shirgall

Earnest people who unconsciously say, "to be honest". What are they selling? Getting laid off and someone thinking I need religion. Getting downvoted for asking an honest question.

Oh come on, not every guy hates Starbucks.

Believe it or not it was when I was so disgusted with George HW Bush. His first strike was the 1989 import ban on foreign-manufactured semi-automatic rifles, and the deal was sealed with this one statement "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God." This led to supporting H. Ross Perot in 1992, and to becoming a libertarian. I joined the Libertarian Party of Oregon, served in a few positions there, and even ran for office in southwest Portland, OR. When the county imposed an income tax, and made it retroactive, I fled to Washington state. More recently I was a Ron Paul delegate to the county Republican Party. However, my suspicions started when I began reading L. Neil Smith science fiction when I was younger. "The Nagasaki Vector" had me hooked, and "Tom Paine Maru" got me looking for his other material. The basic idea is branching time streams and the ability to move between them... and some of them had ancap histories. A key branch point: Gallatin deciding to join the rebels instead of the government during the Whiskey Rebellion, see "The Gallatin Divergence". And if that isn't enough for the creepers to figure out who I am, I dunno, since I use the same avatar and username all over the place.

It's definitely the case that if large organizations can see value in limiting competition by engaging the state more cheaply than competing, they will do it. In fact, it is their fiduciary responsibility to do so. I have a niggling feeling that the key problem here is limited liability and a lack of mindfulness amongst stockholders. If everyone in an organization is personally liable for the effects of that organization, I suspect no organization could afford to get so large as to encounter this vicious circle.

You watched, didn't you? Something worked.

Well, I think Bjorn's priorities are easy because it requires someone else to do them to be effective. For the most part, I'd rather focus on things I can do that greatly improve my local environment, because progress is where I derive the most positive feedback. For whatever reason, banging my head against the big things and not getting anywhere doesn't appeal to me anymore.

You can tell it's a scam because they sell it with "consensus" and not evidence. The predictions are poor, differing evidence doesn't change the theory, the ultimate results are hyped, and past trends are discounted. Of course most people don't have the time to really get invested in learning enough to tear it apart, so they're getting away with it. But, when I was a kid, there was plenty of talk about how the next ice age was starting (and some even said it was man-made). And how DDT killed birds ("Silent Spring"). And about how population growth would overwhelm our ability to feed people ("The Population Bomb"). Apocalyptic talk has always backed up the scam du jour. On top of it the EPA and the Endangered Species act were also both launched in the 1970s. Those have been great successes, right? Were all those things intended to distract us from Vietnam and incredibly high inflation because of it? Are all the stories now intended to distract us from perpetual war in the Middle East and the coming collapse of the economy under its own weight of debt? Many have said Obama is a the second coming of Carter, so it's all kinda coming together, isn't it? I guess I'm cheating a little because the 70s were kind of a banner decade for this kind of crap, but that's when I was a kid.

Yes, came through fine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=9/11_conspiracy_theories#Cockpit_recorders

Wall Street Journal has posted a statshot article on this today. http://blogs.wsj.com/numbers/statshot-arrest-deaths-food-trucks-and-grizzly-bears-1720/?mod=WSJBlog

Abhorrent! We didn't evolve from slime for 4 billion years to just sneak up on carrots *or* test tubes! (runs away very fast)

Sure, it should be, but this does not speak to any propensity to arrest blacks more because they might be racists. It's the facts I had handy though. It could either be that blacks commit more crimes or that blacks are more likely to be arrested if there's (unreasonable due to racist biases) suspicion that they committed a crime. Yeah, stop and frisk is ripe for abuse. Gang unit stats are tough, though, because the gangs themselves have an aspect of racial purity to them, which is going to skew your arrest data. I suspect a mafia unit is going to have a racial bias to its arrest data too.

The classic: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/aus9010.pdf 3 times as many men arrested as women. 3 times as many whites arrested as blacks (which is out of proportion to the number of each class in the population). 2 times as many whites arrested as blacks for violent crimes (skewing ever further from the distribution). There are of course many possible explanations for this, but they are not in that document.

This is a critical point. Rights are universal. Not only are they supposed to apply to every citizen, but also to every non-citizen, no matter their authority or criminal status. This basic fact frustrates the heck out of me when I talk to people about NSA stuff, or immigration, etc. etc. and they think the rest of world has no rights.

If a party is offended by an offer insufficient attention was spent on understanding the interests behind positions and therefore the process of determining the proposal was missing key information on options.

To me it sounds like his priorities are elsewhere and it sounds like that's where the discussion needs to dwell, not on his (or your) failures. What's important to him and why? Spend some time there and don't go to "why isn't x more important" for a little while and try to see how he ticks. Obligatory caveat: I am not a therapist and I've never found a good one.

Labor Theory of Value? Flee! In all seriousness, isn't this why the US is primarily a service economy and not a manufacturing economy anymore? People will always look for ways to make their time valuable to someone else and get their living from that. It's the low-skill/high-rote stuff that's getting eaten up by technological process. In the meantime everyone's standard of living is improving.

if not for significant competition from Taiwan, Japan, and Malaysia I'm sure they would have been more heavy-handed in their management of trade and industry, but they were smart enough to realize they needed to grease the skids. Not perfect by any means, there's plenty of bullying and subsidies going around, but it was even worse in some countries (look up Japan and MITI sometime, and the dumping controversies on memory and microprocessors). Automation can and will move manufacturing elsewhere, but so long as the US taxes on businesses are the highest in the world, it won't be coming to America.

Let me add to the excellent advice above... find a native speaker that is willing to coach you. I worked with a team in Taiwan and it helped me with Mandarin a great deal! They were tickled I was trying to learn.

As an aside, for people that don't understand the need to STFU when you are talking to police, detained, or arrested just look at all the videos of the District Attorney in Texas who escalated her own situation by being aggressive with the responding officer. Cops are trained to detain and arrest people that escalate situations because people like that are more prone to violence. She was the DA, far more used to deference to her authority than really was warranted in this situation. They respond to DUIs and face violence a great deal more than any of us may realize, including her. That is not the time to make a stand. Raising the stakes is what they expect and are ready to respond to. The time to make a stand would have been in a public forum, looking presentable, and not when one is being booked making faces, threats, and acting out. The jury is going to see that, and she sure as hell knew it. However, I suppose it can be considered a wimp-out. What I consider is the fact that I came from a home where yelling (and, yeah, spanking) was commonplace, so I developed a condition where I contain myself until I reach a boiling point and explode in a torrent of emotion, usually anger (and, oddly, yelling, aren't you shocked?). So maybe I have incorporated this quirk in my advice. I accept this criticism.

Peter Schiff is not a billionaire, he has more like $70M. http://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/wall-street/peter-schiff-net-worth/ If he is not getting what he wants from running the radio show, or if there is something else he can do that he wants more, than I don't understand why anyone would criticize that. He's free to experiment with business models for what he does to his heart's content, and we'll let him know what works for us by how we react to it. I appreciate Peter's show because he talked about timely things and introduced me to others that I found interesting. I especially like all the interviews he has done. Sure, his interviewing style sometimes turns into talking over people sometimes, but at least he has interesting people on. Even if he doesn't post his old radio show episodes for free, he does a lot of cuts from them on Youtube for free. It's usually good stuff.

The blogger would benefit from listening to Stef's series on Introduction to Philosophy ( http://feeds.feedburner.com/FreedomainRadio-IntroPhilosophy ) where he spends a great deal of time on truth and then applying it to important things like ethics, religion, and politics. But I suspect we all know that already.

Here's similar data for the United States, for the curious. http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acs-22.pdf For those 5 and over, from the 2011 Census survey: 291,524,091 Only spoke English: 230,947,071 Spoke any other language: 60,577,020 Spanish: 37,579,787 (62%) Chinese (no breakdown for Mandarin versus Cantonese, etc.): 2,882,497 (5%) Trailing behind this are French, German, Vietnamese, Korean, etc. Even in the US, Chinese is #2. I started trying to learn Mandarin after doing considerable business with companies in Taiwan and China in the past five years. My school learning of languages was Spanish and Latin, which really did not help me with this. The local public and private schools only offer Spanish at this point. They used to offer French and German but interest diminished. There is one local private school that has an extensive Latin curriculum that starts in Middle School. They are definitely an outlier. For Canada, obviously English and French dominate, but French knowledge is only greater than 25% of the population in Quebec and New Brunswick, and it falls off quickly after that. http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/as-sa/98-314-x/98-314-x2011001-eng.cfm At least in Canada people stopped reporting "Chinese" and started specifically saying "Mandarin" or "Chinese" on surveys. Mandarin ends up in the middle of the mix, often behind Cantonese (but there's also a non-specific Chinese given a lot but one would expect similar proportions in that category) in the major metropolitan areas. http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/as-sa/98-314-x/2011001/tbl/tbl1-eng.cfm

Stef's new video calling out the possible connection between SSRI use and Parkinson's treatment is especially interesting to me.

What's amusing to me is that tear gas is defined as a chemical weapon... but only if used in a war. Well, the War on Poverty™ and the War on Drugs™ seem to apply here...