OT: Political dead horse

Thanks for the tip... I'll buy it for my next flight ;-)

...Jim Thompson

There's also a theory that we came from not only a different planet, but from a whole nother dimension!

See if you can read the intro at

And the people that say, "IT'S PATENT BULLSHIT!!!!!", I'd like for you to explain precisely how it is that you *KNOW* that to be the case?

Thanks! Rich

And who, exactly, is it who signed those guy's fee checks? And who signed the contract that lets your pension holder go back on their deal?

Thanks, Rich

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That's why I don't understand the repugnocrats' obsession with putting the addicts in jail - wouldn't it be so much more convenient to simply let them have all of the drugs that they want, and if they suicide themselves, just toss them into the landfill?

Not to mention orders of magnitude cheaper! ;-P

Thanks, Rich

So you are a supporter of McCain's attempts to reform the electoral expenditure laws. Dubbya's campaigns have been financed by fattest cats iin big business, and he is running the country just the way they like, so that even more of the money ends up in the pockets of the fattest of the fat cats. You are right about the sort of influence modern capitalists ought to have, but you seem to support a party which is the political manifestation of the interests of the largest business in your country.

The poorest 30% in the U.S. would probably quibble about that - none of the increase in the wealth of the country has trickled down into their pockets, and in fact their share of the weatlh has been going down steadily. My point is that you need to distribute a little more of that wealth to the poorest families, because at the moment their kids don't eat well enough or live well enough to take full advantage of the (rather variable) education opportunities on offer. This is throwing away human assets, which has to be reducing your material wealth.

So offer them a more generous welfare program. That way, they will vote for you. If the programs are generous enough, the kids may grw up healthy enough and educated enough to do useful work for you as well - a useful bonus.

In fact, the negative slope poverty trap is a well-known problem of means-tested benefits, and the best solution to a lot of these problems is to pay out a non-means tested child benefit directly to every mother, so many dollars per week per child. That was what the Melbourne Poverty Survey found in the 1960's and that is the way the U.K. child benefit worked in the pre-Thatcher years, to the intense disgust of some fathers, who were paying income tax on income that was paid to the mothers, and thus unavailable for gambling, drinking, smoking and other masculine necessities.

------------------- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I believe I am on record here, many times actually, as declaring that I support no political party.

They are far better off then they were in Mexico or Cambodia or China. Else why would they come here, and stay?

They mostly eat too much. Distributing wealth won't fix that.

I was poor as a kid. My dad was a milkman. I went to public schools and got through college on scholarships, loans, and two jobs.

And further reduce their incentive to ever do anything productive? What *everyone* should have is significant differential incentives to be, or at least feel like, they are productive and helpful to others. When people do need assistance, as some always will, the assistance should be structured such as to still encourage self-help. Many US welfare policies had, in effect, tax rates over 100%... if a person worked a little, they took away more benefits than were earned.

Besides, we are in a post-stuff society now, and should be optimizing a lot more than material well-being.

John

Sloman seems so mal-informed about the U.S. Wonder where he gets his information, al-Jazeera ?? What a dumb shit! John, I'm glad you've taken him on as your personal play-thing ;-)

...Jim Thompson

I don't know why I bother. His hatred eclipses his reason. The engineering implications are obvious.

John

What is his formal name William, Wilhelm, Willem? Inquiring minds want to know ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Government spending wasteful? Surely you jest.

The war is expensive, but temporary. Its costs, substantial as they are, pale against increases in Medicare, prescription benefits, and other recent increases. The war, after all, will some day end, while the latter items will not.

Yes. It's a form of natural selection of congressmen: votes are won by spending, not cutting.

Ditto for Social Security. A form of taxation without representation, methinks, to incur indebtedness on behalf of (but not to the benefit of) those too young to vote.

Regards, James Arthur

I think there were two categories of property owners in New Orleans: those with flood insurance who didn't care, and those without flood insurance who didn't care.

John

Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn't, or at least is less wasteful than other. Check into how much of a US health care dollar is lost in admin. costs in private cases vs the medicare cases. Moving people from medicare to private insurance would increase costs.

There are over 100 countries in the world so when this one is over, they can always start a new one. Even when they are not in use, armies burn dollars.

Nearly all taxes are taxation with misrepresentation. The folks you voted for did the SSI system and the other taxes and spending but the result will effect generations to come.

Heehee! He's got me kill-filed so I can tell him William and he will never know.

------------- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Just their ideas.

Many of them were born in the U.S.A. And we ar=E9 talking about how the U=2ES.A. could do better, rather than comparing it with countries with less in the way of resources (Mexico, China) or recovering from a fairly horrible failure of goverment (Cambodia).

They eat too much of the wrong food - heavily advertised junk food loaded with sugar - which gets them fat while leaving them short of the vitamins and minerals they'd get from a more balanced diet.

Your father had a job. You were not poor within terms of this discussion. And you'd have got more out school and college if you could have worked at them full-time. I just ran across a study where someone had correlated academic success with hours devoted to part-time jobs. The jobs didn't help your academic success at all.

This is a claim. Try an support it with some evidence - you will find it difficult. Those studies that have been done show that everybody wants a job, if they can get one - jobs give social prestige, social contacts and all sorts of toerh good stuff. The people who claim not to want a job are just embarrassed by not being able to find one.

It's often cheaper and more effective to forego the means-testing. which requires expensive investigation if it is to be effective.

In the UK people still preferred to work, sometimes because the side-benefits of the job compensated for the ostensible loss of spending power.

At the moment the U.S. isn't getting to first on the material well-being of its poorest citizens, and that is costing it money in the long term. Adequately fed, adequately housed and adequately educated are absolute targets, not relative. We've reached them in a lot of European countries, not only for native born citizens, but also for the Turkish and Morrocan guest-workers, while you still have a way to go.

You've got a great country and loads of resources - you should be able to do at least as well as Kerala in India.

-------------------- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

That's hilarious. Do you want to compare outcomes?

I was designing flight hardware for the Apollo S1B booster when I was a Freshman, and communications and laser boresight alignment gear for the C5A aircraft when I was a Sophmore. School was mostly boring.

John

Agreed. You are right - it was hilarious. Most student jobs are stacking the shelves in supermarkets, which doesn't pay well in any sense.

Compared with doing real work, undergraduate courses are superficial and boring. I didn't really get that message until I started on post-graduate research in chemistry, and found that as soon as I had to do something for real, the stuff I'd been taught as an undergraduate was too shallow to be useful, so I'd have to go back to the library and find the advanced textbooks and the original papers.

When I found myself having to build my own electronics for my Ph.D. project, I found myself working in the same way - the absence of any directly relevant undergraduate training didn't hold me back.

On the other hand, I did the first year undergraduate course Theory of Computation 1 while I was completing the Ph.D,, after I'd become a Fortran guru, and picked up a lot of useful stuff, though none of it as useful as the tutor's M.Sc. thesis "Some Experiments in Non-Linear Estimation". _______________ Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

It's not about how much they eat or eating the "wrong" food - it's because from the day they're born the idiot breeders plunk them down in front of the TV (and later, some video game) so they never go outside and run around and play or get any kind of exercise any more.

Thanks, Rich

Well, if they're any good I hire them as interns and pay them three times as much.

Last summer, my daughter made a bunch of money building decks, and she learned not to wear flipflops while power-sanding. Around here, most of the grocery baggers are adult union members. You just make all this stuff up because you want it to be true.

One of my few absolute rules is to never hire PhDs.

John

Wanna bet?