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Has Orwell's '1984' Come 22 Years Later?
gabec asks: "This weekend my mother bought a grille lighter, something like this butane lighter. The self-scanner at Kroger's locked itself up and paged a clerk, who had to enter our drivers license numbers into her kiosk before we could continue. Last week my girlfriend bought four peaches. An alert came up stating that peaches were a restricted item and she had to identify herself before being able to purchase such a decidedly high quantity of the dangerous fruit. My video games spy on me, reporting the applications I run, the websites I visit, the accounts of the people I IM. My ISP is being strong-armed into a two-year archive of each action I take online under the guise of catching pedophiles, the companies I trust to free information are my enemies, the people looking out for me are being watched. As if that weren't enough, my own computer spies on me daily, my bank has been compromised, my phone is tapped--has been for years--and my phone company is A-OK with it. What's a guy that doesn't even consider himself paranoid to think of the current state of affairs?" The sad state of affairs is that Big Brother probably became a quiet part of our lives a lot earlier. The big question now is: how much worse can it get?
Am I just accustomed to old ways? Does the new generation, born with these restrictions, feel the weight of these bonds and recoil from my fears as paranoia? What can I, a person with no political interests--a person that would really rather think that the people in office are there because they're looking out for us, our rights, and our freedoms and not because their short-sightedness is creating a police state--do to stem the tide?"
Sorry, sir--not to be rude--but I don't quite buy into your "big question". (c'mon... peaches??) There are many other real-world, legitimate examples of our freedoms eroded.
From Dictionary.com:
demagoguery:
n : impassioned appeals to the prejudices and emotions of the populace.
Sigs cause cancer.
I click the link, what do I see? "Nothing for you to see here. Please move along."
"Come on, let's go drink till we can't feel feelings anymore."
Ask Slashdot: Has Orwell's '1984' Come 22 Years Later?
I... wonder... what... Slashdot's... answer... will... be.
I don't think you can claim that the store told you that four peaches was a "restricted item" without at least explaining the situation a little bit further.
"What's a guy that doesn't even consider himself paranoid to think of the current state of affairs?"
First thought...more educated and informed than the masses of sheeples?
Seriously, I think a lot of us feel the same way and see that we aren't on a slippery slope any more. We are plummeting down a sheer drop off. The way I see it the government and big business will control more and more of our every day life as we lose more and more privacy and individual choices. Some of us will get sick of it and cash out and go live off the grid in the most remote boondocks we can find and some of us will suffer in relative silence and reminisce over the "good old days" before we lost so much of our privacy and constitutional rights. Others will never notice they lost anything. Maybe there will be another American revolution some day to try and put back into place a government whose altruistic ideals can be effected indefinitely. Hell, 200+ years is pretty good when looked at in the big picture of history but eventually power and money corrupt those who should be looking out for the good of everyone. I guess this sounds kind of defeatist but take the federal minimum wage as an example. How come 30 million people have to try to live on $5.15 an hour? How are their voices not heard? How are our voices not heard?
Money talks and the politicians and big business have the money.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
Id for grille lighters and peaches, huh? And why didn't you just walk away loudly commenting on the store's idiotic policy?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I hate big brother... computer crashes, reboots, finishes writing this ... I love big brother.
Big brother is your friend, by the way chocolate rations are cut in half as of today.
No sig for you, two weeks!
IT'S GO TIME BABY!
The only time I was flagged at a "self checkout" was when I was buying bullets at Wal-Mart.
Someone came over, looked at me, muttered something about how I was obviously old enough, punched a button and let me finish.
No ID, no nothing.
Paid cash, got my change and left.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
"The big question now is: how much worse can it get?" Wrong. The big question is what are we going to do to stop this. It's our government, dammit.
Don't forget that it's not just about privacy. The government basically has to create a state of perpetual fear, stir up hatred of the enemy, torture people, have an ongoing war, control information, and basically convince you to willingly see things that are false.
Now, don't get me wrong, but I don't think we've come to that yet.
cough cough fake terror alerts hussein abu ghraib war on terrorism fox news wmd in iraq cough
The cash went into a scanner which picked up your fingerprints too. It now has a picture of you, your voice, and your fingerprints.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
This isn't a real question, this is a thinly veiled attempt at getting a conversation going about how terrible the US government is.
Yes, there's a lot of censorship and surveillance going on. Yes, we have to be vigilant about everything we've heard.
My fear is, the fact that we find out about these domestic wiretaps, secret European prisons - means that the people put in charge of these things are morons. Most people in the position to be doing important secret 1984-type dealings are smart. The things we know about are pretty bad - how much worse are the things we don't know about?
Whoo, signature!
DesireCampbell.com
Defend freedom of information from government and corporate influence.
That's what really protects freedom, liberty, democracy, and people's rights. If you're lucky.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
It's really nothing to worry about until you wake up in a bathtub full of ice, missing a kidney.
And if you paid by credit card a digital copy of your signature.
No ID? What state do you live in? You must obviously look over 18. Most ammo at Wal-Mart is behind the counter. The only ammo I can think of that isn't is shotgun shells that are on sale.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
The sad state of affairs is that Big Brother probably became a quiet part of our lives a lot earlier.
Disagree.
Most of these things came from the Bush administration. The last 6 years has been a cancer eating away at the very fabric of what it used to mean to be american.
Phrases like 'truth, justice, and the american way' ring very hollow these days...especially to the rest of the world.
1984 was about the state controlling everything. In the current situation, the state is peering more heavily into everything we're doing because a lot of people are so afraid of Islamic terrorists that they're willing to give the state more power. This may or may not be a temporary situation, but the state obviously hasn't reached the level of control that Big Brother did in 1984.
As for corporations watching what you do, the real question is whether Microsoft checking to see if you're using a pirated version of their software is somehow going to affect your political rights, or if it is just a stupid move on their part that will only push customers away from their products. After all, you only have one state. You can choose software vendors.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Well now, I think we all know one little submitter who is going to get a visit from Homeland Security tonight.
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Get some political interests
Sticking your head in the sand will not help. So pull it out, shake out the sand, and get involved. And I don't mean you should flip a coin, pick the red team or the blue team, and blindly follow them.
I mean that you should get active in holding your elected officials accountable for their actions, regardless of their party affiliation. Keep up on the issues and be vocal about them. Read and listen to opposing points of view and try to form and propagate valid opinions. Make sure your representatives know that someone is watching them, and follows what they do. If they lie, cheat, steal, or sell you down the river, nail them. Vote them out in the primary if you can, and in the general if you can't. Cross party lines if you need to, because you are far better off with an honest member of the opposing party than one of "your own party" who is willing to sell you to the devil for a few hookers.
And, for that matter, do the same with your news outlets. And your local ballot boxes. If we paid half the attention to keeping the system honest that we do American idol or celebrity babies, we wouldn't have this problem.
--MarkusQ
There's ridiculous numbers of surveillance cameras everywhere. Even millions in a single city.
I particularly enjoy how I can't shop for good deals on my doctor-recommended loratidine with decongestant that I take every day for my allergies. Apparently, if I purchase more than 15 pills of 240 mg pseudoephedrine each in one day I am obviously running a meth lab.
I never knew. I guess the government knows me better than I know myself. Thank you, government, for stopping me from creating a narcotics lab that I never knew I wanted!
The peach situation baffles the hell out of me though.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Please strip to your underwear and sit with your hands folded behind your head in preparation for a courtesy visit from your friends and fellow Class 1 citizens from Homeland Security's Produce Control Division.
And stop thinking about goats when you play with yourself.
Well you've convinced me.
Your random anecdote, and enormous sample size (of one whole person/incident)
has convinced me that any musings on possible privacy encroachments
and abuses of technology can be ignored.
Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrived from the WalMart front. In honor of the massive overfulfillment of the ninth three-year plan... it's been announced that the NASCAR T-Shirt ration is to be increased to 3 per month!
DoublePlusYeeHaw!
VOTE!
I was ID'd for a lighter the other day. Now, I am a bit younger looking, and I know that restricting lighter sales is the first step to restricting consumption of other products. In California, and at a Walmart, at that. The real issue that would make me start to worry is data aggregation. And that is where I think it all falls apart (knock on wood). If they could aggregate all the data of my purchases, communications, etc, I would be a lot more worried. If you ARE paranoid, a major step to eliminate tracking is to go cash only. Stop using electronic payments of any kind. Stop using grocery discount cards too. They track spending habits.
But again, data aggregation is key, and they don't have that yet.
" smell BS. An ID for a lighter? Bah"
Because in many states you have to be over 18 to buy one.
And it could also be corporate policy that they have to run the license through the system now matter how old they look. But also a good way to collect data on who the person is incase they dont use a CC (or to check for fraud).
TruePunk | Games
I call bullshit. If my grocery store hassled me for buying a butane lighter or fruit I believe that I would find another store to buy them from. I recently bought a lighter similar to the one in the link from a local mega-drugstore and nobody asked for ID (they do require an ID to buy Sudafed). What's going to happen when the thousands of roadside fruitstands start selling bushels of peaches to anybody who has the cash to buy them?
If you want to enjoy modern conveniences, plan ahead. Pay cash for things, don't use kroger cards (at least not in your own name), use someone elses unsecured wireless if you have to be online. It only gets worse if you use all these modern "conveniences".
Think about it, just 10 years ago, I knew no one with a personal cell phone, high speed internet, check card, "savings" cards, etc...
"Big Brother" is supposed to be made of one entity which monitors and seeks to control people's lives and thoughts.
What the summary describes here is merely companies or the government trying to gather information, mostly for a commercial purpose.
These do not constitute a common group with a specific goal, but just different groups that have their own interests. Most of these do not trade information between each other.
However, it is true that the US courts have been asking sites such as Google or Yahoo to forward their user's information, so the tendency could be going towards such a centralized system.
If you're looking for systems in which people's actions and thoughts are restricted, China or USSR would be better examples.
just about the only freedom left is the right to free speech and even that is at times questionable. I used to concider myself a libertarian but leaned republican in elections, now im so ticked off at the state of the world my friends all think ive gone all Che Guevara. I'm just sickened by all the steps taken to "secure" me, what good is it without freedom? I guess im in the majority but I would rather take my chances a bit than deal with some of the BS that is going on now.
The constitution isnt perfect but its alot better than what we have now.
I smell BS. An ID for a lighter? Bah.
Where do you live? perhaps I'd like to move there.
When I used to buy cigarettes in NJ, they'd card me and jot down my license. When I purchase alcohol, some stores jot down my license number on paper or punch it into their cashier devices. I bought a set of markers a couple weeks back and they did the same thing to me. They asked for ID and wrote it down.
Shit's going down, but I think it's regional. It's stupid.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
... to the Brave New World.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Well, guess the terrorists won, eh?
"It's our government, dammit."
Kroger is a government? Hot damn! Now I can bitch in person.
Seriously, how many here have actually read 1984? Did you understand it? If not then why are you posting here?
1984 is when the authorities catch a clue.
Or, as Benny hill once said in a sketch, "My dog likes to chase cars, but if he ever caught one, he wouldn't know what to do with the damn thing!"
Right now, the powers that be are dogs chasing cars, but they are close to figuing out what they'll do when they catch one.
Enjoy this moment while it lasts.
Mmmmmm... Bold, yet refreshing!
No, I'm not a libertarian.
I would be if they were balls-out scrappers for freedom and liberty for all humans. But too often they stop at property rights, and assume that a good round of deregulation and tax cuts will fix everything else.
Freedom and rights have to be fought for. The enemy isn't just the government; it includes corporations.
Human rights must come before corporate rights. Too many Libertarians I know seem uncomfortable with that.
So, which party to turn to? Right now, there's no clear choice. But for now, the first step is denying Bush the convenience of a rubber stamp congress.
That means holding your nose and voting Democratic this fall.
And stop being afraid.
Let's take a way back machine a little bit. Way back before big faceless corporations, people shopped at corner stores, where the manager knew them by name, knew what their regular order was, and for the habitual customers even had the order ready before the customer came in the store. You couldn't get yourself into too much trouble because everyone in town knew you on sight and all of your local relatives. More often than not the cops knew you by name, and not because you were in trouble but because they were as much a part of the community as you were. Privacy hasn't gone anywhere. If anything the world today has given us MORE privacy than ever before. The difference is not the level of privacy but the range of interested people. Before you worried about the local cops. These days, you only wory about them because they can pass the information to the feds whom you're really worried about. Privacy really honestly does not exist, unless you act in a way to preserve it. In the old days that meant shutting your blinds and not leaving your house. Well you have to do the same thing these days, just electronicaly. Sorry, you can't have a credit card if you want privacy because it isn't your money, it's theirs, and so they have an interest in what you buy. Likewise for your internet and phone connections, use a public service, expect it to be public. The only way to have privacy is to keep to yourself. People don't keep to themselves because it's anti social and destructive. But like it or not, there really wasn't ever any such thing as privacy.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
It wasn’t really about the surveillance. That was merely a plot device. It was about a state of mind and the means to achieve that state.
In the superficial sense, i.e. electronic surveillance, much of what you mentioned has fallen into place over the past ten to fifteen years. And most of it has been implemented by commercial interests. As for the mindset? I, and I’m sure a whole lot of others around here, would say that the overwhelming majority of it has sprung up in the body politic within the past 58 months.
May you live in interesting times, comrade.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Computers. Do you think it would have been this easy to build such databases without the computers? What year does Skynet take over anyway? LOL
Is there a way to 'bury' a story, ala digg? ;-)
Suppose we raise it to $60 an hour. Better? Would you still have a job?
OK, that's too much. Well, how many lost jobs are acceptable? Can you give a number? If we raise the minimum wage to $12 an hour and lay off 15% of the workforce, is that good?
More money is great as long as YOU don't lose your job. Everybody, even those already on minimum wage, thinks it'll be the other guy who loses his job or that some rich guy won't be so rich. Sure, and pigs fly really well.
To pay the cleaning people their new minimum wage, we can get rid of one web developer. The other guys can work overtime to make up the loss. Then again, maybe it's just time for the company to go bankrupt and get rid of EVERYBODY.
It goes the other way too. A smelly drunk isn't likely to get hired at $5.15 an hour, but his value might be above zero. He deserves a chance to work. The same goes for the fat girl with acne that makes people feel ill, the guy who stares inappropriately, the lady who has conversations with her knuckles... They all deserve a chance to work.
When I used to buy cigarettes in NJ, they'd card me and jot down my license.
That's cigarettes, not ammo. Cigarettes kill; and not even just the people who use them. Get with the program.
KFG
Orwell was writing about contemporary society. We have been living 1984 for a long time.
Test 1 2 3 4
Cigarettes don't kill. *I* DO.
First of all, by Orwell's definition, the Brother has to control not only your present and future, but to also be able to change the past.
Q: When was the last time the Bush administration changed the past?
A: Never, so whatever we have here, it is not yet 1984.
Second, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Unless you download pornography or plan arson, why should you object to being monitored on the internet or at your store?
Third, biological/organic material is ideally suited for preserving and transporting infectious agents. Peaches are perfect for storing bacteria due to the availability of sugar, moisture, and organic acids.
If anything, eggs should also be added to the watch list as it is the only means for growing smallpox and influenza viruses available to the terrorists. In fact, eggs are currently used to manufacture vaccines against the said viruses.
Fourth, and I paraphrase the Administration spokesman here, I would rather the government collected my call records than my remains
Fifth, the Bluetooth and Wireless technology can be used to control remotely-piloted aereal drones used for terrorism, and must thus be treated as dual-use technology; all foreigners must be required to acquire a deemed exports license to own, operate, or examine the said technology. Manuals should be classified.
Sixth, none of you liberals objected when the Clintons were killing Foster, murdering teenagers with trains, flying in cocaine, and selling missile technology to China (which since then has implemented the sold Aegis, nuclear isotope, and manned-spaceflight technology).
And finally, why do you hate America so much!!!!!11
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Exactly how high is the resolution of those signature scanners? The visual feedback implies that it very low indeed, verging on "featureless blob" for certain styles.
What's a guy that doesn't even consider himself paranoid to think of the current state of affairs?"
But of course you are not paranoid. We never doubted you. No.
I passed the Turing test.
Everytime you play the proprietary software game, you lose a bit of your freedom and get nearer to Orwell's world.
How can you be sure your software is not spying on you? For 1 caught Sony case, how many lesser known applications violate your privacy? Not even counting keyloggers and other obvious malware. XP phones home. How many other apps do that?
Even in the political world, proprietary software brings us closer to 1984. Seems every voting machine provider uses closed software, supposedly for "security". How can we trust these black boxes?
In the good old days of desktop computing without a network, closed source software could be trusted to keep your privacy; there was not any way to transmit the information anyway. But now, any trivial program is able to report your activities to the whole world.
Seems to me proprietary software is a dead end when privacy is involved.
If I told my great-great-great-great-grandmother that in the year 2006, most homes would have a box spying and reporting people activities, backed by the richest company in the world, she'd probably laugh. I'm not.
1. Enter gender and phone number or scan/sign up for Reward Zone.
2. Sign up for a magazine subsription.
3. Sign up for a PRP/PSP (extended warranties on products).
Now the second one is relatively harmless and I'm not certain that Best Buy stores the information gathered there. The first and third however go directly into Best Buy's database. The reward zone card has all the standard info, phone number, address, the works, but with the phone number alone Best Buy can surveil all transactions associated with it. The PSP/PRPs contain all the same information as the reward zone.
Best Buy says they do this so that if someone forgets their receipt but gave their phone number they can print it out for them. But personally, I don't care why they're doing it, I don't want any of my private info getting out.
With all due respect, a wiretap is something different.
You're free to be upset about that, as many people are, however, it's not really "wiretapping."
In wiretapping, they look specifically at your phone, and record the transmissions over it. Records of who called who are just a normal part of the audit trail generated by the network. The government requisition of these has raised a number of eyebrows, however, it's not wiretapping.
It's closer than you think; many public transit systems already have the capability.
The only thing stopping them from doing it right now is allowing people to purchase with cash. Cash is a problem, because it's harder to trace cash than it is to trace credit cards.
I'll use for example the metro system near where I live, in Washington DC. It's an admittedly sophisticated system compared to a lot of other places, but it's nothing that futuristic. You can pay to use the metro (including buses) in one of two ways: you use either a credit card or cash, and you put the amount onto either a semi-reusable cardboard mag-stripe card, or a reusable RFID card. The RFID cards aren't (I don't think) stored value; they just chirp a serial number. So if you use one of those, it's fairly trivial to track you throughout the system, particularly if you load it with a credit card. Find the transaction where you added money to it, get the serial number of the card you put money on, and then follow that serial number around as you use it.
With cash the problem becomes one of identification. You can still track someone around the system using their stored-value mag-stripe card, but identifying someone as they come into the system if they pay with cash is still a significant problem. The way to get around this would be either by requiring everyone to use some non-anonymous form of payment to get in (which might mean scanning a government photo ID when paying with cash) or automated face recognition. Since most public transport is filled with cameras as is, the latter might be the way to go.
Of course none of this keeps you from buying a ticket (RFID or regular) and handing it to another person, so it wouldn't be foolproof, but I would be surprised if the police haven't used the electronic ticketing systems to figure out where suspects under pursuit enter and leave already. It's such an obvious use of the technology I can't imagine that they haven't, especially given the very high-crime areas that public-transport systems tend to run through.
Personally, I feel that it won't be very long in the future when using cash is the mark of someone suspicious. (It already is, in large quantities and in certain places -- bought an airline ticket with cash lately?) That is, anyone using cash to purchase anything from food to movie tickets will be forced through additional scrutiny, not to mention odd looks from "honest" people (using their Visa cards as God intended).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Don't make me call the Ministry of Love... just drink your gin and sacrin already.
Apparently, if I purchase more than 15 pills of 240 mg pseudoephedrine each in one day I am obviously running a meth lab.
Yeah, you probably aren't. You. Other people, given free reign, will use pseudoephedrine in a meth lab. 15/day happens to be where they've currently drawn the line. Should they change it to 50/day? 1000/day? Unrestricted?
15/day. Do you really need to buy more than 15 a day?
What needs to happen now is for people to understand what is going on. This kind of activity has a draining effect on society, basically sapping them of their notion of "freedom." Ask your neighbors, your parents, your kids, your peers: many of them will tell you that they don't mind that they are being treated like criminals. "Why worry if you're not doing anything wrong?" is the typical response. These people don't understand what "freedom" means. These days the word has come to mean "freedom to love America" when in fact it's the opposite we need to allow. So you can start by making sure the people you know, and others if you can, that if our freedom does have a chance of disappearing, and you need to educate them as to what that means.
I'm not saying that this is happening now, though. We're getting closer, but the real danger comes from people who will welcome it when it comes. The single most important battle to be won is in the battle of ideas - that's politics these days.
The other thing you can do is begin securing all aspects of your life. Try and use encryption over the internet; encrypt your emails and messages. Start using cash to buy stuff - the Japanese do it all the time; paying with credit or debit at a store is pretty much rare in Japan. Refuse to buy from the grocery store if they require your drivers license to prove you won't make cyanide when you buy peaches (are peach trees illegal now??).
But important: if you DO make a fuss, DO NOT LOOK LIKE AN ASSHOLE. This is probably what most of you are capable of doing. If you do "fight the man," please do so in an orderly, respectful, and unannoying manner. If you get asked for your license at the grocer's, don't scream about it - people want to get through the line. Simply refuse to purchase from the store, and explain to those around you that you are being asked for your driver's license to buy peaches. The worst thing that can happen is for your ideals to be tied in with obnoxious behavior (this is what happened to liberals).
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
Peaches drive muslims absolutely crazy. They only buy four at a time to keep from raising suspicions, but the seeds can be crushed and used to make suicide LSD.
One word:
ECHELON.
To wit: "ECHELON can capture radio and satellite communications, telephone calls, faxes, e-mails and other data streams nearly anywhere in the world and includes computer automated analysis and sorting of intercepts."
"Inveniemus Viam Aut Faciemus" 'We will find a way... Or we will make one!' --Hannibal of Carthage
Unless you are a criminal, who cares if all these things are spying on you. You can't do anything but complain about it, so just go on and live your life and have fun. Be happy you are lucky enough to live in the USA and not Russia where you have wait in line for toilet paper, or China where you have to be rationed toilet paper, or Iran where there is no toilet paper! God Bless Toilet Pap... oh I mean, America! Oh yeah we aren't doing that anymore, Happy America Everyone!
Half the incidents may be questionable but the truth is the government wants the ability to monitor any phone call without a warrant and soon all car are likely to have tracking devices and black boxes recording not only where you have been but the speed you drove getting there. We are increasingly under the microscope and as computer power increases for storing and accessing the information the situation will get drastically worse. We're in the frog on a hot plate situation. If you suddenly instituted everything they do today on people 25 years ago they would revolted. Do it gradually and they barely notice. Tell them it makes them safer and they insist you do it. Privacy is rapidly becoming an antiquated concept. We should all be very afraid. Already many jobs require good credit. Health insurance requires that you have a good health history. When genetic screening is common place you could find yourself unemployable and unable to get health insurance based on having the potential for desease. You won't be able to join the military because your government profile says that you are probably gay. You can't get a teaching certification because your profile shows you may be a pedophile. Companies are already keeping such profiles on people, TiVo was one of the first to become public. How long before the goverment tries to pigeon hole all of us? Let's say you watch the cartoon channel, go to disneyland by yourself a few times a year and your favorite shop happens to be across the street from a school. If records are kept on your driving habits and viewing and purchase habits and the information is cross referenced you could show up as a possible pedophile and be put on a watch list. Crazy? Remember th TiVo profile that decided a viewer was a pregnant gay man? We aren't there yet but we've gotten halfway there at a frightening pace. It's already a good idea to becareful what you say in any digital form. The technology already exists to record, transcribe and use keywords to search every phone call made. Do you really want to show up on a terrorist watch list because you said to a friend over the phone that the new movie about the White House was a bomb? We are very close to that now. If you happen to work for some government agencies and put it in an email you are likely to draw attention and you might find saying it over the phone could even now set off an alarm in some agencies. We live in very scary times.
When's the last time you read 1984? The fact that you can post this question on Slashdot, that you can go to a store and have a selection of products (and have the money to pay for them), even the fact that you have a girlfriend suggests we aren't living in the totalitarian "future" of Orwell's book. Orwell was reacting to Stalinist Russia, and we're about as far in the opposite direction now as you can get from that-- it's a lot more like the capitalism-run-amok chaos of a Gibson or Dick novel.
Hell, many of the examples you gave are about corporations trying to peg exactly who you are to market to you, not some Big Brother entity who wants to enslave you. I would even venture to say that the powers-that-be aren't really afraid of outspoken political speakers any more. It's become so easy to express your thoughts to the world, and there are so many people doing so, it's almost impossible for one person (no matter how charismatic or persuasive) to sway enough opinions to matter.
I could be wrong, and the jackbooted thugs and black helicopters could be waiting around the corner... But I don't think so. I think the reality is everyone just wants your money. And they want your data, but only because it will lead them to your money.
Try to buy any of the basic needs of life without being on a camera somewhere. Impossible. I live in rural area and I can't. Would this fly 30 years ago. I think not. Our social conscious is clearly changing. Our collective ire isn't likely much of a difference. If it were not more cost efficient to do so we wouldn't do it. But why would we suppose Big Brother is any more efficient than we the masses who can't even balance our checkbooks. Oh yeah, we have a national debt. He can't. I should also add I don't like being on camera.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
What's a guy that doesn't even consider himself paranoid to think of the current state of affairs?
Maybe those crazy guys with exploding vests have a point.
If EVERYONE refused to comply with such absurd rules when purchasing stuff at stores, the stores would lose business.
Ah, yes, there's no reason to perhaps save money by buying a few boxes if a local pharmacy or grocery store happens to have them on sale.
If other people make meth labs, fine. I wish the police or appropriate enforcement agencies the best in their mission to find the bastards; however, I don't appreciate the guilt by association (because of a fraction of a percent of the population) that's directed at me and millions of others who happen to have a medical condition that we really don't want and didn't ask for in the first place.
I would use the phrase, "It's the principle of the matter", but apparently that concept goes beyond you and instead leaps straight to overzealous sarcasm.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
...Orwell was proved right
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
If you're interested in reading the account of someone who started out pretty much where you are, except that he's an attorney specializing in constitutional law, you might want to check out How Would a Patriot Act
From the back cover:
--MarkusQWhen I was a kid, my mother didn't let me use a fork to eat with for quite some time. She always felt like I would poke myself. No, I'm serious. And to use a steak knife was unthinkable. It was my shining triumph of freedom when I went to public school... kindergarten. They had spoons AND forks with which to eat my lunch. Later on, I recall going on a field trip to the park. My mother was also rather scared of the playground equipment... particularly a very tall slide. It was pretty cool though... it was kinda wavy... and it was pretty darned tall. Later she lied to me saying she saw me on the slide, so I admitted that I had climbed the slide.
Is there a connection to my "big mother" story and the "big brother" topic? Yeah. It's about the "sanitized world" problem. In a sanitized world, we won't learn much, the least of which is how to take care of ourselves. These days, knowledge is restricted. Tools are restricted. Research is restricted. Everywhere we turn, our "big mother" is trying to "protect us" from everything both imaginable and unimaginable. What we will lose is a great deal... we will lose things like how to think for ourselves, how to learn, how manage our feelings and emotions. As this continues, we'll build our society of children... run by the most selfish bullies on the planet.
In other places, when there are terrorist or other cataclysmic attacks, when there are murders, when there is mass destruction, they grieve, they attempt to punish the guilty and they move on. That's what we should be doing. When the disasters are "natural" we even try to prevent or reduce the damage possible. (Like with Levy's or early warning systems.)
Bush is being pretty clumsy in his efforts because intent is revealed in the action. For example: "invaders enter our country and successfully execute a very devastating attack." The results are in forming a single department of homeland security ultimately reporting directly to the executive effectively moving a lot of oversight away from the legislative branches. An inordinantly large number of changes in the surpreme courts with highly questionable appointees being confirmed without much difficulty. (Okay, one of them didn't pass muster...) But all the while, the country isn't being made any more secure! Borders are STILL wide open. Illegal immigration is only recently a hot topic, but nothing is being done. Even the ignorant sees this hole in the strategy to "secure the nation." The natural disaster of hurricane Katrina strikes with plenty of warning and plenty of mistakes are made... I won't speculate as to whether there is intent behind that or not, but it does show that the government is poorly structured to handle the emergencies it was once more than capable of managing a few years ago. And has there been any improvements since then? Nope. Latest reports I've heard are that hurricane season has started and we can't even agree on evacuation plans in most prone areas.
Meanwhile, in the name of security and protection, every freedom and right to privacy that we had taken for granted is under risk or has been revealed to have been violated under our very noses.
And with all the mismanagement and all the secret invasions of our lives, we're STILL not impeaching the president responsible for it all?
There is some real filth going on here. Whether it's intentional or not I won't speculate. But the results are clear for all to see and regardless of the motive, the effects justify impeachment.
I've read 1984. Is there something in particular we're getting wrong?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Must be dejavu? I seem to remember making a very similar statement on my blog several days ago. Check it out, it was my first post " Ranting about Bush's Veto of the Stem cell Bill..." last paragraph on CybreLync Chattering blog. CybreLync
CybreLync
*sigh* Here we go again.
Two things. It's not the "reacting" so much as it is the "mis-reacting" and "over-reacting". Second as has been pointed out repeatedly here (in different contexes). Technology is a double-edged sword. Technical sophistication can work in the publics favour, as much as it can the government.
"We need to be careful to keep this technology from being used for ill. When something that's "kind of bad" is proposed, we need to react STRONGLY. Rights have a way of being chipped away and it's usually through violent conflict that these rights are regained. Better to protect them in the first place."
Were were you all when the Sony Bono act was being passed? Certainly a lot weren't protecting their fair use rights in the first place. Maybe a good old fashion storming of the RIAA/MPAA citadel with some hanging will get us back our rights.
"Further, it doesn't really matter who it is that's doing the surveillance. If Walmart has the information, it's only a subpoena from being in Uncle Sam's hands.."
Valid point, but the danger isn't from the occasional "subpoena" but the constant feedback loop that everyone's subjected to. And let's not get into the almost daily leaks of personal information.
Yeah, you probably aren't. You. Other people, given free reign, will use pseudoephedrine in a meth lab. 15/day happens to be where they've currently drawn the line. Should they change it to 50/day? 1000/day? Unrestricted?
Because someone will abuse it, everyone needs to be protected!
15/day. Do you really need to buy more than 15 a day?
Buying in bulk from a wholesaler like Costco where they're in 60 pill containers... Damn me for not wanting to make the trip once a week for a twice daily pill.
Uh, yeah they id for lighters! It's happened to me probably 4-5 times living in southern california. Even when I was like 24! I've also been denied sale of a lighter when I was 18 because I didn't have my id with me.
Whoa, wait a minute! So, does that mean that anyone with a peach or apple tree in their yard is running a cyanide lab? Does that make you guilty of sale of a lethal item by selling your peaches at the farmer's market?
You probably think I'm being facetious or sarcastic; but if you have a peach orchard and you sell your product at a farmers market, do your customers show ID to buy your produce?
This is getting absolutely out of hand. I thought that the original question was completely ludicrous. But now I'm not so sure.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
"FYI, man, you can do like absolutely nothing... and your name goes through like, 17 computers a day, man. 1984? Yeah, RIGHT, man, that's a typo. Orwell's here now and he's livin' large. We have no names man, no names! We are NAMELESS.... Can I score a fry?"
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Look, "1984" has been happening for a long time now, and people are willingly participating in it.
What am I talking about? Politically Correct Speech. Some group of people decided they didn't like what language people were using, and they've somehow gotten to get a lot of people to go along with it. It's to the point where if you don't use politically correct speech for things, some people get really pissed.
this kind of thing has been in the works for quite a long time and in much worse ways than mentioned in the article... The USA tends to make laws to fight *symptoms* of problems and not to cure the problems themselves. This is a prime example:
d ept_id=7021&newsid=16606489&PAG=461&rfi=9
/. who believe in God (and to those who are willing to research God and the Bible with an open mind).
http://www.troyrecord.com/site/news.cfm?BRD=1170&
And I know some will scoff at this or think me nuts, that's fine. If you feel you must mod me down, that's fine too. I just want to throw out some food for thought to those who will care...
These kinds of actions (reactionary laws vs. teaching proper morals) along with the recent hurricanes and terrorist attacks all sound to me like God is warning the U.S. to shape up or prepare to face extinction as a nation. This would not be the first time in history He has done so. And I'm not talking about the end of the world or some miraculous event wiping out most of America. No, I'm talking about God's providence working to discipline those who refuse to obey Him.
And for those who are so inclined, read (or re-read) the books of the prophets... Over and over again nations are wiped out (particularly those with the *most* power and arrogance) and replaced by other nations as the dominating force in the world. And for those who are skeptical about the Bible's accounts of these nations, check archaeological history... Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Medes & Persians, Greeks, Romans, etc, etc.
Let me be clear... I am not suggesting panic. Nor do I think we need any "John 3:16" signs like at the end of Ghostbusters. Just suggesting some serious reflection and consideration to those on
With the peaches and a standard household gene splicing kit, one could turn the peach DNA into marijuana DNA, there by selling drugs and funding terrorism, child porn, world hunger, and opression in the non-free world.
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
i tried to purchase GTA: liberty city stories for PS2 at Target the other day. the clerk asked to see my ID, and then began to scan the back of my drivers license, for a game? i dont even get carded for liquor... I'm certainly old enough to purchase anything i'd like without an ID...
Don't forget the RFID tagged world that we are heading into. Companies such as Wall-Mart and several government agencies have been pushing hard to add RFID spychips to everything that we purchase. Soon we will be wearing RFID tagged clothing and shoes. Our wallets will have RFID tags in our charge cards and passports. We will be driving around in cars with RFID tags in the tires and elsewhere.
Each and every RFID tag will have a unique serial number and we will secretly be scanned when entering stores. Upon checking out our RFID tagged items we will show them our shoppers discount card and pay by charge card where our personal information will be updated in various computer databases. Who knows what personal information will then eventually be shared with credit agencies, advertisers and the governemnt.
As we drive around the country hidden scanners in highways will secretly log our movements at key points. And of course all the young people proudly carry their cell phones everywhere. I have heard that cell phones regularly transmit which cell tower they are closest to even when they are turned off. Only removing the battery or perhaps placing it in a Faraday cage would stop that.
If I understand correctly the USDA wants animal ID for all animals in micro-farms for every sheep, chicken, goat or other animal. That would most likely involve using RFID Tags to track your food. Perhaps they are afraid that that someone could actually buy their food from somewhere in cash without big brother having a record. There is an organization called NoNAIS that is opposed to those proposed rules.
Marketing researchers and the police will be able to inventory the contents of our garbage cans with hand held scanners without even opening the lid.
Many of us even have pets which have been RFID tagged in case they get lost. Some (but not all) Christians believe that RFID chips or something similar implanted into the back of the hands or our foreheads will be the "mark of the beast" described in the Bible. Even if it doesn't go that far, RFID sypchips could play a major role in bringing us into a "1984" like world. Add RFID technology to what other people have said and I think we seriously could be heading towards the future that George Orwell warned us about in the book "1984". Perhaps I should take my tin foil hat off now and just relax, this is still America after all.Am I the only one who isn't very alarmed by all of this? Everytime someone claims that 1984 has arrived and Big Brother is here (which seems to be about once a week) I have to ask myself, "Have any of these people read 1984?" Our society is so much better than 1984. I also highly doubt that it will ever get to that point. While our actions are monitored by everyone, we still have civil liberties. I'm sure that if anyone cares to look into the records, they would be able to learn that I hate Bush. Even so, I have yet to receive any knocks on my door from guys in black suits. We still have the right to assemble. No one is going back and changing the past ala the Ministry of Truth. No, 2006 is a long way off from 1984.
Does anyone else believe that life now is better than it has ever been in history. We have less war, less disease, people seem to be friendlier, open source is flourishing, crime is down. It's about time people stop being such pessimists and simply open their eyes to how wonderful the world is now.
While I see what you are saying, I believe it is dumb to remove the incentives of hard work, dilligence, and sacrifice.
Why should should my sister study 14 hours per day for 20 years, denying herself sleep, sex, and eyesight in the process if she will end up being no better off than a janitor, except that the janitor has been having the time of her life for the last 20 years, has a developed relationship with 7 kids (all on welfare), can sleep well at night in a house she had not earned, and does not need glasses to read the 'funnies'.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Checked at the local supermarket. I think it's because it can be used to manufacture meth. I wanted it for the model fuel cell car bought at Fry's. Checkout computer threw up an exception. Had to show my Driver's license for water. Land of the Free! Glad I wasn't shopping in the dynamite aisle.... LOL!
"Knowing everything doesn't help..."
until they come for you
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
"I, for one, welcome our new surveillance overlords!"
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
The worst part of all this? Most people out there are willing to let it happen.
"I particularly enjoy how I can't shop for good deals on my doctor-recommended loratidine with decongestant that I take every day for my allergies. Apparently, if I purchase more than 15 pills of 240 mg pseudoephedrine each in one day I am obviously running a meth lab. "
Slashlogic strikes again. Just because you've run up against societies restrictions (of which ALL societies on down history have) doesn't mean anyones making an accusation.* What it DOES mean is that the program does work. And it works for the simple reason that meth is a man-made drug with a key component that's hard to make. A choke-point if you will. And even that was hard to get because of the drug industry until a link was established.
*How do you feel about seat-belt checks? Makes your blood boil that he's accusing you of being an unsafe driver?
Along these lines, Wal-Mart wanted my driver's license before I could purchase cold medicine in a bottle, claiming it was a new federal law. The same store had the same brand with the same ingredients in the same quantities in caplet form, no ID required. A large chain grocery store 2 minutes away had both liquid and caplet form for sale, no ID required.
As someone else said, companies will only get away with this shit if we let them.
It is important that low wage jobs exist, or it would be difficult to get that first job that lets you start climbing the ladder.
People move up the ladder by getting an education, taking a min wage job rather than going to college is a great way to get stuck at the bottom rung.
Not only that, but low minimum wages move us backward as a society, when the smart thing to do would be to build machines to do the jobs that no human wants to do. The choice of keeping a more or less permanent underclass to perform these tasks keeps us from moving forward into a time when no one will actually need to do a job they don't want to do.
It is a really primitive idea to think that it makes sense to have human beings perform mindless tasks for a wages that barely cover subsistance.
Libertarianism is the opiate of the upper classes.
When the country falls into chaos, politicians talk about 'patriotism'. Lao-Tzu
This is something that has bugged me for a while.. when will they work out that getting pseudoephedrine out of cold & flu tablets is not cost effective? If over the counter medicines were the sole source of materials for making amphetamines, the street price of the stuff would be more than twice what it is now. Not to mention the fact that there are almost always much larger amounts of other compounds in any products that contain any Drugs of Dependancy (e.g paracetamol, which causes hepatotoxicity and death in doses quite close to the theraputic level), and that stripping these out is (i believe) a generally lengthy and difficult process.
:P i just know some basic maths and maybe some chemistry. The people who actaully make large amounts of pseudoephedrine based drugs probably get their supplies from wholesalers. In raw form.
No, i don't run a meth lab..
I don't really see any malicious intent in this.. someone probably just put 2 and 2 together and somehow got 44.
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
We call these places "schools".
When you are doing useless work and you require expensive supplies/facilities/management, your value is negative. So you get charged for working.
I asked the clerk for a box (550 rounds, I think - the loose kind, not the boxes of 50). The clerk handed the box to me, and I said I had other shopping to do, so off I walked with it, rather than having him ring me up right there.
I live in Southern California. I think they ask you if it is for a rifle or a pistol. If you say "rifle" you have fewer follow-up questions.
I am sure I have purchased lighters before too -- although probably in bulk at Costco, so they do know who I am. I guess if anything catches on fire, I am an official suspect.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
"My ISP is being strong-armed into a two-year archive of each action I take online under the guise of catching pedophiles"
If you are a member of Perverted Justice, you are a vigilante , and have no standing as a law enforcement officer. Your records of posing may mean you are under investigation for a copy cat crime , after using the Dateline special as your guide.
If you get your kicks online by posing as an underage girl in the guise of "catching pedophiles", go right ahead, but don't claim your legal rights are somehow being violated.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
Well, it went to 5, so we're done there.
The poster is right. Each time we find out more about one of these operations, it turns out to be dumb. As more info comes out about Guantanamo prisoners, it comes out that the US is holding bin Laden's driver, a guy who didn't make the cut for 9/11, and a bunch of random people who were turned in by bounty hunters in Afghanistan. The Bush Administration is fighting real trials for those prisoners because they'll lose most of them, and look even stupider.
Meanwhile, bin Laden is still free and active.
But at the same time, I feel for you. I used to have crippling allergy attacks every spring quarter as a College student. I don't follow Ohio news any longer, but I don't see any reason why the government would not have succumbed to meth hysteria.
I don't. I wasn't born yet. But it seems like things were locked down a lot more than they are now.
I am not happy with the bush administration.
This is classic slashdot that I am addicted to; kind of like biting down on a sore tooth.
But I am not too worried that currently I am going to get arrested for thinking the wrong thing. And like many of you, I live in the Bay Area and I just haven't had anybody disappear around me.
If you want to worry about something worry about why Kevin Smith keeps getting to make movies - there's your conspiracy.
Look at the surge of Computer Science degrees in the late 1990's, and then the collapse soon after.
If "people persue their calling", then... WTF???
Clearly people follow the money.
They should draw the line where people start making meth. You know, committing a crime.
KeS
We need to FORCE the politico's to stop waging wars in the middle east (for example) and we really need a Manhattan style program to develop working nano assemblers so that we all can grow our own cars, computers, homes, computers, and also reverse the damn aging process (you know, fix the 5 or 6 things that Aubrey de Gray says that we need to fix to control/reverse aging).
after all, most people reading this are going into a future of old age decrepitude and poverty because of all the money that we have wasted on Vietnam, the two gulf wars and all the future wars in the next 2 decades. It does not need a rocket scientist to see that investing 10 or 100 billion in nanotech in the next 10 years instead of wasting it on some set of conflicts in the next 10 years makes more sense.
Remember, we are now into the nanotech realm and we will soon be making crude nanotech assemblers in the next 10 years...we could use them for really cool "dust-moat" flying dust motes that could spy on you, or new weapons, or we could do something like reverse aging, give people really cheap DNA cosmetic surgery, reverse aging, boost intelligence etc, or we could do the same old, same old crap show...
1) Register error. There are things like alcohol that will flag a stop and check for ID situation, and of course it's controlled from the central inventory software. It's not like the register is concious of what you order, it just checks to see if item #X has an ID flag set. If it is, it stops the sale and asks the clerk to check ID.
2) He's making shit up to try and be dramatic.
I mean peaches certianly aren't globally restricted. We just bought some the other day, no problems, as I imagine millions of people did. You would hear about it if they were sending flags up all over.
As for check ID items, it's up to the store how far they go. Like with alcohol I've had the entire range. Some simply dismiss the warning assuming fomr appearnace I'm over 21. Some check my ID each time. At grocery and convience stores they are usually more carefuly. Some check the ID and enter the birthdate in the register, some have you scan it in a little machine that checks. The most extreme case I saw was at a Frys which is near the university and a couple of high schools, thus lots of underage purchaes. They check your ID, record it, and make you sign the book they recorded it in.
Basically it's the levle of CYA they feel necessary to not get fined/shut down. Fact of the matter is, someone will fool them and buy underage. Well if a fuss is made of it, the liquor board investigates. They then have to prove they took steps to stop that from happening. The liquor board deicded based on that if they were really trying and it was an honest mistake, or if they are being delibratly lax.
thus the response depends on the store, it's not government mandidated, the government just says "You can't sell to minors and you are responsable for taking steps to make sure you don't." Up to you to determine the kind of steps and the proof you keep of them so you can defend yorself if need be.
But ya, I am not seeing any federal peach crackdown here. If that's the case, we'd probably hear about it on CNN.
When I have a cold or sinus infection, my favorite cocktail is Advil+Pseudoephedrine during the day. It helps dry me up, and doesn't make me drowsy. However, at night, I prefer to take a night-time remedy that doesn't have pseudoephedrine so that I can get some help sleeping. So, I tried to buy ONE box of Advil+Pseudoephedrine and ONE box of Advil+Benedryl at Long's. Nope! Couldn't do it. I had to buy one box at Long's, then stop at a grocery store on the way home and buy the other. The grocery store didn't even ask for my ID.
:rolleyes:
SOMEONE is getting rich from this - and it sure ain't me. I'm guessing it is whoever created & manages the "tracking" for the gov't, the lobbyists who got the law passed, and the lawmakers who got the handouts from the lobbyists.
To the boneheads who think this is "for our own protection": Has there been ANY hard data that the use of meth has declined since this law went into effect?
If you calculate the current cost for hard drive space, (around $80-100 per 300 GB retail cost), you can calculate that it would cost only around $300 million to record EVERY phone conversation that occurs over the United States phone system during the year. (assuming 2300 billion minutes of phone calls recorded at 56kbps) Even though this is still a high amount, it would still not be prohibative for the government to accomplish, and this includes EVERY SINGLE PHONECALL, and doesnt include any cost reduction for buying in bulk, and doesnt consider offloading to tape.
Then, consider that in 2 years time, that cost will likely drop by half, and then by half again in another 2 years... If you figure that the government only records 1/4 of all the phone calls (they can exclude grandma Tillie), and then extrapolate the costs of hard drive space, in 10 years, it will only cost around $1 million (today's money!) to record all those calls. That is chump change.
Then, you might argue, it would take far too many man hours to monitor all these recordings to catch anything. The trick is that you dont HAVE to monitor them. You can just wait for someone or a friend of theirs to become a person of interest, and then you can review backward all of the phone conversations that they had. You can then spider out to all of their friend's conversations and so on.
The scary thing about this is that you can be monitored even before you realize that you are going to do something 'illegal'... Worse yet, things can become 'illegal' or make you a person of interest (suspect) at a later time (like making phone calls to a Muslim charity that later is considered a terrorist group)
Just know, that your (and everyone's) phone could easily be tapped already.
From 1984, we have increased surveillance, general fear (of terrorism), an ongoing war with another power that we can barely even SEE (hidden terrorists), control of communications (NSA/AT&T fiasco, Patriot Act tracking what you pull out of libraries, et cetera), and while Big Brother doesn't have a face now, the idea behind him does; a great big concept that any opposition to is unthinkable (a combination of the moral code of the religious right, and the ideals-turned-buzzwords of "freedom", "patriotism", and "security".)
From Brave New World, we have a world obsessed with hedonism, so much that we feel entitle to it. We have a caste system, mainly that Americans are above immigrants, and that god-fearing men and women are above all. We don't have true freedom, because we are "protected" from bad things on all sides. People don't want to think for themselves, or be responsible for others. Look at all the legislation passed in the name of "protecting the children". To make it worse, we barely appreciate the comfort we live in. Many people are dissatisfied with having a roof over their head, clean hot and cold water, electricity, computers, an internect connection, whereas a fair portion of the world is lucky to have food on the table. We have become indoctrinated with the concept of constant entertainment. Look at how many people never go anywhere without an iPod. They are being entertained literally all day. We are surrounded by television, movies, music, games. All this entertainment draws our focus away from the real issues of our time.
The main difference between us and Brave New World, is that there were enclaves for the free thinkers in BNW. Sure, we exist now in our own little tribes, but we have no place to call our own, that is governed by our wishes.
Perhaps we will eventually take The Savage's way out.
Ted Kaczynski already predicted this... and he did exactly what you are describing... He moved to a remote boondock. (well, all except the part about suffering in relative silence).
If you've ever read the Unabomber's manifesto, you will see that he was talking about exactly this when condeming the downward spiral humanity is moving toward using technology.
but I forgot this link: http://www.scienceprog.com/radio-frequency-identif ication-rfid/#article. Sorry. Now, where's my coffee...
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
If you call red tape, delays, and bloated bureaucracies "working," sure. Seasonal allergies can be cripplingly severe.
It's already taking place.
Anyone who takes any interest in 1984 should watch ghost in the shell, stand alone complex.
It is based on a now aging manga by masamune shirow, and I find it rather grim how prophetic the panoply was.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
The question no longer is, Who is John Galt; but Where is John Galt?
$
Morons don't continuously expand their Presidential powers, while ignoring (breaking) hundreds of laws designed to limit their power. You haven't read this Boston Globe article:
Bush challenges hundreds of laws?
Bush knows exactly what he's doing. Calling him a moron is simply underestimating his gross disrespect for your freedoms and the Constitution, and is a distraction from his intent to give himself more and more power while taking away your rights.
Historically, your attitude has been expressed more succinctly by royalty as "There's a bread shortage? Let them eat cake".
Prescient, not precient
From answers.com
The key difference is the availabiliy of the surveillance technology.
First world populations at least have the capacity to watch them (insert favorite boogeyman) as much as they watch us. Even communication satellites are within the means of private organizations. The panopticon is your friend.
A true atrocity (such as forced labor, police apathy, or killings of civilians by government agencies) are much more difficult to manage when there are cameras and microphones everywere. Lest that sound paranoid, realize that that sort of activity is common in in much of the world.
The government's inability to suppress information exchange is key to keeping them as honest at possible
Shaw's Principle: Build a system even a fool could use, and only a fool would want to use it.
Someone should be fired.
Bullets should never be stored in a place where just anyone can pick them up and walk around with them.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Whats the use of being Paranoid? Makes sense if you are able to do something about it.Otherwise, its better to actually ignore it all off &live in peace as though nothing happened - yes thats bad,but its better than whining to ourselves the state of affairs about which we are not able to do anything !!
Wincopy
The world is becoming more like Brave New World than 1984. Most people are either on drugs or act like they might as well be; high culture fades into oblivion; and the silent masses mewl in approval at the behest of leaders who they don't understand.
This is fabricated, this guy obviously doesn't have a girlfriend. The rest may be true though...
Most of that stuff in the post didn't even have anything to do with state or federal govenrment. It was mostly corporate and people giving their privacy away under their own accord.
Then how about a corporate revolution? If you think about it in a broad sense, the American Revolution happened in part due to monetary-based reasons (think about the whole "No taxation without representation" thing you were so fervently taught in grade school). Though that saying isn't exactly a correct observation of the feelings at the time, it does relate back to money.
But why couldn't something along the lines of a corporate revolution happen? Especially if the national debt continues to climb, interest rates continue to increase, gas prices continue to rise, etc. (People actually pay attention to things that actually affect them.) If another depression were to happen, do you think people could start to realise that there was something wrong with the ways the corporations were acting? If another depression were to happen, especially a large one, I highly doubt companies would go back to the way things are now (at least not directly, much as the American government has changed since the Am. Revolution). But then again, I'm an optomist.
Nuff said.
it has.
Yes, by all means, get politically aware. Something we who live in "free" and "democratic" societies often seem to forget is that freedom comes with responsibility. That responsibility is not just to exercise our freedoms in a "responsible" manner, it also includes active participation in the workings of government. Voting is just the most obvious "responsibility" we have in this regard. Far more important is the habitual awareness and involvement with current events and politics... Not only will your vote be more "informed," you'll also be better equipped to influence the "debate" at the dinner table, the pub, the church, etc..
m l
o rtional
Here are the five most fundamental and important changes, which I think provide the best leverage to make American democracy work better:
1. End "personhood" for corporations.
http://www.thomhartmann.com/unequalprotection.sht
2. End the War On Drugs.
http://www.drugwarfacts.org/
3. Open the televised debates to 3rd party candidates.
http://debatethis.org/
4. Ensure transparent ballot counting and elections.
http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/
5. Require proportional delegation in the Electoral College (ie: no more winner-takes-all)
http://www.fairvote.org/e_college/reform.htm#prop
These issues are not in the news much, but they have a common-sense appeal to most people, regardless of their political orientation. These are "systemic" issues, with the potential to have broad effects throughout the society. There are many other things I'd wish for as well, but these five are a good starting point, for beating back the encroachment of Big-Brother government.
--jrd
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
This really scares me, just plain out scares me.
The government basically has to create a state of perpetual fear, stir up hatred of the enemy, torture people, have an ongoing war, control information, and basically convince you to willingly see things that are false.
In terms of the American government making their whole country's citizens paranoid that even their neighbours could be some kind of enemy against their ideology, wasn't this achieved in the fifties using the buzzword "communist" a long time before it was done using the buzzword "terrorist?"
Cliché?
Seriously, I finally read 1984 about three years ago, and was deeply disturbed about the way so much of the novel reflected, what I was seeing around me.
But it must be pointed out that this could be a very clever understanding of the world, as opposed to an amazing clairvoyance. The bbc series, the power of nightmares http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/3755686.stm (episode 1 synopsis, the others are linked in) outlined that during the cold war, western governments used 'the enemy' as a way of keeping us scared and patriotic.
After the cold war finished, Prime Ministers and Presidents look far more like managers and 9/11 has given them the oportunity to create a new enemy 'all around us' with sleeper cells and bond villian mountain bunkers. They have used this to create another blind patriotism, think "if you are not with us you are against us", so if you critisize the PATRIOT act then you must be a terrorist.
One of the points raised is that hardliners (Neo-Cons for the US) have taken advantage to take power. No one with extreme views would seem appealing if everything was 'alright', AFAIK extremists generally take power when things seem difficult.
I conclude that Orwell may have just understood that the powerful have always tried to do these things, only more recently have they had the ability to do them so effectively. Only the technology has changed since the McCarthy days http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism, the witchhunts are certainly still here.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
The scary thing is this guy is just a casual observer. If you step outside the mainstream media and dig deeper you will find things that sound like fiction, but the government is actually doing.
First, the government is going to process the data to get a good profile of you.
Secondly they are going to use it extensively in all interaction with you.
Norway does this today and a lot more. They have a benevolent(?) government, and people live and eat well, so nobody complains much.
Here are some examples of Noway today:
1. The tax office does your full tax return for you since they have all your info anyway. You are sent a copy to confirm that all is correct, and it usually is.
2. Everyone has a personal number assigned at birth. The registry is part of the tax office. To get many benefits like free healthcare, and by law, you must report your address.
3. All public services have full access to your information. This simplifies qualifying for various programs as there is nothing to fill out.
4. Many services are only payable electronically, so a searchable database is easy to build.
5. Tollstations are fully automatic and prolific. Your movements are logged. If you drive through without an electronic tag, a camera snaps, and you are mailed a request for electronic payment. How do the find you?
6. Electronic photoboxes are installed throuout the country to catch speeders.
7. Government controlled free(subsidized) -health care, -education, -childcare makes sure they know everything, as your they are closely involved in all of your familys life.
8. Most norwegians are forced members of a union. The unions political arm, the labour party controls the government as well. The unions often offer benefits such as vacation homes. The government owns the majority of shares in the largest companies. (So i guess the union are on both sides of the table in negotiations) The government also have majority control of other big businesses such as banks.
So your job, your vacation, your representative at the salary negotiation table, your bank, your university, your retirement saving, your doctor, the daycare etc are fully controlled by the government.
"Fix it"
I'm trying to quit smoking but the local Long's Drugs won't sell me Nicorette without swiping the mag strip on my license into their computer. I stopped shopping there. I feel awful that I let them do it the first time. I _assumed_ she was just going to look more closely at my license and didn't have time to react when she swiped it.
Yeah, there's something wrong with $5.15/h - it's a minimum wage and, like all state meddling in the market, it cocks up SO much more than the ignorant claim it fixes.
But just get your doctor to write you a perscription for it. They can perscribe a larger supply and the pharmacy will fill it. Not saying that the pseudoephidrine ban isn't stupid, but just get your doctor to perscribe it and you are done.
'Nuff said.
They say the mind is the first thing to
Revolutions are very serious things and even if done for the best of reasons can have horrible results. Consider the US attitude to the French over their history - paticularly in the years after the French revolution.
many of the examples you gave are about corporations trying to peg exactly who you are to market to you
ok.. i'll give you some more examples
yeah.. corporations are not out to enslave us.. we just don't own anything we buy anymore.. oh wait.. only serfs and slaves dont own property. Guess who is complicit with them... certainly not the general populace from these stories, just a wealthy and influential few.
Then there is the engineering of information and "farming" of public opinion
so really.. its not too far from dystopia as one might think.
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What scares me far more than all of this gov't intrusion and monitoring of simple, everyday activites is the willingness of people to justify the intrusions. Go back and read all these comments. Even the Slashdot crowd, which is most likely smarter than your average random population sample, will denigrate the poster as a "demagogue", and come up with every justification for the intrusions (keeping cough syrup from kids or cold pills from drug dealers, catching terrorists, etc.) even if his point remains valid. Even they are willing to justify these ever-growing intrusions in the name of security.
//Seeker
What possible chance does personal liberty and privacy stand if the citizenry doesn't give a shit? We don't even need the gov't to force us -- our "patriotic" citizens are all too willing to play along. No one intends to willingly give up all their freedoms. They just remain complacent and ignore it long enough for the intrusions keep escalating until legitimate dissent is no longer possible.
When history looks back, I wonder how we will be judged. Will historians shake their heads and cry at how we so willingly lost the very freedom that once made our country unique? Or will gov't intrusion have gotten so bad that questioning any gov't policies, even past ones, will deem the citizen "unpatriotic" and a "threat to his country"?
What do you think?
"Naturally the common people don't want war...That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along...All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."
Herman Goering
Nazi Reichsmarshall and Chief of the Luftwaffe
Germany, Third Reich
During his trial at Nuremburg, before he was hanged.
...was more prescient than 1984. The "seashell radios" that fit in your ears, the video walls, and bringing the entire town into a manhunt by showing it live on TV via helicopter.
Why is it that the very same liberals who claim that there's more to life then just money always turn around and claim that you need lots of money to "partake of what life has to offer"? I've got news for you, being a janitor is a low stress job (I know, I've been one) and as a janitor, one has time to experience the finer things in life, like social outings, and camping, and just lazing around. Being a manager (as I am now) is a high stress job. I spend too much time worrying about my figures, and how well business is going to really relax and enjoy life. It has also put more stress on my relationships, I have half as many friends, and it seems like my SO and I are always fighting. On top of that, I have student loans I need to pay off.
So the janitor can not enjoy some of the nice things I will be able to (someday, hopefully), like a new house, or a new car, but he can enjoy some things I can't. It makes me sick to my stomach when people talk about the plight of the "disadvantaged", as if it's really hard to sit around and collect a welfare check. You know what, those people don't do anything for me, and I don't owe them anything.
As far as social programs go, I'm all for feeding and educating every last child, but that's where it ends. I don't want to see any poor people leaching off the system to make a quick buck. Schools should provide 100% of children's health care needs, as well as meals, and a place to stay (if their parents can't provide one), but they shouldn't give a dime to their parents.
Your sister is ALREADY in danger of becoming no better off than the Janitor.
Because of OFFSHORING.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
what happened to "liberals" was they were systematically undermined through misinformation and outright lies spewed by fox news.
read al frankins books for more details.
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The politicians and corporations didnt write the software to do all thoses things - we did
We built the guns, the bombs, the gas chambers, the drugs. We have only our selves to blame. It should be easy for every one here to see how this all works. To bad most of us here dont want to accept it.
We are being used by lesser people, by people that cant see the logical result of their actions, let alone past them.
Why do submit to this slavery. This is our world. We do not submit to the inferior. Why do we limit our selves to their abilities? When did we forget that life is a struggelthat must be fought? When did we require laws and regulations to dictate all aspects of our lives?
I know stealing is wrong, not because the law tells me, but because I can feel it. The problem is the people that lack this. What these people have in place of morality is something we must not deny- they are, for lack of a better word, evil.
They are the enemy and they must not be in control any longer.
We all know whats possible with technology. We all know that it is a tool that lacks the ability to understand good or evil.
We understand it- they dont. That is scary. Thats why we must take back what is rightfully ours while we still have the chance.
Lock them out, shut them down, reboot. reformat. clean install. They wouldnt hesitate to to it to us.
The pace of technology today demands competent leadership. We are coming up on two important elections cycles. A message must be sent.
How many of these people would you tolorate working with (or for) if they were on your project? It is clear that they do not want to solve real problems, it is clear that they dont understand the problems they attempt to solve. They do not deserve to serve us let alone rule us. These people should be working for minimum wage, yet intstead they are allowed to piss away trillions of dollars in tax money year after year.
It has to start somewhere. It has to start sometime. What better place than here. What better time than now.
We know this isnt complicated - build some roads, build some hospitals, build an army to protect us from real dangers, provide a framework that facilitates growth. Thats it.
Any thing else is not the function of government. All our problems come from shortsighted regulators and corporate leaders. If you cant understand why dumping a billion gallons of toxic chemicals into you're water supply is bad, then you are not a leader (the whole lack of vision thing is a key give away here). If you cant understand why creating laws that force the strong to be be weak and make the weak to feel powerfull is bad you have no right to rule me. If you think that we're all equal, you're wrong - we're not supposed to be. Stop ceating laws that force us to be something we wern't desinged to be.
i have said it before .. but at the risk of being redundant .. as are most of us .. to those of the ruling class ..
.. if you want to know how bad it can/will get .. you only need to look at two issues ..
..
.. study the work of Stanley Milgram .. the CIA has ..
..
..
.. the middle ground being 3 to 6 .. the number of planets required to provide an "average" american life style to the present worlds population ..
.. that 3 to 5 out of every 6 people .. eating our food .. drinking our water .. and breathing our air .. will need to be eliminated by some means .. and if a profit can be made doing it .. so much the better .. global warfare is a good start .. and with all the modern technical and biological knowledge the options are almost limitless ..
..
..
..
.. simple ..
.. to be willing or able to do anything about it .. especially when the average person's source of information and knowledge .. is the corporate owned and controlled media .. and state controlled public education ..
.. and it's a done deal ..
.. as what is require is a paradigm shift .. something the current state of mass consciousness is not likely to be able to embrace .. do to it's programed narrow mindedness .. left vs. right .. liberal vs. conservative ..
in my opinion
first one
the willingness of the masses to be obedient to authority figures
http://www.stanleymilgram.com/
second one
Ecological Footprint
though the number varies
which to those of the current ruling class would suggest
and if you don't think it a valid issue
up until now about 6 percent of the worlds population has managed to consume about 30 percent of the renewable resources and produces nearly 50 percent of the inorganic garbage
india and china are just starting to chase the american dream in earnest
and the reason it will happen
because it is too depressing and too difficult for a mass population conditioned to trust and let other people make decisions for them
throw in generational amnesia
and another revolution (rotation) will not change a thing
The news reports said there is a device in the house that tells people when to get up, when to go to bed and praises the leader. And they will cut power to an apartment complex so police can see what video tapes are trapped in the VCR. I think that is a lot closer to 1994 than these annoyances.
Although both Gandhi and King were open and may have "won" it is worth remembering that both ended up getting shot.
Also smoking a bullet makes you look like a real dork.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I'm an honest, law-abiding citizen, I've never been in trouble with the police and have no criminal record, exactly the same as 99% of other people captured on those same cameras. I therefore very much doubt that law enforcement is interested in me - until I break the law.
Then just imagine the huge amount of video data those cameras create and then realise just how much human resource would be required to analyse that amount of data - impossible. Sure, it can all be archived for a week or two but then comes the question of storing all that data...
However, I do accept that personal information and keeping one's identity as secret as possible is of the utmost importance because all this information is so valuable to insiduous corporations that want to crowbar more money from each and every one of us. This is where the real issue is because 99% of the sheeple in this world are not prepared to take responsibility for their own lives and their own information and are too weak-minded to make informed decisions, falling instead for endless media and advertising hype. In a capitalist society of intelligent, well-informed citizens, such phrases as "brand loyalty" would not exist.
If anything, Western governments are losing influence over the general populace because of the power of the corporations - in the UK, it's frightening to see the amount and effects of outsourcing work to private corporations that are only there to make a profit. A classic example is hospital cleanliness - twenty years ago, when cleaners were employed by the National Health Service itself, there was no doubt a lot of inefficiency and waste but, today, now that the specialised job of hospital cleaning has been farmed out to private corporations, bugs like MRSA are rife in hospital to the point where possibly hundreds of patients a year are dying because of it.
Yes, today we live in a "nanny state" but that is for two very specific reasons - firstly, the general populace is far too fat, dumb and happy to take responsibility for themselves and would rather pay someone else to do it and, secondly, the corporations are eager to accept that money, do very little for it and put it into the hands of a few very rich individuals.
Think about it... no government truly wants an overweight, smoking, unemployed populace because that means having to raise taxes for additional health service resource and benefits, taxes makes them unpopular which means politicians lose their fat salaries and benefits when they lose elections. But people choose to smoke and eat too much crap, the tobacco and junk food companies are raking in the money as a result and because people choose not to take responsibility for themselves, the government steps in with stupid and restrictive legislation to try and cut down on the huge amount of expenditure it has to make in these areas.
This whole idea that law-abiding citizens are being constantly watched by the government is ludicrous - in reality, government just wants everyone to pay their taxes, have lots of sex (so as to create more tax payers in the future) and just be happy and contented (so that no-one goes out committing any crime). Unfortunately, it's the corporate vultures who sit there watching, just waiting for any opportunity to make more money from us - and them not making that money is down to each one of us not giving it to them so easily...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
The big problem is the government treating this like a "war", instead of just branding terrorists as the criminals they are. Of course, they do this so that they can increase their own power. Still, I think that as a real threat, terrorism was worse in Europe in the seventies. There was no single event as big as 911, but much more small ones. Also, the treat was internal (extreme left wing, secession movements).
Visit the link in my .sig. By learning the Art of Living, you can bring more awareness into your own life and into our own world. Ok, we probably got too much awareness now you might say, right? There doesn't go a day we don't hear about something awful about this world.
:-)
Right awareness is focusing on what is good, positive. Around you and otherwise in the world. Media is filled with negative awareness, which we should fight actively to turn both in our daily lives and globally. Of coure, for this to happen also, we need something positive _action_ to happen
First you have to strengthen the individual, so this can go as a positive force out in the world. Every human has capacity to love and nurture eachother, but our stress is a layer in our body and consciousness.. Deprive a man of sleep for 3 days, and even the most harmonious and joyful being will become the worst... So we need to find ways to relieve stress and come back to ourselves again.
With breathing excercises, precious knowledge about life and much more, the Art of Living course is just fantastic in my experiences. It is unique in that this volunteer organisation is handling the very issues that we're facing in the world today: erosion of human values, how to rebuild faith in humanity and bring every religion and faction together instead of destroying this beautiful world. We're all in the same boat, let's start acting like it.
First rate. Just do it while you can!
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, the founder of Art of Living Foundation and International Association for Human Values, has been nominated for the peace price many times. However, just like with Mahatma Gandhi, there seems to be a strong resistance to letting Indians getting the peace price.
Karma is excellent. If you really care about the world, maybe it's time to shift a bit of perspective?
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Pax Americana has definitely become a totalitarian nightmare. ...
It has all the same attributes:
Where 'democracy' is totalitarianism
Where there is eternal war
Where 'freedom' is state control and violation of your civil liberties
Where 'humanitarian intervention' is a synonym for US brutalising of a country that is not a puppet to Washington
Where you can't go to the library to borrow a book on chemistry without being labelled a potential bomb maker.
Of course, the goverment is not worried about 'terrorism'. You are more likely to be hit by a falling plane than be killed by terrorists. The government use terrorism to create a climate of fear and control.
The Bush junta also uses the same kind of doublespeak as was common in Orwell's 1984. Terms like 'PATRIOT Act' stand for somethings rather more threatening.
America is also the world's leading sponsor of international terrorism, including vicious fundementalist religious racist/bigot ethnic cleanser regimes like Israel.
The US has put most of this centuries worst dictators in power, and generally US military aid peaks to such people at the height of their attrocities. This was certainly tru for the following (the figures for US military aid to these regimes have been unashamedly published)
- Pinochet
- Pol Pot
- General Suharto
- Saddam Hussein
- Manuel Noriega
- Columbia
- Turkey (at the height of the attrocities against the Kurds)
In addition the United States pursues economic terrorism against many other countries that don't serve US imperial interests.
The day of reckoning will come for the United States when their empire collapses in a mountain of debt. Just doesn't ask the rest of the world not to have a good kick when you are down, America.
Hmm. Reading the article about the spyware on Blizzard WoW just remembered me that a couple weeks ago I wrote Valve's support questioning them how to run Steam (a piece of software needed to run Half-Life 2).
;-).
Turns out you CANNOT run HL2 without admin privileges. After reading the article on Blizzard I have a better idea of the reasons.
Me:
Customer (xxx) 06/11/2006 04:15 AM
I am not willing to play (and let other people play) HL2 using the Admin account on my computer because of the obvious security implications (I don't want my computer infested with malware).
Is there any way to run it without admin privileges? I installed it using admin privileges and went back to my unprivileged account but turns out it needs to write data to the install folder (bad programmer - no donut for you).
Which are the files STEAM tries to write to in the install folder?
If it turns out to be too complicated I'll just download the no-steam version with BitTorrent
Cheers.
Their reply:
Response (Josh) 06/13/2006 01:34 PM
xxx,
It cannot be run without admin privileges. I know you were probably joking, but I would also encourage you to avoid any product that claims to get around Steam. We take cheating and hacking very seriously.
Whether or not it's going to happen to the entire planet, the idea that for the last couple of years America in particular has been headed for a total repetition of Nazi Germany is a forgone conclusion so utterly obvious that it barely even warrants mention.
Yes, martial law is going to be declared at some point. Yes, hundreds of thousands of you are going to be herded like sheep into concentration camps that are even now being built around the country.
And yes, the unholy triumvirate of George W Bush, Tony Blair, and John Howard is currently the single greatest threat to the proverbial life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness that currently exists on this planet.
And for those of you still oblivious enough to be in the, "it could never happen here," camp, all I can say is, wait 18 months.
Here's a hint: More than half of them aren't even old enough to vote if they wanted to (and if they were, they'd be statistically unlikely to vote anyway). The minimum wage is a heart-string issue. The Democrats tote it out to get emotional votes out of the section of their base that hasn't engaged their brain. It's the Democrats' version of school prayer.
wow.. you just trod all over your own argument.
that leaves 15 million people who are earning below poverty wages who are NOT dependents of others... in other words they NEED a living wage and are not getting it.
I have news for you people who complain about welfare leeches... half the time these people are pushed into that because if they make above a certain level of income.. they will be denied welfare, but their jobs will make them less than welfare!
maybe if you raised the minimum wage, their jobs would make them more than welfare and they would not feel compelled to remain unemployed.
So no.. it's not "the democrat's version of school prayer", it's a valid issue of exploiters paying sub-poverty wages, then lobbying for a "free market" whenever there is a push to raise those wages to a point where people can.. i don't know.. buy food AND a pay rent at the same time?
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Your government has clearly become a cancer out of control since long time, but your constitution 2nd amendment allowed you to carry firearms for this exact reason, not for shooting the neighbour or being taken at school by insane kids. Why the heck don't you start to use them?
(I love the smell of my IP reported to the CIA in the morning:+)
I am growing increasingly circumspect in what I do online; which includes what I communicate through public forums. I increasingly find that I self censor myself in my internet communications. Do you ever think about how your google searches might be interpreted? I wonder how big a picture some interested party can create from the the various pools, seas, and oceans of information out there in which information about me continues to accumulate. And it really spooks me that data mining is probably a bigger business than mining for minerals, and how often my name comes up from the depths. What worries me most is not becoming a victim of a government conspiracy, but to be the target of some private party or corporate entity. Maybe someone has an axe to grind, or someone wants ot go on a fishing expedition to pull a hatchett job on you. Someone with money, access to resources, or clout. These are the people i truly worry about. Not quite the Orwellian 1984. A notable change from the Orwellian story though the watched can more easily turn the watcher's tools against them. We can look back. Smile and say, "YouTube!"
You are just noticing it now. Welcome to reality.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If i was required to enter that information just to pay in cash at the self-chekout, i would have been leaving the item on the scanner and be going to another store.
I realize what they have when you pay with CC, but in a case like that, they would have lost the sale, with me at least.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If you want freedom then you need to learn Russian and emigrate to Russia. After the cold war ended, the USA began to become more and more like the old Soviet Union. At the same time, Russia became more and more a land of liberty and freedom.
I have been to Russia 3 times and to Ukraine 5 times and it is just amazing how free people's daily lives are compared to either the USA or Canada.
Wow! Coming to think of it, I'm glad I don't live in the fascist states of america.
At times like this I wonder if Brin saw the shape of things to come with that one.
Don't get me wrong, I'm in favour of individual privacy. I just wonder if the concept is going to feasible, Part of me wonders if trying to safeguard privacy isn't like trying censor the internet, where some other channel always seems to pop up for the information flow. Similarly it seems that for every snoop or spy measure we stop, three more open up where no one is looking. It makes me wonder if the same principle is at work. Information may not "want to be free", but it certainly seems to seek wider dissemination in much the same way as water seems to seek sea level.
So, for those reasons, I think there is a chance that the battle for invidual privacy is unwinnable over the long term. And if that turns out to be the case, then we need to start thinking about how we can structure society to function in a world without privacy.
I think Brin's solution may turn out to be the way forward. Perhaps the harm lies not in other people and organisations knowing all your of business, but rather in that the information flow is one way only. Perhaps politicians and corporations and the like would be less likely to abuse such information if we could scrutinise their activities with the same clarity with which they seek to scrutinise our own.
Just a weird thought for the weekend.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Why bother? Bush is already doing great terror
When ideas fail, words become very handy.
that Europeans are not so advanced this time.
Being beeped when you want to buy fruit or a lighter?
Sheesh
If you are wondering why the restrictions are in place, watch this:/ #18. None of these are in the US. Cold & flu tablets are conveniently available at your local pharmacy.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meth/
The gist is
a) it *is* cost effective
b) restricting key ingredients has worked in the past - see qualudes
c) there are 9 factories in the world making ephedrine and pseudoephedrine on an industrial scale http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meth/faqs
How much worse can it get? How much longer do you take it before you stop using the products and services that YOU HAVE CHOSEN, and YOU PAY FOR, which are doing this to you?
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
The fundemental difference between the novel 1984 and todays society is that we are not locked away for openly disagreeing with government policy. Sure our behaviour is recorded, which I despise, but we still have free speech.
You would rather think that X is true -- even if you know that X is not true?
As Dilbert once said to a girl while on a date after she said she believed in something that most of us know to be crazy, "since when did belief become a substitute for fact?"
Why should elected officials give a damn about you? Look at Congress: they have a 92% re-election rate. If you had an "A"-grade chance of re-election, would you be particularly-concerned with what a few of your paranoid, nuttier constituents think? Of course not. If you care at all about your constituency, you follow what the majority wants and give it to them: pork-barrel projects and security from whatever boogeyman-of-the-week may be.
Elected officals have very little incentive to look out for you or your freedoms. The history of the U.S., to say nothing of the history of virtually every other nation in the world, ought to be evidence of that. And the history of un-elected officials is even worse.
Go start a religion if you cannot handle reality. You can't handle the truth. But to answer the question: there's nothing you can do. See below.
I am between the ages of 18-25. Do I qualify as a member of the "new generation"?
If I do, then I can say that the sort of post-9/11 pro-security, anti-privacy, anti-freedom paranoia is rampant among my generation. We saw 9/11 and said "where's Big Brother to save us? We've got to do whatever it takes to stop all terrorism!!" (yes, I actually had one person my age say this to me) -- as if that is somehow an achievable goal. I make my usual libertarian arguments, and I occasionally find people who are sympathetic, but by and large, people my age don't give a rat's ass about privacy, and will routinely make fun of privacy-minded people (like me, natch).
Terrorism is the new communism, and it's easier to be blinded by emotion than to run life through the filter of rational, critical, unemotional thought, and so the fear of terrorists overtakes the fear of information abuse that results from invasion of privacy.
Of course, over time -- and by that, I mean over the course of 3-4 years or more -- I find more and more of them very-slowly coming to the conclusions about privacy I came to a decade ago; only, I came to them deductively and predictively, not reactively; I haven't yet been severely-burned by a lack of privacy, whereas some of them have. ("The best revenge is living well", I suppose.)
But none have approached my level of distrust for authority (whether government or business), and I'm not nearly as paranoid as many people on Slashdot: I don't wear tinfoil hats, I don't route my Internet traffic through Tor, I don't reject the advancement of RFID chips in ID cards (although I vehemently oppose national ID systems, such as the U.S.'s REAL ID Act, and the national IDs of most other nations around the world). I no longer GPG-sign my email, and no longer run a node for encrypted, application-layer-routed P2P network. I use encryption whenever possible, but I don't demand that friends and family use PGP/GPG, nor that they use encrypted IM clients. They will never adhere to such demands, and requiring them would leave me friendless.
All my most privacy-conscious friends/family are computer geeks; all my least privacy-conscious friends/family are (largely) computer-illiterate. I do not believe this to be a coincidence.
The truth of the world is that you cannot trust anybody until they prove themselves
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
"Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. It is a force, like fire: a dangerous servant and a terrible master".
- George Washington
Far too many people today have completely lost sight of what Washington was telling us. They see government as a huge nipple, dispensing delicious nourishment for them. Where the nourishment comes from - who pays in the end - is a matter of sublime unconcern. Like the boiling frog, we are so used to paying large fractions of our income (and possessions) in tax that we take it for granted. Just watch the commotion whenever anyone suggests reducing tax the slightest bit.
Seems to me that we are just about at the point where our governments stop being dangerous servants and become terrible masters.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
http://clerk.house.gov/histHigh/Congressional_His
The last President who never vetoed was James A. Garfield, elected in 1880. I'd call that non-modern history. So the article was accurate at the time of publication.
In my fact checking, I see that Bush now has 1 veto, rejecting additional funding for stem cell research, just over a week ago. The Globe article was written in April.
So the article was correct.
See the old movie The Tenant by Roman Polanski, or Brazil by Terry Gilliam, and you'll see what I mean...
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
President bush has done the equivilent of crossing his fingers behind his back while signing 800 bills into law. He has absolved himself from having to follow these laws, and then goes in front of the public (as does the republican congress) applauding this or that new law knowing full well he has no intention of following it. One of these laws he has not agreed to follow, is a law stating that congress must be told about the people he is wiretapping, and they must be told about the people he arrests. He has absolved himself from following the geneva accords as well. Does anyone remember the Gulf War when 1000's of soldiers surrendered to American troops without putting up a fight. The reason they did this, is because we had the reputation as a country of treating our prisoners well. Ask yourself how many 18 year old American kids are going to die in the future because we no longer have that hard won over 200 years reputation. For sure that number will be many more than the number of people who died in 911. Of course it doesn't at all matter to president bush and his ilk. Wealthy people's children don't go to war. And just a question for all you Christians who support bush because you feel he is a god fearing man. Exactly how many people would Jesus torture. Exactly how many people would Jesus kill using torture. We have killed God knows how many people (bush won't say) and we have arrested and tortured God knows how many more in secret prisons around the world where bush can torture them with more ease, because our soldiers who ARE REALLY GOD FEARING and have some conscience, aren't in charge. bush gets up on his podium and crows about how many people he has released, but he fails to note that those he released were absolutely INNOCENT for Gods sake. Final note to all that read this. Once the president is allowed to ignore any law he decides is in his way, we are not anymore a Democracy, we are a kingdom. Scary, HUH?
Mars Libre:
Where the United World will colonize and try and control you. Then they try to tax, but you refuse the steep taxed. Then you rebel, and become a single world nation all our own. Really, people are selfish, and in a capitalistic society that will come out.
You could tell them to get stuffed and fuck off.
The only danger comes when to governments were to go fascist (like Germany did before WW2, or the bush administration), then you had better be very careful what you do.
Unfortunately, the right-wing (GOP) governments in the US seem to be getting more fascist each cycle they get in...it has been theorized and noted by historians, that democratic cultures can very gradually slide into a fascist dictatorship gradually, usually needing some sort of terrorist occurrence (like Hitler fabricated) to gain even more power by promising more security and getting rid of the criminal element in society. go figure
None of this stuff happens to me. You're probably just a fag or something.
A lot of decorative plants are somewhat poisonous, which is why it's a good idea to wash your hands after watering or pruning them. If you experience eye irritation or swelling of the eyelids, then poisonous sap is a likely cause.
Poisonous and Allergenic Plants - University of Maryland
Canadian Poisionus Plants Information System - Reference
I was most surprised to learn how poisonous Wisteria seeds are. I hope gardeners don't all get treated as terrorist suspects though.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
So dont buy them, refuse to buy them. Then at the same time, spit on them. Their rules say, you break it, you must buy it.
Dead lock!!
If its a forced buy then can you really be forced to show ID? Just tell them then those were spoilt, you saw some kid whipe his snotty hands on it.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
it's not much different here either, except perhaps the ASBO or antisocial behaviour order. These didn't seem to bad as they were applied to individuals, well some were farcical asbo to stop someone with tourets swearing. asbo to stop someone going in thier garden in a bikini. perfect for every niggling little nieghbor dispute...
i onID=809&ArticleID=1652470
however there is another side to the asbo, the asbo that gets applied to an area
I bring you skegness's asbo
http://skegnesstoday.co.uk/ViewArticle2.aspx?Sect
now whats the big deal, well for one it gives police the powers to arrest anyone within that area for anything - you do not need to break any law. If they think you might break a law at a later point its enough, more than enough to satisfy the conditions of the asbo order. To be honest there is no restriction on the police at all because legal illegal it doesn't matter, since enter the asbo controlled area and you could be fined £5000 or go to prison for 6 months. It all depends on the individual police officer.
saving britain for decent folk thats the excuse
now how more 1984 do you get than that, when there are no criminals you make them. what is even more alarming is that this is just not being reported. The skegness standard is not widely read even in skegness. This is a complete change in the rule of law and no one appears to give a damn everybody assumes it will not apply to them but they don't see that before the difference was they broke the law and you didnt. now that distinction doesn't apply.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Yes. Whatever status quo will be by the time those new born citizens is when they are age of 6 ot 7 is what they accept as normal and standard. Changing little by little, the system can change considerably over long period of time, and most of the people don't even realize what has been changed, or are already accepting the status quo. All it takes a small change per year and over long period the change is huge.
All it takes is generation or two and the standard of whats normal personal freedom could be changed completely from what it is now to something totally different. Computer is your friend. And what kind of invasion of privacy and personal rights we consider now unacceptable will be perfectly normal in 2100 and majority have accepted it as a normal practice, and consider our fears about that kind of future just Paranoia.
©God
I smell BS. An ID for a lighter? Bah.
I was in Montana when I was 17 (7 years ago), and I wanted to buy a lighter from the 7-11. No dice. They wouldn't let me buy a lighter at 17. I had to have my buddy who was with me (and was 18) go in and buy it for me. 100% no joke.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Without reading offspring posts.. I can still say that you are without a doubt abso-freaking-lutely wrong.
Ashpalt laying is NOT easy. It's straightforward. You can teach a half-blind, half-retarded person to lay asphalt. But.. that doesn't mean it's easy.
There is actually a well-known female author (couldn't tell you her name) that recently published a book about menial minumum wage jobs. She found that you really can't live on one of them. Furthurmore, she found that the jobs required far more physical and mental exertion than could be reasonably expected. I'm sure that most of the slashdot community is quite used to an educated white collar job, but having worked many, many, menial jobs in my life, I can tell you that they are absolutely *not* "easy".
Bottom line... kiss my ass, and every ass of every man that's ever built a house.
So let me get this straight: A lawyer specializing in constitutional law writes a hundred pages or so about an unconstitutional power grab which threatens the most powerful nation on earth, in which the executive branch is usurping the powers vested in the legislative and executive branches and creating a virtual monarchy, and your responses is...
He's a sock puppet because he has the same first name as another author?
And you feel the need to provide two links support to this astonishing point, both of which say basically "I've never seen him in person, and I know of another guy named Glenn...he must be a sock puppet"?
My mind boggles.
--MarkusQ
As the Colonel points out Fruits can be Very Dangerous indeed http://www.jumpstation.ca/recroom/comedy/python/ba nana.html
abandon capitalism and adopt a system that isnt so anachronistic and inappropriate to the modern world.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
perhaps you haven't read plato's "republic" or hobbes' "leviathan?"w s to demand back that shiny trinket it took from you while you weren't looking.
in the republic, we learn that one of the definitions of justice is the will of the stronger - hence the reason that what the supreme court decides IS justice whether we agree with it or not.
in the leviathan, we learn that all of us give up our sovereign rights to the governmental entity (which retains all of it's rights) in exchange for protection and security.
the rights of life, libery and the pursuit of happiness are only granted to us by the sovereign as the sovereign sees fit, and can be revoked as the sovereign sees fit.
arguing with the leviathan is as meaningless, futile and potentially dangerous as peeing against the wind or going naked and unarmed into the den of a bear/lion/big-scary-animal-with-big-teeth-and-cla
it's all well and good to say that we're losing privacies and rights, it's another altogether to act on those silly ideas. as plato, hobbes and various other great minds have taught us throughout history, the goverment is the all-powerful sovereign leviathan that we brought to life to help us, even if it demands that we bow before it.
are you going to be the first to openly go against the leviathan, provoke it and be crushed?
That's a great list. I'd add two others:
6. Work to get some form of instant runoff system going at the local level. If enough people learn how it works when voting for mayor, we'll have a much better chance of getting it implemented at higher levels.
7. Reject proprietary / DRM formats / tiered internet, etc. in favor of open / neutral standards wherever possible, and in general strive to keep information fungible. Probably the greatest hope we have at present is that we can communicate with others in widespread, distributed networks passing detailed information with relative ease. But that ability is under constant assault and could give way to the TV model (sit down, shut up and watch...but don't record...today's version of "truth") if we don't defend it.
--MarkusQ
Why do you hate America?
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
well duh. you were buying bullets. They don't want to fuck with you.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but you are. To uphold liberty and other liberal values does make you a liberal. (Not liking Clinton does not make you less of a liberal either. Clinton is just a man—not a liberal idea—who happened to do many unliberal things.) And of course, you should hardly be ashamed of that since all those people you just quoted were liberals themselves. “Liberal” is not a bad word ands its demonization is the work of the same people who stand opposed to every ideal you enumerated in your post.
Join Tor today!
The bad news is, "Control is exciting". (Insert your harsher synonyms here.) Anyone involved with reviewing this information is not losing sleep at the "horrid terrorists", but they are fidgeting in glee. 'Look at all the lovely patterns.'
The problem with control, *religous included*, since our President seems bent upon including that subject, is that once you have sufficiently crushed people's ability to defend themselves, you can insert provisions that line your pockets. I only caught up with Slashdot again recently last month, and something like 15 "Your Rights" stories, taken together, have me horrified.
1984 is one book, and Fahrenheit 451 is the other, addressing the knowledge side. I for one am glad to see an "official" recognition of a topic I have quietly followed. This trend of SuperControl is here to stay unless by some incredible chance a profound reason opposite to 9-11 emerges to counteract the tide. I've seen comments elsewhere like "why don't you fight it". My reply: not yet. America *RE*-elected Bush in 2004, so this was apparently the mood of the country in 2003. But I do see signs that the downsides are impressing people; I remark that the correct time to fight is *ahead*.
I am amazed I don't know the candidates for the upcoming election... I'll have to check timelines for elections prior to see if this is unusual. At least one of the candidates in the next 5 years will be against these abuses, and that is the time to add support to a more favorable presidency, not the lame duck period of a hopeless Administration desperate to add its last legacies.
Unfortunately, I haven't yet forecasted an event strong enough to ideologically stand up to 9:11. (No longer break time at work, now a Symbol.)
--TaoPhoenix
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I probably am a little paranoid about all this, but I try to counter that with reason. What I feel is important to say here is that, most of this really is rather inert when you remove the human element... the concept of Big Brother CAN be both a positive and a negative force, depending at how it is run and by whom. RFID chips have the power to help commerce, post-criminal enforcement, finding your keys ... beautiful things... and it has the power to allow a government and/or agency to watch your every move. Nanomachines can clean your artiries, kill cancer when it is just a cell big, and allow you to perceive the internet with all five of your senses, without implants, etc... and they can also be used to invade and spy on you, cause severe harm, kill... and (most unlikely of all) go grey-goo as people like to be idioticly paranoid about.
There was a time when people were worried about how reading would dull the brain, that radio would destroy society, and that rock and roll was the work of the devil. But all have been positive forces in our history. Some kid's life was recently saved because of a alligator-deterring technique he saw on the discovery channel! And for all this talk of lack of freedom, here we all are, using the internet, to talk about it!
The point I'm trying to make is... surveillances, RFID, call tapping, new technologies, government itself (big or small) are all completely neutral when unused... what we really don't know is... who is at he helm? Can we trust them? How realistic is it that they want to go so completely totalitarian on us? Until they take away our right to bear arms, I still have to withhold my inner paranoia. I've heard from at least 3 different sources (most of which are via fark or /. of course, but SEEM unrelated) about secret internment camps being built in the country... That's scary, but all I have is someone elses word for it.
All I know is that, almost routinely, I go to bed each night having read some frightening new news... global warming, fascist america, complete lack of accountability with repub-voted biotech firms, all the lies bush has been caught in, the fact that MY country has turned into the bad guy... we're supposed to be the good guys, dammit. Where's all our military spending going, exactly, when we can't even send our guys into harms way (bs'd as that whole situatio is) without humvee armor, huh? Von Braun once said, near the end of his life, that there there would be four great lies told to the public to secure vast quantities of money for military production and research... first would be russians (the impending issue in his time), next would be a 'faceless' and borderless threat (can anyone say 'terrorism'? (frankly, the real terrorism is done in the name of fighting terrorism, as far as I am concerned))... so we've got two prophecies left to fulfill... asteroids (legitimate as the concept is) and then aliens.
All I want is to lead a complete life, relatively free of fear, write some books, make some games, live in a relatively natural setting, etc... there's really no excuse for many of the great ills in the world today, but are some of these fears imagined, or are they real? Is it in the least bit possible that some of these 'edgy' services or technologies are being used more for their good rather than their evil (nuclear power is mostly a success after all, and we haven't destroyed civilization YET!). I dunno... I want to know... and that our government is no longer transparent, that our own 'leader's (for lack of a better word) have no credibility left... it doesn't help.
I'm not an American, but I know that software is used worldwide and any trend of surveillance can and will reach worldwide - some of it already does. But I as a person with no rights in America beyond a tourist's, if I happen to go there, can do nothing. So I ask you now, cry at the top of my lungs, fight! Fight for yourselves, fight for your children, and fight for me. Your tourist, your customer, your fellow soldier, your friend. The best way I can think of is raising this to public awareness. Make it an issue. There's an election in how long? A year? Make sure the party who puts freedom foremost in their list will get the votes. Isn't that the American Way? Stop letting the government and the industry control you. It's you who should, and must, control them. Found organizations. Write to your senator. Spread the word. Get to presidential candidates, their parties, their sponsors. Hopefully, it is not too late now. Fight, because tomorrow it most certainly will be too late. It is up to you to save the free world, and I wish I were exaggerating.
22 years later? People have been noticing this stuff for years. I know many of you won't be a fan of bands such as Rage Against the Machine, but they were singing about "knowing your enemy" back in 1992.
The whole point of 1984 is that you don't notice it happening. It's great that people are starting to realise that the world is a mess, but it's not a new thing.
And this isn't a high and mighty sort of post; I see myself being a sheep many times, it's so hard not to be, and that's where "Big Brother" is so clever.
The enemy is Osama Bin Laden... it has always been Osama Bin Laden...
(two weeks later)
The enemy is Suddam Hussein, it has always been Saddam Hussein...
Of course we are living in 1984, only big brother is a "patriot act".
What took you all so long to realize?
Right now we are on the verge of our society (internationally, not US only) collapsing, historically speaking: there are many conflicts around the world, and the potential for a global war breakout is big.
But this has happened again. In history of Greece, Athens was the mighty superpower that dominated the rest of Greek cities; but the Greek civilisation died a slow and painful death with the Peloponnisian war that lasted 30 years and destroyed everything (and it was a war filled with hate; no rules obeyed).
But then a new world emerged. After a few centuries, it was the Roman empire that fell: divided in two, conquered by Islam and the tribes from the North. Kings reigned Europe and the rest of the western world, for a long period of time; people were opressed by religion and the various kings that had a right of life and death over their people. But this world collapsed too: the French revolution, the American revolution and others brought down the old world.
And then another new world emerged. The world of capitalism...the world of enterprises. The world of profit, where profit is God and machinery is King. Democracy and human rights were given a stronger presence in this new world...it is the world we are today.
But it is not gonna last long. It will fall down, just as the previous worlds. Greed and hunger for power will destroy this world too. People want to control other people, and technology helps them to to do.
The future holds great revolutions, by the people who have nothing to lose; by all those living in the gutter, in the streets, under bridges. Right now these people are a minority..but when they are a majority, the dawn of a new world will be close.
To quote the Declaration of Independence:
"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
This was not Bin Laden. It was Thomas Jefferson. The United States was NOT founded for capitalism, communism, war or peace - it was founded for INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS. Our entire nation was built on this principal, and our nation was and still is unique in its recognition that government derives its powers from its citizenry, that government has no inherent right to exist except as granted by the citizenry, and that if the government repeatedly usurps the power of its citizens, abuses its powers, and generally pursues an agenda that is designed to centralize its power, the it is YOUR DUTY as a CITIZEN to FORCE THE REMOVAL OF YOUR GOVERNMENT.
To the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, Homeland Security, and all the other institutions of government that will invariably read this post:
GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH.
I am one among millions.
When 1984 was released something very close to or having the potential to be very close to what is described in the novel had just been defeated, namely Nazi Germany. Its nice to think of our very plump little lives being the target of some mass conspiracy, but the reality is most of us are not worth the fuel for the imaginary black helicopters that are following us. For some, I suspect this is even more terrifying than Big Brother.
If prinicples were any factor then the cops would bust meth labs and drug dealers year round, not right before the end of the fiscal year so they can justify a large anti-drug budget.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
Saying they're entering your driver's license number is a little drastic. When I worked at kroger 2 years ago we just had to put in date of birth. Granted, laws in your state might be different, but it was probably your DOB going into the computer.
I think a few of you are missing the split.
When we "study 14 hours a day" we expect later to be rewarded with some kind of field where we can work *less*, because of a higher rate per hour.
Those who simply have a lower capacity to study, are forced to take simpler jobs. Then they *work* 14 hours a day *forever*.
The new phrase is "From each, according to their ability to Study; To each, according to the leverage Corporations from making enough desperate people fight against each other".
--TaoPhoenix
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
This is the new wedge issue. Gay marriage may not materialize. The mexican border thing is a way of life for this country rather than a security risk, that's not the new wedge. Abortion has been decided and is in decline (thank God!) Both parties need a wedge issue, a single issue they can shove in single issue voters' faces. Terrorism vs. Freedom is the new wedge. Nothing more than that.
It works like this. If you're a repbulican and you have no ideas, you go to "your base" and bring up the wedge, they are killing unborn babies or the brown skinned terrorists are coming for you. If you're a democrat and you have no ideas, you go to "your base" and bring up the wedge, they want to take away your right to choose what to do with your body or (hopefully it will materialize, the democrats are so fucked right now that they might be too stupid to pull it off) the republicans are taking away your privacy and civil liberties.
It's a fucking wedge issue, nobody here has been wronged in anyway yet and this shit has been going on for years and years, it's not really that new. It's hard to be completely off the grid.
Move to a country that doesn't do that kind of surveillance.
No. In no way shape or form does todays world in any way resemble Orwell's nightmare. To say it does suggests two things:
A) You've never read the book
B) Its a slow news day.
now I'm anybody wants to reach me, i'll be at the Ministry of Love being purified.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Walmart currently DOES aggregate purchases. Three years ago a company I worked for was selling the digital video surveillance apps. Walmart put in place a test program that not only tracked the purchases, but tied it to video feeds.
This means that if they want to see all Snicker bars bought on May 12th in Boise, 5 clicks later they are presented with register shots of everyone in a nice neat list. If you use a credit card or check, they could then pull up all of your orders across all of their stores.
They have scary amounts of data on you, and I can only imagine what type of progress has been made in the past 3 years...
Parent post is rather fierce. These cyclical effects swing in and out. Consider especially that lots of these minimum wage positions are *part time*. That means the opportunity cost of being locked out of anything more useful, being just tired enough from 30 hours at mininum wage to run out of energy to add an extra 25 from a second job PLUS inter-job commute&preparation.
Depending on the "desperation level" of the area, many intelligent candidate workers see these offerings as the traps they are. Depending again on that desperation level, some managers become sharks who grind their staff into the floor.
One chilling comment that stuck with me was the supervisor of an arcade telling me years ago "I work 60 hours a week and clear $250". Are you seeing laziness, or numbing fatigue?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I don't recall who said it, but "We will lose as much freedom as we will tollerate."
*Jimmy "Superfly" Snucka dives Big Brother from the top rope* \m/ O_o \m/
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This has been worrying me for quite a long time now. The sad thing is, I never was a paranoid, though it may be getting hard to tell at this point. The threats I see are very real. Windows collects information about what programs I run and what hardware I run then sends it off to MS and tries to install behind my back a software that allows MS to ensure they have an open back door to your system later when they want it (or anyone else who wishes to hijack the "Genuine Advantage" software.) The government freely passes laws left and right that allow them, in the name of protecting us, to bug our phones and internet connections and continue to push things that are far too anti-capitalist to normally make it through, yet somehow do. The tired old argument is that if you don't like it, then just change it, but, somehow people keep overlooking the fact that an individual without a LOT of free time and money can't actually change very much. The representatives don't listen to an individual -- they actually likely won't even get the letter as it gets screened and automatically responded to by a lower down representative of the representative -- all they listen to are huge numbers, and even then often all they'll listen to are the votes. Unfortunately, votes just say "I don't like this guy's policies as much as the other guy's." That's not saying much. When picking the lesser of two evils, you are still picking an evil. Not to mention that from their point of view it sounds like you are saying "I like this guy's policies" when, in fact, you may hate 99% of them but just hate 100% of the other guy's. So what are you going to do about it? Unless you have the free time and money to run a lot of ads, organize demonstrations, etc, chances are the answer is essentially nothing. They have us essentially locked in so that we just have to do whatever they want now.
Who needs to be paranoid when you can just look at what already exists to see these threats to freedom.
But lori's so hot!
Just like driving a car:
(D) to go forward
(R) to go backward
Orwell's "1984" is the reflexive thought that comes to mind when one thinks of Big Brother-ish tracking of our everyday activities. However, I'd say that the truth is something closer to Walter Mosley's vision of a future where corporations keep tabs on every citizen. The point is that most of this "information-gathering" is profit-motivated.
And the scary part is that a profit-motivated organization is a lot less likely to exercise restraint in the violations of privacy that it is willing to make in order to increase the amount of information it has on each and every customer, employee, and stakeholder.
"The sad state of affairs is that Big Brother probably became a quiet part of our lives a lot earlier. The big question now is: how much worse can it get?"
...
No the big question is... how to fight this development without being locked up for being concidered a terrorist
Big Brother lives by the same rules as the rest of the world. The most important of these is that manpower is expensive. This means that if people, on an individual basis, take extra time (only a minute or two) to fufill requests for information or call and ask some questions of a live person, then modern management will go nuts. Companies and organizations concentrate hard on reducing headcount and making things work more efficiently. Managers up and down the line are evaluated by these measurements. Bottom line employees are too. If you are in a grocery store and the checkout person wants some personal identification for some peaches or anything else, take an extra minute or two to give them the information. It's not hard, just ask a couple of questions about why they want it and make sure the explanation is clear.
This type of behavior causes lines to grow a little bit and things to run a little slower. Computers will notice this sort of thing and flag it. Does it mean the store has a lackadaisical manager who isn't hiring good people or is letting them slack off? The same applies to government organizations.
Much data is collected automatically. There is not much that can be done about that. However, the government has a different, but similar weakness. If you find the government is collecting some piece of information and you wish they would stop, call your representative or senator. Don't complain, just ask for an explanation about why it is needed. Insist on a good explanation. Elected officials have staffs and they cost money. As in most things some staffers are better than others. If voters start chewing up more staffer time the elected one will become unhappy. Hiring more staffers reduces quality which tends to give callers more bad experiences which leads to bad publicity.
Big Brother's weakness is that of every other organization, the bottom line, whether it be money or influence or elected position. Every organization stares at its bottom line for lack of a navel. It takes very little change to catch their notice.
Tristfardd
This discussion makes me think of a discussion waaay back in my college days in the early 90's, at the beginning of the Clinton Administration. Things like the clipper chip and Waco were making some of us a bit paranoid (little did we know things would get much much worse..) and we were discussing how the US might actually become a totalitarian state. Most of my friends had variations on the whole 1984 scenario but I kept telling them how the perfect, modern dictatorship would implement freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc.
And apparently I was right. The powers-that-be today know that a centralized Stalinist gov't would be terribly inefficient and undoubtably unsuccessful at whatever it wanted to do. Much better to have a decentralized economy and system which gives the appearance of freedom while control is still maintained at the top. When you think about it, allowing people to bitch as much as they want about the government is really harmless in most cases. You let the citizens blow off a little steam and, in the end, they'll do little to nothing about wanting to dismantle the state or rid themselves of the current government. In fact, by blowing off steam by writing various mean things in their blog, they'll be convinced they're part of the "system" and able to effect change when, in reality, they're about as powerful as any comrade in the old Soviet system.
But there are small steps which can be taken which will be mostly invisible to the public. Allow people to say what they want but cut them out of the government or corporate job system by denying access if what they wrote on their blogs is too incindiary. For the true troublemakers, silence them with actions seemingly unconnected to their actions. For example, in the near future, the regime could "discover" child porn in a hidden directory on Kos's servers, allowing them to shut everything down in a way which would cause probably roughly 50 percent of Kos's supporters to disavow the man and his efforts.
And they could do things such as create a financial "no-fly" list which would give them the power to arbitrarily freeze the finances of anyone they wish, thus completely locking an individual out of any above-ground commerce. Such lists could also be further extended to all forms of transportation, not just aircraft, meaning an id check for all bus, train, subway tickets and a background check before you're allowed to purchase or license a car, thus severely limiting mobility for any target. This would essentially create an internal passport system in a way that almost no one would really notice.
While we're creating registries, should probably also create one for guns. Of course, such a system won't keep guns out of the hands of criminals but thats not the point. Crime rarely is threatening to the government. Instead, you would want to keep legal, easily-purchased guns out of the hands of anyone who has the potential to be a part of any armed resistance.
Secret detentions could be ramped up a bit. But the key to using all of these new powers is to use them relatively sparingly so that the citizenry never really notices and therefore never really wakes up. The bad things only happen to people who are "terrorist sympathizers", "unpatriotic", "drug dealers", "child pornographers", "tax cheats" and therefore will never happen to me because I'm a good citizen who doesn't complain much and always pays taxes on time. Enemies of the state will never be labeled as such but rather with a label that will easily make the uninformed disavow them.
The jackbooted future will look a lot like the present. Most people, as long as they have the necessities of life and at least a few luxuries, will never protest, never wake up, and will ultimately not stand in the way of whatever the government wants to do. They'll be convinced they're free because they'll face no penalty for looking at that insulting web cartoon of the President. They won't initially like the constant surveillance but eventually they'll get used to it because not on
1. Dont use automated check outs
2. Dont use shit operating systems
3. Research your software/gaming purchases and avoid those that give out information you'd rather keep private
4. Use VOIP and encrypt it, or better yet leave that country and goto a more population friendly location. In fact this goes for a lot of the problems. Other countries just plain arent as distrustful of their population. Go there to one of these other countries and never look back
Yes. It can be their business because you never actually said about who rejected you. For all we know you could have been pissed because a debt counciling service decided not to hire you.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
"Somebody" (sorry) has an article this week that I reached through the Buzzflash.com portal that notes a crucial difference between Orwell and the U.S. We have freedom of speech. Really we do. It just doesn't matter. As long as mass media completes the trifecta with business and government to maintain the Big Lies, it doesn't matter what 15% of the people who use alternative media believe.
The big news this week was the rise in mind share of WMDs. From a low in the 30s, belief that Saddam had WMDs is back in the 50th percentile. There are no facts, no lessons to be learned. The masses only have "opinions of the week" to be molded. And that fabricated social solidarity can coexist very well with a small intelligentsia who see everything differently.
Free speech _and_ totalitarianism -- and totalitarianism all the stronger for the facade of democracy.
This is a serious question. I've never been in a Fry's, don't live anywhre near one. But my understanding is they sell electronics and computer stuff, right? So what the heck is age-restricted that one might purchase there?
I am not a crackpot.
It's only comming from a committee formed by a republican ruled house.. no bias there right?
just the titles alone give me clues as to the fallacies they use to justify their defence of their wealthy backers.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Well. Imagine that not only your clicks are recorded, but also how long you watch on which part of a web page and where your moise pointer rests longer. Imagine that this data is cross-correlated among websites and that you are classified to be a pedophile because you tend to watch websites with children in swimming suites to long. Imagine that your computer tries to recognize faces in front of your web cam and that it recongnizes that you sometimes leave a friend of yours on the computer. Imagine that your computer tries to analyze what you write and passes a warning to other people about it.....
Let the meth makers make their meth and the users burn out their bodies and kill themselves rather quickly. Hell, even legalize the stuff so that it doesn't have to be made in clandestine labs. Darwin's Law: those who are actually stupid enough to try methamphetemine will suffer the consequences. Don't make law-abiding people pay.
15/day. Do you really need to buy more than 15 a day?
Let's say that the dosage is two per day and you're going on a two-week backcountry hiking trip. I'd say yes. Besides, the whole economy-of-scale thing comes into play here - a package of twice the quantity probably costs only half again the cost of the smaller package.
-b.
Oh well...Just to be on the safe side, I think it's best we start learning Newspeak.
The problem with control, *religous included*, since our President seems bent upon including that subject, is that once you have sufficiently crushed people's ability to defend themselves, you can insert provisions that line your pockets.
Disclaimer: This is Slashdot. The previous comment should not be interpreted as an argument against gun control.
Hitler and Stalin would have loved to have all this information available about their citizens.
Resistence against nazi Germany or Stalinist USSR was difficult enough.
With today's sophistication it would be virtually impossible.
That's what people should consider, when they support more and more big brother actions in the name of "fighting the enemy" and "saving democracy".
blanks (108019) wrote: "Every purchase with your CC is tracked."
Perhaps I'm naive, but it was my belief that the big retailers do not touch the CC info, they use a 3rd party to approve the transaction. So the only info they get are transaction and approval codes, and the last 4 dgits of your CC.
That means that the big retailer doesn't know anymore about you than they did before. (Unless you use a legit loyalty card, then all bets are off.)
Now at a tiny retailer, esp. if the form is manually filled out, you're vulnerable to a scam. (I doubt Ed's Pizza is tracking your purchases through it's world-wide chain of 2 stores.)
So the only place that knows everything about the transaction (ID, amount, place and time) would be the approval and credit card companies. And I think perhaps we're just a bit too worried here, because they hate each other and unfunded mandates from the government. I think greed and stupidity will prevent inertia-less data sharing for quite a while.
Come on, we're all smart people here, we can each of us figure out how this COULD work. The question is, are we smart enough to realize how it DOESN'T work?
Absolutely correct! I used to buy my loratidine + decongstant at BJ'S Wholesale Club - don't start with the "bj" jokes, guys - in packs of 45 for about $28 for the lot. That comes down to about - what - 70 cents for each dose, roughly, and I didn't have to buy against for 6 weeks. Suddenly, I went down to get more and they don't sell it. Why? BECAUSE IT'S MORE THAN 15 PER DAY!
So now I'm stuck with having to pay at least 95 cents per dose because I can't take advantage of economies of scale, and I have to make three separate purchases in order to get the same quantity!
God damned government!
As bad as it has gotten, we are going to see it get MUCH worse in the next 5 - 10 years. I am constantly reseaching this exact topic and there seems to be a consistent observable pattern. They play on the masses desire for convenience. Restrictive measures happen as well, but usually take more effort and often waving the t3rr03ist flag to gain support, thus they creep in a bit more slowly. Convenience is the big seller. Any time you hear about ANY great new [electronic] convenience making your life that much easier (and that's easier to reach the goal that they have chosen for you which you want terribly of course, ie: consumption, accumulation of wealth, hot women/men, your own top 40 music video, &c.) you can almost be completely certain that there getting closer to making you live in a pod ("I didn't say it would be easy, I just said it would be the truth")("I know this steak isn't real".."put me back in the pod").
Aaron Russo's new film opened yesterday:
http://www.freedomtofascism.com/
And don't forget INFOWARS
http://www.infowars.com/
Believe it.
Most of the people earning minimum wage aren't the primary providers for their family.
All of the people who are the primary providers who are earning min wage can't provide for their family (unless everyone else in the family who can work, does work). So you have fathers and mothers who slave away at mindless jobs, their kids grow up parentless, form gangs to find some kind of human contact, and end up costing society far more than providing a decent living wage would have cost.
An intelligent species would recognize that many jobs are a waste of time for intelligent beings, and develop technological solutions.
Instead we import an underclass even more desperate than our own underclass, and turn a blind eye to the long term costs to our advancement as a people.
Our present 'Washington leadership' is focused on keeping their position at the top of the heap, they don't want things to get better for the poor, they want to keep the poor right where they are. The rich like their bullet proof cars, their increasingly walled cities, their stark separation from everyone else, as it re-enforces their position as the elite.
So instead of leading the way to a better America for all Americans, they import the best and brightest from Mexico to mow our lawns, preventing change in Mexico, and keeping our poor 'in their place'. Which is right where the 'washington elite' wants them to stay.
When the country falls into chaos, politicians talk about 'patriotism'. Lao-Tzu
I'm sick of this week minded shit... "How much worse can it get?" Take a mother-fucking stand! The question is not how much worse can it get, but what can we do here and now to take it back. What series of actions will bring government back in line as a protector and servant of the people? I'm sick of hearing what's-his-nuts at sun saying: "Privacy is dead, deal with it."
Words.
Just Words.
This is not immutable; people say shit that serves their interest, true or not. McNeeley says that shit so he can sell more computers for running more databases and still sleep at night. Just because this is the current state of things does not mean that this is the way it has to be. Find a way. FIGHT. Take YOUR world back.
Looking at a calendar, it seems 1984 has been and gone. I'm living in the UK, and we are all pretty constantly monitored and measured. It seems that this is how it is. Any deviance from a life of being a model citizen and the world becomes a very painful place.
Monitored at work, monitored in town, monitored when shopping, monitored when travelling. At what point did government stop being a mechanism for providing essential civic services and start being a ruling class?
However, there seems to be no organised coherent opposition to this happening. How can this be?
I told you already that privacy only exists when you take active measures to ensure it exists.
There are no measures you can take against the treachery of those you trust. You started this tread with a little talk about the friendly grocer of years gone by who knew all about you. Today the grocer not only keeps a database of those things, he's selling you out. His information, combined with that from everyone else who's selling you out can be retrieved effortlessly by complete strangers with power and used against you. The only remedy to such invasion is to massively inconvenience yourself by going cash only, but with RFID chips your cash will tell on you the same way your credit card does. Good luck getting your employer to give you a large portion of your paycheck in cash to get around your bank's big sell out. Because you can not spend anonymously, everything you do and everywhere you go is known. Getting around it is nearly impossible. Because you have a non free sore of value, you are a slave.
That being said, you can do as recommended to try to keep some privacy in your private papers. Encryption of email, community anonymizers and other good practices should be encouraged. The problem is that the vast majority of computer users are in the hands of the sellouts of the computer world, M$ and Apple, which do not provide the tools you need and have proved less than trustworthy if they did.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
For every 1 person that gives a shit, there are 10 more that are too stupid or self-involved to care.
Just like driving a car:
(D) to go forward
(R) to go backward
Everyone focuses on the "Big Brother" stuff like cameras in the TV, data mining, etc. That's not what Orwell was most scared of. What Orwell WAS most scared of is what's already been here for a very long time: the military industrial complex.
Ambiguous enemies that change allegiances, or sit on both sides, never-ending wars, patriotic diatribes with no real meaning other than to placate the masses and feed their bloodlust in order to continue the wars. That's the part of 1984 that was most telling. Yet Fox News would make one think that type of world is The American Way.
Please mod parent down, thx.
Cliff writes The sad state of affairs is that Big Brother probably became a quiet part of our lives a lot earlier. The big question now is: how much worse can it get?
That is completely the wrong question. The question is NOT how much worst can it get, the question is when are we going to doing something about it! When are we going to stop accepting and starting refusing?
Asked for identification when buying peaches?!?!? Fucking blow me, Bitch! Raise a fucking stink, in a very loud voice tell the clerk you won't provide ID so you can buy peaches. Make the clerk get the supervisor/manager and explain what an asinine policy they have. Show up every day with a shopping cart full of stuff plus eight peaches, then when asked for ID say no and just walk out.
Fucking Christ on a crutch! Get a god-damn backbone, America!
If the govt becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law, it invites man to become his own law, it invites anarchy
Add in facial recognition software and the situation is open to all kinds of abuse.
That's why I think it might be a good idea to learn to use theatre makeup. Though I used to work in theatre I didn't learn to use makeup. Thinking about it, I realize the college where I was involved in theatre didn't have a class on it, maybe it was part of different classes curricula, say acting but I never took acting so I don't know.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Freck: "I got a lot of problems no one else has."
Barris: "More than you think, and more every day. This is a world becoming progressively worse, can we not agree on that?
"What's on the dessert menu?"
[[ Welcome to Rome 2K. Welcome to the Brave New World. Welcome to the Animal Farm. Welcome to 1984. Blind, unrestrained capitalization naturally tends to squeeze every drop of humanity out of its core machinery to achieve its primary profit objective. Humans who seek to co-exist peacefully, cognizant of their environment, in order to achieve their ethical social aims in the course of their personal and professional lives, are free to expend energy and affect material gains and losses with impunity.
Defense spending makes no one wealthy except reptilian industrialists whose profits from war and disaster are used to effectively prop up a puppet government: Now they can effectively appoint the rulers, compose the rules, shape the debate with poison pills and straw men, and to write the official history. They have placed themselves in control of Government, and in getting away with so many overtly illegal actions have at last proved that their formula works.
And once in control, what's their vision for Humanity? Well, they haven't got one. Every ounce of energy goes into developing strategies, getting money, currying favor, and making deals in order to remain in power, ad nauseum. They have no plan for the general improvement of the body politic. These are cattlement and ranchers, intermingling with reptilian wealth.
Whereas a Human despot might take over the country and start instituting a mandatory educational program -- as Saddam Hussein was wont to do -- American despots would prefer a generation of mindless sycophants, kneeling to salute the American God Machine, drugged, diabetic, deceived, and dimly fleeing (in blessed petrol-powered vehicles) to state-mandated churches and recruiting stations.
Our lives go on, largely unmonitored as long as we comply. Every year over 45 thousand Americans die in automobile accidents. We die in vast numbers, ground up by a capitalist machine that doesn't even pay into the system that maintains the roads. And yet, instead of rationally fearing the drive home, they would have us fearing terrorists, dirty bombs, and Saddam Hussein.
If we want to end the cycle of power, surveillance, despotism, totalitarianism, the way is clear. Remove the influence of the corporate wing. Just as the constitution bans the marriage of Church and State due to its irrational tendencies, it must ban the marriage of Corporate and State to insulate government from usurpation by a machine of rampant, heartless exploitation. In other words, to insulate we the people, the body politic, from Fascism.
Do we already have Fascism in America? I think it is clear that we do. Right now in the United States hate-mongers who demonize intellectuals, spread lies and propaganda daily, parrot one another ceaselessly, and bury all meaningful discourse have become well-known -- even popular -- media figures. This Executive branch has been unprecedented in giving an air of validity to these figures, appearing on their programs (where they won't be challenged or questioned) while pretending that they are in a rational, impartial, and objective forum.
Meanwhile, everybody knows what's going on. We know the game they're playing. We know everything they say is on a propaganda track, and not a track of rational inquiry. We know they are going around the world, sending the people's military to foreign lands to act as human targets, to guard the bases and pipelines they're building for themselves. Everybody in the solar system knows George Bush has no real opinions, interests, or power, that he's just a good lackey who can do what he's told, that the real policy-makers are unknown and unaccountable.
Substance D. Deception.
When we finally care enough to do something about getting screwed-over by the powerful, what will we -- you and I, Joe Citizen -- be al
-- thinkyhead software and media
Bill Clinton was accused of being a "serial liar". Bush lies to Congress, lies to the world, and lies to you, personally, on tv and in the paper, and any disagreement, no matter how mild, is "partisan spin". We have the official Miistry of Truth, Faux News, as "the most trusted news source".
Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy for more than 20 years, and Hitler's ally, and, as the *first* fascist ruler, spoke with some authority when he liked to say, "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power." Meanwhile, Dick Cheney's golden parachute just ended this year, I believe, from Halliburton, recipient of multi-billion mo-bid US federal contracts from Iraq to New Orleans... and does anyone have the nerve to tell me that such does not fit the definition of fascism? (If so, I suggest you have a seance, or get a oieja board, and argue with Mussolini's ghost.)
This is, literally, what Orwell warned about. Meanwhile, the American Christian Fascist party, aka the Republican Party, seemed to have thought it was a game plan.
If you voted for them, you, personally, are a Good German. If you didn't vote, under the heading of "I don't like anyone", then you did NOTHING to fight it, and it's *your* fault. "The only thing necessary for evil to win is for good [persons] to do nothing."
And you'll note that this business-oriented government has allowed our manufacturing capacity to be destroyed, literally, in the name of "globalisation". We can't even make all our own steel....
mark, and yes, I *am* frustrated by folks who bite their nose to
spite their face
I've been reading Slashdot a long time. We've been hearing "it's 1984!" since 1997.
I love this sig. I agree completely. Do I speed? Maybe on occassion...by being inattentive to my odometer...but unless you are going to travel for over 30 minutes, speeding is insignificant. I can't tell you how many times I've been passed by someone who is going 15 to 20 MPH more than me only to be sitting next to them at the light at the bottom of the Interstate off-ramp that's 5 miles down the road. Net effect of speeding vs not? Zilch.
I've used much this same quote on my daughter who will be of driving age in about 10 months....hopefully it sinks in.
Layne
Here's the difference. In 1984, Ingsoc had the resources and the devotees to go after every single Winston Smith. In real life, if your girlfriend buys 4 peaches and they take down her social security and mother's maiden name, what can the government do with that? The RIAA is an example of a group that has tried to do something with this mass surveillance data - and we've all seen how inaccurate their results have been. If the government wants to make the people fear it by attacking people at random, they won't spend the effort on collecting inaccurate data.
Yeah some CEOs true value for sitting on his can and talking on the phone all day and most likely stripping the assets of the company and running it into the ground is 30 million a year plus a golden parachute, pleeeeeaaaasseee make me barf a lot.
The only difference between the CEO and janitor is that daddy paid for the CEO to go to business school so he (or she) could recite an endless string of meaningless buzz terms like "action items," "team empowerment," "rightsizing" and other such meaningless drivel that often leads to cruel outcomes such as outsourcing that hurt BOTH American and third world workers.
When people wake up to the fact that wages and salaries AREN'T set by the market but by what owners (and their parasitic apologists economists) are willing to pay (themselves a lot and those that actually make and design things very little) then we will all be much better off.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
The world would be a far better place if people actually did something about what is making them miserable, rather than hiding inside a bottle, squandering their lives.
Easier said than done. Two months shy of ten years ago I was hit while riding my bike, I rode more than 100 miles a week, after my classes in college when I was hit by a moving van driven by someone who had a record of causing accidents. While I was in a coma the docs told my family it would be a miracle if I lived. I would strongly argue that with those docs now, my sister told me that after I came out of the coma I was screaming everyone to let me die, and I wish I had died. I am now a survivor of a TBI, Traumatic Brain Injury. Though I don't use drugs and only drink occasionally, because of my injury I'm not supposed to drink at all, I frequenly wish I could get and remain drunk and/or stoned. The only think stopping me from doing so is that I never did like to get drunk or stoned. And you want to say just be "happy"?
FalconShould there be a Law?
Alright, lets set the record straight. If you live in the USA, Every single right you think you have can be taken from you in an instant. Pretty much anyone anywhere can gather or purchase ALL of your private information in a matter of minutes. But being in the state that america is in currently, the government can justify these violations of our freedoms by citing terrorism and 9/11.
Hahahahahahahaha.
Name any job below the level of board member where you're expected to work less.
Wow, that does explain the large amount of Art, Music, and english majors I know. It is pretty much known that an art degree is about as good as no degree, but this poor morons persist in persuing thier dreams at the expense of money. All the time and money I invested in my liberal arts degree (philosophy) was a waste of time, and I must have been stupid not to look at how much money I could be making in something souless, like business.
I'm glad there is an equal amount of disdain coming from the other direction, where people in the more liberal feilds laugh at the "pratical" ones as a bunch of greedy, heartless, capitalist sheep. Congratulations, your ambition will lead you to money, alienated kids, and eventually a heart condition.
Salut!
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Er, why are you trying to equate addictive narcotics that are produced, supplied, and distributed with the express intent of being addictive narcotics, with swimming pools? Are swimming pools designed to drown children? I mean, talk about comparing apples with oranges, you are comparing filing cabinets with a three ring circus.
One, not all illegal drugs are "produced, supplied, and distributed with the express intent of being addictive narcotics", ever hear of medical marijuana? Do you know where a painter's "canvas" originated? Hemp or canabis aka marijuana. Boy, Thomas Jefferson must of been a big dupe dealer because of all that hemp he grew on his farm. And maybe we should just rollup and smoke his most famous writing, the Declaration of Independence. And the cloths made from hemp was bad as well. Fact is is hemp was perfectly legal until some wealthy and powerful industrialists pushed to have hemp made illegal with the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. The US government still encouraged farmers to grow hemp during WWII in part by making and show farmers the movie "Hemp For Victory".
So, no I'm not comparing apples to oranges, I'm comparing some things that are dangerous to other things that are dangerous as well.
FalconShould there be a Law?
OK, you're "willing to pay".
Poor people have to pay too. Everybody does. Prices for everything go up.
We have a name for this: inflation
You might as well suggest that we just print more money to fix all our problems.
Because I'm sick of my health care costs skyrocketing because of dumbasses who choose to put stupid things into their own bodies. It is my business.
That's relatively easy to solve, and is already happening. Let insurance companies charge more for risky behavior. Actually I've been denied health insurance because of an injury, from an accident the only way it could be said I caused is by being in the wrong place at the wrong tyme. For auto insurance every ticket causes insurance to go up, the same can be done with health insurance, because I smoke I pay more for the insurance I finally got, the state has health insurance for those who have been denied insurance.
FalconShould there be a Law?
And, ironically, I can carry super-spicy hot sauce in a real biohazard container (purloined from a hospital by my friend) in my carryon lugage and not get asked ONCE about it assuming there is something like a nail clipper nearby.
Ayn Rand is on your wishlist. So very special...
...here's hoping all our precious wishes come true next holiday season ;)
My wish list?
Die! You hypocritical, backward, self-righteous, half-cocked, daddy's brat.
NV/USA: requires name, address, picture id, DOB, and THUMB PRINT,
They also must keep pretty good tract because they only allow one box @ customer @ week.
I refuse to give up my finger print unless I have been arrested for committing some crime.
It is Insane to punish sick people for the possible crime someone else might commit.
"Never try to teach a pig to sing. It simply wastes your time and truely annoys the pig"
Until some better structural solution (and don't give me any fulla'-holes 'isms) comes along, the only real solution is to keep the minimum wage at the realistic value of minimum wage work. At the moment, folks seem to think "$5.15".
I think I've got a solution though I'm not sure how well it is. Take some multiple say 100 or 1000 and every percentage the ceo and other execs make over that for the lowest paid fulltime employee raise their taxes. And don't allow the the corporation to write it off. If an exec wants more pay then they have to pay their employees more.
Of course I'd be against raising a person's income tax as I think income taxes on people should be eliminated. Not corporations just individual income. Instead institute sales taxes and user fees. But the corporation could see their tax rise.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I like my wording better.
BTW, I have a friend who is going to be forced to register for life because of a "crime" he committed 15 years ago - a "crime" which did not have any victims (except my friend, a victim of the government). This is because recently the federal government passed an ex post facto law which increases the penalty for past crimes - and no one in America is making noise about it (except to applaud it).
Seriously - anyone who cares about their lives or their freedom, get out of the USA as soon as you can. Germany, 1936 . . . America, 2006. The similarities are striking. I don't think there's any saving America, other than an eventual invasion by Chinese or Indian troops in the endgame of the next world war.
Baldur
The funny thing is that people are totally happy with letting companies and goverment track them. Every purchase with your CC is tracked. Every purchase with an "awards card" is tracked, and people are totally fine with this type of tracking.
Some may be but not all. When I can I pay cash not CC or DC. I'll even go to the atm and withdraw money instead of handing over a card. The one place I don't do this is at Barnes and Noble as I've joined their membership program. It has saved me quite a bit of money. Like one book for a class in college, the college bookstore had it for around $83 but B&N had it a dollar cheaper then there was the 10% off saving me almost $10. Even there though I'll pay with cash most of the tyme.
FalconShould there be a Law?
There's Frys Electronics, which is who you are thinking of. They do sell food items, but primarly just snacks. I don't think the sell things that need ID, or peaches for that matter. I am talking about Frys Food and Drug, a large chain of grocers that happens to have a store near my house. They are as any other grocer meaning in the states which allow it, they carry a full range of alcoholic products.
[i]We have four boxes with which to defend our freedom: the soapbox, the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box. Apply in that order. - Author unknown [/i] Has it gotten that bad yet? You decide. We've managed to bungle using the first two. Nobody has been brought to trial to use the third and I pray to G*d we never have to use the fourth.
The more I get to know people the more I like my dogs.
What they forget, and we must never forget, is that they, work for us. We must always control them, it is a reasonable requirement and responsibility of citizenship.
Corrupt and openly evil methods are being employed to change our societies and lives, for the worse. Our law makers are failing us, they seek to bypass our courts and forums for fair trial and debate.
They pour billions into the media to promote cynical and false rationales for war. They lie outrageously and are unapolagetic when caught. Their have no real justification for taking our liberties. Our opinions and votes are being bought and sold, we are manipluated during elections by sophisticated simulations and media campaigns.
I respectfully submit that all people must always remember, such methods and "weapons", can and must point both ways. The founding fathers protected the freedom of the press, now the press is the people, that freedom must be strengthened, extended and adapted to this brave new world.
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes (who will watch the watchers) was an age old philosophical conundrum, that never has had a good answer. Or does it?
Imagine if we, "the people", use the (new technologies) to protect our freedoms from political erosion and abuse. Isnt that our right?, isn't that what what "freedom of the press" was about?, we simply need to bear newer, better arms, to protect freedom.
Right now media and technology is being used for the ethical equivalent of Arming Bears (not a typo).
Imagine for a moment:
All police stations, interview rooms, phones, police vehicles, all public administration offices and meeting rooms, any public space, any public employee, any publicly elected official was monitored (watched) 24/7/365 with the information feed stored and/or published to the internet and accessible to any interested citizen. They wanted a public job didn't they? Lets make it really public.
Imagine that we, watch the watchers.
We do have the right, we employ them, its been well established that all employers have a right to monitor all employees. Set up Mandatory video feeds, email traps, phone taps and random cameras active 100% of the time in all agencies, and offices.
Invasive? certainly. Infringing of their liberties and privacies, nah, they are just employees. And even if it is, why is that worse than the invasions commonly committed against yourself and myself.
Why shouldn't a public offical be continuously recorded and the data publicly "reviewed for quality and performance"?
Imagine how useful it would be for a court to "play back" a police officers interview with a complaining suspect. It should normally work in the officers favor... As they say, if they really have done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to fear.
I am serious, no kidding folks. We, the people, must always watch the watchers.
So lets do it! Lets use the public and the net, to monitor the agencies and officials, starting now!
There is no god; get over it already! Never exchange a walk on part in the war, for a lead role in a cage.
as for the leviathan... what is it that keeps most people from driving as fast as they wish? why don't more people leave grocery stores with carts full of food without paying? why aren't there more occurrences of deadly "road rage?" fear of punishment. fear of who punishing? the leviathan - the law of the land; the maker of the law; the only one who can punish with impunity.
personally, i have a sick feeling that this country is sliding more and more out of a democracy into an oligarchy; just something else that supports hobbes' ideas that man is inherently selfish and bad.
honestly, i have not delved into locke's treatise on government, i've only read parts of his treatise on human understanding; any comments i make on locke would only serve to magnify my ignorance. although, i see a distinct perpendicularity between hobbes and locke in the consent to be governed, which seems to be the only thing they agree on. so it appears that the major difference between the two ideas of governmental function stem from two theories about how people would act in a "state of nature."
Unless you have a pre-existing mental condition or something disturbing happens while you are under the influence, in which case it is likely you won't be able to handle it and will have a "bad trip" and possibly need some psychological treatment afterwards. If you had ever actually seen a "hit of acid" or knew how tiny an active dose was you would know better than to spout about "contamination". A normal dose of LSD is about 150 micrograms, most street LSD these days is even weaker than that. It's typically applied to a tiny little piece of paper or is encased in gelatin (again, very tiny). Even assuming 100% of the paper or gelatin was "contamination" of some sort it would be insignificant unless someone was intentionally trying to poison you, the total size of the "dose" is so tiny that the vast majority of chemicals/drugs would have no effect on the human body. Another point about dosage levels, after they first discovered the drug they spent a lot of time trying to find out at what level it became toxic (i.e. at what dose an overdose occurs) - they never found it. Once you hit about 500 micrograms the effects don't get any stronger or last any longer, you will have a very powerful trip at 500 micrograms but even going up to 10 grams there was no change in any test subject. They gave up at that point. LSD is, physiologically, one of the most potent and least toxic substances known to man. Psychologically it's something else entirely. As someone who has done it on more than one occasion I can say I would recommend it to anyone I thought had the strength of mind to stay in control during the experience and not flip out, it's an interesting experience and I learned a lot about how my mind is put together while under the influence. What's unfortunate is that LSD is very hard to come by these days, it's not a profitable drug and is fairly difficult to produce. Most LSD you find these days
(if you can find any) is extremlely weak and tends to be overpriced, the curse of the non-addictive recreational drug!
There are a lot of smokers who aren't addicted. My wife usually smokes one cigarette a day, sometimes she goes days without smoking. She just doesn't fiend for them like a junkie. I've seen her go weeks without smoking and not be bothered. I personally smoke several cigarettes a day, I would say I'm mildly addicted to them in that I do start fiending for a cigarette (it's nowhere near as bad as my coffee addiction fortunately!). However I've never had any problem quitting for whatever reason (unlike coffee!). I needed to save money so I went several months without smoking, after the first two days it wasn't a big deal - I started back up because I remembered how much I enjoyed it and missed hanging out with other smokers (smoking is a great way to meet people). My mother is very senstive to smoke so when she stays with us I don't smoke, it's really not a big deal. My wife and I continue to smoke because we enjoy it. Neither of us smokes more than a pack a day even when we are smoking at our most heavy and if you look up the actual science on smoking we're really not at a hugely increased risk for cancer. I've talked to a lot of other smokers about this and many of them are the same way as us, I've met a few who fit the stereotype about smoking being really hard to quit but many of the smokers (and ex-smokers) I know barely smoke and/or have never had a hard time quitting. Based on the smokers I have known I would say something like 1 in 50 smokers is actually like a junkie when it comes to cigarettes - they smoke more than one pack a day, they start wigging out if they want a cigarette and can't have one, they can't quit even if they desperately want to, etc. I know smoking is bad for you but a lot of things in life are bad for you. With the amount I smoke the risk of it killing me are significantly lower than they are of me dying in a car accident, and with the amazing pace of technological progress chances are doctors will be able to grow me a new pair of lungs within the next couple of decades if I ever need them.
The City of Chicago installed surveillence cameras in my neighborhood last week. One happens to be directly outside the front door of my condo building. There has been no public discussion and there has no discussion with the condo association in particular. We all went to work one day and when we came home it was installed... along with three others within a four-square-block radius. This is not a dangerous neighborhood, nor has it ever been during my 10-year residence.
Yes. 1984 is here.
When it comes time to start thinning the populace, it won't be done by rail car.
The idea here is that all the Semites are on the chopping block; both Jew and Muslim. This is why the religions were set up the way they have been; specifically to divide and conquer. Semitic DNA lends that human form greater power and awareness after the energetic 'shift' we are getting close to. Our overlords don't want that. This is why the Jews have been persecuted and set up throughout history. This is why they are being set up right now for annihilation. (The world is already getting heavily pissed off with them. It's just a matter of time before they get wiped off the map. If you have friends in Israel, advise them to get out now while they still can.)
The white races are next. The Chinese are the ones earmarked to contain the next race. They are by design more suited to 'obeying' in systems of selfishness. Here's a neat story: The Chinese and Taiwanese were caught up in a difficult political mess. The American diplomatic corps was called upon to comment. They wanted to take a neutral stance on the situation, and they wanted their statement to reflect this. Their translators informed them that this was impossible. "It is not possible to make a statement about a political decision which does not carry a tone which either agrees with or disagrees with the action." This caused the American delegation some consternation. "We want to be NEUTRAL. We do not want our statement to carry any emotional opinion or judgment."
Impossible.
This suggests that the Asian culture is designed in such a way that conflict and hierarchical thinking is built into its basic structure. When language will not allow you to emotionally dissociate yourself from a problem, how will this cause one to grow as an individual? Systems of open networking and sharing are that much more difficult to achieve, and this fits well into the game of the overlords who feed on pain and chaos.
Then there are the Crop Circles and UFO's. Whether people like it or not, these phenomenon not only exist, but are a significant linchpin in the whole picture of human culture as it stands today. To ignore them is shortsighted. The truth of the matter is that we are food for higher beings for whom time and space are not obstacles. --Where it is easy to set up religions and groom the human experience so that we are herded in certain directions. Look at how exquisitely human religion has been set up to create a focal point of fear and chaos. --The whole war in the Middle East is directly a result of religious differences. For aliens, fear and pain are food. When people die in torture, the outflow of negative energy which sustains an energetic being is enormous. Imagine a whole planet's worth of people dying in fear and pain? (But then we have, of course, been taught that such energetic spheres of existence do not exist. That Chi is a falsehood. That TeeVee's James Randi is a man of wisdom.)
It is estimated by some that 97% of the human population will be consumed. As such, it is wise to keep in mind that you are here to grow as souls which are indestructible and which will live again and again. --So focus on that; focus on helping your neighbors. We are here to learn the lessons of love and knowledge. There is nothing to fear except ignorance and the inward desire to act in selfish ways.
Here's a very good book available for download which you might find interesting. . . (it's about 450 kb. Right click to save.) It doesn't mention anything about the above points I noted, but it does offer a way through.
Good luck.
-FL
I don't know what sorts of drug users you know but I have only met a few who did drugs to "make the pain go away". They were all alcoholics though, manic-depressive artistes! I've known people who have used heroin for more than a decade. They live in a fucking mansion and drive a brand new Jag. They do it for fun and relaxation, maybe they are addicted but they seem to know what they are doing, neither of them has ever OD'd. They sure as hell don't need to rob or kill to buy their smack and god knows they've got nothing to feel pain about, they're happy and well-adjusted people who have been amazingly succesful in life. I've known hundreds upon hundreds of pot heads, most of the are suburbanites who drive their kids to soccer in SUVs. Taking drugs to deal with "pain" is largely a myth. Most people do drugs because they want to have a good time. Most people who do drugs aren't drug addicts anymore than I'm an alcoholic because I drank a beer last night.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hey lookie, it's another fucking PNAC cyberwar
- Drive your car
- Board a plane, train, or bus
- Enter any federal building
- Open a bank account
- Hold a job
This bill was passed into law on May 11, 2005 by President Bush. It's to be fully implemented by May 11, 2008 at the very latest.Don't believe me? Have a look at the official congressional documentation on the Real ID Act - H.R. 418. Are you wondering how they got this past everyone? They attached it to the Emergency Supplmental Appropriations Act - H.R. 1268 bill, a bill for funding our troops in Iraq. It was passed into law as US Public Law 109-13. I mean who would want to have voting against support of our troops on their voting record, right?
Interested in more information? Want to join in the fight? Take the No National ID pledge. Regardless of your "religious" affiliations, this is certainly a worthwhile cause to contribute to, so they can continue to fight this law.
The National ID card will grant the ability for the Government to apply economic sanctions on an individual level. I hope you find this as disturbing as I do.
Back in the 70s, when minimum wage was more fair (about $7-8 an hour, adjusted) and our world was not falling apart. It was only starting a hopeless decline, which was not caused be the preceding decades of better wages.
The signs of doom were about 50 years ago but wasn't apparent until strong momentium built up 2 decades later. We then entered into mass denile in the 80s while it was only made worse. Some would say the point of no return started around the time of Nixon, some say JFK. Despotism has been slowly growing with only the rate of decline slowing during certain periods. In other words, for 50 years its been 1 step forward, >1 steps back.
History will be on the side of those who saw the trend without 20/20 hindsight.
hahahahaha...i found that hilarious but only because it's sadly true.
You seem to be implying a linear progression of state repression of individual rights, which seems off to me. It waxed in the 1950s during McCarthyism, then waned until the end of the 1960s when COINTELPRO et al reared their ugly heads. Then it waned again in the aftermath of Executive, FBI and CIA overreach. The 1970s and 1980s did not see an increase in government intrusion. The war on drugs in the 1990s slowly moved it up, but it wasn't until the reaction to 9/11 that we saw such eggregious violations of basic freedoms.
I think there's a strong tendency when we look at American history to assume that the government has been increasingly encroaching on our freedoms with each succeeding decade, and that this is somehow a force outside our control. But the violations always pop up during wars.
The post-9/11 era was quickly characterized as a "war" than the more appropriate "hunt for pirates" I would prefer to use. It's not too late for Americans to understand that thinking of this as a "war" is a simpleminded and counterproductive way to deal with a complex situation. I would suggest that already American popular opinion is shifting, and the Bush Administration may have already reached the zenith of its Big Brother powers. What the legislature gives, it can take away.
My main point in this discussion is that fatalism doesn't help us make government respect our freedoms. Political action does. It is possible to influence government, but it takes time and effort, and it can't be accomplished with a silver bullet. I think we've grown so used to instant, technological solutions that we're impatient with human political processes, which are inherently difficult and time-consuming.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Neither Gandhi nor King supposedly masturbated.
Take off every 'ZIG' !!
I was at a Krogers, and me and my mom decided to do the Self-Scan, as we had only a few items. I'm happily scanning along, when I get to the beer. Me, I keep scanning, but the computer - too smart for it's own good. Beer. Must show ID. Or be terminated. So my mom digs out her ID and shows it to the lady. She shakes her head no.
:-/. 21... 21... 21...
Allegedly, a minor can not scan beer. How the holy hell I'm going to get drunk scanning beer (looook at the pritty liiight...) is beyond me, but long story short, Mom had to take the beer, do exactly the same thing I was doing and put it in the cart. I'm a minor, so kill me. Send me to court for scanning a beer...
And I didn't get any of it...
If it weren't for that darned thing about being polite, there's something to be said for the phrase, "Don't get your panties in a wad..." (I'm just scanning the beer. No drinking. Just scanning. Won't kill you. (Or me.))
Come to think of it. I wasn't scanning beer. I was scanning a cardboard box. Welcome to the land of the "free". (You may all sleep peacefully, knowing that minors shall not be abusing the powers of a barcode reader!) </rant>
Ok, that makes sense for peaches, but what if your credit card gets stolen and is used to buy thousands of dollars worth of items, or a gun that gets used in a murder, or something illegal and the person didn't get caught for some length of time because no one ever checks ID? Granted, if you report it stolen, those transactions will be cleared...eventually, but there's a chance that that won't happen until after everything's said and done on the part of the criminal.
Ok yes, if you pay with check or credit card then your id better be checked. This is something that really agravates me where I live, almost no one checks id. And I recently heard something about how VISA isn't requiring id checks for purchase of up to a certain amount, $15.00 I think. That's BS, legally a cc holder is required to pay up to something like $50 even if their card is stolen. Even if not true though I don't want anymore risk of my id being stolen. Having your id stolen can ruin your life.
Think about it, any application you fill out and turn in to the company has enough information on it to not only steal your ID, but pretty much erase you completely in the public's eye.
That's a big reason I wouldn't share any personal data if I don't believe it's needed. I don't and haven't filled out any application requesting financial info or personal data in several years. Well I provided some personal data about a year ago when I had to see a psychologist, I had to see her for an evaluation for my SSI, I'm on disability.
all anyone really needs to steal another's ID is your full name and date of birth. From there, with enough digging and a little social engineering, any other information can be found.
Date of birth and full name aren't even needed really, social engineering can get that info for you. But why make it any easier? Kevin Metnick has shown, and testified to congress on how easy it is to get this info.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The limited liability corporation that is now considered a person, and that is under legal obligation to return maximum profit to investors creates incentives to lie. The reason is simple if you can produce a product for the least cost by polluting the environment, and screwing the workers, and consumers don't know the conditions the product is made in you will make the most profit and the greatest return on investment. Thus it's in your self interest to lie to your customers about the way your product is produced. This lying in turn destroys the transparent information consumers need for the market to operate correctly under "rational actor theory" which is a fundamental premise of economics. Corporations thus actually destroy markets and tend towards monopoly, lying, and corruption. It is this sort of blatant contradiction that is at the heart of economic theory and which plays out in the real world in the disgusting exploitation seen in economic globalization that makes me loath economists as apologists for evil that causes suffering. Nike ring a bell? Microsoft? Union Carbide in Bhopal? Do I really need to keep giving examples of how this plays out or do you get the point already?
And yes there is an alternative it's co-ops that share profits fairly, small businesses, open source software development, and other such business models that allow for multiple actors in a market thus allowing for competition, yet without the blatant exploitation and degraded environment the corporate capitalist model inevitably produces. Visit your local food co-op, community garden, and fire up Ubuntu Linux some time. You might learn something far more valuable than you will learn from an economics text book.
Don't assume all us "hippy" alternative people are stupid and haven't thought this out.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
In some ways corporations are more socialist than co-ops ironically. Again the profit motive encourages large corporations to externalize their costs by say dumping pollution into the environment
where the costs of the sickness the pollution causes are born by society at large. Co-ops not operating under the constraints of the profit system have much less pressure to externalize their costs and thus ironically despite being collectives operate overall in a far less socialist fashion than large corporations. Look up externalities in that "dismal science" "business economics" text book of yours. Or do they skip talking abpout externalites now days? Hmmmmmm...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
"1984" on the front, "Just a little behind schedule" on the back. Quite prophetic.
Skeptical people might ask how improving mindfulness will solve political problems. The fact is, it won't-- it will just put them in perspective.
Can the Right System solve our political problems for us? It can certainly help us on the way, but any working system will have the right mindset to back it up. While with any crooked mindset, you can pervert anything.
Just sitting in a cave somewhere feeling great while doing breathing excercises and meditating will do very little practical. Also sitting in front of the PC at home complaining on an online forum does much the same.
It has everything with our mindfullness and actions, not just mindfullness alone. True spirituality doesn't just go into the mind only, but also out in the body and earth. That is why it is nowadays such incredibly rare to find someone who really live that, and if you do, you are very lucky. Even that is taken as a concept by many, and get stuck in the head, justifying doing anything just because "I know". Best is to realize "I don't really know, but I would like to know.."
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Last November 2005 I placed an engine online, for free, No Charge.. I could not patent it because if I had the government would have seized it and eaten it whole. None of you would have heard of it or me again. Which of course would possibly be considered a blessing I'm sure by a whole lot of doctors who feel that same way RIGHT NOW. I placed my Internet branding iron against the CDC and the AMA for allowing ongoing atrocities being worked against me {and the rest of Roanoke VA patients}. I don't just WRITE about what George Orwell's World is doing to us {processing us all through a meat grinder} because I know I am not the only one going through various kinds of AMA-approved doctor hell.
The United States Government talks a good line to us about how GREAT OUTER SPACE EXPLORATION & DISCOVERY IS GOING TO BE but here in George Orwell's REAL WORLD, Fact is they want Outer Space ruled by their {{our?}} Military. In all truthfulness, th
I have had the unsettling thought that every time a Apache goes down, there is a fat cat somewhere slobbering about the money he will make on the replacement. There is serious money to be made in designing, building and maintaining the machinery of death. President Eisenhower warned of the dangers involved in the unrestrained feeding of this beast.
Wabi-Sabi
Matthe
You are just plain not worth $5.15 much less $9. Minimum wage laws mean you will never find work.
BTW you Mr Armchair economist are an idiot. Anything and everything is at lower demand at a higher cost. Corelation is not causation. Adding a WAG as justification is plain stupid. Bet they (the states with higher minimums) created more jobs in total but fewer shit jobs (minimum wage).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Working a shit job for a pittance the rest of the janitors life is the cost of that party.
If that cost is not high than more people will take that path (e.g. every welfare state ever in history).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
But compared to normal gun-toting middle class people?
The truely poor are vastly outnumbered.
Also based on my experiance at the range. Poor folks cut corners actually leaning how to shoot the cheap assed guns they buy. Anybody stupid enough to buy a cheap 380 is also going to be cheap enough to think they don't need to squeeze off a few hundard rounds just to get the feel of the thing. To say nothing of the cheap guns that fall apart after about that much use (You'll find out about that).
The last time I was at the rifle range a couple of urban types had the most gandy SKS I've ever seen (looked like they modded the stock with a hacksaw in an idiots effort to save weight, not cut down, hollowed out) they were flat missing the target at 50 feet. They left after expending maybe 50 rounds. This is the top of the truely poor folk gun-fu skill base.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Parent is horrible at spelling and grammar, but otherwise correct.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
Where are my mod points? Every time I see something insightful, I never have bloody mod points.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
It's prescient, not precient. Same root as science. It refers to having foreknowledge. If only they would invent a technology that would look over our shoulder as we write and correct out mis-spellings.
Congrats on figuring a few things out, 30 years late is better than not at all. '1984' was ahead of schedule, not 22 yrs behind. Although orwell got some things right, by no means were they correct.
Also, it was the preparation of the people that had to occur first. Hence most missed it entirely. In firefighting and disaster management, sometimes doing nothing is the best of all possible alternatives. That concept itself no longer exists in the general populace when it comes to government involvement. People often understand how poor the job is done by government in regard to Indian Affairs medicine on reservations and even the US Post Office disaster, but there is a total disconnect when it comes to understanding that of all organizations that exist in a society, government is the most wasteful and incompentent of them all and is guaranteed to be the worst choice for involvement.
1984 (a date based on 1948 with the swapping of two numbers) has come and gone. The shreds of liberty are still around but are being slowly removed one by one. The bloated gov. we have now is already far beyond the size that it could exist with anywhere else due to the massive prosperity our former lack of gov. permitted.
Perhaps an amusing observation is that even the term 'liberal' as classically defined no longer refers to the system of thought but rather to the opposite extreme - that of raising gov. to the level of a religion that must be worshipped.
Pleasant dreams.
Your conception of our world as an equivalent to the world portrayed in 1984 belies your complete lack of proportion. The hellish vision was more akin to 1930's Soviet Union than America.
If, in your mind, you seem to think America is close to that then the fissures in your frontal lobes aren't very deep, which accounts for your simplistic interpretation of the ideas presented in the book.
The same goes for all you moronic toadies who talk about Bu$HitlerMcHaliburton's Amerikkka. Life is a chessboard not a checkboard you dopes.
Consider joining the http://freestateproject.org/
Read all about Your Rights being destroyed every day at http://hammeroftruth.com/
Join the http://freestateproject.org/
Browse news blogs for the mere chance of posting about the FSP, the LP, or HoT.
Consider joining http://freestateproject.org/first1000
Search and watch everything related to America: From Freedom to Fascism on google
Consider buying lots of gold ETFs
Feel very scared, not smug, that you realize you are in a police state enacted because of an eminant economic crisis.
Post on /. about all the above hoping readers will point out which datums merely require a tin-foil hat to remedy, which to point and laugh at, and which to really worry about.
1994 was all about the far end of government power over citizens.
The vast difference between 1984 and what you are describing is that all of the ID madness you describe is from corperations - and is the tradeoff you make for dealing with large corperations and banking conglomerates.
Any time you like you can get off that ride. Just buy stuff mostly with cash, and from smaller markets.
I worry more about things like a national ID system (even though SSN is pretty mcuh there already) but we have a long ways to go before anything is really like 1984 from the government side, as much as people like to think we are ruled by facists today. They need to read a little history I'd say.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Criticizing the govt can be a dangerous thing, especially when it knows everything about you. Privacy is necessary for the safety and security of the citizens. (Think of, I don't know, Soviet Russia, Iran...)
In Soviet Russia, the government needs privacy from YOU. For that, they observe everyone else to make sure they have their own privacy and are safe to do whatever they can and be aware of menaces to their freedom. The exact inverse of our way of thinking.
When you have a government doing exactly that to protects its own freedom, what difference does it do if it's benevolent or not? It will neutralize anything it doesn't like and make the rest believe they act in their best interest. Anything is benevolent as long as you believe in it. And if you do believe in it, who's to say it isn't?
The odd thing is, I think we mostly agree.
Our only real difference is that you look at "the system" and you see something that only accepts inputs called "votes," which is mostly ignores. You then (justifiably, given your assumptions) conclude that it's hopeless to try to change things.
I, on the other hand, see a fragile structure that is mostly smoke and mirrors, which derives all it's power from a few simple tricks ("Look over there!", "What's your price?", and "Nice life you got there. It'd be a pity if anything happened to it.") most of which it consistently fails to follow through on. The only reason "the system" seems so stable is that people think it's stable, and nobody dares to try to change it.
You'd probably call me a blind optimist, and I'd say you are unjustifiably pessimistic--but we'd both claim to be realists.
As for the list above, if you stay with your restricted view of things (that the courts aren't a legitimate part of the political process, and that having a criminal convicted of a crime isn't a good way to take them out of circulation) then you are correct. And including Marion Barry in the list didn't really help my case. I just stuck him in when I realized my first Google had turned up almost exclusively Republicans, and I'm tired of being be accused of being partisan when I'm really just fed up with politicians in general.
--MarkusQ