Nope, just call it like I see it. Frivalously trotting out the Nazi/Hitler comparison is never useful. I'm just amused by the high dudgeon in which the left gets over it, but never when it's there own (far more numerous) people doing it, for years on end.
Equating the conservative position within the current political landscape as an analog to the horror of what the Nazis did is not just ignorant, insidious, hateful hyperbole, it degrades the absolute horror of what was done and those it was done to.
Were you delivering the same lecture to the (still!) foaming-at-the-mouth left wing talking heads, activists, and tantrum-having street screamers who couldn't go a week for eight years without calling the last president "BusHitler?" Were you?
And that's one reason why business travel across the Atlantic / Pacific to the US has declined.
Yeah, it wouldn't have anything to do with high fuel prices, a global economic slump that has international trade very tight for now, or perhaps the fact that people are finally figuring out that they can use GoToMeeting and VoIP conference bridges to get a whole lot of things done without having to move human bodies between continents to agree on a marketing program or manufacturing schedule. Nah, it's Eeeevil Laptop Searches. That's it.
No, you should be able to conduct business under your patent, and protect it. If the court finds that they're over-reaching, they'll get smacked down. If the court finds that the patent that was issued to them is in fact what's at stake, then they'll have defended their patent. Sounds like you're really complaining about patents in general. Good luck with that.
London charging a congestion tax is nothing like Tivo trying to collect from anyone who remotely thinks of shifting television content around with a magnetic storage device.
And you've read all of the legal papers involved, and understand that the claim TiVo is making is "nobody can use a magnetic storage device to timeshift broadcasts"? Really? Or is it possible that you're just whining, and don't have a clue about what it costs to develop a technology in the first place, and be the first company to actually do what it takes to make a business out of it. The founders of this country understood it centuries ago. I'm glad they were smarter than you.
there were a great many reports of people being harassed by local police for trying to vote in areas that were considered Democrat strongholds
Those would be unsubstantiated "reports." The media are out in droves for US elections. How about some video? How about a simple first hand report from a credible, non-propogandist reporter? How about some cell phone video, etc? As the other person mentioned in response to you, the party you prefer over the last administration's has at the top a guy whose Justice Department just decided that people caught on video actually intimidating voters, while holding weapons in front of a polling place, should be let off the hook. So, which party puts up with it, again? Ah, I see.
There are legitimate reasons to criticize the current health plans under consideration
That's putting it mildly.
There are millions of people with billions of dollars in health care expenses that didn't do anything wrong
Of course. That's what insurance is for: the big, catastrophic stuff. Just like car insurance, which you don't use for your oil changes. Or the unemployment insurance that you and your employer pay into while you're working - to help with unexpected circumstances. You don't use that plan to pay for continual, normal needs like food and rent. And there's no reason that health insurance should pay for a check-up, either - and imagine how much less it would cost if it wasn't really just a savings plan to make a visit to the office "cost" you $20 instead of $100.
A health savings account should, perhaps. But insurance? You insure against the possibility of something happening. The need for routine medical care is a certainty. So let's talk about why that routine care is so expensive. One answer: lawyers. Caprcious, predatory, lottery-sized law suits, making oily weasles like John Edwards multi-millionaires. And that industry (the trial-lawyer industry) has forced typical doctors to pay six-figure annual insurance premiums, and to practice hideously expensive defensive medicine, throwing untold billions of dollars of pointless tests, equipment, and treatments at patients just to fend off the legal parasites and opportunists.
too sick
Sure enough. My dad had to finally quit working because of ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease). He elected not to undergo long, wretched treatments and circumstances costing untold tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars over time, with the same outcome - only more miserable - either way. So I got to watch him die in front of my eyes, unable to breath, and refusing a trachiotomy. Hell of thing - hard for me to imagine, even today. He had a doctorate in health administration, and was a vice president of a huge health insurance company. It wasn't about the cash, it was about the waste and the misery, and about his personal dignity. He used insurance to cover some immediate costs during his decline, and then drew the line at the point of his choosing. Don't lecture me about sick people who didn't do anything wrong.
but please pick some other government failure to harpoon
Why? It's exactly the same problem as health care. Kids (and parents) who eat their way into a diabetes-induced amputation, costing more in health care than it would cost to provide basic services to a dozen other families, aren't a bit different than kids (and parents) who slack their way through school and become parasites on every other system. What on earth makes you think that more of a Nanny State is going to produce kids who are more responsible for their own lives? It's all part of the same wider cultural problem. And government policies that amount to nothing more than just raising taxes (more!) on the productive people to increase the number of Nannies aimed at the non-productive people are all of a kind.
We all already spend a few grand a year for each student for this goal. We are forced to, on pain of going to jail if we don't.
The DC public school district, for example, spends close to $12,000/year per student, and has some of the highest rates of illiteracy, drop outs, and useless students by the time they are socially pushed through the system. When the same parents in that area are given the option of charter or private schools, they stand in line for three days in hopes of getting such a slot for their kids. The public system is - just like all government options - plagued by politics, inefficiency, unaccountability, and the iron fist of lefty labor unions that protect the worst of the worst who work in the system. Yes, please make sure that health care is handled the same way. That would be great.
So what you're saying is that the applicability of the first amendment depends on each given person's individual parsing of a contraction of the word "whore?"
How is stating that cheated on her husband any more or less defamatory than saying she sells her body for money? The are either both opinion, or both incorrect information meant to defame. Or, you can't tell which is which until you get a court involved.
But where's the money?... would have been bitten out of the economy. There doesn't seem to be any significant bleeding.
It does take a huge bite out. It costs a fortune for merchants, card processors, banks (and of course to the retailers they pass those costs along to) to deal with fraud. Billions and billions a year. It's a drag on the economy that makes it more expensive to be a merchant, more expensive to (however briefly) borrow money, more expensive to run law enforcement, etc.
Bullshit, it can just as easily expose corruption and blatant abuses of power, as has been demonstrated over and over again in the past.
Also, we've seen in the past that having your personal activities closely monitored might help catch you in the act of bribing someone. And since there is the possibility that you are, indeed, bribing officials each day, you're probably all for everyone keeping an eye on you, too, right? Right?
So if an officer happens to take a bribe while off duty then that shouldn't be up to consideration because you drew that particular line?
Do you draw no distinction between an officer suspected of taking bribes, and thus being stalked in an official sort of way, and a woman who's clearly a slightly-off groupie-type with an obsession stalking them for her own personal reasons? How do we know that you aren't involved in bribing officials? I think that someone should be assigned to putting your picture, home address, and general ramblings about you and your daily activities up on a blog, with headlines like, "Possibly Involved In Bribery?" I mean, as long as we're not drawing any lines.
So you have no problem with your kids watching a dozen planets and billions of people... but don't nobody go killing babies?
This is nothing new. Folks pay other people to kill cattle, swine, sheep, goats, rabbits, fish, crustaceans and poultry on their behalf millions of times every day. Most of them would have to be personally starving before they could bring themselves to be that necessarily predatory/brutal up close and personal. To say nothing of using a knife to clean the guts out of a hog before roasting or frying the tasty parts.
So, people are always in denial about reality. The cylon is being depicted as not being in denial about the billions of people they're about to kill. Being a part of that slaughter, and being committed to it, means that doing a bit of it with your own hands is a measure of your moral certainty (or ambivalence). Enjoy your hamburger at lunch today! Or, your tofu (many earthworms were killed when tilling that soybean field, you evil vegan bastards - and you know who you are!).
And... you're too stupid to know that "zero emissions" is referring to the car itself? Or you're assuming that the person saying it is too stupid?
No, the people who blythely say things, like, "Finally, zero-emissions transportation I can afford!" are disengenuous in the extreme. Because most of them do (sort of) know that they're burning a trainload of coal so that they can oh-so-cleanly-and-quietly pull up in front of their local Hipster Nerd Coffee Shop to show off their new Greener Than Thou Car, but it's out of sight and out of mind enough for them to score points in their social circle. And of course they get to have a chuckle at the poor fools who can't personally afford to buy a new vehicle chock full of toxic batteries, but who none the less are subsidizing Mr. Cool Green's purchase by having several thousand dollars of his tax dollars pushed over onto them. So progressive to make lower middle class people who can't play the same game help buy your car for you.
People on a forum like this should be exactly the ones to universally downplay developments like this, because when they wax poetic about their coal-powered car, they're contributing to a larger conversation in the wider culture that generally picks up on the "zero emissions" part and doesn't have a clue about the reality of burning those fossile fuels on the other end of the grid. When it comes to actually reducing emissions, cars like this are lost in the noise, compared to just using more insulation in the attics of older houses, or replacing the windows on older commercial structures. But that's SO not cool, compared to talking about a vehicle that has built-in MiFi, and so it goes un-talked-about.
I'm just trying to figure out how, when everyone involved in the discussion knows exactly what is being said and what it means, there ends up being some confusion that needs to be corrected
You're confusing the need to correct something with the need to actually talk about the big picture, and to look unblinkingly at who is being asked to actually pay for what amounts to a luxury fashion statement that has almost no meaningful impact on pollution (compared to a late-model, compact, efficient ICE vehicle), and which is ultimately all but unusable by most people for practical reasons.
Maybe he's talking to the people who use phrases like "zero emissions" in discussions, right here on this very web site. Or the people who are politically aligned (for other reasons) with people who do, and who thus don't correct them for social discomfort reasons. You know who you are.
Anyone who claims faith has no risk forgets that those who are persecuted for their beliefs are blessed
So, there you go - saying that it is, in fact, without risk. If you're "blessed," then where's the risk? What's a little mortal torment or death, etc., compared to magical immortality after the fact, right? No risk. That's the central message you've just reinforced.
I hope you can have a better experience and find that many of those who claim what you have above are working along different lines from what they should be
Oh, it's not my experience you should be worried about. It's the kids that are being taught to believe in magic, and then have a truly fractured, self-contradictory view of the world messing with their cognitive development through the most important, formative years of their life. Those are the experiences to worry about. Because they're going to be told that there is a benevolent, omnicient being who loves them, and they're going to have to reconcile that with the fact that their little friend Timmy is dying in agony from cancer so that Mysterious Ways can be properly administered by that same all-powerful, loving being. That's hard stuff for a kid to deal with. Which it should be, of course, because it's utter nonsense.
but you still need to have faith that it your specific plane will be fine and that the pilot is good
No. That is a calculated risk. However inaccurate the calculation by the average passenger, it's still a simple gamble, with the odds shown to be highly in their favor (against dying in a crash).
This is not the same as faith, because the people who sell faith specifically tell you that there is no risk, and that the entire topic is incalculable... beyond reason, beyond mortal understanding, and beyond questioning. I understand how airplanes work, and could make an exhaustive study, personally, of the causal relationships between Canada Goose migration and bird-strike-related water landings in the Hudson. I can't predict the impact of all of the variables, but I can come to terms with the odds and the likely outcomes.
This is not the same as believing in magic. Religious faith is believing in magic. It's a very different thing, with important implications pyschologically and philosophically. Magical thinking is a childish habit. Adults who insist on doing it are deliberately engaging in arrested development and in denial about the nature of the universe (because they don't have the intellectual honesty and courage to make their own meaning in the short lifespan they've got to work with). Holding your fingers in your ears and saying, "La la la! I can't hear reality! La la la!" is not the same as making a very reasonable gamble with your life and getting in an airplane, or even out of bed in the morning.
You're kidding, right? The ONLY reason there were so many sub-prime mortgages was because the government created them, through regulation. The whole mess was a direct result of the government essentially mandating that lenders give insane loans to people who couldn't possibly afford them. The huge wash of nonsense easy housing loans directly drove up the price of residential real estate, causing the bubble. And of course, it collapsed because it was never there in the first place.
Of course the results might not have been so bad if the entities pushing the loans (Fannie/Freddie) had the capital to weather the storm. You'll recall the Bush administration going before congress to warn that those two were wildly under-capitalized, and that they either needed more cash set aside, or needed to quit backing BS loans. Of course, you know who shouted that down (see Barney Frank, the wise Democrat in charge of the oversight committee). Do a little Googling, and you can see video of him lecturing the Bush administration about how Fannie was just fine, thank you, and should actually increase the number of loans it guaranteed to people with little income to actually pay for them.
we've never had real regulation because we always compromise with the capitalists
Yeah, we're going to have to look for another example, where the regulatory authority has all of the necessary power. I know! Hugo Chavez. There you go. He's just found that another 34 radio stations needed to be regulated off the air because they weren't towing his line, and dared to question some of his policies. He's just indicated that any reporters questioning the government's actions will be jailed. There, some nice, solid, uncompromising requlatary power in action.
Let's see... oh, I've another one! Joseph Stalin, hard at work centrally regulating the eeevil market place. He had a few rough spots to work out early on though, so a few million people had to die. But after that, that centrally managed economy just worked wonders, didn't it? Fantastic.
I would far prefer to read stories from people directly concerned
Ah, so you prefer the White House press secretary's spin over a professional investigator/reporter actually bothering to ask how something is going to paid for?
I'll never understand why people who don't want to pay real journalists think that the Hugo Chavez model is superior. Actually, maybe there is a pattern there. It's always the lefty nut jobs who bitch about having to pay for content creation, and who also bitch about not having enough control over the media or over other people's voices (I'm particularly amused, this week, by the Democratic National Committee running ads that call people who get together and complain out loud about the prospects of Obamacare "an angry mob" - the irony is fantastic, coming from a "community organizer" - and about the White House asking to have "fishy" emails on the topic forwarded to them for a once over). But Hugo's got your answer! Government control over the media. He just shut down another couple dozen radio stations (which were operating profitably, thank you very much) because they were originating their own content, and not repeating the words of the "directly concerned" Chavez. He also mentioned that anyone who acts like a reporter and criticizes his government will be going to jail. Ah, the left's strange and wonderful relationship with media. It's all about freedom of expression for them, and freedom from expression by anyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice.
Nope, just call it like I see it. Frivalously trotting out the Nazi/Hitler comparison is never useful. I'm just amused by the high dudgeon in which the left gets over it, but never when it's there own (far more numerous) people doing it, for years on end.
Equating the conservative position within the current political landscape as an analog to the horror of what the Nazis did is not just ignorant, insidious, hateful hyperbole, it degrades the absolute horror of what was done and those it was done to.
Were you delivering the same lecture to the (still!) foaming-at-the-mouth left wing talking heads, activists, and tantrum-having street screamers who couldn't go a week for eight years without calling the last president "BusHitler?" Were you?
And that's one reason why business travel across the Atlantic / Pacific to the US has declined.
Yeah, it wouldn't have anything to do with high fuel prices, a global economic slump that has international trade very tight for now, or perhaps the fact that people are finally figuring out that they can use GoToMeeting and VoIP conference bridges to get a whole lot of things done without having to move human bodies between continents to agree on a marketing program or manufacturing schedule. Nah, it's Eeeevil Laptop Searches. That's it.
No, you should be able to conduct business under your patent, and protect it. If the court finds that they're over-reaching, they'll get smacked down. If the court finds that the patent that was issued to them is in fact what's at stake, then they'll have defended their patent. Sounds like you're really complaining about patents in general. Good luck with that.
London charging a congestion tax is nothing like Tivo trying to collect from anyone who remotely thinks of shifting television content around with a magnetic storage device.
And you've read all of the legal papers involved, and understand that the claim TiVo is making is "nobody can use a magnetic storage device to timeshift broadcasts"? Really? Or is it possible that you're just whining, and don't have a clue about what it costs to develop a technology in the first place, and be the first company to actually do what it takes to make a business out of it. The founders of this country understood it centuries ago. I'm glad they were smarter than you.
there were a great many reports of people being harassed by local police for trying to vote in areas that were considered Democrat strongholds
Those would be unsubstantiated "reports." The media are out in droves for US elections. How about some video? How about a simple first hand report from a credible, non-propogandist reporter? How about some cell phone video, etc? As the other person mentioned in response to you, the party you prefer over the last administration's has at the top a guy whose Justice Department just decided that people caught on video actually intimidating voters, while holding weapons in front of a polling place, should be let off the hook. So, which party puts up with it, again? Ah, I see.
There are legitimate reasons to criticize the current health plans under consideration
That's putting it mildly.
There are millions of people with billions of dollars in health care expenses that didn't do anything wrong
Of course. That's what insurance is for: the big, catastrophic stuff. Just like car insurance, which you don't use for your oil changes. Or the unemployment insurance that you and your employer pay into while you're working - to help with unexpected circumstances. You don't use that plan to pay for continual, normal needs like food and rent. And there's no reason that health insurance should pay for a check-up, either - and imagine how much less it would cost if it wasn't really just a savings plan to make a visit to the office "cost" you $20 instead of $100.
A health savings account should, perhaps. But insurance? You insure against the possibility of something happening. The need for routine medical care is a certainty. So let's talk about why that routine care is so expensive. One answer: lawyers. Caprcious, predatory, lottery-sized law suits, making oily weasles like John Edwards multi-millionaires. And that industry (the trial-lawyer industry) has forced typical doctors to pay six-figure annual insurance premiums, and to practice hideously expensive defensive medicine, throwing untold billions of dollars of pointless tests, equipment, and treatments at patients just to fend off the legal parasites and opportunists.
too sick
Sure enough. My dad had to finally quit working because of ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease). He elected not to undergo long, wretched treatments and circumstances costing untold tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars over time, with the same outcome - only more miserable - either way. So I got to watch him die in front of my eyes, unable to breath, and refusing a trachiotomy. Hell of thing - hard for me to imagine, even today. He had a doctorate in health administration, and was a vice president of a huge health insurance company. It wasn't about the cash, it was about the waste and the misery, and about his personal dignity. He used insurance to cover some immediate costs during his decline, and then drew the line at the point of his choosing. Don't lecture me about sick people who didn't do anything wrong.
but please pick some other government failure to harpoon
Why? It's exactly the same problem as health care. Kids (and parents) who eat their way into a diabetes-induced amputation, costing more in health care than it would cost to provide basic services to a dozen other families, aren't a bit different than kids (and parents) who slack their way through school and become parasites on every other system. What on earth makes you think that more of a Nanny State is going to produce kids who are more responsible for their own lives? It's all part of the same wider cultural problem. And government policies that amount to nothing more than just raising taxes (more!) on the productive people to increase the number of Nannies aimed at the non-productive people are all of a kind.
willing to spend a few grand a year for this goal
We all already spend a few grand a year for each student for this goal. We are forced to, on pain of going to jail if we don't.
The DC public school district, for example, spends close to $12,000/year per student, and has some of the highest rates of illiteracy, drop outs, and useless students by the time they are socially pushed through the system. When the same parents in that area are given the option of charter or private schools, they stand in line for three days in hopes of getting such a slot for their kids. The public system is - just like all government options - plagued by politics, inefficiency, unaccountability, and the iron fist of lefty labor unions that protect the worst of the worst who work in the system. Yes, please make sure that health care is handled the same way. That would be great.
If your ISP bill was really high each month, you might consider installing those "patches" you keep hearing about.
Uh huh. And if your ISP bill is a ruinous $10,000 because of a zero-day exploit on the Mac your kid uses to do their homework?
So what you're saying is that the applicability of the first amendment depends on each given person's individual parsing of a contraction of the word "whore?"
How is stating that cheated on her husband any more or less defamatory than saying she sells her body for money? The are either both opinion, or both incorrect information meant to defame. Or, you can't tell which is which until you get a court involved.
But where's the money? ... would have been bitten out of the economy. There doesn't seem to be any significant bleeding.
It does take a huge bite out. It costs a fortune for merchants, card processors, banks (and of course to the retailers they pass those costs along to) to deal with fraud. Billions and billions a year. It's a drag on the economy that makes it more expensive to be a merchant, more expensive to (however briefly) borrow money, more expensive to run law enforcement, etc.
Bullshit, it can just as easily expose corruption and blatant abuses of power, as has been demonstrated over and over again in the past.
Also, we've seen in the past that having your personal activities closely monitored might help catch you in the act of bribing someone. And since there is the possibility that you are, indeed, bribing officials each day, you're probably all for everyone keeping an eye on you, too, right? Right?
So if an officer happens to take a bribe while off duty then that shouldn't be up to consideration because you drew that particular line?
Do you draw no distinction between an officer suspected of taking bribes, and thus being stalked in an official sort of way, and a woman who's clearly a slightly-off groupie-type with an obsession stalking them for her own personal reasons? How do we know that you aren't involved in bribing officials? I think that someone should be assigned to putting your picture, home address, and general ramblings about you and your daily activities up on a blog, with headlines like, "Possibly Involved In Bribery?" I mean, as long as we're not drawing any lines.
nobody seriously objects because nobody seriously believes the space elevator could be built anyway
You're talking to a message board that sometimes has very earnest debates about the physics of Star Trek.
So you have no problem with your kids watching a dozen planets and billions of people ... but don't nobody go killing babies?
This is nothing new. Folks pay other people to kill cattle, swine, sheep, goats, rabbits, fish, crustaceans and poultry on their behalf millions of times every day. Most of them would have to be personally starving before they could bring themselves to be that necessarily predatory/brutal up close and personal. To say nothing of using a knife to clean the guts out of a hog before roasting or frying the tasty parts.
So, people are always in denial about reality. The cylon is being depicted as not being in denial about the billions of people they're about to kill. Being a part of that slaughter, and being committed to it, means that doing a bit of it with your own hands is a measure of your moral certainty (or ambivalence). Enjoy your hamburger at lunch today! Or, your tofu (many earthworms were killed when tilling that soybean field, you evil vegan bastards - and you know who you are!).
You've lumped violating copyright in with identity theft
Which is fine. They both involve the deliberate act of ripping someone off. Same ethical bucket, same direction on the moral compass.
And... you're too stupid to know that "zero emissions" is referring to the car itself? Or you're assuming that the person saying it is too stupid?
No, the people who blythely say things, like, "Finally, zero-emissions transportation I can afford!" are disengenuous in the extreme. Because most of them do (sort of) know that they're burning a trainload of coal so that they can oh-so-cleanly-and-quietly pull up in front of their local Hipster Nerd Coffee Shop to show off their new Greener Than Thou Car, but it's out of sight and out of mind enough for them to score points in their social circle. And of course they get to have a chuckle at the poor fools who can't personally afford to buy a new vehicle chock full of toxic batteries, but who none the less are subsidizing Mr. Cool Green's purchase by having several thousand dollars of his tax dollars pushed over onto them. So progressive to make lower middle class people who can't play the same game help buy your car for you.
People on a forum like this should be exactly the ones to universally downplay developments like this, because when they wax poetic about their coal-powered car, they're contributing to a larger conversation in the wider culture that generally picks up on the "zero emissions" part and doesn't have a clue about the reality of burning those fossile fuels on the other end of the grid. When it comes to actually reducing emissions, cars like this are lost in the noise, compared to just using more insulation in the attics of older houses, or replacing the windows on older commercial structures. But that's SO not cool, compared to talking about a vehicle that has built-in MiFi, and so it goes un-talked-about.
I'm just trying to figure out how, when everyone involved in the discussion knows exactly what is being said and what it means, there ends up being some confusion that needs to be corrected
You're confusing the need to correct something with the need to actually talk about the big picture, and to look unblinkingly at who is being asked to actually pay for what amounts to a luxury fashion statement that has almost no meaningful impact on pollution (compared to a late-model, compact, efficient ICE vehicle), and which is ultimately all but unusable by most people for practical reasons.
so who are you talking to?
Maybe he's talking to the people who use phrases like "zero emissions" in discussions, right here on this very web site. Or the people who are politically aligned (for other reasons) with people who do, and who thus don't correct them for social discomfort reasons. You know who you are.
Anyone who claims faith has no risk forgets that those who are persecuted for their beliefs are blessed
So, there you go - saying that it is, in fact, without risk. If you're "blessed," then where's the risk? What's a little mortal torment or death, etc., compared to magical immortality after the fact, right? No risk. That's the central message you've just reinforced.
I hope you can have a better experience and find that many of those who claim what you have above are working along different lines from what they should be
Oh, it's not my experience you should be worried about. It's the kids that are being taught to believe in magic, and then have a truly fractured, self-contradictory view of the world messing with their cognitive development through the most important, formative years of their life. Those are the experiences to worry about. Because they're going to be told that there is a benevolent, omnicient being who loves them, and they're going to have to reconcile that with the fact that their little friend Timmy is dying in agony from cancer so that Mysterious Ways can be properly administered by that same all-powerful, loving being. That's hard stuff for a kid to deal with. Which it should be, of course, because it's utter nonsense.
but you still need to have faith that it your specific plane will be fine and that the pilot is good
... beyond reason, beyond mortal understanding, and beyond questioning. I understand how airplanes work, and could make an exhaustive study, personally, of the causal relationships between Canada Goose migration and bird-strike-related water landings in the Hudson. I can't predict the impact of all of the variables, but I can come to terms with the odds and the likely outcomes.
No. That is a calculated risk. However inaccurate the calculation by the average passenger, it's still a simple gamble, with the odds shown to be highly in their favor (against dying in a crash).
This is not the same as faith, because the people who sell faith specifically tell you that there is no risk, and that the entire topic is incalculable
This is not the same as believing in magic. Religious faith is believing in magic. It's a very different thing, with important implications pyschologically and philosophically. Magical thinking is a childish habit. Adults who insist on doing it are deliberately engaging in arrested development and in denial about the nature of the universe (because they don't have the intellectual honesty and courage to make their own meaning in the short lifespan they've got to work with). Holding your fingers in your ears and saying, "La la la! I can't hear reality! La la la!" is not the same as making a very reasonable gamble with your life and getting in an airplane, or even out of bed in the morning.
sub prime mortgages? housing bubble?
You're kidding, right? The ONLY reason there were so many sub-prime mortgages was because the government created them, through regulation. The whole mess was a direct result of the government essentially mandating that lenders give insane loans to people who couldn't possibly afford them. The huge wash of nonsense easy housing loans directly drove up the price of residential real estate, causing the bubble. And of course, it collapsed because it was never there in the first place.
Of course the results might not have been so bad if the entities pushing the loans (Fannie/Freddie) had the capital to weather the storm. You'll recall the Bush administration going before congress to warn that those two were wildly under-capitalized, and that they either needed more cash set aside, or needed to quit backing BS loans. Of course, you know who shouted that down (see Barney Frank, the wise Democrat in charge of the oversight committee). Do a little Googling, and you can see video of him lecturing the Bush administration about how Fannie was just fine, thank you, and should actually increase the number of loans it guaranteed to people with little income to actually pay for them.
we've never had real regulation because we always compromise with the capitalists
Yeah, we're going to have to look for another example, where the regulatory authority has all of the necessary power. I know! Hugo Chavez. There you go. He's just found that another 34 radio stations needed to be regulated off the air because they weren't towing his line, and dared to question some of his policies. He's just indicated that any reporters questioning the government's actions will be jailed. There, some nice, solid, uncompromising requlatary power in action.
Let's see... oh, I've another one! Joseph Stalin, hard at work centrally regulating the eeevil market place. He had a few rough spots to work out early on though, so a few million people had to die. But after that, that centrally managed economy just worked wonders, didn't it? Fantastic.
I would far prefer to read stories from people directly concerned
Ah, so you prefer the White House press secretary's spin over a professional investigator/reporter actually bothering to ask how something is going to paid for?
I'll never understand why people who don't want to pay real journalists think that the Hugo Chavez model is superior. Actually, maybe there is a pattern there. It's always the lefty nut jobs who bitch about having to pay for content creation, and who also bitch about not having enough control over the media or over other people's voices (I'm particularly amused, this week, by the Democratic National Committee running ads that call people who get together and complain out loud about the prospects of Obamacare "an angry mob" - the irony is fantastic, coming from a "community organizer" - and about the White House asking to have "fishy" emails on the topic forwarded to them for a once over). But Hugo's got your answer! Government control over the media. He just shut down another couple dozen radio stations (which were operating profitably, thank you very much) because they were originating their own content, and not repeating the words of the "directly concerned" Chavez. He also mentioned that anyone who acts like a reporter and criticizes his government will be going to jail. Ah, the left's strange and wonderful relationship with media. It's all about freedom of expression for them, and freedom from expression by anyone else.