The interesting thing I have noticed over the years is that people don't actually clamor for the government to do something after these events. What you hear is politicians, bureaucrats, and certain members of the media clamoring for the government to do something. The people who yell, "this is an outrage, the government must do something" fall into two categories: those who have been calling for the government to do what they now say this "outrage" means the government must do now without further discussion and those who see an opportunity to wring some advantage out of this change (these categories are not mutually exclusive).
Others have challenged your claim that Groklaw is paid for by IBM, but even if it is, I can think of one important difference between Groklaw and Florian Mueller, Groklaw is often right.
If the summary is at all a reflection of the logic in the article, the article is fundamentally flawed. People today who have quicker access to look up information using their phones are not smarter than those who lived 50 years ago and needed to go through a more laborious process to find the answer. Having access to more information does not in and of itself make you smarter. The reason that we traditionally use the amount of information that someone has quick access to as a measure of intelligence is that in the pre-Internet age, the majority of people who had quick access to large amounts of information were people who were very smart (the others were usually idiot-savants of one sort or another). However, quick access was merely a proxy used to determine intelligence, not an actual measure of intelligence (of course the fact is that as we have tried harder to quantify intelligence we have discovered that intelligence is not one thing but instead a collection of related things).
Actually, it is usually politicians who scream that we "gotta do something" whenever something happens that they see as an opportunity to expand their power. They are often able to stampede people into supporting what these expansions of power right after some tragedy, even if what they propose would not have had any impact on preventing the tragedy (for example, none of the control legislation proposed in the wake of the Newtown school shootings would have had any impact on that event). Even worse, is that often times existing laws addressed the issues which caused the tragedy, but were not enforced (Columbine and Enron were two completely different types of tragedy which led to new laws being passed. Those who were responsible for both were in violation of numerous existing laws when they took the actions that led to the tragedy).
Right federal funds that get collected from the states, run through the federal bureaucracy and then partially returned to the states so that state officials can pretend that they are not responsible for some of the taxes their constituents have to pay to support such services and to make it harder for local voters to hold officials responsible for how the money is spent. ("Well, in order to qualify for federal money, we need to do 'X', even though we all agree that 'X' is an inefficient expenditure of money. Our hands are tied.").
People are no longer allowed to buy healthcare insurance, under Obamacare all plans sold under the name "insurance" are merely cost distribution schemes.
Actually he is probably referring to the Fort Hood shootings of which it can legitimately be argued were not a terrorist attack. However, if they are not a terrorist attack, they are an act of war, not a case of "work place violence" as the Administration is calling it.
The House has passed budgets. The Senate has not voted on them, nor has it passed an alternative budget. How do you negotiate with someone who won't put a list of "demands" on the table?
Are you saying that all of the workers in the account with the air traffic controllers do jobs that are as important and mission critical as that of the air traffic controllers? The air traffic controllers represent less than half of the workers in the account that is being cut.
Also, why didn't the Administrator of the FAA suggest to Congress alternate cuts in the same amount spread out differently? Congress repeatedly asked all Departments for alternatives to the sequestration.
The Democrats kept proposing tax increases now and spending cuts "tomorrow". The sequestration credit goes mostly to the Republicans (even though it was the Democrats' idea).
There is a real simple saying that sums up what I believe about the political parties. "The Democrats love the poor, that is why they work so hard to make more of them. The Republicans love the rich, that's why they try to make it easier to become rich." The Democrats are better at their side of that equation than the Republicans are at their side (that's because all politicians love power).
That's because the established rich don't pay estate tax. Their money is all in trusts and pay some kind of stipend to the heirs. The people who pay estate taxes are the heirs to farmers and small businessmen. The Rockefellers, Kennedys and Duponts (among may others) do not pay estate tax.
The thing is that air traffic controllers are only slightly less than half of the workers in the account that sequestration reductions. Why is the FAA furloughing air traffic controllers rather than other workers?
Police, firefighters, teachers, etc are not (in the context most people think of them) on the federal payroll, so are irrelevant for the current discussion of sequestration.
You are correct that one side is worse than the other. The Dems have consistently proclaimed that they want to address budget problems by raising taxes today and cutting spending tomorrow. The thing is, when tomorrow comes, the spending cuts don't happen.
The other problem is that the tax increases always generate less revenue than anticipated. It is amazing how some people understand that raising taxes reduces the amount of an activity when it comes to cigarettes and smoking, but claim that raising taxes has no impact when it comes to other areas.
No form of government is sustainable once those who control the levers of power start using them primarily for selfish interests. Actually, central planning of the economy will always lead to economically bad results in the long term, whether that central planning is done at the corporate level or the government level. Central planners cannot know enough, soon enough, to make good decisions and since their decisions effect so many people, when they make a bad decision it is disastrous. While individuals may make bad decisions, if they are only making decisions for themselves, or a small group of people, those decisions do not have large impacts. It required central planners to create the famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s and the famine in China in the 1960s. Decentralized economies are incapable of creating such famines in fertile lands.
I don't really care about CO2 emissions. I care more about pollutants that will lead to early deaths and killing off everything living in a stream, river, or lake. China far outstrips the U.S. in the production of those.
Actually, it is a matter of what happens in court. Actually, in all probability the breakdown will be between middle management and upper management. Obviously these two levels are both going to insist that their trials be separate from each other. Then the middle management will insist that they were following orders and when they questioned the legality they were assured that it had been cleared through legal. There may even be documentation supporting this claim. However, the Upper management will insist, in their separate trials, that that is not what happened at all and whatever documentation there is will be vague enough to at least allow the reasonable belief that it was indeed the middle management acting outside of the knowledge or authorization of upper management. And the problem is that both of these scenarios are believable. Of course, by now this has happened often enough that an alternate scenario is also believable. That upper management told middle management to do it in a manner that was intentionally phrased so as to deny that was what they were telling them while middle management was well aware that what they were doing was illegal.
I was a manager of a retail store that had a significant problem with "shrink" (which in this case was primarily due to shoplifting as a result of the location of the store). Shortly after the manager of a larger store, which had a similar problem, only worse, was fired (for an unrelated reason) my regional manager started to tell me every time she saw me that I was under no circumstances address the "shrink" problem the way that the fired manager had and then she gave me a detailed description of what he did (including how he did it so that corporate accounting would not flag it, which of course raised the question of how she knew he did it). I always assured her that I would never do that (and I never did because I had a strategy for addressing the issue that did not require lying or otherwise falsifying my paperwork. I do not know that my strategy would have worked at the larger store).
Absolutely. However, it may be difficult to prove that specific individuals were liable for criminal acts (it may not be, I don't know the specifics of the case). It may not be possible to prove who was criminally liable for this action.
That is because we no longer have health insurance in the U.S.. What we have is cost distribution. Insurance is where I pay a regular fee to cover events that are unlikely to occur but which are financially devastating if they do. The thing we call "health insurance" in the U.S. merely distributes the costs of healthcare among a larger group of people. For health care, individual payer is the only system that will work. Third party payer (whether single party or multiple party) will eventually collapse under demand. The problem with healthcare in the U.S. (and in most of the world) is that we have been gradually moving away from people being responsible for their own costs. The result of this is that costs have risen to the point where most individuals cannot afford to cover their own costs anymore. This means that there is no good way to move back to a system that works until the current system collapses under its own weight.
In the UK, the wait times for care are often extremely long. The five year outcomes for someone diagnosed with a serious illness are significantly worse in the UK than in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
We can't do that...it won't lead to increased government power.
The interesting thing I have noticed over the years is that people don't actually clamor for the government to do something after these events. What you hear is politicians, bureaucrats, and certain members of the media clamoring for the government to do something. The people who yell, "this is an outrage, the government must do something" fall into two categories: those who have been calling for the government to do what they now say this "outrage" means the government must do now without further discussion and those who see an opportunity to wring some advantage out of this change (these categories are not mutually exclusive).
Others have challenged your claim that Groklaw is paid for by IBM, but even if it is, I can think of one important difference between Groklaw and Florian Mueller, Groklaw is often right.
If the summary is at all a reflection of the logic in the article, the article is fundamentally flawed. People today who have quicker access to look up information using their phones are not smarter than those who lived 50 years ago and needed to go through a more laborious process to find the answer. Having access to more information does not in and of itself make you smarter. The reason that we traditionally use the amount of information that someone has quick access to as a measure of intelligence is that in the pre-Internet age, the majority of people who had quick access to large amounts of information were people who were very smart (the others were usually idiot-savants of one sort or another). However, quick access was merely a proxy used to determine intelligence, not an actual measure of intelligence (of course the fact is that as we have tried harder to quantify intelligence we have discovered that intelligence is not one thing but instead a collection of related things).
Actually, it is usually politicians who scream that we "gotta do something" whenever something happens that they see as an opportunity to expand their power. They are often able to stampede people into supporting what these expansions of power right after some tragedy, even if what they propose would not have had any impact on preventing the tragedy (for example, none of the control legislation proposed in the wake of the Newtown school shootings would have had any impact on that event). Even worse, is that often times existing laws addressed the issues which caused the tragedy, but were not enforced (Columbine and Enron were two completely different types of tragedy which led to new laws being passed. Those who were responsible for both were in violation of numerous existing laws when they took the actions that led to the tragedy).
In other words, a chip reader hooked up to his PC.
Right federal funds that get collected from the states, run through the federal bureaucracy and then partially returned to the states so that state officials can pretend that they are not responsible for some of the taxes their constituents have to pay to support such services and to make it harder for local voters to hold officials responsible for how the money is spent. ("Well, in order to qualify for federal money, we need to do 'X', even though we all agree that 'X' is an inefficient expenditure of money. Our hands are tied.").
People are no longer allowed to buy healthcare insurance, under Obamacare all plans sold under the name "insurance" are merely cost distribution schemes.
Actually he is probably referring to the Fort Hood shootings of which it can legitimately be argued were not a terrorist attack. However, if they are not a terrorist attack, they are an act of war, not a case of "work place violence" as the Administration is calling it.
The House has passed budgets. The Senate has not voted on them, nor has it passed an alternative budget. How do you negotiate with someone who won't put a list of "demands" on the table?
Are you saying that all of the workers in the account with the air traffic controllers do jobs that are as important and mission critical as that of the air traffic controllers? The air traffic controllers represent less than half of the workers in the account that is being cut.
Also, why didn't the Administrator of the FAA suggest to Congress alternate cuts in the same amount spread out differently? Congress repeatedly asked all Departments for alternatives to the sequestration.
The Democrats kept proposing tax increases now and spending cuts "tomorrow". The sequestration credit goes mostly to the Republicans (even though it was the Democrats' idea).
There is a real simple saying that sums up what I believe about the political parties. "The Democrats love the poor, that is why they work so hard to make more of them. The Republicans love the rich, that's why they try to make it easier to become rich." The Democrats are better at their side of that equation than the Republicans are at their side (that's because all politicians love power).
That's because the established rich don't pay estate tax. Their money is all in trusts and pay some kind of stipend to the heirs. The people who pay estate taxes are the heirs to farmers and small businessmen. The Rockefellers, Kennedys and Duponts (among may others) do not pay estate tax.
The thing is that air traffic controllers are only slightly less than half of the workers in the account that sequestration reductions. Why is the FAA furloughing air traffic controllers rather than other workers?
Police, firefighters, teachers, etc are not (in the context most people think of them) on the federal payroll, so are irrelevant for the current discussion of sequestration.
You are correct that one side is worse than the other. The Dems have consistently proclaimed that they want to address budget problems by raising taxes today and cutting spending tomorrow. The thing is, when tomorrow comes, the spending cuts don't happen.
The other problem is that the tax increases always generate less revenue than anticipated. It is amazing how some people understand that raising taxes reduces the amount of an activity when it comes to cigarettes and smoking, but claim that raising taxes has no impact when it comes to other areas.
No form of government is sustainable once those who control the levers of power start using them primarily for selfish interests. Actually, central planning of the economy will always lead to economically bad results in the long term, whether that central planning is done at the corporate level or the government level. Central planners cannot know enough, soon enough, to make good decisions and since their decisions effect so many people, when they make a bad decision it is disastrous. While individuals may make bad decisions, if they are only making decisions for themselves, or a small group of people, those decisions do not have large impacts. It required central planners to create the famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s and the famine in China in the 1960s. Decentralized economies are incapable of creating such famines in fertile lands.
I don't really care about CO2 emissions. I care more about pollutants that will lead to early deaths and killing off everything living in a stream, river, or lake. China far outstrips the U.S. in the production of those.
China is still partially a plan-driven economy, which does not need to have a result as long as the Party bosses get theirs.
There, fixed that for ya.
Right, because we will all be better off when all of the doctors' offices are run by national hospital chains.
Actually, it is a matter of what happens in court. Actually, in all probability the breakdown will be between middle management and upper management. Obviously these two levels are both going to insist that their trials be separate from each other. Then the middle management will insist that they were following orders and when they questioned the legality they were assured that it had been cleared through legal. There may even be documentation supporting this claim. However, the Upper management will insist, in their separate trials, that that is not what happened at all and whatever documentation there is will be vague enough to at least allow the reasonable belief that it was indeed the middle management acting outside of the knowledge or authorization of upper management. And the problem is that both of these scenarios are believable. Of course, by now this has happened often enough that an alternate scenario is also believable. That upper management told middle management to do it in a manner that was intentionally phrased so as to deny that was what they were telling them while middle management was well aware that what they were doing was illegal.
I was a manager of a retail store that had a significant problem with "shrink" (which in this case was primarily due to shoplifting as a result of the location of the store). Shortly after the manager of a larger store, which had a similar problem, only worse, was fired (for an unrelated reason) my regional manager started to tell me every time she saw me that I was under no circumstances address the "shrink" problem the way that the fired manager had and then she gave me a detailed description of what he did (including how he did it so that corporate accounting would not flag it, which of course raised the question of how she knew he did it). I always assured her that I would never do that (and I never did because I had a strategy for addressing the issue that did not require lying or otherwise falsifying my paperwork. I do not know that my strategy would have worked at the larger store).
See this this document. Go to table 5 on page 8 to see five year relative survival rates for various countries..
Absolutely. However, it may be difficult to prove that specific individuals were liable for criminal acts (it may not be, I don't know the specifics of the case). It may not be possible to prove who was criminally liable for this action.
That is because we no longer have health insurance in the U.S.. What we have is cost distribution. Insurance is where I pay a regular fee to cover events that are unlikely to occur but which are financially devastating if they do. The thing we call "health insurance" in the U.S. merely distributes the costs of healthcare among a larger group of people. For health care, individual payer is the only system that will work. Third party payer (whether single party or multiple party) will eventually collapse under demand. The problem with healthcare in the U.S. (and in most of the world) is that we have been gradually moving away from people being responsible for their own costs. The result of this is that costs have risen to the point where most individuals cannot afford to cover their own costs anymore. This means that there is no good way to move back to a system that works until the current system collapses under its own weight.
In the UK, the wait times for care are often extremely long. The five year outcomes for someone diagnosed with a serious illness are significantly worse in the UK than in the US.