Texas Republicans have decided on a platform that includes abolishing minimum wage, cancelling climate research, banning the teaching of evolution at schools, and repealing the voting rights act, among other things, but hilariously (or depressingly) the one thing on this laundry list that people are angry about is their plan to "rehabilitate" homosexuals, a practice that many say is harmful.
BBC News has more: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27774102
(Score: 4, Interesting) by hemocyanin on Monday June 09 2014, @11:34PM
As a liberal in a comfortably liberal corner of the country, I too would like to see a Constitutional Amendment that would create the right for states to unilaterally secede. The civil war and some SCOTUS decisions following it determined that secession takes bilateral agreement, but an amendment would fix that issue.
As a liberal, I'm sick of my money going to an ever increasing war machine, an ever more rapacious wall street machine, an ever expanding domestic spying network, and of course to red states. In my state, if we seceded, we'd get an immediate 14% bump in revenue to do useful things with (because we only get back 86% of every dollar sent to Mordor (AKA Washington DC) plus with all the money we saved on not blowing up innocent people around the world, we'd probably get at least another 15-20% extra to good things (or cut taxes).
Sure, Texas would go all Christian Taliban -- but who the fuck cares? It would give those nut cases a place to go and die from all the exploding fertilizer plants.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by tftp on Tuesday June 10 2014, @01:43AM
In my state, if we seceded, we'd get an immediate 14% bump in revenue to do useful things with
In what currency will that revenue be, I wonder? If that's USD then you are still tied to the Wall St. machine that manipulates the USD as it sees fit. If that's your own currency, what would be its exchange rate? (In other words, what unique and valuable goods your country will be selling abroad?) Also, what makes you think that the new elite of your country will not want to rob you blind by devaluing your currency, just as their teachers from Wall St. do currently to the USA?
I'm not trying to tell you that separate existence is bad. You may be right. However those are standard *initial* questions that arise as soon as an idea of a new state is floated. There are many more. Look at the fate of Ukraine as just one example - not just at the 2014, but at all the preceding 20 years of independence.
It would give those nut cases a place to go and die from all the exploding fertilizer plants.
Of course, an ideal world would not contain any dangerous manufacturing. Only the comfortable consumption will remain. Who would be manufacturing the goods then? An invisible caste of elves? I don't think it is proper to laugh at people who work at dangerous chemical plants - their work creates food for the people.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday June 10 2014, @02:27AM
Orbital Power Transmitters, Nessus Mining Stations, Sky Hydroponics Labs.
Don't forget to build Orbital Defense Pods, though, Texas may want to drop some bricks on you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday June 10 2014, @03:25PM
We Must Dissent
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday June 10 2014, @04:05PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by Qzukk on Tuesday June 10 2014, @04:30AM
Of course, in an ideal world the manufacturer would resist cutting corners that caused the facility to explode and kill everyone. Bad for business, don'tcha know?
(Score: 1) by tftp on Tuesday June 10 2014, @04:54AM
I can't imagine that the plant owner decided to cut corners just hoping that the plant won't blow up. You can't make much money on those corners, especially when you pay (or not pay) for them once but carry the risk forever.
Quite frequently accidents occur because some workers (not the plant owners!) decide to cut corners. I don't know what happened at these fertilizer factories, but there are many other incidents that we can learn from. In Chernobyl it was the plant manager who approved an unsafe test without asking the manufacturer, and then had all the safeties disabled (or else they would stop his test automatically.) He had no financial reason to proceed with the test. In Japan it was some workers who were loading radioactive materials by the bucket [wikipedia.org] because they, and their manager, and a manager above that, failed to read instructions. They got no money for making a reactor out of a water tank. Later, also in Japan, the plant at Fukushima was damaged because of poor disaster planning [npr.org] - perhaps in small part because of corner-cutting, but primarily because the managers in charge refused to think out of the box. TEPCO, a huge company, could easily build a better diesel backup - but it was never done not in order to save money, but for bureaucratic reasons alone. TEPCO, as a public company, had no owner, and its management is hired to run the company safely, not to cut corners.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday June 10 2014, @02:20PM
Everyone knows manufacturing is dangerous. The issue in Texas is that despite that knowledge, they allow residential zoning right up to that danger rather than providing a buffer zone.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Tuesday June 10 2014, @02:34PM
If they still allow that, after those explosions, then they need to have their heads checked by a professional. However if they allowed it earlier ... how could one move the factory or a residential neighborhood?
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday June 10 2014, @04:08PM
It's more of an induced negligence. When the owner() reward cost cutting but not safety and drive a constant message of faster! faster! and sometimes even faster and cheaper or someone will have to go!, it's only natural that someone will cut one too many corners.
At Chernobyl, plant management pressed for the test to be completed by the under-qualified (under-trained) evening shift because the upper management (safely far away) would start chopping heads if it didn't happen. The evening crew pressed forward so it wouldn't be their heads. Training costs money and not kissing upper management's feet costs jobs.
In Japan, they should have paused to formalize a procedure or at least do a safety calculation, but time is money and managers who cost too much monbey don't get promoted...
It's a natural result of human nature, the hierarchical structure of most organizations and garbled communications. Sometimes you need an outside force to put the brakes on it, such as evil government regulations.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday June 10 2014, @05:25AM
Sounds good in principle but I have to wonder how long before war starts between the new independent States. There are lots of war mongers and lots of weapons that may go to the seceding State.
(Score: 1) by gidds on Tuesday June 10 2014, @09:23AM
[sig redacted]
(Score: 1) by tftp on Wednesday June 11 2014, @08:07PM
Sounds good in principle but I have to wonder how long before war starts between the new independent States. There are lots of war mongers and lots of weapons that may go to the seceding State.
One cannot sustain a civil war on warmongers alone. They tend to end soon, either by stopping talking like fools, or by fighting and killing each other. Government-organized wars, of course, have fewer constraints because nobody asks soldiers what they want to do.
A voluntary and willful war between two (or more) states is possible only if these states, in firm belief of their populations, have something to fight over. There are certainly some strategic resources (water, for example, in deserts of the West coast) that are valuable. In some circumstances the people may want to fight for them. But by and large fighting will be not between the states; the power of states themselves will be greatly reduced, and they simply won't be able to organize the people or force them to fight for something that they don't care about. Most of the fighting will be between individual citizens, over something that one citizen wants to take from another. This will end up with disappearance of all the excessively violent people; their proportion in the population is not that high even today, and their business will become far more dangerous after the police disappears.
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday June 12 2014, @05:03AM
Hopefully you are right. Anyways I doubt America is going to break up so it is all conjecture.