The House of Representatives is "the people's house". That's why they stand for election every 2 years. And that's why all tax bills must originate in the House. Now, of course, that has been thoroughly subverted both by Gerrymandering and by Senate workflow (amend some House bill to replace all the text with a tax bill - see, it originated in the House!). But still, that was the clear intent.
 

This is the other kneejerk response to any suggestion of reduced government spending that needs to die forever.

1 - How about we cut government spending in some are other than the tiny percentage spent on protecting people against corporate abuse?

2 - We have a system in place for this. The problem with it is not that it's underfunded, but that it's been corrupted by the very corporations it tries to regulate! Arguably, stuff like the DMCA shows that more harm than good is done in some areas, thanks to this. This is perhaps the most serious problem in internal politics in America today but it's not in any way a funding problem.

Both times I lived in areas with high temps and humidities, no one even had a basement. When you're near the coast, and near sea level (typical of high humidity areas), underground anything is right out.

Government, police, etc will always be corrupt. Always. People are people. The only defense is to give them just barely enough resources to do their job, with no excess or space for overreach. It's all about taxes - taxes are the only practical weapon the common voter has against government overreach, and the Constitution was written with this fundamental truth firmly in mind.

Of course, of all of Congress there are but a handful of congresscritters who actually are for less government spending, and usually the voter's choice is merely between which group of supporters the tax money will go to. That's a cultural problem in the US, and we can't begin to fix it until every call for lower taxes stops being dismissed with "you anarchist and probable racist, why do you want 0 government".

Fixing the problem starts with popular acceptance of the idea that one can say we're sending too much without being some extremist calling for the end of government. Less does not mean none - spread the word!

Never seen an evangelical mega-church? You don't pass 10k members by without a lot of up-with-people let's-celebrate. But then again, they barely mention Jesus, and certainly don't mention sin - wouldn't want to offend anyone in the audience after all. But then, that's exactly why the fundies hate the evangelicals.

There are a couple of big religions that grew during medieval times, and so are very feudal in their structure, with God as the king-of-kings, and humility and suborning one's will to him are the key to salvation - this was after all the fundamental basis of feudal society. But that's just a handful of religions. Pantheistic religions have a different model. Religions without a deity seem to actually focus the most on humility for some reason, and like support your argument the best. But there sure are a variety of religions out there!

Slaves? WTF? Are you so blind to the conditions in much of the world that you think offering a job to someone is bad? Are you insane? These are the best jobs most of the poor in Dubai are likely to have offered in their lives.

It's not right for the first world, so better the jobs don't exist at all? Seriously, I can't imagine how you think this is bad. These jobs are vastly better than early industrial revolution American jobs, let alone no job at all in a place with no real social safety net.

Sheltered suburban enclave American middle class are something else. No sense of perspective at all.

Do you have any idea of the rich-poor gap in Dubai? Sure, there's a difference between driving a Porsche for someone else and actually owning it. But there's a vastly greater difference between a Porsche for someone else and starving. WTF? How can you think this is bad for all the newly employed?

He's claiming women are poor at spatial relationships as measured by some (pretty arbitrary) objective standard. You're claiming they're just find in fields where success is a matter of fashion. Was that really the argument you wanted to make?

I don't think basketball has much to do with spatial relationships myself - I'd think athletic ability and hand-eye coordination would be the dominant factors (well, and height can't hurt). But then, what do I know about it?

Plus this ignores the upside. I'd expect several staff per wealthy occupant of the dome, and so many poor enjoy the nice environment for each rich person. For Dubai, that's a step forward.

It sure would be nice to have some standards there!

Because there were some firm standards for terminals, vendors could make clever ones, PCs had emulators, and you could make simplifying assumptions. And I guess if you stick to some basic HTML (which you would for non-AJAX anyhow), maybe we're already there with HTML5 (or XHTML, if you go that way).

Hmm, a modern server-side framework that sticks to the basic, non-AJAX world - does it exist? It would sure make all the geeks who use noscript religiously happy!

Most of what was written in COBOL looked very much like any non-AJAX web app. Sure, there were the batch programs you describe, but mostly it was apps for terminals. Send a form, the terminal posts a reply, hit the database, send the result fields. Same-old same-old. But it was all server-side code.

There are a few WYSIWYG web editors out there, but for some reason they were never that popular. People seem to want to muck around with JavaScript and frameworks and otherwise dick around with the client side code, as if the bit that paints the screen were the important bit. That was the difference in the COBOL years - you wrote the server side and let the client take care of itself, instead of trying to do that backwards.

BS. That's sophomoric laziness and extremism. The goal is to be able to make a solid argument, not philosophical certitude!

The relativity of wrong is unrelated. I love it that your argument for consensus is "see, the consensus of people disagree with you". Nice.

My argument is dead simple: you either have done the work to understand why something is right, or you are taking it on faith that the Wise Men are right. Sure, some Wise Men are more reliable than others, and that's great for them, but you are just lazily operating on faith until you do the work.

If you want to claim "but I put my faith in Wiser Wise Men than those guys do!" OK, fine, but so what? Everyone in history has always believed that!

It's not that all opinions are equal, but that blind faith is blind faith. Science is great because you can do the diligence and confirm the opinion, or at least understand the argument. But until you do that, the difference is as yet immaterial.

It amazes me how many people have strong opinions about issues they don't understand. I take a lot of things on faith: pretty much everything in my life that's both unimportant and uninteresting. But I don't have strong opinions on those things - I know I can't back up my beliefs. But for something I have a strong opinion on, say relativity or evolution, I can explain the science, qualitatively and with simple math. I understand the predictions made, and how they are confirmed, And, most importantly, I understand the arguments of the skeptics - I don't dismiss them out of arrogance, I understand where they're coming from and why they're wrong.

Similarly on issues like abortion, or normative ethics, I can explain in detail why anyone who's too certain about their stance just hasn't thought deeply enough about the issue, because those are areas where there's just no way to reach certainty except ignorance.

No, I make no such argument. My argument is that taking something on faith is the same regardless of which "wise men" you believe without diligence. Sure, it's often more practical to understand the argument and evidence for science than for religion - but that only matters when you actually do the work. Until you do, you're taking that belief on faith.