Unions are not necessary for filling the ranks of teachers; there are numerous professions without any unionization that have no trouble being filled.
Furthermore, while parental apathy is certainly a problem, parental antipathy is far worse! Nowadays, many of the "involved" parents are actually doing more harm than if they did nothing at all.
"My little Johnny is just being creative when he breaks all the crayons and throws them at other students." "My little Susie is a genius and is not being challenged enough, that's why she fails all her tests and doesn't do her homework."
Or my favorite: "My children are your responsibility while they're at school" shortly thereafter followed by "You can't discipline my children, you're not their parent."
I concur completely that we can service the debt just fine without changing the debt ceiling. The 14th Amendment requires the integrity of government debt to be beyond question, and I don't think either party in Congress is willing to play with that fire. I'll also concur that this whole "default on the debt" canard is scare-mongering by the left side of the politcal spectrum.
But make no mistake: there are real, serious, and immediate consequences of not raising the limit, and those consequences will rain down upon everyone. The pensioners and soldiers would be the hardest hit, of course, but a sudden drop in spending in a shaky economy would propagate to every industry, especially those with stronger government dependence (basically, any large contractor).
Furthermore, as others will point out, "the rich" are hardly paying "their fair share" if we identify a "fair share" to be a consistent percentage of income. It is those in the middle quantiles who suffer the greatest tax burden, relative to their means. The poor have exemptions and benefits while the rich have deductions and tax shelters. Closing this gap will not by any means make up the deficit (the rich don't have as much money as people think they do), but it will mitigate some of the ill effects of reaching the debt ceiling. Increasing taxes on those who run the businesses, though, can have as equally negative an effect as a drop in government spending, so the right balance has to be struck.
I just don't think any options should be off the table.
They did not risk their lives in order to further the bureaucratic interests of NASA and Congress. It was precisely the shuttle program that provided the illusion of safety and progress--and on both counts we can definitely say it was an illusion. Don't get me wrong: space exploration is definitely our future, or else we have none, but the shuttles were abject failures in advancing that aim. You are right that blood is the cost of working on the cutting edge and expanding the envelope, but that has nothing to do with the space shuttle.
Since the shuttles weren't shot out of the sky or destroyed by rogue meteors, that is a purely semantic distinction. From an outside perspective, it does not matter that only one component of the system (i.e., the shuttle-booster system) failed if it contributed to the failure of the entire system. Both shuttle and boosters were necessary to perform the intended function (entering orbit), and neither could do so independent of the other. Thus, the whole system is dependent upon both of those components, and the failure of one is equivalent to the failure of all.
(Of course the engineers studying the failure will need to view each piece independently to determine the cause of the failure and develop a solution to prevent similar failures in the future.)
I'll grant that the 40% is not an entirely representative number. Nevertheless, the vehicles were designed to be reusable, so the mission-failure rate isn't telling the whole picture, either. We don't assess airplane or car failures by the number of miles they drove before failing, we assess them by how many failed out of the all those produced.
Nothing done by the shuttle program was particularly revolutionary. The United States had a well established and mature space program by the time the first shuttle entered orbit. Yet two out of the five reusable launch vehicles were destroyed over the course of their lifetime, for a failure rate of 40%. The Apollo program had a similar failure rate, but it at least landed several people on the Moon. I'm not saying the shuttle program didn't improve mankind, but those improvements were merely incremental and obtained at substantial cost.
There's nothing irrational about unionizing. Likewise, there's nothing irrational about firing unionized employees (employers should have the right to free association, too). Nor is there any reason to believe that violence or coercion are inevitable consequences of attempts to unionize.
Unions aren't inherently bad. In many cases, unions were necessary to stop trends of abuse that were going unnoticed by the public and unregulated by the authorities (be they the businesses themselves or the various levels of government). But there is major a difference between a union that advocates for the lives and safety of its workers before an indifferent profiteer and a union that advocates for unreasonable compensation from a bankrupt company.
This situation is neither of those, however, and so it is difficult to judge. On the one hand, Apple is making money hand-over-fist, and there is no reason why the employees who make that possible shouldn't desire a greater share. On the other hand, the employees are already fairly well compensated relative to others in the retail industry, so there is no incentive for the management to provide them with anything more.
Man will never sail the oceans and settle in a distant land. Man will never send a message from one continent to another any faster than by ship. Man will never fly. Man will never land on the moon. Man will never create a machine that can think faster than himself.
History is on the wrong side of those who make predictions denying what is possible but presently infeasible. It won't happen this year, and it probably won't happen this decade, and it may not happen for the next 50 years, but one way or another, space is our future. Building rockets on the ground and then launching them into space is cost-effective only for small vehicles and light payloads. There are many challenges to space exploration, and most people grossly underestimated them 40 years ago and made wild predictions. That doesn't mean it will never happen.
How is the 3.5mm TRS plug too large? Sure, the 1/4in TRS plug was too large, but most equipment doesn't use it anymore, and it's electronically compatible with the 3.5mm plug. Frankly, I don't think you could make a plug much smaller that most people would be able to use.
Here's the problem with third-party voting: the system is completely rigged for two parties. Some of the reasons are positively ancient and some more modern.
The problem begins with plurality voting. All that is necessary to win an election is to obtain the most votes. We all know this, but most people don't really stop and think about the consequences. Let me rephrase the system: you don't need a majority of votes to win an election. Put it another way: a majority of people can vote AGAINST YOU but you can still win the election. There are a number of alternate voting systems, tried with varying levels of success in other countries (and some municipal elections in the US), but there is great resistance to change at the national level. The parties in power obviously have a vested interest in preserving their control. Unfortunately, most Americans agree with them. Talk to an American voter about changing the voting system and nine times out of ten they'll tell you that they're opposed, no matter how well you explain it.
Another major issue is that of primary elections. In most states, primaries are closed, meaning that not only do you have to register your party affiliation with the state, but you cannot vote in another party's primary elections. Nowadays, fortunately, it is fairly simple to change your affiliation, but you can still only vote in one primary at a time. So if you want to have a say in the Libertarian or Green Party primaries (if they even have any), that's fine, but you're stuck with whatever horses the other parties choose. Even among the two major parties, if you vote in one's primary, then you cannot vote in the other's. Party loyalty is enforced by the state.
I would also say that the media contribute heavily to the irrelevance of third parties. All outlets, from the so-called "mainstream media" to cable news and talk radio focus blindly on the two major parties and virtually ignore the others. They also tend to ignore any primary candidates whose views fall outside of their respective parties' mainstream. So the average voter is exposed to a fairly small number of choices, and the mere idea of other choices is treated with contempt and, on occasion, outright derision. You can't win votes without coverage, and you can't get coverage without votes. It's an odd, self-perpetuating cycle of journalistic incompetence and malfeasance.
The end result: the two parties maintain control, and voting for a third party is a form of self-disenfranchisement. If you pick a third party, then you're excluding yourself from the major primaries, and if you pick a third-party candidate, then your net effect on the election is nil.
The issue is not over the effectiveness of the law. Speaking strictly in terms of correlation, the era of the PATRIOT Act had very few terrorist acts against American civilians, whereas the era prior to it had many more. No rational person can dispute that fact, although that does not establish causation, nor does it account for military deaths, nor deaths of non-Americans. So let's accept as a premise that the USA PATRIOT Act was in some way effective at preventing terrorism.
That doesn't make it constitutional. Now you could argue that the PATRIOT Act was necessary, the Constitution be damned, but that is the way of barbarians. Civilized people, whether the targets of terrorists or otherwise, establish rules and either follow them or change them as necessary. There is no reason why the Congress couldn't have passed a Constitutional Amendment essentially gutting the Bill of Rights in the almost ten years since the passage of the PATRIOT Act. But the fact that they haven't even tried, and nobody in the government cares about the obvious contradiction between what the Constitution says and what the law allows--not even the judicial branch, entrusted with the ultimate defense our liberties--is at the heart of the matter.
You can argue it's justified, and the Congress had to act in the immediate aftermath of September 11 to do "whatever is necessary" to protect and defend the United States, but then how can you justify this continuing violation of the Constitution? The document can actually be changed, and if this Act is so necessary, then by all means it should. So why hasn't it?
Why is it that the crowd is blameless, and the instigator is wholly responsible? I used to feel this argument a compelling reason for the limitation on freedom of speech, but I increasingly find it as an excuse for people to avoid responsible when acting as part of a mob. If someone yells "fire" in a crowded theater (which are required to have numerous, unlocked, well labeled exits nowadays) and yet there is no evidence of such (no alarms, no ushers, no smoke, no heat), why does that excuse you for killing someone when attempting to flee? Furthermore, since when is making ridiculous claims illegal? Should we not also lock up all the political commentators who shout absolutely absurd things? What if people are incited to violence because of it?
Incitement is not a crime. The First Amendment makes no exceptions, and for good reason.
Someone who shouts "fire" in a crowded theater when there is no fire is an ass; if people die as a result, then he will bear the moral guilt for his actions for the rest of his life. If he has a conscience, that should be punishment enough; if he doesn't, well I'm sure that's not the only bad thing he's done, and most of those will be criminal acts.
This is not a perfect world. All speech is potentially dangerous. This is the central tenant of anti-censorship: that there can be no impartial judge of what should and should not be "protected" speech. The vast majority of people will not shout "fire" in a crowded theater; even so, taking that word as strong evidence when there is nothing else to corroborate it is foolishness. If people die, it should be criminal foolishness.
That certainly could be; I've already indicated that I don't take what the government says about terrorism at face value. Ultimately, it's of little real concern to me what is actually true. Either you are right, and thus there is no real threat, or I am right, and any real threat is stopped long before it matures. Regardless, I am not going to lose any sleep over the matter. Being awake at 5:30am is purely coincidental.
For my part, I wasn't suggesting that the use of top secret extralegal military/civilian agencies/operatives was justified, I was merely commenting that it was likely. In my opinion, extremely likely.
There have been major terrorist attacks in Madrid, London, and Bombay since 9/11. Yet there have been none here. The TSA is demonstrably incompetent, and we hear unending bitching about how thousands of "illegals" scamper across the border every day. Either both agencies are exceptionally good at detecting the real thing, and simply let people they know not to be threats through (not likely), or there are other forces at play.
These "other forces" could simply be the presence of American soldiers, contractors, diplomats, and agents in Iraq and Afghanistan. The terrorists could be thinking "why go through the trouble of killing Americans over there when we can do it right here?" It's certainly possible, but even they have to have people smart enough to realize that we (the American public) aren't paying attention to the wars anymore. I would think that they would've at least attempted a competent attack, but maybe they simply fear even more retaliation (although I think that would play into their hands very nicely).
So I'm led to believe the "other forces" are soldiers and agents whose existence, purpose, and track records are kept tightly locked up. If the powers that be were to disclose their successes, even for political benefit, it would endanger their lives and their ability to carry out missions.
This is all in the absence of facts, mind you, and I know it sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory; it's a hunch, not a well reasoned conclusion. For one thing, I find it hard to believe that the government could be competent enough to carry such things out, but I suppose if you segregated the operation well enough, and created the right conditions, it would be possible. Even likely.
But as far as I know, the publicly known parts of the DHS are our only defense against terrorist attacks on civilians in the United States. That could be the whole story. I just suspect that it's not.
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Unions are not necessary for filling the ranks of teachers; there are numerous professions without any unionization that have no trouble being filled.
Furthermore, while parental apathy is certainly a problem, parental antipathy is far worse! Nowadays, many of the "involved" parents are actually doing more harm than if they did nothing at all.
"My little Johnny is just being creative when he breaks all the crayons and throws them at other students."
"My little Susie is a genius and is not being challenged enough, that's why she fails all her tests and doesn't do her homework."
Or my favorite: "My children are your responsibility while they're at school" shortly thereafter followed by "You can't discipline my children, you're not their parent."
I'll do my best to make myself have been born earlier. It hasn't worked yet, but I'll keep trying.
Because cycle detection is such a difficult algorithm.
Well that doesn't do OP any good now does it?
You can buy 4 incandescents for $0.88 where I live. I've never seen a single CFL that cheap.
That may be true, but they wouldn't need as many stewardesses in the first place if they didn't serve food and drinks.
I concur completely that we can service the debt just fine without changing the debt ceiling. The 14th Amendment requires the integrity of government debt to be beyond question, and I don't think either party in Congress is willing to play with that fire. I'll also concur that this whole "default on the debt" canard is scare-mongering by the left side of the politcal spectrum.
But make no mistake: there are real, serious, and immediate consequences of not raising the limit, and those consequences will rain down upon everyone. The pensioners and soldiers would be the hardest hit, of course, but a sudden drop in spending in a shaky economy would propagate to every industry, especially those with stronger government dependence (basically, any large contractor).
Furthermore, as others will point out, "the rich" are hardly paying "their fair share" if we identify a "fair share" to be a consistent percentage of income. It is those in the middle quantiles who suffer the greatest tax burden, relative to their means. The poor have exemptions and benefits while the rich have deductions and tax shelters. Closing this gap will not by any means make up the deficit (the rich don't have as much money as people think they do), but it will mitigate some of the ill effects of reaching the debt ceiling. Increasing taxes on those who run the businesses, though, can have as equally negative an effect as a drop in government spending, so the right balance has to be struck.
I just don't think any options should be off the table.
They did not risk their lives in order to further the bureaucratic interests of NASA and Congress. It was precisely the shuttle program that provided the illusion of safety and progress--and on both counts we can definitely say it was an illusion. Don't get me wrong: space exploration is definitely our future, or else we have none, but the shuttles were abject failures in advancing that aim. You are right that blood is the cost of working on the cutting edge and expanding the envelope, but that has nothing to do with the space shuttle.
Since the shuttles weren't shot out of the sky or destroyed by rogue meteors, that is a purely semantic distinction. From an outside perspective, it does not matter that only one component of the system (i.e., the shuttle-booster system) failed if it contributed to the failure of the entire system. Both shuttle and boosters were necessary to perform the intended function (entering orbit), and neither could do so independent of the other. Thus, the whole system is dependent upon both of those components, and the failure of one is equivalent to the failure of all.
(Of course the engineers studying the failure will need to view each piece independently to determine the cause of the failure and develop a solution to prevent similar failures in the future.)
Drove or flew, as the case may be.
I'll grant that the 40% is not an entirely representative number. Nevertheless, the vehicles were designed to be reusable, so the mission-failure rate isn't telling the whole picture, either. We don't assess airplane or car failures by the number of miles they drove before failing, we assess them by how many failed out of the all those produced.
Nothing done by the shuttle program was particularly revolutionary. The United States had a well established and mature space program by the time the first shuttle entered orbit. Yet two out of the five reusable launch vehicles were destroyed over the course of their lifetime, for a failure rate of 40%. The Apollo program had a similar failure rate, but it at least landed several people on the Moon. I'm not saying the shuttle program didn't improve mankind, but those improvements were merely incremental and obtained at substantial cost.
The crews of the Challenger and the Columbia might disagree with your assessment of the quality of NASA's work.
Are they also saying that every child is an independent act of God, not derived from either of its parents?
If not, then they must accept that (some of) those variations--regardless of their origin--are propagated from parent to child.
In other words, that evolution (in the strictest sense of the word) occurs.
There's nothing irrational about unionizing. Likewise, there's nothing irrational about firing unionized employees (employers should have the right to free association, too). Nor is there any reason to believe that violence or coercion are inevitable consequences of attempts to unionize.
Unions aren't inherently bad. In many cases, unions were necessary to stop trends of abuse that were going unnoticed by the public and unregulated by the authorities (be they the businesses themselves or the various levels of government). But there is major a difference between a union that advocates for the lives and safety of its workers before an indifferent profiteer and a union that advocates for unreasonable compensation from a bankrupt company.
This situation is neither of those, however, and so it is difficult to judge. On the one hand, Apple is making money hand-over-fist, and there is no reason why the employees who make that possible shouldn't desire a greater share. On the other hand, the employees are already fairly well compensated relative to others in the retail industry, so there is no incentive for the management to provide them with anything more.
Man will never sail the oceans and settle in a distant land.
Man will never send a message from one continent to another any faster than by ship.
Man will never fly.
Man will never land on the moon.
Man will never create a machine that can think faster than himself.
History is on the wrong side of those who make predictions denying what is possible but presently infeasible. It won't happen this year, and it probably won't happen this decade, and it may not happen for the next 50 years, but one way or another, space is our future. Building rockets on the ground and then launching them into space is cost-effective only for small vehicles and light payloads. There are many challenges to space exploration, and most people grossly underestimated them 40 years ago and made wild predictions. That doesn't mean it will never happen.
How is the 3.5mm TRS plug too large? Sure, the 1/4in TRS plug was too large, but most equipment doesn't use it anymore, and it's electronically compatible with the 3.5mm plug. Frankly, I don't think you could make a plug much smaller that most people would be able to use.
Here's the problem with third-party voting: the system is completely rigged for two parties. Some of the reasons are positively ancient and some more modern.
The problem begins with plurality voting. All that is necessary to win an election is to obtain the most votes. We all know this, but most people don't really stop and think about the consequences. Let me rephrase the system: you don't need a majority of votes to win an election. Put it another way: a majority of people can vote AGAINST YOU but you can still win the election. There are a number of alternate voting systems, tried with varying levels of success in other countries (and some municipal elections in the US), but there is great resistance to change at the national level. The parties in power obviously have a vested interest in preserving their control. Unfortunately, most Americans agree with them. Talk to an American voter about changing the voting system and nine times out of ten they'll tell you that they're opposed, no matter how well you explain it.
Another major issue is that of primary elections. In most states, primaries are closed, meaning that not only do you have to register your party affiliation with the state, but you cannot vote in another party's primary elections. Nowadays, fortunately, it is fairly simple to change your affiliation, but you can still only vote in one primary at a time. So if you want to have a say in the Libertarian or Green Party primaries (if they even have any), that's fine, but you're stuck with whatever horses the other parties choose. Even among the two major parties, if you vote in one's primary, then you cannot vote in the other's. Party loyalty is enforced by the state.
I would also say that the media contribute heavily to the irrelevance of third parties. All outlets, from the so-called "mainstream media" to cable news and talk radio focus blindly on the two major parties and virtually ignore the others. They also tend to ignore any primary candidates whose views fall outside of their respective parties' mainstream. So the average voter is exposed to a fairly small number of choices, and the mere idea of other choices is treated with contempt and, on occasion, outright derision. You can't win votes without coverage, and you can't get coverage without votes. It's an odd, self-perpetuating cycle of journalistic incompetence and malfeasance.
The end result: the two parties maintain control, and voting for a third party is a form of self-disenfranchisement. If you pick a third party, then you're excluding yourself from the major primaries, and if you pick a third-party candidate, then your net effect on the election is nil.
I believe you have missed the intentional irony.
The issue is not over the effectiveness of the law. Speaking strictly in terms of correlation, the era of the PATRIOT Act had very few terrorist acts against American civilians, whereas the era prior to it had many more. No rational person can dispute that fact, although that does not establish causation, nor does it account for military deaths, nor deaths of non-Americans. So let's accept as a premise that the USA PATRIOT Act was in some way effective at preventing terrorism.
That doesn't make it constitutional. Now you could argue that the PATRIOT Act was necessary, the Constitution be damned, but that is the way of barbarians. Civilized people, whether the targets of terrorists or otherwise, establish rules and either follow them or change them as necessary. There is no reason why the Congress couldn't have passed a Constitutional Amendment essentially gutting the Bill of Rights in the almost ten years since the passage of the PATRIOT Act. But the fact that they haven't even tried, and nobody in the government cares about the obvious contradiction between what the Constitution says and what the law allows--not even the judicial branch, entrusted with the ultimate defense our liberties--is at the heart of the matter.
You can argue it's justified, and the Congress had to act in the immediate aftermath of September 11 to do "whatever is necessary" to protect and defend the United States, but then how can you justify this continuing violation of the Constitution? The document can actually be changed, and if this Act is so necessary, then by all means it should. So why hasn't it?
Why is it that the crowd is blameless, and the instigator is wholly responsible? I used to feel this argument a compelling reason for the limitation on freedom of speech, but I increasingly find it as an excuse for people to avoid responsible when acting as part of a mob. If someone yells "fire" in a crowded theater (which are required to have numerous, unlocked, well labeled exits nowadays) and yet there is no evidence of such (no alarms, no ushers, no smoke, no heat), why does that excuse you for killing someone when attempting to flee? Furthermore, since when is making ridiculous claims illegal? Should we not also lock up all the political commentators who shout absolutely absurd things? What if people are incited to violence because of it?
Incitement is not a crime. The First Amendment makes no exceptions, and for good reason.
Someone who shouts "fire" in a crowded theater when there is no fire is an ass; if people die as a result, then he will bear the moral guilt for his actions for the rest of his life. If he has a conscience, that should be punishment enough; if he doesn't, well I'm sure that's not the only bad thing he's done, and most of those will be criminal acts.
This is not a perfect world. All speech is potentially dangerous. This is the central tenant of anti-censorship: that there can be no impartial judge of what should and should not be "protected" speech. The vast majority of people will not shout "fire" in a crowded theater; even so, taking that word as strong evidence when there is nothing else to corroborate it is foolishness. If people die, it should be criminal foolishness.
If this discussion had a point anymore, I would continue it. Alas, it does not.
That certainly could be; I've already indicated that I don't take what the government says about terrorism at face value. Ultimately, it's of little real concern to me what is actually true. Either you are right, and thus there is no real threat, or I am right, and any real threat is stopped long before it matures. Regardless, I am not going to lose any sleep over the matter. Being awake at 5:30am is purely coincidental.
For my part, I wasn't suggesting that the use of top secret extralegal military/civilian agencies/operatives was justified, I was merely commenting that it was likely. In my opinion, extremely likely.
There have been major terrorist attacks in Madrid, London, and Bombay since 9/11. Yet there have been none here. The TSA is demonstrably incompetent, and we hear unending bitching about how thousands of "illegals" scamper across the border every day. Either both agencies are exceptionally good at detecting the real thing, and simply let people they know not to be threats through (not likely), or there are other forces at play.
These "other forces" could simply be the presence of American soldiers, contractors, diplomats, and agents in Iraq and Afghanistan. The terrorists could be thinking "why go through the trouble of killing Americans over there when we can do it right here?" It's certainly possible, but even they have to have people smart enough to realize that we (the American public) aren't paying attention to the wars anymore. I would think that they would've at least attempted a competent attack, but maybe they simply fear even more retaliation (although I think that would play into their hands very nicely).
So I'm led to believe the "other forces" are soldiers and agents whose existence, purpose, and track records are kept tightly locked up. If the powers that be were to disclose their successes, even for political benefit, it would endanger their lives and their ability to carry out missions.
This is all in the absence of facts, mind you, and I know it sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory; it's a hunch, not a well reasoned conclusion. For one thing, I find it hard to believe that the government could be competent enough to carry such things out, but I suppose if you segregated the operation well enough, and created the right conditions, it would be possible. Even likely.
But as far as I know, the publicly known parts of the DHS are our only defense against terrorist attacks on civilians in the United States. That could be the whole story. I just suspect that it's not.
Au contraire, members of Congress enjoy special exemption from screening rules.