That is what I was thinking, but I did not want to state it outright since it had been too long since I last looked it up and didn't feel like looking it up this morning.
We don't have anything in our Constitution about Buckyballs (although I am pretty sure if it had ever occurred to the Founding Fathers that the Federal Government would do this, they would have put something in there about it...however, I am also pretty sure that they would have thought that the 10th Amendment covered this).
I read through the majority of the comments and they almost completely agree. There are several different points made, but they are variations on the same theme. That theme is that big, national advertizing campaigns really do not offer anything of value to small, local companies. To put it another way, what small, local companies need in an advertizing company is one that understands the small, local market they are in (in other words a small, local advertizing company).
Which is actually very pertinent information as it suggests that this finding is more a useful tool for measuring the improvement (or failure to improve) of man's releasing of pollutants into the environment than it is a newly discovered threat. Although if the more extreme global warming alarmists are correct, these pollutants may get released into the environment at some future date, to the detriment of those living near the Himalayas (probably not an issue for those living at a distance from the Himalayas).
You make very good points and you present perfectly valid reasons to choose not to do business with someone. But guess what? That is your decision. I share your perspective on many of those issues and will choose not to do business with many of those companies. However, what makes it complicated is that a few years ago an American company was being hammered because it paid a substandard wage (by American standards) in a third world country and had working conditions which were horrendous (again by American standards). But when one investigated a little closer one discovered that the wages the company paid were more than a factor of ten better than any other available work in that country and the working conditions were paradise compared to working conditions at the alternatives to working for the American company. The American company was improving conditions where the factory was. If they had attempted to provide working conditions which would have been acceptable in the U.S., they would have lost money having the factory there. The people in that country were better off with the American company producing things there and the American company was able to make a profit, something they would not have been able to do with a factory that met U.S. working conditions.
The thing is that if someone in a country that does not provide those things can provide that service for less than you can you should be in some other line of work. You need to offer something which makes your labor worth more than the labor of that guy living in that country that does not have those expenses. If you and your fellow citizens cannot find ways to pay for those expenses and produce goods or services which are worth the added cost, your country is going to go under.
The classic example of this is what happened right after NAFTA passed...and then what happened a few years later. Right after NAFTA passed a bunch of companies relocated their production facilities to Mexico because they could pay workers in Mexico about 10% of what they needed to pay workers in the U.S. (even after calculating for additional transportation expenses) and still pay better than any other employers in that area of Mexico (thus getting the best of the available workers). A few years later many of those companies were moving their production facilities back to the U.S. because, for the work they needed done, Mexican workers were less than 10% as productive. This was not a universal experience. It only applied to certain industries. In other industries, Mexican workers were productive enough to be competitive (and in some industries they were productive enough that U.S. workers were NOT competitive).
If you are not offering something that makes your service more than that than why should someone pay you more than that (that something might be the fact that you live closer to the person buying the service, or it might be that you have a better understanding of their requirements).
The answer is easy. They are afraid there is something in there that someone could use to understand what they are doing in some other area. They don't know what, so to be safe they redacted everything that might possibly shed light on why they did what they did. They figure if they can stall long enough when people finally start to figure out what they did wrong they can just say "Well, what does it matter now?" and brush the whole matter under the rug.
Except that the facts say that fewer FOIA requests have actually been responded to under Obama than under Bush. Obama has said all the right things about transparency, but the people who work for him haven't actually done anything. Perhaps you remember that days after taking office Obama issued and executive order closing Guantanamo within a year. It is still open. What you talked about in your post is the same thing. Obama issued a high profile order and then no one followed through (actually the people responsible for following through in the case you mentioned did the exact opposite of the high profile order).
They have only reduced the projected spending by 2%, even though spending was projected to increase by something on the order of 10%* (at a time when inflation is counted as being less than 2%).
Actually, what you are hearing about is more of the "Washington Monument Gambit", just done in a more localized and subtle fashion. All of that stuff that you mentioned is attempts to find ways to make the cuts hurt voters so that they demand that Congress restore the spending. Even after the sequestration the federal government is going to increase spending this year over last year by more than the rate of inflation.
*I have seen what the projected spending increase was a percentage of existing spending but I cannot find it now. It is amazingly hard to get numbers that allow you to realistically evaluate government budget priorities, which in and of itself suggests to me that the government spends way more than the voters would support if they fully understood how the government was spending money.
If you look at the history of AT&T you discover there were government officials who intentionally promoted policies that made AT&T a monopoly because it was easier for the government to exert control over a single corporation than it was to exert control over many small regional companies. This same principle was applied to other areas of the economy as well. Those who believe that the government should manage the economy always prefer a few large companies over many small companies because the former is easier to control.
At&T did not become a monopoly because of government funding but because government regulators managed the regulations intentionally to favor AT&T over its smaller competitors in the early days of telephony. If the government regulators had not created the AT&T monopoly by regulating (not by funding) it into existence there would have been no need for them to break it up. For that matter there were several times when the withdrawal of government regulatory support for AT&T would have broken its monopoly more effectively than the government's breakup of AT&T.
So you think it would be better if AT&T still had the telecommunications monopoly in the US?
You mean the monopoly that the government helped them acquire in the first place? The monopoly that government regulations kept in place for so many years? The only reason it required government intervention to break up AT&T was because government regulation built AT&T in the first place.
No, let the free market (and lawsuits) shut down those big companies that are too big for the consumer to know whether or not they produce food that is not safe for human consumption. Before government regulation of meat packing every town had two or three butchers, you would know the person who packed the meat you ate. If someone got sick because Jerry the Butcher did not clean his equipment properly, people stopped going to Jerry the Butcher, or more likely, if Jerry the Butcher didn't properly clean his equipment word would get around town long before anyone got sick and he would lose customers. Very few people bought meat that was packed a long way away because no one trusted it. The exceptions would be that sometimes people bought from a local butcher who bought from those big meat packing plants, but people would expect the local butcher to check out where he got his meat from.
Ultimately thought the problem is that the way government regulators deal with a problem is that when a big company is the source of a food borne illness outbreak the government introduces new regulations that they require everyone to follow, even though it usually turns out that the problem was caused by that big company ignoring the regulations that were already on the books. If the big company was already ignoring the regulations why would anyone think that new regulations would help?
Actually, when people refer to "Fox News" they are almost always referring to "Fox News Channel", since the "Fox News" which is broadcast over the air is almost always local news and is not easily distinguishable from the local news on other networks. For example, the slogan associated with Fox News "fair and balanced" is the slogan of Fox News Channel.
It is really simple to see what the problem was, if developers had money to pay to AppGratis to promote their app, they should instead be giving that money to Apple.
You hit a good point. There is a corollary to it, most devices have a method of resetting the login to the default (usually something that requires physical access to the device) because there are a significant number of times when for one reason or another the correct login credentials have been lost. If the manufacturer does not use the same default login credentials for every one of a particular device and the end user has lost the card they sent with it that has the default credentials (an eventuality that is likely in those cases where the changed credentials have been lost) the company will either have to have maintained a database of the default credentials for every one of their devices they have shipped, or the end user will be SOL (which will probably result in them being very unhappy with the manufacturer).
The fact of the matter is that a lot of these devices are going to be things which are infrequently accessed, so even if you file the credentials away in a "safe, secure" location by the time you need them again you may have forgotten where that was.
Perhaps you should consider the fact that while Fox News is legitimately considered "conservative" (although primarily only in comparison to the other News channels--I refuse to watch any of them since TV is a terrible medium for news), Fox is not. There is NOTHING conservative about the network that runs the SImpsons, Family Guy and Glee.
The article is NOT about Fox News, the article is about Fox. Perhaps you should learn something about these organizations. Personally, having one's views represented by Fox News is every bit as bad as having one's views represented by Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
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That is what I was thinking, but I did not want to state it outright since it had been too long since I last looked it up and didn't feel like looking it up this morning.
I believe that Terry Pratchett is suffering from a form of Alzheimer's disease. I do not believe that Alzheimer's involves the myelin.
Sorry, but there is a mechanism built in to the algorithm to prevent that from happening.
Yeah, I can definitely see the case for applying the 9th Amendment here.
We don't have anything in our Constitution about Buckyballs (although I am pretty sure if it had ever occurred to the Founding Fathers that the Federal Government would do this, they would have put something in there about it...however, I am also pretty sure that they would have thought that the 10th Amendment covered this).
The head of Google is worried about my privacy? Now that is funny :D
He's not worried about your privacy, he's worried about his privacy.
I read through the majority of the comments and they almost completely agree. There are several different points made, but they are variations on the same theme. That theme is that big, national advertizing campaigns really do not offer anything of value to small, local companies. To put it another way, what small, local companies need in an advertizing company is one that understands the small, local market they are in (in other words a small, local advertizing company).
Which is actually very pertinent information as it suggests that this finding is more a useful tool for measuring the improvement (or failure to improve) of man's releasing of pollutants into the environment than it is a newly discovered threat. Although if the more extreme global warming alarmists are correct, these pollutants may get released into the environment at some future date, to the detriment of those living near the Himalayas (probably not an issue for those living at a distance from the Himalayas).
As long as you can change both of those, what difference does it make?
You make very good points and you present perfectly valid reasons to choose not to do business with someone. But guess what? That is your decision. I share your perspective on many of those issues and will choose not to do business with many of those companies. However, what makes it complicated is that a few years ago an American company was being hammered because it paid a substandard wage (by American standards) in a third world country and had working conditions which were horrendous (again by American standards). But when one investigated a little closer one discovered that the wages the company paid were more than a factor of ten better than any other available work in that country and the working conditions were paradise compared to working conditions at the alternatives to working for the American company. The American company was improving conditions where the factory was. If they had attempted to provide working conditions which would have been acceptable in the U.S., they would have lost money having the factory there. The people in that country were better off with the American company producing things there and the American company was able to make a profit, something they would not have been able to do with a factory that met U.S. working conditions.
The thing is that if someone in a country that does not provide those things can provide that service for less than you can you should be in some other line of work. You need to offer something which makes your labor worth more than the labor of that guy living in that country that does not have those expenses. If you and your fellow citizens cannot find ways to pay for those expenses and produce goods or services which are worth the added cost, your country is going to go under.
The classic example of this is what happened right after NAFTA passed...and then what happened a few years later. Right after NAFTA passed a bunch of companies relocated their production facilities to Mexico because they could pay workers in Mexico about 10% of what they needed to pay workers in the U.S. (even after calculating for additional transportation expenses) and still pay better than any other employers in that area of Mexico (thus getting the best of the available workers). A few years later many of those companies were moving their production facilities back to the U.S. because, for the work they needed done, Mexican workers were less than 10% as productive. This was not a universal experience. It only applied to certain industries. In other industries, Mexican workers were productive enough to be competitive (and in some industries they were productive enough that U.S. workers were NOT competitive).
If you are not offering something that makes your service more than that than why should someone pay you more than that (that something might be the fact that you live closer to the person buying the service, or it might be that you have a better understanding of their requirements).
But that doesn't apply to the DoD - they're taking very deep and very real cuts.
Give me numbers: spending this year vs spending last year to support that claim.
The answer is easy. They are afraid there is something in there that someone could use to understand what they are doing in some other area. They don't know what, so to be safe they redacted everything that might possibly shed light on why they did what they did. They figure if they can stall long enough when people finally start to figure out what they did wrong they can just say "Well, what does it matter now?" and brush the whole matter under the rug.
Except that the facts say that fewer FOIA requests have actually been responded to under Obama than under Bush. Obama has said all the right things about transparency, but the people who work for him haven't actually done anything. Perhaps you remember that days after taking office Obama issued and executive order closing Guantanamo within a year. It is still open. What you talked about in your post is the same thing. Obama issued a high profile order and then no one followed through (actually the people responsible for following through in the case you mentioned did the exact opposite of the high profile order).
They have only reduced the projected spending by 2%, even though spending was projected to increase by something on the order of 10%* (at a time when inflation is counted as being less than 2%).
Actually, what you are hearing about is more of the "Washington Monument Gambit", just done in a more localized and subtle fashion. All of that stuff that you mentioned is attempts to find ways to make the cuts hurt voters so that they demand that Congress restore the spending. Even after the sequestration the federal government is going to increase spending this year over last year by more than the rate of inflation.
*I have seen what the projected spending increase was a percentage of existing spending but I cannot find it now. It is amazingly hard to get numbers that allow you to realistically evaluate government budget priorities, which in and of itself suggests to me that the government spends way more than the voters would support if they fully understood how the government was spending money.
If you look at the history of AT&T you discover there were government officials who intentionally promoted policies that made AT&T a monopoly because it was easier for the government to exert control over a single corporation than it was to exert control over many small regional companies. This same principle was applied to other areas of the economy as well. Those who believe that the government should manage the economy always prefer a few large companies over many small companies because the former is easier to control.
At&T did not become a monopoly because of government funding but because government regulators managed the regulations intentionally to favor AT&T over its smaller competitors in the early days of telephony. If the government regulators had not created the AT&T monopoly by regulating (not by funding) it into existence there would have been no need for them to break it up. For that matter there were several times when the withdrawal of government regulatory support for AT&T would have broken its monopoly more effectively than the government's breakup of AT&T.
So you think it would be better if AT&T still had the telecommunications monopoly in the US?
You mean the monopoly that the government helped them acquire in the first place? The monopoly that government regulations kept in place for so many years? The only reason it required government intervention to break up AT&T was because government regulation built AT&T in the first place.
No, let the free market (and lawsuits) shut down those big companies that are too big for the consumer to know whether or not they produce food that is not safe for human consumption. Before government regulation of meat packing every town had two or three butchers, you would know the person who packed the meat you ate. If someone got sick because Jerry the Butcher did not clean his equipment properly, people stopped going to Jerry the Butcher, or more likely, if Jerry the Butcher didn't properly clean his equipment word would get around town long before anyone got sick and he would lose customers. Very few people bought meat that was packed a long way away because no one trusted it. The exceptions would be that sometimes people bought from a local butcher who bought from those big meat packing plants, but people would expect the local butcher to check out where he got his meat from.
Ultimately thought the problem is that the way government regulators deal with a problem is that when a big company is the source of a food borne illness outbreak the government introduces new regulations that they require everyone to follow, even though it usually turns out that the problem was caused by that big company ignoring the regulations that were already on the books. If the big company was already ignoring the regulations why would anyone think that new regulations would help?
Yet you apparently watch the trash that is put out by the other networks.
Actually, when people refer to "Fox News" they are almost always referring to "Fox News Channel", since the "Fox News" which is broadcast over the air is almost always local news and is not easily distinguishable from the local news on other networks. For example, the slogan associated with Fox News "fair and balanced" is the slogan of Fox News Channel.
It is really simple to see what the problem was, if developers had money to pay to AppGratis to promote their app, they should instead be giving that money to Apple.
You hit a good point. There is a corollary to it, most devices have a method of resetting the login to the default (usually something that requires physical access to the device) because there are a significant number of times when for one reason or another the correct login credentials have been lost. If the manufacturer does not use the same default login credentials for every one of a particular device and the end user has lost the card they sent with it that has the default credentials (an eventuality that is likely in those cases where the changed credentials have been lost) the company will either have to have maintained a database of the default credentials for every one of their devices they have shipped, or the end user will be SOL (which will probably result in them being very unhappy with the manufacturer).
The fact of the matter is that a lot of these devices are going to be things which are infrequently accessed, so even if you file the credentials away in a "safe, secure" location by the time you need them again you may have forgotten where that was.
Now, we have the story about EA being ranked as the worst company in America....four days after having a story about EA's response to being ranked the worst company in America (and both were posted by Soulskill). http://games.slashdot.org/story/13/04/05/2131219/ea-responds-to-its-appearance-in-the-worst-company-in-america-poll
Perhaps you should consider the fact that while Fox News is legitimately considered "conservative" (although primarily only in comparison to the other News channels--I refuse to watch any of them since TV is a terrible medium for news), Fox is not. There is NOTHING conservative about the network that runs the SImpsons, Family Guy and Glee.
The article is NOT about Fox News, the article is about Fox. Perhaps you should learn something about these organizations. Personally, having one's views represented by Fox News is every bit as bad as having one's views represented by Debbie Wasserman Schultz.