If Bill Gates or the RIAA CEO wants to lobby, let them hire the lobbyist from his personal salary, rather than using the corporation's billon-dollar treasury.
I agree completely that it's unjust to let corporations write the laws of this country, but how should we go about ending corporate lobbyists? If we only let the CEO lobby out of his personal salary, the company will just pay him more to compensate. Then you get the extra disadvantage of not having any direct record that the company is connected to a certain piece of legislation. Can we limit individual campaign contributions? Maybe, but that doesn't seem like it would be America's thing. So what should we do? I honestly don't know.
I used to work for a book manufacturer, and I can tell you that the cost of producing a physical book is next to nothing. I think the manufacturer charged the publisher something like 5-12 cents per book for the finished product. So, don't expect a drastic price drop in the move away from physical books..
So if RIM were a Chinese company, or better - Iranian, or say head quartered in Dubai, would you have any problems with BlackBerries being used by the majority of our government officials & heads of industry?
But...isn't RIM Canadian? (Citation) I mean, they might see it as the same thing since the US has good relations with Canada, but it seems like that should count for something. In your example, it would be like the US being concerned that BlackBerries made in Dubai were being used by Iran to spy on the US.
Not that a lot of Americans wouldn't have issues with that, but it doesn't make as much sense when there's multiple countries involved.
Except they make an exception for that one bit that's your most sensitive erogenous zone. And rabbis dare call that bit an imperfection. And even deny the pain that the procedure to "fix it" leads to pain and negative side effects, or even pretend these are a good thing.
Except they're not the ones calling it an imperfection. Like it or not, they don't circumcise because they don't like how their wangs look. It's a symbol of the covenant between God and his chosen people.
And no, I'm not Jewish....just a Troll-feeder, apparently.
Just because you haven't heard it said before doesn't mean it's not an incredibly offensive racial slur. When Darwin's theory of evolution became fairly widely known, some people decided it was OK to subjugate black people. After all, they looked more like monkeys than the white folk, so they must be less human, right? Even if "monkey" isn't used where you hear it, it still stands for a hell of a lot of oppression and subjugation.
It's unfortunate, for the joke's sake, that comparing a black person to a monkey doesn't imply the same things as it does for a white person. But that's the way it is. Closing your ears and pretending that dehumanization never happened isn't going to make the joke funny.
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If Bill Gates or the RIAA CEO wants to lobby, let them hire the lobbyist from his personal salary, rather than using the corporation's billon-dollar treasury.
I agree completely that it's unjust to let corporations write the laws of this country, but how should we go about ending corporate lobbyists? If we only let the CEO lobby out of his personal salary, the company will just pay him more to compensate. Then you get the extra disadvantage of not having any direct record that the company is connected to a certain piece of legislation. Can we limit individual campaign contributions? Maybe, but that doesn't seem like it would be America's thing. So what should we do? I honestly don't know.
I used to work for a book manufacturer, and I can tell you that the cost of producing a physical book is next to nothing. I think the manufacturer charged the publisher something like 5-12 cents per book for the finished product. So, don't expect a drastic price drop in the move away from physical books..
So if RIM were a Chinese company, or better - Iranian, or say head quartered in Dubai, would you have any problems with BlackBerries being used by the majority of our government officials & heads of industry?
But...isn't RIM Canadian? (Citation) I mean, they might see it as the same thing since the US has good relations with Canada, but it seems like that should count for something. In your example, it would be like the US being concerned that BlackBerries made in Dubai were being used by Iran to spy on the US. Not that a lot of Americans wouldn't have issues with that, but it doesn't make as much sense when there's multiple countries involved.
Except they make an exception for that one bit that's your most sensitive erogenous zone. And rabbis dare call that bit an imperfection. And even deny the pain that the procedure to "fix it" leads to pain and negative side effects, or even pretend these are a good thing.
Except they're not the ones calling it an imperfection. Like it or not, they don't circumcise because they don't like how their wangs look. It's a symbol of the covenant between God and his chosen people.
And no, I'm not Jewish....just a Troll-feeder, apparently.
Just because you haven't heard it said before doesn't mean it's not an incredibly offensive racial slur. When Darwin's theory of evolution became fairly widely known, some people decided it was OK to subjugate black people. After all, they looked more like monkeys than the white folk, so they must be less human, right? Even if "monkey" isn't used where you hear it, it still stands for a hell of a lot of oppression and subjugation.
It's unfortunate, for the joke's sake, that comparing a black person to a monkey doesn't imply the same things as it does for a white person. But that's the way it is. Closing your ears and pretending that dehumanization never happened isn't going to make the joke funny.
I don't see this as a drawback. I see this as help for the growing obesity problem.