I can't explain it to you, because you would first have to understand why it's not a realistic expectation that the United States or Europe has either the right or the ability to compel the people of other nations to accept our concept of a 'living wage' or anything else.  You are a self-admitted socialist; which, by definition, requires the use of force (or credible threats of force) upon those who dissent in order to achieve the common goals of socialism to any effective degree.  There is no such thing as a voluntary state, but a voluntary socialist state is impossible by it's own definitions.

Fail.  Employee safety and general conditions were 'fixed' long before regulation, mostly by the collective will of unions prior to the second world war.  The regulations came later, and at first simply enshrined the negotiated working condition rules into law; but then became perverted later.

Care to try again, or perhaps attempt to defend this point of view?

Name one example of a market failure that was 'fixed' by regulation.  Just one.

I'm sure that you have no concept of just how many ways this is wrong.

Add to that, some people prefer their proof of steak on the rare side, while other would demand well done.  And then there are all the proof of A1 sauce proponents!  I'll never understand it all!

What point would that be, that Metric is more precise?  Of course it is, it was developed by and four science & international commerce.  But the fact that I can look at a gallon of water, and know that it's just a bit over 8 pounds tells me something useful in practice.  Real people don't need that kind of precision, most of the time.  For example, I've been running an experiment over the past two weeks.  I've got two coolers, and I want to figure out how much ice would be required to keep the contents chilled for four days as well as how much salt to add to those gallons in order to keep the contents frozen for four days.  Everything that I'm doing is in gallons, but for a frame of reference, I checked out the price of bagged ice at the store.  The bagged ice is sold only in four pound and 10 pound bags.  Knowing that a gallon of water is very close to 8 pounds gives me a frame of reference to make my intuitive guesses as to how much it would cost me to buy the ice I need versus freezing my own in gallon jugs.

Why do we have to remember them?  No one uses them anymore.  At least the gill is still called the half-cup.  The point of this argument is that AS is still in use in the US wherever it is more useful than any alternative system.  Metric is used by Americans, when we want to.  Ever heard of a two liter bottle?

Talk about 'derp'.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units#Units_of_capacity_and_volume)

Bushel
Half-Bushel
Peck
Gallon
Half-Gallon
quart
pint
cup
gill (half-cup)
Half-gill (quarter-cup)
Ounce
Tablespoon

Each one of those is a half measurement of the one above it.  The volume to weight references are because a pint of water (16 fluid ounces) is very close to one pound in weight.

EDIT:  From Wikipedia...

"One fluid ounce is 1⁄16 of a U.S. pint, 1⁄32 of a U.S. quart, and 1⁄128 of a U.S. gallon. The fluid ounce derives its name originally from being the volume of one ounce avoirdupois of water, but in the U.S. it is defined as 1⁄128 of a U.S. gallon. Consequently, a fluid ounce of water weighs about 1.041 ounces avoirdupois.

The saying "a pint's a pound the world around" refers to 16 US fluid ounces of water weighing approximately (about 4% more than) one pound avoirdupois. An imperial pint of water weighs a pound and a quarter."

I disagree with this subjective opinion.


You (convientiently, I assume) completely ignored the reasons that most countries in the world have adopted it.  You also fail to notice the contradiction that citizens in the UK were forced to use Metric, and did not chose to use Metric of their own will.

Actually, the US isn't the only nation left that still uses an Imperial system.  But that doesn't matter much.  There are 300+ million people in the US.  Two-thirds of whom don't give a crap what Europeans do.

They don't complain because that gets you arrested.  The prohibition on homeschooling is the only statute still in effect that was passed by the Nazi's.  That alone should tell you something.  I'd bet you think you live in a free country.

I was never overwhelmed by the metric system, I just don't consider it particularly useful.

Interstate Freeway signs are also in both AS and Metric around here.  So is my speedometer.  Doesn't matter much.  Data in metric is available in the US, it's just that nobody cares, and the government can't realy force people to care.  If it was truely a better system, people would use if of their own free will.  In some ways, they do.  I know that a gallon is just under four liters, and beverages are available in both types of bottles.  The gallon jugs also have their metric measurements printed on the label so the Eurotrash visiting Walt Disney World in the off season won't have a stroke trying to buy milk.  The public will adapt to whatever they use daily.  If Metric is superior, it's not superior enough to get people to switch.  It was easy enough for Europeans to do that because the various imperial systems that existed were all incompatible, which affected commerce.  THe United States never really had that problem.


How often do you need to convert from Km to meters in real life?  I agree that it doesn't require much thought converting between different scales, but doing that in AS tends to develop the gray matter.  If you needed to convert between miles to yards in your daily life, you'd know how to do it in your head as well.  Most people don't have to do that.  That said, AS actually is very intuitive within scales, as it is largely based upon halving and quartering, whichis something that the human mind has no problem doing.  Even the math illiterate public have never had issues with AS in the past, as in the Old West attaracting gold prospectors who couldn't even read.  Try to teach a four year old how a decimal system of division works, and then try to teach that same four year old about even sharing and you will understand the differences.

Price deflation isn't what the OP question was refering to, I don't think.  Anyways, under such a condition, as long as the price deflation is generaly known, the market will adapt to that.  Vendors will prefer to hold them as much as the consumers will, and will offer bitcoin discounts to help seperate the consumer from his desire to hold onto the bitcoin.  At some discounted rate, the consumer's desire to have the thinkg now outwieghs his desire to keep bitcoins that are rising in spending power, and then the sale happens.  Gold worked this way, very slowly, for generations.  Rare was the economic conditions that gold was dropping in spending power, and also rare was the economic conditions that gold wasn't spent when the deal was right.

I was barred from sending a transaction of .06 BTC, which shouldn't have required a fee in any case.  There is something else wrong, really.  I was testing out Bitcoin Android.

If your boat is more important than your child's education, then public school really is the best place for them anyway.  At least then they would actually have a decent chance of getting a decent education.

Yeah, and that is exactly how the public education system is designed.  To provided the education levels necessary to get by working for someone else.  That's why the wealthy don't send their kids to public schools.


Well, homeschooling varies dramticly along that kind of scale.  I've never encountered the much feared 'church/political cult' type homeschool family, and seriously doubt that they even really exist in any non-trivial amount.  My wife & I did start out with choosing our materials ourselves, but that is a lot of work.  For the past several years we have opted to pay the money for a packaged curriculum that we think highly of, that is a derivitive of literature based education theory. (http://www.sonlight.com/aboutus.html)  Yes, it's Christian.  No, that's not the overwelming focus.  I have seen such systems that have to have a bible reference for every single lesson, which is kind of superfluous when one is trying to recreate Newton's apple drop lesson on gravity.


If you're primarily homeschooling, a few focused classes with professional tutors or co-ops isn't terriblely expensive.  Far less expensive than the $12K per year per child that the state spends on public education.  All totalled, with the yearly packaged curriculium and the money we spend for coops, group classes, tutored classes and a few museum trips each year; I'd say that I spend about $8K per year for all my kids.  I could probably afford private school with that (my parents did for myself and my siblings) but homeschooling works well for us.

This is a common error that observers make.  Homeschooling is a misnomer, as the kids rarely stay home.  For example, my kids have art, dance and singing classes and a weekly 'co-op' set of classes taught by other parents.  I also have access to retired teachers who do contract work.  My kids took two years of Spanish from one such teacher, who formed a weekly class of about 12 homeschooled students, who then met at a local public library.  The reason that homeschoolers tend to do so well in every subject is because homeschooled children are taught how to think far better than that can be developed as a skill in a large classroom setting.  The only professional skills that teachers are taught, that other college graduagtes are not, are the skills of crowd management and child psychology, which are both neccessary when dealling with 30+ children for hours each day that you don't know in a familiar way.  Institutional educations is profoundly efficient, but that does not mean that it's more effective.

While I might not be able to teach my own children how to play a piano, I still have far more access to those who can than the average public schooled child or his parents.

Bitcoin isn't deflationary yet and won't be for decades at least.  Technically, it won't be until 2133, when the block reward drops to zero; but in practice it may turn deflationary at some point in the middle if the loss of bitcoin addresses exceeds the creation of new coins.  Presently, Bitcoin is still inflating at over 40% APR (decending) and will not drop below the common 'target' inflation rate of 2% APR until about 2020.  So regardless of where one lands on the 'deflationary spiral' debate, it has no bearing on why Bitcoin should or should not be used in our lifetimes.  Our grandchildren might have a real reason to have this debate around 2050 or so.  The 2030 date that so many articles throw around is just crap.

I teach my kids the units of measurements that they need for the problem at hand.  My son's tape measure has both a metric and a AS edge.  He could have chosen either, he chose to use the one that made the most sense to him at the time and in the context, which was a foot.  He didn't use either inches nor meters, as either unit would have been less intuitive for his problem.

To illustrate this concept, take another practicum problem that I have not yet used on my kids.  How do you weight a car, using only a pressure gauge, a pencil, a ruler and four sheets of blank paper?  The answer is that you have Dad park the car over top of the paper, trace the footprint of the tyres, and measure the tire pressures.  Then you use the ruler to make an estimate as to the area of the paper, multiply that by the pressure measurements, and add up all four results.

In AS, the pressure is Pounds-Per-Square-Inch so the paper traces are calculated in inches, and then the raw pressure measurement is multiplied.  Add them up and you are done

However, in Metric the pressure unit is the Pascal, or the Newtwon/Meter.  (No, I didn't remember that, like my own kids would do if they needed to, I simply looked it up)  So to start with one would have to measure the area in square centimeters and then convert to square meters.  Not that hard, surely, but an extra step.  Then one would have to multiply out and add up, and end up with Newtons, a unit of force instead of weight.  If the unit is wrong, the answer is wrong; so we are looking for kilograms.  To get there, we would have to involve the exceleration of gravity (2.2 m/s squared, if I recall correctly).  So the math just got way more complicated, unless the problem solver knew the shortcut that a Newton was (roughly) equal to 102 grams at Earth gravity or knew to look it up.  But why would an eight year old know that, or choose to go to the trouble?  This just illustrates what I have said about Metric in other threads, it workds well for sciences beause it was invented by scientists for their own ends.  AS appears more complicated, but is usually more practical in practice becauseit was evolved by people who freely (in most cases) choose to use those particular units.  The student should be able to use whatever unit of measurement he favors.

More or less, yes.  But the progressive dream is unified political power, i.e. a world state.  Their support of immigrants have less to do with the rights of immigrants and everything to do with increasing political power.  Same is true with the 'right', except they favor more social control, which generally requires that there be a distinct politcal scapegoat class.  That used to be a racial or religious distinction, now it's a distinction of origin (which is really racial or religious anyway).  The politcal base doesn't really care about immigrants on either side, so neither side's politcal base has much incentive to object to their party's political gaming of other peoples' rights.  When the day comes that the political left has to choose between pandering to immigrants (or any other politically dependent social class) or maintaining the social support networks, the support networks will win.  It's those very social programs that increase their political power, and open borders are incompatible with a welfare state.

I'm sure that they love you in the little world that you live in, but this one doesn't really look anything like that one.

They won't be brown this time around, perhaps green.  Or wearing blue helmets.