"Which is the point I was making - the low-wage jobs are coming back (there are actually new jobs to be had)"
That's a different point, also wrong. We have added low-wage jobs, but generally not as fast as we have added workers seeking them. Unemployment remains high, and highest among low-skilled workers. Number of applicants per job opening is also highest at the low end. This recession has been and is hardest on the less skilled. The total number of jobs at the very lowest end may have gone up more than at the higher ends relative to the previous number of jobs, but if the number of looking workers is still higher, "There are actually new jobs to be had" is misleading at best. If you are looking for a job, you're more likely to get one if you are a higher skilled worker.
If that is the point you were making, you said the exact opposite. Maybe you misspoke when you said "Low-wage and just above (service and labor jobs) are plentiful", but in that case you probably shouldn't keep arguing with people who point out you are wrong. And when your misstatement results in something so obviously ridiculous, you probably shouldn't get offended when people question your intelligence.
Which is why I checked the citation: A joint report by The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal. Are you going to suggest they are socialist shills pushing a big government agenda by falsifying easily checked data?
" 'So I might try to figure out what measure of "largest" you were using' Should have said "government organization"."
By employment, the second largest government organization is the Postal Service. Do you ever look things up? I'm not sure how this is relevant in any case. The public sector in this country employs vastly more schoolteachers than DHS goons, the fact that one is organized as a single group and the other split between myriad districts doesn't strike me as supporting any particular point you were making.
I could point out that the lesson of Europe is that austerity makes things worse, or argue with your premise that social entitlements were their problem, but frankly, you're not making it worth my while. You'll just say you meant something different and throw out more made up, easily disprovable stuff to support your new tangent.
"Yes, there are countries with proportionally larger public sectors, probably none other than China with one actually as large."
None other than China? Canada, Austrailia, Israel, Brazil, and pretty much the entirety of Europe, just to name the ones that seem like obviously better comparisons to the US than North Korea and China. If you need someone to lay out what they "prove": Many of these countries are not considered hellish distopias, so your apparent contention that a large public sector is a terrible thing does not appear to fit the evidence.
The list of countries with smaller public sectors than the US includes mostly third world countries as well as (irony alert): China. To be fair, I would have guessed China's public sector was bigger than ours too. On the other hand, I didn't guess; I looked it up.
"the DHS is now the largest organization in the US outside the Defense Department"
The Defense department is the largest employer in the US, but second is Walmart and third is McDonalds. I've only memorized the top three, and DHS is no doubt big. So I might try to figure out what measure of "largest" you were using, if I had any suspicion you weren't just making stuff up to fit you conclusion like every other "fact" you've thrown out.
"What I meant was that there have been proportionally fewer job losses in that sector than in the better-paying skilled jobs."
What you said was entirely different, and wrong. What you are saying now is misleading at best, and to the best of my knowledge, also wrong.
From the page you helpfully linked below:
"The overall unemployment rate is 8.8%, but the rate remains especially high for those with limited education, Hispanics (11.9%), Blacks (15.5%), teenagers (24.5%), those aged 20-24 (15.0%), veterans who’ve served since 2001 (10.9%), and persons with a disability (15.6%)."
Do those sound like categories that correlate with higher paid jobs? Unemployment in this recession has disproportionately hit those at the bottom. The unemployment rate for those with a college degree is significantly less than for those without.
"Low-wage and just above (service and labor jobs) are plentiful" is just ridiculously contrary to the facts.
I haven't called you any names, nor am I a socialist. I'm not sure what you're looking for proof of. That you are wrong about whether North Korea is a useful example here? North Korea is not a useful example here. It's an idiotic one. Nobody is going to try to prove that to you; because you already know it, you're just being intentionally obtuse.
"Dividends are taxed twice--once when the company (which you own) is paying taxes on earnings, and again when you receive their earnings."
The company is taxed once, and the individual is taxed once. They are not the same. If you don't like it, don't form a corporation, form a partnership. Then you and the company are one, and you get taxed once.
"Two people have claimed that, and called me an "idiot" (yes, you did), claim that I'm wrong, and that there's proof!! and yet... nothing."
In considering the effects of public sector size (or anything) on a society, it is most useful to look at countries that are as similar to the US as possible in other respects. North Korea is about as different from the US as possible in about as many ways as possible. It is among the least useful examples you could possibly pick.
If you cannot grasp this, it does not prove you're an idiot, just that you argue like one.
Well that may be an argument against ever trying to invent anything in the first place.
But the universities here are throwing caution to the wind and doing research anyway, so: Should they patent their discoveries just to prevent others from doing so? No. Publishing their research is just as good as patenting it. Whatever nefarious shenanigans you want to imagine someone will pull after the fact will be exactly as effective or ineffective against prior art as against a patent.
You can claim the patent system is corrupt and broken, and I'll agree. But in discussing what's wrong with it, you should get your facts right about how it works.
Why is this considered an "Insightful" point on every legal question?
If the "patch of ground" you are standing on is the United States, format shifting is legal. If your lawyer is too incompetent to cite a clear cut supreme court decision, format shifting is still legal.
The human eye can distinguish detail of about 0.017 degrees (20/20 vision). "Space" is commonly defined as 100km up. A bit of trig tells us to see something from space with the unaided eye, it must be 1.7 kilometers across. Black Rock City is roughly twice that according to the only map I could find with a scale. It will be a little black dot to be sure, but if you're going to go with a silly "bigness" standard you may as well know it passes.
Personally, a week-long event with 50,000 attendees says "big" to me.
"The question is: Did they get permission to use that camera from the Burning Man officials ?"
Since they aren't attendees, why would they need to? Burning Man can put whatever conditions on attendance they like, but why would they have any authority over the ESA?
As far as why do Burning Man attendees spend all that time and money on something that isn't what you think would be cool: because it's their time and money and they spend it on what they think is cool.
Also, I know about a dozen Burning Man fans, and I separately know quite a few hippies. Burning Man isn't hippies.
I didn't say digging a 1000 foot mine was "easy". I said it was "wildly easier" than capturing an asteroid at L2 and flying up to it (considerably further than humans have ever gone) with mining equipment. This isn't an opinion, we have facts at hand: 1000 meter mines exist, and we can calculate how much it cost to dig them. Then we can calculate the vastly higher cost of a trip to the moon, since we've done that too. Unless going twice as far and hauling mining equipment along will make space travel radically cheaper, digging a 1000 foot mine is a radically simpler proposition.
Iron ore is not useful at ISS, nor the moon. If we built a space station or moon base with enough industrial capacity to convert iron ore into useful parts, sure. So when the size of our moon base approaches that of Pittsburgh we can figure out if there is any way to obtain all the other expendables you need to refine ore in space. But currently, if you had a working smelter and a bunch of iron ore in space, it still wouldn't make sense to ship all the limestone and coke up, assuming all you wanted was blobs of iron. The blobs of iron are cheaper to ship up than what you need to make them in space. And once you start talking about wanting finished parts, it's just ridiculous.
That's a free demo. Every game I've bought in the last decade has used that model.
Shareware games had licenses that let you freely copy them, and commonly gave you the whole game but included some sort of nagging unless you paid to register your copy. That model wen't away because nobody made much money with it in the first place. So the mostly indie devs who did it just went to releasing their stuff entirely free or went to the demo model.
"At this point, I'm tired of searching legalese just to prove my point."
Failure is exhausting. The first says directors of a corporation must not put the interests of others before the interests of their shareholders; it places no restrictions on what the shareholders may declare to be in their interest. The second might say something if you had quoted a complete sentence, but it doesn't look like it's headed anywhere relevant.
I understood you. Reaching a vein of ore in the earth is wildly easier than getting to orbit.
We don't even need to consider the fact the the asteroids in question are not in earth orbit, or that earth orbit isn't a very useful place to have some iron ore.
And then a foundry and a machine shop. Unless you just want unformed blobs of iron. In that case you can start shipping up more weight in fuel and other expendables than you'll get in iron, so you can lose money on your operation at an even faster rate than if you were shipping the ore down, which is impressive.
The ISS was feasible enough to waste vast sums on. A space mine has the advantage of being obviously inane enough that we won't. So I'm going to call ISS even stupider than a space mine. We've thoroughly explore the inside of a can we built, and gained the knowledge that it's harder to keep the toilet working than you'd think, and about squat else. Seriously, a station with access to nothing we didn't send up there. It's like exploring the wilderness without leaving your billion dollar tent.
Going to the moon: I'm not immune to emotional appeal: that men have walked on the moon is way cool. Scientifically, we learned quite a bit from the rocks they brought back, and I'd certainly endorse a (tele-robotic) sample-return mission to an asteroid. And we learned lots about how to go about manned space travel, an activity we expected to, and have, continued to engage in, wisely or otherwise.
Space mining isn't something we are going to do, so learning how should not be a priority. We should spend the (ridiculously huge amount of) money on something with a point.
"Do you not see the benefit of running a space mine for a loss financially to gain the knowledge of space mining?"
Knowledge of space mining is valuable only if it eventually makes space mining financially viable. Barring a reduction in launch costs by many orders of magnitude, space mining won't be financially viable no matter how well we do it, so no, I don't see any benefit in running a space mine at this time.
Slashdot Mirror
"Which is the point I was making - the low-wage jobs are coming back (there are actually new jobs to be had)"
That's a different point, also wrong. We have added low-wage jobs, but generally not as fast as we have added workers seeking them. Unemployment remains high, and highest among low-skilled workers. Number of applicants per job opening is also highest at the low end. This recession has been and is hardest on the less skilled. The total number of jobs at the very lowest end may have gone up more than at the higher ends relative to the previous number of jobs, but if the number of looking workers is still higher, "There are actually new jobs to be had" is misleading at best. If you are looking for a job, you're more likely to get one if you are a higher skilled worker.
If that is the point you were making, you said the exact opposite. Maybe you misspoke when you said "Low-wage and just above (service and labor jobs) are plentiful", but in that case you probably shouldn't keep arguing with people who point out you are wrong. And when your misstatement results in something so obviously ridiculous, you probably shouldn't get offended when people question your intelligence.
Wikipedia? Probably an okay starting point..."
Which is why I checked the citation: A joint report by The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal. Are you going to suggest they are socialist shills pushing a big government agenda by falsifying easily checked data?
" 'So I might try to figure out what measure of "largest" you were using'
Should have said "government organization"."
By employment, the second largest government organization is the Postal Service. Do you ever look things up? I'm not sure how this is relevant in any case. The public sector in this country employs vastly more schoolteachers than DHS goons, the fact that one is organized as a single group and the other split between myriad districts doesn't strike me as supporting any particular point you were making.
I could point out that the lesson of Europe is that austerity makes things worse, or argue with your premise that social entitlements were their problem, but frankly, you're not making it worth my while. You'll just say you meant something different and throw out more made up, easily disprovable stuff to support your new tangent.
"Yes, there are countries with proportionally larger public sectors, probably none other than China with one actually as large."
None other than China? Canada, Austrailia, Israel, Brazil, and pretty much the entirety of Europe, just to name the ones that seem like obviously better comparisons to the US than North Korea and China. If you need someone to lay out what they "prove": Many of these countries are not considered hellish distopias, so your apparent contention that a large public sector is a terrible thing does not appear to fit the evidence.
The list of countries with smaller public sectors than the US includes mostly third world countries as well as (irony alert): China. To be fair, I would have guessed China's public sector was bigger than ours too. On the other hand, I didn't guess; I looked it up.
"the DHS is now the largest organization in the US outside the Defense Department"
The Defense department is the largest employer in the US, but second is Walmart and third is McDonalds. I've only memorized the top three, and DHS is no doubt big. So I might try to figure out what measure of "largest" you were using, if I had any suspicion you weren't just making stuff up to fit you conclusion like every other "fact" you've thrown out.
"What I meant was that there have been proportionally fewer job losses in that sector than in the better-paying skilled jobs."
What you said was entirely different, and wrong. What you are saying now is misleading at best, and to the best of my knowledge, also wrong.
From the page you helpfully linked below:
"The overall unemployment rate is 8.8%, but the rate remains especially high for those with limited education, Hispanics (11.9%), Blacks (15.5%), teenagers (24.5%), those aged 20-24 (15.0%), veterans who’ve served since 2001 (10.9%), and persons with a disability (15.6%)."
Do those sound like categories that correlate with higher paid jobs? Unemployment in this recession has disproportionately hit those at the bottom. The unemployment rate for those with a college degree is significantly less than for those without.
"Low-wage and just above (service and labor jobs) are plentiful" is just ridiculously contrary to the facts.
That sentence isn't on the page it links to.
I haven't called you any names, nor am I a socialist. I'm not sure what you're looking for proof of. That you are wrong about whether North Korea is a useful example here? North Korea is not a useful example here. It's an idiotic one. Nobody is going to try to prove that to you; because you already know it, you're just being intentionally obtuse.
"Dividends are taxed twice--once when the company (which you own) is paying taxes on earnings, and again when you receive their earnings."
The company is taxed once, and the individual is taxed once. They are not the same. If you don't like it, don't form a corporation, form a partnership. Then you and the company are one, and you get taxed once.
"Two people have claimed that, and called me an "idiot" (yes, you did), claim that I'm wrong, and that there's proof!! and yet... nothing."
In considering the effects of public sector size (or anything) on a society, it is most useful to look at countries that are as similar to the US as possible in other respects. North Korea is about as different from the US as possible in about as many ways as possible. It is among the least useful examples you could possibly pick.
If you cannot grasp this, it does not prove you're an idiot, just that you argue like one.
"Low-wage and just above (service and labor jobs) are plentiful"
Um.. no.
"The US right now has THE MOST progressive tax system in the world"
The extra caps doesn't make this statement any less ridiculously false.
Well that may be an argument against ever trying to invent anything in the first place.
But the universities here are throwing caution to the wind and doing research anyway, so: Should they patent their discoveries just to prevent others from doing so? No. Publishing their research is just as good as patenting it. Whatever nefarious shenanigans you want to imagine someone will pull after the fact will be exactly as effective or ineffective against prior art as against a patent.
You can claim the patent system is corrupt and broken, and I'll agree. But in discussing what's wrong with it, you should get your facts right about how it works.
Prior art: look it up.
Why is this considered an "Insightful" point on every legal question?
If the "patch of ground" you are standing on is the United States, format shifting is legal. If your lawyer is too incompetent to cite a clear cut supreme court decision, format shifting is still legal.
The human eye can distinguish detail of about 0.017 degrees (20/20 vision). "Space" is commonly defined as 100km up. A bit of trig tells us to see something from space with the unaided eye, it must be 1.7 kilometers across. Black Rock City is roughly twice that according to the only map I could find with a scale. It will be a little black dot to be sure, but if you're going to go with a silly "bigness" standard you may as well know it passes.
Personally, a week-long event with 50,000 attendees says "big" to me.
"The question is: Did they get permission to use that camera from the Burning Man officials ?"
Since they aren't attendees, why would they need to? Burning Man can put whatever conditions on attendance they like, but why would they have any authority over the ESA?
As far as why do Burning Man attendees spend all that time and money on something that isn't what you think would be cool: because it's their time and money and they spend it on what they think is cool.
Also, I know about a dozen Burning Man fans, and I separately know quite a few hippies. Burning Man isn't hippies.
I didn't say digging a 1000 foot mine was "easy". I said it was "wildly easier" than capturing an asteroid at L2 and flying up to it (considerably further than humans have ever gone) with mining equipment. This isn't an opinion, we have facts at hand: 1000 meter mines exist, and we can calculate how much it cost to dig them. Then we can calculate the vastly higher cost of a trip to the moon, since we've done that too. Unless going twice as far and hauling mining equipment along will make space travel radically cheaper, digging a 1000 foot mine is a radically simpler proposition.
Iron ore is not useful at ISS, nor the moon. If we built a space station or moon base with enough industrial capacity to convert iron ore into useful parts, sure. So when the size of our moon base approaches that of Pittsburgh we can figure out if there is any way to obtain all the other expendables you need to refine ore in space. But currently, if you had a working smelter and a bunch of iron ore in space, it still wouldn't make sense to ship all the limestone and coke up, assuming all you wanted was blobs of iron. The blobs of iron are cheaper to ship up than what you need to make them in space. And once you start talking about wanting finished parts, it's just ridiculous.
That's a free demo. Every game I've bought in the last decade has used that model.
Shareware games had licenses that let you freely copy them, and commonly gave you the whole game but included some sort of nagging unless you paid to register your copy. That model wen't away because nobody made much money with it in the first place. So the mostly indie devs who did it just went to releasing their stuff entirely free or went to the demo model.
This assumes that the market thinks the same things are good as you do. This is a bad assumption, despite wild popularity.
"At this point, I'm tired of searching legalese just to prove my point."
Failure is exhausting.
The first says directors of a corporation must not put the interests of others before the interests of their shareholders; it places no restrictions on what the shareholders may declare to be in their interest.
The second might say something if you had quoted a complete sentence, but it doesn't look like it's headed anywhere relevant.
"All that money you invest is meaningless..."
Paying for subscription-based games is not meant to be an investment, and is optional HTH.
I understood you. Reaching a vein of ore in the earth is wildly easier than getting to orbit.
We don't even need to consider the fact the the asteroids in question are not in earth orbit, or that earth orbit isn't a very useful place to have some iron ore.
And then a foundry and a machine shop. Unless you just want unformed blobs of iron. In that case you can start shipping up more weight in fuel and other expendables than you'll get in iron, so you can lose money on your operation at an even faster rate than if you were shipping the ore down, which is impressive.
The ISS was feasible enough to waste vast sums on. A space mine has the advantage of being obviously inane enough that we won't. So I'm going to call ISS even stupider than a space mine. We've thoroughly explore the inside of a can we built, and gained the knowledge that it's harder to keep the toilet working than you'd think, and about squat else. Seriously, a station with access to nothing we didn't send up there. It's like exploring the wilderness without leaving your billion dollar tent.
Going to the moon: I'm not immune to emotional appeal: that men have walked on the moon is way cool. Scientifically, we learned quite a bit from the rocks they brought back, and I'd certainly endorse a (tele-robotic) sample-return mission to an asteroid. And we learned lots about how to go about manned space travel, an activity we expected to, and have, continued to engage in, wisely or otherwise.
Space mining isn't something we are going to do, so learning how should not be a priority. We should spend the (ridiculously huge amount of) money on something with a point.
"Do you not see the benefit of running a space mine for a loss financially to gain the knowledge of space mining?"
Knowledge of space mining is valuable only if it eventually makes space mining financially viable. Barring a reduction in launch costs by many orders of magnitude, space mining won't be financially viable no matter how well we do it, so no, I don't see any benefit in running a space mine at this time.