I always get concerned whenever a police captains/spokemen/union reps says something to the effect of "our first priority is going home safely at night". Police's first priority should always making sure members of the public go home safely at the end of the day.
I don't think this is realistic. You really can't blame people for wanting to protect their own lives. People who choose to sacrifice themselves for others are lauded because what they've done is extraordinary, heroic, above and beyond what can reasonably be expected. You're saying that we should expect extraordinary heroism. That's not just unreasonable and unrealistic, it's unsustainable. Heroes die.
What if you had a fireman who said, "I'm not going into that building. I could get killed."
Or if you had a soldier who said, "I'm not going to fight at the front. I could get killed."
Cops voluntarily join the force. They know that there are going to be risks. We pay them a lot of money to take those risks. That's the job. They can't just shoot anybody who might be a danger (or might be an innocent person making a call on his cell phone). If you're not willing to take that risk, don't take the job. The unemployment rate is high and there's a long line of better-qualified people who are willing to take those risks.
I have heard that a popular method of drug research is to do clinical studies of a large number of people, but only report on the people that had positive results. You had 500 people in the trial, 10 got better, you report your 10 person drug test. Doctors should be required by law to report negative drug effects to the FDA from all their patients, even for clinical trials.
The only people who do that are quacks like Burzynski, who published a book describing his "successes" who may not have actually had cancer in the first place, and whom he didn't follow more than 6 months.
You couldn't publish something like that in a major peer-reviewed medical journal today.
What the drug companies did do until recently was commission a lot of studies, and publish only the studies with good results. The journals put an end to that by requiring every investigator to report the start of a study in a public registry, like http://www.clinicaltrials.gov.... If they don't report the study, the journals won't publish it when it's done. And doctors can ask the drug companies about the studies that suddenly disappeared.
The trouble is that when a pharmaceutical corporation carries out research on a new drug, it very much wants that drug to be found useful, safe, and fit for use. (Although it's in the corporation's interest that any really serious side-effects should be identified, as it would lose even more money if it marketed something that turned out to be a new thalidomide).
Unlike a proper scientific team, the corporation undertakes its research wanting a particular outcome. That alone is almost enough to guarantee that any results reported will be unreliable and unsafe.
That's why some of the best studies, such as the ones on cardiology drugs, were done by the Veterans Administration. You go to a medical conference and you can hear doctors referring to "the VA study".
Kaiser Permanente and Blue Cross/Blue Shield did some good studies too, but their economic model doesn't encourage it.
A factor is you've got christians holding everyone back because they are afraid the kids might learn something that will make them question their faith (science).
Let's make it clear that this only applies to Christian extremists. Some Christians are nice, rational people. You wouldn't know they were Christians if they didn't tell you.
While "no child left behind" might sound noble, the way it was written and funded, it's been incredibly destructive to education in the US. It's been tweaked to avoid complete destruction, but schools would be way better off if they were allowed to educate kids to their potential instead of just focusing on getting everyone to pass the test. Because schools now aren't rewarded for kids who excel, they're just punished for any kids who fail, so schools allocated resources to keeping a few kids from failing instead of maximizing educational outcome across all students.
I always thought that the purpose of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top was to destroy the public education system and the teachers' unions.
A lot of this dates back to the "segregation academies" of the South. The former Confederate states traditionally had low funding for black schools (they got hand-me-down textbooks from the white schools, teachers who were paid less, etc.). One of the solutions (maybe not the best one) for equal education was to integrate the schools. Some states responded by closing down public schools entirely, and letting people who could afford it go to private schools. A lot of the privatization and charter school movement was driven by the goal of preserving white-only schools (sometimes with a few token blacks).
The second is a fear of testing. I'm pretty sure the top countries in education test heavily (at least Japan and South Korea do). Testing is the only way we know if children are learning anything. Heck, that's the only reason we know the U.S. ranks so poorly in education.
You don't understand testing.
The person who explains it best is Diane Ravitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . She used to be in the conservative camp, and the Wall Street Journal even gave her a regular op-ed column (because she was for charter schools and against unions). She was Assistant Secretary of Education under both HGW Bush and Bill Clinton. She started out believing in testing, but in the Department of Education, her job was to review all the data, and she saw that testing didn't work, so she changed her position.
One big problem with testing is that, as Ravitch found, the one factor that most strongly affects test scores is family income. The effect of family income was stronger than any effect of the teacher. A "bad" teacher with wealthy students will have better scores than a "good" teacher with low-income students.
If you judge teachers by their students' test results, you'll just reward teachers with wealthy students and punish teachers with poor students.
You seem to think that the tests under No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top are like the College Boards or the AP tests, where you just count up the right and wrong answers and give the student a score. They're not. First, they don't judge the teachers by student achievement, they judge teachers by improvement, the delta of achievement. Second, they have to "adjust" the tests for income, student age, and other factors.
They wind up with a formula to judge teachers. These formulas vary according to the test, but the New York Times had a story on the formula used in New York State, which was so complicated that the NYT couldn't find anybody who could explain it or claimed to understand it. These formulas are developed not by people working in the schools, but by private contractors, like Pearson and McGraw-Hill. Diane Ravitch keeps complaining that the private companies don't disclose their methods or supporting data, as an academic researcher would do, so nobody outside the companies can see whether they're doing it right.
Another big problem with testing is that they're not validated. Nobody knows what they're measuring, and whether it's something that kids really need to know. You could teach a course in which students were required to memorize the names of the components of a computer (like "power supply" and "resistor"), and make up a test to tell you how well they memorized the names. (I saw a course like that.) You could rank students and teachers by percentiles. But they wouldn't know anything useful about electronics or computers.
Another big problem is that the high-stakes tests fail standard statistical tests. If you were dealing with a medical treatment, you'd have to say that the results were not statistically significant. Most teachers have too few students for statistical significance. For example, the NYT gave the example of a new teacher in a junior high school whose students were doing very well in terms of science fair projects and getting into specialized schools like Bronx Science and Stuyversant, whose principal liked her and wanted to rehire her, perhaps permanently, but the principle couldn't rehire her because she did poorly in the high-stakes test. According to the formula, she was in the bottom 5% of teachers. However, the confidence interval of her score was between zero and 51%. So she was equally likely to be in the top half. Or in other words, her test score was statistically meaningless. But she had to be fired anyway. (If you don't know what a confidence interval is, then I can't explain the problem.)
You're saying that if I've been paying taxes all my life, and I have cancer and I could be cured for $50,000, but I don't have $50,000, the government should leave me to die, like that guy in the NEJM article http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...
Sounds good to me. Fuck off. I'm tired of the pretentious, entitled parasites who can be bought for an empty promise.
You sound like a parasite to me. You want the government to do things for you, but you don't want the government to do things for anybody else.
There's always some excuse why you deserve it. I don't buy that it is your money and I don't buy that you deserve expensive health care that you are unwilling to pay for yourself.
It certainly is my money. I pay taxes like everybody else, and I'm entitled to a share of what the government does with my money, according to the laws that my elected representatives passed.
You're saying that if I've been paying taxes all my life, and I have cancer and I could be cured for $50,000, but I don't have $50,000, the government should leave me to die, like that guy in the NEJM article http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...
I don't believe that and most American don't believe that. I don't think there's a developed country in the world where they believe that.
Well I arrived at America in the 1940s (when I was born), and you don't know how good this country used to be.
Up to the 1960s, some of the best colleges (like CCNY) were basically free. So college students didn't have to work for slave wages in Chinatown. In the developed European countries (except the UK) college is still free, so it's not impossible for a modern economy to supply free education.
My father grew up in the "old norm." He worked loyally for his company during WWII, risked his life going up testing experimental aircraft systems, came in to work every day, and worked as much overtime as it took to get the job done. He was never drunk on the job, and never lied to cover up mistakes. After he was in his 50s, he couldn't keep up with the latest technology, but he had a good union so his employer found him another job in the company where he could be useful until he retired. And he was paid very well -- enough to help me and my sister through college.
That was standard in the American work force from after WWII up to the 1970s. All the major corporations -- Eastman Kodak, IBM, The New York Times -- had a policy of employment for life. Some companies, like the auto manufacturers, had cyclical layoffs, but with the unions they set it up with unemployment insurance and so forth to cushion the shock.
Companies in Germany and the other developed countries in Europe are continuing to do that, so it's not impossible.
I think you should go back to college and study some sociology. (I once did a paper on Henry Ford and the asssembly line.) It sounds like you don't understand social science research.
I think you're making 2 mistakes.
(1) The Andrew Carnegie story you're describing is unusual.
Almost everybody who succeeds in America succeeds with some kind of social support. You came to this country with enough education to be able to go to college.
You had significant advantages over most black people, for example. In much of the South, they weren't even allowed to vote until the 1970s, and their school systems were worse than any socialist country.
(2) You may be doing well now, but the American economy has an enormous amount of insecurity. As TFA says, the wheel of fortune turns. Most Americans have a peak income in heir career, and never earn as much again.
That's particularly true in the engineering and technical professions. In the 1970s, there were many age-discrimination lawsuits by older programmers in their 50s who were trained in COBOL, FORTRAN, etc. who were not given a chance to retrain themselves but fired and replaced by younger, cheaper workers. Aircraft engineers, who were in great demand during the 1960s, wound up selling real estate in the 1970s.
You may have made enough money in your business to live in comfort for the rest of your life. If so, enjoy America.
If not, you may wind up in 10 years in the cutthroat capitalism job market again, back in Chinatown waiting on tables.
What good is a high income without job security? I know people who worked their way up to $60,000 after 20 years of loyal service, got fired at age 50 and never worked again. What does that average out to, $35,000 a year?
If you want "real science," go read Paul Krugman in the New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/column/... He's an economist, but he went to MIT so he knows what science is, and he gives you all the data you want. (You may not care, but I'm saying this for the benefit of anyone who is reading this.)
Job insecurity is not normal for the US, it's not good and its not necessary.
As Bernie Sanders says, the European social democracies are a good model.
You don't even know what a market is. It's not some magic controlling beast, it is merely an avenue for trade - trade which you don't have to participate in.
Well, let's see. You're telling me that if I have cancer, and it would cost $50,000 to treat me, and I don't have $50,000 www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1312793 , I'm free not to participate in the market.
That doesn't sound like a good deal to me. What would I get under socialism?
socialism doesn't work for anyone except a few parasites at the top who take everything and the 20% of the parasites at the bottom who wouldn't work for anything anywhere.
Hell, I was even there long enough to have experienced their health care system after I got a wisdom tooth removed in Helsinki. Cost me $25 (which the dentist wouldn't take because he said it had been a pleasure to practice English with me).
Just because it didn't cost you a lot doesn't mean it was cheap. Capitalism paid for that bit of social welfare.
It was cheap because the Finnish health care system costs half as much per capita as the US health care system.
While the Soviet Communism had many great accomplishments, I wouldn't praise their freedom of expression.
While US capitalism had many accomplishments, I wouldn't praise their health care system. It's the most expensive in the world. For those who can easily afford to spend $100,000 for a major illness, and have the skills to shop for health care, it's a good system, with outcomes as good as the other developed countries like Canada. For those who don't have that kind of money, they leave sick people to die. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...
The major accomplishments of our health care system, like the new $100,000 a year drugs, are mostly the results of government grants to academic researchers, whose universities sell the rights to private companies.
I will acknowledge that for rare and hard-to-diagnose diseases, we do have some of the best medical centers in the world. People come from Canada and elsewhere to be treated at the National Institutes of Health campus -- oops! Socialized medicine.
And for treating soldiers with head wounds and missing limbs (of which we have so many from Iraq and Afghanistan) the US military and VA health care system is the best in the world -- oops! Socialized medicine.
Obama!? Wow, if you believe he is anything near a socialist (or communist) then you have bought the right-wing propaganda a little too much. At least Roger Ailes can rest easy knowing he is still doing a good job.
And your high school economics teacher should be ashamed of himself.
GP said, " Name one country, where the people have moved UP in life, that runs under socialism"
My post accomplished that, simply raising the bar in order to try and prove some other point that the answer was not intended for is just an exercise in public masturbation
And he started out by excluding China, which has one of the strongest manufacturing-based economies in the world.
(And is similar to free-market India in many ways.)
In socialism, those starving people are brought up to a higher standard of living.
The 30 million people that starved to death in the Great Leap Forward, and the seven million that died in the Holodomor, would disagree.
Well, which is it? Did 7 million Ukrainians die because of the inefficiencies of socialism, or did they die because Stalin was trying to exterminate unreliable nationalists (who later allied with the Nazis)?
I'm guessing Time Warner is going to be giving all those royalties back?
That's what Good Morning to You Productions is demanding in the lawsuit.
When one of the parties commits fraud upon the court, which is what it looks like they did in the discovery or non-discovery of that 1927 songbook, https://www.techdirt.com/artic... judges can get very angry.
They've been knowingly demanding and collecting all that money under false pretenses. That's a little worse than downloading a few mp3s.
The judicial system is so arbitrary and corrupt that anything could happen. But sometimes, once in a while, it actually produces justice.
If you're saying rights don't exist if they can be violated, then there are no rights. Freedom of speech does exist, and the court system is generally pretty sensitive about it. The courts will not side with the illegal action by the police.
No, I'm saying that rights do exist, but they can be violated.
We do have freedom of speech in the U.S., but the government favors some peoples' freedom of speech over others.
The mayors of New York City, particularly Bloomberg and Giuliani, have let the people they agree with express their freedom of speech much more than the people they don't agree with.
For example, Bloomberg wouldn't let demonstrators against the Iraq war hold a rally in Central Park. There was no other public space in Manhattan that could have held all those demonstrators, and the park had been used for other large events, such as free music performances (which were also commercial promotions). Bloomberg claimed that it would "damage the grass," which is an old excuse that goes back to Robert Moses, but Jimmy Breslin, a columnist, called up a groundsman in Kentucky who said that he's had crowds like that with no problem to the grass.
Even worse, the cops arrested demonstrators (and bystanders who had nothing to do with the demonstration), and charged them with assaulting a cop, a felony. The charges were later dismissed when videotapes turned up showing that the cops had falsely sworn charges against them, also a felon. The cops weren't disciplined.
Bloomberg also kicked out the peaceful political demonstrators from Occupy Wall Street from Zucotti Park, which was probably the most deserted, under-used park in lower Manhattan.
This is in a city that has turned over public parks like Bryant Park over to commercial businesses, like restaurants and fashion shows.
Giuliani actually wrote regulations that would have permitted demonstrations by sports fans, but not political demonstrations.
Insisting that the event be sufficiently organized to ensure the safety of the attendees and the community and the rights of all are respected is hardly unreasonable and frankly is well enshrined in our laws. You are making the mistake of presuming the first amendment rights of those attending the event are the only rights in play. They aren't.
How is insisting that Chief Keef couldn't appear, even by hologram, a reasonable restriction to assure the safety of the attendees or protect any competing rights?
It doesn't matter what the terms of the permit are; those terms are illegal.
That is for a court of law to decide. You may be right but that has not yet been decided to my knowledge.
I can decide that too. What are you saying -- I don't have a right to make a decision if I'm not a judge?
I suppose you think there was freedom of speech in the Soviet Union, because their courts also decided that their law guaranteeing freedom of speech wasn't violated when they put dissidents in jail.
The government may only enact reasonable content-neutral restrictions on speech. Saying that a specific person cannot perform or a specific viewpoint cannot be expressed runs afoul of well-established First Amendment case law.
That is not remotely true. I refer you to FCC v Pacifica Foundation, better known as the case over George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words broadcast which was upheld by the Supreme Court and restricts viewpoints based on their content.
The Supreme Court upheld a lot of things. That doesn't mean they were right.
The Supreme Court decided in Dredd Scott that Negroes couldn't be citizens, and that slave owners couldn't be deprived of their property rights.
In this case, you need a permit to use the park. Their permit said that they would not have this wanted fugitive perform. They violated the terms of their permit, so were shut down. This is pretty straightforward and they had to know this would happen - they probably wanted the publicity.
I once heard a talk by an ACLU lawyer about that. If a park is a public space, commonly used for public performances, you don't need a permit. A permit is merely a convenience that makes things easier for the the City, the police, and the people who are giving the event.
When the City gives you a permit, they're not bestowing you a privilege or favor like a king would do. They're giving you the paperwork for something you have a right to do whether they like it or not.
And the Constitution doesn't allow them to give or deny a permit based on the content of what you're going to say.
Of course they do it anyway. That just supports the parent's point: freedom of speech doesn't exist.
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I always get concerned whenever a police captains/spokemen/union reps says something to the effect of "our first priority is going home safely at night". Police's first priority should always making sure members of the public go home safely at the end of the day.
I don't think this is realistic. You really can't blame people for wanting to protect their own lives. People who choose to sacrifice themselves for others are lauded because what they've done is extraordinary, heroic, above and beyond what can reasonably be expected. You're saying that we should expect extraordinary heroism. That's not just unreasonable and unrealistic, it's unsustainable. Heroes die.
What if you had a fireman who said, "I'm not going into that building. I could get killed."
Or if you had a soldier who said, "I'm not going to fight at the front. I could get killed."
Cops voluntarily join the force. They know that there are going to be risks. We pay them a lot of money to take those risks. That's the job. They can't just shoot anybody who might be a danger (or might be an innocent person making a call on his cell phone). If you're not willing to take that risk, don't take the job. The unemployment rate is high and there's a long line of better-qualified people who are willing to take those risks.
Well, presumably, the purpose of religion is to increase the founder's inclusive fitness.
http://gocomics.typepad.com/.a...
You make a good point.
This was explained in the journal xkcd.
https://xkcd.com/882/
Ok, it's not peer-reviewed. But it has a very high impact factor.
I have heard that a popular method of drug research is to do clinical studies of a large number of people, but only report on the people that had positive results. You had 500 people in the trial, 10 got better, you report your 10 person drug test. Doctors should be required by law to report negative drug effects to the FDA from all their patients, even for clinical trials.
The only people who do that are quacks like Burzynski, who published a book describing his "successes" who may not have actually had cancer in the first place, and whom he didn't follow more than 6 months.
You couldn't publish something like that in a major peer-reviewed medical journal today.
What the drug companies did do until recently was commission a lot of studies, and publish only the studies with good results. The journals put an end to that by requiring every investigator to report the start of a study in a public registry, like http://www.clinicaltrials.gov.... If they don't report the study, the journals won't publish it when it's done. And doctors can ask the drug companies about the studies that suddenly disappeared.
The trouble is that when a pharmaceutical corporation carries out research on a new drug, it very much wants that drug to be found useful, safe, and fit for use. (Although it's in the corporation's interest that any really serious side-effects should be identified, as it would lose even more money if it marketed something that turned out to be a new thalidomide).
Unlike a proper scientific team, the corporation undertakes its research wanting a particular outcome. That alone is almost enough to guarantee that any results reported will be unreliable and unsafe.
That's why some of the best studies, such as the ones on cardiology drugs, were done by the Veterans Administration. You go to a medical conference and you can hear doctors referring to "the VA study".
Kaiser Permanente and Blue Cross/Blue Shield did some good studies too, but their economic model doesn't encourage it.
A factor is you've got christians holding everyone back because they are afraid the kids might learn something that will make them question their faith (science).
Let's make it clear that this only applies to Christian extremists. Some Christians are nice, rational people. You wouldn't know they were Christians if they didn't tell you.
While "no child left behind" might sound noble, the way it was written and funded, it's been incredibly destructive to education in the US. It's been tweaked to avoid complete destruction, but schools would be way better off if they were allowed to educate kids to their potential instead of just focusing on getting everyone to pass the test. Because schools now aren't rewarded for kids who excel, they're just punished for any kids who fail, so schools allocated resources to keeping a few kids from failing instead of maximizing educational outcome across all students.
I always thought that the purpose of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top was to destroy the public education system and the teachers' unions.
A lot of this dates back to the "segregation academies" of the South. The former Confederate states traditionally had low funding for black schools (they got hand-me-down textbooks from the white schools, teachers who were paid less, etc.). One of the solutions (maybe not the best one) for equal education was to integrate the schools. Some states responded by closing down public schools entirely, and letting people who could afford it go to private schools. A lot of the privatization and charter school movement was driven by the goal of preserving white-only schools (sometimes with a few token blacks).
[anti-black racism ignored for now]
The second is a fear of testing. I'm pretty sure the top countries in education test heavily (at least Japan and South Korea do). Testing is the only way we know if children are learning anything. Heck, that's the only reason we know the U.S. ranks so poorly in education.
You don't understand testing.
The person who explains it best is Diane Ravitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . She used to be in the conservative camp, and the Wall Street Journal even gave her a regular op-ed column (because she was for charter schools and against unions). She was Assistant Secretary of Education under both HGW Bush and Bill Clinton. She started out believing in testing, but in the Department of Education, her job was to review all the data, and she saw that testing didn't work, so she changed her position.
One big problem with testing is that, as Ravitch found, the one factor that most strongly affects test scores is family income. The effect of family income was stronger than any effect of the teacher. A "bad" teacher with wealthy students will have better scores than a "good" teacher with low-income students.
If you judge teachers by their students' test results, you'll just reward teachers with wealthy students and punish teachers with poor students.
You seem to think that the tests under No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top are like the College Boards or the AP tests, where you just count up the right and wrong answers and give the student a score. They're not. First, they don't judge the teachers by student achievement, they judge teachers by improvement, the delta of achievement. Second, they have to "adjust" the tests for income, student age, and other factors.
They wind up with a formula to judge teachers. These formulas vary according to the test, but the New York Times had a story on the formula used in New York State, which was so complicated that the NYT couldn't find anybody who could explain it or claimed to understand it. These formulas are developed not by people working in the schools, but by private contractors, like Pearson and McGraw-Hill. Diane Ravitch keeps complaining that the private companies don't disclose their methods or supporting data, as an academic researcher would do, so nobody outside the companies can see whether they're doing it right.
Another big problem with testing is that they're not validated. Nobody knows what they're measuring, and whether it's something that kids really need to know. You could teach a course in which students were required to memorize the names of the components of a computer (like "power supply" and "resistor"), and make up a test to tell you how well they memorized the names. (I saw a course like that.) You could rank students and teachers by percentiles. But they wouldn't know anything useful about electronics or computers.
Another big problem is that the high-stakes tests fail standard statistical tests. If you were dealing with a medical treatment, you'd have to say that the results were not statistically significant. Most teachers have too few students for statistical significance. For example, the NYT gave the example of a new teacher in a junior high school whose students were doing very well in terms of science fair projects and getting into specialized schools like Bronx Science and Stuyversant, whose principal liked her and wanted to rehire her, perhaps permanently, but the principle couldn't rehire her because she did poorly in the high-stakes test. According to the formula, she was in the bottom 5% of teachers. However, the confidence interval of her score was between zero and 51%. So she was equally likely to be in the top half. Or in other words, her test score was statistically meaningless. But she had to be fired anyway. (If you don't know what a confidence interval is, then I can't explain the problem.)
You would do just as well if you fired a
You're saying that if I've been paying taxes all my life, and I have cancer and I could be cured for $50,000, but I don't have $50,000, the government should leave me to die, like that guy in the NEJM article http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...
Sounds good to me. Fuck off. I'm tired of the pretentious, entitled parasites who can be bought for an empty promise.
You sound like a parasite to me. You want the government to do things for you, but you don't want the government to do things for anybody else.
If I pay taxes, it's my money too.
There's always some excuse why you deserve it. I don't buy that it is your money and I don't buy that you deserve expensive health care that you are unwilling to pay for yourself.
It certainly is my money. I pay taxes like everybody else, and I'm entitled to a share of what the government does with my money, according to the laws that my elected representatives passed.
You're saying that if I've been paying taxes all my life, and I have cancer and I could be cured for $50,000, but I don't have $50,000, the government should leave me to die, like that guy in the NEJM article http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...
I don't believe that and most American don't believe that. I don't think there's a developed country in the world where they believe that.
That doesn't sound like a good deal to me. What would I get under socialism?
Heh, quite a bit till you run out of other peoples' money. Funny how many of the socialism arguments boil down to greed.
If I pay taxes, it's my money too.
When I read the Wall Street Journal editorial page, they said that all their arguments boiled down to greed. Greed is good, they said.
Well I arrived at America in the 1940s (when I was born), and you don't know how good this country used to be.
Up to the 1960s, some of the best colleges (like CCNY) were basically free. So college students didn't have to work for slave wages in Chinatown. In the developed European countries (except the UK) college is still free, so it's not impossible for a modern economy to supply free education.
My father grew up in the "old norm." He worked loyally for his company during WWII, risked his life going up testing experimental aircraft systems, came in to work every day, and worked as much overtime as it took to get the job done. He was never drunk on the job, and never lied to cover up mistakes. After he was in his 50s, he couldn't keep up with the latest technology, but he had a good union so his employer found him another job in the company where he could be useful until he retired. And he was paid very well -- enough to help me and my sister through college.
That was standard in the American work force from after WWII up to the 1970s. All the major corporations -- Eastman Kodak, IBM, The New York Times -- had a policy of employment for life. Some companies, like the auto manufacturers, had cyclical layoffs, but with the unions they set it up with unemployment insurance and so forth to cushion the shock.
Companies in Germany and the other developed countries in Europe are continuing to do that, so it's not impossible.
I think you should go back to college and study some sociology. (I once did a paper on Henry Ford and the asssembly line.) It sounds like you don't understand social science research.
I think you're making 2 mistakes.
(1) The Andrew Carnegie story you're describing is unusual.
Almost everybody who succeeds in America succeeds with some kind of social support. You came to this country with enough education to be able to go to college.
You had significant advantages over most black people, for example. In much of the South, they weren't even allowed to vote until the 1970s, and their school systems were worse than any socialist country.
(2) You may be doing well now, but the American economy has an enormous amount of insecurity.
As TFA says, the wheel of fortune turns. Most Americans have a peak income in heir career, and never earn as much again.
That's particularly true in the engineering and technical professions. In the 1970s, there were many age-discrimination lawsuits by older programmers in their 50s who were trained in COBOL, FORTRAN, etc. who were not given a chance to retrain themselves but fired and replaced by younger, cheaper workers. Aircraft engineers, who were in great demand during the 1960s, wound up selling real estate in the 1970s.
You may have made enough money in your business to live in comfort for the rest of your life. If so, enjoy America.
If not, you may wind up in 10 years in the cutthroat capitalism job market again, back in Chinatown waiting on tables.
What good is a high income without job security? I know people who worked their way up to $60,000 after 20 years of loyal service, got fired at age 50 and never worked again. What does that average out to, $35,000 a year?
If you want "real science," go read Paul Krugman in the New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/column/... He's an economist, but he went to MIT so he knows what science is, and he gives you all the data you want. (You may not care, but I'm saying this for the benefit of anyone who is reading this.)
Job insecurity is not normal for the US, it's not good and its not necessary.
As Bernie Sanders says, the European social democracies are a good model.
You don't even know what a market is. It's not some magic controlling beast, it is merely an avenue for trade - trade which you don't have to participate in.
Well, let's see. You're telling me that if I have cancer, and it would cost $50,000 to treat me, and I don't have $50,000 www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1312793 , I'm free not to participate in the market.
That doesn't sound like a good deal to me. What would I get under socialism?
socialism doesn't work for anyone except a few parasites at the top who take everything and the 20% of the parasites at the bottom who wouldn't work for anything anywhere.
Whereas capitalism is the reverse.
Hell, I was even there long enough to have experienced their health care system after I got a wisdom tooth removed in Helsinki. Cost me $25 (which the dentist wouldn't take because he said it had been a pleasure to practice English with me).
Just because it didn't cost you a lot doesn't mean it was cheap. Capitalism paid for that bit of social welfare.
It was cheap because the Finnish health care system costs half as much per capita as the US health care system.
While the Soviet Communism had many great accomplishments, I wouldn't praise their freedom of expression.
While US capitalism had many accomplishments, I wouldn't praise their health care system. It's the most expensive in the world. For those who can easily afford to spend $100,000 for a major illness, and have the skills to shop for health care, it's a good system, with outcomes as good as the other developed countries like Canada. For those who don't have that kind of money, they leave sick people to die. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...
The major accomplishments of our health care system, like the new $100,000 a year drugs, are mostly the results of government grants to academic researchers, whose universities sell the rights to private companies.
I will acknowledge that for rare and hard-to-diagnose diseases, we do have some of the best medical centers in the world. People come from Canada and elsewhere to be treated at the National Institutes of Health campus -- oops! Socialized medicine.
And for treating soldiers with head wounds and missing limbs (of which we have so many from Iraq and Afghanistan) the US military and VA health care system is the best in the world -- oops! Socialized medicine.
Obama!? Wow, if you believe he is anything near a socialist (or communist) then you have bought the right-wing propaganda a little too much. At least Roger Ailes can rest easy knowing he is still doing a good job.
And your high school economics teacher should be ashamed of himself.
GP said, " Name one country, where the people have moved UP in life, that runs under socialism"
My post accomplished that, simply raising the bar in order to try and prove some other point that the answer was not intended for is just an exercise in public masturbation
And he started out by excluding China, which has one of the strongest manufacturing-based economies in the world.
(And is similar to free-market India in many ways.)
In socialism, those starving people are brought up to a higher standard of living.
The 30 million people that starved to death in the Great Leap Forward, and the seven million that died in the Holodomor, would disagree.
Well, which is it? Did 7 million Ukrainians die because of the inefficiencies of socialism, or did they die because Stalin was trying to exterminate unreliable nationalists (who later allied with the Nazis)?
I'm guessing Time Warner is going to be giving all those royalties back?
That's what Good Morning to You Productions is demanding in the lawsuit.
When one of the parties commits fraud upon the court, which is what it looks like they did in the discovery or non-discovery of that 1927 songbook, https://www.techdirt.com/artic... judges can get very angry.
They've been knowingly demanding and collecting all that money under false pretenses. That's a little worse than downloading a few mp3s.
The judicial system is so arbitrary and corrupt that anything could happen. But sometimes, once in a while, it actually produces justice.
If you're saying rights don't exist if they can be violated, then there are no rights. Freedom of speech does exist, and the court system is generally pretty sensitive about it. The courts will not side with the illegal action by the police.
No, I'm saying that rights do exist, but they can be violated.
We do have freedom of speech in the U.S., but the government favors some peoples' freedom of speech over others.
The mayors of New York City, particularly Bloomberg and Giuliani, have let the people they agree with express their freedom of speech much more than the people they don't agree with.
For example, Bloomberg wouldn't let demonstrators against the Iraq war hold a rally in Central Park. There was no other public space in Manhattan that could have held all those demonstrators, and the park had been used for other large events, such as free music performances (which were also commercial promotions). Bloomberg claimed that it would "damage the grass," which is an old excuse that goes back to Robert Moses, but Jimmy Breslin, a columnist, called up a groundsman in Kentucky who said that he's had crowds like that with no problem to the grass.
Even worse, the cops arrested demonstrators (and bystanders who had nothing to do with the demonstration), and charged them with assaulting a cop, a felony. The charges were later dismissed when videotapes turned up showing that the cops had falsely sworn charges against them, also a felon. The cops weren't disciplined.
Bloomberg also kicked out the peaceful political demonstrators from Occupy Wall Street from Zucotti Park, which was probably the most deserted, under-used park in lower Manhattan.
This is in a city that has turned over public parks like Bryant Park over to commercial businesses, like restaurants and fashion shows.
Giuliani actually wrote regulations that would have permitted demonstrations by sports fans, but not political demonstrations.
Insisting that the event be sufficiently organized to ensure the safety of the attendees and the community and the rights of all are respected is hardly unreasonable and frankly is well enshrined in our laws. You are making the mistake of presuming the first amendment rights of those attending the event are the only rights in play. They aren't.
How is insisting that Chief Keef couldn't appear, even by hologram, a reasonable restriction to assure the safety of the attendees or protect any competing rights?
It doesn't matter what the terms of the permit are; those terms are illegal.
That is for a court of law to decide. You may be right but that has not yet been decided to my knowledge.
I can decide that too. What are you saying -- I don't have a right to make a decision if I'm not a judge?
I suppose you think there was freedom of speech in the Soviet Union, because their courts also decided that their law guaranteeing freedom of speech wasn't violated when they put dissidents in jail.
The government may only enact reasonable content-neutral restrictions on speech. Saying that a specific person cannot perform or a specific viewpoint cannot be expressed runs afoul of well-established First Amendment case law.
That is not remotely true. I refer you to FCC v Pacifica Foundation, better known as the case over George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words broadcast which was upheld by the Supreme Court and restricts viewpoints based on their content.
The Supreme Court upheld a lot of things. That doesn't mean they were right.
The Supreme Court decided in Dredd Scott that Negroes couldn't be citizens, and that slave owners couldn't be deprived of their property rights.
I don't agree with that either.
In this case, you need a permit to use the park. Their permit said that they would not have this wanted fugitive perform. They violated the terms of their permit, so were shut down. This is pretty straightforward and they had to know this would happen - they probably wanted the publicity.
I once heard a talk by an ACLU lawyer about that. If a park is a public space, commonly used for public performances, you don't need a permit. A permit is merely a convenience that makes things easier for the the City, the police, and the people who are giving the event.
When the City gives you a permit, they're not bestowing you a privilege or favor like a king would do. They're giving you the paperwork for something you have a right to do whether they like it or not.
And the Constitution doesn't allow them to give or deny a permit based on the content of what you're going to say.
Of course they do it anyway. That just supports the parent's point: freedom of speech doesn't exist.
What about the non-tariff barriers? https://www.wto.org/english/tr...
That's where they sneak in the provisions about intellectual property rights, "market pricing," "investor-state dispute settlement"?
Is this like the Trans-Pacific Partnership?
Are they going to settle disputes by private arbitrators, whose decisions can't be reviewed by courts or changes by national legislatures?