I find the entire idea of creating a wired democracy to be revolting. The best government is seen in its effects and not heard. I don't want to think about government or politics in my day to day existence and would much rather just have the professionals that I elect get on with the business of governing competently. I don't want big crusades - I've had enough crusades with Bush. When I elect a President and a Congress, I don't want them asking me my opinion every 30 seconds. I want to know that they thought through the issues and made the best decisions they could, kept the army in powder, the navy afloat, the planes in the air, the satellites working, the bridges up and the roads in good repair. If it turns out that they do something that I politically don't agree with, I can -actually live with that-, so long as they bring a general air of competence to the table.
I'm talking about the modern world, and you're talking about pirates. Unfortunately for you, you picked up on a wonderful example on the depth of morality of those in power. Piracy is committed by those without country - ie, those without power - and privateering is the exact same act committed by those backed by a country - ie, those with power.
You just don't know what you are talking about. Piracy is a cheap way to fight a war, but its still fighting a war, and that's what you don't get.
The War on Terrorism is using violence and threats of force to get what "we" want by using violence and threatening to use force. In this latest round, "we" have directly killed a hundred thousand people, detained over 80,000 without due process, displaced three million Iraqis and a few hundred thousand Afghanis, created a paradise for terrorists who want to train in militias, all in response after "they" killed three thousand civilians in what is undoubtedly the worst terrorist act in history.
They should have been nicer to us. If you don't want your country flattened, don't mess with the USA. It's pretty simple.
And you know, that's the thing. Each year, the USA sends to the middle east some 300 billion dollars for oil. What do we get for that? A bunch of extremist schools chanting death to America. That's pretty shoddy customer service. You can go on about your poor muslim buddies as much as you want, but I saw everything I needed to know about muslims on 9/11.
There's no real difference between Democrats and Republicans. There is no voice of dissent in American media. Issues that are important are simply left out of the discussion entirely. (Example: how many civilians should we be allowed to kill rather than should be we killing civilians in the first place?)
The media is smart enough to know the answer is something you wouldn't like. The answer for a lot of people would be that, we obviously haven't killed enough.
From 2000 through 2005, U.S. multinationals eliminated 2.1 million jobs at home while adding 784,000 to their payrolls abroad, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis." -USAToday
It's overwhelmingly automation. http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2004/mar/wk5/art01.htm "US had highest productivity gains in manufacturing." Have you ever built anything? Just look at how a factory floor is today versus a decade ago. Nowadays instead of lathes and saws and a wide variety of cutting tools, you have a big honking laser CNC cutter that just lasers the part out, with no operator invention. That's dozens of jobs right there.
And, look at how customer service used to be done, with hoards of people and paper files and multipart copies. Nowadays, thanks to people like us, all of those people no longer have jobs. Yes, if you are in computer science, you can't escape your own role in throwing people out of work. Every programming contract we get is to throw somebody else out of work.
Irregardless, let's approach the situation from your point of view. Let's assume that we follow the funding to the source, and bomb the country responsible. (Never mind the argument that we have no legal right to do so under international law.)
We have every right to do so under international law. Besides, what sovereign right does the United Nations have over me? Or some institution in Europe? That's just absurd.
If we follow your logic, which countries do we declare war on?
We don't have to declare war, just reserve the right to bomb or otherwise destroy any nation that harbors terrorists that attack the USA.
How many neighbors of "terrorists" have to die before we stop bombing, or do we just kill civilians in perpetuity for the actions of a non-government organization?
There's no such thing as civilians, in war.
Why did we invade Iraq and not Saudi Arabia or the UAE, or maintain enough troops in Afghanistan and bring security to the entire country instead of just the capital?
You know, I never thought of that before. Wow, we really should bomb Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Afghanistan is useless. We should have just nuked Kandahar and focused on Iraq.
Explain the thuggery that unionbusting has employed. Maybe there should be a look into it, as they'll move to IT when they get word of it. The only shame(to them) is that we already know their tactics and strategy. If you don't let them drag it out, they can't bring in their thugs(internally developed or externally developed).
You will not enslave myself or my office into a union, ever. I'm not handing a part of my paycheck over to a bunch of crooks. Screw that. Unions deserve to be not only busted, but smashed.
His toughest interview was in Ireland. But it's really besides the point. It is true that the new McCarthyism is less visible, but I believe that's only because it's very difficult to call someone a conspirator and get away with it
And the Dems avoided Fox for their debates. This is not the same as the McCarthy era, where the entire mainstream media was under the gun to produce journalism that agreed with McCarthy. A reporter losing a press credential is not the same as an entire generation of actors and directors and weapons scientists being blacklisted. It simply isn't.
Exports are up. Hooray! What benefit has that brought to the average American worker? Are salaries up? Are benefits and retirement options up? Are we exporting technological goods that are bringing our standard of living higher, or just selling more crap that is now affordable to other western nations, allowing us to compete with fierce exporters like Indonesia and Thailand?
It's brought employment. American workers continue to import far more than they export, but the situation is improving. Right now, in terms of crap sold, its cars, telecommunications equipment, jet engines, locomotives, and other goods. Our biggest competitive problem, right now, is Europe, and yes, we are gaining the ground on Europe. Even as I type this, Audi announces that they will not be able to import one of their cars to the USA because of the dollar; BMW announces they will be building a new kind of car in the USA rather than in Germany, and the Japanese continue to build plants in the USA. This -does- benefit the American worker, with good jobs and good benefits.
Your comments on the middle east echo that of liberals, in the true sense of the word, who have no memory of the past. Saddam Hussein was an American pawn who overstepped his bounds in Kuwait, and we didn't assassinate him because the first Bush Administration at least recognized that there is no exit strategy in Iraq, much like other oppressive Islamist regimes we have supported on and off since the 1960s.
Your response shows a gross misunderstanding of our relationship with these people. Saddam was never an American pawn. He, like other dictators, were people that the USA supported to some extent in the interests of stability and access to resources.
The only way for fundamental human rights to continue existing is through law which is equally and universally applied, no matter how grotesque you think their actions or politics may be. The correct, legal way to approach the terrorist attacks of September 11th was to find evidence for the crime (remember, acts of war can only be committed by states or breakaway territories), trying the suspects, and then sentencing them. This is why we have the UN and the World Court.
That's a joke. Terrorism IS an act of war. You seem to think that terrorism is a modern problem. It is not. Terrorism is no different than piracy, which western nations ultimately dealt with by finally seeing that supporting pirates was in fact the same as a defacto declaration of war. If you are hosting a terrorist organization in your country, of any kind, then you are engaging in an act of war. It is silly to pretend otherwise. If the USA sent a dozen guys in uniform to blow something up, that is an act of war, but if the USA pays someone not in uniform to blow something, you argue that it is not? That's just patently absurd. Similarly, if an Iranian warplane goes and bombs Tel Aviv, that is an act of war, but if Iran pays Hizbollah to blow up Tel Aviv, that isn't. Terrorism is just a weapons system, get it? A country either lays out some money for a bomber and some uniforms for some dude to blow something up, or, it can pay a bunch of "terrorists" to go and blow up something. It's all money to the country doing the check writing.
The whole notion that terrorism is a law enforcement matter is absurd.
Microsoft seems to be hell bent on making their product harder to use, and at its own peril.
What Microsoft doesn't get is that operating systems and computers, in general, are just appliances. Yes, people like to tinker, but, when one opens up the box, they want everything. This fascination with dynamically installed and dynamically loaded modularity has been the ruin of Microsoft ever since Windows 3.1 began prompting me for Disk 5 when I tried to do something, and it continues to this day. All the Windows versions continually ask for the CD/DVD, whatever, Visual Studio defaults to online help - which sucks when you are on the train, and now they want to make Windows even more modular?
By contrast, I put in a Linux DVD, and I install everything. If I want to install something more, I can do the insanely difficult exercise of typing "sudo apt get install [programname]".
Democrats that think like that no longer exist. The leading brain trusts behind the Democratic Party think of the USA as evil so even the idea of an American culture and the space race as a statement of that culture would come off to them today as nationalistic and evil.
All they've done is start a new age of McCarthyism, suspend habeas corpus, agree to formally demolish our borders with Mexico and Canada, extend the powers of the executive branch beyond the oversight of congress, lied under oath or refused to even testify about the terrorist attacks under oath, wiretapped American citizens who are 'guilty' of receiving 'suspicious' phone calls, run the economy into the ground... caused two to three trillion dollars of damage to our economy for a war that was both illegal and unnecessary, which also caused the price of oil to quintuple, and probably caused the sharpest devaluation of the American dollar since the depression...
I think a "New Age of McCarthyism" understates how bad McCarthy was. McCarthy created a national climate of fear over the whole media. There's no media that is afraid of Bush.... because, ironically, Republicans (in order to get their talk shows), dismantled the regulatory tools Democrats and Republicans both used to use to bully the MSM into running stories favorable to the current government. When McCarthy was around, Hollywood blacklisted people that disagreed with McCarthy. Today, in "Bush McCarthyism", the reverse applies. Hollywood blacklists everyone that actually likes Bush.
Habeas Corpus isn't suspended for any US Citizen, rather by combatants whose own side does not follow the Geneva convention. I think Bush's stance on immigration and trade have both been very progressive and very courageous, actually. Wiretapping is about Americans getting calls from people overseas in Islamic countries, and that's probably pretty reasonable. Bush didn't run the economy into the ground, rather the American people ran themselves into the ground because we've chosen to borrow rather than save. Bush didn't make people take out home equity loans to buy plasma screens. The war was necessary at the point at which it was undertaken. Rather, if we had wanted to avoid it, we should have let Saddam have Kuwait and washed our hands of the region in 1991 and let the UN collapse at that point. As a function of GDP, the war's not been that expensive, however, I will agree that fiscally there's a ton of better ways the country could have spent that money.
The price of oil quintupling had nothing to do with the war and had everything to do with peak oil and increasing Chinese and Indian demand. You don't have to believe me. There's plenty of left wing and environmentalist sites that can bore you to tears about sustainability and Hubbert peaks and the sad, sucky reality is, that they seem to be right, and the previous commodities recession of the 1990s is more an anomaly than a long term measure.
The dollar contraction in value is by design and is designed to foster American exports in manufacturered goods. Under Bush, exports have increased to approximately 15% of GDP, a record level, and it is these exports that keep the economy from cratering completely. So, from here on out, we're going to actually have to produce goods to sell to the world to actually get goods back, -just like every other country has to-.
So, with that defense of Bush, where has he erred?
a) the war. while we can disagree with the motives, the conditions on the ground in Iraq, and so on, there's really no way to argue that the war has't really had any economic benefit to the USA. It costs too much in blood and treasure relative to what we are getting out of it.
b) federal spending - budget deficits. Bush here is pretty indefensible when it comes to fiscal restraint. Yes, I do like a lot of the things he has spent money on. But, the prescription drug program is a real budget buster and, for the price tag, Democratic arguments about getting a better deal for the government purchasing of services have some weight.
c) USA PATRIOT, etc. We both agree that the surveillance programs in use by the government are not only intrusive, but, if they were not necessary during the cold war, then why are they necessary now? Surely the KGB had its own spies in the USA...
Billions wasted in Iraq and one of the most exciting programs since the Moon landing starts a slow death from budget cuts. Just plain sickening. We need a grass roots funding effort to save the Rovers since it looks like the second one will be cut next year
The same President who launched the war in Iraq also is the first President to enact a workable plan for putting people on Mars. By contrast, if Obama gets in, its likely that NASA will face some pretty deep cuts. For some reason, Republicans don't have as big of a problem blowing lots of money on space stuff, whereas Democrats always have to get past this "we could use the money to feed the poor" mental stumbling block. If it wasn't for the war, Bush would have been alright.
It most assuredly is, you just make excuses for it. The entire history of the USA is forged based on immigrants willing to work the existing "natives" would not. American railroads were laid in the west, by Chinese immigrants. American mines were dug by the Irish fleeing the potato famine. And so on. Everyone has ancestors who benefited from this arrangement and today is no different.
Please stop reading from your assigned playbook. It's starting to get quite old.
And do what, adopt your tired, and ancient playbook? My playbook is backed by Darwin and has a track record of proven success. Your playbook is a bunch of feel good nonsense that has produced consistent sloth and laziness throughout the world.
The UK(as seen today) is a textbook example of what happens when you have a mad lady called Thatcher rip things apart, some acolytes to keep the press at bay, and an urge to lose all national identity/sovereignty over the next 20+ years.
Where the UK screwed up was the massive nationalizations that took place in the 1960s... by the time the iron lady came along to liberate everything, it was already too late. I'd blame Labor in the 1950s, that took a economy that produced its own cars, lead in aircraft and jet engine designs, and produced a bunch of state run institutions that fell further and further behind.
Where the USA screwed up (and this is so typical), was overconfidence coming out of World War II. Americans assumed that a manufacturing process that was best in the world in WWII would be the best one for ever did not realize just how fast the world moved. But, to the USA's credit, rather than throw up the fences and try and keep the world out, the USA invited the competition and did its best to improve its products. Where it did so, American companies succeeded, such as GE, Caterpillar and Boeing. Where it failed, US companies cratered, such as RCA.
So is that worse than spending in killing people in a foreign country that did nothing to you?
If the Iraqi people were not killing each other, there would be no US troops in the country today. Indeed, the whole criticism of how the post invasion occupation was handled was, in fact, that Bush did not properly anticipate that Iraq would collapse in sectarian strife. One would have thought Iraqi's best would have risen to the occasion and seized the opportunity to advance their country in freedom but instead they looted their national assets and began killing their neighbors. It's not 30-100 US soldiers KIA a month that keeps the USA from declaring victory in Iraq and leaving, its the 500-3000 Iraqis killing each other.
As far as the larger picture, of the invasion itself, well, the mistake was really made in 1991 and in the sanctions regime afterwards. If you wanted to not have the USA involved in Iraq, then, the USA should not have intervened against Saddam in 1991, or, should have removed him from power then, when his popularity was genuinely at an ebb. Instead, the USA went with the foolish wishes of the international community and imposed these crippling postwar sanctions on the Iraqi people to force compliance with the terms of a cease fire that Saddam never actually abided by. WMD aside, Saddam violated the terms of his cease fire by firing on US Aircraft, ethnically cleansing parts of Iraq, and a number of other things. And, while Saddam did not have WMD, he himself did say after his capture that his plan was to wait out the sanctions and then resume re-arming.
Thus, the real choice was to really let Saddam have Kuwait in 1991, and with that, quite honestly, Saudi Arabia, or, to remove Saddam from power. So really, the question is, if Saddam was not removed from power, what's the cost of a nuclear armed Iraq sitting on top of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia? If you can live with that, then, yes, the US Iraqi policy was a mistake from 1991 on. If you cannot, then, the best you could really argue is that either Bush I should have finished the job, Clinton should have taken a different sanctions tack, or that Bush II should have better prepared for the postwar occupation.
I mean, what would the world have been like had Britain and France did not declare war on Germany after it invaded Poland?
Ok, check this out.... there are people that have health insurance and also get their cats health insurance or can otherwise pick up the cost of giving a cat radiotherapy.
Like pretending that all those profits we waste on private insurers are giving us healthcare comparable to our international competitors who pay less because theirs is all paid on the same basis as our Medicaid.
Dude, you don't even know what you are talking about. International competitors do not have the same health insurance as we do in the USA because they ration health care to deal with scarcity wheras we charge more for it. To put it simply: my mother in law received an open heart bypass that she would not have received in the UK, but she had private health insurance and it paid the entire $100,000 tab.
Maybe there really are a lot of IT people like you. If there are, this country is doomed, and the foreigners won't be coming here for much longer
And what is wrong with foreigners coming to the United States. I'm sorry that you are not good enough compete, but your inadequacy does not entitle you to a single dime of my money through taxes or anything else. Find another field that you can compete in, otherwise, kill yourself, loser, and go pray to your Obama statue. Here is Obama, king of rats and second rate losers.
So what you're saying is that IT people (like you, that is) like McCain because he'll import more foreigners to compete with Americans for IT jobs? IT people (like you) want to leave the economy with Bush's policies intact, so no taxes to pay for a continuing explosion in spending (like a
America is a land of foreigners. Cut spending by capping Medicaid.
$TRILLION+ for Iraq), and continuing to leave no oversight of the corporations who have robbed that economy, like the banks, Halliburton, KBR, Enron and whichever new ones are based in Arizona instead of over in Texas?
How are banks robbing the economy? They lent money to people. People didn't pay it back. And, even if we assume that your wildest accusations regarding Halliburton are true, that pales in significance compared to the economic disasters wrought by trial lawyers and unions to the United States. In fact, teachers unions have ruined the educational system in this country so much that children educated at home actually score -better- on standardized tests.
IT people like you think that Progressivism is socialism, but that the Bush handouts McCain will continue (if there's anything left) are somehow not? That haven't noticed how different the US is from real socialisms like Canada, UK, France, Germany and so many others whose economies are making ours look like some failing MBA's final project?
In point of fact, the USA economy continues to grow, has a lower unemployment rate than most other countries, and has the most opportunity of any nation. Indeed, the current European criticism of the United States is that that long overvalued dollar, now reaching a more correct valuation, is making life difficult for Germany and France to export their way out of its ridiculous social expenditures. God forbid, if the dollar hits $2/EU, then Europeans might actually have to work for a change.
Are there really that many IT people like you who haven't noticed that McCain and Bush's "Conservatism" has failed more miserably than any kind of government since the Soviet system it most closely resembes?
The soviet system was characterized by central planning, which is what your so-called progressivism is. But, it doesn't even have to be that complicated. Socialism is really simple. You basically have a gang of demagogues or a class of thieves to go and pretend that they are helping out the loser class by stealing from the capable classes for themselves. Socialism is like this. One guy, A, worked a little and built himself a boat, and another guy, B, drank beer and didn't. The guy, C, comes along, screams bloody murder about inequality, and thus, given goads the otherwise lazy B to help him take the boat. So, guy C takes the boat, gives guy B a ride for about 10 minutes, but then kicks guy B out of the boat and keeps it for himself.
His Republican anti-immigration policies don't protect any IT jobs
Get informed. McCain introduced legislation that would have changed US immigration policy from one of welfare for third world countries to one which favored people with technical skills. He would have given some form of amnesty to immigrants already illegally in the country and he would have raised the H1B limit. When you add in the tried and true practices of deregulation and low taxes, you get a proven recipe for growth.
By contrast, Obama is essentially running on a platform that failed in the 1960s and will fail again. Obama's platform is to raise taxes, have a government make market distorting decisions, reducing the freedom of people to keep the fruits of their labors and as a consequence, their likelihood to do engage in them. Unabashed progressivism, or socialism by any other name, continues to be tried throughout the globe and continues to fail wherever it is applied, with the only success being in socialist countries, there is some equality of wealth, because there is no wealth at all.
I have worked w/people who don't have CS studies, and it seems to me that they're completely oblivious to all of things that they do not know
Well, you see, that is really the trick, because, you really do need to have some exposure somewhere along the way to formal computer theory. Someone with some exposure to, say, graph theory, will be able to basically see that many, many problems are actually quite related. From there, you wind up with a rather gross misunderstanding of algorithmic complexity, misuse and misunderstanding of data structures, and then a failure to really understand what compilers can and cannot do. Everything is a graph in programming, and if you don't get that, you are really sorta not able to program as effectively as you could.
Also, as far as anyone has ever told me and I've ever seen, grad school for engineering and ESPECIALLY for CS is completely worthless for getting a job, and is done almost only by those who wish to go into academia. Sure, 2 years of Business school might be required after 5 or so years in the work force in order to get a managerial position that really pays bank, but that's far in the future. Places like MS and Google and Yahoo! are hiring kids out of my school at 75k or more a year for software engineering jobs (there is obviously a variance, and some jobs get a lower salary)
You are completely wrong on this one. A C/S degree is the thing that gets you out programming and into technical lead roles. Companies value C/S degrees enormously. Most of the time people without degrees are completely oblivious to the doors that are not opened for them. Degrees open doors, C/S Degrees, open C/S doors. Get one.
Move. Welfare through earmarks or welfare through the official welfare system is still welfare. If you live where all the jobs have dried up then move to where you can have a decent job. Lots of people do it.
In fact, I can give you a number of good reasons the government should allow earmarks in rural areas.
1. National Security. In the event of a general nuclear war, all major cities and the suburbs would be completely destroyed. By having a population in the rural areas, we avoid overconcentrating ourselves in rural areas and thus have a population suitably trained and inclined to fight a guerilla war against a hypothetical invader.
2. Economic Stability. Having millions of people roaming the nation chasing jobs creates enormous dynamic pressures on local infrastructures. Imagine a ball passing through a rubber hose. Local resources are streched, then, expensive new construction is undertaken to meet the need for roads, schools, water, fuel and communications, and then, before the bonds have even been paid, shifting economic pressures cause that same population to suddenly deflate, leaving the remaining the residents with bankrupt blight.
3. Natural resource banking. Many of these rural areas are places where globalization has made resource extraction uncompetitive. The resources are still there, just uneconomical. In a world with changing times, rampant terrorism, we're only one civil war away from losing an important source of minerals. Keeping a small population in a resource extraction area provides an excellent way to allow sufficient infrastructure to be maintained for quick rampup in the event of a national emergency.
That's just three. I've not even gotten to epidemic management, selective breeding of humans, and all sorts of other good stuff.
Move. Welfare through earmarks or welfare through the official welfare system is still welfare. If you live where all the jobs have dried up then move to where you can have a decent job. Lots of people do it. And before someone responds with the typical, "Oh, you don't know what it's like," I've had family and friends move to other states for better housing and jobs. They're all much better off now.
I don't think the charge would be "you don't know what its like". I think the charge would be, well, this is my preference for a use of federal dollars. I'm sure you have yours. Name me one program that you think the Federal government should do, and I guarantee you I could make an argument for that program to be cut, in favor of earmarks for meth-makers in appalachia.
The "culture of sharing" would eventually turn into a "culture of snooping" and "culture of freeloaders", all of which is a shockingly good description of communism, except the communists take you out and shoot you or re-educate you when you get caught.
It's not communism because the sharing isn't compulsory. I choose to participate, by either enabling passwords on my wireless access point, or disabling.
Did you know that the state of Maryland has the fifth largest percentage of non-white people in the Union? So even if it's not offensive, your use of the term to refer to people from Maryland is puzzling. Funny how ignorance and racially charged terms seem to travel together like that...
I live 5 minutes away from Maryland. Trust me, when I say redneck, its an accurate term. Trust me. Just go there.
You misunderstand how the system works. Taxpayer funding for elections works just fine in Canada and other civilized countries. Ensuring fairness is trivially easy, and it cuts those idiotic two-year American campaigns to a matter of weeks. And our politicians actually do real work, instead of spending every moment trying to raise more money so they can outspend their rivals in the next election
First off, Americans actually like the elections and the democratic process, which is why we revel in it so much. Secondly, let the politicians, as I said, put up web sites, and eliminate caps on individual donors. Problem solved.
Slashdot Mirror
I find the entire idea of creating a wired democracy to be revolting. The best government is seen in its effects and not heard. I don't want to think about government or politics in my day to day existence and would much rather just have the professionals that I elect get on with the business of governing competently. I don't want big crusades - I've had enough crusades with Bush. When I elect a President and a Congress, I don't want them asking me my opinion every 30 seconds. I want to know that they thought through the issues and made the best decisions they could, kept the army in powder, the navy afloat, the planes in the air, the satellites working, the bridges up and the roads in good repair. If it turns out that they do something that I politically don't agree with, I can -actually live with that-, so long as they bring a general air of competence to the table.
I'm talking about the modern world, and you're talking about pirates. Unfortunately for you, you picked up on a wonderful example on the depth of morality of those in power. Piracy is committed by those without country - ie, those without power - and privateering is the exact same act committed by those backed by a country - ie, those with power.
You just don't know what you are talking about. Piracy is a cheap way to fight a war, but its still fighting a war, and that's what you don't get.
The War on Terrorism is using violence and threats of force to get what "we" want by using violence and threatening to use force. In this latest round, "we" have directly killed a hundred thousand people, detained over 80,000 without due process, displaced three million Iraqis and a few hundred thousand Afghanis, created a paradise for terrorists who want to train in militias, all in response after "they" killed three thousand civilians in what is undoubtedly the worst terrorist act in history.
They should have been nicer to us. If you don't want your country flattened, don't mess with the USA. It's pretty simple.
And you know, that's the thing. Each year, the USA sends to the middle east some 300 billion dollars for oil. What do we get for that? A bunch of extremist schools chanting death to America. That's pretty shoddy customer service. You can go on about your poor muslim buddies as much as you want, but I saw everything I needed to know about muslims on 9/11.
There's no real difference between Democrats and Republicans. There is no voice of dissent in American media. Issues that are important are simply left out of the discussion entirely. (Example: how many civilians should we be allowed to kill rather than should be we killing civilians in the first place?)
The media is smart enough to know the answer is something you wouldn't like. The answer for a lot of people would be that, we obviously haven't killed enough.
From 2000 through 2005, U.S. multinationals eliminated 2.1 million jobs at home while adding 784,000 to their payrolls abroad, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis." -USAToday
It's overwhelmingly automation. http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2004/mar/wk5/art01.htm "US had highest productivity gains in manufacturing." Have you ever built anything? Just look at how a factory floor is today versus a decade ago. Nowadays instead of lathes and saws and a wide variety of cutting tools, you have a big honking laser CNC cutter that just lasers the part out, with no operator invention. That's dozens of jobs right there.
And, look at how customer service used to be done, with hoards of people and paper files and multipart copies. Nowadays, thanks to people like us, all of those people no longer have jobs. Yes, if you are in computer science, you can't escape your own role in throwing people out of work. Every programming contract we get is to throw somebody else out of work.
Irregardless, let's approach the situation from your point of view. Let's assume that we follow the funding to the source, and bomb the country responsible. (Never mind the argument that we have no legal right to do so under international law.)
We have every right to do so under international law. Besides, what sovereign right does the United Nations have over me? Or some institution in Europe? That's just absurd.
If we follow your logic, which countries do we declare war on?
We don't have to declare war, just reserve the right to bomb or otherwise destroy any nation that harbors terrorists that attack the USA.
How many neighbors of "terrorists" have to die before we stop bombing, or do we just kill civilians in perpetuity for the actions of a non-government organization?
There's no such thing as civilians, in war.
Why did we invade Iraq and not Saudi Arabia or the UAE, or maintain enough troops in Afghanistan and bring security to the entire country instead of just the capital?
You know, I never thought of that before. Wow, we really should bomb Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Afghanistan is useless. We should have just nuked Kandahar and focused on Iraq.
Clarke event, a gamma ray burst? I don't think so. I'm holding out for the lunar obelisk.
That statement was not made by a republican.
Apollo 11 Plaque
"Here, Men from the Planet Earth first landed on the moon. We came in peace for all mankind."
Richard M. Nixon.
Explain the thuggery that unionbusting has employed. Maybe there should be a look into it, as they'll move to IT when they get word of it. The only shame(to them) is that we already know their tactics and strategy. If you don't let them drag it out, they can't bring in their thugs(internally developed or externally developed).
You will not enslave myself or my office into a union, ever. I'm not handing a part of my paycheck over to a bunch of crooks. Screw that. Unions deserve to be not only busted, but smashed.
His toughest interview was in Ireland. But it's really besides the point.
It is true that the new McCarthyism is less visible, but I believe that's only because it's very difficult to call someone a conspirator and get away with it
And the Dems avoided Fox for their debates. This is not the same as the McCarthy era, where the entire mainstream media was under the gun to produce journalism that agreed with McCarthy. A reporter losing a press credential is not the same as an entire generation of actors and directors and weapons scientists being blacklisted. It simply isn't.
Exports are up. Hooray! What benefit has that brought to the average American worker? Are salaries up? Are benefits and retirement options up? Are we exporting technological goods that are bringing our standard of living higher, or just selling more crap that is now affordable to other western nations, allowing us to compete with fierce exporters like Indonesia and Thailand?
It's brought employment. American workers continue to import far more than they export, but the situation is improving. Right now, in terms of crap sold, its cars, telecommunications equipment, jet engines, locomotives, and other goods. Our biggest competitive problem, right now, is Europe, and yes, we are gaining the ground on Europe. Even as I type this, Audi announces that they will not be able to import one of their cars to the USA because of the dollar; BMW announces they will be building a new kind of car in the USA rather than in Germany, and the Japanese continue to build plants in the USA. This -does- benefit the American worker, with good jobs and good benefits.
Your comments on the middle east echo that of liberals, in the true sense of the word, who have no memory of the past. Saddam Hussein was an American pawn who overstepped his bounds in Kuwait, and we didn't assassinate him because the first Bush Administration at least recognized that there is no exit strategy in Iraq, much like other oppressive Islamist regimes we have supported on and off since the 1960s.
Your response shows a gross misunderstanding of our relationship with these people. Saddam was never an American pawn. He, like other dictators, were people that the USA supported to some extent in the interests of stability and access to resources.
The only way for fundamental human rights to continue existing is through law which is equally and universally applied, no matter how grotesque you think their actions or politics may be. The correct, legal way to approach the terrorist attacks of September 11th was to find evidence for the crime (remember, acts of war can only be committed by states or breakaway territories), trying the suspects, and then sentencing them. This is why we have the UN and the World Court.
That's a joke. Terrorism IS an act of war. You seem to think that terrorism is a modern problem. It is not. Terrorism is no different than piracy, which western nations ultimately dealt with by finally seeing that supporting pirates was in fact the same as a defacto declaration of war. If you are hosting a terrorist organization in your country, of any kind, then you are engaging in an act of war. It is silly to pretend otherwise. If the USA sent a dozen guys in uniform to blow something up, that is an act of war, but if the USA pays someone not in uniform to blow something, you argue that it is not? That's just patently absurd. Similarly, if an Iranian warplane goes and bombs Tel Aviv, that is an act of war, but if Iran pays Hizbollah to blow up Tel Aviv, that isn't. Terrorism is just a weapons system, get it? A country either lays out some money for a bomber and some uniforms for some dude to blow something up, or, it can pay a bunch of "terrorists" to go and blow up something. It's all money to the country doing the check writing.
The whole notion that terrorism is a law enforcement matter is absurd.
Microsoft seems to be hell bent on making their product harder to use, and at its own peril.
What Microsoft doesn't get is that operating systems and computers, in general, are just appliances. Yes, people like to tinker, but, when one opens up the box, they want everything. This fascination with dynamically installed and dynamically loaded modularity has been the ruin of Microsoft ever since Windows 3.1 began prompting me for Disk 5 when I tried to do something, and it continues to this day. All the Windows versions continually ask for the CD/DVD, whatever, Visual Studio defaults to online help - which sucks when you are on the train, and now they want to make Windows even more modular?
By contrast, I put in a Linux DVD, and I install everything. If I want to install something more, I can do the insanely difficult exercise of typing "sudo apt get install [programname]".
That statement was not made by a republican.
Democrats that think like that no longer exist. The leading brain trusts behind the Democratic Party think of the USA as evil so even the idea of an American culture and the space race as a statement of that culture would come off to them today as nationalistic and evil.
All they've done is start a new age of McCarthyism, suspend habeas corpus, agree to formally demolish our borders with Mexico and Canada, extend the powers of the executive branch beyond the oversight of congress, lied under oath or refused to even testify about the terrorist attacks under oath, wiretapped American citizens who are 'guilty' of receiving 'suspicious' phone calls, run the economy into the ground... caused two to three trillion dollars of damage to our economy for a war that was both illegal and unnecessary, which also caused the price of oil to quintuple, and probably caused the sharpest devaluation of the American dollar since the depression...
I think a "New Age of McCarthyism" understates how bad McCarthy was. McCarthy created a national climate of fear over the whole media. There's no media that is afraid of Bush.... because, ironically, Republicans (in order to get their talk shows), dismantled the regulatory tools Democrats and Republicans both used to use to bully the MSM into running stories favorable to the current government. When McCarthy was around, Hollywood blacklisted people that disagreed with McCarthy. Today, in "Bush McCarthyism", the reverse applies. Hollywood blacklists everyone that actually likes Bush.
Habeas Corpus isn't suspended for any US Citizen, rather by combatants whose own side does not follow the Geneva convention. I think Bush's stance on immigration and trade have both been very progressive and very courageous, actually. Wiretapping is about Americans getting calls from people overseas in Islamic countries, and that's probably pretty reasonable. Bush didn't run the economy into the ground, rather the American people ran themselves into the ground because we've chosen to borrow rather than save. Bush didn't make people take out home equity loans to buy plasma screens. The war was necessary at the point at which it was undertaken. Rather, if we had wanted to avoid it, we should have let Saddam have Kuwait and washed our hands of the region in 1991 and let the UN collapse at that point. As a function of GDP, the war's not been that expensive, however, I will agree that fiscally there's a ton of better ways the country could have spent that money.
The price of oil quintupling had nothing to do with the war and had everything to do with peak oil and increasing Chinese and Indian demand. You don't have to believe me. There's plenty of left wing and environmentalist sites that can bore you to tears about sustainability and Hubbert peaks and the sad, sucky reality is, that they seem to be right, and the previous commodities recession of the 1990s is more an anomaly than a long term measure.
The dollar contraction in value is by design and is designed to foster American exports in manufacturered goods. Under Bush, exports have increased to approximately 15% of GDP, a record level, and it is these exports that keep the economy from cratering completely. So, from here on out, we're going to actually have to produce goods to sell to the world to actually get goods back, -just like every other country has to-.
So, with that defense of Bush, where has he erred?
a) the war. while we can disagree with the motives, the conditions on the ground in Iraq, and so on, there's really no way to argue that the war has't really had any economic benefit to the USA. It costs too much in blood and treasure relative to what we are getting out of it.
b) federal spending - budget deficits. Bush here is pretty indefensible when it comes to fiscal restraint. Yes, I do like a lot of the things he has spent money on. But, the prescription drug program is a real budget buster and, for the price tag, Democratic arguments about getting a better deal for the government purchasing of services have some weight.
c) USA PATRIOT, etc. We both agree that the surveillance programs in use by the government are not only intrusive, but, if they were not necessary during the cold war, then why are they necessary now? Surely the KGB had its own spies in the USA...
Billions wasted in Iraq and one of the most exciting programs since the Moon landing starts a slow death from budget cuts. Just plain sickening. We need a grass roots funding effort to save the Rovers since it looks like the second one will be cut next year
The same President who launched the war in Iraq also is the first President to enact a workable plan for putting people on Mars. By contrast, if Obama gets in, its likely that NASA will face some pretty deep cuts. For some reason, Republicans don't have as big of a problem blowing lots of money on space stuff, whereas Democrats always have to get past this "we could use the money to feed the poor" mental stumbling block. If it wasn't for the war, Bush would have been alright.
It's not xenophobia or nativism.
It most assuredly is, you just make excuses for it. The entire history of the USA is forged based on immigrants willing to work the existing "natives" would not. American railroads were laid in the west, by Chinese immigrants. American mines were dug by the Irish fleeing the potato famine. And so on. Everyone has ancestors who benefited from this arrangement and today is no different.
Please stop reading from your assigned playbook. It's starting to get quite old.
And do what, adopt your tired, and ancient playbook? My playbook is backed by Darwin and has a track record of proven success. Your playbook is a bunch of feel good nonsense that has produced consistent sloth and laziness throughout the world.
The UK(as seen today) is a textbook example of what happens when you have a mad lady called Thatcher rip things apart, some acolytes to keep the press at bay, and an urge to lose all national identity/sovereignty over the next 20+ years.
Where the UK screwed up was the massive nationalizations that took place in the 1960s... by the time the iron lady came along to liberate everything, it was already too late. I'd blame Labor in the 1950s, that took a economy that produced its own cars, lead in aircraft and jet engine designs, and produced a bunch of state run institutions that fell further and further behind.
Where the USA screwed up (and this is so typical), was overconfidence coming out of World War II. Americans assumed that a manufacturing process that was best in the world in WWII would be the best one for ever did not realize just how fast the world moved. But, to the USA's credit, rather than throw up the fences and try and keep the world out, the USA invited the competition and did its best to improve its products. Where it did so, American companies succeeded, such as GE, Caterpillar and Boeing. Where it failed, US companies cratered, such as RCA.
It's pretty easy to see through your backwards glass just by considering that "Conservatives" have been spending this economy for
It's pretty easy to that you were modded up to +4 insightful that this whole board is filled with nothing but a bunch of liberal toadies.
I hope you all rot in hell. Mod that down, bitch.
So is that worse than spending in killing people in a foreign country that did nothing to you?
If the Iraqi people were not killing each other, there would be no US troops in the country today. Indeed, the whole criticism of how the post invasion occupation was handled was, in fact, that Bush did not properly anticipate that Iraq would collapse in sectarian strife. One would have thought Iraqi's best would have risen to the occasion and seized the opportunity to advance their country in freedom but instead they looted their national assets and began killing their neighbors. It's not 30-100 US soldiers KIA a month that keeps the USA from declaring victory in Iraq and leaving, its the 500-3000 Iraqis killing each other.
As far as the larger picture, of the invasion itself, well, the mistake was really made in 1991 and in the sanctions regime afterwards. If you wanted to not have the USA involved in Iraq, then, the USA should not have intervened against Saddam in 1991, or, should have removed him from power then, when his popularity was genuinely at an ebb. Instead, the USA went with the foolish wishes of the international community and imposed these crippling postwar sanctions on the Iraqi people to force compliance with the terms of a cease fire that Saddam never actually abided by. WMD aside, Saddam violated the terms of his cease fire by firing on US Aircraft, ethnically cleansing parts of Iraq, and a number of other things. And, while Saddam did not have WMD, he himself did say after his capture that his plan was to wait out the sanctions and then resume re-arming.
Thus, the real choice was to really let Saddam have Kuwait in 1991, and with that, quite honestly, Saudi Arabia, or, to remove Saddam from power. So really, the question is, if Saddam was not removed from power, what's the cost of a nuclear armed Iraq sitting on top of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia? If you can live with that, then, yes, the US Iraqi policy was a mistake from 1991 on. If you cannot, then, the best you could really argue is that either Bush I should have finished the job, Clinton should have taken a different sanctions tack, or that Bush II should have better prepared for the postwar occupation.
I mean, what would the world have been like had Britain and France did not declare war on Germany after it invaded Poland?
Ok, check this out.... there are people that have health insurance and also get their cats health insurance or can otherwise pick up the cost of giving a cat radiotherapy.
Like pretending that all those profits we waste on private insurers are giving us healthcare comparable to our international competitors who pay less because theirs is all paid on the same basis as our Medicaid.
Dude, you don't even know what you are talking about. International competitors do not have the same health insurance as we do in the USA because they ration health care to deal with scarcity wheras we charge more for it. To put it simply: my mother in law received an open heart bypass that she would not have received in the UK, but she had private health insurance and it paid the entire $100,000 tab.
Maybe there really are a lot of IT people like you. If there are, this country is doomed, and the foreigners won't be coming here for much longer
And what is wrong with foreigners coming to the United States. I'm sorry that you are not good enough compete, but your inadequacy does not entitle you to a single dime of my money through taxes or anything else. Find another field that you can compete in, otherwise, kill yourself, loser, and go pray to your Obama statue. Here is Obama, king of rats and second rate losers.
So what you're saying is that IT people (like you, that is) like McCain because he'll import more foreigners to compete with Americans for IT jobs? IT people (like you) want to leave the economy with Bush's policies intact, so no taxes to pay for a continuing explosion in spending (like a
America is a land of foreigners. Cut spending by capping Medicaid.
$TRILLION+ for Iraq), and continuing to leave no oversight of the corporations who have robbed that economy, like the banks, Halliburton, KBR, Enron and whichever new ones are based in Arizona instead of over in Texas?
How are banks robbing the economy? They lent money to people. People didn't pay it back. And, even if we assume that your wildest accusations regarding Halliburton are true, that pales in significance compared to the economic disasters wrought by trial lawyers and unions to the United States. In fact, teachers unions have ruined the educational system in this country so much that children educated at home actually score -better- on standardized tests.
IT people like you think that Progressivism is socialism, but that the Bush handouts McCain will continue (if there's anything left) are somehow not? That haven't noticed how different the US is from real socialisms like Canada, UK, France, Germany and so many others whose economies are making ours look like some failing MBA's final project?
In point of fact, the USA economy continues to grow, has a lower unemployment rate than most other countries, and has the most opportunity of any nation. Indeed, the current European criticism of the United States is that that long overvalued dollar, now reaching a more correct valuation, is making life difficult for Germany and France to export their way out of its ridiculous social expenditures. God forbid, if the dollar hits $2/EU, then Europeans might actually have to work for a change.
Are there really that many IT people like you who haven't noticed that McCain and Bush's "Conservatism" has failed more miserably than any kind of government since the Soviet system it most closely resembes?
The soviet system was characterized by central planning, which is what your so-called progressivism is. But, it doesn't even have to be that complicated. Socialism is really simple. You basically have a gang of demagogues or a class of thieves to go and pretend that they are helping out the loser class by stealing from the capable classes for themselves. Socialism is like this. One guy, A, worked a little and built himself a boat, and another guy, B, drank beer and didn't. The guy, C, comes along, screams bloody murder about inequality, and thus, given goads the otherwise lazy B to help him take the boat. So, guy C takes the boat, gives guy B a ride for about 10 minutes, but then kicks guy B out of the boat and keeps it for himself.
His Republican anti-immigration policies don't protect any IT jobs
Get informed. McCain introduced legislation that would have changed US immigration policy from one of welfare for third world countries to one which favored people with technical skills. He would have given some form of amnesty to immigrants already illegally in the country and he would have raised the H1B limit. When you add in the tried and true practices of deregulation and low taxes, you get a proven recipe for growth.
By contrast, Obama is essentially running on a platform that failed in the 1960s and will fail again. Obama's platform is to raise taxes, have a government make market distorting decisions, reducing the freedom of people to keep the fruits of their labors and as a consequence, their likelihood to do engage in them. Unabashed progressivism, or socialism by any other name, continues to be tried throughout the globe and continues to fail wherever it is applied, with the only success being in socialist countries, there is some equality of wealth, because there is no wealth at all.
I have worked w/people who don't have CS studies, and it seems to me that they're completely oblivious to all of things that they do not know
Well, you see, that is really the trick, because, you really do need to have some exposure somewhere along the way to formal computer theory. Someone with some exposure to, say, graph theory, will be able to basically see that many, many problems are actually quite related. From there, you wind up with a rather gross misunderstanding of algorithmic complexity, misuse and misunderstanding of data structures, and then a failure to really understand what compilers can and cannot do. Everything is a graph in programming, and if you don't get that, you are really sorta not able to program as effectively as you could.
Also, as far as anyone has ever told me and I've ever seen, grad school for engineering and ESPECIALLY for CS is completely worthless for getting a job, and is done almost only by those who wish to go into academia. Sure, 2 years of Business school might be required after 5 or so years in the work force in order to get a managerial position that really pays bank, but that's far in the future. Places like MS and Google and Yahoo! are hiring kids out of my school at 75k or more a year for software engineering jobs (there is obviously a variance, and some jobs get a lower salary)
You are completely wrong on this one. A C/S degree is the thing that gets you out programming and into technical lead roles. Companies value C/S degrees enormously. Most of the time people without degrees are completely oblivious to the doors that are not opened for them. Degrees open doors, C/S Degrees, open C/S doors. Get one.
Move. Welfare through earmarks or welfare through the official welfare system is still welfare. If you live where all the jobs have dried up then move to where you can have a decent job. Lots of people do it.
In fact, I can give you a number of good reasons the government should allow earmarks in rural areas.
1. National Security. In the event of a general nuclear war, all major cities and the suburbs would be completely destroyed. By having a population in the rural areas, we avoid overconcentrating ourselves in rural areas and thus have a population suitably trained and inclined to fight a guerilla war against a hypothetical invader.
2. Economic Stability. Having millions of people roaming the nation chasing jobs creates enormous dynamic pressures on local infrastructures. Imagine a ball passing through a rubber hose. Local resources are streched, then, expensive new construction is undertaken to meet the need for roads, schools, water, fuel and communications, and then, before the bonds have even been paid, shifting economic pressures cause that same population to suddenly deflate, leaving the remaining the residents with bankrupt blight.
3. Natural resource banking. Many of these rural areas are places where globalization has made resource extraction uncompetitive. The resources are still there, just uneconomical. In a world with changing times, rampant terrorism, we're only one civil war away from losing an important source of minerals. Keeping a small population in a resource extraction area provides an excellent way to allow sufficient infrastructure to be maintained for quick rampup in the event of a national emergency.
That's just three. I've not even gotten to epidemic management, selective breeding of humans, and all sorts of other good stuff.
Move. Welfare through earmarks or welfare through the official welfare system is still welfare. If you live where all the jobs have dried up then move to where you can have a decent job. Lots of people do it. And before someone responds with the typical, "Oh, you don't know what it's like," I've had family and friends move to other states for better housing and jobs. They're all much better off now.
I don't think the charge would be "you don't know what its like". I think the charge would be, well, this is my preference for a use of federal dollars. I'm sure you have yours. Name me one program that you think the Federal government should do, and I guarantee you I could make an argument for that program to be cut, in favor of earmarks for meth-makers in appalachia.
The "culture of sharing" would eventually turn into a "culture of snooping" and "culture of freeloaders", all of which is a shockingly good description of communism, except the communists take you out and shoot you or re-educate you when you get caught.
It's not communism because the sharing isn't compulsory. I choose to participate, by either enabling passwords on my wireless access point, or disabling.
Did you know that the state of Maryland has the fifth largest percentage of non-white people in the Union? So even if it's not offensive, your use of the term to refer to people from Maryland is puzzling. Funny how ignorance and racially charged terms seem to travel together like that...
I live 5 minutes away from Maryland. Trust me, when I say redneck, its an accurate term. Trust me. Just go there.
You misunderstand how the system works. Taxpayer funding for elections works just fine in Canada and other civilized countries. Ensuring fairness is trivially easy, and it cuts those idiotic two-year American campaigns to a matter of weeks. And our politicians actually do real work, instead of spending every moment trying to raise more money so they can outspend their rivals in the next election
First off, Americans actually like the elections and the democratic process, which is why we revel in it so much. Secondly, let the politicians, as I said, put up web sites, and eliminate caps on individual donors. Problem solved.