Screw your SFPD

Right.  Screw the SFPD for doing their job.  For cracking down on quality of life issues and cracking down on lowlives selling drugs.  Damn those cops for responding to the complaints of legitimate businesses who provide a service to the city, pay taxes, and who have worked hard to establish a business and earn a living for their families.  The SFPD should thank the drug dealers, gamblers, and other low lifes for and allow them to continue gambling, drinking, smoking weed, and selling drugs.  After all, these people contribute so much to the quality of life and economy of the city of San Francisco and should be allowed to scare away customers with impunity.  

Not to mention the bail-out. When they take tax payers money, it is aid. When people take it, it is welfare.

If everytime someone said the way things are is pretty good lets not change anything, we will still be in the dark ages.

From the San Francisco Chronicle - October 7, 2013

Market Street Chess Players - by C. W. Nevius

"S.F. cops say the real problem isn't chess; it's the drug dealing and criminal activity. OK, so focus on the drug dealing and criminal activity.

On the other hand, some homeless advocates are upset that chess players have been offered a nice spot in Yerba Buena Park because no one checked with the players first. So now they are in the position of arguing that they'd rather be on the gritty sidewalk - amid drug dealers and thugs - than in one of the city's prettiest parks.

I call checkmate - on both sides - and let's move on to something important."

There's also the City on the Hill idea promoted by President Reagan and his minions. It originates with an Israeli teacher who was executed, and came to America via John Winthrop (Puritan leader in 1630).

It requires a certain degree of righteousness (i.e. justice) and so those advocating it should not be so eager to toss treaties (such as those made with Indian nations) into the waste basket, nor to deny a redress of systemic wrongs that remain the status quo.

one amazing thread so many intelligent opinions not all agreeing too am extremely impressed by  viewpoints here keep it up all of you

Israelite is probably the preferred term. I might have said Palestinian, but that would have provoked even greater skepticism. Identification of individuals as members of a community in his day was most commonly an identification with a town or village. Hence the term Nazarene might be best.

In any case, we know the man was a preacher, and that he was put to death. In the longest sermon with which he is credited, he used language about a city on a hill. John Wintrop used that language to prepare an idea that would be expressed 71 years later as "New English Israel" (Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana). 

Reagan's minions mostly ignore everything else in this sermon.

This may have been true in the past but these days Spain is in serious financial trouble. 

I seem to remember Spain was conquered by Moors early on and the French under Napoleon, for example.

Um, no - these guys are there every single day. If you didn't see it, you weren't looking in the right place.

Watched an episode of Top Gear 6 weeks back or so, the Spanish aren't on top of anything now. Great swaths of that country are abandoned. A brand new international airport, built 6 years ago, and they just walked away from it. Computers work, everything looks brand new. Huge housing tracts completely empty. The boys held a race on the streets of Madrid in an area that was once a thriving area. Apartments and office buildings just vacant. It was erie how void of people many parts of that country are.

The Spanish lived under a fascist regime for much of the 20th century under Franco(1936-1975).  Think he didn't persecute anyone?

The Moors never quite conquered all of Spain. Castile held out.

The story says 5th and Market near the cable car turnaround.  Been there 40-50 times this past year.  Using the BART station, the BofA ATMs, the BK around the corner, Pub City Cafe, Westfield across the street...where exactly are they hiding this line of tables?

Right outside the Payless. Not really near the cable car turnaround.

I have rounded that very corner at least a dozen times this year.  Not a chessboard in sight...so unless they only play at certain times of day...

And if they are there then that means I somehow missed them having walked right past that corner so often, so clearly this phenom is far from worthy of multiple news stories and protests.

I have been there all 7 days of the week, at various times ranging from 4pm to 2am on weekdays and 11am to 2am on weekends.  I have ridden up the BART station escalator facing that Payless, not 50 feet away, several times.

So you can see why I would be skeptical :).

This would be better with numbers. The best I could find is a marginal  income tax map : http://www.gfmag.com/tools/global-database/economic-data/12151-personal-income-tax-rates.html

(the tax rate gives a good indication of what amount of redistribution you are going to expect - of course, it does not take in account how the money is collected or redistributed ; I suspect most of India's is lost to corruption, and most of Greece's never goes out of the taxpayer's pocket due to tax evasion)

So, although your claim is technically true because the only really socialist countries out there are North Korea and Cuba, I'm not sure this map shows what you expected. All developped countries in Europe, plus China, plus the Canada, plus Australia, have a higher marginal tax rate than the US.

I haven't found any data of the same kind for subventions, food stamps, etc. to see the other end of the problem, but expect it to reflect the same numbers. If you are talking about row numbers, it might well be that the volume of money redistributed in the US is higher than anywhere else, but it needs to be divided by GDP per capita to get meaningful numbers. 

Oh yeah?  Are you sure? 

Maybe some day I will progress past the second grade reading level so I can understand ubiquitous platitudes that don't reflect reality; rather, dogma.

Most Americans living today are products of assimilation.  How do you decide which historical civilization you want to identify with?

Our political system offers a clear choice between the Children's Crusade and nineteenth century labor organizers.

America has millions of empty houses too... and millions of homeless.  America should do the math. 

This is what I've been saying for years. There are many empty apartment buildings in New York City--and everybody knows NYC has a major homeless problem that gets worse every day. All they have to do is renovate those buildings and large amounts of people could be housed. Real Estate developers are holding those buildings for speculation. Seize them under eminent domain and train the homeless in the skills needed and let them homestead those apartments, they fix them up and then go to live in them. In the process they learn a skill so they can get jobs. A simple solution but no one is interested in helping the homeless least of all Mayor Moneybags who would rather outlaw soft drinks then do anything contructive--pun intended.