ieldanth

"However, I understand that there is no such thing as either of our examples" <---

Again, I see that you are unable to debate without changing my argument by taking one phrase out of context, so I bid you farewell.

The original post above asserts that anyone who has strong religious beliefs will unfailingly confront difficult situations with nothing but pure drama.

No it doesn't.

"I could not romantically love someone with strong, unquestionable, irrational religious beliefs. Ever. It says very powerful things about who she is as a person, what her priorities are, and whether she can deal with difficult circumstances with rationality or just with drama."

Since you believe that all religious beliefs are irrational, we can derive that, to you, religious beliefs fall under a subset of irrational beliefs and so 'irrational religious' could be considered redundant. Likewise, 'unquestionable' would be a subset of 'strong' beliefs. Therefore, what we have is 'someone with strong irrational beliefs' minus the modifiers 'religious' and 'unquestionable' which are fairly redundant to the above mentioned terms according to your demonstrated beliefs as noted further in the thread. The relevant term becomes 'irrational' in your last sentence when you differentiate between a person who handles difficult situations rationally versus one who handles them with just drama. Since you ascribe irrational behavior to the person in question, you would of course not be applying the rational response, so we are left with the notion that they handle situations just with drama. Therefore, you assert that someone with strong religious beliefs would unfailingly handle those situations with just drama by definition.

In short, yes it does.

As for the other, you have to show where I asserted that strongly religious people do not exist. I will not be attempting to prove a negative.

In short, no I didn't. (neener neener neener)

I could not romantically love someone with strong, unquestionable, irrational religious beliefs. Ever. It says very powerful things about who she is as a person, what her priorities are, and whether she can deal with difficult circumstances with rationality or just with drama.

Similarly, I could not marry a Vulcan, someone who's world is nothing but logic and reason. Speaks volumes about how they react to events that have no rational explanation. However, I understand that there is no such thing as either of our examples and that people are generally a mixture of the two. There is a bit of the rational and irrational in all of us. Your post bears this out.

But there really are people without strong religious beliefs. This does not make them unfeeling automatons. It just means they don't have any religious faith, and they don't blame some mystical force when things they can't understand happen.

Read the entire post. I did not question whether people with or without strong beliefs, religious or otherwise, exist, just how they are pigeonholed into pure rational/pure irrational behaviors.

The original post above asserts that anyone who has strong religious beliefs will unfailingly confront difficult situations with nothing but pure drama. That itself is an irrational conclusion made by someone who apparently cherishes rationality and thus proves my point.

We do need to protect the entrepreneur who fails through no fault of his own, but what about the guy who just should not be in business? How many times can we allow a person to sink business after business before we say 'ENOUGH! You suck at business! Stop it!'?

Small business owners compete in niche markets where the likes of Wal-Mart have a hard time penetrating. The model of big retail tends to be in sales of thousands of fairly generic commodities and favors mass production. Small mom and pop stores today specialize in smaller quantity, rare, antique, or custom items that big retailers can't stock due to low availability. Competing directly with the large retailer in mass-produced commodities place the smaller store at a severe disadvantage since it is bulk buying power that gives the chain store most of its competitive edge. The only way to really compete in this arena is through service or convenience. A small store can compete, for example, by delivering groceries to the elderly or disabled.

After all, to quote the old cliche "a dog is not just for christmas".

For some reason, when I read that cliche, I remembered the old slogan "Orange juice, its not just for breakfast" and couldn't help but put 2 and 2 together.

I could not romantically love someone with strong, unquestionable, irrational religious beliefs. Ever. It says very powerful things about who she is as a person, what her priorities are, and whether she can deal with difficult circumstances with rationality or just with drama.

Similarly, I could not marry a Vulcan, someone who's world is nothing but logic and reason. Speaks volumes about how they react to events that have no rational explanation. However, I understand that there is no such thing as either of our examples and that people are generally a mixture of the two. There is a bit of the rational and irrational in all of us. Your post bears this out.

prolly cause those fighting to go topless aren't ever the ones you want to SEE topless.

True, not a big fan of moobs either.

What if she is horribly disfigured and didn't want to scare the children?

I think people love to hate celebrities. You don't necessarily need to have actually "done" anything to justify it.

Dont get me started on madoga otherwise VJ's servers will probably run out of room...

This'll be good...

The father is happy with it, for now. This type of adoption has happened for ages and isn't necessarily for slave trade. No matter the opinions people have of Madonna, it is likely the quality of life afforded this boy will be far better than the prospect of starving. Also, lets just gloss over the millions being donated to this orphanage. The article would probably be more compelling if it weren't dripping with barely concealed envy.

There is nothing worth capturing there.

I bet there's tons of cheap labor there.

This would be offset by the near complete lack of civilian infrastructure.

It's a study in backwards priorities. Instead of using nuclear technology to generate electricity and improve the lot of the people, the first thing they went for was how to militarize it. Good two-pronged way of making sure you are never invaded though.

1. It would be very painful for the invader.

2. There is nothing worth capturing there.

I personally think it was more modelled after a Borg Cube. It's Apple's way of saying they mean to assimilate us all!

So now we are not allowed to build small rectangular buildings without upsetting some people's oh so delicate sensibilities? Sorry, but these people want to be offended.

It was a white person hating on white people who had officially killed over 6 million people based on their own hatred. I don't know, but if a nation just killed off enough of their own population over the course of 5 years to fill a medium-large city, it would tend to make you a little distrustful of them, wouldn't it?

Racism as we define it today is an irrational hatred of other ethnicities. Distrust of the German people was, at the time, very understandable.

The explanation may be found in the way scientific research is conducted. The "random, double-blind, placebo-controlled" studies meant to establish the value of a particular medical intervention are expensive.

How would you come up with a placebo for water?

Jalapenos are nuthin. Let's see him eat 247 habaneros, THEN I'll be impressed...

He would be hollow afterwards, but yeah. Never have to worry about tasting anything else for the rest of his life...

...all 15 seconds of it.

Yes, but with publicly traded companies, they are vulnerable to being taken over by a competitor or merged into a huge conglomerate. Publicly traded stock should never exceed 49 percent of the total stock - the majority of stock should always be owned by the employees. If you quit, then you must sell your stock. When you are hired you are already vested into the company.

So, when you are hired, would you buy in? When you leave, you naturally sell the stock back to the company, since selling on the open market would eventually lead to a greater than 49% share being openly traded and thus causing the company to be vulnerable to hostile takeovers. Would this stock go into a pool of available stock or would each employee be responsible for a share of the sale? Would you institute a vesting system to keep transient employees from taking advantage of the stock sellback? It would help bookkeeping if you either were a private corporation or a public corporation but not both. Shares of the company would have to be bought and sold internally only for the workers to maintain control, but you are going to have to come up with the investment capital to get it off the ground as well. A system of all charter employees chipping in a particular amount as a down payment on an SBA loan may work, depending on what your business will be doing, and you derive shares from there. You just have to have some people willing to take on some risk. A location, an idea, and enough charisma to get people excited enough to chip in and help out and you have got your dream in hand. I would suggest going small starting out and working on something that is fairly simple, but has an amount of unmet demand in a particular area. Keeps your overhead from killing you.

I do that sometimes. Some photos just naturally lend themselves to creative tinkering.

I just checked...

Employee-owned - I was thinking more in line with credit unions. I'm a member of a credit union, but I'm not involved in the financial decisions beyond voting on board members.

To that end, it is possible to own a piece of your employer if they are publicly traded.

You even get to vote on board members if you own as much as one share.

How can we retain a vital economy without higher paying jobs or at least a majority percentage of jobs above the poverty level? I think it's odd that many of those who oppose minimum wage believe in trickle down economics - the idea that if you give those on the upper tier more income mobility, they in turn will share the wealth so to speak. Without some way of balancing the scales, our society is quickly becoming economically divided between the rich and the poor

The problem is, the poverty line moves depending on how many people you are trying to support, but the job only pays a particular amount regardless. What would be a living wage for a single person may not be feasible for a family of four. So, most jobs being above the poverty level for what size family? Is that economically feasible? Should we, with a changing economic landscape, not educate people on the growing importance of relying on multiple streams of income rather than just one? As America shifts from manufacturing to service, it becomes more important to be one of the people who own part of the company rather than just another employee. The rich are getting richer by doing things that make them richer. This includes investing in other companies and knowing how the marketplace works. I'm not talking about your Fortune 500 fatcats, even though they certainly know how it works, but your neighborhood millionaires that you don't even know about since they don't go around conspicuously consuming. They know how the market works and how to make money off it and how to budget so that they end up with more this month than last on average. Bad things still happen to them, so they are not immune to setbacks, but they are far more prepared than someone with a collection of debts that eats up 90% of their income.

I would be interested to know how many primary breadwinners stay in those positions and why. Transient workers who may be coming back from, say, a layoff would certainly account for some of those positions filled. However, these people, unless they are either in a location with few opportunities or out of sheer lack of ambition would not stay in dead-end positions like this and would seek more gainful employment at the nearest opportunity. Minimum wage jobs are of course sticky since the companies that utilize that type of labor tend to be two or three-tiered franchises with perhaps a superintendent, a small group of managers(generally one per shift) and a pool of workers and that is about it. The managerial position represents the only shot at a raise and those positions do not open often. The super, if there is one, is usually the franchise owner and so that position rarely changes hands.

The employee-owned business is a good idea as long as you have employees who know how to run a business profitably. This means a greater emphasis on economic education than we currently see. Most Americans do not have a good understanding of that one critical topic.

"7,300,000: Number of workers who would benefit from an increase in the minimum wage

72%: Percentage of adult workers who would benefit from an increase in the minimum wage

"

There are only 10 million workers?

Sorry, but those seem like some fairly brown-fingered numbers there.

Also, since we are apparently trying to raise a family of three on minimum wage, why stop at $8 an hour? Why not raise it to $20 or even $30 an hour! Think of the spending power then! The American economy would be an unstoppable powerhouse!

It isn't minimum wages but wages as an average that determine cost of living. The two are tied together through market dynamics. Demand goes up, supply lags, and you have the third dynamic that Mr Siegel forgot: price. Prices increase to re-establish balance in the short term while production tries to catch up with demand. Problem is, prices act as a ratchet in that once supply and demand are equal again, the prices do not usually fall back to original levels.

Either way, we currently stand at about 3% of jobs in the minimum wage category, usually entry level or unskilled positions that are not generally held by people trying to support a family(primary income). Either that or areas where the majority of jobs are minimum wage or thereabout. Usually, these areas are high-unemployment with companies that are only there as a stopover on their way toward overseas manufacturing. When the minimum wage increases, these companies move out. Either that, or they cut benefits. Now, you have people who were making $5.15/hr making $0/hr, or people who now make $8/hr but don't have health insurance. Want to see actual evidence of this? Go shopping. Note the number of "Made in the USA" tags you see today vs "Made in (insert country here)".

What is needed in these areas isn't a mandatory wage hike, but economic development and incentives for growth. A reason for companies to move in and provide good jobs.

He'll regret that in a few hours...

...so will anyone else in the house.