You argument in its whole is that democracy as a system needs to be thrown out and instead we need a system where only those with money get to vote and their vote depends on money they are willing to spend on their voting.
Agreeing with you. I find it amazing that grossly rich bastards like the Kennedy's, etc., always want to tax the heck out of the middle class worker INCOMES finally breaking even middle management levels. None of them seem to wish to tax standing capital.
THIS. Why won't the political class ever touch the idea of a wealth tax?
Free Speech Protections have very specific applicability - it only protect citizens against government limiting their speech targeted at some aspect of government.
Incorrect. Free Speech is protected absolutely, unless the radical left-wing in the Senate manages to pass their new amendment that will create a protected class (allowed free speech), and eliminate it for all others.
You still failed to demonstrate how "we, the people" benefit from allowing anonymous and corporate money influence politics.
Try reading the FEC regulations and demonstrate how anyone without a lot funds to pay lawyers and accountants to collect data and submit reports could possibly follow all the requirements. And that's the CURRENT system - trying to create NEW rules that restrict not only direct contributions, but also ANY communication, including blogs, articles, flyers, etc. would completely stifle free speech. Even sending email to any significant audience requires something like Constant Contact, which is NOT free. It all requires some money.
How is our democratic process is strengthened by SuperPACs trying to buy elections?
It doesn't. But allowing Nazis to demonstrate and hold parades doesn't strengthen anything we want, either. But free speech is useless if only the speech we LIKE is allowed. As Thomas Jefferson said, "I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it."
What do you think happens when bill affecting ABC Inc. that donated substantial amount to a politician's election fund comes on the floor? Conflict of interest happens, where this politician has to potentially choose between representing campaign donors or representing constituents. Sure, some politicians would act honorably and do the right thing, but you can be sure that some will fail. So why create this issue at all? What do, we, the people, gain from allowing anonymous and corporate money into politics? Are we any freer as a result?
Free Speech. Probably the most important freedom enshrined in the Constitution. And, yes, we ARE more free because of it.
If you don't believe me, try starting a political committee some time and try to deal with the scrutiny required by the FEC and the IRS. You won't feel very free to express your opinion in that arena, quite the opposite. And that's a very handy tool for an established politician, who now has a very big stick (some penalties will net you jail time) and lawyers on staff.
Clearly true, if you had bothered to find statistics for the group the GP was talking about, which was the top 1%, not the top 20%. Cheap labor, corporate CEOs, and people that hire nannies and personal assistants are NOT in your charts or stats.
Why don't these guys simply pay attention to a scientific poll that was already run in Eric Cantor's district to see how successful this idea is!
Sheesh!
First time in history that Majority leader of the House has lost his seat- all because he supported some form of immigration reform.
That worked well for him didn't it.
That's funny, because the only scientific polling I have seen proves exactly the opposite: that immigration reform had absolutely nothing to do with it. Rachel Maddow did practically a whole show on exactly that to you people, and here you are trying to spread falsehoods and propagating MSM myths.
Of course, she does mention the Brat ads about immigration, stretching it to "his whole campaign ran on it", which is also false. Brat ran on the Republican Creed, and we spent 5 years laying the groundwork to get rid of Cantor. But, whatever, clearly the immigration debate was NOT the deciding factor.
There is NO HOSTILITY TOWARDS IMMIGRATION. There is however hostility towards lawbreakers and those who ignore our constitution and borders.
Ding ding!
I would prefer a much more open immigration policy, but we have the dual issues of wage suppression at a time when average wages have fallen far behind, and an over burdened social welfare system that is being asked to support more and more of our current citizens that are struggling, and is ill-equipped to deal with a flood of new claimants.
What more concerning is that unlimited money could buy unlimited influence.
Clearly false, not only in the sense that there is no such thing as "unlimited money", but that there is also a hard limit to the amount of influence money can buy, no matter how much funds you spend to trying it.
The fact is, regardless of what you believe, grassroots can beat money every time. I have other examples, but the Cantor one is excellent. I was involved with that, and we actually started the effort to oust Cantor five years ago. We presented Cantor some minor challenges along the way (which at least forced him to spend some of his considerable war chest on campaign efforts), but we never really had a good candidate until Brat came along. We had laid the groundwork at the grassroots level already. The platform Brat ran on was easy: He ran on the points in the Republican Party Creed, and he only needed to show how Cantor failed to follow it, point-by-point.
When average candidate has to spend this kind of crazy money to get elected, then donors are in position to dictate policy.
Candidates are supposed to represent their constituents, including the donors. In Brat's case, ALL of his money (the little of it he had) came from small donors and individuals. He should be accountable to them. In Cantor's case, he was beholden not to money from his district, but from large, national PACs, corporate donors, etc. It cost him his seat, and the money could not save him.
Why create a situation where politician has to make a choice between voting in the best interest of constituents and keeping re-election funding?
The only way to do that is to elect corrupt politicians. In fact, politicians never have to make that choice, because it's called bribery, quid-pro-quo, and corruption, and it's 100% illegal. As we have shown, many more times than this, the money does not help if you don't have support of the people. Buy all the votes you want, we'll make more.
Most wars are ultimately about resources. The changes caused by global warming are subtle enough that someone like you can easily argue they are natural occurrences in the short run but as time marches on they will become more and more obvious. Expansion of the Hadley Cells and more desertification in the descending legs (where Syria is located) is an expected result of global warming.
And most people killed by governments are killed BY THEIR OWN GOVERNMENT, not by war. There are plenty of reasons for war, and, frankly, many of the large ones were NOT about resources, but caused by nationalism or religious intolerance.
But, hey, keep on preaching the global warming alarmism. It's most likely to lead to either war, or some country deciding the need to eliminate a chunk of their own population. That's the path "you're not allowed to use fossil fuels or nuclear" will lead to, as it reduces resources for EVERYONE.
What? Who would setup there racks that way! As if you wouldnt have them all coming into the same network and being aggregates somewhere and having routing determine which links are used. I seriously doubt they segregate parts of their server farm for different interconnects. That just sounds inefficient.
Anyone with a large customer base that is pushing out a LOT of data (like Netflix). For the most part, they pay CDNs to deliver their data to the last-mile networks. With the Comcast and Verizon deal, they are co-locating their servers in Comcast and Verizon's data centers. The content they deliver is fairly static, so it makes sense to do it that way. User account data and other volatile data probably takes a different route, but when you start a movie streaming, you'll connect to the closest delivery point on your network. For Comcast and Verizon customers, that's now a shorter route.
And yet if we don't control our CO2 emissions the end result will be an increased strain on our civilization which is likely to cause more wars anyway.
Pure rampant speculation without even any historical evidence to back it up.
For instance one factor in the Syrian conflict is the drought that Syria has been going through for the last 3 years. The chances are good that global warming is part of the Syrian drought.
Droughts have occurred since before mankind existed. More rampant speculation with NO evidence.
Wait... since netflix has direct connection to verizon, and I doubt netflix's amazon cloud servers discriminate between comcast and verizon connections.
You are misunderstanding how interconnects work. The servers aren't sitting there pushing out data to every connection. Netflix pays for delivery to several CDNs. They now have new agreements with Comcast and Verizon with connections directly to those networks. So the servers used for Verizon are different than the servers used for other network connections.
Their real question is whether the changes will cause a great die off in humans and animals. Some animals will undoubtedly thrive in the new environment but humans, probably not so much.
Considering the biggest killer of humans in the last 200 years has been governments, for some reason I don't think they can be trusted to "save" any of them. Give them enough power to control CO2 emissions, then their most likely course of action will be to quickly reduce the global population - because attrition would take too long.
Do you have a any citations that collaborate this claim, ranking it vs other causes? Looking at various statistics about leading causes of death, intentional deaths including war seem to be pretty far down the list.
I can't find any specific figures for ALL cases of killing by government, but there are some supporting figures on this web site on the statistics for Democide. It's by far #1 cause of unnatural death in the 20th century. Include wars (which is actually LESS a killer than governments killing their own people), and it easily surpasses everything else.
No, they are not. A tariff is a tax applied ONLY TO AN IMPORTED ITEM.
A tax applied to ALL ITEMS, is simply a tax and TOTALLY LEGAL PER ALL TREATIES.
Only if the tax is applied universally. You originally said the goods would be "taxed based on where the parts are from". That's a tariff and likely would run afoul of trade treaties.
Their real question is whether the changes will cause a great die off in humans and animals. Some animals will undoubtedly thrive in the new environment but humans, probably not so much.
Considering the biggest killer of humans in the last 200 years has been governments, for some reason I don't think they can be trusted to "save" any of them. Give them enough power to control CO2 emissions, then their most likely course of action will be to quickly reduce the global population - because attrition would take too long.
Days are only 24 hours, you use a few sleeping, you have better things to do than watching movies the rest of the time.
Well I don't know about that, people should be able to spend their time how they want.
On the other hand, when they are petitioning the government to solve a problem, they might want to consider issues like the broken tax code, drone wars, ubiquitous surveillance and the $17 trillion federal debt, rather than imposing new regulations on Internet service because their video watching marathons are doing too much buffering.
They already HAS paid Verizon for better service...and Verizon STILL isn't providing it...
No, not for "better service", they paid for an interconnect. That's it. It means that instead of streaming traversing from Netflix -> 3rd party backbone provider -> Verizon, it now goes directly from Netflix -> Verizon. So Verizon is correct - they are providing a connection from Netflix at the data rate specified in the agreement. Those messages may be the interconnect is actually too small (because Netflix undersized it), or something between the user's device and Verizon's network. Sure, it could be a crowded Verizon network, but claiming it's THE cause is speculation, and claiming that there is something Verizon isn't providing is completely wrong.
Well, your argumentation is as devoid of actual substance as that of Evolution deniers, Climate Change Deniers and other reality deniers.
That's funny, because it's got more substance than yours or Altemeyr's. So what does thae make you?
Basically your claim that Altemeyr cannot be right because you think he cannot be right.
No, my claim is that Altemeyr has created an extremely long argumentative essay with lots of references to back up his opinion. It's still not science. It's not even a balanced essay, because the only opinion it informs is his own. Just because there are facts included does not make it science. There are also facts to refute his opinion. If it was science, that would instantly disprove his theory. The very notion that (1) Different facts can be used to discredit his opinion, and (2) different conclusions can be drawn from the same set of facts, by definition rules out real "science" as a valid description of his writing.
The fact that you have your head so far up your ass that you can't even acknowledge that means you are anti-science, and nothing more than a useful idiot spreading propaganda and lies. You're hurting science as well as the Democratic party that all of this is intended to prop up.
If you want to discuss it more, I'd suggest you pop over to Daily Kos, where the other hyper-partisans will buy into your arguments. It's finished here.
You are fully retarded, and you're just calling names. I pointed out that all of his stuff is opinion, not fact, clearly documented it, and you're still out on trying to claim your worldview is objective.
But you are obviously not interested in facts, otherwise you would have looked, you know, at the actual research and criticized the approach and methods used. Your claim that he uses tiny samples is a direct lie on your side. Your claim that he is cherry-picking is another direct lie. I suspect you have not even looked and made that up to be able to stick with your own broken model of the world. You do not even seem to have read enough of it to find out that Altemeyr is not referring to political parties but to people attracted to certain areas of the spectrum. The science is sound. The problem you have with it is in your mind.
You're defending a bunch of political propaganda as science. It's not. He's welcome to his opinion, as are you, but claiming it's unbiased science is an insult to real scientists.
And yes, Altemeyr also gives his opinions on the subject, but only after cleanly deriving the scientific facts.
Incorrect. He starts with his hyperpartisan opinion and uses cherry-picked surveys and specific people to represent entire groups. His writing is full of hasty generalization and appeals to misleading authority
Here are some examples, directly from his writing:
Republicans in Congress voted massively against the bill, and Democrats took the heat for trying to stop a recession that the Republicans had largely caused by deregulating the banking system.
Oh, my, that is soooo SCIENCY! There are valid arguments for the causes of the crisis, with Democratic and Republican policies as culprits. What Altemeyr does here (as throughout his writing) is to present his opinion as fact. It's not.
The first of what became Tea Party protests occurred on February 10, 2009. It was produced by FreedomWorks, an organization led by influential Republicans such as former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, that specialized in creating “grass roots” protests. On February 9, a FreedomWorks official phoned Mary Rakovich in Ft. Myers, Florida, whom he had trained in organizing demonstrations http://www.verumserum.com/?p=4... . He wanted a protest the next night when Obama was in town holding a town hall on the stimulus bill. About ten people showed up on short notice to decry government waste and “Obamas socialism,” but it was a start. Rakovich was then interviewed on Fox.
Here he presents a cherry-picked event to depict his opinion of what started a very diverse movement. And it's not even accurate. There are many events that lead to various protests and groups that called themselves "tea party". Altemeyr uses this one to support his later fallacious appeal to misleading authority arguments. He ignores factual events like the Ron Paul tea party events, the Young Americans for Liberty tea party protests, and others - but instead selects a later event attended by only 10 people (smaller than the earlier events). This is at LEAST cherry-picking, or you could just all it a lie, because it's intentionally deceitful.
So if you're on board with this guy's OPINION, you can like it and think it's "science". If you're looking for some unbiased and useful social science commentary, look elsewhere. Because his writing is really just partisan propaganda.
I'm as free to use meaningless ad hominen attacks as any "crackpot".
Well you've certainly succeeded in that, with the links you posted. You've even managed to include both ad hominem AND strawman arguments in your response. It makes it easy to attack libertarian ideas when you first define it as a desire to eliminate all government. Around here we call that anarchy.
Libertarianism, or more accurately classical liberalism, is nothing more than the basic principles and ideals from the US Constitution. No doubt you'll then claim I'm supporting slavery, but that institution was an exception to the principles of the Constitutional Republic, and was corrected with the 14th amendment. The Constitution recognized (after the failure of the Articles of the Confederacy), is that government is a necessary evil. It's necessary for a functioning state, but inherently evil and therefore requires strict restraints.
What's stunning about people like you that propose a fungible state that practices no adherence to principle or rule of law, is you end up with things like excessively powerful corporations (assisted by government authority), which you rail against. At the same time you emphatically support entities like a privately owned central bank, which all government funds are required to borrow from, and require the middle class and especially the working poor to suffer the debt and interest payments that result from it.
This isn't wah-wah I need the nanny state to protect me from my own stupidity, this is I want to live in a country where if a toy is marketed as suitable for a 3 year old, that it actually contains no small sharp parts or is made of hazerdous toxic materials or is likely to explode, without me having to personally vet them all.
And why do you suppose that every taxpayer and business should have to pay and be subject to prosecution by the government because you don't want to take responsibility for your children and the things you give them to play with?
He(?) isn't failing to take responsibility; You're expecting the impossible. You want him to be a safety expert across multiple fields and spend large amounts of time testing his children's toys. Of course you don't only want him to do this but all parents, and childrens homes and anyone else responsible for children. Just so some companies can cut corners and make unsafe toys. It'd actually cost the taxpayer more not less.
When I was a kid and wanted a toy, my parents gave me a stick. And we LIKED it.
These cars are driving on public property not private land so you analogy to landfill on your own land fails.
Good point. The cars obey the SAME rules as every other car on the public road, including safety inspections and insurance requirements (actually, Uber cars have MORE).
Only if you're significantly myopic by limiting "history" to a tiny portion of its totality.
Try reading the histories of Standard Oil and Southern Pacific Railroad et. al.
I have, and your view is propaganda spread in government-run schools designed to support trust in government, and is not an accurate depiction at all. Most learned historians know that Standard Oil's market share was shrinking before the government went after them, and that the primary motivation for doing it was a desire for greater power by Huey Long, who had designs on the Presidency. His fame comes from taking on the supposed "boogeyman", even though competition from other oil companies was already correcting the issue before started his campaign.
when the largest corporations bought the Supreme Court
Back then, there was more money in private hands than government. So I can't imagine why they would want the SCOTUS unless they got it for firesale prices, so you'll have to provide some citation for that. The specific case you cite (both in Wikipedia AND a progressive propaganda site that promotes Democracy because they think minorities are always wrong), was correct on the law. There was no reason to treat corporate deductions for mortgages different than individuals, based on the rule of law. The real issue (which the court didn't address), was the congress using revenue raising powers for behavior modification, a problem worse today than ever, with a tax code so complicated even the professionals can't follow it all.
Those who perpetuate the myth of government oppression are either ignorant of corporate history, are willfully recalcitrant about corporate malfeasance, are merely regurgitating corporate propaganda or are themselves blind to the foundation of western capitalism- personal self-interest and greed.
You're and indoctrinated, statist piece of shit. There is no educating useful idiots like you. Go worship on the alter of totalitarian government, and good luck to you. Why not try North Korea. They have EXACTLY what you're looking for already implemented.
You argument in its whole is that democracy as a system needs to be thrown out and instead we need a system where only those with money get to vote and their vote depends on money they are willing to spend on their voting.
Cool straw man, bro
Agreeing with you. I find it amazing that grossly rich bastards like the Kennedy's, etc., always want to tax the heck out of the middle class worker INCOMES finally breaking even middle management levels. None of them seem to wish to tax standing capital.
THIS. Why won't the political class ever touch the idea of a wealth tax?
Free Speech Protections have very specific applicability - it only protect citizens against government limiting their speech targeted at some aspect of government.
Incorrect. Free Speech is protected absolutely, unless the radical left-wing in the Senate manages to pass their new amendment that will create a protected class (allowed free speech), and eliminate it for all others.
You still failed to demonstrate how "we, the people" benefit from allowing anonymous and corporate money influence politics.
Try reading the FEC regulations and demonstrate how anyone without a lot funds to pay lawyers and accountants to collect data and submit reports could possibly follow all the requirements. And that's the CURRENT system - trying to create NEW rules that restrict not only direct contributions, but also ANY communication, including blogs, articles, flyers, etc. would completely stifle free speech. Even sending email to any significant audience requires something like Constant Contact, which is NOT free. It all requires some money.
How is our democratic process is strengthened by SuperPACs trying to buy elections?
It doesn't. But allowing Nazis to demonstrate and hold parades doesn't strengthen anything we want, either. But free speech is useless if only the speech we LIKE is allowed. As Thomas Jefferson said, "I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it."
What do you think happens when bill affecting ABC Inc. that donated substantial amount to a politician's election fund comes on the floor? Conflict of interest happens, where this politician has to potentially choose between representing campaign donors or representing constituents. Sure, some politicians would act honorably and do the right thing, but you can be sure that some will fail. So why create this issue at all? What do, we, the people, gain from allowing anonymous and corporate money into politics? Are we any freer as a result?
Free Speech. Probably the most important freedom enshrined in the Constitution. And, yes, we ARE more free because of it.
If you don't believe me, try starting a political committee some time and try to deal with the scrutiny required by the FEC and the IRS. You won't feel very free to express your opinion in that arena, quite the opposite. And that's a very handy tool for an established politician, who now has a very big stick (some penalties will net you jail time) and lawyers on staff.
Clearly false:
Clearly true, if you had bothered to find statistics for the group the GP was talking about, which was the top 1%, not the top 20%. Cheap labor, corporate CEOs, and people that hire nannies and personal assistants are NOT in your charts or stats.
Why don't these guys simply pay attention to a scientific poll that was already run in Eric Cantor's district to see how successful this idea is!
Sheesh!
First time in history that Majority leader of the House has lost his seat- all because he supported some form of immigration reform.
That worked well for him didn't it.
That's funny, because the only scientific polling I have seen proves exactly the opposite: that immigration reform had absolutely nothing to do with it. Rachel Maddow did practically a whole show on exactly that to you people, and here you are trying to spread falsehoods and propagating MSM myths.
Oh, look, here it is.
Of course, she does mention the Brat ads about immigration, stretching it to "his whole campaign ran on it", which is also false. Brat ran on the Republican Creed, and we spent 5 years laying the groundwork to get rid of Cantor. But, whatever, clearly the immigration debate was NOT the deciding factor.
There is NO HOSTILITY TOWARDS IMMIGRATION. There is however hostility towards lawbreakers and those who ignore our constitution and borders.
Ding ding!
I would prefer a much more open immigration policy, but we have the dual issues of wage suppression at a time when average wages have fallen far behind, and an over burdened social welfare system that is being asked to support more and more of our current citizens that are struggling, and is ill-equipped to deal with a flood of new claimants.
For the GOP, that would mean access to cheap labor, reduced taxes (say, for nanny/personal services), etc.
That's not the GOP, that's the upper class. And, in fact, the majority of them vote Democrat, not Republican.
What more concerning is that unlimited money could buy unlimited influence.
Clearly false, not only in the sense that there is no such thing as "unlimited money", but that there is also a hard limit to the amount of influence money can buy, no matter how much funds you spend to trying it.
The fact is, regardless of what you believe, grassroots can beat money every time. I have other examples, but the Cantor one is excellent. I was involved with that, and we actually started the effort to oust Cantor five years ago. We presented Cantor some minor challenges along the way (which at least forced him to spend some of his considerable war chest on campaign efforts), but we never really had a good candidate until Brat came along. We had laid the groundwork at the grassroots level already. The platform Brat ran on was easy: He ran on the points in the Republican Party Creed, and he only needed to show how Cantor failed to follow it, point-by-point.
When average candidate has to spend this kind of crazy money to get elected, then donors are in position to dictate policy.
Candidates are supposed to represent their constituents, including the donors. In Brat's case, ALL of his money (the little of it he had) came from small donors and individuals. He should be accountable to them. In Cantor's case, he was beholden not to money from his district, but from large, national PACs, corporate donors, etc. It cost him his seat, and the money could not save him.
Why create a situation where politician has to make a choice between voting in the best interest of constituents and keeping re-election funding?
The only way to do that is to elect corrupt politicians. In fact, politicians never have to make that choice, because it's called bribery, quid-pro-quo, and corruption, and it's 100% illegal. As we have shown, many more times than this, the money does not help if you don't have support of the people. Buy all the votes you want, we'll make more.
Most wars are ultimately about resources. The changes caused by global warming are subtle enough that someone like you can easily argue they are natural occurrences in the short run but as time marches on they will become more and more obvious. Expansion of the Hadley Cells and more desertification in the descending legs (where Syria is located) is an expected result of global warming.
And most people killed by governments are killed BY THEIR OWN GOVERNMENT, not by war. There are plenty of reasons for war, and, frankly, many of the large ones were NOT about resources, but caused by nationalism or religious intolerance.
But, hey, keep on preaching the global warming alarmism. It's most likely to lead to either war, or some country deciding the need to eliminate a chunk of their own population. That's the path "you're not allowed to use fossil fuels or nuclear" will lead to, as it reduces resources for EVERYONE.
What? Who would setup there racks that way! As if you wouldnt have them all coming into the same network and being aggregates somewhere and having routing determine which links are used. I seriously doubt they segregate parts of their server farm for different interconnects. That just sounds inefficient.
Anyone with a large customer base that is pushing out a LOT of data (like Netflix). For the most part, they pay CDNs to deliver their data to the last-mile networks. With the Comcast and Verizon deal, they are co-locating their servers in Comcast and Verizon's data centers. The content they deliver is fairly static, so it makes sense to do it that way. User account data and other volatile data probably takes a different route, but when you start a movie streaming, you'll connect to the closest delivery point on your network. For Comcast and Verizon customers, that's now a shorter route.
And yet if we don't control our CO2 emissions the end result will be an increased strain on our civilization which is likely to cause more wars anyway.
Pure rampant speculation without even any historical evidence to back it up.
For instance one factor in the Syrian conflict is the drought that Syria has been going through for the last 3 years. The chances are good that global warming is part of the Syrian drought.
Droughts have occurred since before mankind existed. More rampant speculation with NO evidence.
Wait... since netflix has direct connection to verizon, and I doubt netflix's amazon cloud servers discriminate between comcast and verizon connections.
You are misunderstanding how interconnects work. The servers aren't sitting there pushing out data to every connection. Netflix pays for delivery to several CDNs. They now have new agreements with Comcast and Verizon with connections directly to those networks. So the servers used for Verizon are different than the servers used for other network connections.
Their real question is whether the changes will cause a great die off in humans and animals. Some animals will undoubtedly thrive in the new environment but humans, probably not so much.
Considering the biggest killer of humans in the last 200 years has been governments, for some reason I don't think they can be trusted to "save" any of them. Give them enough power to control CO2 emissions, then their most likely course of action will be to quickly reduce the global population - because attrition would take too long.
Do you have a any citations that collaborate this claim, ranking it vs other causes? Looking at various statistics about leading causes of death, intentional deaths including war seem to be pretty far down the list.
I can't find any specific figures for ALL cases of killing by government, but there are some supporting figures on this web site on the statistics for Democide. It's by far #1 cause of unnatural death in the 20th century. Include wars (which is actually LESS a killer than governments killing their own people), and it easily surpasses everything else.
No, they are not. A tariff is a tax applied ONLY TO AN IMPORTED ITEM. A tax applied to ALL ITEMS, is simply a tax and TOTALLY LEGAL PER ALL TREATIES.
Only if the tax is applied universally. You originally said the goods would be "taxed based on where the parts are from". That's a tariff and likely would run afoul of trade treaties.
Their real question is whether the changes will cause a great die off in humans and animals. Some animals will undoubtedly thrive in the new environment but humans, probably not so much.
Considering the biggest killer of humans in the last 200 years has been governments, for some reason I don't think they can be trusted to "save" any of them. Give them enough power to control CO2 emissions, then their most likely course of action will be to quickly reduce the global population - because attrition would take too long.
Days are only 24 hours, you use a few sleeping, you have better things to do than watching movies the rest of the time.
Well I don't know about that, people should be able to spend their time how they want.
On the other hand, when they are petitioning the government to solve a problem, they might want to consider issues like the broken tax code, drone wars, ubiquitous surveillance and the $17 trillion federal debt, rather than imposing new regulations on Internet service because their video watching marathons are doing too much buffering.
They already HAS paid Verizon for better service...and Verizon STILL isn't providing it...
No, not for "better service", they paid for an interconnect. That's it. It means that instead of streaming traversing from Netflix -> 3rd party backbone provider -> Verizon, it now goes directly from Netflix -> Verizon. So Verizon is correct - they are providing a connection from Netflix at the data rate specified in the agreement. Those messages may be the interconnect is actually too small (because Netflix undersized it), or something between the user's device and Verizon's network. Sure, it could be a crowded Verizon network, but claiming it's THE cause is speculation, and claiming that there is something Verizon isn't providing is completely wrong.
Well, your argumentation is as devoid of actual substance as that of Evolution deniers, Climate Change Deniers and other reality deniers.
That's funny, because it's got more substance than yours or Altemeyr's. So what does thae make you?
Basically your claim that Altemeyr cannot be right because you think he cannot be right.
No, my claim is that Altemeyr has created an extremely long argumentative essay with lots of references to back up his opinion. It's still not science. It's not even a balanced essay, because the only opinion it informs is his own. Just because there are facts included does not make it science. There are also facts to refute his opinion. If it was science, that would instantly disprove his theory. The very notion that (1) Different facts can be used to discredit his opinion, and (2) different conclusions can be drawn from the same set of facts, by definition rules out real "science" as a valid description of his writing.
The fact that you have your head so far up your ass that you can't even acknowledge that means you are anti-science, and nothing more than a useful idiot spreading propaganda and lies. You're hurting science as well as the Democratic party that all of this is intended to prop up.
If you want to discuss it more, I'd suggest you pop over to Daily Kos, where the other hyper-partisans will buy into your arguments. It's finished here.
You are fully retarded, and you're just calling names. I pointed out that all of his stuff is opinion, not fact, clearly documented it, and you're still out on trying to claim your worldview is objective.
Robot is a robot.
But you are obviously not interested in facts, otherwise you would have looked, you know, at the actual research and criticized the approach and methods used. Your claim that he uses tiny samples is a direct lie on your side. Your claim that he is cherry-picking is another direct lie. I suspect you have not even looked and made that up to be able to stick with your own broken model of the world. You do not even seem to have read enough of it to find out that Altemeyr is not referring to political parties but to people attracted to certain areas of the spectrum. The science is sound. The problem you have with it is in your mind.
You're defending a bunch of political propaganda as science. It's not. He's welcome to his opinion, as are you, but claiming it's unbiased science is an insult to real scientists.
And yes, Altemeyr also gives his opinions on the subject, but only after cleanly deriving the scientific facts.
Incorrect. He starts with his hyperpartisan opinion and uses cherry-picked surveys and specific people to represent entire groups. His writing is full of hasty generalization and appeals to misleading authority
Here are some examples, directly from his writing:
Oh, my, that is soooo SCIENCY! There are valid arguments for the causes of the crisis, with Democratic and Republican policies as culprits. What Altemeyr does here (as throughout his writing) is to present his opinion as fact. It's not.
Here he presents a cherry-picked event to depict his opinion of what started a very diverse movement. And it's not even accurate. There are many events that lead to various protests and groups that called themselves "tea party". Altemeyr uses this one to support his later fallacious appeal to misleading authority arguments. He ignores factual events like the Ron Paul tea party events, the Young Americans for Liberty tea party protests, and others - but instead selects a later event attended by only 10 people (smaller than the earlier events). This is at LEAST cherry-picking, or you could just all it a lie, because it's intentionally deceitful.
So if you're on board with this guy's OPINION, you can like it and think it's "science". If you're looking for some unbiased and useful social science commentary, look elsewhere. Because his writing is really just partisan propaganda.
I'm as free to use meaningless ad hominen attacks as any "crackpot".
Well you've certainly succeeded in that, with the links you posted. You've even managed to include both ad hominem AND strawman arguments in your response. It makes it easy to attack libertarian ideas when you first define it as a desire to eliminate all government. Around here we call that anarchy.
Libertarianism, or more accurately classical liberalism, is nothing more than the basic principles and ideals from the US Constitution. No doubt you'll then claim I'm supporting slavery, but that institution was an exception to the principles of the Constitutional Republic, and was corrected with the 14th amendment. The Constitution recognized (after the failure of the Articles of the Confederacy), is that government is a necessary evil. It's necessary for a functioning state, but inherently evil and therefore requires strict restraints.
What's stunning about people like you that propose a fungible state that practices no adherence to principle or rule of law, is you end up with things like excessively powerful corporations (assisted by government authority), which you rail against. At the same time you emphatically support entities like a privately owned central bank, which all government funds are required to borrow from, and require the middle class and especially the working poor to suffer the debt and interest payments that result from it.
This isn't wah-wah I need the nanny state to protect me from my own stupidity, this is I want to live in a country where if a toy is marketed as suitable for a 3 year old, that it actually contains no small sharp parts or is made of hazerdous toxic materials or is likely to explode, without me having to personally vet them all.
And why do you suppose that every taxpayer and business should have to pay and be subject to prosecution by the government because you don't want to take responsibility for your children and the things you give them to play with?
He(?) isn't failing to take responsibility; You're expecting the impossible. You want him to be a safety expert across multiple fields and spend large amounts of time testing his children's toys. Of course you don't only want him to do this but all parents, and childrens homes and anyone else responsible for children. Just so some companies can cut corners and make unsafe toys. It'd actually cost the taxpayer more not less.
When I was a kid and wanted a toy, my parents gave me a stick. And we LIKED it.
Now GET OFF MY LAWN!
Nanny statist.
These cars are driving on public property not private land so you analogy to landfill on your own land fails.
Good point. The cars obey the SAME rules as every other car on the public road, including safety inspections and insurance requirements (actually, Uber cars have MORE).
You were saying?
Why do you think the option with less support should have precedence over the one with more?
Maybe because that's how we got the Salem witch hunts, slavery, Jim Crow, and laws banning same-sex marriage?
That's a pretty skewed view of political history.
Only if you're significantly myopic by limiting "history" to a tiny portion of its totality.
Try reading the histories of Standard Oil and Southern Pacific Railroad et. al.
I have, and your view is propaganda spread in government-run schools designed to support trust in government, and is not an accurate depiction at all. Most learned historians know that Standard Oil's market share was shrinking before the government went after them, and that the primary motivation for doing it was a desire for greater power by Huey Long, who had designs on the Presidency. His fame comes from taking on the supposed "boogeyman", even though competition from other oil companies was already correcting the issue before started his campaign.
when the largest corporations bought the Supreme Court
Back then, there was more money in private hands than government. So I can't imagine why they would want the SCOTUS unless they got it for firesale prices, so you'll have to provide some citation for that. The specific case you cite (both in Wikipedia AND a progressive propaganda site that promotes Democracy because they think minorities are always wrong), was correct on the law. There was no reason to treat corporate deductions for mortgages different than individuals, based on the rule of law. The real issue (which the court didn't address), was the congress using revenue raising powers for behavior modification, a problem worse today than ever, with a tax code so complicated even the professionals can't follow it all.
Those who perpetuate the myth of government oppression are either ignorant of corporate history, are willfully recalcitrant about corporate malfeasance, are merely regurgitating corporate propaganda or are themselves blind to the foundation of western capitalism- personal self-interest and greed.
You're and indoctrinated, statist piece of shit. There is no educating useful idiots like you. Go worship on the alter of totalitarian government, and good luck to you. Why not try North Korea. They have EXACTLY what you're looking for already implemented.