I've bought a couple of houses, and every time the lender had to show me the amortization rate of my loan. It's pretty crazy how much you pay in interest over the life of the loan, true. But if you're paying back 10x the loan amount, stop taking loans from the mob.
That's true, and I didn't mean to imply that the Declaration of Independence didn't have admiral ideals embedded in it. However, one is a legally binding document for the USA and the other is not. That is quite a large difference.
Job creation is something that human employers do, and that's the only source of jobs. There is no job fairy.
Neither do job creators just magically create these jobs. They see a market need and fill it. If they didn't, the next guy who tried the same thing and failed would have succeeded. That's the thing - job creators are necessary, but not any particular job creator*. The guys that say "raise my taxes and I'll take my job creator self overseas" are deluded by ego. There are a hundred guys right behind him happy to take over his market position and provide those exact same jobs. And one of them will succeed, because the market is still there.
*there is the occasional rare genius that creates his own market and is absolutely necessary. But not many.
I'll respect what they believe when I think it is moral and just and they demonstrate that they truly believe it through their actions. I don't care if they refrain from murder because of a self-consistent, logical moral framework based on the principle of minimizing harm, or if they refrain from murder because a sky fairy told them it is wrong. Either way, I'll respect their choice to refrain from murder and encourage them to continue doing so.
Limit what government can do so that it can't provide lavish benefits to some at the expense of others and that pretty much solves the problem.
So, pretty much get rid of government, then. As long as you allow taxation, government can provide exceptions to taxes that provide a huge benefit to those favored few. And without taxation, government can do nothing. Everything else is the same: any power to regulate includes the power to exempt from regulation, which provides a huge competitive advantage. Any power to enact laws includes the power to enact loopholes that exempt from those laws, etc.
No wars or economic disasters? Throw in a lack of blatant civil rights abuse and you might have just set a bar no administration has met since Harrison.
Which is actually a somewhat scary conclusion. Are the only alternatives in our political system truly the insanity we see out of the Rs or the incompetence we see out of the Ds? Seems there ought to be some way to set up a system that encourages a sane, competent governing body, but I've yet to see it. The somewhat rare occasions we see competent sanity, it tends to boil down to an individual or group of individuals accomplishing DESPITE the system.
I think the key is to distinguish between Joe down the street, who is a registered Republican, and the folks in the legislature who are Republican. It is pretty clear that the Republican Party, as represented by it's leadership and politicians, is very much more insistent on adherence to the party line than Democrats (as defined by the same metric). Or at least more capable of enforcing such - I suspect Dems would if they could. You are right that it is foolish to make the same statement about the individuals who have no more affiliation with either party than their voter registration, which is most people in the country.
Of course there are ass-hats in both parties, and on every side of any issue. The main difference is that the GOP is a tightly controlled party that asserts firm party discipline. And the party line is major asshattery. The Democratic Party (DP?) is much more splintered. While there is probably just as much asshattery, it is on a more individual basis because the Democratic Party leadership doesn't have nearly as much influence over individual votes. So they can't enforce their preferred brand of asshattery as the party line.
And yet you and Mr. Card both are expressing your thoughts via a public forum. If you think it is none of my business what you think, keep those thoughts to yourself. As for what is and is not an acceptable boycott, I don't see that I (or anyone else) has any obligation to provide you (or anyone else) my business. Maybe I don't want to shop there b/c I don't like your opinions on the works of Dolph Lundgren. Why shouldn't I base my purchasing decisions on whatever criteria I find relevant? You are welcome to find my decisions frivolous or despicable, but unacceptable to me implies you feel that my decision should, you know, not be accepted. Maybe you simply meant disapproved of?
by 'better place' you actually meant 'more conducive to your pet politics.' Smarmy arrogance like this is why many have problems with the left.
Because the Right thinks the world would be a worse place if their political beliefs were implemented? I don't get how simply believing the world would be a better place if it ran more aligned with how I think it should run is indicative of smarmy arrogance. What kind of psycho wants to see the world run in a way that he thinks makes it worse? What a bizarre, logically devoid justification for disagreement.
social contract theory is neither voluntary nor something clearly negotitated and agreed upon by two parties
Whenever I hear this argument against the social contract, it brings to mind a teenager complaining about doing his chores saying "I didn't ASK to be born!"
This. In school, it was my job to understand and learn as much as possible. It took me a while to realize that learning and understanding are nice in my job, but I'm getting paid to produce solutions. It's somewhat surprising how often I find I can produce a solution without the sort of thorough knowledge of the problem space I pursued in school.
I think it depends on whether you are characterizing Southerners as racist or The South. To my mind, one is a large swath of people that have a wide variety of opinions and beliefs. The other is a historical political/social culture that still has an influence on modern institutions in regions where it was most pervasive at its height. And that political/social culture undeniably has some roots that were planted in racism. Which makes it tricky to distinguish, in modern institutions, what occurs because of the normal stupidity that everywhere is subject to, and what occurs because of the influence of those historical roots.
On the bright side, I do love the irony of athiests letting themselves get drawn into a holy war...
I think this is where a lot of the dispute between atheism is/is not a religion comes from. Non-interested third parties see the rabid fringe of atheists behave as zealous in their proselytizing as any religious zealot, and naturally lump them together as having some agenda around god that they are pushing. When you behave just like the rabid religious zealots, the small detail that your agenda is "No god" rather than "My god" is no more than a technicality to me. The leopard might find his spots to be extremely different than the tiger's stripes, but I'm overwhelmingly more concerned with the similarities between their teeth and their claws.
It's not a slur. The X reference the Greek letter Chi, the first letter of the Greek word for Christ.
Pretty much everything else you said is quite ironic. If you want to have an intelligent discourse, best not to start by taking unnecessary offense at an imaginary slight. If people using perfectly acceptable language that just happens to not be your preferred nomenclature bothers you so much, you should probably reconsider your objectivity.
Ah, and your point is that non US citizens who are admittedly waging a war against all who do not accept their narrow creed
Or even those who are merely accused of such. Or those who are standing too near those are merely accused of such. I'd be all for drone attacks if I believed for an instant that our intelligence agencies were capable of correctly identifying the threats. I mean, who cares if murderers are in turn murdered? The entire problem with vigilantism is its terrible track record of actually getting the right person. And killing someone because you really really believe he is a bad guy, you just don't have any proof, is vigilantism, whether it is Joe down the street or the US president.
So you see, like socialists, and unlike either democrats or republicans, libertarians base their ideas, not on pragmatism, but on actual ideas about right and wrong. Politics are subservient to ethics.
Ah, but you are implicitly asserting that your ethics are superior to mine. What if we disagree on what the ideal good is? In a society of 300 million, that is going to be inevitable. We can't resort to what works best for most of the people most of the time, i.e. pragmatism, because you have rejected that as a valid basis for a social structure. You state that it is evil to force anyone to do anything they don't want to do, as though that is some hotly debated principle. It's not. Most people even accept the corollary, that it is also wrong to prevent anyone from doing that which they want, with the caveat that their actions have no negative impact on others. Which is again where we run into the problem of basing our society on ethics. Take 300 million definitions of harm, with no allowances made for pragmatism, then try to build a society that minimizes that harm. Good luck.
Yup. My job is currently quite different than where I started years ago, mostly because all the tasks I used to do are largely automated now. Funny thing is, the point was to save me time and effort - in reality, I now spend more time and effort at my job, just at different (sometimes more interesting) things. The curse of a job well done and all that.
I think people sometimes want conspiracies to be true b/c that is ironically a more optimistic view of the world. If evil and suffering can be laid to the feet of a small group of evil people, all that it takes to remove that evil and suffering is to somehow defeat those evil people. If most evil and suffering can be laid to the feet of human apathy, ignorance, greed and incompetence multiplied by billions of people, then you have a much more impossible task in trying to defeat it. Plus, in one scenario, you are simply a powerless pawn in the grips of evil. In the other, you are a minor actor that actively (if unknowingly) contributes to the evil.
Bullshit. There are plenty of people out there that do their jobs in a humane, conscientious manner. It's a common belief among psychopaths trying to justify their own shitty behavior that everyone else behaves the same way, but it simply isn't true. Most people would not and do not shit all over their fellow human beings in an effort to "get ahead".
Slashdot Mirror
I've bought a couple of houses, and every time the lender had to show me the amortization rate of my loan. It's pretty crazy how much you pay in interest over the life of the loan, true. But if you're paying back 10x the loan amount, stop taking loans from the mob.
That's true, and I didn't mean to imply that the Declaration of Independence didn't have admiral ideals embedded in it. However, one is a legally binding document for the USA and the other is not. That is quite a large difference.
Job creation is something that human employers do, and that's the only source of jobs. There is no job fairy.
Neither do job creators just magically create these jobs. They see a market need and fill it. If they didn't, the next guy who tried the same thing and failed would have succeeded. That's the thing - job creators are necessary, but not any particular job creator*. The guys that say "raise my taxes and I'll take my job creator self overseas" are deluded by ego. There are a hundred guys right behind him happy to take over his market position and provide those exact same jobs. And one of them will succeed, because the market is still there.
*there is the occasional rare genius that creates his own market and is absolutely necessary. But not many.
That's the Declaration of Independence. Nothing to do with the Constitution.
I'll respect what they believe when I think it is moral and just and they demonstrate that they truly believe it through their actions. I don't care if they refrain from murder because of a self-consistent, logical moral framework based on the principle of minimizing harm, or if they refrain from murder because a sky fairy told them it is wrong. Either way, I'll respect their choice to refrain from murder and encourage them to continue doing so.
Limit what government can do so that it can't provide lavish benefits to some at the expense of others and that pretty much solves the problem.
So, pretty much get rid of government, then. As long as you allow taxation, government can provide exceptions to taxes that provide a huge benefit to those favored few. And without taxation, government can do nothing. Everything else is the same: any power to regulate includes the power to exempt from regulation, which provides a huge competitive advantage. Any power to enact laws includes the power to enact loopholes that exempt from those laws, etc.
No wars or economic disasters? Throw in a lack of blatant civil rights abuse and you might have just set a bar no administration has met since Harrison.
Maybe it's your genteel manner of polite debate that has prompted the downmods? Or your charming responses to those who do make a counter point?
Which is actually a somewhat scary conclusion. Are the only alternatives in our political system truly the insanity we see out of the Rs or the incompetence we see out of the Ds? Seems there ought to be some way to set up a system that encourages a sane, competent governing body, but I've yet to see it. The somewhat rare occasions we see competent sanity, it tends to boil down to an individual or group of individuals accomplishing DESPITE the system.
I think the key is to distinguish between Joe down the street, who is a registered Republican, and the folks in the legislature who are Republican. It is pretty clear that the Republican Party, as represented by it's leadership and politicians, is very much more insistent on adherence to the party line than Democrats (as defined by the same metric). Or at least more capable of enforcing such - I suspect Dems would if they could. You are right that it is foolish to make the same statement about the individuals who have no more affiliation with either party than their voter registration, which is most people in the country.
Of course there are ass-hats in both parties, and on every side of any issue. The main difference is that the GOP is a tightly controlled party that asserts firm party discipline. And the party line is major asshattery. The Democratic Party (DP?) is much more splintered. While there is probably just as much asshattery, it is on a more individual basis because the Democratic Party leadership doesn't have nearly as much influence over individual votes. So they can't enforce their preferred brand of asshattery as the party line.
It's none of your business what I think
And yet you and Mr. Card both are expressing your thoughts via a public forum. If you think it is none of my business what you think, keep those thoughts to yourself. As for what is and is not an acceptable boycott, I don't see that I (or anyone else) has any obligation to provide you (or anyone else) my business. Maybe I don't want to shop there b/c I don't like your opinions on the works of Dolph Lundgren. Why shouldn't I base my purchasing decisions on whatever criteria I find relevant? You are welcome to find my decisions frivolous or despicable, but unacceptable to me implies you feel that my decision should, you know, not be accepted. Maybe you simply meant disapproved of?
There is a huge difference between boycotting someone for their views and for their actions. Only the latter is acceptable
What's unacceptable about boycotting someone because of their views?
by 'better place' you actually meant 'more conducive to your pet politics.' Smarmy arrogance like this is why many have problems with the left.
Because the Right thinks the world would be a worse place if their political beliefs were implemented? I don't get how simply believing the world would be a better place if it ran more aligned with how I think it should run is indicative of smarmy arrogance. What kind of psycho wants to see the world run in a way that he thinks makes it worse? What a bizarre, logically devoid justification for disagreement.
social contract theory is neither voluntary nor something clearly negotitated and agreed upon by two parties
Whenever I hear this argument against the social contract, it brings to mind a teenager complaining about doing his chores saying "I didn't ASK to be born!"
This. In school, it was my job to understand and learn as much as possible. It took me a while to realize that learning and understanding are nice in my job, but I'm getting paid to produce solutions. It's somewhat surprising how often I find I can produce a solution without the sort of thorough knowledge of the problem space I pursued in school.
I think it depends on whether you are characterizing Southerners as racist or The South. To my mind, one is a large swath of people that have a wide variety of opinions and beliefs. The other is a historical political/social culture that still has an influence on modern institutions in regions where it was most pervasive at its height. And that political/social culture undeniably has some roots that were planted in racism. Which makes it tricky to distinguish, in modern institutions, what occurs because of the normal stupidity that everywhere is subject to, and what occurs because of the influence of those historical roots.
On the bright side, I do love the irony of athiests letting themselves get drawn into a holy war...
I think this is where a lot of the dispute between atheism is/is not a religion comes from. Non-interested third parties see the rabid fringe of atheists behave as zealous in their proselytizing as any religious zealot, and naturally lump them together as having some agenda around god that they are pushing. When you behave just like the rabid religious zealots, the small detail that your agenda is "No god" rather than "My god" is no more than a technicality to me. The leopard might find his spots to be extremely different than the tiger's stripes, but I'm overwhelmingly more concerned with the similarities between their teeth and their claws.
It's not a slur. The X reference the Greek letter Chi, the first letter of the Greek word for Christ.
Pretty much everything else you said is quite ironic. If you want to have an intelligent discourse, best not to start by taking unnecessary offense at an imaginary slight. If people using perfectly acceptable language that just happens to not be your preferred nomenclature bothers you so much, you should probably reconsider your objectivity.
Ah, and your point is that non US citizens who are admittedly waging a war against all who do not accept their narrow creed
Or even those who are merely accused of such. Or those who are standing too near those are merely accused of such. I'd be all for drone attacks if I believed for an instant that our intelligence agencies were capable of correctly identifying the threats. I mean, who cares if murderers are in turn murdered? The entire problem with vigilantism is its terrible track record of actually getting the right person. And killing someone because you really really believe he is a bad guy, you just don't have any proof, is vigilantism, whether it is Joe down the street or the US president.
So you see, like socialists, and unlike either democrats or republicans, libertarians base their ideas, not on pragmatism, but on actual ideas about right and wrong. Politics are subservient to ethics.
Ah, but you are implicitly asserting that your ethics are superior to mine. What if we disagree on what the ideal good is? In a society of 300 million, that is going to be inevitable. We can't resort to what works best for most of the people most of the time, i.e. pragmatism, because you have rejected that as a valid basis for a social structure. You state that it is evil to force anyone to do anything they don't want to do, as though that is some hotly debated principle. It's not. Most people even accept the corollary, that it is also wrong to prevent anyone from doing that which they want, with the caveat that their actions have no negative impact on others. Which is again where we run into the problem of basing our society on ethics. Take 300 million definitions of harm, with no allowances made for pragmatism, then try to build a society that minimizes that harm. Good luck.
Yup. My job is currently quite different than where I started years ago, mostly because all the tasks I used to do are largely automated now. Funny thing is, the point was to save me time and effort - in reality, I now spend more time and effort at my job, just at different (sometimes more interesting) things. The curse of a job well done and all that.
I think people sometimes want conspiracies to be true b/c that is ironically a more optimistic view of the world. If evil and suffering can be laid to the feet of a small group of evil people, all that it takes to remove that evil and suffering is to somehow defeat those evil people. If most evil and suffering can be laid to the feet of human apathy, ignorance, greed and incompetence multiplied by billions of people, then you have a much more impossible task in trying to defeat it. Plus, in one scenario, you are simply a powerless pawn in the grips of evil. In the other, you are a minor actor that actively (if unknowingly) contributes to the evil.
Slashdot needs a +1 Burn mod....
Just like pretty much every other job.
Bullshit. There are plenty of people out there that do their jobs in a humane, conscientious manner. It's a common belief among psychopaths trying to justify their own shitty behavior that everyone else behaves the same way, but it simply isn't true. Most people would not and do not shit all over their fellow human beings in an effort to "get ahead".