It's more like 2-4% these days, and that's apples to oranges. You aren't making your purchase because you found something on Visa or Mastercard's web site. Visa and Mastercard didn't build the mall you were shopping in when you found the product. Apple and Google are selling marketplaces - not just handling the financial processing.
That's very nice, but it has no relevance to the financial solvency of the system.
A shared expense to equalize risk of disability isn't a bad idea. It's setting it up in such a way that it's going to crash and burn and become insolvent, despite having decades of notice, is the problem. I'm not saying 'down with social security,' but if you're going to implement such a system, you have the responsibility of keeping it solvent, either by increasing funding or decreasing benefits. Obviously my own politics dictate my personal preference as to which of those two I'd like, but doing nothing is not an option.
Sorry, this is BS. I'm 31. I'll be 65 in 2045. I get a little folded piece of paper in my social security statements every year that says in big bold letters 'I've heard I won't receive any social security after year 20xx. Is that true?' I've never earned six figures in my life so am not in some sky-high bracket.
The paper says 'No! According to our estimates, after the year 20xx, assuming Congress does not act to change Social security's financial picture, you will receive $0.70 for every dollar you are owed.'
This is directly from the Social Security administration.
They take the worst case of 'you won't receive anything,' claim it isn't true, and then tell you that you'll get seventy cents on the dollar. Wow, thanks! I could lose thirty percent without the government helping me out. Only in the SSA's book is this 'good news' - because we aren't losing the whole thing.
You might want to re-over-educate yourself about how sales tax works. Congress has got nothing to do with it - it's State sales tax.
Even if you say 'Congress should enact a VAT that would replace State sales tax,' you still have the same problems. I live in state A, work in state B, and buy geegaws to have shipped to state C. Which state gets a share of my VAT?
And that's assuming that Congress could somehow forbid states to enact sales taxes, which they can't.
As a small business owner, if you made me file sales tax returns to every single state with whom we did business, I'd just stop running my business. We already spend a ton of time and $$$ on taxes. The 1099 reporting law that recently got repealed would have been a nightmare. A sales tax bill due to every state is unimaginable. Maybe Amazon could figure out a way to do it, but your average small business sure as heck can't.
And yes, I am a Western, moderately-educated, arugula-eating capitalist. Hey, at least we got the arugula in common.
You have got to be kidding me. The US military is occupying that country. Of course you have leverage. Of course you have to also pay your allies for their undying friendship.
No, we don't. Occupying a country by military force means you exert absolute control with that military force. You have martial law. We aren't and we don't. We have a military force there, yes, but we also have one in Japan, one in Korea, some in Germany, some in Saudi Arabia, and some in Kuwait -- all countries we aren't occupying.
Iraq has a sovereign government and if anyone in America could pick up the phone and have their will be done then it would make what we are trying to do there a lot easier, but we can't. Take this from somebody (my dad) who was over there and had direct responsibility for trying to help Iraq build (or re-build, in some cases) a modern economy. The Iraqi central government has to sign off on everything and they just don't want to most of the time, particularly if it involves spending Iraqi rather than American money. The level of corruption and sectarianism in Iraq makes the United States look like kindergarten.
Your perception of the war is high-school simplistic. Maybe it makes you feel good about yourself and whatever country you live in to think that Americans are getting whatever they want because they parked a bunch of tanks in Baghdad. But you have not been there and you clearly aren't even very well read about how the Iraqi government works today versus what the American military is actually doing there. I don't even know what 'pay your allies for their friendship' means, as if Britain were some thug we hired to do our job for us. They're a sovereign country and they had no obligation to send anyone to Iraq.
I'm not suggesting that we aren't there because of self-interest. But that self-interest is a large, democratic, stable Middle-eastern country (instead of a large, tyrannical, unstable Middle-eastern dictatorship). If you had even the slightest notion of what it costs to send hundreds of thousands of people along with cars, trucks, tanks, airplanes, spare parts, food, water, a good chunk of the State Department, and all of the contractors necessary to support those things, you would very quickly see exactly how much America is 'profiting' because of the war in Iraq. I'm sure Bechtel and Haliburton have made several billion dollars apiece. But even if both these companies' entire revenue came from Iraq, it doesn't even out. The total cost of the Iraq war has been estimated at anywhere from $768 billion (costofwar.com) to $3 trillion (Washington Post), and that's just the financial cost.
As it happens, I don't think the war was a good idea in the first place, but for reasons that have nothing to do with drivel like yours. This is my favorite:
That's not quite true. The US will be invading Iran before the decade is over. Kyrgyzstan is about Iran. Afghanistan is about Iran. Iraq is about Iran. It's called encirclement. The end game, the big prize, the thing that will tide America over into post-oil supremacy.
'Post-oil supremacy' has got to be the stupidest thing I've heard all week. We're not 'post-oil' and won't be for a long time. I don't know what we'd be 'encircling.' Having huge amounts of money and lives tied up in the Middle East isn't an end game at all. Most Americans (myself included) would prefer we were out of there entirely. 'Satrapy' isn't a system and it certainly isn't an Empire - it's a derogatory term used to reduce an enormously complicated situation to something simple enough to fit your one-dimensional worldview. 'Keep the money flowing'? 'White Man's burden'? What money? Flowing where? What are you even talking about?
A libertarian would have the state declare bankruptcy and nullify the state employee union's contract and pensions.
I'm not sure how placing the entire State government under the supervision of a federal bankruptcy court would be "libertarian".
In principle, it would be libertarian because the state would be able to re-negotiate things like prison guards' salaries and other public employee benefits, particularly pensions, that are bankrupting the state (especially the pension obligations that they have but aren't reporting). It's 'burn everything down and start over,' and it certainly has appeal.
In practice, this can't happen for a few reasons. The federal entity designed to guarantee pensions would explode if California offloaded its entire pension load, and this would have a lot of repercussions outside of California. Pensions are very hard to un-do, which is why unions realized the genius in asking for rich pensions rather than salary increases about a while back - you're promising money later, when the current administration will be gone, and you can't un-promise it without actually taking money away from old folks living on a fixed income. It's the Social Security problem but much more immediate.
No cache was discovered in 2010 - it was quite well known for decades that Afghanistan sits on huge untapped mineral resources.
So that wiki article you linked that says:
As of 2006, the mineral resources of Afghanistan were relatively underexplored from a global perspective.
Who knew? According to what? Even if we knew in 2003 what we know today, the math still doesn't work out in favor of invasion just for resources. We have plenty of resources in places where rule of law exists.
As for corruption and graft, Iraq ain't no Peoria either, yet corporations line up cap in hand in Washington, begging for a cut of the oil exploitation rights, the infrastructure contracts and what have you.
They don't line up in Washington - they line up in Baghdad. 'Blood for oil' is very sexy but it's always been naive and it's never been true. You know that exploitation rights are not the same as actually getting the oil, right? It's still their oil - they might pay an American company (or a European company, or a Chinese company - it's up to them, strangely enough) to dig the wells because we have the technology and the experience to do it, but how that translates into a big fat oil pipeline to the United States is beyond me. They sell oil on the open market just like every other Middle Eastern country.
What shadow conspiracy? It's all in the open.
It's all so trivially simply in your worldview. Because oil companies are huge multinational businesses with a big lobby, they clearly dictate foreign policy, right? My dad was the head of one of the provincial reconstruction teams in Iraq. The people getting rich there are the Iraqi politicians and their families. KBR and Haliburtion are definitely making a lot of money on military contracts, but nobody has proposed an alternative: our military isn't big enough to do things it did in WWII like running cafeterias because under 1% of American citizens serve in the armed forces. So we pay private companies to bring in the ice cream and the sausages, and Iraq pays private companies to exploit oil. There are big American oil companies competing for that business and there are big non-American ones -- we have no leverage over them to make them pick an American company, because if we did and if we used it, the Brits might be pretty pissed off at us, since they had people in Iraq for a long time as well and BP is still pretty big.
'America as Empire' probably gets a lot of government majors their PhDs, but come on. An Empire has colonies that exist to expand the influence of the mother country and it has governors with a great deal of control over those colonies. We've never had anything like absolute control over the Iraqis because we don't have the stomach for the brutality that would require. Iraq hasn't expanded American influence - we have a lot of military infrastructure there, sure, but unless we're planning on invading Turkey anytime soon, our bases in Kuwait and Kyrgyzstan have been there for a lot longer.
Iraq has been a huge expense for America and the return on our investment is questionable even for people who supported the idea in the first place. My dad's experience was that we (the Americans) don't have the balls to go after corrupt Iraqis who are well-connected to the government or one of the militias, so many of the really honest local politicians and police chiefs (who were not very numerous to begin with) get assassinated. Look at this guy in Pakistan recently. He thought that maybe a woman shouldn't be put to death for blasphemy and he died for it. If that had happened in Iraq, we probably wouldn't have done a lot about it unless the blasphemer were an American citizen, because we are supposed to respect their culture. If we were really running an Empire, we wouldn't be at the mercy of hundreds of sheiks and Iraqi politicians -- unfortunately for the Imperialists among us, they
Not to throw a wet towel on your knee-jerk American-conspiracy liberal gut reaction, but we invaded Afghanistan in 2003. The cache was discovered in 2010. What, you thought Slashdot was about sane discussion?
Even so,it's not like America 'gets' these resources. 'Oh, but American companies will win exploitation rights blah blah blah.' Maybe they will, but they'll regret it. Anybody who knows anything about Afghanistan knows that the only people who will come out ahead doing business in Afghanistan are Afghans. The corruption and graft in that country make Iraq look like Peoria.
And even if we did somehow invade Afghanistan seven years in advance on the hope that we'd strike gold, invading Afghanistan for resources is like invading a nunnery for single young women -- sure, you might find some, but you'd need to be very, very desperate first as the consequences and cost of doing so are outrageous.
No country has ever profited from a war in Afghanistan in the long run. I'm sure some individuals are finding ways to make a buck, but the cost in human lives, money, and political capital is astronomical next to even the gains the US is trying to make, much less any secret shadow conspiracy goals like 'bomb them for their rockz.'
That's because a lot of folks can't stomach the idea that their country was founded on the very intentional and institutionalized genocide of one group of people and the enslavement of another.
What country wasn't founded on institutionalized genocide? Almost every 'civilized' country in history had a dominant culture that killed off or otherwise suppressed a whole bunch of others, and even those that didn't (as much) only didn't due to accident of geography (say, the Japanese, not that it made them any less prone to doing the same thing to others). Heck, the Romans were much better at it than we are. I'd sooner bet on Roman Centurions vs. The Taliban than I would on the USA vs. The Taliban.
I'm not saying that your point about people not wanting to think poorly of themselves or their country is wrong, because it's quite clearly right. But I don't think that the US is any more prone to it than any other country. It's a human condition, not exclusively or even particularly American.
The only simple part about flying is the basic operation of the ailerons, rudder, and elevators. Knowing when and to what extent to operate them is less simple, and if you add on radio work, navigation, and landing, it's much harder. There are computers that will land planes for you, but they require sophisticated approaches at major airports - not your local podunk airport.
Computers can do the mechanical job of flying the airplane pretty well these days, but they don't yet work well with ATC or other airplanes in the vicinity to handle separation, and they also (as far as I know) won't do anything other than direct or waypoint navigation - you can't say 'go from PHL to ABE to JFK and calculate the route to avoid mountains and also clouds and don't fly into airspace without clearance. And if you don't get a Class B clearance through Philly, go around and under the controlled airspace like this.'
As a student pilot near the end of his 40-45 hours' training for a private pilot certification, it's neat that people are thinking of stuff like this, but I can't see it ever happening -- at least, not as a solution to congestion.
The nature of government control over any mass-market activity like driving is such that they become very bad at saying 'no' to the public. It's shamefully easy to get a driver's license. Not so for a pilot's license. I'm as much of an anti-government nut as you'll find on Slashdot, and while there are definitely parts of the FAA that I think are crazy, on the instruction and licensing side I've been very impressed with what I've seen. The FAA Pilot's handbook (the core 'textbook' for pilots) is well written and concise. The written tests have a few weird questions on them (like a couple on pre-1940 navigation systems) but for the most part are pretty challenging -- not the MADD-influenced DMV test with questions like 'You've just consumed nine beers. Calculate your BAC.' The 'final exam' of a pilot's license is the checkride, where you sit for up to a couple hours with an FAA examiner and demonstrate everything you have to know as a pilot, is nothing like the 'I'll be fine if I can parallel park' road test. A lot of very good flight instructors I've met admit to having failed either or both the written test or checkride on their first try. In other words, it's not designed so that a 16 year-old can pass it with a little bit of effort. It's designed to make sure you know wtf you are doing before you take off, and it includes sections on how airplane engines work, airplane instruments, airport signage, lighting, and traffic patterns, communicating with ATC, reading charts, understanding aviation weather (clouds, pressure, temperature, and density) and quite a lot about navigation.
That's not to say that you can't strip down the curriculum for a more limited set of flight rules (and we do, in fact - 'sport pilots' only need half as many hours) but even becoming a sport pilot isn't easy, to say nothing of becoming a good one. Unless you live in a handful of places around the world where the weather is consistently clear without a lot of wind, air travel will never be reliable for a commuter. Are you going to spend 20 minutes checking aviation weather or calling in for a weather briefing every day before you go to work? And if you don't, what if it's clear where you depart but you run right into a weather system halfway there and can't see the ground (that'd need another 40 hours of training for your instrument rating to even be legal).
There are definitely some things that could be done to lower the barriers of entry to aviation, and making a reliable, short-range VTOL that doesn't need AVGAS is certainly one of them. And I'm not trying to be elitist about flying, either, like it's some exclusive or impenetrable club -- it isn't. Most pilots I know encourage everybody else they know to at least take an intro flight, because there's really nothing like it. But even so, the national drop-out rate for flight school students is 80% (some recent AOPA study - don't have a link handy but Google it). It used to be that everyone thought 'oh, well, it's just expensive, people start and don't want to spend the money to finish.' That's not wrong but it's not the whole story. The study found that money wasn't the top reason for dropping out. People get intimidated and scared right around the point where they have to fly solo. They're nervous about talking to ATC. They're nervous about landing in a crosswind. They're uncomfortable in a tiny airplane. The quality of flight instructors is all over the map (another reason cited in the study); just about every CFI out there doesn't dream of being a CFI but is building up hours to try and get a job working for an airline or flying a corporate jet. That doesn't mean they don't know what they're doing, but it does mean that they're teaching because they have to and not because teaching is necessarily what they want.
As much as I love aviation, I would sooner spend the money on what other posters have suggested - either a good public transit system or multi-gigabit FTTH infrastructure for telecommuting.
I don't know what basement you live in, but I imagine it's either China, or the local International Socialist Organization chapter on a college campus.
I'd write more, but I'm being kept down by the housecleaning chemical companies.
credit card processing as a resource, access to mass media, access to funds to be able to get elected, are basic, human entitlements.
What? huh? where? according to whom? Because you say so?
People absolutely go from town to town, or door to door within a single town (probably not in a horse cart) for local elections.
Your post was about necessary resources for human beings to survive. You have now changed your tune to 'necessary resources to get elected to office,' which is a completely different question, to say nothing of the sheer absurdity of your 'right' to get elected. How can every human possibly have a 'right to get elected?'
it doesnt matter what the reason is. it doesnt matter what the factors are.
This is clearly true, given your apparent awareness of reason and facts.
What you are describing is far more tyrannical than any private corporation could ever be, because it relies entirely on somebody deciding what services humans are entitled to and then deciding who must provide them and how. People don't do very complex things like change careers because some person in the government decided that they ought to. It's been tried, and probably the only place it has met any success is China, where the State can sometimes decide what job you ought to have that best serves the State (er, I mean, other people), but I certainly hope you're not going to point to the Chinese as a great example of how to use our freedoms.
There is not one country in the world that I'm aware of which enshrines in law the basic human entitlement of credit card processing.
Of course it's absurd. Just like a lot of the stuff that car companies are forced to do. It's tough, though, because in some cases, government mandates have resulted in improvements to safety and efficiency (in the technology, not in the political process) but this is a win-win on the bureaucratic side. The pols love it because they can say they protected your children, and the car companies love it because the requirements apply to everyone. Imagine if you made a widget and suddenly you had to add a $200 part (sorry, a $100 part with a $100 margin) to that widget, but so did everybody else in the widget business. Free money.
It's just a question of degrees though. When the government came in and mandated a small thing like seatbelts, they were (presumably) saving more than 200 lives a year, and not at a cost of $200/car. But there's no reason for anyone involved in this decision-making process to stop there.
They could say its for tourism just like Intelligent Design was not merely Creationism relabeled but the courts were not fooled by that tall tale either.
Except that the Intelligent Design cases were about curriculum in a public school, which is mandatory, and this is an amusement park. Nobody can make you go there.
If you ask me, the government shouldn't even be allowed to spend tax dollars on stuff like this, secular or not. So don't let me stop you from bulldozing this ridiculous project. I'm just pointing out that, once you allow government to be in the business of spending tax dollars on private enterprise that doesn't serve a fundamental need in society, it is very difficult to then try and establish parameters about what qualifies and what doesn't.
I don't even know where to start here. You clearly have no notion of how the financial service industry works, and about as little idea of how feudalism works.
so basically, that makes that small group, or individuals or individual, the sole decision makers in regard to what happens in that aspect of life.
Let's follow your example and say that I run a private company that has a large, worldwide share of processing credit cards (there are a couple private companies that actually do have a pretty big share). Let's further say that I am the chief executive with absolute power over that company.
My bad behavior is constrained by two primary factors: government regulation and the other big companies, because three major players does not a monopoly make (and you're discounting Discover and a handful of other companies around the world in the credit card business). Even free-market types like me don't think that the government should stay completely out of the financial industry. If we're relying on competition to keep people honest, then we need an authority to make sure that these guys are actually competing and not colluding, because the minute they stop competing we do have a monopoly.
they are choosing not to let me use their resources, but, it turns out that they are the controller of majority (dominant majority) of those resources.
Visa and Mastercard primarily work through issuing banks that actually handle most of the money that goes back and forth (American Express and Discover actually have more of a direct relationship with the cardholder in that you don't see things like Capital One American Express -- they are the bank as well as the card company). You can be rejected by one bank for their Mastercard but accepted by another. This is true of processing and accepting cards as well -- you can get thrown out of one processor, but only if you are a repeat, egregious violator or breaking the law can you be blacklisted by all of Mastercard or all of Visa.
You furthermore describe credit card processing as a resource to which you have some basic, human entitlement. The minimum standards for both having a card and accepting credit card transactions are not very high, so it's not very far removed from what would be necessary if it were such a basic need, but it ain't. They aren't withholding bread, water, electricity, fuel, or oxygen -- they're the gatekeepers to a tremendously complex commerce network which they developed, and there are so many gatekeepers that even if a single individual ran Visa like a tyrant, it would be quite difficult to 'deprive' you of their 'resources.'
Finally, a feudal compact involved trading land for military service, or else (if you were a serf) trading land for physical labor. Your dichotomy here is as flimsy as it comes. You're equating web hosting and accepting credit card transactions to something as basic and fundamental as land and food, and then suggesting that this resource without which you will perish is controlled by a single individual who did nothing to deserve that control.
Visa, Mastercard, and AmEx didn't stumble upon some pre-existing financial network and claim it for themselves. Along with thousands of banks and hundreds of thousands of people on every level in the finance business, they made it, and even so are subject to tremendous regulation in how they use it, who is allowed to do what with it, and when they are allowed to penalize anyone. Furthermore, there is hardly only one gatekeeper to this resource -- there are hundreds of companies that will give you a credit card and dozens and dozens that will process somebody else's for you.
The 'de facto government' in this picture is not the credit card company but the actual governments of the world who can step in and tell these companies when and by how much they're allowed to adjust rates (and sometimes even force them to set certain rates) and how much latitude they have in providing or denying service to just about everyone. Clearly, the government can declare certain functions so basic that they are a fundamental right and not a privilege, but that hasn't happened with web hosting or credit card processing.
And is a bank legally required to offer you a mortgage? A car loan? No -- their obligation, even in Europe, is a very basic level of service that is deemed necessary to survive these days.
The credit card industry is a whole different can of worms, because the credit card companies and their issuing banks have an enormous number of security and anti-fraud requirements. Saying 'Paypal is a bank' is only applicable to how it treats the money you actually have in your account -- whether or not they allow you to accept EFT or credit card transactions is another matter entirely.
Paypal has rightly been in a lot of hot water because of the leeway they've had in the past to simply freeze the money you have in your Paypal account. This is a very different situation than freezing out incoming transfers or donations.
There is no comparison. Paypal (like everybody else) isn't allowed to use ethnicity or gender in making decisions about whom they serve, but neither are they obligated to provide service to everyone, no matter what.
They offer a service which required that you agree to a published set of rules. You have basic protections under the law that say such rules can't be completely arbitrary or discriminatory, but it's still a private business transaction and there is a world of difference between 'I want to run a shop that sells stuff only to white people' and 'Under no circumstances am I allowed to refuse service to anybody.' Most private businesses are allowed to deny service to specific individuals if they have cause, and in this case that 'cause' for both Amazon and Paypal is not some secret document but a pretty reasonable set of limitations like 'you can't host illegal stuff' and 'you can't take money that we think might be used to harm people.' They might well be wrong about the likelihood that the Wikileaks cablegate trove will actually harm anyone, but they don't want to take that chance, and that is very much their prerogative.
"Banks may not deny accounts to their customers because of political reasons." and be done with it.
And what exactly is a 'political reason'?
You are talking about a basic bank account. As you pointed out, most countries have pretty strict rules about basic bank accounts. This is about as relevant to Paypal service as a luxury yacht. Basic bank accounts can't accept credit card transactions and certainly nobody is about to suggest that accepting donations via credit card is a requirement for living.
If Assange's power company, water company, local grocery store, or other similarly fundamental service cut him off, then I'm on board with you, private business or no. But Amazon web hosting and Paypal credit card processing hardly fall under that umbrella.
You, as a private citizen, are free to stop doing business with anyone whom you so choose simply because you don't like what they are doing.
But when Paypal, as a private business, stops doing business with someone they choose because they don't like what their client is doing, you threaten to 'report them to the European Parliament?' On what possible basis? Are you actually suggesting that the government should force Paypal or any other private business to continue doing business against their will?
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China will run out of coal before 2050, however.
Source, please.
It's more like 2-4% these days, and that's apples to oranges. You aren't making your purchase because you found something on Visa or Mastercard's web site. Visa and Mastercard didn't build the mall you were shopping in when you found the product. Apple and Google are selling marketplaces - not just handling the financial processing.
That's very nice, but it has no relevance to the financial solvency of the system.
A shared expense to equalize risk of disability isn't a bad idea. It's setting it up in such a way that it's going to crash and burn and become insolvent, despite having decades of notice, is the problem. I'm not saying 'down with social security,' but if you're going to implement such a system, you have the responsibility of keeping it solvent, either by increasing funding or decreasing benefits. Obviously my own politics dictate my personal preference as to which of those two I'd like, but doing nothing is not an option.
Sorry, this is BS. I'm 31. I'll be 65 in 2045. I get a little folded piece of paper in my social security statements every year that says in big bold letters 'I've heard I won't receive any social security after year 20xx. Is that true?' I've never earned six figures in my life so am not in some sky-high bracket.
The paper says 'No! According to our estimates, after the year 20xx, assuming Congress does not act to change Social security's financial picture, you will receive $0.70 for every dollar you are owed.'
This is directly from the Social Security administration.
They take the worst case of 'you won't receive anything,' claim it isn't true, and then tell you that you'll get seventy cents on the dollar. Wow, thanks! I could lose thirty percent without the government helping me out. Only in the SSA's book is this 'good news' - because we aren't losing the whole thing.
over-educated, arugula-eating elitist.
You might want to re-over-educate yourself about how sales tax works. Congress has got nothing to do with it - it's State sales tax.
Even if you say 'Congress should enact a VAT that would replace State sales tax,' you still have the same problems. I live in state A, work in state B, and buy geegaws to have shipped to state C. Which state gets a share of my VAT?
And that's assuming that Congress could somehow forbid states to enact sales taxes, which they can't.
As a small business owner, if you made me file sales tax returns to every single state with whom we did business, I'd just stop running my business. We already spend a ton of time and $$$ on taxes. The 1099 reporting law that recently got repealed would have been a nightmare. A sales tax bill due to every state is unimaginable. Maybe Amazon could figure out a way to do it, but your average small business sure as heck can't.
And yes, I am a Western, moderately-educated, arugula-eating capitalist. Hey, at least we got the arugula in common.
You have got to be kidding me. The US military is occupying that country. Of course you have leverage. Of course you have to also pay your allies for their undying friendship.
No, we don't. Occupying a country by military force means you exert absolute control with that military force. You have martial law. We aren't and we don't. We have a military force there, yes, but we also have one in Japan, one in Korea, some in Germany, some in Saudi Arabia, and some in Kuwait -- all countries we aren't occupying.
Iraq has a sovereign government and if anyone in America could pick up the phone and have their will be done then it would make what we are trying to do there a lot easier, but we can't. Take this from somebody (my dad) who was over there and had direct responsibility for trying to help Iraq build (or re-build, in some cases) a modern economy. The Iraqi central government has to sign off on everything and they just don't want to most of the time, particularly if it involves spending Iraqi rather than American money. The level of corruption and sectarianism in Iraq makes the United States look like kindergarten.
Your perception of the war is high-school simplistic. Maybe it makes you feel good about yourself and whatever country you live in to think that Americans are getting whatever they want because they parked a bunch of tanks in Baghdad. But you have not been there and you clearly aren't even very well read about how the Iraqi government works today versus what the American military is actually doing there. I don't even know what 'pay your allies for their friendship' means, as if Britain were some thug we hired to do our job for us. They're a sovereign country and they had no obligation to send anyone to Iraq.
I'm not suggesting that we aren't there because of self-interest. But that self-interest is a large, democratic, stable Middle-eastern country (instead of a large, tyrannical, unstable Middle-eastern dictatorship). If you had even the slightest notion of what it costs to send hundreds of thousands of people along with cars, trucks, tanks, airplanes, spare parts, food, water, a good chunk of the State Department, and all of the contractors necessary to support those things, you would very quickly see exactly how much America is 'profiting' because of the war in Iraq. I'm sure Bechtel and Haliburton have made several billion dollars apiece. But even if both these companies' entire revenue came from Iraq, it doesn't even out. The total cost of the Iraq war has been estimated at anywhere from $768 billion (costofwar.com) to $3 trillion (Washington Post), and that's just the financial cost.
As it happens, I don't think the war was a good idea in the first place, but for reasons that have nothing to do with drivel like yours. This is my favorite:
That's not quite true. The US will be invading Iran before the decade is over. Kyrgyzstan is about Iran. Afghanistan is about Iran. Iraq is about Iran. It's called encirclement. The end game, the big prize, the thing that will tide America over into post-oil supremacy.
'Post-oil supremacy' has got to be the stupidest thing I've heard all week. We're not 'post-oil' and won't be for a long time. I don't know what we'd be 'encircling.' Having huge amounts of money and lives tied up in the Middle East isn't an end game at all. Most Americans (myself included) would prefer we were out of there entirely. 'Satrapy' isn't a system and it certainly isn't an Empire - it's a derogatory term used to reduce an enormously complicated situation to something simple enough to fit your one-dimensional worldview. 'Keep the money flowing'? 'White Man's burden'? What money? Flowing where? What are you even talking about?
A libertarian would have the state declare bankruptcy and nullify the state employee union's contract and pensions.
I'm not sure how placing the entire State government under the supervision of a federal bankruptcy court would be "libertarian".
In principle, it would be libertarian because the state would be able to re-negotiate things like prison guards' salaries and other public employee benefits, particularly pensions, that are bankrupting the state (especially the pension obligations that they have but aren't reporting). It's 'burn everything down and start over,' and it certainly has appeal.
In practice, this can't happen for a few reasons. The federal entity designed to guarantee pensions would explode if California offloaded its entire pension load, and this would have a lot of repercussions outside of California. Pensions are very hard to un-do, which is why unions realized the genius in asking for rich pensions rather than salary increases about a while back - you're promising money later, when the current administration will be gone, and you can't un-promise it without actually taking money away from old folks living on a fixed income. It's the Social Security problem but much more immediate.
I am American. I'm not liberal.
No cache was discovered in 2010 - it was quite well known for decades that Afghanistan sits on huge untapped mineral resources.
So that wiki article you linked that says:
As of 2006, the mineral resources of Afghanistan were relatively underexplored from a global perspective.
Who knew? According to what? Even if we knew in 2003 what we know today, the math still doesn't work out in favor of invasion just for resources. We have plenty of resources in places where rule of law exists.
As for corruption and graft, Iraq ain't no Peoria either, yet corporations line up cap in hand in Washington, begging for a cut of the oil exploitation rights, the infrastructure contracts and what have you.
They don't line up in Washington - they line up in Baghdad. 'Blood for oil' is very sexy but it's always been naive and it's never been true. You know that exploitation rights are not the same as actually getting the oil, right? It's still their oil - they might pay an American company (or a European company, or a Chinese company - it's up to them, strangely enough) to dig the wells because we have the technology and the experience to do it, but how that translates into a big fat oil pipeline to the United States is beyond me. They sell oil on the open market just like every other Middle Eastern country.
What shadow conspiracy? It's all in the open.
It's all so trivially simply in your worldview. Because oil companies are huge multinational businesses with a big lobby, they clearly dictate foreign policy, right? My dad was the head of one of the provincial reconstruction teams in Iraq. The people getting rich there are the Iraqi politicians and their families. KBR and Haliburtion are definitely making a lot of money on military contracts, but nobody has proposed an alternative: our military isn't big enough to do things it did in WWII like running cafeterias because under 1% of American citizens serve in the armed forces. So we pay private companies to bring in the ice cream and the sausages, and Iraq pays private companies to exploit oil. There are big American oil companies competing for that business and there are big non-American ones -- we have no leverage over them to make them pick an American company, because if we did and if we used it, the Brits might be pretty pissed off at us, since they had people in Iraq for a long time as well and BP is still pretty big.
'America as Empire' probably gets a lot of government majors their PhDs, but come on. An Empire has colonies that exist to expand the influence of the mother country and it has governors with a great deal of control over those colonies. We've never had anything like absolute control over the Iraqis because we don't have the stomach for the brutality that would require. Iraq hasn't expanded American influence - we have a lot of military infrastructure there, sure, but unless we're planning on invading Turkey anytime soon, our bases in Kuwait and Kyrgyzstan have been there for a lot longer.
Iraq has been a huge expense for America and the return on our investment is questionable even for people who supported the idea in the first place. My dad's experience was that we (the Americans) don't have the balls to go after corrupt Iraqis who are well-connected to the government or one of the militias, so many of the really honest local politicians and police chiefs (who were not very numerous to begin with) get assassinated. Look at this guy in Pakistan recently. He thought that maybe a woman shouldn't be put to death for blasphemy and he died for it. If that had happened in Iraq, we probably wouldn't have done a lot about it unless the blasphemer were an American citizen, because we are supposed to respect their culture. If we were really running an Empire, we wouldn't be at the mercy of hundreds of sheiks and Iraqi politicians -- unfortunately for the Imperialists among us, they
Not to throw a wet towel on your knee-jerk American-conspiracy liberal gut reaction, but we invaded Afghanistan in 2003. The cache was discovered in 2010. What, you thought Slashdot was about sane discussion?
Even so,it's not like America 'gets' these resources. 'Oh, but American companies will win exploitation rights blah blah blah.' Maybe they will, but they'll regret it. Anybody who knows anything about Afghanistan knows that the only people who will come out ahead doing business in Afghanistan are Afghans. The corruption and graft in that country make Iraq look like Peoria.
And even if we did somehow invade Afghanistan seven years in advance on the hope that we'd strike gold, invading Afghanistan for resources is like invading a nunnery for single young women -- sure, you might find some, but you'd need to be very, very desperate first as the consequences and cost of doing so are outrageous.
No country has ever profited from a war in Afghanistan in the long run. I'm sure some individuals are finding ways to make a buck, but the cost in human lives, money, and political capital is astronomical next to even the gains the US is trying to make, much less any secret shadow conspiracy goals like 'bomb them for their rockz.'
I'd like to prove that there are no ejorbijorbies in my neighbor's house. Can you recommend a good method for me to detect them?
only the resource-rich bits
...of Afghanistan?
That's because a lot of folks can't stomach the idea that their country was founded on the very intentional and institutionalized genocide of one group of people and the enslavement of another.
What country wasn't founded on institutionalized genocide? Almost every 'civilized' country in history had a dominant culture that killed off or otherwise suppressed a whole bunch of others, and even those that didn't (as much) only didn't due to accident of geography (say, the Japanese, not that it made them any less prone to doing the same thing to others). Heck, the Romans were much better at it than we are. I'd sooner bet on Roman Centurions vs. The Taliban than I would on the USA vs. The Taliban.
I'm not saying that your point about people not wanting to think poorly of themselves or their country is wrong, because it's quite clearly right. But I don't think that the US is any more prone to it than any other country. It's a human condition, not exclusively or even particularly American.
The only simple part about flying is the basic operation of the ailerons, rudder, and elevators. Knowing when and to what extent to operate them is less simple, and if you add on radio work, navigation, and landing, it's much harder. There are computers that will land planes for you, but they require sophisticated approaches at major airports - not your local podunk airport.
Computers can do the mechanical job of flying the airplane pretty well these days, but they don't yet work well with ATC or other airplanes in the vicinity to handle separation, and they also (as far as I know) won't do anything other than direct or waypoint navigation - you can't say 'go from PHL to ABE to JFK and calculate the route to avoid mountains and also clouds and don't fly into airspace without clearance. And if you don't get a Class B clearance through Philly, go around and under the controlled airspace like this.'
As a student pilot near the end of his 40-45 hours' training for a private pilot certification, it's neat that people are thinking of stuff like this, but I can't see it ever happening -- at least, not as a solution to congestion.
The nature of government control over any mass-market activity like driving is such that they become very bad at saying 'no' to the public. It's shamefully easy to get a driver's license. Not so for a pilot's license. I'm as much of an anti-government nut as you'll find on Slashdot, and while there are definitely parts of the FAA that I think are crazy, on the instruction and licensing side I've been very impressed with what I've seen. The FAA Pilot's handbook (the core 'textbook' for pilots) is well written and concise. The written tests have a few weird questions on them (like a couple on pre-1940 navigation systems) but for the most part are pretty challenging -- not the MADD-influenced DMV test with questions like 'You've just consumed nine beers. Calculate your BAC.' The 'final exam' of a pilot's license is the checkride, where you sit for up to a couple hours with an FAA examiner and demonstrate everything you have to know as a pilot, is nothing like the 'I'll be fine if I can parallel park' road test. A lot of very good flight instructors I've met admit to having failed either or both the written test or checkride on their first try. In other words, it's not designed so that a 16 year-old can pass it with a little bit of effort. It's designed to make sure you know wtf you are doing before you take off, and it includes sections on how airplane engines work, airplane instruments, airport signage, lighting, and traffic patterns, communicating with ATC, reading charts, understanding aviation weather (clouds, pressure, temperature, and density) and quite a lot about navigation.
That's not to say that you can't strip down the curriculum for a more limited set of flight rules (and we do, in fact - 'sport pilots' only need half as many hours) but even becoming a sport pilot isn't easy, to say nothing of becoming a good one. Unless you live in a handful of places around the world where the weather is consistently clear without a lot of wind, air travel will never be reliable for a commuter. Are you going to spend 20 minutes checking aviation weather or calling in for a weather briefing every day before you go to work? And if you don't, what if it's clear where you depart but you run right into a weather system halfway there and can't see the ground (that'd need another 40 hours of training for your instrument rating to even be legal).
There are definitely some things that could be done to lower the barriers of entry to aviation, and making a reliable, short-range VTOL that doesn't need AVGAS is certainly one of them. And I'm not trying to be elitist about flying, either, like it's some exclusive or impenetrable club -- it isn't. Most pilots I know encourage everybody else they know to at least take an intro flight, because there's really nothing like it. But even so, the national drop-out rate for flight school students is 80% (some recent AOPA study - don't have a link handy but Google it). It used to be that everyone thought 'oh, well, it's just expensive, people start and don't want to spend the money to finish.' That's not wrong but it's not the whole story. The study found that money wasn't the top reason for dropping out. People get intimidated and scared right around the point where they have to fly solo. They're nervous about talking to ATC. They're nervous about landing in a crosswind. They're uncomfortable in a tiny airplane. The quality of flight instructors is all over the map (another reason cited in the study); just about every CFI out there doesn't dream of being a CFI but is building up hours to try and get a job working for an airline or flying a corporate jet. That doesn't mean they don't know what they're doing, but it does mean that they're teaching because they have to and not because teaching is necessarily what they want.
As much as I love aviation, I would sooner spend the money on what other posters have suggested - either a good public transit system or multi-gigabit FTTH infrastructure for telecommuting.
you arent as free as a chinese
I don't know what basement you live in, but I imagine it's either China, or the local International Socialist Organization chapter on a college campus.
I'd write more, but I'm being kept down by the housecleaning chemical companies.
credit card processing as a resource, access to mass media, access to funds to be able to get elected, are basic, human entitlements.
What? huh? where? according to whom? Because you say so?
People absolutely go from town to town, or door to door within a single town (probably not in a horse cart) for local elections.
Your post was about necessary resources for human beings to survive. You have now changed your tune to 'necessary resources to get elected to office,' which is a completely different question, to say nothing of the sheer absurdity of your 'right' to get elected. How can every human possibly have a 'right to get elected?'
it doesnt matter what the reason is. it doesnt matter what the factors are.
This is clearly true, given your apparent awareness of reason and facts.
What you are describing is far more tyrannical than any private corporation could ever be, because it relies entirely on somebody deciding what services humans are entitled to and then deciding who must provide them and how. People don't do very complex things like change careers because some person in the government decided that they ought to. It's been tried, and probably the only place it has met any success is China, where the State can sometimes decide what job you ought to have that best serves the State (er, I mean, other people), but I certainly hope you're not going to point to the Chinese as a great example of how to use our freedoms.
There is not one country in the world that I'm aware of which enshrines in law the basic human entitlement of credit card processing.
Er, I agree with you entirely. I hate this kind of thing. Nice post though.
Of course it's absurd. Just like a lot of the stuff that car companies are forced to do. It's tough, though, because in some cases, government mandates have resulted in improvements to safety and efficiency (in the technology, not in the political process) but this is a win-win on the bureaucratic side. The pols love it because they can say they protected your children, and the car companies love it because the requirements apply to everyone. Imagine if you made a widget and suddenly you had to add a $200 part (sorry, a $100 part with a $100 margin) to that widget, but so did everybody else in the widget business. Free money.
It's just a question of degrees though. When the government came in and mandated a small thing like seatbelts, they were (presumably) saving more than 200 lives a year, and not at a cost of $200/car. But there's no reason for anyone involved in this decision-making process to stop there.
They could say its for tourism just like Intelligent Design was not merely Creationism relabeled but the courts were not fooled by that tall tale either.
Except that the Intelligent Design cases were about curriculum in a public school, which is mandatory, and this is an amusement park. Nobody can make you go there.
If you ask me, the government shouldn't even be allowed to spend tax dollars on stuff like this, secular or not. So don't let me stop you from bulldozing this ridiculous project. I'm just pointing out that, once you allow government to be in the business of spending tax dollars on private enterprise that doesn't serve a fundamental need in society, it is very difficult to then try and establish parameters about what qualifies and what doesn't.
I don't even know where to start here. You clearly have no notion of how the financial service industry works, and about as little idea of how feudalism works.
so basically, that makes that small group, or individuals or individual, the sole decision makers in regard to what happens in that aspect of life.
Let's follow your example and say that I run a private company that has a large, worldwide share of processing credit cards (there are a couple private companies that actually do have a pretty big share). Let's further say that I am the chief executive with absolute power over that company.
My bad behavior is constrained by two primary factors: government regulation and the other big companies, because three major players does not a monopoly make (and you're discounting Discover and a handful of other companies around the world in the credit card business). Even free-market types like me don't think that the government should stay completely out of the financial industry. If we're relying on competition to keep people honest, then we need an authority to make sure that these guys are actually competing and not colluding, because the minute they stop competing we do have a monopoly.
they are choosing not to let me use their resources, but, it turns out that they are the controller of majority (dominant majority) of those resources.
Visa and Mastercard primarily work through issuing banks that actually handle most of the money that goes back and forth (American Express and Discover actually have more of a direct relationship with the cardholder in that you don't see things like Capital One American Express -- they are the bank as well as the card company). You can be rejected by one bank for their Mastercard but accepted by another. This is true of processing and accepting cards as well -- you can get thrown out of one processor, but only if you are a repeat, egregious violator or breaking the law can you be blacklisted by all of Mastercard or all of Visa.
You furthermore describe credit card processing as a resource to which you have some basic, human entitlement. The minimum standards for both having a card and accepting credit card transactions are not very high, so it's not very far removed from what would be necessary if it were such a basic need, but it ain't. They aren't withholding bread, water, electricity, fuel, or oxygen -- they're the gatekeepers to a tremendously complex commerce network which they developed, and there are so many gatekeepers that even if a single individual ran Visa like a tyrant, it would be quite difficult to 'deprive' you of their 'resources.'
Finally, a feudal compact involved trading land for military service, or else (if you were a serf) trading land for physical labor. Your dichotomy here is as flimsy as it comes. You're equating web hosting and accepting credit card transactions to something as basic and fundamental as land and food, and then suggesting that this resource without which you will perish is controlled by a single individual who did nothing to deserve that control.
Visa, Mastercard, and AmEx didn't stumble upon some pre-existing financial network and claim it for themselves. Along with thousands of banks and hundreds of thousands of people on every level in the finance business, they made it, and even so are subject to tremendous regulation in how they use it, who is allowed to do what with it, and when they are allowed to penalize anyone. Furthermore, there is hardly only one gatekeeper to this resource -- there are hundreds of companies that will give you a credit card and dozens and dozens that will process somebody else's for you.
The 'de facto government' in this picture is not the credit card company but the actual governments of the world who can step in and tell these companies when and by how much they're allowed to adjust rates (and sometimes even force them to set certain rates) and how much latitude they have in providing or denying service to just about everyone. Clearly, the government can declare certain functions so basic that they are a fundamental right and not a privilege, but that hasn't happened with web hosting or credit card processing.
And is a bank legally required to offer you a mortgage? A car loan? No -- their obligation, even in Europe, is a very basic level of service that is deemed necessary to survive these days.
The credit card industry is a whole different can of worms, because the credit card companies and their issuing banks have an enormous number of security and anti-fraud requirements. Saying 'Paypal is a bank' is only applicable to how it treats the money you actually have in your account -- whether or not they allow you to accept EFT or credit card transactions is another matter entirely.
Paypal has rightly been in a lot of hot water because of the leeway they've had in the past to simply freeze the money you have in your Paypal account. This is a very different situation than freezing out incoming transfers or donations.
There is no comparison. Paypal (like everybody else) isn't allowed to use ethnicity or gender in making decisions about whom they serve, but neither are they obligated to provide service to everyone, no matter what.
They offer a service which required that you agree to a published set of rules. You have basic protections under the law that say such rules can't be completely arbitrary or discriminatory, but it's still a private business transaction and there is a world of difference between 'I want to run a shop that sells stuff only to white people' and 'Under no circumstances am I allowed to refuse service to anybody.' Most private businesses are allowed to deny service to specific individuals if they have cause, and in this case that 'cause' for both Amazon and Paypal is not some secret document but a pretty reasonable set of limitations like 'you can't host illegal stuff' and 'you can't take money that we think might be used to harm people.' They might well be wrong about the likelihood that the Wikileaks cablegate trove will actually harm anyone, but they don't want to take that chance, and that is very much their prerogative.
"Banks may not deny accounts to their customers because of political reasons." and be done with it.
And what exactly is a 'political reason'?
You are talking about a basic bank account. As you pointed out, most countries have pretty strict rules about basic bank accounts. This is about as relevant to Paypal service as a luxury yacht. Basic bank accounts can't accept credit card transactions and certainly nobody is about to suggest that accepting donations via credit card is a requirement for living.
If Assange's power company, water company, local grocery store, or other similarly fundamental service cut him off, then I'm on board with you, private business or no. But Amazon web hosting and Paypal credit card processing hardly fall under that umbrella.
So let me get this straight:
You, as a private citizen, are free to stop doing business with anyone whom you so choose simply because you don't like what they are doing.
But when Paypal, as a private business, stops doing business with someone they choose because they don't like what their client is doing, you threaten to 'report them to the European Parliament?' On what possible basis? Are you actually suggesting that the government should force Paypal or any other private business to continue doing business against their will?
The secular purpose is tourism. That's why it's the State tourism board that's behind it.
If this is the best they can do, they ought to fire the whole board, but it's just garden variety dumb ... not illegal.