Elsewhere in the Old Testament, there are very specific rules about what should happen if somebody is raped: 1. If the woman is not married or engaged, the rapist pays her father 50 shekels of silver, and marries her. 2. If the woman is engaged, the town is supposed to stone both her rapist and her to death. (both of these are from Deuteronomy 22) Apparently the justification for this one is that it's her fault she didn't scream loudly enough. 3. If the woman is married, that's adultery, so both of them should be killed. (Leviticus 20:10)
Which goes to show exactly how much the people that wrote those books cared about women.
I can: In my (somewhat limited) experience the people who tend to show up and serve, at least where I live, are at least fairly decent about it, and want to be fair. When I took my turn (I had the time, figured why not), our deliberations were far more based in the facts and the relevant law than either of the attorneys had been throughout the case.
In case you're wondering, we convicted a criminal defendant in a felonious assault: We had the victim's testimony identifying him, DNA evidence from the scene putting him there and holding a weapon, eyewitness evidence having him fleeing the scene and getting into the victim's car, and finally the police catching him in the victim's car with the victim's blood on his jacket, and the hospital evidence showing the results of the attack. And the defense had offered no alternate theory, just tried to insinuate that the victim was a crack whore (which she might have been, but that didn't change the jury's votes).
You never pay into SS or Medicare, because there is no fund with any assets there, it's all IOUs, gov't bonds.
Just so we're clear here, what you're arguing here is that a US Treasury bond is not an asset. This would come as a big surprise to anyone who's ever bought one, including everyone working in financial markets anywhere in the world. The only way those IOUs aren't assets is if the US Treasury decides to default on its loan obligations, which means that we've also just seriously pissed off the Chinese and everyone else who was holding them, triggered a global financial collapse and quite possibly a serious war.
Now, that's not nothing, but it's not even close to explaining why US health care costs 3.5 times that of the UK. Some things that are more likely to make a difference: 1. Most health care in the US is fee-for-service, so doctors get paid more if they do more procedures, no matter how useful those procedures are. Solution: put doctors on salary. 2. The US spends a lot of money keeping people alive as basically a vegetable in a hospital during the last year of their life. Solution: end-of-life counseling and legalizing euthanasia. 3. A significant portion of health care costs are insurance companies, hospitals, individuals, and government each haggling to try to make the other parties pay for the cost of care. Solution: Single payer and single provider, so there's nobody else to haggle with. 4. Another significant problem is that people without insurance and money to pay for care tend to seek care at emergency rooms, which both makes it harder for ERs to handle real emergencies and means we spend easily 5 times what we would have spent to treat the same condition in a doctor's office. Solution: Cover everybody.
In other words, you get pretty close to what every other country in the world is doing, and it gets a lot cheaper to provide health care.
Quite a few: about 1800 during the 2004 Republican convention, for example. Many of those were cases where the cops arrested people and dropped the charges a few days later because they had no evidence whatsoever of any sort of crime, but others were charged and jailed. The Bush years also saw the introduction of sonic weapons, Total Information Awareness, and lots of other repression tactics. And yes, the Obama administration has done much the same thing in going after Occupy protesters.
Basically, when it comes to civil liberties, neither the Bush nor the Obama administration have much if any regard for them, and both had the full support of their respective parties' congressional delegation. If you want to support civil liberties, you should support organizations like the ACLU and vote for a candidate that actually supports civil liberties, like Gary Johnson (L) or Jill Stein (G).
If Cubans have it so well, why are so many still risking their lives to leave Cuba by traveling in make-shift boats across 90 miles of treacherous ocean?
First and foremost, for the same reason many people are risking their lives running across the desert to get into the US from Mexico: Better economic opportunities in the US. Secondly (although considerably less so now than in the 1960's), because of political concerns.
When was the last time you went to Cuba or talk to a Cuban or someone with relatives in Cuba?
I haven't been there, but my mother and many of her friends have made several trips as part of a religious exchange program. I've spoken (with some translation help) with the leaders of the Cuban religious body during their return visits, mostly in the mid-1990's. And no, none of these visits were shadowed by police or other government officials.
Why not compare Cuba to the Dominican Republic, Trinadad and Tobago, or Puerto Rico?
GDP per capita - Cuba: $9,900 Dominican Republic: $9,000 Trinidad & Tobago: $20,000 Puerto Rico: $16,300 (notably, this is dropping, not growing) Life expectancy at birth - Cuba: 77.9 Dominican Republic: 77.4 Trinidad & Tobago: 71.6 Puerto Rico: 79.0 Literacy - Cuba: 99.8% Dominican Republic: 87% Trinidad & Tobago: 98.6% Puerto Rico: 94.1% Hospital beds per 1000 - Cuba: 5.9 Dominican Republic: 1.0 Trinidad & Tobago: 2.5 Puerto Rico: (not listed in the stats I'm reading) Unemployment - Cuba: 1.6% Dominican Republic: 13.1% Trinidad & Tobago: 6.4% Puerto Rico: 14.2% Florida: 8.6%
So your average Cuban makes less than someone from T&T or PR, but enjoys a better life expectancy, much better education, very good health care, and much less unemployment. It's not a paradise (which I never claimed it was), but it does some things well. And if you're getting your impressions of what Cuba is like from people living in Miami, you're getting at best part of the story.
If you read only one of those, read Halloween 10, in which a consultant to SCO is writing to SCO's CFO about how Microsoft gave them $86 million to work with.
To clarify, the mob hit on him was actually not for taking on the mob, it was for taking on the banks who were trying to force him to sell what is now Cleveland Public Power to what is now FirstEnergy of Ohio.
Also, I'd hug him too, if I could hug his wife next: she's ridiculously hot.
As it stands now, those in Afghanistan have no reason to quit fighting, they haven't really lost anything they value and those who live there are not to the point where they would put a stop to those supposedly fighting for them
The other approach (which has somewhat worked in Iraq) is to convince the population that the life provided under US occupation or a US-allied government is better than life under the other guys. For instance, the main reason that the VietCong had the slightest chance of winning in Vietnam is because their government had convinced people that they were the better choice - if they hadn't, the Vietnamese peasant population would have promptly turned in any VC in the area to the French, US, or South Vietnam.
If it works, it kills far fewer people than, say, the Dresden bombing.
If you haven't done any rail travel lately in the US, please be aware that a train ticket for the normal, slow train costs about as much as a coach class airplane ticket for the same trip.
Well, waddaya know, I've done quite a bit of it, including the trip you've described, and can tell you you're only partially right: 1. The train is vastly more comfortable than flying: Your seat in coach is about the same size as First Class offers you in the air,and you're free to go up and hang out in the lounge car if you'd rather.
2. A trip from Albany to Buffalo in 8 hours is too slow. A trip from Albany to Buffalo in 2-3 hours, on the other hand, is a lot more competitive with flying. (The main reason for the slowness is actually because Amtrak has to compete with freight traffic across New York, while in the Northeast Corridor it has complete control of the tracks.)
3. As a sibling poster pointed out, Amtrak ridership is increasing, particularly in the high-speed corridor from Boston to Washington (which is running a profit). The market is in fact saying that the public wants high-speed passenger rail.
4. In addition to getting you there faster, it means Amtrak could run more trains with the same number of cars and engines. For example, right now there's 1 westbound trip per day across upstate NY: With high-speed rail, you could easily have a morning train and an evening train in both directions.
Actually, for Cuba, it's worked out pretty well in a lot of ways: Their GDP is about 10 times what it was in 1970, including recovering from a slump in the early 1990s when they lost all aid from the Soviets. The Communist regime also improved literacy dramatically (from about 60% to 99% today), and has a health care system that's been used as a model for other Latin American countries. Your average Cuban isn't rich and doesn't have political freedom, but they are very likely to have housing, food, clothing, decent health, employment, education for their children, and are living to a ripe old age. They've even been regaining religious freedom since the Soviet collapse, and also are allowed a bit more economic freedom since Raul Castro took over from Fidel.
In short, for day-to-day living, you'd much rather be an average Cuban than an average Haitian.
There are 3 likely reasons: 1. AC is not in a position to get a new job. That might be due to the location (and having a life situation that doesn't allow just moving across the country), a lack of experience, age discrimination, immigration status (for an H1-B holder, quitting means leaving the country), or a whole bunch of other factors.
2. AC can make more money putting up with this, and decided that more money is more important than more time right now. For instance, if the alternative is unemployment, working 13 hours a day is attractive.
There are many serious proposals of high-speed rail lines in other areas of the country where there are cities spaced no more than 100 miles apart, or about an hour by high-speed rail. To get an idea of how fast it would be, take driving times, divide by two, and add 40 minutes to get to and from the train station (which will probably be near the middle of the city). Then compare that with flight times + 1 hour on each end to get to and from the airport.
So, for example, Boston to Chicago, currently a 27 hour trip by rail or road, would become something like 8-9 hours, with stops in Springfield MA, Albany, Syracuse NY, Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, and South Bend IN. That's not as fast as the 3 hour flight, but it's a lot closer to competitive, and very competitive if you're going on a shorter segment, say Boston-Buffalo.
The reporting on this mentioned protesters outside holding signs that translated to "Free Pussy Riot". They didn't comment on whether they meant "Free (Pussy Riot)" or "(Free Pussy) Riot".
3 reasons: 1. He's a chessplayer, which necessarily makes him a giant nerd. Hence news for nerds. 2. This is stuff that matters, especially if you're Russian. 3. The potential for "In Capitalist Russia..." jokes is obvious.
Kucinich also had that kind of support within his district, winning by landslides most of the time.
As I pointed out in a sibling post, the Democratic Party generally disliked him, and didn't really complain when the Ohio Republicans eliminated his district (for the express purpose of reducing the number of likely Democratic House seats).
You haven't cited anything to support this. The fact is, no one has any idea what side of the Laffer Curve we are on. Odds are, we're on the side that says we're collecting too little in taxes.
Actually, a group of economists crunched the numbers and found that the optimal top marginal tax rate was somewhere between 70% and 85%. So we do know which side of the Laffer curve we're on, and it's the side that means that lower tax rates mean less revenue and higher tax rates mean higher revenue. In other words, just like you'd expect, not the bizzaro world where up is down. And yes, reality backs up what the researchers found: For instance, when Bush cut taxes from 39.5% to 35% in 2001, revenue dropped.
The Laffer Curve argument is basically a fraud. You can make the argument that government should always have low taxes, but you can't make it on that basis and have a leg to stand on.
I'm from Kucinich's district, and I'm hardly surprised he worked with Paul Ryan. For instance, he worked a lot with Ron Paul trying to cut back military spending and Iraq War funding, because the two of them arrived to the same conclusion for completely different reasons.
For the most part, it's been a record of futility, though: His own party's leadership hates him because he doesn't toe the party line on issues like health care (he once kicked Nancy Pelosi out of his office when she tried to force his hand). And of course John Boehner and friends hate him for being a Democrat. So none of his bills or resolutions make it anywhere unless he has support from other backbenchers, hence the strange bedfellows.
To whoever modded this flamebait: The accusation against Cheney is easy to sustain. Dick Cheney publicly proclaimed that he led the group that ordered waterboarding of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. American prosecutors defined waterboarding or the ordering of waterboarding of a prisoner to be a crime against humanity at the 1945 Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal.
Slashdot Mirror
Elsewhere in the Old Testament, there are very specific rules about what should happen if somebody is raped:
1. If the woman is not married or engaged, the rapist pays her father 50 shekels of silver, and marries her.
2. If the woman is engaged, the town is supposed to stone both her rapist and her to death. (both of these are from Deuteronomy 22) Apparently the justification for this one is that it's her fault she didn't scream loudly enough.
3. If the woman is married, that's adultery, so both of them should be killed. (Leviticus 20:10)
Which goes to show exactly how much the people that wrote those books cared about women.
After all, digital audio makes it much easier to erase a few minutes' worth of incriminating evidence, all without having to do the Rose Mary Stretch.
I can: In my (somewhat limited) experience the people who tend to show up and serve, at least where I live, are at least fairly decent about it, and want to be fair. When I took my turn (I had the time, figured why not), our deliberations were far more based in the facts and the relevant law than either of the attorneys had been throughout the case.
In case you're wondering, we convicted a criminal defendant in a felonious assault: We had the victim's testimony identifying him, DNA evidence from the scene putting him there and holding a weapon, eyewitness evidence having him fleeing the scene and getting into the victim's car, and finally the police catching him in the victim's car with the victim's blood on his jacket, and the hospital evidence showing the results of the attack. And the defense had offered no alternate theory, just tried to insinuate that the victim was a crack whore (which she might have been, but that didn't change the jury's votes).
It hurts GDP for tourists to die before they've spent all their money on useless stuff made in China saying "I Love Montana".
You never pay into SS or Medicare, because there is no fund with any assets there, it's all IOUs, gov't bonds.
Just so we're clear here, what you're arguing here is that a US Treasury bond is not an asset. This would come as a big surprise to anyone who's ever bought one, including everyone working in financial markets anywhere in the world. The only way those IOUs aren't assets is if the US Treasury decides to default on its loan obligations, which means that we've also just seriously pissed off the Chinese and everyone else who was holding them, triggered a global financial collapse and quite possibly a serious war.
These are tests and procedures done a doctor covering his ass rather than trying to diagnose and treat evident conditions.
... and increase his income (see my first point). This is especially true for specialists.
The evidence is that the amount of money that can be saved by various tort reform laws is approximately 2%:
http://www.nber.org/bah/2009no3/w15371.html
Now, that's not nothing, but it's not even close to explaining why US health care costs 3.5 times that of the UK. Some things that are more likely to make a difference:
1. Most health care in the US is fee-for-service, so doctors get paid more if they do more procedures, no matter how useful those procedures are. Solution: put doctors on salary.
2. The US spends a lot of money keeping people alive as basically a vegetable in a hospital during the last year of their life. Solution: end-of-life counseling and legalizing euthanasia.
3. A significant portion of health care costs are insurance companies, hospitals, individuals, and government each haggling to try to make the other parties pay for the cost of care. Solution: Single payer and single provider, so there's nobody else to haggle with.
4. Another significant problem is that people without insurance and money to pay for care tend to seek care at emergency rooms, which both makes it harder for ERs to handle real emergencies and means we spend easily 5 times what we would have spent to treat the same condition in a doctor's office. Solution: Cover everybody.
In other words, you get pretty close to what every other country in the world is doing, and it gets a lot cheaper to provide health care.
Quite a few: about 1800 during the 2004 Republican convention, for example. Many of those were cases where the cops arrested people and dropped the charges a few days later because they had no evidence whatsoever of any sort of crime, but others were charged and jailed. The Bush years also saw the introduction of sonic weapons, Total Information Awareness, and lots of other repression tactics. And yes, the Obama administration has done much the same thing in going after Occupy protesters.
Basically, when it comes to civil liberties, neither the Bush nor the Obama administration have much if any regard for them, and both had the full support of their respective parties' congressional delegation. If you want to support civil liberties, you should support organizations like the ACLU and vote for a candidate that actually supports civil liberties, like Gary Johnson (L) or Jill Stein (G).
If Cubans have it so well, why are so many still risking their lives to leave Cuba by traveling in make-shift boats across 90 miles of treacherous ocean?
First and foremost, for the same reason many people are risking their lives running across the desert to get into the US from Mexico: Better economic opportunities in the US. Secondly (although considerably less so now than in the 1960's), because of political concerns.
When was the last time you went to Cuba or talk to a Cuban or someone with relatives in Cuba?
I haven't been there, but my mother and many of her friends have made several trips as part of a religious exchange program. I've spoken (with some translation help) with the leaders of the Cuban religious body during their return visits, mostly in the mid-1990's. And no, none of these visits were shadowed by police or other government officials.
Why not compare Cuba to the Dominican Republic, Trinadad and Tobago, or Puerto Rico?
GDP per capita - Cuba: $9,900 Dominican Republic: $9,000 Trinidad & Tobago: $20,000 Puerto Rico: $16,300 (notably, this is dropping, not growing)
Life expectancy at birth - Cuba: 77.9 Dominican Republic: 77.4 Trinidad & Tobago: 71.6 Puerto Rico: 79.0
Literacy - Cuba: 99.8% Dominican Republic: 87% Trinidad & Tobago: 98.6% Puerto Rico: 94.1%
Hospital beds per 1000 - Cuba: 5.9 Dominican Republic: 1.0 Trinidad & Tobago: 2.5 Puerto Rico: (not listed in the stats I'm reading)
Unemployment - Cuba: 1.6% Dominican Republic: 13.1% Trinidad & Tobago: 6.4% Puerto Rico: 14.2% Florida: 8.6%
So your average Cuban makes less than someone from T&T or PR, but enjoys a better life expectancy, much better education, very good health care, and much less unemployment. It's not a paradise (which I never claimed it was), but it does some things well. And if you're getting your impressions of what Cuba is like from people living in Miami, you're getting at best part of the story.
It could be worse: He could have to answer to the Coca-Cola company!
If you read only one of those, read Halloween 10, in which a consultant to SCO is writing to SCO's CFO about how Microsoft gave them $86 million to work with.
To clarify, the mob hit on him was actually not for taking on the mob, it was for taking on the banks who were trying to force him to sell what is now Cleveland Public Power to what is now FirstEnergy of Ohio.
Also, I'd hug him too, if I could hug his wife next: she's ridiculously hot.
As it stands now, those in Afghanistan have no reason to quit fighting, they haven't really lost anything they value and those who live there are not to the point where they would put a stop to those supposedly fighting for them
The other approach (which has somewhat worked in Iraq) is to convince the population that the life provided under US occupation or a US-allied government is better than life under the other guys. For instance, the main reason that the VietCong had the slightest chance of winning in Vietnam is because their government had convinced people that they were the better choice - if they hadn't, the Vietnamese peasant population would have promptly turned in any VC in the area to the French, US, or South Vietnam.
If it works, it kills far fewer people than, say, the Dresden bombing.
If you haven't done any rail travel lately in the US, please be aware that a train ticket for the normal, slow train costs about as much as a coach class airplane ticket for the same trip.
Well, waddaya know, I've done quite a bit of it, including the trip you've described, and can tell you you're only partially right:
1. The train is vastly more comfortable than flying: Your seat in coach is about the same size as First Class offers you in the air,and you're free to go up and hang out in the lounge car if you'd rather.
2. A trip from Albany to Buffalo in 8 hours is too slow. A trip from Albany to Buffalo in 2-3 hours, on the other hand, is a lot more competitive with flying. (The main reason for the slowness is actually because Amtrak has to compete with freight traffic across New York, while in the Northeast Corridor it has complete control of the tracks.)
3. As a sibling poster pointed out, Amtrak ridership is increasing, particularly in the high-speed corridor from Boston to Washington (which is running a profit). The market is in fact saying that the public wants high-speed passenger rail.
4. In addition to getting you there faster, it means Amtrak could run more trains with the same number of cars and engines. For example, right now there's 1 westbound trip per day across upstate NY: With high-speed rail, you could easily have a morning train and an evening train in both directions.
Actually, for Cuba, it's worked out pretty well in a lot of ways: Their GDP is about 10 times what it was in 1970, including recovering from a slump in the early 1990s when they lost all aid from the Soviets. The Communist regime also improved literacy dramatically (from about 60% to 99% today), and has a health care system that's been used as a model for other Latin American countries. Your average Cuban isn't rich and doesn't have political freedom, but they are very likely to have housing, food, clothing, decent health, employment, education for their children, and are living to a ripe old age. They've even been regaining religious freedom since the Soviet collapse, and also are allowed a bit more economic freedom since Raul Castro took over from Fidel.
In short, for day-to-day living, you'd much rather be an average Cuban than an average Haitian.
There are 3 likely reasons:
1. AC is not in a position to get a new job. That might be due to the location (and having a life situation that doesn't allow just moving across the country), a lack of experience, age discrimination, immigration status (for an H1-B holder, quitting means leaving the country), or a whole bunch of other factors.
2. AC can make more money putting up with this, and decided that more money is more important than more time right now. For instance, if the alternative is unemployment, working 13 hours a day is attractive.
That's simply not true.
There are many serious proposals of high-speed rail lines in other areas of the country where there are cities spaced no more than 100 miles apart, or about an hour by high-speed rail. To get an idea of how fast it would be, take driving times, divide by two, and add 40 minutes to get to and from the train station (which will probably be near the middle of the city). Then compare that with flight times + 1 hour on each end to get to and from the airport.
So, for example, Boston to Chicago, currently a 27 hour trip by rail or road, would become something like 8-9 hours, with stops in Springfield MA, Albany, Syracuse NY, Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, and South Bend IN. That's not as fast as the 3 hour flight, but it's a lot closer to competitive, and very competitive if you're going on a shorter segment, say Boston-Buffalo.
If you actually read the paper, you'd have seen that they specifically include tax avoidance in their calculations.
The reporting on this mentioned protesters outside holding signs that translated to "Free Pussy Riot". They didn't comment on whether they meant "Free (Pussy Riot)" or "(Free Pussy) Riot".
3 reasons: ..." jokes is obvious.
1. He's a chessplayer, which necessarily makes him a giant nerd. Hence news for nerds.
2. This is stuff that matters, especially if you're Russian.
3. The potential for "In Capitalist Russia
Kucinich also had that kind of support within his district, winning by landslides most of the time.
As I pointed out in a sibling post, the Democratic Party generally disliked him, and didn't really complain when the Ohio Republicans eliminated his district (for the express purpose of reducing the number of likely Democratic House seats).
In practice, he has whatever power the president decides he should have, and he's a part of cabinet meetings.
He's also the only decision of any practical importance whatsoever than a presidential candidate makes before election day.
You haven't cited anything to support this. The fact is, no one has any idea what side of the Laffer Curve we are on. Odds are, we're on the side that says we're collecting too little in taxes.
Actually, a group of economists crunched the numbers and found that the optimal top marginal tax rate was somewhere between 70% and 85%. So we do know which side of the Laffer curve we're on, and it's the side that means that lower tax rates mean less revenue and higher tax rates mean higher revenue. In other words, just like you'd expect, not the bizzaro world where up is down. And yes, reality backs up what the researchers found: For instance, when Bush cut taxes from 39.5% to 35% in 2001, revenue dropped.
The Laffer Curve argument is basically a fraud. You can make the argument that government should always have low taxes, but you can't make it on that basis and have a leg to stand on.
I'm from Kucinich's district, and I'm hardly surprised he worked with Paul Ryan. For instance, he worked a lot with Ron Paul trying to cut back military spending and Iraq War funding, because the two of them arrived to the same conclusion for completely different reasons.
For the most part, it's been a record of futility, though: His own party's leadership hates him because he doesn't toe the party line on issues like health care (he once kicked Nancy Pelosi out of his office when she tried to force his hand). And of course John Boehner and friends hate him for being a Democrat. So none of his bills or resolutions make it anywhere unless he has support from other backbenchers, hence the strange bedfellows.
To whoever modded this flamebait: The accusation against Cheney is easy to sustain. Dick Cheney publicly proclaimed that he led the group that ordered waterboarding of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. American prosecutors defined waterboarding or the ordering of waterboarding of a prisoner to be a crime against humanity at the 1945 Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal.
Ergo, Dick Cheney is an admitted war criminal.