With a text input box you can specify any degree of precision you want.
Nobody knows what frequency and Q they want on a filter, or the speed of a limiter attack -- they just want to move the mouse left or right until it sounds right, they want to be able to go fast through the settings they know they don't want and zero in on the one they do, and generally they want to do it without their right hand leaving the mouse. The actual number is meaningless, and if a knob doesn't have a text box for entry, nine times out of ten I never miss it...
Note I started working in the late nineties and my mind has never been significantly poisoned by analogue recording work. Naturally computer people would think a text box is superior, because they're left-brained analytical nuts who compose music with a calculator, graph paper and a d20/sarcasm
Hi, I'm a film sound designer and re-recording mixer in my day job. Knobs and analog gauges are much easier for user population to visualize and interpret. You're dealing with people who have decades of training with analogue equipment -- also, IMHO knobs are a superior widget in many cases, because (if they're implemented properly) you can drag the mouse pointer further away from the knob to increase precision.
Pair programming claims master/apprentice inevitably leads to "watch the master" where the apprentice sits around and learns nothing.
Sounds like the master in that case is just saying "move over kid, let me do it" all the time. Naturally software development is an attractive field for control freaks -- people who came to computers specifically because computers follow precise instructions, need to be taught nothing, and require no patience or emotional consideration. Many other crafts require intensive teamwork, an ability to judge people and products subjectively, and a LOT of patience.
Traditionally, master-apprentice relationships also had very specific timelines and goals: work for me for five years, and the guild will certify you and then you can be a journeyman, with more pay and autonomy. That's not very amenable to the modern economy, where newbies are all perma-temps with no future in an organization, people on the line are terrified of training their cheaper, younger replacement, and rockstars are at liberty to jump ship (it's the only reliable way to get a raise!) and generally will care fuck-all about training and career development.
Master-apprentice is a system based on a huge amount of institutional trust: Will I have a job tomorrow? Will I advance if I do well? Will it pay for me to keep doing this job? Is it worth it for me to get better at this job? It's fashionable in recent times to see all of these questions as strictly individual issues that no one but the employee has to think about, and people behave accordingly.
Note that many public libraries are (were?) started with bequeaths of private collections. The Library of Congress was based on a gift of Thomas Jefferson's library, etc.
My father ran into this recently. He was redoing his will and he wants to leave all of his books to his Mason lodge, since they have a large reading room. However, he's been Kindling it up now for two or three years, and it occurred to him that he wasn't going to be able to pass these on, even though the books on the Kindle are public domain and of general interest.
Ironically, the stuff that is the most economical and profitable to put on a Kindle are public domain classics and books of foundational cultural interest, and putting them on a Kindle makes them impossible to share or disseminate.
"Legacy regulation" isn't what keeps FaceTime off AT&T's network; throttling and QOS disparities are as much a product of too few competitors in the market and barriers to entry erected by the participants.
I don't believe network neutrality is a Good Thing, because I recognize that most people's definition amounts to price fixing of bandwidth. But I do know the barriers to it are not primarily state-imposed in the US, and countries that have more liberalized Internet access regimes have them because of laws, not because of the absence of laws.
I guess my point, that by your standard, every politician on Earth is a Marxist, is basically conceded?
Governments interfering with large bankruptcies is quite common; George W. Bush was no Marxist, but he initiated TARP. If you wanna argue the merits of your approach do so, but your attempts to label your enemies are obnoxious and lacking in any kind of rational basis.
I'm sorry the world doesn't live up to your standards, but as the saying goes, you can either carpet the earth or wear shoes. (OTOH you might have a point: George Bernard Shaw, A FUCKING SOCIALIST, once said that all progress depended on the unreasonable man. So shine on you crazy diamond.)
On what basis do you claim that GM was "confiscated"? Did the state ever hold title on GM? It did make loans to GM, and it only tendered these loans with conditions, the sort of conditions any lender in such a situation might do, but it never appropriated or "nationalized" GM in the style of a popular socialist government (you're actually accusing him of socialism, not Marxism).
If you want to argue about the priority of labor contract claims over shareholders and bondholders, you need to take your argument up with three hundred years of bankruptcy law.
I'm not sure if, by your standard, there's ever been an American president who wasn't a Marxist. Your criteria, if the GM bankruptcy liquidation to New GM is your predicate, is indistinguishable from an FDIC bank reorganization. We could call it Marxism, but given that Obama is more right-wing than a French UMP deputy, more militaristic than a British Tory, and more free-marketeering than the median German libertarian, I'm not sure where that leaves the terminology.
Obama is a convinced Marxist basically, he is completely convinced that the free market capitalism is the root of all evil
I'm not sure if Obama has taken a position on the labor alienation, commodity fetishism or historical materialism, let alone the Hegelian dialectic as it applies to capital. He might have said something once about the labor theory of value being wrong, or about the relative moral value of M-C-M' transactions in a market, but I may be mistaken.
This word, "marxism," I do not think it means what you think it means.
For 50GB you may as well use regular S3 storage... at 12 cents/GB, that's $6/month and you have instant access to your data, no need to wait 3 to 5 hours to do a restore from Glacier storage (and they say "most jobs" can be retrieved in that timeframe, they didn't say if 5 hours is the upper bound).
For 50GB, given an average internet connection and a 4 hour retrieval delay, I expect that most of your total down time is going to be spent downloading -- you can't open a partially-downloaded truecrypt volume, the bigger the payload, the less latency becomes a factor. What you're doing is saving several dollars a month to make your restore process 5 hours longer.
I don't believe newborn babies are any different than a fetus: they're blank and have no individuality, and a one-day-old is pretty worthless and not really a human being but just a collection of cells.
Well. Infants eat, drink and breathe. An infant's mother can die but the infant will live. An infant's mother can throw herself in front of a car and the infant won't get injured, an infant's mother can drink a bottle of wine every day and the infant won't suffer any developmental disorder. A mother and a child in utero are not severable interests. They live and die together, they eat the same food and breathe the same air -- it's not possible to discuss the welfare of "the mother" as a separate concern from that of "the child." The characterization of the utilitarian perspective as "if an individual hasn't been seen yet" is a comical strawman. The whole point is there isn't a second individual in any meaningful sense, unless you define human nature down so far that it becomes nothing more than a chemical formula.
It's also pretty egregious to take the situation of the day-before-birth fetus and the day-after-birth infant as some kind of white line that a pro-choice advocate would strictly observe. There is this whole thing called "viability," and the extent to which it's possible for the government to police a doctor doing a surgery, versus a guy selling pills in the mail, versus a woman's vagina at the instant of fertilization.
Mixed in with this is the fact that about a third of the "individuals" ever fertilized have been lost to miscarriages, often without even the mother's knowledge, and it's routine for us to kill many, many "individuals" in the process of in vitro fertilization.
Of course most skeptical people doubt the argument is about defining the measure of a person, as much as it is about policing female autonomy and the belief that pregnancy is a just punishment for being slutty. The moralization is all just satisfying window dressing to accomplish concrete, specific social reforms.
The fraud problem comes from the world of credit cards and traditional banking which are hopelessly insecure.
You go too far. Insecure compared to what? Sites that maintain "accounts" of BTCs in wallets are routinely hacked, and employ many of the same identity validation procedures a human bank uses-- Mt. Gox won't remit human currency to you unless they have a photo ID on file, and their password recovery is comparable to any old dumb bank website. Keeping your bitcoins at home in a wallet or on paper is more secure, but then you can't use them with interbanking products, like a fancy Bitinstant international debit card.
No, these are great. It's August and Bitcoin stories are stoking demand, because for the second year in a row we're having an abnormal BTC price run-up (faltering lately, but still managing to hang in there).
I sold out a week ago and made 200% off coins I bought last November, completely on the theory that BTCs go scarce at the height of summer and suddenly stop moving when school starts.
It's complicated, the company was originally chartered by the Earl of Cumberland, who nowadays couldn't be considered an executive of the government, but in 1600 it's not as clear.
- The EIC undertook commissions and carried out instructions or orders on behalf of the King and parliament, without clear remuneration -- they were something quite different from a contractor.
- Along with carrying its own flag, it had the independent power to coin money, acquire territory without consultation of the British government, and it enforced criminal penalties over its territory.
- Pitt's India Act created a Board of Control whereby the Company's operations in India were jointly administered by the British government and the Company. The management of the Company and the Government was a revolving door and people on either side, private and public, could hold executive authority. The salaries of BOC members were paid by the Company, and the Governor-General of India (a government official, appointed by the king and parliament) was directly responsible for supervising of Company officials (private employees) in India.
- The Company and the government were economically entangled in unusual and opaque ways which nowadays would be considered not-arms-lenght or corrupt. The Privy council of the government contributed to bounties to help recover kidnapped EIC officers. Notably, when the India Office assumed the BEIC's operations in India, it did not purchase or compensate the Company; it's private army was similar absorbed by the British army. The cabinet portfolio of Secretary of State for India was created to replace the President of the Board of Control.
- The Company was subject to numerous private laws. The Company was abolished by an Act of Parliament, and shareholders were only compensated properly years later at a discount.
- The Company's records are archived by the UK government.
Comparisons with the British East India Company are tricky, mainly because the BEIC was a government corporation. The BEIC flew its own flag, maintained its own military, engaged in private warfare, and it's credit was backed tacitly by the British crown -- more like Fanny Mae, it Fanny Mae was a trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund that owned half the real estate on the Asian continent, and had an air force capable of starving a city.
Even Shell or Exxon aren't really comparable enterprises.
You're talking about something different from the OP.
I would first find fault with the designation of "designer" humans. Are in vitro fertilized embryos "designer"? After all, these are people which shouldn't exist, their parents are empirically incapable of conceiving children, an intervention has occurred (which kills several fertilized embryos in the process) in order to conceive a child, because of the parents' belief that they are incomplete without children -- it is their wish, their sensibility, their purchase, and not their right or their nature. The child is a plan, a consumer product, alas, only available to the relatively wealthy.
Further, places much less well off than rich US medical clinics already offer "designer" humans, in China and India it's common for mothers to simply cull their female zygotes, they abort them. This is plainly an evil thing, it's bad practically and bad morally. But, how do you prevent it? What steps are you willing to go to to prevent the abortion of "undesirable" zygotes? You can ban abortion, but that only bans it for people that can't buy a plane ticket or have access to "discrete" services, and a lot of people believe they have a right to have abortions. The government could examine all expectant mothers and license abortions, forbidding ones that meet their politically-correct standard of "by design." Of course, that designation is up for debate, and something like malaria susceptibility might or might not be defect dependent on local conditions, the "luck" of such a trait given their parents genotype.
And then, we're not just talking about giving people glowing ears or racing stripes, we're also talking about making sure they'll never contract HIV, or the plague, or congenital blindness. What do you tell someone who's born with an abnormality? "Sorry, but our advanced moral consciousness demands that you be born blind, because it would be a violation of human dignity for you not to be"? Why are genotypic changes such a big deal, but phenotypic modifications, like vaccines, not a "violation of human dignity"? Is it a violation of human dignity that I'm immune to measles, because I grew up rich and white in the western world, while a billion Africans are not?
Non-suicidal. The fact is we don't know what Hemmingway would have done without alcohol (let alone alcoholism, which is a different question).
It would be egregious however to deny someone treatment for alcoholism on the basis that it will hurt their literary output. We can't simply deny people remedies because their diseases are so "picturesque," We might as well deny antibiotics to lepers, on account of the fact that their disease reminds us of God's wrath.
Ryan's do though. With Ryan as the VP a final plan would be much more grounded in logic.
With Ryan as the VP he will no longer be able to vote on his own bill:/ With him out of the House, negotiating the bill falls on John Boehner and Eric Cantor. If I want the Ryan bill, my most logical course of action is to vote for a Republican House rep, and a Tea Partier in the primary.
As it is, Romney has already started undoing the Ryan budget's Medicare cuts, because he's running for president.
The President should have enough clout to bludgeon Congress into passing a budget, or at least present a budget that even a single member can agree is somehtig worth voting for.
That's the most unconstitutional thing I've ever heard. President's don't "ram" budgets through; don't you remember the Bush administration, when the most pork-laden, deficit-spending omnibuses were drafted and signed without even token opposition from the White House?
But ignore our own blithering incompetence in governing!
I'm not telling anyone to vote for anybody, someone made an argument that had no basis in fact, and I corrected it.
Meanwhile, "blithering incompetence" compared to what? Was the Iraq War "competent"? Was holding House voting open for three hours in order to strong-arm reps into voting for Medicare Part D "competent"? Was the Senate floor debate on Terri Schaivo's life support "competent"? Was flat employment and a lost decade of stagnant wages "competent"? Was the response to Hurricane Katrina "competent"?
I don't know if you're defending Republicans, but I don't understand the "competence" criterion. If running government was about "competence" and "logic" we wouldn't need to hold election. The whole point is that rational, very smart people disagree, and that people, Republican and Democrat, are perfectly happy to live with unsolved problem X if it gets them objective Y. What you call incompetence I call priorities.
So far Romney (tempered as he will be by Ryan)
How does a vice president "temper" a president? VPs have no institutional authority -- at least Cheney had a Rolodex, a long memory and a history with the Bush family. Did Quayle temper Bush I? Did Gore temper Clinton? Does Joe Biden temper Obama?
Your complete interpretation of American politics is ahistorical and groundless, and seems to go no further than shallow sloganeering. It is bullshit. Which is not to say you're voting for the wrong guy, but good luck convincing anyone else.
Our system cultivates lying, it attracts liars, pays them a good salary and absolves them when they win.
However,
This does not mean they are bad people, or that they are unqualified,
Or that they won't do the right thing by you or anyone else,
Or that they don't believe in things (for better or worse).
And it's not personal.
The system is set up in such a way that we're supposed to choose the right person for the job, and he goes off and does it for 2-4-6 years; it's specifically designed to prevent you from voting for particular ideologies or laws, and it overtly monkeys with anybody who tries to keep specific promises. (These were all intentional choices on the part of the designers.)
There's no question that you can teach a religion as a matter of humanities, or of comparative religion.
However, it's not clear how in your science class where you teach the different creation stories, how you're going to grade someone that points out the Earth is more than 5000 years old. Are they being intolerant? Facts must be either true or false, they're objective; they cannot be true for me and false for you. Science is based on the idea that there is an external world which rational people cannot deny. People might disagree with particular evidence, and particular conclusions, and certain ideas in our culture might be very powerful and afforded respect, like Christianity. But you're going a step farther, and affirming that facts can be whatever people vote them to be -- your panel of judges might as well proclaim Pi is 22/7.
And here we see the danger of such things, because we know from evidence that Pi is not 22/7, and now it becomes the state's responsibility to correct those who promulgate "frauds," such as Darwin, or the irrationality of Pi. Legislation of objective facts is inherently tyrannical.
You can argue legal technicalities all you want, but at a fundamental level, democracy is all about giving the people (or the majority of them) what they want most of the time.
This is a tired point, but the United States is a Presidential Republic, it is not a Democracy, and its constitutional order embeds a deeply elitist, anti-democratic bias by design.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody knows what frequency and Q they want on a filter, or the speed of a limiter attack -- they just want to move the mouse left or right until it sounds right, they want to be able to go fast through the settings they know they don't want and zero in on the one they do, and generally they want to do it without their right hand leaving the mouse. The actual number is meaningless, and if a knob doesn't have a text box for entry, nine times out of ten I never miss it...
Note I started working in the late nineties and my mind has never been significantly poisoned by analogue recording work. Naturally computer people would think a text box is superior, because they're left-brained analytical nuts who compose music with a calculator, graph paper and a d20 /sarcasm
Hi, I'm a film sound designer and re-recording mixer in my day job. Knobs and analog gauges are much easier for user population to visualize and interpret. You're dealing with people who have decades of training with analogue equipment -- also, IMHO knobs are a superior widget in many cases, because (if they're implemented properly) you can drag the mouse pointer further away from the knob to increase precision.
Sounds like the master in that case is just saying "move over kid, let me do it" all the time. Naturally software development is an attractive field for control freaks -- people who came to computers specifically because computers follow precise instructions, need to be taught nothing, and require no patience or emotional consideration. Many other crafts require intensive teamwork, an ability to judge people and products subjectively, and a LOT of patience.
Traditionally, master-apprentice relationships also had very specific timelines and goals: work for me for five years, and the guild will certify you and then you can be a journeyman, with more pay and autonomy. That's not very amenable to the modern economy, where newbies are all perma-temps with no future in an organization, people on the line are terrified of training their cheaper, younger replacement, and rockstars are at liberty to jump ship (it's the only reliable way to get a raise!) and generally will care fuck-all about training and career development.
Master-apprentice is a system based on a huge amount of institutional trust: Will I have a job tomorrow? Will I advance if I do well? Will it pay for me to keep doing this job? Is it worth it for me to get better at this job? It's fashionable in recent times to see all of these questions as strictly individual issues that no one but the employee has to think about, and people behave accordingly.
Who needs libraries when you can pay Time Warner $50 a month to read public domain books FOR FREE! :)
Note that many public libraries are (were?) started with bequeaths of private collections. The Library of Congress was based on a gift of Thomas Jefferson's library, etc.
My father ran into this recently. He was redoing his will and he wants to leave all of his books to his Mason lodge, since they have a large reading room. However, he's been Kindling it up now for two or three years, and it occurred to him that he wasn't going to be able to pass these on, even though the books on the Kindle are public domain and of general interest.
Ironically, the stuff that is the most economical and profitable to put on a Kindle are public domain classics and books of foundational cultural interest, and putting them on a Kindle makes them impossible to share or disseminate.
"Legacy regulation" isn't what keeps FaceTime off AT&T's network; throttling and QOS disparities are as much a product of too few competitors in the market and barriers to entry erected by the participants.
I don't believe network neutrality is a Good Thing, because I recognize that most people's definition amounts to price fixing of bandwidth. But I do know the barriers to it are not primarily state-imposed in the US, and countries that have more liberalized Internet access regimes have them because of laws, not because of the absence of laws.
I guess my point, that by your standard, every politician on Earth is a Marxist, is basically conceded?
Governments interfering with large bankruptcies is quite common; George W. Bush was no Marxist, but he initiated TARP. If you wanna argue the merits of your approach do so, but your attempts to label your enemies are obnoxious and lacking in any kind of rational basis.
I'm sorry the world doesn't live up to your standards, but as the saying goes, you can either carpet the earth or wear shoes. (OTOH you might have a point: George Bernard Shaw, A FUCKING SOCIALIST, once said that all progress depended on the unreasonable man. So shine on you crazy diamond.)
On what basis do you claim that GM was "confiscated"? Did the state ever hold title on GM? It did make loans to GM, and it only tendered these loans with conditions, the sort of conditions any lender in such a situation might do, but it never appropriated or "nationalized" GM in the style of a popular socialist government (you're actually accusing him of socialism, not Marxism).
If you want to argue about the priority of labor contract claims over shareholders and bondholders, you need to take your argument up with three hundred years of bankruptcy law.
I'm not sure if, by your standard, there's ever been an American president who wasn't a Marxist. Your criteria, if the GM bankruptcy liquidation to New GM is your predicate, is indistinguishable from an FDIC bank reorganization. We could call it Marxism, but given that Obama is more right-wing than a French UMP deputy, more militaristic than a British Tory, and more free-marketeering than the median German libertarian, I'm not sure where that leaves the terminology.
I'm not sure if Obama has taken a position on the labor alienation, commodity fetishism or historical materialism, let alone the Hegelian dialectic as it applies to capital. He might have said something once about the labor theory of value being wrong, or about the relative moral value of M-C-M' transactions in a market, but I may be mistaken.
This word, "marxism," I do not think it means what you think it means.
These apps don't work unless the iDevice is unlocked when you plug it in, or you have the backup password.
For 50GB, given an average internet connection and a 4 hour retrieval delay, I expect that most of your total down time is going to be spent downloading -- you can't open a partially-downloaded truecrypt volume, the bigger the payload, the less latency becomes a factor. What you're doing is saving several dollars a month to make your restore process 5 hours longer.
Well. Infants eat, drink and breathe. An infant's mother can die but the infant will live. An infant's mother can throw herself in front of a car and the infant won't get injured, an infant's mother can drink a bottle of wine every day and the infant won't suffer any developmental disorder. A mother and a child in utero are not severable interests. They live and die together, they eat the same food and breathe the same air -- it's not possible to discuss the welfare of "the mother" as a separate concern from that of "the child." The characterization of the utilitarian perspective as "if an individual hasn't been seen yet" is a comical strawman. The whole point is there isn't a second individual in any meaningful sense, unless you define human nature down so far that it becomes nothing more than a chemical formula.
It's also pretty egregious to take the situation of the day-before-birth fetus and the day-after-birth infant as some kind of white line that a pro-choice advocate would strictly observe. There is this whole thing called "viability," and the extent to which it's possible for the government to police a doctor doing a surgery, versus a guy selling pills in the mail, versus a woman's vagina at the instant of fertilization.
Mixed in with this is the fact that about a third of the "individuals" ever fertilized have been lost to miscarriages, often without even the mother's knowledge, and it's routine for us to kill many, many "individuals" in the process of in vitro fertilization.
Of course most skeptical people doubt the argument is about defining the measure of a person, as much as it is about policing female autonomy and the belief that pregnancy is a just punishment for being slutty. The moralization is all just satisfying window dressing to accomplish concrete, specific social reforms.
You go too far. Insecure compared to what? Sites that maintain "accounts" of BTCs in wallets are routinely hacked, and employ many of the same identity validation procedures a human bank uses-- Mt. Gox won't remit human currency to you unless they have a photo ID on file, and their password recovery is comparable to any old dumb bank website. Keeping your bitcoins at home in a wallet or on paper is more secure, but then you can't use them with interbanking products, like a fancy Bitinstant international debit card.
You can't buy a car with a regular debit card, and you're dinging them for not supporting it with a Bitcoin debit card?
No, these are great. It's August and Bitcoin stories are stoking demand, because for the second year in a row we're having an abnormal BTC price run-up (faltering lately, but still managing to hang in there).
I sold out a week ago and made 200% off coins I bought last November, completely on the theory that BTCs go scarce at the height of summer and suddenly stop moving when school starts.
It's complicated, the company was originally chartered by the Earl of Cumberland, who nowadays couldn't be considered an executive of the government, but in 1600 it's not as clear.
- The EIC undertook commissions and carried out instructions or orders on behalf of the King and parliament, without clear remuneration -- they were something quite different from a contractor.
- Along with carrying its own flag, it had the independent power to coin money, acquire territory without consultation of the British government, and it enforced criminal penalties over its territory.
- Pitt's India Act created a Board of Control whereby the Company's operations in India were jointly administered by the British government and the Company. The management of the Company and the Government was a revolving door and people on either side, private and public, could hold executive authority. The salaries of BOC members were paid by the Company, and the Governor-General of India (a government official, appointed by the king and parliament) was directly responsible for supervising of Company officials (private employees) in India.
- The Company and the government were economically entangled in unusual and opaque ways which nowadays would be considered not-arms-lenght or corrupt. The Privy council of the government contributed to bounties to help recover kidnapped EIC officers. Notably, when the India Office assumed the BEIC's operations in India, it did not purchase or compensate the Company; it's private army was similar absorbed by the British army. The cabinet portfolio of Secretary of State for India was created to replace the President of the Board of Control.
- The Company was subject to numerous private laws. The Company was abolished by an Act of Parliament, and shareholders were only compensated properly years later at a discount.
- The Company's records are archived by the UK government.
Comparisons with the British East India Company are tricky, mainly because the BEIC was a government corporation. The BEIC flew its own flag, maintained its own military, engaged in private warfare, and it's credit was backed tacitly by the British crown -- more like Fanny Mae, it Fanny Mae was a trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund that owned half the real estate on the Asian continent, and had an air force capable of starving a city.
Even Shell or Exxon aren't really comparable enterprises.
You aren't a "you" until you're born -- it's impossible to argue from the comparative state of not existing.
All stopped clocks show the correct time when Julian Assange is in the room.
If you think destroying fetuses for any purpose is wrong, that means that you must oppose in vitro fertilization.
You're talking about something different from the OP.
I would first find fault with the designation of "designer" humans. Are in vitro fertilized embryos "designer"? After all, these are people which shouldn't exist, their parents are empirically incapable of conceiving children, an intervention has occurred (which kills several fertilized embryos in the process) in order to conceive a child, because of the parents' belief that they are incomplete without children -- it is their wish, their sensibility, their purchase, and not their right or their nature. The child is a plan, a consumer product, alas, only available to the relatively wealthy.
Further, places much less well off than rich US medical clinics already offer "designer" humans, in China and India it's common for mothers to simply cull their female zygotes, they abort them. This is plainly an evil thing, it's bad practically and bad morally. But, how do you prevent it? What steps are you willing to go to to prevent the abortion of "undesirable" zygotes? You can ban abortion, but that only bans it for people that can't buy a plane ticket or have access to "discrete" services, and a lot of people believe they have a right to have abortions. The government could examine all expectant mothers and license abortions, forbidding ones that meet their politically-correct standard of "by design." Of course, that designation is up for debate, and something like malaria susceptibility might or might not be defect dependent on local conditions, the "luck" of such a trait given their parents genotype.
And then, we're not just talking about giving people glowing ears or racing stripes, we're also talking about making sure they'll never contract HIV, or the plague, or congenital blindness. What do you tell someone who's born with an abnormality? "Sorry, but our advanced moral consciousness demands that you be born blind, because it would be a violation of human dignity for you not to be"? Why are genotypic changes such a big deal, but phenotypic modifications, like vaccines, not a "violation of human dignity"? Is it a violation of human dignity that I'm immune to measles, because I grew up rich and white in the western world, while a billion Africans are not?
Non-suicidal. The fact is we don't know what Hemmingway would have done without alcohol (let alone alcoholism, which is a different question).
It would be egregious however to deny someone treatment for alcoholism on the basis that it will hurt their literary output. We can't simply deny people remedies because their diseases are so "picturesque," We might as well deny antibiotics to lepers, on account of the fact that their disease reminds us of God's wrath.
With Ryan as the VP he will no longer be able to vote on his own bill :/ With him out of the House, negotiating the bill falls on John Boehner and Eric Cantor.
If I want the Ryan bill, my most logical course of action is to vote for a Republican House rep, and a Tea Partier in the primary.
As it is, Romney has already started undoing the Ryan budget's Medicare cuts, because he's running for president.
That's the most unconstitutional thing I've ever heard. President's don't "ram" budgets through; don't you remember the Bush administration, when the most pork-laden, deficit-spending omnibuses were drafted and signed without even token opposition from the White House?
I'm not telling anyone to vote for anybody, someone made an argument that had no basis in fact, and I corrected it.
Meanwhile, "blithering incompetence" compared to what? Was the Iraq War "competent"? Was holding House voting open for three hours in order to strong-arm reps into voting for Medicare Part D "competent"? Was the Senate floor debate on Terri Schaivo's life support "competent"? Was flat employment and a lost decade of stagnant wages "competent"? Was the response to Hurricane Katrina "competent"?
I don't know if you're defending Republicans, but I don't understand the "competence" criterion. If running government was about "competence" and "logic" we wouldn't need to hold election. The whole point is that rational, very smart people disagree, and that people, Republican and Democrat, are perfectly happy to live with unsolved problem X if it gets them objective Y. What you call incompetence I call priorities.
How does a vice president "temper" a president? VPs have no institutional authority -- at least Cheney had a Rolodex, a long memory and a history with the Bush family. Did Quayle temper Bush I? Did Gore temper Clinton? Does Joe Biden temper Obama?
Your complete interpretation of American politics is ahistorical and groundless, and seems to go no further than shallow sloganeering. It is bullshit. Which is not to say you're voting for the wrong guy, but good luck convincing anyone else.
Our system cultivates lying, it attracts liars, pays them a good salary and absolves them when they win.
However,
The system is set up in such a way that we're supposed to choose the right person for the job, and he goes off and does it for 2-4-6 years; it's specifically designed to prevent you from voting for particular ideologies or laws, and it overtly monkeys with anybody who tries to keep specific promises. (These were all intentional choices on the part of the designers.)
There's no question that you can teach a religion as a matter of humanities, or of comparative religion.
However, it's not clear how in your science class where you teach the different creation stories, how you're going to grade someone that points out the Earth is more than 5000 years old. Are they being intolerant? Facts must be either true or false, they're objective; they cannot be true for me and false for you. Science is based on the idea that there is an external world which rational people cannot deny. People might disagree with particular evidence, and particular conclusions, and certain ideas in our culture might be very powerful and afforded respect, like Christianity. But you're going a step farther, and affirming that facts can be whatever people vote them to be -- your panel of judges might as well proclaim Pi is 22/7.
And here we see the danger of such things, because we know from evidence that Pi is not 22/7, and now it becomes the state's responsibility to correct those who promulgate "frauds," such as Darwin, or the irrationality of Pi. Legislation of objective facts is inherently tyrannical.
This is a tired point, but the United States is a Presidential Republic, it is not a Democracy, and its constitutional order embeds a deeply elitist, anti-democratic bias by design.