You're wrong, but there is admittedly more to it. In addition to forcing the Japanese to surrender, the bombs were used to keep the Soviets out. They were imminently prepared for a ground invasion by August, and the use of the weapons was authorized by the author of our first containment policy President Harry Truman.
I'm not so sure about that. By that point in the war, the USSR had the most powerful army in the world, but its navy sucked. Especially in the Pacific, since quite a few of its ships had been sent to reinforce the Baltic. I was poking around on some alternate history websites a month ago, and it looks like if the bomb hadn't been used, the Russians probably wouldn't have been able to invade Hokkaido until the spring of 1946. And, even then, Hokkaido is basically the Alaska of Japan. The Russians might have been able to help with the invasion of Honshu later in 1946, but, if so, they'd probably would have been doing it in American and Canadian vessels.
If we hadn't used the bomb, there wouldn't be too much "North Japan" to worry about (just Hokkaido, which, present day, only has a population of 5 million), but Korea might have been unified under the Communists.
Corporate agency is actually a field of study in metaphysics. So, yeah, corporations can be said to have intentions, beliefs, and desires, and these propositional attitudes might not be shared by the individuals that constitute the corporation.
No walking down the streets naked, though. Which is probably a good thing, since I don't think the world is ready for Stanley Morgan in its birthday suit.
Your theory would be a lot more plausible if the history books showed any indication that the Americans even knew where Korea was before the Korean War. The partition between North and South happened because the USSR declared war on Japan at the very end of WWII. The Americans took a look at the map for a good five minutes, and then proposed the split just to keep Russia from claiming the whole thing. Stalin, who was more concerned about Eastern Europe, agreed.
Ironically, the South was more agrarian, and had a existing Communist movement; and the North was relatively industralized and more pro-Western. Both sides of the partition were put under dictators since the Koreans on both sides of the divide weren't exactly happy with their new imperial overlords. South Korea finally became democratic at the end of the '80s.
There is a theory that one of the causes of the Korean War was Truman having a brain-fart during a speech, and left it off the list of places America would protect if they were attacked by the Commies. Not entirely his fault, since South Korea was a long way away from being the economic powerhouse it is today.
Sure, the current situation isn't the fault of the North Korean *people*. I'd put the blame on the North Korean *government*, the usual nasty-ass Cold War leftovers, and, as in all things, a heaping helping of Hanlon's Razor.
Ohh, St. Reagan's Voodoo Economics, peace be upon him. Listen, mate, the US have a wealth disparity that is about the level of a third world banana republic. Nothing is trickling down, except the rich pissing on the rest.
Voodoo Economics don't work because the rich have a lower Marginal Propensity to Consume - they tend to spend a smaller proportion and save a larger proportion of their income than the poor. Here, we have something that might convince the rich to actually cough up some of their dough instead of just sitting on it. That should help both the economy and us, the poor.
How is shunning the country going to help to encourage them to become better members of the world community? If you stop listening to any group of people then it causes resentment to fester.
I'd feel better about that if thought the DPRK's ambassador represented a people instead of just an illegitimate government. I don't have a lot of hope for the DPRK peacefully reforming. I'd like to be proven wrong, mind.
The point is that that wouldn't have happened if the government had stepped in. Voluntary donations are better all around. People feel better about giving them than taxes, they usually give more, and those receiving it are more grateful.
Why wouldn't it have happened if the government stepped in? Does government intervention rule out private charity? What makes you think that people *usually* give more in such a vacuum, and the case you cite isn't just a fluke? There is plenty of unmet needs out there right now, and I don't see private charities stepping up to the plate.
Medical care is a limited resource and it is impossible to treat EVERYBODY as if they are all of unlimited worth. [...] Getting back on topic, the question at had isn't if somebody who needs medical care should or should not be treated, but if the system is one of central planning with a central bureaucracy literally allocating the decision of your life or death, or if perhaps a less centralized system ought to be put into place that preserves personal liberties. For myself, I strongly distrust central planning groups because they almost never have my interests and needs in mind, or for that matter even care if I live or die.
You're right that we can't expend infinite resources on a single individual, but I would think that universal health care systems would tend to use a triage system rather than a hard cutoff. Also, public funded universal health care doesn't rule out private health care. If you don't like a central planning group (which, hopefully, would have some level of democratic oversight), then you're quite welcome to use your own money to buy health care on the open market. Universal health care would just make sure that everybody gets *some* level of protection vs. our current allocation system of "screw you, you're poor." It's not like universal health care would make private practices illegal, you know.
It looks more like the idea is to enable governments to see if random migrants are criminals, and maybe make it easier for migrants to cross borders. I don't see anything in TFA about access to socialized services. I suppose nations could handle that simply by issuing IDs to their own citizens - no need for a transnational ID system there, unless different nations want to work out some sort of exchange. TFA mentions something about this cutting down on corruption (by making it unnecessary to forge IDs saying that the migrant is a citizen?) and something about an electronic remittance system. Does anybody have more details on this? What is in it for the migrants? If I never leave my native member country, would I have to sign up for this system?
We're going to have to cut trillions from the budget just to break even and then to tack on another few trillion to pay for socialized medicine, we will need to cut from somewhere else.
Or, you know, we could RAISE TAXES! Or rather, undo the reckless tax cuts that the previous administration put in place.
Our American medical dollars might be stretching further if we did more *preventative* care. There's a lot of uninsured people who just wait until they have to go to the emergency room - and then don't pay the bill, raising the costs for people who *can* pay for health insurance. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right? Also, I think lack of access to health insurance is a major driver of lawsuits. If you get hurt, you want somebody to pay for the bill, even if it is a bit of stretch to think it was their fault. Some level of socialized medicine would do a lot to make our economy more efficient. (I would prefer a public single-payer system to an individual mandate, though.)
Sorry to be horribly obvious, but money is just a way of allocating resources. If you want more education, then teachers are going to have to eat and will need a place to live. They need chalk, blackboards, paper, books, etc. That's resources that won't be going to doctors, or some other sector of the economy. If you use certain chemicals to make drugs, that's chemicals that aren't going to research. The only difference between raw capitalism and pure socialism is how our votes on resource allocation are weighted - under raw capitalism, the 'votes' of the rich are weighted, under socialism, our 'votes' are equal, at least in theory.
I don't think most people even care about their genes winning out. They care more about getting it on and maybe having kids. And for quite a few people, the second thing is just a side effect of the first thing. If everyone cared about their own genes, let alone their 'race,' then the Europeans wouldn't be 'losing' the population game, would they? It's not like there is some vast Muslim conspiracy to sterilize the Crusaders, is there. I might care about having kids myself, but why should I care about the fate of my 'race'? If my genes want to mingle with those from elsewhere, more power to them. Sounds more like a win-win than a loss. On the other hand, I *do* care about my kids living in a free society.
Ironically, the neo-Nazi helps demonstrate my point. Assuming that the neo-Nazi isn't horribly misquoting the Talmud, it does appear that Jews used teach that "gentiles are less than human," but they're getting along with modern democracy just as well as anybody else. Everybody's religious texts say some crazy shit, but we're mostly able to get on with life despite that. There is no reason to think that Muslims are any different.
Yes, countries that institute Sharia have zero respect for non-believers, but that's because Sharia is a body of religious law. Countries that institute religious law tend to not be respectful of non-believers for some reason. Instituting religious law is incompatible with a modern democracy period, regardless of which religion we're talking about.
What is needed is the development of a Muslim Democrat movement similar to the Christian Democrats of Europe or arguably the Republicans of America. I wouldn't vote for them myself, just as I probably wouldn't vote for Christian Democrats and don't vote for Republicans. However, it is much better to have loyal democratic opposition than a disloyal antidemocratic opposition. It's better to have Social Democrats than antidemocratic Revolutionary Communists. The Muslim Brotherhood looks like it is headed in this Muslim Democrat direction, but only time will tell.
You might argue that Christians are more likely to accept democracy than other religions, given the whole "render on to Cesar that which is Cesar's" thing. Are there any non-Christian religions that are compatible with democracy? Could these provide a model for Muslim Democrats?
"If you truly believe the militants in those ghettos are just gonna wake up and embrace democracy I have a bridge you might be interested in." 1) How long did it take militant Catholics or militant Puritans to wake up and embrace democracy? 2) It's not the militants we need to win over, just the silent majority of regular Joes (or Achmeds, as the case may be). Militants can be isolated. 3) As for why Muslims in Europe might not be integrating... Based on American history, when immigrant communities don't integrate, it's usually because they are facing discrimination from the 'natives,' and are banding together for mutual protection. If Muslims aren't integrating, maybe the problem isn't on their side.
"you can't have a dialog with someone whose faith teaches that you are less than human, which is exactly what a Dhimmi is, no different that the 3/5ths rule the USA had for blacks." And we to some extent worked out the Black thing, at least to the point that we now have a Black president. It did take a Civil War, but it was mostly politics. It certainly didn't involve wholesale religious conversion or genocide, which would seem to be the only solutions to the "Muslim Problem" if you are correct.
Um, you may be mistakenly assuming that young liberals get their news from the 24-hour news networks. I don't have TV at the moment, and even if I did, I'd just watch PBS Newshour. I get most of my news online. I don't know how many people in the young liberal demographic are like this, but I do know that the 24-hours news networks suck. It could be that Fox News is just more popular among the young people that watch 24-hour news.
Bulls eye, several times over. I look forwards to a time when "Internet" is a mesh of WiFis organically recovering from physical attempts at sabotage in seconds, but saying that one want us to "build a communications infrastructure that cannot be controlled from the top" is just silly. It's a matter of materials and economics - as long as we need to rely on kilometres of cables, we will need to rely on whoever controls the kilometres of cables (which for economical reasons will have to be just a few large players, i.e. states). If we rely on satellites we rely on whoever controls the satellites. I just hope it will remain infeasible to control radio waves in the air.
Apparently you can make and launch a cubesat for less than $100,000. How hard would it be for a grassroots organization to put together a constellation of cubesat routers? How hard would it be for people living in censored territories to cobble together an uplink?
Cubesats might be better than ground-based meshes. Just need to bounce the signal up to and down from orbit instead of having to blanket an entire area with wifi routers. Cubesat launches apparently cost about $40,000, anybody want to start a kickstarter project? The cubesat launches might be a bit of a bottleneck, in addition to the money, I'm not sure how NASA or whoever might feel about pirate radio routers in outer space. We would need to come up with a cheap and easy way for people in the censored territories to be able to build an uplink. The uplink beam should be narrow, so the authorities couldn't detect it - I don't think them being able to see the downlink would be a problem, just encrypt it. (Might be a problem if the powers that be have anti-sat weapons!). Spread out groundstations internationally, use them as freenet-style distributed nodes for the cubesat network, as well as proxies into the standard internet. How does that sound?
The mandate was pretty much a deal breaker for us "liberals" as well. Taxing me to help other people, that's fine. Taxing me to 'help' me, that's paternalism. I'd much rather have a minimal level of single payer government health insurance. If you want more, you can buy it on the open market. Ironically, from what I've heard, the individual mandate was originally something the Republicans wanted to add to the Clinton health care plan. Obama threw it in to get the health insurance industry on board. They took it, then screwed him over anyway. The health care deal is a compromise in a way - *everybody* is equally unhappy, as far as I can tell.
Sure, wikilinks is biased. According to their Wikipedia article, they eavesdropped on a TOR exit node that Chinese hackers were using to gather intelligence from various foreign governments and organizations. Wikileaks released some of the information on foreign governments, but privately warned non-governmental organizations (such as Tibetan associations) that they were being spied on, didn't release that data. I suppose that the "fair and balanced" thing to do would have been to release everything?
As for "Where are the reports on what the Taliban do to innocents in the name of their unholy war?," I would suggest looking at the rest of Western propo^H^H^H^H^Hjournalism. Where are the reports on the benefits of Taliban rule? (Hey, we're restoring family values!)
To probably mis-quote Heinlein, "The government lies. The media lies. But in a free country, they aren't the *same* lies."
Actually, in philosophy of science, falsifiability has been dead for decades, thanks to the Quine-Duhem Thesis. The Quine-Duhem Thesis states that a theory never makes a prediction in isolation, but does so in conjunction with auxiliary hypotheses and propositions about initial conditions. This means that when we are faced with an observation that apparently falsifies our theory, we always have the option of "explaining away" the observation by rejecting at least one of our auxiliary hypotheses or propositions about initial conditions. (This does lead to the theory becoming more ad hoc.)
Falsifiability has pretty much been replaced by Bayesianism. Bayesianism uses Bayes' Theorem (used in many spam filters, btw), and allows us to talk about an observation confirming or disconfirming a theory. Confirmation does not mean "prove," it only means "makes more likely to be true." Same thing with disconfirmation: "makes less likely to be true," not "falsifies." This is a better fit with actual scientific practice, since scientists tend to look for evidence that confirms their theory, not evidence that fails to falsify it. But for some odd reason, philosophically aware scientists haven't gotten the memo about all of this, and they are still talking about an account of theory confirmation that's been dead for about 50 years.
Philosophers also think that you are never required to accept the results of a non-deductive argument (including the results of abduction, aka the scientific method), and you always have the option of withholding judgment. However, if you do accept a well-confirmed theory as being true, most epistemologists (who study knowledge) would agree that you are justified.
"Why is the US so stubborn about adopting the International System of Units? Even the country where the "Imperial" units come from did."
That's a very good question. Does this Metrication Matters guy have any answers? If we want to metrify the US, a good first step would be to figure out why we haven't already, and not just bitch and moan about Americans being stubborn. The only other countries that haven't switched to metric are Burma and Liberia, but maybe we could compare America with countries that were slow to switch? One hypothesis that comes to mind is that America is the largest economy of the world. The products Americans use are either made by Americans, or by companies who suck it up and provide "imperial" measurements. Other countries didn't have so much economic pull, and were faced with products labeled in "foreign" measurements. So there was some incentive to switch to some single measuring system. Ways of testing this hypothesis: I think the UK used to be a much larger economy (in terms of percentage of global GDP) than it is now. When did the UK switch? If this hypothesis is right, autarkies should be less likely to switch. This might explain why Burma hasn't switched yet. When did the DPRK switch?
I'll admit that this hypothesis is probably BS, but does anybody have a better one?
In the meantime, switching to consumption rather than mileage makes a lot of sense, even if we do it using "Imperial" units instead of metric. Don't let perfection be the enemy of the better than what we have.
Slashdot Mirror
You're wrong, but there is admittedly more to it. In addition to forcing the Japanese to surrender, the bombs were used to keep the Soviets out. They were imminently prepared for a ground invasion by August, and the use of the weapons was authorized by the author of our first containment policy President Harry Truman.
I'm not so sure about that. By that point in the war, the USSR had the most powerful army in the world, but its navy sucked. Especially in the Pacific, since quite a few of its ships had been sent to reinforce the Baltic. I was poking around on some alternate history websites a month ago, and it looks like if the bomb hadn't been used, the Russians probably wouldn't have been able to invade Hokkaido until the spring of 1946. And, even then, Hokkaido is basically the Alaska of Japan. The Russians might have been able to help with the invasion of Honshu later in 1946, but, if so, they'd probably would have been doing it in American and Canadian vessels.
If we hadn't used the bomb, there wouldn't be too much "North Japan" to worry about (just Hokkaido, which, present day, only has a population of 5 million), but Korea might have been unified under the Communists.
Corporate agency is actually a field of study in metaphysics. So, yeah, corporations can be said to have intentions, beliefs, and desires, and these propositional attitudes might not be shared by the individuals that constitute the corporation.
No walking down the streets naked, though. Which is probably a good thing, since I don't think the world is ready for Stanley Morgan in its birthday suit.
Your theory would be a lot more plausible if the history books showed any indication that the Americans even knew where Korea was before the Korean War. The partition between North and South happened because the USSR declared war on Japan at the very end of WWII. The Americans took a look at the map for a good five minutes, and then proposed the split just to keep Russia from claiming the whole thing. Stalin, who was more concerned about Eastern Europe, agreed.
Ironically, the South was more agrarian, and had a existing Communist movement; and the North was relatively industralized and more pro-Western. Both sides of the partition were put under dictators since the Koreans on both sides of the divide weren't exactly happy with their new imperial overlords. South Korea finally became democratic at the end of the '80s.
There is a theory that one of the causes of the Korean War was Truman having a brain-fart during a speech, and left it off the list of places America would protect if they were attacked by the Commies. Not entirely his fault, since South Korea was a long way away from being the economic powerhouse it is today.
Sure, the current situation isn't the fault of the North Korean *people*. I'd put the blame on the North Korean *government*, the usual nasty-ass Cold War leftovers, and, as in all things, a heaping helping of Hanlon's Razor.
Ohh, St. Reagan's Voodoo Economics, peace be upon him. Listen, mate, the US have a wealth disparity that is about the level of a third world banana republic. Nothing is trickling down, except the rich pissing on the rest.
Voodoo Economics don't work because the rich have a lower Marginal Propensity to Consume - they tend to spend a smaller proportion and save a larger proportion of their income than the poor. Here, we have something that might convince the rich to actually cough up some of their dough instead of just sitting on it. That should help both the economy and us, the poor.
How is shunning the country going to help to encourage them to become better members of the world community? If you stop listening to any group of people then it causes resentment to fester.
I'd feel better about that if thought the DPRK's ambassador represented a people instead of just an illegitimate government. I don't have a lot of hope for the DPRK peacefully reforming. I'd like to be proven wrong, mind.
He's a 52 year old IT manager who was fired. He probably didn't have a good chance of getting a new job (in IT at least) anyway.
Sure, Marx and Engels were revolutionaries, but the governments they were fighting against were about like the current government of Iran.
The point is that that wouldn't have happened if the government had stepped in. Voluntary donations are better all around. People feel better about giving them than taxes, they usually give more, and those receiving it are more grateful.
Why wouldn't it have happened if the government stepped in? Does government intervention rule out private charity? What makes you think that people *usually* give more in such a vacuum, and the case you cite isn't just a fluke? There is plenty of unmet needs out there right now, and I don't see private charities stepping up to the plate.
Medical care is a limited resource and it is impossible to treat EVERYBODY as if they are all of unlimited worth. [...] Getting back on topic, the question at had isn't if somebody who needs medical care should or should not be treated, but if the system is one of central planning with a central bureaucracy literally allocating the decision of your life or death, or if perhaps a less centralized system ought to be put into place that preserves personal liberties. For myself, I strongly distrust central planning groups because they almost never have my interests and needs in mind, or for that matter even care if I live or die.
You're right that we can't expend infinite resources on a single individual, but I would think that universal health care systems would tend to use a triage system rather than a hard cutoff. Also, public funded universal health care doesn't rule out private health care. If you don't like a central planning group (which, hopefully, would have some level of democratic oversight), then you're quite welcome to use your own money to buy health care on the open market. Universal health care would just make sure that everybody gets *some* level of protection vs. our current allocation system of "screw you, you're poor." It's not like universal health care would make private practices illegal, you know.
It looks more like the idea is to enable governments to see if random migrants are criminals, and maybe make it easier for migrants to cross borders. I don't see anything in TFA about access to socialized services. I suppose nations could handle that simply by issuing IDs to their own citizens - no need for a transnational ID system there, unless different nations want to work out some sort of exchange. TFA mentions something about this cutting down on corruption (by making it unnecessary to forge IDs saying that the migrant is a citizen?) and something about an electronic remittance system. Does anybody have more details on this? What is in it for the migrants? If I never leave my native member country, would I have to sign up for this system?
We're going to have to cut trillions from the budget just to break even and then to tack on another few trillion to pay for socialized medicine, we will need to cut from somewhere else.
Or, you know, we could RAISE TAXES! Or rather, undo the reckless tax cuts that the previous administration put in place.
Our American medical dollars might be stretching further if we did more *preventative* care. There's a lot of uninsured people who just wait until they have to go to the emergency room - and then don't pay the bill, raising the costs for people who *can* pay for health insurance. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right? Also, I think lack of access to health insurance is a major driver of lawsuits. If you get hurt, you want somebody to pay for the bill, even if it is a bit of stretch to think it was their fault. Some level of socialized medicine would do a lot to make our economy more efficient. (I would prefer a public single-payer system to an individual mandate, though.)
Sorry to be horribly obvious, but money is just a way of allocating resources. If you want more education, then teachers are going to have to eat and will need a place to live. They need chalk, blackboards, paper, books, etc. That's resources that won't be going to doctors, or some other sector of the economy. If you use certain chemicals to make drugs, that's chemicals that aren't going to research. The only difference between raw capitalism and pure socialism is how our votes on resource allocation are weighted - under raw capitalism, the 'votes' of the rich are weighted, under socialism, our 'votes' are equal, at least in theory.
I don't think most people even care about their genes winning out. They care more about getting it on and maybe having kids. And for quite a few people, the second thing is just a side effect of the first thing. If everyone cared about their own genes, let alone their 'race,' then the Europeans wouldn't be 'losing' the population game, would they? It's not like there is some vast Muslim conspiracy to sterilize the Crusaders, is there. I might care about having kids myself, but why should I care about the fate of my 'race'? If my genes want to mingle with those from elsewhere, more power to them. Sounds more like a win-win than a loss. On the other hand, I *do* care about my kids living in a free society.
Ironically, the neo-Nazi helps demonstrate my point. Assuming that the neo-Nazi isn't horribly misquoting the Talmud, it does appear that Jews used teach that "gentiles are less than human," but they're getting along with modern democracy just as well as anybody else. Everybody's religious texts say some crazy shit, but we're mostly able to get on with life despite that. There is no reason to think that Muslims are any different.
Yes, countries that institute Sharia have zero respect for non-believers, but that's because Sharia is a body of religious law. Countries that institute religious law tend to not be respectful of non-believers for some reason. Instituting religious law is incompatible with a modern democracy period, regardless of which religion we're talking about.
What is needed is the development of a Muslim Democrat movement similar to the Christian Democrats of Europe or arguably the Republicans of America. I wouldn't vote for them myself, just as I probably wouldn't vote for Christian Democrats and don't vote for Republicans. However, it is much better to have loyal democratic opposition than a disloyal antidemocratic opposition. It's better to have Social Democrats than antidemocratic Revolutionary Communists. The Muslim Brotherhood looks like it is headed in this Muslim Democrat direction, but only time will tell.
You might argue that Christians are more likely to accept democracy than other religions, given the whole "render on to Cesar that which is Cesar's" thing. Are there any non-Christian religions that are compatible with democracy? Could these provide a model for Muslim Democrats?
"If you truly believe the militants in those ghettos are just gonna wake up and embrace democracy I have a bridge you might be interested in." 1) How long did it take militant Catholics or militant Puritans to wake up and embrace democracy? 2) It's not the militants we need to win over, just the silent majority of regular Joes (or Achmeds, as the case may be). Militants can be isolated. 3) As for why Muslims in Europe might not be integrating... Based on American history, when immigrant communities don't integrate, it's usually because they are facing discrimination from the 'natives,' and are banding together for mutual protection. If Muslims aren't integrating, maybe the problem isn't on their side.
"you can't have a dialog with someone whose faith teaches that you are less than human, which is exactly what a Dhimmi is, no different that the 3/5ths rule the USA had for blacks." And we to some extent worked out the Black thing, at least to the point that we now have a Black president. It did take a Civil War, but it was mostly politics. It certainly didn't involve wholesale religious conversion or genocide, which would seem to be the only solutions to the "Muslim Problem" if you are correct.
Have you people even considered that they didn't make an atomic device because they don't want to?
They're people too you know? They want to live their lives like everybody else.
Even the suicide bombers, the guys who blow themselves up with a bunch of civilians who have nothing to do with anything?
Yes, believe it or not, suicide bombers are people too: http://muslimmatters.org/2008/04/19/the-psychology-of-the-suicide-bomber/
However, since ordinary people are quite capable of violence against the Other, being unable to get nuclear material is probably a better explanation.
Um, you may be mistakenly assuming that young liberals get their news from the 24-hour news networks. I don't have TV at the moment, and even if I did, I'd just watch PBS Newshour. I get most of my news online. I don't know how many people in the young liberal demographic are like this, but I do know that the 24-hours news networks suck. It could be that Fox News is just more popular among the young people that watch 24-hour news.
Bulls eye, several times over. I look forwards to a time when "Internet" is a mesh of WiFis organically recovering from physical attempts at sabotage in seconds, but saying that one want us to "build a communications infrastructure that cannot be controlled from the top" is just silly. It's a matter of materials and economics - as long as we need to rely on kilometres of cables, we will need to rely on whoever controls the kilometres of cables (which for economical reasons will have to be just a few large players, i.e. states). If we rely on satellites we rely on whoever controls the satellites. I just hope it will remain infeasible to control radio waves in the air.
Apparently you can make and launch a cubesat for less than $100,000. How hard would it be for a grassroots organization to put together a constellation of cubesat routers? How hard would it be for people living in censored territories to cobble together an uplink?
Cubesats might be better than ground-based meshes. Just need to bounce the signal up to and down from orbit instead of having to blanket an entire area with wifi routers. Cubesat launches apparently cost about $40,000, anybody want to start a kickstarter project? The cubesat launches might be a bit of a bottleneck, in addition to the money, I'm not sure how NASA or whoever might feel about pirate radio routers in outer space. We would need to come up with a cheap and easy way for people in the censored territories to be able to build an uplink. The uplink beam should be narrow, so the authorities couldn't detect it - I don't think them being able to see the downlink would be a problem, just encrypt it. (Might be a problem if the powers that be have anti-sat weapons!). Spread out groundstations internationally, use them as freenet-style distributed nodes for the cubesat network, as well as proxies into the standard internet. How does that sound?
The mandate was pretty much a deal breaker for us "liberals" as well. Taxing me to help other people, that's fine. Taxing me to 'help' me, that's paternalism. I'd much rather have a minimal level of single payer government health insurance. If you want more, you can buy it on the open market. Ironically, from what I've heard, the individual mandate was originally something the Republicans wanted to add to the Clinton health care plan. Obama threw it in to get the health insurance industry on board. They took it, then screwed him over anyway. The health care deal is a compromise in a way - *everybody* is equally unhappy, as far as I can tell.
Sure, wikilinks is biased. According to their Wikipedia article, they eavesdropped on a TOR exit node that Chinese hackers were using to gather intelligence from various foreign governments and organizations. Wikileaks released some of the information on foreign governments, but privately warned non-governmental organizations (such as Tibetan associations) that they were being spied on, didn't release that data. I suppose that the "fair and balanced" thing to do would have been to release everything?
As for "Where are the reports on what the Taliban do to innocents in the name of their unholy war?," I would suggest looking at the rest of Western propo^H^H^H^H^Hjournalism. Where are the reports on the benefits of Taliban rule? (Hey, we're restoring family values!)
To probably mis-quote Heinlein, "The government lies. The media lies. But in a free country, they aren't the *same* lies."
Actually, in philosophy of science, falsifiability has been dead for decades, thanks to the Quine-Duhem Thesis. The Quine-Duhem Thesis states that a theory never makes a prediction in isolation, but does so in conjunction with auxiliary hypotheses and propositions about initial conditions. This means that when we are faced with an observation that apparently falsifies our theory, we always have the option of "explaining away" the observation by rejecting at least one of our auxiliary hypotheses or propositions about initial conditions. (This does lead to the theory becoming more ad hoc.)
Falsifiability has pretty much been replaced by Bayesianism. Bayesianism uses Bayes' Theorem (used in many spam filters, btw), and allows us to talk about an observation confirming or disconfirming a theory. Confirmation does not mean "prove," it only means "makes more likely to be true." Same thing with disconfirmation: "makes less likely to be true," not "falsifies." This is a better fit with actual scientific practice, since scientists tend to look for evidence that confirms their theory, not evidence that fails to falsify it. But for some odd reason, philosophically aware scientists haven't gotten the memo about all of this, and they are still talking about an account of theory confirmation that's been dead for about 50 years.
Philosophers also think that you are never required to accept the results of a non-deductive argument (including the results of abduction, aka the scientific method), and you always have the option of withholding judgment. However, if you do accept a well-confirmed theory as being true, most epistemologists (who study knowledge) would agree that you are justified.
"Why is the US so stubborn about adopting the International System of Units? Even the country where the "Imperial" units come from did."
That's a very good question. Does this Metrication Matters guy have any answers? If we want to metrify the US, a good first step would be to figure out why we haven't already, and not just bitch and moan about Americans being stubborn. The only other countries that haven't switched to metric are Burma and Liberia, but maybe we could compare America with countries that were slow to switch? One hypothesis that comes to mind is that America is the largest economy of the world. The products Americans use are either made by Americans, or by companies who suck it up and provide "imperial" measurements. Other countries didn't have so much economic pull, and were faced with products labeled in "foreign" measurements. So there was some incentive to switch to some single measuring system. Ways of testing this hypothesis: I think the UK used to be a much larger economy (in terms of percentage of global GDP) than it is now. When did the UK switch? If this hypothesis is right, autarkies should be less likely to switch. This might explain why Burma hasn't switched yet. When did the DPRK switch?
I'll admit that this hypothesis is probably BS, but does anybody have a better one?
In the meantime, switching to consumption rather than mileage makes a lot of sense, even if we do it using "Imperial" units instead of metric. Don't let perfection be the enemy of the better than what we have.
The tragedy of democracy is that you get the government you deserve.