Posted: 1:20 p.m. ET CNN's Deborah Feyerick in Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Right now, the main priority is to restore order to New Orleans.
One official told us, "You can't rescue people when you're being shot at." (See the video of how violence is hindering help -- 3:13)
There are hundreds of people from the National Guard here in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. We're seeing people from all the agencies. They're waiting to deploy.
Their sense is that the condition inside New Orleans is so unstable they don't want to be sending people into harm's way.
----
They... haven't deployed troops because SOME few people are shooting... dangerous black poor people.
This is the ARMY that's afraid of the REPORTS of people shooting. That's a few idiots with guns in a crowd of 100,000, and the guard is waiting in Baton Rouge BECAUSE THEY MIGHT GET HURT BY ALL THOSE VIOLENT PEOPLE????
Give it one, two more days, and the riots with hundreds of dead will be in full swing. The guard will come in too late, and shoot anyone who makes a funny move.
Would this happen if this was a nice white suburb in Illinois with a few nuts with guns holding off aid to all of Schaumburg? You all KNOW the Guard would be in already if it were. They're staying out, as the post indicates, because they are afraid of the superpowerful violent blacks. It's Louisiana -- the whites have a terror of the blacks of New Orleans.
I was responding to the thread,where skin color was indeed an issue.
And it's too bad you don't like it. Because that's why the people are stuck in New Orleans, and why people are obsessing on the few rapists and shooters, and why people are afraid to enter the city.
It's Louisiana. It's New Orleans. Skin color is what everything is about down there.
Look at it this way: the attitudes expressed about how stupid or criminal the poor people left behind in the evacuation NEED to be spotlighted.
Bush started off on one of the critical memes, the one about "personal responsibility", in his speech. He's the leader of this mode of thought, this idea of ultimate libertarianism.
The gigantic tax cuts, the defunding of the public schools, the endless defunding of public service, all stem from the core attitude being expressed by the "they didn't help themselves" crowd.
It's the cancer that is killing the U.S. The people who hold these attitudes, like Bush, are people who never have been poor, don't understand poor, never will be poor. They are dragging us down with them into a special hell reserved for the very stupid.
And it's not a new American idea, either. In the aftermath of the Chicago Fire in 1871, the worthies of the city organized a relief fund for the poor and destitite of the city.
It went bollocks. They set up booths at which people could stand in line to apply for the charity. The poor found, however, that the strictures for the aid were so stringent that they could't qualify. A current address was one requirement. Proof of poverty was another, I think.
The reason for all the filters was simple: the administrators of the fund were determined that no slackers or unworthies would get undeserved money. They were so assiduous in their goals that years after the fire was out, almost NO MONIES had been dispensed. The fund was retired -- there was a LOT of money in that fund -- and the poor of Chicago went to hell in their own, unpublicized way.
There is some Calvanistic mindset among Americans, brought over with the stiffnecked businessmen from Europe, that the poor are unworthy and lazy and should be denied aid until they get their moral act together. The poor deserve what they don't get, and the rich are blessed by their own hard work. It's inlaid in our culture, and impossible to erase.
It's also incorrect. If Bush had been born to a poor family, he'd have been denied financial aid for college for drug use, would have frittered away his youth drinking and using drugs, would have been drafted and sent to Vietnam, and would be a rummy or dead today. His family's privileges gained him many amnesties from a character that would have destroyed a poor man.
And the same goes for those who espose his views on "personal responsiblity". Think of the responsiblity he showed as the CIC as he vacationed until Tuesday. Think of many, many things that he hasn't taken responsibility for, during his unknown years in his thirties and the years since he became President.
Think of the family and school districts that supported many of you posters, that kept your status up despite your best efforts to destroy yourselves during your own youth. Privilege begets more privilege; your own efforts are worthy, but rememeber, most of you chose your parents wisely.
You do realize that the men raping and shooting number in the double digits?
This is about terror of scary brown people. I've been to New Orleans, and I know what the attitude towards the poor blacks of NOLA is.
Tens of thousands of people are dying in the street because whites are obsessing about the dozens committing psychopathic crimes. They're AFRAID of the people, don't want to go into the town, and don't want the people to come to THEIR towns.
Every incident of black crime is being amplified and fed back into the fear to postdatedly justify the lack of response for the calls for help.
Obsession about the few psychos to the exclusion of all others is the hallmark of network news, and they are now feeding their fear and bias back into the stew of white fear.
"The Internet is not your personal stump to beat up people."
The hell he says. It's called the First Amendment, firstly, and secondly, speech is what the Internet is FOR! It's not a communications system run for the benefit of corporations. It's a protocol. It was designed to let people speak -- once upon a time, the people who couldn't speak because a cult or a country would destroy them for voicing the truth. No more...
There are laws covering slander and libel. If a business is suing people regardless of actual illegality, then we have a abuse of the courts a la Scientology. Sue to make people shut up; failing that, bankrupt and ruin them as a warning to others.
Monopolies were controlled for this very reason. The law, as it used to be enforced before the Federalist Society takedown of the judiciary, was intended to prevent a monopoly in one area to enable a company to create new monopolies in other industries, at infinitum until one company can conceivably own and run, well, everything.
Federalist Society members see nothing wrong with that. In fact, they want stock and seats on the board of directors.
Microsoft can use its monopoly in the OS to spend unlimited amounts of the 100 bil play money pile to bankrupt and dominate the VOIP market. And moving on, any other industry they care to take over.
And, if this is in the interest of the stockholders, um... why haven't they paid any dividends out of that 100 billion dollar pile? If the shareholders' interests really were the purpose of the company, the stockholders would all be rich.
Back in the late seventies and early eighties, Gerard K. O'Neill, famous for the development of the idea of orbital space habitats, made the rounds of the government and corporate powers to strongly propose the idea of the satellite phone. He wanted to have a profit-making reason to go into space to realize his dreams.
The prototype phone he showed around was about the size of a cellular handset you could buy today.
O'Neill's project never made it out of the gate. Too expensive for a private company to make, and we are all about private companies.
Bill Gates famously put some of his cash into a six billion dollar venture called Iridium which actually still functions. At least, unless they've deorbitted due to budget woes. They went bankrupt, and the US government picked it up for pennies on the dollar. That's one way of getting a cheap satphone system.
America and the rest of the planet went a different route, for purely business reasons. It was more profitable to roll out cellular coverage in stages, as customers could be found to pay the bills. They make fabulous amounts of money.
But as we see today in New Orleans, although cell phones passed the money test, they've utterly failed to support their users. People are dying out there because the cheap, easy-to-build cell towers are powerless and flooded.
Sometimes, and I can't see how much more forcefully a point can be made than an entire region falling out of communication, engineering for critical infrastructure should NOT BE LEFT SOLEY TO THE FREE MARKET.
The military is flying in satphones so that rescuers and cops can finally talk to each other.
Iridium, or a successor should be government subsidized, expanded, and maintained as a national security asset. Screw the cell phone companies. Screw the billionaires. Make a national phone company, like the post office. Let it operate independently, for profit, but chartered to provide service for all, from the satellites in the sky, at subidized prices. Priority for disasters. We need this. It is not an optional extra for civilization.
I know someone who can't rest because a relative was driving north on I-10 and hasn't been heard from in over two days. He should be able to phone. A prison has rioted, and no one can get through to find out what's going on.
If we can spend a trillion- yes, after it is over, a trillion will be spent-- on this war in Iraq, we can spend a few measly billion dollars a year in perpetuity to make sure this infrastructure failure never happpens again.
Libertarians, this one's for you. A lesson in humility and sanity. Government is sometimes the only solution.
" In Soviet Russia, the new and improved Internet ponders you!"
I think it is time to change that tag to:
"In Soviet America the new and improved Internet ponders you."
And they won't be kidding. How exactly different are the old Soviet model and the new American security state, other than corporations being largely autonomous?
This may require a time machine to implement. Barring that, a miracle.
I attended elementary school in Chicago, and walked a half block to get there. The idea of bussing kids is odd to me.
Cites shouldn't bus. Reaasign kids to their own neighborhoods. If the school isn't safe, well, that's the problem, isn't it? If your kids don't go there, you won't give a damn about funding or safety. Feedback loop; cut to disaster.
Build suburbs in a configuration to enable kids to walk to school. The suburbs are immensely expensive to maintain for society as a whole, but the costs are off the books. The cost of fuel is highlighting this particular cost.
In cities, stop bussing kids around to "magnet" schools. Kids should go to school in the district they live in.
Stop funding schools by taxing homeowners. Federally fund schools on a per capita basis. No exceptions. Tax private schools in some fashion so they stop being attractive to parents.
There's a economic depression going on. That's why people are cutting back on movie ticket purchases.
Salaries are down, raises are gone, jobs that pay well are scarce, and those jobs easy to get are slavery with a timecard and optional Medicaid.
There's a price for the free-market utopia that's finally upon us, and will be with us for at least another fifty years. That price is an increasingly impoverished workforce.
Broke people don't buy stuff. And there are only so many upper middle class and wealthy people to buy expensive real estate and splurge on $50 outings to the movies.
Attendance is down because people are cutting back on the luxuries. And DVD rentals are what, a dollar a day?
There's a economic depression going on. That's why people are cutting back on movie ticket purchases.
Salaries are down, raises are gone, jobs that pay well are scarce, and those jobs easy to get are slavery with a timecard and optional Medicaid.
There's a price for the free-market utopia that's finally upon us, and will be with us for at least another fifty years. That price is an increasingly impoverished workforce.
Broke people don't buy stuff. And there are only so many upper middle class and wealthy people to buy expensive real estate and splurge on $50 outings to the movies.
Attendance is down because people are cutting back on the luxuries. And DVD rentals are what, a dollar a day?
"And it is generally a good idea to find and prosecute people who are behind terrorist attacks."
And how exactly would this work with this all-eyes-are-on-you system for 200 million?
Is anyone thinking?
What terrorists? How would you "find and capture" them? Especially if they are dead in the attack? Suppose they don't want to bother the trains, and instead, oh, blow up the water pipelines? Can you place cameras everywhere? If you can, how will you answer the first two questions?
The only people being locked down are us. We are voluntarily entering prison, for no sane reason whatsoever.
Most terrorist plots busted up in the US are hatched by white men. Fact. How would this stop them? Or is this just a war on funny looking brown people, ignoring the crazy white men who are actually arming and plotting?
A giant surveillance system, protecting no one, and 200 million bucks down the drain, and we all enter prison every time we take a train ride, all for nothing and serving no purpose.
Want to prevent "terrorist" attacks, by which I assume you mean brown funny people?
Don't invade their countries, don't steal their money, don't torture their people, and pay attention to what your president has done. Al Queda has gone from a despised group of loonies to the heroes of the oppressed in the muslim underclass, and its all-because-we-validated-their-worst-predictions about what we would do after being attacked by 40 loons -- invade and hold the oil fields. Bush and company are maneuvering to invade Iran now -- another rich oil field. Amazingly enough, the terrorists from the 9-11 attack were mostly Saudi Arabians -- and we haven't even said boo to the Saudis. And everyone has noticed.
We are earning the hatred of those who had no truck with al Queda, and its not because they hate our freedom. They hate us because we're murderous, two-faced hypocrites. A few of those angry young people will be crazy enough, fervent enough, to start killing innocent people here in the US -- and it won't be because they hate us; they hate what we do, and hate us because we simply don't give a damn about what happens to the funny brown people.
Cameras. God. Just stop killing innocent people! Apologize for the invasion of Iraq! Let the people in prison go. It's freaking simple! We're GENERATING the terrorists!
I suppose that the upcoming financial crash of the U.S. -- due to the fact that we don't make anything, don't want to pay taxes, are pouring our blood and moral authority out in Iraq, are spending ourselves blind, are "making" money from selling our houses to each other, and are borrowing 2 bil a day from China to finance this party -- may have a silver lining.
Maybe Hollywood, the RIAA, the SPA, and the book publishers of the U.S. won't be able to set terms for the world if the world realizes that the Americans don't have squat to threaten them with anymore. A broke and broken U.S. isn't going to dicatate terms as much as it used to.
It's come to this. I'm trying to be cheerful about our upcoming deballing. We won't go bald, after all...
"If you use something like VLC, then it will simply not check that it is playing to an `authorised' monitor."
DMCA, baby. In that case they are in violation of federal law and will be shut down if they do not rewrite the player to comply. OR the video will simply fail to stream, OR the monitor will simply not accept the stream from the player.
All the pieces are falling into place, as scheduled.
As I've babbled on before, this is an inevitability. Europe and the Soviet Union are making things. They are flush with cash. Canada has a national budget surplus because they take in more taxes than they spend. China and Taiwan are so fat with money from actually making things that they are floating the financial mess that is the U.S. under Bushism.
We've cut taxes, evaporated our job base, let corporations like Haliburton move offshore to the Caymans and cease to pay taxes, and spent like a man charging up his credit cards before he declares bankruptcy. And I don't think that is much of a stretch as a metaphor for what is happening now in the U.S.
The Treasury of the U.S. has been looted. We are broke and busted. The connected corporations are wheeling cash away in trucks as quickly as they may before the crash comes.
To put it as simply, but not quite accurately as I can, China is floating the US by loaning it about two billion dollars a day.
$2,000,000,000US a day.
And China just decoupled from the US dollar, instead pegging the yuan to a breadbasket of world currencies, thus signaling the end of the party.
China and all the other debt holders are both in a dillema and the catbird's seat. If they call us out on a busted hand by simultaneously cutting off the allowance and asking for repayment, the world economy collapses. No one wants that: the US debt is in dollars, and a collapsed dollar means a collapsed outstanding debt -- which may be what the neocons are planning all along, considering how much debt they are piling up. China et al take a bath when the dollar collapses. On the other hand, the world WILL have a whip hand to use against the U.S. if they have to. If a U.S. world currency crisis is inevitable, the world might as well make pie out of rotten apples by reining in the U.S. by simply refusing to lend it any more money to fund its empire-building and simultaneous taxpayers' holiday.
This is all relevant to this discussion in the most important way. A broke U.S. will not be participating in a vigorous expansion into space. The reason we've not finished the ISS, built a next-gen manned space launcher or even patched the existing fleet of shuttles is all the same. We can't afford it. We won't tax ourselves, even for "wartime". We won't pay our bills. We are letting the oil companies raise prices unregulated by our representatives who damn well should be doing their job and capping their price rape.
I dreamed a dream of L5 colonies as a young man, building solarsats to beam back power to a hungry world. Of mining asteroids and the moon to obtain megatonnage of metals to build space habitats at L5 and other orbits as a lasting insurance policy against a singular disaster wiping out humanity. And not to mention making lots of new wealth in gigawattage sold, aluminum, steel, and new places for people to emmigrate.
These things may still happen, but I sadly, so sadly see that the U.S. will not be the primary agent.
A frog, some people swear, is incapable of noticing subtle rises in the temperature of the water it occupies. These same folk say that if you put a frog in a pot of cold water, and slowly let the water come to a boil, the frog will happily do froggy things in the water until it boils to death.
The frog is now dead. The US and its clients have boiled away all the water in the pot.
Go back to your reality TV shows, citizens, nothing to fear unless you are doing something criminal or unpatriotic or that which undermines the President's authority in wartime (which by defining the war's purpose as eliminating a common noun, will be eternal)...
You aren't a criminal, are you? Or anti-party-in-power, which will be equivalent?
Your points about production costs and disposal problems are spot on though.
Confusion always arises when cost accounting is brought into consideration.
Keeping our cars running on oil requires massive taxpayer subsidies. The Iraq war has cost 300 billion dollars -- so far. That invasion/conquest was a cold-blooded move to obtain the second-biggest source of oil in the world. How much does that work out per gasoline-powered car sold these past thre years? That's real cost accounting.
If NiMH or lithium-ion costs too much for the free market to handle, it's because the set of rules selected for computing the costs is rigged from the start. And Exxon holds the patents for NiMH battery tech, so forget that ever taking off unless they feel like it. Exxon seems to have made billions in profit the last quarter alone: they could easily start building NiMH battery plants and disposal/recycling centers, driving down the per-unit cost. They won't -- it would threaten their business model, oil. That's why they snapped up the patents.
If we wanted to, if the government were ideologically inclined to, if the oil-based companies would let us, the government could have taken that 300 billion and built lithium-ion factories and recycling centers across the country, and then let private business take over the maintenance.
It depends on seeing things clearly, and making sane choices. Right now, we have turned the world against us by invading a helpless yet oil-rich country, confiscating its oil fields, and fighting the angry insurgency to the tune of 300 bil.
With that in mind, what was really economical: the invasion, which will fail, at 300B, or spending a trillion or so to build a battery industry that would drop unit costs down to gasoline-priced levels?
Now, suddenly, the eBook reader will become a widespread piece of hardware. In a 2,000 buck Tablet PC running Windows.
And think of this: with the moderating effect of the used textbook market gone, the sky's the limit for textbook prices. The $500 book is a-comin'.
And think of this: the entire publishing cost for the paper book is gone, which means the book becomes pure profit. And they will raise the prices over and over again...
Digitally copying textbooks is now a federal crime in the U.S. The law passed years ago. I recall the penalty is five years in a PMITA prison per book.
The FBI could also scan cars around rallies to find "threats" to the president's peace of mind, AKA people with known anti-Bush tendencies, to arrest and harrass; the SS could use it to track dissidents... after all, they're doing it right now, with current tech.
This is not a drill; this is a police state. Don't give them any more toys than those they already abuse.
"Well, hell yes. Ford makes cars and trucks that go faster than 75 miles per hour, even tho the speed is illegal. They are winking at the speeders. How many people die every year because of that excess capacity for speed? And Ford is not liable... why?"
Slashdot Mirror
And. Haliburton is being awarded cleanup contracts as we speak.
Cheney's company.
God.
"Everyone left of the aisle is using it to advance wackjob theories."
Name one. I'm pretty up on what's being said.
And is anyone not in Bush's camp "left"? Seems to be.
To illustrate my point that fear of dangerous black people is freezing rescue efforts, read:
i ndex.html
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/09/01/scene.blog/
Guard gathering in Baton Rouge
Posted: 1:20 p.m. ET
CNN's Deborah Feyerick in Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Right now, the main priority is to restore order to New Orleans.
One official told us, "You can't rescue people when you're being shot at." (See the video of how violence is hindering help -- 3:13)
There are hundreds of people from the National Guard here in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. We're seeing people from all the agencies. They're waiting to deploy.
Their sense is that the condition inside New Orleans is so unstable they don't want to be sending people into harm's way.
----
They... haven't deployed troops because SOME few people are shooting... dangerous black poor people.
This is the ARMY that's afraid of the REPORTS of people shooting. That's a few idiots with guns in a crowd of 100,000, and the guard is waiting in Baton Rouge BECAUSE THEY MIGHT GET HURT BY ALL THOSE VIOLENT PEOPLE????
Give it one, two more days, and the riots with hundreds of dead will be in full swing. The guard will come in too late, and shoot anyone who makes a funny move.
Would this happen if this was a nice white suburb in Illinois with a few nuts with guns holding off aid to all of Schaumburg? You all KNOW the Guard would be in already if it were. They're staying out, as the post indicates, because they are afraid of the superpowerful violent blacks. It's Louisiana -- the whites have a terror of the blacks of New Orleans.
I was responding to the thread,where skin color was indeed an issue.
And it's too bad you don't like it. Because that's why the people are stuck in New Orleans, and why people are obsessing on the few rapists and shooters, and why people are afraid to enter the city.
It's Louisiana. It's New Orleans. Skin color is what everything is about down there.
Look at it this way: the attitudes expressed about how stupid or criminal the poor people left behind in the evacuation NEED to be spotlighted.
Bush started off on one of the critical memes, the one about "personal responsibility", in his speech. He's the leader of this mode of thought, this idea of ultimate libertarianism.
The gigantic tax cuts, the defunding of the public schools, the endless defunding of public service, all stem from the core attitude being expressed by the "they didn't help themselves" crowd.
It's the cancer that is killing the U.S. The people who hold these attitudes, like Bush, are people who never have been poor, don't understand poor, never will be poor. They are dragging us down with them into a special hell reserved for the very stupid.
And it's not a new American idea, either. In the aftermath of the Chicago Fire in 1871, the worthies of the city organized a relief fund for the poor and destitite of the city.
It went bollocks. They set up booths at which people could stand in line to apply for the charity. The poor found, however, that the strictures for the aid were so stringent that they could't qualify. A current address was one requirement. Proof of poverty was another, I think.
The reason for all the filters was simple: the administrators of the fund were determined that no slackers or unworthies would get undeserved money. They were so assiduous in their goals that years after the fire was out, almost NO MONIES had been dispensed. The fund was retired -- there was a LOT of money in that fund -- and the poor of Chicago went to hell in their own, unpublicized way.
There is some Calvanistic mindset among Americans, brought over with the stiffnecked businessmen from Europe, that the poor are unworthy and lazy and should be denied aid until they get their moral act together. The poor deserve what they don't get, and the rich are blessed by their own hard work. It's inlaid in our culture, and impossible to erase.
It's also incorrect. If Bush had been born to a poor family, he'd have been denied financial aid for college for drug use, would have frittered away his youth drinking and using drugs, would have been drafted and sent to Vietnam, and would be a rummy or dead today. His family's privileges gained him many amnesties from a character that would have destroyed a poor man.
And the same goes for those who espose his views on "personal responsiblity". Think of the responsiblity he showed as the CIC as he vacationed until Tuesday. Think of many, many things that he hasn't taken responsibility for, during his unknown years in his thirties and the years since he became President.
Think of the family and school districts that supported many of you posters, that kept your status up despite your best efforts to destroy yourselves during your own youth. Privilege begets more privilege; your own efforts are worthy, but rememeber, most of you chose your parents wisely.
You do realize that the men raping and shooting number in the double digits?
This is about terror of scary brown people. I've been to New Orleans, and I know what the attitude towards the poor blacks of NOLA is.
Tens of thousands of people are dying in the street because whites are obsessing about the dozens committing psychopathic crimes. They're AFRAID of the people, don't want to go into the town, and don't want the people to come to THEIR towns.
Every incident of black crime is being amplified and fed back into the fear to postdatedly justify the lack of response for the calls for help.
Obsession about the few psychos to the exclusion of all others is the hallmark of network news, and they are now feeding their fear and bias back into the stew of white fear.
Sorry, but that's the truth.
"The Internet is not your personal stump to beat up people."
The hell he says. It's called the First Amendment, firstly, and secondly, speech is what the Internet is FOR! It's not a communications system run for the benefit of corporations. It's a protocol. It was designed to let people speak -- once upon a time, the people who couldn't speak because a cult or a country would destroy them for voicing the truth. No more...
There are laws covering slander and libel. If a business is suing people regardless of actual illegality, then we have a abuse of the courts a la Scientology. Sue to make people shut up; failing that, bankrupt and ruin them as a warning to others.
Monopolies were controlled for this very reason. The law, as it used to be enforced before the Federalist Society takedown of the judiciary, was intended to prevent a monopoly in one area to enable a company to create new monopolies in other industries, at infinitum until one company can conceivably own and run, well, everything.
Federalist Society members see nothing wrong with that. In fact, they want stock and seats on the board of directors.
Microsoft can use its monopoly in the OS to spend unlimited amounts of the 100 bil play money pile to bankrupt and dominate the VOIP market. And moving on, any other industry they care to take over.
And, if this is in the interest of the stockholders, um... why haven't they paid any dividends out of that 100 billion dollar pile? If the shareholders' interests really were the purpose of the company, the stockholders would all be rich.
Back in the late seventies and early eighties, Gerard K. O'Neill, famous for the development of the idea of orbital space habitats, made the rounds of the government and corporate powers to strongly propose the idea of the satellite phone. He wanted to have a profit-making reason to go into space to realize his dreams.
The prototype phone he showed around was about the size of a cellular handset you could buy today.
O'Neill's project never made it out of the gate. Too expensive for a private company to make, and we are all about private companies.
Bill Gates famously put some of his cash into a six billion dollar venture called Iridium which actually still functions. At least, unless they've deorbitted due to budget woes. They went bankrupt, and the US government picked it up for pennies on the dollar. That's one way of getting a cheap satphone system.
America and the rest of the planet went a different route, for purely business reasons. It was more profitable to roll out cellular coverage in stages, as customers could be found to pay the bills. They make fabulous amounts of money.
But as we see today in New Orleans, although cell phones passed the money test, they've utterly failed to support their users. People are dying out there because the cheap, easy-to-build cell towers are powerless and flooded.
Sometimes, and I can't see how much more forcefully a point can be made than an entire region falling out of communication, engineering for critical infrastructure should NOT BE LEFT SOLEY TO THE FREE MARKET.
The military is flying in satphones so that rescuers and cops can finally talk to each other.
Iridium, or a successor should be government subsidized, expanded, and maintained as a national security asset. Screw the cell phone companies. Screw the billionaires. Make a national phone company, like the post office. Let it operate independently, for profit, but chartered to provide service for all, from the satellites in the sky, at subidized prices. Priority for disasters. We need this. It is not an optional extra for civilization.
I know someone who can't rest because a relative was driving north on I-10 and hasn't been heard from in over two days. He should be able to phone. A prison has rioted, and no one can get through to find out what's going on.
If we can spend a trillion- yes, after it is over, a trillion will be spent-- on this war in Iraq, we can spend a few measly billion dollars a year in perpetuity to make sure this infrastructure failure never happpens again.
Libertarians, this one's for you. A lesson in humility and sanity. Government is sometimes the only solution.
" In Soviet Russia, the new and improved Internet ponders you!"
I think it is time to change that tag to:
"In Soviet America the new and improved Internet ponders you."
And they won't be kidding. How exactly different are the old Soviet model and the new American security state, other than corporations being largely autonomous?
This may require a time machine to implement. Barring that, a miracle.
I attended elementary school in Chicago, and walked a half block to get there. The idea of bussing kids is odd to me.
Cites shouldn't bus. Reaasign kids to their own neighborhoods. If the school isn't safe, well, that's the problem, isn't it? If your kids don't go there, you won't give a damn about funding or safety. Feedback loop; cut to disaster.
Build suburbs in a configuration to enable kids to walk to school. The suburbs are immensely expensive to maintain for society as a whole, but the costs are off the books. The cost of fuel is highlighting this particular cost.
In cities, stop bussing kids around to "magnet" schools. Kids should go to school in the district they live in.
Stop funding schools by taxing homeowners. Federally fund schools on a per capita basis. No exceptions. Tax private schools in some fashion so they stop being attractive to parents.
None of this can happen. But it is the cure.
Piracy, quality, yadda yadda.
There's a economic depression going on. That's why people are cutting back on movie ticket purchases.
Salaries are down, raises are gone, jobs that pay well are scarce, and those jobs easy to get are slavery with a timecard and optional Medicaid.
There's a price for the free-market utopia that's finally upon us, and will be with us for at least another fifty years. That price is an increasingly impoverished workforce.
Broke people don't buy stuff. And there are only so many upper middle class and wealthy people to buy expensive real estate and splurge on $50 outings to the movies.
Attendance is down because people are cutting back on the luxuries. And DVD rentals are what, a dollar a day?
"TROLL"????
Jesus god, Bushies, are you smoking crack????
Piracy, quality, yadda yadda.
There's a economic depression going on. That's why people are cutting back on movie ticket purchases.
Salaries are down, raises are gone, jobs that pay well are scarce, and those jobs easy to get are slavery with a timecard and optional Medicaid.
There's a price for the free-market utopia that's finally upon us, and will be with us for at least another fifty years. That price is an increasingly impoverished workforce.
Broke people don't buy stuff. And there are only so many upper middle class and wealthy people to buy expensive real estate and splurge on $50 outings to the movies.
Attendance is down because people are cutting back on the luxuries. And DVD rentals are what, a dollar a day?
"And it is generally a good idea to find and prosecute people who are behind terrorist attacks."
And how exactly would this work with this all-eyes-are-on-you system for 200 million?
Is anyone thinking?
What terrorists? How would you "find and capture" them? Especially if they are dead in the attack? Suppose they don't want to bother the trains, and instead, oh, blow up the water pipelines? Can you place cameras everywhere? If you can, how will you answer the first two questions?
The only people being locked down are us. We are voluntarily entering prison, for no sane reason whatsoever.
Most terrorist plots busted up in the US are hatched by white men. Fact. How would this stop them? Or is this just a war on funny looking brown people, ignoring the crazy white men who are actually arming and plotting?
A giant surveillance system, protecting no one, and 200 million bucks down the drain, and we all enter prison every time we take a train ride, all for nothing and serving no purpose.
Want to prevent "terrorist" attacks, by which I assume you mean brown funny people?
Don't invade their countries, don't steal their money, don't torture their people, and pay attention to what your president has done. Al Queda has gone from a despised group of loonies to the heroes of the oppressed in the muslim underclass, and its all-because-we-validated-their-worst-predictions about what we would do after being attacked by 40 loons -- invade and hold the oil fields. Bush and company are maneuvering to invade Iran now -- another rich oil field. Amazingly enough, the terrorists from the 9-11 attack were mostly Saudi Arabians -- and we haven't even said boo to the Saudis. And everyone has noticed.
We are earning the hatred of those who had no truck with al Queda, and its not because they hate our freedom. They hate us because we're murderous, two-faced hypocrites. A few of those angry young people will be crazy enough, fervent enough, to start killing innocent people here in the US -- and it won't be because they hate us; they hate what we do, and hate us because we simply don't give a damn about what happens to the funny brown people.
Cameras. God. Just stop killing innocent people! Apologize for the invasion of Iraq! Let the people in prison go. It's freaking simple! We're GENERATING the terrorists!
I suppose that the upcoming financial crash of the U.S. -- due to the fact that we don't make anything, don't want to pay taxes, are pouring our blood and moral authority out in Iraq, are spending ourselves blind, are "making" money from selling our houses to each other, and are borrowing 2 bil a day from China to finance this party -- may have a silver lining.
Maybe Hollywood, the RIAA, the SPA, and the book publishers of the U.S. won't be able to set terms for the world if the world realizes that the Americans don't have squat to threaten them with anymore. A broke and broken U.S. isn't going to dicatate terms as much as it used to.
It's come to this. I'm trying to be cheerful about our upcoming deballing. We won't go bald, after all...
"If you use something like VLC, then it will simply not check that it is playing to an `authorised' monitor."
DMCA, baby. In that case they are in violation of federal law and will be shut down if they do not rewrite the player to comply. OR the video will simply fail to stream, OR the monitor will simply not accept the stream from the player.
All the pieces are falling into place, as scheduled.
As I've babbled on before, this is an inevitability. Europe and the Soviet Union are making things. They are flush with cash. Canada has a national budget surplus because they take in more taxes than they spend. China and Taiwan are so fat with money from actually making things that they are floating the financial mess that is the U.S. under Bushism.
We've cut taxes, evaporated our job base, let corporations like Haliburton move offshore to the Caymans and cease to pay taxes, and spent like a man charging up his credit cards before he declares bankruptcy. And I don't think that is much of a stretch as a metaphor for what is happening now in the U.S.
The Treasury of the U.S. has been looted. We are broke and busted. The connected corporations are wheeling cash away in trucks as quickly as they may before the crash comes.
To put it as simply, but not quite accurately as I can, China is floating the US by loaning it about two billion dollars a day.
$2,000,000,000US a day.
And China just decoupled from the US dollar, instead pegging the yuan to a breadbasket of world currencies, thus signaling the end of the party.
China and all the other debt holders are both in a dillema and the catbird's seat. If they call us out on a busted hand by simultaneously cutting off the allowance and asking for repayment, the world economy collapses. No one wants that: the US debt is in dollars, and a collapsed dollar means a collapsed outstanding debt -- which may be what the neocons are planning all along, considering how much debt they are piling up. China et al take a bath when the dollar collapses. On the other hand, the world WILL have a whip hand to use against the U.S. if they have to. If a U.S. world currency crisis is inevitable, the world might as well make pie out of rotten apples by reining in the U.S. by simply refusing to lend it any more money to fund its empire-building and simultaneous taxpayers' holiday.
This is all relevant to this discussion in the most important way. A broke U.S. will not be participating in a vigorous expansion into space. The reason we've not finished the ISS, built a next-gen manned space launcher or even patched the existing fleet of shuttles is all the same. We can't afford it. We won't tax ourselves, even for "wartime". We won't pay our bills. We are letting the oil companies raise prices unregulated by our representatives who damn well should be doing their job and capping their price rape.
I dreamed a dream of L5 colonies as a young man, building solarsats to beam back power to a hungry world. Of mining asteroids and the moon to obtain megatonnage of metals to build space habitats at L5 and other orbits as a lasting insurance policy against a singular disaster wiping out humanity. And not to mention making lots of new wealth in gigawattage sold, aluminum, steel, and new places for people to emmigrate.
These things may still happen, but I sadly, so sadly see that the U.S. will not be the primary agent.
So many times I've used the metaphor...
A frog, some people swear, is incapable of noticing subtle rises in the temperature of the water it occupies. These same folk say that if you put a frog in a pot of cold water, and slowly let the water come to a boil, the frog will happily do froggy things in the water until it boils to death.
The frog is now dead. The US and its clients have boiled away all the water in the pot.
Go back to your reality TV shows, citizens, nothing to fear unless you are doing something criminal or unpatriotic or that which undermines the President's authority in wartime (which by defining the war's purpose as eliminating a common noun, will be eternal)...
You aren't a criminal, are you? Or anti-party-in-power, which will be equivalent?
Are you sure?
They'll be watching.
Forever.
Confusion always arises when cost accounting is brought into consideration.
Keeping our cars running on oil requires massive taxpayer subsidies. The Iraq war has cost 300 billion dollars -- so far. That invasion/conquest was a cold-blooded move to obtain the second-biggest source of oil in the world. How much does that work out per gasoline-powered car sold these past thre years? That's real cost accounting.
If NiMH or lithium-ion costs too much for the free market to handle, it's because the set of rules selected for computing the costs is rigged from the start. And Exxon holds the patents for NiMH battery tech, so forget that ever taking off unless they feel like it. Exxon seems to have made billions in profit the last quarter alone: they could easily start building NiMH battery plants and disposal/recycling centers, driving down the per-unit cost. They won't -- it would threaten their business model, oil. That's why they snapped up the patents.
If we wanted to, if the government were ideologically inclined to, if the oil-based companies would let us, the government could have taken that 300 billion and built lithium-ion factories and recycling centers across the country, and then let private business take over the maintenance.
It depends on seeing things clearly, and making sane choices. Right now, we have turned the world against us by invading a helpless yet oil-rich country, confiscating its oil fields, and fighting the angry insurgency to the tune of 300 bil.
With that in mind, what was really economical: the invasion, which will fail, at 300B, or spending a trillion or so to build a battery industry that would drop unit costs down to gasoline-priced levels?
Now, suddenly, the eBook reader will become a widespread piece of hardware. In a 2,000 buck Tablet PC running Windows.
And think of this: with the moderating effect of the used textbook market gone, the sky's the limit for textbook prices. The $500 book is a-comin'.
And think of this: the entire publishing cost for the paper book is gone, which means the book becomes pure profit. And they will raise the prices over and over again...
Solution on the profiteer's part: make the software connect to the company's encrypted server to check the actual time.
Digitally copying textbooks is now a federal crime in the U.S. The law passed years ago. I recall the penalty is five years in a PMITA prison per book.
I'm not kidding.
The FBI could also scan cars around rallies to find "threats" to the president's peace of mind, AKA people with known anti-Bush tendencies, to arrest and harrass; the SS could use it to track dissidents... after all, they're doing it right now, with current tech.
This is not a drill; this is a police state. Don't give them any more toys than those they already abuse.
"Well, hell yes. Ford makes cars and trucks that go faster than 75 miles per hour, even tho the speed is illegal. They are winking at the speeders. How many people die every year because of that excess capacity for speed? And Ford is not liable... why?"
WTF is this moderated as "troll"?