That's what really worries me. Without prospects for marriage, what are billions of horny Chinamen going to do to vent their frustration?
Um, marry someone who is not Chinese? It already happens in Vietnam and Thailand. Some even marry white American girls after moving to the US [pauses for the sound of conservative Americans' heads exploding].
Why would conservative American heads explode?
You're right about Vietnam and Thailand though. Those countries are already exporting wives to Taiwan to the point where a huge fraction of recent marriages in Taiwan involve at least one foreigner. Once China becomes wealthy and that wealth is widely distributed (if they can make that happen) I'm sure they'll start importing women from southeast Asia. They'll likely increase their imports from Russia too.
As for Chinese marrying Americans - for some reason there seems to be a lot of racial preferences among American women that keep that from happening in large numbers. I remember reading a study that men are generally willing to date women of any race but that women tend to have a strong preference for marrying within their race - the big exception being women of Asian ancestry who are frequently willing to marry white men. So you tend to see a lot of AF/WM couples but very few WF/AM couples. But hopefully women will stop being so racially biased and we'll see more interracial marriages in the future. Perhaps as more Chinese men get rich while females will be more open to dating them.
My suspicion is that China's island-building brinkmanship is intended simply to stoke the fires of nationalism while the Chinese economy teeters on the verge of collapse. What better way to mis-direct the discontent at home than perceived enemies abroad (us against the world or at least our nearby neighbors)? That or the Party is making the landgrab while it still.
I think a lot of it is simply nationalism. We've seen it before where a country that feels it is naturally better than everyone else but has been unfairly held down suddenly gets its act together and starts becoming powerful and wants to take its 'rightful place' as the boss. Yes the leadership is stoking nationalist fires, but much of the leadership is also burning with nationalism and nationalist ambitions.
If I were prone to dark speculation, I would think about the ChiCom leaders with an overabundance of men in the population (resulting from preferential male births).
They have 50 million more men than women. That's a frustrated powder keg that must dealt with; one way to reduce that population is a land war.
On the other hand a huge portion of those men are only-childs, and even only-grand-childs. Getting a lot of them killed would create another group of people who are plenty pissed off and have nothing to lose.
The most dangerous thing that could come out of that part of the world is a united empire run by religious fanatics or whose government is influenced enough by fanaticism that it looks away while people within the empire use its resources to cause inflame hatred and commit terrorism. Allowing ISIS to gain control of Iraq and Syria would be less dangerous to America than allowing Iran to gain control of Iraq and Syria because in the first case you have two nations who balance each other instead of one much larger nation trying to unify itself behind a shared hatred.
I can see how a government run utility that provides a basic commodity that doesn't ever change could be well run. The technology is well understood and doesn't need to change much. It either works or it doesn't and when it doesn't everyone complains to their government reps.
is broadband like that? If we turn it over to the government will we be happy if it is exactly the same 40 years from now (well perhaps a little less down time)?
Cars are provided by several different companies. In the last 40 years there have been tremendous improvements in safety, efficiency, and comfort. Roads on the other hand are supply by the government. Any improvements there?
I'm old enough to remember the explosion of new services that suddenly became available when Bell was split up.
A private company in a competitive environment has to constantly improve to stay in the market. A monopoly doesn't. A nationalized industry doesn't. A government agency or industry may happen to get good leaders and do well, but if they don't there isn't much pressure to change.
Consider electricity. The uses for electricity have exploded over the last 30 years. The ways it is used, the types of devices, the electronics, the cars, etc. etc. But most places are supplied with electricity by a monopoly or some sort of government run group. Have you seen any modifications in the electricity industry to better supply the new uses of electricity? Any innovations or new ideas for how electricity is delivered to the home to make it more useful and convenient?
If an industry by it's nature is going to be a monopoly then it may make sense to nationalize it. But doing so carries a heavy price in stagnation that must be considered. For the moment most people do have choices. There are cable, fios, cell-tower and/or satellite available to many people. I suspect most people have at least two of those options in their area. A lot of local towns need to figure out how to get out of local monopolies they foolishly (or corruptly) granted, but there is no need to nationalize this stuff and end innovation.
Can she do that, or does she have to do something "transformative" like adding fine print to the canvass saying "Can you believe someone paid $90,000 for this?"
When I was a kid we weren't allowed to bring basketballs to school. Nor were we allowed to bring walkie-talkies. We couldn't bring treadmills to use during class. A distraction is a distraction. How can anyone be surprised that banning them improves academic performance. The only thing surprising is that they weren't banned a decade ago.
But there are many many many people who use facebook regularly and the major players have to pander to them because the facebook viewers have a lot of votes.
Exactly, and if the government is going to require everyone to get something, they should fund it either by providing it or by reimbursing the cost.
In fact I actually went to a private school for good parts of my education and I can assure you that my parents did not get a tax break.
I'm all for school choice vounchers. I my ideal world your parents wouldn't have gotten a tax break; they would have been given a voucher for purchasing an education, and that voucher would have only been used at places that don't charge a penny more (i.e. schools couldn't charge the voucher prices +$1000 per semester).
He's not asking for special tax treatment. He'll still pay the same amount of taxes. He's asking that the government spend the same amount of money on his kids' educations. He's not asking for a penny more than that, nor is he asking for money for himself.
Then it's not the community's job to allow these people to live in our cities, hold claims to land, conduct trade, or access or public roads or other venues.
You're right, it isn't the community's job because it is no job at all. Property rights, living rights, trading rights, and travel rights are all pretty fundamental and it requires no effort to not interfere in them. Where effort is required is when you decide to take away people's fundamental rights. When you claim that interfering in people's rights is a "job" then you turn reality on its head.
Protecting a healthy society may require interfering in people's rights - for example we enslaved several million Americans to protect our society during WWII - but don't pretend that you're not doing what you're doing.
You misunderstand. I was speaking metaphorically about the situation in Iraq, not about the American economy.
I don't say much about specific items in the economy because I realize I don't know enough and am probably not smart enough to understand things like why the economy crashed in the final year of Bush the Younger. Instead, when voting, I look at the things I believe I do understand - that certain rules always win out in the long run. Supply and Demand, there's no free lunch, tragedy of the commons, etc..
I believe deficit stimulus spending is like an addictive drug. It creates a temporary high but the crash that follows leaves us worse off than before, which causes the government to use more stimulus with each attempt requiring more money but achieving less effect. The Bush/Obama stimulus may have prevented a depression but it didn't create a recovery. What does seem to have create a slow recovery - like an addict who starts giving up a drug faces - is the sequester.
It's not that deficit spending can't be good. When used to build a road or a port to allow increased economic activity it can be very good. But it can also be used to build an unneeded road or port and simply be a waste of money. It is the thing that gets built that matters, not the fact that the government is the one spending the money. If the money is going to be poorly spent by the government it would be better not to spend it at all than to spend it simply for the sake of stimulus.
Why? Because every time the government spends money, whether borrowed or not, it sucks money from the rest of the economy and prevents growth of other economic activity. The government hired 50 programmers to build a pretty website that does nothing? Some would call it a stimulus; I would call it 50 programmers who aren't available to build a app to make a factory more efficient.
I wasn't very impressed with either Bush the Younger or Obama the Unready. The last president I thought was qualified for the job both mentally and morally was Bush the Elder. And although Clinton had his moral problems, nothing he did is as bad as the combination of Bush and Obama. Bush invaded thinking we would have an easy victory and was horribly wrong. But he made the best of it by sticking it out and finding a way to get the country mostly stabilized and with a bit of support still needed. Then Obama came along and through the hard won results away.
It's like a family where one spouse buys a house with a 30 year mortgage for $50,000 and after signing all the papers finds he misread and the actual amount is $500,000, far more than the house is work. So the guy slaves and sacrifices for 29 years and 8 months to pay off the mortgage, in part to get the house and in part to maintain the family credit rating. Then with 4 months to go he dies, so his heir look at the house, sees there is still $10,000 left of the mortgage, stops payments and burns the house down, simultaneously destroying both the family reputation and the house that was almost paid off.
I think Ms. Fiorina is simply wrong because Tim Cook is being VERY CONSISTENT on Indiana and Saudi Arabia.
In one case he's supporting puritanical fanatics who want to use state power to control the beliefs and behaviors of citizens, forcing them to follow his beliefs.
In the other case he is supporting exactly the same thing.
Whether you're a woman in Saudi Arabia who wants to decide for herself who she will spend time with, who she will produce children for, who she will cook for, etc.., or whether you're a baker in Indiana who wants to decide for herself who she will spend time with, who she will produce baked goods for, who she will cater for, etc., Tim Cook does not have your back (except perhaps with a whip). Tim wants to allow people to compel you to do things against your will.
30 years ago I supported the right of gays to decide who they would engage in activities with without government interference. Today i support the right of bakers to do the same thing. Somehow this support for freedom once made me a progressive and now makes me a bigot. Suppose being a progressive and being a bigot are the same thing?
I was recently explaining to some students why I don't know about the trickier parts of the language I use everyday. I don't use those tricky parts and I would chew out anyone on my team who did, so the precise details of how those parts work never come up..
In spite of all this, Centers continues to insist that Branstad does not use e-mail. But checking your e-mail on your phone counts as using e-mail. Receiving e-mails from your staff counts as using e-mail. Sending accidental e-mails with your Blackberry counts as using e-mail.
Checking a group distribution list because that's how you get news is not really "using" e-mail.
Checking a group mail is not checking "your" e-mail.
Sending e-mails which demonstrate that you have no idea what you are doing does certainly not count as "using" "e-mail".
Obviously, this craptastically ignorant fuckstain is not tech savvy.
I was with you until you said he "obviously" is not "tech savvy". So we know from reading the article that he recognizes that his Blackberry is "old-fashioned". And he apparently doesn't waste a lot of time digging into how the company that makes Blackberry markets them (they call them "smart phones" but there are much smarter phones our there these days).
As for the email? He had his staff set something up and he checked in on a regular bases using an app that probably hid details from him. Did he need to care what those details were? I'm pretty tech savvy in some areas. i can build a large scale web app. I can tell you about a lot of different frameworks for building sites. I can tell you about strengths and weaknesses of those frameworks, strengths and weaknesses of the various languages for writing code, what common architectures, web servers, and application servers are. Yet here I sit using Slashdot and I haven't the faintest idea what language it is written in, what web server is serving the content, what frameworks are involved. If I viewed the source on the page to see the javascript I might get some clues, but I honestly just don't care. This governor may have viewed it the same way. It was an app set up by someone else for him and he didn't care to find out how it was implemented even if he could tell you details about various computer communication protocols.. He has other things to spend his time on.
"Presently, only one in 10 schools nationwide offer computer science classes."
From 1992-1996 I went to a tiny high school in the middle of nowhere surrounded by corn fields, and even I had 4 computer programming courses - granted only like 5-6 kids were in the 4th class, they almost canceled it on us.
Maybe they teach programming and computers in the Midwest but not elsewhere?
Slashdot Mirror
That's what really worries me. Without prospects for marriage, what are billions of horny Chinamen going to do to vent their frustration?
Um, marry someone who is not Chinese? It already happens in Vietnam and Thailand. Some even marry white American girls after moving to the US [pauses for the sound of conservative Americans' heads exploding].
Why would conservative American heads explode?
You're right about Vietnam and Thailand though. Those countries are already exporting wives to Taiwan to the point where a huge fraction of recent marriages in Taiwan involve at least one foreigner. Once China becomes wealthy and that wealth is widely distributed (if they can make that happen) I'm sure they'll start importing women from southeast Asia. They'll likely increase their imports from Russia too.
As for Chinese marrying Americans - for some reason there seems to be a lot of racial preferences among American women that keep that from happening in large numbers. I remember reading a study that men are generally willing to date women of any race but that women tend to have a strong preference for marrying within their race - the big exception being women of Asian ancestry who are frequently willing to marry white men. So you tend to see a lot of AF/WM couples but very few WF/AM couples. But hopefully women will stop being so racially biased and we'll see more interracial marriages in the future. Perhaps as more Chinese men get rich while females will be more open to dating them.
My suspicion is that China's island-building brinkmanship is intended simply to stoke the fires of nationalism while the Chinese economy teeters on the verge of collapse. What better way to mis-direct the discontent at home than perceived enemies abroad (us against the world or at least our nearby neighbors)? That or the Party is making the landgrab while it still.
I think a lot of it is simply nationalism. We've seen it before where a country that feels it is naturally better than everyone else but has been unfairly held down suddenly gets its act together and starts becoming powerful and wants to take its 'rightful place' as the boss. Yes the leadership is stoking nationalist fires, but much of the leadership is also burning with nationalism and nationalist ambitions.
If I were prone to dark speculation, I would think about the ChiCom leaders with an overabundance of men in the population (resulting from preferential male births). They have 50 million more men than women. That's a frustrated powder keg that must dealt with; one way to reduce that population is a land war.
On the other hand a huge portion of those men are only-childs, and even only-grand-childs. Getting a lot of them killed would create another group of people who are plenty pissed off and have nothing to lose.
The solution is to have a citizenry willing to respect the rights of their fellow citizens and recognize the proper limits of government when voting.
The most dangerous thing that could come out of that part of the world is a united empire run by religious fanatics or whose government is influenced enough by fanaticism that it looks away while people within the empire use its resources to cause inflame hatred and commit terrorism. Allowing ISIS to gain control of Iraq and Syria would be less dangerous to America than allowing Iran to gain control of Iraq and Syria because in the first case you have two nations who balance each other instead of one much larger nation trying to unify itself behind a shared hatred.
Iran is already making war against America both directly and by proxy. https://www.washingtonpost.com... http://www.wsj.com/articles/ir... http://www.nationalreview.com/... Does this deal do anything to end that state of war? Does this deal do anything to prevent Iran from gaining domination in Iraq and Syria? Or does it just prevent America and allies from stopping them?
I can see how a government run utility that provides a basic commodity that doesn't ever change could be well run. The technology is well understood and doesn't need to change much. It either works or it doesn't and when it doesn't everyone complains to their government reps.
is broadband like that? If we turn it over to the government will we be happy if it is exactly the same 40 years from now (well perhaps a little less down time)?
Cars are provided by several different companies. In the last 40 years there have been tremendous improvements in safety, efficiency, and comfort. Roads on the other hand are supply by the government. Any improvements there?
I'm old enough to remember the explosion of new services that suddenly became available when Bell was split up.
A private company in a competitive environment has to constantly improve to stay in the market. A monopoly doesn't. A nationalized industry doesn't. A government agency or industry may happen to get good leaders and do well, but if they don't there isn't much pressure to change.
Consider electricity. The uses for electricity have exploded over the last 30 years. The ways it is used, the types of devices, the electronics, the cars, etc. etc. But most places are supplied with electricity by a monopoly or some sort of government run group. Have you seen any modifications in the electricity industry to better supply the new uses of electricity? Any innovations or new ideas for how electricity is delivered to the home to make it more useful and convenient?
If an industry by it's nature is going to be a monopoly then it may make sense to nationalize it. But doing so carries a heavy price in stagnation that must be considered. For the moment most people do have choices. There are cable, fios, cell-tower and/or satellite available to many people. I suspect most people have at least two of those options in their area. A lot of local towns need to figure out how to get out of local monopolies they foolishly (or corruptly) granted, but there is no need to nationalize this stuff and end innovation.
Could Ms. Girl take Prince's work and add, in tiny letters in the corner, "Can you believe someone paid $90,000 for this?" and then sell it?
Can she do that, or does she have to do something "transformative" like adding fine print to the canvass saying "Can you believe someone paid $90,000 for this?"
When I was a kid we weren't allowed to bring basketballs to school. Nor were we allowed to bring walkie-talkies. We couldn't bring treadmills to use during class. A distraction is a distraction. How can anyone be surprised that banning them improves academic performance. The only thing surprising is that they weren't banned a decade ago.
But there are many many many people who use facebook regularly and the major players have to pander to them because the facebook viewers have a lot of votes.
In fact I actually went to a private school for good parts of my education and I can assure you that my parents did not get a tax break.
I'm all for school choice vounchers. I my ideal world your parents wouldn't have gotten a tax break; they would have been given a voucher for purchasing an education, and that voucher would have only been used at places that don't charge a penny more (i.e. schools couldn't charge the voucher prices +$1000 per semester).
As was said at the the Democratic National Convention: "Government’s the only thing that we all belong to". That counts double for your kids.
From the Democratic National Convention: "Government’s the only thing that we all belong to". That counts double for your kids.
He's not asking for special tax treatment. He'll still pay the same amount of taxes. He's asking that the government spend the same amount of money on his kids' educations. He's not asking for a penny more than that, nor is he asking for money for himself.
Then it's not the community's job to allow these people to live in our cities, hold claims to land, conduct trade, or access or public roads or other venues.
You're right, it isn't the community's job because it is no job at all. Property rights, living rights, trading rights, and travel rights are all pretty fundamental and it requires no effort to not interfere in them. Where effort is required is when you decide to take away people's fundamental rights. When you claim that interfering in people's rights is a "job" then you turn reality on its head. Protecting a healthy society may require interfering in people's rights - for example we enslaved several million Americans to protect our society during WWII - but don't pretend that you're not doing what you're doing.
You misunderstand. I was speaking metaphorically about the situation in Iraq, not about the American economy.
I don't say much about specific items in the economy because I realize I don't know enough and am probably not smart enough to understand things like why the economy crashed in the final year of Bush the Younger. Instead, when voting, I look at the things I believe I do understand - that certain rules always win out in the long run. Supply and Demand, there's no free lunch, tragedy of the commons, etc..
I believe deficit stimulus spending is like an addictive drug. It creates a temporary high but the crash that follows leaves us worse off than before, which causes the government to use more stimulus with each attempt requiring more money but achieving less effect. The Bush/Obama stimulus may have prevented a depression but it didn't create a recovery. What does seem to have create a slow recovery - like an addict who starts giving up a drug faces - is the sequester.
It's not that deficit spending can't be good. When used to build a road or a port to allow increased economic activity it can be very good. But it can also be used to build an unneeded road or port and simply be a waste of money. It is the thing that gets built that matters, not the fact that the government is the one spending the money. If the money is going to be poorly spent by the government it would be better not to spend it at all than to spend it simply for the sake of stimulus.
Why? Because every time the government spends money, whether borrowed or not, it sucks money from the rest of the economy and prevents growth of other economic activity. The government hired 50 programmers to build a pretty website that does nothing? Some would call it a stimulus; I would call it 50 programmers who aren't available to build a app to make a factory more efficient.
I wasn't very impressed with either Bush the Younger or Obama the Unready. The last president I thought was qualified for the job both mentally and morally was Bush the Elder. And although Clinton had his moral problems, nothing he did is as bad as the combination of Bush and Obama. Bush invaded thinking we would have an easy victory and was horribly wrong. But he made the best of it by sticking it out and finding a way to get the country mostly stabilized and with a bit of support still needed. Then Obama came along and through the hard won results away.
It's like a family where one spouse buys a house with a 30 year mortgage for $50,000 and after signing all the papers finds he misread and the actual amount is $500,000, far more than the house is work. So the guy slaves and sacrifices for 29 years and 8 months to pay off the mortgage, in part to get the house and in part to maintain the family credit rating. Then with 4 months to go he dies, so his heir look at the house, sees there is still $10,000 left of the mortgage, stops payments and burns the house down, simultaneously destroying both the family reputation and the house that was almost paid off.
Bush isn't an environmentalist? News to me. But you're right that the ethanol thing was not done to help the environment. It hurt the environment.
I think Ms. Fiorina is simply wrong because Tim Cook is being VERY CONSISTENT on Indiana and Saudi Arabia.
In one case he's supporting puritanical fanatics who want to use state power to control the beliefs and behaviors of citizens, forcing them to follow his beliefs.
In the other case he is supporting exactly the same thing.
Whether you're a woman in Saudi Arabia who wants to decide for herself who she will spend time with, who she will produce children for, who she will cook for, etc.., or whether you're a baker in Indiana who wants to decide for herself who she will spend time with, who she will produce baked goods for, who she will cater for, etc., Tim Cook does not have your back (except perhaps with a whip). Tim wants to allow people to compel you to do things against your will.
30 years ago I supported the right of gays to decide who they would engage in activities with without government interference. Today i support the right of bakers to do the same thing. Somehow this support for freedom once made me a progressive and now makes me a bigot. Suppose being a progressive and being a bigot are the same thing?
I'm surprised to learn that it is undefined. I thought it always just rolled around.
True, but sadly ( I do miss C sometimes) I'm not using a language that has those kind of gotchas.
I was recently explaining to some students why I don't know about the trickier parts of the language I use everyday. I don't use those tricky parts and I would chew out anyone on my team who did, so the precise details of how those parts work never come up..
That would explain why there are so few incremental updates and improvements.
Checking a group distribution list because that's how you get news is not really "using" e-mail.
Checking a group mail is not checking "your" e-mail.
Sending e-mails which demonstrate that you have no idea what you are doing does certainly not count as "using" "e-mail".
Obviously, this craptastically ignorant fuckstain is not tech savvy.
I was with you until you said he "obviously" is not "tech savvy". So we know from reading the article that he recognizes that his Blackberry is "old-fashioned". And he apparently doesn't waste a lot of time digging into how the company that makes Blackberry markets them (they call them "smart phones" but there are much smarter phones our there these days).
As for the email? He had his staff set something up and he checked in on a regular bases using an app that probably hid details from him. Did he need to care what those details were? I'm pretty tech savvy in some areas. i can build a large scale web app. I can tell you about a lot of different frameworks for building sites. I can tell you about strengths and weaknesses of those frameworks, strengths and weaknesses of the various languages for writing code, what common architectures, web servers, and application servers are. Yet here I sit using Slashdot and I haven't the faintest idea what language it is written in, what web server is serving the content, what frameworks are involved. If I viewed the source on the page to see the javascript I might get some clues, but I honestly just don't care. This governor may have viewed it the same way. It was an app set up by someone else for him and he didn't care to find out how it was implemented even if he could tell you details about various computer communication protocols.. He has other things to spend his time on.
"Presently, only one in 10 schools nationwide offer computer science classes."
From 1992-1996 I went to a tiny high school in the middle of nowhere surrounded by corn fields, and even I had 4 computer programming courses - granted only like 5-6 kids were in the 4th class, they almost canceled it on us.
Maybe they teach programming and computers in the Midwest but not elsewhere?