Slashdot Mirror
Four Outrages Techies Need To Know About the State of the Union
Mr.Intel writes "Last night's State of the Union Address contained ten things (and four outrages) technical professionals need to know about the President's plans, and how his policies might affect you, your employer, and your family well into the future."
At 27, I'm a "millennial." My generation and Generation X are looking at a bleak future because of what is being done by the Boomers.
I have a simple solution: take away the Boomers' Social Security and Medicare. All of it. Keep the Boomers' parents on it. They paid in and didn't give us this situation. They passed on the baton of leadership to the Boomers around Bush Sr. and the Boomers hit prime time in the Clinton and Bush years.
I say "f#$%" them, as a generation. They want to be able to default $500k mortgages and enjoy generous pensions and Social Security when they won't even let my generation discharge a few 10s of thousands of dollars in student loans **in bankruptcy court**. They want to turn Generation X into beasts of burden to fund their benefits while my generation wallows in disproportionate unemployment?
Screw them. The revenues from taking them off the potential Social Security and Medicare rosters would more than pay off our debt in under a decade.
Disturbingly, that's not as 100% true as you think. There are some cases of local laws in various places also being privately held copyrighted material and/or "trade secrets" of various organizations. The most common example of this are laws covering zoning and construction written by local engineering forms which then charge money for copies. The bigger concern isn't petty local corruption like that, however, it's actually things like case law and various binding legal interpretations by the legislative and executive branch. Case law has traditionally largely only been accessible by contracting with private firms with virtual monopolies on republishing them. Aside from that, we're increasingly seeing (or not seeing) more and more binding decisions being made by secret courts and various executive offices which in some cases aren't even accessible by Congress. We're also more and more seeing what amounts to superuser permissions to create binding policy equivalent to laws being handed off to more and more agencies.
Consider no fly lists. We know that certain people aren't allowed on airplanes. We don't know which people, and we don't know why, and we don't know which things we might do that might get us put on the list, or on other lists which we don't even know about. The rationale in that particular example is that flying is a privilege, not a right, and therefore having it taken away is not a punishment. Clearly that's a load of nonsense. Traveling about the country is certainly a right, and removing of the more convenient ways to do that is a curtailment of that right. If that argument is faulty, that means that it's acceptable to refuse registered voters entrance to polling places because it only inconveniences them and they can find another way to vote. Even if being able to board planes is a privilege and not a right, removal of privileges that everyone enjoys by default still qualifies as a punishment by any sane definition.