>Proposing $19 trillion in new give-aways that only those who don't pay income taxes could love, and which the other half of the country (which DOES pay income taxes) won't support, is sane?
You can always tell an idiot by his inability to recognize the difference between an investment and an expense. They usually use phrases like "no such thing as a free lunch" because they are incapable of figuring out that if you spend money on the right things you MAKE more money than you spent. The weird thing is, when their wealthy corporation-buddies do that, they praise it, and those guys do it all the time - but when somebody suggests government does it, then they call him crazy...
Republicans have been telling us for years that "government should be run more like a business" - well THIS is how you run government more like a business: by buying assets that will make you more money than it will cost. Assets like lots and lots of college graduates who don't have debt and earn taxable incomes. Assets like public healthcare which costs less than any other way of doing it, provides higher quality and - because people are sick less - makes a profit because everybody can be more productive. Healthcare can NEVER be done for a profit, it's literally impossible. If the "healthcare industry" has made a profit, everybody else suffered a loss 5 times or more that. Take whatever the healthcare industry adds to your GDP away, and your GDP goes up by more than 5 times that amount.
I did the math for my own country recently. To give everybody who got at least a 50% average in highschool free university (including a living stipend and with about a 30% budget boost to hire additional lecturers, build infrastructure for the increased student numbers etc. etc) would work out to about half a million rand per candidate. Then I worked out what happens if we DON'T do that. Without a tertiary education in this country - you will never earn more than minimum wage levels, it's virtually impossible - maybe one in ten-thousand manage it, so you can't bet on those odds. Instead - you're talking poverty, which means that person uses more healthcare, and has to use the public healthcare facilities that taxpayers fund, that person spends a lot more time unemployed (because low-skill jobs tend not to have job security) so we're spending a lot more money on social safety nets to keep her from starving than we otherwise would - she is never earning enough to pay income tax, but she still uses services like roads and sewage which she isn't helping to pay upkeep on. She spends almost her entire income just on surviving - that is, on essential goods, so she isn't paying sales tax either. Over her lifetime her entire tax bill is maybe 3000-rand (inflation adjusted over 50 years from high-school graduation) - but she's cost the treasury at least 5-million. That's ten times what it would have cost to send her to university. Even though if we do this many would drop-out and not complete, a lot would finish - and they earn middle-class incomes. They pay income tax. They buy houses and cars and pay taxes on those. They have job security so they rarely if ever use the social safety net. They can afford private medical care so they are reducing the burden on the public clinics.
Even if only 10% of them actually graduated, society would turn a massive profit on the deal, the tax-income from all these educated people exceeds the cost of educating them many times over. That's money I save.
Neither of those things have anything to do with liberty whatsoever. But republicans love to tell you they do, so you're busy looking at that while they strip all your ACTUAL liberties away. Censoring the media to appease their social conservative base, making abortions de facto impossible to get with onerous regulations (where was that anti-regulation stance from Cruz when his state passed a series of regulations that left the largest state with only two providers for this service ?), starting unwinnable wars to give money to their defense-contractor-cronies.
Some of the most free countries in the world also have some of the highest taxes - it's simply not important. What *does* matter is: 1) Are you getting value for your money - is your taxes well-spent, on high quality government services that are as good as the market would have provided without the onerous need to pay for somebody else's profits ? That's a win everytime you can get it, and exactly why universal healthcare is actually cheaper for society (much) than so-called free market healthcare. People say Bernie's plan would cost too much, but utterly ignore 50% of the balance sheet, it's always cost less to do this right - and there's no evidence it wouldn't this time. 2) What quality of life can you get with the money you keep ? If you had half as much cash as you do now, but had a nicer house, a nicer car, shorter hours away from your family, could afford a decent vacation once a year - would you care ? Would you SERIOUSLY call that a bad deal ?
I would rather defend freedoms that matter, like freedom of thought and freedom of speech and privacy, than worry about something as utterly insignificant to the world as the tax rate.
Except that it wasn't... you can't retroactively change a contract, even governments are careful about that - and especially so with very powerful companies who can afford long running supreme court cases^H^^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hbig donors.
I mean a scenario where there is laws granting a company an exclusive right to trade in a given area, or industries actually owned by the state - in both cases it's a monopoly with the power of the state. A natural monopoly is pretty much the only scenario where that's a good thing.
I'm not sure if that was meant for me or the AC. Just in case - a simple google for "child slavery in the chocolate industry" will get you an overwhelming number of articles detailing the things I said.
1) I call bullshit on either Obama or Bernie ever saying that or anything that remotely enough resembles it to make this satire as opposed to just flagrant lies. 2) Or do you mean West Africa ? Because I got news for you - West Africa is, if anything, actually MORE capitalist than the USA - take it from somebody who has lived there and travelled the region extensively.
Nope, those too are natural monopolies, though power is gradually ceasing to be thanks to new technologies making the initial capital outlay potentially much smaller (home solar and such). A natural monopoly exists anytime you have an industry where you have a relatively massive initial capital investment required and very low per-unit margines so that it would take decades to recover your investment (remember - you don't count "profit" until after that happens). Anybody who is thinking of competing is now going to be deterred because they will take even LONGER - after all, you have an entrenchment boost already, so with less potential customers - that means instead of 20 years it may now take 40 years to start making a profit (and that's on the very generous assumption that you can take a full 50% of the incumbent's customers in year one - actual projections are more like 2.5%).
In those cases - giving state monopolies are actually *better* for consumers. They are going to have a monopoly anyway, at least if you do it this way you can attach conditions to the deal to reduce the negatives a bit, like forcing them to deploy to regions with few potential customers that private industry would have avoided, regulating certain minimum product quality standards and maximum prices etc. etc.
It's far from ideal - but when the ideal is impossible, it's the best out of two bad deals.
The biggest potential problem comes in if new technology changes the industry and makes true free market competition a genuine possibility. In that case, it's important that there be some sort of escape clause in the monopoly deal that allows government to end it when it no longer benefits consumers. Power is rapidly moving in that direction. In practise such clauses are sadly rare (and they are most rare in countries like the US where the political system is for sale to the highest bidder) but the smarter and better run countries do put them in, in fact they do one better and generally add something like a renewal requirement to the deal - so every 20 years or so they can choose to not renew it if it no longer makes sense - or even give your infrastructure to another company if that company is offering consumers a better deal (which is perfectly acceptable considering the only reason they could build that infrastructure in the first place is because you used your eminent domain as a government to give them access to loads of private property).
He is also on the wrong side... just further along. He's the guy who said he wants to have government effectively curate the internet remember - great firewall of china style. Because literally the only thing worse than ISPs deciding what internet services do or do not work well for you (based on double-pay kickbacks) is having government decide which services you can access.
In the real world, it's bullshit. You could possibly argue that consumer demand created them, but there's a point where it ceases to be a factor because choosing NOT to buy no longer has any actual impact on the corporation - in fact even killing it would have zero impact on the founders. A point where punishing it for doing wrong is almost useless because the people who actually have the authority to be responsible for the wrongdoing feel no pain - they just respond to the fines by cutting wages and salaries so you end up punishing a bunch of people who had no power or authority to prevent the bad behavior.
You end up in a scenario where they are the largest employer so everybody HAS to keep them happy, or face a major unemployment issue, they biggest bank account so they can buy more political influence in a minute than you can get with a decade's worth of campaigning. More money than almost any government. And the ability to shuffle themselves around the world picking the laws they like - so instead of competing for our demand - our elected governments are competing for the privilege of letting them be the most lawless.
Corporations are what happens when you take all the worst evils humans are capable off - and remove the fucking leash.
Over regulation may cost somebody a paycheck in a few years.
Under regulation WILL kill a thousand people tomorrow. It has never failed to do so. And whom it doesn't kill - it enslaves.
One of the last bastions of bona-fide "grabbed from their homes and chained up" slavery in the world is the cocoa bean farms of the DRC - staffed almost entirely by kidnapped child slaves. They are a source of nearly all the chocolate that Hershey's, Cadburrys and Nestle sell. This was first exposed in 2000. All three companies pledged to clean up their act. Bernie Sanders used the popular sentiment to drive through a law prohibiting US companies from importing goods produced by child labour. Then GW pointed at the marketing blitz of "cleaning up our supply chain" ads the the companies were running, said "clearly this industry is self regulating so there's no need to enforce the law" and never enforced the law - 8 years later it was basically languishing in the realm of the forgotten. It's now 16 years later, not one of the companies have done anything about the problem - in fact, it's only gotten MUCH worse. There are now tens of thousands of these kidnapped child-slaves working those farms under whip, with no payment, little food and no adequate shelter. Almost all of them dying on the job before they hit puberty.
According to the memo which we actually HAVE - this is not conjecture, it's a fact, we have the fucking document: "By 2015 the Behring strait will be iceless 9-months of the year, as opposed to the current 3-months"
It's still cheaper to sail through liquid water than break through ice.
Thats a strawman. I think it was obvious in context that I was referring only to the American made M-series. And its noteworthy that despite the R1 only ever being used in one war which was lost I rate it higher than the M16. The FN-FAL is simply a much better design by every metric and the R1 is probably the single best version of that design ever built. There is a reason every other NATO country chose the FN-FAL.
If my life depended on it - I would choose an R1 (ruggedized African version of the F1-FAL) over an M-anything any day of the week - and I'd choose a well-made AK over the R1. And part of the evidence is this: two of the world's best trained, disciplined and funded army's went up against AK-armed armys with M16's and R1's respectively in the 20th century - and they both lost.
You know... of all the bullshit Obama gets accused off, this is the most ridiculous. "His" wars (both of which was started by Bush) show no sign of being afraid of killing innocents, on the contrary - the drone program seems to be killing a few grandmothers a week but if it ever actually killed anybody who was actually a threat to the united states nobody would know because it would probably be an accident while aiming at his neighbour's 3-year old kid.
Obama is, if anything, one of the more brutal hawks in US history.
>Somebody who was NOT there has the benefit of 20/20 hindsight
So ? Every jury in every civilian case has the same problem - and it's particularly difficult for homocide when the accused is claiming self defense. The Jury has to decide if a reasonable person would have concluded that the situation was, indeed, life threatening and thus be justified in using lethal force against the deceased. It's not, in fact, any different when we're assessing whether a soldier's actions were justified, or a mistake that happened is one that a reasonable person would have made.
>and history shows they will crucify the poor son of a bitch who was in the bad situation at the time Or the guy he killed will get no justice even though his entire claim of self defense rested on "it was a black kid and he was wearing a hoodie". Sometimes Juries get it wrong - nobody is saying oversight is perfect, but people who were themselves in that situation and whose recollection and experience is biassed in the same way are the worst possible choices. It's like having a self defense case where every juror is somebody who has previously killed somebody in a self defense.
It may not be perfect, but it's better than the alternative. Those with 20/20 hindsight and objective, physical evidence can make at least a reasonably objective assessment. To really be objective you should show empathy to the conditions in which it happened - but empathy is a far cry from personal recollection - and the latter is way, way too far.
>Discounting someone's judgement "because they were there" is inexcusable No, it is literally the only possible way to live in a free and just society. This is no less true of a soldier than anybody else.
>does, indeed, merit the response "Go fuck yourself Except that I didn't receive that response, the OP got that. I merely discounted the judgement on which that response was based but the only response I received was from you.
Now you mention it, isn't it funny how those "we must make government smaller" republicans never seem to want touch libraries. It's not like any of their voters read... yet somehow libraries get a free pass while the programs that give hungry people food get gutted. It's an interesting observation since the only *other* things that get a free pass are military spending, oil subsidies, tax breaks for rich people, tax loopholes for big corporations and their own paychecks (they will never suggest balancing the budget by cutting their OWN salaries).
But everything else on that list, you can see clear self-interest. Not cutting those things means money back in their own pockets (even with military spending- contractors tend to be very loyal donors). I find it surprising that they haven't suggested gutting the LoC or the Smithsonian and such... where's the benefit for them there ? It can't even be that they just like to use them, they've never been inside either and neither has anybody who votes for them...
Nah, the republicans won't block the appointment of a librarian, none of their voters care about libraries after all, those are for people who know what books are.
When your opponent has a gun that will fire reliably while burried in mud, or filled with sand, a gun you "must keep clean" is a dismal failure and putting in place procedures to ensure it's kept clean is not "fixing" it.
Slashdot Mirror
Great. Just what we always wanted. Needing a virus scanner on a console....
>Proposing $19 trillion in new give-aways that only those who don't pay income taxes could love, and which the other half of the country (which DOES pay income taxes) won't support, is sane?
You can always tell an idiot by his inability to recognize the difference between an investment and an expense. They usually use phrases like "no such thing as a free lunch" because they are incapable of figuring out that if you spend money on the right things you MAKE more money than you spent. The weird thing is, when their wealthy corporation-buddies do that, they praise it, and those guys do it all the time - but when somebody suggests government does it, then they call him crazy...
Republicans have been telling us for years that "government should be run more like a business" - well THIS is how you run government more like a business: by buying assets that will make you more money than it will cost. Assets like lots and lots of college graduates who don't have debt and earn taxable incomes. Assets like public healthcare which costs less than any other way of doing it, provides higher quality and - because people are sick less - makes a profit because everybody can be more productive.
Healthcare can NEVER be done for a profit, it's literally impossible. If the "healthcare industry" has made a profit, everybody else suffered a loss 5 times or more that. Take whatever the healthcare industry adds to your GDP away, and your GDP goes up by more than 5 times that amount.
I did the math for my own country recently. To give everybody who got at least a 50% average in highschool free university (including a living stipend and with about a 30% budget boost to hire additional lecturers, build infrastructure for the increased student numbers etc. etc) would work out to about half a million rand per candidate.
Then I worked out what happens if we DON'T do that. Without a tertiary education in this country - you will never earn more than minimum wage levels, it's virtually impossible - maybe one in ten-thousand manage it, so you can't bet on those odds. Instead - you're talking poverty, which means that person uses more healthcare, and has to use the public healthcare facilities that taxpayers fund, that person spends a lot more time unemployed (because low-skill jobs tend not to have job security) so we're spending a lot more money on social safety nets to keep her from starving than we otherwise would - she is never earning enough to pay income tax, but she still uses services like roads and sewage which she isn't helping to pay upkeep on. She spends almost her entire income just on surviving - that is, on essential goods, so she isn't paying sales tax either. Over her lifetime her entire tax bill is maybe 3000-rand (inflation adjusted over 50 years from high-school graduation) - but she's cost the treasury at least 5-million. That's ten times what it would have cost to send her to university. Even though if we do this many would drop-out and not complete, a lot would finish - and they earn middle-class incomes. They pay income tax. They buy houses and cars and pay taxes on those. They have job security so they rarely if ever use the social safety net. They can afford private medical care so they are reducing the burden on the public clinics.
Even if only 10% of them actually graduated, society would turn a massive profit on the deal, the tax-income from all these educated people exceeds the cost of educating them many times over. That's money I save.
Neither of those things have anything to do with liberty whatsoever. But republicans love to tell you they do, so you're busy looking at that while they strip all your ACTUAL liberties away. Censoring the media to appease their social conservative base, making abortions de facto impossible to get with onerous regulations (where was that anti-regulation stance from Cruz when his state passed a series of regulations that left the largest state with only two providers for this service ?), starting unwinnable wars to give money to their defense-contractor-cronies.
Some of the most free countries in the world also have some of the highest taxes - it's simply not important. What *does* matter is:
1) Are you getting value for your money - is your taxes well-spent, on high quality government services that are as good as the market would have provided without the onerous need to pay for somebody else's profits ? That's a win everytime you can get it, and exactly why universal healthcare is actually cheaper for society (much) than so-called free market healthcare. People say Bernie's plan would cost too much, but utterly ignore 50% of the balance sheet, it's always cost less to do this right - and there's no evidence it wouldn't this time.
2) What quality of life can you get with the money you keep ? If you had half as much cash as you do now, but had a nicer house, a nicer car, shorter hours away from your family, could afford a decent vacation once a year - would you care ? Would you SERIOUSLY call that a bad deal ?
I would rather defend freedoms that matter, like freedom of thought and freedom of speech and privacy, than worry about something as utterly insignificant to the world as the tax rate.
Except that it wasn't... you can't retroactively change a contract, even governments are careful about that - and especially so with very powerful companies who can afford long running supreme court cases^H^^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hbig donors.
I thought so, just figured I'd make sure.
I mean a scenario where there is laws granting a company an exclusive right to trade in a given area, or industries actually owned by the state - in both cases it's a monopoly with the power of the state. A natural monopoly is pretty much the only scenario where that's a good thing.
I'm not sure if that was meant for me or the AC.
Just in case - a simple google for "child slavery in the chocolate industry" will get you an overwhelming number of articles detailing the things I said.
1) I call bullshit on either Obama or Bernie ever saying that or anything that remotely enough resembles it to make this satire as opposed to just flagrant lies.
2) Or do you mean West Africa ? Because I got news for you - West Africa is, if anything, actually MORE capitalist than the USA - take it from somebody who has lived there and travelled the region extensively.
Nope, those too are natural monopolies, though power is gradually ceasing to be thanks to new technologies making the initial capital outlay potentially much smaller (home solar and such).
A natural monopoly exists anytime you have an industry where you have a relatively massive initial capital investment required and very low per-unit margines so that it would take decades to recover your investment (remember - you don't count "profit" until after that happens). Anybody who is thinking of competing is now going to be deterred because they will take even LONGER - after all, you have an entrenchment boost already, so with less potential customers - that means instead of 20 years it may now take 40 years to start making a profit (and that's on the very generous assumption that you can take a full 50% of the incumbent's customers in year one - actual projections are more like 2.5%).
In those cases - giving state monopolies are actually *better* for consumers. They are going to have a monopoly anyway, at least if you do it this way you can attach conditions to the deal to reduce the negatives a bit, like forcing them to deploy to regions with few potential customers that private industry would have avoided, regulating certain minimum product quality standards and maximum prices etc. etc.
It's far from ideal - but when the ideal is impossible, it's the best out of two bad deals.
The biggest potential problem comes in if new technology changes the industry and makes true free market competition a genuine possibility. In that case, it's important that there be some sort of escape clause in the monopoly deal that allows government to end it when it no longer benefits consumers. Power is rapidly moving in that direction. In practise such clauses are sadly rare (and they are most rare in countries like the US where the political system is for sale to the highest bidder) but the smarter and better run countries do put them in, in fact they do one better and generally add something like a renewal requirement to the deal - so every 20 years or so they can choose to not renew it if it no longer makes sense - or even give your infrastructure to another company if that company is offering consumers a better deal (which is perfectly acceptable considering the only reason they could build that infrastructure in the first place is because you used your eminent domain as a government to give them access to loads of private property).
Yeah... that's never going to happen. Look up the concept of a natural monopoly.
Telecoms is practically THE textbook example.
He is also on the wrong side... just further along. He's the guy who said he wants to have government effectively curate the internet remember - great firewall of china style.
Because literally the only thing worse than ISPs deciding what internet services do or do not work well for you (based on double-pay kickbacks) is having government decide which services you can access.
Aaah yes, the classic libertarian fairy tale.
In the real world, it's bullshit. You could possibly argue that consumer demand created them, but there's a point where it ceases to be a factor because choosing NOT to buy no longer has any actual impact on the corporation - in fact even killing it would have zero impact on the founders. A point where punishing it for doing wrong is almost useless because the people who actually have the authority to be responsible for the wrongdoing feel no pain - they just respond to the fines by cutting wages and salaries so you end up punishing a bunch of people who had no power or authority to prevent the bad behavior.
You end up in a scenario where they are the largest employer so everybody HAS to keep them happy, or face a major unemployment issue, they biggest bank account so they can buy more political influence in a minute than you can get with a decade's worth of campaigning. More money than almost any government. And the ability to shuffle themselves around the world picking the laws they like - so instead of competing for our demand - our elected governments are competing for the privilege of letting them be the most lawless.
Corporations are what happens when you take all the worst evils humans are capable off - and remove the fucking leash.
>Preventing abuse of monopoly
Aaah, so you're in favour of net neutrality then.
Over regulation may cost somebody a paycheck in a few years.
Under regulation WILL kill a thousand people tomorrow. It has never failed to do so.
And whom it doesn't kill - it enslaves.
One of the last bastions of bona-fide "grabbed from their homes and chained up" slavery in the world is the cocoa bean farms of the DRC - staffed almost entirely by kidnapped child slaves. They are a source of nearly all the chocolate that Hershey's, Cadburrys and Nestle sell. This was first exposed in 2000. All three companies pledged to clean up their act. Bernie Sanders used the popular sentiment to drive through a law prohibiting US companies from importing goods produced by child labour. Then GW pointed at the marketing blitz of "cleaning up our supply chain" ads the the companies were running, said "clearly this industry is self regulating so there's no need to enforce the law" and never enforced the law - 8 years later it was basically languishing in the realm of the forgotten.
It's now 16 years later, not one of the companies have done anything about the problem - in fact, it's only gotten MUCH worse. There are now tens of thousands of these kidnapped child-slaves working those farms under whip, with no payment, little food and no adequate shelter. Almost all of them dying on the job before they hit puberty.
> and promoting the competitive environment
Which, apparently, you do by getting rid of a law against a seriously anti-competitive practice. #republicanlogic.
According to the memo which we actually HAVE - this is not conjecture, it's a fact, we have the fucking document: "By 2015 the Behring strait will be iceless 9-months of the year, as opposed to the current 3-months"
It's still cheaper to sail through liquid water than break through ice.
Thats a strawman. I think it was obvious in context that I was referring only to the American made M-series. And its noteworthy that despite the R1 only ever being used in one war which was lost I rate it higher than the M16. The FN-FAL is simply a much better design by every metric and the R1 is probably the single best version of that design ever built. There is a reason every other NATO country chose the FN-FAL.
Sanders is the president America needs.
Trump is the president America deserves.
If my life depended on it - I would choose an R1 (ruggedized African version of the F1-FAL) over an M-anything any day of the week - and I'd choose a well-made AK over the R1.
And part of the evidence is this: two of the world's best trained, disciplined and funded army's went up against AK-armed armys with M16's and R1's respectively in the 20th century - and they both lost.
You know... of all the bullshit Obama gets accused off, this is the most ridiculous. "His" wars (both of which was started by Bush) show no sign of being afraid of killing innocents, on the contrary - the drone program seems to be killing a few grandmothers a week but if it ever actually killed anybody who was actually a threat to the united states nobody would know because it would probably be an accident while aiming at his neighbour's 3-year old kid.
Obama is, if anything, one of the more brutal hawks in US history.
>Somebody who was NOT there has the benefit of 20/20 hindsight
So ? Every jury in every civilian case has the same problem - and it's particularly difficult for homocide when the accused is claiming self defense. The Jury has to decide if a reasonable person would have concluded that the situation was, indeed, life threatening and thus be justified in using lethal force against the deceased. It's not, in fact, any different when we're assessing whether a soldier's actions were justified, or a mistake that happened is one that a reasonable person would have made.
>and history shows they will crucify the poor son of a bitch who was in the bad situation at the time
Or the guy he killed will get no justice even though his entire claim of self defense rested on "it was a black kid and he was wearing a hoodie". Sometimes Juries get it wrong - nobody is saying oversight is perfect, but people who were themselves in that situation and whose recollection and experience is biassed in the same way are the worst possible choices. It's like having a self defense case where every juror is somebody who has previously killed somebody in a self defense.
It may not be perfect, but it's better than the alternative. Those with 20/20 hindsight and objective, physical evidence can make at least a reasonably objective assessment. To really be objective you should show empathy to the conditions in which it happened - but empathy is a far cry from personal recollection - and the latter is way, way too far.
>Discounting someone's judgement "because they were there" is inexcusable
No, it is literally the only possible way to live in a free and just society. This is no less true of a soldier than anybody else.
>does, indeed, merit the response "Go fuck yourself
Except that I didn't receive that response, the OP got that. I merely discounted the judgement on which that response was based but the only response I received was from you.
Now you mention it, isn't it funny how those "we must make government smaller" republicans never seem to want touch libraries. It's not like any of their voters read... yet somehow libraries get a free pass while the programs that give hungry people food get gutted. It's an interesting observation since the only *other* things that get a free pass are military spending, oil subsidies, tax breaks for rich people, tax loopholes for big corporations and their own paychecks (they will never suggest balancing the budget by cutting their OWN salaries).
But everything else on that list, you can see clear self-interest. Not cutting those things means money back in their own pockets (even with military spending- contractors tend to be very loyal donors). I find it surprising that they haven't suggested gutting the LoC or the Smithsonian and such... where's the benefit for them there ? It can't even be that they just like to use them, they've never been inside either and neither has anybody who votes for them...
Nah, the republicans won't block the appointment of a librarian, none of their voters care about libraries after all, those are for people who know what books are.
When your opponent has a gun that will fire reliably while burried in mud, or filled with sand, a gun you "must keep clean" is a dismal failure and putting in place procedures to ensure it's kept clean is not "fixing" it.