Those companies sapped the economy, and drained the tax coffers -- they did little to grow the economy. They were con jobs that pumped money upwards, never outwards. They annihilated California to the tune of twenty billion, which money somehow has never been found. Weird, innit?
To fire with intent to load up the prosecutor ranks with "loyal Bushies", days after the election, in anticipation of the criminal trials to come against the very officials doing the purging -- that is called "obstruction of justice" with a forward looking viewpoint. They wanted agents in the prosecution ranks to lower the possiblity of convictions, or even being brought to court in the first place. This isn't about being partisan, this is about knowing you've committed crimes and knowing that you can get your people into place to block.
There were thousands of allegations of impropriety, constantly pounded into our ears -- including the missive you quote.
There were no convictions, because there weren't any improprieties. They had eight aching years of screaming, endless accusations, and after over a hundred millions bucks were spent on RNC special prosecutors and congressional investigations, they came up with a perjury trap that should never have been allowed by the judge. All the vapor, the FUD, turned out to be a hologram. And we lost our news media on the way, because it turned into a rather vacuous republican entertainment vehicle in the end.
The current RNC strategy is to recycle those "allegations", long put into their graves, to create a cloud of illegality of the only recent Demo admin, so that when the piper comes callin' in 2008, a large proportion of the populace thinks that Clinton and Bush are somehow equivalent. Oh, my.
There hasn't been anything, ANYthing, like the sheer in-your-face fuck-you-ness of the neocons. This isn't an administration, this is a looting riot. They just wiped out, in the face of all mail admin logic, all the emails sent round the official channels. What did the email concern? Loading the US prosecutors up with "loyal Bushies", acccording to one mail -- immediately after the November 7th election, when they knew that the subpoenas were soon to come (not too soon, infuriatingly). They wanted the fix in, and they bypassed the email trial, using the RNC mail servers -- and then "lost" the mails. Damned weird, that. How do you lose email? It's backed up everywhere -- this is a tech community site, please, spare us.
And who could prosecute the crime? The Attorney General's office. Who would prosecute non-compliance with subpoenas? The AG's office. It's a perfect crime. The criminal IS the sherriff.
There is a further consideration, which I strongly believe, that Ford and the other auto companies are walking into a perfect economic storm. The national debt, borrowing, and spending, coupled with twenty five years of "right-sizing" the work force, outsourcing the manufacturing to foreign companies, depressing wages, disappearing cheap credit, and feeling the violent increases in real estate and rental costs, are creating a "all curves down" depression of consumer spending. Only 10-20% of American workers can really afford those monster trucks when the job market collapses into sub-Mcdonald wages, Couple that with the tax-cut piper coming to the economic door, wanting to be paid. Ford and the others are really producing luxury items in the forms of the trucks; they aren't content with the low margins cheap cars give, or more accurately, Wall Street won't let them be content with just making cars for low income people. They are never quite rich *enough*, so they keep chasing ever-bigger spenders. At a point, you just don't have enough "wealthy" customers ready to buy a 35,000 dollar truck in a given year, and boom, instant karma. Chinese and Korean car companies aren't chasing the same markets in the same way, so they will eat the lower-income segment, leaving Ford etc. chasing the same upper income spenders.
If one had wanted to prevent this from happening, I could only imagine that we should have closed the domestic market from foreign labor competition. We would have had higher prices for what we sell -- maybe, because almost all those savings from labor cost cuts went into pure profit -- but we would have had a workforce capable of buying the products we made at home. Now we have neither the manufacturing capabilities NOR the customers with sufficient income to buy products, a lose-lose situation, and it will get much worse. Nobody wins in the long run except the very wealthiest players who gamed the entire situation for the last thirty years.
Ford as a nameplate will always be around, but the company/with factories will not. They've screwed the pooch, along with all the other auto execs in Detroit. They believed their own PR about the world never changing from big gas-fueled hot rods, and now they are toast. Chrysler is the first to go on the chopping block. There is no recovery plan, as they *have no cars* the new world market demands -- electric, non-polluting, cheap, very low margin. They still want to make Americamobiles. Their only chance is a government that wants to bail them out -- not impossible, considering the clout they wield over elections.
How many cameras are surrounding the estates of the wealthy who actually steal real money? I'd imagine if any exist, they point out at the hoi polloi, never in at the lives of the powerful, who never are monitored without their consent.
It was a far-right wing military coup that overturned a democratic nation. If the killers in uniform were anywhere to the left of Richard Nixon, Bush would be at war with them now. Regardless, we've a full on superconservative military dictatorship throwing people in prison for ten years at a whim. Let's call a fascism a fascism. Why are people afraid of the word? Fascists. FASCISTS.
The skintight leotard spacesuit was proposed back in the heady days of the seventies (L5! Solar solar power sats! VTAL shuttles!) and was prominently used in Niven and Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye". So some work was done by NASA and others before that book was published -- Pournelle has long been a astronautics consultant, and put in in the book. But budget cuts made everything die.
The price increases are being instituted by game players in the very wealthy futures markets, fake free markets that seek to manipulate prices higher for the distributor and hoarder and shaft the producers and consumers. We don't need theses dicks -- they are anti-survival in the real sense, card sharks who are willing to starve the world to make themselves immensely wealthy. Control them and control their fake crap tables. Or dump them entirely. Strip them of their control and tax their profits away. The market is only free if you rent the stalls.
Second: biofuels make sense carbonwise because when burned, they release carbon that already existed in plant matter, and would have been reoxidized anyway when the plant died and rotted. There is no net greenhouse gas component increase when you burn plants. Fossil fuels, when burned, release carbon locked into the deep earth for tens or hundreds of millions of years, hence the enormous carbon gas buildup in the atmosphere. Coal and petro fuels add billions of tons of carbon oxides into the soup every year, greenhouse gases that would not exist had we not manufactured them.
So what happens if the cheating manipulates the margins smaller than that which would trigger a mandatory free recount? Already being done. The entire layer of computerized gadgets is not necessary by the accepted logic of keeping the paper ballots as a verified trail! And if the only way we can trust the magic boxen is to perform recounts by margin trigger or random (not so random, see last election) selection of districts to keep them honest, why then not eliminate the entire electronic cloud and simply count the votes by hand the way Canada does? They get the job done in three hours!
Canada gets its national elections counted by hand, to final announced totals, in about... three hours. By PENCIL.
The US is slowed because we hold the election in different time zones, and we have to cycle people through, YES, loooonnngg lines to get to the damned machines. A card and a pencil can be used by an entire crowd simultaneously. We are also slowed by our weird voter verification process. More than slowed. Ground to a halt.
eVoting is not designed to make things easy or verifiable. It is supposedly designed to solve a non-existent problem, lack of speedy vote counting. In the real world, the code is secret, easily modified by dispatched techs during the election, and the fact of its very existence during the act of voting or accumulation is forever unverifiable. The voting machine companies fought like rabid weasels for years to silence questions about their machines. They bought the regulators.
Don't forget that changes can be made up the line at the accumulator boxen. Don't just suspect the touchscreen PCs.
Amazing things happened during the last few elections. Votes swung republican in key counties in both 2000 and 2004 after a little visit from the company reps in Florida and Ohio. A major stockholder in Diebold ran against a Vietnam vet, Clelland, in Ohio and overcame a pre-election poll deficit of double digit proportions. Boys and girls, those machines are being used to cheat in big races that come down to a few districts. After all that I've seen since 2002, we've had Bush reinstalled through a little magic code.
This legislation will not solve the problem, because automatic recounts were already fraudulently pre-selected by voting companies in the last election to prevent a manual recount. They also can manipulate the totals to *just under* the mandatory margin for a manual recount. Not a theory, its already done and few cared. The men who are making a giant mountain range of cash from this administration aren't going to give up because some paper is kept around. Paper has to be counted, and that takes a margin trigger or a very expensive recount by candidate request.
Do it like the Canadians do. Count by hand, call it in to central offices, count those up by hand. Members of all parties present at all counts. They get their national counts done in HOURS, using pencils. And it doesn't cost them billions of dollars to do it. Techies are blinded by the wonders of their PCs. PCs can't do everything, and they aren't needed to do everything. When something infinitely malleable and secret is introduced to a simple, open process, it isn't done to make things easier or safer, but to hide cheating. QED
'What country has landed on the moon?' 38 years ago.
'What country invented the transistor, and later the microchip?' Over 50 years ago.
'What country harnessed electricity, and set up the first electric lights?' You'd be surprised. But that was over 120 years ago.
'What country set up the first assembly line, and mass produced the automobile?' Again, 100 years ago.
'What country split the atom?' 63 years ago.
Now. Which of the wealthy industrialized countries has the highest percentage of poor? Which has least progressive taxation, ie rich pay higher percentage, indeed, pay taxes at all. Which has lowest average wages. Which has declining participation in the wealth generated by labor. Which has worst ratio superrich to general population. Which has giant trade imbalance. Which has largest debt. Which has biggest tax breaks for wealthiest people. Which has collapsing real estate market. Which has no manufacturing capacity for its own markets. Which has worst schools. Which has largest percentage of permanent poor. Which has poorest representation of science in government. Which has most money wasted on military and spy networks. Which has religious belief that markets cure anything. Which lost a major city and told its people to go to hell for being poor and stupid. Which has the highest per capita spending on health care with the worst per capita coverage. Add: Which has businesses taking 30 percent or more of the health care expenditures as admin costs and profit. Which has worst sex education, teen pregnancy rate and STD infection rate. Which has worst newborn death rate. Which has collapsing science funding. Which has had science infiltrated by the operatives of a political party. Which has a population so uneducated and unimaginative that they only finished 1/4 of a space station and forgot to build a shuttle to get to it. And can't understand why that would matter. Which economy is about to explode, sinking belly up? Which nation is exceedingly wealthy and well educated because they nationalized their oil fields, keeping all the profits? That would be Norway. Which countries tax high, have excellent labor representation in business decisions, has excellent health care at reasonable cost, low poverty rates, lowest teen birth rates and STD infection rates, and now lead the world in tech development? Why, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and all the other countries mentioned.
Apparently the people of a nation taking control of their futures through their representative governments do better than those who abdicate their control to be ruled by corporate business. Who would have thought it.
I've always thought the skintight model was the way to go, if you really wanted to colonize zero g or any of the planets. The hardshell suit is just too complex and expensive. I wish NASA had the money to spend on some engineering studies again. Or that we had any imaginative engineers left in that field. NASA has been a trucking company for too long.
I dunno about the actual work done on the skintight suits. Divers wear pretty tight outfits, and they manage somehow. Has any engineering been done in the last twenty years? As you say, new material are available.
With a skintight suit, you could throw on a "parka" in the freezing shade, or wear a beadouin's cloak in the harsh sunlight. On Mars, you could toss on a really well insulated snowsuit and some good boots. In contruction zones in zero g or the moon, you could wear some sports armor to guard your knees and elbows.
A skintight would be a lot less fatiguing to wear, be lighter to carry, leaks aren't the spectacular death that hardshell wearers worry over, and importantly, you can turn yor head. And if it were comfortable enough to wear full time, explosive decompression of the ship or habitat would be handled by slapping down your visor rather than, oh, dying 'cause it takes 90 minutes to suit up.
Mars' atmosphere has no free oxygen, as the element combines readily and quickly. Earth has free O2 because it has plants converting CO2 to O2. Mars' air is mostly CO2, and the air pressure at ground level is measured in millibars, or thousandths of Earth's sea-level air pressure. It's enough to blow dust during energetic wind storms, but is practically vaccuum for us. Think of air pressure at oh, 15 miles above sea level here, wild guess, close enough.
Just had a vision: in the free market nirvana, with no price controls mechanisms, a phone call is made from Food, Inc. to the manager of the Southwest Sector Food Production division of Food, Inc.
"Hey, Bob, how's it going?"
"Fine, Mr. Midas, just fine."
"Say, Bob, do you mind shutting down the lower 48,000 acre quadrant for the year? We think that costs of production with the price increase from our WaterCo division have become too high to justify a corn crop this fiscal year."
"Heh. Sure, Mr. Midas. Thanks for that stock bonus last year!"
"No problem, Bob. Now, make sure that corn stays good and dead, huh?"
Price of corn doubles, and doubles again... when the markets control their own supply, they ALWAYS CUT SUPPLY to maximize profit. No doubt they'll blame government regulation of pesticides or some bullshit. This is exactly how Enron jacked the state of California for 20 billion dollars of free money. And the White House and the Free Marketeers covered for them every step of the way. Truly free markets are a mechanism to loot. This is why we regulate.
Free markets can't deal with disaster or disruption, and food supply moves with disaster and disruption. Food is too important to leave up to the markets. If food prices weren't controlled by the government in some way, all independent farmers would be gone, corporations would control the food market vertically, and we'd be spending ten dollars for a loaf of bread. Prices would march magically and rapidly upwards, just as oil prices do. A small number of men would grow quite wealthy, farmers would become sub-miniumum wage slaves, and the vast majority of the world would become much poorer. At least in our present system, price spikes from weather are smoothed out to the point most people can afford to eat. Leave it to the free marketers, and it's Enron City, baby, and fuck the stupid poor grandmas, burn baby burn, hardy har har.
It's the futures markets. They're a thin veneer over a pack of rich men manipulating prices upward by collusion; the price of energy, food, oil, wood, gas, all of them go up and up and no one questions the "markets".
If the system is too complex to understand, it means inevitably that someone has complexified it to hide manipulation. Follow the money. A few people are trying to make trillions of dollars over their lifetimes. Find them.
Solution: simplify and re-regulate the markets. Remove those investment machines that can't be understood, but always seem to raise prices. TAX the profits so that the motive to manipulate the prices ever upwards at our expense and to their wealth is removed. Reinstate the capital gains tax, and rewrite the law so they can't hide monies in ways taxes can't address. Remove the offshore banking hideouts. This is survival we're talking about here, both ecological and economic. They're destroying our economy with greed so that we won't afford to take action against them, and delaying action on carbon control at a time that is absolutely critical to mitigate the coming weather changes.
Left Leaning Krugman? It'll come as a surprise to that economist that he's a communist pinko. So, every person that doesn't subscribe to the free-market-cures-everything is "leftist"? That's pretty much every economist who's not a member of the Chicago School. No wonder the neocons are so paranoid: they're surrounded by left-wing enemies of freedom.
And Krugman has made every basket a slam-dunk since Bush took office. I guess being right makes you a com-mun-ist.
Disney owns the copyright on the movie, not Peter Pan. Indeed the hospital gets a cut of the royalities in perpetuity -- the English government granted them an exception to copyright expiration time limits, as you probably now, letting them make profit from the Peter Pan copyright for eternity. Interesting case.
For illustration, imagine yourself going through life with your name, address, and phone number, along with a map to your home with careful directions as to how to get there, printed on a t-shirt you must wear for all to see. And to top it off, anyone who looks at the shirt can access records about where you've been, what you've read, who you talk to, along with careful timestamps on all these items.
Would you be confortable with that? Are you so free of enemies or sure of the people who watch you that you'd wear that shirt? Or would you rather just walk around without that highly informative piece of clothing, as free men have always done?
Apparently there was a comments period that expired last year on the proposed law referenced in the Hasbrouck response to the proposal. I may have been too hasty, as there is no reference to the law being in effect now; but there is no plan *not* to go ahead with the rule changes, so I think it's going forward soon. The list is going to be created -- what the hell will stop them? It's flying under the radar.
It would really help if this rule had a name. Hasbrouck, the writer who spotted the rule proposal up for public comment, says the references have been removed from the government websites. Doesn't mean it's dead. It'll surface again soon, when no one is paying attention. Some Friday night during basketball playoffs in June, probably . This stuff makes you dead cynical.
No this is not about Air Traffic Control or about In-Flight Entertainment. It's about travel and after Jan1 2007, leaving the USA may get harder...or become impossible. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has proposed that all airlines, cruise ships, and private vessels be required to obtain a clearance for each passenger they propose taking into or out of the United States. In January, US citizens will need a passport to get back in from Mexico or Canada; however, permission will be pre-required from the DHS if you wish to leave regardless what passport you hold. No approval (or no answer) and you will not be permitted to leave the USA. While the DHS probably decided that the existing rule that permits manifest transmission to the DHS no later than 15 minutes after the vessel has left did not fully solve the problem. Vulnerability for mischief still existed and that a pre-approval approach solved that problem. The NPRM time period for comments has passed and DHS has yet to make a pronouncement, but travelers, airlines, civil libertarians, and those worried about stolen identity had better pay attention.
This all began in December of 2004, when the US congress passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, calling for the Department of Homeland Security to pen a safety procedure to prevent the possibility of individuals that they believe to have the wrong intent from flying. One problem is, it is their sole determination, done in secrecy, with no court of last resort, no review, no contest. The new policy would require airlines to submit a manifest 60 minutes before each international flight, to or from the US, to obtain the approval of the travelers onboard. No approval, no travel. While it is not our intent to subvert US security decisions, we want to advise our readers that they should be aware of the total impact of these impending regulations. Airlines will be required to collect, store and transmit passenger data beyond what is presently in a passenger's passport. Obtaining, storing, retrieving, safeguarding and IT changes are estimated to cost airlines over $1 Billion dollars over the next 10 years. I think we can safely say that this will end last minute travel changes or possibly even impact travelers who are victims of late arrivals. What about data security? What if your passport expires overseas? What if your international flight is diverted to a US airport? Hey, what if your subject to a data error? Believe IFExpress, you have not heard the end of this.
You might want to read one of the particularly interesting and well thought out responses to the proposed rulemaking here
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Those companies sapped the economy, and drained the tax coffers -- they did little to grow the economy. They were con jobs that pumped money upwards, never outwards. They annihilated California to the tune of twenty billion, which money somehow has never been found. Weird, innit?
Found and found. Your point?
To fire with intent to load up the prosecutor ranks with "loyal Bushies", days after the election, in anticipation of the criminal trials to come against the very officials doing the purging -- that is called "obstruction of justice" with a forward looking viewpoint. They wanted agents in the prosecution ranks to lower the possiblity of convictions, or even being brought to court in the first place. This isn't about being partisan, this is about knowing you've committed crimes and knowing that you can get your people into place to block.
Yes.
There were thousands of allegations of impropriety, constantly pounded into our ears -- including the missive you quote.
There were no convictions, because there weren't any improprieties. They had eight aching years of screaming, endless accusations, and after over a hundred millions bucks were spent on RNC special prosecutors and congressional investigations, they came up with a perjury trap that should never have been allowed by the judge. All the vapor, the FUD, turned out to be a hologram. And we lost our news media on the way, because it turned into a rather vacuous republican entertainment vehicle in the end.
The current RNC strategy is to recycle those "allegations", long put into their graves, to create a cloud of illegality of the only recent Demo admin, so that when the piper comes callin' in 2008, a large proportion of the populace thinks that Clinton and Bush are somehow equivalent. Oh, my.
There hasn't been anything, ANYthing, like the sheer in-your-face fuck-you-ness of the neocons. This isn't an administration, this is a looting riot. They just wiped out, in the face of all mail admin logic, all the emails sent round the official channels. What did the email concern? Loading the US prosecutors up with "loyal Bushies", acccording to one mail -- immediately after the November 7th election, when they knew that the subpoenas were soon to come (not too soon, infuriatingly). They wanted the fix in, and they bypassed the email trial, using the RNC mail servers -- and then "lost" the mails. Damned weird, that. How do you lose email? It's backed up everywhere -- this is a tech community site, please, spare us.
And who could prosecute the crime? The Attorney General's office. Who would prosecute non-compliance with subpoenas? The AG's office. It's a perfect crime. The criminal IS the sherriff.
There is a further consideration, which I strongly believe, that Ford and the other auto companies are walking into a perfect economic storm. The national debt, borrowing, and spending, coupled with twenty five years of "right-sizing" the work force, outsourcing the manufacturing to foreign companies, depressing wages, disappearing cheap credit, and feeling the violent increases in real estate and rental costs, are creating a "all curves down" depression of consumer spending. Only 10-20% of American workers can really afford those monster trucks when the job market collapses into sub-Mcdonald wages, Couple that with the tax-cut piper coming to the economic door, wanting to be paid. Ford and the others are really producing luxury items in the forms of the trucks; they aren't content with the low margins cheap cars give, or more accurately, Wall Street won't let them be content with just making cars for low income people. They are never quite rich *enough*, so they keep chasing ever-bigger spenders. At a point, you just don't have enough "wealthy" customers ready to buy a 35,000 dollar truck in a given year, and boom, instant karma. Chinese and Korean car companies aren't chasing the same markets in the same way, so they will eat the lower-income segment, leaving Ford etc. chasing the same upper income spenders.
If one had wanted to prevent this from happening, I could only imagine that we should have closed the domestic market from foreign labor competition. We would have had higher prices for what we sell -- maybe, because almost all those savings from labor cost cuts went into pure profit -- but we would have had a workforce capable of buying the products we made at home. Now we have neither the manufacturing capabilities NOR the customers with sufficient income to buy products, a lose-lose situation, and it will get much worse. Nobody wins in the long run except the very wealthiest players who gamed the entire situation for the last thirty years.
Ford as a nameplate will always be around, but the company/with factories will not. They've screwed the pooch, along with all the other auto execs in Detroit. They believed their own PR about the world never changing from big gas-fueled hot rods, and now they are toast. Chrysler is the first to go on the chopping block. There is no recovery plan, as they *have no cars* the new world market demands -- electric, non-polluting, cheap, very low margin. They still want to make Americamobiles. Their only chance is a government that wants to bail them out -- not impossible, considering the clout they wield over elections.
How many cameras are surrounding the estates of the wealthy who actually steal real money? I'd imagine if any exist, they point out at the hoi polloi, never in at the lives of the powerful, who never are monitored without their consent.
It was a far-right wing military coup that overturned a democratic nation. If the killers in uniform were anywhere to the left of Richard Nixon, Bush would be at war with them now. Regardless, we've a full on superconservative military dictatorship throwing people in prison for ten years at a whim. Let's call a fascism a fascism. Why are people afraid of the word? Fascists. FASCISTS.
The skintight leotard spacesuit was proposed back in the heady days of the seventies (L5! Solar solar power sats! VTAL shuttles!) and was prominently used in Niven and Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye". So some work was done by NASA and others before that book was published -- Pournelle has long been a astronautics consultant, and put in in the book. But budget cuts made everything die.
The price increases are being instituted by game players in the very wealthy futures markets, fake free markets that seek to manipulate prices higher for the distributor and hoarder and shaft the producers and consumers. We don't need theses dicks -- they are anti-survival in the real sense, card sharks who are willing to starve the world to make themselves immensely wealthy. Control them and control their fake crap tables. Or dump them entirely. Strip them of their control and tax their profits away. The market is only free if you rent the stalls.
Second: biofuels make sense carbonwise because when burned, they release carbon that already existed in plant matter, and would have been reoxidized anyway when the plant died and rotted. There is no net greenhouse gas component increase when you burn plants. Fossil fuels, when burned, release carbon locked into the deep earth for tens or hundreds of millions of years, hence the enormous carbon gas buildup in the atmosphere. Coal and petro fuels add billions of tons of carbon oxides into the soup every year, greenhouse gases that would not exist had we not manufactured them.
So what happens if the cheating manipulates the margins smaller than that which would trigger a mandatory free recount? Already being done.
The entire layer of computerized gadgets is not necessary by the accepted logic of keeping the paper ballots as a verified trail!
And if the only way we can trust the magic boxen is to perform recounts by margin trigger or random (not so random, see last election) selection of districts to keep them honest, why then not eliminate the entire electronic cloud and simply count the votes by hand the way Canada does? They get the job done in three hours!
Canada gets its national elections counted by hand, to final announced totals, in about... three hours. By PENCIL.
The US is slowed because we hold the election in different time zones, and we have to cycle people through, YES, loooonnngg lines to get to the damned machines. A card and a pencil can be used by an entire crowd simultaneously. We are also slowed by our weird voter verification process. More than slowed. Ground to a halt.
eVoting is not designed to make things easy or verifiable. It is supposedly designed to solve a non-existent problem, lack of speedy vote counting. In the real world, the code is secret, easily modified by dispatched techs during the election, and the fact of its very existence during the act of voting or accumulation is forever unverifiable. The voting machine companies fought like rabid weasels for years to silence questions about their machines. They bought the regulators.
Don't forget that changes can be made up the line at the accumulator boxen. Don't just suspect the touchscreen PCs.
Amazing things happened during the last few elections. Votes swung republican in key counties in both 2000 and 2004 after a little visit from the company reps in Florida and Ohio. A major stockholder in Diebold ran against a Vietnam vet, Clelland, in Ohio and overcame a pre-election poll deficit of double digit proportions. Boys and girls, those machines are being used to cheat in big races that come down to a few districts. After all that I've seen since 2002, we've had Bush reinstalled through a little magic code.
This legislation will not solve the problem, because automatic recounts were already fraudulently pre-selected by voting companies in the last election to prevent a manual recount. They also can manipulate the totals to *just under* the mandatory margin for a manual recount. Not a theory, its already done and few cared. The men who are making a giant mountain range of cash from this administration aren't going to give up because some paper is kept around. Paper has to be counted, and that takes a margin trigger or a very expensive recount by candidate request.
Do it like the Canadians do. Count by hand, call it in to central offices, count those up by hand. Members of all parties present at all counts. They get their national counts done in HOURS, using pencils. And it doesn't cost them billions of dollars to do it. Techies are blinded by the wonders of their PCs. PCs can't do everything, and they aren't needed to do everything. When something infinitely malleable and secret is introduced to a simple, open process, it isn't done to make things easier or safer, but to hide cheating. QED
'What country has landed on the moon?'
38 years ago.
'What country invented the transistor, and later the microchip?'
Over 50 years ago.
'What country harnessed electricity, and set up the first electric lights?'
You'd be surprised. But that was over 120 years ago.
'What country set up the first assembly line, and mass produced the automobile?'
Again, 100 years ago.
'What country split the atom?'
63 years ago.
Now.
Which of the wealthy industrialized countries has the highest percentage of poor?
Which has least progressive taxation, ie rich pay higher percentage, indeed, pay taxes at all.
Which has lowest average wages.
Which has declining participation in the wealth generated by labor.
Which has worst ratio superrich to general population.
Which has giant trade imbalance.
Which has largest debt.
Which has biggest tax breaks for wealthiest people.
Which has collapsing real estate market.
Which has no manufacturing capacity for its own markets.
Which has worst schools.
Which has largest percentage of permanent poor.
Which has poorest representation of science in government.
Which has most money wasted on military and spy networks.
Which has religious belief that markets cure anything.
Which lost a major city and told its people to go to hell for being poor and stupid.
Which has the highest per capita spending on health care with the worst per capita coverage. Add: Which has businesses taking 30 percent or more of the health care expenditures as admin costs and profit.
Which has worst sex education, teen pregnancy rate and STD infection rate.
Which has worst newborn death rate.
Which has collapsing science funding.
Which has had science infiltrated by the operatives of a political party.
Which has a population so uneducated and unimaginative that they only finished 1/4 of a space station and forgot to build a shuttle to get to it. And can't understand why that would matter.
Which economy is about to explode, sinking belly up?
Which nation is exceedingly wealthy and well educated because they nationalized their oil fields, keeping all the profits? That would be Norway.
Which countries tax high, have excellent labor representation in business decisions, has excellent health care at reasonable cost, low poverty rates, lowest teen birth rates and STD infection rates, and now lead the world in tech development? Why, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and all the other countries mentioned.
Apparently the people of a nation taking control of their futures through their representative governments do better than those who abdicate their control to be ruled by corporate business. Who would have thought it.
I've always thought the skintight model was the way to go, if you really wanted to colonize zero g or any of the planets. The hardshell suit is just too complex and expensive. I wish NASA had the money to spend on some engineering studies again. Or that we had any imaginative engineers left in that field. NASA has been a trucking company for too long.
I dunno about the actual work done on the skintight suits. Divers wear pretty tight outfits, and they manage somehow. Has any engineering been done in the last twenty years? As you say, new material are available.
With a skintight suit, you could throw on a "parka" in the freezing shade, or wear a beadouin's cloak in the harsh sunlight. On Mars, you could toss on a really well insulated snowsuit and some good boots. In contruction zones in zero g or the moon, you could wear some sports armor to guard your knees and elbows.
A skintight would be a lot less fatiguing to wear, be lighter to carry, leaks aren't the spectacular death that hardshell wearers worry over, and importantly, you can turn yor head. And if it were comfortable enough to wear full time, explosive decompression of the ship or habitat would be handled by slapping down your visor rather than, oh, dying 'cause it takes 90 minutes to suit up.
Mars' atmosphere has no free oxygen, as the element combines readily and quickly. Earth has free O2 because it has plants converting CO2 to O2. Mars' air is mostly CO2, and the air pressure at ground level is measured in millibars, or thousandths of Earth's sea-level air pressure. It's enough to blow dust during energetic wind storms, but is practically vaccuum for us. Think of air pressure at oh, 15 miles above sea level here, wild guess, close enough.
Because of lack of economy of scale. If cars weren't mass-produced, they'd cost ten million dollars apiece.
Just had a vision: in the free market nirvana, with no price controls mechanisms, a phone call is made from Food, Inc. to the manager of the Southwest Sector Food Production division of Food, Inc.
"Hey, Bob, how's it going?"
"Fine, Mr. Midas, just fine."
"Say, Bob, do you mind shutting down the lower 48,000 acre quadrant for the year? We think that costs of production with the price increase from our WaterCo division have become too high to justify a corn crop this fiscal year."
"Heh. Sure, Mr. Midas. Thanks for that stock bonus last year!"
"No problem, Bob. Now, make sure that corn stays good and dead, huh?"
Price of corn doubles, and doubles again... when the markets control their own supply, they ALWAYS CUT SUPPLY to maximize profit. No doubt they'll blame government regulation of pesticides or some bullshit. This is exactly how Enron jacked the state of California for 20 billion dollars of free money. And the White House and the Free Marketeers covered for them every step of the way. Truly free markets are a mechanism to loot. This is why we regulate.
Free markets can't deal with disaster or disruption, and food supply moves with disaster and disruption. Food is too important to leave up to the markets. If food prices weren't controlled by the government in some way, all independent farmers would be gone, corporations would control the food market vertically, and we'd be spending ten dollars for a loaf of bread. Prices would march magically and rapidly upwards, just as oil prices do. A small number of men would grow quite wealthy, farmers would become sub-miniumum wage slaves, and the vast majority of the world would become much poorer. At least in our present system, price spikes from weather are smoothed out to the point most people can afford to eat. Leave it to the free marketers, and it's Enron City, baby, and fuck the stupid poor grandmas, burn baby burn, hardy har har.
It's the futures markets. They're a thin veneer over a pack of rich men manipulating prices upward by collusion; the price of energy, food, oil, wood, gas, all of them go up and up and no one questions the "markets".
If the system is too complex to understand, it means inevitably that someone has complexified it to hide manipulation. Follow the money. A few people are trying to make trillions of dollars over their lifetimes. Find them.
Solution: simplify and re-regulate the markets. Remove those investment machines that can't be understood, but always seem to raise prices. TAX the profits so that the motive to manipulate the prices ever upwards at our expense and to their wealth is removed. Reinstate the capital gains tax, and rewrite the law so they can't hide monies in ways taxes can't address. Remove the offshore banking hideouts. This is survival we're talking about here, both ecological and economic. They're destroying our economy with greed so that we won't afford to take action against them, and delaying action on carbon control at a time that is absolutely critical to mitigate the coming weather changes.
Left Leaning Krugman? It'll come as a surprise to that economist that he's a communist pinko. So, every person that doesn't subscribe to the free-market-cures-everything is "leftist"? That's pretty much every economist who's not a member of the Chicago School. No wonder the neocons are so paranoid: they're surrounded by left-wing enemies of freedom.
And Krugman has made every basket a slam-dunk since Bush took office. I guess being right makes you a com-mun-ist.
Disney owns the copyright on the movie, not Peter Pan. Indeed the hospital gets a cut of the royalities in perpetuity -- the English government granted them an exception to copyright expiration time limits, as you probably now, letting them make profit from the Peter Pan copyright for eternity. Interesting case.
Finally! Never thought I'd find the thing, and it was on Slashdot all the time.
l
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/06/11/04/1353204.shtm
For illustration, imagine yourself going through life with your name, address, and phone number, along with a map to your home with careful directions as to how to get there, printed on a t-shirt you must wear for all to see. And to top it off, anyone who looks at the shirt can access records about where you've been, what you've read, who you talk to, along with careful timestamps on all these items.
Would you be confortable with that? Are you so free of enemies or sure of the people who watch you that you'd wear that shirt? Or would you rather just walk around without that highly informative piece of clothing, as free men have always done?
It would really help if this rule had a name. Hasbrouck, the writer who spotted the rule proposal up for public comment, says the references have been removed from the government websites. Doesn't mean it's dead. It'll surface again soon, when no one is paying attention. Some Friday night during basketball playoffs in June, probably . This stuff makes you dead cynical.
http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001156.html
THE thing to read, but it's fairly dense:
http://hasbrouck.org/IDP/IDP-APIS-comments.pdf
http://www.papersplease.org/wp/
http://www.airfax.com/airfax/ifexpress/ifexpress11 132006.htm