I can't understand why the US government would saddle undergraduates with that much debt before they've even had a chance to start making a living.
Ah, well, seem, the answer to that question are two assumption you made in that sentence. Look closely:
...the US government would saddle undergraduates with that...
Ask yourself 'What is an undergraduate?'.
A bunch of answers probably popped into your head, but go simpler: An undergraduate is a human being.
The other assumption is that it is the US government doing this. It is not. It is banks loaning money via a government program that guarantees payment of said loan, either by the student or by the government.
Here is the question with your assumptions fixed:
I can't understand why the US government would have banks saddle human beings with that much debt before they've even had a chance to start making a living.
I think you can work the answer out yourself. Hint, it rhymes with 'rofits'.
The loans are government backed, they should be no interest.
No. They are government backed, therefor, they should be government issued. Our idiotic system of privatizing profit and socializing risk needs to stop.
It is one thing for a government to hire a company to build a building. The government does not have workers skilled at that, and does not want to hire them. Hell, I might even be okay with the government using private contractors as cooks for the military, although the military was always able to train cooks before.
There is some reasonable argument made that the government should purchase skills it doesn't have but need temporarily, instead of creating a group to do it, hiring them, setting up standards, pointing them at the problem, and then letting them go when it's done. It does not need a plumber or locksmith or airplane pilot on staff.
There is not, however, a reasonable argument for the government to hire people to give out money.
The government is perfectly capable of handing money to students and colleges on their own. (It does that anyway, via direct loans and grants.)
It is perfectly capable of collecting the money back from the students. (In fact, it appears that, every year, they mail a form to every person in the US that you're supposed to mail back with a government payment by April 15th.)
Why the hell is any private business involved in this whatsoever? The government is already doing all this. Money in, money out, it's half the damn government's job.
But no, we just had to have businesses involved, so that the rich can suck out some more money from a government service provided to random people.
(Incidentally, such loans probably should have some sort of interest on them, if only to encourage people to actually pay them back. Perhaps the interest should be indexed to ability to pay...if you're out of work, you have a reduced payment schedule and no interest, whereas if you're making money, you pay maybe 5% interest.)
Dude- you got $85K with ZERO collateral. The rate is NOT unreasonable. It is the best investment you can make for your future.
Whereas the bank issued a loan guaranteed by the government, with the ability to garnish wages to recover it, that cannot be removed via bankrupcy.
Just because it looks fair from the student's end doesn't mean it is actually fair, or the slightest bit reasonable.
If banks want to issue student loans to people at 8% randomly, they should feel free to do so, without any government involvement.
But they should not be able to do it as part of a government program that guarantees they'll get paid back, so they have no risk at all.
You know, this is a major problem in this country. The government decides to operate a government program, but it would be much too easy to, you know, actually let the government do that.
Private industry has to be included somehow, and at some point they start making huge profits, and everyone says 'Well, that's just the free market at work'.
No, it's not. If banks want to participate in a government program, they can damn well have rules limiting their profit from that program, and how they're allowed to interact with people, and all sorts of shit, or they can stay the hell away from from the government program designed to get people loans, and just give people loans themselves. Nothing stopping them.
Of course, in this case, direct student loans have recently skyrocketed to also match the cost of other loans. I have no idea what's going on there. Both programs are supposed to 'borrow money on the open market', which should be, for a government banked (aka, non-defaultable) loan should just be slightly above the Fed, which is absurdly idiotically low at this point. (Actually, I would suspect that any loans would end up being slightly higher than the inflation rate, instead. But still.)
Yeah, that's what happened. A guy asked a question at a debate, and Obama's team instantly attacked him, and which point the Republicans showed up.
Which is a bit different from the way everyone else remembers it, where he asked a question, Obama tried roughly to answer it despite him clearly disbelieving it, and that was all.
...until the Republicans made a national hero of the guy, inviting him to speak at all their events, without actually bothering to do any research whatsoever.(1) At which point the media decided to look at the question he'd asked and found it total nonsense based on misconceptions about how taxes work, and out-and-out falsehoods on top of that.
Frankly, I don't mind asking politicians questions that are hypotheticals, even posed as if you're the guy in the hypothetical...but I do mind when the media doesn't do its job and explain why the question everyone's talking about is based on incorrect premises, and here's how taxes actually work for small businesses, and if Joe's hypothetical was true here is how his taxes would change, etc.
This would require some sort of actually functioning media in this country, so that's probably too much to hope for, though.
1) Is it just me, or have the Republicans gotten really bad at researching their own people recently? Forget Joe the plumber, Palin's kid was pregnant and they didn't manage to figure that out in advance either.
Indeed. In fact, you just gave me an interesting idea: You should not be able to go to college with an undeclared major.
Granted, people would just pick one, and then change, which is fine, but it at least would result in the college saying 'Enough of this nonsense. You come here for a reason, or not at all.'
But, anyway, I've long though that the way to help the poor out of generational poverty would be to make sure they all get certified in air conditioning repair or CNC specialist or pipe welding. Have it in damn high school.
Instead of sending the super-intelligent poor off, on a scholarship, to get a worthless degree like everyone else, and leaving the non-super-intelligent (Not 'dumb', just average.) poor to rot.
He goes on for a while about minorities and gaming, nothing that minorities are underrepresented in gaming, and that the common approach of reading % of characters as a measure of this is a bit of tokenism and misses the point – that the experience of growing up white and growing up, say, Latino are different and this affects a lot of things in subtle ways, and just changing a character's skin isn't going to reflect these ways. And that making this irrelevant works against both the white and Latino's experience. This is true as far as it goes, but it really doesn't have much to do with character creation:
It's actually not really true at all.
Perhaps someone wants to play someone who grew up Latino, and actually attempts to make roleplaying choices based on that.
I am, of course, assuming that we're talking about a roleplaying game based in this world. In, say, a zombie-infestation FPS there might not be much distinction at all, you have a grand total of five people you interact with, whereas in a Forgotten Realms game without 'normal' racism, it wouldn't make any difference at all.
But in RPs set in this universe, at least nominally, someone might want to sit down and say 'Okay, I just roleplayed the white guy that I am, perhaps next I will roleplay a woman, or maybe a black guy who's from a poor urban area.'.
Granted, many people are not that skilled, to actually get inside the mindset of other people, and will end up either being somewhat stereotypical or just playing as themselves with their history erased and written back different, but the same personality.
But poor writing is still writing, and, at minimum, it makes people think about 'If I were someone besides me, how would I react to this', which is good even if they get it wrong.
The only (very minor) point of his is a good on in that allowing wide variety of avatars restricts gaming options, in that (presumably) the entire game must be completable by all option, and hence 99% of it going have to be 'generic'.
This mainly applies to gender, though, not race or appearance.
But, the thing is, game creators have no problems making the player character male or female when the story requires it. Like in adventure games.
I mean SydShamino doesn't exactly have control over US foreign policy if he voted Republican and Obama got in right?
So by your logic, he should be immune to any foreign policy decisions made?
Your logic is exactly backwards. You can conclude it is unfair we're forced to 'own stock' in the US, but we do, in fact, have to suffer with whatever leaders we've actually picked, and live with the consequences of their action.
Exactly like a stockholder has to live with the board he voted in, and the CEO they picked, and any illegal actions they did, regardless of the fact his vote couldn't have possibly changed thing.
Except, of course, he doesn't...if a stockholder doesn't like new management, and thinks they will harm the stock price or commit felonies, he can trivially sell his stock before that happens, whereas it's not so easy to change countries.
What you are suggesting would completely destroy the fabric of all Western Nation retirement funds.
Erm...no it wouldn't. Not unless you're suggesting that all corporations are criminal enterprises. A novel suggestion, but it probably goes too far.
I'm failing to see a difference, from the investor POV, between fiscal malfeasance that destroys the company, and criminal malfeasance that harms other people and gets the company taken away from the stockholders. Both of them require roughly the same level of oversight within the company, but we have the first one (Because it harms the stockholders) and we don't have the second (Because, right now, it doesn't harm them.)
If you can't pay attention to the fucking companies you're investing in, if you can't make sure that they're reasonable protected from being operated by criminals, either criminals who are going to steal the company blind or criminals who are going to commit crimes for the company, you shouldn't be investing in stocks.
And if you make the wrong choice anyway, that's why stocks are risky.
It works exceptionally well because it allows compensatory damages, which would be newly issued stock that goes to the victim, but it also allows punitive damages/fines of just the government requiring the issuing of the stock and then the government selling it itself.
My idea is sorta the same thing, except the government issues an infinite amount of new stock, mathematically devaluing all existing stock to zero.
Of course, we could throw in your idea, too, with criminal actions. I.e., if a company is being destroyed because it decided to kill or maim someone for profit, we should give the victim (or their estate) like 5% of the new stock. (Whatever level of compensation makes sense.)
We could even give it to them at the start of of the government running it, let them sell that 5% off when it's the only stock on the market, and possibly worth more.
While I try to invest (and hence limit my potential returns) by picking companies whose public policies I support, I have no ability to execute contracts or make policy decisions at any of them, including the one I work for.
THEN YOU SHOULDN'T FUCKING OWN A COMPANY.
I'm sorry that you've apparently decided that the stock market is an 'investment', that you've decided that the point of the stock market is to watch stocks go up.
But that is not the actual world, where stock ownership is company ownership.
We're already making a damn concession by having corporations as a limited liability company. Without, you would, as an owner, be personally liable if the company couldn't cover their debts, or committed criminal actions and got hit with fines.
Perhaps you should actually treat ownership of a company as the serious business it is, and not as some sort of 'investment' you have no control over. You want to invest in something that requires no work, buy old comic books, which rarely commit felonies. Do not purchase companies or self-directed robots or vicious dogs, all of which might wander off if you don't keep an eye on them and commit felonies.
If you want to own a company, you own a fucking company, and bear responsibility for their actions. Granted, you own a tiny part, so are only a tiny part responsible, but, OTOH, you're losing money proportional to the amount of your ownership.
But this way the only people convicted of a crime are those that, you know, committed or abetted it.
If you purchased stock in a criminal company, you did abet it.
Especially since most of the illegal actions done by companies is to, rather suspiciously, raise the stock price. I wonder who that's benefiting.
You're lucky I'm not calling for a total dissolution of the corporate veil after any felony, which would result in you being legally liable for any fines or lawsuits against the company.
A lot of people are, in fact, randomly stalked, unless by 'a link' you mean 'happened to walk by their stalker one day on the street'.
Maybe they possibly talked to their stalker once while ordering coffee or something. Most of stalking victims would not even classify their stalker as an 'acquaintance'.
If you think all stalking victims know their stalker, or have any sort of 'link', you are very very mistaken.
Now, there is the 'bad breakup' stalkers, and other 'rejected' stalkers, who used to be close to their victim but are not anymore, but they're in the minority.
Yes. I love how libertarians have perfect faith in torts as the only mechanism required to regulate corporate behavior, but when someone tries to do exactly that, it's all whiners and losers trying to make a buck.
This is what pisses me off when 'conservatives' start whining about 'tort reform'.
Look, you either get more regulations or you let people freely sue. One or the other, or both. I think the latter leads to disasters, but it at least is somewhat consistent.
Right now, they want to have 'tort reform' for medical stuff. Now, the reason most of those medical mistakes happen is to due to cost cutting. One less nurse to check things, one surgeon who doesn't have the time to get to know his patient, one OR cleaning crew that is doing the work of two. And someone gets the wrong pill, or a reaction to anesthesia, or an infection.
The constant and continual reduction on staff in hospitals is the cause of probably 80% of medical malpractice. (And bad doctors are the other 20%.)
Now, sane people would attempt to reduce the amount of mistakes, which would incidentally also reduce the amount of malpractice insurance. Like I said, either rules about this stuff, or the malpractice insurance industry exerting pressure because they're sick of paying out on lawsuits, would end up working in the long run.
But trying to fix that would require that medical care become slightly more costly, and as it's already on the thin line of profitability, what it would actually mean is that insurance companies can't suck as much money out of them. (At least, not without killing them, and the health insurance industry is a smart enough parasite to avoid that most of the time...although there are plenty of hospitals that it has killed.)
But the right in this county is, in fact, corporatist. They don't want to regulate companies, and they don't want to let people sue them either. They apparently don't want any constraints on their behavior at all. (And the left is about halfway there also, at least the ones who've been elected!)
I used to be in favor of the 'corporate death penalty', and I still am, but only in a certain way.
We shouldn't break the company. What we should do is fire all corporate executives (Everyone who legally empowered to agree to contracts.), and the board of directors, cancel all stock and leave it operated by the government for a while. (1) They will run it basically as before, and also do a housecleaning to find illegal behaviors that have become ingrained in the company.
It then, after about a month, publish balance sheets and stuff so that people can see how it's doing. Then the company should issue new stock, under a new stock symbol, on the stock exchange, so people can purchase it. And the new owners will, presumably, elect a new board of directors, etc, and the temporary executives put in by the government will resign.
I.e., we don't need to dissolve the company if they commit crimes. We need to fire the people who ran the company in a criminal manner, and we need to take it away from the owners who let the company get run in a criminal manner. Then we clean it up, and sell it to whoever's willing to pay for it.
'The company', as an abstract entity that presumably provides some actual services, and employs a bunch of people, can continue to exist. So 'death penalty' isn't really the right word. Let's call it corporate forfeiture. (Hey, if we call it that, does that mean we don't have to have a trial?)
1) The government running a company, incidentally, is not without precedent, especially during bankruptcy. The federal government does assume caretaker responsibility of some business, the most famous example being when it found itself running a brothel in Nevada for about a year.
A part of that break emphasizing: $160,000 for compensatory damages.
In other words, she had 160,000 dollars worth of medical bills from that coffee. (Well, that figure includes lost wages and stuff.) Which is not that amazing for third degree burns.
Incidentally, 185-190 degrees is 22-27 degrees lower than the boiling point of water. If you were to put a pot of water on the stove until it started to boil, cut it off, and wait maybe a minute...that's the temperature McDonalds was handing people coffee in in tiny cardboard cups.
Go ahead, people who say she didn't deserve that. Pour that in your lap. I dare you. (Call 911 before you do that.)
Well, the obvious solution is to require any relative path with a directory in it to start with a./, if it didn't already start with../
It's worth pointing out that, right now, colons, are legal characters in URL. But relatively attempting to access a page named blah:blah.txt will not, in fact, actually work right.
And heaven forbid if the page is named mailto:blah@blah.txt, which, is perfectly correct if you access it like http://example.com/mailto:blah@blah.txt. Yes, both @ and : are allowed in the path part of a http URL. (Heh, in preview those links actually work, proving my point.) This file is obviously quite impossible to refer to relatively unless you make the link something like./mailto:blah@blah.txt
So, yeah, if we used http/example.com/, we'd need to either change relative links or absolute links...but we needed to do that under the existing scheme, too. And ended up mostly ignoring it, and thus we have filenames that can be mistaken for URIs and you don't want to refer to relatively. We could do the same with relative links, requiring them to start with a./ or a../
...although we're sunk if the DNS root ever puts up a webpage.;)
Well, no, the point I was trying to make is that we need two different chars.
One to separate the protocol and path in a URL, and one to separate out the protocol and the other path (That I don't know the name of) in a URN.
Right now, the different is that URLs have a:// and URNs just have a:. But instead, URLs could have a / or a $ or whatever, leaving the single : for URNs.
Or we could have done it the other way, with a single colon for URLs, and something else for URNs.
Of course, it's too late now.
The real stupidity, of course, wasn't this, it was using 'www' as the prefix for websites. WWW, the only acronym in existence that has three times as many syllables to pronounce as the actual words it replaced. Why the hell we couldn't use 'web' I don't know.
Actually, while the double slashes aren't needed, something should be there, like a single slash.
mailto: and news: and other protocols don't need double slashes because they aren't specifying a unique-over-the-entire-internet URL.
It would be nice if things that were were programmatically distinguishable from things that aren't, like they are now, even if you don't recognize the protocol name. Specifically, without a slash, it's a URN, not a URL.
Although there's really no reason that we need a : at all. We could have used a/.
You're saying what I would be saying if I had time to be in this discussion.
Science fiction starts with an unreal premise. Which is why I don't make a lot of distinction between fantasy and sci-fi.
Sometimes the unrealness of this premise is 'We invented a time machine or discovered telepathy' and that's the only change. Sometime it's 'we're in the future or another universe with magic'. Whatever.
But this can never solve the plot's conflict, unless the unreal is very carefully explained in the first place. (Harry Potter attempted to do this, incidentally, in the climax to the series, and opinions are divided on whether or not it worked. As those specific rule of magic was repeatedly drilled into my head, I'll give them a pass.)
Note sometimes it can be hard to figure what the 'conflict' is, often people mistake the problem driving the episode as the conflict, but it does not have to be.
For example, if a dozen people get locked in a house and people start going crazy, someone starts killing the others, the 'problem' is the weather...but no one's going to 'solve' that.
But here's a sci-fi example on how to do it right, strangely from Star Trek: Bashir and Garak are on the holodeck, and something goes wrong with the transporter, and most of the remaining main character's bodies are dumped into the holodeck program.
Now, if we had had an episode about trying to get people out of the holodeck, that would be exceptionally lame. But we didn't get that...we got a few status updates on how close the solution was, but we didn't really care about. It was some random timelimit, like the storm outside, and we knew it would magically go away when the story was over, probably in the nick of time.
Instead of caring about the 'problem', we instead had a rather surreal roleplaying session, where Bashir attempted to play a pre-scripted Bond-like story in a totally crazy way so that no one got killed. (Even people who were supposed to.)
We all understood the rules straight off the bat, and there was no techobabble to save him. If he 'died', he was fine (For once, the safeties weren't broken.), the game was over, and everyone else died. If he got anyone else's body killed, they were dead.
This resulted in an absolutely hilarious episode, as Bashir's 'spy character' made increasingly strange (For people actually playing the hologame) decisions, helped along by Bashir's genre savviness, and all the silly cliches lampshaded by the actual spy Garak.
In the end, Bashir attempted to throw his lot in with the supervillian and he actually 'destroyed the earth'. At which point the villain still tried to kill him, despite all logic...probably due the programmer never even considering anyone would reach the end of a game with the goal to save the world...and then deliberately destroy it.
No techno-babble solution. Not even any actual sci-fi in the story itself, just sci-fi to *set up* the story with a crazy premise 'A guy is role playing a (lawyer-friendly) James Bond movie, and suddenly he has to make sure that, under no circumstances, do specific characters get killed...or that he gets killed...or that he leaves the games.'
The ultimate offense, in fact, is when the Federation gave away several planets, with people on them, to the Cardassians. (Thus causing the creation of the Marquis.)
Did people own land on those planets? Were there independent government who actually had a voice in this, or is the Federation such a strong government it can literally dissolve member worlds and hand them away?! Were none of those worlds members, where they 'territories' or something?
Why do invading aliens parasites think they can infect admirals and run the Federation, and why is the civilian government now involved in this at all, despite the episode taking place on earth?
How come no human, or at least no human member of the Federation, seem to own a private starship? I mean, the starships are constructed automatically, right?
See, for all Star Trek handwaving how the Federation and their economy worked, that was almost better than when they actually attempt to delve into those issues and presented a world that appears to be both quasi-fascist and quasi-communist without actually addressing that such a world would, you know, actually be different than ours. (I.e, they just pretend someone can plausibly own a restaurant or a vineyard.)
Just because most of your friends at school are "in a band" doesn't mean that's typical of the whole population.
It's worth pointing out that schools in 1906 usually didn't have a school band.
That is, after all, the whole premise of 'The Music Man', set in 1912. The guy travels from county to county throughout entire states and sets up a fake music program in each one, before abounding with their money without bothering to teach anyone any music. Each town is stated to have, essentially, a single piano teacher, and the town owns a player piano. (Probably with Sousa music on it!)
Yes, it's fiction, but it's a pretty accurate representation of what sort of 'music' you could find in towns 100 years ago. Piano lessons. That's it.
So no matter what percentage of kids are in school bands, it's much higher than it was 100 years ago, where maybe 1 out of 50 schools, the expensive private ones, had any sort of musical program at all.
I say 14 years, with the ability to file for an extension...but, in the second term, you have to have mandatory licensing.
I.e, you can't stop people from using your work in their work...they just have to pay a specific set amount to do so. Set by some sort licensing board.
And entirely free if what they're doing is free.
E.g., to use a modern example, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles premiered in comic form in 1984. Assuming the copyright was renewed, right now they'd be under the mandatory rule, which means that if someone wanted to use in some work and sell it, they'd simply have to pay a fee, determined by the amount original content and copyrighted content. If someone wants to paint the Turtles on a day care mural, they can, for free.
I'd even be willing to give copyright holders a third term of 14 years, where they continue to hold the copyright on the actual performance, but only that. I.e., if we're talking about a movie, they still would be the only one who can sell copies of said movies...but the plot, the characters, the premise, everything made up of the movie is now public domain. And people, if they wish, could do a remake or a sequel or whatever. Or if it's music, people can perform covers for free, but only the copyright holders could sell the actual original audio of the song. (And plays and sheet music and books, where people can just retype it and it's as good as the original, probably would never get renewed for that.)
So 42 years of sole ownership of the actual work, the movie or comic book or musical recording that can't be duplicated by others, but nothing else, 28 years of sole control of that work and the premises in the work, and 14 years of copyright as it is now. Assuming they renew it each time.
All the people opposed to having two levels of SSL security, one where you pay for a cert, and another where you just make one and use it, seem incapable of realizing that we'd don't want to use unsigned certs to protect CC transactions and whatnot.
And we're not talking about some sort of transparent failure. If someone uses some sort of existing cert and it expires or is for a different domain, it should, by God, throw up said huge warnings.
But there should be some way to generate an SSL cert that is marked as 'Just encryption, not authentication', and doesn't present itself as a locked icon symbol or whatever, and doesn't throw up absurd warnings. It just silently encrypts the fucking connection. So you can't sniff people's damn google searches or their web mail password or whatever.
In fact, as I'm hoping for a new standard anyway, let's just require it to use SNI on a different port, removing all confusion if the connection is secure. Call it httpe or something.
A zip fastener and a cheap padlock is enough to make it clear that your tent isn't public. Anything more is a waste of effort - and may just draw attention to your tent.
So. Why. The. Fuck. Can't. We. Do. That?
Are you having some sort of mental issue or something? We want a damn door on the tent. We don't care if it's metaphorically steel or fabric.
Right now, there isn't even, metaphorically, a tent. Everything's just out in the fucking open air, where anyone can walk up and take it.
It is not a valid complaint that part of the security system is much stronger than another part, when all parts are stronger than damn plaintext.
So what is stopping you? People who "know what they are asking for" will understand what the warnings in Firefox are all about and click through them in 10 seconds the first time they visit the site. If someone is put off by the warnings then they clearly don't "know what they are asking for".
They were asking for a web page. We, the creators of the page, wanted to give it to them with a small amount of cheap security.
Yeah, because the black hats are just queuing up to go to the massive effort of sniffing passwords or staging man-in-the-middle attacks on obscure web forums, whereas the much cheaper technique of phishing (which is neither sniffing nor man-in-the-middle, and won't be stopped by simply using SSL) is exceedingly rare.
I have no idea why you're bitching about how pointless SSL is. No one was talking about that.
But, yes, people do sniff passwords and attack people that way. Google 'wifi scam airport'. (And notice this is actually a MitM attack. You can, of course, sniff any wifi connection anyway.)
Oh, look, someone on their laptop just logged into that forum they visit every day. Oh, look, someone just stole their login id and is going to use it to post spam.
Oh, look, they just sent their hotmail password, too. I wonder if any of those are their bank's password.
Good thing we didn't let them use that insecure SSL cert to log into those sites. You know, to visit a site they visit all the time, and thus it could have compared to an existing cert.
That would just be a horrible idea, to transparently encrypt all traffic that's moderately sensitive. The people who think that's a good idea are probably the same people who store expensive items inside their house, when everyone knows people can break through windows.
People should be required to either store their stuff in impregnable vaults, or leaving it lying around on their lawn. Letting people keep stuff behind a standard door just gives them a false sense of security and we should loudly repeatedly war people whenever they attempt to set something of theirs down inside any sort of structure instead of outside.
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I can't understand why the US government would saddle undergraduates with that much debt before they've even had a chance to start making a living.
Ah, well, seem, the answer to that question are two assumption you made in that sentence. Look closely:
Ask yourself 'What is an undergraduate?'.
A bunch of answers probably popped into your head, but go simpler: An undergraduate is a human being.
The other assumption is that it is the US government doing this. It is not. It is banks loaning money via a government program that guarantees payment of said loan, either by the student or by the government.
Here is the question with your assumptions fixed:
I can't understand why the US government would have banks saddle human beings with that much debt before they've even had a chance to start making a living.
I think you can work the answer out yourself. Hint, it rhymes with 'rofits'.
The loans are government backed, they should be no interest.
No. They are government backed, therefor, they should be government issued. Our idiotic system of privatizing profit and socializing risk needs to stop.
It is one thing for a government to hire a company to build a building. The government does not have workers skilled at that, and does not want to hire them. Hell, I might even be okay with the government using private contractors as cooks for the military, although the military was always able to train cooks before.
There is some reasonable argument made that the government should purchase skills it doesn't have but need temporarily, instead of creating a group to do it, hiring them, setting up standards, pointing them at the problem, and then letting them go when it's done. It does not need a plumber or locksmith or airplane pilot on staff.
There is not, however, a reasonable argument for the government to hire people to give out money.
The government is perfectly capable of handing money to students and colleges on their own. (It does that anyway, via direct loans and grants.)
It is perfectly capable of collecting the money back from the students. (In fact, it appears that, every year, they mail a form to every person in the US that you're supposed to mail back with a government payment by April 15th.)
Why the hell is any private business involved in this whatsoever? The government is already doing all this. Money in, money out, it's half the damn government's job.
But no, we just had to have businesses involved, so that the rich can suck out some more money from a government service provided to random people.
(Incidentally, such loans probably should have some sort of interest on them, if only to encourage people to actually pay them back. Perhaps the interest should be indexed to ability to pay...if you're out of work, you have a reduced payment schedule and no interest, whereas if you're making money, you pay maybe 5% interest.)
Dude- you got $85K with ZERO collateral. The rate is NOT unreasonable. It is the best investment you can make for your future.
Whereas the bank issued a loan guaranteed by the government, with the ability to garnish wages to recover it, that cannot be removed via bankrupcy.
Just because it looks fair from the student's end doesn't mean it is actually fair, or the slightest bit reasonable.
If banks want to issue student loans to people at 8% randomly, they should feel free to do so, without any government involvement.
But they should not be able to do it as part of a government program that guarantees they'll get paid back, so they have no risk at all.
You know, this is a major problem in this country. The government decides to operate a government program, but it would be much too easy to, you know, actually let the government do that.
Private industry has to be included somehow, and at some point they start making huge profits, and everyone says 'Well, that's just the free market at work'.
No, it's not. If banks want to participate in a government program, they can damn well have rules limiting their profit from that program, and how they're allowed to interact with people, and all sorts of shit, or they can stay the hell away from from the government program designed to get people loans, and just give people loans themselves. Nothing stopping them.
Of course, in this case, direct student loans have recently skyrocketed to also match the cost of other loans. I have no idea what's going on there. Both programs are supposed to 'borrow money on the open market', which should be, for a government banked (aka, non-defaultable) loan should just be slightly above the Fed, which is absurdly idiotically low at this point. (Actually, I would suspect that any loans would end up being slightly higher than the inflation rate, instead. But still.)
Yeah, that's what happened. A guy asked a question at a debate, and Obama's team instantly attacked him, and which point the Republicans showed up.
Which is a bit different from the way everyone else remembers it, where he asked a question, Obama tried roughly to answer it despite him clearly disbelieving it, and that was all.
Frankly, I don't mind asking politicians questions that are hypotheticals, even posed as if you're the guy in the hypothetical...but I do mind when the media doesn't do its job and explain why the question everyone's talking about is based on incorrect premises, and here's how taxes actually work for small businesses, and if Joe's hypothetical was true here is how his taxes would change, etc.
This would require some sort of actually functioning media in this country, so that's probably too much to hope for, though.
1) Is it just me, or have the Republicans gotten really bad at researching their own people recently? Forget Joe the plumber, Palin's kid was pregnant and they didn't manage to figure that out in advance either.
Indeed. In fact, you just gave me an interesting idea: You should not be able to go to college with an undeclared major.
Granted, people would just pick one, and then change, which is fine, but it at least would result in the college saying 'Enough of this nonsense. You come here for a reason, or not at all.'
But, anyway, I've long though that the way to help the poor out of generational poverty would be to make sure they all get certified in air conditioning repair or CNC specialist or pipe welding. Have it in damn high school.
Instead of sending the super-intelligent poor off, on a scholarship, to get a worthless degree like everyone else, and leaving the non-super-intelligent (Not 'dumb', just average.) poor to rot.
He goes on for a while about minorities and gaming, nothing that minorities are underrepresented in gaming, and that the common approach of reading % of characters as a measure of this is a bit of tokenism and misses the point – that the experience of growing up white and growing up, say, Latino are different and this affects a lot of things in subtle ways, and just changing a character's skin isn't going to reflect these ways. And that making this irrelevant works against both the white and Latino's experience. This is true as far as it goes, but it really doesn't have much to do with character creation:
It's actually not really true at all.
Perhaps someone wants to play someone who grew up Latino, and actually attempts to make roleplaying choices based on that.
I am, of course, assuming that we're talking about a roleplaying game based in this world. In, say, a zombie-infestation FPS there might not be much distinction at all, you have a grand total of five people you interact with, whereas in a Forgotten Realms game without 'normal' racism, it wouldn't make any difference at all.
But in RPs set in this universe, at least nominally, someone might want to sit down and say 'Okay, I just roleplayed the white guy that I am, perhaps next I will roleplay a woman, or maybe a black guy who's from a poor urban area.'.
Granted, many people are not that skilled, to actually get inside the mindset of other people, and will end up either being somewhat stereotypical or just playing as themselves with their history erased and written back different, but the same personality.
But poor writing is still writing, and, at minimum, it makes people think about 'If I were someone besides me, how would I react to this', which is good even if they get it wrong.
The only (very minor) point of his is a good on in that allowing wide variety of avatars restricts gaming options, in that (presumably) the entire game must be completable by all option, and hence 99% of it going have to be 'generic'.
This mainly applies to gender, though, not race or appearance.
But, the thing is, game creators have no problems making the player character male or female when the story requires it. Like in adventure games.
I mean SydShamino doesn't exactly have control over US foreign policy if he voted Republican and Obama got in right?
So by your logic, he should be immune to any foreign policy decisions made?
Your logic is exactly backwards. You can conclude it is unfair we're forced to 'own stock' in the US, but we do, in fact, have to suffer with whatever leaders we've actually picked, and live with the consequences of their action.
Exactly like a stockholder has to live with the board he voted in, and the CEO they picked, and any illegal actions they did, regardless of the fact his vote couldn't have possibly changed thing.
Except, of course, he doesn't...if a stockholder doesn't like new management, and thinks they will harm the stock price or commit felonies, he can trivially sell his stock before that happens, whereas it's not so easy to change countries.
What you are suggesting would completely destroy the fabric of all Western Nation retirement funds.
Erm...no it wouldn't. Not unless you're suggesting that all corporations are criminal enterprises. A novel suggestion, but it probably goes too far.
I'm failing to see a difference, from the investor POV, between fiscal malfeasance that destroys the company, and criminal malfeasance that harms other people and gets the company taken away from the stockholders. Both of them require roughly the same level of oversight within the company, but we have the first one (Because it harms the stockholders) and we don't have the second (Because, right now, it doesn't harm them.)
If you can't pay attention to the fucking companies you're investing in, if you can't make sure that they're reasonable protected from being operated by criminals, either criminals who are going to steal the company blind or criminals who are going to commit crimes for the company, you shouldn't be investing in stocks.
And if you make the wrong choice anyway, that's why stocks are risky.
Oooh, I like that idea as a lesser punishment.
It works exceptionally well because it allows compensatory damages, which would be newly issued stock that goes to the victim, but it also allows punitive damages/fines of just the government requiring the issuing of the stock and then the government selling it itself.
My idea is sorta the same thing, except the government issues an infinite amount of new stock, mathematically devaluing all existing stock to zero.
Of course, we could throw in your idea, too, with criminal actions. I.e., if a company is being destroyed because it decided to kill or maim someone for profit, we should give the victim (or their estate) like 5% of the new stock. (Whatever level of compensation makes sense.)
We could even give it to them at the start of of the government running it, let them sell that 5% off when it's the only stock on the market, and possibly worth more.
While I try to invest (and hence limit my potential returns) by picking companies whose public policies I support, I have no ability to execute contracts or make policy decisions at any of them, including the one I work for.
THEN YOU SHOULDN'T FUCKING OWN A COMPANY.
I'm sorry that you've apparently decided that the stock market is an 'investment', that you've decided that the point of the stock market is to watch stocks go up.
But that is not the actual world, where stock ownership is company ownership.
We're already making a damn concession by having corporations as a limited liability company. Without, you would, as an owner, be personally liable if the company couldn't cover their debts, or committed criminal actions and got hit with fines.
Perhaps you should actually treat ownership of a company as the serious business it is, and not as some sort of 'investment' you have no control over. You want to invest in something that requires no work, buy old comic books, which rarely commit felonies. Do not purchase companies or self-directed robots or vicious dogs, all of which might wander off if you don't keep an eye on them and commit felonies.
If you want to own a company, you own a fucking company, and bear responsibility for their actions. Granted, you own a tiny part, so are only a tiny part responsible, but, OTOH, you're losing money proportional to the amount of your ownership.
But this way the only people convicted of a crime are those that, you know, committed or abetted it.
If you purchased stock in a criminal company, you did abet it.
Especially since most of the illegal actions done by companies is to, rather suspiciously, raise the stock price. I wonder who that's benefiting.
You're lucky I'm not calling for a total dissolution of the corporate veil after any felony, which would result in you being legally liable for any fines or lawsuits against the company.
Erm, are you retarded or something?
A lot of people are, in fact, randomly stalked, unless by 'a link' you mean 'happened to walk by their stalker one day on the street'.
Maybe they possibly talked to their stalker once while ordering coffee or something. Most of stalking victims would not even classify their stalker as an 'acquaintance'.
If you think all stalking victims know their stalker, or have any sort of 'link', you are very very mistaken.
Now, there is the 'bad breakup' stalkers, and other 'rejected' stalkers, who used to be close to their victim but are not anymore, but they're in the minority.
Yes. I love how libertarians have perfect faith in torts as the only mechanism required to regulate corporate behavior, but when someone tries to do exactly that, it's all whiners and losers trying to make a buck.
This is what pisses me off when 'conservatives' start whining about 'tort reform'.
Look, you either get more regulations or you let people freely sue. One or the other, or both. I think the latter leads to disasters, but it at least is somewhat consistent.
Right now, they want to have 'tort reform' for medical stuff. Now, the reason most of those medical mistakes happen is to due to cost cutting. One less nurse to check things, one surgeon who doesn't have the time to get to know his patient, one OR cleaning crew that is doing the work of two. And someone gets the wrong pill, or a reaction to anesthesia, or an infection.
The constant and continual reduction on staff in hospitals is the cause of probably 80% of medical malpractice. (And bad doctors are the other 20%.)
Now, sane people would attempt to reduce the amount of mistakes, which would incidentally also reduce the amount of malpractice insurance. Like I said, either rules about this stuff, or the malpractice insurance industry exerting pressure because they're sick of paying out on lawsuits, would end up working in the long run.
But trying to fix that would require that medical care become slightly more costly, and as it's already on the thin line of profitability, what it would actually mean is that insurance companies can't suck as much money out of them. (At least, not without killing them, and the health insurance industry is a smart enough parasite to avoid that most of the time...although there are plenty of hospitals that it has killed.)
But the right in this county is, in fact, corporatist. They don't want to regulate companies, and they don't want to let people sue them either. They apparently don't want any constraints on their behavior at all. (And the left is about halfway there also, at least the ones who've been elected!)
I used to be in favor of the 'corporate death penalty', and I still am, but only in a certain way.
We shouldn't break the company. What we should do is fire all corporate executives (Everyone who legally empowered to agree to contracts.), and the board of directors, cancel all stock and leave it operated by the government for a while. (1) They will run it basically as before, and also do a housecleaning to find illegal behaviors that have become ingrained in the company.
It then, after about a month, publish balance sheets and stuff so that people can see how it's doing. Then the company should issue new stock, under a new stock symbol, on the stock exchange, so people can purchase it. And the new owners will, presumably, elect a new board of directors, etc, and the temporary executives put in by the government will resign.
I.e., we don't need to dissolve the company if they commit crimes. We need to fire the people who ran the company in a criminal manner, and we need to take it away from the owners who let the company get run in a criminal manner. Then we clean it up, and sell it to whoever's willing to pay for it.
'The company', as an abstract entity that presumably provides some actual services, and employs a bunch of people, can continue to exist. So 'death penalty' isn't really the right word. Let's call it corporate forfeiture. (Hey, if we call it that, does that mean we don't have to have a trial?)
1) The government running a company, incidentally, is not without precedent, especially during bankruptcy. The federal government does assume caretaker responsibility of some business, the most famous example being when it found itself running a brothel in Nevada for about a year.
A part of that break emphasizing: $160,000 for compensatory damages.
In other words, she had 160,000 dollars worth of medical bills from that coffee. (Well, that figure includes lost wages and stuff.) Which is not that amazing for third degree burns.
Incidentally, 185-190 degrees is 22-27 degrees lower than the boiling point of water. If you were to put a pot of water on the stove until it started to boil, cut it off, and wait maybe a minute...that's the temperature McDonalds was handing people coffee in in tiny cardboard cups.
Go ahead, people who say she didn't deserve that. Pour that in your lap. I dare you. (Call 911 before you do that.)
Well, the obvious solution is to require any relative path with a directory in it to start with a ./, if it didn't already start with ../
It's worth pointing out that, right now, colons, are legal characters in URL. But relatively attempting to access a page named blah:blah.txt will not, in fact, actually work right.
And heaven forbid if the page is named mailto:blah@blah.txt, which, is perfectly correct if you access it like http://example.com/mailto:blah@blah.txt. Yes, both @ and : are allowed in the path part of a http URL. (Heh, in preview those links actually work, proving my point.) This file is obviously quite impossible to refer to relatively unless you make the link something like ./mailto:blah@blah.txt
So, yeah, if we used http/example.com/, we'd need to either change relative links or absolute links...but we needed to do that under the existing scheme, too. And ended up mostly ignoring it, and thus we have filenames that can be mistaken for URIs and you don't want to refer to relatively. We could do the same with relative links, requiring them to start with a ./ or a ../
Well, no, the point I was trying to make is that we need two different chars.
One to separate the protocol and path in a URL, and one to separate out the protocol and the other path (That I don't know the name of) in a URN.
Right now, the different is that URLs have a :// and URNs just have a :. But instead, URLs could have a / or a $ or whatever, leaving the single : for URNs.
Or we could have done it the other way, with a single colon for URLs, and something else for URNs.
Of course, it's too late now.
The real stupidity, of course, wasn't this, it was using 'www' as the prefix for websites. WWW, the only acronym in existence that has three times as many syllables to pronounce as the actual words it replaced. Why the hell we couldn't use 'web' I don't know.
Actually, while the double slashes aren't needed, something should be there, like a single slash.
mailto: and news: and other protocols don't need double slashes because they aren't specifying a unique-over-the-entire-internet URL.
It would be nice if things that were were programmatically distinguishable from things that aren't, like they are now, even if you don't recognize the protocol name. Specifically, without a slash, it's a URN, not a URL.
Although there's really no reason that we need a : at all. We could have used a /.
http/slashdot.org
And left mailto: and whatnot for URNs.
You're saying what I would be saying if I had time to be in this discussion.
Science fiction starts with an unreal premise. Which is why I don't make a lot of distinction between fantasy and sci-fi.
Sometimes the unrealness of this premise is 'We invented a time machine or discovered telepathy' and that's the only change. Sometime it's 'we're in the future or another universe with magic'. Whatever.
But this can never solve the plot's conflict, unless the unreal is very carefully explained in the first place. (Harry Potter attempted to do this, incidentally, in the climax to the series, and opinions are divided on whether or not it worked. As those specific rule of magic was repeatedly drilled into my head, I'll give them a pass.)
Note sometimes it can be hard to figure what the 'conflict' is, often people mistake the problem driving the episode as the conflict, but it does not have to be.
For example, if a dozen people get locked in a house and people start going crazy, someone starts killing the others, the 'problem' is the weather...but no one's going to 'solve' that.
But here's a sci-fi example on how to do it right, strangely from Star Trek: Bashir and Garak are on the holodeck, and something goes wrong with the transporter, and most of the remaining main character's bodies are dumped into the holodeck program.
Now, if we had had an episode about trying to get people out of the holodeck, that would be exceptionally lame. But we didn't get that...we got a few status updates on how close the solution was, but we didn't really care about. It was some random timelimit, like the storm outside, and we knew it would magically go away when the story was over, probably in the nick of time.
Instead of caring about the 'problem', we instead had a rather surreal roleplaying session, where Bashir attempted to play a pre-scripted Bond-like story in a totally crazy way so that no one got killed. (Even people who were supposed to.)
We all understood the rules straight off the bat, and there was no techobabble to save him. If he 'died', he was fine (For once, the safeties weren't broken.), the game was over, and everyone else died. If he got anyone else's body killed, they were dead.
This resulted in an absolutely hilarious episode, as Bashir's 'spy character' made increasingly strange (For people actually playing the hologame) decisions, helped along by Bashir's genre savviness, and all the silly cliches lampshaded by the actual spy Garak.
In the end, Bashir attempted to throw his lot in with the supervillian and he actually 'destroyed the earth'. At which point the villain still tried to kill him, despite all logic...probably due the programmer never even considering anyone would reach the end of a game with the goal to save the world...and then deliberately destroy it.
No techno-babble solution. Not even any actual sci-fi in the story itself, just sci-fi to *set up* the story with a crazy premise 'A guy is role playing a (lawyer-friendly) James Bond movie, and suddenly he has to make sure that, under no circumstances, do specific characters get killed...or that he gets killed...or that he leaves the games.'
The ultimate offense, in fact, is when the Federation gave away several planets, with people on them, to the Cardassians. (Thus causing the creation of the Marquis.)
Did people own land on those planets? Were there independent government who actually had a voice in this, or is the Federation such a strong government it can literally dissolve member worlds and hand them away?! Were none of those worlds members, where they 'territories' or something?
Why do invading aliens parasites think they can infect admirals and run the Federation, and why is the civilian government now involved in this at all, despite the episode taking place on earth?
How come no human, or at least no human member of the Federation, seem to own a private starship? I mean, the starships are constructed automatically, right?
See, for all Star Trek handwaving how the Federation and their economy worked, that was almost better than when they actually attempt to delve into those issues and presented a world that appears to be both quasi-fascist and quasi-communist without actually addressing that such a world would, you know, actually be different than ours. (I.e, they just pretend someone can plausibly own a restaurant or a vineyard.)
No, he operates a restaurant on Earth.
With apparently free food and no profits.
No, he was not correct. People's chests, both men and women, have gotten bigger.
And that is the problem.
No, the lack of degradation is actually the opposite of a problem.
Just because most of your friends at school are "in a band" doesn't mean that's typical of the whole population.
It's worth pointing out that schools in 1906 usually didn't have a school band.
That is, after all, the whole premise of 'The Music Man', set in 1912. The guy travels from county to county throughout entire states and sets up a fake music program in each one, before abounding with their money without bothering to teach anyone any music. Each town is stated to have, essentially, a single piano teacher, and the town owns a player piano. (Probably with Sousa music on it!)
Yes, it's fiction, but it's a pretty accurate representation of what sort of 'music' you could find in towns 100 years ago. Piano lessons. That's it.
So no matter what percentage of kids are in school bands, it's much higher than it was 100 years ago, where maybe 1 out of 50 schools, the expensive private ones, had any sort of musical program at all.
And sheet music is still a big business.
I say 14 years, with the ability to file for an extension...but, in the second term, you have to have mandatory licensing.
I.e, you can't stop people from using your work in their work...they just have to pay a specific set amount to do so. Set by some sort licensing board.
And entirely free if what they're doing is free.
E.g., to use a modern example, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles premiered in comic form in 1984. Assuming the copyright was renewed, right now they'd be under the mandatory rule, which means that if someone wanted to use in some work and sell it, they'd simply have to pay a fee, determined by the amount original content and copyrighted content. If someone wants to paint the Turtles on a day care mural, they can, for free.
I'd even be willing to give copyright holders a third term of 14 years, where they continue to hold the copyright on the actual performance, but only that. I.e., if we're talking about a movie, they still would be the only one who can sell copies of said movies...but the plot, the characters, the premise, everything made up of the movie is now public domain. And people, if they wish, could do a remake or a sequel or whatever. Or if it's music, people can perform covers for free, but only the copyright holders could sell the actual original audio of the song. (And plays and sheet music and books, where people can just retype it and it's as good as the original, probably would never get renewed for that.)
So 42 years of sole ownership of the actual work, the movie or comic book or musical recording that can't be duplicated by others, but nothing else, 28 years of sole control of that work and the premises in the work, and 14 years of copyright as it is now. Assuming they renew it each time.
I think you said that better than I ever could.
All the people opposed to having two levels of SSL security, one where you pay for a cert, and another where you just make one and use it, seem incapable of realizing that we'd don't want to use unsigned certs to protect CC transactions and whatnot.
And we're not talking about some sort of transparent failure. If someone uses some sort of existing cert and it expires or is for a different domain, it should, by God, throw up said huge warnings.
But there should be some way to generate an SSL cert that is marked as 'Just encryption, not authentication', and doesn't present itself as a locked icon symbol or whatever, and doesn't throw up absurd warnings. It just silently encrypts the fucking connection. So you can't sniff people's damn google searches or their web mail password or whatever.
In fact, as I'm hoping for a new standard anyway, let's just require it to use SNI on a different port, removing all confusion if the connection is secure. Call it httpe or something.
A zip fastener and a cheap padlock is enough to make it clear that your tent isn't public. Anything more is a waste of effort - and may just draw attention to your tent.
So. Why. The. Fuck. Can't. We. Do. That?
Are you having some sort of mental issue or something? We want a damn door on the tent. We don't care if it's metaphorically steel or fabric.
Right now, there isn't even, metaphorically, a tent. Everything's just out in the fucking open air, where anyone can walk up and take it.
It is not a valid complaint that part of the security system is much stronger than another part, when all parts are stronger than damn plaintext.
So what is stopping you? People who "know what they are asking for" will understand what the warnings in Firefox are all about and click through them in 10 seconds the first time they visit the site. If someone is put off by the warnings then they clearly don't "know what they are asking for".
They were asking for a web page. We, the creators of the page, wanted to give it to them with a small amount of cheap security.
Yeah, because the black hats are just queuing up to go to the massive effort of sniffing passwords or staging man-in-the-middle attacks on obscure web forums, whereas the much cheaper technique of phishing (which is neither sniffing nor man-in-the-middle, and won't be stopped by simply using SSL) is exceedingly rare.
I have no idea why you're bitching about how pointless SSL is. No one was talking about that.
But, yes, people do sniff passwords and attack people that way. Google 'wifi scam airport'. (And notice this is actually a MitM attack. You can, of course, sniff any wifi connection anyway.)
Oh, look, someone on their laptop just logged into that forum they visit every day. Oh, look, someone just stole their login id and is going to use it to post spam.
Oh, look, they just sent their hotmail password, too. I wonder if any of those are their bank's password.
Good thing we didn't let them use that insecure SSL cert to log into those sites. You know, to visit a site they visit all the time, and thus it could have compared to an existing cert.
That would just be a horrible idea, to transparently encrypt all traffic that's moderately sensitive. The people who think that's a good idea are probably the same people who store expensive items inside their house, when everyone knows people can break through windows.
People should be required to either store their stuff in impregnable vaults, or leaving it lying around on their lawn. Letting people keep stuff behind a standard door just gives them a false sense of security and we should loudly repeatedly war people whenever they attempt to set something of theirs down inside any sort of structure instead of outside.