Yes, I'm sure Hamas is in no way encouraging or endorsing missile attacks on Israel by groups other than itself. That's why it erected a monument to them. Obviously, they'd love nothing more than to round up those malcontents and arrest them - it's just the Israeli attacks against them in response to those rocket attacks that have prevented them from doing so in the last 13 years.

Well, I don't dispute that, given that Palestinian rockets not infrequently misfire and blow up their own citizens. But if you're randomly shooting a handgun into a group of a thousand people and one soldier, as far as I'm concerned, you're targeting civilians. The fact that they're firing rockets more or less randomly into a largely-civilian area hardly absolves them from shooting at civilians.

Israel has been delivering such rockets for the last few days now.

Actually, they're not. Hamas haven't held an election since they themselves were elected. Funny thing about electing despots.

Indeed. And while those rockets have wounded thousands, and inconvenienced many more, they've only killed a handful. Israel has exceeded that by many orders of magnitude in a tiny fraction of the time. Maybe someday the Palestinians will figure out that getting into a violent pissing contest with someone with the power to utterly destroy you isn't really a smart move.

Like the 13-year strategy of rocket attacks against civilian targets that Hamas has pursued in violation of international law? I think Israel, like Hamas, has figured out that international law is largely toothless.

The two are not mutually exclusive. Something doesn't become unscientific just because you happen to think it's trivial.

World discovers A/B testing
Freaks out
Until the next reality tv show comes on

Yeah, in the same way GIMP stands for Gnu Image Manipulation Program

It's not that it's a format that he dislikes; it's in a format that is cumbersome to read. There's a reason we moved away from stone tablets - formats are important.

MS Word is a pretty poor choice to distribute a read-only document. Even PDF has unnecessary cruft and overhead if it's not intended to be printed.

So, first you have a go at millennials for being worried about corruptiuon...

Then you say their worries are justified.

Which is it?

Rewrite history much? The Coalition won 90 seats; Labor won 55. It wasn't only most definitively not a narrow margin, it was one of the most decisive elections in recent history. Preferences deals aren't even relevant in the lower house, which is what determines who forms government; preference deals only happen with the Senate, and all the squawking about preferences this election wasn't to do with the coalition; it was to do with the minor parties, who finally got around to exploiting the preferential system the way the major parties have for years, and won a handful of seats, such that they hold the balance of power in the Senate (as long as the Greens vote in a bloc with Labor, which so far, they have).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

They didn't even need to do that. The Labor party self-destructed - they couldn't even keep the same prime minister for a whole term during the last six years. It was the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd backstabbing powerplay that won the Coalition the election.

Right back at you buddy.

They got to the middle class by living off welfare? Never happens.

No it doesn't. If you're unemployed, or not employed full-time, you will be living below the "standard" of people on the minimum wage, all other factors being equal. Also, if you have an unemployed wife or children, your standard of living will be lower than that of people who can spend their entire minimum wage on themselves.

You could say the minimum wage sets a floor on living standards for full-time workers with no dependents, but that's not as catchy.

I have no idea why he targeted conservatives, but zero-sum economics is not just a Marxist viewpoint anymore - it's a popular viewpoint for many who don't understand economics, because they can intuitively understand it.

I see you're a fan of the theory that an arrow could never hit a moving turtle, because over small enough intervals, it only moves a negligible fraction of the distance.

Yes. He's saying that because the minimum wage is too high, jobs are not going to those who expect the minimum wage (i.e. US workers). It's like any sort of market manipulation - screw with the market, create a black market. Frequently, the black market turns out to be worse than the market would be without the manipulation (e.g. because the workers are illegal anyway, they can also be abused without them going to the authorities).

Oh, those poor desperate people who had to work. I'm so glad to see they can now sit and accomplish nothing under a welfare system that pacifies them by providing their basic needs and no more, while providing a disincentive to actually bettering themselves.