Yep. He simply forced shooters to select another target, that doesn't count as 'saving'.
And in the process saved dozens of lives. He forced the shooters to prey on who was left hiding in the school, something they were going to do anyway, rather than prey on the easy targets outside first. A thing to remember in conflict be it armed or not, is that there is considerable power in denying foes easy options.
You guessed wrong. You're the one who won't accept my valid point and resorting to insults. Here I thought you woke up and realized that the American Dream is just that: a fantasy
Don't get me wrong. I don't believe you at all. But let me address an obvious point.
I'm so happy people are finally waking up to realize that all the popular beliefs on what "made America great" are simply naive dreams at best, lies at worst. No, America didn't become great thanks to freedom, democracy, capitalism, or all that wonderful sounding propaganda they try to brainwash you with.
America became great thanks to one thing and one thing only - strength.Might makes right as it always has - US was relatively stronger at the time, so it won, and wrote the history books.
Strength doesn't just happen. The US didn't get hit by cosmic rays and just become strong one day. Things like "freedom, democracy, capitalism" not only made the US "great", but they also made it strong.
What would be the point of doing so? Pollution, especially with the recent fad of ignoring the actual harm of pollution, is not a good reason in itself of discontinuing an activity. One needs to compare costs and benefits.
It remains that oil has a lot of benefits when it's in our fuel tanks or in our plastics. But not so when it's in the ground.
Government is not a monopoly as long as the voters can vote for it to no longer be one.
And where can voters do that? It makes no sense to make such claims when those claims don't apply anywhere.
A true monopoly is beyond reach of basically everything and becomes a state within the state.
Well, then none of your examples have been "true" monopolies.
Anyway, companies be just as omnipresent.
They could be in theory, but they aren't.
Negative "contributions" usually result in jail time.
Society is usually not very forgiving when it comes to that.
I would advise you to reconsider your interpretation of that word.
There's no reason to. First, your observation is just wrong. Negative contributions don't usually result in jail time.
Second, negative contributions are quite standard in federal level spending, for example. When one spends at least an order of magnitude more than necessary for a service or good (which is pretty much standard operating procedure at the federal level, especially in defense and R&D), there's a negative contribution to society hidden in there.
When one uncritically subsidizes college-level education making it not just more expensive for everyone (and remarkably onerous for many college students), but less useful as well (since schools have less incentive to provide a challenging academic environment), that's a huge negative contribution to society. And all quite legal.
To go to our current example, there's no reason to have a lot of paid vacation and such policies harm people who want to work hard.
Another example? This is pretty much the only example. It's quite novel for a president and administration to be so wrong on most fronts to get this relatively right. One wonders what he could have done, if he had dropped the ideological blinders from the start.
Even if it's completely irrational (and the FA says non-rigid exteriors are better able to withstand a micrometeor), I can't help but feel that if I was up in the ISS, I'd want a solid metal wall, rather than an inflatable fabric one.
And? Sounds like the appropriate choice would be to get over your belief than to compromise your safety.
The next question of course is how to get it up there? It's about 10x more than the maximum payload of either the Dragon or Soyuz rockets...
It's inflatable. It's not "10x" more when it's being launched.
You believe in the US so much you choose to accept what comes, and I change that slightly to say not only do you choose what follows, but you deserve what comes with it.
Not at all. I believe merely, that I should try to make my society better than just give up on it. It's also where most of my friends and family are, so I have a vested interest as well.
No, you can't always get another job. Are you in the US? Are you aware of the unemployment problems?
Yes, I am aware of the unemployment problems. But you can always find another job.
And you can't just get a job at the local Gas-Quick-Mart if you're trying to keep your house and raise 2 children.
Well, that's the thing about economics. You basically can do what you can afford, be it as a person or family, or as a country. If you're having so much trouble making ends meet, then shorten the ends. Here, that probably means don't keep your house or suck it up at work.
It puzzles me why you think it's better to screw over all of society just so that you can have a better life style without actually being the one working or sacrificing for that life style.
No, you can't always save your money. If your wife is diagnosed with cancer, or perhaps you're in a car accident with extreme medical bills, your savings would go to that. Then you're living paycheck to paycheck, making ends meet.
Well, serious, how often does that happen? That is the point of insurance, to cover cash flow in extreme situations. That's also one of the primary points of saving money (which among other things can be thought of as self-insurance).
The biggest objection to fracking is the unknown chemicals pumped into the ground, potentially contaminating the groundwater. These people pumped water down, not chemicals. There is no danger of contamination.
And you happen to "know" what chemicals are already in the ground? One of the problems with geothermal already is the chemicals that dissolve in water.
Well. That is quite easy once there is
1.no competition to your monopoly or oligolopoly
2.your war chest is so large that no one will be able to threat it for a foreseeable future.
Why are we speaking of monopolies of all things?
Keep in mind that the largest monopoly is the government which supposedly is keeping these from being created! And that monopoly prevention is a relatively small task for a government to have. It doesn't need a lot of power or resources to enact narrow functions like that.
Plus, you can sue a business while governments typically can hide behind sovereign immunity.
Why do you think the U.S. has some of the most strict laws in the world regarding this?
Because the US has long desired and supported relatively free and competitive markets. For example, one of the causes of the Revolutionary War was the British government passing a tax on tea so that the East India company could have a market advantage in trade in the American colonies. That lead in turn to the Boston Tea Party, the illegal dumping of a bunch of East India tea into the Boston harbor.
And with the case of microsoft, almost an international level.
Microsoft has never been a monopoly. It's had market dominance for a time, but there's always been substantial competition.
In practise, it is far easier to guard secrets in a small organization.
Sure it is. Now even if we grant that unwarranted assertion, consider that there are a zillion such small organizations in the US government and some of these are probably so secret that even their current names are classified.
The ability to evade oversight is the biggest issue with large and complex governments. But you also have the problem of various forms of unintended aggregation of power. A government tasked with health care has a new avenue for accessing personal information about you and a lower threshold of risk for those in power who break the law. Rather than having to break into a doctor's office, they can just tap into a national data base, a far less risky approach.
And what makes you think government reduction won't contribute?
Because reducing it doesn't change much, especially when the companies taking over the (often huge) job typically becomes huge monopolies after a while.
Government does a lot more than just prevent monopolies from forming (well monopolies other than the government itself). We can cut the parts that government shouldn't be doing and well, keep the itty bitty parts you want, like the ability to prevent monopolies.
Anyway, most people tend to not act on their own initiative. Nor should all have to.
So what? There are consequences both positive and negative to such choices. One shouldn't expect a government to play a hand in such choices.
"Does everything for you" is just straw man-y. No one calls for that kind of government.
Well, that was a bit of rhetorical puffery on my part. It does remain that there doesn't seem a natural limit or extent to what government could allegedly be doing for me. The same people who argue that government should be interfering in my work, my health care, my education, my retirement, or any of a bunch of things that have at best minor relevance to society probably will probably find new needs for government action down the road.
And the general justification for government intervention is pretty open-ended. For example, the "safety net" concept is based on the fact that bad things happen to us. But most such safety nets go well beyond anything that addresses the original problem, such as mandatory pensions and health insurance coverage.
Most just want to work to live and love and for that reason they want to contribute to a society.
Why does "contributing" to society involve taking from society?
Then give it a design patent. Not a utility patent.
Why wouldn't utility patents cover designs as well? Glancing at Wikipedia, it appears that design patents cover the "look" of a invention while utility patents cover the "functionality" of a invention.
Most people in the US are lucky to get 2 weeks of paid vacation per year...
And you still can have as much unpaid vacation as you want. Why should anyone be paying for your vacation? It's nice and all that Europe gets a lot of paid vacation. But what has anyone done to deserve that sort of entitlement?
I take about two to three months of unpaid vacation a year. That works pretty well for me.
Before everyone else starts in on the "Well he should just find another job..." Quit yellin that BS. If you have a job now, you're lucky. So you take what you can get and do the best you can. It doesn't mean you're not allowed to complain if it's difficult to change your current position.
You can always get another job. You can also save your money. That goes a long ways towards cutting your dependence on work for your wealth.
So a power vacuum to be filled by exactly those who are the source of the problem would reduce crony capitalism?
The power vacuum would also be filled by the rest of us. And businesses have considerable weakness compared to a government. For example, they have to run a profit and have physical assets that must be protected in order to run that profit.
Enlarging/shrinking government actually doesn't affect the transparency issue much.
Sure it does. a vast, complex government can get away with a lot more than a simple one.
Sure, reducing government increases personal freedom, and it might be beneficial for those wo think they would do better on their own (Wild West style) than the average, but crony capitalism is best fought by strengthening democracy, educating people and increasing participation.
And what makes you think government reduction won't contribute? Keep in mind that there's probably no more important aspect to democracy than a population willing to act on its own initiative rather than waiting on the local authority figures to act for them. A large government that does everything for you gets in the way of that.
Well, how do they do it ?? Does the next Star Trek NOT have actors dodging phaser blasts ??
How do people in the real world dodge really fast things like bullets now? By not being in the path of the weapon when it fires.
Of course, by the time of Star Trek, phasers should be able to automatically lock on the target in real time and hit it, no matter how the target dodges.
Both the teabaggers (I have documentation from when they called themselves that, and no revisionist history will get me to stop calling them what they asked to be called)
So what? They changed their mind. I'm sure you got the memo.
Further, what's this about "documentation"? Do you think there's some court or bureaucracy out there that audits your insults? "I'm sorry sir, but you cannot use the insult 'incoherent, drooling cocksucker' because the adjective 'drooling' is insensitive to hypersalivation sufferers and hence prohibited by the Americans with Disabilities Act".
I finally listened to one of the jackasses who chants "love it or leave it" and went somewhere with lower taxes and a higher standard of living. And no, I'm not saying where, because if I did, someone would argue the points by selecting skewed numbers friendly to their cause. It's not an argument worth having. The US is not the best country to live in, and hasn't been for years. Anyone capable of moving should.
No offense, but that sounds good for everyone. When I read about your advocacy of unfocused "meat space" DDoS attacks (the example given was creating traffic jams in a public intersection), frankly, I'd rather that you be doing that sort of thing somewhere else and hurting some other country's society not mine.
And the unpredictability of that damage. I think that makes it work right there.
Damages happen even in the most stable economies.
The "most stable" economies aren't particularly stable. So not of a point there.
What about them? People just need things to be stable "enough" (yes, it's vague, but that's what life is: few things are black and white), not absolutely 100% perfect. Predicting 1 thing is better than predicting none.
What about them? Perhaps, if you had read the sentence that immediately followed:
These far less predictable secondary events can provide as much trouble as the original crisis.
So "testing for minutia" caused teacher quality to decline?
No, I'm sure that testing came about as a response to decline in teacher quality. Hence, why I made my comment above. You were saying that the usefulness of education was lost to testing for minutia. I merely noted that the testing came well after the loss of usefulness started.
Well, for one, I don't separate the US Libertarian Party from the Republican Party.
Why not? They are pretty distinct groups.
You might as well separate out the Tea Party and Republican Party.
Which are also fairly distinct.
The #1 cause is the parents.
[...]
That lack of involvement was caused by the 1%
Can't keep the story straight, eh? Well, I can understand the need to blame someone unpopular for our faults. But doing so is harmful since we then don't actually fix those faults. Obsessing about the one percent isn't going to make parents any more responsible for their children.
I just wanted to make a few remarks on "blood diamonds". The thing to remember about them is that first and foremost, they undermine the De Beers cartel on diamond production. That's the primary reason for the ban and the propaganda.
Second, those "criminal organizations" that move things like blood diamonds are for the most part just unrecognized governments. While there are some legitimate governments that are more wholesome than these groups, there are also a number of diamond producers who aren't, for example, the current government of Zimbabwe.
Third, blood diamonds just like any other product made or mined elsewhere, do enrich the local populations. Yammering about "slavery" ignores that the slaves would be slaves whether they were mining diamonds or something else. You can buy a cheap diamond, help African workers, and help destroy a cartel.
but it did put Paul Ryan in as his running mate, as well as forcing Romney to appear inconsistent as he tries to get the Tea Party's votes.
And how is that consistent with the Tea Party "fizzling"?
Thus my point that the crisis was not economic instability. Somebody paid for it.
"Paying for it" is irrelevant to whether something is economically destabilizing. If I buy a nuclear weapon, everyone knows I did, and then proceed to blow up New York City in a completely predictable way, it still creates economic instability even though I and the hapless property of New York City "paid for it".
And here's a consideration more in line with your thinking. Just because we can predict with reasonable accuracy the primary crisis, what about the secondary effects? I doubt you could predict "Cash for Clunkers", for example, other than to say that some sort of retarded and grossly incompetent attempts at economic incentives would occur. These far less predictable secondary events can provide as much trouble as the original crisis.
That's been lost to test for minutia to prove "teacher quality"
"Testing for minutia" happens in the first place because of this waste. Cause and effect is flipped.
But when education is provided by the "government" and one party (making up at least half the government) claims to be anti-government, education is being sabotaged on a regular basis.
There's too many disinterested parties to just blame the "anti-government" party. I'll just point out here that there's two parties who have a personal stake in the outcome of education, and a single third party paid to care about that education. None of those parties are the Republican or Libertarian parties.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. He simply forced shooters to select another target, that doesn't count as 'saving'.
And in the process saved dozens of lives. He forced the shooters to prey on who was left hiding in the school, something they were going to do anyway, rather than prey on the easy targets outside first. A thing to remember in conflict be it armed or not, is that there is considerable power in denying foes easy options.
You guessed wrong. You're the one who won't accept my valid point and resorting to insults. Here I thought you woke up and realized that the American Dream is just that: a fantasy
Don't get me wrong. I don't believe you at all. But let me address an obvious point.
I'm so happy people are finally waking up to realize that all the popular beliefs on what "made America great" are simply naive dreams at best, lies at worst. No, America didn't become great thanks to freedom, democracy, capitalism, or all that wonderful sounding propaganda they try to brainwash you with.
.Might makes right as it always has - US was relatively stronger at the time, so it won, and wrote the history books.
America became great thanks to one thing and one thing only - strength
Strength doesn't just happen. The US didn't get hit by cosmic rays and just become strong one day. Things like "freedom, democracy, capitalism" not only made the US "great", but they also made it strong.
Let me guess. You're trying to be sarcastic. I guess higher brain function fails hard when you run into disagreement.
What would be the point of doing so? Pollution, especially with the recent fad of ignoring the actual harm of pollution, is not a good reason in itself of discontinuing an activity. One needs to compare costs and benefits.
It remains that oil has a lot of benefits when it's in our fuel tanks or in our plastics. But not so when it's in the ground.
Government is not a monopoly as long as the voters can vote for it to no longer be one.
And where can voters do that? It makes no sense to make such claims when those claims don't apply anywhere.
A true monopoly is beyond reach of basically everything and becomes a state within the state.
Well, then none of your examples have been "true" monopolies.
Anyway, companies be just as omnipresent.
They could be in theory, but they aren't.
Negative "contributions" usually result in jail time.
Society is usually not very forgiving when it comes to that.
I would advise you to reconsider your interpretation of that word.
There's no reason to. First, your observation is just wrong. Negative contributions don't usually result in jail time.
Second, negative contributions are quite standard in federal level spending, for example. When one spends at least an order of magnitude more than necessary for a service or good (which is pretty much standard operating procedure at the federal level, especially in defense and R&D), there's a negative contribution to society hidden in there.
When one uncritically subsidizes college-level education making it not just more expensive for everyone (and remarkably onerous for many college students), but less useful as well (since schools have less incentive to provide a challenging academic environment), that's a huge negative contribution to society. And all quite legal.
To go to our current example, there's no reason to have a lot of paid vacation and such policies harm people who want to work hard.
Another example? This is pretty much the only example. It's quite novel for a president and administration to be so wrong on most fronts to get this relatively right. One wonders what he could have done, if he had dropped the ideological blinders from the start.
Even if it's completely irrational (and the FA says non-rigid exteriors are better able to withstand a micrometeor), I can't help but feel that if I was up in the ISS, I'd want a solid metal wall, rather than an inflatable fabric one.
And? Sounds like the appropriate choice would be to get over your belief than to compromise your safety.
The next question of course is how to get it up there? It's about 10x more than the maximum payload of either the Dragon or Soyuz rockets...
It's inflatable. It's not "10x" more when it's being launched.
You believe in the US so much you choose to accept what comes, and I change that slightly to say not only do you choose what follows, but you deserve what comes with it.
Not at all. I believe merely, that I should try to make my society better than just give up on it. It's also where most of my friends and family are, so I have a vested interest as well.
No, you can't always get another job. Are you in the US? Are you aware of the unemployment problems?
Yes, I am aware of the unemployment problems. But you can always find another job.
And you can't just get a job at the local Gas-Quick-Mart if you're trying to keep your house and raise 2 children.
Well, that's the thing about economics. You basically can do what you can afford, be it as a person or family, or as a country. If you're having so much trouble making ends meet, then shorten the ends. Here, that probably means don't keep your house or suck it up at work.
It puzzles me why you think it's better to screw over all of society just so that you can have a better life style without actually being the one working or sacrificing for that life style.
No, you can't always save your money. If your wife is diagnosed with cancer, or perhaps you're in a car accident with extreme medical bills, your savings would go to that. Then you're living paycheck to paycheck, making ends meet.
Well, serious, how often does that happen? That is the point of insurance, to cover cash flow in extreme situations. That's also one of the primary points of saving money (which among other things can be thought of as self-insurance).
The biggest objection to fracking is the unknown chemicals pumped into the ground, potentially contaminating the groundwater. These people pumped water down, not chemicals. There is no danger of contamination.
And you happen to "know" what chemicals are already in the ground? One of the problems with geothermal already is the chemicals that dissolve in water.
You believe in the US and choose to not leave when you are able.
Yes. I chose to bear what may follow.
Well. That is quite easy once there is
1.no competition to your monopoly or oligolopoly
2.your war chest is so large that no one will be able to threat it for a foreseeable future.
Why are we speaking of monopolies of all things? Keep in mind that the largest monopoly is the government which supposedly is keeping these from being created! And that monopoly prevention is a relatively small task for a government to have. It doesn't need a lot of power or resources to enact narrow functions like that.
Plus, you can sue a business while governments typically can hide behind sovereign immunity.
Why do you think the U.S. has some of the most strict laws in the world regarding this?
Because the US has long desired and supported relatively free and competitive markets. For example, one of the causes of the Revolutionary War was the British government passing a tax on tea so that the East India company could have a market advantage in trade in the American colonies. That lead in turn to the Boston Tea Party, the illegal dumping of a bunch of East India tea into the Boston harbor.
And with the case of microsoft, almost an international level.
Microsoft has never been a monopoly. It's had market dominance for a time, but there's always been substantial competition.
In practise, it is far easier to guard secrets in a small organization.
Sure it is. Now even if we grant that unwarranted assertion, consider that there are a zillion such small organizations in the US government and some of these are probably so secret that even their current names are classified.
The ability to evade oversight is the biggest issue with large and complex governments. But you also have the problem of various forms of unintended aggregation of power. A government tasked with health care has a new avenue for accessing personal information about you and a lower threshold of risk for those in power who break the law. Rather than having to break into a doctor's office, they can just tap into a national data base, a far less risky approach.
And what makes you think government reduction won't contribute?
Because reducing it doesn't change much, especially when the companies taking over the (often huge) job typically becomes huge monopolies after a while.
Government does a lot more than just prevent monopolies from forming (well monopolies other than the government itself). We can cut the parts that government shouldn't be doing and well, keep the itty bitty parts you want, like the ability to prevent monopolies.
Anyway, most people tend to not act on their own initiative. Nor should all have to.
So what? There are consequences both positive and negative to such choices. One shouldn't expect a government to play a hand in such choices.
"Does everything for you" is just straw man-y. No one calls for that kind of government.
Well, that was a bit of rhetorical puffery on my part. It does remain that there doesn't seem a natural limit or extent to what government could allegedly be doing for me. The same people who argue that government should be interfering in my work, my health care, my education, my retirement, or any of a bunch of things that have at best minor relevance to society probably will probably find new needs for government action down the road.
And the general justification for government intervention is pretty open-ended. For example, the "safety net" concept is based on the fact that bad things happen to us. But most such safety nets go well beyond anything that addresses the original problem, such as mandatory pensions and health insurance coverage.
Most just want to work to live and love and for that reason they want to contribute to a society.
Why does "contributing" to society involve taking from society?
Then give it a design patent. Not a utility patent.
Why wouldn't utility patents cover designs as well? Glancing at Wikipedia, it appears that design patents cover the "look" of a invention while utility patents cover the "functionality" of a invention.
What we have here is the fallacy of argument from karma. That's the last refuge of religious nutcases. You keep fine company.
It's a specific design of a bike pedal. I don't know what they're claiming, but a non-obvious elaboration on an existing thing can be patentable.
Most people in the US are lucky to get 2 weeks of paid vacation per year...
And you still can have as much unpaid vacation as you want. Why should anyone be paying for your vacation? It's nice and all that Europe gets a lot of paid vacation. But what has anyone done to deserve that sort of entitlement?
I take about two to three months of unpaid vacation a year. That works pretty well for me.
Before everyone else starts in on the "Well he should just find another job..." Quit yellin that BS. If you have a job now, you're lucky. So you take what you can get and do the best you can. It doesn't mean you're not allowed to complain if it's difficult to change your current position.
You can always get another job. You can also save your money. That goes a long ways towards cutting your dependence on work for your wealth.
So a power vacuum to be filled by exactly those who are the source of the problem would reduce crony capitalism?
The power vacuum would also be filled by the rest of us. And businesses have considerable weakness compared to a government. For example, they have to run a profit and have physical assets that must be protected in order to run that profit.
Enlarging/shrinking government actually doesn't affect the transparency issue much.
Sure it does. a vast, complex government can get away with a lot more than a simple one.
Sure, reducing government increases personal freedom, and it might be beneficial for those wo think they would do better on their own (Wild West style) than the average, but crony capitalism is best fought by strengthening democracy, educating people and increasing participation.
And what makes you think government reduction won't contribute? Keep in mind that there's probably no more important aspect to democracy than a population willing to act on its own initiative rather than waiting on the local authority figures to act for them. A large government that does everything for you gets in the way of that.
Well, how do they do it ?? Does the next Star Trek NOT have actors dodging phaser blasts ??
How do people in the real world dodge really fast things like bullets now? By not being in the path of the weapon when it fires.
Of course, by the time of Star Trek, phasers should be able to automatically lock on the target in real time and hit it, no matter how the target dodges.
Both the teabaggers (I have documentation from when they called themselves that, and no revisionist history will get me to stop calling them what they asked to be called)
So what? They changed their mind. I'm sure you got the memo.
Further, what's this about "documentation"? Do you think there's some court or bureaucracy out there that audits your insults? "I'm sorry sir, but you cannot use the insult 'incoherent, drooling cocksucker' because the adjective 'drooling' is insensitive to hypersalivation sufferers and hence prohibited by the Americans with Disabilities Act".
I finally listened to one of the jackasses who chants "love it or leave it" and went somewhere with lower taxes and a higher standard of living. And no, I'm not saying where, because if I did, someone would argue the points by selecting skewed numbers friendly to their cause. It's not an argument worth having. The US is not the best country to live in, and hasn't been for years. Anyone capable of moving should.
No offense, but that sounds good for everyone. When I read about your advocacy of unfocused "meat space" DDoS attacks (the example given was creating traffic jams in a public intersection), frankly, I'd rather that you be doing that sort of thing somewhere else and hurting some other country's society not mine.
There are lots of things people can do in meatspace that get in people's way that are explicitly legal. We just don't do it because we fear the law.
Or because we don't want to be rude to people who don't have anything to do with our protest.
You're conflating damages with instability.
And the unpredictability of that damage. I think that makes it work right there.
Damages happen even in the most stable economies.
The "most stable" economies aren't particularly stable. So not of a point there.
What about them? People just need things to be stable "enough" (yes, it's vague, but that's what life is: few things are black and white), not absolutely 100% perfect. Predicting 1 thing is better than predicting none.
What about them? Perhaps, if you had read the sentence that immediately followed:
These far less predictable secondary events can provide as much trouble as the original crisis.
So "testing for minutia" caused teacher quality to decline?
No, I'm sure that testing came about as a response to decline in teacher quality. Hence, why I made my comment above. You were saying that the usefulness of education was lost to testing for minutia. I merely noted that the testing came well after the loss of usefulness started.
Well, for one, I don't separate the US Libertarian Party from the Republican Party.
Why not? They are pretty distinct groups.
You might as well separate out the Tea Party and Republican Party.
Which are also fairly distinct.
The #1 cause is the parents.
[...]
That lack of involvement was caused by the 1%
Can't keep the story straight, eh? Well, I can understand the need to blame someone unpopular for our faults. But doing so is harmful since we then don't actually fix those faults. Obsessing about the one percent isn't going to make parents any more responsible for their children.
I just wanted to make a few remarks on "blood diamonds". The thing to remember about them is that first and foremost, they undermine the De Beers cartel on diamond production. That's the primary reason for the ban and the propaganda.
Second, those "criminal organizations" that move things like blood diamonds are for the most part just unrecognized governments. While there are some legitimate governments that are more wholesome than these groups, there are also a number of diamond producers who aren't, for example, the current government of Zimbabwe.
Third, blood diamonds just like any other product made or mined elsewhere, do enrich the local populations. Yammering about "slavery" ignores that the slaves would be slaves whether they were mining diamonds or something else. You can buy a cheap diamond, help African workers, and help destroy a cartel.
but it did put Paul Ryan in as his running mate, as well as forcing Romney to appear inconsistent as he tries to get the Tea Party's votes.
And how is that consistent with the Tea Party "fizzling"?
Thus my point that the crisis was not economic instability. Somebody paid for it.
"Paying for it" is irrelevant to whether something is economically destabilizing. If I buy a nuclear weapon, everyone knows I did, and then proceed to blow up New York City in a completely predictable way, it still creates economic instability even though I and the hapless property of New York City "paid for it".
And here's a consideration more in line with your thinking. Just because we can predict with reasonable accuracy the primary crisis, what about the secondary effects? I doubt you could predict "Cash for Clunkers", for example, other than to say that some sort of retarded and grossly incompetent attempts at economic incentives would occur. These far less predictable secondary events can provide as much trouble as the original crisis.
That's been lost to test for minutia to prove "teacher quality"
"Testing for minutia" happens in the first place because of this waste. Cause and effect is flipped.
But when education is provided by the "government" and one party (making up at least half the government) claims to be anti-government, education is being sabotaged on a regular basis.
There's too many disinterested parties to just blame the "anti-government" party. I'll just point out here that there's two parties who have a personal stake in the outcome of education, and a single third party paid to care about that education. None of those parties are the Republican or Libertarian parties.