Since the hypothetical situation is with currency backed by gold, the price of gold after currency was de-linked is irrelevant...
It's irrelevant because it was delinked - the reason we didn't have a global deflationary period is because we didn't have gold currencies. If we had had gold currencies, then the changes in gold valuation would have been very relevant indeed.
After the de-linking, gold was driven by market demand for artistic/sentimental/electro-chemical/paranoid uses.
Of course, and none of those pressures goes away merely because we decide to use it for currency - besides people needing it for currency, you'd still have all those other reasons out there for people to want gold, which means that there's absolutely no reason to believe that gold will maintain a stable value compared to other goods or services. That demand only makes things worse, in fact - the electronics makers need the gold that everyone would be suddenly unwilling to part with in the first place, causing the exchange value of gold to go even higher than it would if they didn't exist.
President Jenna Bush will launch Operation Zulu Freedom... to protect the Gold Eagle from terrorists, of course.
You seriously need to read What Has Government Done To Our Money on the Ludwig von Mises institute web site.
Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt. If you want to refute me, refute me - don't send me to the library to read something I already read fifteen years ago.
If we go back to a classical gold standard, the price of gold in dollars will go sky-high. That doesn't matter unless you use gold for something.
Errr, but we would be using gold for something - a currency, remember? You may not think the price going through the roof matters, but it'll really suck for gold-poor people, which I would bet includes you.
The price of gold going sky-high won't lead to deflation. In 1973, as you mentioned, the price of gold went through the roof. It didn't cause deflation then.
Because it wasn't tied to the currency in 1973 - gold and the dollar were delinked in 1971, and by 1973, currencies were free-floating. If the value of gold had gone up as it did, but been used to back the currency, the result would have inevitably been deflation. We would have inevitably, unavoidably experienced deflation in the economy as the currency rose in value faster than the things you would want to buy with it. This is not a particularly controversial position, by the way - you're going to have trouble finding many reputable economists, either on the right or the left, who would argue otherwise. And no, Jude Wanniski is not an economist, reputable or otherwise, before I get a spew of Wanniskisms in response.
Your assertion that gold is prone to inflation because 'a dollar today will buy you 1/4'th as much "consumer goods" now as it did in 1971, but a dollar today will only buy you one tenth of the gold it bought in 1971' is flawed.
No, I assure you that those are cold, hard, inescapable facts. But don't take my word for it - go look up the price of gold in 1971 versus today, and make a line graph showing the price during that period. I'm quite serious - doing this is very instructive. Then graph the price of consumer goods as measured by the CPI over that same period. Finally, take your two graphs and put one on top of the other.
Now, the entire rationale behind gold-backed currencies is that they give long term price stability, so that you can walk into the Men's Wearhouse or wherever and buy a suit with your gold eagle, just like your great-great-grandpappy did back in 18-whatever. But in order for that to be true, the value of gold should - at least roughly - track the value of consumer goods that you'd buy with your gold. It would be remarkable if they matched exactly, so we don't set the bar quite that high, but they should at least be similar in their trends.
And it doesn't work. It just plain doesn't work - the idea of price stability under a gold currency is plainly, empirically false. Which will become clear as day when you overlay those two graphs - they don't resemble one another at all. Gold goes up, up, up, and so does the CPI, but at a much slower rate than gold does, meaning that gold gained more value than consumer goods did over the last thirty-odd years. Which means, finally, that you would not be paying the same amount today for that suit as you did in 1971. And then the whole reason for having a gold-backed currency in the first place goes right in the toilet, so what's the point to it after that? What justifies the use of gold for currency once that magic aura pops like a cheap yellow balloon?
Nothing, really. And given the divergence between gold and consumer goods, and the inevitable deflation that would ensue, there's a very good reason not to have done it - most of us would be a hell of a lot poorer than we are now if a gold-backed currency had been in use.
Just as an aside, gold currencies are not a necessary part of laissez faire economics - it's perfectly acceptable to be a proponent of free markets, even to a libertarian extent, without also requi
Well, you're the most insightful AC I've come across in a while, but since I have no mod points, I'll play along with you;)
The answer is, IMO, you get both #1 and #3 occurring. There aren't, as you point out, enough ounces of gold in the world to cover the dollars in circulation, nevermind all the other currencies out there. The result is that in order to cover all those dollars, the dollar-denominated price of gold shoots through the roof. All the people who currently own gold suddenly get very, very rich - whoopee for them, but not so good for the rest of us. Of course, you could avoid this by instituting a fractional reserve system, but if you talk to the goldbugs for a very long, you'll soon discover that fractional reserve is a close second on their list of monetary evils, right behind "fiat" paper money, mainly because it doesn't give you that magic immunity from governmental policy that gold is supposed to bring - at the very least, the state can diddle with the reserve requirements and dictate monetary value that way.
The reason it's bad news for the rest of us is because, contrary to the goldbugs absurd claims that gold is somehow immune to inflationary pressures, gold simply doesn't track consumer prices - i.e., there's no magic inflation-fighting power inherent in a gold currency. You can see this quite easily by comparing consumer prices to the price of gold. Since 1971, when the US finally abandoned the partial gold-standard for good, the dollar-denominated price of an ounce of gold has risen tenfold. The problem is that, if you look at the CPI for the same period, consumer prices have risen only about four-and-a-half-fold since 1971. In other words, the price of gold has far outstripped the price of consumer goods since 1971 - a dollar today will buy you 1/4'th as much "consumer goods" now as it did in 1971, but a dollar today will only buy you one tenth of the gold it bought in 1971.
What's the result of this failure to track consumer prices, where the value of the currency outstrips the value of the stuff you want to buy with it? Deflation. Massive, sustained deflation, which, for those of you who've forgotten your intro microeconomics, is very very bad. In a hyperinflationary environment, people can't buy stuff because until their wages catch up with prices, they can't afford it. In a sustained deflationary environment, people can't buy stuff because they largely don't have jobs any more - spending gets awfully rare once people realize that, no matter what they want to buy, they're better off not spending it because whatever it is they want to buy, it's going to be cheaper in real terms tomorrow. You're better off just hanging on to your money than you are in trying to use it to, say, build stuff. That's bad, because everyone who has a job here is relying on someone else to part with their money, which gets less and less frequent as deflation mounts. Borrowers, like me with my college loans - heh - are especially screwed, because they borrowed cheap dollars yesterday, but get to pay back their loans with expensive dollars tomorrow. Wheee - sign me up, you betcha. And as a result, anyone with half a brain simply refuses to pay back their loans as deflation gets more and more severe. Fuckem, is the thinking - you're better off in bankruptcy than you are trying to pay off absurdly expensive loans. On the other hand, you might get to see the amusing (!) phenomenon of negative interest rates if deflation becomes bad enough, where your credit card company offers to pay you if you spend money, so as to cut their own losses over time;)
No, a gold standard is a recipe for disaster, as you rightly note, and that's just the economics of it - the political end is just as bad. Most of the gold being produced comes from places like Australia and South Africa and Russia. All fince places, full of lovely people, I'm sure, but as an American, I'm not exactly keen on a monetary system that gives the South Africans a say
What it is: laptop - keyboard + stand. I guess I don't see what makes it such a big deal.
Pretty much. You get all the disadvantages of a laptop - no expandability, comparatively underpowered - with none of the advantages like portability and mobility. You could get pretty much the same effect by taking the battery out of a Powerbook and chaining it to your desk.
With 10 gigabit, the kiddie just has to get a few bots to cause a server to die, or if they are persitant enough to accumulate a huge amount of bots, they can do huge amounts of damage to the internet
Well, wait a minute. You're assuming that institutions won't also see their bandwidth rise, but why assume that? If 10 Gb connections are going to be available and affordable to me, won't universities and businesses have access to commensurately larger pipes as well? If I can afford 10 Gb, what's to stop them from buying a hundred 10 Gb pipes and bonding them together? Granted, that only preserves the status quo rather than solving the problem once and for all, but at least it doesn't make things worse...
Why do we really need this sort of insane bandwidth in ones home?
Put it out there, and people will find a use for it. Let's not fall into the trap of thinking that because we can't imagine how someone would use it, that means that nobody will find a use for it.
I'm beginning to understand now - you've been a racist and a bigot for so long now, that it's positively ingrained in you, inescapably built into your core self-image. Of course, you don't think of yourself as a bigot - heaven forfend - because you've managed to find a socially acceptable manner of expressing your bigotry, targeting the one group that contemporary culture allows you to target. Needless to say, the fact that you find so much friendly company, so many out there willing to reinforce and reward your bigotry and your racism, that fact does not remove the stain you wear. And wear with no small amount of pride, it would appear.
And the idea of the "big, bad state" righting some serious wrongs has your dick all bent out of shape.
LOL. And I mean that. LOL. You couldn't be more wrong. You think you can control it, that you can ride that tiger until the riding is done. You think that everything's just going to be wonderful, that as long as you keep the right sort of racists in power - racists like you - that everything will just work itself out fine. But of course you're too myopic and short-sighted to look beyond anything other that your own bigoted self-interest, and realize that you can't control it forever, and you can't always insure that your friends wield the levers of power. Someday someone will come along to hang you and people like you, and you will have very thoughtfully given them the rope with which to do it. Me, I'd prefer not to see that come to pass, but then again, why should I expend much effort on someone who is so clearly and obviously self-destructive? You play with fire with all the gay abandon of a toddler with a pack of matches, and you think that because you hold the matchbook at the moment, you'll always be able to control what comes forth from it.
You're wrong, and you couldn't be more wrong. You don't really despise or hate or reject bigotry and racism - you love it. You love it right down to the very depths of your soul. You must - after all, how else to explain someone who on the one hand claims to oppose it, but in deed and not word, perpetuates it, embraces it, claims it for his own, all in order to insure that the right sort of bigot is able to extract his share of ill-gotten gains from the world at large. No, no - not those other bigots, the wrong sort whom you claim to oppose, but wind up resembling so very, very much.
So, to register a formal rejection of your imaginary vision of me, the state can make roads. The state can provide for the national defense. The state can build bridges. The state can even help those who are unable to help themselves. But what the state has absolutely no business doing is what it did back in the day - which, by the way, I remember firsthand just fine - and what you want it to continue doing now. Bull Connor may be dead, but he's not gone - you're filling in for him quite nicely, thank you. Except that your brand of racism and bigotry is far more poisonous and insidious, because although you, like Connor, claim the right to dictate how others live their lives, you couch your racism in the language of justice and liberty and the like. You wouldn't know justice if it bit you, and considering how long I'm apparently supposed to believe that you've been dragging your sorry racist ass across this earth, you really have no excuse for not coming to understand that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
No thanks. I'll have no part of your bigotry. Find someone else to infect.
Old enough to know that anyone who leans on questions like that has an argument that's in trouble. The fact that this was your opening bid...well, I'll let that speak for itself.
Oh, we should be color-blind, sex-blind,
ethnic-blind, religious-blind, and so forth. Sure, I agree, in theory -- if it were possible.
How on earth can you know if it's "possible",
considering that's it's never been tried?
We've gone from one form of state-sponsored
discrimination to another, from enforced segregation fifty years ago and before, to enforced discrimination under the current "progressive" regime, whereby citizens and entities in our society are alternately rewarded for discriminating in favor of some ethnicity/race/gender, or punished for failing to discriminate against their opposite numbers.
Black people actually PREFER outright prejudice to people who profess to be color-blind, but actually aren't.
Har har har - why choose, when you can have it both ways? Burn down those who dare to step over the line of discrimination, while simultaneously enforcing an Orwellian thoughtcrime regime against everyone else, that forces them to behave as though they believe in some ideal, whether or not they actually do. You say you prefer it? Fine, stop punishing those who act upon their own beliefs in employment - if I have a job to fill, it's my job to fill however I see fit, and who do you think you are to tell me how or why or with whom it should or shouldn't be filled? Who are you?
And, seriously, what do you think Joe Lieberman's chances at the Presidency were, being Jewish?
In the primary? Not good, for reasons the perceptive AC above alluded to. In the general election? Better than John Kerry's, I guarantee it, because Lieberman has something resembling experience and credibility on national security, defense, and foreign policy, unlike JFK The Lesser there.
If we can get more women and people of color into positions of authority at the expense of a few disappointed white guys, I say it's a good thing, and it will continue to be a good thing until there's much more progress in that area than there's been to date.
In other words, bend over, here it comes again. Kudos to you - not many people are brave enough to be so blatantly racist as that these days. Of course, it's easier for you than the sheet-draped yahoos we see on TV from time to time, the ones that are your true ideological soulmates - unlike them, you're smart enough to pick as the target of your racism the one group that is forbidden to behave towards others as you yourself do towards them.
Buy a clue, look around, open your eyes - those blinders you've got on will have a significant fraction of this country forever prone and supplicating to someone else, so long as you hold this unhealthy belief that discrimination is just hunky-dory, as long as it benefits someone you like. Got news for you, sport - a state that is powerful enough to give you what you want is powerful enough to take it all away again, and if you think it can't happen, you weren't paying attention in history class.
Right - the article somehow makes it sound like this is a result of quota hiring, but there's nothing to suggest that.
Then again, if it were, MIT would hardly announce that fact to the world, would they?
The fact that they're not trumpeting that it's a quota job doesn't necessarily indicate that it's not, not when they would have an obvious vested interest in keeping such a thing quiet. Not that I think it necessarily did happen, understand - I merely point out that their silence doesn't really tell us anything at all.
Of course it's discriminatory - the fact that it's a legal, politically-correct sort of discrimination doesn't change the fact that you're discriminating against one gender or the other. If their scores are equal, you're basically saying that there is no difference as far as merit is concerned, and so you select your candidate based on their gender. It doesn't matter which one you choose based on gender, it's the fact that gender becomes the deciding criterion that makes it discriminatory - it would be equally discriminatory to choose only men when faced with candidates of equal qualifications. If you want an equal, non-discriminatory way of choosing among similarly qualified applicants, try flipping a coin next time.
Then again, what do I know? I think the whole equal-opportunity thing is bullshit anyway...
Hmmm.... that's not partisan moderating at all, now is it?
You'd get the same thing from the other end if you posted from a conservative standpoint. Making a political post that's even remotely partisan is the easiest way I know to take a ride on the moderation rollercoaster. Come back in an hour or three, and those scores will be reversed, I guaran-damn-tee it:)
If you're implying that the intolerance of discrimination by the judiciary is a bad thing in regards to homosexual marriage, you'd better be prepared to take that recursively all the way back to the civil rights movement, and nullify that too.
It is perfectly possible to believe that the right thing was done in the wrong manner, and that the ends cannot be used to justify the means. Which affords one the freedom to object when the courts are used to do the wrong thing in the wrong manner, as a matter of fact - c.f.Plessy v. Ferguson or Dred Scott, among others.
That's what I said when you insisted that I was talking about either simulations or live-fire/OPFOR exercises. Physician, heal thyself - if you want to try reading for comprehension, start at home, jag-off.
9 square blocks would be more than enough.
Right, because 9 square blocks is adequate to represent any random city anywhere in the world. Sheesh.
Note where I identify at least two other options in addition to the video games / no training dichotomy.
The false dichotomy you present is that we can either have computerized simulations, or we can have live-fire/OPFOR exercises, and that is precisely the false dichotomy you continue to pursue in your followup post. They are not mutually exclusive, and there is no real reason you can't do both.
I'd put a squad that went through 10 FTX's together against a squad that's played 10,000 games and I'm sure the FTX squad would win.
See what I mean? Nobody is suggesting that they do nothing but play games all day long, but rather that they supplement their field exercises with simulations.
So, exactly, how would this "complement" such training? And no generalities or fuzzy-feeling crap.
Oh, please - your failures of imagination are not binding on the rest of the world, you know. Going to build a twenty or thirty square-mile replica of a middle eastern city, complete with resident population for the troops to train in, are you? Don't you think that environment can be simulated a bit more cost-effectively than that?
If the Army calls this an accurate representation...
This would be an excellent point for you to show us all where the Army has made such a claim. After all, if they don't, or if they insert appropriate caveats about the nature of reality versus simulation, your argument sort of falls apart, doesn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
It's irrelevant because it was delinked - the reason we didn't have a global deflationary period is because we didn't have gold currencies. If we had had gold currencies, then the changes in gold valuation would have been very relevant indeed.
After the de-linking, gold was driven by market demand for artistic/sentimental/electro-chemical/paranoid uses.
Of course, and none of those pressures goes away merely because we decide to use it for currency - besides people needing it for currency, you'd still have all those other reasons out there for people to want gold, which means that there's absolutely no reason to believe that gold will maintain a stable value compared to other goods or services. That demand only makes things worse, in fact - the electronics makers need the gold that everyone would be suddenly unwilling to part with in the first place, causing the exchange value of gold to go even higher than it would if they didn't exist.
President Jenna Bush will launch Operation Zulu Freedom... to protect the Gold Eagle from terrorists, of course.
Let's not go there, eh? ;)
Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt. If you want to refute me, refute me - don't send me to the library to read something I already read fifteen years ago.
If we go back to a classical gold standard, the price of gold in dollars will go sky-high. That doesn't matter unless you use gold for something.
Errr, but we would be using gold for something - a currency, remember? You may not think the price going through the roof matters, but it'll really suck for gold-poor people, which I would bet includes you.
The price of gold going sky-high won't lead to deflation. In 1973, as you mentioned, the price of gold went through the roof. It didn't cause deflation then.
Because it wasn't tied to the currency in 1973 - gold and the dollar were delinked in 1971, and by 1973, currencies were free-floating. If the value of gold had gone up as it did, but been used to back the currency, the result would have inevitably been deflation. We would have inevitably, unavoidably experienced deflation in the economy as the currency rose in value faster than the things you would want to buy with it. This is not a particularly controversial position, by the way - you're going to have trouble finding many reputable economists, either on the right or the left, who would argue otherwise. And no, Jude Wanniski is not an economist, reputable or otherwise, before I get a spew of Wanniskisms in response.
Your assertion that gold is prone to inflation because 'a dollar today will buy you 1/4'th as much "consumer goods" now as it did in 1971, but a dollar today will only buy you one tenth of the gold it bought in 1971' is flawed.
No, I assure you that those are cold, hard, inescapable facts. But don't take my word for it - go look up the price of gold in 1971 versus today, and make a line graph showing the price during that period. I'm quite serious - doing this is very instructive. Then graph the price of consumer goods as measured by the CPI over that same period. Finally, take your two graphs and put one on top of the other.
Now, the entire rationale behind gold-backed currencies is that they give long term price stability, so that you can walk into the Men's Wearhouse or wherever and buy a suit with your gold eagle, just like your great-great-grandpappy did back in 18-whatever. But in order for that to be true, the value of gold should - at least roughly - track the value of consumer goods that you'd buy with your gold. It would be remarkable if they matched exactly, so we don't set the bar quite that high, but they should at least be similar in their trends.
And it doesn't work. It just plain doesn't work - the idea of price stability under a gold currency is plainly, empirically false. Which will become clear as day when you overlay those two graphs - they don't resemble one another at all. Gold goes up, up, up, and so does the CPI, but at a much slower rate than gold does, meaning that gold gained more value than consumer goods did over the last thirty-odd years. Which means, finally, that you would not be paying the same amount today for that suit as you did in 1971. And then the whole reason for having a gold-backed currency in the first place goes right in the toilet, so what's the point to it after that? What justifies the use of gold for currency once that magic aura pops like a cheap yellow balloon?
Nothing, really. And given the divergence between gold and consumer goods, and the inevitable deflation that would ensue, there's a very good reason not to have done it - most of us would be a hell of a lot poorer than we are now if a gold-backed currency had been in use.
Just as an aside, gold currencies are not a necessary part of laissez faire economics - it's perfectly acceptable to be a proponent of free markets, even to a libertarian extent, without also requi
Um, well, I object to oil as a currency as well, largely on the same grounds. Other than that, I'm not sure what you want me to say ;)
The answer is, IMO, you get both #1 and #3 occurring. There aren't, as you point out, enough ounces of gold in the world to cover the dollars in circulation, nevermind all the other currencies out there. The result is that in order to cover all those dollars, the dollar-denominated price of gold shoots through the roof. All the people who currently own gold suddenly get very, very rich - whoopee for them, but not so good for the rest of us. Of course, you could avoid this by instituting a fractional reserve system, but if you talk to the goldbugs for a very long, you'll soon discover that fractional reserve is a close second on their list of monetary evils, right behind "fiat" paper money, mainly because it doesn't give you that magic immunity from governmental policy that gold is supposed to bring - at the very least, the state can diddle with the reserve requirements and dictate monetary value that way.
The reason it's bad news for the rest of us is because, contrary to the goldbugs absurd claims that gold is somehow immune to inflationary pressures, gold simply doesn't track consumer prices - i.e., there's no magic inflation-fighting power inherent in a gold currency. You can see this quite easily by comparing consumer prices to the price of gold. Since 1971, when the US finally abandoned the partial gold-standard for good, the dollar-denominated price of an ounce of gold has risen tenfold. The problem is that, if you look at the CPI for the same period, consumer prices have risen only about four-and-a-half-fold since 1971. In other words, the price of gold has far outstripped the price of consumer goods since 1971 - a dollar today will buy you 1/4'th as much "consumer goods" now as it did in 1971, but a dollar today will only buy you one tenth of the gold it bought in 1971.
What's the result of this failure to track consumer prices, where the value of the currency outstrips the value of the stuff you want to buy with it? Deflation. Massive, sustained deflation, which, for those of you who've forgotten your intro microeconomics, is very very bad. In a hyperinflationary environment, people can't buy stuff because until their wages catch up with prices, they can't afford it. In a sustained deflationary environment, people can't buy stuff because they largely don't have jobs any more - spending gets awfully rare once people realize that, no matter what they want to buy, they're better off not spending it because whatever it is they want to buy, it's going to be cheaper in real terms tomorrow. You're better off just hanging on to your money than you are in trying to use it to, say, build stuff. That's bad, because everyone who has a job here is relying on someone else to part with their money, which gets less and less frequent as deflation mounts. Borrowers, like me with my college loans - heh - are especially screwed, because they borrowed cheap dollars yesterday, but get to pay back their loans with expensive dollars tomorrow. Wheee - sign me up, you betcha. And as a result, anyone with half a brain simply refuses to pay back their loans as deflation gets more and more severe. Fuckem, is the thinking - you're better off in bankruptcy than you are trying to pay off absurdly expensive loans. On the other hand, you might get to see the amusing (!) phenomenon of negative interest rates if deflation becomes bad enough, where your credit card company offers to pay you if you spend money, so as to cut their own losses over time ;)
No, a gold standard is a recipe for disaster, as you rightly note, and that's just the economics of it - the political end is just as bad. Most of the gold being produced comes from places like Australia and South Africa and Russia. All fince places, full of lovely people, I'm sure, but as an American, I'm not exactly keen on a monetary system that gives the South Africans a say
Ummm....yes? Just a guess, but what the hell...
Okay. Where's the option where I upgrade the iMac to have PCI/AGP slots?
Pretty much. You get all the disadvantages of a laptop - no expandability, comparatively underpowered - with none of the advantages like portability and mobility. You could get pretty much the same effect by taking the battery out of a Powerbook and chaining it to your desk.
Well, shit - I guess I was just asking for that ;)
The BBC is reporting on the results on the Beeb.
Kudos - I don't think my landlord knows jack shit about cryptography... ;)
You misspelled "idiots". PRNewswire doesn't have "editors".
Well, wait a minute. You're assuming that institutions won't also see their bandwidth rise, but why assume that? If 10 Gb connections are going to be available and affordable to me, won't universities and businesses have access to commensurately larger pipes as well? If I can afford 10 Gb, what's to stop them from buying a hundred 10 Gb pipes and bonding them together? Granted, that only preserves the status quo rather than solving the problem once and for all, but at least it doesn't make things worse...
Put it out there, and people will find a use for it. Let's not fall into the trap of thinking that because we can't imagine how someone would use it, that means that nobody will find a use for it.
And the idea of the "big, bad state" righting some serious wrongs has your dick all bent out of shape.
LOL. And I mean that. LOL. You couldn't be more wrong. You think you can control it, that you can ride that tiger until the riding is done. You think that everything's just going to be wonderful, that as long as you keep the right sort of racists in power - racists like you - that everything will just work itself out fine. But of course you're too myopic and short-sighted to look beyond anything other that your own bigoted self-interest, and realize that you can't control it forever, and you can't always insure that your friends wield the levers of power. Someday someone will come along to hang you and people like you, and you will have very thoughtfully given them the rope with which to do it. Me, I'd prefer not to see that come to pass, but then again, why should I expend much effort on someone who is so clearly and obviously self-destructive? You play with fire with all the gay abandon of a toddler with a pack of matches, and you think that because you hold the matchbook at the moment, you'll always be able to control what comes forth from it.
You're wrong, and you couldn't be more wrong. You don't really despise or hate or reject bigotry and racism - you love it. You love it right down to the very depths of your soul. You must - after all, how else to explain someone who on the one hand claims to oppose it, but in deed and not word, perpetuates it, embraces it, claims it for his own, all in order to insure that the right sort of bigot is able to extract his share of ill-gotten gains from the world at large. No, no - not those other bigots, the wrong sort whom you claim to oppose, but wind up resembling so very, very much.
So, to register a formal rejection of your imaginary vision of me, the state can make roads. The state can provide for the national defense. The state can build bridges. The state can even help those who are unable to help themselves. But what the state has absolutely no business doing is what it did back in the day - which, by the way, I remember firsthand just fine - and what you want it to continue doing now. Bull Connor may be dead, but he's not gone - you're filling in for him quite nicely, thank you. Except that your brand of racism and bigotry is far more poisonous and insidious, because although you, like Connor, claim the right to dictate how others live their lives, you couch your racism in the language of justice and liberty and the like. You wouldn't know justice if it bit you, and considering how long I'm apparently supposed to believe that you've been dragging your sorry racist ass across this earth, you really have no excuse for not coming to understand that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
No thanks. I'll have no part of your bigotry. Find someone else to infect.
Old enough to know that anyone who leans on questions like that has an argument that's in trouble. The fact that this was your opening bid...well, I'll let that speak for itself.
Oh, we should be color-blind, sex-blind, ethnic-blind, religious-blind, and so forth. Sure, I agree, in theory -- if it were possible.
How on earth can you know if it's "possible", considering that's it's never been tried? We've gone from one form of state-sponsored discrimination to another, from enforced segregation fifty years ago and before, to enforced discrimination under the current "progressive" regime, whereby citizens and entities in our society are alternately rewarded for discriminating in favor of some ethnicity/race/gender, or punished for failing to discriminate against their opposite numbers.
Black people actually PREFER outright prejudice to people who profess to be color-blind, but actually aren't.
Har har har - why choose, when you can have it both ways? Burn down those who dare to step over the line of discrimination, while simultaneously enforcing an Orwellian thoughtcrime regime against everyone else, that forces them to behave as though they believe in some ideal, whether or not they actually do. You say you prefer it? Fine, stop punishing those who act upon their own beliefs in employment - if I have a job to fill, it's my job to fill however I see fit, and who do you think you are to tell me how or why or with whom it should or shouldn't be filled? Who are you?
And, seriously, what do you think Joe Lieberman's chances at the Presidency were, being Jewish?
In the primary? Not good, for reasons the perceptive AC above alluded to. In the general election? Better than John Kerry's, I guarantee it, because Lieberman has something resembling experience and credibility on national security, defense, and foreign policy, unlike JFK The Lesser there.
If we can get more women and people of color into positions of authority at the expense of a few disappointed white guys, I say it's a good thing, and it will continue to be a good thing until there's much more progress in that area than there's been to date.
In other words, bend over, here it comes again. Kudos to you - not many people are brave enough to be so blatantly racist as that these days. Of course, it's easier for you than the sheet-draped yahoos we see on TV from time to time, the ones that are your true ideological soulmates - unlike them, you're smart enough to pick as the target of your racism the one group that is forbidden to behave towards others as you yourself do towards them.
Buy a clue, look around, open your eyes - those blinders you've got on will have a significant fraction of this country forever prone and supplicating to someone else, so long as you hold this unhealthy belief that discrimination is just hunky-dory, as long as it benefits someone you like. Got news for you, sport - a state that is powerful enough to give you what you want is powerful enough to take it all away again, and if you think it can't happen, you weren't paying attention in history class.
Then again, if it were, MIT would hardly announce that fact to the world, would they?
The fact that they're not trumpeting that it's a quota job doesn't necessarily indicate that it's not, not when they would have an obvious vested interest in keeping such a thing quiet. Not that I think it necessarily did happen, understand - I merely point out that their silence doesn't really tell us anything at all.
Of course it's discriminatory - the fact that it's a legal, politically-correct sort of discrimination doesn't change the fact that you're discriminating against one gender or the other. If their scores are equal, you're basically saying that there is no difference as far as merit is concerned, and so you select your candidate based on their gender. It doesn't matter which one you choose based on gender, it's the fact that gender becomes the deciding criterion that makes it discriminatory - it would be equally discriminatory to choose only men when faced with candidates of equal qualifications. If you want an equal, non-discriminatory way of choosing among similarly qualified applicants, try flipping a coin next time.
Then again, what do I know? I think the whole equal-opportunity thing is bullshit anyway...
Me too. "Captain Darl McBride" has a nice ring to it.
Feel free to add suggestions for the remainder of the crew ;)
Depends on how much the refrigeration costs, doesn't it?
You'd get the same thing from the other end if you posted from a conservative standpoint. Making a political post that's even remotely partisan is the easiest way I know to take a ride on the moderation rollercoaster. Come back in an hour or three, and those scores will be reversed, I guaran-damn-tee it :)
It is perfectly possible to believe that the right thing was done in the wrong manner, and that the ends cannot be used to justify the means. Which affords one the freedom to object when the courts are used to do the wrong thing in the wrong manner, as a matter of fact - c.f. Plessy v. Ferguson or Dred Scott, among others.
That's what I said when you insisted that I was talking about either simulations or live-fire/OPFOR exercises. Physician, heal thyself - if you want to try reading for comprehension, start at home, jag-off.
9 square blocks would be more than enough.
Right, because 9 square blocks is adequate to represent any random city anywhere in the world. Sheesh.
Given the end result, it might as well have been.
The false dichotomy you present is that we can either have computerized simulations, or we can have live-fire/OPFOR exercises, and that is precisely the false dichotomy you continue to pursue in your followup post. They are not mutually exclusive, and there is no real reason you can't do both.
I'd put a squad that went through 10 FTX's together against a squad that's played 10,000 games and I'm sure the FTX squad would win.
See what I mean? Nobody is suggesting that they do nothing but play games all day long, but rather that they supplement their field exercises with simulations.
So, exactly, how would this "complement" such training? And no generalities or fuzzy-feeling crap.
Oh, please - your failures of imagination are not binding on the rest of the world, you know. Going to build a twenty or thirty square-mile replica of a middle eastern city, complete with resident population for the troops to train in, are you? Don't you think that environment can be simulated a bit more cost-effectively than that?
This would be an excellent point for you to show us all where the Army has made such a claim. After all, if they don't, or if they insert appropriate caveats about the nature of reality versus simulation, your argument sort of falls apart, doesn't it?