so in other words it's okay to put poisons in food as long as you pretend to list them on the label
Why do you care how I kill myself, as long as I'm making an informed decision?
The lifetime cost of diabetes is around $85,000, so I suppose you might argue that my poor diet raises your health insurance premiums. The lifetime cost of a single knee replacement is around $130,000, so I would counter that it is 3x more expensive to be an avid runner who wears out both his knees than to be a diabetic.
There's a well-known study on the effect of voluntary exercise on life expectancy. Just drop a running wheel in a rat cage, and see if they live longer. Turns out that young rats will run, literally, miles every day. They eventually get bored, or old, and stop running, but if you reduce their food intake by just 8%, they get back on the wheel and run.
To be a little hungry seems to stimulate activity and raise the mental state a bit. It may not be good for tasks that require sustained, focused attention, but that fidgety feeling you get before lunch can actually be directed.
What percentage of income do other people spend on directing support to charity?
10% is enshrined in the Christian Old Testament. Some Jews read this as a donation to a class of priest no longer in existence, but also acknowledge a 2.5% terumah or a general "as much as you are able." Some also seem to interpret these as necessarily paid in food and only by farmers. Islamic zakat is 2.5%.
In the US, private charitable giving (as declared on tax returns) averages $1200 per household, or about 1.7% (keeping in mind that mean is a terrible way to measure US economic data). These guys have much more complete data that suggests something like 2-4% being 'normal.' This is still a terrible measure, because bible-belt Southerners average close to 7%, while New Englanders average under 3% (source).
First of all a "No placebos do not work" statement is made, promptly followed by admitting the placebo effect is real. Make up your mind, if the placebo effect is real then by definition placebos do work.
The issue here is what does it mean for a treatment to "work?"
If you take twelve people with flu and give them no treatment for a week, twelve of them will get better: reduced fever, reduced pain measures, improved nasal airflow. Does this mean "No Treatment" works? If you just tell them every day that they look much better and air out their room, many of them will report higher scores on comprehensive well-being surveys and lower perceived discomfort within days. We should be careful about our language, and I think that means to distinguish between "have an effect" and "work."
Many interventions have effects - positive of negative - that are reproducible and quantifiable. Placebos, aroma therapy, life coaching... That doesn't mean the work.
An intervention "works" if it produces the effect in claims by the mechanism it claims. Western medicine mechanisms involve interactions among molecules. For example, insulin lowers blood sugar because it stimulates glucose uptake by muscle. You can measure each of those molecules; you can measure their interactions; they induce phenomena consistent with the health outcome.
Homeopathic treatments claimed mechanism is "like cures like," and that water memory of exposure to a toxin allows it to displace the miasm causing the actual distress. Miasms aren't directly measurable and don't produce consistent effects. "Memory" in water or alcohol of past exposure to dilute toxins has no measurable effect on the chemical or quantum states of the molecule. There is no way to determine whether a homeopathic treatment has the effect it claims by the mechanism it claims. There is no objective way to prove that it "works," but its claims are inconsistent with otherwise proven science and chemistry.
So far as I know, no one has a mechanism for placebos. It's a reproducible phenomenon in an incredibly complex system, and science has generally bees satisfied to describe it as "the placebo effect." Placebos don't "work," but they do have an effect.
Let me introduce you to Dale Akiki. Patently false accusations, including that he had sacrificed a giraffe in a church classroom during Sunday services, landed him in an extended court trial. He was eventually exonerated, but for a long stretch of the 1990s, everyone in San Diego knew he was a satanic pedophile.
What mass shootings are you talking about the few that hit national news and are talked about over and over for decades, that one at the high school in Colorado happened 16 years ago?
You can't possibly think that Columbine is the only 'mass shooting' in the last two decades. Here's a helpful list of last year's multiple-victim shootings. There's 283 entries. Now, most of those are not "quiet white boy flips his lid and goes on shooting spree," but to just pretend that the number of shooting victims is inconseqential, or that there's nothing to be done about ubiquitous shootings is callous and mean.
According to the CDC influenza and pneumonia are a bigger killer than guns and nearly half of gun deaths are suicide.
Maybe you've seen the annual drive to get people to have flu shots in order to reduce the deaths by flu and pneumonia. What are we doing to reduce involuntary gun deaths? Police? They only show up after the fact.
It's also why our poorest state is wealthier than the UK on a per capita basis.
Yet, strangely, our wealthiest states have shorter life expectancy and higher infant mortality than the UK. Canada, Norway and Australia rank higher for quality of life. US culture has decided that money is everything and has, accordingly, sacrificed everything on behalf of the dollar.
By comparison, from my land in 25 minutes I drive past my neighbor's waterfall on the other side of my canyon, past the fjord, down between the mountains and the ocean and into town. You share a ride with little personal space with strangers in an underground tunnel.
Some of those strangers are interesting people. You can talk to a dozen different people, each with a unique perspective on the world, some of them quite insightful or funny, during lunch. And a completely different dozen on the way home from work.
I can understand why you'd enjoy some beautiful scenery and being 25 minutes from the next living soul, but it seems to me a little like the difference between reading "The Road to Character" and reading Slashdot.
You said "The winner is AT&T" and that's objectively wrong.
AT&T has 120M wireless subscribers. This fine amount to a little more than a penny per subscriber per month over the time period in question, during which some of their $50/month unlimited subscribers upgraded to $70/month 6GB or $100/month 10GB plans. If they had even 0.05% conversion, then AT&T has objectively won the dollar fight.
But why should you even tax a business? Businesses don't consume or produce anything - the people working at them do. A business is just a paper shell representing a group of people. If you tax the business, the money just comes from the employees (lower wages) and customers (higher prices).
You tax businesses to discourage people from hiding assets and economic activity within a shell corporation to avoid taxation. (ie, I don't own anything or draw a salary, but my consulting company lets me live in this nice house and provides a generous entertainment budget) The US has decided to minimize the taxation of the individuals comprising the business (ie, highly favorable treatment of capital gains and dividends), and you can't simultaneously argue against taxing the business because its participants are taxed and against taxing the distributions because the business is taxed.
As you say, though, it is all the same money, so the only question is where to impose a tax. The US used to get the lion's share of tax revenue from businesses, where clear accounting rules make it clear what a business can "afford." Taxing individuals is much more complicated for everyone - I have to discount my salary by some 35%, between Federal, Social security, and State taxes to figure out my budget, nevermind the various discounts and incentives.
Taxing businesses creates a contradiction if you believe in "no taxation without representation."
Surely you're joking. Just who do you think is paying all those lobbyists? Who do you imagine supports the campaigns of the elected officials? BP may not get to cast a ballot in any particular district, but their interests are far better represented than your own. And again, corporate suffrage would enable the creation of armies of shell companies with no purpose other than to sway elections. Patently ridiculous.
Disney management will simply wait for the uproar to die down and then start setting vague and aggressive performance objectives for the U.S. workers. They'll then get rid of people via performance review.
They probably don't even need to worry about getting rid of their existing workforce. If your boss spends a lot of time loudly whining about how he can't afford to keep all these IT people; about how he wishes he could replace them all with H1B's, but then tells you not to worry about your job, you'd be an idiot not to fire up the resume printer. Before long, the only people left will be the ones who can't get work elsewhere.
does it mean they will become like them after they're bought?
Github is not selling out: they're offering a 10% stake. Even if the entire offering is bought by one entity, that entity will not have the power to force github to do anything the existing structure doesn't want.
Possibly worth noting that Andreessen Horowitz already has a 13% stake, and he hasn't managed to make them Evil. Raising outside ownership to 23% isn't going to give the vultures control.
You know, I'm not a fan of this idea, where government shoulders the costs and then owns the resource. We didn't do electricity or telephone this way back in the days, we encouraged private industry to do this by providing subsidies and a regulatory climate where private enterprise could survive.
So, you favor government shouldering the cost, giving away ownership, and guaranteeing profitability for the utility company. Honestly, that system has worked out pretty well, in many cases. The private industry part tends to encourage cost minimization while the regulatory oversight discourages price gouging and customer abuse.
The problem with purely private solutions is that the people involved have a financial incentive to provide poor service at exorbitant prices. The problem with purely government solutions is that disinterest and incompetence may result in poor service and high costs. Striking a healthy balance between the two requires careful analysis, an understanding of policy, and an interest in the public good that we have systematically bred out of our politicians by insisting that they be attractive fund-raisers.
Either way, the legislature, being comprised of representatives of the jurisdiction involved approved such an action. By extrapolation, that means that the entire jurisdiction approved and agreed to pay taxes to benefit others in the area. That's how a republic works.
No, actually, it isn't. Neither democracy nor representative forms of government force agreement upon everyone.
No government based on the unanimous support of the entire population will ever work. If that's your working definition of democracy, you may want to revisit your civics lessons.
The whole concept behind a government is that everyone agrees to abide by its rules. You don't have to believe that the rules are right or best, but you do have to abide by them. In a representative democracy, the representatives create those rules on behalf of individual citizens. Again, you don't have to agree that a particular rule is the best, but you do have to accept that your opinion is in the minority.
I would love to see this argument applied to the times a local or city council votes to grant a cable company a non-exclusive franchise to operate in their community. Usually, such an agreement is represented as the greedy cable company bribing city officials into giving them a government-granted monopoly. Under your "republic", it's really everyone in the community agreeing to this.
This is why civilized cultures see bribery (or even "campaign contributions") as such a serious threat to society. If you can appeal to and corrupt the people's representative and distort him not to represent those people, then you no longer have a representative democracy. Instead, you've created a plutocracy, where the rules are created by those rich enough to pay for representation. A plutocracy will force people to abide by rules that lack popular support. A representative democracy will force a minority to abide by rules that most people favor.
Either way, you're paying the cable company for service you aren't using -- handing them money for no reason.
Every May, I call Comcast and threaten to cancel. In exchange, they usually offer me the same "discount" as new subscribers. Last year's offer was internet+basic cable for $50, vs internet only for $65.
I figure Comcast must have such a massive stockpile of set-top boxes that they're willing to pay their customers $15/month to store them. Or, like "12 CDs for the price of 1," they make so much money off the people who forget to cancel after the trial that they don't mind the "loss."
Mr. Anonymous Coward, I am confident in positing you either work for Comcast or Time Warner.
There's a surprisingly strong movement, at least in the US, essentially claiming that it's "better" to rent almost anything. Rent your cable modem and get a free upgrade when DOCSIS 3 is retired. Lease your car and save on depreciation. Rent a house and save thousands on taxes and maintenance. These notions are so logically and economically flawed that it's hard not to imagine a (at best) disingenuous campaign, but maybe it goes along with the disposable-everything culture and inability to see past the next paycheck.
You must have a real dilemma when you fill up your vehicle with gas...
You're mistaken: Rockoon is so principled, he never uses any subsidized product. He obviously doesn't own a car, as the automotive industry itself has been bailed out far too often. Public transit is right out, obviously, He can't even bike, because the rubber subsidy means no tires. So, Rockoon walks everywhere on pure leather shoes, bought only from chain stores with over 1000 employees to avoid "small business" subsidies. He rents a house rather than accept the government subsidy on a mortgage. Even there, he has to sit in the dark to avoid subsidies on all forms of electrical generation. He eats no sugar, corn, wheat or dairy. He is fortunate to be able to wear wool clothes these days, because the cotton subsidy means no BVDs. But it's all worth it, to avoid selfishly taking money from other taxpayers.
Really, when you think about it, it's easy to understand why he's such an angry guy. If you spent your days in woolen underwear, you'd be a little irritable, too.
Who said, "The Internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it"?
It was John Gilmore. But he was wrong.
He was right at the time. He said that circa 1995, and it was mostly about Usenet. Usenet had a distributed system for maintaining discussions, somewhat like a BitTorrent for blogs. Even though individual servers could become quite large and popular, thus potentially gaining the power to filter, censor, or delete content, that content was simultaneously mirrored across multiple other servers. Users could therefore tell whether a particular server was censoring and switch to a different provider.
The web (as opposed to the net) is largely centralized. Economies of scale and growing bandwidth have largely quashed the ancient system local mirrors. Have largely allowed ad-supported commercial entities to replace more altruistic university-run services. The web can not route around censorship very well, and the web has killed off the internet services that can
What you CAN hold them accountable for is the outrageous cost increases that far exceed inflation and infrastructure growth.
At most state schools, the per student spending on undergraduate instruction has increased at very close to, or below, the rate of inflation over the past 10-20 years. This is really very impressive, considering the massive increase in enrollment over that time.
Meanwhile, the student cost to attend those schools has increased at 2-3x the rate of inflation. The difference is due to states, across the board, failing to increase education spending to meet the expansion and, in many cases, actually reducing education spending. Education is no longer considered a public benefit, and taxpayers refuse to pay for some other kid's schooling.
There are plenty of people, Republicans and others, who want to stamp out islamists carrying on war against the US and all civilized parts of the world, but we don't want to trample the rights and protections of innocents to do it.
That is spin. Many of those Republicans - McConnell, McCain, Hatch, etc - opposed the bill not because the authorized data collection programs trample the rights of Americans, but because the restrictions placed on the NSA damage its ability to protect Americans. The Republican 'opposition' prefer more spying.
Section 215 of the Patsiot Act, the one that authorized mass metadata collection, sunseted on Monday at 0000 hours because Rand Paul blocked Bitch McConnell railroading in a clean extension. [...] It was dead Monday, and it is still dead. The Freedom Act did not re-enact it.
The Patriot act did not explicitly empower the bulk collection of communication metadata. That power was based on a broad interpretation of the text that the courts seem increasingly likely to deem illegal. In contrast, the "Freedom" act will require ISPs and phone companies to log and retain this metadata, and will explicitly allow NSA to demand that data based on 'reasonable articulable suspicion' going out two hops a named individual. So, if NSA has a 'reasonable suspicion' that someone might be bad, and that person googles "famous US landmarks," then NSA can ISPs provide data from anyone else who used google.
This may be a restriction over just having a desktop tool to query their own database, but the FISA not historically been much of an impediment. They're mostly just moving the data warehouse from NSA to the ISPs. ISPs that used not to log your every connection will now be required to. ISPs that used those logs only for technical troubleshooting will now be required to develop tools for identifying and connecting endpoints, in order to provide that data to the government upon request. They are certain to find commercial uses for that data to offset the costs.
So, the law that the NSA twisted to justify the bulk metadata program ended, but it was replaced with a law that explicitly authorizes bulk metadata collection and moves that collection to private companies that are not restricted by the 4th amendment. It's being sold to the public like a big curtailing of power, but it doesn't look that way to me
Australia has experimented with various alternate voting methods including compulsory voting, still get the authoritarian right wing types in government.
People like authoritarian, protective governments. They like for someone to focus their fear on a particular movement or group. They like to think that something is being done about that threat. They know they're not doing anything wrong and will be untouched by those protective measures. Even if there is some small consequence, the security is worth it.
These people don't speak, so you don't know they exist. They're part of the 95% of slashdot readers who have never posted a comment. They don't have strong opinions. They are good people, always ready with a smile and a wave, always ready to help a neighbor in need, and never asking for anything in return. They just want to go about their life, and a strong, protective government with visible police and pro-active defense is very comforting.
Also, take advantage of any other financial opportunities your company offers. Is there an employee stock purchase program? If there is put the maximum amount you can into it. There is almost no other investment that will give back as much as an ESPP will. At my company the stock is purchased at 15% below the offering price of either the first day or the last day (whichever is lower).
Just make sure you divest this regularly and diversify. You do not want to have both your job and your emergency/retirement savings to be dependent on the continued success of one company.
That's an interesting answer kids, pretend to be self-reliant by sponging off others and start a business when you have little experience on how to do anything involved with it. Why would we want the kids to have their attitude adjusted to that?
Starting a business is very risky, regardless of when you do it or what your skills are. In countries, like the US, without a social safety net to support those who try-but-fail, it is much better to try while it's not too big a lifestyle adjustment to live on rice and beans, while you can sleep in your car (tough to do with a 2-year-old), and while you can fall back on your parents should worse come to worst.
Kids spend 16 years being taught to follow instructions and wait for guidance from anointed leaders. 16 years being prepared to trade the majority of their labor value for the false security of a "regular" paycheck. The sooner they try to take initiative and responsibility for their own success, the better. If they fail, at worst they'll appreciate that there's more to running a successful organization than the armchair CEOs seem to think. At best, they'll learn from their failure, start over, and be succeed on the second or third try.
Slashdot Mirror
so in other words it's okay to put poisons in food as long as you pretend to list them on the label
Why do you care how I kill myself, as long as I'm making an informed decision?
The lifetime cost of diabetes is around $85,000, so I suppose you might argue that my poor diet raises your health insurance premiums. The lifetime cost of a single knee replacement is around $130,000, so I would counter that it is 3x more expensive to be an avid runner who wears out both his knees than to be a diabetic.
There's a well-known study on the effect of voluntary exercise on life expectancy. Just drop a running wheel in a rat cage, and see if they live longer. Turns out that young rats will run, literally, miles every day. They eventually get bored, or old, and stop running, but if you reduce their food intake by just 8%, they get back on the wheel and run.
To be a little hungry seems to stimulate activity and raise the mental state a bit. It may not be good for tasks that require sustained, focused attention, but that fidgety feeling you get before lunch can actually be directed.
What percentage of income do other people spend on directing support to charity?
10% is enshrined in the Christian Old Testament. Some Jews read this as a donation to a class of priest no longer in existence, but also acknowledge a 2.5% terumah or a general "as much as you are able." Some also seem to interpret these as necessarily paid in food and only by farmers. Islamic zakat is 2.5%.
In the US, private charitable giving (as declared on tax returns) averages $1200 per household, or about 1.7% (keeping in mind that mean is a terrible way to measure US economic data). These guys have much more complete data that suggests something like 2-4% being 'normal.' This is still a terrible measure, because bible-belt Southerners average close to 7%, while New Englanders average under 3% (source).
First of all a "No placebos do not work" statement is made, promptly followed by admitting the placebo effect is real. Make up your mind, if the placebo effect is real then by definition placebos do work.
The issue here is what does it mean for a treatment to "work?"
If you take twelve people with flu and give them no treatment for a week, twelve of them will get better: reduced fever, reduced pain measures, improved nasal airflow. Does this mean "No Treatment" works? If you just tell them every day that they look much better and air out their room, many of them will report higher scores on comprehensive well-being surveys and lower perceived discomfort within days. We should be careful about our language, and I think that means to distinguish between "have an effect" and "work."
Many interventions have effects - positive of negative - that are reproducible and quantifiable. Placebos, aroma therapy, life coaching... That doesn't mean the work.
An intervention "works" if it produces the effect in claims by the mechanism it claims. Western medicine mechanisms involve interactions among molecules. For example, insulin lowers blood sugar because it stimulates glucose uptake by muscle. You can measure each of those molecules; you can measure their interactions; they induce phenomena consistent with the health outcome.
Homeopathic treatments claimed mechanism is "like cures like," and that water memory of exposure to a toxin allows it to displace the miasm causing the actual distress. Miasms aren't directly measurable and don't produce consistent effects. "Memory" in water or alcohol of past exposure to dilute toxins has no measurable effect on the chemical or quantum states of the molecule. There is no way to determine whether a homeopathic treatment has the effect it claims by the mechanism it claims. There is no objective way to prove that it "works," but its claims are inconsistent with otherwise proven science and chemistry.
So far as I know, no one has a mechanism for placebos. It's a reproducible phenomenon in an incredibly complex system, and science has generally bees satisfied to describe it as "the placebo effect." Placebos don't "work," but they do have an effect.
Let me introduce you to Dale Akiki. Patently false accusations, including that he had sacrificed a giraffe in a church classroom during Sunday services, landed him in an extended court trial. He was eventually exonerated, but for a long stretch of the 1990s, everyone in San Diego knew he was a satanic pedophile.
If it is a bare, unsupported, accusation, just deny it. If the smearer offers evidence, offer evidence of your own that the accusation is untrue.
For example, an ad to show that I am not a witch. Everyone will believe that.
What mass shootings are you talking about the few that hit national news and are talked about over and over for decades, that one at the high school in Colorado happened 16 years ago?
You can't possibly think that Columbine is the only 'mass shooting' in the last two decades. Here's a helpful list of last year's multiple-victim shootings. There's 283 entries. Now, most of those are not "quiet white boy flips his lid and goes on shooting spree," but to just pretend that the number of shooting victims is inconseqential, or that there's nothing to be done about ubiquitous shootings is callous and mean.
According to the CDC influenza and pneumonia are a bigger killer than guns and nearly half of gun deaths are suicide.
Maybe you've seen the annual drive to get people to have flu shots in order to reduce the deaths by flu and pneumonia. What are we doing to reduce involuntary gun deaths? Police? They only show up after the fact.
It's also why our poorest state is wealthier than the UK on a per capita basis.
Yet, strangely, our wealthiest states have shorter life expectancy and higher infant mortality than the UK. Canada, Norway and Australia rank higher for quality of life. US culture has decided that money is everything and has, accordingly, sacrificed everything on behalf of the dollar.
By comparison, from my land in 25 minutes I drive past my neighbor's waterfall on the other side of my canyon, past the fjord, down between the mountains and the ocean and into town. You share a ride with little personal space with strangers in an underground tunnel.
Some of those strangers are interesting people. You can talk to a dozen different people, each with a unique perspective on the world, some of them quite insightful or funny, during lunch. And a completely different dozen on the way home from work.
I can understand why you'd enjoy some beautiful scenery and being 25 minutes from the next living soul, but it seems to me a little like the difference between reading "The Road to Character" and reading Slashdot.
You said "The winner is AT&T" and that's objectively wrong.
AT&T has 120M wireless subscribers. This fine amount to a little more than a penny per subscriber per month over the time period in question, during which some of their $50/month unlimited subscribers upgraded to $70/month 6GB or $100/month 10GB plans. If they had even 0.05% conversion, then AT&T has objectively won the dollar fight.
But why should you even tax a business? Businesses don't consume or produce anything - the people working at them do. A business is just a paper shell representing a group of people. If you tax the business, the money just comes from the employees (lower wages) and customers (higher prices).
You tax businesses to discourage people from hiding assets and economic activity within a shell corporation to avoid taxation. (ie, I don't own anything or draw a salary, but my consulting company lets me live in this nice house and provides a generous entertainment budget) The US has decided to minimize the taxation of the individuals comprising the business (ie, highly favorable treatment of capital gains and dividends), and you can't simultaneously argue against taxing the business because its participants are taxed and against taxing the distributions because the business is taxed.
As you say, though, it is all the same money, so the only question is where to impose a tax. The US used to get the lion's share of tax revenue from businesses, where clear accounting rules make it clear what a business can "afford." Taxing individuals is much more complicated for everyone - I have to discount my salary by some 35%, between Federal, Social security, and State taxes to figure out my budget, nevermind the various discounts and incentives.
Taxing businesses creates a contradiction if you believe in "no taxation without representation."
Surely you're joking. Just who do you think is paying all those lobbyists? Who do you imagine supports the campaigns of the elected officials? BP may not get to cast a ballot in any particular district, but their interests are far better represented than your own. And again, corporate suffrage would enable the creation of armies of shell companies with no purpose other than to sway elections. Patently ridiculous.
Disney management will simply wait for the uproar to die down and then start setting vague and aggressive performance objectives for the U.S. workers. They'll then get rid of people via performance review.
They probably don't even need to worry about getting rid of their existing workforce. If your boss spends a lot of time loudly whining about how he can't afford to keep all these IT people; about how he wishes he could replace them all with H1B's, but then tells you not to worry about your job, you'd be an idiot not to fire up the resume printer. Before long, the only people left will be the ones who can't get work elsewhere.
does it mean they will become like them after they're bought?
Github is not selling out: they're offering a 10% stake. Even if the entire offering is bought by one entity, that entity will not have the power to force github to do anything the existing structure doesn't want.
Possibly worth noting that Andreessen Horowitz already has a 13% stake, and he hasn't managed to make them Evil. Raising outside ownership to 23% isn't going to give the vultures control.
You know, I'm not a fan of this idea, where government shoulders the costs and then owns the resource. We didn't do electricity or telephone this way back in the days, we encouraged private industry to do this by providing subsidies and a regulatory climate where private enterprise could survive.
So, you favor government shouldering the cost, giving away ownership, and guaranteeing profitability for the utility company. Honestly, that system has worked out pretty well, in many cases. The private industry part tends to encourage cost minimization while the regulatory oversight discourages price gouging and customer abuse.
The problem with purely private solutions is that the people involved have a financial incentive to provide poor service at exorbitant prices. The problem with purely government solutions is that disinterest and incompetence may result in poor service and high costs. Striking a healthy balance between the two requires careful analysis, an understanding of policy, and an interest in the public good that we have systematically bred out of our politicians by insisting that they be attractive fund-raisers.
Either way, the legislature, being comprised of representatives of the jurisdiction involved approved such an action. By extrapolation, that means that the entire jurisdiction approved and agreed to pay taxes to benefit others in the area. That's how a republic works.
No, actually, it isn't. Neither democracy nor representative forms of government force agreement upon everyone.
No government based on the unanimous support of the entire population will ever work. If that's your working definition of democracy, you may want to revisit your civics lessons.
The whole concept behind a government is that everyone agrees to abide by its rules. You don't have to believe that the rules are right or best, but you do have to abide by them. In a representative democracy, the representatives create those rules on behalf of individual citizens. Again, you don't have to agree that a particular rule is the best, but you do have to accept that your opinion is in the minority.
I would love to see this argument applied to the times a local or city council votes to grant a cable company a non-exclusive franchise to operate in their community. Usually, such an agreement is represented as the greedy cable company bribing city officials into giving them a government-granted monopoly. Under your "republic", it's really everyone in the community agreeing to this.
This is why civilized cultures see bribery (or even "campaign contributions") as such a serious threat to society. If you can appeal to and corrupt the people's representative and distort him not to represent those people, then you no longer have a representative democracy. Instead, you've created a plutocracy, where the rules are created by those rich enough to pay for representation. A plutocracy will force people to abide by rules that lack popular support. A representative democracy will force a minority to abide by rules that most people favor.
Either way, you're paying the cable company for service you aren't using -- handing them money for no reason.
Every May, I call Comcast and threaten to cancel. In exchange, they usually offer me the same "discount" as new subscribers. Last year's offer was internet+basic cable for $50, vs internet only for $65.
I figure Comcast must have such a massive stockpile of set-top boxes that they're willing to pay their customers $15/month to store them. Or, like "12 CDs for the price of 1," they make so much money off the people who forget to cancel after the trial that they don't mind the "loss."
Mr. Anonymous Coward, I am confident in positing you either work for Comcast or Time Warner.
There's a surprisingly strong movement, at least in the US, essentially claiming that it's "better" to rent almost anything. Rent your cable modem and get a free upgrade when DOCSIS 3 is retired. Lease your car and save on depreciation. Rent a house and save thousands on taxes and maintenance. These notions are so logically and economically flawed that it's hard not to imagine a (at best) disingenuous campaign, but maybe it goes along with the disposable-everything culture and inability to see past the next paycheck.
You must have a real dilemma when you fill up your vehicle with gas...
You're mistaken: Rockoon is so principled, he never uses any subsidized product. He obviously doesn't own a car, as the automotive industry itself has been bailed out far too often. Public transit is right out, obviously, He can't even bike, because the rubber subsidy means no tires. So, Rockoon walks everywhere on pure leather shoes, bought only from chain stores with over 1000 employees to avoid "small business" subsidies. He rents a house rather than accept the government subsidy on a mortgage. Even there, he has to sit in the dark to avoid subsidies on all forms of electrical generation. He eats no sugar, corn, wheat or dairy. He is fortunate to be able to wear wool clothes these days, because the cotton subsidy means no BVDs. But it's all worth it, to avoid selfishly taking money from other taxpayers.
Really, when you think about it, it's easy to understand why he's such an angry guy. If you spent your days in woolen underwear, you'd be a little irritable, too.
Who said, "The Internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it"?
It was John Gilmore. But he was wrong.
He was right at the time. He said that circa 1995, and it was mostly about Usenet. Usenet had a distributed system for maintaining discussions, somewhat like a BitTorrent for blogs. Even though individual servers could become quite large and popular, thus potentially gaining the power to filter, censor, or delete content, that content was simultaneously mirrored across multiple other servers. Users could therefore tell whether a particular server was censoring and switch to a different provider.
The web (as opposed to the net) is largely centralized. Economies of scale and growing bandwidth have largely quashed the ancient system local mirrors. Have largely allowed ad-supported commercial entities to replace more altruistic university-run services. The web can not route around censorship very well, and the web has killed off the internet services that can
What you CAN hold them accountable for is the outrageous cost increases that far exceed inflation and infrastructure growth.
At most state schools, the per student spending on undergraduate instruction has increased at very close to, or below, the rate of inflation over the past 10-20 years. This is really very impressive, considering the massive increase in enrollment over that time.
Meanwhile, the student cost to attend those schools has increased at 2-3x the rate of inflation. The difference is due to states, across the board, failing to increase education spending to meet the expansion and, in many cases, actually reducing education spending. Education is no longer considered a public benefit, and taxpayers refuse to pay for some other kid's schooling.
There are plenty of people, Republicans and others, who want to stamp out islamists carrying on war against the US and all civilized parts of the world, but we don't want to trample the rights and protections of innocents to do it.
That is spin. Many of those Republicans - McConnell, McCain, Hatch, etc - opposed the bill not because the authorized data collection programs trample the rights of Americans, but because the restrictions placed on the NSA damage its ability to protect Americans. The Republican 'opposition' prefer more spying.
Section 215 of the Patsiot Act, the one that authorized mass metadata collection, sunseted on Monday at 0000 hours because Rand Paul blocked Bitch McConnell railroading in a clean extension. [...] It was dead Monday, and it is still dead. The Freedom Act did not re-enact it.
The Patriot act did not explicitly empower the bulk collection of communication metadata. That power was based on a broad interpretation of the text that the courts seem increasingly likely to deem illegal. In contrast, the "Freedom" act will require ISPs and phone companies to log and retain this metadata, and will explicitly allow NSA to demand that data based on 'reasonable articulable suspicion' going out two hops a named individual. So, if NSA has a 'reasonable suspicion' that someone might be bad, and that person googles "famous US landmarks," then NSA can ISPs provide data from anyone else who used google.
This may be a restriction over just having a desktop tool to query their own database, but the FISA not historically been much of an impediment. They're mostly just moving the data warehouse from NSA to the ISPs. ISPs that used not to log your every connection will now be required to. ISPs that used those logs only for technical troubleshooting will now be required to develop tools for identifying and connecting endpoints, in order to provide that data to the government upon request. They are certain to find commercial uses for that data to offset the costs.
So, the law that the NSA twisted to justify the bulk metadata program ended, but it was replaced with a law that explicitly authorizes bulk metadata collection and moves that collection to private companies that are not restricted by the 4th amendment. It's being sold to the public like a big curtailing of power, but it doesn't look that way to me
Australia has experimented with various alternate voting methods including compulsory voting, still get the authoritarian right wing types in government.
People like authoritarian, protective governments. They like for someone to focus their fear on a particular movement or group. They like to think that something is being done about that threat. They know they're not doing anything wrong and will be untouched by those protective measures. Even if there is some small consequence, the security is worth it.
These people don't speak, so you don't know they exist. They're part of the 95% of slashdot readers who have never posted a comment. They don't have strong opinions. They are good people, always ready with a smile and a wave, always ready to help a neighbor in need, and never asking for anything in return. They just want to go about their life, and a strong, protective government with visible police and pro-active defense is very comforting.
Also, take advantage of any other financial opportunities your company offers. Is there an employee stock purchase program? If there is put the maximum amount you can into it. There is almost no other investment that will give back as much as an ESPP will. At my company the stock is purchased at 15% below the offering price of either the first day or the last day (whichever is lower).
Just make sure you divest this regularly and diversify. You do not want to have both your job and your emergency/retirement savings to be dependent on the continued success of one company.
That's an interesting answer kids, pretend to be self-reliant by sponging off others and start a business when you have little experience on how to do anything involved with it. Why would we want the kids to have their attitude adjusted to that?
Starting a business is very risky, regardless of when you do it or what your skills are. In countries, like the US, without a social safety net to support those who try-but-fail, it is much better to try while it's not too big a lifestyle adjustment to live on rice and beans, while you can sleep in your car (tough to do with a 2-year-old), and while you can fall back on your parents should worse come to worst.
Kids spend 16 years being taught to follow instructions and wait for guidance from anointed leaders. 16 years being prepared to trade the majority of their labor value for the false security of a "regular" paycheck. The sooner they try to take initiative and responsibility for their own success, the better. If they fail, at worst they'll appreciate that there's more to running a successful organization than the armchair CEOs seem to think. At best, they'll learn from their failure, start over, and be succeed on the second or third try.