1) Because they didn't succeed in a vacuum, they benefit from civilization, so are obligated to support it to at least the same extent if not more because they are able while others aren't.

2) swap dumb with rich and Trump is the bazillionaire he claims to be. You can't just swap dissimilar unrelated concepts and say "see, proved it" without looking like a braying moron.

3) Yes it should without question, our best and brightest don't come from the privileged class as a higher percentage. Actually the opposite because they don't have to do their best to survive, poorer people do, and drive matters immensely. If we want to compete internationally, we must educate the uneducated and undereducated, even those who can't afford $500000 to fake a crew history or SAT score. That education needs to be better than the countries we compete with, and it is all too often simply not.
That is a conservative stance, not a liberal one.

4) equating wealth to gpa, like this moronic video does, means Trump, like everyone else, should start at 0 and not get a bonus from daddy. If that happened, he would be zero. He is not self made, he did not only get a small $14 million unrepaid interest free loan. He did squander the money, failing at venture after venture until only Russian gangsters will loan him money, loans he needs because he squandered the money....then he repeatedly lied about it immorally squandering billions from hundreds of duped investors too...THAT is evil, yes.

5) We make $30000 for two people and don't take a dime, even overpaid my taxes...not everyone has my opportunities, privileges, and abilities. You are just spouting nonsense straw man arguments. In a perfect world, we could all be self sustaining with equal opportunity to succeed, we don't live in that communist/socialist utopia.....no one ever has.
I believe we are better off when the least privileged don't have to resort to violent or immoral crime to survive. I believe we are better off as a nation when our best people have the opportunities to succeed that our worst but most privileged are afforded. I believe we are better off being protected from the irresponsibility of purely profit driven commerce that, by design, must walk the razors edge of acceptability to maximize profit and minimize obligations by any means necessary, usually leaving them for socialist programs to clean up/repair. I believe we do more good ensuring the starving among us are fed food humans would willingly eat before ensuring some unrepentant apocalyptic bankers get their multi million dollar bonuses and a free pass on their crimes, and before those making multi millions a year get to hoard more and pay even less of their share.

6) What you are spouting is bat shit insane, not even AOC advocates pure socialism....not even Russia had pure socialism. Your ilk, however, calls any government program that doesn't directly benefit them or their Trumpian masters "socialist"....education, infrastructure, all regulatory agencies, social security, even the fbi have been labeled socialist by Trumpists in the zeal to discredit the report they assumed would expose criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States (ps, it found exactly that dozens of times over), while military welfare programs for equipment we don't want and won't use, bailouts for banks and agribusiness, public funds for private ventures like golf courses and troll roads, (edit:Freudian slip?) and don't forget the unmentioned elephant, the military itself...all that socialism is fine, you think it's not even socialism. *facepalm

I'll say it again.

Asinine.

No Bob.
I understand, after years of lying to yourself that Trump is intelligent you no longer know what intelligence is. Her IQ is so much higher than Trump's it's nearly exponential. She can put forth a rational, salient argument using English and complete sentences, Trump is incapable of any part of that.

Edit: OMG! Reported 920 Trump SAT score?! Subtract the 400 points given for showing up to take it, he got well under 50%! No wonder he's tried so hard to hide his grades, threatening his schools with lawsuits or worse if they release them. He's a bona fide, quantified moron, and doesn't want it proven.
Mueller, who has the certified score in hand, hinted that they did reflect well on Trump in one respect. “From these SATs, it’s evident that he did not cheat off anyone else’s paper,”

You elected a terrible joke to the highest office on the planet, we need far less of what your ilk calls comedy, it's not funny or based in reality, it's reminiscent of 11 year old girls making up nasty lies about a classmate and laughing then saying "we're just joking" when caught.

In Trig/pre calc, my teacher insisted I was a cheater because I tested great but didn't do homework or pay much attention in class, so she separated me during a test...the class average dropped significantly but not my score, I never had to do trig homework after that day. That said, don't ask me trig questions now, I haven't used it in nearly 30 years. ;-)

Kind of....they all seemed to think that there is a hidden unknowable, and they alone had the unknowable deciphered and other theories about it were just mistaken.
Some eastern religions sure seemed more like just philosophies, like Tao, but they all seemed fairly self certain that they alone had the solution to the ultimate question.....but we all know that answer is 42, and not one of them came up with that end sum, so they're all undeniably wrong and so easily dismissed as fable, fantasy, or disguised political tools.

1 more comment have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

This is great timing for me, as I just watched the full series on Netflix of the anime Hi Score Girl. I highly recommend it. Very fun show all about growing up playing video games (arcade and console) in the early 90s with tons of actual gameplay footage.

*related=https://videosift.com/video/Your-New-Social-Credit-Score

Your New Social Credit Score has been added as a related post - related requested by Fantomas.

Squirrels are stupidly determined little fuckers when it comes to nuts.

I used to have a bar fridge out on my patio and one day, I threw a bag of peanuts into it because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Anyway, the next day I came out onto the patio and the fridge door was open and the nuts were gone. The little bastards actually chewed through the soft magnetic strip holding the door closed and managed to get the door open and abscond with my hard-earned nuts.

I got even, 'tho -- kinda.

On the corner of our block, we had this big green thing that was a cover for some pretty high voltage stuff underneath. I threw some peanuts under the gap between the cover and the ground and waited. Sure's shit, here comes one cocky fucking squirrel lookin' to score my nuts. Under the cover he goes then --FLASH!! -- BOOM!! -- victory over squirrels! Only he took the power out for the entire block and the surge fried my brand-new Pentium Pro computer. Oh, and one of my neighbors narced me off to PG&E who were none-too-happy with my brilliantly-laid trap and my erstwhile vengeance over genus Sciurus.

I know a lot of people would ask me, "Well, what did you learn from all this?", to which I'd reply, "Not a damned thing."

For anyone keeping score:

This thread contains 15,067 words and 86,501 characters.

Not counting this comment.

In the mid 70's, my grandfather would wake me up at 3am on full moon nights to go hunt nutria at the family ranch on lake Austin with .22s. Find the two glowing spots in the water and aim right between them. We didn't collect tails, just kept score. He almost always won, but I was 5+-. Mostly I just spotted them for him.
I know the damage they can cause, I wish eradication was a possibility, but I think people will be gone before they are. Tenacious little bastards.

A big part of the Zero's reputation came from racking up kills in China against a lot of second-rate planes with poorly-trained pilots. After all, there was a reason that the Republic of China hired the American Volunteer Group to help out during the Second Sino-Japanese War – Chinese pilots had a hard time cutting it.

The Wildcat was deficient in many ways versus the Zero, but it still had superior firepower via ammo loadout. The Zero carried very few 20mm rounds, most of it's ammo was 7.7mm. There are records of Japanese pilots unloading all their 7.7mm ammo on a Wildcat and it was still flyable. On the flip side, the Wildcat had an ample supply of .50 cal.

Stanley "Swede" Vejtasa was able to score seven kills against Japanese planes in one day with a Wildcat.

Yes, the discovery of the Akutan Zero helped the United States beat this plane. But MilitaryFactory.com notes that the Hellcat's first flight was on June 26, 1942 – three weeks after the raid on Dutch Harbor that lead to the fateful crash-landing of the Mitsubishi A6M flown by Tadayoshi Koga.

Marine Captain Kenneth Walsh described how he knew to roll to the right at high speed to lose a Zero on his tail. Walsh would end World War II with 17 kills. The Zero also had trouble in dives, thanks to a bad carburetor.

We were behind in technology for many reasons, but once the Hellcat started replacing the Wildcat, the Japanese Air Superiority was over. Even if they had maintained a lead in technology, as Russia showed in WW2, quantity has a quality all of it's own. We were always going to be able to field more pilots and planes than Japan would be able to.

As far as Soviet rockets, once we were stunned by the launch of Sputnik, we kicked into high gear. You can say what you will of reliability, consistency, and dependability, but exactly how many manned Soviet missions landed on the moon and returned? Other than Buran, which was almost a copy of our Space Shuttle, how many shuttles did the USSR field?

The Soviets did build some things that were very sophisticated and were, for a while, better than what we could field. The Mig-31 is a great example. We briefly lagged behind but have a much superior air capability now. The only advantages the Mig and Sukhoi have is speed, they can fire all their missiles and flee. If they are engaged however, they will lose if pilots are equally skilled.

As @newtboy has said, I am sure that Russia and China are working on military advancements, but the technology simply doesn't exist to make a Hypersonic missile possible at this point.

China is fielding a man portable rifle that can inflict pain, not kill, and there is no hard evidence that it works.

There is no proof that the Chinese have figured out the technology for an operational rail gun on land, let alone the sea. We also have created successful railguns, the problem is POWERING them repeatedly, especially onboard a ship. If they figured out a power source that will pull it off, then it is possible, but there is no concrete proof other than a photo of a weapon attached to a ship. Our experts are guessing they might have it functional by 2025, might...

China has shown that long range QEEC is possible. It has been around but they created the first one capable of doing it from space. The problem is, they had to jury rig it. Photons, or light, can only go through about 100 kilometers of optic fiber before getting too dim to reliably carry data. As a result, the signal needs to be relayed by a node, which decrypts and re-encrypts the data before passing it on. This process makes the nodes susceptible to hacking. There are 32 of these nodes for the Beijing-Shanghai quantum link alone.

The main issue with warfare today is that it really doesn't matter unless the battle is between one of the big 3. Which means that ANY action could provoke Nuclear conflict. Is Russia going to hypersonic missile one of our carriers without Nukes become an option on the table as a retaliation? Is China going to railgun a ship and risk nuclear war?

Hell no, no more than we would expect to blow up some major Russian or Chinese piece of military hardware without severe escalation! Which means we can create all the technological terrors we like, because we WON'T use them unless they somehow provide us a defense against nuclear annihilation.

So just like China and Russia steal stuff from us to build military hardware to counter ours, if they create something that is significantly better, we will began trying to duplicate it. The only thing which would screw this system to hell is if one of us actually did begin developing a successful counter measure to nukes. If that happens, both of the other nations are quite likely to threaten IMMEDIATE thermonuclear war to prevent that country from developing enough of the counter measures to break the tie.

I think I've played this game on the Kinect back in 2008. Pretty fun, but I couldn't get a high score...

Again...Race is not the ONLY criteria looked at, finances, family, school districts, etc all come into play....and the two students I mentioned were excellent students, far better than I was, and I'm certain their applications were accepted before race had been factored in, their scores were that good. As I understand it, race is only factored in to choose between two relatively equally scoring students, never to accept students who aren't proficient simply due to ethnicity.
Given the same educational opportunities across the board, race could be removed completely....that's simply not where we are. The proper order of things seems to be fix the underlying issues like unequal schools/education THEN remove the programs implemented to address the results of those issues. Reversing that order only further harms the downtrodden and likely never addresses the underlying issues as it removes any incentives for the ruling class to do so.

Properly funding public education so it's on par with private education seems to be step one to me. As I mentioned, we are moving in the other direction here, defunding it in multiple ways.

I mentioned why racial assumptions are often used instead of a full individual examination of all factors, lack of staff to do that examination thoroughly and a desire for diversity in the outcome.

Nice discussion, thanks for staying respectful. Time for me to move on, though....my opinion doesn't matter anyway, I'm no policy maker, just an unemployed welder/house husband with an opinion.

This appears to be the gist of the argument. I hate to be that guy, stepping aside for someone who works harder yet cant beat my score. Its nice to help other people but not by shooting yourself in the foot.

So you get where I'm coming from, I went to 3 "good" prep schools k-12 for a total of 7 years. In that time there were a total of 3 black kids at the same schools, one of which dropped out because of harassment. I also went to 5 years of public schools with up to 70% black kids, those schools taught me absolutely nothing. That's a large part of why I'm convinced just using SAT scores (or similar) only rate ones opportunities, not abilities. That was thousands upon thousands of white kids well prepared for years to take that test and two black kids....hardly equal opportunities. It's hard to ignore that personal experience.