Plus, Lamarckian evolution involves inheritance, whereas the author is talking about learned/conditioned behavior in individuals. The brain is plastic. It very definitely does adapt to do well whatever you do often.
In my experience, highway driving is great for contemplation. City driving not so much. YMMV...:)
Turnpikes, community road service days, stuff like that. Also, sales taxes, property taxes, etc. Property taxes, as I'm sure you're aware, kind of suck when you get older and can't earn anymore. Income taxes are actually a step up from that.
That's a non-sequitur. I haven't tried to prove anything about Panetta. I've merely demonstrated that an argument that was made to prove something about Panetta is based on an incorrect reason, and hence hasn't been shown to be true.
No. World population is expected to plateau and start falling this century. Per capita energy consumption in the places where population is growing is so much less than per capita consumption in the U.S. that it's a wash. The big problem we have at the moment is that countries that are reaching our level of development but have higher populations from last century, but now have low population growth, are increasing their energy growth at alarming rates. Trying to rein in overpopulation will do nothing to address this problem.
If Panetta wanted more money for his department, he wouldn't have worked with the President and Congress to try to rein in military spending to the minimal extent he did. I would certainly like a Secretary of Defense who actually *cut* the defense budget instead of just decreasing the rate of increase, but claiming that he is trying to maximize his budget is simply counterfactual. If he were trying to maximize his budget, his behavior over the past year would have been very different.
Interestingly, his retraction was based on current science. He didn't say there is no global warming. He said "obviously, it's not going to kill us all next week, like I was afraid it would twenty years ago when I said it could kill us all in twenty years."
It's nice when people admit that their predictions of the future were wrong when the science shows that they were mistaken. You seem to think it's a bad thing, but it's not.
While your assumption is very simplifying, and thus attractive, I don't think it's correct. The reality is that politicians feel corrupt to us because they live in their own echo chamber, and they do believe a lot of things that are just plain stupid because of that. They listen to the wrong people, the people who have the loudest voices, and choose who to ally with based on what they think is right, or in some cases what they think is beneficial to them.
Saying that they are just looking out for themselves is oversimplifying. Saying that nothing they say is ever valid is incorrect. It's comforting either to think that politicians are basically good, and looking out for us, or basically evil, and trying to screw us. It's much harder to live in the real world, where they are much more complicated than that, and require our involvement if they are to serve us.
I've never heard of any of the companies listed in the Wikipedia article you cite. And it only lists a few companies. If you made a similar list for Silicon Valley, it would fill several pages. The bell curve is a magical thing, so of course there are a few tech companies in any big city. But Las Vegas is several standard deviations out from Silicon Valley.
No, you don't even have a natural right to die. In the sense of enforceable rights, you have no rights at all, unless they are granted or unless you are able to exercise them without interference because nobody is trying to stop you from doing so. In the sense of natural rights, you have whatever natural rights you think you have, but the fact that you have them has no force.
The state doesn't have a natural right to your property. No-one has a natural right to your property, or to any property. To the extent that property ownership exists, it exists through common consent, not by nature. This is actually true of all rights that are enforceable. E.g., if you accept the notion of natural rights at all, it's hard to claim that two people have a natural right to marry, and two other people do not; if that were so, the right wouldn't be natural. The right that matters is the one granted by common consent, because you can actually exercise it. So it's important to understand the distinction between these two concepts, both of which can be referred to by the word "right."
So back to your point, the state doesn't have a natural right to your property, but you don't either. Taxation is simply the exchange you make with the rest of the people who might dispute your right to your property, that results in them agreeing not to dispute it.
No, sorry, this is just equivocating. There is no difference between a share and a house. The fact that you own your house (if you do!) is purely a social construct. If all the people who would like to live in your house decided to take it from you, there is nothing that you could do to stop them. The reason this doesn't happen is that (1) they couldn't all have it, and (2) they also want to own a house without using force to defend it.
Indeed, in a sense your ownership of a share is less subject to common agreement than your ownership of your house, because your ownership of your house really is an agreement between you and the rest of the population. Your ownership of a stock is an agreement between you and the next person to whom you try to sell it, and the company that issued it. As long as all these parties agree that you own the stock, you own the stock.
Yes, it is scary. The world is not a happy, comfortable place. Many people have in fact suffered exactly the woe you describe here. This has come as often at the hands of corporations as governments, but it can definitely come at the hands of governments. If you don't want this to happen, the last thing you should be doing is destabilizing a democracy.
Right, have you ever _been_ to Las Vegas? It's just about antithetical to the geek ethic. More to the point, it's _completely_ antithetical to the Apple aesthetic.
This is true in a commodity market with low margins. In Apple's market, recouping their costs is a non-problem. This is why they have, and are sitting on, a humongous cash surplus. They probably can't raise their prices—if they did, their sales would drop. They have chosen the price point they have because it is what the market will bear. So no, if their taxes went up, they would simply make less money. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is an open question, but the notion that an increase in taxes is always passed along to the customer, while it seems to make sense, is actually wrong.
You think it's theft because you think that property is a natural right. Property is no more a natural right than copyright. Property is a right that exists by consent of every person who does not own it, or else by force. If by consent, then consent can be withheld. If by force, then you initiated force, and you no longer hold the moral high ground. In neither case is taxation theft.
Yup, because Apple in no way benefits from access to the Silicon Valley job market. They could hire all those programmers in Bangalore instead, but they choose to support the Silicon Valley economy out of a sense of generosity and community spirit.
Charitable donations can be deducted from your net income, up to a certain percentage (7.5%?). Same thing with MSAs and 401ks. Plus, when you give away or sock away money, you can't spend it. So in practice, the extent to which these tax deductions are available to you is a function of the amount of your income that is surplus for you. IOW, you have to be relatively wealthy to take advantage of these opportunities, and even if you do, your available cash goes down, not up, as a result.
Much as we might love Penn and Teller, the fact that a pair of comedians have determined on a TV show that malathion is perfectly safe is not something that reassures me that it is perfectly safe. What I'd like to see would be evidence. Bullshit is entertainment, not science, and they don't claim otherwise. That's not to say that it is completely invalid, but it's certainly not completely reliable.
The conclusion that you propose is implied by the problem you state actually isn't implied by it. There is no causal link between food availability and population growth. If there were, the U.S would have a higher population density than India.
Population growth will likely flatten out mid-century. Children who are starving in places like that are starving not because not enough food is being produced, but because they do not live in a democratic society where they get a say in how produced food is distributed. The question of conventional versus organic is completely irrelevant to their situation.
Crop yields per what? There are a lot of inputs: water, energy, pesticides, and land, for example. Depending on which factors you leave out, you will get very different answers.
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Oh no, we are by no means plain weirdos. Many of us are quite attractive.
Plus, Lamarckian evolution involves inheritance, whereas the author is talking about learned/conditioned behavior in individuals. The brain is plastic. It very definitely does adapt to do well whatever you do often.
In my experience, highway driving is great for contemplation. City driving not so much. YMMV... :)
Turnpikes, community road service days, stuff like that. Also, sales taxes, property taxes, etc. Property taxes, as I'm sure you're aware, kind of suck when you get older and can't earn anymore. Income taxes are actually a step up from that.
That's a non-sequitur. I haven't tried to prove anything about Panetta. I've merely demonstrated that an argument that was made to prove something about Panetta is based on an incorrect reason, and hence hasn't been shown to be true.
He said it is a national security threat. Use your logic, Luke.
No. World population is expected to plateau and start falling this century. Per capita energy consumption in the places where population is growing is so much less than per capita consumption in the U.S. that it's a wash. The big problem we have at the moment is that countries that are reaching our level of development but have higher populations from last century, but now have low population growth, are increasing their energy growth at alarming rates. Trying to rein in overpopulation will do nothing to address this problem.
If Panetta wanted more money for his department, he wouldn't have worked with the President and Congress to try to rein in military spending to the minimal extent he did. I would certainly like a Secretary of Defense who actually *cut* the defense budget instead of just decreasing the rate of increase, but claiming that he is trying to maximize his budget is simply counterfactual. If he were trying to maximize his budget, his behavior over the past year would have been very different.
Interestingly, his retraction was based on current science. He didn't say there is no global warming. He said "obviously, it's not going to kill us all next week, like I was afraid it would twenty years ago when I said it could kill us all in twenty years."
It's nice when people admit that their predictions of the future were wrong when the science shows that they were mistaken. You seem to think it's a bad thing, but it's not.
Also, BTW, "Alarmist in Chief?" In chief of what?
Mod parent up, please.
While your assumption is very simplifying, and thus attractive, I don't think it's correct. The reality is that politicians feel corrupt to us because they live in their own echo chamber, and they do believe a lot of things that are just plain stupid because of that. They listen to the wrong people, the people who have the loudest voices, and choose who to ally with based on what they think is right, or in some cases what they think is beneficial to them.
Saying that they are just looking out for themselves is oversimplifying. Saying that nothing they say is ever valid is incorrect. It's comforting either to think that politicians are basically good, and looking out for us, or basically evil, and trying to screw us. It's much harder to live in the real world, where they are much more complicated than that, and require our involvement if they are to serve us.
That story was bullshit. Of course, any negative rumor, once started, is forever after assumed to have been true.
I've never heard of any of the companies listed in the Wikipedia article you cite. And it only lists a few companies. If you made a similar list for Silicon Valley, it would fill several pages. The bell curve is a magical thing, so of course there are a few tech companies in any big city. But Las Vegas is several standard deviations out from Silicon Valley.
No, you don't even have a natural right to die. In the sense of enforceable rights, you have no rights at all, unless they are granted or unless you are able to exercise them without interference because nobody is trying to stop you from doing so. In the sense of natural rights, you have whatever natural rights you think you have, but the fact that you have them has no force.
The state doesn't have a natural right to your property. No-one has a natural right to your property, or to any property. To the extent that property ownership exists, it exists through common consent, not by nature. This is actually true of all rights that are enforceable. E.g., if you accept the notion of natural rights at all, it's hard to claim that two people have a natural right to marry, and two other people do not; if that were so, the right wouldn't be natural. The right that matters is the one granted by common consent, because you can actually exercise it. So it's important to understand the distinction between these two concepts, both of which can be referred to by the word "right."
So back to your point, the state doesn't have a natural right to your property, but you don't either. Taxation is simply the exchange you make with the rest of the people who might dispute your right to your property, that results in them agreeing not to dispute it.
No, sorry, this is just equivocating. There is no difference between a share and a house. The fact that you own your house (if you do!) is purely a social construct. If all the people who would like to live in your house decided to take it from you, there is nothing that you could do to stop them. The reason this doesn't happen is that (1) they couldn't all have it, and (2) they also want to own a house without using force to defend it.
Indeed, in a sense your ownership of a share is less subject to common agreement than your ownership of your house, because your ownership of your house really is an agreement between you and the rest of the population. Your ownership of a stock is an agreement between you and the next person to whom you try to sell it, and the company that issued it. As long as all these parties agree that you own the stock, you own the stock.
Yes, it is scary. The world is not a happy, comfortable place. Many people have in fact suffered exactly the woe you describe here. This has come as often at the hands of corporations as governments, but it can definitely come at the hands of governments. If you don't want this to happen, the last thing you should be doing is destabilizing a democracy.
Right, have you ever _been_ to Las Vegas? It's just about antithetical to the geek ethic. More to the point, it's _completely_ antithetical to the Apple aesthetic.
This is true in a commodity market with low margins. In Apple's market, recouping their costs is a non-problem. This is why they have, and are sitting on, a humongous cash surplus. They probably can't raise their prices—if they did, their sales would drop. They have chosen the price point they have because it is what the market will bear. So no, if their taxes went up, they would simply make less money. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is an open question, but the notion that an increase in taxes is always passed along to the customer, while it seems to make sense, is actually wrong.
You think it's theft because you think that property is a natural right. Property is no more a natural right than copyright. Property is a right that exists by consent of every person who does not own it, or else by force. If by consent, then consent can be withheld. If by force, then you initiated force, and you no longer hold the moral high ground. In neither case is taxation theft.
Yup, because Apple in no way benefits from access to the Silicon Valley job market. They could hire all those programmers in Bangalore instead, but they choose to support the Silicon Valley economy out of a sense of generosity and community spirit.
Charitable donations can be deducted from your net income, up to a certain percentage (7.5%?). Same thing with MSAs and 401ks. Plus, when you give away or sock away money, you can't spend it. So in practice, the extent to which these tax deductions are available to you is a function of the amount of your income that is surplus for you. IOW, you have to be relatively wealthy to take advantage of these opportunities, and even if you do, your available cash goes down, not up, as a result.
Much as we might love Penn and Teller, the fact that a pair of comedians have determined on a TV show that malathion is perfectly safe is not something that reassures me that it is perfectly safe. What I'd like to see would be evidence. Bullshit is entertainment, not science, and they don't claim otherwise. That's not to say that it is completely invalid, but it's certainly not completely reliable.
The conclusion that you propose is implied by the problem you state actually isn't implied by it. There is no causal link between food availability and population growth. If there were, the U.S would have a higher population density than India.
Population growth will likely flatten out mid-century. Children who are starving in places like that are starving not because not enough food is being produced, but because they do not live in a democratic society where they get a say in how produced food is distributed. The question of conventional versus organic is completely irrelevant to their situation.
Crop yields per what? There are a lot of inputs: water, energy, pesticides, and land, for example. Depending on which factors you leave out, you will get very different answers.