No one's gonna touch the idea of organs going to the highest bidder?
Probably for the best....
When I'm President, The Things I'll Change.
When I'm President, the things I'll Change.
High IQ doesn't necessarily mean you know ANYTHING about politics.
[+]
Remora.Brain said: »
Could you specify more on what exactly you think are just plain bad?
The Esperanto thing is silly. English is already the current lingua franca and I don't see a reason to change it. I'm selfish, though: I have a degree in English language and literature.
I'm allergic to marijuana, so I really don't want it legalized. I live near a bunch of hookah bars and the last thing I need is to vomit in the street on my way home from work because of the cloud of pot smoke going into my lungs. Yes, literally, I am that allergic to the stuff.
Prostitution is a funny thing. When it becomes legal, business goes down. Part of why people pay for sex is that it is illicit, oddly enough. But I don't object to decriminalizing it. Just know that there are a lot of considerations involved.
Reforming voting law is fine. Changing a nation of 300 million to a direct democracy is insane. Go study how politics in California have worked, as direct democracy has a fair foothold over there. A few rich *** in Salt Lake City have been tying up the legislative and judicial systems for years with their pet projects. I far prefer living in a republic, though I'd love to find a way to make politicians more accountable. Maybe assign someone to hold a gun to their temple at all hours of the day and the moment their hand reaches out to grab some money, the trigger gets pulled.
The weight training thing is your personal silliness. People should be encouraged to be in better shape, but lifting heavy stuff is pointless vanity. I say this as someone who does manual labor for a living: big muscles are stupid. And, frankly, kinda gay, and I'm saying that as a gay man, so professional opinion there. If you want the country to be in better shape, ban cars or make TVs and computers that only run when attached to treadmills or stationary bicycles. We need cardiovascular health and endurance, not hypertrophic vanity muscles.
Taxes fall in with voting reform. By all means, do it, but recognize that both are legislative processes. You're better off forming a super PAC, buying a couple influential Senators and Congressmen, and basically being a total hypocrite.
Tech has made it so we don't need as large a standing military, true. To say we'll never invade again is short-sighted. Our intervention in Bosnia in the 90s wasn't well-received at the time, but history has had a different opinion. By the same token, we thought we were doing the same in Iraq and Afghanistan and that definitely didn't work. Hindsight's a ***.
And selling organs... So, like, if I'm $40,000 in debt to the Mafia, the IRS, or Sallie Mae, I can just chuck a kidney or a lung up on the marketplace? Really not sure what the plan is there. If it were me, I'd say to hell with religious beliefs and personal freedom and declare any warm corpse that shows up in a hospital to be a free-for-all to keep other people alive. But getting capital exchange involved sounds frightening.
[+]
When I went to high school, first year in weight room I hurt my back and ended up dropping out of school after being given *ssloads of pills and losing any motivation to leave my room.
If they had shown me proper lifting technique, or at least not let a bunch of 9th graders go in cold and try to deadlift stupid amounts of weight unsupervised, I wouldn't have hurt myself lol.
Lifting is good and if you start with just the bar and progress with increments of 5s, novice lifters will enjoy it. It's quick and easy at first, and by the time it becomes a real challenge, most people have become fascinated with how strong they've become, the guys especially.
If they had shown me proper lifting technique, or at least not let a bunch of 9th graders go in cold and try to deadlift stupid amounts of weight unsupervised, I wouldn't have hurt myself lol.
Lifting is good and if you start with just the bar and progress with increments of 5s, novice lifters will enjoy it. It's quick and easy at first, and by the time it becomes a real challenge, most people have become fascinated with how strong they've become, the guys especially.
What's going on in here? hahaha
[+]
Phoenix.Upbeatglitch said: »
What's going on in here? hahaha
The only thing I can agree with is the legalization of prostitution as brothels(I think that's the word). Make them pay taxes and be under constant medical check like porn actors, that way two things should happen:
More safety both for the pronstitutes and the clients.
Less exploiting and enslavement cause it wouldn't be a business as good anymore for local gangsters.
In the european countries where this is a thing it's actually much better than where it's forbidden.
More safety both for the pronstitutes and the clients.
Less exploiting and enslavement cause it wouldn't be a business as good anymore for local gangsters.
In the european countries where this is a thing it's actually much better than where it's forbidden.
[+]
The military is fine the way it is, more or less.
When I was in, the only thing I noticed was that once a company would order whatever they needed for the year, they would then order random nonsense to fill out the rest of their given budget. If they don't, their budget next year would decrease. I got some pretty neat stuff because of that, but it still shouldn't be that way.
That said, leave the military budget alone. It's that military industrial complex that needs to be cut. When I was in Iraq, they stuck me(us, rather) on some tower and had a civilian contractor come in to do the same job I was trained to do, and paid him about 10x what I was getting paid. Bribery and corruption in Washington aside, that doesn't make much sense.
When I was in, the only thing I noticed was that once a company would order whatever they needed for the year, they would then order random nonsense to fill out the rest of their given budget. If they don't, their budget next year would decrease. I got some pretty neat stuff because of that, but it still shouldn't be that way.
That said, leave the military budget alone. It's that military industrial complex that needs to be cut. When I was in Iraq, they stuck me(us, rather) on some tower and had a civilian contractor come in to do the same job I was trained to do, and paid him about 10x what I was getting paid. Bribery and corruption in Washington aside, that doesn't make much sense.
Remora.Brain said: »
Quote:
No, it has no benefit. Everyone around the world uses english which is an easy enough language and by now is so wide spread that it's pointless to overthrow it. Chinese is the only language that has more speakers and that is only cause chinese peeps are everywhere.
Well I will say it would be an uphill battle, I'm not willing to say it has no benefit, as I believe it has the ability to enhance learning if nothing else. It doesn't have to serve a purpose as a Universal language so much as be a tool to familiarize someone with language acquisition which is the primary reason I've ever shown interest in it.
The bonus would be if it became more widespread and actually usable outside of the small circle it current calls home and I suppose the new generations of Americans who studied it, coming off the assumption it were made a curriculum.
1) One of the most difficult things for second language learners to master is the ability to deal with phonemes that aren't present in their mother tongue. This can be very difficult to accomplish, especially if you begin the process later in life.
People have a natural tendency to replace foreign pronunciations with similar-sounding pronunciations from a familiar language (like when an American uses the English "ooh" to attempt the French "u"); this is an obstacle to authentic speech that many learners will never overcome. The ability to move your mouth in a new way is a critical skill that, once applied to one new sound, can be used in the acquisition of all others**. In my opinion, this is the main extent to which one's first foreign language can expedite mastery of a second, but this result is possible no matter which language you choose to study. If it's truly your goal to lessen the difficulty of attaining multilingualism, you'd might as well study a language that people actually use!
**Assuming you don't get trapped like the people who learn Spanish and then trill when they speak Japanese. >__>;
2) The obvious way that learning one foreign language can help you learn another is if the two are similar enough to share vocabulary. Learning vocabulary in Esperanto will certainly help you remember the words in French or Italian, but once again you're still better off just learning one of those to begin with.
[+]
You're a polyglot, Carrelo. You learn languages much easier than most.
And the phoneme thing is actually irrelevant. Speaking with a foreign accent is perhaps troublesome, but unless you're a jerk (e.g., a Parisian or urban Japanese), minor pronunciation quirks can be ignored. If anything, the uniformity of American vernacular English is the weird exception. I can tell what part of London someone was born in, even after living in the United States for over 10 years, because British accents are sufficiently diverse that even a city can have multiple different ones. Meanwhile, the only person to ever correctly identify me as being from New England was a Norwegian immigrant (for some reason most Americans interpret my accent as British, which is ridiculous).
And the phoneme thing is actually irrelevant. Speaking with a foreign accent is perhaps troublesome, but unless you're a jerk (e.g., a Parisian or urban Japanese), minor pronunciation quirks can be ignored. If anything, the uniformity of American vernacular English is the weird exception. I can tell what part of London someone was born in, even after living in the United States for over 10 years, because British accents are sufficiently diverse that even a city can have multiple different ones. Meanwhile, the only person to ever correctly identify me as being from New England was a Norwegian immigrant (for some reason most Americans interpret my accent as British, which is ridiculous).
@Brain: Take a few reading about macroeconomics and political science to see how extremely difficult it is to manage an economy to keep it from breaking.
Let's ignore all the power play and politicking and assume you have absolute power and authority and nobody in your government will go against you - they might disagree and advise you but will obey you like an Emperor.
1st let's go with tax heavens. there are 2 main types of tax heaven - those that are in country and those that are outside. You have no authority over those that are outside your country. You can not stop them and anything short of a ban on trade is not going to stop those tax heavens. For those inside your country, you will need an agency or department to find them and shut them down while making sure you're not hurting your economy. A company might open a mine somewhere to reduce some of its own tax and shut the mine down after with "unforeseen circumstances" or just "not enough profit" reasoning. You can't exactly put them into jail cause they are running a stupid business and failed at keeping an operation.
Taxes is a cost to a firm. An international firm will always look for places with the lowest costs. That means cheap labor, low taxes and stupid tax systems with lots of loop holes. The more your are making your own tax system perfect, the lest the major companies will be staying around and invest in your own country. You will be left with medium and small companies - who are too weak to move international - suffer the taxes. This is extremely bad to the economy as the more you are taxing the small and medium companies, the weaker your economy becomes as it's like taxing the poor and middle class. With large international companies running away into other countries, you will be lowering your own direct investment and you will see factories closing down all over.
Managing the economy of a country is like riding on a running tiger. You have a little control over it but if it's jumping down a cliff then you are going for the ride. You can't make it stop or jump down because it will just eat you then makes the jump anyways.
Adding a bit of politics into the equation then the difficult problems become real nightmares. Even if you managed to make a super perfect plan for your country, you won't be able to do half of what you plan. Other people will try to stop you using a whole range of political maneuvers designed to keep people on the top from going into "Tyrant" or "Emperor" mode. Chances are, you will get some of it done and the rest get stuck somewhere and everything turn out rushed, half baked or too late.
Let's ignore all the power play and politicking and assume you have absolute power and authority and nobody in your government will go against you - they might disagree and advise you but will obey you like an Emperor.
1st let's go with tax heavens. there are 2 main types of tax heaven - those that are in country and those that are outside. You have no authority over those that are outside your country. You can not stop them and anything short of a ban on trade is not going to stop those tax heavens. For those inside your country, you will need an agency or department to find them and shut them down while making sure you're not hurting your economy. A company might open a mine somewhere to reduce some of its own tax and shut the mine down after with "unforeseen circumstances" or just "not enough profit" reasoning. You can't exactly put them into jail cause they are running a stupid business and failed at keeping an operation.
Taxes is a cost to a firm. An international firm will always look for places with the lowest costs. That means cheap labor, low taxes and stupid tax systems with lots of loop holes. The more your are making your own tax system perfect, the lest the major companies will be staying around and invest in your own country. You will be left with medium and small companies - who are too weak to move international - suffer the taxes. This is extremely bad to the economy as the more you are taxing the small and medium companies, the weaker your economy becomes as it's like taxing the poor and middle class. With large international companies running away into other countries, you will be lowering your own direct investment and you will see factories closing down all over.
Managing the economy of a country is like riding on a running tiger. You have a little control over it but if it's jumping down a cliff then you are going for the ride. You can't make it stop or jump down because it will just eat you then makes the jump anyways.
Adding a bit of politics into the equation then the difficult problems become real nightmares. Even if you managed to make a super perfect plan for your country, you won't be able to do half of what you plan. Other people will try to stop you using a whole range of political maneuvers designed to keep people on the top from going into "Tyrant" or "Emperor" mode. Chances are, you will get some of it done and the rest get stuck somewhere and everything turn out rushed, half baked or too late.
[+]
The best way to encourage the learning of foreign languages is to offer them at an early age. Bilingualism is a very excellent thing to have since childhood. But in the case of USA, I'd say spanish should be the second.
[+]
Quote:
The weight training thing is your personal silliness. People should be encouraged to be in better shape, but lifting heavy stuff is pointless vanity. I say this as someone who does manual labor for a living: big muscles are stupid. And, frankly, kinda gay, and I'm saying that as a gay man, so professional opinion there. If you want the country to be in better shape, ban cars or make TVs and computers that only run when attached to treadmills or stationary bicycles. We need cardiovascular health and endurance, not hypertrophic vanity muscles.
I think this is just a common misconception people hold. You don't become a giant body builder by lifting heavy weights. You become a big muscly bodybuilder type by lifting moderate weight a lot of times, eating a lot, then cutting calorie intake to starve yourself for a while to make your body fat percentage as close to 0 as you can get it.
You can lift in different rep ranges for different goals, so you don't have to turn into a sweaty, oily, homoerotic muscle man unless you want to. You could become much stronger, build better endurance, and become much more athletic without looking like Jay Cutler. Look at your average olympic weightlifter for example, they do not bulk up to nearly what you're imagining.
Quote:
Reforming voting law is fine. Changing a nation of 300 million to a direct democracy is insane. Go study how politics in California have worked, as direct democracy has a fair foothold over there. A few rich *** in Salt Lake City have been tying up the legislative and judicial systems for years with their pet projects. I far prefer living in a republic, though I'd love to find a way to make politicians more accountable. Maybe assign someone to hold a gun to their temple at all hours of the day and the moment their hand reaches out to grab some money, the trigger gets pulled.
I'm not advocating a direct leap to having 300 million people, most of whom can't tell their heads from their ***, but having more representatives representing fewer people is a step in the right direction imho. The less people each representative represents, the more influence each person they represent has on their actions, in theory at least.
And the IQ test thing was more of a joke statement than what I want, though I do think that people should be able to pass a test of sorts to vote, requiring some standard base of knowledge and critical thinking before being allowed to have a vote in something that's supposed to have a great impact on hundreds of millions of lives. Real IQ tests themselves are pretty stupid. I mean people think I'm HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE and I supposedly have an IQ of 164, so a lot of good that does me.
Quote:
And selling organs... So, like, if I'm $40,000 in debt to the Mafia, the IRS, or Sallie Mae, I can just chuck a kidney or a lung up on the marketplace? Really not sure what the plan is there. If it were me, I'd say to hell with religious beliefs and personal freedom and declare any warm corpse that shows up in a hospital to be a free-for-all to keep other people alive. But getting capital exchange involved sounds frightening.
People already sell and buy organs on the black market. The idea is we offer safe and legal means to participate in organ sales. Obviously there would need to be healthy amounts of regulation and screening, but it's far better than the alternative. We can make this work and save lives while helping the desperate instead of preying on them.
If you really want to advocate the necessity of excercise make it swimming, not weight lifting.
[+]
Running and swimming primarily help the heart. If you want actual muscle exercise and calorie burning, you weight lift.
[+]
Your muscles still get work done through swimming. It's a fairly complete sport and it is even fun to do.
Every person should do the sport they want to do, but saying weight lifting for all is ridiculous.
Every person should do the sport they want to do, but saying weight lifting for all is ridiculous.
Shiva.Onorgul said: »
You learn languages much easier than most.
Shiva.Onorgul said: »
And the phoneme thing is actually irrelevant. Speaking with a foreign accent is perhaps troublesome, but unless you're a jerk (e.g., a Parisian or urban Japanese), minor pronunciation quirks can be ignored. If anything, the uniformity of American vernacular English is the weird exception. I can tell what part of London someone was born in, even after living in the United States for over 10 years, because British accents are sufficiently diverse that even a city can have multiple different ones. Meanwhile, the only person to ever correctly identify me as being from New England was a Norwegian immigrant (for some reason most Americans interpret my accent as British, which is ridiculous).
I guess it doesn't matter if mastery isn't a necessary prerequisite for multilingualism, but that depends on where you draw the line between language as a tool and language as an art. Lines are too straight for me personally, so I don't draw one at all. XP
That's because weight lifting is the most beneficial thing you can do for your muscles. What you're saying is equivalent to "Well, you don't need to run, you can just walk".
Quote:
If you really want to advocate the necessity of excercise make it swimming, not weight lifting.
Swimming doesn't produce the same benefits of weightlifting. Weightlifting increases absolute strength, endurance, force generation, bone density, etc. The only true advantage swimming has is it's low impact. That said, swimming is a great form of exercise for its own reasons.
Weight lifting is prefered because not only is it common to have weights on high school campuses from the get go, but it's arguably cheaper than building and maintaining a pool for schools with neither, and boosts performance in all athletic activities.
Weight lifting's biggest issue is that people have such a negative image of it in their mind, especially women. They think they'll all swell up and become muscle bound or something if they lift.
It's really unfair. If I work at it hard for years, I might get big. For women, all they have to do is stumble into the weights area and their muscles will explode. That is most definitely true, probably.
idk, maintaining weight is really hard if you're lifting. Unless she's already eating like 3k Cal a day when she starts, she's more likely to shrink than get muscley. <__<
FFFFFUUUUUUUUU
Accidentally back paged my serious and seriously long post.
The licensing process is for the safety of all involved, helping to protect against violence and the spread of STDs. Also, tax evasion is illegal for any profession, that would include prostitution.
The money spent locking up a few for a crime will obviously be less than the money spent locking up every hooker that gets caught in the current system. That and all the legal prostitutes will be generating money, and be safer because of it.
This safety also extends to anyone the "John" hooks up with after meeting with a prostitute, by reducing the likelihood of STDs being spread.
On another note, I do plan on going back for another degree in political science and such after I get the funds I need from my current path. I admit I'm not nearly as well versed now as I will be in say five years. I learn fast and I learn well. However, I want my intentions to remain the same and to use my education to find ways to help me get as close as possible to my original goals.
Carrelo, as someone who has a wealth of experience with languages, let me ask that you respond to this question on a point by point basis so I can learn more.
Would introducing Esperanto to children Kindergarten-Elementary benefit them in being a stepping stone to bilingualism? The only sources listed by the people of Lernu, an online site for Esperanto, and wiki all point to really old studies about Esperanto enhancing language acquisition. Since the language is constructed with so many roots common to English, Spanish, French, and Italian, would it not be more beneficial to expose all children to some degree to Esperanto during childhood, then allow them to pick one of the natural languages of their choice?
Accidentally back paged my serious and seriously long post.
Quote:
What if a woman doesn't get per Prostitute License? You'll still be spending money putting those women(maybe some men) in prison because for some people being a registered 'Prostitute' may be very embarrassing to them and they may not get their legal license.
The licensing process is for the safety of all involved, helping to protect against violence and the spread of STDs. Also, tax evasion is illegal for any profession, that would include prostitution.
The money spent locking up a few for a crime will obviously be less than the money spent locking up every hooker that gets caught in the current system. That and all the legal prostitutes will be generating money, and be safer because of it.
This safety also extends to anyone the "John" hooks up with after meeting with a prostitute, by reducing the likelihood of STDs being spread.
On another note, I do plan on going back for another degree in political science and such after I get the funds I need from my current path. I admit I'm not nearly as well versed now as I will be in say five years. I learn fast and I learn well. However, I want my intentions to remain the same and to use my education to find ways to help me get as close as possible to my original goals.
Carrelo, as someone who has a wealth of experience with languages, let me ask that you respond to this question on a point by point basis so I can learn more.
Would introducing Esperanto to children Kindergarten-Elementary benefit them in being a stepping stone to bilingualism? The only sources listed by the people of Lernu, an online site for Esperanto, and wiki all point to really old studies about Esperanto enhancing language acquisition. Since the language is constructed with so many roots common to English, Spanish, French, and Italian, would it not be more beneficial to expose all children to some degree to Esperanto during childhood, then allow them to pick one of the natural languages of their choice?
Remora.Brain said: »
Would introducing Esperanto to children Kindergarten-Elementary benefit them in being a stepping stone to bilingualism?
Get rid of the unions. Almost all of them are corrupt and drive up the price of everything. How many Cal-Trans workers does it take to watch one person dig?
[+]
Shiva.Jirachi said: »
Idk I feel like trying to force people into weight lifting will cause problems.
Those who want to start off low may get made fun of by others, they may one day try to go too far and end up getting hurt, maybe seriously.
Or so an already 'tough' guy doesn't look like a wimp he goes too far over what he can handle...
I've never had a gym coach able to effectively watch over 30 kids, by the coach might get to them it may be too late before somethings happened.
Those who want to start off low may get made fun of by others, they may one day try to go too far and end up getting hurt, maybe seriously.
Or so an already 'tough' guy doesn't look like a wimp he goes too far over what he can handle...
I've never had a gym coach able to effectively watch over 30 kids, by the coach might get to them it may be too late before somethings happened.
That's why you start all new lifters on the same base, compound lifts with the bar. Since everyone is made to start at the same point, no one will start out wit a bad experience unless they have some weird disorder that makes them unable to lift a 45 pound weight with the largest muscle groups in their body. By the time your average teenage male stops progressing on his lifts and needs to do a reset, he's already pretty strong.
Also, picking on people in the weight room seems to be relatively rare, and in my experience is mostly summed up by laughing at the dumbass who hurt himself showing off. This could also be because most of the weight rooms I've been in were for teams though.
Phoenix.Josiahfk said: »
You can start with separating the head of state and the head of government. They're supposed to keep each other in check people, not be the same guy.
Phoenix.Josiahfk said: »
Next work with the overseparation of power problem you guys have that delays ***in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Since everyone cannot fulfil multiple roles, the president could end up stuck helpless with his legislation or policies being delayed, against a majority opposition party control in one of them, since the president has no power to disolve either house and they're all in elected terms like him the ***could go on near endlessly.
b.) The President doesn't produce legislation. The fact that our Presidents campaign on it is because the voting public are morons. People genuinely complain when Presidential candidates go outside the country to campaign even when international diplomacy is a core part of the job.
[+]
All FFXI content and images © 2002-2024 SQUARE ENIX CO., LTD. FINAL
FANTASY is a registered trademark of Square Enix Co., Ltd.