Why don't we give out condoms to lesser countries and give tax incentives in wealthier ones? Face it. The reason for habit loss is economic as people need housing, food, and cheap products that produce toxins. Immigration problems wouldn't be an issue if Latin Americans and Africans could find work at livable wages. When over supply of labor hits you get a dump on demand.
In short: Because it doesn't work. Richer people are only richer because there are others who are poor; exploitation in one way or another - that is the bedrock on which Capitalism rests. If we somehow got rid of the poorest 75% of the world's population, just to take a number, one of the things that would happen would be that the bottom of the pile got a lot closer to where you are (if you didn't happen to be one the 75%); and who do you think it is that works hard at very low wages to produce the food, clothes etc etc that the wealthier end of the world enjoy? The poorer you are, the harder you have to work and the less you get paid for it.
The real solution to this problem isn't, in effect, to tell the poor to go and kill themselves, but reducing inequality, improving things like education, health care, food safety, etc. These are the factors that have led to people having fewer children as well as being more interested in (and and able to) protecting the environment.
You bring freedom back. You stop turning it into an Orwellian mechanism for social control and surveillance.
It is a beautiful dream - it would have appealed a lot in the 60es and 70es, but it is just a dream. Just like the myth of unregulated capitalism or perfect communism. People don't really want "Freedom" - they just want their lives to be comfortable, safe and satisfying, tomorrow the same as today, give or take a few inches. I don't even think the people who talk about some idealised, perfect freedom actually want that; they just want enough freedom to do the things they want to do without having to pay too dearly for it.
The Chinese, and to some extent the Europeans too, come from a different place than the Americans, with respect to freedom (As a European myself, with a Chinese wife and family, I do have some relevant background). Especially to the Chinese, it seems that "Freedom" in the way the Americans imagine it, sounds a lot like being alone, outside family and society; not at all an attractive thing. It is the same with democracy - they look at the American elections, laugh and say "Why would anyone want that?" I'm pretty convinced that the overwhelming majority of Chinese want their government to clean up the internet and get rid of corruption and organised crime.
It doesn't seem unlikely that big data technology can be used for this purpose; not nonsense like Facebook and Twitter data, which is only a small corner of what big data is really used for: scientific analysis of huge datasets.
Only if there is some inherit difference between the genders that would result in them approaching problem solving differently. If there is the problem solving would be enhanced, if there isn't then you would expect it to be the same.
Not entirely correct - the difference doesn't have to be inherent, only factual; ie. it does not matter whether the difference in performance is because men and women are fundamentally different in some way, or they have become different because of cultural conditioning. I'm not denying that there may be inherent differences between the genders, when it comes to certain skills, although research suggests that the differences are very minute; but that whole debate have moved on from "nature vs nurture" to "nature via nurture": each individual's skillset is the result of natural traits modified by the environment, and the sometimes surprising thing is how much our inherent traits can be modified, especially when it comes to the brain.
Since men and women do seem to tend to have different ways to solve problems, having a balanced mix of both genders in an office will increase the number of ways the team is able to solve problems; I think that much is indisputable. Of course, if your particular office doesn't require much in the way of problem solving, that may be irrelevant, but another perspective is that everybody tends to modify their behaviour in the presence of the opposite gender, which is quite often not a bad thing in itself.
If women choose not to go into computing fields, why should they be forced (or even encouraged) to do so?
It seems to me that most offices would benefit from having a sensible balance of both genders. For whatever reason, women tend to have a different approach to problem solving than men, which might add value in itself. It might also motivate people to be a little bit more aware of certain aspects of coexistence that are often somewhat neglected in an all-male office - IOW it might make the office-atmosphere a little nicer.
Why isn't there a similar push to get men into kindergarten education or nursing?
Isn't there? When I had young children I heard about that constantly; men can make a very valuable contribution to the traditional women's jobs. We simply have a different approach doing things (and it hasn't got a lot to do with the Trump approach to women either).
How about letting people pick the field(s) they want to go into without telling them what they "ought" to do based on a pointless metric or percentage?
An excellent idea - the problem, in many ways, is that we culturally condition each other to believe there are certain things we can't or shouldn't do. Boys learn that they shouldn't do "girl things", like playing with dolls or similar, and girls learn in the same way that there are certain things that are "boys only". This is, in my view, a stupid waste - one of my favourite examples is the amazing mathematician, Emmy Noether; I wonder how many brilliant women never got to excel in science simply because "science is a boy thing" and their interest wasn't encouraged.
... what is it that is lacking in the ESA program that is not able to get landings right?
One of the contributing factors is probably that there is less redundancy; I think ESA are trying to pack as much science as possible into a limited budget. I think also, the lander part of the program wasn't necessarily the main ambition, although it would have been very, very nice to our own vehicle down there. I think everybody agrees that space missions are unsustainably expensive, so we really do need to find (safe) ways to reduce the costs a lot; this is no doubt another important part of ESA's space mission designs.
Of course he doesn't understand. If you click on the name he uses, you will see that most of his comments seem to be jeers that he hopes are efficient put-downs. He isn't trying to understand or engage in an enlightened discussion, he just wants a howling match from the safety of his bedroom.
There are ways to publish such videos without such insane restrictions.
Of course, but that is hardly the issue here. They are trying to promote important health awareness information as widely as possible, and facebook is, regrettably, popular. It is a real shame that unenlightened prudishness shall stand in the way of such a noble purpose. And as the saying goes, all things are pure to the innocent; or in other words, the more prudish you are, the more you have to be ashamed of, clearly.
What kind of people buy these 'smart TVs' and why? For Internet? Doesn't almost everybody have a PC or tablet nowadays anyway?
Well, I can understand the appeal in some ways - as I understand it, smart tvs are sort of like giant tablet computers; you can get them with Android, I believe, so I imagine it might have a certain appeal if you are an Android developer. I'm not sure I'd want one myself, unless it was seriously hackable.
The main reason for using Linux is security; and control! The two main reasons are security and control; and privacy! The three main reasons... no, amongst the reasons are such items as...
They haven't been sufficiently grovelling towards the current crop of Tories in power.
Not to mention that to a certain segment of humanity, the Tories themselves are a bunch of bleeding-heart socialists. It isn't possible to reason with that kind of people, but on the other hand, it is important that those of us who are not as unhinged, stand up and speak out against the nut-cases.
Dishonestly persuade (someone) to act in one's favour by a gift of money or other inducement.
Oxford English Dictionary
I may at some point make the effort to look up the quotes - they seem somewhat abridged (in my experience, entries in OED are longer and more nuanced) , but leave that for now. However, even if they are accurately quoted, this definition still covers situations that most people would agree are not about bribery: a defence lawyer acting for a criminal that he knows is guilty, an advertiser trying to persuade you to buy crap you don't need etc. There are lots of examples like that.
...Democracy will never work.... When you see left wing democratic socialists, they think they have a right (by majority vote)...
So, it doesn't work because you can't always have it your way? In a democracy, that is the way it is supposed to be - sometimes your side wins, sometimes the other side wins. It sort of evens out in the end.
Those people who think Government is the only solution to the problems government creates, are creating a beast that will eventually eat them up. They are just too ignorant and haven't learned from history.
And yet it seems to work quite well in Scandinavia and in fact much of the rest of Europe too. Not perfectly, but reasoably well - we can certainly live with it. It makes me wonder why you can't?
There are at least two major weaknesses in this idea:
1) Looking around in the business landscape, it seems clear that 'we' (especially managers) have little understanding of what makes a good leader. ATM the trend is that you have to be the "Alpha Male", hence leadership courses that include white water rafting and other supposedly, very 'male' passtimes. This may impress the sales teams, but I doubt the engineers are in awe over it.
2) Even if we knew what personality traits make a good leader, it is far from clear that there is a simple - or even any - connection between your DNA toolkit and your personality. So far, we seem to have some trouble finding a well defined set of genes for things like skin colour or height, and things like personality are vastly more complex than a simple, physical trait. Plus, of course, we have very limited knowledge (in fact, next to none) about how brain structure maps to personality traits.
So far, we have only just begun to scrape the surface of the genome, the epi-genome and the structure of the nervous system. We are still in the phase where, the more we discover, the more we come to realise how hopelessly inadequate our current understanding still is. It is not impossible that we will understand these areas well, but it will take a while; we will probably be well-established on Mars and beyond long before that day. Going to Mars is, after all, only rocket science.
Here's what I get, and it looks fine to me... "persuade (someone) to act in one's favor, typically illegally or dishonestly, by a gift of money or other inducement."
Since we are mincing words, give us the whole dictionary entry + the reference to which dictionary. Your definition here seems to match paying a defence lawyer as well - after all, they will often end up defending somebody, knowing they deserve the full weight of the law, so I think this definition is far too wide.
Let's try to use words with some integrity; bribery is a criminal offence, whereas what Samsung allegedly did was to try to buy the guy's silence, which is merely odious, but not a crime.
...If you're going intelligently elect a leader,...
Don't you think that train has left the station a long time ago? When the media and a far too loud crowd dominate everything the way they have done, increasingly, since the days of Bill Clinton, at least, intelligent discourse doesn't stand a chance. I rather suspect that is the intention - these people do not want democracy to work, because their extremist agenda will never win in a fair and honest, democratic contest.
Before you can have quarity you must learn to say quarity.
Yes, I know... *sigh* - it is such a tired old joke that Chinese can't distinguish 'l' and 'r'; it is also incorrect - it is the Japanese, which is a very different cup of tea, liguistically speaking. Chinese uses both the 'l' and the 'r' sound (see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...), and they have no trouble with those sounds in other languages.
The explanation for why the Japanese have trouble distinguishing the two sounds has someting to do with the fact that the 'l' sounds is absent from the language (not an expert, but see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...). Apparently, when children are quite young, they form a large number of connections in the brain, far more than they are going to use, and the ones that are not kept active by use, are then pruned as the child matures; so Japanese children can distinguish 'r' from 'l' (as well as a lot of other things), but later they lose that ability because it is never used. In English the sound of 'l' is quite close to 'r', so to a Japanese ear, 'l' is simply perceived as 'r'.
To be able to learn something about the physical world from someone who's been dead for 150 years is somewhat revelatory.
Well, look at some the names that are prominent in science, especially mathematics:
Euclid, ~2000 years ago, the father of, well, Euclidean geometry Isaac Newton, ~400 years ago, prominent contributor to classical mechanics and differential calculus Gauss, ~350 years ago, major contributor to just about anything, not least differential geometry etc
In fact, most of the mathematics and physics you study as an undergraduate at university is at least 100 years old (apart from linear algebra, which is surprisingly young); the only major revolutions since then were general relativity and quantum mechanics, and that is close to a century ago now. What we have been doing since can be described as gap-filling, by comparison. Very important gap-filling, with immense value to all areas of modern life, but the next revolution in science is not going to come until we find a way to unify GR and QM.
This is a very valid point, but fortunately the OP has some mention of this:
The quality of China's research is also striking. The chart narrows the research to include only those papers that were cited at least once by other researchers, an indication that the papers were influential in the field.
Let us not blind ourseves with the prejudice, that because the researchers are Chinese, it must somehow be of a poorer quality. China is simply investing much more aggressively in education than the US, so it is no surprise they are able to produce more, good research. That said, I think it is more relevant to look at this per capita; there are 300 million Americans and 1300 million Chinese, which is ~4 times as many, so until they produce >4 times as much good quality research, they are still catching up. They will get there, without a doubt, but I think there is some way to go still.
No, they are not trying to do a Monty Burns impression. This is a deadly serious issue, as anyone living in Seattle or Portland can tell you. You do not want to give the so-called "homeless advocates" any influence in your local government. They will utterly destroy your city's quality of life.
Amazing - so this is the attitude of the average citizen in God's own nation, where a higher percentage of people claim to believe in God and Christ and all that? "I want my quality of life and to hell with those worse off"? But of course, once it gets to be your turn, you will start whining about how unfair it is; and the risk of the average American losing everything and ending up on the street is a lot higher than in most industrialised nations. Your attitude is not only despicable, it is stupid and pathetic.
If society - that is the ordinary members of society, not the state - does not care about those in need, then you will end up, like now, with a growing mass of people who are desperate and bittter against all those smug, well-fed idiots, that turned their back with some lame excuse. This is exactly what Karl Marx went over in excruciating detail in his works; even if you don't agree with the ideologies of his various followers, common sense tells us that he was right in saying that unfettered capitalism breeds inequality, which breeds revolution. I'm not saying that naive communism is The Solution, or even a solution, but it is blindingly obvious that society must care for its weakest members - it is simply a good investment in stability, which is a crucial element in creating a productive business climate. Even hard-nosed businesses like Oracle, Microsoft and Google know this and have on-going, social projects.
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't we give out condoms to lesser countries and give tax incentives in wealthier ones? Face it. The reason for habit loss is economic as people need housing, food, and cheap products that produce toxins. Immigration problems wouldn't be an issue if Latin Americans and Africans could find work at livable wages. When over supply of labor hits you get a dump on demand.
In short: Because it doesn't work. Richer people are only richer because there are others who are poor; exploitation in one way or another - that is the bedrock on which Capitalism rests. If we somehow got rid of the poorest 75% of the world's population, just to take a number, one of the things that would happen would be that the bottom of the pile got a lot closer to where you are (if you didn't happen to be one the 75%); and who do you think it is that works hard at very low wages to produce the food, clothes etc etc that the wealthier end of the world enjoy? The poorer you are, the harder you have to work and the less you get paid for it.
The real solution to this problem isn't, in effect, to tell the poor to go and kill themselves, but reducing inequality, improving things like education, health care, food safety, etc. These are the factors that have led to people having fewer children as well as being more interested in (and and able to) protecting the environment.
The election of Trump wouldn't necessarily make all that much of a difference.
You bring freedom back. You stop turning it into an Orwellian mechanism for social control and surveillance.
It is a beautiful dream - it would have appealed a lot in the 60es and 70es, but it is just a dream. Just like the myth of unregulated capitalism or perfect communism. People don't really want "Freedom" - they just want their lives to be comfortable, safe and satisfying, tomorrow the same as today, give or take a few inches. I don't even think the people who talk about some idealised, perfect freedom actually want that; they just want enough freedom to do the things they want to do without having to pay too dearly for it.
The Chinese, and to some extent the Europeans too, come from a different place than the Americans, with respect to freedom (As a European myself, with a Chinese wife and family, I do have some relevant background). Especially to the Chinese, it seems that "Freedom" in the way the Americans imagine it, sounds a lot like being alone, outside family and society; not at all an attractive thing. It is the same with democracy - they look at the American elections, laugh and say "Why would anyone want that?" I'm pretty convinced that the overwhelming majority of Chinese want their government to clean up the internet and get rid of corruption and organised crime.
It doesn't seem unlikely that big data technology can be used for this purpose; not nonsense like Facebook and Twitter data, which is only a small corner of what big data is really used for: scientific analysis of huge datasets.
Only if there is some inherit difference between the genders that would result in them approaching problem solving differently. If there is the problem solving would be enhanced, if there isn't then you would expect it to be the same.
Not entirely correct - the difference doesn't have to be inherent, only factual; ie. it does not matter whether the difference in performance is because men and women are fundamentally different in some way, or they have become different because of cultural conditioning. I'm not denying that there may be inherent differences between the genders, when it comes to certain skills, although research suggests that the differences are very minute; but that whole debate have moved on from "nature vs nurture" to "nature via nurture": each individual's skillset is the result of natural traits modified by the environment, and the sometimes surprising thing is how much our inherent traits can be modified, especially when it comes to the brain.
Since men and women do seem to tend to have different ways to solve problems, having a balanced mix of both genders in an office will increase the number of ways the team is able to solve problems; I think that much is indisputable. Of course, if your particular office doesn't require much in the way of problem solving, that may be irrelevant, but another perspective is that everybody tends to modify their behaviour in the presence of the opposite gender, which is quite often not a bad thing in itself.
If women choose not to go into computing fields, why should they be forced (or even encouraged) to do so?
It seems to me that most offices would benefit from having a sensible balance of both genders. For whatever reason, women tend to have a different approach to problem solving than men, which might add value in itself. It might also motivate people to be a little bit more aware of certain aspects of coexistence that are often somewhat neglected in an all-male office - IOW it might make the office-atmosphere a little nicer.
Why isn't there a similar push to get men into kindergarten education or nursing?
Isn't there? When I had young children I heard about that constantly; men can make a very valuable contribution to the traditional women's jobs. We simply have a different approach doing things (and it hasn't got a lot to do with the Trump approach to women either).
How about letting people pick the field(s) they want to go into without telling them what they "ought" to do based on a pointless metric or percentage?
An excellent idea - the problem, in many ways, is that we culturally condition each other to believe there are certain things we can't or shouldn't do. Boys learn that they shouldn't do "girl things", like playing with dolls or similar, and girls learn in the same way that there are certain things that are "boys only". This is, in my view, a stupid waste - one of my favourite examples is the amazing mathematician, Emmy Noether; I wonder how many brilliant women never got to excel in science simply because "science is a boy thing" and their interest wasn't encouraged.
... what is it that is lacking in the ESA program that is not able to get landings right?
One of the contributing factors is probably that there is less redundancy; I think ESA are trying to pack as much science as possible into a limited budget. I think also, the lander part of the program wasn't necessarily the main ambition, although it would have been very, very nice to our own vehicle down there. I think everybody agrees that space missions are unsustainably expensive, so we really do need to find (safe) ways to reduce the costs a lot; this is no doubt another important part of ESA's space mission designs.
Of course he doesn't understand. If you click on the name he uses, you will see that most of his comments seem to be jeers that he hopes are efficient put-downs. He isn't trying to understand or engage in an enlightened discussion, he just wants a howling match from the safety of his bedroom.
There are ways to publish such videos without such insane restrictions.
Of course, but that is hardly the issue here. They are trying to promote important health awareness information as widely as possible, and facebook is, regrettably, popular. It is a real shame that unenlightened prudishness shall stand in the way of such a noble purpose. And as the saying goes, all things are pure to the innocent; or in other words, the more prudish you are, the more you have to be ashamed of, clearly.
Unlike you, I don't cower behind AC.
What kind of people buy these 'smart TVs' and why? For Internet? Doesn't almost everybody have a PC or tablet nowadays anyway?
Well, I can understand the appeal in some ways - as I understand it, smart tvs are sort of like giant tablet computers; you can get them with Android, I believe, so I imagine it might have a certain appeal if you are an Android developer. I'm not sure I'd want one myself, unless it was seriously hackable.
The main reason for using Linux is security; and control! The two main reasons are security and control; and privacy! The three main reasons ... no, amongst the reasons are such items as ...
Sorry to any Monty Python fans...
They haven't been sufficiently grovelling towards the current crop of Tories in power.
Not to mention that to a certain segment of humanity, the Tories themselves are a bunch of bleeding-heart socialists. It isn't possible to reason with that kind of people, but on the other hand, it is important that those of us who are not as unhinged, stand up and speak out against the nut-cases.
Trump is not the Secretary of State. He doesn't have the country's classified documents on his server.
Good point. Let's all pray that he never will be.
Dishonestly persuade (someone) to act in one's favour by a gift of money or other inducement.
Oxford English Dictionary
I may at some point make the effort to look up the quotes - they seem somewhat abridged (in my experience, entries in OED are longer and more nuanced) , but leave that for now. However, even if they are accurately quoted, this definition still covers situations that most people would agree are not about bribery: a defence lawyer acting for a criminal that he knows is guilty, an advertiser trying to persuade you to buy crap you don't need etc. There are lots of examples like that.
...Democracy will never work. ... When you see left wing democratic socialists, they think they have a right (by majority vote) ...
So, it doesn't work because you can't always have it your way? In a democracy, that is the way it is supposed to be - sometimes your side wins, sometimes the other side wins. It sort of evens out in the end.
Those people who think Government is the only solution to the problems government creates, are creating a beast that will eventually eat them up. They are just too ignorant and haven't learned from history.
And yet it seems to work quite well in Scandinavia and in fact much of the rest of Europe too. Not perfectly, but reasoably well - we can certainly live with it. It makes me wonder why you can't?
There are at least two major weaknesses in this idea:
1) Looking around in the business landscape, it seems clear that 'we' (especially managers) have little understanding of what makes a good leader. ATM the trend is that you have to be the "Alpha Male", hence leadership courses that include white water rafting and other supposedly, very 'male' passtimes. This may impress the sales teams, but I doubt the engineers are in awe over it.
2) Even if we knew what personality traits make a good leader, it is far from clear that there is a simple - or even any - connection between your DNA toolkit and your personality. So far, we seem to have some trouble finding a well defined set of genes for things like skin colour or height, and things like personality are vastly more complex than a simple, physical trait. Plus, of course, we have very limited knowledge (in fact, next to none) about how brain structure maps to personality traits.
So far, we have only just begun to scrape the surface of the genome, the epi-genome and the structure of the nervous system. We are still in the phase where, the more we discover, the more we come to realise how hopelessly inadequate our current understanding still is. It is not impossible that we will understand these areas well, but it will take a while; we will probably be well-established on Mars and beyond long before that day. Going to Mars is, after all, only rocket science.
Here's what I get, and it looks fine to me...
"persuade (someone) to act in one's favor, typically illegally or dishonestly, by a gift of money or other inducement."
Since we are mincing words, give us the whole dictionary entry + the reference to which dictionary. Your definition here seems to match paying a defence lawyer as well - after all, they will often end up defending somebody, knowing they deserve the full weight of the law, so I think this definition is far too wide.
Give us some credit for a little intelligence.
Give me a good reason.
Let's try to use words with some integrity; bribery is a criminal offence, whereas what Samsung allegedly did was to try to buy the guy's silence, which is merely odious, but not a crime.
...If you're going intelligently elect a leader,...
Don't you think that train has left the station a long time ago? When the media and a far too loud crowd dominate everything the way they have done, increasingly, since the days of Bill Clinton, at least, intelligent discourse doesn't stand a chance. I rather suspect that is the intention - these people do not want democracy to work, because their extremist agenda will never win in a fair and honest, democratic contest.
Before you can have quarity you must learn to say quarity.
Yes, I know... *sigh* - it is such a tired old joke that Chinese can't distinguish 'l' and 'r'; it is also incorrect - it is the Japanese, which is a very different cup of tea, liguistically speaking. Chinese uses both the 'l' and the 'r' sound (see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...), and they have no trouble with those sounds in other languages.
The explanation for why the Japanese have trouble distinguishing the two sounds has someting to do with the fact that the 'l' sounds is absent from the language (not an expert, but see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...). Apparently, when children are quite young, they form a large number of connections in the brain, far more than they are going to use, and the ones that are not kept active by use, are then pruned as the child matures; so Japanese children can distinguish 'r' from 'l' (as well as a lot of other things), but later they lose that ability because it is never used. In English the sound of 'l' is quite close to 'r', so to a Japanese ear, 'l' is simply perceived as 'r'.
To be able to learn something about the physical world from someone who's been dead for 150 years is somewhat revelatory.
Well, look at some the names that are prominent in science, especially mathematics:
Euclid, ~2000 years ago, the father of, well, Euclidean geometry
Isaac Newton, ~400 years ago, prominent contributor to classical mechanics and differential calculus
Gauss, ~350 years ago, major contributor to just about anything, not least differential geometry
etc
In fact, most of the mathematics and physics you study as an undergraduate at university is at least 100 years old (apart from linear algebra, which is surprisingly young); the only major revolutions since then were general relativity and quantum mechanics, and that is close to a century ago now. What we have been doing since can be described as gap-filling, by comparison. Very important gap-filling, with immense value to all areas of modern life, but the next revolution in science is not going to come until we find a way to unify GR and QM.
This is a very valid point, but fortunately the OP has some mention of this:
The quality of China's research is also striking. The chart narrows the research to include only those papers that were cited at least once by other researchers, an indication that the papers were influential in the field.
Let us not blind ourseves with the prejudice, that because the researchers are Chinese, it must somehow be of a poorer quality. China is simply investing much more aggressively in education than the US, so it is no surprise they are able to produce more, good research. That said, I think it is more relevant to look at this per capita; there are 300 million Americans and 1300 million Chinese, which is ~4 times as many, so until they produce >4 times as much good quality research, they are still catching up. They will get there, without a doubt, but I think there is some way to go still.
No, they are not trying to do a Monty Burns impression. This is a deadly serious issue, as anyone living in Seattle or Portland can tell you. You do not want to give the so-called "homeless advocates" any influence in your local government. They will utterly destroy your city's quality of life.
Amazing - so this is the attitude of the average citizen in God's own nation, where a higher percentage of people claim to believe in God and Christ and all that? "I want my quality of life and to hell with those worse off"? But of course, once it gets to be your turn, you will start whining about how unfair it is; and the risk of the average American losing everything and ending up on the street is a lot higher than in most industrialised nations. Your attitude is not only despicable, it is stupid and pathetic.
If society - that is the ordinary members of society, not the state - does not care about those in need, then you will end up, like now, with a growing mass of people who are desperate and bittter against all those smug, well-fed idiots, that turned their back with some lame excuse. This is exactly what Karl Marx went over in excruciating detail in his works; even if you don't agree with the ideologies of his various followers, common sense tells us that he was right in saying that unfettered capitalism breeds inequality, which breeds revolution. I'm not saying that naive communism is The Solution, or even a solution, but it is blindingly obvious that society must care for its weakest members - it is simply a good investment in stability, which is a crucial element in creating a productive business climate. Even hard-nosed businesses like Oracle, Microsoft and Google know this and have on-going, social projects.
Some cultures shake their heads to mean yes. Not the Chinks I guess, so maybe Pakis.
This app is rascist and I hope it gets sued into a blivion..
You should probably get somebody to explain the inadvertent irony in your choice of words to you.