Oh, so its not what you that makes it torture, but how often?
You should do a study of what real torture was/is like. Somehow I don't think I would consider being burned with a branding iron any less torture if you only did it to me one day rather than for months on end.
Real simple, if I have $20 million and it costs me $1 million a year to maintain my rights to the minerals and it is going to take me 25 years to get all the permits I need to start producing product, I will run out of money before I can start selling anything.
The problem is that there are large legal barriers that create delay in actually getting a return on investment. The larger the start up costs and the longer between initiating activity and actually generating any revenue, the more money one needs to start the company. At some point that number becomes too large for anyone to bother.
On the other hand there is a possibility he is just hitting up legislators for government money.
I believe there are currently laws and/or regulations that limit the percentage of the country that a particular cable provider is allowed to service. I would propose opening that up on the condition that everything above that percentage be in markets that have at least one competitor up to about a third higher than the current limit and once it exceeds that the percentage of a cable providers market that must be in regions with competitors must be double the amount it exceeds the current limit.
We are in our current state of affairs because of government imposed local monopolies, fixing the problem the government created is not going to be easy.
In a natural monopoly like utilities, roads, bridges, etc, you're going to pay through the nose if privately owned.
As far as I can tell utilities (telephone and electrical service anyway) are not natural monopolies. If you study the history of both, you will discover that in the early days there were many competitors in many areas. The politicians decided to come in and create local monopolies. The most successful local monopolies bought out the less successful local monopolies in other regions until there was only one in the case of telephone service(there is some evidence that there was government interference in deciding who was a "successful" local monopoly and who wasn't).
That is a perfect example of why this ruling is not incorrect. It is not the 4th Ammendment which protects the mail from being inspected by the authorities, but a law.
Actually, I think it would be a good idea to campaign for a law similar to the one you quote for email. I would even suggest that it contain a provision stating something along the lines of saying that the 4th Ammendment applies to electronic communication except in those cases where said communication is broadcast (such as most Twitter posts and many Facebook posts).
I haven't been following this closely, but I could tell it was going to be a major loss for the American people. There are a couple of reasons. One, many of the people who do not have broadband connections to the Internet do not have them because they do not see them as being valuable enough to be worth the price. Two, this Administration has so far demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of how business works and therefore was likely to conclude that this could be implemented by government fiat without any consideration of what it would really cost. There are several other reasons, but after the way that last one came out I realized that they couldn't be posted in a short comment without sounding like a troll.
Someone missed out on hearing that in economics "cost" is in principle, not monetary. "Cost" includes, but is not solely monetary cost.
It is zero "net cost" from the government's POV since the total (economic) revenues at least cover the total (economic) costs.
Except that isn't true. It is zero "net cost" from the government's POV since the "cost" of voter anger is less than the gain in power. When the government starts justifying some action on the basis of cost, you can be almost certain that it is something the government shouldn't be doing and that the taxpayer is going to get hosed.
Special forces are forced to go without sleep for weeks at a time? Forced to assume stress positions without reprieve? Kept stripped naked in 50 degree rooms? All without knowing if or when any of it will end?
You sicken me.
That is my understanding. Why does it sicken you that I don't consider things that the military does as part of training to be torture. Look at historical records of what torture was when it was a routine part of the penal code, then tell me that sleep deprivation is in the same category. There are people who undergo sleep deprivation for extended time periods of their own volition (and not as a form of self-flagellation) and you call it torture.
They waterboard as part of special ops training. They put them through sleep deprivation. I believe that not allowing them to sit down for extendeded periods of time is part of ordinary military training (actually, I suspect that sleep deprivation is as well).
You have no idea what real torture is, if you consider those torture. Compare: waterboarding/pulling out fingernails.
Can't speak for your experience on the matter, but in my experience, if government had things it's way, FOIA would not exist
Since FOIA was put into place by the government, this statement is nonsense. Unfortunately, the nature of government is that there are certain parts of government that require individuals whose thought patterns make them susceptible to thinking that everything should be secret (not everyone who shares that thought pattern falls into that fallacy, but they all tend towards it). There are two dangers in dealing with this. One is failure to provide oversight to those areas of government with people who do not fall prey to this tendency. The other is to put people who fall prey to the opposite fallacy (that the government needs no secrets) in charge of such oversight.
I just realized, there is a third danger, putting people who are willing to use whatever information they come across for political advantage in charge of oversight on those departments that need the first sorts of persons.
I suspect the reason they never "went through with it" is because no one ever intended to go through with it. I would guess that someone in the chain of command saw something on Wikileaks that was supposed to be classified and said, "Ooh, that could be bad, what if the person who leaked this (minor significance) document leaked this other (major significance) document that they would also likely have access to." So they assigned someone to come with a plan on how Wikileaks could be dealt with if such leaks became an operational problem.
The person who made the plan quite likely knew that no one was ever going to implement it. It was probably also an exercise in planning psy ops.
What torture at Guantanamo? Please do not use as an example of torture anything that is part of the training regime of U.S. military special ops forces.
SETI and Intelligent Design are based on the same principle, that certain patterns of signal are signs of intelligence. The only difference is the media they are looking at signal in.
If that was his idea, it makes some sense since the "coffee party" is small enough it wouldn't take very many people to outnumber the original, unlike the "tea party".
If "NO information is accurate", how do you know that any particular information is not accurate?
As for my statements in the first, I am not going to go back and find the articles that talked about the several facts. However, when I read the story about Venezuela modifying the contracts that they had signed, the Chavez Administration did not challenge that reading, they merely gave a justification for unilaterally modifying the contracts. As to the output of Venezuela's oil fields, there are sources that do not care about the politics of the situation, they are merely concerned with how much oil is available in the world at any given time and where it came from (source gives an idea as to how complicated it is to refine it in to the most profitable products).
Do something about it and join the Coffee Party [coffeepartyusa.com]?
I love your solution to disagreeing with behavior by the Obama Administration: Join an organization started by members of Obama's Presidential campaign. You are worried about the tea party being taken over by special interests, so you suggest joining an organization that is basically just a subsidiary of the Democratic Party (which you seem to believe, likely correctly, is run by special interests).
Venezuela is sitting on one of the largest oil reservoirs outside the US and the middle east. To make matters worse, they kicked out foreign oil companies because they want to exploit them themselves.
Actually, they want to make all the profit themselves with foreign oil companies providing the capital to further develop those reservoirs. You are not wrong that their oil does increase the interest of the world in how they manage their affairs. The thing to realize is that there are two things that concern the world. One, the fact that Venezuela (under Hugo Chavez) signed contracts with foreign companies to develop oil resources and then unilaterally modified what percentage of the profits went to those companies. Two, Venezuela's output of oil has been slowly, steadily declining since Chavez took control of the oil fields.
Perhaps people who didn't win elections repeatedly. Chavez is far less of a dictator than, say, Bush II.
I didn't realize that Bush II was still President. I was under the impression that when his term expired he turned over the office of President to Barack Obama, when did the coup that put Bush back in office occur?
You make a good point. Fortunately, on those occasions when University free speech zones (the setting in which they are most commonly applied) have been challenged in court, they have usually been ruled unconstitutional.
That being said, it is interesting that the people who implement these "free speech zones" are those who claim to be the strongest proponents of unfettered free speech. They are, also, from whom many of the members of the Obama Administration have been drawn.
I live in one of the 10 largest metropolitan areas of the US, so I am not a hillbilly (not that I would mind). No, I hated the fact that the government created the telephone monopoly that it later broke up.
I do dislike health insurance, because it isn't really insurance and the fact that it exists is one of the factors contributing to medical costs rising faster than inflation (Medicare and Medicaid are the main factors in that).
Personally, I preferred when people helped those less fortunate than themselves out of the goodness of their hearts rather than at the point of a gun.
There is something to what you are saying. However, that is not entirely true. One thing is that when Taiwan separated from China, it was every bit as much a dictatorship as the mainland was. Actually, A lot could probably be learned about cultural evolution by studying the ways that Taiwan and China have developed. Although one would need to be careful to factor in such factors as Taiwan being an island and China having a much larger population.
I don't know the details of how they do the budgeting, never having been part of one of them. However, I know of three or four that I know are approximately 200 years old (that is they were founded not long after the original volunteer fire department started by Benjamin Franklin).
I'm sorry you lived in areas where not enough people were civic minded enough to support a competent volunteer fire department. When there is a serious fire in this area, five or six or more volunteer fire companies may turn out to fight the fire. If the next town over has a government fire department it would certainly respond to a multi-alarm blaze. Of course, if the government fire department has a multi-alarm fire within its area, the nearest volunteer fire departments will turn out to help fight the fire. Where I am specifically the nearest government fire department would over 1/2 hour to get here.
And yes, some of the local volunteer fire departments have paid fire fighters, but they aren't paid with tax dollars. They are paid out of the same fund raisers that pay for the fire hall and the fire engines.
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Oh, so its not what you that makes it torture, but how often?
You should do a study of what real torture was/is like. Somehow I don't think I would consider being burned with a branding iron any less torture if you only did it to me one day rather than for months on end.
Real simple, if I have $20 million and it costs me $1 million a year to maintain my rights to the minerals and it is going to take me 25 years to get all the permits I need to start producing product, I will run out of money before I can start selling anything.
The problem is that there are large legal barriers that create delay in actually getting a return on investment. The larger the start up costs and the longer between initiating activity and actually generating any revenue, the more money one needs to start the company. At some point that number becomes too large for anyone to bother.
On the other hand there is a possibility he is just hitting up legislators for government money.
I believe there are currently laws and/or regulations that limit the percentage of the country that a particular cable provider is allowed to service. I would propose opening that up on the condition that everything above that percentage be in markets that have at least one competitor up to about a third higher than the current limit and once it exceeds that the percentage of a cable providers market that must be in regions with competitors must be double the amount it exceeds the current limit.
We are in our current state of affairs because of government imposed local monopolies, fixing the problem the government created is not going to be easy.
In a natural monopoly like utilities, roads, bridges, etc, you're going to pay through the nose if privately owned.
As far as I can tell utilities (telephone and electrical service anyway) are not natural monopolies. If you study the history of both, you will discover that in the early days there were many competitors in many areas. The politicians decided to come in and create local monopolies. The most successful local monopolies bought out the less successful local monopolies in other regions until there was only one in the case of telephone service(there is some evidence that there was government interference in deciding who was a "successful" local monopoly and who wasn't).
That is a perfect example of why this ruling is not incorrect. It is not the 4th Ammendment which protects the mail from being inspected by the authorities, but a law.
Actually, I think it would be a good idea to campaign for a law similar to the one you quote for email. I would even suggest that it contain a provision stating something along the lines of saying that the 4th Ammendment applies to electronic communication except in those cases where said communication is broadcast (such as most Twitter posts and many Facebook posts).
I haven't been following this closely, but I could tell it was going to be a major loss for the American people. There are a couple of reasons. One, many of the people who do not have broadband connections to the Internet do not have them because they do not see them as being valuable enough to be worth the price. Two, this Administration has so far demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of how business works and therefore was likely to conclude that this could be implemented by government fiat without any consideration of what it would really cost. There are several other reasons, but after the way that last one came out I realized that they couldn't be posted in a short comment without sounding like a troll.
Someone missed out on hearing that in economics "cost" is in principle, not monetary. "Cost" includes, but is not solely monetary cost.
It is zero "net cost" from the government's POV since the total (economic) revenues at least cover the total (economic) costs.
Except that isn't true. It is zero "net cost" from the government's POV since the "cost" of voter anger is less than the gain in power. When the government starts justifying some action on the basis of cost, you can be almost certain that it is something the government shouldn't be doing and that the taxpayer is going to get hosed.
Special forces are forced to go without sleep for weeks at a time? Forced to assume stress positions without reprieve? Kept stripped naked in 50 degree rooms? All without knowing if or when any of it will end?
You sicken me.
That is my understanding. Why does it sicken you that I don't consider things that the military does as part of training to be torture. Look at historical records of what torture was when it was a routine part of the penal code, then tell me that sleep deprivation is in the same category. There are people who undergo sleep deprivation for extended time periods of their own volition (and not as a form of self-flagellation) and you call it torture.
They waterboard as part of special ops training. They put them through sleep deprivation. I believe that not allowing them to sit down for extendeded periods of time is part of ordinary military training (actually, I suspect that sleep deprivation is as well).
You have no idea what real torture is, if you consider those torture. Compare: waterboarding/pulling out fingernails.
Can't speak for your experience on the matter, but in my experience, if government had things it's way, FOIA would not exist
Since FOIA was put into place by the government, this statement is nonsense.
Unfortunately, the nature of government is that there are certain parts of government that require individuals whose thought patterns make them susceptible to thinking that everything should be secret (not everyone who shares that thought pattern falls into that fallacy, but they all tend towards it). There are two dangers in dealing with this. One is failure to provide oversight to those areas of government with people who do not fall prey to this tendency. The other is to put people who fall prey to the opposite fallacy (that the government needs no secrets) in charge of such oversight.
I just realized, there is a third danger, putting people who are willing to use whatever information they come across for political advantage in charge of oversight on those departments that need the first sorts of persons.
I suspect the reason they never "went through with it" is because no one ever intended to go through with it. I would guess that someone in the chain of command saw something on Wikileaks that was supposed to be classified and said, "Ooh, that could be bad, what if the person who leaked this (minor significance) document leaked this other (major significance) document that they would also likely have access to." So they assigned someone to come with a plan on how Wikileaks could be dealt with if such leaks became an operational problem.
The person who made the plan quite likely knew that no one was ever going to implement it. It was probably also an exercise in planning psy ops.
What torture at Guantanamo? Please do not use as an example of torture anything that is part of the training regime of U.S. military special ops forces.
SETI and Intelligent Design are based on the same principle, that certain patterns of signal are signs of intelligence. The only difference is the media they are looking at signal in.
If that was his idea, it makes some sense since the "coffee party" is small enough it wouldn't take very many people to outnumber the original, unlike the "tea party".
If "NO information is accurate", how do you know that any particular information is not accurate?
As for my statements in the first, I am not going to go back and find the articles that talked about the several facts. However, when I read the story about Venezuela modifying the contracts that they had signed, the Chavez Administration did not challenge that reading, they merely gave a justification for unilaterally modifying the contracts. As to the output of Venezuela's oil fields, there are sources that do not care about the politics of the situation, they are merely concerned with how much oil is available in the world at any given time and where it came from (source gives an idea as to how complicated it is to refine it in to the most profitable products).
Do something about it and join the Coffee Party [coffeepartyusa.com]?
I love your solution to disagreeing with behavior by the Obama Administration: Join an organization started by members of Obama's Presidential campaign. You are worried about the tea party being taken over by special interests, so you suggest joining an organization that is basically just a subsidiary of the Democratic Party (which you seem to believe, likely correctly, is run by special interests).
Venezuela is sitting on one of the largest oil reservoirs outside the US and the middle east. To make matters worse, they kicked out foreign oil companies because they want to exploit them themselves.
Actually, they want to make all the profit themselves with foreign oil companies providing the capital to further develop those reservoirs. You are not wrong that their oil does increase the interest of the world in how they manage their affairs. The thing to realize is that there are two things that concern the world. One, the fact that Venezuela (under Hugo Chavez) signed contracts with foreign companies to develop oil resources and then unilaterally modified what percentage of the profits went to those companies. Two, Venezuela's output of oil has been slowly, steadily declining since Chavez took control of the oil fields.
Perhaps people who didn't win elections repeatedly. Chavez is far less of a dictator than, say, Bush II.
I didn't realize that Bush II was still President. I was under the impression that when his term expired he turned over the office of President to Barack Obama, when did the coup that put Bush back in office occur?
Three words for you: free speech zones.
You make a good point. Fortunately, on those occasions when University free speech zones (the setting in which they are most commonly applied) have been challenged in court, they have usually been ruled unconstitutional.
That being said, it is interesting that the people who implement these "free speech zones" are those who claim to be the strongest proponents of unfettered free speech. They are, also, from whom many of the members of the Obama Administration have been drawn.
I live in one of the 10 largest metropolitan areas of the US, so I am not a hillbilly (not that I would mind). No, I hated the fact that the government created the telephone monopoly that it later broke up.
I do dislike health insurance, because it isn't really insurance and the fact that it exists is one of the factors contributing to medical costs rising faster than inflation (Medicare and Medicaid are the main factors in that).
Personally, I preferred when people helped those less fortunate than themselves out of the goodness of their hearts rather than at the point of a gun.
There is something to what you are saying. However, that is not entirely true. One thing is that when Taiwan separated from China, it was every bit as much a dictatorship as the mainland was. Actually, A lot could probably be learned about cultural evolution by studying the ways that Taiwan and China have developed. Although one would need to be careful to factor in such factors as Taiwan being an island and China having a much larger population.
I don't know the details of how they do the budgeting, never having been part of one of them. However, I know of three or four that I know are approximately 200 years old (that is they were founded not long after the original volunteer fire department started by Benjamin Franklin).
I'm sorry you lived in areas where not enough people were civic minded enough to support a competent volunteer fire department. When there is a serious fire in this area, five or six or more volunteer fire companies may turn out to fight the fire. If the next town over has a government fire department it would certainly respond to a multi-alarm blaze. Of course, if the government fire department has a multi-alarm fire within its area, the nearest volunteer fire departments will turn out to help fight the fire. Where I am specifically the nearest government fire department would over 1/2 hour to get here.
And yes, some of the local volunteer fire departments have paid fire fighters, but they aren't paid with tax dollars. They are paid out of the same fund raisers that pay for the fire hall and the fire engines.
So... how many fire fighting gigs do they budget for?
???
No, they are volunteers, not the government.