Hmmm.... I see all these replies I made, that disappeared after hitting the submit button, have finally shown up. I can see why they were modded as redundant, but I only made duplicate replies because the system never acknowledged my replies.
You gotta be kidding me. Understaffed? Only because no one is actually working. If there are employees who are allowed to surf porn the majority of work day then discipline is so lax that very little is getting done. Sure, not everyone is surfing porn, but it's for sure there are checks on how much work someone is getting done. There is zero accountability.
Really? You can justify speeds of 80+ mph or so in a residential zone? At that speed a kid could run out into the street a couple hundred feet in front of you and you wouldn't miss him in a car. You couldn't stop in twice that distance from that speed. You would travel at least a quarter of that distance just getting your foot on the brake. Or how about if someone backs out of their driveway in front of you. What was a fender-bender at the speed limit just very possibly became a fatal accident.
Maybe they would be keeping up with their workload if they were, you know, working rather than watching porn. I mean, if things are so lax that recording porn on an everyday basis for extended periods of time happens what are the non-porn-addicts doing with their time? Just surfing the web? Sleeping? Who knows when there is no supervision and it's blatantly obvious that no one cares what the employees are doing?
All governments run at this level of efficiency, or worse. If the private sector can do something for a $1,000,000 then government can do the same thing for $10,000,000+. You have to work for a governmental organization to see and understand how it's possible. I didn't really understand how this possible until I worked for a US government agency for a while, and then it became very clear. The waste built into the system was incredible. If someone didn't do their job they hired someone else to do it and kept both people on the payroll rather than firing the incompetent/lazy employee and then replacing them. The same went for parts/machinery. If they ordered something custom-built and it didn't come in built to specifications then they had another one built and paid for both.
Any private enterprise run the same way the government agency I worked for was would have gone out of business in a very short time. It would have bankrupted itself, just like both of our governments are, and have been, doing for years. You think it's chance that deficit spending is the norm? Corruption and incompetence rule.
I haven't used either in years, but when I did use Debian experimental,
Ummmm.... You used a Debian release designed for Debian devs to use for integrating packages into Sid, and then complain that it was incomplete?
Just for your information, Ubuntu takes a snapshot of Sid(unstable) and works on it for 6 months before it's released. During that 6 months Debian is adding new packages and new package versions to Sid on a regular basis. Packages move from Sid to testing after 10 days unless there are severe problems found during that 10 day period. This means both Sid and testing have never versions of software packages than an Ubuntu release will have when it's released.
Most Debian users will run either testing or Sid on their desktops and thus will have newer software versions than an Ubuntu user will have. And, they will continue to have newer/updated versions of software installed during every update. Debian stable (what Squeeze will be when it is officially released) is used mostly for server installs because of its package stability.
No, it's not the size of the population being managed. It's the philosophy of certain politicians that think they are entitled to make decisions affecting the lives of the citizens of this country that are best left to citizens themselves.
It's arrogance on the part of politicians influenced by certain political theories, mainly that of socialism, that a few centralized bureaucrats are much more capable of running everyone's lives than the individuals are running their own. It's like Bill Maher said, reflecting the opinions of the academic left and leftists in government, that the American citizens "are stupid and just need to be dragged to it". The arrogance reflected in such a statement is colossal.
It started before the Olmstead act, by another "progressive" President, Woodrow Wilson.
He put propogandists on the street corners, and had people listening to conversations and reporting back to the government if anything was said against his administration. He disliked both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and figured that he was doing "God's" will.
In US history it's always been the progressive presidents who have done the most to move the government toward centralization and reducing individual liberties, no matter what political party they represented. Teddy Roosevelt wanted to control everyone's income. FDR created internment camps even though he knew the Japanese living in this country were loyal citizens. Wilson wanted to do away with anything related to the Constitution and reinstituted segregation in the armed forces. Nixon instituted price and wage controls and an enemies list. GWB increased the power of the presidency and expanded spying on American citizens beyond anything done before. Obama has made it legal to a withhold due process of law to any American on just the allegation of being linked to terrorism, and made it lawful for American citizens to be assassinated by their government on nothing more than an allegation made by the administration.
When are people going to learn that "progressivism" is a very clear and present danger to their liberty?
An update for you. I had to run to the local Staples so I took an Ubuntu CD with me. I told the salesman I was looking to buy a new laptop, but that I run Linux so I needed to check for hardware compatibility. I asked if I could boot into my cd to check and he said probably not, but only because it was very difficult to get a cd into the drive because of how the displays were mounted.
Well, we figured out how to get a cd into the drive and booted it up. Probably not everyone will let you do this, but this proves that at least some stores will if you explain yourself up front and ask respectfully. Maybe my age, late 50's, made me appear less likely to wipe out a hard drive, as he said the reason it's so difficult to get a cd into the drive is because they've had so many people wipe out hard drives with live cd's and other similar tools.
How many shops will unbox a PC that has no floor model to let me test it? Or (in the case of small form factor machines with no built-in optical drive) let me plug in a USB DVD-ROM drive? Or unbox a printer or scanner and let me connect it to a floor model PC?
Just get the hardware list from the retailer, manufacturer, or from the machine itself. You know, the built-in utilities that tell you what hardware is included in the machine.... You don't need a printer. All you need is a pencil paper for keeping track of a few pieces of hardware.
Most of the major components will just work. The main things for you to Google will be wireless and video chipsets. Once in a great while a wired network card won't work, but that's not too likely. Another thing would be the webcam if the laptop has one. Linux has generic drivers that cover a wide range of webcams, but some might not work.
Another option is just to tell the salesman in the brick-and-mortar store that you run Linux and want to boot the machine into a livecd to check hardware compatibility. If they say no, tell them they aren't going to sell you anything unless they do and walk off. My bet is that they will call you back. If they don't, go to another retailer and repeat until you find one who will work with you. That's the store you want to deal with anyway as they are going to give you much better after-the-sale service because they care about their relationship with their customers. With the economy in the shape it's in it shouldn't be hard to find a retailer who will work with you if they want to make a sale.
My wife recently bought an HP laptop. It comes with the recovery stuff on a partition.
You get one time you can burn a physical recovery disk. When we tried it, the process failed. Leaving you with no more tries at a recovery disk, and no recovery disk.
Very annoying. Combine that with the performance of the laptop, and we won't be buying anything else from HP because they're products are overpriced and crappy. Ripping a CD created MP3 with really bad jitter and noise -- lame for a dual core machine which wasn't doing anything else at the time.
Posting anonymously because my wife works for HP and we bought it using her discount.:-P
I don't work for HP, but my experience with HP laptops is similar to yours.
When I got mine it wouldn't play videos without skipping, jumping, tearing, etc.... It was bad enough that any form of video playback was unusable. Video and audio recording were just as bad. Ripping cd's to disk put the cpu at 100% usage and resulted in lousy playback.
Two days of that was enough. I wiped out the recovery partition along with the factory partitions and installed Debian. It's been a decent laptop ever since. All problems with audio and video playback and recording vanished and it's been rock solid ever since. The laptop is now 5 years old and still running strong. I doubt it would handle Vista or 7, and I'm not about to even waste the time to try them as Debian Sid runs very well on it, plus I've left all things MS behind.
From the grub screen to being fully logged into a working environment takes exactly 1 minute. That includes entering my user name and password. Not bad for a single core Turion and a 4200 rpm hard drive.
Wow, what a weak reply. Even in your closely edited response you left the evidence of what I said was true.
The following quote comes from Wikipedia. Is that a left-wing-enough source for you?
Political philosophy is the study of such topics as liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why (or even if) they are needed, what makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it should take and why, what the law is, and what duties citizens owe to a legitimate government, if any, and when it may be legitimately overthrown—if ever. In a vernacular sense, the term "political philosophy" often refers to a general view, or specific ethic, political belief or attitude, about politics that does not necessarily belong to the technical discipline of philosophy.[1] Political philosophy can also be understood by analysing it through the perspectives of metaphysics, epistemology and axiology thereby unearthing the ultimate reality side, the knowledge or methodical side and the value aspects of politics. Then it gives insights into the various aspects of the origin of the state, its nature, forms and its multifarious dimensions in different social systems. Three central concerns of political philosophy have been the political economy by which property rights are defined and access to capital is regulated, the demands of justice in distribution and punishment, and the rules of truth and evidence that determine judgments in the law.
Notice what political_theory/political_philosophy is all about? Government! Even if it's only a group of people outside of a nation/state, it's still a way for that group to govern themselves. No matter how you try to twist and dodge, it's still a form of government.
Who in their right mind would work if 90% of ever dollar earned went to the government? It's those high income people who buy big ticket items that create jobs. It's also those people who run the vast majority of small businesses. You really think they are going to work 80-100 hours a week like most small businesspeople I know if they know almost everything they are working for is going to be taken away from them? They are going to shut down their business, or at least reduce them in size until they get down to a much smaller tax burden. That means a major loss in jobs for everyone else.
The high tax rates are what dragged out the recovery from the Great Depression. The more you tax a person the less money he has to spend. The less money he has to spend the fewer products he buys. The fewer products that are bought the more the economy shrinks. And since it is private business that creates jobs and funds government what's the net effect? Less economic growth. Think about it. If the government spends $1 billion paying people to work that money had to come from somewhere. That means they had to collect more than $1 billion in taxes(administrative costs) to do that. What do they get back on their investment? Maybe $200,000 in income taxes. Not a good thing. Not a good way to grow things. If the private sector pays out $1 billion in wages it creates, under the same tax rate, a net of $200,000 in income taxes for the government. Under which scenario will a government pay down its debt and more jobs be created? The private sector spending the money and creating the jobs, or the government creating government jobs and paying the equivalent in wages? It's self-evident the government reduces its deficit when it is smaller, has fewer employees, and the private sector does what it's good at, business.
You'll notice that as soon as FDR was out of office an amendment to the constitution was created limiting presidents to 2 terms. If FDR was so great, and what he did so wonderful for the country, why did they immediately say we never want any president to stay in power this long ever again? I'd say that the history you are reading has been highly edited to make FDR and his policies look good.
Centralization of capital, which means the government is spending most of the money, actually means less money available for business because the more money the government gets their hands on the more it spends to increase its own power. Government debt is what makes it hard for small businesses to get loans. Every dollar the government borrows means one less dollar available to build small businesses.
They tried this in Sweden and had to back off. It was so bad in the 70's they had to devalue their Krona several times, and change government ownership of all banks. They found they couldn't compete with the government making all the rules and controlling who got what. Sweden was headed for full-blown socialism and it was bankrupting them.
We've declined as a society primarily because we stopped investing in the common good. One can't go from a tax rate of 92% to a tax rate of 35% without seriously eroding the common good. It's the common good that drives prosperity because it is investment in these things that are the building blocks of a strong economy.
I'm sorry, but you can't be that ignorant.
We had a high income tax rate right after WWII because we had a deficit that was 110% of our gdp due to the war. That had to be paid down no matter what it did to the economy if the US was ever to prosper again. The tax rate was to pay off our war debt, and as soon as it was put into effect we went into a recession/depression, 1946. That was the biggest recession the US has had other than today and the great depression. However, when the debt was paid off, and the tax rate lowered, the US went into the biggest, longest, economic boom it had ever seen.
Wait a minute, are trying to tell me that Bush, the man who brought the following words into the US lexicon:
-extraordinary rendition -the Patriot Act -warrantless wiretaps and NSAs -regime change -"post 9/11 world" -Title 1 "regulation" of ISPs -Abu Graib and Guantanimo Bay
That is small stuff compared to what Obama is doing:
1. The assassination of American citizens at the request of the President with no due process. 2. Forcing American citizens to buy a product just to live here. 3. The ability of an SEC bureaucrat to take over an American business with no due process and not have to answer any questions about it. No FOIA requests will be honored, and the business is restricted from saying anything to anyone about the situation. 4. The suspension of due process for American citizens with nothing more than an allegation of terrorism by the White House. 5. The FBI can now monitor all your financial records without a warrant or even requesting one.
Obam's big spending bill was the stimulus? LOL. That doesn't even come close to what Obama care is going to cost. The CBO released a statement on May 20 saying it was going to cost an additional $143 billion, and even Obama admits his bill is going to raise health care costs for everyone. This after he promised Obama care was going to lower everyone costs. Just wait till this bill is fully functional. Every entitlement ever created has never come close to coming in at or under under budget. They've all cost substantially more than estimated, and with Obama's record of deceit and doubletalk you can bet this is going to do the same thing.
Anyone who thinks the left, and specifically Obama, is for personal freedom, is sadly mistaken. He is going to do more to increase the power of the federal government and restrict liberty than all previous presidents combined, including Wilson and FDR who created the internment camps for Japanese citizens during WWII. Funny how it's the progressives who always take away our liberties.
I think that licence to sin is exactly what liberty is. I think YOU confuse licence with obligation.
Not at all. Like I said, I've been where you are and done all that, and probably gone further into that lifestyle than you've ever thought of. I spent more than a decade loaded. First move in the morning, every morning for more than a decade, was to get high. I rolled a doobie the night before to smoke as soon as I woke up in the morning, and away I went. I worked in a sawmill loaded on opium. I thought I was experiencing freedom, but I was enslaved and didn't know it.
To say that a person cannot know whether licentious behavior is profitable or not is simply foolish. All around us every day we have examples, plus the examples from human history, that show us the results of licentiousness.
The Romans thought freedom was the equivalent of licentiousness and look what it did to them. It destroyed them by destroying their national character, the justice in their courts, the national will, and their Senate which was once a great forum for understanding issues and dealing with the people's problems became a joke, a shadow of what it once was. It became a society so interested in partying it failed to notice its own decline. In doing so it brought down the greatest empire the world had ever seen up to their time.
The same is true for Babylon. The night it was destroyed there was a huge party taking place, even with the enemy at their gates, and the guards wanted to party too, so that no one saw the river dry up and the Medo-Persians enter the city. Their licentiousness destroyed their freedom.
Why were the Medo-Persians at the gates of Babylon that night? Because they recognized the decline of Babylonian empire and the Babylonians didn't. If the Babylonian's would have had any kind of sense of priorities they would have been working at defending their city and trying to understand what in them was making them appear so weak that the Medo-Persians would dare attack them in the first place. Instead of doing that, they partied hearty.
Here we have two examples of empires destroyed by licentiousness. What more do you need to see licentiousness does not equal freedom. A wise man respects and values his freedom and does what is required to maintain it. He is alert to what would destroy it, whether the enemy is internal or external. A licentious individual, by definition, cannot do those those things for his interests lie in getting dissipated, not in protecting himself, his family, his nation, and ultimately, his freedom. He's asleep at the wheel.
You assert this like it's fact, but it's not. It's an unsupported assertion as you provide no evidence for it, and use very tortured logic that ignores the meaning of the word, servitude.
What is servitude? According to Merriam-Webster it is as follows: a condition in which one lacks liberty especially to determine one's course of action or way of life
Even if what you say happens, and the crook cheats an honest man, how is the honest man in servitude? How has his liberty to make his own choices been denied him?
I'll tell you my own experience gathered over several decades of watching different companies in the HVAC business. I worked for several different companies during my career and have seen the following. The crooked ones did really good for a while, then their reputations caught up with them and they either failed outright, shrank to a small fraction of their former size, or were forced to start treating their customers honestly to maintain their business The honest businesses are still thriving, and have far outgrown the peak that the dishonest ones reached before they ran into major problems.
There is a rule of thumb in customer relations. You cheat someone and they will tell at least 10 people about it. You treat them well and they will tell 1 or 2. Any logical, sane, businessman who is in business for the long haul will not want angry customers spreading the news about how they got cheated to their friends and neighbors. He will know he cannot exist long term with that happening.
During a job interview one time I asked about the prospective employer's honesty in relation to how they dealt with their customers. The answer was one that will surprise you. They weren't honest businessmen by choice, but they acknowledged that they were forced to act honestly to remain in business. This was a small business, as it only did $10 million dollars of business a year or so, but it completely contradicts your assertion.
The last employer I worked for in the HVAC business was very honest. The honesty was a conscious decision based on the owner's Christian beliefs, and he was competing with some very unethical businessmen. The result? He ran the largest, and most profitable, HVAC business in the area, had very loyal employees, and profited from a database full of extremely loyal customers who had been coming back to him to fix their problems for decades.
We serviced an area with a radius of more than 70 miles. People paid us to drive that far because they knew they could trust us to deal honestly with them.
There were 7 or 8 HVAC businesses in the area, and we did approximately 40% of the total HVAC business available. We got the most profitable jobs and the best paying customers, and the dishonest guys took leftovers. We dominated that market because of how we did business.
So, do I come even close to accepting your warped logic? Absolutely not. Real life experience tells me you're dead wrong.
If free enterprise is constrained by honesty and morals, then it's not really free
I'm sorry, but that's a ridiculous statement. Free enterprise is nothing more than business run by individuals.
A person is in servitude because they discipline their own behavior? Just how do you end up at that conclusion? It makes no sense. Liberty is all about people being free to make their own decisions, and being moral is personal decision.
No. I'm not actually making that mistake. I'm saying both systems are susceptible to greed. In one the individual acts greedy. In the other the state is greedy and ambitious, and at the time time takes away the freedom of the individual.
Let me give you a couple of quotes from the San Jose State University website that does a good job show what goes on in Sweden's economy and government.
The weakness of the Social Welfare State is that a large share of people's income must be taken in taxes to pay for the social services the state provides. This leaves people with the necessities taken care of but with a yearning for more income to spend at their discretion. Many Swedes have coped with this need for discretionary income by working two jobs. The main job's income is largely taken in taxes to pay for the social services. The second job's income become their real income, the income they have to spend.
To survive people have to work two jobs. Their main job accomplishes nothing more than paying their taxes. I call that servitude. It's like the peons in the feudal system. They had nothing left after paying their taxes either.
This is the most important issue in political economy. If the Welfare State has functioned to the satisfaction of the Swedish people then it is a system worthy of consideration by other industrialized countries. On the other hand, if it was serious flaws then these should be noted. While the Swedish system might be a suitable model for industrialized countries it is probably not affordable as a system for developing countries.
The long tenure of the Social Democratic Party led to a mentality of its leaders that they knew better than the people what was best for them. For example, Sweden had initially adopted the left side traffic system of Britain. When other countries adopted the right side system of France more and more problems were arising. The government called for a referendum on the issue. The Swedish public decisively voted agains the change. Nevertheless the government mandated the change and at a designated time Swedish drivers were required to cross over into the opposite lanes. The change was however accepted. But the notion of the Social Democrats that they and they alone know what is best for Sweden can be irritating. The danger is that the Social Democrats will become an elite much like the aristocracy of old.
This is a very mild of socialism. Yet even in it can be seen servitude to the state and the seeds of the problems found in the aristocratic form of government. The political party in control is ignoring the will of the people. Sound like current US politics?
Also, I found elsewhere that Sweden has had to do a lot of deregulation as their economy was completely failing as they moved toward complete socialism. The government was exerting so much control over business and the banks that it required squelched the economy to the point of having to devaluate their currency more than once back in the 70's. Also, the labor unions and business had to create an agreement between them or the government would have taken total control of that aspect of their economy too.
Socialism, once you let it get a toehold is very hungry for power and will soon enslave an apathetic population.
The Swedish experiment with even this mild form of socialism has been less than successful.
I ask you to provide an example of single socialistic government in existence that does not control all aspects of the country, including, education, distribution, and production. What you will find in each country's history is that power keeps on being concentrated into smaller and smaller groups of people, and that personal liberty keeps on being taken away from the individual. It can be no other way with everything being centralized. You cannot keep individual choice and liberty and control everything centrally at the same time. F.A. Hayek makes this very clear, and it is also self-evident.
Alexis de Toqueville, who was a contemporary of the fathers of socialism, says that a single individual cannot be as efficient as the government, but that the total sum of what is produced by individuals is far than what the government can produce. He was a wise man, and the economic history of the US proves the truth of his statement. As long as government stayed out of the way the US economy was by far the strongest this world has ever seen.
And how did they spend us into oblivion? By centralizing power into the federal government and instituting socialistic policies by creating entitlement after entitlement that they couldn't pay for, despite party affiliation. Entitlements now dwarf military spending in the federal budget and are growing at an exponential rate under Obama, and that doesn't even begin to take into account our unfunded liabilities which are mostly entitlement spending.
Bush overspent. He liked buying votes with entitlements too. He was, however, pretty conservative in his spending and in expanding the power of the federal government compared to Obama. But, that doesn't mean all his spending or power grabs were the right thing to do. He was leading us down the wrong path too.
The problem with universal health care in Massachusetts is that it is bankrupting the state. Projected costs are so far below actual costs that they aren't even close to the same ballpark.
That means it's a total failure as it is not even close to be sustainable. However, everyone pushing universal health care completely ignores that fact and goes on to point to it as a "success".
I agree with you that power needs to be returned to the individual states and local communities. Smaller groups are always able to fit the needs of the individuals that make up that group than extremely large groups are. The large group cannot be as flexible as the small group. This has been proven over and over again in many ways.
Take a small business and compare its agility to a very large corporation. In the large corporation the individual becomes a small cog in a very large wheel that will grind individualism into dust. The exact same thing happens with small and large government.
No he isn't. The description I posted from M-W says it is a form of government and that it includes control of production, which is the total economy, plain and simple. That can only be enforced on a national level by a government. A small group of people disconnected from the rest of society might be able to do what he describes, but once this becomes the way to run a nation it can only be a form of government that controls all aspect of the individual's life.
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Hmmm.... I see all these replies I made, that disappeared after hitting the submit button, have finally shown up. I can see why they were modded as redundant, but I only made duplicate replies because the system never acknowledged my replies.
You gotta be kidding me. Understaffed? Only because no one is actually working. If there are employees who are allowed to surf porn the majority of work day then discipline is so lax that very little is getting done. Sure, not everyone is surfing porn, but it's for sure there are checks on how much work someone is getting done. There is zero accountability.
Really? You can justify speeds of 80+ mph or so in a residential zone? At that speed a kid could run out into the street a couple hundred feet in front of you and you wouldn't miss him in a car. You couldn't stop in twice that distance from that speed. You would travel at least a quarter of that distance just getting your foot on the brake. Or how about if someone backs out of their driveway in front of you. What was a fender-bender at the speed limit just very possibly became a fatal accident.
Maybe they would be keeping up with their workload if they were, you know, working rather than watching porn. I mean, if things are so lax that recording porn on an everyday basis for extended periods of time happens what are the non-porn-addicts doing with their time? Just surfing the web? Sleeping? Who knows when there is no supervision and it's blatantly obvious that no one cares what the employees are doing?
Maybe they would be behind if they actually worked. You know, come to work and actually do their jobs rather than watching porn,
Maybe they wouldn't be behind in their work if they actually did the work. You know, work rather than watch porn during working hours.
It's called "government efficiency".
All governments run at this level of efficiency, or worse. If the private sector can do something for a $1,000,000 then government can do the same thing for $10,000,000+. You have to work for a governmental organization to see and understand how it's possible. I didn't really understand how this possible until I worked for a US government agency for a while, and then it became very clear. The waste built into the system was incredible. If someone didn't do their job they hired someone else to do it and kept both people on the payroll rather than firing the incompetent/lazy employee and then replacing them. The same went for parts/machinery. If they ordered something custom-built and it didn't come in built to specifications then they had another one built and paid for both.
Any private enterprise run the same way the government agency I worked for was would have gone out of business in a very short time. It would have bankrupted itself, just like both of our governments are, and have been, doing for years. You think it's chance that deficit spending is the norm? Corruption and incompetence rule.
I haven't used either in years, but when I did use Debian experimental,
Ummmm.... You used a Debian release designed for Debian devs to use for integrating packages into Sid, and then complain that it was incomplete?
Just for your information, Ubuntu takes a snapshot of Sid(unstable) and works on it for 6 months before it's released. During that 6 months Debian is adding new packages and new package versions to Sid on a regular basis. Packages move from Sid to testing after 10 days unless there are severe problems found during that 10 day period. This means both Sid and testing have never versions of software packages than an Ubuntu release will have when it's released.
Most Debian users will run either testing or Sid on their desktops and thus will have newer software versions than an Ubuntu user will have. And, they will continue to have newer/updated versions of software installed during every update. Debian stable (what Squeeze will be when it is officially released) is used mostly for server installs because of its package stability.
No, it's not the size of the population being managed. It's the philosophy of certain politicians that think they are entitled to make decisions affecting the lives of the citizens of this country that are best left to citizens themselves.
It's arrogance on the part of politicians influenced by certain political theories, mainly that of socialism, that a few centralized bureaucrats are much more capable of running everyone's lives than the individuals are running their own. It's like Bill Maher said, reflecting the opinions of the academic left and leftists in government, that the American citizens "are stupid and just need to be dragged to it". The arrogance reflected in such a statement is colossal.
It started before the Olmstead act, by another "progressive" President, Woodrow Wilson.
He put propogandists on the street corners, and had people listening to conversations and reporting back to the government if anything was said against his administration. He disliked both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and figured that he was doing "God's" will.
In US history it's always been the progressive presidents who have done the most to move the government toward centralization and reducing individual liberties, no matter what political party they represented. Teddy Roosevelt wanted to control everyone's income. FDR created internment camps even though he knew the Japanese living in this country were loyal citizens. Wilson wanted to do away with anything related to the Constitution and reinstituted segregation in the armed forces. Nixon instituted price and wage controls and an enemies list. GWB increased the power of the presidency and expanded spying on American citizens beyond anything done before. Obama has made it legal to a withhold due process of law to any American on just the allegation of being linked to terrorism, and made it lawful for American citizens to be assassinated by their government on nothing more than an allegation made by the administration.
When are people going to learn that "progressivism" is a very clear and present danger to their liberty?
An update for you. I had to run to the local Staples so I took an Ubuntu CD with me. I told the salesman I was looking to buy a new laptop, but that I run Linux so I needed to check for hardware compatibility. I asked if I could boot into my cd to check and he said probably not, but only because it was very difficult to get a cd into the drive because of how the displays were mounted.
Well, we figured out how to get a cd into the drive and booted it up. Probably not everyone will let you do this, but this proves that at least some stores will if you explain yourself up front and ask respectfully. Maybe my age, late 50's, made me appear less likely to wipe out a hard drive, as he said the reason it's so difficult to get a cd into the drive is because they've had so many people wipe out hard drives with live cd's and other similar tools.
Take Linux LiveCD to shop, test machine.
How many shops will unbox a PC that has no floor model to let me test it? Or (in the case of small form factor machines with no built-in optical drive) let me plug in a USB DVD-ROM drive? Or unbox a printer or scanner and let me connect it to a floor model PC?
Just get the hardware list from the retailer, manufacturer, or from the machine itself. You know, the built-in utilities that tell you what hardware is included in the machine.... You don't need a printer. All you need is a pencil paper for keeping track of a few pieces of hardware.
Most of the major components will just work. The main things for you to Google will be wireless and video chipsets. Once in a great while a wired network card won't work, but that's not too likely. Another thing would be the webcam if the laptop has one. Linux has generic drivers that cover a wide range of webcams, but some might not work.
Another option is just to tell the salesman in the brick-and-mortar store that you run Linux and want to boot the machine into a livecd to check hardware compatibility. If they say no, tell them they aren't going to sell you anything unless they do and walk off. My bet is that they will call you back. If they don't, go to another retailer and repeat until you find one who will work with you. That's the store you want to deal with anyway as they are going to give you much better after-the-sale service because they care about their relationship with their customers. With the economy in the shape it's in it shouldn't be hard to find a retailer who will work with you if they want to make a sale.
My wife recently bought an HP laptop. It comes with the recovery stuff on a partition.
You get one time you can burn a physical recovery disk. When we tried it, the process failed. Leaving you with no more tries at a recovery disk, and no recovery disk.
Very annoying. Combine that with the performance of the laptop, and we won't be buying anything else from HP because they're products are overpriced and crappy. Ripping a CD created MP3 with really bad jitter and noise -- lame for a dual core machine which wasn't doing anything else at the time.
Posting anonymously because my wife works for HP and we bought it using her discount. :-P
I don't work for HP, but my experience with HP laptops is similar to yours.
When I got mine it wouldn't play videos without skipping, jumping, tearing, etc.... It was bad enough that any form of video playback was unusable. Video and audio recording were just as bad. Ripping cd's to disk put the cpu at 100% usage and resulted in lousy playback.
Two days of that was enough. I wiped out the recovery partition along with the factory partitions and installed Debian. It's been a decent laptop ever since. All problems with audio and video playback and recording vanished and it's been rock solid ever since. The laptop is now 5 years old and still running strong. I doubt it would handle Vista or 7, and I'm not about to even waste the time to try them as Debian Sid runs very well on it, plus I've left all things MS behind.
From the grub screen to being fully logged into a working environment takes exactly 1 minute. That includes entering my user name and password. Not bad for a single core Turion and a 4200 rpm hard drive.
Wow, what a weak reply. Even in your closely edited response you left the evidence of what I said was true.
The following quote comes from Wikipedia. Is that a left-wing-enough source for you?
Notice what political_theory/political_philosophy is all about? Government! Even if it's only a group of people outside of a nation/state, it's still a way for that group to govern themselves. No matter how you try to twist and dodge, it's still a form of government.
About your 90% tax....
Who in their right mind would work if 90% of ever dollar earned went to the government? It's those high income people who buy big ticket items that create jobs. It's also those people who run the vast majority of small businesses. You really think they are going to work 80-100 hours a week like most small businesspeople I know if they know almost everything they are working for is going to be taken away from them? They are going to shut down their business, or at least reduce them in size until they get down to a much smaller tax burden. That means a major loss in jobs for everyone else.
The high tax rates are what dragged out the recovery from the Great Depression. The more you tax a person the less money he has to spend. The less money he has to spend the fewer products he buys. The fewer products that are bought the more the economy shrinks. And since it is private business that creates jobs and funds government what's the net effect? Less economic growth. Think about it. If the government spends $1 billion paying people to work that money had to come from somewhere. That means they had to collect more than $1 billion in taxes(administrative costs) to do that. What do they get back on their investment? Maybe $200,000 in income taxes. Not a good thing. Not a good way to grow things. If the private sector pays out $1 billion in wages it creates, under the same tax rate, a net of $200,000 in income taxes for the government. Under which scenario will a government pay down its debt and more jobs be created? The private sector spending the money and creating the jobs, or the government creating government jobs and paying the equivalent in wages? It's self-evident the government reduces its deficit when it is smaller, has fewer employees, and the private sector does what it's good at, business.
You'll notice that as soon as FDR was out of office an amendment to the constitution was created limiting presidents to 2 terms. If FDR was so great, and what he did so wonderful for the country, why did they immediately say we never want any president to stay in power this long ever again? I'd say that the history you are reading has been highly edited to make FDR and his policies look good.
Centralization of capital, which means the government is spending most of the money, actually means less money available for business because the more money the government gets their hands on the more it spends to increase its own power. Government debt is what makes it hard for small businesses to get loans. Every dollar the government borrows means one less dollar available to build small businesses.
They tried this in Sweden and had to back off. It was so bad in the 70's they had to devalue their Krona several times, and change government ownership of all banks. They found they couldn't compete with the government making all the rules and controlling who got what. Sweden was headed for full-blown socialism and it was bankrupting them.
We've declined as a society primarily because we stopped investing in the common good. One can't go from a tax rate of 92% to a tax rate of 35% without seriously eroding the common good. It's the common good that drives prosperity because it is investment in these things that are the building blocks of a strong economy.
I'm sorry, but you can't be that ignorant.
We had a high income tax rate right after WWII because we had a deficit that was 110% of our gdp due to the war. That had to be paid down no matter what it did to the economy if the US was ever to prosper again. The tax rate was to pay off our war debt, and as soon as it was put into effect we went into a recession/depression, 1946. That was the biggest recession the US has had other than today and the great depression. However, when the debt was paid off, and the tax rate lowered, the US went into the biggest, longest, economic boom it had ever seen.
Wait a minute, are trying to tell me that Bush, the man who brought the following words into the US lexicon:
-extraordinary rendition
-the Patriot Act
-warrantless wiretaps and NSAs
-regime change
-"post 9/11 world"
-Title 1 "regulation" of ISPs
-Abu Graib and Guantanimo Bay
That is small stuff compared to what Obama is doing:
1. The assassination of American citizens at the request of the President with no due process.
2. Forcing American citizens to buy a product just to live here.
3. The ability of an SEC bureaucrat to take over an American business with no due process and not have to answer any questions about it. No FOIA requests will be honored, and the business is restricted from saying anything to anyone about the situation.
4. The suspension of due process for American citizens with nothing more
than an allegation of terrorism by the White House.
5. The FBI can now monitor all your financial records without a warrant or even requesting one.
Obam's big spending bill was the stimulus? LOL. That doesn't even come close to what Obama care is going to cost. The CBO released a statement on May 20 saying it was going to cost an additional $143 billion, and even Obama admits his bill is going to raise health care costs for everyone. This after he promised Obama care was going to lower everyone costs. Just wait till this bill is fully functional. Every entitlement ever created has never come close to coming in at or under under budget. They've all cost substantially more than estimated, and with Obama's record of deceit and doubletalk you can bet this is going to do the same thing.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2010/05/cbo-health-care-bill-will-cost-115-billion-more-than-previously-assessed.html
Anyone who thinks the left, and specifically Obama, is for personal freedom, is sadly mistaken. He is going to do more to increase the power of the federal government and restrict liberty than all previous presidents combined, including Wilson and FDR who created the internment camps for Japanese citizens during WWII. Funny how it's the progressives who always take away our liberties.
I think that licence to sin is exactly what liberty is. I think YOU confuse licence with obligation.
Not at all. Like I said, I've been where you are and done all that, and probably gone further into that lifestyle than you've ever thought of. I spent more than a decade loaded. First move in the morning, every morning for more than a decade, was to get high. I rolled a doobie the night before to smoke as soon as I woke up in the morning, and away I went. I worked in a sawmill loaded on opium. I thought I was experiencing freedom, but I was enslaved and didn't know it.
To say that a person cannot know whether licentious behavior is profitable or not is simply foolish. All around us every day we have examples, plus the examples from human history, that show us the results of licentiousness.
The Romans thought freedom was the equivalent of licentiousness and look what it did to them. It destroyed them by destroying their national character, the justice in their courts, the national will, and their Senate which was once a great forum for understanding issues and dealing with the people's problems became a joke, a shadow of what it once was. It became a society so interested in partying it failed to notice its own decline. In doing so it brought down the greatest empire the world had ever seen up to their time.
The same is true for Babylon. The night it was destroyed there was a huge party taking place, even with the enemy at their gates, and the guards wanted to party too, so that no one saw the river dry up and the Medo-Persians enter the city. Their licentiousness destroyed their freedom.
Why were the Medo-Persians at the gates of Babylon that night? Because they recognized the decline of Babylonian empire and the Babylonians didn't. If the Babylonian's would have had any kind of sense of priorities they would have been working at defending their city and trying to understand what in them was making them appear so weak that the Medo-Persians would dare attack them in the first place. Instead of doing that, they partied hearty.
Here we have two examples of empires destroyed by licentiousness. What more do you need to see licentiousness does not equal freedom. A wise man respects and values his freedom and does what is required to maintain it. He is alert to what would destroy it, whether the enemy is internal or external. A licentious individual, by definition, cannot do those those things for his interests lie in getting dissipated, not in protecting himself, his family, his nation, and ultimately, his freedom. He's asleep at the wheel.
You assert this like it's fact, but it's not. It's an unsupported assertion as you provide no evidence for it, and use very tortured logic that ignores the meaning of the word, servitude.
What is servitude? According to Merriam-Webster it is as follows: a condition in which one lacks liberty especially to determine one's course of action or way of life
Even if what you say happens, and the crook cheats an honest man, how is the honest man in servitude? How has his liberty to make his own choices been denied him?
I'll tell you my own experience gathered over several decades of watching different companies in the HVAC business. I worked for several different companies during my career and have seen the following. The crooked ones did really good for a while, then their reputations caught up with them and they either failed outright, shrank to a small fraction of their former size, or were forced to start treating their customers honestly to maintain their business The honest businesses are still thriving, and have far outgrown the peak that the dishonest ones reached before they ran into major problems.
There is a rule of thumb in customer relations. You cheat someone and they will tell at least 10 people about it. You treat them well and they will tell 1 or 2. Any logical, sane, businessman who is in business for the long haul will not want angry customers spreading the news about how they got cheated to their friends and neighbors. He will know he cannot exist long term with that happening.
During a job interview one time I asked about the prospective employer's honesty in relation to how they dealt with their customers. The answer was one that will surprise you. They weren't honest businessmen by choice, but they acknowledged that they were forced to act honestly to remain in business. This was a small business, as it only did $10 million dollars of business a year or so, but it completely contradicts your assertion.
The last employer I worked for in the HVAC business was very honest. The honesty was a conscious decision based on the owner's Christian beliefs, and he was competing with some very unethical businessmen. The result? He ran the largest, and most profitable, HVAC business in the area, had very loyal employees, and profited from a database full of extremely loyal customers who had been coming back to him to fix their problems for decades.
We serviced an area with a radius of more than 70 miles. People paid us to drive that far because they knew they could trust us to deal honestly with them.
There were 7 or 8 HVAC businesses in the area, and we did approximately 40% of the total HVAC business available. We got the most profitable jobs and the best paying customers, and the dishonest guys took leftovers. We dominated that market because of how we did business.
So, do I come even close to accepting your warped logic? Absolutely not. Real life experience tells me you're dead wrong.
If free enterprise is constrained by honesty and morals, then it's not really free
I'm sorry, but that's a ridiculous statement. Free enterprise is nothing more than business run by individuals.
A person is in servitude because they discipline their own behavior? Just how do you end up at that conclusion? It makes no sense. Liberty is all about people being free to make their own decisions, and being moral is personal decision.
No. I'm not actually making that mistake. I'm saying both systems are susceptible to greed. In one the individual acts greedy. In the other the state is greedy and ambitious, and at the time time takes away the freedom of the individual.
Let me give you a couple of quotes from the San Jose State University website that does a good job show what goes on in Sweden's economy and government.
To survive people have to work two jobs. Their main job accomplishes nothing more than paying their taxes. I call that servitude. It's like the peons in the feudal system. They had nothing left after paying their taxes either.
These quotes are from the following link: http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/sweden.htm
This is a very mild of socialism. Yet even in it can be seen servitude to the state and the seeds of the problems found in the aristocratic form of government. The political party in control is ignoring the will of the people. Sound like current US politics?
Also, I found elsewhere that Sweden has had to do a lot of deregulation as their economy was completely failing as they moved toward complete socialism. The government was exerting so much control over business and the banks that it required squelched the economy to the point of having to devaluate their currency more than once back in the 70's. Also, the labor unions and business had to create an agreement between them or the government would have taken total control of that aspect of their economy too.
Socialism, once you let it get a toehold is very hungry for power and will soon enslave an apathetic population.
The Swedish experiment with even this mild form of socialism has been less than successful.
I ask you to provide an example of single socialistic government in existence that does not control all aspects of the country, including, education, distribution, and production. What you will find in each country's history is that power keeps on being concentrated into smaller and smaller groups of people, and that personal liberty keeps on being taken away from the individual. It can be no other way with everything being centralized. You cannot keep individual choice and liberty and control everything centrally at the same time. F.A. Hayek makes this very clear, and it is also self-evident.
Alexis de Toqueville, who was a contemporary of the fathers of socialism, says that a single individual cannot be as efficient as the government, but that the total sum of what is produced by individuals is far than what the government can produce. He was a wise man, and the economic history of the US proves the truth of his statement. As long as government stayed out of the way the US economy was by far the strongest this world has ever seen.
And how did they spend us into oblivion? By centralizing power into the federal government and instituting socialistic policies by creating entitlement after entitlement that they couldn't pay for, despite party affiliation. Entitlements now dwarf military spending in the federal budget and are growing at an exponential rate under Obama, and that doesn't even begin to take into account our unfunded liabilities which are mostly entitlement spending.
Bush overspent. He liked buying votes with entitlements too. He was, however, pretty conservative in his spending and in expanding the power of the federal government compared to Obama. But, that doesn't mean all his spending or power grabs were the right thing to do. He was leading us down the wrong path too.
The problem with universal health care in Massachusetts is that it is bankrupting the state. Projected costs are so far below actual costs that they aren't even close to the same ballpark.
That means it's a total failure as it is not even close to be sustainable. However, everyone pushing universal health care completely ignores that fact and goes on to point to it as a "success".
I agree with you that power needs to be returned to the individual states and local communities. Smaller groups are always able to fit the needs of the individuals that make up that group than extremely large groups are. The large group cannot be as flexible as the small group. This has been proven over and over again in many ways.
Take a small business and compare its agility to a very large corporation. In the large corporation the individual becomes a small cog in a very large wheel that will grind individualism into dust. The exact same thing happens with small and large government.
No he isn't. The description I posted from M-W says it is a form of government and that it includes control of production, which is the total economy, plain and simple. That can only be enforced on a national level by a government. A small group of people disconnected from the rest of society might be able to do what he describes, but once this becomes the way to run a nation it can only be a form of government that controls all aspect of the individual's life.