Reducing the American worker to the standing of a Chinese one and hollowing out the US industrial sector seems to me to be a poor way to secure American prosperty and power.
I first have a quibble with what you wrote. The US industrial sector has already been hollowed out. What has kept us going industrially is new industry creation. Second, the US worker is already being reduced in standing. It's just being done via inflation and poorly thought out regulations and laws (and large scale underemployment).
By all accounts my birth country, Germany, is much more competitive with regards to China, and somehow they manage to do this with strong trade unions and a comprehensive wellfare system.
They have three things in their favor. First, strong protectionist systems (particularly the regulatory system) and second, they're the best competitors in their protected block. Germany props up its economy with exports to the rest of the EU, especially to the weakest countries like the PIGS. Germany is doing great. Greece, Spain, Italy, etc aren't.
Third, they're getting an economic boost from building up East Germany. Eventually, those trade advantages are going to settle down, then we'll see where Germany goes.
In comparison, how is the US going to do a Germany? It doesn't have a vast protected trade block it can exploit.
The same mechanism that got you to reply as I expected;)
So no mechanism then.
Are my bad vibes interfering with the proper operation of government?
How should I know? I was not talking about you specifically, but American culture as a whole. But hey, if you are so insecure and defensive about it... maybe? I can't run your life for you, it's up to you to fix your own problems.
Again no reason given.
Ok, since you don't have a defense of your claim, I'll advance my own theory on what's going on here. You're just employing a standard religion argument. Bad things are happening because we're not trying hard enough or aren't pure enough. The obvious rebuttal is that if this were going to work, it would work even with some detractors present. Since it doesn't, we don't need to libel a bunch of people for noting that the system isn't working.
The thing people just don't get is that the US government is split between the state and federal levels. The federal government was never intended to do all the things it currently does. One gets that by bending the rules, and once you start bending the rules, corruption follows naturally.
In a country with a true "strong rejection of government", Obama would not have been reelected. Instead, when things don't work, somehow it's the mean old naysayers who are making things break rather than the people who actually did or as usually is the case, didn't do it.
Ah yes, the no true Scotsman argument, or should I say no true American argument.
If it's a correct observation, then it's not a fallacy. Here, it is a correct argument. Obama is strengthening the central federal government at the expense of everyone else. Romney might be as bad, but I don't see evidence for that. So yes, I would expect people who strongly reject government to vote strongly for Romney.
When something breaks, it's always the other guys' fault, and those guys are certainly no real Americans. They don't stand for real American values. They don't stand for what God^H^H^H FSM^H^H^H Founding Fathers wanted. "We", who are the real Americans, are the poor tragic victims getting blamed
Do you always get hysterical when someone disagrees with you? Sure, I'm tired of getting blamed irrationally for other peoples' bullshit. So yes, when something breaks, I'm not going to take seriously the "it's the fault of the people who said, correctly, that it wasn't going to work". The burden of proof is on the people with the wonderful plan. When it fails, they're the ones who fucked up.
I find it remarkable that you have been so far unable to come up with a reason for your opinion in your prior post. There's no reason to expect naysaying to have more self-fulfilling power than the optimistic point of view. These things aren't fragile flowers that will die, if someone thinks negatively about them.
It strikes me, someone who thinks the process of turning fossil fuels into energy and other useful products is "fantastically convoluted", wouldn't be developing a technological civilization. It's just not that hard.
But let's ignore that. We now have as our characteristics, a society that stayed local in spatial scope while on Earth, has considerable biological resources, and resides somewhere in space, but not anywhere we've looked.
As for metal mining, even assuming a civilisation could extract enough metal for it to be noticeable after geological time periods in a tectonically active world, that metal doesn't go up in smoke, unlike gasoline.
We are an example of a civilization that has mined enough metal to be noticed on a geological scale. And because that metal doesn't go away, there'll be sedimentary layers with unusual characteristics (such as unusually high or low metal and organics concentrations) for millions of years to come.
You'd need massive capital controls to direct investment the way you envision.
I'd say rather their absence. The more you try to control people and keep their stuff, the harder they try to leave. I believe the US would keep more capital just by being a better place to start a business and employ people. But that would mean that the people who are employed would need to make some sacrifice in the process.
Who's to say that a hypothetical civilisation wouldn't have skipped the few decades of gasoline and just gone straight to wind farms plus electric engines?
Why would they leave that lying around? Even if they chose not to use oil and coal for an energy source, they are still a vast supply of organic compounds. Similarly, where's the evidence of metal mining, which would be needed for those electric engines?
American culture has a strong rejection of government
This creates a self fulfilling prophecy.
What's the mechanism here? Are my bad vibes interfering with the proper operation of government?
Should you be paying me money to keep me from self-fulfilling you into a bad end? I foresee you becoming an alcoholic, losing your dog, nobody likes you at work, your car is busted, your basement fortress of solitude leaks, computer fan starts whining, etc. But if you send money now, I'm sure I could be mistaken!
But amusingly, despite this culture against government, it's never quite enough cut all those government jobs or change their system. Oh sure we got people like khallow here talking big, but who won the election again? Apparently the guy who will do a horrible job.
In a country with a true "strong rejection of government", Obama would not have been reelected. Instead, when things don't work, somehow it's the mean old naysayers who are making things break rather than the people who actually did or as usually is the case, didn't do it.
Well there's the rub. It's not moving faster than the speed of light, but it is expanding faster than the speed of light. That is, you get far enough away and the distance between us and it grows roughly proportional to itself. Supposedly.
If I may interject, with regards to your first point, governmental services can leverage ultimate scale and provide investments that do not have to be short term profitable (infrastructure such as the Interstate system are a good example).
That's not a selling point. Yes, government services can squander public funds on a scale that is staggering. Interstates may not have been a next quarter short term investment. But they started paying for themselves very quickly. The kind of "investments" that can only be rationalized on true long time scales, generally are spending that doesn't generate positive return on investment in any time scale.
IMHO the long time scale is chosen to dodge accountability for mishandling the money. Most education, health care, and pension spending fall in this category.
Opportunity cost makes only sense in the latter context. Most of the yellow wasn't spend but saved or put into investment vehicles, and had therefore very limited stimulus effect. If you want to stimulate the economy with tax cuts you have to tailor them to the lower income segment where the incentive for additional consumption is much higher. The Bush tax cuts on the other hand are structured exactly the other way around.
Economic activity != good for us. The big problem with investment is not that it has limited stimulus effect, but that it has an even weaker targeting effect than encouraging consumption. At least with consumption, you can encourage one round of spending mostly in your target region before the money flees to better places.
Against that, you have to weigh that investment goes directly into the future. There is profound long term impact that doesn't happen with consumption. The consumer just gets something now while the person selling them the goods or services in question also has little reason to make any long term changes. The spurt from the consumption is going away after all.
The Bush tax cuts on the other hand are structured exactly the other way around.
Sounds good then. To work properly IMHO, they would need in conjunction increased incentives to invest in the US rather than other places.
It should go without saying that we students were hardly in a position to judge the technical competence of an entire department!
It should go without saying that you were in a unique position to determine how good a fit that department was for you. Nobody else could do that for you. Plus, if they were graduating only 5% of the students majoring in that field of study, that would have come up from talking with students.
Oh well, that's water under the bridge. From my limited experience, there's a number of things I'd consider truly hard, such as raising kids well (that doesn't last just four years!), starting a profitable business which employs people, or recovering from a crippling injury.
Current thought is that the universe is expanding exponentially (with a very small positive exponent). So the universe we can see and interact with is slowly sliding off the edge of our map.
Sure, it is difficult to some degree and sure, there are professors who can make it a bit less pleasant. But I see you made your college experience unusually hard by making a poor choice and staying with it.
This idea, that taxes are the source of all our government's financial problems, has now been sold to a huge proportion of America, whose grasp of math apparently extends to, "Taxes are money that I pay out of my pocket. I like having more money in my pocket. These people are telling me that not only will I be happier if I'm paying less taxes, we'll all be better off if we pay less taxes and the government gets shrunk!"
I take it you disagree? Do you have reasons why?
The answer, "Well, if everyone making more than some very low yearly income pays a little more, and we make the very rich pay a lot more, we can do a lot better for everyone because of this, that, and the other,"
There's at least a trillion dollars gap between what we spend and what we collect in revenue. How would you cover that gap?
If they can turn a profit on selling Falcon 9 launches anywhere near the price points they claim to be able to achieve, then it will change the universe.
This is where we seem to be thinking at cross purposes. I'm thinking in terms of creating an assembly line to provide a civilization with espresso machines, and you're thinking in terms of making a one-off to sit on your work bench for when you feel like a cup (obviously neither of us have addressed where the beans are coming from).
Why you are thinking that? If you have that kind of labor and resources, then there's little reason to do anything for preparation. You already have civilization and they can figure out things on their own. You certainly don't have the "We'll die of starvation, if you don't figure out how to make an assembly line of X".
Give the most brilliant victorian engineer complete information on the composition and design of a microchip and they still wouldn't be able to build one.
Why are we speaking of microchips? Nobody, be they a Victorian engineer or not, is going to be able to make anything beyond the crudest integrated circuits without a considerable amount of infrastructure that no longer exists.
Your labor will be devalued anyway. There will be plenty of people with your level of education throughout the world. Even if your country implements protectionist measures, it's still easier to export goods from those other countries than from yours and your labor still drops in value.
And there's inflation. I doubt aside from exceptionally skilled or lucky employees that most peoples' wages and benefits will keep up with inflation. That's the usual trick by which such things are done.
This is only going to go back to rising wages in the developed world when that massive pool of labor starts to dry up.
And yeah, perhaps a student could work a full-time shit-job while putting themselves through school and graduate late and scraping by with rote memorization and a lackluster GPA instead of really learning, burned out, and missing out on what should have been one of the fondest personal and professional experience of their lives.
Well, I guess you have to decide what's best for you. Four or five years of fun and a pile of debt, or a more stable future which is somewhat less fun and maybe took a bit longer.
Given the hypothetical situation we're discussing, it would seem to be better spent bootstrapping an industrial base as fast as possible.
And that's naturally what's happening. Optimization when you don't know the circumstances under which the optimization is going to occur, is doomed to failure. My view is a working and secure machine shop plus competent people running that shop is most of the way back to your bootstrapping of civilization.
An afternoon to put a device through hundreds or thousands of heating/cooling pressurization/de-pressurization cycles and analyze all the faults that occur? Sure, why not.
You're kidding me. That's a ridiculous level of testing. Just start running cups of coffee and see what breaks down the road.
Sure, because when you're constantly battling against the clock for survival in a hostile world, you have plenty of time. This is why I never bother to tie my horse. If it wanders off, I'll eventually find it, if it's important enough.
Well, it is pretty much true. Sure, there will be push times, such as right after the catastrophe starts or during harvest time, when you need to work all out. But there will also be a lot of downtime where you'll have time to tinker.
The problem of not having an industrial civilization at your disposal would seem to apply to reverse engineering as well. In fact, it would seem to be harder when dealing with reverse engineering of parts designed by engineers who take modern machining methods for granted as opposed to parts purpose-designed to be workable with simpler fabrication techniques. As for documentation agreeing with what's actually built, this is a common problem. Very often part of the real design of an article resides in the institutional memory of the organization that manufactures it. It's extremely common with software especially for the source itself to be the best and most up-to-date documentation. Nevertheless, the goal of this project is to produce rigorous and definitive documentation.
Easier than dealing with documentation that just doesn't apply to your situation and doesn't give you enough information to make things work.
Also, as far as reverse engineering neatly bypassing that problem, it only works if the reverse engineering gives you absolute knowledge of not only the current composition of every part. Even that may not be enough, since it doesn't actually tell you _how_ to make the parts.
Neither is that important a consideration. Really, you're exaggerating the difficulty of this sort of thing.
Well technically, in countries with compulsory voting, what is compulsory is that you turn up at a polling place on election day and get your name marked off the register. You are perfectly free to then put a blank ballot in the box, or draw smiley faces all over it, or whatever. They can't actually force you to vote, because that would obviously undermine the principal of having a secret, anonymous ballot.
The bullshit rationalizations come easy don't they? They could have just stayed home and saved everyone some trouble. The US way is the superior way here because we don't babysit everyone's ass on election day. We don't make this particular bit of silly stuff illegal.
It is extremely foolish to force people who can't handle the responsibility of voting to appear at a voting booth. Maybe as you claim, the irresponsible person will vote for Mickey Mouse and throw their vote away. Or maybe they'll vote for the person at the top of their ballot.
I see you can't. Who mixes opportunity cost of revenue not taken and spending on the same graph except to be deceptive? "Non-partisan groups" with partisan axes to grind.
That yellow was spent on something. It didn't magically burn up, leaving IOUs. And of course as the other replier noted, why are those tax cuts still there, if they're so harmful? Where's Medicare on that graph? It's all Booshes fault, right?
If you can't get those taxes back, then there's another solution. Don't spend it.
Do you really think Romney's policies would have been less disastrous?
I do. Part of the problem was simply the Obama administration's callous pursuit of ideological goals during a recession, resulting in great costs and uncertainty to the US and the people who employ people. Romney would have had to do something about the economic climate and the destructive and constitutionally adventuresome regulations coming out of the federal government (such as the EPA's bizarre court tricks). Obama as a reelected, lame duck president, doesn't have to care what sort of mess he leaves for us.
We need to keep in mind that Obama was a beneficiary of that interesting statistical anomaly. Romney was long considered one of the weaker candidates compared to Obama.
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Reducing the American worker to the standing of a Chinese one and hollowing out the US industrial sector seems to me to be a poor way to secure American prosperty and power.
I first have a quibble with what you wrote. The US industrial sector has already been hollowed out. What has kept us going industrially is new industry creation. Second, the US worker is already being reduced in standing. It's just being done via inflation and poorly thought out regulations and laws (and large scale underemployment).
By all accounts my birth country, Germany, is much more competitive with regards to China, and somehow they manage to do this with strong trade unions and a comprehensive wellfare system.
They have three things in their favor. First, strong protectionist systems (particularly the regulatory system) and second, they're the best competitors in their protected block. Germany props up its economy with exports to the rest of the EU, especially to the weakest countries like the PIGS. Germany is doing great. Greece, Spain, Italy, etc aren't.
Third, they're getting an economic boost from building up East Germany. Eventually, those trade advantages are going to settle down, then we'll see where Germany goes.
In comparison, how is the US going to do a Germany? It doesn't have a vast protected trade block it can exploit.
The same mechanism that got you to reply as I expected ;)
So no mechanism then.
Are my bad vibes interfering with the proper operation of government?
How should I know? I was not talking about you specifically, but American culture as a whole. But hey, if you are so insecure and defensive about it... maybe? I can't run your life for you, it's up to you to fix your own problems.
Again no reason given.
Ok, since you don't have a defense of your claim, I'll advance my own theory on what's going on here. You're just employing a standard religion argument. Bad things are happening because we're not trying hard enough or aren't pure enough. The obvious rebuttal is that if this were going to work, it would work even with some detractors present. Since it doesn't, we don't need to libel a bunch of people for noting that the system isn't working.
The thing people just don't get is that the US government is split between the state and federal levels. The federal government was never intended to do all the things it currently does. One gets that by bending the rules, and once you start bending the rules, corruption follows naturally.
In a country with a true "strong rejection of government", Obama would not have been reelected. Instead, when things don't work, somehow it's the mean old naysayers who are making things break rather than the people who actually did or as usually is the case, didn't do it.
Ah yes, the no true Scotsman argument, or should I say no true American argument.
If it's a correct observation, then it's not a fallacy. Here, it is a correct argument. Obama is strengthening the central federal government at the expense of everyone else. Romney might be as bad, but I don't see evidence for that. So yes, I would expect people who strongly reject government to vote strongly for Romney.
When something breaks, it's always the other guys' fault, and those guys are certainly no real Americans. They don't stand for real American values. They don't stand for what God^H^H^H FSM^H^H^H Founding Fathers wanted. "We", who are the real Americans, are the poor tragic victims getting blamed
Do you always get hysterical when someone disagrees with you? Sure, I'm tired of getting blamed irrationally for other peoples' bullshit. So yes, when something breaks, I'm not going to take seriously the "it's the fault of the people who said, correctly, that it wasn't going to work". The burden of proof is on the people with the wonderful plan. When it fails, they're the ones who fucked up.
I find it remarkable that you have been so far unable to come up with a reason for your opinion in your prior post. There's no reason to expect naysaying to have more self-fulfilling power than the optimistic point of view. These things aren't fragile flowers that will die, if someone thinks negatively about them.
But let's ignore that. We now have as our characteristics, a society that stayed local in spatial scope while on Earth, has considerable biological resources, and resides somewhere in space, but not anywhere we've looked.
As for metal mining, even assuming a civilisation could extract enough metal for it to be noticeable after geological time periods in a tectonically active world, that metal doesn't go up in smoke, unlike gasoline.
We are an example of a civilization that has mined enough metal to be noticed on a geological scale. And because that metal doesn't go away, there'll be sedimentary layers with unusual characteristics (such as unusually high or low metal and organics concentrations) for millions of years to come.
You'd need massive capital controls to direct investment the way you envision.
I'd say rather their absence. The more you try to control people and keep their stuff, the harder they try to leave. I believe the US would keep more capital just by being a better place to start a business and employ people. But that would mean that the people who are employed would need to make some sacrifice in the process.
Who's to say that a hypothetical civilisation wouldn't have skipped the few decades of gasoline and just gone straight to wind farms plus electric engines?
Why would they leave that lying around? Even if they chose not to use oil and coal for an energy source, they are still a vast supply of organic compounds. Similarly, where's the evidence of metal mining, which would be needed for those electric engines?
American culture has a strong rejection of government
This creates a self fulfilling prophecy.
What's the mechanism here? Are my bad vibes interfering with the proper operation of government?
Should you be paying me money to keep me from self-fulfilling you into a bad end? I foresee you becoming an alcoholic, losing your dog, nobody likes you at work, your car is busted, your basement fortress of solitude leaks, computer fan starts whining, etc. But if you send money now, I'm sure I could be mistaken!
But amusingly, despite this culture against government, it's never quite enough cut all those government jobs or change their system. Oh sure we got people like khallow here talking big, but who won the election again? Apparently the guy who will do a horrible job.
In a country with a true "strong rejection of government", Obama would not have been reelected. Instead, when things don't work, somehow it's the mean old naysayers who are making things break rather than the people who actually did or as usually is the case, didn't do it.
As long as it's not expanding faster than light
Well there's the rub. It's not moving faster than the speed of light, but it is expanding faster than the speed of light. That is, you get far enough away and the distance between us and it grows roughly proportional to itself. Supposedly.
If I may interject, with regards to your first point, governmental services can leverage ultimate scale and provide investments that do not have to be short term profitable (infrastructure such as the Interstate system are a good example).
That's not a selling point. Yes, government services can squander public funds on a scale that is staggering. Interstates may not have been a next quarter short term investment. But they started paying for themselves very quickly. The kind of "investments" that can only be rationalized on true long time scales, generally are spending that doesn't generate positive return on investment in any time scale.
IMHO the long time scale is chosen to dodge accountability for mishandling the money. Most education, health care, and pension spending fall in this category.
Opportunity cost makes only sense in the latter context. Most of the yellow wasn't spend but saved or put into investment vehicles, and had therefore very limited stimulus effect. If you want to stimulate the economy with tax cuts you have to tailor them to the lower income segment where the incentive for additional consumption is much higher. The Bush tax cuts on the other hand are structured exactly the other way around.
Economic activity != good for us. The big problem with investment is not that it has limited stimulus effect, but that it has an even weaker targeting effect than encouraging consumption. At least with consumption, you can encourage one round of spending mostly in your target region before the money flees to better places.
Against that, you have to weigh that investment goes directly into the future. There is profound long term impact that doesn't happen with consumption. The consumer just gets something now while the person selling them the goods or services in question also has little reason to make any long term changes. The spurt from the consumption is going away after all.
The Bush tax cuts on the other hand are structured exactly the other way around.
Sounds good then. To work properly IMHO, they would need in conjunction increased incentives to invest in the US rather than other places.
It should go without saying that we students were hardly in a position to judge the technical competence of an entire department!
It should go without saying that you were in a unique position to determine how good a fit that department was for you. Nobody else could do that for you. Plus, if they were graduating only 5% of the students majoring in that field of study, that would have come up from talking with students.
Oh well, that's water under the bridge. From my limited experience, there's a number of things I'd consider truly hard, such as raising kids well (that doesn't last just four years!), starting a profitable business which employs people, or recovering from a crippling injury.
True, it probably won't affect much more than a sphere a few hundred million light years in diameter.
Current thought is that the universe is expanding exponentially (with a very small positive exponent). So the universe we can see and interact with is slowly sliding off the edge of our map.
"Not for Profit" does not always mean "unpaid volunteer", and that includes the board.
And even when it does, you can still have the gatekeeper syndrome. People do this sort of thing for many reasons not just money.
Sure, it is difficult to some degree and sure, there are professors who can make it a bit less pleasant. But I see you made your college experience unusually hard by making a poor choice and staying with it.
This idea, that taxes are the source of all our government's financial problems, has now been sold to a huge proportion of America, whose grasp of math apparently extends to, "Taxes are money that I pay out of my pocket. I like having more money in my pocket. These people are telling me that not only will I be happier if I'm paying less taxes, we'll all be better off if we pay less taxes and the government gets shrunk!"
I take it you disagree? Do you have reasons why?
The answer, "Well, if everyone making more than some very low yearly income pays a little more, and we make the very rich pay a lot more, we can do a lot better for everyone because of this, that, and the other,"
There's at least a trillion dollars gap between what we spend and what we collect in revenue. How would you cover that gap?
If they can turn a profit on selling Falcon 9 launches anywhere near the price points they claim to be able to achieve, then it will change the universe.
This is where we seem to be thinking at cross purposes. I'm thinking in terms of creating an assembly line to provide a civilization with espresso machines, and you're thinking in terms of making a one-off to sit on your work bench for when you feel like a cup (obviously neither of us have addressed where the beans are coming from).
Why you are thinking that? If you have that kind of labor and resources, then there's little reason to do anything for preparation. You already have civilization and they can figure out things on their own. You certainly don't have the "We'll die of starvation, if you don't figure out how to make an assembly line of X".
Give the most brilliant victorian engineer complete information on the composition and design of a microchip and they still wouldn't be able to build one.
Why are we speaking of microchips? Nobody, be they a Victorian engineer or not, is going to be able to make anything beyond the crudest integrated circuits without a considerable amount of infrastructure that no longer exists.
Your labor will be devalued anyway. There will be plenty of people with your level of education throughout the world. Even if your country implements protectionist measures, it's still easier to export goods from those other countries than from yours and your labor still drops in value.
And there's inflation. I doubt aside from exceptionally skilled or lucky employees that most peoples' wages and benefits will keep up with inflation. That's the usual trick by which such things are done.
This is only going to go back to rising wages in the developed world when that massive pool of labor starts to dry up.
And yeah, perhaps a student could work a full-time shit-job while putting themselves through school and graduate late and scraping by with rote memorization and a lackluster GPA instead of really learning, burned out, and missing out on what should have been one of the fondest personal and professional experience of their lives.
Well, I guess you have to decide what's best for you. Four or five years of fun and a pile of debt, or a more stable future which is somewhat less fun and maybe took a bit longer.
Given the hypothetical situation we're discussing, it would seem to be better spent bootstrapping an industrial base as fast as possible.
And that's naturally what's happening. Optimization when you don't know the circumstances under which the optimization is going to occur, is doomed to failure. My view is a working and secure machine shop plus competent people running that shop is most of the way back to your bootstrapping of civilization.
An afternoon to put a device through hundreds or thousands of heating/cooling pressurization/de-pressurization cycles and analyze all the faults that occur? Sure, why not.
You're kidding me. That's a ridiculous level of testing. Just start running cups of coffee and see what breaks down the road.
Sure, because when you're constantly battling against the clock for survival in a hostile world, you have plenty of time. This is why I never bother to tie my horse. If it wanders off, I'll eventually find it, if it's important enough.
Well, it is pretty much true. Sure, there will be push times, such as right after the catastrophe starts or during harvest time, when you need to work all out. But there will also be a lot of downtime where you'll have time to tinker.
The problem of not having an industrial civilization at your disposal would seem to apply to reverse engineering as well. In fact, it would seem to be harder when dealing with reverse engineering of parts designed by engineers who take modern machining methods for granted as opposed to parts purpose-designed to be workable with simpler fabrication techniques. As for documentation agreeing with what's actually built, this is a common problem. Very often part of the real design of an article resides in the institutional memory of the organization that manufactures it. It's extremely common with software especially for the source itself to be the best and most up-to-date documentation. Nevertheless, the goal of this project is to produce rigorous and definitive documentation.
Easier than dealing with documentation that just doesn't apply to your situation and doesn't give you enough information to make things work.
Also, as far as reverse engineering neatly bypassing that problem, it only works if the reverse engineering gives you absolute knowledge of not only the current composition of every part. Even that may not be enough, since it doesn't actually tell you _how_ to make the parts.
Neither is that important a consideration. Really, you're exaggerating the difficulty of this sort of thing.
Well technically, in countries with compulsory voting, what is compulsory is that you turn up at a polling place on election day and get your name marked off the register. You are perfectly free to then put a blank ballot in the box, or draw smiley faces all over it, or whatever. They can't actually force you to vote, because that would obviously undermine the principal of having a secret, anonymous ballot.
The bullshit rationalizations come easy don't they? They could have just stayed home and saved everyone some trouble. The US way is the superior way here because we don't babysit everyone's ass on election day. We don't make this particular bit of silly stuff illegal.
It is extremely foolish to force people who can't handle the responsibility of voting to appear at a voting booth. Maybe as you claim, the irresponsible person will vote for Mickey Mouse and throw their vote away. Or maybe they'll vote for the person at the top of their ballot.
We are talking about a President who gave us a massive tax cut in wartime.
Compared to a president who tried to impose massive environmental restrictions in the middle of the biggest recession since the Great Depression?
Simply the economics of that sort of action are going to be a disaster.
Heh.
I see you can't. Who mixes opportunity cost of revenue not taken and spending on the same graph except to be deceptive? "Non-partisan groups" with partisan axes to grind.
That yellow was spent on something. It didn't magically burn up, leaving IOUs. And of course as the other replier noted, why are those tax cuts still there, if they're so harmful? Where's Medicare on that graph? It's all Booshes fault, right?
If you can't get those taxes back, then there's another solution. Don't spend it.
Do you really think Romney's policies would have been less disastrous?
I do. Part of the problem was simply the Obama administration's callous pursuit of ideological goals during a recession, resulting in great costs and uncertainty to the US and the people who employ people. Romney would have had to do something about the economic climate and the destructive and constitutionally adventuresome regulations coming out of the federal government (such as the EPA's bizarre court tricks). Obama as a reelected, lame duck president, doesn't have to care what sort of mess he leaves for us.
We need to keep in mind that Obama was a beneficiary of that interesting statistical anomaly. Romney was long considered one of the weaker candidates compared to Obama.