It is not that I am easily offended by your discussion of religion, it is that I disagree. But now that you mention it, I actually agree; the teachers freedom of religion is indeed restricted, in favor of the students freedom. I don't think it's analagous though, because I don't see whose constitutionally garaunteed freedom is protected by restricting the TV stations free speech rights in this case.
Let us therefore adress your possibly less contentious example:
"Forbidding porn on primetime broadcast television no more restricts free speech, than does forbidding the carrying of concealed fragmentation grenades restricts the right to bear arms."
I guess I agree with that, but only because forbidding the carrying of concealled fragmentation grenades absolutely and obviously restricts the right to bear arms. Forbidding concealled carrying of nukes restricts the right to bear arms. I think such restrictions on the right to bear arms are obviously a good idea. I only wish we, as a society, would do it by repealing the second amendment. Currently, we pretend it's still in force, which just helps people get all sorts of weird ideas about how "real" the other amendments in the bill of rights are suppoesed to be.
"Let's just admit that they've created something new, and it's not entirely unreasonable for them to wish to protect their exclusive use of their creations"
It would be hard to argue they've created something new, as comics about people with super-human powers and the terminology involed both predate the companies involved.
In any case, Trademarks do not exist to protect people who have invented something new. If I market the "2Short Wheel", I can trademark that without having invented the wheel. The trademark prevents you from selling "2Short Wheels" and thus destroying my reputation for quality wheels with your inferior product. The trade mark protects consumers by letting them know that they are getting geuine 2Short wheels, the same ones all those people who said great things about them were actually talking about.
So if we're talking about using "SuperMan" in reference to a comic-book charachter who flies around saving the day, this would definitely be less absurd. When I buy a "SuperMan" comic, I expect it is a comic about THE Superman, produced by the same people (in the corporate sense) who produced the fine Superman content I've enjoyed in the past.
When I buy a book that mentions "Super Hero", am I surprised to learn it is not a DC product, whoops I mean Marvel, well, you know, DC or Marvel, but not anyone else? Um, no. Heck, if I bought it it is probably related to "Champions", the "Super-Hero Role Playing Game" from Atlas. Whom, I note, DC/Marvel are not suing decades into their marketing of a series of books that say "Super Hero" all over them.
The story here is not that DC/Marvel sent out this letter; it was probaly some lawyer that was bored, and needed to eat up another 10 minutes of billable time. The story here is that the recipients listened to the C&D letter, rather than say, wiping their asses with it. I know people will claim this is how big companies abuse the little guy who can't afford a legal battle. A reasonable lawyer would not bother charging you for the 3.5 seconds it would take him to consider the case and drop the C&D in the shredder, assuming you were paranoid enough to cosult him in the first place.
Your formula sounds reasonable, but let's apply it to different data:
If every year, there are x births and x/2 deaths (which there are, roughly), then is the likelihood of any given life ending in death 50%?
Statistics is tricky stuff.
In any case, for marraiges, the correct statistic (as far as my recent research indicates) is that in a certain year in the late 70s a particular study estimated there were half as many divorces as weddings. Suprisingly to me, there do not appear to be good stats for most years before or since.
Now these studies were done because of concern over rising divorce rates, and liberalized (no-fault) divorce laws. As the other poster points out, arguing from that one year to the general case ignores the large number of pre-existing marraiges from years with presumably lower rates. And, strange as it seems, it was actually difficult to get divorced in some cases before the late 70s, so that rate may have included some "backlog" of marraiges that were long over but couldn't easily be ended before.
But for the sake of argument, let's stiputate quite a lot of marraiges end in divorce. That means nothing about your marraige; there is no such thing as the law of averages; statistics are not predictive of individual cases, or even of what the future statistics will be.
I'm not saying don't have a pre-nup because you should trust each other (Though, obviously, you should trust each other). A prenup specifies how your lives and fortunes shall be re-seperated should your marraige fail. If you are not planning on conflating your lives and fortunes to such a degree that specifying how to do that fairly in advance is completely impossible, I don't think you should get married. Entirely too many people get married who shouldn't, if you ask me.
Shit does indeed happen. You can not predict what will happen in your life together, or how you will face it together as a team. Maybe you'll decide one of you should work while the other goes back to school and improves their earning potential. Maybe you'll have a kid; maybe it will be triplets. Maybe one of you will fall ill and the other will need to care for them. Maybe, after 20 years of life's grand adventure together, you'll decide to split up, and need to divide up your stuff and otherwise seperate your lives. If so, it will suck, and probably be messy. If you think you can make an agreement now that predicts what will be "fair" then, and that that will at all protect you from it being messy, then in my opinion you should not get married.
Yuck! Where do you come up with this stuff? I don't want to see any of that, nor do I imagine do others. Why do you imagine TV stations are in a desperate rush to drive away their audiences and lose all their advertising revenues?
I note that my daily newspaper is not under any prohibitions against printing objectionable content. Oddly, it doesn't seem to contain one trace of the disgusting, freaky porn you seem so obseesed with.
I'd generally prefer people who find content on TV objectionable to take that up with the TV station, or their advertisers. If a lot of people find something objectionable, and say so, advertisers and TV stations will listen. When people feel the neeed to have government step in and tell TV stations what they can't broadcast because this minority doesn't like it, then, yeah, that makes me uncomfortable.
When the FCC does not actually issue any clear rules, but just levies fines after the fact, leaving the limits of acceptable speech up to the imaginations of fearful network legal departments... I say that's reprehensible; utterly contrary to supposed American ideals, not just of freedom of expression, but of the rule of law. The FCC can just decide what it thinks is objectionable on a whim, and fine people millions?
Theoretically, to solicit the opinions of interested or expert parties on a topic congress is considering legislating. This does not mean committee members must not have any opinions of their own.
"How can Dee Snyder get a fair shake when he's dragged before a congressional committee by a woman who's husband sits on that committee?"
Dee Snyder was dragged before the committed by a private citizen? First I've heard of it. He wasn't even supeonaed by the commitee, he was invited to appear and tell his side of the story, (which he did a bang up job of). And was the commitee even considering fining him? No. They were considering requiring albums that encouraged violence to be marked with a "V". And they decided not to require that.
"Besides, my point was that this is not a Bush/Gore or Republican/Democrat thing, so blaming it on any particular person or party is pointless"
And my point is, you're full of it. The Bush administration is levying massive fines without even stating the limits ahead of time. We don't need no stinking rules, you'll know you broke them when we fine you! You're saying because Al Gores wife took an objectionable, vaugely similar position 20 years ago, we shouldn't blame the Bush administration for it's actions today. That's insane; I certainly blamed Tipper for her actions 20 years ago, I'll certainly blame the Bush administration for it's actions today. Nor will the example of a single Democrat having once been wrong about something prevent me from seeing the overwhelming pattern of where the Bush administration is on this issue compared to the Democratic party or the country at large.
"I don't think this should be on the air at 8:00pm" I encourage you to take that up with your TV station. You could even not watch it.
I do see your point about families though. I do wish they were free to watch a show whose premise about people getting kidnapped and murdered, without fear of seeing nakedness. I just think free speach is more important.
No. That's what I recall claimed in a satistics course using the "over 50% of mairaiges end in divorce" claim as an example of misleading analysis. Doing some brief googling just now, all I turn up are various discussions of the "over 50%" claim itself, and the fact that it apparently has no sound statistical backing in the first place. Some people apparently have projected that 50% of mairaiges starting in particular years will end in divorce; others have made other projections. Solid historical data seems to not exist, or to indicate rates below 50%.
Regarless, life is not a roll of the dice against a statistics table. What percentage of marraiges end in divorce means squat about whether your marraige will. That's up to you and your spouse.
The GP was saying people who want to get married should have a pre-nup. I'm arguing that people who want a pre-nup should not get married.
"her husband did sit on the commitee. Of course, I'm sure he was complete unbiased."
I'm sure he wasn't. Nor should he be. Senators are not judges; they are expected to hold and push for their own opinions; those opinions are hopefully why we elected them. Which is why people were quite legitimately concerned about Gores position on censorship. Then again, what did that committee do? Fine Twisted Sister millions of dollars retroactively? No. They pushed the recording industry into adopting voluntary warning labels. At least that's my recollection, as I said, this is like, ancient history whose relevance to this disscussion I fail to grasp. How should Al Gores wife arguing a position I didn't like 20 years ago lessen my outrage at the Bush administration enforcing a dangerously misguided, only vaugely related policy today?
"this was a bit much to be shown on the air at 8:00" You mean, right after the News about car bombins in Iraq, not to mention the typical level of fictional violence at that, or any hour? What is the standard here? The standard here is, after the fact, without ever spelling out the rules in advance, if someone decides they are offended, millions in fines! "Free speach" obviously shouldn't apply if someone, somewhere might see a naked person and be offended! Naked people are TERRIBLE! Not offending anyone is much more important than any silly "First Amendment". I'm sure the framers didn't mean you could say things people didn't like...
What restrictions on prayer in public schools? You can pray in public schools all you want. Some people get all upset that public schools can't make the students pray, but they're idiots.
As for your theory that restricting free speach to only specific media, or fining them because you don't like what they say isn't actually restricting free speach... um, yeah.
Our rights to pray and to speak are supposed to be constitutionally garaunteed. There is no constitutional protection against being offended. These fines are blatantly unconstitutional, just as prohibitions on praying in public schools would be, if they existed.
Your prayers may or may not be offensive to me (I haven't heard them); but I'll relentlessly defend your right to utter them. My speech may or may not be offensive to you; tough f*cking sh*t.
Dude, I almost remember Twisted Sister, and I'm like, old.
Let's see, Tipper Gore did some stuff as a private citizen, and years later when her husband ran for President, it was definitely an issue that gave people concern about his position on censorship.
Now members of the Bush administration, appointed by Bush, are doing stuff in their official capacities, and you object if we blame "the Bush administration"?
I mean, if people are brining this up in an irrelevant attempt to defend a poitical opponent of Laura Bush 20 years from now, feel free to tell them what I will now tell you: The last time I heard something that moronicly weak, it was a Twisted Sister album.
Yet most people who get married stay married, because most first marriages succeed, it's just the serial-divorcing Liz Taylors of the world that drive your deceptive statistic down. Marraige is a merger of your lives; an agreement to face the world as a single team. Your wife can't take half your stuff in a divorce because you don't have stuff that isn't hers too. If you're not up for that, don't get married. Prenups are for suckers; if you want it to still be your stuff and not hers, you're just living together.
Well, FWIW, average salaries & home values are a lousy place to start crunching numbers; median is much better. Nor would we expect the median income to afford a median home. Home ownership is a bit above 50% generally, a bit below in city centers, so the median income should expect to afford a cheap home.
If your job requires you to live in a place where you can't afford a home you consider acceptable based on the salary it pays, you might want to reconsider whether it represents a "decent living". Most people make enough to afford a home they consider acceptable, as evidenced by their buying it. If they didn't, housing prices would fall.
I beleive I stipulated I was being pedantic. I will now continue to be.
"The GP was trying to make a point to the GGP. The GGP was indicating that they believed they should be able to have any weapon they wanted and that if they weren't allowed to they would use the democratic process to make sure that they could. The GP was making the point that the GGP could not use the democratic process to get his way since the US is not a "true" or "direct" democracy (as you put it). This of course means that if the GGP thought that everyone should be able to purchase and install a nice little SAM site in their backyard he can't just go out and get a simple majority of the people to agree and enact a new city/state/federal ordinance. As laws and even amendments to the constitution itself can only be initiated and passed by the various legislatures at either the federal or state level."
I beleive you, I and the GP all agree the GPP is an idiot. However, if a majority of the populace agreed with him, I've no doubt he could use the democratic process to enact his will, albeit by electing representatives who agreed with him. Because the US is a democracy. Perhaps the GP meant to say, "the US is not a direct democracy". Idiot though he is, I beleive the GPP knows this, along with everybody else on the entire planet who has enough knowledge to have even heard of the US in the first place.
"when you are speaking of a country and say that they are a "Democratic Republic" it actually means something unrelated to the individual generic terms."
I cannot agree. Simply conflating the definitions, a Democratic Republic would be "A political order of Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives, whose head of state is not a monarch." I do not beleive "Democratic Republic" means the least bit more or less than that. If you disagree, please give me an example of a political system that fits the term, but not the definition, or vice-versa.
"Speaking of the US in specifics, our type of government is described by several different terms..." Certainly, for many terms describe different aspects of it. The US is a Democracy, is a Republic, is Federalist, and is Constitution based. Any combination of those terms should be accurate. "almost-pure Republic" is meaningless though. You have a monarch or you don't, there is no "almost". We don't, so we're a Republic.
My point is, "Republic" is not an alternative to "Democracy", they are idependent concepts. People who say, "It's not a democracy, it's a Republic" bug me. It's both. And why, in this discussion (or most) could the US being a Republic matter much? Modern Republics include the US, Mexico, China, and Iran. Modern non-Republics include Saudi Arabia, Nepal, The UK, Canada, and Spain. Who cares if it's a republic? What relevant information does saying "it's a republic" add to the blatantly false "It's not a Democracy"?
I beleive that's what I implied by pointing out the US is a democracy but not a direct one. "The US is not a democracy, it's a Republic" is a part-wrong, part-meaningless statement that some people seem to have picked up from poor 5th grade social studies teachers, and love to pull out on slashdot where they get modded informative for it. It's like saying, "Boats aren't vehicles, they are things made of wood"
Republic just means "non-monarchy", so ancient Athens qualifies. In modern times, "Republic" is a useless term, because these days whether the head of state is called a President or a King is no guide to his political relevance or legitimacy. Plenty of Presidents head dictatorships, while many Kings are benevolent figureheads attached to democracies. And vice-versa.
Direct democracy doesn't scale, and gets run down in witty sayings by people who have never practiced it. The only direct democracies I'm aware of are the local governments of certain small towns in New England, one of which I used to live in. That town is unquestionably the most responsibly run governmental unit I've ever seen.
Pedantry bugs me, but even I will be stirred to it by incorrect pedantry. The US is not a direct democracy, but I have never heard anyone even suggest that it is.
While it is not at all clear to me what point is being attempted by people who leap to point out the US is a Republic, not a Democracy, it is quite clear you are wrong. The US is both, and the fact it is a democracy is by far the more worthwhile thing to know.
Dictionary.com will give you three different dictionaries takes on "Democracy", all of which include agreement with American Heritage definition number 1: "Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives"
"Republic" on the other hand? "A political order whose head of state is not a monarch" So, yeah, the US is a republic, the UK isn't, China is, Iran is. "Republic" is just not a very useful distinction in the modern world.
":I share the same beliefs with you regarding our economy. I have zero economics background"
That fits.
"Homes in most places are unaffordable for most people considering local salaries"
Simply false. In every state in the country, most people can afford a home, and do.
"How do we trust so-called experts who say that our economy is doing great and that home prices aren't going to fall, rather they'll level off?" You shouldn't, it's not. Real, honest experts might reasonably debate whether it is doing "OK" or "sucky" but to claim the current state of the economy is "great" would require ignorance or lying. Whether home prices will fall or level off is certainly not something a responsible expert would state with any confidence.
Um, previous to the Federal reserve, the US had various forms of government sponsored "hard" currency, which was mostly pretty good, except when they tried to set the value of silver vs gold differently than the rest of the world. It also had a lot of privately issued "free-market" currencies, which were universally crap. They all lost their value in time frames that make the Fed managed dollar look like bedrock.
If you require "100% reserve", what is there for the "free market" to do? Compete on the degree they can convince people they are not cheating in a business where the only possible profit is by cheating?
"I've modified my life to live entirely off the dollar standard and I now live on a hard currency standard."
So you've convinced everyone you do business with to set prices based on fixed amounts of shiny metal?
Humans freely exploits humans in their efforts to do large scale violence to yet more humans. This is not something that pleases me; but given that context, exploiting some fish too doesn't bother me in the least. Of course, independent of context, chopping up the fish and eating it because it's tasty doesn't bother me either.
Well, I have known Mormons who were young-earth creationists. I had assumed this was the official position of the church, but I'll gladly take your word for it that it is not. In any case, I still beleive that most proponents of ID/Creationism, whether Mormon or not, would not be satisfied with teaching that evolution definitely happened, but maybe God guided it a little. For that matter, neither would I, though for different reasons.
"I don't have an intuitive feel of the scale of the energies involved"
I do. Next to the velocity of the station, the additional velocity imparted to the ball by the golf club is not worth mentioning. The orbit degrading, and the ball burning up on reentry in 3-4 years is exactly the same projection as for the ISS itself in the absence of regular orbit-maintaining boosts.
"it's not a disclaimer, because one way or another you are still saying that evolution happened."
1) Well, no you're not; if God needs to guide it, it's not evolution. Evolution proposes to explain how the species currently in existence came about by natural means. It aims to be an entirely sufficient explanation, with no need of supernatural assistance. It succeeds. What other things some people might beleive are not relevant if they don't add to the explanation.
2) Whether you call it a disclaier or not, why should Gravity not have the added line "Some people beleive God guides things downward." What makes evolution special compared to the whole rest of swcience that we should make irrelevant mention of religious beleifs when teaching it?
3) The disclaimer (or whatever you call it) would not satisfy those who currently push Creationism/ID. The ones who push those hard (such as strict interpreters of Mormonism in Utah) don't think God guided evolution; they think he created the world as is six thousand years ago.
The two are not mutually exclusive. Google is making money, and that's great. But a P/E of 75 is not "a little high", it's freakishly, stupidly, baked-off-your-ass high. Buying Google at their current price means expecting them to outgrow every other company ever; by a large margin. (Or expecting to find someone even more irrationally optimistic than you sometime in the future, so you can rip them off)
At some point, Google stock will come back to reality, and the shareholders are going to lose a lot of money. The company may come though this OK if management is willing and able to ignore the screaming (which, given their history, and the odd way they've set up the corp, they may be) So I'm fairly willing to depend on their excellent software, but I'll pass on their stock.
"1) An actual encyclopedia. You never specified it had to be free/open/what have you"
It need not be free, open or what have you; but clearly it must be "What I have". I have Wikipedia at my fingertips anywhere I have web access. Furhtermore, I question whether "actual" encyclopedias status as "autoritative" are in any sense beyond question. I've looked up subjects I know well in paper encylopedias, and the fact they don't have a footnote saying it's only true if you cath a good edit is not because they don't need one. Both Wikipedia and Britanica are only true if you cath a good edit; with wikipedia, this is acknowledged, the edits come faster, and the full edit history and discussion thereof is laid out for you to see.
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It is not that I am easily offended by your discussion of religion, it is that I disagree. But now that you mention it, I actually agree; the teachers freedom of religion is indeed restricted, in favor of the students freedom. I don't think it's analagous though, because I don't see whose constitutionally garaunteed freedom is protected by restricting the TV stations free speech rights in this case.
Let us therefore adress your possibly less contentious example:
"Forbidding porn on primetime broadcast television no more restricts free speech, than does forbidding the carrying of concealed fragmentation grenades restricts the right to bear arms."
I guess I agree with that, but only because forbidding the carrying of concealled fragmentation grenades absolutely and obviously restricts the right to bear arms. Forbidding concealled carrying of nukes restricts the right to bear arms. I think such restrictions on the right to bear arms are obviously a good idea. I only wish we, as a society, would do it by repealing the second amendment. Currently, we pretend it's still in force, which just helps people get all sorts of weird ideas about how "real" the other amendments in the bill of rights are suppoesed to be.
"Let's just admit that they've created something new, and it's not entirely unreasonable for them to wish to protect their exclusive use of their creations"
It would be hard to argue they've created something new, as comics about people with super-human powers and the terminology involed both predate the companies involved.
In any case, Trademarks do not exist to protect people who have invented something new. If I market the "2Short Wheel", I can trademark that without having invented the wheel. The trademark prevents you from selling "2Short Wheels" and thus destroying my reputation for quality wheels with your inferior product. The trade mark protects consumers by letting them know that they are getting geuine 2Short wheels, the same ones all those people who said great things about them were actually talking about.
So if we're talking about using "SuperMan" in reference to a comic-book charachter who flies around saving the day, this would definitely be less absurd. When I buy a "SuperMan" comic, I expect it is a comic about THE Superman, produced by the same people (in the corporate sense) who produced the fine Superman content I've enjoyed in the past.
When I buy a book that mentions "Super Hero", am I surprised to learn it is not a DC product, whoops I mean Marvel, well, you know, DC or Marvel, but not anyone else? Um, no. Heck, if I bought it it is probably related to "Champions", the "Super-Hero Role Playing Game" from Atlas. Whom, I note, DC/Marvel are not suing decades into their marketing of a series of books that say "Super Hero" all over them.
The story here is not that DC/Marvel sent out this letter; it was probaly some lawyer that was bored, and needed to eat up another 10 minutes of billable time. The story here is that the recipients listened to the C&D letter, rather than say, wiping their asses with it. I know people will claim this is how big companies abuse the little guy who can't afford a legal battle. A reasonable lawyer would not bother charging you for the 3.5 seconds it would take him to consider the case and drop the C&D in the shredder, assuming you were paranoid enough to cosult him in the first place.
Your formula sounds reasonable, but let's apply it to different data:
If every year, there are x births and x/2 deaths (which there are, roughly), then is the likelihood of any given life ending in death 50%?
Statistics is tricky stuff.
In any case, for marraiges, the correct statistic (as far as my recent research indicates) is that in a certain year in the late 70s a particular study estimated there were half as many divorces as weddings. Suprisingly to me, there do not appear to be good stats for most years before or since.
Now these studies were done because of concern over rising divorce rates, and liberalized (no-fault) divorce laws. As the other poster points out, arguing from that one year to the general case ignores the large number of pre-existing marraiges from years with presumably lower rates. And, strange as it seems, it was actually difficult to get divorced in some cases before the late 70s, so that rate may have included some "backlog" of marraiges that were long over but couldn't easily be ended before.
But for the sake of argument, let's stiputate quite a lot of marraiges end in divorce. That means nothing about your marraige; there is no such thing as the law of averages; statistics are not predictive of individual cases, or even of what the future statistics will be.
I'm not saying don't have a pre-nup because you should trust each other (Though, obviously, you should trust each other). A prenup specifies how your lives and fortunes shall be re-seperated should your marraige fail. If you are not planning on conflating your lives and fortunes to such a degree that specifying how to do that fairly in advance is completely impossible, I don't think you should get married. Entirely too many people get married who shouldn't, if you ask me.
Shit does indeed happen. You can not predict what will happen in your life together, or how you will face it together as a team. Maybe you'll decide one of you should work while the other goes back to school and improves their earning potential. Maybe you'll have a kid; maybe it will be triplets. Maybe one of you will fall ill and the other will need to care for them. Maybe, after 20 years of life's grand adventure together, you'll decide to split up, and need to divide up your stuff and otherwise seperate your lives. If so, it will suck, and probably be messy. If you think you can make an agreement now that predicts what will be "fair" then, and that that will at all protect you from it being messy, then in my opinion you should not get married.
Yuck! Where do you come up with this stuff? I don't want to see any of that, nor do I imagine do others. Why do you imagine TV stations are in a desperate rush to drive away their audiences and lose all their advertising revenues?
I note that my daily newspaper is not under any prohibitions against printing objectionable content. Oddly, it doesn't seem to contain one trace of the disgusting, freaky porn you seem so obseesed with.
I'd generally prefer people who find content on TV objectionable to take that up with the TV station, or their advertisers. If a lot of people find something objectionable, and say so, advertisers and TV stations will listen. When people feel the neeed to have government step in and tell TV stations what they can't broadcast because this minority doesn't like it, then, yeah, that makes me uncomfortable.
When the FCC does not actually issue any clear rules, but just levies fines after the fact, leaving the limits of acceptable speech up to the imaginations of fearful network legal departments... I say that's reprehensible; utterly contrary to supposed American ideals, not just of freedom of expression, but of the rule of law. The FCC can just decide what it thinks is objectionable on a whim, and fine people millions?
"What would be the point of the hearings then?"
Theoretically, to solicit the opinions of interested or expert parties on a topic congress is considering legislating. This does not mean committee members must not have any opinions of their own.
"How can Dee Snyder get a fair shake when he's dragged before a congressional committee by a woman who's husband sits on that committee?"
Dee Snyder was dragged before the committed by a private citizen? First I've heard of it. He wasn't even supeonaed by the commitee, he was invited to appear and tell his side of the story, (which he did a bang up job of). And was the commitee even considering fining him? No. They were considering requiring albums that encouraged violence to be marked with a "V". And they decided not to require that.
"Besides, my point was that this is not a Bush/Gore or Republican/Democrat thing, so blaming it on any particular person or party is pointless"
And my point is, you're full of it. The Bush administration is levying massive fines without even stating the limits ahead of time. We don't need no stinking rules, you'll know you broke them when we fine you! You're saying because Al Gores wife took an objectionable, vaugely similar position 20 years ago, we shouldn't blame the Bush administration for it's actions today. That's insane; I certainly blamed Tipper for her actions 20 years ago, I'll certainly blame the Bush administration for it's actions today. Nor will the example of a single Democrat having once been wrong about something prevent me from seeing the overwhelming pattern of where the Bush administration is on this issue compared to the Democratic party or the country at large.
"I don't think this should be on the air at 8:00pm"
I encourage you to take that up with your TV station. You could even not watch it.
I do see your point about families though. I do wish they were free to watch a show whose premise about people getting kidnapped and murdered, without fear of seeing nakedness. I just think free speach is more important.
No. That's what I recall claimed in a satistics course using the "over 50% of mairaiges end in divorce" claim as an example of misleading analysis. Doing some brief googling just now, all I turn up are various discussions of the "over 50%" claim itself, and the fact that it apparently has no sound statistical backing in the first place. Some people apparently have projected that 50% of mairaiges starting in particular years will end in divorce; others have made other projections. Solid historical data seems to not exist, or to indicate rates below 50%.
Regarless, life is not a roll of the dice against a statistics table. What percentage of marraiges end in divorce means squat about whether your marraige will. That's up to you and your spouse.
The GP was saying people who want to get married should have a pre-nup. I'm arguing that people who want a pre-nup should not get married.
"her husband did sit on the commitee. Of course, I'm sure he was complete unbiased."
I'm sure he wasn't. Nor should he be. Senators are not judges; they are expected to hold and push for their own opinions; those opinions are hopefully why we elected them. Which is why people were quite legitimately concerned about Gores position on censorship. Then again, what did that committee do? Fine Twisted Sister millions of dollars retroactively? No. They pushed the recording industry into adopting voluntary warning labels. At least that's my recollection, as I said, this is like, ancient history whose relevance to this disscussion I fail to grasp. How should Al Gores wife arguing a position I didn't like 20 years ago lessen my outrage at the Bush administration enforcing a dangerously misguided, only vaugely related policy today?
"this was a bit much to be shown on the air at 8:00"
You mean, right after the News about car bombins in Iraq, not to mention the typical level of fictional violence at that, or any hour? What is the standard here? The standard here is, after the fact, without ever spelling out the rules in advance, if someone decides they are offended, millions in fines! "Free speach" obviously shouldn't apply if someone, somewhere might see a naked person and be offended! Naked people are TERRIBLE! Not offending anyone is much more important than any silly "First Amendment". I'm sure the framers didn't mean you could say things people didn't like...
"restrictions on prayer in public schools "
What restrictions on prayer in public schools? You can pray in public schools all you want. Some people get all upset that public schools can't make the students pray, but they're idiots.
As for your theory that restricting free speach to only specific media, or fining them because you don't like what they say isn't actually restricting free speach... um, yeah.
Our rights to pray and to speak are supposed to be constitutionally garaunteed. There is no constitutional protection against being offended. These fines are blatantly unconstitutional, just as prohibitions on praying in public schools would be, if they existed.
Your prayers may or may not be offensive to me (I haven't heard them); but I'll relentlessly defend your right to utter them. My speech may or may not be offensive to you; tough f*cking sh*t.
Dude, I almost remember Twisted Sister, and I'm like, old.
Let's see, Tipper Gore did some stuff as a private citizen, and years later when her husband ran for President, it was definitely an issue that gave people concern about his position on censorship.
Now members of the Bush administration, appointed by Bush, are doing stuff in their official capacities, and you object if we blame "the Bush administration"?
I mean, if people are brining this up in an irrelevant attempt to defend a poitical opponent of Laura Bush 20 years from now, feel free to tell them what I will now tell you:
The last time I heard something that moronicly weak, it was a Twisted Sister album.
"Over 50% of marriages end in divorce."
Yet most people who get married stay married, because most first marriages succeed, it's just the serial-divorcing Liz Taylors of the world that drive your deceptive statistic down. Marraige is a merger of your lives; an agreement to face the world as a single team. Your wife can't take half your stuff in a divorce because you don't have stuff that isn't hers too. If you're not up for that, don't get married. Prenups are for suckers; if you want it to still be your stuff and not hers, you're just living together.
Well, FWIW, average salaries & home values are a lousy place to start crunching numbers; median is much better. Nor would we expect the median income to afford a median home. Home ownership is a bit above 50% generally, a bit below in city centers, so the median income should expect to afford a cheap home.
If your job requires you to live in a place where you can't afford a home you consider acceptable based on the salary it pays, you might want to reconsider whether it represents a "decent living". Most people make enough to afford a home they consider acceptable, as evidenced by their buying it. If they didn't, housing prices would fall.
"But no, I don't think there is any big thing left. "
Currently, I expect to die someday. So at least in medicine, there are still "big things" left.
"Concentrate more on promoting than on demoting" quoth the moderator guidelines...
"Actually you are the one being pedantic."
I beleive I stipulated I was being pedantic. I will now continue to be.
"The GP was trying to make a point to the GGP. The GGP was indicating that they believed they should be able to have any weapon they wanted and that if they weren't allowed to they would use the democratic process to make sure that they could. The GP was making the point that the GGP could not use the democratic process to get his way since the US is not a "true" or "direct" democracy (as you put it). This of course means that if the GGP thought that everyone should be able to purchase and install a nice little SAM site in their backyard he can't just go out and get a simple majority of the people to agree and enact a new city/state/federal ordinance. As laws and even amendments to the constitution itself can only be initiated and passed by the various legislatures at either the federal or state level."
I beleive you, I and the GP all agree the GPP is an idiot. However, if a majority of the populace agreed with him, I've no doubt he could use the democratic process to enact his will, albeit by electing representatives who agreed with him. Because the US is a democracy. Perhaps the GP meant to say, "the US is not a direct democracy". Idiot though he is, I beleive the GPP knows this, along with everybody else on the entire planet who has enough knowledge to have even heard of the US in the first place.
"when you are speaking of a country and say that they are a "Democratic Republic" it actually means something unrelated to the individual generic terms."
I cannot agree. Simply conflating the definitions, a Democratic Republic would be "A political order of Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives, whose head of state is not a monarch." I do not beleive "Democratic Republic" means the least bit more or less than that. If you disagree, please give me an example of a political system that fits the term, but not the definition, or vice-versa.
"Speaking of the US in specifics, our type of government is described by several different terms..."
Certainly, for many terms describe different aspects of it. The US is a Democracy, is a Republic, is Federalist, and is Constitution based. Any combination of those terms should be accurate. "almost-pure Republic" is meaningless though. You have a monarch or you don't, there is no "almost". We don't, so we're a Republic.
My point is, "Republic" is not an alternative to "Democracy", they are idependent concepts. People who say, "It's not a democracy, it's a Republic" bug me. It's both. And why, in this discussion (or most) could the US being a Republic matter much? Modern Republics include the US, Mexico, China, and Iran. Modern non-Republics include Saudi Arabia, Nepal, The UK, Canada, and Spain. Who cares if it's a republic? What relevant information does saying "it's a republic" add to the blatantly false "It's not a Democracy"?
I beleive that's what I implied by pointing out the US is a democracy but not a direct one. "The US is not a democracy, it's a Republic" is a part-wrong, part-meaningless statement that some people seem to have picked up from poor 5th grade social studies teachers, and love to pull out on slashdot where they get modded informative for it. It's like saying, "Boats aren't vehicles, they are things made of wood"
Republic just means "non-monarchy", so ancient Athens qualifies. In modern times, "Republic" is a useless term, because these days whether the head of state is called a President or a King is no guide to his political relevance or legitimacy. Plenty of Presidents head dictatorships, while many Kings are benevolent figureheads attached to democracies. And vice-versa.
Direct democracy doesn't scale, and gets run down in witty sayings by people who have never practiced it. The only direct democracies I'm aware of are the local governments of certain small towns in New England, one of which I used to live in. That town is unquestionably the most responsibly run governmental unit I've ever seen.
"The US is not a democracy, it never has been."
Pedantry bugs me, but even I will be stirred to it by incorrect pedantry. The US is not a direct democracy, but I have never heard anyone even suggest that it is.
While it is not at all clear to me what point is being attempted by people who leap to point out the US is a Republic, not a Democracy, it is quite clear you are wrong. The US is both, and the fact it is a democracy is by far the more worthwhile thing to know.
Dictionary.com will give you three different dictionaries takes on "Democracy", all of which include agreement with American Heritage definition number 1: "Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives"
"Republic" on the other hand? "A political order whose head of state is not a monarch" So, yeah, the US is a republic, the UK isn't, China is, Iran is. "Republic" is just not a very useful distinction in the modern world.
":I share the same beliefs with you regarding our economy. I have zero economics background"
That fits.
"Homes in most places are unaffordable for most people considering local salaries"
Simply false. In every state in the country, most people can afford a home, and do.
"How do we trust so-called experts who say that our economy is doing great and that home prices aren't going to fall, rather they'll level off?"
You shouldn't, it's not. Real, honest experts might reasonably debate whether it is doing "OK" or "sucky" but to claim the current state of the economy is "great" would require ignorance or lying. Whether home prices will fall or level off is certainly not something a responsible expert would state with any confidence.
Um, previous to the Federal reserve, the US had various forms of government sponsored "hard" currency, which was mostly pretty good, except when they tried to set the value of silver vs gold differently than the rest of the world. It also had a lot of privately issued "free-market" currencies, which were universally crap. They all lost their value in time frames that make the Fed managed dollar look like bedrock.
If you require "100% reserve", what is there for the "free market" to do? Compete on the degree they can convince people they are not cheating in a business where the only possible profit is by cheating?
"I've modified my life to live entirely off the dollar standard and I now live on a hard currency standard."
So you've convinced everyone you do business with to set prices based on fixed amounts of shiny metal?
Humans freely exploits humans in their efforts to do large scale violence to yet more humans. This is not something that pleases me; but given that context, exploiting some fish too doesn't bother me in the least. Of course, independent of context, chopping up the fish and eating it because it's tasty doesn't bother me either.
Well, I have known Mormons who were young-earth creationists. I had assumed this was the official position of the church, but I'll gladly take your word for it that it is not.
In any case, I still beleive that most proponents of ID/Creationism, whether Mormon or not, would not be satisfied with teaching that evolution definitely happened, but maybe God guided it a little. For that matter, neither would I, though for different reasons.
"I don't have an intuitive feel of the scale of the energies involved"
I do. Next to the velocity of the station, the additional velocity imparted to the ball by the golf club is not worth mentioning. The orbit degrading, and the ball burning up on reentry in 3-4 years is exactly the same projection as for the ISS itself in the absence of regular orbit-maintaining boosts.
"it's not a disclaimer, because one way or another you are still saying that evolution happened."
1) Well, no you're not; if God needs to guide it, it's not evolution. Evolution proposes to explain how the species currently in existence came about by natural means. It aims to be an entirely sufficient explanation, with no need of supernatural assistance. It succeeds. What other things some people might beleive are not relevant if they don't add to the explanation.
2) Whether you call it a disclaier or not, why should Gravity not have the added line "Some people beleive God guides things downward." What makes evolution special compared to the whole rest of swcience that we should make irrelevant mention of religious beleifs when teaching it?
3) The disclaimer (or whatever you call it) would not satisfy those who currently push Creationism/ID. The ones who push those hard (such as strict interpreters of Mormonism in Utah) don't think God guided evolution; they think he created the world as is six thousand years ago.
"Google is not a bubble. Google is profitable."
The two are not mutually exclusive. Google is making money, and that's great. But a P/E of 75 is not "a little high", it's freakishly, stupidly, baked-off-your-ass high. Buying Google at their current price means expecting them to outgrow every other company ever; by a large margin. (Or expecting to find someone even more irrationally optimistic than you sometime in the future, so you can rip them off)
At some point, Google stock will come back to reality, and the shareholders are going to lose a lot of money. The company may come though this OK if management is willing and able to ignore the screaming (which, given their history, and the odd way they've set up the corp, they may be) So I'm fairly willing to depend on their excellent software, but I'll pass on their stock.
"1) An actual encyclopedia. You never specified it had to be free/open/what have you"
It need not be free, open or what have you; but clearly it must be "What I have". I have Wikipedia at my fingertips anywhere I have web access. Furhtermore, I question whether "actual" encyclopedias status as "autoritative" are in any sense beyond question. I've looked up subjects I know well in paper encylopedias, and the fact they don't have a footnote saying it's only true if you cath a good edit is not because they don't need one. Both Wikipedia and Britanica are only true if you cath a good edit; with wikipedia, this is acknowledged, the edits come faster, and the full edit history and discussion thereof is laid out for you to see.