Ok, I see you have a number of issues. Let me attempt to address them.
Having less trained people doesn't mean you're going to progress any better
That depends why they're getting trained. If they're getting trained because someone needs them and is willing to pay amply for them, then well, that means there's not enough. If they're getting trained, because there's some "free" subsidy from government (which in turn exists because some politician heard that more skilled workers is better), then there's probably too many skilled workers of that category being trained.
You continue to be amazed by something that happens to almost any candidate during elections (or even outside of it)?
Yes. If one really thinks about it, why should someone without some sort of incurable brain disease get into a tizzy because a candidate said the naughty "f" word, "fired"? There's no rational answer for that.
As to your second question, maybe I'm just amazed that my face eaters from Betelgeuse have not found you yet. It's a pretty good reason to be amazed, I assure you.
I'm the guy who said nice guys finish last
So why should I care that you know a cliche, especially one that isn't really true? We know the source of the cliche, that people appear to be bad and profit by that. But we also know that humans attribute bad motives to others when they don't get what they want. So Romney fires people, then it must mean that Romney is a bad person. Similarly, Obama has used and discarded others all his life. That doesn't mean he is a bad person. It just means that if he wants something, you make sure he pays up front.
said we need lots of well trained people so we can choose who to hire and fire.
I thought you were, in your state of offendness, attempting to be sarcastic. You may still be attempting to do so. It's not like I can read your mind on that.
Well, maybe you're talking about mcgrew (the other guy who was replying), but that has nothing to do with me.
Well, if you were trying to be offended by Romney and he was as well, then that looks to me like the necessary connection to connect you two.
The rounding of rocks is usually due to rocks rubbing against each other carbon dioxide wouldn't be able to generate the necessary force unless it was moving at rather high speeds with higher densities than I (as a non-expert) doubt would be attainable on the lower gravity of Mars.
Carbon dioxide ice flashing to steam would be able to generate the necessary power. It would be necessary to demonstrate that the above process actually occurs enough to the same material to create worn pebbles.
We all are waiting to die. Doing a lot of constructive stuff (like say, science research on Mars many orders of magnitude faster than anything we're used to today) while you wait, seems a better use of your time.
A continuous, amorphous substance whose molecules move freely past one another and that has the tendency to assume the shape of its container; a liquid or gas.
If the stream bed is a billion years old and has carbon dioxide repeatedly flood it, it may well have well-worked stones like what are seen. Yes, I do think that the idea is something of a stretch, but it needs to be ruled out.
Recommendation #1:
Establish a new and supplemental allocation of 20,000 H-1B STEM visas to meet
employersâ(TM) hiring needs and generate up to $200 million for new investments in
the American STEM pipeline.
Linking H-1B to "STEM pipelines" will also help it survive political adversity.
Personally, I don't mind the presence of the H-1B. But it shouldn't be a indentured servant program because then, US workers can't compete with H-1B visa workers (it wouldn't be legal for US workers to work under similar conditions to those that H-1B visa workers experience, such as getting booted out of the country, if the company fires them).
Alas, he was running for office, so as I said it's a poor choice of words.
I continue to be amazed by how hard people try to be offended by Romney. A couple of Slashdotters were whining about his "nervous chuckle" and psychoanalyzing that to pieces (I think their conclusion was that he was too human to be a good president).
And now we find that Romney said "fire" and that's supposedly bad, if you're running for president. My take is that a good president will have to fire a lot of people in the US government. There's simply too much corruption and incompetence to just let things slide for another four years.
So where's the end to aging and diseases? If we had enough well trained people you'd think we'd be a lot closer to those great things
Why would you think that? Number of people trained and effort expended doesn't imply progress. If resources are taken from the few who actually do anything and given to the many who don't, then you're going to see less progress, even if more people are trained to do something (poorly) in the end.
No, you need a society filled with well-trained people, so that there's more competition for those jobs. I bet Romney would love having more trained people for the same jobs, so he can choose who to hire and "fire"
Well, obviously, it'd be better to not offend the sensibilities of the rich guys. By all means let's churn out cheap scientists and whatnot. And hope they're at least worth what they're going to get paid.
Yet Assange has made it his business to disseminate classified documents to anyone and everyone. Information that can get people killed.
One can say the same of any press organization that deals with leaks of this nature. As long as the business is legal, and it is legal, the US military doesn't have an excuse for the designation.
Assange knew he was going to be targeted the day he bought the wikileaks domain name. Not just by the US, but every government in the world wants his head on a plate. Britain is fighting to have him extradited as we sit here.
There are more than two countries in the world. It's worth noting that Wikileaks doesn't actually release leaks from the more authoritarian governments out there, governments that take even less heed of law than the US government currently does.
I gather a lot of things don't work that way in the military.
it is possible to make more as an O-3 than an O-6, depending on years served.
Look I wasn't looking to argue. I was just pointing out that there really isn't that much difference between modern military forces. I think I made a solid case here. Saying that US military pay-grade isn't rank, when well, it is, just isn't contributing anything to this discussion.
He's speaking that as a customer, he likes the choice to "fire" one service provider and hire another if the first provider is doing a bad job.
Really? That's pretty damn innocuous.
At best, Romney made a poor choice of words. Customers don't fire people.
Customers do it all the time by buying from someone else instead. For example, General Motors has shed a huge amount of jobs and market share since the 70s. Those workers shed were fired by the former customers of GM. The ex-customers didn't give them a pink slip or turn the wheels of bureaucracy. They didn't make the decision to fire that particular person. They just shopped elsewhere and that was enough.
The analogy is pretty obvious.
I'd worry about Romney's competence if he can't tell the different between being a boss of a business and being merely a customer of a business.
It's one thing to have a legitimate concern. It's another to just be an ass.
It has unified pay-grades, but ranks can be quite different across the branches
Ok, I looked. Pay-grade is rank. "Rank" as you put it, is a label stuck on a pay-grade. Sure, it might appear to be confusing that a captain in the US Army has a lower rank than a captain in the US Navy, but it wouldn't be at all surprising that an O-3 has a lower rank than an O-6.
You won't find a cure to diseases and extend people's lives without well trained people working on those problems. Without people working to improve your life, you won't have the time to establish that culture of thinking, and your society won't be free.
So you need some well trained people. We already had that. You don't need a society filled with so-called "well trained people" especially when the effort actually harms the more valuable goals by taking resources away from them and giving them to people to train for jobs that already have too many people trained for them.
My links are broken for some reason. I don't know why. I had edited this in an OpenOffice document since I had to turn the computer off partway through the post. I guess the copy/paste from the document adds some characters that break the post's links.
One merely needs to look at the opportunity that Obama squandered when he entered office in 2009. He was within 2 votes for the next two years of overturning the only serious obstacle to any legislation he wished to pass (the Senate filibuster). He instead squandered that opportunity on Obamacare, a 2000 page monstrosity that just doesn't help. For example, it makes health care more expensive by subsidizing demand for health insurance and making health insurance cover more cases. It also implements some unconstitutional gimmicks in the process. Since expensive health care is the problem, this is pretty harmful and it's probably the most counterproductive bits of US law for the past decade. More so than even the Patriot Act or the ethanol subsidies for corn.
And then there's the coverup over Fast and Furious, whose purpose seemed to be smuggling high quality firearms to Mexican drug cartels. Since weapons from the program have been found at numerous crime scenes in both Mexico and the US, when are we going to see the people responsible for the program tried for assisting in those crimes? For example, if you give someone a gun, they kill someone with it, and you know they're going to kill someone with it, then you are guilty of accessory to murder. That is a federal felony especially considering the international nature of the crime.
The Obama administration instead protects these people from justice. I must admit, here I attribute that to malice not incompetence.
Finally, there's just the matter of having priorities screwed up. Both examples above show that. Such as believing universal coverage is more important than cheap coverage. Or believing that arming Mexican drug gangs somehow has value.
Going on, Obama's ideological blindness and rank incompetence shows up over and over again. For example, the initial stimulus, ARRA was more a gift to unions than actual stimulus. This is especially apparent when one considers how quickly the money was spent. A considerable portion of it took years to spend, which just isn't stimulus at that point.
There were projections made at the time to justify the stimulus spending. Those projections have greatly understated current unemployment. Even projected unemployment in the absence of the stimulus is better than current levels.
Then there's the pursuit of environmental goals at the expense of the US economy, both with the obstruction of off-shore oil drilling and the Keystone pipeline (which has the double harm of encouraging Canada to make a deal with China instead). It further manifests with the large loans to failed renewable energy companies. The VC model of funding untried companies to see what survives or not can work, but they don't give out hundreds of millions of dollars at a time when they do so.
The incompetence also manifests in really poor law and regulation. For example, the EPA recently argued that a couple didn't have the legal standing to contest a EPA decision that they not only halt construction on their property, but also pay $75,000 per day until they restored the property to wetlands. EPA employees should have been fired for this when the case first came to light.
The Obama administration has also entered many waivers and exemptions from Obamacare provisions for its cronies and allies. It looks hideously bad when someone passes "health care reform" and then turns around and excuses their allies from the burden of the law.
In summary, there's plenty of signs of incompetence for those that choose to look.
A free society. The end of aging and disease. A culture of thinking.
And you think Romney could bring that about??? Wow... that's pretty deluded.
As I was saying, those are things more valuable than a "well trained workforce". Romney could help enable those things by getting the federal government out of the way.
The FDA for example is a roadblock to the "end of aging and disease". The numerous programs that force you to pay for things of dubious value, like Social Security and the individual mandate from Obamacare, are obstacles to a free society. And we don't need the federal government to fund indoctrination of our formerly young adult children in college. A return to the days when one went to college only if they really meant it, would do a lot to create a thinking society. And a generation with a vastly lower debt load.
Mark, you could always continue to whine or you could pull your head out of your ass and live in the real world with the rest of us. Maybe you ought to think about why you're not chipping stone axes for a living and how that change came about.
The human race is doomed. Our technology for damaging the earth and killing each other has exceeded our political ability to control it. It will destroy us, soon.
There's this thing called "follow through", that is, completing a motion. Getting as far as we have, and then declaring inevitable doom, is not good follow through.
What has changed is that countries sponsoring terrorists or aiding and supplying them, are now enemies instead of possible allies if we could find some advantage to it.
What has changed is that the USSR with its considerable nuclear force was no longer backing state terrorism.
MPG and GPM have the same information content. So no reason to switch. And MPG has the "bigger is better" thing going for it.
Still it's not as bad as measuring rainfall in liters per square meter like we do here in Spain.
Nothing bad about it. The real dimensions are liters of fluid per square meter of land. That doesn't translate easily into a single unit "millimeters", but average height of a pool of fluid in millimeters, assuming the land were flat and the fluid didn't run off".
Perhaps because a citizen of a foreign country, a country that might in all other ways be a friend or neutral to the US, might form a group for the purposes of directing weapons at the United States intended to do physical harm to it's citizens or it's government.
Such is not the case with Assange.
Nothing in this article even says the US is targeting him for death. It's more about letting US Service people know that giving him documents will have some very serious blowback. Which it should.
They still have to back those threats in court. And given that other people and groups with that classification have been targeted for death, there is an implicit threat here for Assange and Wikileaks.
It's also interesting to note that the US has never been penalized for the erroneous or even outright deceptive pre-war story that rationalized invasion of Iraq. That among other evidence, says to me that most countries wanted political cover rather than the truth. "Those dastardly Americans tricked us again. Check out the swag I got!"
The 'sad part' is you're still missing the point! He's not laughing cause it was a joke and he finds it funny - he's laughing cause he was caught out saying something amazingly stupid - opening his trap without engaging his brain - yet again, and instead of having the decency to be ashamed or bashful for the appalling or stupid things he just said, he laughs to distract peoples attention and it make it seem like he meant it as a joke.
Out of curiosity, do you really believe the above garbage? It looked like a joke to me. As has been already noted, the people at the press thing thought he was joking. I'm willing to take their side especially over an idiot on the internet with an ax to grind.
The 'really fucking sad part' is the previous poster explained that to you and you claimed to understand and still tried to spin in into a good thing!
This was a case of noblesse oblige. I couldn't just let that poor poster continue their life in darkness without at least a little illumination.
Lets make a it really simple - he says stupid things, then weasels out of the shame without actually refuting the stupid/horrible thing he said. Try spinning that again please?
As you wish. We all say and do stupid stuff on occasion. You just did in the post above, for example, though due to other reasons than merely putting your foot in your mouth. What separates the better communicators in such cases, is that a) they recognize the error as they say it, and b) have come up with tricks for mitigating the effects of the gaff, such as Romney's alleged nervous chuckling.
If the trick works as you allege it did in this cause, then what's the big deal? Romney occasionally saying dumb stuff? Everyone does. Romney making it appear as a joke? Well, he's a politician and that's a good skill for one to have. Maybe you should figure out a similar trick for when you do that.
Finally, there's no reason for shame here. Anyone who has to talk a lot will make mistakes. And for a president those mistakes will often be broadcast worldwide. They'll have no time to beat themselves because they flubbed the delivery of their latest airplane joke. Better that they chuckle and move on.
I find it hard to believe that anything higher than a basic understanding of math (how to add/subtract/multiply/divide) is needed for such tasks.
While math can vary wildly in character and complexity, it's worth noting that humans already do a lot of complex math. They just aren't aware of it. Basic math can get you the paint you need. A better awareness of math can get you the paint you need, when you change your mind, without having to rethink the problem from scratch.
Slashdot Mirror
Having less trained people doesn't mean you're going to progress any better
That depends why they're getting trained. If they're getting trained because someone needs them and is willing to pay amply for them, then well, that means there's not enough. If they're getting trained, because there's some "free" subsidy from government (which in turn exists because some politician heard that more skilled workers is better), then there's probably too many skilled workers of that category being trained.
You continue to be amazed by something that happens to almost any candidate during elections (or even outside of it)?
Yes. If one really thinks about it, why should someone without some sort of incurable brain disease get into a tizzy because a candidate said the naughty "f" word, "fired"? There's no rational answer for that.
As to your second question, maybe I'm just amazed that my face eaters from Betelgeuse have not found you yet. It's a pretty good reason to be amazed, I assure you.
I'm the guy who said nice guys finish last
So why should I care that you know a cliche, especially one that isn't really true? We know the source of the cliche, that people appear to be bad and profit by that. But we also know that humans attribute bad motives to others when they don't get what they want. So Romney fires people, then it must mean that Romney is a bad person. Similarly, Obama has used and discarded others all his life. That doesn't mean he is a bad person. It just means that if he wants something, you make sure he pays up front.
said we need lots of well trained people so we can choose who to hire and fire.
I thought you were, in your state of offendness, attempting to be sarcastic. You may still be attempting to do so. It's not like I can read your mind on that.
Well, maybe you're talking about mcgrew (the other guy who was replying), but that has nothing to do with me.
Well, if you were trying to be offended by Romney and he was as well, then that looks to me like the necessary connection to connect you two.
The rounding of rocks is usually due to rocks rubbing against each other carbon dioxide wouldn't be able to generate the necessary force unless it was moving at rather high speeds with higher densities than I (as a non-expert) doubt would be attainable on the lower gravity of Mars.
Carbon dioxide ice flashing to steam would be able to generate the necessary power. It would be necessary to demonstrate that the above process actually occurs enough to the same material to create worn pebbles.
Does that rule CO2 out as a possible fluid for you?
Gases are fluids as well as liquids.
We all are waiting to die. Doing a lot of constructive stuff (like say, science research on Mars many orders of magnitude faster than anything we're used to today) while you wait, seems a better use of your time.
A continuous, amorphous substance whose molecules move freely past one another and that has the tendency to assume the shape of its container; a liquid or gas.
If the stream bed is a billion years old and has carbon dioxide repeatedly flood it, it may well have well-worked stones like what are seen. Yes, I do think that the idea is something of a stretch, but it needs to be ruled out.
Recommendation #1:
Establish a new and supplemental allocation of 20,000 H-1B STEM visas to meet employersâ(TM) hiring needs and generate up to $200 million for new investments in the American STEM pipeline.
Linking H-1B to "STEM pipelines" will also help it survive political adversity.
Personally, I don't mind the presence of the H-1B. But it shouldn't be a indentured servant program because then, US workers can't compete with H-1B visa workers (it wouldn't be legal for US workers to work under similar conditions to those that H-1B visa workers experience, such as getting booted out of the country, if the company fires them).
Alas, he was running for office, so as I said it's a poor choice of words.
I continue to be amazed by how hard people try to be offended by Romney. A couple of Slashdotters were whining about his "nervous chuckle" and psychoanalyzing that to pieces (I think their conclusion was that he was too human to be a good president).
And now we find that Romney said "fire" and that's supposedly bad, if you're running for president. My take is that a good president will have to fire a lot of people in the US government. There's simply too much corruption and incompetence to just let things slide for another four years.
So where's the end to aging and diseases? If we had enough well trained people you'd think we'd be a lot closer to those great things
Why would you think that? Number of people trained and effort expended doesn't imply progress. If resources are taken from the few who actually do anything and given to the many who don't, then you're going to see less progress, even if more people are trained to do something (poorly) in the end.
No, you need a society filled with well-trained people, so that there's more competition for those jobs. I bet Romney would love having more trained people for the same jobs, so he can choose who to hire and "fire"
Well, obviously, it'd be better to not offend the sensibilities of the rich guys. By all means let's churn out cheap scientists and whatnot. And hope they're at least worth what they're going to get paid.
Yet Assange has made it his business to disseminate classified documents to anyone and everyone. Information that can get people killed.
One can say the same of any press organization that deals with leaks of this nature. As long as the business is legal, and it is legal, the US military doesn't have an excuse for the designation.
Assange knew he was going to be targeted the day he bought the wikileaks domain name. Not just by the US, but every government in the world wants his head on a plate. Britain is fighting to have him extradited as we sit here.
There are more than two countries in the world. It's worth noting that Wikileaks doesn't actually release leaks from the more authoritarian governments out there, governments that take even less heed of law than the US government currently does.
No, rank is rank. That's why we call it rank...
I gather a lot of things don't work that way in the military.
it is possible to make more as an O-3 than an O-6, depending on years served.
Look I wasn't looking to argue. I was just pointing out that there really isn't that much difference between modern military forces. I think I made a solid case here. Saying that US military pay-grade isn't rank, when well, it is, just isn't contributing anything to this discussion.
He's speaking that as a customer, he likes the choice to "fire" one service provider and hire another if the first provider is doing a bad job.
Really? That's pretty damn innocuous.
At best, Romney made a poor choice of words. Customers don't fire people.
Customers do it all the time by buying from someone else instead. For example, General Motors has shed a huge amount of jobs and market share since the 70s. Those workers shed were fired by the former customers of GM. The ex-customers didn't give them a pink slip or turn the wheels of bureaucracy. They didn't make the decision to fire that particular person. They just shopped elsewhere and that was enough.
The analogy is pretty obvious.
I'd worry about Romney's competence if he can't tell the different between being a boss of a business and being merely a customer of a business.
It's one thing to have a legitimate concern. It's another to just be an ass.
I don't dare to predict the outcome of this trend.
As Benjamin Franklin said:
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
The consequence will be a loss of liberty and safety. How much is lost will depend on how much is given away.
It has unified pay-grades, but ranks can be quite different across the branches
Ok, I looked. Pay-grade is rank. "Rank" as you put it, is a label stuck on a pay-grade. Sure, it might appear to be confusing that a captain in the US Army has a lower rank than a captain in the US Navy, but it wouldn't be at all surprising that an O-3 has a lower rank than an O-6.
You won't find a cure to diseases and extend people's lives without well trained people working on those problems. Without people working to improve your life, you won't have the time to establish that culture of thinking, and your society won't be free.
So you need some well trained people. We already had that. You don't need a society filled with so-called "well trained people" especially when the effort actually harms the more valuable goals by taking resources away from them and giving them to people to train for jobs that already have too many people trained for them.
My links are broken for some reason. I don't know why. I had edited this in an OpenOffice document since I had to turn the computer off partway through the post. I guess the copy/paste from the document adds some characters that break the post's links.
Where's the indication of Obama's incompetence?
One merely needs to look at the opportunity that Obama squandered when he entered office in 2009. He was within 2 votes for the next two years of overturning the only serious obstacle to any legislation he wished to pass (the Senate filibuster). He instead squandered that opportunity on Obamacare, a 2000 page monstrosity that just doesn't help. For example, it makes health care more expensive by subsidizing demand for health insurance and making health insurance cover more cases. It also implements some unconstitutional gimmicks in the process. Since expensive health care is the problem, this is pretty harmful and it's probably the most counterproductive bits of US law for the past decade. More so than even the Patriot Act or the ethanol subsidies for corn.
And then there's the coverup over Fast and Furious, whose purpose seemed to be smuggling high quality firearms to Mexican drug cartels. Since weapons from the program have been found at numerous crime scenes in both Mexico and the US, when are we going to see the people responsible for the program tried for assisting in those crimes? For example, if you give someone a gun, they kill someone with it, and you know they're going to kill someone with it, then you are guilty of accessory to murder. That is a federal felony especially considering the international nature of the crime.
The Obama administration instead protects these people from justice. I must admit, here I attribute that to malice not incompetence.
Finally, there's just the matter of having priorities screwed up. Both examples above show that. Such as believing universal coverage is more important than cheap coverage. Or believing that arming Mexican drug gangs somehow has value.
Going on, Obama's ideological blindness and rank incompetence shows up over and over again. For example, the initial stimulus, ARRA was more a gift to unions than actual stimulus. This is especially apparent when one considers how quickly the money was spent. A considerable portion of it took years to spend, which just isn't stimulus at that point.
There were projections made at the time to justify the stimulus spending. Those projections have greatly understated current unemployment. Even projected unemployment in the absence of the stimulus is better than current levels.
Then there's the pursuit of environmental goals at the expense of the US economy, both with the obstruction of off-shore oil drilling and the Keystone pipeline (which has the double harm of encouraging Canada to make a deal with China instead). It further manifests with the large loans to failed renewable energy companies. The VC model of funding untried companies to see what survives or not can work, but they don't give out hundreds of millions of dollars at a time when they do so.
The incompetence also manifests in really poor law and regulation. For example, the EPA recently argued that a couple didn't have the legal standing to contest a EPA decision that they not only halt construction on their property, but also pay $75,000 per day until they restored the property to wetlands. EPA employees should have been fired for this when the case first came to light.
The Obama administration has also entered many waivers and exemptions from Obamacare provisions for its cronies and allies. It looks hideously bad when someone passes "health care reform" and then turns around and excuses their allies from the burden of the law.
In summary, there's plenty of signs of incompetence for those that choose to look.
A free society. The end of aging and disease. A culture of thinking.
And you think Romney could bring that about??? Wow... that's pretty deluded.
As I was saying, those are things more valuable than a "well trained workforce". Romney could help enable those things by getting the federal government out of the way.
The FDA for example is a roadblock to the "end of aging and disease". The numerous programs that force you to pay for things of dubious value, like Social Security and the individual mandate from Obamacare, are obstacles to a free society. And we don't need the federal government to fund indoctrination of our formerly young adult children in college. A return to the days when one went to college only if they really meant it, would do a lot to create a thinking society. And a generation with a vastly lower debt load.
The human race is doomed. Our technology for damaging the earth and killing each other has exceeded our political ability to control it. It will destroy us, soon.
There's this thing called "follow through", that is, completing a motion. Getting as far as we have, and then declaring inevitable doom, is not good follow through.
What has changed is that countries sponsoring terrorists or aiding and supplying them, are now enemies instead of possible allies if we could find some advantage to it.
What has changed is that the USSR with its considerable nuclear force was no longer backing state terrorism.
Start by using GPM as a metric.
MPG and GPM have the same information content. So no reason to switch. And MPG has the "bigger is better" thing going for it.
Still it's not as bad as measuring rainfall in liters per square meter like we do here in Spain.
Nothing bad about it. The real dimensions are liters of fluid per square meter of land. That doesn't translate easily into a single unit "millimeters", but average height of a pool of fluid in millimeters, assuming the land were flat and the fluid didn't run off".
Perhaps because a citizen of a foreign country, a country that might in all other ways be a friend or neutral to the US, might form a group for the purposes of directing weapons at the United States intended to do physical harm to it's citizens or it's government.
Such is not the case with Assange.
Nothing in this article even says the US is targeting him for death. It's more about letting US Service people know that giving him documents will have some very serious blowback. Which it should.
They still have to back those threats in court. And given that other people and groups with that classification have been targeted for death, there is an implicit threat here for Assange and Wikileaks.
There are ground, air, and naval organizations within the IDF, but all report to the same general staff and draw on the same pool of personnel.
Same with the US.
There are no branch-specific uniforms or ranks.
It's worth noting here that the US has the same ranks for all of its military.
The real difference between the US and Israel is that the US has branch-specific uniforms and rank names. Not a whole lot of difference there.
It's also interesting to note that the US has never been penalized for the erroneous or even outright deceptive pre-war story that rationalized invasion of Iraq. That among other evidence, says to me that most countries wanted political cover rather than the truth. "Those dastardly Americans tricked us again. Check out the swag I got!"
The 'sad part' is you're still missing the point! He's not laughing cause it was a joke and he finds it funny - he's laughing cause he was caught out saying something amazingly stupid - opening his trap without engaging his brain - yet again, and instead of having the decency to be ashamed or bashful for the appalling or stupid things he just said, he laughs to distract peoples attention and it make it seem like he meant it as a joke.
Out of curiosity, do you really believe the above garbage? It looked like a joke to me. As has been already noted, the people at the press thing thought he was joking. I'm willing to take their side especially over an idiot on the internet with an ax to grind.
The 'really fucking sad part' is the previous poster explained that to you and you claimed to understand and still tried to spin in into a good thing!
This was a case of noblesse oblige. I couldn't just let that poor poster continue their life in darkness without at least a little illumination.
Lets make a it really simple - he says stupid things, then weasels out of the shame without actually refuting the stupid/horrible thing he said. Try spinning that again please?
As you wish. We all say and do stupid stuff on occasion. You just did in the post above, for example, though due to other reasons than merely putting your foot in your mouth. What separates the better communicators in such cases, is that a) they recognize the error as they say it, and b) have come up with tricks for mitigating the effects of the gaff, such as Romney's alleged nervous chuckling.
If the trick works as you allege it did in this cause, then what's the big deal? Romney occasionally saying dumb stuff? Everyone does. Romney making it appear as a joke? Well, he's a politician and that's a good skill for one to have. Maybe you should figure out a similar trick for when you do that.
Finally, there's no reason for shame here. Anyone who has to talk a lot will make mistakes. And for a president those mistakes will often be broadcast worldwide. They'll have no time to beat themselves because they flubbed the delivery of their latest airplane joke. Better that they chuckle and move on.
I find it hard to believe that anything higher than a basic understanding of math (how to add/subtract/multiply/divide) is needed for such tasks.
While math can vary wildly in character and complexity, it's worth noting that humans already do a lot of complex math. They just aren't aware of it. Basic math can get you the paint you need. A better awareness of math can get you the paint you need, when you change your mind, without having to rethink the problem from scratch.