If you assault someone because you hate gays/minorities/etc, why is that worse than assaulting someone because you hate them individually?
Because the point of it is not just to hurt some particular person, but to attack a whole group of people, usually with the message that this kind of person is not a legitimate American but somebody who should be expelled by force or made into a second-class citizen. It is a low-scale of terrorism, trying to induce fear in the target group to bring about political change.
An example of why hate crime laws were created: It was once common, particularly in the South, for groups of white people to beat up and/or kill black men, just for fun. The point wasn't to hurt one guy, it was to scare the bejeesus out of every black person in town so that they'd "stay in their place" or stay out of town entirely.
Here's the power of federally funded research: The government can do research that won't immediately and obviously lead to profits in a way that private company's research can't. A lot of research has no short-term value, and in many cases there's not even a clear idea of what the scientists will find when they examine something, but then 2 decades later it's suddenly a ground-breaking discovery.
For example, Watson and Crick were mostly government funded, and some of the practical applications of their discovery of DNA are only becoming clear now.
An interesting and related problem: A website aimed at the deaf took the time to provide video of their site translated into ASL. At first glance, this seems stupid - many deaf people can read perfectly well. But it actually turns out that people who were born deaf or became deaf in early childhood have significant literacy problems, especially if they learned ASL first, because reading English engages the auditory senses.
Asking a sighted person on how to design properly for the blind, or a hearing person on how to design properly for the deaf, makes about as much sense as asking a marketing guy about how to design a web server: They may have some ideas, but will have no clue which ones are good.
(here's another hint: they don't pay sales tax - consumers do).
It's more complicated than that.
Sales taxes, like all other taxes, are usually partially paid by multiple people. If the seller passes the full amount of the tax to the buyer, then there will be fewer buyers, so the seller will pay for it partially by not selling as much stuff as he used to, and the buyers that he does get are paying the extra 5%. So both buyers and sellers end up contributing to the cost of the tax.
Absolutely - as far as I can tell, Facebook has now achieved everything it set out to do: 1. Make Mark Zuckerberg extremely rich. 2. Help Mark Zuckerberg find a smart and hot woman to get it on with.
My solution to this problem: Let GP pay no taxes, but have no access to anything the government has built, or any businesses where government regulation has had demonstrably beneficial effects.
In other words, he gets a homestead in the middle of nowhere with no electric grid, no bank account, no credit card, no car (not that he could drive it anywhere anyways), no Internet access, and (for the sake of argument) put him right next to the Mexican border where the drug cartels like to hang out with semiautomatic rifles, but without any kind of border patrol. Hope he has a good time!
Government at all levels, from federal all the way down to local, should be prohibited from making sweetheart deals to one company without making them for all companies.
Well, here's the problem with that: Congresscritters are very very good at drafting legislation that only applies to 1 company even though in theory it applies to everybody. For instance, they might pass a law that gives a sweet deal to all business that run search engines in Mountain View, CA - for legal purposes, that isn't specific, but in practice it is.
You should have started with "In Soviet Russia, letters send you!"
Seriously, my understanding is that the USPS relies on OCR rather than a special format to handle a lot of sorting and routing, and secondarily on humans to figure out what goes where. In the US, the zip code was invented in 1963 to get a letter at least as far as the correct post office, and the zip+4 came about in 1983 to get you within a typical city block - by that point, it's in the right carrier's bag, and can be delivered correctly fairly easily.
Billy Mays here for BS Patents, Inc! Want to have a bunch of guaranteed revenue forever without doing anything useful? Then call now for a kit on how to create a nonsense patent! We'll include all the information you need to ignore silly rules like "prior art" by adding "with a computer" to the end of an existing patent, and how to pick something that everybody already uses so you'll have lots of people to sue! This kit can be yours for only $39.95 if you call now! But wait - order 2 and they'll go for $59.90, a $20 savings!
Riddle me this then: How is it that restrictions on fine print of financial agreements between lenders and average borrowers, which garner the support of 90% of Americans in polls, aren't actually in place? How is it that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, opposed by roughly 65% of Americans for years, are still going on? How is it that even though people across the political spectrum from Tea Partiers to Occupiers are demanding that big banks be investigated for what appears to be fraud fraud worth trillions of dollars, no such investigation is taking place?
I can guess at who's demands the government is actually satisfying, but it's definitely not the general public's.
FB knows your stated desires. GOOG knows you're hidden desires.
Between the two of them, they could create one heck of a phone sex operation.
Re:The 21st century formula for a successful compa
on
HP To Cut 30,000 Jobs
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· Score: 3, Funny
My favorite answer to this problem: Clearly, saying "he, she, or it" every time is a bit cumbersome, but at the same time we want to be inclusive. This eventually leads to the contraction "h'or'sh'it"
Frank Zappa, when asked what kids ought to hope for: "What I tell kids and what I’ve been telling kids for quite some time is first, register to vote, and second as soon as you’re old enough, run for something."
For what it's worth, in my early forays into elected positions (high school student council, not exactly cutthroat), I got up, gave my impassioned speech about the idea that student council presidents need to be advocates for the students rather than party planners, and promptly lost to the guy who got up and said "I'll give everyone who votes for me a beer." It wasn't a total waste though: Some of the points I made (e.g. the city underfunding schools to the point where they didn't have toilet paper in the bathrooms) ended up causing a hue and cry among parents, and after a couple of years the mayor was voted out and school funding increased.
To quote the new guy, "Don't quote me regulations. I co-chaired the committee that reviewed the recommendation to revise the color of the book that regulation's in. We kept it gray."
As to "dynasties that don't have to work" canard, the money that is not spent is working all the time. What do you think the money is doing, just sitting there?
Money at its core represents a claim on somebody else's work. For instance, if I trade $5 for a sandwich at the deli, that's me exercising my claim on all the work that goes into making it, from the farm to the guy handing me a sandwich.
It doesn't add value though. If I need to frob a plotznik to make a widget, putting $50K in a factory and telling it to frob plotzniks won't do anything useful at all. More useful would be to pay Joe $50K to frob plotzniks for a year, and presumably I'm a reasonably smart capitalist and ensured that Joe actually added $60K worth of plotznik frobbing to my product. But notice that the $50K didn't add the $10K worth of value - Joe did by frobbing more plotzniks than he got paid to do.
If we abstract this out as a bond, I lend you $50K to run a plotznik frobbing business with a 10% interest rate, you in turn hire Joe to frob plotzniks, he frobs $60K worth, you give me the $55K I'm owed and keep $5K, and I get $5K without frobbing a single plotznik. The stock is similar enough: I buy 1000 shares of Frobbers Inc from some other investor at $50 per share. You then used that market cap to justify a loan from somebody else, hired Joe to frob plotzniks, he frobbed $60K worth, you pay back the loan, pocket $3K and reinvest the remaining $2K you didn't have to pay back, increasing your market cap by $2 per share. I then sell those 1000 shares to somebody else for $52 per share, pocketing $2K, even though I had nothing to do with producing anything.
And now pretend that instead of managing my investments myself, I hired somebody else to do so for a 5% commission. My investment manager took my $50K, invested it in Frobbers Inc, got the $2K return, pocketed his $100, giving me $1900 that I did absolutely nothing to earn. The only reason I'm entitled to the $1900 is that I started with $50K and told my manager "invest it" - I didn't frob any plotzniks, I didn't even judge whether you were a good risk, I just used the power of investment to indirectly take $1900 worth of work from Joe. (Adding a $50K plotznik-frobbing machine doesn't really change the fundamentals - instead of taking $1900 of value from Joe, I'm taking it from the people who charged less for their plotznik-frobbing machine than its worth.)
The only engineer president of the US I'm aware of is Herbert Hoover. Who was a fairly decent guy, but screwed up big time when the Great Depression hit.
They are enthusiastic when they talk, and the first few days at work. But as the weeks wear on, their performance starts to drop.
2 points about that: 1. That's true with middle- and upper-class workers too, at least some of the time. It's a lot easier to talk about doing a job, or contemplate doing a job, than to actually do it. 2. That may not be their problem, that may be your problem. Have you had conversations with them like "You seem to be less enthusiastic than you were your first few days. What could we do differently?" Some possible answers you might get include: "My feet are sore from standing up all day. Is the a chance of being able to sit down while I work?" and "There's no chance of advancement, ever. Why work hard if I'm just going to stumble along at minimum wage until you fire me?".
It's wrong to assume all rich people are lazy bums, of course. But it's also very unlikely that a rich person really does $5000 worth of work in the same time that a poor person does $5 worth of work. And it's very very unlikely that Paris Hilton or the various Walton siblings does enough work to come even close to deserving the amount of money that has gone her way her entire life.
I don't understand why so many people have trouble with the idea that Obama does all of these crazy illegal things that he hates because he's trying to win Congress's trust.
He doesn't need Congress's trust. He needs the American people's trust. And the country needs to know that laws are being followed and enforced fairly if we don't want the place to turn into a totalitarian regime. Constitutionality is more important than law, and following the law is more important than any political jockeying.
And if you don't understand how important that is, consider how you reacted when George W Bush did all sorts of crazy illegal things. If it's ok for presidents you like to do something, it's also ok for presidents you don't like to do the same thing.
They've been asleep at the wheel for 10 years, why wake up now?
No they haven't been. They've had several changes to stop this train, and John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Anthony Kennedy are all happily cheering as we're charging right into police-state territory. This is exactly what those guys want.
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If you assault someone because you hate gays/minorities/etc, why is that worse than assaulting someone because you hate them individually?
Because the point of it is not just to hurt some particular person, but to attack a whole group of people, usually with the message that this kind of person is not a legitimate American but somebody who should be expelled by force or made into a second-class citizen. It is a low-scale of terrorism, trying to induce fear in the target group to bring about political change.
An example of why hate crime laws were created: It was once common, particularly in the South, for groups of white people to beat up and/or kill black men, just for fun. The point wasn't to hurt one guy, it was to scare the bejeesus out of every black person in town so that they'd "stay in their place" or stay out of town entirely.
Here's the power of federally funded research: The government can do research that won't immediately and obviously lead to profits in a way that private company's research can't. A lot of research has no short-term value, and in many cases there's not even a clear idea of what the scientists will find when they examine something, but then 2 decades later it's suddenly a ground-breaking discovery.
For example, Watson and Crick were mostly government funded, and some of the practical applications of their discovery of DNA are only becoming clear now.
An interesting and related problem: A website aimed at the deaf took the time to provide video of their site translated into ASL. At first glance, this seems stupid - many deaf people can read perfectly well. But it actually turns out that people who were born deaf or became deaf in early childhood have significant literacy problems, especially if they learned ASL first, because reading English engages the auditory senses.
Asking a sighted person on how to design properly for the blind, or a hearing person on how to design properly for the deaf, makes about as much sense as asking a marketing guy about how to design a web server: They may have some ideas, but will have no clue which ones are good.
(here's another hint: they don't pay sales tax - consumers do).
It's more complicated than that.
Sales taxes, like all other taxes, are usually partially paid by multiple people. If the seller passes the full amount of the tax to the buyer, then there will be fewer buyers, so the seller will pay for it partially by not selling as much stuff as he used to, and the buyers that he does get are paying the extra 5%. So both buyers and sellers end up contributing to the cost of the tax.
Read about Tax incidence for more on the subject.
Absolutely - as far as I can tell, Facebook has now achieved everything it set out to do:
1. Make Mark Zuckerberg extremely rich.
2. Help Mark Zuckerberg find a smart and hot woman to get it on with.
Caring about party identification more than what they're actually saying is a sure sign of partisan hackery.
My solution to this problem: Let GP pay no taxes, but have no access to anything the government has built, or any businesses where government regulation has had demonstrably beneficial effects.
In other words, he gets a homestead in the middle of nowhere with no electric grid, no bank account, no credit card, no car (not that he could drive it anywhere anyways), no Internet access, and (for the sake of argument) put him right next to the Mexican border where the drug cartels like to hang out with semiautomatic rifles, but without any kind of border patrol. Hope he has a good time!
Government at all levels, from federal all the way down to local, should be prohibited from making sweetheart deals to one company without making them for all companies.
Well, here's the problem with that: Congresscritters are very very good at drafting legislation that only applies to 1 company even though in theory it applies to everybody. For instance, they might pass a law that gives a sweet deal to all business that run search engines in Mountain View, CA - for legal purposes, that isn't specific, but in practice it is.
You should have started with "In Soviet Russia, letters send you!"
Seriously, my understanding is that the USPS relies on OCR rather than a special format to handle a lot of sorting and routing, and secondarily on humans to figure out what goes where. In the US, the zip code was invented in 1963 to get a letter at least as far as the correct post office, and the zip+4 came about in 1983 to get you within a typical city block - by that point, it's in the right carrier's bag, and can be delivered correctly fairly easily.
Billy Mays here for BS Patents, Inc! Want to have a bunch of guaranteed revenue forever without doing anything useful? Then call now for a kit on how to create a nonsense patent! We'll include all the information you need to ignore silly rules like "prior art" by adding "with a computer" to the end of an existing patent, and how to pick something that everybody already uses so you'll have lots of people to sue! This kit can be yours for only $39.95 if you call now! But wait - order 2 and they'll go for $59.90, a $20 savings!
Therefore there is no constitutional right to privacy.
Many Supreme Court justices and rulings would disagree with you on that point. Here's a fairly well-sourced discussion on the right of privacy.
Riddle me this then: How is it that restrictions on fine print of financial agreements between lenders and average borrowers, which garner the support of 90% of Americans in polls, aren't actually in place? How is it that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, opposed by roughly 65% of Americans for years, are still going on? How is it that even though people across the political spectrum from Tea Partiers to Occupiers are demanding that big banks be investigated for what appears to be fraud fraud worth trillions of dollars, no such investigation is taking place?
I can guess at who's demands the government is actually satisfying, but it's definitely not the general public's.
FB knows your stated desires. GOOG knows you're hidden desires.
Between the two of them, they could create one heck of a phone sex operation.
My favorite answer to this problem: Clearly, saying "he, she, or it" every time is a bit cumbersome, but at the same time we want to be inclusive. This eventually leads to the contraction "h'or'sh'it"
Frank Zappa, when asked what kids ought to hope for:
"What I tell kids and what I’ve been telling kids for quite some time is first, register to vote, and second as soon as you’re old enough, run for something."
For what it's worth, in my early forays into elected positions (high school student council, not exactly cutthroat), I got up, gave my impassioned speech about the idea that student council presidents need to be advocates for the students rather than party planners, and promptly lost to the guy who got up and said "I'll give everyone who votes for me a beer." It wasn't a total waste though: Some of the points I made (e.g. the city underfunding schools to the point where they didn't have toilet paper in the bathrooms) ended up causing a hue and cry among parents, and after a couple of years the mayor was voted out and school funding increased.
Well, really this is following in a long and glorious tradition of fuzzily incorrect arithmetic.
To quote the new guy, "Don't quote me regulations. I co-chaired the committee that reviewed the recommendation to revise the color of the book that regulation's in. We kept it gray."
In other words, in Soviet Russia, the people control the czars!
As to "dynasties that don't have to work" canard, the money that is not spent is working all the time. What do you think the money is doing, just sitting there?
Money at its core represents a claim on somebody else's work. For instance, if I trade $5 for a sandwich at the deli, that's me exercising my claim on all the work that goes into making it, from the farm to the guy handing me a sandwich.
It doesn't add value though. If I need to frob a plotznik to make a widget, putting $50K in a factory and telling it to frob plotzniks won't do anything useful at all. More useful would be to pay Joe $50K to frob plotzniks for a year, and presumably I'm a reasonably smart capitalist and ensured that Joe actually added $60K worth of plotznik frobbing to my product. But notice that the $50K didn't add the $10K worth of value - Joe did by frobbing more plotzniks than he got paid to do.
If we abstract this out as a bond, I lend you $50K to run a plotznik frobbing business with a 10% interest rate, you in turn hire Joe to frob plotzniks, he frobs $60K worth, you give me the $55K I'm owed and keep $5K, and I get $5K without frobbing a single plotznik. The stock is similar enough: I buy 1000 shares of Frobbers Inc from some other investor at $50 per share. You then used that market cap to justify a loan from somebody else, hired Joe to frob plotzniks, he frobbed $60K worth, you pay back the loan, pocket $3K and reinvest the remaining $2K you didn't have to pay back, increasing your market cap by $2 per share. I then sell those 1000 shares to somebody else for $52 per share, pocketing $2K, even though I had nothing to do with producing anything.
And now pretend that instead of managing my investments myself, I hired somebody else to do so for a 5% commission. My investment manager took my $50K, invested it in Frobbers Inc, got the $2K return, pocketed his $100, giving me $1900 that I did absolutely nothing to earn. The only reason I'm entitled to the $1900 is that I started with $50K and told my manager "invest it" - I didn't frob any plotzniks, I didn't even judge whether you were a good risk, I just used the power of investment to indirectly take $1900 worth of work from Joe. (Adding a $50K plotznik-frobbing machine doesn't really change the fundamentals - instead of taking $1900 of value from Joe, I'm taking it from the people who charged less for their plotznik-frobbing machine than its worth.)
The only engineer president of the US I'm aware of is Herbert Hoover. Who was a fairly decent guy, but screwed up big time when the Great Depression hit.
They are enthusiastic when they talk, and the first few days at work. But as the weeks wear on, their performance starts to drop.
2 points about that:
1. That's true with middle- and upper-class workers too, at least some of the time. It's a lot easier to talk about doing a job, or contemplate doing a job, than to actually do it.
2. That may not be their problem, that may be your problem. Have you had conversations with them like "You seem to be less enthusiastic than you were your first few days. What could we do differently?" Some possible answers you might get include: "My feet are sore from standing up all day. Is the a chance of being able to sit down while I work?" and "There's no chance of advancement, ever. Why work hard if I'm just going to stumble along at minimum wage until you fire me?".
It's wrong to assume all rich people are lazy bums, of course. But it's also very unlikely that a rich person really does $5000 worth of work in the same time that a poor person does $5 worth of work. And it's very very unlikely that Paris Hilton or the various Walton siblings does enough work to come even close to deserving the amount of money that has gone her way her entire life.
Their obvious competitor, at least for land-based units rather than airborne, is Omni Consumer Products.
Well, whatever it was, the key ingredient was actually the chocolate coating.
I don't understand why so many people have trouble with the idea that Obama does all of these crazy illegal things that he hates because he's trying to win Congress's trust.
He doesn't need Congress's trust. He needs the American people's trust. And the country needs to know that laws are being followed and enforced fairly if we don't want the place to turn into a totalitarian regime. Constitutionality is more important than law, and following the law is more important than any political jockeying.
And if you don't understand how important that is, consider how you reacted when George W Bush did all sorts of crazy illegal things. If it's ok for presidents you like to do something, it's also ok for presidents you don't like to do the same thing.
They've been asleep at the wheel for 10 years, why wake up now?
No they haven't been. They've had several changes to stop this train, and John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Anthony Kennedy are all happily cheering as we're charging right into police-state territory. This is exactly what those guys want.