So VW decides to "fix" a problem that (technically) is a US only issue by greenwashing up a car they don't sell in the US.
It's not "only" a US issue. In fact, the numbers I've heard are somewhere between 500,000 and 650,000 cars affected in the US, but 11 million world-wide. There are a lot more of those cars in Europe than the US, and Europe has a lot more diesel cars on the road.
Agreed, however, for many research orientated universities patents are a vital source of revenue.
Wisconsin-Madison is a state-supported school. I realize these days it's considered okay to double- and triple-dip into taxpayers pockets, but this system where schools get to have tax money for research, and then patent the results for profit, is completely wrong. As a citizen, it means I'm paying for the research, then paying AGAIN to have any access to it. Based on state-granted monopoly.
At best, any revenue derived from these university patents should go back into the general fund, not for the (unencumbered) sole use of the school.
Of course, everybody talks about doing things for the public good, but as soon as an opportunity arises for any significant personal gain, they will screw the public every time. Seems to be part of what the US culture has become.
No I think mostly only the police should be allowed to own guns. Security people should not, if they need guns for something they should call the police.
LOL. Okay, dude. You're naive, at best. You trust the police? Apparently you haven't been paying attention lately. The police, who are now using military surplus on people in the streets, that are never held accountable for excessive use of force? The police, which the courts have already established have NO obligation to protect anyone?
Here's a clue for you: this will never happen. Banning guns starts with the debate on who will actually have a monopoly on having guns. It will NOT be "just the police". There are many armed bureaucracies that will NOT give up their guns. The FBI and everyone under Homeland Security, sure. But also the Department of Education (did you know they have their own SWAT squads?), HUD, Health and Human Services, the Department of Agriculture (which also has their own SWAT teams, they use them for raiding illegal raw milk producing farmers, among other things), the State Department (of course), and Commerce (yep, armed). There are numerous state bureaucracies that also have armed teams, including Alcohol bureaus and DMVs. All these folks will NOT be willing to give up guns.
Most private security companies are run and often staffed by military veterans and retired police, and none of them are going to give up their guns. And the wealthy and the elites that hire them will make sure they never have to. Because, yes, your rulers do not want you to have guns, and that's the rulers in government and the rulers not in government. Do you think the banks are going to go along with having their money and assets transported around by unarmed guards? Your government cannot function without the banks, there is no way they will disarm the banks and their security folks. You're going to tell them "Well just call the cops." Good luck.
Of course, we're just getting started. There will be MANY groups clamoring to be part of the monopoly-allowed-to-have-guns, many of them with money and influence, not to mention the weapons manufacturers themselves. One of the few productive exports the US has left is weapons - you think they will give that up? Oh, then you get to try to figure out HOW those powerless, not wealthy, and non influential people will be disarmed, and WHO is going to disarm them. Break out the popcorn - it's going to be fun.
So you're one of those "ban guns" - except for the police, a bunch of bureaucrats, some government officials, approved security people for the wealthy, and other elites that need protection from the unwashed masses that are not allowed to have guns - people.
Drugs are not the same as guns. You don't get physically addicted to guns. You are comparing apples and oranges.
You said banning guns would be easier than encryption because guns are physical objects. When I pointed out drugs are physical objects, too, and bans fail, you move the goal post. So... you think the only people using illegal drugs are physically addicted?
I assume you, like most people, don't really want to ban guns, but just provide certain people with a monopoly on using them. More people have been killed by their own government than by any other cause.
No it's not the same as guns. Guns are physical objects, encryption is not. Encryption is nothing else than a few mathematical formulas. It is impossible to ban thoughts and speech however you can ban guns.
I just RTFA. I saw nothing about violence. I saw nothing about moderating technical criticism. Would you care to point out where Ms. Sharp said anything like that?
It's in the last link of the summary, when she tried to change the LKML to be more to her liking:
Quoting her first message: 'Seriously, guys? Is this what we need in order to get improve -stable? Linus Torvalds is advocating for physical intimidation and violence. Ingo Molnar and Linus are advocating for verbal abuse.... Violence, whether it be physical intimidation, verbal threats or verbal abuse is not acceptable. Keep it professional on the mailing lists.'"
Verbal abuse != violence. Physical intimidation might be, and a credible threat of violence can be assault - but I don't think Linus has ever actually done that.
That's usually said to children who have been hurt by words, and it's nonsense. It's telling them to suppress their emotional response entirely, which isn't healthy.
It's said to children to teach them not to suppress their emotional response entirely, but to help them learn restraint, and the difference between verbal sparring and physical assault. It's the basis of civilized society. People are allowed to have disagreements, arguments, and even yell at each other, but it is NOT okay to escalate those disagreements into physical altercation. That's why we prosecute people for assault when they "throw the first punch" - they have initiated violence. We teach our children these concepts early.
The reason that things like solitary confinement or threatening violence work and are considered torture is because even if there is no physical harm there is still very real harm being done.
Those are also physical assault, and actual violence. Threatening violence is assault, and can be criminally prosecuted. Ditto for kidnapping / false imprisonment.
Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can do more permanent damage. Stockholm syndrome, being groomed, being broken down and molded, these are all this that can be achieved by words alone. Maybe Sarah took these things to heart and was incompatible with that environment, and it's healthy for her to express that. Nobody is expecting everything to change over one individual but she is not out of line in speaking her mind.
"Stockholm syndrome", "being groomed", "broken down and molded" - not just words. ALL of your examples involve more than just words - they are using words as part of a system of violence characterized by some form of imprisonment or threat of violence (assault). They don't work on people that can just walk away, or have access to other, neutral actors or supportive people. That is, they work only for people FORCEFULLY isolated or kept under constant surveillance.
So, you've just given us examples of actual, physical force and/or violence, where words are also used to emotionally and psychologically harm the victim. That's not what we're talking about, here.
You're making crude generalizations on the basis of gender. I dare say that borderline bullying isn't a healthy environment for a lot of men or women; it's immature and unprofessional and, as Sarah Sharp eloquently points out in her post, by tolerating such a culture the leaders of the community in question are prioritising the "need" for people to express themselves aggressively over other people's potential need for respectful and sensitive communication.
It's all very well to say that people need to learn not to take things personally, but the fact is that you can't possibly know - especially not over a mailing list - just what emotional or personal issues a person might be going through. Do you really a want a situation where curious and potentially talented developers are put off contributing to an important project because of a toxic culture?
What struck me about what she was trying to do, and I've seen others try to do the same thing, is to equate some comment or comments on a mailing list, or other post, as "violence". When I grew up we learned that "Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me." That is, they're just words, they are not fists or knives or guns. It's not "violence" to berate someone or use colorful language or anything else. It may "offend" you, but taking offense at something someone says is entirely subjective, and impossible to enforce, because you end up with "speech codes", banning words, and other asinine restrictions until everything is a euphemism or metaphor until no one knows what anyone is talking about any more.
Bullying used to mean you're getting physically intimidated, punched, kicked, assaulted or robbed regularly. Now it seems it's enough that someone said something that hurt your feelings. And people can get their feelings hurt by things that are totally NOT intended that way by the speaker, just because of the listener's history or viewpoint.
Equating speech to physical violence is a very dangerous trend that will not end well.
Incorrect. The TOPS of the potato PLANT, yes. Potatoes are okay, and sweet potatoes are good for them. Check your local pet store, and you will find lots of dog food that includes sweet potatoes.
Well, what really bothers me is that a "good" website would have 1-3MB of content. For me, a good web page is mostly text, and rarely holds more than 20K of actual content.
Dude, you simply cannot do a decent animated kittycat gif with a 20K web page, so your analysis is obviously biased.
My parents have a dog, which LOVES cucumbers. It even looks like he likes them more than meat. When planted cucmbers are ripe, this dog looks under leaves and eats one every time he is near garden.
My beagle loved sweet potatoes. She kept digging them up out of the garden way before they were big enough to harvest. When we did go to harvest them, we got like 2 potatoes.
Let's discuss some of his policies:
1) Bernie preaches Increased taxes. The tax rates from the 1940's through the 1980s were much higher, with the top marginal tax above 90%. The rich still worked and got filthy rich. This is important because that money was used to pay for the (now) crumbling infrastructure we take for granted. It was used to pay for social programs that were incredibly popular and successful.
To understand this, you need to review exactly how that "top marginal rate" was applied and when, the people it actually affected, and how it would apply as a modification to the current tax code. The spending (any way you want to break it down) was still significantly smaller proportion of the nation's GDP than what it would be under Sander's proposals.
2) Bernie preaches Increased taxes. The tax rates from the 1940's through the 1980s were much higher, with the top marginal tax above 90%. This paid for education which used to cost less than $1800 (inflation adjusted) per year at UC. Now a year of school at a UC costs $13000. There has been a redistribution of wealth from those who have not, to those who have (banks and financial institutions collect on this debt, and ultimately their shareholders). If you have numbers otherwise, show them.
WHY has UC, a state-supported school, gone from charging $1800 to $13000? A significant part of the reason is federal funding of student education via direct lending. It is then paid directly by the beneficiaries (degree holders, who earn more than non-degree holders). Under Sander's proposal of paying for it directly, the funding is likely to increase (more people will want this benefit), and spread out over more people (instead of 22-32 year-olds, you have a larger pool of 18-, say 60-year-olds). But that will include people that have already paid for their own education, people that received NO benefit, because they did not get a paid-for education, etc. That's not really as fair a system, especially because the real beneficiaries will be the highly-paid administration and tenured professors of the state-supported schools. Note that under the current system, there are NO banks or for-profit finance institutions involved. Student loans are now ALL directly provided and managed by the federal government.
3) Bernie preaches Increased taxes. Before Reagan finally put the stake through the heart of the US, US deficit/debt were under control. The US debt started increasing massively after Reagan cut taxes. If you have numbers otherwise, show them.
Well during Reagan's administration, the debt did increase. But the budget was later balanced during the Clinton years, so it was handled at that point. Unnecessary wars and excessive foreign intervention were very expensive (and continues to this day), and then the elites in both parties decided in 2008 to... bail out the banks during the financial meltdown, in spite of the wishes of the citizenry. Blaming all of that debt on Reagan is disingenuous at best. You need to go back at least to FDR.
4) Bernie preaches Increased regulation. As the right and far right parties in the US cut regulations, they removed any incentives for businesses to provide for the society that gives them the limited liability and corporate-hood they so enjoy.
He is wrong and so are you. Regulation is hurting small business and increasing the power of the largest corporations that keep their money overseas to avoid taxation. In 1975 the bound edition of the Federal Register (the publication that expresses the details of Federal regulation) consisted of 71,244 pages. It has increased dramatically in recent years and at the end of 2011 it stood at 169,301. 38,000 PAGES of new regulations were released in 2001-2011 alone. Large multinational corporations have cadres of lawyers and accountants that can figure that out, absorb the costs, and figure out how to avoid
LOL, you just pulled one of the tricks they used to usurp the Constitution: the "are you with us or with the terrorist" trick!
Conflating my statement to that one is unadulterated bullshit. I tried to address what you said rationally, but you're full of angst and can't see past your nose. In fact, your initial reply was really nothing more than "Yea, well so-and-so did it first so it's okay for me to do it now." I tried to give you the benefit of the doubt, but you're hopelessly lost in a delusion of your own snowflakitude.
And with you and all the other Millennials hell-bent on tearing up the Constitution
You mean the Constitution that previous generations defended so well?
Assuming you're being facetious with that comment (with respect to, probably generations from FDR on), then yes, that one.
You mean to tell me all the entrenched old farts in Congress who keep getting reelected and keeping the bread and circus going weren't there before Millenials came along?
They've been really awful at following it, haven't they? So your answer to the thing getting beaten so badly it's on life support is to go ahead and pull the plug and let it die completely?
Or the debt, the taxes, the regulations, the secret spying?
Again, Sander's ideas seems to be to double-down on all of them (with the possible exception of secret spying, IDK where he stands on that.
Well, it's not so much secret spying as we older more mature folks knew about it. We just didn't talk much about it until that that Millenial brat Snowden brought it up.
Well clearly YOU didn't, but I and others certainly did, except we were just called delusional crackpots until Snowden showed up to confirm it. Yea, maybe you should listen to us crackpots now instead of waiting until Sanders is in charge for a few years, to avoid letting us say "I told you so." Again.
The US is the only first-world nation that considers universal healthcare to be some sort of evil communist plot.
It's also the only country that considers pharmaceutical companies and their profits to be more important than the health of their citizens - but that's how the system works, and Obamacare has expanded on it. I can imagine with their power in Washington and the media (and with the FDA, which is funded by the drug companies) that a single payer system would be shafting the doctors and hospitals even more to help the drug companies even more.
Maybe military spending - huge standing armies, garrisons all over the world, constantly looking abroad for 'monsters to slay' - is a far greater threat to the constitution.
I don't know where Bernie stands on the Military Industrial Complex. I agree, it's a great threat to our well being in general, as well as the militarization of the police force (maybe the whole thing will merge - they love declaring war on the citizens). I know he got upset that DHS wasn't being "properly funded", so I don't think he's much better there than anyone else. Bound to be better than Hillary and Obama - they seem to like the Neocon foreign policy just fine. At least Rand Paul keeps talking about cutting off money for supporting foreign dictatorships, a small start in the right direction.
Cute. You're worried that we the people might promote our general welfare over the welfare of the few. That, to you, is tearing up the constitution.
Umm... No. Not sure how you got that unless you only read the first sentence of my post and jumped to some unfounded conclusion. What Bernie wants is basically a centralized authority with unlimited power over resources, with the rulers in charge having the ability to decide who pays and who benefits. Whenever these things get proposed it's ALWAYS the middle class that gets hurt, and their burden is already too high. Because that's where the most money with the least means to protect it.
Trump wants to eliminate a lot of the tax code and exempt the bottom end from paying anything. Do you even know what you're talking about?
Probably not. I haven't made an effort to study any plans he's put out there, and there hasn't been much detail from news sources (which is probably intentional on the media's part). I did note that he had ideas about adding taxes for hedge fund managers and the like, which just sounded like "more complications to the tax code" to me. Other R candidates don't impress me either. Huckabee seems to have the closest tax plan to what I want, but I don't like anything else about him. At all.
And with you and all the other Millennials hell-bent on tearing up the Constitution so the US can be a Socialist country, Sanders probably has a pretty good chance of getting elected. Hell, just the offer of free Bachelor's degrees and single-payer healthcare is probably enough to do it (although the way Obamacare has been implemented, single-payer healthcare is probably the lesser evil).
Trump's ideas aren't much better, but at least he's not planning to double-down on the unsustainable deficit spending and vast expansion of the Entitlement Class like Sanders. Both are enthusiastic about expanding the 7,000 page tax code to 12,000 or more pages, which only means more crony favors for the big corporations and more profits sitting overseas where it will never generate revenue. The real fix is to gut the thing, simplify it greatly, and eliminate pretty much ALL the corporate welfare, loopholes, and everything else that keeps the burden on the shrinking and struggling middle class.
"Omniscient" would mean knowing all actual things. Possible things are not things, and an "omniscient" entity need not know them to be "omniscient".
... or even knowing all possible things. Consensus among many monotheist theologians is the concept of God existing outside of time entirely. So theoretically (umm... conceptually?) an omniscient God would have knowledge of all possible freely-made choices and all possible outcomes of each.
Blows your mind if you think about it that way. But religions often deal in paradoxes, and blowing your mind with them is useful, because once your logical mind is blown away, your heart is open to the concept of a higher power.
Slashdot Mirror
So VW decides to "fix" a problem that (technically) is a US only issue by greenwashing up a car they don't sell in the US.
It's not "only" a US issue. In fact, the numbers I've heard are somewhere between 500,000 and 650,000 cars affected in the US, but 11 million world-wide. There are a lot more of those cars in Europe than the US, and Europe has a lot more diesel cars on the road.
Agreed, however, for many research orientated universities patents are a vital source of revenue.
Wisconsin-Madison is a state-supported school. I realize these days it's considered okay to double- and triple-dip into taxpayers pockets, but this system where schools get to have tax money for research, and then patent the results for profit, is completely wrong. As a citizen, it means I'm paying for the research, then paying AGAIN to have any access to it. Based on state-granted monopoly.
At best, any revenue derived from these university patents should go back into the general fund, not for the (unencumbered) sole use of the school.
Of course, everybody talks about doing things for the public good, but as soon as an opportunity arises for any significant personal gain, they will screw the public every time. Seems to be part of what the US culture has become.
Lose, not loose. You did it THREE TIMES! It's practically a crime.
No I think mostly only the police should be allowed to own guns. Security people should not, if they need guns for something they should call the police.
LOL. Okay, dude. You're naive, at best. You trust the police? Apparently you haven't been paying attention lately. The police, who are now using military surplus on people in the streets, that are never held accountable for excessive use of force? The police, which the courts have already established have NO obligation to protect anyone?
Here's a clue for you: this will never happen. Banning guns starts with the debate on who will actually have a monopoly on having guns. It will NOT be "just the police". There are many armed bureaucracies that will NOT give up their guns. The FBI and everyone under Homeland Security, sure. But also the Department of Education (did you know they have their own SWAT squads?), HUD, Health and Human Services, the Department of Agriculture (which also has their own SWAT teams, they use them for raiding illegal raw milk producing farmers, among other things), the State Department (of course), and Commerce (yep, armed). There are numerous state bureaucracies that also have armed teams, including Alcohol bureaus and DMVs. All these folks will NOT be willing to give up guns.
Most private security companies are run and often staffed by military veterans and retired police, and none of them are going to give up their guns. And the wealthy and the elites that hire them will make sure they never have to. Because, yes, your rulers do not want you to have guns, and that's the rulers in government and the rulers not in government. Do you think the banks are going to go along with having their money and assets transported around by unarmed guards? Your government cannot function without the banks, there is no way they will disarm the banks and their security folks. You're going to tell them "Well just call the cops." Good luck.
Of course, we're just getting started. There will be MANY groups clamoring to be part of the monopoly-allowed-to-have-guns, many of them with money and influence, not to mention the weapons manufacturers themselves. One of the few productive exports the US has left is weapons - you think they will give that up? Oh, then you get to try to figure out HOW those powerless, not wealthy, and non influential people will be disarmed, and WHO is going to disarm them. Break out the popcorn - it's going to be fun.
So you're one of those "ban guns" - except for the police, a bunch of bureaucrats, some government officials, approved security people for the wealthy, and other elites that need protection from the unwashed masses that are not allowed to have guns - people.
Drugs are not the same as guns. You don't get physically addicted to guns. You are comparing apples and oranges.
You said banning guns would be easier than encryption because guns are physical objects. When I pointed out drugs are physical objects, too, and bans fail, you move the goal post. So... you think the only people using illegal drugs are physically addicted?
I assume you, like most people, don't really want to ban guns, but just provide certain people with a monopoly on using them. More people have been killed by their own government than by any other cause.
No it's not the same as guns. Guns are physical objects, encryption is not. Encryption is nothing else than a few mathematical formulas. It is impossible to ban thoughts and speech however you can ban guns.
Right. Works as good as banning drugs, right?
I just RTFA. I saw nothing about violence. I saw nothing about moderating technical criticism. Would you care to point out where Ms. Sharp said anything like that?
It's in the last link of the summary, when she tried to change the LKML to be more to her liking:
Verbal abuse != violence. Physical intimidation might be, and a credible threat of violence can be assault - but I don't think Linus has ever actually done that.
we should build an OS above this concept
Then we can ruin it with systemd!
That's usually said to children who have been hurt by words, and it's nonsense. It's telling them to suppress their emotional response entirely, which isn't healthy.
It's said to children to teach them not to suppress their emotional response entirely, but to help them learn restraint, and the difference between verbal sparring and physical assault. It's the basis of civilized society. People are allowed to have disagreements, arguments, and even yell at each other, but it is NOT okay to escalate those disagreements into physical altercation. That's why we prosecute people for assault when they "throw the first punch" - they have initiated violence. We teach our children these concepts early.
The reason that things like solitary confinement or threatening violence work and are considered torture is because even if there is no physical harm there is still very real harm being done.
Those are also physical assault, and actual violence. Threatening violence is assault, and can be criminally prosecuted. Ditto for kidnapping / false imprisonment.
Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can do more permanent damage. Stockholm syndrome, being groomed, being broken down and molded, these are all this that can be achieved by words alone. Maybe Sarah took these things to heart and was incompatible with that environment, and it's healthy for her to express that. Nobody is expecting everything to change over one individual but she is not out of line in speaking her mind.
"Stockholm syndrome", "being groomed", "broken down and molded" - not just words. ALL of your examples involve more than just words - they are using words as part of a system of violence characterized by some form of imprisonment or threat of violence (assault). They don't work on people that can just walk away, or have access to other, neutral actors or supportive people. That is, they work only for people FORCEFULLY isolated or kept under constant surveillance.
So, you've just given us examples of actual, physical force and/or violence, where words are also used to emotionally and psychologically harm the victim. That's not what we're talking about, here.
You're making crude generalizations on the basis of gender. I dare say that borderline bullying isn't a healthy environment for a lot of men or women; it's immature and unprofessional and, as Sarah Sharp eloquently points out in her post, by tolerating such a culture the leaders of the community in question are prioritising the "need" for people to express themselves aggressively over other people's potential need for respectful and sensitive communication. It's all very well to say that people need to learn not to take things personally, but the fact is that you can't possibly know - especially not over a mailing list - just what emotional or personal issues a person might be going through. Do you really a want a situation where curious and potentially talented developers are put off contributing to an important project because of a toxic culture?
What struck me about what she was trying to do, and I've seen others try to do the same thing, is to equate some comment or comments on a mailing list, or other post, as "violence". When I grew up we learned that "Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me." That is, they're just words, they are not fists or knives or guns. It's not "violence" to berate someone or use colorful language or anything else. It may "offend" you, but taking offense at something someone says is entirely subjective, and impossible to enforce, because you end up with "speech codes", banning words, and other asinine restrictions until everything is a euphemism or metaphor until no one knows what anyone is talking about any more.
Bullying used to mean you're getting physically intimidated, punched, kicked, assaulted or robbed regularly. Now it seems it's enough that someone said something that hurt your feelings. And people can get their feelings hurt by things that are totally NOT intended that way by the speaker, just because of the listener's history or viewpoint.
Equating speech to physical violence is a very dangerous trend that will not end well.
Potatoes are toxic to dogs.
Incorrect. The TOPS of the potato PLANT, yes. Potatoes are okay, and sweet potatoes are good for them. Check your local pet store, and you will find lots of dog food that includes sweet potatoes.
Well, what really bothers me is that a "good" website would have 1-3MB of content. For me, a good web page is mostly text, and rarely holds more than 20K of actual content.
Dude, you simply cannot do a decent animated kittycat gif with a 20K web page, so your analysis is obviously biased.
My parents have a dog, which LOVES cucumbers. It even looks like he likes them more than meat. When planted cucmbers are ripe, this dog looks under leaves and eats one every time he is near garden.
My beagle loved sweet potatoes. She kept digging them up out of the garden way before they were big enough to harvest. When we did go to harvest them, we got like 2 potatoes.
Let's discuss some of his policies: 1) Bernie preaches Increased taxes. The tax rates from the 1940's through the 1980s were much higher, with the top marginal tax above 90%. The rich still worked and got filthy rich. This is important because that money was used to pay for the (now) crumbling infrastructure we take for granted. It was used to pay for social programs that were incredibly popular and successful.
To understand this, you need to review exactly how that "top marginal rate" was applied and when, the people it actually affected, and how it would apply as a modification to the current tax code. The spending (any way you want to break it down) was still significantly smaller proportion of the nation's GDP than what it would be under Sander's proposals.
2) Bernie preaches Increased taxes. The tax rates from the 1940's through the 1980s were much higher, with the top marginal tax above 90%. This paid for education which used to cost less than $1800 (inflation adjusted) per year at UC. Now a year of school at a UC costs $13000. There has been a redistribution of wealth from those who have not, to those who have (banks and financial institutions collect on this debt, and ultimately their shareholders). If you have numbers otherwise, show them.
WHY has UC, a state-supported school, gone from charging $1800 to $13000? A significant part of the reason is federal funding of student education via direct lending. It is then paid directly by the beneficiaries (degree holders, who earn more than non-degree holders). Under Sander's proposal of paying for it directly, the funding is likely to increase (more people will want this benefit), and spread out over more people (instead of 22-32 year-olds, you have a larger pool of 18-, say 60-year-olds). But that will include people that have already paid for their own education, people that received NO benefit, because they did not get a paid-for education, etc. That's not really as fair a system, especially because the real beneficiaries will be the highly-paid administration and tenured professors of the state-supported schools. Note that under the current system, there are NO banks or for-profit finance institutions involved. Student loans are now ALL directly provided and managed by the federal government.
3) Bernie preaches Increased taxes. Before Reagan finally put the stake through the heart of the US, US deficit/debt were under control. The US debt started increasing massively after Reagan cut taxes. If you have numbers otherwise, show them.
Well during Reagan's administration, the debt did increase. But the budget was later balanced during the Clinton years, so it was handled at that point. Unnecessary wars and excessive foreign intervention were very expensive (and continues to this day), and then the elites in both parties decided in 2008 to ... bail out the banks during the financial meltdown, in spite of the wishes of the citizenry. Blaming all of that debt on Reagan is disingenuous at best. You need to go back at least to FDR.
4) Bernie preaches Increased regulation. As the right and far right parties in the US cut regulations, they removed any incentives for businesses to provide for the society that gives them the limited liability and corporate-hood they so enjoy.
He is wrong and so are you. Regulation is hurting small business and increasing the power of the largest corporations that keep their money overseas to avoid taxation. In 1975 the bound edition of the Federal Register (the publication that expresses the details of Federal regulation) consisted of 71,244 pages. It has increased dramatically in recent years and at the end of 2011 it stood at 169,301. 38,000 PAGES of new regulations were released in 2001-2011 alone. Large multinational corporations have cadres of lawyers and accountants that can figure that out, absorb the costs, and figure out how to avoid
LOL, you just pulled one of the tricks they used to usurp the Constitution: the "are you with us or with the terrorist" trick!
Conflating my statement to that one is unadulterated bullshit. I tried to address what you said rationally, but you're full of angst and can't see past your nose. In fact, your initial reply was really nothing more than "Yea, well so-and-so did it first so it's okay for me to do it now." I tried to give you the benefit of the doubt, but you're hopelessly lost in a delusion of your own snowflakitude.
Good day to you, sir!
You're not listening to me. At all. I don't like Bernie, so you're hating on me, and that's all you can see.
And with you and all the other Millennials hell-bent on tearing up the Constitution
You mean the Constitution that previous generations defended so well?
Assuming you're being facetious with that comment (with respect to, probably generations from FDR on), then yes, that one.
You mean to tell me all the entrenched old farts in Congress who keep getting reelected and keeping the bread and circus going weren't there before Millenials came along?
They've been really awful at following it, haven't they? So your answer to the thing getting beaten so badly it's on life support is to go ahead and pull the plug and let it die completely?
Or the debt, the taxes, the regulations, the secret spying?
Again, Sander's ideas seems to be to double-down on all of them (with the possible exception of secret spying, IDK where he stands on that.
Well, it's not so much secret spying as we older more mature folks knew about it. We just didn't talk much about it until that that Millenial brat Snowden brought it up.
Well clearly YOU didn't, but I and others certainly did, except we were just called delusional crackpots until Snowden showed up to confirm it. Yea, maybe you should listen to us crackpots now instead of waiting until Sanders is in charge for a few years, to avoid letting us say "I told you so." Again.
The US is the only first-world nation that considers universal healthcare to be some sort of evil communist plot.
It's also the only country that considers pharmaceutical companies and their profits to be more important than the health of their citizens - but that's how the system works, and Obamacare has expanded on it. I can imagine with their power in Washington and the media (and with the FDA, which is funded by the drug companies) that a single payer system would be shafting the doctors and hospitals even more to help the drug companies even more.
Maybe military spending - huge standing armies, garrisons all over the world, constantly looking abroad for 'monsters to slay' - is a far greater threat to the constitution.
I don't know where Bernie stands on the Military Industrial Complex. I agree, it's a great threat to our well being in general, as well as the militarization of the police force (maybe the whole thing will merge - they love declaring war on the citizens). I know he got upset that DHS wasn't being "properly funded", so I don't think he's much better there than anyone else. Bound to be better than Hillary and Obama - they seem to like the Neocon foreign policy just fine. At least Rand Paul keeps talking about cutting off money for supporting foreign dictatorships, a small start in the right direction.
Cute. You're worried that we the people might promote our general welfare over the welfare of the few. That, to you, is tearing up the constitution.
Umm... No. Not sure how you got that unless you only read the first sentence of my post and jumped to some unfounded conclusion. What Bernie wants is basically a centralized authority with unlimited power over resources, with the rulers in charge having the ability to decide who pays and who benefits. Whenever these things get proposed it's ALWAYS the middle class that gets hurt, and their burden is already too high. Because that's where the most money with the least means to protect it.
Trump wants to eliminate a lot of the tax code and exempt the bottom end from paying anything. Do you even know what you're talking about?
Probably not. I haven't made an effort to study any plans he's put out there, and there hasn't been much detail from news sources (which is probably intentional on the media's part). I did note that he had ideas about adding taxes for hedge fund managers and the like, which just sounded like "more complications to the tax code" to me. Other R candidates don't impress me either. Huckabee seems to have the closest tax plan to what I want, but I don't like anything else about him. At all.
I support Bernie Sanders.
Supporting Trump is just idiotic.
And with you and all the other Millennials hell-bent on tearing up the Constitution so the US can be a Socialist country, Sanders probably has a pretty good chance of getting elected. Hell, just the offer of free Bachelor's degrees and single-payer healthcare is probably enough to do it (although the way Obamacare has been implemented, single-payer healthcare is probably the lesser evil).
Trump's ideas aren't much better, but at least he's not planning to double-down on the unsustainable deficit spending and vast expansion of the Entitlement Class like Sanders. Both are enthusiastic about expanding the 7,000 page tax code to 12,000 or more pages, which only means more crony favors for the big corporations and more profits sitting overseas where it will never generate revenue. The real fix is to gut the thing, simplify it greatly, and eliminate pretty much ALL the corporate welfare, loopholes, and everything else that keeps the burden on the shrinking and struggling middle class.
"Omniscient" would mean knowing all actual things. Possible things are not things, and an "omniscient" entity need not know them to be "omniscient".
... or even knowing all possible things. Consensus among many monotheist theologians is the concept of God existing outside of time entirely. So theoretically (umm... conceptually?) an omniscient God would have knowledge of all possible freely-made choices and all possible outcomes of each.
Blows your mind if you think about it that way. But religions often deal in paradoxes, and blowing your mind with them is useful, because once your logical mind is blown away, your heart is open to the concept of a higher power.
Large doses of LSD can work too.
Like VW's emission test results....
Well, one man's trash, as they say. I'm hoping to pick up a gently used VW diesel for cheap very soon.