"missile defense" pretty clearly defines the objective with only two words. Perhaps the objective is unnecessary, or the system is unlikely to meet the objective, but I don't think you can say the objective isn't clear.
It's really such a simple proposition, they probably knew it was unconstitutional when they enacted it, but did it anyway to placate some big contributors and lobbyists from the RIAA/MPAA crowd.
If this can be shown to be the case (based on statements they made) for any congressman they should be impeached. The Courts are NOT supposed to be the only arbiters of constitutionality, all three co-equal branches of government take the same oath to uphold the constitution and are expected to do their bit. Congressmen are obligated to vote against a law that they consider unconstitutional, the president is obligated to veto it and the courts are obligated to find it unconstitutional and void it only if the first two checks fail. Arguably the courts aren't even the final arbiters of constitutionality since congress has the power impeach judges and to regulate and even make EXEMPTIONS to the court's appellate jurisdiction. so the most immediate check on a runaway judiciary is supposed to be those same congress-critters that are passing the buck because they think constitutionality is not their problem.
I don't see anything on the site suggesting that Chen is deviously trying to discredit a colleague. It states only that there's an *unpublished* study that doesn't make the mathematical error Chen identified in other studies. If anything scienceblog is the one deviously trying to discredit Chen by overstating his conclusions with this bit:
However, even if that were true, that would not mean that cognitive dissonance does not exist. Chen's argument is of the following form: If Socrates is a woman, then he is mortal. Socrates is not a woman. Therefore, he is not mortal.
Chen never says that "cognitive dissonance does not exist", only scienceblog does as a straw man entirely of it's own invention. Chen explicitly states that his findings don't disprove cognitive dissonance, and further that he wouldn't be surprised if it DOES. He only states that he found a flaw in many of the experiments on the phenomena.
I say "only" because of scienceblog's overstated strawman. If Chen is correct this appears to be no small thing. Much of the foundational research on cognitive dissonance, one of the more thoroughly researched concepts in psychology will be invalidate. While this doesn't say that it doesn't exist, it says we really don't know and even if it does we know a LOT less about it than we thought we did.
As for "discrediting a colleague" Chen's findings do discredit Egan's earlier study with the Monkey's and M&M's but if he's correct that study SHOULD be discredited because it's flawed. It's also hardly fair to slam Chen for not citing Egan's as yet unpublished research in his paper. That her new research apparently seeks to compensate for the flaw Egan found suggests that his paper probably precedes her latest research. This is the whole point of peer review. Egan (and many before her) published their research, a peer reviewed their research and identified a flaw in their methodology, Egan revised her research to remove the flaw. As a result the new research will have more accurate conclusions that we can have more confidence in because flaws are being identified and addressed.
Corporate greed (and government monopolies) prevent connecting rural housing to broadband?
I thought greed and the free market would solve everything!
Ron Paul where are you?!?!?
Corporate greed works great when a bunch of different greedy companies are all vying for your $$$. It's when one corporation is guaranteed the $$$ because the government shuts the doors on the other greedy corps that want it that you get crappy service. It's Lily Tomlin's old AT&T catchphrase in action: "We don't care, we don't have too. We're the phone company".
Verizon FIOS came into my town a couple of years back, all of a sudden COX cable which hadn't increased bandwidth (but had increased prices) in all the years since it was granted the local monopoly found all sorts of ways to increase services, up the bandwidth and lower prices. Sadly for them it was too late, they couldn't come close to competing on service or price. I'm sure they have some customer left around here but suddenly all my friends had @verizon email addresses.
Anyone who has ever read a state constitution will tell you that the federal constitution is a very different sort of beast.
And in most cases the federal constitution looks better by the comparison. The federal constitution may not have the lawyerly precision of some modern state constitutions but it's not particularly vague, nor particularly difficult to understand. Most of the confusion comes from two sources:First, our political class has chosen to ignore the bits they find inconvenient, usually those bits that limit their power or jurisdiction. For instance the enumeration of powers in Article 1 section 8 and the 10th amendment... taken together any layman can figure out what it means and what the implications are for the federal government's power. It takes the highly trained mind of lawyers and politicians in government inconvenienced by (what the untrained see as limitations) to grasp just how confusing and vague it all really is and finally conclude that it means nothing and has no implications.
The other source of confusion is our penchant for reading our dearest political conviction into the constitution even if they're alien to the text. We torture the text to make things we believe are imperative appear there, We think "these are important, fundamental political principles they MUST be in our fundamental political document". But they aren't. The constitution doesn't encode all of our most cherished political imperatives, it's actually a much more mundane document, a dry text about the "plumbing" of government. How it's run, how political decisions are made and who makes them, how, in short, government is "constituted". It's NOT a guarantee of utopian good government. When we see bad government we think it's unconstitutional, that's not true. We could have a truly horrible government run entirely within the bounds set by the constitution. The real protection to our freedoms that the constitution affords isn't in paper promises saying this or that right exists but in the wisdom of how that dry and boring plumbing was put together... separation of powers, limited jurisdictions, checks and balances between competing branches and levels of government. Sadly what usually happens when we torture the text of the constitution to make it reflect our higher political aspirations the mundane checks and concrete protections to our freedom they afford are sacrificed. So we torture the text to grant power to one branch or level over some other to MAKE that other behave in the RIGHT way. So we've empowered the Federal government (especially the federal courts) way beyond the original constitutional bounds to make the states behave. Of course now we have all our eggs in one basket and no recourse should it go bad.
I'd argue that community schooling not only doesn't teach kids how to relate to adults but it actively undermines their ability to relate to not just adults but to anyone who isn't an immediate peer.
But, that wasn't the point of my two comments you responded to directly... I confess to being a little snarky, my point was that you were confronted with an individual who was genuinely *different* and you and your friends had trouble relating to him BUT ironically you were citing as your comparative advantage over him your superior ability to relate to people who are different. It struck me because I have often dealt with objections to home-schooling that ultimately boiled down to a desire for uniformity. "IF we let people teach their own kids who knows what strange, outlandish things they'll teach?" Our actual tolerance of diversity is pretty superficial, it's about skin color, ethnic cuisine and quaint cultural traditions, but we want everyone learning the same ideas, the same uniform culture from the same books.
While I still grant the potential for homeschoolers to be insular, I don't see it as being particularly difficult to address. Homeschooler != "shut in". Older homeschooled kids tend to be quite active in extra-curricular activities outside the home. I suspect that on average they are more deeply involved in a greater number of such extra-curricular activities than their public school peers (and i've seen at least one study that supports that notion, though I can't recall the specifics). When schooling doesn't take up your whole day, and your curriculum is extremely flexible it affords a you a lot of opportunities that aren't otherwise possible. Your community sounds exceptionally multi-cultural but that is not the norm. Most communities are more homogeneous and sadly many of those that aren't also aren't marked by cross-cultural harmony and acceptance either. My own kids may have fewer cross-cultural experiences than yours do, but they have quite a few more than would be the norm in the local public school, in large part that's because of my own relationships. But also because my kids have friends from around the state through the homeschool group we're active in and their other extra-curricular activities.
I think you're sample size of one is a little small to draw a valid conclusion from. And, I'd note that a homeschooler in college in the '80's would be the thin wedge of the homeschool movement before their was much in the way of support groups & resources homeschoolers enjoy today (and thus fewer social opportunities outside the home) so you're looking at the extreme case for poor socialization among homeschoolers. BUT, I'll concede that potential liability, even while I'd say it can also be found among some public and many private schools as well.
On the whole though I stand by my observation that *as a group* homeschooled teens are more socially mature than their community schooled counterparts. The caveat being that any individual in either class may be holding down one end of the bell curve and be better or worse than the average of the other group being compared. I'd imagine that even in your own experiences you've met community schooled individuals that were as socially awkward and difficult as your homeschooled suite-mate, but in those cases you did not attribute their problems with their educational background. As in my own experience I've met both well socialized public school kids, and some shy homeschoolers. (Though I can honestly say I've never met a homeschool teen who was hostile/alienated towards adults which I've definitely encountered with a few public schooled kids.)
I also have to point out that you are making two somewhat contradictory points. 1) Homeschooling is a poor choice because homeschoolers end up only socializing with people like them and so they can't deal with people who are different from them and 2) Homeschooling is a poor choice because it produces people who are too different from us and we can't relate to them.
As a homeschooling dad let me reply to the "socialization" objections that several people have raised. I initially made the decision to homeschool my kids for the academic advantages and figured I'd have to actively mitigate what I saw as the "socialization" weakness of the homeschool model. But, as time has gone on I've come to the conclusion that far from being a weakness socialization is actually the more significant benefit of homeschooling.
I often come into contact with public and private school kids that seem incapable of social interaction with anyone outside of their immediate peer group. They have neither the desire nor the ability to socialize with people outside of a very narrow age bracket. Even within that age bracket they have difficulty socializing with other kids that aren't "like" them. Certainly this isn't true of ALL traditionally schooled kids, and even when it is true it isn't always taken to the extremes of the stereotypically sullen teenager who can only grunt one-word replies when conversing with an adult. And, of course most people continue to grow up and mature beyond the stunted peer-exclusive socialization schools provide as they enter other more natural social situations after graduation.
By contrast though I've never met a homeschool kid (and being active in our state homeschool organization I've met a LOT) that suffered from that apparent inability to interact socially with non-peers (adults, older kids, younger kids). As a class the homeschooled teenagers I've met seem more socially mature than their public/private school counterparts. As they progress through the teen years most of them seem better able socially to enter the adult world sooner and with the opportunities to pursue their own interests afforded by homeschooling they often do.
Electric heat pumps can actually get more heat in your home than they use to do it.
Heat pumps as the name implies aren't generating heat, they're moving it from one place to another and heat pumps using chemical fuels (like natural gas) also get more heat into your home than they use to do it. I doubt converting electrical energy to heat via resistive heating is any more efficient than converting a chemical to heat via combustion. (Certainly not when you consider that most of that electricity is generated using the exact same chemical combustion to produce the same heat, to produce pressure, to spin a turbine, to generate electricity, carried with transmission losses to your electric heater.)
The ONLY reason that chemical fuels seem valuable now is because we essentially get them for free. Or rather, all the work has already been done to store the energy. We just need to dig it up, refine it a bit, and get it where it is needed.
Certainly that's PART of the appeal but I think it's also significant that you can easily store chemicals but it's hard to store electricity. This is particularly relevant when what you want to do with the energy is transportation where you have to store the energy in the vehicle itself. (There are of course modes of transportation like trains which have set routes and it can be arranged that they can be plugged into the grid on those routes, but there are obvious limitations to such vehicles which vehicles that store their own energy don't face)
Meh... this is typical of a healthy party in our two party system. A party broad enough to get over 50% of the vote must of necessity be a coalition of various factions. In the primaries, especially the early primaries, they're in direct competition with each other and the debate can get rough. In the end their interests while not identical, are at least complimentary, some one candidate will win, compromises will be made, losing factions and candidates will be thrown some bones, consensus will be (grudgingly) achieved and unity (at least on the surface) restored (until next time).
I don't think the current discord is structural, the interests of the different factions in the Republican coalition remain complimentary. A consensus candidate is theoretically possible BUT it happens that the actual candidates this cycle are all deeply flawed as consensus candidates so the process is dragging on. Huckabee appeals to his Evangelicals but isn't trusted by libertarians/fiscal conservatives, Gulliani appeals to law & order and hawkish conservatives but has has zero appeal to Evangelicals/social conservatives, Thompson could have had broad appeal to all factions but was a lousy campaigner without a base within any particular faction to build from. Romney says all the right things but he's flip-flopped so much to run as a Republican in MA that nobody's quite sure he means any of it. McCain is most passionate and strident about issues where he disagrees with ALL the factions within his party (and in agreement with their opposition) so he's not trusted. Beyond just disagreeing with them that he seems to go out of his way to piss them off in the course of these debate so he's personally disliked as well. The remaining candidates were protest candidates. I'm sorry supporters of Tom Tancredo, Duncan Hunter and of course Ron Paul but that is the simple fact. Senators and Governors run to win, congressional representatives run to promote some cause. At worst the just want a soapbox to preach from, at best they want enough votes that the major candidates are compelled to move their way to compete for those voters.
Thank you for more fully explaining your theory, I find myself in some agreement with it. Yes, past performance does not guarantee future results BUT it usually is a reliable indicator. Certainly non-voters could theoretically vote and in doing so blow away the assumptions that your gerrymander is founded upon. But, the kind of upheaval that would totally upset the underlying assumptions of the gerrymander are the kinds of upheaval that make questions of how your government is constituted moot. Even a tyrant must consider the popular will on some level. It's a matter of degree. A democracy with extensive gerrymandering is obviously more responsive than a dictatorship needs to be, but it's still less responsive than one without such gerrymanders by making almost all politicians secure in their seats (absent a major political upheaval) and granting the party in power more power than their actual mandate from the people.
Note, being perfectly responsive to the peoples will is NOT necessarily a good thing, I'm not someone that makes a fetish of perfect democracy. A lynch mob after all is a perfect democracy, the large majority is in agreement and the small minority will shortly cease any protest. Elsewhere in this discussion I argue against the direct election of Senators, It's just that our system already accounts for checking the people's will via explicitly non-democratic mechanisms. There's no reason to take the one body which is designed to be the most perfect representation of the popular will and make it less so.
I agree though my reasoning is different. The increased accountability from a smaller number of people makes sense but it's WHO those people are that is important. The constitution as originally conceived was a weird hybrid, it was a single, sovereign national government AND it was a confederacy if sovereign governments (the states). The house reflects the single unified national part with the people proportionally represented by their representatives. The Senate though reflected the "federal" part. Each sovereign STATE had two votes regardless of population because Senators don't represent the people but the states and specifically the state governments. Direct election of Senators totally screws that up the scheme. State governments are no longer represented in the federal government (So it's really not "federal" anymore) separation of powers between the federal and state governments has gone by the wayside and the sates have ceased to be sovereign in any meaningful sense.
All government power has been centralized now. That has led to some good results. Blacks for instance are particularly hostile to federalist ideas because state's rights was the rallying cry of the segregationists who's states were oppressing them. But "Hard cases make bad law". In those cases the centralized power did a good thing but that doesn't mean it will always do so, and now we've put all our eggs in one basket. We have one big, distant government you can't escape, with no countervailing authority to thwart it rather than 50 small governments that you could easily move away from and with another authority capable of stepping if things went too far.
Anyways back to the point. The people who vote don't actually represent the populous. So why does it matter? There are loads of people who cannot vote, tons of people who can but don't register and shitloads that register but never take the time to vote. At any time, if the people thought the redistricting was a problem or their new representative was a problem, they could easily change it by simply registering and showing up to vote.
This also is NOT a problem (whereas gerrymandering is). People who CAN vote yet choose not to are making a political decision. They may do so for complacent, foolish or irresponsible reasons but letting the complacent, foolish and irresponsible self-select out of the process is probably a feature of democracy rather than a bug. In some smaller number of cases not voting is an intentional and valid political decision. You often hear analysis along the lines of "If candidate X gets the nomination, constituency Y who would normally vote for his party will probably stay home in november." That constituency not showing up to vote because of their dissatisfaction with "their" candidate influence the process in their favor, in the next cycle their party will strive to address their issues to get them to the polls. Even complacency is a political posture and may be perfectly valid. Complacency indicates that things are going well (or at least that people are basically content). Huge constituencies with big political differences between them and high political passions leading to high voter turnout are usually the result of a crisis (and often also the cause of subsequent crises). Stable politics, big parties with only marginal differences between them and a complacent voter base indicate an essential contentment with how things are. Should a crisis emerge, sharp differences rise between the parties and politics subsequently becomes more important to people they'll be less complacent and vote, for the guy they think can get them back to that happy place of contentment where they don't *have* to care about politics again.
To the degree that not voting is a problem because of legitimately feeling that voting is meaningless then gerrymandering IS a problem since it's done in such a way as to determine outcome. Of course your vote does still count, those drawing the lines have to draw them around real voters, and there are state-wide races that they can't gerrymander (though history may have "gerrymandered" you into a one-party state). And there's the primaries where you usually have more choices and you can influence the nominee of the pre-determined winning party.
As someone once said "Th constitution isn't perfect... but it's better than what we have now". Sadly the actual constitution of our government (how it's organized and works) bears only a passing resemblance to the written one. Pretty much the entire alphabet soup of federal agencies, and 9/10ths of the laws and federal programs are not authorized in the constitution (see Article 1, section 8. read in light of the 10th amendment) But that's the written constitution and it's just so much paper at this point. Good for praising in the abstract and making us feel good about ourselves but God forbid anyone should apply that text of it to the actual workings of government.
Of course, if we WERE adhering to the written constitution this is all moot since this is not a federal but a STATE case... The 10th amendment cuts both ways, unless the state government is expressly forbidden to do so, it's free to legislate as it pleases in those areas the federal government isn't authorized to.
I noticed that as well. Perhaps they're using personnel other than MPs as guards. OR perhaps they are just being more specific. Which MPs in the given situation as opposed to ALL MPs present. (The MP that is guarding the prisoner as opposed to the one behind the desk taking information.
... Although the President's determination on this issue is final, courts have concurred with his determination.
This is the problem. The Geneva convention states that only a competent tribunal can determine the status of a detainee . Until that happens they are assumed to be legal combatants and POW's. (Article 5 of the GCIII).
I'm not saying this as an opponent of the President or the war. The Geneva conventions are less than ideal when dealing with people you know are going to to abuse the rights given to POW's. Adhering strictly to them would likely have resulted in the deaths of both US personnel and of POW's (POW's are allowed freedoms and possessions you really don't want to give a bunch of fanatical dead-enders that glorify suicide attacks). Many of the decisions about how to deal with the detainees were made immediately after the prison battle of Qala-i-Jangi. Still, the geneva conventions ARE clear on this, and US policy didn't adhere to them. Perhaps tribunals set up in country and working in an expedited manner to merely establish status (but not war crimes) would have been workable.
Where you tripped yourself up was the with this test of property rights as a definition of what you could do with it. That argument is a rough tack to take, because ultimately, somebody out there could always do something more effectively with what you own.
The "test of property rights" has nothing to do with what you're currently doing or not doing with your property, or with whether or not someone could do more. It's simply the origins of property. The sky above your head isn't owned by you, it never was. It's unowned, or publicly owned depending on your view of it. The airlines traveling through that public space isn't a "subsidy"... it's nearer a right.
But, I see that this long diversion into property rights was just to defend the point that spending government money isn't by necessity a bad thing. Fine, you could have made that point up front and I'd have agreed. The question isn't "Is it OK for the government to spend money for the public good?" but "is spending more money beyond the $ Billion a year already spent on Amtrak such a public good?" NOW, there are probably decent arguments in favor of the latter proposition BUT "Airplanes don't have to buy land for rails so it's only fair that neither should railroads" is pretty pathetic.
Rail has a lot of benefits and it should be able to be profitable. A competent business, free from the government interference, red tape, bloat and entitlement attitude that comes with that fat check would be a lot better than the current glorified make-work program. Cut the fat, cut unprofitable routes, focus on those regions where rail travel makes sense and makes a profit. Start with a firm foundation and grow from there. If you MUST have rail travel in all the money loosing routes currently mandated then split those bits off into a separate entity that can continue to live off the government teat, but set the parts that COULD be profitable free so we can have a viable and vibrant rail travel industry instead of what we have now.
Ah... I'm dense, i've been trolled and it took me this long to realize it. Anyway on the odd chance that you're serious in your absolutist, expansive view of property rights (far exceeding the most hard-core anarcho-capitalist libertarian view) I'll respond.
Your view of property seems to be that it's an ever expanding wedge of space starting from a point at the center of the earth expanding out infinitely into space giving you very brief ownership of prime real estate on the sun, moon, entire stars and galaxies etc. Sorry, but that's a clearly flawed and just silly conception. Your further assert that your control over that wedge is absolute, extending to electro-magnetism from TV & radio stations or the neighbors porch light for that matter. As for the rest of us property rights have a vertical limit and if we don't want electromagnetism from our neighbors trespassing we build a faraday cage, or wear tin-foil hats, no one will stop you. Property rights spring from a person's ability to occupy, transform by their labor, or put to use the property. As you have no ability to occupy or use the space an infinite height above that bit of earth you DO own you don't have any natural claim to it. That's the most pro-property rights view of what property *is* fundamentally and how it originates (look up "original appropriation" or the homestead principle, read Locke or Rand, or Rothbard, that's the view MOST sympathetic to yours). You don't have an infinite vertical claim by any view of property rights I've ever heard of. If anything the airlines by their actual use of that space far beyond your ability to do so yourself have a better claim to ownership as the original appropriators of it.
Airlines operate at a profit about as often as George Bush breaks 45% approval rating in the polls.
While some airlines are notoriously unprofitable, others make a tidy sum. As a whole the airline industry is expected to make about $4 billion in profits this year. http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/03/business/airlines.php
An intrinsic advantage of air travel to have my sky ruined by contrails, or have loud planes flying overhead?
An intrinsic advantage to have the Feds legislate flying a model rocket with a decent engine, building a tall building, or flying a balloon, or a kite, or anything like that
Yes an intrinsic advantage like that. Unless you're very close to an airport noise is very rarely an issue and no different than having a railroad as a neighbor. Tall buildings are again only an issue if you're immediately adjacent to an airport. As for balloons, kites and model rockets... If they're going high enough that interrupting air traffic is an issue you're likely going to need to pay your neighbors for the use of *their* airspace (or are you trespassing? or rich enough to own that much land?)
Um, obviously, you've forgotten about the FAA!!!!
Well, most businesses don't consider having a huge federal bureaucracy telling them what they can and can't do a "subsidy" or a benefit of any kind. (unless like the FRA almost the entire budget is one big payout straight to the business;)
but also enormously from gasoline taxes
Do you have a source for this? According to the DOT website the only gasoline taxes going into the AATF are from airplane gasoline taxes on general aviation (so unless you're "driving" a Cesna down the highway you're not paying this). Even that's a small percentage of the total AATF funding (~$10 million out of $11 billion from all sources mostly passenger ticket taxes & usage fees)
I think the FAA costs more per year, as of now, then Amtrak is subsidized over a decade.
True. The FRA is giving ~$900 million in direct payments to Amtrak, Though let's call it an even $1 billion to cover the rest of the FRA's budget like we are the FAA. The FAA budget is about $14 billion.
BUT $11 billion of that is coming FROM air travel via the AATF from ticket and cargo taxes, aircraft fuel taxes and international airport usage fees. Say the total in "subsidies" (funding for the FAA NOT coming from taxes on the industry in the first place) is about $3 billion this year. Since the airlines actually operate at a profit they're even contributing to the US general fund subsidizing them via corporate taxes on that profit... sadly that can't be said for Amtrak.
I'm sure you can find numerous examples of corporate welfare in the air traffic industry. Still, as I said before, nothing that can compare to being carried by the federal government for over 30 years.
a) airlines don't have to pay for the land they fly over. What if I don't want any aircraft flying over my house? That's my land that they are violating.
That's not a subsidy it's an intrinsic advantage of air travel
b) aircraft design is very heavily subsidized by the military. Everything in a commercial aircraft is deritative from bomber design.
Also not a subsidy just a side benefit of military spending that would happen even if there were no 3rd commercial party was incidentally benefiting from it.
c) US airlines are repeatedly bailed out by the government. Look at the how much money the taxpayers forked over to the airlines after 9/11.
Granted, though that one time deal hardly qualifies as "repeatedly" and per passenger mile the worst excesses in corporate welfare in the airline industry can't come close to the subsidies that have kept Amtrak going since 1971.
Slashdot Mirror
"missile defense" pretty clearly defines the objective with only two words. Perhaps the objective is unnecessary, or the system is unlikely to meet the objective, but I don't think you can say the objective isn't clear.
I say "only" because of scienceblog's overstated strawman. If Chen is correct this appears to be no small thing. Much of the foundational research on cognitive dissonance, one of the more thoroughly researched concepts in psychology will be invalidate. While this doesn't say that it doesn't exist, it says we really don't know and even if it does we know a LOT less about it than we thought we did.
As for "discrediting a colleague" Chen's findings do discredit Egan's earlier study with the Monkey's and M&M's but if he's correct that study SHOULD be discredited because it's flawed. It's also hardly fair to slam Chen for not citing Egan's as yet unpublished research in his paper. That her new research apparently seeks to compensate for the flaw Egan found suggests that his paper probably precedes her latest research. This is the whole point of peer review. Egan (and many before her) published their research, a peer reviewed their research and identified a flaw in their methodology, Egan revised her research to remove the flaw. As a result the new research will have more accurate conclusions that we can have more confidence in because flaws are being identified and addressed.
Corporate greed (and government monopolies) prevent connecting rural housing to broadband?
I thought greed and the free market would solve everything!
Ron Paul where are you?!?!?
Corporate greed works great when a bunch of different greedy companies are all vying for your $$$. It's when one corporation is guaranteed the $$$ because the government shuts the doors on the other greedy corps that want it that you get crappy service. It's Lily Tomlin's old AT&T catchphrase in action: "We don't care, we don't have too. We're the phone company".
Verizon FIOS came into my town a couple of years back, all of a sudden COX cable which hadn't increased bandwidth (but had increased prices) in all the years since it was granted the local monopoly found all sorts of ways to increase services, up the bandwidth and lower prices. Sadly for them it was too late, they couldn't come close to competing on service or price. I'm sure they have some customer left around here but suddenly all my friends had @verizon email addresses.
Anyone who has ever read a state constitution will tell you that the federal constitution is a very different sort of beast.
And in most cases the federal constitution looks better by the comparison. The federal constitution may not have the lawyerly precision of some modern state constitutions but it's not particularly vague, nor particularly difficult to understand. Most of the confusion comes from two sources:First, our political class has chosen to ignore the bits they find inconvenient, usually those bits that limit their power or jurisdiction. For instance the enumeration of powers in Article 1 section 8 and the 10th amendment... taken together any layman can figure out what it means and what the implications are for the federal government's power. It takes the highly trained mind of lawyers and politicians in government inconvenienced by (what the untrained see as limitations) to grasp just how confusing and vague it all really is and finally conclude that it means nothing and has no implications.
The other source of confusion is our penchant for reading our dearest political conviction into the constitution even if they're alien to the text. We torture the text to make things we believe are imperative appear there, We think "these are important, fundamental political principles they MUST be in our fundamental political document". But they aren't. The constitution doesn't encode all of our most cherished political imperatives, it's actually a much more mundane document, a dry text about the "plumbing" of government. How it's run, how political decisions are made and who makes them, how, in short, government is "constituted". It's NOT a guarantee of utopian good government. When we see bad government we think it's unconstitutional, that's not true. We could have a truly horrible government run entirely within the bounds set by the constitution. The real protection to our freedoms that the constitution affords isn't in paper promises saying this or that right exists but in the wisdom of how that dry and boring plumbing was put together... separation of powers, limited jurisdictions, checks and balances between competing branches and levels of government. Sadly what usually happens when we torture the text of the constitution to make it reflect our higher political aspirations the mundane checks and concrete protections to our freedom they afford are sacrificed. So we torture the text to grant power to one branch or level over some other to MAKE that other behave in the RIGHT way. So we've empowered the Federal government (especially the federal courts) way beyond the original constitutional bounds to make the states behave. Of course now we have all our eggs in one basket and no recourse should it go bad.
I'd argue that community schooling not only doesn't teach kids how to relate to adults but it actively undermines their ability to relate to not just adults but to anyone who isn't an immediate peer.
But, that wasn't the point of my two comments you responded to directly... I confess to being a little snarky, my point was that you were confronted with an individual who was genuinely *different* and you and your friends had trouble relating to him BUT ironically you were citing as your comparative advantage over him your superior ability to relate to people who are different. It struck me because I have often dealt with objections to home-schooling that ultimately boiled down to a desire for uniformity. "IF we let people teach their own kids who knows what strange, outlandish things they'll teach?" Our actual tolerance of diversity is pretty superficial, it's about skin color, ethnic cuisine and quaint cultural traditions, but we want everyone learning the same ideas, the same uniform culture from the same books.
While I still grant the potential for homeschoolers to be insular, I don't see it as being particularly difficult to address. Homeschooler != "shut in". Older homeschooled kids tend to be quite active in extra-curricular activities outside the home. I suspect that on average they are more deeply involved in a greater number of such extra-curricular activities than their public school peers (and i've seen at least one study that supports that notion, though I can't recall the specifics). When schooling doesn't take up your whole day, and your curriculum is extremely flexible it affords a you a lot of opportunities that aren't otherwise possible. Your community sounds exceptionally multi-cultural but that is not the norm. Most communities are more homogeneous and sadly many of those that aren't also aren't marked by cross-cultural harmony and acceptance either. My own kids may have fewer cross-cultural experiences than yours do, but they have quite a few more than would be the norm in the local public school, in large part that's because of my own relationships. But also because my kids have friends from around the state through the homeschool group we're active in and their other extra-curricular activities.
I think you're sample size of one is a little small to draw a valid conclusion from. And, I'd note that a homeschooler in college in the '80's would be the thin wedge of the homeschool movement before their was much in the way of support groups & resources homeschoolers enjoy today (and thus fewer social opportunities outside the home) so you're looking at the extreme case for poor socialization among homeschoolers. BUT, I'll concede that potential liability, even while I'd say it can also be found among some public and many private schools as well.
On the whole though I stand by my observation that *as a group* homeschooled teens are more socially mature than their community schooled counterparts. The caveat being that any individual in either class may be holding down one end of the bell curve and be better or worse than the average of the other group being compared. I'd imagine that even in your own experiences you've met community schooled individuals that were as socially awkward and difficult as your homeschooled suite-mate, but in those cases you did not attribute their problems with their educational background. As in my own experience I've met both well socialized public school kids, and some shy homeschoolers. (Though I can honestly say I've never met a homeschool teen who was hostile/alienated towards adults which I've definitely encountered with a few public schooled kids.)
I also have to point out that you are making two somewhat contradictory points. 1) Homeschooling is a poor choice because homeschoolers end up only socializing with people like them and so they can't deal with people who are different from them and 2) Homeschooling is a poor choice because it produces people who are too different from us and we can't relate to them.
As a homeschooling dad let me reply to the "socialization" objections that several people have raised. I initially made the decision to homeschool my kids for the academic advantages and figured I'd have to actively mitigate what I saw as the "socialization" weakness of the homeschool model. But, as time has gone on I've come to the conclusion that far from being a weakness socialization is actually the more significant benefit of homeschooling.
I often come into contact with public and private school kids that seem incapable of social interaction with anyone outside of their immediate peer group. They have neither the desire nor the ability to socialize with people outside of a very narrow age bracket. Even within that age bracket they have difficulty socializing with other kids that aren't "like" them. Certainly this isn't true of ALL traditionally schooled kids, and even when it is true it isn't always taken to the extremes of the stereotypically sullen teenager who can only grunt one-word replies when conversing with an adult. And, of course most people continue to grow up and mature beyond the stunted peer-exclusive socialization schools provide as they enter other more natural social situations after graduation.
By contrast though I've never met a homeschool kid (and being active in our state homeschool organization I've met a LOT) that suffered from that apparent inability to interact socially with non-peers (adults, older kids, younger kids). As a class the homeschooled teenagers I've met seem more socially mature than their public/private school counterparts. As they progress through the teen years most of them seem better able socially to enter the adult world sooner and with the opportunities to pursue their own interests afforded by homeschooling they often do.
Electric heat pumps can actually get more heat in your home than they use to do it.
Heat pumps as the name implies aren't generating heat, they're moving it from one place to another and heat pumps using chemical fuels (like natural gas) also get more heat into your home than they use to do it. I doubt converting electrical energy to heat via resistive heating is any more efficient than converting a chemical to heat via combustion. (Certainly not when you consider that most of that electricity is generated using the exact same chemical combustion to produce the same heat, to produce pressure, to spin a turbine, to generate electricity, carried with transmission losses to your electric heater.)
The ONLY reason that chemical fuels seem valuable now is because we essentially get them for free. Or rather, all the work has already been done to store the energy. We just need to dig it up, refine it a bit, and get it where it is needed.
Certainly that's PART of the appeal but I think it's also significant that you can easily store chemicals but it's hard to store electricity. This is particularly relevant when what you want to do with the energy is transportation where you have to store the energy in the vehicle itself. (There are of course modes of transportation like trains which have set routes and it can be arranged that they can be plugged into the grid on those routes, but there are obvious limitations to such vehicles which vehicles that store their own energy don't face)
Meh... this is typical of a healthy party in our two party system. A party broad enough to get over 50% of the vote must of necessity be a coalition of various factions. In the primaries, especially the early primaries, they're in direct competition with each other and the debate can get rough. In the end their interests while not identical, are at least complimentary, some one candidate will win, compromises will be made, losing factions and candidates will be thrown some bones, consensus will be (grudgingly) achieved and unity (at least on the surface) restored (until next time).
I don't think the current discord is structural, the interests of the different factions in the Republican coalition remain complimentary. A consensus candidate is theoretically possible BUT it happens that the actual candidates this cycle are all deeply flawed as consensus candidates so the process is dragging on. Huckabee appeals to his Evangelicals but isn't trusted by libertarians/fiscal conservatives, Gulliani appeals to law & order and hawkish conservatives but has has zero appeal to Evangelicals/social conservatives, Thompson could have had broad appeal to all factions but was a lousy campaigner without a base within any particular faction to build from. Romney says all the right things but he's flip-flopped so much to run as a Republican in MA that nobody's quite sure he means any of it. McCain is most passionate and strident about issues where he disagrees with ALL the factions within his party (and in agreement with their opposition) so he's not trusted. Beyond just disagreeing with them that he seems to go out of his way to piss them off in the course of these debate so he's personally disliked as well. The remaining candidates were protest candidates. I'm sorry supporters of Tom Tancredo, Duncan Hunter and of course Ron Paul but that is the simple fact. Senators and Governors run to win, congressional representatives run to promote some cause. At worst the just want a soapbox to preach from, at best they want enough votes that the major candidates are compelled to move their way to compete for those voters.
Thank you for more fully explaining your theory, I find myself in some agreement with it. Yes, past performance does not guarantee future results BUT it usually is a reliable indicator. Certainly non-voters could theoretically vote and in doing so blow away the assumptions that your gerrymander is founded upon. But, the kind of upheaval that would totally upset the underlying assumptions of the gerrymander are the kinds of upheaval that make questions of how your government is constituted moot. Even a tyrant must consider the popular will on some level. It's a matter of degree. A democracy with extensive gerrymandering is obviously more responsive than a dictatorship needs to be, but it's still less responsive than one without such gerrymanders by making almost all politicians secure in their seats (absent a major political upheaval) and granting the party in power more power than their actual mandate from the people.
Note, being perfectly responsive to the peoples will is NOT necessarily a good thing, I'm not someone that makes a fetish of perfect democracy. A lynch mob after all is a perfect democracy, the large majority is in agreement and the small minority will shortly cease any protest. Elsewhere in this discussion I argue against the direct election of Senators, It's just that our system already accounts for checking the people's will via explicitly non-democratic mechanisms. There's no reason to take the one body which is designed to be the most perfect representation of the popular will and make it less so.
I agree though my reasoning is different. The increased accountability from a smaller number of people makes sense but it's WHO those people are that is important. The constitution as originally conceived was a weird hybrid, it was a single, sovereign national government AND it was a confederacy if sovereign governments (the states). The house reflects the single unified national part with the people proportionally represented by their representatives. The Senate though reflected the "federal" part. Each sovereign STATE had two votes regardless of population because Senators don't represent the people but the states and specifically the state governments. Direct election of Senators totally screws that up the scheme. State governments are no longer represented in the federal government (So it's really not "federal" anymore) separation of powers between the federal and state governments has gone by the wayside and the sates have ceased to be sovereign in any meaningful sense.
All government power has been centralized now. That has led to some good results. Blacks for instance are particularly hostile to federalist ideas because state's rights was the rallying cry of the segregationists who's states were oppressing them. But "Hard cases make bad law". In those cases the centralized power did a good thing but that doesn't mean it will always do so, and now we've put all our eggs in one basket. We have one big, distant government you can't escape, with no countervailing authority to thwart it rather than 50 small governments that you could easily move away from and with another authority capable of stepping if things went too far.
Anyways back to the point. The people who vote don't actually represent the populous. So why does it matter? There are loads of people who cannot vote, tons of people who can but don't register and shitloads that register but never take the time to vote. At any time, if the people thought the redistricting was a problem or their new representative was a problem, they could easily change it by simply registering and showing up to vote.
This also is NOT a problem (whereas gerrymandering is). People who CAN vote yet choose not to are making a political decision. They may do so for complacent, foolish or irresponsible reasons but letting the complacent, foolish and irresponsible self-select out of the process is probably a feature of democracy rather than a bug. In some smaller number of cases not voting is an intentional and valid political decision. You often hear analysis along the lines of "If candidate X gets the nomination, constituency Y who would normally vote for his party will probably stay home in november." That constituency not showing up to vote because of their dissatisfaction with "their" candidate influence the process in their favor, in the next cycle their party will strive to address their issues to get them to the polls. Even complacency is a political posture and may be perfectly valid. Complacency indicates that things are going well (or at least that people are basically content). Huge constituencies with big political differences between them and high political passions leading to high voter turnout are usually the result of a crisis (and often also the cause of subsequent crises). Stable politics, big parties with only marginal differences between them and a complacent voter base indicate an essential contentment with how things are. Should a crisis emerge, sharp differences rise between the parties and politics subsequently becomes more important to people they'll be less complacent and vote, for the guy they think can get them back to that happy place of contentment where they don't *have* to care about politics again.
To the degree that not voting is a problem because of legitimately feeling that voting is meaningless then gerrymandering IS a problem since it's done in such a way as to determine outcome. Of course your vote does still count, those drawing the lines have to draw them around real voters, and there are state-wide races that they can't gerrymander (though history may have "gerrymandered" you into a one-party state). And there's the primaries where you usually have more choices and you can influence the nominee of the pre-determined winning party.
Because I'm a conservative who is concerned about social justice, I agree.
Diamonds She'll pretty much have to
You know, like nunchuku skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills... Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills.
And businesses are owned, operated and staffed by what?
As someone once said "Th constitution isn't perfect... but it's better than what we have now". Sadly the actual constitution of our government (how it's organized and works) bears only a passing resemblance to the written one. Pretty much the entire alphabet soup of federal agencies, and 9/10ths of the laws and federal programs are not authorized in the constitution (see Article 1, section 8. read in light of the 10th amendment) But that's the written constitution and it's just so much paper at this point. Good for praising in the abstract and making us feel good about ourselves but God forbid anyone should apply that text of it to the actual workings of government.
Of course, if we WERE adhering to the written constitution this is all moot since this is not a federal but a STATE case... The 10th amendment cuts both ways, unless the state government is expressly forbidden to do so, it's free to legislate as it pleases in those areas the federal government isn't authorized to.
I noticed that as well. Perhaps they're using personnel other than MPs as guards. OR perhaps they are just being more specific. Which MPs in the given situation as opposed to ALL MPs present. (The MP that is guarding the prisoner as opposed to the one behind the desk taking information.
... Although the President's determination on this issue is final, courts have concurred with his determination.
This is the problem. The Geneva convention states that only a competent tribunal can determine the status of a detainee . Until that happens they are assumed to be legal combatants and POW's. (Article 5 of the GCIII).
I'm not saying this as an opponent of the President or the war. The Geneva conventions are less than ideal when dealing with people you know are going to to abuse the rights given to POW's. Adhering strictly to them would likely have resulted in the deaths of both US personnel and of POW's (POW's are allowed freedoms and possessions you really don't want to give a bunch of fanatical dead-enders that glorify suicide attacks). Many of the decisions about how to deal with the detainees were made immediately after the prison battle of Qala-i-Jangi. Still, the geneva conventions ARE clear on this, and US policy didn't adhere to them. Perhaps tribunals set up in country and working in an expedited manner to merely establish status (but not war crimes) would have been workable.
Where you tripped yourself up was the with this test of property rights as a definition of what you could do with it. That argument is a rough tack to take, because ultimately, somebody out there could always do something more effectively with what you own.
The "test of property rights" has nothing to do with what you're currently doing or not doing with your property, or with whether or not someone could do more. It's simply the origins of property. The sky above your head isn't owned by you, it never was. It's unowned, or publicly owned depending on your view of it. The airlines traveling through that public space isn't a "subsidy"... it's nearer a right.
But, I see that this long diversion into property rights was just to defend the point that spending government money isn't by necessity a bad thing. Fine, you could have made that point up front and I'd have agreed. The question isn't "Is it OK for the government to spend money for the public good?" but "is spending more money beyond the $ Billion a year already spent on Amtrak such a public good?" NOW, there are probably decent arguments in favor of the latter proposition BUT "Airplanes don't have to buy land for rails so it's only fair that neither should railroads" is pretty pathetic.
Rail has a lot of benefits and it should be able to be profitable. A competent business, free from the government interference, red tape, bloat and entitlement attitude that comes with that fat check would be a lot better than the current glorified make-work program. Cut the fat, cut unprofitable routes, focus on those regions where rail travel makes sense and makes a profit. Start with a firm foundation and grow from there. If you MUST have rail travel in all the money loosing routes currently mandated then split those bits off into a separate entity that can continue to live off the government teat, but set the parts that COULD be profitable free so we can have a viable and vibrant rail travel industry instead of what we have now.
Ah... I'm dense, i've been trolled and it took me this long to realize it. Anyway on the odd chance that you're serious in your absolutist, expansive view of property rights (far exceeding the most hard-core anarcho-capitalist libertarian view) I'll respond.
Your view of property seems to be that it's an ever expanding wedge of space starting from a point at the center of the earth expanding out infinitely into space giving you very brief ownership of prime real estate on the sun, moon, entire stars and galaxies etc. Sorry, but that's a clearly flawed and just silly conception. Your further assert that your control over that wedge is absolute, extending to electro-magnetism from TV & radio stations or the neighbors porch light for that matter. As for the rest of us property rights have a vertical limit and if we don't want electromagnetism from our neighbors trespassing we build a faraday cage, or wear tin-foil hats, no one will stop you. Property rights spring from a person's ability to occupy, transform by their labor, or put to use the property. As you have no ability to occupy or use the space an infinite height above that bit of earth you DO own you don't have any natural claim to it. That's the most pro-property rights view of what property *is* fundamentally and how it originates (look up "original appropriation" or the homestead principle, read Locke or Rand, or Rothbard, that's the view MOST sympathetic to yours). You don't have an infinite vertical claim by any view of property rights I've ever heard of. If anything the airlines by their actual use of that space far beyond your ability to do so yourself have a better claim to ownership as the original appropriators of it.
Airlines operate at a profit about as often as George Bush breaks 45% approval rating in the polls.
While some airlines are notoriously unprofitable, others make a tidy sum. As a whole the airline industry is expected to make about $4 billion in profits this year.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/03/business/airlines.php
An intrinsic advantage of air travel to have my sky ruined by contrails, or have loud planes flying overhead?
An intrinsic advantage to have the Feds legislate flying a model rocket with a decent engine, building a tall building, or flying a balloon, or a kite, or anything like that
Yes an intrinsic advantage like that. Unless you're very close to an airport noise is very rarely an issue and no different than having a railroad as a neighbor. Tall buildings are again only an issue if you're immediately adjacent to an airport. As for balloons, kites and model rockets... If they're going high enough that interrupting air traffic is an issue you're likely going to need to pay your neighbors for the use of *their* airspace (or are you trespassing? or rich enough to own that much land?) Um, obviously, you've forgotten about the FAA!!!!
Well, most businesses don't consider having a huge federal bureaucracy telling them what they can and can't do a "subsidy" or a benefit of any kind. (unless like the FRA almost the entire budget is one big payout straight to the business;)
but also enormously from gasoline taxes
Do you have a source for this? According to the DOT website the only gasoline taxes going into the AATF are from airplane gasoline taxes on general aviation (so unless you're "driving" a Cesna down the highway you're not paying this). Even that's a small percentage of the total AATF funding (~$10 million out of $11 billion from all sources mostly passenger ticket taxes & usage fees)
I think the FAA costs more per year, as of now, then Amtrak is subsidized over a decade.
True. The FRA is giving ~$900 million in direct payments to Amtrak, Though let's call it an even $1 billion to cover the rest of the FRA's budget like we are the FAA. The FAA budget is about $14 billion.
BUT $11 billion of that is coming FROM air travel via the AATF from ticket and cargo taxes, aircraft fuel taxes and international airport usage fees. Say the total in "subsidies" (funding for the FAA NOT coming from taxes on the industry in the first place) is about $3 billion this year. Since the airlines actually operate at a profit they're even contributing to the US general fund subsidizing them via corporate taxes on that profit... sadly that can't be said for Amtrak.
I'm sure you can find numerous examples of corporate welfare in the air traffic industry. Still, as I said before, nothing that can compare to being carried by the federal government for over 30 years.
a) airlines don't have to pay for the land they fly over. What if I don't want any aircraft flying over my house? That's my land that they are violating.
That's not a subsidy it's an intrinsic advantage of air travel
b) aircraft design is very heavily subsidized by the military. Everything in a commercial aircraft is deritative from bomber design.
Also not a subsidy just a side benefit of military spending that would happen even if there were no 3rd commercial party was incidentally benefiting from it.
c) US airlines are repeatedly bailed out by the government. Look at the how much money the taxpayers forked over to the airlines after 9/11.
Granted, though that one time deal hardly qualifies as "repeatedly" and per passenger mile the worst excesses in corporate welfare in the airline industry can't come close to the subsidies that have kept Amtrak going since 1971.