Two out of three ain't bad, eh? Canada had a draft during both WW I and WW II. WW II, at least, was an offensive war (aren't all wars offensive?) given that Canada declared war on Germany without having been itself attacked and before Germany declared war on Canada. For WW I, Britain kindly declared war on Germany on Canada's behalf (immediately after which my Grandfather enthusiastically enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force at the age of 16).
See? That's what happens when one day you suddenly wake up Canadian. You actually go ahead and pull some of those dusty Canadian history books that you've ignored for years off of your parent's bookshelves and start learning something about your "native" land.
Unless you can produce real world measurements of RMS recommended hardware vs non-recommended hardware to back up your claim, you are just an AC FUD spreading troll and the incompetent who modded your claim as "insightful" does not understand the meaning of the word.
No, science mostly ignores the Bible stories because there are a near infinite number of actual historical events that could account for stories such as the flood. It has nothing to do with disparaging religion, it is simply that the Bible doesn't have enough specific detail to pinpoint which historical event might be referred to. The story of the flood is, what, four paragraphs long?
1 And the LORD said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation.
2 Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female.
3 Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.
4 For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.
5 And Noah did according unto all that the LORD commanded him.
6 And Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth.
7 And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons' wives with him, into the ark, because of the waters of the flood.
8 Of clean beasts, and of beasts that are not clean, and of fowls, and of every thing that creepeth upon the earth,
9 There went in two and two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female, as God had commanded Noah.
10 And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth.
11 In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.
12 And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.
13 In the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah's wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the ark;
14 They, and every beast after his kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind, and every fowl after his kind, every bird of every sort.
15 And they went in unto Noah into the ark, two and two of all flesh, wherein is the breath of life.
16 And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the LORD shut him in.
17 And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth.
18 And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters.
19 And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered.
20 Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.
21 And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man:
22 All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.
23 And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.
24 And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days. (Genesis 7)
How are you going to get anything specific enough to test out of that? Now there is one possible way of testing the hypothesis that only one such flood happened:
20 And Noah builded an altar unto the LORD; and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar.
21 And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth;
You have it the wrong way around. The real issue was indeed slavery. Federalism and States rights were just a legal smoke screen used by Southern politicians (and afterwords by Southern historians embarrassed by "the peculiar institution") to justify their desire to preserve slavery in the South and even expand slavery into the Western territories. One simple proof of this is that areas in the South without significant slave populations (e.g. West VA and East TN) voted overwhelmingly to stay in the Union. In the case of TN, there were two votes on secession. For both votes, the East TN (mostly small family farms with few slaves) no vote was balanced by the West TN (an area much like the deep plantation South with a large slave population) yes vote and the final vote (barely no then barely yes) was ultimately decided by Middle TN where the Cumberland Plateau area drops down into the Nashville basin and the economy became progressively more like the Deep South as you head West. A second bit of evidence is that the Republican Party was formed not to end or interfere with slavery in the existing Southern states, but merely to prevent its expansion into the Western territories. Furthermore, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, it explicitly applied only to States in rebellion and not to the slave holding border states partially because there were legal questions as to whether Lincoln had the power to interfere in what was viewed as a state issue (and partially because these states were voting to end slavery themselves anyway so there was little point in alienating the slave owning population of these states over the issue while the war was still raging).
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.
TANSTAAFL: When you do not use private markets to ration health care, you must still ration health care. In Norway (based on what a Norwegian friend tells me), health care to the elderly is rationed by assuming all old folks have consented to "Do Not Revive" orders. If you do want to be revived if you are old and obviously dieing, then you are expected to pay for the added cost. This is not unreasonable. Norwegian society has decided that it is not willing to bear the expenses in these cases, but will pay for others (e.g. young adults with cancer). This is not unjust since all health care is rationed everywhere, it is merely a different way of rationing health care than our U.S. market system which is content to let anyone die who cannot pay the bills for their own treatments.
A better way to think about which system has better outcomes is to pretend that you have not yet been born. You do not know if you will be born into a rich family or a poor one. You do not know if you will be given healthy genes that give you the opportunity to live to 100 or a cancer gene that will kick in when you are 12. Which health care system would you prefer to be born into? One that you pay for through taxes, that guarantees everyone a basic level of care, and covers major problems up to some age or cost limit (many Euro countries) or one that each person is expected to pay for themselves based on their own personal medical history and, well, too bad if you were, say, born with diabetes (the U.S. system)?
A candidate? Power in the U.S. is very diffuse. We vote for individuals for offices from local township councils to President. I don't require that every candidate represent me exactly on every issue at every level. Only that the sum of the individuals who win keep things generally moving in the direction(s) I prefer. Having watched 11 Presidents in my lifetime (25% of the total) try and run a country that has grown to about 300 million people (its grown by about 120 million people in my lifetime), I think the whole thing works remarkably well.
I agree that his social science hypothesis testing approach is interesting, but unfortunately he also is subject to great bias in his selection of data to test his hypotheses.
R.e. your sig: years ago, I got into an argument with a Sandanista supporter over Sandinista censorship of the opposition newspaper. She claimed that it was OK (wartime and all that) while I tried to argue that it was never OK for a gov't to censor speach. Given the Wiki article you pointed me to which used NYTimes reporting on the Sandinistas as an example that proves his point, I wonder if Chomsky would agree that his thesis applies, too, when his cause celebre is the power structure (e.g. consider self-censorship of Chinese reporters in the PRC or perhaps the reporting of Palestinian journalists who write articles decrying the behavior of Israel without ever having interviewed an Israeli)?
And that's not even getting into the fact that the "will of the people" is disrupted and confused by a centrally owned media that has been clearly shown to be biased towards certain perspectives.
Are you claiming the "clearly shown" liberal commie bias that conservatives have "proven"(just look at Dan Rather and Keith Olbermann) or the "clearly shown" fascist bias that liberals have "proven" (just look at the Fox Noise channel)?
That seems to be especially true of those who want to limit government to its "Constitutional tasks". Make you should take a gander at Article I, Section 8 which, like most of the Constitution, is masterful in both its simplicity and flexibility.
We The People have pretty much the size of Government We The People want doing pretty much the tasks We The People believe to be Constitutional else We The People would have chosen other leaders.
I noticed the lack of discussion about state and federal EPA standards, too. Columbus, OH shut down its trash burning power plant a few years ago due to dioxide emissions that would have prohibitively costly to remove.
It is fairly trivial to kill inflation. Just shut off the money supply spigot. This is what Paul Volcker did in the early 1980s. It is not true, however that you can just turn on the money supply to reverse a deflationary spiral.
It wasn't gov't intervention that led to the huge growth in farm production in the 1900-1920 era. This was mostly due to an incredible growth in agricultural productivity as machines replaced horses and mules. Think John Deere.
That's why Linux takes so long to boot these days. You can have very good hardware compatibility or you can have very good boot speed. You can't have both. (Well, until someone invents persistent RAM.)
Or you could just write the list of modules required by a machine to a file during the initial install and look it up during later boots. I installed Ubuntu about 3 months ago on my home pc (older VP6 MB, 2x PIII processors and some ide disks). Ubuntu takes 20 minutes to boot. Further, since the cups system locks up the machine every time someone tries to print, the machine needs frequent reboots. No, I've never had these problems with any previous versions of linux on this box. Ubuntu is going to be replaced as soon as I have a spare weekend and will never again be installed on any machine I control.
Get off your high horse and do some reading yourself, dude. If the Brits had truly thrown the full weight of Her Empire into crushing the spine of the people, India would probably look more like the Congo than the flourishing Democracy it is today. If you were capable of following your own advice by trying to understand the world in more hues than black or white you would remember that the Brits brought India an educated civil service and an independent judiciary among other useful tools of government as well as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and other assorted nastiness. And if you had actually done all of that reading you claim, you would be aware that the effects of 100 or so years of Euro colonialism that ended 60 years ago are a tiny pinprick on Indian society and politics when compared to the effects of over 3000 years of human habitation on the subcontinent.
I've had TW for many years now and have never had any problems with customer service. As a recent example, when Hurricane Ike came roaring through Central Ohio, the TW techies worked overtime to get my service restored. For each of the small number of times that I've had problems, the TW support folks have been very professional and were clearly trying hard to solve the problem, which they inevitably did. I've never had Comcast or Verizon or ATT internet or video services, so I can't speak knowledgeably about their service rep, but don't lump them all together with some blanket statement about how they all have the worst service, because it simply isn't true. And no, I don't work for TW or own stock in the company.
Uh, huh. Now show us that most people who believe in the man made origins of global warming believe in making you buy fair trade coffee. You can't. And that is the why you were called out as using a bogus Ad hominem argument. Calling someone's comment asshattery when they provide you with a link to a definition describing why your argument was bogus is a further use of an Ad hominem argument. Claiming that "I am new here" so my point about your nonsense must be wrong is still a further use of an Ad hominem argument. Are you capable of making any other type of argument? Finally, you do not format arguments, you make them -- in your case, very poorly (which is not an Ad hominem argument on my part, but a statement of fact backed up by the above dissection of your inane troll).
You'll find that most people who support the manmade global warming assumption use it to justify a whole host of government intrusion into our lives from punitive taxation to telling you what kind of car you should drive (hybrid), to what kind of coffee you should drink (organic, fair trade).
Trying to divert attention away from the science by making vague and unsupported claims about about the motivations and desires of those who do is a form of the logical fallacy known as an Ad hominem argument.
Slashdot Mirror
As for the cost, almost anyone who works has health insurance in the U.S.
This is patently untrue. Only ~70% of employed persons had employer provided health insurance as of 2006, down from ~75% in 2000. That leaves 30% of employed persons scrambling to cover the cost on their own. Since most of the non-covered employees are in the lower income ranks, they simply can't afford private coverage.
Two out of three ain't bad, eh? Canada had a draft during both WW I and WW II. WW II, at least, was an offensive war (aren't all wars offensive?) given that Canada declared war on Germany without having been itself attacked and before Germany declared war on Canada. For WW I, Britain kindly declared war on Germany on Canada's behalf (immediately after which my Grandfather enthusiastically enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force at the age of 16).
See? That's what happens when one day you suddenly wake up Canadian. You actually go ahead and pull some of those dusty Canadian history books that you've ignored for years off of your parent's bookshelves and start learning something about your "native" land.
Unless you can produce real world measurements of RMS recommended hardware vs non-recommended hardware to back up your claim, you are just an AC FUD spreading troll and the incompetent who modded your claim as "insightful" does not understand the meaning of the word.
Also, there is no "right to privacy" in the US constitution.
The SCOTUS disagrees with you.
No, science mostly ignores the Bible stories because there are a near infinite number of actual historical events that could account for stories such as the flood. It has nothing to do with disparaging religion, it is simply that the Bible doesn't have enough specific detail to pinpoint which historical event might be referred to. The story of the flood is, what, four paragraphs long?
1 And the LORD said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation.
2 Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female.
3 Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.
4 For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.
5 And Noah did according unto all that the LORD commanded him.
6 And Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth.
7 And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons' wives with him, into the ark, because of the waters of the flood.
8 Of clean beasts, and of beasts that are not clean, and of fowls, and of every thing that creepeth upon the earth,
9 There went in two and two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female, as God had commanded Noah.
10 And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth.
11 In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.
12 And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.
13 In the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah's wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the ark;
14 They, and every beast after his kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind, and every fowl after his kind, every bird of every sort.
15 And they went in unto Noah into the ark, two and two of all flesh, wherein is the breath of life.
16 And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the LORD shut him in.
17 And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth.
18 And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters.
19 And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered.
20 Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.
21 And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man:
22 All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.
23 And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.
24 And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days. (Genesis 7)
How are you going to get anything specific enough to test out of that? Now there is one possible way of testing the hypothesis that only one such flood happened:
20 And Noah builded an altar unto the LORD; and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar.
21 And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth;
Oh, we've been trying to civilize our southern neighbours for quite a while...
Ahh, maybe that's why you declared aboot 200K of us to be Canadian citizens recently. I thought it was because you'd graduated from sheet music piracy to citizen piracy. It was a bit of a shock to learn last week that I was a Lost Canadian who has suddenly been found. Just one question: Where is Canada, anyway?
You have it the wrong way around. The real issue was indeed slavery. Federalism and States rights were just a legal smoke screen used by Southern politicians (and afterwords by Southern historians embarrassed by "the peculiar institution") to justify their desire to preserve slavery in the South and even expand slavery into the Western territories. One simple proof of this is that areas in the South without significant slave populations (e.g. West VA and East TN) voted overwhelmingly to stay in the Union. In the case of TN, there were two votes on secession. For both votes, the East TN (mostly small family farms with few slaves) no vote was balanced by the West TN (an area much like the deep plantation South with a large slave population) yes vote and the final vote (barely no then barely yes) was ultimately decided by Middle TN where the Cumberland Plateau area drops down into the Nashville basin and the economy became progressively more like the Deep South as you head West. A second bit of evidence is that the Republican Party was formed not to end or interfere with slavery in the existing Southern states, but merely to prevent its expansion into the Western territories. Furthermore, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, it explicitly applied only to States in rebellion and not to the slave holding border states partially because there were legal questions as to whether Lincoln had the power to interfere in what was viewed as a state issue (and partially because these states were voting to end slavery themselves anyway so there was little point in alienating the slave owning population of these states over the issue while the war was still raging).
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.
Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address
... what I keep hearing from people in the field of nuclear physics is that Fusion will be realized by the mid 2020s.
The joke in the fusion energy community is that in every decade since the 1950s, it has been predicted that controlled fusion is only 20 years away.
It is no longer a civil matter when a state governor uses the Nat'l Guard in an attempt to prevent the enforcement of a legal court order granted to the plaintiffs in the original civil suit.
TANSTAAFL: When you do not use private markets to ration health care, you must still ration health care. In Norway (based on what a Norwegian friend tells me), health care to the elderly is rationed by assuming all old folks have consented to "Do Not Revive" orders. If you do want to be revived if you are old and obviously dieing, then you are expected to pay for the added cost. This is not unreasonable. Norwegian society has decided that it is not willing to bear the expenses in these cases, but will pay for others (e.g. young adults with cancer). This is not unjust since all health care is rationed everywhere, it is merely a different way of rationing health care than our U.S. market system which is content to let anyone die who cannot pay the bills for their own treatments.
A better way to think about which system has better outcomes is to pretend that you have not yet been born. You do not know if you will be born into a rich family or a poor one. You do not know if you will be given healthy genes that give you the opportunity to live to 100 or a cancer gene that will kick in when you are 12. Which health care system would you prefer to be born into? One that you pay for through taxes, that guarantees everyone a basic level of care, and covers major problems up to some age or cost limit (many Euro countries) or one that each person is expected to pay for themselves based on their own personal medical history and, well, too bad if you were, say, born with diabetes (the U.S. system)?
A candidate? Power in the U.S. is very diffuse. We vote for individuals for offices from local township councils to President. I don't require that every candidate represent me exactly on every issue at every level. Only that the sum of the individuals who win keep things generally moving in the direction(s) I prefer. Having watched 11 Presidents in my lifetime (25% of the total) try and run a country that has grown to about 300 million people (its grown by about 120 million people in my lifetime), I think the whole thing works remarkably well.
and American recruits are constantly being told that military will never actually let them die.
You have obviously never served in the U.S. military.
I agree that his social science hypothesis testing approach is interesting, but unfortunately he also is subject to great bias in his selection of data to test his hypotheses.
R.e. your sig: years ago, I got into an argument with a Sandanista supporter over Sandinista censorship of the opposition newspaper. She claimed that it was OK (wartime and all that) while I tried to argue that it was never OK for a gov't to censor speach. Given the Wiki article you pointed me to which used NYTimes reporting on the Sandinistas as an example that proves his point, I wonder if Chomsky would agree that his thesis applies, too, when his cause celebre is the power structure (e.g. consider self-censorship of Chinese reporters in the PRC or perhaps the reporting of Palestinian journalists who write articles decrying the behavior of Israel without ever having interviewed an Israeli)?
Noam Chomsky has proposed many interesting hypotheses in his career, but he hasn't proven anything in his career ever.
And that's not even getting into the fact that the "will of the people" is disrupted and confused by a centrally owned media that has been clearly shown to be biased towards certain perspectives.
Are you claiming the "clearly shown" liberal commie bias that conservatives have "proven"(just look at Dan Rather and Keith Olbermann) or the "clearly shown" fascist bias that liberals have "proven" (just look at the Fox Noise channel)?
That seems to be especially true of those who want to limit government to its "Constitutional tasks". Make you should take a gander at Article I, Section 8 which, like most of the Constitution, is masterful in both its simplicity and flexibility.
We The People have pretty much the size of Government We The People want doing pretty much the tasks We The People believe to be Constitutional else We The People would have chosen other leaders.
I noticed the lack of discussion about state and federal EPA standards, too. Columbus, OH shut down its trash burning power plant a few years ago due to dioxide emissions that would have prohibitively costly to remove.
It is fairly trivial to kill inflation. Just shut off the money supply spigot. This is what Paul Volcker did in the early 1980s. It is not true, however that you can just turn on the money supply to reverse a deflationary spiral.
It wasn't gov't intervention that led to the huge growth in farm production in the 1900-1920 era. This was mostly due to an incredible growth in agricultural productivity as machines replaced horses and mules. Think John Deere.
That's why Linux takes so long to boot these days. You can have very good hardware compatibility or you can have very good boot speed. You can't have both. (Well, until someone invents persistent RAM.)
Or you could just write the list of modules required by a machine to a file during the initial install and look it up during later boots. I installed Ubuntu about 3 months ago on my home pc (older VP6 MB, 2x PIII processors and some ide disks). Ubuntu takes 20 minutes to boot. Further, since the cups system locks up the machine every time someone tries to print, the machine needs frequent reboots. No, I've never had these problems with any previous versions of linux on this box. Ubuntu is going to be replaced as soon as I have a spare weekend and will never again be installed on any machine I control.
Get off your high horse and do some reading yourself, dude. If the Brits had truly thrown the full weight of Her Empire into crushing the spine of the people, India would probably look more like the Congo than the flourishing Democracy it is today. If you were capable of following your own advice by trying to understand the world in more hues than black or white you would remember that the Brits brought India an educated civil service and an independent judiciary among other useful tools of government as well as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and other assorted nastiness. And if you had actually done all of that reading you claim, you would be aware that the effects of 100 or so years of Euro colonialism that ended 60 years ago are a tiny pinprick on Indian society and politics when compared to the effects of over 3000 years of human habitation on the subcontinent.
I've had TW for many years now and have never had any problems with customer service. As a recent example, when Hurricane Ike came roaring through Central Ohio, the TW techies worked overtime to get my service restored. For each of the small number of times that I've had problems, the TW support folks have been very professional and were clearly trying hard to solve the problem, which they inevitably did. I've never had Comcast or Verizon or ATT internet or video services, so I can't speak knowledgeably about their service rep, but don't lump them all together with some blanket statement about how they all have the worst service, because it simply isn't true. And no, I don't work for TW or own stock in the company.
Uh, huh. Now show us that most people who believe in the man made origins of global warming believe in making you buy fair trade coffee. You can't. And that is the why you were called out as using a bogus Ad hominem argument. Calling someone's comment asshattery when they provide you with a link to a definition describing why your argument was bogus is a further use of an Ad hominem argument. Claiming that "I am new here" so my point about your nonsense must be wrong is still a further use of an Ad hominem argument. Are you capable of making any other type of argument? Finally, you do not format arguments, you make them -- in your case, very poorly (which is not an Ad hominem argument on my part, but a statement of fact backed up by the above dissection of your inane troll).
You'll find that most people who support the manmade global warming assumption use it to justify a whole host of government intrusion into our lives from punitive taxation to telling you what kind of car you should drive (hybrid), to what kind of coffee you should drink (organic, fair trade).
Trying to divert attention away from the science by making vague and unsupported claims about about the motivations and desires of those who do is a form of the logical fallacy known as an Ad hominem argument.
They had to do that because there is a world market for maybe five computers so none of those markets were going to last very long.