teaching...being an underpaid and overworked profession.
Too many teachers I've seen are people I would never pay to do anything, people unable to read a map or do long division. Stupidity is widespread and growing in public schools.
Trying to tie Iraq to 9/11 and then saying the US shouldn't have attacked Iraq because Iraq wasn't involved in 9/11 is a dishonest straw man argument.
Iraq had a history of military aggression and attempting to build nuclear and poison gas weapons. Iraq lost the Kuwait war and the terms of surrender had them agreeing to inspections. They continuously evaded inspections and eventually prevented them entirely, as was widely reported at the time. At that point, Iraq had lost any legallistic defense that it didn't deserve to be attacked. Since Iraq had an aggressive history, continued to make threatening pronouncements, and outsiders were unable to determine that they weren't developing WMDs, there was adequate reason to wage a preemptive war against Iraq.
I have heard an excuse for Hussein's acting in such a self-destructive manner. I am not able to judge its validity, but here it is:
Hussein feared an attack by Iran, and consequently could not show any weakness. He thought he needed WMDs, and demanded that his scientists produce them. They couldn't, but due to Hussein's violent behavior they continued to tell him that they were making progress. These reports of progress leaked to the outside world, thus the reports at the time that Iraq was developing WMDs. If Hussein had allowed inspections, Iran would have eventually figured out that Iraq was much weaker than it appeared, and Iran might have attacked.
Looking back over 8 years, what should the US have done? The idea that the US should not have engaged in any military action is preposterous. It would have been regarded as a sign of massive weakness, and invited even worse attacks. So then, who should the US have attacked? None of the middle-Eastern countries are angelic, but they aren't all the same. Egypt seems to be behaving itself to a fair degree. Lebanon has a substantial Christian population, and would have been a target that would cause great backlash within the US. Attacking an oil-rich country that sponsored terrorists is a possibility, but a rich country might be able to fight back in a non-obvious but effective manner: a difficult choice. The most obvious choices were countries with terrorist training camps and countries making loud-mouthed threats against the US. Afghanistan won the prize because of terrorist training. Iran might have been a good choice because of its position as a loud-mouthed developer of militant Islam, but Iran then and now has a large portion of its populace not overtly antagonistic to the West, and they might have changed their minds if attacked.
In any case, the wars were not fought nearly as well as they could have been. Allowing the use of mosques as sanctuaries is wrong, as is the failure to cross borders to hit enemy training camps. Get in, lay waste, get out. Repeat as required, but don't sit around rebuilding the defeated.
Not many compilers are aware of the video extensions (SSE, etc.), nor are they able to turn even simple loops into code using those parallel extensions. Speedups of 2X, 3X, or more are possible in certain cases.
50 years ago, before CRT glass was greatly improved, TVs had a separate sheet of glass in front of the CRT to protect the CRT from impacts. After a number of years, if you took the glass sheet off, you could see where it had turned grey from the impact of xrays from the CRT.
Of course it's his money. The GP said that he was selling the company he made, so it's his money.
It's always easier to say someone richer than you has more than he needs.
You previously attacked the rich person, and now you're supporting him?
Of course, I'm sure he goes to the movies and buys hamburgers with excess cash like everyone else, instead of using it to help poor African children.
The start of this sentence sounds like he's OK for buying hamburger (instead of steak), and then you criticize him for not trying "to help poor African children." There is no moral obligation to help them and there's plenty reason to believe that most charity money that goes to Africa ends up supporting viscious dictatorships or worse.
But it's always easier to be morally righteous when you're the one that stands to benefit the most out of that sort of "transaction."
Yeah, the easiest person to deceive is one's self. Sigh.
It's really no different than how some people try to justify shoplifting or such.
There's a world of difference between justifiying getting paid well for years of intense effort and justifying theft.
We had tax rates that high in the 1960s and 1970s, yet we didn't suffer.
Stagflation. The misery index.
Western Europe has not done well copared to the US over the last two decades. It's the recently freed Eastern Europeans that have made the most progress.
High capital gains taxes tend to exacerbate bubbles, because people sitting on gains don't want to pay taxes on their profits. So they stay in their stocks, and other people seeing the gains buy more. If the early owners could get out without penalty, there'd be less of a tendency for the price to rise too much.
Keep in mind that the "bubble we've seen lately", the housing bubble, was caused entirely by government forcing low loan qualification levels. (Thanks to Barney Frank & Chris Dodd, et. al.) The rising side of the bubble was caused by increasing demand made possible by those loans, and the falling side was caused by the inevitable failure of those loans.
Take-home income: $3,115,000
That's enough for anyone.
Let's say I own company A, and my take-home pay is $3,115,000. I see company B, which isn't operating very efficiently and produces components that my company uses. I could buy company B, increase my pretax income by $1,000,000, produce more of my product at a lower price, and give all employees a small raise. But my take-home pay increases to only $3,215,000 with a 90% incremental rate. It's not worth my effort, so I won't bother. Everyone loses.
Liberals don't understand or deliberately ignore the concept of INCENTIVE.
It is next to impossible to have perfectly pure food. Plants grow in dirt (except hydroponics) and excrement is a preferred fertilizer. There's organic waste in the air everywhere, and it can't be avoided. What's important is to identify how much bad stuff is too much. Pointing at fast food joints as you do is deliberately misleading.
The "conservative loonies", as you put it, gave us Goldwater and Reagan. It's the moderates who provided Nixon, Ford, Dole, the Bushes and McCain. The moderates still have control of the Republican party, and that is the problem.
Dodd is a special case, so corrupt that he can't understand the concept. He's more corrupt than his father, and his father stood out by being so corrupt that he was censured!
Airline security should be the job of each individual airline. They have the incentives to keep their passengers safe (great advertising advantage) and find ways to do so without giving each passenger an enema (also a great advertising advantage).
WalMart should be smart enough to write contracts that insist on safety, and they should send prototypes and production samples to testing labs, or insist that their providers do so. The difficulty is that it's hard for a foreigner to insist on product safety from China, so extra precautions are needed. It would probably cost about $100 to send a bracelet to a lab and instruct them to grind it up and run it through a spectrograph or some other instrument that could identify likely toxins.
The amount by which WalMart is able to undercut local retailers varies a great deal. A local grocery chain (Market Basket) beats WalMart on most items, but boots at WalMart for $20 beat the hell out of $80 at a local retailer. A large part of Walmart's generally better prices is due to pressuring their suppliers to become more efficient. And yes, of course that causes people who were doing unneeded work or who were operating inefficiently to lose their jobs -- they were wasting people's money. Now they can attempt to find employment where their skills are used efectively.
Keep in mind that if WalMart really destroyed the local economy, there'd be no-one able to buy from WalMart, and WalMart would have to close its doors and go out of business. That isn't happening, so WalMart isn't destroying the local economy.
Using Japan and Taiwan as historical examples, it's reasonable to think that Chinese goods will improve in quality and thereby earn a higher price. The Chinese people will become richer as a result of all their production, and be able to buy their own goods, and insist on some level of quality.
The risk, as always, is that China may think that military action is to their advantage. As they get richer, their ability to make war increases, but as their wealth increases, the people in general are less likely to be tolerant of a belligerent government.
With regard to the US, it's going to be difficult to keep Congress from buying votes while impoverishing the populace. I have absolutely no confidence that people like Barney Frank will not lead the country to suicide while claiming moral superiority.
I'm no materials scientist, to I'm guessing here. Aluminum is shiny and cheap enough that it can be used not only for plating (Is Al plating difficult?) but as the base metal. For long-term shine, give it a coating of silicon dioxide. As you mentioned, tin is probably OK, and it has a transparent oxide. It's probably possible to give silver a protective coating, but silver would cut into the profit margin.
Most people who've been awake for the past decade, if asked what metals are poisonous, should be able to name lead, mercury, and cadmium. They've all been in the news. A few years ago the arts community made a lot of noise when regulations banning cadmium in all paints (including artist's oils) were proposed. And it doesn't take much effort to do internet research and find out what's really poisonous.
allowing free trade with people who use prison labour to reduce their costs.
Prison labor exists in the US too, and it's considered a good thing. Inmates learn a trade, make a tiny bit of money, and a company or the state gets cheap labor. If there's something about Chinese labor practices you're objecting to, you're going to have to express it more clearly.
I think that most of us guys have become accustomed to the level of control we achieve with our hand(s). It's a lot easier for a guy to get off without toys. You can make your grip tighter, but women can't make thieir fingers longer and thicker.
Men become much less sensitive as they get older. In many cases, so much so that the muscles controlling the hand will cramp long before orgasm.
Women have most of their sensitivity in the clitoris, which is near the surface. Longer/thicker doesn't really have much effect on the important nerve endings.
There's this misconception that people lose their civil rights by becoming criminals. They don't.
A properly convicted criminal serving a jail sentence has lost a portion of his rights, the most obvious being the right to leave the jail.
Rights are what you have as a result of being human, i.e. a rational animal. When you act to hurt an innocent person (violating his rights), you have thrown away some portion of your rights immediately. If the violated rights are among those recognized by the government and you're caught and successfully prosecuted, then the government can punish or force restitution in proportion to the damaged rights of the hurt person. The government does this without violating your rights because you have forfeited them to the extent of the damage you've done. When the punishment or restitution is complete, the deficit in your rights is gone. Your rights are restored - whether the government recognizes it or not.
Rights in the sense of civil rights or political rights have a lot of similarity to the phrase "It is right that." If you are about to leave a grocery with a can of soup, "it is right that" you pay the grocer: he has a right to be paid.
-----
The protection of others is not the only reason governments jail people (and please don't confuse government with the fiction that is society). Punishment, political revenge, "protective custody", "crimes" that have no victims, are all reasons government use for imprisonment.
There's dasher and dancer and prancer and vixen, comet and cupid and donder and blitzen. But do you recall the most tested reindeer of all? Rudolf, the red-nosed reindeer...
One of the symptoms that many drugs suppress is death. The causes of heart disease are pretty well known (at least in an approximate way), and the way to avoid some types of heart disease by eating properly and exercising is well established. That's not a good reason not to develop emergency drugs to suppress fibrillation, restart stopped hearts, dissolve a clot, etc..
The argument against new analogs of existing drugs has some validity, but varieties can have fewer side effects or avoid some individual allergies. And there are drugs that are the ONLY accepted treatment for some conditions, and better treatments would be beneficial.
I can think of at least a half dozen OTC drug families for pain (aspirin-like, acetaminophen, -caines, etc.) and each has disadvantages, and some are synergistic. Try telling someone in severe, continuing pain that they have no need for better pain-killers.
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Too many teachers I've seen are people I would never pay to do anything, people unable to read a map or do long division. Stupidity is widespread and growing in public schools.
Any Democrat federal Representative or Senator.
Trying to tie Iraq to 9/11 and then saying the US shouldn't have attacked Iraq because Iraq wasn't involved in 9/11 is a dishonest straw man argument.
Iraq had a history of military aggression and attempting to build nuclear and poison gas weapons. Iraq lost the Kuwait war and the terms of surrender had them agreeing to inspections. They continuously evaded inspections and eventually prevented them entirely, as was widely reported at the time. At that point, Iraq had lost any legallistic defense that it didn't deserve to be attacked. Since Iraq had an aggressive history, continued to make threatening pronouncements, and outsiders were unable to determine that they weren't developing WMDs, there was adequate reason to wage a preemptive war against Iraq.
I have heard an excuse for Hussein's acting in such a self-destructive manner. I am not able to judge its validity, but here it is:
Hussein feared an attack by Iran, and consequently could not show any weakness. He thought he needed WMDs, and demanded that his scientists produce them. They couldn't, but due to Hussein's violent behavior they continued to tell him that they were making progress. These reports of progress leaked to the outside world, thus the reports at the time that Iraq was developing WMDs. If Hussein had allowed inspections, Iran would have eventually figured out that Iraq was much weaker than it appeared, and Iran might have attacked.
Looking back over 8 years, what should the US have done? The idea that the US should not have engaged in any military action is preposterous. It would have been regarded as a sign of massive weakness, and invited even worse attacks. So then, who should the US have attacked? None of the middle-Eastern countries are angelic, but they aren't all the same. Egypt seems to be behaving itself to a fair degree. Lebanon has a substantial Christian population, and would have been a target that would cause great backlash within the US. Attacking an oil-rich country that sponsored terrorists is a possibility, but a rich country might be able to fight back in a non-obvious but effective manner: a difficult choice. The most obvious choices were countries with terrorist training camps and countries making loud-mouthed threats against the US. Afghanistan won the prize because of terrorist training. Iran might have been a good choice because of its position as a loud-mouthed developer of militant Islam, but Iran then and now has a large portion of its populace not overtly antagonistic to the West, and they might have changed their minds if attacked.
In any case, the wars were not fought nearly as well as they could have been. Allowing the use of mosques as sanctuaries is wrong, as is the failure to cross borders to hit enemy training camps. Get in, lay waste, get out. Repeat as required, but don't sit around rebuilding the defeated.
Not many compilers are aware of the video extensions (SSE, etc.), nor are they able to turn even simple loops into code using those parallel extensions. Speedups of 2X, 3X, or more are possible in certain cases.
There aren't any blind NASCAR drivers.
50 years ago, before CRT glass was greatly improved, TVs had a separate sheet of glass in front of the CRT to protect the CRT from impacts. After a number of years, if you took the glass sheet off, you could see where it had turned grey from the impact of xrays from the CRT.
Of course it's his money. The GP said that he was selling the company he made, so it's his money.
You previously attacked the rich person, and now you're supporting him?
The start of this sentence sounds like he's OK for buying hamburger (instead of steak), and then you criticize him for not trying "to help poor African children." There is no moral obligation to help them and there's plenty reason to believe that most charity money that goes to Africa ends up supporting viscious dictatorships or worse.
Yeah, the easiest person to deceive is one's self. Sigh.
There's a world of difference between justifiying getting paid well for years of intense effort and justifying theft.
Stagflation. The misery index.
Western Europe has not done well copared to the US over the last two decades. It's the recently freed Eastern Europeans that have made the most progress.
High capital gains taxes tend to exacerbate bubbles, because people sitting on gains don't want to pay taxes on their profits. So they stay in their stocks, and other people seeing the gains buy more. If the early owners could get out without penalty, there'd be less of a tendency for the price to rise too much.
Keep in mind that the "bubble we've seen lately", the housing bubble, was caused entirely by government forcing low loan qualification levels. (Thanks to Barney Frank & Chris Dodd, et. al.) The rising side of the bubble was caused by increasing demand made possible by those loans, and the falling side was caused by the inevitable failure of those loans.
Let's say I own company A, and my take-home pay is $3,115,000. I see company B, which isn't operating very efficiently and produces components that my company uses. I could buy company B, increase my pretax income by $1,000,000, produce more of my product at a lower price, and give all employees a small raise. But my take-home pay increases to only $3,215,000 with a 90% incremental rate. It's not worth my effort, so I won't bother. Everyone loses.
Liberals don't understand or deliberately ignore the concept of INCENTIVE.
It is next to impossible to have perfectly pure food. Plants grow in dirt (except hydroponics) and excrement is a preferred fertilizer. There's organic waste in the air everywhere, and it can't be avoided. What's important is to identify how much bad stuff is too much. Pointing at fast food joints as you do is deliberately misleading.
Cadmium is about 3 times as expensive as aluminum. There's more involved here than just making a quick buck.
Long term (millenia) no system lasts. Over a shorter term, monarchies have had a tendency toward longevity.
Stability is only a worthwhile goal if the system is good. As far as I can tell, all the systems so far are just a variety of degrees of defective.
Can you say show trial? Good baby. I knew you could.
On what possible ground could you jail Rove? He was an ADVISOR, he had no legislative or administrative authority.
To use Heinlein's phrase, Obabma is an incompetent whore. Always has been, always will be. Wake up.
The "conservative loonies", as you put it, gave us Goldwater and Reagan. It's the moderates who provided Nixon, Ford, Dole, the Bushes and McCain. The moderates still have control of the Republican party, and that is the problem.
Dodd is a special case, so corrupt that he can't understand the concept. He's more corrupt than his father, and his father stood out by being so corrupt that he was censured!
Airline security should be the job of each individual airline. They have the incentives to keep their passengers safe (great advertising advantage) and find ways to do so without giving each passenger an enema (also a great advertising advantage).
WalMart should be smart enough to write contracts that insist on safety, and they should send prototypes and production samples to testing labs, or insist that their providers do so. The difficulty is that it's hard for a foreigner to insist on product safety from China, so extra precautions are needed. It would probably cost about $100 to send a bracelet to a lab and instruct them to grind it up and run it through a spectrograph or some other instrument that could identify likely toxins.
The amount by which WalMart is able to undercut local retailers varies a great deal. A local grocery chain (Market Basket) beats WalMart on most items, but boots at WalMart for $20 beat the hell out of $80 at a local retailer. A large part of Walmart's generally better prices is due to pressuring their suppliers to become more efficient. And yes, of course that causes people who were doing unneeded work or who were operating inefficiently to lose their jobs -- they were wasting people's money. Now they can attempt to find employment where their skills are used efectively.
Keep in mind that if WalMart really destroyed the local economy, there'd be no-one able to buy from WalMart, and WalMart would have to close its doors and go out of business. That isn't happening, so WalMart isn't destroying the local economy.
Using Japan and Taiwan as historical examples, it's reasonable to think that Chinese goods will improve in quality and thereby earn a higher price. The Chinese people will become richer as a result of all their production, and be able to buy their own goods, and insist on some level of quality.
The risk, as always, is that China may think that military action is to their advantage. As they get richer, their ability to make war increases, but as their wealth increases, the people in general are less likely to be tolerant of a belligerent government.
With regard to the US, it's going to be difficult to keep Congress from buying votes while impoverishing the populace. I have absolutely no confidence that people like Barney Frank will not lead the country to suicide while claiming moral superiority.
I'm no materials scientist, to I'm guessing here. Aluminum is shiny and cheap enough that it can be used not only for plating (Is Al plating difficult?) but as the base metal. For long-term shine, give it a coating of silicon dioxide. As you mentioned, tin is probably OK, and it has a transparent oxide. It's probably possible to give silver a protective coating, but silver would cut into the profit margin.
Most people who've been awake for the past decade, if asked what metals are poisonous, should be able to name lead, mercury, and cadmium. They've all been in the news. A few years ago the arts community made a lot of noise when regulations banning cadmium in all paints (including artist's oils) were proposed. And it doesn't take much effort to do internet research and find out what's really poisonous.
Prison labor exists in the US too, and it's considered a good thing. Inmates learn a trade, make a tiny bit of money, and a company or the state gets cheap labor. If there's something about Chinese labor practices you're objecting to, you're going to have to express it more clearly.
PopSci and PopMech seem to echo their names, PopSci being a bit more esoteric. In the early years, PS even published articles by a philosopher.
I'm afraid I can't let you do that, Dave.
Men become much less sensitive as they get older. In many cases, so much so that the muscles controlling the hand will cramp long before orgasm.
Women have most of their sensitivity in the clitoris, which is near the surface. Longer/thicker doesn't really have much effect on the important nerve endings.
A properly convicted criminal serving a jail sentence has lost a portion of his rights, the most obvious being the right to leave the jail.
Rights are what you have as a result of being human, i.e. a rational animal. When you act to hurt an innocent person (violating his rights), you have thrown away some portion of your rights immediately. If the violated rights are among those recognized by the government and you're caught and successfully prosecuted, then the government can punish or force restitution in proportion to the damaged rights of the hurt person. The government does this without violating your rights because you have forfeited them to the extent of the damage you've done. When the punishment or restitution is complete, the deficit in your rights is gone. Your rights are restored - whether the government recognizes it or not.
Rights in the sense of civil rights or political rights have a lot of similarity to the phrase "It is right that." If you are about to leave a grocery with a can of soup, "it is right that" you pay the grocer: he has a right to be paid.
-----
The protection of others is not the only reason governments jail people (and please don't confuse government with the fiction that is society). Punishment, political revenge, "protective custody", "crimes" that have no victims, are all reasons government use for imprisonment.
There's dasher and dancer and prancer and vixen, comet and cupid and donder and blitzen. But do you recall the most tested reindeer of all? Rudolf, the red-nosed reindeer...
One of the symptoms that many drugs suppress is death. The causes of heart disease are pretty well known (at least in an approximate way), and the way to avoid some types of heart disease by eating properly and exercising is well established. That's not a good reason not to develop emergency drugs to suppress fibrillation, restart stopped hearts, dissolve a clot, etc..
The argument against new analogs of existing drugs has some validity, but varieties can have fewer side effects or avoid some individual allergies. And there are drugs that are the ONLY accepted treatment for some conditions, and better treatments would be beneficial.
I can think of at least a half dozen OTC drug families for pain (aspirin-like, acetaminophen, -caines, etc.) and each has disadvantages, and some are synergistic. Try telling someone in severe, continuing pain that they have no need for better pain-killers.