Thursday, April 25, 2013

The 1 Percenters And Fairness

I don’t know if you ever heard of TED? TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design and they are a series of fifteen minute talks on a whole number of topics. The two talks that I think you find interesting are on the “Moral behavior in animals” by Frans de Waal and he is a primatologist and ethologist and the other talk is by Jonathan Haidt a noted psychologist and his talk is “The moral roots of liberals and conservatives”

I think you will get the most out of them by watching them in order…




We have lost the Yin and the Yang, we have lost the art of compromise. Just take a look at Congress and the gun bill, neither side got what they wanted the liberals wanted background checks, a ban on assault style weapons and large capacity magazines and the conservatives wanted no controls at all. There was a comprise that just included background checks, but the conservatives blocked even that and now we are left with the possibility of more violence.

Or take a look at taxing the millionaires and billionaires there was no middle ground for the conservatives and as a result the budget was a 2% cut across the board. Now we backups at airports because the FAA budget was cut by 2%, since that largest portion of the FAA budget is manpower even with shutting down Tweed New Haven, New London and Oxford airport control towers and hundreds of other control towers around the country  it still was enough to cover the 2% cut. Therefore they had to cut the hours that the controls worked. Hence the delays. The conservatives should have compromised and taking tax increases for the 1 percenters instead of cutting WIC, Head Start and other programs that are part of the safety net and our infrastructure like the FAA and highway construction.

Just like the monkeys we know fairness when we see it.

1 comment:

  1. The controllers cut had little to ZERO input on scheduled airliners. Controllers are in three areas, Tower, Approach and Center. Center controllers contol airplanes above 10 to 12 thousand feet. Approach Controllers control airplanes under 12 thousand near major airports. Tower controllers only control airplanes in the near vicinity of airports during takeoff and landing. NONE of the center or approach controllers were to be cut. Most of the cuts were coming from contract tower controllers at smaller outlying fields.

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