I gave you my thoughts. You didn't like them. Why would I waste time on you further?
BTW: in all seriousness, if you think my job can be done by a kid with a calculator and a formula sheet, yet is obscenely highly paid, why don't you do it?
Paleo need not be hunter-gatherer; pastoralists like the Masai eat an essentially all-animal diet.
You are of course correct that grain-eaters will outnumber and thus conquer most H-G people, but that doesn't make any statement either way about the health properties of the diets. A real whole-grain diet doesn't look anything like what most Americans eat, for starters.
Sounds horrible. OTOH, I live in an uncompetitive state, and I have never in my life (age 38) seen a presidential campaign ad on TV at home except on Meet the Press or similar, where they review the week's ads. Went to a wedding in VA in '08 and was stunned by how much I saw when flipping channels.
In a similar all-politics-is-local vein, I've met exactly one politician campaigning door-to-door in my life, but I hear that's de rigueur for local offices and state legislature seats in lots of places.
To make this short, I'm just going to link to their website. Our Party
Going down the list:
Economy: I think that regulations should be subject to cost-benefit analysis. I think subsidizing specific companies is a terrible idea. I'm opposed to the Farm Bill, too, but that's a bipartisan problem. It's a very vague plank, but I'll call it a "soft agree".
Defense: essentially nothing to distinguish the two here, so I'll limit myself to the platitude that the Navy is the most important force we have. Nobody wins this one.
Health care: Obamacare is a disaster in the making that is going to have large, negative, and far-reaching effects that most people have utterly failed to grasp. Major agree with GOP. I'm a doctor, so it's pretty natural I'd agree with them on this.
Education: I believe that school choice is a win. Agree.
Energy: I don't so much agree with the GOP as think that the Democrats don't have a serious energy policy at all. Soft agree.
Courts: I think that the Republican nominees have tended to be a little better on constitutional rights but really can't stand the obsequious deference toward cops and prosecutors. Very soft agree
That's their summation of what they think is important. Additionally, I think that the Republicans are wrong on gay marriage and the drug war, but I'm not very upset about it since the official stance of President Obama in 2008 was opposition to gay marriage - and I don't see a lot of people raking him over the coals on that stance. And the Democrats are no better on the Drug War.
I live in a poor state. I have friends who are coastal liberals, and their ideas are great if you live somewhere that everyone is upper middle class - cue the old Friedman saw about "in America among Scandinavians, we have no poverty either". But most poor people are not poor because they are unlucky, although some are. They are poor because they are dumb - not uneducated and not even lazy, just dumb. All the education spending in the world will not get someone who cannot manage abstract thought to become a college graduate.
As an anesthesiologist, I ask every patient I examine to do the following three things: "Tilt your head all the way back, open your mouth all the way, and stick out your tongue." Try it yourself right now. If done correctly, I should be staring at something that looks like this. It is the single most difficult thing I ask people to do and at least ten percent of ostensibly normal people (i.e., high school graduates/GED holders) can't do it at all. They cannot do it after I demonstrate how to do it and repeat each step until they participate - yes, there are people who literally will not stick out their tongue in response to four or five requests to do so. "Stick your tongue out, please. Just like your mother always told you not to. No, stick it out. No, keep your mouth open and stick it out. No, I don't want to see your tongue, I'm trying to look at the back of your throat. No, you need to stick your tongue out." Ad nauseam. If you cannot get a (theoretically) mentally competent adult to do that, is it really a lack of education that's the problem?
Ultimately, as the old joke goes, liberals think conservatives are evil and conservatives think liberals are hopelessly naïve. Based on my experience with humanity, I fall where I do.
So for you, and for JosephTX, I'd say that refusal to means-test SS is a sign of a lack of seriousness (and I will apply that label to the GOP, too). Cutting defense is probably a good idea but should be done primarily by winding down expensive wars rather than retrenching a peacetime commitment. Healthcare in the US is a long argument that I am not interested in typing out, but the very short version is that if we wanted everyone to be covered we could have expanded Medicaid to cover all citizens and been done with it - no new rules
Depending on what part of the pig it's from, lard can retain a certain delicious porky flavor. I wouldn't eat a sandwich of it, but spreading it on bread like butter? Sure, I could do that.
It's not the most gripping title you've ever read, but you would probably enjoy skimming William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. He mentions an argument by Johann van Thuenen that essentially describes the city as being surrounded by various economic zones, each of which is home to lower-productivity activities the farther one goes from the center - so that activities like vegetable and dairy farming (remember, he's writing in 1826, pre-refrigeration and essentially the very dawn of the railroad, so these are highly perishable products) are close to the center, grains (less perishable) further out than that, wood (for burning, and essentially nonperishable over reasonable time spans) further out than that, and ranching (animals are self-motile and so can travel great distances to markets) farthest of all, with wilderness beyond that is suitable only for hunting and gathering (which, in an early industrial society, meant things like fur trapping).
He advances basically this argument: while it appears that the city subsidizes the hinterland, if one looks only at flows of taxes, the city would not exist without the productivity of the hinterland, and any improvements to transport (e.g.) directly translate into greater trade, of which the city captures the lion's share. New York and Chicago are compared; Chicago became primum inter pares because its location was a great nexus of rail and water transport, and New York was the primary beneficiary because the trade out of Chicago flowed through the Erie Canal and thence to New York City. The same theory essentially explains why Philadelphia was eclipsed by New York in the early history of the US; it had a large, productive hinterland to draw upon, but New York's was even larger.
Oh, do tell. I'm more concerned with cutting carbohydrate than being properly paleo, but the overlap is huge, so I often end up poring over paleo sites for recipes. I've lost 80 lbs/ 35 kg in the past year with no other intervention. Is it right for you? Don't know. It's sure as hell right for me.
Not directed at ferrisoxide: if you are tempted to say "just eat less", then you are not the person who needs to hear this message. The experience of those who have never had difficulty losing weight is as relevant to the average overweight person as the experience of professional athletes is to those who cannot gain muscle.
Not to single you out - I know nothing of your political views - but it does amuse me that one of the more liberal states in the Union doesn't want the slackers in DC on the grounds that they're a bunch of dead-weight degenerates. It's almost as if they don't believe their own hype about how all that you need to do is have a little more spending on education and a little job training and everything will turn into utopia...
Warm weather means you can train year-round. This is especially important for aviation. You're not going to want people up in icing conditions when they're still learning to fly. A SERE course in Pensacola in January isn't fun but it's a lot better than doing the same think in the Lake of the Woods. As for the West, big empty spaces are perfect for maneuver and bombing. And for keeping prying eyes away - Area 51 and the like. Think it through.
You and I probably disagree less than you think. Do remember that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. The libertarian movement has too much vinegar and not enough honey.
It's been nearly 20 years since the GOP fielded somebody with any hope of winning the state and they're getting worse and worse.
You know, if you'd just thought of this statement earlier today, you wouldn't have written something like
And how do you explain states like WA that get ignored despite having only a couple percentage points difference between the parties?
because you'd have realized you already answered your own question. In local politics, social issues are usually unimportant because 1) the focus is on basic good governance: can you pave the streets, keep the schools functioning, and keep a lid on crime? and 2) people in a given area tend to have fairly similar social views. A Republican in WA is almost certainly miles to the left socially of a Democrat in MS - who will oppose gay marriage and abortion. Once you step on the national stage, those social issues loom large, and on the national stage WA goes D every time, so they're not worth courting for either party.
(I'm assuming you're hedwards and forgot to log in.)
The national GOP candidates have not appealed to Washingtonians. The national Democratic candidates have not appealed to Mississippians. So what? The Democrats have become "more extreme" too; Nancy Pelosi isn't Tip O'Neill. I'll bet that most Washington Republicans are pro-choice, just as all Mississippi Democrats are pro-life, but that doesn't mean that either national party is likely to give up its abortion plank any time soon, because doing so wouldn't win enough votes to be worth the change. Washington and Mississippi may have active competition between R and D at the state level, but they are not evenly split when it comes to national politics. I don't know why this surprises anyone.
South of K street N, west of 2nd Street E. That's the part that really needs to be stateless territory. The rest doesn't. It would have taken a big bribe to MD to get them to take it thirty years ago, but with gentrification proceeding apace I think it's a winner today, assuming that the feds thrown in a little property-tax-substitute grant.
Alternatively, every single Democrat in the South is nominally pro-life, too. Why won't the Democrats nominate a pro-life candidate in order to win votes down here?
New York is wealthy precisely because it brokers the trade of all those rural areas. Read Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. It talks about this at length - New York grew to preeminence not just because of its great natural harbor, but because it had access to the Great Lakes via the Erie Canal. Chicago replicated the same feat, only using railroads into the Northwest and Plains instead of canals into the Midwest. Without the hinterland, there would be nothing for New York to sell.
Slashdot Mirror
I gave you my thoughts. You didn't like them. Why would I waste time on you further?
BTW: in all seriousness, if you think my job can be done by a kid with a calculator and a formula sheet, yet is obscenely highly paid, why don't you do it?
Paleo need not be hunter-gatherer; pastoralists like the Masai eat an essentially all-animal diet.
You are of course correct that grain-eaters will outnumber and thus conquer most H-G people, but that doesn't make any statement either way about the health properties of the diets. A real whole-grain diet doesn't look anything like what most Americans eat, for starters.
I'm not really interested in responding to more of your anecdotal experiences,
... followed by paragraphs of just that.
Sounds horrible. OTOH, I live in an uncompetitive state, and I have never in my life (age 38) seen a presidential campaign ad on TV at home except on Meet the Press or similar, where they review the week's ads. Went to a wedding in VA in '08 and was stunned by how much I saw when flipping channels.
In a similar all-politics-is-local vein, I've met exactly one politician campaigning door-to-door in my life, but I hear that's de rigueur for local offices and state legislature seats in lots of places.
Going down the list:
That's their summation of what they think is important. Additionally, I think that the Republicans are wrong on gay marriage and the drug war, but I'm not very upset about it since the official stance of President Obama in 2008 was opposition to gay marriage - and I don't see a lot of people raking him over the coals on that stance. And the Democrats are no better on the Drug War.
I live in a poor state. I have friends who are coastal liberals, and their ideas are great if you live somewhere that everyone is upper middle class - cue the old Friedman saw about "in America among Scandinavians, we have no poverty either". But most poor people are not poor because they are unlucky, although some are. They are poor because they are dumb - not uneducated and not even lazy, just dumb. All the education spending in the world will not get someone who cannot manage abstract thought to become a college graduate.
As an anesthesiologist, I ask every patient I examine to do the following three things: "Tilt your head all the way back, open your mouth all the way, and stick out your tongue." Try it yourself right now. If done correctly, I should be staring at something that looks like this. It is the single most difficult thing I ask people to do and at least ten percent of ostensibly normal people (i.e., high school graduates/GED holders) can't do it at all. They cannot do it after I demonstrate how to do it and repeat each step until they participate - yes, there are people who literally will not stick out their tongue in response to four or five requests to do so. "Stick your tongue out, please. Just like your mother always told you not to. No, stick it out. No, keep your mouth open and stick it out. No, I don't want to see your tongue, I'm trying to look at the back of your throat. No, you need to stick your tongue out." Ad nauseam. If you cannot get a (theoretically) mentally competent adult to do that, is it really a lack of education that's the problem?
Ultimately, as the old joke goes, liberals think conservatives are evil and conservatives think liberals are hopelessly naïve. Based on my experience with humanity, I fall where I do.
So for you, and for JosephTX, I'd say that refusal to means-test SS is a sign of a lack of seriousness (and I will apply that label to the GOP, too). Cutting defense is probably a good idea but should be done primarily by winding down expensive wars rather than retrenching a peacetime commitment. Healthcare in the US is a long argument that I am not interested in typing out, but the very short version is that if we wanted everyone to be covered we could have expanded Medicaid to cover all citizens and been done with it - no new rules
Depending on what part of the pig it's from, lard can retain a certain delicious porky flavor. I wouldn't eat a sandwich of it, but spreading it on bread like butter? Sure, I could do that.
It's not the most gripping title you've ever read, but you would probably enjoy skimming William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. He mentions an argument by Johann van Thuenen that essentially describes the city as being surrounded by various economic zones, each of which is home to lower-productivity activities the farther one goes from the center - so that activities like vegetable and dairy farming (remember, he's writing in 1826, pre-refrigeration and essentially the very dawn of the railroad, so these are highly perishable products) are close to the center, grains (less perishable) further out than that, wood (for burning, and essentially nonperishable over reasonable time spans) further out than that, and ranching (animals are self-motile and so can travel great distances to markets) farthest of all, with wilderness beyond that is suitable only for hunting and gathering (which, in an early industrial society, meant things like fur trapping).
He advances basically this argument: while it appears that the city subsidizes the hinterland, if one looks only at flows of taxes, the city would not exist without the productivity of the hinterland, and any improvements to transport (e.g.) directly translate into greater trade, of which the city captures the lion's share. New York and Chicago are compared; Chicago became primum inter pares because its location was a great nexus of rail and water transport, and New York was the primary beneficiary because the trade out of Chicago flowed through the Erie Canal and thence to New York City. The same theory essentially explains why Philadelphia was eclipsed by New York in the early history of the US; it had a large, productive hinterland to draw upon, but New York's was even larger.
I figured it might be a joke, but you never know when you might learn something ;)
all that it implies
Oh, do tell. I'm more concerned with cutting carbohydrate than being properly paleo, but the overlap is huge, so I often end up poring over paleo sites for recipes. I've lost 80 lbs/ 35 kg in the past year with no other intervention. Is it right for you? Don't know. It's sure as hell right for me.
Not directed at ferrisoxide: if you are tempted to say "just eat less", then you are not the person who needs to hear this message. The experience of those who have never had difficulty losing weight is as relevant to the average overweight person as the experience of professional athletes is to those who cannot gain muscle.
All of the above. Not necessarily for everyone, but for a lot of people.
Not to single you out - I know nothing of your political views - but it does amuse me that one of the more liberal states in the Union doesn't want the slackers in DC on the grounds that they're a bunch of dead-weight degenerates. It's almost as if they don't believe their own hype about how all that you need to do is have a little more spending on education and a little job training and everything will turn into utopia...
I'm aware these people exist, but the dude above me who's posting on /. isn't one of them.
Thank you for a recitation of why I'm not a Democrat already.
Warm weather means you can train year-round. This is especially important for aviation. You're not going to want people up in icing conditions when they're still learning to fly. A SERE course in Pensacola in January isn't fun but it's a lot better than doing the same think in the Lake of the Woods. As for the West, big empty spaces are perfect for maneuver and bombing. And for keeping prying eyes away - Area 51 and the like. Think it through.
It was a necessary compromise at the time that turned out to have some useful emergent properties.
You and I probably disagree less than you think. Do remember that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. The libertarian movement has too much vinegar and not enough honey.
Millenium hand and shrimp.
The Blue Dogs were socially conservative but fiscally redistributionist. That's the exact opposite of what I want.
It's been nearly 20 years since the GOP fielded somebody with any hope of winning the state and they're getting worse and worse.
You know, if you'd just thought of this statement earlier today, you wouldn't have written something like
And how do you explain states like WA that get ignored despite having only a couple percentage points difference between the parties?
because you'd have realized you already answered your own question. In local politics, social issues are usually unimportant because 1) the focus is on basic good governance: can you pave the streets, keep the schools functioning, and keep a lid on crime? and 2) people in a given area tend to have fairly similar social views. A Republican in WA is almost certainly miles to the left socially of a Democrat in MS - who will oppose gay marriage and abortion. Once you step on the national stage, those social issues loom large, and on the national stage WA goes D every time, so they're not worth courting for either party.
(I'm assuming you're hedwards and forgot to log in.)
The national GOP candidates have not appealed to Washingtonians. The national Democratic candidates have not appealed to Mississippians. So what? The Democrats have become "more extreme" too; Nancy Pelosi isn't Tip O'Neill. I'll bet that most Washington Republicans are pro-choice, just as all Mississippi Democrats are pro-life, but that doesn't mean that either national party is likely to give up its abortion plank any time soon, because doing so wouldn't win enough votes to be worth the change. Washington and Mississippi may have active competition between R and D at the state level, but they are not evenly split when it comes to national politics. I don't know why this surprises anyone.
South of K street N, west of 2nd Street E. That's the part that really needs to be stateless territory. The rest doesn't. It would have taken a big bribe to MD to get them to take it thirty years ago, but with gentrification proceeding apace I think it's a winner today, assuming that the feds thrown in a little property-tax-substitute grant.
Does FIRE have a counterpart in Canada?
I think you're going to whoosh a lot of people with that one. 1984 electoral map.
Alternatively, every single Democrat in the South is nominally pro-life, too. Why won't the Democrats nominate a pro-life candidate in order to win votes down here?
New York is wealthy precisely because it brokers the trade of all those rural areas. Read Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. It talks about this at length - New York grew to preeminence not just because of its great natural harbor, but because it had access to the Great Lakes via the Erie Canal. Chicago replicated the same feat, only using railroads into the Northwest and Plains instead of canals into the Midwest. Without the hinterland, there would be nothing for New York to sell.