DebateGate
General Category => 3DHS => Topic started by: sirs on September 09, 2014, 05:24:00 PM
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While some would try to argue that the importance about the 2nd amendment is nothing more than talking about guns, the issue of an even more important freedom, that of the right to free expression, as blanketed by the 1st amendment is finding a not so pleasant taste in some Senate Democrats in DC, who wanted to fast track a NEW amendment to the Constitution, giving Government greater ability to regulate and restrict what people could say using their 1st amendment right.
It gets even more humerous. Apparently, the effort by Senate Democrats was to bring this amendment up for a vote, with the expectation of the GOP to filibuster the effort....that way they could march out to the microphones with preplanned talking points, along the lines of These Republicans are obstructing votes in order to protect millionaires and billionaires, like the Koch's, who are poisoning our politics with filthy outside money!
So what DID the GOP do? Well, enough Republicans said, sure, let's open it up to debate. So instead of filibusting, the GOP called Reid's bluff to open the topic up for the whole Senate. NOW the Democrats are whining that they have to debate on a topic, as important as the 1st amendment, taking away prescious podium time that they'd be using to lament minimum wage and income disparity
Priceless
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Everything to sirs is priceless.
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Not everything, but you could definitely say I consider freedom, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution of the U.S. priceless
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Irony is best when unintended.
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What about "freedom isn't free"
How does that jibe with "freedom is priceless".
Perhaps you are aware that this is NOT the country rated as freest in the world. Lots of others have us beat, including Canada and Iceland.
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What about "freedom isn't free"
That makes no sense. When you're in prison, obviously you're not free, When you could legally purchase X yesterday, but made illegal by Government the next day, you no longer have the freedom to buy X now, do you. If you could legally partipate in Y today, but Government is legislating that Y will be made illegal, obviously the freedom to do Y is about to be usurped.
How does that jibe with "freedom is priceless".
Because that goes without explantion. Freedom is priceless
Perhaps you are aware that this is NOT the country rated as freest in the world. Lots of others have us beat, including Canada and Iceland.
In very specific issues, possibly. In the totality of freedom however, as highlighted in the Bill of Rights, not even close to the U.S.
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Finland is at the top of the list.
http://rsf.org/index2014/en-asia.php (http://rsf.org/index2014/en-asia.php)
The US is 43rd out of 190
In economic freedom, the US is 17th out of 45, according to the Cato Institute.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Freedom_of_the_World (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Freedom_of_the_World)
Who is number one? Hong Kong! Who is second? Singapore!
They must have not included the Freedom to Chew Gum and to throw it away irresponsibly,
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Again, based on what? Does Finland have a comparable 2nd Amendment?
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Who gives a shit?
I know I don't. I know that hunting is popular in Finland.
Maybe there is a gun nut freedom index as well.
Guns are useful only for defending your freedom if your freedom is threatened.
The right to own a gun is rather like the right to chew gum if your freedom is not threatened, which I find to be the case in my life.
Again, the main reason for the 2nd Amendment was that in the South, the slaves needed to be repressed and returned to their owners, and in the West, people were threatened by bears, wolverines and hostile Indians (and others).
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Since you can't seem to answer either question, apparently the US is a free-er country than even Finland. 8)
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Finland has earned their freedom.
WWII started early for them , and they had to fight the USSR.
Yes, there are a lot of interesting stories about Finnish marksmanship.
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Again, based on what? Does Finland have a comparable 2nd Amendment?
I see what you are getting at.
A lot of the rankings would change if you controlled the criteria.
But if the US is halfway down the list of the most free, is this a problem? How much of this is a problem of government?
If Hong Kong made the list at all, the criteria must be pretty twisty.
And Singapore?
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Hong Kong is supposed to to be the easiest place to start a business.
I hardly think my ability to answer sirs stupid questions has even a teensy bit of bearing on the comparative freedom of the US and Finland.
But it does to sirs.
"it speaks VOLUMES!"
"Priceless!"
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Hong Kong is supposed to to be the easiest place to start a business.
That is certainly a freedom that we could improve here.
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The main difficulty with starting a business is inexperience. People start businesses unaware that customers not space their visits conveniently. They come in swarms in December, and vanish in January. There are dearths and spates and the rent on the space is the biggest hurdle.
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No.
Inexperience cures itself.
The biggest hurdle to founding a business and to growing a business is government.
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Hardly.
I want to start a business here in Miami, and all I needed was a $60 peddler's license.
That was a waste of money, but it was not a difficulty.
I suppose if I were selling food, I would need to have the kitchen inspected. As a customer, I think this is perfectly normal.
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There are plenty of useless regulations , obsolete regulations , and wasted taxes.
If the government really stuck to real improvement of truly needed regulation it would be a facilitator of business starting and maintenance.
But no , the government seems to be used to suppress competition for the established as often as it does anything else.
We have a lot of cities in which starting up a taxi business is truly impossible , because the city government is a tool handy to the established taxicab companies,
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No.
Inexperience cures itself.
The biggest hurdle to founding a business and to growing a business is government.
BINGO!!
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The biggest hurdle to having a successful business is not knowing how to run a business. It requires a lot of analysis, data and preparation. Most businesses fail because the owner does not understand how to run the business. The second biggest hurdle is paying the rent. OI doubt that the government is even in the top ten.
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Before I became a good Physical Therapist, I had to become a Physical Therapist. Before I could become a PT, I had to graduate with a degree in PT. Before I could apply to PT school, I had to have experience working in the field as an aide. Before I could be hired as an aide, I had to have experience working.....as an aide. You have to start somewhere, and yes, you're going to make mistakes, perhaps substantial ones, when you first start off. But the lack of experience will limit much of your initial progress.
But success comes not simply from experience, but from being able to navigate the bureaucratic tsunami, imposed by governments, at all levels, and still make a profit
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I don;t see where the government harmed you by doing anything more than assuring that you were competent.
I had to get a BA, and MA and a PhD. I have attended classes in seven universities, two since I got my doctorate.
Now I invest money. Government regulations protect me from being ripped off: all I have to do is know where I am protected and where I am not.
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This had nothing to do with me. This had everything to do with referencing how experience may play a role in beginning a business, the primary factor in a business becoming successful, as Plane has accurately highlighted, is the impediments imposed by Government, at all levels, local, state, and federal
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You apparently have some sort of business. Plane does not.
I have sold stuff in a gift shop, wholesaled stuff to other gift shops and sold stuff with my wife a flea market. I didn't make a lot of money, when I realized that before Christmas, the best selling season of the year I was making about $4.00 an hour, I sold out and quit. I suppose if I had been desperate, I would not have done this. All my profits were going in rent. The government posed no problems for me, I declared my puny income and paid taxes on it,
Both you and Plane seem to be infected with the Rightwing Asshole virus, which causes average people to think like multizillionaires. It is a common American affliction: poor hardscrabble farmers died for the Confederacy because they did not want to lose the opportunity to become plantation owners, with slaves and all that.
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The amount of wrong you manage to accomplish is quite staggering. No, I don't have a business, I have experience...it had to start somewhere. The point being that experience isn't the key to success. It's a factor, and definately not the key to starting a business, as that's specifically relating to NOT having had experience
Speaking of infected, best refill that prescription drawer of yours, and get back to us when you're ready to respond rationally to current reality
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One of the symptoms is the inability to see the truth.
***BINGO!***
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Truth of course in this case, this nearly pathological record you have at being wrong, in so many issues political
Case in point...what is this supposed "truth", as seen and opined thru the eyes of a hard core liberal, am I not seeing? Specifics here required, as some nebulous claim to "everything" demonstrates absolutely nothing
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The truth is, sirs, you do not know diddly about starting a business.
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You're right, I don't. That requires I start one, then the experience begins. Success occrs when that would-be business owner leans to navigate all the local, state, and federal land mines imposed by Government
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I have recently been told that it is easier to start a business in Communist China than in the USA.
This was not always true .
According to TIME magazine this week 4% of Americans are self employed.
This was not always the way either.
Immigrants accounted for more than 16 percent (25.7 million) of the 157.6 million workers in the civilian labor force in 2012. Between 1970 and 2012, the percentage of foreign-born workers in the civilian labor force tripled, from 5 percent to 16 percent. Over the same period, the foreign-born share of the total population grew from almost 5 percent to nearly 13 percent.http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested-statistics-immigrants-and-immigration-united-states
That is a recent development too.
How come we have nine or ten percent unemployment , but need to import sixteen percent of our workforce?
Really it is easy to believe that if the government got off the back of the employers and potential employers we could have 100% employment the next day.
Then , after that , if we hired fifteen percent of México's population , it would not feel like hurt.
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I have recently been told that it is easier to start a business in Communist China than in the USA.
This was not always true .
How come we have nine or ten percent unemployment , but need to import sixteen percent of our workforce?
Really it is easy to believe that if the government got off the back of the employers and potential employers we could have 100% employment the next day.
YEP
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In what ways is the government on the backs of employers?
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It depends on the industry.
Think about the one that made you upset.
When in Texas they increased the requirement on abortion clinics such that about half of them closed.
Consider that these are the same requirements already applied to all the other outpatient clinics, so I do not consider this to be especially egregious.
Ort consider me , OSHA will ensure I am fired if I do not wear hearing protection (earplugs) in designated areas, even when these areas are silent. They also require that I wear a fall harness with a six foot lanyard to stop my fall anytime I work near a four foot drop.
There are regulations that are needed and helpful, but these get lost in the mass of regulations that are useless or counterproductive.
The government has a strong preference for businesses that are large and prepared to deal with volumes of regulations, small businesses are held to the same standards as mega businesses that can have a permanent staff of lawyers and accountants.
Anecdotes abound of inspectors becoming petty tyrants , even though lots of civil servants are sincerely doing the best work they are allowed to do.
The sad truth is that most of the anti-regulation emotion is flowing from people who have had some ridiculous regulation enforced on them, and the reams of regulations never shrink or simplify.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U0OqJqNbbs
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The Texas legislature was uninterested in the safety of patients: their goal was to shut down the clinics. I agree that is one case of excess regulation, but not typical.
I would say that applying the same standards of hygiene to both McDonalds and Joe's Diner makes sense. Allowing Joe to poison diners because he only has a small operation does not seem to make sense.
The college where I taught is complaining that they have to provide attendance figures for every student every day to justify the government paying Pell Grants. Thios seems logical to me. It is a nuisance to the instructors, but I always took roll, and then transcribed the figures to the administration, because they requested it and I thought it made sense. Why should the government pay tuition for a student who attends three classes and flunks out? At some point I realized that I was the only one doing this, and the administration was not reporting attendance after all. Now they are actually requiring it, because the Feds are cracking down.
It is devilishly hard to get useful figures from most colleges. For example, what percentage of freshmen entering in 2014 will graduate with a BA by the end of 2019?
What percentage of each major find a job in their field within a year of graduation, and what was the salary?
In all the years I taught, I never heard one college official state the actual full time enrollment. This is a FTE, or full time equivalent, because not all students are full time.
They would generally give reports from recruiters.
I was a college dropout. I dropped out of a program at Barry University because their promise that they had the courses and resources to teach me how to write software, and I dropped out of Miami Dade Community College after I completed three courses in desktop publishing, because they taught me all I needed to know. But I was not getting government funding.
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The Texas legislature was uninterested in the safety of patients: their goal was to shut down the clinics. I agree that is one case of excess regulation, but not typical.
I would say that applying the same standards of hygiene to both McDonalds and Joe's Diner makes sense. Allowing Joe to poison diners because he only has a small operation does not seem to make sense.
These two statements do not match, why should there be a high standard for outpatient treatment centers of all kinds in Texas , except for Abortion clinics , which can have a lower or no standard?
The government can wipe out a small business with a requirement for filling out forms that no one will read , but these forms would be a proportionally small burden on a big business , so since forms never die and tend to grow and multiply there is a strong bias in regulations generally favoring big businesses over small ones.
Requiring cleanliness and cold refrigeration is reasonable in any food related business, requiring an hundred pounds of forms be filled out is a bigger deal to the small one (remember most of that information from the forms does not get used.)
The college where I taught is complaining that they have to provide attendance figures for every student every day to justify the government paying Pell Grants. Thios seems logical to me. It is a nuisance to the instructors, but I always took roll, and then transcribed the figures to the administration, because they requested it and I thought it made sense. Why should the government pay tuition for a student who attends three classes and flunks out? At some point I realized that I was the only one doing this, and the administration was not reporting attendance after all. Now they are actually requiring it, because the Feds are cracking down.
It is devilishly hard to get useful figures from most colleges. For example, what percentage of freshmen entering in 2014 will graduate with a BA by the end of 2019?
What percentage of each major find a job in their field within a year of graduation, and what was the salary?
In all the years I taught, I never heard one college official state the actual full time enrollment. This is a FTE, or full time equivalent, because not all students are full time.
They would generally give reports from recruiters.
I was a college dropout. I dropped out of a program at Barry University because their promise that they had the courses and resources to teach me how to write software, and I dropped out of Miami Dade Community College after I completed three courses in desktop publishing, because they taught me all I needed to know. But I was not getting government funding.
Hmmm....... didn't know about that.
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That is not what the Texas law said. Bah. You are making up shit.
The law was designed to make running the clinics difficult to impossible, because Roe v. Wade says that abortions are legal.
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That is not what the Texas law said. Bah. You are making up shit.
The law was designed to make running the clinics difficult to impossible, because Roe v. Wade says that abortions are legal.
Nope.
The requirements of the Texas law are not mor eonerous than the requirements applied to other clinics.
The difference is hyperbole.
Unless the protection of Abortion requires that abortion mills be cramped and dirty there is little to object about.
I actually know the answer to this one, but I bet you will have trouble with how tricky it is.
One of the "onerous" requirements is that one of the abortion clinics doctors must have admitting priveledges in a nearby hospital. Typically there are dozens of qualified such doctors at every hospital.
What keeps an abortion mill from meeting this requirement by taking an unpaid partner who is already a Dr. with admitting privileges?
We are talking about a small number of clinics in the first place, each one could be saved by one such willing Doctor.
Well , if they were also willing to remodel or move into a building with wide halls and clean up a bit.
Every cosmetic surgery clinic in Texas copes with these same regulations by meeting the standard, does Abortion really need to be protected from cleanliness?