Yes, we are bigger than Romania. We also have more money than they, per capita, and more people. Your point is puzzling; we aren't trying to do the same with the same amount of money. Resources scale with population and wealth. If what you said somehow made sense, we'd have no highways or electrical power outside of the cities.
You did't address the fact that the ISPs and telcos were given tens of billions in tax breaks in the last fifteen years to build the networks they now say they cannot afford to build. I was there, I remember. They stole the money; the OP is correct.
And the "government" built the roads, the phone lines, the water systems, the waste management systems, the airports, the regulatory systems that you use every day without noticing. Not only is government - that's us, it's us - capable, but does it far more cheaply than private entrepeneurs claim they can do it. Private investors want profits, and will game the customers for ever more each quarter. And do; this is abundantly obvious from the current example of the telcos sandbagging Netflix and raising rates. Other countries (as we used to do) set up the projects, build the infrastructure, and contract out the maintenance. And get far, far more payback for far less outlay. In the US, the outlay is eternal and goes into tens of billions in profits each year instead of network growth. The profits finance 1) raises for executives 2) political bribery 3) war chests for buying out competitors and patents so that the companies can protect their monopoly status. It's robbery by ideology. The free market doesn't work, because markets are not free - they are gamed by clever, motivated tribes of thieves who are far more agile and informed than you or your representatives can hope to be. Cut them out.
How do you make Google Docs equivalent to Office, if you don't have anyone in-house who knows what Office can do? Gotta know it to match it. Some Word users complain that Google doesn't understand their more esoteric needs, such as style templates. If Google devs don't know what those are and how people use them, how can they meet people's wishes? This is a good thing.
And what doctor could you see that would take you with almost no notice? They are booked weeks in advance. You'd be more likely to go to the ER.
So, you get sick, you need doctor's note to stay home, which is practically impossible to obtain, and you'd have to get to the doctor, possibly using public trans, while you are too sick to go to work.
Do the managers of the US know this? Yup. Do they care? Would, but if they made a fuss, they'd be fired or passed over for promotion. The impetus for this decision comes from top - the very top, Koch brothers-type top. Billionaires made this standard policy, and it's been trickling down on our faces for decades. No unions or any employee juice of any kind, plus a government that is hands-off regulating employers, yields an ever-downward slide of rights to perks to fire-at-will. Look at what happened in Michigan yesterday; that was a Koch brothers front operation blitzkrieging yet another slide into the abyss.Every day in every way, we get less and they get more.
There will never be an economic environment that will satisfy people who don't want us to go to space. There will always be a fiscal crisis caused by people who don't want to pay taxes, worlds without end, amen. The human race also, on the vast whole, doesn't believe we are living on a planet. We're talking people, the majority, who think Jesus or Mohammed or the Messiah or the great wheel of destruction and creation is coming to end the world. They don't believe in an actual *world* - they think reality is temporary and really a rather shoddy piece of work.
Between people who don't believe in science or planets in the quietude of their own minds, and the majority who pray, in fear or with bitterness or with hate that the world be destroyed and remade any minute now, the governments of the world aren't going to finance anything more than tax breaks for rich people, roads for more cars, and whatever other large-scale projects people think they need to make sure the world of tomorrow is exactly like the world they grew up in.
Space travel requires imagination. The idea to construct space colonies require entire encyclopedias of knowledge even space scientists don't believe in acquiring - they are trained to think small. We are being sold Space on the business class plan - someone makes money, ergo it is good.
But we need to diversify our civilization's base. Staying on this planet, only here, is suicide. Mathematically certain as a meteor strike.
Ten billion is what we spend in Afghanistan and Iraq every what, five days?
"Well you wouldn't launch from just *any* airport... you always launch eastward to gain speed from earth's rotation. "
Actually, it takes off - and flies - like a jetliner, so orientation of the runway is not a factor. The pilot can turn the plane eastward after takeoff, and then gun the engine.
That five million are not programmers and engineers. The H1Bs are. They are imported precisely to counter employment of local graduates and to drive down wages. This is not a supposition. There is more than enough corporate money to pay increasing salaries to college graduates - but they want to keep that money, which they pay to themselves, of course. So they flood the tech market. It's not a huge overall effect, but it is targeted and successful in reducing American salaries. And in case no one notices it, we live in our own country. We'd like to see our wages increase proportionally to the increasing megawealth of our employers' bosses.
This program was created in 1990, not 1790. It exists only to drive down wages. It exists because the employers are lying about the purpose of the program. There is no worker shortage. There is a shortage of workers who will work for cheap so that the corps can increase profits 20% a quarter.
That money that is not being paid to us is not being used by us to buy a house, an education, buy goods, or to raise our children. That money is being diverted from us to make rich people far richer. It is helping to inhibit the wage growth of the few occupations left to the American middle class that could conceivably use real, actual free market forces to their advantage. It is shutting the free market down, not advancing it.
It's an unfair market. They are bringing in workers from across the world, from different markets and economies, to drive down wages. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Market. They have accomplished this, as Cringley illustrates, by lying and cheating. If they were not permitted to lie to us and to cheat us, our wages would be much higher, their profits would be a tiny bit lower, and the low wage workers would be working in their own countries where they *would* be paid a fair market wage, that is, a wage proportionate to the local standards. This isn't just about fairness, or about the simple purpose of this duplicity is to make our lords so much more rich - it's about national security, *real* national security, not the militaristic crap about being prepared for China to bomb us. To have a United States with citizens that can advance their careers, earn more money, buy homes and educate children, we cannot compete with workers from countries made impoverished by too many babies too quickly added to the local economies. This isn't a game - this is killing our middle class. This is converting the US into a country of bosses and slobs, with the money more and more going to the bosses. Numbers bear this out. It's ain't the debt that's killing us, it's the wealth redistribution to the top tier.
This is about *your* survival. The wage pressure is always downwards, with pauses to get used to the new lower levels.
You may have yours, but, so what? A good chunk of us will not have ours, and more importantly, the coming generations will get even less. Even Jerry Pournelle, free market idealist extraordinaire, said himself a few days ago on TWIT that to succeed in the future, people will have to make themselves valuable to those with the money. In other words, make yourself useful to the rich people. Even he's seen that the middle class is rapidly converting into a servant class for the wealthy.
Curtail the H1Bs. Let the home countries take care of their own workers by building their own industries. That's how markets work. O class workers can come here as much as they like, because the are exceptional, and by that, it is meant *few*.
Lying to us about a worker "shortage" when there simply isn't one? This isn't about "business", this is about government run by businesses for businesses' purposes, not for the benefit of the actual citizens. Government, under orders from businesses, opened up the H1B program quotas. That is not a free market move, that is a straight-out government-mandated interference in our local markets so that businesses can gain profit and leverage over US citizens. Wages stagnate and fall, H1Bs work without complaint else they be deported. Free market for whom?
Don't be silly. Don't need to drug the passengers. Just shackle and blindfold them. Hell, we've done it to thousands of innocent brown people whose names we'll never know, and who will never see the sun again. Let's just do it to everyone.
As always, the usual problem, always changing. After donating, we get on the USA shit list for the rest of our lives, spend quality time with the TSA at airports with laptop copying and/or confiscation, and mysterious entities investigating our friends. Employers and schools secretly inquiring about our backgrounds see security flags. Intimidation doesn't require actual actions against us. The threat alone is what causes donations and support to dry up.
Chinese companies make almost every circuit board, CPU, and radio comm chip in the world. They've had backdoors in "your" internet for over a decade. This happened in the name of reducing labor costs and breaking unions, and increasing profits for American companies. Now we really don't "control" anything with electrons flipping about anymore. You don't ever know what hidden capabilities are built into devices; they could lie hidden, sleepers, until needed. So who controls what is moot. We gave up control a long time ago.
That is an article of faith. However, it is baldly evident that it no longer is uncontrolled. The internet has been brought to heel, and will soon be locked down to the atomic level.
Quantum computing will come after that, and there will no longer be Too Many Secrets, Marty, because they will be able to crack any key-based encryption. This is a long game.
There will be encrypted comm, of course, using quantum-entangled computers, but WE will never see that. It will, by the mechanics of power, be reserved for the government and associated corporations to use. One law for me, and another for thee.
The end result will be a prison for us, with guarded, monitored, recorded internet services, and a closed secret world for our, let's just say it, masters. We've the social and governmental DNA for it already; we've already accepted secret wars and blacked-out war zones. We're okay with phone and car tracking. There's nothing to stop this.
Ask Wikileaks, Assange, and anyone who supported them financially about how much better it is. "Better" depends entirely on whether or not you are fucking with American power. The Chinese do the same with whomever fucks with their power. This is about an empire taking over the internet at its core. DNS and so many other things should be decentralized and encrypted. No power base in the world will let that happen - they need to monitor us to maintain power.
said the US opposes proposals from some of the 'nondemocratic nations' that include tracking and monitoring content and user information, which 'makes it very easy for nations to monitor traffic.'"
They are "broke" because the laws are being run by the Republicans. If the dems win the next election, then suddenly they won't be "broke" anymore. 'nuff said.
This Catbeller has been banging this drum for over eleven years, may I just say?
The "free market" ain't, and never can be, free, when you are dealing with players who understand the markets better than you do, and, furthermore, will cheat like motherfuckers. Conspiracy isn't necessary. The unwritten rules are always clear. Manufacture scarcity.
The new forestry corporations did it in the late 80s, buying up forests and rights, until in 1992 they tripled wood prices overnight, blaming Clinton and his evil environmental regulations, which didn't exist yet, being as he just was elected, for the cause. They cornered the market and fixed prices. The on;y congresscitter to object was fabulously ejected by them funding his shiny new opponent. No one else dared say a word.
Enron INfamously pretended that evil regulations made them incapable of restraining costs as they shut down power plants on mathematicians say-so to jack prices. California's entire budget mess for the last ten years can be traced back to that robbery. Free market is only free for those who control the market.
Enron not-so-famously was hell-bent on cornering the world's water supplies in drought areas - guess why... but don't worry, in their absence other bastards have bought up water rights, and soon "scarcity" will quintuple water prices across the world.
Kucinich in Cleveland was right, when he said the new private power companies would raise rates after they took over power grids. Cleveland to this day still has lower electrical bills than all the surrounding cities with free-market electric companies gouging them for decades.
And internet and radio internet... ah, so damned obviously they have refused to build infrastructure and have been "forced" to raise prices while the rest of the world simply licenses companies to build infrastructure at a decent price. Eleven YEARS ago, here, I posted a quick calculation: how much have people paid, in total, for DSL, cable, and modem charges combined - and how much had the telcos actually spent. It's eleven years later. We've pumped a good chunk of a trillion into their pockets, and they've spent a tiny fraction of that on actual buildout. They are taking us like a lost tourist.
Most of the rest of the world does it correctly. Scale has nothing to do with it. We don't have a limited amount of cash and a limited workforce; our companies can scale up any buildout. THEY DON'T WANT TO.
Copy whatever country did it right. Let local muni governments build out the systems for a fraction of the cost that these lying sacks of excrement quote. Let this end. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Market. Not when the "free" market companies can buy each other or merge, thus eliminating the market, or simply cooperate by obeying unwritten rules to jackup prices.
How about this: we stop fucking invading and attempting to conquer other countries with giant oil fields? You see, that way, we don't have to develop blahblah battlefield tactical blahblah, don't have to take care of over thirty thousand men and women with their limbs and sex organs blown off, and don't have to excise from our collective consciousness the fact we've slaughtered, tortured and imprisoned over a hundred thousand innocent people for no damned reason whatsoever while the actual perp lived in Pakistan for over ten fucking years in total peace. Just saying.
Neutral journalism: Opinions Divided on Flat Earth Theory
"Biased" journalism: Eccentrics Propose Earth is Flat, Say Everyone is Deluded
I'll take "biased". There is objective truth based on evidence. The universe does not care about opinions. Tax cuts do not make the economy grow. Jesus is not coming. Homeopathy does not work. Scientology is a fraud. Ayn Rand was a sociopath writing for future sociopaths.
The overwhelming victory of "objective" journalism has permitted lunatics to take over Congress and the education system. I've had enough of "objective" reporting. Enough low-information voters seeking low-information reporting. Some people are right, some are wrong. Say the truth and save the world. Really, it is the only hope.
Since possessing such info is usually against the law for the FBI to have, agencies like the FBI have private companies gather it up for them. Then the FBI, or the NSA, or the CIA, or whoever, just gets the data on request through the "legal" channel of the private company. This is standard procedure. This means that the story is not danrathered yet; we are perhaps splitting hairs. The question is: WHO were they gathering the information for? Anyone? Was that "anyone" any law or spook service that asked for it, and how could we ever tell? Possession of such information by a private company which has no need for it should be on-the-face-of-it evidence of intent to provide to those who can't get, or are not allowed to get, such private data.
Life is hard. Not impossible. Air can be made to breathe. Tunnels made of brick, covered by soil, protect the colonists from radiation. Water is lying on the ground,ready to be melted. Tech exists, science has it covered. Plants can be grown and eaten. It's how we live here, after all; every difficulty you mention has an analog on Earth, along with the added dimension of people shooting at you.
The work will be done by the colonists, so it's really not anyone's problem but their own. We need to keep sending supplies and more people; eventually they will make both their own goods and new people as well, and won't need more supplies.
The real off-world backup for humanity lies in free-space rotating habitats, which would be one hell of a lot easier to maintain, but no where near as much fun to explore as a whole new world.
And we spend trillions trying to conquer oil fields. Mars and free space cost a tiny percentage of that. And they can give us back powersats, metal, and the all-important HOPE that we no longer seem to feel.
Yes, the high speed winds of Mars are a problem. Read more about it. 1% pressure compared to Earth is a problem if the winds move fast enough. Dust and fines mess up equipment.
I've been a member of the Planetary Society. But, I disagree with the basic thrust of their scientists' stated position on manned space flight.
First, manned flights weren't eating the money that would have gone towards unmanned science missions. We've cut manned flight for over forty years. We've it down to zero, right now. And no money seems to be newly flowing to the unmanned side of the house, is it? False enemy they've made.
Second, we are proceeding at a glacial pace! And even if we launched a fleet every two years, we are still communicating at a top speed of 8 kilobits a second. We've high def cameras that can transmit 4K, yet we are still looking at 1976 Viking-speed photos slowly uploading from Curiosity. What use is this? We can't see nary a damned thing. We need a high speed relay in orbit around Mars, preferably nuclear powered, to beam back a laser signal, or at least short wavelength radio. This is ridiculous. We were supposed to launch one, but, no money. A trillion for other things tho...
Third. The hell with Apollo. Kids, that was a political stunt. No, no NO. We do not send a manned expedition to Mars. We send a colonization wave to Mars, or why bother? Send people to land and stay for life. No get-rocks-and-come-back-yay-science. Live there. And you will get science in petabyte amounts, a whole new world of science. It costs far less to land them without the enormous complexity necessary to send them back. Anyone who wants to spend 9 months in transit most likely never wanted to come back in the first place - these will be true believers. I'd go. Not to mention that if a meteor hits Earth and wipes out all life, Mars will still be there, the backup drive.
Fourth. Space scientists for thirty years have been banging the is-there-life-on-Mars gong, because it was the one facet they thought they could interest Americans in. Give it up. I don't give a damn about the cellular life that might have lived there once. We will never find it, launching a lander every ten years or so. Only humans can find such things, and they have to be there to do it, with hammers and drills and microscopes, right next to the damned rock. Besides which, if you send life to Mars, there WILL be life on Mars. And if we don't, inevitably there won't be any on Earth, either. We can't keep all our bets on the blur marble; it will be hit someday by Lucifer's Hammer.
The Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act is itself illegal under international law. You don't just declare an embassy an un-embassy when it suits you. Expel, yes, revoke ambassadorships, yes, but you don't decide international law is moot and invade. Otherwise the embassy system is a joke.
Let's see, what if, oh, the Russians did it to the American Embassy? Oh, that's bad? So it's only okay if WE do it? So this is about empire, then.
Some Iranian students did that to the American embassy back in the 70s, and the US is STILL retaliating against Iran to this day for that affront. But, you know, It's OK If It's The USA.
The citizen soldiers didn't affect the American Revolution one way or another. Washington and his regular troops, horribly under-funded by the money-hoarding businessmen, did the heavy lifting and the heavy dying.
But all that would have been for naught but for Ben Franklin in Paris, persuading the French to fund our insurgency under the table. And most importantly, we would have defeated but for the intervention of the French Navy, which engaged the British warships at the very end.
Guys with muskets do not defeat trained armies. We were lucky that the French wanted the British to lose. Else those household guns would have been shoved up the traitors' collective bums before the British hanged them.
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Yes, we are bigger than Romania. We also have more money than they, per capita, and more people. Your point is puzzling; we aren't trying to do the same with the same amount of money. Resources scale with population and wealth. If what you said somehow made sense, we'd have no highways or electrical power outside of the cities.
You did't address the fact that the ISPs and telcos were given tens of billions in tax breaks in the last fifteen years to build the networks they now say they cannot afford to build. I was there, I remember. They stole the money; the OP is correct.
And the "government" built the roads, the phone lines, the water systems, the waste management systems, the airports, the regulatory systems that you use every day without noticing. Not only is government - that's us, it's us - capable, but does it far more cheaply than private entrepeneurs claim they can do it. Private investors want profits, and will game the customers for ever more each quarter. And do; this is abundantly obvious from the current example of the telcos sandbagging Netflix and raising rates. Other countries (as we used to do) set up the projects, build the infrastructure, and contract out the maintenance. And get far, far more payback for far less outlay. In the US, the outlay is eternal and goes into tens of billions in profits each year instead of network growth. The profits finance 1) raises for executives 2) political bribery 3) war chests for buying out competitors and patents so that the companies can protect their monopoly status. It's robbery by ideology. The free market doesn't work, because markets are not free - they are gamed by clever, motivated tribes of thieves who are far more agile and informed than you or your representatives can hope to be. Cut them out.
How do you make Google Docs equivalent to Office, if you don't have anyone in-house who knows what Office can do? Gotta know it to match it. Some Word users complain that Google doesn't understand their more esoteric needs, such as style templates. If Google devs don't know what those are and how people use them, how can they meet people's wishes? This is a good thing.
And what doctor could you see that would take you with almost no notice? They are booked weeks in advance. You'd be more likely to go to the ER.
So, you get sick, you need doctor's note to stay home, which is practically impossible to obtain, and you'd have to get to the doctor, possibly using public trans, while you are too sick to go to work.
Do the managers of the US know this? Yup. Do they care? Would, but if they made a fuss, they'd be fired or passed over for promotion. The impetus for this decision comes from top - the very top, Koch brothers-type top. Billionaires made this standard policy, and it's been trickling down on our faces for decades. No unions or any employee juice of any kind, plus a government that is hands-off regulating employers, yields an ever-downward slide of rights to perks to fire-at-will. Look at what happened in Michigan yesterday; that was a Koch brothers front operation blitzkrieging yet another slide into the abyss.Every day in every way, we get less and they get more.
There will never be an economic environment that will satisfy people who don't want us to go to space. There will always be a fiscal crisis caused by people who don't want to pay taxes, worlds without end, amen. The human race also, on the vast whole, doesn't believe we are living on a planet. We're talking people, the majority, who think Jesus or Mohammed or the Messiah or the great wheel of destruction and creation is coming to end the world. They don't believe in an actual *world* - they think reality is temporary and really a rather shoddy piece of work.
Between people who don't believe in science or planets in the quietude of their own minds, and the majority who pray, in fear or with bitterness or with hate that the world be destroyed and remade any minute now, the governments of the world aren't going to finance anything more than tax breaks for rich people, roads for more cars, and whatever other large-scale projects people think they need to make sure the world of tomorrow is exactly like the world they grew up in.
Space travel requires imagination. The idea to construct space colonies require entire encyclopedias of knowledge even space scientists don't believe in acquiring - they are trained to think small. We are being sold Space on the business class plan - someone makes money, ergo it is good.
But we need to diversify our civilization's base. Staying on this planet, only here, is suicide. Mathematically certain as a meteor strike.
Ten billion is what we spend in Afghanistan and Iraq every what, five days?
"Well you wouldn't launch from just *any* airport... you always launch eastward to gain speed from earth's rotation. "
Actually, it takes off - and flies - like a jetliner, so orientation of the runway is not a factor. The pilot can turn the plane eastward after takeoff, and then gun the engine.
That five million are not programmers and engineers. The H1Bs are. They are imported precisely to counter employment of local graduates and to drive down wages. This is not a supposition. There is more than enough corporate money to pay increasing salaries to college graduates - but they want to keep that money, which they pay to themselves, of course. So they flood the tech market. It's not a huge overall effect, but it is targeted and successful in reducing American salaries. And in case no one notices it, we live in our own country. We'd like to see our wages increase proportionally to the increasing megawealth of our employers' bosses.
This program was created in 1990, not 1790. It exists only to drive down wages. It exists because the employers are lying about the purpose of the program. There is no worker shortage. There is a shortage of workers who will work for cheap so that the corps can increase profits 20% a quarter.
That money that is not being paid to us is not being used by us to buy a house, an education, buy goods, or to raise our children. That money is being diverted from us to make rich people far richer. It is helping to inhibit the wage growth of the few occupations left to the American middle class that could conceivably use real, actual free market forces to their advantage. It is shutting the free market down, not advancing it.
It's an unfair market. They are bringing in workers from across the world, from different markets and economies, to drive down wages. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Market. They have accomplished this, as Cringley illustrates, by lying and cheating. If they were not permitted to lie to us and to cheat us, our wages would be much higher, their profits would be a tiny bit lower, and the low wage workers would be working in their own countries where they *would* be paid a fair market wage, that is, a wage proportionate to the local standards. This isn't just about fairness, or about the simple purpose of this duplicity is to make our lords so much more rich - it's about national security, *real* national security, not the militaristic crap about being prepared for China to bomb us. To have a United States with citizens that can advance their careers, earn more money, buy homes and educate children, we cannot compete with workers from countries made impoverished by too many babies too quickly added to the local economies. This isn't a game - this is killing our middle class. This is converting the US into a country of bosses and slobs, with the money more and more going to the bosses. Numbers bear this out. It's ain't the debt that's killing us, it's the wealth redistribution to the top tier.
This is about *your* survival. The wage pressure is always downwards, with pauses to get used to the new lower levels.
You may have yours, but, so what? A good chunk of us will not have ours, and more importantly, the coming generations will get even less. Even Jerry Pournelle, free market idealist extraordinaire, said himself a few days ago on TWIT that to succeed in the future, people will have to make themselves valuable to those with the money. In other words, make yourself useful to the rich people. Even he's seen that the middle class is rapidly converting into a servant class for the wealthy.
Curtail the H1Bs. Let the home countries take care of their own workers by building their own industries. That's how markets work. O class workers can come here as much as they like, because the are exceptional, and by that, it is meant *few*.
Lying to us about a worker "shortage" when there simply isn't one? This isn't about "business", this is about government run by businesses for businesses' purposes, not for the benefit of the actual citizens. Government, under orders from businesses, opened up the H1B program quotas. That is not a free market move, that is a straight-out government-mandated interference in our local markets so that businesses can gain profit and leverage over US citizens. Wages stagnate and fall, H1Bs work without complaint else they be deported. Free market for whom?
Don't be silly. Don't need to drug the passengers. Just shackle and blindfold them. Hell, we've done it to thousands of innocent brown people whose names we'll never know, and who will never see the sun again. Let's just do it to everyone.
As always, the usual problem, always changing. After donating, we get on the USA shit list for the rest of our lives, spend quality time with the TSA at airports with laptop copying and/or confiscation, and mysterious entities investigating our friends. Employers and schools secretly inquiring about our backgrounds see security flags. Intimidation doesn't require actual actions against us. The threat alone is what causes donations and support to dry up.
Chinese companies make almost every circuit board, CPU, and radio comm chip in the world. They've had backdoors in "your" internet for over a decade. This happened in the name of reducing labor costs and breaking unions, and increasing profits for American companies. Now we really don't "control" anything with electrons flipping about anymore. You don't ever know what hidden capabilities are built into devices; they could lie hidden, sleepers, until needed. So who controls what is moot. We gave up control a long time ago.
"OUR" internet? Are you under the impression that the US owns the internet?
That is an article of faith. However, it is baldly evident that it no longer is uncontrolled. The internet has been brought to heel, and will soon be locked down to the atomic level.
Quantum computing will come after that, and there will no longer be Too Many Secrets, Marty, because they will be able to crack any key-based encryption. This is a long game.
There will be encrypted comm, of course, using quantum-entangled computers, but WE will never see that. It will, by the mechanics of power, be reserved for the government and associated corporations to use. One law for me, and another for thee.
The end result will be a prison for us, with guarded, monitored, recorded internet services, and a closed secret world for our, let's just say it, masters. We've the social and governmental DNA for it already; we've already accepted secret wars and blacked-out war zones. We're okay with phone and car tracking. There's nothing to stop this.
Ask Wikileaks, Assange, and anyone who supported them financially about how much better it is. "Better" depends entirely on whether or not you are fucking with American power. The Chinese do the same with whomever fucks with their power. This is about an empire taking over the internet at its core. DNS and so many other things should be decentralized and encrypted. No power base in the world will let that happen - they need to monitor us to maintain power.
What... sheer... motherfucking... hypocrisy...
IOIIITUSA : It's OK if it's the USA
Must be why Wyoming has no water or electricity. Can't be done.
They are "broke" because the laws are being run by the Republicans. If the dems win the next election, then suddenly they won't be "broke" anymore. 'nuff said.
This Catbeller has been banging this drum for over eleven years, may I just say?
The "free market" ain't, and never can be, free, when you are dealing with players who understand the markets better than you do, and, furthermore, will cheat like motherfuckers. Conspiracy isn't necessary. The unwritten rules are always clear. Manufacture scarcity.
The new forestry corporations did it in the late 80s, buying up forests and rights, until in 1992 they tripled wood prices overnight, blaming Clinton and his evil environmental regulations, which didn't exist yet, being as he just was elected, for the cause. They cornered the market and fixed prices. The on;y congresscitter to object was fabulously ejected by them funding his shiny new opponent. No one else dared say a word.
Enron INfamously pretended that evil regulations made them incapable of restraining costs as they shut down power plants on mathematicians say-so to jack prices. California's entire budget mess for the last ten years can be traced back to that robbery. Free market is only free for those who control the market.
Enron not-so-famously was hell-bent on cornering the world's water supplies in drought areas - guess why... but don't worry, in their absence other bastards have bought up water rights, and soon "scarcity" will quintuple water prices across the world.
Kucinich in Cleveland was right, when he said the new private power companies would raise rates after they took over power grids. Cleveland to this day still has lower electrical bills than all the surrounding cities with free-market electric companies gouging them for decades.
And internet and radio internet... ah, so damned obviously they have refused to build infrastructure and have been "forced" to raise prices while the rest of the world simply licenses companies to build infrastructure at a decent price. Eleven YEARS ago, here, I posted a quick calculation: how much have people paid, in total, for DSL, cable, and modem charges combined - and how much had the telcos actually spent. It's eleven years later. We've pumped a good chunk of a trillion into their pockets, and they've spent a tiny fraction of that on actual buildout. They are taking us like a lost tourist.
Most of the rest of the world does it correctly. Scale has nothing to do with it. We don't have a limited amount of cash and a limited workforce; our companies can scale up any buildout. THEY DON'T WANT TO.
Copy whatever country did it right. Let local muni governments build out the systems for a fraction of the cost that these lying sacks of excrement quote. Let this end. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Market. Not when the "free" market companies can buy each other or merge, thus eliminating the market, or simply cooperate by obeying unwritten rules to jackup prices.
How about this: we stop fucking invading and attempting to conquer other countries with giant oil fields? You see, that way, we don't have to develop blahblah battlefield tactical blahblah, don't have to take care of over thirty thousand men and women with their limbs and sex organs blown off, and don't have to excise from our collective consciousness the fact we've slaughtered, tortured and imprisoned over a hundred thousand innocent people for no damned reason whatsoever while the actual perp lived in Pakistan for over ten fucking years in total peace. Just saying.
Neutral journalism: Opinions Divided on Flat Earth Theory
"Biased" journalism: Eccentrics Propose Earth is Flat, Say Everyone is Deluded
I'll take "biased". There is objective truth based on evidence. The universe does not care about opinions. Tax cuts do not make the economy grow. Jesus is not coming. Homeopathy does not work. Scientology is a fraud. Ayn Rand was a sociopath writing for future sociopaths.
The overwhelming victory of "objective" journalism has permitted lunatics to take over Congress and the education system. I've had enough of "objective" reporting. Enough low-information voters seeking low-information reporting. Some people are right, some are wrong. Say the truth and save the world. Really, it is the only hope.
Since possessing such info is usually against the law for the FBI to have, agencies like the FBI have private companies gather it up for them. Then the FBI, or the NSA, or the CIA, or whoever, just gets the data on request through the "legal" channel of the private company. This is standard procedure. This means that the story is not danrathered yet; we are perhaps splitting hairs. The question is: WHO were they gathering the information for? Anyone? Was that "anyone" any law or spook service that asked for it, and how could we ever tell? Possession of such information by a private company which has no need for it should be on-the-face-of-it evidence of intent to provide to those who can't get, or are not allowed to get, such private data.
Life is hard. Not impossible. Air can be made to breathe. Tunnels made of brick, covered by soil, protect the colonists from radiation. Water is lying on the ground,ready to be melted. Tech exists, science has it covered. Plants can be grown and eaten. It's how we live here, after all; every difficulty you mention has an analog on Earth, along with the added dimension of people shooting at you.
The work will be done by the colonists, so it's really not anyone's problem but their own. We need to keep sending supplies and more people; eventually they will make both their own goods and new people as well, and won't need more supplies.
The real off-world backup for humanity lies in free-space rotating habitats, which would be one hell of a lot easier to maintain, but no where near as much fun to explore as a whole new world.
And we spend trillions trying to conquer oil fields. Mars and free space cost a tiny percentage of that. And they can give us back powersats, metal, and the all-important HOPE that we no longer seem to feel.
Yes, the high speed winds of Mars are a problem. Read more about it. 1% pressure compared to Earth is a problem if the winds move fast enough. Dust and fines mess up equipment.
I've been a member of the Planetary Society. But, I disagree with the basic thrust of their scientists' stated position on manned space flight.
First, manned flights weren't eating the money that would have gone towards unmanned science missions. We've cut manned flight for over forty years. We've it down to zero, right now. And no money seems to be newly flowing to the unmanned side of the house, is it? False enemy they've made.
Second, we are proceeding at a glacial pace! And even if we launched a fleet every two years, we are still communicating at a top speed of 8 kilobits a second. We've high def cameras that can transmit 4K, yet we are still looking at 1976 Viking-speed photos slowly uploading from Curiosity. What use is this? We can't see nary a damned thing. We need a high speed relay in orbit around Mars, preferably nuclear powered, to beam back a laser signal, or at least short wavelength radio. This is ridiculous. We were supposed to launch one, but, no money. A trillion for other things tho...
Third. The hell with Apollo. Kids, that was a political stunt. No, no NO. We do not send a manned expedition to Mars. We send a colonization wave to Mars, or why bother? Send people to land and stay for life. No get-rocks-and-come-back-yay-science. Live there. And you will get science in petabyte amounts, a whole new world of science. It costs far less to land them without the enormous complexity necessary to send them back. Anyone who wants to spend 9 months in transit most likely never wanted to come back in the first place - these will be true believers. I'd go. Not to mention that if a meteor hits Earth and wipes out all life, Mars will still be there, the backup drive.
Fourth. Space scientists for thirty years have been banging the is-there-life-on-Mars gong, because it was the one facet they thought they could interest Americans in. Give it up. I don't give a damn about the cellular life that might have lived there once. We will never find it, launching a lander every ten years or so. Only humans can find such things, and they have to be there to do it, with hammers and drills and microscopes, right next to the damned rock. Besides which, if you send life to Mars, there WILL be life on Mars. And if we don't, inevitably there won't be any on Earth, either. We can't keep all our bets on the blur marble; it will be hit someday by Lucifer's Hammer.
The Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act is itself illegal under international law. You don't just declare an embassy an un-embassy when it suits you. Expel, yes, revoke ambassadorships, yes, but you don't decide international law is moot and invade. Otherwise the embassy system is a joke.
Let's see, what if, oh, the Russians did it to the American Embassy? Oh, that's bad? So it's only okay if WE do it? So this is about empire, then.
Some Iranian students did that to the American embassy back in the 70s, and the US is STILL retaliating against Iran to this day for that affront. But, you know, It's OK If It's The USA.
The citizen soldiers didn't affect the American Revolution one way or another. Washington and his regular troops, horribly under-funded by the money-hoarding businessmen, did the heavy lifting and the heavy dying.
But all that would have been for naught but for Ben Franklin in Paris, persuading the French to fund our insurgency under the table. And most importantly, we would have defeated but for the intervention of the French Navy, which engaged the British warships at the very end.
Guys with muskets do not defeat trained armies. We were lucky that the French wanted the British to lose. Else those household guns would have been shoved up the traitors' collective bums before the British hanged them.