And what exactly did he tell us about "all the greasy things our government does" and what "massive fuck up" and "war crimes" are you talking about? Care to cite any examples? I am genuinely curious because there is no way I can read all the published documents, most of which is completely routine stuff, but I figured out someone would pick the juiciest bits for us. And yet, I haven't seen anything that justifies such a drastic step as publishing classified information and quite clearly putting lives of our Afghan allies and our own soldiers a risk.
A lot of Afghans felt that if they had a choice between Soviet occupation and the forces that the US was imposing in their place, they would prefer the Soviets.
I doubt that 1-2 million civilians killed during Soviet occupation would agree with that. Soviet version of pinpoint strikes involved flattening entire mujaheddin controlled towns and villages with carpet bombing. Btw, if you care to look at the history of Afghanistan, the disaster that it is now started with a leftist Soviet sponsored coup in 1978. Look up Saur Revolution. The communists manage to so thoroughly exterminate the previous government and elite (corrupt but secular and reasonably centrist) and implement disastrous land reforms and forced state atheism that it ensured that the opposition to Soviets consisted almost entirely of Muslim extremists groups which were the only ones around to take over the moment Soviets left (which they would eventually with or without US assistance to the mujaheddin). So it's a reasonable argument that it was the Soviet Union that caused Taliban to come to power and that the US role was incidental.
Dishing out some charity (financed by heroin sales and foreign donations) in order to win over population is not the way to build a sustainable economy. The job of the government (same applies to Afghanistan as does to US) is primarily to provide a stable rule of law (not arbitrary executions at the whim of the local mullahs). If the country has poor resources and is unable to produce anything worthwhile then it is probably going to be poor. There is no magical way for the government to change that and to conjure up wealth out of the rocks and sand. Taliban is a fundamentally inhuman organization that would sacrifice a million people in a blink of an eye if they thought that's what Allah wants. Their first concern is with their religious fantasies not with actual human beings. So please don't defend them.
Well, I meant if I lived there. I'm not gonna go on about what my Afghan friends think because they obviously don't represent the 28 million Afghans, but my strong impression is that among the more educated, intelligent and of course women, the US occupation is considered a good thing. Actually among the more patriotic Afghans too who consider the well being of the actual people of Afghanistan to be more important than jihad. I'm more ambiguous actually about Iraq since we brought down a secular government (albeit a vicious dictatorship) and I'm not sure that what comes after we leave will not be even worse.
I don't think it is wrong either. If I had a choice of US occupation and the government by the likes of Taliban and whoever is going to take over Iraq after we leave (Shiite extremists owned by Iran?) I would choose US occupation every time.
Ok, first of all I take back the beneath contempt thing from my last post as I don't actually doubt your sincerity. I just think you are as close to being 100% wrong in everything you said as it is possible to be. If you look up socialism in the dictionary you will find that its central characteristic is the state ownership of the means of production (industry) and distribution (trade). You cannot have liberty under the system where it is illegal for you to produce something and then sell it, which is exactly how it was in socialist countries in Eastern Europe, China etc. Only state was allowed to own the means of production although in some countries small business were allowed and those tended to be vastly more productive than state own businesses. Look up private owned agricultural businesses in Soviet Union which produced 30% of the gross product of the nation despite covering only 3% of the arable land. If you think it's no big deal to give up the economic liberty then consider that humans can only survive on Earth (other than as hunters/gatherers in small parts of Africa) through producing stuff. Human economic activity is the only difference between the city I am in now (and probably a trillion dollars worth of stuff that's in it) and the worthless empty desert 50 miles away. In other words if the government controls the economic activity, that means that there is zero liberty for the population except as granted by the government. There are no rights possible without the right to produce and trade because those are the same thing as the right to life.
If you are one of those who think they have socialism in Sweden or whatever, then you are the one who is ignorant of what socialism is. Welfare state is not the same thing as socialism. If you are in favor of welfare state (sort of forced charity) on top of a completely capitalist economy, like Sweden's, then you should call it welfare state and not socialism.
Cutting taxes is often NOT good for the economy, especially long term when there is a lot of debt and unfunded entitlement programs, and programs that are desperately needed but have yet to be created and funded.
Easy solution: eliminate the existing entitlement programs and don't create any new ones. As for Gore not being socialist enough for you, sorry to say thing this, but that is pretty disgusting. I hope you are under 20 years old. Otherwise, anybody who is able to witness the record of socialist economic "theories" and the economic collapse and destruction they had brought everywhere they were tried, not to mention the totalitarian regimes they brought into power (you can't have socialism AND liberty - you have to pick one) and literally 100s of millions of lives (all by government action) lost, and still argues for it has lost any right to the excuse of honest ignorance and is beneath contempt.
Not really for anybody with a brain and a pair of working eyes. There is a strong correlation of lower taxes and economic prosperity throughout history of USA and the world. What people in favor of higher taxes argue for is greater equality, not greater overall wealth of the nation - which only comes through production (which is encouraged by lower taxes)
If you had a drug addiction, and you were always broke, there's a very good reason to think that ending the drug addiction would solve the second problem.
Government can be broke while the economy is healthy. The only thing needed is for the government to act like everybody else when they are broke: reduce spending.
What could Gore, or anyone, have possibly fucked up more than that?
He could have done all those things AND damaged the economy even more by Obama style massive increase in government spending. There is no natural limit of ~10% for unemployment in the US, it can easily go up to 20% or more like in various European countries. Keep taxing and spending and you'll see.
Democrats aren't inherently better or anything, but at least they have demonstrated that cutting military spending and progressive taxes reduce the national debt. If people making more than 160,000 a year are really going to quit working over a 4% increase in Federal tax income, I say good riddance.
Spoken like someone who makes less than $160,000. Raising taxes on any income group harms everybody in the long run. What economy in recession needs the least is to reduce individuals and business ability to invest, to hire and to spend and that's exactly what higher taxes do.
Sadly, only a certain segment of the population believes you can cut taxes and start two wars without harming the economy.
First of all, cutting taxes is generally understood to be good for the economy. Fighting wars generally isn't, so I don't know why you are bundling those two together. Secondly, the two wars were generally supported by both parties (though in case of Iraq there were more opponents among Democrats but that was mostly posturing for political reasons). I don't think it's clear at all that the US foreign policy would have been any different under Clinton or, god forbid, Gore especially after 9/11.
I don't think the recession was caused by Obama nor inherited from Bush. It's simplistic to the point of ridiculous to view something as complex as the economic cycle as determined by which president is in office even though their decisions of course have some impact.
But my point is to question if this is a positive or a negative point. Sure it's nice to have clean energy, but there are downsides too. It involved investing billions that could have been used for other purposes, not least tax breaks for individuals and businesses.
Just look at Ireland (well it's in crisis too but there is no question that lowering taxes was a huge factor in the unprecedented economic boom there). What if they decided that instead of bringing in hundreds of high tech companies by very low business taxes they decided to invest that money in windmills, solar plants and the best broadband in the world? Maybe they would be in Portugal's place today (btw Ireland GDP per capita today: $39K, Portugal: $21K - 20 years ago they were about the same).
Another problem is higher electricity prices. There is no surer way to reduce jobs, increase prices and generally harm the economy than by increasing energy cost.
Disclaimer: I don't know if what I said above has anything to do with reality in Portugal, I am just pointing out that there are two sides to clean energy equation
Portugal is also, by some margin, the poorest country of the Western Europe and by per capita GDP it's been overtaken by Eastern and Central European countries (Portugal: $21K, Czech Republic: $24K, Slovenia $28K). Btw, since you are comparing it with the USA: $46K. I don't know much about Portugal, but perhaps one of the reasons is that it tends to embark on projects like you mentioned that sound good but don't make economic sense?
Geneva Convention doesn't apply to just any asshole with a gun (a pretty good description of both Taliban and Al-Qaeda), only to uniformed soldiers of an official army of an actual recognized country and to unarmed civilians. Armed people in civilian clothes using civilian facilities, unmarked vehicles and tactics like IEDs and suicide bombers are a fair game and have been routinely shot on the spot in every war without any legal repercussions.
Prioritizing doesn't mean that all resources are devoted to the highest priority and nothing left for lower priorities. They could have a backlog of DNA lab work as well as a backlog of copyright cases. In fact that is probably the case. They could be increasing the amount of manpower assigned to both. None of the information available justifies the headline.
b) Talking about socialism, good thing we don't have unions in software industry or they wouldn't look too kindly on all these people working for free.
I don't think you understand the issue if you still think that Apple is stealing someone's idea. As far as I can tell, and please correct me if I'm wrong, the image in question is just used to illustrate how this patented technology might looked like if used by an app to show points of interest at the destination. Instead of mocking up the screen, some guy at Apple though he would save time by using an existing app that sort of looked like what he needed to show. As GP said, definitely a gaffe, but not such a big deal really. To use a car analogy, say I invent and patent a new engine that is powered by the Jobs reality distortion field instead of by gasoline. I then include a picture of, say, Ford dashboard with the speedometer showing 1000 mph to illustrate what the potential car built with this new engine would be capable of. The issue is that I didn't ask Ford for permission to use a picture of their dashboard.
I am actually FOR the removal of software patents, this removal will stop the fear of being sued over something so trivial and encourage creativity and innovation, something the world is so desperate in need of.
Maybe in case of trivial innovation but in case of difficult and expensive innovation it will reward the copier and punish the innovator. It will also discourage the investors from investing into innovators and encourage them to wait until some poor fool puts in all the work, invents a new technology, and then simply reverse engineer it and mass produce it, leaving him in the dust. Patents are a complex issue and I'm not necessarily in favor of the system as it is but it is funny to read all the naive posts here from people who fail to see both sides of equation.
Not at all. America is rich because while there was liberty for individuals to develop its vast resources in a much more efficient way than any kind of government planning ever could, there was also for the most part the rule of law. As for slavery, that's really not worth discussing. There was slavery for thousands of years in Africa so why isn't it rich? Slave owning, agricultural south was also much poorer than non slave owning capitalist, industrialized north.
As long as they are selling it at $5 there is no problem, the threat of competition is driving the price down. As soon as they start raising the price to unreasonable level it opens the door to competition. Not to mention that the product in question will not stay in demand forever, at this point company D is already working on something else that will make it irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
And where are the hardpoints for Hellfire missiles? Ah, cyber-offensive capabilities...
.
And what exactly did he tell us about "all the greasy things our government does" and what "massive fuck up" and "war crimes" are you talking about? Care to cite any examples? I am genuinely curious because there is no way I can read all the published documents, most of which is completely routine stuff, but I figured out someone would pick the juiciest bits for us. And yet, I haven't seen anything that justifies such a drastic step as publishing classified information and quite clearly putting lives of our Afghan allies and our own soldiers a risk.
Yep when Godzilla wakes up we need to know if he's moving towards Tokyo or New York.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan#Soviet_invasion_and_civil_war Thousands killed was during the coup. Total casualties from the war (mostly civilians) were probably around 1 million with up to 6 million forced to leave the country to Pakistan and Iran.
I doubt that 1-2 million civilians killed during Soviet occupation would agree with that. Soviet version of pinpoint strikes involved flattening entire mujaheddin controlled towns and villages with carpet bombing. Btw, if you care to look at the history of Afghanistan, the disaster that it is now started with a leftist Soviet sponsored coup in 1978. Look up Saur Revolution. The communists manage to so thoroughly exterminate the previous government and elite (corrupt but secular and reasonably centrist) and implement disastrous land reforms and forced state atheism that it ensured that the opposition to Soviets consisted almost entirely of Muslim extremists groups which were the only ones around to take over the moment Soviets left (which they would eventually with or without US assistance to the mujaheddin). So it's a reasonable argument that it was the Soviet Union that caused Taliban to come to power and that the US role was incidental.
Dishing out some charity (financed by heroin sales and foreign donations) in order to win over population is not the way to build a sustainable economy. The job of the government (same applies to Afghanistan as does to US) is primarily to provide a stable rule of law (not arbitrary executions at the whim of the local mullahs). If the country has poor resources and is unable to produce anything worthwhile then it is probably going to be poor. There is no magical way for the government to change that and to conjure up wealth out of the rocks and sand. Taliban is a fundamentally inhuman organization that would sacrifice a million people in a blink of an eye if they thought that's what Allah wants. Their first concern is with their religious fantasies not with actual human beings. So please don't defend them.
Well, I meant if I lived there. I'm not gonna go on about what my Afghan friends think because they obviously don't represent the 28 million Afghans, but my strong impression is that among the more educated, intelligent and of course women, the US occupation is considered a good thing. Actually among the more patriotic Afghans too who consider the well being of the actual people of Afghanistan to be more important than jihad. I'm more ambiguous actually about Iraq since we brought down a secular government (albeit a vicious dictatorship) and I'm not sure that what comes after we leave will not be even worse.
I don't think it is wrong either. If I had a choice of US occupation and the government by the likes of Taliban and whoever is going to take over Iraq after we leave (Shiite extremists owned by Iran?) I would choose US occupation every time.
Ok, first of all I take back the beneath contempt thing from my last post as I don't actually doubt your sincerity. I just think you are as close to being 100% wrong in everything you said as it is possible to be. If you look up socialism in the dictionary you will find that its central characteristic is the state ownership of the means of production (industry) and distribution (trade). You cannot have liberty under the system where it is illegal for you to produce something and then sell it, which is exactly how it was in socialist countries in Eastern Europe, China etc. Only state was allowed to own the means of production although in some countries small business were allowed and those tended to be vastly more productive than state own businesses. Look up private owned agricultural businesses in Soviet Union which produced 30% of the gross product of the nation despite covering only 3% of the arable land. If you think it's no big deal to give up the economic liberty then consider that humans can only survive on Earth (other than as hunters/gatherers in small parts of Africa) through producing stuff. Human economic activity is the only difference between the city I am in now (and probably a trillion dollars worth of stuff that's in it) and the worthless empty desert 50 miles away. In other words if the government controls the economic activity, that means that there is zero liberty for the population except as granted by the government. There are no rights possible without the right to produce and trade because those are the same thing as the right to life.
If you are one of those who think they have socialism in Sweden or whatever, then you are the one who is ignorant of what socialism is. Welfare state is not the same thing as socialism. If you are in favor of welfare state (sort of forced charity) on top of a completely capitalist economy, like Sweden's, then you should call it welfare state and not socialism.
No, it's obviously Marvin.
... is expected to perform some of the repetitive or more mundane functions inside the orbiting laboratory
....
R2
Here I am, brain the size of a planet
Cutting taxes is often NOT good for the economy, especially long term when there is a lot of debt and unfunded entitlement programs, and programs that are desperately needed but have yet to be created and funded.
Easy solution: eliminate the existing entitlement programs and don't create any new ones. As for Gore not being socialist enough for you, sorry to say thing this, but that is pretty disgusting. I hope you are under 20 years old. Otherwise, anybody who is able to witness the record of socialist economic "theories" and the economic collapse and destruction they had brought everywhere they were tried, not to mention the totalitarian regimes they brought into power (you can't have socialism AND liberty - you have to pick one) and literally 100s of millions of lives (all by government action) lost, and still argues for it has lost any right to the excuse of honest ignorance and is beneath contempt.
Not really for anybody with a brain and a pair of working eyes. There is a strong correlation of lower taxes and economic prosperity throughout history of USA and the world. What people in favor of higher taxes argue for is greater equality, not greater overall wealth of the nation - which only comes through production (which is encouraged by lower taxes)
Government can be broke while the economy is healthy. The only thing needed is for the government to act like everybody else when they are broke: reduce spending.
He could have done all those things AND damaged the economy even more by Obama style massive increase in government spending. There is no natural limit of ~10% for unemployment in the US, it can easily go up to 20% or more like in various European countries. Keep taxing and spending and you'll see.
Spoken like someone who makes less than $160,000. Raising taxes on any income group harms everybody in the long run. What economy in recession needs the least is to reduce individuals and business ability to invest, to hire and to spend and that's exactly what higher taxes do.
Sadly, only a certain segment of the population believes you can cut taxes and start two wars without harming the economy.
First of all, cutting taxes is generally understood to be good for the economy. Fighting wars generally isn't, so I don't know why you are bundling those two together. Secondly, the two wars were generally supported by both parties (though in case of Iraq there were more opponents among Democrats but that was mostly posturing for political reasons). I don't think it's clear at all that the US foreign policy would have been any different under Clinton or, god forbid, Gore especially after 9/11.
I don't think the recession was caused by Obama nor inherited from Bush. It's simplistic to the point of ridiculous to view something as complex as the economic cycle as determined by which president is in office even though their decisions of course have some impact.
But my point is to question if this is a positive or a negative point. Sure it's nice to have clean energy, but there are downsides too. It involved investing billions that could have been used for other purposes, not least tax breaks for individuals and businesses.
Just look at Ireland (well it's in crisis too but there is no question that lowering taxes was a huge factor in the unprecedented economic boom there). What if they decided that instead of bringing in hundreds of high tech companies by very low business taxes they decided to invest that money in windmills, solar plants and the best broadband in the world? Maybe they would be in Portugal's place today (btw Ireland GDP per capita today: $39K, Portugal: $21K - 20 years ago they were about the same).
Another problem is higher electricity prices. There is no surer way to reduce jobs, increase prices and generally harm the economy than by increasing energy cost.
Disclaimer: I don't know if what I said above has anything to do with reality in Portugal, I am just pointing out that there are two sides to clean energy equation
Portugal is also, by some margin, the poorest country of the Western Europe and by per capita GDP it's been overtaken by Eastern and Central European countries (Portugal: $21K, Czech Republic: $24K, Slovenia $28K). Btw, since you are comparing it with the USA: $46K. I don't know much about Portugal, but perhaps one of the reasons is that it tends to embark on projects like you mentioned that sound good but don't make economic sense?
but it's totally ok to complain about someone who complains about someone who complains about bad grammar.
Geneva Convention doesn't apply to just any asshole with a gun (a pretty good description of both Taliban and Al-Qaeda), only to uniformed soldiers of an official army of an actual recognized country and to unarmed civilians. Armed people in civilian clothes using civilian facilities, unmarked vehicles and tactics like IEDs and suicide bombers are a fair game and have been routinely shot on the spot in every war without any legal repercussions.
Prioritizing doesn't mean that all resources are devoted to the highest priority and nothing left for lower priorities. They could have a backlog of DNA lab work as well as a backlog of copyright cases. In fact that is probably the case. They could be increasing the amount of manpower assigned to both. None of the information available justifies the headline.
There is a free market of investigative agencies. You can look them up in yellow pages under private investigators.
Without trade civilization is impossible. There is no distinction between protecting trade and protecting people.
a) 90% accept cash for their work. Evil bastards!
b) Talking about socialism, good thing we don't have unions in software industry or they wouldn't look too kindly on all these people working for free.
I don't think you understand the issue if you still think that Apple is stealing someone's idea. As far as I can tell, and please correct me if I'm wrong, the image in question is just used to illustrate how this patented technology might looked like if used by an app to show points of interest at the destination. Instead of mocking up the screen, some guy at Apple though he would save time by using an existing app that sort of looked like what he needed to show. As GP said, definitely a gaffe, but not such a big deal really. To use a car analogy, say I invent and patent a new engine that is powered by the Jobs reality distortion field instead of by gasoline. I then include a picture of, say, Ford dashboard with the speedometer showing 1000 mph to illustrate what the potential car built with this new engine would be capable of. The issue is that I didn't ask Ford for permission to use a picture of their dashboard.
I am actually FOR the removal of software patents, this removal will stop the fear of being sued over something so trivial and encourage creativity and innovation, something the world is so desperate in need of.
Maybe in case of trivial innovation but in case of difficult and expensive innovation it will reward the copier and punish the innovator. It will also discourage the investors from investing into innovators and encourage them to wait until some poor fool puts in all the work, invents a new technology, and then simply reverse engineer it and mass produce it, leaving him in the dust. Patents are a complex issue and I'm not necessarily in favor of the system as it is but it is funny to read all the naive posts here from people who fail to see both sides of equation.
Not at all. America is rich because while there was liberty for individuals to develop its vast resources in a much more efficient way than any kind of government planning ever could, there was also for the most part the rule of law. As for slavery, that's really not worth discussing. There was slavery for thousands of years in Africa so why isn't it rich? Slave owning, agricultural south was also much poorer than non slave owning capitalist, industrialized north.
As long as they are selling it at $5 there is no problem, the threat of competition is driving the price down. As soon as they start raising the price to unreasonable level it opens the door to competition. Not to mention that the product in question will not stay in demand forever, at this point company D is already working on something else that will make it irrelevant.