Having worked in the government there is a lot of work put into informing people about the dangers and risks of poor information security on a constant basis. The higher up the food chain you get the more critical it is that you understand those dangers and mitigate them as much as possible. When you get to the point that you are a national leader of a federal agency like he is all that personal stuff should be locked down incredibly tight. At that level you can safely assume that other nation states will be trying to pry into the details of your life. If some punk kid can manage this what kind of access do you think other nation states must have.
Oh I get family. It's just the need some people have to be in close physical proximity to family outside of their household that has always perplexed me. I wonder if it's more heavily influenced by genetics or upbringing and such. I grew up in a large family, by today's standards, but only saw extended family every couple months or so. Now as an adult, going a couple years without seeing any one family member doesn't phase me at all. My wife, who's family situation was much the same, gets antsy when she hasn't seen extended family in a month or so.
Meanwhile one of my siblings married a man who is the oldest child in his large family. His mother expects them to be in attendance at every other Sunday dinner, despite living over an hour drive away. As well as being at her home for every single holiday, because apparently my parents don't get holiday visiting rights or something.
I think the actual reason the 2nd amendment is actually there so that a militia can be raised in a time of need and some portion of them actually bring their own arms, and possibly know how to use them. This was written when the Federal Government wasn't supposed to be maintaining a standing army, so it was arguably more important then.
That said I believe the US military would be outmatched by far in the case of a popular civilian rebellion. US military bases tend not to be fortified in any meaningful manner. The garrisons are housed almost entirely within the local economy. The bases are mostly reliant on the local utilities for power, water, and fuels. The Army and Marines might be different but from what I've seen of other branches they don't keep nearly enough small arms and ammunition on hand to equip more than a couple percent of a garrison at any one time.
You don't have to look any further back than Iraq to see how punishingly hopeless fighting a guerrilla war can be. In Iraq we had the relative luxury of fighting thousands of miles from home where loved ones weren't likely to be put in danger. The enemy was equipped with relatively primitive weapons. Our entire logistics system was effectively beyond the reach of our enemies until the last hop in country. The population of Iraq was also only about a tenth of the US. Just look how worn down and thoroughly used up our military is/was after fighting in the Mideast for a few years. Now imagine what it'd be like when the soldiers couldn't just come home on rotation and instead were in the fight 24/7/365 until it was over.
My wife does a lot of breast feeding support stuff, including administering a Facebook group. One day my wife posted a photo of our 3 year old daughter mimic'ing her breastfeeding. It was just my daughter seated on a couch holding one of her baby dolls in a breastfeeding pose, with some text overlaid about normalizing breastfeeding. At some point some lady responded that as a CPS type professional she'd likely interpret it as an indicator of sexual abuse in the home. I can only imagine how scandalized she'd be if she knew that my son has been known to do the same thing.
I don't think that's all of it. I actually watch a let's play series for 7DTD because the players aren't all that great, they aren't half bad, but definitely not great. What makes it fun to watch though is their personalities and all the comedy that comes from their interactions.
As a kid my brother, friends, and I used to take long turns at playing various games, with the other(s) perpetually parked on the couch or side chair. Let's Plays and streams are kind of an extension of that activity in my mind, particularly when the people recording actually interact with the people watching and commenting.
The strong prevalence of double income families would definitely be a complicating factor with this kind of program, but I don't think it'd be insurmountable.
The family ties thing has always kind of bemused me, I guess because I don't particularly feel that way myself. I spent most of a decade being told where I had to live, usually 700 miles or more from relatives. And it really wasn't that big of a deal since travel wasn't prohibitively expensive, I could afford to visit when I wanted. With modern communications I can keep in closer touch with my family than I did when we lived in the same zip code. I suspect that in many cases people are actually afraid to be distant from family because that is their only real safety net.
In the days before the civil rights movement Jury Nullification was a pretty obvious problem. All white juries frequently found other white people completely innocent of crimes against blacks on a regular basis, and conversely found blacks guilty of crimes for which there was nothing but suspicion.
I'm for Jury Nullification in general, but it is foolish to think that it is without flaw or risk of abuse.
From my understanding GPS jamming is typically a matter of broadcasting a different set of signals at higher power. So the drone doesn't actually know that it lost its GPS signal. The Jammer then manipulates their signals to position the drone where they want it. I believe that is the method that Iran is suspected of having used to capture that CIA drone.
For food you could run a soup kitchen/caffeteria. Beneficiaries can simply show up to eat their free meal and leave. Although this has holes as well, legitimate beneficiaries could sell their access to someone else. Housing could be handled in the same kind of way, you show up and are directed to a cot for the night. Again though it's still possible to defraud this system by selling your spot for the night.
All the possibilities for fraud along with the cost of fighting that, are one of the driving arguments for a basic income. It may well simply be cheaper to society to give everyone an allowance, whether they need it or not. There would be considerable savings in the cost of administering benefits and defending against fraud.
Yes, the costs of some things might rise in some or all markets a bit. This isn't really the end of the world though and would possibly be a good thing. Right now for instance we actually have a sizable glut in the housing market. Some specific markets are expensive while others are remarkably cheap. If we eliminated all the government subsidies for housing and the behemoth administration for it and just gave every citizen a monthly check you might start seeing people move to parts of the country that have ample cheap housing.
I don't even see/hear the advertisements because I just don't consume my entertainment with ads. That said I'm still sick of it simply from everyone else hyping it constantly.
The point of this article is that it already happened. They passed that bill last night. And since the Senate already approved it months ago it just needs a presidential signature I believe. And at this point, if the President hasn't already signed it, he'd be really sticking his neck out by not signing it.
It is very interesting to me that the FCC requires such a basic tier of service. When I called a couple years ago about getting such service I was told that they don't sell such a service at all. The lowest tier they would sell sounded and was priced what is here described as Standard.
I suppose though that my local government could have colluded with the cable providers such that the requirements for basic actually matches standard.
Oh please! If the government had lost a single agent that they could tie in anyway to the Snowden leak they would have trumpeted that from the mountain tops. As it is they've yet to put forward a single case where his actions resulted in the death or capture of a single person. Which is unsurprising considering they've yet to put forth a single creditable incident that was prevented by the systemic abuses Snowden revealed.
It happened in California recently. The state legislature changed the list of crimes, conviction for which, would strip the right to possess a firearm. They did not notify any of the affected people who had legally registered firearms, giving them time to sell or otherwise dispose of their guns. Instead they showed up on their doorsteps with SWAT teams.
The comedian Whitney Cummings shared a story on some late night show once about arriving at the airport late and without ID or something. The guy at the ticket counter was stonewalling until she convinced him to google her to prove who she was. He very shortly escorted her through security and got her on her plane apologizing the whole way for not recognizing her, professing to be a huge fan. While on her flight she realized he had miss spelled her name on the boarding pass, and had apparently mistaken her for a porn star with a similar name.
"The next thing you need to do is start rolling pack all those social support programs, you need force people to do what they need to do to make ends meet. If that means leaving coasts for Midwest that is what needs to happen. We need to incite people to go where they can earn a living wage with the skills they possess."
One of the problem with this is that the groups with wealth have leveraged that to lock in the working poor. Need to cancel your cable because your income shrunk, that'll be a few hundred dollars in fees. Many low income households take advantage of lower prices through subscription, but it means they end up locked in and can't take action when their income shrinks. Moving is a significant barrier to most people because it's not just about them. Moving with a family to somewhere that you don't have social support already available, and usually with no bankroll to speak of, is rough and scary as hell.
That isn't to say that it doesn't need to happen, but it's not an easy thing to make happen.
The problem with a speed bump though is that building one that isn't disruptive at 30mph but is at higher speeds could be problematic. A google search indicated that the city of Portland uses such speed bumps, they are 22 feet wide with a constant slope on both sides leading to a peak height of 3 inches in the center. It'd take a hell of a lot of quickset to make one of those. By my math a 15 foot wide road, which would be a pretty narrow street, would take slightly more than 1.5 cubic yards of material. You might be able to buy a portable version made of dense rubber or something though that you could layout and bolt down in an hour or less.
If I'm not wrong Vigilante denotes acting outside of the law as part of it's definition. Police forces are usually authorized and given extra duties and powers on top of their normal civilian rights. The Police can be a vigilante by acting beyond the limits set by the law, but they do not otherwise fit as a vigilante.
Fuse the waste into large glass torpedo shapes weighing tens of tons at least. Ship them out to sea and drop them into the ocean near a subduction zone several miles below sea level. The cylinders will gain enough velocity to embed themselves deeply in the ocean sediment effectively sealing them selves from the rest of the environment. By the time any particle from the cylinder emerges on the surface again it will have been so diluted and decayed as to be indiscernible from background radiation.
For me the advantages of a PC over consoles are: 1. Cost - provided you aren't paying super premium prices you can build a good gaming PC for the cost of a modern console.
2. Upgradability/reusability - I'm still using hard drives, cases, input devices, and other bits and bobs which I purchased nearly a decade ago in my current PC. If something breaks you can replace the broken thing with something that is better and cheaper than the original. Given a modicum of reading comprehension and tinkering you can trouble shoot and fix your own problems without voiding the warranty on the entire system.
3. Utility - Consoles have come a long ways in closing this gap but the last time I saw a system really pursue this they ended up rescinding it all and removing the feature, other OS for PS2.
4. Customization - On consoles you are stuck playing games how the publisher shipped it, or patches it later. If you don't like the graphics settings you are usually out of luck. On a PC you can fiddle with every little thing if you so desire. And of course there is also the modding communities that spring up around some games, which is facilitated by the PC and usually restricted on consoles.
5. Steam sales - Okay, that probably isn't really relevant given that many console games can be traded between friends and bought in bargain bins or trade in shops. But it does seem like the consoles have been going towards online requirements to register your game preventing transferal of it to someone else. Steam of course won't let you transfer owned games either, but it does offer discounts frequently that are hard to beat and frees you from managing game disks.
The last thing I would add is possibly an issue of anecdote not being statistically relevant but... It seems like among my friends the guys that always had consoles spent a lot more money buying games, especially due to frequency of purchases, than those of us with PC's. It seemed like the PC games got played for longer, the only console games I remember sticking around for a long time were the versus fighter games.
I think their stated profit margin per car was around $9k, which is a pretty good margin in the automotive industry. The company as a whole may not turn a profit quarter to quarter, but that is because they are making large investments in other areas as you mentioned.
It might not cost them a lot of money to do the actual work of the recall. But you can bet money that it'll cost them as easy fodder for their opponents.
I seem to remember a few years back when there was a particularly snowy winter they were handing out tickets for illegal right turns like candy. The city wasn't able to keep up with snow removal and had just been plowing snow and slush to the side of the road. This eventually caused the right hand turn lanes at most intersections to be covered in banks of snow and ice several feet tall. Drivers did the common sense thing and were turning right on red, normally legal, from the right most lane that was passable. The red light cameras couldn't adjust for the road conditions though and were spitting out tickets at an obscene rate. The City acknowledged that this was not proper and that the drivers were in the legal right. The catch though was that they refused to just shred those tickets, or filter them out. Instead it was up to each driver that received a ticket to either pay the fine(s) or show up in court to contest the ticket. This was particularly egregious because the city ordinances for the cameras required a human police officer to review each and every proposed ticket from the camera system and verify it before sending the ticket out. So the city was in essence continuing to take specific action to charge people fines for imaginary traffic ordinance violations even after acknowledging no such violation happened, and insisted that to clear it every wrongfully fined individual had to make a court appearance.
I think tuition costs have sky rocketed because the Fed has gotten too lenient in their lending policies for education. As more and more students are able to take out large loans to pay for a degree the schools simply charge more and more. It's a pretty basic capitalist principle that you find a price that maximizes your profits by selling all of the product you can at the highest price the market will bear. So long as the Fed keeps pumping more money into the economy ear marked for college degrees, colleges will keep raising tuition to capture as much of that money as possible.
Restricting how many students a college can take on for any given degree path reeks to me of strong central planning. Especially when you realize that a college degree isn't specialized job training, it is purely an educational thing. Do we really, as a society, want to say who may and may not learn about whatever subject because there simply aren't enough job openings in that field?
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Having worked in the government there is a lot of work put into informing people about the dangers and risks of poor information security on a constant basis. The higher up the food chain you get the more critical it is that you understand those dangers and mitigate them as much as possible. When you get to the point that you are a national leader of a federal agency like he is all that personal stuff should be locked down incredibly tight. At that level you can safely assume that other nation states will be trying to pry into the details of your life. If some punk kid can manage this what kind of access do you think other nation states must have.
Oh I get family. It's just the need some people have to be in close physical proximity to family outside of their household that has always perplexed me. I wonder if it's more heavily influenced by genetics or upbringing and such. I grew up in a large family, by today's standards, but only saw extended family every couple months or so. Now as an adult, going a couple years without seeing any one family member doesn't phase me at all. My wife, who's family situation was much the same, gets antsy when she hasn't seen extended family in a month or so.
Meanwhile one of my siblings married a man who is the oldest child in his large family. His mother expects them to be in attendance at every other Sunday dinner, despite living over an hour drive away. As well as being at her home for every single holiday, because apparently my parents don't get holiday visiting rights or something.
I think the actual reason the 2nd amendment is actually there so that a militia can be raised in a time of need and some portion of them actually bring their own arms, and possibly know how to use them. This was written when the Federal Government wasn't supposed to be maintaining a standing army, so it was arguably more important then.
That said I believe the US military would be outmatched by far in the case of a popular civilian rebellion. US military bases tend not to be fortified in any meaningful manner. The garrisons are housed almost entirely within the local economy. The bases are mostly reliant on the local utilities for power, water, and fuels. The Army and Marines might be different but from what I've seen of other branches they don't keep nearly enough small arms and ammunition on hand to equip more than a couple percent of a garrison at any one time.
You don't have to look any further back than Iraq to see how punishingly hopeless fighting a guerrilla war can be. In Iraq we had the relative luxury of fighting thousands of miles from home where loved ones weren't likely to be put in danger. The enemy was equipped with relatively primitive weapons. Our entire logistics system was effectively beyond the reach of our enemies until the last hop in country. The population of Iraq was also only about a tenth of the US. Just look how worn down and thoroughly used up our military is/was after fighting in the Mideast for a few years. Now imagine what it'd be like when the soldiers couldn't just come home on rotation and instead were in the fight 24/7/365 until it was over.
My wife does a lot of breast feeding support stuff, including administering a Facebook group. One day my wife posted a photo of our 3 year old daughter mimic'ing her breastfeeding. It was just my daughter seated on a couch holding one of her baby dolls in a breastfeeding pose, with some text overlaid about normalizing breastfeeding. At some point some lady responded that as a CPS type professional she'd likely interpret it as an indicator of sexual abuse in the home. I can only imagine how scandalized she'd be if she knew that my son has been known to do the same thing.
I don't think that's all of it. I actually watch a let's play series for 7DTD because the players aren't all that great, they aren't half bad, but definitely not great. What makes it fun to watch though is their personalities and all the comedy that comes from their interactions.
As a kid my brother, friends, and I used to take long turns at playing various games, with the other(s) perpetually parked on the couch or side chair. Let's Plays and streams are kind of an extension of that activity in my mind, particularly when the people recording actually interact with the people watching and commenting.
The strong prevalence of double income families would definitely be a complicating factor with this kind of program, but I don't think it'd be insurmountable.
The family ties thing has always kind of bemused me, I guess because I don't particularly feel that way myself. I spent most of a decade being told where I had to live, usually 700 miles or more from relatives. And it really wasn't that big of a deal since travel wasn't prohibitively expensive, I could afford to visit when I wanted. With modern communications I can keep in closer touch with my family than I did when we lived in the same zip code. I suspect that in many cases people are actually afraid to be distant from family because that is their only real safety net.
In the days before the civil rights movement Jury Nullification was a pretty obvious problem. All white juries frequently found other white people completely innocent of crimes against blacks on a regular basis, and conversely found blacks guilty of crimes for which there was nothing but suspicion.
I'm for Jury Nullification in general, but it is foolish to think that it is without flaw or risk of abuse.
From my understanding GPS jamming is typically a matter of broadcasting a different set of signals at higher power. So the drone doesn't actually know that it lost its GPS signal. The Jammer then manipulates their signals to position the drone where they want it. I believe that is the method that Iran is suspected of having used to capture that CIA drone.
For food you could run a soup kitchen/caffeteria. Beneficiaries can simply show up to eat their free meal and leave. Although this has holes as well, legitimate beneficiaries could sell their access to someone else. Housing could be handled in the same kind of way, you show up and are directed to a cot for the night. Again though it's still possible to defraud this system by selling your spot for the night.
All the possibilities for fraud along with the cost of fighting that, are one of the driving arguments for a basic income. It may well simply be cheaper to society to give everyone an allowance, whether they need it or not. There would be considerable savings in the cost of administering benefits and defending against fraud.
Yes, the costs of some things might rise in some or all markets a bit. This isn't really the end of the world though and would possibly be a good thing. Right now for instance we actually have a sizable glut in the housing market. Some specific markets are expensive while others are remarkably cheap. If we eliminated all the government subsidies for housing and the behemoth administration for it and just gave every citizen a monthly check you might start seeing people move to parts of the country that have ample cheap housing.
I don't even see/hear the advertisements because I just don't consume my entertainment with ads. That said I'm still sick of it simply from everyone else hyping it constantly.
The point of this article is that it already happened. They passed that bill last night. And since the Senate already approved it months ago it just needs a presidential signature I believe. And at this point, if the President hasn't already signed it, he'd be really sticking his neck out by not signing it.
It is very interesting to me that the FCC requires such a basic tier of service. When I called a couple years ago about getting such service I was told that they don't sell such a service at all. The lowest tier they would sell sounded and was priced what is here described as Standard.
I suppose though that my local government could have colluded with the cable providers such that the requirements for basic actually matches standard.
Oh please! If the government had lost a single agent that they could tie in anyway to the Snowden leak they would have trumpeted that from the mountain tops. As it is they've yet to put forward a single case where his actions resulted in the death or capture of a single person. Which is unsurprising considering they've yet to put forth a single creditable incident that was prevented by the systemic abuses Snowden revealed.
It happened in California recently. The state legislature changed the list of crimes, conviction for which, would strip the right to possess a firearm. They did not notify any of the affected people who had legally registered firearms, giving them time to sell or otherwise dispose of their guns. Instead they showed up on their doorsteps with SWAT teams.
The comedian Whitney Cummings shared a story on some late night show once about arriving at the airport late and without ID or something. The guy at the ticket counter was stonewalling until she convinced him to google her to prove who she was. He very shortly escorted her through security and got her on her plane apologizing the whole way for not recognizing her, professing to be a huge fan. While on her flight she realized he had miss spelled her name on the boarding pass, and had apparently mistaken her for a porn star with a similar name.
"The next thing you need to do is start rolling pack all those social support programs, you need force people to do what they need to do to make ends meet. If that means leaving coasts for Midwest that is what needs to happen. We need to incite people to go where they can earn a living wage with the skills they possess."
One of the problem with this is that the groups with wealth have leveraged that to lock in the working poor. Need to cancel your cable because your income shrunk, that'll be a few hundred dollars in fees. Many low income households take advantage of lower prices through subscription, but it means they end up locked in and can't take action when their income shrinks. Moving is a significant barrier to most people because it's not just about them. Moving with a family to somewhere that you don't have social support already available, and usually with no bankroll to speak of, is rough and scary as hell.
That isn't to say that it doesn't need to happen, but it's not an easy thing to make happen.
The problem with a speed bump though is that building one that isn't disruptive at 30mph but is at higher speeds could be problematic. A google search indicated that the city of Portland uses such speed bumps, they are 22 feet wide with a constant slope on both sides leading to a peak height of 3 inches in the center. It'd take a hell of a lot of quickset to make one of those. By my math a 15 foot wide road, which would be a pretty narrow street, would take slightly more than 1.5 cubic yards of material. You might be able to buy a portable version made of dense rubber or something though that you could layout and bolt down in an hour or less.
If I'm not wrong Vigilante denotes acting outside of the law as part of it's definition. Police forces are usually authorized and given extra duties and powers on top of their normal civilian rights. The Police can be a vigilante by acting beyond the limits set by the law, but they do not otherwise fit as a vigilante.
Chechnya
Fuse the waste into large glass torpedo shapes weighing tens of tons at least. Ship them out to sea and drop them into the ocean near a subduction zone several miles below sea level. The cylinders will gain enough velocity to embed themselves deeply in the ocean sediment effectively sealing them selves from the rest of the environment. By the time any particle from the cylinder emerges on the surface again it will have been so diluted and decayed as to be indiscernible from background radiation.
For me the advantages of a PC over consoles are:
1. Cost - provided you aren't paying super premium prices you can build a good gaming PC for the cost of a modern console.
2. Upgradability/reusability - I'm still using hard drives, cases, input devices, and other bits and bobs which I purchased nearly a decade ago in my current PC. If something breaks you can replace the broken thing with something that is better and cheaper than the original. Given a modicum of reading comprehension and tinkering you can trouble shoot and fix your own problems without voiding the warranty on the entire system.
3. Utility - Consoles have come a long ways in closing this gap but the last time I saw a system really pursue this they ended up rescinding it all and removing the feature, other OS for PS2.
4. Customization - On consoles you are stuck playing games how the publisher shipped it, or patches it later. If you don't like the graphics settings you are usually out of luck. On a PC you can fiddle with every little thing if you so desire. And of course there is also the modding communities that spring up around some games, which is facilitated by the PC and usually restricted on consoles.
5. Steam sales - Okay, that probably isn't really relevant given that many console games can be traded between friends and bought in bargain bins or trade in shops. But it does seem like the consoles have been going towards online requirements to register your game preventing transferal of it to someone else. Steam of course won't let you transfer owned games either, but it does offer discounts frequently that are hard to beat and frees you from managing game disks.
The last thing I would add is possibly an issue of anecdote not being statistically relevant but... It seems like among my friends the guys that always had consoles spent a lot more money buying games, especially due to frequency of purchases, than those of us with PC's. It seemed like the PC games got played for longer, the only console games I remember sticking around for a long time were the versus fighter games.
I think their stated profit margin per car was around $9k, which is a pretty good margin in the automotive industry. The company as a whole may not turn a profit quarter to quarter, but that is because they are making large investments in other areas as you mentioned.
It might not cost them a lot of money to do the actual work of the recall. But you can bet money that it'll cost them as easy fodder for their opponents.
I seem to remember a few years back when there was a particularly snowy winter they were handing out tickets for illegal right turns like candy. The city wasn't able to keep up with snow removal and had just been plowing snow and slush to the side of the road. This eventually caused the right hand turn lanes at most intersections to be covered in banks of snow and ice several feet tall. Drivers did the common sense thing and were turning right on red, normally legal, from the right most lane that was passable. The red light cameras couldn't adjust for the road conditions though and were spitting out tickets at an obscene rate. The City acknowledged that this was not proper and that the drivers were in the legal right. The catch though was that they refused to just shred those tickets, or filter them out. Instead it was up to each driver that received a ticket to either pay the fine(s) or show up in court to contest the ticket. This was particularly egregious because the city ordinances for the cameras required a human police officer to review each and every proposed ticket from the camera system and verify it before sending the ticket out. So the city was in essence continuing to take specific action to charge people fines for imaginary traffic ordinance violations even after acknowledging no such violation happened, and insisted that to clear it every wrongfully fined individual had to make a court appearance.
I think tuition costs have sky rocketed because the Fed has gotten too lenient in their lending policies for education. As more and more students are able to take out large loans to pay for a degree the schools simply charge more and more. It's a pretty basic capitalist principle that you find a price that maximizes your profits by selling all of the product you can at the highest price the market will bear. So long as the Fed keeps pumping more money into the economy ear marked for college degrees, colleges will keep raising tuition to capture as much of that money as possible.
Restricting how many students a college can take on for any given degree path reeks to me of strong central planning. Especially when you realize that a college degree isn't specialized job training, it is purely an educational thing. Do we really, as a society, want to say who may and may not learn about whatever subject because there simply aren't enough job openings in that field?