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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (364689)	12/28/2007 6:54:41 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1578185

I am not sure the country should be unified. There are some significant differences between the North and the South regarding the major issues. Yes there would be benefits as well as costs from a peaceful splitup. One factor to consider is it might not have been the last splitup. If it was decided that states had the right to leave, than maybe New England would have left, or maybe some other group would have broken up in the future. Good point. Up until WW II, the North was the strongest part of the Union......economically speaking. In addition most of the defense plants were in the North. Since WW II, the South has grown dramatically but still the North has more wealth. Yes, if the US broke up, and WWI and/or WWII still happened on schedule, the North would probably be more powerful than the South when those wars came around. But at least post WWII, and I think even earlier than that a disproportionate share of our soldiers came from the South. (Not a majority, but more than the old South's share of our population) That's true too. Also "more powerful than the South", doesn't equal "as powerful as the country actually was without the breakup". If either the North or the South gets involved on the side of the allies but not the other, than the American forces in the world wars would be weaker. If either one allies with the Axis things get even worse. Or you might get a country that was more focused on North America, and get neither half involved in the wars overseas. That would spare us our share of the destruction of the wars at least at first, but could lead to strongly negative consequences. Prior to actual American participation in the war, our major involvement was providing goods. I think that the North could have provided those goods without the South's participation. That's hard to say. Its hard to know exactly what would have transpired had the North let the South secede. Yes. Such questions are always difficult to answer, and impossible to answer definitively. One possibility you did not discuss.......the South coming back into the Union of their own volition. I did mention it, but I didn't go in to it in any depth. Then I missed it. If they came back and could dictate the terms you might still have slavery, unless perhaps they came back much later and had since outlawed slavery. Best case IMO would be if they came back after outlawing slavery (or accepted no slavery as part of the terms of coming back), but where able to keep the government from having quite as strong of centralization trend as the one that started with the Civil War, and was accelerated by FDR. But even then there is downsides. One being that some of that centralization has been beneficial, a larger one being that the institution of slavery would have continued for a longer time in the US. How much longer is an important question when your trying to speculate about how good or bad the results from letting the south go would have been. I don't think slavery would have continued for much longer.........many of the slavers were Portuguese or Brits and both countries were cracking down on the slave trade. And as CJ points out, slavery was slowly becoming uneconomical.

To: TimF who wrote (364689)	12/29/2007 5:35:30 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578185

How Bad Loans Cause Violent Crime Even if you don’t hold a risky mortgage, you still could be hurt by the subprime loan crisis. According to a recent study from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Woodstock Institute, increases in foreclosures in a neighborhood were shown to lead to an upsurge in violent crime. In Cleveland’s Slavic Village, where foreclosure rates are among the nation’s highest, 800 homes have become the scene of drug dealing and gang wars. This summer, a 12-year-old was killed when she stumbled into a gunfight. Meanwhile, in Atlanta’s Westview Village, a cluster of 22 empty homes has turned into an enclave for prostitution and arson. How can neighborhoods with many foreclosures prevent crime? “Trying to keep people in their homes is the best solution,” says Geoff Smith, who co-authored the report. Short of that, “communities could work with banks to keep foreclosed properties in productive use.” Even when bad mortgages don’t lead to violence, they can cause harm: A new report estimates that 44.5 million U.S. households will see property values decline a combined $223 billion because of the wave of foreclosures. parade.com

To: TimF who wrote (364689)	12/29/2007 5:37:16 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 1578185

What's Wrong with Air Travel? More than 760 million passengers travel on U.S. airlines each year. PARADE asked Marion Blakey, who recently left her post as head of the Federal Aviation Administration, what the government is doing to make flying less stressful. What has gone wrong with air travel? We’re in the safest period in aviation history, but some of our current system is built on World War II technology. Planes must fly on specific highways in the sky to maintain contact with the ground. It costs time and fuel and is inefficient. Recently, the White House opened up military airspace to help with the travel crunch. Why don’t we do this all the time? Freeing up military airspace isn’t a permanent solution. We need to redesign how we use airspace and fly on the most efficient flight paths. So, can we fix air travel? The world is moving toward a satellite-based system to handle more planes and allow them to fly shorter distances on optimal flight plans. It will cost us about $1 billion a year in investment and won’t be operational until at least 2013. Until then, what can people do to make flying better? Leave early in the day, fly in the middle of the week and check the on-time record of your flight. We also must invest in aviation research and get kids interested in math and science, or else we’ll face a pilot and engineer shortage. parade.com