I use one pot, literally a pot with oil in it and a thermometer. I would suggest trying to blanch at 260 or so, and not until they float, because at that point they're cooked. You want to get them slightly translucent then pull them out of the oil. Always do small batches, then allow to drain thoroughly (about 10 mins) on a wire rack (or paper towels if you don't have a rack). Then crank the oil to about 375 and fry until golden brown.
I guess what's going wrong for you is that you're blanching at too high a temp and for too long, really. If you're doing a lot of fries, have two pots, one at 265, one at 375, but make sure that your blanched fries do get to drain for about 10 mins.
In summary:
Blanch at 265 until slightly translucent
Drain for 10 mins
Fry at 375 until golden
Blanched properly, they won't soak up much if any oil at all. As long as there's moisture coming out at a decent rate (steam), it's hard for oil to get in. The idea is to blanch them until they're slightly tender, but not cooked all the way through. Then you drain them for 10-15 mins, which lets most of the surface oil drip off. Then you fry again at a high temp until golden-brown, probably only a few minutes since you blanched. If you blanch too long, you'll have soggy fries from the oil. Too little and they'll be undercooked.
The best recipe for fries I've found is actually in Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles cookbook. Check that out, most bookstores have it.
They're a lot like what we call "Steak Fries" here in the US. I generally prefer them to the thin fast-food kind, but done properly, they're all good.
Remember everyone, don't buy those frozen par-cooked ones. Cut 'em fresh, blanch them in 250-275 degree oil, drain, then fry at a higher temp (365 works for me). Oh yeah, and if you want 'em REAL good, fry them in some sort of animal fat. Otherwise use Peanut Oil and only that.
I think he attended the campus in orono (or bangor, I can't remember now, but I think one of those cities lacks a campus, so the answer is the one that DOES have one. it was the main campus, whichever it was).This was at least 5 years ago though. I went up to visit once, and it was really nice up there. Being a city kid, though, he just couldn't adjust. I'm a city kid transplanted to the suburbs for a lot of my childhood, so I did adjust well to school out in the boonies (James Madison Univ, in VA).
Plasma donation is limited to 2x a week, but they encourage you to do it that many times. In fact, the center near JMU would pay $20 on the first visit, $30 on the second one in the same week, to try and get you back in there. Blood plasma has a very short shelf life. I don't believe they can freeze it.
Tutoring is a sweet job, because a lot of it is no-brain work since you've been doing it for 4 years. I mean, you have to be good at explaining technical details to people that have no idea and generally don't care, but I happened to have developed that skill while doing tech support during high school at a local ISP. It's the same principle really. Our school listed your major next to your name on the list. If yours has the same facility, you'll beat out work study kids, just because people will likely want your help over that of some art major who happens to think he's ok at calc.
If you really want to reach out to the smaller market, see if your school offers courses like Nature of Mathematics or other basic math theory classes to non-majors, because you'll likely be the only tutor. If not that, then try statistics. That's a requirement for a lot of people, where at my school there were few to no tutors.
Just saw in your heading that you go to Maine. My cousin went there for a year before transferring.
Common college sickness is generally cheap to medicate, so you might get by. I mean, if you get mono, that's an office visit and prednisone if you swell up really bad (and that stuff is cheap out of pocket). But you never know. I had to see a doctor a few times because I was randomly losing feeling on one side of my face. It eventually turned out that my wisdom teeth were so badly impacted that the root was growing into the nerve canal. My dentist never saw it until the crown of the tooth shifted enough forward to show up in an x-ray. Up til then they thought I didn't have wisdom teeth.
Plasma donation's a good way to make some extra change in college though. That and tutoring. Our math dept kept a list of independent tutors that they'd give to freshmen and sophomores who needed help. The combination of very few tutors (I was the only one for certain courses) plus building up a good reputation meant that I could charge decent money ($15/hr or so, cash) and still get as much business as I felt like handling (maybe 4 hrs a week). I was an economics major, but I bet as a chem eng major, you have a whole lot of math skills. People taking those courses as graduation requirements WILL pay good money for your help.
You're extending one instance to a whole industry. The bottom line is that you need medical care, and unless you value a car more than your own life, you really can't argue finding more utility in automotive expense vs health care expense. In fact, your argument has nothing to do with the cost of healthcare, it has to do with you having a bad experience with a doctor.
Please, tell me why I should trust a medical system that costs more then the lease on my fucking BMW?
I stopped reading right at this line. You're an absolute idiot.
Why does healthcare cost more than the lease on your BMW? Because one is a matter of your HEALTH, while the other is a car (a make that is generally overpriced and underdesigned compared to others in its class, nonetheless). Do you feel you're entitled to cheap healthcare so you can afford an expensive car? Where exactly are your priorities? If I had to choose, I'd shift my expenditure to health over my possessions, and I'd consider myself a fairly materialistic person.
Seriously, ask yourself that question again. Why should healthcare cost more than a lease on your BMW? Because the former is the only thing you've got, while the latter is mass produced in Germany (that is, if you're not some yuppie in a 3-series, driving one just to say you've got a BMW).
Seriously, I'd be willing to give up my car and drive a civic, or move out of my apartment in a great location to live somewhere more modest in a second if it came down to being able to afford that or my health. I don't question the fact that healthcare costs more than my car, either, because its friggin' healthcare.
I'm a poor college student with no health insurance and not a lot of financial help. If I can find a solution to a problem that cuts the doctor out, it can be a wallet-saver.
How are you a college student w/o health insurance? At least in the US, most require it, and will offer basic coverage at a pretty low cost. It's even an eligible expense under your student loan funds.
Seriously, there are options out there for people on a budget. It may not cover prescriptions and will have high office copays, but you'll be covered if something major happens. Google it. I know total starving artists who have insurance this way, and if they can afford it, anyone can. I'm not even sure how they pay rent.
Oh, consider donating plasma. There's usually places around most colleges. Where I went to school, you could pull $50/week (two visits per week) for donating. $200/mo cash will probably cover the basic insurance though your university.
What are you studying, anyway? I hope something that will at least allow you to afford insurance after graduation, or make you employable to someone that will pay benefits.:)
I don't know if this was a serious post or not, but I had a similar experience. I was having chest pain and spells of dizziness, one so bad that I ended up at the ER. The dizziness was never explained, but was most likely caused by panic, when I thought the chest pain was me about to drop dead, and not a strain. I'm in my 20's as well, and statistically the pec strain is a lot more likely than a heart attack or similar. Problem was, I wasn't thinking about it that way. Now, I'm not saying I just *ignore* symptoms of things now, but I do tend to think, "Oh, yeah, thats right, it hurt after I took a nasty swing with a golf club yesterday."
Being an Italian-American and knowing a bit about the history of where I came from, I think it's safe to look at Europe as a place where actual fascist military aggressors held power. To even compare the current US administration to any of those is absurd, whether you're behind their actions or not. Your words make you sound a lot like the extreme left in America (are you American?), which might be the reason Bush was re-elected in the first place - there's no realistic platform on the left, just complaints.
Note that I've made no assertions on my political stance. It's probably best that you don't try and assume I'm a right wing nut here. I'm certainly not, nor am I a far-left crackpot either. I just happen to have had enough of the international criticism of America, mostly by nations far more socialist than ours. We don't have to let you in, ESPECIALLY if you admittedly don't even like us. The bottom line is that I'll support my country, even if I don't support all of its actions, because I've been given the opportunity at a pretty great life here. Even a dog doesn't shit where it sleeps.
US citizens have the right to demonstrate. You might have those rights in your country to do it there. It doesn't mean we have to embrace it or let you in. It's kinda like talking badly about your neighbor then inviting yourself over for the barbeque he's having the next weekend.
It compiles just fine under Win2k running Cygwin. Just gotta make sure to have g++ and ncurses installed. The ncurses binaries wouldn't install for me, and the build shell script wouldn't work, so for anyone running into that, just uzip the ncurses tarball in/usr/src, go in and do a make, then a make install. Cleared it up for me (this has nothing to do with your program, btw, it was Cygwin giving me problems).
Under default settings, I got to G and H, then everything started to go extinct. Then I started looking at the source and haven't run it again yet. Nice job!
Just to clarify my prior comments, I wasn't making conclusions about the rigor of this particular report. I was more attempting to illustrate good consulting vs bad, since the post I replied to made a comment along the lines that all economic consultants are crackpots. I realize that this was a press release and not the actual report in its entirety.
I figured the fact that it was released by an economic consulting firm was the first clue it was half-assed, but thanks for the additional information.
Haha, that gave me a pretty good laugh. Seriously, though, there are some very reputable economic consulting firms out there. (note: I don't work in economic consulting, or any consulting at all for that matter)
The difference between consulting in good-faith and that done poorly is reporting on the weakness of the model as its own section in a report, or at the very least, parenthetically. Nobody's model is perfect, and the flaws should be pointed out. Consultants should not pretend to be fortune tellers. My undergrad econometrics and consulting coursework all had an element of ethics in reporting rolled into it, but I guess that went out the window for the folks that published this report. I would call this paper more a PR ploy than anything else.
Let me put my "I have a business degree" spin on this (I do).
5-year projected statements are the norm for a consultant, especially one with an agenda. They might have a contract on the back burner with a telecom carrier to project the same project if they were to do it as a private project.
Second, they're making a lot of assumptions, such as internet service penetration at a given price point (estimating demand accurately is hard). Their net benefit figure probably comes from a weighted average of those on dialup and broadband, paying their respective rates currently.
Also, they're estimating cost on a project where the exact technology used probably hasn't even been determined (for instance, WiMax doesn't yet fully exist), and doesn't take into account existing infrastructure (poles, etc already exist in many places).
I agree that this is a half-assed article. I'm just trying to shed some light on what makes it a half-assed article, from the economic consulting point of view.
We are on our third defense handout. All I was saying is that its such a small portion of GDP that we would normally be able to afford it, if we didn't waste everywhere else. To abstract it, my point is that we should be able to throw $80B at ANY pressing need easily; there should always be at LEAST that much slack in the budget. The fact that we don't have that slack is a problem.
On the tax cuts, I think we should be able to afford those too, and its because we're wasting so much in every facet of government, that we can't. I'm more in favor of a tax cut than the government spending it for me, given the choice. Problem is, we're getting a tax cut AND the government's still spending it like it's theirs. To me the problem is getting rid of the excessive spending (wherever that may be, I'm keeping this abstract and not pointing fingers at any programs/war/etc), not the tax cut.
WRT to Ohio, whats happening is politics. Spending on education is akin to a long term investment, whereas tax subsidies for businesses is a quick fix. Keeping the businesses there in the short term means less jobs lost, which means reelection. Spending on education means losing some more jobs in the short run, until those educated can form a skilled labor force and attract business back. The key is a balance, so that you're not starving the same people you're educating, nor bribing business to stay year in and year out because you're not developing a workforce.
You can probably tell that I'm very fiscally conservative, probably libertarian, but the one place I do believe in putting the bulk of public effort is into education. You can privatize a lot of things, but fully privatizing education erases the Equality of Opportunity in our country. If there's any entitlement I believe everyone here starts off with, its that. If you blow it, its on you to recover, but the first opportunity (education) should be on all of us. Hey, who cares if my tax dollars can go to education? I can make all that money back by hiring some of those people whose education I helped pay for.
First, you need to read the entire thread, because my original statement was along the lines of wondering where real conservatism went. Reading between the lines, that means that I don't believe our current administration is conservative. Following that, I'm alluding to the fact that I don't agree with how we're appropriating GDP right now. That aside, though, give this a thought:
The current war is estimated at $85B, that seems to be what's being appropriated annually. For a $2.1 trillion economy, that's not exactly a whole lot. Compare that with 34% of GDP spent on "human resources," which includes all the poorly managed government handouts. We can afford the tax cuts and the war (and I'm taking no position here in support or against the war) if we could be more responsible in how we manage our handout programs. As far as I'm concerned, if we're going to spend a third of GDP, spend it wisely (education, not endless welfare).
That's an easy one: A real conservative stands for small government (in other words, reduced role of government)and fiscal responsibility (and leanness, going with reduced role of govt).
Now, the above two have some sweeping implications. There's no way I could cover it all, but generally reduced market regulation, few goods provided as public (basically only those necessary, like education, defense, conservation of lands). These are basically the things that a free market wouldn't otherwise take care of.
Unfortunately, our government's gotten way too big and has its hands in too many "public works" projects to be effective anymore. If our deficit spending isn't the best example, I'm not sure what is.
Meh, being conservation-minded and anti-poverty definitely doesn't hole someone into being a liberal, imho. But I guess thats how polarized things have gotten.
I happen to be a conservative who has nothing in common with most of the "conservatives" we have in politics. First, I believe in sensible conservation, not because we're going to destroy the Earth if we don't, but because the Earth will destroy us. Bottom line, the planet (and life) will survive with or without humans occupying it, so we've gotta make that choice. Second, poverty is a serious issue, but I believe the best way to help that situation domestically is through education, not handouts (unless that handout is education and the basics needed to survive long enough to get educated). Seems to me we just hand out too much, and we're not paying attention to what people do with the handouts. Having grown up near a major city and with some family-owned Section 8 properties, I have seen what really happens with your hard-earned money that gets redistributed. Poverty, to me, is justified for those individuals unwilling to work their way out of it.
Now, the socialist thing, yeah, that will make you a liberal:) My point, though, was that real conservatives DO have conservation and poverty high on their agendas. Problem is, we aren't electing any of these.
Slashdot Mirror
I use one pot, literally a pot with oil in it and a thermometer. I would suggest trying to blanch at 260 or so, and not until they float, because at that point they're cooked. You want to get them slightly translucent then pull them out of the oil. Always do small batches, then allow to drain thoroughly (about 10 mins) on a wire rack (or paper towels if you don't have a rack). Then crank the oil to about 375 and fry until golden brown.
I guess what's going wrong for you is that you're blanching at too high a temp and for too long, really. If you're doing a lot of fries, have two pots, one at 265, one at 375, but make sure that your blanched fries do get to drain for about 10 mins.
In summary:
Blanch at 265 until slightly translucent Drain for 10 mins Fry at 375 until golden
Blanched properly, they won't soak up much if any oil at all. As long as there's moisture coming out at a decent rate (steam), it's hard for oil to get in. The idea is to blanch them until they're slightly tender, but not cooked all the way through. Then you drain them for 10-15 mins, which lets most of the surface oil drip off. Then you fry again at a high temp until golden-brown, probably only a few minutes since you blanched. If you blanch too long, you'll have soggy fries from the oil. Too little and they'll be undercooked.
The best recipe for fries I've found is actually in Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles cookbook. Check that out, most bookstores have it.
They're a lot like what we call "Steak Fries" here in the US. I generally prefer them to the thin fast-food kind, but done properly, they're all good.
Remember everyone, don't buy those frozen par-cooked ones. Cut 'em fresh, blanch them in 250-275 degree oil, drain, then fry at a higher temp (365 works for me). Oh yeah, and if you want 'em REAL good, fry them in some sort of animal fat. Otherwise use Peanut Oil and only that.
And malt liquor goes quite well with them.
I think he attended the campus in orono (or bangor, I can't remember now, but I think one of those cities lacks a campus, so the answer is the one that DOES have one. it was the main campus, whichever it was).This was at least 5 years ago though. I went up to visit once, and it was really nice up there. Being a city kid, though, he just couldn't adjust. I'm a city kid transplanted to the suburbs for a lot of my childhood, so I did adjust well to school out in the boonies (James Madison Univ, in VA).
Plasma donation is limited to 2x a week, but they encourage you to do it that many times. In fact, the center near JMU would pay $20 on the first visit, $30 on the second one in the same week, to try and get you back in there. Blood plasma has a very short shelf life. I don't believe they can freeze it.
Tutoring is a sweet job, because a lot of it is no-brain work since you've been doing it for 4 years. I mean, you have to be good at explaining technical details to people that have no idea and generally don't care, but I happened to have developed that skill while doing tech support during high school at a local ISP. It's the same principle really. Our school listed your major next to your name on the list. If yours has the same facility, you'll beat out work study kids, just because people will likely want your help over that of some art major who happens to think he's ok at calc.
If you really want to reach out to the smaller market, see if your school offers courses like Nature of Mathematics or other basic math theory classes to non-majors, because you'll likely be the only tutor. If not that, then try statistics. That's a requirement for a lot of people, where at my school there were few to no tutors.
Just saw in your heading that you go to Maine. My cousin went there for a year before transferring.
Common college sickness is generally cheap to medicate, so you might get by. I mean, if you get mono, that's an office visit and prednisone if you swell up really bad (and that stuff is cheap out of pocket). But you never know. I had to see a doctor a few times because I was randomly losing feeling on one side of my face. It eventually turned out that my wisdom teeth were so badly impacted that the root was growing into the nerve canal. My dentist never saw it until the crown of the tooth shifted enough forward to show up in an x-ray. Up til then they thought I didn't have wisdom teeth.
Plasma donation's a good way to make some extra change in college though. That and tutoring. Our math dept kept a list of independent tutors that they'd give to freshmen and sophomores who needed help. The combination of very few tutors (I was the only one for certain courses) plus building up a good reputation meant that I could charge decent money ($15/hr or so, cash) and still get as much business as I felt like handling (maybe 4 hrs a week). I was an economics major, but I bet as a chem eng major, you have a whole lot of math skills. People taking those courses as graduation requirements WILL pay good money for your help.
You're extending one instance to a whole industry. The bottom line is that you need medical care, and unless you value a car more than your own life, you really can't argue finding more utility in automotive expense vs health care expense. In fact, your argument has nothing to do with the cost of healthcare, it has to do with you having a bad experience with a doctor.
Please, tell me why I should trust a medical system that costs more then the lease on my fucking BMW?
I stopped reading right at this line. You're an absolute idiot.
Why does healthcare cost more than the lease on your BMW? Because one is a matter of your HEALTH, while the other is a car (a make that is generally overpriced and underdesigned compared to others in its class, nonetheless). Do you feel you're entitled to cheap healthcare so you can afford an expensive car? Where exactly are your priorities? If I had to choose, I'd shift my expenditure to health over my possessions, and I'd consider myself a fairly materialistic person.
Seriously, ask yourself that question again. Why should healthcare cost more than a lease on your BMW? Because the former is the only thing you've got, while the latter is mass produced in Germany (that is, if you're not some yuppie in a 3-series, driving one just to say you've got a BMW).
Seriously, I'd be willing to give up my car and drive a civic, or move out of my apartment in a great location to live somewhere more modest in a second if it came down to being able to afford that or my health. I don't question the fact that healthcare costs more than my car, either, because its friggin' healthcare.
I thought Ayn Rand had passed away, but here you are posting on slashdot. Wow.
(this is not a flame. this post actually made my day a bit. i even have a copy of atlas shrugged in my top desk drawer here.)
I'm a poor college student with no health insurance and not a lot of financial help. If I can find a solution to a problem that cuts the doctor out, it can be a wallet-saver.
:)
How are you a college student w/o health insurance? At least in the US, most require it, and will offer basic coverage at a pretty low cost. It's even an eligible expense under your student loan funds.
Seriously, there are options out there for people on a budget. It may not cover prescriptions and will have high office copays, but you'll be covered if something major happens. Google it. I know total starving artists who have insurance this way, and if they can afford it, anyone can. I'm not even sure how they pay rent.
Oh, consider donating plasma. There's usually places around most colleges. Where I went to school, you could pull $50/week (two visits per week) for donating. $200/mo cash will probably cover the basic insurance though your university.
What are you studying, anyway? I hope something that will at least allow you to afford insurance after graduation, or make you employable to someone that will pay benefits.
I don't know if this was a serious post or not, but I had a similar experience. I was having chest pain and spells of dizziness, one so bad that I ended up at the ER. The dizziness was never explained, but was most likely caused by panic, when I thought the chest pain was me about to drop dead, and not a strain. I'm in my 20's as well, and statistically the pec strain is a lot more likely than a heart attack or similar. Problem was, I wasn't thinking about it that way. Now, I'm not saying I just *ignore* symptoms of things now, but I do tend to think, "Oh, yeah, thats right, it hurt after I took a nasty swing with a golf club yesterday."
Ha. I second that. I keep my ipod out because I flip songs a lot. I don't like listening on "random" and I'm too impulsive to make playlists.
Being an Italian-American and knowing a bit about the history of where I came from, I think it's safe to look at Europe as a place where actual fascist military aggressors held power. To even compare the current US administration to any of those is absurd, whether you're behind their actions or not. Your words make you sound a lot like the extreme left in America (are you American?), which might be the reason Bush was re-elected in the first place - there's no realistic platform on the left, just complaints.
Note that I've made no assertions on my political stance. It's probably best that you don't try and assume I'm a right wing nut here. I'm certainly not, nor am I a far-left crackpot either. I just happen to have had enough of the international criticism of America, mostly by nations far more socialist than ours. We don't have to let you in, ESPECIALLY if you admittedly don't even like us. The bottom line is that I'll support my country, even if I don't support all of its actions, because I've been given the opportunity at a pretty great life here. Even a dog doesn't shit where it sleeps.
4. This planet is real, whereas Tatooine is 100% pure fiction. Have you lost touch with reality, kid?
US citizens have the right to demonstrate. You might have those rights in your country to do it there. It doesn't mean we have to embrace it or let you in. It's kinda like talking badly about your neighbor then inviting yourself over for the barbeque he's having the next weekend.
It's even easier if you use Cygwin. I didn't have to touch a line of code.
It compiles just fine under Win2k running Cygwin. Just gotta make sure to have g++ and ncurses installed. The ncurses binaries wouldn't install for me, and the build shell script wouldn't work, so for anyone running into that, just uzip the ncurses tarball in /usr/src, go in and do a make, then a make install. Cleared it up for me (this has nothing to do with your program, btw, it was Cygwin giving me problems).
Under default settings, I got to G and H, then everything started to go extinct. Then I started looking at the source and haven't run it again yet. Nice job!
Reread my original post. I did suggest that these forecasts may've been influenced by some private firms that want to take on this project.
Just to clarify my prior comments, I wasn't making conclusions about the rigor of this particular report. I was more attempting to illustrate good consulting vs bad, since the post I replied to made a comment along the lines that all economic consultants are crackpots. I realize that this was a press release and not the actual report in its entirety.
I figured the fact that it was released by an economic consulting firm was the first clue it was half-assed, but thanks for the additional information.
Haha, that gave me a pretty good laugh. Seriously, though, there are some very reputable economic consulting firms out there. (note: I don't work in economic consulting, or any consulting at all for that matter)
The difference between consulting in good-faith and that done poorly is reporting on the weakness of the model as its own section in a report, or at the very least, parenthetically. Nobody's model is perfect, and the flaws should be pointed out. Consultants should not pretend to be fortune tellers. My undergrad econometrics and consulting coursework all had an element of ethics in reporting rolled into it, but I guess that went out the window for the folks that published this report. I would call this paper more a PR ploy than anything else.
Let me put my "I have a business degree" spin on this (I do).
5-year projected statements are the norm for a consultant, especially one with an agenda. They might have a contract on the back burner with a telecom carrier to project the same project if they were to do it as a private project.
Second, they're making a lot of assumptions, such as internet service penetration at a given price point (estimating demand accurately is hard). Their net benefit figure probably comes from a weighted average of those on dialup and broadband, paying their respective rates currently.
Also, they're estimating cost on a project where the exact technology used probably hasn't even been determined (for instance, WiMax doesn't yet fully exist), and doesn't take into account existing infrastructure (poles, etc already exist in many places).
I agree that this is a half-assed article. I'm just trying to shed some light on what makes it a half-assed article, from the economic consulting point of view.
I tend to think we're on the same page.
We are on our third defense handout. All I was saying is that its such a small portion of GDP that we would normally be able to afford it, if we didn't waste everywhere else. To abstract it, my point is that we should be able to throw $80B at ANY pressing need easily; there should always be at LEAST that much slack in the budget. The fact that we don't have that slack is a problem.
On the tax cuts, I think we should be able to afford those too, and its because we're wasting so much in every facet of government, that we can't. I'm more in favor of a tax cut than the government spending it for me, given the choice. Problem is, we're getting a tax cut AND the government's still spending it like it's theirs. To me the problem is getting rid of the excessive spending (wherever that may be, I'm keeping this abstract and not pointing fingers at any programs/war/etc), not the tax cut.
WRT to Ohio, whats happening is politics. Spending on education is akin to a long term investment, whereas tax subsidies for businesses is a quick fix. Keeping the businesses there in the short term means less jobs lost, which means reelection. Spending on education means losing some more jobs in the short run, until those educated can form a skilled labor force and attract business back. The key is a balance, so that you're not starving the same people you're educating, nor bribing business to stay year in and year out because you're not developing a workforce.
You can probably tell that I'm very fiscally conservative, probably libertarian, but the one place I do believe in putting the bulk of public effort is into education. You can privatize a lot of things, but fully privatizing education erases the Equality of Opportunity in our country. If there's any entitlement I believe everyone here starts off with, its that. If you blow it, its on you to recover, but the first opportunity (education) should be on all of us. Hey, who cares if my tax dollars can go to education? I can make all that money back by hiring some of those people whose education I helped pay for.
First, you need to read the entire thread, because my original statement was along the lines of wondering where real conservatism went. Reading between the lines, that means that I don't believe our current administration is conservative. Following that, I'm alluding to the fact that I don't agree with how we're appropriating GDP right now. That aside, though, give this a thought:
The current war is estimated at $85B, that seems to be what's being appropriated annually. For a $2.1 trillion economy, that's not exactly a whole lot. Compare that with 34% of GDP spent on "human resources," which includes all the poorly managed government handouts. We can afford the tax cuts and the war (and I'm taking no position here in support or against the war) if we could be more responsible in how we manage our handout programs. As far as I'm concerned, if we're going to spend a third of GDP, spend it wisely (education, not endless welfare).
That's an easy one: A real conservative stands for small government (in other words, reduced role of government)and fiscal responsibility (and leanness, going with reduced role of govt).
Now, the above two have some sweeping implications. There's no way I could cover it all, but generally reduced market regulation, few goods provided as public (basically only those necessary, like education, defense, conservation of lands). These are basically the things that a free market wouldn't otherwise take care of.
Unfortunately, our government's gotten way too big and has its hands in too many "public works" projects to be effective anymore. If our deficit spending isn't the best example, I'm not sure what is.
Meh, being conservation-minded and anti-poverty definitely doesn't hole someone into being a liberal, imho. But I guess thats how polarized things have gotten.
:) My point, though, was that real conservatives DO have conservation and poverty high on their agendas. Problem is, we aren't electing any of these.
I happen to be a conservative who has nothing in common with most of the "conservatives" we have in politics. First, I believe in sensible conservation, not because we're going to destroy the Earth if we don't, but because the Earth will destroy us. Bottom line, the planet (and life) will survive with or without humans occupying it, so we've gotta make that choice. Second, poverty is a serious issue, but I believe the best way to help that situation domestically is through education, not handouts (unless that handout is education and the basics needed to survive long enough to get educated). Seems to me we just hand out too much, and we're not paying attention to what people do with the handouts. Having grown up near a major city and with some family-owned Section 8 properties, I have seen what really happens with your hard-earned money that gets redistributed. Poverty, to me, is justified for those individuals unwilling to work their way out of it.
Now, the socialist thing, yeah, that will make you a liberal