ReeferMadness

If the problem is apportionment, the answer is to give them the same amount of money and allow the to buy the bread they need. And have an economic system that will put enough emphasis on generating bread (and not put it all towards private jets or luxury yachts).

Well, I guess that proves it's the literal word of God. Silly me.

Whataboutism. Nice deflection. These guys are starting to face consequences. Unlike Trump and Moore. Any way of confirming that you're a real person an not a bot? Cuz I'm still skeptical that the type of delusional tin-hat thinking contained in your post actually occurs in real, sentient beings.

What BS this "debate" is, as usual around here. Al Franken - accused by 1 adult woman, immediately apologizes and calls for an investigation into his own behavior. Roy Moore - accused by a dozen women, teenagers at the time (some under the age of consent), banned from mall. Calls them all liars Donald Trump - accused by 20+ women of various charges, including rape of a 13 year old. Accusers include wife. Calls them all liars and threatens to sue them. Sure. Exactly the same.

The bible wasn't written. It was selected over the course of about 1,000 years from passages that were written by various people. That seems to me to be a rather haphazard way to pass along a vital message from the creator - especially since there were already thousands of generations of people that had to get by without it. There are some practical questions here? What would have happened if the people who wrote the bible passages didn't write them or wrote the wrong things? Aha! you say. God is omniscient and so he knew in advance that they would be born and what they would write. But if that's the case, what does that say about free will? If God knew in advance what was going to be written, that implies everything is predetermined. If everything is predetermined, there is no free will (none that is meaningful anyway) and the universe is nothing more than a giant mobile.

You still need a way of allocating scarce resources to the people. There is a difference between what people want and what they need.

You don't say. Religion is an excuse for people who want to do good things to do them and it's an excuse for people who want to do bad things to do them. You take a book that was written thousands of years ago in a completely different context and - surprise! - people can interpret it just about any way they want. OK. You believe that a book written over the course of ~1,000 years translated from obsolete dialects of a foreign languages; consisting of passages which were selected by various people hundreds of years after the original authors were dead is the literal word of God and should be followed literally today. And you're saying there is no contradiction between that and science? If you consider a religion as a belief system based solely on faith instead of logic with a devoted following that will not be swayed by evidence to the contrary, the most important religion in practice today is fundamentalist capitalism. The markets are the gods. They provide all that's good in the world and when they don't it's obvious that you haven't followed the religion closely enough. The commandments are all in support of endless economic growth and they are followed regardless of any facts or evidence which get in their way. The latest example is the latest round of tax cuts for billionaires (including a tax break for private jets!) which proponents swear will pay for themselves. This line has been trotted our repeatedly going back at least 50 years and tax cuts have NEVER paid for themselves but the true devotees bow their heads and defer to the market gods . And any science that is inconvenient (climate change, the effects of fracking, the impacts of wealth disparity on society, the list goes on and on) is ignored, de-funded, denied or undermined.

I like the way you think but I wouldn't go about it in exactly the way you are. There's no reason to get rid of money - it's just a means of exchange. And there is no reason for people to be exactly equal in wealth. However, the current levels of disparity of wealth and income constitute some of the most destructive factors in society. People don't need to be rewarded with billions or even millions to be motivated or happy. One area that has always been poorly served by capitalist economies is high quality, low cost, basic goods. This would make a natural entry point for government to set up highly automated, manufacturing and distribution of these types of products. I can think of lots of examples. I don't care much about fashion - I just want shoes that fit and last. Major appliances used to last 20-25 years, now they're sent for "recycling" after an average of 7 years.

How many people actually dig ditches by hand anymore? In fact, with advances in AI, it's close to the point where you just ask for a ditch to be dug. Why does it seem that these discussions always assume technology from Adam Smith's time? I think that we need an economic system that reflects the fact that we live in a finite world and our first priority should be to ensure that everyone has the basics before we indulge in our fantasies. And we should be restricting economic activities to that which will fit into a sustainable future, reflecting the best scientific consensus at the time. Under those conditions, I'm not sure there would be any racecar drivers. I think that you need to ask what makes the job stressful and demanding. A lot of stress is caused when people feel trapped in their current jobs (for a number of reasons). Sometimes its' the people you work with or the fact that people are doing repetitive, boring tasks. There are things that could be thought of as demanding and stressful (surgeon, astronaut) but a lot of the people doing those things love what they do.

Some people will work no matter what they get paid because, as Altai says, they get fulfillment. Some people will find a way not to work ( or at least not to be productive), no matter what. And there is a lot of work that is done in the world (much of it highly paid) that really doesn't serve any useful purpose. And most of what remains will be automated in the coming few decades. Between automation, elimination of non-value-added work, and people who are naturally motivated (and modest added incentives as required), it's easy to imagine a "work optional" world. I know the idea makes lots of peoples' heads explode but it's one possible future. If we're smart enough to seize on it.

I don't recall learning any American history in school but it doesn't matter. You can't avoid it in day to day life. There were 2 Americas - the enlightened, educated one and the one that was backwards, stupid, greedy and evil. The second one denied science, twisted religion, dehumanized people who were different and failed to honor basic human rights. Some things never change. When is the next civil war?

This guy had 23 guns in the hotel room, some of which had apparently been modified for rapid fire (much faster than normal semi but not quite full automatic). He had another 19 guns he left at home. He had several thousand rounds of ammo. But hey, let's not be crazy and mention gun control. cuz the framers of 2a had exactly this situation in mind when they wrote it.

What a stupid, stupid, stupid debate. Flawed logic stacked on top of false information, all based on faulty premises. First off, North Korea has no reason to attack Canada. Unlike the US, we don't pose a threat to them and never have. Second, ballistic missile defence is expensive to build and cheap to overwhelm. It didn't work in the 80s when Ronnie Raygun was trying to put it into space and it won't work now. If you really think that North Korea is a threat to Canada, you should be lobbying the government for Canada to build it's own nuclear arsenal and ICBMs. Mutually assured destruction is madness from a standpoint of humanity but at least it has logic in terms of a country's selfish interests. Finally, almost nobody asks why an impoverished country is isolating itself from the rest of the world by spending its limited resources on nuclear weapons. The answer is actually pretty simple. The NK leadership has learned lessons from observing how the US treated Noriega, Saddam and countless other regimes it didn't like. It learned that the only way to survive is to have nukes. And not to show any weakness in the face of international threats. So, the people who think that we need to beg the US to save us from the threat, as usual, have it 100% backwards. To the extent the threat exists, the US (helped by other western countries) created it.

And the United Nations is under the control of aliens who are trying to take over the world, enslave white people and put transgender people in charge. Watch out for black helicopters.

Thanks. I love it when people poke fun at my handle. It's like screaming to the world "I have nothing intelligent to say so I'll just do what worked for me in the 5th grade".

Busy doing what? He spends his time, golfing, watching TV and tweeting. Right wingers are king when it comes to hypocrisy. Go back a few years and check what Trump said every time Obama took a break golfing. Trump has probably already spent more time on the golf course than Obama in all of his first term.

Citizens of USA are now treated to the sight of their con-man leader sucking up to a foreign dictator who is openly trashing him. Putin is the only foreign leader Trump can't bring himself to dump on. Of course, he's been muted in his criticism of Trudeau as well but that's because Trudeau is more popular in the USA that he is.

What a laugh. He's done nothing but golf, brag about the election, flip White House staff and unsuccessfully try to repeal Obamacare. How has that affected employment? They better be stronger because already there is a lot fewer of them. Let's see how many are left when the indictments start to drop.

As the Trump shit show drags on and the walls of cognitive dissonance that protect many Trump supporters from seeing clearly crumble, Trump's approval ratings drop lower and lower. It will be interesting to see how many people stay loyal, particularly within the congressional GOP, when Mueller starts to issue indictments. Trump supporters can loosely be categorized as following: Sociopaths - these are people who know what Trump is but support him because they think they can get some personal advantage from his presidency, like a tax cut. Sadly, this category currently includes most of the congressional GOP. Sycophants - sociopaths wouldn't be as dangerous if they didn't have their hangers on. Like remoras riding sharks, they feed on the trail of carnage. Extremists - include many of the people who show up at Trump rallies, a collection of racists, misogynists, single issue fetishists (e.g. abortion is murder), anti-globalists and other right wing crackpots. This group will be the last to abandon their hero, although he will do little of substance even for them. Fools - Underemployed, under-educated, under-informed, these are ordinary people who believed Trump when he said he would bring back jobs and put things back to the way they were in the (fill in your favorite decade here). I feel badly for these people. I grew up in a situation where money was hard to come by and things were tight. There was a time when I was younger when I might have been fooled by a con artist also. As time drags on and the Trump debacle worsens, the fools will gradually overcome their cognitive dissonance and realize that the MSM, whatever their flaws, are not pawns of the deep state and that what they say about Trump have truth. They have started to drift away and that trend will continue. Most of the sociopaths never intended to support Trump over the long haul (their goals were dismantling Obamacare, getting big tax cuts and getting fat contracts from Trump's infrastructure spending) and they will drop him once the gig is up. They will take the sycophants with them. Then, we'll get to see how large the pool of right wing nutbars in the USA really is. it would be nice if it were in the neighborhood of 5% but I suspect is is much larger - perhaps 20% or more.

Yes. Like other authoritarian kleptocratic leaders, Trump promotes his family to positions for which they have 0 qualifications. Anyone else is used as long as they are useful, then demonized and dumped. Trump must have had something big on Priebus. After Trump got Scaramucci to completely and publicly humiliate him, Priebus went on national TV like a whipped dog and proclaimed his undying devotion to the man that made him look like a fool.

My personal bias is that if western countries are going to intervene militarily in another country, they do so only with the best interests of that country's citizens in mind and only when it's clear that they are doing so. If the USA bombs Syria to protect American interests and their relationship with Israel, it's not clear to me how their actions are morally superior to that of Russia. If Obama had any good options for military intervention in Syria, it isn't clear to me what they were. My understanding was that he tried to support 'moderate' Syrian rebels only there didn't really seem to be any. I'm sure all those Syrian kids on the ground are saddened that you didn't get your wish that more bombs were dropped on their country.

Honestly, I don't believe that the people in the White House are that stupid or undisciplined. (Trump's loyal base is but that's a different discussion). I've come to the conclusion that Scaramucci's outburst was to deflect media attention from the fact that the GOP was trying to take Healthcare away from 16 million Americans in a bill that was literally dreamed up over lunch. And from Trump's perspective, the Healthcare bill itself is misdirection. I've been reading up on Putin and the Russian oligarchs. They've been laundering their money through New York real estate and it's pretty clear to me that the Trump family was involved. Robert Muelller has recently expanded the Trump probe to include business deals and the Trumps are now crapping their pants. Remember the name Preet Bharara? He was a US Attorney who was suddenly fired by Trump. At the time he was fired, he was working on a money laundering case involving a Russian holding company called Prevezon. After Bharara was let go, the case was quickly and quietly settled (with, of course Prevezon admitting to no wrong doing). Prevezon's lawyer was Natalia Veselnitskaya. If that name sounds familiar, maybe it's because she's the lawyer that met with Trump Jr when he was promised official Russian dirt on Hillary. link here. The stench on the Trump family is building. If there is still anything called justice in the USA, the whole family will be indicted. Follow the money.

I haven't seen it but I can well imagine. The wealthiest, best educated portions of the country are blue states for sure. If you split the country between red states and blue states you'd have one wealthy country with good education and universal health care and one, well... you get the picture. If you find it, post a link.

Coal has no future. Smart Republicans know that. Even in India and China, they are cancelling new coal plants in favor of solar and natural gas. And even if coal were to continue to be mined the job losses will continue due to automation. Trump lied to the gullible masses. Those jobs that were exported as part of globalization (the ones that the right wingers claimed at the time weren't going to leave) are never coming back. The factories might return but the jobs will be automated out of existence. As is the case most of the time, we continue to argue about things that mattered to the last generation, not what will matter to the next generation.

I get how people from the middle states might feel that there is a great gap between the rhetoric of the Democrats and their actual governance. I can understand (although not agree) with the relatively poor might see government assistance for the seriously poor as unfair. I can even understand (although it's something I disparage) how people can be inclined to blame outsiders like immigrants when they feel their lives are not going as well as they would like. Still, I can't imagine how any intelligent person with a working internet connection could fail to see Trump for what he is. The tragedy is that while these people might honestly have believed in Trump as a savior, he will destroy many things that are making their lives even as good as they are today. Analysis shows that many of the states that rely most heavily on government programs are those states that voted most heavily for Trump. Conversely, I've read that something like 2/3 of the GDP of the US is produced in regions that went for Clinton.