That depends. Did we start the war with afghanistan, or just strike back? They explicitly supported the group that attacked us.
Stipulating that we started the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that they are in fact separate wars not just different battlefields in the same war, his term isn't over yet but he seems likely to be better on that metric.
It's kind of sad that it took me a few lines to realize this must be satire. It sounds almost like what some of the Obama uber-partisans will spout, but it's just over the top enough to reveal itself.
If it's not satire, let me know, so I can go weep quietly for my country.
Actually, that's not entirely true, assuming your definition of capitalism includes free markets. Capitalism has been so misused as a term over the years that I can't just take that as a given. Free markets are built on voluntary exchanges. That indicates the moral choice to forgo confiscation. It may be insufficiently moral for your taste, but it is still tied to morality.
A slave market is a cargo cult version of a free market. It may mimic some of the surface qualities of a free market, but since it confiscates the labor of slaves, it by definition is NOT a free market.
It's their company. They are in charge. They can do what they want with it. It's not your company. You can't control what they do. All you can legitimately do is choose not to work for them or buy what they produce. As can every single other person. The fact that you have to compete with other people who will do those things is not a form of entitlement on their part. The word entitlement implies that the person possessing it is taking something from someone else against their will. The corporations are doing no such thing by cutting corners.
The following is an attempt to preemptively prevent someone from claiming that by firing workers corporations are taking something from their employees against their will.
I suspect you, like many other socialists, confuse "failure to help on terms you approve of" with "causing you harm". If you refuse to work for minimum wage, and can't convince anyone to hire you for more, none of those people who failed to hire you did anything to you. If you starve it is the fault of reality as such, not the fault of anyone who failed to hire you. Firing someone is NOT taking something from them. It's ceasing to provide money while simultaneously ceasing to expect them to provide them with labor that they were exchanging that money for. It's not the same thing.
Then you must also be opposed to closed shop laws, and current us labor law, which prohibit the union and employer from making agreements that they would prefer, and also prevent the employer from firing the union wholesale and replacing every employee if the union strikes.
It's not hard. Spend any time working with at a place with a strong union observing stupid union mandated rules. Not all union mandated rules are stupid... but the stupid ones are unbelievably frustrating to deal with. The intelligent rules won't even be noticed. Also, it depends on what you mean by anti-union. I'm not against unions as a concept. I do think closed shop laws are immoral, as are laws about what constitutues an illegal strike and which prevent the hiring of replacement non-union workers.
The thing is we are as certain as we can be that any major economic bubble bursting slows down the economy. We are also as certain as possible that major damaging events disrupt the markets. The tech bubble and 9/11 would have had a slowdown in the economy with or without the tax cuts. We can't actually say what would have happened if the tax cuts aren't there. The inability to do controlled experiments is a fundamental weakness in any form of economic modeling. Hence, I said it was inherently unknowable. You seem to prefer to throw your preferred interpretation out there and because it can't be proven either, claim that it's true. You do not understand what is and what is not evidence.
You have demonstrated a clear set of partisan blinders in other ways. Tax cuts and bursting of the housing bubble did indead contribute to the deficits. Bush, however, was not some great deregulator. The number of regulations on the books and regulators running them increased during his watch. Even if some particular set of regulations was removed, it's impossible to prove that deregulation had a greater impact than all the new regulations. You clearly are looking for any way you can blame the Republicans and absolve Democrats.
That article does NOT provide a CBO projection. It's someone's graph based on numbers from the CBO. Americanprogress.org has a very definite agenda in favor of social spending. If not, they might have done a similar graph, with and without Medicare part D instead of with and without the cuts. Or do what the heritage foundation did and make a graph showing the CBO projections for revenue and total spending which shows that the the spending increases are much larger than the revenue decreases. I don't trust their uptick in projected revenue, as despite it being a good idea, the bush tax cuts will almost certainly not be allowed to expire.
Picking one specific item whose magnitude is greater than the deficit and blaming it alone for the deficit, is inherently unfair. It's picking the one thing you don't like and blaming it.
Also, it's impossible to prove the Bush Tax cuts did not work. I'm not saying it would have been worse, I'm saying it's inherently unknowable. However, the CBO models used to justify stimulus are definitively wrong, since they projected better unemployment without stimulus than we actually got with stimulus. If your models bear no relation to reality they are invalid. I mention this because I've seen many spirited defenses of stimulus which rely on CBO reports which amount to putting the same numbers into the same model and getting the same results which have already been proven wrong.
That's an inherently unfair way of looking at it. You can only get that sorting all revenue affecting items over the last 10 years, putting the tax cuts at the top, and then cutting them off entirely to claim they are the main cause. It would be just as unfair to put medicaid spending at the top and claiming it's the primary cause.
If the tax cuts reduce revenue by 5% (and it's hard to come up with number for this, because you can't say what revenue would have been without those cuts, because the economy would not have been the same) then the tax cuts only contributed to 5% of the deficit as well.
The free market isn't good by definition. Because it's free of coercion and force (or it ceases to be 'free'), it is not evil by definition, but that's not the same thing just as non-negative doesn't mean positive. Lawful neutral I'd say...
Actually, no, fascism is not a right-wing school of thought. I really don't have time to go through the rounds on this argument all over again, but fascism is really rather centrist.
The problem is, he isn't the one eating an espensive meal and desert at that restaurant. He's paying for other people to eat at that restaurant (unless he works for government in some fashion or receives government funds in some other fashion). Your analogy, if it works at all, doesn't really support your point unless you assume, a priori, that he is obligated in some fashion for someone else to eat desert. Check your premises, especially regarding what consists of things almost everyone agrees are required.
Well, it depends on his rational expectation of the effect of smoking and drinking on his health. Given that smokers will most likely not suffer from lung cancer, his expected utility could have vastly exceeded his expected cost of smoking and rinking. Smoking increases the rate from 1.7% to 17% lifetime chance in men, barring some common cause.
The article was just a screed against standardized testing. Yes, using student testing outcomes has problems. It's a far more accurate way to determine teacher ability than any other method the teacher unions will accept though. It's really sad when you see someone decrying the concept of merit pay as a concept who expects to be paid more for having a masters degree.
Re:Menu-izing the Ribbon for screen real estate
on
The Condescending UI
·
· Score: 1
Unfortunately, the quickbar does not work with roaming profiles because it's stored in local application settings instead of roaming data (This information may be outdated.) It's not alone, lots of programs don't handle roaming well one way or another.
I also dislike the ribbon. Being able to just eyeball scan a menu was much, much faster when doing something that I don't frequently use. It also avoided the necessity of inventing icons for all tasks. Icons are simply not intuitive for me. The save icon looks like a floppy disk, which low and behold, people mostly don't use anymore so it only works for people because that's what they've always used. The word 'save' will make sense for all time. At least most of the icons in the additional ribbons are labeled, but the whole process is slower than opening a menu and looking was.
So, someone wouldn't have been accused of theft for freeing a slave and running away with it? Maybe the federal government wouldn't have gotten involved, but there were sure as hell governments actively protecting slave owners.
The data is not as clean as you might think. Consider, as an example, the set of USHCN annual averages for all stations. The adjustments they make to the temperature are very close to a quadratic fit for reasons unknown, but the low point of the quadratic is in exactly the right spot to reduce the temperature spike in the 30's below the one in the 90's instead of being slightly higher. It's a very smooth curve of adjustments, almost entirely due to the time of observation bias adjustment. If I understand correctly, the time of observation adjustment is determined mathematically by comparisons to before and after data as well as comparisons to nearby stations. My personal suspicion is that their methods are subject to a form of positive feedback such that the observed trends effects are magnified.
Also of note: the average linear trend for adjusted data is over 3 times the linear trend of Raw data in the last century.
Not entirely true in either case. The nations guard is occasionally called up, and welfare is managed by the states. Some of them spend quite a bit on managing welfare progams.
It's worse than that. It may not be possible to get a handle on the variables. There was a slashdot article recently where someone took a perfect model (it generated the data) then tried to determine the variables given the data. Despite a perfect functional form, and data with 0 errors in measurement, he found that several alternate sets of variables fit the existing data well enough, but would have diverged from the actual model significantly.
Slashdot Mirror
That depends. Did we start the war with afghanistan, or just strike back? They explicitly supported the group that attacked us.
Stipulating that we started the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that they are in fact separate wars not just different battlefields in the same war, his term isn't over yet but he seems likely to be better on that metric.
It's kind of sad that it took me a few lines to realize this must be satire. It sounds almost like what some of the Obama uber-partisans will spout, but it's just over the top enough to reveal itself.
If it's not satire, let me know, so I can go weep quietly for my country.
Damn, i wish I could mod that funny...
Actually, that's not entirely true, assuming your definition of capitalism includes free markets. Capitalism has been so misused as a term over the years that I can't just take that as a given. Free markets are built on voluntary exchanges. That indicates the moral choice to forgo confiscation. It may be insufficiently moral for your taste, but it is still tied to morality.
A slave market is a cargo cult version of a free market. It may mimic some of the surface qualities of a free market, but since it confiscates the labor of slaves, it by definition is NOT a free market.
It's still of net benefit to the people so employed, which means it's a good thing. It's just not sufficiently good for your taste.
When you owe the bank $100,000 the bank own you. When you owe the bank $100,000,000, you own the bank.
But it's relevant to look at other companies as part of why Apple moved manufacturing off shore.
It's their company. They are in charge. They can do what they want with it. It's not your company. You can't control what they do. All you can legitimately do is choose not to work for them or buy what they produce. As can every single other person. The fact that you have to compete with other people who will do those things is not a form of entitlement on their part. The word entitlement implies that the person possessing it is taking something from someone else against their will. The corporations are doing no such thing by cutting corners.
The following is an attempt to preemptively prevent someone from claiming that by firing workers corporations are taking something from their employees against their will.
I suspect you, like many other socialists, confuse "failure to help on terms you approve of" with "causing you harm". If you refuse to work for minimum wage, and can't convince anyone to hire you for more, none of those people who failed to hire you did anything to you. If you starve it is the fault of reality as such, not the fault of anyone who failed to hire you. Firing someone is NOT taking something from them. It's ceasing to provide money while simultaneously ceasing to expect them to provide them with labor that they were exchanging that money for. It's not the same thing.
Then you must also be opposed to closed shop laws, and current us labor law, which prohibit the union and employer from making agreements that they would prefer, and also prevent the employer from firing the union wholesale and replacing every employee if the union strikes.
It's not hard. Spend any time working with at a place with a strong union observing stupid union mandated rules. Not all union mandated rules are stupid... but the stupid ones are unbelievably frustrating to deal with. The intelligent rules won't even be noticed. Also, it depends on what you mean by anti-union. I'm not against unions as a concept. I do think closed shop laws are immoral, as are laws about what constitutues an illegal strike and which prevent the hiring of replacement non-union workers.
The thing is we are as certain as we can be that any major economic bubble bursting slows down the economy. We are also as certain as possible that major damaging events disrupt the markets. The tech bubble and 9/11 would have had a slowdown in the economy with or without the tax cuts. We can't actually say what would have happened if the tax cuts aren't there. The inability to do controlled experiments is a fundamental weakness in any form of economic modeling. Hence, I said it was inherently unknowable. You seem to prefer to throw your preferred interpretation out there and because it can't be proven either, claim that it's true. You do not understand what is and what is not evidence.
You have demonstrated a clear set of partisan blinders in other ways. Tax cuts and bursting of the housing bubble did indead contribute to the deficits. Bush, however, was not some great deregulator. The number of regulations on the books and regulators running them increased during his watch. Even if some particular set of regulations was removed, it's impossible to prove that deregulation had a greater impact than all the new regulations. You clearly are looking for any way you can blame the Republicans and absolve Democrats.
That article does NOT provide a CBO projection. It's someone's graph based on numbers from the CBO. Americanprogress.org has a very definite agenda in favor of social spending. If not, they might have done a similar graph, with and without Medicare part D instead of with and without the cuts. Or do what the heritage foundation did and make a graph showing the CBO projections for revenue and total spending which shows that the the spending increases are much larger than the revenue decreases. I don't trust their uptick in projected revenue, as despite it being a good idea, the bush tax cuts will almost certainly not be allowed to expire.
Picking one specific item whose magnitude is greater than the deficit and blaming it alone for the deficit, is inherently unfair. It's picking the one thing you don't like and blaming it.
Also, it's impossible to prove the Bush Tax cuts did not work. I'm not saying it would have been worse, I'm saying it's inherently unknowable. However, the CBO models used to justify stimulus are definitively wrong, since they projected better unemployment without stimulus than we actually got with stimulus. If your models bear no relation to reality they are invalid. I mention this because I've seen many spirited defenses of stimulus which rely on CBO reports which amount to putting the same numbers into the same model and getting the same results which have already been proven wrong.
That's an inherently unfair way of looking at it. You can only get that sorting all revenue affecting items over the last 10 years, putting the tax cuts at the top, and then cutting them off entirely to claim they are the main cause. It would be just as unfair to put medicaid spending at the top and claiming it's the primary cause.
If the tax cuts reduce revenue by 5% (and it's hard to come up with number for this, because you can't say what revenue would have been without those cuts, because the economy would not have been the same) then the tax cuts only contributed to 5% of the deficit as well.
The free market isn't good by definition. Because it's free of coercion and force (or it ceases to be 'free'), it is not evil by definition, but that's not the same thing just as non-negative doesn't mean positive. Lawful neutral I'd say...
Actually, no, fascism is not a right-wing school of thought. I really don't have time to go through the rounds on this argument all over again, but fascism is really rather centrist.
Over what time frame? Citation needed, because I'm aware of no place in the US where per student education funding is lower than it was10 years ago.
The problem is, he isn't the one eating an espensive meal and desert at that restaurant. He's paying for other people to eat at that restaurant (unless he works for government in some fashion or receives government funds in some other fashion). Your analogy, if it works at all, doesn't really support your point unless you assume, a priori, that he is obligated in some fashion for someone else to eat desert. Check your premises, especially regarding what consists of things almost everyone agrees are required.
Well, it depends on his rational expectation of the effect of smoking and drinking on his health. Given that smokers will most likely not suffer from lung cancer, his expected utility could have vastly exceeded his expected cost of smoking and rinking. Smoking increases the rate from 1.7% to 17% lifetime chance in men, barring some common cause.
The article was just a screed against standardized testing. Yes, using student testing outcomes has problems. It's a far more accurate way to determine teacher ability than any other method the teacher unions will accept though. It's really sad when you see someone decrying the concept of merit pay as a concept who expects to be paid more for having a masters degree.
Unfortunately, the quickbar does not work with roaming profiles because it's stored in local application settings instead of roaming data (This information may be outdated.) It's not alone, lots of programs don't handle roaming well one way or another.
I also dislike the ribbon. Being able to just eyeball scan a menu was much, much faster when doing something that I don't frequently use. It also avoided the necessity of inventing icons for all tasks. Icons are simply not intuitive for me. The save icon looks like a floppy disk, which low and behold, people mostly don't use anymore so it only works for people because that's what they've always used. The word 'save' will make sense for all time. At least most of the icons in the additional ribbons are labeled, but the whole process is slower than opening a menu and looking was.
So, someone wouldn't have been accused of theft for freeing a slave and running away with it? Maybe the federal government wouldn't have gotten involved, but there were sure as hell governments actively protecting slave owners.
The data is not as clean as you might think. Consider, as an example, the set of USHCN annual averages for all stations. The adjustments they make to the temperature are very close to a quadratic fit for reasons unknown, but the low point of the quadratic is in exactly the right spot to reduce the temperature spike in the 30's below the one in the 90's instead of being slightly higher. It's a very smooth curve of adjustments, almost entirely due to the time of observation bias adjustment. If I understand correctly, the time of observation adjustment is determined mathematically by comparisons to before and after data as well as comparisons to nearby stations. My personal suspicion is that their methods are subject to a form of positive feedback such that the observed trends effects are magnified.
Also of note: the average linear trend for adjusted data is over 3 times the linear trend of Raw data in the last century.
Not entirely true in either case. The nations guard is occasionally called up, and welfare is managed by the states. Some of them spend quite a bit on managing welfare progams.
It's worse than that. It may not be possible to get a handle on the variables. There was a slashdot article recently where someone took a perfect model (it generated the data) then tried to determine the variables given the data. Despite a perfect functional form, and data with 0 errors in measurement, he found that several alternate sets of variables fit the existing data well enough, but would have diverged from the actual model significantly.