Somebody rifled my car over the weekend. I found a lot of stuff just dumped on the passenger's seat, and the driver's door not fully closed. The most valuable thing was my snowbrush, but I suspect if I'd kept cash it would have disappeared.
If you don't go to restaurants that expect tips, you avoid the issue (as well as most restaurants in the US). If you go to restaurants that expect tips, and don't tip, you're screwing the staff over. They get a lowered minimum wage out of expectation of tips, and the IRS will assume a certain minimum amount of tipping in their income when they file taxes. You're not bothering the people who have any decision-making power.
I did a side-by-side comparison with a matte and a glossy. I found that the areas I couldn't read due to glare on the glossy screen were roughly similar to the areas I couldn't read due to contrast being washed out on the matte. Other people's experiences may differ, but I'm happy with glossy.
First, there's what I mentioned about the emails: nobody who inadvertently mishandled classified materials was criminally prosecuted. Go ahead and find someone, or (ideally) shut up. That may not be what they tell people in the military, but it's how things work in practice, including for people with no significant political clout.
Second, there's a distinct lack of evidence for your claims, not to mention a distinct lack of specificity. The rape claims are unproven (I've seen evidence that Clinton might have raped one woman), and rape is difficult to prove. Lots of people get off rape charges. It's not a good thing, but that's how things go. I have no idea how many politicians have committed rape, or at least sexual harassment.
Third, the Clintons have been extensively investigated for a number of things by hostile investigators, and have come out fairly clean.
It's very clear that the Clintons are not particularly good people, and the Paula Jones case established that Bill is a real jerk at minimum, but when I try to track down specific accusations, they always turn out to be trumped-up (pun unintentional, but I'll take it) or outright stupid. Hillary Clinton, as far as I can tell, was accused of nothing specific substantially wrong over Benghazi, but the accusers were loud.
Back of the envelope calculation suggests that a ton moving down 20m will release about 400 Kj. That means the 500-ton tower would store about 200 Mj. That's under 60 kilowatt-hours. The average US home runs about 30 Kwh a day, so that's about a day's worth of electricity for two houses. Building a water tower 15 times that size would store a day's worth of electricity for thirty houses. That's assuming 100% efficiency; in actuality, it's about 70-80% efficient, so say 22 houses. That's for a really big water tower. You can tell people to conserve on power, and you can be overconfident and figure it's 8 hours of storage, but that's a really big water tower that won't serve 100 houses with overnight electricity. There may be other problems. It would be fairly expensive to build and maintain, and might be noisy.
As I said, it's a matter of scale. Pumped hydro is not practical for neighborhood storage.
Ah yes, we have reached the crux of the matter. Tolerance and intolerance
That's not the crux of the matter. The crux is profits, since we're talking about private corporations here. Social media platforms are going to do what they think brings in the most profit.
This isn't anything new, either. It's easier now to disseminate things most people think wrong than it ever has been. In the past, platforms have had to deal with limited resources. A newspaper letters to the editor column might be a third of a page, with an extra page on Saturday. They could be, and often were, arbitrary in what they printed. It's easy to get a blog going these days with minimal or no restrictions on what you can say.
You're coming up with some ideal solution that won't work in practice, sort of like Communism or Libertarianism. Most people will prefer to have their content curated, rather than having to deal with, say, neo-Nazi trolls one at a time. Therefore, they will tend to use the social media that filter that sort of stuff out before they see it. That social media will therefore make more money and outcompete your idea of what social media should be like. It's a straight business decision.
You know, the sort of decision the right wingers and libertarians have been insisting that government and idealism should keep their noses out from.
But again... the issue is how tolerance has been redefined by some groups, and how they leverage this to unfairly control the debate...
,p>
No, the issue is that some people have no idea how to present their ideas without offending the people social media make money on, and call for intervention in corporate business affairs to compensate for that. Feel free to start up a social media site that's run as you want it to be run. That's how this sort of thing works in a free market.
Well, that too would also disagree with AmiMojo's idea that there isn't a good definition for the term.
I was unaware that AmiMoJo had endorsed the Urban Dictionary definition introduced by slinches. In any case, the UD definition is potentially useful.
And when it comes to topics of social justice, it's largely the left who positions themselves as "for" one social justice cause or another. The right on the other hand argues against it, unafraid to say they're against social justice.
Not in my observation. Their are plenty of people around here who object to paying taxes or losing privilege on the basis of justice. Since they're arguing about society, I'd call that social justice. It differs a lot from my idea of it, but it seems to qualify.
Pregnancies aren't exactly a disease. It's actually of part of the ritual that propagates the species.
Pregnancies can kill. I had a co-worker whose wife just barely survived. All sorts of things can go wrong. I really don't see the difference between paying for abortions and paying for depression treatment myself. Are you sure your objections are strictly because you don't want to pay for medical procedures, of certain types?
That assumes "treating [gays] like everybody else" is all society has to do. It isn't. Legislation of protected classes and enforcement of those laws aren't free.
If people treated gays just like everybody else, they wouldn't be a protected class anywhere. Protected classes are in response to discrimination.
No, it's about you. Are you a known angel investor or venture capitalist? If so, people come to you with investment ideas as a matter of course. If you aren't, why is this person trying to get money out of you? Again, relatively few people get rich, so why you?
I misused the word "legit", sorry. What I meant is that offers like that are not going to be good opportunities, unless there's something special about them - and, by extension, you.
This is a long-standing issue. Immigrants, by and large, vote Democrat. This isn't a new thing. Hispanics tend, on the whole, to be religious conservatives, and vote Democrat.
Currently, we're undergoing a demographic shift away from the predominantly Christian white-dominated society. The Republican party will adapt or die and be replaced. Anyone want to take bets?
I am intelligent, and have put in a lot of work, but, frankly, I stumbled into this field. Being an actuary sounded dull, and that was about the only other non-academic option presented for math majors. My wife, quite a bit later, decided that the graphic arts would never earn the money she wanted, and I told her programming had worked great as a racket for me.
I'm sure I could have been as financially successful in other lines of work, but I doubt I'd have found one I like as much for the money.
In other words, I had intelligence, something of a work ethic, and dumb luck.
In 1895, automation was pretty darn expensive. There were quite a few decades when manufacturing was primarily done by hiring a lot of warm bodies to do repetitive things, because that was the least expensive way to do it.
Waiters and waitresses will be around for a long time, since there's lots of minor matters that a human can react to, such as telling what special orders would be possible, handling little incidents, that sort of thing.
On the other hand, where I live we have special city-issued garbage cans, designed for ease of dumping with automated equipment. There's no obvious reason we couldn't automate those (well, once self-driving garbage trucks are feasible).
Lots of things are called "communism" by people who don't know what they're talking about. I know of no implementation of Communism with a UBI. The Marxist creed of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," besides being unrealistic, doesn't include UBIs.
The assembly line was about finding ways to use unskilled labor (primarily) more effectively. It required a lot of labor. There's getting to be less and less need for unskilled labor, or moderately unskilled labor, and some people really aren't able to do more. We're at the point where industry and agriculture can't find employment for all that many people, so the service industry has been growing. Where is that going? I don't know and neither do you.
"...always result in more total wealth for the nation...." Duh. How does it help the average member of the nation? In some cases, increasing automation has had devastating effects on large numbers of people.
The problem is, how do you tell the difference between the person playing WoW because it's fun, and the person playing WoW because of some mental illness? It's really hard in general to tell if someone is actually healthy, and everything we've tried has wound up screwing some unfortunate or other.
As far as nicer things go? The "B" in "UBI" stands for "Basic". Enough money to live on, plenty of incentive to make more.
You're assuming that people will use the UBI to live on without working. Lots of people get second jobs as it is, because they want more money. If they have a UBI, that means that they'll continue working to get more money and a higher standard of living.
I don't know how well this would work, and neither do you. That's why the experimentation.
You're looking at big lottery winnings, I suspect. That's not just a case of people getting unworked-for money, that's a case of people getting far more money than they know how to handle. I'm pretty well off and I wouldn't know what to do with $50M. Sure, I'd like some money to play with and some to enable me to live lavishly for the rest of my life, but exactly what would be the best way to do that?
Only a few people get rich. (For "rich" to have any meaning, this has to be true.) They have to have something going for them more than the average person. They may be very lucky, or come from a wealthy family, or very talented, or have an unusually good idea. (Hard work can help, but there's far more hard workers than there are rich people.)
So, when anyone tells you you're going to be rich, ask yourself what is so unusual about you that you're going to get rich. If it's nothing, then that anyone is lying to you. It takes some humility to be good at this, and that's not something everyone has. (Personally, I'm much better than most of the rest of you at humility.)
Having a stock offering was also apparently good for having wealthy and highborn women spend the night with you. "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" - still useful reading.
Distributing the lynchings over a century doesn't help; they were pretty heavily front-loaded in that century. Nor is that the only problem stemming from private discrimination; I included it as an obvious example.
I'm well aware that unions were racist at that time period. Pretty much everyone was. You know why Jackie Robinson was picked to be the first black player in 20th-century Major League Baseball? Not only was he an excellent player, the people who made the decision thought he could handle the hate and death threats better than most. Decades later, the amount of hate mail and threats Hank Aaron faced when threatening Babe Ruth's record of total career home runs was appalling. Racism was not from the top down in society; it permeated it. Racist laws were popular, much as tough-on-crime and think-of-the-children laws are now, and were passed because people wanted them.
You seem keen to see racism among unions, Democrats, and progressives, but you don't seem to see it among Republicans, conservatives, etc. Given the period of history we're considering, that's prejudiced partial blindness. You seem blind to the documented realities of the Southern Strategy.
Hispanics tend to be religious conservatives. They vote Democrat. Ever wonder why? It's because they don't feel welcome in the Republican party, which is basically the white Christian party. (They're getting more desperate as part of the demographic shift. Non-Hispanic white Christians are no longer a majority in the US.) If the Republicans ever decide to act for the benefit of Christian conservatives in general, they'll get a real boost from Hispanics.
While some Democrat/progressive policies have been harmful, a lot of Republican/conservative policies have been also. The War on Drugs was heavily Republican-backed, for example.
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Somebody rifled my car over the weekend. I found a lot of stuff just dumped on the passenger's seat, and the driver's door not fully closed. The most valuable thing was my snowbrush, but I suspect if I'd kept cash it would have disappeared.
If you don't go to restaurants that expect tips, you avoid the issue (as well as most restaurants in the US). If you go to restaurants that expect tips, and don't tip, you're screwing the staff over. They get a lowered minimum wage out of expectation of tips, and the IRS will assume a certain minimum amount of tipping in their income when they file taxes. You're not bothering the people who have any decision-making power.
Which is not the same thing as saying it's done. Lots of employers violate the law, and just fire anyone who complains about illegal treatment.
I did a side-by-side comparison with a matte and a glossy. I found that the areas I couldn't read due to glare on the glossy screen were roughly similar to the areas I couldn't read due to contrast being washed out on the matte. Other people's experiences may differ, but I'm happy with glossy.
You seem to have three problems there.
First, there's what I mentioned about the emails: nobody who inadvertently mishandled classified materials was criminally prosecuted. Go ahead and find someone, or (ideally) shut up. That may not be what they tell people in the military, but it's how things work in practice, including for people with no significant political clout.
Second, there's a distinct lack of evidence for your claims, not to mention a distinct lack of specificity. The rape claims are unproven (I've seen evidence that Clinton might have raped one woman), and rape is difficult to prove. Lots of people get off rape charges. It's not a good thing, but that's how things go. I have no idea how many politicians have committed rape, or at least sexual harassment.
Third, the Clintons have been extensively investigated for a number of things by hostile investigators, and have come out fairly clean.
It's very clear that the Clintons are not particularly good people, and the Paula Jones case established that Bill is a real jerk at minimum, but when I try to track down specific accusations, they always turn out to be trumped-up (pun unintentional, but I'll take it) or outright stupid. Hillary Clinton, as far as I can tell, was accused of nothing specific substantially wrong over Benghazi, but the accusers were loud.
Back of the envelope calculation suggests that a ton moving down 20m will release about 400 Kj. That means the 500-ton tower would store about 200 Mj. That's under 60 kilowatt-hours. The average US home runs about 30 Kwh a day, so that's about a day's worth of electricity for two houses. Building a water tower 15 times that size would store a day's worth of electricity for thirty houses. That's assuming 100% efficiency; in actuality, it's about 70-80% efficient, so say 22 houses. That's for a really big water tower. You can tell people to conserve on power, and you can be overconfident and figure it's 8 hours of storage, but that's a really big water tower that won't serve 100 houses with overnight electricity. There may be other problems. It would be fairly expensive to build and maintain, and might be noisy.
As I said, it's a matter of scale. Pumped hydro is not practical for neighborhood storage.
That's not the crux of the matter. The crux is profits, since we're talking about private corporations here. Social media platforms are going to do what they think brings in the most profit.
This isn't anything new, either. It's easier now to disseminate things most people think wrong than it ever has been. In the past, platforms have had to deal with limited resources. A newspaper letters to the editor column might be a third of a page, with an extra page on Saturday. They could be, and often were, arbitrary in what they printed. It's easy to get a blog going these days with minimal or no restrictions on what you can say.
You're coming up with some ideal solution that won't work in practice, sort of like Communism or Libertarianism. Most people will prefer to have their content curated, rather than having to deal with, say, neo-Nazi trolls one at a time. Therefore, they will tend to use the social media that filter that sort of stuff out before they see it. That social media will therefore make more money and outcompete your idea of what social media should be like. It's a straight business decision. You know, the sort of decision the right wingers and libertarians have been insisting that government and idealism should keep their noses out from.
I was unaware that AmiMoJo had endorsed the Urban Dictionary definition introduced by slinches. In any case, the UD definition is potentially useful.
Not in my observation. Their are plenty of people around here who object to paying taxes or losing privilege on the basis of justice. Since they're arguing about society, I'd call that social justice. It differs a lot from my idea of it, but it seems to qualify.
Pregnancies can kill. I had a co-worker whose wife just barely survived. All sorts of things can go wrong. I really don't see the difference between paying for abortions and paying for depression treatment myself. Are you sure your objections are strictly because you don't want to pay for medical procedures, of certain types?
If people treated gays just like everybody else, they wouldn't be a protected class anywhere. Protected classes are in response to discrimination.
No, it's about you. Are you a known angel investor or venture capitalist? If so, people come to you with investment ideas as a matter of course. If you aren't, why is this person trying to get money out of you? Again, relatively few people get rich, so why you?
I misused the word "legit", sorry. What I meant is that offers like that are not going to be good opportunities, unless there's something special about them - and, by extension, you.
This is a long-standing issue. Immigrants, by and large, vote Democrat. This isn't a new thing. Hispanics tend, on the whole, to be religious conservatives, and vote Democrat.
Your perception of racism is clearly not theirs.
Taking side streets to avoid congestion works as long as not that many drivers do it. It doesn't necessarily work if too many people do it.
Currently, we're undergoing a demographic shift away from the predominantly Christian white-dominated society. The Republican party will adapt or die and be replaced. Anyone want to take bets?
I am intelligent, and have put in a lot of work, but, frankly, I stumbled into this field. Being an actuary sounded dull, and that was about the only other non-academic option presented for math majors. My wife, quite a bit later, decided that the graphic arts would never earn the money she wanted, and I told her programming had worked great as a racket for me.
I'm sure I could have been as financially successful in other lines of work, but I doubt I'd have found one I like as much for the money.
In other words, I had intelligence, something of a work ethic, and dumb luck.
In 1895, automation was pretty darn expensive. There were quite a few decades when manufacturing was primarily done by hiring a lot of warm bodies to do repetitive things, because that was the least expensive way to do it.
Waiters and waitresses will be around for a long time, since there's lots of minor matters that a human can react to, such as telling what special orders would be possible, handling little incidents, that sort of thing.
On the other hand, where I live we have special city-issued garbage cans, designed for ease of dumping with automated equipment. There's no obvious reason we couldn't automate those (well, once self-driving garbage trucks are feasible).
Knowledge professions are in serious danger.
Lots of things are called "communism" by people who don't know what they're talking about. I know of no implementation of Communism with a UBI. The Marxist creed of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," besides being unrealistic, doesn't include UBIs.
Actually, entitlements go up and down, not just up. Taxes on the rich go up and down. Reality isn't working as you predict.
The assembly line was about finding ways to use unskilled labor (primarily) more effectively. It required a lot of labor. There's getting to be less and less need for unskilled labor, or moderately unskilled labor, and some people really aren't able to do more. We're at the point where industry and agriculture can't find employment for all that many people, so the service industry has been growing. Where is that going? I don't know and neither do you.
"...always result in more total wealth for the nation...." Duh. How does it help the average member of the nation? In some cases, increasing automation has had devastating effects on large numbers of people.
You're assuming that the UBI will creep up more than inflation. You may be certain of that, but lots of people, some smarter than you, aren't.
The problem is, how do you tell the difference between the person playing WoW because it's fun, and the person playing WoW because of some mental illness? It's really hard in general to tell if someone is actually healthy, and everything we've tried has wound up screwing some unfortunate or other.
As far as nicer things go? The "B" in "UBI" stands for "Basic". Enough money to live on, plenty of incentive to make more.
Nope. If you were at all correct, we'd tax the wealthy at considerably higher rates.
We have experience with progressive income taxes. They don't lead to a dystopia.
You're assuming that people will use the UBI to live on without working. Lots of people get second jobs as it is, because they want more money. If they have a UBI, that means that they'll continue working to get more money and a higher standard of living.
I don't know how well this would work, and neither do you. That's why the experimentation.
You're looking at big lottery winnings, I suspect. That's not just a case of people getting unworked-for money, that's a case of people getting far more money than they know how to handle. I'm pretty well off and I wouldn't know what to do with $50M. Sure, I'd like some money to play with and some to enable me to live lavishly for the rest of my life, but exactly what would be the best way to do that?
That's why it's never a legit opportunity.
Only a few people get rich. (For "rich" to have any meaning, this has to be true.) They have to have something going for them more than the average person. They may be very lucky, or come from a wealthy family, or very talented, or have an unusually good idea. (Hard work can help, but there's far more hard workers than there are rich people.)
So, when anyone tells you you're going to be rich, ask yourself what is so unusual about you that you're going to get rich. If it's nothing, then that anyone is lying to you. It takes some humility to be good at this, and that's not something everyone has. (Personally, I'm much better than most of the rest of you at humility.)
Having a stock offering was also apparently good for having wealthy and highborn women spend the night with you. "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" - still useful reading.
Distributing the lynchings over a century doesn't help; they were pretty heavily front-loaded in that century. Nor is that the only problem stemming from private discrimination; I included it as an obvious example.
I'm well aware that unions were racist at that time period. Pretty much everyone was. You know why Jackie Robinson was picked to be the first black player in 20th-century Major League Baseball? Not only was he an excellent player, the people who made the decision thought he could handle the hate and death threats better than most. Decades later, the amount of hate mail and threats Hank Aaron faced when threatening Babe Ruth's record of total career home runs was appalling. Racism was not from the top down in society; it permeated it. Racist laws were popular, much as tough-on-crime and think-of-the-children laws are now, and were passed because people wanted them.
You seem keen to see racism among unions, Democrats, and progressives, but you don't seem to see it among Republicans, conservatives, etc. Given the period of history we're considering, that's prejudiced partial blindness. You seem blind to the documented realities of the Southern Strategy.
Hispanics tend to be religious conservatives. They vote Democrat. Ever wonder why? It's because they don't feel welcome in the Republican party, which is basically the white Christian party. (They're getting more desperate as part of the demographic shift. Non-Hispanic white Christians are no longer a majority in the US.) If the Republicans ever decide to act for the benefit of Christian conservatives in general, they'll get a real boost from Hispanics.
While some Democrat/progressive policies have been harmful, a lot of Republican/conservative policies have been also. The War on Drugs was heavily Republican-backed, for example.