Bonam

Yeah not sure why people don't get this. The Iraq and Syria that are drawn on maps are nothing more than fantasies at this point. The area needs to be partitioned along ethnic/sectarian lines. Along with a Sunni state, there also needs to be a sovereign Kurdish state consisting of parts of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Critically though, it can't be external powers imposing new partitions/borders, the people of these areas have to get there themselves. And the only realistic way for them to get there is the same way most other borders have been established when countries have fallen apart: civil war. The West needs to get out of the way and let the people of the middle-east determine their own destiny. We don't really need their oil any more, there's a global oversupply. Let them fight it out and stop interfering.

The debt from education doesn't really have much impact in this regard. In Canada, tuition has risen but is still fairly reasonable. A student might graduate with a few tens of thousands of dollars in debt. I don't know anyone that ended up with more than $50k in student loans. And yet to buy a house in Vancouver, you're looking at a $1-2 million mortgage. That's a loan that's 20-100 times larger than what your student loan is likely to be, so basically the student loan pales to complete insignificance in comparison. People aren't buying houses not because of "choices they make in their financial affairs" or because of "student loans", but because the price of housing has risen to absurd, astronomical heights as successive governments have done everything possible to prop up housing prices. How long does it take to save up a "responsible" 20% down payment on a $2 million house? Even if you make, say, $100k and diligently save a full 1/3 of your after tax income. About 20 years. If you graduate from your professional degree in your mid 20s, and immediately enter a lucrative career and are frugal and never encounter any life events that force you to use a substantial chunk of your savings, you might be looking at that house purchase in your mid 40s. And you'll be completely depleting your entire life savings to do it and taking on $1.6 million in debt, which you likely won't be able to pay off during the remainder of your working years. Unless something changes, owning a home will be strictly limited to the aging members of older generations who bought houses back when prices were reasonable, people who inherit a home from their parents upon their death, and the top ~1% of earners. Everyone else will be renting.

There are companies doing just that... selling the promise of mining asteroids to investors, and using that money to pay their employees to work towards that goal. Unfortunately for you, you don't get a piece of that "pie" unless you are working on it or investing in it. Not until these companies succeed and start making profits and paying taxes, anyway. New technologies don't just magically appear, they are developed because lots of smart people put in lots of effort to develop them, and because people with lots of money see fit to invest in them because they expect a return.

I suspect that with a lottery-type system we definitely could tell the difference - it would be much better than what we have.

Of course we're not serious about fighting ISIS. If we were "serious", we wouldn't be taking the occasional shot from the air, we'd have a few million troops on the ground. We weren't serious in Iraq, we weren't serious in Afghanistan, and we aren't serious in Syria now. The West has not fought a war "seriously" since WWII.

Turkey buys the oil and is a supposed "NATO ally" so that's the conflict of interest right there and likely why little/nothing is done about the oil shipments. No one's going to war with Russia, least of all the US, don't worry about it. They might plink at each other a bit in Syria though if they feel like it, it lets you test out the latest weapon technologies, all good friendly sport.

It's not the UN that changed the pre-WWII equation when it comes to international relations. Rather, it was the advent of nuclear weapons and the threat of mutual assured destruction. That's what has kept the peace between,major powers since WWII, not the league of nations mark 2. Nuclear weapons are likely right up there with vaccines and antibiotics in terms of inventions that have saved millions of lives. Thanks to them, we live in a world where an all out war between powerful countries is basically unthinkable.

I don't see how such a statement would be inherently "bigoted". A certain religion, ideology, or philosophy may teach negative things like death or violence, but that doesn't mean that everyone who chooses to self-identify with said religion/ideology/philosophy necessarily believes in or acts upon that portion of its teachings. Certain religions, ideologies, and philosophies most certainly do advocate violence and it is factually correct (and therefore not bigoted) to say so. By the way, there is no practical difference between a religion, an ideology, and a philosophy. Neither is an inherent characteristic of an individual (like their race/ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation). A person chooses to believe in, or not believe in, any given religion/ideology/philosophy and chooses to what extent to follow its ideas. A religion and its followers should be no more immune to criticism than an ideology and its followers. While religious ideas and/or institutions are given special legal consideration in some countries, there is nothing inherently different about them than other sorts of ideas that should shield them from criticism. Bad ideas are bad ideas, whether or not they are religious in nature.

Hard drives are relatively small and if you're talking about personal or small business use, you're talking about retiring a drive or two every few years. Easiest thing is simply to keep them. If you must get rid of the drive, a simple format or using a free third party software tool for erasing/overwriting the drive will be more than plenty unless you've got really top secret information on there.

I'll just leave this here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/dave-schroeder/the-recent-and-troubling-redefinition-of-mass-shooting/10153452653799118 The idea that what we commonly think of as "mass shootings" happens hundreds of times a year in the US, frequently claimed in this thread, is a lie.

What? Not bothering with cites? Sure, it's weak. Do I care? No. The vast majority of the time here whenever someone demands a cite and is actually provided with one, they immediately dismiss it for one dumb reason or another.

I don't bother with cites on this site. The level of dialog here is too low to bother putting in the effort. What I will say is that whether discussing it on this forum or watching discussions in the media, whenever anyone (typically from the gun rights side) brings up the idea of screening people for mental illness, someone else (typically from the gun control side) usually shoots it down by saying that the issue of mental illness is tangential, that even bringing it up is stigmatizing the mentally ill and inherently bigoted, etc.

Take a hypothetical case: Let's say every single person in society is treated equally, except one person who everyone treats like crap. Is it more accurate to describe the situation by saying that every single person except that one is "privileged", or that that one person is discriminated against? Now what about if instead of everyone and 1 person, say group A is 99% of the population and is treated well, and group B is 1% of the population and is treated poorly. Are members of group A really privileged? Or is it just that group B is discriminated against? Being treated the same way as the majority of the population is not a "privilege". A privileged group would be an aristocracy, where they are a minority of the population that has additional rights or privileges that most of the population doesn't get.

Except that people are individuals, not "groups". No one in my family ever got given any free land nor any special low interest rate loans. So when some idiot looks at me and thinks I am "privileged" because the ancestors of people who had similar skin tones got something, they can go screw themselves.

Ah, the true colors come out at last.

How could anything change? Each event serves as further confirmation to each side of their own ideology. And everyone is firmly entrenched in their ideology. For example, most gun control proponents are against any system that would prevent the mentally ill from having access to guns. And in a broader sense, the whole conversation on the topic is stupid... you have people who believe in a universal right to own guns, and you have people who want to blame the existence of guns for everything, and almost no one talking about reasonable solutions. The inability of the US to do anything about the issue of mass shootings isn't unique to this one issue, it's a broader symptom of the growing polarization of political discourse and inability of people to see the "other side" as a partner to negotiate solutions with rather than an enemy to be condemned. You see this at all levels of society, from facebook comment threads right on up to federal government organs.

The PM gets a salary. Let him use it on the things his family needs (like childcare), just like everyone else. Unlike everyone else, his family's biggest expense (residence) is already paid for.

Hardly. You frequently advocate murder of a significant portion of the population to fulfill your political/economic aims.

So why do you want to send 70 million people to the guillotines again? Just for the fun of seeing lots of heads lopped off?

In practice once you get through killing the first 1% you end up having to keep killing. Stalin killed about 10% and still wasn't done. This method doesn't exactly achieve any happy ends, except for those few sick individuals who enjoy murder.

What do you do with the next 1% after that?

You'll have to be more specific. What's on the tape and why is it relevant?

More complicated =/= better. The most efficient and reliable component of any device is the one that isn't there. That's not to say that the Apple product isn't higher quality than the generic one, it probably is, but the author's argument that since there are more parts it's therefore better is nonsense.

That's true in pretty much 99% of cases that someone accuses someone else of being racist on this board.

Even inside multi-use washrooms, the actual stalls typically offer enough privacy. In the US and Canada, individual stalls are often designed with giant gaps at the top and bottom for some reason, but in other countries individual stalls typically have floor to ceiling walls. If you replaced all the stalls with this kind of design where the walls are full height, then the only public area would be the sinks and I don't see why anyone would care if sinks are shared by men and women. Of course, that still leaves the question of urinals and whether you'd still have some of those or not in a shared washroom... presumably you could tuck them away behind a corner or wall in a way that blocks sightlines or something.