Are voucher systems somehow the silver bullet or does that simply stretch public funds to private hands and further deplete the money to be spent on public education?
No, and no. Vouchers aren't a magic bullet, but neither do they deplete money to be spent on public education. In none of the places where vouchers are being tested are the amounts of the vouchers as much as the per-pupil funding for the public school system. So you remove one student (per voucher) but Or perhaps what does real accountability mean? Or does it just mean more teaching to the tests?
Acountability is the tough one. How do you measure whether someone is teaching well? How can you afford NOT to do so, when a bad teacher can ruin any student (s)he touches, and (s)he touches dozens-hundreds per year.
How can you allow a Teacher's Union to exist? Unions do not exist to guarantee high-quality work, they exist to guarantee as many jobs as possible for Union members (the more cynical, of which I am one, think unions exist to guarantee as many jobs as possible for union leaders and their relatives). While wanting more teachers may not be a bad thing, it is not necessarily a good thing either.
If it is necessary to "teach the test", then there is already something wrong with the system. A good general education should be able to pass "the test" with no difficulties, even without "teaching to the test". Unless the "test" covers things that no sane teacher would teach. If so, the "test" has a fundamental problem.
Somewhere along here, someone needs to develop a curiculum that is suitable for teaching people to think. Which should include reading/writing, mathematics, and logic. After that foundation is established, you add in history (those who do not learn it are condemned to repeat it), rhetoric, semantics, and the fundamentals of science. And after that, you can add...wait, after that, you don't NEED to add anything, because the little monkeys already know enough to learn whatever else they need without any help from you.
Is it the teachers fault or does society blame the teachers too much?
Yes, and yes. Their job is to teach kids whatever. If the kids don't learn it, they have fundamentally failed.
But...it's a hell of a lot of responsibility, and these days very little authority to go along with it. And when authority/responsibility aren't balanced, bad things happen.
Interestingly, there is some evidence that the teaching professions and the nursing professions (both of which are in dire straits in the US today) were both adversely affected by the Feminist Movement. As more fields became open to women, the more capable women moved away from the traditional fields, leaving the traditional fields the poorer for it.
Does this imply we should undo the results of two generations of Feminism? No. Pointless to try, and a bad idea even if it were possible.
Instead, we should understand that some of our fundamental institutions are undergoing an upheaval. Which will continue for quite some time. In a generation or two, things will sort themselves out. Until then, we will all suffer through the change, just like we suffered through the Industrial Revolution, which was the same sort of fundamental change....
No, the non-extradition treaty I was talking about is specifically about war criminals. And the US have never, nor will they ever, extradite US citizens to other countries. Other citizens, sure, but not US citizens. I believe it's a constitutional right over there.
True enough. We have to strip their US citizenship before we extradite them. Which we have done, from time to time.
The Constitution keeps getting in the way when foreigners want us to do things, doesn't it? It's why we won't sign on to the International War Crimes Tribunal. It would require a Constitutional Amendment to make it legal, and there is no way in Hell that we'll ever pass such an Amendment. It's also why we do these little non-extradition treaties you dislike so.
Nobody is saying the US has to protect every little backwater -- that's the job of the UN and all members, including US, should strengthen the UN's ability to do just that.
I'll bite. How?
If, for example, a country like the Sudan is violating the human rights of its citizens/subjects/whatever, what should the USA do to "help the UN"? Ask for sanctions against the Sudan? We did, as I recall. The UN declined to pass such a resolution. Invade the Sudan? Isn't that what we're taking flak for now? Ignore the problem until it (and the non-Arab Sudanese) goes away? That seems to be what the UN is doing now.
Your analogy is bad. Here's a better one:
A thug threatens to beat you up. I walk by, see it, and pull out a.45. The thug, seeing the.45, decides he has better things to do than beat you up. Then I say "hey, man, don't report me to the police for having an unlicensed gun!"
You don't HAVE to do what I ask, but you'd be pretty damn ungrateful if you turned me in after I saved your butt.
Note further that if the EU were busy helping the world as they like to think that they do, the situation you describe would never happen. Unless, of course, the EU were to do the same sort of thing. Which I expect they would.
Seems to me that Alaska, Idaho, Wyoming, Vermont, New Hampshire, Delaware, DC, North Dakota, Maine (as examples) get way more out of the Electoral College than the Old South does. In general, the Old South has few, if any, low population states (Arkansas and West Virginia are the smallest, I think, and neither is in the bottom 10).
In fact, the Electoral College was part of the compromise introduced to convince small states to retify the Constitution, to avoid being dominated by Virginia.
If you think Rich Lowry, George Will, or Jonah Goldberg are more "intelligent" than Andrew Sullivan or TNR, then you're still not getting it. You're still a parrot.
Of course Geore Will is more intelligent than the rest of those knotheads! He's the only syndicated editorialist that writes about BASEBALL!
As for dissolving NATO, it's no big secret that France and Germany are trying to create a real european force able to oppose the US. Unfortunately, the UK is more american than european, Spain had a really pro-US government (but that changed 5 months ago) and Italy is still kind of pro-US (I'm talking about governments, not population), so the project is going real slow. Maybe in 10 or 15 years.
So, why haven't France and Germany just withdrawn from NATO, increased military spending to reasonable levels, and gotten on with it? Are they trying to make the rest of Europe pay for it?
It'll be interesting to see how well the European economy holds up under military spending levels comparable to the USA.
There is also rumors about some talks between France, Germany and Russia to create a kind of replacement for the UN.
Yay! Go for it!! Build a new UN!!! Itmight surprise you to know that most Americans could care less about the UN. Won't bother most of us if it goes under just like the League of Nations (you remember that one? the last big international body before the UN? The one that let Italy invade Ethiopia, and Japan invade China without doing more than deploring it in public), nor will it bother most of us if you form ANOTHER League of Nations (you remember that one? the one that the USA didn't join).
The US still have a good 10 to 15 years as the world leader. After that ? Who knows what will happen...
I would guesstimate at least 20, more likely 50. It'll take a fleet like the Brits had early last century for anyone to rival us, really. And building up an effective Navy is not a trivial or quick task. Unfortunately, noone but the USA has any real institutional memory of that sort of thing these days. The British Fleet has been a shadow of its former majesty since shortly after WW2. The Soviet Union had a go at Fleet-building, and didn't succeed in contesting control of the Atlantic, much less the Pacific, and they worked at it for 40 years.
That said, go for it! I've got no real emotional capital invested in the idea of the USA as "world leader", so it won't bother me at all to let Europe (the guys who were "world leaders" up to WW1) take the job back over. We were pretty happy letting Europe worry about Europe and Asia and Africa without bothering us, I expect we will be again.
No, I'm saying it's hypocritical to demand from other countries to do what you yourself don't want to do (extradite war criminals).
This isn't actually bout "war criminals", you know? It's about ordinary, common variety criminals.
That said, the USA is quite willing to extradite war criminals. It has done so on occasion. Course, we don't automagically take YOUR word that someone is a war criminal. You have to prove it to the judge, just like everyone else has to.
Sort of like the way European countries refuse to extradite murderers to the USA if they could face the death penalty over here.
Yes, I think it's impossible to rebuild a war-torn country without WMF/World Bank grants.
But, but, there was no WMF/World Bank after WW2 to rebuild war-torn economies! How did Europe recover?
Never mind. We paid for that, didn't we? Marshall Plan, and all that....
Yes, I think it's impossible to start a decent economy if the majority of your spending has to go to the military because of the danger from your neighbours (joining NATO helps this tremendously).
So, the USA has to protect every little backwater (either by providing the coin to fund the UN, the troops to do the UN mandates, or doing it directly), but we're evil if we do so?
Tell you what, the EU can create its own version of the IMF, fund it itself, and distribute the money any way it wants to, and noone on this side of the Atlantic will care a whit.
Fact is, if the EU were to guarantee the integrity of all Eurasian countries (and Africa, if you are feeling generous), and pay the costs themselves, I am sure that the USA would be delighted at the prospect of reducing our own military expenditures to a reasonable level for protecting ourselves.
What's that? You don't want the USA to pull out of Bosnia? Or pull out of NATO? Whyever not, if the EU can handle European matters without us?
Yep! True enough. And if the Soviet Union had had the veto, they would have broken zero resolutions. Wait, they have a veto.
Well, if China had had the veto, THEY would've broken zero resolutions. Umm, my bad. They do have the veto.
Well, how about a small country, then? The UK or France? Surely they'd never abuse veto power, if they even had it? Hmm, they have it, too, eh?
Well, tell you what. If the rest of the Permanent Members of the Security Council are willing to vote to amend the UN Charter appropriately, I'll be willing to lobby my Senators to surrender our veto as well.
Can't guarantee we'd stay in the UN, mind you, but that's the subject for another day.
So, what you are saying is that the USA doesn't help countries that don't help them? Terrible the way the USA abuses its sovereignty by advancing its own interests, isn't it?
So, in order to get a chance at having a normal life, a whole country has to become a US lapdog.
Are you suggesting that it is impossible to have a "normal life" without doing what we say? How odd!
US have a lot of influence in the UN, WTO, WMF, and (especially) NATO.
Hmm, Has the EU ever considered dissolving NATO, since it has outlived its (nominal) purpose? I can't say that I would disagree with the idea of the Europeans taking care of themselves, if that's what they want.
If I discuss through e-mail religion, politics, etc... with a citizen of another country which is deemed critical or violates some law in China for example, could the fact that my mail server connects to a mail server located in China become equivalent to me actually going to China to speak against the government?
Well, if your government has an extradition Treaty with China (unlikely), and if whatever you are discussing is illegal in your own country (unlikely, in the examples you gave, if you live in a civilized country), and if your court system is willing to extradite you to China, then yes.
Note that a country doesn't have to extradite anyone they don't want to extradite. They don't have to give a reason, or even have a reason. They can just say "no".
Australia said "no", then changed their minds and said "yes". If you don't like the decision, take it up with the Australian government, not the US government.
But, it was easy to pay it off in a short time when both of us were working full time, so we didn't really miss a nearly $700 a month payment while we were paying it of in 7 years instead of 30, and we saved about 60,000 USD in interest doing it. Now all we owe are utilities and taxes.
Its a nice feeling, and those we can handle, or at least till oil hits $100 a barrel.>/I>
I agree. House has been paid off for two years now. Cars for longer than that. So nice not to have to write those checks to the bank anymore.
Re:You can hack anything.
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Unless the reactor is specifically designed to produce lots of Pu, you won't get enough to make a bomb out of a reactor this small.
I am curious why you believe that you should pay less taxes just because you actively chose to increase the number of people you have to support on your salary.
Consider: if I were to hire my wife to keep house, and pay her 40% of my salary, and hire my daughter as her assistant, at 20% of my salary, and deduct those salaries from my income (which I can do if I incorporate, and cause my salary to be "corporate income"), the three of us would be paying considerably less taxes than I do now. So I'm paying MORE than I would have to, if I chose to treat my wife as a servant. I'm paying extra taxes for treating the mother of my child with some respect;-)
Well, they come out of every one of my paychecks, so I have to assume that "Pay as You Go" has some specific meaning I don't know since I have no idea what could be said to the contrary.
Social Security and, to a lesser extent, Medicare were sold to the American public as an investment into retirement. The theory was that you put money into the system, that money comes back to you later on when you get old enough to take money out of the system.
This was done, mostly, because back then, taking handouts from the government was considered embarrassing. So it was dressed up as an annuity that you invested in.
It is possible that it was so treated early on, but very quickly, the Social Security taxes were just tossed into the General Fund, and IOU's written to the Social Security Administration.
This, by the way, is why the "budget surpluses" of the Clinton years were illusory - the government was balancing the budget by ignoring future liabilities (which is a crime if you are a business and have a pension plan), and lending money to itself. Taking a few dollars from the left pocket, putting them in the right pocket, and calling it extra income.
Just curious, assuming you believe that taxes are necessary at some level (I do), what kind do you approve of?
Income taxes are pretty much the only acceptable taxes, though it is arguable that sales taxes (which tax the income in a different way) are just as usable. Taxes on capital are bad, as it is possible to be "land-poor" (own a lot of things, not have a lot of money), and thus find yourself really strained to pay property taxes of any sort.
Actually, other than arguing rates, I have no real problem with our current income tax system. You pay, essentially, whatever the going rate is on your income over the poverty level. So it pretty much guarantees that taxes won't be sufficient to drive people into poverty (you stop paying taxes at that point). Note that the taxes imposed by the States change that whole picture, though most are patterned after the Federal tax structure to a certain extent.
As an aside, I was pretty surprised how much that varies from state to state.
Yah, taxes vary wildly from state to state. I've lived in ten that I can think of off the top of my head, and all of them different from the next. Some states believe in investing more in infrastructure, assuming they will get a return in the long run. I can't argue with that idea, I wish more states would do it. Some states believe that if the state gets involved in more than it absolutely has to, it will just get intrusive, annoying, and generally ruin more than they improve. Can't argue with that either. A middle ground is ideal, but how to get the government bureaucrats to stop building their little empires?
Re:You can hack anything.
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Yes.
A reactor this size will have on the order of 100Kg of U235, mixed in with a considerable amount of U238 (the amount of U238 varies depending on design details), encases in zirconium pellets, or something similar.
Extracting that U235, and making a weapon from it, are not trivial exercises. It's not impossible, by any means, but the equipment required to extract the U235 from the U238 would work just as well with Uranium ore as with what's inside a reactor, so why bother tearing your reactor down?
You can't even make a decent dirty bomb, without grinding the reactor up into dust. Which is likely to be lethal to a whole bunch of people doing the work....
Re:I've got mine on pre-order.
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This is ignorable, really. The cost of manufacture should cover nicely the energy used to make it, and thus you pay the energy cost to make when you pay for the device.
Cost to dispose of the item is not so easily dealt with. It can be argued that the fee you pay for garbage pickup/recycling/whatever covers the disposal cost. But that probably doesn't cover all possibilities inherent in the issue.
They're not taxing "profit" (income minus expenses), or there would be a real shortage of people left to tax.
Check sometime. They are taxing approximately the difference between your income and the poverty line for your family. Actually, the taxation point is somewhat less than the poverty line (~$2600 below the poverty line), but not exceptionally below it.
They also provide more services to you and your kid at the same time.
Which "more services" are these? I'm curious.
So $3,050 is what you would spend per person if you "weren't extravagent"? Interesting, but I'm not sure that's exactly how they came up with that number.
Check the definition of "poverty" sometime. It is based on family size. The Poverty limit increases by $3140 per person, interestingly enough. Within 3% of the standard deduction for a child.
Note that the standard deduction for adults is rather less than the Poverty line, so it could be argued that the $3050 for children is considerably more generous than that for adults.
But, the taxes in the USA are designed to cost you no taxes if you live just below the poverty line, with increasing taxation as you exceed the poverty threshold by larger amounts.
I am curious as to how I am increasing my cost to the Federal Government by having a child or six. Really I am. No doubt the State has to provide me more services (schools, for example, which I pay separate taxes for), but I can't think of any Federal activity that is incrementally affected by my child. And my kid goes to a private school, so that one doesn't really happen either.
You're not subisidzing the activity. Name a single thing you're paying for with your Federal Income Tax that is in any way affected by the presence of absence of my child. National Defense? No, we didn't make the Army bigger because I had a kid. Or even because millions of people had kids. NASA? Again, no. FDA? Not that I'm aware of. FTC? Vaguely possible, though the extra wear and tear I put on the highway because I have three people in the car as compared to just one is trivial, and probably negative, since I could have let the other two use separate cars.
Try coming up with some. I'm really curious. Also curious why you believe that three people living on 60K/year should pay as much taxes as two people living on same. Or six people, for that matter.
Now, you are subsidizing a lot of people with your Federal taxes. Specifically with your Medicare and Social Security taxes. Which are Pay as You Go, no matter what you have heard to the contrary. The government is taking those taxes and paying current users of the system. When you retire, the workers of that time will be paying for your benefits. A Ponsy Scheme, in other words.
And your Property Taxes would be subsidizing my kid, if you lived where I do. Of course, so would mine. And I disapprove of property taxes in general.
Okay. I had remembered the Lorenz-FitzGerald contraction, but not that time was included.
It's a shame that that wasn't done after fluid dynamics got going good, or someone might have hypothesized that a boundary layer event was causing the light to have the same apparent speed in any direction near the Earth's surface.;-)
I have no personal stake in this. It is an interesting bit of physics if it turns out to be true, but it is a very long way from a workable power source. And I'm not in the energy business anyway. I've never heard that P&F spent a lot of time trying to keep things secret. Nor that they tried to prevent others from duplicating their work.
You seem to be assuming that they were scammers, who, upon hearing that people insisted on proof of their claims, quietly gave out bogus information so that noone COULD prove their claim, then gave up on the claim when people failed to duplicate it. Which they had ensured themselves by withholding information. A bizarre picture of reality, to say the least. Frankly, if *I* were trying to scam someone this way, I'd not make a Press COnference, I'd quietly approach some reasonably rich person who wanted to be even richer, make a few carefully doctored "demonstrations", and ask for a few hundred thousand a year to develop the idea. I expect that with a little care in choosing the sucker, and not too much greed, I could get 5-10 years of comfortable living out of someone that way. Then "discover" what had really been happening, tell the sucker "Sorry, turns out that there was something else going on, and we have nothing".
Then go look for another sucker.
Going public is not the action of a conman. The conman wants to keep a low profile, because there's more chance of someone crying "Bullshit!" if there are more people aware of what is happening.
I missed the part where they asked for (and got) lots of money from someone to research cold fusion.
I think I also missed the part where they were reluctant to reveal exact details. As I recall, they wanted it confirmed, and were rather put out when noone else could duplicate their results.
There are no "breakthrough" discoveries.
Not sure I agree with this. Sure, things build on other things. But relativity made some profound changes in our view of the universe, that had not been there before (specifically, that Time progressed at varying rates within the cosmos). I'm not entirely sure, but can't think of any conception of the possibility that time was other than an invariant before Einstein published Special Relativity.
Well, I should qualify that. The Time Machine, by HG Wells came along seven years earlier, I believe.
I do not believe that Europe set its fuel costs to be high to "effect social change". They did it because they saw it as a relatively harmless way of raising more money.
When I was a lad in Germany, Germans paid outrageous gas prices. Far more than we did, and more (in real dollars) than we do now. This was before there were environmental issues being raised, and before German roads became crowded.
Today, in Germany, the roads are crowded far more than they were, gas prices are higher than ever, and, if they were trying to effect social change, it is not clear just what change they wanted to effect. If it was to discourage automobile usage, it was an abject failure.
Note, in a nearby article, that the UK had to institute fines to get people to stop driving in the center of London, even with extremely high gasoline prices to discourage people from driving at all. Obviously, high fuel prices didn't work for them either.
We are dependent on foreign oil because it is cheaper to buy it there than to use our own. When oil prices start rising, they only rise until the price is high enough that it is more profitable to open a well in the Gulf and pump from it. Note that raising gasoline taxes does not affect this really - gasoline tax hikes affect all gasoline, foreign and domestic.
Reducing our dependence on foreign oil will only happen when it is more expensive to bring oil from Saudi Arabia than from the Gulf of Mexico. Raising taxes on oil will reduce demand somewhat (and damage the economy to a greater or lesser extent), but it will not cause us to eliminate oil imports - it will cause us to shut off the most expensive sources of oil. Not sure just where that is right now, but it is as likely as not in Texas as in Saudi Arabia.
Slashdot Mirror
half had Gore winning, half Bush.
In general, the "looser" the definition of "vote" allowed, the more likely Gore was to win.
No, and no. Vouchers aren't a magic bullet, but neither do they deplete money to be spent on public education. In none of the places where vouchers are being tested are the amounts of the vouchers as much as the per-pupil funding for the public school system. So you remove one student (per voucher) but Or perhaps what does real accountability mean? Or does it just mean more teaching to the tests?
Acountability is the tough one. How do you measure whether someone is teaching well? How can you afford NOT to do so, when a bad teacher can ruin any student (s)he touches, and (s)he touches dozens-hundreds per year.
How can you allow a Teacher's Union to exist? Unions do not exist to guarantee high-quality work, they exist to guarantee as many jobs as possible for Union members (the more cynical, of which I am one, think unions exist to guarantee as many jobs as possible for union leaders and their relatives). While wanting more teachers may not be a bad thing, it is not necessarily a good thing either.
If it is necessary to "teach the test", then there is already something wrong with the system. A good general education should be able to pass "the test" with no difficulties, even without "teaching to the test". Unless the "test" covers things that no sane teacher would teach. If so, the "test" has a fundamental problem.
Somewhere along here, someone needs to develop a curiculum that is suitable for teaching people to think. Which should include reading/writing, mathematics, and logic. After that foundation is established, you add in history (those who do not learn it are condemned to repeat it), rhetoric, semantics, and the fundamentals of science. And after that, you can add...wait, after that, you don't NEED to add anything, because the little monkeys already know enough to learn whatever else they need without any help from you.
Is it the teachers fault or does society blame the teachers too much?
Yes, and yes. Their job is to teach kids whatever. If the kids don't learn it, they have fundamentally failed.
But...it's a hell of a lot of responsibility, and these days very little authority to go along with it. And when authority/responsibility aren't balanced, bad things happen.
Interestingly, there is some evidence that the teaching professions and the nursing professions (both of which are in dire straits in the US today) were both adversely affected by the Feminist Movement. As more fields became open to women, the more capable women moved away from the traditional fields, leaving the traditional fields the poorer for it.
Does this imply we should undo the results of two generations of Feminism? No. Pointless to try, and a bad idea even if it were possible.
Instead, we should understand that some of our fundamental institutions are undergoing an upheaval. Which will continue for quite some time. In a generation or two, things will sort themselves out. Until then, we will all suffer through the change, just like we suffered through the Industrial Revolution, which was the same sort of fundamental change....
All of those examples seem to be primarily liability issues. So your problems may be the lawyers, not the schools. Which I can well believe.
True enough. We have to strip their US citizenship before we extradite them. Which we have done, from time to time.
The Constitution keeps getting in the way when foreigners want us to do things, doesn't it? It's why we won't sign on to the International War Crimes Tribunal. It would require a Constitutional Amendment to make it legal, and there is no way in Hell that we'll ever pass such an Amendment. It's also why we do these little non-extradition treaties you dislike so.
Nobody is saying the US has to protect every little backwater -- that's the job of the UN and all members, including US, should strengthen the UN's ability to do just that.
I'll bite. How?
If, for example, a country like the Sudan is violating the human rights of its citizens/subjects/whatever, what should the USA do to "help the UN"? Ask for sanctions against the Sudan? We did, as I recall. The UN declined to pass such a resolution. Invade the Sudan? Isn't that what we're taking flak for now? Ignore the problem until it (and the non-Arab Sudanese) goes away? That seems to be what the UN is doing now.
Your analogy is bad. Here's a better one:
A thug threatens to beat you up. I walk by, see it, and pull out a .45. The thug, seeing the .45, decides he has better things to do than beat you up. Then I say "hey, man, don't report me to the police for having an unlicensed gun!"
You don't HAVE to do what I ask, but you'd be pretty damn ungrateful if you turned me in after I saved your butt.
Note further that if the EU were busy helping the world as they like to think that they do, the situation you describe would never happen. Unless, of course, the EU were to do the same sort of thing. Which I expect they would.
In fact, the Electoral College was part of the compromise introduced to convince small states to retify the Constitution, to avoid being dominated by Virginia.
Of course Geore Will is more intelligent than the rest of those knotheads! He's the only syndicated editorialist that writes about BASEBALL!
So, why haven't France and Germany just withdrawn from NATO, increased military spending to reasonable levels, and gotten on with it? Are they trying to make the rest of Europe pay for it?
It'll be interesting to see how well the European economy holds up under military spending levels comparable to the USA.
There is also rumors about some talks between France, Germany and Russia to create a kind of replacement for the UN.
Yay! Go for it!! Build a new UN!!! Itmight surprise you to know that most Americans could care less about the UN. Won't bother most of us if it goes under just like the League of Nations (you remember that one? the last big international body before the UN? The one that let Italy invade Ethiopia, and Japan invade China without doing more than deploring it in public), nor will it bother most of us if you form ANOTHER League of Nations (you remember that one? the one that the USA didn't join).
The US still have a good 10 to 15 years as the world leader. After that ? Who knows what will happen...
I would guesstimate at least 20, more likely 50. It'll take a fleet like the Brits had early last century for anyone to rival us, really. And building up an effective Navy is not a trivial or quick task. Unfortunately, noone but the USA has any real institutional memory of that sort of thing these days. The British Fleet has been a shadow of its former majesty since shortly after WW2. The Soviet Union had a go at Fleet-building, and didn't succeed in contesting control of the Atlantic, much less the Pacific, and they worked at it for 40 years.
That said, go for it! I've got no real emotional capital invested in the idea of the USA as "world leader", so it won't bother me at all to let Europe (the guys who were "world leaders" up to WW1) take the job back over. We were pretty happy letting Europe worry about Europe and Asia and Africa without bothering us, I expect we will be again.
This isn't actually bout "war criminals", you know? It's about ordinary, common variety criminals.
That said, the USA is quite willing to extradite war criminals. It has done so on occasion. Course, we don't automagically take YOUR word that someone is a war criminal. You have to prove it to the judge, just like everyone else has to.
Sort of like the way European countries refuse to extradite murderers to the USA if they could face the death penalty over here.
Yes, I think it's impossible to rebuild a war-torn country without WMF/World Bank grants.
But, but, there was no WMF/World Bank after WW2 to rebuild war-torn economies! How did Europe recover?
Never mind. We paid for that, didn't we? Marshall Plan, and all that....
Yes, I think it's impossible to start a decent economy if the majority of your spending has to go to the military because of the danger from your neighbours (joining NATO helps this tremendously).
So, the USA has to protect every little backwater (either by providing the coin to fund the UN, the troops to do the UN mandates, or doing it directly), but we're evil if we do so?
Tell you what, the EU can create its own version of the IMF, fund it itself, and distribute the money any way it wants to, and noone on this side of the Atlantic will care a whit.
Fact is, if the EU were to guarantee the integrity of all Eurasian countries (and Africa, if you are feeling generous), and pay the costs themselves, I am sure that the USA would be delighted at the prospect of reducing our own military expenditures to a reasonable level for protecting ourselves.
What's that? You don't want the USA to pull out of Bosnia? Or pull out of NATO? Whyever not, if the EU can handle European matters without us?
Well, if China had had the veto, THEY would've broken zero resolutions. Umm, my bad. They do have the veto.
Well, how about a small country, then? The UK or France? Surely they'd never abuse veto power, if they even had it? Hmm, they have it, too, eh?
Well, tell you what. If the rest of the Permanent Members of the Security Council are willing to vote to amend the UN Charter appropriately, I'll be willing to lobby my Senators to surrender our veto as well.
Can't guarantee we'd stay in the UN, mind you, but that's the subject for another day.
So, in order to get a chance at having a normal life, a whole country has to become a US lapdog.
Are you suggesting that it is impossible to have a "normal life" without doing what we say? How odd!
US have a lot of influence in the UN, WTO, WMF, and (especially) NATO.
Hmm, Has the EU ever considered dissolving NATO, since it has outlived its (nominal) purpose? I can't say that I would disagree with the idea of the Europeans taking care of themselves, if that's what they want.
Well, if your government has an extradition Treaty with China (unlikely), and if whatever you are discussing is illegal in your own country (unlikely, in the examples you gave, if you live in a civilized country), and if your court system is willing to extradite you to China, then yes.
Note that a country doesn't have to extradite anyone they don't want to extradite. They don't have to give a reason, or even have a reason. They can just say "no".
Australia said "no", then changed their minds and said "yes". If you don't like the decision, take it up with the Australian government, not the US government.
How are they being coerced? Just curious.
If Americans leave Bosnia, there will likely be another genocide just like during the 92-95 war.
Nonsense! The UN will prevent that, just like it is preventing genocide from occuring in the Sudan!.
Oh, wait....
Umm, we're allowed to veto them if we want. It's part of the UN Charter. Just like the UK can, or France, or Russia, or China.
And, just out of curiousity, why are we not allowed to vote our interests in the UN, just like every other country in the world can (and does)?
I agree. House has been paid off for two years now. Cars for longer than that. So nice not to have to write those checks to the bank anymore.
Unless the reactor is specifically designed to produce lots of Pu, you won't get enough to make a bomb out of a reactor this small.
Not really. If you had to take care of the kids all day, you'd start to think that "enforcer" is just part of the job description.
Consider: if I were to hire my wife to keep house, and pay her 40% of my salary, and hire my daughter as her assistant, at 20% of my salary, and deduct those salaries from my income (which I can do if I incorporate, and cause my salary to be "corporate income"), the three of us would be paying considerably less taxes than I do now. So I'm paying MORE than I would have to, if I chose to treat my wife as a servant. I'm paying extra taxes for treating the mother of my child with some respect ;-)
Well, they come out of every one of my paychecks, so I have to assume that "Pay as You Go" has some specific meaning I don't know since I have no idea what could be said to the contrary.
Social Security and, to a lesser extent, Medicare were sold to the American public as an investment into retirement. The theory was that you put money into the system, that money comes back to you later on when you get old enough to take money out of the system.
This was done, mostly, because back then, taking handouts from the government was considered embarrassing. So it was dressed up as an annuity that you invested in.
It is possible that it was so treated early on, but very quickly, the Social Security taxes were just tossed into the General Fund, and IOU's written to the Social Security Administration.
This, by the way, is why the "budget surpluses" of the Clinton years were illusory - the government was balancing the budget by ignoring future liabilities (which is a crime if you are a business and have a pension plan), and lending money to itself. Taking a few dollars from the left pocket, putting them in the right pocket, and calling it extra income.
Just curious, assuming you believe that taxes are necessary at some level (I do), what kind do you approve of?
Income taxes are pretty much the only acceptable taxes, though it is arguable that sales taxes (which tax the income in a different way) are just as usable. Taxes on capital are bad, as it is possible to be "land-poor" (own a lot of things, not have a lot of money), and thus find yourself really strained to pay property taxes of any sort.
Actually, other than arguing rates, I have no real problem with our current income tax system. You pay, essentially, whatever the going rate is on your income over the poverty level. So it pretty much guarantees that taxes won't be sufficient to drive people into poverty (you stop paying taxes at that point). Note that the taxes imposed by the States change that whole picture, though most are patterned after the Federal tax structure to a certain extent.
As an aside, I was pretty surprised how much that varies from state to state.
Yah, taxes vary wildly from state to state. I've lived in ten that I can think of off the top of my head, and all of them different from the next. Some states believe in investing more in infrastructure, assuming they will get a return in the long run. I can't argue with that idea, I wish more states would do it. Some states believe that if the state gets involved in more than it absolutely has to, it will just get intrusive, annoying, and generally ruin more than they improve. Can't argue with that either. A middle ground is ideal, but how to get the government bureaucrats to stop building their little empires?
A reactor this size will have on the order of 100Kg of U235, mixed in with a considerable amount of U238 (the amount of U238 varies depending on design details), encases in zirconium pellets, or something similar.
Extracting that U235, and making a weapon from it, are not trivial exercises. It's not impossible, by any means, but the equipment required to extract the U235 from the U238 would work just as well with Uranium ore as with what's inside a reactor, so why bother tearing your reactor down?
You can't even make a decent dirty bomb, without grinding the reactor up into dust. Which is likely to be lethal to a whole bunch of people doing the work....
Cost to dispose of the item is not so easily dealt with. It can be argued that the fee you pay for garbage pickup/recycling/whatever covers the disposal cost. But that probably doesn't cover all possibilities inherent in the issue.
Check sometime. They are taxing approximately the difference between your income and the poverty line for your family. Actually, the taxation point is somewhat less than the poverty line (~$2600 below the poverty line), but not exceptionally below it.
They also provide more services to you and your kid at the same time.
Which "more services" are these? I'm curious. So $3,050 is what you would spend per person if you "weren't extravagent"? Interesting, but I'm not sure that's exactly how they came up with that number.
Check the definition of "poverty" sometime. It is based on family size. The Poverty limit increases by $3140 per person, interestingly enough. Within 3% of the standard deduction for a child.
Note that the standard deduction for adults is rather less than the Poverty line, so it could be argued that the $3050 for children is considerably more generous than that for adults.
But, the taxes in the USA are designed to cost you no taxes if you live just below the poverty line, with increasing taxation as you exceed the poverty threshold by larger amounts.
You're not subisidzing the activity. Name a single thing you're paying for with your Federal Income Tax that is in any way affected by the presence of absence of my child. National Defense? No, we didn't make the Army bigger because I had a kid. Or even because millions of people had kids. NASA? Again, no. FDA? Not that I'm aware of. FTC? Vaguely possible, though the extra wear and tear I put on the highway because I have three people in the car as compared to just one is trivial, and probably negative, since I could have let the other two use separate cars.
Try coming up with some. I'm really curious. Also curious why you believe that three people living on 60K/year should pay as much taxes as two people living on same. Or six people, for that matter.
Now, you are subsidizing a lot of people with your Federal taxes. Specifically with your Medicare and Social Security taxes. Which are Pay as You Go, no matter what you have heard to the contrary. The government is taking those taxes and paying current users of the system. When you retire, the workers of that time will be paying for your benefits. A Ponsy Scheme, in other words.
And your Property Taxes would be subsidizing my kid, if you lived where I do. Of course, so would mine. And I disapprove of property taxes in general.
It's a shame that that wasn't done after fluid dynamics got going good, or someone might have hypothesized that a boundary layer event was causing the light to have the same apparent speed in any direction near the Earth's surface. ;-)
I have no personal stake in this. It is an interesting bit of physics if it turns out to be true, but it is a very long way from a workable power source. And I'm not in the energy business anyway. I've never heard that P&F spent a lot of time trying to keep things secret. Nor that they tried to prevent others from duplicating their work.
You seem to be assuming that they were scammers, who, upon hearing that people insisted on proof of their claims, quietly gave out bogus information so that noone COULD prove their claim, then gave up on the claim when people failed to duplicate it. Which they had ensured themselves by withholding information. A bizarre picture of reality, to say the least. Frankly, if *I* were trying to scam someone this way, I'd not make a Press COnference, I'd quietly approach some reasonably rich person who wanted to be even richer, make a few carefully doctored "demonstrations", and ask for a few hundred thousand a year to develop the idea. I expect that with a little care in choosing the sucker, and not too much greed, I could get 5-10 years of comfortable living out of someone that way. Then "discover" what had really been happening, tell the sucker "Sorry, turns out that there was something else going on, and we have nothing".
Then go look for another sucker.
Going public is not the action of a conman. The conman wants to keep a low profile, because there's more chance of someone crying "Bullshit!" if there are more people aware of what is happening.
I think I also missed the part where they were reluctant to reveal exact details. As I recall, they wanted it confirmed, and were rather put out when noone else could duplicate their results.
There are no "breakthrough" discoveries.
Not sure I agree with this. Sure, things build on other things. But relativity made some profound changes in our view of the universe, that had not been there before (specifically, that Time progressed at varying rates within the cosmos). I'm not entirely sure, but can't think of any conception of the possibility that time was other than an invariant before Einstein published Special Relativity.
Well, I should qualify that. The Time Machine, by HG Wells came along seven years earlier, I believe.
When I was a lad in Germany, Germans paid outrageous gas prices. Far more than we did, and more (in real dollars) than we do now. This was before there were environmental issues being raised, and before German roads became crowded.
Today, in Germany, the roads are crowded far more than they were, gas prices are higher than ever, and, if they were trying to effect social change, it is not clear just what change they wanted to effect. If it was to discourage automobile usage, it was an abject failure.
Note, in a nearby article, that the UK had to institute fines to get people to stop driving in the center of London, even with extremely high gasoline prices to discourage people from driving at all. Obviously, high fuel prices didn't work for them either.
We are dependent on foreign oil because it is cheaper to buy it there than to use our own. When oil prices start rising, they only rise until the price is high enough that it is more profitable to open a well in the Gulf and pump from it. Note that raising gasoline taxes does not affect this really - gasoline tax hikes affect all gasoline, foreign and domestic.
Reducing our dependence on foreign oil will only happen when it is more expensive to bring oil from Saudi Arabia than from the Gulf of Mexico. Raising taxes on oil will reduce demand somewhat (and damage the economy to a greater or lesser extent), but it will not cause us to eliminate oil imports - it will cause us to shut off the most expensive sources of oil. Not sure just where that is right now, but it is as likely as not in Texas as in Saudi Arabia.