But you're dismissing centuries of wisdom, philosophy, study, and experience of human nature. This was all known centuries ago, and fully factored. Our government was the first to harness it, and the reason for our success.
Obama's undoing it, radically transforming America (his words) into a dependent, divided society of haves and have-nots.
Absolutely without a question correct, in my experience (and I have a few recent ones).
But they're not learning basic or useful skills, they're not learning critical thinking, they don't understand basic economics, and they're not learning how their government works and how to participate in it. That's harmful to the country.
Instead they're being indoctrinated with poisonous, idiotic drivel, handed "everybody wins" badges, and sent out into life, back to their parents' houses, and ready to occupy wall street.
I am to some degree, but a lot of that "wisdom" was just often wrong as it was correct IMO -- it took the (quite modern) invention of double-blind studies (and more fundamentally, the scientific method) to really nail down a lot of it.
This is particularly the case when it comes to understanding the motivation of people who engage in self-destructive and/or anti-social behavior. If you take, e.g., a teenager who likes to cut themselves and just physically restrain them, while you've fixed the immediate problem you've done nothing to truly help them long-term. Historically such a person would probably end up in an institution; today there's a good chance they can be truly helped and become a productive member of society.
I think how many useful skills they learn (or not), etc. has (and always has had) as much or more to do with the student than the university.
I am all for some educational reform -- I have no qualms about someone like Jim Thompson here setting up the EE curriculum, for instance, even though it'll likely produce lots of whining and moaning from students used to the current system.
Perhaps in a few liberal arts classes, but there's little or none of that technical classes. You don't get an "A for effort" in your mechanical engineering class if your bridge design homework would lead to the thing falling down...
The only reason more than about 1 in 1,000 college graduates would move back to their parents' house would be if they were unable to get a job. No one *wants* to move back in with the 'rents; it's only done because you've run out of money! :-)
Not dismissing it, merely placing it alongside more recent work, which typically happens to have a a more extensive theoretical under-pinning and be based on more extensive and more systematic observations.
Newtons' Law of Gravity was brilliant in its time, but we've had Maxwell, Einstein and Feynman since then.
You wax enthusiastic about Bastiat, because he's your kind of nit-wit, and ignore Keynes because you don't like his ideas - despite the fact that they are much better founded and lot more coherent.
It certainly wasn't all known centuries ago, and while your government works rather better than the Dutch and Venetian republics on which it was modelled, your constitution is now ridiculously antiquated. The device of assembling an electoral college to select a president was useful, back when communications involved giving a written message to a guy with a horse and telling him where to take it, but it's a fatuous waste of time today. The French two-round system of electing a president directly - which de Gaulle installed to exploit his personal popularity - makes more sense, if you want that much political power invested in a single individual.
Most countries go for a figure-head head of state, with real power vested in prime minister who is - usually - the leader of the political party with the largest number of representatives in the lower house (congress as opposed to the senate in the US context).
Rubbish. He's very much into business as usual. The US used to be a relatively egalitarian society, but the rest of the world caught up and passed it some time ago, and while Obama is talking about making it a bit more egalitarian, he's doing very little.
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James Arthur would think that. His silly ideas look like transparent nonsense to anybody who has been trained in critical thinking, and he resents it.
Actually they are learning useful skills and critical thinking, they do understand basic economics and they do know how their government works. What they learn and what they know isn't what James Arthur thinks he learned and believes in, because he's a deluded right-wing nitwit who can't do critical thinking when it threatens his core values, and he doesn't like having to try to explain stuff to people who are aware that he's out of his mind.
But if they were being indoctrinated with James Arthur's poisonous idiotic drivel, he'd be as happy as pig in shit.
Oh, you snipped the substantive part of my post...the point was that our government was designed as distributed intelligence, with people making their own decisions. That's loads more efficient economically, and it's a lot more fun too.
Socialism means a central vision, hence central control. Rulers. People don't like being ruled, so they have to be coerced. Socialism requires coercion. Socialism is intolerant and repressive.
When insurance companies complained that Obamacare was forcing them to raise rates, Kathleen Sebelius, the Obamacare czar, said they weren't ALLOWED to say that, and she'd punish them if they did. She'd put them out of business. That's coercion.
Obama says, under Obamacare, that Catholics aren't allowed to practice their beliefs any more. In support of that, he denigrates and disparages them! Isn't that stunning, that an American president would ridicule, belittle, and disparage 26% of the country to get his way? To falsely imply defects in their character, and offer phony "accommodations"? That's coercion, too.
Rulers imagine they know better. But, they don't. Like Barack Obama, visiting, praising, and deciding we need Solyndra. There's no way any handful of people can ever have enough knowledge to beat the collective computing power of 310 million people, each deciding their own affairs.
It's the same reason we've gone from mainframes, to PCs, to embedded controllers--it's most effective to make the decisions at the point of information and need. Eliminate cumbersome communication overhead and delay. Crunch data where it happens, not centrally.
Devolving to central control isn't progressive, it's regressive.
Freedom. It's a wonderful thing, the secret to the greatest prosperity and liberty the world has ever known. Let's not forget that.
OMG, social science has "nailed things down?" And is more reliable today than the things filtered by the centuries, tested and refined over time?
Joel, please, this is mush! Everything is not relative, not some foggy, hazy degree of gray! There are essential truths!
More concretely, in 1776 Adam Smith wrote ""It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."
Is this different today? Has it changed over time? These are the sorts of timeless principles embedded in the Constitution.
Obama might complain that a negative-feedback amplifier was invented in our grandfathers' day, and calculus before even that. Does that mean they're outmoded or wrong? Heavens no!
OK, "nailed things down" might be a stretch -- I would readily admit that "social sciences" are the "softest" sciences there are. Nevertheless, I do think that just the past hundred or so years has, indeed, allowed us to understand human nature significantly better all the filtering, testing, and refinement (as they were) over millenia past.
Ah, but whose truths are they? Where are they spelled out? I have plenty of respect for people who want to use some religious document as their essential truths, but we're all well aware of just how many different such documents there are to choose from out there... and what they promote as "the truth" varies dramatically.
No, that particular aspect hasn't changed.
Agreed... but as society today clearly demonstrates, there's plenty of stuff in the Constitution that people *have* changed their mind about over the past couple of centuries; that in no way makes it a lesser documents or suggests that the entire thing is rubbish.
Hey, Obama says the fleet-wide vehicle mileage in 2025 is going to be
Sounds more like poor communication -- a faux pas -- to me: If you're going to make some policy, and the people it affects who don't like it claim they're going to lie about its effects, you'd be likely to tell them that if they do so you're going to come down on them like a ton of bricks as well.
Granted, she could have been wrong about it being a lie. And clearly her response was not well-phrased or appropriate either (putting someone out of business for libel is going too far -- she probably just meant it as a threat and couldn't really do that anyway). But while that definitely wasn't her best day on the job, you can see where she was coming from.
Hopefully she apologized...
Mmm... I think there's a slight difference between, "you must pay for birth controls for your members if they request it (we realize that you feel the use of such birth control is inappropriate)" and "you aren't allowed to practice your beliefs."
But it's a complicated question in general -- when the good of the many start to outweigh the needs of the few, to quote Spock -- and I don't have an appropriate background to properly debate it. (But recall my example before of people who believe in -- only -- faith healing, no drugs or surgical procedures or anything: Where's the outcry on their behalf?)
I'd say it's just more plain stupid; coercion tends to imply you'll get your way, and the methods you describe seldom accomplish that.
In the case of Solyndra I think there were plenty of good reasons not to make it into a joint venture with the feds... but are you suggesting here that all utilities should be privatized?
Actually with "web computing" there's been a large move back towards the centralized model...
Um, the U.S. seldom ranks #1 on lists of "things people like" -- income, health, literacy, etc. -- take your pick. Not that it's a bad place -- it's a truly wonderful place, and I'm not planning on moving any time soon -- but calling it the "greatest prosperity and liberty the world has ever known" is a bit of a stretch too.
Well, I'm predicting the Republicans will get the presidency in 2016. Should be... interesting...
Those predictions for "54.5MPG by 2025" are pretty meaningless, of course -- you can predict anything you want when it's clear you'll be long gone from office by then!
Not so you'd notice. Traditional wisdom amounts to doing what you used to do, even when it's stopped making sense. Like not eating pork even after you've worked out that trichinae are killed by heating the meat to 55 degrees Celcius (58C if you want a margin for error).
Driving out demons is another bit of traditional wisdom that kills a few people every year. Modern social science hasn't got all that much further - though reading "Freakonomics" could be educational.
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Sure. Every right-wing nitwit has access to a stock of essential truths. All - to a greater or lesser degree - their personal delusions, but they sincerely believe in them, just like Nancy Regan believed in astrology.
Timeless perhaps, but not universal. Believing that the unrestricted few market is the only way of distributing goods and services is as silly as believing that god will provide. You don't come unstuck all that fast if you rely on the free market alone - much more slowly than you do if you rely on some god's benevolence - but it's still a sub-optimal strategy.
He hasn't actually made any such complaint. What - exactly - do you think that he is dismissing as old-fashioned? Hoover-style recession management isn't dismissed because it's old-fashioned. It's dismissed because when it was tried - back in 1929-33 - it utterly failed. Keynes' scheme works a whole lot better, even though you can't bear to believe in it.
Twaddle. Socialism is about redirecting part of the national tax stream towards supporting people who aren't in work at the time, and central government gets to decide how the tax stream gets divided up. Once you've made up your mind about how much money you've got to spend you can decentralise the distribution any way you like. Socialism doesn't have a pope who specifies doctrine.
People don't like being ruled, so they have to be coerced. Government requires coercion. Government is intolerant and repressive.
Particularly of people who don't want to pay taxes. Socialism collects more in tax, but not a lot more, and delivers rather more in services. If you don't like it, you can elect a less socialist government. We've been adjusting the balance in Europe for quite a long time now, and the electorate usually seems to settle for a more socialist approach than the US favours, in part because Europe mostly has fairly stringent rules about how much money the rich can spend on misleading the electorate.
That's your "understanding" of the situation. It doesn't really tie up with what I read here when I googled Kathleen Sebelius
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Nonsense. The Catholic Church is no longer allowed to pick and chose the kind of health care it's employee health insurance covers. If the Catholic Church really believes that it can tell non-catholics how to run their lives (as opposed to telling them how it thinks they ought to run their lives) it's a religious despotism manqu=E9, not a religion.
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need " was the original formulation
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and it wasn't an immediate social program, but rather an aspiration for the day when communism had got society working properly. The abundance of goods and services that a developed communist society would produce was going to be sufficient to ensure that there would be enough to satisfy everyone's needs.
Since profligacy is unlimited, and resources are not, your formulation is a straw man of the dimmest kind.
Damn, you must have had a lucky and sheltered life.
That type never does, short of being under "gunpoint".
What an amazing distortion of the question. Of course it is all about funding really. But bear in mind, that Catholic church has been a major healthcare provider for centuries, has been inconsistently funded by various states during that time.
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Not entirely. But with proper private input on what produces a properly qualified graduate (not the fad of the month) we might make better progress.
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Think that one over, the clouds are distributed systems. A different deal.
So you want to construct another absurd straw man. The 1788 US constitution did include some distributed decision-making - perhaps more than other countries, bit it still had a central president and a central congress making short-term decisions for the country as a whole.
The nice thing about democracy is that there are mechanisms that let the country as a whole review every last decision over a longer term and reverse bad ones.
Claiming that the "American way" is all about distributed decision- making is an absurd - and obviously invalid - generalisation. Some of the American innovations were useful and were copied by other people when they re-wrote their own constitutions. The idea of electing local officials - dog-catchers and judges - isn't one of them.
No-one is suggesting that safeguards aren't needed. Quite a few people have noticed that America's collection of safeguards doesn't seem to stop the people who own America from running America largely for their own benefit.
You could do with a safeguard that made it more difficult for people with money to buy electoral advertising for the political candidates that they favoured (including themselves as in Ross Perot and Mitt Romney). Most other countries seem to have managed this.
They certainly do. And Faux News delivers right-wing votes at a much lower cost per head than importing lions did for Roman senators.
They are, which rather takes the edge of your attempt at irony. Your problem is that you were indoctrinated at a early age with the absurd idea that the American Constitution is perfect - this was and is a delusion that is convenient for the people who exercise disproportionate political power in your country, which is why it is still taught in primary school.
You need to apply your critical thinking skills - skills which you claim to have mastered - to this particular thing you know that isn't actually so.
If you start from just how much the average Jo knows about the Constitution, they have no idea what is in it, to say nothing on whether to change, let alone address the process to make changes to it. The same is nearly true of congresscritters.=20
The obvious one would be social security; some people believe that was rather unconstitutional, yet I'd wager quite a fair bit that the vast majority of the population today approves the program.
E.g., if you polled people along the lines of, "...It's been determined that the U.S. social security program is unconstitutional. Should we abolish the program, or change the constitutional to make it legal?," you'll get >2/3 of people voting for "change the constitution."
Isn't carrying around one of those wallet-sized copies of the constitution the kind of thing that immediately gets you added to various federal "watch lists" these days? :-)
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