The nature of government is to march determinedly towards totalitarianism. In a free society, it is the public's greatest responsibility to periodically push them back with such vigor that they are forced to retreat to a more balanced position. This is potentially a very large step towards totalitarianism. It is, therefore, the public's supreme duty, in the face of such an overstep, to slap the government's hand and say, "No. Bad government. No cookie." As it is oft said, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
The worst examples of totalitarianism from the 20th Century occurred when governments lost the ability to govern either through economic calamity (e.g., the rise of the USSR and the Nazi regime) or intervention by foreign powers (e.g., American intervention in South America and the Middle East). Charismatic megalomaniacs, usually backed by a loyal military, then rise to power through the promise of a new Utopia that quickly collapses into brutal totalitarianism. The slow march of a well-intentioned, functioning government towards totalitarianism is a nonexistent threat in modern times.
That is not to say that I disagree with your broader point. The government should be afraid of The People because they have the power to vote for a government that represents their best interests--e pluribus unum--but modern American politics is corrupted by special interest money and uses wedge issues and micro-targeted ad buys to leverage an uninformed electorate to vote for power-hungry asshats that represent Money instead of People. A politician that stands up against this sort of overreach--and these LPRs are unequivocally an invasion of privacy--will be branded "soft on crime" before dropping 15 points in the polls from the non-stop Willie Horton ads.
Without a doubt. Europe has a racism problem. It's just a different racism problem than the one in the US. If you're used to the one in europe why bother getting used to the one in the US? The racism problem in europe is going to get worse before it gets better as it becomes 'blame the turk' 'blame the arab' 'blame the indian' 'blame the roma' etc. for all that ails them, and their lack of jobs.
The difference between the US and (Northern) Europe is that racism is overt in Europe. There are simply less social taboos against expressing or even legislating racism. The US has more of a broad culture of hate; everything is us versus them. In certain parts of the country that hate manifests as racism. In other parts of the country it is based on political views, sexual orientation, religious belief, etc. Blame the liberal, blame the tea-party, blame the gays, blame the Muslims, blame the atheists, blame the socialists, blame the immigrants, blame the South, etc.; the country is going to hell in a hand basket and it is everyone's fault by my ethnic/religious/political group. The thing that the US has going for it is that it is enormous so you can generally find a place to live that aligns well with your beliefs and talk to people that you agree with about how terrible it is in some other part of the country.
Choose US if you are ambitious and good at what you do. There is no country on Earth that will offer you the same opportunity to succeed and the same liberty to pursue your goals without excessive interference from the government, while at the same time offering strong rule of law and minimum corruption. Ignore the impression you might have from Hollywood movies. Apart from some inner city ghettos, the quality of life in the US is amazing. Chose Canada or Scandinavia if you are insecure about your ability to maintain employment, have no ambition to start a business and need the reassurance of a strong safety net. China and India are still third world countries with extreme poverty and an enormous amount of corruption. Australia may be a good middle ground between the collectivist nanny states of Europe or Canada, with zero energy and innovation, and the US. Also, as far as I know, the immigration policy is relatively welcoming (like in Canada) compared to the US and Europe.
Apparently you haven't been following current events... since about 1964. Let me bring you up to speed: basically nothing you said is true anymore. The reason you perceive the US as offering more opportunity and liberty is because in Canada, Europe, and Australia, you can live a fantastic, enjoyable life and even raise a family on middle-class wages. Scandinavians aren't all striving to be the next Mark Zuckerberg because they're allowed to be happy and aren't shamed and punished for being poor or middle class. And "safety net" is not a good way to describe what social democracies provide because it is a loaded term that implies that only people that are lazy or down on their luck need or use. It's more like a substrate on which you can build whatever type of life you would like to live.
The two banks that I have accounts with use card readers to generate a one-time log-in key from the chip in my ATM card instead of a password... I think this practice is common in Europe, where ATM cards (have to?) have "smart chips" in them. Granted, if someone steals my ATM card and PIN, they can log into my account and transfer funds at will, but in theory that is less likely than having a password stolen.
Something like that happened to me years ago when I used my ATM card at the Toronto airport. Apparently thieves had installed a camera in the ATM that recorded my card number and PIN from which they were able to generate a fake card. Two days later, when I had returned home, my bank called asking if I had bought a plane ticket from Alberta to Vancouver that morning. I said no and they promptly issued a new card and refunded the money. They told me that ATM card cloning was so common that they basically have insurance against it.
Next door in the Netherlands, PostNL will drop your package off with whatever random person on your block happens to be home at 11 AM on a weekday and leave you a slip with an illegible address scribbled on it, forcing you to knock on everyone's door asking if they received your package. That is, except for the one time I had a 25 kg bag of grains shipped to my house, which is when they decided to drop it off 5 km away at a store that closes at 5 PM. I like your packstation system better!
What drugs can do is break down the illusion of being normal that many fucked-up people try so hard to project. There are a lot of fucked up people trying hard to appear normal "like everybody else".
The real tragedy is that we live in such a shallow and unenlightened society that a) people blame the drug for this, b) we generally like to blame drugs, guns, and other inanimate objects for what people do, and c) the shallow, exclusive focus on external behavior and appearances means that many people don't know what real character actually is.
A phenomenon that is highlighted by the absurdity that something like one in five Americans takes antidepressants, making it highly likely that any crusading against the evils of "drugs" is on drugs.
Gun control only benefits wrongdoers, and only harm law abiding citizen.
You are conflating gun control with gun prohibition. If I go duck hunting with more than two shells in the magazine and one in the chamber, I will get a massive fine because semi-automatic shotguns with 15-shell magazines aren't fair to the ducks. Yet I'm free to remove the plug from my shotgun and walk around with it slung over my shoulder. The man that shot Gabrielle Giffords had a 30-round magazine in a semi-automatic pistol. He was subdued when he stopped to reload. The guy in TFA walked into a crowded movie theater with (last I read) an assault rifle, tear gas, a smoke bomb, a riot helmet and a bullet-proof vest. If he had been packing a flintlock or a single-action revolver, things would have gone differently. Gun prohibition, like drug prohibition, is silly and unenforceable; it drives the create of black markets. There is a middle ground; see alcohol laws.
Don't worry, I'm sure a blogger is hard at work crafting an elaborate conspiracy theory linking this shooting to a leftist plot to terrorize people into passing gun laws. The FBI, of course, was in on the whole thing.
Because the progressives believe that they can perfect their fellow man. Which is what makes them so dangerous. See: prohibition.
The Prohibition Movement was started and perpetuated by church groups. Laws like the one in NYC banning large sodas are ridiculous, but so are laws banning pot and gay marriage. Every interest group with an axe to grind pushes stupid laws to regulate behaviors they don't like--singling out progressives is willful ignorance.
I can't, for the life of me, figure out why in this backwards world, the "problem" of drug toursim needs to be solved by the Netherlands implementing "koffie shop cards" to ensure that only residents can buy pot... Rational thought would suggest the Dutch government point to all these statistics--and the cost-savings--as a result of their soft drugs policies and tell other countries "if you don't want your citizens coming here to buy put, then legalize it in your own country." I mean, why is it OK to hide your fortune in a Swiss bank account to take advantage of their banking laws, but it's not ok to come to Amsterdam to take advantage of the Dutch drug laws?
I bet the list of things that can trigger psychotic episodes in mentally ill people includes pretty much everything.
The only honest to goodness negative reaction I've ever seen with marijuana use (outside of the physical effects like smoking too much and getting the spins/nauseous) is increased anxiety, and that was only a couple times, both times involving someone that probably didn't want to smoke in the first place and was just doing so to "go along with the crowd" and hadn't really gotten high before, so the effects freaked them out.
In those cases, though, I find it hard to blame the weed itself for that; nobody should consume an intoxicating substance just to "fit in", but then we've all been to high school and now how THAT goes...
On the other hand, I have "high anxiety" in that I used to suffer from panic attacks, but marijuana actually calms me and mitigates the attacks completely. Many people with high anxiety self-medicate with marijuana--in my case because I trust a plant that has been in continuous use by humans for thousands of years over a for-profit company that invents drugs by trial and error. On the other hand, I have encountered plenty of people who can't touch the stuff because it makes them paranoid and anxious and many of them benefit tremendously from prescription pharmaceuticals--to each their own. The effects vary by dose, strain, delivery method, and person. It's not for everyone, but others absolutely adore it. One thing it is not is addictive as anyone who was once a broke college student knows. I'm sure someone has linked to this essay already, but Carl Sagan summed it up pretty well.
On a side note, I have two younger step-siblings. One has been off of heroin for a couple of years and the other is in rehab. Both got hooked in their teens. When I was a teenager, "everyone" knew that pot was completely harmless and that heroin was horribly addictive. Meth was a different story; it was the "new" drug and I saw a lot of people ruin their lives with that stuff. My siblings, on the other hand, grew up in the era of "Drugs are bad, mmm-kay" where they were taught that marijuana is a "gateway drug" and it is just as bad as all the others--a Schedule I narcotic just like LSD and heroin. The message they seemed to have absorbed is "I tried pot and it was pretty mellow--so all these other drugs can't be that bad." I mean, look at the propaganda on whitehouse.gov. Sure, they don't out-and-out lie, but they try so hard to make marijuana seem dangerous: "In 2009, marijuana was involved in 376,000 emergency department visits nationwide." Yah, and I bet 100% of those cases also involved alcohol! The LD50 for pot is about the same as H20... The point is that informing kids about drugs works--but not if you lie to them. No one told us about meth and all my step-siblings got was fact-free propaganda.
I learned to type on a typewriter. Now I use this keyboard at work (I do a lot of writing for my job). Since there are no labels on the keys, I can see the wear patterns and they are concentrated around the home row (and space bar) exactly as intended. I suppose the home row makes no sense on virtual keyboards, but then again virtual keyboards make no sense, which is why there are a zillion "swipe" and "predictive" keyboards on the Android market... so, yah, as you say, interta; I already have to deal with f***ing French keyboards, why would I want to complicate my life even more by adding another non-QWERTY keyboard to the mix?
For those of us that have had to justify the discharge of large sums of money given to you by taxpayers to do research, the answer is obvious. It varies by country and agency, but getting awarded a grant is the first step in the constant cabaret show that is justifying your use of said grant money. And some agencies--like DARPA--will even go so far as to take the money back if your leg kicks aren't high enough at one of your ridiculously frequent reviews. Thus, given the price tag, basically everyone involved in the LHC project has been engaged in a constant media blitz from Day One, ranging from the possibility of creating tiny black holes to (everyone but the actual scientists) peeing themselves over faster-than-light neutrinos that probably weren't. They learned the lesson of the SSC well. So, when the first evidence of the Higgs Boson was revealed, the PR machine went into overdrive trying to justify spending billions of Euros on a giant, underground doughnut that was vulnerable to baguette. Combined with the laughable quality of "science journalism" and the toddler-level understanding of science of the media and general population, stories about transporters and spaceships were a humorous inevitability.
Also, something that was predicted in 1964 cannot be on the "fringe of common scientific knowledge," a phrase that is itself just as hyperbolic as the examples cited in the OP. Now, the discovery of bacteria that can use As in place of P, that would have been at the fringe had it turned out to be true.
> Yes, you mentioned the ER. The fix to that isn't to impose insurance, it's to remove the requirement that the ER treat those who won't pay their bills.
Now you've crossed from naive to stupid. I would bet every dollar I have that your opinion on this changes as soon as you or a loved one is in the position of needing emergency health care.
Actually s/he is just repeating Ron Paul's healthcare plan. And therein lies the fallacy of all the libertarian "broccoli" nonsense. There are two choices; don't treat people without insurance or force everyone to share in the risk pool (i.e., buy insurance or pay a tax penalty.)
This is why the right wing comes off like a pack of retarded children. They take the perfectly acceptable point of view that government should be minimalistic and non-intrusive, and warp it until they look like a pack of asylum escapees.
I don't want the government meddling in my medicare, thank you very much! If the government would get rid of all these regulations, stop taxing and spending, and just stick to the basics, like keeping gays from marrying and making sure no one smokes pot or uses birth control, then we would all be billionaires. Of course, you couldn't possibly understand that, as you are clearly a communist.
The way a lot of healthcare works in the Netherlands is that the government forces everyone to buy basic health insurance. Many employers have special deals with insurance companies that make it cheaper for their employees, but you are free to buy from other companies, so long as you have health insurance. Without it you basically aren't allowed to participate in the economy at all (i.e., no job, no back account, no benefits, etc.) There is a minimum, legal annual co-pay (which is rising) and government assistance for people who can't afford insurance on their own. Your premium is calculated from your age and your co-pay; there is no such thing as preexisting conditions. Insurance companies are not allowed to deny people coverage, your GP (huisarts) acts as the gatekeeper just as with HMOs, but the costs of procedures are effectively dictated by the government.
Dental insurance is optional and, with the big push towards privatization that seems to be everywhere, they decided to experiment in that market, essentially removing the cost controls and allowing dentists to compete with each other for prices. And, almost instantly, dentists stopped doing basic procedures and focused on high-margin stuff. In other words, it almost instantly turned into the American system in which people with money get the best treatment and the poor get the shaft.
What I find interesting about the Dutch system, which shares a lot of features of Obamacare, it that deliberate and explicit cost controls are apparently necessary even when you force everyone to buy insurance. Obamacare seems to control costs only through the shared risk pool--or do I have that wrong? Also--but maybe this is just a cultural thing--Dutch doctors treat everyone like hypochondriacs because they go to the doctor for every little ache and pain. Anyone that has had to deal with HMOs, co-pays, and reimbursements from American insurance companies--and that values their time--knows that doctors won't do squat unless the pain/problem has persisted for more than two weeks or so. As a consequence, people can walk around with curable--though minor--ailments that have been diagnosed as "stress related" unless they are very persistent (and willing to switch doctors). For a variety of reasons--lawsuits being among them--GPs in the US generally refer you after relatively little complaining by comparison. I wonder how the American tendency to diagnose and treat everything and the lack of explicit cost controls will affect premiums, even with the individual mandate.
I suppose the upshot is that I can now wonder now that Roberts has departed from the four lunatics that wanted to toss the whole thing out based on their apparent powers to see into the future.
The golden rule of TV in the 2000's; if I like it, it will be cancelled or, as with Community, they will just ruin it by firing the creator to make it "more appealing to a broad audience." Network TV is driven entirely by the lowest common denominator because it puts the most eyeballs in front of the ads. Seinfeld wouldn't have made it past the pilot in 2010. There are a few gems tucked away on non-network companies--It's Always Sunny, Breaking Bad, Futurama, The Daily Show--but I don't see how anyone in this day and age can spend more than two-three hours a week watching TV unless they're really into "Ow, My Balls!" marathons... or sports.
And the best way to watch TV? Netflix, unless you live outside the US, in which case USENET+XBMC because the only thing worse than reality shows and canned laugh-tracks is commercials.
Fact is, the officer can arrest anyone, for any reason, or for no reason at all. If you object or resist, you'll be held overnight or longer. Then, when they're tired of harassing you, they kick you out. If you try to file charges, you find that there's no record you were ever there, and they all insist that they've never seen you before. This isn't at all a hypothetical scenario. It's pretty well understood by most non-white Americans over the age of 5.
And strip-searched. Don't forget that the same SCOTUS that says it's ok to demand proof of citizenship says that the police can strip-search you without bringing up any charges. Put those two things together, sprinkle on good old fashion racial profiling, and voila legal shelter for racists and xenophobes to harass people for the crime of being non-white in a border state.
It's not limited to the US, either. The immigration and naturalization service in the Netherlands is trying to effectively kick all Iranians out of the country as we speak, even though they are in the country legally. The justification is the new set of sanctions that the EU is imposing, which contain no mention of people--only financial transactions and trade. Rather than just denying them iPads, it is threatening to ruin their careers and their chance to make a life for themselves outside of Iran.
I'd rather a small turnout of people making an actual decision.
Voting isn't what's important. Having an opinion is. 100% voter turnout isn't worth much if 70% of that turnout picked randomly.
Unless they figure a good way to validate that someone is making a serious choice (and force them to do so), all this does is dilute the already very thin pool of educated voters.
"I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." - Paul Weyrich
Let's look at a presidential election. Roughly 49% of the population decides to vote GOP well in advance of the election. Another 49% decides to vote Dem. These are the voters you speak of; they are familiar with the issues, the candidates, and their opinions are difficult to change. The other 2%, what we like to call "swing voters" to their faces, or "low-information voters" behind their backs decide the election. The dumbest, least-informed people decide who gets to be president. As the voting population decreases as a whole, the number of people comprising that 2% decreases, making negative attack ads, smears, and targeted ads far more effective. Personally I want to see everyone over 18 vote in every election simply because it makes the vote more difficult to manipulate with lies and distortions and it naturally favors candidates that support policies that are popular with the majority of people. That way we can spend our time convincing each other what those policies should be, rather than having political campaigns carpet-bomb a couple of districts in a couple of states with lies two weeks before the election.
Political platforms are so unimportant these days that Mitt Romney doesn't even seem to need one. And Obama has treated his platform as something that you just dust off for elections and put back in the closet after you win. Why? Because WTF difference does your platform make when elections are decided by people too stupid to see a difference between polar opposites until a TV commercial with ominous music tells them that one of the candidates will certainly destroy thing_they_love the second Dr. Evil is elected. I know it seems counter-intuitive, but platforms start to matter when the voting population goes up because you can only fool all of the people some of the time.
No. Improved technology can allow individuals and society overall to increase productivity, as can increasing urbanization (because that stimulates creativity and innovation). This grows the economy for real. To see why, realize that mechanization can allow one person to do a job that 200 years ago would have required hundreds or thousands of people. That means that those people can do something else instead, either working or leisure, and that in turn means that the economy must be larger.
This is Slashdot. When arguing here, at least try to avoid obvious logic errors or factual mistakes...
You don't understand what zero sum means. That does not mean that it doesn't grow or shrink--of course the economy grows. And for a long time it grew faster than the demands of population growth and with moderate inflation. Zero sum means that the economy, at any given time, is of finite volume (roughly $17 trillion for the US, a bit more for the EU as a whole). If the economy grows by 3% and 1% of the population takes 90% of that growth, the other 99% split the remaining 10%, which is exactly what has happened since the end of the recession. Zero sum means that every dollar I spend is the income of another person. If the economy were not zero-sum, then the balance sheets of banks, which book debt as assets, wouldn't make any sense.
without his getting richer, GP wouldn't have a job. At least not where he's at. Remember the economy is not a fixed size pie with CEOs taking a larger piece. Just the act of them taking a piece makes more pies to spread around.
It isn't fixed in the sense that the economy grows and shrinks, but it is a pie and the more one person gets, the less another does. If the total volume of the economy is 100 units and there are 50 people, there are 2 units per person. So let's say the CEO takes 51 and the other 49 take 1. Now let's say the economy grows by 3%. Does that mean that everyone get's to split that 3% growth? No, not in the current economy because CEOs take most of their compensation as sweat-heart stock deals with no downside and the rest of us get wages and, lucky us, can gamble our retirement funds in the stock market because ordinary interest won't outpace inflation over time. So 90% of that growth goes to the CEO; and that is not a made-up number, that is actually how much of the post-recession growth has gone to the top 1%. So, after 3% economic growth, 49 people make 1.006 units and 1 person makes 52.7. The next year, the CEO will have 55.3 and the rest of us 1.012. I'm not trying to be condescending, I just find it instructive to look at the actual numbers, which really are demoralizing. It gets worse when you dig into tax policy which lets the CEO pay a flat 15% capital gains tax (on the increase in value, not the total value) when he exercises the stock options that comprise the bulk of his compensation. Except that he won't even pay that, because what he actually does is borrow against the value of those options for a tax break on the interest payments which are soaked up by the part of the loan that he reinvested into a so-called hedge fund, which in practice just turns out to be a de facto government-guaranteed bank for rich people because commercial and investment banks were allowed to merge.
The CEO, whose wealth grew by 8%, goes off to buy a second house in La Jolla. The wealth of the other 49 only grew by 1%, but because it was 1% of a much smaller number, almost all of it is eaten by rising costs (i.e., inflation). So they are told, don't worry, the bank will lend you money to buy a house, which will increase in value over time. So, don't worry so much about wages--just use those to buy food and build equity in a house. The house will act as your savings account and, when your kids are old enough for college, you can borrow against the increased value of the house to pay their tuition. Your house, well, it's like a magic money-making machine--it's a sure-fire investment for the non-investor class! And it was, for twenty years. But speculators got a bit too optimistic and it turns out that most of that growth was imaginary. Oops! Sorry, your sole source of economic growth--and class mobility--actually lost money. (Don't worry about the CEO, you can cram down a mortgage on a second home, unlike with a primary residence.)
Ok, but you say that, if the CEO doesn't make tons of money, we wouldn't have jobs. I acknowledge the fact that the 3% growth translates into more jobs, but of that means that what actually happens in the above model is that instead of 49 people making 1.012 after two years of growth, 50 people are actually making 0.98 units each. Wait, what? We're actually losing money? Yes, absolutely. As I said, it is perfectly natural for some people to make more than others, but current government policy divides the pie so unevenly that we actually make less money in inflation-adjusted dollars every year on average since the 80's. Add to that the fact that most of the wealth that was destroyed during the recession came in the form of collapsing housing prices, and not only do we make less money each year, but we've also lost what little wealth we managed to accumulate from the rapidly-growing pie in the early
I'm not one of those idiots who whines and bitches about how someone makes more money than other people and how they should somehow give it all back to them or something. However, it's strange thinking that I've worked here for fifteen years and the biggest purchase of my life is my $200k house that I'll be paying off until I die . . . while my boss/CEO is buying fighter jets, billion dollar yachts, appearing in Iron Man 2, buying massively expensive houses all over the place, and buying a 141sq mile Hawaiian island. It's kind of demoralizing to realize that Larry probably spent more in this one purchase than every single person *combined* in my entire division will earn (after taxes) in three or four life-times. Or as much as I would earn in take-home if I continued working from today until the year 17,000.
I am one of those idiots. Not because we shouldn't award innovation and hard work, but because your boss/CEO is getting richer at your expense. I know that the libertarians around here like to say that free markets lead to meritocracy, but it just isn't the case. Your wages, my wages, and 99% of people on Slashdot have stagnated over the past 30 years. Instead, we are supposed to "earn" money by investing in a house. How has that worked out? Gen X, the generation to which I happen to belong, has lost around 40% of its wealth since the housing bubble burst. But Larry Ellison is buying a Hawaiian island. Where did that money come from? Thin air? Where did our lost wealth go? Thin air? No, of course not. It never existed except as debt on a bank balance sheet. And now that the debt has gone bad, we get to pay to de-leverage banks. The economy is zero sum. We can collectively only increase our wealth by the amount that the economy grows each year. Likewise, when the economy shrinks, we must collectively shed wealth. But somehow Larry gets rich when the economy grows and gets richer when it shrinks. That is the policies of the government actively transferring wealth from you and I to Larry Ellison so that he can buy a f***ing Hawaiian island during a prolonged, global economic contraction that has turned home ownership into Russian roulette for the rest of us. And it will continue like this until perception and reality converge.
Also, WTF does one person need with an entire Hawaiian island? Or a fighter jet? Why do we allow one person to accumulate so much wealth that they have to find new, unnecessary extravagances to blow it on while the rest of us can barely afford to educate our kids? Shouldn't there be some level of comfort that we allow the middle class to achieve before letting people like Larry Ellison skip ludicrous and go straight to plaid? Right now it seems that we have to wait for the benevolent "job creators" to toss some coin our way, but not until there is "more certainty" in the markets. Fortunately for us there are still enough billionaires to buy the White House for someone that understands their plight.
As for knuckleballs, it's an exaggeration to say, "even the pitcher doesn't know where it's going." Not that a pitcher has fine control over it, but if it were as wild as you suggest, it would be useless. If you can throw a baseball already with decent accuracy, you can try a knuckleball for yourself and see. It's not that hard to get it in the strike zone if you're a decent pitcher.
Yes, I used to play baseball, both pitching and hitting.
I used to play too, but I was the catcher on my high school team. I don't disagree with anything said about reading pitches: when a prima donna pitcher throws whatever he feels like instead of what you call, it's damn hard to get a glove on the ball, let alone a bat. So we learn to watch the wind up, the release, and the seams to know where the ball is headed. Once you know a pitcher well enough you can even guess where and how far a pitch will break almost before it leaves his hand. Knuckle balls are a completely different story. I caught for exactly two pitchers that could throw three knuckle balls in a row across the plate, let alone in the strike zone. And one was a minor league pitcher that coached us part time. Sure, lots of pitchers will tell you they can throw a knuckle ball, but they wildly over-estimate their accuracy. Most of the time, the best you can say is that the ball heads in the general direction of your glove. The rest of the time you're either digging it out of the dirt or doing your best to get some part of your body in front of it. With very few exceptions--that is, exceptional pitchers--the knuckle ball is a pitch that you call to make pitchers happy when you're 10 runs ahead or there is no one on base.
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The nature of government is to march determinedly towards totalitarianism. In a free society, it is the public's greatest responsibility to periodically push them back with such vigor that they are forced to retreat to a more balanced position. This is potentially a very large step towards totalitarianism. It is, therefore, the public's supreme duty, in the face of such an overstep, to slap the government's hand and say, "No. Bad government. No cookie." As it is oft said, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
The worst examples of totalitarianism from the 20th Century occurred when governments lost the ability to govern either through economic calamity (e.g., the rise of the USSR and the Nazi regime) or intervention by foreign powers (e.g., American intervention in South America and the Middle East). Charismatic megalomaniacs, usually backed by a loyal military, then rise to power through the promise of a new Utopia that quickly collapses into brutal totalitarianism. The slow march of a well-intentioned, functioning government towards totalitarianism is a nonexistent threat in modern times.
That is not to say that I disagree with your broader point. The government should be afraid of The People because they have the power to vote for a government that represents their best interests--e pluribus unum--but modern American politics is corrupted by special interest money and uses wedge issues and micro-targeted ad buys to leverage an uninformed electorate to vote for power-hungry asshats that represent Money instead of People. A politician that stands up against this sort of overreach--and these LPRs are unequivocally an invasion of privacy--will be branded "soft on crime" before dropping 15 points in the polls from the non-stop Willie Horton ads.
Without a doubt. Europe has a racism problem. It's just a different racism problem than the one in the US. If you're used to the one in europe why bother getting used to the one in the US? The racism problem in europe is going to get worse before it gets better as it becomes 'blame the turk' 'blame the arab' 'blame the indian' 'blame the roma' etc. for all that ails them, and their lack of jobs.
The difference between the US and (Northern) Europe is that racism is overt in Europe. There are simply less social taboos against expressing or even legislating racism. The US has more of a broad culture of hate; everything is us versus them. In certain parts of the country that hate manifests as racism. In other parts of the country it is based on political views, sexual orientation, religious belief, etc. Blame the liberal, blame the tea-party, blame the gays, blame the Muslims, blame the atheists, blame the socialists, blame the immigrants, blame the South, etc.; the country is going to hell in a hand basket and it is everyone's fault by my ethnic/religious/political group. The thing that the US has going for it is that it is enormous so you can generally find a place to live that aligns well with your beliefs and talk to people that you agree with about how terrible it is in some other part of the country.
Choose US if you are ambitious and good at what you do. There is no country on Earth that will offer you the same opportunity to succeed and the same liberty to pursue your goals without excessive interference from the government, while at the same time offering strong rule of law and minimum corruption. Ignore the impression you might have from Hollywood movies. Apart from some inner city ghettos, the quality of life in the US is amazing. Chose Canada or Scandinavia if you are insecure about your ability to maintain employment, have no ambition to start a business and need the reassurance of a strong safety net. China and India are still third world countries with extreme poverty and an enormous amount of corruption. Australia may be a good middle ground between the collectivist nanny states of Europe or Canada, with zero energy and innovation, and the US. Also, as far as I know, the immigration policy is relatively welcoming (like in Canada) compared to the US and Europe.
Apparently you haven't been following current events... since about 1964. Let me bring you up to speed: basically nothing you said is true anymore. The reason you perceive the US as offering more opportunity and liberty is because in Canada, Europe, and Australia, you can live a fantastic, enjoyable life and even raise a family on middle-class wages. Scandinavians aren't all striving to be the next Mark Zuckerberg because they're allowed to be happy and aren't shamed and punished for being poor or middle class. And "safety net" is not a good way to describe what social democracies provide because it is a loaded term that implies that only people that are lazy or down on their luck need or use. It's more like a substrate on which you can build whatever type of life you would like to live.
Wow, those are some tiny engineers! I wonder what they eat?
The two banks that I have accounts with use card readers to generate a one-time log-in key from the chip in my ATM card instead of a password... I think this practice is common in Europe, where ATM cards (have to?) have "smart chips" in them. Granted, if someone steals my ATM card and PIN, they can log into my account and transfer funds at will, but in theory that is less likely than having a password stolen.
Something like that happened to me years ago when I used my ATM card at the Toronto airport. Apparently thieves had installed a camera in the ATM that recorded my card number and PIN from which they were able to generate a fake card. Two days later, when I had returned home, my bank called asking if I had bought a plane ticket from Alberta to Vancouver that morning. I said no and they promptly issued a new card and refunded the money. They told me that ATM card cloning was so common that they basically have insurance against it.
Next door in the Netherlands, PostNL will drop your package off with whatever random person on your block happens to be home at 11 AM on a weekday and leave you a slip with an illegible address scribbled on it, forcing you to knock on everyone's door asking if they received your package. That is, except for the one time I had a 25 kg bag of grains shipped to my house, which is when they decided to drop it off 5 km away at a store that closes at 5 PM. I like your packstation system better!
What drugs can do is break down the illusion of being normal that many fucked-up people try so hard to project. There are a lot of fucked up people trying hard to appear normal "like everybody else". The real tragedy is that we live in such a shallow and unenlightened society that a) people blame the drug for this, b) we generally like to blame drugs, guns, and other inanimate objects for what people do, and c) the shallow, exclusive focus on external behavior and appearances means that many people don't know what real character actually is.
A phenomenon that is highlighted by the absurdity that something like one in five Americans takes antidepressants, making it highly likely that any crusading against the evils of "drugs" is on drugs.
Gun control only benefits wrongdoers, and only harm law abiding citizen.
You are conflating gun control with gun prohibition. If I go duck hunting with more than two shells in the magazine and one in the chamber, I will get a massive fine because semi-automatic shotguns with 15-shell magazines aren't fair to the ducks. Yet I'm free to remove the plug from my shotgun and walk around with it slung over my shoulder. The man that shot Gabrielle Giffords had a 30-round magazine in a semi-automatic pistol. He was subdued when he stopped to reload. The guy in TFA walked into a crowded movie theater with (last I read) an assault rifle, tear gas, a smoke bomb, a riot helmet and a bullet-proof vest. If he had been packing a flintlock or a single-action revolver, things would have gone differently. Gun prohibition, like drug prohibition, is silly and unenforceable; it drives the create of black markets. There is a middle ground; see alcohol laws.
Don't worry, I'm sure a blogger is hard at work crafting an elaborate conspiracy theory linking this shooting to a leftist plot to terrorize people into passing gun laws. The FBI, of course, was in on the whole thing.
Because the progressives believe that they can perfect their fellow man. Which is what makes them so dangerous. See: prohibition.
The Prohibition Movement was started and perpetuated by church groups. Laws like the one in NYC banning large sodas are ridiculous, but so are laws banning pot and gay marriage. Every interest group with an axe to grind pushes stupid laws to regulate behaviors they don't like--singling out progressives is willful ignorance.
I can't, for the life of me, figure out why in this backwards world, the "problem" of drug toursim needs to be solved by the Netherlands implementing "koffie shop cards" to ensure that only residents can buy pot... Rational thought would suggest the Dutch government point to all these statistics--and the cost-savings--as a result of their soft drugs policies and tell other countries "if you don't want your citizens coming here to buy put, then legalize it in your own country." I mean, why is it OK to hide your fortune in a Swiss bank account to take advantage of their banking laws, but it's not ok to come to Amsterdam to take advantage of the Dutch drug laws?
I bet the list of things that can trigger psychotic episodes in mentally ill people includes pretty much everything.
The only honest to goodness negative reaction I've ever seen with marijuana use (outside of the physical effects like smoking too much and getting the spins/nauseous) is increased anxiety, and that was only a couple times, both times involving someone that probably didn't want to smoke in the first place and was just doing so to "go along with the crowd" and hadn't really gotten high before, so the effects freaked them out.
In those cases, though, I find it hard to blame the weed itself for that; nobody should consume an intoxicating substance just to "fit in", but then we've all been to high school and now how THAT goes...
On the other hand, I have "high anxiety" in that I used to suffer from panic attacks, but marijuana actually calms me and mitigates the attacks completely. Many people with high anxiety self-medicate with marijuana--in my case because I trust a plant that has been in continuous use by humans for thousands of years over a for-profit company that invents drugs by trial and error. On the other hand, I have encountered plenty of people who can't touch the stuff because it makes them paranoid and anxious and many of them benefit tremendously from prescription pharmaceuticals--to each their own. The effects vary by dose, strain, delivery method, and person. It's not for everyone, but others absolutely adore it. One thing it is not is addictive as anyone who was once a broke college student knows. I'm sure someone has linked to this essay already, but Carl Sagan summed it up pretty well.
On a side note, I have two younger step-siblings. One has been off of heroin for a couple of years and the other is in rehab. Both got hooked in their teens. When I was a teenager, "everyone" knew that pot was completely harmless and that heroin was horribly addictive. Meth was a different story; it was the "new" drug and I saw a lot of people ruin their lives with that stuff. My siblings, on the other hand, grew up in the era of "Drugs are bad, mmm-kay" where they were taught that marijuana is a "gateway drug" and it is just as bad as all the others--a Schedule I narcotic just like LSD and heroin. The message they seemed to have absorbed is "I tried pot and it was pretty mellow--so all these other drugs can't be that bad." I mean, look at the propaganda on whitehouse.gov. Sure, they don't out-and-out lie, but they try so hard to make marijuana seem dangerous: "In 2009, marijuana was involved in 376,000 emergency department visits nationwide." Yah, and I bet 100% of those cases also involved alcohol! The LD50 for pot is about the same as H20... The point is that informing kids about drugs works--but not if you lie to them. No one told us about meth and all my step-siblings got was fact-free propaganda.
I learned to type on a typewriter. Now I use this keyboard at work (I do a lot of writing for my job). Since there are no labels on the keys, I can see the wear patterns and they are concentrated around the home row (and space bar) exactly as intended. I suppose the home row makes no sense on virtual keyboards, but then again virtual keyboards make no sense, which is why there are a zillion "swipe" and "predictive" keyboards on the Android market... so, yah, as you say, interta; I already have to deal with f***ing French keyboards, why would I want to complicate my life even more by adding another non-QWERTY keyboard to the mix?
For those of us that have had to justify the discharge of large sums of money given to you by taxpayers to do research, the answer is obvious. It varies by country and agency, but getting awarded a grant is the first step in the constant cabaret show that is justifying your use of said grant money. And some agencies--like DARPA--will even go so far as to take the money back if your leg kicks aren't high enough at one of your ridiculously frequent reviews. Thus, given the price tag, basically everyone involved in the LHC project has been engaged in a constant media blitz from Day One, ranging from the possibility of creating tiny black holes to (everyone but the actual scientists) peeing themselves over faster-than-light neutrinos that probably weren't. They learned the lesson of the SSC well. So, when the first evidence of the Higgs Boson was revealed, the PR machine went into overdrive trying to justify spending billions of Euros on a giant, underground doughnut that was vulnerable to baguette. Combined with the laughable quality of "science journalism" and the toddler-level understanding of science of the media and general population, stories about transporters and spaceships were a humorous inevitability.
Also, something that was predicted in 1964 cannot be on the "fringe of common scientific knowledge," a phrase that is itself just as hyperbolic as the examples cited in the OP. Now, the discovery of bacteria that can use As in place of P, that would have been at the fringe had it turned out to be true.
> Yes, you mentioned the ER. The fix to that isn't to impose insurance, it's to remove the requirement that the ER treat those who won't pay their bills.
Now you've crossed from naive to stupid. I would bet every dollar I have that your opinion on this changes as soon as you or a loved one is in the position of needing emergency health care.
Actually s/he is just repeating Ron Paul's healthcare plan. And therein lies the fallacy of all the libertarian "broccoli" nonsense. There are two choices; don't treat people without insurance or force everyone to share in the risk pool (i.e., buy insurance or pay a tax penalty.)
This is why the right wing comes off like a pack of retarded children. They take the perfectly acceptable point of view that government should be minimalistic and non-intrusive, and warp it until they look like a pack of asylum escapees.
I don't want the government meddling in my medicare, thank you very much! If the government would get rid of all these regulations, stop taxing and spending, and just stick to the basics, like keeping gays from marrying and making sure no one smokes pot or uses birth control, then we would all be billionaires. Of course, you couldn't possibly understand that, as you are clearly a communist.
The way a lot of healthcare works in the Netherlands is that the government forces everyone to buy basic health insurance. Many employers have special deals with insurance companies that make it cheaper for their employees, but you are free to buy from other companies, so long as you have health insurance. Without it you basically aren't allowed to participate in the economy at all (i.e., no job, no back account, no benefits, etc.) There is a minimum, legal annual co-pay (which is rising) and government assistance for people who can't afford insurance on their own. Your premium is calculated from your age and your co-pay; there is no such thing as preexisting conditions. Insurance companies are not allowed to deny people coverage, your GP (huisarts) acts as the gatekeeper just as with HMOs, but the costs of procedures are effectively dictated by the government.
Dental insurance is optional and, with the big push towards privatization that seems to be everywhere, they decided to experiment in that market, essentially removing the cost controls and allowing dentists to compete with each other for prices. And, almost instantly, dentists stopped doing basic procedures and focused on high-margin stuff. In other words, it almost instantly turned into the American system in which people with money get the best treatment and the poor get the shaft.
What I find interesting about the Dutch system, which shares a lot of features of Obamacare, it that deliberate and explicit cost controls are apparently necessary even when you force everyone to buy insurance. Obamacare seems to control costs only through the shared risk pool--or do I have that wrong? Also--but maybe this is just a cultural thing--Dutch doctors treat everyone like hypochondriacs because they go to the doctor for every little ache and pain. Anyone that has had to deal with HMOs, co-pays, and reimbursements from American insurance companies--and that values their time--knows that doctors won't do squat unless the pain/problem has persisted for more than two weeks or so. As a consequence, people can walk around with curable--though minor--ailments that have been diagnosed as "stress related" unless they are very persistent (and willing to switch doctors). For a variety of reasons--lawsuits being among them--GPs in the US generally refer you after relatively little complaining by comparison. I wonder how the American tendency to diagnose and treat everything and the lack of explicit cost controls will affect premiums, even with the individual mandate.
I suppose the upshot is that I can now wonder now that Roberts has departed from the four lunatics that wanted to toss the whole thing out based on their apparent powers to see into the future.
The golden rule of TV in the 2000's; if I like it, it will be cancelled or, as with Community, they will just ruin it by firing the creator to make it "more appealing to a broad audience." Network TV is driven entirely by the lowest common denominator because it puts the most eyeballs in front of the ads. Seinfeld wouldn't have made it past the pilot in 2010. There are a few gems tucked away on non-network companies--It's Always Sunny, Breaking Bad, Futurama, The Daily Show--but I don't see how anyone in this day and age can spend more than two-three hours a week watching TV unless they're really into "Ow, My Balls!" marathons... or sports.
And the best way to watch TV? Netflix, unless you live outside the US, in which case USENET+XBMC because the only thing worse than reality shows and canned laugh-tracks is commercials.
Fact is, the officer can arrest anyone, for any reason, or for no reason at all. If you object or resist, you'll be held overnight or longer. Then, when they're tired of harassing you, they kick you out. If you try to file charges, you find that there's no record you were ever there, and they all insist that they've never seen you before. This isn't at all a hypothetical scenario. It's pretty well understood by most non-white Americans over the age of 5.
And strip-searched. Don't forget that the same SCOTUS that says it's ok to demand proof of citizenship says that the police can strip-search you without bringing up any charges. Put those two things together, sprinkle on good old fashion racial profiling, and voila legal shelter for racists and xenophobes to harass people for the crime of being non-white in a border state.
It's not limited to the US, either. The immigration and naturalization service in the Netherlands is trying to effectively kick all Iranians out of the country as we speak, even though they are in the country legally. The justification is the new set of sanctions that the EU is imposing, which contain no mention of people--only financial transactions and trade. Rather than just denying them iPads, it is threatening to ruin their careers and their chance to make a life for themselves outside of Iran.
Ugh.
I'd rather a small turnout of people making an actual decision.
Voting isn't what's important. Having an opinion is. 100% voter turnout isn't worth much if 70% of that turnout picked randomly.
Unless they figure a good way to validate that someone is making a serious choice (and force them to do so), all this does is dilute the already very thin pool of educated voters.
"I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."
- Paul Weyrich
Let's look at a presidential election. Roughly 49% of the population decides to vote GOP well in advance of the election. Another 49% decides to vote Dem. These are the voters you speak of; they are familiar with the issues, the candidates, and their opinions are difficult to change. The other 2%, what we like to call "swing voters" to their faces, or "low-information voters" behind their backs decide the election. The dumbest, least-informed people decide who gets to be president. As the voting population decreases as a whole, the number of people comprising that 2% decreases, making negative attack ads, smears, and targeted ads far more effective. Personally I want to see everyone over 18 vote in every election simply because it makes the vote more difficult to manipulate with lies and distortions and it naturally favors candidates that support policies that are popular with the majority of people. That way we can spend our time convincing each other what those policies should be, rather than having political campaigns carpet-bomb a couple of districts in a couple of states with lies two weeks before the election.
Political platforms are so unimportant these days that Mitt Romney doesn't even seem to need one. And Obama has treated his platform as something that you just dust off for elections and put back in the closet after you win. Why? Because WTF difference does your platform make when elections are decided by people too stupid to see a difference between polar opposites until a TV commercial with ominous music tells them that one of the candidates will certainly destroy thing_they_love the second Dr. Evil is elected. I know it seems counter-intuitive, but platforms start to matter when the voting population goes up because you can only fool all of the people some of the time.
The economy is zero sum.
No. Improved technology can allow individuals and society overall to increase productivity, as can increasing urbanization (because that stimulates creativity and innovation). This grows the economy for real. To see why, realize that mechanization can allow one person to do a job that 200 years ago would have required hundreds or thousands of people. That means that those people can do something else instead, either working or leisure, and that in turn means that the economy must be larger.
This is Slashdot. When arguing here, at least try to avoid obvious logic errors or factual mistakes...
You don't understand what zero sum means. That does not mean that it doesn't grow or shrink--of course the economy grows. And for a long time it grew faster than the demands of population growth and with moderate inflation. Zero sum means that the economy, at any given time, is of finite volume (roughly $17 trillion for the US, a bit more for the EU as a whole). If the economy grows by 3% and 1% of the population takes 90% of that growth, the other 99% split the remaining 10%, which is exactly what has happened since the end of the recession. Zero sum means that every dollar I spend is the income of another person. If the economy were not zero-sum, then the balance sheets of banks, which book debt as assets, wouldn't make any sense.
without his getting richer, GP wouldn't have a job. At least not where he's at. Remember the economy is not a fixed size pie with CEOs taking a larger piece. Just the act of them taking a piece makes more pies to spread around.
It isn't fixed in the sense that the economy grows and shrinks, but it is a pie and the more one person gets, the less another does. If the total volume of the economy is 100 units and there are 50 people, there are 2 units per person. So let's say the CEO takes 51 and the other 49 take 1. Now let's say the economy grows by 3%. Does that mean that everyone get's to split that 3% growth? No, not in the current economy because CEOs take most of their compensation as sweat-heart stock deals with no downside and the rest of us get wages and, lucky us, can gamble our retirement funds in the stock market because ordinary interest won't outpace inflation over time. So 90% of that growth goes to the CEO; and that is not a made-up number, that is actually how much of the post-recession growth has gone to the top 1%. So, after 3% economic growth, 49 people make 1.006 units and 1 person makes 52.7. The next year, the CEO will have 55.3 and the rest of us 1.012. I'm not trying to be condescending, I just find it instructive to look at the actual numbers, which really are demoralizing. It gets worse when you dig into tax policy which lets the CEO pay a flat 15% capital gains tax (on the increase in value, not the total value) when he exercises the stock options that comprise the bulk of his compensation. Except that he won't even pay that, because what he actually does is borrow against the value of those options for a tax break on the interest payments which are soaked up by the part of the loan that he reinvested into a so-called hedge fund, which in practice just turns out to be a de facto government-guaranteed bank for rich people because commercial and investment banks were allowed to merge.
The CEO, whose wealth grew by 8%, goes off to buy a second house in La Jolla. The wealth of the other 49 only grew by 1%, but because it was 1% of a much smaller number, almost all of it is eaten by rising costs (i.e., inflation). So they are told, don't worry, the bank will lend you money to buy a house, which will increase in value over time. So, don't worry so much about wages--just use those to buy food and build equity in a house. The house will act as your savings account and, when your kids are old enough for college, you can borrow against the increased value of the house to pay their tuition. Your house, well, it's like a magic money-making machine--it's a sure-fire investment for the non-investor class! And it was, for twenty years. But speculators got a bit too optimistic and it turns out that most of that growth was imaginary. Oops! Sorry, your sole source of economic growth--and class mobility--actually lost money. (Don't worry about the CEO, you can cram down a mortgage on a second home, unlike with a primary residence.)
Ok, but you say that, if the CEO doesn't make tons of money, we wouldn't have jobs. I acknowledge the fact that the 3% growth translates into more jobs, but of that means that what actually happens in the above model is that instead of 49 people making 1.012 after two years of growth, 50 people are actually making 0.98 units each. Wait, what? We're actually losing money? Yes, absolutely. As I said, it is perfectly natural for some people to make more than others, but current government policy divides the pie so unevenly that we actually make less money in inflation-adjusted dollars every year on average since the 80's. Add to that the fact that most of the wealth that was destroyed during the recession came in the form of collapsing housing prices, and not only do we make less money each year, but we've also lost what little wealth we managed to accumulate from the rapidly-growing pie in the early
I'm not one of those idiots who whines and bitches about how someone makes more money than other people and how they should somehow give it all back to them or something. However, it's strange thinking that I've worked here for fifteen years and the biggest purchase of my life is my $200k house that I'll be paying off until I die . . . while my boss/CEO is buying fighter jets, billion dollar yachts, appearing in Iron Man 2, buying massively expensive houses all over the place, and buying a 141sq mile Hawaiian island. It's kind of demoralizing to realize that Larry probably spent more in this one purchase than every single person *combined* in my entire division will earn (after taxes) in three or four life-times. Or as much as I would earn in take-home if I continued working from today until the year 17,000.
I am one of those idiots. Not because we shouldn't award innovation and hard work, but because your boss/CEO is getting richer at your expense. I know that the libertarians around here like to say that free markets lead to meritocracy, but it just isn't the case. Your wages, my wages, and 99% of people on Slashdot have stagnated over the past 30 years. Instead, we are supposed to "earn" money by investing in a house. How has that worked out? Gen X, the generation to which I happen to belong, has lost around 40% of its wealth since the housing bubble burst. But Larry Ellison is buying a Hawaiian island. Where did that money come from? Thin air? Where did our lost wealth go? Thin air? No, of course not. It never existed except as debt on a bank balance sheet. And now that the debt has gone bad, we get to pay to de-leverage banks. The economy is zero sum. We can collectively only increase our wealth by the amount that the economy grows each year. Likewise, when the economy shrinks, we must collectively shed wealth. But somehow Larry gets rich when the economy grows and gets richer when it shrinks. That is the policies of the government actively transferring wealth from you and I to Larry Ellison so that he can buy a f***ing Hawaiian island during a prolonged, global economic contraction that has turned home ownership into Russian roulette for the rest of us. And it will continue like this until perception and reality converge.
Also, WTF does one person need with an entire Hawaiian island? Or a fighter jet? Why do we allow one person to accumulate so much wealth that they have to find new, unnecessary extravagances to blow it on while the rest of us can barely afford to educate our kids? Shouldn't there be some level of comfort that we allow the middle class to achieve before letting people like Larry Ellison skip ludicrous and go straight to plaid? Right now it seems that we have to wait for the benevolent "job creators" to toss some coin our way, but not until there is "more certainty" in the markets. Fortunately for us there are still enough billionaires to buy the White House for someone that understands their plight.
As for knuckleballs, it's an exaggeration to say, "even the pitcher doesn't know where it's going." Not that a pitcher has fine control over it, but if it were as wild as you suggest, it would be useless. If you can throw a baseball already with decent accuracy, you can try a knuckleball for yourself and see. It's not that hard to get it in the strike zone if you're a decent pitcher.
Yes, I used to play baseball, both pitching and hitting.
I used to play too, but I was the catcher on my high school team. I don't disagree with anything said about reading pitches: when a prima donna pitcher throws whatever he feels like instead of what you call, it's damn hard to get a glove on the ball, let alone a bat. So we learn to watch the wind up, the release, and the seams to know where the ball is headed. Once you know a pitcher well enough you can even guess where and how far a pitch will break almost before it leaves his hand. Knuckle balls are a completely different story. I caught for exactly two pitchers that could throw three knuckle balls in a row across the plate, let alone in the strike zone. And one was a minor league pitcher that coached us part time. Sure, lots of pitchers will tell you they can throw a knuckle ball, but they wildly over-estimate their accuracy. Most of the time, the best you can say is that the ball heads in the general direction of your glove. The rest of the time you're either digging it out of the dirt or doing your best to get some part of your body in front of it. With very few exceptions--that is, exceptional pitchers--the knuckle ball is a pitch that you call to make pitchers happy when you're 10 runs ahead or there is no one on base.