This alarmism is based on an extrapolation of current conditions. Extrapolations 80 years into the future have a long history of looking laughably silly in hindsight.
The snow on Kilimanjaro was predicted to disappear by 2015 or thereabouts.
Science is all about forming hypotheses, then making falsifiable predictions.
What testable predictions do we have for Ethiopian coffee? What year will coffee be untenable as a crop?
Wait a couple of years and see if these predictions are correct - sounds like a valid test of climate change.
What's the problem with doing that?
(If you don't like waiting years, then let's look at previous testable predictions and see how well they held up. Anyone have a list of testable predictions?)
Look for numerous unanimous decisions like this going forward. This guy is going to make SCOTUS great again with his consensus building activities. I bet he could talk Justice Alito into voting for installing a transgender bathroom in the building.
I rather think that Ruth Bader Ginsburg would hold her own in that discussion.
"Let directors create what they want, and let viewers watch how they want in their own home. That kind of philosophy respects the views of both parties."
The directors/writers/etc don't put language, nudity and violence just for the fun of annoying special snowflakes like yourself. It's part of the characters, part of the experience, part of the story. If you remove things, it's not worth your time.
I hate extreme violence, gore and horror movies in general. So I don't watch horror movies. See how easy that was? Now do the same.
You could just as easily go the other way.
Directors/writers/etc don't subtitle their movies or overdub them. Does that mean I shouldn't watch anime that's been dubbed in English by volunteers?
Directors/writers/etc don't make fun of their movies either. Does that mean I shouldn't watch MST3K movies?
This entire issue seems like a total nothing-burger. People are willing to pay money to watch movies in a specific way, that's fine.
The thing about rights is when you dictate what *other* people can and can't do. Why do we worry about people quietly enjoying modified movies in the privacy of their home?
There's no insight, no tech content, no explanation - just a childish swipe at the elected president.
And to top it off, anyone with half a brain or more would immediately recognize that the times cited in the OP were years before Trump, and mostly during Obama... so that the post casts aspersions on Obama more than Trump.
We're supposed to be the smart people in the room. One side just got done ginning up a sniper to take out the other side - do we really have to stand for this nonsense?
This forum depends on our participation. Can't we just take back control and refuse to mod up this sort of crap?
While this is only partially damning to the US compared to the thousands of other things it is failing at, this method of data collection ignores the need for sampling. Even taking a census of collected data is nothing but a biased sample due to the sheer quantity of data that is never entered into a google search. At best the changes in frequencies may show the behavior of whatever subset of the area targeted participates, but it remains a convenience sample with limited use in larger inference.
And further, it draws conclusions about the data by "rationale". Explaining a reasonable-sounding rationale for the data is not the same as testing a hypothesis.
For example, I'm sure "severed head of Donald Trump" was a big search item a couple of weeks ago. Did this mean that a large part of the population wanted to do him harm?
A lot of people have been searching "Jihad" recently. Can you conclude anything about the people doing the searches, other than they heard something in the news and wanted to find out more?
Could it be that people google things that appear to be are racist and selfish because... they wanted to find out more about what's going on?
Oh boo hoo hoo, milo yogurt and ann coulter couldn't speak on a college campus because of protests. A republican student murdered another student for being black. If you're upset about liberals shutting down free speech but not the massive rise in right-wing hate crimes across the country, are you even fooling yourself? You hate liberals, you don't have a fucking reason other than they're not like you.
During the Milo riots, leftist rioters beat Milo attendees with flagpoles and fists. [MMA fighter] Jake Shields pulled a victim from a crowd of beaters and protected him from harm. When asked, the victim had no idea why he was being beaten. Some of the rioters had simply started calling him [the victim] a nazi, for apparently no reason, and the beatings began from there.
This is why the left keeps saying things about the right that aren't true. They say it because once you've established that someone is a nazi, or islamaphobe, or racist, or so on... once you've established that they are despicable then it's OK to attempt to murder them.
I suppose it's a form of virtue signalling, in the manner of "she's a witch! Burn her!" You are such a good and virtuous person that you actively stamp out evil. It starts by labelling the other person as something despicable.
I've *never* seen the right do that to the extent that the left has done, in the last several months. Apparently holding the bloody, severed head of the president is OK, knifing him to death as part of "Shakespeare in the park" is OK, and putting up disgusting nude statues of him in cities across the nation is considered OK.
The left says a lot of things about the right that simply aren't true, for a reason: it's to justify breaking laws and trampling rights. They want to get their way in any manner possible, and the ends justify any means.
The left says a lot of things about the right that simply aren't true.
"My (corrected) response: "If you have to ask that question, than you know nothing about success.""
"THEN" you two-seat taking dumbass!
Two important points about success.
1) Generally speaking, you can't succeed if you measure your success by what other people think of you.
I don't think creimer gives a rats ass whether his spelling or grammar are perfect in a quickly tossed post, and I would venture to guess that he especially doesn't care what "AC on the internet" thinks.
2) Success has been studied in-depth, and creimer has grasped probably the most important aspect.
Your response makes me think of this George Carlin quote:
There’s a reason you don’t talk to [your HS classmates] for 25 years. Because you don’t particularly like them! Besides, I already know what the captain of the football team is doing these days: mowing my lawn.
with no enforceable requirements. It's a moot point when we pull out. The point is that we've made the gesture to pull out. It's basically a giant middle finger to the rest of the world.
Not *entirely*... it also requires developed nations to give $100 billion annually to the less-developed nations.
Really. The agreement has no enforceable requirements, the goals are paltry and minor, and yet sends $100 billion to undeveloped nations to waste on corruption.
(And the US is already one of the least polluting nations, our measures of pollution have been going down over time, and this trend will continue with the introduction of electric vehicles and drone delivery.)
I honestly have no idea why anyone was ever in favor of the Paris agreement.
Since the Paris deal was never submitted to the Senate for confirmation, it is not a legally binding treaty, only a verbal agreement by Obama.
I am not arguing for or against the climate deal, just pointing out a simple fact of US law.
Citation: US Constitution Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution, includes the Treaty Clause, which empowers the president of the United States to propose and chiefly negotiate agreements, which must be confirmed by the Senate, between the United States and other countries, which become treaties between the United..
That's not even remotely true.
The Paris deal isn't a treaty, it's an "accord". Because that's different, it can be agreed to by the president without any buy-in from the legislature. It comes under the "umbrella" treaty agreement the US has with the UN which *was* ratified by congress.
And if you disagree, note that Obama actually taught constitutional law at college, and no one disagreed with the action at the time - no one in the legislature brought the issue or the supreme court, no group in the US sued the government and pushed it to the supreme court.
I don't know where people get these ideas from. A plain-text reading of the constitution does not always convey the complexity and intricacies of the underlying law.
I can't believe people actually attribute strategy to this guy.
You mean despite winning the election, being a multi-billionaire, being a successful TV star, having a gorgeous wife who's also smart, raising well-mannered kids, and having a cohesive, loving family?
He got all of that without having any strategy - is that what you're saying?
Your side thinks he sabotages his schemes by these tweets.
You mean District Court Judges?
The tweets were used by the judges as justification to override his executive order - that's true.
At the same time, that justification was roundly decried as being inappropriate material to make a judicial decision on.
So sure, you could look at it as sabotaging his plans, but you could also look at it as cementing his case with the supreme court. It was highly likely that the District Court Judges would have overridden his orders anyway, but by using the tweets as justification it looks like partisan partiality.
And in any event, the issue isn't decided yet, since it's going to the supreme court.
He does great at sabotaging his own schemes. It's really great that he lacks a filter.
I would love to be a fly on the wall on his lawyers' office. It's got to have a thick covering of hair of all over the floor.
And while everyone is running around with their hair on fire over "covfefe" and his other tweets, he's been quietly getting his agenda done.
For an example, Jeff Sessions rolled back the Obama-era drug sentencing guidelines, resulting in the harshest possible sentences for drug offenders... which went almost unnoticed by the MSM.
Your side thinks he sabotages his schemes by these tweets.
The rest of us know (and Trump himself knows) that the tweets are meaningless and valueless in and of themselves, but they distract the MSM from what is really going on, and in a way that makes the left look like gibbering imbeciles.
He's been doing this since about *a year* prior to the election, and your side hasn't caught on even yet!
Best SciFi series ever made. No aliens with stuff glued to their foreheads. Realistic space travel. Realistic space problems. Gritty and dirty. And the most complex plot I have ever seen in a TV show.
And furthermore the space battle scenes - which they have 3 or 4 times a season - are absolutely riveting.
As an Engineer, I always see solutions to problems.
As a physicist, I know engineers are not smart enough realize how stupid they are. The hyper loop will never be cheaper than air travel or rail.
I was watching some of the original Mission Impossible episodes recently, and recalling my thoughts on watching them when they were first aired.
Some of them required tiny TV cameras hidden in (for example) a brooch worn by the female lead, and I remember thinking at the time how preposterous that was. The technological problems of getting a videcon that small, the lenses necessary, the power supply to generate the HV necessary for the tube, all the tube or transistor amplifiers, and the dry-cell battery needed to power it for several hours - complete fantasy!
And of course nowadays these devices are on eBay for $10.
You may not see the solutions to the problems today, but you really can't predict what will be possible tomorrow.
There's a difference between physically impossible and technologically impossible.
It's at an all-time high ($347) going into the shareholders meeting, and most of the news is filled with innuendo intended to cause panic selling.
Examples: "Tesla: Could confusion kill model 3?", "Is Tesla Inc Stock Worth All the Controversy?", "Tesla Cars: Easy To Total, Expensive To Repair", and so on.
It's impossible to research stocks by reading the financial news nowadays. Lots of manipulation-driven reporting.
Yes dear AC, like WMD in Iraq, no anthropomorphic climate change, voodoo economics, bombing middle eastern countries will make them peaceful, pollution is good for you, nuclear power is clean as hell and produces no waste products, privatization makes things cheaper, guns make everyone safer.... hell, I could go on all day.
Your post is so amusing. No wonder it is anonymous.
Insightful, with a clear point and historical context. Whether anyone agrees with the position is immaterial - it in NO WAY should have been modded down.
You are a victim of the forces you are commenting upon, and I'm sorry for that.
Was it Trump who misunderstood the study, or government advisers?
Was it Trump who misunderstood the study, or did the study not communicate clearly?
Did the study use a lot of jargon, confusing verbiage, and passive voice?
Did it make clear and specific projections, or was everything couched in "if this scenario and those people do that then something might change here to cause this effect"?
Is the news article cited above just completely and totally wrong, or has it been vetted for accuracy?
If you don't donate, you should start, just for your own health.
I'd be happy to give blood anonymously. Since that is impossible, I don't do it.
It's unfortunate because I have an uncommon type (not the rarest) and try to live charitably.
You can cite all the reasons why it has to be non-anonymous, but the disadvantages to *me* for being non-anonymous outweigh the advantages to "society in general" for these unnecessary restrictions.
Because thanks to Orin Hatch (R-Utah) the burden of proof is on the FDA. Meaning, THEY will have to do the studies and THEY have to prove that the claims are bogus.
Which is as it should be.
Otherwise you have a government agency responsible for any failure of safety regulations, but no burden of cost for implementing those regulations.
And thus it costs $2.5 billion to bring a drug to market because of paranoid bureaucrats terrified of being held responsible for failure...
A stagnant medical industry, littered with improvements that can't be brought to market because they wouldn't be cost effective...
Small-population diseases for which we have cures, but which can't be implemented due to the costs involved with testing...
And the inability for patients with terminal illnesses to "opt out" of the regulation by informed choice, if they want to take a hail-mary chance with a new or innovative solution.
Oh, and mentioning Orrin Hatch is an "appeal to the character of the person", it's basically an emotional argument. I don't know why that's relevant when you could just discuss the issue rationally.
Go check again, the Federal government actually has minimal oversight over schools, healthcare or welfare.
So you're saying that:
"No child left behind" is optional, "Common core" is just a recommendation, I don't have to have health insurance if I don't want it, and the government doesn't set my SSA retirement benefits?
Slashdot Mirror
This alarmism is based on an extrapolation of current conditions. Extrapolations 80 years into the future have a long history of looking laughably silly in hindsight.
The snow on Kilimanjaro was predicted to disappear by 2015 or thereabouts.
Of course, it actually didn't.
Science is all about forming hypotheses, then making falsifiable predictions.
What testable predictions do we have for Ethiopian coffee? What year will coffee be untenable as a crop?
Wait a couple of years and see if these predictions are correct - sounds like a valid test of climate change.
What's the problem with doing that?
(If you don't like waiting years, then let's look at previous testable predictions and see how well they held up. Anyone have a list of testable predictions?)
Look for numerous unanimous decisions like this going forward. This guy is going to make SCOTUS great again with his consensus building activities. I bet he could talk Justice Alito into voting for installing a transgender bathroom in the building.
I rather think that Ruth Bader Ginsburg would hold her own in that discussion.
The directors/writers/etc don't put language, nudity and violence just for the fun of annoying special snowflakes like yourself. It's part of the characters, part of the experience, part of the story. If you remove things, it's not worth your time.
I hate extreme violence, gore and horror movies in general. So I don't watch horror movies. See how easy that was? Now do the same.
You could just as easily go the other way.
Directors/writers/etc don't subtitle their movies or overdub them. Does that mean I shouldn't watch anime that's been dubbed in English by volunteers?
Directors/writers/etc don't make fun of their movies either. Does that mean I shouldn't watch MST3K movies?
This entire issue seems like a total nothing-burger. People are willing to pay money to watch movies in a specific way, that's fine.
The thing about rights is when you dictate what *other* people can and can't do. Why do we worry about people quietly enjoying modified movies in the privacy of their home?
How does this crap get modded up in a tech forum?
There's no insight, no tech content, no explanation - just a childish swipe at the elected president.
And to top it off, anyone with half a brain or more would immediately recognize that the times cited in the OP were years before Trump, and mostly during Obama... so that the post casts aspersions on Obama more than Trump.
We're supposed to be the smart people in the room. One side just got done ginning up a sniper to take out the other side - do we really have to stand for this nonsense?
This forum depends on our participation. Can't we just take back control and refuse to mod up this sort of crap?
Slashdot has been bloody awful lately.
Pointless political articles and click-bait headlines with little or no tech aspect, just what the audience wants to see!
While this is only partially damning to the US compared to the thousands of other things it is failing at, this method of data collection ignores the need for sampling. Even taking a census of collected data is nothing but a biased sample due to the sheer quantity of data that is never entered into a google search. At best the changes in frequencies may show the behavior of whatever subset of the area targeted participates, but it remains a convenience sample with limited use in larger inference.
And further, it draws conclusions about the data by "rationale". Explaining a reasonable-sounding rationale for the data is not the same as testing a hypothesis.
For example, I'm sure "severed head of Donald Trump" was a big search item a couple of weeks ago. Did this mean that a large part of the population wanted to do him harm?
A lot of people have been searching "Jihad" recently. Can you conclude anything about the people doing the searches, other than they heard something in the news and wanted to find out more?
Could it be that people google things that appear to be are racist and selfish because... they wanted to find out more about what's going on?
Oh boo hoo hoo, milo yogurt and ann coulter couldn't speak on a college campus because of protests. A republican student murdered another student for being black. If you're upset about liberals shutting down free speech but not the massive rise in right-wing hate crimes across the country, are you even fooling yourself? You hate liberals, you don't have a fucking reason other than they're not like you.
During the Milo riots, leftist rioters beat Milo attendees with flagpoles and fists. [MMA fighter] Jake Shields pulled a victim from a crowd of beaters and protected him from harm. When asked, the victim had no idea why he was being beaten. Some of the rioters had simply started calling him [the victim] a nazi, for apparently no reason, and the beatings began from there.
This is why the left keeps saying things about the right that aren't true. They say it because once you've established that someone is a nazi, or islamaphobe, or racist, or so on... once you've established that they are despicable then it's OK to attempt to murder them.
I suppose it's a form of virtue signalling, in the manner of "she's a witch! Burn her!" You are such a good and virtuous person that you actively stamp out evil. It starts by labelling the other person as something despicable.
I've *never* seen the right do that to the extent that the left has done, in the last several months. Apparently holding the bloody, severed head of the president is OK, knifing him to death as part of "Shakespeare in the park" is OK, and putting up disgusting nude statues of him in cities across the nation is considered OK.
The left says a lot of things about the right that simply aren't true, for a reason: it's to justify breaking laws and trampling rights. They want to get their way in any manner possible, and the ends justify any means.
The left says a lot of things about the right that simply aren't true.
Don't believe them.
"My (corrected) response: "If you have to ask that question, than you know nothing about success.""
"THEN" you two-seat taking dumbass!
Two important points about success.
1) Generally speaking, you can't succeed if you measure your success by what other people think of you.
I don't think creimer gives a rats ass whether his spelling or grammar are perfect in a quickly tossed post, and I would venture to guess that he especially doesn't care what "AC on the internet" thinks.
2) Success has been studied in-depth, and creimer has grasped probably the most important aspect.
Your response makes me think of this George Carlin quote:
There’s a reason you don’t talk to [your HS classmates] for 25 years. Because you don’t particularly like them! Besides, I already know what the captain of the football team is doing these days: mowing my lawn.
with no enforceable requirements. It's a moot point when we pull out. The point is that we've made the gesture to pull out. It's basically a giant middle finger to the rest of the world.
Not *entirely*... it also requires developed nations to give $100 billion annually to the less-developed nations.
Really. The agreement has no enforceable requirements, the goals are paltry and minor, and yet sends $100 billion to undeveloped nations to waste on corruption.
(And the US is already one of the least polluting nations, our measures of pollution have been going down over time, and this trend will continue with the introduction of electric vehicles and drone delivery.)
I honestly have no idea why anyone was ever in favor of the Paris agreement.
It's a complete and total waste.
Since the Paris deal was never submitted to the Senate for confirmation, it is not a legally binding treaty, only a verbal agreement by Obama.
I am not arguing for or against the climate deal, just pointing out a simple fact of US law.
Citation: US Constitution Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution, includes the Treaty Clause, which empowers the president of the United States to propose and chiefly negotiate agreements, which must be confirmed by the Senate, between the United States and other countries, which become treaties between the United ..
That's not even remotely true.
The Paris deal isn't a treaty, it's an "accord". Because that's different, it can be agreed to by the president without any buy-in from the legislature. It comes under the "umbrella" treaty agreement the US has with the UN which *was* ratified by congress.
And if you disagree, note that Obama actually taught constitutional law at college, and no one disagreed with the action at the time - no one in the legislature brought the issue or the supreme court, no group in the US sued the government and pushed it to the supreme court.
I don't know where people get these ideas from. A plain-text reading of the constitution does not always convey the complexity and intricacies of the underlying law.
I can't believe people actually attribute strategy to this guy.
You mean despite winning the election, being a multi-billionaire, being a successful TV star, having a gorgeous wife who's also smart, raising well-mannered kids, and having a cohesive, loving family?
He got all of that without having any strategy - is that what you're saying?
Your side thinks he sabotages his schemes by these tweets.
You mean District Court Judges?
The tweets were used by the judges as justification to override his executive order - that's true.
At the same time, that justification was roundly decried as being inappropriate material to make a judicial decision on.
So sure, you could look at it as sabotaging his plans, but you could also look at it as cementing his case with the supreme court. It was highly likely that the District Court Judges would have overridden his orders anyway, but by using the tweets as justification it looks like partisan partiality.
And in any event, the issue isn't decided yet, since it's going to the supreme court.
He does great at sabotaging his own schemes. It's really great that he lacks a filter.
I would love to be a fly on the wall on his lawyers' office. It's got to have a thick covering of hair of all over the floor.
And while everyone is running around with their hair on fire over "covfefe" and his other tweets, he's been quietly getting his agenda done.
For an example, Jeff Sessions rolled back the Obama-era drug sentencing guidelines, resulting in the harshest possible sentences for drug offenders... which went almost unnoticed by the MSM.
Trump withdrew from the Paris accord, and Covfefe was the more searched term than Paris Climate Agreement.
Your side thinks he sabotages his schemes by these tweets.
The rest of us know (and Trump himself knows) that the tweets are meaningless and valueless in and of themselves, but they distract the MSM from what is really going on, and in a way that makes the left look like gibbering imbeciles.
He's been doing this since about *a year* prior to the election, and your side hasn't caught on even yet!
Best SciFi series ever made. No aliens with stuff glued to their foreheads. Realistic space travel. Realistic space problems. Gritty and dirty. And the most complex plot I have ever seen in a TV show.
And furthermore the space battle scenes - which they have 3 or 4 times a season - are absolutely riveting.
Another thumbs up for "The Expanse".
As an Engineer, I always see solutions to problems.
As a physicist, I know engineers are not smart enough realize how stupid they are.
The hyper loop will never be cheaper than air travel or rail.
I was watching some of the original Mission Impossible episodes recently, and recalling my thoughts on watching them when they were first aired.
Some of them required tiny TV cameras hidden in (for example) a brooch worn by the female lead, and I remember thinking at the time how preposterous that was. The technological problems of getting a videcon that small, the lenses necessary, the power supply to generate the HV necessary for the tube, all the tube or transistor amplifiers, and the dry-cell battery needed to power it for several hours - complete fantasy!
And of course nowadays these devices are on eBay for $10.
You may not see the solutions to the problems today, but you really can't predict what will be possible tomorrow.
There's a difference between physically impossible and technologically impossible.
I've been following Tesla's stock price of late.
It's at an all-time high ($347) going into the shareholders meeting, and most of the news is filled with innuendo intended to cause panic selling.
Examples: "Tesla: Could confusion kill model 3?", "Is Tesla Inc Stock Worth All the Controversy?", "Tesla Cars: Easy To Total, Expensive To Repair", and so on.
It's impossible to research stocks by reading the financial news nowadays. Lots of manipulation-driven reporting.
Yes dear AC, like WMD in Iraq, no anthropomorphic climate change, voodoo economics, bombing middle eastern countries will make them peaceful, pollution is good for you, nuclear power is clean as hell and produces no waste products, privatization makes things cheaper, guns make everyone safer.... hell, I could go on all day.
Your post is so amusing. No wonder it is anonymous.
I hear 'ya, brother!
Now, can you tell me more about the 31 genders?
Dude, great post!
Insightful, with a clear point and historical context. Whether anyone agrees with the position is immaterial - it in NO WAY should have been modded down.
You are a victim of the forces you are commenting upon, and I'm sorry for that.
But yes, that white Christian terrorism, whoo boy we gotta do something about that!
Faggot.
Now now, let's not be prejudiced!
There's no evidence to suggest that it was Muslim in any way. We should wait until the official reports come in.
Let's not jump to conclusions.
A quick question for everyone.
Kathy Griffin holding the bloody, severed head of the US president was all over twitter the other day.
Does this image count as hate speech? Will Kathy lose her twitter account, or will reposters of the image be banned or penalized in any way?
I'm just wondering if the content is important, as opposed to the political bias.
Not to put too fine a point on the issue but...
Was it Trump who misunderstood the study, or government advisers?
Was it Trump who misunderstood the study, or did the study not communicate clearly?
Did the study use a lot of jargon, confusing verbiage, and passive voice?
Did it make clear and specific projections, or was everything couched in "if this scenario and those people do that then something might change here to cause this effect"?
Is the news article cited above just completely and totally wrong, or has it been vetted for accuracy?
Any reason to bash Trump, I suppose.
If you don't donate, you should start, just for your own health.
I'd be happy to give blood anonymously. Since that is impossible, I don't do it.
It's unfortunate because I have an uncommon type (not the rarest) and try to live charitably.
You can cite all the reasons why it has to be non-anonymous, but the disadvantages to *me* for being non-anonymous outweigh the advantages to "society in general" for these unnecessary restrictions.
Once again, the Simpsons were ahead of their time:
“I tried every tincture and poultice and tonic and patent medicine there is, and all I really needed was the blood of a young boy.”
--Montgomery Burns
Why isn't the FDA shutting this down.
Because thanks to Orin Hatch (R-Utah) the burden of proof is on the FDA. Meaning, THEY will have to do the studies and THEY have to prove that the claims are bogus.
Which is as it should be.
Otherwise you have a government agency responsible for any failure of safety regulations, but no burden of cost for implementing those regulations.
And thus it costs $2.5 billion to bring a drug to market because of paranoid bureaucrats terrified of being held responsible for failure...
A stagnant medical industry, littered with improvements that can't be brought to market because they wouldn't be cost effective...
Small-population diseases for which we have cures, but which can't be implemented due to the costs involved with testing...
And the inability for patients with terminal illnesses to "opt out" of the regulation by informed choice, if they want to take a hail-mary chance with a new or innovative solution.
Oh, and mentioning Orrin Hatch is an "appeal to the character of the person", it's basically an emotional argument. I don't know why that's relevant when you could just discuss the issue rationally.
Go check again, the Federal government actually has minimal oversight over schools, healthcare or welfare.
So you're saying that:
"No child left behind" is optional,
"Common core" is just a recommendation,
I don't have to have health insurance if I don't want it, and
the government doesn't set my SSA retirement benefits?
Is that what you're saying?