Oddly, though, I find that the encryption response to NSA intrusion to be as much of an overreaction as our response to terrorism has been.
Sure, I don't like them rifling though my Facebook pages I suppose. But at the same time, if I gave a shit about what was on Facebook, I wouldn't have posted it on Facebook.
I think we're in an arms race created by people flipping out about terrorism. We flip out to a terrorist attack and demand results. The NSA flips out about the need for results and whines when it can't read people's mail. The people flip out about the NSA trying to read people's mail and also missing terrorist attacks and throw up a bunch of encryption. In the end, more people die from auto accidents than terrorism, so everyone is basically wasting their time.
Yes, you're right, but the NSA and CIA do provide information to actual law enforcement for investigations and warnings. So this does affect law enforcement capabilities, if not directly.
The question is whether the added capabilities are worth the price and that is a political one.
Heavy elements are created by fusion inside of stars and also supernovae (which also frequently, but not always result in black holes). As far as I know, no black hole has ever exploded as nothing escapes from a black hole, and an explosion would seem to put the lie to that.
As far as creating a new universe from a singularity, we may never know. There is some speculation on that, but we're unlikely to ever be able to see that due to the impenetrability of the event horizon.
That said, our observations are that the Big Bang created mostly hydrogen, much less helium, and a trace of lithium. Heavy elements were not created in the Big Bang. We can see this with the Population II stars out there which are older and are metal-poor.
You're right, for a supermassive black hole, like the one at the center of our galaxy, the gravitational shear between what you experience at your head and your feet is basically like what you'd experience on the surface of Earth.
However, if you did manage to get far enough in, with all the oddness that implies, you would experience increasing shear as you approached the singularity. Eventually, it would become strong enough to rip you apart.
A "normal" stellar mass black hole would rip you apart almost immediately because the shear would be very high much less further in.
Either situation is probably academic, as you'd have been charbroiled long before you entered the event horizon by the X-rays and extremely hot matter in orbit which has been accelerated by the black hole to extreme velocities and energies.
No, the mass of a black hole does grow. The mass of black holes can be measured.
There are three things (and only three things) you can measure about a singularity inside a black hole: its mass, its charge, and its angular momentum. Obviously, for the black hole itself, you can measure the area of the event horizon as well, but the event horizon is not actually the singularity, but a border between where light can escape, and where it cannot. The event horizon's area and shape are defined by the singularity's mass (area of the event horizon) and the angular momentum (spinning singularities have "flattened" event horizons).
Now that may sound like a lot of things you can measure, but it is actually the most sparse data sets known to exist for an object. And considering all of the things that get sucked into a black hole, you lose a lot of information about the original infalling matter when it is reduced to that.
However, I thought that they had decided that the information was encoded into the event horizon as fluctuations, or was that just a theory?
Calling the Universe a simulation is pointless. It certainly could be, but the simple fact that it shares some characteristics of what we would call a "simulation" doesn't make it a "simulated universe".
That's like saying, "I think quantization is messy, so I am going to assume there is a Universe that doesn't have it because that would be less fake, or something".
We have no frame of reference outside of the Universe. Everything else is mere speculation and completely unscientific. Assuming that the Universe is a simulation because it is quantized is just making shit up. How could you possibly falsify such a theory?
Kind of an odd point for NdGT to make. You might as well believe in God, because you don't get a simulation without someone running one, and both concepts are at about the same level of scientific inquiry.
Anyway, I think the simulation idea is interesting, but in scientific terms it's wankery.
Looks pretty saccharine to me, and therefore not to my tastes, but it doesn't have to be. I just won't go there.
Freedom of association is important. Hopefully those who are in such a community will understand its value and be supportive of the existence of, if not the values of, other communities that they may not agree with.
Yes, they may try and hold it as long as possible to increase value, but note that something that sits in your vault, unused, doesn't make any money. And if they patent it, the patent does run out eventually. They need to do *something* with it.
More likely, it becomes used in very, very expensive applications where they can charge an arm and a leg for it. I'm thinking military equipment as a good target.
Eventually, though, unless it is uneconomical to mass produce, it will make its way into other things. Those who are greedy may well try and use older tech to keep it breaking, but someone who wants to break into the market, or someone even greedier is going to use it to differentiate their product in order to eat the lunch of the people using the inferior tech.
Note that it is possible for the better tech to be stopped, possibly through suggesting it is not safe (FUD) or some sort of paid-for government regulation, but greed by itself, won't stop this.
I don't want to underestimate the challenge of setting up a truly apolitical system, but I think such a thing can be possible. Or at least to the degree that it would be sufficient.
What it is really going to come down to is a strong understanding by everyone involved that this exists, it is not to be interfered with for political points, and every change needs to be simple and the reasons presented to all clearly.
And most importantly, there are no exceptions for anyone for any reason. A basic income is not meant to redress past wrongs or even end poverty. If I hand someone $100 bucks a week and they go spending it on entertainment and not food, then they should have the right to do so and starve. It is their choice.
If you do something illegal with the money, you still go to jail, but you still get your money the next period.
I would also make this caveat. A basic income is not a human right and should never be considered one. It is a mark of an advanced society. We do this to advance civilization and demonstrate that we have moved beyond hand to mouth survival. If a society cannot support a basic income readily, it should not.
So, if we cannot come up with a governance system that can adequately create that situation, I don't think it should be forced. I don't believe that it is impossible to do, however. And I think the worst enemy of such a system is politics, followed by ignorance of what is actually being provided. Dispel ignorance, remove as much politicking as possible, and have a societal understanding of exactly what is being provided and I think it can work.
I will not pretend that I know if we're totally ready for that, but I think it is a question we need to look at because structural unemployment caused by automation and rapid progress may eventually get so high as to ultimately change the nature of society. At the same time, it is hard to argue that you should dispense with automation just to keep less efficient people in jobs. We clearly don't need all humans to work all the time to eat now, at least in Western countries. So we should not be holding ourselves back forcing there to be jobs when we don't need those jobs. Or forebears have built a world that they meant to leave to us in which they invested so we may benefit. We should thus benefit.
I agree. People either live in NYC for one of two reasons:
* They need to hold down a job in NYC * They like NYC for some reason.
In the first instance, basic income means they can just leave NYC because they don't need to live there anymore.
In the second, then it is up to them to make up the difference between their basic income and what it costs to live in NYC. Presumably that will be provided by an employer.
Yes, but you shouldn't underestimate the effects. The government won't just be offering a service or some benefits. They will stand in for every single employer out there. You can argue that this is no different than any other employer paying someone, and certainly there are parallels.
However, think about what employers are sometimes able to make their employees do.... If people become used to having a basic income, it absolutely *MUST* be no strings attached. That means:
No removal of basic income for felonies, including serial killing or terrorism. No removal of income for saying things that no one likes, including the most vile racism, sexism, or ethnocentricity you can think of No removal of income for failing to vote No removal of income for anything at all except dying, and only then if we have a death certificate or a legal process declaring them dead.
And that needs to be made a Constitutional Amendment that Congress would have zero power to adjust or amend.
I am actually *FOR* a basic income. I believe that it is what greater automation and productivity of humanity should be providing us with. What I do NOT want to happen is it becomes a social engineering experiment for ANYONE.
In fact, I'd prefer if the political system had no control over the basic income at all. Zero. It is controlled simply by a directorate who can only change it based on things like the value of the dollar or the GDP or something. No exemptions, no incentives, nothing but X amount of money delivered to every citizen over the age of 18. Their only job is to ensure that the plan does not sap the economy by an unrealistic expectation of what people can get out of it.
If China does it, they won't have to worry about that. They'll have a Great Moon Firewall that will make connections to the Internet impossible anyway.
Sadly, the loss of life we have suffered did not used to terrify us, and I don't think it terrifies most people in the USA today either. It's those people who are always looking for some sort of outrage or some sort of event to make themselves seem important or to grab a headline. And then the damage control starts and the politicians run away so that they don't end up on the Evening News.
I don't think America as a nation has run away from a space program or space exploration, but I do think our *government* considers it either a joke or a pork barrel. And that is why I hope commercial exploration keeps moving forward.
If they succeed, which I think they are quite capable of, China will prove that we are held back less by the difficulty of the task of the Moon, or a Moon base, or going to Mars, but rather by the difficulty of getting our politicians to pull their heads out of their asses to commit to it.
I agree that they shouldn't simply target people who "view" anything, especially if you can be entrapped into it by going to a perfectly legitimate adult porn site and suddenly, you're looking at child porn. That could affect anyone, being an actual pedophile is not required. That is just scary.
Unless you can trace back monetary payments to the producers or traders of such material, I don't see how simply viewing that material exploits anyone, even if it is for more perverted reasons. It's like a Go to Jail, Go Directly to Jail card for doing nothing to anyone but viewing some pixels.
Let's be clear, though. The people who produce this material are the scum of the Earth and need to go to jail immediately and stay there. That does not mean that we allow that sentiment to explode outward so that it affects even people who are unwillingly viewing that material. That's just too far.
They should end the laws that make viewing the material illegal and concentrate on trading and, most importantly, production. Anything that monetarily supports that business needs to be stamped out. If no one is trading this material, then no one is going to see it, and there is less incentive to produce it. There will always be some sick people who just do that for their jollies and trade with like minded pedos, but I don't see why fighting that has to turn into something that can pull in non-pedos and ruin their lives.
Personally, I think he's just over-enthusiastic and drinking his own Kool-Aid. I believe he's sincere, but lacks a certain sense of realism about where things are going and the actual challenges inherent in it.
I think we need people like that to sort of keep things moving forward, as it is far too easy to simply accept the world the way it is. Just as long as we collectively maintain a balanced perspective about what we are actually doing in regard to reality.
You're creating a strawman and willfully ignoring what I wrote.
I do not believe that the VA has been successful, and therefore it is not a good example of the government being able to do health care well. That doesn't mean I think it should be shut down, but it does mean that I don't think it should be duplicated for all Americans in a new program for universal health care.
The VA program is there and as people rely on it, I wouldn't just shut it down, but it is an example of how the government is bad at health care. It is not a good example of why we should trust the government with health care, in fact, it is quite the opposite.
I disagree. Sympathizing with him is only humane if there is something to sympathize with.
The only reason he is not dead is because to kill him makes us killers. We are not the same as he is and it is appropriate to not kill him.
He has to be incarcerated for everyone's protection, but sympathy is not required for him unless he really has some sort of true pathos that I am unaware of.
I don't think someone one needs an xbox and an HD TV to not be treated badly, but I agree that we should be working to actually take the time we have with such people in jail to try to get them to not re-offend. If that means those people having a decent standard of living in jail, I won't complain. However, I don't think he needs to be treated like a middle class schoolkid in jail to do that.
Now, the suggestion of solitary being extreme, I have to agree with. There have been times where I have been taken out of normal society for extended periods of time due to a schedule shift like working at night. Even though I was not incarcerated and did lots of things like play multiplayer games and hang out online, it severely decreased the number of people I was associating with and it was horrible. And I am not someone who needs lots of people around to be happy. I can only imagine how difficult it would be to actually be completely isolated except for some guards. Even an xbox and all the reading material in the world won't make that more tolerable.
As a victim of both waterboarding and microwaved meals, I'm with him. Unless I can get the good Stouffer's stuff, you might as well tie me back on to the board and stick the cellophane over my head and get to work. At least the gagging and fear allows me to forget those horrible Swedish Meatballs I had to experience that one time. *shiver*
I'm not a big fan of Che Guevara myself, but let's just say that Che had a bigger following than Breivik is ever likely to. He was speaking to and fighting for a cause that had widespread sympathy in Latin America, even if I think it was a bad ideology. I don't see there being the same support going for Breivik's idea in Norway.
I also don't think Che ever went on a one man killing spree in a camp.
Che was an adept organizer, not simply a "visionary soldier" (read: ideological murderer). He's famous less for killing people than he is for his organizing of people to do that killing.
That said, it is hard to say how things will go. If something radicalizes Europeans to that level and in that same way, yes he could be seen as more sympathetic. It's still hard to see anything short of a new fascism lionizing him.
Are you actually defending Federal heath care with the VA system? You know... the one where people with terminal illness never get appointments and then *die* of treatable illnesses so that Federal officials can get bonuses?
Actually, the VA system is an excellent argument for why the Federal government sucks at health care.
Of course, we can't shut down health care in the VA system, promises have been made, but please don't pretend that having to keep that promise means that is an argument that the government is doing a *good* job and it should expand its efforts to continue to provide underfunded health care to people who the government clearly doesn't actually care enough about to properly fund it.
And don't go blaming this or that party. When you have a health care system run by the government, you have now made health care a political football. If that's going to happen, let's bring the level of government down to the level where the legislators actually see people as humans and not as blocs of votes and special interests.
I'm against criminalization of drug use, but I don't for a second believe that pot legalization is representative of all legalized drugs.
I don't think drug users should be in jail, and certain drugs are clearly not a threat, but there are drugs out there that cause very nasty habits. Legal or not, they can destroy lives, just like legal alcohol does.
We should not downplay the effects, but remain objective about the benefits of decriminalization, including spending less money on jails and more money on a more fruitful effort of educating people away from drug use, especially dangerous drugs like heroin and methamphetamine.
And yet, in a Libertarian society, the existence of unions to protect workers from abuses would be completely legal and just as effective, if not more so. There is nothing about that solution that required any government intervention at all. Indeed, the original unions and strikers were opposed by governments and law enforcement which turned out against them at the behest of large business owners.
And once government became the "friend" of organized labor, you started to see the abuses from the other side as well from those parts of the government that were attempting to ensure the union vote on their side.
Even though I don't think that perfect anarchy is ever going to work, there are options with a more limited government. You need government for a lot of things, I just don't think we need it for everything and that is where it is going.
I'm sorry, but there is nothing safe about actual opiates taken for recreational purposes. Yes, pure forms of opiates aren't going to disfigure or kill you from impurities, but the level of physical dependency on opiates is real and quite considerable. This isn't pot we're talking about here. You should only be using opiates for something like actual painkilling, not for getting by in life.
Do I think that prohibition is necessarily the best idea? Not really. On the other hand, I feel about opiates the same way I do about many other things that are legal: Legal or not, you should simply never do it unless medically necessary.
I think there is a considerable state interest in keeping people off of hard drugs like opiates. I agree that the approach of treating them like criminals is not helpful, because ultimately, one reason to not want widespread drug use is the possibility of addiction fueled crime which consigns people to jails. So throwing people in jail to prevent people from going to jail is sort of silly.
I do think that opiates should be legal and available, but taxed heavily and as unfairly as possible. I think the government should keep a pulse on the black market and then keep throwing them off by lowering the prices to run the dealers out of business every time they make something cheaper. And at the same time, that money is to be thrown right back at the problem by funding anti-drug programs and education.
My only real concern with taxation making money off of drugs is that it will get thrown to the general fund, like Social Security, and then we end up as a country where we fund our government via addictions. That would bother me unless the only goal and target for that revenue source was getting people off those addictions and health care related to that.
Actually, the countries that Bernie Sanders loves are the size of US states. So why couldn't a US State manage its own program? It might actually work better.
Putting everything through a large Federal government considerably increases the waste due to administrative costs and makes health care into a permanent Federal level hot button issue that we really shouldn't be having at that level. You want to be talking about foreign relations, defense, and global trade at that level, and it would help if you could kick the health care issues down to a level that would be more responsive to begin with. In that way, we have Federal candidates who we can hold to task for a much less generalized set of responsibilities.
Also, creating a good health care program in a state could induce large economic growth in that state, thus providing incentives to less interested states to do the same thing.
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Oddly, though, I find that the encryption response to NSA intrusion to be as much of an overreaction as our response to terrorism has been.
Sure, I don't like them rifling though my Facebook pages I suppose. But at the same time, if I gave a shit about what was on Facebook, I wouldn't have posted it on Facebook.
I think we're in an arms race created by people flipping out about terrorism. We flip out to a terrorist attack and demand results. The NSA flips out about the need for results and whines when it can't read people's mail. The people flip out about the NSA trying to read people's mail and also missing terrorist attacks and throw up a bunch of encryption. In the end, more people die from auto accidents than terrorism, so everyone is basically wasting their time.
Yes, you're right, but the NSA and CIA do provide information to actual law enforcement for investigations and warnings. So this does affect law enforcement capabilities, if not directly.
The question is whether the added capabilities are worth the price and that is a political one.
Heavy elements are created by fusion inside of stars and also supernovae (which also frequently, but not always result in black holes). As far as I know, no black hole has ever exploded as nothing escapes from a black hole, and an explosion would seem to put the lie to that.
As far as creating a new universe from a singularity, we may never know. There is some speculation on that, but we're unlikely to ever be able to see that due to the impenetrability of the event horizon.
That said, our observations are that the Big Bang created mostly hydrogen, much less helium, and a trace of lithium. Heavy elements were not created in the Big Bang. We can see this with the Population II stars out there which are older and are metal-poor.
You're right, for a supermassive black hole, like the one at the center of our galaxy, the gravitational shear between what you experience at your head and your feet is basically like what you'd experience on the surface of Earth.
However, if you did manage to get far enough in, with all the oddness that implies, you would experience increasing shear as you approached the singularity. Eventually, it would become strong enough to rip you apart.
A "normal" stellar mass black hole would rip you apart almost immediately because the shear would be very high much less further in.
Either situation is probably academic, as you'd have been charbroiled long before you entered the event horizon by the X-rays and extremely hot matter in orbit which has been accelerated by the black hole to extreme velocities and energies.
No, the mass of a black hole does grow. The mass of black holes can be measured.
There are three things (and only three things) you can measure about a singularity inside a black hole: its mass, its charge, and its angular momentum. Obviously, for the black hole itself, you can measure the area of the event horizon as well, but the event horizon is not actually the singularity, but a border between where light can escape, and where it cannot. The event horizon's area and shape are defined by the singularity's mass (area of the event horizon) and the angular momentum (spinning singularities have "flattened" event horizons).
Now that may sound like a lot of things you can measure, but it is actually the most sparse data sets known to exist for an object. And considering all of the things that get sucked into a black hole, you lose a lot of information about the original infalling matter when it is reduced to that.
However, I thought that they had decided that the information was encoded into the event horizon as fluctuations, or was that just a theory?
Calling the Universe a simulation is pointless. It certainly could be, but the simple fact that it shares some characteristics of what we would call a "simulation" doesn't make it a "simulated universe".
That's like saying, "I think quantization is messy, so I am going to assume there is a Universe that doesn't have it because that would be less fake, or something".
We have no frame of reference outside of the Universe. Everything else is mere speculation and completely unscientific. Assuming that the Universe is a simulation because it is quantized is just making shit up. How could you possibly falsify such a theory?
Kind of an odd point for NdGT to make. You might as well believe in God, because you don't get a simulation without someone running one, and both concepts are at about the same level of scientific inquiry.
Anyway, I think the simulation idea is interesting, but in scientific terms it's wankery.
Looks pretty saccharine to me, and therefore not to my tastes, but it doesn't have to be. I just won't go there.
Freedom of association is important. Hopefully those who are in such a community will understand its value and be supportive of the existence of, if not the values of, other communities that they may not agree with.
The thing is... greed doesn't work that way.
Yes, they may try and hold it as long as possible to increase value, but note that something that sits in your vault, unused, doesn't make any money. And if they patent it, the patent does run out eventually. They need to do *something* with it.
More likely, it becomes used in very, very expensive applications where they can charge an arm and a leg for it. I'm thinking military equipment as a good target.
Eventually, though, unless it is uneconomical to mass produce, it will make its way into other things. Those who are greedy may well try and use older tech to keep it breaking, but someone who wants to break into the market, or someone even greedier is going to use it to differentiate their product in order to eat the lunch of the people using the inferior tech.
Note that it is possible for the better tech to be stopped, possibly through suggesting it is not safe (FUD) or some sort of paid-for government regulation, but greed by itself, won't stop this.
I don't want to underestimate the challenge of setting up a truly apolitical system, but I think such a thing can be possible. Or at least to the degree that it would be sufficient.
What it is really going to come down to is a strong understanding by everyone involved that this exists, it is not to be interfered with for political points, and every change needs to be simple and the reasons presented to all clearly.
And most importantly, there are no exceptions for anyone for any reason. A basic income is not meant to redress past wrongs or even end poverty. If I hand someone $100 bucks a week and they go spending it on entertainment and not food, then they should have the right to do so and starve. It is their choice.
If you do something illegal with the money, you still go to jail, but you still get your money the next period.
I would also make this caveat. A basic income is not a human right and should never be considered one. It is a mark of an advanced society. We do this to advance civilization and demonstrate that we have moved beyond hand to mouth survival. If a society cannot support a basic income readily, it should not.
So, if we cannot come up with a governance system that can adequately create that situation, I don't think it should be forced. I don't believe that it is impossible to do, however. And I think the worst enemy of such a system is politics, followed by ignorance of what is actually being provided. Dispel ignorance, remove as much politicking as possible, and have a societal understanding of exactly what is being provided and I think it can work.
I will not pretend that I know if we're totally ready for that, but I think it is a question we need to look at because structural unemployment caused by automation and rapid progress may eventually get so high as to ultimately change the nature of society. At the same time, it is hard to argue that you should dispense with automation just to keep less efficient people in jobs. We clearly don't need all humans to work all the time to eat now, at least in Western countries. So we should not be holding ourselves back forcing there to be jobs when we don't need those jobs. Or forebears have built a world that they meant to leave to us in which they invested so we may benefit. We should thus benefit.
I agree. People either live in NYC for one of two reasons:
* They need to hold down a job in NYC
* They like NYC for some reason.
In the first instance, basic income means they can just leave NYC because they don't need to live there anymore.
In the second, then it is up to them to make up the difference between their basic income and what it costs to live in NYC. Presumably that will be provided by an employer.
Yes, but you shouldn't underestimate the effects. The government won't just be offering a service or some benefits. They will stand in for every single employer out there. You can argue that this is no different than any other employer paying someone, and certainly there are parallels.
However, think about what employers are sometimes able to make their employees do.... If people become used to having a basic income, it absolutely *MUST* be no strings attached. That means:
No removal of basic income for felonies, including serial killing or terrorism.
No removal of income for saying things that no one likes, including the most vile racism, sexism, or ethnocentricity you can think of
No removal of income for failing to vote
No removal of income for anything at all except dying, and only then if we have a death certificate or a legal process declaring them dead.
And that needs to be made a Constitutional Amendment that Congress would have zero power to adjust or amend.
I am actually *FOR* a basic income. I believe that it is what greater automation and productivity of humanity should be providing us with. What I do NOT want to happen is it becomes a social engineering experiment for ANYONE.
In fact, I'd prefer if the political system had no control over the basic income at all. Zero. It is controlled simply by a directorate who can only change it based on things like the value of the dollar or the GDP or something. No exemptions, no incentives, nothing but X amount of money delivered to every citizen over the age of 18. Their only job is to ensure that the plan does not sap the economy by an unrealistic expectation of what people can get out of it.
Gentlemen! Please! You don't have to crowd so close together, this is the Space Room!
If China does it, they won't have to worry about that. They'll have a Great Moon Firewall that will make connections to the Internet impossible anyway.
Sadly, the loss of life we have suffered did not used to terrify us, and I don't think it terrifies most people in the USA today either. It's those people who are always looking for some sort of outrage or some sort of event to make themselves seem important or to grab a headline. And then the damage control starts and the politicians run away so that they don't end up on the Evening News.
I don't think America as a nation has run away from a space program or space exploration, but I do think our *government* considers it either a joke or a pork barrel. And that is why I hope commercial exploration keeps moving forward.
If they succeed, which I think they are quite capable of, China will prove that we are held back less by the difficulty of the task of the Moon, or a Moon base, or going to Mars, but rather by the difficulty of getting our politicians to pull their heads out of their asses to commit to it.
I agree that they shouldn't simply target people who "view" anything, especially if you can be entrapped into it by going to a perfectly legitimate adult porn site and suddenly, you're looking at child porn. That could affect anyone, being an actual pedophile is not required. That is just scary.
Unless you can trace back monetary payments to the producers or traders of such material, I don't see how simply viewing that material exploits anyone, even if it is for more perverted reasons. It's like a Go to Jail, Go Directly to Jail card for doing nothing to anyone but viewing some pixels.
Let's be clear, though. The people who produce this material are the scum of the Earth and need to go to jail immediately and stay there. That does not mean that we allow that sentiment to explode outward so that it affects even people who are unwillingly viewing that material. That's just too far.
They should end the laws that make viewing the material illegal and concentrate on trading and, most importantly, production. Anything that monetarily supports that business needs to be stamped out. If no one is trading this material, then no one is going to see it, and there is less incentive to produce it. There will always be some sick people who just do that for their jollies and trade with like minded pedos, but I don't see why fighting that has to turn into something that can pull in non-pedos and ruin their lives.
Personally, I think he's just over-enthusiastic and drinking his own Kool-Aid. I believe he's sincere, but lacks a certain sense of realism about where things are going and the actual challenges inherent in it.
I think we need people like that to sort of keep things moving forward, as it is far too easy to simply accept the world the way it is. Just as long as we collectively maintain a balanced perspective about what we are actually doing in regard to reality.
You're creating a strawman and willfully ignoring what I wrote.
I do not believe that the VA has been successful, and therefore it is not a good example of the government being able to do health care well. That doesn't mean I think it should be shut down, but it does mean that I don't think it should be duplicated for all Americans in a new program for universal health care.
The VA program is there and as people rely on it, I wouldn't just shut it down, but it is an example of how the government is bad at health care. It is not a good example of why we should trust the government with health care, in fact, it is quite the opposite.
I disagree. Sympathizing with him is only humane if there is something to sympathize with.
The only reason he is not dead is because to kill him makes us killers. We are not the same as he is and it is appropriate to not kill him.
He has to be incarcerated for everyone's protection, but sympathy is not required for him unless he really has some sort of true pathos that I am unaware of.
I don't think someone one needs an xbox and an HD TV to not be treated badly, but I agree that we should be working to actually take the time we have with such people in jail to try to get them to not re-offend. If that means those people having a decent standard of living in jail, I won't complain. However, I don't think he needs to be treated like a middle class schoolkid in jail to do that.
Now, the suggestion of solitary being extreme, I have to agree with. There have been times where I have been taken out of normal society for extended periods of time due to a schedule shift like working at night. Even though I was not incarcerated and did lots of things like play multiplayer games and hang out online, it severely decreased the number of people I was associating with and it was horrible. And I am not someone who needs lots of people around to be happy. I can only imagine how difficult it would be to actually be completely isolated except for some guards. Even an xbox and all the reading material in the world won't make that more tolerable.
As a victim of both waterboarding and microwaved meals, I'm with him. Unless I can get the good Stouffer's stuff, you might as well tie me back on to the board and stick the cellophane over my head and get to work. At least the gagging and fear allows me to forget those horrible Swedish Meatballs I had to experience that one time. *shiver*
I'm not a big fan of Che Guevara myself, but let's just say that Che had a bigger following than Breivik is ever likely to. He was speaking to and fighting for a cause that had widespread sympathy in Latin America, even if I think it was a bad ideology. I don't see there being the same support going for Breivik's idea in Norway.
I also don't think Che ever went on a one man killing spree in a camp.
Che was an adept organizer, not simply a "visionary soldier" (read: ideological murderer). He's famous less for killing people than he is for his organizing of people to do that killing.
That said, it is hard to say how things will go. If something radicalizes Europeans to that level and in that same way, yes he could be seen as more sympathetic. It's still hard to see anything short of a new fascism lionizing him.
Are you actually defending Federal heath care with the VA system? You know... the one where people with terminal illness never get appointments and then *die* of treatable illnesses so that Federal officials can get bonuses?
Actually, the VA system is an excellent argument for why the Federal government sucks at health care.
Of course, we can't shut down health care in the VA system, promises have been made, but please don't pretend that having to keep that promise means that is an argument that the government is doing a *good* job and it should expand its efforts to continue to provide underfunded health care to people who the government clearly doesn't actually care enough about to properly fund it.
And don't go blaming this or that party. When you have a health care system run by the government, you have now made health care a political football. If that's going to happen, let's bring the level of government down to the level where the legislators actually see people as humans and not as blocs of votes and special interests.
I'm against criminalization of drug use, but I don't for a second believe that pot legalization is representative of all legalized drugs.
I don't think drug users should be in jail, and certain drugs are clearly not a threat, but there are drugs out there that cause very nasty habits. Legal or not, they can destroy lives, just like legal alcohol does.
We should not downplay the effects, but remain objective about the benefits of decriminalization, including spending less money on jails and more money on a more fruitful effort of educating people away from drug use, especially dangerous drugs like heroin and methamphetamine.
And yet, in a Libertarian society, the existence of unions to protect workers from abuses would be completely legal and just as effective, if not more so. There is nothing about that solution that required any government intervention at all. Indeed, the original unions and strikers were opposed by governments and law enforcement which turned out against them at the behest of large business owners.
And once government became the "friend" of organized labor, you started to see the abuses from the other side as well from those parts of the government that were attempting to ensure the union vote on their side.
Even though I don't think that perfect anarchy is ever going to work, there are options with a more limited government. You need government for a lot of things, I just don't think we need it for everything and that is where it is going.
I'm sorry, but there is nothing safe about actual opiates taken for recreational purposes. Yes, pure forms of opiates aren't going to disfigure or kill you from impurities, but the level of physical dependency on opiates is real and quite considerable. This isn't pot we're talking about here. You should only be using opiates for something like actual painkilling, not for getting by in life.
Do I think that prohibition is necessarily the best idea? Not really. On the other hand, I feel about opiates the same way I do about many other things that are legal: Legal or not, you should simply never do it unless medically necessary.
I think there is a considerable state interest in keeping people off of hard drugs like opiates. I agree that the approach of treating them like criminals is not helpful, because ultimately, one reason to not want widespread drug use is the possibility of addiction fueled crime which consigns people to jails. So throwing people in jail to prevent people from going to jail is sort of silly.
I do think that opiates should be legal and available, but taxed heavily and as unfairly as possible. I think the government should keep a pulse on the black market and then keep throwing them off by lowering the prices to run the dealers out of business every time they make something cheaper. And at the same time, that money is to be thrown right back at the problem by funding anti-drug programs and education.
My only real concern with taxation making money off of drugs is that it will get thrown to the general fund, like Social Security, and then we end up as a country where we fund our government via addictions. That would bother me unless the only goal and target for that revenue source was getting people off those addictions and health care related to that.
Actually, the countries that Bernie Sanders loves are the size of US states. So why couldn't a US State manage its own program? It might actually work better.
Putting everything through a large Federal government considerably increases the waste due to administrative costs and makes health care into a permanent Federal level hot button issue that we really shouldn't be having at that level. You want to be talking about foreign relations, defense, and global trade at that level, and it would help if you could kick the health care issues down to a level that would be more responsive to begin with. In that way, we have Federal candidates who we can hold to task for a much less generalized set of responsibilities.
Also, creating a good health care program in a state could induce large economic growth in that state, thus providing incentives to less interested states to do the same thing.