You are correct, the answer to that problem is not protests but education (and I do not mean the schools, they have become part of the problem). You need to take the time to educate the people around you about either A) how you believe they should vote on the candidates and issues and why or B) how they can find out what they need to know to affect the change they want and the hard work that is involved in accomplishing that change. Educating the average voters is the only way to solve these problems.
I often see people who support things like the "Occupy" protests, also support making it easier for people to register and vote. I think that that is counter productive. We already have too many people who can't be bothered to understand what is actually going on who vote. We do not need more people who cannot even be bothered to take the effort every few years to go down to the courthouse and renew their registration.
What changes are the "Occupy" protesters demanding, specifics please?
As for the town council, they are barely able to decide what color to paint the park bench. They have no more influence than I do over Wall Street getting a free pass for the largest cluster of financial fraud in history.
First, if you are saying that the town council is indecisive, that is a function of who is on it. If on the other hand you mean it is powerless, that is part of what is wrong, too many people demand that too many decisions be made at too high a level of government.
As to Wall Street getting a pass, that is because many of the decisions that led up to that fraud being perpetrated were committed by politicians. The men who were chosen by Congress to draft the "fix" for the financial markets (Dodd-Frank), were two of the architects of the financial meltdown. Which sums up the problem I have with the "Occupy" movement, they are protesting Wall Street, when they should be protesting Washington. The problem is the politicians, not the bankers.
In the Middle East, there were no channels to change things. Furthermore, the evidence suggests that Egypt is worse now than it was before (and on a downward spiral), especially if you are a member of a minority.
You are correct that voting is not, in and of itself, adequate. However, protests in the streets add very little, especially if they get violent. If you want to change things you need to do more than vote, you need to get involved. As I said, show up at Township Supervisor meetings. When they give you the opportunity, ask questions. Keep asking until you understand the answers. You need to talk to your neighbors about what you think the government should be doing differently and why. You need to address whatever problem you perceive at the lowest level of government possible. If it is a school issue, it should be addressed by the local school board. If you can't convince enough people to bring about change on the local level, maybe it's because your suggested solution is wrong.
In addition to talking to the people around you, you need to listen to them. Maybe what you think is the problem is only a symptom, or not even a problem. Maybe the problem is something else entirely and if that was fixed the "problem" you see would not be a problem at all (I happen to think that is the case with the "Occupy" protesters: the "problem" they are protesting is not a problem. It only looks like one because of a problem they are ignoring).
You really do not want to live in the world that will come to be if the current protests turn violent and are "successful", too many of the people involved with the "Occupy" protests want very bad things (the Lyndon LaRouche nuts, among others, are out in force and they have an agenda, unlike a large number of the protesters).
Postal carriers are not elected in the U.S.. However, when I looked to see if dogcatcher is actually an elected office I found this article, which sums up the point I am trying to make. The fact of the matter is that my questions are not addressed just to you, but to the many people who express the sentiment you did, that there is no point in voting. Changing things takes a lot of time and effort. If you are not willing to put in that effort, don't complain that you can't change things.
How about your state legislators? How about your local elected officials? Do you know who they are? Have you gone to the local Township supervisor meetings? the County Commissioner meetings?
If you know all of these, do you talk to other people in your area about these people?
3. Reduce the hyper-focus on the financial markets. Get individual retirement investors out of the market and into something safer like a pension or annuity.
Where do you think the money in that pension fund or annuity is going to be invested? That's right, in the financial markets.
It's too late. It has already been hi-jacked. There is a group advertising on craigslist to hire people to protest at $350 to $650 a week. The group has ties to ACORN (which was caught, in multiple locations, registering people fraudulently).
That's because too many people think that it is just a matter of showing up every four years and voting for President (and whoever from that party is down ticket). Do you know how your Congressperson voted on the bank bailout? The Stimulus bill?
And the message that people need to spread comes from a study sometime in the last 5 years that showed that, everything else being equal, the more powerful the Congressmen and Senators from a particular state are, the worse off a state is economically. The theory to explain the results they found is that the more government money that is available in a particular state, the more companies spent effort chasing that funding and the less effort they spent finding a satisfying a need/want in the private economy (it is a little more complicated than that and they cited examples of the types of companies that were concentrated in states with powerful federal legislators and were mostly absent from states without such powerful legislators).
What this means is that if you repeatedly cut the top 1% down to the mean and distribute it among everyone else, it doesn't take long before you have dramatically increased the overall standard of living.
No, what history shows is that it does not take long until you have drastically reduced the overall standard of living.
While I agree that the USTR had a larger role in the negotiations than the actual occupant of the office of President, I believe that what is going on now has more to do with domestic policy than anythng else. I do not see how this halfway approach serves the interests of the USTR. On the other hand, I can see how this action by Obama furthers his agenda,
The question comes down to interpretation of tax law. Did Google's accountants correctly interpret tax law so as to allow them to avoid taxes in all of these cases? My bet would be that after a 5-10 year investigation the IRS will conclude that Google made several "innocent" mistakes and owes the IRS some significant sum and that they will agree to a settlement with Google that covers the cost of the workers time.
Anyone who negotiates with the U.S. who does not understand that the President signing a treaty does not represent the U.S. accepting any international obligation until the Senate ratifies the treaty really has no business negotiating international treaties. It would be like someone negotiating treaties with England thinking that the Queen signing the treaty without Parliament (and/or the Prime Minister) being involved would be binding on England.
That being said, I agree that the President signing the treaty without submitting it to the Senate for ratification is the worst of both worlds for everybody. I do not know why Obama is doing several of the things he has done recently that he has no authority to do. However, it is beginning to look like he is trying to expand the power of the President to act unilaterally. On the other hand, it is possible that because of spending a portion of his formative years in Indonesia that he truly does not understand the limits to Presidential authority.
Actually, the problem with this is more basic. No matter when you date the start of the Little Ice Age, the cooling started at least as early as 1300 (when warm summers stopped being dependable in Northern Europe) and probably around 1250 (when the North Atlantic glaciers started to expand).
Until such a time as it is ratified by the U.S. Senate, none of its provisions are binding on the U.S., not even the arbitration process. The problem that Senator Wyden (and the OP and myself) have is with the President saying that he will sign it and treat it as binding without it being ratified by the U.S. Senate (I have additional problems with the treaty, but they are not something I will lay solely at Obama's feet). The President does not have the authority to enter into an agreement with other nations that are, in anyway, binding on the U.S. (outside of things that fall exclusively under the authority of the President and then only for so long as he is President).
Statements by the President (or his spokesperson) that he is going to sign this treaty and implement regulations and enforcement protocols without getting it ratified by the Senate (which is the way I read the things that have come out of the White House on this. although that may be mistaken). I point out White House statements about waivers to the NCLB law to indicate why I believe what I am hearing is true--Obama has in the past stated (and acted) in ways that exceed his authority and thus I am inclined to believe interpretations of his statements that say he intends to do so again.
Considering how massively hyped it was at the time. I am pretty sure that they would be surprised that it is not being used in even more ways than it is currently. I remember the inventors talking about how it was going to change the way everything was displayed. They suggested that magazines would be published in it and the ads would change depending on where you bought/read the magazine (they never quite explained how the information about the contents for the new ad would get into the magazine). This is not the same as changes on an e-reader. They imagined this for disposable magazines they you would throw away when you were done with them.
You do not actually disagree with the original poster. You just take a slightly more direct route to the same conclusion. The OP said: ACTA is a trade agreement. Trade agreements are nothing more than a form of treaty. Treaties must be voted on by the Senate. You said: ACTA is not a trade agreement, it is a treaty. Treaties must be voted on by Congress.
I agree with you both. ACTA is not binding on the U.S.until such a time as 2/3s of the Senate vote to ratify it. While Obama can sign it and act on it as law, insofar as anything in it fully falls under the powers of the Presidency, his doing so would not be binding on Congress, or even future Presidents unless it is ratified by the Senate.
Unfortunately for Obama, very little ACTA falls under the authority of the President. Almost all of the provisions of ACTA apply to areas where Congress is explicitly given authority. Of course, that has not stopped Obama before. He recently declared that he was going to give states waivers to the No Child Left Behind Act if they met certain conditions. The problem being that there is no provision in the No Child Left Behind Act for waivers on any basis (and there are no subsequent laws passed by Congress creating such waivers either).
I am not sure what an alterior motive is, but I am quite sure that MS has an ulterior motive for this. The only question is whether or not that ulterior motive is detrimental to the Open Source community.
. If I worked for a company that shredded hard drives, and a shipment of 320GB solid state drives came in to be shredded, and I took one or two home, I'd be charged with theft. Same principle here.
40 years ago, Mitchell was allowed to keep the camera. Today he is required to return it. There must have been something that triggered the change in policy.
Actually, it is not the same principle at all, hard drives are a different issue altogether because of data security issues (although I get your point).
Your final sentence gets at the issue of concern here. I, for one, would like to know why NASA has decided at this point that it wants the camera back. (Is it because Mitchell is a complete and utter goofball?)
Not only would it have "slipped under the radar", it was on the government books as "expended". According to official records it was left on the moon with no intention of ever recovering it. If this was an item that was supposed to be brought back to the earth as part of the mission, I would say that the government has a point, even if all they would have done with it is stick it in a box in a warehouse somewhere. However, until he tried to sell it, the government thought it was gone forever.
Well, you would not have been too far wrong. The OMB is a branch of the Administration. As such it is directly answerable to the President. So the headline of this story, "Is the OMB Trying To End Planetary Exploration?" would have almost exactly the same meaning if it read "Is the Obama Administration Trying To End Planetary Exploration?" althought that headline would be significatly longer (which is a negative in good headline writing).
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct, the answer to that problem is not protests but education (and I do not mean the schools, they have become part of the problem). You need to take the time to educate the people around you about either A) how you believe they should vote on the candidates and issues and why or B) how they can find out what they need to know to affect the change they want and the hard work that is involved in accomplishing that change. Educating the average voters is the only way to solve these problems.
I often see people who support things like the "Occupy" protests, also support making it easier for people to register and vote. I think that that is counter productive. We already have too many people who can't be bothered to understand what is actually going on who vote. We do not need more people who cannot even be bothered to take the effort every few years to go down to the courthouse and renew their registration.
As for the town council, they are barely able to decide what color to paint the park bench. They have no more influence than I do over Wall Street getting a free pass for the largest cluster of financial fraud in history.
First, if you are saying that the town council is indecisive, that is a function of who is on it. If on the other hand you mean it is powerless, that is part of what is wrong, too many people demand that too many decisions be made at too high a level of government.
As to Wall Street getting a pass, that is because many of the decisions that led up to that fraud being perpetrated were committed by politicians. The men who were chosen by Congress to draft the "fix" for the financial markets (Dodd-Frank), were two of the architects of the financial meltdown. Which sums up the problem I have with the "Occupy" movement, they are protesting Wall Street, when they should be protesting Washington. The problem is the politicians, not the bankers.
In the Middle East, there were no channels to change things. Furthermore, the evidence suggests that Egypt is worse now than it was before (and on a downward spiral), especially if you are a member of a minority.
You are correct that voting is not, in and of itself, adequate. However, protests in the streets add very little, especially if they get violent. If you want to change things you need to do more than vote, you need to get involved. As I said, show up at Township Supervisor meetings. When they give you the opportunity, ask questions. Keep asking until you understand the answers. You need to talk to your neighbors about what you think the government should be doing differently and why. You need to address whatever problem you perceive at the lowest level of government possible. If it is a school issue, it should be addressed by the local school board. If you can't convince enough people to bring about change on the local level, maybe it's because your suggested solution is wrong.
In addition to talking to the people around you, you need to listen to them. Maybe what you think is the problem is only a symptom, or not even a problem. Maybe the problem is something else entirely and if that was fixed the "problem" you see would not be a problem at all (I happen to think that is the case with the "Occupy" protesters: the "problem" they are protesting is not a problem. It only looks like one because of a problem they are ignoring).
You really do not want to live in the world that will come to be if the current protests turn violent and are "successful", too many of the people involved with the "Occupy" protests want very bad things (the Lyndon LaRouche nuts, among others, are out in force and they have an agenda, unlike a large number of the protesters).
Postal carriers are not elected in the U.S.. However, when I looked to see if dogcatcher is actually an elected office I found this article, which sums up the point I am trying to make. The fact of the matter is that my questions are not addressed just to you, but to the many people who express the sentiment you did, that there is no point in voting. Changing things takes a lot of time and effort. If you are not willing to put in that effort, don't complain that you can't change things.
How about your state legislators? How about your local elected officials? Do you know who they are? Have you gone to the local Township supervisor meetings? the County Commissioner meetings?
If you know all of these, do you talk to other people in your area about these people?
3. Reduce the hyper-focus on the financial markets. Get individual retirement investors out of the market and into something safer like a pension or annuity.
Where do you think the money in that pension fund or annuity is going to be invested? That's right, in the financial markets.
It's too late. It has already been hi-jacked. There is a group advertising on craigslist to hire people to protest at $350 to $650 a week. The group has ties to ACORN (which was caught, in multiple locations, registering people fraudulently).
Do you know who your Congressperson is? Do you know how they voted on issues you care about?
That's because too many people think that it is just a matter of showing up every four years and voting for President (and whoever from that party is down ticket). Do you know how your Congressperson voted on the bank bailout? The Stimulus bill?
And the message that people need to spread comes from a study sometime in the last 5 years that showed that, everything else being equal, the more powerful the Congressmen and Senators from a particular state are, the worse off a state is economically. The theory to explain the results they found is that the more government money that is available in a particular state, the more companies spent effort chasing that funding and the less effort they spent finding a satisfying a need/want in the private economy (it is a little more complicated than that and they cited examples of the types of companies that were concentrated in states with powerful federal legislators and were mostly absent from states without such powerful legislators).
What this means is that if you repeatedly cut the top 1% down to the mean and distribute it among everyone else, it doesn't take long before you have dramatically increased the overall standard of living.
No, what history shows is that it does not take long until you have drastically reduced the overall standard of living.
While I agree that the USTR had a larger role in the negotiations than the actual occupant of the office of President, I believe that what is going on now has more to do with domestic policy than anythng else. I do not see how this halfway approach serves the interests of the USTR. On the other hand, I can see how this action by Obama furthers his agenda,
The question comes down to interpretation of tax law. Did Google's accountants correctly interpret tax law so as to allow them to avoid taxes in all of these cases? My bet would be that after a 5-10 year investigation the IRS will conclude that Google made several "innocent" mistakes and owes the IRS some significant sum and that they will agree to a settlement with Google that covers the cost of the workers time.
That is what Microsoft has always done (OK, once upon a time, they wrote some compilers).
More likely, the solar cycles.
Anyone who negotiates with the U.S. who does not understand that the President signing a treaty does not represent the U.S. accepting any international obligation until the Senate ratifies the treaty really has no business negotiating international treaties. It would be like someone negotiating treaties with England thinking that the Queen signing the treaty without Parliament (and/or the Prime Minister) being involved would be binding on England.
That being said, I agree that the President signing the treaty without submitting it to the Senate for ratification is the worst of both worlds for everybody. I do not know why Obama is doing several of the things he has done recently that he has no authority to do. However, it is beginning to look like he is trying to expand the power of the President to act unilaterally. On the other hand, it is possible that because of spending a portion of his formative years in Indonesia that he truly does not understand the limits to Presidential authority.
Actually, the problem with this is more basic. No matter when you date the start of the Little Ice Age, the cooling started at least as early as 1300 (when warm summers stopped being dependable in Northern Europe) and probably around 1250 (when the North Atlantic glaciers started to expand).
Do you really think rich conservative right wingers want any criticism of capitalism or protection for the poor?
No more than rich "liberal" left wingers want people to learn to think for themselves and no longer accept the word of the "authorities".
Until such a time as it is ratified by the U.S. Senate, none of its provisions are binding on the U.S., not even the arbitration process. The problem that Senator Wyden (and the OP and myself) have is with the President saying that he will sign it and treat it as binding without it being ratified by the U.S. Senate (I have additional problems with the treaty, but they are not something I will lay solely at Obama's feet). The President does not have the authority to enter into an agreement with other nations that are, in anyway, binding on the U.S. (outside of things that fall exclusively under the authority of the President and then only for so long as he is President).
Statements by the President (or his spokesperson) that he is going to sign this treaty and implement regulations and enforcement protocols without getting it ratified by the Senate (which is the way I read the things that have come out of the White House on this. although that may be mistaken). I point out White House statements about waivers to the NCLB law to indicate why I believe what I am hearing is true--Obama has in the past stated (and acted) in ways that exceed his authority and thus I am inclined to believe interpretations of his statements that say he intends to do so again.
Considering how massively hyped it was at the time. I am pretty sure that they would be surprised that it is not being used in even more ways than it is currently. I remember the inventors talking about how it was going to change the way everything was displayed. They suggested that magazines would be published in it and the ads would change depending on where you bought/read the magazine (they never quite explained how the information about the contents for the new ad would get into the magazine). This is not the same as changes on an e-reader. They imagined this for disposable magazines they you would throw away when you were done with them.
You do not actually disagree with the original poster. You just take a slightly more direct route to the same conclusion. The OP said: ACTA is a trade agreement. Trade agreements are nothing more than a form of treaty. Treaties must be voted on by the Senate. You said: ACTA is not a trade agreement, it is a treaty. Treaties must be voted on by Congress.
I agree with you both. ACTA is not binding on the U.S.until such a time as 2/3s of the Senate vote to ratify it. While Obama can sign it and act on it as law, insofar as anything in it fully falls under the powers of the Presidency, his doing so would not be binding on Congress, or even future Presidents unless it is ratified by the Senate.
Unfortunately for Obama, very little ACTA falls under the authority of the President. Almost all of the provisions of ACTA apply to areas where Congress is explicitly given authority. Of course, that has not stopped Obama before. He recently declared that he was going to give states waivers to the No Child Left Behind Act if they met certain conditions. The problem being that there is no provision in the No Child Left Behind Act for waivers on any basis (and there are no subsequent laws passed by Congress creating such waivers either).
I am not sure what an alterior motive is, but I am quite sure that MS has an ulterior motive for this. The only question is whether or not that ulterior motive is detrimental to the Open Source community.
. If I worked for a company that shredded hard drives, and a shipment of 320GB solid state drives came in to be shredded, and I took one or two home, I'd be charged with theft. Same principle here. 40 years ago, Mitchell was allowed to keep the camera. Today he is required to return it. There must have been something that triggered the change in policy.
Actually, it is not the same principle at all, hard drives are a different issue altogether because of data security issues (although I get your point).
Your final sentence gets at the issue of concern here. I, for one, would like to know why NASA has decided at this point that it wants the camera back. (Is it because Mitchell is a complete and utter goofball?)
Not only would it have "slipped under the radar", it was on the government books as "expended". According to official records it was left on the moon with no intention of ever recovering it. If this was an item that was supposed to be brought back to the earth as part of the mission, I would say that the government has a point, even if all they would have done with it is stick it in a box in a warehouse somewhere. However, until he tried to sell it, the government thought it was gone forever.
Well, you would not have been too far wrong. The OMB is a branch of the Administration. As such it is directly answerable to the President. So the headline of this story, "Is the OMB Trying To End Planetary Exploration?" would have almost exactly the same meaning if it read "Is the Obama Administration Trying To End Planetary Exploration?" althought that headline would be significatly longer (which is a negative in good headline writing).