Considering the national debt as of right now, I sincerely doubt Americans care about their children outside of sacrifice.

People keep telling me the world will end if idiots like this don't run our lives.  People sure are gullible.

If an individual's labor at a company is only worth, say, 5$ per hour, and the business has to pay them $8.00 an hour by law, the business doesn't then hire the person anyway, they just don't get hired at all.  That means:

A. No chance for the person to gain the experience needed to make more than $5 an hour, and
B. An hourly wage of 0$, which is, by all standards, much worse than not making a "living wage"

That means the individual making 0$ an hour is not adding wealth to the economy.  Then the individual making 0$ an hour gets on welfare to survive.  Who pays for these people to live?  The middle class, which is indeed burdened by this extra weight they must carry.  This is not even mentioning the increased cost of hiring an American worker thanks to his governmental overlords, over a foreigner willing to work for a fraction of the cost, and even excluding the incredible cost of empire which directly makes the average American that much poorer.  I expect the economy to continue slowing to a halt; there is no "if", the middle class is hamstrung.

Let's say the minimum wage is raised to $10/hr, nationwide.  The direct effects are easily understood: the unemployment rate goes up, the amount of people on welfare increase, and the middle class is further burdened.  Let's say the minimum wage is raised to $20/hr, nationwide.  Same thing, just worse.  At some point, the middle class evaporates--no business can afford to function, nobody can afford paying the bottom rungs $20 an hour, and so the economy either flops, along with the nation, or there's a coup d'état.

But let's say the minimum wage was lowered to just $1/hr.  What would it matter?  Nobody really wants to work for that wage, or less, so there may as well be no minimum wage to stop it; people know what others are worth, and what they themselves are willing to work for, so there's no point for government to actually define a minimum wage, except to buy votes for democrats from welfare recipients (it's the perfect scheme, if you ask me; you not only satisfy the people with a "living wage", but you get more voters for your party: it's brilliant.)  Anyhow, once that's out of the way, and people are no longer prosecuted for wanting to work at their own determined price, the amount of people on welfare diminish, until welfare is no longer required, and the poor people survive immensely better than they did with government assistance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_war This is what's primarily going to be used.

Don't worry, the nukes are just there to keep the sheep from wandering too close to the fences.  People farmers want to profit from you, and they can't do it if you're dead, but they can do it extremely well if you're afraid, which is exactly what a nuke does.  All people farmers agree, nukes do more harm than good (who wants to take over a nation they nuked?  That's expensive.)  However, you forget about them if there's prolonged peace, so there must be the looming threat of nuclear war forever to continue harvest.

Did you know, a single bullet can end your life?  A tiny little bullet.  Through the cranium.  Dead.  Those are everywhere, mind you.  Understanding this, does a nuclear bomb really matter?  It's not like it changes how many times you'll die, and by the time you're dead, you'll forget all about how much it hurt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_rule

It's interesting to see how this is playing out; I've considered this term "grouping through category" (group being participatory, category being non-participatory) which describes an individual who takes qualities of their being that differ from others--sex, race, political leaning, religion, and nationality being the top ones ATM--and assigns themselves to a group they feel they must involuntarily participate in, and must protect themselves from groups they believe other people participate in.  Of course, a man with black skin, for example, doesn't necessarily identify with a group named "black people"; however, he may feel he has no choice based on his skin color and upbringing.  Likewise, he may view people of white skin to all participate in a group called "white people" thus assigning them blame for anything a member or leader of the group "white people" do; the cause is to believe oneself to belong to said group, but the effect others feel is the forced association with people they have nothing to do with (notable examples would be reparations for slavery, or say it's a matter of feminists putting the categorical woman under a group "women", the categorical man under a group "men", and expecting to influence one or the other like "Teach men not to rape" or whatever it is.)  Perhaps these are the fundamental causes of social discrimination--racism, sexism, you name it--whether positive discrimination or negative.

As a result, individuals who identify themselves as being part of a group, and who identify others by the same category as participating in groups, feel they are owed something for the negative consequences of what happens to other people within their group.  Ergo, in this case, the group "black people"--not the category of people with black skin or are otherwise of African descent--treats their own as the victim of a hate crime in hopes of some kind of greater retribution than would normally be obtained; people who give handouts to the 4th-tier group called "Unfortunates" (we'll call this group "The Guilties"), which includes the 3rd-tier group "Minorities", will look favorably upon this 2nd-tier group "black people" (with 1st-tier being subcultures within that group) and potentially reward them with whatever.  It's simple human behavior, path of least resistance: if there's an easier way out, or no viable other way out (poverty is a bitch during the late stages of empire), then people will take it.  In this case, there's something to be gained, so people expend energy to obtain it.

But the larger effect of this, perhaps, as I've linked above, is the fact that people, when divided into these tiny little groups, become significantly less powerful with fewer members, and the more divisions a person experiences--say they "involuntarily" participate in the groups "man", "Hispanic" and "American"--the less individual power they have over their lives, and must refer to their "party leaders" for guidance on all matters.  It's like intellectual feudalism: you're allowed only to think within the confines of your group that you are allotted, and the further down the chain you are, the less you'll have to work with.  It worked well for religion, with >98% of any religion's members being the peasants who are expected to simply submit to the word of God, and then you had the <2%, who are allowed to interpret or even scribe the word of God; I think the exact same phenomenon is occurring with issues such as these.

From what I understand about the case, Michael was attempting to charge at the police officer, when he was shot down; however, it's being painted as though Michael was an innocent nobody being targeted for a race/class crime.  This is similar to the Trayvon Martin case, where a boy who lived by the thug life, died by the thug life, but was painted like he was an angel and victim of a hate crime; I have plenty of rational friends, and even some of them succumbed to the propaganda machine this time around, so I have no doubt that such tactics are effective on most people.  Michael to me seemed like your run-of-the-mill thug, and while I'll always empathize that a person had to be subject to that kind of environment, his actions were his alone and the purposeful obfuscation of clearly negative facts about Michael is not the way to serve justice.

Also, to be fair, the people are in the video are indeed saying "indicted", not "dead"; it's eerie how far from the truth a racist will go to justify himself.

Can you add an option for neither?

I doubt this will happen.  VR is a much more likely candidate for fulfillment of sexual fantasy; sexbots are inefficient, take up too much space, take a lot of resources to develop, as compared to a headset, easily customizable software, and something to put your dick in/something dick-shaped.  Most jobs which will use robotics aren't going to have robots that look like people, as people aren't necessarily the most efficient at doing certain tasks.  The ones which will, are likely going to be in the services industry, and will likely be novelties as the businesses which cut out the expense of making a presentable robot will be less expensive.

I think there will be a larger market for alternative sex down the road, assuming feminism in its modern format continues to spread, the court system remains or increases in gynocentrism, and white knights become increasingly unwilling to conform to the monetary and social demands of their partners.  Considering the porn industry is still around and strong, I see no reason to believe improvements in alternative sex won't result in an increase of sales.  If the only pro left for the man in the modern family is to have a spot to plant his hoo-haw, then I foresee this industry--in whatever form it takes--as being incredibly disruptive and I will have my popcorn ready for the ensuing governmental response (which will, as you can probably guess, result in some kind of ban in an attempt to keep men on the hamster wheel of tax farming.)

QFT

I was thinking this thread would be about atheists who treat government as their new religion.  Ah well.

Yes, it's true that nations which have fewer religious people--not necessarily atheists, but any non-religious, i.e. at least semi-rational--live happier, more peaceful and productive lives.  Not because religion isn't present, it's because people who choose non-religion typically have more powerful reasoning skills, which is perfectly ideal for the market environment: ability to negotiate and foresee implications, rather than resorting to violence (whether criminally or politically) and advocating equality-of-outcome.

Seeing as bitcoin is not ideal for robbery, taxation or inflation, fiat is still the #1 funding method of terrorism.

If I was for banning guns, I wouldn't be a libertarian

Same for me, I got into an argument about gun bans on this forum that finally broke me into libertarianism.

Scientific proof?  Nonsense.  Just another INTP trying to rationalize a prior bias; that lack of Fi is a bitch sometimes.

Glad I could be of service, you're very welcome

I needed to finish painting the background; you can see that the surrounding area of the fire, the trees, and its "leaves" have no detail; the rock-looking things (perhaps they were supposed to be bushes?) look blurry as well, I was probably planning on doing something with them.  And of course there's always tweaking to do once everything is painted; messing with the hue, levels, contrast, textures, and whatnot.

That's old news; they kept the two in very close proximity for an extended period of time, inevitably it was going to spread.  As long as you're not exposed to someone with ebola for extended periods of time, you're probably not going to catch it; you have much greater odds of catching and dying from the flu.

And the reason there is way too much money to be made from war is due to the socialization of its cost.  Without the wealth of the entire nation at one's disposal, war would be far too expensive to wage at any level outside of defense from invasion.

Same old, same old.

"If you're dumb enough to listen to us, you shouldn't use bitcoin."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BxUHe8v4Pw

Check out this one as well if you haven't already.