This has nothing to do with Rand or her political theories, and I even advocate for a UBI which should tell you how far off the mark you are. It is simple logic and basic economics. When prices go up, people look for less expensive alternatives. Why do you think Amazon (or Walmart) have so many customers to begin with?
The other is that is costs a certain amount of money for a person to live, even at a subsistence level. If the government (that is our tax dollars) have to pay this amount, will it be more or less if the person has some income of their own? This should be simple math.
You realize that any efforts which make labor more expensive drive exactly this kind of automation. Eventually Amazon won't have an employees on SNAP because it won't employ anyone to do minimum wage labor. Is Bernie going to start taxing them for all of the people that they don't employee next?
You also make the assumption that it's the corporations that cost us something to support these people. When these people don't have a job at all (and can't get any because you've made it more expensive to employee them than their labor is worth) it's going to cost the rest of us a lot more to support them.
Well since it's the department of corrections, these would all be state run (i.e., non-private) prisons. My guess is that the government gets a cut for all of these sales. They probably got a cut of the previous device and music sales as well, but now someone has offered them a better cut. It would appear that the linked news article bears this assumption out:
The Department of Corrections, meanwhile, has collected $1.4 million in commissions on each song downloaded and other related sales since July 2011.
If you do it's probably because this has nothing to do with the state legislature as they don't run the DoC and wouldn't be responsible for this. If it makes you feel better you can still image it's all the evil Republicans' fault since the governor of Florida is a Republican and he would be the one ultimately in charge and responsible for appointing the secretary that would oversee the agency.
We all generally know who is competent, or at least more competent. There's always someone that's getting asked to put out the fires or to help fix things or to look over something to make sure that it's okay. That's the competent person, or at least the person more competent than everyone else. Management might not realize this person exists, but that's their own failing. Worse still, management probably undervalues this person because they just look at some metrics that really penalize anyone who's spending a considerable amount of their time helping other people out even though that person is adding the most value to the company.
It might take a while for people to figure out, but if you actually took a step back and monitored a company, there are going to be a few people that have everyone else beating a footpath to their door when they need help. And then there's the other side of the coin, the people that are never going to get asked to do something because everyone knows that they'll screw it up or do a shoddy job of it. It's just that capturing this as a metric so that middle management doesn't make a mess of things is hard to do.
Are you sure that the secular west managed to do something better? Hell, even Newton and Einstein were partially religious, and not rabid hateful atheists.
I would argue that it has on the whole done better, but that doesn't mean it will be perfect. I suspect that in another few years, the current idiocy surrounding 60 genders will largely die off. Meanwhile religions will continue to believe as they have for centuries or millennia because if you start to pull at the threads of the central tenants of the faith, the whole thing will unravel.
I also think there's a difference between secularism and the rabid atheists that were as hateful of religious folks as religious folks were of atheists. These seem to be largely the group that moved on to Atheism+ which has swallowed the social justice dogma and act much like the religions that they so despised. I think there was a mistaken belief that secularism would cure people of the type of thinking that leads people to religion. However, I think that this is backwards and that it's that people's way of thinking leads to create and join religions.
Removing the old religions does nothing to stop religious thinking. It simply means that there's a vacuum to be filled with new religions. Maybe these are more secular in nature, but they have many of the same hallmarks of contemporary religions. Thirty years ago the moral busy bodies of the western world were avid church goers, but reducing the number of church goers did nothing to the number of moral busy bodies. They merely found new homes in the various social justice movements where their holier than thou art attitude fits in just as well as it did in many religious denominations.
Looking back across human history, it took ages for us to get to this point. It's incredibly presumptuous to assume that the secular west somehow has a silver bullet solution to every problem it confronts and that it will resolve all of them sometime shortly after breakfast. However, I would bet that it has the best chance at pushing humanity forward and that the best qualities of the secular west are being embraced around the world and helping humanity move forward.
There are plenty of times I've felt out of my depth, and sometimes it's because I legitimately was. I think the issue comes down to what people do about it. It's not a sin to realize you lack the required knowledge to accomplish something, but it's pretty damned foolish to remain in that state when you've become aware of it.
I also suspect that people's susceptibility to this is directly related to their belief that everyone (or maybe even anyone) else knows what the hell is going on. Once a person comes to realize that almost no one has the right answers and that most people just operate as best as they're capable of doing, it's kind of hard to feel like a fraud if you're at least trying to get better.
Water isn't an element, so yes it should bother anyone. If you or anyone else wants to come up with a different classification system, that's fine, but it's probably not useful and it certainly shouldn't be used as if it has the same level of authority or relevance of an established system without a pretty good demonstration of why this new system is better.
In the case of elements, there are clear rules as to what distinguishes and element from something else. Although there is a recognized heaviest element, there's been speculation for years about whether the theoretically heavier ones might exist and what their properties might be like, and how much farther along the table it's possible to go until the laws of physics suggest that they can't go on based on our understanding of atoms.
However, if you ordered a steak, but the cook decided to call a fat 'ole turd a steak, you'd be pretty damn bothered. So I think you already know the answer, or at least you should.
Deficit spending has been occurring under every president for years now. It doesn't matter which of the major parties you elect, because they're going to spend like crazy and the electorate really doesn't seem to care as long as the spending gets put towards whatever programs or sectors they like.
The only real way out of it is to massively grow the economy so that overall tax revenue increases without additional increases in spending. The first half is possible, but have you ever known a government that doesn't grow like a cancer? You'd realistically need a constitutional amendment to disallow deficit spending outside of lawfully declared war (which we really don't do anymore so most of our military adventurism wouldn't cut it) if you wanted any chance of that happening.
Once you eliminate the most vicious forms of disease, starvation, and exposure, nature needs to develop new ways thinning out the heard as it were. Life (or I suppose death) finds a way.
For some people, their only notable achievement will be a Darwin award.
We all want change and progress, but only up until it affects us personally. The rest of the people who were swept up in its path, we can easily dismiss if we bothered to take them into consideration at all. But when it comes for us, now there's a fucking problem and why isn't anyone doing something about it?
The problem with nice neighborhoods is that everyone wants to live there. It's the same thing with beaches, lakes, etc. It would be nice if everyone could live (or have a nice little bungalow they could escape to for vacations) no more than 10 feet from the ocean, but there's a limited amount of beach front property, etc. When demand outstrips supply, prices increase. This is fundamental economics and inescapable. Attempts to circumvent this will inevitably fail, much like the design for an aircraft that fails to take the effects of gravity into account.
That isn't going to work to the extent that it would be necessary. When companies like Google, Apple, etc. move to an area, the workers they bring are highly skilled, highly paid individuals. Unless additional housing is built, those new workers will lead to an increase in price of a limited resource. They can easily afford to pay more for housing than existing residents whose labor may not command as high of a wage as a software engineer. The additional influx of new highly paid employees means that the local economy in general will see a boost, but it's not going to be evenly distributed (the owner of an eatery might make a good deal more money, but the fry cook isn't going to see as much of a bump) and it won't offset the increased prices that these newcomers are willing to pay for good housing.
The only way to solve this problem is to build additional housing, but cities are often loathe to grant building permits at all (it will require destroying old buildings that "represent the history of the area") or have implemented rent controls that mean developers have no interest in building new housing since they can't charge what they feel is a fair rate. If everyone owned their own housing, you could get the government to implement laws to prevent property taxes increasing for existing owners just because someone wealthy moved next door, but governments are often too greedy to agree to that and it does nothing to help the people who are renting.
So we repeat this useless set of actions and whine about gentrification instead of learning from mistakes or doing something that will actually solve the problem in a way that makes most people the happiest. People eventually get pushed out due to rising prices and while they are upset, no one else really cares about them as everyone else has their own set of problems to deal with and aren't personally affected by this issue. Eventually everything settles down as a new equilibrium is reached where the people living in an area can all afford to do so. Meanwhile, somewhere in another state or a neighboring city, a new business has moved into the area and has brought with them employees who earn significantly more than existing folks in the area.
I don't think they wanted Clinton either. A lot of her actions as Secretary of State were quite opposed to what Russia was doing and it's likely that she would have been willing to step that up and increase U.S. intervention in Syria and the other proxy conflicts that the U.S. and Russia are engaged in. That isn't to say they liked Trump or wanted him to win. As you point out, they, like most others, were probably sure that wasn't a real possibility based on the data. I suspect that they were ambivalent about him, or perhaps they were indifferent towards him.
I think that Trump also fits quite well into the known-to-be-corrupt, feckless category just as well as Clinton (or most other politicians for that matter) so they knew that they wouldn't have a problem dealing with Trump either. He's in real estate and has enough history prior to his foray into politics to leave them comfortable in that assessment.
My guess is that if Clinton were elected, she would similarly beleaguered at this point in her presidency. As much as you might like to argue that the media would be on her side, they also like blood in the water.
The U.S. still does a lot of chip design and fabrication. It's just that the chips get shipped overseas for packaging and final product assembly.
Also, U.S. manufacturing output has been increasing year over year even though we were moving large chunks of it overseas. I think now would be a good time to start reinvesting in local manufacturing, but that would be done with machines. A lot of the jobs aren't coming back, but that's okay because it means that labor is free to do something that's more productive instead.
I realize that this is just a troll attempt, but even if we had a president that everyone could agree was competent, trustworthy, etc. the U.S. was founded to get away from exactly this kind of autocracy where one person has the power and authority to change something like this. People always think of all the good that might be done with such power, but rarely consider how much evil can be wrought with that authority just as easily.
Yeah, but to be fair Trump very well could have said exactly that when asked about this specific issue. He just tends to ignore the question and say whatever it is that he wants to say.
I don't know if it's the devices themselves or if we raised a generation that we didn't want to let play outside for fear that they would get into trouble or that something bad would happen to them. Is it any wonder that they turned to electronic devices in order to keep themselves entertained and that they never learned to enjoy other activities outside of those devices?
I think that we've replaced a lot of our environments and communities with digital equivalents and they're a very shallow substitute at best. Maybe that will change as the technology improves, but I think it's pretty important for us to remember that we're an animal that spent a lot of its evolutionary history without exposure to this kind of technology and that just like other animals we need some natural light, exercise, and a lot of other things that we might tend to put off as a bit primitive or regard as uncivilized.
When looked at in that way, it doesn't seem strange at all for technology to exert a large amount of selective pressure on the population. Of course a lot of people are miserable or appear to be ill. They're just unfit for this new world we find ourselves in, but there's no need for them to remain that way. Humans are wonderful at adapting the environment to suit them, so there's nothing that says you can't go barbecue or shoot hoops down at the park instead of posting on social media.
Why would either of these companies want to publicly admit that they've been rummaging through each other's trash bins. That's a bit like being a musician and deciding to rip off Kesha.
If you're going to steal, find someone actually worth stealing from.
We already do. Look at approval ratings. They're always low, for everyone. Congress hasn't been above 50% in over a decade, and more recently is down in the low-to-mid teens. That's probably the equivalent of a negative three on the five start scale, and yet everybody just keeps voting the same worthless bastards right back in to office.
But it also means that Canadian radio has to play even more Justin Beiber.
I think you might want to look at the overall outcomes instead of picking out a single (I say single since the movie uses the same characters from Great White North) instance where it worked out well.
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This has nothing to do with Rand or her political theories, and I even advocate for a UBI which should tell you how far off the mark you are. It is simple logic and basic economics. When prices go up, people look for less expensive alternatives. Why do you think Amazon (or Walmart) have so many customers to begin with?
The other is that is costs a certain amount of money for a person to live, even at a subsistence level. If the government (that is our tax dollars) have to pay this amount, will it be more or less if the person has some income of their own? This should be simple math.
You realize that any efforts which make labor more expensive drive exactly this kind of automation. Eventually Amazon won't have an employees on SNAP because it won't employ anyone to do minimum wage labor. Is Bernie going to start taxing them for all of the people that they don't employee next?
You also make the assumption that it's the corporations that cost us something to support these people. When these people don't have a job at all (and can't get any because you've made it more expensive to employee them than their labor is worth) it's going to cost the rest of us a lot more to support them.
The Department of Corrections, meanwhile, has collected $1.4 million in commissions on each song downloaded and other related sales since July 2011.
If you do it's probably because this has nothing to do with the state legislature as they don't run the DoC and wouldn't be responsible for this. If it makes you feel better you can still image it's all the evil Republicans' fault since the governor of Florida is a Republican and he would be the one ultimately in charge and responsible for appointing the secretary that would oversee the agency.
We all generally know who is competent, or at least more competent. There's always someone that's getting asked to put out the fires or to help fix things or to look over something to make sure that it's okay. That's the competent person, or at least the person more competent than everyone else. Management might not realize this person exists, but that's their own failing. Worse still, management probably undervalues this person because they just look at some metrics that really penalize anyone who's spending a considerable amount of their time helping other people out even though that person is adding the most value to the company.
It might take a while for people to figure out, but if you actually took a step back and monitored a company, there are going to be a few people that have everyone else beating a footpath to their door when they need help. And then there's the other side of the coin, the people that are never going to get asked to do something because everyone knows that they'll screw it up or do a shoddy job of it. It's just that capturing this as a metric so that middle management doesn't make a mess of things is hard to do.
Are you sure that the secular west managed to do something better? Hell, even Newton and Einstein were partially religious, and not rabid hateful atheists.
I would argue that it has on the whole done better, but that doesn't mean it will be perfect. I suspect that in another few years, the current idiocy surrounding 60 genders will largely die off. Meanwhile religions will continue to believe as they have for centuries or millennia because if you start to pull at the threads of the central tenants of the faith, the whole thing will unravel.
I also think there's a difference between secularism and the rabid atheists that were as hateful of religious folks as religious folks were of atheists. These seem to be largely the group that moved on to Atheism+ which has swallowed the social justice dogma and act much like the religions that they so despised. I think there was a mistaken belief that secularism would cure people of the type of thinking that leads people to religion. However, I think that this is backwards and that it's that people's way of thinking leads to create and join religions.
Removing the old religions does nothing to stop religious thinking. It simply means that there's a vacuum to be filled with new religions. Maybe these are more secular in nature, but they have many of the same hallmarks of contemporary religions. Thirty years ago the moral busy bodies of the western world were avid church goers, but reducing the number of church goers did nothing to the number of moral busy bodies. They merely found new homes in the various social justice movements where their holier than thou art attitude fits in just as well as it did in many religious denominations.
Looking back across human history, it took ages for us to get to this point. It's incredibly presumptuous to assume that the secular west somehow has a silver bullet solution to every problem it confronts and that it will resolve all of them sometime shortly after breakfast. However, I would bet that it has the best chance at pushing humanity forward and that the best qualities of the secular west are being embraced around the world and helping humanity move forward.
How many are frauds though?
There are plenty of times I've felt out of my depth, and sometimes it's because I legitimately was. I think the issue comes down to what people do about it. It's not a sin to realize you lack the required knowledge to accomplish something, but it's pretty damned foolish to remain in that state when you've become aware of it.
I also suspect that people's susceptibility to this is directly related to their belief that everyone (or maybe even anyone) else knows what the hell is going on. Once a person comes to realize that almost no one has the right answers and that most people just operate as best as they're capable of doing, it's kind of hard to feel like a fraud if you're at least trying to get better.
Here's a novel concept. Just don't spy on your users and then you never have to worry about it.
Water isn't an element, so yes it should bother anyone. If you or anyone else wants to come up with a different classification system, that's fine, but it's probably not useful and it certainly shouldn't be used as if it has the same level of authority or relevance of an established system without a pretty good demonstration of why this new system is better.
In the case of elements, there are clear rules as to what distinguishes and element from something else. Although there is a recognized heaviest element, there's been speculation for years about whether the theoretically heavier ones might exist and what their properties might be like, and how much farther along the table it's possible to go until the laws of physics suggest that they can't go on based on our understanding of atoms.
However, if you ordered a steak, but the cook decided to call a fat 'ole turd a steak, you'd be pretty damn bothered. So I think you already know the answer, or at least you should.
Deficit spending has been occurring under every president for years now. It doesn't matter which of the major parties you elect, because they're going to spend like crazy and the electorate really doesn't seem to care as long as the spending gets put towards whatever programs or sectors they like.
The only real way out of it is to massively grow the economy so that overall tax revenue increases without additional increases in spending. The first half is possible, but have you ever known a government that doesn't grow like a cancer? You'd realistically need a constitutional amendment to disallow deficit spending outside of lawfully declared war (which we really don't do anymore so most of our military adventurism wouldn't cut it) if you wanted any chance of that happening.
Once you eliminate the most vicious forms of disease, starvation, and exposure, nature needs to develop new ways thinning out the heard as it were. Life (or I suppose death) finds a way.
For some people, their only notable achievement will be a Darwin award.
Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?
We all want change and progress, but only up until it affects us personally. The rest of the people who were swept up in its path, we can easily dismiss if we bothered to take them into consideration at all. But when it comes for us, now there's a fucking problem and why isn't anyone doing something about it?
The problem with nice neighborhoods is that everyone wants to live there. It's the same thing with beaches, lakes, etc. It would be nice if everyone could live (or have a nice little bungalow they could escape to for vacations) no more than 10 feet from the ocean, but there's a limited amount of beach front property, etc. When demand outstrips supply, prices increase. This is fundamental economics and inescapable. Attempts to circumvent this will inevitably fail, much like the design for an aircraft that fails to take the effects of gravity into account.
That isn't going to work to the extent that it would be necessary. When companies like Google, Apple, etc. move to an area, the workers they bring are highly skilled, highly paid individuals. Unless additional housing is built, those new workers will lead to an increase in price of a limited resource. They can easily afford to pay more for housing than existing residents whose labor may not command as high of a wage as a software engineer. The additional influx of new highly paid employees means that the local economy in general will see a boost, but it's not going to be evenly distributed (the owner of an eatery might make a good deal more money, but the fry cook isn't going to see as much of a bump) and it won't offset the increased prices that these newcomers are willing to pay for good housing.
The only way to solve this problem is to build additional housing, but cities are often loathe to grant building permits at all (it will require destroying old buildings that "represent the history of the area") or have implemented rent controls that mean developers have no interest in building new housing since they can't charge what they feel is a fair rate. If everyone owned their own housing, you could get the government to implement laws to prevent property taxes increasing for existing owners just because someone wealthy moved next door, but governments are often too greedy to agree to that and it does nothing to help the people who are renting.
So we repeat this useless set of actions and whine about gentrification instead of learning from mistakes or doing something that will actually solve the problem in a way that makes most people the happiest. People eventually get pushed out due to rising prices and while they are upset, no one else really cares about them as everyone else has their own set of problems to deal with and aren't personally affected by this issue. Eventually everything settles down as a new equilibrium is reached where the people living in an area can all afford to do so. Meanwhile, somewhere in another state or a neighboring city, a new business has moved into the area and has brought with them employees who earn significantly more than existing folks in the area.
I don't think they wanted Clinton either. A lot of her actions as Secretary of State were quite opposed to what Russia was doing and it's likely that she would have been willing to step that up and increase U.S. intervention in Syria and the other proxy conflicts that the U.S. and Russia are engaged in. That isn't to say they liked Trump or wanted him to win. As you point out, they, like most others, were probably sure that wasn't a real possibility based on the data. I suspect that they were ambivalent about him, or perhaps they were indifferent towards him.
I think that Trump also fits quite well into the known-to-be-corrupt, feckless category just as well as Clinton (or most other politicians for that matter) so they knew that they wouldn't have a problem dealing with Trump either. He's in real estate and has enough history prior to his foray into politics to leave them comfortable in that assessment.
My guess is that if Clinton were elected, she would similarly beleaguered at this point in her presidency. As much as you might like to argue that the media would be on her side, they also like blood in the water.
The U.S. still does a lot of chip design and fabrication. It's just that the chips get shipped overseas for packaging and final product assembly.
Also, U.S. manufacturing output has been increasing year over year even though we were moving large chunks of it overseas. I think now would be a good time to start reinvesting in local manufacturing, but that would be done with machines. A lot of the jobs aren't coming back, but that's okay because it means that labor is free to do something that's more productive instead.
I realize that this is just a troll attempt, but even if we had a president that everyone could agree was competent, trustworthy, etc. the U.S. was founded to get away from exactly this kind of autocracy where one person has the power and authority to change something like this. People always think of all the good that might be done with such power, but rarely consider how much evil can be wrought with that authority just as easily.
Yeah, but to be fair Trump very well could have said exactly that when asked about this specific issue. He just tends to ignore the question and say whatever it is that he wants to say.
I don't know if it's the devices themselves or if we raised a generation that we didn't want to let play outside for fear that they would get into trouble or that something bad would happen to them. Is it any wonder that they turned to electronic devices in order to keep themselves entertained and that they never learned to enjoy other activities outside of those devices?
I think that we've replaced a lot of our environments and communities with digital equivalents and they're a very shallow substitute at best. Maybe that will change as the technology improves, but I think it's pretty important for us to remember that we're an animal that spent a lot of its evolutionary history without exposure to this kind of technology and that just like other animals we need some natural light, exercise, and a lot of other things that we might tend to put off as a bit primitive or regard as uncivilized.
When looked at in that way, it doesn't seem strange at all for technology to exert a large amount of selective pressure on the population. Of course a lot of people are miserable or appear to be ill. They're just unfit for this new world we find ourselves in, but there's no need for them to remain that way. Humans are wonderful at adapting the environment to suit them, so there's nothing that says you can't go barbecue or shoot hoops down at the park instead of posting on social media.
Why would either of these companies want to publicly admit that they've been rummaging through each other's trash bins. That's a bit like being a musician and deciding to rip off Kesha.
If you're going to steal, find someone actually worth stealing from.
We already do. Look at approval ratings. They're always low, for everyone. Congress hasn't been above 50% in over a decade, and more recently is down in the low-to-mid teens. That's probably the equivalent of a negative three on the five start scale, and yet everybody just keeps voting the same worthless bastards right back in to office.
Came here for the meta. It was beyond expectations. Will reference again.
But it also means that Canadian radio has to play even more Justin Beiber.
I think you might want to look at the overall outcomes instead of picking out a single (I say single since the movie uses the same characters from Great White North) instance where it worked out well.
I can't see how telling everyone this could result in any forms of bad behavior to harm legitimate riders. Not at all.
Also, how skewed is the rating system if anyone below 4 is considered bad. They need a new system if it's 5 stars or bust.