The great thing about living in a democracy is that you can have a revolution without murdering half of the country. We have had several major revolutions in America's history, and only one of them was armed. And even that one didn't depend on privately armed citizens,; the military split into two separate factions.
And who's really going to revolt, anyway? People in this country don't even care enough to drag their asses to a polling place once a year and vote and you think they're going to take up arms against the government? Utterly ridiculous. If people actually cared about change then they already have the ability to change things. Armed revolt is a ludicrous idea in a thousand different ways.
Yeah, and the Mongols were one of the most religiously tolerant cultures of the time, yet they sacked Baghdad and destroyed the most advanced intellectual culture in the world, caused the loss of countless ancient manuscripts and obliterated an absolutely priceless cultural legacy that will never be recovered.
People are war-mongering dicks no matter what philosophy they espouse or religion they adhere to.
That said, I have yet to see an atheist (besides retired philanthropists) that gives 10% of their income away while working a regular job (heck, over half of Christians don't do it). But I know several Christians that give away 20% or more.
There are all sorts of things wrong with that statement. First of all, you can't just disavow those "retired philanthropists" as if that doesn't matter.
Second, you can't just say "I don't know any atheists that give away 10% of their income" and represent that as anything other than an incredible bias in your perspective. How many atheists are you intimate enough with to know the particulars of their finances? Being a Christian, I imagine that most of the people you know that well are also Christian. The fact that you have never seen an atheist give away 10% of their income to charitable organization is a reflection of who you spend time with, not atheists in general. This is common. I agree that it's more common among Christians than not, but this is certainly not a rare occurrence.
And if you're giving your tithing directly to the church, that can only very loosely be considered charity from an outsider's perspective. If you're a member of an independent church, I would buy it. But if you're Mormon or Catholic, or another of the major massive organized churches, how much of that actually goes to funding charitable works and helping the poor? It's a whole lot less than you think.
What's the difference between, say John D. Rockefeller (a Baptist) and Andrew Carnegie (non-religious) giving away their fortunes to charitable causes? One was guided by his Christian beliefs, the other by what we would call secular humanism today. But one's actions is attributed to his religion and the other's is pure anomaly? That's a pretty poor attitude to have.
As far as I know (I am not a biologist) wildfires are relatively rare in rainforests. They definitely have not evolved to use fire in the same way forests in arid areas have.
Also, as the article states, these wildfires are not occurring in the old growth forest, they are occurring in cleared land. I imagine any study of the natural fire system is not particularly useful in this case. There aren't any mature trees there to char, it's all low-lying stuff.
While I agree that you can definitely get a great education if you want, to call it "very affordable" and pass off legitimate complaints as people simply being lazy and materialistic is an incredible stretch.
I live in Utah, a state that has a very low cost of living and an affordable, high-quality research institution in the University of Utah, and a very affordable community college system that feeds into the university. Let's run the numbers for a standard four-year plan.
I'm going to assume that you have a pretty decent job, and that your commute to school and to work are both reasonable and cheap (not the case for most people, but that's a choice so let's assume they have aligned their life around school and work). Rent here for a single one bedroom is about $500/month, so let's say you spend $600 with utilities and internet. $200/month for car insurance, gas, and maintenance, $200/month for food, and $200 for random expenses and a little bit of entertainment. Note that these are all conservative estimates for someone trying to keep costs at a minimum in a place that has a very low cost of living. That comes out to about $1200/month after-taxes, about $9/hr., which is an average wage for someone who has no education past high school. So this assumes that you have an average full-time job, one that allows you to pay all your expenses and save very little or no money every month.
Community college tuition is about $1800 a semester full-time. So you take all of your gen-eds and pre-req classes at the community college, that's going to cost you roughly $2200/semester with books and other fees, so $4400 a year. This is *less* than what subsidized loans will cover for the first year, and roughly the same cost as subsidized in the second year.
University costs $4000 a semester full-time, plus books or fees so about $4500 a semester. This is far less than what subsidized loans will apply, so you're going to have to take out some unsubsidized loans.
So here's where you stand after four years, assuming that you can work 40/hrs. a week full-time and go to school full-time, which by the way, is an incredibly difficult thing to do if your job or your major is even remotely challenging. You're going to come out of school with $19,000 in subsidized loan debt and $2800 in unsubsidized loan debt, not counting the interest that has accrued while you were in school, and launch yourself into a job market that is mildly depressing to say the least.
And this is a *best-case* scenario. One where you know *exactly* what you want to do before you start school, get it done in the proper order, with no mistakes or changes of mind.
Notice that there is no budget for health insurance. No savings, even for the short term. No budget for "a big screen TV." No budget for emergency car breakdowns or trips home to see your parents. No gym membership. No going out to eat. No dates. No fun activities at all, more or less.
And what happens to you if you have a health crisis during that time? You're fucked. What happens if you happen to have a child? Sorry, no school for you. Car breaks down? Sorry, you're fucked. Lose your job, even for a short period? Sorry, no school for you. Your budget can't stand losing even one paycheck.
Not to mention that your'e going to miss out on all the things that most (affluent) people take for granted as part of the college experience. You're not going to be doing much socializing. Not making a whole lot of connections. You're not going to have time to get involved with clubs or organizations. No leadership experience. No partying. You're definitely not impressing many potential mates with your unhealthy lifestyle, lack of free time, and lack of money. So I'm going to have to say that you were either *incredibly* lucky or that you had some outside assistance. Nobody that goes to school and pays their own way has that type of attitude about it. Unless you were just incredibly short-sighted about living your life on the edge of survival every day for 4+ years.
That is a good post, but I think there's a very significant distinction in #1 that you're missing. I do not trust "scientists" any more than I trust "clergy" or "politicians." Individual scientists, no matter how gifted or principled, are prone to the same flaws as very other human being: ignorance, hubris, greed, etc., etc.
I do, however, trust the scientific process. I trust that over time, working as a community, we can use rigorous experiment and debate to establish a degree of certainty about how the physical world works.
Now, I am not a climate scientist. I have seen both sides of the argument, however, and tried to piece together what parts I do understand with my knowledge of rhetoric and scientific principles. One side of the argument is largely composed of logical arguments based on empirical evidence and the other is largely composed of a whole lot of bullshit. The only logical people that are arguing *against* AGW are the pure skeptics. And relatively few of those skeptics are people actually conducting research in the field. Most folks who argue against AGW are, quite frankly, idiots.
So while I don't trust "scientists" as individuals, I do trust that the systemic study of climate science and AGW that has occured over the last half a century has produced clear, distinct knowledge on the nature and causes of climate change. And that trust has close to nothing to do with the individual merit or lack thereof of any of the individual scientists that have worked in the field.
That's true, but that's a much more subtle argument than the one GP poster was making. "Everyone under 35 having temp jobs" and working three jobs to make ends meet is not an accurate description of the European economy. In Spain and Greece, maybe, but those are outliers and for much more complicated reasons than the hackneyed "too much regulation" line.
Yucca Mtn. happens to be above a rather large aquifer. You may not realize this because of the harsh surface environment, but Nevada has huge aquifers all over the state . Most of Nevada was covered by a rather large lake in recent history, and there is groundwater about 500 feet below the containment facility at Yucca. And it is in a seismologically active region, literally right on top of a fault line. Yucca Mtn. is made of volcanic tuff, and water does move through it and into the groundwater. When presented with this information, the DoE more or less said "Eh, it's probably safe." They did not bring in independent scientists to appraise their research. They didn't release that information to the public. They just want us to trust them.
We're talking about something that needs to be safe for time frames that are about as long as the history of human civilization. 10,000 years is how long Yucca Mtn. needs to be safe. Nobody can guarantee Yucca will be safe for the next 100 years, let alone 10,000.
And the reason they didn't give a *legitimate* answer to the question is because there is no legitimate answer. The best thing to do with high level nuclear waste is to reprocess it into fuel, and store what can't be used in salt formations which will be geologically stable for millions of years. That's the smartest and safest thing to do. But that's not politically viable at the moment.
The reason they chose Yucca Mtn. isn't because it's the best place to keep the waste, or because dumping all of our nuclear waste in a giant hole in the ground is the smartest thing to do with it. It's because Yucca Mtn. is in the desert, and it was the most politically expedient way the states that rely on nuclear power can avoid taking responsibility for their own waste.
They view our environment as a giant trash can, and they disrespect our dignity and our sovereignty. If they want to store nuclear waste in our state they're going to have to do it on our terms, not theirs.
Considering spent fuel casks can survive being dropped out of an airplane, a head-on rail collision, or attack by rocket propelled grenades, what more assurance do you need that nuclear waste transport is safe?
I don't want any "assurance" at all. I want control. I want *my* elected representatives to be involved in the decision making. I want *my* elected representatives to have direct veto power over planning and decisions, not some mid-level Washington bureaucrat who got the job because he was a good friend of the last president's largest campaign donor. Or a senator from Wisconsin who doesn't really care that Yucca Mtn.stores 50% more waste than it was designed to hold (as would be almost certainly the case if it was approved), he only wants to get the waste out of *his* backyard as quickly as possible.
That's an easy statistic to pull out, but it doesn't have a whole lot to do with the conversation at hand. That has more to do with the fact that 2/3 of the state are LDS. LDS men are strongly encouraged to go on religious missions when they are 18 or 19, which happens to be about the same time you enlist in the military. There is an overlap of roughly 100% in rural Utah of the type of kids that would go into the military and the type of kids that would go on LDS missions.
I think the more relevant statistic is that rural Nevada has the highest recruitment rate in the US. That is the environment in which Sen. Reid was raised. And although rural Utah has a much lower rate of military service, the culture there is very, very similar with regard to how they view patriotism and service to country. They have the same attitude towards the military, but the religious nature of the state skews the statistics with regards to enlistment.
It may be the GOP's bread and butter, but the Dems haven't been very supportive either. Ever since getting destroyed in the 80s they've moved pretty hard to the right. Even Obama is solidly to the right of every Democratic president of the last 80 years on most economic issues.
Except that real unemployment figures are either the same as the US or lower in most of Europe. In Germany and Scandinavia, where "regulations" and the welfare state are probably stronger than nearly anywhere else in the world, unemployment is *far* lower than in the US.
And these people have higher wages, work less, and receive more government services. Barely making ends meet in Europe doesn't mean you're literally on the edge of survival like it does in the US. It means you just don't have any money to spend.
I have no idea what facts you're using to make your judgments, but it definitely doesn't correspond to reality.
No, people really do like he said. My uncle once had a spinal fusion surgery. He left the hospital the minute they let him out of intensive care and was back to work within a few days (driving heavy machinery at a gold mine) without any sort of rehab or care for himself. That old-fashioned work ethic can get pretty crazy in some people. You're damn sure he isn't taking a day off because he caught a cold.
Or we 20-somethings work in a job where it's a huge imposition to get someone to cover your shift. I work hourly, but have a fairly good wage and full benefits including sick time and vacation. I think I've used 2 sick days in the five years I've worked here. It's just too much of a hassle to ask someone to cover my shift, so I only call in sick if I literally am too ill to perform my duties, which has only happened once when I caught a really bad flu.
This is true. The battle among Republicans over the next few years is going to be incredibly interesting. At some point in the coming years and decades the Republican party is going to have to have some massive changes. There's just no way they can win nationally with their current platform.
I'm crossing my fingers that we end up with a Republican party that isn't batshit crazy.
Eh....not so much. At least at a national level, the progressive wing of the Republican party essentially died with Theodore Roosevelt. It's hard to track the Republican party by Presidents since Eisenhower was the only Republican between 1932 and 1968, and Ike was an anomalies even in the 50s, but Coolidge started the modern trend of small-government, laissez-faire politics, which were the polar opposite of Roosevelt's trust-busting policies. The modern Republican platform really started to form then.
A pretty simple formulation of the modern brand of Republicanism as a combination of Coolidge's economic beliefs, Eisenhower's military interventionism (despite giving rousing speeches advocating peace, Ike was the one who started the Domino Theory and launched America's incredible military growth in the second half of the 20th century, as well as starting the modern trend of CIA-led coups and assassinations that mark some of the most shameful acts of US foreign policy), and the adoption of the evangelical right that started in the 50s and peaked in the 70s and 80s.
But you're correct that the late 60s, early 70s was when the Democrats lost the South and the Republican party adopted their modern electorate.
I grew up with a guy that decided he wanted to be a Republican politician when he was a teenager. He is absolutely the person that the AC describes. He's now ~26 and a staffer for the state party.
Exactly! I am a full-on proponent of nuclear energy, and I think a site *like* Yucca Mtn. is necessary for our country. As someone who was raised in rural Nevada, though, I think that people from outside the area don't really understand what NIMBY is all about in this particular case.
As you pointed out, the DoE performed nuclear tests for decades in the Nevada desert. That area has silently been carrying the legacy of the Cold War. People in rural areas of Nevada and Utah (and probably Arizona, too, I'm unsure) have experienced extraordinarily high cancer rates. There are several other unsavory federal sites in the region, like the plant that decommissions chemical weapons in the West Desert of Utah that have caused massive health problems for workers and area residents.
Citizens have born that burden in silence. This is an area of the country that is extremely patriotic, in a very old-fashioned sense. They sacrificed, quite literally, their lives and the lives of their children in order to help the military progress of our country. We, and our environment, are seen as less valuable and more expendable than other regions of the country which are equally suitable, or even more suitable for nuclear waste disposal. And that is, quite frankly, bullshit.
Senator Reid grew up in this environment. He is fully aware of the dangers of allowing the federal government free reign to do whatever they please. The federal government has *never* answered legitimate questions about how this will effect the environment long-term, particularly groundwater contamination. They have *never* answered questions about properly securing nuclear waste traveling across the region. They just want to dump their problems on Nevada and pay some hush money in the form of pork-laden jobs. In this particular case, I think Senator Reid's efforts to block the Yucca Mtn. project are laudable. Enough is enough.
I like the $1.4 billion "or more" part. I think it might cost somewhere in the range of $1.4 to $50 billion dollars, depending on how many people they get to sign up.
Not only are you crass, but you obviously have no idea what you're talking about. Between 1850 and 1871, the United States government *gave* the railroad companies more than 175 million acres of public land. That is over 10% of the entire land area of the United States! And even that figure underestimates the significance of that number, because in the West the value of land is largely dependent upon water rights (particularly back then) and the railroad companies more or less had monopolies on the water rights of huge portions of the western United States.
It's no coincidence that a large percentage of the richest men in the history of the world were American railroad men in the 19th century. It was the biggest governmental handout in the history of the world.
The average American watches 34 hours of television *per week*. It is entirely plausible that Netflix has replaced a little over 1/4 of television viewing for its customers. I'm surprised it's not more, actually.
Now that it has become clear beyond any sort of doubt that football causes significant amount of brain damage, the NFL has become very strict about enforcing dangerous hits with fines and suspensions. They've gone over the top, actually, to cover their assess since they ignored published medical science for decades. Now that the public has caught on to the science, they're backtracking as fast as they can.
Just like you said, some of the smarter players have seen the signs and got out early. I remember Robert Smith retired in 2000 after his best year as a professional because he had already made millions and wanted to walk away healthy. People thought he was nuts!
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The great thing about living in a democracy is that you can have a revolution without murdering half of the country. We have had several major revolutions in America's history, and only one of them was armed. And even that one didn't depend on privately armed citizens,; the military split into two separate factions.
And who's really going to revolt, anyway? People in this country don't even care enough to drag their asses to a polling place once a year and vote and you think they're going to take up arms against the government? Utterly ridiculous. If people actually cared about change then they already have the ability to change things. Armed revolt is a ludicrous idea in a thousand different ways.
Who do you know that feeds their family with a Glock?
Spain had a dictator ~40 years ago, Germany ~80 years ago. Not that I agree with GP poster at all.
Commenting to remove accidental negative mod points. Nice post!
Yeah, and the Mongols were one of the most religiously tolerant cultures of the time, yet they sacked Baghdad and destroyed the most advanced intellectual culture in the world, caused the loss of countless ancient manuscripts and obliterated an absolutely priceless cultural legacy that will never be recovered.
People are war-mongering dicks no matter what philosophy they espouse or religion they adhere to.
There are all sorts of things wrong with that statement. First of all, you can't just disavow those "retired philanthropists" as if that doesn't matter.
Second, you can't just say "I don't know any atheists that give away 10% of their income" and represent that as anything other than an incredible bias in your perspective. How many atheists are you intimate enough with to know the particulars of their finances? Being a Christian, I imagine that most of the people you know that well are also Christian. The fact that you have never seen an atheist give away 10% of their income to charitable organization is a reflection of who you spend time with, not atheists in general. This is common. I agree that it's more common among Christians than not, but this is certainly not a rare occurrence.
And if you're giving your tithing directly to the church, that can only very loosely be considered charity from an outsider's perspective. If you're a member of an independent church, I would buy it. But if you're Mormon or Catholic, or another of the major massive organized churches, how much of that actually goes to funding charitable works and helping the poor? It's a whole lot less than you think.
What's the difference between, say John D. Rockefeller (a Baptist) and Andrew Carnegie (non-religious) giving away their fortunes to charitable causes? One was guided by his Christian beliefs, the other by what we would call secular humanism today. But one's actions is attributed to his religion and the other's is pure anomaly? That's a pretty poor attitude to have.
As far as I know (I am not a biologist) wildfires are relatively rare in rainforests. They definitely have not evolved to use fire in the same way forests in arid areas have.
Also, as the article states, these wildfires are not occurring in the old growth forest, they are occurring in cleared land. I imagine any study of the natural fire system is not particularly useful in this case. There aren't any mature trees there to char, it's all low-lying stuff.
While I agree that you can definitely get a great education if you want, to call it "very affordable" and pass off legitimate complaints as people simply being lazy and materialistic is an incredible stretch.
I live in Utah, a state that has a very low cost of living and an affordable, high-quality research institution in the University of Utah, and a very affordable community college system that feeds into the university. Let's run the numbers for a standard four-year plan.
I'm going to assume that you have a pretty decent job, and that your commute to school and to work are both reasonable and cheap (not the case for most people, but that's a choice so let's assume they have aligned their life around school and work). Rent here for a single one bedroom is about $500/month, so let's say you spend $600 with utilities and internet. $200/month for car insurance, gas, and maintenance, $200/month for food, and $200 for random expenses and a little bit of entertainment. Note that these are all conservative estimates for someone trying to keep costs at a minimum in a place that has a very low cost of living. That comes out to about $1200/month after-taxes, about $9/hr., which is an average wage for someone who has no education past high school. So this assumes that you have an average full-time job, one that allows you to pay all your expenses and save very little or no money every month.
Community college tuition is about $1800 a semester full-time. So you take all of your gen-eds and pre-req classes at the community college, that's going to cost you roughly $2200/semester with books and other fees, so $4400 a year. This is *less* than what subsidized loans will cover for the first year, and roughly the same cost as subsidized in the second year.
University costs $4000 a semester full-time, plus books or fees so about $4500 a semester. This is far less than what subsidized loans will apply, so you're going to have to take out some unsubsidized loans.
So here's where you stand after four years, assuming that you can work 40/hrs. a week full-time and go to school full-time, which by the way, is an incredibly difficult thing to do if your job or your major is even remotely challenging. You're going to come out of school with $19,000 in subsidized loan debt and $2800 in unsubsidized loan debt, not counting the interest that has accrued while you were in school, and launch yourself into a job market that is mildly depressing to say the least.
And this is a *best-case* scenario. One where you know *exactly* what you want to do before you start school, get it done in the proper order, with no mistakes or changes of mind.
Notice that there is no budget for health insurance. No savings, even for the short term. No budget for "a big screen TV." No budget for emergency car breakdowns or trips home to see your parents. No gym membership. No going out to eat. No dates. No fun activities at all, more or less.
And what happens to you if you have a health crisis during that time? You're fucked. What happens if you happen to have a child? Sorry, no school for you. Car breaks down? Sorry, you're fucked. Lose your job, even for a short period? Sorry, no school for you. Your budget can't stand losing even one paycheck.
Not to mention that your'e going to miss out on all the things that most (affluent) people take for granted as part of the college experience. You're not going to be doing much socializing. Not making a whole lot of connections. You're not going to have time to get involved with clubs or organizations. No leadership experience. No partying. You're definitely not impressing many potential mates with your unhealthy lifestyle, lack of free time, and lack of money. So I'm going to have to say that you were either *incredibly* lucky or that you had some outside assistance. Nobody that goes to school and pays their own way has that type of attitude about it. Unless you were just incredibly short-sighted about living your life on the edge of survival every day for 4+ years.
That is a good post, but I think there's a very significant distinction in #1 that you're missing. I do not trust "scientists" any more than I trust "clergy" or "politicians." Individual scientists, no matter how gifted or principled, are prone to the same flaws as very other human being: ignorance, hubris, greed, etc., etc.
I do, however, trust the scientific process. I trust that over time, working as a community, we can use rigorous experiment and debate to establish a degree of certainty about how the physical world works.
Now, I am not a climate scientist. I have seen both sides of the argument, however, and tried to piece together what parts I do understand with my knowledge of rhetoric and scientific principles. One side of the argument is largely composed of logical arguments based on empirical evidence and the other is largely composed of a whole lot of bullshit. The only logical people that are arguing *against* AGW are the pure skeptics. And relatively few of those skeptics are people actually conducting research in the field. Most folks who argue against AGW are, quite frankly, idiots.
So while I don't trust "scientists" as individuals, I do trust that the systemic study of climate science and AGW that has occured over the last half a century has produced clear, distinct knowledge on the nature and causes of climate change. And that trust has close to nothing to do with the individual merit or lack thereof of any of the individual scientists that have worked in the field.
That's true, but that's a much more subtle argument than the one GP poster was making. "Everyone under 35 having temp jobs" and working three jobs to make ends meet is not an accurate description of the European economy. In Spain and Greece, maybe, but those are outliers and for much more complicated reasons than the hackneyed "too much regulation" line.
Yucca Mtn. happens to be above a rather large aquifer. You may not realize this because of the harsh surface environment, but Nevada has huge aquifers all over the state . Most of Nevada was covered by a rather large lake in recent history, and there is groundwater about 500 feet below the containment facility at Yucca. And it is in a seismologically active region, literally right on top of a fault line. Yucca Mtn. is made of volcanic tuff, and water does move through it and into the groundwater. When presented with this information, the DoE more or less said "Eh, it's probably safe." They did not bring in independent scientists to appraise their research. They didn't release that information to the public. They just want us to trust them.
We're talking about something that needs to be safe for time frames that are about as long as the history of human civilization. 10,000 years is how long Yucca Mtn. needs to be safe. Nobody can guarantee Yucca will be safe for the next 100 years, let alone 10,000.
And the reason they didn't give a *legitimate* answer to the question is because there is no legitimate answer. The best thing to do with high level nuclear waste is to reprocess it into fuel, and store what can't be used in salt formations which will be geologically stable for millions of years. That's the smartest and safest thing to do. But that's not politically viable at the moment.
The reason they chose Yucca Mtn. isn't because it's the best place to keep the waste, or because dumping all of our nuclear waste in a giant hole in the ground is the smartest thing to do with it. It's because Yucca Mtn. is in the desert, and it was the most politically expedient way the states that rely on nuclear power can avoid taking responsibility for their own waste.
They view our environment as a giant trash can, and they disrespect our dignity and our sovereignty. If they want to store nuclear waste in our state they're going to have to do it on our terms, not theirs.
I meant to put this link.
I don't want any "assurance" at all. I want control. I want *my* elected representatives to be involved in the decision making. I want *my* elected representatives to have direct veto power over planning and decisions, not some mid-level Washington bureaucrat who got the job because he was a good friend of the last president's largest campaign donor. Or a senator from Wisconsin who doesn't really care that Yucca Mtn.stores 50% more waste than it was designed to hold (as would be almost certainly the case if it was approved), he only wants to get the waste out of *his* backyard as quickly as possible.
That's an easy statistic to pull out, but it doesn't have a whole lot to do with the conversation at hand. That has more to do with the fact that 2/3 of the state are LDS. LDS men are strongly encouraged to go on religious missions when they are 18 or 19, which happens to be about the same time you enlist in the military. There is an overlap of roughly 100% in rural Utah of the type of kids that would go into the military and the type of kids that would go on LDS missions.
I think the more relevant statistic is that rural Nevada has the highest recruitment rate in the US. That is the environment in which Sen. Reid was raised. And although rural Utah has a much lower rate of military service, the culture there is very, very similar with regard to how they view patriotism and service to country. They have the same attitude towards the military, but the religious nature of the state skews the statistics with regards to enlistment.
It may be the GOP's bread and butter, but the Dems haven't been very supportive either. Ever since getting destroyed in the 80s they've moved pretty hard to the right. Even Obama is solidly to the right of every Democratic president of the last 80 years on most economic issues.
Except that real unemployment figures are either the same as the US or lower in most of Europe. In Germany and Scandinavia, where "regulations" and the welfare state are probably stronger than nearly anywhere else in the world, unemployment is *far* lower than in the US.
And these people have higher wages, work less, and receive more government services. Barely making ends meet in Europe doesn't mean you're literally on the edge of survival like it does in the US. It means you just don't have any money to spend.
I have no idea what facts you're using to make your judgments, but it definitely doesn't correspond to reality.
No, people really do like he said. My uncle once had a spinal fusion surgery. He left the hospital the minute they let him out of intensive care and was back to work within a few days (driving heavy machinery at a gold mine) without any sort of rehab or care for himself. That old-fashioned work ethic can get pretty crazy in some people. You're damn sure he isn't taking a day off because he caught a cold.
Or we 20-somethings work in a job where it's a huge imposition to get someone to cover your shift. I work hourly, but have a fairly good wage and full benefits including sick time and vacation. I think I've used 2 sick days in the five years I've worked here. It's just too much of a hassle to ask someone to cover my shift, so I only call in sick if I literally am too ill to perform my duties, which has only happened once when I caught a really bad flu.
This is true. The battle among Republicans over the next few years is going to be incredibly interesting. At some point in the coming years and decades the Republican party is going to have to have some massive changes. There's just no way they can win nationally with their current platform.
I'm crossing my fingers that we end up with a Republican party that isn't batshit crazy.
Eh....not so much. At least at a national level, the progressive wing of the Republican party essentially died with Theodore Roosevelt. It's hard to track the Republican party by Presidents since Eisenhower was the only Republican between 1932 and 1968, and Ike was an anomalies even in the 50s, but Coolidge started the modern trend of small-government, laissez-faire politics, which were the polar opposite of Roosevelt's trust-busting policies. The modern Republican platform really started to form then.
A pretty simple formulation of the modern brand of Republicanism as a combination of Coolidge's economic beliefs, Eisenhower's military interventionism (despite giving rousing speeches advocating peace, Ike was the one who started the Domino Theory and launched America's incredible military growth in the second half of the 20th century, as well as starting the modern trend of CIA-led coups and assassinations that mark some of the most shameful acts of US foreign policy), and the adoption of the evangelical right that started in the 50s and peaked in the 70s and 80s.
But you're correct that the late 60s, early 70s was when the Democrats lost the South and the Republican party adopted their modern electorate.
I grew up with a guy that decided he wanted to be a Republican politician when he was a teenager. He is absolutely the person that the AC describes. He's now ~26 and a staffer for the state party.
Exactly! I am a full-on proponent of nuclear energy, and I think a site *like* Yucca Mtn. is necessary for our country. As someone who was raised in rural Nevada, though, I think that people from outside the area don't really understand what NIMBY is all about in this particular case.
As you pointed out, the DoE performed nuclear tests for decades in the Nevada desert. That area has silently been carrying the legacy of the Cold War. People in rural areas of Nevada and Utah (and probably Arizona, too, I'm unsure) have experienced extraordinarily high cancer rates. There are several other unsavory federal sites in the region, like the plant that decommissions chemical weapons in the West Desert of Utah that have caused massive health problems for workers and area residents.
Citizens have born that burden in silence. This is an area of the country that is extremely patriotic, in a very old-fashioned sense. They sacrificed, quite literally, their lives and the lives of their children in order to help the military progress of our country. We, and our environment, are seen as less valuable and more expendable than other regions of the country which are equally suitable, or even more suitable for nuclear waste disposal. And that is, quite frankly, bullshit.
Senator Reid grew up in this environment. He is fully aware of the dangers of allowing the federal government free reign to do whatever they please. The federal government has *never* answered legitimate questions about how this will effect the environment long-term, particularly groundwater contamination. They have *never* answered questions about properly securing nuclear waste traveling across the region. They just want to dump their problems on Nevada and pay some hush money in the form of pork-laden jobs. In this particular case, I think Senator Reid's efforts to block the Yucca Mtn. project are laudable. Enough is enough.
I like the $1.4 billion "or more" part. I think it might cost somewhere in the range of $1.4 to $50 billion dollars, depending on how many people they get to sign up.
Not only are you crass, but you obviously have no idea what you're talking about. Between 1850 and 1871, the United States government *gave* the railroad companies more than 175 million acres of public land. That is over 10% of the entire land area of the United States! And even that figure underestimates the significance of that number, because in the West the value of land is largely dependent upon water rights (particularly back then) and the railroad companies more or less had monopolies on the water rights of huge portions of the western United States.
It's no coincidence that a large percentage of the richest men in the history of the world were American railroad men in the 19th century. It was the biggest governmental handout in the history of the world.
The average American watches 34 hours of television *per week*. It is entirely plausible that Netflix has replaced a little over 1/4 of television viewing for its customers. I'm surprised it's not more, actually.
Now that it has become clear beyond any sort of doubt that football causes significant amount of brain damage, the NFL has become very strict about enforcing dangerous hits with fines and suspensions. They've gone over the top, actually, to cover their assess since they ignored published medical science for decades. Now that the public has caught on to the science, they're backtracking as fast as they can.
Just like you said, some of the smarter players have seen the signs and got out early. I remember Robert Smith retired in 2000 after his best year as a professional because he had already made millions and wanted to walk away healthy. People thought he was nuts!