Prohibition I: Alcohol. Failed. Prohibition II: Every other drug not already immensely profitable, like cigarettes. Civil law suspended, Constitution suspended permanently. Prohibition III: Possessing imaginary property. Direct takeover of Federal and local law enforcement by corporations. Now government directly monitors home activity of the citizenry for the corporations. You know, all those processor ID's and MAC addresses that people laughed at the paranoid for going on about? The future is here.
On January 24, 2006 Halliburton's subsidiary KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown and Root) announced that it had been awarded a $385 million contingency contract by the Department of Homeland Security to build "temporary detention and processing facilities" or internment camps. According to Business Wire, this contract will be executed in cooperation with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Fort Worth District. Critics point to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp as a possible model. According to a press release posted on the Halliburton website, "The contract, which is effective immediately, provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs. The contingency support contract provides for planning and, if required, initiation of specific engineering, construction and logistics support tasks to establish, operate and maintain one or more expansion facilities."[20]
You can never know what code is in place on the voting machine,the accumulator machine, or at any point on the chain. This is a false sense of security, this notion that open source will solve the problem. The code posted for you to read is not necessarily the same code on the machines.
Even if the system is pure and shiny, NEXT time someone will slip in the alterations when no one cares to look anymore. A computer based system exists to cheat.
This is a solution to a non-existent problem. Canada does it right - manually.They finish their elections in three hours, by hand count. Florida in 2000 was slow because the Repubs were told to slow it down to a crawl by challenging every damn ballot during the hand count to create the perception that hand counts were impossible. We watched them do it, live on camera for godssake.
Drop yer drawers, bend over and grab your ankles, it's time for the free market to finally introduce you to a little quality time with what we call reality.
Not as much fun when it's you that's getting pounded, is it?
Corporations do not have rights, as they are not humans. The government - us have granted privileges to them, such as immunity to personal liability and enormous tax breaks. They can bargain en masse.
They have no "right" to spy on anyone because they own property. They have only what we grant them, and no more.
There are hundreds of millions of lead-acid batteries in dumps around the country. They didn't come from electric cars - they came from gas cars. No one cared about lead pollution until electric cars came around, then, suddenly, everyone's green, esp. the producers of IC engines.
BUT - lead acid batteries are recycled more than almost anything else barring steel and aluminum. One of the few success stories. The lead in the batteries of electric cars will not be tossed behind a tree on the interstate, as owners of gas cars have done for a hundred years. The batteries will be recycled. No waste.
"I have seen this exact situation several times from government bureaucrat types."
It's not the bureaucrats, it's the greedy programmers and consulting companies that pull that trick. "Bureaucrats" have lifetime jobs and don't run up fat expense accounts while they sit in the strip club. They can't.
It's private enterprise that milks the government, which milks you. Da Gubmint is rather frugal, in comparison to the utter lying pigs that are... Da Consultants.
Not a wild fantasy? That's why we call it science fiction, or SF, instead of "stuff we just make up". Welcome to SF as it was before the mass market publishers and anime came along. It used to be a bit more rigorous.
Systems always need "bureaucrats". They run the stuff *you* don't want to be bothered with.
America isn't being hamstrung by government. The "bureaucrats", after all, just implement what the people want. America is ruining itself, educationwise, by:
1. Spending the last two hundred years making sure the slave and their descendants cannot obtain a proper education. This has led to gerrymandering school districts and the creation of the property-tax based funding system that guarantees that the majority of funds and talent go to the "right" places.
2. Substitute "poor" for "slaves" and the same obtains. Americans in general are obsessed with making sure the poor don't steal their money. They make the children of such stay in their own districts and they complain endlessly about the "waste" supposedly engendered by the "bureaucrats". Ignoring the fact that wealthy districts outspend poor ones 5-1, and no one there complains about the "waste". The further fact that yes, indeed, spending more makes for better students. They just don't want their money spent on the wrong people.
3. Americans will not support birth control programs for the very young, and neither will they support education (other than "NO!") that will lower the birthrate by explaining from the age of eight on up exactly how not to get pregnant. The high birthrate among the poor destroys the school systems by insuring the stupid will constantly flood the system with ever-more stupid kids who have ever-more than that kids. Kept up for a few generations, as it has been, and we have Kingdoms of the Fabulously Idiotic gumming up the cities and countryside, further inflaming the rhetoric against funding public schools. To stop this, we start with: this is a vagina, this is a condom, use them together. And oh yeah: easy abortions if necessary. They are now effectively impossible to obtain.
4. Religion. See number 3. We are one of the most intensly religious countries on earth, and it is gumming up the need to control the birthrate of those who shouldn't be having kids so young and so indiscriminately, and ALSO infects our (back to thread point here) knowledge of science by creating an enormous number of reactionaries who just don't like science on principle.
5. Americans don't know science. Let's let this hang on for a bit: Americans, even geeks and SFers, don't understand the method, history, and knowledge of the sciences. They can't teach their kids what they don't understand, and can't instill a love of it for the same reason. We love magic, of all sorts, because we can understand it. Science is alien to our culture. Please understand that technology is just applied science, not science itself, so love of tech does not equal love of science. We like gadgets, but despise evolutionary theory.
With all this, it is all but impossible to stop the slide.
Really, did everyone forget that the Invisible Hand will fix this situation? A wireless carrier will offer their services at a much lower price, and then the customers will change to that carrier. Other companies will see this and lower their own prices, thus the Invisible Hand will prevail.
Unless, of course, the companies' managements see that it is in their own interests to maintain a defacto many-headed monopoly and watch each others prices with the single purpose of matching each other's price increases. Funny, but Adam Smith warned us, about something like that, what was it, oh yes: no two businessmen ever met together that didn't conspire to fix prices.
They're in night clubs. And tall buildings. And airplanes. And streets.
If we're under constant barrage from skulking Terrists taking pictures and finding out where streets and tall buildings are, why haven't we been bombed? The dinkus with the shoe full of C4 doesn't count. He tried to light it *with a match*. Not exactly an operative.
Al Qaeda did what it did to get the result it wanted. The purpose was not to blow you up real good, it was to 1) take revenge for a long list of perceived and real offenses, (done) and 2) provoke us into doing something stupid, i.e. invade oil-rich countries and kill innocent people. Done and done. They don't need to bomb anyone anymore. As bin Laden said, he's succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. And got away clean.
How does anyone know there is "kiddie porn"? Did you see it, and if you did, how and why?
If you never see it, how the hell do you know it exists? Is it the Hunting of the Snark rule? We are told three times, and so it is true?
What exactly is this "kiddy porn" that they keep finding? Is it a teenager in a bikini? I'm betting yes. They're arresting people for what they *think* about a picture. There are millions of old Montgomery Ward catalogs out there; they'd better get cracking rounding them up and arresting the owners. Is it a Snark or a Boojum?
The real honest-to-Satan kiddie porn dealers (I assert) don't sit around posting their wares on the Usenet like some 13 year old. They are a different breed than geeks. They use face-to-face and have a lot of layers of cover. They sure as hell don't distribute on public networks.
Kiddie porn and terrorists, the commies of the 2000's. Used to the same purpose by the power-mad.
Or they could just mail it in an envelope. Over seven years and counting, no anthrax mailer arrests. Or order a pizza with extra anchovies, or *not* call the contact between 12 AM and 2 AM on the 13th, or simply visit the contact's home and tell them. BTW, the last is how al Qaeda operates. They don't use any communications but face-to-face. Works a treat.
I didn't say "foreign-born", and you know that wasn't the argument.
The argument is why not hire H1B executives at 1/2 or less the cost and save billions. H1B is not "foreign", it is a classification of imported workers who live here at their American employer's discretion and wages. They can't quit, as they would have to return home. They can't bargain after they are here, not until contract's end, and the conditions are not such that they have leverage even then. The purpose of H1B as far as American corps is concerned is to flood labor markets with indentured employees willing to work for peanuts, and thus drive down everyone's wages.
This importation DOES NOT threaten the CEOs and board members who authorize it. They don't vote to import people to drive down THEIR salaries. Their salaries and bonuses are in the many many billions, from their own coffers, as a direct result/reward for sh*tcanning American workers and driving down everyone's wages but theirs .
And one more thing: if outsourcing and H1B workers are good for the corporate bottom line, and nothing else but that matters, then WHY aren't they firing the executives and replacing them with cheaper foreign contract executives? A company could save hundreds of millions or even billions that way.
Unless, of course, overall corporate profit performance is not the goal, but rather the executives' profits. Lie and loot. The executives rake in millions, then quit and move on to the next company to loot, leaving devastation behind.
Here's the adaptation to the new marketplace: people aren't bothering to study the subjects anymore because they *know* they will be treated like contract bathroom cleaners. Why bother to become a whatever knowing the wages will shrink?
Who will pay/borrow a third of a million dollars to obtain a series of degrees to be told that they need to adjust their expectations to that of a worker in Pakistan? This is impossible. You cannot simultaneously gut the professions in the name of increasing value for Wall Street - and the CEO's two hundred million dollar bonus - and expect to see many bother to increase your worker base. There is a glut, and it is artificial. And it is killing our middle class and our economy. Rich people aren't spending the profits in the local supermarket - they're hoarding.
I can solve it in Slashdot. Regulate profits of corporations, including the looting by the boards of directors and Wall Street players. Remove or reduce the H1B system. Let wages find a TRUE free market adjustment, by segmenting the players into appropriate wage sets. We survived a half-century without the H1B infusion, and we were stinking rich with an excellently paid middle class. Somehow, I don't think that hurt us. The people doing well from this new flood of workers are the usual suspects, the stockholders and the corporate bosses. Reregulate them. A corp is a government creature, and needs to be brought to heel to serve the interests of the nation that allows it to exist with all its privileges.
Here's a quickie: language and core skills proficiency provision for obtaining an H1B. If an applicant can't speak English well and doesn't know the job he's taking, then it's a warm body being imported to depress wages.
Here's another quickie: force company to pay prevailing American wage even to those overseas, and certainly to those coming here to work. Take the incentive out. Let the stockholders scream. Want to make the world middle class? Pay them a real wage, not the pretend wage we pay to people we import, in reality or virually.
And it diminishes the overall capability of the industry to constantly water down the talent pool by importing lesser abled (sometimes - remember language ability counts towards the total), and once again, guts the national economy and security by disincentivizing students to enter the field. Race to the bottom.
Countries are instituted to take care of their citizens, not their corporations. Corporations are just legal fictions, and should be treated as such. We are hurting ourselves to serve an ideology that in the end is looting our future.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple invented Firewire, you see. The standards body called it 1394 later. So it was stuck with two names.
Prohibition I: Alcohol. Failed.
Prohibition II: Every other drug not already immensely profitable, like cigarettes. Civil law suspended, Constitution suspended permanently.
Prohibition III: Possessing imaginary property. Direct takeover of Federal and local law enforcement by corporations. Now government directly monitors home activity of the citizenry for the corporations. You know, all those processor ID's and MAC addresses that people laughed at the paranoid for going on about? The future is here.
They already have.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halliburton
Hundreds in this one cell, per only two whistleblowers. The total number is probably in the tens of thousands. And,"ONLY"?
You can never know what code is in place on the voting machine,the accumulator machine, or at any point on the chain. This is a false sense of security, this notion that open source will solve the problem. The code posted for you to read is not necessarily the same code on the machines.
Even if the system is pure and shiny, NEXT time someone will slip in the alterations when no one cares to look anymore. A computer based system exists to cheat.
This is a solution to a non-existent problem. Canada does it right - manually.They finish their elections in three hours, by hand count. Florida in 2000 was slow because the Repubs were told to slow it down to a crawl by challenging every damn ballot during the hand count to create the perception that hand counts were impossible. We watched them do it, live on camera for godssake.
Until they change it to 40K in a few years. Boil the frog slowly.
Drop yer drawers, bend over and grab your ankles, it's time for the free market to finally introduce you to a little quality time with what we call reality.
Not as much fun when it's you that's getting pounded, is it?
"Fresh meat" sounded too crass.
You think that's the only camera? There will be cameras covering the cameras. Whatcha gonna do, walk away?
Corporations do not have rights, as they are not humans. The government - us have granted privileges to them, such as immunity to personal liability and enormous tax breaks. They can bargain en masse.
They have no "right" to spy on anyone because they own property. They have only what we grant them, and no more.
There are hundreds of millions of lead-acid batteries in dumps around the country. They didn't come from electric cars - they came from gas cars. No one cared about lead pollution until electric cars came around, then, suddenly, everyone's green, esp. the producers of IC engines.
BUT - lead acid batteries are recycled more than almost anything else barring steel and aluminum. One of the few success stories. The lead in the batteries of electric cars will not be tossed behind a tree on the interstate, as owners of gas cars have done for a hundred years. The batteries will be recycled. No waste.
Don't try it. They arrest you and charge you with destruction of their property. It already happened.
"I have seen this exact situation several times from government bureaucrat types."
It's not the bureaucrats, it's the greedy programmers and consulting companies that pull that trick. "Bureaucrats" have lifetime jobs and don't run up fat expense accounts while they sit in the strip club. They can't.
It's private enterprise that milks the government, which milks you. Da Gubmint is rather frugal, in comparison to the utter lying pigs that are... Da Consultants.
Not a wild fantasy? That's why we call it science fiction, or SF, instead of "stuff we just make up". Welcome to SF as it was before the mass market publishers and anime came along. It used to be a bit more rigorous.
Systems always need "bureaucrats". They run the stuff *you* don't want to be bothered with.
America isn't being hamstrung by government. The "bureaucrats", after all, just implement what the people want. America is ruining itself, educationwise, by:
1. Spending the last two hundred years making sure the slave and their descendants cannot obtain a proper education. This has led to gerrymandering school districts and the creation of the property-tax based funding system that guarantees that the majority of funds and talent go to the "right" places.
2. Substitute "poor" for "slaves" and the same obtains. Americans in general are obsessed with making sure the poor don't steal their money. They make the children of such stay in their own districts and they complain endlessly about the "waste" supposedly engendered by the "bureaucrats". Ignoring the fact that wealthy districts outspend poor ones 5-1, and no one there complains about the "waste". The further fact that yes, indeed, spending more makes for better students. They just don't want their money spent on the wrong people.
3. Americans will not support birth control programs for the very young, and neither will they support education (other than "NO!") that will lower the birthrate by explaining from the age of eight on up exactly how not to get pregnant. The high birthrate among the poor destroys the school systems by insuring the stupid will constantly flood the system with ever-more stupid kids who have ever-more than that kids. Kept up for a few generations, as it has been, and we have Kingdoms of the Fabulously Idiotic gumming up the cities and countryside, further inflaming the rhetoric against funding public schools. To stop this, we start with: this is a vagina, this is a condom, use them together. And oh yeah: easy abortions if necessary. They are now effectively impossible to obtain.
4. Religion. See number 3. We are one of the most intensly religious countries on earth, and it is gumming up the need to control the birthrate of those who shouldn't be having kids so young and so indiscriminately, and ALSO infects our (back to thread point here) knowledge of science by creating an enormous number of reactionaries who just don't like science on principle.
5. Americans don't know science. Let's let this hang on for a bit: Americans, even geeks and SFers, don't understand the method, history, and knowledge of the sciences. They can't teach their kids what they don't understand, and can't instill a love of it for the same reason. We love magic, of all sorts, because we can understand it. Science is alien to our culture. Please understand that technology is just applied science, not science itself, so love of tech does not equal love of science. We like gadgets, but despise evolutionary theory.
With all this, it is all but impossible to stop the slide.
Last I checked, breathing is also voluntary.
Really, did everyone forget that the Invisible Hand will fix this situation? A wireless carrier will offer their services at a much lower price, and then the customers will change to that carrier. Other companies will see this and lower their own prices, thus the Invisible Hand will prevail.
Unless, of course, the companies' managements see that it is in their own interests to maintain a defacto many-headed monopoly and watch each others prices with the single purpose of matching each other's price increases. Funny, but Adam Smith warned us, about something like that, what was it, oh yes: no two businessmen ever met together that didn't conspire to fix prices.
They're in night clubs. And tall buildings. And airplanes. And streets.
If we're under constant barrage from skulking Terrists taking pictures and finding out where streets and tall buildings are, why haven't we been bombed? The dinkus with the shoe full of C4 doesn't count. He tried to light it *with a match*. Not exactly an operative.
Al Qaeda did what it did to get the result it wanted. The purpose was not to blow you up real good, it was to 1) take revenge for a long list of perceived and real offenses, (done) and 2) provoke us into doing something stupid, i.e. invade oil-rich countries and kill innocent people. Done and done. They don't need to bomb anyone anymore. As bin Laden said, he's succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. And got away clean.
Yes. No one ever knew where Times Square was before. Or that it was crowded.
Hey! Let's try not blowing people up or stealing their countries. It's so crazy, it might just work...
Ah, the kiddie porn.
How does anyone know there is "kiddie porn"? Did you see it, and if you did, how and why?
If you never see it, how the hell do you know it exists? Is it the Hunting of the Snark rule? We are told three times, and so it is true?
What exactly is this "kiddy porn" that they keep finding? Is it a teenager in a bikini? I'm betting yes. They're arresting people for what they *think* about a picture. There are millions of old Montgomery Ward catalogs out there; they'd better get cracking rounding them up and arresting the owners. Is it a Snark or a Boojum?
The real honest-to-Satan kiddie porn dealers (I assert) don't sit around posting their wares on the Usenet like some 13 year old. They are a different breed than geeks. They use face-to-face and have a lot of layers of cover. They sure as hell don't distribute on public networks.
Kiddie porn and terrorists, the commies of the 2000's. Used to the same purpose by the power-mad.
Or they could just mail it in an envelope. Over seven years and counting, no anthrax mailer arrests. Or order a pizza with extra anchovies, or *not* call the contact between 12 AM and 2 AM on the 13th, or simply visit the contact's home and tell them. BTW, the last is how al Qaeda operates. They don't use any communications but face-to-face. Works a treat.
K.I.S.S.
RNC's Fox News spokesman request clarification: "In English, not in... [pauses for synapses to fire, times out] ... science talk..."
Split screen shows NASA man wants to poke pencil in man's ear to see if it comes out the ear on the opposite side...
I didn't say "foreign-born", and you know that wasn't the argument.
The argument is why not hire H1B executives at 1/2 or less the cost and save billions. H1B is not "foreign", it is a classification of imported workers who live here at their American employer's discretion and wages. They can't quit, as they would have to return home. They can't bargain after they are here, not until contract's end, and the conditions are not such that they have leverage even then. The purpose of H1B as far as American corps is concerned is to flood labor markets with indentured employees willing to work for peanuts, and thus drive down everyone's wages.
This importation DOES NOT threaten the CEOs and board members who authorize it. They don't vote to import people to drive down THEIR salaries. Their salaries and bonuses are in the many many billions, from their own coffers, as a direct result/reward for sh*tcanning American workers and driving down everyone's wages but theirs .
And one more thing: if outsourcing and H1B workers are good for the corporate bottom line, and nothing else but that matters, then WHY aren't they firing the executives and replacing them with cheaper foreign contract executives? A company could save hundreds of millions or even billions that way.
Unless, of course, overall corporate profit performance is not the goal, but rather the executives' profits. Lie and loot. The executives rake in millions, then quit and move on to the next company to loot, leaving devastation behind.
Here's the adaptation to the new marketplace: people aren't bothering to study the subjects anymore because they *know* they will be treated like contract bathroom cleaners. Why bother to become a whatever knowing the wages will shrink?
Who will pay/borrow a third of a million dollars to obtain a series of degrees to be told that they need to adjust their expectations to that of a worker in Pakistan? This is impossible. You cannot simultaneously gut the professions in the name of increasing value for Wall Street - and the CEO's two hundred million dollar bonus - and expect to see many bother to increase your worker base. There is a glut, and it is artificial. And it is killing our middle class and our economy. Rich people aren't spending the profits in the local supermarket - they're hoarding.
I can solve it in Slashdot. Regulate profits of corporations, including the looting by the boards of directors and Wall Street players. Remove or reduce the H1B system. Let wages find a TRUE free market adjustment, by segmenting the players into appropriate wage sets. We survived a half-century without the H1B infusion, and we were stinking rich with an excellently paid middle class. Somehow, I don't think that hurt us. The people doing well from this new flood of workers are the usual suspects, the stockholders and the corporate bosses. Reregulate them. A corp is a government creature, and needs to be brought to heel to serve the interests of the nation that allows it to exist with all its privileges.
Here's a quickie: language and core skills proficiency provision for obtaining an H1B. If an applicant can't speak English well and doesn't know the job he's taking, then it's a warm body being imported to depress wages.
Here's another quickie: force company to pay prevailing American wage even to those overseas, and certainly to those coming here to work. Take the incentive out. Let the stockholders scream. Want to make the world middle class? Pay them a real wage, not the pretend wage we pay to people we import, in reality or virually.
And it diminishes the overall capability of the industry to constantly water down the talent pool by importing lesser abled (sometimes - remember language ability counts towards the total), and once again, guts the national economy and security by disincentivizing students to enter the field. Race to the bottom.
Countries are instituted to take care of their citizens, not their corporations. Corporations are just legal fictions, and should be treated as such. We are hurting ourselves to serve an ideology that in the end is looting our future.