Only if you're a sophist. So the Ivory Coast could spend half it's GDP ($23.6 billion) and that would be "more" than what the U.S. spends on it's military in a year (over a trillion dollars)?
The U.S. spends more on "defense" spending than the rest of the world - combined - and that's a fact you can't obfuscate away.
Ah, the Tenther argument. Nevermind that the Constitution only explicitly grants Congress the authority to fund an Army and a Navy. Which means that if health care is unconstitutional, then so is the USAF/CIA/NSA/FBI/NORAD. Funny how you never see teabaggers like Pudge ranting about how those institutions are all unconstitutional....
And yet, no one is starting new health insurance companies, and health insurance companies that already exist are trying to shrink and insure fewer people. If there's so much money in it, why wouldn't lots of new companies be formed?
Except anyone can use Google and find out this is false
And anyone that's heard of Hollywood Accounting knows that's bullshit. Try 30% "operating costs", which include millions for top executives, but aren't included in "profit numbers" since they are "operating costs".
Now, why don't you try giving the usual wingnut deflection a rest, and explain how other western countries spend half as much (or less) than the U.S. on health care, yet have better health stats than we do.
From slash articles on Bjorn Lomborg, to umpteen editorials and thinly-designed hit pieces on the Bush Administration's politicization of science data, SciAm abandoned objectivity entirely. Certainly, they'd always had a vaguely leftish tilt, taking an obvious anti-Reagan stance in the 1980s, but the magazine nevertheless maintained SOME credibility at that time by not pushing their politics too far.
Translation: point out that ideology-driven conservatives are push policy based on ideology, facts be damned, and you've "lost objectivity".
You are incorrect that the music publishing industry can't prevent you from listing your digital copy of a song on Ebay.
Ebay policies != laws.
None of the other items in your list are remotely related to a third party transmitting your own music back to you, so I'm not sure what good they do your argument.
Obviously, it was about the limitations of copyright. Owning a copyright gives you an exclusive right to make copies for distribution, and puts limits on 'public performances'. Nothing more, nothing less. Since Amazon's service doesn't do either of those, the Concerns voice here are just canards.
The fact is the RIAA have long made a clear distinction between an individual listening to his copy of a song and other uses of that song, such as streaming or public performance or the like.
That would be music that you yourself performed and recorded. Otherwise, you don't "own" the music. You own nothing but a license
You own a copy of that music, big difference. Which means that this...
to play it under the terms that its real owner dictates
...is total BS. You can buy music, transfer it to any devices you own, make a thousand personal backup copies of it, destroy it, list it on Ebay for a billion dollars - and there's not a damned thing the label can do about it.
What copyright restricts you from doing is making copies of music and distributing them without permission. All this "licensing" nonsense is just RIAA propaganda.
Now that that's out of the way, would you by chance be interested in purchasing some oceanfront property in Nebraska?
On the contrary, it actually benefits the game companies if the old stuff gets forgotten. This way, they can dredge up forgotten IP, market it as a gritty reboot and have something to sell.
Uh huh. And who makes up most of the audience for aging rock bands that announce "reunion" tours - people that have never heard of it before or people that were fans of the band in the 80's?
Well, on one hand the state forces foreign companies to make 49%/51% joint Chinese-owned company ventures in order to have access to the Chinese market
Irrelevant to world conquest.
Then we have border disputes. China claims or has, in the past 10 years, claimed territory of: Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Taiwan (the entire country at missile-point, no less), Russia, India, Bhutan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines, Brunei, Tajikstan, and any other country that has the misfortune to be touching them that isn't on their payroll.
Irrelevant to world conquest. And the rest of your post can be countered with simple "the Chinese aren't doing anything that the Americans, British, French and Russians aren't doing as well, and probably to a greater degree".
Uhm, China is a military power and does have an army capable of conquering the world.
Not so much. China doesn't spend a tenth what the U.S. does on its military and has a sixth of Russia's nuclear arsenal. The U.S. has about 800 military bases around the world - China has zero. And the U.S. Navy could take on the rest of the world's navies - combined.
D) Demolishing any industrial policy to promote domestic manufacturing
The teabaggers could abolish the minimum wage, the NLRB, OSHA, overtime laws and every other form of worker protection and there would still be third world labor willing to work for what a fraction of what Americans would. For one thing, they don't have our housing costs or soon to be mandated junk health insurance to pay for. Unfortunately, Democrats haven't served the interests of the working man either, by pushing "free trade laws" (larded down with pro-corporate policies like extended copyrights) and embracing "austerity" (but not for the rich) over job creation (thanks Obama!).
The Germans figured this out a long time ago:
1) Invest in Education and encourage a high standard of living 2) Promote high quality and high end manufacturing from the skilled workforce created by 1) 3) Take the rewards from 2) and reinvest them in 1)
1. Media coverage of the walker protests were overwhelmingly pro-union excep for fox.
You mean like the Sunday talk shows issuing repeated (and frequently accepted) invitations to Walker, Christie, and Kasich but zero requests from union leaders? Or maybe overwhelming ignoring the protests compared to the media attention lavished on the teabaggers in 2009? And of course nevermind the deficit "crisis" in Wisconsin was created by Walker with his big business tax cut. And nevermind that Wisconsin Republicans proved they were lying (we must end collective bargaining to fight the deficit) when the unions accepted Walker's cuts and the state legislature ended collective bargaining in a non-budgetary bill.
2. The media was very clearly against the war in Iraq.
You're clearly peddling in revisionist history so bad even Cheney would laugh at it. Hundreds of thousands of anti-war protesters were flatly ignored. War critics were outnumbered at least 2-1 by pro-war pundits. Phil Donahue's show was canceled for questioning the war, despite it being MSNBC's top rated show at the time. Dozens of retired generals were bought on broadcast TV to lend their "expertise" to the subject while ignoring the fact that they also worked for defense contractors and thus were of course pro-war. Pro-war pundits that had it all wrong are still treated as Very Serious and Important People to this day, while critics who called it right from the start are as ignored today as they were in 2003.
3. It also happily trashes republicans it perceives as too far to the right as enthusiastically as any Democrat. (Paul, Palin).
President Paul would be a threat to the banking industry, the military-industrial-congressional-contractor complex, and the prison-industrial complex. That's why he was trashed by the corporate media, not for being "too far to the right". And Palin got trashed because she's an intellectually lazy hack who has no actual morals or positions other than what will best serve her politically. Any more questions?
4. And yet the ratio of the share of taxation borne by the top 10% to their income is higher here than in any other western nation.
*cough* bullshit *cough*. As Warren Buffet noted, he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. And that's just starting with the official tax rate - middle Americans don't have accountants to create offshore tax havens for them, much less millions of dollars to stash in them.
The last two years have seen the deficits explode beyond any previous period in the last 40 years, even after correcting for inflation.
Which have two simple causes, both of which were left by Bush:
1) Low taxes on the rich 2) Spending a decade invading, occupying and bombing other countries
Both extreme right wing policies, both supported by the media. Both of which Obama has chosen to continue, since he's a firm believer in right wing military and economic policies.
Even most of the left sees a problem with current deficits.
Yes, the left sees a problem with undertaxing the rich while spending over a trillion dollars a year on the military. Yes, over a trillion - there's far more military spending than just the Pentagon's budget. Veterans Affairs, GI Bill, Department of Energy managing our nuclear weapon stockpile, Department of Homeland Security, anti-terror operations of the FBI (which now consume most of the agency's resources). The first two are good programs, but of course they are military spending.
What coverage there has been of tea party rallies has been generally negative.
Probably has something to do with the fact that teabaggers are fucking idiots. They never had a problem with Bush's deficit spending, never had a problem with Bush tap
Non sequitur. Profit motive is a leash on corporate risk taking on what planet? Unless you had a momentary bout of dyslexia and mean to say "liability", but that's capped for the nuclear industry. Remove that cap and force top executives and shareholders of nuclear power plants to live at those nuclear facilities, and then their protestations that their plants are totally safe will have a shred of credibility.
Tried. Tried. TRIED. Which Democrats have tried to re-implement the FD. Again, this is as reasonable as claiming that the Republican Party tried to re-implement the Gold Standard because one Republican in the House, Ron Paul, talks about it.
This is as much of a teabagger boogyman as FEMA camps and Obama taking your guns away.
Profit. Motive. You're ignoring it. Any kind of any organization made up of humans can and will make mistakes - but private business has a huge incentive to cut corners and skimp on safety protocols because it means extra $$$ in the pockets of CEO's and shareholders.
And I'll say it again: you guys are ignoring the profit motive that gives private business an incentive to cut corners, make rosy worst case scenario plans, and skimp on safety.
I keep saying this, but you don't listen. Both private industry and government organizations are run by people. Until we can replace people with something better, we're still going to have problems.
Except private industry has a direct incentive to cut as many corners as possible while charging as much as possible for it's services in the pursuit of profit. Government employees can of course screw up, but they don't have a direct incentive to do things half-assed. Still listening?
Who else is there? Government? Remember that all of the biggest accidents, such as Chernobyl and the crazy meltdowns in experimental plants, come from government run plants. If you can't trust private industry to do it, you might as well just not do it since you've excluded the most trustworthy parties.
You're ignoring the profit motive, most likely on purpose. Both private enterprise and government entities can do things half-assed - as can any group of humans - but only private enterprise has a huge, direct incentive to do so if it makes them another buck. Especially when they have low liability caps to work under - as does the nuclear power industry in both the United States and Japan.
And what do you know, corners have been cut in both the United States and Japan. Because there's a buck to be made. Who could have predicted....
Why - because if there's a dime to be made, it should be going into private hands? Besides, there wouldn't be many private investors after making a reasonable number of hurdles for them to jump over:
1) Plants must have heavy oversight 2) No liability cap 3) Board of directors, CEO, CFO must live on plant grounds
Please state why you think a 9.0 earthquake was a strong possibility - especially when expert geologists didn't think this particular fault was capable of more than an 8.5-8.6 or so prior to this -
Because plenty of other geologists said they should have been looking farther back than 1896 to plan their worst case scenario:
In postulating the maximum-sized earthquake and tsunami that the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex might face, TEPCO's engineers decided not to factor in quakes earlier than 1896. That meant the experts excluded a major quake that occurred more than 1,000 years ago â" a tremor followed by a powerful tsunami that hit many of the same locations as the recent disaster.
The warning from the 2001 report about the 3,000-year history would prove to be most telling: "The recurrence interval for a large-scale tsunami is 800 to 1,100 years. More than 1,100 years have passed since the Jogan tsunami, and, given the reoccurrence interval, the possibility of a large tsunami striking the Sendai plain is high."
Shorter storyline: Japan's nuclear industry downplayed the risks and ignored outside experts not on their payroll. Funny how often that happens...
Er... The media is supposed to be liberal, isn't it? So the fairness doctrine, rather than silencing conservatives, should ensure they have a voice in the public debate, despite the media's liberal bias.
Er...on what planet is that? The media overwhelmingly....
Favors corporate interests and executives over unions and workers and patients
Supports war and spouts whatever the Pentagon tells it to
Trashes Democrats it perceives as too far to the left as enthusiastically as any Republican (see: Gore, Dean, Kucinich, Edwards)
Hypes "austerity" while ignoring the fact that the U.S. has worse income inequality than freaking Egypt under Mubarak
Gives more press coverage to 200 teabaggers at a protest than 200,000 liberals protesting war, unemployment, or for gay rights.
Refuses to call torture torture when the U.S. does it
Slashdot Mirror
Only if you're a sophist. So the Ivory Coast could spend half it's GDP ($23.6 billion) and that would be "more" than what the U.S. spends on it's military in a year (over a trillion dollars)?
The U.S. spends more on "defense" spending than the rest of the world - combined - and that's a fact you can't obfuscate away.
Yup. When you add up all of our military spending - not just what goes through the Pentagon - it's over a trillion dollars a year.
Ah, the Tenther argument. Nevermind that the Constitution only explicitly grants Congress the authority to fund an Army and a Navy. Which means that if health care is unconstitutional, then so is the USAF/CIA/NSA/FBI/NORAD. Funny how you never see teabaggers like Pudge ranting about how those institutions are all unconstitutional....
No, it's not. Ditto for the G.I. Bill. They're great programs, but of course they're military spending.
Here, let me help you with that.
And anyone that's heard of Hollywood Accounting knows that's bullshit. Try 30% "operating costs", which include millions for top executives, but aren't included in "profit numbers" since they are "operating costs".
Now, why don't you try giving the usual wingnut deflection a rest, and explain how other western countries spend half as much (or less) than the U.S. on health care, yet have better health stats than we do.
Translation: point out that ideology-driven conservatives are push policy based on ideology, facts be damned, and you've "lost objectivity".
For distribution. You have the right to make as many backup copies as you want, and this has also been long settled law - it's called Time Shifting.
Ebay policies != laws.
Obviously, it was about the limitations of copyright. Owning a copyright gives you an exclusive right to make copies for distribution, and puts limits on 'public performances'. Nothing more, nothing less. Since Amazon's service doesn't do either of those, the Concerns voice here are just canards.
Good thing RIAA grandstanding != laws, then.
You own a copy of that music, big difference. Which means that this...
...is total BS. You can buy music, transfer it to any devices you own, make a thousand personal backup copies of it, destroy it, list it on Ebay for a billion dollars - and there's not a damned thing the label can do about it.
What copyright restricts you from doing is making copies of music and distributing them without permission. All this "licensing" nonsense is just RIAA propaganda.
Now that that's out of the way, would you by chance be interested in purchasing some oceanfront property in Nebraska?
Uh huh. And who makes up most of the audience for aging rock bands that announce "reunion" tours - people that have never heard of it before or people that were fans of the band in the 80's?
Nostalgia sells for a reason.
Yes, "facts".
It's a fact that the Japanese were offering to surrender - with the condition that they keep their Emperor to save face.
It's a fact that the U.S. refused that offer, insisting on unconditional surrender.
It's a fact that the U.S. dropped a couple of nukes to force said unconditional surrender.
It's a fact that after the Japanese surrendered that they were...allowed to keep their Emperor.
Irrelevant to world conquest.
Irrelevant to world conquest. And the rest of your post can be countered with simple "the Chinese aren't doing anything that the Americans, British, French and Russians aren't doing as well, and probably to a greater degree".
And where is the equivalency between China's militarism to American militarism, or were you too busy trying to be clever to get that far?
Not so much. China doesn't spend a tenth what the U.S. does on its military and has a sixth of Russia's nuclear arsenal. The U.S. has about 800 military bases around the world - China has zero. And the U.S. Navy could take on the rest of the world's navies - combined.
Don't forget
D) Demolishing any industrial policy to promote domestic manufacturing
The teabaggers could abolish the minimum wage, the NLRB, OSHA, overtime laws and every other form of worker protection and there would still be third world labor willing to work for what a fraction of what Americans would. For one thing, they don't have our housing costs or soon to be mandated junk health insurance to pay for. Unfortunately, Democrats haven't served the interests of the working man either, by pushing "free trade laws" (larded down with pro-corporate policies like extended copyrights) and embracing "austerity" (but not for the rich) over job creation (thanks Obama!).
The Germans figured this out a long time ago:
1) Invest in Education and encourage a high standard of living
2) Promote high quality and high end manufacturing from the skilled workforce created by 1)
3) Take the rewards from 2) and reinvest them in 1)
You mean like the Sunday talk shows issuing repeated (and frequently accepted) invitations to Walker, Christie, and Kasich but zero requests from union leaders? Or maybe overwhelming ignoring the protests compared to the media attention lavished on the teabaggers in 2009? And of course nevermind the deficit "crisis" in Wisconsin was created by Walker with his big business tax cut. And nevermind that Wisconsin Republicans proved they were lying (we must end collective bargaining to fight the deficit) when the unions accepted Walker's cuts and the state legislature ended collective bargaining in a non-budgetary bill.
You're clearly peddling in revisionist history so bad even Cheney would laugh at it. Hundreds of thousands of anti-war protesters were flatly ignored. War critics were outnumbered at least 2-1 by pro-war pundits. Phil Donahue's show was canceled for questioning the war, despite it being MSNBC's top rated show at the time. Dozens of retired generals were bought on broadcast TV to lend their "expertise" to the subject while ignoring the fact that they also worked for defense contractors and thus were of course pro-war. Pro-war pundits that had it all wrong are still treated as Very Serious and Important People to this day, while critics who called it right from the start are as ignored today as they were in 2003.
President Paul would be a threat to the banking industry, the military-industrial-congressional-contractor complex, and the prison-industrial complex. That's why he was trashed by the corporate media, not for being "too far to the right". And Palin got trashed because she's an intellectually lazy hack who has no actual morals or positions other than what will best serve her politically. Any more questions?
*cough* bullshit *cough*. As Warren Buffet noted, he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. And that's just starting with the official tax rate - middle Americans don't have accountants to create offshore tax havens for them, much less millions of dollars to stash in them.
Which have two simple causes, both of which were left by Bush:
1) Low taxes on the rich
2) Spending a decade invading, occupying and bombing other countries
Both extreme right wing policies, both supported by the media. Both of which Obama has chosen to continue, since he's a firm believer in right wing military and economic policies.
Yes, the left sees a problem with undertaxing the rich while spending over a trillion dollars a year on the military. Yes, over a trillion - there's far more military spending than just the Pentagon's budget. Veterans Affairs, GI Bill, Department of Energy managing our nuclear weapon stockpile, Department of Homeland Security, anti-terror operations of the FBI (which now consume most of the agency's resources). The first two are good programs, but of course they are military spending.
Probably has something to do with the fact that teabaggers are fucking idiots. They never had a problem with Bush's deficit spending, never had a problem with Bush tap
Non sequitur. Profit motive is a leash on corporate risk taking on what planet? Unless you had a momentary bout of dyslexia and mean to say "liability", but that's capped for the nuclear industry. Remove that cap and force top executives and shareholders of nuclear power plants to live at those nuclear facilities, and then their protestations that their plants are totally safe will have a shred of credibility.
Tried. Tried. TRIED. Which Democrats have tried to re-implement the FD. Again, this is as reasonable as claiming that the Republican Party tried to re-implement the Gold Standard because one Republican in the House, Ron Paul, talks about it.
This is as much of a teabagger boogyman as FEMA camps and Obama taking your guns away.
Profit. Motive. You're ignoring it. Any kind of any organization made up of humans can and will make mistakes - but private business has a huge incentive to cut corners and skimp on safety protocols because it means extra $$$ in the pockets of CEO's and shareholders.
And I'll say it again: you guys are ignoring the profit motive that gives private business an incentive to cut corners, make rosy worst case scenario plans, and skimp on safety.
Except private industry has a direct incentive to cut as many corners as possible while charging as much as possible for it's services in the pursuit of profit. Government employees can of course screw up, but they don't have a direct incentive to do things half-assed. Still listening?
You're ignoring the profit motive, most likely on purpose. Both private enterprise and government entities can do things half-assed - as can any group of humans - but only private enterprise has a huge, direct incentive to do so if it makes them another buck. Especially when they have low liability caps to work under - as does the nuclear power industry in both the United States and Japan.
And what do you know, corners have been cut in both the United States and Japan. Because there's a buck to be made. Who could have predicted....
Why - because if there's a dime to be made, it should be going into private hands? Besides, there wouldn't be many private investors after making a reasonable number of hurdles for them to jump over:
1) Plants must have heavy oversight
2) No liability cap
3) Board of directors, CEO, CFO must live on plant grounds
Because plenty of other geologists said they should have been looking farther back than 1896 to plan their worst case scenario:
Shorter storyline: Japan's nuclear industry downplayed the risks and ignored outside experts not on their payroll. Funny how often that happens...
Er...on what planet is that? The media overwhelmingly....
Favors corporate interests and executives over unions and workers and patients
Supports war and spouts whatever the Pentagon tells it to
Trashes Democrats it perceives as too far to the left as enthusiastically as any Republican (see: Gore, Dean, Kucinich, Edwards)
Hypes "austerity" while ignoring the fact that the U.S. has worse income inequality than freaking Egypt under Mubarak
Gives more press coverage to 200 teabaggers at a protest than 200,000 liberals protesting war, unemployment, or for gay rights.
Refuses to call torture torture when the U.S. does it
On what planet is the American media liberal?