a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and who in modern times is usually a president (2) : a political unit (as a nation) having such a form of government
There are other definitions which do fit your opinion more or less, but they aren't the only definitions of "republic" - in the US.
You can say that, but that doesn't make it so. Governments have far more power than corporations since one can readily acquire money with power, but not the other way around. Why would you even think that a company like Google would have more power than a government?
Even a regular bill needs to go through the senate, and end with a presidential signature... etc.
The Senate is part of the US Congress. And they can pass veto-proof legislation with supermajorities in both branches of Congress. So legislation is not at all the same as a constitutional amendment.
You can craft a new law that won't run afoul of the court guidelines.
And that can be done with the Citizens United ruling since the problem was that corporations were explicitly banned from doing activities that individuals could do. Of course, preventing individuals from donating to campaigns might run afoul of other constitutional restrictions such as the First Amendment.
. You obviously have no idea what it would mean to move most of the world cities inland.
About as much as it costs to leave cities in place. We already replace our cities every 50 years.
The pure bullshit is that you think moving to a low carbon economy will actually harm anyone's style of life in the west
Nonsense. The fantasy here is that what you want will magically have positive economic consequence. We need to keep in mind also that most of the world is not in the west. They will suffer as well.
I'll change my beliefs based on evidence, and actually care if they are right or wrong.
Sure, you will. I'll believe that when there's evidence.
Positive Sum Gaming would work if the rich didn't gain when you lose. But they do.
This is wrong. You are operating from incorrect premise, probably because you live in a developed world country.
You're also assuming we have to have 80% of humanity living in abject poverty.
You just made this assumption for the first time in this thread.
We already produce enough food to feed everyone on the planet, we just need people willing to say it's OK for people to have food, even if they didn't work themselves to death to get it.
A truly stupid statement, since those people have been saying that for some time. Saying "it's OK for people to have food" doesn't magically give people food. You need to have the infrastructure in place, including social and legal, in order for it to happen.
Wealth is the goods and services that you can enjoy.
Nonsense. I can enjoy great, highly valued ski trips to Vail, Colorado but they don't add to my wealth. Instead, if I invest that money, I not only can use a portion of it in the future to buy such ski trips or anything else of similar value that I happen to desire. Wealth is whatever enables me to buy present or future goods and services of value.
And I especially like when the government responds to criticisms by saying they didn't understand this issue when they made their rules and will take comments from the industry and revise their proposed rules as they have done in this case.
They should have asked for that input before making the rule.
I know it is not as fun for the anti-government types, but even the linked to article mentions it at the very bottom of the story:
Would you give a CEO a similar break if they come up with a stupid rule and only reverse it in the face of huge opposition from their employees, customers, or regulators?
So this is already a non issue, they have agreed to revise the rules so there are not the dire consequences the article was using to stir everyone up.
There are plenty of similarly shitty rules that don't get revised even though they are highly unpopular. For example, the EPA was claiming that it could levy fines on other parties without those parties acquiring standing to sue the EPA in court. That got revised only when it was brought into court and ruled unconstitutional.
This story brings attention to the broken decision making process behind the generation of regulation in the US.
80% of you in the US are competing over 5% of the money in the economy
Looking at the chart, they say 11%.
The problem with this statement is twofold. First, it still ignores significant parts of the economy, such as future income. For example, if you have an income (not net income) of 17,300 (like the mean of the bottom 40%), then you probably have a few tens of thousands of potential net income over your lifetime. That isn't reflected in the net worth figure.
Second, it ignores that most US residents don't compete for wealth. For example, more than a third don't save at all for retirement (36%). So of the 44% who aren't in the 20% wealthiest and happen to save even a little and thus, compete in even the slightest way for wealth, they have 11% of the wealth of the US. That doesn't sound bad to me at all.
Desertification is on the menu for much of the world due to AGW. (e.g., all the USA from California to Indiana is expected to desertify.)
I'll just note that we don't have evidence for that claim. We do have plenty of evidence that continued poor agricultural practices (which the US has mostly abandoned) in the US would do much greater harm over corresponding time frames than even the worst predictions of AGW over the next few centuries.
The world population is expected to stabilize at 11 billion. Given sufficient time and stability, technology will allow 11 billion people to have a modern lifestyle, and I hope we have the time. (This solves the poverty issue.)
One of those expectations is that we don't reverse the trend to wealthier societies. Messing with the world's energy infrastructure for poorly thought out purposes is one way we can reverse that and our attempts to stabilize global population.
My biggest fears with AGW is the immense loss of culture and history as the seas swallow and destroy most of the major cities in the world today.
Most culture isn't dependent at all on location. And what is dependent can be moved or rebuilt for small cost over those periods of time. Similarly, history is something that happened. It won't change just because the future is not as you'd like. I find your fears rather trivial, but typical of those who prioritize AGW over much more serious human problems.
Poverty and desertification can destroy cites as well.
A rising tide doesn't raise all ships, it swamps all but the biggest boats.
At least you've vaguely heard of the saying. The real saying is "A rising tide raises all boats". It basically sums up the general outcome of positive sum games. It amazes me how many people just don't get what a positive sum game is.
And the great irony here is that the largest ships, the developed world countries, are the ones being swamped. That's because they choose not to adapt. It's easier to blame the consequences of actions on the rich or whatever and just keep doing the same stupid things you decided you were going to do.
Also, how does that help you, living a middle class life in a first world country.
Adaptation is cheaper and more effective than ignoring reality. For example, labor got cheaper, but capital didn't. Put some of your effort into acquiring capital rather than just depending on your labor for your well being.
It's OK to think about yourself and your long term well being, You know?
When the supposed solutions result in plunging billions of people into greater poverty, then it dishonors me and mine to not speak against these games. I can adapt for a lot less harm to the rest of the world than the current bout of absurd regulation, protectionism, and hysteria.
What comments like this miss is that the big thing the federal government did that wouldn't have happened in bankruptcy - it guaranteed that GM's and Chrysler's vendors would be paid in full.
Let's not go crazy with the assertions. A regular bankruptcy probably would have resulted in the same thing. Vendors are near the top of the list in bankruptcy court.
Here you are forgetting another key fact about 2008. The credit crisis meant that even healthy companies were unable to raise capital to buy up or rescue these suppliers. Some otherwise healthy Fortune 500 companies experienced severe cash flow problems that threatened their day to day operations.
That's ok. The businesses, not necessarily Fortune 500 without severe cash flow problems would be the ones doing the buying.
Yea, when you're a bit older, and have grown that money to a nice nest egg so that you don't need to work ever (at least till the economy crashes again), then you can say that you've won that particular game
That's not a prestige project, that's a giant bell jar with really good vacuum pumps.
It started life as a status project. Sure, that's a sunk cost now, but someone burned a lot of money in the past on it which biases it as a model for our attempts to price similar scale projects now.
As for those giant tents, they may be prestige projects, but that doesn't really mean anything.
It means that the sponsor isn't particularly concerned about cost which is a strong bias upward in cost estimates for such projects.
If you're going to build a truly massive vacuum chamber on the cheap, then you can probably build it somewhere like Fall River Pass in Colorado so that you only have to hold off.65 Atmospheres of pressure, although I don't know if there are any suitable pre-existing depressions around there that you can use. Honestly, your plan sounds pretty neat and is probably practical. The problem is that inflatable vacuum chambers are still a pretty novel technology. So, you would be basing one highly experimental project on another highly experimental project.
Those other necessary highly experimental projects would be part of the cost and it wouldn't be just one such project. Some would be at a scale capable of being fit into a large garage.
Even the inflatable vacuum structure is itself another stepping stone to a large ground-based fusor project. The point is that a series of very focused and cost controlled projects can build up quickly and relatively cheaply to a competitive project, but you have to strictly control the design burden on these projects.
Building a project that does a very limited thing, even if it is at a scale which hasn't been attempted before, is far cheaper than building a project that does a number of disparate things at a very high standard of operation and a very large scale of operation in each of these things.
Wouldn't have happened because the supply chain would have imploded.
That is a swamp that needs to be cleaned out. GM will go bankrupt again and we'll be back at this same argument in a few years. I don't see to protecting a few jobs for a short time at the expense of the future.
When a company the size of GM + its supply chain goes under, the jobs go away too and aren't easily replaced.
Do you know for sure that condition is true? How? Again, I'm honestly asking you.
First, their efforts, such as supporting libertarian think tanks, tea party candidates, or opposing AGW efforts are much more aggressive and costly than merely exploiting tax loop holes, moving wealth into low tax areas, or bribing a few congresscritters.
Some of these efforts are clearly reactionary though not necessarily right wing. Resisting climate change mitigation can be done on other grounds than merely right wing ones. And while restoring the rule of law, individual freedom, and financial responsibility sounds reactionary and conservative, it remains one of the more out there aspects of liberalism.
People don't really want to live in a budget at the national level, respect laws (particularly legal restrictions on law and regulation) that go against their inclinations or ideologies, or observe the freedom of other people to do things with which they disagree. Those sorts of inclinations are ancient. The division of politics into left and right while it may have made lots of sense in past centuries and still does to some limited degree today, just isn't aging well.
Well the like of the Koch brothers have made it so now
Nonsense.
but you are obviously too indoctrinated by the US media to realise this.
Looks who's talking. Have some billionaires spend a little money and suddenly they own a whole political movement. Does that mean that Soros owns what's usually considered as the left by now?
Slashdot Mirror
How does an oil pipeline have anything to do with anything Google shareholders care about?
It makes Google's power generation holdings more valuable, if there is a net shift from oil to electric powered vehicles.
Similarly, how does immigration reform benefit Facebook shareholders, who I assume, would be more interested in reducing immigration
Your assumption would be incorrect.
"Republic" is not defined as "not a monarchy" in the US
Let's look at the actual definition. This is the first one listed:
a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and who in modern times is usually a president (2) : a political unit (as a nation) having such a form of government
There are other definitions which do fit your opinion more or less, but they aren't the only definitions of "republic" - in the US.
You have not provided any positive definition of the word "republic," only asserted it as a simple antonym of monarchy.
Actually that is a proper definition of "republic". Not every definition is positive.
Government is only a corporate tool.
You can say that, but that doesn't make it so. Governments have far more power than corporations since one can readily acquire money with power, but not the other way around. Why would you even think that a company like Google would have more power than a government?
Even a regular bill needs to go through the senate, and end with a presidential signature... etc.
The Senate is part of the US Congress. And they can pass veto-proof legislation with supermajorities in both branches of Congress. So legislation is not at all the same as a constitutional amendment.
You can craft a new law that won't run afoul of the court guidelines.
And that can be done with the Citizens United ruling since the problem was that corporations were explicitly banned from doing activities that individuals could do. Of course, preventing individuals from donating to campaigns might run afoul of other constitutional restrictions such as the First Amendment.
US Congress can start a constitutional amendment process, but they can't make it happen by themselves.
. You obviously have no idea what it would mean to move most of the world cities inland.
About as much as it costs to leave cities in place. We already replace our cities every 50 years.
The pure bullshit is that you think moving to a low carbon economy will actually harm anyone's style of life in the west
Nonsense. The fantasy here is that what you want will magically have positive economic consequence. We need to keep in mind also that most of the world is not in the west. They will suffer as well.
I'll change my beliefs based on evidence, and actually care if they are right or wrong.
Sure, you will. I'll believe that when there's evidence.
Positive Sum Gaming would work if the rich didn't gain when you lose. But they do.
This is wrong. You are operating from incorrect premise, probably because you live in a developed world country.
You're also assuming we have to have 80% of humanity living in abject poverty.
You just made this assumption for the first time in this thread.
We already produce enough food to feed everyone on the planet, we just need people willing to say it's OK for people to have food, even if they didn't work themselves to death to get it.
A truly stupid statement, since those people have been saying that for some time. Saying "it's OK for people to have food" doesn't magically give people food. You need to have the infrastructure in place, including social and legal, in order for it to happen.
and the best you can say to them is "you may not be able to put food on the table today, but over your lifetime you might earn a few hundred k!"
Which, if you think about it, is not that bad an outcome especially given that the vast majority of the bottom 35-40% can put food on the table.
Wealth is the goods and services that you can enjoy.
Nonsense. I can enjoy great, highly valued ski trips to Vail, Colorado but they don't add to my wealth. Instead, if I invest that money, I not only can use a portion of it in the future to buy such ski trips or anything else of similar value that I happen to desire. Wealth is whatever enables me to buy present or future goods and services of value.
Sadly, the FDA has such a shoestring budget that they are more often reactionary than anything.
Reactionary is good behavior for the role that the FDA has. Now, if we could only get them to do risk management too.
Prevention is much cheaper than mitigation.
Except, of course, when it is more expensive, for example, tiger repelling rocks.
And I especially like when the government responds to criticisms by saying they didn't understand this issue when they made their rules and will take comments from the industry and revise their proposed rules as they have done in this case.
They should have asked for that input before making the rule.
I know it is not as fun for the anti-government types, but even the linked to article mentions it at the very bottom of the story:
Would you give a CEO a similar break if they come up with a stupid rule and only reverse it in the face of huge opposition from their employees, customers, or regulators?
So this is already a non issue, they have agreed to revise the rules so there are not the dire consequences the article was using to stir everyone up.
There are plenty of similarly shitty rules that don't get revised even though they are highly unpopular. For example, the EPA was claiming that it could levy fines on other parties without those parties acquiring standing to sue the EPA in court. That got revised only when it was brought into court and ruled unconstitutional.
This story brings attention to the broken decision making process behind the generation of regulation in the US.
It is about accountability what the cows are fed with.
And how does drying and packaging spent grain further accountability? It's a dumb rule even if you do RTFA.
80% of you in the US are competing over 5% of the money in the economy
Looking at the chart, they say 11%.
The problem with this statement is twofold. First, it still ignores significant parts of the economy, such as future income. For example, if you have an income (not net income) of 17,300 (like the mean of the bottom 40%), then you probably have a few tens of thousands of potential net income over your lifetime. That isn't reflected in the net worth figure.
Second, it ignores that most US residents don't compete for wealth. For example, more than a third don't save at all for retirement (36%). So of the 44% who aren't in the 20% wealthiest and happen to save even a little and thus, compete in even the slightest way for wealth, they have 11% of the wealth of the US. That doesn't sound bad to me at all.
Desertification is on the menu for much of the world due to AGW. (e.g., all the USA from California to Indiana is expected to desertify.)
I'll just note that we don't have evidence for that claim. We do have plenty of evidence that continued poor agricultural practices (which the US has mostly abandoned) in the US would do much greater harm over corresponding time frames than even the worst predictions of AGW over the next few centuries.
The world population is expected to stabilize at 11 billion. Given sufficient time and stability, technology will allow 11 billion people to have a modern lifestyle, and I hope we have the time. (This solves the poverty issue.)
One of those expectations is that we don't reverse the trend to wealthier societies. Messing with the world's energy infrastructure for poorly thought out purposes is one way we can reverse that and our attempts to stabilize global population.
My biggest fears with AGW is the immense loss of culture and history as the seas swallow and destroy most of the major cities in the world today.
Most culture isn't dependent at all on location. And what is dependent can be moved or rebuilt for small cost over those periods of time. Similarly, history is something that happened. It won't change just because the future is not as you'd like. I find your fears rather trivial, but typical of those who prioritize AGW over much more serious human problems.
Poverty and desertification can destroy cites as well.
A rising tide doesn't raise all ships, it swamps all but the biggest boats.
At least you've vaguely heard of the saying. The real saying is "A rising tide raises all boats". It basically sums up the general outcome of positive sum games. It amazes me how many people just don't get what a positive sum game is.
And the great irony here is that the largest ships, the developed world countries, are the ones being swamped. That's because they choose not to adapt. It's easier to blame the consequences of actions on the rich or whatever and just keep doing the same stupid things you decided you were going to do.
Also, how does that help you, living a middle class life in a first world country.
Adaptation is cheaper and more effective than ignoring reality. For example, labor got cheaper, but capital didn't. Put some of your effort into acquiring capital rather than just depending on your labor for your well being.
It's OK to think about yourself and your long term well being, You know?
When the supposed solutions result in plunging billions of people into greater poverty, then it dishonors me and mine to not speak against these games. I can adapt for a lot less harm to the rest of the world than the current bout of absurd regulation, protectionism, and hysteria.
What comments like this miss is that the big thing the federal government did that wouldn't have happened in bankruptcy - it guaranteed that GM's and Chrysler's vendors would be paid in full.
Let's not go crazy with the assertions. A regular bankruptcy probably would have resulted in the same thing. Vendors are near the top of the list in bankruptcy court.
Here you are forgetting another key fact about 2008. The credit crisis meant that even healthy companies were unable to raise capital to buy up or rescue these suppliers. Some otherwise healthy Fortune 500 companies experienced severe cash flow problems that threatened their day to day operations.
That's ok. The businesses, not necessarily Fortune 500 without severe cash flow problems would be the ones doing the buying.
Karl Marx predicted that capital flowing to where labor was cheapest would result in a race to the bottom
One of the many things he missed is that it raises the bottom greatly in the process.
Yea, when you're a bit older, and have grown that money to a nice nest egg so that you don't need to work ever (at least till the economy crashes again), then you can say that you've won that particular game
That's not a prestige project, that's a giant bell jar with really good vacuum pumps.
It started life as a status project. Sure, that's a sunk cost now, but someone burned a lot of money in the past on it which biases it as a model for our attempts to price similar scale projects now.
As for those giant tents, they may be prestige projects, but that doesn't really mean anything.
It means that the sponsor isn't particularly concerned about cost which is a strong bias upward in cost estimates for such projects.
If you're going to build a truly massive vacuum chamber on the cheap, then you can probably build it somewhere like Fall River Pass in Colorado so that you only have to hold off .65 Atmospheres of pressure, although I don't know if there are any suitable pre-existing depressions around there that you can use. Honestly, your plan sounds pretty neat and is probably practical. The problem is that inflatable vacuum chambers are still a pretty novel technology. So, you would be basing one highly experimental project on another highly experimental project.
Those other necessary highly experimental projects would be part of the cost and it wouldn't be just one such project. Some would be at a scale capable of being fit into a large garage.
Even the inflatable vacuum structure is itself another stepping stone to a large ground-based fusor project. The point is that a series of very focused and cost controlled projects can build up quickly and relatively cheaply to a competitive project, but you have to strictly control the design burden on these projects.
Building a project that does a very limited thing, even if it is at a scale which hasn't been attempted before, is far cheaper than building a project that does a number of disparate things at a very high standard of operation and a very large scale of operation in each of these things.
Wouldn't have happened because the supply chain would have imploded.
That is a swamp that needs to be cleaned out. GM will go bankrupt again and we'll be back at this same argument in a few years. I don't see to protecting a few jobs for a short time at the expense of the future.
When a company the size of GM + its supply chain goes under, the jobs go away too and aren't easily replaced.
Except by the next few major auto companies.
Do you know for sure that condition is true? How? Again, I'm honestly asking you.
First, their efforts, such as supporting libertarian think tanks, tea party candidates, or opposing AGW efforts are much more aggressive and costly than merely exploiting tax loop holes, moving wealth into low tax areas, or bribing a few congresscritters.
Some of these efforts are clearly reactionary though not necessarily right wing. Resisting climate change mitigation can be done on other grounds than merely right wing ones. And while restoring the rule of law, individual freedom, and financial responsibility sounds reactionary and conservative, it remains one of the more out there aspects of liberalism.
People don't really want to live in a budget at the national level, respect laws (particularly legal restrictions on law and regulation) that go against their inclinations or ideologies, or observe the freedom of other people to do things with which they disagree. Those sorts of inclinations are ancient. The division of politics into left and right while it may have made lots of sense in past centuries and still does to some limited degree today, just isn't aging well.
Well the like of the Koch brothers have made it so now
Nonsense.
but you are obviously too indoctrinated by the US media to realise this.
Looks who's talking. Have some billionaires spend a little money and suddenly they own a whole political movement. Does that mean that Soros owns what's usually considered as the left by now?