But even the homeless will pay some taxes, as they do tend to have some cash transactions. Yes, mountain men might be able to pull it off, though the traditional mountain man still had some dealings with civilization, if for no other reason than it was unlikely he was going to be able to manufacture steel, guns or bullets. Even those crazy survivalists who imagine themselves as fortresses against society still have to buy supplies. There really are very few people at any point in genus Homo's history who could be considered to have been wholly independent, and the opportunities to do so have been shrinking for thousands of years. Not even the people who live in the deepest darkest Amazon somehow exist outside of some sort of cooperative society that places expectations on its members as to the contributions they will make. Those contributions aren't taxes in the sense that civilization requires, but they are certainly antecedents, and demonstrate that humans are social animals, and not just lone wolves (not even lone wolves are really that either, canines are another species that bond as strongly and work as cooperatively as humans).
Lot's of thing are "force" if you choose to define things that way. The social contract is effectively a kind of force, peer pressure is a kind of force. But the use of the word "force" is intended to suggest violence, as in "it's an act of violence that I have to pay taxes", which is about as sensible as saying "it's an act of violence to demand that I drive the speed limit".
I think it's a bit more than just "Microsoft unfair advantage". Other AV products have always been monstrously bloated affairs, and have become all the worse over then last decade as they throw all kinds of other shit like firewalls and the like in. Products like mcafee and Norton have become almost as bad as the disease they purport to treat. So far as I can tell, Defender really doesn't do much more than sniff out viruses and malware, and while I agree Microsoft's insider knowledge probably gives it a bit of an edge, I think the narrower intent of the software has a lot to do with its better performance.
Taxes have been a fact of life for civilization since the very beginning. At least in democracies, you elect those who will decide what kind of taxes will be imposed and how much those taxes will be. You have no right not to pay taxes. Grow up.
What "oil hungry" nations are there right now? With the price of oil globally pretty cheap, it's not as if the US is the country pumping oil out of the ground, or selling it abroad. Everyone has an oversupply, which is why the price is low.
I think it highly improbable that Obergefell v Hodges is going to be overturned. In fact, even with a court likely to be stacked with Scalia-like conservatives, I have my doubts that Roe v Wade is going to get chucked.
So long as the glut continues, you're not going to be making a lot of people rich, and where the oil is more expensive to get at, like oil sands in Alberta, Saskatchewan and the Dakotas, or even North Sea oil, you're finding production falling off because the lower prices reduces the economic argument for grabbing the oil. That's the real problem here. Cheap oil is great if you're a consumer, it's probably pretty damned good if you're a refiner as well, but if you're a producer it sucks really bad, and while technology has indeed allowed cheaper access to some sources like shale oil, all in all low oil prices have actually had a pretty shitty effect, to the point where Shell is selling its North Sea assets.
It's the great irony of oil production that it seems it is low prices, rather than high prices, that are causing the industry problems, and may in the medium term lead to more development of renewables. The Saudis, at least, seem to know this, which is why they've set up their massive sovereign wealth fund. They're going to grab the money while they can, because they know in the long term, fossil fuels are a dead end.
The point of any kind of storage system is to still be able to deliver electricity when primary generation isn't happening. Whether you're talking about a battery, about compressed air, pumped dams, the point is to convert an inconsistent primary generation system like solar or wind into a system that can produce power all the time, and in particular during peak hours.
I thought the general idea was to use the technology, not necessarily to use identical specs. There are better overall battery designs out there, but the point here is to use the same basic battery system to gain some economies of scale. In other words, Tesla is looking beyond simple optimization of storage capacity. They want to build enough batteries to bring down overall production costs for both cars and for other storage systems.
Huh? The US maintained large standing armies in Europe and the Far East, maintained and even expanded its military assets, not to mention a lot of domestic programs. It did this with debt. In fact, the US has pretty much had a continuous debt since at least the Civil War.
Vancouver has no lack of Canadian citizens who can speak Mandarin, and while the resorts in my area certainly get tourists from China, the bulk of the tourists are either Americans, Canadians from back east, and Europeans. If any languages other than English should be required, it should be French and German.
"Earliest ancestor" is a bit of scientific short hand. In long form it means "the fossil we've found is related to and a lot like we expect the earliest ancestor to appear." The odds of any fossil we find actually being that of a direct ancestor of any extant population is pretty small, but it isn't a vast leap to state that seeing that this earliest known deuterostome was hanging out in the sand 500-odd million years ago, it was likely representative of the earliest members of the superphylum, and the actual common ancestor to all extant deuterostomes would have looked a lot like it.
If a President was an absolute ruler, you would have a point, but a President has to get Congress and the courts to be onside for any initiative to actually fly, and depending on the initiative maybe even the states as well. Now you may be right that candidates may make promises that they must at least have some knowledge may not make it past these other branches of government, and I suppose that's a valid critique of any promise, but putting aside the blatantly or even strongly unlikely to pass muster commitments, one can still make a promise to the voters in good faith, and end up falling short. In fact, most democracies are pretty much designed that way. Politics is ultimately about compromise, and while the victor will often get a bit of a honeymoon after an election, inevitably, one way or another, even where their party controls the legislative controls, some initiatives will fall of the rails.
If you want leaders who can just make decrees then you're probably living in the wrong country.
I'm not going to defend a clearly abused program, but I can certainly see in some occupations how that wouldn't be terribly reasonable at all. Universities often recruit professors and researchers from overseas, because it's a helluva lot easier to tempt a Cambridge-trained physicist, say, than to train one from the ground up. Once the fellow is here, the university's capacity to train new physicists actually improves.
I think there are legitimate grounds for attracting foreign talent, but it has to be done in a way that doesn't allow companies to basically use foreign workers as a means of driving wages down. If a skillset is hard to find among the domestic population, due to a lack of training opportunities (in which case, bad on colleges and universities), or simply due to a sector be in a state of extensive growth, thus creating an effective shortage, then sure, why not?
The biggest problem with these programs is that even where you require employers to demonstrate they've sought out domestic workers to fill the positions, they still find ways to cheat. Up here in Canada we had the Temporary Foreign worker program, which was, like the H1B program in the US, all about filling in holes in labor markets due to skill shortages, yada yada yada. Inevitably, you had some guy running a McDonalds claiming he couldn't find any local workers, and bringing in a bunch of foreign workers, often paying below minimum wage, and getting away with it in part because no one in the Federal government was paying any attention, and no one at the provincial level making sure minimum wages were enforced.
My favorite trick, one which I saw first hand in my area, was hotels and resorts putting out job ads and either requiring absurd skills like "can speak Mandarin", or simply just shredding any resume that they received, and then proclaiming "You see, we had the job ad out for months, and there were too few applicants!" And of course because the government oversight in these programs is usually next to nothing, basically a few bureaucrats rubber stamping whatever came their way, with neither the resources nor the inclination to actually investigate, they got away with it for years.
So if you're going to put restrictions on H1Bs, which I think is sensible, you're going to need to have an enforcement system in place that is effective enough to catch and make an example of enough of the cheaters to scare the rest straight, or they'll just simply find new and inventive ways to get past the rules. Foreign recruitment is a huge industry, and one that makes enough money to pay the lawyers to figure out how to game the system.
Children are not chattel, they are not property. Society and the law bequeath upon parents the right to raise their offspring, and gives them wide, but not infinite latitude in how that is done. Minors are still citizens, and still enjoy constitutional rights, and that means a parent has absolutely no right to cause their child injury, or more to the point, kill them, whether that be intentionally, or due to the parents' belief in some medical quackery. You hurt or kill your child by feeding them poisons, you are a killer, at the very least guilty of manslaughter.
Except that more than just 16 year olds work at places like this, and Walmart in particular, through its part time employment practices, essentially uses the taxpayer as its benefits system. If Walmart is to be allowed to pay a very minimum wage, then it should at least be forced to provide a large amount of full time employment.
In actuality Walmart seems to be slowly realizing that its employment practices lead to high turnover, and the cost of training new employees is actually costing it money. There's something to be said for a decent wage and benefits if you're talking about retention. If you could pay one 17 year who you trained to clean the bathrooms and sweep the floor, and he stayed at the job for more than a few months, wouldn't that ultimately be cheaper than having to train a new person with some frequency, even if the training isn't overly complex?
What you're talking about here is a rather one-dimensional of the worth of a job, even a so-called "low skilled job". There are damned few jobs that literally require no training whatsoever, and not that many where the training takes a few hours. A place like McDonalds or Walmart can actually have a good deal of training in safety, processes, systems and the like that can extend longer than one shift, and thus every time you have to replace an employee who you've pissed on because you're paying them shit wages, you're costs actually go up. And that's not even talking about productivity and quality issues that come from paying piss poor wages.
Want to solve the housing problem, don't starve people out. Build more houses. If the market can support the jobs, then the market can support the housing, unless of course you're talking about a real estate bubble, and in the hottest markets that has fuck all to do with minimum wages, and everything to do with speculators, and in some areas, like Seattle, Vancouver, Toronto and London, it has to do with wealthy foreign buyers planting their cash into what they view as safe real estate market. That somebody working at McDonalds slinging burgers for $15 an hour is utterly irrelevant in these kinds of markets, and cutting their wage in half wouldn't bring the housing prices down at all, because there is little if any relation between the overheated market and the hourly wage of burger slingers and door greeters.
People have used all sorts of things for centuries, that doesn't make them less toxic. You're feeding your children poison. You should be rotting in a jail cell, Mr. Christian Anarcho-capitalist.
There used to be this great Seattle-based comedy show called Almost Live (a sort of low-budget SNL), and they had this really hilarious skit with this tobacco company executive insisting "Smoking is completely safe. Leading chiropractors have found it in fact puts a protective lining on the lungs!"
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But even the homeless will pay some taxes, as they do tend to have some cash transactions. Yes, mountain men might be able to pull it off, though the traditional mountain man still had some dealings with civilization, if for no other reason than it was unlikely he was going to be able to manufacture steel, guns or bullets. Even those crazy survivalists who imagine themselves as fortresses against society still have to buy supplies. There really are very few people at any point in genus Homo's history who could be considered to have been wholly independent, and the opportunities to do so have been shrinking for thousands of years. Not even the people who live in the deepest darkest Amazon somehow exist outside of some sort of cooperative society that places expectations on its members as to the contributions they will make. Those contributions aren't taxes in the sense that civilization requires, but they are certainly antecedents, and demonstrate that humans are social animals, and not just lone wolves (not even lone wolves are really that either, canines are another species that bond as strongly and work as cooperatively as humans).
Lot's of thing are "force" if you choose to define things that way. The social contract is effectively a kind of force, peer pressure is a kind of force. But the use of the word "force" is intended to suggest violence, as in "it's an act of violence that I have to pay taxes", which is about as sensible as saying "it's an act of violence to demand that I drive the speed limit".
I think it's a bit more than just "Microsoft unfair advantage". Other AV products have always been monstrously bloated affairs, and have become all the worse over then last decade as they throw all kinds of other shit like firewalls and the like in. Products like mcafee and Norton have become almost as bad as the disease they purport to treat. So far as I can tell, Defender really doesn't do much more than sniff out viruses and malware, and while I agree Microsoft's insider knowledge probably gives it a bit of an edge, I think the narrower intent of the software has a lot to do with its better performance.
Taxes have been a fact of life for civilization since the very beginning. At least in democracies, you elect those who will decide what kind of taxes will be imposed and how much those taxes will be. You have no right not to pay taxes. Grow up.
We need to stop using fossil fuels. That's not something you and I are going to agree on, I suspect.
What "oil hungry" nations are there right now? With the price of oil globally pretty cheap, it's not as if the US is the country pumping oil out of the ground, or selling it abroad. Everyone has an oversupply, which is why the price is low.
I think it highly improbable that Obergefell v Hodges is going to be overturned. In fact, even with a court likely to be stacked with Scalia-like conservatives, I have my doubts that Roe v Wade is going to get chucked.
So long as the glut continues, you're not going to be making a lot of people rich, and where the oil is more expensive to get at, like oil sands in Alberta, Saskatchewan and the Dakotas, or even North Sea oil, you're finding production falling off because the lower prices reduces the economic argument for grabbing the oil. That's the real problem here. Cheap oil is great if you're a consumer, it's probably pretty damned good if you're a refiner as well, but if you're a producer it sucks really bad, and while technology has indeed allowed cheaper access to some sources like shale oil, all in all low oil prices have actually had a pretty shitty effect, to the point where Shell is selling its North Sea assets.
It's the great irony of oil production that it seems it is low prices, rather than high prices, that are causing the industry problems, and may in the medium term lead to more development of renewables. The Saudis, at least, seem to know this, which is why they've set up their massive sovereign wealth fund. They're going to grab the money while they can, because they know in the long term, fossil fuels are a dead end.
The point of any kind of storage system is to still be able to deliver electricity when primary generation isn't happening. Whether you're talking about a battery, about compressed air, pumped dams, the point is to convert an inconsistent primary generation system like solar or wind into a system that can produce power all the time, and in particular during peak hours.
I thought the general idea was to use the technology, not necessarily to use identical specs. There are better overall battery designs out there, but the point here is to use the same basic battery system to gain some economies of scale. In other words, Tesla is looking beyond simple optimization of storage capacity. They want to build enough batteries to bring down overall production costs for both cars and for other storage systems.
He was hardly going to fuck over Peter Thiel. But yes, one must give credit where credit is due.
Huh? The US maintained large standing armies in Europe and the Far East, maintained and even expanded its military assets, not to mention a lot of domestic programs. It did this with debt. In fact, the US has pretty much had a continuous debt since at least the Civil War.
It's hard to know whether you're trolling, or really are a fucking retard.
Vancouver has no lack of Canadian citizens who can speak Mandarin, and while the resorts in my area certainly get tourists from China, the bulk of the tourists are either Americans, Canadians from back east, and Europeans. If any languages other than English should be required, it should be French and German.
Plants produce oxygen via nuclear fusion?
"Earliest ancestor" is a bit of scientific short hand. In long form it means "the fossil we've found is related to and a lot like we expect the earliest ancestor to appear." The odds of any fossil we find actually being that of a direct ancestor of any extant population is pretty small, but it isn't a vast leap to state that seeing that this earliest known deuterostome was hanging out in the sand 500-odd million years ago, it was likely representative of the earliest members of the superphylum, and the actual common ancestor to all extant deuterostomes would have looked a lot like it.
If a President was an absolute ruler, you would have a point, but a President has to get Congress and the courts to be onside for any initiative to actually fly, and depending on the initiative maybe even the states as well. Now you may be right that candidates may make promises that they must at least have some knowledge may not make it past these other branches of government, and I suppose that's a valid critique of any promise, but putting aside the blatantly or even strongly unlikely to pass muster commitments, one can still make a promise to the voters in good faith, and end up falling short. In fact, most democracies are pretty much designed that way. Politics is ultimately about compromise, and while the victor will often get a bit of a honeymoon after an election, inevitably, one way or another, even where their party controls the legislative controls, some initiatives will fall of the rails.
If you want leaders who can just make decrees then you're probably living in the wrong country.
I'm not going to defend a clearly abused program, but I can certainly see in some occupations how that wouldn't be terribly reasonable at all. Universities often recruit professors and researchers from overseas, because it's a helluva lot easier to tempt a Cambridge-trained physicist, say, than to train one from the ground up. Once the fellow is here, the university's capacity to train new physicists actually improves.
I think there are legitimate grounds for attracting foreign talent, but it has to be done in a way that doesn't allow companies to basically use foreign workers as a means of driving wages down. If a skillset is hard to find among the domestic population, due to a lack of training opportunities (in which case, bad on colleges and universities), or simply due to a sector be in a state of extensive growth, thus creating an effective shortage, then sure, why not?
The biggest problem with these programs is that even where you require employers to demonstrate they've sought out domestic workers to fill the positions, they still find ways to cheat. Up here in Canada we had the Temporary Foreign worker program, which was, like the H1B program in the US, all about filling in holes in labor markets due to skill shortages, yada yada yada. Inevitably, you had some guy running a McDonalds claiming he couldn't find any local workers, and bringing in a bunch of foreign workers, often paying below minimum wage, and getting away with it in part because no one in the Federal government was paying any attention, and no one at the provincial level making sure minimum wages were enforced.
My favorite trick, one which I saw first hand in my area, was hotels and resorts putting out job ads and either requiring absurd skills like "can speak Mandarin", or simply just shredding any resume that they received, and then proclaiming "You see, we had the job ad out for months, and there were too few applicants!" And of course because the government oversight in these programs is usually next to nothing, basically a few bureaucrats rubber stamping whatever came their way, with neither the resources nor the inclination to actually investigate, they got away with it for years.
So if you're going to put restrictions on H1Bs, which I think is sensible, you're going to need to have an enforcement system in place that is effective enough to catch and make an example of enough of the cheaters to scare the rest straight, or they'll just simply find new and inventive ways to get past the rules. Foreign recruitment is a huge industry, and one that makes enough money to pay the lawyers to figure out how to game the system.
So is that the explanation for your appallingly poor grasp of genetics?
Children are not chattel, they are not property. Society and the law bequeath upon parents the right to raise their offspring, and gives them wide, but not infinite latitude in how that is done. Minors are still citizens, and still enjoy constitutional rights, and that means a parent has absolutely no right to cause their child injury, or more to the point, kill them, whether that be intentionally, or due to the parents' belief in some medical quackery. You hurt or kill your child by feeding them poisons, you are a killer, at the very least guilty of manslaughter.
Except that more than just 16 year olds work at places like this, and Walmart in particular, through its part time employment practices, essentially uses the taxpayer as its benefits system. If Walmart is to be allowed to pay a very minimum wage, then it should at least be forced to provide a large amount of full time employment.
In actuality Walmart seems to be slowly realizing that its employment practices lead to high turnover, and the cost of training new employees is actually costing it money. There's something to be said for a decent wage and benefits if you're talking about retention. If you could pay one 17 year who you trained to clean the bathrooms and sweep the floor, and he stayed at the job for more than a few months, wouldn't that ultimately be cheaper than having to train a new person with some frequency, even if the training isn't overly complex?
What you're talking about here is a rather one-dimensional of the worth of a job, even a so-called "low skilled job". There are damned few jobs that literally require no training whatsoever, and not that many where the training takes a few hours. A place like McDonalds or Walmart can actually have a good deal of training in safety, processes, systems and the like that can extend longer than one shift, and thus every time you have to replace an employee who you've pissed on because you're paying them shit wages, you're costs actually go up. And that's not even talking about productivity and quality issues that come from paying piss poor wages.
Want to solve the housing problem, don't starve people out. Build more houses. If the market can support the jobs, then the market can support the housing, unless of course you're talking about a real estate bubble, and in the hottest markets that has fuck all to do with minimum wages, and everything to do with speculators, and in some areas, like Seattle, Vancouver, Toronto and London, it has to do with wealthy foreign buyers planting their cash into what they view as safe real estate market. That somebody working at McDonalds slinging burgers for $15 an hour is utterly irrelevant in these kinds of markets, and cutting their wage in half wouldn't bring the housing prices down at all, because there is little if any relation between the overheated market and the hourly wage of burger slingers and door greeters.
Well then, if that's the logic, then let's halve the minimum wage... no wait, let's make it a penny, and then wow, will we all be in great shape!
People have used all sorts of things for centuries, that doesn't make them less toxic. You're feeding your children poison. You should be rotting in a jail cell, Mr. Christian Anarcho-capitalist.
There used to be this great Seattle-based comedy show called Almost Live (a sort of low-budget SNL), and they had this really hilarious skit with this tobacco company executive insisting "Smoking is completely safe. Leading chiropractors have found it in fact puts a protective lining on the lungs!"
Which would be fine if it was just morons poisoning themselves, but they're poisoning small children, and that's the chief problem here.