...because of the loss of 'civic virtue'. Me, I'm trying to figure out whether the institutionalized acceptance of any immoral act as long as it is for profit is a separate and distinct cause, or just a symptom of the loss of 'civic virtue'.
Surrounded by "the void" as you contemplate the approach of a mass hurtling along at 22,000 MPH (give or take) whose design was dictated by a cost vs. capabilities calculation...that would be exciting.
Your analogy breaks down because of differing conditions controlling behavior: You go to prison for intentionally driving someone else's business into bankruptcy but you can make an awful lot of money driving everybody's world over the cliff of climate change.
I'm afraid "dystopian future" is exactly right. I've been reading the collected works of H.G. Wells (free ebook on Amazon)...his works extend much further into the social realm than the casual reader might get out of War of the Worlds or even from the inferences of The Time Machine. And they're depressing...what we endure now is naught but a rerun of England's decline and with exactly the same driver: Catering to a wealthy aristocracy that prioritizes the accumulation of wealth over all else...a wealthy aristocracy that has cast aside morality and ethics and consequently has devolved into parasitism.
Brian Wingfield writes in Bloomberg that the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future has sent a draft report to Energy Secretary Steven Chu recommending that US communities should be encouraged to vie for becoming a federal nuclear-waste site
I didn't want to be right when I hypothesized that the reason that Corporate America was intentionally sabotaging the economy of the United States of America was to leave the American people no economic choices other than accepting death on a dish..in the water...on the wind from the Corporations...
In a society with a secret police whose tentacles include both a pervasive HUMINT presence and whose ELINT capabilities not only reach deep into the means of communications - to include the internet and communications between internal and external banks - but firewall and filter virtually all communications incoming and outgoing, is it "corruption" when a representative of the state extracts additional fees from foreign capitalists?
Corruption implies that the state is unaware of it.
(I must note, of course, that corruption in such societies is often simply noted until the time comes that it may be used as a lever to attain a state goal. And since the act of corrupting a PRC official is typically illegal not just in the PRC but in the home country of the individual making the pay-offs, it is a lever that crosses borders...and oceans. Corruption can serve the state well.)
Technology has failed democracy. The first form of government that has the bio- or nanotechnology to make a politician's nose light up and cause their ears to flap when they lie or are acting on behalf of someone other than the majority of their constituents wins.
My conclusion exactly; there doesn't appear to be any inherently bad form of government - but any form of government is vulnerable to the manipulations of bad people.
History repeats over and over that bad people at the top yields increasing misery the further down the ladder you go amongst that government's citizens. (Which is undoubtedly the reason why revising history is so popular among those who seek to corrupt government.)
A competitor for the internet. Preferably competitors of the kind that appear and disappear before the corporate giants and their wholly-owned governments can sink their claws into them.
lolll...is compartmentalized capitalism focused on advancing the interests of the state. The PRC has this trick: You can make yourselves wealthy, but if you attempt to make yourself wealthy at the expense of the state as they do in the U.S. and E.U., then you're fitted with some of that uniquely Chinese jewelry:
made me laugh...but they better go outside quick, for the days of being unable to escape electronics and personalized advertising (a la Blade Runner) are approaching even faster.
Soon you won't be outside even when you're outside...
Made me laugh. Pielke is the guy who argues - essentially - that since the neighborhood is burning and that is a larger problem, you shouldn't do anything about the fact that your house is on fire. http://motherjones.com/environment/2008/10/qa-roger-pielke-sr
Very useful guy if you're making a fortune generating greenhouse gases...you can use him to argue that you should be left alone until such time as slash-and-burn agriculture is outlawed.
How? The Republicans sided with Big Oil and the OPEC countries against the American people and the United States of America on behalf of the super-wealthy who had oil interests. Consequently, we did not get off of oil and the soaring price of energy drove the price of everything else up. That kicked a bunch of spouses - spouses who used to ensure little Tommy and Janie did their homework - out of the home and into the job market so so their families could meet basic living expenses and afford the occasional luxury, creating a generation of latchkey kids.
Worse, those energy-driven shocks to the economy enabled the Republicans to foist the lie of flood-up/trickle-down economics upon the American people with the consequence that the American worker's wages started being suppressed because the head cheese (a.k.a. the CEO and his or her executive suite) wanted any increase in profits resulting from price increases and productivity gains them since they could now keep any compensation increases they gave themselves rather than seeing their taxes soar as a penalty for excessive greed. So inflation - unmatched by wage increases - kicked even more spouses out into the job market, creating even more latchkey kids.
And "flood-up/trickle-down" economics in turn incentivized the few to look to reduce the cost of "labor" (their term for the American people...that is, for those Americans who did not fall into "entitlement spending"...the status most equivalent to the dogs and cats in the "Pending Euthanasia" cages at the shelter to the super-wealthy and the right)...so they bought inequitable free trade from a corrupt Congress and White House, bringing yet more wage pressure upon the American family...sending even more spouses to work...creating even more latchkey kids whose parents didn't have the time or were too tired to take the active role in their children's education of previous generations...
In conclusion, the super-wealthy got super-wealthy through manipulating our economy and tax structure - and in the process inflicted enormous damage upon the nuclear American family that, once upon a time, consistently featured a supervising parent at home around the clock...a parent who - among other duties - supervised the doing of homework and monitored the educational performance of their children.
And I do believe at least some of the super-wealthy are cognizant of their role in the destruction of the American family and attempt to assuage their consciences by throwing money at the problem.
I'd hate for GM to not only tell me who was allowed to ride in my car but also that any burger joint I drove my GM product to had to give Apple a 30% cut of any orders I or my passengers made at their drive-in window.
It should be noted that your so-called "private taxes" differ from real taxes in one significant way - the energy monopolies can't throw you in jail for not paying them.
Though, I'm curious - do you actually believe that the people who manufacture the hardware you'll be using for your point-of-use energy generation won't be making a profit when they sell them to you?
I would think (particularly given the increasingly "conservatively" corrupt state of the SCOTUS) that you should have appended "yet" to your first sentence...and they can already use liens and court judgements that yield garnishments to throw you out of your residence (or even an apartment...you won't be able to stay in yours if enough is being garnished to make you incapable of meeting your expenses), which can be a fate worse than jail given the hazards of exposure to the elements, crime, etc.
Regarding your second sentence, there is a big difference between a one-off payment to purchase an energy source and what the energy monopolies do in the way of raising rates/prices whenever the CEO of some corporation in the energy harvesting, generation, or distribution system or a speculator in the carbonaceous energy sources wants a new yacht for their kid...or when it appears that the American people have a couple of loose pennies to rub together...or when a "private investor group" demands higher dividends for themselves...or on a whim...or whatever drives their decision to begin gouging again.
There is no true effective difference to the consumer between "profit" and taxes, except the consumer doesn't have a prayer of controlling the amount of extortion involved with the former if the product or service is a necessity and sufficiently monopolized, as is most definitely the case with energy.
At least with government taxes you can vote change in.
Point-of-use energy energy generation offers the American people the opportunity for independence from the energy monopolies and the private taxes that they levy (they call those private taxes "profit"). Important, in an era of artificially suppressed wages. Additionally, point-of-use energy offers the opportunity to defund the nastiest of our politicians...a good thing, in a democracy. So support it!.
I hear you, Marine. When I got out of the Army, the stuff I was used to was maybe 10 years ahead of the civilian world; there is a good chance that such as TFA's general (his predecessors, really) didn't even know about it because they didn't have "need to know". But I couldn't tell any prospective employers that their stuff was antiquated (to date my discharge, I was amazed that an extremely pricy "high-speed" modem out in the civilian world only crawled along at 1200 bps - and didn't even have hardware encryption) because it was all classified and I had to sign off on a seven-year non-disclosure and international travel restriction.
lollll..I figure that is the ultimate "Catch-22" when writing a résumé: Tell the truth, and go directly to jail - do not pass "Go".'
And it was rough playing dumb around the civilians, too, because that attitude that the military is incapable of intellectual achievement is pervasive...and highly irritating. I still laugh at the thought of the civilian world not being able draw the proper conclusions from whom DARPA worked for.
Your' pretty stupid. Energy companies have a vested interest in this working. They sell electricity. Getting it cheaper and more reliably is ALWAYS in their best interest.
You can argue OPEC doesn't want it, but that's not 'Energy Companies' it's Oil Producers.
Why the insult? Am I supposed to conclude juvenile along with naive? Speaking of the latter, who gets cut out of the loop if renewable energy replaces carbonaceous (whether hydrocarbons or coal) fuels?
Do you really think there is a difference between OPEC, Big Oil/Gas/Coal/Nuclear, and America's Republicans? If so, whose memes are "You'll take my SUV from my cold, dead hands!" and "Forcing me to replace incandescents with CFLs is un-American!"??? The "left's"?
You misunderstand motive; it isn't about where it was invented, it is about Big Energy not wanting competition. So slam it, put it down...discourage investment...discourage deployment.
Speaking of which, I do hope my surviving relatives in Britain understand that we in the U.S. tend to bomb the crap out of anybody who doesn't cooperate with - let alone threatens - the energy monopolies.
Corporations without any IT staff interfacing with "vendors" who are highly proficient at making soothing technical noises while cranking out large bills? Wheeee...money growing on MBA-shaped trees.
And "What trade secrets?" is the least of it....CEOs better start being careful about the content of the emails they send to their mistresses, 'cuz leverage is leverage.
Apple's income and the jobs of their Chinese factory workers...both of which trump the rights of American workers and consumers. "America...whadda country!".
On the other hand, the owner of a network in Missouri that hosts botnet deserves a good deal of the credit for either their complicity or their stupidity.
(I was tempted to grant a huss based upon the possibility that educational funding cuts have resulted in the poor hypothetical sap being unable to afford any decent sniffers...but then I remembered Wireshark.)
Slashdot Mirror
...because of the loss of 'civic virtue'. Me, I'm trying to figure out whether the institutionalized acceptance of any immoral act as long as it is for profit is a separate and distinct cause, or just a symptom of the loss of 'civic virtue'.
Surrounded by "the void" as you contemplate the approach of a mass hurtling along at 22,000 MPH (give or take) whose design was dictated by a cost vs. capabilities calculation...that would be exciting.
Your analogy breaks down because of differing conditions controlling behavior: You go to prison for intentionally driving someone else's business into bankruptcy but you can make an awful lot of money driving everybody's world over the cliff of climate change.
I'm afraid "dystopian future" is exactly right. I've been reading the collected works of H.G. Wells (free ebook on Amazon)...his works extend much further into the social realm than the casual reader might get out of War of the Worlds or even from the inferences of The Time Machine. And they're depressing...what we endure now is naught but a rerun of England's decline and with exactly the same driver: Catering to a wealthy aristocracy that prioritizes the accumulation of wealth over all else...a wealthy aristocracy that has cast aside morality and ethics and consequently has devolved into parasitism.
Brian Wingfield writes in Bloomberg that the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future has sent a draft report to Energy Secretary Steven Chu recommending that US communities should be encouraged to vie for becoming a federal nuclear-waste site
I didn't want to be right when I hypothesized that the reason that Corporate America was intentionally sabotaging the economy of the United States of America was to leave the American people no economic choices other than accepting death on a dish..in the water...on the wind from the Corporations...
No, but you can declare that corporations are people and their wealth is free speech and drown that idea in an ocean of propaganda...
In a society with a secret police whose tentacles include both a pervasive HUMINT presence and whose ELINT capabilities not only reach deep into the means of communications - to include the internet and communications between internal and external banks - but firewall and filter virtually all communications incoming and outgoing, is it "corruption" when a representative of the state extracts additional fees from foreign capitalists?
Corruption implies that the state is unaware of it.
(I must note, of course, that corruption in such societies is often simply noted until the time comes that it may be used as a lever to attain a state goal. And since the act of corrupting a PRC official is typically illegal not just in the PRC but in the home country of the individual making the pay-offs, it is a lever that crosses borders...and oceans. Corruption can serve the state well.)
Technology has failed democracy. The first form of government that has the bio- or nanotechnology to make a politician's nose light up and cause their ears to flap when they lie or are acting on behalf of someone other than the majority of their constituents wins.
My conclusion exactly; there doesn't appear to be any inherently bad form of government - but any form of government is vulnerable to the manipulations of bad people.
History repeats over and over that bad people at the top yields increasing misery the further down the ladder you go amongst that government's citizens. (Which is undoubtedly the reason why revising history is so popular among those who seek to corrupt government.)
A competitor for the internet. Preferably competitors of the kind that appear and disappear before the corporate giants and their wholly-owned governments can sink their claws into them.
lolll...is compartmentalized capitalism focused on advancing the interests of the state. The PRC has this trick: You can make yourselves wealthy, but if you attempt to make yourself wealthy at the expense of the state as they do in the U.S. and E.U., then you're fitted with some of that uniquely Chinese jewelry:
A bullet behind the ear.
made me laugh...but they better go outside quick, for the days of being unable to escape electronics and personalized advertising (a la Blade Runner) are approaching even faster.
Soon you won't be outside even when you're outside...
If one of the "Big Box" retailers has moved into the natural successor to "competition" when monopolization has become pervasive: War.
Made me laugh. Pielke is the guy who argues - essentially - that since the neighborhood is burning and that is a larger problem, you shouldn't do anything about the fact that your house is on fire. http://motherjones.com/environment/2008/10/qa-roger-pielke-sr
Very useful guy if you're making a fortune generating greenhouse gases...you can use him to argue that you should be left alone until such time as slash-and-burn agriculture is outlawed.
How? The Republicans sided with Big Oil and the OPEC countries against the American people and the United States of America on behalf of the super-wealthy who had oil interests. Consequently, we did not get off of oil and the soaring price of energy drove the price of everything else up. That kicked a bunch of spouses - spouses who used to ensure little Tommy and Janie did their homework - out of the home and into the job market so so their families could meet basic living expenses and afford the occasional luxury, creating a generation of latchkey kids.
Worse, those energy-driven shocks to the economy enabled the Republicans to foist the lie of flood-up/trickle-down economics upon the American people with the consequence that the American worker's wages started being suppressed because the head cheese (a.k.a. the CEO and his or her executive suite) wanted any increase in profits resulting from price increases and productivity gains them since they could now keep any compensation increases they gave themselves rather than seeing their taxes soar as a penalty for excessive greed. So inflation - unmatched by wage increases - kicked even more spouses out into the job market, creating even more latchkey kids.
And "flood-up/trickle-down" economics in turn incentivized the few to look to reduce the cost of "labor" (their term for the American people...that is, for those Americans who did not fall into "entitlement spending"...the status most equivalent to the dogs and cats in the "Pending Euthanasia" cages at the shelter to the super-wealthy and the right)...so they bought inequitable free trade from a corrupt Congress and White House, bringing yet more wage pressure upon the American family...sending even more spouses to work...creating even more latchkey kids whose parents didn't have the time or were too tired to take the active role in their children's education of previous generations...
In conclusion, the super-wealthy got super-wealthy through manipulating our economy and tax structure - and in the process inflicted enormous damage upon the nuclear American family that, once upon a time, consistently featured a supervising parent at home around the clock...a parent who - among other duties - supervised the doing of homework and monitored the educational performance of their children.
And I do believe at least some of the super-wealthy are cognizant of their role in the destruction of the American family and attempt to assuage their consciences by throwing money at the problem.
I'd hate for GM to not only tell me who was allowed to ride in my car but also that any burger joint I drove my GM product to had to give Apple a 30% cut of any orders I or my passengers made at their drive-in window.
I disagree.
It should be noted that your so-called "private taxes" differ from real taxes in one significant way - the energy monopolies can't throw you in jail for not paying them.
Though, I'm curious - do you actually believe that the people who manufacture the hardware you'll be using for your point-of-use energy generation won't be making a profit when they sell them to you?
I would think (particularly given the increasingly "conservatively" corrupt state of the SCOTUS) that you should have appended "yet" to your first sentence...and they can already use liens and court judgements that yield garnishments to throw you out of your residence (or even an apartment...you won't be able to stay in yours if enough is being garnished to make you incapable of meeting your expenses), which can be a fate worse than jail given the hazards of exposure to the elements, crime, etc.
Regarding your second sentence, there is a big difference between a one-off payment to purchase an energy source and what the energy monopolies do in the way of raising rates/prices whenever the CEO of some corporation in the energy harvesting, generation, or distribution system or a speculator in the carbonaceous energy sources wants a new yacht for their kid...or when it appears that the American people have a couple of loose pennies to rub together...or when a "private investor group" demands higher dividends for themselves...or on a whim...or whatever drives their decision to begin gouging again.
There is no true effective difference to the consumer between "profit" and taxes, except the consumer doesn't have a prayer of controlling the amount of extortion involved with the former if the product or service is a necessity and sufficiently monopolized, as is most definitely the case with energy.
At least with government taxes you can vote change in.
Point-of-use energy energy generation offers the American people the opportunity for independence from the energy monopolies and the private taxes that they levy (they call those private taxes "profit"). Important, in an era of artificially suppressed wages. Additionally, point-of-use energy offers the opportunity to defund the nastiest of our politicians...a good thing, in a democracy. So support it!.
I hear you, Marine. When I got out of the Army, the stuff I was used to was maybe 10 years ahead of the civilian world; there is a good chance that such as TFA's general (his predecessors, really) didn't even know about it because they didn't have "need to know". But I couldn't tell any prospective employers that their stuff was antiquated (to date my discharge, I was amazed that an extremely pricy "high-speed" modem out in the civilian world only crawled along at 1200 bps - and didn't even have hardware encryption) because it was all classified and I had to sign off on a seven-year non-disclosure and international travel restriction.
lollll..I figure that is the ultimate "Catch-22" when writing a résumé: Tell the truth, and go directly to jail - do not pass "Go".'
And it was rough playing dumb around the civilians, too, because that attitude that the military is incapable of intellectual achievement is pervasive...and highly irritating. I still laugh at the thought of the civilian world not being able draw the proper conclusions from whom DARPA worked for.
Your' pretty stupid. Energy companies have a vested interest in this working. They sell electricity. Getting it cheaper and more reliably is ALWAYS in their best interest.
You can argue OPEC doesn't want it, but that's not 'Energy Companies' it's Oil Producers.
Why the insult? Am I supposed to conclude juvenile along with naive? Speaking of the latter, who gets cut out of the loop if renewable energy replaces carbonaceous (whether hydrocarbons or coal) fuels?
Do you really think there is a difference between OPEC, Big Oil/Gas/Coal/Nuclear, and America's Republicans? If so, whose memes are "You'll take my SUV from my cold, dead hands!" and "Forcing me to replace incandescents with CFLs is un-American!"??? The "left's"?
You misunderstand motive; it isn't about where it was invented, it is about Big Energy not wanting competition. So slam it, put it down...discourage investment...discourage deployment.
Speaking of which, I do hope my surviving relatives in Britain understand that we in the U.S. tend to bomb the crap out of anybody who doesn't cooperate with - let alone threatens - the energy monopolies.
Corporations without any IT staff interfacing with "vendors" who are highly proficient at making soothing technical noises while cranking out large bills? Wheeee...money growing on MBA-shaped trees.
And "What trade secrets?" is the least of it....CEOs better start being careful about the content of the emails they send to their mistresses, 'cuz leverage is leverage.
Apple's income and the jobs of their Chinese factory workers...both of which trump the rights of American workers and consumers. "America...whadda country!".
On the other hand, the owner of a network in Missouri that hosts botnet deserves a good deal of the credit for either their complicity or their stupidity.
(I was tempted to grant a huss based upon the possibility that educational funding cuts have resulted in the poor hypothetical sap being unable to afford any decent sniffers...but then I remembered Wireshark.)