I don't get why they keep going back to that "half of Americans don't pay taxes" when it's not so cut and dry as that. It's like you can explain WHY this is the case, and they just don't give a damn.
Even worse is that people listen to this nonsense.
This kind of thing right here? This is exactly why education budgets get slashed, to prevent people from getting the kind of education that allows them to detect outrageous bullshit when they hear it on TV.
The availability of soda in schools I think is another contributing factor. I noticed a few years ago at my work (I work for a school district) that they had gotten rid of all of it from the lunch menu and vending machines and I thought it was kind of stupid. But the more I thought about it, it seemed like a good idea. Well a couple of months ago I noticed they brought it all back, and I think that's a poor decision. Then again, this district isn't known for making the best decisions.
I'm not a fan of bottled water. It's a sickening waste. A real problem for our state too, because a lot of our water is sold outside the state (more importantly, outside the watershed for the Great Lakes). Sure, we have the worlds largest supply of easily accessible fresh water, but I wonder how long that will last if this trend continues.
Of course, if we keep poisoning out water, maybe no one else will want it.
But back to what we were just talking about, they don't sell soda at the elementary schools, which is nice, and out of (I think) 6 beverage vending machines at our High School, 2 of them sell soda. The rest is juice, Gatorade, water, milk/chocolate milk, those Arnold Palmer Ice Teas have their own machine (but they contain so much sugar they're not any better than soda). Oh, and there is a vending machine that sells nothing but ice cream.
The school lunches at least are pretty healthy. I'm 80% certain my district doesn't use any of that "Pink Slime", and being a wealthy area, they can more easily afford good stuff.
I say that, but the district just fired my dad, and is privatizing their custodial services all in order to "save money."
I'm not a fan of bottled water. It's a sickening waste. A real problem for our state too, because a lot of our water is sold outside the state (more importantly, outside the watershed for the Great Lakes). Sure, we have the worlds largest supply of easily accessible fresh water, but I wonder how long that will last if this trend continues.
Leave it to you to take something reasonable such as opposition to the waste of natural resources that bottled water is and imply something absurd such as it's a danger to depleting the great lakes.
The estimated volume of the great lakes is 5,440 cubic miles. Converted to gallons this is 5.989x10^15 gallons of water (1.101x10^12 gallons per cubic mile)
An estimation of the United States bottled water (Albeit a bit outdated[1999]) is 3.4 billion gallons a year. It would take 1.76 million years to bottle up the lakes.
Lets assume our current usage was closer to the world consumption of bottled water from these estimates (23.5 billion gallons a year) it would still take 255,000 years to drain the lakes.
But lets pretend something absurd, such as the entire United States sucked every last bit of fresh water from your precious lake. The United States uses approx: 392,000,000 acre feet of water a year. Converted to gallons (325,851 gallons per acre foot) gives us 1.277x10^14 gallons. It would take 47 years at our current consumption to deplete the lake.
The majority of which is due to thermoelectric power followed by agriculture (49% and 34% respectively)
So to think that bottled water is any significant danger to our fresh water supply or the great lakes is a completely insane position. If you care about conservation of of water (not the other valid reasons to oppose bottled water) you should focus on agriculture and industrial uses of water which account for much more use then personal consumption.
And here I was feeling bad this morning about leaving the tap running while I brushed my teeth. Fuck that, I'm never going to drain the Saskatchewan River with my piddling bathroom tap, I'll be leaving it on for the whole day now so I don't have to wait for the water to get cold.
Shit, but what if I want hot water? Kitchen tap, duh; and keep the tub faucet running at shower temperature 24/7, I can avoid that morning cold blast. Life is good.
I had a realization something like that when I took environmental law in college, the truly massive amount of water that a lot of industrial applications use.
A foundry or a manufacturing plant for example might have a permit to pump and them return as wastewater (appropriately filtered under the clean water act) something like 50,000 gallons of water a day. Really water intensive applications like say a power plant might have a permit for a million gallons of water a day.
There's that, but there's also the free rider issue, where it might be just fine if I were to leave every tap in my apartment running all day every day, but if everyone in my city did it, the results might be a bit harder on the system. While we're not in any immanent danger of running out of water, it's as much because of regulation like the clean water act as it is just the pure vastness of the quantity of water sloshing around the planet.
That’s the rich-guy philosophy in a nutshell: don’t tell us how to use our money; we’ll tell you.
However, if King would have cared to complete his thought on paper it would have come out as "don’t tell us how to use our money; we’ll tell you...how we're going to use our money. But then again that would have drained away every bit of absurdity he was shooting for.
What some of us want—those who aren’t blinded by a lot of bullshit persiflage thrown up to mask the idea that rich folks want to keep their damn money—is for you to acknowledge that you couldn’t have made it in America without America.
This is why Republican economics are based on Rand, and not Christ, because Jesus actually said, "From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked." Simply put, Republican economics are anti-Christian economics.
In reply to ToddBohr, #1090:, In reply to Mongopwn, #1088:
The issue with bottled water isn't the water consumption, but rather, the plastic bottles (of limited use in recycling, as plastics degrade over time -- if they sold water in aluminum, it'd be a lot better), as well as the transportation of bottled water. It is much more energy efficient to drink water from the tap. Frequently, bottled water is merely tap water that has been filtered. Unless noted otherwise, bottled water is an energy-intensive product that leaves behind a huge "carbon footprint," if a person cares about that sort of thing.
Depending on the "brand," I think the total cost can range from 100x to 10,000x more expensive. Not to mention, if you just filter the tap water, you can homebrew and make beer cheaper than bottled water!
Chlorine and chloramine content in water (present in almost all tap water across the US) will also mess with the taste and potentially screw up the yeast.
My personal favourite was this one: This is why Republican economics are based on Rand, and not Christ, because Jesus actually said, "From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked." Simply put, Republican economics are anti-Christian economics.
Except you are taking that verse is completely out of context and you didn't even use the whole verse, which in itself alters the meaning. On a literal level, it is referring to punishing servants for not doing their master's bidding. More trusted servants that understand their actions are wrong should be punished more harshly than a servant that makes a mistake out of ignorance. However, that entire section isn't even supposed to be taken literally, Peter is even quoted as calling it a parable in an earlier verse. Basically, it is saying that a person that understands the significance of their actions and still chooses to do something wrong is more responsible for that decision than someone that makes the same choice without realizing the overall consequences.
So, not really relevant to the point you were trying to make.
But Obama used that partial passage in a speech one time...so his application of it to present-day politics is pretty much irrefutable.
To Swooper's point, though, it would be great if taxes were based on a percentage of income - let's say 28 percent in this hypothetical situation. That way as more is given (or earned, in this scenario), more will automatically be demanded from the government. Oh well, one can dream.
I'm really amazed it took someone this long to throw down the "context" card.
Quit looking for ways to justify your selfishness by putting the Republican Jesus Seal of Approval on it. If you can't see that Jesus was all about giving everything for the sake of others, you have no idea what he was about. When you try to put individualistic philosophy in the mouth of the guy who told the rich young ruler to sell all he had and give it to the poor in order to follow Him wants people to hang on to every scrap of money for dear life, if you're trying to say that the Apostles who held everything in common together in Jerusalem were all about getting theirs before taking care of anyone else, you have completely missed the point of the whole book.
Your rationalizations are pathetic, and I'm sorry, but the contempt I hold that kind of hypocrisy in is difficult to mask sometimes. You have to pick, either Rand or Jesus, not both. It would be difficult to come up with two more opposite philosophies than what Christ and that psychotic woman preached, the attempt to wrap greed and self-centred egoism in the Bible is absurd in the extreme.
Let me boil it down: if your Bible teaches individualism over looking to the needs of the poor and giving everything you have for others without looking for anything in return in this life, you've got a Bible none of its writers would recognize.
