not. America is a scapegoat in Muslim countries and that wouldn't change just by "leaving them alone" (whatever that means).
It's also pretty clear that they would continue hating us if we left them alone but our allies didn't.
Pakistanis are very pissed that the US said it would back India for a permanent seat on the UN security council before the Kashmir issue is "resolved" (and it won't be "resolved" until Pakistan gets things exactly how they want, of course). You think if we stopped sending drone strikes across their borders suddenly they would love us and say "Yeah sure support India all you want?"
Israel is another quite obvious one.
Then you have stuff like... is it "leaving them alone" if we allow free speech that they consider blasphemous, like the Mohammed cartoons or the Burn The Koran Day thing? Or does "leaving them alone" mean we need to start policing ourselves to their standards? Or do you imagine that once we "leave them alone" they just won't care about little issues like that anymore?
How about the huge number of radical Muslims already living in the West, mostly Europe -- Sweden, England, Denmark -- that are already drawing *local* opposition such as the Swiss minaret ban, the French headscarf ban, etc? Does "leaving them alone" mean we have to completely change local policies as well to suit them?
Please elaborate. When you think about how intertwined the Muslim and Western worlds are these days, I think you'll agree that "leaving them alone" is a ridiculous suggestion, and in fact almost meaningless since it's impossible to completely separate us from them.
I see what you're saying. Clearly a reaction to a terrorist threat has to be more general than the precise mode of attack that succeeded. But you have to be careful in how much you abstract away the details. Your line of logic is why we cannot bring nail clippers onto planes, even though that's completely retarded.
Similarly, it's completely retarded to abstract away "fanatic Muslim men" to become "any human being on Earth regardless of age and gender."
Why? Turning the establishment's tools against themselves is rather poetic.
That would be incredibly naive profiling.
Middle class white males and females with liberal political leanings are more likely to be environmental or animal rights terrorists than other groups. It would make sense to single out that group for more screening at... animal testing labs. Not airports.
Muslim men are far more likely than other groups to be involved in plane hijackings. It would make sense to single them out for more screening... at airports. Not animal testing labs! Get it?
1. More terrorist attacks have been carried out in the USA by white guys than brown ones.
Plane-based terrorist attacks? I doubt it. Context is important. There have been a lot of white guys (and gals) in environmental terrorist attacks. I'm not very worried about an environmental terrorist attack on a plane, most of them are at animal testing facilities and the like. And yeah, I bet you anything if you worked at an animal testing lab, and you saw a group of white, middle class, hippie-looking college students hanging out in the parking lot after dark, you WOULD be worried. And there's nothing wrong with that.
2. Eating bacon or anything else that proves you are not a muslim so you can attack your enemy is acceptable practice, there is no rule against it in this case.
However, it is believed that most mosques in the country are already being monitored. Eating bacon is easy, never associating with mosques in your entire life is not so easy.
I don't have any hard numbers about government expenses due to these projects but taking what you said you can construct a reasonable scenario where the county ends up losing money.
Presumably, the cost of local services in the county increase when the population increases. Normally that is offset by an increase in property tax revenue (income tax goes to the state, not the county). The property tax burden is split between businesses and people. Since the business tax portion will not be collected, the new revenue requirements will not necessarily be fully met.
From some of the PR on the counties' website http://datacentersites.com/ it seems like they are counting on the initial presence of these companies luring other companies into the same area, but without all of the same tax incentives. So maybe these projects really are loss-leaders. If the new companies don't materialize, it will be a gamble that didn't pay off.
Like I said, no hard numbers but it's at least a reasonable possibility.
Not only that but I think they hope there will be a cluster effect in the future. It's like if you gave one gas station a big incentive knowing that within a few years there will be 3 more gas stations on the same block. When a McDonalds opens up, a Burger King is sure to follow.
Most alcohol-related deaths are not the people who are drinking, but the people who they are crashing into when driving drunk. Alcohol is one of those drugs where the damage to society is in general higher than the damage to the user.
Fair enough, I was looking at health effects based on activities inside the bar (smoking, drinking, etc), not their wider ramifications. When you start saying "x affects y affects z, z is bad, so let's BAN x" then you are basically living in a nanny state.
That is not the same as saying your business should be illegal and should be regulated, please don't mistake that. It is not illegal to have a girlfriend, but you don't have a right to a girlfriend, either.
Okay I definitely misunderstood what you meant. I guess you're seeing what I said as an entitlement to run a pub, guaranteed by the government, which I'm not saying. I'm talking about the right to do it at all.
And here's the thing. Indirect regulation is just as harmful as direct regulation. It's like if you don't make possession of alcohol illegal, but the transportation, production, consumption, and distribution of alcohol are illegal, then say "but we didn't actually ban alcohol!!" It's the same thing. If it turns out that smoking is an activity that is so prevalent in the business of running a pub that banning smoking results in most pubs losing money and shutting down, then banning smoking in pubs is the same thing as outright banning pubs.
and you don't have a right that society builds its laws around your business
Okay true but I am part of society so it's perfectly fair to want laws that allow me to exist happily and peacefully. I think when people bring up things like pubs going out of business due to the smoking ban, it's to alert society that there have been potentially unintended consequences to the law and maybe we should take another look. Personally I think smoking bans are absolutely retarded, but if I did support them and I was under the impression that a huge part of society is avoiding going out because of second hand smoke, then suddenly these restaurants and bars start going out of business, I would reconsider.
If you're willing to make a scene you could pee in your pants while they're touching you.
Google "drugs in diapers". People HAVE used children before to break the law. Why not again?
Who cares? People have not used children to hijack planes before. Context is everything. The crime of smuggling drugs just doesn't come close to hijacking and suicide bombing. It doesn't warrant the same response and certainly can't be used to justify a harsher response to the more serious crimes.
Yup your typical white American mom and dad with their 3 year old daughter definitely has a history in the last 2 decades of hijacking planes and generally engaging in terrorism. Thank GOD we don't profile or we might have missed this horrible threat.
You linked to a story that said a stranger gave a kid a teddy bear with a gun inside it.
But nobody objected to the girl's teddy bear going through the x-ray machine.
Do you even know what we're talking about here??
That may help other countries with their domestic terrorists. But if you missed the memo, plenty of anti-US terrorists are wealthy (Osama), well-educated (all the 9/11 hijackers), have high connections (Times Square bomber links to Pakistan air force), etc.
It's a false assumption that people will like us if we just edumacate them and give them jobs.
It's already well known that Muslim men attract more scrutiny than 4 year old white females, for instance. And yet terrorists don't seem to have been able to just draft a bunch of 4 year old white females to hijack planes. Why do you think that is, in your world view?
I mean hell, why haven't terrorists just recruited a bunch of American pilots to become terrorists? They have a lot less screening, and anyway they are flying the plane so they don't need to smuggle anything onboard, they can just do it 9/11 style.
Your argument just doesn't make sense. Muslim terrorists are going to work with what they have, and that's largely Muslim males.
How exactly are you calculating these chances? There have been 0 hijackings by nuns. There have been more than 0 hijackings by Muslim males. I get that we're just making up numbers, but the leap from zero to non-zero is huge.
And if it's soooo easy to recruit "light-skinned female terrorists" then there would have been more hijackings by them. It's quite obvious and quite well known that Muslim men attract more security attention, despite whatever laws and regulations against profiling exist. And yet every single hijacker is a Muslim male. Go figure!
The limits of liberty are usually when you personally are injuring other people. Having a bar does not hurt other people. Only people who drink too much or too regularly are hurt, and they are doing it to themselves. Your argument is so widespread that it would allow the government to regulate every aspect of your life, from forcing you to exercise to banning religions that require fasting to outlawing sex acts that may lead to infection.
If you want to discuss what I say, please do so. If you want to invent analogies that I disagree with, assert tha they are my opinion, then demonstrate that my opinion is wrong because your analogy is flawed, let me know so I can stop wasting time.
Sorry that I offended you. I think your examples are flawed because you are comparing requirements that enable access TO brick and mortar stores with requirements that enable access to all of the content WITHIN an online site, and basically saying "if stores can do it, so can sites." In reality, the latter is more work than the one-time cost of installing a ramp, etc. Sites are much more dynamic than buildings after all. I don't see how you are missing the obvious lack of parity there.
So from the other direction I extend your example to saying okay, then everything inside brick and mortar stores should also be accessible. If every image on a website need a descriptive alt tag, then every book inside Barnes and Noble needs a braille version. Explain to me why that logic doesn't work in your world view. To me it's clear that access to a store (ramps, etc) corresponds to access to a website (net neutrality, etc), and access to the content of a website (alt tags, etc) corresponds to access to the content of a store (braille books, etc). Explain why that's wrong.
That's an absurd statement. The physical equivalent is to claim that stairs are accessible to people in wheelchairs because there exist some prototypes that are expensive and don't work well that traverse stairs. While technically true, it most certainly isn't equal access.
No it's not absurd, it's an important point to consider, especially when drafting legislation. 35 years ago when ADA was created, mechanized stair-climbing robotic wheelchairs were science fiction. Are you claiming that the ability to parse a webpage is as far out of reach as that?
Hobbyist virus writers routinely steal information from browsers, even on bank websites that go out of their way to obfuscate the PIN entry, etc. Were hobbyist roboticists toying around with stair-climbing robots that could support a full grown person 35 years ago? I don't think so. Your comparison is really lopsided.
If you're just writing a simple list of requirements like that then it's trivial to add "ability to handle second hand cigarette smoke." Does that change your outlook, if it's explicitly added as a job requirement?
Not only that, but by splitting the market you'll get specialty sites that cater to the smaller, ignored demographics and provide them with a better, more targeted experience. Everybody wins.
How about if you have a bar and one of your employees has a religion injunction about being around alcohol? Do you suggest that the bar stop serving alcohol?
It makes no sense. You say "substitute until you get it" but you can also substitute until it's totally absurd.
But mines ARE risky to work in. The sooner we have fully robotic mines, the better. What are you trying to argue, that we should bend over backwards to ensure that human-based mining can continue forever in the safest manner possible?
There is a natural right to run a pub. It's called liberty. WTF!?
You know what? Smoking sections don't work. They might, I suppose, if you installed an airlock or something... But they don't. So you still get smoke even in your non-smoking section. And for my wife, who has a serious problem with cigarette smoke, that meant we could basically not dine out anywhere.
What about the guy who's been addicted to smoking since he was 6 and can't go more than 30 minutes without lighting up? Now HE basically can't eat out anywhere.
Does it just come down to whichever group is bigger? More victim-looking? I don't see how it's fair for the government to impose a 100% ban, just like it wouldn't be fair to impose a 100% requirement FOR having smoking sections. Why can't there just be some restaurants that are non-smoking and others that allow it?