They have no terrorist groups wanting to level Shanghai, there is no such thing as an Al-Qaeda like threat to the PRC in any shape or form.
The Uyghurs are trying. They aren't half the threat that the PRC makes them out to be (the same could be said for Al-Qaeda), but they are still a threat and they still do blow stuff up and kill people.
There are plenty of people that have chosen specifically not to pursue any degree program for many reasons. Some people chose to be tradesmen, entering into a career in one of the many trades like electrician or plumber. These people are highly motivated, and often very competent in their field.
What fairy tale do you live in? I have never in my life met somebody whose starry-eyed dream it was to be a plumber. Simple fact is that most tradesmen of that sort get into the field by signing on to an entry level position at hardware store or a mid-size contractor and/or specific service company. If the work doesn't bother them too much they get the skill (and licenses/certifications) necessary to break out on their own such that they don't have to split their earnings with their employer and attendant overhead. It's the same story in just about any skilled labor industry.
Some people have chosen to enter into a field that is new and therefor does not yet have an established degree program, like many of the earlier pioneers in computers and software.
More fantasy. Yes, such people do exist, but make up a minuscule percentage of the workforce. You might as well be counting lottery winners or people who make it big in Hollywood.
Clearly spoken as someone that is not a white-male from a middle class family in the united states.
White as snow, 3rd generation born and bred to Washington State, from a family that is the perfect picture of the median income of a single-earner bachelors-degree possessing household. Now I'll give you that I had merit-based grants and scholarships falling all over me, that comes with the territory of a 149 IQ, a straight A record for the prior 9 years, and good SAT/ACT scores. However, that ultimately indicates that I was neither lazy nor incompetent, and does not undermine my argument.
And probably also not from a truly impoverished neighbor hood, where the government grants wont cover many of the necessities of life, such as transportation, or better yet to put food on the table of an entire family. There is more to the economic situation that being able to pay tuition, but we try not to think about that, since again this helps to maintain the elitist attitudes and our own self gratification.
My maternal grandfather was a latch-key street urchin who had to drag his single, drunk father out of bars on the weekends when he was home from the logging camps. He ultimately joined the army (in wartime, served in theater), worked to get an engineering education when he left, worked his way into management, and retired upper middle class. Damn near anybody can join the army and get an education that way if they aren't cowards. No doubt that's elitism too, just like any recognition of capacitive difference is elitism. If living with my eyes open makes me elitist, than I accept that brand without hesitation.
There are still respectable universities with sub $10k yearly tuition. I live fairly close to one in fact, the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA. You also seem to imagine that all grants and scholarships are needs-based and are derived from parents' incomes, which I can absolutely assure you is not the case. Just because you and others are too lazy to find the ones that aren't, you assume they don't exist.
Yes, a seriously committed student can make it work, but that is not the norm today.
In other words, people are lazy. Just underscores my point. I worked 20 hours a week when I was in college and commuted an hour each way, and that was in an Honors Program that required, I shit you not, 500 pages of reading a week.
... and so would have no direct impact on the end of the Islamic Golden Age, which happened around 1100-1200, which is the period you said was a "ridiculous" reference. Even though I was not the original poster, I have defended the reference, Al-Ghazali and his ideas were directly and actively contemporary to the decline of Islamic civilization, that is the point. Whether or not earlier Islamic scholars are more important to Islam is not the issue nor ever was. You are introducing it now to convince yourself. Religious people are always amusing in that way. C.S. Lewis did the same thing when he was doing Christian apologetics, whenever he got too close to a thought which would undermine his argument, he dismissed it out of hand (frequently with a false choice/dichotomy/trilemma) and changed the subject hoping nobody would notice.
It's amusing that Muslims like you look back on Ibn Rushd, one of the few brilliant thinkers that the Islamic world has produced, and still scream heretic! Whereas in the West we look at great thinkers once accused of heresy like Galileo and think only the dogma they opposed to be foolish. This is why everybody looks at Islam and wonders when it will grow up.
That was about the time that Al-Ghazali wrote The Incoherence of the Philosophers, which was, with the exception of Ibn Rushd, more or less the tombstone of the Islamic Golden Age and the superiority that the Islamic world once held over the West. It advocated dogma over exploration and innovation, and the author and his followers through the countless generations are reaping that harvest.
It seems that you think that retirement should be disproportionately increased as lifespans increase with no regard for the sort of pressure that places on society. Your view is unconsidered and emotionally-driven. Are you paying no attention to the social consequences of how generations in retirement *right now* are draining unforeseen resources due to their own increased lifespans?
Further your consideration of mandatory education is more blind acceptance than factual. I have already said that diplomas are near worthless, and I can back that up. According to the Dept. of Education's own statistics, high school and equivalent graduates only make ~$7500 more a year than those who do not graduate. Whereas people with bachelors degrees make wholly ~$20000 more than high school or equivalent graduates. I maintain that the reason for this more-than-doubling of value is as much or moreso scarcity as it is any inherent gain from the education itself. Mandating undergraduate degrees would, absolutely, drive down median incomes for those with degrees as now everybody and their dog would have them. Further it would necessarily require inflation and the lowering of standards because most of the people who don't pursue undergraduate degrees are generally either too lazy or incompetent. With all of the copious grants and scholarships available from public and private sources both, there are few who validly are prevented from that education for want of money. It is almost always talent or will, and forcing those with neither talent nor will through a process judged by similar "retention" standards as secondary education will completely tarnish if not effectively erase the value of the certification of undergraduate degrees.
Zero sum nonsense. Doctorates, like any degree, should be a measure of work, not some semi-divine ordination whose population is determined by some arbitrary quota. The problem with degrees today is slipping standards, that has caused inflation. However as population is still growing, each generation of teachers must necessarily produce more teachers or the ratio of educators per capita will precipitously drop, to the detriment of the whole society.
You also probably have no conception of how a degree of scarcity improves performance. "Stability" as you call it breeds complacency. People who know they have a guaranteed job because there is little competition are more likely to be lazy, sloppy, or otherwise performance deficient because they don't have the same fear that somebody who could do better will replace them. As more people have to fight to achieve tenure or comfortable positions in industry the degree to which they must perform and, indeed, innovate in order to stand out is naturally increased. This is beneficial to society as a whole if not always to the lazy sod who always finishes last.
The point is, closing doors and creating arbitrary quotas is not the answer. Those who can prove themselves should at least have the opportunity to try, but standards must be raised and maintained to prevent inflation. Any degree must be rigorous to have value and meaning both to society and to the person seeking it.
Quantum mechanics might not have been necessary to reach the current level of computing technology, but it will be wholly integral to the next level, quantum computing itself. When it becomes a matter of qubits rather than bits, quantum mechanics will be inextricable from real-world application.
You might not have noticed, but many people now have multiple careers in their working life. My dad started in insurance and now works as a consultant on interior finishings. I have put a decade into IT but plan to leave it in a few years for education, and I know others in my own office had different careers before IT and plan to have different careers after. Gone are the days where people get hired at a company as teenagers and work there until they retire with pensions (haha! pensions!).
More mandatory schooling would cause a chain reaction of certificate inflation. Diplomas are already nigh worthless due to slipping standards and grade inflation, and undergraduate degrees are being forced along the same path as the quality of students from the aforementioned system continues to fall, but students must be admitted regardless to keep the financial gears of the colleges and universities turning. Mandatory undergraduate degrees would just move the goal posts, making them well nigh worthless too, and then graduate degrees would be the filtering mechanism for hiring managers, making success an even harder and longer road than it already is.
There are already more degrees, especially undergraduate, circulating than are deserved or even needed.
My father-in-law has a PhD in CS and he is in industry applying it to the real world. My sister-in-law is earning a PhD in linguistics and will probably apply it within academia. That is a fairly normal division, PhDs in the sciences are more likely to gravitate toward actual industrial application, and the arts/humanities toward academic application. It's natural since there are rarely if ever any businesses that need PhDs in English Literature.
However it's disgusting that you are so dismissive and even derisive of people who work so hard, and depending on the institution that employs them, will probably go on to educate scores of people. Educated people are the key to not becoming a broken society in the first place that needs foreigners to come dig wells for them.
The character limit has quite a bit to do with it. Twitter by design can never be anything more than a bumper sticker fight. If you want a respectful and thoughtful debate, well, honestly one of the few I can even think of is that between Robert Nozick and John Rawls, and that was conducted with entire books.
As for group think, I can only offer the old platitude: be the change you want to see in the world. I won't positively mod stupidity even if its intent would be sympathetic to a position I hold. In fact, I get as much or more bothered by stupidity from "within" than "without" because I don't want some douche representing a good idea badly such that it turns people away.
Holy crap that was so stupid... how is this shit on TV anywhere? In the first place pottery, if not necessarily porcelain, preceded glass EVERYWHERE, but secondly in Science and Civilisation in China Volume 4, Part 1 Dr. Joseph Needham writes at length about optics in dynastic China, including "burning-lenses" in use during the Tang Dynasty that were essentially magnifying glasses applied to concentrate sunlight to cauterize wounds.
But just think of this adapted to file systems and networks and terminals... it will be just like Hackers the movie!
What every interface designer has realized is that 3D "flying" mechanics are bullshit gimmicks that everybody hates within minutes of use. If something can be available immediately, it should be, you shouldn't have to "fly" to it just so you can admire what a "cool" visual effect that is. Interfaces aren't flat because people are uncreative and stupid, they're flat because that is the most efficient way to present information.
This is why my first sentence was a warning against conflation. You're conflating talent with knowledge. They are not the same. You can teach almost anybody to play an instrument to a certain level of technical competency. However, just because somebody can read music and play notes does not make them talented. If they cannot transcend the mechanical aspect of music and play (let alone compose!) in a way that connects them emotionally with their audience (which is a talent), it will never matter who they learned from or how hard they studied.
It's a matter of 'necessary but not sufficient'. You're right, most musicians have to learn from others the techniques of music, but if they lack an inherent talent, that knowledge by itself will not be enough to carry them forward.
If the thing that moves you about music is production value, I can't help you, but you need help.
Anecdotal though it may be, I will point to my favorite guzheng player as an example. Bei Bei He started out just posting amateur videos of performances to YouTube (which is when I started following her). Recording quality? Mediocre at best, but excellent performances. She self-published her first album, which caught the eye of an indie producer who collaborated with her on her second. Her music has been several times used as interstitials on NPR and is gaining popularity (though I doubt it will or even could be mainstream... guzhengs are unknown to most Americans/Westerners), but it started with self-published mediocre quality videos on YouTube. Talent shines regardless of tools.
You're conflating a lot things here. Talent is the first and last key to art, and can overcome inferior tools and distribution. However talent is singular, and cannot be bought or taught. At a certain point the quality of tools reaches a sort of "Monster Cables" level of diminishing returns. Truly good music will sound amazing whether it is recorded and produced in a high budget studio with a stupidly huge team or if it is recorded with a few hundred bucks worth of mid-grade hobbyist equipment and the artists themselves. Really expensive tools and teams can make talentless douchebags sound good, that's the whole pop music industry in a nutshell, but people with talent remain so even with inferior equipment.
How can the current and future system have been prohibitive of past achievements if anybody can record and release themselves? I think you're in denial. Yes, the "record album" paradigm is dead, and rightfully. Now there is no magical middleman prerequisite to distribution. In that there can be no loss.
Law enforcement seems to get more and more antagonistic to the people they supposedly "serve" year over year. There is a severe conflict of interest arising as law enforcement has grown into a revenue stream for government as its primary function, to the point where major crimes are sidelined. (Listen to the second part of This American Life episode about Adrian Schoolcraft. It is sickening.)
The prison population can and should be drastically reduced with the elimination of jail time for many non-violent offenses. There are a number of ways to financially and logistically punish non-violent offenders without locking them up. That should be a last resort, not a first, but the bail bonds industry is actually the main opponent of this sort of reform because it would cut their revenue stream drastically.
However there is nothing that can be done about the financial nature of speech in democracy. Print costs money, TV and radio cost money, rallies cost money, signs cost money, even web hosting and bandwidth cost money. And that money pays for the candidate to be able to speak and be heard, so the SCotUS is wholly correct in ruling as they have over and over that money is speech and protected as such. The best we can do is make sure that the accounting is as public and open as is feasible.
And as for unemployment/food/housing, your article focuses on the aftermath of the financial crisis and recession. That's like moaning that a house is ruined after a tornado hit it. Yeah, duh, things are bad right now, but performance over the long term has been historically much better. When you look at each American decade as an aggregate, it's always positive. We're already up from the bottom of the crisis, the question is how far can we go in a few years and what policies will enable growth? Growth sure as hell won't come from more taxes and regulations.
Speaking of that and health insurance, current law is very likely preventing job growth, as small companies have to stay below 50 employees or be forced to provide health care. That's an effective hiring freeze for all businesses of that size. Congratulations, no jobs and no health care, all courtesy of bullshit legislative micromanagement.
Further, the UNCRC, while a largely well-intentioned accord, is critically deficient in some areas. The 'best interests of the child' might sound great, but its not a legitimate legal test, rather a fill in the blank to justify anything a government wishes to do with respect to children. So long as a government claims their actions are in the 'best interests' the courts are likely to agree because there is no standard for the test. Additionally there are provisions for children's 'right to privacy' which is antithetical to the parents' responsibility of protecting their children. There is a reason why children do not have the same privacy as adults, adults have earned through experience the right to not have their mail read or calls monitored, as it is assumed that they can deal with potential threats themselves, but it is a parent's responsibility to make sure, through monitoring communications if necessary, that their children are not naively walking into the trap of a predator.
Lastly the UNCRC insidiously with one hand promotes freedom of expression while with the other hand denies freedom of information (literally requiring states to "protect" children from "harmful information"). What use is expression when the promotion of ignorance is the price? Tiered knowledge is nonsense promoted by an echo chamber of moralists hiding behind academic credentials. There are more flaws to the UNCRC, but I am not going to go through it line by line, suffice to say the Senate has done its job in not ratifying it.
Protecting citizens from dangerous ideas like democratic reform. It's a fairly simple dichotomy, the US censors to retain economic power, while China censors to retain political power. In the end it's always about power.
Slashdot Mirror
They have no terrorist groups wanting to level Shanghai, there is no such thing as an Al-Qaeda like threat to the PRC in any shape or form.
The Uyghurs are trying. They aren't half the threat that the PRC makes them out to be (the same could be said for Al-Qaeda), but they are still a threat and they still do blow stuff up and kill people.
There are plenty of people that have chosen specifically not to pursue any degree program for many reasons. Some people chose to be tradesmen, entering into a career in one of the many trades like electrician or plumber. These people are highly motivated, and often very competent in their field.
What fairy tale do you live in? I have never in my life met somebody whose starry-eyed dream it was to be a plumber. Simple fact is that most tradesmen of that sort get into the field by signing on to an entry level position at hardware store or a mid-size contractor and/or specific service company. If the work doesn't bother them too much they get the skill (and licenses/certifications) necessary to break out on their own such that they don't have to split their earnings with their employer and attendant overhead. It's the same story in just about any skilled labor industry.
Some people have chosen to enter into a field that is new and therefor does not yet have an established degree program, like many of the earlier pioneers in computers and software.
More fantasy. Yes, such people do exist, but make up a minuscule percentage of the workforce. You might as well be counting lottery winners or people who make it big in Hollywood.
Clearly spoken as someone that is not a white-male from a middle class family in the united states.
White as snow, 3rd generation born and bred to Washington State, from a family that is the perfect picture of the median income of a single-earner bachelors-degree possessing household. Now I'll give you that I had merit-based grants and scholarships falling all over me, that comes with the territory of a 149 IQ, a straight A record for the prior 9 years, and good SAT/ACT scores. However, that ultimately indicates that I was neither lazy nor incompetent, and does not undermine my argument.
And probably also not from a truly impoverished neighbor hood, where the government grants wont cover many of the necessities of life, such as transportation, or better yet to put food on the table of an entire family. There is more to the economic situation that being able to pay tuition, but we try not to think about that, since again this helps to maintain the elitist attitudes and our own self gratification.
My maternal grandfather was a latch-key street urchin who had to drag his single, drunk father out of bars on the weekends when he was home from the logging camps. He ultimately joined the army (in wartime, served in theater), worked to get an engineering education when he left, worked his way into management, and retired upper middle class. Damn near anybody can join the army and get an education that way if they aren't cowards. No doubt that's elitism too, just like any recognition of capacitive difference is elitism. If living with my eyes open makes me elitist, than I accept that brand without hesitation.
Yes, a seriously committed student can make it work, but that is not the norm today.
In other words, people are lazy. Just underscores my point. I worked 20 hours a week when I was in college and commuted an hour each way, and that was in an Honors Program that required, I shit you not, 500 pages of reading a week.
The latter lived much earlier.
... and so would have no direct impact on the end of the Islamic Golden Age, which happened around 1100-1200, which is the period you said was a "ridiculous" reference. Even though I was not the original poster, I have defended the reference, Al-Ghazali and his ideas were directly and actively contemporary to the decline of Islamic civilization, that is the point. Whether or not earlier Islamic scholars are more important to Islam is not the issue nor ever was. You are introducing it now to convince yourself. Religious people are always amusing in that way. C.S. Lewis did the same thing when he was doing Christian apologetics, whenever he got too close to a thought which would undermine his argument, he dismissed it out of hand (frequently with a false choice/dichotomy/trilemma) and changed the subject hoping nobody would notice.
It's amusing that Muslims like you look back on Ibn Rushd, one of the few brilliant thinkers that the Islamic world has produced, and still scream heretic! Whereas in the West we look at great thinkers once accused of heresy like Galileo and think only the dogma they opposed to be foolish. This is why everybody looks at Islam and wonders when it will grow up.
That was a bit ambiguous, I will grant, but I did intend for it to be a measure of both the quantity and the quality of work.
That was about the time that Al-Ghazali wrote The Incoherence of the Philosophers, which was, with the exception of Ibn Rushd, more or less the tombstone of the Islamic Golden Age and the superiority that the Islamic world once held over the West. It advocated dogma over exploration and innovation, and the author and his followers through the countless generations are reaping that harvest.
It seems that you think that retirement should be disproportionately increased as lifespans increase with no regard for the sort of pressure that places on society. Your view is unconsidered and emotionally-driven. Are you paying no attention to the social consequences of how generations in retirement *right now* are draining unforeseen resources due to their own increased lifespans?
Further your consideration of mandatory education is more blind acceptance than factual. I have already said that diplomas are near worthless, and I can back that up. According to the Dept. of Education's own statistics, high school and equivalent graduates only make ~$7500 more a year than those who do not graduate. Whereas people with bachelors degrees make wholly ~$20000 more than high school or equivalent graduates. I maintain that the reason for this more-than-doubling of value is as much or moreso scarcity as it is any inherent gain from the education itself. Mandating undergraduate degrees would, absolutely, drive down median incomes for those with degrees as now everybody and their dog would have them. Further it would necessarily require inflation and the lowering of standards because most of the people who don't pursue undergraduate degrees are generally either too lazy or incompetent. With all of the copious grants and scholarships available from public and private sources both, there are few who validly are prevented from that education for want of money. It is almost always talent or will, and forcing those with neither talent nor will through a process judged by similar "retention" standards as secondary education will completely tarnish if not effectively erase the value of the certification of undergraduate degrees.
Zero sum nonsense. Doctorates, like any degree, should be a measure of work, not some semi-divine ordination whose population is determined by some arbitrary quota. The problem with degrees today is slipping standards, that has caused inflation. However as population is still growing, each generation of teachers must necessarily produce more teachers or the ratio of educators per capita will precipitously drop, to the detriment of the whole society.
You also probably have no conception of how a degree of scarcity improves performance. "Stability" as you call it breeds complacency. People who know they have a guaranteed job because there is little competition are more likely to be lazy, sloppy, or otherwise performance deficient because they don't have the same fear that somebody who could do better will replace them. As more people have to fight to achieve tenure or comfortable positions in industry the degree to which they must perform and, indeed, innovate in order to stand out is naturally increased. This is beneficial to society as a whole if not always to the lazy sod who always finishes last.
The point is, closing doors and creating arbitrary quotas is not the answer. Those who can prove themselves should at least have the opportunity to try, but standards must be raised and maintained to prevent inflation. Any degree must be rigorous to have value and meaning both to society and to the person seeking it.
Quantum mechanics might not have been necessary to reach the current level of computing technology, but it will be wholly integral to the next level, quantum computing itself. When it becomes a matter of qubits rather than bits, quantum mechanics will be inextricable from real-world application.
You might not have noticed, but many people now have multiple careers in their working life. My dad started in insurance and now works as a consultant on interior finishings. I have put a decade into IT but plan to leave it in a few years for education, and I know others in my own office had different careers before IT and plan to have different careers after. Gone are the days where people get hired at a company as teenagers and work there until they retire with pensions (haha! pensions!).
More mandatory schooling would cause a chain reaction of certificate inflation. Diplomas are already nigh worthless due to slipping standards and grade inflation, and undergraduate degrees are being forced along the same path as the quality of students from the aforementioned system continues to fall, but students must be admitted regardless to keep the financial gears of the colleges and universities turning. Mandatory undergraduate degrees would just move the goal posts, making them well nigh worthless too, and then graduate degrees would be the filtering mechanism for hiring managers, making success an even harder and longer road than it already is.
There are already more degrees, especially undergraduate, circulating than are deserved or even needed.
This sheds rather a lot of light on your past performances around here. You're still staying on my foes list though.
My father-in-law has a PhD in CS and he is in industry applying it to the real world. My sister-in-law is earning a PhD in linguistics and will probably apply it within academia. That is a fairly normal division, PhDs in the sciences are more likely to gravitate toward actual industrial application, and the arts/humanities toward academic application. It's natural since there are rarely if ever any businesses that need PhDs in English Literature.
However it's disgusting that you are so dismissive and even derisive of people who work so hard, and depending on the institution that employs them, will probably go on to educate scores of people. Educated people are the key to not becoming a broken society in the first place that needs foreigners to come dig wells for them.
The character limit has quite a bit to do with it. Twitter by design can never be anything more than a bumper sticker fight. If you want a respectful and thoughtful debate, well, honestly one of the few I can even think of is that between Robert Nozick and John Rawls, and that was conducted with entire books.
As for group think, I can only offer the old platitude: be the change you want to see in the world. I won't positively mod stupidity even if its intent would be sympathetic to a position I hold. In fact, I get as much or more bothered by stupidity from "within" than "without" because I don't want some douche representing a good idea badly such that it turns people away.
Holy crap that was so stupid... how is this shit on TV anywhere? In the first place pottery, if not necessarily porcelain, preceded glass EVERYWHERE, but secondly in Science and Civilisation in China Volume 4, Part 1 Dr. Joseph Needham writes at length about optics in dynastic China, including "burning-lenses" in use during the Tang Dynasty that were essentially magnifying glasses applied to concentrate sunlight to cauterize wounds.
Where did you hear that bullshit? Do you ever confirm anything before you parrot?
But just think of this adapted to file systems and networks and terminals... it will be just like Hackers the movie!
What every interface designer has realized is that 3D "flying" mechanics are bullshit gimmicks that everybody hates within minutes of use. If something can be available immediately, it should be, you shouldn't have to "fly" to it just so you can admire what a "cool" visual effect that is. Interfaces aren't flat because people are uncreative and stupid, they're flat because that is the most efficient way to present information.
This is why my first sentence was a warning against conflation. You're conflating talent with knowledge. They are not the same. You can teach almost anybody to play an instrument to a certain level of technical competency. However, just because somebody can read music and play notes does not make them talented. If they cannot transcend the mechanical aspect of music and play (let alone compose!) in a way that connects them emotionally with their audience (which is a talent), it will never matter who they learned from or how hard they studied.
It's a matter of 'necessary but not sufficient'. You're right, most musicians have to learn from others the techniques of music, but if they lack an inherent talent, that knowledge by itself will not be enough to carry them forward.
In Greece that's more offensive than just one anyway.
If the thing that moves you about music is production value, I can't help you, but you need help.
Anecdotal though it may be, I will point to my favorite guzheng player as an example. Bei Bei He started out just posting amateur videos of performances to YouTube (which is when I started following her). Recording quality? Mediocre at best, but excellent performances. She self-published her first album, which caught the eye of an indie producer who collaborated with her on her second. Her music has been several times used as interstitials on NPR and is gaining popularity (though I doubt it will or even could be mainstream... guzhengs are unknown to most Americans/Westerners), but it started with self-published mediocre quality videos on YouTube. Talent shines regardless of tools.
You're conflating a lot things here. Talent is the first and last key to art, and can overcome inferior tools and distribution. However talent is singular, and cannot be bought or taught. At a certain point the quality of tools reaches a sort of "Monster Cables" level of diminishing returns. Truly good music will sound amazing whether it is recorded and produced in a high budget studio with a stupidly huge team or if it is recorded with a few hundred bucks worth of mid-grade hobbyist equipment and the artists themselves. Really expensive tools and teams can make talentless douchebags sound good, that's the whole pop music industry in a nutshell, but people with talent remain so even with inferior equipment.
How can the current and future system have been prohibitive of past achievements if anybody can record and release themselves? I think you're in denial. Yes, the "record album" paradigm is dead, and rightfully. Now there is no magical middleman prerequisite to distribution. In that there can be no loss.
Law enforcement seems to get more and more antagonistic to the people they supposedly "serve" year over year. There is a severe conflict of interest arising as law enforcement has grown into a revenue stream for government as its primary function, to the point where major crimes are sidelined. (Listen to the second part of This American Life episode about Adrian Schoolcraft. It is sickening.)
The prison population can and should be drastically reduced with the elimination of jail time for many non-violent offenses. There are a number of ways to financially and logistically punish non-violent offenders without locking them up. That should be a last resort, not a first, but the bail bonds industry is actually the main opponent of this sort of reform because it would cut their revenue stream drastically.
However there is nothing that can be done about the financial nature of speech in democracy. Print costs money, TV and radio cost money, rallies cost money, signs cost money, even web hosting and bandwidth cost money. And that money pays for the candidate to be able to speak and be heard, so the SCotUS is wholly correct in ruling as they have over and over that money is speech and protected as such. The best we can do is make sure that the accounting is as public and open as is feasible.
And as for unemployment/food/housing, your article focuses on the aftermath of the financial crisis and recession. That's like moaning that a house is ruined after a tornado hit it. Yeah, duh, things are bad right now, but performance over the long term has been historically much better. When you look at each American decade as an aggregate, it's always positive. We're already up from the bottom of the crisis, the question is how far can we go in a few years and what policies will enable growth? Growth sure as hell won't come from more taxes and regulations.
Speaking of that and health insurance, current law is very likely preventing job growth, as small companies have to stay below 50 employees or be forced to provide health care. That's an effective hiring freeze for all businesses of that size. Congratulations, no jobs and no health care, all courtesy of bullshit legislative micromanagement.
Further, the UNCRC, while a largely well-intentioned accord, is critically deficient in some areas. The 'best interests of the child' might sound great, but its not a legitimate legal test, rather a fill in the blank to justify anything a government wishes to do with respect to children. So long as a government claims their actions are in the 'best interests' the courts are likely to agree because there is no standard for the test. Additionally there are provisions for children's 'right to privacy' which is antithetical to the parents' responsibility of protecting their children. There is a reason why children do not have the same privacy as adults, adults have earned through experience the right to not have their mail read or calls monitored, as it is assumed that they can deal with potential threats themselves, but it is a parent's responsibility to make sure, through monitoring communications if necessary, that their children are not naively walking into the trap of a predator.
Lastly the UNCRC insidiously with one hand promotes freedom of expression while with the other hand denies freedom of information (literally requiring states to "protect" children from "harmful information"). What use is expression when the promotion of ignorance is the price? Tiered knowledge is nonsense promoted by an echo chamber of moralists hiding behind academic credentials. There are more flaws to the UNCRC, but I am not going to go through it line by line, suffice to say the Senate has done its job in not ratifying it.
Protecting citizens from dangerous ideas like democratic reform. It's a fairly simple dichotomy, the US censors to retain economic power, while China censors to retain political power. In the end it's always about power.
You apparently failed to notice the the phrase 'her replacement'.
Privacy died a long time ago. At least when I get to the age where I have to worry about prostate cancer I won't be quite so... butthurt about it.