People who constant medical support beyond basic medicines are already removed the the military.
A soldier requiring blood pressure/heart medication, or diabetes medication, etc, is not allowed to continue being a soldier. If someone can't survive, or has their usefulness reduced considerably, when not on medication for a day or two, they are given medical discharges.
I'm sure I'm going to get blasted. But anyone who compares this to past military issues like segregation or preventing women from serving isn't being realistic.
The medical costs are an actual issue - The military should NOT pay for gender transition - http://www.military.com/daily-... This is a readiness and leathality issue. Soldiers must be able to fight - it doesn't matter if they are a cook or a band-member. Hormone therapies cause physiological and behavioral changes, surgeries require significant time to heal - this is not conducive to a functioning and coherent squad.
If you have ongoing gender issues/crisis, you should not be entering the military. The military requires stability and focus. Such distractions only detract from readiness and squad relations.
The only way ANY transgender should be allowed is if ze has already completed gender reassignment, is stable, healthy, and requires minimal support (And that means MINIMAL!) People who require regular medical support to be functional are not allowed in the military (diabetics, severe allergies, etc).
However, even if there are transgenders that meet the minimal support requirements, the additional costs of medical testing/vetting transgender recruits are likely also burdensome. I don't think the extra costs are worth catering to what will always be a very small percentage of the overall force.
moronic Republicans on the education boards insist on "teaching the controversy" of their invisible sky man over evolution
Yes, because adding one small thing regarding the evolution debate just kills all other subjects in school. If you think _THAT_ is the dealbreaker you're just as clueless as the rest.
I'm conservative, and I'm all for evolution, and I don't have anything against the invisible sky-man. I'll even think less of schools that don't teach evolution.
But that doesn't mean that the rest of the curriculum - history, math, english/language - is going to be shit. What's shit is schools that hold kids back so that the idiot glue-eaters can 'catch up'. My father was a 5th-grade teacher for 30+ years. By the time he retired, he was teaching stuff in his class that was 3rd-grade material when he started. He had countless kids that could barely read or handle basic mat - the teachers in the earlier grades would simply pass the kids with high because they didn't want to deal with parents. And of course the administration didn't care, nor did the school board - that is until standardized testing exposed how terrible the teachers were.
Do you know what happened then? The teachers started stealing the tests before the exams and had special 'study' sessions. Again the administration looked the other way - the better testing scores looked good, and the union made any type of punishment impossible anyway. My father couldn't get out of their fast enough.
The unions and the touchy-feely 'everyone gets a trophy' and 'everyone is special' crowd have completely fucked up our education system, not the republicans.
If you have a glut of workers, the cost goes down. If you have a limited supply of workers, the cost goes up.
If you manipulate the market by keeping an open supply of low-cost workers (immigration/illegal immigration) - wages lower in accordance with the artificial glut. (population levels go up, however, as does the amount of services the government has to provide, along with maintaining increasing burdens on transportation and housing infrastructure).
If you want naturally higher wages, you have to remove the glut of workers. (or create more jobs, but that's getting cost-prohibitive these days)
Can you read? He said 'bigger mass shootings" "Than ever happened in the US"
The largest in the US is the Pulse Nightclub, at 50 dead. Your links prove that France's attack was 130 dead, and while some of those were bombing victims, more than 50 died of gunfire.
As for the other, he is incorrect. There have been high death toll shootings in places outside of 'gun-free' zones. However, the top 3 mass shootings in the US were in Gun-Free zones. And 8 of the top 10.
You're a vitriolic ideologue who can't read, and a perfect example of the real problem.
Do the math. The promises look good on paper, but don't match reality.
China is already at twice the emissions per GDP than they were in 2005. (2005 = ~400, 2016 = ~960 metric tons) Assuming their average GDP growth is the same as it has been for the last ten years, the promise to peak by 2027-2030 and get to 65% of what they were in 2005 is nonsensical. They would have to be at peak TODAY, and implement drastic actions to cut their current emissions/gdp by 75% within the next 12 years.
If the best the US can do is offer a 27% cut in overall emissions, there's no fucking way China can cut theirs by 75%. The whole agreement is virtue-signalling theater.
China is the one who the primary exporter of most emissions-heavy industries, and other countries will never stop importing products they need, just to make some sort of moral ecological stand.
This just in, belligerent nations also understand the value of global virtue-signalling.
China and India are the ONLY ones that matter in terms of global emissions. They still have 2 billion people between them that are dirt-poor and have yet to take part in their national economy in any meaningful way. Right now, with only 1/4 of their populations economically active, they account for over 37% of TOTAL GLOBAL EMISSIONS.
The US, with 350m people and 99% economic engagement accounts for 16% and decreasing. China and India will continue growing, and their overall percentage will increase dramatically in just 5 years.
Per-capita use isn't an argument either, sure the US has higher per-capita use, but if you look at the actual number of economically engaged people in India and China, their per-capita use is actually higher than the US, it's just averaged out across the other 2 billion people that aren't responsible for anything more than cookfire smoke - no cars, no consumer goods, no roads, no airplane travel, because they can't afford any of those luxuries.
The US was committed to 25%+ reduction in just 7 years. China and India's pledges were next to nothing - no percentages of reductions, just vague promises to spend more on renewables and the (non-binding) promise to do 'something' by 2030. That's a pretty one-sided agreement, and the 25%+ reduction in the US would do absolutely nothing in the long-term for the world, but would hurt the US economy.
Sure, let's sign this magic piece of paper that says that you'll 'agree' to do 'something' - but that 'something' is entirely up to you, and non-binding. It'll look like us world leaders are actually leading, but we won't actually have to do anything besides set a 'goal'. And those fools that actually do something? It'll hurt their economy and push more business to the ones who don't!
1 billion people in China aren't even a part of their economy yet, so they arguably shouldn't be counted.
If you only count the 300-400m people in China that are not dirt-poor farmers living without electricity, cars, paved roads, etc, then the per-capita emissions are TWICE what the average American's is.
Moot point. You're comparing a completely modern 1st-world economy to countries that have higher populations living in primitive conditions than they do in modern conditions.
There's only 300m Chinese that are actively participating in the economy and considered 'middle' class. The other billion are dirt-poor. If you consider that 300-500 million in China represent 30% of total global emissions, what happens when 3 times that many start taking part in the Chinese economy?
India has even less people living modernly, and a higher population than China.
If these two countries do nothing, in 20 years they will account for 70%+ of total global emissions, and total global emissions will be 2-3x the current amount. The US is already modern, and already fairly efficient. We've basically 'peaked' already, our total percentage of global emissions will be less and less.
There is really NOTHING the US can do, the only way to make any meaningful reduction in emissions is to make China and India do it, and they're not going to.
As far as I know, the per-capita emissions are by far highest in the US too followed by the EU, China and India in that order
Perhaps some research before you post?
Top 10 Emissions per capita (via the link posted)
Qatar 39.7
Kuwait 24.4
UAE 21.8
Australia 18.6
Turkmenistan 17.5
Oman 17.5
United States 16.1
Saudi Arabia 16.0
Canada 15.5
Kazakhstan 15.2
It's really a moot point. _NOTHING_ the US does will affect the climate meaningfully. The US is 14% of total emissions. Even if the US were to shut down everything - every car, coalplant, and cow - 86% of emissions (which are already too high to begin with) will still be there, and the other countries will just ramp up production to take up the slack. (In fact, replacing US production with poorer-quality less-efficient production will likely just increase emissions well past what the US is putting out)
The US is not really that dependent on foreign oil anymore. In fact, about 70% of our oil needs are met by our own oil production. Of what oil from 'foreign' sources we do get, about half comes from that far-off land called 'Canada'. We're exporting quite a bit now, to be honest, the US could be basically self-sufficient at this point.
The Paris deal lets countries set their own goals ('Nationally Determined Contributions') and isn't legally binding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So really the Paris Agreement is a plan made up by idealogues who want to 'save the planet'. Those ideologues want to set strict goals in the US (and the EU), affecting Western economies, while countries like India, China, and Russia set goals that do little to curb their emissions (and, of course, don't hurt their own economy)
In short, it's political theater that hurts the west.
"Did this amount to a centrally planned and coordinated effort to exterminate the Armenian people? I don't think so."
You're wrong. Simply, clearly, and provably wrong. There's a whole wikipedia page full of high-level government witnesses - including Turks/Ottomans - that talk about the intentions, the systemic nature, and the results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Basically, the Turks who want to continue to deny the genocide (and you, apparently) are claiming that they didn't _intend_ for 1.5 million to die, it 'just happened' that, after the massacres, everyone who wasn't killed right away somehow died during an organized and planned forced march through the Syrian desert with no food, water, shelter, or rest.
And the justification of some Armenian 'fifth column' is ridiculous. You don't kill all the women, children, and grandparents because a handful of Armenian men are helping the war against you. It was simply an excuse to take action against a hated group people who were already denigrated third-class citizens because they weren't the correct religion.
GOP-installed? Yea, they elevated him to the Chair, but don't forget that that Ajit Pai was put on the commission by Obama. He's a grandstanding tool (and former lawyer for Verizon through his old firm).
One incident doesn't outweigh numerous incidents of violence on the left. And this guy was a one-off loner wacko. I no more consider him the poster-child of the White Supremacist movement than I consider Omar Mateen to be true ISIS.
Also, since we're trying to connect White Supremacists to Nationalists, how does the fact that he posted photos of himself spitting on and burning the American flag fit in to all that? Isn't that a leftist thing?
Because it shows that letting one ideologically homogeneous populous area 'stuff the box' to outweigh the overall results in the other 49 states is a problem - the exact problem the electoral college was created to prevent.
California's (actually, LA/San Fran's) huge mass of +5m votes for Hillary is the _perfect_ example of the wisdom of the electoral college.
Then they'll delay any fixes 'til forever, cancel and discontinue apps that were key features of the TV, etc, etc.
I've got a JS9000 (2015), and I'm still waiting for them to update their HDR code - they've been promising the updated firmware since before the 2016 series came out. The latest promise was that the update would roll out in December - now we're in January and still nothing.
Samsung was great 8 years ago, now they're just pumping out shiny new equipment with features that only partially work. They're the Korean Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
People who constant medical support beyond basic medicines are already removed the the military.
A soldier requiring blood pressure/heart medication, or diabetes medication, etc, is not allowed to continue being a soldier. If someone can't survive, or has their usefulness reduced considerably, when not on medication for a day or two, they are given medical discharges.
Because viagra is exactly the same as castration and cosmetic surgery.
I'm sure I'm going to get blasted. But anyone who compares this to past military issues like segregation or preventing women from serving isn't being realistic.
The medical costs are an actual issue - The military should NOT pay for gender transition - http://www.military.com/daily-... This is a readiness and leathality issue. Soldiers must be able to fight - it doesn't matter if they are a cook or a band-member. Hormone therapies cause physiological and behavioral changes, surgeries require significant time to heal - this is not conducive to a functioning and coherent squad.
If you have ongoing gender issues/crisis, you should not be entering the military. The military requires stability and focus. Such distractions only detract from readiness and squad relations.
The only way ANY transgender should be allowed is if ze has already completed gender reassignment, is stable, healthy, and requires minimal support (And that means MINIMAL!) People who require regular medical support to be functional are not allowed in the military (diabetics, severe allergies, etc).
However, even if there are transgenders that meet the minimal support requirements, the additional costs of medical testing/vetting transgender recruits are likely also burdensome. I don't think the extra costs are worth catering to what will always be a very small percentage of the overall force.
fixes: marks, math, and there.
Dad didn't teach language and typing.
moronic Republicans on the education boards insist on "teaching the controversy" of their invisible sky man over evolution
Yes, because adding one small thing regarding the evolution debate just kills all other subjects in school. If you think _THAT_ is the dealbreaker you're just as clueless as the rest.
I'm conservative, and I'm all for evolution, and I don't have anything against the invisible sky-man. I'll even think less of schools that don't teach evolution.
But that doesn't mean that the rest of the curriculum - history, math, english/language - is going to be shit. What's shit is schools that hold kids back so that the idiot glue-eaters can 'catch up'. My father was a 5th-grade teacher for 30+ years. By the time he retired, he was teaching stuff in his class that was 3rd-grade material when he started. He had countless kids that could barely read or handle basic mat - the teachers in the earlier grades would simply pass the kids with high because they didn't want to deal with parents. And of course the administration didn't care, nor did the school board - that is until standardized testing exposed how terrible the teachers were.
Do you know what happened then? The teachers started stealing the tests before the exams and had special 'study' sessions. Again the administration looked the other way - the better testing scores looked good, and the union made any type of punishment impossible anyway. My father couldn't get out of their fast enough.
The unions and the touchy-feely 'everyone gets a trophy' and 'everyone is special' crowd have completely fucked up our education system, not the republicans.
Or they simply didn't do their paperwork right. Perhaps they chose the wrong type of visa, or waited until the last minute.
Unfortunately the US government usually doesn't give more than vague reasons for denial.
Workers/labor is a commodity, like anything else.
If you have a glut of workers, the cost goes down.
If you have a limited supply of workers, the cost goes up.
If you manipulate the market by keeping an open supply of low-cost workers (immigration/illegal immigration) - wages lower in accordance with the artificial glut. (population levels go up, however, as does the amount of services the government has to provide, along with maintaining increasing burdens on transportation and housing infrastructure).
If you want naturally higher wages, you have to remove the glut of workers. (or create more jobs, but that's getting cost-prohibitive these days)
Can you read? He said 'bigger mass shootings" "Than ever happened in the US"
The largest in the US is the Pulse Nightclub, at 50 dead. Your links prove that France's attack was 130 dead, and while some of those were bombing victims, more than 50 died of gunfire.
As for the other, he is incorrect. There have been high death toll shootings in places outside of 'gun-free' zones. However, the top 3 mass shootings in the US were in Gun-Free zones. And 8 of the top 10.
You're a vitriolic ideologue who can't read, and a perfect example of the real problem.
Do the math. The promises look good on paper, but don't match reality.
China is already at twice the emissions per GDP than they were in 2005. (2005 = ~400, 2016 = ~960 metric tons) Assuming their average GDP growth is the same as it has been for the last ten years, the promise to peak by 2027-2030 and get to 65% of what they were in 2005 is nonsensical. They would have to be at peak TODAY, and implement drastic actions to cut their current emissions/gdp by 75% within the next 12 years.
If the best the US can do is offer a 27% cut in overall emissions, there's no fucking way China can cut theirs by 75%. The whole agreement is virtue-signalling theater.
Your entire comment is based on fantasy.
China is the one who the primary exporter of most emissions-heavy industries, and other countries will never stop importing products they need, just to make some sort of moral ecological stand.
This just in, belligerent nations also understand the value of global virtue-signalling.
China and India are the ONLY ones that matter in terms of global emissions. They still have 2 billion people between them that are dirt-poor and have yet to take part in their national economy in any meaningful way. Right now, with only 1/4 of their populations economically active, they account for over 37% of TOTAL GLOBAL EMISSIONS.
The US, with 350m people and 99% economic engagement accounts for 16% and decreasing. China and India will continue growing, and their overall percentage will increase dramatically in just 5 years.
Per-capita use isn't an argument either, sure the US has higher per-capita use, but if you look at the actual number of economically engaged people in India and China, their per-capita use is actually higher than the US, it's just averaged out across the other 2 billion people that aren't responsible for anything more than cookfire smoke - no cars, no consumer goods, no roads, no airplane travel, because they can't afford any of those luxuries.
The US was committed to 25%+ reduction in just 7 years. China and India's pledges were next to nothing - no percentages of reductions, just vague promises to spend more on renewables and the (non-binding) promise to do 'something' by 2030. That's a pretty one-sided agreement, and the 25%+ reduction in the US would do absolutely nothing in the long-term for the world, but would hurt the US economy.
Sure, let's sign this magic piece of paper that says that you'll 'agree' to do 'something' - but that 'something' is entirely up to you, and non-binding. It'll look like us world leaders are actually leading, but we won't actually have to do anything besides set a 'goal'. And those fools that actually do something? It'll hurt their economy and push more business to the ones who don't!
That's the Paris Agreement in a nutshell.
1 billion people in China aren't even a part of their economy yet, so they arguably shouldn't be counted.
If you only count the 300-400m people in China that are not dirt-poor farmers living without electricity, cars, paved roads, etc, then the per-capita emissions are TWICE what the average American's is.
Moot point. You're comparing a completely modern 1st-world economy to countries that have higher populations living in primitive conditions than they do in modern conditions.
There's only 300m Chinese that are actively participating in the economy and considered 'middle' class. The other billion are dirt-poor. If you consider that 300-500 million in China represent 30% of total global emissions, what happens when 3 times that many start taking part in the Chinese economy?
India has even less people living modernly, and a higher population than China.
If these two countries do nothing, in 20 years they will account for 70%+ of total global emissions, and total global emissions will be 2-3x the current amount. The US is already modern, and already fairly efficient. We've basically 'peaked' already, our total percentage of global emissions will be less and less.
There is really NOTHING the US can do, the only way to make any meaningful reduction in emissions is to make China and India do it, and they're not going to.
As far as I know, the per-capita emissions are by far highest in the US too followed by the EU, China and India in that order
Perhaps some research before you post?
Top 10 Emissions per capita (via the link posted)
Qatar 39.7
Kuwait 24.4
UAE 21.8
Australia 18.6
Turkmenistan 17.5
Oman 17.5
United States 16.1
Saudi Arabia 16.0
Canada 15.5
Kazakhstan 15.2
It's really a moot point. _NOTHING_ the US does will affect the climate meaningfully. The US is 14% of total emissions. Even if the US were to shut down everything - every car, coalplant, and cow - 86% of emissions (which are already too high to begin with) will still be there, and the other countries will just ramp up production to take up the slack. (In fact, replacing US production with poorer-quality less-efficient production will likely just increase emissions well past what the US is putting out)
The US is not really that dependent on foreign oil anymore. In fact, about 70% of our oil needs are met by our own oil production. Of what oil from 'foreign' sources we do get, about half comes from that far-off land called 'Canada'. We're exporting quite a bit now, to be honest, the US could be basically self-sufficient at this point.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/r...
China has double the US Emissions - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
India's emissions are gaining.
The Paris deal lets countries set their own goals ('Nationally Determined Contributions') and isn't legally binding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So really the Paris Agreement is a plan made up by idealogues who want to 'save the planet'. Those ideologues want to set strict goals in the US (and the EU), affecting Western economies, while countries like India, China, and Russia set goals that do little to curb their emissions (and, of course, don't hurt their own economy)
In short, it's political theater that hurts the west.
"Did this amount to a centrally planned and coordinated effort to exterminate the Armenian people?
I don't think so."
You're wrong. Simply, clearly, and provably wrong. There's a whole wikipedia page full of high-level government witnesses - including Turks/Ottomans - that talk about the intentions, the systemic nature, and the results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Basically, the Turks who want to continue to deny the genocide (and you, apparently) are claiming that they didn't _intend_ for 1.5 million to die, it 'just happened' that, after the massacres, everyone who wasn't killed right away somehow died during an organized and planned forced march through the Syrian desert with no food, water, shelter, or rest.
And the justification of some Armenian 'fifth column' is ridiculous. You don't kill all the women, children, and grandparents because a handful of Armenian men are helping the war against you. It was simply an excuse to take action against a hated group people who were already denigrated third-class citizens because they weren't the correct religion.
My mortgage interest deduction is roughly equal to the local property taxes I pay - $2500/year
It's a wash. Sure the federal government gets less, but the local infrastructure and schools get most of their money from homeowners.
GOP-installed? Yea, they elevated him to the Chair, but don't forget that that Ajit Pai was put on the commission by Obama. He's a grandstanding tool (and former lawyer for Verizon through his old firm).
One incident doesn't outweigh numerous incidents of violence on the left. And this guy was a one-off loner wacko. I no more consider him the poster-child of the White Supremacist movement than I consider Omar Mateen to be true ISIS.
Also, since we're trying to connect White Supremacists to Nationalists, how does the fact that he posted photos of himself spitting on and burning the American flag fit in to all that? Isn't that a leftist thing?
Europe could probably defeat Russia without us.
You just lost all credibility right there. Even in a non-nuclear conflict, the rest of Europe doesn't have the military might to stop Russia.
Especially considering he didn't start *any* wars
Definitions are arguable, but according to Wikipedia, there are three 'wars' that were started during his presidency and Americans are key players...:
Libya
ISIS
The 'new' Afganistan war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Because it shows that letting one ideologically homogeneous populous area 'stuff the box' to outweigh the overall results in the other 49 states is a problem - the exact problem the electoral college was created to prevent.
California's (actually, LA/San Fran's) huge mass of +5m votes for Hillary is the _perfect_ example of the wisdom of the electoral college.
Then they'll delay any fixes 'til forever, cancel and discontinue apps that were key features of the TV, etc, etc.
I've got a JS9000 (2015), and I'm still waiting for them to update their HDR code - they've been promising the updated firmware since before the 2016 series came out. The latest promise was that the update would roll out in December - now we're in January and still nothing.
Samsung was great 8 years ago, now they're just pumping out shiny new equipment with features that only partially work. They're the Korean Apple.