Dantius

Originally Posted By: Sylae

 

 

 

 

Your orbital lasers are weak, old man!

 

 

 

Personally, I think that Bioware could have avoided the whole DLC thing easily by just not releasing From Ashes as a DLC, and just requiring you to buy the Collector's Edition to get the Prothean (geddit?). That would totally undercut any argument against it (I mean, could you imagine trying to argue "You're charging extra for including extra content in a special edition? GREEDY FASCISTS!"), and the content would still be included for the people willing to pony up. Then, they could release it several months down the line if they felt like it, but the anger over day 1 DLC would be totally defused.

Yes, because an encyclopedia filled with filth like articles on "Zionist Occupation Governments" is totally a legitimate source about racist views.

False, Jade Empire was published 7 years ago.

Clearly you fail to realize that the only two acceptable Mass Effect pairings are FemShem/Garrus and Kaiden/Nuclear Warhead.

I'm already married to my work. And my ego.

No, yes, yes, no, never, no, I certainly will, probably, right here.

Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm. A fascinating exploration of the psychological roots in political and religious authoritarianism. A bit dated (it would be nice to see how his thoughts evolved after WWII ended, but I'm sure he's published other books about that), but still very relevant.

I still think it'd be pretty cool to see a list of the top one or two hundred posters so I could get more reliable data than just the top ten + the few active people with high postcounts that haven't made the cut.

Smart money's on six months.

I didn't get that vibe from his post at all, and frankly there's really no need to be so rude about it, either.

It was probably created by some other, active member as a gimmick account for the user number 1000, but then lost that status after the board switch. Dunno whose it is, though.

EDIT: Oh, Riibu.

Spiderweb Software, message boards. A forum barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the AIM chats. We have the capability to make the Internet's first user-friendly UBB threads. Spiderweb Software will be that board. More elitist than before. Smarter, spam-ier, meme-ier.

[cue cheesy 70's muzak]

Because when I think "conservative", the words "Paul Krugmann" spring to mind first.

While buying a volt dosen't actually cut nt carbon emissions unless you have nuclear/renewable power generating your electricity, it does both a.) reduce dependency on foreign oil, and b.) relocate dangerous smog and pollution to areas where millions of people don't live.

Furthermore, you aren't paying for it. The government is, by not taking as much money from me as they normally would. Granted, this might impose a minor cost to you, but it's not like you and every other American citizen is writing me a check to buy it.

(Full disclosure: My main car is a Prius, not a Volt. I don't buy American cars anymore, inferior quality for the price)




Honestly? It's a tax, and it's being called a penalty because the political climate now is so irrationally hostile to the word "tax" if it's not followed by "cut" that it's funny. Also, because if it were called a tax, it wouldn't g before the Supreme Court, and it kind of has to because the Court is almost certainly going to uphold the law (again, different subject).

And re liability insurance: You're splitting hairs. The Big Gubbmint has forced you to buy a product because it is in the interest of the nation to have because a large pool drives down everyone's costs, and also in your interest to posses in the event you get in an accident.



Medical insurance is not just to protect yourself. It's also to protect other for similar reasons. Although it pains libertarians to hear it, healthcare is not a free market, because the invisible hand cannot operate in it. If I'm rushed to Lutheran General with a heart attack, I can't say "Oh, your treatment is too expensive, so I'll go to a hospital in Indiana instead": I get the treatment at your price, or I die. Because of this, the only effective means of paying for healthcare in the absence of a national program that sets and pays for costs (which is SOCIALISM OMG!!!!!), is insurance. By purchasing health insurance, not only do I remove the burden of paying for my treatments from the government (since hospitals can't turn down patients), but I also decrease the amount charged to everyone else by increasing the pool of the insured. So, although it might seem like purchasing insurance is a decision for me and my family alone, it actually affects everybody, much like smoking, which means the government has clear and compelling reasons for regulating and monitoring it.

How, exactly, does the government use taxation to "dictate" what people should buy, eat, and drive? If you're referring to tax incentives, it's pretty difficult to claim that because I (the government) am offering you a $4000 tax break if you buy a Volt, that I'm somehow "dictating" that you buy a Volt.

And the government has every interest in incentiveizing and decentivizing (is that a word?) certain behaviors. If a nickel tax on every cigarette you smoke makes you cut down on smoking, then your health and the health of people around you has been improved- which is a good thing.

And if this is some oblique reference to the PPACA, then somebody's attacking a straw man- the government is not forcing you to buy a product, they're imposing tax penalties in order to defray the costs of uninsured medical care and making it impossible for insurers to deny you coverage for preexisting conditions. That's not "dictat[ing] what the population should buy", it's penalizing someone for not buying a vital service that benefits both them and everybody else that by all rights they should posses already- which you'll note has already been done for car insurance, so it's hardly an unprecedented expansion of federal power.



Ugh. Taxes are not "redistributed" to people who are not entrepreneurial. The vast majority of taxes goes to funding the military, healthcare, Social Security (are old people insufficiently entrepreneurial for your tastes?), and interest on bonds. That's hardly Soviet-style "redistribution".



This is called the "Laffer curve" (as I'm sure you, Excalibur, and Lilith know). While it's fine in theory- I mean, it makes logical sense that a government would collect no money for no tax, and I accept the arguments that it also makes no money at 100%- it's incredibly misused in practice. When you're trying to build a tax policy based on the data points (0,0) and (100,0) and the idea there's a maximum somewhere in between (hello MVT!), everything in between is basically guesswork, and guesswork is really not an acceptable justification for economic policy. This was used as an excuse for Reagan-era tax cuts, and I can't believe people bought it, much less that people still buy it now. Just because the government collects less revenue at rates close to 100% doesn't mean that it would also collect less revenue at rates above 35%, and the idea that tax dollars don't contribute productively to the economy should be laughable- just look at things like roads, the Internet, and practically any defense or healthcare contractor and tell me that they don't contribute "total benefits" to the economy greater than their cost.

Yes. Absolutely.

Let's look at a relatively uncontroversial case study. It's widely agreed that Bashar al-Assad is doing terrible tings to his people to stay in power. Since he's the dictator, it's certainly not in the Syrian government's interest for the US to intervene and stop them massacring their own people. Does that mean that, since it's not the "that countries national interest" for us to be there, that we shouldn't intervene? I think not.

So "that countries national interest" is largely irrelevant when determining whether to occupy/invade a country. I mean, it certainly wasn't in Germany or Japan's national interest at the time to be invaded, have their governments deposed, and occupied for decades, but they seemed to have turned out alright after that. In the absence of them being allowed to decide whether or not they get invaded or occupied (because OBVIOUSLY they would pick no), then the only relevant judge of what to do would by default fall to the occupier: aka the US. Of course, in a perfect world we would only intervene in cases of obvious humanitarian crisis, ala Kosovo or Libya, both of which were cheap, painless, and accomplished their objective. Since this isn't a perfect world, I suppose we'll just have to swallow self-interest as a means to improvement: while Afghanistan may be a blatant case of American intervention for our own self-interested reasons, and while it's obviously FAR from the land of milk and honey it was promised it would become back in '01, it's not really a viable argument to claim that Afghanistan was better under the Taliban than it is now.

Of course, it upsets a lot of people across the political spectrum when you say that, in certain cases, sometimes it's actually in a countries best long-term interests to remain and occupy them even if they object to it. Building stable, long-term institutions to make democratic self governance possible is hard, and all too often the publics of both occupier and occupied simply give up before such institutions can be built. This creates more a sort of vicious loop, providing "case studies" for various anti-occupation groups, and politically pressuring future occupations to become still shorter and less likely to succeed. But that's another problem entirely.

If you want to know what a country run by engineers looks like, just look at China. Nine out of nine members of the Politburo's Standing Committee are engineers.

Take from that what you will.

EDIT: Corrected total number of members

Getting your stuff stolen from your car is hardly a Chicago-only phenomena. My car hasn't been robbed once in Chicago, but I've been broken into in both Troy and Durham, so the whole anecdotes != data thing comes into play.

To answer your question, I live in Chicago because my job (civil engineering) and my specialty (MEM) tend to require a large and fairly robust construction sector, which means a city is pretty much a prerequisite. My best job offer out of grad school was in Chicago, so I took it. Years later, I still like my job and my salary and my house and other such material trappings, so I'm not really inclined to suddenly pick up shop and skedaddle to a city I'm totally unfamiliar with and be unemployed and maybe work for a lower salary if I do get a job because of a little endemic corruption in politics.

EDIT: Also, what Excalibur said. Though, to be fair, there's a demand for nice parts of any city so long as people are rich enough, and there are rich people everywhere. There are nice parts of Vietnam, for heaven's sake.

Yet another reason why it's a good thing Internet libertarians don't run countries.

I, for one, thought winter was ridiculous. This is Chicago, and winter should have snow on the ground for more than a combined total of like four weeks, tops. It's like 80 in March! I've already planted my garden! This shouldn't be happening! I DEMAND MORE WINTER! THERE'S A REASON I MOVED HERE!

 

And, if things keep up this way, summer's going to be brutal. Ugh.

And now, I am the master and you the apprentice.

It took you this long to finish like three pages of narration sans primary sources and a graphic?

 

I mean, give the prior record of completion of vastly epic projects by various people on SW, I guess it's still better than just not doing anything at all, but I was expecting something more along the lines of Slarty Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Blades Empire or Slartydides's History of the Oldbieonnesian War if you've been working on it for so many years.