I agree, I don't know that we really need to have enough nukes to take out every single strategic target in Russia at once, for example... and we have scaled back our arsenals specifically. But we do need to keep up to date enough on research and training that we don't let anyone leap frog us too much, and that requires keeping at least something of a real arsenal around.
Despite what the current administration wants us to believe, current terrorism is about as much of a threat to our security as drug gangs are - they cause a mess of trouble, make life suck for a minority of people, and in general cost us a lot in law enforcement. But they aren't threatening to change our economy, political system, or national borders.
ie, they are not a real national threat to the continuance of most of the US as a decent place to live.
We keep nukes around because a single regional or global hegemony is an inherently unstable state, that will not continue for even the rest of my parent's lifetime, let alone mine. When we fall or another power rises, given the fact that any opponent large enough to pose a real threat to us will have nukes, and will likely have the same MAD level concerns about using them, we'll be quite happy to have kept our place as a nuclear power.
I'm really careful not to tailgate or brake too quickly in my sporty car - I know that *I* can stop on a dime, but I really don't expect the guy behind me to be able to, and even if he's at fault the accident is still going to hurt.
I don't really get excessive tailgating unless you're about to pass someone. Your fastest time is still limited by the person in front of you, so unless you're going to pass you're only saving yourself one or two seconds of trip time. It's a little different when trying to aggressively hold a spot in really heavy traffic, but even then you aren't normally going fast enough to be considered tailgating anymore.
You're forgetting that anything done to someone while in prison (rape, death, torture, humiliation) by other inmates is completely fair, as convicted criminals aren't really people any more. Especially if they did some really evil, like downloading fake pictures of naked kiddies or smoking marijuana.
Of course, the one (admittedly shining) example of a relatively unbiased government sponsored new program makes up for all the horrendously biased and political government sponsored news programs that have been used by repressive governments since the dawn of time to repress their people.
Out of curiosity, what other news networks do you have in Britain? Do you get local copies of the American crap networks or are the independent British networks competing successfully with BBC?
As an OpenGL developer, I can say that I will never touch an ATI product when I have a choice.
Their driver support lags behind nVidia by years, and when they "support" a feature, it will often be in software with no warning that it is - so instead of failing with a useful error message, all you know is that *something* you did causes your system to render at 1 frame per minute and be completely unusable.
I have spent weeks bending over backwards and through hoops to get our ATI test card to agree with me, just because it is so darn unresponsive when anything goes wrong. Non power of two texture in one of your models because the modeller apparently ignored your instructions? No warning, no error - just a hung machine that will take 5 minutes to kill the process.
Yes, and on a satellite where every gram launches into space matters, not to mention the costs of losing the satellite if that system fails, I'm sure it's high on their priority list.
Benefits starting being offered because, at the time, companies did not have to count future benefits (like retirement, or future healthcare) against their current bottom line. So they were like free money during negotations - you could promise the moon, but still show your stockholders at the end of the year that you were making nice profits.
By the time laws were passed to change this, US automakers had amassed so much debt in pensions that they could barely afford their work.
However, I did read an article on this recently saying that while the pensions add to the price of a car (I think it averaged out to around $1,000 per car difference), that wasn't the only major disparity between manufacturers. Toyota, for example, had a much higher portion of the costs of their cars spent on research and development - ie, they were spending more to develop better cars. I think it shows a bit.
Terrorism is not, and has never been, a significant threat to our national security.
It's been a horrible nuisance, an indirect threat to our civil liberties, and a tragedy for all those affected directly by the attacks, but the only thing that "changed after september 11th" is that everyone got fricking paranoid.
It's only take 18 years for the western world to forget that a world with a single global military power is not a natural or sustainable state of affairs. I am still much more worried about a rising China, a re-invigorated Russia, or an organized Caliphate (in the VERY long term) than I am about terrorism.
And as for "Americans" not being concerned about this instead of healthcare.. not saying I agree with it, but most productive Americans who take part in these sorts of debates *do* have healthcare. It's privatized and possibly inefficient, but they can afford it. Generally the people who are stuck without it (the unfortunate lower classes) vote less and spend less time arguing on Slashdot. So no, universal healthcare doesn't affect me personally, in terms of my health. Its affect on my sense of decency and charity is something completely different.
Yeah, I've been getting a real feeling from his campaign this year that he's trying a little hard for the witty one-liners.
We've got "follow him to the gates of hell" right off the bat, as well as that "insult to drunken sailors" line. He feels a lot more pre-prepped and pre-packaged than I remember him seeming his last go around, and I don't like it. The optimistic part of me wants to think that he's sort of toeing the party line a little more to get himself elected, and then he'll go back to what he seemed to stand for. But that seems far too optimistic for me to actually vote based on it.
Well, all I can say is good luck telling all of Asia that they can't have cars and electronics now like we've been using for fifty years. I'm sure they'll be willing to listen for the good of the planet.
Every time this comes up it makes me want to do a study.
Make a big list of bad things that someone can be - a racist, a liar, incompetent, heretical, power-hungry, etc... and have people rank which ones are the worst thing you could find out your friend is.
From the amount of vitriol thrown around whenever the subject comes up, I'm curious just how high "racist" would rank in our current polite society.
Well, the good news is that at least that most of the people getting paid to run this war are American citizens. It's just a roundabout form of government welfare.
And hey! Most of the contractors working on these jobs are getting healthcare, too! Isn't that what the democrats are all worried about?
People complain about the military industrial complex but tend to forget that it is, at least, a large provider of jobs for Americans.
Personally, I think Iraq was a bad move for us strategically, but I don't have any problem with military investment/expenditure. I keeps me employed:)
I'm more concerned about whether he acts on it. He can have a personal hatred that he admit isn't completely rational, as long as he realizes that his duties override it. That's what I'm most looking for in a president - the ability to separate what is best for the country, and what his duties and limitations in his position are from what he personally wants.
Not saying McCain will necessarily do that, but for me it overrides whether he is or is not completely impartial about this sort of thing.
Not to mention that the quote "I still hate the gooks" doesn't necessarily mean that he is prejudiced against all Asians - that's drawing a bit more inference than he had to mean.
Again, I'm not a huge McCain fan - I just think people draw a lot more from that comment than they need to.
Oh, I'm not saying it's the best or most forgiving stance he could take. I'm just saying that he does, at least, have some understandable grounds for his prejudice. We're electing the president, not the pope.
Apparently your grandfather is a more forgiving person in that regard than John McCain. Good for him.
Umm, the vast majority of beer drinkers *are* doing it for the taste of the beer, because they aren't actually getting drunk.
The vast majority of college students doing kegs stands and drinking natty light, though, I will agree with you about.
As for pot being illegal, it's just because it was counter-culture, associated with blacks and communists and other people who were not in power in the 70's. The first drug czar actually believed that smoking pot turned you into a homosexual. Just another culture war.
His crazy ideas don't bother me, because I know he has a snowball's chance in hell of ever actually getting them done.
However, having someone with an anti-authoritarian mindset who treats the constitution seriously sitting as a roadblock between congress and more federal power seems like a really good idea to me.
There's no way I'd ever want the end results of full libertarian rule - but we're so far out the other way and trending farther that I think we should shift quite a bit toward that libertarian ideal before we started hurting things.
For some real information on what happens when you shoot a wall with a shotgun/rifle.
And to the OP, a 5.56 mm round will go right through several drywall walls - they barely slow down a bullet of any caliber. You'll just have very little control of what it's going to hit afterwards.
And a shotgun is still dangerous to people downrange - but its rounds lose velocity very quickly, and out past 100ft or so it is very unlikely to cause a killing wound, although it's entirely possible to still injure someone with it. Normal accurate killing range for an AR-15 is more like 300 yards, although it's still quite deadly (although somewhat less accurate) farther out.
Now, when I show up as a freshly graduated student with no debt history (scholarships) and a $50k a year job, they can go ahead and turn me down for treatment because I "can't pay."
Couldn't get a car loan, and I had a hell of a time getting a credit card to even start building debt.
Credit score says nothing about financial responsibility, just that you're playing their game properly. I still don't see how paying off a $300 limit credit card every month shows more financial responsibility (ie, what your credit score is supposedly showing, that you are a lower risk to a loan institution) than actually managing your money so you don't need credit to begin with.
I remember every charity organization and every school around having some sort of fund raiser to help Tsunami victims. It wasn't that no one in the US cared, it's that it's farther away and affects someone else. Everyone takes care of their own at higher priority than the rest of the world.
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I agree, I don't know that we really need to have enough nukes to take out every single strategic target in Russia at once, for example... and we have scaled back our arsenals specifically. But we do need to keep up to date enough on research and training that we don't let anyone leap frog us too much, and that requires keeping at least something of a real arsenal around.
Impressively myopic.
Despite what the current administration wants us to believe, current terrorism is about as much of a threat to our security as drug gangs are - they cause a mess of trouble, make life suck for a minority of people, and in general cost us a lot in law enforcement. But they aren't threatening to change our economy, political system, or national borders.
ie, they are not a real national threat to the continuance of most of the US as a decent place to live.
We keep nukes around because a single regional or global hegemony is an inherently unstable state, that will not continue for even the rest of my parent's lifetime, let alone mine. When we fall or another power rises, given the fact that any opponent large enough to pose a real threat to us will have nukes, and will likely have the same MAD level concerns about using them, we'll be quite happy to have kept our place as a nuclear power.
I'm really careful not to tailgate or brake too quickly in my sporty car - I know that *I* can stop on a dime, but I really don't expect the guy behind me to be able to, and even if he's at fault the accident is still going to hurt.
I don't really get excessive tailgating unless you're about to pass someone. Your fastest time is still limited by the person in front of you, so unless you're going to pass you're only saving yourself one or two seconds of trip time. It's a little different when trying to aggressively hold a spot in really heavy traffic, but even then you aren't normally going fast enough to be considered tailgating anymore.
You're forgetting that anything done to someone while in prison (rape, death, torture, humiliation) by other inmates is completely fair, as convicted criminals aren't really people any more. Especially if they did some really evil, like downloading fake pictures of naked kiddies or smoking marijuana.
Of course, the one (admittedly shining) example of a relatively unbiased government sponsored new program makes up for all the horrendously biased and political government sponsored news programs that have been used by repressive governments since the dawn of time to repress their people.
Out of curiosity, what other news networks do you have in Britain? Do you get local copies of the American crap networks or are the independent British networks competing successfully with BBC?
As an OpenGL developer, I can say that I will never touch an ATI product when I have a choice.
Their driver support lags behind nVidia by years, and when they "support" a feature, it will often be in software with no warning that it is - so instead of failing with a useful error message, all you know is that *something* you did causes your system to render at 1 frame per minute and be completely unusable.
I have spent weeks bending over backwards and through hoops to get our ATI test card to agree with me, just because it is so darn unresponsive when anything goes wrong. Non power of two texture in one of your models because the modeller apparently ignored your instructions? No warning, no error - just a hung machine that will take 5 minutes to kill the process.
Give me nVidia any day.
Yes, and on a satellite where every gram launches into space matters, not to mention the costs of losing the satellite if that system fails, I'm sure it's high on their priority list.
Benefits starting being offered because, at the time, companies did not have to count future benefits (like retirement, or future healthcare) against their current bottom line. So they were like free money during negotations - you could promise the moon, but still show your stockholders at the end of the year that you were making nice profits.
By the time laws were passed to change this, US automakers had amassed so much debt in pensions that they could barely afford their work.
However, I did read an article on this recently saying that while the pensions add to the price of a car (I think it averaged out to around $1,000 per car difference), that wasn't the only major disparity between manufacturers. Toyota, for example, had a much higher portion of the costs of their cars spent on research and development - ie, they were spending more to develop better cars. I think it shows a bit.
Terrorism is not, and has never been, a significant threat to our national security.
It's been a horrible nuisance, an indirect threat to our civil liberties, and a tragedy for all those affected directly by the attacks, but the only thing that "changed after september 11th" is that everyone got fricking paranoid.
It's only take 18 years for the western world to forget that a world with a single global military power is not a natural or sustainable state of affairs. I am still much more worried about a rising China, a re-invigorated Russia, or an organized Caliphate (in the VERY long term) than I am about terrorism.
And as for "Americans" not being concerned about this instead of healthcare.. not saying I agree with it, but most productive Americans who take part in these sorts of debates *do* have healthcare. It's privatized and possibly inefficient, but they can afford it. Generally the people who are stuck without it (the unfortunate lower classes) vote less and spend less time arguing on Slashdot. So no, universal healthcare doesn't affect me personally, in terms of my health. Its affect on my sense of decency and charity is something completely different.
Yeah, I've been getting a real feeling from his campaign this year that he's trying a little hard for the witty one-liners.
We've got "follow him to the gates of hell" right off the bat, as well as that "insult to drunken sailors" line. He feels a lot more pre-prepped and pre-packaged than I remember him seeming his last go around, and I don't like it. The optimistic part of me wants to think that he's sort of toeing the party line a little more to get himself elected, and then he'll go back to what he seemed to stand for. But that seems far too optimistic for me to actually vote based on it.
Well, all I can say is good luck telling all of Asia that they can't have cars and electronics now like we've been using for fifty years. I'm sure they'll be willing to listen for the good of the planet.
Every time this comes up it makes me want to do a study.
Make a big list of bad things that someone can be - a racist, a liar, incompetent, heretical, power-hungry, etc... and have people rank which ones are the worst thing you could find out your friend is.
From the amount of vitriol thrown around whenever the subject comes up, I'm curious just how high "racist" would rank in our current polite society.
Where oh where are my mod points. Well said.
Well, the good news is that at least that most of the people getting paid to run this war are American citizens. It's just a roundabout form of government welfare.
:)
And hey! Most of the contractors working on these jobs are getting healthcare, too! Isn't that what the democrats are all worried about?
People complain about the military industrial complex but tend to forget that it is, at least, a large provider of jobs for Americans.
Personally, I think Iraq was a bad move for us strategically, but I don't have any problem with military investment/expenditure. I keeps me employed
I'm more concerned about whether he acts on it. He can have a personal hatred that he admit isn't completely rational, as long as he realizes that his duties override it. That's what I'm most looking for in a president - the ability to separate what is best for the country, and what his duties and limitations in his position are from what he personally wants.
Not saying McCain will necessarily do that, but for me it overrides whether he is or is not completely impartial about this sort of thing.
Not to mention that the quote "I still hate the gooks" doesn't necessarily mean that he is prejudiced against all Asians - that's drawing a bit more inference than he had to mean.
Again, I'm not a huge McCain fan - I just think people draw a lot more from that comment than they need to.
Oh, I'm not saying it's the best or most forgiving stance he could take. I'm just saying that he does, at least, have some understandable grounds for his prejudice. We're electing the president, not the pope.
Apparently your grandfather is a more forgiving person in that regard than John McCain. Good for him.
I've never had a non-alcoholic beer that didn't taste like crap :)
I had heard his suicide interpreted as being influenced by God as punishment. I apologize if that was an incorrect interpretation.
Umm, the vast majority of beer drinkers *are* doing it for the taste of the beer, because they aren't actually getting drunk.
The vast majority of college students doing kegs stands and drinking natty light, though, I will agree with you about.
As for pot being illegal, it's just because it was counter-culture, associated with blacks and communists and other people who were not in power in the 70's. The first drug czar actually believed that smoking pot turned you into a homosexual. Just another culture war.
Because he was tortured by them for years?
He's a human being. Even God killed Judas.
I'm not a huge Romney fan, but at least he was a *successful* businessman. Impressively so.
I'll never understand why people thought a flunkie like Bush would make a good president.
His crazy ideas don't bother me, because I know he has a snowball's chance in hell of ever actually getting them done.
However, having someone with an anti-authoritarian mindset who treats the constitution seriously sitting as a roadblock between congress and more federal power seems like a really good idea to me.
There's no way I'd ever want the end results of full libertarian rule - but we're so far out the other way and trending farther that I think we should shift quite a bit toward that libertarian ideal before we started hurting things.
www.theboxoftruth.com
For some real information on what happens when you shoot a wall with a shotgun/rifle.
And to the OP, a 5.56 mm round will go right through several drywall walls - they barely slow down a bullet of any caliber. You'll just have very little control of what it's going to hit afterwards.
And a shotgun is still dangerous to people downrange - but its rounds lose velocity very quickly, and out past 100ft or so it is very unlikely to cause a killing wound, although it's entirely possible to still injure someone with it. Normal accurate killing range for an AR-15 is more like 300 yards, although it's still quite deadly (although somewhat less accurate) farther out.
Now, when I show up as a freshly graduated student with no debt history (scholarships) and a $50k a year job, they can go ahead and turn me down for treatment because I "can't pay."
Couldn't get a car loan, and I had a hell of a time getting a credit card to even start building debt.
Credit score says nothing about financial responsibility, just that you're playing their game properly. I still don't see how paying off a $300 limit credit card every month shows more financial responsibility (ie, what your credit score is supposedly showing, that you are a lower risk to a loan institution) than actually managing your money so you don't need credit to begin with.
I remember every charity organization and every school around having some sort of fund raiser to help Tsunami victims. It wasn't that no one in the US cared, it's that it's farther away and affects someone else. Everyone takes care of their own at higher priority than the rest of the world.