Electronic money is used for tracking. They want cash dead, so little people can't hide. Big people will, of course, perform illegal acts with secret funds as they always do.
Electronic voting is used for cheating. Nothing wrong with the Canadian paper ballot system, except that it is impossible to cheat when two parties are staring at your every counted ballot. Your conservatives want to take over the counting just enough to insure they cannot lose in the future. Not that it seems necessary, as they are installing their own Fox News clone to redefine reality and have a leader in power with less than 30% of the popular vote. But it never hurts to make damned sure you can't lose critical counts.
No one on Wall Street goes to prison, drnb. Obama didn't make that happen. Wall Street did. They run the country. Don't like it? So vote Republican. Oh, wait...
We had a chance to stop this takeover back in the eighties and nineties. We needed to provide taxpayer money to fund elections, remove all contributions WHATSOEVER, and restrict candidates to single points of communications. Running for office should require three staffers and a camera, not a billion dollars for media buys.
But now, candidates must, truly must, do what money tells them to do, not because they want to get rich, but because they know that if they buck Wall Street, a billion dollars will rain down in opposition to them and kick them out of office. This is the death of democracy you're seeing, not "Obama", who somehow you've noticed has just invented kowtowing to Wall Street. Bush and Reagan utterly caved and let them take over, for Godzakes. This isn't about Democrats, it's about money and how our collective distaste for funding elections by taxes has let infinite amounts of money shut down democracy here, and soon around the world. We did this to ourselves with our own ideology and distaste for politicians and the political process. Democracy has never been popular with Americans. They prefer wealthy landlords, more or less, as long as they are entertained.
Yet still they flourish, and their predecessors flourished centuries before them.
No one guaranteed that history will stop for you because you've always made a living doing what you like to do. Tell that to the steelworkers, auto factory workers, and all the other people who were told to go work for Wal-Mart. No one sued for them. And they are the country.
To stop history, we need to monitor everyone's communications and make sure they don't read what they are not supposed to read. A total eyeball control police state. And now we have one.
Congratulations, "content creators". You've stuck a meter on everyone's eyeballs. No fascist state has ever dreamed of accomplishing what you have done. We used to mock the Soviets because all copiers had to be registered with the State to make sure unapproved materials weren't being reproduced. And here we are. And here we will live. And it's all because of you. Winners all.
The publishers have recently collectively sued - twice! - libraries and such to shut down the practice of lending books, I shit you not. Not little tries, but HUGE attempts. What sickens me is that ebooks, instead of setting books free for all, is becoming a method of stopping centuries of reading books for free. And not only that, but they are burying any book that can't be show to be copyright free - millions of paper books will disappear when the libraries are finally closed down. Google and Microsoft almost saved them all - but it seems that the idiots will win. And history loses. REAL history - the words will disappear.
Municipalities are the only possible solution for laying cheap, no-profit fiber to everyone's homes. They do it with water and power; exactly as you say, private water and power companies wouldn't cut it - too much outlay for too little return. That's why the Tennessee Valley Authority did what Edison wouldn't. No munis, no gigabit for everyone.
4K video - without fiber, not possible. Also, Netflix in 720 or 1080 isn't really possible without gigabit pipes and no bandwidth caps. Right now it looks like 1996 wants its videos back.
Keep in mind that in such a situation, you are surrounded by people panicking, dying, clawing at you, standing there trying to aim, to get you out of the way. Having seen what happens when a crowd of people try to leave a burning nightclub through a doorway, all at the same time, I'd say you probably would not keep your feet. It's shooter's choice; he can flood the area with tear gas, as he did, or smoke bombs, or simply *shut off the lights* by shooting them out. I am all for trying to take the guy out. But in real massacres, it is hard to do what you can do on a firing range. If a shooter carried a six-foot high shield with a camera on one side and a screen on the other, firing through the armor wall, he couldn't be touched by a gun or rifle. Attacker always have advantage.
Yes. After a few years, they were as reliable as they are now. They were not operated by financialists trying to game the system by pretending they had to short your water supply because, well, just because gobbledygook yak yak yak. They built the damned pipes and people got enough water. Same with power.
They did what they did because they were regulated monopolies that were required to plough profits back into their infrastructure instead of being free to drain those profits into outside ventures and their managers' pockets. It is a fact, QED, an open in-your-face fact, that regulated monopolies work, and worked well for over a century. What has changed is the worldwide adoption of free market fundamentalism and the idea that markets provide optimum price. They do not, because business people, unlike electrons or game sprites, are aware of the system they play in and cheat like motherfuckers.
Or you can spend money on water pipes instead of football stadiums or CEO stock options and pay. There is no "shortage" of power, water, or internet capacity. There is simply an incentive not to build or maintain infrastructure, because when scarcity occurs, you can raise prices. Scare = expensive. Come on Enron was ten years ago, you all still remember. They throttled power and raised prices to make lots and lots and LOTS of money. It was a scam. There was enough power.
And in rare cases, such as a small town in the middle of nowhere, or an area in a drought, there really isn't enough water. Too many people, unsustainable landscape. Those people should move. Canada is full of water. The world's population lives next to free water. Go where the water is. Droughts will increase in severity, and we aren't going to see the end of those.
But internet? The cost of the "pipes" and "water" is tiny, and shrinking constantly. There is no incentive to build past an optimum scarcity/profit intersection. They want to raise prices. And we, being free market fundamentalists, believe their lies. Hell, THEY believe their own lies.
Subject to their terms of service - and whims. And they will reinstate the caps after the suckers sign on for a few years. Come on, we've seen this so many times now, we know how the heroin trade works. First shot is free, then the price goes up forever after they are the only game(s) in town.
So we can reach our bandwidth cap in, what, five minutes? Unless it is a Genuine Comcast Internet Content, of course - bandwidth doesn't seem to matter then.
Fastest to the finish line is useless when the finish line is five feet away from the starting line.
Munis should build the infrastructure and operate as non-profits. Shut the telecoms and cable conglomerates down - they are bringing the internet age to a grinding crawl. Internet isn't cable, and it should't be operated for a profit any more than the street system.
Ability scales with population. To say it's easier for a small country to enforce a law is to say that the US can't build roads or armed forces like Switzerland has because we're too big. Obviously ability scales with population and size. And certainly with wealth - the US has enormously more resources per capital than Iceland has. Same deal with the "expense" of installing fiber-to-the-home and such - of course we can do it, at reasonable cost for everyone, and run it for pennies per terabit - it's just that some people don't want it to happen for their own reasons.
I agree that we can't eliminate guns without turning us into a police state. I also look up at all the cameras, the GPS trackers in our phones and our cars (soon), the drones, the blimps, the private cop armies being built - we already have the police state. The 50 cal you have in the basement, ready to revolt? Useless. This isn't pioneer America. Look what happened to Occupy, a totally peaceful and unarmed organization - arrested before they even left their homes. You think you can wave *guns* at the state and live?
Yes, I am afraid of the man on the street with a gun. I know too many people. The man you see before you could be bipolar, angry, depressed, sociopathic, ideologically insane, consumed with end-times nonsense (very common in the US). I am afraid because if everyone is armed, some MUST crack and start firing, every damned day - just as what happened last night.
Keep in mind that being armed would have saved few last night - he tossed in a smoke bomb and started firing. Pop guns, machine guns, armies - nothing works against a simple plan that plays on people's confused perceptions. Surprise trumps defense, every time.
I am afraid it is too late to "control" guns in the US - too many, too ideologically mad. But I think "no military assault weapons" is a sane rule, as no one needs those. Those are for mass slaughter. You need them to kill crowds, not muggers.
And just to remind everyone: laser guns are coming soon. Mass murder with a damned flashlight at distance and with no sound. They are already outlawed. But they will come.
You're right. And Paul Krugman's definition is quoted in the Wikipedia article, and the man who is right *every* time gets to tell me what moral hazard is, any day.
It's a fact that the US has targeted anyone who contributes to Assange, Manning or Wikileaks. They mess with you at the borders, taking your stuff away and questioning you, making it damned clear that you are their bitch for the rest of your life.
So how do we help Assange, Wikileaks and Manning without effectively losing citizenship? I am not overstating this. They will fuck with you for the rest of your life, in countless ways, untraceable to them. And no court will stop them, given that they don't give a fuck what the courts think. Secret police don't have rules.
People in Iceland, like the USA, were in danger of losing their homes due to circumstances beyond their control.
The US yakked about "moral hazard" and let the banks take everyone's homes.
Iceland spent a tiny bit and let people keep their homes.
Now the US has millions of disillusioned, unhomed people whose collective demand has pumped rental costs to unaffordable heights, so they are screwed both ways.
In Iceland, people remained in their homes, found new jobs, and everyone is happy except the Friedmanites and Randites. The moral hazard was understood differently. In Iceland, you say, they believed the real moral hazard was the societal breakdown caused by people ruined through no fault of their own, but by the actions of foreign bankers - so they made sure it didn't happen.
In the USA, it is our firm economic religion that people's failures are their own, and them's the breaks. Except rich bankers of course, who made out fine, own everyone's abandoned homes, and are about to make an even bigger killing when the value goes up and they can unload. The moral hazard is never the rich man's, always the schmuck's. 19th century plantation capitalism; freedom is for the owners, not the serfs. You wanna be free, get rich, lazy parasites...
And so far, Iceland is doing just fine, while Ireland, for instance, did what it was told.
Ireland balanced its budget, and then had to bail out the banks and is now in a cost-cutting death spiral, while being told all that nasty social spending caused it all and has to stop. Milton Friedman for the win there. Thieves take all.
Iceland for the win. Doing what you are told is not, despite what vast numbers of human instinctively believe, the right thing to do.
The e-voting systems are performing their function. Insiders at companies providing and maintaining the machines will tip elections into the Republicans' favor, if and when necessary, if the margins are razor thin and they can slip in techs to "fix" things. Or probably they don't need to do that anymore - they've had a decade to set the backdoors in place so they don't need to go in physically.
(2008 was not necessary - they need Democratic Presidents to blame things on when they have their inevitable economic collapses. And since they won't let a Democrat actually *be* a President, by fillibustering every bill and refusing to seat his judicial appointments, it's not like a Democrat can do anything but take the blame for the extremely active Republican President who precedes him.)
We are now living in the Republican permanent empire. And with "conservatives" in Canada running to "fix" their perfectly verifiable pencil-and-paper system with wonderful e-voting supersystems, Canada will be Harpered forever as well. It's good to be the magic genie behind the screen.
Ireland did it right. Junk the cheatmatic magic voting boxes.
Listen, if they can cheat, they ARE cheating. Their ethics are business ethics, ie none but winning at any cost.
WE THE PEOPLE are the enemy! They are fighting their own nation for the quiet right to lie to us. They are waging war against our ability to get the truth, and treating reporters and sources as terrorists. What few are left.
We call it "lying". We seek leaks because our government is lying to us. We were lied to on a daily basis to get us into a war with a helpless Iraq, and now we are being lied into another war with Iran. We are lied to every single day.
Our news companies now openly cheer on the liars, and slander the truthtellers. Wikileaks merely pipelined the truth to us about a generation earlier than we are used to getting it. We heard the truth now, rather than waiting until the ignored homeless vets of the lied-for wars are wasting away on the streets begging for help, and being ignored, as usual.
Gentle Reader, if truth is not important to you, enlist in the Army and go die for the lies. At least don't cheer on the liars. They are not heroes. They are scum, usually scum who never served and whose children will never serve.
Not to mention the hundreds of thousands, millions of civilians who also die in agony for our right to hear lies.
"There will be an immediate and nearly catastrophic increase in the amount of bad science, pseudo-science and technobabble-based science fiction in popular media."
In Sci-Fi, such as TV shows or novelizations therefrom, yes.
In Science Fiction, where writers drink bourbon and eat science magazines with sprinkles, we'll do it right, as usual, for the real SF devotees.
Assange isn't "hiding". He's seeking asylum from an obvious US plot to drag him in chains to a sham trial on US soil for the crime of embarrassing them.
Slashdot Mirror
Electronic money is used for tracking. They want cash dead, so little people can't hide. Big people will, of course, perform illegal acts with secret funds as they always do.
Electronic voting is used for cheating. Nothing wrong with the Canadian paper ballot system, except that it is impossible to cheat when two parties are staring at your every counted ballot. Your conservatives want to take over the counting just enough to insure they cannot lose in the future. Not that it seems necessary, as they are installing their own Fox News clone to redefine reality and have a leader in power with less than 30% of the popular vote. But it never hurts to make damned sure you can't lose critical counts.
No one on Wall Street goes to prison, drnb. Obama didn't make that happen. Wall Street did. They run the country. Don't like it? So vote Republican. Oh, wait...
We had a chance to stop this takeover back in the eighties and nineties. We needed to provide taxpayer money to fund elections, remove all contributions WHATSOEVER, and restrict candidates to single points of communications. Running for office should require three staffers and a camera, not a billion dollars for media buys.
But now, candidates must, truly must, do what money tells them to do, not because they want to get rich, but because they know that if they buck Wall Street, a billion dollars will rain down in opposition to them and kick them out of office. This is the death of democracy you're seeing, not "Obama", who somehow you've noticed has just invented kowtowing to Wall Street. Bush and Reagan utterly caved and let them take over, for Godzakes. This isn't about Democrats, it's about money and how our collective distaste for funding elections by taxes has let infinite amounts of money shut down democracy here, and soon around the world. We did this to ourselves with our own ideology and distaste for politicians and the political process. Democracy has never been popular with Americans. They prefer wealthy landlords, more or less, as long as they are entertained.
Yet still they flourish, and their predecessors flourished centuries before them.
No one guaranteed that history will stop for you because you've always made a living doing what you like to do. Tell that to the steelworkers, auto factory workers, and all the other people who were told to go work for Wal-Mart. No one sued for them. And they are the country.
To stop history, we need to monitor everyone's communications and make sure they don't read what they are not supposed to read. A total eyeball control police state. And now we have one.
Congratulations, "content creators". You've stuck a meter on everyone's eyeballs. No fascist state has ever dreamed of accomplishing what you have done. We used to mock the Soviets because all copiers had to be registered with the State to make sure unapproved materials weren't being reproduced. And here we are. And here we will live. And it's all because of you. Winners all.
The publishers have recently collectively sued - twice! - libraries and such to shut down the practice of lending books, I shit you not. Not little tries, but HUGE attempts. What sickens me is that ebooks, instead of setting books free for all, is becoming a method of stopping centuries of reading books for free. And not only that, but they are burying any book that can't be show to be copyright free - millions of paper books will disappear when the libraries are finally closed down. Google and Microsoft almost saved them all - but it seems that the idiots will win. And history loses. REAL history - the words will disappear.
So the victim has to hire several hundred lawyers to get his due. Easy. Anyone can do it.
Municipalities are the only possible solution for laying cheap, no-profit fiber to everyone's homes. They do it with water and power; exactly as you say, private water and power companies wouldn't cut it - too much outlay for too little return. That's why the Tennessee Valley Authority did what Edison wouldn't. No munis, no gigabit for everyone.
4K video - without fiber, not possible. Also, Netflix in 720 or 1080 isn't really possible without gigabit pipes and no bandwidth caps. Right now it looks like 1996 wants its videos back.
Keep in mind that in such a situation, you are surrounded by people panicking, dying, clawing at you, standing there trying to aim, to get you out of the way. Having seen what happens when a crowd of people try to leave a burning nightclub through a doorway, all at the same time, I'd say you probably would not keep your feet. It's shooter's choice; he can flood the area with tear gas, as he did, or smoke bombs, or simply *shut off the lights* by shooting them out. I am all for trying to take the guy out. But in real massacres, it is hard to do what you can do on a firing range. If a shooter carried a six-foot high shield with a camera on one side and a screen on the other, firing through the armor wall, he couldn't be touched by a gun or rifle. Attacker always have advantage.
Yes. After a few years, they were as reliable as they are now. They were not operated by financialists trying to game the system by pretending they had to short your water supply because, well, just because gobbledygook yak yak yak. They built the damned pipes and people got enough water. Same with power.
They did what they did because they were regulated monopolies that were required to plough profits back into their infrastructure instead of being free to drain those profits into outside ventures and their managers' pockets. It is a fact, QED, an open in-your-face fact, that regulated monopolies work, and worked well for over a century. What has changed is the worldwide adoption of free market fundamentalism and the idea that markets provide optimum price. They do not, because business people, unlike electrons or game sprites, are aware of the system they play in and cheat like motherfuckers.
TYPO CORRECTION: I meant "fresh water", not "free water".
Or you can spend money on water pipes instead of football stadiums or CEO stock options and pay. There is no "shortage" of power, water, or internet capacity. There is simply an incentive not to build or maintain infrastructure, because when scarcity occurs, you can raise prices. Scare = expensive. Come on Enron was ten years ago, you all still remember. They throttled power and raised prices to make lots and lots and LOTS of money. It was a scam. There was enough power.
And in rare cases, such as a small town in the middle of nowhere, or an area in a drought, there really isn't enough water. Too many people, unsustainable landscape. Those people should move. Canada is full of water. The world's population lives next to free water. Go where the water is. Droughts will increase in severity, and we aren't going to see the end of those.
But internet? The cost of the "pipes" and "water" is tiny, and shrinking constantly. There is no incentive to build past an optimum scarcity/profit intersection. They want to raise prices. And we, being free market fundamentalists, believe their lies. Hell, THEY believe their own lies.
Subject to their terms of service - and whims. And they will reinstate the caps after the suckers sign on for a few years. Come on, we've seen this so many times now, we know how the heroin trade works. First shot is free, then the price goes up forever after they are the only game(s) in town.
So we can reach our bandwidth cap in, what, five minutes? Unless it is a Genuine Comcast Internet Content, of course - bandwidth doesn't seem to matter then.
Fastest to the finish line is useless when the finish line is five feet away from the starting line.
Munis should build the infrastructure and operate as non-profits. Shut the telecoms and cable conglomerates down - they are bringing the internet age to a grinding crawl. Internet isn't cable, and it should't be operated for a profit any more than the street system.
Ability scales with population. To say it's easier for a small country to enforce a law is to say that the US can't build roads or armed forces like Switzerland has because we're too big. Obviously ability scales with population and size. And certainly with wealth - the US has enormously more resources per capital than Iceland has. Same deal with the "expense" of installing fiber-to-the-home and such - of course we can do it, at reasonable cost for everyone, and run it for pennies per terabit - it's just that some people don't want it to happen for their own reasons.
I agree that we can't eliminate guns without turning us into a police state. I also look up at all the cameras, the GPS trackers in our phones and our cars (soon), the drones, the blimps, the private cop armies being built - we already have the police state. The 50 cal you have in the basement, ready to revolt? Useless. This isn't pioneer America. Look what happened to Occupy, a totally peaceful and unarmed organization - arrested before they even left their homes. You think you can wave *guns* at the state and live?
Yes, I am afraid of the man on the street with a gun. I know too many people. The man you see before you could be bipolar, angry, depressed, sociopathic, ideologically insane, consumed with end-times nonsense (very common in the US). I am afraid because if everyone is armed, some MUST crack and start firing, every damned day - just as what happened last night.
Keep in mind that being armed would have saved few last night - he tossed in a smoke bomb and started firing. Pop guns, machine guns, armies - nothing works against a simple plan that plays on people's confused perceptions. Surprise trumps defense, every time.
I am afraid it is too late to "control" guns in the US - too many, too ideologically mad. But I think "no military assault weapons" is a sane rule, as no one needs those. Those are for mass slaughter. You need them to kill crowds, not muggers.
And just to remind everyone: laser guns are coming soon. Mass murder with a damned flashlight at distance and with no sound. They are already outlawed. But they will come.
You're right. And Paul Krugman's definition is quoted in the Wikipedia article, and the man who is right *every* time gets to tell me what moral hazard is, any day.
It's a fact that the US has targeted anyone who contributes to Assange, Manning or Wikileaks. They mess with you at the borders, taking your stuff away and questioning you, making it damned clear that you are their bitch for the rest of your life.
So how do we help Assange, Wikileaks and Manning without effectively losing citizenship? I am not overstating this. They will fuck with you for the rest of your life, in countless ways, untraceable to them. And no court will stop them, given that they don't give a fuck what the courts think. Secret police don't have rules.
People in Iceland, like the USA, were in danger of losing their homes due to circumstances beyond their control.
The US yakked about "moral hazard" and let the banks take everyone's homes.
Iceland spent a tiny bit and let people keep their homes.
Now the US has millions of disillusioned, unhomed people whose collective demand has pumped rental costs to unaffordable heights, so they are screwed both ways.
In Iceland, people remained in their homes, found new jobs, and everyone is happy except the Friedmanites and Randites. The moral hazard was understood differently. In Iceland, you say, they believed the real moral hazard was the societal breakdown caused by people ruined through no fault of their own, but by the actions of foreign bankers - so they made sure it didn't happen.
In the USA, it is our firm economic religion that people's failures are their own, and them's the breaks. Except rich bankers of course, who made out fine, own everyone's abandoned homes, and are about to make an even bigger killing when the value goes up and they can unload. The moral hazard is never the rich man's, always the schmuck's. 19th century plantation capitalism; freedom is for the owners, not the serfs. You wanna be free, get rich, lazy parasites...
And so far, Iceland is doing just fine, while Ireland, for instance, did what it was told.
Ireland balanced its budget, and then had to bail out the banks and is now in a cost-cutting death spiral, while being told all that nasty social spending caused it all and has to stop. Milton Friedman for the win there. Thieves take all.
Iceland for the win. Doing what you are told is not, despite what vast numbers of human instinctively believe, the right thing to do.
The e-voting systems are performing their function. Insiders at companies providing and maintaining the machines will tip elections into the Republicans' favor, if and when necessary, if the margins are razor thin and they can slip in techs to "fix" things. Or probably they don't need to do that anymore - they've had a decade to set the backdoors in place so they don't need to go in physically.
(2008 was not necessary - they need Democratic Presidents to blame things on when they have their inevitable economic collapses. And since they won't let a Democrat actually *be* a President, by fillibustering every bill and refusing to seat his judicial appointments, it's not like a Democrat can do anything but take the blame for the extremely active Republican President who precedes him.)
We are now living in the Republican permanent empire. And with "conservatives" in Canada running to "fix" their perfectly verifiable pencil-and-paper system with wonderful e-voting supersystems, Canada will be Harpered forever as well. It's good to be the magic genie behind the screen.
Ireland did it right. Junk the cheatmatic magic voting boxes.
Listen, if they can cheat, they ARE cheating. Their ethics are business ethics, ie none but winning at any cost.
Bit redundant there... sorry, tired, hit reply too soon. Wish I could unpost. Good first post, tho. Well done.
"Same game, new enemy."
WE THE PEOPLE are the enemy! They are fighting their own nation for the quiet right to lie to us. They are waging war against our ability to get the truth, and treating reporters and sources as terrorists. What few are left.
"We call this "disinformation technology."
We call it "lying". We seek leaks because our government is lying to us. We were lied to on a daily basis to get us into a war with a helpless Iraq, and now we are being lied into another war with Iran. We are lied to every single day.
Our news companies now openly cheer on the liars, and slander the truthtellers. Wikileaks merely pipelined the truth to us about a generation earlier than we are used to getting it. We heard the truth now, rather than waiting until the ignored homeless vets of the lied-for wars are wasting away on the streets begging for help, and being ignored, as usual.
Gentle Reader, if truth is not important to you, enlist in the Army and go die for the lies. At least don't cheer on the liars. They are not heroes. They are scum, usually scum who never served and whose children will never serve.
Not to mention the hundreds of thousands, millions of civilians who also die in agony for our right to hear lies.
"There will be an immediate and nearly catastrophic increase in the amount of bad science, pseudo-science and technobabble-based science fiction in popular media."
In Sci-Fi, such as TV shows or novelizations therefrom, yes.
In Science Fiction, where writers drink bourbon and eat science magazines with sprinkles, we'll do it right, as usual, for the real SF devotees.
Don't confuse the two genres.
Stuff belonging to people standing on OUR oil.
Assange isn't "hiding". He's seeking asylum from an obvious US plot to drag him in chains to a sham trial on US soil for the crime of embarrassing them.