We believe now there's a new parasitic fly evolved to prey on honeybees. Honeybees are well-studied; it's unlikely we'd have missed this parasite in the past 5000 years, so it must be relatively new. The parasite is a tiny fly which injects eggs into the back of the bee's neck (roughly), which hatch into 8-12 new parasites. The bees typically fly toward light when infested; however, if one fails to leave the hive in this way, you have a dozen new parasites infecting a dozen bees and, should more than one of those bees stay in the hive, it propagates out at an alarming rate: the damn things reproduce like fruit flies, so in a few short week they infest the entire hive, and all the bees leave and die--which is the pattern behavior of CCD.
The bees that don't die have been swapping genetics around every time their queens die. Suddenly, with 60% of all bees gone, there's a lot of nectar. They fill up their hives and start packing nectar into brood comb; thus they start swarming, sometimes 3-5 swarms or more in the beginning of the year. That means 3-5 new queens per hive, each mating with 8-15 drones from multiple other hives. These are the bees that didn't die.
They trade genetics like crazy. Such extreme selection pressure would lead to rapidly filling queens with genetics to resist the new parasite. With multiple mating, the queen could produce 2/3 of her workers fatally susceptible to parasites, and 1/3 not. If the hive weakens, they'll decide they don't like the queen, kill her, and raise a new one--possibly from one of the 1/3 of eggs immune to parasites, meaning stronger genetics. The queen makes drones as clones of herself, so such a new queen would both produce more immune bees (and likely not get killed by a colony angry at its poor survival rates) and spread such stronger genetics all over the place.
Give it time and they'll proliferate their resistance. They always do. It's really fucking hard to extinct honeybees; you have to get them *all* in one pass.
Monoculture is a dumb theory. Back 150 years ago, the Italians were the bee of choice. Today, people vary between Italians, Russians, Buckfast, Germans, Carnies... some have MH or VSH genes, and most are wild-mated with local bees to obtain genetic memory of the local climate (that is: bees with instinctive behaviors adapted for local survival are the ones flying around wild mating with your virgin queens).
We have more genetic diversity now than ever. Even with colonies vanishing, the bees swap genetics like crazy--every time a queen dies (every 7 years for a hive, roughly), and rapidly when they swarm due to massive reductions in the bee population (meaning lots of available nectar). It's actually hard to lose genetic traits in the honeybee population.
We've got "survivor" strains which survive CCD. Many of them have MH and VSH genes, although MH dilutes quickly. The gene pool has rapidly improved.
When honey bees die off, there's an excess of available nectar due to fewer pollinators. Hives fill with bees, who start packing brood comb with collected honey; in response, they raise a new queen. The old queen takes 1/3 of the bees and leaves, while the old hive grows a replacement. You now have two hives. A hive can swarm 3-5 times easily if conditions persist to drive swarm behavior.
Bees really don't go extinct very easily. They rapidly replace any lost colonies, rebounding the population in a few short months. It's always the survivors who rebound. In this latest round, we've started to suspect evolution of a new plague of parasitic flies, each of which infects one live bee and produces 8-12 offspring; hives which go unaffected or which resist the parasite will spread, immediately requiring broad mating--the virgin queen goes out to find a bunch of drones (not all from the same hive, either) to get busy with, then comes back laying eggs. Each time a hive collapses, its genetics have already been passed on many times, and its capacity for nectar consumption is left as surplus for another hive to expand and fill in. Even a new plague of parasitic flies can't extinct honey bees, and hardly manages to cut away at their genetic diversity.
Education *is* technology! We learn the best way to teach, and do that! Unfortunately, it's also politics, so we don't actually do that; we just handwave, pat ourselves on the back for having ideas, never implement most ideas, select the least-effective ones to implement so nothing changes, and then talk about how important education is.
At some point that is pretty much an irreducible problem
It's not. The truth is the whole concept of "learning styles" is basically like the pudding model of the atom: it's cute, but it's not real.
Take me for instance: I'm more of an auditory or kinesthetic learner than a visual learner. Why? Because when I hear things, I turn sounds into images, feelings, colors, movement, ideas--my brain encodes sound in an explosive sensory manner. I process all of these things visually: emotions, movement, and abstract ideas are visual things--some don't have image data, but are still visual (yes I know, that makes no sense). Kinesthetic learning, as well, gives me a huge stream of visual information to work with; I don't remember the feeling, the movements, the actions, but rather what I saw and what I examined at every step.
Our different learning styles are essentially based in how effectively we can attend different information, which can be taught. I can teach you to pay attention to sounds, to visualize things people say, to visualize what you read, and to pay attention to the visual and auditory cues present when carrying out an instructive task. That, in turn, moves the information through the efficient memory model of visual memory, which is really how all humans learn best.
Auditory and kinesthetic learners are really good at accessing the extreme amounts of data in these tasks and converting them to visual data; they are, however, all visual learners. We can easily train all students to learn in these ways, thus reducing the problem to simply maximizing the structure and amount of information provided, which itself is a simple problem narrowing us down to exactly one particular style of learning adjusted for the crude speed of the learner (of course, the speed is based on how much information they have: they may learn new things slowly, but they'll expand on well-learned ideas quickly, so even slow learners can catch up).
Everyone wants simple answers, and everyone wants a romantic dream. In education, this comes down to ignoring the complexities of the human mind--don't think for a minute that the simple explanation above means simple implementation--and instead going with goofy theories that only require a modicum of effort--"show pictures, sound, and then have them do hands-on, and you'll easily teach all types of learners!" You're gonna need more sweat and blood invested than that; you have to teach these kids to learn, first and foremost.
Of course there's more profit in providing cures to billions of people! 30,000 people with ALS and billions of wasted dollars successfullycuring them; or 2 million people with HIV, and the same billions of dollars spent curing HIV? Guess which one's more profitable? Hint: you spent $890 billion and cured 30,000 people in one scenario, and spent $890 billion and cured 2,000,000 people in the other.
People think only in terms of money when considering economics; they don't think about non-monetary return.
No, no, he has an important point. While we're at it, have you seen that new thing in America? Running water? This is literally the infrastructure to drown witches and babies you don't want!
Yeah I figured it'd involve a lot of heat to make these things. Liquid crystal growth works extremely well with the right carriers, but finding such carriers can be hard. AlO2 won't bond with much, and would probably bond strongly if it did.
Can you chemically grow them? Find a liquid or aqueous aluminum compound with lower bond strength than the crystal's bond strength (shouldn't be hard, unless your molecule looks like B12 and you want the cobalt). Grow enormous 14-foot crystal.
Yes. People don't use ink-jet printers for child pornography; obviously, they just want to know what computers the child pornography has been bittorrented through.
So it's ultra-hard like steel, ultra-light like aluminum, and ultra-clear like glass, while being a decent insulator of heat and electricity? Why aren't my windows made of this stuff?
Honestly, this whole stance is stupid. You can't control that kind of information in any meaningful way. It's like deciding only the Shepherds of the Righteous will have weapons: you're just creating an imbalance.
The more access dangerous criminals have to dangerous toys, the more society moves to control them. When society gives up hope on controlling their access to dangerous toys, it finds other ways to control criminals. In the most extreme, the criminals become so dangerous as to create a failing no-man's land; but they are still taken by infighting, until you have a small group of leaders controlling a large group of subjects. Essentially, the most-powerful group beats down the least-powerful for encroaching on their power; then everyone feels the sting of oppression, and, eventually, society rises up to crush them, learning (temporarily) from the experience to be more hostile to people who threaten society.
People have this idea that they can keep dangerous hacking technology out of the hands of parties known for human rights violations. Strange that they don't take an aggressive stance against such parties; they simply want to protect themselves, without really removing that threat. It's as if they want to hide their heads down and go largely unnoticed, not drawing the attention, and not giving them any new toys to get their adrenaline rushing over the prospect of rushing into town guns blazing to show off what they've just acquired.
Encryption wouldn't protect you here. The application can access the underlying data; the database can access its contents (to search on indexes); you have the access to ask for the decrypted content.
Excess labor is self-buffering. We have welfare systems for that (and I advocate a better one because it's time). Even in the appropriate economic conditions for full communism (which may never occur, even though we can define them easily), you would run out of shit to spend your money on (nothing you want or need), and so simply take shorter working hours (and give up part of your income), requiring the hiring of more employees, until everyone is working 10-15 hour weeks, or 1 hour work weeks, making a full salary: you don't "implement" communism; it happens as a natural result of capitalism having expanded wealth beyond what any human society can spend. The Soviets missed this, else they would have realized it won't work unless it's already working.
Every time you improve efficiency--new tools (specialized hand tools, power tools, machines, automated machines) or management techniques (artisan, assembly line, cellular manufacture, advancements in project management)--you reduce the human labor required to produce a unit product or service. Those chairs you sell for $60 involve $40 of human labor; you cut that in half, you sell them for $40, you make the same profit. That makes unemployment, while the rest of consumers have more money in their hands (the extra $20, which is why they come to you and not your ass-expensive competitor still selling for $60; you just got to take away his business for free).
That means new markets can open to target that $20 with a new good or service, or existing markets can expand to sell more of a much-desired good or service. The cost of selling that thing? Ultimately, human labor. Volume discounts, competition, and all other price (read: profit margin) suppression factors later, that $20 employs exactly the same number of laborers your prior efficiency improvements displaced (if your profit margins overall for the new products are exactly the same--your profits, in total, will be higher).
Welfare buffers this turn-over by supplying a means to maintain the labor force in the interim. Even without welfare, as long as they don't die out, we keep the unemployment numbers we need.
Better welfare retains wealth: a Citizen's Dividend would cost as much as our current system (I computed profit plus risk margins; the numbers sound low, but they're on the order of ridiculous shit that will make me richer than Warren Buffet in under 3 years if I become a landlord), and wouldn't inflate in a recession (everyone is getting the dividend; everyone making under $625k is coming out ahead), while keeping the poor and unemployed operating as economic drivers (the poor buy food and housing, which creates employment for other less-poor, who can buy other products... it trickles up).
Functional economic drivers keep money in people's hands, meaning any efficiency gains which damage the economy by creating too much unemployment (AUTOMATION) will benefit even the displaced worker (cheaper goods), helping the economy to more rapidly recover, create more opportunities to sell cheaper goods to consumers who spend less on current goods, creating more need for human labor (someone has to run the machines--that it takes 2 people instead of 20 means you can make those new goods *really* *cheap*, so your market is bigger: more people have that much money to spend; it also means you can make and sell 10 new goods instead of just the one), bringing employment back up. Keeping the consumers well-monetized without giving the unemployed a luxurious lifestyle and without raping the rich and the businesses to fund the poor accelerates this process; as well, reducing labor costs (e.g. by providing for means of living, thus you can repeal minimum wage) helps slow the initial damage (machines don't become as cheap as people quite so fast, and not all at once) and speed the recovery (cheaper labor means cheaper goods).
We don't need fake jobs; that just destroys wealth by increasing costs, decreasing the amount the consumer can spend, slowing market growths, increas
It does not add up; it multiplies. There is an important difference: multiplication is addition across a span of repetition.
$45 million out of $1 billion? Let's take that as a bench mark. It's 4.5%. Let's say that kind of waste is all across military discretionary spending only (not the mandatory military spending), since we know that's about $500 billion. People make a lot of noise about this number, since they can compare all discretionary spending and show the government throws some 80% of its discretionary spending at military, and then claim the US Government spends 80% of our tax money on military--sly manipulation of numbers.
What's 4.5% of $500 billion? $22.5 billion. We're still not into staggering numbers here. With 300 million Americans (more like 224 million adult taxpayers), that's some $75/year. Our welfare system--most of it, excluding Medicaid and Medicare, as well as higher education support (both of which you could argue are welfare, since they supply non-state services to people who can't afford them themselves)--cost $1.62 trillion in 2013. The welfare system, if cut back and redistributed as a Citizen's Dividend (essentially an expansion of social security to pay lifetime benefits instead of retirement benefits--if you save your lifetime benefits all your life, it comes out to about equal your retirement benefits now), would amount to $563 per person per month, distributed to all American adults.
We should absolutely look into fixing the DISA processes, making them more efficient by straightening out the bureaucracy. Unfortunately, bureaucrats like rules, regulations, processes, systems; they want new rules to justify their existence, not slimmed rules to expedite the process. Wealth is simple: people cost money, and every cost in everything you buy is people labor; cut half the people labor, you cut half your costs, you can drop your prices by that much, and you make the same amount of profit, leaving more money in consumer hands, opening new markets, and creating new profit opportunities while undercutting your competitors on price. Expedite the bureaucratic process and you need fewer clerks handling forms, since it takes less human time to shuffle those forms around, and thus you can fire the bureaucrats; bureaucrats have all kinds of explanations about checks and balances and regulation and the important function of having these forms pass constantly through people's hands to sign off on without really thinking about the impacts, much of which never actually occurs in practice.
The arguments are funny. "There should be more women on their team!" vs. "Of the top 12 competitors, 2 were women." Women engaged in math competition are obviously interested in math, and have demonstrated staggering academic achievement in math; when placed next to men who have also demonstrated staggering academic achievement in math, they suck.
Not really, no. He's just saying what I've been thinking (and saying, but since I'm not a reknown philosopher, few listen) for many years
He's saying what Stalin, Kim Jong-Il, and the Democrats have been saying for many years: we shouldn't put just *any* information out there to land in front of the populous; someone has to decide certain information--like advertisements or criticism of the Government--is toxic and should be kept from the fragile, easily-manipulated minds of the masses.
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily.
We believe now there's a new parasitic fly evolved to prey on honeybees. Honeybees are well-studied; it's unlikely we'd have missed this parasite in the past 5000 years, so it must be relatively new. The parasite is a tiny fly which injects eggs into the back of the bee's neck (roughly), which hatch into 8-12 new parasites. The bees typically fly toward light when infested; however, if one fails to leave the hive in this way, you have a dozen new parasites infecting a dozen bees and, should more than one of those bees stay in the hive, it propagates out at an alarming rate: the damn things reproduce like fruit flies, so in a few short week they infest the entire hive, and all the bees leave and die--which is the pattern behavior of CCD.
The bees that don't die have been swapping genetics around every time their queens die. Suddenly, with 60% of all bees gone, there's a lot of nectar. They fill up their hives and start packing nectar into brood comb; thus they start swarming, sometimes 3-5 swarms or more in the beginning of the year. That means 3-5 new queens per hive, each mating with 8-15 drones from multiple other hives. These are the bees that didn't die.
They trade genetics like crazy. Such extreme selection pressure would lead to rapidly filling queens with genetics to resist the new parasite. With multiple mating, the queen could produce 2/3 of her workers fatally susceptible to parasites, and 1/3 not. If the hive weakens, they'll decide they don't like the queen, kill her, and raise a new one--possibly from one of the 1/3 of eggs immune to parasites, meaning stronger genetics. The queen makes drones as clones of herself, so such a new queen would both produce more immune bees (and likely not get killed by a colony angry at its poor survival rates) and spread such stronger genetics all over the place.
Give it time and they'll proliferate their resistance. They always do. It's really fucking hard to extinct honeybees; you have to get them *all* in one pass.
Monoculture is a dumb theory. Back 150 years ago, the Italians were the bee of choice. Today, people vary between Italians, Russians, Buckfast, Germans, Carnies ... some have MH or VSH genes, and most are wild-mated with local bees to obtain genetic memory of the local climate (that is: bees with instinctive behaviors adapted for local survival are the ones flying around wild mating with your virgin queens).
We have more genetic diversity now than ever. Even with colonies vanishing, the bees swap genetics like crazy--every time a queen dies (every 7 years for a hive, roughly), and rapidly when they swarm due to massive reductions in the bee population (meaning lots of available nectar). It's actually hard to lose genetic traits in the honeybee population.
We've got "survivor" strains which survive CCD. Many of them have MH and VSH genes, although MH dilutes quickly. The gene pool has rapidly improved.
When honey bees die off, there's an excess of available nectar due to fewer pollinators. Hives fill with bees, who start packing brood comb with collected honey; in response, they raise a new queen. The old queen takes 1/3 of the bees and leaves, while the old hive grows a replacement. You now have two hives. A hive can swarm 3-5 times easily if conditions persist to drive swarm behavior.
Bees really don't go extinct very easily. They rapidly replace any lost colonies, rebounding the population in a few short months. It's always the survivors who rebound. In this latest round, we've started to suspect evolution of a new plague of parasitic flies, each of which infects one live bee and produces 8-12 offspring; hives which go unaffected or which resist the parasite will spread, immediately requiring broad mating--the virgin queen goes out to find a bunch of drones (not all from the same hive, either) to get busy with, then comes back laying eggs. Each time a hive collapses, its genetics have already been passed on many times, and its capacity for nectar consumption is left as surplus for another hive to expand and fill in. Even a new plague of parasitic flies can't extinct honey bees, and hardly manages to cut away at their genetic diversity.
That's all actually scientifically known, with some mean of 3 seconds improvement in times for swimmers when on marijuana versus not.
Meth. Not even BOOOOM!!!!!
Education *is* technology! We learn the best way to teach, and do that! Unfortunately, it's also politics, so we don't actually do that; we just handwave, pat ourselves on the back for having ideas, never implement most ideas, select the least-effective ones to implement so nothing changes, and then talk about how important education is.
At some point that is pretty much an irreducible problem
It's not. The truth is the whole concept of "learning styles" is basically like the pudding model of the atom: it's cute, but it's not real.
Take me for instance: I'm more of an auditory or kinesthetic learner than a visual learner. Why? Because when I hear things, I turn sounds into images, feelings, colors, movement, ideas--my brain encodes sound in an explosive sensory manner. I process all of these things visually: emotions, movement, and abstract ideas are visual things--some don't have image data, but are still visual (yes I know, that makes no sense). Kinesthetic learning, as well, gives me a huge stream of visual information to work with; I don't remember the feeling, the movements, the actions, but rather what I saw and what I examined at every step.
Our different learning styles are essentially based in how effectively we can attend different information, which can be taught. I can teach you to pay attention to sounds, to visualize things people say, to visualize what you read, and to pay attention to the visual and auditory cues present when carrying out an instructive task. That, in turn, moves the information through the efficient memory model of visual memory, which is really how all humans learn best.
Auditory and kinesthetic learners are really good at accessing the extreme amounts of data in these tasks and converting them to visual data; they are, however, all visual learners. We can easily train all students to learn in these ways, thus reducing the problem to simply maximizing the structure and amount of information provided, which itself is a simple problem narrowing us down to exactly one particular style of learning adjusted for the crude speed of the learner (of course, the speed is based on how much information they have: they may learn new things slowly, but they'll expand on well-learned ideas quickly, so even slow learners can catch up).
Everyone wants simple answers, and everyone wants a romantic dream. In education, this comes down to ignoring the complexities of the human mind--don't think for a minute that the simple explanation above means simple implementation--and instead going with goofy theories that only require a modicum of effort--"show pictures, sound, and then have them do hands-on, and you'll easily teach all types of learners!" You're gonna need more sweat and blood invested than that; you have to teach these kids to learn, first and foremost.
Of course there's more profit in providing cures to billions of people! 30,000 people with ALS and billions of wasted dollars successfullycuring them; or 2 million people with HIV, and the same billions of dollars spent curing HIV? Guess which one's more profitable? Hint: you spent $890 billion and cured 30,000 people in one scenario, and spent $890 billion and cured 2,000,000 people in the other.
People think only in terms of money when considering economics; they don't think about non-monetary return.
The hell did I just read?
No, no, he has an important point. While we're at it, have you seen that new thing in America? Running water? This is literally the infrastructure to drown witches and babies you don't want!
Yeah I figured it'd involve a lot of heat to make these things. Liquid crystal growth works extremely well with the right carriers, but finding such carriers can be hard. AlO2 won't bond with much, and would probably bond strongly if it did.
Can you chemically grow them? Find a liquid or aqueous aluminum compound with lower bond strength than the crystal's bond strength (shouldn't be hard, unless your molecule looks like B12 and you want the cobalt). Grow enormous 14-foot crystal.
Yes. People don't use ink-jet printers for child pornography; obviously, they just want to know what computers the child pornography has been bittorrented through.
What I really want is flexible glass that can dent when dropped, allowing me to just hammer it back flat like a dented piece of steel.
So it's ultra-hard like steel, ultra-light like aluminum, and ultra-clear like glass, while being a decent insulator of heat and electricity? Why aren't my windows made of this stuff?
+1 funny would bang your wife again
Honestly, this whole stance is stupid. You can't control that kind of information in any meaningful way. It's like deciding only the Shepherds of the Righteous will have weapons: you're just creating an imbalance.
The more access dangerous criminals have to dangerous toys, the more society moves to control them. When society gives up hope on controlling their access to dangerous toys, it finds other ways to control criminals. In the most extreme, the criminals become so dangerous as to create a failing no-man's land; but they are still taken by infighting, until you have a small group of leaders controlling a large group of subjects. Essentially, the most-powerful group beats down the least-powerful for encroaching on their power; then everyone feels the sting of oppression, and, eventually, society rises up to crush them, learning (temporarily) from the experience to be more hostile to people who threaten society.
People have this idea that they can keep dangerous hacking technology out of the hands of parties known for human rights violations. Strange that they don't take an aggressive stance against such parties; they simply want to protect themselves, without really removing that threat. It's as if they want to hide their heads down and go largely unnoticed, not drawing the attention, and not giving them any new toys to get their adrenaline rushing over the prospect of rushing into town guns blazing to show off what they've just acquired.
Encryption wouldn't protect you here. The application can access the underlying data; the database can access its contents (to search on indexes); you have the access to ask for the decrypted content.
Excess labor is self-buffering. We have welfare systems for that (and I advocate a better one because it's time). Even in the appropriate economic conditions for full communism (which may never occur, even though we can define them easily), you would run out of shit to spend your money on (nothing you want or need), and so simply take shorter working hours (and give up part of your income), requiring the hiring of more employees, until everyone is working 10-15 hour weeks, or 1 hour work weeks, making a full salary: you don't "implement" communism; it happens as a natural result of capitalism having expanded wealth beyond what any human society can spend. The Soviets missed this, else they would have realized it won't work unless it's already working.
Every time you improve efficiency--new tools (specialized hand tools, power tools, machines, automated machines) or management techniques (artisan, assembly line, cellular manufacture, advancements in project management)--you reduce the human labor required to produce a unit product or service. Those chairs you sell for $60 involve $40 of human labor; you cut that in half, you sell them for $40, you make the same profit. That makes unemployment, while the rest of consumers have more money in their hands (the extra $20, which is why they come to you and not your ass-expensive competitor still selling for $60; you just got to take away his business for free).
That means new markets can open to target that $20 with a new good or service, or existing markets can expand to sell more of a much-desired good or service. The cost of selling that thing? Ultimately, human labor. Volume discounts, competition, and all other price (read: profit margin) suppression factors later, that $20 employs exactly the same number of laborers your prior efficiency improvements displaced (if your profit margins overall for the new products are exactly the same--your profits, in total, will be higher).
Welfare buffers this turn-over by supplying a means to maintain the labor force in the interim. Even without welfare, as long as they don't die out, we keep the unemployment numbers we need.
Better welfare retains wealth: a Citizen's Dividend would cost as much as our current system (I computed profit plus risk margins; the numbers sound low, but they're on the order of ridiculous shit that will make me richer than Warren Buffet in under 3 years if I become a landlord), and wouldn't inflate in a recession (everyone is getting the dividend; everyone making under $625k is coming out ahead), while keeping the poor and unemployed operating as economic drivers (the poor buy food and housing, which creates employment for other less-poor, who can buy other products... it trickles up).
Functional economic drivers keep money in people's hands, meaning any efficiency gains which damage the economy by creating too much unemployment (AUTOMATION) will benefit even the displaced worker (cheaper goods), helping the economy to more rapidly recover, create more opportunities to sell cheaper goods to consumers who spend less on current goods, creating more need for human labor (someone has to run the machines--that it takes 2 people instead of 20 means you can make those new goods *really* *cheap*, so your market is bigger: more people have that much money to spend; it also means you can make and sell 10 new goods instead of just the one), bringing employment back up. Keeping the consumers well-monetized without giving the unemployed a luxurious lifestyle and without raping the rich and the businesses to fund the poor accelerates this process; as well, reducing labor costs (e.g. by providing for means of living, thus you can repeal minimum wage) helps slow the initial damage (machines don't become as cheap as people quite so fast, and not all at once) and speed the recovery (cheaper labor means cheaper goods).
We don't need fake jobs; that just destroys wealth by increasing costs, decreasing the amount the consumer can spend, slowing market growths, increas
It does not add up; it multiplies. There is an important difference: multiplication is addition across a span of repetition.
$45 million out of $1 billion? Let's take that as a bench mark. It's 4.5%. Let's say that kind of waste is all across military discretionary spending only (not the mandatory military spending), since we know that's about $500 billion. People make a lot of noise about this number, since they can compare all discretionary spending and show the government throws some 80% of its discretionary spending at military, and then claim the US Government spends 80% of our tax money on military--sly manipulation of numbers.
What's 4.5% of $500 billion? $22.5 billion. We're still not into staggering numbers here. With 300 million Americans (more like 224 million adult taxpayers), that's some $75/year. Our welfare system--most of it, excluding Medicaid and Medicare, as well as higher education support (both of which you could argue are welfare, since they supply non-state services to people who can't afford them themselves)--cost $1.62 trillion in 2013. The welfare system, if cut back and redistributed as a Citizen's Dividend (essentially an expansion of social security to pay lifetime benefits instead of retirement benefits--if you save your lifetime benefits all your life, it comes out to about equal your retirement benefits now), would amount to $563 per person per month, distributed to all American adults.
We should absolutely look into fixing the DISA processes, making them more efficient by straightening out the bureaucracy. Unfortunately, bureaucrats like rules, regulations, processes, systems; they want new rules to justify their existence, not slimmed rules to expedite the process. Wealth is simple: people cost money, and every cost in everything you buy is people labor; cut half the people labor, you cut half your costs, you can drop your prices by that much, and you make the same amount of profit, leaving more money in consumer hands, opening new markets, and creating new profit opportunities while undercutting your competitors on price. Expedite the bureaucratic process and you need fewer clerks handling forms, since it takes less human time to shuffle those forms around, and thus you can fire the bureaucrats; bureaucrats have all kinds of explanations about checks and balances and regulation and the important function of having these forms pass constantly through people's hands to sign off on without really thinking about the impacts, much of which never actually occurs in practice.
Perhaps so; but We, the Righteous, will hack them all and show our moral superiority!
What the hell is sexual bonding?
The arguments are funny. "There should be more women on their team!" vs. "Of the top 12 competitors, 2 were women." Women engaged in math competition are obviously interested in math, and have demonstrated staggering academic achievement in math; when placed next to men who have also demonstrated staggering academic achievement in math, they suck.
Men and women have fundamentally different brains.
Not really, no. He's just saying what I've been thinking (and saying, but since I'm not a reknown philosopher, few listen) for many years
He's saying what Stalin, Kim Jong-Il, and the Democrats have been saying for many years: we shouldn't put just *any* information out there to land in front of the populous; someone has to decide certain information--like advertisements or criticism of the Government--is toxic and should be kept from the fragile, easily-manipulated minds of the masses.