And the truth is that when I was a kid not that long ago, I walked over a mile to school, not infrequently through 2-foot deep snow, uphill, carrying about 25-30 pounds of books, in subzero temperatures. But no, I didn't work 28 hours down at the mill or pay the mill owner for permission to come to work.
I'm surprised no one has pointed out yet that this was exactly the behavior predicted by the Flying Spaghetti Monster pressing down on objects to keep them from floating into space.
this would take away the ability for political parties to bully voters as they come to the polling places
Have you ever been actually bullied as you come to a polling place? Bear in mind that this does not in any way qualify as "bullying": "Hi, I'm with Smith for dogcatcher. Have you made your decision about who you want as the local dogcatcher? If not, let me tell you why Smith would make an excellent dogcatcher..."
I agree that it can be annoying to listen to pitches that you don't want to hear, but that's the deal you make when you create the concept of free speech - you will hear things you disagree with, at times when you'd rather not listen.
What is definitely true is that the richer a person gets, the more conservative they tend to lean, because of simple self-interest. People who are poorer tend to lean liberal for the same reason. This can appear like a person gaining wisdom with age and success, because your average newly minted young adult has approximately $0 in assets (-$25,000 or so if they have a college degree) while middle-aged and older people have had the time to accumulate assets and demand higher salaries for their work, but it is actually simply a matter of flipped social and financial position. Conservative values like deference to elders also are a lot more popular among 65-year-olds than 25-year-olds.
AT&T is the third largest campaign contributor in the US, giving approximately $5000 to 386 out of 435 Congressmen, and 66 of the 100 Senators, so it's safe to say AT&T already is the ruling party!
What I'm awaiting, though, is the change to inaugurate President Stephen Colbert!
Well, actually, there is, throughout the US: absentee ballots. And absentee ballots are significantly more prone to fraud than in-person votes, including quite a few criminal prosecutions for fraud schemes across the country. Oh, and there have been cases of election officials conveniently locating a bunch of absentee ballots after election day that had been "lost".
Back when I was living in New Hampshire during a hotly contested presidential primary, a "completely independent" group of volunteers showed up at my grandmother's nursing home to help the residents cast their votes, helpfully filling out the ballots so that all the voters needed to do was sign their name at the bottom. Clearly nothing funny going on there.
Is it open season for every intelligence agent working for the US to be able to release whatever classified information they want to the world?
I'd say yes to that, actually. My reasoning: 1. People who choose to work as an intelligence agent presumably go into it wanting to be good at their job. Part of being a good intelligence agent is to keep what we know secret from the other side's intelligence agents. If classified information shows up in the New York Times or Pravda, that means that the intelligence agent in question just ended his career to give away that information. That's not something anybody does willy-nilly: you haven't just lost your job, you've guaranteed that you will never work in the same field ever again, and may not work at all ever again. That's a pretty severe punishment.
2. If the organization is leaking secrets all over the place as a result of this policy, then they have bad hiring practices, bad internal controls on classified information, and/or bad policies that these now ex-agents think have to be leaked. No matter which it is, I can be equally certain that the management responsible for any of those mistakes will use top secret classification and a mountain of useless data for the politicians to go through to prevent anyone from being held accountable, unless these leaks happen.
What? Are you crazy? Putting a stop to the F-35 would end a large component of the American Way of Life (TM) - taking ridiculous sums of taxpayer money to pay a small set of favored contracting companies to build a bunch of military stuff at ridiculously inflated prices that may or may not work, in exchange for bribes^Hcampaign donations to the politicians who made the decision to engage in this policy.
This policy isn't about protecting the American people, and hasn't been since at least 1989.
Cost parity between formerly cheap East and formerly expensive West has been achieved.
Umm, no it hasn't: 1. In countries in the formerly cheap East, they don't have pesky environmental or labor laws (or at least nothing effective), so unlike the West they (for example) don't have to pay extra when they work people 7x16 hours a week instead of 5x8 (or 5x7). 2. If there really was parity, right now there'd be a glut of electronics manufacturing jobs in the West for goods for export to the East. That has demonstrably not happened. 3. In India, an average software developer earns about Rs400,000 a year, which is approximately $6500 US. An average American developer easily earns 10-20 times that.
And even if there were parity between East and West, that really doesn't matter, because manufacturing will simply move to the global South, where there are plenty of desperate people looking for work. For example, if China started getting too demanding, within a few years you'd see iPhones being made in Botswana or South Africa instead (both are politically stable enough to make business investment possible).
Of course we don't spy on Congress. The mere notion would be preposterous. And Bernie, how about that cute 20-something uninhibited hippie chick you have in Bennington that your wife doesn't know about?
over 50% of them (is the US) pay nothing into the system yet reap untold benefits.
1. The survey was in the UK so your US-based views don't apply. 2. That claim is based on the fact 50% pay no income tax, but it is false to extend that to "paying nothing into the system": In many cases, that means they pay every other kind of tax, including payroll, sales (gasoline, cigarettes, etc), state and municipal income taxes, and sometimes property taxes. They also pay in fees for various government services, such as driver's licensing. 3. Most of those that actually pay no taxes at all do so because they have the audacity to be children under the age of 16, or retirees who don't have any income besides Social Security.
I am simply stating that there is not enough proof either for OR against AGW.
What exactly constitutes "enough"? Consider an argument of this form: - A happened. - B happened after A happened. - In lab tests, A leads to B. - Causes C,D,E,F,... that experts in the field proposed for alternative reasons why B might be happening have been ruled out. Would you consider the statement "A causes B" to be probably true, or probably false?
Substitute in "anthropogenic CO2 release" for A, "increasing global average temperature" for B, and a whole bunch of natural causes for C,D,E,F,..., and that's exactly where the global warming "debate" is. There's a reason why almost all scientists who actually study this stuff (including a guy hired by global warming skeptics to try to prove their point) believe that AGW is real.
Your logic appears to be the equivalent of this: 1. Some people who believe in evolution are idiots who believe Lamarck was completely right about how traits evolve. 2. Ergo, evolution is wrong.
Now, as far as the "It's naturally caused" argument, there's lots of evidence that it isn't, and to claim otherwise is to be deliberately misleading.
And if you really want to experience what everybody naked looks like, just go to a nudist colony for a day or two. I guarantee you you will either: 1. Stop caring whether people are wearing clothes, or 2. Really wish people would put their clothes back on.
That's because the people you'd probably like to look at naked are a significant minority of the population: They're the sex you're attracted to, relatively healthy body weight, and in the young adult age range. In fact, for most people 50% are of the sex you're not attracted to, about 55% are overweight or obese, and about 70% are older than 40 or younger than 18, which if you do some quick math means that about 93% of people you encounter you'd really rather not see naked.
In addition, it's worth mentioning that the US currently defines its "border" as anything within 100 miles of any land or sea border, or any international airport. As a matter of standing case law, it is legal for them to grab you in, say, San Francisco, and search your laptop, cell phone, person, papers, and effects, without providing any legal justification other than "You're in a border zone".
And of course, Mr Abidor being a scholar of Islamic Studies had absolutely nothing to do with him being stopped, that was total coincidence.
And what they're looking for isn't so much evidence of criminal activity as it is dirt on people, in case they need to protect America by blackmailing people like they did in COINTELPRO.
People with loose morals often read books that have been banned. People with strict morals, by contrast, form censorship committees and study those books in a group setting.
And the real irony is that Disney built its animated empire on stories in the public domain: - Snow White? Grimm's Fairy Tales. - Pinocchio? Carlo Collodi, 1880. - Fantasia? Classical music from the public domain. The highlight, the Sorcerer's Apprentice, is from Goethe in 1798. - Bambi? Nope, they stole that one too, from a 1923 work of Felix Salten - Cinderella? That was written about 1700. - Alice in Wonderland? Lewis Carroll, of course.
Basically, if it's a "Disney princess", they almost definitely stole the character from somewhere else.
Also, he's demonstrably wrong: After the whole Boston Marathon bombing went down, the support for the NSA spying went down, not up. A logical reason for this: the NSA had clearly failed to catch terrorists despite all their willful violation of the rights of all Americans, so the benefits for all that intrusion were approximately 0.
Besides that, regardless of what the NSA does or doesn't do, your average American is about 15 times more likely to be killed by a drunk driver than a terrorist.
I wasn't aware of leaders of the GOP claiming Obama was born in Kenya.
You mean besides Donald Trump leading the charge to say Obama wasn't a citizen, Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain, and Rick Perry saying they didn't know whether he was a US citizen, and Newt Gingrich saying that Obama had a "Kenyan" worldview? Bear in mind that these were all people leading in the GOP presidential polls at some point in 2012.
So, yea, you obviously don't know our politics at all.
Neither do you, or you're carefully leaving things out so that you can square your probable support of the Republican Party with your belief that racism is bad.
The Democratic Party was the party of racism from 1860 until the mid-1900's. Franklin Roosevelt arguably signaled the shift within the Democratic Party when he allowed African-Americans to serve in the army, albeit in segregated units, but by 1960 the Democratic Party was firmly committed to racial equality and the Kennedy administration was forcing southern states to desegregate. By 1964, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, the Democratic Party was very much an anti-racist, and many of the pro-segregation Democrats (most notably Strohm Thurmond) left the party entirely. Richard Nixon came back with fundamentally racist arguments, Ronald Reagan used more subtle racism to get elected in 1980, and the current GOP is now simultaneously embracing racism (e.g. the bogus claims that Obama was born in Kenya) and pretending that racism doesn't exist (e.g. striking down the aforementioned Voting Rights Act).
It probably measures a lot of dying American creationists. This would hardly be surprising: It was 1968 before the US Supreme Court struck down state laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools, so older Americans are much more likely to have been taught creationism in their science classes than younger Americans.
Slashdot Mirror
And the truth is that when I was a kid not that long ago, I walked over a mile to school, not infrequently through 2-foot deep snow, uphill, carrying about 25-30 pounds of books, in subzero temperatures. But no, I didn't work 28 hours down at the mill or pay the mill owner for permission to come to work.
I'm surprised no one has pointed out yet that this was exactly the behavior predicted by the Flying Spaghetti Monster pressing down on objects to keep them from floating into space.
Because Bruce Schneier can easily arrange to get a lot of upvotes for story submissions about him.
And of course, there's absolutely no possible way that a Facebook employee would have access to that information.
this would take away the ability for political parties to bully voters as they come to the polling places
Have you ever been actually bullied as you come to a polling place? Bear in mind that this does not in any way qualify as "bullying": ..."
"Hi, I'm with Smith for dogcatcher. Have you made your decision about who you want as the local dogcatcher? If not, let me tell you why Smith would make an excellent dogcatcher
I agree that it can be annoying to listen to pitches that you don't want to hear, but that's the deal you make when you create the concept of free speech - you will hear things you disagree with, at times when you'd rather not listen.
Generally, the smarter a person gets, the more republican they tend to lean in ideology even if they insist on remaining democrats or liberals.
There's at best no evidence for that assertion. And there's also serious counterarguments.
What is definitely true is that the richer a person gets, the more conservative they tend to lean, because of simple self-interest. People who are poorer tend to lean liberal for the same reason. This can appear like a person gaining wisdom with age and success, because your average newly minted young adult has approximately $0 in assets (-$25,000 or so if they have a college degree) while middle-aged and older people have had the time to accumulate assets and demand higher salaries for their work, but it is actually simply a matter of flipped social and financial position. Conservative values like deference to elders also are a lot more popular among 65-year-olds than 25-year-olds.
AT&T is the third largest campaign contributor in the US, giving approximately $5000 to 386 out of 435 Congressmen, and 66 of the 100 Senators, so it's safe to say AT&T already is the ruling party!
What I'm awaiting, though, is the change to inaugurate President Stephen Colbert!
The reason there is no remote voting
Well, actually, there is, throughout the US: absentee ballots. And absentee ballots are significantly more prone to fraud than in-person votes, including quite a few criminal prosecutions for fraud schemes across the country. Oh, and there have been cases of election officials conveniently locating a bunch of absentee ballots after election day that had been "lost".
Back when I was living in New Hampshire during a hotly contested presidential primary, a "completely independent" group of volunteers showed up at my grandmother's nursing home to help the residents cast their votes, helpfully filling out the ballots so that all the voters needed to do was sign their name at the bottom. Clearly nothing funny going on there.
Is it open season for every intelligence agent working for the US to be able to release whatever classified information they want to the world?
I'd say yes to that, actually. My reasoning:
1. People who choose to work as an intelligence agent presumably go into it wanting to be good at their job. Part of being a good intelligence agent is to keep what we know secret from the other side's intelligence agents. If classified information shows up in the New York Times or Pravda, that means that the intelligence agent in question just ended his career to give away that information. That's not something anybody does willy-nilly: you haven't just lost your job, you've guaranteed that you will never work in the same field ever again, and may not work at all ever again. That's a pretty severe punishment.
2. If the organization is leaking secrets all over the place as a result of this policy, then they have bad hiring practices, bad internal controls on classified information, and/or bad policies that these now ex-agents think have to be leaked. No matter which it is, I can be equally certain that the management responsible for any of those mistakes will use top secret classification and a mountain of useless data for the politicians to go through to prevent anyone from being held accountable, unless these leaks happen.
What? Are you crazy? Putting a stop to the F-35 would end a large component of the American Way of Life (TM) - taking ridiculous sums of taxpayer money to pay a small set of favored contracting companies to build a bunch of military stuff at ridiculously inflated prices that may or may not work, in exchange for bribes^Hcampaign donations to the politicians who made the decision to engage in this policy.
This policy isn't about protecting the American people, and hasn't been since at least 1989.
Cost parity between formerly cheap East and formerly expensive West has been achieved.
Umm, no it hasn't:
1. In countries in the formerly cheap East, they don't have pesky environmental or labor laws (or at least nothing effective), so unlike the West they (for example) don't have to pay extra when they work people 7x16 hours a week instead of 5x8 (or 5x7).
2. If there really was parity, right now there'd be a glut of electronics manufacturing jobs in the West for goods for export to the East. That has demonstrably not happened.
3. In India, an average software developer earns about Rs400,000 a year, which is approximately $6500 US. An average American developer easily earns 10-20 times that.
And even if there were parity between East and West, that really doesn't matter, because manufacturing will simply move to the global South, where there are plenty of desperate people looking for work. For example, if China started getting too demanding, within a few years you'd see iPhones being made in Botswana or South Africa instead (both are politically stable enough to make business investment possible).
Of course we don't spy on Congress. The mere notion would be preposterous. And Bernie, how about that cute 20-something uninhibited hippie chick you have in Bennington that your wife doesn't know about?
over 50% of them (is the US) pay nothing into the system yet reap untold benefits.
1. The survey was in the UK so your US-based views don't apply.
2. That claim is based on the fact 50% pay no income tax, but it is false to extend that to "paying nothing into the system": In many cases, that means they pay every other kind of tax, including payroll, sales (gasoline, cigarettes, etc), state and municipal income taxes, and sometimes property taxes. They also pay in fees for various government services, such as driver's licensing.
3. Most of those that actually pay no taxes at all do so because they have the audacity to be children under the age of 16, or retirees who don't have any income besides Social Security.
I am simply stating that there is not enough proof either for OR against AGW.
What exactly constitutes "enough"? Consider an argument of this form:
- A happened.
- B happened after A happened.
- In lab tests, A leads to B.
- Causes C,D,E,F,... that experts in the field proposed for alternative reasons why B might be happening have been ruled out.
Would you consider the statement "A causes B" to be probably true, or probably false?
Substitute in "anthropogenic CO2 release" for A, "increasing global average temperature" for B, and a whole bunch of natural causes for C,D,E,F,..., and that's exactly where the global warming "debate" is. There's a reason why almost all scientists who actually study this stuff (including a guy hired by global warming skeptics to try to prove their point) believe that AGW is real.
I love a good straw man argument in the morning!
Your logic appears to be the equivalent of this:
1. Some people who believe in evolution are idiots who believe Lamarck was completely right about how traits evolve.
2. Ergo, evolution is wrong.
Now, as far as the "It's naturally caused" argument, there's lots of evidence that it isn't, and to claim otherwise is to be deliberately misleading.
They left you out because a wise guy doesn't count!
And if you really want to experience what everybody naked looks like, just go to a nudist colony for a day or two. I guarantee you you will either:
1. Stop caring whether people are wearing clothes, or
2. Really wish people would put their clothes back on.
That's because the people you'd probably like to look at naked are a significant minority of the population: They're the sex you're attracted to, relatively healthy body weight, and in the young adult age range. In fact, for most people 50% are of the sex you're not attracted to, about 55% are overweight or obese, and about 70% are older than 40 or younger than 18, which if you do some quick math means that about 93% of people you encounter you'd really rather not see naked.
As always, XKCD explains why that won't help much.
In addition, it's worth mentioning that the US currently defines its "border" as anything within 100 miles of any land or sea border, or any international airport. As a matter of standing case law, it is legal for them to grab you in, say, San Francisco, and search your laptop, cell phone, person, papers, and effects, without providing any legal justification other than "You're in a border zone".
And of course, Mr Abidor being a scholar of Islamic Studies had absolutely nothing to do with him being stopped, that was total coincidence.
And what they're looking for isn't so much evidence of criminal activity as it is dirt on people, in case they need to protect America by blackmailing people like they did in COINTELPRO.
People with loose morals often read books that have been banned. People with strict morals, by contrast, form censorship committees and study those books in a group setting.
And the real irony is that Disney built its animated empire on stories in the public domain:
- Snow White? Grimm's Fairy Tales.
- Pinocchio? Carlo Collodi, 1880.
- Fantasia? Classical music from the public domain. The highlight, the Sorcerer's Apprentice, is from Goethe in 1798.
- Bambi? Nope, they stole that one too, from a 1923 work of Felix Salten
- Cinderella? That was written about 1700.
- Alice in Wonderland? Lewis Carroll, of course.
Basically, if it's a "Disney princess", they almost definitely stole the character from somewhere else.
Also, he's demonstrably wrong: After the whole Boston Marathon bombing went down, the support for the NSA spying went down, not up. A logical reason for this: the NSA had clearly failed to catch terrorists despite all their willful violation of the rights of all Americans, so the benefits for all that intrusion were approximately 0.
Besides that, regardless of what the NSA does or doesn't do, your average American is about 15 times more likely to be killed by a drunk driver than a terrorist.
I wasn't aware of leaders of the GOP claiming Obama was born in Kenya.
You mean besides Donald Trump leading the charge to say Obama wasn't a citizen, Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain, and Rick Perry saying they didn't know whether he was a US citizen, and Newt Gingrich saying that Obama had a "Kenyan" worldview? Bear in mind that these were all people leading in the GOP presidential polls at some point in 2012.
So, yea, you obviously don't know our politics at all.
Neither do you, or you're carefully leaving things out so that you can square your probable support of the Republican Party with your belief that racism is bad.
The Democratic Party was the party of racism from 1860 until the mid-1900's. Franklin Roosevelt arguably signaled the shift within the Democratic Party when he allowed African-Americans to serve in the army, albeit in segregated units, but by 1960 the Democratic Party was firmly committed to racial equality and the Kennedy administration was forcing southern states to desegregate. By 1964, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, the Democratic Party was very much an anti-racist, and many of the pro-segregation Democrats (most notably Strohm Thurmond) left the party entirely. Richard Nixon came back with fundamentally racist arguments, Ronald Reagan used more subtle racism to get elected in 1980, and the current GOP is now simultaneously embracing racism (e.g. the bogus claims that Obama was born in Kenya) and pretending that racism doesn't exist (e.g. striking down the aforementioned Voting Rights Act).
I think the survey measures something else.
It probably measures a lot of dying American creationists. This would hardly be surprising: It was 1968 before the US Supreme Court struck down state laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools, so older Americans are much more likely to have been taught creationism in their science classes than younger Americans.