The number of people who have more kids while already on welfare is vanishingly small. I'm certain they exist, and I agree that they're stupid. But this is where the old saying is so apt: don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Just because there are some people that abuse the system doesn't mean the system isn't good, and shouldn't be maintained. The fact is, most people do not want to live on welfare, because it's extremely hard (the government doesn't provide nearly enough money to survive on welfare alone) and there's substantial shame involved in being on welfare, because of the stigma associated with it. Maybe 1 in a thousand people is happy being on welfare, and isn't planning to get off, but let's face it, with any system there are going to be those that abuse the system.
Getting rid of welfare because some people are lazy fucks is like getting rid of universities because some people cheat on exams. Try your best to catch the ones that game the system, but recognize that some of them are going to get away with it and just write them off. Like I said in my other post, we spend so little on welfare as it is that you probably aren't giving up much more than a few cents to provide for the people that really do need help. Are you really such a penny-pincher that that's not worth it to you?
I will admit that welfare has problems: I don't think people who shouldn't be on welfare getting welfare is one of those problems (or at least, it's not a material problem, financially), but I think there are lots of people that probably do need welfare that aren't getting it, and I think that the government does a spectacularly bad job of administering welfare (which surprises exactly no one, there's not much the government does efficiently or well). What's bothers me more than "how many cents am I paying per year to support AFDC and Food Stamps" is "what percentage of the money I do pay gets eaten up in the bureaucracy." Because if I'm going to give, I want as much of what I give as possible to go to those that need it, and as little as possible to entrenched bureaucrats. It seems reasonable that you and I can agree on that, at least.
There was a study done a while ago (and I don't have the numbers in front of me) that showed that some huge percentage of the money we pay in taxes goes to simply, well, collecting taxes. I recognize that the IRS is a huge monster of a department and that running it takes money, but I would hope that it's not a huge, stupid percentage, which is what this study implied. Things like that really upset me.
I guess the point I'm trying to drive home is that I'm not a big-government liberal, in fact, I'm a pretty fiscally conservative guy. But the United States is the wealthiest nation on earth, and the fact that helping single mothers raise their children is even an issue really saddens me. We do so little as it is, and it's not like I'm even necessarily advocating doing more. I'd just like it if smart people (and Slashdot is filled with them) would take a step back and recognize that we do very little, and that it costs us next to nothing. In short, of all the things you pay taxes for, it's one of the ones least worth complaining about.
What International Law? There is no "International Law", just as there is no international government to enforce it. Furthermore, while I cannot speak for other countries, you most certainly can have your US citizenship revoked if you do any number of things the US government forbids you from doing (there are certain countries you aren't allowed to travel to, and I believe serving in the armed forces of another country without obtaining prior permission is grounds for losing your citizenship). There's a little paragraph in your passport that even outlines how you can lose it, IIRC.
Hong Kong was not democratic under the British. In a democracy, the people have control either directly or indirectly over the actions of the government -- this was not the case in colonial Hong Kong. Leading up to 1997, the British began (and even instituted) some democratic reforms but only because the mainland was taking over -- they wanted Hong Kong SAR to be democratic because they feared Beijing's ability to change the colony, whereas they had never shown any interest in pursuing the same reforms when it might have impacted their ability to rule Hong Kong.
Hong Kong people had no vote, no British citizenship -- they were not a real (ie, non-colonial) part of the UK and were ruled autocratically. You know, a British-appointed non-Chinese governer was the center of pre-1997 Hong Kong politics. Whether Hong Kong people were better off under the British or not is up for debate, but don't make the mistake of thinking that just because British people could vote in their leaders that Hong Kong people had that right. They were "BNO", British National Overseas, with no rights to relocate to Britain and no rights to participate in British politics.
As for Singapore, having legal opposition parties means nothing -- for the record, these exist on the mainland, too, and are similarly impotent. Singapore's central redeeming feature is that its ruling party doesn't call itself Communist. Opposition parties that actually "oppose" are swiftly crushed. It's like the mainland, only capitalist and cleanly.
Actually, your IQ is just the score you get on the test. Whether or not IQ is isomorphic to intelligence is the big question here, and it hasn't been answered to the satisfaction of anyone.
So assuming this study was done with any rigour, we can conclude that obesity is related statistically to IQ, which may or may not be the same thing as intelligence.
Personally, I think IQ is a crock of shit. When I was in school I (like many of us, in all likelihood) was given an IQ test. I scored higher than my friend, who was (and remains) manifestly more intelligent and capable than I am in all ways that matter (and I beat him by a large margin, too). I could lie to myself and say that that proves that I'm more intelligent than he is, but the reality is, while IQ may correlate with intelligence, it is certainly not the same thing. Some people just don't test well.
Having said that, I have noticed that people who are morbidly obese often do seem stupid. But that may just be my own prejudices coming out (in fact, I'm sure that's the case -- as others have pointed out, a number of famous intelligent people have been fat).
Only Taiwan is democratic, and this is a recent thing (1987, if I recall correctly). It is still considered quite corrupt by western standards. Hong Kong is not and never was a democracy, although there are democratic agitators there now. Singapore is a dictatorial police state, which, rather like the mainland, is predicated on a "democratic" system that has no bearing on political affairs in practice.
In fact, having lived in both Singapore and Mainland China, I'd take my freedoms on the mainland any day of the week. The Singaporeans are corporatist facists who tap every phone on the island out of principle. We don't criticize them because of their high degree of economic freedom (2nd in the world only after Hong Kong.)
Put another way, it's ok for Singapore to be totalitarian because they're capitalist. Much like most of Latin America and Africa -- make no mistake about it, singling out China for human rights violations and lack of democracy is very much a hold-over from the cold war.
I adressed this issue here. I sort of regret bringing that 10% statistic up, because it does sound much larger than it actually is. The thing to recognise is that nearly half of all welfare mothers have only one child, which brings the average way down (to less than the national average, in fact, which I'll admit surprised me.)
As another poster pointed out, the 10% is actually for 4 or more, not for more than 4. My mistake. The same poster supplied the following data from the 2000 census: 2.57 is the average number of people per household, across the entire population of the United States. Taking a weighted average from the data on the site I linked, we can determine the average number of kids for recipients of welfare: 43.2% have one child, 30.7% have 2, 15.8% have 3, and 10.3% have four or more. Assuming that four or more means 4 for a lower bound, we have a mean of 1.932 children per household for welfare recipients.
In order to bring that up to the national average, the number of children required in the "4 or more" column would have to be 10. Yes, 10. To meet the average for the United States. Assuming 10.3% of the population have 10 children, we get the following weighted average: 2.55. Less than 2.57, even!
Just out of curiosity, do you know how much of your paycheck goes to pay for welfare? My guess is no, because if you had any idea how small the percentage is compared to all the other stuff you pay for, you wouldn't be bringing it up.
I think most everyone agrees that poverty and family size are positively correlated; it's hard to argue with this. It's not surprising, either, as from an economic perspective children are a money sink that offer little or no return on investment. In some settings (for example, in China) children are seen as an investment in the parent's future, and a parent typically spends everything they have on making sure their child is in an economically stable earnings bracket and saves little or nothing for themselves. The hope (and cultural expectation) is that the child will care for the parent in their later years. Not so in the West.
Here, most children expect an inheritance from their parents, and people start planning for retirement by putting money aside relatively early -- many of us as early as our 20s. We won't need kids (from an economic standpoint, mind you) to take care of us when we're old.
Children are a time-sink, a lot of work, and they offer no financial reward in most cases. Young people today, having not experienced the joy that a child can bring, will often come to the conclusion that their career is more important than starting a family.
So it shouldn't surprise anyone that many of the nation's high-earners are also childless, or if they have children, they only have one or two. This brings the national average down.
A higher percentage of poor people are also on welfare (which surprises exactly no one.) You would therefore expect people on welfare to have higher numbers of children than the national average.
However, there are a few key assumptions that are implicitly made when people talk about welfare mothers with tons of children. One particularly erroneous one is that they have those children on welfare, not that they had three kids, lost their jobs, and were forced on to welfare to make ends meet. Obviously that's a rather different situation, wouldn't you say? And yet, just looking at the numbers, it all looks the same.
Your argument is sort of silly, too, from a purely mathematical standpoint. The mean of a sample (average household size, in your case) is not at all indicative of the "shape" of the distribution (skew, kurtosis, etc) and makes drawing conclusions difficult without further analysis. This is why the median and the mode are usually included when trying to draw meaningful conclusions.
The time that elapses between steps 2 and 3 is variable. Late-term abortions are generally held to be dangerous, not to mention the moral quandries associated with them. Sometimes the father is a dead-beat who doesn't leave (or leaves after the child is born), but provides no financial support, or worse, spends money.
Personally, being pro-choice, I support a woman's right to choose. Were I woman, and were I in a similar situation, I might choose to have an abortion. But I think it's important to recognize the psychological strife that comes with ending the life growing inside of you. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that it's not an agonizing decision for most women, even those that are pro-choice. For me, respecting a woman's right to choose means also respecting her choice to keep the child. If she can't pay for it herself, I don't think giving her a measily 7000 dollars a year is too much of a burden on the American taxpayer, given the other things we pay for (like billion dollar stealth bombers the military doesn't even want.) But I'm making a value judgement there, based on my own politics. You might disagree, which is your perogative.
Everything else aside though, the "just have an abortion" response is pretty callous, and if you think about it, it's easy for you to say because, and this is important, you will never have to decide whether or not having an abortion is the right decision or the wrong one. It's like non-smokers who tell a lifelong addict to "just quit smoking." It might be the right response, but it's much easier said than done. A person who has successfully quit smoking generally has a great deal more empathy for people who have trouble kicking the habit than people who have no frame of reference. I hate to sound sexist, but as men, we are biologically incapable of having a frame of reference when it comes to abortion.
We will never have more than anecdotal evidence to bring to bear when it comes to subjects like pregnancy, period cramps, and abortion. A little bit of humility goes a long way here.
Not that old chestnut again. Have you actually ever bothered to read any of the statistics on welfare recipients? Of people on welfare who have children, only 10% have more than 4 kids. A google search for "welfare recipients statistics" turned up these two links as the first hits:
While it is true that there are a number of single mothers on welfare, this is largely because of the following scenario (all too common):
Woman has job.
Woman gets pregnant.
Father leaves.
Woman takes maternity leave.
Despite laws intended to protect her job while she is off, realities force employers to find someone to fill her position. She's assured that this is only temporary.
Woman has a baby. By now, living without a wage and on her own has put her heavily in debt.
As soon as she can, she goes back to her old job. She finds her position filled by someone new. Typically, she is let go soon after, obstensibly due to "restructuring." The fact that someone has filled her old position and that she must balance child-rearing duties with work, of course, are not the reason (this is sarcasm.)
Her child demands a great deal of her time. With no one to help her and no money for a babysitter, her responsibilities make working difficult.
The period of unemployment while she was pregnant makes employers regard her as someone "reentering the workforce." Compared to single men with no dependants applying for the same positions, she is regarded as a high risk candidate. Employers are extremely risk averse. Social stigma associated with single motherhood further reduces her attractiveness as a candidate.
Reduced to this, she gets on welfare to help her get by. She works a job with low pay but relatively flexible hours, and tries to keep from getting further into debt.
On average, within two years, she is able to transition off of welfare: her child becomes eligible for public pre-K programs around age 2.
Once school frees up a substantial block of time, she can concentrate on getting a real job.
The old 'welfare queen who has 20 kids and keeps having more to increase her welfare check' is a fantasy invented by men who have no concept of just how difficult bearing children can be. It also completely neglects that the marginal increase in aid for each new child is far less than the increase in costs of raising that child.
Have you ever met anyone on welfare?
They deserve your compassion. I make a lot more money than they'll likely ever make, but let me tell you, I don't know if I would have the strength or fortitude to make it with the odds they're up against. Working a job, taking care of their child, living in poverty, many of them going to school part-time... you should think twice before you judge them.
Marriage involves changing your life for the other person, and for your children if you have them. If you're under the impression that you can make your life with someone without changing a single thing, you're dreadfully mistaken. In fact, it's not just marriage that's this way: any successful reasonably long term relationship is founded on compromise.
Of course, it's a two-way street: each of you needs to re-evaluate priorities and meet the other half-way. In this particular instance, it seems the GP's wife was doing what you seem to be advocating: expecting her needs to be met without re-evaluating her position. Of course, we only have the GP's side of the story in this.
Marriage is more than just cohabitation. If you're not ready for that, I'd encourage you not to get married. But don't lie to yourself and think that marriage doesn't involve changing your life. It does.
I think one only needs to look at fuel efficiency trends to see the answer to your question. By all counts, today's combustion engines are far less efficient than they could be made to be, but increasing efficiency while at the same time controlling emissions is a technically challenging task, and overcoming technically challenging tasks costs money. When oil was 10 dollars a barrel, cars were, generally speaking, extremely inefficient. As the price of oil has gone up, the increased scarcity of the commodity has driven innovation in the improvement of engine efficiency. As a result, today's cars are far, far more efficient than the cars of yesteryear, and because we are still nowhere near the limits of engine efficiency imposed on us by thermodynamics, it is reasonable to assume that the efficiency of normal combustion engines and their derivatives (hybrids, etc) will continue to improve. The pace is likely to be logarithmic, of course, because we've already picked all the proverbial low-hanging fruit, but we can still expect improvement in this regard.
Of course I think you're right that in the long run, we will probably have to generate the mobile fuel we consume in vehicles, rather than simply finding it ready-made in the ground. Modern nuclear reactor designs are extremely efficient and, after the inital investment required to build one, produce electricity very cheaply. The primary barriers that exist to building these today are political, not technical. It's worth noting, however, that political barriers tend to disappear when economic pressures become grave enough, and the ever-increasing price of oil will certainly do this in the long run.
The bio-diesel example was, as I said, just an example. I cannot predict with anymore accuracy than you or anyone else what the replacement technology will be, but as oil is running out, and producing it chemically is not a particularly efficient (read cheap) option compared to alternatives available today, there is no doubt that a replacement technology will be decided upon by consumers or governments.
It may not be as cheap as oil, in fact, I guarantee it won't be as cheap as oil. But making driving more expensive will act in two major ways: one, people will seek (and find, subject to diminishing returns, of course) ways to make one unit of mobile energy (in today's terms, a barrel of oil, in tomorrow's, who knows) take them further; two, people will find ways to reduce the amount they need to drive.
In the US, people currently are very dependent on driving, largely due to urban layout and cultural preferences. Other countries don't have as much of a driving culture, and don't suffer as much from urban sprawl. It's not much of a stretch to envision a future where people are more likely to move than to commute three hours every day, and I'd even go so far as to suggest that that might actually be a good thing for people's overall happiness. A frightningly large portion of the land on which American cities are built these days is made up of parking lots; a decrease in people's willingness to drive further would create demand for more local restaurants, local supermarkets, and replacing parking lots with these would be the obvious choice.
In fact, it's likely that a general increase in the cost of getting from A to B would, in the mid-to-long run, greatly boost demand for local products and have a deglobalising effect. In the very long term, of course, people will find some way to bring costs down enough relative to people's income to offset this -- the promises of wealth that globalisation brings are simply too tantalising.
I guess what I'm saying here is, yes, oil is running out, and eventually, it will be too expensive for us to make use of it, except for relatively exotic, low-demand applications. But when you listen to peak-oil-extremists, the implication is that there is no way to substitute off of oil and that when oil is 500 dollars a barrel we will be forced to pay that ridiculous sum.
That will never happen, because there are lots of technologies that, while more expensive than oil at today's prices, are nonetheless cheaper than paying 500 dollars for a barrel of oil.
But you see, that's exactly his point. If the price of oil is 70 dollars per barrel, then the reserves or methodologies that cost 80 dollars per barrel are not viable. But the more money you're willing to throw at the problem, the more possible cost-effective solutions there are.
The main reason that demand for oil is so price-inelastic is because much of our infrastructure is dependent on oil, and because of that, it makes more sense to absorb an increase in cost than to replace said infrastructure. But this cannot go on forever. When oil costs 500 dollars per barrel, you can bet that we won't be using oil anywhere near as much. There are other, cheaper alternatives, like electric cars, cars powered by organically produced biodiesels, cars running on ethanol, etc. At today's oil prices, these solutions are too expensive to be viable. It's not just that the vehicles themselves are expensive, it's the cost of replacing the associated infrastructure: gas stations, for example. Replacing all the gas stations in the United States with stations providing some other kind of fuel will take a long time. But at 500 dollars per barrel, it becomes too expensive to stay with oil, and so there will suddenly be strong economic incentive to see that infrastructure replaced.
Relative to Europe, America's gas prices are outrageously low, and yet our recent increase in fuel prices prompted a tremendously large number of Californians to purchase more fuel-efficient hybrids. It's extremely unlikely that they would have purchased these cars in the numbers they did had they not had the economic incentive to do so. When it comes right down to it, people want to save money.
And because people want to save money, they will substitute away from oil intensive products as prices rise. At the same time, rising prices will make oil-production methods previously considered too expensive suddenly economical, increasing supply at that price point.
So we have two competing forces at work here: increase in available supply as price increases (law of supply) and decreasing demand as price increases (law of demand). It's not hard to see that in this scenario, the price can only go so high before consumers have stopped using oil completely. Supply doesn't end up being a problem in this scenario, because as Rei suggested we can produce all the oil we want from other sources of energy synthetically. It'll just be so expensive that nobody will want to buy it. They'll find other ways to get from A to B that are more cost effective. Let's face it, at 500 dollars a barrel, it's not like you need any exotic technology to be more cost effective.
Here's a prediction for a long term movement. Oil prices continue to rise, as the remaining oil in the world becomes more and more expensive to extract. Bio-diesel vehicles become popular, because diesel engines are already well understood, almost no changes are required to make them run on bio-diesel, and so it's an easy migration path for car companies. Oil companies, faced with rising oil extraction costs, begin looking in to ways to efficiently produce bio-diesel in large quantities. Something like algae-produced bio-diesel is invested in. Despite the good prospects, analysts calculate that the price at which it becomes cost-competitive with oil-based fuels is around 120 dollars per barrel.
Prices continue to rise. Car companies begin advertising bio-diesel capable cars, many electrical hybrids. The environmentalists are the early adopters. They fill them up with bio-diesel when the can, but with normal diesel otherwise. Gas stations that provide diesel are already ubiquitous, and as diesel-fueled cars increase in number gas stations invest in more diesel pumps and tanks. As the 120 dollars per barrel price point approaches, some gas stations in places like the SF bay area, Boston and New York City begin advertising bio-diesel as a cleaner (albeit slightly more expensive) alternative to standard diesel fuel. Environmentalists again are the ear
Your general point is well taken -- poverty in and of itself does not create terrorists, because obviously, not all poor people (or even a large percentage of them) turn to terrorism. However:
When people perceive that they are being wronged by someone else, violence is the most typical reaction. Without a doubt, many of our actions in the Middle East, and before us the actions of Britain in the Middle East, and before that the actions of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, have been wrong from a moral standpoint.
It's always dangerous to take a complex situation and offer a simple explanation, and saying "They did that because they're just evil" is most certainly a simple explanation. Take the Holocaust, for example. For a while, it was in vogue to say that the Holocaust happened because Germans in general and Nazis in particular were just evil. Because that sounds a bit like a generalisation, academics studying the phenomenon at the time came up with an official sounding term for it: Sonderweg, which is German for "strange way." The idea was that there was something about Germans that made the Holocaust possible there (and only there). Exactly what that something was was up to debate. It was said to be a special, unfortunate mixture of culture and history.
This theory was well received pretty much everywhere because it implicitly made the Holocaust a special case, something unlikely to happen again. After all, if Sonderweg is a post World War I German phenomenon, we don't need to worry too much that we might be capable of similar genocide.
Of course, it all turned out to be bunk.
Subsequent psychological analysis of some of the most thorough butchers of the SS (particularly Adolf Eichmann) found them to be normal, sane individuals who played with their children. Many (Eichmann in particular) were apparently motivated by a desire to rise in the ranks of the SS -- and thereby ensure job security and status in what to them appeared to be an increasingly Nazi world -- rather than by hatred of Jews/Gypsies/Homosexuals or by inherent, sociopathic evil. There's even a term for this: "The Banality of Evil."
Psychological tests later done in the United States, most notably the Stanford Prison Experiment and the creation of "The Third Wave" in Palo Alto's Cubberly High School showed that under the right circumstances, it was remarkably easy to make people behave the way that the Nazis had. The Milgram experiments of 1961-63 showed that people adminstrating painful electric shocks to a subject (who was in fact an actor, a fact the test subjects were unaware of) at the instruction of a superior would often administer voltages they knew were enough to be potentially lethal, despite pleas from the actor for them to stop.
The reason I'm getting in to all of this is because the Holocaust is a very good and relatively well understood and widely studied example of how your thinking is completely wrong. Indeed, despite people's one-time certainty that the Sonderweg hypothesis was the correct one, Holocaust-like events have occured in other places under different circumstances since then: under Pol-Pot's regime in Democratic Kampuchea, between the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda, and now in Darfur. The less-discussed Armenian Genocide is another example (although it occured before World War II.)
The danger here is one of dehumanisation: "The people who are responsible for crime X are inhuman, evil, and want nothing less than destruction and mahem. They are fundamentally not like us." This is, essentially, the crux of your argument. It's convenient, because it makes action against the people you are dehumanising moral.
The truth, of course, is that these people are not demons. They, like you, have been raised or made to believe that we are demons, that we are unjust, that we are cruel. It's easy to imagine a Muslim version of yourself making the exact same arguments about us to a crowd of impressionable, undereducated and impoveri
Captain periodless, the guy's name is "Kim Jong Il", not "Kim Il Jong." If you're going to comment on the politics of another country's leader, it's good form to actually remember his name.
Looked at broadly, Communism and Socialism are about as similar as Facism and Capitalism. If you want to make that argument, fine, but I think you'll find that most people will disagree with you.
It seems to me that you have very little notion of what Socialism is. What you do know appears to be a product of cold war era anti-Communist brainwashing. Would-be Communist states such as the USSR nationalised most of their industries, so anyone that advocates nationalisation of any industry (which I'm not doing, by the way) must be on the slippery slope to Totalitarianism. In reality, things don't work that way.
Many countries -- most of Scandinavia comes to mind -- are socialist and yet not totalitarian. Socialism doesn't mean the Stasi and five year plans, you know. It just refers to society where government, instead of private industry, provides some services. What percentage of services are provided publically roughly estimates the degree of Socialism practiced in said country. Very socialist countries (such as Finland) have many services provided by the government and paid for by taxes. Less socialist countries, such as the US, provide most services through private industry (but still provide some publically, such as public transit, or libraries, or social/corporate welfare.)
Have you ever noticed that totalitarian police states always have words like Democracy or Republic in their names? People's Republic of such-and-such, or Democratic People's Republic of so-and-so, or whatever. Ronald Reagan used to joke that the difference between a People's Republic and a Republic was the difference between a jacket and straightjacket. He and others (including you, I'd wager) were aware that just because a nation calls itself free and democratic doesn't make it free and democratic.
Surprisingly, these same rational people seem completely incapable of recognising that just because a country calls itself "Communist" doesn't mean it actually is. I'm personally of the opinion that Communism isn't feasible, but let's call a spade a spade. "Red" China isn't communist, never was, and certainly isn't now. The USSR, Cuba, and the DDR were/are all one party police states with planned economies. Communist? Most certainly not. Laos essentially runs on a heavily regulated market economy, and yet the party that runs the country also refers to itself as Communist. Pol-Pot wanted to turn Cambodia into one huge agrarian commune, killing off unwanted people in the process, to my knowledge not something that Marx ever suggested, even remotely. And yet he called himself Communist.
If you're trying to argue that many of the nations that have in the past called themselves communist have, for the most part, participated in or otherwise been privy to gross human rights violations, you'll find no argument from me. The problem comes when you equate the name they use to call themselves with the philosophy going by the same. In the same way that you wouldn't malign democracy just because Pol Pot called his regime "Democratic Kampuchea" or Kim Jong Il his the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea", it's stupid to draw conclusions about Communism or Socialism from these perverse examples.
The fact that non-totalitarian countries that call themselves Democracies exist and non-totalitarian countries that call themselves Communist do not only underscores that Communism is either unworkable in practice (my position) or extremely tricky to get right (the position of most modern-day Communists). Either way, it's apples and oranges.
And this comment: "[h]ow many Socialists do you know have positive things to say about the wealthy" is just strange, I'm not even sure where it's coming from. Socialism doesn't mandate the abolishment of personal wealth or private property, unlike Communism. It seems like I'm going to need to say this again: Socialism is not Communism. Communist societies are communal -- everything is owned by the people, not by individuals, most especially the me
Here's the problem though. GR and QM are both, relative to ST, extremely simple. And while ST may make the same predictions that GR and QM make, it does so in a far more complex way, without adding any extra information -- QM and GR are incompatible, but ST fails to resolve those incompatibilities in a testable way.
GR was more complex than Classical Newtonian Mechanics, but it was, essentially, a value-added theory: it explained a bunch of things that Classical Mechanics couldn't, all while remaining compatible with Classical Mechanics in places where Classical Mechanics made accurate predictions. Therefore, GR was taken to replace classical mechanics, despite the added complexity of the theory, because it was broader in scope, falsifiable, and provably more correct than the theory it replaced.
ST does not fit this mold. It is far, far, far, far more complex than either GR or QM, and makes no extra falsifiable predictions. It doesn't resolve the inconsistencies between the two. In other words, from a purely scientific perspective, it's just a hypothesis and not a particularly useful one at that.
Of course, I'm a mathematician by training and lots of interesting math has come out of ST, so for that I'm happy.
Yes, well, maybe I did come off a bit harshly, sorry for that. I did say in my post that I was discounting HK and Taiwan because of their unwillingness/inability to standardise on a particular romanization method, however. And I believe -- though I may be wrong -- that Red Flag Linux, the distribution in question, is very much a mainland oriented operation.
I'm glad to hear that tablet handwriting recognition has advanced, though, that's good news. Obviously if such an input method is ubiquitous in HK then having a Free implementation is important. Of course from an efficiency perspective, writing out characters by hand -- especially traditional characters -- is a good deal slower than using a text-based input method, but... well, people will use what they will use, won't they, who am I to say differently.
It occurs to me that good handwriting recognition solutions for Chinese probably don't exist for the same reasons that good free fonts don't exist: too many glyphs. While we may spend most of our time using only 4000 characters, I find that when I use fonts with less than about 8000 characters I notice, and I'm not even particularly literary. This means that someone interested in providing a free solution would have to create a database of nearly 10,000 characters with their stroke orders and common varations to be even moderately useful.
Implementing the actual recognition algorithm -- despite the complexity involved in getting it to properly recognise grass script and the like -- is probably far simpler than that task. In the same way that no one has the patience to individually construct and hint 10 thousand glyph outlines to make a good truetype font, no one has the patience to produce such a database. Unless you're aware of one that's already available?
This would probably workout better if there were more Linux adoption outside of the server room in Asia, but on the mainland at least, people are married to their Windows machines. Are things better in HK?
You're nuts, man. It may be that in Taiwan and Hong Kong where there is no standard romanization (really) for Chinese characters tablet-based input methods are popular, but on the Mainland -- which is the real market here -- there is pinyin. Pinyin is taught in schools, everyone knows it, and most Chinese people use pinyin-based input methods (although some, like me, prefer wubi). Support for these and many other non-graphical input methods in Linux is very good -- in fact, I prefer SCIM's smart pinyin input method to the vast majority of the ones I use on Windows.
Handwriting recognition software is complex and doesn't work particularly well, anyway, even with state of the art non-free solutions. Anyone who has more than a third grade Chinese education knows that in handwriting many variations on stroke order exist, despite their not being "correct". Nokia and others have been marketing cell phones with handwriting recognition on the mainland in recent years and while they are popular as a gimmick, no one I know that owns one actually uses the handwriting recognition, for two reasons: one, it often doesn't recognize their handwriting unless they write stroke by stroke like a first grader, and two, lots of people forget how to write characters, even common ones.
As a Mandarin-speaker who uses Linux exclusively, I can say that the only real bar to a totally free Chinese operating system that would satisfy 99% of mainland corporate users is the lack of Free high quality, hinted Chinese truetype fonts. Everyone I know (including myself) uses MS's SimHei and SimSun, or in the case of Taiwanese and HK folks, MingLiU. There's just nothing free out there that comes close.
And one (presumably) difference between you and I is that when I run across something that trips up a family member with an MS product
Hi friend, I'd just like to point out that one should never say "between you and I", but rather should say "between you and me." To see why this is, consider that we always say "between us" or "between them" but never "between we" or "between they". In English, between is a preposition that governs the objective case, that is, "me, him, us, and them."
In the same way that you wouldn't say, "between you and he", you should never say "between you and I."
In all likelihood, you've been conditioned to always say "so-and-so and I", instead of "me and so-and-so." When you were a kid, and you said, "Me and Mark went to the park today", your mom probably said, "No, bmajik, Mark and I went to the park today." What she meant was, when discussing a group of people that includes oneself, always place the pronoun indicating yourself last, and not that you should always use "... and I."
I'm not a hippie, but it's funny you should say this, because, yes, actually, if over 50% of the population dislike something, it can be made illegal. That's essentially how democracy works. Kind of sucks, doesn't it. Note that saying "can" is not the same as saying "should."
It seems to me that you're being deliberately obtuse in this situation, what with your ad homniem arguments and all. I can empathise with not liking other people telling you what to do, and in most cases I agree with your general stance. I am still a registered member of the Libertarian party, although I'll freely admit that I haven't voted that way since Harry Browne ran for President. I've taken Economics since then.
I am of the opinion that when something is provably damaging to everyone, it should probably be regulated. For example, corporate waste disposal is expensive -- sometimes prohibitively so. When we pass laws regulating what sorts of waste materials factories can dump in the local rivers, we are hurting them economically, and by extension ourselves -- economically. At some point though, it becomes obvious that there are things more important than raw economic efficiency. The guys who were making hand over fist by taking the "let's just dump the waste" shortcut are most likely quite fed up with society telling them that they can't do that anymore. They most likely never felt the side-effects of their actions directly, because they could afford to buy homes far from their factories. But we as a society decided -- that is, we voted in representatives that passed the appropriate laws -- that they couldn't do that anymore. Now they can't (although some still do, but that's something else entirely.) I would be surprised if you disagreed with that decision.
Now, I don't think driving an SUV is anywhere near as damaging and I don't really see any reason to pass laws to prevent people from buying SUVs -- something I said, I believe, in my previous post. But I do think that effectively saying "it's my right to pollute the air you breathe" smacks of a certain arrogance that is sort of unbecoming. Isn't the Libertarian mantra that one's right to swing one's fist ends where the face of another begins? If you're under the impression that driving gas-guzzlers doesn't affect others, you're wrong. Not only in terms of pollution, but politically in terms of increased oil dependency too.
I'm not advocating legislating away the SUV problem, although as I said previously I think some sort of tax-based economic disincentive might work. This wouldn't keep you from buying SUVs, it would just mean that you'd have to think a lot harder on how important it was to you, as it would be more expensive. There's no need to eliminate SUV ownership, just reduce it. Where I live, most of the people who buy SUVs are youngish mothers who find the size of the car reassuring and secure. Most are surprised to learn that SUVs are actually less safe in accidents than your typical small car. They aren't offroading, SUV ownership is not a "hobby" for them. They would lose little -- and perhaps gain a lot -- by buying a Volvo instead. And you could still buy SUVs. I'm not sure how this is a problem.
In some parts of the US, you need the clearance an SUV offers. Places where it snows a lot, for example. Making SUVs illegal would be braindead.
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The number of people who have more kids while already on welfare is vanishingly small. I'm certain they exist, and I agree that they're stupid. But this is where the old saying is so apt: don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Just because there are some people that abuse the system doesn't mean the system isn't good, and shouldn't be maintained. The fact is, most people do not want to live on welfare, because it's extremely hard (the government doesn't provide nearly enough money to survive on welfare alone) and there's substantial shame involved in being on welfare, because of the stigma associated with it. Maybe 1 in a thousand people is happy being on welfare, and isn't planning to get off, but let's face it, with any system there are going to be those that abuse the system.
Getting rid of welfare because some people are lazy fucks is like getting rid of universities because some people cheat on exams. Try your best to catch the ones that game the system, but recognize that some of them are going to get away with it and just write them off. Like I said in my other post, we spend so little on welfare as it is that you probably aren't giving up much more than a few cents to provide for the people that really do need help. Are you really such a penny-pincher that that's not worth it to you?
I will admit that welfare has problems: I don't think people who shouldn't be on welfare getting welfare is one of those problems (or at least, it's not a material problem, financially), but I think there are lots of people that probably do need welfare that aren't getting it, and I think that the government does a spectacularly bad job of administering welfare (which surprises exactly no one, there's not much the government does efficiently or well). What's bothers me more than "how many cents am I paying per year to support AFDC and Food Stamps" is "what percentage of the money I do pay gets eaten up in the bureaucracy." Because if I'm going to give, I want as much of what I give as possible to go to those that need it, and as little as possible to entrenched bureaucrats. It seems reasonable that you and I can agree on that, at least.
There was a study done a while ago (and I don't have the numbers in front of me) that showed that some huge percentage of the money we pay in taxes goes to simply, well, collecting taxes. I recognize that the IRS is a huge monster of a department and that running it takes money, but I would hope that it's not a huge, stupid percentage, which is what this study implied. Things like that really upset me.
I guess the point I'm trying to drive home is that I'm not a big-government liberal, in fact, I'm a pretty fiscally conservative guy. But the United States is the wealthiest nation on earth, and the fact that helping single mothers raise their children is even an issue really saddens me. We do so little as it is, and it's not like I'm even necessarily advocating doing more. I'd just like it if smart people (and Slashdot is filled with them) would take a step back and recognize that we do very little, and that it costs us next to nothing. In short, of all the things you pay taxes for, it's one of the ones least worth complaining about.
According to International law...
What International Law? There is no "International Law", just as there is no international government to enforce it. Furthermore, while I cannot speak for other countries, you most certainly can have your US citizenship revoked if you do any number of things the US government forbids you from doing (there are certain countries you aren't allowed to travel to, and I believe serving in the armed forces of another country without obtaining prior permission is grounds for losing your citizenship). There's a little paragraph in your passport that even outlines how you can lose it, IIRC.
Hong Kong was not democratic under the British. In a democracy, the people have control either directly or indirectly over the actions of the government -- this was not the case in colonial Hong Kong. Leading up to 1997, the British began (and even instituted) some democratic reforms but only because the mainland was taking over -- they wanted Hong Kong SAR to be democratic because they feared Beijing's ability to change the colony, whereas they had never shown any interest in pursuing the same reforms when it might have impacted their ability to rule Hong Kong.
Hong Kong people had no vote, no British citizenship -- they were not a real (ie, non-colonial) part of the UK and were ruled autocratically. You know, a British-appointed non-Chinese governer was the center of pre-1997 Hong Kong politics. Whether Hong Kong people were better off under the British or not is up for debate, but don't make the mistake of thinking that just because British people could vote in their leaders that Hong Kong people had that right. They were "BNO", British National Overseas, with no rights to relocate to Britain and no rights to participate in British politics.
As for Singapore, having legal opposition parties means nothing -- for the record, these exist on the mainland, too, and are similarly impotent. Singapore's central redeeming feature is that its ruling party doesn't call itself Communist. Opposition parties that actually "oppose" are swiftly crushed. It's like the mainland, only capitalist and cleanly.
Actually, your IQ is just the score you get on the test. Whether or not IQ is isomorphic to intelligence is the big question here, and it hasn't been answered to the satisfaction of anyone.
So assuming this study was done with any rigour, we can conclude that obesity is related statistically to IQ, which may or may not be the same thing as intelligence.
Personally, I think IQ is a crock of shit. When I was in school I (like many of us, in all likelihood) was given an IQ test. I scored higher than my friend, who was (and remains) manifestly more intelligent and capable than I am in all ways that matter (and I beat him by a large margin, too). I could lie to myself and say that that proves that I'm more intelligent than he is, but the reality is, while IQ may correlate with intelligence, it is certainly not the same thing. Some people just don't test well.
Having said that, I have noticed that people who are morbidly obese often do seem stupid. But that may just be my own prejudices coming out (in fact, I'm sure that's the case -- as others have pointed out, a number of famous intelligent people have been fat).
Only Taiwan is democratic, and this is a recent thing (1987, if I recall correctly). It is still considered quite corrupt by western standards. Hong Kong is not and never was a democracy, although there are democratic agitators there now. Singapore is a dictatorial police state, which, rather like the mainland, is predicated on a "democratic" system that has no bearing on political affairs in practice.
In fact, having lived in both Singapore and Mainland China, I'd take my freedoms on the mainland any day of the week. The Singaporeans are corporatist facists who tap every phone on the island out of principle. We don't criticize them because of their high degree of economic freedom (2nd in the world only after Hong Kong.)
Put another way, it's ok for Singapore to be totalitarian because they're capitalist. Much like most of Latin America and Africa -- make no mistake about it, singling out China for human rights violations and lack of democracy is very much a hold-over from the cold war.
Another thought... lots of kids aren't planned. Not saying this is right, but it's a fact. I wasn't (planned, I mean.)
I adressed this issue here. I sort of regret bringing that 10% statistic up, because it does sound much larger than it actually is. The thing to recognise is that nearly half of all welfare mothers have only one child, which brings the average way down (to less than the national average, in fact, which I'll admit surprised me.)
As an addendum, you'll be glad that I used your numbers in another post in this thread to further illustrate how silly your line of reasoning is.
Thanks for that.
As another poster pointed out, the 10% is actually for 4 or more, not for more than 4. My mistake. The same poster supplied the following data from the 2000 census: 2.57 is the average number of people per household, across the entire population of the United States. Taking a weighted average from the data on the site I linked, we can determine the average number of kids for recipients of welfare: 43.2% have one child, 30.7% have 2, 15.8% have 3, and 10.3% have four or more. Assuming that four or more means 4 for a lower bound, we have a mean of 1.932 children per household for welfare recipients.
In order to bring that up to the national average, the number of children required in the "4 or more" column would have to be 10. Yes, 10. To meet the average for the United States. Assuming 10.3% of the population have 10 children, we get the following weighted average: 2.55. Less than 2.57, even!
Still think 10.3% is a lot of people?
Just out of curiosity, do you know how much of your paycheck goes to pay for welfare? My guess is no, because if you had any idea how small the percentage is compared to all the other stuff you pay for, you wouldn't be bringing it up.
Go ahead, look it up. Compare it to the military, medicare/medicaid, and everything else. Hell, I'll even look it up for you, that's what a nice guy I am: Myth: Welfare is to blame for runaway government spending.
Those numbers are from 1992. I'm rather sure our defense budget has drastically increased since then.
I think most everyone agrees that poverty and family size are positively correlated; it's hard to argue with this. It's not surprising, either, as from an economic perspective children are a money sink that offer little or no return on investment. In some settings (for example, in China) children are seen as an investment in the parent's future, and a parent typically spends everything they have on making sure their child is in an economically stable earnings bracket and saves little or nothing for themselves. The hope (and cultural expectation) is that the child will care for the parent in their later years. Not so in the West.
Here, most children expect an inheritance from their parents, and people start planning for retirement by putting money aside relatively early -- many of us as early as our 20s. We won't need kids (from an economic standpoint, mind you) to take care of us when we're old.
Children are a time-sink, a lot of work, and they offer no financial reward in most cases. Young people today, having not experienced the joy that a child can bring, will often come to the conclusion that their career is more important than starting a family.
So it shouldn't surprise anyone that many of the nation's high-earners are also childless, or if they have children, they only have one or two. This brings the national average down.
A higher percentage of poor people are also on welfare (which surprises exactly no one.) You would therefore expect people on welfare to have higher numbers of children than the national average.
However, there are a few key assumptions that are implicitly made when people talk about welfare mothers with tons of children. One particularly erroneous one is that they have those children on welfare, not that they had three kids, lost their jobs, and were forced on to welfare to make ends meet. Obviously that's a rather different situation, wouldn't you say? And yet, just looking at the numbers, it all looks the same.
Your argument is sort of silly, too, from a purely mathematical standpoint. The mean of a sample (average household size, in your case) is not at all indicative of the "shape" of the distribution (skew, kurtosis, etc) and makes drawing conclusions difficult without further analysis. This is why the median and the mode are usually included when trying to draw meaningful conclusions.
The time that elapses between steps 2 and 3 is variable. Late-term abortions are generally held to be dangerous, not to mention the moral quandries associated with them. Sometimes the father is a dead-beat who doesn't leave (or leaves after the child is born), but provides no financial support, or worse, spends money.
Personally, being pro-choice, I support a woman's right to choose. Were I woman, and were I in a similar situation, I might choose to have an abortion. But I think it's important to recognize the psychological strife that comes with ending the life growing inside of you. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that it's not an agonizing decision for most women, even those that are pro-choice. For me, respecting a woman's right to choose means also respecting her choice to keep the child. If she can't pay for it herself, I don't think giving her a measily 7000 dollars a year is too much of a burden on the American taxpayer, given the other things we pay for (like billion dollar stealth bombers the military doesn't even want.) But I'm making a value judgement there, based on my own politics. You might disagree, which is your perogative.
Everything else aside though, the "just have an abortion" response is pretty callous, and if you think about it, it's easy for you to say because, and this is important, you will never have to decide whether or not having an abortion is the right decision or the wrong one. It's like non-smokers who tell a lifelong addict to "just quit smoking." It might be the right response, but it's much easier said than done. A person who has successfully quit smoking generally has a great deal more empathy for people who have trouble kicking the habit than people who have no frame of reference. I hate to sound sexist, but as men, we are biologically incapable of having a frame of reference when it comes to abortion.
We will never have more than anecdotal evidence to bring to bear when it comes to subjects like pregnancy, period cramps, and abortion. A little bit of humility goes a long way here.
Not that old chestnut again. Have you actually ever bothered to read any of the statistics on welfare recipients? Of people on welfare who have children, only 10% have more than 4 kids. A google search for "welfare recipients statistics" turned up these two links as the first hits:
While it is true that there are a number of single mothers on welfare, this is largely because of the following scenario (all too common):
The old 'welfare queen who has 20 kids and keeps having more to increase her welfare check' is a fantasy invented by men who have no concept of just how difficult bearing children can be. It also completely neglects that the marginal increase in aid for each new child is far less than the increase in costs of raising that child.
Have you ever met anyone on welfare?
They deserve your compassion. I make a lot more money than they'll likely ever make, but let me tell you, I don't know if I would have the strength or fortitude to make it with the odds they're up against. Working a job, taking care of their child, living in poverty, many of them going to school part-time... you should think twice before you judge them.
Marriage involves changing your life for the other person, and for your children if you have them. If you're under the impression that you can make your life with someone without changing a single thing, you're dreadfully mistaken. In fact, it's not just marriage that's this way: any successful reasonably long term relationship is founded on compromise.
Of course, it's a two-way street: each of you needs to re-evaluate priorities and meet the other half-way. In this particular instance, it seems the GP's wife was doing what you seem to be advocating: expecting her needs to be met without re-evaluating her position. Of course, we only have the GP's side of the story in this.
Marriage is more than just cohabitation. If you're not ready for that, I'd encourage you not to get married. But don't lie to yourself and think that marriage doesn't involve changing your life. It does.
I think one only needs to look at fuel efficiency trends to see the answer to your question. By all counts, today's combustion engines are far less efficient than they could be made to be, but increasing efficiency while at the same time controlling emissions is a technically challenging task, and overcoming technically challenging tasks costs money. When oil was 10 dollars a barrel, cars were, generally speaking, extremely inefficient. As the price of oil has gone up, the increased scarcity of the commodity has driven innovation in the improvement of engine efficiency. As a result, today's cars are far, far more efficient than the cars of yesteryear, and because we are still nowhere near the limits of engine efficiency imposed on us by thermodynamics, it is reasonable to assume that the efficiency of normal combustion engines and their derivatives (hybrids, etc) will continue to improve. The pace is likely to be logarithmic, of course, because we've already picked all the proverbial low-hanging fruit, but we can still expect improvement in this regard.
Of course I think you're right that in the long run, we will probably have to generate the mobile fuel we consume in vehicles, rather than simply finding it ready-made in the ground. Modern nuclear reactor designs are extremely efficient and, after the inital investment required to build one, produce electricity very cheaply. The primary barriers that exist to building these today are political, not technical. It's worth noting, however, that political barriers tend to disappear when economic pressures become grave enough, and the ever-increasing price of oil will certainly do this in the long run.
The bio-diesel example was, as I said, just an example. I cannot predict with anymore accuracy than you or anyone else what the replacement technology will be, but as oil is running out, and producing it chemically is not a particularly efficient (read cheap) option compared to alternatives available today, there is no doubt that a replacement technology will be decided upon by consumers or governments.
It may not be as cheap as oil, in fact, I guarantee it won't be as cheap as oil. But making driving more expensive will act in two major ways: one, people will seek (and find, subject to diminishing returns, of course) ways to make one unit of mobile energy (in today's terms, a barrel of oil, in tomorrow's, who knows) take them further; two, people will find ways to reduce the amount they need to drive.
In the US, people currently are very dependent on driving, largely due to urban layout and cultural preferences. Other countries don't have as much of a driving culture, and don't suffer as much from urban sprawl. It's not much of a stretch to envision a future where people are more likely to move than to commute three hours every day, and I'd even go so far as to suggest that that might actually be a good thing for people's overall happiness. A frightningly large portion of the land on which American cities are built these days is made up of parking lots; a decrease in people's willingness to drive further would create demand for more local restaurants, local supermarkets, and replacing parking lots with these would be the obvious choice.
In fact, it's likely that a general increase in the cost of getting from A to B would, in the mid-to-long run, greatly boost demand for local products and have a deglobalising effect. In the very long term, of course, people will find some way to bring costs down enough relative to people's income to offset this -- the promises of wealth that globalisation brings are simply too tantalising.
I guess what I'm saying here is, yes, oil is running out, and eventually, it will be too expensive for us to make use of it, except for relatively exotic, low-demand applications. But when you listen to peak-oil-extremists, the implication is that there is no way to substitute off of oil and that when oil is 500 dollars a barrel we will be forced to pay that ridiculous sum.
That will never happen, because there are lots of technologies that, while more expensive than oil at today's prices, are nonetheless cheaper than paying 500 dollars for a barrel of oil.
But you see, that's exactly his point. If the price of oil is 70 dollars per barrel, then the reserves or methodologies that cost 80 dollars per barrel are not viable. But the more money you're willing to throw at the problem, the more possible cost-effective solutions there are.
The main reason that demand for oil is so price-inelastic is because much of our infrastructure is dependent on oil, and because of that, it makes more sense to absorb an increase in cost than to replace said infrastructure. But this cannot go on forever. When oil costs 500 dollars per barrel, you can bet that we won't be using oil anywhere near as much. There are other, cheaper alternatives, like electric cars, cars powered by organically produced biodiesels, cars running on ethanol, etc. At today's oil prices, these solutions are too expensive to be viable. It's not just that the vehicles themselves are expensive, it's the cost of replacing the associated infrastructure: gas stations, for example. Replacing all the gas stations in the United States with stations providing some other kind of fuel will take a long time. But at 500 dollars per barrel, it becomes too expensive to stay with oil, and so there will suddenly be strong economic incentive to see that infrastructure replaced.
Relative to Europe, America's gas prices are outrageously low, and yet our recent increase in fuel prices prompted a tremendously large number of Californians to purchase more fuel-efficient hybrids. It's extremely unlikely that they would have purchased these cars in the numbers they did had they not had the economic incentive to do so. When it comes right down to it, people want to save money.
And because people want to save money, they will substitute away from oil intensive products as prices rise. At the same time, rising prices will make oil-production methods previously considered too expensive suddenly economical, increasing supply at that price point.
So we have two competing forces at work here: increase in available supply as price increases (law of supply) and decreasing demand as price increases (law of demand). It's not hard to see that in this scenario, the price can only go so high before consumers have stopped using oil completely. Supply doesn't end up being a problem in this scenario, because as Rei suggested we can produce all the oil we want from other sources of energy synthetically. It'll just be so expensive that nobody will want to buy it. They'll find other ways to get from A to B that are more cost effective. Let's face it, at 500 dollars a barrel, it's not like you need any exotic technology to be more cost effective.
Here's a prediction for a long term movement. Oil prices continue to rise, as the remaining oil in the world becomes more and more expensive to extract. Bio-diesel vehicles become popular, because diesel engines are already well understood, almost no changes are required to make them run on bio-diesel, and so it's an easy migration path for car companies. Oil companies, faced with rising oil extraction costs, begin looking in to ways to efficiently produce bio-diesel in large quantities. Something like algae-produced bio-diesel is invested in. Despite the good prospects, analysts calculate that the price at which it becomes cost-competitive with oil-based fuels is around 120 dollars per barrel.
Prices continue to rise. Car companies begin advertising bio-diesel capable cars, many electrical hybrids. The environmentalists are the early adopters. They fill them up with bio-diesel when the can, but with normal diesel otherwise. Gas stations that provide diesel are already ubiquitous, and as diesel-fueled cars increase in number gas stations invest in more diesel pumps and tanks. As the 120 dollars per barrel price point approaches, some gas stations in places like the SF bay area, Boston and New York City begin advertising bio-diesel as a cleaner (albeit slightly more expensive) alternative to standard diesel fuel. Environmentalists again are the ear
Your general point is well taken -- poverty in and of itself does not create terrorists, because obviously, not all poor people (or even a large percentage of them) turn to terrorism. However:
When people perceive that they are being wronged by someone else, violence is the most typical reaction. Without a doubt, many of our actions in the Middle East, and before us the actions of Britain in the Middle East, and before that the actions of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, have been wrong from a moral standpoint.
It's always dangerous to take a complex situation and offer a simple explanation, and saying "They did that because they're just evil" is most certainly a simple explanation. Take the Holocaust, for example. For a while, it was in vogue to say that the Holocaust happened because Germans in general and Nazis in particular were just evil. Because that sounds a bit like a generalisation, academics studying the phenomenon at the time came up with an official sounding term for it: Sonderweg, which is German for "strange way." The idea was that there was something about Germans that made the Holocaust possible there (and only there). Exactly what that something was was up to debate. It was said to be a special, unfortunate mixture of culture and history.
This theory was well received pretty much everywhere because it implicitly made the Holocaust a special case, something unlikely to happen again. After all, if Sonderweg is a post World War I German phenomenon, we don't need to worry too much that we might be capable of similar genocide.
Of course, it all turned out to be bunk.
Subsequent psychological analysis of some of the most thorough butchers of the SS (particularly Adolf Eichmann) found them to be normal, sane individuals who played with their children. Many (Eichmann in particular) were apparently motivated by a desire to rise in the ranks of the SS -- and thereby ensure job security and status in what to them appeared to be an increasingly Nazi world -- rather than by hatred of Jews/Gypsies/Homosexuals or by inherent, sociopathic evil. There's even a term for this: "The Banality of Evil."
Psychological tests later done in the United States, most notably the Stanford Prison Experiment and the creation of "The Third Wave" in Palo Alto's Cubberly High School showed that under the right circumstances, it was remarkably easy to make people behave the way that the Nazis had. The Milgram experiments of 1961-63 showed that people adminstrating painful electric shocks to a subject (who was in fact an actor, a fact the test subjects were unaware of) at the instruction of a superior would often administer voltages they knew were enough to be potentially lethal, despite pleas from the actor for them to stop.
The reason I'm getting in to all of this is because the Holocaust is a very good and relatively well understood and widely studied example of how your thinking is completely wrong. Indeed, despite people's one-time certainty that the Sonderweg hypothesis was the correct one, Holocaust-like events have occured in other places under different circumstances since then: under Pol-Pot's regime in Democratic Kampuchea, between the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda, and now in Darfur. The less-discussed Armenian Genocide is another example (although it occured before World War II.)
The danger here is one of dehumanisation: "The people who are responsible for crime X are inhuman, evil, and want nothing less than destruction and mahem. They are fundamentally not like us." This is, essentially, the crux of your argument. It's convenient, because it makes action against the people you are dehumanising moral.
The truth, of course, is that these people are not demons. They, like you, have been raised or made to believe that we are demons, that we are unjust, that we are cruel. It's easy to imagine a Muslim version of yourself making the exact same arguments about us to a crowd of impressionable, undereducated and impoveri
Captain periodless, the guy's name is "Kim Jong Il", not "Kim Il Jong." If you're going to comment on the politics of another country's leader, it's good form to actually remember his name.
But what do I know?
Looked at broadly, Communism and Socialism are about as similar as Facism and Capitalism. If you want to make that argument, fine, but I think you'll find that most people will disagree with you.
It seems to me that you have very little notion of what Socialism is. What you do know appears to be a product of cold war era anti-Communist brainwashing. Would-be Communist states such as the USSR nationalised most of their industries, so anyone that advocates nationalisation of any industry (which I'm not doing, by the way) must be on the slippery slope to Totalitarianism. In reality, things don't work that way.
Many countries -- most of Scandinavia comes to mind -- are socialist and yet not totalitarian. Socialism doesn't mean the Stasi and five year plans, you know. It just refers to society where government, instead of private industry, provides some services. What percentage of services are provided publically roughly estimates the degree of Socialism practiced in said country. Very socialist countries (such as Finland) have many services provided by the government and paid for by taxes. Less socialist countries, such as the US, provide most services through private industry (but still provide some publically, such as public transit, or libraries, or social/corporate welfare.)
Have you ever noticed that totalitarian police states always have words like Democracy or Republic in their names? People's Republic of such-and-such, or Democratic People's Republic of so-and-so, or whatever. Ronald Reagan used to joke that the difference between a People's Republic and a Republic was the difference between a jacket and straightjacket. He and others (including you, I'd wager) were aware that just because a nation calls itself free and democratic doesn't make it free and democratic.
Surprisingly, these same rational people seem completely incapable of recognising that just because a country calls itself "Communist" doesn't mean it actually is. I'm personally of the opinion that Communism isn't feasible, but let's call a spade a spade. "Red" China isn't communist, never was, and certainly isn't now. The USSR, Cuba, and the DDR were/are all one party police states with planned economies. Communist? Most certainly not. Laos essentially runs on a heavily regulated market economy, and yet the party that runs the country also refers to itself as Communist. Pol-Pot wanted to turn Cambodia into one huge agrarian commune, killing off unwanted people in the process, to my knowledge not something that Marx ever suggested, even remotely. And yet he called himself Communist.
If you're trying to argue that many of the nations that have in the past called themselves communist have, for the most part, participated in or otherwise been privy to gross human rights violations, you'll find no argument from me. The problem comes when you equate the name they use to call themselves with the philosophy going by the same. In the same way that you wouldn't malign democracy just because Pol Pot called his regime "Democratic Kampuchea" or Kim Jong Il his the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea", it's stupid to draw conclusions about Communism or Socialism from these perverse examples.
The fact that non-totalitarian countries that call themselves Democracies exist and non-totalitarian countries that call themselves Communist do not only underscores that Communism is either unworkable in practice (my position) or extremely tricky to get right (the position of most modern-day Communists). Either way, it's apples and oranges.
And this comment: "[h]ow many Socialists do you know have positive things to say about the wealthy" is just strange, I'm not even sure where it's coming from. Socialism doesn't mandate the abolishment of personal wealth or private property, unlike Communism. It seems like I'm going to need to say this again: Socialism is not Communism. Communist societies are communal -- everything is owned by the people, not by individuals, most especially the me
Here's the problem though. GR and QM are both, relative to ST, extremely simple. And while ST may make the same predictions that GR and QM make, it does so in a far more complex way, without adding any extra information -- QM and GR are incompatible, but ST fails to resolve those incompatibilities in a testable way.
GR was more complex than Classical Newtonian Mechanics, but it was, essentially, a value-added theory: it explained a bunch of things that Classical Mechanics couldn't, all while remaining compatible with Classical Mechanics in places where Classical Mechanics made accurate predictions. Therefore, GR was taken to replace classical mechanics, despite the added complexity of the theory, because it was broader in scope, falsifiable, and provably more correct than the theory it replaced.
ST does not fit this mold. It is far, far, far, far more complex than either GR or QM, and makes no extra falsifiable predictions. It doesn't resolve the inconsistencies between the two. In other words, from a purely scientific perspective, it's just a hypothesis and not a particularly useful one at that.
Of course, I'm a mathematician by training and lots of interesting math has come out of ST, so for that I'm happy.
Yes, well, maybe I did come off a bit harshly, sorry for that. I did say in my post that I was discounting HK and Taiwan because of their unwillingness/inability to standardise on a particular romanization method, however. And I believe -- though I may be wrong -- that Red Flag Linux, the distribution in question, is very much a mainland oriented operation.
I'm glad to hear that tablet handwriting recognition has advanced, though, that's good news. Obviously if such an input method is ubiquitous in HK then having a Free implementation is important. Of course from an efficiency perspective, writing out characters by hand -- especially traditional characters -- is a good deal slower than using a text-based input method, but... well, people will use what they will use, won't they, who am I to say differently.
It occurs to me that good handwriting recognition solutions for Chinese probably don't exist for the same reasons that good free fonts don't exist: too many glyphs. While we may spend most of our time using only 4000 characters, I find that when I use fonts with less than about 8000 characters I notice, and I'm not even particularly literary. This means that someone interested in providing a free solution would have to create a database of nearly 10,000 characters with their stroke orders and common varations to be even moderately useful.
Implementing the actual recognition algorithm -- despite the complexity involved in getting it to properly recognise grass script and the like -- is probably far simpler than that task. In the same way that no one has the patience to individually construct and hint 10 thousand glyph outlines to make a good truetype font, no one has the patience to produce such a database. Unless you're aware of one that's already available?
This would probably workout better if there were more Linux adoption outside of the server room in Asia, but on the mainland at least, people are married to their Windows machines. Are things better in HK?
You're nuts, man. It may be that in Taiwan and Hong Kong where there is no standard romanization (really) for Chinese characters tablet-based input methods are popular, but on the Mainland -- which is the real market here -- there is pinyin. Pinyin is taught in schools, everyone knows it, and most Chinese people use pinyin-based input methods (although some, like me, prefer wubi). Support for these and many other non-graphical input methods in Linux is very good -- in fact, I prefer SCIM's smart pinyin input method to the vast majority of the ones I use on Windows.
Handwriting recognition software is complex and doesn't work particularly well, anyway, even with state of the art non-free solutions. Anyone who has more than a third grade Chinese education knows that in handwriting many variations on stroke order exist, despite their not being "correct". Nokia and others have been marketing cell phones with handwriting recognition on the mainland in recent years and while they are popular as a gimmick, no one I know that owns one actually uses the handwriting recognition, for two reasons: one, it often doesn't recognize their handwriting unless they write stroke by stroke like a first grader, and two, lots of people forget how to write characters, even common ones.
As a Mandarin-speaker who uses Linux exclusively, I can say that the only real bar to a totally free Chinese operating system that would satisfy 99% of mainland corporate users is the lack of Free high quality, hinted Chinese truetype fonts. Everyone I know (including myself) uses MS's SimHei and SimSun, or in the case of Taiwanese and HK folks, MingLiU. There's just nothing free out there that comes close.
Hi friend, I'd just like to point out that one should never say "between you and I", but rather should say "between you and me." To see why this is, consider that we always say "between us" or "between them" but never "between we" or "between they". In English, between is a preposition that governs the objective case, that is, "me, him, us, and them."
In the same way that you wouldn't say, "between you and he", you should never say "between you and I."
In all likelihood, you've been conditioned to always say "so-and-so and I", instead of "me and so-and-so." When you were a kid, and you said, "Me and Mark went to the park today", your mom probably said, "No, bmajik, Mark and I went to the park today." What she meant was, when discussing a group of people that includes oneself, always place the pronoun indicating yourself last, and not that you should always use "... and I."
Hope that helps!
I'm not a hippie, but it's funny you should say this, because, yes, actually, if over 50% of the population dislike something, it can be made illegal. That's essentially how democracy works. Kind of sucks, doesn't it. Note that saying "can" is not the same as saying "should."
It seems to me that you're being deliberately obtuse in this situation, what with your ad homniem arguments and all. I can empathise with not liking other people telling you what to do, and in most cases I agree with your general stance. I am still a registered member of the Libertarian party, although I'll freely admit that I haven't voted that way since Harry Browne ran for President. I've taken Economics since then.
I am of the opinion that when something is provably damaging to everyone, it should probably be regulated. For example, corporate waste disposal is expensive -- sometimes prohibitively so. When we pass laws regulating what sorts of waste materials factories can dump in the local rivers, we are hurting them economically, and by extension ourselves -- economically. At some point though, it becomes obvious that there are things more important than raw economic efficiency. The guys who were making hand over fist by taking the "let's just dump the waste" shortcut are most likely quite fed up with society telling them that they can't do that anymore. They most likely never felt the side-effects of their actions directly, because they could afford to buy homes far from their factories. But we as a society decided -- that is, we voted in representatives that passed the appropriate laws -- that they couldn't do that anymore. Now they can't (although some still do, but that's something else entirely.) I would be surprised if you disagreed with that decision.
Now, I don't think driving an SUV is anywhere near as damaging and I don't really see any reason to pass laws to prevent people from buying SUVs -- something I said, I believe, in my previous post. But I do think that effectively saying "it's my right to pollute the air you breathe" smacks of a certain arrogance that is sort of unbecoming. Isn't the Libertarian mantra that one's right to swing one's fist ends where the face of another begins? If you're under the impression that driving gas-guzzlers doesn't affect others, you're wrong. Not only in terms of pollution, but politically in terms of increased oil dependency too.
I'm not advocating legislating away the SUV problem, although as I said previously I think some sort of tax-based economic disincentive might work. This wouldn't keep you from buying SUVs, it would just mean that you'd have to think a lot harder on how important it was to you, as it would be more expensive. There's no need to eliminate SUV ownership, just reduce it. Where I live, most of the people who buy SUVs are youngish mothers who find the size of the car reassuring and secure. Most are surprised to learn that SUVs are actually less safe in accidents than your typical small car. They aren't offroading, SUV ownership is not a "hobby" for them. They would lose little -- and perhaps gain a lot -- by buying a Volvo instead. And you could still buy SUVs. I'm not sure how this is a problem.
In some parts of the US, you need the clearance an SUV offers. Places where it snows a lot, for example. Making SUVs illegal would be braindead.
I don't own a car, as it happens. But I do have rather bad gas at the moment, so maybe you're right.