If you make a voting machine, you are building a product to sell to governments. If you are selling to governments, you must engage in lobbying, because that is how governments operate. If you engage in lobbying, sometimes you can just buy both sides, but usually you need to play favorites. If you want to build voting machines that are actually purchased and used, you must be HEAVILY engaged in politics, so districts controlled by your side buy your machines.
Our system is corrupt, because any time you get to spend other people's money, it tends towards corruption. The out of town salesmen with an expense account tends toward corruption (buy the pretty girl a drink, it's on the company)... non-profits that steer contracts to the friends of employees become corrupt. Governments steering tax payer dollars are corrupt... it's not a function of government, it's a function of the disconnect between the people whose money you are spending and the people deciding, the bigger the gap, the more corruption.
How much would I have to pay you to overpay by $100 for a $100 item... I want you to pay me $200, and it's only worth $100... you assume that there is a catch and demand more than $100. Let's say you are a parent on a sports team (10 players), and you are deciding on the uniform maker... it should cost $10, but I want you and every parent to pay $20... If I get you to do that, I make $200 instead of $100, so I'm happy to pay you any amount under $100. For you, any amount over $10 and you win... If I give you the uniform for free and take you to a $40 lunch, think you'll find a way to rationalize picking my uniforms? So I collect $180 for 9 shirts, pay out $40 for lunch, and I walk away with $140, that's better than the free market price of $100.
The ROI on lobbying government is huge. Obama's campaign is spending a total off $700M including the primary... that is 1/1000 of the amount of the recent bailout... that our government is for sale shouldn't be shocking, that it is so damned cheap is just sad. It's expensive to pay off the uniform example, cheaper for a non-profit, cheaper still for a local government... move up the chain, people are cheaper to buy.
Wal-mart doesn't let it's buyers meet with vendors at restaurants... in fact, they have to meet in Wal-mart headquarters in pre-selected rooms. They don't want their buyers bought off. Congress loves junkets, and they regulate themselves... of course they are for sale.
I voted absentee ballot in 2000 from Florida, as I did in 1998 for mid-term elections, we had a close Senate race. The card stock wasn't noticeably different... The absentee instructions were, punch the number on the card with the included tool, then when finished, turn the card over to remove any hanging pieces (don't recall if they were called Chads), stick in envelope 1, stick that in envelope 2, and you were supposed to sign one of them, maybe witnessed?
It wasn't that hard... Assuming the in person instructions were the same, people were responsible for clearing their chads before turning in the ballot. The dimpled chads were a made up issue by Palm Beach County officials trying to steal an election. The voter intent issue for non-punched chads were nonsense, if you pushed the tool in, the vote counted. The paper system with chads was bad for a close election, because each recount caused more chads to fall off, causing the numbers to shift.
While elections are counted to the vote, our vote counting systems always had a margin of error, which is the reason for hand recounts in close elections.
The problem with your claims is that they are silly. A decade ago predicting increased storms now means nothing... Short term temperature fluctuations are related to solar cycles, the long term trend was the claim of Global warming...
I.e. that natural temperature is a sine wave, varying over time. GW rotates the sine wave, so instead of rolling on a Y = 0 line, it rotates on a Y = 0.01X, where the underlying temperature increases by 1 degree every hundred years (the GW claims pre-Gore politics, now claiming 3 degrees). Add to this sine wave a completely random function that hides the average, because each year random stuff happens.
GW takes a trendline and continues it out to infinity, combined with the forward feedback, and the earth's temperature hits infinite at some point, clearly silly.
Are there things out that that we do not know that can reverse this forward feedback? Are there things that we can do NOW (other than massively decrease human economic activity) that can reverse the forward feedback. Why are we not trying to bio-engineer things that consume CO2 and produce something useful? A micro-organism that consumes CO2 and releases some form of energy and Oxygen gas? Rapidly growing trees that consume more CO2 and store it?
The forward feedback is what feels forced, and the lack of attempts to create a negative feedback loops. Combine this with the POLITICAL style deployment of scientific results, attempts to drown out criticism in a medieval Church fashion, and other oddities, and you have plenty of reasons for people that aren't scientists to feel like they are being sold a story line, not real science.
The hysterics are funded by the usual leftists that always want to curb western economic activity, for various reasons. The skeptics are funded by the usual suspects, oil companies and other producers that require carbon emissions. Neither side is unbiased, so why don't we focus on the research, not the financing.
The issues on global warming that are in dispute are numerous... we keep hearing predictions from models that have not been proven to have any predictive powers, and they keep getting more alarmist, and the increasingly ridiculous claims that every example of bad weather is a function of global warming. The issue is the "hockey stick" part of the forward feedback loop... that's the claim that because events will create forward feedback, we will hit a point in a few years where it isn't preventable, because even if we never emitted another CO2 gas, the forward feedback would be self sustaining.
Most things in the universe have negative feedback... The issue with global warming is we know that the current models show this forward feedback, but we KNOW that the models are incomplete. Are we missing significant variables that would create a feedback loop? It seems reasonable to wonder if something will happen with the higher CO2 levels that will cause a negative affect on global warming.
The consequences of GW are dire, and it's a real concern. But the scientific credibility is NOT enhanced by the political advocates calling for the same policies that their fellow ideologues called for for different reasons before, the celebrities weighing in, or the silly exaggerated movies.
Theory of evolution has been tested and demonstrated in small areas with smaller organisms. Theory of evolution is also a concept more than a specific theory, making it easier to demonstrate pieces... yes, evolutionary biology shows the process of small organisms... not the same thing.
Increased CO2 -> increased heat, that's the easy claim Increased heat -> increased CO2 and there is no way of stopping it is the stranger claim
Perhaps we'll see a spread of CO2 absorbing plants move out of tropical areas to other zones as temperatures change, who knows, but there are plenty of areas for negative feedback, and only time will tell.
Guess what, subprime defaults are still under 10%, and even if they rise to 25%, that still means that 75% of the people with subprime mortgages were able to buy houses that they weren't otherwise. So "blaming" subprime is silly... the problem is that the holders of the banks mistook the risks, but nobody cared because as long as prices went up, they WERE risk free.
The problem in the boom was people took 2/28 and 3/27 loans... these were priced at 30 year loans (for amortization), but after 2 or 3 years, they reset from the low "teaser" (often 1% - 2.5% higher than the prime mortgages) to a high rate that would be 10% - 11%... The people getting them often didn't know that if interest rates STAYED the same, their rate would go from 7% - 11%, and they were qualified at the 7%... they assumed that sure the loan rate would "reset," but if interest rates could go up, they could also go down...
Brokers, new in the field, said things like "prime rate is stable, long term rates shift," because you had a 2 year stretch without the Fed moving it's rates. If someone had a low credit score now, they weren't going to be better in 2 years, because new home owners underestimate the costs of owning a home... but on paper, if you had some blemishes on your report, in Fannie Mae conforming only REALLY looked back two years (looked at 4, but mostly at 2)...
If you had a business or health failure, and took a LOT of hits on your credit score from not paying bills but nothing before/after, maybe you were better in two years. Most subprime people have a bunch of problems that are permanent. But, even if your score didn't improve, you could always refinance with another 2/28 in two years, giving the brokers your new equity in the house to try again...
So nobody worried, because with the market going up, if you couldn't make the payments, you could refinance out of trouble.
The Voodoo Economics attack was at the Laffer Curve, which claimed that there is a ideal point of taxation that maximizes government revenue, and above that, people don't do economic activity and therefore taxes decline. Reagan predicted that his tax cuts would increase revenue, which was NOT the case, but it did free up capital, got the economy going, and tax revenues DID increase in time. Also, we have really cut taxes... I'd like them lower and flatter, but we can't do that without cutting the government. Taxes are running around 17% of GDP and governments expenditures at 20% of GDP... I'd like to see those both around 10% or less.
The real thing that Reagan cutting taxes did was: A) transfer wealth to current savers (money in 401k and tax deferred annuity programs) had deferred 70% (or 90% at some point) taxes, and could now take it out at 30% in the early days B) allow middle class people to build wealth... middle class people get paid a wage/salary, whether that wage/salary is 20k or 250k, they pay taxes on their labor, and if the rates are high, they can't build wealth, if they are low, they can work overtime/part-time second job, and use that extra money to build wealth, at 70% - 90% taxes, they can't C) stopped the real estate only system... the tax code HEAVILY favors real estate investors -- you can tax defer the capital gains forever by buying a new property (important when Capital Gains rate was 40%, where Obama wants it, less important at the 15% it is now -- and you can depreciate property... if you can buy a building for 3M, and depreciate it over 30 years, you have 100k in "losses," so if you are making 100k/year in profits renting it out, it's tax free... sure your depreciation gets paid back when you sell the property as a capital gain (so you convert ordinary income, taxed at 40% with FICA into capital gains at 15%), and can be deferred on an exchange
The problem is Obamanomics is that it is NOT Clinton-style populism and fiscal conservatism (at least when paired with a GOP Congress), it is NOT FDR/LBJ New Deal/Great Society program heavy, it is European style socialism... heavy on regulation, income redistribution, etc... capitalism produces more gains/growth, but also downturns... Americans suffer more in economic downturns, but we benefit more in upturns... You can't have the upside without the downside, which is what people apparently want.
Blue label is tasteless trash, loved by non Whiskey drinkers that show off spending money on Whiskey.
Plenty of $30 - $50 bottles have more flavor than Blue Label...
Johnny Walker is crap whiskey, though the Green Label has an interesting, distinctive flavor. Red label is passable as a mixer, and Black label is a cheap drink, but none of them are good whiskeys.
Yes, because Israel, a loyal US Ally/Satellite that has advanced US Agenda in the mideast, and contained its military operations to self defense, should be abandoned because an artificial liberation movement has become the latest leftist craze. The people in the disputed territories are in a crappy situation, which Israel HAS been attempting to negotiate a solution for. However, the Arab world's insistence on arming them to the teeth and paying them to die, plus keeping 3 generations of people in "refugee camps" instead of settling them (roughly the same number of Jews were kicked out of Arab countries as Arabs that fled Israel during the 1948 War) like Israel settled the Jews the Arabs kicked out, has prevented a solution.
Arafat the Egyptian embraced lefty rhetoric and style, so like Castro, became seen as a darling of the left who love dictators if they embrace "revolution." The fact that their aid dollars went to his corrupt regime and killing civilian Jews mattered way less than their embrace of a "freedom fighter." The fact that he also used the resources to systematically terrorize Arab Christians probably also ingratiated himself to the secular left.
The amount of land in dispute is TRIVIAL, except to Israel that is in physical danger without it. Emotional attachment aside, financial compensation to the displaced Arabs, including purchasing them land in nearby Arab nations, would have been WAY CHEAPER than the current disaster of a policy.
So keep spewing hateful ignorance, and be prepared to lose to the silent majority in two months, because you guys are irrational and crazy.
Give me a break, when was the last time you heard of a clinic getting bombed? It was a handful of nut jobs, and they are in prison. Clinton tightened the regulations on distance from the clinic, and protests kind of faded. They have adopted less confrontational approaches.
It probably feels good to go on Slashdot and compare Christians to Al Qaeda, you could go diary on Daily Kos and get told how wonderful you are, but it would be the same BS as here.
There is zero comparison between people protesting an abortion clinic and some people going too far than an organized movement to kill civilians haphazardly to advance a political agenda.
On some level you have to realize that the "internal justification" of the anti-abortion murderers is their belief that they are preventing murder, while the Islamist Terrorists are pursuing an agenda of despotism and establishing a Caliphate military dictatorship. The former are targeting the specific people that they believe are currently in the process of taking a life (in the view of the actor), the latter are looking to kill or maim as many as possible.
Not justifying the abortion clinic attacks, just suggesting that the actions were at least targeted at preventing what they consider a wrong, while the terrorists we are fighting are NOT targeted at preventing a wrong (I'd suggest that their attacks on our troops aren't terrorism, just asymmetrical warfare, our troops are a valid military target, for that reason I'm hard pressed to classify the hit on the Pentagon as a terrorist attack since it's a military target)... they may have a goal that they believe in, but their methodology is simply evil.
The American and UK both have constitutional law... the UK's are based upon Acts of Parliament to which the crown assented... the legal power in the UK derives from the Sovereign and what the crown ceded to Parliament, so "Constitutional Law" there is about asserting Parliamentary power. In the US, power derives from the consent of the states that ceded power to it in establishing the government (Constitution was ratified by state governments, not the people).
So in a broad sense, "Constitutional Law" exists in both.
In the common vernacular, in the US Constitutional Law refers to limitations on government and the rights of the people, which don't really have an analog behind vague laws about "Human Rights" elsewhere. When people in the US talk about Constitutional Rights, they mean the rights of the people, primarily enshrined in the Bill of Rights Amendments, not the powers of Congress to issue Letters of Marque...:)
So legal definition, power of government, both the same... Acts of Parliament cede power from Crown to Parliament... US Constitutions cedes power from States to Federal Government, sharing sovereignty between the levels of government. But the US Bill of Rights as a "sancrosact" set of laws requiring HUGE Supermajority to change, pretty unique.
The US entered the two World Wars on behalf of European Allies (France in the Great War, UK in WW II), although each time with a pretense that that wasn't the case. Before entering the second world war, the US was EXTREMELY provocative with its support of the Brits, with things like the Lend Lease Act, where the US shipped over materiel with basically no repayment.
During the Cold War period, despite liberal blasts later as a form of US Imperialism, the Europeans had legitimate fears of being invaded by Stalin. The US paid for (and put our troops at risk) Europe's defense for 50 years, letting them talk down to us for "militarism."
The belief that the US was unfairly subsidizing Europe was not unheard in US circles, so sock puppet, not, taken advantage of, absolutely.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) is an executive branch department (Wikipedia Entry). The judicial system is made up of Judges at most levels, and justices are the supreme court level. To laymen, that distinction it one of terminology, not job (though they don't judge cases the same way a trial court does, and the terms have some meaning.
Roofs get replaced in Florida every 30 - 40 years. A cost effective roofing solution would take advantage of the fact that you need to spend money on a new roof anyway, so that reduces the cost. (I mean: If a solar roof costs $20k, and a standard roof $10k, than than solar roof incrementally only costs $10k, but the government subsidy will be based off $20k, making it even cheaper).
You do realize that the government has no money of its own, right? That $10k in subsidy comes from the taxpayers. You're essentially paying yourself to put a roof on, but only after giving the government a cut of the money to do other things with.
If you want a government solution, it's going to cost money. I would prefer financial incentives that are relatively neutral and let the market (with externalities internalized) work. The free market isn't just a political point about government = bad except in campaign commercials, it's about the allocation of resources. Floors, Ceilings, subsidies, tariffs, etc., all alter the Supply or Demand side of the equation without being a centrally planned mandate. Centrally planned actions usually fail.
I brought up the roofs because there are panels/tiles for roofs that are integrated solar, so that cost of the regular roof doesn't exist, so you pay the incremental. I bring that up, because Miami-Dade standards aside (and really, the Hurricane panic normally only affects us in the tri-county area), it seems like an easy solution to get things better.
If a regular roof is $10k, and a solar roof $20k, and that person would save $100/mo. in electricity, assuming people want a 7 year return on home improvements, than a subsidy exceeding $1600 (which would be 8% of the roof cost, 16% of the incremental costs), would get the roof done.
You probably get more bang-for-buck giving people a 10% - 20% tax credit for solar roofs than you do for a lot of these other programs.
Oil is traded on a world market. However, because of inelastic demand, small increases/decreases in demand will have major price swings. Most of the developing world that is gobbling up energy at home is heavily subsidizing energy, while the US slightly taxes it, and Europe heavily taxes it. Because of lag times, the first movers to get off energy will do well, because if costs keep going up, the sooner you do capital changes to decrease usage, the better.
A lot of small changes that would get us decently there. We don't need a silver bullet, or major sacrifice, we need to stop making energy policy a political football and start moving in a new direction. When Bush pitched his energy policies in what, 2002?, all we heard about is "won't lower gas prices for 5 years, written by business, etc.," well, 6 years later, I'd take decreased prices in 5 years. Stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good and let us get cost effective changes first.
Roofs get replaced in Florida every 30 - 40 years. A cost effective roofing solution would take advantage of the fact that you need to spend money on a new roof anyway, so that reduces the cost. (I mean: If a solar roof costs $20k, and a standard roof $10k, than than solar roof incrementally only costs $10k, but the government subsidy will be based off $20k, making it even cheaper).
If prices of Solar are down around $1.80 a watt, and that should drop to $1/watt soon, we're on our way, because does anyone think that the cost of energy is going down? Oil is the most volatile, because it's the most convenient, but energy is energy.
A plug-in hybrid car for houses with solar roofs and a power grid that used Coal/Nuclear/Wind for the "differences" would do great... need to do something clever because at night there is no solar, but solar could still take up a huge chunk of residential power needs... which is something.
Anything we do to decrease our demand for fossil fuel based energy drastically drops the price, or at least gives us an advantage over people paying full price. If small increases in demand drastically push up prices, small decreases in demand can do the reverse.
Solar roofs take advantage of the fact that people need to replace roofs periodically anyway, so there is a built in subsidy there.
Vista financial success... Fortune has an article on Bill Gates and his next move, plus one on Microsoft. In the years that Gates has been transitioning out (about 10 years now, in 98 Ballmer named President, in 2000, named CEO, and the last 8 years Gates has brought people in for his other senior roles), MS revenues have increased 5-fold and the company has diversified.
Microsoft's problem is that the stock is in the doldrums because they aren't seen as a growth plan, so their P/E ratio has dropped about as fast as they've increased earning. Their other problem is that their brand is tarnished... Original Xbox was a disaster, Xbox 360 had a good run but is being beaten by the Wii. The Apple commercials, while silly, are trashing Microsoft as old and lame. They are seen as part of the boring business infrastructure. They make plenty of money, but they don't have a good consumer brand right now. This isn't inherently a problem, plenty of companies have a lousy brand but sell industrial services... combined with monopoly rents, MSFT can remain a Fortune 500 company that way... however, that's a 10% growth, PE 12 story, not 25% growth, PE 50 story.
Further, growth will get harder, Linux keeps getting closer to being good enough for more and more stuff. Apple is carving out an increasing niche... all of these slow MSFT's financial growth....
Networks are the Head, the second tier networks are the normal tail that we look at... Youtube is the long tail.
The networks have steadily slid from 80% - 40% of television viewing AS the number of cable channels expanded, so the tail got longer.
Youtube introduced a long tail to television.
The question will be, who gets more viewers (total person-minutes watched) 1. The Networks (Head) 2. Second Tier Cable (Tail) 3. Cable in General (Head + Tail) 4. Youtube + Other Web Video
Long Tail theory indicates that 3 + 4 should be roughly the same... and 1 should consistently hold 80% of 3, while 2 holds 20%... This requires redefining the Head from just the big 3/4 networks to include some other major channels.
Now the REAL interesting question is does #4 become dominated by Youtube (80%+, natural monopoly), or spread across all web video with you tube only because the locally head of a long tail from there.
It's a standard power curve... it agrees that the hits make up lots of the sales, the thing is how many.
Integrate from 1 - 10 off the curve, you see the sales of the Top 10 sellers... they sell a lot, they sit in the front of book stores. Go to 1-100, and you have probably only doubled sales.
Long tail observes that theoretically, the curve goes out to infinity and never hits zero, which is what the Internet makes interesting.
A mall book store can stock 5000 books, a big box book store 20000, and Wal-mart's book section, 1000. Wal-mart moves a lot of books because they stock the 1000 most popular books and move them readily. The mall book store have 5x the inventory and probably about the same in sales, because they aren't moving as many of the top 1000 because of Wal-mart. The Big box store, with 15000 moves more... maybe double the mall bookstore with 4x the inventory?
You see diminishing returns... so sales people observe the 80/20 rule, 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers/products, etc., it's the power curve... But long tail observes that if you can only carry 100 products, 80% will come from your top 20%, but if you carried infinite inventory, the long tail exceeds the bulbous head because it's infinite.
The average bookstore apparently stocks around 15k books (when I first read the long tail argument), the most profitable books. If you looked at Amazon's sales, their "big sellers" were the sale 15k books as everyone else, so you would think 80/20 rule, that's 80% of revenue, the other 1M+ books were just there because they were slightly profitable, brought customers in, etc. Turns out, the majority of the sales were from the books AFTER rank 15K, the books that booksellers don't carry.
This brings one to two conclusions: 1. 80/20 rule is a function of limited inventory, if you take the tail to its conclusion, the tipping point is around where others drop off, with half before and half after, so the bulbous head is 80% of 50% of sales, or 40%... still important, but not the final say in revenue... Long tail means Internet changes the economics of inventory... I go to a Wal-mart OR Website for my "common" stuff, Internet for everything else. 2. Amazon.com does well on the long tail because the others can't play there. The normal shops compete for the first 15k, Amazon has a competitive advantage for the rest of the inventory, and therefore makes profits. -- This leads to the natural conclusion that the long tong tail is a natural monopoly, only one player can make money stocking it. Wal-mart owns the common 20% of items, Amazon sells the rest, and we all get out of retail because Retail = Wal-mart + Amazon.com.
If Gates hired a programmer, gave him the goal, DOS 1.0, and the guy wrote it, then Microsoft developed DOS. But if Microsoft finds someone who wrote something basic as a hobby, offers him money, then sells it, he bought DOS?
Gates would have bought DOS regardless of if they cut the guy a check for the software or paid him out on a W-2, so who cares?
In the 1940s, the US was the only country whose factories were humming instead of smoldering. We were replenishing the capital stock of the entire west, that took a few decades. US marketshare for manufacturing declined DESPITE INCREASING because everyone else started manufacturing again as they rebuilt their bombed out infrastructure.
America got lucky, damned lucky, that our leadership wanted competent government, and created a professional Civil Service. In Europe, they created a privileged Civil Service, where it doesn't seem at ALL accountable to elected officials, and people strive for wonderful government jobs... America is lucky that we somewhat sneer at them, it's part of competent but not suffocating government.
Our government may be mediocre, but it's a consistently moderate mediocre... Which drastically separates us from the kleptocracy of government that the rest of the Americas suffer from... Israel has a completely dysfunctional public sector because they look the privileged elite approach of Europe, and things like post office jobs are highly coveted and fought for because the post office can give you loans to buy your home, while private sector employees got nothing... Canada's professional Civil Service seems much more like Americas than Europes, which is important for their general success.
Before Win95, Apple has a small but real Market, IBM made noise with OS/2, someone was pushing GEOS (came with my multimedia upgrade kit at some point), and most computers booted to DOS and ran Wordperfect 5.1/DOS and or LOTUS 1-2-3 and connected to the Netware box. Even if most OEMs shipped with Windows 3.11, computers didn't always boot it. The real data was a 3270 terminal away. Microsoft's high-end OSes NT Workstation was a novelty, NT Server was an also ran.
With Windows 95, they took over the desktop... DOS was hidden, OS/2 defeated, and with Office 95 shipping WELL before Wordperfect ported to Win32... With Win95 they grabbed a desktop monopoly, Office monopoly, and pushed NT Server as highly competitive with Netware and inevitably overtaking them.
It'd be another 2 years before Netscape made Microsoft wet-itself, panic, and get itself into anti-trust trouble... the SAME anti-trust trouble that caused IBM to use a third-party OS and off-the-shelf processor when creating the PC.
Microsoft's profits might grow, Win2K might have gotten NT capable of replacing the DOS/Windows combo (XP with XP Home edition finally banished it), but the high water mark was hit. When Win95 launched, everyone was excited, the cheap PC Platform got a lot of expensive Mac/Amiga capabilities. The next few years, Microsoft spent floundering around for expansion (most of which didn't pan out), focused on suffocating competitors like Netscape, and Bill Gates spent time being deposed for court cases...
So yeah, it was the pinnacle of their success financially, and the peak for him before he went from geek hero to generally appreciated business hero, before his downfall as tech villain... It was the end of his being able to focus on technology and products, and the beginning of managing legal problems.
The President is a political person, elected through politics, answerable only to political process, so of course he can engage in partisan process. The purpose of the Hatch Act (and similar legislation) was to depoliticize the Civil Servants.
While we joke about government employees being "lazy, incompetent, over/under paid, whatever," without a professional Civil Servants class it becomes a cesspool of corruption. As the public employees are normally unionized with a union that can both fight management (as a union) and change management (as a political organization), they are generally well paid and compensated, particularly with pension benefits and other back end benefits that politicians can approve and leave someone else with the bill. As a result, those jobs are potentially very desirable.
If you don't keep the political bosses away, watch how quickly jobs go to politically connected people that don't show up to work... It seems unlikely that someone powerful would care about a 30k - 90k/year job, but what if they could get it for their daughter-in-law that doesn't work, and just funnel money and benefits to their kids. That's how these positions work in countries without extensive controls, and why we have so many to keep the "friends and family plan" out.
Look at any community non profit and look at how many incompetent people hold well paying jobs because someone that gives money is friends with their parents/grandparents... corruption happens everywhere, and this attempts to reduce it. It doesn't attempt to remove partisanship from politics.
It is critical that the Civil Service function between changes in administration. If a new President came in and fired everyone to give overpaid jobs to the "friends and family plan" for the party and his supporters, you'd have a completely inept government, instead of our mostly inept one.
These days, we take for granted that the Civil Servants are employees doing a job, not appointees serving as the pleasure of the President, but understand how difficult it was to arrive there. Until Social Security and the SSA, and the IRS and it's paperwork, people didn't have "careers" the way we do now, you showed up, worked, got paid at the end of the day/week depending on the type of employee.
Right now, we don't have masses of Civil Servants doing political work or losing their job. The Hatch Act was part of creating that environment. The "excesses of it," obviously someone blogging on their lunch hour doesn't seem to be what was envisioned when they wanted to stop party bosses from filling a government secretarial pool with their cronies and cranking out letters from there, seem draconian. However, the alternative was real... and not useful to have good government.
The percentage of income in America dedicated to food is absurdly small. When earth was all agrarian societies, it was close to 100%, as people developed tools and skills to trade, that amount has steadly declined. In 2005, Americans spend 9% of their income on food... even with the major run-ups and inflationary pressures, it's maybe 13% or 14%? Before the energy runup, energy usage was down to 4% of income (compared to around 10% or 12% before the oil crisis), which is why the first doubling of energy didn't wipe out economic growth, just cut the economy back by a few percentage points.
Organic is based on the fact that if an "Average American" spends 10% of their income on food, then the yuppies with 4x that income could either spend 2.5% of their income on food, or pay twice as much for "organic" and still only be spending 5% of their income on food.
That said, we have some organic produce in my house... for certain vegetables, they are simply much more flavorful than the regular produce... not because of organic magic, but because the produce doesn't have to be picked as early to be shipped by agribusiness, and therefore is fresher. However, you can't demonstrate "fresher" in the commodity market, but you can demonstrate organic.
But it's definitely WAY less productive... but it's an affordable luxury to an increasingly affluent American upper middle class.
Ignore the Prequels for a moment... let's take the universe deployed in the original piece. Also ignore the Nazi/Fascist imagery as well...
Why does random citizen on Planet X care if the Empire is there of the Republic is there? Under the Republic, he was governed by a nobleman, probably a King or Queen (though we don't know if lesser planets, or less connected families had lesser titles like in Dune, which was AN inspiration for Star Wars). If you wanted to rise up and not be ruled by a Monarch, the Jedi Knights were there to "keep the peace" as they have for 1000 generations. While Tatooine is an impoverished fringe world run by the Hutt Mafia, we don't know that being ruled by a random monarch is better.
The inefficient Republic couldn't really do much, and it clearly lacked a massive military so that the Jedi were keepers of the peace and generally given free range. They seemed to only answer to some Jedi Counsel, and while the Republic certainly appears to be mostly human (judging by the makeup of the Empire -- 100% AND the Rebellion, 50%), the Jedi Counsel seems to be heavily influenced by this little Green Guy we meet.
That world is somewhat ambiguous. We're told to root for the "White Army" there to restore the noblemen to power (where they are "elected officials," who wants to bet that Princess Leia's election to the Senate, as daughter of the King, was about as competitive of Saddam Hussein or Joseph Stalin's elections) and their Republic government where some form of vote takes place to send their children or other connected allies to the Senate (we don't know if the Senators are elected by the people or some Parliament, and we don't know if that Parliament is elected, appointed, or inherited).
One presumes that there were wealthy urban planets (or planets with wealth urban cores) with wealthy individuals served by the various courts... they probably lost out as their connections to the monarchs lost value as the imperial governors took power. OTOH, goods appear to be readily available to the wealthy because the smugglers seemed to grow in numbers (including the spice smugglers on Tatooine, but the importance of spice is unclear, or if it's a throw away line to pay homage to Dune), and the decline of the government while the Empire, Imperial Senate, Regional Governors, and Planet Monarchs are no longer aligned to screw the people (admittedly referencing the Trade Federation from Ep. 1, where we see a sanctioned monopoly that can strangle a planet with blockades).
So, one COULD have kept that moral ambiguity by leaving things in the background, but they didn't. A throw away line or two from Palpatine about the inefficiency of the Republic would have kept the idea that he might have been fed up with the pace of the Republic and the Jedi Knights. In the Prequels, he is made raw evil, in the originals, there is plenty of young rebel nonsense in there.
As a kid watching the originals, I saw NONE of that, but as an adult watching them, I appreciated some underlying ambiguities. OTOH, Jar Jar isn't substantially more annoying than C3PO's whining other than the fact that "Android/Robot = cool, retarded alien = lame," and I met C3PO as a child, and Jar Jar as an adult. My wife, who never saw Star Wars as a kid, so has no fond memories, thinks that the Droids are just as annoying.
BTW: I really liked how in Episode I, they delved into some political references. A trade dispute and a deadlocked Senate leads to a No Confidence vote in favor of the Senator from the isolated planet, clearly the rest of the chamber felt that their planet could be next. However, I did NOT like how the rest took events that were described as Epic and made them ordinary. The Clone Wars appeared to be a long war that bordered on a Civil War, instead it appeared to be a short series of events between Jedi and Clones/Storm Troopers/Battle Droids. I guess we don't directly here of a non-Jedi fighting in the Clone Wars, but the Clone Wars definitely seemed more substantial than Episode II made it seem.
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If you make a voting machine, you are building a product to sell to governments. If you are selling to governments, you must engage in lobbying, because that is how governments operate. If you engage in lobbying, sometimes you can just buy both sides, but usually you need to play favorites. If you want to build voting machines that are actually purchased and used, you must be HEAVILY engaged in politics, so districts controlled by your side buy your machines.
Our system is corrupt, because any time you get to spend other people's money, it tends towards corruption. The out of town salesmen with an expense account tends toward corruption (buy the pretty girl a drink, it's on the company)... non-profits that steer contracts to the friends of employees become corrupt. Governments steering tax payer dollars are corrupt... it's not a function of government, it's a function of the disconnect between the people whose money you are spending and the people deciding, the bigger the gap, the more corruption.
How much would I have to pay you to overpay by $100 for a $100 item... I want you to pay me $200, and it's only worth $100... you assume that there is a catch and demand more than $100. Let's say you are a parent on a sports team (10 players), and you are deciding on the uniform maker... it should cost $10, but I want you and every parent to pay $20... If I get you to do that, I make $200 instead of $100, so I'm happy to pay you any amount under $100. For you, any amount over $10 and you win... If I give you the uniform for free and take you to a $40 lunch, think you'll find a way to rationalize picking my uniforms? So I collect $180 for 9 shirts, pay out $40 for lunch, and I walk away with $140, that's better than the free market price of $100.
The ROI on lobbying government is huge. Obama's campaign is spending a total off $700M including the primary... that is 1/1000 of the amount of the recent bailout... that our government is for sale shouldn't be shocking, that it is so damned cheap is just sad. It's expensive to pay off the uniform example, cheaper for a non-profit, cheaper still for a local government... move up the chain, people are cheaper to buy.
Wal-mart doesn't let it's buyers meet with vendors at restaurants... in fact, they have to meet in Wal-mart headquarters in pre-selected rooms. They don't want their buyers bought off. Congress loves junkets, and they regulate themselves... of course they are for sale.
I voted absentee ballot in 2000 from Florida, as I did in 1998 for mid-term elections, we had a close Senate race. The card stock wasn't noticeably different... The absentee instructions were, punch the number on the card with the included tool, then when finished, turn the card over to remove any hanging pieces (don't recall if they were called Chads), stick in envelope 1, stick that in envelope 2, and you were supposed to sign one of them, maybe witnessed?
It wasn't that hard... Assuming the in person instructions were the same, people were responsible for clearing their chads before turning in the ballot. The dimpled chads were a made up issue by Palm Beach County officials trying to steal an election. The voter intent issue for non-punched chads were nonsense, if you pushed the tool in, the vote counted. The paper system with chads was bad for a close election, because each recount caused more chads to fall off, causing the numbers to shift.
While elections are counted to the vote, our vote counting systems always had a margin of error, which is the reason for hand recounts in close elections.
The problem with your claims is that they are silly. A decade ago predicting increased storms now means nothing... Short term temperature fluctuations are related to solar cycles, the long term trend was the claim of Global warming...
I.e. that natural temperature is a sine wave, varying over time. GW rotates the sine wave, so instead of rolling on a Y = 0 line, it rotates on a Y = 0.01X, where the underlying temperature increases by 1 degree every hundred years (the GW claims pre-Gore politics, now claiming 3 degrees). Add to this sine wave a completely random function that hides the average, because each year random stuff happens.
GW takes a trendline and continues it out to infinity, combined with the forward feedback, and the earth's temperature hits infinite at some point, clearly silly.
Are there things out that that we do not know that can reverse this forward feedback? Are there things that we can do NOW (other than massively decrease human economic activity) that can reverse the forward feedback. Why are we not trying to bio-engineer things that consume CO2 and produce something useful? A micro-organism that consumes CO2 and releases some form of energy and Oxygen gas? Rapidly growing trees that consume more CO2 and store it?
The forward feedback is what feels forced, and the lack of attempts to create a negative feedback loops. Combine this with the POLITICAL style deployment of scientific results, attempts to drown out criticism in a medieval Church fashion, and other oddities, and you have plenty of reasons for people that aren't scientists to feel like they are being sold a story line, not real science.
The hysterics are funded by the usual leftists that always want to curb western economic activity, for various reasons. The skeptics are funded by the usual suspects, oil companies and other producers that require carbon emissions. Neither side is unbiased, so why don't we focus on the research, not the financing.
The issues on global warming that are in dispute are numerous... we keep hearing predictions from models that have not been proven to have any predictive powers, and they keep getting more alarmist, and the increasingly ridiculous claims that every example of bad weather is a function of global warming. The issue is the "hockey stick" part of the forward feedback loop... that's the claim that because events will create forward feedback, we will hit a point in a few years where it isn't preventable, because even if we never emitted another CO2 gas, the forward feedback would be self sustaining.
Most things in the universe have negative feedback... The issue with global warming is we know that the current models show this forward feedback, but we KNOW that the models are incomplete. Are we missing significant variables that would create a feedback loop? It seems reasonable to wonder if something will happen with the higher CO2 levels that will cause a negative affect on global warming.
The consequences of GW are dire, and it's a real concern. But the scientific credibility is NOT enhanced by the political advocates calling for the same policies that their fellow ideologues called for for different reasons before, the celebrities weighing in, or the silly exaggerated movies.
Theory of evolution has been tested and demonstrated in small areas with smaller organisms. Theory of evolution is also a concept more than a specific theory, making it easier to demonstrate pieces... yes, evolutionary biology shows the process of small organisms... not the same thing.
Increased CO2 -> increased heat, that's the easy claim
Increased heat -> increased CO2 and there is no way of stopping it is the stranger claim
Perhaps we'll see a spread of CO2 absorbing plants move out of tropical areas to other zones as temperatures change, who knows, but there are plenty of areas for negative feedback, and only time will tell.
Guess what, subprime defaults are still under 10%, and even if they rise to 25%, that still means that 75% of the people with subprime mortgages were able to buy houses that they weren't otherwise. So "blaming" subprime is silly... the problem is that the holders of the banks mistook the risks, but nobody cared because as long as prices went up, they WERE risk free.
The problem in the boom was people took 2/28 and 3/27 loans... these were priced at 30 year loans (for amortization), but after 2 or 3 years, they reset from the low "teaser" (often 1% - 2.5% higher than the prime mortgages) to a high rate that would be 10% - 11%... The people getting them often didn't know that if interest rates STAYED the same, their rate would go from 7% - 11%, and they were qualified at the 7%... they assumed that sure the loan rate would "reset," but if interest rates could go up, they could also go down...
Brokers, new in the field, said things like "prime rate is stable, long term rates shift," because you had a 2 year stretch without the Fed moving it's rates. If someone had a low credit score now, they weren't going to be better in 2 years, because new home owners underestimate the costs of owning a home... but on paper, if you had some blemishes on your report, in Fannie Mae conforming only REALLY looked back two years (looked at 4, but mostly at 2)...
If you had a business or health failure, and took a LOT of hits on your credit score from not paying bills but nothing before/after, maybe you were better in two years. Most subprime people have a bunch of problems that are permanent. But, even if your score didn't improve, you could always refinance with another 2/28 in two years, giving the brokers your new equity in the house to try again...
So nobody worried, because with the market going up, if you couldn't make the payments, you could refinance out of trouble.
The Voodoo Economics attack was at the Laffer Curve, which claimed that there is a ideal point of taxation that maximizes government revenue, and above that, people don't do economic activity and therefore taxes decline. Reagan predicted that his tax cuts would increase revenue, which was NOT the case, but it did free up capital, got the economy going, and tax revenues DID increase in time. Also, we have really cut taxes... I'd like them lower and flatter, but we can't do that without cutting the government. Taxes are running around 17% of GDP and governments expenditures at 20% of GDP... I'd like to see those both around 10% or less.
The real thing that Reagan cutting taxes did was:
A) transfer wealth to current savers (money in 401k and tax deferred annuity programs) had deferred 70% (or 90% at some point) taxes, and could now take it out at 30% in the early days
B) allow middle class people to build wealth... middle class people get paid a wage/salary, whether that wage/salary is 20k or 250k, they pay taxes on their labor, and if the rates are high, they can't build wealth, if they are low, they can work overtime/part-time second job, and use that extra money to build wealth, at 70% - 90% taxes, they can't
C) stopped the real estate only system... the tax code HEAVILY favors real estate investors -- you can tax defer the capital gains forever by buying a new property (important when Capital Gains rate was 40%, where Obama wants it, less important at the 15% it is now -- and you can depreciate property... if you can buy a building for 3M, and depreciate it over 30 years, you have 100k in "losses," so if you are making 100k/year in profits renting it out, it's tax free... sure your depreciation gets paid back when you sell the property as a capital gain (so you convert ordinary income, taxed at 40% with FICA into capital gains at 15%), and can be deferred on an exchange
The problem is Obamanomics is that it is NOT Clinton-style populism and fiscal conservatism (at least when paired with a GOP Congress), it is NOT FDR/LBJ New Deal/Great Society program heavy, it is European style socialism... heavy on regulation, income redistribution, etc... capitalism produces more gains/growth, but also downturns... Americans suffer more in economic downturns, but we benefit more in upturns... You can't have the upside without the downside, which is what people apparently want.
Blue label is tasteless trash, loved by non Whiskey drinkers that show off spending money on Whiskey.
Plenty of $30 - $50 bottles have more flavor than Blue Label...
Johnny Walker is crap whiskey, though the Green Label has an interesting, distinctive flavor. Red label is passable as a mixer, and Black label is a cheap drink, but none of them are good whiskeys.
Yes, because Israel, a loyal US Ally/Satellite that has advanced US Agenda in the mideast, and contained its military operations to self defense, should be abandoned because an artificial liberation movement has become the latest leftist craze. The people in the disputed territories are in a crappy situation, which Israel HAS been attempting to negotiate a solution for. However, the Arab world's insistence on arming them to the teeth and paying them to die, plus keeping 3 generations of people in "refugee camps" instead of settling them (roughly the same number of Jews were kicked out of Arab countries as Arabs that fled Israel during the 1948 War) like Israel settled the Jews the Arabs kicked out, has prevented a solution.
Arafat the Egyptian embraced lefty rhetoric and style, so like Castro, became seen as a darling of the left who love dictators if they embrace "revolution." The fact that their aid dollars went to his corrupt regime and killing civilian Jews mattered way less than their embrace of a "freedom fighter." The fact that he also used the resources to systematically terrorize Arab Christians probably also ingratiated himself to the secular left.
The amount of land in dispute is TRIVIAL, except to Israel that is in physical danger without it. Emotional attachment aside, financial compensation to the displaced Arabs, including purchasing them land in nearby Arab nations, would have been WAY CHEAPER than the current disaster of a policy.
So keep spewing hateful ignorance, and be prepared to lose to the silent majority in two months, because you guys are irrational and crazy.
Give me a break, when was the last time you heard of a clinic getting bombed? It was a handful of nut jobs, and they are in prison. Clinton tightened the regulations on distance from the clinic, and protests kind of faded. They have adopted less confrontational approaches.
It probably feels good to go on Slashdot and compare Christians to Al Qaeda, you could go diary on Daily Kos and get told how wonderful you are, but it would be the same BS as here.
There is zero comparison between people protesting an abortion clinic and some people going too far than an organized movement to kill civilians haphazardly to advance a political agenda.
On some level you have to realize that the "internal justification" of the anti-abortion murderers is their belief that they are preventing murder, while the Islamist Terrorists are pursuing an agenda of despotism and establishing a Caliphate military dictatorship. The former are targeting the specific people that they believe are currently in the process of taking a life (in the view of the actor), the latter are looking to kill or maim as many as possible.
Not justifying the abortion clinic attacks, just suggesting that the actions were at least targeted at preventing what they consider a wrong, while the terrorists we are fighting are NOT targeted at preventing a wrong (I'd suggest that their attacks on our troops aren't terrorism, just asymmetrical warfare, our troops are a valid military target, for that reason I'm hard pressed to classify the hit on the Pentagon as a terrorist attack since it's a military target)... they may have a goal that they believe in, but their methodology is simply evil.
The American and UK both have constitutional law... the UK's are based upon Acts of Parliament to which the crown assented... the legal power in the UK derives from the Sovereign and what the crown ceded to Parliament, so "Constitutional Law" there is about asserting Parliamentary power. In the US, power derives from the consent of the states that ceded power to it in establishing the government (Constitution was ratified by state governments, not the people).
So in a broad sense, "Constitutional Law" exists in both.
In the common vernacular, in the US Constitutional Law refers to limitations on government and the rights of the people, which don't really have an analog behind vague laws about "Human Rights" elsewhere. When people in the US talk about Constitutional Rights, they mean the rights of the people, primarily enshrined in the Bill of Rights Amendments, not the powers of Congress to issue Letters of Marque... :)
So legal definition, power of government, both the same... Acts of Parliament cede power from Crown to Parliament... US Constitutions cedes power from States to Federal Government, sharing sovereignty between the levels of government. But the US Bill of Rights as a "sancrosact" set of laws requiring HUGE Supermajority to change, pretty unique.
The US entered the two World Wars on behalf of European Allies (France in the Great War, UK in WW II), although each time with a pretense that that wasn't the case. Before entering the second world war, the US was EXTREMELY provocative with its support of the Brits, with things like the Lend Lease Act, where the US shipped over materiel with basically no repayment.
During the Cold War period, despite liberal blasts later as a form of US Imperialism, the Europeans had legitimate fears of being invaded by Stalin. The US paid for (and put our troops at risk) Europe's defense for 50 years, letting them talk down to us for "militarism."
The belief that the US was unfairly subsidizing Europe was not unheard in US circles, so sock puppet, not, taken advantage of, absolutely.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) is an executive branch department (Wikipedia Entry). The judicial system is made up of Judges at most levels, and justices are the supreme court level. To laymen, that distinction it one of terminology, not job (though they don't judge cases the same way a trial court does, and the terms have some meaning.
If you want a government solution, it's going to cost money. I would prefer financial incentives that are relatively neutral and let the market (with externalities internalized) work. The free market isn't just a political point about government = bad except in campaign commercials, it's about the allocation of resources. Floors, Ceilings, subsidies, tariffs, etc., all alter the Supply or Demand side of the equation without being a centrally planned mandate. Centrally planned actions usually fail.
I brought up the roofs because there are panels/tiles for roofs that are integrated solar, so that cost of the regular roof doesn't exist, so you pay the incremental. I bring that up, because Miami-Dade standards aside (and really, the Hurricane panic normally only affects us in the tri-county area), it seems like an easy solution to get things better.
If a regular roof is $10k, and a solar roof $20k, and that person would save $100/mo. in electricity, assuming people want a 7 year return on home improvements, than a subsidy exceeding $1600 (which would be 8% of the roof cost, 16% of the incremental costs), would get the roof done.
You probably get more bang-for-buck giving people a 10% - 20% tax credit for solar roofs than you do for a lot of these other programs.
Oil is traded on a world market. However, because of inelastic demand, small increases/decreases in demand will have major price swings. Most of the developing world that is gobbling up energy at home is heavily subsidizing energy, while the US slightly taxes it, and Europe heavily taxes it. Because of lag times, the first movers to get off energy will do well, because if costs keep going up, the sooner you do capital changes to decrease usage, the better.
A lot of small changes that would get us decently there. We don't need a silver bullet, or major sacrifice, we need to stop making energy policy a political football and start moving in a new direction. When Bush pitched his energy policies in what, 2002?, all we heard about is "won't lower gas prices for 5 years, written by business, etc.," well, 6 years later, I'd take decreased prices in 5 years. Stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good and let us get cost effective changes first.
Roofs get replaced in Florida every 30 - 40 years. A cost effective roofing solution would take advantage of the fact that you need to spend money on a new roof anyway, so that reduces the cost. (I mean: If a solar roof costs $20k, and a standard roof $10k, than than solar roof incrementally only costs $10k, but the government subsidy will be based off $20k, making it even cheaper).
If prices of Solar are down around $1.80 a watt, and that should drop to $1/watt soon, we're on our way, because does anyone think that the cost of energy is going down? Oil is the most volatile, because it's the most convenient, but energy is energy.
A plug-in hybrid car for houses with solar roofs and a power grid that used Coal/Nuclear/Wind for the "differences" would do great... need to do something clever because at night there is no solar, but solar could still take up a huge chunk of residential power needs... which is something.
Anything we do to decrease our demand for fossil fuel based energy drastically drops the price, or at least gives us an advantage over people paying full price. If small increases in demand drastically push up prices, small decreases in demand can do the reverse.
Solar roofs take advantage of the fact that people need to replace roofs periodically anyway, so there is a built in subsidy there.
Vista financial success... Fortune has an article on Bill Gates and his next move, plus one on Microsoft. In the years that Gates has been transitioning out (about 10 years now, in 98 Ballmer named President, in 2000, named CEO, and the last 8 years Gates has brought people in for his other senior roles), MS revenues have increased 5-fold and the company has diversified.
Microsoft's problem is that the stock is in the doldrums because they aren't seen as a growth plan, so their P/E ratio has dropped about as fast as they've increased earning. Their other problem is that their brand is tarnished... Original Xbox was a disaster, Xbox 360 had a good run but is being beaten by the Wii. The Apple commercials, while silly, are trashing Microsoft as old and lame. They are seen as part of the boring business infrastructure. They make plenty of money, but they don't have a good consumer brand right now. This isn't inherently a problem, plenty of companies have a lousy brand but sell industrial services... combined with monopoly rents, MSFT can remain a Fortune 500 company that way... however, that's a 10% growth, PE 12 story, not 25% growth, PE 50 story.
Further, growth will get harder, Linux keeps getting closer to being good enough for more and more stuff. Apple is carving out an increasing niche... all of these slow MSFT's financial growth....
Gates without Microsoft
Microsoft without Gates
Networks are the Head, the second tier networks are the normal tail that we look at... Youtube is the long tail.
The networks have steadily slid from 80% - 40% of television viewing AS the number of cable channels expanded, so the tail got longer.
Youtube introduced a long tail to television.
The question will be, who gets more viewers (total person-minutes watched)
1. The Networks (Head)
2. Second Tier Cable (Tail)
3. Cable in General (Head + Tail)
4. Youtube + Other Web Video
Long Tail theory indicates that 3 + 4 should be roughly the same... and 1 should consistently hold 80% of 3, while 2 holds 20%... This requires redefining the Head from just the big 3/4 networks to include some other major channels.
Now the REAL interesting question is does #4 become dominated by Youtube (80%+, natural monopoly), or spread across all web video with you tube only because the locally head of a long tail from there.
It's not the shape, the shape is fixed...
It's a standard power curve... it agrees that the hits make up lots of the sales, the thing is how many.
Integrate from 1 - 10 off the curve, you see the sales of the Top 10 sellers... they sell a lot, they sit in the front of book stores. Go to 1-100, and you have probably only doubled sales.
Long tail observes that theoretically, the curve goes out to infinity and never hits zero, which is what the Internet makes interesting.
A mall book store can stock 5000 books, a big box book store 20000, and Wal-mart's book section, 1000. Wal-mart moves a lot of books because they stock the 1000 most popular books and move them readily. The mall book store have 5x the inventory and probably about the same in sales, because they aren't moving as many of the top 1000 because of Wal-mart. The Big box store, with 15000 moves more... maybe double the mall bookstore with 4x the inventory?
You see diminishing returns... so sales people observe the 80/20 rule, 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers/products, etc., it's the power curve... But long tail observes that if you can only carry 100 products, 80% will come from your top 20%, but if you carried infinite inventory, the long tail exceeds the bulbous head because it's infinite.
The average bookstore apparently stocks around 15k books (when I first read the long tail argument), the most profitable books. If you looked at Amazon's sales, their "big sellers" were the sale 15k books as everyone else, so you would think 80/20 rule, that's 80% of revenue, the other 1M+ books were just there because they were slightly profitable, brought customers in, etc. Turns out, the majority of the sales were from the books AFTER rank 15K, the books that booksellers don't carry.
This brings one to two conclusions:
1. 80/20 rule is a function of limited inventory, if you take the tail to its conclusion, the tipping point is around where others drop off, with half before and half after, so the bulbous head is 80% of 50% of sales, or 40%... still important, but not the final say in revenue... Long tail means Internet changes the economics of inventory... I go to a Wal-mart OR Website for my "common" stuff, Internet for everything else.
2. Amazon.com does well on the long tail because the others can't play there. The normal shops compete for the first 15k, Amazon has a competitive advantage for the rest of the inventory, and therefore makes profits. -- This leads to the natural conclusion that the long tong tail is a natural monopoly, only one player can make money stocking it. Wal-mart owns the common 20% of items, Amazon sells the rest, and we all get out of retail because Retail = Wal-mart + Amazon.com.
Alex
If Gates hired a programmer, gave him the goal, DOS 1.0, and the guy wrote it, then Microsoft developed DOS. But if Microsoft finds someone who wrote something basic as a hobby, offers him money, then sells it, he bought DOS?
Gates would have bought DOS regardless of if they cut the guy a check for the software or paid him out on a W-2, so who cares?
In the 1940s, the US was the only country whose factories were humming instead of smoldering. We were replenishing the capital stock of the entire west, that took a few decades. US marketshare for manufacturing declined DESPITE INCREASING because everyone else started manufacturing again as they rebuilt their bombed out infrastructure.
America got lucky, damned lucky, that our leadership wanted competent government, and created a professional Civil Service. In Europe, they created a privileged Civil Service, where it doesn't seem at ALL accountable to elected officials, and people strive for wonderful government jobs... America is lucky that we somewhat sneer at them, it's part of competent but not suffocating government.
Our government may be mediocre, but it's a consistently moderate mediocre... Which drastically separates us from the kleptocracy of government that the rest of the Americas suffer from... Israel has a completely dysfunctional public sector because they look the privileged elite approach of Europe, and things like post office jobs are highly coveted and fought for because the post office can give you loans to buy your home, while private sector employees got nothing... Canada's professional Civil Service seems much more like Americas than Europes, which is important for their general success.
Before Win95, Apple has a small but real Market, IBM made noise with OS/2, someone was pushing GEOS (came with my multimedia upgrade kit at some point), and most computers booted to DOS and ran Wordperfect 5.1/DOS and or LOTUS 1-2-3 and connected to the Netware box. Even if most OEMs shipped with Windows 3.11, computers didn't always boot it. The real data was a 3270 terminal away. Microsoft's high-end OSes NT Workstation was a novelty, NT Server was an also ran.
With Windows 95, they took over the desktop... DOS was hidden, OS/2 defeated, and with Office 95 shipping WELL before Wordperfect ported to Win32... With Win95 they grabbed a desktop monopoly, Office monopoly, and pushed NT Server as highly competitive with Netware and inevitably overtaking them.
It'd be another 2 years before Netscape made Microsoft wet-itself, panic, and get itself into anti-trust trouble... the SAME anti-trust trouble that caused IBM to use a third-party OS and off-the-shelf processor when creating the PC.
Microsoft's profits might grow, Win2K might have gotten NT capable of replacing the DOS/Windows combo (XP with XP Home edition finally banished it), but the high water mark was hit. When Win95 launched, everyone was excited, the cheap PC Platform got a lot of expensive Mac/Amiga capabilities. The next few years, Microsoft spent floundering around for expansion (most of which didn't pan out), focused on suffocating competitors like Netscape, and Bill Gates spent time being deposed for court cases...
So yeah, it was the pinnacle of their success financially, and the peak for him before he went from geek hero to generally appreciated business hero, before his downfall as tech villain... It was the end of his being able to focus on technology and products, and the beginning of managing legal problems.
The President is a political person, elected through politics, answerable only to political process, so of course he can engage in partisan process. The purpose of the Hatch Act (and similar legislation) was to depoliticize the Civil Servants.
While we joke about government employees being "lazy, incompetent, over/under paid, whatever," without a professional Civil Servants class it becomes a cesspool of corruption. As the public employees are normally unionized with a union that can both fight management (as a union) and change management (as a political organization), they are generally well paid and compensated, particularly with pension benefits and other back end benefits that politicians can approve and leave someone else with the bill. As a result, those jobs are potentially very desirable.
If you don't keep the political bosses away, watch how quickly jobs go to politically connected people that don't show up to work... It seems unlikely that someone powerful would care about a 30k - 90k/year job, but what if they could get it for their daughter-in-law that doesn't work, and just funnel money and benefits to their kids. That's how these positions work in countries without extensive controls, and why we have so many to keep the "friends and family plan" out.
Look at any community non profit and look at how many incompetent people hold well paying jobs because someone that gives money is friends with their parents/grandparents... corruption happens everywhere, and this attempts to reduce it. It doesn't attempt to remove partisanship from politics.
It is critical that the Civil Service function between changes in administration. If a new President came in and fired everyone to give overpaid jobs to the "friends and family plan" for the party and his supporters, you'd have a completely inept government, instead of our mostly inept one.
These days, we take for granted that the Civil Servants are employees doing a job, not appointees serving as the pleasure of the President, but understand how difficult it was to arrive there. Until Social Security and the SSA, and the IRS and it's paperwork, people didn't have "careers" the way we do now, you showed up, worked, got paid at the end of the day/week depending on the type of employee.
Right now, we don't have masses of Civil Servants doing political work or losing their job. The Hatch Act was part of creating that environment. The "excesses of it," obviously someone blogging on their lunch hour doesn't seem to be what was envisioned when they wanted to stop party bosses from filling a government secretarial pool with their cronies and cranking out letters from there, seem draconian. However, the alternative was real... and not useful to have good government.
The percentage of income in America dedicated to food is absurdly small. When earth was all agrarian societies, it was close to 100%, as people developed tools and skills to trade, that amount has steadly declined. In 2005, Americans spend 9% of their income on food... even with the major run-ups and inflationary pressures, it's maybe 13% or 14%? Before the energy runup, energy usage was down to 4% of income (compared to around 10% or 12% before the oil crisis), which is why the first doubling of energy didn't wipe out economic growth, just cut the economy back by a few percentage points.
Organic is based on the fact that if an "Average American" spends 10% of their income on food, then the yuppies with 4x that income could either spend 2.5% of their income on food, or pay twice as much for "organic" and still only be spending 5% of their income on food.
That said, we have some organic produce in my house... for certain vegetables, they are simply much more flavorful than the regular produce... not because of organic magic, but because the produce doesn't have to be picked as early to be shipped by agribusiness, and therefore is fresher. However, you can't demonstrate "fresher" in the commodity market, but you can demonstrate organic.
But it's definitely WAY less productive... but it's an affordable luxury to an increasingly affluent American upper middle class.
Ignore the Prequels for a moment... let's take the universe deployed in the original piece. Also ignore the Nazi/Fascist imagery as well...
Why does random citizen on Planet X care if the Empire is there of the Republic is there? Under the Republic, he was governed by a nobleman, probably a King or Queen (though we don't know if lesser planets, or less connected families had lesser titles like in Dune, which was AN inspiration for Star Wars). If you wanted to rise up and not be ruled by a Monarch, the Jedi Knights were there to "keep the peace" as they have for 1000 generations. While Tatooine is an impoverished fringe world run by the Hutt Mafia, we don't know that being ruled by a random monarch is better.
The inefficient Republic couldn't really do much, and it clearly lacked a massive military so that the Jedi were keepers of the peace and generally given free range. They seemed to only answer to some Jedi Counsel, and while the Republic certainly appears to be mostly human (judging by the makeup of the Empire -- 100% AND the Rebellion, 50%), the Jedi Counsel seems to be heavily influenced by this little Green Guy we meet.
That world is somewhat ambiguous. We're told to root for the "White Army" there to restore the noblemen to power (where they are "elected officials," who wants to bet that Princess Leia's election to the Senate, as daughter of the King, was about as competitive of Saddam Hussein or Joseph Stalin's elections) and their Republic government where some form of vote takes place to send their children or other connected allies to the Senate (we don't know if the Senators are elected by the people or some Parliament, and we don't know if that Parliament is elected, appointed, or inherited).
One presumes that there were wealthy urban planets (or planets with wealth urban cores) with wealthy individuals served by the various courts... they probably lost out as their connections to the monarchs lost value as the imperial governors took power. OTOH, goods appear to be readily available to the wealthy because the smugglers seemed to grow in numbers (including the spice smugglers on Tatooine, but the importance of spice is unclear, or if it's a throw away line to pay homage to Dune), and the decline of the government while the Empire, Imperial Senate, Regional Governors, and Planet Monarchs are no longer aligned to screw the people (admittedly referencing the Trade Federation from Ep. 1, where we see a sanctioned monopoly that can strangle a planet with blockades).
So, one COULD have kept that moral ambiguity by leaving things in the background, but they didn't. A throw away line or two from Palpatine about the inefficiency of the Republic would have kept the idea that he might have been fed up with the pace of the Republic and the Jedi Knights. In the Prequels, he is made raw evil, in the originals, there is plenty of young rebel nonsense in there.
As a kid watching the originals, I saw NONE of that, but as an adult watching them, I appreciated some underlying ambiguities. OTOH, Jar Jar isn't substantially more annoying than C3PO's whining other than the fact that "Android/Robot = cool, retarded alien = lame," and I met C3PO as a child, and Jar Jar as an adult. My wife, who never saw Star Wars as a kid, so has no fond memories, thinks that the Droids are just as annoying.
BTW: I really liked how in Episode I, they delved into some political references. A trade dispute and a deadlocked Senate leads to a No Confidence vote in favor of the Senator from the isolated planet, clearly the rest of the chamber felt that their planet could be next. However, I did NOT like how the rest took events that were described as Epic and made them ordinary. The Clone Wars appeared to be a long war that bordered on a Civil War, instead it appeared to be a short series of events between Jedi and Clones/Storm Troopers/Battle Droids. I guess we don't directly here of a non-Jedi fighting in the Clone Wars, but the Clone Wars definitely seemed more substantial than Episode II made it seem.