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Messages - Alia

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1
Big Government - Authoritarian / Re: My Problem with Universal Health Care
« on: December 08, 2009, 03:51:13 pm »
Just as higher wages in other countries would cause the price of goods to go up, wages here on order of five cents an hour would cause goods to deflate.

Coca-Cola would go bankrupt if everyday Joes couldn't afford a single bottle after a whole day's work. They could lower their prices, or go out of business. And they could lower their prices, since the labour would be costing them less.

2
Rules / Re: My rules
« on: November 23, 2009, 12:30:27 am »
Please make all posts in English, due to some measure of spamming all strangers posting in foreign languages will be banned and their posts will be removed. You may post foreign languages if its clear that you are not spamming. But if your first post around here is in Cyrillic script and is a link to a Toyota add, I might just kick you out.

Thanks for understanding...

I won't be the one to say anything but I wouldn't be in the least bit shocked if you lost your forum over this. Did you know that in America, you cannot refuse to hire someone for an inability to speak English but you can refuse to hire someone for an inability to speak Spanish?

3
The Public Forum / Re: What is wrong with America?
« on: November 23, 2009, 12:25:50 am »
And if you hadn't been somebody's cousin and somebody else's son, you'd be in prison now. Think about it.

4
Big Government - Authoritarian / Re: My Problem with Universal Health Care
« on: November 23, 2009, 12:17:12 am »
We do not need higher wages... If anything we need lower wages so we can compete with the overseas labour market.

Health care is just one of the parasitic industries that force minnimum wage higher and destroy the job market with thier trusts that make cost of living go higher. "The market will self-regulate," cry Republicans, but a market without any international trade regulation will not do so; it will destroy itself instead.

One more advantage of universal health care would be my vision of assigning each doctor a preset number of patients. If this was done properly, instead of pushing medications, instead of convincing people they are ill to provide more treatment and rake in more profit - as they must do in a ballooning medical indistry - each doctor would strive to make less work for himself instead of more, and my educated guess is that many peoples' "chronic" "conditions" would miraculously disappear. The twin forces of genetic degradation and medical advancement would cancel eachother out, pushing for cures instead of treatments. There is a very good reason no disease since polio has actually been cured.

5
The Public Forum / Re: They say a picture is worth a thousand words....
« on: November 23, 2009, 12:00:23 am »
The war is still on, only now it's become masochistic and self-defeating, and I'm still laughing at the people who failed to judge a book by its cover because they thought they knew what was written on the inside.

I'd rather not have a war at all. I'd rather deal with terrorism on a security basis and with international threats through intelligence and both offensive and defensive armament.

However, if we're going to have a war I'd rather a Republican deal with it than almost any Democrat I can think of. I'm not endorsing Bush, it's just that in this case he was the lesser of two Goods. I got the feeling McCain would have won and ended the whole thing by now.

6
The Mud pile / Re: Hypocrisy courtesy of Maureen Dowd
« on: November 22, 2009, 11:45:06 pm »
Now, taken aside the absurd arrogance of accusing a movement that I know first hand is multi racial, of being racist. I'm going to show how based on her own standard of racial politics, namely that anyone who criticized a black man for any reason is only motivated by race must prove that she herself is a racist.

You just don't understand. You're using logic, when I've been trying to tell you that predefined terms simply are what they're defined as, and logic does not apply. This is why American culture is so degenerate; the media controls the opinions, and the opinions control the definitions.

If most people accept something as true they'll find a way to define it true. We have a language that allows for murky terms to begin with, and moreover, allows for those terms to change with popular usage.

Racism as it exists now in popular usage - and thus Truth as our dynamic language allows this - is such:

If 1 OR 2 are true, [action] OR [opinion] = [racist].

0. Check if [individual] = minority. If true, then no possible [action] or [opinion] = [racist].

1. [Opionion] = negative about a member of a minority or an entire minority.

2. [Action] = more detrimental on average to minorities than non-minorities OR [action] = beneficial to a non-minority over a minority on an individual basis.

If you truly do not believe that logic applies before popular conviction in terms of definitions and labels, then tell me plainly how Pluto can suddenly become a non-planet, and why an invertebrate that is not a fish is called a starfish, a silverfish, or a jellyfish. Scientists tried to rename the jellyfish the jelly-animal but it didn't take, and they'll be called jellyfish for the rest of eternity, because they are jellyfish. As a Republican you must be familiar with the Fairness Doctrine, which states that equal time must be given on the air to Liberal opinions. Despite the fact that this results in the "unfair" allocation of funds since programs that bring in listeners like Rush Limbaugh are forced to share time with programs that can cost radio stations money, it is still called the fairness doctrine, because that is what it is.

Some terms are pretty much defined as bad, or if you like, "evil" - and those terms, in turn, are defined by popular opinion. Popular opinion is whatever the now Liberal media wants it to be. Just look at the definition of "equal opportunity employer". In my opinion, a language form that allows this is a recipie for cultural disaster, and I would much rather have a precise and unflexible language with each and every term with one exclusive, perfectly clear and unambiguous definition.

If you're unhappy that others can define you into moral wrongness in this fashion, create a language without this fundamental flaw. There is no way the media-dominating ***cough*** could pull off a guilt-induced, forced culture suicide in the confines of such a language.

Maybe you'll be the one to do it - Change the dictionary. Create your own dictionary utterly devoid of ambiguity that has unflinching, perfectly-designed rules for creation of new words... A dictionary only a computer could love [understand]. In the meantime, you're just going to have to accept that things mean what they're generally understood to mean, and that people can use this to make logic simply unapplicable.

7
Global / Re: Obama Awared Nobel Peace Prize
« on: November 22, 2009, 10:39:50 pm »
"Promises of disarmament" ...?

A non-***slur deleted**** politician makes a promise, and people roll thier eyes. Obongo makes a promise and he gets a Nobel prize. Never even mind the fact that if we disarm, we will be destroyed... Let's just give up the whole cabbage and assume that disarmament is a good thing. A promise equals a Nobel prize all of a sudden?

Nice.

Read my lips: No new ***slur deleted***!

Where's my Nobel prize?

8
Big Government - Authoritarian / Re: My Problem with Universal Health Care
« on: September 21, 2009, 08:24:57 pm »
I don't agree with your assertion that to want people to have access to healthiness is to believe it to be a right. I have always drawn the distinction between rights and publicly provided services.

A right is something you have, that a dictator can take away from you. Such as your life, your property, your freedom, your ability to speak, ect. That is the basis of the bill of rights in this country. To protect people from other people, and from the government. Not to protect people from themselves or from nature. This I believe is primarily their responsibility.

If Life is a right, then so is Health. In an Alia-style fascist dictatorship, the dictator makes the disctinction between the inferior genes and their hapless bearer. One must be wiped out; the other should not be punished. As long as the latter is behaving responsibly, and is in fact a victim of his own body, the State will pick up the slack, provided the person agrees to be sterilised. If Technology advances far enough, they would even be allowed to have children as long as their gametes go through a process that assures the disorder is not passed on.

I have no problem with Health being a right for those that are responsible enough to earn it; I have a problem with the alternative, with people dying of heart problems at 45 while cigarette smokers who drink and drug outlast them, even if they die more slowly and painfully when the time comes. Protecting people from Nature is a part of creating a world where instead of chaos and randomness, we have rewards for responsibility and punishments for bad behaviour. This replaces helplessness and apathy with a healthy dose of drive, pride and deserving in accomplishment, and confidense for the broad masses. I think that's worth it, because Humans need it. In the Past, this need was filled by gods who were either punishing you or rewarding you, depending upon your behaviour. Without these gods, without the false assurance of fairness they provide, hopelessness takes over. One of the only benefits of a large government is that it can provide this fairness, only real, instead of false.


I also see a fundamental flaw with your proposed system. If you cut compensation to doctors, less will aspire to be doctors. The fewer doctors there are, the longer the wait time will be to see them. This is why you can't fix prices. The same holds true of any commodity. if you say grain can only be a certain price, then people will stop growing it and chose another more profitable crop.

Managing the economy in this way will only guarantee that for every sector you regulate, others will expand, and that one will contract. This will create shortages in some places, and unneeded surpluses in others.

For your system to work, you would need to be able to force a certain number of people to become doctors. And that would require radically changing our system of government.

I don't think so, the "force" is already there, and the State would simply have to take everyone who needs a job and put them through the system I outlined. If they aren't perfect, so what? They can still learn. Standards are kept artificially high to inflate the price of medical care and the profits of doctors. I'm talking about tearing down this artificial wall, not making more.

Your thought about Capitalism is very true. But remember, Capitalism is not the fairness it seems to be. Bound up in it, it has all the price-fixing, absence of competition, and control of the economy which I can tell you despise. Only, in Capitalism, instead of fixing prices so they don't go higher, Trusts fix them so they stay artificially high. Instead of denying competion with State-run control, big companies work together to crush upstarts with their greater financial power and keep their pockets fat.

You should forget words like Capitalism and Socialism, and more importantly, their associations. Capitalism is not any more neccesarilly associated with free competition than Socialism is, except in the rare case when Capitaism is newborn and only if everyone starts on a decently level playing field.

It's just a matter of where the control comes from.

9
Big Government - Authoritarian / Re: My Problem with Universal Health Care
« on: September 07, 2009, 08:41:02 pm »
To speak of deserving something, as you just have, is admitting that it is a right. You do not want to see poeple die because they cannot pay, and there isn't anything wrong with that.

Health care costs are ballooning out of control for all the reasons the Republicans say. However there is a very nasty reason nobody ever mentions. Medicine does not belong within capitalism because it's not capitalistic. Medicine is either needed to live, or it is not. Even after you strip away the government scamming hospitals out of billions by forcing them to accept everyone in the emergency room, even if they cannot pay, even after you reform the insurance system, medicine will always be left with an ugly, anti-capitalistic flaw: You cannot refuse it if you need it.

Let me elaborate. If ten people suffer amoung five doctors, and are each paying the doctors $10 a week to treat their condition, the doctors make $50 a week each. However, if the doctors increase the cost of treatment to $20, even if two of the ten can no longer pay, the doctors each have four clients left and make $80 a week, and for less work, too. If they increase the cost to $40, and another two cannot pay, they still each have three clients left and each recieve $120 a week. Taking this even further, the ideal situation is to charge exhorbitantly, let us say we make the cost of treatment $200 a week, and only the last two people can pay, leaving the doctors with minnimum work and maximum profit of $200 a week each, because no one who can pay will refuse. This is the ideal. If one of our two doctors lowered his prices back to $10 a week, he would recieve double the work he originally had and only $100 a week compared to $200 for just one client.

I believe in Socialism where Capitalism must fail, and here is an example. Whenever need works to the benefit of the trust and oversupply cannot counter it, I think intervention must come.

Food is another such commodity, and this will eventually be realised. Now, deliberate oversupply counters need. This is so farmer after farmer is put out of business because low prices do not allow him to compete with massive growers, and when all the skills are comfortably in the hands of a select few, a shortage will be engineered and prices will skyrocket. This is waiting in the wings, I assure you. People not on Welfare will die. The starving will roam the streets raiding peoples' homes. This is not Depression II, this is utter Catastrophe.

I believe in price fixing, but, only for necessities. Someone needs to see to it that providers of necessities make enough to live, even when there are a great many provders and harsh competition. This forestalls Catastrophe.

The way I see it government should probably step in on health care, but the problem needs to be faced from the bottom up. Firstly, medical school is too expensive. Government-run medical schools should admit students, and even pay them to live comfortably for high academic achievement, and enough to at least live even if they have a C-average. If they never graduate, they must repay their entire debt to Society. If they do graduate, they should be put to work as doctors, and paid a fair price for their hours rather than an exhorbitant one. The face of medicine should change; no longer harsh competition in which the brightest few with their eyes on money from the outset earn the right to stand beyond competition and drive up prices. Instead, a decent system where those genuinely willing to help can be doctors, paid a fair wage for a fair job. If people want the best, with no chance of error, they can pay for that. If they're sick and need help from an honest Joe for an honest price, then they can be helped.

10
The Public Forum / The Failure of Oversuccess
« on: September 07, 2009, 08:08:19 pm »
Unfortunately it looks like these ***slur deleted*** need to be taken out. They are going to put a strain on native [kinds] and could cause them to become endangered or extinct.

This is clearly why humans shouldn't move around to environments that can't handle them.

Very wise.

When you take a step outside Humanity, you realise we're just animals after all, with the same natures and patterns as these witless Birds. That was the pin in my heart's coffin really. I learnt to think like a Naturalist.

It is very obvious that these starlings are fitter and more successful than the native species they are outcrowding, harassing, and replacing. So shouldn't a Darwinist be on the side of the starling? No, an ecosystem must be considered as a whole, and whether it functions as a whole or not. One invasive species can destroy hundreds of native, harm the balance achieved over thousands of starling-free years, and puts the entire ecosystem, or society, at risk, ironically, through its oversuccess.

Oversuccess can be bad. It seems anti-Darwinistic and contradictory at first, but oversuccessful species strip resources at an unsustainable rate. I've dropped the metaphor and I'm only talking about animals now and species as a whole, but, I'm including Humans as a whole as an oversuccessful species. We have such an impact because our oversuccess leads to an unsustainable rate of population growth. When this happens, a species becomes a burden to its ecosystem and all the other species which naturally thrive there, sustainably. Gradually, the land gives out. First resources run slim, and the reasonably successful are affected before the oversuccessful. Some of these species outcrowded are ultimately keystone species, who just by their existence, sustain and play a vital role in every part of the ecosystem. When they are gone, they trigger a chain reaction, a mass extinction, and Nature is lucky if she can pick up the pieces and start over. I believe that climate change, meteors, and miscellaneous changes in abiotic environment play only an ancillary role in many mass extinctions. I believe oversuccess is probably always at least linked to the main cause and usually the red herring itself, the reason being that we are within a mass extinction at this very moment, and we are lucky enough to be able to observe the cause.

And it is us.

11
The Public Forum / Bird-Hate Rampant, Genocide Fails, Shakespere at Fault
« on: September 07, 2009, 02:51:32 am »
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090906/ap_on_re_us/us_most_hated_bird
Quote
Shock and caw: Pesky starlings still overwhelm





SALT LAKE CITY – The next time the sky darkens with a flock of noisy unwelcome starlings, blame Shakespeare — or, better yet, a few of his strangest fans.

Had the Bard not mentioned the starling in the third scene of "Henry IV," arguably the most hated bird in North America might never have arrived. In the early 1890s, about 100 European starlings were released in New York City's Central Park by a group dedicated to bringing to America every bird ever mentioned by Shakespeare.

Today, it's more like Hitchcock.

Some 200 million shiny black European starlings crowd North America, from the cool climes of Alaska to the balmy reaches of Mexico's Baja peninsula. The enormous flocks endanger air travel, mob cattle operations, chase off native songbirds, roost on city blocks, leaving behind corrosive, foul-smelling droppings and hundreds of millions of dollars of damage each year.

And getting rid of them is near impossible.

Last year U.S. government agents poisoned, shot and trapped 1.7 million starlings, more than any other nuisance species, according to new figures, only to see them roaring back again.

"It's sort of like bailing the ocean with a thimble," said Richard Dolbeer, a retired Wildlife Services researcher in Sandusky, Ohio who spent years trying to figure out ways to keep starlings — which he calls "flying bullets" — and other birds from causing problems at airports. Federal aviation officials say they have caused $4 million in damage since 1990.

After the starlings' introduction, they quickly expanded west, taking advantage of vast tracts of forested land opening up to agriculture and human development, Dolbeer said. By the 1950s, starlings had reached California and nearly all parts in-between. Today, it's one of the most common birds in the U.S.

Their prodigious presence is no mystery. Starlings breed like crazy, eat almost anything, are highly mobile and operate in overwhelming numbers. They're also expert at nesting in protected nooks and making an intimidating statement as they swirl in vast clouds called "murmurations."

"They're great survivors and quite the biological machine," said Greg Butcher, director of bird conservation at the National Audubon Society.

They're also responsible for the most deadly bird strikes in aviation: a 1960 civilian crash in Boston that killed 62 and a 1996 military cargo plane crash that killed 34 in the Netherlands. Since then, there have been close calls, including a Boeing 747 that ran into a flock in Rome last fall. No one was killed but the badly damaged plane had a rough landing.

Those kinds of scenarios are why wildlife biologist Mike Smith has been tweaking a series of traps used at Salt Lake City International Airport, where there have been 19 reported starling strikes since 1990. The traps use dog food to attract a starling or two. Hundreds more soon follow, driven by their innate desire to flock with each other. He once caught 800 in a single day.

The most popular lethal tactic is a poison called DRC-1339, which is often sprinkled on french fries, a favorite starlings snack. Within a day or two, starlings keel over from organ failure.

No other state poisoned more starlings last year than Washington. Starlings there caused $9 million in damages to agricultural operations over five years. Nationwide, starlings cause $800 million in damage to agricultural operations each year, according to a Cornell University estimate.

At one feed lot, some 200,000 starlings gathered each day, lining fence tops, wires, water troughs and even perching on top of cows. They've learned to steal the most nutritious morsels from the cattle troughs and pose an ever-present threat of moving disease from one ranch to another, said Roger Woodruff, director of Wildlife Services in Washington.

Nearly 650,000 starlings were poisoned last year in the state, an all-time record, he said.

When killing's not an option, agents often turn to harassment campaigns.

In downtown Indianapolis, flocks as large as 40,000 show up around dusk in the winter to hang out, find food and keep warm. They quickly wear out their welcome with their noise and their mess. Crews are deployed nearly every night to scare them off with lasers, pyrotechnic explosions and noise devices with names like "screamers" and "bangers."

Like other urban areas, they've had some success shooing them out of downtown and onto undeveloped land, said Judy Loven, director of Wildlife Services in Indiana, but it's likely going to be an ongoing battle.

"They're pretty much wise to our ways and pass that information along," said Jeff Homan, a wildlife researcher in Bismarck, N.D., who's part of a team focusing on starlings and blackbirds.

It's unlikely those who engineered the starlings' release in Central Park — including its leader, New York drug manufacturer named Eugene Schieffelin — could have fully imagined the consequences of their experiment, said author Kim Todd, who wrote about the introduction in her 2001 book "Tinkering With Eden: A Natural History of Exotic Species in America."

"It's sad but true that we often only see a creature's beauty when it is out-of-reach or rare," Todd said in an e-mail. "I can't imagine that Schieffelin, who appreciated starlings on the page and in small groups, would have the same affection for them in their enormous, pesky flocks."

12
Big Government - Authoritarian / Re: My Problem with Universal Health Care
« on: September 07, 2009, 02:33:50 am »
That is actually a brilliant idea... I might have to steel steal that as my only current plan is to require them to lose the weight themselves to be eligible which is admittedly not a perfect solution.

I can't believe you'd push for universal health care at all. It really is more of a Socialist idea.

13
The Public Forum / Re: They say a picture is worth a thousand words....
« on: September 07, 2009, 02:27:48 am »
These people all seem to be counting on the Magic ***slur deleted*** to somehow get us out of the war. I hope none of them hold their breath. Besides, McCain served, so he has some small right to be a warmonger. Much more right than Obama has to throw away American lives protecting terrorists from justice. With Obama's anti-American, amry-crippling policies, he will extend the war and cost more American lives treating terrorists "fairly" than McCain probably ever would have, warmonger or no. I'm glad I didn't vote for either of them.

Even though I don't think McCain was actually crazy, I still think people who use the word "nutter" are somewhat endearing.

But... #2 for the win I suppose. He gets the gold star for most rational, with a more or less, push the pendulum further as it swings, to bring it back harder the way we want sort of philosophy.

14
The Public Forum / Re: What is wrong with America?
« on: September 07, 2009, 01:47:06 am »
I'm only enraged because we live in a world in which the innocent are saved from prosecution by having connections.

This is outrageous. The innocent should never be saved.

Plus, you should not spell the word store "S-T-O-O-R". If you weren't shot for that, I don't know what to tell you about the state of America. Fascism Lite just isn't good enough for me.

15
Big Government - Authoritarian / Re: My Problem with Universal Health Care
« on: September 03, 2009, 04:34:49 pm »
I'm borderline on the obesity issue, since obesity has been shown to be genetic.

Therefore I would set it up thusly.

I would provide gyms with tax breaks for admitting those whose obesity is a danger to their health. Along with the tax breaks would come a few minor obligations. Excercise cards would be given out to the obese, and they would work like punch cards inside a gym, with the punch card machines being given to the gyms who apply for the tax breaks. So, if the obese individual can prove he is trying, he will recieve medical care. A reasonable number of hours that constitutes a reasonable effort will be decided and agreed upon by experts, and if people tried to cheat, there would be cameras in the gyms that applied for tax breaks. Those that do not try to improve will not recieve medical care for obesity-related ailments.

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