Hitler was no Stalin. He was not out to replace corporate executives with his own cronies, and he most certainly didn't. He knew that those already at the top were in a far better position to make industry thrive and help rebuild the German economy than anyone the NSDAP could come up with. Hitler received a lot of backing from heavy industry (his opponents from within the party were being backed by light industry) before he ever even came into power. The fear on everyone's mind was communism (and the economy to a somewhat lesser extent). The Nazi Party and Hitler were seen as the most viable option to succeed in fighting against it. Labor unions tended to be very Marxist and corporations feared them. Hitler promised industry (and delivered) a regime where they would thrive and where labor unions would not be a threat to their existance.
It should be noted that the platform of the NSDAP on paper was not the NSDAP under Hitler. There were many similarities yes, but much of what Hitler did was at odds with the party at large. Hitler was very much in bed with big money heavy industry and despite the NSDAP's stance of being pro labor union (so long as they weren't Marxists), they were very heavy handed with them in an effort to appease some of their biggest monetary supporters.
This fact is no different than any other system and is not unique to capitalism. Any amount of power tends towards corruption if there is no control valve. In the USSR where there was to be a single class society, there were two classes; those who were in charge of controlling the distribution of wealth, and everyone else. In those european nations with a socialist slant, the result is somewhat akin to facism, where the tables are turned and government seizes power over big business. The inevitable result of this is really not all that different than business seizing control of government.
I am of the opinion that for the most part, people do not need a college education. What they need is a quality highschool education. Far too many people with a college education end up working retail and other jobs not applying their degree. Flooding the job market with sub-par college graduates does nothing but lower wages due to decreased competition, and fatter wallets for the universities. It's bad to encourage people to go to college without a plan on what they want to do. The only people pushing the "it's ok to be undecided" idea are the colleges themselves.
While well intentioned, your argument fails to reflect reality. Our so called "educated public" already fails to understand the whole picture and often drives our politicians to do things not good for our nation as a whole. Our education system is designed to create followers and fails to produce leaders. While being able to be a good follower is essential, at least SOME leadership skill is also essential for people to understand the big picture.
I had class mates in my senior year of engineering school that were shocked that you couldn't just design a part using CAD-CAM and email the design off to a machine shop to be produced. The concept of thinking about how the part was going to actually be made eluded them. We had a conversation that went something like this:
|Me| They can't make that part the way it's designed.
|Them| Can't they just machine it out of Delrin?
|Me| Where are they going to find a 1 ft cube of Delrin?!
we have a nice standard for what is Obscene:
(a) It (whatever it is, photo, "artwork", film, etc.) must appeal primarily to purient interest
(b) It depicts sexual activity in a patently offensive manner (according to community standards)
(c) Taken as a whole, the work has no artistic, political, or social value. This definition is a huge pile of horseshit. By this definition, my having weird sex with my wife is illegal. BDSM between consenting adults would be strictly illegal in almost every part of the country. And just about any career artist's head will explode when you start legislating what it means to have artistic value. Most of Picaso's work would be considered obsene in many places by this definition.
This is not necessarily true for regulated industries. A medical device company would need more than 5 years to bring a complex new device to market and turn a profit. I think 10 years should be sufficient, and 6 years to put it on the market. If you donâ(TM)t have something on the market in 6 years, the patent should expire. Perhaps exceptions for regulated industries would be more reasonable than a one size fits all rule set.
A little off topic, but actually a little less than roughly half the land in Pennsylvania was given up voluntarily in exchange for goods. For quite some time Pennsylvania had a good relationship with the Six Nations and had a policy to maintain that relationship. However, after the French and Indian War, this relationship quickly started to deteriorate. With the loss of their long time interpreter/ambassador to the Six Nations in the 1760s, and the Western expansion finally starting to severely over crowd their hunter/gatherer society, the communication finally fell apart and it was all bad from that point on.
I wouldn't call that playing devil's advocate at all. The fact is, lead actors are often grossly over paid. People complain about CEO's making millions when a company is doing poorly under them, but think nothing of movie actors making millions when the MPAA reports diving profits due to pirating. They don't even take on major responsibility for the production (no one wrings their neck when it's a flop). For some high profile actors in certain situations, high compensation is earned because they will draw a lot more viewers and money. However, the rediculous millions they make plus royalties is not justified.
What about all of the creative programmers that create the interaction that drives the sales of these video games? What about their millions of dollars?
Picture an America devoid of Harry Potter because some religious nutbag in the government decided that J.K. Rowling was promoting witchcraft. The idea of a world without Harry Potter pleases me to the point where I don't think I would mind if it was censored. Though this is a unique case for me. And yes I realize the slippery slope.
This is the last response I will make to this. I was a bit presumptuous to say that jury nullification is not allowed. However, it has a shaky position in the US justice system.
US vs Dougherty 1972, US Court of Appeals: This case upheld that a jury can nullify the law. It also found that the defense may not inform the jury of their power to nullify the law.
U.S. v. Krzyske 1988: The judge was asked by a jury member about jury nullification and was told by the judge "There is no such thing as valid jury nullification." The jury convicted the defendant and the decision was upheld on appeal.
U.S. v. Thomas 1997, Second Circuit: "ruled that jurors can be removed if there is evidence that they intend to nullify the law, under Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure 23(b)." (wikipedia)
It's a lot more complicated that you make it out to be.
Why would you need an RFID chip for surgery? Why not a regular hospital bracelet? If you need definite identification, you can even get a temporary tattoo from a tattoo gun. If it's done lightly, it comes off in about 30 days. Not that I don't entirely agree with most of your points, there's a liability issue with patient identification. Hospitals spend a LOT of money trying to minimize human error when it comes to getting the right treatment to the right patient. The consequences of error can be severe for both the patient's health (long and short term) and the bottom line of a hospital's finances (due to malpractice litigation). As such, I am completely understanding if a hosptital wanted to demand that you had an RFID tag on your person when recieving care. With that said, implantation doesn't make much sense because it would increase the risk of infection. A much more likely senario is a RFID tagged ID bracelet. This would be safer, cheaper, much more efficient, and the compared failure rate would be negligible.
Here's a simplified explanation of how trial by jury works. Before the trial, the judge explains to the jury what law the defendant is accused of breaking, and explains to them specifically that they are only to determine whether or not the defendant broke that law. He also instructs the jury on how to interpret that law. The jury is not given a copy of the written law to read for themselves. This is what is specifically ment when someone refers to the instruction of a jury.
THEN at the trial the prosecution makes their case to present the evidence that the defendant broke the law in question. THEN the defense makes their case for defense. This is not considered "instructing a jury". Interpretation of the law (or it's non-existence) is not allowed as a defense because only the judge is allowed to do this. If the case made it through a hearing, then the judge has decided that the law in question exists. Only in an appeal to a much higher court can the law itself come into question. And at this point, the final decision is being made by judges. Hope this makes you feel all warm and fuzzy.
The defendant never has anything to do with how the jury is instructed. The jury is instructed by the judge based on the judge's interpretation of the law. Blame the judges in this case. Also note, jury nullification is not allowed. As Original_Replica stated, trial by jury in the US is a sham.
He is in jail not because he was told to shut up. He's in jail because the jury was improperly instructed. There have been many other cases like his where the question at hand (that there is no law creating the present state of the income tax) was brought up. The problem is that the government has decided that the improper instruction of the jury is proper. So appeals canâ(TM)t work so long as everyone in the bureaucratic chain actually agrees on something. Furthermore, this is not something that our Congressmen have power over, and I guarantee that they are not going to pass a new law banning income tax no matter how many people bitch. The most you could hope for is a real law creating the income tax.
This book was "Previously banned" by the admission of the author. Right along with Lolita and others. It is banned no more. Don't forget about the Sedition Act when John Adams was President. Christ, it's not like anyone is claming that the US is perfect.
Find a freedom that is PRESENTLY being violated in the US to bitch about. It's not hard to do.
Advertising makes products that I do want cost more There's a double edged sword here. Without advertising, new product awareness takes an extremely long time to mature. You are relying entirely on word-of-mouth from those who just happened to walk by and notice it in a store. This means volume will be extremely low and cost per item relatively high. The consequence of this is that the manufacturer must charge more for the product. It always costs a lot less per unit to make 1,000,000 of an item than to make 1,000 of an item. Advertising done appropriately spreads product awareness rapidly, informing those who would want the product that it exists, thereby increasing the product market and lowering the price. The problem with advertising only comes when advertising is done in excess and causes the prices to start to climb again.
They can only enforce this in their own country. In other words, if Google and Yahoo don't play by their rules, they will probably be filtered by the Great Firewall of China.
The reality of moves like this is that unless they require some kind of objective identification or background checks on every single user, minors will start accounts saying that they are older and pedophiles will start accounts saying that they are younger. The amusing conclusion is that pedophiles will only be hitting on eachother.
It always pains me to order beer at a restaurant. Not only am I paying out the arse for it, I have to be lucky for them to have something other than piss water. I'll just take clean water thank you.
But aside from that, it amazes me how people complain about the rising costs of everything, but never seem to notice fountain drinks.
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Hitler was no Stalin. He was not out to replace corporate executives with his own cronies, and he most certainly didn't. He knew that those already at the top were in a far better position to make industry thrive and help rebuild the German economy than anyone the NSDAP could come up with. Hitler received a lot of backing from heavy industry (his opponents from within the party were being backed by light industry) before he ever even came into power. The fear on everyone's mind was communism (and the economy to a somewhat lesser extent). The Nazi Party and Hitler were seen as the most viable option to succeed in fighting against it. Labor unions tended to be very Marxist and corporations feared them. Hitler promised industry (and delivered) a regime where they would thrive and where labor unions would not be a threat to their existance.
It should be noted that the platform of the NSDAP on paper was not the NSDAP under Hitler. There were many similarities yes, but much of what Hitler did was at odds with the party at large. Hitler was very much in bed with big money heavy industry and despite the NSDAP's stance of being pro labor union (so long as they weren't Marxists), they were very heavy handed with them in an effort to appease some of their biggest monetary supporters.
This fact is no different than any other system and is not unique to capitalism. Any amount of power tends towards corruption if there is no control valve. In the USSR where there was to be a single class society, there were two classes; those who were in charge of controlling the distribution of wealth, and everyone else. In those european nations with a socialist slant, the result is somewhat akin to facism, where the tables are turned and government seizes power over big business. The inevitable result of this is really not all that different than business seizing control of government.
I am of the opinion that for the most part, people do not need a college education. What they need is a quality highschool education. Far too many people with a college education end up working retail and other jobs not applying their degree. Flooding the job market with sub-par college graduates does nothing but lower wages due to decreased competition, and fatter wallets for the universities. It's bad to encourage people to go to college without a plan on what they want to do. The only people pushing the "it's ok to be undecided" idea are the colleges themselves.
While well intentioned, your argument fails to reflect reality. Our so called "educated public" already fails to understand the whole picture and often drives our politicians to do things not good for our nation as a whole. Our education system is designed to create followers and fails to produce leaders. While being able to be a good follower is essential, at least SOME leadership skill is also essential for people to understand the big picture.
I had class mates in my senior year of engineering school that were shocked that you couldn't just design a part using CAD-CAM and email the design off to a machine shop to be produced. The concept of thinking about how the part was going to actually be made eluded them. We had a conversation that went something like this:
|Me| They can't make that part the way it's designed.
|Them| Can't they just machine it out of Delrin?
|Me| Where are they going to find a 1 ft cube of Delrin?!
This is not necessarily true for regulated industries. A medical device company would need more than 5 years to bring a complex new device to market and turn a profit. I think 10 years should be sufficient, and 6 years to put it on the market. If you donâ(TM)t have something on the market in 6 years, the patent should expire. Perhaps exceptions for regulated industries would be more reasonable than a one size fits all rule set.
A little off topic, but actually a little less than roughly half the land in Pennsylvania was given up voluntarily in exchange for goods. For quite some time Pennsylvania had a good relationship with the Six Nations and had a policy to maintain that relationship. However, after the French and Indian War, this relationship quickly started to deteriorate. With the loss of their long time interpreter/ambassador to the Six Nations in the 1760s, and the Western expansion finally starting to severely over crowd their hunter/gatherer society, the communication finally fell apart and it was all bad from that point on.
I wouldn't call that playing devil's advocate at all. The fact is, lead actors are often grossly over paid. People complain about CEO's making millions when a company is doing poorly under them, but think nothing of movie actors making millions when the MPAA reports diving profits due to pirating. They don't even take on major responsibility for the production (no one wrings their neck when it's a flop). For some high profile actors in certain situations, high compensation is earned because they will draw a lot more viewers and money. However, the rediculous millions they make plus royalties is not justified.
What about all of the creative programmers that create the interaction that drives the sales of these video games? What about their millions of dollars?
This is the last response I will make to this. I was a bit presumptuous to say that jury nullification is not allowed. However, it has a shaky position in the US justice system.
US vs Dougherty 1972, US Court of Appeals: This case upheld that a jury can nullify the law. It also found that the defense may not inform the jury of their power to nullify the law.
U.S. v. Krzyske 1988: The judge was asked by a jury member about jury nullification and was told by the judge "There is no such thing as valid jury nullification." The jury convicted the defendant and the decision was upheld on appeal.
U.S. v. Thomas 1997, Second Circuit: "ruled that jurors can be removed if there is evidence that they intend to nullify the law, under Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure 23(b)." (wikipedia)
It's a lot more complicated that you make it out to be.
Keys are going out of style due to the ease of copying keys and picking locks.
Here's a simplified explanation of how trial by jury works. Before the trial, the judge explains to the jury what law the defendant is accused of breaking, and explains to them specifically that they are only to determine whether or not the defendant broke that law. He also instructs the jury on how to interpret that law. The jury is not given a copy of the written law to read for themselves. This is what is specifically ment when someone refers to the instruction of a jury.
THEN at the trial the prosecution makes their case to present the evidence that the defendant broke the law in question. THEN the defense makes their case for defense. This is not considered "instructing a jury". Interpretation of the law (or it's non-existence) is not allowed as a defense because only the judge is allowed to do this. If the case made it through a hearing, then the judge has decided that the law in question exists. Only in an appeal to a much higher court can the law itself come into question. And at this point, the final decision is being made by judges. Hope this makes you feel all warm and fuzzy.
The defendant never has anything to do with how the jury is instructed. The jury is instructed by the judge based on the judge's interpretation of the law. Blame the judges in this case. Also note, jury nullification is not allowed. As Original_Replica stated, trial by jury in the US is a sham.
He is in jail not because he was told to shut up. He's in jail because the jury was improperly instructed. There have been many other cases like his where the question at hand (that there is no law creating the present state of the income tax) was brought up. The problem is that the government has decided that the improper instruction of the jury is proper. So appeals canâ(TM)t work so long as everyone in the bureaucratic chain actually agrees on something. Furthermore, this is not something that our Congressmen have power over, and I guarantee that they are not going to pass a new law banning income tax no matter how many people bitch. The most you could hope for is a real law creating the income tax.
This book was "Previously banned" by the admission of the author. Right along with Lolita and others. It is banned no more. Don't forget about the Sedition Act when John Adams was President. Christ, it's not like anyone is claming that the US is perfect.
Find a freedom that is PRESENTLY being violated in the US to bitch about. It's not hard to do.
This includes the Roman Catholic Church who holds many secrets in the Vatican. Though I view them as a cult as well.
They can only enforce this in their own country. In other words, if Google and Yahoo don't play by their rules, they will probably be filtered by the Great Firewall of China.
The reality of moves like this is that unless they require some kind of objective identification or background checks on every single user, minors will start accounts saying that they are older and pedophiles will start accounts saying that they are younger. The amusing conclusion is that pedophiles will only be hitting on eachother.
It always pains me to order beer at a restaurant. Not only am I paying out the arse for it, I have to be lucky for them to have something other than piss water. I'll just take clean water thank you.
But aside from that, it amazes me how people complain about the rising costs of everything, but never seem to notice fountain drinks.