Just repeal the Bush/Obama tax cuts and restore $4T in revenue over ten years to the federal budget. That will fix the current budget problems, as the tax cuts were never funded with corresponding budget cuts.
If there's one thing Reagan taught us, it is that tax cuts are never offset by budget cuts.
$4T/ 10 years works out to a bit more than $1000/person/year. Current tax receipts are about $3T/year. If you disband the army, make social security redundant, close DHS, and all other government functions down to NASA, then there's enough tax base to pay a "basic income" of $12,000/year (assuming you're only going to pay adults). Assuming everyone keeps paying their social security taxes after the government starts paying them to breathe.
The cynic in you should say this is only benefits rich people.
Many private colleges and universities (Utica included) have outrageous sticker prices that almost no one pays. These schools practice need-blind admissions and "pay" themselves the difference between nominal tuition and what the student can actually afford. This is touted as a great way to let any qualified student get a Utica (or Harvard or Stanford) education. Nominally, it works by overcharging those who can afford tuition to subsidize those who can't. In practice, it's a way to get just a little more than each person can comfortable afford. We're giving you $80,000 - surely you can take a $20k loan for the balance. Sounds a lot like those lotteries where you have to pay $1000 tax to receive your $10,000 winnings, subject to $9000 processing fee.
If the grants and tuition waivers are paid by the school's endowment, then it just moves money from the highly flexible endowment fund to the dedicated instructional fund. It (probably) doesn't change the actual university revenues (except to those people who think that money taken out of your left pocket and placed in your right pocket is "revenue"), it just give the administration more flexibility in distributing what they have.
The people currently receiving generous financial aid will see their financial aid packages drop by the same dollar amount as tuition. The small number of people from families wealthy enough to afford $35k tuition will be able to buy their kid a Mercedes for college instead of some lame-ass Honda, and that's a small enough number of people that Utica isn't going to notice.
They've also suggested that these specimens must have been specifically placed in the pile they were found, potentially over hundreds of years. They could represent individual weirdo's shunned and cast out. Birth or developmental defects rather than speciation. Imagine what a future archeologist would think if he came across a chamber where thalidomide babies (many of whom are now in their 50s) or hydrocephalic people were collected upon their death.
A better way: after you cut down the tree, did you grow a new tree in its place? If so, it's carbon-neutral: the new tree absorbs carbon equal to that released by burning the old one. If not, it's contributing to global warming.
In order to get the tree in the first place, it had to have removed all of that carbon from the atmosphere. By burning it, you're just restoring carbon that had already been in the air.
Burning a tree today restores the atmosphere we had 30 years ago. Burning a coal today restores the atmosphere we had 1e8 years ago. Planting a tree today reduces future carbon, regardless of whether it consumes recent or ancient CO2.
What of all those people in India and China (and other parts of the world) who burn organics like wood or straw or animal dung for heat, cooking, etc? That puts out far more pollution than a gas or even coal-fired power plant per capita.
Per BTU, not per capita. It's maybe a couple thousand BTU to cook dinner over an open fire, where a US household uses 100,000/day to cook, refrigerate, light, and watch TV. Even with recent development, China's household energy consumption is still 10x lower than the US. It's hard to use efficiency or scrubbers to make up for 20-50x difference in per capita consumption.
Also, remember that burning wood or dung is carbon neutral, regardless of the soot, carbon monoxide, sulphides or nitrides released.
Rand Paul won his seat in 2010 with 755216 votes. Lessig reached his "MILLION DOLLARS!!!" with donations from 8328 donors.
Rand Paul raised almost all of his $3.1M from two donors. Ted Cruz reached his $37M with donations from 3 donors. What's your point? There's no connection between donors and voters. Only 90,000 voters make sizable ($2600) contributions to any campaign and fewer than 150 are responsible for the majority of 2016 spending so far.
Are you satisfied with a system that allows each of Ted Cruz's donors to have literally 100,000 times as much "speech" as each of Lessig's donors?
Lessig (and Rand Paul) are ignored by the establishment - is that because they have tenfold less money or one fewer major/celebrity donor?
Times have changed. Voters now live in the online world. I'd like to see Congress force the entire damn campaign online for every candidate, in order to make a green statement and mean it by applying it to the elite.
The younger, online crowd vote in smaller proportion than the older, traditional media crowd: remember that a quarter of congress doesn't read their own email. Also, I really do not want to find out how much spam a billion dollars of SuperPAC money will buy.
The problem is that campaigning is synonymous with marketing plus a healthy dose of propaganda thrown in.
To sell a candidate as though he's a box of soap is a relatively new strategy. The campaigns between Nixon-McGovern and Bush-Gore all cost about the same. The Bush-Kerry race (now with "527" groups) doubled that. Obama-McCain nearly doubled Bush-Kerry, and Obama-Romney (post Citizens United) doubled that.
Nor is this money being spent to develop or inform voters of policy. It's at best 10 second sound bites, and usually just emotional manipulation, cynically calculated to move voters, with the majority of money coming from a handful of super-rich and corporations. While it is certainly true that a group of people should be allowed to pool their resources to support a candidate, PACs that get most of their funding from a single individual (eg David Koch or George Soros) distort the spirit of community action. Ted Cruz's campaign is being paid for by three donors.
TL;DR: campaign spending has exploded as it became possible for people to escape individual spending limits by laundering their money through "advocacy groups" and SuperPACs.
But there is no consensus [...] that an urgent mitigation based policy framework is needed
This part is no longer the scientific debate but the political one. Obviously, there is no scientific consensus on politics, and there will never be.
Unfortunately, it's politically expedient to blur the line between data and policy. It sounds pretty heartless to say "We are definitely causing climate change; there is minor disagreement over the rate and extent of sea level change and loss of farmland; and the best mitigation policy is to resign Boston, Florida and the Kiribati islands to the sea and just let people move to higher ground." I mean, that's a legitimate policy response: these changes are going to be slow enough that people have plenty of time to leave before the ocean is actually in their living room and plenty of time to build structures capable of standing up to bigger hurricanes. Let the slow pressure of nature encourage individuals to come up with their own solutions. If they can't be bothered to take care of themselves, then they get what they deserve.
People tend not to support governments whose explicit policy is "I've got mine, so fuck you," and politicians have to obscure that policy somehow. Pretending that the lack of policy consensus is actually a failing of data consensus is good obfuscation.
But there are already ranchers in Africa that are raising Rhinos and humanely cutting the horn regularly, storing the currently illegal to sell product. Allow them to profit from it and the practice would relatively explode, even if still confined to said ranches.
I think the underlying question here is whether a rhino in a paddock, eating Cheetos and having its horn shaved every full moon, counts as a "real" rhino. Are the conservationists interested in the mere existence of rhino animals (which may have genetic diversity reduce by selective breeding), or are they interested in restoring the majestic, roving herds of rhinos that roamed Africa before the white man? My guess is that a lot of them would rather see the species extinct than reduced to domestic cattle.
Don't be obtuse. Authorization comes from the owner of the device or someone acting on the owner's behalf. Do you really think the locksmith is authorized to grant you access to his customer's homes?
A default password is 'security optional.' The user has the option to change the password and restrict access, but he's also free to leave the default pw so anyone can access. Same way you're free to configure your WAP with no encryption.
The house - data metaphor is really not a good way to talk about data security. I may be perfectly happy to have other people wander around my data. To let grandma check in on the baby from across the country, even if that means that a random person could stumble across the feed. People can "take" that data with no loss to me whatsoever and, as long as I'm careful with the data so available, little risk of harm. If a random person comes into my house, I have to clean up muddy footprints; if he takes my TV, it's no longer available to me; and he might even do physical harm to me or mine. A router password is not a house key. It's not even close.
Silliness aside, until manufacturers have to pay the price in the marketplace for their crappy wares, they won't bother to do it right.
Well, yes, but isn't it a bit naive to think that 'the Market' will magically make them pay?
Almost every time I see an expert complaining about a product, it ends up looking like a fanatic blowing a legitimate but rare issue far out of proportion. Network connected baby monitors, projectile toys, window cords... It's all the same. Freak accident or strange connection, and all of a sudden there's someone crying for government or a product liability lawyer to protect people from themselves.
People don't care about your pet project. They don't care if someone might figure out how to access their internet baby monitor because they'd really like a way to feed the baby monitor onto their facebook page. They don't care if bad guys might use the baby monitor to find out when the house is vacant because the curtains are all open and anyone walking by can see the house is empty. Bad practices increase the risk of extremely unlikely events, but they're still extremely unlikely events.
The problem is that most people do not think about security and thus will not demand that in products. So the market place will not demand such.
Laws will happen. Just as soon as the first death is caused by a hack (or a hack gone wrong).
Am I the only one who remembers when products like baby monitors worked by RF broadcast? It used to be anyone could turn their radio to 88.7, their TV to channel 4, or whatever frequency was being broadcast, and listen in. Anyone with the same brand of monitor could pick up neighboring signals (in the unlikely event you'd both bought the same one), and they rarely even offered so much as a choice of 'channel A' vs 'channel B'.
Sure, the old systems required physical proximity. Maybe the new network connected ones are more widely viewable, if you're dumb enough to put them on a public-facing address. It sure seems like a paranoid fantasy that 'hackerz' might troll the internet for open baby monitors, figure out a physical address to go with the IP address, then go steal your baby or your baby monitor.
To be able to regulate such things you'd have to somehow magically be able to control who can be allowed to program anything in the first place, then you'd have to control all the possible tools for that
"Regulating" does not necessarily mean "strangling." For example, electrical devices are already required to be UL or CE certified before they can be marketed, but any numbnut with some wire and a soldering iron can build his own power strip, hair dryer, or Tesla coil.
It's patently ridiculous for a government to require software be bug- and exploit-free. It's also true that some disclosures would provide consumer benefit: does the software/device "phone home"? What information does it disclose if it does so? Does it implement encryption? Properly, using a widely recognized protocol? Does it run locally or is it a remote front-end?
Apple already claims to do some kind of review (or at least have some kind of conditions) for an iTunes listing. So does Google Play. That's self-regulation - it may not be perfect; it may not catch all the malware, but Apple and Google seem to think limited regulation provides some consumer benefit.
Examples: corn subsidies of $4-5B/year on crop values of $80B. Wheat subsidies of $2B on crop value of $15B.
Most of the direct, government payment programs ended around 2008. Interestingly, the 'farm price' of wheat went from about $3.50 before 2007 to $6.70 after 2009. Rich people's taxes no longer paying for poor people's bread.
Same as who gets to decide when you're allowed to shoot someone. Elected representatives, speaking for the majority of the population, constrained by a court system that protects the rights of smaller groups.
The questions asked will be "Do you believe the Jews have the sole right to Israel and the surrounding territory?" Any answer other that "Yes, it is their right and destiny" is counted as antisemitic.
Also, anti-zionist will be lumped in with anti-semitic.
I think you are the one conflating anti-zionism and anti-semitism. The litmus test you give is exactly zionism. A common mistake, because of the prevalence of Zionism within Jewish Israel and particularly its vocal "hard right" political groups. Much the way the rest of the world thinks Americans love drone-based assassinations.
The two-state solution is anti-zionist but not inherently anti-semitic; that one of those states might be committed to Jewish genocide is anti-semitic.
Apparently 15 Americans are crushed to death moving their furniture every year! BAN THE COUCH!
The source of that information is really interesting. Almost all (84%) people killed by furniture are under 8, killed when a TV (60%) or chest/bureau falls on them.
There are zero fatalities in the 10-year study involving people between 9-30 years old. I'm not sure what protects this age group from malicious TVs, unless the broadcasters somehow allow the TVs to distinguish members of the target demographic. It does seem that, if you're over 30, you should put on a college student costume before trying to move or walk near your TV.
The study covers 2000-2010, including the tail end of massive CRTs. I expect the statistics will be very different for 2010-2020.
In which case it also wouldn't prove anything at all, like whether your vote was fraudulent or not.
The point of this investigation is not to determine who voted for whom, which is, in fact, illegal. The point of this investigation is to determine whether, in aggregate, there are discrepancies between voting results and other recognized demographic trends.
If it turns out that a neighborhood of poor black people voted 80% Republican, it doesn't necessarily mean fraud. Maybe the neighborhood got very gentrified between when the demographics were reported and the election. Maybe the particular candidate had a specific message that appealed well to that exact neighborhood. Maybe his opponent's ex-wife lived in the area. Discrepancies between expected population trends and observed population trends are interesting.
In this case, Sergeant what's-his-name could look up prices for HDDs on Amazon, fill a form asking for 100 dollars to buy a larger HDD and 50 dollars to pay for installation services and be done with it. Paperwork's done, tracked, everyone's happy.
No, in this case, Sergeant what's-his-name looked at the time he'd have to spend filling out a purchase requisition and decided the data just wasn't worth that. Five years of historical license plate location data is not as valuable to his department's investigations as a coffee break.
What are license plate scanners actually good for? The present location of stolen cars. Maybe some location data for crimes currently under investigation (ie, a few weeks). Not last year's crimes. Strangely, this is what citizen activists have been asking for a long time: why do you need to know where every car has been over the past five years? So now, when it comes down to costing the police even just the tiniest amount of effort, they find that, in fact, they probably only need a few months' worth of history.
I mean... you can't tell me they can't afford 100 dollars worth of something somewhere in that department. I refuse to believe they're THAT hard up for money that they can't afford a fucking harddrive.
I'm sure they could, if it were actually important. So let me tell you how this went down. License plate computer is acting up...Call IT. IT says the HDD is full, mostly because it has 30 GB of license plate data going back 5 years. Chief holds a little problem-solving conference in his head, and decides to throw out the old, never-used data rather than spend 10 minutes requisitioning a HD replacement.
Just stop keeping data on average citizens for which you don't really have any justification.
So, why are they collecting all that data in the first place? Is it really necessary for them to do their jobs and protect the public?
Storing it all because some sales rep told them a great story about picking up a cold case, going back through the records, and finding that Thuggy McBadguy had been close to a convenience store when it was robbed in 2011. Five years later, they're out of disk space, and it turns out they've never actually looked at any of that archived data.
The more interesting question is why this department finds the 20 minutes to fill out a purchase order a more compelling reason to review their perpetual data retention policy than public criticism.
What civil liberties are being broken when they search for a piece of stolen property? That property could be in a bin, ditch etc.[...]
This really is no different than seeing a stolen car in the driveway of a premise.
It's quite different from seeing a stolen car in a driveway. It's even different that using a license plate camera to record the location of every car. Car license plates are in the open. They're required to be publicly displayed and visible to anyone without any special equipment.
Stingray inserts itself between every cell phone and the contracted service provider. That communication is not in the open. You need special equipment to 'see' it, and service providers make a big deal about your communications being encrypted and private.
If you want to make a physical analogy for massive large scale electronic surveillance, this is more like disguising cops as store clerks so they can read your credit card number, just in case you're using a stolen card.
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Just repeal the Bush/Obama tax cuts and restore $4T in revenue over ten years to the federal budget. That will fix the current budget problems, as the tax cuts were never funded with corresponding budget cuts.
If there's one thing Reagan taught us, it is that tax cuts are never offset by budget cuts.
$4T/ 10 years works out to a bit more than $1000/person/year. Current tax receipts are about $3T/year. If you disband the army, make social security redundant, close DHS, and all other government functions down to NASA, then there's enough tax base to pay a "basic income" of $12,000/year (assuming you're only going to pay adults). Assuming everyone keeps paying their social security taxes after the government starts paying them to breathe.
The cynic in you should say this is only benefits rich people.
Many private colleges and universities (Utica included) have outrageous sticker prices that almost no one pays. These schools practice need-blind admissions and "pay" themselves the difference between nominal tuition and what the student can actually afford. This is touted as a great way to let any qualified student get a Utica (or Harvard or Stanford) education. Nominally, it works by overcharging those who can afford tuition to subsidize those who can't. In practice, it's a way to get just a little more than each person can comfortable afford. We're giving you $80,000 - surely you can take a $20k loan for the balance. Sounds a lot like those lotteries where you have to pay $1000 tax to receive your $10,000 winnings, subject to $9000 processing fee.
If the grants and tuition waivers are paid by the school's endowment, then it just moves money from the highly flexible endowment fund to the dedicated instructional fund. It (probably) doesn't change the actual university revenues (except to those people who think that money taken out of your left pocket and placed in your right pocket is "revenue"), it just give the administration more flexibility in distributing what they have.
The people currently receiving generous financial aid will see their financial aid packages drop by the same dollar amount as tuition. The small number of people from families wealthy enough to afford $35k tuition will be able to buy their kid a Mercedes for college instead of some lame-ass Honda, and that's a small enough number of people that Utica isn't going to notice.
They've also suggested that these specimens must have been specifically placed in the pile they were found, potentially over hundreds of years. They could represent individual weirdo's shunned and cast out. Birth or developmental defects rather than speciation. Imagine what a future archeologist would think if he came across a chamber where thalidomide babies (many of whom are now in their 50s) or hydrocephalic people were collected upon their death.
A better way: after you cut down the tree, did you grow a new tree in its place? If so, it's carbon-neutral: the new tree absorbs carbon equal to that released by burning the old one. If not, it's contributing to global warming.
In order to get the tree in the first place, it had to have removed all of that carbon from the atmosphere. By burning it, you're just restoring carbon that had already been in the air.
Burning a tree today restores the atmosphere we had 30 years ago. Burning a coal today restores the atmosphere we had 1e8 years ago. Planting a tree today reduces future carbon, regardless of whether it consumes recent or ancient CO2.
What of all those people in India and China (and other parts of the world) who burn organics like wood or straw or animal dung for heat, cooking, etc? That puts out far more pollution than a gas or even coal-fired power plant per capita.
Per BTU, not per capita. It's maybe a couple thousand BTU to cook dinner over an open fire, where a US household uses 100,000/day to cook, refrigerate, light, and watch TV. Even with recent development, China's household energy consumption is still 10x lower than the US. It's hard to use efficiency or scrubbers to make up for 20-50x difference in per capita consumption.
Also, remember that burning wood or dung is carbon neutral, regardless of the soot, carbon monoxide, sulphides or nitrides released.
So say I have a Windows PC with some media files on it. [...] How do I get those onto an iPad without installing any Apple crapware?
Start up IIS or install apache and point your iPad browser at the PC.
Interesting, lidar works with very short pulses of laser light, how would one go about encoding or encrypting those? Is that even possible?
Since timing is important, you just emit your pulses at random intervals and only pay attention to reflections within a relevant response window.
Rand Paul won his seat in 2010 with 755216 votes.
Lessig reached his "MILLION DOLLARS!!!" with donations from 8328 donors.
Rand Paul raised almost all of his $3.1M from two donors.
Ted Cruz reached his $37M with donations from 3 donors.
What's your point? There's no connection between donors and voters. Only 90,000 voters make sizable ($2600) contributions to any campaign and fewer than 150 are responsible for the majority of 2016 spending so far.
Are you satisfied with a system that allows each of Ted Cruz's donors to have literally 100,000 times as much "speech" as each of Lessig's donors?
Lessig (and Rand Paul) are ignored by the establishment - is that because they have tenfold less money or one fewer major/celebrity donor?
Times have changed. Voters now live in the online world. I'd like to see Congress force the entire damn campaign online for every candidate, in order to make a green statement and mean it by applying it to the elite.
The younger, online crowd vote in smaller proportion than the older, traditional media crowd: remember that a quarter of congress doesn't read their own email. Also, I really do not want to find out how much spam a billion dollars of SuperPAC money will buy.
The problem is that campaigning is synonymous with marketing plus a healthy dose of propaganda thrown in.
To sell a candidate as though he's a box of soap is a relatively new strategy. The campaigns between Nixon-McGovern and Bush-Gore all cost about the same. The Bush-Kerry race (now with "527" groups) doubled that. Obama-McCain nearly doubled Bush-Kerry, and Obama-Romney (post Citizens United) doubled that.
Nor is this money being spent to develop or inform voters of policy. It's at best 10 second sound bites, and usually just emotional manipulation, cynically calculated to move voters, with the majority of money coming from a handful of super-rich and corporations. While it is certainly true that a group of people should be allowed to pool their resources to support a candidate, PACs that get most of their funding from a single individual (eg David Koch or George Soros) distort the spirit of community action. Ted Cruz's campaign is being paid for by three donors.
TL;DR: campaign spending has exploded as it became possible for people to escape individual spending limits by laundering their money through "advocacy groups" and SuperPACs.
But there is no consensus [...] that an urgent mitigation based policy framework is needed
This part is no longer the scientific debate but the political one. Obviously, there is no scientific consensus on politics, and there will never be.
Unfortunately, it's politically expedient to blur the line between data and policy. It sounds pretty heartless to say "We are definitely causing climate change; there is minor disagreement over the rate and extent of sea level change and loss of farmland; and the best mitigation policy is to resign Boston, Florida and the Kiribati islands to the sea and just let people move to higher ground." I mean, that's a legitimate policy response: these changes are going to be slow enough that people have plenty of time to leave before the ocean is actually in their living room and plenty of time to build structures capable of standing up to bigger hurricanes. Let the slow pressure of nature encourage individuals to come up with their own solutions. If they can't be bothered to take care of themselves, then they get what they deserve.
People tend not to support governments whose explicit policy is "I've got mine, so fuck you," and politicians have to obscure that policy somehow. Pretending that the lack of policy consensus is actually a failing of data consensus is good obfuscation.
But there are already ranchers in Africa that are raising Rhinos and humanely cutting the horn regularly, storing the currently illegal to sell product. Allow them to profit from it and the practice would relatively explode, even if still confined to said ranches.
I think the underlying question here is whether a rhino in a paddock, eating Cheetos and having its horn shaved every full moon, counts as a "real" rhino. Are the conservationists interested in the mere existence of rhino animals (which may have genetic diversity reduce by selective breeding), or are they interested in restoring the majestic, roving herds of rhinos that roamed Africa before the white man? My guess is that a lot of them would rather see the species extinct than reduced to domestic cattle.
Don't be obtuse. Authorization comes from the owner of the device or someone acting on the owner's behalf. Do you really think the locksmith is authorized to grant you access to his customer's homes?
A default password is 'security optional.' The user has the option to change the password and restrict access, but he's also free to leave the default pw so anyone can access. Same way you're free to configure your WAP with no encryption.
The house - data metaphor is really not a good way to talk about data security. I may be perfectly happy to have other people wander around my data. To let grandma check in on the baby from across the country, even if that means that a random person could stumble across the feed. People can "take" that data with no loss to me whatsoever and, as long as I'm careful with the data so available, little risk of harm. If a random person comes into my house, I have to clean up muddy footprints; if he takes my TV, it's no longer available to me; and he might even do physical harm to me or mine. A router password is not a house key. It's not even close.
Silliness aside, until manufacturers have to pay the price in the marketplace for their crappy wares, they won't bother to do it right.
Well, yes, but isn't it a bit naive to think that 'the Market' will magically make them pay?
Almost every time I see an expert complaining about a product, it ends up looking like a fanatic blowing a legitimate but rare issue far out of proportion. Network connected baby monitors, projectile toys, window cords... It's all the same. Freak accident or strange connection, and all of a sudden there's someone crying for government or a product liability lawyer to protect people from themselves.
People don't care about your pet project. They don't care if someone might figure out how to access their internet baby monitor because they'd really like a way to feed the baby monitor onto their facebook page. They don't care if bad guys might use the baby monitor to find out when the house is vacant because the curtains are all open and anyone walking by can see the house is empty. Bad practices increase the risk of extremely unlikely events, but they're still extremely unlikely events.
The problem is that most people do not think about security and thus will not demand that in products. So the market place will not demand such.
Laws will happen. Just as soon as the first death is caused by a hack (or a hack gone wrong).
Am I the only one who remembers when products like baby monitors worked by RF broadcast? It used to be anyone could turn their radio to 88.7, their TV to channel 4, or whatever frequency was being broadcast, and listen in. Anyone with the same brand of monitor could pick up neighboring signals (in the unlikely event you'd both bought the same one), and they rarely even offered so much as a choice of 'channel A' vs 'channel B'.
Sure, the old systems required physical proximity. Maybe the new network connected ones are more widely viewable, if you're dumb enough to put them on a public-facing address. It sure seems like a paranoid fantasy that 'hackerz' might troll the internet for open baby monitors, figure out a physical address to go with the IP address, then go steal your baby or your baby monitor.
To be able to regulate such things you'd have to somehow magically be able to control who can be allowed to program anything in the first place, then you'd have to control all the possible tools for that
"Regulating" does not necessarily mean "strangling." For example, electrical devices are already required to be UL or CE certified before they can be marketed, but any numbnut with some wire and a soldering iron can build his own power strip, hair dryer, or Tesla coil.
It's patently ridiculous for a government to require software be bug- and exploit-free. It's also true that some disclosures would provide consumer benefit: does the software/device "phone home"? What information does it disclose if it does so? Does it implement encryption? Properly, using a widely recognized protocol? Does it run locally or is it a remote front-end?
Apple already claims to do some kind of review (or at least have some kind of conditions) for an iTunes listing. So does Google Play. That's self-regulation - it may not be perfect; it may not catch all the malware, but Apple and Google seem to think limited regulation provides some consumer benefit.
He's right, you are getting a heck of a deal.
Examples: corn subsidies of $4-5B/year on crop values of $80B. Wheat subsidies of $2B on crop value of $15B.
Most of the direct, government payment programs ended around 2008. Interestingly, the 'farm price' of wheat went from about $3.50 before 2007 to $6.70 after 2009. Rich people's taxes no longer paying for poor people's bread.
Who gets to decide what speech is allowed? You?
Same as who gets to decide when you're allowed to shoot someone. Elected representatives, speaking for the majority of the population, constrained by a court system that protects the rights of smaller groups.
The questions asked will be "Do you believe the Jews have the sole right to Israel and the surrounding territory?" Any answer other that "Yes, it is their right and destiny" is counted as antisemitic.
Also, anti-zionist will be lumped in with anti-semitic.
I think you are the one conflating anti-zionism and anti-semitism. The litmus test you give is exactly zionism. A common mistake, because of the prevalence of Zionism within Jewish Israel and particularly its vocal "hard right" political groups. Much the way the rest of the world thinks Americans love drone-based assassinations.
The two-state solution is anti-zionist but not inherently anti-semitic; that one of those states might be committed to Jewish genocide is anti-semitic.
Apparently 15 Americans are crushed to death moving their furniture every year! BAN THE COUCH!
The source of that information is really interesting. Almost all (84%) people killed by furniture are under 8, killed when a TV (60%) or chest/bureau falls on them.
There are zero fatalities in the 10-year study involving people between 9-30 years old. I'm not sure what protects this age group from malicious TVs, unless the broadcasters somehow allow the TVs to distinguish members of the target demographic. It does seem that, if you're over 30, you should put on a college student costume before trying to move or walk near your TV.
The study covers 2000-2010, including the tail end of massive CRTs. I expect the statistics will be very different for 2010-2020.
In which case it also wouldn't prove anything at all, like whether your vote was fraudulent or not.
The point of this investigation is not to determine who voted for whom, which is, in fact, illegal. The point of this investigation is to determine whether, in aggregate, there are discrepancies between voting results and other recognized demographic trends.
If it turns out that a neighborhood of poor black people voted 80% Republican, it doesn't necessarily mean fraud. Maybe the neighborhood got very gentrified between when the demographics were reported and the election. Maybe the particular candidate had a specific message that appealed well to that exact neighborhood. Maybe his opponent's ex-wife lived in the area. Discrepancies between expected population trends and observed population trends are interesting.
In this case, Sergeant what's-his-name could look up prices for HDDs on Amazon, fill a form asking for 100 dollars to buy a larger HDD and 50 dollars to pay for installation services and be done with it. Paperwork's done, tracked, everyone's happy.
No, in this case, Sergeant what's-his-name looked at the time he'd have to spend filling out a purchase requisition and decided the data just wasn't worth that. Five years of historical license plate location data is not as valuable to his department's investigations as a coffee break.
What are license plate scanners actually good for? The present location of stolen cars. Maybe some location data for crimes currently under investigation (ie, a few weeks). Not last year's crimes. Strangely, this is what citizen activists have been asking for a long time: why do you need to know where every car has been over the past five years? So now, when it comes down to costing the police even just the tiniest amount of effort, they find that, in fact, they probably only need a few months' worth of history.
I mean... you can't tell me they can't afford 100 dollars worth of something somewhere in that department. I refuse to believe they're THAT hard up for money that they can't afford a fucking harddrive.
I'm sure they could, if it were actually important. So let me tell you how this went down. License plate computer is acting up...Call IT. IT says the HDD is full, mostly because it has 30 GB of license plate data going back 5 years. Chief holds a little problem-solving conference in his head, and decides to throw out the old, never-used data rather than spend 10 minutes requisitioning a HD replacement.
Just stop keeping data on average citizens for which you don't really have any justification.
So, why are they collecting all that data in the first place? Is it really necessary for them to do their jobs and protect the public?
Storing it all because some sales rep told them a great story about picking up a cold case, going back through the records, and finding that Thuggy McBadguy had been close to a convenience store when it was robbed in 2011. Five years later, they're out of disk space, and it turns out they've never actually looked at any of that archived data.
The more interesting question is why this department finds the 20 minutes to fill out a purchase order a more compelling reason to review their perpetual data retention policy than public criticism.
What civil liberties are being broken when they search for a piece of stolen property? That property could be in a bin, ditch etc.[...]
This really is no different than seeing a stolen car in the driveway of a premise.
It's quite different from seeing a stolen car in a driveway. It's even different that using a license plate camera to record the location of every car. Car license plates are in the open. They're required to be publicly displayed and visible to anyone without any special equipment.
Stingray inserts itself between every cell phone and the contracted service provider. That communication is not in the open. You need special equipment to 'see' it, and service providers make a big deal about your communications being encrypted and private.
If you want to make a physical analogy for massive large scale electronic surveillance, this is more like disguising cops as store clerks so they can read your credit card number, just in case you're using a stolen card.