People have been demanding open government so politicians now need to promise openness and transparency to get voted in. Once voted in they realize they really don't want to be open after all and lately seem to go in the opposite direction totally, namely it's the people who are expected and forced to be open and transparent while we get record secretive governments. Both my Provincial and Federal governments, right wingers both, have done the same and I expect it'll continue no matter who is in power.
If it's like Canada, juvenile trials aren't secret, instead there is just a publication ban on identifying the minor which sometimes includes witnesses etc if they can lead to identifying the minor. The reporters just refer to the minor by a pseudonym, often a letter or they will be found in contempt. Occasionally there is a ban on publishing evidence, things like rape videos, but reporters and the public can still sit in court and report most of the trial. Very occasionally there is a publication ban on the whole trial "in the interest of justice", namely being able to get an impartial jury in case of a mistrial, appeal forcing a new trial or in one famous case, whether there would be need to try the defendant for some more of the murders he did. They're still not secret as journalists and the public are allowed to attend and once the trial comes to an end, including the appeal process, everything is published. Actual secret courts goes against the rights of people, namely the right to justice and would probably be considered unconstitutional by the courts. America is weird because you have a Bill of Rights that your Supreme Court regularly makes exceptions for, eg limiting speech in the name of national security contrary to the plain ban on Congress limiting any speech. If national security is that important, amend the constitution.
Here in Canada it is the government leading the safety thing and the people demanding privacy. They keep introducing legislation to give more powers to the police etc, things like being able to go to ISPs and demand names and the people keep screaming no. Terrorism, child porn and this time, cyberbullying. Unluckily the public slowly gets worn down, the new powers are attached to other legislation and it looks like they may succeed this time around. Thing is this government, who got voted in on a transparency promise, is the most secretive government ever and freaks out when their privacy is broken. The former Public Safety Minister (WTF?) accused everyone of being for child molesters while trying to pass his new law and then freaked when his public divorce proceeding, including how he was screwing the babysitter for 8 years, was publicized. They really seem to go on the principal that everyone is as crooked as they are.
Just have a publication ban on the names. They do it around here all the time, usually for juveniles. The press just has to refer to the defendants as AB and CD when reporting. Same with any sensitive witnesses, refer to them by letter.
Yes, obviously while traveling the 13+ billion light years space is gong to stretch and even without expansion the visible edge of the universe will be much further away and unreachable. I guess I should have been clearer that it is possible to travel the distance without going faster then c.
At one gee acceleration they are all reachable within a (long) human lifetime (assuming you don't want to slow down when you get there), The only time travel involved is into the future relatively. Of course the needed technology may be unachievable and it would take close to infinite energy but the laws of physics allows travel to other galaxies.
I've read that it's only 30 years, ship time, at one gee acceleration all the way, longer if you want to slow down and stop once there. Even the edge of the visible universe is achievable in a human lifetime (80 years IIRC) at one gee, of course by the time you get there the edge will be much further away. Just need close to infinite free energy.
The problem is that there are laws that you have broken, there are so many. The other day I was in the forest in the middle of no-where and I peed. That is enough of a crime to really ruin my life, years in prison as a sex offender then put on a list that limits freedoms extremely plus having it publicized so that the lynch mob knows where to go to lynch the child molester. Only child molesters get put on the list you know and even if you get off, it's probably due to an activist judge or slick lawyer. As long as there are so many laws on the books and a society that is only interested in extreme punishment, your life can be ruined.
The other problem is the extreme reluctance of government to extend the Constitution through amendments. Even a simple one like making the Air Force constitutional that would easily pass is not done. At least when it came to giving Congress powers like passing laws limiting speech in the name of national security or placing sane limits on ownership of arms, there would be much more discussion about what is national security and what are sane limits on ownership of arms and in the absence of agreement there wouldn't be any limits on guns or speech. Could even make voting a constitutional right so the idiots who think that Congress can prosecute Snowden for speech can vote along with the people who have read the Constitution and know that there is no exception for national security
It would be sorta like winning the lottery. Your old job, or business would be gone but with all the offers for a very well paid job doing nothing at "Big Corp" for just doing a few small favours, you really wouldn't need to actually work again. Be good for "Big Corp" too as the price of lobbying will go down, especially with most representatives being ordinary people it'll take much less blow (perhaps just beer) and cheaper hookers. With the ban on felons it'll be easy to disqualify anyone as well since everyone is a felon in waiting.
Venus does a good job of keeping a heavy atmosphere while only having a negligible magnetic field. Thinking about Venus, another big variable is the amount of green house gases affecting the habitable zone and the paradox of the Earth seeming to have been habitable in the sense of having liquid water for close to 4 billion years while the Sun has increased its output by 25%. Of course in another billion or so years the Sun will get hot enough to boil the oceans of Earth and that'll be the end of an inhabitable Earth (unless we move it)
"connexion" is perfectly valid British English though Google informs me it went out of style about 60 years ago. May have got carried away with devise as an alternate to device. They were pretty strict about using proper spelling back when I was in school as it was a way to avoid being considered an American
It's more then that, read some older texts, perhaps early 18th century, and you will see many words with legal but different and often variable spelling. Even now what different groups of people consider correct spelling in English varies. "The centre of the grey coloured licence devise had a strange connexion to an organisation that had its dialogue paralysed as if by diarrhoea." Is an example of a correctly spelled nonsensical sentence that could trigger spelling nazis here. Dictionaries weren't commonly used until the middle of the 18th century and later dictionaries attempted to change various spellings, often for no other reason then nationalism.
Do not different Germans have different pronouncements? Or do Austrians, Swiss, North and South Germans all have the same pronouncement? Just in England there are numerous dialects with someone from the south barely able to understand someone from the north, then there are the Americans who not only have different pronouncements but even spell many words differently, as well as Canadians, Australians, various small Caribbean nations, all who have English as their first language but can barely understand each other if talking fast.
The part of government that has acquired huge powers due to the war on drugs along with pressures from the prison industry along with civil forfeiture financing many smaller governments are major pressures keeping marijuana and other drugs illegal. Whether its the President who is corrupt or the bureaucracy it seems like corruption to me, especially the way civil forfeiture is used.
Why in a representative democracy should the party in power be able to fix things to give them a future advantage? Just the idea of politicians having power in how the electoral process works reeks of corruption. And no, corruption does not have to involve money. And why reference Europeans? It's a big place with a lot of different cultures and political systems.
We're talking about Europe because you made comparisons with Europe and said that gerrymandering is the most brazen form of political corruption in the US. I pointed out that not only is gerrymandering common in Europe, European political parties have far more sinister ways of corrupting the political process.
I've reviewed the thread and can't find any references to Europe besides yours.
Marijuana criminalization was about protecting industries, read up on Hearst and his new pulp paper industry and the threat of cheap hemp paper, as well as a part of government that had experienced unparallelled power during prohibition wanting to keep that power. Getting certain groups of people hysterical was the propaganda part of it, very successful as it was run by one of the largest media empires of the time. Note if the government had tried to illegalize hemp it would never of succeeded so they had to invent a new word, marijuana, so people didn't catch on.
Here I thought that it cost a fortune to run for power in the American federal government which means needing large campaign contributions with the contributors expecting favours in return. Glad to hear I'm totally wrong on that. Free markets are great but expecting them to stay free, especially as they grow is as stupid as expecting to have a communist state without some arsehole dictator seizing power.
How else do you measure perception? I know for my country the ranking seems pretty accurate including the downward spiral since the right took power. Most of the other countries seem to agree with general perception. Actually the countries with the best growth, wealth, education, etc are generally a mix of socialist and capitalist. The Nordic countries, Germany, the larger Commonwealth countries are all doing quite well. Even China since they've moved to a mixed system has made enormous strides. As a counter we have Russia who have gone from socialist to pure capitalist and things are so bad that most of the population is drinking itself to death. This is after going from feudal to space faring in half a century while making huge sacrifices to win WWII and having totally nutty dictators, especially Stalin who was a special type of insane. Other examples of pure capitalist countries being corrupt consist of much of South and Central America and much of Africa. Think of General Pinochet or Haiti though to be honest they all seem to be corrupt no matter what their politics. Perhaps you think that Northern Europe is spending down their wealth, I don't see much evidence of it. Instead it seems it is the capitalist right wing governments that are in massive debt or if inheriting a balanced budget, say to themselves, "I'm finally living in my means and can pay my bills, I can now take time of of work" rather then "I'm finally living in my means, time to pay off this debt" I'm old fashioned and think that people and countries should live in their means and have the minimum of debt. I'm also old fashioned and think that governments should follow their Constitutions and not turn into police states and taking the best of different systems seems to work the best.
Gerrymandering is a process by which political parties in power user their power to give them a slight advantage in future elections. It involves no "corruption" (i.e., exchange of money for political favors), and pretty limited in scope. It is also widespread in Europe, except Europeans don't know and don't care.
But European parties in power have many more mechanisms to hurt their opponents and help themselves, and they use those mechanisms frequently. Again, Europeans don't know and don't care.
Why in a representative democracy should the party in power be able to fix things to give them a future advantage? Just the idea of politicians having power in how the electoral process works reeks of corruption. And no, corruption does not have to involve money. And why reference Europeans? It's a big place with a lot of different cultures and political systems. Perhaps we should also talk about Africa or S. America and do a lot of generalizing. It's America that pretends to be the bastion of freedom and is acting like a bully on the world stage.
other ways the American democratic process has been corrupted, witness the re-election statistics
In what way is it "corruption" when American voters choose to send the same representative to Congress year after year?
In what way do you think is Europe better? The UK has lifetime peerage. Germany has a large part of its parliament appointed by party committees who keep unelectable politicians in parliament.
Can you even find reelection statistics for, say, Germany?
The American Congress consistently has very high dissatisfaction ratings and yet keep getting re-elected. Lifetime peerage or other fair way to appoint members along with an effective upper house (which has now been pretty well neutered) gives a chance for a sober second look at legislation so that, with luck, really crappy legislation that hasn't been thought through can be slowed down and perhaps amended to fix problems. Your Founding Fathers agreed about the upper house who was appointed rather then elected and tried to fix the peerage crap by letting the States appoint the upper house. Unluckily there was so much corruption in the process that eventually it was changed to direct elections and now you have an upper house who is as much interested in re-election as doing the right thing. I just looked up the reelection statistics for Germany. One party (FDP) got totally wiped out losing all of its 93 seats. Obviously they did not please the voters with their performance as part of the ruling coalition. Having any amount of Parliament appointed by the party is bad, whether through the complicated German system or the simple system of a party vetting all its candidates, especially in safe seats.
Here whole political parties have been wiped out due to perceived corruption.
And in the US, political parties have changed radically in their composition and political programs over the past two centuries; only the labels have remained the same. Furthermore, representatives within those parties are far more independent than representatives in European political parties. Voting against your party, common in the US, will get you in serious trouble in many places in Europe.
Not having such party discipline does have a lot to say for itself, it also gives more reasons for people not to vote along party lines yet the American system seems to be set up that way.
The problem come in when the democratic process itself is corrupted. The most brazen in the States is gerrymandering but there are lots of other ways the American democratic process has been corrupted, witness the re-election statistics. When was the last time a party was wiped out due to perceived corruption? Here whole political parties have been wiped out due to perceived corruption. Unluckily they always come back with a new name and now have gotten wise to the idea of corrupting the democratic process in the name of fairness.
Corruption is hard to measure as by its nature it is usually hidden, We can look at the corruption perception index, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... where the top countries traditionally generally have democratic socialism and the bottom countries are a mix of capitalist and socialist. We can also look at surveys asking the people, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... with similar results. The reality seems to be that a mix of capitalism and socialism seems to have the best outcome for the large majority of nations.
Slashdot Mirror
" they figure it's about 7 years from rookie to bad cap"
Power corrupts...
And attracts the corruptible.
People have been demanding open government so politicians now need to promise openness and transparency to get voted in. Once voted in they realize they really don't want to be open after all and lately seem to go in the opposite direction totally, namely it's the people who are expected and forced to be open and transparent while we get record secretive governments.
Both my Provincial and Federal governments, right wingers both, have done the same and I expect it'll continue no matter who is in power.
If it's like Canada, juvenile trials aren't secret, instead there is just a publication ban on identifying the minor which sometimes includes witnesses etc if they can lead to identifying the minor. The reporters just refer to the minor by a pseudonym, often a letter or they will be found in contempt.
Occasionally there is a ban on publishing evidence, things like rape videos, but reporters and the public can still sit in court and report most of the trial.
Very occasionally there is a publication ban on the whole trial "in the interest of justice", namely being able to get an impartial jury in case of a mistrial, appeal forcing a new trial or in one famous case, whether there would be need to try the defendant for some more of the murders he did. They're still not secret as journalists and the public are allowed to attend and once the trial comes to an end, including the appeal process, everything is published.
Actual secret courts goes against the rights of people, namely the right to justice and would probably be considered unconstitutional by the courts.
America is weird because you have a Bill of Rights that your Supreme Court regularly makes exceptions for, eg limiting speech in the name of national security contrary to the plain ban on Congress limiting any speech. If national security is that important, amend the constitution.
Here in Canada it is the government leading the safety thing and the people demanding privacy. They keep introducing legislation to give more powers to the police etc, things like being able to go to ISPs and demand names and the people keep screaming no. Terrorism, child porn and this time, cyberbullying. Unluckily the public slowly gets worn down, the new powers are attached to other legislation and it looks like they may succeed this time around.
Thing is this government, who got voted in on a transparency promise, is the most secretive government ever and freaks out when their privacy is broken. The former Public Safety Minister (WTF?) accused everyone of being for child molesters while trying to pass his new law and then freaked when his public divorce proceeding, including how he was screwing the babysitter for 8 years, was publicized.
They really seem to go on the principal that everyone is as crooked as they are.
Just have a publication ban on the names. They do it around here all the time, usually for juveniles. The press just has to refer to the defendants as AB and CD when reporting. Same with any sensitive witnesses, refer to them by letter.
Yes, obviously while traveling the 13+ billion light years space is gong to stretch and even without expansion the visible edge of the universe will be much further away and unreachable. I guess I should have been clearer that it is possible to travel the distance without going faster then c.
At one gee acceleration they are all reachable within a (long) human lifetime (assuming you don't want to slow down when you get there), The only time travel involved is into the future relatively.
Of course the needed technology may be unachievable and it would take close to infinite energy but the laws of physics allows travel to other galaxies.
You're basically right but assuming a prosecution out to get you and lack of a good lawyer you might feel that the plea bargain is the safer course.
I've read that it's only 30 years, ship time, at one gee acceleration all the way, longer if you want to slow down and stop once there. Even the edge of the visible universe is achievable in a human lifetime (80 years IIRC) at one gee, of course by the time you get there the edge will be much further away.
Just need close to infinite free energy.
The problem is that there are laws that you have broken, there are so many. The other day I was in the forest in the middle of no-where and I peed. That is enough of a crime to really ruin my life, years in prison as a sex offender then put on a list that limits freedoms extremely plus having it publicized so that the lynch mob knows where to go to lynch the child molester. Only child molesters get put on the list you know and even if you get off, it's probably due to an activist judge or slick lawyer.
As long as there are so many laws on the books and a society that is only interested in extreme punishment, your life can be ruined.
The other problem is the extreme reluctance of government to extend the Constitution through amendments. Even a simple one like making the Air Force constitutional that would easily pass is not done.
At least when it came to giving Congress powers like passing laws limiting speech in the name of national security or placing sane limits on ownership of arms, there would be much more discussion about what is national security and what are sane limits on ownership of arms and in the absence of agreement there wouldn't be any limits on guns or speech.
Could even make voting a constitutional right so the idiots who think that Congress can prosecute Snowden for speech can vote along with the people who have read the Constitution and know that there is no exception for national security
It would be sorta like winning the lottery. Your old job, or business would be gone but with all the offers for a very well paid job doing nothing at "Big Corp" for just doing a few small favours, you really wouldn't need to actually work again.
Be good for "Big Corp" too as the price of lobbying will go down, especially with most representatives being ordinary people it'll take much less blow (perhaps just beer) and cheaper hookers.
With the ban on felons it'll be easy to disqualify anyone as well since everyone is a felon in waiting.
Venus does a good job of keeping a heavy atmosphere while only having a negligible magnetic field.
Thinking about Venus, another big variable is the amount of green house gases affecting the habitable zone and the paradox of the Earth seeming to have been habitable in the sense of having liquid water for close to 4 billion years while the Sun has increased its output by 25%. Of course in another billion or so years the Sun will get hot enough to boil the oceans of Earth and that'll be the end of an inhabitable Earth (unless we move it)
"connexion" is perfectly valid British English though Google informs me it went out of style about 60 years ago. May have got carried away with devise as an alternate to device.
They were pretty strict about using proper spelling back when I was in school as it was a way to avoid being considered an American
I always figured he doesn't want anyone to read his posts so I usually just skip them. Much easier then struggling with his weird choice of font.
It's more then that, read some older texts, perhaps early 18th century, and you will see many words with legal but different and often variable spelling. Even now what different groups of people consider correct spelling in English varies. "The centre of the grey coloured licence devise had a strange connexion to an organisation that had its dialogue paralysed as if by diarrhoea." Is an example of a correctly spelled nonsensical sentence that could trigger spelling nazis here.
Dictionaries weren't commonly used until the middle of the 18th century and later dictionaries attempted to change various spellings, often for no other reason then nationalism.
Do not different Germans have different pronouncements? Or do Austrians, Swiss, North and South Germans all have the same pronouncement? Just in England there are numerous dialects with someone from the south barely able to understand someone from the north, then there are the Americans who not only have different pronouncements but even spell many words differently, as well as Canadians, Australians, various small Caribbean nations, all who have English as their first language but can barely understand each other if talking fast.
The part of government that has acquired huge powers due to the war on drugs along with pressures from the prison industry along with civil forfeiture financing many smaller governments are major pressures keeping marijuana and other drugs illegal.
Whether its the President who is corrupt or the bureaucracy it seems like corruption to me, especially the way civil forfeiture is used.
We're talking about Europe because you made comparisons with Europe and said that gerrymandering is the most brazen form of political corruption in the US. I pointed out that not only is gerrymandering common in Europe, European political parties have far more sinister ways of corrupting the political process.
I've reviewed the thread and can't find any references to Europe besides yours.
Marijuana criminalization was about protecting industries, read up on Hearst and his new pulp paper industry and the threat of cheap hemp paper, as well as a part of government that had experienced unparallelled power during prohibition wanting to keep that power. Getting certain groups of people hysterical was the propaganda part of it, very successful as it was run by one of the largest media empires of the time. Note if the government had tried to illegalize hemp it would never of succeeded so they had to invent a new word, marijuana, so people didn't catch on.
Here I thought that it cost a fortune to run for power in the American federal government which means needing large campaign contributions with the contributors expecting favours in return. Glad to hear I'm totally wrong on that.
Free markets are great but expecting them to stay free, especially as they grow is as stupid as expecting to have a communist state without some arsehole dictator seizing power.
How else do you measure perception? I know for my country the ranking seems pretty accurate including the downward spiral since the right took power. Most of the other countries seem to agree with general perception.
Actually the countries with the best growth, wealth, education, etc are generally a mix of socialist and capitalist. The Nordic countries, Germany, the larger Commonwealth countries are all doing quite well.
Even China since they've moved to a mixed system has made enormous strides. As a counter we have Russia who have gone from socialist to pure capitalist and things are so bad that most of the population is drinking itself to death. This is after going from feudal to space faring in half a century while making huge sacrifices to win WWII and having totally nutty dictators, especially Stalin who was a special type of insane.
Other examples of pure capitalist countries being corrupt consist of much of South and Central America and much of Africa. Think of General Pinochet or Haiti though to be honest they all seem to be corrupt no matter what their politics.
Perhaps you think that Northern Europe is spending down their wealth, I don't see much evidence of it. Instead it seems it is the capitalist right wing governments that are in massive debt or if inheriting a balanced budget, say to themselves, "I'm finally living in my means and can pay my bills, I can now take time of of work" rather then "I'm finally living in my means, time to pay off this debt"
I'm old fashioned and think that people and countries should live in their means and have the minimum of debt. I'm also old fashioned and think that governments should follow their Constitutions and not turn into police states and taking the best of different systems seems to work the best.
Gerrymandering is a process by which political parties in power user their power to give them a slight advantage in future elections. It involves no "corruption" (i.e., exchange of money for political favors), and pretty limited in scope. It is also widespread in Europe, except Europeans don't know and don't care.
But European parties in power have many more mechanisms to hurt their opponents and help themselves, and they use those mechanisms frequently. Again, Europeans don't know and don't care.
Why in a representative democracy should the party in power be able to fix things to give them a future advantage? Just the idea of politicians having power in how the electoral process works reeks of corruption. And no, corruption does not have to involve money. And why reference Europeans? It's a big place with a lot of different cultures and political systems. Perhaps we should also talk about Africa or S. America and do a lot of generalizing. It's America that pretends to be the bastion of freedom and is acting like a bully on the world stage.
other ways the American democratic process has been corrupted, witness the re-election statistics
In what way is it "corruption" when American voters choose to send the same representative to Congress year after year?
In what way do you think is Europe better? The UK has lifetime peerage. Germany has a large part of its parliament appointed by party committees who keep unelectable politicians in parliament.
Can you even find reelection statistics for, say, Germany?
The American Congress consistently has very high dissatisfaction ratings and yet keep getting re-elected.
Lifetime peerage or other fair way to appoint members along with an effective upper house (which has now been pretty well neutered) gives a chance for a sober second look at legislation so that, with luck, really crappy legislation that hasn't been thought through can be slowed down and perhaps amended to fix problems.
Your Founding Fathers agreed about the upper house who was appointed rather then elected and tried to fix the peerage crap by letting the States appoint the upper house. Unluckily there was so much corruption in the process that eventually it was changed to direct elections and now you have an upper house who is as much interested in re-election as doing the right thing.
I just looked up the reelection statistics for Germany. One party (FDP) got totally wiped out losing all of its 93 seats. Obviously they did not please the voters with their performance as part of the ruling coalition.
Having any amount of Parliament appointed by the party is bad, whether through the complicated German system or the simple system of a party vetting all its candidates, especially in safe seats.
And in the US, political parties have changed radically in their composition and political programs over the past two centuries; only the labels have remained the same. Furthermore, representatives within those parties are far more independent than representatives in European political parties. Voting against your party, common in the US, will get you in serious trouble in many places in Europe.
Not having such party discipline does have a lot to say for itself, it also gives more reasons for people not to vote along party lines yet the American system seems to be set up that way.
The problem come in when the democratic process itself is corrupted. The most brazen in the States is gerrymandering but there are lots of other ways the American democratic process has been corrupted, witness the re-election statistics. When was the last time a party was wiped out due to perceived corruption? Here whole political parties have been wiped out due to perceived corruption. Unluckily they always come back with a new name and now have gotten wise to the idea of corrupting the democratic process in the name of fairness.
Corruption is hard to measure as by its nature it is usually hidden, We can look at the corruption perception index, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... where the top countries traditionally generally have democratic socialism and the bottom countries are a mix of capitalist and socialist.
We can also look at surveys asking the people, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... with similar results.
The reality seems to be that a mix of capitalism and socialism seems to have the best outcome for the large majority of nations.