Yeah, I think that "mentally sick" diagnosis is spot on for this one.

One every other season doesn't seem like enough to get sick of them. Also, was one of those five episode 200, because that one was a clip show that wasn't really a clip show. Also, I think it's not so much about writers throwing in clip shows when they are out of ideas, but more about producers having a contractually mandated number of episodes, but not quite enough budget. As for the British approach, while it is fine as well, it does have its criticisms too. I liked this bit from the good place where one of the characters is having another watch her favorite BBC comedy: "It ran for 16 years on the BBC. They did nearly 30 episodes"

Hence your not a zero sum game argument, sure. Except that it's not about whether it's a zero sum game or not. That's simplistic reasoning. You can have a non-zero sum game where, nevertheless any excess accumulates to certain players and not others. A classic example in actual games is monopoly. Technically, Monopoly can be zero sum, if all of the money is gone from the bank, except that I've played games of monopoly like that (because we were missing a lot of the money, not because we actually used up the normal amount of money) and we just printed more money in the form of a tally sheet, so not really. In monopoly, depending on exactly how you play (such as what you do with free parking money and other fines, and also mortgage loans), the amount of total wealth among the players increases throughout the game. The more rounds, the more wealth. However, the end point of the game (if anyone has the stamina to make it that far) has all the wealth going to just one player. Non-zero sum, high wealth inequatality. Real life does not have to be like that, but the reality is that, in the US, real wealth of both the mean and median average person is going down while the wealth of the upper end is going up. So the zero sum vs. non zero sum argument is meaningless.

Anyway, to revisit "...somebody who earns more on the high end doesn't come at the expense of those on the low end." It is more correct to say that somebody who earns more on the high end does not _have_ to come at the expense of those on the low end. That statement would be true. The original statement is not true because it implies that someone earning more on the high end never comes at the expense of those on the low end, and we have all of history to show us the inaccuracy of that.

You're obsessed with the straw man that others think that this is a zero sum game. We do not. Once again, whether it is zero sum or not has nothing to do with it. Players can lose out on their total share against other players in either a zero sum game or a growth game, even in cases where the growth is unbounded. You shouldn't even need any familiarity with game theory to know that. The false dilemma (zero sum vs. non-zero sum) is coming from you here.

Anyway, in response to a statement that, if it is the case that income inequality not somehow being bad, that therefore the wealthy should have no problem giving up their wealth, your response is "yes they would." but no further explanation than that. It seems like it should be simple, if it's not bad thing to have less wealth than others, then no-one should care about having more wealth than others, then they should have no problem giving their wealth away. That's the argument you disagreed with from another poster, yet you have not actually come up with any direct counter-argument. Now, this may come down to semantics. Clearly, those with wealth who jealously guard it do thing that wealth inequality is bad if it means them having less wealth than others. So, in that sense, their unwillingness to give up their wealth means that wealth inequality is bad to them, at least with the scope limited to their personal selves. They may of course think that wealth inequality is perfectly fine for others as long as they themselves have more wealth. There is the broader question of course of whether wealth inequality is morally wrong. There it is not, per se, morally wrong. Someone works harder, they earn more, they get more. Og the caveperson forages all day, going further, Og gets the opportunity to eat better. Very straightforward. Very simplistic as well, however. There is nothing inherently wrong with people having more wealth. To use a non-caveperson example, I am perfectly happy with, for example, the salary of the highly skilled surgeon who saved my life (and by extension all highly skilled surgeons who save people's lives) being very well paid. It makes sense that they make more than the burger flipper at a fast food restaurant.

So, I think that's the real disconnect here. Wealth inequality is not inherently bad. However, it has to be recognized that, in the modern worldthe, massive accumulations of wealth warp the economy in ways that affect the ability of others to accumulate their own wealth. One obvious mechanism of this is the "golden rule". Not the one about doing unto others, but the one about "he who has the gold makes the rules". That is not a joke. It is clearly a very real thing that wealth leads to the ability to change the rules of the game to increase the accumulation of wealth. That's just one effect. So, semantically speaking, when people talk about "income inequality" they are using it to encapsulate all of the known ills that are typically seen with extreme income inequality because, at this point, they are practically synonymous. Which means that you can argue all you want about how it's not fundamentally bad for some people to have more than others, but you're just arguing at cross purposes, because that is not what most people really mean (I will grant that there are some who really do mean that, of course).

I really can't see myself buying a Dodge Neon. It might be easier to use "person X" and "person Y" rather than unnecessarily using "you" and "me". Also, I am a bit confused by thirty years ago and twenty years ago? I get the ten year difference, but why does this example arbitrarily have to be decades in the past? That aside, I don't really see the point of the analogy as it relates to the discussion. I mean, at different points in time, specifically related to cars, the position of the two subjects wasn't great. One did not have a car and the other had an old car that probably had frequent issues, needed lots of repair, low gas mileage, etc. That seems to to agree with what I am saying, which is simply that not having enough to be comfortable is not great and it's not great to be on the low end of extreme wealth inequality.

Uh. OK. Not even sure what to say with the rest of that, but it seems it's a bit unhinged. Of course, that may be colored by observation of those people who seem to have a frankly insane fetish for attacking rsilvergun. I mean, it's not like rsilvergun even posted on this thread.

What it comes down to is not whether you should care, per se, about the people far wealthier, but about the people poorer. Given that the people on Slashdot tend, in general (not as much as in the past) to come from a more educated, and therefore typically wealthier background, it is likely that the people poorer than the average Slashdotter are the majority. So, do you also not care about the people poorer than you? You're not wrong as long as everyone has the opportunity to be comfortable, but severe income inequality tends to not have a floor.

A simpler explanation would be that he's not a fascist.

CPB might have been useful 50 years ago, but with today's technology and access you can find all sorts of really good educational videos online.

And with the online stuff you can choose to avoid the ones that are politically biased.

Or seek them out. Both kinds are available in the new media.

The ones I hate are the smug Google IT! answers. I did Google it, but all of the results pointed to people smugly replying that I should google it!.

Some years ago I took the NH tax burden and compared it to CA and tried to come up with an explanation. NH has no income tax or sales tax, most of its revenue comes from business taxes. NH property taxes fund local, not state, budgets.

I couldn't figure out why the numbers were so different. I've just now redone that calculation, and here's the results:

NH spends $5640 per person on state services, CA spends $12,500. More than double.

NH spends $850,000 per square mile, CA spends $1,960,000. More than double.

(California has 28x the population of NH, and about 17x the land area.)

About 1/3 of California state budget comes from the federal government, about 1/3 of NH state budget comes from the federal government.

California has a long seacoast with ports of entry for shipping, a warm, sunny environment, the biggest tech sector in the US, and lots of worldwide industry such as the movie industry, Disneyland, vinyards, and tourism. When I originally did the calculation it had Spacex, Tesla, and Oracle and a number of others.

New Hampshire has skiing and hiking.

California should be swimming in money, but it's not. It periodically skirts with bankruptcy, and everyone complains that you can't get anything done due to regulations. Despite having oil wells and refineries in state, energy prices are through the roof. (CA electricity prices are about 2x the prices in FL.)

I'm totally not seeing the difference. How does a podunk little state like NH have such a high quality lifestyle, while CA has opportunity, variety, culture, but at high cost and stress.

I'd be interested in any explanation people have.

More drag means their orbits will decay faster if they become inert junk.

I did, in fact, specifically mention that scenario. That would be due process for a criminal infraction which is the known (and once again, acknowledged by me) exception to the human right in question. The post I was replying to, however, did not mention due process or indeed anything that would normally be a criminal infraction. Also, seizing a foreigners passport issued by their own country is extremely unusual for non-criminal cases and even many criminal ones in most countries. In any case, please refer to article 13 of the universal declaration of human rights for what I was talking about.

Let's be clear here. I am very, very much against littering. I was also on an organ transplant waiting list and almost certainly would have died during the nearly decade long wait I would have had to go through if I didn't end up getting one without the waiting list. So, from a selfish utilitarian perspective, organ banks that remove the organs of litterers to provide to transplant patients would have been of great benefit to me. So understand where I am coming from when I say that is a morally repugnant idea.

All that is what you would expect, and your answer is a fine answer to the original poster. My post though, was in response to Bert64 and was to remind them of what the original poster was actually asking. I personally have not been to London in forever.

OK. So we'll just ignore the fact that the time frame up for discussion was 5 years ago, but somehow I'm the one being "revisionist" when you move it to 10-15 years ago? OK, let's go back three times longer.

15 years ago, we already had things like Siri and Watson. Various kinds of computer generated art had been around for decades and "filters" and other "intelligent" tools were all over the place in all kinds of graphics software, editing video live, etc. Sure, turning your face into Shrek, or an anime character, or aging or de-aging it live was still a couple of years away at that point, but the writing on the wall was clear from what was available that such things were right around the corner. So, yeah, I am very confident saying that the Slashdot crowd would not have been poo-pooing things that largely already existed at that time and were clearly being improved on constantly.

I will add the caveat that I suppose I am being a bit of a snob when I talk about the Slashdot crowd. I mean the actual, real, tech types here. I am excluding the ones who were posting serialized porn, ASCII nudes, thousand page posts of nothing but swastikas, etc. Or just people I consider not really worth considering. Sturgeon's Law applies here.

As for the product being terrible. I call it that because it is. Once it stops constantly giving me answers that make very basic errors, giving replies that contradict themselves, telling me at the start that "no, X is not the case", then giving all the facts that show that X is the case, etc. then maybe I won't find it to be so terrible. As it is, we keep seeing, over and over and over again articles about lawyers getting in trouble for submitting briefs citing cases that don't exist. How hard is it to not cite something that doesn't exist? Sure, it's improving. The fact that it may be good in the future does not make it good now, however.

Because of context. The AC said he was MAGA and he is not. I pointed out that he is not. It matters because that was what was being discussed.

I believe the standard on that the courts have normally upheld is that you have no requirement to provide an ID, but you do have to provide your name and address even without probable cause.

Yeah, I think that's one where they're going to find that a lot of members of their MAGA "big tent" are not going to be so super enthusiastic.

The reasons not to cover both the free speech parts and establishment of religion parts of the first amendment. Some object just because it is forced speech and it's creepy and forcing it is exactly counter to the fundamental principles of the country. Some object because they follow a religion that has prohibitions against idolatry and it counts as idolatry. If you look at the history (or at least claims about the history) of Christianity in Roman times, one of the causes of conflict between Christianity and the pre-Christian Roman empire was exactly that sort of conflict. The Christians would not pray to the Emperor or the Roman state, and they would not take the out that Jews in the Roman Empire supposedly did, which was to include a prayer for (rather than to) the emperor/state in their services. Supposedly, those early Christians refused to do either. A more general religious objection is, of course, the "under god" part which basically makes it a forced prayer by some perspectives. If not a forced prayer, it still forces a religious position.