He is essentially opening the possibility of there being a creator who designed the universe to appear naturally occurring.
No. He's not saying that's any more likely that a naturally occurring universe in which a naturally occurring person runs a simulation that might look just like our universe. That simulation would be a feature of a naturally occurring universe occupied by a naturally occurring simulation-running resident.
Well that's fine, as long as you're on the record saying that you have no sense of reality whatsoever. Freedom to live is similar to being killed if you try to leave. Gotcha.
Orwell wrote a book about people exactly like you.
Are you even listening to yourself? So they pay it, but not really. What you're saying is that Mitt Romney was actually correct. Thanks for agreeing that the facts are the facts.
Really? You consider "feel free to leave our country" and "if you try to leave, we'll shoot you with a machine gun" to be different only in degree? That would be amusing if the consequences of that sort of deluded thinking weren't so serious.
You're just making stuff up. Nobody decides to be a cab driver because of some phony narrative that you're saying a cab company is telling them. Everybody involved is crystal clear on what it means to own a cab company, and work for one. Nobody is forced to work for one. Or forced to use what Uber is offering to do some of that work on the fly when it suits somebody to do so.
Slavery, specifically, is something that humanity decided in the 1800s was something that we were not going to socially support and it's been declared illegal worldwide and there's no sign we're going to reverse that anytime soon
Well, not counting the many countries where it's widely practiced. Or the large, well-financed religious movement occupying swaths of the middle east where slavery is not only tolerated, but celebrated (and supported by people and cash from people across the globe, including in Europe and North America). And then there's the matter of defining "slavery." Does it mean "being compelled to work for other people without compensation?" If so, then you could lump, for example, the half of the country that pays no income tax into the group of people who are enjoying part-time slavery on the part of the people who DO pay income taxes.
The difference is that collectivist/communist/socialist operations can only function (until they inevitably run out of other people's money) through the use of force. That authoritarianism is baked into those collectivist systems.
Right. The nationalization of industries, stuff like that - nothing at all to do with Marxism.
And those countries with the "highest quality of life" because of their highest wealth distribution? They're financially floundering in the face of what it's like to suddenly deal with the multicultural issues and wider spectrum of skills (or lack of them) that countries like the US have had to deal with (as a nation if immigrants since day one) for much longer. The fact that you even use phrases like "free health service" shows how completely disingenuous you're being. There is no free. You can choose to buy services, or you can be forced to buy them (or buy them for somebody else). But "free?" Do you even listen to yourself?
Really? Who's blinded - me, or the guy who's asserting that living under the Soviets in East Germany was better than living free in the west? Be specific. Address the assertions that the west was - as mentioned - more corrupt, more polluted than the counterparts run under regimes like the Soviets. Please, do inform. Obviously you won't be involving ideology, just the facts. Right? Right.
My use of the east-vs-west Germany comparison is based on knowing people (of the age bracket you mentioned as well as younger and older) who lived in both places, and more. How many people do you know from Romania? From what used to be Yugoslavia? From Ukraine? From Estonia? From Latvia? From across Russia? Let's say you've encountered lots of them - people in their 20's, 30's, 40's,... 60's, 70's. If that were actually the case, you'd have no intellectually honest way to say that talking to them would paint life under Soviet rule, in that idyllic socialized economy as being even a pale shadow of the quality of life and prosperity created by Horrible West and their Eeeeevil market economies. If you claim to have personal knowledge of people who lived through all of that and say that they're telling you it was better than living in the west... let's face it, you're not being honest.
You don't know a single thing about what I know. And resorting to pointing out how cities are NOW shows that you're anxious to avoid the actual topic at hand: how did life in the East compare to life in the West when the two were run by the two very different social systems we're discussing? Not today. Rewind thirty or forty years and look at it in the proper context, where you can really see the glorious quality of life offered up by that collectivist paradise.
Try comparing with Scandinavia for example They live better lives than you do.
Because they operate under conditions that the US (for example) doesn't have. And the Scandinavians are quickly finding out what it's like to have to deal with very similar problems, and how that makes their systems less and less viable. The eventual uselessness of things like the North Sea off-shore oil drilling cash cow will also play a role.
How do you insure that the basic income people have a voice in government but do not just vote themselves more and more?
We already have a political party that draws much of its power from a demographic that includes the nearly half of the country that pays no income taxes, but which never the less gets an equal voice in how the other half are taxed to make up for that. And a loud minority of that group is now trying to elect, as chief executive, someone who assures us that the real solution to everything is taxing the tax-paying minority another $19 trillion or so in order to give out more goodies to that no-income-tax-paying power base. Entrenching a mechanism that directly hands that group ever more cash (or, more likely, which establishes towering new bureaucracies and mammoth new expansions of government intrusiveness in order to deliver the freebies in lieu of cash) will just be more of the same, only off-the-cliff worse.
No, the Greek failure wasn't of the tax man's poor collecting success. The failure was the culture's sense of entitlement to free stuff, or to making someone else pay for the stuff they didn't want to pay for. That same flaw has been boiling up in the US for a long time, and is coming to a head in the form of Bernie Sanders supporters and the like. When those that feel entitled to free stuff come unavoidably close to having to admit that that only works when they can force someone else to do the work they won't, they inevitably point to anyone who has accumulated more, created more, or squandered less, and calls them the villains (because even though it doesn't make you prosperous when you tear down someone else's prosperity, it soothes some part of the irrational mind for a few minutes, and buys time to pass the blame to someone else a year or two later).
Venezuela's particular failures, and Greece's, are both symptoms of the same problem. Just manifested a bit differently. Entitlement-minded collectivists always wind up in the same place, and tend to lash out at the end. See the juvenile finger-pointing from both the Greeks and the Venezuelans as they hit rock bottom. It's ALWAYS someone else's fault, and pretty much always the favorite bad guy is the neighbor who made better decisions.
Not a straw man at all. He points out that a market economy makes things worse, not better. I point out that he has a perfect laboratory in recent history to observe how precisely wrong he is. Which also makes your accusation of ad hominem incorrect, because he can't possibly be ignorant of those basic facts, and is thus deliberately lying to score points. Pointing out that his statements are driven by his character flaws and incorrect world view isn't ad hominem, it's a way to explain why he's BSing.
It's plenty clear. East Germany was a misery of relative poverty, industrial pollution and ruination, political oppression, and good old fashioned tyranny compared to the West. Was it another shock to the people in the East to have their prison rattled once again, as the USSR collapsed? Yes. That doesn't change the fact that the GP who tried to portray life under Soviets as better than life in the west was either completely ignorant (unlikely) or deliberately lying (likely) in order to score lazy Bernie Sanders-esque points among what he was hoping would be a low-information audience.
East Germany was saddled with all of the personal and political oppression, confiscation, corruption, pollution, and misery that Marxism could place upon it and everything else it touches. When you are gunned down on the spot for trying to leave, it's no capitalist/market economy or society. Stop pretending otherwise.
Ask the people in East Germany before they were set free from your idea of utopia if they think their lifestyles - as empowered by mandatory collectivist wonderfulness - was more or less corrupt, or polluted, or impoverished than was the lifestyle in West Germany.
You're deliberately pretending that history didn't happen so you can insist that having other people provide for you is somehow not only fair to them, but preferable. No. We don't want to be your slaves, slacker-boy. Trying to re-tell the history of prosperity so you can avoid looking at reality is just your juvenile way of wishing you could slack your way through life while other people work and create and make the things you want to be handed simply because you're breathing.
Citation: "It was a fiery, catastrophic attempt at a launch that was unsuccessful,"
Should we now call every exploded - and most importantly unmanned - U.S. military or commercial launch failiure also a fiery catastrophic attempt?
You must be new at this. Even the people who LAUNCHED the failed Antares that blew up at Wallops recently referred to it as a "castrophic" failure. It's a word people actually use to describe things like giant exploding rockets.
Slashdot Mirror
He is essentially opening the possibility of there being a creator who designed the universe to appear naturally occurring.
No. He's not saying that's any more likely that a naturally occurring universe in which a naturally occurring person runs a simulation that might look just like our universe. That simulation would be a feature of a naturally occurring universe occupied by a naturally occurring simulation-running resident.
Well that's fine, as long as you're on the record saying that you have no sense of reality whatsoever. Freedom to live is similar to being killed if you try to leave. Gotcha.
Orwell wrote a book about people exactly like you.
Are you even listening to yourself? So they pay it, but not really. What you're saying is that Mitt Romney was actually correct. Thanks for agreeing that the facts are the facts.
Really? You consider "feel free to leave our country" and "if you try to leave, we'll shoot you with a machine gun" to be different only in degree? That would be amusing if the consequences of that sort of deluded thinking weren't so serious.
You're just making stuff up. Nobody decides to be a cab driver because of some phony narrative that you're saying a cab company is telling them. Everybody involved is crystal clear on what it means to own a cab company, and work for one. Nobody is forced to work for one. Or forced to use what Uber is offering to do some of that work on the fly when it suits somebody to do so.
Slavery, specifically, is something that humanity decided in the 1800s was something that we were not going to socially support and it's been declared illegal worldwide and there's no sign we're going to reverse that anytime soon
Well, not counting the many countries where it's widely practiced. Or the large, well-financed religious movement occupying swaths of the middle east where slavery is not only tolerated, but celebrated (and supported by people and cash from people across the globe, including in Europe and North America). And then there's the matter of defining "slavery." Does it mean "being compelled to work for other people without compensation?" If so, then you could lump, for example, the half of the country that pays no income tax into the group of people who are enjoying part-time slavery on the part of the people who DO pay income taxes.
The difference is that collectivist/communist/socialist operations can only function (until they inevitably run out of other people's money) through the use of force. That authoritarianism is baked into those collectivist systems.
Right. The nationalization of industries, stuff like that - nothing at all to do with Marxism.
And those countries with the "highest quality of life" because of their highest wealth distribution? They're financially floundering in the face of what it's like to suddenly deal with the multicultural issues and wider spectrum of skills (or lack of them) that countries like the US have had to deal with (as a nation if immigrants since day one) for much longer. The fact that you even use phrases like "free health service" shows how completely disingenuous you're being. There is no free. You can choose to buy services, or you can be forced to buy them (or buy them for somebody else). But "free?" Do you even listen to yourself?
The generals and commissars are still capitalists. Nobody works for free.
Really? You are actually pretending to confuse getting a paycheck with operating in a capitalist/market economy?
blinded by ideology
Really? Who's blinded - me, or the guy who's asserting that living under the Soviets in East Germany was better than living free in the west? Be specific. Address the assertions that the west was - as mentioned - more corrupt, more polluted than the counterparts run under regimes like the Soviets. Please, do inform. Obviously you won't be involving ideology, just the facts. Right? Right.
My use of the east-vs-west Germany comparison is based on knowing people (of the age bracket you mentioned as well as younger and older) who lived in both places, and more. How many people do you know from Romania? From what used to be Yugoslavia? From Ukraine? From Estonia? From Latvia? From across Russia? Let's say you've encountered lots of them - people in their 20's, 30's, 40's, ... 60's, 70's. If that were actually the case, you'd have no intellectually honest way to say that talking to them would paint life under Soviet rule, in that idyllic socialized economy as being even a pale shadow of the quality of life and prosperity created by Horrible West and their Eeeeevil market economies. If you claim to have personal knowledge of people who lived through all of that and say that they're telling you it was better than living in the west... let's face it, you're not being honest.
You don't know a single thing about what I know. And resorting to pointing out how cities are NOW shows that you're anxious to avoid the actual topic at hand: how did life in the East compare to life in the West when the two were run by the two very different social systems we're discussing? Not today. Rewind thirty or forty years and look at it in the proper context, where you can really see the glorious quality of life offered up by that collectivist paradise.
Try comparing with Scandinavia for example They live better lives than you do.
Because they operate under conditions that the US (for example) doesn't have. And the Scandinavians are quickly finding out what it's like to have to deal with very similar problems, and how that makes their systems less and less viable. The eventual uselessness of things like the North Sea off-shore oil drilling cash cow will also play a role.
How do you insure that the basic income people have a voice in government but do not just vote themselves more and more?
We already have a political party that draws much of its power from a demographic that includes the nearly half of the country that pays no income taxes, but which never the less gets an equal voice in how the other half are taxed to make up for that. And a loud minority of that group is now trying to elect, as chief executive, someone who assures us that the real solution to everything is taxing the tax-paying minority another $19 trillion or so in order to give out more goodies to that no-income-tax-paying power base. Entrenching a mechanism that directly hands that group ever more cash (or, more likely, which establishes towering new bureaucracies and mammoth new expansions of government intrusiveness in order to deliver the freebies in lieu of cash) will just be more of the same, only off-the-cliff worse.
No, the Greek failure wasn't of the tax man's poor collecting success. The failure was the culture's sense of entitlement to free stuff, or to making someone else pay for the stuff they didn't want to pay for. That same flaw has been boiling up in the US for a long time, and is coming to a head in the form of Bernie Sanders supporters and the like. When those that feel entitled to free stuff come unavoidably close to having to admit that that only works when they can force someone else to do the work they won't, they inevitably point to anyone who has accumulated more, created more, or squandered less, and calls them the villains (because even though it doesn't make you prosperous when you tear down someone else's prosperity, it soothes some part of the irrational mind for a few minutes, and buys time to pass the blame to someone else a year or two later).
Venezuela's particular failures, and Greece's, are both symptoms of the same problem. Just manifested a bit differently. Entitlement-minded collectivists always wind up in the same place, and tend to lash out at the end. See the juvenile finger-pointing from both the Greeks and the Venezuelans as they hit rock bottom. It's ALWAYS someone else's fault, and pretty much always the favorite bad guy is the neighbor who made better decisions.
Not a straw man at all. He points out that a market economy makes things worse, not better. I point out that he has a perfect laboratory in recent history to observe how precisely wrong he is. Which also makes your accusation of ad hominem incorrect, because he can't possibly be ignorant of those basic facts, and is thus deliberately lying to score points. Pointing out that his statements are driven by his character flaws and incorrect world view isn't ad hominem, it's a way to explain why he's BSing.
It's plenty clear. East Germany was a misery of relative poverty, industrial pollution and ruination, political oppression, and good old fashioned tyranny compared to the West. Was it another shock to the people in the East to have their prison rattled once again, as the USSR collapsed? Yes. That doesn't change the fact that the GP who tried to portray life under Soviets as better than life in the west was either completely ignorant (unlikely) or deliberately lying (likely) in order to score lazy Bernie Sanders-esque points among what he was hoping would be a low-information audience.
East Germany was saddled with all of the personal and political oppression, confiscation, corruption, pollution, and misery that Marxism could place upon it and everything else it touches. When you are gunned down on the spot for trying to leave, it's no capitalist/market economy or society. Stop pretending otherwise.
Ask the people in East Germany before they were set free from your idea of utopia if they think their lifestyles - as empowered by mandatory collectivist wonderfulness - was more or less corrupt, or polluted, or impoverished than was the lifestyle in West Germany.
You're deliberately pretending that history didn't happen so you can insist that having other people provide for you is somehow not only fair to them, but preferable. No. We don't want to be your slaves, slacker-boy. Trying to re-tell the history of prosperity so you can avoid looking at reality is just your juvenile way of wishing you could slack your way through life while other people work and create and make the things you want to be handed simply because you're breathing.
But why would you want to wait to retire until you're to ill or feeble to enjoy it?
So you don't have to eat expired cat food?
One major problem that many retirees have these days is outliving their retirement funds by 20 to 30 years
If you're healthy enough to live for 30 more years, you're probably healthy enough to work a little longer, too.
Yeah that whole air-pushing thing explains the results they got in a vacuum.
Really appreciate the complete lack of even a whiff of the explanation in the summary.
Tell that to Trump. He says there are 11 million of them among us :-)
Of course he's wrong. That number is low.
Citation: "It was a fiery, catastrophic attempt at a launch that was unsuccessful,"
Should we now call every exploded - and most importantly unmanned - U.S. military or commercial launch failiure also a fiery catastrophic attempt?
You must be new at this. Even the people who LAUNCHED the failed Antares that blew up at Wallops recently referred to it as a "castrophic" failure. It's a word people actually use to describe things like giant exploding rockets.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...