TRoaches

From what I've read he was in a nearby country (I think it was either China or Korea I can't remember) and he went with a tour company that targets their advertising towards western students studying abroad. The trips are marketed as "The trip your parents don't want you to take!" and that sort of thing. The company apparently ceased to exist in the wake of this incident. Most people probably just do it so they can have a crazy story to tell when they get back home. Its hard for me to even feel sympathy for him. What he did was astoundingly arrogant.

At the risk of sounding like an old person I really think this is the dawn of a new era of "internet kids", meaning people that were born recently enough that they have only experienced life with, and on, the internet. I really do think social media has, ironically, stunted the average 20-something's ability to exist socially. A BIG part of being a social animal is conflict resolution. Before the internet children were forced to learn to resolve social conflicts face-to-face. This is an awkward, but invaluable, experience that I think the internet generation is missing out on. Sometimes it leads to fights, crying, hurt feelings, and lost friendships. All negative things, but very valuable negative experiences that are highly educational. Resolving a social media conflict is as easy as unfriending or blocking the problem. This doesn't work in the real world, and if you primarily learn to resolve conflict this way you will never learn how to actually resolve conflict, which is to try to see the other person's perspective and help them to see yours. Related to this is the illusion of control. In the real world you may have very little control over who you interact with on a daily basis. Rarely in life are you allowed to pick your classmates or co-workers. If someone is annoying you at work you can't just block them. You are forced to address the issue, ignore them, or find a new job. Social media has led people to believe that they are entitled to complete control over who they interact with, and this has morphed into something like "I voted for X, therefore X should win". They can't fathom the possibility that something like the elected government is completely beyond their individual control. I'm far from a luddite and I wouldn't place the blame for anything 100% on social media, but it really looks like a big contributing factor to me. If memory serves the internet became mainstream in the mid 90's with social media really taking off about 10 years later. A person born in the mid 90's who started using social media right from the start, when their social development was just getting started, would have just voted in their first presidential election (or maybe just the first one where their candidate lost). For many of them the automatic reaction to perceived negativity or defeat is BLOCK BAN I QUIT UNFRIENDED, like our friend from reddit has apparently done with their mods. http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/200/368/147.jpg

Many Americans are Democrats in their younger years, then gravitate towards the Republicans as they get older, then vote for Democrats again after they die. :wink:

I watched an interview with Thomas Sowell (economist, author, think tank guy) where he made an argument against affirmative action that I had never considered before. Consider a situation where a person pursues a job in a field where they have no real experience but they are confident that they would be able to learn and perform if given a chance. Sometimes companies love to hire people like this, because they are cheaper and may turn out to be a stellar hire who just hasn't been given a real chance to excel yet. It is a gamble, however, and the person may not work out in the end. The company may decide, after a trial period, that they just aren't going to work out. When a minority applicant is in this position, according to Sowell, a company is actually incentivized NOT to hire them because of affirmative action, because it makes it much more difficult to fire them down the road if necessary. If the applicant is white they can just tell him thanks but no thanks and send him home. Sowell contends that affirmative action, in the end, causes companies to shy away from giving ethnic minorities a shot at a position unless they are over-qualified and not asking for much money. A cheap, over-qualified applicant is more of a sure thing than gamble. This means that the only people who really benefit from the law are people who would likely be solid contenders for the job in question without such a law, and even then they will only benefit if they are competing with other applicants with the same level of qualification and experience and affirmative action laws are the deciding factor. It achieves this, however, to the detriment of ambitious candidates who are younger and less qualified. If the goal of the law is upward economic mobility, and if Sowell is right (I think he is), then it is achieving the exact opposite of its goal by silently shutting doors on minority applicants.

I'm curious to see how trans rights are going to play out when trans-women start collecting all of the Olympic women's records.

This is precisely why "political correctness" really is a modern form of modern political tyranny, a method by which those in power can control the population. It sounds clever enough: we will discourage bad things like bigotry and eventually they will disappear! The problem is that the definition of bigotry changes over time and from person to person. It is an arbitrary human construct built, not from logic, but from human emotion. Some forms of hatred are perfectly acceptable (e.g. I hate Nazis!) and others are considered despicable. It is so far removed from logic that even objectively observable facts and legitimate scientific theories can be branded as political heresy and their advocates silenced. Most people look back on the witch hunts carried out in the past by the church and agree that they were absurd, even evil. Not nearly as many see the blatant parallels between those witch hunts and the ones that we have today. The new gospel is tolerance and social justice, and the new heresy is anything that deviates from that gospel. The old church ladies who gossiped about which of their neighbors was the least pious or most scandalous have been replaced by "social justice warriors" who will hunt down your employer and demand that you be fired from your job because you dared to say something that, to their ears, sounded intolerably intolerant. In the old days a person who did something heretical would be forced to confess and made to do some kind of penance. If they refused to confess they were tortured or jailed. Now you are forced to apologize (a form of confession) and if you refuse you will be punished through loss of employment or other opportunity. This is the great paradox at work: The more "tolerant" we seem to become as a society the less tolerant we really are. Tolerance, as it is used in modern jargon, is a code word for homogeneity, which is the opposite of diversity. Its all very Orwellian use of language to obscure what is really happening. Consider the recent stories about bakeries refusing to make particular types of cakes. If a baker refuses to bake a cake for a gay wedding because of their religious beliefs they are branded as intolerant and forced to go to government re-education (not a joke, really happened). If another baker refused to bake, for example, a confederate flag cake there is no backlash, and they may even be heralded as heroes of tolerance. No logic to be found, just emotion. One is bad, the other is good, and anyone who disagrees is just a bigot, and they can rest assured that they will be "held accountable" for their beliefs at the next Two Minutes Hate session to be held on Twitter and covered by the Daily Show.

Hate is a thought. Hate crime is a form of thought crime.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQLUlenavRo

***(gavel bangs)*** CONGRESS IS NOW IN SESSION.....Our first order of business, we will vote on the amendment to completely destroy the gravy train that we all personally benefit from, and was the sole motivation for 99% of us to enter politics in the first place. All in favor of destroying said gravy train, say aye...... (crickets chirping) All opposed..... (a chorus of nays) The motion fails. ***(gavel bangs)***

After considering the choices presented and trying to come up with my own alternative to them I have decided that the Fallout universe is not really well suited for crossover writing, because of the historical divergence. If you mash something like Star Trek and the X-files together there is no conflict there because both of those stories are set in a universe that very closely resembles our own reality. The Fallout universe is a complete historical divergence, particularly with regard to technological development. The only way I think it could work would be through some kind of convoluted time travel scenario, i.e. the Enterprise passed through/was sucked into some galactic anomaly (again) that sent it back through time to some point prior to the point of divergence, but even then the continuity would get really messy. Though, for what its worth, that lack of continuity has never seemed to bother the Star Trek writers when they were writing the scripts. The Voyage Home and First Contact both come to mind as examples of near-total disregard for timeline continuity.

.....and the other party (and their fans :wink:) are holding that report up and spinning its projections in a positive way, claiming that its projections are indicative of the ACA's positive effects on the economy (net increase in demand for goods, boost demand for labor, create jobs, etc). You have two sides interpreting the report to their favor, one in a positive way and the other in a negative way. You have chosen to accept the positive interpretation and reject the negative interpretation, despite the fact that neither interpretation is based on reality. Your premise has no more or less merit than that of a person who accepts the negative interpretation. You are simply being hopeful. Hope made for a fine campaign slogan, but the economy does not run on hope.

I found myself wondering just now about the historical accuracy of CBO projections. I would encourage anyone interested to do a quick web search for "CBO historical accuracy" and see if they can find anyone from either academia or business who has anything positive to say about the accuracy of CBO projections. It is fair to say they have been laughably inaccurate. 40% margins of error are not unheard of. Some of the inaccuracy is explained by simple bias on the part of the people who prepare the reports, who are likely "encouraged" to make them a bit rosier than they should be by the presidents and congresspeople who back the proposed budgets. Another explanation is that once the CBO prediction is released it becomes a self-defeating prophecy. For example, if the CBO predicts a surplus congress and the president take that as a cue to start spending the surplus and then POOF no more surplus. In other words, if this CBO projection turned out to be even close to accurate it would be the exception to the rule, because the historical precedent is for them to be EXTREMELY inaccurate. eta: I also found this article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2012/02/02/are-cbo-estimates-really-the-gold-standard-of-accuracy/ proposed an interesting explanation for the inaccuracies, that being that the economic model that is used to produce the projections is itself flawed, and will always produce erroneous results regardless of the input that you give it.

So now unemployment is a good thing....... :thumbsup:

I can't even express how uninterested I am in browsing a 170 page CBO report so I'll just ask you: On what page does it say that the ACA will reduce the deficit, boost the economy, and create jobs? Also, why do you consider it a good thing that people will be "purposely dropping out of jobs"? Because that sounds, to me, like a very bad thing. "My government takes care of me so I don't need to work.", said no successful, productive, or innovative person, ever.

Objective journalism isn't really supposed to have "sides". You readily admit that you are getting your information from media sources that belong to one "side", and blasting the other "side" for being....biased?!?! If your preferred news sources can be described as coming from a particular "side" of any given issue then that source is biased, and should not be considered a true news source. MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN produce about 95% editorial content. I would BARELY consider them legitimate news sources. If any of those infotainment productions were to submit a transcript of their broadcast to a Journalism 101 class for critique the professor would fail them all for their complete disregard of anything resembling journalistic ethics.