|
Greatbacon posted:If you consider that all the lead in the gasoline most likely ended up in the air, floating around all the cities and suburbs of this country in small little trace amounts, slowly accumulating more and more over a lifetime, it sort of explains the general economic and social violence and insanity in this country. Like the lead in the pipes of the Roman aqueducts slowly poisoning the empire. Only a compelling hypothesis if you ignore how crazy the rest of the world is.
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2016 04:39
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 23:30 |
|
|
Armyman25 posted:I'm sure this has been brought up before, but wouldn't the "well regulated" portion of the 2nd Amendment authorise rules and limits on the use, carry, ownership, etc of of arms? The argument is that that's not actually part of the law, just a reasoning put in. So if the Amendment said "The right for people to bear arms in a well regulated militia shall not be infringed", then you would have a stronger case. As it stands, the bit about a "well regulated militia being necessary" just shows why the founders thought it should be included. You might think this is the same thing, but there's a lot of precedent for the founders wanting something and still erring on the side of individual rights in order to secure that goal.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2016 17:06
|
|
|
AdmiralViscen posted:Right, but at the time of its writing "bear arms" didn't mean "owning a gun," it meant "serving in a militia." I'm seeing many conflicting viewpoints on that matter. It is worth noting though that it's not just "bear arms", it's "keep and bear arms". It's not quite as old as the Founders, but the Dredd Scott case seems to indicate that it would be a personal right: quote:[If negroes were civilians,] It would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognized as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right...to keep and carry arms wherever they went.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2016 17:36
|
|
|
RuanGacho posted:It might solve the red state issue of no taxation and no representation if everyone has to flee to the cities to get non fatal water. Rural areas don't have complex water systems though.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2016 17:58
|
|
|
Nocturtle posted:This probably isn't news for most people, but American life expectancy is still significantly below other countries. The three main contributors to the discrepancy are gun, drug and automotive fatalities. CNN has an ok article: I'm curious as to what "more favorably" actually means (in the context of "in the 80s life was better"). Also, they don't give out exact percentages, but based on this: eviltastic posted:I'm no expert, but after some googling this does not appear to be the case. http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/809956.PDF It seems like the major contributing factor is probably increased reliance on automobiles, which results in a higher amount of automobile fatalities.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2016 00:37
|
|
|
ColonelDimak posted:I could see middle class whites having lower automobile fatality rates by driving newer vehicles with better safety ratings and features. It looks like the deciding factor is more that white people don't drive drunk as much.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2016 04:07
|
|
|
SumYungGui posted:Even if you accept that those times were an aberration, you can be rightfully pissed off that the result of such phenomenal wealth for decades on end was 'lol get hosed you lazy teenagers, I got a degree working part time and then I earned my house with a solid retirement so you can too' in place of 'gee we should rebuild the nation's infrastructure because it's all kinda falling apart and work on the social safety net to improve the entire country for everyone who isn't a billionaire'. It sounds like you're getting pissed at the middle class instead of the wealthy.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2016 07:40
|
|
|
http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/gove...1.html?mode=jqmquote:OKLAHOMA CITY - The Senate passed a measure Thursday that would require high schools in the state to teach students about the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2016 17:22
|
|
|
DeusExMachinima posted:That's a really smart move on Uber's part. Let people use a service on your app of their own accord and then go, "oh by the way if rear end in a top hat was king you couldn't do what you just decided to do." Reminds me of weird laws Uber went through getting into Vegas. If you're not outside the terminal at the airport when they show up they have to make another pass through the terminal pickup. Normal cars can wait for whoever of course. Taxis are allowed to stop and wait for customers of course. "Them" being Uber, who blew through $700 million last quarter.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2016 01:37
|
|
|
Everblight posted:I struggle to understand how Uber can lose money, at all. They have zero risk, zero assets and need to pay a few coders to make an app that sends push notifications and mapping software. I understand good coders are expensive, but they aren't $700m expensive, and it's not like Uber needs to maintain a fleet of vehicles or pay the vast majority of their The way you do it is you charge $1 and pay the drivers $2. And then you have 10 million drivers and 70 rides from each of them in three months (made up numbers).
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2016 04:57
|
|
|
DemeaninDemon posted:Hey can we not argue about uber? That's pretty toxic and dumb. Everything is toxic if it involves a topic people actually care and disagree about.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2016 07:07
|
|
|
DemeaninDemon posted:Except it's the same slap fight every single time. Hence the dumb part. Every discussion is the same one every single time. This can be fighting about Uber or circle jerking about how bad the Puritan Work Ethic is. You're not changing people's minds either way.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2016 07:10
|
|
|
zoux posted:McGovern and Carter were electoral disasters, to be fair. With Carter they got what they paid for - a Washington Outsider who wouldn't deal with those scummy politicians. It just turned out that being ideologically pure is a great way to have a poo poo presidency.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2016 16:32
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:As a pure "mechanics" question because I don't want to bring back primarychat: Would it be fair to say that Sanders' shot at the nomination lies in having enough pledged delegates that Hillary needs the superdelegate margin to win, and then hoping the DNC does not pull that trigger over fears of delegitimizing the process? That's the most likely scenario, yes. There's enough of a divide that he won't win outright, so his hope is that he gets close to an outright majority of delegates, and then the Superdelegates flip. Which, if the ~20% of delegates are already committed to Hillary, means that he has to keep up his NH performance in basically every other state.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2016 16:41
|
|
|
So not really politics but I just found out "cuckservative" word filters to "Jeb Bush" (quote my post to see which is which).
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2016 17:12
|
|
|
Mitt Romney posted:What would it take to educate the American public on how marginal tax brackets work? They should heavily embed it in high school or something. Marginal tax brackets are inherently unintuitive because of the nature of their existence. It gets even worse as you add more brackets. Really the best solution is probably to just make an "effective" tax rate and teach people what that is. So as a simple example: If the tax brackets are as follows: - $0-$50,000: pay 0% -$50,000+ : pay 50% Then someone who's paid $75,000 pays an effective rate of (50,000*0 + 25,000*0.5)/75,000 = 16.7% effective rate. And people don't even need to know the calculations behind it, just make a calculator app that does it for them.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2016 17:04
|
|
|
e: dp
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2016 17:05
|
|
|
Inferior Third Season posted:If you try to explain to people what an effective tax rate is, they will give up trying to understand because it becomes "complicated". Nope, just say "go to [website] and it'll calculate it for you". Keep in mind this is also in tandem with a shift in media narrative. Right now the media reports on "Top rates are [x]" which gets people thinking "Rich people pay [x] in taxes".
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2016 17:53
|
|
|
Scrub-Niggurath posted:It's such bullshit. There really needs to be some sort of common minimum test voters have to pass, maybe something as simple as literacy And we don't want to make people take the same tests over and over again. Maybe we can "grandfather" them in if they've already shown enough aptitude.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2016 18:10
|
|
|
Paradoxish posted:That's fine, but the problem is that people need at least an intuitive sense of "I can't make less money if I get a raise" in order to have any kind of reasonable public discourse on taxes. If you don't understand that, you literally cannot comprehend how any changes to the tax code will affect you. And the reason why people don't know that is that they hear tax bracket and think "If I make over a certain amount of money, I get taxed more". Note that that's not even false, it's just only applicable for a certain pool of money. It's a fundamental problem with the way tax brackets work. It's much easier to give people a calculator and show them that their rate doesn't go up by much (if at all) if they get a raise.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2016 18:33
|
|
|
zoux posted:Let's remember that for most of these people this idea of "oh no not a raise leading to higher taxes" isn't even happening, they're just concerned that when They Finally Make It they're going to be taxed more. Yeah but even with that in mind an effective tax rate changes the calculus. A guy saying "my taxes are 15% but if i'm rich I'll pay 20%" is a lot more benign than "my taxes are 15% but if I'm rich I'll pay 35%!"
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2016 18:39
|
|
|
Your Dunkle Sans posted:Probably because they're deeply insecure and authoritarian and so they need to feel that they always have their children under their thumb so they can control them better. The anxiety about Common Core is exactly the opposite - they fear that this is a less effective way of teaching their children than the way they were used to.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2016 01:58
|
|
|
Your Dunkle Sans posted:I'm referring specifically to the notion of why parents would be opposed to having their children be smarter than them. And the presumption in the post you quoted is that parents oppose Common Core because they don't want their children to be smarter than them.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2016 02:05
|
|
|
Xae posted:I'm just a little skeptical that after a couple thousand years of math education we've suddenly discovered a new way to teach it is so great it is worth removing or mitigating the ability of the parent to assist the "proper" way. It's only in the past 150-ish years that anyone outside of the top 1% has gotten math education.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2016 16:43
|
|
|
Your Dunkle Sans posted:Americans have a really skewed view on what the idea of 'government' is supposed to look like. I blame our founding fathers for trying to start with the Articles of Confederation and then working our way back to federalism from there. Looking at the EU, the theory checks out.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2016 18:10
|
|
|
Freakazoid_ posted:I cannot think of a more boring subject than math. English should probably be split into a writing and a reading class.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2016 20:40
|
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:I think math in the context of something nearly immediately rewarding and engaging like a simple Unity 3D game would help a lot. The only time I remember seeing vectors before college is in Physics. Most of that other stuff is also college level work.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2016 22:18
|
|
|
I was gonna save this bottle of wine for Valentine's Day, but I guess I can open it early.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2016 23:09
|
|
|
Bullfrog posted:What if..... what if a republican is the next president though. We'd be completely hosed forever So no different than yesterday.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2016 23:16
|
|
|
Mr Jaunts posted:So I can only imagine Obama will do everything in his power to get a new Justice through before he leaves office. But my question is, is there anything he, or the Dems in Congress can do to fight the opposition of the Republicans? Nope, there's even precedent for not confirming nominations during an election year. What this does do is give Democrats another reason to get out and vote (or rather, it gives their existing reason an actual physical manifestation).
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2016 23:21
|
|
|
Hollismason posted:This probably means Ginsberg is going to retire though and it wouldn't Surprise me. She will, but she probably won't announce it until after the election.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2016 23:22
|
|
|
Al-Saqr posted:I was under the impression that Scalia was aged 60-69 not 79, dude hid his age well compared to the other supreme justices. Interesting fact: Clarence Thomas is the youngest (at least currently) SCOTUS Justice at confirmation, and he was 43 at the time. He's only two years older than Alito, who was confirmed 15 years later.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2016 23:27
|
|
|
UrbicaMortis posted:The supreme court is a pretty weird thing. Was it always meant to be this incredibly important political institution? I mean, obviously a supreme court is going to be important but to the extent it now is? From outside the US it seems odd. Pretty much. It's designed to be a co-equal branch of government.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2016 23:30
|
|
|
Business Gorillas posted:Is there anything stopping them from dragging their feet for 4 years and try to wait for another election? The fact that they'll probably lose the Senate if they lose the Presidency.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2016 23:41
|
|
|
Stultus Maximus posted:You and Joementum both say this, are there enough swing seats in play for real? Everyone who was elected in 2010 is up for grabs now. You might remember that as being a productive Republican class.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2016 23:43
|
|
|
Mitt Romney posted:The GOP can only turnout so many people though. Romney's turnout in 2012 was great but it was still 332 EV for Obama. Yeah, it feels like the strategy was less "maxing out our turnout" and more "minimizing the other guys' turnout". Right now there's a much bigger reason for the Democrats to vote for someone, and that conflicts with the plan.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2016 23:51
|
|
|
UV_Catastrophe posted:In terms of firing up their voting base, it seems to me that Republicans have everything to gain from taking a brave, obstructionist stance against our usurper-in-chief. It's strange how "voting against [x]" is only a disadvantage when Democrats are doing it.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2016 23:55
|
|
|
Boon posted:This is neither here nor there, but good for some perspective. While I think it's a great thing that Scalia has passed, the posters in this thread are such hypocritical assholes when it comes to people dying and their moral highgrounds. I don't think you'd have to go back very far in previous threads to find a dogpile about someone being happy that someone died, and it happened to me once. Eh, I normally agree but if any situation deserves a mulligan it's probably this one. At least for the next 48 hours or so.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 14, 2016 07:13
|
|
|
PostNouveau posted:There's nothing stopping the GOP from just never confirming a Democratically nominated justice. Even if Hillary wins the election, they could just settle in for four years of 4-4 and try to wait out RBG. I mean, nothing other than losing control of the Senate, which will happen if Hillary wins.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 14, 2016 19:26
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 23:30 |
|
|
Rexicon1 posted:The loving worst political party in the history of the world. No, not really.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 14, 2016 21:39
|
|