The question is "Can we go to the moon?" and that contains the implicit assumption that we left the moon.
Perhaps English is not your first language, but no, "can we go" does not imply we've been there before. Or maybe you've just never gone someplace you haven't been before?
"Can we return" implies we've been. "Can we go back", the same. But just "can we go", no. Sorry. Nice try.
Why limit it to that one specific natural disaster?
Because that was the context of his statement and context is important, and as I pointed out, he made no such demand. Why try so hard to change the subject?
As far as I can tell this is part of the "fuck you, I got mine" philosophy.
You mean like the "I got hydro, fuck you" philosophy that allows you to demand so many regulations on fossil fuel energy that it becomes illegal and has to shut down, leaving other parts of the country in the dark or under severe energy shortages?
I for one rather have a nice first world nation.
We have a nice first world nation and some of us would like it to stay that way. That includes having electricity.
I am not the person who decided to invest in something that is going to become illegal.
People do not choose to "invest" in how their local power company makes electricity. Their local power company makes power and the people buy it from them because they don't have anyone else to buy it from. The ones who live in an area that have dams for hydro get hydro power. Those who live where there is a nuke plant get nuclear power. Those who live where coal is the power plant of choice get coal.
I'm not going to send $10 to my power company and demand that they build a nuke plant because I don't want them to do coal, it would be a waste of time and money.
If you really can't deal with the thought of any regulation
It is something that used to be legal that no longer is.
It is illegal to sell water? Someone better tell Coke and Pepsi and Evian and...
It may be illegal to sell water that you call medicine, but it is also illegal to sell electricity and call it medicine, too. The issue is not a prohibition on how you label something, it is a prohibition on how it is produced, which makes your analogy specious.
If the media companies did not recognize format shifting, then they would not have signed a contract with Amazon that allows them to distribute ripped copies of media that has been purchased in solid form. It would be simple for them: you shall not distribute MP3s when someone buys a CD from you.
We're talking about the distribution system (Amazon) that actually reached out and deleted a book from their Kindle users when the estate of the author pulled (or pointed out they didn't have) authorization to sell that book as an epub. 1984, anyone? It's not like there isn't precedent for Amazon to obey copyright owner limitations.
If their costs go up, this does not necessarily mean the price the market will bear will go up the same amount.
The price the market will bear depends upon the competition driving prices down. At the very bottom end of that drive, however, is profit. A company that does not profit cannot stay in business. It can't pay the employees or the suppliers and it doesn't have employees or suppliers eventually. Very hard to be a company if you don't have employees or suppliers.
If you note, the increased costs of oil have driven prices up well beyond what anyone would have imagined a decade or two ago. The market apparently bears that newer price.
But your analysis reminds me of an old joke. Two widget companies are competing, one of them selling at a price well below the other. The one CEO asks the other how he can sell widgets so far below the cost of manufacturing them. The answer? "What I don't get in profits I make up in volume.".
I am not a climate scientist. So someone please help me to understand how and why the ice caps melting is a perfectly okay thing? I'm not asking whether or not the ice caps melting is man made.
Yes, implicit in your question is the assumption it is human caused. If you thought it wasn't caused by us, then your question is moot. Good or bad, it's going to happen. The question is not "is this good?", but "how do we deal with it?" For example, the people in Pompeii probably didn't stop to ask "is this good or bad", they had a grasp on the situation and lept right to the question "how do I get out of here?" Those who sat pondering "is this good or bad" are the ones we find in the archeological digs.
How is it not climate change?I have an extremely open mind. Just lay out some reasons why it's not climate change.... I *want* to believe climate change is a hoax. It just doesn't look like one to me.
The important question is not "is climate change a hoax", the important question is "can we do anything to stop it?" That, of course, contains the implicit assumption that we are causing it. It's all this "correlation is not causation" stuff writ large. If you see something happening and you don't remove the actual causal forcing, then it will keep happening. If all you do is stop the correlated activity, you'll be left wondering why the thing you are trying to stop isn't stopping.
As for the original article, I find the claim that we'll stop helping developing countries unless they build their things the way we tell them to to be counterproductive. "Spend extra money getting to the same level of development we are at or we won't help you get there." Oh, you want to keep us down. We'll build our plants doing it our way as we can afford, and if it doesn't have "sequestration" that's too bad. You lost any right to tell us how to do things when you walked away from the table.
But, really, as far as the media companies are concerned, there is no 'legally ripped' as they don't recognize your right to format shift music you have purchased.
Interesting. Not long ago I got a credit for a free MP3 from Amazon for using the app store for my Android devices. After going through the signup process for this Amazon Cloud thing, as if by magic almost every CD I have ever bought from Amazon showed up on my desktop system as MP3s. They don't seen to have any DRM on them, they play on everything I tried them on.
What was that about no recognition of format shifting? I didn't even have to do the shifting, Amazon did it for me.
My advice is to keep your laptop/ipod or whatever with you as carry-on luggage.
That advice is true whether or not he's dealing with ripped media. It's just common sense, at least to anyone who has seen how baggage handlers handle baggage.
I hear that certain lifestyles run a much higher risk of contracting diseases that are long-term and costly to treat. Maybe we should outlaw such lifestyles on the pretext of not wanting to pay for the downstream healthcare costs. Just saying.
Yeah! This. I hear that the hetero style often results in pregnancy (a horrible debilitating disease, if you ask any woman, especially around 9 months in) and huge long-term costs as everyone pays to feed and educate the results. It should be outlawed.
If it was so good, why could they sell me a 2-liter bottle but not a 64 ounce cup?
And I'm still wondering how the sugar that isn't in a 64 oz cup of diet Mt. Dew merits a prohibition on selling me a 64 oz cup of diet Mt. Dew. And where the government thought it had the right to ban such a sale in the first place.
From what I've experienced, American employers really don't give a shit about their employees and certainly don't plan on keeping them around for 50+ years.
No, it's more like they see no reasonable benefit to them from your closer connection to your children twenty years after they are born, and YOU are very unlikely to be working for them after 40 years (hired at 20, retire at 60, that's 40 years) much less 50 (did you enter the workforce at 15?)
Whether they are happy or sad
So this is the entire benefit to them, their children are twenty and they are 'happy'? I'd be happy if my employer bought me a Jaguar and a Rolex... should the government force them to do that, too?
is a waste of their precious money.
So, money can be precious to workers but not to the stockholders? Just askin'.
No, I got it exactly right. The aggregate data "shows a clear but misleading pattern of bias against female applicants." That's the "let's see if the percentages match the general population and claim discrimination if they don't match, ignoring all possible reasons why." It wasn't until someone considered the specific instances that they decided "The bias in the aggregated data stems not from any pattern of discrimination on the part of admissions committees". That's looking at the actual "agency X" and figuring out that there are plenty of opportunities for girls to play sports but they don't want to, and "agency X" isn't actually violating Title 9 by failing to provide the opportunities.
Sounds like a totally appropriate use of taxpayer money.
Nonsense. If you choose to have a child, you should accept the responsibility to raise it. That include feeding, clothing, housing, and nurturing. If you can't afford any of that, don't have a child.
After the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, mothers on welfare were required to go to work.
There is a significant difference between what is being discussed here, which is taxpayer funded child support for anyone who wants to go back to work, and welfare. By the way, this legislation was signed by Bill Clinton.
What happens to their kids? Are they supposed to run around unsupervised on the streets?
People who can afford to pay for child care should do so, and if they allow their children to run amok in the streets they should be charged with child abandonment or endangerment. It is not everyone else's responsibility to pay for raising your children.
For my own safety, I'd rather have them in government-funded programs.
And I'd rather have them in parent-funded programs, or in the home where the parents can monitor them personally and maybe create some emotional bonding that would keep them from becoming sociopaths.
That's a good use of taxpayer money. It's cheaper than putting them all in jail.
Yes, let's put all children in jail. That's exactly what I've been suggesting. You win.
I have to say, you Americans have a completely retarded system when it comes to maternity leave etc., and I don't just mean what the government decides.
"We Americans" don't have a system for maternity leave. If you look carefully in our Constitution, you won't find one of the powers of government to be "give every woman who wants to have a baby paid time off". It isn't a disease that needs mandatory time off or sick leave. In other words, the government has no business deciding.
It's been 3 awesome months.
I'm sure it has been. Does your government pay you for taking time off for everything that is "awesome"? Can you get them to pay for a trip to Disneyland, for example?
What I don't get is: even when you don't have paid maternity/paternity leave (which is your society's fault),
Hardly.
why can't you as the man take (20-40%) of the time staying at home (before kindergarden), and then your wife takes the rest?
Well, the woman is pregnant all nine months. Does your government manage to get that job swapped off to the husband so he needs time off? Wouldn't that be awesome, a system like you ask about, where I can get my wife pregnant, take five months off with pay, and then she gets the next four to deal with being pregnant. Wham, bam, thank you Ma'am I'm going to Orlando for five months!
But seriously, some companies do give paid paternity leave, so your question is moot.
I mean, she has after all carried the baby and given birth to it, so surely she deserves more than 50%?
How magnanimous of you. I'm sure your wife thinks you are the salt of the earth. She deserves more than 50% of the maternity leave time for herself. You'll be happy with 49%.
Is your employer really going to deny you a total of (1-3)x3 months of unpaid leave,
You're talking about paid leave to start with, and now it's unpaid. The FMLA means our employers cannot deny us 3 months of unpaid leave for maternity or paternity. So, this question is also moot.
when seen against your entire working life of 50+ years
And you think Norway has a good system? You have to work 50+ years over there? Our standard retirement age is around 62 to 65 or so. We don't really enter the workforce, for the most part, until long after 12. We'd call them sweatshops, I think.
and all the benefits that come from a closer connection to your children?
Exactly what are the benefits to your employer during your 40th through 50th years of employment from your closer connection to your children? 30-40? 20-30?
We all deserve the pain it would cause for supporting the system we have now for so many decades.
Yeah, the pain.
The young folks don't have to pay into a system that they aren't going to get anything back from. What a pain for them. Less taxes for the rest of their lives.
The old folks don't get anything back from a system they've already paid into for all their lives and depend on to stay alive now.
I think the "pain" you expect us all to share is a bit different for some of us compared to others.
The "government" WAS the boomers. They made this promise to themselves
You're wrong. The social security act was passed in 1935 and taxes started being collected in 1937. The "boomers" weren't born until WWII -- after 1945 or so. This promise was made to us by FDR and his New Deal democrats, not the 'boomers'.
Each person making $129,000 year saves 10 other people from starving to death.
Huh? This is nonsense. What does it mean? What makes you think I'm going to be making $129,000 a year after I retire? That's just ridiculous.
(and most boomers will collect way more- even adjusting for inflation-- than they contributed).
Not if you cut them off because they managed to save a little too much of what they earned and in your mind don't deserve to get anything back from a system they paid into all their lives.
Here's a deal for you: give me back all the money I put into the system. Pay me back. I'll worry about myself. But don't you dare promise me that you'll take care of me in the future if I give you money I worked to earn today and then renege on the deal. That's patently dishonest.
I bet NONE of the people Bernie Madoff ripped off expected they would be 100% dependent on social security.
You're pulling in so much irrelevant stuff that talking to you makes no sense. I bet James Gandolfino expected to pay into the system for a few more years, too. So what?
In many British families in at least the last couple of hundred years, the upper classes farmed out their kids to governesses or boarding schools. So it's not necessarily funded by the taxpayer.
Those upper class British families were not crying for "better child care". Better child care is available for those who can pay for it. The complaint about needing "better child care" includes an implicit "that I don't have to pay a lot, if anything, for", and that means "taxpayer funded." Or, when someone is corporation bashing, the company needs to provide it free, which means the cost is passed on to the shareholders. In both cases, "other people paying to raise my children so I don't have to."
There was a study in Science of sex discrimination in Berkeley, in which researchers found that the graduate departments overall discriminated against admitting women. Then they refined the study to find out which specific departments were discriminating more -- and none of them were.
It turned out to be a now-classic example of Simpson's paradox in statistics.
No, sounds like the now typical politically correct use of simple statistics to prove whatever you want. If "agency X" doesn't have equal numbers of male and female Y, then agency X is discriminating against women. It doesn't matter why the numbers aren't the same. (And you can include cases when the numbers of men and women are a ratio dependent upon the percentages in the total.)
This is a typical Title 9 analysis. If School A has 40% female attendance, then if athletics doesn't have 40% participation by women the school is in violation of Title 9. It doesn't matter if 40% of the women don't want to participate, or if more than 60% of the men want to, if the numbers don't match the school is doing something wrong. (E.g., a school can have 100 women's sports, but if they have a very good men's football program and lots of boys want to play on the team, the school is at fault.)
So, in your example, the fact that the engineering departments didn't have X% of women applying was proof that the departments were discriminating, even if they accepted every woman that applies. No paradox here, just simple misapplication of statistics.
So, latch-key kids is your vision for a better society?
Latch-key kids are kids who don't have after-school child care and thus use their "latch keys" to get into the house where no parent is home.
Apparently, a society of children raised by professional child raisers, kind of like 10 hour a day school from age 1 through 18, is the better society the OP envisions. Funded, of course, by the taxpayer. Who needs parental or emotional attachments when the government is ready, willing and able to provide for all needs?
I could see means testing social security more (we already means test it some). Then you only take it away from people who have so much savings or such good pensions that they don't need it (it's just a cherry on top of their retirement income).
So then you're a proponent of government taking money away from people under false pretenses. As in, "we'll take X percent of your income away from you today to provide for you when you get old. Oops, now you're old, we aren't going to provide for you after all. But we WILL give out free lunches to every child no matter how much money their parents make during the summer when school isn't in session. Aren't you glad you paid all those taxes and trusted us?"
If a private company did that, they'd be guilty of fraud and behaving unethically. When government does it, its the younger people deciding they don't want to honor the promises made to their parents.
Slashdot Mirror
The question is "Can we go to the moon?" and that contains the implicit assumption that we left the moon.
Perhaps English is not your first language, but no, "can we go" does not imply we've been there before. Or maybe you've just never gone someplace you haven't been before?
"Can we return" implies we've been. "Can we go back", the same. But just "can we go", no. Sorry. Nice try.
Bloomie and his fellow elitists would be ecstatic to have such neighbors, no?
As long as all their sodas were in 32 oz or less size cups, I expect he'd be quite happy. Maybe not.
Why limit it to that one specific natural disaster?
Because that was the context of his statement and context is important, and as I pointed out, he made no such demand. Why try so hard to change the subject?
As far as I can tell this is part of the "fuck you, I got mine" philosophy.
You mean like the "I got hydro, fuck you" philosophy that allows you to demand so many regulations on fossil fuel energy that it becomes illegal and has to shut down, leaving other parts of the country in the dark or under severe energy shortages?
I for one rather have a nice first world nation.
We have a nice first world nation and some of us would like it to stay that way. That includes having electricity.
I am not the person who decided to invest in something that is going to become illegal.
People do not choose to "invest" in how their local power company makes electricity. Their local power company makes power and the people buy it from them because they don't have anyone else to buy it from. The ones who live in an area that have dams for hydro get hydro power. Those who live where there is a nuke plant get nuclear power. Those who live where coal is the power plant of choice get coal.
I'm not going to send $10 to my power company and demand that they build a nuke plant because I don't want them to do coal, it would be a waste of time and money.
If you really can't deal with the thought of any regulation
Hyperbole much?
I have no interest in your mythology. I want to know what state meets your demand for no natural disasters/
He made no such demand. He responded to one natural disaster which pretty much only occurs at the coast or very closely thereto.
It is something that used to be legal that no longer is.
It is illegal to sell water? Someone better tell Coke and Pepsi and Evian and ...
It may be illegal to sell water that you call medicine, but it is also illegal to sell electricity and call it medicine, too. The issue is not a prohibition on how you label something, it is a prohibition on how it is produced, which makes your analogy specious.
It was several years ago,
That was several years ago, this is today.
If the media companies did not recognize format shifting, then they would not have signed a contract with Amazon that allows them to distribute ripped copies of media that has been purchased in solid form. It would be simple for them: you shall not distribute MP3s when someone buys a CD from you.
We're talking about the distribution system (Amazon) that actually reached out and deleted a book from their Kindle users when the estate of the author pulled (or pointed out they didn't have) authorization to sell that book as an epub. 1984, anyone? It's not like there isn't precedent for Amazon to obey copyright owner limitations.
If their costs go up, this does not necessarily mean the price the market will bear will go up the same amount.
The price the market will bear depends upon the competition driving prices down. At the very bottom end of that drive, however, is profit. A company that does not profit cannot stay in business. It can't pay the employees or the suppliers and it doesn't have employees or suppliers eventually. Very hard to be a company if you don't have employees or suppliers.
If you note, the increased costs of oil have driven prices up well beyond what anyone would have imagined a decade or two ago. The market apparently bears that newer price.
But your analysis reminds me of an old joke. Two widget companies are competing, one of them selling at a price well below the other. The one CEO asks the other how he can sell widgets so far below the cost of manufacturing them. The answer? "What I don't get in profits I make up in volume.".
I am not a climate scientist. So someone please help me to understand how and why the ice caps melting is a perfectly okay thing? I'm not asking whether or not the ice caps melting is man made.
Yes, implicit in your question is the assumption it is human caused. If you thought it wasn't caused by us, then your question is moot. Good or bad, it's going to happen. The question is not "is this good?", but "how do we deal with it?" For example, the people in Pompeii probably didn't stop to ask "is this good or bad", they had a grasp on the situation and lept right to the question "how do I get out of here?" Those who sat pondering "is this good or bad" are the ones we find in the archeological digs.
How is it not climate change?I have an extremely open mind. Just lay out some reasons why it's not climate change. ... I *want* to believe climate change is a hoax. It just doesn't look like one to me.
The important question is not "is climate change a hoax", the important question is "can we do anything to stop it?" That, of course, contains the implicit assumption that we are causing it. It's all this "correlation is not causation" stuff writ large. If you see something happening and you don't remove the actual causal forcing, then it will keep happening. If all you do is stop the correlated activity, you'll be left wondering why the thing you are trying to stop isn't stopping.
As for the original article, I find the claim that we'll stop helping developing countries unless they build their things the way we tell them to to be counterproductive. "Spend extra money getting to the same level of development we are at or we won't help you get there." Oh, you want to keep us down. We'll build our plants doing it our way as we can afford, and if it doesn't have "sequestration" that's too bad. You lost any right to tell us how to do things when you walked away from the table.
But, really, as far as the media companies are concerned, there is no 'legally ripped' as they don't recognize your right to format shift music you have purchased.
Interesting. Not long ago I got a credit for a free MP3 from Amazon for using the app store for my Android devices. After going through the signup process for this Amazon Cloud thing, as if by magic almost every CD I have ever bought from Amazon showed up on my desktop system as MP3s. They don't seen to have any DRM on them, they play on everything I tried them on.
What was that about no recognition of format shifting? I didn't even have to do the shifting, Amazon did it for me.
My advice is to keep your laptop/ipod or whatever with you as carry-on luggage.
That advice is true whether or not he's dealing with ripped media. It's just common sense, at least to anyone who has seen how baggage handlers handle baggage.
I said for the NUTRITION you get.
Anyone who drinks PBR for the nutrition is a moron and their opinion should not be ignored, it should be lampooned and vilified at every opportunity.
I hear that certain lifestyles run a much higher risk of contracting diseases that are long-term and costly to treat. Maybe we should outlaw such lifestyles on the pretext of not wanting to pay for the downstream healthcare costs. Just saying.
Yeah! This. I hear that the hetero style often results in pregnancy (a horrible debilitating disease, if you ask any woman, especially around 9 months in) and huge long-term costs as everyone pays to feed and educate the results. It should be outlawed.
If it was so good, why could they sell me a 2-liter bottle but not a 64 ounce cup?
And I'm still wondering how the sugar that isn't in a 64 oz cup of diet Mt. Dew merits a prohibition on selling me a 64 oz cup of diet Mt. Dew. And where the government thought it had the right to ban such a sale in the first place.
From what I've experienced, American employers really don't give a shit about their employees and certainly don't plan on keeping them around for 50+ years.
No, it's more like they see no reasonable benefit to them from your closer connection to your children twenty years after they are born, and YOU are very unlikely to be working for them after 40 years (hired at 20, retire at 60, that's 40 years) much less 50 (did you enter the workforce at 15?)
Whether they are happy or sad
So this is the entire benefit to them, their children are twenty and they are 'happy'? I'd be happy if my employer bought me a Jaguar and a Rolex... should the government force them to do that, too?
is a waste of their precious money.
So, money can be precious to workers but not to the stockholders? Just askin'.
No, I got it exactly right. The aggregate data "shows a clear but misleading pattern of bias against female applicants." That's the "let's see if the percentages match the general population and claim discrimination if they don't match, ignoring all possible reasons why." It wasn't until someone considered the specific instances that they decided "The bias in the aggregated data stems not from any pattern of discrimination on the part of admissions committees". That's looking at the actual "agency X" and figuring out that there are plenty of opportunities for girls to play sports but they don't want to, and "agency X" isn't actually violating Title 9 by failing to provide the opportunities.
Sounds like a totally appropriate use of taxpayer money.
Nonsense. If you choose to have a child, you should accept the responsibility to raise it. That include feeding, clothing, housing, and nurturing. If you can't afford any of that, don't have a child.
After the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, mothers on welfare were required to go to work.
There is a significant difference between what is being discussed here, which is taxpayer funded child support for anyone who wants to go back to work, and welfare. By the way, this legislation was signed by Bill Clinton.
What happens to their kids? Are they supposed to run around unsupervised on the streets?
People who can afford to pay for child care should do so, and if they allow their children to run amok in the streets they should be charged with child abandonment or endangerment. It is not everyone else's responsibility to pay for raising your children.
For my own safety, I'd rather have them in government-funded programs.
And I'd rather have them in parent-funded programs, or in the home where the parents can monitor them personally and maybe create some emotional bonding that would keep them from becoming sociopaths.
That's a good use of taxpayer money. It's cheaper than putting them all in jail.
Yes, let's put all children in jail. That's exactly what I've been suggesting. You win.
I have to say, you Americans have a completely retarded system when it comes to maternity leave etc., and I don't just mean what the government decides.
"We Americans" don't have a system for maternity leave. If you look carefully in our Constitution, you won't find one of the powers of government to be "give every woman who wants to have a baby paid time off". It isn't a disease that needs mandatory time off or sick leave. In other words, the government has no business deciding.
It's been 3 awesome months.
I'm sure it has been. Does your government pay you for taking time off for everything that is "awesome"? Can you get them to pay for a trip to Disneyland, for example?
What I don't get is: even when you don't have paid maternity/paternity leave (which is your society's fault),
Hardly.
why can't you as the man take (20-40%) of the time staying at home (before kindergarden), and then your wife takes the rest?
Well, the woman is pregnant all nine months. Does your government manage to get that job swapped off to the husband so he needs time off? Wouldn't that be awesome, a system like you ask about, where I can get my wife pregnant, take five months off with pay, and then she gets the next four to deal with being pregnant. Wham, bam, thank you Ma'am I'm going to Orlando for five months!
But seriously, some companies do give paid paternity leave, so your question is moot.
I mean, she has after all carried the baby and given birth to it, so surely she deserves more than 50%?
How magnanimous of you. I'm sure your wife thinks you are the salt of the earth. She deserves more than 50% of the maternity leave time for herself. You'll be happy with 49%.
Is your employer really going to deny you a total of (1-3)x3 months of unpaid leave,
You're talking about paid leave to start with, and now it's unpaid. The FMLA means our employers cannot deny us 3 months of unpaid leave for maternity or paternity. So, this question is also moot.
when seen against your entire working life of 50+ years
And you think Norway has a good system? You have to work 50+ years over there? Our standard retirement age is around 62 to 65 or so. We don't really enter the workforce, for the most part, until long after 12. We'd call them sweatshops, I think.
and all the benefits that come from a closer connection to your children?
Exactly what are the benefits to your employer during your 40th through 50th years of employment from your closer connection to your children? 30-40? 20-30?
We all deserve the pain it would cause for supporting the system we have now for so many decades.
Yeah, the pain.
The young folks don't have to pay into a system that they aren't going to get anything back from. What a pain for them. Less taxes for the rest of their lives.
The old folks don't get anything back from a system they've already paid into for all their lives and depend on to stay alive now.
I think the "pain" you expect us all to share is a bit different for some of us compared to others.
The "government" WAS the boomers. They made this promise to themselves
You're wrong. The social security act was passed in 1935 and taxes started being collected in 1937. The "boomers" weren't born until WWII -- after 1945 or so. This promise was made to us by FDR and his New Deal democrats, not the 'boomers'.
Each person making $129,000 year saves 10 other people from starving to death.
Huh? This is nonsense. What does it mean? What makes you think I'm going to be making $129,000 a year after I retire? That's just ridiculous.
(and most boomers will collect way more- even adjusting for inflation-- than they contributed).
Not if you cut them off because they managed to save a little too much of what they earned and in your mind don't deserve to get anything back from a system they paid into all their lives.
Here's a deal for you: give me back all the money I put into the system. Pay me back. I'll worry about myself. But don't you dare promise me that you'll take care of me in the future if I give you money I worked to earn today and then renege on the deal. That's patently dishonest.
I bet NONE of the people Bernie Madoff ripped off expected they would be 100% dependent on social security.
You're pulling in so much irrelevant stuff that talking to you makes no sense. I bet James Gandolfino expected to pay into the system for a few more years, too. So what?
In many British families in at least the last couple of hundred years, the upper classes farmed out their kids to governesses or boarding schools. So it's not necessarily funded by the taxpayer.
Those upper class British families were not crying for "better child care". Better child care is available for those who can pay for it. The complaint about needing "better child care" includes an implicit "that I don't have to pay a lot, if anything, for", and that means "taxpayer funded." Or, when someone is corporation bashing, the company needs to provide it free, which means the cost is passed on to the shareholders. In both cases, "other people paying to raise my children so I don't have to."
There was a study in Science of sex discrimination in Berkeley, in which researchers found that the graduate departments overall discriminated against admitting women. Then they refined the study to find out which specific departments were discriminating more -- and none of them were. It turned out to be a now-classic example of Simpson's paradox in statistics.
No, sounds like the now typical politically correct use of simple statistics to prove whatever you want. If "agency X" doesn't have equal numbers of male and female Y, then agency X is discriminating against women. It doesn't matter why the numbers aren't the same. (And you can include cases when the numbers of men and women are a ratio dependent upon the percentages in the total.)
This is a typical Title 9 analysis. If School A has 40% female attendance, then if athletics doesn't have 40% participation by women the school is in violation of Title 9. It doesn't matter if 40% of the women don't want to participate, or if more than 60% of the men want to, if the numbers don't match the school is doing something wrong. (E.g., a school can have 100 women's sports, but if they have a very good men's football program and lots of boys want to play on the team, the school is at fault.)
So, in your example, the fact that the engineering departments didn't have X% of women applying was proof that the departments were discriminating, even if they accepted every woman that applies. No paradox here, just simple misapplication of statistics.
So, latch-key kids is your vision for a better society?
Latch-key kids are kids who don't have after-school child care and thus use their "latch keys" to get into the house where no parent is home.
Apparently, a society of children raised by professional child raisers, kind of like 10 hour a day school from age 1 through 18, is the better society the OP envisions. Funded, of course, by the taxpayer. Who needs parental or emotional attachments when the government is ready, willing and able to provide for all needs?
I could see means testing social security more (we already means test it some). Then you only take it away from people who have so much savings or such good pensions that they don't need it (it's just a cherry on top of their retirement income).
So then you're a proponent of government taking money away from people under false pretenses. As in, "we'll take X percent of your income away from you today to provide for you when you get old. Oops, now you're old, we aren't going to provide for you after all. But we WILL give out free lunches to every child no matter how much money their parents make during the summer when school isn't in session. Aren't you glad you paid all those taxes and trusted us?"
If a private company did that, they'd be guilty of fraud and behaving unethically. When government does it, its the younger people deciding they don't want to honor the promises made to their parents.
Indeed if we rolled back government spending to early 1990s levels we could eliminate the income tax entirely.
Because everyone knows that when we were actually spending at 1990s levels (in 1990) there was no income tax.