Lurker > red sox 777

Anyway, I'm trying to illustrate a contradiction I see in the thinking of a lot of middle class people, especially tea partiers. They claim to support capitalism, and spout economic theories and policies that support the value of property/capital. Free market policies.

However, their own beliefs, held deep down, their values, are that labor is important. To these people, someone deserves their wealth because they worked for it. But that is utterly foreign to capitalism and the economic theories these people claim they support and vote for. Someone deserves their wealth because someone else is willing to give it to them. That's all. The price of something is what someone else will pay for it. Nothing more. Work/labor/moral deservingness has nothing to do with it.

Then they vote for Republicans thinking that Republican policies will help them, when those policies will not. Because those policies help capitalists, not workers. And these people are workers, in fact and at heart, but not in their minds.

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No, Communists believe in the importance of labor in all its forms. Capitalists believe in the value of capital (i.e. property) to an economy.

Also, where were/are the labor unions in the Soviet Union and China? I don't think Communism tolerates any labor unions that compete with it. No, no, Communism hates competition above all.

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Looking forward to a bright future in America where 50% of people are unemployed.

If you don't support increasing unemployment to 50% as a goal, remember that if you support employment, you support labor. If you support labor, you must be a Communist.

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Deny. Apparently South Central LA is now 89% Hispanic.

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Opinion polls show France electing a Socialist as president this weekend.

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Disappointed in President Obama for blaming the high oil prices on speculators. That's a lie that's well over 100 years old. Market manipulation is never the reason the price of something reaches a high level for an extended period of time. Obama should know (and does know) better, but is pandering.

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2.7% inflation in March, folks. Good, we're finally getting inflation up to that 3% zone fairly consistently. Give QE1 and QE2 some more time to work their way through the economy and hopefully we can get inflation up to 4-5%.

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It does seem strange that people are still donating to a hopeless campaign- probably just to make a statement.

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Probably. The Alien & Sedition Acts got overturned by the new President and new majority in Congress before it got up that far in the courts.

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You do realized that the Alien & Sedition Acts never made it to the Supreme Court, right?

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Canada achieved great success in both world wars, you know!

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The Inflation

The sweet, sweet, inflation. Can you see it? $10 gas, Dow 30,000.......we can all be rich.

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An amendment can't overrule them either if they decide it means something else. The first amendment is pretty damn clear. Didn't stop the Alien and Sedition act.

You can word it in very clear language. Courts have followed amendments throughout US history. If we actually get a tyrannical court at some point in the future that simply doesn't care about the law (we haven't at any point in US History up until now), you would amend the constitution to get rid of judicial review.

By the President, right? Well why would he impeach them for making him a dictator?

No, by Congress, the same as for a President. Majority vote in the House to impeach, 2/3 in the Senate to remove from office.

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The Constitution delegates to them the power to decide what the Constitution says. This is unfortunately a problem with the US Constitution, because there is no one to overrule them short of an amendment. But it is hard to create a system that fixes this problem (there is always someone with final authority), and the framers did a very good job IMO in limiting it as much as possible.

Also, remember that judges, like presidents, can be impeached.

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Poor Mittens spent something like $40 million of his own money on his 2008 campaign. That's like, a year's earnings.....and not just any year, but a fairly good, 20% return year.

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Well, if you want to view ratification as a contract, I think it makes perfect sense. Arizona has a forum to litigate its disputes with Congress, if it thinks Congress is not following the Constitution. That is the federal courts. Indeed, this is exactly what states do. They do something that contradicts federal law, and the case gets litigated.

If Arizona, hypothetically, doesn't want to obey the authority of the courts, it shouldn't have ratified the Constitution in the first place.

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Actually, they do in many cases. Your remedy in many situations is to sue them, not to break the contract yourself.

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The difference: Arizona ratified the US Constitution. If a state doesn't want to obey the supremacy clause of the Constitution, their remedy is not to ratify it in the first place.

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Most liberals are fundamentalists without knowing it. A surprising number of libertarians are fundamentalists without knowing it too.

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$1B seems high for Instagram. As I recall, Google only paid that much for as big a site as Youtube. Of course, I guess it's much easier to avoid losing money with Instagram- video streaming is really expensive, and Youtube lost money for many years.

Eh, don't be too surprised if Facebook's market cap goes to 200B, 300B+ even, before the end of the year.

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Venture capital is really the farthest thing from vulture capitalism. Vulture capitalism is the stuff Bain Capital does- buy out unprofitable companies, then tear them apart and sell the pieces for more than the whole. Or alternatively, what Goldman Sachs does. VC is actually.....productive!

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If you or any of your family members/acquaintances lost money in the first internet bubble, you have them to thank.

My parents work in technology, so some of their acquaintances lost money in the internet bubble. Some of their other acquaintances struck it rich. It's all about the timing (if you got out from mid-1999 through early 2000 you did very very well). In general, tech employees did pretty well. Even if you didn't have to sense to sell your stock options before the bubble burst, you can't lose money you never had in the first place. If you were rich on paper for a few months, it's no bigger a loss than the gain you got from the bubble.

Stupid people lost their money to smarter people, basically. And we got loads of new, wonderful, technology out of it. That's wonderful to me.

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Accel's investment was a huge success then. That's exactly what venture capital is supposed to do.

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You're obviously trolling, but how are these vulture capitalists? They're anything but, because they're actually investing in Rovio's growth. And if they are, they're terrible vultures for giving so much money for Rovio to spend on its employees.

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If a corporation is a person, surely a fetus is?

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Newbie: you overrate KC. It's an interesting math idea, but not as wonderful a tool as you have been asserting.

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And the other difference is that in communism, it's the 99% who are working.

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Nope, the difference here is that it's all contractual. The idea is that prior to going to college (100% college enrollment in this system), people have no idea if they will hit the 1% lottery or not (that is, whether they will end up among the few who find a job). So they sign a contract with the state agreeing to pay taxes to support welfare if they win, and they receive welfare if they lose. People could refuse to sign the contract, but that's a huge risk that almost nobody will take, because the odds of finding work are too low.

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They consider it an ethnicity. Not a race, which is why there are 2 questions. Otherwise, what would Hispanic people answer on the race question? There is no option for Hispanic.

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http://www.census.gov/schools/pdf/2010form_info.pdf

Here's the official form. It's very clear. Question 8 asks "Is person 1 of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin?" Question 9 then asks "What is person 1's race?" The options given for race are White, Black/African American/Negro, American Indian/Alaska Native, and a whole slew of different Asian options. It's very clear that the census does not treat Hispanic as a race.

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I've heard some people say that their parents forbid them to learn Spanish, to avoid being categorized as Hispanic by people.

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Sounds a little bit like slavery to me.

How so? The 99% are receiving welfare, not working. And for the mechanics of it, it would work something like this: prior to enrolling in college, you sign a contract promising to pay a percentage of your income in taxes to support welfare. If you make it into the 1%, you make a lot of money and some of that goes to taxes for the welfare. If not, you collect welfare.

Of course, this proposal would be incredibly hated by the (greedy and self-righteous) middle class, so it could probably unite the politicians in condemning it.

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Well, remember that the percentage of Hispanics in the US has grown very rapidly over the past 20 years. As that has happened, I believe (not completely sure) that the percentage of US Hispanics who speak English has also fallen rapidly.

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Well, much like voting for politicians who will eliminate your job or cut your welfare benefits, sometimes you have to do what's right even if it means less desirable personal circumstances!

If you vote for a politician who will eliminate your welfare benefits, you are very noble and a true patriot.

I think we should expand welfare, however. Get 50% of the country on it. The fact is, as technology improves and trade with other countries increases, we need fewer and fewer people in the USA to work, but they need to be smarter and better educated/trained. People have this idea that everyone should work, but I think it's perhaps outdated.

Let's dream of a capitalist utopia where 1% of people are employed (and getting mega rich) and 99% are on welfare?

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This is totally false and you know it. Someone who's skin is brown and speaks spanish is considered by most people to be hispanic, latino, or just mexican literally 100% of the time.

Okay, fine, by recently I meant before.....say, 1995. Maybe 2000. But who has still read the New York Times since the Internet got going anyway?

I'm happy with "white-hispanic" because in the interests of linguistic continuity, I'd prefer people to use the term that's been used here for 500 years rather than the one that's only gained traction in the last 20. "White-hispanic" reminds people that most Hispanics are white, something that has been forgotten in America at astonishing speed.

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Yeah.....but it's just too personally risky for defendants to actually do it, I think. Especially if they don't have the benefits of an excellent, expensive, attorney and a media frenzy.

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Probably it doesn't come up because until recently, Zimmerman would have just been labeled "white" and nothing more!

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Now we just need to get Roe v. Wade overturned. I mean, come on. Privacy? We have enough privacy for abortions but not to prevent getting strip searched at any time?

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Given you're from boston, probably next to San Francisco as the most ass-backwards city in America, I have trouble thinking that your words are just a bunch of liberal brain-washed rehashes that you've been fed.

Did you seriously just accuse me of being liberal? Well...........

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Except when he needs college financial aid right? Then all of a sudden he's pure hispanic.

You are trying to justify this race thing but you can't do it because the minorities usually play it both ways.

When they want to be a minority, they will claim that when it is convenient for them. However, if it pays to be white, then they claim that too.

Well, I'm not a fan of the racial classifications for colleges either. But I'm mostly pointing out that the terms Hispanic and Black are very different. Obama historically could not just claim to be white- "My mother is white" wouldn't have gotten him very far in the South pre-1960s. On the other hand, Zimmerman could have ridden in the white compartment of the train, married a Southern belle, etc. with no problems with the law.

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Yes, and something he can do when the charge is only 2nd degree murder- and him being a sympathetic defendant too. It's much riskier to fight a 1st degree murder charge that can lead to the death penalty, and even if not, in Florida carries a mandatory sentence of at least life in prison without parole.

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You're right, looking at Zimmerman's mugshot the 1st thought that came to my mind was how German he was.

Give me a break.

His German ancestry is irrelevant. If both his parents were 100% white-hispanic, he would still be white. Straight up white, no hyphen with hispanic even needed.

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You can't use that now. If you ask any person in America what "Hispanic" means, no one is going to say "Oh that can mean French or Persion or English." Obviously Hispanic in this day pretty much refers to one that is a Mexican national but in some circumstances is also used as a central or even South American origin.

You are only trying to justify that the media is intentionally inflaming the situation.

For 90% of Hispanic people, on the Census they are supposed to answer that they are "white" on the race question. Then answer "hispanic" on the ethnicity question. They are white for the purposes of the Census, and they have been white for hundreds of years. Why should we get to tell hundreds of millions of people that they are no longer white, but rather this new race category we created in the past 20 years?

It's perfectly fine for the media to refer to Zimmerman as straight up white, so white-hispanic is okay because it is no stronger than white by itself.

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In other words, it is correct to call Zimmerman "white," "hispanic," and "white-hispanic." They are all correct.

It is probably not correct to call President Obama plain "white" because it wasn't good enough for him to board the white section of a train before the 1950s.

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Hispanic technically is an ethnicity that refers to people of any race with ancestors from Latin America. Insofar as it's used as a race, it traditionally corresponds with white, yeah. Spanish, German, French, Italian, Irish, Polish, English, Persian......all these are white. That's why not too long ago no one listed Hispanic as a race- because it was just part of white. According to the current Census Bureau usage (as an ethnicity, not a race), that's not technically correct, because it's possible to be a black Hispanic- for example, if you are descended from Brazilian slaves.

As for black, the traditional rule is that one drop of black blood made you black. See Plessy v. Ferguson, for example, where a 7/8 white man was not allowed to ride in the white compartment of a train.

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Oh right, he was only 17- no death penalty then, but life in prison without parole is still enough of a deterrent to going to trial.

In a way, Zimmerman is lucky the media made such a big deal out of this case. It would be par for the course normally for the prosecution to charge 1st degree murder, and tell the defendant: either you take the plea deal or else you go ahead and risk your life. But not with so much media scrutiny.

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How it probably goes is Trayvon gets charged with 1st degree murder, then accepts a plea bargain where he pleads guilty to 2nd degree murder or manslaughter with a few years in prison, in order to avoid a 1st degree murder conviction and the death penalty. Poor kid goes to prison for a few years, and because of his record when he gets out is unable to support himself, eventually driving him to crime. Rinse and repeat for a few decades.

This storyline is complicated by the fact that his stepfather was wealthy enough to be living in a gated community. So it's not quite as probable as it would be otherwise, but still a fairly strong possibility.

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If you don't enjoy getting drunk.

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And I know you're trolling, but this is somewhat better than your usual troll topic, which are among the worst troll topics here, and was interesting enough to get a quick response.

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