Copyright only exists to encourage content creators to create more work, not to guarantee them money for the rest of their lives (and that of their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc...). When Disney decided that copyrights should be perpetual and bought a bunch of politicians to make it so, THEY didn't uphold their part of the bargain (as stated in the Constitution).
Meaning, I have no moral qualms pirating anything where the creator wouldn't receive any benefit from my purchasing it. Pirating Louis Armstrong songs is not morally or ethically wrong, for example, since purchasing it isn't encouraging his zombie to produce further work. The same goes for a stunning amount of music where the band receives very little to no benefit from album sales. For example, if you go buy a Beatles CD, no one from the band receives a cent, so why is pirating it wrong?
Copyright does not exist to guarantee a revenue stream for giant faceless corporations.
But the packaging for that album is awesome. Actually most of their packaging is worth the purchase. They are one of the few bands that compel me to actually buy a physical version of music. The rest is all iTunes/Amazon, packaging is generally not worth the extra $5-10.
I like Trent Reznor's approach of adding a PDF of the album art. I think a very small minority of bands on iTunes do it as well.
Correct me if I'm wrong (which isn't rare); but the Japanese style trains sound expensive airplanes the way you describe them. What application do these have in Japan then, last time I checked Japan was pretty small, and dense. How do they over come these problems?
Personally I think we should have a intercontinental commuter rail system, at least linking major cities. Sure we have Amtrack, but as it currently stands they are full of fail in most places that isn't the North East. I don't know anything about the technology involved, so I'll leave that up to those who do, I also would be rabidly opposed to it if it involved taking funding from fixing up our existent bits of decaying infrastructure.
One quick point, the infrastructure doesn't actually exist in this case, so I'd see no problem with an updated design, or some sort of Japanese style bullet.
If I were you, I'd move the hell out of there. This presumes that you can, and you may have a number of really good reasons why you can't.
Move where? Its not like much of the US (world) is running on any sustainable level. Sure, we don't have enough water, neither does many places where you think it wouldn't be an issue (the NE for example). We're at least smarter than the people in Southern California and Nevada, since we require developers to guarantee 100 years of water before developing any land, something those other idiotic desert boom towns don't do. We at least got somewhat lucky and managed to grab the CAP canal (running from the Colorado river, to Phoenix/Tuscon), and some counties have been smart enough to stockpile that water like mad (not the most populous one, though)
If we ever got smart on our agricultural lobby, and stopped growing cotton (a highly water intensive crop), our water fears would lessen a bit. Something like 80% of our water use, like everywhere else, is agricultural and industrial, meaning we can legislate, or regulate their use to force up some extra water for real people (if we boot the pro-business republican carpet baggers out). We also live in an odd oasis that for some reason looks like a cross between Florida, southern California, and the Midwest, with sprawling green lawns, water hungry trees, more idiotic gold courses than you can shake a hose at. For some reason we've never heard of xeroscaping, even if Tuscon down south is known for it.
As for climate change, I don't think we're going to get the worst of it. Sure, we're in year 15 of a hundred year drought, but we're the desert, we might end up learning this fact. The Anasazi did, not that they are a hopeful example.
Large portions of the worlds population live in deserts, they adapt to it. Something we, for some dumb reason, seem unwilling to do. Let the people who don't like the desert move to cooler climates, let the desert rats (like me) have it.
I doubt, to be more ontopic, that this is going to happen. Arizona is somewhat dumb when it comes to things like this, but I don't think (or at least pray) that we're not this dumb. I'd be happy with a conventional rail portal, preferably if Amtrack actually manned up to the task, and moved their depot someplace useful, and allowed access to Tuscon. They already are a money bleeding, paritally public funded, rail boondoggle, and one is enough.
And some of us hate trees, snow, and a somewhat boring culture. Some of us LIKE the desert, and would wish that all the people from the midwest would go home (as should the Californians), and then we wouldn't have much of a water problem either.
?People are so blindly interested in anything billed as "eco" or "green or "solar" that common sense goes right out the window.
Or, people are genuinely interested in a fast train to replace a tedious, long, boring, and often slow drive, that some people have to do very often (my step-brother is a pilot, he lives in Maricopa, and commutes to Tuscon 3x a week, for example).
As you stated, trains are more efficient than cars, and can run faster, "green" or not, THAT might be why people are interested, or at least its why I'm interested.
The Phoenix Metro area has around 4.2 million, Tuscon Metro has around 1 million, so call it 5 million. And now your math is wrong.
Phoenix, like almost every other town in the world is surrounded by tons and tons of suburbs (though Phoenix is pretty much a suburb of itself). The Phoenix Metro area is generally also the #2 or #3 fastest growing population centers in the U.S. as well.
That said, this is a scam, its a great idea, but still a complete scam. I would love a decent high speed rail system running from Flagstaff to Tuscon, via Phoenix. Phoenix suffers from some of the worst road planning I've ever seen, sometimes it actually takes longer to LEAVE Phoenix, than drive to Flagstaff (around 2 hours). It once took me three hours to get from the I-17 and the 101, to the Carefree Highway (which is about 5 miles). Our planners are building roads based on REALLY old population projections from the 90s, and our TERRIBLE politicians are so hardcore about their anti-pork mumbo-jumbo that Arizona languishes when it comes to fedral funds, meaning our roads suffer even more.
Add to that our rampant corruption, and HUGE amounts of needless sprawl...
If this happens, it will be a massive joke, just like the "light rail", which doesn't serve any purpose (they removed bus routes to run a really slow train down the same central corridors, but with the buses cars could at least turn left and the buses were faster), and is functionally free (no ticket enforcement)./rant
Its a ROM mod, not the ROM itself. Its a file, that tells a program what to modify in the ROM, and as such they are not distributing any copyrighted work, but only a modification to it.
This can be seen as a Doom map pack for the original Cronotrigger.
Yes, yes, small lower case "d" and "r". Absolutely correct, though you should have put them in quotes; just to drop a pedant bomb on you as well.
I know, though, that republics and democracies are not mutually exclusive, but generally anytime some on states "the U.S. is a democracy." some uninformed wanker will leap from the woodwork and yell "No! We are a republic!" as if the were mutally exclusive, and as if being a republic was somehow inferior to being a democracy, and this is the fault of whatnot and why politics suck.
That is why I ran with and implied difference, is to head the idiots off at the pass, Yes, not pedant-friendly, but idiot-friendly. There is much more of the former to worry about, than the latter.
I recommend plenty of grains, and perhaps some flax (to keep the coat healthy, for the yearly shearing). Also avoid rural Scotland, or the American south.
While I'm not nearly as bad as the person your replying too (and potentially bating) my legs indeed got all "twitchy" and kept me from sleeping BEFORE the "RLS" ads. It might not have been "RLS", since the term wasn't coined yet, but the symptoms were still there. I'm lucky enough to have it very mild, so I mocked it as well, but one of my freind's gets only 30% of normal sleep because of it, and this was true BEFORE, yet again, the ad campaign.
In other words, just because Pfizer invented "ED" (Erectile Disfunction) as a term, they didn't invent the fact that some men had a hard time "responding". Yes, they raised consciousness, and even created a misguided capitalist frenzy, but it still was an existent problem which they found a fix for.
I will agree with you on ADD (especially "adult ADD", its called "you have a boring life") and Aspergers. Both of these fit a need to make us feel special, and ADD, like most cases of depression, are normal reactions to an unhealthy environment. The difference, here, is that these are MENTAL disorders, not somatic ones.
Nethack is a TERRIBLE thing to compare normal games too, nothing has has that much depth. I remember trying to explain to my girlfriend how to play Nethack (she's now more addicted than I am), and finally just told her "if you start sucking, Google knows why". I've been playing for years, and I'm sure I'm missing a couple strange quirks. There isn't many games like that, graphical or non.
The original Rogue wasn't terribly complex, really. Perhaps a little more nuanced than the Diablo series, but not too much more. Diablo did a decent job melding Rogue-likes to modern gaming. Diablo 2 was a bit better at it, since there was a decent degree of hidden complexity in it, especially so when playing Hardcore, with real death like the roguelikes.
Diku was very powerful, once you got used to it. For awhile me and some freinds were running a fork of an existing mud as a platform, it was so heavily modified by the original coders to be practically not Diku anymore. Our coder was familiar with Diku, but couldn't do squat with this one, since hardly a line was unmodified.
The coder/builder dichotomy was somewhat annoying, though. I always hated having to send my ideas to the coder, then wait for him to find a way to implement it, then send his particular implementation back down so I could maybe/perhaps do what I needed to do.
They (the liberals) have already destroyed the first two parts of the first amendment "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" by laws that 'separate church and state'.
Huh? It seems making laws to keep a separate church and state are completely in the spirit of the lines of the Constitution you cite. There is no law prohibiting you from being as religious as you want (if there was, all these mega-churches would be doomed). Yes, there are laws keeping us from having a theocracy (this generally fails, look at all the republican candidates and presidents of the last 30 years), and laws keeping religions getting federal funding. I see no objection with these, since they do not hinder your individual ability to practice your religion.
Hopefully we pass more laws against enforcing religion on a government level, since I find it silly to be forced to live by the tenets of a system whose basis I disagree with. Before you object to that, imagine yourself implanted into a Muslim theocracy, or a Hindu theocracy. And no, we are NOT a christian nation, our founders were not Christians anything like they are today. They were deists, who have more in common with atheists than modern Christians.
It's funny listening to Obama preaching about raising taxes. Assuming American companies said "Gee, Obama is right, we should pay more taxes!", which companies does Obama think could afford to pay those taxes?
I don't give a rats ass about American corporations, and they don't give a rats ass about me, an American citizen. I would rather the government care more about me than some opportunistic, amoral, legal fiction. I could care even less for them because they use unsustainable business plans, and then steal my money when they fail, but what do they care since their officers have multiple billions of dollars in the bank, the US economy could tank they wouldn't suffer one bit.
Oh, but the jobs! Wait, these companies that manufacture things, which used to be the pillar holding America up, they decided that employing people in third world countries are better than here. They still don't have much of a stake in the US, and oddly the US citizens have less of a stake in them, and increasingly so. Most of them are US companies in name only, with 90% of their workforce being foreign. If they aren't even paying taxes, then screw them.
Toyota going out of business would be a far greater blow to America than GM or Chrysler, since they employ more American workers.
Odd thing, I live in a Democracy (well a Republic, but still), therefore a majority of the people (or at least states) voted for Obama and Bush. Under this political system, this means that they have a limited amount of time to do our (the majorities) bidding, and if they don't we get rid of them. To sum it all up with a cliche, people get the government they deserve.
There really isn't much point in complaining, vote for "the other guy" next time, though I'm guessing he will be just as bad. We seem to be on a 50 year roll for picking the worst possible person.
Yes, I have issues with Obama giving money away to a bunch of companies that caused these problems anyway. I'm not a libertarian or a free marketer, but I think that companies like AIG really just deserve to die, and would have of their own impetus. But, depending on the state of things in the next 3 years, I won't vote for him again. Unless he's running against someone worse.
This second form of "tyranny" isn't tyranny, its how things work. I disagree, you disagree, then we try to change things. Our country was set up for these very reasons.
Hell, I voted for Dennis Kucinich in the last three primaries, and even wrote him in for the Bush vs. Kerry general. Last election I had a secret hope that Kucinich and Ron Paul would get together and form a coup.
Disgusting bullshit. Even if you were running-around in a white sheet, I couldn't hate you anymore because I think your comment is sick, sick, sick.
No it isn't. Anyone who holds a mere mental structure above human beings (the definition of a fundamentalist) is a threat. This hold true to people who believe in a political ideal to the point of threatening to destroy society, people who hold a religious ideal above the lives of others. Any purely mental, abstract construct should never outweigh human considerations. This isn't just towards the religious, scientists had their moments too, such as eugenics.
I agree, when confronted with reasonable people, it is always best to be reasonable no matter how strong you disagree. But when people aren't willing to be reasonable, or are trying to force something down your throat (this goes for everyone, not just the religious) by means other than logical argument, then I can see some hostility.
There is a certain class of people who are right, will always be right (no amount of evidence to the contrary), and who thus think they know better than you, and thus should have control over your life "for your own good". These are the people who cause atheists to jump up and down and throw nasty names about. Not the other 90% of religious people.
Your analogy is REALLY flawed. Being Black doesn't imply a certain rational framework, or adherence to a certain theory. As far as I know, no ethnicity has a defining body of theory, that once they change their minds, they change their race.
I just stopped believing that the Earth Revolves around the Sun, therefor I ceased to be white.
Your statement is rather silly, since basically your saying that no group that holds a view contrary to science, reason, or evidence, should be discredited, even if this opens a very large can of worms, since there are so many contradictory views. This is especially true when you make a statement of an ontic nature, which is falsifiable such as the claims of the young earthers. Either the world is 3000 years old, or it isn't, and proof would exist that would prove or disprove one or the other claim. Faith never plays into it.
Intolerance would be saying "never tolerate religious group x", which is almost as bad as racism, even if it is much more prevalent than racism. Though oddly religious groups seem much less tolerant than anyone else, since your are a bad bad person if you don't align with their sexual, social, or ideological mores.
I have nothing against religion, or the religious as long as they don't try to muck with my life, or tell me what do based on what their supreme deity of choice told them, since that argument has no bearing on my life. If they keep their ideas away from me, I'll happily ignore them. UNTIL, that is, they try to pass of faith for reason because of religious arguments. The second they say something disprovable, it is fair game, and they shouldn't complain when someone attacks it with evidence, science, and reason.
I cannot scientifically disprove God or gods, but I can easily disprove the world being 3000 years old, or similar claims.
There is no right to be wrong, especially when you try to spread falsehood as unassailable truth (there is no such thing as an unassailable truth, truth should be attacked at every chance we have, just to make sure truth is REALLY truth, and some some pleasing falsehood that makes us happy).
Would it though, if they had to cancel your favorite show because there just isn't enough money to justify making it?
I'd be okay with that, its not like TV is a necessity or anything. I could probably live my life just as well (if not better) without an idiot box. But then again I'm not very typical, since all I really watch on the damn thing is news and Dirty Jobs. One of which I can get on the internet with richer content, the other I really don't care too much about.
I can't even watch network TV anymore, the commercials drive me insane, and counteract the entertainment value of the 40 minute shows in a 60 minute slot. Hulu is even beginning to get there now.
Television competes with other ways to waste time, so even if it tanks there is still the internet, videogames, movies, books, etc... Hell, long walks, and hobbies as well. I could care less.
Actually "Mexican Influenza" would work. Mexican doesn't just refer to people who live in, or are from, Mexico, but also of things that originate in that country. For example; "Last night I ate Mexican food."
I can see more (uninformed) people being offended by that, though, than the term "Swine Flu". Yes, I parenthetically added "uninformed" since this is how I view anyone who backs down from a VERY old naming convention because of the risk that someone might be offended.
Checking Wikipedia real fast has told me something interesting, apparently the WHO does things like this. They renamed the human flavor of the the Hanta virus from Korean Hemorrhagic Fever to HFRS, as too, presumably, not offend Koreans, or more probably, not to hurt their tourism trade. Too bad the the Ebola river valley doesn't have a tourism trade, or we could expect renaming on that. Same with Marburg.
I agree with your assessments of Germany and Vietnam, though I still think it is largely a matter of hindsight. If the solutions were completely obvious, I'm sure they would have been enacted.
I don't think our current problems are as much politics as a lack of decent planning. I think as far as our leaders got was "Lets invade x", but never how to actually get out of it. For the first couple years of Iraq the Dems were rather weak and complacent, letting Bush do whatever he felt like. As for Afghanistan, well... I think the problem with Afghanistan was Iraq. For some reason we decided the the clear and immediate threat, the one that actually committed an act of war, should be on the back burner to a more ideological conflict. We should have put off invading Iraq until we had our horses in a row in Afghanistan.
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Copyright only exists to encourage content creators to create more work, not to guarantee them money for the rest of their lives (and that of their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc...). When Disney decided that copyrights should be perpetual and bought a bunch of politicians to make it so, THEY didn't uphold their part of the bargain (as stated in the Constitution).
Meaning, I have no moral qualms pirating anything where the creator wouldn't receive any benefit from my purchasing it. Pirating Louis Armstrong songs is not morally or ethically wrong, for example, since purchasing it isn't encouraging his zombie to produce further work. The same goes for a stunning amount of music where the band receives very little to no benefit from album sales. For example, if you go buy a Beatles CD, no one from the band receives a cent, so why is pirating it wrong?
Copyright does not exist to guarantee a revenue stream for giant faceless corporations.
I think he's smoking the Constitution.
But the packaging for that album is awesome. Actually most of their packaging is worth the purchase. They are one of the few bands that compel me to actually buy a physical version of music. The rest is all iTunes/Amazon, packaging is generally not worth the extra $5-10.
I like Trent Reznor's approach of adding a PDF of the album art. I think a very small minority of bands on iTunes do it as well.
Correct me if I'm wrong (which isn't rare); but the Japanese style trains sound expensive airplanes the way you describe them. What application do these have in Japan then, last time I checked Japan was pretty small, and dense. How do they over come these problems?
Personally I think we should have a intercontinental commuter rail system, at least linking major cities. Sure we have Amtrack, but as it currently stands they are full of fail in most places that isn't the North East. I don't know anything about the technology involved, so I'll leave that up to those who do, I also would be rabidly opposed to it if it involved taking funding from fixing up our existent bits of decaying infrastructure.
One quick point, the infrastructure doesn't actually exist in this case, so I'd see no problem with an updated design, or some sort of Japanese style bullet.
That said, I agree with you completely.
If I were you, I'd move the hell out of there. This presumes that you can, and you may have a number of really good reasons why you can't.
Move where? Its not like much of the US (world) is running on any sustainable level. Sure, we don't have enough water, neither does many places where you think it wouldn't be an issue (the NE for example). We're at least smarter than the people in Southern California and Nevada, since we require developers to guarantee 100 years of water before developing any land, something those other idiotic desert boom towns don't do. We at least got somewhat lucky and managed to grab the CAP canal (running from the Colorado river, to Phoenix/Tuscon), and some counties have been smart enough to stockpile that water like mad (not the most populous one, though)
If we ever got smart on our agricultural lobby, and stopped growing cotton (a highly water intensive crop), our water fears would lessen a bit. Something like 80% of our water use, like everywhere else, is agricultural and industrial, meaning we can legislate, or regulate their use to force up some extra water for real people (if we boot the pro-business republican carpet baggers out). We also live in an odd oasis that for some reason looks like a cross between Florida, southern California, and the Midwest, with sprawling green lawns, water hungry trees, more idiotic gold courses than you can shake a hose at. For some reason we've never heard of xeroscaping, even if Tuscon down south is known for it.
As for climate change, I don't think we're going to get the worst of it. Sure, we're in year 15 of a hundred year drought, but we're the desert, we might end up learning this fact. The Anasazi did, not that they are a hopeful example.
Large portions of the worlds population live in deserts, they adapt to it. Something we, for some dumb reason, seem unwilling to do. Let the people who don't like the desert move to cooler climates, let the desert rats (like me) have it.
I doubt, to be more ontopic, that this is going to happen. Arizona is somewhat dumb when it comes to things like this, but I don't think (or at least pray) that we're not this dumb. I'd be happy with a conventional rail portal, preferably if Amtrack actually manned up to the task, and moved their depot someplace useful, and allowed access to Tuscon. They already are a money bleeding, paritally public funded, rail boondoggle, and one is enough.
And some of us hate trees, snow, and a somewhat boring culture. Some of us LIKE the desert, and would wish that all the people from the midwest would go home (as should the Californians), and then we wouldn't have much of a water problem either.
?People are so blindly interested in anything billed as "eco" or "green or "solar" that common sense goes right out the window.
Or, people are genuinely interested in a fast train to replace a tedious, long, boring, and often slow drive, that some people have to do very often (my step-brother is a pilot, he lives in Maricopa, and commutes to Tuscon 3x a week, for example).
As you stated, trains are more efficient than cars, and can run faster, "green" or not, THAT might be why people are interested, or at least its why I'm interested.
The Phoenix Metro area has around 4.2 million, Tuscon Metro has around 1 million, so call it 5 million. And now your math is wrong.
Phoenix, like almost every other town in the world is surrounded by tons and tons of suburbs (though Phoenix is pretty much a suburb of itself). The Phoenix Metro area is generally also the #2 or #3 fastest growing population centers in the U.S. as well.
That said, this is a scam, its a great idea, but still a complete scam. I would love a decent high speed rail system running from Flagstaff to Tuscon, via Phoenix. Phoenix suffers from some of the worst road planning I've ever seen, sometimes it actually takes longer to LEAVE Phoenix, than drive to Flagstaff (around 2 hours). It once took me three hours to get from the I-17 and the 101, to the Carefree Highway (which is about 5 miles). Our planners are building roads based on REALLY old population projections from the 90s, and our TERRIBLE politicians are so hardcore about their anti-pork mumbo-jumbo that Arizona languishes when it comes to fedral funds, meaning our roads suffer even more.
Add to that our rampant corruption, and HUGE amounts of needless sprawl...
If this happens, it will be a massive joke, just like the "light rail", which doesn't serve any purpose (they removed bus routes to run a really slow train down the same central corridors, but with the buses cars could at least turn left and the buses were faster), and is functionally free (no ticket enforcement). /rant
Its a ROM mod, not the ROM itself. Its a file, that tells a program what to modify in the ROM, and as such they are not distributing any copyrighted work, but only a modification to it.
This can be seen as a Doom map pack for the original Cronotrigger.
Yes, yes, small lower case "d" and "r". Absolutely correct, though you should have put them in quotes; just to drop a pedant bomb on you as well.
I know, though, that republics and democracies are not mutually exclusive, but generally anytime some on states "the U.S. is a democracy." some uninformed wanker will leap from the woodwork and yell "No! We are a republic!" as if the were mutally exclusive, and as if being a republic was somehow inferior to being a democracy, and this is the fault of whatnot and why politics suck.
That is why I ran with and implied difference, is to head the idiots off at the pass, Yes, not pedant-friendly, but idiot-friendly. There is much more of the former to worry about, than the latter.
I recommend plenty of grains, and perhaps some flax (to keep the coat healthy, for the yearly shearing). Also avoid rural Scotland, or the American south.
While I'm not nearly as bad as the person your replying too (and potentially bating) my legs indeed got all "twitchy" and kept me from sleeping BEFORE the "RLS" ads. It might not have been "RLS", since the term wasn't coined yet, but the symptoms were still there. I'm lucky enough to have it very mild, so I mocked it as well, but one of my freind's gets only 30% of normal sleep because of it, and this was true BEFORE, yet again, the ad campaign.
In other words, just because Pfizer invented "ED" (Erectile Disfunction) as a term, they didn't invent the fact that some men had a hard time "responding". Yes, they raised consciousness, and even created a misguided capitalist frenzy, but it still was an existent problem which they found a fix for.
I will agree with you on ADD (especially "adult ADD", its called "you have a boring life") and Aspergers. Both of these fit a need to make us feel special, and ADD, like most cases of depression, are normal reactions to an unhealthy environment. The difference, here, is that these are MENTAL disorders, not somatic ones.
Nethack is a TERRIBLE thing to compare normal games too, nothing has has that much depth. I remember trying to explain to my girlfriend how to play Nethack (she's now more addicted than I am), and finally just told her "if you start sucking, Google knows why". I've been playing for years, and I'm sure I'm missing a couple strange quirks. There isn't many games like that, graphical or non.
The original Rogue wasn't terribly complex, really. Perhaps a little more nuanced than the Diablo series, but not too much more. Diablo did a decent job melding Rogue-likes to modern gaming. Diablo 2 was a bit better at it, since there was a decent degree of hidden complexity in it, especially so when playing Hardcore, with real death like the roguelikes.
Diku was very powerful, once you got used to it. For awhile me and some freinds were running a fork of an existing mud as a platform, it was so heavily modified by the original coders to be practically not Diku anymore. Our coder was familiar with Diku, but couldn't do squat with this one, since hardly a line was unmodified.
The coder/builder dichotomy was somewhat annoying, though. I always hated having to send my ideas to the coder, then wait for him to find a way to implement it, then send his particular implementation back down so I could maybe/perhaps do what I needed to do.
They (the liberals) have already destroyed the first two parts of the first amendment "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" by laws that 'separate church and state'.
Huh? It seems making laws to keep a separate church and state are completely in the spirit of the lines of the Constitution you cite. There is no law prohibiting you from being as religious as you want (if there was, all these mega-churches would be doomed). Yes, there are laws keeping us from having a theocracy (this generally fails, look at all the republican candidates and presidents of the last 30 years), and laws keeping religions getting federal funding. I see no objection with these, since they do not hinder your individual ability to practice your religion.
Hopefully we pass more laws against enforcing religion on a government level, since I find it silly to be forced to live by the tenets of a system whose basis I disagree with. Before you object to that, imagine yourself implanted into a Muslim theocracy, or a Hindu theocracy. And no, we are NOT a christian nation, our founders were not Christians anything like they are today. They were deists, who have more in common with atheists than modern Christians.
It's funny listening to Obama preaching about raising taxes. Assuming American companies said "Gee, Obama is right, we should pay more taxes!", which companies does Obama think could afford to pay those taxes?
I don't give a rats ass about American corporations, and they don't give a rats ass about me, an American citizen. I would rather the government care more about me than some opportunistic, amoral, legal fiction. I could care even less for them because they use unsustainable business plans, and then steal my money when they fail, but what do they care since their officers have multiple billions of dollars in the bank, the US economy could tank they wouldn't suffer one bit.
Oh, but the jobs! Wait, these companies that manufacture things, which used to be the pillar holding America up, they decided that employing people in third world countries are better than here. They still don't have much of a stake in the US, and oddly the US citizens have less of a stake in them, and increasingly so. Most of them are US companies in name only, with 90% of their workforce being foreign. If they aren't even paying taxes, then screw them.
Toyota going out of business would be a far greater blow to America than GM or Chrysler, since they employ more American workers.
We shouldn't be giving bailouts to ANYONE, ever.
I guess I've been far luckier than you, then. I've met quite a few highly intelligent homeless men in my career.
Actually, I doubt business school attracts people who are much smarter than average.
Odd thing, I live in a Democracy (well a Republic, but still), therefore a majority of the people (or at least states) voted for Obama and Bush. Under this political system, this means that they have a limited amount of time to do our (the majorities) bidding, and if they don't we get rid of them. To sum it all up with a cliche, people get the government they deserve.
There really isn't much point in complaining, vote for "the other guy" next time, though I'm guessing he will be just as bad. We seem to be on a 50 year roll for picking the worst possible person.
Yes, I have issues with Obama giving money away to a bunch of companies that caused these problems anyway. I'm not a libertarian or a free marketer, but I think that companies like AIG really just deserve to die, and would have of their own impetus. But, depending on the state of things in the next 3 years, I won't vote for him again. Unless he's running against someone worse.
This second form of "tyranny" isn't tyranny, its how things work. I disagree, you disagree, then we try to change things. Our country was set up for these very reasons.
Hell, I voted for Dennis Kucinich in the last three primaries, and even wrote him in for the Bush vs. Kerry general. Last election I had a secret hope that Kucinich and Ron Paul would get together and form a coup.
Disgusting bullshit. Even if you were running-around in a white sheet, I couldn't hate you anymore because I think your comment is sick, sick, sick.
No it isn't. Anyone who holds a mere mental structure above human beings (the definition of a fundamentalist) is a threat. This hold true to people who believe in a political ideal to the point of threatening to destroy society, people who hold a religious ideal above the lives of others. Any purely mental, abstract construct should never outweigh human considerations. This isn't just towards the religious, scientists had their moments too, such as eugenics.
I agree, when confronted with reasonable people, it is always best to be reasonable no matter how strong you disagree. But when people aren't willing to be reasonable, or are trying to force something down your throat (this goes for everyone, not just the religious) by means other than logical argument, then I can see some hostility.
There is a certain class of people who are right, will always be right (no amount of evidence to the contrary), and who thus think they know better than you, and thus should have control over your life "for your own good". These are the people who cause atheists to jump up and down and throw nasty names about. Not the other 90% of religious people.
Anyone who forces things on you ":
Your analogy is REALLY flawed. Being Black doesn't imply a certain rational framework, or adherence to a certain theory. As far as I know, no ethnicity has a defining body of theory, that once they change their minds, they change their race.
I just stopped believing that the Earth Revolves around the Sun, therefor I ceased to be white.
Your statement is rather silly, since basically your saying that no group that holds a view contrary to science, reason, or evidence, should be discredited, even if this opens a very large can of worms, since there are so many contradictory views. This is especially true when you make a statement of an ontic nature, which is falsifiable such as the claims of the young earthers. Either the world is 3000 years old, or it isn't, and proof would exist that would prove or disprove one or the other claim. Faith never plays into it.
Intolerance would be saying "never tolerate religious group x", which is almost as bad as racism, even if it is much more prevalent than racism. Though oddly religious groups seem much less tolerant than anyone else, since your are a bad bad person if you don't align with their sexual, social, or ideological mores.
I have nothing against religion, or the religious as long as they don't try to muck with my life, or tell me what do based on what their supreme deity of choice told them, since that argument has no bearing on my life. If they keep their ideas away from me, I'll happily ignore them. UNTIL, that is, they try to pass of faith for reason because of religious arguments. The second they say something disprovable, it is fair game, and they shouldn't complain when someone attacks it with evidence, science, and reason.
I cannot scientifically disprove God or gods, but I can easily disprove the world being 3000 years old, or similar claims.
There is no right to be wrong, especially when you try to spread falsehood as unassailable truth (there is no such thing as an unassailable truth, truth should be attacked at every chance we have, just to make sure truth is REALLY truth, and some some pleasing falsehood that makes us happy).
Would it though, if they had to cancel your favorite show because there just isn't enough money to justify making it?
I'd be okay with that, its not like TV is a necessity or anything. I could probably live my life just as well (if not better) without an idiot box. But then again I'm not very typical, since all I really watch on the damn thing is news and Dirty Jobs. One of which I can get on the internet with richer content, the other I really don't care too much about.
I can't even watch network TV anymore, the commercials drive me insane, and counteract the entertainment value of the 40 minute shows in a 60 minute slot. Hulu is even beginning to get there now.
Television competes with other ways to waste time, so even if it tanks there is still the internet, videogames, movies, books, etc... Hell, long walks, and hobbies as well. I could care less.
Actually "Mexican Influenza" would work. Mexican doesn't just refer to people who live in, or are from, Mexico, but also of things that originate in that country. For example; "Last night I ate Mexican food."
I can see more (uninformed) people being offended by that, though, than the term "Swine Flu". Yes, I parenthetically added "uninformed" since this is how I view anyone who backs down from a VERY old naming convention because of the risk that someone might be offended.
Checking Wikipedia real fast has told me something interesting, apparently the WHO does things like this. They renamed the human flavor of the the Hanta virus from Korean Hemorrhagic Fever to HFRS, as too, presumably, not offend Koreans, or more probably, not to hurt their tourism trade. Too bad the the Ebola river valley doesn't have a tourism trade, or we could expect renaming on that. Same with Marburg.
I agree with your assessments of Germany and Vietnam, though I still think it is largely a matter of hindsight. If the solutions were completely obvious, I'm sure they would have been enacted.
I don't think our current problems are as much politics as a lack of decent planning. I think as far as our leaders got was "Lets invade x", but never how to actually get out of it. For the first couple years of Iraq the Dems were rather weak and complacent, letting Bush do whatever he felt like. As for Afghanistan, well... I think the problem with Afghanistan was Iraq. For some reason we decided the the clear and immediate threat, the one that actually committed an act of war, should be on the back burner to a more ideological conflict. We should have put off invading Iraq until we had our horses in a row in Afghanistan.
But then again, what do I know?