Recently, an ad depicted USA without California. Guess what? there was a public outcry from US citizens, because you don't want a piece of your land to be taken from your country!!! same goes for Serbia/Kosovo, but for Serbia/Kosovo you support the opposite view.
I'm not up to the task of justifying beliefs I don't holdâ""US citizens" don't all think alike. Of course, it's also a fact that no American president has ever committed ethnic cleansing against the majority ethnic population of California. And ultimately, it wouldn't matter one bit if white people became a minority on California, because the American government is based on universal human principles, not upon ethnic nationalism the way Milosevic's Serbia was. This is why even a predominantly Hispanic California will never secede, and why you and others are wrong in even comparing the two situations.
The world's serious political problems are less than your fingers, as we speak. Yet you only try to solve some of them.
You only believe that because you're not clever enough to think of more than ten solutions, but arrogant enough to think you can solve all the problems.
The better societies of Sweden, Germany, Switcherland etc (where social democracy is applied) strongly disagree with you. You failed to justify how the "best" system, as you claim, produces 50 million poor people (that's 1/6 of the US population), tent cities etc.
Sweden, Germany, and Switzerland have markets. They have capitalist powerhouses like Saab, Siemens, Credit Suisse, IKEA, Ericsson, Bayer, Daimler, and so forth. They just have social welfare on top of it. And of the three Switzerland is the only one even remotely capable of defending itself.
And for the record, the American poor are still richer than most of the "rich" people in the world.
It was a hypothetical question. It seems you agree with the map of US changing...is this true? or you are just saying that because it's not going to happen in reality?
I think it's telling that in general, almost nobody wants to secede from the United States. If the country were to go downhill to enough of an extent that this changed, I'd support secession as a remedy if enough people in a given state or area wanted it (and if it wasn't just so they could continue slavery or something like that).
But you are not examining the cause of the problem! the problem is political, not religious, and your country is in the middle of it. If it was religious, Muslims would put bombs in the Vatican. That's what you don't realize.
I don't entirely disagree with you on this point. But you must realize that, to a Muslim, politics is part of religion.
So that's all for you? all the problems of the world are just that? your myopia is obvious: you don't care for what happens to the rest of the world, you only care for serving your interests.
Hey, the problems of the world are myriad, and we're never going to solve them all to anyone's satisfaction. I just brought up some examples that seemed relevant to our discussion here.
That's a major mistake of yours. Economic liberalism is destroying capitalism for the masses, because it favors capitalism for the elite. All the major players in the world (the president of the World Bank, the EU etc) have started talking about governments regulating markets more, because the extreme liberalism and the lack of any control puts all the wealth in the hands of the few.
A bunch of people believed that garbage a hundred years ago, and it never led to anything good. Markets are, so far, the best economic system we have. Failing to recognize that marks you as a pseudointellectual.
Again, you're ignoring the fact that our valiant student isn't always paying the entire $400k himself (if he gets federal student aid, even low-interest loans with subsidized interest), that he may prefer going to school for 8 years and then working in a professional field, and so forth. Plus, $45k to $85k understates the actual difference in income you'd have.
Well, you'd have to also live in a country where the government didn't help you pay for college any, since you don't pay all that $400k yourself. But please, instead of being pedantic just adjust the relevant numbers for yourself.
The counter trend is that there is no justification to spend $400k on an eight year education which will only pay $85k a year.
If the marginal benefit to your income is $40k (i.e. you go from $45k to $85k), it only takes 10 years to pay that back. When you factor in other marginal benefits like working in an air-conditioned office sitting at your ass typing instead of outdoors/on your back/in the rain/underneath cars/etc., it might be even more worthwhile.
I've found that a widescreen is wonderful if I want to read or write in a primary taller-than-it-is-wide window on one side and keep an eye on something else on the side. On the other hand, the Windows UI discourages this behavior by encouraging you to maximize all your windows and tab between them.
Now you've passed a limit where an opinion becomes a lie. Kosovo is part of Serbia. How would you feel if the UN came and took California out of the US, and attached it to Mexico?
If the majority of Californians wanted to secede from the US and join Mexico, I would hope for their self-determination to be respected as well. As it turns out, the majority of Californians want it the other way around, which is why California seceded from Mexico and joined the US. Same for Texas.
You don't have any rights to slay them. The only right you have is to defend your country, within your country's limits.
Wrong. You don't get to attack the United States and then hide in the middle of nowhere. We will hunt you down and kill you all.
Perhaps, I am not a drugs specialist or user. But from what I've read, soft drugs usually lead to hard drugs. In either case, though, a society which depends on drugs to be happy has serious problems.
What you've read is wrong. If anything, the dependence on drugs to be happy can be laid at the feet of pharmaceuticals more than anyone else.
I surely have figured how the world works, that's why I am not happy with it. And if it was on my hands, I'd change it. You, on the other hand, thinks that things are what they are because they are, without having given any thought to it. They have brainwashed you to believe that things should not be different...and that's the most dangerous thing!
I do think things should be different. I just think they should be different in different ways than you do. For instance, it would be great if, instead of trying to blow up the civilized world, more Muslims participated in it. It would be great if governments stopped throwing people in prison for putting the wrong substances into their bodies. It would be wonderful if Koreans and Chinese gave up their racial hatred of the Japanese, and if the North Korean government collapsed this afternoon, so we could get our troops out of East Asia. It would be great if the Serbs recognized the self-determination of the ethnic groups they tried to exterminate in the 90's. And it would be wonderful if European countries embraced markets more and welfare less. The problem is that you want to take us backwards, not forwards.
Okay, here's the complete story on skin color: First for the base. Human skin in and of itself is fairly translucent. Blood, however, is fairly red, leaving a pinkish hue. There's a brown pigment (melanin) and a yellow pigment. It's the presence of the yellow pigment that changes the hue between east Asians and Europeans, and the degree of melanin that changes the saturation.
It doesn't promote racism at all to suggest the probability distribution of being talented at and inclined to develop video games is identical for all races. (One theory I have heard for a similar issue vis a vis sexism is that men and women have the same average intelligence, but men have a wider variance, which means there are proportionally more male geniuses and more male idiots. Thus, when you go to the mathematics or physics department there are more male mathematicians or physicists than women, but there are also more men than women if you look at the opposite side of the curve. The point here is that, even without one population being on average smarter or dumber, or even on average better or worse at particular tasks, differences even in variance will affect proportions of people in a particular occupation if that occupation falls too far to either side of average.)
Your link misses the entire point of the term "African American," which is not a fancy P.C. word for "black people," but a term used to identify people in a specific cultural group, with certain overall traditions, customs, and apparently gaming habits. It's come into commonplace usage because it's a unique phrase which sets that group off from other cultural, ethnic and racial groups in America.
Black is to African American as Catholic is to Christian. Black is a flavor. African American is a demographic description. Black has meaning, subtlety and context. African American is just a huge bunch of undifferentiated people of African descent
FWIW, I've heard Cuba actually has a remarkably egalitarian society--at least with regards to race--but it's so hard to hear reliable things about Cuba that I don't know..
I don't think that's how it works. It's more that human beings have a probability distribution of intelligence that centers around 100 IQ, not that the actual distribution of intelligence at the present moment in time is a smooth curve. If one in 100 billion people have an IQ of 214 that doesn't preclude such a person living today, it only suggests that on average, only one such person will live for every 100 billion other people in the world.
In my experience (and I have a fair bit of exposure to and experience with the medical psychology) psychology is only good when the practitioners ignore their trade and just act like friends to their patients.
Psychology is also good when the practitioners run experiments, write papers, teach classes--you know, all that scientific crap that research psychologists do. Psychology is a much bigger field than counseling.
Well, there's wine and there's wine. With most wine, the price pressures on the demand side, because rich folk do love them some overpriced wine. But if you're not a snob it might be a nice alternative.
I think burning weed produces CO2. But at least it's carbon neutral, since it doesn't produce more than it consumed when growing, and if some of the weed is actually industrial hemp, you still win.
Setting aside the specific issues of your specific implementation (note that cap-and-trade works largely the same way your system does), your policy is best because it doesn't actually solve the problem.
Let me elaborate. The actual problem of CO2 is going to be solved by going to alternative sources of fuel, preventing coal fires (a great example of low-hanging fruit), refactoring our cities to require less individual automobile transport, and so forth. The problem is, no bureaucracy is clever enough to prioritize and implement all of these at once without leaving something out. The market, however, is. If you put a financial burden on people who let coal fires get out of control, they have an incentive to invest in better fire suppression systems. What if the suppression systems waste CO2 too? Well, that'll be factored into the cost, and we'll come out to the right balance.
I think government does have more of a role to play in some cases. For instance, I'd love to have a law that said when you bought a new car, fuel costs was advertised instead of just the MSRP, so if you saw a 20 MPG gas guzzler and a constant estimate of 200,000 miles before replacement, that $35,000 would be prominently displayed, while an efficient 50 MPG vehicle would have a comparatively easy $14,000 posted on it. If the price of gasoline factored in your tax or the costs of carbon permits, the effect would be greater. Fixes like this help the market by making decision-making closer to the model of rationality economists use.
The problem with sugar cane is that the US can't grow enough (global warming might fix that) and imports are highly tariffed to protect what little sugar production the US has. It also helps corn, since they can produce "high fructose corn syrup" as a sugar substitute.
Subsidies are generous partially because without those subsidies, farmers would have to get another job. You might say "well nuts to them, get another job you surplus farmers", but the rationale is that we need to maintain all the farming we can in case of war.
Why dumpster dive if you can pay some guy $30 per account information to dumpster dive for you? Do you think the criminal mastermind himself is going to get his dumb ass caught in the bank dumpster?
To you, your identity may be priceless. To me, your identity is worth less than $15 because that's how much I'm willing to pay for it and how much I can get it for.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not up to the task of justifying beliefs I don't holdâ""US citizens" don't all think alike. Of course, it's also a fact that no American president has ever committed ethnic cleansing against the majority ethnic population of California. And ultimately, it wouldn't matter one bit if white people became a minority on California, because the American government is based on universal human principles, not upon ethnic nationalism the way Milosevic's Serbia was. This is why even a predominantly Hispanic California will never secede, and why you and others are wrong in even comparing the two situations.
The world's serious political problems are less than your fingers, as we speak. Yet you only try to solve some of them.You only believe that because you're not clever enough to think of more than ten solutions, but arrogant enough to think you can solve all the problems.
The better societies of Sweden, Germany, Switcherland etc (where social democracy is applied) strongly disagree with you. You failed to justify how the "best" system, as you claim, produces 50 million poor people (that's 1/6 of the US population), tent cities etc.Sweden, Germany, and Switzerland have markets. They have capitalist powerhouses like Saab, Siemens, Credit Suisse, IKEA, Ericsson, Bayer, Daimler, and so forth. They just have social welfare on top of it. And of the three Switzerland is the only one even remotely capable of defending itself.
And for the record, the American poor are still richer than most of the "rich" people in the world.
I think it's telling that in general, almost nobody wants to secede from the United States. If the country were to go downhill to enough of an extent that this changed, I'd support secession as a remedy if enough people in a given state or area wanted it (and if it wasn't just so they could continue slavery or something like that).
But you are not examining the cause of the problem! the problem is political, not religious, and your country is in the middle of it. If it was religious, Muslims would put bombs in the Vatican. That's what you don't realize.I don't entirely disagree with you on this point. But you must realize that, to a Muslim, politics is part of religion.
So that's all for you? all the problems of the world are just that? your myopia is obvious: you don't care for what happens to the rest of the world, you only care for serving your interests.Hey, the problems of the world are myriad, and we're never going to solve them all to anyone's satisfaction. I just brought up some examples that seemed relevant to our discussion here.
That's a major mistake of yours. Economic liberalism is destroying capitalism for the masses, because it favors capitalism for the elite. All the major players in the world (the president of the World Bank, the EU etc) have started talking about governments regulating markets more, because the extreme liberalism and the lack of any control puts all the wealth in the hands of the few.A bunch of people believed that garbage a hundred years ago, and it never led to anything good. Markets are, so far, the best economic system we have. Failing to recognize that marks you as a pseudointellectual.
Again, you're ignoring the fact that our valiant student isn't always paying the entire $400k himself (if he gets federal student aid, even low-interest loans with subsidized interest), that he may prefer going to school for 8 years and then working in a professional field, and so forth. Plus, $45k to $85k understates the actual difference in income you'd have.
Well, you'd have to also live in a country where the government didn't help you pay for college any, since you don't pay all that $400k yourself. But please, instead of being pedantic just adjust the relevant numbers for yourself.
If the marginal benefit to your income is $40k (i.e. you go from $45k to $85k), it only takes 10 years to pay that back. When you factor in other marginal benefits like working in an air-conditioned office sitting at your ass typing instead of outdoors/on your back/in the rain/underneath cars/etc., it might be even more worthwhile.
I've found that a widescreen is wonderful if I want to read or write in a primary taller-than-it-is-wide window on one side and keep an eye on something else on the side. On the other hand, the Windows UI discourages this behavior by encouraging you to maximize all your windows and tab between them.
If the majority of Californians wanted to secede from the US and join Mexico, I would hope for their self-determination to be respected as well. As it turns out, the majority of Californians want it the other way around, which is why California seceded from Mexico and joined the US. Same for Texas.
You don't have any rights to slay them. The only right you have is to defend your country, within your country's limits.Wrong. You don't get to attack the United States and then hide in the middle of nowhere. We will hunt you down and kill you all.
Perhaps, I am not a drugs specialist or user. But from what I've read, soft drugs usually lead to hard drugs. In either case, though, a society which depends on drugs to be happy has serious problems.What you've read is wrong. If anything, the dependence on drugs to be happy can be laid at the feet of pharmaceuticals more than anyone else.
I surely have figured how the world works, that's why I am not happy with it. And if it was on my hands, I'd change it. You, on the other hand, thinks that things are what they are because they are, without having given any thought to it. They have brainwashed you to believe that things should not be different...and that's the most dangerous thing!I do think things should be different. I just think they should be different in different ways than you do. For instance, it would be great if, instead of trying to blow up the civilized world, more Muslims participated in it. It would be great if governments stopped throwing people in prison for putting the wrong substances into their bodies. It would be wonderful if Koreans and Chinese gave up their racial hatred of the Japanese, and if the North Korean government collapsed this afternoon, so we could get our troops out of East Asia. It would be great if the Serbs recognized the self-determination of the ethnic groups they tried to exterminate in the 90's. And it would be wonderful if European countries embraced markets more and welfare less. The problem is that you want to take us backwards, not forwards.
Every state redistricts people that way. It has nothing to do with race and everything to do with which party people in a given neighborhood vote for.
Finding Mayflower ancestors to marry seems like a fool's errand. They're all dead. Or did you mean "descendants"?
Okay, here's the complete story on skin color: First for the base. Human skin in and of itself is fairly translucent. Blood, however, is fairly red, leaving a pinkish hue. There's a brown pigment (melanin) and a yellow pigment. It's the presence of the yellow pigment that changes the hue between east Asians and Europeans, and the degree of melanin that changes the saturation.
It doesn't promote racism at all to suggest the probability distribution of being talented at and inclined to develop video games is identical for all races. (One theory I have heard for a similar issue vis a vis sexism is that men and women have the same average intelligence, but men have a wider variance, which means there are proportionally more male geniuses and more male idiots. Thus, when you go to the mathematics or physics department there are more male mathematicians or physicists than women, but there are also more men than women if you look at the opposite side of the curve. The point here is that, even without one population being on average smarter or dumber, or even on average better or worse at particular tasks, differences even in variance will affect proportions of people in a particular occupation if that occupation falls too far to either side of average.)
That's funny: one of the black bloggers I read defines it the other way around:
Black is to African American as Catholic is to Christian. Black is a flavor. African American is a demographic description. Black has meaning, subtlety and context. African American is just a huge bunch of undifferentiated people of African descentIn Cuba, citizens of all races are equally poor!
What ain't no country I ever heard of! They speak English in What!?
I don't think that's how it works. It's more that human beings have a probability distribution of intelligence that centers around 100 IQ, not that the actual distribution of intelligence at the present moment in time is a smooth curve. If one in 100 billion people have an IQ of 214 that doesn't preclude such a person living today, it only suggests that on average, only one such person will live for every 100 billion other people in the world.
Psychology is also good when the practitioners run experiments, write papers, teach classes--you know, all that scientific crap that research psychologists do. Psychology is a much bigger field than counseling.
Well, there's wine and there's wine. With most wine, the price pressures on the demand side, because rich folk do love them some overpriced wine. But if you're not a snob it might be a nice alternative.
I think burning weed produces CO2. But at least it's carbon neutral, since it doesn't produce more than it consumed when growing, and if some of the weed is actually industrial hemp, you still win.
Setting aside the specific issues of your specific implementation (note that cap-and-trade works largely the same way your system does), your policy is best because it doesn't actually solve the problem.
Let me elaborate. The actual problem of CO2 is going to be solved by going to alternative sources of fuel, preventing coal fires (a great example of low-hanging fruit), refactoring our cities to require less individual automobile transport, and so forth. The problem is, no bureaucracy is clever enough to prioritize and implement all of these at once without leaving something out. The market, however, is. If you put a financial burden on people who let coal fires get out of control, they have an incentive to invest in better fire suppression systems. What if the suppression systems waste CO2 too? Well, that'll be factored into the cost, and we'll come out to the right balance.
I think government does have more of a role to play in some cases. For instance, I'd love to have a law that said when you bought a new car, fuel costs was advertised instead of just the MSRP, so if you saw a 20 MPG gas guzzler and a constant estimate of 200,000 miles before replacement, that $35,000 would be prominently displayed, while an efficient 50 MPG vehicle would have a comparatively easy $14,000 posted on it. If the price of gasoline factored in your tax or the costs of carbon permits, the effect would be greater. Fixes like this help the market by making decision-making closer to the model of rationality economists use.
The problem with sugar cane is that the US can't grow enough (global warming might fix that) and imports are highly tariffed to protect what little sugar production the US has. It also helps corn, since they can produce "high fructose corn syrup" as a sugar substitute.
Subsidies are generous partially because without those subsidies, farmers would have to get another job. You might say "well nuts to them, get another job you surplus farmers", but the rationale is that we need to maintain all the farming we can in case of war.
Why dumpster dive if you can pay some guy $30 per account information to dumpster dive for you? Do you think the criminal mastermind himself is going to get his dumb ass caught in the bank dumpster?
To you, your identity may be priceless. To me, your identity is worth less than $15 because that's how much I'm willing to pay for it and how much I can get it for.
Soylent green is made out of individuals too, but what's best for a batch of soylent green isn't what's best for the individual!
He was talking about individuals, not societies.