Your impression is wrong. While socialized medicine does have it's own negatives, quality of care is much better in Canada and the majority of Europe. Almost universally. The facts do not support your argument.
Was that in 1812 or 1846? The Democrats were pro-war and have been since before the GOP existed. War of 1812, Mexican War, WWI, WW2, Korea, Vietnam all started under Democratic administrations. AFAIK the Democratic Party has never been anti-war.
If they went to a la carte cable, it definitely would be cheaper for most people. Who actually watches most of the cable channels? If I could pay $15/month for HBO, $10/month for ESPN, and maybe an extra $10 for a few other channels it still would be cheaper than the $40/month Comcast would charge me for their cable package with "free" HBO, the content providers would make more money (other than ESPN, no basic cable channel gets more than a couple dollars per subscriber and most make hardly anything at all). And that doesn't even count the fact that a lot of the channels I would like to have don't come with that basic package, so to actually get every single channel I want it would probably be $80 or more. No way in hell am I paying $80/month just so I can scroll through the channel listing and complain that there's nothing worth watching. And since I don't have an a la carte option, the only business that gets my money is the local bar where I occasionally go to watch sports.
Cable companies need to wake up to this. They want to go back to the days where they were the sole gatekeepers for mass entertainment, but those days are gone and people have other alternatives. You can pay less than $20/month for Hulu Pro and Netflix. That will replace cable if you're just looking to browse around or stare at the TV for awhile to unwind. And the number of content providers who don't offer digital distribution is dwindling so exclusive content isn't much of a dealbreaker anymore. The number of people willing to pay top dollar for cable when there are quality alternatives at 50% or more of the cost is shrinking. If the cable companies don't adapt, they're going to get beaten out.
I met a friend of my uncle's at Thanksgiving dinner last year who is even worse than Mrs. Thatcher. He worked with Fermi as a grad student at the University of Chicago when they built the first nuclear reactor, and went on to a very successful academic career, teaching at Northwestern University and MIT.
I had a really great conversation with the guy where we talked about the history of nuclear power and some general physics/astronomy subjects, but after a while the conversation drifted to politics. Turns out he was rather conservative, which was no big surprise given his age and association with my uncle (who is a very active Republican). But as it turns out, he's a truther. He is absolutely certain that Obama is a Muslim that was born in Kenya.
So by all accounts he is an incredibly gifted, intelligent, educated man and yet he believes some of the most ridiculous nonsense politically. I was baffled.
Meh...movies are different from books. You can't give the same depth of characterization without making the whole thing 20 hours long. It's just impossible. The only one that really irked me was significantly changing Faramir's character like a poster above already pointed out.
The books aren't perfect, either. If you did a reverse comparison, you could point out many instances where the films are significantly better than the books (the 100-page history lesson in the middle of the Two Towers is interesting, but kills the flow of the story). I can geek out about Middle Earth lore as much as anybody, but there are parts of the book that just couldn't possibly translate to film, nor should they try. I think it turned out pretty well, overall.
So military grunts are a bunch of 18 year old dipshits, yet any yahoo who walks up to a sporting good store and buys a weapon has been fully trained in proper gun safety and use? How is that any different? After all, some of those soldiers have shot their whole life and are expert marksmen when they enter the service.
It seems like with something as dangerous as a rifle you should have standards that make the lowest common denominator as high as possible. But as it is you don't have to take any sort of gun ownership or safety class when purchasing a weapon, so a significant proportion of the gun-owning population is at the same level as those 18 year old dipshits before BT, right?
"The most recent headlines would probably read something like "man goes on insane rampage, kills six with bolt-action hunting rifle", as opposed to a dozen."
No, they wouldn't, because we ALREADY know that doesn't happen. Keep in mind that various states and municipalities have banned guns every which way from near complete bans to restrictions on "assault" weapons, and they've been doing it for over 50 years (80 if you count Federal restrictions that were put in place back in the 30s).
The Department of Justice has been keeping records and statistics for all of that time. And we KNOW that bans don't work. The government's own statistics prove it.
The places that had the strictest bans continued to have the highest crime rates. The only real difference was that the guns used were, by definition, illegal. But they were still obtained, and still used.
I am well aware that the "fewer guns equals fewer deaths" argument seems straightforward and logical, and even obvious. But things are not always what they seem. And we KNOW that, at least here in the United States, restrictions don't work. They don't reduce crime. In fact, the number and severity of crimes tends to go UP.
True, but those are all city and statewide bans, which only restricts access for people that aren't willing to hop in a car and drive over state lines. But if we had a true nationwide ban on the manufacture and sale of semi-automatic weapons you would certainly see a decrease in gun crime over a long enough time period. But with the huge quantity of weaponry in the US and the vehemence with which our citizens insist that being armed is a civil right, "long enough time period" could very well be 50+ years.
Arguing about what would or would not happen in that situation is a moot point, though. That type of ban would never happen in the US and pandora's box has already been opened. There are too many rifles and handguns in the country already, cutting off the supply wouldn't stop anybody even remotely determined to purchase one. Maybe over many decades we could remove the amount of weaponry in our country, but not in any sort of politically gratifying time scale.
Better to target the true cause of gun violence: poverty, drug laws, and lack of adequate mental healthcare for a large part of the population. But those problems are actually difficult to solve, so I'm sure we'll continue hearing politicians yell at each other across the aisle about gun control instead of actually trying to solve the problem.
Hehe....we're on the same brainwave. I almost gave a similar reply about Salt Lake City. It's horrible here. Terrible weather, ugly people, nothing to do, and religious fanatics everywhere trying to stop you from having fun (well that last one's a tiny bit true, I guess). Certainly not a place that any right-thinking young professional would want to move.
All your reasons are silly. Just buy a Subaru Outback.
- Modern cars are often rather small, making them worthless for big trips with young children (try to fit two decent strollers in the trunk of something that isn't a Crown Vic, I dare you).
- Some modern cars (not all) do not support roof racks. So you can't even use it to bring a bicycle with you (since you can't tow with it, either) on a small fun trip.
- They quit making station wagons (give or take) so those customers bought SUVs (which are now being downsized to CUVs, which I guess is the modern day station wagon).
The Outback is a wagon. You can easily fit all the gear for a family trip in the back, and they have a million options for racks to add extra storage if you need it.
- The towing capacity of the average modern car is about 1000 lbs (many actually explicitly state NO towing WHATSOEVER). This means that families owning a house, where every couple of months you want to haul a large item home will need to oftentimes rent another vehicle for that purpose. Why not just buy a more versatile vehicle to start with?
- Modern cars have small engines. This is great around the town, but on the highway, mileage suffers horribly. SUVs get much better highway mileage (not better than cars, but not all that far away) because they often put an appropriately sized engine in them.
My outback is rated to tow 2700 lbs and gets about 30 mpg on the highway (not pulling anything of course). What full size SUV gets even close to that? Maybe their engine is more efficient per lb, but if you're carrying 1500 extra lbs. it's not going to matter.
- It sucks ass getting a flat in a car on a long trip, since most modern cars have a toy tire, or worse, tire goop and an inflator ("clown shoes" as I like to call it). Many SUVs offer a full size spare--extremely handy!
Nope. It comes stock with a donut, but has enough space in the compartment for a full-size spare.
- If you like to do your own repair work, modern cars are hell on earth due to their cramped engine compartments, unibody construction, and independent suspension (of course, most SUVs have that nowadays too, but not *all* are terrible to work on the way it generally is with cars).
This is sort of true. I wouldn't say it's hell on earth to work on a Subaru, but it can be irritating if you don't have a lift. But as you noted, most SUV's suffer from the same problem.
It seems like you're railing against shitty cars, not just cars in general. If you want to drive an SUV, fine, but 99% of what you can accomplish in an SUV you can accomplish in a smaller car, and it will be cheaper and safer. And how many people really tow a boat or a full-size trailer with their SUV? 5% of owners? Less probably. It's just silly how many people drive SUV's. It doesn't make any goddamn sense.
Nah, you still get Mexican weed, even in Cali. A lot of mids are Mexican, and you can even find brick weed if you're so inclined. Not everybody's buying top of the line all the time.
Oh and by far the scariest weapon is not an atom bomb, which is really kind of pathetic, barely matching the death toll of a single bombing run, but the simple and humble knife. Several muslim empires have killed more then 200 million people each using only the simple and humble knife, and a quite dull badly made brittle knife at that. No other state or weapon has come anywhere close to those piles of corpses.
I'm a little bit more afraid of someone setting off a rogue a-bomb in Manhattan than I am of waking up to find a bunch of Abassids with dull knives beating on my door. I'm pretty sure that's not just me.
Comparing the infrastructure costs of rail to air travel only works if you compare the government money that has gone towards building and maintaining air infrastructure as well.
I'm not sure what the costs of that is, but I imagine if you add up the cost of building and maintaining every airport in California that $65 billion price tag will start to look a lot less ridiculous.
It's also terribly ironic because increased contact with the Muslim world via Andalusia is one of the most important developments that sparked the early Renaissance in Europe.
I don't think that statistical analysis can glean anything terribly interesting other than confirming what we already know. Sure, an authentic cadence sounds satisfying, and because of that it's always going to very popular. But for anything even moderately more complex, most of it is going to depend on cultural factors for whether or not it becomes popular.
Just look at the history of blues changes in western music. Go back 200 years and Beethoven was the only major European composer playing around with the V-IV progression IIRC. Most people absolutely hated it, and it sounded completely foreign to their ears. They nicknamed it coitus interruptus because it did not resolve "properly." Then blues explodes in the US, and from the 1950's on that's one of the most common progressions in Western music. Then in the 1970's everybody's so tired of blues-based rock that it gets passe again. It sounds boring. So over time it went from sounding unnatural and experimental to being so common that it was uninteresting to many musicians. Nothing about the actual theory or function of the chords changed, just cultural factors.
Plus, it would be pretty difficult to do. Even if you spent a great deal of time on each song, it would be difficult to give consistent interpretations. Is that iii substiuting for tonic? Is that a tri-tone sub of the V, or just a passing chord? Things like that.
Maybe because the "diverse, alternative world-views" are demonstrably false, unscientific, and have absolutely no function other than as a tool fundamentalists use to further their own political goals?
Why do you think caring about the separation of church and state guaranteed to us in the constitution makes someone "obsessive."
They also thought black people were 3/5 of a person with no civil rights. The argument to the authority of the founding fathers is ridiculous. Our country should be the way *we* want it to be and reflect the current opinions and needs of society, not some guys that lived a few centuries ago.
The structure of our country is different, the culture is different, technology is different, education is different, etc. etc. There is no reason the politics can't change as well.
I don't know how this meme started, but republic does not mean that we elect people to vote on our behalf. Republicanism is a form of government where the people rule, rather than a single monarch. This has no bearing on the form of that government or how those people are chosen. China is a republic. Iran is a republic. The USSR was a republic. So was Rome up until the time of Julius Caesar. None of these places are/were democracies (well Rome was eventually, but it was a republic even when it wasn't a democracy).
What we are is a *representative* democracy rather than a *direct* democracy. That is the distinction you are arguing.
Remember that the professor is looking for feedback from his constituents as to how he should vote, he is not looking to replace the ballot box.
Perhaps this is where your worry about direct voting went off the rails. That is NOT what he is proposing.
True, but the moment he starts voting against the stated will of his constituents his entire platform goes down in flames. He may not be advocating direct democracy in the poly-sci sense, but I assume he's going to be campaigning as if it were. People will be rightfully indignant if he goes against their wishes a significant amount of the time.
I think it's interesting that he's trying this in Vermont. Vermont is pretty small and well-educated. It already has a lot of voter participation and limited direct democracy through their town hall meetings. And it's such a small population that I imagine regular voters can get fairly easy access to their representatives. It's not like at the federal level where lobbyists have such a disproportionate advantage over regular citizens.
I wonder if this idea would be more or less successful in Vermont than in other states.
That's a good question, not sure what I did there, maybe I put in 2010?
I guess we just disagree on what is too hot to be outside. We used to play basketball when I was a kid all day every day, even when temps got 100+. If you're sweating and stay hydrated you don't really notice it after awhile. I did yard work as a teenager and *that* was much, much worse. But riding a bike or playing sports wasn't too bad. You get used to it really quickly if you stay hydrated and take breaks in the shade.
I spent a few weeks out of the year in Yuma and it was noticeably worse down there, though. That heat wave that hits around 10:30-11:30 is pretty vicious. And it was in the 1990s so temps were a bit lower than they are now.
I'm gonna stick with my "modern kids are pussies" line, though. Much more satisfying.
You're right about the heat island, but you're still overstating it quite a bit. 110 is not the typical high during the summer, and 100 is not the typical low, not even last year. The highest it got last year was 114, and the average high temp June-August was 106. The average low temp was 83. I'm not positive, but I think the NOAA station is at SkyHarbor which would be pretty accurate for temperatures downtown.
Others have already pointed it out, but some pretty gigantic assumptions about male-female relationships in your post. The same things you say about men could also be said about women? They have porn and sex toys, too.
What's the difference between men and women to you? What's a woman's need for a relationship other than sex and companionship? How is that any different than a man's need for a relationship?
I grew up in a small town in Nevada and other than the gang activity everything was the same. We still went outside. We also played a shitload of video games, but it's not like you have to hide in the house if it's 100 degrees. 120 yeah, but that doesn't happen for very long, even in Phoenix.
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Your impression is wrong. While socialized medicine does have it's own negatives, quality of care is much better in Canada and the majority of Europe. Almost universally. The facts do not support your argument.
Was that in 1812 or 1846? The Democrats were pro-war and have been since before the GOP existed. War of 1812, Mexican War, WWI, WW2, Korea, Vietnam all started under Democratic administrations. AFAIK the Democratic Party has never been anti-war.
50% or less of the cost, I mean.
If they went to a la carte cable, it definitely would be cheaper for most people. Who actually watches most of the cable channels? If I could pay $15/month for HBO, $10/month for ESPN, and maybe an extra $10 for a few other channels it still would be cheaper than the $40/month Comcast would charge me for their cable package with "free" HBO, the content providers would make more money (other than ESPN, no basic cable channel gets more than a couple dollars per subscriber and most make hardly anything at all). And that doesn't even count the fact that a lot of the channels I would like to have don't come with that basic package, so to actually get every single channel I want it would probably be $80 or more. No way in hell am I paying $80/month just so I can scroll through the channel listing and complain that there's nothing worth watching. And since I don't have an a la carte option, the only business that gets my money is the local bar where I occasionally go to watch sports.
Cable companies need to wake up to this. They want to go back to the days where they were the sole gatekeepers for mass entertainment, but those days are gone and people have other alternatives. You can pay less than $20/month for Hulu Pro and Netflix. That will replace cable if you're just looking to browse around or stare at the TV for awhile to unwind. And the number of content providers who don't offer digital distribution is dwindling so exclusive content isn't much of a dealbreaker anymore. The number of people willing to pay top dollar for cable when there are quality alternatives at 50% or more of the cost is shrinking. If the cable companies don't adapt, they're going to get beaten out.
I met a friend of my uncle's at Thanksgiving dinner last year who is even worse than Mrs. Thatcher. He worked with Fermi as a grad student at the University of Chicago when they built the first nuclear reactor, and went on to a very successful academic career, teaching at Northwestern University and MIT.
I had a really great conversation with the guy where we talked about the history of nuclear power and some general physics/astronomy subjects, but after a while the conversation drifted to politics. Turns out he was rather conservative, which was no big surprise given his age and association with my uncle (who is a very active Republican). But as it turns out, he's a truther. He is absolutely certain that Obama is a Muslim that was born in Kenya.
So by all accounts he is an incredibly gifted, intelligent, educated man and yet he believes some of the most ridiculous nonsense politically. I was baffled.
Meh...movies are different from books. You can't give the same depth of characterization without making the whole thing 20 hours long. It's just impossible. The only one that really irked me was significantly changing Faramir's character like a poster above already pointed out.
The books aren't perfect, either. If you did a reverse comparison, you could point out many instances where the films are significantly better than the books (the 100-page history lesson in the middle of the Two Towers is interesting, but kills the flow of the story). I can geek out about Middle Earth lore as much as anybody, but there are parts of the book that just couldn't possibly translate to film, nor should they try. I think it turned out pretty well, overall.
So military grunts are a bunch of 18 year old dipshits, yet any yahoo who walks up to a sporting good store and buys a weapon has been fully trained in proper gun safety and use? How is that any different? After all, some of those soldiers have shot their whole life and are expert marksmen when they enter the service.
It seems like with something as dangerous as a rifle you should have standards that make the lowest common denominator as high as possible. But as it is you don't have to take any sort of gun ownership or safety class when purchasing a weapon, so a significant proportion of the gun-owning population is at the same level as those 18 year old dipshits before BT, right?
"The most recent headlines would probably read something like "man goes on insane rampage, kills six with bolt-action hunting rifle", as opposed to a dozen."
No, they wouldn't, because we ALREADY know that doesn't happen. Keep in mind that various states and municipalities have banned guns every which way from near complete bans to restrictions on "assault" weapons, and they've been doing it for over 50 years (80 if you count Federal restrictions that were put in place back in the 30s).
The Department of Justice has been keeping records and statistics for all of that time. And we KNOW that bans don't work. The government's own statistics prove it.
The places that had the strictest bans continued to have the highest crime rates. The only real difference was that the guns used were, by definition, illegal. But they were still obtained, and still used.
I am well aware that the "fewer guns equals fewer deaths" argument seems straightforward and logical, and even obvious. But things are not always what they seem. And we KNOW that, at least here in the United States, restrictions don't work. They don't reduce crime. In fact, the number and severity of crimes tends to go UP.
True, but those are all city and statewide bans, which only restricts access for people that aren't willing to hop in a car and drive over state lines. But if we had a true nationwide ban on the manufacture and sale of semi-automatic weapons you would certainly see a decrease in gun crime over a long enough time period. But with the huge quantity of weaponry in the US and the vehemence with which our citizens insist that being armed is a civil right, "long enough time period" could very well be 50+ years.
Arguing about what would or would not happen in that situation is a moot point, though. That type of ban would never happen in the US and pandora's box has already been opened. There are too many rifles and handguns in the country already, cutting off the supply wouldn't stop anybody even remotely determined to purchase one. Maybe over many decades we could remove the amount of weaponry in our country, but not in any sort of politically gratifying time scale.
Better to target the true cause of gun violence: poverty, drug laws, and lack of adequate mental healthcare for a large part of the population. But those problems are actually difficult to solve, so I'm sure we'll continue hearing politicians yell at each other across the aisle about gun control instead of actually trying to solve the problem.
Well there's a lot of places that are in the spectrum between San Jose and Poughkeepsie. You went from one extreme to the other :)
Hehe....we're on the same brainwave. I almost gave a similar reply about Salt Lake City. It's horrible here. Terrible weather, ugly people, nothing to do, and religious fanatics everywhere trying to stop you from having fun (well that last one's a tiny bit true, I guess). Certainly not a place that any right-thinking young professional would want to move.
:)
Plus, we're full.
The Outback is a wagon. You can easily fit all the gear for a family trip in the back, and they have a million options for racks to add extra storage if you need it.
My outback is rated to tow 2700 lbs and gets about 30 mpg on the highway (not pulling anything of course). What full size SUV gets even close to that? Maybe their engine is more efficient per lb, but if you're carrying 1500 extra lbs. it's not going to matter.
Nope. It comes stock with a donut, but has enough space in the compartment for a full-size spare.
This is sort of true. I wouldn't say it's hell on earth to work on a Subaru, but it can be irritating if you don't have a lift. But as you noted, most SUV's suffer from the same problem.
It seems like you're railing against shitty cars, not just cars in general. If you want to drive an SUV, fine, but 99% of what you can accomplish in an SUV you can accomplish in a smaller car, and it will be cheaper and safer. And how many people really tow a boat or a full-size trailer with their SUV? 5% of owners? Less probably. It's just silly how many people drive SUV's. It doesn't make any goddamn sense.
Nah, you still get Mexican weed, even in Cali. A lot of mids are Mexican, and you can even find brick weed if you're so inclined. Not everybody's buying top of the line all the time.
I'm a little bit more afraid of someone setting off a rogue a-bomb in Manhattan than I am of waking up to find a bunch of Abassids with dull knives beating on my door. I'm pretty sure that's not just me.
Comparing the infrastructure costs of rail to air travel only works if you compare the government money that has gone towards building and maintaining air infrastructure as well.
I'm not sure what the costs of that is, but I imagine if you add up the cost of building and maintaining every airport in California that $65 billion price tag will start to look a lot less ridiculous.
It's also terribly ironic because increased contact with the Muslim world via Andalusia is one of the most important developments that sparked the early Renaissance in Europe.
I don't think that statistical analysis can glean anything terribly interesting other than confirming what we already know. Sure, an authentic cadence sounds satisfying, and because of that it's always going to very popular. But for anything even moderately more complex, most of it is going to depend on cultural factors for whether or not it becomes popular.
Just look at the history of blues changes in western music. Go back 200 years and Beethoven was the only major European composer playing around with the V-IV progression IIRC. Most people absolutely hated it, and it sounded completely foreign to their ears. They nicknamed it coitus interruptus because it did not resolve "properly." Then blues explodes in the US, and from the 1950's on that's one of the most common progressions in Western music. Then in the 1970's everybody's so tired of blues-based rock that it gets passe again. It sounds boring. So over time it went from sounding unnatural and experimental to being so common that it was uninteresting to many musicians. Nothing about the actual theory or function of the chords changed, just cultural factors.
Plus, it would be pretty difficult to do. Even if you spent a great deal of time on each song, it would be difficult to give consistent interpretations. Is that iii substiuting for tonic? Is that a tri-tone sub of the V, or just a passing chord? Things like that.
Maybe because the "diverse, alternative world-views" are demonstrably false, unscientific, and have absolutely no function other than as a tool fundamentalists use to further their own political goals?
Why do you think caring about the separation of church and state guaranteed to us in the constitution makes someone "obsessive."
That's interesting. I guess I got my answer. It started with Madison.
They also thought black people were 3/5 of a person with no civil rights. The argument to the authority of the founding fathers is ridiculous. Our country should be the way *we* want it to be and reflect the current opinions and needs of society, not some guys that lived a few centuries ago.
The structure of our country is different, the culture is different, technology is different, education is different, etc. etc. There is no reason the politics can't change as well.
I don't know how this meme started, but republic does not mean that we elect people to vote on our behalf. Republicanism is a form of government where the people rule, rather than a single monarch. This has no bearing on the form of that government or how those people are chosen. China is a republic. Iran is a republic. The USSR was a republic. So was Rome up until the time of Julius Caesar. None of these places are/were democracies (well Rome was eventually, but it was a republic even when it wasn't a democracy).
What we are is a *representative* democracy rather than a *direct* democracy. That is the distinction you are arguing.
True, but the moment he starts voting against the stated will of his constituents his entire platform goes down in flames. He may not be advocating direct democracy in the poly-sci sense, but I assume he's going to be campaigning as if it were. People will be rightfully indignant if he goes against their wishes a significant amount of the time.
I think it's interesting that he's trying this in Vermont. Vermont is pretty small and well-educated. It already has a lot of voter participation and limited direct democracy through their town hall meetings. And it's such a small population that I imagine regular voters can get fairly easy access to their representatives. It's not like at the federal level where lobbyists have such a disproportionate advantage over regular citizens.
I wonder if this idea would be more or less successful in Vermont than in other states.
That's a good question, not sure what I did there, maybe I put in 2010?
I guess we just disagree on what is too hot to be outside. We used to play basketball when I was a kid all day every day, even when temps got 100+. If you're sweating and stay hydrated you don't really notice it after awhile. I did yard work as a teenager and *that* was much, much worse. But riding a bike or playing sports wasn't too bad. You get used to it really quickly if you stay hydrated and take breaks in the shade.
I spent a few weeks out of the year in Yuma and it was noticeably worse down there, though. That heat wave that hits around 10:30-11:30 is pretty vicious. And it was in the 1990s so temps were a bit lower than they are now.
I'm gonna stick with my "modern kids are pussies" line, though. Much more satisfying.
You're right about the heat island, but you're still overstating it quite a bit. 110 is not the typical high during the summer, and 100 is not the typical low, not even last year. The highest it got last year was 114, and the average high temp June-August was 106. The average low temp was 83. I'm not positive, but I think the NOAA station is at SkyHarbor which would be pretty accurate for temperatures downtown.
Check it yourself.
Others have already pointed it out, but some pretty gigantic assumptions about male-female relationships in your post. The same things you say about men could also be said about women? They have porn and sex toys, too. What's the difference between men and women to you? What's a woman's need for a relationship other than sex and companionship? How is that any different than a man's need for a relationship?
I grew up in a small town in Nevada and other than the gang activity everything was the same. We still went outside. We also played a shitload of video games, but it's not like you have to hide in the house if it's 100 degrees. 120 yeah, but that doesn't happen for very long, even in Phoenix.