The whole point of terrorism is to deny the enemy use of his or her resources. The moment you've got the enemy spending loads more than you are, then you are winning, and the fact that you are winning will attract others to your cause. It's simple economics. The USA, for example, may have 20 trillion dollars in physical assets, or even 100 trillion, so, any tiny fraction the potential of an idiot with a bomb up his rear can deny those assets is an automatic win for the bad guys.
To his credit, Bush did at least see this point. His answer, to invade everybody, was directly because he saw that defending everything that has to be defended is a no win proposition, and therefor, the obvious answer was to essentially create wars everywhere and make the terrorists attack soldiers rather than civilians. The big question is, really, is it less expensive to defend 100 trillion dollars of domestic assets, than it is to spend 100 billion a year on a bunch of wars? And, perhaps Bush's biggest failing was that, knowing that he's following the strategy of attacking everybody abroad to not have to eat the big bill at home, why not just dispense with even the dumbness of TSA and homeland security... like, he could not resist the unfortunate temptation to do something in the name of security when his own stated policy goals said that it couldn't work. He didn't trust himself, and by extension, could not trust his country, and that is why he failed.
It allows the unwashed masses (of which I am one) a chance to do things that were once only the realm of researchers in academia or the corporate world
I agree, that's why I have great hopes for my atomic bomb.
A 'Trademark' is a 'Mark' under which you 'Trade'.
It's your name. The problem here is that the runners of the site know full well that they could put up signs saying stephen-conroy.com in public, and people would go and click on them and get this political message. It's a put on. But really, what's at stake here is that they are arguing for a right to lie, and they shouldn't have it.
The domain name is stephen-conroy.com. I'd say, that's trademark infringement. Like, you could own stephen-conroy-sucks.com, but, having a site that has the capacity to mislead people in order to get hits is as wrong as calling something Cheerios when it is not. The irony here is that they basically are saying that someone is a fascist in order to protect their right to lie. I wonder if, really, the rest of the their message is actually honest.
If George Bush would have signed the exact same executive order, this post would be modded +5, insightful, and with that said, the very people who are heading for the hills because Obama signed it would be trying to defend Bush in that onslaught.
So really, all that is changed is that we substituted one guy for another, but the erosion of liberty continues at pretty much the same or even accelerated pace.
I'm sorry, but Monty sold his baby, and got well paid for it. If I could sell any program I wrote for a fraction of what he sold MySQL for, and they kicked me out of working on it, I could do any number of any other things I wanted to work on in life. Come on Monty, attack P=NP. It's not like you need a job.
I guess the question is, can a modern desktop operating system, out of the box, wire itself to an ipv6 network the same way one does with ipv4? Like, if Verizon decreed that FIOS shall use IPV6 addresses for everything, does that break the following operating systems:
I guess the question is, how many applications break on the switch to ipv6? Seems to me that if it were so easy to port to ipv6, we would have done it already.
Literally everything Bush has ever touched has turned to shit. It's a testimony to the greatness of the US that we survived him.
The rule is, regardless of political party, do not elect a President from Texas, ever again. The problem with Bush Jr was that he was a supremely effective politician - like, Bush Jr got pretty much everything he wanted, and a lot of it turned out to go south. Obama, if he had 10% of Bush Jr's political machine and strong arm ability, would canadian style single payer by now. Just imagine, Bush, with less control of Congress than Obama has, got a huge tax cut, federalized public schools with no child left behind, got medicare prescription drugs, doubled the funding for basically every federal research agency there is, doubled the defense budget, and, to top it off, even got two wars. Same thing with LBJ. He got Vietnam, medicare, medicaid, the whole great society, and everything he did, turned to shit. In essence, Obama, love him or hate him, has his most pressing fiscal problems are related to two presidents from Texas.
Why reinvent functionality that is perfectly adequate (for what you are doing) in the first place?
You are right, but we were young and cocky and totally blown away by Beast.
I wouldn't be so quick to underestimate even Windows 3.1 compared to Amiga OS. Was Amiga OS the better multitasker, yes... but Amiga multitasking had a huge shortcoming, in that, it was not hardware protected memory. Needed real 386 paging tables for that, again, that hardware obsolescence showed early on. Even Windows 3.1 did, something, albiet, foolish.
But then Windows 3.1 had a lot of better software outside of multitasking. Windows had real hardware independence. It had a concept of an abstract graphics device and from there you had the notion of the same code for Graphics on screen and graphics on the printer, and Amiga really only had bitmaps. Amiga RastPorts were just not nearly as useful as GDI was, and it showed. Windows applications were way better looking. Windows 3.1 was a lot easier to develop for, just to put simple graphic apps on the screen. Amiga you had to write pages of stuff just to get to the part where you had the Window, but Windows was just RegisterClass and then CreateWindow.
And hardware superiority began to shift towards the x86 platform at the right time. VGA hardware let you have 16 colors at 640x480 and Amiga only had 4, and the 80386 was pulling away from the 68000, hardware paging was huge, and, not paying a penalty for long pointers, again, that hardware story looms. Not losing CPU cycles to the video logic, definitely, tilts the edge to the PC. Really, by the early 1990s, the only thing Amiga had going for it over x86 was ironically in sound, but soundblaster by then let you have some modicum of wavetable sound.
But really, the biggest thing to me in software was that Amiga fonts were no match for True Type Fonts. When did Amiga get rotating, scalable, true type fonts? I dunno, as I'd bailed on it before then.
Had Commodre switched to a 14MHz 68000 for the Amiga 600 and 2000, as well as to an improved Denise with slightly higher color depths,
Think they really got hurt with the approach of having multiple bit planes in the long run.
But, it really seemed to me at the time that they had the pieces in place to jack up the blitter just a -little- bit and could have had some basic 3d transformations for a rectangle, and that could have put them into doing hardware accelerated 3d graphics by the early 1990s. But they just didn't keep going down that path. Like, they had the line draw unit, and they had the blitter, but the two weren't married. We tried and tried and hoped and hoped that you could use the blitter as a source for the line draw unit and thus get a crude texture mapping engine but it just couldn't work the way we wanted it, and shortly after that, x86 got so fast that Id was doing it in software and the rest is history.
They started out real strong but then they didn't really do anything with it.
The whole Amiga OS story is utterly misplaced and foolish. Amiga, for those who were into PCs, really, was a story about hardware that was way ahead of its time for the price. You had a 32 bit processor in the 68k married up with 4 channel waveform audio and hardware accelerated bitmap graphics. It was amazing, it really was. But as someone who learned C on the Amiga, I never thought the Operating System was really all that great. Indeed, I had a really fun summer working on a game engine with a friend of mine and our biggest triumph was NOT to use the operating system to manage the Blitter because it was too damned slow. I mean, Intuition had its upsides, for sure, but overall, the whole Amiga story was about the hardware. People bought that Hardware Reference Manual because it was so well written, and, in those days, you had IBM PC's with CGA / EGA graphics and the best sound you got from them was a dopy Adlib or SoundBlaster with tinny crappy FM synthesis and Amiga had faux true-color displays with quadraphonic sound playing. It was a revolution.
For me, to get that same kind of hardware buzz, since then, has really been in workstations. I loved my Dual Pentium II with first a FireGL and then a Voodoo2 and then an nVidia GeForce board, that was Amiga to me. I loved my Dual Opteron, that was Amiga to me. And right now, I have my dual Nehalem Xeon with a GeForce GTS, that is Amiga to me. Amiga's not a software story, never has been. It's about hardware that makes you imagine entirely new kinds of applications with just the sheer power available, power that makes you drool, or at least, is really fun to screw around with.
Ah, yes, invading other nations "to take their oil" isn't a "desperation measure", but investing in domestic industry is. What world are you living in?
The world where it was politically easier to build a massive oil infrastructure in the middle of a desert than it is to plow up thousands of acres of pristine wilderness in some of America's heartland. There may be mountains of shale oil under Colorado, but the mess would be extravagant.
And, the thing is, too, is that there are absolutely no guarantees that we can come up with an alternative energy system simply by throwing money on it. Could you ask any scientist to have an ETA on any discovery? Doubtful. Invading a country may be evil and whatever, but on some level it is a safer and more realistic bet than dumping money on research. After all, if money were the only obstacle, we would have cured cancer and have nuclear fusion by now, and we do not.
Therefore it would still have been MUCH cheaper to invest in domestic industry, instead of going overseas to steal other peoples resources. Your argument makes absolutely no sense.
You can't say that. Seriously. I mean, if it were only a trillion dollars to do national energy independence, why wouldn't have the other party just gone and made that bet? The fact is, money can help science but it cannot guarantee invention and invention is what this country, no, this world, needs. And look at where we are now, we're a year into the Obama administration and the biodiesel industry has essentially been destroyed. Mind you, its not Obama's fault, but, if you were going to be blowing money on the stimulus package. Nova Biosource Fuels, one of the bigger producers that I had stock in, is in liquidation and some of its 180 million gallon capacity is for parts on e-bay at one point.
If you think that first world nations fight wars over resources, then you really don't understand globalization. We fight over ideology, we fight to project power, and we fight to maintain our dominance and increase our security
I'm a lot more cynical than you. Having gone from thoroughly and idealistically supporting President Bush and Pax Americana and the idea of spreading liberty by overthrowing dictators, to see how well that didn't turn out, I wonder if the whole projection of power hasn't always been a sort of an empire. What threat or purpose or overarching national interest, really, do we still have troops in Germany, Japan or Korea. All of those wars have been either over or quiet now for longer than most of us have been alive. Suddenly the isolationism of the pre-1940s Republican Party seems a lot more appealing to me. The world doesn't want to be policed, saved, or defended, so why do it? As we prepare to push Khalid Sheik Mohammed on trial in New York, I have to ask, if we had put Goering on trial under US laws, could he have conceivably walked, or maybe Nuremberg was just a big show trial too. I mean, we can bitch as much as we want about Babi Yar and the terrible Nazis shooting up a bunch of civilians and shoving them into a ditch. But then again, we firebombed the shit out of them and then they shoved the burned up corpses into a ditch. That's not to say that Nazis were somehow on the same moral plane as us, but it is to say that even if you fight a war to save the world, the very act of doing so corrupts your national character. I wonder if the best course for the national soul of America, to recapture its innocence, is to simply not have bases and troops all around the world and to not have any more wars. After all, regardless of all the "its a smaller world hype", its still a pretty damned long swim from Europe to the USA, or from China to the USA, and missile defense is becoming a reality. We don't need to be all over the world any more.
I say "may be" because, if you look at the Oil deals that Iraq has been making, you'll notice that the US is getting the short end of the stick.
Not really. Regardless of who gets to pump the oil out of Ir
The Democrats and the Republicans are both equally guilty on free trade. Looks like you fell for the trade
Believe it or not, the parties are doing a long and slow flip on the issue. Republicans used to be staunch protectionists and it was the Democrats that were huge into free trade. Indeed, Republican protectionism was one of the underlying causes of the civil war and Republicans remained protectionists until the 1930s. It was then that Democrats ran with blaming Republican Tariffs for the great depression, when ironically, Republican Tariffs actually helped the whole USA become a superpower from 1870-1920.
Ah, yes, the old "war for oil" idiocy again. Only in the mind of a blithering moron would it make more sense to spend trillions invading a foreign nation instead
I think the expectation was that everyone was surprised about the apparent "ease" of Afghanistan, and assumed that it would translate to Iraq, or, given the experience of the administration, any number of 1980's and 1990's operations, like Panama, or Grenada, come to mind. Like, I think they genuinely believed that Iraq would be pretty easy in the mold of other operations pulled off by Republicans - topple the dictator, put in our guy, and go forth, but the problem was that in Iraq, there was no "our guy".
Ah, yes, the old "war for oil" idiocy again. Only in the mind of a blithering moron would it make more sense to spend trillions invading a foreign nation instead
It's not just about getting oil for ourselves, its being able to control it for everyone else. It's also about using up someone else's oil before taking desperation measures for our own.
. Ownership doesn't enter into the question at all - free trade is simply a matter of making it easier to conduct business; there is nothing to say that national governments or state-owned enterprises can't take part in that
No. Ultimately, the government actually owns all the land. It alone has the power of arms, and it alone has the power to make law as to what can be done on that land.
I think your attitude is bizarre; it seems that you think that anything done or provided by society is by definition evil...
Society is not government, guess that's where we would part ways...
I guess this is the sad result of the Cold-War conditioning that afflicts so many Americans - you have learned that government is a sort of... conspiracy that is only out to take your money and that tax is nothing short of state-sanctioned theft
That's pretty much just the truth of the matter. Government doesn't work for the people, it works for the people who work for it.
And, many of us Americans felt that way long before the cold war was even a thought. In fact, many Americans felt that way throughout the national history. Tis why so many Americans left Europe, and their worship of government. Government's a tool.
Posting anonymously because it's bull. 200 years to peak oil there? Maybe if they don't sell any.
This isn't flamebait at all. None other than Dick Cheney was running around telling everyone who would listen that there was a huge production problem in the middle east. He had a great quote to sum it, something like, "If the Saudi's have so much more oil, they would have to be finding other fields like Gawar, and they haven't been". In fact, he calculated out how many Gawar size mega fields anybody would have to find, simply to meet existing demand, and they aren't out there.
Suddenly we find the USA sitting in Iraq, for what reason? The whole Bush administration's energy policy was essentially to get the dibs on the last remaining oil taps in the world, its own coastlines, interior, and in Iraq, essentially to buy time for its other plan of shoveling money at alternative energy projects would kick in.
And Corporatists come in all political flavors. Did you think the left wing of that particular ugly flapping bird won't be choking on their Target stock?
Good point. Really, the entire health care bill the Democrats are building could be renamed:
"The National Walmart Has to Buy Health Insurance for Its Employees Act".
They aren't fundamentally changing the balance of things, just throwing a little sugar on it for the masses.
The whole point of free trade was to unlink, fundamentally, resources from national ownership. Now that the Chinese have crossed the rubicon on the basic issue of access to materials on open markets, what is really the point of pretending that they are genuinely interested in free trade? Do we still want to pretend that they are interested in moving towards western liberalism. As much as Republicans called liberals Chamberlins on other issues, conservatives still ignoring the growing failure of free trade with the east are really, fundamentally, the genuine Chamberlins of our day. I hope they choke on their Walmart stock.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole point of terrorism is to deny the enemy use of his or her resources. The moment you've got the enemy spending loads more than you are, then you are winning, and the fact that you are winning will attract others to your cause. It's simple economics. The USA, for example, may have 20 trillion dollars in physical assets, or even 100 trillion, so, any tiny fraction the potential of an idiot with a bomb up his rear can deny those assets is an automatic win for the bad guys.
To his credit, Bush did at least see this point. His answer, to invade everybody, was directly because he saw that defending everything that has to be defended is a no win proposition, and therefor, the obvious answer was to essentially create wars everywhere and make the terrorists attack soldiers rather than civilians. The big question is, really, is it less expensive to defend 100 trillion dollars of domestic assets, than it is to spend 100 billion a year on a bunch of wars? And, perhaps Bush's biggest failing was that, knowing that he's following the strategy of attacking everybody abroad to not have to eat the big bill at home, why not just dispense with even the dumbness of TSA and homeland security... like, he could not resist the unfortunate temptation to do something in the name of security when his own stated policy goals said that it couldn't work. He didn't trust himself, and by extension, could not trust his country, and that is why he failed.
Famous self promoting futurist has plunged deep into his well of creativity to give us a Kindle Clone.
It allows the unwashed masses (of which I am one) a chance to do things that were once only the realm of researchers in academia or the corporate world
I agree, that's why I have great hopes for my atomic bomb.
A 'Trademark' is a 'Mark' under which you 'Trade'.
It's your name. The problem here is that the runners of the site know full well that they could put up signs saying stephen-conroy.com in public, and people would go and click on them and get this political message. It's a put on. But really, what's at stake here is that they are arguing for a right to lie, and they shouldn't have it.
The domain name is stephen-conroy.com. I'd say, that's trademark infringement. Like, you could own stephen-conroy-sucks.com, but, having a site that has the capacity to mislead people in order to get hits is as wrong as calling something Cheerios when it is not.
The irony here is that they basically are saying that someone is a fascist in order to protect their right to lie. I wonder if, really, the rest of the their message is actually honest.
If Bush had signed on to National Healthcare, you'd be against it! Right?
You mean, like prescription drugs, right?
If George Bush would have signed the exact same executive order, this post would be modded +5, insightful, and with that said, the very people who are heading for the hills because Obama signed it would be trying to defend Bush in that onslaught.
So really, all that is changed is that we substituted one guy for another, but the erosion of liberty continues at pretty much the same or even accelerated pace.
I hope they can be better nourished so that they can be bigger and easier targets.
I'm sorry, but Monty sold his baby, and got well paid for it. If I could sell any program I wrote for a fraction of what he sold MySQL for, and they kicked me out of working on it, I could do any number of any other things I wanted to work on in life. Come on Monty, attack P=NP. It's not like you need a job.
a wsj analyst has to be looking at this, and concluding that the gpu business is doomed.
How come there's no 1984 tag here?
Because 1984 is obsolete and we're moving past it to something worse.
I guess the question is, can a modern desktop operating system, out of the box, wire itself to an ipv6 network the same way one does with ipv4? Like, if Verizon decreed that FIOS shall use IPV6 addresses for everything, does that break the following operating systems:
a) Linux
b) Mac
c) Windows
I guess the question is, how many applications break on the switch to ipv6? Seems to me that if it were so easy to port to ipv6, we would have done it already.
Literally everything Bush has ever touched has turned to shit. It's a testimony to the greatness of the US that we survived him.
The rule is, regardless of political party, do not elect a President from Texas, ever again. The problem with Bush Jr was that he was a supremely effective politician - like, Bush Jr got pretty much everything he wanted, and a lot of it turned out to go south. Obama, if he had 10% of Bush Jr's political machine and strong arm ability, would canadian style single payer by now. Just imagine, Bush, with less control of Congress than Obama has, got a huge tax cut, federalized public schools with no child left behind, got medicare prescription drugs, doubled the funding for basically every federal research agency there is, doubled the defense budget, and, to top it off, even got two wars. Same thing with LBJ. He got Vietnam, medicare, medicaid, the whole great society, and everything he did, turned to shit. In essence, Obama, love him or hate him, has his most pressing fiscal problems are related to two presidents from Texas.
Why reinvent functionality that is perfectly adequate (for what you are doing) in the first place?
You are right, but we were young and cocky and totally blown away by Beast.
I wouldn't be so quick to underestimate even Windows 3.1 compared to Amiga OS. Was Amiga OS the better multitasker, yes... but Amiga multitasking had a huge shortcoming, in that, it was not hardware protected memory. Needed real 386 paging tables for that, again, that hardware obsolescence showed early on. Even Windows 3.1 did, something, albiet, foolish.
But then Windows 3.1 had a lot of better software outside of multitasking. Windows had real hardware independence. It had a concept of an abstract graphics device and from there you had the notion of the same code for Graphics on screen and graphics on the printer, and Amiga really only had bitmaps. Amiga RastPorts were just not nearly as useful as GDI was, and it showed. Windows applications were way better looking. Windows 3.1 was a lot easier to develop for, just to put simple graphic apps on the screen. Amiga you had to write pages of stuff just to get to the part where you had the Window, but Windows was just RegisterClass and then CreateWindow.
And hardware superiority began to shift towards the x86 platform at the right time. VGA hardware let you have 16 colors at 640x480 and Amiga only had 4, and the 80386 was pulling away from the 68000, hardware paging was huge, and, not paying a penalty for long pointers, again, that hardware story looms. Not losing CPU cycles to the video logic, definitely, tilts the edge to the PC. Really, by the early 1990s, the only thing Amiga had going for it over x86 was ironically in sound, but soundblaster by then let you have some modicum of wavetable sound.
But really, the biggest thing to me in software was that Amiga fonts were no match for True Type Fonts. When did Amiga get rotating, scalable, true type fonts? I dunno, as I'd bailed on it before then.
Had Commodre switched to a 14MHz 68000 for the Amiga 600 and 2000, as well as to an improved Denise with slightly higher color depths,
Think they really got hurt with the approach of having multiple bit planes in the long run.
But, it really seemed to me at the time that they had the pieces in place to jack up the blitter just a -little- bit and could have had some basic 3d transformations for a rectangle, and that could have put them into doing hardware accelerated 3d graphics by the early 1990s. But they just didn't keep going down that path. Like, they had the line draw unit, and they had the blitter, but the two weren't married. We tried and tried and hoped and hoped that you could use the blitter as a source for the line draw unit and thus get a crude texture mapping engine but it just couldn't work the way we wanted it, and shortly after that, x86 got so fast that Id was doing it in software and the rest is history.
They started out real strong but then they didn't really do anything with it.
The whole Amiga OS story is utterly misplaced and foolish. Amiga, for those who were into PCs, really, was a story about hardware that was way ahead of its time for the price. You had a 32 bit processor in the 68k married up with 4 channel waveform audio and hardware accelerated bitmap graphics. It was amazing, it really was. But as someone who learned C on the Amiga, I never thought the Operating System was really all that great. Indeed, I had a really fun summer working on a game engine with a friend of mine and our biggest triumph was NOT to use the operating system to manage the Blitter because it was too damned slow. I mean, Intuition had its upsides, for sure, but overall, the whole Amiga story was about the hardware. People bought that Hardware Reference Manual because it was so well written, and, in those days, you had IBM PC's with CGA / EGA graphics and the best sound you got from them was a dopy Adlib or SoundBlaster with tinny crappy FM synthesis and Amiga had faux true-color displays with quadraphonic sound playing. It was a revolution.
For me, to get that same kind of hardware buzz, since then, has really been in workstations. I loved my Dual Pentium II with first a FireGL and then a Voodoo2 and then an nVidia GeForce board, that was Amiga to me. I loved my Dual Opteron, that was Amiga to me. And right now, I have my dual Nehalem Xeon with a GeForce GTS, that is Amiga to me. Amiga's not a software story, never has been. It's about hardware that makes you imagine entirely new kinds of applications with just the sheer power available, power that makes you drool, or at least, is really fun to screw around with.
Ah, yes, invading other nations "to take their oil" isn't a "desperation measure", but investing in domestic industry is. What world are you living in?
The world where it was politically easier to build a massive oil infrastructure in the middle of a desert than it is to plow up thousands of acres of pristine wilderness in some of America's heartland. There may be mountains of shale oil under Colorado, but the mess would be extravagant.
And, the thing is, too, is that there are absolutely no guarantees that we can come up with an alternative energy system simply by throwing money on it. Could you ask any scientist to have an ETA on any discovery? Doubtful. Invading a country may be evil and whatever, but on some level it is a safer and more realistic bet than dumping money on research. After all, if money were the only obstacle, we would have cured cancer and have nuclear fusion by now, and we do not.
Therefore it would still have been MUCH cheaper to invest in domestic industry, instead of going overseas to steal other peoples resources. Your argument makes absolutely no sense.
You can't say that. Seriously. I mean, if it were only a trillion dollars to do national energy independence, why wouldn't have the other party just gone and made that bet? The fact is, money can help science but it cannot guarantee invention and invention is what this country, no, this world, needs. And look at where we are now, we're a year into the Obama administration and the biodiesel industry has essentially been destroyed. Mind you, its not Obama's fault, but, if you were going to be blowing money on the stimulus package. Nova Biosource Fuels, one of the bigger producers that I had stock in, is in liquidation and some of its 180 million gallon capacity is for parts on e-bay at one point.
If you think that first world nations fight wars over resources, then you really don't understand globalization. We fight over ideology, we fight to project power, and we fight to maintain our dominance and increase our security
I'm a lot more cynical than you. Having gone from thoroughly and idealistically supporting President Bush and Pax Americana and the idea of spreading liberty by overthrowing dictators, to see how well that didn't turn out, I wonder if the whole projection of power hasn't always been a sort of an empire. What threat or purpose or overarching national interest, really, do we still have troops in Germany, Japan or Korea. All of those wars have been either over or quiet now for longer than most of us have been alive. Suddenly the isolationism of the pre-1940s Republican Party seems a lot more appealing to me. The world doesn't want to be policed, saved, or defended, so why do it? As we prepare to push Khalid Sheik Mohammed on trial in New York, I have to ask, if we had put Goering on trial under US laws, could he have conceivably walked, or maybe Nuremberg was just a big show trial too. I mean, we can bitch as much as we want about Babi Yar and the terrible Nazis shooting up a bunch of civilians and shoving them into a ditch. But then again, we firebombed the shit out of them and then they shoved the burned up corpses into a ditch. That's not to say that Nazis were somehow on the same moral plane as us, but it is to say that even if you fight a war to save the world, the very act of doing so corrupts your national character. I wonder if the best course for the national soul of America, to recapture its innocence, is to simply not have bases and troops all around the world and to not have any more wars. After all, regardless of all the "its a smaller world hype", its still a pretty damned long swim from Europe to the USA, or from China to the USA, and missile defense is becoming a reality. We don't need to be all over the world any more.
I say "may be" because, if you look at the Oil deals that Iraq has been making, you'll notice that the US is getting the short end of the stick.
Not really. Regardless of who gets to pump the oil out of Ir
The Democrats and the Republicans are both equally guilty on free trade. Looks like you fell for the trade
Believe it or not, the parties are doing a long and slow flip on the issue. Republicans used to be staunch protectionists and it was the Democrats that were huge into free trade. Indeed, Republican protectionism was one of the underlying causes of the civil war and Republicans remained protectionists until the 1930s. It was then that Democrats ran with blaming Republican Tariffs for the great depression, when ironically, Republican Tariffs actually helped the whole USA become a superpower from 1870-1920.
Ah, yes, the old "war for oil" idiocy again. Only in the mind of a blithering moron would it make more sense to spend trillions invading a foreign nation instead
I think the expectation was that everyone was surprised about the apparent "ease" of Afghanistan, and assumed that it would translate to Iraq, or, given the experience of the administration, any number of 1980's and 1990's operations, like Panama, or Grenada, come to mind. Like, I think they genuinely believed that Iraq would be pretty easy in the mold of other operations pulled off by Republicans - topple the dictator, put in our guy, and go forth, but the problem was that in Iraq, there was no "our guy".
Ah, yes, the old "war for oil" idiocy again. Only in the mind of a blithering moron would it make more sense to spend trillions invading a foreign nation instead
It's not just about getting oil for ourselves, its being able to control it for everyone else. It's also about using up someone else's oil before taking desperation measures for our own.
. Ownership doesn't enter into the question at all - free trade is simply a matter of making it easier to conduct business; there is nothing to say that national governments or state-owned enterprises can't take part in that
No. Ultimately, the government actually owns all the land. It alone has the power of arms, and it alone has the power to make law as to what can be done on that land.
I think your attitude is bizarre; it seems that you think that anything done or provided by society is by definition evil...
Society is not government, guess that's where we would part ways...
I guess this is the sad result of the Cold-War conditioning that afflicts so many Americans - you have learned that government is a sort of ... conspiracy that is only out to take your money and that tax is nothing short of state-sanctioned theft
That's pretty much just the truth of the matter. Government doesn't work for the people, it works for the people who work for it.
And, many of us Americans felt that way long before the cold war was even a thought. In fact, many Americans felt that way throughout the national history. Tis why so many Americans left Europe, and their worship of government. Government's a tool.
Posting anonymously because it's bull. 200 years to peak oil there? Maybe if they don't sell any.
This isn't flamebait at all. None other than Dick Cheney was running around telling everyone who would listen that there was a huge production problem in the middle east. He had a great quote to sum it, something like, "If the Saudi's have so much more oil, they would have to be finding other fields like Gawar, and they haven't been". In fact, he calculated out how many Gawar size mega fields anybody would have to find, simply to meet existing demand, and they aren't out there.
Suddenly we find the USA sitting in Iraq, for what reason? The whole Bush administration's energy policy was essentially to get the dibs on the last remaining oil taps in the world, its own coastlines, interior, and in Iraq, essentially to buy time for its other plan of shoveling money at alternative energy projects would kick in.
And Corporatists come in all political flavors. Did you think the left wing of that particular ugly flapping bird won't be choking on their Target stock?
Good point. Really, the entire health care bill the Democrats are building could be renamed:
"The National Walmart Has to Buy Health Insurance for Its Employees Act".
They aren't fundamentally changing the balance of things, just throwing a little sugar on it for the masses.
The whole point of free trade was to unlink, fundamentally, resources from national ownership. Now that the Chinese have crossed the rubicon on the basic issue of access to materials on open markets, what is really the point of pretending that they are genuinely interested in free trade? Do we still want to pretend that they are interested in moving towards western liberalism. As much as Republicans called liberals Chamberlins on other issues, conservatives still ignoring the growing failure of free trade with the east are really, fundamentally, the genuine Chamberlins of our day. I hope they choke on their Walmart stock.