Just to continue the sarcasm a bit, since you didn't get it the first time:
I'm a citizen of Cascadia- an occupied nation somewhat north of Southern California. It would help us Cascadians who labor under the oppressive regime of the United States and Canada if the teaming masses of immoral Mexifornicators and Californicators would simply die off; they suck far more resources than they return to the area.
Sarcasm off. Actually, from the map, you appear to be right- Oregon and Washington and Idaho, and very likely British Columbia, are also affected.
Any TRUE warmonger would be outraged at how Iraq has been handled. Sorely lacking in the plan for Iraq and the War on Terror:
1. Sacrifices at home to provide needed material for the troops. 2. Wartime production crowding out civilian production. 3. A draft calling up millions- even though it's obvious that cannon fodder would be usefull, as the enemy is highly limited on manpower. 4. Nukes and terror to break the spirit of the enemy.
All the true warmongers I know are calling for all or part of the above- which means that the Bush Administration is sorely lacking in this area, yet another lie to stack on the mountain of lies.
This was true a few years ago- but I doubt it heavily now. The reason why is obvious- there has been little or NO ramp up of production, NO factories re-opening, to support the War in Iraq. The closest we've come is that GM is buying more parts for China to run the military Hummer line at 1/2 capacity- up from 1/1000ths capacity....
I wonder when does the "you broke enough enough stuff so you getting kicked out" rule come into force?
Sometime after January 30 is my guess, depending on who gets elected of course (or maybe just as important, who doesn't).
That must happen after they quit looking for WMD and After they give on having election lines where snipers shoot people.
There's that too- right now the Shia and Kurds are looking at being the big winners in the January 30 election- because it's a sure bet anybody voting in the Sunni Triangle will be voting for their last time.
Funny, my son hasn't had any problems- in fact, the two he has (Leapfrog's nursery rhymes and the Leapfrog piano) seem to be so robust in comparison to his other toys. Of course, at 19 months, he's not learning much from them yet- other than if you throw certain computer equipment against the wall it will do something at random....
Worse than that- what little manufacturing that isn't automated is sent overseas, so the economies this war is helping are not our own, but mainly China and India.
Then you get what you deserve, I'd say. Somehow I greatly doubt that Tillamock Cheese and North Plains Lettuce purchased in Beaverton at the farmer's market are contaminated.
Well, considering that in 1998 and 1999, Iraq had a very public display of destroying a lot of weapons, and provided us with several thousand pages of documentation on it, I'd suggest that maybe, just maybe, Iraq's weapons destruction progrom was actually NOT the lie that our government thought it was.
Here's the classes of WMDs that I find insignificant, first of all (all of which I could, with some research, point to stories about):
1. East German Sarin with an expiration date of 1989. 2. left over poison gas residue of various types on various pieces of scrap metal found in the desert. 3. Aluminum tubes with multiple possible uses. 4. Large ammounts of conventional weapons that the allied forces thought were so insignificant that they didn't even bother to secure them.
Did I miss anything? Was ANYTHING found outside of these categories at all? Note, NONE of these categories were outside of the UN resolutions, as expired gas could be considered to be destroyed, dead ammo could be considered to be destroyed, conventional weapons were allowed, and there WERE other uses for the aluminium tubes.
What I meant is that from the extreme right wing- CNN looks like it has a liberal commie pinko bias, but in exactly the same way you think it has a conservative bias- subtlely. Lou Dobbs gets his jibes in against GWB- including the "all of his companies tanked" one- but especially on his grandfather's ties to Saudi Arabia and the Bin Laden family. Oddly enough, I never saw F911- I got my portion of it filtered through CNN.
Far more interesting I thought than the Cocaine story was a hiddle line in the original cocaine story- that in 1974 GWB paid for an abortion.
What do you mean playing against a human team? Your robots will play against my robots.
The dream (perhaps not in this article, but in the SAF show I saw) was not to play against other robots- but rather to one day play against, and beat, a human team.
I suppose the Windows 2050 "Processors" will get trounced in the quarterfinals by the Linux 2050 "Beowulf Clusters" 5-1, to the delight of the fans watching on cornea-integrated-media-delivery systems.
Of course they will- the Windows 2050 team will be stuck on BSOD.
Of course, same robots will be busy eradicating the last of mankind to "restore peace and democracy" in the "digital world."
Ah, you watched sci-fi channel while you were typing this....
Or for that matter, Isaac Asimov's infamous short story, The Last Question, in which mankind builds smarter and smarter computers until one answers the question "how can entropy be reversed?" with "Let there be Light".
Not too terribly ambitious- Sunday's Scientific American Frontiers had the current Robotic World Cup, a miniaturized version of this, and I've got to say, the current state of the art as far as game theory was quite impressive (as well as some of the hardware- one American team had a backspin roller on the front of their bots that meant that the bot could actually autonomously "pull" a ball out of a corner on the modified foosball table they were using for a field). I have NO doubt at all that 2050 is a realistic goal date for a robotic team playing against humans wining the world cup. Of course, long before then, they'll be stocking the shelves at your local costco.
No they aren't. Established corporations *hate* capitalism. Capitalism means competition for the piece of the pie they already have.
And so they compete in fine capitalist fashion: by bribing politicians to raise barriers of entry to their industry. Capitalism is just letting those who control the means of production be in charge- all else follows from that.
America is more a corporate oligarchy than anything else. Real capitalism died a long, long time ago and we only pay lip service to it now.
I would suggest that the seeds of corporate oligarchy are in Adam Smith's invisible hand to begin with- that the concentration of wealth and power is inevitable in the abscence of regulations and force against it.
You're stretching things to ridiculous lengths to back up a weak argument. I don't believe that anyone under 18 should be expected to work, and that for the most part, people under 18 should only work by choice. You're implying that I said that newborns should be put straight to work out of the womb, when I never said that.
What you SAID was that anybody who didn't want to be homeless had to work- and that means anybody.
We do have numbers for the institutionalized -- it's the actual population minus the non-institutionalized population, which right now is around six million people. The best estimates of illegals puts the count at 8 million to 12 million people. The census (from which, along with the BLS employment reports, I derived my numbers) does try to take them into account. There's no way that 55 million illegals could be in the nation, because it would have been all too clear.
It's all too clear to me- during my 26 months of unemployment, 80 of my applications were for fast food jobs. You'd think that in the Portland area, anybody could get a relatively unskilled burger flipping job, right? No chance- EVERY kitchen is spainish only, and unless you speak spainish you're not very likely to get hired. The numbers estimated to be pouring across the Arizona border by ranchers in the area are downright astounding: 1-2 million/month.
My original point, which you chose to completely miss, is that the government should not be in the business of providing anything more than a brief safety net for people.
An outmoded concept at best considering what robotics is going to do to the working population over the next 10 years.
What I said was, "If you want to have a house, you have to work." There's a difference between a house and a home. If you have family that's willing to put you up in their home, fine.
Good luck having THAT in a culture that puts profit above family.
More power to you. But if you don't have that, and you're not willing to work hard enough for a decent home, the government shouldn't be in the business of mandating that someone provide it for you. And if you want a house -- i.e., a structure that has your name on the deed -- you will have to work for it.
So you suggest that the government has NO duty to provide for the common welfare? Can we also take away these rights from corporations? Hmm- the government no longer has to bail out the incredibly inefficient banks, so we can take away the FDIC. The government no longer has to bail out stupid corporations- forget limited liability. The government shouldn't be providing a stable money supply- back to bartering I guess.
My point is that you are NOT taking your point to it's logical conclusion- that what you REALLY want is the right to steal from your neighbor without them saying anything about it- and that you will never have. The robber barons tried that in 1929, and caused the Bonus Army to put the white house under seige in 1932.
From my own body- I'd say it's the other way around, as my eating habits (which aren't the healtiest) combined with my migraine medications have caused obesity-related acid reflux to such an extent that I'm lucky to get 6 hours a night on my normal work schedule- and play "catch up on weekends", which just leads to more obesity since I never get around to exercising.
How many countries involved? Half a dozen or so? So $52,560,000/year--$2,628,0000,000 over half a millennium in order to save 150,000 lives (let's imagine that they would all be saved, which is false): $175,000/person. That might actually be worthwhile, to tell the truth. Although I daresay a more in-depth analysis would probably reveal that the funds would be better allocated elsewhere.
Not really- because given your original premise, that a person is only worth what they earn, most of those people over their working lifetime will be lucky to earn half that ammount. These ain't Americans we're talking about- these people would be VERY lucky to earn $17,500 a year, and in their culture that would make them rich.
In answer to the first question: a sane one. Human life is not infinitely valuable (although it is, of course, quite valuable, and any given individual's life is priceless to him).
Sane only by the idea that little pieces of paper are more important than human beings- and not realizing that the money supply is actually infinite.
It would not, for example, be a good thing to spend all the money in the world to save the life of one man--everyone would starve to death, being unable to buy food.
Nah, you'd just print up more money. Money has no reality, no actual value beyond what people believe it has. This is what causes inflation.
In answer to the second question: sure, it'd be great if we could do everything possible to save everyone's life from everything that could end it. But resources are finite (which is why money is finite: money is just a convenient representation of resources
No it isn't- money hasn't been a representation of actual resources in over 100 years.
we can't do everything.
We've got far more resources than we think we do- scarcity of resources is an artificial imposition of having private ownership. Take away the private ownership and there is plenty for all.
Thus one must consider what is a wise use of money and what is not. Eliminating malaria would use up a chunk of money, but it'd save more lives (certainly) for less money (probably) than creating a tsunami centre.
And since money is an artificial contruct to begin with and is totally mythological, all one needs do is revalue the currency and then one has enough for both.
It's a question of return on investment: how much can we improve how many people's lives, and how much does it cost?
Ah yes, the good old Return On Investment lie- if one actually has MORAL priorities that are greater than FINANCIAL priorities, ROI becomes just another excuse to be immoral.
Money just tracks resources, and the decisions one makes on how those resources are allocated have very real effects on people's lives.
Money hasn't tracked resources since the decision was made to delink the gold supply from money- and even before that it had major problems tracking resources. We've got computers now- why not track resources with the actual resources?
As of August 1, 2004, there were about 288.6 million people in the US who were not institutionalized (prison or jail, hospitals, nursing homes, etc).
Another way of limiting it- just because they're institutionalized doesn't mean that their living expenses are free.
Of those, 64.9 million were age 15 or younger, so we're down to 221.2 million people (unless, of course, you prefer to put those kids to work).
You claimed that anybody who needed housing needed to work for that housing- that includes kids.
Another 32.5 million are 66 or older, a significant portion of whom are retired, bringing things down to 188.7 million people available for the workforce.
Just because they're old and retired doesn't mean that their living expenses have gone to 0- that's the reason why we have that horrid socialist program called social secuirty.
According to BLS statistics, 140.2 million people were employed, and a further 8 million were unemployed but looking.
True- but that doesn't mean they're the ONLY people who require food, clothing, shelter and medical care.
This leaves about 41 million people remaining. These will include students who aren't working; stay-at-home parents or friends/family members who live with someone, possibly to care for someone who requires constant care; people who are paid outside of the normal chain (for example, illegal immigrants, or those engaged in certain careers traditionally landing under the eye of vice squads such as prostitution and the drug trade) and people who, for one reason or another, simply aren't looking for a job, whether it's out of frustration or because they don't have any incentive to do so (financially independent, sponging off of family, or similar reasons).
All of which should be homeless by your argument, right?
In any case, your own percentages (the references of 66% and 75%) were shot out of the water by your own admissions.
Except for the fact that we don't have a number for the institutionalized, nor no real number for the illegal immigrants. Put those both together, and your 288.6 million could, by the estimates at NumbersUSA, really be 350 million- which accounts for the other 16-25%. I'll readily admit that I don't know how many of those people are real- but then again, neither does our government thanks to the open borders progrom. There are lots of statistical games you can play within that- just as you did at the very start of this message by assuming that there were categories of people that we are not able to get any useful work out of.
Did it ever occur to you that the reason your sister needs milk subsidies or that your father is only scraping by is because of socialist policies?
So socialist policies are the reason that agribusinesses use capitalism to buy up family farms and reduce production, thereby raising the price of milk? Or that the corporation moves jobs overseas to force people out of work?
Dude- you've got one wierd definition of what is socialist. Got news for you- corporations are capitalists in the extreme.
Let's not even get into the immorality of forcibly taking from one person to give to another.
You mean like the stock market encourages businesses to forcibly lower wages to raise profits?
Once again dude, you've got the wrong system. Oh, and BTW, Stalin was no socialist, he was a capitalist using the language of socialism to pull the world's largest con.
How much would it cost to staff a tsunami centre for 500 years?
Given the type of technology we have in the Pacific? Aproximately (given the lower wages there) $8,760,000/country. You only need ONE person on duty in these places after all.
How much would it cost to make every structure--even those which only last for a decade or two--tsunami-proof?
Why would that be neccessary for salvation of HUMAN LIFE? Evacuate the people when the warning comes in, and be done with it.
Could that money be used for better purposes? Last I checked the tsunami killed about 150,000 people--that's 300 people a year for 500 years. Could that money be used to save 1,000 lives a year?
Once again, what kind of person is so morally bankrupt as to compare human life to money? In other words, shouldn't we be doing BOTH?
It's not generally worth worrying about once-in-a-century disasters, much less twice-in-a-millennia ones, unless the costs are high enough. Asteroids probably fall into the not likely enough to be worth worrying about category even given the amount of damage one could do, simply because the odds are so low.
Depends on your viewpoint- which do you want to maximize, the movement of little green pieces of paper or human potential? If the first, there's no need to EVER plan for disaster- because the cost of a disaster happening just means that a different set of people have the opportunity to become wealthy. If the second, no price is too high to save a human child that might become the next Einstien.
You do realize that the cry mentioned will come from not just the rich.
Only for a very strange definition of who is the rich. As long as the work and goods are there, the average consumer cares not one whit where they actually come from.
Also it's not just the rich that complains about cost.
Only because the right wing has brainwashed ordinary people to vote against their own physical and economic interests.
I know you all around here hate people with money, but try to keep some perspective.
No, we don't hate people with money- we hate people who steal money by profiting off of somebody else's work.
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Just to continue the sarcasm a bit, since you didn't get it the first time:
I'm a citizen of Cascadia- an occupied nation somewhat north of Southern California. It would help us Cascadians who labor under the oppressive regime of the United States and Canada if the teaming masses of immoral Mexifornicators and Californicators would simply die off; they suck far more resources than they return to the area.
Sarcasm off. Actually, from the map, you appear to be right- Oregon and Washington and Idaho, and very likely British Columbia, are also affected.
Any TRUE warmonger would be outraged at how Iraq has been handled. Sorely lacking in the plan for Iraq and the War on Terror:
1. Sacrifices at home to provide needed material for the troops.
2. Wartime production crowding out civilian production.
3. A draft calling up millions- even though it's obvious that cannon fodder would be usefull, as the enemy is highly limited on manpower.
4. Nukes and terror to break the spirit of the enemy.
All the true warmongers I know are calling for all or part of the above- which means that the Bush Administration is sorely lacking in this area, yet another lie to stack on the mountain of lies.
This was true a few years ago- but I doubt it heavily now. The reason why is obvious- there has been little or NO ramp up of production, NO factories re-opening, to support the War in Iraq. The closest we've come is that GM is buying more parts for China to run the military Hummer line at 1/2 capacity- up from 1/1000ths capacity....
I'd also point out that we had between 10-50 million illegal immigrants come in during that time- most of which were of working age.
I wonder when does the "you broke enough enough stuff so you getting kicked out" rule come into force?
Sometime after January 30 is my guess, depending on who gets elected of course (or maybe just as important, who doesn't).
That must happen after they quit looking for WMD and After they give on having election lines where snipers shoot people.
There's that too- right now the Shia and Kurds are looking at being the big winners in the January 30 election- because it's a sure bet anybody voting in the Sunni Triangle will be voting for their last time.
Nah, closest military base was the Naval Blimp Hangers- and they've been owned by the Tillamock Rail Road since the 1970s.
Funny, my son hasn't had any problems- in fact, the two he has (Leapfrog's nursery rhymes and the Leapfrog piano) seem to be so robust in comparison to his other toys. Of course, at 19 months, he's not learning much from them yet- other than if you throw certain computer equipment against the wall it will do something at random....
Worse than that- what little manufacturing that isn't automated is sent overseas, so the economies this war is helping are not our own, but mainly China and India.
Then you get what you deserve, I'd say. Somehow I greatly doubt that Tillamock Cheese and North Plains Lettuce purchased in Beaverton at the farmer's market are contaminated.
Well, considering that in 1998 and 1999, Iraq had a very public display of destroying a lot of weapons, and provided us with several thousand pages of documentation on it, I'd suggest that maybe, just maybe, Iraq's weapons destruction progrom was actually NOT the lie that our government thought it was.
And just the month before, we gave up an additional $20 billion + to our trading partners in bad trade agreements.
Iraq IS currently American soil, under the Pottery Barn rule- we broke it, we bought it, it's our occupied territory now.
Here's the classes of WMDs that I find insignificant, first of all (all of which I could, with some research, point to stories about):
1. East German Sarin with an expiration date of 1989.
2. left over poison gas residue of various types on various pieces of scrap metal found in the desert.
3. Aluminum tubes with multiple possible uses.
4. Large ammounts of conventional weapons that the allied forces thought were so insignificant that they didn't even bother to secure them.
Did I miss anything? Was ANYTHING found outside of these categories at all? Note, NONE of these categories were outside of the UN resolutions, as expired gas could be considered to be destroyed, dead ammo could be considered to be destroyed, conventional weapons were allowed, and there WERE other uses for the aluminium tubes.
What I meant is that from the extreme right wing- CNN looks like it has a liberal commie pinko bias, but in exactly the same way you think it has a conservative bias- subtlely. Lou Dobbs gets his jibes in against GWB- including the "all of his companies tanked" one- but especially on his grandfather's ties to Saudi Arabia and the Bin Laden family. Oddly enough, I never saw F911- I got my portion of it filtered through CNN.
Far more interesting I thought than the Cocaine story was a hiddle line in the original cocaine story- that in 1974 GWB paid for an abortion.
What do you mean playing against a human team? Your robots will play against my robots.
The dream (perhaps not in this article, but in the SAF show I saw) was not to play against other robots- but rather to one day play against, and beat, a human team.
I suppose the Windows 2050 "Processors" will get trounced in the quarterfinals by the Linux 2050 "Beowulf Clusters" 5-1, to the delight of the fans watching on cornea-integrated-media-delivery systems.
Of course they will- the Windows 2050 team will be stuck on BSOD.
Of course, same robots will be busy eradicating the last of mankind to "restore peace and democracy" in the "digital world."
Ah, you watched sci-fi channel while you were typing this....
Or for that matter, Isaac Asimov's infamous short story, The Last Question, in which mankind builds smarter and smarter computers until one answers the question "how can entropy be reversed?" with "Let there be Light".
Not too terribly ambitious- Sunday's Scientific American Frontiers had the current Robotic World Cup, a miniaturized version of this, and I've got to say, the current state of the art as far as game theory was quite impressive (as well as some of the hardware- one American team had a backspin roller on the front of their bots that meant that the bot could actually autonomously "pull" a ball out of a corner on the modified foosball table they were using for a field). I have NO doubt at all that 2050 is a realistic goal date for a robotic team playing against humans wining the world cup. Of course, long before then, they'll be stocking the shelves at your local costco.
No they aren't. Established corporations *hate* capitalism. Capitalism means competition for the piece of the pie they already have.
And so they compete in fine capitalist fashion: by bribing politicians to raise barriers of entry to their industry. Capitalism is just letting those who control the means of production be in charge- all else follows from that.
America is more a corporate oligarchy than anything else. Real capitalism died a long, long time ago and we only pay lip service to it now.
I would suggest that the seeds of corporate oligarchy are in Adam Smith's invisible hand to begin with- that the concentration of wealth and power is inevitable in the abscence of regulations and force against it.
You're stretching things to ridiculous lengths to back up a weak argument. I don't believe that anyone under 18 should be expected to work, and that for the most part, people under 18 should only work by choice. You're implying that I said that newborns should be put straight to work out of the womb, when I never said that.
What you SAID was that anybody who didn't want to be homeless had to work- and that means anybody.
We do have numbers for the institutionalized -- it's the actual population minus the non-institutionalized population, which right now is around six million people. The best estimates of illegals puts the count at 8 million to 12 million people. The census (from which, along with the BLS employment reports, I derived my numbers) does try to take them into account. There's no way that 55 million illegals could be in the nation, because it would have been all too clear.
It's all too clear to me- during my 26 months of unemployment, 80 of my applications were for fast food jobs. You'd think that in the Portland area, anybody could get a relatively unskilled burger flipping job, right? No chance- EVERY kitchen is spainish only, and unless you speak spainish you're not very likely to get hired. The numbers estimated to be pouring across the Arizona border by ranchers in the area are downright astounding: 1-2 million/month.
My original point, which you chose to completely miss, is that the government should not be in the business of providing anything more than a brief safety net for people.
An outmoded concept at best considering what robotics is going to do to the working population over the next 10 years.
What I said was, "If you want to have a house, you have to work." There's a difference between a house and a home. If you have family that's willing to put you up in their home, fine.
Good luck having THAT in a culture that puts profit above family.
More power to you. But if you don't have that, and you're not willing to work hard enough for a decent home, the government shouldn't be in the business of mandating that someone provide it for you. And if you want a house -- i.e., a structure that has your name on the deed -- you will have to work for it.
So you suggest that the government has NO duty to provide for the common welfare? Can we also take away these rights from corporations? Hmm- the government no longer has to bail out the incredibly inefficient banks, so we can take away the FDIC. The government no longer has to bail out stupid corporations- forget limited liability. The government shouldn't be providing a stable money supply- back to bartering I guess.
My point is that you are NOT taking your point to it's logical conclusion- that what you REALLY want is the right to steal from your neighbor without them saying anything about it- and that you will never have. The robber barons tried that in 1929, and caused the Bonus Army to put the white house under seige in 1932.
From my own body- I'd say it's the other way around, as my eating habits (which aren't the healtiest) combined with my migraine medications have caused obesity-related acid reflux to such an extent that I'm lucky to get 6 hours a night on my normal work schedule- and play "catch up on weekends", which just leads to more obesity since I never get around to exercising.
How many countries involved? Half a dozen or so? So $52,560,000/year--$2,628,0000,000 over half a millennium in order to save 150,000 lives (let's imagine that they would all be saved, which is false): $175,000/person. That might actually be worthwhile, to tell the truth. Although I daresay a more in-depth analysis would probably reveal that the funds would be better allocated elsewhere.
Not really- because given your original premise, that a person is only worth what they earn, most of those people over their working lifetime will be lucky to earn half that ammount. These ain't Americans we're talking about- these people would be VERY lucky to earn $17,500 a year, and in their culture that would make them rich.
In answer to the first question: a sane one. Human life is not infinitely valuable (although it is, of course, quite valuable, and any given individual's life is priceless to him).
Sane only by the idea that little pieces of paper are more important than human beings- and not realizing that the money supply is actually infinite.
It would not, for example, be a good thing to spend all the money in the world to save the life of one man--everyone would starve to death, being unable to buy food.
Nah, you'd just print up more money. Money has no reality, no actual value beyond what people believe it has. This is what causes inflation.
In answer to the second question: sure, it'd be great if we could do everything possible to save everyone's life from everything that could end it. But resources are finite (which is why money is finite: money is just a convenient representation of resources
No it isn't- money hasn't been a representation of actual resources in over 100 years.
we can't do everything.
We've got far more resources than we think we do- scarcity of resources is an artificial imposition of having private ownership. Take away the private ownership and there is plenty for all.
Thus one must consider what is a wise use of money and what is not. Eliminating malaria would use up a chunk of money, but it'd save more lives (certainly) for less money (probably) than creating a tsunami centre.
And since money is an artificial contruct to begin with and is totally mythological, all one needs do is revalue the currency and then one has enough for both.
It's a question of return on investment: how much can we improve how many people's lives, and how much does it cost?
Ah yes, the good old Return On Investment lie- if one actually has MORAL priorities that are greater than FINANCIAL priorities, ROI becomes just another excuse to be immoral.
Money just tracks resources, and the decisions one makes on how those resources are allocated have very real effects on people's lives.
Money hasn't tracked resources since the decision was made to delink the gold supply from money- and even before that it had major problems tracking resources. We've got computers now- why not track resources with the actual resources?
As of August 1, 2004, there were about 288.6 million people in the US who were not institutionalized (prison or jail, hospitals, nursing homes, etc).
Another way of limiting it- just because they're institutionalized doesn't mean that their living expenses are free.
Of those, 64.9 million were age 15 or younger, so we're down to 221.2 million people (unless, of course, you prefer to put those kids to work).
You claimed that anybody who needed housing needed to work for that housing- that includes kids.
Another 32.5 million are 66 or older, a significant portion of whom are retired, bringing things down to 188.7 million people available for the workforce.
Just because they're old and retired doesn't mean that their living expenses have gone to 0- that's the reason why we have that horrid socialist program called social secuirty.
According to BLS statistics, 140.2 million people were employed, and a further 8 million were unemployed but looking.
True- but that doesn't mean they're the ONLY people who require food, clothing, shelter and medical care.
This leaves about 41 million people remaining. These will include students who aren't working; stay-at-home parents or friends/family members who live with someone, possibly to care for someone who requires constant care; people who are paid outside of the normal chain (for example, illegal immigrants, or those engaged in certain careers traditionally landing under the eye of vice squads such as prostitution and the drug trade) and people who, for one reason or another, simply aren't looking for a job, whether it's out of frustration or because they don't have any incentive to do so (financially independent, sponging off of family, or similar reasons).
All of which should be homeless by your argument, right?
In any case, your own percentages (the references of 66% and 75%) were shot out of the water by your own admissions.
Except for the fact that we don't have a number for the institutionalized, nor no real number for the illegal immigrants. Put those both together, and your 288.6 million could, by the estimates at NumbersUSA, really be 350 million- which accounts for the other 16-25%. I'll readily admit that I don't know how many of those people are real- but then again, neither does our government thanks to the open borders progrom. There are lots of statistical games you can play within that- just as you did at the very start of this message by assuming that there were categories of people that we are not able to get any useful work out of.
Did it ever occur to you that the reason your sister needs milk subsidies or that your father is only scraping by is because of socialist policies?
So socialist policies are the reason that agribusinesses use capitalism to buy up family farms and reduce production, thereby raising the price of milk? Or that the corporation moves jobs overseas to force people out of work?
Dude- you've got one wierd definition of what is socialist. Got news for you- corporations are capitalists in the extreme.
Let's not even get into the immorality of forcibly taking from one person to give to another.
You mean like the stock market encourages businesses to forcibly lower wages to raise profits?
Once again dude, you've got the wrong system. Oh, and BTW, Stalin was no socialist, he was a capitalist using the language of socialism to pull the world's largest con.
How much would it cost to staff a tsunami centre for 500 years?
Given the type of technology we have in the Pacific? Aproximately (given the lower wages there) $8,760,000/country. You only need ONE person on duty in these places after all.
How much would it cost to make every structure--even those which only last for a decade or two--tsunami-proof?
Why would that be neccessary for salvation of HUMAN LIFE? Evacuate the people when the warning comes in, and be done with it.
Could that money be used for better purposes? Last I checked the tsunami killed about 150,000 people--that's 300 people a year for 500 years. Could that money be used to save 1,000 lives a year?
Once again, what kind of person is so morally bankrupt as to compare human life to money? In other words, shouldn't we be doing BOTH?
It's not generally worth worrying about once-in-a-century disasters, much less twice-in-a-millennia ones, unless the costs are high enough. Asteroids probably fall into the not likely enough to be worth worrying about category even given the amount of damage one could do, simply because the odds are so low.
Depends on your viewpoint- which do you want to maximize, the movement of little green pieces of paper or human potential? If the first, there's no need to EVER plan for disaster- because the cost of a disaster happening just means that a different set of people have the opportunity to become wealthy. If the second, no price is too high to save a human child that might become the next Einstien.
You do realize that the cry mentioned will come from not just the rich.
Only for a very strange definition of who is the rich. As long as the work and goods are there, the average consumer cares not one whit where they actually come from.
Also it's not just the rich that complains about cost.
Only because the right wing has brainwashed ordinary people to vote against their own physical and economic interests.
I know you all around here hate people with money, but try to keep some perspective.
No, we don't hate people with money- we hate people who steal money by profiting off of somebody else's work.