Choose a cheaper college in a cheaper town.

Manufacturing may be, but what about manufacturing EMPLOYMENT? When you use robots and automation, there aren't so many employees.

I believe manufacturing employment has also not shrunk, but it's harder to find statistics on that and it depends on what you mean by "manufacturing employment". If you mean jobs for people with high school education, those have shrunk, simply because more and more people are actually getting college degrees.

And it may look large because US manufacturing is focused on large-ticket items, like aircraft and rockets and tanks. It's still the case that 99% of the routine goods that you buy (whether clothes or household items or toys or electronics) are made in China.

It doesn't just "look large", that makes it objectively large. And, yes, the US focuses on high margin, high value items because those support the high salaries that US workers demand.

Mostly, these jobs move to China or Europe because Americans don't want to do them anymore.

See what Rowe has to say about this:

http://www.mikeroweworks.com/2...

beer is roughly $1000/ton (based on a 150lb keg costing about $75). You're looking at maybe a 5% rise in cost.

Except you're looking at the weight ratios wrong. Producing 1 ton of beer produces less than 1 ton of spent grain (beer is mostly water). So the ratio would be probably be closer to.... I don't know 1:5. Which would only be a 1% rise in cost.

I would agree, but "Rusty Shackleford" is the alias of "Dale Gribble" from "King of the Hill." So, being used as the "non-name name" on a show that millions of people watched for over a decade may lead to a lot of other people also using it.

Similar to how "Doe" is a pretty rare real last name, but very common in aliases.

Sorry to go dark. Life intruded.

I think the best method is to take things off slashdot.

My email is slashdot[SlashDotUID]@hotmail.com

Pig shit, not so much.

There is a fundamental difference between how the UK relates to the EU and how US states relate to the US government: The UK issues it's own currency.

I'm sorry, are you serious? Do you actually believe that federal/state distinctions are determined by who issues currency? Does that mean that Germany is part of a "European nation" because it uses the Euro while the UK is not? The current identification of currency with nations is a novel economic phenomenon, and one that probably isn't even going to last.

So you listing some reasons is good but... so what? You didn't actually respond to the central point, relating back to the start of this: the proposition that the constitution was written by and for capital owners.

So what? The people who wrote the Constitution also wore wigs and smelled bad. What does that have to do with anything? What exactly are you trying to get at here?

...which you just assumed for some reason, then...

No, it's an observation: political, cultural, and historical ignorance is extremely widespread among Europeans, as are erroneous assumptions about the US; you confirmed it by asking these truly elementary questions about the US. Don't get me wrong, it's good that you ask, but US government and history really is something all Europeans ought to be learning about in great detail in secondary school.

I thought the shredding was technically legal because it was presubponea

Yeah, I remember how well that worked in the 90's

Remember when Arther Anderson stood up to Enron and refused to sign their books. And in turn sacrificed the lucrative consulting contracts with Enron for only CPA fees.

As opposed to simply adding a footnote disavowing the report before signing it anyway.

If you want to find out who out of two groups decides, you can't look at the cases where they agree.

People at the 90th income percentile are not "a group" and don't make decisions as a group. They are merely a population of individuals that these researchers decided to single out.

If, for example a 30000 people group always wins when they disagree with a 30 milliion group, then either the 30000 group decides, or its interests align perfectly with a third group that does decide.

The paper shows a correlation involving people around the 90th percentile and people around the 50th percentile. The paper simply provides no data over who decides in cases where "the 30000" and "the 30 million" disagree. So you cannot infer that "the 30000 always win" from the paper or any of its references.

It doesn't ignore them. They enter into the the calculation, but they don't provide any information about the power structure.

"Domination" and "power" are quantitative issues. If on most issues, governmental decisions reflect the will of about 50% of the population, then you can't say that a small group "dominates". Even if the correlations they found were valid, they would amount to nothing more than "slightly disproportionate influence", not "domination". And that the 90th percentile has a slightly disproportionate influence on politics and policy is no secret and pretty uncontroversial: that population consists mostly of older people and more politically active people.

You speak as if the economic mobility in the USA were perfect. it isn't.

This has nothing to do with economic mobility, it has to do with demographics. Many people reach the 90th percentile after working for a few decades and drop out again when they retire. They certainly aren't in the 90th percentile while getting their education.

I don't understand your reasoning here. The groups were selected solely based on their income. They weren't selected based on their opinions or how closely they correlate with political decisions (that would be circular). The groups don't need to have consistent or stable preferences.

You are confusing a sociological and political meaning of "groups" with a statistical meaning of "populations". People whose last name starts with the letter "X" are a population, but they aren't a "group" in the sociological or political sense.

Why? I don't think that's obvious. You're saying that if I to a multivariate analysis of the preferences of a large group and a small group vs. political decisions, I should expect to find most of the explanatory power with the small group, regardless of which small group that is? That's a pretty outrageous statement, which needs to be substantiated.

Let me try to illustrate. Assume the US consists of 100 subpopulations, each with 100 preferences they particularly care about, but overall, the population is divided equally on all preferences. If you randomly pick one person from each of those subpopulations and look at how policy aligns with their preferences, you won't see any consistent agreement because you just picked 100 random people; any preference that you identify within that population is just a statistical fluke. If you pick 100 people out of just one (or a few) of these populations, they do have many consistent preferences. And since politicians do implement something, you'll actually see some of these agree with policy. It's not "outrageous" at all. More importantly, it's the authors' job to show that their statistical methods are reasonable and valid, which they haven't done at all; there are no control groups in the paper, for example.

If you have a good dictator, nothing beats a benevolent dictatorship. The problem is that dictators tend to go bad. When those that wield power are out of touch with the general population, they tend to use it to further their own interests at the expense of the people. Democracy is the best safeguard against that that has been found.

Democracy by itself doesn't deliver that. It is the combination of democracy and limits on the power of government that protects our society from dictatorship. But limits on the power of government mean that many preferences that the population has simply shouldn't be heeded by government at all. Most of the preferences of the 50th percentile in this study that representatives fail to implement at the federal level are probably preferences that should be ignored by the federal government in the first place because heeding them is not the function of government in a free society.

As I was saying: the fundamental assumption that we ought to make decisions as a "majoritarian electoral democracy" is wrong; that is not what our nation is supposed to be, and for good reason. That's one of the reasons that even if the correlations they observe in the paper exist, there would be nothing wrong with it. It is not intrinsically anti-democratic, it is simply not a "majoritarian electoral democracy" because it is not supposed to be.

The terminology of the paper is confused because we actually do have "majoritarian electoral representation", but the paper tests for simple "majoritarianism" on each issue. The former is not intended to deliver the latter.

If people want to argue that we ought to change our political system to that, we need to have an argument about the fundamentals of our society, not about hokey statistical analyses.

And states vary hugely in size and population and any number of factors.

A common principle of government is that decisions should be as local as possible.

You're right that states vary hugely in population size and monster states like California were never envisioned by the Founders. California probably needs more levels of government than Wyoming. But the large variance in size between states, as well as population growth, is another reason why federal power should be limited, because political power becomes more and more unequal between citizens of different states and different states at the federal level. Limiting federal powers is one way of limiting the impact of that.

The narrative seems to talk about the federal government as this monster that has to be controlled, while state governments are mostly left out of that narrative, and I've yet to see an explanation for why they are cast so differently.

That's elementary: in the US, the federal government has enumerated powers; those are the only things it can do. It vastly exceeds these these days. The relationship is not much different as it is between the UK and the EU. How would you like if Brussels unilaterally decides that the UK should adopt the Euro and speak German, your local opinion doesn't matter? A second reason is that the federal government is fundamentally different: individual states are in competition with each other for people and business, so if California screws up, people move away; you can't easily move away at the federal level.

Then the conversation is really about how the government reflects the wishes of the other entities.

Here is another mistake you make: US government isn't intended to be majoritarian democracy; it's not supposed to grant wishes, it is supposed to protect liberty and justice for all. "Justice" not in the modern, perverted sense of "social justice", but in the sense of equal treatment under the law.

Who is the axiomatic limitation of federal authority designed to protect, and from whom?

I know to Europeans, the US is just one big homogeneous mix of people; why should Texas be governed by different laws from California or Massachusetts? Well, for the same reason that the UK, Germany, and Spain are governed by different laws: they have different cultures, economies, and histories. And these differences are stable, because people are different and they move to the states that reflect their preferences.

It's interesting to look at this discussion from outside the US.

Subsidiarity is a key principle for government in Europe. Among other things, it's part of the Maastricht treaty, and the laws of several member states. Many member states would have joined the union if it weren't so, both the United States and the European Union. The people of your own country are adamant about it. The return of political control to local and regional entities has been a significant movement, and the UK of all places has strong and active devolution.

It's good that you ask, but it is disturbing that any European should have to ask in the first place, because these issues are a core part of European governance and politics. Having spent a lot of time in Europe, I find Europeans to be profoundly ignorant of politics, history, or culture, even their own.

You can force companies to pay higher wages, but you can't force them to exist. If they can't compete with overseas manufacturers at those higher wages, they are going to go out of business. And that's the reason companies outsource in the first place and why some key industries have disappeared from the US. So, high labor costs are the reason jobs are moving overseas, even to Europe; US wages are some of the highest in the world, and the only way we can pay those wages is by focusing on highly productive jobs. Jobs that return less than what a worker minimally costs disappear from the US, and no union is going to change that.

It's a myth that manufacturing in the US is on the decline; it simply has become smaller relative to other sectors, but in absolute terms, it's been growing.

It's also worth mentioning that they are paid a lot more here than wherever they come from. And they are going to work in IT either way. If we don't bring them here, they are going to compete with us from abroad, pay taxes abroad, work cheaper, and help build competing industries elsewhere.

Furthermore, it is not that difficult for H-1B's to change jobs or get green cards these days, and many of them immigrate. Conversely, for employment based immigration, almost everybody starts off as an H-1B, so killing off H-1Bs at this point kills of most employment-based immigration.

yes