Comment Re:Buy local honey (Score 3, Informative) 387
+1 and wiki link to foul brood.
+1 and wiki link to foul brood.
Oh for mod points! Way to start my day off the right way! LOL!
Raising the minimum wage has been repeatedly demonstrated to raise the unemployment rate of the people most likely to receive it and it's also reasonable to assume it's a contributor to inflation. Couple that with import tariffs and what you've accomplished is to throw some minimum wage earners out of work and raise the cost of living for everyone, effectively negating any benefit you hoped to achieve by raising the minimum wage.
Tariffs impoverish everyone for the marginal (and debatable) benefit of some politically connected minority. You need to look no further than the sugar market to see a case study in how populist tariffs make almost everyone worse off and in ways that are hard to predict and control.
First off: thank you for a serious answer. I appreciate when people invest the time to make
My point is that it shouldn't have to be settled through the legislative or judicial process. When we're talking something as serious as killing a US citizen (or really anyone) our policies should have originated in the legislative process, not be an afterthought that we hope reigns in an executive power grab. It's as much a comment on how the process for developing the policies of the US should work as it is about the morality of using deadly force without due process.
As I mentioned in another thread, and as I think the Wired article covered, this stretches the definition of immediacy to absurdity and practically speaking it means that the position of the Executive is: we can kill anyone, anywhere, so long as we think they might be plotting against the US. To take someone's life, I think you need to raise the bar higher than that.
Deadly force without due process is justifiable only when the threat of harm is immediate and otherwise unavoidable. It is stretching the definition of immediacy to the point of absurdity to argue that some dude in a hut in the middle of nowhere Africa represents an immediate and unavoidable danger to the US.
You left out an important bit:
"... if and when he is convicted thereof by a court martial or by a court of competent jurisdiction.
(b) Whenever the loss of United States nationality is put in issue in any action or proceeding commenced on or after September 26, 1961 under, or by virtue of, the provisions of this chapter or any other Act, the burden shall be upon the person or party claiming that such loss occurred, to establish such claim by a preponderance of the evidence."
Look, who needs a Congressional declaration? We've got ample precedent of of declaring war on things with no Congressional action necessary! Have you never heard of the War on Drugs or the War on Poverty? Look at how well those two wars are going!
Yep, that's right, when Obama took office he completely replaced the entire US Intelligence apparatus! The people feeding him his daily intelligence briefings are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from the people who were telling Bush that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction! *whew* Bush and Obama both had access to intelligence that we do not, fortunately Obama has access to the RIGHT intelligence whereas Bush just had some shit they randomly pulled off the Internet. Hooray for Hope and Change!
I, for one, welcome our new warrant-less wire-tapping remote control drone executing won't someone think of the children overlords!
So what's your answer then when an elected US official abandons the rule of law? Are they above the law and thus able to act with complete impunity? Are they subject to the law "by the people" and thus eligible for enhanced expedited impeachment by any interested party?
Are we not to complain when the rule of law has abandoned us?
Can we count on you to withhold your objections when someone you DON'T like is wielding this power against someone that you do like?
Well played sir!
Just try to keep your cat out of it, alright?
+1
Go read Obama's paper from today, he specifically complains that firearms manufactures made "cosmetic" changes to avoid the previous ban. Why did they do that? Because the previous 'ban' only banned cosmetic features, not actual functionality.
Two weapons, exactly identical in function in every way, are treated differently because of how they look. It's how the old 'ban' worked; it's now the new 'ban' is proposed to work. As pointed out in other places in the thread:
1) Long guns aren't the problem; hand guns are.
2) Scary looking makes no difference to lethality.
So what do our saviors in government do? Propose useless legislation based on looks and on the wrong class of firearm. The GP picked an terrible way of stating it but the essential point is correct: the proposed fixes have no chance of preventing another Sandy Hook or any other firearm death for that matter.
Even backing up to removable storage can be (and often is when talking about confidential documents) a violation of company policy. There's a reason they want you using your corporate backup solution and not USB drives. This is one of those reasons.
My argument isn't that there's no better way to do healthcare in the US, just that the solution that we had foisted upon us isn't it. Yes, big wads of cash would have the same inflationary problem that handing big wads of cash to college students is having in the higher education market, but it would have been far less destructive than the $1 trillion boon-doogle we ended up with.
Here's something you don't often hear in the US healthcare debate but needs to be understood: the vast majority of the so-called uninsured in the US already have access to some form of government healthcare (CHIPS, Medicaid, etc) that they simply don't take advantage of. If we reduced our focus to just the truly uninsured and uninsurable we're talking a number that's much more manageable than the scary numbers thrown around in the debate. We could easily afford to provide healthcare for all of those people and do it for far less than we're going to spend on the ACA.
If you want to reduce costs and improve choice, break down the interstate barriers to supplying insurance. Prior to 2012 i would have said that's unconstitutional but the SCOTUS has had their say (even though I disagree) and so there's really no barrier to simply striking down all state regulation of insurance and letting the private insurers sell in any state they want.
For that matter, end the employer tax breaks for providing insurance and get them out of the middle of the equation. Other than tradition and inertia, there's no reason employers have to be involved in my insurance decisions at all. (They're gonna have to raise my salary if they stop providing medical but I'm ok with that so long as we come out even at the end.)
There's lots we can do and a lots we could have done. Instead we just lined up to handout a lot of money to special interests but didn't really improve anyone's outcomes.
With your bare hands?!?