but nobody else in broadcast media working on an out-and-out agenda at the scale that Fox works
True. Their agenda is to be a minor counter-balance to the plainly left leaning agenda of news/talk provided by CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, PBS, NYT, LAT, WAPO, and all the rest. So, that's a good agenda, in that it at least provides a small bit of push-back, and brings up a few stories that simply don't get any attention elsewhere. So what if they have an agenda? It's completely drowned out by the rest of 'em anyway, so you've surely got no worries.
Ah. So the point is that it now takes two incomes to live substantially better, or just the one income if you want to live like it used to be - which nobody does. Got it.
Leaving aside irrelevant examples from previous generations
Why are they irrelevant, if they exactly mirror the same procedures and motivations today? They serve as good examples of how tearing down an aggressive, murderous thugocracy like Saddam's doesn't happen in one day, and it takes years for the people who lived under such a regime to develop a sustainable, democratic replacement. Which is exactly why Germany and Japan are worth mentioning. Did you think that those countries had viable economies and nice warm and fuzzy, efficient, level-headed governments running immediately after they were decapitated for their beligerant, expansionist, slaughtering ways? Why are you so anxious to ignore history, instead of learn from it? Ah, I see. Because history suggests that appeasing murderous totalitarians has a way of costing millions of lives, and you'd love to ignore that.
Who was Iraq threatening when it was conquered, how, and with what?
Just ask the guys in the patrolling aircraft who were being shot at every week. You know, the patrols that were being flown to keep Saddam from killing hundreds of thousands of more people in the north and south. How? How about with the long range missiles he continued to build? How about with the large stores of nasty stuff like VX that UN inspectors knew to be there, but which were a complete mystery, in terms of their disposition? Saddam's deliberate policy was to make sure that people in Israel and Iran thought he had a large arsenal of viable, ready-to-use WMDs. His conventional forces took a serious spanking when he invaded Kuwait, and he was desparate to be able to project power in non-conventional ways. A hobbled Republican Guard or not, though, it didn't stop them from firing on the very aircraft he agreed to allow to patrol the no-fly zones, and it didn't stop him from making a public display of sending cash to groups sponsoring terrorist bombers and training facilities (on TV, no less!). And of course it didn't stop him from doing international weapons trade with fine partners like North Korea - especially on missle hardware.
Also along the lines of "with what" - don't forget the millions and millions in cash skimmed off of the Oil For Food program, and used to rebuild his military (and gold plate the doorknobs in more palaces - but that's more of an assault on good taste, despite starving his own people to do it).
And also along the lines of "how," of course, was the sustained, deliberate obfuscation of weapons destruction records and the blocking of inspectors at every turn. He wasn't just hiding a few things, he was deliberately making it clear that he was hiding things - because he knew that only the knowledge that he had WMDs and the means and willingness to use them could keep him in power.
Is it better to live in a violent primitive Islamic tribal proconsulate than a stable advanced secular dictatorship?
Nice false dichotomy, there. Regardless: the primitive Islamic tribal proconsulate you seem to prefer (though it's not obvious why you like the way the Taliban treats, say, women who teach their daughters to read) was exactly the sort of spot where Al Queda found a happy home, and trained thousands of busy little bomb builders and murderers. The people trained in that environment are exactly the folks who, through connections in Pakistan, reach out to and recruit/fund the charming guys who do things like blow up train stations in London or Madrid. The dictatorship you see as the only other option doesn't really seem to be a problem in, say, Iraq. Or Turkey. It's actually dangerous dictatorships like Saddams (now gone) or Iran's (now getting crazier by the minute, and building nukes) that are the very reason to support democracy in places like Iraq. Because only the people in Iran can shut down the crazy mullahs who run that theocratic horror show, and they need to see that honest elections and a constitutional democracy can work.
is as much a necessity today as a phone line was back in the 1980s
Yes, and having a phone line for your house - with your own phone number - would have been considered a fantasy luxury only forty years before that. Do you sense a pattern, here?
as the economy has expanded, the wealthy have taken the lion's share of the increase
Also an eternal state of affairs: the people who risk money to grow something usually are the ones that get the most visible return on that investment. They're also the ones who (more often) lose that investment, since most business ventures fail. Of course you prefer to ignore those, since it's not as fun for you.
Obviously you prefer the sort of paradise that Hugo Chavez is nobly creating for his people. He's a big one for making sure that the proceeds from risk are taken away and given to somebody else, so you'd like it there. Unfortunately, you'd have to also like his particular taste in music and talk on the radio, since it turns out that he has to use violence and shut down the free press in order to make his redistribuitionist paradise "work" (if you can call it working). Of course, local politicians who encourage citizens to do little things like reach for a better life than the crumbs that Chavez is doling out have an unfortunate habit of being beaten and killed by the noble forces of The Pie Is Only One Size And We Kill People Who Try To Make It Bigger. But since you LIKE the idea of keeping the pie the same size, and just making every slice smaller and smaller as more babies are born, you'd probably sign right up help violently put down someone who'd dare to, say, start a business. Or, like Chavez, would you prefer they DID start a business, make it productive, and then simply take it away and give it to the State, only to wonder why it suddenly becomes mediocre, non-productive, and laden with corrupt bureaucrats?
Want to know who gets the biggest slice of the pie, really, in your redistributionist paradise? The entity you empower to take the money and dole it out. Of course you know that, and must just be quivering with delight at where the federal government in the US is headed right now. So many new unaccountable Czars! $4,500 towards a new car (we'll just take it from someone else, who isn't even born yet, so don't worry). Ah, these are good times. Can't wait for the massive new Public Option health insurance program that will cost trillions. It's OK, Pelosi swears we'll only need a "millionaire" tax - nobody else will have to pay anything. Fantastic!
So, really, you live exactly like middle class people forty years ago? You eat only canned vegetables during the winter, don't have cable tv, cell phones, or internet access? You won't use an MRI machine if you feel a tumor growing, and will let high blood pressure kill you instead of taking new drugs? You buy no movie tickets that cost more than the an hour's work at minimum wage? You avoid high-end antibiotics, and only have one (wired) telephone in your house? You consider steel belted radial tires to be a luxury? You hang your laundry on a line outside and repair your socks when they get holes? You where the same clothes for years? You live in a typical post-war house on an eighth of an acre, with a tiny kitchen, one bedroom (maybe two), and a living/dining room just big enough for a table and some chairs, watching your black-and-white vacuum tube TV?
In what way, really, are you living like typical 1950's middle class people? You're not. It's not comparable... because the WORLD isn't comparable.
I must tour a rural village powered by electric mud. I'll just hop in my flying car and be right over.
Do I even need to go into What Could Possibly Go Wrong mode when discussing the prospects of using electricity-generating bacteria to power medical devices implanted in your body?
You're still not going far enough. It needs to be a total reinvention. They should call themselves "The" and leave it at that. That way they can sell hot dogs, hubcaps, insurance, and massages, as necessary.
Compare the middle class standard of living to 40 years ago. If middle class people today were making what they make but willing to live like they were a few decades back, they'd be flush with cash. But instead, they have larger houses, multiple vehicles, magic wireless communications devices for everyone in the house, miraculous high speed access to an undreamt of trove of online information and entertainment, giant flatscreen TVs in more than one room, regular sips of designer coffee drinks, fresh out-of-season produce in an embarassment of varieties... need I go on? These are considered normal, every day things. Your 1950 economic dream household lived like paupers by comparison.
The problem isn't income (adjusted or otherwise), it's the expectation of having (and being entitled to have) things/services/experiences that are wildly beyond what someone in the middle class would have previously enjoyed. You know, like... central air conditioning. Or living past 80.
That is not "remaining stagnant," it's "spending every dollar you can get on new creature comforts that never before existed, livin like a king compared to the middle class of only a generation or two ago, and then complaining that you don't have enough cash left over to really live like a king compared to how you're living just this minute."
Nice rant, but it didn't have a thing to do with the GP's point.
If the point was that corporate farms sell unpleasant produce, and small farms don't, then yes, it does have something to do with it. Because that's an incorrect take on it the realities of the market.
I was speaking in terms of the huge conglomerate corporate farms
So how big is huge? A farm with 10 acres? 1,000? 10,000? Size has nothing to do with choice of harvest and shipping methods. Small farmers sometimes also sell their goods in exactly the same condition as very large farms. And some very large operations do a much better job with quick delivery of more perishable goods across greater distances than any smaller operation possibly could.
What I'm objecting to is the reflexive use of the word "corporate" to mean "inherently bad, no matter what." It's code, especially among the Slashdot Hipper-Than-Thou demographic, to mean "evil," without any connection to reality. I've dealt with plenty of actually evil small mom-and-pop vendors/retailers in my time. Corporateness has nothing to do with it, in and of itself, any more than size does. Businesses meet demands for a product. My grocery store has cheap (less good) tomatoes, and more expensive (quite good) tomatoes - both delievered to the store by large farming/distribution operations. They also carry locally grown tomatoes that are completely hit-or-miss in terms of quality.
they had all these heirloom varieties raised by people (not corporations)
Right, because there are no people that incorporate their farm business, or work for farmers who have incorporated their business. Incorporated businesses are Teh Evil!
So, when a husband and wife farming couple raise tomatoes you like, that's good. And when the same husband and wife hire a local teenager to help them pull weeds and water the plants, that's probably still OK with you, right? How about when the same husband and wife buy some insurance, just in case some kid wanders onto their property and lobotomizes himself on a wooden stake in their tomatoe patch? Is it evil to have insurance? No? How about when the husband and wife are told that unless they incorporate, they stand the real risk of that kid's parents suing them personally into oblivion, taking their house, and leaving them destitute, even if the kid who hurt himself on their property was trespassing?
So, they incorporate, to separate the farming activities from their personal household finances. Now they're paying corporate taxes, having to pay for separate bank accounts, legal and accounting services, etc. They (the same two people) are now Corporate Farmers. Man, that is really evil, isn't it? Those bastards. I'm sure their produce sucks, now.
No, the word smaller is entirely ambiguous in this case because it assumes that one thing is small (compared to what?), and another this is ten times more so. But if you don't have some baseline, the use of smaller ("more small than the first thing, which is already small, and here's why we consider it to be small...") makes no sense. Use of "smaller" presumes familiarity with the overall scale of things, and why the two sizes in question mean something, in relation to the larger framework. If you don't want to include thinking or discussion about the overall spectrum of sizes in your communication, then just say what you actually mean, which is "it's one tenth the size." Is that so hard?
The fuss is over the fact that saying something is 10 times smaller than something else means that the thing you're comparing it to is, itself, already considered small. But compared to what? It's meaningless. Shorter, and more accurate to simply say "it's a tenth the size."
People drag out the "ten times..." type stuff when they're trying to sensationalize something that's... not sensational. It's like some sophomore trying to add words to an essay that has to be a certain length. It's hollow, and obscures rather than clarifies anything that's being said. It's childish, and chips away at critical thinking and clarity of expression. And it's not like it's easier to type "ten times small than" instead of "a tenth the size of"... so there's no excuse for this.
It's the same sort of cognitive laziness that has people saying "I could care less" when they actually mean (and should say) the opposite. Is the extra semi-syllable in "couldn't" really such a price to pay for actually saying what you mean, instead of the opposite of what you mean? Meh. It's all part of the wider infantilization of our culture. It's the reason why so many people can't be bothered to wonder how their magical new healthcare program is going to be paid for... thinking and communicating is hard! Somebody else should do it!
Just to be a jerk myself for a moment, what entitles her to any of the $2.5 million he earned as a lawyer and through his investments anyway?
There's no way to know without getting boringly into the details of their divorce. Let's face it: some spouses are cruel idiots. It goes both ways. For all we know, she brought more money to the marriage than he did, and he spent it all, while hiding his own stuff overseas. It's not worth guessing. The point is that the judge in the case thought it was important to know about the assets in question, and the guy's being coy about it, to a fault.
If you want to fight crime, fight the reasons to commit it. Unless you're willing to do that, punishment will be no deterrent. It will serve as an act of revenge, it will serve as a tool to ensure the same person will not commit it again, but you will not turn anyone who didn't commit it yet away from it.
So in this case, where a guy was either hiding money from his wife, or refusing to show the judge any evidence that he lost it in the bad investments he says took away his $2.5 million, you're suggesting that society just needs to change the underlying problem? Which problem is that, exactly? That women getting a divorce are allowed to go after assets in the marriage? Or that the guy's quite possibly a dick? I see.
In most cases it isn't really a competition, one company gets and area and has it has a monopoly.
Every place I've ever lived there were many trash removal companies, and fierce competition. Some people down county from me have public pickup. Theirs is only once a week, and the pickup crew will only take some things, not others, and are notoriously obnoxious. The private company that does my development won the bid this year, and are anxious to continue to provide the services next year... so they bust their balls to do a terrific job. They know that if they're too expensive or don't do a good, polite, clean, quiet job, they'll get dumped for any of the dozen other companies clamboring to do the work.
So, happily we don't have to deal with the tax-burdened, extra-bureaucracy, politicians-involved, jerky, too-costly, limited performance government variety (even though it might make some of the county's leftier residents happy to put more work under government control, and make the residents more dependent on the government) - instead, we get to watch the market scramble to provide the best services for the best price, and continue to scramble to do so, year in and year out. And no need to in-efficiently collect taxes for the work, launder it through government budgeting and allocation, and chase it around through more government workers to an agency that in turn has to use hugely complex contracting laws to hire four guys and a truck.
So... any business entity that provides a "social necessity" is, thus, an example of socialism hard and successfully at work?
How about food? I buy all of mine from private businesses that compete for my money.
How about trash removal? Where I live, it's handled by private companies that compete for my money.
How about fuel to heat houses and move vehicles? I don't think society would work too well without those private provided commodities.
If the service was not socialized then small communicates will either not be served or would have to pay more to send (or even receive) a letter.
Small communities are not served the same way as more urban areas with more customers. In rural towns, people who want to send and receive mail must, themselves, travel to a post office. In some cases, that can take hours. Shipping parcels? Not all areas are served the same way, or even close to it. Timeliness of deliveries? Depends on where you are. If you don't want to live in an easily served market, you have to live with the consequences of having different priorities. And that's reflected in the varying levels of service that the USPS provides, and the different prices they charge. This is becoming more true by the year. Especially as the very-important-to-society internet (brought to end users' homes by private companies!) makes paper mail less vital.
So, the USPS is self-funded, relying on delivering services in highly competitive market in order to pay their bills. They have a variety of positions to fill, and offer fairly modest salaries combined with fairly aggressive benefits packages in order to attract and retain workers who could just go somewhere else.
How is this socialism? Other than, obviously, the government controlling the prices they're allowed to charge, and thus limiting their ability to more gracefully meet certain costs. So it's not socialism - it's a business running in a market, and managing to hang on by its teeth despite an especially burdensome regulatory millstone around its neck.
Ya know, the best way to 'manage' natural resources is to leave them the fuck alone
Excellent idea. So, you're suggesting that all of the humans in the world are rounded up into spots on the planet that do not have natural resources (like, dirt, plants, or water - you know, resources), and have them stand perfectly still until they die. Of course, 6 billion rotting corpses will impact the local natural resources... hmmm. Maybe make some sort of oven or something to cook them all in, and the very last person who's daring to breath (and use up those natural oxygen resouces!) can make sure that the carbon sequestration is working right before killing himself, too. But, man... where to operate all of those disposal facilities? Whaddya do with billions of people?
Yeah, that would be a bit dramatic, wouldn't it. I know... let's force sterilization on everyone that doesn't see things exactly your way, and then you can be free of any further ethical fussiness. Well, except that the ones you keep alive (who will continue to insist on doing things like drinking water, urinating, and eating stuff that grows in the dirt) may actually give birth to some kids that, again, won't see things your way. You'll have to decide how to dispose of them, too.
Oh, and don't forget the ants. They are forever re-arranging the local natural resources. Piling up dirt over here, moving organic debris from one place to another, respirating... the nerve! And beavers. Don't forget the beavers. You're going to have to decide how you're going to certify specific beavers as being sufficiently thoughtful about what streams they back up, which local grasses and small mammals they drown, and which beautiful trees they knock down just so they can have a snack and build a new house - one that's no doubt a big, rodent version of an evil McMansion. The beavers that aren't towing the line? Kill 'em. Likewise with birds that pluck the wrong grasses out when making nests. Birds are notorious for not keeping Earth Mother Gaia first and foremost in their minds when they reproduce, poop on things, and eat seeds that could be making new plants. The bastards.
how about you just stop throwing millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere???
Hey! Nice dodge, there. Excellent way to avoid the topic. It's not a fine. It's a tax, and it's being called one by the very people who are proposing that model, so you might as well just relax and enjoy it. It's a tax, and everyone (including people who earn less than $250k!) will be paying it.
even cheaper if you don't bother rushing things like medical aid or water to the survivors after these events occur (but i see people like you already thought of that).
Oh, I see. You're a history-revising partisan. That explains a few things.
Do you have any evidence for this assertion? At all?
Just the ruling party's discussions, this very past week, about now being open to taxing health care benefits (except for union members, of course, since we all know who they vote for), and the "cap-and-trade" legislation which is a tax on everyone and everything in the economy.
To say nothing of the very real tax that is future interest on trillions of dollars in new deficit spending - an amount that dwarfs the combined deficit spending of the last six administrations, even during wartime. Or vote-buying pork on which the recent profits on the re-paid TARP funds from banks are about to be spent, rather tha returned to the tax payers in whose names the money was borrowed from the Chinese. Remember how He was telling us that He hoped the bank subsidies would even return a profit for the taxpayers? He forgot to mention that those profits would be redirected to highly localized district spending under the watchful eye of congressional representatives in His party, rather than being used to chip away at the deficit.
When the people who just promised you that they wouldn't do anything to cost you more money actually do so many things in eight weeks that will cost you more money - for decades to come - you don't see how that's going to impact your personal bottom line? Still, the prevailing movement to consider treating your health insurance benefits as taxable income in order to fund a trillion or so in Obamacare spending - that's the juicy one.
I disagree with your hypothesis. Swearing when you're alone helps alleviate pain as well.
Swearing when you're alone is only swearing because... you think of it as swearing. Which means that the part of your brain that's choosing and using those words is doing it in that context: knowing that they're words set aside for a specific sort of expression.
Slashdot Mirror
but nobody else in broadcast media working on an out-and-out agenda at the scale that Fox works
True. Their agenda is to be a minor counter-balance to the plainly left leaning agenda of news/talk provided by CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, PBS, NYT, LAT, WAPO, and all the rest. So, that's a good agenda, in that it at least provides a small bit of push-back, and brings up a few stories that simply don't get any attention elsewhere. So what if they have an agenda? It's completely drowned out by the rest of 'em anyway, so you've surely got no worries.
Ah. So the point is that it now takes two incomes to live substantially better, or just the one income if you want to live like it used to be - which nobody does. Got it.
Leaving aside irrelevant examples from previous generations
Why are they irrelevant, if they exactly mirror the same procedures and motivations today? They serve as good examples of how tearing down an aggressive, murderous thugocracy like Saddam's doesn't happen in one day, and it takes years for the people who lived under such a regime to develop a sustainable, democratic replacement. Which is exactly why Germany and Japan are worth mentioning. Did you think that those countries had viable economies and nice warm and fuzzy, efficient, level-headed governments running immediately after they were decapitated for their beligerant, expansionist, slaughtering ways? Why are you so anxious to ignore history, instead of learn from it? Ah, I see. Because history suggests that appeasing murderous totalitarians has a way of costing millions of lives, and you'd love to ignore that.
Who was Iraq threatening when it was conquered, how, and with what?
Just ask the guys in the patrolling aircraft who were being shot at every week. You know, the patrols that were being flown to keep Saddam from killing hundreds of thousands of more people in the north and south. How? How about with the long range missiles he continued to build? How about with the large stores of nasty stuff like VX that UN inspectors knew to be there, but which were a complete mystery, in terms of their disposition? Saddam's deliberate policy was to make sure that people in Israel and Iran thought he had a large arsenal of viable, ready-to-use WMDs. His conventional forces took a serious spanking when he invaded Kuwait, and he was desparate to be able to project power in non-conventional ways. A hobbled Republican Guard or not, though, it didn't stop them from firing on the very aircraft he agreed to allow to patrol the no-fly zones, and it didn't stop him from making a public display of sending cash to groups sponsoring terrorist bombers and training facilities (on TV, no less!). And of course it didn't stop him from doing international weapons trade with fine partners like North Korea - especially on missle hardware.
Also along the lines of "with what" - don't forget the millions and millions in cash skimmed off of the Oil For Food program, and used to rebuild his military (and gold plate the doorknobs in more palaces - but that's more of an assault on good taste, despite starving his own people to do it).
And also along the lines of "how," of course, was the sustained, deliberate obfuscation of weapons destruction records and the blocking of inspectors at every turn. He wasn't just hiding a few things, he was deliberately making it clear that he was hiding things - because he knew that only the knowledge that he had WMDs and the means and willingness to use them could keep him in power.
Is it better to live in a violent primitive Islamic tribal proconsulate than a stable advanced secular dictatorship?
Nice false dichotomy, there. Regardless: the primitive Islamic tribal proconsulate you seem to prefer (though it's not obvious why you like the way the Taliban treats, say, women who teach their daughters to read) was exactly the sort of spot where Al Queda found a happy home, and trained thousands of busy little bomb builders and murderers. The people trained in that environment are exactly the folks who, through connections in Pakistan, reach out to and recruit/fund the charming guys who do things like blow up train stations in London or Madrid. The dictatorship you see as the only other option doesn't really seem to be a problem in, say, Iraq. Or Turkey. It's actually dangerous dictatorships like Saddams (now gone) or Iran's (now getting crazier by the minute, and building nukes) that are the very reason to support democracy in places like Iraq. Because only the people in Iran can shut down the crazy mullahs who run that theocratic horror show, and they need to see that honest elections and a constitutional democracy can work.
I'm pretty sure
is as much a necessity today as a phone line was back in the 1980s
Yes, and having a phone line for your house - with your own phone number - would have been considered a fantasy luxury only forty years before that. Do you sense a pattern, here?
as the economy has expanded, the wealthy have taken the lion's share of the increase
Also an eternal state of affairs: the people who risk money to grow something usually are the ones that get the most visible return on that investment. They're also the ones who (more often) lose that investment, since most business ventures fail. Of course you prefer to ignore those, since it's not as fun for you.
Obviously you prefer the sort of paradise that Hugo Chavez is nobly creating for his people. He's a big one for making sure that the proceeds from risk are taken away and given to somebody else, so you'd like it there. Unfortunately, you'd have to also like his particular taste in music and talk on the radio, since it turns out that he has to use violence and shut down the free press in order to make his redistribuitionist paradise "work" (if you can call it working). Of course, local politicians who encourage citizens to do little things like reach for a better life than the crumbs that Chavez is doling out have an unfortunate habit of being beaten and killed by the noble forces of The Pie Is Only One Size And We Kill People Who Try To Make It Bigger. But since you LIKE the idea of keeping the pie the same size, and just making every slice smaller and smaller as more babies are born, you'd probably sign right up help violently put down someone who'd dare to, say, start a business. Or, like Chavez, would you prefer they DID start a business, make it productive, and then simply take it away and give it to the State, only to wonder why it suddenly becomes mediocre, non-productive, and laden with corrupt bureaucrats?
Want to know who gets the biggest slice of the pie, really, in your redistributionist paradise? The entity you empower to take the money and dole it out. Of course you know that, and must just be quivering with delight at where the federal government in the US is headed right now. So many new unaccountable Czars! $4,500 towards a new car (we'll just take it from someone else, who isn't even born yet, so don't worry). Ah, these are good times. Can't wait for the massive new Public Option health insurance program that will cost trillions. It's OK, Pelosi swears we'll only need a "millionaire" tax - nobody else will have to pay anything. Fantastic!
So, really, you live exactly like middle class people forty years ago? You eat only canned vegetables during the winter, don't have cable tv, cell phones, or internet access? You won't use an MRI machine if you feel a tumor growing, and will let high blood pressure kill you instead of taking new drugs? You buy no movie tickets that cost more than the an hour's work at minimum wage? You avoid high-end antibiotics, and only have one (wired) telephone in your house? You consider steel belted radial tires to be a luxury? You hang your laundry on a line outside and repair your socks when they get holes? You where the same clothes for years? You live in a typical post-war house on an eighth of an acre, with a tiny kitchen, one bedroom (maybe two), and a living/dining room just big enough for a table and some chairs, watching your black-and-white vacuum tube TV?
In what way, really, are you living like typical 1950's middle class people? You're not. It's not comparable... because the WORLD isn't comparable.
I must tour a rural village powered by electric mud. I'll just hop in my flying car and be right over.
Do I even need to go into What Could Possibly Go Wrong mode when discussing the prospects of using electricity-generating bacteria to power medical devices implanted in your body?
You're still not going far enough. It needs to be a total reinvention. They should call themselves "The" and leave it at that. That way they can sell hot dogs, hubcaps, insurance, and massages, as necessary.
Then you, as you clearly must know, are well outside the norm, as the term "middle class" is now generally used.
the middle class has remained stagnant
Bullshit.
Compare the middle class standard of living to 40 years ago. If middle class people today were making what they make but willing to live like they were a few decades back, they'd be flush with cash. But instead, they have larger houses, multiple vehicles, magic wireless communications devices for everyone in the house, miraculous high speed access to an undreamt of trove of online information and entertainment, giant flatscreen TVs in more than one room, regular sips of designer coffee drinks, fresh out-of-season produce in an embarassment of varieties... need I go on? These are considered normal, every day things. Your 1950 economic dream household lived like paupers by comparison.
The problem isn't income (adjusted or otherwise), it's the expectation of having (and being entitled to have) things/services/experiences that are wildly beyond what someone in the middle class would have previously enjoyed. You know, like... central air conditioning. Or living past 80.
That is not "remaining stagnant," it's "spending every dollar you can get on new creature comforts that never before existed, livin like a king compared to the middle class of only a generation or two ago, and then complaining that you don't have enough cash left over to really live like a king compared to how you're living just this minute."
Nice rant, but it didn't have a thing to do with the GP's point.
If the point was that corporate farms sell unpleasant produce, and small farms don't, then yes, it does have something to do with it. Because that's an incorrect take on it the realities of the market.
I was speaking in terms of the huge conglomerate corporate farms
So how big is huge? A farm with 10 acres? 1,000? 10,000? Size has nothing to do with choice of harvest and shipping methods. Small farmers sometimes also sell their goods in exactly the same condition as very large farms. And some very large operations do a much better job with quick delivery of more perishable goods across greater distances than any smaller operation possibly could.
What I'm objecting to is the reflexive use of the word "corporate" to mean "inherently bad, no matter what." It's code, especially among the Slashdot Hipper-Than-Thou demographic, to mean "evil," without any connection to reality. I've dealt with plenty of actually evil small mom-and-pop vendors/retailers in my time. Corporateness has nothing to do with it, in and of itself, any more than size does. Businesses meet demands for a product. My grocery store has cheap (less good) tomatoes, and more expensive (quite good) tomatoes - both delievered to the store by large farming/distribution operations. They also carry locally grown tomatoes that are completely hit-or-miss in terms of quality.
they had all these heirloom varieties raised by people (not corporations)
Right, because there are no people that incorporate their farm business, or work for farmers who have incorporated their business. Incorporated businesses are Teh Evil!
So, when a husband and wife farming couple raise tomatoes you like, that's good. And when the same husband and wife hire a local teenager to help them pull weeds and water the plants, that's probably still OK with you, right? How about when the same husband and wife buy some insurance, just in case some kid wanders onto their property and lobotomizes himself on a wooden stake in their tomatoe patch? Is it evil to have insurance? No? How about when the husband and wife are told that unless they incorporate, they stand the real risk of that kid's parents suing them personally into oblivion, taking their house, and leaving them destitute, even if the kid who hurt himself on their property was trespassing?
So, they incorporate, to separate the farming activities from their personal household finances. Now they're paying corporate taxes, having to pay for separate bank accounts, legal and accounting services, etc. They (the same two people) are now Corporate Farmers. Man, that is really evil, isn't it? Those bastards. I'm sure their produce sucks, now.
It's perfectly unambigious
No, the word smaller is entirely ambiguous in this case because it assumes that one thing is small (compared to what?), and another this is ten times more so. But if you don't have some baseline, the use of smaller ("more small than the first thing, which is already small, and here's why we consider it to be small...") makes no sense. Use of "smaller" presumes familiarity with the overall scale of things, and why the two sizes in question mean something, in relation to the larger framework. If you don't want to include thinking or discussion about the overall spectrum of sizes in your communication, then just say what you actually mean, which is "it's one tenth the size." Is that so hard?
I don't quite see what the fuss is all about?
... so there's no excuse for this.
The fuss is over the fact that saying something is 10 times smaller than something else means that the thing you're comparing it to is, itself, already considered small. But compared to what? It's meaningless. Shorter, and more accurate to simply say "it's a tenth the size."
People drag out the "ten times..." type stuff when they're trying to sensationalize something that's... not sensational. It's like some sophomore trying to add words to an essay that has to be a certain length. It's hollow, and obscures rather than clarifies anything that's being said. It's childish, and chips away at critical thinking and clarity of expression. And it's not like it's easier to type "ten times small than" instead of "a tenth the size of"
It's the same sort of cognitive laziness that has people saying "I could care less" when they actually mean (and should say) the opposite. Is the extra semi-syllable in "couldn't" really such a price to pay for actually saying what you mean, instead of the opposite of what you mean? Meh. It's all part of the wider infantilization of our culture. It's the reason why so many people can't be bothered to wonder how their magical new healthcare program is going to be paid for... thinking and communicating is hard! Somebody else should do it!
Just to be a jerk myself for a moment, what entitles her to any of the $2.5 million he earned as a lawyer and through his investments anyway?
There's no way to know without getting boringly into the details of their divorce. Let's face it: some spouses are cruel idiots. It goes both ways. For all we know, she brought more money to the marriage than he did, and he spent it all, while hiding his own stuff overseas. It's not worth guessing. The point is that the judge in the case thought it was important to know about the assets in question, and the guy's being coy about it, to a fault.
If you want to fight crime, fight the reasons to commit it. Unless you're willing to do that, punishment will be no deterrent. It will serve as an act of revenge, it will serve as a tool to ensure the same person will not commit it again, but you will not turn anyone who didn't commit it yet away from it.
So in this case, where a guy was either hiding money from his wife, or refusing to show the judge any evidence that he lost it in the bad investments he says took away his $2.5 million, you're suggesting that society just needs to change the underlying problem? Which problem is that, exactly? That women getting a divorce are allowed to go after assets in the marriage? Or that the guy's quite possibly a dick? I see.
In most cases it isn't really a competition, one company gets and area and has it has a monopoly.
Every place I've ever lived there were many trash removal companies, and fierce competition. Some people down county from me have public pickup. Theirs is only once a week, and the pickup crew will only take some things, not others, and are notoriously obnoxious. The private company that does my development won the bid this year, and are anxious to continue to provide the services next year... so they bust their balls to do a terrific job. They know that if they're too expensive or don't do a good, polite, clean, quiet job, they'll get dumped for any of the dozen other companies clamboring to do the work.
So, happily we don't have to deal with the tax-burdened, extra-bureaucracy, politicians-involved, jerky, too-costly, limited performance government variety (even though it might make some of the county's leftier residents happy to put more work under government control, and make the residents more dependent on the government) - instead, we get to watch the market scramble to provide the best services for the best price, and continue to scramble to do so, year in and year out. And no need to in-efficiently collect taxes for the work, launder it through government budgeting and allocation, and chase it around through more government workers to an agency that in turn has to use hugely complex contracting laws to hire four guys and a truck.
Because it provides a social necessity.
So... any business entity that provides a "social necessity" is, thus, an example of socialism hard and successfully at work?
How about food? I buy all of mine from private businesses that compete for my money.
How about trash removal? Where I live, it's handled by private companies that compete for my money.
How about fuel to heat houses and move vehicles? I don't think society would work too well without those private provided commodities.
If the service was not socialized then small communicates will either not be served or would have to pay more to send (or even receive) a letter.
Small communities are not served the same way as more urban areas with more customers. In rural towns, people who want to send and receive mail must, themselves, travel to a post office. In some cases, that can take hours. Shipping parcels? Not all areas are served the same way, or even close to it. Timeliness of deliveries? Depends on where you are. If you don't want to live in an easily served market, you have to live with the consequences of having different priorities. And that's reflected in the varying levels of service that the USPS provides, and the different prices they charge. This is becoming more true by the year. Especially as the very-important-to-society internet (brought to end users' homes by private companies!) makes paper mail less vital.
"Socialism" can work
So, the USPS is self-funded, relying on delivering services in highly competitive market in order to pay their bills. They have a variety of positions to fill, and offer fairly modest salaries combined with fairly aggressive benefits packages in order to attract and retain workers who could just go somewhere else.
How is this socialism? Other than, obviously, the government controlling the prices they're allowed to charge, and thus limiting their ability to more gracefully meet certain costs. So it's not socialism - it's a business running in a market, and managing to hang on by its teeth despite an especially burdensome regulatory millstone around its neck.
Ya know, the best way to 'manage' natural resources is to leave them the fuck alone
Excellent idea. So, you're suggesting that all of the humans in the world are rounded up into spots on the planet that do not have natural resources (like, dirt, plants, or water - you know, resources), and have them stand perfectly still until they die. Of course, 6 billion rotting corpses will impact the local natural resources... hmmm. Maybe make some sort of oven or something to cook them all in, and the very last person who's daring to breath (and use up those natural oxygen resouces!) can make sure that the carbon sequestration is working right before killing himself, too. But, man... where to operate all of those disposal facilities? Whaddya do with billions of people?
Yeah, that would be a bit dramatic, wouldn't it. I know... let's force sterilization on everyone that doesn't see things exactly your way, and then you can be free of any further ethical fussiness. Well, except that the ones you keep alive (who will continue to insist on doing things like drinking water, urinating, and eating stuff that grows in the dirt) may actually give birth to some kids that, again, won't see things your way. You'll have to decide how to dispose of them, too.
Oh, and don't forget the ants. They are forever re-arranging the local natural resources. Piling up dirt over here, moving organic debris from one place to another, respirating... the nerve! And beavers. Don't forget the beavers. You're going to have to decide how you're going to certify specific beavers as being sufficiently thoughtful about what streams they back up, which local grasses and small mammals they drown, and which beautiful trees they knock down just so they can have a snack and build a new house - one that's no doubt a big, rodent version of an evil McMansion. The beavers that aren't towing the line? Kill 'em. Likewise with birds that pluck the wrong grasses out when making nests. Birds are notorious for not keeping Earth Mother Gaia first and foremost in their minds when they reproduce, poop on things, and eat seeds that could be making new plants. The bastards.
how about you just stop throwing millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere???
Hey! Nice dodge, there. Excellent way to avoid the topic. It's not a fine. It's a tax, and it's being called one by the very people who are proposing that model, so you might as well just relax and enjoy it. It's a tax, and everyone (including people who earn less than $250k!) will be paying it.
even cheaper if you don't bother rushing things like medical aid or water to the survivors after these events occur (but i see people like you already thought of that).
Oh, I see. You're a history-revising partisan. That explains a few things.
None of which matters, because Fairey has already said that he derived his painting from Garcia's photograph. That much isn't even in question.
So in other words, you're counting pretty much any economic policy you don't like as a tax. Right.
... tax, shall we? What with it being, you know, a tax on your compensation for working.
Taxing your employee health care benefits? Let's call that a
Taxing carbon use? Let's see... sure, let's call that a tax increase, too. What with it being, you know, a tax and whatnot.
Do you have any evidence for this assertion? At all?
Just the ruling party's discussions, this very past week, about now being open to taxing health care benefits (except for union members, of course, since we all know who they vote for), and the "cap-and-trade" legislation which is a tax on everyone and everything in the economy.
To say nothing of the very real tax that is future interest on trillions of dollars in new deficit spending - an amount that dwarfs the combined deficit spending of the last six administrations, even during wartime. Or vote-buying pork on which the recent profits on the re-paid TARP funds from banks are about to be spent, rather tha returned to the tax payers in whose names the money was borrowed from the Chinese. Remember how He was telling us that He hoped the bank subsidies would even return a profit for the taxpayers? He forgot to mention that those profits would be redirected to highly localized district spending under the watchful eye of congressional representatives in His party, rather than being used to chip away at the deficit.
When the people who just promised you that they wouldn't do anything to cost you more money actually do so many things in eight weeks that will cost you more money - for decades to come - you don't see how that's going to impact your personal bottom line? Still, the prevailing movement to consider treating your health insurance benefits as taxable income in order to fund a trillion or so in Obamacare spending - that's the juicy one.
I disagree with your hypothesis. Swearing when you're alone helps alleviate pain as well.
Swearing when you're alone is only swearing because... you think of it as swearing. Which means that the part of your brain that's choosing and using those words is doing it in that context: knowing that they're words set aside for a specific sort of expression.