Delta1212

Phi, let's be fair, it's entirely possible that he thinks there should be a toll booth at the end of his driveway and the corner of every street so that we can fairly compensate the rightful owners of those properties for our use of their facilities at whatever rate the market will allow. How much would you be willing to pay to legally drive off of your own property, do you think?

Yeah, I don't think presenting challenges that don't make a lot of sense makes your argument look stronger.

The Communist Manifesto is only a little over 150 years old. That's a rather high bar to clear, even if I didn't think a mixed economy worked better in any case.

There are lots of reasons to criticize Stalin, but I feel somewhat compelled to point out that Britain and France also signed an agreement with Hitler to let him just straight up take over a portion of Czechoslovakia in order to avoid going to war with him. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact came later and was certainly fueled in large part by the USSR's own expansionist plans for Eastern Europe, but to make shocked exclamations about how anyone could ever deal peaceably with Hitler! is to ignore the entire history of 1930s Europe. Until after the war when the full extent of what the Nazis had been doing was uncovered, Hitler was alternately viewed as either a great or a very dangerous man but much of the world didn't realize what a monster he was, and many indications that did exist of what was going on were dismissed even by his enemies as being exaggerated because the truth was too horrible to be believed until the proof was literally staring everyone in the face. There are plenty of reasons to be extremely critical of Stalin, is what I'm saying, but just shouting Hitler is not a particularly nuanced or useful perspective.

I think the primary point is that ascribing an idea to an ideology and then evaluating the idea based on whether the ideology that you have categorized it as belonging to is considered "good" or "bad" is a poor practice. Ideas should be evaluated on their own merit, the circumstances they are intended to be implemented in and any data available on the success or failure of that idea in similar circumstances. "That sounds like communism so it must be a bad idea" or "This is guaranteed to work because it's based on the principles of capitalism" are bad ways to go about evaluating any kind of plan. Politically, we really need an increased focus on data and less focus on ideology, but of course, that's much easier said than it is to see implemented when everything, including facts, are viewed as ideological battlegrounds.

Sensei, I agree that they should, but without a check to enforce it, that never seems to happen. In the US especially, the prevailing ideology is short term profits over everything else. We have a set up that incentivizes CEOs to make a profit every quarter in order to earn record bonuses even if the steps they take to do so wind up gutting the company in the long term. There have been numerous examples of companies being destroyed by this practice over the last fifteen years, but it's still the the way a huge sector of our economy does business. And one of the primary ways of driving up profits under this system is cost cutting, which usually means cutting "unnecessary" expenses like employee benefits or employees themselves, irrespective of what the cut to benefits does to employee retention and happiness, and ignoring the fact that the employees were adding value to the company through their work. It's become a serious problem in some sectors and it doesn't seem to be going away on its own at this point. I'm also aware of a number of businesses that I or people I know have had direct contact with that bend or break the labor laws that do exist in this country by denying overtime pay to people that are legally entitled to it or denying benefits to employees that are similarly entitled to it by treating them as "outside contractors" even though they don't fulfill the description of a contractor and are actually full time employees of the company. Technically, they have the right to sue the company for overtime pay and benefits to which they are entitled, and the company is legally barred from retaliating, but it is incredibly easy to get around that because the bar for proving that a firing is in retaliation is fairly high, and you can't prove that you didn't get promoted or any raises in retaliation because it's very hard to prove you would have gotten them anyway. So without the ability to bargain as a group, individuals are left out to dry without even the existing labor laws to protect them because trying to get them enforced on their own is likely to be career ending. I'm not saying that labor unions are always pure as the driven snow and never cause problems, I've seen that myself as well. But unfettered capitalism doesn't always result in the best of outcomes either. What people should know and do is often very different from what actually gets done, and the cratering of the economy less than ten years ago should be a rather pointed illustration of how far you can trust people to do the things that are in everyone's interests instead of being shortsighted when it comes to making money.

How do the rich run out of money from an income tax, exactly?

My hometown in New Jersey had it's own electricity. We were the only town for miles around that had power consistently after Sandy (our power went out for a little under five minutes during the storm and that was it). You could see the town line at night by where the houses started having lights in their windows. And yes, it was cheaper than PSE&G, who in some cases took weeks to restore power to certain areas.

I've had to moderate some forums before. Someone who is smart can be hard to catch, it's true, but frequently it's very easy to tell when it's the same person posting under a different account name, even before you look at IP information.

That's actually pretty close to the opposite of what I said.

I could maybe get behind a flat tax if it was both fairly high and had a high standard deduction. So everybody pays, say, 40% tax on all income after their first $50,000 or so.

Well something certainly can be beyond understanding under any circumstances. It's just not always easy to tell whether something is beyond current understanding or beyond ever being understand regardless of what we do.

I'm going to say that my personal instinct tends toward putting off revealing what is going on in the hopes that it ends well so I don't scare them needlessly. But I know on the flip side that I appreciate being kept informed at each step along the way. I think it's much easier, on the receiving end, to know what's going on early, before there's even solid confirmation that something is wrong. If nothing turns out to be wrong, then everyone is relieved and no real harm done. If something is wrong, it gives everyone the same chance to come to terms with it by degrees instead of having the whole thing dropped on them out of the blue all at once. So I would like to think I'd treat my own kids the way I know I would appreciate being treated if the roles were reversed, but I completely understand the opposite impulse and how difficult it especially becomes to break the news later on if no one knows what's happening and the news is much more serious.

Imagine that, people who live on the street, are difficult to find and are unlikely to be able to get mail are less likely to show up/be concerned about showing up to court than people with a fixed address.

Ok, granted. Leading off of that, do you think there is a possibility that Sanders is leading in the popular vote among people who have voted so far in the Democratic primary?

But he's saying that the caucus states are the ones that are inaccurate. Which means 80% of states do have accurate numbers, not 20%. That's a very different situation than what you just described.

There are degrees of inaccuracy. The claim was that, because there is a level of uncertainty in part of the count, the number is a falsehood/lie. I think that's rather strong language. At worst, it would seem to be an imperfect approximation, not something made up out of whole cloth.

That's the obvious implication of your statement, though. Thr point of stating that Hillary has a 3 million vote lead in the popular vote among Democratic primary voters is that she is leading in raw votes, not just delegates. The only way that "talking point" is invalidated by inaccurate vote counts among the caucuses is if the inaccuracy results in an outcome other than Hillary Clinton having a significant lead in the popular vote, and the only way for that to be the case is if there is an uncounted advantage for Bernie Sanders numbering in the millions. Otherwise, it's completely irrelevant whether that talking point is rendered "inaccurate" by the imprecision of the data, because the central point remains the same. Whether she's up by 3 million or 2.5 million or 3.5 million because we don't have solid enough numbers to say for sure, she's still up by quite a bit and 3 million is a reasonable approximation of how much she is ahead by.

The most important part is that there is no perfectly rigid material. As you get longer, the displacement from the rotation will propagate out at the speed of sound through the material which will cause it to bend and eventually break long before you reach what would be the speed of light at the far end.

At that point, I think it's best to stop thinking of it as a pole and more of a very thick wire. And I don't think we have any materials at present with the tensile strength to sustain that. You're basically talking about a ridiculously long space elevator, and I think even normally conceived of space elevator is a little beyond us at this point, though not quite as far as what you are describing.

You think there are 3 million+ votes unaccounted for in the totals because of imprecise counts at caucuses? Not not just that there are that many unaccounted for but that Sanders has 3 million+ more unaccounted for votes than Clinton out of the caucuses? Sanders is the only candidate I've ever donated money to, but I can still recognize that that isn't even remotely plausible. Hillary has the popular vote in the Democratic primary by a fair margin. The most that can be quibbled about is exactly how much she is leading by, not whether she actually has a lead.

Well, it started with a municipality in North Carolina making it illegal to discriminate against trans people, which prompted the state legislature to make it illegal for more local governments to make it illegal to discriminate against trans people and also mandating that people use the bathroom of the gender on their birth certificate. That's how it got to be a national issue all of a sudden.

I'm personally wondering what is to stop the hypothetical sexual predator that is going to dress in drag to gain access to the women's room if trans people are allowed to use the proper bathrooms from simply abusing the current bathroom laws that are going around by falsely claiming that they were born a woman and therefore are legally mandated to use the women's room even though they look like a man. Heck, that even seems like less effort than the reverse. The idea that these laws are protecting anyone from "predators" is a joke. They exist exclusively to comfort those who think trans people are icky.

He isn't losing because of the way the delegates are apportioned, though. Hillary is also beating him soundly in the popular vote. So no, it wouldn't make a difference.

That's just how the math works out/what we observe. I'm not sure we have a deeper answer for why the universe works the way that it does.