do you value a policy that seeks to make abortions rare, safe, and legal?
Of course, this is disingenuous, since the Dems only support the "safe" and "legal" parts. They don't have any interest in "rare".
If they wanted abortions to be "safe, legal, and rare", then they'd support regulating the industry the way any other industriy is regulated. For instance, my daughter has to get parental permission to get her ears pierced. Or to go on a Field Trip to a Museum. For that matter, her Doctor is required to let her parents know about any care she gets...
Except for an abortion. That she can get without parental input. A prescription cough syrup requires parental notification, an abortion not only doesn't require it but doesn't even ALLOW the Doctor to tell the parents.
Was anyone else disturbed by the announcement that research into hydro is being cut back?
NOt even a little bit. The technology is mature enough, and pretty much every potential hudro source in North America has already been dammed up and tapped.
About the only way we'll get more hydropower is to completely dam off Niagara Falls, and use ALL that water for power. And I can just see the Greens' reaction to that plan.
more efficient turbines
That's not specific to hydropower, so no reason to research it separately for hydro- as opposed to any other source of energy.
Nuclear is a lot better than oil/coal burning, that much is for sure. Atleast in countrys with enough of a reliable infrastructure that failing safety-mechanisms won't just be disabled to avoid interupting the production. (as in Chernobyl)
Not quite correct. The safety mechanisms at Chernobyl were disabled to allow testing of a specific disaster scenario.
The Russians wanted to learn how much power could be extracted from a reactor while a meltdown was occurring. They chose Chernobyl as a testbed for the scenario, but had to disbale the safety interlocks to allow the Chernobyl reactor to perform as required for the test (with the interlocks in place, they couldn't make it do something so unsafe as to even come close to a meltdown-in-progress).
Unfortunately, with the safety interlocks disabled, the "disaster scenario" they were testing became a bit too realistic.
The situation you describe is covered under Conspiracy Laws.
Talking about doing something is perfectly ok - as long as noone involved does it.
As soon as one party to the conversation commits the illegal act, the other parties to the conversation are, more or less automatically, chargable as Conspirators.
Which carries a sentence similar to the crime they were conspiring about.
These people don't belong in our civilized society.
Funny, that's exactly what the buttheads you're talking about are saying....
Hmm, I'm an employer. I suddenly no longer have to pay my share of FICA tax. I have the choice of returning that money to my worker's paycheck, or keeping it myself. In addition, I'm the standard capitalistic heartless bastard who believes that Greed is Good and Profit is King. Which do you think I'm going to do? Where do you think that money will be going?
Well, if you're stupid, into your own pocket. If you're smart, it'll be used to offer higher salaries to the guys you hire away from the stupid employers. And as increased salaries to your own employees, to keep them from leaving for a 6% pay raise elsewhere.
Note by the way, that there were two things done after 1929 that would actually tend to limit future "depressions":
1) FDIC and FSLIC were created to prevent banks from failing. This acted to minimize loss of consumer confidence during later economic downturns. Consumer confidence is the biggest positive feedback element in the economy - if they're optimistic, they buy, which pushes the economy up, making them more optimistic. And vice versa when they're pessimistic.
2) Rules against Margin trading. Much of the "money" that existed in 1929 was imaginary, even by modern loose definitions - people bought on margin (made a small downpayment on the stock), and sold when the stock went up (which it did all through the 20's), thus having "paper fortunes" (most of their "wealth" was actually tied up in the margins that they were betting on, but they didn't notice, since stock prices didn't go down) that evaporated into air when the stock markets fell.
This left them no poorer than they had been (they were worth about as much as ever, which is to say not much), but it made them FEEL poorer - one day they owned $100,000 in stock (frequently with nothing invested at all, or only a nominal amount), after the margin calls, they had to sell all that stock to pay off the margins. Leaving them in the hole by whatever cash they had to come up with after selling their stocks, but feeling like they were $100,000 in the hole. Note the comment about consumer confidence above.
Do I consider those to be unwarranted government interference in the market? Not especially. But they do act as a brake on the markets - banks have to pay for the FDIC/FSLIC, and that money isn't going into the interest that your money is earning. And is raising slightly the cost of borrowing money. Margin buying is almost insanely risky, but does allow for buying with little liquidity, which means more of your money can be earning money at any given moment.
Is the downside worth the cost? Yes, I think so. We haven't had a new Great Depression yet, anyway. Will these measures prevent any future depressions? No. It'll happen, sooner or later, probably as a result of some ill-conceived attempt to "save" the taxpayers from their own idiocy.
Which attempts always fail, in the end - make something idiot-proof, and we'll breed a better grade of idiot to get around it.
"You can make things fool-proof, but you can't make them damnfool-proof"
You are also assuming that:
- the populace would be 100% against the government
True enough. and the OP assumed the military would be 100% FOR the government. It won't be. If the Civil War is any guide, a 60-40 split (gov/rebel) is not unreasonable.
- no three-way rebellions
Also true. And the Army will split as many ways as the rebellion does. Plus one more faction for the government.
- there'll be one rifle per head rather than ten rifles per head in one tenth of the cases and zero rifles per head in nine tenths of the cases
Rather unlikely - more than 10% of American households keep firearms. Over 40%, last I heard. 40% of Americans is rather more than 100,000,000 last I checked.
I understated the number of firearms available to the "rebels" to account for the fact that not all Americans own firearms.
Note that the total number of civilian-held firearms is closer to 300,000,000 than 100,000,000.
Note further that the firearms owners are likely to be disproportionally represented among any rebels - after all, they're the ones with the means to rebel.
And the collapse of the stock market had nothing to do with the depression. Right.
Not very much, really. Black Tuesday certainly traumatized a lot of people, but it didn't do all that much to drive the economy into Depression (for all that it is considered the keynote event).
One year before the crash, the Stock Markets were about where they were just before the passage of the Smoot Hawley tariffs. During that last year, the Markets increased by 50%. A few months after the crash (and just before the passage of Smoot Hawley), the Markets were heading back up (a fairly normal bounce from a fall, just as the "collapse" was a fairly normal reaction to a runup).
Then comes Smoot-Hawley, and the market turns downward for another two years. And the rest of the world's economy follows suit. Note that the Markets lost more value after the passage of Smoot-Hawley (which was, ostensibly, to protect American industry so as to help the economy get back on its feet) than they did before.
If that insane spike in stock prices that was 1929 is discounted (and it should be - there is no way on God's green earth that the total value of American companies increased by 50% in one year - it was a dot-com boom-bust on an epic scale), then virtually the entire collapse in value of the US stock markets happened AFTER Smoot-Hawley. Which means either that Smoot-Hawley was a cause, or the effect (Great Depression) happened IN SPITE OF government controls.
Given that the New Deal (started in 1933) didn't actually do much to cure the Depression (it took WW2, and the destruction of much of the industry in the rest of the world), there is not much reason to believe that the government interventions in the economy (including Smoot-Hawley) of the '30s were a shining example of the usefulness of governments' control over economies. Rather the reverse.
Now, there is always the question of whether the Markets (and the economy) would have recovered if left to their own devices. Unfortunately, since we don't have a way to check alternate cases, we'll never know. And it's unlikely we'll even be able to make good guesses. Historically, however, government interventions in the economy have seldom produced the stated results, and frequently have produced, shall we say, less than optimal results.
So I think I'll stick with reasonably free markets as an ideal, and settle for the fact that the governments (not just our government, but all of them) are acting with the best of intentions, but are rather stupid....
Compare to the War on Terror where casualties have been measued in the thousands
That is misleading and/or incorrect. The correct statement is: Compare to the War on Terror where American casualties have been measued in the thousands
Umm, no. The casualties he mentioned for the Cold War were also American casualties. It is perfectly reasonable to compare American casualties in two different "wars", just as it is to compare total casualties in two different "wars". Comparing total casualties in one war with American casualties in another war is "misleading and/or incorrect"
They would have been paranoid if they had posited something terrible happening because of unchecked capitalism and it never did. But, well, it did happen
Umm, no. Proximate cause for the Great Depression was the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs, and the corresponding tariffs passed in other nations in retaliation. Those tariffs were NOT an example of "unchecked" capitalism, but rather the reverse.
At a slightly greater remove, the Great Depression was a side-effect of the industrialization of the world to support WW1, and the inability of that new industry to convert to peacetime production. Problem there wasn't "unchecked" capitalism either, but governments making war (and spending money they didn't have to do so) "unchecked".
1776: muskets vs muskets
2005: 100,000,000 rifles vs 200,000 rifles + tanks and artillery.
And this assuming that the Army would be 100% behind the government - it wasn't during the Civil War (Remember, Bobby Lee was offered command of the Union Army before he took command of the Confederate Army).
Most likely it would be 100,000,000 rifles + tanks and artillery vs 200,000 rifles + tanks and artillery.
Which shows that they're hurting sales, at least by a tiny amount. After all, some small percentage of the viewers of fansubs might instead buy the $70 Japanese-only DVDs and then hire a translator for their own local use.
YOu state categorically that "they" are hurting sales because someone MIGHT do something?
A is true because B might be true? I'm not sure I follow the logic there.
And whtever gives you the idea that "environmentalists" are driven by altruism?
I neither suggested nor implied that Greenpeace and the Sierra Club were the "largest portion of the "anti-nuke movement"". Merely that they, along with many other noted environmentalists were part and parcel of the anti-nuke movement.
I believe the largest group opposing nuclear power would have been the families with children who didn't want nuclear power in their backyards
Interestingly, a simple Google of "anti-nuclear activist" provides about a 50-50 split between environmetalists and NIMBY types. With a large overlap, in that many of the NIMBY types also profess to be environmentalists.
When I was in school at Georgia Tech many years ago, the anti-nuke activists (including Greenpeace) came on campus arguing the NIMBY line ("how would you like it if a nuclear power plant were built in your neighborhood?").
We found their reaction quite amusing when we pointed to the nuclear power plant on campus (in the heart of Atlanta) of which they had been unaware.
No. The First Article was not ratified. The second became the 27th Amendment in 1992. The thrid-twelfth became the the first Ten Amendments (the Bill of Rights).
This is not very surprising, considering that teachers and principles don't consider students as people. They are just kids and the teachers have the rights to command them. On their view you need to be adult to be counted in people.
Hmmm. Quite possible. I had not considered that most teachers don't consider their students to be "people", though, in retrospect, it is obvious that many (if not most) of mine thought so (and I'm talking about the sixties here)
Slashdot Mirror
And both horizons are too short. By an order of megnitude or two.
Of course, this is disingenuous, since the Dems only support the "safe" and "legal" parts. They don't have any interest in "rare".
If they wanted abortions to be "safe, legal, and rare", then they'd support regulating the industry the way any other industriy is regulated. For instance, my daughter has to get parental permission to get her ears pierced. Or to go on a Field Trip to a Museum. For that matter, her Doctor is required to let her parents know about any care she gets...
Except for an abortion. That she can get without parental input. A prescription cough syrup requires parental notification, an abortion not only doesn't require it but doesn't even ALLOW the Doctor to tell the parents.
NOt even a little bit. The technology is mature enough, and pretty much every potential hudro source in North America has already been dammed up and tapped.
About the only way we'll get more hydropower is to completely dam off Niagara Falls, and use ALL that water for power. And I can just see the Greens' reaction to that plan.
more efficient turbines
That's not specific to hydropower, so no reason to research it separately for hydro- as opposed to any other source of energy.
Not quite correct. The safety mechanisms at Chernobyl were disabled to allow testing of a specific disaster scenario.
The Russians wanted to learn how much power could be extracted from a reactor while a meltdown was occurring. They chose Chernobyl as a testbed for the scenario, but had to disbale the safety interlocks to allow the Chernobyl reactor to perform as required for the test (with the interlocks in place, they couldn't make it do something so unsafe as to even come close to a meltdown-in-progress).
Unfortunately, with the safety interlocks disabled, the "disaster scenario" they were testing became a bit too realistic.
Seoul is within artillery range of North Korea. And North Korea has a lot of ertillery.
Talking about doing something is perfectly ok - as long as noone involved does it.
As soon as one party to the conversation commits the illegal act, the other parties to the conversation are, more or less automatically, chargable as Conspirators.
Which carries a sentence similar to the crime they were conspiring about.
These people don't belong in our civilized society.
Funny, that's exactly what the buttheads you're talking about are saying....
Closer to the gorund means more fallout.
It kind of balances out.
A myth. Fallout from a nuclear weapon is based on the size of the boom, and the nearness to the ground.
Not on whether it was a "tactical" boom or a "strategic" boom.
U-238??? I think not. Might want some U-235, or Plutonium, perhaps. MIght even be able to do it with Thorium. But not U-238.
Also, the neutron source is optional. When you add a neutron source, you're allowing for a smaller critical mass of fissionables.
Nor should it be.
That said, feel free to build your own if it's that important to you.
Looks to roughly comparable to Geosynchronous orbit at perigee.
My God, the number of people who don't know a joke when they see one is appalling!
Well, if you're stupid, into your own pocket. If you're smart, it'll be used to offer higher salaries to the guys you hire away from the stupid employers. And as increased salaries to your own employees, to keep them from leaving for a 6% pay raise elsewhere.
1) FDIC and FSLIC were created to prevent banks from failing. This acted to minimize loss of consumer confidence during later economic downturns. Consumer confidence is the biggest positive feedback element in the economy - if they're optimistic, they buy, which pushes the economy up, making them more optimistic. And vice versa when they're pessimistic.
2) Rules against Margin trading. Much of the "money" that existed in 1929 was imaginary, even by modern loose definitions - people bought on margin (made a small downpayment on the stock), and sold when the stock went up (which it did all through the 20's), thus having "paper fortunes" (most of their "wealth" was actually tied up in the margins that they were betting on, but they didn't notice, since stock prices didn't go down) that evaporated into air when the stock markets fell.
This left them no poorer than they had been (they were worth about as much as ever, which is to say not much), but it made them FEEL poorer - one day they owned $100,000 in stock (frequently with nothing invested at all, or only a nominal amount), after the margin calls, they had to sell all that stock to pay off the margins. Leaving them in the hole by whatever cash they had to come up with after selling their stocks, but feeling like they were $100,000 in the hole. Note the comment about consumer confidence above.
Do I consider those to be unwarranted government interference in the market? Not especially. But they do act as a brake on the markets - banks have to pay for the FDIC/FSLIC, and that money isn't going into the interest that your money is earning. And is raising slightly the cost of borrowing money. Margin buying is almost insanely risky, but does allow for buying with little liquidity, which means more of your money can be earning money at any given moment.
Is the downside worth the cost? Yes, I think so. We haven't had a new Great Depression yet, anyway. Will these measures prevent any future depressions? No. It'll happen, sooner or later, probably as a result of some ill-conceived attempt to "save" the taxpayers from their own idiocy.
Which attempts always fail, in the end - make something idiot-proof, and we'll breed a better grade of idiot to get around it.
"You can make things fool-proof, but you can't make them damnfool-proof"
- the populace would be 100% against the government
True enough. and the OP assumed the military would be 100% FOR the government. It won't be. If the Civil War is any guide, a 60-40 split (gov/rebel) is not unreasonable.
- no three-way rebellions
Also true. And the Army will split as many ways as the rebellion does. Plus one more faction for the government.
- there'll be one rifle per head rather than ten rifles per head in one tenth of the cases and zero rifles per head in nine tenths of the cases
Rather unlikely - more than 10% of American households keep firearms. Over 40%, last I heard. 40% of Americans is rather more than 100,000,000 last I checked.
I understated the number of firearms available to the "rebels" to account for the fact that not all Americans own firearms.
Note that the total number of civilian-held firearms is closer to 300,000,000 than 100,000,000.
Note further that the firearms owners are likely to be disproportionally represented among any rebels - after all, they're the ones with the means to rebel.
Not very much, really. Black Tuesday certainly traumatized a lot of people, but it didn't do all that much to drive the economy into Depression (for all that it is considered the keynote event).
One year before the crash, the Stock Markets were about where they were just before the passage of the Smoot Hawley tariffs. During that last year, the Markets increased by 50%. A few months after the crash (and just before the passage of Smoot Hawley), the Markets were heading back up (a fairly normal bounce from a fall, just as the "collapse" was a fairly normal reaction to a runup).
Then comes Smoot-Hawley, and the market turns downward for another two years. And the rest of the world's economy follows suit. Note that the Markets lost more value after the passage of Smoot-Hawley (which was, ostensibly, to protect American industry so as to help the economy get back on its feet) than they did before.
If that insane spike in stock prices that was 1929 is discounted (and it should be - there is no way on God's green earth that the total value of American companies increased by 50% in one year - it was a dot-com boom-bust on an epic scale), then virtually the entire collapse in value of the US stock markets happened AFTER Smoot-Hawley. Which means either that Smoot-Hawley was a cause, or the effect (Great Depression) happened IN SPITE OF government controls.
Given that the New Deal (started in 1933) didn't actually do much to cure the Depression (it took WW2, and the destruction of much of the industry in the rest of the world), there is not much reason to believe that the government interventions in the economy (including Smoot-Hawley) of the '30s were a shining example of the usefulness of governments' control over economies. Rather the reverse.
Now, there is always the question of whether the Markets (and the economy) would have recovered if left to their own devices. Unfortunately, since we don't have a way to check alternate cases, we'll never know. And it's unlikely we'll even be able to make good guesses. Historically, however, government interventions in the economy have seldom produced the stated results, and frequently have produced, shall we say, less than optimal results.
So I think I'll stick with reasonably free markets as an ideal, and settle for the fact that the governments (not just our government, but all of them) are acting with the best of intentions, but are rather stupid....
That is misleading and/or incorrect. The correct statement is: Compare to the War on Terror where American casualties have been measued in the thousands
Umm, no. The casualties he mentioned for the Cold War were also American casualties. It is perfectly reasonable to compare American casualties in two different "wars", just as it is to compare total casualties in two different "wars". Comparing total casualties in one war with American casualties in another war is "misleading and/or incorrect"
Umm, no. Proximate cause for the Great Depression was the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs, and the corresponding tariffs passed in other nations in retaliation. Those tariffs were NOT an example of "unchecked" capitalism, but rather the reverse.
At a slightly greater remove, the Great Depression was a side-effect of the industrialization of the world to support WW1, and the inability of that new industry to convert to peacetime production. Problem there wasn't "unchecked" capitalism either, but governments making war (and spending money they didn't have to do so) "unchecked".
And this assuming that the Army would be 100% behind the government - it wasn't during the Civil War (Remember, Bobby Lee was offered command of the Union Army before he took command of the Confederate Army).
Most likely it would be 100,000,000 rifles + tanks and artillery vs 200,000 rifles + tanks and artillery.
And we don't have to worry about NIH Syndrome kicking in.
YOu state categorically that "they" are hurting sales because someone MIGHT do something?
A is true because B might be true? I'm not sure I follow the logic there.
Then you just switch from the one microwave beam to the other when you want to slow down.
And whtever gives you the idea that "environmentalists" are driven by altruism?
I neither suggested nor implied that Greenpeace and the Sierra Club were the "largest portion of the "anti-nuke movement"". Merely that they, along with many other noted environmentalists were part and parcel of the anti-nuke movement.
I believe the largest group opposing nuclear power would have been the families with children who didn't want nuclear power in their backyards
Interestingly, a simple Google of "anti-nuclear activist" provides about a 50-50 split between environmetalists and NIMBY types. With a large overlap, in that many of the NIMBY types also profess to be environmentalists.
When I was in school at Georgia Tech many years ago, the anti-nuke activists (including Greenpeace) came on campus arguing the NIMBY line ("how would you like it if a nuclear power plant were built in your neighborhood?").
We found their reaction quite amusing when we pointed to the nuclear power plant on campus (in the heart of Atlanta) of which they had been unaware.
No. The First Article was not ratified. The second became the 27th Amendment in 1992. The thrid-twelfth became the the first Ten Amendments (the Bill of Rights).
Hmmm. Quite possible. I had not considered that most teachers don't consider their students to be "people", though, in retrospect, it is obvious that many (if not most) of mine thought so (and I'm talking about the sixties here)