I'm not going to continue this argument, you're simply being facetious at this point. You can try to semantically twist and turn all you want, but in the real world, it's obvious what the difference between a discovery and an invention is. No amount of "agreeing to disagree" will change that, either. You can "agree to disagree" with something that is true, but that doesn't make the fact any less incontrovertible.
...Which is BS, and why we are having so much trouble with patents killing innovation today. The legal system has become disconnected with reality and common sense, and most certainly has strayed from its original intention, to protect inventions, not ideas.
There's clearly a difference. Yes, you can discover that when electricity is run through a filament, it lights up. That means that if you want to run electricity through a filament to produce light, by gummy, have at it. Edison had a patent on a specific creation--his light bulb--but that doesn't mean that no one could run electricity through filaments or create other ways of creating light. His patent simply meant that no one else could legally copy his design.
Third, it's good to have educated workers. But that education ain't worth much if potential employers can't hire the graduates, and taking money away from potential employers makes it that much harder for them to hire those graduates.
This myth that giving rich people more money results in more jobs drives me batshit crazy. It is NOT true. If you look at tax rates on the rich historically, there is NO correlation to unemployment. ZILCH. ZERO. NADA. Right now, rich people have lower taxes than they've had in over a century. The highest marginal tax rate, which was over 90% during periods of our greatest economic growth in this country, is currently 35%. The capital gains tax rate, which is what most of the super-wealthy pay, is only 15%--lower than it's been since 1942. Corporate tax rates are low also, with many corporations effectively paying negative taxes--zero in taxes, but receiving government subsidies.
And whoa nellie, has it paid off! In the past 20 years, the poor and middle class have been sliding backwards in terms of total wealth and income distribution. Meanwhile, the super rich and corporations and going like gangbusters. They're taking home more income as a percentage of total income than they have since the 1920s. So if giving money to these so-called "job creators" is what we're supposed to do to reduce unemployment, I've got news for you. That's exactly what we've been doing more than ever for most, probably all, of your lifetime. Where the hell are the jobs?
There is ONE thing and one thing ONLY that creates jobs: DEMAND If there is no demand, I don't care how much money rich people have, there will be no jobs. If there is demand, I don't care how badly rich people are compared to today, there will be jobs. Period. End of story.
Anyone who is serious about reducing unemployment must focus on getting money into the hands of the people who actually spend the vast majority of it--the poor and middle class. This is by far the best way to increase demand and thus decrease unemployment. I know that it's popular to whine and complain about wealth redistribution, but shocker! There has already been massive wealth distribution in this country--from the poor and middle class to the rich. One only has to look at, for example, the effective tax rate of people like Mitt Romney versus median-income Americans to see this wealth redistribution in action.
People like me aren't fighting to go to Mitt Romney's house and take his stuff, that's ridiculous. What we do want, though, is for the redistribution that is happening currently to stop, for everyone to pay their fair share, for this insane idiocy of supporting "job creators" who aren't actually creating jobs but doing nothing but serving as hugd money vacuums to stop.
And the kicker? Once that demand is created, it's not like the rich will lose their money. They will still be rich and still continue to get richer. Probably not as fast and not with such vast sums like they are doing today, but the wealth will be shared with everyone and we as a country can finally experience meaningful economic progress again. That's the kind of "getting rich" I can really stand behind.
Yeah, it does, actually. It's just too common that a process such as a new process to make steel is arrived at independently by multiple people and/or companies. Plus, a new process of making steel is something that is discovered, not something that is made. In my opinion, things that are discovered shouldn't be patentable. Thoughts and ideas should be freely sharable, period.
This isn't a best-selling book, this is an unpublished script. The original author is one the record of stating that it's perfectly fine. There is a time window of 40 years in which CBS could have chosen to do something productive with the script. How do you think this is similar at all?
The quick answer is that yes, if I wrote a book and 40 years later Warner Brothers decides to make a movie of it without paying me any royalties, I'd be fine with that. Why? Because I don't buy into the BS line of reasoning that just because I write a book, I should have the final indefinite say-so over what happens to it for my entire natural lifetime plus some ungodly number of years after. At some point, society's interest in having creative works in the public domain outweigh an individual's (or a company's) need or desire to profit off of it. Or more to the point in this case, reserve the right to highly unlikely profit at some indeterminate point in the future off of it.
That's one of the things that really pisses me off about people these days. Everything is about me, me, ME!, with no concept of owing anything to advancing society. Your post is a perfect example of this attitude. By couching it in terms of, "Don't you think it's okay to be greedy and indefinitely keep your stuff all to your own self, and to hell with everyone else?" To some extent, I would agree; I'm not in favor of forcing people to live on communes and share everything. But we're not talking about physical property which necessitates Person A having to go without if Person B takes it. And, like I said before, it's not like I'm advocating having no copyright at all.
But the reason our founding fathers put a reasonable limit on the length of copyrights and patents is precisely because they never had this romantic notion that people assign to them now that one's individual liberty is sacrosanct. They knew that the best society is one in which there is a reasonable balance between individual liberty and the good of our collective civilization, admittedly tilting towards individual liberty. Of course, thanks to massive amounts of corporate money buying our federal government, that balance has been all but completely eliminated, which is why we are falling behind other countries that have a much more sane balance than we do.
I'm not a fan of their hardware, either. In 2000, I bought a Sony home theater system, thinking I was getting good quality with the "good" brand. Within a few months, the DVD changer got jammed and I couldn't watch any DVDs on it. It was under warranty so I sent it in to be repaired. They kept it for almost two months. I was absolutely livid. When they finally sent it back, it had a nasty scratch down the left side, and the icing on the cake was that it STILL didn't work! So I unplugged the thing, stuck it right back in the box that I had just gotten it out of, and sent it back. I waited a few more weeks, finally got it back, and this time it worked, though I was still pissed off at the scratch.
Within a month after the anniversary date of my purchase, all of a sudden, the center channel speaker started making this hideous noise. It wasn't the speaker, it was the port on the system the speaker was plugged into. If I swapped it out with a different speaker, the different speaker made the noise. I couldn't hear crap, so I called them back up. They said they'd be happy to repair it--for a few hundred bucks. I explained that although more than a calendar year had passed since I bought the thing, it had been in their repair facilities for over two of those twelve months, and I felt that they should give me credit for that time and repair the thing for free. They refused to budge.
So I unplugged the damn thing, hauled it to an electronics recycling center, and swore never to knowingly buy another piece of Sony hardware again. I had such a bitter taste in my mouth from the experience that I didn't even buy a replacement component; to this day, I just use the speakers on my television. Wow, things sure have changed since the days I wrote a script to hit Amazon's site and page me when a PS2 was available so that I could get one on launch day. After all of the other crap that's gone down, the root kit, the other OS option, the PSN hackage, the filesharing lawsuits, stories like this hitting WAY too often... I used to be a Sony fan, but for ten years now, and for the foreseeable future, I wouldn't use their stuff even if someone gave it to me for free. Which is a shame for Sony, since in the past ten years I've finally gotten enough disposable income to afford fancy electronics. And as the techno-geek in my family and circle of friends, I've also advised many consumers with money in hand to avoid their stuff.
...And Slashdot has seen fit to munge my post. I'll just leave it at, if you think that simple math calculations prove how stupid purchasing a vehicle like the Volt is, then you need a new calculator. Look up the info yourself next time instead of just reading Republican talking points.
Well, this pretty much pegs you as a bullshit troll.
If you had actually followed the link above, you would see that the Telsa Model S (the sedan, not the $100k+ Roadster) does 0-60 in 6.5 seconds, and that's the base
So will a Yaris beat a Tesla Model S? In a long-distance race, if a top of the line Yaris is competing against a Model S or you've done some expensive modifications to the Yaris, it theoretically can, but if you take the average Yaris on the road, I don't think so. You're sure as hell not going to pay 1/10 of the cost, more like 1/3 (with a very heavy emphasis on for now), and you also will be severely gimped on features and, if you're a tall guy like me, extremely uncomfortable in the compact crackerbox you're driving.
You also seem to be under the incorrect perception that I'm some sort of green tree-hugger. I do believe that we should be more environmentally responsible, but I assure you that I have never been to any rallies to save any spotted anythings. Personally, I don't particularly care if they drill in Alaska or build a pipeline through Montana. But converting to alternative fuels, with the end goal being electric cars, is not just an environmentally wise decision. That's just gravy. The fact is that our current energy policy is simply unsustainable. As oil reserves in countries get depleted, as we compete with countries like China, India, and others that are becoming more industrialized, as international tensions mount, the inevitable path is that unless we free ourselves from oil dependency, we are royally screwed in ways that your trollish mind cannot possibly imagine.
That's what you and your buddies need to wrap your tiny little brains around. No matter how much we drill, no matter how much we increase our domestic production, not matter how much we pipe down from Canada, we supply such a small percentage of oil on the world market, and we are in such heated competition for it now with other countries whose demand is expanding much faster than ours, we will never be able to drill ourselves out of this situation.
But, you know, go ahead and keep thinking that. Once you're paying $20 or $30 per gallon within a generation or so, let's see how you feel about electric cars then, which will probably still have an energy equivalency of $1 to $2 per "gallon". It's just a shame that uninformed idiots learning the hard way have such negative impacts on the rest of us.
Try this. March down to the IRS and tell them that you're going to deduct some off of your tax bill because your religion instructs you that "Thou shalt not kill." Tell them that the money you're holding back is because you don't want to have to pay for soldiers to go fight in wars or for lawyers to prosecute federal death penalty cases. Then try to get some Internet time from jail and post again how your religious rights should extend infinitely, and that you should not ever have to pay to allow someone else to do anything that violates your own rights or conscience.
Or do this. Next time you have to go to a hospital, don't pay the whole bill. When they ask you why you're not paying the rest, explain to them that you don't want the rest of that amount to be used for free or low-cost prenatal services to unwed mothers, or to provide emergency trauma care to drug users who get shot or stabbed, or to treat sexually transmitted diseases of the indigent because it's against your religious beliefs.
Or go to an Apple store and tell them you want one of the new iPads. When they bring it out, pull out $300 for the $830-priced model. When they balk at giving you the item, just explain to them that you're conscientiously opposed to the labor practices that Apple is supporting in China, so you're just paying for the hardware. After all, your religious rights extend infinitely, right? By insisting that you pay the full $830, they're violating your First Amendment rights, and you should sue.
Like I said, religious rights do not extend infinitely. Sometimes other people's rights trump your own, especially when it comes to things like health care and their own individual liberty. If, say for example, a religious hospital is given the leeway to not have to pay for coverage or is charged less for insurance because that coverage is not provided, that gives it a financial advantage over another hospital that does not have that advantage. In other words, if a religious institution or company wants to provide public services and compete with public companies, they should be subject to the exact same laws and regulations as everyone else.
Wow, so the fact that just about everything in the world except cars right now runs on electricity, I guess that makes for an awful lot of stupidity out there.
And maybe you've been hiding under a rock lately, but the electric cars today are pretty damn good. Yes, even the Chevy Volt that some idiots keep talking about as if it's already doomed. They're a bit on the pricey side right now, but that's because some of the technology is still relatively new and they don't have the volume that cars with ICEs have thanks to an almost century-long head start. Have you even looked something like the Tesla Model S that beats the crap out of most ICE cars today? Now imagine how much less it would cost if the government just handed billions of dollars over to Tesla like it does oil companies.
I didn't say we'd be petroleum-free; we'll be petroleum-independent. The vast majority of our oil is used for energy production, plain and simple.
And we don't need to put wind turbines in every neighborhood. What we need is a combination of approaches, all tailored for the region they're serving. And yes, we very likely would need to rely on things like coal and natural gas for a while as other renewable technologies ramp up. Still, it would be much, much better to generate the power at one central location since we already have the distribution channels in place. Like I said, that way we could generate it at scale, which allows us to do other nifty things like concentrate the pollution to be more easily cleaned than just having millions of cars and trucks spewing it into the open air.
Not really. The scalpers would just get hundreds (thousands?) of people to register to be in the lottery to ensure that they get the tickets. Hell, they could probably even get more that way.
Honestly, I would think that the best way is to have some kind of lottery system combined with some process to vet people who are actually developers or industry folks who should be there. Maybe a really basic question about development that only developers would readily know the answer to. Once you've "passed," you don't have to do it again next year, you're automatically in the drawing (if you want to go, of course) for five years or such.
I'd love to see the same thing for popular concerts and sporting events.
Or better yet, convert the country over to renewable alternative fuels, such as solar, hydro, geothermal, wind, etc. Subsidize electric cars instead of oil companies so that the power is generated at scale in power plants instead of hideously inefficiently inside relatively hideously inefficient internal combustion engines.
You'd kill two birds with one stone. Most of these power generation technologies are much cleaner, so you don't have to worry about things like oil spills. Also, you'd permanently sever our parasitic and detrimental dependence on the Middle East and other oil-producing countries that do not have our best interest in mind. And it's better for us as well--imagine never having to go to a gas station to "fill up" again, and paying less than 25% for the energy equivalency of gasoline.
Apologies in advance for the atrocious grammar. Re-reading my post, that's kind of embarrassing. Oh well, chalk it up to being distracted by other things while I was trying to write my thoughts out. Still, I should have proofread it much better.
Oh, make no mistake about it, it is a violation of the rights of religious institutions. I don't think that was ever in much question. The question is just how far do those rights extend? My religious rights, for example, do not give me the right to dictate your health care options. Why should it be any different for an employer dictating that an employee cannot have have contraceptive coverage for no incremental expense past what the coverage already costs?
That is why Sandra Fluke should have been allowed to testify in a panel regarding religious freedom. They had a panel made of people whose agenda is pushing that freedom as far as possible, even at the expense of the individual liberty of people like Sandra Fluke. Without her testimony, there was no one to say, "That's too far," and the panel--and the public--did not get a fair representation of the issue at hand.
Also, if you actually watch the panel, you will quickly see that it wasn't just about religious freedom. Every person who testified did so extensively about the issue of contraception. To pretend like contraception just happened to be an issue that came up is extremely dishonest and disingenuous. I for one do not believe that simply draping some issue in the mantle of religious freedom and not allowing any opposing viewpoints because, hey, it's not relevant to religious freedom, is not an acceptable way to debate.
The court actually dug the coffin up, drove another nail into it, and reburied it. Yes, it was a lot of work, but the point needed to be proven that badly.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not going to continue this argument, you're simply being facetious at this point. You can try to semantically twist and turn all you want, but in the real world, it's obvious what the difference between a discovery and an invention is. No amount of "agreeing to disagree" will change that, either. You can "agree to disagree" with something that is true, but that doesn't make the fact any less incontrovertible.
...Which is BS, and why we are having so much trouble with patents killing innovation today. The legal system has become disconnected with reality and common sense, and most certainly has strayed from its original intention, to protect inventions, not ideas.
I'm sorry it's so confusing. To me and most normal people, the difference is pretty obvious.
There's clearly a difference. Yes, you can discover that when electricity is run through a filament, it lights up. That means that if you want to run electricity through a filament to produce light, by gummy, have at it. Edison had a patent on a specific creation--his light bulb--but that doesn't mean that no one could run electricity through filaments or create other ways of creating light. His patent simply meant that no one else could legally copy his design.
Third, it's good to have educated workers. But that education ain't worth much if potential employers can't hire the graduates, and taking money away from potential employers makes it that much harder for them to hire those graduates.
This myth that giving rich people more money results in more jobs drives me batshit crazy. It is NOT true. If you look at tax rates on the rich historically, there is NO correlation to unemployment. ZILCH. ZERO. NADA. Right now, rich people have lower taxes than they've had in over a century. The highest marginal tax rate, which was over 90% during periods of our greatest economic growth in this country, is currently 35%. The capital gains tax rate, which is what most of the super-wealthy pay, is only 15%--lower than it's been since 1942. Corporate tax rates are low also, with many corporations effectively paying negative taxes--zero in taxes, but receiving government subsidies.
And whoa nellie, has it paid off! In the past 20 years, the poor and middle class have been sliding backwards in terms of total wealth and income distribution. Meanwhile, the super rich and corporations and going like gangbusters. They're taking home more income as a percentage of total income than they have since the 1920s. So if giving money to these so-called "job creators" is what we're supposed to do to reduce unemployment, I've got news for you. That's exactly what we've been doing more than ever for most, probably all, of your lifetime. Where the hell are the jobs?
There is ONE thing and one thing ONLY that creates jobs: DEMAND If there is no demand, I don't care how much money rich people have, there will be no jobs. If there is demand, I don't care how badly rich people are compared to today, there will be jobs. Period. End of story.
Anyone who is serious about reducing unemployment must focus on getting money into the hands of the people who actually spend the vast majority of it--the poor and middle class. This is by far the best way to increase demand and thus decrease unemployment. I know that it's popular to whine and complain about wealth redistribution, but shocker! There has already been massive wealth distribution in this country--from the poor and middle class to the rich. One only has to look at, for example, the effective tax rate of people like Mitt Romney versus median-income Americans to see this wealth redistribution in action.
People like me aren't fighting to go to Mitt Romney's house and take his stuff, that's ridiculous. What we do want, though, is for the redistribution that is happening currently to stop, for everyone to pay their fair share, for this insane idiocy of supporting "job creators" who aren't actually creating jobs but doing nothing but serving as hugd money vacuums to stop.
And the kicker? Once that demand is created, it's not like the rich will lose their money. They will still be rich and still continue to get richer. Probably not as fast and not with such vast sums like they are doing today, but the wealth will be shared with everyone and we as a country can finally experience meaningful economic progress again. That's the kind of "getting rich" I can really stand behind.
Yeah, it does, actually. It's just too common that a process such as a new process to make steel is arrived at independently by multiple people and/or companies. Plus, a new process of making steel is something that is discovered, not something that is made. In my opinion, things that are discovered shouldn't be patentable. Thoughts and ideas should be freely sharable, period.
Off-topic, but the link in your signature leads to a spamming content farm. You should probably delete it or update it as appropriate.
I was actually just thinking, 6%? Yup, that would just about account for anyone left with a shred of morality in the company.
Like that would stop them. Any person in a city with a beach would just be declared a terrorist and sent to Guantana—
Oh wait... Shit.
This isn't a best-selling book, this is an unpublished script. The original author is one the record of stating that it's perfectly fine. There is a time window of 40 years in which CBS could have chosen to do something productive with the script. How do you think this is similar at all?
The quick answer is that yes, if I wrote a book and 40 years later Warner Brothers decides to make a movie of it without paying me any royalties, I'd be fine with that. Why? Because I don't buy into the BS line of reasoning that just because I write a book, I should have the final indefinite say-so over what happens to it for my entire natural lifetime plus some ungodly number of years after. At some point, society's interest in having creative works in the public domain outweigh an individual's (or a company's) need or desire to profit off of it. Or more to the point in this case, reserve the right to highly unlikely profit at some indeterminate point in the future off of it.
That's one of the things that really pisses me off about people these days. Everything is about me, me, ME!, with no concept of owing anything to advancing society. Your post is a perfect example of this attitude. By couching it in terms of, "Don't you think it's okay to be greedy and indefinitely keep your stuff all to your own self, and to hell with everyone else?" To some extent, I would agree; I'm not in favor of forcing people to live on communes and share everything. But we're not talking about physical property which necessitates Person A having to go without if Person B takes it. And, like I said before, it's not like I'm advocating having no copyright at all.
But the reason our founding fathers put a reasonable limit on the length of copyrights and patents is precisely because they never had this romantic notion that people assign to them now that one's individual liberty is sacrosanct. They knew that the best society is one in which there is a reasonable balance between individual liberty and the good of our collective civilization, admittedly tilting towards individual liberty. Of course, thanks to massive amounts of corporate money buying our federal government, that balance has been all but completely eliminated, which is why we are falling behind other countries that have a much more sane balance than we do.
You're the guy at the office who goes apeshit whenever someone refers to 2000 as the start of the century/millennium, aren't you?
I'm not a fan of their hardware, either. In 2000, I bought a Sony home theater system, thinking I was getting good quality with the "good" brand. Within a few months, the DVD changer got jammed and I couldn't watch any DVDs on it. It was under warranty so I sent it in to be repaired. They kept it for almost two months. I was absolutely livid. When they finally sent it back, it had a nasty scratch down the left side, and the icing on the cake was that it STILL didn't work! So I unplugged the thing, stuck it right back in the box that I had just gotten it out of, and sent it back. I waited a few more weeks, finally got it back, and this time it worked, though I was still pissed off at the scratch.
Within a month after the anniversary date of my purchase, all of a sudden, the center channel speaker started making this hideous noise. It wasn't the speaker, it was the port on the system the speaker was plugged into. If I swapped it out with a different speaker, the different speaker made the noise. I couldn't hear crap, so I called them back up. They said they'd be happy to repair it--for a few hundred bucks. I explained that although more than a calendar year had passed since I bought the thing, it had been in their repair facilities for over two of those twelve months, and I felt that they should give me credit for that time and repair the thing for free. They refused to budge.
So I unplugged the damn thing, hauled it to an electronics recycling center, and swore never to knowingly buy another piece of Sony hardware again. I had such a bitter taste in my mouth from the experience that I didn't even buy a replacement component; to this day, I just use the speakers on my television. Wow, things sure have changed since the days I wrote a script to hit Amazon's site and page me when a PS2 was available so that I could get one on launch day. After all of the other crap that's gone down, the root kit, the other OS option, the PSN hackage, the filesharing lawsuits, stories like this hitting WAY too often... I used to be a Sony fan, but for ten years now, and for the foreseeable future, I wouldn't use their stuff even if someone gave it to me for free. Which is a shame for Sony, since in the past ten years I've finally gotten enough disposable income to afford fancy electronics. And as the techno-geek in my family and circle of friends, I've also advised many consumers with money in hand to avoid their stuff.
...And Slashdot has seen fit to munge my post. I'll just leave it at, if you think that simple math calculations prove how stupid purchasing a vehicle like the Volt is, then you need a new calculator. Look up the info yourself next time instead of just reading Republican talking points.
Well, this pretty much pegs you as a bullshit troll.
If you had actually followed the link above, you would see that the Telsa Model S (the sedan, not the $100k+ Roadster) does 0-60 in 6.5 seconds, and that's the base
So will a Yaris beat a Tesla Model S? In a long-distance race, if a top of the line Yaris is competing against a Model S or you've done some expensive modifications to the Yaris, it theoretically can, but if you take the average Yaris on the road, I don't think so. You're sure as hell not going to pay 1/10 of the cost, more like 1/3 (with a very heavy emphasis on for now), and you also will be severely gimped on features and, if you're a tall guy like me, extremely uncomfortable in the compact crackerbox you're driving.
You also seem to be under the incorrect perception that I'm some sort of green tree-hugger. I do believe that we should be more environmentally responsible, but I assure you that I have never been to any rallies to save any spotted anythings. Personally, I don't particularly care if they drill in Alaska or build a pipeline through Montana. But converting to alternative fuels, with the end goal being electric cars, is not just an environmentally wise decision. That's just gravy. The fact is that our current energy policy is simply unsustainable. As oil reserves in countries get depleted, as we compete with countries like China, India, and others that are becoming more industrialized, as international tensions mount, the inevitable path is that unless we free ourselves from oil dependency, we are royally screwed in ways that your trollish mind cannot possibly imagine.
That's what you and your buddies need to wrap your tiny little brains around. No matter how much we drill, no matter how much we increase our domestic production, not matter how much we pipe down from Canada, we supply such a small percentage of oil on the world market, and we are in such heated competition for it now with other countries whose demand is expanding much faster than ours, we will never be able to drill ourselves out of this situation.
But, you know, go ahead and keep thinking that. Once you're paying $20 or $30 per gallon within a generation or so, let's see how you feel about electric cars then, which will probably still have an energy equivalency of $1 to $2 per "gallon". It's just a shame that uninformed idiots learning the hard way have such negative impacts on the rest of us.
Try this. March down to the IRS and tell them that you're going to deduct some off of your tax bill because your religion instructs you that "Thou shalt not kill." Tell them that the money you're holding back is because you don't want to have to pay for soldiers to go fight in wars or for lawyers to prosecute federal death penalty cases. Then try to get some Internet time from jail and post again how your religious rights should extend infinitely, and that you should not ever have to pay to allow someone else to do anything that violates your own rights or conscience.
Or do this. Next time you have to go to a hospital, don't pay the whole bill. When they ask you why you're not paying the rest, explain to them that you don't want the rest of that amount to be used for free or low-cost prenatal services to unwed mothers, or to provide emergency trauma care to drug users who get shot or stabbed, or to treat sexually transmitted diseases of the indigent because it's against your religious beliefs.
Or go to an Apple store and tell them you want one of the new iPads. When they bring it out, pull out $300 for the $830-priced model. When they balk at giving you the item, just explain to them that you're conscientiously opposed to the labor practices that Apple is supporting in China, so you're just paying for the hardware. After all, your religious rights extend infinitely, right? By insisting that you pay the full $830, they're violating your First Amendment rights, and you should sue.
Like I said, religious rights do not extend infinitely. Sometimes other people's rights trump your own, especially when it comes to things like health care and their own individual liberty. If, say for example, a religious hospital is given the leeway to not have to pay for coverage or is charged less for insurance because that coverage is not provided, that gives it a financial advantage over another hospital that does not have that advantage. In other words, if a religious institution or company wants to provide public services and compete with public companies, they should be subject to the exact same laws and regulations as everyone else.
Wow, so the fact that just about everything in the world except cars right now runs on electricity, I guess that makes for an awful lot of stupidity out there.
And maybe you've been hiding under a rock lately, but the electric cars today are pretty damn good. Yes, even the Chevy Volt that some idiots keep talking about as if it's already doomed. They're a bit on the pricey side right now, but that's because some of the technology is still relatively new and they don't have the volume that cars with ICEs have thanks to an almost century-long head start. Have you even looked something like the Tesla Model S that beats the crap out of most ICE cars today? Now imagine how much less it would cost if the government just handed billions of dollars over to Tesla like it does oil companies.
I didn't say we'd be petroleum-free; we'll be petroleum-independent. The vast majority of our oil is used for energy production, plain and simple.
And we don't need to put wind turbines in every neighborhood. What we need is a combination of approaches, all tailored for the region they're serving. And yes, we very likely would need to rely on things like coal and natural gas for a while as other renewable technologies ramp up. Still, it would be much, much better to generate the power at one central location since we already have the distribution channels in place. Like I said, that way we could generate it at scale, which allows us to do other nifty things like concentrate the pollution to be more easily cleaned than just having millions of cars and trucks spewing it into the open air.
Ah, thanks! Maaaan... In that case, I do wish I could go. I love new gizmos, especially the multi-hundred-dollar variety.
Not really. The scalpers would just get hundreds (thousands?) of people to register to be in the lottery to ensure that they get the tickets. Hell, they could probably even get more that way.
Honestly, I would think that the best way is to have some kind of lottery system combined with some process to vet people who are actually developers or industry folks who should be there. Maybe a really basic question about development that only developers would readily know the answer to. Once you've "passed," you don't have to do it again next year, you're automatically in the drawing (if you want to go, of course) for five years or such.
I'd love to see the same thing for popular concerts and sporting events.
Of course, everyone who gets in drives away in a free Tesla.
What reference am I missing here?
Or better yet, convert the country over to renewable alternative fuels, such as solar, hydro, geothermal, wind, etc. Subsidize electric cars instead of oil companies so that the power is generated at scale in power plants instead of hideously inefficiently inside relatively hideously inefficient internal combustion engines.
You'd kill two birds with one stone. Most of these power generation technologies are much cleaner, so you don't have to worry about things like oil spills. Also, you'd permanently sever our parasitic and detrimental dependence on the Middle East and other oil-producing countries that do not have our best interest in mind. And it's better for us as well--imagine never having to go to a gas station to "fill up" again, and paying less than 25% for the energy equivalency of gasoline.
Apologies in advance for the atrocious grammar. Re-reading my post, that's kind of embarrassing. Oh well, chalk it up to being distracted by other things while I was trying to write my thoughts out. Still, I should have proofread it much better.
Awesome! Thanks for taking the time to do it!
Oh, make no mistake about it, it is a violation of the rights of religious institutions. I don't think that was ever in much question. The question is just how far do those rights extend? My religious rights, for example, do not give me the right to dictate your health care options. Why should it be any different for an employer dictating that an employee cannot have have contraceptive coverage for no incremental expense past what the coverage already costs?
That is why Sandra Fluke should have been allowed to testify in a panel regarding religious freedom. They had a panel made of people whose agenda is pushing that freedom as far as possible, even at the expense of the individual liberty of people like Sandra Fluke. Without her testimony, there was no one to say, "That's too far," and the panel--and the public--did not get a fair representation of the issue at hand.
Also, if you actually watch the panel, you will quickly see that it wasn't just about religious freedom. Every person who testified did so extensively about the issue of contraception. To pretend like contraception just happened to be an issue that came up is extremely dishonest and disingenuous. I for one do not believe that simply draping some issue in the mantle of religious freedom and not allowing any opposing viewpoints because, hey, it's not relevant to religious freedom, is not an acceptable way to debate.
The court actually dug the coffin up, drove another nail into it, and reburied it. Yes, it was a lot of work, but the point needed to be proven that badly.