You must have better grocery stores where you live. I have the ghastly crap chain (Winn-Dixie), the tolerably nice chain (Kroger), and a small regional chain (Brookshire's) that sucks on price but has a good selection.
But the Wal*Mart supercenter absolutely tanks all of them on price, and although Winn-Dixie and Brookshire's are relatively small, Kroger is a behemoth that ought to stand a chance of competing.
Not to mention that Wal*Mart is now opening food-only stores. I went to one in Kingwood, TX; prices were great, selection was better than I expected, and (best of all) it didn't look like a Wal*Mart inside.
Naah, Wal*Mart will conquer all. Of course, given their prices, they probably deserve to.
I can speak with a bit of authority on this matter.
I'm a medical student, and EVERYBODY wants to talk about medicine. All the time. Ad nauseam. And they're all quite keen on a diagnosis.
When you're out in practice, you do have the luxury of saying "well, I can't be sure, why don't you schedule an appointment with my office?" I can't really do that - I can of course encourage them to go see someone about their problem, but that won't get them to stop asking me 8 billion questions about it, or perhaps just engaging me in long, repetitive conversations about this or that medical treatment they read about in People or saw on TV (except Oprah; in my experience she makes a real effort to get things right).
If you know any medical students, please think carefully before asking them any of the following questions at a party:
What are you planning to specialize in? (Best if asked at every party, even if they're only a month apart.)
What have been your most complicated patients?
Do you feel like a doctor yet?
How is it working up there at that humongous public hospital where a third of the patients are complete charity cases with no insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid? Are those people really sick? Do you treat them or boot them out into the cold after stealing their clothes for your gluttonous lucre-lust?
Wow, you've been in school a long time.
and finally
I've been having this problem with my bowels...You'll be very popular.
I live in a metro area with about 300,000 people - Verizon doesn't serve my area, and AT&T didn't until a few months ago. Sometimes you have no choice.
Hate to break it to you, but the economists I've had the honor to meet consider "force of survival" a pretty potent economic factor. No matter which group of discoverers you're talking about, the motive was economic.
Economic doesn't always mean strictly monetary, folks. Keep that in mind.
Mississippi ended prohibition (in the 60's, IIRC) when a party at the Jackson (state capital, for those who've forgotten 5th grade or aren't Americans) Country Club was broken up and all the alcohol in the place destroyed. The mayor and governor were in attendence, among other luminaries of the state.
Alot of people are happy with just a few local channels and don't want to look at all the Blah Blah commercialized Hype.[sic]
So, the broadcast networks are the home of "pure" broadcasting, while the evil cable networks are the commercial pabulum? Take a look around, man. The average person - really average - finds television to be a better use of time than sitting there at home doing literally nothing. If you find the programs bland, and relatively indistinguishable - well, as soon as one network has a good idea, the others will copy it. Big surprise, that. You want some great TV? Pay for it. HBO is about $15/month, tons of movies, great original series.
Remember that the data is not the plural of anecdote, and just because you and your friends hate TV doesn't mean everyone does.
My point was that there is a big difference between taking an inheritance away from a 40-year-old child and taking it away from a 6-year-old one. You punish the survivors of accidental deaths. I don't think very many people in society want to make it illegal for parents to spend anything more than poverty levels on their own children, but that's what "closing all the loopholes" would require.
The very wealthy will find ways around anything; in the simplest case, they move themselves to Monaco and their assets to the Caribbean. In campaigning for the elimination of the estate tax, the Republicans did a poor job of explaining themselves (probably because it doesn't clearly lend itself to sound bites), but the kernel of truth is this: because of the way our tax system is structured, the federal tax burden falls heaviest on those with large wage incomes - generally speaking, professionals like doctors, lawyers, and accountants. These people aren't always (or even often) from especially wealthy families; most I've known are hardworking, bright children of middle-class families. And they, having accumulated a nest egg that could push their children into the next level of wealth, are the kind that are most likely to see that wealth eliminated by taxation.
Better still, offer copyright holders a choice at the inception of the copyright: either it's property, in which case you must pay a property tax each year (but you're allowed to keep it as long as you pay the tax), or it's a limited-term grant of monopoly (in which case it's free, but you only get it for x years).
The logistics aren't fun - how do you assess the value of a copyrighted work - but it's an interesting intellectual position.
Regardless of the merits of death taxes - I'm not terribly fond of them, because they don't accomplish what they're supposed to - a nontrivial inheritance is most certainly a good idea.
If there were, for example, a 100% death tax (with exception for spouse, of course) for all assets above a certain level (say $1 000 000), you are effectively punishing accidental death. An expected death would allow time for you to set up foundations that could employ your offspring, to give them gifts of cash and property, and generally to divest your assets. An unexpected one would result in total elimination of everything you've done.
... and hydroelectric is even less available than wind, and experiences pretty stiff resistance from environmentalists when it's proposed (viz China's Three Gorges dam, or the smash-the-dams movement in the Pacific Northwest).
I'm just saying that while the easy renewables are nifty toys, and certainly fall into the category of "we oughta use these", they aren't going to power the world.
Don't compare nukes to renewables - of course it's a lot cheaper to make electricity when the sun boils the water for you. Compare them to the health and environmental effects of coal, oil, and natural gas, though, and you have a better comparison.
Don't forget that you'll have to wait until Trent Lott is well and truly eclipsed - probably another election cycle or so. His brother-in-law was appointed by Mississippi's attorney general to head up the state's tobacco lawsuit - one that eventually became the large, multi-state settlement.
Incidentally, Trent was always suspiciously quiet on tort reform.
Bush formally withdrew from Kyoto. That was not the death knell; it was the funeral, or perhaps dumping the ashes in a trash can. The US Senate killed Kyoto on a 95-0 vote (see here) in 1997. Clinton was free to keep us tangentially attached to the protocol, because he knew it would get him popularity without any risk of it actually becoming law. Bush is quite a bit more straight-shooting, and said to hell with it.
Kyoto, believe it or not, would really cause immense suffering right now to pretty much the entire population of the earth - because it would flatline the US economy, which has powered the entire world since Japan crashed and Germany reunified.
Most of the developed world's politicians - especially the Europeans - live in countries with strong enough Green factions that supporting Kyoto was guaranteed to give them a few extra votes. It was totally without risk, too, because they knew that the US would play the heavy and kill it. And we did. And they got their votes.
That's at a typical site. We've cherry-picked wind sites up until now.
I'm not saying wind doesn't work - obviously it does - but that it's not a viable source of power for everyone, everywhere. Nukes, like fossil fuels, are.
I understand your concern, but the US has extraordinarily few climate zones that would make sense to any European.
For example, I live in USDA zone 8, close to zone 7 (US Dept of Agriculture zones are a guide to how cold it gets in an average year, in my case 10 to 15 F or -12 to -9.5 C). This is roughly comparable to what you would find in Dijon, Rotterdam, or Hamburg, or maybe in the hills above Trieste.
A typical summer, however, will top 100 F (~38 C) several times, with >75% humidity common - and there are many places both hotter and more humid than this.
I lived one summer in Gainesville, Florida, in the north-central part of the state. At night, it was quite common for the low temperature to be 80 F (27 C), although that was just before dawn - at any reasonable hour, figure on at least 85 (29 C).
Anyway, the North American climate is, to say the least, largely less hospitable than that of Europe.
The air conditioning is still not always necessary at night (which is to say, it's not running much, as it's a central unit with thermostat), but I will be utterly dependent on it in another week or two, and won't turn it off until late October. Around December 1, I'll have to turn it on again for a month or so. (It's not too rare to wear shorts as late as New Year's Day, although it's usually cold.)
Fundamentalist Christians exert about zero influence in the neocon movement.
Bush is assuredly NOT a neoconservative; he just has a lot of them working for him and likes some of their ideas. The most publicly known neocons are largely liberals (in the classical sense) who have drifted to the right on defense and economics. Think of them as what you would get if you convinced a libertarian that the state could do something useful other than guaranteeing contracts.
That said, you're overblowing it. Christianity is not, in the main, undergoing a significant fundamentalist period (despite the popularity of Pentecostalism in the US), and it's not undergoing a holy-war period (except in a few scattered places, like N. Ireland). Do you really think that the people of the US are going to sign up to exterminate every Muslim? The US hasn't exterminated anyone since the American Indians, and we even developed a conscience about that in the late 1800's.
In any case, Americans like their leaders religious - but not too religious. Jimmy Carter really weirded a lot of people out by saying the sorts of things that anyone who's ever lived in the South recognizes as ordinary, everyday talk about faith - like being "born again". Discomfort with the Religious Right and its influence on the Republicans helped push Clinton into office in the '92 elections (not that he needed much of a push).
I assume that by "a truly secular government" you mean one headed by an atheist. Forget it; won't happen.
Abandoning Israel won't happen either. They're not saints, but they are a democracy, and they aren't wrapping themselves in ball bearings and detonating themselves in Palestinian markets. That pretty well assures that the American public will support them - lots of people remember seeing dancing in the streets in Arab cities on 11 September 2001, and that's not an image that dies quickly.
The American people see the UN for what it is - a nice place for diplomats to walk around with lots of untraceable money and pocket it. I'm not saying it does no good - the principle of it is fine, and some of the agencies do fantastic work (like WHO and UNICEF). But the General Assembly grants equal weight to Belize and Brazil, the council on human rights is chaired by Libya, and the Security Council has France with a veto and India without one. It's a fossilization of post-WWII structures, and it's outmoded. The US will continue to seek international support outside it, but we'd be mad as hatters to turn over the resolution of anything to the UN (just look up what the UN's peacekeepers did at Srebrenica).
Anyway, you're way off on the role of religion. People who want to be led will follow someone who leads. Current times aside, a religious leader is often one of the least dangerous people they can follow. Exterminating religion isn't possible, and it isn't desirable. It gives structure, purpose, and meaning to lots of people's lives. It serves a wide variety of useful social purposes. The fact that some people think God wants them to play with rattlesnakes means that they and their religious leaders are, in fact, batshit crazy, but it doesn't mean Christianity should be wiped out. Likewise, the fact that some people think God wants them to blow themselves up and take out a few Jews (or Americans, or for the double bonus an American Jew) in the process means they and their religious leaders are, in fact, barking moonbat crazy, but it doesn't mean Islam should be wiped out.
And that's the view from the heartland. Believe it or not, most of them care.
Males are definitely much more affectionate, but they have also been the best hunters (in my experience). My female was a year-old stray when I found her, and she's only caught one or two birds. Voles, now, she's terror on them, and a flying insect signs its death warrant when it enters the area of our back patio.
But the big males are the squirrel-killers. Of course, if you like squirrels, then you probably want something that sticks to mice.
You're quite right about that; I'm 28, and can run rings around students I tutor with in-the-head and by-hand math.
There's another aspect to it, too, though: I could never figure change in my head until I was maybe 23 or 24, because I'd just not had enough experience buying stuff. (I hate cash, and have used a credit card for probably 80+% of all my change-requiring purchases since age 19. I'm exempting things like vending machines, parking garages, etc., because there's nothing to figure there.)
Though I suppose you'll never read this, I'm fully aware that life would go on if every human died tomorrow. However, saying "would that be so bad" does tend to lump you in with those who really would like the entire human population (except, generally, for those enlightened enough to live "in harmony with nature", which almost always includes the speaker) to kick the bucket post haste.
The offing of humanity en masse was in JDevers' post, not yours. That's why I said "in ref to parents..."
And even if every human on earth died would that really be so bad?
You first. I'll off myself if you do.
Really.
Trust me.
As regards parent posts: you're willing to off some immense portion of humanity - let's be very conservative, and say at least 50% - just to get rid of religious belief? You really need to pause and re-think your moral system.
But then how do you make the accent that points the other way? I'm guessing you just lean really hard on the right side of the key when pressing it, right?
Let's see: à
Yep, it works. Cool. I never knew it could do that.
Oh, sorry; that's an accent grave, and á is an acute accent.
I'm fairly certain that British English would use the accent grave, and I almost mentioned that in my post, but accents in originally-French words are almost always excluded from the American spelling for the simple reason that we don't have keys on our keyboards for them. As a result, we don't know where they belong, even if we're aware that they should be present.
Your concerns are well-founded, but I'd go a step further: the next Outlook-address-book-reading virus won't do anything except send the spammer your address book, which will logically consist exclusively of whitelisted email addresses.
It's a nice step forward, though. I didn't mean to imply that OCR was terribly expensive, just that it's hard enough to do it for tens of millions of messages that it will tend to cut down on spam.
Slashdot Mirror
You must have better grocery stores where you live. I have the ghastly crap chain (Winn-Dixie), the tolerably nice chain (Kroger), and a small regional chain (Brookshire's) that sucks on price but has a good selection. But the Wal*Mart supercenter absolutely tanks all of them on price, and although Winn-Dixie and Brookshire's are relatively small, Kroger is a behemoth that ought to stand a chance of competing. Not to mention that Wal*Mart is now opening food-only stores. I went to one in Kingwood, TX; prices were great, selection was better than I expected, and (best of all) it didn't look like a Wal*Mart inside. Naah, Wal*Mart will conquer all. Of course, given their prices, they probably deserve to.
I'm a medical student, and EVERYBODY wants to talk about medicine. All the time. Ad nauseam. And they're all quite keen on a diagnosis.
When you're out in practice, you do have the luxury of saying "well, I can't be sure, why don't you schedule an appointment with my office?" I can't really do that - I can of course encourage them to go see someone about their problem, but that won't get them to stop asking me 8 billion questions about it, or perhaps just engaging me in long, repetitive conversations about this or that medical treatment they read about in People or saw on TV (except Oprah; in my experience she makes a real effort to get things right).
If you know any medical students, please think carefully before asking them any of the following questions at a party:
What are you planning to specialize in? (Best if asked at every party, even if they're only a month apart.)
What have been your most complicated patients?
Do you feel like a doctor yet?
How is it working up there at that humongous public hospital where a third of the patients are complete charity cases with no insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid? Are those people really sick? Do you treat them or boot them out into the cold after stealing their clothes for your gluttonous lucre-lust?
Wow, you've been in school a long time.
and finally
I've been having this problem with my bowels...You'll be very popular.
I live in a metro area with about 300,000 people - Verizon doesn't serve my area, and AT&T didn't until a few months ago. Sometimes you have no choice.
Economic doesn't always mean strictly monetary, folks. Keep that in mind.
Mississippi ended prohibition (in the 60's, IIRC) when a party at the Jackson (state capital, for those who've forgotten 5th grade or aren't Americans) Country Club was broken up and all the alcohol in the place destroyed. The mayor and governor were in attendence, among other luminaries of the state.
So? As noted elsewhere, our hardcore country boys generally view booze as something to buffer the crystal meth when they can't score a Valium.
I thought we were supposed to like it when people started paying attention to news outside their own town.
Alot of people are happy with just a few local channels and don't want to look at all the Blah Blah commercialized Hype.[sic]
So, the broadcast networks are the home of "pure" broadcasting, while the evil cable networks are the commercial pabulum? Take a look around, man. The average person - really average - finds television to be a better use of time than sitting there at home doing literally nothing. If you find the programs bland, and relatively indistinguishable - well, as soon as one network has a good idea, the others will copy it. Big surprise, that. You want some great TV? Pay for it. HBO is about $15/month, tons of movies, great original series.
Remember that the data is not the plural of anecdote, and just because you and your friends hate TV doesn't mean everyone does.
The very wealthy will find ways around anything; in the simplest case, they move themselves to Monaco and their assets to the Caribbean. In campaigning for the elimination of the estate tax, the Republicans did a poor job of explaining themselves (probably because it doesn't clearly lend itself to sound bites), but the kernel of truth is this: because of the way our tax system is structured, the federal tax burden falls heaviest on those with large wage incomes - generally speaking, professionals like doctors, lawyers, and accountants. These people aren't always (or even often) from especially wealthy families; most I've known are hardworking, bright children of middle-class families. And they, having accumulated a nest egg that could push their children into the next level of wealth, are the kind that are most likely to see that wealth eliminated by taxation.
The logistics aren't fun - how do you assess the value of a copyrighted work - but it's an interesting intellectual position.
If there were, for example, a 100% death tax (with exception for spouse, of course) for all assets above a certain level (say $1 000 000), you are effectively punishing accidental death. An expected death would allow time for you to set up foundations that could employ your offspring, to give them gifts of cash and property, and generally to divest your assets. An unexpected one would result in total elimination of everything you've done.
That would be because they suck.
Give me Beau Rivage, any day. I'm in Jackson, and no way in hell would I drive three hours to hang out at a casino right next to the port.
I'm just saying that while the easy renewables are nifty toys, and certainly fall into the category of "we oughta use these", they aren't going to power the world.
Don't compare nukes to renewables - of course it's a lot cheaper to make electricity when the sun boils the water for you. Compare them to the health and environmental effects of coal, oil, and natural gas, though, and you have a better comparison.
Incidentally, Trent was always suspiciously quiet on tort reform.
Let's hope Bill Frist will do one better.
Bush formally withdrew from Kyoto. That was not the death knell; it was the funeral, or perhaps dumping the ashes in a trash can. The US Senate killed Kyoto on a 95-0 vote (see here) in 1997. Clinton was free to keep us tangentially attached to the protocol, because he knew it would get him popularity without any risk of it actually becoming law. Bush is quite a bit more straight-shooting, and said to hell with it.
Kyoto, believe it or not, would really cause immense suffering right now to pretty much the entire population of the earth - because it would flatline the US economy, which has powered the entire world since Japan crashed and Germany reunified.
Most of the developed world's politicians - especially the Europeans - live in countries with strong enough Green factions that supporting Kyoto was guaranteed to give them a few extra votes. It was totally without risk, too, because they knew that the US would play the heavy and kill it. And we did. And they got their votes.
I'm not saying wind doesn't work - obviously it does - but that it's not a viable source of power for everyone, everywhere. Nukes, like fossil fuels, are.
For example, I live in USDA zone 8, close to zone 7 (US Dept of Agriculture zones are a guide to how cold it gets in an average year, in my case 10 to 15 F or -12 to -9.5 C). This is roughly comparable to what you would find in Dijon, Rotterdam, or Hamburg, or maybe in the hills above Trieste.
A typical summer, however, will top 100 F (~38 C) several times, with >75% humidity common - and there are many places both hotter and more humid than this.
I lived one summer in Gainesville, Florida, in the north-central part of the state. At night, it was quite common for the low temperature to be 80 F (27 C), although that was just before dawn - at any reasonable hour, figure on at least 85 (29 C).
Anyway, the North American climate is, to say the least, largely less hospitable than that of Europe.
The air conditioning is still not always necessary at night (which is to say, it's not running much, as it's a central unit with thermostat), but I will be utterly dependent on it in another week or two, and won't turn it off until late October. Around December 1, I'll have to turn it on again for a month or so. (It's not too rare to wear shorts as late as New Year's Day, although it's usually cold.)
Either way, you're out one squirrel.
Bush is assuredly NOT a neoconservative; he just has a lot of them working for him and likes some of their ideas. The most publicly known neocons are largely liberals (in the classical sense) who have drifted to the right on defense and economics. Think of them as what you would get if you convinced a libertarian that the state could do something useful other than guaranteeing contracts.
That said, you're overblowing it. Christianity is not, in the main, undergoing a significant fundamentalist period (despite the popularity of Pentecostalism in the US), and it's not undergoing a holy-war period (except in a few scattered places, like N. Ireland). Do you really think that the people of the US are going to sign up to exterminate every Muslim? The US hasn't exterminated anyone since the American Indians, and we even developed a conscience about that in the late 1800's.
In any case, Americans like their leaders religious - but not too religious. Jimmy Carter really weirded a lot of people out by saying the sorts of things that anyone who's ever lived in the South recognizes as ordinary, everyday talk about faith - like being "born again". Discomfort with the Religious Right and its influence on the Republicans helped push Clinton into office in the '92 elections (not that he needed much of a push).
I assume that by "a truly secular government" you mean one headed by an atheist. Forget it; won't happen.
Abandoning Israel won't happen either. They're not saints, but they are a democracy, and they aren't wrapping themselves in ball bearings and detonating themselves in Palestinian markets. That pretty well assures that the American public will support them - lots of people remember seeing dancing in the streets in Arab cities on 11 September 2001, and that's not an image that dies quickly.
The American people see the UN for what it is - a nice place for diplomats to walk around with lots of untraceable money and pocket it. I'm not saying it does no good - the principle of it is fine, and some of the agencies do fantastic work (like WHO and UNICEF). But the General Assembly grants equal weight to Belize and Brazil, the council on human rights is chaired by Libya, and the Security Council has France with a veto and India without one. It's a fossilization of post-WWII structures, and it's outmoded. The US will continue to seek international support outside it, but we'd be mad as hatters to turn over the resolution of anything to the UN (just look up what the UN's peacekeepers did at Srebrenica).
Anyway, you're way off on the role of religion. People who want to be led will follow someone who leads. Current times aside, a religious leader is often one of the least dangerous people they can follow. Exterminating religion isn't possible, and it isn't desirable. It gives structure, purpose, and meaning to lots of people's lives. It serves a wide variety of useful social purposes. The fact that some people think God wants them to play with rattlesnakes means that they and their religious leaders are, in fact, batshit crazy, but it doesn't mean Christianity should be wiped out. Likewise, the fact that some people think God wants them to blow themselves up and take out a few Jews (or Americans, or for the double bonus an American Jew) in the process means they and their religious leaders are, in fact, barking moonbat crazy, but it doesn't mean Islam should be wiped out.
And that's the view from the heartland. Believe it or not, most of them care.
But the big males are the squirrel-killers. Of course, if you like squirrels, then you probably want something that sticks to mice.
There's another aspect to it, too, though: I could never figure change in my head until I was maybe 23 or 24, because I'd just not had enough experience buying stuff. (I hate cash, and have used a credit card for probably 80+% of all my change-requiring purchases since age 19. I'm exempting things like vending machines, parking garages, etc., because there's nothing to figure there.)
The offing of humanity en masse was in JDevers' post, not yours. That's why I said "in ref to parents..."
You first. I'll off myself if you do.
Really.
Trust me.
As regards parent posts: you're willing to off some immense portion of humanity - let's be very conservative, and say at least 50% - just to get rid of religious belief? You really need to pause and re-think your moral system.
Let's see: à
Yep, it works. Cool. I never knew it could do that.
Oh, sorry; that's an accent grave, and á is an acute accent.
Your concerns are well-founded, but I'd go a step further: the next Outlook-address-book-reading virus won't do anything except send the spammer your address book, which will logically consist exclusively of whitelisted email addresses.
It's a nice step forward, though. I didn't mean to imply that OCR was terribly expensive, just that it's hard enough to do it for tens of millions of messages that it will tend to cut down on spam.