No, I said I'd take an improvement over no improvement.
How is that "ANYTHING", and why is pragmatism so hard for you to comprehend?
If you believe for a second that a Republican controlled congress is going to allow the PATRIOT Act (their fucking baby!) to sunset- you're beyond dense. Who is it, you think, who added the amendment extending it?
Let me try, now:
Seriously?
You'd stop ANY PROGRESS, regardless of how badly the status quo fucks people over, SIMPLY FOR THE SAKE OF STOPPING CHANGE?
Yes, because the status quo is better.
Fuck a watered down Patriot Act, let's just keep the full she-bang.
Because there's no way both houses controlled by the Republicans aren't going to push through an extension, sans reform, with ease, once it's tacked to something non-filibusterable.
Republicans did in fact block the bill... It is precisely because they're still the minority that they did this, instead of simply voting it down (the vote was for cloture, not passage)...
There was 1 Democrat who did not vote for cloture. That's even less significant than the 4 republicans that voted FOR it.
Woe for common sense.
You are right that it passed the Republican controlled house, after they added an amendment extending the Patriot Act until 2017. The Senate Republicans simply filibustered so they can wait until they've got a majority, and the extension can be passed through on something that won't be filibustered by the minority at that time, thus keeping the reform away from reality.
Agreed. Why aim for better if perfection is out of reach. Much better to let the status quo lay still. I love conservative ideology.
I do give the guy credit for sticking to his probably honest-felt convictions, even if pragmatism is a dirty word to him.
It's also a good thing that the Patriot Act won't be extended in 2015 anyway, when the House attaches it to an education bill.
Fascists have a long and glorious history of pointing their finger at other fascists and saying their real cause is to prevent the country from falling to Them.
Well, 1 is a number, so I guess what you said is technically accurate.
It also didn't pass the House until the amendment extending the Patriot Act until 2017 was added.
Calling the failure to proceed bipartisan is either stupidity or deliberately disingenuous.
What I can't figure out is if it was intended to fail, and who out-gamed the other to make it fail. Let's be realistic, it was filibustered by the Republicans. I'm not going to count the 4 Republican yays for cloture or the 1 democratic nay as anything but statistical noise. There's a puzzle in the life of this bill, and I wish it made sense to me.
Was the state protecting the old trusts that laws were written to combat? It seems to me that history shows us that the natural end-result of pure free-market capitalism is the formation of abusive monopolies even without state assistance. I think the state assistance is an attempt to utilize the monopolies, which sometimes have uses, but under the control of the people.
I think he's generalizing based on self-identified libertarian voting habits, as polled.
I know a lot of good libertarians, seemingly like yourself, but you all still vote Republican. I'm not saying you should have voted Democrat instead, but fuck, Republicans seem to be banking that the megatrusts they're working for will eventually get powerful enough to ensure their power forever.
Only if the compiler knows that explode() prevents execution past that point, which it won't, unless specifically designed to look for the case of explode() twiddling an I/O register that it knows is going to cause a catastrophic fission chain reaction
My programming experience started with an Amiga 500, around age 6. By age 10, I had successfully proved the value of programming in a mock-commercial setting- "Community" as we called it. We had "Community Dollars", a governing body, banks and financial regulations, and weekly market events where we pitched goods and services for Community Dollars. My first market event was a "beat the computer" numbers game, written on an Apple IIGS, in BASIC, on a school computer. I was even given time in class to work on the project that my teacher was at first dubious about (I was the only person attempting to program a class computer, and the teacher doubted my skills). I think she, like my dad, made the right call.
Fast forward 21 years, I make good money, I enjoy the view 30 floors up in Seattle, WA, I was active in sports (track, football) in highschool, and would consider myself socially well adjusted. I don't think I agree with your advice.
An interest in computers and programming at a young age in no way precludes essential areas of development for a child, it doesn't seem to have for me.
Where does the US constitution say you lose your free speech rights if you work in a group?
Right next to where it says your conglomerate has the rights of a person.
I love how far this can be extended, as well. Corporate armies? Sounds awesome.
The obvious thing you're missing, is that the rights of the individuals within the groups were never infringed. The rights of the group were infringed, and the ability to infringe on a group is literally enshrined into US case law, so long as it's not a protected one.
But hey, when "Right to Work" is a euphemism for "abridging the rights of 2 people (corporation, union) to form a contract between themselves" and somehow not an acknowledgement that the rights of the individual are superior to the rights of the group, I can see how a lot of shit confuses you.
I could never vote for one, from a simply pragmatic standpoint, but I also kind of like them, just for their unabashed honesty in their bone-headed ideas. You don't get that from the major parties.
Or, because if the enterprise they were investing their assets into and becoming partial owners of engaged in the act of raping babies, and a prosecutor could not effectively pierce the corporate veil, they wouldn't go down for the actions they helped fund.
You're trying to make it personal. The rule they violated was a blanket rule that applied to all incorporated entities- it was non-partisan. If the rule sucked, the rule should have been removed. Instead, we got the nuclear option. Yay.
A world where we take responsibility for the evil we finance?
One can only assume that the organization of said entities would restructure along with the now even-more-hawkish investors so that they would become good citizen corporations, instead of hives of scum and villainy.
The catch, is it can be a bit tricky to figure out who to assign blame to, so the corporation ends up settling with a large cash payout instead of holding anyone accountable for the actions behind the veil.
Comparing "average wealth" according to some table is nonsense; the demographics, purchasing power, tax structure, and composition of that wealth are entirely different in the US and European nations.
It's all about context, right? When talking about the average individual *wealth* in one country vs. the average individual *wealth* in another country, I'm pretty sure the selection criteria cares little about those things.
What I said remains true: The vast majority of their population is *better off* than the equivalent wealth percentile in the US. That's precisely what those hokey pokey tables tell us. PPP is probably not a fantastic tool in this case, as it precludes the original topic of the discussion- health care costs. This is why accumulated wealth is a better indicator of population prosperity than their income.
So you compare the US distribution with the top 1% "shaved off" to European populations without 1% "shave off"? What sense does that make?
Why did you skip the part about the flattened curves in Europe? I already explained that they had very good gini indexes. As an example, in the most slanted economy in the Eurozone (Germany), shaving off the top 1% shaves off nearly *half* the amount of wealth you lose in the US (as a percent of the whole). It declines steeply from there. As an average across the Eurozone, shaving off the top 1% doesn't appreciably alter their favorable standing next to us. The flatter their distributions (lower gini index), the higher their lead on us in median individual wealth. If only you assigned worth to those numbers on some tables.
Being from Europe, I can tell you that you're full of it, when it comes right down to it.
I'm not from Europe...
My point stands. The US may provide better opportunities for a few, but far less opportunities for prosperity for the average Joe. We're overly-content serfs, distracted by flashing lights, hard math, and the general complexity of our daily life; and you're helping us stay that way.
You are correct- I meant to type mean, since our median wealth is already down at eastern-bloc levels. I was trying to illustrate that we only look good when using the mean.
You're also correct that the top 400 only have 2.29 trillion in assets, I thought it was more than that.
Let's call it the top 1%, who have 37.1% of our total wealth of approximately 80 trillion.
So, our average wealth goes from 357k (pretty respectable, even in comparison with Europe) to 222k. Very bottom of the list for Europe.
So really, I should have said, shave 1% of our population off, and all of a sudden we're wealthier than the likes of Spain and Greece, but none of those other commie socialist freedom haters. Shave 1% off of your average western European country, and thanks to their fantastic (near.5) gini coefficients, you barely impact the average.
What's the grand point to all this? We may have the best opportunity as Americans in the world to rape and pillage beyond belief, and become richer than God, but when it comes right down to it- the Europeans enjoy better success for a greater percentage of their population.
I thank you for the opportunity to elaborate;)
Hardly. You used the absolute term, "only fair". That's a ridiculous claim. Claiming it may be the fairest does not contradict the implied assertion that it isn't the only fair way.
Competition is the way to drive prices down...
Addressed previously. Competition is *a* way to drive prices down.
What are you going to import? What the "cartels" are selling abroad? That's reimport. Something invented abroad? We already import those things — but our government, in its wisdom, insists on requiring an approval before allowing such imports...
Cheaper drugs. We pay more for a specific drug than anywhere in the first world. Why? Because what choice do we have?
The government, via the FDA is a captured regulatory body. While I certainly ascribe blame to our government for being corruptible, the fact their lobbyists, former executives, or other such still-interested parties have attained positions of regulatory power is the real problem.
The only "monopoly" currently in existence is the temporary one — rewarding inventors with the exclusive rights to sell their inventions for a limited time. Such reward of inventions seems perfectly fine with me — if you don't like it, you don't have to buy these new drugs and you will not be any worse off than if the system didn't exist at all and the drugs in question, instead of costing too much, simply have not been invented...
The Federal Government funds 42% of pharmaceutical research in the US, and any inventions or IP generated as a result of said funding belongs solely to the beneficiary.
To me, it's a better model for us as a country to throw those shitbags to the wind, cover the other 58% of the funding, and run it at-cost.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I said I'd take an improvement over no improvement.
How is that "ANYTHING", and why is pragmatism so hard for you to comprehend?
If you believe for a second that a Republican controlled congress is going to allow the PATRIOT Act (their fucking baby!) to sunset- you're beyond dense. Who is it, you think, who added the amendment extending it?
Let me try, now:
Seriously?
You'd stop ANY PROGRESS, regardless of how badly the status quo fucks people over, SIMPLY FOR THE SAKE OF STOPPING CHANGE?
I'm going to give you a list of Bush laws with sunset provisions that were allowed to sunset:
There you go. That's the whole list.
You were saying?
Also known as the event horizon.
Na. not quite there yet. Give them time, though.
Yes, because the status quo is better.
Fuck a watered down Patriot Act, let's just keep the full she-bang.
Because there's no way both houses controlled by the Republicans aren't going to push through an extension, sans reform, with ease, once it's tacked to something non-filibusterable.
No progress until Victory!
Republicans did in fact block the bill... It is precisely because they're still the minority that they did this, instead of simply voting it down (the vote was for cloture, not passage)...
There was 1 Democrat who did not vote for cloture. That's even less significant than the 4 republicans that voted FOR it. Woe for common sense.
You are right that it passed the Republican controlled house, after they added an amendment extending the Patriot Act until 2017. The Senate Republicans simply filibustered so they can wait until they've got a majority, and the extension can be passed through on something that won't be filibustered by the minority at that time, thus keeping the reform away from reality.
Agreed. Why aim for better if perfection is out of reach. Much better to let the status quo lay still. I love conservative ideology.
I do give the guy credit for sticking to his probably honest-felt convictions, even if pragmatism is a dirty word to him.
It's also a good thing that the Patriot Act won't be extended in 2015 anyway, when the House attaches it to an education bill.
Fascists have a long and glorious history of pointing their finger at other fascists and saying their real cause is to prevent the country from falling to Them.
Well, 1 is a number, so I guess what you said is technically accurate.
It also didn't pass the House until the amendment extending the Patriot Act until 2017 was added.
Calling the failure to proceed bipartisan is either stupidity or deliberately disingenuous.
What I can't figure out is if it was intended to fail, and who out-gamed the other to make it fail. Let's be realistic, it was filibustered by the Republicans. I'm not going to count the 4 Republican yays for cloture or the 1 democratic nay as anything but statistical noise. There's a puzzle in the life of this bill, and I wish it made sense to me.
A little research would tell you where the extension to the Patriot Act came from. Poison pill, or true intentions?
Was the state protecting the old trusts that laws were written to combat? It seems to me that history shows us that the natural end-result of pure free-market capitalism is the formation of abusive monopolies even without state assistance. I think the state assistance is an attempt to utilize the monopolies, which sometimes have uses, but under the control of the people.
I think he's generalizing based on self-identified libertarian voting habits, as polled.
I know a lot of good libertarians, seemingly like yourself, but you all still vote Republican. I'm not saying you should have voted Democrat instead, but fuck, Republicans seem to be banking that the megatrusts they're working for will eventually get powerful enough to ensure their power forever.
Only if the compiler knows that explode() prevents execution past that point, which it won't, unless specifically designed to look for the case of explode() twiddling an I/O register that it knows is going to cause a catastrophic fission chain reaction
My programming experience started with an Amiga 500, around age 6. By age 10, I had successfully proved the value of programming in a mock-commercial setting- "Community" as we called it. We had "Community Dollars", a governing body, banks and financial regulations, and weekly market events where we pitched goods and services for Community Dollars. My first market event was a "beat the computer" numbers game, written on an Apple IIGS, in BASIC, on a school computer. I was even given time in class to work on the project that my teacher was at first dubious about (I was the only person attempting to program a class computer, and the teacher doubted my skills). I think she, like my dad, made the right call.
Fast forward 21 years, I make good money, I enjoy the view 30 floors up in Seattle, WA, I was active in sports (track, football) in highschool, and would consider myself socially well adjusted. I don't think I agree with your advice.
An interest in computers and programming at a young age in no way precludes essential areas of development for a child, it doesn't seem to have for me.
Where does the US constitution say you lose your free speech rights if you work in a group?
Right next to where it says your conglomerate has the rights of a person.
I love how far this can be extended, as well. Corporate armies? Sounds awesome.
The obvious thing you're missing, is that the rights of the individuals within the groups were never infringed. The rights of the group were infringed, and the ability to infringe on a group is literally enshrined into US case law, so long as it's not a protected one.
But hey, when "Right to Work" is a euphemism for "abridging the rights of 2 people (corporation, union) to form a contract between themselves" and somehow not an acknowledgement that the rights of the individual are superior to the rights of the group, I can see how a lot of shit confuses you.
Insidious Coital Commerce?
I could never vote for one, from a simply pragmatic standpoint, but I also kind of like them, just for their unabashed honesty in their bone-headed ideas. You don't get that from the major parties.
To be fair, the rights of known individual sociopaths are also often limited legislatively
Or, because if the enterprise they were investing their assets into and becoming partial owners of engaged in the act of raping babies, and a prosecutor could not effectively pierce the corporate veil, they wouldn't go down for the actions they helped fund.
Good thing corporations don't do shit like that.
You're trying to make it personal. The rule they violated was a blanket rule that applied to all incorporated entities- it was non-partisan. If the rule sucked, the rule should have been removed. Instead, we got the nuclear option. Yay.
A world where we take responsibility for the evil we finance?
One can only assume that the organization of said entities would restructure along with the now even-more-hawkish investors so that they would become good citizen corporations, instead of hives of scum and villainy.
The catch, is it can be a bit tricky to figure out who to assign blame to, so the corporation ends up settling with a large cash payout instead of holding anyone accountable for the actions behind the veil.
Comparing "average wealth" according to some table is nonsense; the demographics, purchasing power, tax structure, and composition of that wealth are entirely different in the US and European nations.
It's all about context, right? When talking about the average individual *wealth* in one country vs. the average individual *wealth* in another country, I'm pretty sure the selection criteria cares little about those things.
What I said remains true: The vast majority of their population is *better off* than the equivalent wealth percentile in the US. That's precisely what those hokey pokey tables tell us. PPP is probably not a fantastic tool in this case, as it precludes the original topic of the discussion- health care costs. This is why accumulated wealth is a better indicator of population prosperity than their income.
So you compare the US distribution with the top 1% "shaved off" to European populations without 1% "shave off"? What sense does that make?
Why did you skip the part about the flattened curves in Europe? I already explained that they had very good gini indexes. As an example, in the most slanted economy in the Eurozone (Germany), shaving off the top 1% shaves off nearly *half* the amount of wealth you lose in the US (as a percent of the whole). It declines steeply from there. As an average across the Eurozone, shaving off the top 1% doesn't appreciably alter their favorable standing next to us. The flatter their distributions (lower gini index), the higher their lead on us in median individual wealth. If only you assigned worth to those numbers on some tables.
Being from Europe, I can tell you that you're full of it, when it comes right down to it.
I'm not from Europe...
My point stands. The US may provide better opportunities for a few, but far less opportunities for prosperity for the average Joe. We're overly-content serfs, distracted by flashing lights, hard math, and the general complexity of our daily life; and you're helping us stay that way.
You are correct- I meant to type mean, since our median wealth is already down at eastern-bloc levels. I was trying to illustrate that we only look good when using the mean.
.5) gini coefficients, you barely impact the average.
;)
You're also correct that the top 400 only have 2.29 trillion in assets, I thought it was more than that.
Let's call it the top 1%, who have 37.1% of our total wealth of approximately 80 trillion.
So, our average wealth goes from 357k (pretty respectable, even in comparison with Europe) to 222k. Very bottom of the list for Europe.
So really, I should have said, shave 1% of our population off, and all of a sudden we're wealthier than the likes of Spain and Greece, but none of those other commie socialist freedom haters. Shave 1% off of your average western European country, and thanks to their fantastic (near
What's the grand point to all this? We may have the best opportunity as Americans in the world to rape and pillage beyond belief, and become richer than God, but when it comes right down to it- the Europeans enjoy better success for a greater percentage of their population.
I thank you for the opportunity to elaborate
Self-contradiction detected...
Hardly. You used the absolute term, "only fair". That's a ridiculous claim. Claiming it may be the fairest does not contradict the implied assertion that it isn't the only fair way.
Competition is the way to drive prices down...
Addressed previously. Competition is *a* way to drive prices down.
What are you going to import? What the "cartels" are selling abroad? That's reimport. Something invented abroad? We already import those things — but our government, in its wisdom, insists on requiring an approval before allowing such imports...
Cheaper drugs. We pay more for a specific drug than anywhere in the first world. Why? Because what choice do we have? The government, via the FDA is a captured regulatory body. While I certainly ascribe blame to our government for being corruptible, the fact their lobbyists, former executives, or other such still-interested parties have attained positions of regulatory power is the real problem.
The only "monopoly" currently in existence is the temporary one — rewarding inventors with the exclusive rights to sell their inventions for a limited time. Such reward of inventions seems perfectly fine with me — if you don't like it, you don't have to buy these new drugs and you will not be any worse off than if the system didn't exist at all and the drugs in question, instead of costing too much, simply have not been invented...
The Federal Government funds 42% of pharmaceutical research in the US, and any inventions or IP generated as a result of said funding belongs solely to the beneficiary.
To me, it's a better model for us as a country to throw those shitbags to the wind, cover the other 58% of the funding, and run it at-cost.