You proved yourself to be a redneck, uneducated, and racist in the same post that you denounced the same. Bravo! I think I'll avoid Cleveland and try some Cincinnati chili....
I think the shame of it is that China's basically following the US' pattern of success. Following WWII, the States had a huge manufacturing machine. Programs like Apollo, basically fueled by cold-war competitive feelings, continued to allow the gigantic military-industrial complex that is the US economy grow even further. We see now, as America tranforms slowly into a tertiary economy, that this might not be the best way to do things.
The shame of it is that China could do some interesting things, and not just reinvent the wheel, as another poster suggests. I suggest that this 'reinvention' isn't in technology, but economic development. Instead of following the footsteps of the Americans, why not become powerhouse agricultural experts, or energy technologists for that matter? They certainly have the land to erect multi-acre solar arrays. These would give China a huge advantage in the world, and have the added bonus of feeding its people.
I've been to China, and I've been to the poorer neighborhoods in the States. You just can't compare the two, 1960's or now. IMHO, the class division there is much more prominent than in the West.
Oh, and before you mod this as flamebait, maybe at least try to make an effort to prove me wrong!
'Don't know if this is your sig or you meant to attach this to your post, but the onus should be on *you* as the one that asserts the point to prove yourself right. Just saying 'education was better in Russia than is in the US now' and 'more people were covered than they are in the US now' doesn't make it so.
So I'll turn it back to you -- I'd like to see figures that prove that the *quality of care* for all those Soviets covered by the national healthcare plan was equal -- or even in the same stratosphere -- as the equivalent US citizen on private health insurance. I won't comment either way on the education stance, which is highly subjective, except to say that a reasonable education is available to as vast majority of Americans. You can lead a horse to water...
As for the question as to whether the US should spend money on a space race when we have so many that don't have insurance, as so many other posters said, this isn't how an economy works. If there were as many people *starving* in the US, living at the absolute bottommost percent of the poverty level when compared to the poorest of the poor countries, the gov't would be abandoning these kinds of cultural/scientific milestones, and pursuing social programs. Wait -- I believe they did already. Look at the state of the union in the 30's. Little programs started like the WPA and the SSA. If JFK faced similar times, you can certainly bet the Apollo money would've gone directly to the soup kitchens.
Waiters and waitresses are required to claim a minimum of 8% above sale
Quick note -- this is a common misconception. An audit is initiated on a restaurant when its staff does not claim a total of 8% of the total sales for that tax period. At that point, individual servers are audited, where a study of each individual's sales is done. Without a specific audit, the gov't has no way to calculate specific server/sales ratios. Only the total for the reporting busines..
So, if you're a bright and somewhat sketchy bartender, and I've known many, you train the unwashed masses who get a job at the bar/restaurant to wait tables, and tell them that they have to claim 100% of their tips. This is usually between 10-20%. Even most experienced servers claim 10%, just to be safe. Said bartender can claim *nada*. Every corporate-run bar/restaurant is continually checked to make sure the 8% margin is being met restaurant-wide, so an individual an be confident that he won't trigger an audit. Usually this is just one or two of the top people in the business, so they don't greatly affect the total numbers.
Pretty sketchy, like I said. I'm not sure why the gov't hasn't clamped down on it more, other than lack of interest. Bigger fish to fry, I guess.
While the parent was indeed a plagiarist, and I do agree that the size comparisons that people make are silly, why can't we call IFF a form of RFID? IFF *is* RFID. You can't divorce the two. I can easily find dozens of credible sources that cite IFF as a form of active RFID. IEEE websites, rfidprivacy.org, several university sites, all agree that IFF was the first developed RFID technology. The only key difference in what Wal*Mart's using is in the fact that it's a passive system. It's radio frequency identification, right? Why wouldn't identify-friend or foe qualify?
Very well said -- I didn't stress enough that there isn't 'one diet to rule them all.' We're all different, and our dietary requirements certainly are too.
I for one, tend to put on belly fat if I'm not careful about my carbs, so I totally agree with your healthy fat statements. It's the people that think they can continually eat whatever fat they want, and just avoid the carbs, that worry me. I think 20/20 or some such show followed a bunch of people trying different weight-loss programs around, and the Atkins guy's typical dinner was 6 McD's quarter pounders, sans the bread. Not what I'd call healthy fat, compared to some nice omega-3 fats like you'd get with salmon or tuna. Hell, even trim strip steak would beat the clown's pseudo-meat. And don't even get me started on trans-fatty acids from partially hydrogenized veggy oil, the 'plastic' oils as you so rightly described.
Anyway, you're totally right. Different strokes for different folks. Thanks for the good points.
Totally agree that the 'calories are calories' statement is pretty silly.
But I think the point that the FDA is trying to make is that limiting advertising of unhealthy food, providing subsidies to healthier food providers, and taxing unhealthy ones is waaayy too stringent. Are they acting as an advocate for the junk food industry? Absolutely! And rightly so.
The US tends to be very careful about when and how it limits the market -- one of the reasons capitalism has worked there is because the gov't keeps its nose out as much as possible. Take smoking -- it look a long time for the government to rev up policies to limit the marketing of cigarettes, but when they did, it was justified. Smoking is physically addictive and it kills. Eating sweets/junk/other empty calories, on the other hand, can be done in moderation. Is it Dolly Madison's or McDonald's fault that people overeat their products? No. There are plenty -- I among them -- who enjoy these kinds of food in moderation and can still fit into a rollercoaster seat. Until it can be proven that overeating is caused by the food itself, and not just pure western pigginess, it's only safe to say that the WHO's dietary guidelines were right, *not* their legal recommendations.
(As a side note, I also think that the reason that so much of the US is overweight, despite the obsession with a trim appearance, is because the people care about it for the wrong reason. We want to be thin, but don't care about being healthy. Fat and cholesterol be damned, I'm going to stay on phase one of the Atkins diet until I look like Jennifer Aniston. Who cares about cardio health and liver disease. Until the population at large begins to care about the holistic picture, the scales will continue to climb)
While I agree that the parent doesn't specifically mention anything about this, doesn't it directly apply to the grandparent? This:
Maybe if they didn't spend R&D time and money on useless features, their products would be more affordable
I thought this implied that Photoshop was too expensive to reach anything but a commercial environment, and that if they dropped the cost, they would make up the loss per unit by vastly increasing demand and volume. Software, obviously, has a tiny manufacturing cost after R&D. So, price goes down, demand goes up -- elasticity of demand, right? I'm honestly asking, IANAEconomist. 'Just heard of this term in the previous post.
We discuss this concept in MCAD a lot, though. We work in the highest part of the field; our packages can easily reach six figures per seat without support. The assumption is that we only sell to big aerospace, automotive, and consumer goods, so we have to make up the gigantic R&D cost with a high unit cost, since we sell to a relative small number of companies. But what about the oodles of small shops that are using AutoCAD or another low- to mid-end products? If we dropped our price to that level, given the huge functionality/performance/process improvements in this kind of product, would the volume more than cover the per-unit price drop? It's something all the major MCAD players try to do in some contrived fashion, but it never quite works as expected.
I suppose PhotoShop elements tries to do a similar thing, disabling what they believe to be irrelevent home-user features, and dropping the price accordingly. It would be interesting to see what those sales figures look like compared to the mainstream product. I would guess that despite the gigantic number of dig-camera users, the number of home users wanting to dick with the images, beyond contrast changes o maybe cropping, is pretty small.
Very interesting comments -- tort reform has for so long been considered a no-brainer by those 'in the know', you never hear well-drawn counter arguments. Well done.
Re:You know... things just don't amaze me.
on
Message in a Battle
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· Score: 1
See, I think these are two entirely different types of animation. I tend to still think Dobby was more interesting and advanced.
I believe that for Gollum, they actually motion-captured Andy Serkis' movements with a cloud-of-points-type of suit. Effectively, the realism of his movements is derived just like rotoscoping.
Dobby, on the other hand, was a fully scratch-created and rendered character. He's somewhat more complex, too, because of his clothing (which rocked) and some other 'extras' on his body. Not to take anything away from Gollum -- he's fantastic -- but notice too that Dobby got much less screen time. I suspect the hours-to-frames ratio for Dobby was significantly higher than Gollum. Just a guess.
Some of Dobby's movements were just incredible, too. Gollum's expressions were very special, but I didn't see any body movement that was as striking as when Dobby snapped his fingers. It was so fluid and balanced, it was just breathtaking.
I'm not a fan of the movement to make everything out of shiny looking plastics with their high gloss finish that gives things things an oily look. But, even the metal backing on the iPods gets smeared with fingerprints
Geeze, you must really have a hard time finding a car you like.
Wow, so we have nowhere to go in terms of evolving software development methodologies? Brooks would be disappointed.
Saying this book is only about a "cute 'invisible elephant'" analogy is like saying that The Mythical Man Month takes 300 pages to only say that there is no silver bullet for the problems of the dev cycle. My hope would be that newer books derive common ideas from the foundations of modern software engineering, like Brooks' works. Keep an open mind.
I think he was just talking about the voluminous, boring nature of The Silmarillion.
I don't know if other Christian religions do this, but on Christmas Eve at the Catholic church I went to when I was a kid, they used read this llooonnnnggggggg passage that is one solid, multipage sentence describing Christ's lineage. Without a doubt, that homily is what's waiting for me if there's a hell. When I read the 1st page of Silarmillion, it reminded me of this. I threw the book down and ran out of the room shrieking like a little girl.
I run builds for a large software development team, building on XP, Irix, Solaris, RedHat, HP and AIX. An XP box is my primary workstation and one of my build machines; I use it for coding, building, email, web surfing, testing, just about every day-to-day task.
I use Outlook and it does crash often (every other day?), but I've yet to have it drag down the whole O/S. 'Matter of fact, at different times I have to reboot (cleanly) because something's acting flakey or it's gotten slow, but I've never had the O/S flat out crash. Certainly the Unix boxen stay up longer, but my XP's idle process is currently about 700 hours old -- around a month. If you're crashing twice a day, I'd imagine that something's not quite setup right with your system.
Dostoevsky said that "beauty will save the world." I don't understand why it's beyond the capacity of the average Slashdotter to imagine that art, literature, and other parts of our culture could have some value equal to medical research and other 'practical' matters.
Try going to a museum some time. Some of the greatest works of art ever done were conceived with the help of huge amounts of private funding. Michelangelo was no starving artist; many of his benefactors chose to lavish him with riches. Why should modern trusts do any less?
I'm an engineer and as pragmatic as the next guy, but given a world without art and beauty, just give me the cancer -- what's the point?
BTW, if this was sarcasm and I missed it, I'm very happy and apologize in advance.
I assume from your post that Western economists are not your favorite people.
I think your view of the evolution of the US is unfortunate and at its roots simply pessimistic for pessimism's sake -- or perhaps a little prejudiced? I mean no insult, just my genuine feeling from your post.
You back little of what you say with data, and have peppered your argument with the kinds of 'proletariat overthrowing the bourgeious' Marxist rhetoric that died with, well, a vast majority of the Marxist states. Dialectical Materialism is all but dead, unless you like what's happening in Vietnam and Cuba.
For the middle class, undoubtedly the most powerful entity in the US ecoonomy, to die, and the lower-income segment of the population dominate the population numbers, a huge disparity in wealth would have to occur. Mind you I write 'wealth', not 'income'. Look at the average middle-class American, his/her life is not necessarily so different than that of the elite. TVs, nice cars, vacations, McMansions, all of these things abound. The *relative* cost of material wealth in the US, and for the most part the rest of the capitalist world, is constantly decreasing when compared to income.
It's also pretty easy to find data that debunks your claim that there is a blooming lower-income representation in the US. There is a *huge* amount of mobility in America in terms of income. As long as the lowliest, poor, academically challenged kid can train to become a plumber and make six figures, people in the US will continue to (with notable exceptions) rightly blame themselves when they're unhappy with their incomes/overall wealth. Mobility is alive and well, and small-medium sized mom 'n pop businesses continue to be a backbone for the economy.
Your post was lined with an implicit criticism of materialism in the US. I couldn't agree with you more, there. What famous Marxist said something to the effect that the West would sell the noose to its executioner? Unfortunately, it seems like the charge from materialism leads quickly to religious fundamentalism, a disease that is quickly spreading through all parts of the globe.
I'm sure the Teamsters would be thrilled with that idea. Not to mention the crippling effect it might have on the economy, with freight shipping probably being slowed down by ~25%.
The average minivan weighs about as much as a Grand Cherokee (~4000lbs). So I can't take my wife and four kids to work and school, just so fatality statistics are on your side?
Well, I could qualify that by saying 'long-term stability'. I don't think you could characterize the region as being at all stable over the last 500 or so years. I don't think the administration is aiming for immediate calm, or stability in 1, 2, or even 5 years. My thought is that they're looking for an evolution of the area, not a CIA-style band-aid like the ones that got us (and them) into this fix in the first place.
That being said, I don't necessarily agree that this has been the best course of action, but 'stability' in the Mid East is a phrase that has long been used in the US' strategy documents.
Yep, I never said it was necessarily a *good* idea, just that it was the idea;-). From what I've read, the thought was to have a pro-US gov't in Iraq, to send a message to dictatorships/aristocracies such as Saudi Arabia. With the CIA's track record in installing new governments, you can only imagine what the result might be...
And yes, maybe calling Rice a moderate is a little exaggerated, but 'much more moderate' than Wolfowitz isn't, methinks.
I'm not saying there is no merit to any of this stuff, but I suggest that this site is run by a group of thinkers who lean decidedly to the left.
I agree with that, but the question is, assuming *a majority* of our media has a significant left slant, why are these stories underreported? You might argue the premise -- please do.
I think the answer is that many of them are yawners, or just too plain complicated for that 90th percentile of the viewing public. We want to invade Iraq to avenge the deaths of our countrymen, not to try to assure long-term peace and stability. That's hard to understand and not very inspiring. We don't want to hear about Africa because we have enough problems understanding all of these things about the Middle Eastern history, let alone thousands of years of the African continent's strife. We don't want to hear about Patriot II because those damn laws are just too complicated. Just keep my kids safe.
Our media tends to reflect our culture, not vice-versa. For all I love about this country, it is undeniably becoming more dumbed-down. Although my slant tends to be to the right, I'm glad organizations like this are pointing to that spot that exists just above all those low-brows.
BTW -- TV news and other TV outlets increasingly reflect the trends of Nielsen numbers. These are derived from what tends to be a very skewed, *very* dim portion of the viewing public. Ever wonder why they're adding those damn watermarks to all the channels? The people who participate in the ratings studies keep getting the channels & shows they're watching mixed up in their viewing logs (yes, they're still often manual), so they had to add them to help these -- *ahem* -- special people. Sorry for the cynicism, 'just seen too much of this.
I've long thought that the 'real' reason for us going to Iraq was stabilization, after reading much about Wolfowitz and Rumsfield's contributions to the Defense Planning Guidance report. I don't understand why the President thinks that the American people can't handle these reasons, and has to instead nearly fabricate facts to corollate Iraq with 9/11.
On the other hand, the report does seem to allude that Colin Powell and Wolfowitz are on the same page -- from what I've read, this may be inaccurate. The power struggle seems to be between the teams of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz -- the hawks -- and Rice and Powell, the more moderate conservatives. Until 9/11, Rice and Powell were able to keep the President on a more moderate agenda. It wasn't until the attacks that the DOD had their opportunity to advance -- and maybe justifiably.
The change from the word 'containment' to 'preempt' in our National Security strategy is probably the most influential event of the Bush admin, and maybe the a defining moment for the 21st century.
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You proved yourself to be a redneck, uneducated, and racist in the same post that you denounced the same. Bravo! I think I'll avoid Cleveland and try some Cincinnati chili....
The shame of it is that China could do some interesting things, and not just reinvent the wheel, as another poster suggests. I suggest that this 'reinvention' isn't in technology, but economic development. Instead of following the footsteps of the Americans, why not become powerhouse agricultural experts, or energy technologists for that matter? They certainly have the land to erect multi-acre solar arrays. These would give China a huge advantage in the world, and have the added bonus of feeding its people.
I've been to China, and I've been to the poorer neighborhoods in the States. You just can't compare the two, 1960's or now. IMHO, the class division there is much more prominent than in the West.
'Don't know if this is your sig or you meant to attach this to your post, but the onus should be on *you* as the one that asserts the point to prove yourself right. Just saying 'education was better in Russia than is in the US now' and 'more people were covered than they are in the US now' doesn't make it so.
So I'll turn it back to you -- I'd like to see figures that prove that the *quality of care* for all those Soviets covered by the national healthcare plan was equal -- or even in the same stratosphere -- as the equivalent US citizen on private health insurance. I won't comment either way on the education stance, which is highly subjective, except to say that a reasonable education is available to as vast majority of Americans. You can lead a horse to water...
As for the question as to whether the US should spend money on a space race when we have so many that don't have insurance, as so many other posters said, this isn't how an economy works. If there were as many people *starving* in the US, living at the absolute bottommost percent of the poverty level when compared to the poorest of the poor countries, the gov't would be abandoning these kinds of cultural/scientific milestones, and pursuing social programs. Wait -- I believe they did already. Look at the state of the union in the 30's. Little programs started like the WPA and the SSA. If JFK faced similar times, you can certainly bet the Apollo money would've gone directly to the soup kitchens.
Quick note -- this is a common misconception. An audit is initiated on a restaurant when its staff does not claim a total of 8% of the total sales for that tax period. At that point, individual servers are audited, where a study of each individual's sales is done. Without a specific audit, the gov't has no way to calculate specific server/sales ratios. Only the total for the reporting busines..
So, if you're a bright and somewhat sketchy bartender, and I've known many, you train the unwashed masses who get a job at the bar/restaurant to wait tables, and tell them that they have to claim 100% of their tips. This is usually between 10-20%. Even most experienced servers claim 10%, just to be safe. Said bartender can claim *nada*. Every corporate-run bar/restaurant is continually checked to make sure the 8% margin is being met restaurant-wide, so an individual an be confident that he won't trigger an audit. Usually this is just one or two of the top people in the business, so they don't greatly affect the total numbers.
Pretty sketchy, like I said. I'm not sure why the gov't hasn't clamped down on it more, other than lack of interest. Bigger fish to fry, I guess.
Good god! They can even *predict* the bugs, but they won't fix them?! Villains!
While the parent was indeed a plagiarist, and I do agree that the size comparisons that people make are silly, why can't we call IFF a form of RFID? IFF *is* RFID. You can't divorce the two. I can easily find dozens of credible sources that cite IFF as a form of active RFID. IEEE websites, rfidprivacy.org, several university sites, all agree that IFF was the first developed RFID technology. The only key difference in what Wal*Mart's using is in the fact that it's a passive system. It's radio frequency identification, right? Why wouldn't identify-friend or foe qualify?
I for one, tend to put on belly fat if I'm not careful about my carbs, so I totally agree with your healthy fat statements. It's the people that think they can continually eat whatever fat they want, and just avoid the carbs, that worry me. I think 20/20 or some such show followed a bunch of people trying different weight-loss programs around, and the Atkins guy's typical dinner was 6 McD's quarter pounders, sans the bread. Not what I'd call healthy fat, compared to some nice omega-3 fats like you'd get with salmon or tuna. Hell, even trim strip steak would beat the clown's pseudo-meat. And don't even get me started on trans-fatty acids from partially hydrogenized veggy oil, the 'plastic' oils as you so rightly described.
Anyway, you're totally right. Different strokes for different folks. Thanks for the good points.
But I think the point that the FDA is trying to make is that limiting advertising of unhealthy food, providing subsidies to healthier food providers, and taxing unhealthy ones is waaayy too stringent. Are they acting as an advocate for the junk food industry? Absolutely! And rightly so.
The US tends to be very careful about when and how it limits the market -- one of the reasons capitalism has worked there is because the gov't keeps its nose out as much as possible. Take smoking -- it look a long time for the government to rev up policies to limit the marketing of cigarettes, but when they did, it was justified. Smoking is physically addictive and it kills. Eating sweets/junk/other empty calories, on the other hand, can be done in moderation. Is it Dolly Madison's or McDonald's fault that people overeat their products? No. There are plenty -- I among them -- who enjoy these kinds of food in moderation and can still fit into a rollercoaster seat. Until it can be proven that overeating is caused by the food itself, and not just pure western pigginess, it's only safe to say that the WHO's dietary guidelines were right, *not* their legal recommendations.
(As a side note, I also think that the reason that so much of the US is overweight, despite the obsession with a trim appearance, is because the people care about it for the wrong reason. We want to be thin, but don't care about being healthy. Fat and cholesterol be damned, I'm going to stay on phase one of the Atkins diet until I look like Jennifer Aniston. Who cares about cardio health and liver disease. Until the population at large begins to care about the holistic picture, the scales will continue to climb)
I gots karma to burn!
Maybe if they didn't spend R&D time and money on useless features, their products would be more affordable
I thought this implied that Photoshop was too expensive to reach anything but a commercial environment, and that if they dropped the cost, they would make up the loss per unit by vastly increasing demand and volume. Software, obviously, has a tiny manufacturing cost after R&D. So, price goes down, demand goes up -- elasticity of demand, right? I'm honestly asking, IANAEconomist. 'Just heard of this term in the previous post.
We discuss this concept in MCAD a lot, though. We work in the highest part of the field; our packages can easily reach six figures per seat without support. The assumption is that we only sell to big aerospace, automotive, and consumer goods, so we have to make up the gigantic R&D cost with a high unit cost, since we sell to a relative small number of companies. But what about the oodles of small shops that are using AutoCAD or another low- to mid-end products? If we dropped our price to that level, given the huge functionality/performance/process improvements in this kind of product, would the volume more than cover the per-unit price drop? It's something all the major MCAD players try to do in some contrived fashion, but it never quite works as expected.
I suppose PhotoShop elements tries to do a similar thing, disabling what they believe to be irrelevent home-user features, and dropping the price accordingly. It would be interesting to see what those sales figures look like compared to the mainstream product. I would guess that despite the gigantic number of dig-camera users, the number of home users wanting to dick with the images, beyond contrast changes o maybe cropping, is pretty small.
Very interesting comments -- tort reform has for so long been considered a no-brainer by those 'in the know', you never hear well-drawn counter arguments. Well done.
I believe that for Gollum, they actually motion-captured Andy Serkis' movements with a cloud-of-points-type of suit. Effectively, the realism of his movements is derived just like rotoscoping.
Dobby, on the other hand, was a fully scratch-created and rendered character. He's somewhat more complex, too, because of his clothing (which rocked) and some other 'extras' on his body. Not to take anything away from Gollum -- he's fantastic -- but notice too that Dobby got much less screen time. I suspect the hours-to-frames ratio for Dobby was significantly higher than Gollum. Just a guess.
Some of Dobby's movements were just incredible, too. Gollum's expressions were very special, but I didn't see any body movement that was as striking as when Dobby snapped his fingers. It was so fluid and balanced, it was just breathtaking.
So brave you forgot to log in?
Geeze, you must really have a hard time finding a car you like.
Saying this book is only about a "cute 'invisible elephant'" analogy is like saying that The Mythical Man Month takes 300 pages to only say that there is no silver bullet for the problems of the dev cycle. My hope would be that newer books derive common ideas from the foundations of modern software engineering, like Brooks' works. Keep an open mind.
I don't know if other Christian religions do this, but on Christmas Eve at the Catholic church I went to when I was a kid, they used read this llooonnnnggggggg passage that is one solid, multipage sentence describing Christ's lineage. Without a doubt, that homily is what's waiting for me if there's a hell. When I read the 1st page of Silarmillion, it reminded me of this. I threw the book down and ran out of the room shrieking like a little girl.
I use Outlook and it does crash often (every other day?), but I've yet to have it drag down the whole O/S. 'Matter of fact, at different times I have to reboot (cleanly) because something's acting flakey or it's gotten slow, but I've never had the O/S flat out crash. Certainly the Unix boxen stay up longer, but my XP's idle process is currently about 700 hours old -- around a month. If you're crashing twice a day, I'd imagine that something's not quite setup right with your system.
This is obviously caused by SUVs.
Try going to a museum some time. Some of the greatest works of art ever done were conceived with the help of huge amounts of private funding. Michelangelo was no starving artist; many of his benefactors chose to lavish him with riches. Why should modern trusts do any less?
I'm an engineer and as pragmatic as the next guy, but given a world without art and beauty, just give me the cancer -- what's the point?
BTW, if this was sarcasm and I missed it, I'm very happy and apologize in advance.
I think your view of the evolution of the US is unfortunate and at its roots simply pessimistic for pessimism's sake -- or perhaps a little prejudiced? I mean no insult, just my genuine feeling from your post.
You back little of what you say with data, and have peppered your argument with the kinds of 'proletariat overthrowing the bourgeious' Marxist rhetoric that died with, well, a vast majority of the Marxist states. Dialectical Materialism is all but dead, unless you like what's happening in Vietnam and Cuba.
For the middle class, undoubtedly the most powerful entity in the US ecoonomy, to die, and the lower-income segment of the population dominate the population numbers, a huge disparity in wealth would have to occur. Mind you I write 'wealth', not 'income'. Look at the average middle-class American, his/her life is not necessarily so different than that of the elite. TVs, nice cars, vacations, McMansions, all of these things abound. The *relative* cost of material wealth in the US, and for the most part the rest of the capitalist world, is constantly decreasing when compared to income.
It's also pretty easy to find data that debunks your claim that there is a blooming lower-income representation in the US. There is a *huge* amount of mobility in America in terms of income. As long as the lowliest, poor, academically challenged kid can train to become a plumber and make six figures, people in the US will continue to (with notable exceptions) rightly blame themselves when they're unhappy with their incomes/overall wealth. Mobility is alive and well, and small-medium sized mom 'n pop businesses continue to be a backbone for the economy.
Your post was lined with an implicit criticism of materialism in the US. I couldn't agree with you more, there. What famous Marxist said something to the effect that the West would sell the noose to its executioner? Unfortunately, it seems like the charge from materialism leads quickly to religious fundamentalism, a disease that is quickly spreading through all parts of the globe.
The average minivan weighs about as much as a Grand Cherokee (~4000lbs). So I can't take my wife and four kids to work and school, just so fatality statistics are on your side?
That being said, I don't necessarily agree that this has been the best course of action, but 'stability' in the Mid East is a phrase that has long been used in the US' strategy documents.
And yes, maybe calling Rice a moderate is a little exaggerated, but 'much more moderate' than Wolfowitz isn't, methinks.
I agree with that, but the question is, assuming *a majority* of our media has a significant left slant, why are these stories underreported? You might argue the premise -- please do.
I think the answer is that many of them are yawners, or just too plain complicated for that 90th percentile of the viewing public. We want to invade Iraq to avenge the deaths of our countrymen, not to try to assure long-term peace and stability. That's hard to understand and not very inspiring. We don't want to hear about Africa because we have enough problems understanding all of these things about the Middle Eastern history, let alone thousands of years of the African continent's strife. We don't want to hear about Patriot II because those damn laws are just too complicated. Just keep my kids safe.
Our media tends to reflect our culture, not vice-versa. For all I love about this country, it is undeniably becoming more dumbed-down. Although my slant tends to be to the right, I'm glad organizations like this are pointing to that spot that exists just above all those low-brows.
BTW -- TV news and other TV outlets increasingly reflect the trends of Nielsen numbers. These are derived from what tends to be a very skewed, *very* dim portion of the viewing public. Ever wonder why they're adding those damn watermarks to all the channels? The people who participate in the ratings studies keep getting the channels & shows they're watching mixed up in their viewing logs (yes, they're still often manual), so they had to add them to help these -- *ahem* -- special people. Sorry for the cynicism, 'just seen too much of this.
On the other hand, the report does seem to allude that Colin Powell and Wolfowitz are on the same page -- from what I've read, this may be inaccurate. The power struggle seems to be between the teams of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz -- the hawks -- and Rice and Powell, the more moderate conservatives. Until 9/11, Rice and Powell were able to keep the President on a more moderate agenda. It wasn't until the attacks that the DOD had their opportunity to advance -- and maybe justifiably.
The change from the word 'containment' to 'preempt' in our National Security strategy is probably the most influential event of the Bush admin, and maybe the a defining moment for the 21st century.