by "efficiency" I take you it are not referring externalizing the costs of manufacturing? Because by any other measure, American manufacturing processes are amongst the most efficient in the world in terms of manpower required, resources consumed, and damage to the environment. But by your calculus of efficiency, 1 company that gets 16 hours of work from its workers, 7 days a week, by threatening them with rape and beating or starvation, hiring them during childhood and burning them out by 25 years of age is more "efficient" than the company which makes the stupid mistake of allowing workers to go to the bathroom, go home after a mere 8 hours, and live long and relatively satisfying lives?
Yes... subsidization may "artificially" reduce the cost to company of needing to treat its labour force in a HUMANE fashion. But trade at the expense of HUMANITY is not beneficial to either PARTY. That is at least when you are talking about what foreign trade policies a NATION should adopt. Because in deciding trade policy the only parties are the NATIONS themselves, not the corporations. The NATIONS are the representatives of the PEOPLE and only have moral rights derived from HUMAN RIGHTS of the citizens. When you argue that increased trade is good for a NATION, you are talking about the human beings in that nation. However, you do not and can not make the claim that increased trade is always good for the people of both trading nations, because this is quite obviously NOT TRUE.
When you say that subsidies is bad for the CORPORATION and therefore should be prohibited you are attacking a straw man. Because no one with authority to prohibit or allow subsidies derives authority from the CORPORATIONS. They derive authority from the PEOPLE. And the PEOPLE are often helped by subsidy.
no one interested in the public good really cares what is good or bad for THE CORPORATION. We are only interested in what is good for real human beings. And trade is not always beneficial to both "parties", when you are referring to the parties as being the constituents of a nation.
In fact... trade can be and in modern times often IS detrimental to both "PARTIES".
Trade between China and the US, is not only increasing human rights abuses in China, but it is increasing human rights abuses in the US. The people of both nations lose, as multinational corporations trance along their merry way externalizing the true costs of manufacturing and business to the poor oppressed people of BOTH parties, while a miniscule number of business executives and corrupt government officials perform a song and dance about how trade is good for BOTH parties.
Again... the PARTIES are ALL THE PEOPLE living in those communities between which some capital is to be traded. Not merely the owners of that capital.
When corporations presume to take no responsibility whatsoever for moral concerns above making profit, they forfeit any moral claim whatsoever to PRIVATE property. corporations are merely tools, and morally are not PARTY to trade, but are the implements of trade.
Corporations are not wronged in the least when subsidies are granted, any more than your virtual memory is WRONGED when you install more RAM in your computer. Yes... the RAM will decrease the trade of data between your motherboard and your hard drive. But it will improve your user experience with the computer. Likewise subsidies can increase the user experience of living on the earth.. that is to say.. the experience of the only entities capable of having one. THE PEOPLE.
Corporations feel no pain.
We pass laws forbiding child molestation without much regard to the feelings of pedophiles. Why do we attribute so much more moral weight to the feelings of legally ficticious "persons" called corporations?
I'm arguing that American Government should buy foreign products which is obviously in order to prevent other nations from developing their economies. Oh wait, it's the exact opposite.
It's a subsidy which has an adverse affect on trade.
Your argument would be persuasive, if it was based on fact. Subsidies are neither good nor bad for trade, it all depends on what is being subsidized and under what circumstance. Your argument sounds like a neoliberal talking point used to justify denying the right of underdeveloped nations from fostering their own economies at the expense of America.
There are about 43 million arguments for why trade is a good thing for both parties.
I'm sure the Mafia uses many of those same arguments when they come knocking on your door offering to sell you protection services to offset the cost of insuring that they don't burn down your house.
I can't answer as to whether or not the grandfather poster is a communist, however your post makes no sense. It is not the aim of communists to reduce the productivity and wealth of the country.
If you had any objective evidence that the government buying locally would hurt the local economy then it would be persuasive to a communist just as easily as it would to a non-communist.
However, all things being equal, whatever the government buys from a local company it will recover a significant fraction of that cost in the form of income tax. So if there are 2 products, 1 made locally selling for $11, and one made overseas selling for $9. If the government would collect $3 on the profits made for the local product (in the form of income taxes) and merely $1 on the profits for the overseas one, then we can see that the locally produced product actually cost $1 less (for the government) than the foreign made one.
If you consider the amount of money the government saves on reduced wellfare costs (like it or not, we have a wellfare state), then buying locally can even same more money, since whatever the government buys from overseas results in lost jobs locally, which the government must then partially offset by supplying wellfare benefits, which cost money.
The government reaps benefits directly AND indirectly from all local economic activity. Some foreign made product would need to be astronomically cheaper to justify the state not buying locally.
Remember: The STATE must provide wellfare. It also has a responsibility to REDISTRIBUTE wealth. It can do this indirectly by making sure it buys all its products from local firms and companies which also insist on shopping in the local economy. In fact, I would like to see the state consider trying to make purchases from smaller local firms, rather than always giving contracts to the huge multinationals.
If you had your way, and removed all wellfare responsibilities from the state, then your argument might be more persuasive. But as it stands, the government is responsible for more than merely saving money.
Unlike a firm which must compete, the government locally has a captive market. It has responsibilities to the local market which go far beyond what private firms have, but it also has powers which go beyond what private firms have. Pretending the government is nothing more than another corporation is fallacious and leads you to crazy notions such as the commonly held one that governments have a duty not to provide services if someone can make a profit off that same service.
A simpler answer is to run it like primary education. If you are sick you go to the local hospital or doctor, and they fix you up as best they can. Local boards of health are responsible for managing the healthcare needs of the local community and report to and recieve funding from a higher level of government which has the ultimate reponsibility of insuring that healthcare is available everywhere to anyone who wants it.
medical intellectual property should be outlawed, as the knowledge of how to cure a sick person can not be withheld on any moral basis, however the state should collect taxes for the purpose of generously funding all forms of medical research. Selling pills at a profit is fine however since the underlying IP for any particular drug would be public knowledge, the cost of drugs themselves would be comparable to the cost of other commodities.
The funding for healthcare should come from taxes in the same way that police, fire departments, justice and schools are funded.
You dont buy 911-insurance. Why should you need to buy health insurance?
Healthcare is a fundamental human need (and therefore it is a human right). objects of human rights should never be the basis of a free market, since the consumer is under coercive threat to purchase that object at any price.
The free market has enough areas to play with in designer fashions, gormet foods, plasma television, home entertainment, sports cars... it doesn't have to dominate every single field of human existence.
"competition" in the field of healthcare is seems unnecessary. every doctor wants to save as many lives are humanely possible as a fundamental human psychological trait. We ALL want to. How can the profit incentive make that need any more compelling? Even people who are not doctors feel the overpowering psychological need to try to help other people during times of crises.
More-over the profit motive causes doctors to think about cutting costs.. this is not what we want them to be thinking about. If they waste an extra foot of gauze, or a few extra cotton balls to do a really fine job dressing a stab wound... who cares?? If we think too much medicine is being wasted on treating stab victims, perhaps we should look at the educational system to determine why so many people are getting stabbed, rather than try to think of how we can encourage doctors to use less (or cheaper costing) gauze.
In Canada BLOOD costs you nothing. (you also get paid nothing to donate blood).
Do you think that people waste more blood just because it is free? Or that Canada suffers blood shortages?
People give because they feel self actualized to help other human beings.
That is the "incentive" we should exploit in promoting healthcare. not GREED
employers should not be providing healthcare, because not everyone has a job. In the capitalist system it is accepted that an unemployment rate of around 5%-10% is EXPECTED. This is healthy and normal. If there was a 0% unemployment rate then businesses would not be able to find staff to perform necessary functions. Consequently, some people who want to work can't find work right now. And yet.. they may still get sick. Shifting the burden to the employer also necessarily involves the employee feeling indentured to the employer for something which is their right to have in any case. HEALTHCARE.
This solution also doesn't address the question of those who are self employed. And forcing a self employed person to buy their own healthcare is an artificial and unfair bar against those who would wish to try their hand at starting a small business. Small business are an essential element in keeping our capitalist system from degrading to a few groups of oligopolies dominating all sectors of the economy.
In Canada, since the state provides essential healthcare, you can freely gamble your home and all your worldly possessions and open that small business you always dreamed of. You might lose your shirt, but at least you wont lose your leg or perhaps your life for needing to adopt an inferior healthcare path.
Of course we are getting rid of universal healthcare soon enough (we can't afford to pay for pharma-profits anymore), but it was nice while it lasted.
It means that you have been fully indoctrinated to accept the political and social assumptions of your society, and you now indoctrinate others into those assumptions... in such a way that it perpetuates the current political system. You are to the modern state what a priest is in Catholisism.
Your job, as a political scientist, is to maintain a faith in the state and political process.
Are you sure you are not talking about journalists?
It's not a bad amount. Small inventors are likely to have budgets well below that, meaning the 10 million prize is more than enough to recoup the costs, and leave the inventor able to spend the rest of their lives inventing things if they choose.
*IF* they win.
On a wider issue, I much prefer the idea of prizes and grants, from government and private industry, than patents.
Who says the winner doesn't ALSO get the patent? You think the winner has to surrender his patents to the public domain to collect the prize?
With the bread & circuses being happily consumed by the masses,
by "bread & circuses" I assume you mean corporate wellfare, and by the "masses" I assume you mean corporate america?
Because it isn't like the US government is spending more than other western countries per capita on SOCIAL programs. So I know you aren't referring to that.
Perhaps you are referring to the massive subsidies given to the television industry?
What about all the time and money lost getting the decision up to the supreme court and getting them to actually declare it unconstutional ? What about people prosecuted with this new law and declared guilty. Will they automatically have their decsions reversed and given complete pardons for the crime ?
I'm not sure what you are asking.
If you are convicted of an offence which turns out to be of no force or effect, then your conviction must be overturned.
You dont need a pardon, because you were never guilty of anything in the first place.
The fact that you didn't challenge the law yourself doesn't change the fact of whether or not the law had any force or effect. You merely chose not to dispute that point.
You aren't guilty of anything unless you violate a law which is in effect at the time of the commission of the alleged offence.
However, I would in fact argue that yes. The State should compensate you. The state should not pass unconstitutional laws, and the state is to blaim for doing so. Not everyone has the means to challenge unconstitutional laws. But we would all sleep more easily knowing that if someday our rights are trampled we will be compensated (even if it is only after someone else finally proves it).
We would all look to our lawmakers and demand more diligence in their law making if we knew that our own taxes would be wasted to compensate the victims of state oppression.
So.. if some current state administration doesn't like abortion (right now) for example.... it should look EXTREMELY carefully at the constitution, and the jurisprudence before outlawing it again, and trying to put women in jail for having abortions.. the state could very well open itself up to huge liability if it turned out that all those women had the legal right and the state destroyed their lives without the right of law.
This is particularily important now, since some states are already going ahead and banning abortions all over again even though the issue has been decided and the law is known.
The state should not simply go ahead and outlaw something and throw people in jail on the basis that "at the end of the day it was all done in good faith so we wont need to compensate our victims anyway". This happened in the earlier 1/2 of the last century and millions died and, even in north america forfeited their property, all in the name of unconstitutional laws.
I spend too much time dreaming of a Just society..
So the DA honestly believes his evidence that you're guilty of murder. The jury disagrees. Should we now throw the DA in jail?
No. We should never PUNISH people for honest mistakes. However that does not mean that we don't hold people responsible for their honest mistakes.
A DA need not actually in fact HONESTLY believe you are guilty any more than the defense lawyer needs to believe you are innocent. However, if he doesn't actually have an opinion, he is being RECKLESS. Clearly if *he* isn't convinced beyond a reasonable doubt, then why should he expect a conviction? Answer: he might get lucky and score a plea bargain.
The accused doesn't necessarily know that the case against him is weak and may not be sturdy enough to endure the ordeal of a trial. He may seek a plea bargain as the easy way out. This happens notwithstandingt whether or not the accused is guilty or innocent.
This is a perfectly effective method of obtaining convictions. It doesn't obtain JUSTICE, but it obtains convictions.
For some mysterious reason we accept honest mistakes from the Prosecution and the Police but if I or you or a corporation destroys someones life via an honest mistake there are grounds for a lawsuit.
When we only allow a lawsuit in the case of a malicious prosecution we are being unfair to the victims of NEGLIGENT PROSECUTION.
Our current system encourages NEGLIGENT PROSECUTION. And in fact... most (if not almost all) prosecution is handled negligently.
The People have lost faith in the judicial system. But it usually isn't the Judges fault. It is almost always the fault of the Prosecution, who have grown lazy and complacent due to the lax rules which explicitly permit them to be negligent. Evidence is lost (both incriminatory and exculpatory), police witnesses show up who cant remember anything (because they are afraid of accidentally exonerating the accused). And the process is run in a shody, wasteful manner because it is virtually assured that the Prosecution will not be held accountable for its fuckups.. and any fuckups are only likely to increase the odds of a offer of plea bargain (regardless of the truth of the matter).
After an enourmously expensive trial which only the very rich can actually afford, the accused is probably AQUITTED. If the accused is NOT rich, then they are probably convicted. Actual guilt or innocence plays little role when negligence is permitted.
The system is wonderful (for the rich and unscrupulous) because it makes it more likely the wealthy will get off, while the middle class and poor will be more likely convicted.
If you are innocent, then a proficient and proper prosecution is most likely to uncover that fact without the NEED for a trial. If you are poor and innocent, you can't afford a full and proper trial (don't kid yourself about public defenders) and you are much more likely to simply plead guilty no matter what. IF you are guilty, then an incompetent prosecution maximizes the chance you will in fact either get off because of a technicallity or you will get off because the prosecution doesn't understand his own case.
Moreover negligent prosecutions against innocent people tend to appear on the surface as STRONGER cases, maximizing the harm done to the innocent. This has the effect of scaring innocent people into pleading guilty. If *that* is what you want.. then please continue to advocate the practice of allowing negligent prosecution.
If you look at the conviction rates you will see that about 1/4 of all prosecutions are in fact against INNOCENT people (that is to say they are not convicted). These people are victims just as much as victims of crime. Except they are victims of the beligerent attitude of a STATE which considers that it has the right to negligently try people for crimes they didn't commit without compensation.
Trying innocent people doesn't reduce crime. It encourages crime. In 25% of the cases a person can commit a crime, and the WRONG person will be charged. T
Why is it that Congress and the President can break their oath to uphold the Constitution's restrictions on their power and there is no real penalty?
Maybe it is time to penalize repeat offenders who vote for and pass (and don't veto) for unconstitutional laws.
This accomplishes what? Unconstitutional laws are technically of no force or effect. Therefore no harm was done. So you would be outlawing a harmless activity, and that itself would be an unconstitutional law. Unconstitional laws only cause harm indirectly.. Because overzealous DA's tries to enforce them. If there needs to be any balancing of powers, it is that victims of failed prosecutions (i.e. the presumptively INNOCENT person accused of a crime who isn't convicted (either because the crime itself was unconstitional or for lack of evidence)) should be compensated by the Prosecutor for all damages incurred.
Right now the victim of a wrongful prosecution (it is wrongful because the Court aquitted them or ruled the law itself wrong), get nothing unless they can establish malice.
If I accidentally hit you with my car I have to compensate you. You don't need to establish malice.
Why should the DA get off scott free when he negligently prosecutes an innocent person? You can destroy lives even when you have no malice.
Fair market value is the price the buyer is willing to pay, and the price the seller is willing to accept when neither party has any particular external pressure to make the transaction go ahead.
When a person needs healthcare they must buy it immediately or ELSE. This is a situation under duress and does not result in the buyer paying fair market value. Calling such a transaction FREE is fallacious. In any other area of commerce, a contract made in such circumstances would not even be binding. And yet people are obligated to pay their medical debt. As long as medical associations can strictly control who is permitted to practice medicine in a particular area (they do), and state enforced medical PATENTS insure that there is only 1 provider of any given medical product, there is never any danger that a person in need of healthcare will be able to shop around for treatment and take advantage of the FREE market.
You aren't in a position to haggle over price when you are in extreme pain or dying. Calling that a FREE market is a perverse lie.
The cost of healthcare is set to the level which a large enough segment of society is willing to tolerate before it overthrows the entire medical system completely (perhaps the entire government) and adopts a publicly run healthcare system that most civilized nations have adopted. This has nothing to do with a free market. This is oppression. The government is actually BANNING you from IMPORTing your own drugs for personal use? WHAT THE F*CK IS THAT??? A free market where you can't buy from whoever you want to? Not even copyright law forbids you for importing a copywritten product for your own personal use.
The various branches of the one-world government are so utterly in the pockets of lobbiests that the Canadian Arm (which currently would love nothing more than to abolish the canadian healthcare system entirely) is actually going to make it illegal for canadian pharmacists to export drugs out of Canada. For who's benefit? (A: the drug companies.)
Who exactly are the CUSTOMERS in this free market? It isn't the patient. The patient is the PRODUCT. You are being sold and bartered like so much cattle, and large transnational corporations are reaping the profits.
PS: Canadians also live longer than Americans and spend less money on healthcare. (and on a per capita basis our immigration rates are at parity with the US).
But, wealthy/rich people like to spend more money on more expensive things...their food bills are MUCH higher than normal people's in that they generally eat finer,more expensive foods (filet mignon vs cubed steak). So...they will pay more in taxes, because they consume more expensive items generally across the board...
really? so someone who earns 500k a year spends all of his money, has nothing left to show for it after paying all of their bills at the end of the year, and dies as broke as they were when they started?
So what? If a millionare wants to reign in his spending to match that of someone making $100K, so what? You may be interested in:
a millionare has much more at stake in this country, and his property benefits on a continuing basis much more from the social services (such as defense, police forces, fire departments, roads, etc, the courts) than does the property of a person earning $100k. (let alone $30k) It are INVESTMENTS that benefit most from such services, consumed items are consumed and by definition reap nothing.
The web page that you cited is absolutely irrelevant to the argument. It charts taxes against spending, not against WEALTH. No one denies this consumption tax based system scales up with consumption. The point is that consumption as a ratio of wealth, scales practically inversly with wealth. The parent poster's point was that the million dollar a year earner consumes almost nothing MORE than what a 100k earner consumes. The million earner merely invests more. consequently the milion/year earner pays the same tax while reaping greater benefit on a dollar per dollar basis.
this is a regressive tax system. It will lead inevitably to more and more wealth being concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer families, and thus take us back to a system of aristocracy. That is, of course, the entire POINT. This "fair" tax, is a tax system by the rich for the rich. It has nothing to do with creating a FAIR or just society.
I'm not saying income tax is king either. But consumption taxes are far worse.
saying that either side has a low threshold for the "sanctity of life" is just plain insulting and rude.
What if it is true?
I think you are confusing soldiers with philosophers. And while the fantasy of the warrior-poet may lift our spirits, it has very little to do with the reality of an all volunteer army. Professional solders are hired killers. They believe that learning how to kill will help lift up humanity better than learning how to heal or build or think.
They are there because they didn't need to be drafted and compelled to kill, they CHOSE to kill. They figured the trauma of putting a bullet in another human beings brain would not cause them permanent psychological harm. They figured they would not suffer shell shock or nightmares for the rest of their lives. Or they are killing because they are so poor that desperation drove them to join the military. It was rarely a moral decision. And the average high school educated marine who thinks it was, is on average too ignorant to know the difference. Show me a single reqruitment add which says "you may have to kill some poor sob in another country for reasons you aren't allowed to know, but its worth it because getting blood on your hands is goodness!" or perhaps "you'll kill innocent civilians and attack some non-military targets... but our government will give you immunity from war crimes prosecution!".
The ads are designed to appeal to the unimaginative. The geek so lacking in human skills as to think flying a remote control weapon is ultra cool. They dont tell the truth. They dont explain WHY there is a war. They appeal to selfishness. "join the army.. be all that YOU can be".. as if all that a person can be is a soldier. That is about the LEAST that a person can be. It is the evil of last resort. It should not be something to aspire to in any circumstance.
The real moral soldier would want more PROOF than some transparently false claims of WMD's or an also transparently false connection between Iraq and 911 before shipping off with the intention of putting themself in a situation where they will kill people.
blind obedience to the bible, your church and your political leaders is not morality; It is obedience; it is blind; nothing more.
What kind of person would want to become a TOOL for the state... seperate and apart from free society.. a virtual slave... to kill or be killed at the beck and call of the government. Tell me what kind of brilliant philosopher and moralist seeks THAT??
Men do more dangerous things because we are more capable of doing more dangerous things successfully. This isn't just bravado. There is a certain amount of risk assessment to every action a person takes. And depending on how active a person is dictates their self awareness as well as how capable they are of performing a given feat. A given act may be considered objectively dangerous but every act danger level is subjective to the person performing the act.
Right. And every man dumb enough to want to intentionally risk dying for cheap thrills is rational enough to only do things which are objectively safe because of their supremely honed reflexes and perfect masculine physic.
Men seem to do more dangerous things because they are more likely to survive the 'dangerous' activity.
So when a man is looking out of the bay at the ground at 10000 feet and deciding weather or not to jump. How exactly does a MAN compute his odds of death compared with a woman? And at what point does the woman say 'no.. I'm not going to do it. I'm a woman and my odds just aren't good enough. If I was a man then the danger would be just right."
The new laws are more restrictive limiting who can possibly apply for a job.
The law as stated would require the employer to list honest bare minimum requirements they are willing to HIRE. Once that is done anyone who applies under the new rules would be a bona fide candidate and genuinely qualified. It would be easier to objectively prove at that point whether or not an employer is not hiring blacks because blacks are not applying or because they are simply racist and prefer to hire whites. More over it would be much easer to catch those who lie about their qualifications. Because if the true minimum qualifications are posted, then anyone who misrepresented themselves would get caught almost immediately. As it stands many companies put requirements which are nothing more than fluff and someone can get away with lying about qualifications on the bet that at the end of the day the company was ALSO lying about requiring those skills.
What happened to all the racists who used to argue "It's my company, I'll hire only whites if I want to"? Did they all vanish? No, they are still out there and still practicing discrimination in whatever way they can. If that means putting ficticious job requirements in a listing in order to have a ready excuse on hand to fire whoever they want, then they will do it.
This is a law which governs how prospective employee and employers are permitted to ADVERTISE themselves to one another in a commercial setting where considerable coercive power is in the hands of the employer and exists without any balancing considerations available to the applicants. The state has a hand in insuring that the PEOPLE (the majority of which are employees rather than employers) are not falsely advertised to, in any setting.
The same arguments you make in favour of allowing companies to include fanciful requirements in a job listing (for "future plans") can be used to argue in favour of allowing the advertising of non-existant features in a product (to allow the consumers to "plan" for the future). By this ethic, the consumer can always test the feature if they really need it afterall. That was how advertising actually was/is when/where there is no control of false advertisers. As it is, advertisers routinely stretch the truth to the absolute limits when pushing their wares.
The notion that a business will not be able to find job applicants unless it is allowed to include false job requirements is fantastical. I'd like to know exactly how that works.
Post HONEST minimum requirements. This is all the law (as purported by the article) requires.
Some people may not have the job skills but have the ability or will to learn, and such an employer could see that by looking at a resume or talking to someone.
If a business puts honest to goodness minimum requirements in a job posting, how could it possibly get away with hiring someone lacking the required skills? It would amount to hiring an unnecessary person (subject to being fired at any arbitrary time). You can easily post an add for a TRAINEE job position, if you are willing to consider hiring such people. I dont see the problem, unless you don't want to be legally obligated to hire recent immigrants who would easily qualify for the TRAINEE position and apply for the job, thereby removing your excuse that none of the minority groups bothered applying for the job or qualified.
By listing only the FANTASY job position and accepting applications from underqualified workers, the company can easily practice discrimination against any minority group and claim that none of the applicants from that minority group qualify for the job. (meanwhile, none of the white people who got hired in the end qualified for the job (as advertised) EITHER).
In the end, if a particular skill is not really a REQUIREMENT, then dont list it as a REQUIREMENT. List it as a 'a plus'. Of course then, you would need to HONOUR the salary rates you have advertised in an attempt to lure applicants. Because you ca
"I mean, seriously, its like none of their freakin business. Doesnt this help kill 'free enterprise' or deminish capitalism? This is like communist USSR here.
It is our place and decision to run online employment boards how we see fit and put up descriptions of our jobs and post our skills to our own likings. We are free to find the people who we think may be good at the job by looking at their resume"
Don't kid yourself. Contract law as well as advertising have always been regulated, at least since slavery, fraud and false advertising were outlawed.
You are not free to post whatever kinds of ads you like, nor are you free to treat other human beings however you see fit. Even employees and job applicants are human beings. And if the only way to get employers to comply with human rights norms is to impose rules on them (as it seems to be the case), then too bad. If you want to treat people like your personal play things, you are free to set up business somewhere else. I understand the Chinese don't take human rights to be as important as profit these days. Perhaps you would feel comfortable doing business over there?
Perhaps these new rules will prevent companies from advertising necessary qualifications which go far beyond the actual qualifications they anticipate anyone will actually have. Putting false requirements on a job posting is merely a means to oppress new employees, by lying to them and making them think they only have a job because of charity rather than their bona fide merit.
Alternatively if you are interested, the current special edition of Scientific American "The Frontiers of Physics" has an article called "The Search for Relativity Violations" on page 13. It is on news stands now until February 20, 2006.
If you want to design your own experiments and stick it to the "man", then what you may want to look for are substances which FALL at different speeds in a vacuum.
Since the force of gravity is proportional only to gravitational mass of both bodies, and acceleration due to gravity is proportional to force and inversly proportional to intertial mass: Something with a lower inertial mass than gravitational mass will accelerate faster in free fall. Something high inertial mass compared to gravitational mass will accelerate slower in free fall.
I'm afraid you aren't going to find any physicists out there arguing that GR doesn't claim that gravitational mass and inertial mass are equal. It has nothing to do with what any experiment proves. The theory is the theory.
Anyone claiming that General Relativity does not purport that Gravitational Mass and Inertial mass are the same, simply doesn't know the theory.
Here is a direct quote from Albert Einstein (the guy who discovered GR, and widely respected by scientists):
"The gravitational mass of a body is equal to its inertial law"
- source: Relativity: The Special And General Theory, chapter 19.
Certainly open and public debate, public records,the right to petition the government are all hallmarks of democracy. However there is a difference between something being 'necessary' for democracy and something being 'sufficient' for democracy.
There is an additional element and a necessary element that is removed. And that is the right to have ones vote counted.
The moment that representatives consider factors other than what would be the desires of their constituents (had their constituents been fully appraised of the situation) then you dont have democracy. Not even representative democracy.
To many so called "democracies" are based on the notion that once a representative is in office, it is his luxury to vote however he personally feels on the issues. He is a stand in to represent what his constituents feel. And his democratic duty (if we are to have a democracy) is to use his best judgement and knowledge to vote and speak for THEM.
What instead we typically have now is a candidate claims to belief X,Y, and Z, and then people vote on that basis. and later on issue W comes up, and the representative them votes in the way that best benefits his CONTRIBUTORS. Those who paid for his election campaign and showered him with gifts. i.e. the "lobbiests".
If a majority government intends to do X, and is going to do X regardless of what anyone else wants, then holding some token public hearings is little more than a PR show. It is a farce. The decision has already been made. This is not democracy any more than a kangaroo court is Justice.
When a representative pursues an issue without putting the will of his constituents (not his contributors or his party) up FIRST then what he is doing is taking away the vote from his constituents.
To have democracy every citizens vote must count.
What we basically have is something like 'democracy for the rich'. Similar to a corporation with shareholders. If you are rich and can afford to make significant enough contributions, your vote counts. The more contributions you make.. the more your vote counts. Our "democracy" is corporatism dressed like democracy.
Wealth doesn't buy elections. But wealth buys representatives in parliament/congress/sentate/whatever.
You may have the right to lobby, yell and scream. But you dont have the right to force the government to do anything in particular, unless you are a regular contributor and can threaten to withhold your contributions. Or alternatively, close your plant and fire 300 voters telling them which politician cost them their job. (in fact you are going to close the plant anyway and outsource to China, but your poorly educated workers wont know the difference).
If the minister had been allowed to make his own law unimpeded this would have resulted in disaster.
The results were a disaster anyway. Just a different kind of disaster.
Democracy is much more than voting once every four years,
it's reading the papers (free press),
which is owned by the wealthy elite media conglomerates and services to its advertisers.
complain and demonstrate when things go bad
whatever the aforementioned media tells you has gone bad, you can complain about.
(free association, right to strike, right to free speech),
however, if you dont want to lose your job and watch your family wind up broke and destitute, you better associate only with the right kind of people, show up and work when your are told, and keep your mouth shut and your head down.
perhaps get involved into local politics
Because there is no way in hell you are going to get anywhere at the national level without the backing of the media conglomerates. And you wont get that unless you sell your soul, and give up on your naive democratic ideals.
or more, to name only a few things you can do.
without representatives who are legally compelled to count my vote it won't be democracy rega
the word "prove" bears defining. Technically nothing is ever proven in a courtroom either, if the standard of proof you expect is "beyond any conceivable doubt", because in court you only need to prove guilt "beyond all reasonable doubt" or many other things "on the balance of probabilities". But this is not the standard used by science. Scientists hold them selves to a much higher standard.
On the otherhand... engineers dont require proof beyond all conceivable doubt. But are quite happy to build machines based on what science has "proved". Because by the standards of engineering, something merely need to work in the vast majority of cases (say 99.999% or 99.9999% of the time for high quality work). Scientists are trying to find solutions to prove things far beyond 5 or 6 significant digits of reliability, but to an infinite degree of reliability.
So, while nothing is ever proven by scientists according to the standard of mathematicians (i.e. absolute perfection), according to other standards.... science proves all sorts of things.
Making a claim like "scientists never prove anything", is misleading, because it causes one to confuse your position with being "truth is subjective", and such notions are what allow certain idealogues to claim the earth is 5000 years old (based on the scientific fact that there is perhaps a 0.00000000000000001% chance or so that the earth might actually be only 5000 years old) or that global warming is a myth based on the perhaps 1% chance that it is. Scientists prove things to the limits of our technology and knowledge and scientists also document the margin of error to which it is proven, and that is a hell of a lot MORE proof than anyone in any other field provides, except pure maths.
In almost all fields of human endeavor, except the very highly technical, such as medicine or advanced engineering, we can treat science as if it were proven with absolute perfection because our own human error is so much more likely to be the cause of difficulty than the margin of error in most main stream sciences in trying to account for why things go wrong.
There is a slight chance that your automobile does not actually need gasoline. It may be a perpetual motion machine. But are you going to disregard the science which has "proved" that your car is not? Are you going to invest your time and money trying to invent a perpetual motion machine yourself?
Are you worried that your car may transmute into a thermonuclear bomb and cause the sun to implode the next time you start it? Science "proved" those things wont happen well enough for you to treat those things as impossibilities. And yes, scientist to scientist... I can't be certain you wont destroy the solar system tonight, but I science has "proven" I'm more likely to simply burst into flame myself in the next 30 seconds, so I have more urgent matters to attend to.
There's still the question of "relativistic mass", which IMHO is just an artifact of trying to make relativistic effects mesh better with our Newtonian perception. The real test of whether "relativistic mass" is actual real mass would be to see if the gravity well around a massive object is stronger when it is moving than when it is stationary.
When an object is moving relative to you, you will measure its mass to be greater than if it were standing still. This includes its intertia and gravitational attraction to other things as well as time dilation related to gravity. These are all products of mass. Gravity has no meaning without mass, and mass without gravity is nonsensical in the theory of relativity, as well as in all observations we have ever made.
In the theory of relativity, nothing has an absolute mass and there is no absolute frame of reference (nor have we detected one in the real world).
My point is that this process is not especially non-democratic compared to what typically happens in so called western democracies.
In a republic the people do not get to weigh in on anything except during elections. We have collectively decided to pretend that this is "democracy". If the winners of the election then decide to do something in secret, calling it undemocratic is misleading. The winners in so called "western democracies" always do things in secret, and then concentrate on selling their decision to the public, or keeping them completely obscure and secret, and only rarely truly trust democracy to choose the best answer. The entire system is undemocratic from the moment the first ballot is cast. But the situation is even worse than it appears, because people do not even vote for representatives: People are voting for political parties. People are effectively voting for brand names and labels, which make understanding the differences between candidates irrelevant, as candidates are expected to vote the party line, and in any event have no moral justification for voting other than the party line (since they were expected to vote the party line when they were elected in the first place). The fact that the majority of elections also use a first past the post system to insure that only vague and generic platforms can actually win any representation whatsoever, means that on specific issues the only way to get the government to act is the old fashioned way: lobby the government. Lobbying the people is almost a pointless exercise. The people have no power.
This is not democracy by any stretch of the imagination. Pointing out 1 symptom of the failure of democracy as a whole, and saying that this 1 symptom is non-democratic gives the impression that the political system as a whole is otherwise democratic, and that is misleading.
Except in name, we don't have a democracy at all. The wealthy still run the show for their own self aggrandizement.
Slashdot Mirror
by "efficiency" I take you it are not referring externalizing the costs of manufacturing? Because by any other measure, American manufacturing processes are amongst the most efficient in the world in terms of manpower required, resources consumed, and damage to the environment. But by your calculus of efficiency, 1 company that gets 16 hours of work from its workers, 7 days a week, by threatening them with rape and beating or starvation, hiring them during childhood and burning them out by 25 years of age is more "efficient" than the company which makes the stupid mistake of allowing workers to go to the bathroom, go home after a mere 8 hours, and live long and relatively satisfying lives?
Yes... subsidization may "artificially" reduce the cost to company of needing to treat its labour force in a HUMANE fashion. But trade at the expense of HUMANITY is not beneficial to either PARTY. That is at least when you are talking about what foreign trade policies a NATION should adopt. Because in deciding trade policy the only parties are the NATIONS themselves, not the corporations. The NATIONS are the representatives of the PEOPLE and only have moral rights derived from HUMAN RIGHTS of the citizens. When you argue that increased trade is good for a NATION, you are talking about the human beings in that nation. However, you do not and can not make the claim that increased trade is always good for the people of both trading nations, because this is quite obviously NOT TRUE.
When you say that subsidies is bad for the CORPORATION and therefore should be prohibited you are attacking a straw man. Because no one with authority to prohibit or allow subsidies derives authority from the CORPORATIONS. They derive authority from the PEOPLE. And the PEOPLE are often helped by subsidy.
no one interested in the public good really cares what is good or bad for THE CORPORATION. We are only interested in what is good for real human beings. And trade is not always beneficial to both "parties", when you are referring to the parties as being the constituents of a nation.
In fact... trade can be and in modern times often IS detrimental to both "PARTIES".
Trade between China and the US, is not only increasing human rights abuses in China, but it is increasing human rights abuses in the US. The people of both nations lose, as multinational corporations trance along their merry way externalizing the true costs of manufacturing and business to the poor oppressed people of BOTH parties, while a miniscule number of business executives and corrupt government officials perform a song and dance about how trade is good for BOTH parties.
Again... the PARTIES are ALL THE PEOPLE living in those communities between which some capital is to be traded. Not merely the owners of that capital.
When corporations presume to take no responsibility whatsoever for moral concerns above making profit, they forfeit any moral claim whatsoever to PRIVATE property. corporations are merely tools, and morally are not PARTY to trade, but are the implements of trade.
Corporations are not wronged in the least when subsidies are granted, any more than your virtual memory is WRONGED when you install more RAM in your computer. Yes... the RAM will decrease the trade of data between your motherboard and your hard drive. But it will improve your user experience with the computer. Likewise subsidies can increase the user experience of living on the earth.. that is to say.. the experience of the only entities capable of having one. THE PEOPLE.
Corporations feel no pain.
We pass laws forbiding child molestation without much regard to the feelings of pedophiles. Why do we attribute so much more moral weight to the feelings of legally ficticious "persons" called corporations?
I'm arguing that American Government should buy foreign products which is obviously in order to prevent other nations from developing their economies. Oh wait, it's the exact opposite.
No.. it isn't the exact opposite
It's a subsidy which has an adverse affect on trade.
Your argument would be persuasive, if it was based on fact. Subsidies are neither good nor bad for trade, it all depends on what is being subsidized and under what circumstance. Your argument sounds like a neoliberal talking point used to justify denying the right of underdeveloped nations from fostering their own economies at the expense of America.
There are about 43 million arguments for why trade is a good thing for both parties.
I'm sure the Mafia uses many of those same arguments when they come knocking on your door offering to sell you protection services to offset the cost of insuring that they don't burn down your house.
I can't answer as to whether or not the grandfather poster is a communist, however your post makes no sense. It is not the aim of communists to reduce the productivity and wealth of the country.
If you had any objective evidence that the government buying locally would hurt the local economy then it would be persuasive to a communist just as easily as it would to a non-communist.
However, all things being equal, whatever the government buys from a local company it will recover a significant fraction of that cost in the form of income tax. So if there are 2 products, 1 made locally selling for $11, and one made overseas selling for $9. If the government would collect $3 on the profits made for the local product (in the form of income taxes) and merely $1 on the profits for the overseas one, then we can see that the locally produced product actually cost $1 less (for the government) than the foreign made one.
If you consider the amount of money the government saves on reduced wellfare costs (like it or not, we have a wellfare state), then buying locally can even same more money, since whatever the government buys from overseas results in lost jobs locally, which the government must then partially offset by supplying wellfare benefits, which cost money.
The government reaps benefits directly AND indirectly from all local economic activity. Some foreign made product would need to be astronomically cheaper to justify the state not buying locally.
Remember: The STATE must provide wellfare. It also has a responsibility to REDISTRIBUTE wealth. It can do this indirectly by making sure it buys all its products from local firms and companies which also insist on shopping in the local economy. In fact, I would like to see the state consider trying to make purchases from smaller local firms, rather than always giving contracts to the huge multinationals.
If you had your way, and removed all wellfare responsibilities from the state, then your argument might be more persuasive. But as it stands, the government is responsible for more than merely saving money.
Unlike a firm which must compete, the government locally has a captive market. It has responsibilities to the local market which go far beyond what private firms have, but it also has powers which go beyond what private firms have. Pretending the government is nothing more than another corporation is fallacious and leads you to crazy notions such as the commonly held one that governments have a duty not to provide services if someone can make a profit off that same service.
A simpler answer is to run it like primary education. If you are sick you go to the local hospital or doctor, and they fix you up as best they can. Local boards of health are responsible for managing the healthcare needs of the local community and report to and recieve funding from a higher level of government which has the ultimate reponsibility of insuring that healthcare is available everywhere to anyone who wants it.
medical intellectual property should be outlawed, as the knowledge of how to cure a sick person can not be withheld on any moral basis, however the state should collect taxes for the purpose of generously funding all forms of medical research. Selling pills at a profit is fine however since the underlying IP for any particular drug would be public knowledge, the cost of drugs themselves would be comparable to the cost of other commodities.
The funding for healthcare should come from taxes in the same way that police, fire departments, justice and schools are funded.
You dont buy 911-insurance. Why should you need to buy health insurance?
Healthcare is a fundamental human need (and therefore it is a human right). objects of human rights should never be the basis of a free market, since the consumer is under coercive threat to purchase that object at any price.
The free market has enough areas to play with in designer fashions, gormet foods, plasma television, home entertainment, sports cars... it doesn't have to dominate every single field of human existence.
"competition" in the field of healthcare is seems unnecessary. every doctor wants to save as many lives are humanely possible as a fundamental human psychological trait. We ALL want to. How can the profit incentive make that need any more compelling? Even people who are not doctors feel the overpowering psychological need to try to help other people during times of crises.
More-over the profit motive causes doctors to think about cutting costs.. this is not what we want them to be thinking about. If they waste an extra foot of gauze, or a few extra cotton balls to do a really fine job dressing a stab wound... who cares?? If we think too much medicine is being wasted on treating stab victims, perhaps we should look at the educational system to determine why so many people are getting stabbed, rather than try to think of how we can encourage doctors to use less (or cheaper costing) gauze.
In Canada BLOOD costs you nothing. (you also get paid nothing to donate blood).
Do you think that people waste more blood just because it is free? Or that Canada suffers blood shortages?
People give because they feel self actualized to help other human beings.
That is the "incentive" we should exploit in promoting healthcare. not GREED
employers should not be providing healthcare, because not everyone has a job. In the capitalist system it is accepted that an unemployment rate of around 5%-10% is EXPECTED. This is healthy and normal. If there was a 0% unemployment rate then businesses would not be able to find staff to perform necessary functions. Consequently, some people who want to work can't find work right now. And yet.. they may still get sick. Shifting the burden to the employer also necessarily involves the employee feeling indentured to the employer for something which is their right to have in any case. HEALTHCARE.
This solution also doesn't address the question of those who are self employed. And forcing a self employed person to buy their own healthcare is an artificial and unfair bar against those who would wish to try their hand at starting a small business. Small business are an essential element in keeping our capitalist system from degrading to a few groups of oligopolies dominating all sectors of the economy.
In Canada, since the state provides essential healthcare, you can freely gamble your home and all your worldly possessions and open that small business you always dreamed of. You might lose your shirt, but at least you wont lose your leg or perhaps your life for needing to adopt an inferior healthcare path.
Of course we are getting rid of universal healthcare soon enough (we can't afford to pay for pharma-profits anymore), but it was nice while it lasted.
It means that you have been fully indoctrinated to accept the political and social assumptions of your society, and you now indoctrinate others into those assumptions... in such a way that it perpetuates the current political system. You are to the modern state what a priest is in Catholisism.
Your job, as a political scientist, is to maintain a faith in the state and political process.
Are you sure you are not talking about journalists?
It's not a bad amount. Small inventors are likely to have budgets well below that, meaning the 10 million prize is more than enough to recoup the costs, and leave the inventor able to spend the rest of their lives inventing things if they choose.
*IF* they win.
On a wider issue, I much prefer the idea of prizes and grants, from government and private industry, than patents.
Who says the winner doesn't ALSO get the patent? You think the winner has to surrender his patents to the public domain to collect the prize?
With the bread & circuses being happily consumed by the masses,
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by "bread & circuses" I assume you mean corporate wellfare, and by the "masses" I assume you mean corporate america?
Because it isn't like the US government is spending more than other western countries per capita on SOCIAL programs. So I know you aren't referring to that.
Perhaps you are referring to the massive subsidies given to the television industry?
http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJ
Advertisements and unartistic drivel will soon be beamed in glorious 1080i to every household in the nation! Lets Roll!
corporate civic virtue???
At least the facade has been dropped. Can we finally stop calling China "Communist", and call it what it is. Corporatocracy.
What about all the time and money lost getting the decision up to the supreme court and getting them to actually declare it unconstutional ? What about people prosecuted with this new law and declared guilty. Will they automatically have their decsions reversed and given complete pardons for the crime ?
I'm not sure what you are asking.
If you are convicted of an offence which turns out to be of no force or effect, then your conviction must be overturned.
You dont need a pardon, because you were never guilty of anything in the first place.
The fact that you didn't challenge the law yourself doesn't change the fact of whether or not the law had any force or effect. You merely chose not to dispute that point.
You aren't guilty of anything unless you violate a law which is in effect at the time of the commission of the alleged offence.
However, I would in fact argue that yes. The State should compensate you. The state should not pass unconstitutional laws, and the state is to blaim for doing so. Not everyone has the means to challenge unconstitutional laws. But we would all sleep more easily knowing that if someday our rights are trampled we will be compensated (even if it is only after someone else finally proves it).
We would all look to our lawmakers and demand more diligence in their law making if we knew that our own taxes would be wasted to compensate the victims of state oppression.
So.. if some current state administration doesn't like abortion (right now) for example.... it should look EXTREMELY carefully at the constitution, and the jurisprudence before outlawing it again, and trying to put women in jail for having abortions.. the state could very well open itself up to huge liability if it turned out that all those women had the legal right and the state destroyed their lives without the right of law.
This is particularily important now, since some states are already going ahead and banning abortions all over again even though the issue has been decided and the law is known.
The state should not simply go ahead and outlaw something and throw people in jail on the basis that "at the end of the day it was all done in good faith so we wont need to compensate our victims anyway". This happened in the earlier 1/2 of the last century and millions died and, even in north america forfeited their property, all in the name of unconstitutional laws.
I spend too much time dreaming of a Just society..
So the DA honestly believes his evidence that you're guilty of murder. The jury disagrees. Should we now throw the DA in jail?
No. We should never PUNISH people for honest mistakes. However that does not mean that we don't hold people responsible for their honest mistakes.
A DA need not actually in fact HONESTLY believe you are guilty any more than the defense lawyer needs to believe you are innocent. However, if he doesn't actually have an opinion, he is being RECKLESS. Clearly if *he* isn't convinced beyond a reasonable doubt, then why should he expect a conviction? Answer: he might get lucky and score a plea bargain.
The accused doesn't necessarily know that the case against him is weak and may not be sturdy enough to endure the ordeal of a trial. He may seek a plea bargain as the easy way out. This happens notwithstandingt whether or not the accused is guilty or innocent.
This is a perfectly effective method of obtaining convictions. It doesn't obtain JUSTICE, but it obtains convictions.
For some mysterious reason we accept honest mistakes from the Prosecution and the Police but if I or you or a corporation destroys someones life via an honest mistake there are grounds for a lawsuit.
When we only allow a lawsuit in the case of a malicious prosecution we are being unfair to the victims of NEGLIGENT PROSECUTION.
Our current system encourages NEGLIGENT PROSECUTION. And in fact... most (if not almost all) prosecution is handled negligently.
The People have lost faith in the judicial system. But it usually isn't the Judges fault. It is almost always the fault of the Prosecution, who have grown lazy and complacent due to the lax rules which explicitly permit them to be negligent. Evidence is lost (both incriminatory and exculpatory), police witnesses show up who cant remember anything (because they are afraid of accidentally exonerating the accused). And the process is run in a shody, wasteful manner because it is virtually assured that the Prosecution will not be held accountable for its fuckups.. and any fuckups are only likely to increase the odds of a offer of plea bargain (regardless of the truth of the matter).
After an enourmously expensive trial which only the very rich can actually afford, the accused is probably AQUITTED. If the accused is NOT rich, then they are probably convicted. Actual guilt or innocence plays little role when negligence is permitted.
The system is wonderful (for the rich and unscrupulous) because it makes it more likely the wealthy will get off, while the middle class and poor will be more likely convicted.
If you are innocent, then a proficient and proper prosecution is most likely to uncover that fact without the NEED for a trial. If you are poor and innocent, you can't afford a full and proper trial (don't kid yourself about public defenders) and you are much more likely to simply plead guilty no matter what. IF you are guilty, then an incompetent prosecution maximizes the chance you will in fact either get off because of a technicallity or you will get off because the prosecution doesn't understand his own case.
Moreover negligent prosecutions against innocent people tend to appear on the surface as STRONGER cases, maximizing the harm done to the innocent. This has the effect of scaring innocent people into pleading guilty. If *that* is what you want.. then please continue to advocate the practice of allowing negligent prosecution.
If you look at the conviction rates you will see that about 1/4 of all prosecutions are in fact against INNOCENT people (that is to say they are not convicted). These people are victims just as much as victims of crime. Except they are victims of the beligerent attitude of a STATE which considers that it has the right to negligently try people for crimes they didn't commit without compensation.
Trying innocent people doesn't reduce crime. It encourages crime. In 25% of the cases a person can commit a crime, and the WRONG person will be charged. T
Why is it that Congress and the President can break their oath to uphold the Constitution's restrictions on their power and there is no real penalty?
Maybe it is time to penalize repeat offenders who vote for and pass (and don't veto) for unconstitutional laws.
This accomplishes what? Unconstitutional laws are technically of no force or effect. Therefore no harm was done. So you would be outlawing a harmless activity, and that itself would be an unconstitutional law. Unconstitional laws only cause harm indirectly.. Because overzealous DA's tries to enforce them. If there needs to be any balancing of powers, it is that victims of failed prosecutions (i.e. the presumptively INNOCENT person accused of a crime who isn't convicted (either because the crime itself was unconstitional or for lack of evidence)) should be compensated by the Prosecutor for all damages incurred.
Right now the victim of a wrongful prosecution (it is wrongful because the Court aquitted them or ruled the law itself wrong), get nothing unless they can establish malice.
If I accidentally hit you with my car I have to compensate you. You don't need to establish malice.
Why should the DA get off scott free when he negligently prosecutes an innocent person? You can destroy lives even when you have no malice.
Fair market value is the price the buyer is willing to pay, and the price the seller is willing to accept when neither party has any particular external pressure to make the transaction go ahead.
When a person needs healthcare they must buy it immediately or ELSE. This is a situation under duress and does not result in the buyer paying fair market value. Calling such a transaction FREE is fallacious. In any other area of commerce, a contract made in such circumstances would not even be binding. And yet people are obligated to pay their medical debt. As long as medical associations can strictly control who is permitted to practice medicine in a particular area (they do), and state enforced medical PATENTS insure that there is only 1 provider of any given medical product, there is never any danger that a person in need of healthcare will be able to shop around for treatment and take advantage of the FREE market.
You aren't in a position to haggle over price when you are in extreme pain or dying. Calling that a FREE market is a perverse lie.
The cost of healthcare is set to the level which a large enough segment of society is willing to tolerate before it overthrows the entire medical system completely (perhaps the entire government) and adopts a publicly run healthcare system that most civilized nations have adopted. This has nothing to do with a free market. This is oppression. The government is actually BANNING you from IMPORTing your own drugs for personal use? WHAT THE F*CK IS THAT??? A free market where you can't buy from whoever you want to?
Not even copyright law forbids you for importing a copywritten product for your own personal use.
The various branches of the one-world government are so utterly in the pockets of lobbiests that the Canadian Arm (which currently would love nothing more than to abolish the canadian healthcare system entirely) is actually going to make it illegal for canadian pharmacists to export drugs out of Canada. For who's benefit? (A: the drug companies.)
Who exactly are the CUSTOMERS in this free market? It isn't the patient. The patient is the PRODUCT. You are being sold and bartered like so much cattle, and large transnational corporations are reaping the profits.
PS: Canadians also live longer than Americans and spend less money on healthcare.
(and on a per capita basis our immigration rates are at parity with the US).
But, wealthy/rich people like to spend more money on more expensive things...their food bills are MUCH higher than normal people's in that they generally eat finer,more expensive foods (filet mignon vs cubed steak). So...they will pay more in taxes, because they consume more expensive items generally across the board...
really? so someone who earns 500k a year spends all of his money, has nothing left to show for it after paying all of their bills at the end of the year, and dies as broke as they were when they started?
I guess consumption tax is fair after all.
So what? If a millionare wants to reign in his spending to match that of someone making $100K, so what? You may be interested in:
a millionare has much more at stake in this country, and his property benefits on a continuing basis much more from the social services (such as defense, police forces, fire departments, roads, etc, the courts) than does the property of a person earning $100k. (let alone $30k) It are INVESTMENTS that benefit most from such services, consumed items are consumed and by definition reap nothing.
The web page that you cited is absolutely irrelevant to the argument. It charts taxes against spending, not against WEALTH. No one denies this consumption tax based system scales up with consumption. The point is that consumption as a ratio of wealth, scales practically inversly with wealth. The parent poster's point was that the million dollar a year earner consumes almost nothing MORE than what a 100k earner consumes. The million earner merely invests more. consequently the milion/year earner pays the same tax while reaping greater benefit on a dollar per dollar basis.
this is a regressive tax system. It will lead inevitably to more and more wealth being concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer families, and thus take us back to a system of aristocracy. That is, of course, the entire POINT. This "fair" tax, is a tax system by the rich for the rich. It has nothing to do with creating a FAIR or just society.
I'm not saying income tax is king either. But consumption taxes are far worse.
saying that either side has a low threshold for the "sanctity of life" is just plain insulting and rude.
What if it is true?
I think you are confusing soldiers with philosophers. And while the fantasy of the warrior-poet may lift our spirits, it has very little to do with the reality of an all volunteer army. Professional solders are hired killers. They believe that learning how to kill will help lift up humanity better than learning how to heal or build or think.
They are there because they didn't need to be drafted and compelled to kill, they CHOSE to kill. They figured the trauma of putting a bullet in another human beings brain would not cause them permanent psychological harm. They figured they would not suffer shell shock or nightmares for the rest of their lives. Or they are killing because they are so poor that desperation drove them to join the military. It was rarely a moral decision. And the average high school educated marine who thinks it was, is on average too ignorant to know the difference. Show me a single reqruitment add which says "you may have to kill some poor sob in another country for reasons you aren't allowed to know, but its worth it because getting blood on your hands is goodness!" or perhaps "you'll kill innocent civilians and attack some non-military targets... but our government will give you immunity from war crimes prosecution!".
The ads are designed to appeal to the unimaginative. The geek so lacking in human skills as to think flying a remote control weapon is ultra cool. They dont tell the truth. They dont explain WHY there is a war. They appeal to selfishness. "join the army.. be all that YOU can be".. as if all that a person can be is a soldier. That is about the LEAST that a person can be. It is the evil of last resort. It should not be something to aspire to in any circumstance.
The real moral soldier would want more PROOF than some transparently false claims of WMD's or an also transparently false connection between Iraq and 911 before shipping off with the intention of putting themself in a situation where they will kill people.
blind obedience to the bible, your church and your political leaders is not morality; It is obedience; it is blind; nothing more.
What kind of person would want to become a TOOL for the state... seperate and apart from free society.. a virtual slave... to kill or be killed at the beck and call of the government. Tell me what kind of brilliant philosopher and moralist seeks THAT??
Men do more dangerous things because we are more capable of doing more dangerous things successfully. This isn't just bravado. There is a certain amount of risk assessment to every action a person takes. And depending on how active a person is dictates their self awareness as well as how capable they are of performing a given feat. A given act may be considered objectively dangerous but every act danger level is subjective to the person performing the act.
Right. And every man dumb enough to want to intentionally risk dying for cheap thrills is rational enough to only do things which are objectively safe because of their supremely honed reflexes and perfect masculine physic.
Men seem to do more dangerous things because they are more likely to survive the 'dangerous' activity.
So when a man is looking out of the bay at the ground at 10000 feet and deciding weather or not to jump. How exactly does a MAN compute his odds of death compared with a woman? And at what point does the woman say 'no.. I'm not going to do it. I'm a woman and my odds just aren't good enough. If I was a man then the danger would be just right."
The new laws are more restrictive limiting who can possibly apply for a job.
The law as stated would require the employer to list honest bare minimum requirements they are willing to HIRE.
Once that is done anyone who applies under the new rules would be a bona fide candidate and genuinely qualified. It would be easier to objectively prove at that point whether or not an employer is not hiring blacks because blacks are not applying or because they are simply racist and prefer to hire whites. More over it would be much easer to catch those who lie about their qualifications. Because if the true minimum qualifications are posted, then anyone who misrepresented themselves would get caught almost immediately. As it stands many companies put requirements which are nothing more than fluff and someone can get away with lying about qualifications on the bet that at the end of the day the company was ALSO lying about requiring those skills.
What happened to all the racists who used to argue "It's my company, I'll hire only whites if I want to"? Did they all vanish? No, they are still out there and still practicing discrimination in whatever way they can. If that means putting ficticious job requirements in a listing in order to have a ready excuse on hand to fire whoever they want, then they will do it.
This is a law which governs how prospective employee and employers are permitted to ADVERTISE themselves to one another in a commercial setting where considerable coercive power is in the hands of the employer and exists without any balancing considerations available to the applicants. The state has a hand in insuring that the PEOPLE (the majority of which are employees rather than employers) are not falsely advertised to, in any setting.
The same arguments you make in favour of allowing companies to include fanciful requirements in a job listing (for "future plans") can be used to argue in favour of allowing the advertising of non-existant features in a product (to allow the consumers to "plan" for the future). By this ethic, the consumer can always test the feature if they really need it afterall. That was how advertising actually was/is when/where there is no control of false advertisers. As it is, advertisers routinely stretch the truth to the absolute limits when pushing their wares.
The notion that a business will not be able to find job applicants unless it is allowed to include false job requirements is fantastical. I'd like to know exactly how that works.
Post HONEST minimum requirements. This is all the law (as purported by the article) requires.
Some people may not have the job skills but have the ability or will to learn, and such an employer could see that by looking at a resume or talking to someone.
If a business puts honest to goodness minimum requirements in a job posting, how could it possibly get away with hiring someone lacking the required skills? It would amount to hiring an unnecessary person (subject to being fired at any arbitrary time). You can easily post an add for a TRAINEE job position, if you are willing to consider hiring such people. I dont see the problem, unless you don't want to be legally obligated to hire recent immigrants who would easily qualify for the TRAINEE position and apply for the job, thereby removing your excuse that none of the minority groups bothered applying for the job or qualified.
By listing only the FANTASY job position and accepting applications from underqualified workers, the company can easily practice discrimination against any minority group and claim that none of the applicants from that minority group qualify for the job. (meanwhile, none of the white people who got hired in the end qualified for the job (as advertised) EITHER).
In the end, if a particular skill is not really a REQUIREMENT, then dont list it as a REQUIREMENT. List it as a 'a plus'. Of course then, you would need to HONOUR the salary rates you have advertised in an attempt to lure applicants. Because you ca
"I mean, seriously, its like none of their freakin business. Doesnt this help kill 'free enterprise' or deminish capitalism? This is like communist USSR here.
It is our place and decision to run online employment boards how we see fit and put up descriptions of our jobs and post our skills to our own likings. We are free to find the people who we think may be good at the job by looking at their resume"
Don't kid yourself. Contract law as well as advertising have always been regulated, at least since
slavery, fraud and false advertising were outlawed.
You are not free to post whatever kinds of ads you like, nor are you free to treat other human beings however you see fit. Even employees and job applicants are human beings. And if the only way to get employers to comply with human rights norms is to impose rules on them (as it seems to be the case), then too bad. If you want to treat people like your personal play things, you are free to set up business somewhere else. I understand the Chinese don't take human rights to be as important as profit these days. Perhaps you would feel comfortable doing business over there?
Perhaps these new rules will prevent companies from advertising necessary qualifications which go far beyond the actual qualifications they anticipate anyone will actually have. Putting false requirements on a job posting is merely a means to oppress new employees, by lying to them and making them think they only have a job because of charity rather than their bona fide merit.
Good luck with that.
Alternatively if you are interested, the current special edition of Scientific American "The Frontiers of Physics" has an article called "The Search for Relativity Violations" on page 13. It is on news stands now until February 20, 2006.
If you want to design your own experiments and stick it to the "man", then what you may want to look for are substances which FALL at different speeds in a vacuum.
Since the force of gravity is proportional only to gravitational mass of both bodies, and acceleration due to gravity is proportional to force and inversly proportional to intertial mass: Something with a lower inertial mass than gravitational mass will accelerate faster in free fall. Something high inertial mass compared to gravitational mass will accelerate slower in free fall.
I'm afraid you aren't going to find any physicists out there arguing that GR doesn't claim that gravitational mass and inertial mass are equal. It has nothing to do with what any experiment proves. The theory is the theory.
n /works/1910s/relative/ch19.htm
Anyone claiming that General Relativity does not purport that Gravitational Mass and Inertial mass are the same, simply doesn't know the theory.
Here is a direct quote from Albert Einstein (the guy who discovered GR, and widely respected by scientists):
"The gravitational mass of a body is equal to its inertial law"
- source: Relativity: The Special And General Theory, chapter 19.
I just googled that exact phrase and found it at http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/einstei
I wonder what Chapter 20 is called....
"The Equality of Inertial and Gravitational Mass as an argument for the General Postule of Relativity"
do you think its part of the theory?
Certainly open and public debate, public records,the right to petition the government are all hallmarks of democracy.
However there is a difference between something being 'necessary' for democracy and something being 'sufficient' for democracy.
There is an additional element and a necessary element that is removed. And that is the right to have ones vote counted.
The moment that representatives consider factors other than what would be the desires of their constituents (had their constituents been fully appraised of the situation) then you dont have democracy. Not even representative democracy.
To many so called "democracies" are based on the notion that once a representative is in office, it is his luxury to vote however he personally feels on the issues. He is a stand in to represent what his constituents feel. And his democratic duty (if we are to have a democracy) is to use his best judgement and knowledge to vote and speak for THEM.
What instead we typically have now is a candidate claims to belief X,Y, and Z, and then people vote on that basis. and later on issue W comes up, and the representative them votes in the way that best benefits his CONTRIBUTORS. Those who paid for his election campaign and showered him with gifts. i.e. the "lobbiests".
If a majority government intends to do X, and is going to do X regardless of what anyone else wants, then holding some token public hearings is little more than a PR show. It is a farce. The decision has already been made. This is not democracy any more than a kangaroo court is Justice.
When a representative pursues an issue without putting the will of his constituents (not his contributors or his party) up FIRST then what he is doing is taking away the vote from his constituents.
To have democracy every citizens vote must count.
What we basically have is something like 'democracy for the rich'. Similar to a corporation with shareholders. If you are rich and can afford to make significant enough contributions, your vote counts. The more contributions you make.. the more your vote counts.
Our "democracy" is corporatism dressed like democracy.
Wealth doesn't buy elections. But wealth buys representatives in parliament/congress/sentate/whatever.
You may have the right to lobby, yell and scream. But you dont have the right to force the government to do anything in particular, unless you are a regular contributor and can threaten to withhold your contributions. Or alternatively, close your plant and fire 300 voters telling them which politician cost them their job. (in fact you are going to close the plant anyway and outsource to China, but your poorly educated workers wont know the difference).
If the minister had been allowed to make his own law unimpeded this would have resulted in disaster.
The results were a disaster anyway. Just a different kind of disaster.
Democracy is much more than voting once every four years,
it's reading the papers (free press),
which is owned by the wealthy elite media conglomerates and services to its advertisers.
complain and demonstrate when things go bad
whatever the aforementioned media tells you has gone bad, you can complain about.
(free association, right to strike, right to free speech),
however, if you dont want to lose your job and watch your family wind up broke and destitute, you better associate only with the right kind of people, show up and work when your are told, and keep your mouth shut and your head down.
perhaps get involved into local politics
Because there is no way in hell you are going to get anywhere at the national level without the backing of the media conglomerates. And you wont get that unless you sell your soul, and give up on your naive democratic ideals.
or more, to name only a few things you can do.
without representatives who are legally compelled to count my vote it won't be democracy rega
the word "prove" bears defining. Technically nothing is ever proven in a courtroom either, if the standard of proof you expect is "beyond any conceivable doubt", because in court you only need to prove guilt "beyond all reasonable doubt" or many other things "on the balance of probabilities". But this is not the standard used by science. Scientists hold them selves to a much higher standard.
On the otherhand... engineers dont require proof beyond all conceivable doubt. But are quite happy to build machines based on what science has "proved". Because by the standards of engineering, something merely need to work in the vast majority of cases (say 99.999% or 99.9999% of the time for high quality work). Scientists are trying to find solutions to prove things far beyond 5 or 6 significant digits of reliability, but to an infinite degree of reliability.
So, while nothing is ever proven by scientists according to the standard of mathematicians (i.e. absolute perfection), according to other standards.... science proves all sorts of things.
Making a claim like "scientists never prove anything", is misleading, because it causes one to confuse your position with being "truth is subjective", and such notions are what allow certain idealogues to claim the earth is 5000 years old (based on the scientific fact that there is perhaps a 0.00000000000000001% chance or so that the earth might actually be only 5000 years old) or that global warming is a myth based on the perhaps 1% chance that it is. Scientists prove things to the limits of our technology and knowledge and scientists also document the margin of error to which it is proven, and that is a hell of a lot MORE proof than anyone in any other field provides, except pure maths.
In almost all fields of human endeavor, except the very highly technical, such as medicine or advanced engineering, we can treat science as if it were proven with absolute perfection because our own human error is so much more likely to be the cause of difficulty than the margin of error in most main stream sciences in trying to account for why things go wrong.
There is a slight chance that your automobile does not actually need gasoline. It may be a perpetual motion machine. But are you going to disregard the science which has "proved" that your car is not? Are you going to invest your time and money trying to invent a perpetual motion machine yourself?
Are you worried that your car may transmute into a thermonuclear bomb and cause the sun to implode the next time you start it? Science "proved" those things wont happen well enough for you to treat those things as impossibilities. And yes, scientist to scientist... I can't be certain you wont destroy the solar system tonight, but I science has "proven" I'm more likely to simply burst into flame myself in the next 30 seconds, so I have more urgent matters to attend to.
There's still the question of "relativistic mass", which IMHO is just an artifact of trying to make relativistic effects mesh better with our Newtonian perception. The real test of whether "relativistic mass" is actual real mass would be to see if the gravity well around a massive object is stronger when it is moving than when it is stationary.
When an object is moving relative to you, you will measure its mass to be greater than if it were standing still. This includes its intertia and gravitational attraction to other things as well as time dilation related to gravity. These are all products of mass. Gravity has no meaning without mass, and mass without gravity is nonsensical in the theory of relativity, as well as in all observations we have ever made.
In the theory of relativity, nothing has an absolute mass and there is no absolute frame of reference (nor have we detected one in the real world).
My point is that this process is not especially non-democratic compared to what typically happens in so called western democracies.
In a republic the people do not get to weigh in on anything except during elections. We have collectively decided to pretend that this is "democracy". If the winners of the election then decide to do something in secret, calling it undemocratic is misleading.
The winners in so called "western democracies" always do things in secret, and then concentrate on selling their decision to the public, or keeping them completely obscure and secret, and only rarely truly trust democracy to choose the best answer. The entire system is undemocratic from the moment the first ballot is cast. But the situation is even worse than it appears, because people do not even vote for representatives: People are voting for political parties. People are effectively voting for brand names and labels, which make understanding the differences between candidates irrelevant, as candidates are expected to vote the party line, and in any event have no moral justification for voting other than the party line (since they were expected to vote the party line when they were elected in the first place). The fact that the majority of elections also use a first past the post system to insure that only vague and generic platforms can actually win any representation whatsoever, means that on specific issues the only way to get the government to act is the old fashioned way: lobby the government. Lobbying the people is almost a pointless exercise. The people have no power.
This is not democracy by any stretch of the imagination. Pointing out 1 symptom of the failure of democracy as a whole, and saying that this 1 symptom is non-democratic gives the impression that the political system as a whole is otherwise democratic, and that is misleading.
Except in name, we don't have a democracy at all. The wealthy still run the show for their own self aggrandizement.
oh... then completely typical in other words.