The Glade 4.0

Thoughts?

Yup. Hayek's economics were pretty close to my own...a strong libertarian economic broth with a necessary sprinkling of social safety net spices.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

You can not do good with someone else's money.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I drive down nice public roadways that say different. I would say that's better (def: comparative to the word good) than walking or having to have money in my wallet to drive down private roads.

Also I'm kind of fond of Injured Workers compensation and (to an extent) the universal unemployment insurance system. Main because these things can happen to anyone despite their ability, skill, carefulness or dedication.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

There definitely need to be certain forms of social protection. Most of them relate to emergencies, either affecting the individual or affecting the community as a whole, crimes, or various other vagaries that occur as distinct events i.e. this man cannot work for 4 months because he was hit by a drunk driver.

People end up paying for these things directly or indirectly anyhow; there's nothing wrong with taxing people to pay for these services and punishing them for refusing to pay, nor is there anything wrong with forbidding "opting-out", nor does it matter what any given ideology espouses. **** happens, and people end up paying for it. What goes around comes around.

That said, there is no reason for a social safety net that protects against nonspecific social conditions commonly referred to as "accident of birth", "bigotry", or other things that can't be tied down to some specific cause and effect. There also should not be an unlimited social safety net for people mentioned in the above paragraph except insofar as either A) they have worked for it through some sort of retirement system tied to actual work (not a generalized "social security" system) or B) they have incurred permenant, total, inability to work without any hope of economically feasible rehabilitation, and it is beyond the means of family members to provide for them.

Basically, yes, we should be prepared as a society both to take care of victims of accidents, crime, and war, and we should not accept ideology as an excuse to avoid participating in reality. We should not be providing a "social safety net" for what amounts to dissimilar ability or circumstance, or worse, failure to make an effort to provide for onesself.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I like the cut of his gib. He also has a cool mustache. That book is full of all kinds of useful information.

Doesn't really have anything to do w/ the OP, but people always like to bring up roadways when talking about federal action. If the .gov hadn't driven the rail industry into the ground and build all those expensive highways, maybe we wouldn't have to use so many cars in America and could actually have public transportation. I hate buying cars. Expensive money sinks...

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Clearly, we should do away with our standing army.

DE - How are "accident of birth" and "Bigotry" non specific? Are you trying to argue that race-based or other discrimination does not exist, or that the situation a person is born to has no impact on their potential, or their chances of success?

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Clearly we should.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Every time I think you can't sound any more extreme, you never fail to surprise me. Let me guess, you think the invisible hand of the market would make a private army better than our publicly accountable one? Or perhaps state militias could defend us against an invasion from China?

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

He agrees with you and you mock him.

Do you not then mock yourself?

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

You can't draw a specific conclusion of "this person's birth in these circumstances led directly to their problem now" since the problem is generally just "I'm poor". There are always lots of intervening circumstances.

Moreover, those are just bad luck or lack of effort on the part of the person suffering them anyhow. "I didn't get a diploma" for example, is their own fault. It doesn't matter if the school has a dirt floor and one teacher; if they didn't finish its on them. They need to take what's available and work their way up. "There's no jobs here". Move. "I have three kids". **** less and use a condom, and go ask a church for help.

It really doesn't matter whether racism exists; we already have discrimination laws that protect against that. It doesn't matter if people were born poor; they need to do the best they can with what they got. Helping people for those problems is the responsibility of private charity and organizations.

Specifc problems are things like "I used to work construction, then I got hit by a drunk driver and was paralyzed". There is a specific, identifiable cause of the problem. In that case, there should be public assistance to A) provide for interim expenses and B) retrain the victim for a new job.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Aside from the fact that there is no reason whatsoever to get rid of our active Army, China can't invade us in the first place.

Maybe you haven't noticed, but there is this very large body of water between us and China. China would have to supply millions of troops across that body of water, which is controlled by our Navy.

Doing away with the Army doesn't mean doing away with the Navy. It would not be much of a problem out in that expanse of the pacific to simply saturate PLAN destroyers with Harpoon and Tomahawk missiles until they either ran out of SAMs or couldn't engage them fast enough, and then you could just move in and drop regular old bombs on the amphibious ships. That's without even considering how submarines might factor in, but just to be fair we'll assume the subs are hunting down Chinese subs.

Then of course there's the fact that getting rid of our active Army wouldn't mean getting rid of the National Guard, which has about 50 Brigade Combat Teams itself. China is going to project enough force across that ocean to take on a modern, well-trained force with heavy weapons that is defending its home.. and which, by the way, will have unmolested rear areas since China lacks strategic bombers?

Come on. No, there is no good reason to get rid of the Army just because Minutemen worked well 200+ years ago, but invasion from China is laughable. They would be hard-pressed to invade Hawaii.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

DE, you are not an expert in military matters. Quit lecturing us like we're ignorant twits.

*pouts*

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

OCEANS NO LONGER PROTECT US!!!! /pee



In fairness, it wouldn't take long for China to convert it's massive industrial infrastructure to making such an invasion possible, but at least you got the gist of my point. I used China off the top of my head because, well, it's big and communist-scary, and that scores big points around these parts.

As far as your military expertise is concerned - any person who believes water boarding is not torture is not a military expert.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

... the capacity to create a naval force doesn't preclude DE's point of the massive problem of mobilizing a land invasion force large enough to invade the US all the way across the Pacific Ocean with our Navy **** it in the *** the entire way.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

There are people that agree with me that governments engage in clandestine conspiracies to conceal the truth. Some of them think the Moon landing was fake. Just because we agree that governments engage in conspiracies doesn't mean it's inappropriate to mock them for thinking the moon landing was faked.


(edit - mars != moon)

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

I don't ultimately disagree. Again, it was a somewhat random example. That doesn't change the underlying point.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

There's these big gray things that float on oceans that do.



In fairness, yes, it will take China quite a while to make such an invasion possible because it doesn't have the institutional design experience we do in the sorts of things that would be needed - aircraft carriers, more modern submarines, and escorts, as well as more supply ships, strategic bombers, etc. You can't just start throwing these things together, designs have to be made, tested, and flaws worked out, and then there's the institutional knowledge of how to employ them. China has zero experience in conducting long-range naval operations, aircraft carrier operations, or sustaining an intercontinental war effort, much less against a massive, industrialized opponent with 11 supercarriers and dozens of attack submarines. These things are not easy to do, and institutional experience is a big part of what makes them work.

In fact, it would probably take at least 50 years for China to even be able to contemplate invading even Hawaii or Alaska, much less the CONUS simply because of the length of time it would take to start building the necessary forces, equipment, and learning how to use them.. and of course we'd notice this massive buildup and take our own steps, even if we had no active Army.

[/quote]As far as your military expertise is concerned - any person who believes water boarding is not torture is not a military expert.[/quote]

I'm glad I wasn't drinking anything when I read this. I would definitely have snorted it.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

How long did it take the US to convert it's manufacturing infrastructure to a war-effort infrastructure during WWII? Now, if we look at China, do they have a manufacturing infrastructure or a service-oriented economy?

I don't think it would take as long as you imagine for them to motivate, should they decide to commit to it.

And, had you snorted what you were drinking, you might actually get some semblance of insight as to why I have concluded that you are not, in fact, a military expert.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Converting manufacturing infrastructure is not the same as having no design knowledge in a given field and building war-worthy machinery, capable of invading the United States.

Besides Formula 1 engines/transmissions, siesmically qualified structure that house nuclear safety equipment and Technic's original SL1200 turntables, very few manufactured products have to meet durability requirements and performance envelopes that military products do.

I bought a $20 Zagg Invisi-Shield for my phone that was designed by a military contractor (it just covers the screen, nothing else). You can't even damage the screen with a pen.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Well, you're wrong.

First of all, this isn't World War II. Technology in general is more advanced. You can't just rush a modern jet fighter into production the way you could a WWII fighter, for example.

Second, the U.S. already had aircraft carriers, battleships, submarines, long-ranged bombers, etc. at the beginning of WWII, and we did have institutional experience in long-distance warfighting from WWI and the Spanish-American war. We didn't need to learn how to make our primary combat systems from scratch; in fact a lot of them were already in production and we just needed to increase the rate of production.

Sure, China can crank out guns, tanks, and even 4th-4.5th generation fighter planes without much trouble but it cannot get them to the U.S. and it cannot easily overcome that problem in a short period of time. China has never had an operational aircraft carrier in its history, and the ships and subs it does have are behind ours in technology. Even if they catch up in technolog, we still have overwhelming numerical superiority at sea, and you can only build carriers so fast, especially when you need to be building escorts, subs, amphibious ships and logistics ships at the same time.

Tell me, how many shipyards has China got that can accomadate an aircraft carrier?

Oh, by the way, you might want to consider that not only would this rather detract from their economic situation, but we also might just try nuclear first strike if they were on a campaign to build up for invasion. Since we have overwhelming superiority in terms of accuracy and numbers of nukes, we could easily put a stop to it tht way with little (if we were really lucky, no) damage from retaliation.



I know exactly why.

1) You think that I need to agree with your assessments on matters unrelated to military expertise in order to be an expert on the military because
2) it's the only way you can contest the fact that you get your *** kicked all over the forum whenever you make your silly assertions about the military and
3) you think you're scoring points with people.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Since we were a major supplier of goods/arms during WWII well before we entered the conflict directly, the answer would be years. Of course, what we were supplying did not include an entire navy, for which the fast construction time for the larger vessels is 18mos?

For us, that's true. But China has a command economy, and could likely put it's massive labor force to work on building a ship in considerably less time.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

The U.S.S. Essex CV-9, first of the large fleet carriers built for WWII (of the previous 8 carriers, CV-1 was an experimental ship, 2 and 3 were converted during construction from battlescruisers after WWI, CV-4 was a small carrier used mostly in noncombat roles, CV-5, -6, and -8 were large carriers and CV-7 was a medium-sized carrier built to use up remaining allowable tonnage under the various naval treaties).

It was laid down April 28th 1941 and comissioned December 31st 1942.

Note that this period, from the beginning of the war December 7th 1941 to December 1942 was the period in which Japan made its great gains in the pacific.

Also note that even on a war footing it took 20 months to build such a ship. Note also that we had built large carriers before, and started work on the ship before the war started; we were not working from scratch.

Finally, this ship had only to be able to accomadate WWII fighters and bombers, not much larger and heavier jets. It was eventually modified to take jets, but you could not simply duplicate an Essex and expect it to stand up to combat with a Nimitz and its escorts - especially not in a Navy that has no experience in carrier takeoff and landing, much less fighting carrier battles.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."